","Sartwell, Crispin, 2008, Against the State: An Introduction to\nAnarchist Political Theory, Albany, NY: SUNY Press.","Scrivener, Michael Henry, 1982, Radical Shelley: The\nPhilosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe\nShelley, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.","Simmons, A. John, 1980, Moral Principles and Political\nObligations, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.","–––, 1993, On The Edge of Anarchy: Locke,\nConsent, and the Limits of Society, Princeton, NJ: Princeton\nUniversity Press.","–––, 2001, Justification and Legitimacy:\nEssays on Rights and Obligations, Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress.","Stirner, Max, 1844 [1995], The Ego and Its Own (Der\nEinzige und sein Eigentum), David Leopold (ed.), Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press. doi:9780511815959","Stringham, Edward P., 2007, Anarchy and the Law: The Political\nEconomy of Choice, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.","Thoreau, Henry David, 1849 [1937], “Civil\nDisobedience” in Walden and Other Writings, Brooks\nAtkinson (ed.), New York: Modern Library, pp. 667–693.","Tolstoy, Leo, 1894, The Kingdom of God is Within You\n(T͡Sarstvo Bozhie vnutri vas), London: William\nHeinemann.","Varden, Helga, 2015, “John Locke: Libertarian\nAnarchism”, in Philosophie de la justice/Philosophy of\nJustice, Guttorm Fløistad (ed.), Netherlands: Springer,\npp. 157–176.","Wolff, Robert Paul, 1970, In Defense of Anarchism, New\nYork: Harper and Row.","Zerzan, John, 2008, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of\nCivilization, Port Townsend, WA: Feral House.","–––, 2012, Future Primitive: Revisited,\nPort Townsend, WA: Feral House."],"string":"[\n \"Anderson, William C. and Zoé Samudzi, 2017, “The Anarchism\\nof Blackness” at The Anarchist Library\\n [Anderson and Samudzi 2017 available online]\",\n \"Bakunin, Mikhail, 1873 [1990], Statism and Anarchy\\n(Gosudarstvennost’ i anarkhii͡a), Marshall S.\\nShatz (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1882/1908 [1910/1970], God and the\\nState (Dieu et l’État), New York: Dover\\nPublishing.\",\n \"Ben-Dor, Oren, 2000, Constitutional Limits and the Public\\nSphere: A Critical Study of Bentham’s Constitutionalism,\\nOxford: Hart Publishing.\",\n \"Bentham, Jeremy, 1843, “Anarchical Fallacies”, in\\nThe Works of Jeremy Bentham, Volume 2. Edinburgh: Tait.\\n [Bentham 1843 available online]\",\n \"Berdyaev, Nicolas, 1940 [1944], Slavery and Freedom\\n(O rabstve i svobode cheloveka), R.M. French (trans.),\\nLondon: Geoffrey Bless.\",\n \"Berlin, Isaiah, 1969, “Two Concepts of Liberty” in I. Berlin,\\nFour Essays on Liberty, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Bertram, Christopher, 2010 [2017], “Jean Jacques\\nRousseau”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy\\n(Summer 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =\\nhttps://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/rousseau/\",\n \"Bey, Hakim, 1985, The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological\\nAnarchy, Poetic Terrorism, Anti-Copyright.\\n [Bey 1985 available online]\",\n \"Bookchin, Murray, 1971 [1986], Post-Scarcity Anarchism,\\nMontreal: Black Rose.\",\n \"–––, 1995, Social Anarchism or Lifestyle\\nAnarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm, Oakland, CA: AK Press.\",\n \"Camus, Albert, 1951 [1991], The Rebel (L’homme\\nrévolté), Anthony Bower (trans.), New York:\\nVintage\",\n \"Casey, Gerard, 2012, Libertarian Anarchy: Against the\\nState, London: Bloomsbury.\",\n \"Chomsky, Noam, 2005, Chomsky on Anarchism, Barry Paterman\\n(ed.), Oakland: AK Press.\",\n \"Clark, John P., 2013, The Impossible Community: Realizing\\nCommunitarian Anarchism, London: Bloomsbury.\",\n \"Christoyannopoulos, Alexandre J.M.E., 2010, “Christian\\nAnarchism: A Revolutionary Reading of the Bible”, in Jun &\\nWahl 2010: 149–168.\",\n \"–––, 2011, Christian Anarchism: A Political\\nCommentary on the Gospel (Abridged Edition). Charlottesville, VA:\\nImprint Academic/Philosophy Documentation Center.\",\n \"Croeser, Sky, 2019, “Post-Industrial and Digital Society” in Carl\\nLevy and Matthew S. Adams, (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of\\nAnarchism, New York: Palgrave MacMillan.\",\n \"Daring, C.B., J. Rogue, Deric Shannon, and Abbey Volcano (eds.),\\n2010, Queering Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and\\nDesire, Oakland, CA: AK Press.\",\n \"Davis, Laurence, 2012, “Anarchism and the Future of\\nRevolution”, in Ruth Kinna (ed.), The Continuum Companion to\\nAnarchism, London: Continuum.\",\n \"Davis, Richard A, 2009, “Love, Hate, and Kierkegaard’s\\nChristian Politics of Indifference”, in Alexandre J.M.E.\\nChristoyannopoulos, (ed.), Religious Anarchism: New\\nPerspectives, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, pp.\\n82–105.\",\n \"Depuis-Déri, Francis, 2010, “Anarchy in Political\\nPhilosophy”, in Jun & Wahl 2010: 9–24.\",\n \"Ellul, Jacques, 1988 [1991], Anarchy and Christianity\\n(Anarchie et christianisme), Geoffrey W. Bromiley (trans.),\\nGrand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans\",\n \"Ervin, Lorenzo Kom’boa, 1997 [2016], “Anarchism and the\\nBlack Revolution” in Black Anarchism: A Reader, Black Rose\\nAnarchist Federation, at The Anarchist Library\\n [Ervin 1997 [2016] available online]\",\n \"Feyerabend, Paul, 1975 [1993], Against Method: Outline of an\\nAnarchist Theory of Knowledge, third edition, London: Verso.\\nFirst edition is 1975.\",\n \"Fiala, Andrew, 2013a, Against Religions, Wars, and States:\\nEnlightenment Atheism, Just War Pacifism, and Liberal-Democratic\\nAnarchism, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.\",\n \"–––, 2013b, “Political Skepticism and\\nAnarchist Themes in the American Tradition”, European\\nJournal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, V(2).\\ndoi:10.4000/ejpap.545\",\n \"–––, 2015, “Sovereignty”, in Andrew\\nFiala (ed.), Bloomsbury Companion to Political Philosophy,\\nLondon: Bloomsbury Publishing, chapter 2.\",\n \"Franks, Benjamin, 2003, “Direct Action Ethic”,\\nAnarchist Studies, 11(1): 13–41.\",\n \"Franks, Benjamin and Matthew Wilson (eds.), 2010, Anarchism\\nand Moral Philosophy, New York: Palgrave MacMillan.\",\n \"Franks, Benjamin, Nathan Jun, and Leonard Wilson (eds.), 2018,\\nAnarchism: A Conceptual Approach, London: Routledge.\",\n \"Gandhi, Mohandas K, 1916 [1956], “Benares University Speech,\\nFebruary 4, 1916”, in The Gandhi Reader: A Sourcebook of His\\nLife and Writings, Homer A. Jack (ed.), New York: Grove Press,\\npp. 128–135.\",\n \"Gans, Chaim, 1992, Philosophical Anarchism and Political\\nDisobedience, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Godwin, William, 1793, An Enquiry Concerning Political\\nJustice, volume 2, London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson.\\n [Godwin 1793 available online]\",\n \"Goldman, Emma, 1913 [1996], “Syndicalism: Its Theory and\\nPractice”, in Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader,\\nthird edition, Alix Kates Shulman (ed.), Atlantic Highlands, NJ:\\nHumanities Press, pp. 87–100.\",\n \"Graeber, David, 2004, Fragments of an Anarchist\\nAnthropology, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm.\",\n \"James, William, 1907 [1981], Pragmatism, Indianapolis:\\nHackett.\",\n \"Jensen, Derick, 2006, Endgame, 2 volumes, New York: Seven\\nStories Press.\",\n \"Johnson, Kahal and Kathy E. Ferguson, 2019, “Anarchism and\\nIndigeneity”, in Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams, (eds.), The\\nPalgrave Handbook of Anarchism, New York: Palgrave MacMillan.\\n\",\n \"Jun, Nathan J. and Shane Wahl, (eds.), 2010, New Perspectives\\non Anarchism, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.\",\n \"Jun, Nathan J. (ed.), 2017, Brill’s Companion to\\nAnarchism and Philosophy, Leiden, NL: Brill.\",\n \"King, Martin Luther Jr, 1961 [1991], “Love, Law, and Civil\\nDisobedience”, reprinted in A Testament of Hope: The\\nEssential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., James\\nMelvin Washington (ed.), San Francisco: HarperCollins, pp.\\n43–53.\",\n \"Kornegger, Peggy, 1975, “Anarchism: The Feminist\\nConnection”, The Second Wave, Spring.\\n [Kornegger 1975 available online]\",\n \"Kropotkin, Peter, 1892 [1995], The Conquest of Bread\\n(La Conquête du Pain) reprinted in The Conquest of\\nBread and Other Anarchist Writings, Marshall Shatz (ed.),\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–202.\",\n \"–––, 1910, “Anarchism”, in The\\nEncyclopaedia Britannica, 1910 edition. Reprinted in Kropotkin\\n1927.\\n [Kropotkin 1910 available online]\",\n \"–––, 1927 [2002], Anarchism: A Collection of\\nRevolutionary Writings, Roger N. Baldwin (ed.), New York:\\nVanguard Press. Reprinted 2002 New York: Dover.\",\n \"Lazar, Hilary, 2018, “Intersectionality”, in Benjamine Franks,\\nNathan Jun, and Leonard Wilson (eds.), Anarchism: A Conceptual\\nApproach, London: Routledge.\",\n \"Levy, Carl and Matthew S. Adams, (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook\\nof Anarchism, New York: Palgrave MacMillan.\",\n \"Machan, Tibor, R., 2002, “Anarchism and Minarchism: A\\nRapprochement”, From Journal des Économistes et des\\nÉtudes Humaines 12(4): 569–588.\",\n \"Malatesta, Errico, 2015, Life and Ideas: The Anarchist\\nWritings of Enrico Malatesta, Vernon Richards (ed.), Oakland, CA:\\nPM Press.\",\n \"Marshall, Peter H., 2010, Demanding the Impossible: A History\\nof Anarchism, updated edition, Oakland, CA: PM Press.\",\n \"Marx, Karl, 1875, Critique of the Gotha Program (Part I,\\nSection 3), abridged version first published in Die Neue\\nZeit, 1(18) (1890–91). For the famous quote, see Section 3 in\\nPart I, of the\\n version available online.\",\n \"May, Todd, 1994, The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist\\nAnarchism, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University\\nPress.\",\n \"McLaughlin, Paul, 2007, Anarchism and Authority: A\\nPhilosophical Introduction to Classical Anarchism, New York:\\nRoutledge.\",\n \"Newman, Saul, 2016, Postanarchism, Cambridge:\\nPolity.\",\n \"Nocella, Anthony J. II, Richard J. White, and Erika Cudworth\\n(eds.), 2015, Anarchism and Animal Liberation: Essays on\\nComplementary Elements of Total Liberation, Jefferson, NC:\\nMcFarland.\",\n \"Nozick, Robert, 1974, Anarchy, State, Utopia, New York:\\nBasic Books.\",\n \"Ostrom, Elinor, 1990, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of\\nInstitutions for Collective Action, Cambridge: Cambridge\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Perry, Lewis Wayne, 1973 [1995], Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy\\nand the Government of God in Antislavery Thought, Knoxville, TN:\\nUniversity of Tennessee Press.\",\n \"Parsons, Lucy, 1905 [2010] “The Principles of Anarchism”, at The\\nAnarchist Library\\n [Parsons 1905 [2010] available online]\",\n \"Prichard, Alex, 2018, “Freedom” in Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams,\\n(eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism, New York:\\nPalgrave MacMillan.\",\n \"Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 1840 [1876], What is Property? First\\nMemoir, Benjamin R. Tucker (trans.), Princeton, MA: Benjamin R.\\nTucker.\",\n \"Ramnath, Maia, 2011, Decolonizing Anarchism: An\\nAntiauthoritarian History of India’s Liberation Struggle,\\nOakland, CA: AK Press.\",\n \"Rand, Ayn, 1964, “The Nature of Government”, in\\nThe Virtue of Selfishness, New York: Penguin.\",\n \"Rapp, John A., 2012, Daoism and Anarchism: Critiques of State\\nAutonomy in Ancient and Modern China, London: Continuum.\",\n \"Reiman, Jeffrey, 1972, In Defense of Political Philosophy: A\\nReply to Robert Paul Wolff’s “In Defense of\\nAnarchism”, New York: Harper & Row.\",\n \"Rothbard, Murray N., 1977, “Robert Nozick and the Immaculate\\nConception of the State”, Journal of Libertarian\\nStudies 1(1): 45–57.\",\n \"–––, 2008, “Are Libertarians\\n‘Anarchists’?”, at Mises Daily: Friday,\\nJanuary 04, 2008. URL =\\n <https://mises.org/library/are-libertarians-anarchists>\",\n \"Sartwell, Crispin, 2008, Against the State: An Introduction to\\nAnarchist Political Theory, Albany, NY: SUNY Press.\",\n \"Scrivener, Michael Henry, 1982, Radical Shelley: The\\nPhilosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe\\nShelley, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.\",\n \"Simmons, A. John, 1980, Moral Principles and Political\\nObligations, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1993, On The Edge of Anarchy: Locke,\\nConsent, and the Limits of Society, Princeton, NJ: Princeton\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"–––, 2001, Justification and Legitimacy:\\nEssays on Rights and Obligations, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress.\",\n \"Stirner, Max, 1844 [1995], The Ego and Its Own (Der\\nEinzige und sein Eigentum), David Leopold (ed.), Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press. doi:9780511815959\",\n \"Stringham, Edward P., 2007, Anarchy and the Law: The Political\\nEconomy of Choice, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.\",\n \"Thoreau, Henry David, 1849 [1937], “Civil\\nDisobedience” in Walden and Other Writings, Brooks\\nAtkinson (ed.), New York: Modern Library, pp. 667–693.\",\n \"Tolstoy, Leo, 1894, The Kingdom of God is Within You\\n(T͡Sarstvo Bozhie vnutri vas), London: William\\nHeinemann.\",\n \"Varden, Helga, 2015, “John Locke: Libertarian\\nAnarchism”, in Philosophie de la justice/Philosophy of\\nJustice, Guttorm Fløistad (ed.), Netherlands: Springer,\\npp. 157–176.\",\n \"Wolff, Robert Paul, 1970, In Defense of Anarchism, New\\nYork: Harper and Row.\",\n \"Zerzan, John, 2008, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of\\nCivilization, Port Townsend, WA: Feral House.\",\n \"–––, 2012, Future Primitive: Revisited,\\nPort Townsend, WA: Feral House.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../authority/","text":"authority"},{"href":"../autonomy-moral/","text":"autonomy: in moral and political philosophy"},{"href":"../feyerabend/","text":"Feyerabend, Paul"},{"href":"../godwin/","text":"Godwin, William"},{"href":"../libertarianism/","text":"libertarianism"},{"href":"../nozick-political/","text":"Nozick, Robert: political philosophy"},{"href":"../pacifism/","text":"pacifism"},{"href":"../political-obligation/","text":"political obligation"},{"href":"../sovereignty/","text":"sovereignty"},{"href":"../max-stirner/","text":"Stirner, Max"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../authority/\",\n \"text\": \"authority\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../autonomy-moral/\",\n \"text\": \"autonomy: in moral and political philosophy\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../feyerabend/\",\n \"text\": \"Feyerabend, Paul\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../godwin/\",\n \"text\": \"Godwin, William\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../libertarianism/\",\n \"text\": \"libertarianism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../nozick-political/\",\n \"text\": \"Nozick, Robert: political philosophy\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../pacifism/\",\n \"text\": \"pacifism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../political-obligation/\",\n \"text\": \"political obligation\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../sovereignty/\",\n \"text\": \"sovereignty\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../max-stirner/\",\n \"text\": \"Stirner, Max\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":57,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"anaxagoras"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Anaxagoras"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Wed Aug 22, 2007; substantive revision Mon Nov 11, 2019"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\n\nAnaxagoras of Clazomenae (a major Greek city of Ionian Asia Minor), a\nGreek philosopher of the 5th century B.C.E. (born ca.\n500–480), was the first of the Presocratic philosophers to live in\nAthens. He propounded a physical theory of\n“everything-in-everything,” and claimed that\nnous (intellect or mind) was the motive cause of the\ncosmos. He was the first to give a correct explanation of eclipses,\nand was both famous and notorious for his scientific theories,\nincluding the claims that the sun is a mass of red-hot metal, that the\nmoon is earthy, and that the stars are fiery stones. Anaxagoras\nmaintained that the original state of the cosmos was a mixture of all\nits ingredients (the basic realities of his system). The ingredients\nare thoroughly mixed, so that no individual ingredient as such is\nevident, but the mixture is not entirely uniform or\nhomogeneous. Although every ingredient is ubiquitous, some ingredients\nare present in higher concentrations than others, and these\nproportions may also vary from place to place (even if they do not do\nso in the original state of the cosmos). The mixture is unlimited in\nextent, and at some point in time it is set into motion by the action\nof nous (intellect). The mixture begins to rotate around some\nsmall point within it, and as the whirling motion proceeds and expands\nthrough the mass, the ingredients in the mixture are shifted and separated\nout (in terms of relative density) and remixed with each other,\nultimately producing the cosmos of apparently separate material masses and\nmaterial objects, with the different properties, that we perceive."],"string":"[\n \"\\n\\nAnaxagoras of Clazomenae (a major Greek city of Ionian Asia Minor), a\\nGreek philosopher of the 5th century B.C.E. (born ca.\\n500–480), was the first of the Presocratic philosophers to live in\\nAthens. He propounded a physical theory of\\n“everything-in-everything,” and claimed that\\nnous (intellect or mind) was the motive cause of the\\ncosmos. He was the first to give a correct explanation of eclipses,\\nand was both famous and notorious for his scientific theories,\\nincluding the claims that the sun is a mass of red-hot metal, that the\\nmoon is earthy, and that the stars are fiery stones. Anaxagoras\\nmaintained that the original state of the cosmos was a mixture of all\\nits ingredients (the basic realities of his system). The ingredients\\nare thoroughly mixed, so that no individual ingredient as such is\\nevident, but the mixture is not entirely uniform or\\nhomogeneous. Although every ingredient is ubiquitous, some ingredients\\nare present in higher concentrations than others, and these\\nproportions may also vary from place to place (even if they do not do\\nso in the original state of the cosmos). The mixture is unlimited in\\nextent, and at some point in time it is set into motion by the action\\nof nous (intellect). The mixture begins to rotate around some\\nsmall point within it, and as the whirling motion proceeds and expands\\nthrough the mass, the ingredients in the mixture are shifted and separated\\nout (in terms of relative density) and remixed with each other,\\nultimately producing the cosmos of apparently separate material masses and\\nmaterial objects, with the different properties, that we perceive.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Life and Work","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. Metaphysical Principles","sub_toc":["2.1 No Becoming or Passing-Away","2.2 Everything-in-Everything","2.3 No Smallest or Largest"]},{"content_title":"3. The Physical Principles","sub_toc":["3.1 Mixture and Rotation","3.2 Ingredients and Seeds","3.3 Mind/Intellect","3.4 The Principle of Predominance"]},{"content_title":"4. Science: The Anaxagorean Cosmos","sub_toc":["4.1 Cosmology","4.2 Meteorology and Geology","4.3 Other Worlds?"]},{"content_title":"5. Knowledge","sub_toc":["5.1 Mind/Intellect in Us"]},{"content_title":"6. Anaxagoras’ Influence","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":["Editions and Texts","Secondary Literature"]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Life and Work\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Metaphysical Principles\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"2.1 No Becoming or Passing-Away\",\n \"2.2 Everything-in-Everything\",\n \"2.3 No Smallest or Largest\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. The Physical Principles\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"3.1 Mixture and Rotation\",\n \"3.2 Ingredients and Seeds\",\n \"3.3 Mind/Intellect\",\n \"3.4 The Principle of Predominance\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Science: The Anaxagorean Cosmos\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"4.1 Cosmology\",\n \"4.2 Meteorology and Geology\",\n \"4.3 Other Worlds?\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Knowledge\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"5.1 Mind/Intellect in Us\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. Anaxagoras’ Influence\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"Editions and Texts\",\n \"Secondary Literature\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\n\nAnaxagoras, son of Hegesibulus (or Eubulus), was a native of\nClazomenae, on the west coast of what is now Turkey. According to\nDiogenes Laertius (see the article on Doxography of Ancient\nPhilosophy) (Diels-Kranz [DK] 59 A1), Anaxagoras came from an\naristocratic and landed family, but abandoned his inheritance to study\nphilosophy. (We do not know how he acquired his philosophical\nlearning). He came to Athens (perhaps about the middle of the\n5th century, perhaps earlier), and was a friend and\nprotégé of Pericles, the Athenian general and political\nleader. There is controversy about his time in Athens; Diogenes\nLaertius says that he came to Athens to study philosophy as a young\nman. Some scholars claim that his arrival was as early as the Persian\ninvasion of 480 (O’Brien 1968, Woodbury 1981, Graham 2006), others\nargue for a later date of about 456 (Mansfeld 1979, see also Mansfeld\n2011 on Aristotle’s evidence; there is a good discussion of the\nproblems about dating Anaxagoras’ life in Sider 2005). It is clear\nfrom their dramas that his work was known to Sophocles, Euripides, and\nperhaps Aeschylus (Seneca suggests in his Natural Questions\n4a.2.17 that they shared Anaxagoras’ view about the source of the\nNile); it was certainly familiar to the comic playwright Aristophanes\n(Curd 2007, Sider 2005; see Mansfeld 1979). He was a resident in the\ncity for at least twenty years; he was said to have been charged with\nimpiety (and perhaps with Medism, political sympathy with the\nPersians), and banished from the city (437/6?). The charges against\nAnaxagoras may have been as much political as religious, because of\nhis close association with Pericles. He retreated to Lampsacus (in the\neastern Hellespont) where he died; ancient reports say that he was\nmuch honored there before and after his death. Democritus, a younger\ncontemporary, dated his own life in relation to Anaxagoras’, saying\nthat he was young in the old age of Anaxagoras (DK59A5); he reportedly\naccused Anaxagoras of plagiarism. Although Anaxagoras lived in Athens\nwhen Socrates was a youth and young adult, there are no reports that\nAnaxagoras and Socrates ever met. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates\nsays that he heard someone reading from Anaxagoras’ book (probably\nArchelaus, who was, according to Diogenes Laertius, pupil of\nAnaxagoras and teacher of Socrates). Anaxagoras is included in the\nancient lists of those who wrote only one book: in\nthe Apology, Socrates reports that it could be bought for a\ndrachma.","\n\nAs with all the Presocratics, Anaxagoras’ work survives only in\nfragments quoted by later philosophers and commentators; we also have\ntestimonia about his views in many ancient sources. The standard\ncollection of Presocratic texts (both fragments and testimonia) is\nH. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, in\nwhich Anaxagoras is given the identifying number 59. The Greek text\nand translations can also be found in Gemelli-Marciano, 2007–2010; Graham, 2010; and Laks and Most, 2016a and 2016b. (For discussion\nof the sources for the Presocratics, and problems associated with\nthem, see the article on Presocratic Philosophy.) Any\ndiscussion of Anaxagoras’ views must be a reconstruction that goes\nbeyond the few details that we have in the verbatim quotations, though\ninformed by the evidence of the fragments and testimonia. It should be\nkept in mind in reading the following account that scholars disagree and that other\ninterpretations are possible.","\n\nAccording to Simplicius, a 6th century C.E. neo-Platonist\ncommentator on Aristotle, and our main source for the fragments,\nAnaxagoras began his book by describing an original state of complete\n(but not entirely uniform) mixture of all the ingredients of the\ncosmos; that mixture is then set in motion by the action of\nMind/Intellect (nous). The ingredients are eternal and always remain in a\nmixture of all with all, yet the rotary motion produces shifts in the\nproportions of the ingredients in a given region. The expanding\nrotation of the original mixture ultimately produces the continuing development\nof the world as we now perceive it. The foundations of his theory,\ndescriptions of this development, and a discussion of nous\nform the bulk of what remains to us of Anaxagoras’ book. The\ntestimonia suggest that the book also included detailed accounts of\nastronomical, meteorological, and geological phenomena as well as more\ndetailed discussions of perception and knowledge, now missing from our\ncollection of fragments, and known only by later reports and criticisms."],"section_title":"1. Life and Work","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\nAnaxagoras was influenced by two strains in early Greek\nthought. First, there is the tradition of inquiry into nature founded\nby the Milesians, and carried on by Xenophanes (Mourelatos 2008b) and\nby Heraclitus (Graham 2008). The early Milesian\nscientist-philosophers (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes) sought to\nexplain the cosmos and all its phenomena, by appealing to regularities\nwithin the cosmic system itself, without reference to extra-natural\ncauses or to the personified gods associated with aspects of nature by\ntraditional Greek religion (Graham 2006, Gregory 2007 and 2013). They\nbased their explanations on the observed regular behavior of the\nmaterials that make up the cosmos (see White 2008 on the role of\nobservation and measurement in early Presocratic theories).","\n\nSecond, there is the influence of Eleatic arguments, due to\nParmenides, concerning the metaphysical requirements for a basic\nexplanatory entity within this Milesian framework, and the\nmetaphysically proper way to go about inquiry (Curd, 2004, 2007; Sisko\n2003; for different views, see Palmer 2009, Sisko 2013). Parmenides\ncan be seen as arguing that any acceptable cosmological account must\nbe rational, i.e., in conformity with the canons for proper inquiry,\nand must begin with metaphysically acceptable entities that are wholly\nand completely what they are; are not subject to generation,\ndestruction, or alteration; and are wholly knowable i.e., graspable by\nthought and understanding (Parmenides B2, B3, B7, B8; see Mourelatos\n2008a). Anaxagoras bases his account of the natural world on three\nprinciples of metaphysics, all of which can be seen as grounded in\nthese Eleatic requirements: No Becoming or Passing-Away, Everything is\nin Everything, and No Smallest or Largest."],"section_title":"2. Metaphysical Principles","subsections":[{"content":["\n\nA fundamental tenet of Eleatic theory is that what-is-not cannot be\n(Parmenides DK 28 B2). Parmenides, using this claim (see DK 28\nB8.15–16), argued that coming-to-be and passing-away are therefore\nruled out, because genuine coming-to-be is change from what-is-not to\nwhat-is, while destruction is change from what-is to what-is-not.\nThus, says Parmenides, what-is “is without start or stop, since\ncoming to be and passing away have wandered very far away, and true\ntrust drove them out”\n (DK 28 B8.27–28).[1] \n Anaxagoras accepts this principle, explaining apparent generation and\ndestruction by replacing them with mixture and separation (or\ndissociation) of ingredients:","\n\nThe Greeks do not think correctly about coming-to-be and\npassing-away; for no thing comes to be or passes away, but is mixed\ntogether and dissociated from the things that are. And thus they\nwould be correct to call coming-to-be being mixed together and passing-away\nbeing dissociated. (DK 59 B17)","\n\nWhat seems to us, through perception, to be generation of new entities or\ndestruction of old ones is not that at all. Rather, objects that\nappear to us to be born, to grow, and to die, are merely arrangements\nand re-arrangements of more metaphysically basic ingredients. The\nmechanism for the apparent coming-to-be is mixing and separating out\nfrom the mixture produced by the vortex motion of the ingredients. Through that mechanism, the real things, the ingredients,\ncan retain their character throughout. When an arrangement breaks\napart (or “passes away”) the ingredients are dissociated\nfrom one another (through separation) and can be re-mixed to form (or\n“become”) different arrangements, i.e., other perceptible\nobjects.","\n\nOne way to think of Anaxagoras’ point in B17 is that animals,\nplants, human beings, the heavenly bodies, and so on, are natural\nconstructs. They are constructs because they depend\nfor their existence and character on the ingredients of which they are\nconstructed (and the pattern or structure that they acquire in the\nprocess). Yet they are natural because their\nconstruction occurs as one of the processes of nature. Unlike\nhuman-made artifacts (which are similarly constructs of\ningredients), they are not teleologically determined to fulfill some\npurpose. This gives Anaxagoras a two-level metaphysics. Things\nsuch as earth, water, fire, hot, bitter, dark, bone, flesh, stone, or\nwood are metaphysically basic and genuinely real (in the required\nEleatic sense): they are things-that-are. The objects constituted\nby these ingredients are not genuinely real, they are temporary\nmixtures with no autonomous metaphysical status: they are not\nthings-that-are. (The natures of the ingredients, and the\nquestion of what is included as an ingredient, are addressed below; see\n3.2 “Ingredients and Seeds”). This view, that the\ningredients are more real than the objects that they make up, is common\nin Presocratic philosophy, especially in the theories of those thinkers\nwho were influenced by Parmenides’ arguments against the\npossibility of what-is-not and so against genuine coming-to-be and\npassing-away. It can be found in Empedocles, and in the\npre-Platonic atomists, as well as, perhaps, in Plato’s middle\nperiod Theory of Forms (Denyer, 1983, Frede 1985, W.-R. Mann 2000, Silverman\n2002)."],"subsection_title":"2.1 No Becoming or Passing-Away"},{"content":["\n\n\n\n“All things were together.” B1 (in part)\n\n\n\n“In everything there is a share of everything.” B11 (in\npart)\n\n","\n\nAs we have seen, Anaxagoras’ commitment to Eleatic principles rules\nout the possibility of genuine coming-to-be or passing-away. It also\nrules out real qualitative changes and transformations. When a warm\nliquid cools (it seems) the hot liquid becomes cold; when a child\ningests food (milk and bread, for instance), the milk and bread are\n(it seems) transformed into flesh, blood, and bone. Yet Anaxagoras\nobjects to these claims because they entail that the hot ceases to be,\nand the cold comes to be, in the liquid, and that the bread and milk\nare destroyed while flesh, blood, and bone come to be. His solution is\nto claim not only that “all things were together” in the\noriginal mixture, but that everything is in everything at all\ntimes. If there is already blood and bone in the milk and bread, then\nthe growth of the child can be attributed to the accumulation of these\ningredients from the bread and milk, and their assimilation into the\nsubstance of the child’s body, rather than to the transformation of\nbread and milk into something else. Further, if there are both hot and\ncold in the liquid, there is no disappearance into nothing of the hot\nas the liquid cools, and no generation of the cold from what is not\n(or even from what is not cold). The clearest statement of this is in\nAnaxagoras B10, a quotation found in the following passage:","\n\nWhen Anaxagoras discovered the old belief that nothing comes from\nthat which is not in any way whatsoever, he did away with coming-to-be,\nand introduced dissociation in place of coming-to-be. For he\nfoolishly said that all things are mixed with each other, but that as\nthey grow they are dissociated. For in the same seminal fluid\nthere are hair, nails, veins and arteries, sinew, and bone, and it\nhappens that they are imperceptible because of the smallness of the\nparts, but when they grow, they gradually are separated off.\n“For how,” he says, “can hair come from what is not\nhair, and flesh from what is not flesh?” He maintained\nthis, not only about bodies, but also about colors. For he said\nthat black is in white and white in black. And he laid down the\nsame thing with respect to weights, believing that light is mixed with\nheavy and vice versa. (DK 59 B10; the passage is from the\nanonymous scholiast on a 4th c. C.E. work of Gregory\nof\n Nazianzus.[2])","\n\nAlthough interpreters both ancient (including this scholiast and\nSimplicius) and modern (Guthrie 1965 is a good example) have seen\nthe desire to explain nutrition and growth as the primary\nmotivation for adopting the Everything-in-Everything principle, it is more\nlikely that Anaxagoras’ adoption of the general metaphysical\nprinciple of No-Becoming leads him to claim that everything is in\neverything (Schofield 1981, Curd 2007). Nutrition and growth are simply particularly clear instances of the changes\nthat are ruled out as fundamentally real if there is no becoming.","\n\nThe Everything-in-Everything principle asserts the omnipresence of\ningredients. In everything there is a mixture of all the ingredients\nthat there are: every ingredient is everywhere at all times. This\nprinciple is a fundamental tenet of Anaxagoras’ theory, and leads to\ndifficulties of interpretation (see, for instance, the debate between\nMathews 2002 and 2005 and Sisko 2005). If everything is in everything,\nthere must be interpenetration of ingredients, for it must be possible\nfor there to be many ingredients in the same space. Indeed, the\nprinciple requires that all ingredients be in every space at all times\n(the No Smallest or Largest principle also plays a role here: see\nsect. 2.3). This will allow any ingredient to emerge from a mixture\nthrough accumulation (or, having been unmixed, to become submerged in\none) at any point at any time, and thus allow for the appearance of\ncoming-to-be (or passing-away) of things or qualities.","\n\nSome scholars have supposed that Anaxagoras thought of these\ningredients as very small particles (Vlastos 1950, Guthrie 1965, Sider\n2005, Lewis 2000). But a particle would have to be a smallest\namount of some type of ingredient, occupying some space all by\nitself—with no other type of ingredient in it. Not only\ndoes the No Smallest or Largest principle rule this out (see sect.\n2.3), but the particulate interpretation seems inconsistent with the\nEverything-in-Everything principle. It is crucial to\nAnaxagoras’ theory that there be (in actuality) no such pure bits\nor volumes of any type of ingredient.","\n\nInstead one might conceive of the ingredients as fluid, like pastes or\nliquids which can be smeared together, with different areas of the\nmixture characterized by different relative densities of the\ningredients, all of which are nevertheless everywhere in it. Each\ngenuinely real ingredient could be mixed with every other, and so\nwould be contained in any area of the mixture, and in principle\nvisibly recoverable from it by accumulation or increased\nconcentration. The differing densities of the ingredients would allow\nfor differences in the phenomenal character of the mixture. To an\nobserver, different areas would appear hotter or colder, sweeter or\nmore bitter, more red than green, and so on, and rightly so. As the\nrelative concentration of ingredients in any area of the mixture\naltered (through the mixture and separation brought about by the\nrotation of the original blend of ingredients), the phenomenal\ncharacter of that region of the mixture would alter. An\nintriguing account (Marmodoro 2015, 2017) suggests that Anaxagorean\ningredients are not material; rather they are primitive physical\nqualitative powers or dispositions (in the parlance of contemporary\nmetaphysics, they are “gunky”). "],"subsection_title":"2.2 Everything-in-Everything"},{"content":["\n\nB1’s claim that “all things were together” before the\noriginal rotation occurred does not guarantee the truth of the\nEverything-in-Everything principle. If separation occurs within an\noriginal mixture of everything with everything, as a result of the\nmotion imparted by nous, then it could be that, given enough\ntime, ingredients would be segregated from one another (as they are in\nEmpedocles during the triumph of Strife, when the four roots are\ncompletely separated). Anaxagoras needs to block this, so that he can\nmaintain his commitment to the No Becoming principle. In some region\nthat came by separation to contain, say, nothing but bone, there would\ncome to be pure bone (as a new entity), in replacement for and\ndestruction of the mixture that was previously there. He blocks this\npossibility by claiming that there is no smallest (and no largest). If\nthere is no lower limit on the density of an ingredient, then no\ningredient will be completely removed from any region of the mixture\nthrough the force of the rotary motion caused by\nnous. Here are Anaxagoras’ claims:","\n\n\n\nNor of the small is there a smallest, but always a smaller (for\nwhat-is cannot not be) — but also of the large there is always a\nlarger. And [the large] is equal to the small in extent\n(plêthos), but in relation to itself each thing is both\nlarge and small.\n (B3[3])\n\n\n\nSince the shares of the large and the small are equal in number, in\nthis way too, all things will be in everything; nor is it possible that\n[anything] be separate, but all things have a share of\neverything. Since it is not possible that there is a least, it\nwould not be possible that [anything] be separated, nor come to be by\nitself, but just as in the beginning, now too all things are together.\n(B6 [in part])\n\n","\n\nThe passage from B6 makes clear that the “no smallest”\nprinciple is connected to the principle of Everything-in-Everything,\nand B3 asserts that the “no smallest” claim depends on the\nimpossibility of what-is-not. Here is one way to interpret what\nAnaxagoras is saying: if there were a smallest (particle, density,\namount) of any ingredient (call it S), we could in principle\nthrough separation reduce the amount of S in some area of the\nmixture to that smallest, and then induce further separation through\nrotation, which would remove that ingredient from a particular area of\nthe mixture. That would leave some area without “everything\nin everything.” The area would cease to be S to\nany degree and so would be not-S. In that area, the\nexplanation of coming-to-be in terms of emergence from a previous\nmixture would fail. Note that Anaxagoras — like other Greek\nthinkers, including Plato — assumes that anything that is\nmust be something or other and so slides easily between “what is\nnot f” and “what is not” (Furley\n2002).","\n\nAnaxagoras’ solution is to deny that there is any lower limit\non smallness. Adopting the model of density described above, he\ncan say that there is no lowest degree of density in the mixture.\nThis emphasis on density makes it clear that Anaxagoras’\ntechnical sense of smallness is not one of particle size but of degree\nof submergence or emergence in the mixture. For an ingredient to\nbe small is for there to be a comparatively low density of that\ningredient in a particular area of the mixture in comparison with all\nthe other ingredients (everything else) in that area. The\ncorresponding assertion that there is no upper limit on largeness can\nthen be interpreted as the claim that no matter how emergent from the\nmixture (standing out from the background mixture) an ingredient is, it\ncan become still more emergent. So, no matter how sweet some water\ntastes, there is still some salt in it. The salt in the sample is\nsmall, i.e., submerged in the mixture of water and other ingredients,\nbut there will never cease to be salt in the sample.\nCorrespondingly, no matter how salty another sample is, it can always\nbecome more salty and even “turn to salt” because there is\nno upper limit to the degree of emergence from the background. As\nthe salt emerges, other ingredients will submerge, but will never\ndisappear, so that the wet itself is deeply submerged in the mix, and\nwe are left with an apparently solid block of salt (though that salt\nwill itself contain all other ingredients, with most of them in such\nsmall concentrations that they are completely submerged and not\napparent to an observer). This account of large and small is\nimplied in Schofield 1980, and worked out more fully in Inwood 1986 and\nFurth 1991; it is accepted in Curd 2007; see also Marmodoro 2017."],"subsection_title":"2.3 No Smallest or Largest"}]},{"main_content":["\n\nThe Eleatic metaphysics that Anaxagoras accepts shapes the science\nthat he proposes. Anaxagoras offers an ambitious scientific theory that\nattempts to explain the workings of the cosmos, even while accepting\nthe Eleatic ban on coming-to-be and passing-away. His goal is\nscientific knowledge, i.e., understanding, as far as that is possible for human\nbeings."],"section_title":"3. The Physical Principles","subsections":[{"content":["\n\nThe original state of the cosmos was an unlimited (apeiron)\nmixture of all the ingredients. The mixture of ingredients, all\nwith all, exists eternally. Up to some point in the past, it was\nmotionless (59 B1, A45), and it was everywhere undifferentiated, or\nalmost so. According to B1, which Simplicius, the source for the\nfragment, says was near the beginning of Anaxagoras’ book:","\n\nAll things were together, unlimited both in amount and in\nsmallness, for the small, too, was unlimited. And because all\nthings were together, nothing was evident on account of smallness; for\nair and aether covered all things, both being unlimited, for these are\nthe greatest among all things both in amount and in largeness.","\n\nThis undifferentiated mass includes all there is of all the natural\ningredients that there are, the ingredients that will eventually form\nthe natural constructs that constitute the cosmos as we know it.\nNothing is ever added to or subtracted from this storehouse of stuffs,\nalthough the mass of stuffs is not always homogeneous. In fact,\nthere are different densities of ingredients even at this earliest\n(pre-motion) stage. B1 makes clear that air (dark, moist stuff)\nand aether (bright fiery stuff) are the most emergent (largest)\ningredients, and their dominance means that the original mixture must\nhave been like a dense bright cloud: nothing else would be evident or\nmanifest, even had there been an observer. At some point\nnous (the time being right) set the mixture in motion and\ncaused it to begin to revolve (first in a small area, and then in an\never-widening area). The rotary motion causes the ingredients in\nthe mass to shift. This shifting produces what Anaxagoras calls\n“separating off.” Because the mass is a plenum, any\nseparation will be a rearrangement (thus a mixing) of\ningredients. The continouous ever-expanding rotation produces more and\nmore separation. The Everything-in-Everything principle continues\nto hold, so there are all ingredients at all places at all times, but\nthe different densities of ingredients allow for local variations, and\nso the rotating mass becomes qualitatively differentiated."],"subsection_title":"3.1 Mixture and Rotation"},{"content":["\n\nNowhere in the extant fragments does Anaxagoras give a complete list\nof the ingredients in the mixture, or a clear indication of their\nscope, so it is up to commentators to figure out what he meant, given\nthe available evidence. There are three alternatives. First, some\nscholars have held that Anaxagoras limited the basic ingredients to\nthe opposites, such as hot and cold, wet and dry, sweet and bitter,\ndark and light, and so on. It is the opposites that have explanatory\nforce in the theory, and all other things and properties are reducible\nto the opposites. Supporters of this view include Tannery 1886, Burnet\n1930, Cornford 1930, Vlastos 1950, Schofield 1980 (with reservations),\nInwood 1986, Spanu 1987–88, Sedley 2007, and Marmodoro 2015, 2017. On\nthis view all the material stuffs and all the objects in the universe\nwould be natural constructs. At the opposite extreme, a second option\naccepts that literally everything in the natural world is in the\noriginal mixture — opposites, but also natural materials (fire,\nearth, copper, iron, and the like), animals and plants (and their\nparts such as flesh, blood, and bone), and so on. This view makes no\ndistinction between ingredients and what have been called natural\nconstructs above. It can be found in Strang 1963, Stokes 1965, Guthrie\n1965, Barnes 1982, Furth 1991, Graham 1994 and 2004, Lewis\n2000. Finally, there is a middle view, which rejects the\nopposites-only account, and accepts that some things (plants and\nanimals, heavenly bodies) are natural constructs. The original mix\nincludes opposites, but also natural substances like metals and earth,\nand the ingredients of animals, such as flesh, blood, and bone, but no\nwhole physical objects such as plants and animals themselves, or their\norganic parts such as legs and hearts (Curd 2007; this view is\nsuggested in Schofield 1980, 132 ff.).","\n\nThe “opposites only” view cannot stand (arguments\nagainst it are given in Guthrie 1965 and Graham 2004). B15 may provide\nsome evidence for the view:","\n\nThe dense and the wet and the cold and the dark came together\nhere, where <the> earth is now; but the rare and the hot and the\ndry <and the bright> moved out to\nthe far reaches of the aether.","\n\nBut Anaxagoras’ own lists include more than the opposites (see B4a and\nB4b). Further, the Principle of Predominance (in B12, see sect. 3.4)\nwould seem to require more than opposites, since it does not seem to\nsay that each thing is reducible to opposite characteristics that\npredominate, but that each thing gets its character from the\nparticular material ingredients that predominate in it. Further\nevidence against the opposites-only view is found in Aristotle.\nAristotle claims that for Anaxagoras, the elements (the basic\nrealities) are what Aristotle calls the homoiomerous parts (On\nComing to Be and Passing Away I.1 314a18). These are (for\nAristotle) things that are literally “like-parted,” i.e.,\nthey are homogeneous all the way through, like a piece of pure gold,\nrather than being different in their different parts (like a hand),\nand Aristotle lists flesh, blood, bone, and adds “and the others\nof which the part is called by the same name [as the whole].”\nThe term homoiomeries is Aristotelian, and has no role to\nplay in Anaxagoras (Graham 1994, Curd 2007; contra: Sisko\n2009), but it is clear that for Aristotle, the ingredients in an\nAnaxagorean mixture are not just the opposites.","\n\nIf the attempt to reduce the Anaxagorean ingredients to opposites is\nunsuccessful, so, too, is the interpretation that allows as an\ningredient every kind of thing in the phenomenal world. A minor\npoint is that Anaxagoras surely does not think that artifacts made by\nhuman beings are part of the mixture, and there are other semi-natural\nartifacts as well that would not seem to be present: cheese, bronze,\nwhiskey, for example. More importantly, the wide-scope view fails\nto take seriously B17’s replacement of coming-to-be and\npassing-away with mixture and dissolution. Further, it is unclear\nhow the view can discriminate between an individual and its parts or\ningredients. Are there homunculi of individuals in the original\nmix? (Lewis 2000 accepts this.) If so, how can the theory\nexplain that the growth of an organism is not simply its enlargement\n(by adding ingredients) but also its development? (A\nplant’s leaves may grow larger, but its seed pods develop, and\nare not just an enlargement of a structure that was already present in\nthe seedling plant.) In B4a Anaxagoras refers to the animals and\nhumans “that have been compounded, as many as have soul,”\nand this suggests that B17’s implicit model of living things as\nnatural constructs mixed together from the ingredients that are\ngenuinely real must be taken seriously.","\n\nIt seems, then, best to interpret Anaxagoras as claiming that all\nthe material ingredients of natural living things and the heavenly\nbodies are present in the original mix, but that these objects\nthemselves are not among the ingredients but are natural constructions,\nproduced by the processes of mixture and separation that we call\nnutrition and growth, or by the rotations of the heavens and the\nattendant clumping together and breaking apart of the ingredients of\nthe stars, clouds, comets, planets, and so on.","\n\nA problem for any account of the original mixture is Anaxagoras’\nmention of seeds. The word for seeds (spermata) occurs twice\nin the fragments, in lists of ingredients (in B4a and in B4b), but\nAnaxagoras nowhere explains or makes it clear what it means. There are\na number of options: seeds have been taken to be the smallest possible\nbits of ingredients (but, as argued above, there are no smallest bits\nin Anaxagoras’ system), or to be extremely small homunculi-like\ningredients that some interpretations take to be origins for\nAnaxagoras of living things which then expand by the addition of other\ningredients (Lewis 2000). Furley 1976 and 2002 advocates the simplest\ninterpretation, that Anaxagoras simply means biological seeds (but not\nhomunculi), and this seems the best proposal (see also Barnes 1982,\nCurd 2007, Sedley 2007, Marmodoro 2015, 2017, 147–153; Marmodoro also sees seeds as biological, containing pre-existing structures). A seed would then be a biological origin\npoint, and might perhaps be the route through which nous\n(which controls all things that have soul, i.e., anything alive)\nenters a living thing. If a seed is mixed with the right ingredients\nin the right circumstances, a living thing will grow."],"subsection_title":"3.2 Ingredients and Seeds"},{"content":["\n\nAccording to Diogenes Laertius, Anaxagoras acquired the nickname Mr.\nMind (DK 59 A1); his view that the cosmos is controlled by\nnous, mind or intelligence, first attracted and then\ndisappointed Socrates (Plato, Phaedo 97b8ff.). Plato and\nAristotle applauded Anaxagoras for using nous as the\nfirst principle of motion, but both criticized him for failing to be\nconsistent in that use, arguing that once he invoked Mind to set the\noriginal mixture in motion, Anaxagoras reduced later causes to\nmindless mechanism.","\n\nAnaxagoras is adamant that nous is completely different\nfrom the ingredients that constituted the original mixture. It is the\nonly thing to which the Everything-in-Everything principle does not\napply. Mind is present to some things, but it is not an ingredient or share as\nflesh and blood are ingredients in a dog (B11: “In everything\nthere is a share of everything except nous, but there\nare some things in which nous, too, is\npresent”). In B12 (the longest extant fragment), Anaxagoras\nclaims that if nous were just another ingredient it\ncould neither know nor rule in the way that it does.","\n\nThe other things have a share of everything, but nous\nis unlimited and self-ruling and has been mixed with no thing, but is\nalone itself by itself. For if it were not by itself, but had been\nmixed with anything else, then it would partake of all things, if it\nhad been mixed with anything (for there is a share of everything in\neverything just as I have said before); and the things mixed together\nwith it would thwart it, so that it would control none of the things\nin the way that it in fact does, being alone by itself. For it is the\nfinest of all things and the purest, and indeed it maintains all\ndiscernment about everything and has the greatest strength. (59 B12,\nin part)","\n\nMind/Intellect plays a number of roles in Anaxagoras’ system. First, it\ninaugurates the rotation of the mass of ingredients; it then controls\nthat rotation, and the local rotations that take place within the\nlarge whirl that is the whole cosmos:","\n\nNous controlled the whole revolution, so that it\nstarted to revolve in the beginning. First it began to revolve from a\nsmall region, but it is revolving yet more, and it will revolve still\nmore… And whatever sorts of things were going to be, and\nwhatever sorts were and now are not, and as many as are now and\nwhatever sorts will be, all these nous set in\norder. And nous also ordered this revolution, in which\nthe things being separated off now revolve, the stars and the sun and\nthe moon and the air and the aether. This revolution caused them to\nseparate off. (59 B12, in part)","\n\nNous then is not only first cause, it also, one might\nsay, is the preserver of order in the cosmos, as it maintains the\nrotations that govern all the natural processes. Anaxagoras does not\nexplain how these processes work, or how nous can\naffect the ingredients. But there is a hint of his reasoning in a\ncomment in Aristotle (Metaphysics I.3.984b15):","\n\nWhen someone said that nous is present — in\nnature just as it is in animals — as the cause of the cosmos and\nof all its order, he appeared as a sober man among the random\nchatterers who preceded him. (We know that Anaxagoras clearly held\nthese views, but Hermotimus of Clazomenae gets the credit for holding\nthem earlier.)","\n\nJust as we control our bodies by our thoughts, so the cosmos is\ncontrolled by nous; we may be unclear about the\ndetails, but the results are obvious to us. One fundamental point\nabout Anaxagoras’ theory of mind is that he nowhere in the extant\nmaterial identifies mind with a divine principle or god. In fragment\n1018 and in Trojan Women (886), Euripides says that mind is\ngod in each of us, and connects the necessity of the universe with\nZeus and mind, and these claims are thought to have been influenced by\nAnaxagoras’ views. Although later testimonial reports in Aëtius\nand Iamblichus say that Anaxagoras connected nous and\ngod, there are many more reports of his denial of divinity to the\nheavenly bodies and his alleged atheism.","\n\nNous is the most powerful thing in the cosmos,\ncontrolling the rotation and all ensouled things. Part of that power\nand control lies in its powers of knowledge. Anaxagoras asserts that\nnous has all judgment and discernment about all things;\nmoreover, this knowledge extends to everything that emerges from the\nmixtures and dissociations caused by the original rotation:","\n\nAnd nous discerned them all: the things that are being mixed\ntogether, the things that are being separated off, and the things that\nare being dissociated. And whatever sorts of things were going to be,\nand whatever sorts were and now are not, and as many as are now and\nwhatever sorts will be, all these nous set in\norder. (B12, in part)","\n\nThis suggests a beginning of an answer to the objections lodged\nagainst Anaxagoras’ use of nous as a cause. While\nnous is not the teleological and ethical cause for which Socrates was\nsearching in the Phaedo, nous could serve as an\nultimate explanation. Anaxagoras nowhere says that\nnous arranges things in a certain way because it is best for\nthem to be so, or even suggests something like an Aristotelian final\ncause, (although Sedley 2007 argues that exactly this view is implicit\nin the fragments, contra: Graham, 2009, Sisko 2010a). Things are the way\nthey are because that is the way things have unfolded\nsince nous first set everything in motion, and as it\ncontinued to move them. (One might compare this to the role of the\nunmoved mover as the ultimate cause in Aristotle’s universe; despite\nbeing the first cause the unmoved mover does not create.)","\n\nAnaxagoras links mind and soul in B12: “nous has\ncontrol over all things that have soul, both the larger and the\nsmaller.” This suggests not only that Anaxagoras took the\nactions of humans and animals as the model for how nous\ncontrols the cosmos, but also suggests how nous differs from\nthe other ingredients. He claims that it is the purest and finest of\nall things. Some scholars argue that it is only in Plato that we meet\na genuine notion of the immaterial (Renehan 1980, Sedley 2007), but\nAnaxagoras’ denial that nous is mixed with or partakes of\nother ingredients (while still being in some of them) and his\ninsistence on its fineness and purity may suggest that he is thinking\nof mind as a non-corporeal entity that can pervade and control a body\nor even the whole cosmos without being a material part of it (Curd\n2009). On either interpretation, if\nnous were simply an ordinary ingredient on a par with the\nother basic ingredients, then, as Anaxagoras notes in B12, its relative\nsmallness would allow it to be swamped and overcome\n(“thwarted”) by the other ingredients."],"subsection_title":"3.3 Mind/Intellect"},{"content":["\n\nFragment B12 ends with a further discussion of mixture and separation,\nand Anaxagoras’ enunciation of what has come to be called the\n“Principle of Predominance.” After reasserting that no\ningredient is ever fully dissociated or separated from any other\n(except for nous, which is not an ingredient),\nAnaxagoras adds that all nous is alike (that is, cosmic\nnous and mind in us share the same nature), but\n“Nothing else is like anything else, but each one is and was\nmost manifestly those things of which there are the most in it.”\nThus, something is hot, if hot predominates over the cold in it, flesh\nif flesh predominates over other ingredients, and so on. The principle\ndoes not claim that there is any single predominating ingredient at\neach place in the mixture. Rather, the predominance seems to be along\nnumerous lines of possibility: more flesh than blood, more hot than\ncold, more red than green, and so on (Furley 2002). This need not\nmean that there is more humanity than doghood in a human being (indeed\nit could not mean this, on the account advanced in this article, which\nrules out dogs and humans as Anaxagorean ingredients). Rather, to be a\nhuman being is to have a certain set of predominant characteristics\narranged in a certain way (that arrangement may be the work of soul\n— perhaps nous — in a living thing).","\n\nA problem for the Principle of Predominance is to determine what it is\nto be a predominant ingredient, especially given the\nEverything-in-Everything and No Smallest principles. A classic example\nis the following: the gold in this gold ring is that discontinuous\npart of the total mixture in which gold predominates. But now, as\nStrang says, “Consider the gold which predominates as an\ningredient: does it also, like the original piece of gold, contain\nwithin it an admixture of all other substances? If so, it is gold\nbecause gold predominates in it as an ingredient; and we can ask the\nsame question about the ingredient of the ingredient, and so on ad\ninfinitum” (Strang 1963, 101; see also Cornford\n1930). Because there can be no pure gold (there is no pure anything),\nit becomes difficult to see what the gold could be that predominates\nin anything. But if I cannot determine what predominates in it, I\ncannot determine what anything is.","\n\nStrang 1963 proposes a solution to the problem. While acknowledging\nthat there can never be pure instances of any ingredient in actuality,\nthere could be such instances in analysis. I can analyze mixtures and\ndetermine predominant ingredients, but I will never be able to produce\na pure instance of such an ingredient. The problem here is how this\nwould be worked out, and why I can be certain that there are such\nnatures (as we might call them). Anaxagoras suggests two\nthings. First, in B12 he stresses that nous has the\npower to know and understand all the ingredients (indeed cosmic\nnous apparently knew all this before the rotation began; see\nquotation above). Second, in B21 and B21a he suggests how\nhuman nous (nous in us) can come to such an\nunderstanding by relying on sense perception but moving beyond it in\nthought (see sect. 5. Knowledge). Finally, because the ingredients are\ngenuinely basic entities in the sense required to ground a rational\ncosmology in the Eleatic sense, they must be stable natures in the\nParmenidean sense (for a related account, see Marmodoro\n2015). Anaxagoras is committed to the arguments that ground Eleatic\nmetaphysics; thus he can claim an a priori reason to think\nthat the ingredients can be knowable in the sense required by the\nPrinciple of Predominance. His epistemological view that humans can\nreach understanding through beginning with sense experience then fits\nwith these metaphysical commitments."],"subsection_title":"3.4 The Principle of Predominance"}]},{"main_content":["\n\nAnaxagoras gave a complete account of the universe: of the heavens,\nthe earth, and geological and meteorological phenomena. The accounts\nof the action of nous and the original rotation and its\nconsequences appear in the fragments: B9 describes the force and\nvelocity of the rotation, B12 and 13 explain the beginning of the\nrotation and the subsequent breaking up and remixing of the mass of\ningredients, while B15 and 16 specify the cosmological consequences of\nthe continued rotation (Curd 2007 and 2008, Graham 2006, Gregory\n2007). Most of the other information comes from the testimonia, but\nthere is enough in the remaining fragments to make it clear that\neverything is ultimately explained by the great rotation set in motion\nby nous. Further, and intriguingly, Anaxagoras claims that\nthe cosmic rotary motion could produce other worlds like our own."],"section_title":"4. Science: The Anaxagorean Cosmos","subsections":[{"content":["\n\nThe rotation of the mixture begins in a small area, and then spreads\nout through the mass (B12). As the extent of the mixture is unlimited\n(or infinite, apeiron), the rotation and expansion will\ncontinue forever, bringing more and more ingredients into the whirl (a\nsummary of the process is in Gregory 2007). The force and speed of the\nrotation is (according to B9) much faster at the edges, where the\nexpanding rotation meets the as-yet-unmoved mass of ingredients: what\nwe perceive of the rotation (probably the motions of the heavens) is\nmuch slower than the unobserved rotation. The force is enough to pull\napart and rearrange the ingredients:","\n\nWhen nous began to move [things], there was separation\noff from the multitude that was being moved, and whatever\nnous moved, all this was dissociated; and as things\nwere being moved and dissociated, the revolution made them dissociate\nmuch more. (B13)","\n\nThere are two sorts of dissociation. First, as the rotation enters the\nas-yet-unmoved mass of ingredients, that mass begins to break up and\nthe ingredients start to shift in their concentrations. This causes\nthe original arrangement of ingredients to break up and begin to be\nrearranged. Because the mixture is a plenum, any separation is at the\nsame time a rearrangement of ingredients. Then, those new\nrearrangements are themselves subject to further break-up and further\nrearrangement. Anaxagoras indicates this in the fragments by using\ndifferent terms for different stages in the process (although he is\nnot completely consistent in these uses). Normally, he uses the notion\nof being separated off (forms of the verb apokrinesthai) for the\ninitial breaking apart of the mass. Re-arrangements are referred to as\nmixing (summisgesthai) or compacting\n(sumpêgnusthai). He also uses “joining\ntogether” (proskrinesthai) as a contrast to the\nseparating off process (apokrinesthai) in B4a and B4b. When,\nin B17, he claims that passing-away is really dissociation, he uses\nthe word diakrinesthai. This is a later stage than the\nearliest separations off of B1. The primary terms are compound forms\nof the verb krinein, to distinguish. The word can also mean\n“to judge” or “to determine,” and through the\nuse of these compound terms, Anaxagoras reminds his readers that all\nof the changes are ultimately traceable to the action of\nnous, or Mind, that sets the mass moving in the first\ninstance.","\n\nOver time, the rotation throws lighter ingredients towards the edges\nof the whirl and pushes the heavier ones to the center (B15), thus\nputting more dark and heavy ingredients like earth in the center and\nthrowing air and aether (fire) away from the center. This gives the\ntraditional Greek picture of our Earth (itself a mixture of all\ningredients, with earth and heavy ores and minerals predominating)\ncovered (in many places) by water, with air and the fiery reaches of\nthe heavens.","\n\nThe sun is a mass of fiery metal, and the moon is an earthy lump\n(with no light of its own). The same rotation ultimately produces\nthe stars and planets as well. Sometimes the force of the\nrotation snatches up stones from the surface of the Earth and spins\nthem around the Earth as they gradually rise higher through the force\nof the rotation. Until these bodies are high enough, they remain\nunseen between the Earth and the moon and so sometimes intervene to\nprevent heavenly bodies from being seen by terrestrial observers.\nThe force and shaking of the rotation can cause slippage, and so\nsometimes a star (a flaming mass of rock and iron) is thrown downwards\ntoward the earth as a meteor (such as the one Anaxagoras is supposed to\nhave predicted at Aegospotami; see Galzerano 2019). The fullest account of\nAnaxagoras’ view on meteors can be found in Plutarch’s\nLife of Lysander 12 (59 A12). Anaxagoras is also credited\nwith discovering the causes of eclipses — the interposition of\nanother body between earth and the sun or the moon: sometimes he\ncredits this to the “unseen bodies” mentioned above (see\nGraham and Hintz, 2007, Graham 2013a and 2013b, Taub 2003). According\nto the ancient sources (see esp. A1 and A42), Anaxagoras also gave\nexplanations for the light of the Milky Way, the formation of comets,\nthe inclination of the heavens, the solstices, and the composition of\nthe moon and stars."],"subsection_title":"4.1 Cosmology"},{"content":["\n\nThe rotation begun by nous ultimately affects phenomena\non the earth and above the surface of the earth. Anaxagoras claims\nthat the earth is flat, rests on air, and remains where it is because\nof its size (A42; a number of geological and meteorological views\nattributed to Anaxagoras were also apparently held by Anaximenes;\nwhether this is because Anaxagoras was following Anaximenes or because\nthe commentators conflate the two is unclear). Despite the manner of\nits formation, the earth is stationary, not spinning. The (relative)\nflatness of the earth allows water to spread over the earth, with\nmountains and plains rising above the level of the water. The levels\nchange as water is evaporated or added by rain, and as water that has\nbeen trapped in the earth by the rotation makes its way out through\nrivers to the sea. Because the air under the earth is also moving\n(pushed along by the cosmic rotation), it sometimes gets caught up in\nthe crevices of the earthy stuff. When this air cannot make its way\nout, the force of the moving air causes earthquakes. Anaxagoras seems\ndetermined to explain everything. The extant sources report views on\nthunder and lightning, the source of the Nile, the first correct\naccount of the nature of hail, and inquiry into why the sea is\nsalty. He also offered accounts of sense perception and made\ninquiries into embryology."],"subsection_title":"4.2 Meteorology and Geology"},{"content":["\n\nOne of the more curious aspects of Anaxagoras’ theory is hinted\nat in B4a:","\n\nSince these things are so, it is right to think that there are many\ndifferent things present in everything that is being combined, and\nseeds of all things, having all sorts of forms, colors, and flavors,\nand that humans and also the other animals were compounded, as many as\nhave soul. Also that there are cities that have been constructed\nby humans and works made, just as with us, and that there are a sun and\na moon and other heavenly bodies for them, just as with us, and the\nearth grows many different things for them, the most valuable of which\nthey gather together into their household and use. I have said\nthis about the separation off, because there would be separation off\nnot only for us but also elsewhere.","\n\nWhere is the “elsewhere” where there would also be\nseparation off, and where there are sun and moon “for them, just\nas with us”? Surprisingly, no ancient sources discuss this\n(although Simplicius, who quotes the fragment, is clearly puzzled by\nit, and argues for a neo-Platonic metaphysical interpretation). Modern\ncommentators have suggested that the other worlds are on the moon\nand/or other planets (Jöhrens 1939, Zeller 1923), elsewhere on\nthe face of our Earth (Cornford, 1934), or even contained within\nourselves (and all other things) so that there are infinite worlds\nwithin worlds (Mansfeld 1980, Schofield 1996, Sisko 2003). There is\nalso the possibility that Anaxagoras has no commitment to the reality\nof these other worlds, but is simply engaging in a thought experiment\nto show how the rotation would work (Fränkel 1969, Vlastos 1975,\nSchofield 1996). There may be another possibility (Curd 2007). The\nunlimited rotation begins in a small area and expands indefinitely,\npulling more and more of the unlimited mass of as-yet-unmixed\ningredients into the whirl. Such an action could produce smaller local\nrotations within the larger whirl (especially at the expanding edges,\nas in the rotations of hurricane winds) and there, too, separation,\nmixture, and dissociation would occur. Such processes would result in\nthe formation of systems like our own. This is not a\nthought-experiment on Anaxagoras’ part, but a commitment to the\nlaw-likeness of the rotations controlled by\nnous, and an awareness that similar processes will\nproduce similar phenomena. Our world-system is not unique in the\nuniverse, although there is but one universe (constituted by the\nentire limitless mass of ingredients)."],"subsection_title":"4.3 Other Worlds?"}]},{"main_content":["\n\nBoth ancient and modern critics have complained that Anaxagoras is\nunclear about the nature of nous (Mind/Intelligence) and its\nrole in his theory (Laks 1993, 2002; Lesher 1995). In B12 Anaxagoras\nclaims that\nnous has all discernment, and that nous “knew\nthem all: the things that are being mixed together, the things that\nare being separated off, and the things that are being\ndissociated.” Further, Anaxagoras remarks that there is\nnous in many things, and that it is alike in all the\nthings that it is in, both large and small (presumably those with\nsoul, i.e., living things). Aristotle says that Anaxagoras conflates\nsoul and mind, and B12 seems to confirm this, insofar as Anaxagoras\nthere treats nous primarily as a mover, yet also says\nthat it controls all things that have soul. It seems likely that in\nthings other than cosmic nous, those compacted or\nmixed-together natural constructs that have soul, the powers of\nnous include both knowing and perceiving. Nowhere do we have\nan analysis of the process of thinking for Anaxagoras, and although\nAristotle and Theophrastus say that earlier thinkers identified\nthinking and sense perception, there is little evidence for this view\nin Anaxagoras (Laks 1999, Warren 2007).","\n\nIt seems clear that if nous is to have all discernment and\nto order the cosmos, it must have some knowledge of the contents of the\noriginal mixture (Lesher 1995, Curd 2004). Further, if the\ningredients are fundamentally real things they must have stable and\nknowable natures. (This follows from Parmenides’ arguments\nabout the connection between what-is and what is knowable.) Thus,\nthere is a match between the natures of the ingredients and the\ncognitive power of cosmic nous, but Anaxagoras leaves the\nmechanism unexplained. It seems likely that cosmic nous\njust has a direct intellectual grasp of these nature and acts in\naccordance with that knowledge."],"section_title":"5. Knowledge","subsections":[{"content":["\n\nOnly a few fragments and testimonia discuss Anaxagoras’\nviews on perception and knowledge in living things. Aristotle and\nTheophrastus give us some account of his theory of perception, saying,\nmost surprisingly, that for Anaxagoras all sensation is accompanied by\ndiscomfort or pain (A92). Theophrastus links this to\nAnaxagoras’ belief that like is perceived by unlike; on\nTheophrastus’ view, perception is via touch, and unlike things\nproduce some irritation when touched. Theophrastus adduces loud noises\nand very bright light as producers of pain in perceivers, and suggests\nthat the mechanism is the same in all cases of sensation. Some\nirritation will be below the level of awareness for most perceivers,\nwhich is why humans do not normally feel pain when\nperceiving (see Warren 2007 for a good discussion of Anaxagoras on perception).","\n\nWhat is the relation between perception and knowledge?\nAnaxagoras does not claim that perception alone is sufficient for\nknowing; nor does he seem to embrace skepticism. Sextus\nEmpiricus, always on the lookout for arguments for and against any\ndogmatic position, gives us most of the evidence for Anaxagoras’\nviews. Says Sextus, of the skeptic’s methodology, “We\nset what is thought in opposition to what appears, as Anaxagoras set\nthe appearance that snow is white in opposition to the claim that snow\nis frozen water, water is black, and therefore snow is black”\n(A97; but see the passage from Cicero in the same testimonium).\nHere Anaxagoras accepts that snow seems to us to be white, but claims\nthat the reality must be that snow is black. The evidence of the\nsenses must be corrected by what we know through thought. In B21,\nAnaxagoras recognizes the weakness of the senses (“Owing to\nfeebleness [of the senses], we are not able to determine the\ntruth”), but in B21a he accepts that sense perception can be a\nstep towards understanding: “appearances are a sight of the\nunseen.” This follows from his own theory, for the evidence\nof our own control of our bodies by our minds, the facts of nutrition\nand growth, and the local revolutions of the heavens are evidence for\nthe workings of cosmic nous, the No-Becoming principle, and\nthe great cosmic revolution. Like other Presocratics, Anaxagoras\nleaves us with no detailed account of how knowledge derives from\nperception through the refinements of thought: Anaxagoras’\naccount can be compared with that of Democritus, where the relation of\nsense-perception and thought is similar and similarly unexplained."],"subsection_title":"5.1 Mind in Us"}]},{"main_content":["\n\nReportedly the first of the Presocratic philosophers to settle\nin Athens, Anaxagoras was a significant figure, not only for later\nphilosophical thinkers, but also for the wider civic culture of his\ntime. He was clearly an important influence on Pericles.\nPlutarch reports:","\n\nBut Anaxagoras of Clazomenae was the one who most associated with\nPericles and who most bestowed on him that dignity and wisdom more\nweighty than demagoguery, and on the whole raised up and exalted the\nworthiness of his character …These are not the only advantages\nthat Pericles enjoyed because of his connection with Anaxagoras. It\nseems that Pericles rose above superstition, that attitude of\nastonishment about celestial occurrences which is produced in those\nwho are ignorant about the causes of things and who are crazed by\ndivinity and divine interventions because of their inexperience in\nthese areas. Natural philosophy substitutes for festering superstition\nthat unshaken piety that is attended by good hopes. (A15,\nA16)","\n\nThat naturalism appears in the dramas of Euripides, who is often\ndescribed as a pupil of Anaxagoras, and in the comedies of\nAristophanes, who satirizes the views of Anaxagoras as well as the\nfigure of Socrates in Clouds. Anaxagoras’ theory\nof the floods of the Nile was known to Herodotus (and may be referred\nto in Aeschylus). Despite stories that they did not get along,\nthere are signs of influence of Anaxagoras on Democritus (in his\naccounts of perception and knowledge) and Anaxagoras’ scientific\nclaims and discoveries affected all the thinkers of his time.\nOnce his views about meteors, hail, and eclipses became known, such\ntopics were always included in scientific accounts of astronomical and\nmeteorological phenomena. In the testimonia, Anaxagoras’\neven temperament was taken as a model of good behavior, and he was\nfamous as a prognosticator of everything from meteor falls to rain\nshowers. ","\n\nAnaxagoras’ views appear among Socrates’ survey of\nprevious naturalistic theories of explanation (Phaedo 96a6\nff.). More ominously, Meletus seems to have attributed Anaxagoras’\nclaims about the earthy nature of the moon and stars to Socrates at his\ntrial (see Plato’s Apology 26e7ff., 59 A35). Although\nAnaxagoras’ alleged indictment for impiety was probably as much political\nas a sign of his danger to public religion (attacking Anaxagoras was an\nindirect attack on Pericles), he was seen as important and influential\nenough to qualify to some as an enemy of the polis.","\n\nPhilosophically, Anaxagoras’ theories were also widely known and\ninfluential. Some scholars have thought that the author of the Derveni\nPapyrus (found in Northern Greece) was familiar with Anaxagoras’\ntheories (Betegh 2004; Kouremenos et al. 2006), and once he introduced\nMind as a cause, other thinkers followed him. Diogenes of Apollonia\nclaimed that air (as mind and god) directs all things. Zeno of Elea\n(perhaps) and Melissus (certainly) criticize his theory. Anaxagoras’\nview that “each one is and was most manifestly those things of\nwhich there are the most in it” (the principle of Predominance)\nis echoed in Plato’s claims that sensible things acquire their\ncharacters and names from the Forms in which they participate\n(Phaedo 102a10 ff.). Plato even adopts Anaxagoras’ language\nof sharing or participating in (see Furley 2002), and like Anaxagoras’ nous,\nPlatonic forms are “themselves by themselves” in being\nself-explanatory (see Herrmann, 2007). Aristotle, although impatient\nwith the gaps in Anaxagoras’ account of nous, expresses\nadmiration for his recognition that mind has a role to play in guiding\nthe cosmos, and he treats Anaxagoras’ explanation of eclipses as a\nmodel of scientific explanation."],"section_title":"6. Anaxagoras’ Influence","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nAnaxagoras, son of Hegesibulus (or Eubulus), was a native of\\nClazomenae, on the west coast of what is now Turkey. According to\\nDiogenes Laertius (see the article on Doxography of Ancient\\nPhilosophy) (Diels-Kranz [DK] 59 A1), Anaxagoras came from an\\naristocratic and landed family, but abandoned his inheritance to study\\nphilosophy. (We do not know how he acquired his philosophical\\nlearning). He came to Athens (perhaps about the middle of the\\n5th century, perhaps earlier), and was a friend and\\nprotégé of Pericles, the Athenian general and political\\nleader. There is controversy about his time in Athens; Diogenes\\nLaertius says that he came to Athens to study philosophy as a young\\nman. Some scholars claim that his arrival was as early as the Persian\\ninvasion of 480 (O’Brien 1968, Woodbury 1981, Graham 2006), others\\nargue for a later date of about 456 (Mansfeld 1979, see also Mansfeld\\n2011 on Aristotle’s evidence; there is a good discussion of the\\nproblems about dating Anaxagoras’ life in Sider 2005). It is clear\\nfrom their dramas that his work was known to Sophocles, Euripides, and\\nperhaps Aeschylus (Seneca suggests in his Natural Questions\\n4a.2.17 that they shared Anaxagoras’ view about the source of the\\nNile); it was certainly familiar to the comic playwright Aristophanes\\n(Curd 2007, Sider 2005; see Mansfeld 1979). He was a resident in the\\ncity for at least twenty years; he was said to have been charged with\\nimpiety (and perhaps with Medism, political sympathy with the\\nPersians), and banished from the city (437/6?). The charges against\\nAnaxagoras may have been as much political as religious, because of\\nhis close association with Pericles. He retreated to Lampsacus (in the\\neastern Hellespont) where he died; ancient reports say that he was\\nmuch honored there before and after his death. Democritus, a younger\\ncontemporary, dated his own life in relation to Anaxagoras’, saying\\nthat he was young in the old age of Anaxagoras (DK59A5); he reportedly\\naccused Anaxagoras of plagiarism. Although Anaxagoras lived in Athens\\nwhen Socrates was a youth and young adult, there are no reports that\\nAnaxagoras and Socrates ever met. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates\\nsays that he heard someone reading from Anaxagoras’ book (probably\\nArchelaus, who was, according to Diogenes Laertius, pupil of\\nAnaxagoras and teacher of Socrates). Anaxagoras is included in the\\nancient lists of those who wrote only one book: in\\nthe Apology, Socrates reports that it could be bought for a\\ndrachma.\",\n \"\\n\\nAs with all the Presocratics, Anaxagoras’ work survives only in\\nfragments quoted by later philosophers and commentators; we also have\\ntestimonia about his views in many ancient sources. The standard\\ncollection of Presocratic texts (both fragments and testimonia) is\\nH. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, in\\nwhich Anaxagoras is given the identifying number 59. The Greek text\\nand translations can also be found in Gemelli-Marciano, 2007–2010; Graham, 2010; and Laks and Most, 2016a and 2016b. (For discussion\\nof the sources for the Presocratics, and problems associated with\\nthem, see the article on Presocratic Philosophy.) Any\\ndiscussion of Anaxagoras’ views must be a reconstruction that goes\\nbeyond the few details that we have in the verbatim quotations, though\\ninformed by the evidence of the fragments and testimonia. It should be\\nkept in mind in reading the following account that scholars disagree and that other\\ninterpretations are possible.\",\n \"\\n\\nAccording to Simplicius, a 6th century C.E. neo-Platonist\\ncommentator on Aristotle, and our main source for the fragments,\\nAnaxagoras began his book by describing an original state of complete\\n(but not entirely uniform) mixture of all the ingredients of the\\ncosmos; that mixture is then set in motion by the action of\\nMind/Intellect (nous). The ingredients are eternal and always remain in a\\nmixture of all with all, yet the rotary motion produces shifts in the\\nproportions of the ingredients in a given region. The expanding\\nrotation of the original mixture ultimately produces the continuing development\\nof the world as we now perceive it. The foundations of his theory,\\ndescriptions of this development, and a discussion of nous\\nform the bulk of what remains to us of Anaxagoras’ book. The\\ntestimonia suggest that the book also included detailed accounts of\\nastronomical, meteorological, and geological phenomena as well as more\\ndetailed discussions of perception and knowledge, now missing from our\\ncollection of fragments, and known only by later reports and criticisms.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Life and Work\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nAnaxagoras was influenced by two strains in early Greek\\nthought. First, there is the tradition of inquiry into nature founded\\nby the Milesians, and carried on by Xenophanes (Mourelatos 2008b) and\\nby Heraclitus (Graham 2008). The early Milesian\\nscientist-philosophers (Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes) sought to\\nexplain the cosmos and all its phenomena, by appealing to regularities\\nwithin the cosmic system itself, without reference to extra-natural\\ncauses or to the personified gods associated with aspects of nature by\\ntraditional Greek religion (Graham 2006, Gregory 2007 and 2013). They\\nbased their explanations on the observed regular behavior of the\\nmaterials that make up the cosmos (see White 2008 on the role of\\nobservation and measurement in early Presocratic theories).\",\n \"\\n\\nSecond, there is the influence of Eleatic arguments, due to\\nParmenides, concerning the metaphysical requirements for a basic\\nexplanatory entity within this Milesian framework, and the\\nmetaphysically proper way to go about inquiry (Curd, 2004, 2007; Sisko\\n2003; for different views, see Palmer 2009, Sisko 2013). Parmenides\\ncan be seen as arguing that any acceptable cosmological account must\\nbe rational, i.e., in conformity with the canons for proper inquiry,\\nand must begin with metaphysically acceptable entities that are wholly\\nand completely what they are; are not subject to generation,\\ndestruction, or alteration; and are wholly knowable i.e., graspable by\\nthought and understanding (Parmenides B2, B3, B7, B8; see Mourelatos\\n2008a). Anaxagoras bases his account of the natural world on three\\nprinciples of metaphysics, all of which can be seen as grounded in\\nthese Eleatic requirements: No Becoming or Passing-Away, Everything is\\nin Everything, and No Smallest or Largest.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Metaphysical Principles\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nA fundamental tenet of Eleatic theory is that what-is-not cannot be\\n(Parmenides DK 28 B2). Parmenides, using this claim (see DK 28\\nB8.15–16), argued that coming-to-be and passing-away are therefore\\nruled out, because genuine coming-to-be is change from what-is-not to\\nwhat-is, while destruction is change from what-is to what-is-not.\\nThus, says Parmenides, what-is “is without start or stop, since\\ncoming to be and passing away have wandered very far away, and true\\ntrust drove them out”\\n (DK 28 B8.27–28).[1] \\n Anaxagoras accepts this principle, explaining apparent generation and\\ndestruction by replacing them with mixture and separation (or\\ndissociation) of ingredients:\",\n \"\\n\\nThe Greeks do not think correctly about coming-to-be and\\npassing-away; for no thing comes to be or passes away, but is mixed\\ntogether and dissociated from the things that are. And thus they\\nwould be correct to call coming-to-be being mixed together and passing-away\\nbeing dissociated. (DK 59 B17)\",\n \"\\n\\nWhat seems to us, through perception, to be generation of new entities or\\ndestruction of old ones is not that at all. Rather, objects that\\nappear to us to be born, to grow, and to die, are merely arrangements\\nand re-arrangements of more metaphysically basic ingredients. The\\nmechanism for the apparent coming-to-be is mixing and separating out\\nfrom the mixture produced by the vortex motion of the ingredients. Through that mechanism, the real things, the ingredients,\\ncan retain their character throughout. When an arrangement breaks\\napart (or “passes away”) the ingredients are dissociated\\nfrom one another (through separation) and can be re-mixed to form (or\\n“become”) different arrangements, i.e., other perceptible\\nobjects.\",\n \"\\n\\nOne way to think of Anaxagoras’ point in B17 is that animals,\\nplants, human beings, the heavenly bodies, and so on, are natural\\nconstructs. They are constructs because they depend\\nfor their existence and character on the ingredients of which they are\\nconstructed (and the pattern or structure that they acquire in the\\nprocess). Yet they are natural because their\\nconstruction occurs as one of the processes of nature. Unlike\\nhuman-made artifacts (which are similarly constructs of\\ningredients), they are not teleologically determined to fulfill some\\npurpose. This gives Anaxagoras a two-level metaphysics. Things\\nsuch as earth, water, fire, hot, bitter, dark, bone, flesh, stone, or\\nwood are metaphysically basic and genuinely real (in the required\\nEleatic sense): they are things-that-are. The objects constituted\\nby these ingredients are not genuinely real, they are temporary\\nmixtures with no autonomous metaphysical status: they are not\\nthings-that-are. (The natures of the ingredients, and the\\nquestion of what is included as an ingredient, are addressed below; see\\n3.2 “Ingredients and Seeds”). This view, that the\\ningredients are more real than the objects that they make up, is common\\nin Presocratic philosophy, especially in the theories of those thinkers\\nwho were influenced by Parmenides’ arguments against the\\npossibility of what-is-not and so against genuine coming-to-be and\\npassing-away. It can be found in Empedocles, and in the\\npre-Platonic atomists, as well as, perhaps, in Plato’s middle\\nperiod Theory of Forms (Denyer, 1983, Frede 1985, W.-R. Mann 2000, Silverman\\n2002).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.1 No Becoming or Passing-Away\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\n\\n\\n“All things were together.” B1 (in part)\\n\\n\\n\\n“In everything there is a share of everything.” B11 (in\\npart)\\n\\n\",\n \"\\n\\nAs we have seen, Anaxagoras’ commitment to Eleatic principles rules\\nout the possibility of genuine coming-to-be or passing-away. It also\\nrules out real qualitative changes and transformations. When a warm\\nliquid cools (it seems) the hot liquid becomes cold; when a child\\ningests food (milk and bread, for instance), the milk and bread are\\n(it seems) transformed into flesh, blood, and bone. Yet Anaxagoras\\nobjects to these claims because they entail that the hot ceases to be,\\nand the cold comes to be, in the liquid, and that the bread and milk\\nare destroyed while flesh, blood, and bone come to be. His solution is\\nto claim not only that “all things were together” in the\\noriginal mixture, but that everything is in everything at all\\ntimes. If there is already blood and bone in the milk and bread, then\\nthe growth of the child can be attributed to the accumulation of these\\ningredients from the bread and milk, and their assimilation into the\\nsubstance of the child’s body, rather than to the transformation of\\nbread and milk into something else. Further, if there are both hot and\\ncold in the liquid, there is no disappearance into nothing of the hot\\nas the liquid cools, and no generation of the cold from what is not\\n(or even from what is not cold). The clearest statement of this is in\\nAnaxagoras B10, a quotation found in the following passage:\",\n \"\\n\\nWhen Anaxagoras discovered the old belief that nothing comes from\\nthat which is not in any way whatsoever, he did away with coming-to-be,\\nand introduced dissociation in place of coming-to-be. For he\\nfoolishly said that all things are mixed with each other, but that as\\nthey grow they are dissociated. For in the same seminal fluid\\nthere are hair, nails, veins and arteries, sinew, and bone, and it\\nhappens that they are imperceptible because of the smallness of the\\nparts, but when they grow, they gradually are separated off.\\n“For how,” he says, “can hair come from what is not\\nhair, and flesh from what is not flesh?” He maintained\\nthis, not only about bodies, but also about colors. For he said\\nthat black is in white and white in black. And he laid down the\\nsame thing with respect to weights, believing that light is mixed with\\nheavy and vice versa. (DK 59 B10; the passage is from the\\nanonymous scholiast on a 4th c. C.E. work of Gregory\\nof\\n Nazianzus.[2])\",\n \"\\n\\nAlthough interpreters both ancient (including this scholiast and\\nSimplicius) and modern (Guthrie 1965 is a good example) have seen\\nthe desire to explain nutrition and growth as the primary\\nmotivation for adopting the Everything-in-Everything principle, it is more\\nlikely that Anaxagoras’ adoption of the general metaphysical\\nprinciple of No-Becoming leads him to claim that everything is in\\neverything (Schofield 1981, Curd 2007). Nutrition and growth are simply particularly clear instances of the changes\\nthat are ruled out as fundamentally real if there is no becoming.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe Everything-in-Everything principle asserts the omnipresence of\\ningredients. In everything there is a mixture of all the ingredients\\nthat there are: every ingredient is everywhere at all times. This\\nprinciple is a fundamental tenet of Anaxagoras’ theory, and leads to\\ndifficulties of interpretation (see, for instance, the debate between\\nMathews 2002 and 2005 and Sisko 2005). If everything is in everything,\\nthere must be interpenetration of ingredients, for it must be possible\\nfor there to be many ingredients in the same space. Indeed, the\\nprinciple requires that all ingredients be in every space at all times\\n(the No Smallest or Largest principle also plays a role here: see\\nsect. 2.3). This will allow any ingredient to emerge from a mixture\\nthrough accumulation (or, having been unmixed, to become submerged in\\none) at any point at any time, and thus allow for the appearance of\\ncoming-to-be (or passing-away) of things or qualities.\",\n \"\\n\\nSome scholars have supposed that Anaxagoras thought of these\\ningredients as very small particles (Vlastos 1950, Guthrie 1965, Sider\\n2005, Lewis 2000). But a particle would have to be a smallest\\namount of some type of ingredient, occupying some space all by\\nitself—with no other type of ingredient in it. Not only\\ndoes the No Smallest or Largest principle rule this out (see sect.\\n2.3), but the particulate interpretation seems inconsistent with the\\nEverything-in-Everything principle. It is crucial to\\nAnaxagoras’ theory that there be (in actuality) no such pure bits\\nor volumes of any type of ingredient.\",\n \"\\n\\nInstead one might conceive of the ingredients as fluid, like pastes or\\nliquids which can be smeared together, with different areas of the\\nmixture characterized by different relative densities of the\\ningredients, all of which are nevertheless everywhere in it. Each\\ngenuinely real ingredient could be mixed with every other, and so\\nwould be contained in any area of the mixture, and in principle\\nvisibly recoverable from it by accumulation or increased\\nconcentration. The differing densities of the ingredients would allow\\nfor differences in the phenomenal character of the mixture. To an\\nobserver, different areas would appear hotter or colder, sweeter or\\nmore bitter, more red than green, and so on, and rightly so. As the\\nrelative concentration of ingredients in any area of the mixture\\naltered (through the mixture and separation brought about by the\\nrotation of the original blend of ingredients), the phenomenal\\ncharacter of that region of the mixture would alter. An\\nintriguing account (Marmodoro 2015, 2017) suggests that Anaxagorean\\ningredients are not material; rather they are primitive physical\\nqualitative powers or dispositions (in the parlance of contemporary\\nmetaphysics, they are “gunky”). \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.2 Everything-in-Everything\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nB1’s claim that “all things were together” before the\\noriginal rotation occurred does not guarantee the truth of the\\nEverything-in-Everything principle. If separation occurs within an\\noriginal mixture of everything with everything, as a result of the\\nmotion imparted by nous, then it could be that, given enough\\ntime, ingredients would be segregated from one another (as they are in\\nEmpedocles during the triumph of Strife, when the four roots are\\ncompletely separated). Anaxagoras needs to block this, so that he can\\nmaintain his commitment to the No Becoming principle. In some region\\nthat came by separation to contain, say, nothing but bone, there would\\ncome to be pure bone (as a new entity), in replacement for and\\ndestruction of the mixture that was previously there. He blocks this\\npossibility by claiming that there is no smallest (and no largest). If\\nthere is no lower limit on the density of an ingredient, then no\\ningredient will be completely removed from any region of the mixture\\nthrough the force of the rotary motion caused by\\nnous. Here are Anaxagoras’ claims:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n\\nNor of the small is there a smallest, but always a smaller (for\\nwhat-is cannot not be) — but also of the large there is always a\\nlarger. And [the large] is equal to the small in extent\\n(plêthos), but in relation to itself each thing is both\\nlarge and small.\\n (B3[3])\\n\\n\\n\\nSince the shares of the large and the small are equal in number, in\\nthis way too, all things will be in everything; nor is it possible that\\n[anything] be separate, but all things have a share of\\neverything. Since it is not possible that there is a least, it\\nwould not be possible that [anything] be separated, nor come to be by\\nitself, but just as in the beginning, now too all things are together.\\n(B6 [in part])\\n\\n\",\n \"\\n\\nThe passage from B6 makes clear that the “no smallest”\\nprinciple is connected to the principle of Everything-in-Everything,\\nand B3 asserts that the “no smallest” claim depends on the\\nimpossibility of what-is-not. Here is one way to interpret what\\nAnaxagoras is saying: if there were a smallest (particle, density,\\namount) of any ingredient (call it S), we could in principle\\nthrough separation reduce the amount of S in some area of the\\nmixture to that smallest, and then induce further separation through\\nrotation, which would remove that ingredient from a particular area of\\nthe mixture. That would leave some area without “everything\\nin everything.” The area would cease to be S to\\nany degree and so would be not-S. In that area, the\\nexplanation of coming-to-be in terms of emergence from a previous\\nmixture would fail. Note that Anaxagoras — like other Greek\\nthinkers, including Plato — assumes that anything that is\\nmust be something or other and so slides easily between “what is\\nnot f” and “what is not” (Furley\\n2002).\",\n \"\\n\\nAnaxagoras’ solution is to deny that there is any lower limit\\non smallness. Adopting the model of density described above, he\\ncan say that there is no lowest degree of density in the mixture.\\nThis emphasis on density makes it clear that Anaxagoras’\\ntechnical sense of smallness is not one of particle size but of degree\\nof submergence or emergence in the mixture. For an ingredient to\\nbe small is for there to be a comparatively low density of that\\ningredient in a particular area of the mixture in comparison with all\\nthe other ingredients (everything else) in that area. The\\ncorresponding assertion that there is no upper limit on largeness can\\nthen be interpreted as the claim that no matter how emergent from the\\nmixture (standing out from the background mixture) an ingredient is, it\\ncan become still more emergent. So, no matter how sweet some water\\ntastes, there is still some salt in it. The salt in the sample is\\nsmall, i.e., submerged in the mixture of water and other ingredients,\\nbut there will never cease to be salt in the sample.\\nCorrespondingly, no matter how salty another sample is, it can always\\nbecome more salty and even “turn to salt” because there is\\nno upper limit to the degree of emergence from the background. As\\nthe salt emerges, other ingredients will submerge, but will never\\ndisappear, so that the wet itself is deeply submerged in the mix, and\\nwe are left with an apparently solid block of salt (though that salt\\nwill itself contain all other ingredients, with most of them in such\\nsmall concentrations that they are completely submerged and not\\napparent to an observer). This account of large and small is\\nimplied in Schofield 1980, and worked out more fully in Inwood 1986 and\\nFurth 1991; it is accepted in Curd 2007; see also Marmodoro 2017.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.3 No Smallest or Largest\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThe Eleatic metaphysics that Anaxagoras accepts shapes the science\\nthat he proposes. Anaxagoras offers an ambitious scientific theory that\\nattempts to explain the workings of the cosmos, even while accepting\\nthe Eleatic ban on coming-to-be and passing-away. His goal is\\nscientific knowledge, i.e., understanding, as far as that is possible for human\\nbeings.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. The Physical Principles\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThe original state of the cosmos was an unlimited (apeiron)\\nmixture of all the ingredients. The mixture of ingredients, all\\nwith all, exists eternally. Up to some point in the past, it was\\nmotionless (59 B1, A45), and it was everywhere undifferentiated, or\\nalmost so. According to B1, which Simplicius, the source for the\\nfragment, says was near the beginning of Anaxagoras’ book:\",\n \"\\n\\nAll things were together, unlimited both in amount and in\\nsmallness, for the small, too, was unlimited. And because all\\nthings were together, nothing was evident on account of smallness; for\\nair and aether covered all things, both being unlimited, for these are\\nthe greatest among all things both in amount and in largeness.\",\n \"\\n\\nThis undifferentiated mass includes all there is of all the natural\\ningredients that there are, the ingredients that will eventually form\\nthe natural constructs that constitute the cosmos as we know it.\\nNothing is ever added to or subtracted from this storehouse of stuffs,\\nalthough the mass of stuffs is not always homogeneous. In fact,\\nthere are different densities of ingredients even at this earliest\\n(pre-motion) stage. B1 makes clear that air (dark, moist stuff)\\nand aether (bright fiery stuff) are the most emergent (largest)\\ningredients, and their dominance means that the original mixture must\\nhave been like a dense bright cloud: nothing else would be evident or\\nmanifest, even had there been an observer. At some point\\nnous (the time being right) set the mixture in motion and\\ncaused it to begin to revolve (first in a small area, and then in an\\never-widening area). The rotary motion causes the ingredients in\\nthe mass to shift. This shifting produces what Anaxagoras calls\\n“separating off.” Because the mass is a plenum, any\\nseparation will be a rearrangement (thus a mixing) of\\ningredients. The continouous ever-expanding rotation produces more and\\nmore separation. The Everything-in-Everything principle continues\\nto hold, so there are all ingredients at all places at all times, but\\nthe different densities of ingredients allow for local variations, and\\nso the rotating mass becomes qualitatively differentiated.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.1 Mixture and Rotation\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nNowhere in the extant fragments does Anaxagoras give a complete list\\nof the ingredients in the mixture, or a clear indication of their\\nscope, so it is up to commentators to figure out what he meant, given\\nthe available evidence. There are three alternatives. First, some\\nscholars have held that Anaxagoras limited the basic ingredients to\\nthe opposites, such as hot and cold, wet and dry, sweet and bitter,\\ndark and light, and so on. It is the opposites that have explanatory\\nforce in the theory, and all other things and properties are reducible\\nto the opposites. Supporters of this view include Tannery 1886, Burnet\\n1930, Cornford 1930, Vlastos 1950, Schofield 1980 (with reservations),\\nInwood 1986, Spanu 1987–88, Sedley 2007, and Marmodoro 2015, 2017. On\\nthis view all the material stuffs and all the objects in the universe\\nwould be natural constructs. At the opposite extreme, a second option\\naccepts that literally everything in the natural world is in the\\noriginal mixture — opposites, but also natural materials (fire,\\nearth, copper, iron, and the like), animals and plants (and their\\nparts such as flesh, blood, and bone), and so on. This view makes no\\ndistinction between ingredients and what have been called natural\\nconstructs above. It can be found in Strang 1963, Stokes 1965, Guthrie\\n1965, Barnes 1982, Furth 1991, Graham 1994 and 2004, Lewis\\n2000. Finally, there is a middle view, which rejects the\\nopposites-only account, and accepts that some things (plants and\\nanimals, heavenly bodies) are natural constructs. The original mix\\nincludes opposites, but also natural substances like metals and earth,\\nand the ingredients of animals, such as flesh, blood, and bone, but no\\nwhole physical objects such as plants and animals themselves, or their\\norganic parts such as legs and hearts (Curd 2007; this view is\\nsuggested in Schofield 1980, 132 ff.).\",\n \"\\n\\nThe “opposites only” view cannot stand (arguments\\nagainst it are given in Guthrie 1965 and Graham 2004). B15 may provide\\nsome evidence for the view:\",\n \"\\n\\nThe dense and the wet and the cold and the dark came together\\nhere, where <the> earth is now; but the rare and the hot and the\\ndry <and the bright> moved out to\\nthe far reaches of the aether.\",\n \"\\n\\nBut Anaxagoras’ own lists include more than the opposites (see B4a and\\nB4b). Further, the Principle of Predominance (in B12, see sect. 3.4)\\nwould seem to require more than opposites, since it does not seem to\\nsay that each thing is reducible to opposite characteristics that\\npredominate, but that each thing gets its character from the\\nparticular material ingredients that predominate in it. Further\\nevidence against the opposites-only view is found in Aristotle.\\nAristotle claims that for Anaxagoras, the elements (the basic\\nrealities) are what Aristotle calls the homoiomerous parts (On\\nComing to Be and Passing Away I.1 314a18). These are (for\\nAristotle) things that are literally “like-parted,” i.e.,\\nthey are homogeneous all the way through, like a piece of pure gold,\\nrather than being different in their different parts (like a hand),\\nand Aristotle lists flesh, blood, bone, and adds “and the others\\nof which the part is called by the same name [as the whole].”\\nThe term homoiomeries is Aristotelian, and has no role to\\nplay in Anaxagoras (Graham 1994, Curd 2007; contra: Sisko\\n2009), but it is clear that for Aristotle, the ingredients in an\\nAnaxagorean mixture are not just the opposites.\",\n \"\\n\\nIf the attempt to reduce the Anaxagorean ingredients to opposites is\\nunsuccessful, so, too, is the interpretation that allows as an\\ningredient every kind of thing in the phenomenal world. A minor\\npoint is that Anaxagoras surely does not think that artifacts made by\\nhuman beings are part of the mixture, and there are other semi-natural\\nartifacts as well that would not seem to be present: cheese, bronze,\\nwhiskey, for example. More importantly, the wide-scope view fails\\nto take seriously B17’s replacement of coming-to-be and\\npassing-away with mixture and dissolution. Further, it is unclear\\nhow the view can discriminate between an individual and its parts or\\ningredients. Are there homunculi of individuals in the original\\nmix? (Lewis 2000 accepts this.) If so, how can the theory\\nexplain that the growth of an organism is not simply its enlargement\\n(by adding ingredients) but also its development? (A\\nplant’s leaves may grow larger, but its seed pods develop, and\\nare not just an enlargement of a structure that was already present in\\nthe seedling plant.) In B4a Anaxagoras refers to the animals and\\nhumans “that have been compounded, as many as have soul,”\\nand this suggests that B17’s implicit model of living things as\\nnatural constructs mixed together from the ingredients that are\\ngenuinely real must be taken seriously.\",\n \"\\n\\nIt seems, then, best to interpret Anaxagoras as claiming that all\\nthe material ingredients of natural living things and the heavenly\\nbodies are present in the original mix, but that these objects\\nthemselves are not among the ingredients but are natural constructions,\\nproduced by the processes of mixture and separation that we call\\nnutrition and growth, or by the rotations of the heavens and the\\nattendant clumping together and breaking apart of the ingredients of\\nthe stars, clouds, comets, planets, and so on.\",\n \"\\n\\nA problem for any account of the original mixture is Anaxagoras’\\nmention of seeds. The word for seeds (spermata) occurs twice\\nin the fragments, in lists of ingredients (in B4a and in B4b), but\\nAnaxagoras nowhere explains or makes it clear what it means. There are\\na number of options: seeds have been taken to be the smallest possible\\nbits of ingredients (but, as argued above, there are no smallest bits\\nin Anaxagoras’ system), or to be extremely small homunculi-like\\ningredients that some interpretations take to be origins for\\nAnaxagoras of living things which then expand by the addition of other\\ningredients (Lewis 2000). Furley 1976 and 2002 advocates the simplest\\ninterpretation, that Anaxagoras simply means biological seeds (but not\\nhomunculi), and this seems the best proposal (see also Barnes 1982,\\nCurd 2007, Sedley 2007, Marmodoro 2015, 2017, 147–153; Marmodoro also sees seeds as biological, containing pre-existing structures). A seed would then be a biological origin\\npoint, and might perhaps be the route through which nous\\n(which controls all things that have soul, i.e., anything alive)\\nenters a living thing. If a seed is mixed with the right ingredients\\nin the right circumstances, a living thing will grow.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.2 Ingredients and Seeds\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nAccording to Diogenes Laertius, Anaxagoras acquired the nickname Mr.\\nMind (DK 59 A1); his view that the cosmos is controlled by\\nnous, mind or intelligence, first attracted and then\\ndisappointed Socrates (Plato, Phaedo 97b8ff.). Plato and\\nAristotle applauded Anaxagoras for using nous as the\\nfirst principle of motion, but both criticized him for failing to be\\nconsistent in that use, arguing that once he invoked Mind to set the\\noriginal mixture in motion, Anaxagoras reduced later causes to\\nmindless mechanism.\",\n \"\\n\\nAnaxagoras is adamant that nous is completely different\\nfrom the ingredients that constituted the original mixture. It is the\\nonly thing to which the Everything-in-Everything principle does not\\napply. Mind is present to some things, but it is not an ingredient or share as\\nflesh and blood are ingredients in a dog (B11: “In everything\\nthere is a share of everything except nous, but there\\nare some things in which nous, too, is\\npresent”). In B12 (the longest extant fragment), Anaxagoras\\nclaims that if nous were just another ingredient it\\ncould neither know nor rule in the way that it does.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe other things have a share of everything, but nous\\nis unlimited and self-ruling and has been mixed with no thing, but is\\nalone itself by itself. For if it were not by itself, but had been\\nmixed with anything else, then it would partake of all things, if it\\nhad been mixed with anything (for there is a share of everything in\\neverything just as I have said before); and the things mixed together\\nwith it would thwart it, so that it would control none of the things\\nin the way that it in fact does, being alone by itself. For it is the\\nfinest of all things and the purest, and indeed it maintains all\\ndiscernment about everything and has the greatest strength. (59 B12,\\nin part)\",\n \"\\n\\nMind/Intellect plays a number of roles in Anaxagoras’ system. First, it\\ninaugurates the rotation of the mass of ingredients; it then controls\\nthat rotation, and the local rotations that take place within the\\nlarge whirl that is the whole cosmos:\",\n \"\\n\\nNous controlled the whole revolution, so that it\\nstarted to revolve in the beginning. First it began to revolve from a\\nsmall region, but it is revolving yet more, and it will revolve still\\nmore… And whatever sorts of things were going to be, and\\nwhatever sorts were and now are not, and as many as are now and\\nwhatever sorts will be, all these nous set in\\norder. And nous also ordered this revolution, in which\\nthe things being separated off now revolve, the stars and the sun and\\nthe moon and the air and the aether. This revolution caused them to\\nseparate off. (59 B12, in part)\",\n \"\\n\\nNous then is not only first cause, it also, one might\\nsay, is the preserver of order in the cosmos, as it maintains the\\nrotations that govern all the natural processes. Anaxagoras does not\\nexplain how these processes work, or how nous can\\naffect the ingredients. But there is a hint of his reasoning in a\\ncomment in Aristotle (Metaphysics I.3.984b15):\",\n \"\\n\\nWhen someone said that nous is present — in\\nnature just as it is in animals — as the cause of the cosmos and\\nof all its order, he appeared as a sober man among the random\\nchatterers who preceded him. (We know that Anaxagoras clearly held\\nthese views, but Hermotimus of Clazomenae gets the credit for holding\\nthem earlier.)\",\n \"\\n\\nJust as we control our bodies by our thoughts, so the cosmos is\\ncontrolled by nous; we may be unclear about the\\ndetails, but the results are obvious to us. One fundamental point\\nabout Anaxagoras’ theory of mind is that he nowhere in the extant\\nmaterial identifies mind with a divine principle or god. In fragment\\n1018 and in Trojan Women (886), Euripides says that mind is\\ngod in each of us, and connects the necessity of the universe with\\nZeus and mind, and these claims are thought to have been influenced by\\nAnaxagoras’ views. Although later testimonial reports in Aëtius\\nand Iamblichus say that Anaxagoras connected nous and\\ngod, there are many more reports of his denial of divinity to the\\nheavenly bodies and his alleged atheism.\",\n \"\\n\\nNous is the most powerful thing in the cosmos,\\ncontrolling the rotation and all ensouled things. Part of that power\\nand control lies in its powers of knowledge. Anaxagoras asserts that\\nnous has all judgment and discernment about all things;\\nmoreover, this knowledge extends to everything that emerges from the\\nmixtures and dissociations caused by the original rotation:\",\n \"\\n\\nAnd nous discerned them all: the things that are being mixed\\ntogether, the things that are being separated off, and the things that\\nare being dissociated. And whatever sorts of things were going to be,\\nand whatever sorts were and now are not, and as many as are now and\\nwhatever sorts will be, all these nous set in\\norder. (B12, in part)\",\n \"\\n\\nThis suggests a beginning of an answer to the objections lodged\\nagainst Anaxagoras’ use of nous as a cause. While\\nnous is not the teleological and ethical cause for which Socrates was\\nsearching in the Phaedo, nous could serve as an\\nultimate explanation. Anaxagoras nowhere says that\\nnous arranges things in a certain way because it is best for\\nthem to be so, or even suggests something like an Aristotelian final\\ncause, (although Sedley 2007 argues that exactly this view is implicit\\nin the fragments, contra: Graham, 2009, Sisko 2010a). Things are the way\\nthey are because that is the way things have unfolded\\nsince nous first set everything in motion, and as it\\ncontinued to move them. (One might compare this to the role of the\\nunmoved mover as the ultimate cause in Aristotle’s universe; despite\\nbeing the first cause the unmoved mover does not create.)\",\n \"\\n\\nAnaxagoras links mind and soul in B12: “nous has\\ncontrol over all things that have soul, both the larger and the\\nsmaller.” This suggests not only that Anaxagoras took the\\nactions of humans and animals as the model for how nous\\ncontrols the cosmos, but also suggests how nous differs from\\nthe other ingredients. He claims that it is the purest and finest of\\nall things. Some scholars argue that it is only in Plato that we meet\\na genuine notion of the immaterial (Renehan 1980, Sedley 2007), but\\nAnaxagoras’ denial that nous is mixed with or partakes of\\nother ingredients (while still being in some of them) and his\\ninsistence on its fineness and purity may suggest that he is thinking\\nof mind as a non-corporeal entity that can pervade and control a body\\nor even the whole cosmos without being a material part of it (Curd\\n2009). On either interpretation, if\\nnous were simply an ordinary ingredient on a par with the\\nother basic ingredients, then, as Anaxagoras notes in B12, its relative\\nsmallness would allow it to be swamped and overcome\\n(“thwarted”) by the other ingredients.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.3 Mind/Intellect\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nFragment B12 ends with a further discussion of mixture and separation,\\nand Anaxagoras’ enunciation of what has come to be called the\\n“Principle of Predominance.” After reasserting that no\\ningredient is ever fully dissociated or separated from any other\\n(except for nous, which is not an ingredient),\\nAnaxagoras adds that all nous is alike (that is, cosmic\\nnous and mind in us share the same nature), but\\n“Nothing else is like anything else, but each one is and was\\nmost manifestly those things of which there are the most in it.”\\nThus, something is hot, if hot predominates over the cold in it, flesh\\nif flesh predominates over other ingredients, and so on. The principle\\ndoes not claim that there is any single predominating ingredient at\\neach place in the mixture. Rather, the predominance seems to be along\\nnumerous lines of possibility: more flesh than blood, more hot than\\ncold, more red than green, and so on (Furley 2002). This need not\\nmean that there is more humanity than doghood in a human being (indeed\\nit could not mean this, on the account advanced in this article, which\\nrules out dogs and humans as Anaxagorean ingredients). Rather, to be a\\nhuman being is to have a certain set of predominant characteristics\\narranged in a certain way (that arrangement may be the work of soul\\n— perhaps nous — in a living thing).\",\n \"\\n\\nA problem for the Principle of Predominance is to determine what it is\\nto be a predominant ingredient, especially given the\\nEverything-in-Everything and No Smallest principles. A classic example\\nis the following: the gold in this gold ring is that discontinuous\\npart of the total mixture in which gold predominates. But now, as\\nStrang says, “Consider the gold which predominates as an\\ningredient: does it also, like the original piece of gold, contain\\nwithin it an admixture of all other substances? If so, it is gold\\nbecause gold predominates in it as an ingredient; and we can ask the\\nsame question about the ingredient of the ingredient, and so on ad\\ninfinitum” (Strang 1963, 101; see also Cornford\\n1930). Because there can be no pure gold (there is no pure anything),\\nit becomes difficult to see what the gold could be that predominates\\nin anything. But if I cannot determine what predominates in it, I\\ncannot determine what anything is.\",\n \"\\n\\nStrang 1963 proposes a solution to the problem. While acknowledging\\nthat there can never be pure instances of any ingredient in actuality,\\nthere could be such instances in analysis. I can analyze mixtures and\\ndetermine predominant ingredients, but I will never be able to produce\\na pure instance of such an ingredient. The problem here is how this\\nwould be worked out, and why I can be certain that there are such\\nnatures (as we might call them). Anaxagoras suggests two\\nthings. First, in B12 he stresses that nous has the\\npower to know and understand all the ingredients (indeed cosmic\\nnous apparently knew all this before the rotation began; see\\nquotation above). Second, in B21 and B21a he suggests how\\nhuman nous (nous in us) can come to such an\\nunderstanding by relying on sense perception but moving beyond it in\\nthought (see sect. 5. Knowledge). Finally, because the ingredients are\\ngenuinely basic entities in the sense required to ground a rational\\ncosmology in the Eleatic sense, they must be stable natures in the\\nParmenidean sense (for a related account, see Marmodoro\\n2015). Anaxagoras is committed to the arguments that ground Eleatic\\nmetaphysics; thus he can claim an a priori reason to think\\nthat the ingredients can be knowable in the sense required by the\\nPrinciple of Predominance. His epistemological view that humans can\\nreach understanding through beginning with sense experience then fits\\nwith these metaphysical commitments.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.4 The Principle of Predominance\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nAnaxagoras gave a complete account of the universe: of the heavens,\\nthe earth, and geological and meteorological phenomena. The accounts\\nof the action of nous and the original rotation and its\\nconsequences appear in the fragments: B9 describes the force and\\nvelocity of the rotation, B12 and 13 explain the beginning of the\\nrotation and the subsequent breaking up and remixing of the mass of\\ningredients, while B15 and 16 specify the cosmological consequences of\\nthe continued rotation (Curd 2007 and 2008, Graham 2006, Gregory\\n2007). Most of the other information comes from the testimonia, but\\nthere is enough in the remaining fragments to make it clear that\\neverything is ultimately explained by the great rotation set in motion\\nby nous. Further, and intriguingly, Anaxagoras claims that\\nthe cosmic rotary motion could produce other worlds like our own.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Science: The Anaxagorean Cosmos\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThe rotation of the mixture begins in a small area, and then spreads\\nout through the mass (B12). As the extent of the mixture is unlimited\\n(or infinite, apeiron), the rotation and expansion will\\ncontinue forever, bringing more and more ingredients into the whirl (a\\nsummary of the process is in Gregory 2007). The force and speed of the\\nrotation is (according to B9) much faster at the edges, where the\\nexpanding rotation meets the as-yet-unmoved mass of ingredients: what\\nwe perceive of the rotation (probably the motions of the heavens) is\\nmuch slower than the unobserved rotation. The force is enough to pull\\napart and rearrange the ingredients:\",\n \"\\n\\nWhen nous began to move [things], there was separation\\noff from the multitude that was being moved, and whatever\\nnous moved, all this was dissociated; and as things\\nwere being moved and dissociated, the revolution made them dissociate\\nmuch more. (B13)\",\n \"\\n\\nThere are two sorts of dissociation. First, as the rotation enters the\\nas-yet-unmoved mass of ingredients, that mass begins to break up and\\nthe ingredients start to shift in their concentrations. This causes\\nthe original arrangement of ingredients to break up and begin to be\\nrearranged. Because the mixture is a plenum, any separation is at the\\nsame time a rearrangement of ingredients. Then, those new\\nrearrangements are themselves subject to further break-up and further\\nrearrangement. Anaxagoras indicates this in the fragments by using\\ndifferent terms for different stages in the process (although he is\\nnot completely consistent in these uses). Normally, he uses the notion\\nof being separated off (forms of the verb apokrinesthai) for the\\ninitial breaking apart of the mass. Re-arrangements are referred to as\\nmixing (summisgesthai) or compacting\\n(sumpêgnusthai). He also uses “joining\\ntogether” (proskrinesthai) as a contrast to the\\nseparating off process (apokrinesthai) in B4a and B4b. When,\\nin B17, he claims that passing-away is really dissociation, he uses\\nthe word diakrinesthai. This is a later stage than the\\nearliest separations off of B1. The primary terms are compound forms\\nof the verb krinein, to distinguish. The word can also mean\\n“to judge” or “to determine,” and through the\\nuse of these compound terms, Anaxagoras reminds his readers that all\\nof the changes are ultimately traceable to the action of\\nnous, or Mind, that sets the mass moving in the first\\ninstance.\",\n \"\\n\\nOver time, the rotation throws lighter ingredients towards the edges\\nof the whirl and pushes the heavier ones to the center (B15), thus\\nputting more dark and heavy ingredients like earth in the center and\\nthrowing air and aether (fire) away from the center. This gives the\\ntraditional Greek picture of our Earth (itself a mixture of all\\ningredients, with earth and heavy ores and minerals predominating)\\ncovered (in many places) by water, with air and the fiery reaches of\\nthe heavens.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe sun is a mass of fiery metal, and the moon is an earthy lump\\n(with no light of its own). The same rotation ultimately produces\\nthe stars and planets as well. Sometimes the force of the\\nrotation snatches up stones from the surface of the Earth and spins\\nthem around the Earth as they gradually rise higher through the force\\nof the rotation. Until these bodies are high enough, they remain\\nunseen between the Earth and the moon and so sometimes intervene to\\nprevent heavenly bodies from being seen by terrestrial observers.\\nThe force and shaking of the rotation can cause slippage, and so\\nsometimes a star (a flaming mass of rock and iron) is thrown downwards\\ntoward the earth as a meteor (such as the one Anaxagoras is supposed to\\nhave predicted at Aegospotami; see Galzerano 2019). The fullest account of\\nAnaxagoras’ view on meteors can be found in Plutarch’s\\nLife of Lysander 12 (59 A12). Anaxagoras is also credited\\nwith discovering the causes of eclipses — the interposition of\\nanother body between earth and the sun or the moon: sometimes he\\ncredits this to the “unseen bodies” mentioned above (see\\nGraham and Hintz, 2007, Graham 2013a and 2013b, Taub 2003). According\\nto the ancient sources (see esp. A1 and A42), Anaxagoras also gave\\nexplanations for the light of the Milky Way, the formation of comets,\\nthe inclination of the heavens, the solstices, and the composition of\\nthe moon and stars.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.1 Cosmology\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThe rotation begun by nous ultimately affects phenomena\\non the earth and above the surface of the earth. Anaxagoras claims\\nthat the earth is flat, rests on air, and remains where it is because\\nof its size (A42; a number of geological and meteorological views\\nattributed to Anaxagoras were also apparently held by Anaximenes;\\nwhether this is because Anaxagoras was following Anaximenes or because\\nthe commentators conflate the two is unclear). Despite the manner of\\nits formation, the earth is stationary, not spinning. The (relative)\\nflatness of the earth allows water to spread over the earth, with\\nmountains and plains rising above the level of the water. The levels\\nchange as water is evaporated or added by rain, and as water that has\\nbeen trapped in the earth by the rotation makes its way out through\\nrivers to the sea. Because the air under the earth is also moving\\n(pushed along by the cosmic rotation), it sometimes gets caught up in\\nthe crevices of the earthy stuff. When this air cannot make its way\\nout, the force of the moving air causes earthquakes. Anaxagoras seems\\ndetermined to explain everything. The extant sources report views on\\nthunder and lightning, the source of the Nile, the first correct\\naccount of the nature of hail, and inquiry into why the sea is\\nsalty. He also offered accounts of sense perception and made\\ninquiries into embryology.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.2 Meteorology and Geology\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nOne of the more curious aspects of Anaxagoras’ theory is hinted\\nat in B4a:\",\n \"\\n\\nSince these things are so, it is right to think that there are many\\ndifferent things present in everything that is being combined, and\\nseeds of all things, having all sorts of forms, colors, and flavors,\\nand that humans and also the other animals were compounded, as many as\\nhave soul. Also that there are cities that have been constructed\\nby humans and works made, just as with us, and that there are a sun and\\na moon and other heavenly bodies for them, just as with us, and the\\nearth grows many different things for them, the most valuable of which\\nthey gather together into their household and use. I have said\\nthis about the separation off, because there would be separation off\\nnot only for us but also elsewhere.\",\n \"\\n\\nWhere is the “elsewhere” where there would also be\\nseparation off, and where there are sun and moon “for them, just\\nas with us”? Surprisingly, no ancient sources discuss this\\n(although Simplicius, who quotes the fragment, is clearly puzzled by\\nit, and argues for a neo-Platonic metaphysical interpretation). Modern\\ncommentators have suggested that the other worlds are on the moon\\nand/or other planets (Jöhrens 1939, Zeller 1923), elsewhere on\\nthe face of our Earth (Cornford, 1934), or even contained within\\nourselves (and all other things) so that there are infinite worlds\\nwithin worlds (Mansfeld 1980, Schofield 1996, Sisko 2003). There is\\nalso the possibility that Anaxagoras has no commitment to the reality\\nof these other worlds, but is simply engaging in a thought experiment\\nto show how the rotation would work (Fränkel 1969, Vlastos 1975,\\nSchofield 1996). There may be another possibility (Curd 2007). The\\nunlimited rotation begins in a small area and expands indefinitely,\\npulling more and more of the unlimited mass of as-yet-unmixed\\ningredients into the whirl. Such an action could produce smaller local\\nrotations within the larger whirl (especially at the expanding edges,\\nas in the rotations of hurricane winds) and there, too, separation,\\nmixture, and dissociation would occur. Such processes would result in\\nthe formation of systems like our own. This is not a\\nthought-experiment on Anaxagoras’ part, but a commitment to the\\nlaw-likeness of the rotations controlled by\\nnous, and an awareness that similar processes will\\nproduce similar phenomena. Our world-system is not unique in the\\nuniverse, although there is but one universe (constituted by the\\nentire limitless mass of ingredients).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.3 Other Worlds?\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nBoth ancient and modern critics have complained that Anaxagoras is\\nunclear about the nature of nous (Mind/Intelligence) and its\\nrole in his theory (Laks 1993, 2002; Lesher 1995). In B12 Anaxagoras\\nclaims that\\nnous has all discernment, and that nous “knew\\nthem all: the things that are being mixed together, the things that\\nare being separated off, and the things that are being\\ndissociated.” Further, Anaxagoras remarks that there is\\nnous in many things, and that it is alike in all the\\nthings that it is in, both large and small (presumably those with\\nsoul, i.e., living things). Aristotle says that Anaxagoras conflates\\nsoul and mind, and B12 seems to confirm this, insofar as Anaxagoras\\nthere treats nous primarily as a mover, yet also says\\nthat it controls all things that have soul. It seems likely that in\\nthings other than cosmic nous, those compacted or\\nmixed-together natural constructs that have soul, the powers of\\nnous include both knowing and perceiving. Nowhere do we have\\nan analysis of the process of thinking for Anaxagoras, and although\\nAristotle and Theophrastus say that earlier thinkers identified\\nthinking and sense perception, there is little evidence for this view\\nin Anaxagoras (Laks 1999, Warren 2007).\",\n \"\\n\\nIt seems clear that if nous is to have all discernment and\\nto order the cosmos, it must have some knowledge of the contents of the\\noriginal mixture (Lesher 1995, Curd 2004). Further, if the\\ningredients are fundamentally real things they must have stable and\\nknowable natures. (This follows from Parmenides’ arguments\\nabout the connection between what-is and what is knowable.) Thus,\\nthere is a match between the natures of the ingredients and the\\ncognitive power of cosmic nous, but Anaxagoras leaves the\\nmechanism unexplained. It seems likely that cosmic nous\\njust has a direct intellectual grasp of these nature and acts in\\naccordance with that knowledge.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Knowledge\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nOnly a few fragments and testimonia discuss Anaxagoras’\\nviews on perception and knowledge in living things. Aristotle and\\nTheophrastus give us some account of his theory of perception, saying,\\nmost surprisingly, that for Anaxagoras all sensation is accompanied by\\ndiscomfort or pain (A92). Theophrastus links this to\\nAnaxagoras’ belief that like is perceived by unlike; on\\nTheophrastus’ view, perception is via touch, and unlike things\\nproduce some irritation when touched. Theophrastus adduces loud noises\\nand very bright light as producers of pain in perceivers, and suggests\\nthat the mechanism is the same in all cases of sensation. Some\\nirritation will be below the level of awareness for most perceivers,\\nwhich is why humans do not normally feel pain when\\nperceiving (see Warren 2007 for a good discussion of Anaxagoras on perception).\",\n \"\\n\\nWhat is the relation between perception and knowledge?\\nAnaxagoras does not claim that perception alone is sufficient for\\nknowing; nor does he seem to embrace skepticism. Sextus\\nEmpiricus, always on the lookout for arguments for and against any\\ndogmatic position, gives us most of the evidence for Anaxagoras’\\nviews. Says Sextus, of the skeptic’s methodology, “We\\nset what is thought in opposition to what appears, as Anaxagoras set\\nthe appearance that snow is white in opposition to the claim that snow\\nis frozen water, water is black, and therefore snow is black”\\n(A97; but see the passage from Cicero in the same testimonium).\\nHere Anaxagoras accepts that snow seems to us to be white, but claims\\nthat the reality must be that snow is black. The evidence of the\\nsenses must be corrected by what we know through thought. In B21,\\nAnaxagoras recognizes the weakness of the senses (“Owing to\\nfeebleness [of the senses], we are not able to determine the\\ntruth”), but in B21a he accepts that sense perception can be a\\nstep towards understanding: “appearances are a sight of the\\nunseen.” This follows from his own theory, for the evidence\\nof our own control of our bodies by our minds, the facts of nutrition\\nand growth, and the local revolutions of the heavens are evidence for\\nthe workings of cosmic nous, the No-Becoming principle, and\\nthe great cosmic revolution. Like other Presocratics, Anaxagoras\\nleaves us with no detailed account of how knowledge derives from\\nperception through the refinements of thought: Anaxagoras’\\naccount can be compared with that of Democritus, where the relation of\\nsense-perception and thought is similar and similarly unexplained.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.1 Mind in Us\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nReportedly the first of the Presocratic philosophers to settle\\nin Athens, Anaxagoras was a significant figure, not only for later\\nphilosophical thinkers, but also for the wider civic culture of his\\ntime. He was clearly an important influence on Pericles.\\nPlutarch reports:\",\n \"\\n\\nBut Anaxagoras of Clazomenae was the one who most associated with\\nPericles and who most bestowed on him that dignity and wisdom more\\nweighty than demagoguery, and on the whole raised up and exalted the\\nworthiness of his character …These are not the only advantages\\nthat Pericles enjoyed because of his connection with Anaxagoras. It\\nseems that Pericles rose above superstition, that attitude of\\nastonishment about celestial occurrences which is produced in those\\nwho are ignorant about the causes of things and who are crazed by\\ndivinity and divine interventions because of their inexperience in\\nthese areas. Natural philosophy substitutes for festering superstition\\nthat unshaken piety that is attended by good hopes. (A15,\\nA16)\",\n \"\\n\\nThat naturalism appears in the dramas of Euripides, who is often\\ndescribed as a pupil of Anaxagoras, and in the comedies of\\nAristophanes, who satirizes the views of Anaxagoras as well as the\\nfigure of Socrates in Clouds. Anaxagoras’ theory\\nof the floods of the Nile was known to Herodotus (and may be referred\\nto in Aeschylus). Despite stories that they did not get along,\\nthere are signs of influence of Anaxagoras on Democritus (in his\\naccounts of perception and knowledge) and Anaxagoras’ scientific\\nclaims and discoveries affected all the thinkers of his time.\\nOnce his views about meteors, hail, and eclipses became known, such\\ntopics were always included in scientific accounts of astronomical and\\nmeteorological phenomena. In the testimonia, Anaxagoras’\\neven temperament was taken as a model of good behavior, and he was\\nfamous as a prognosticator of everything from meteor falls to rain\\nshowers. \",\n \"\\n\\nAnaxagoras’ views appear among Socrates’ survey of\\nprevious naturalistic theories of explanation (Phaedo 96a6\\nff.). More ominously, Meletus seems to have attributed Anaxagoras’\\nclaims about the earthy nature of the moon and stars to Socrates at his\\ntrial (see Plato’s Apology 26e7ff., 59 A35). Although\\nAnaxagoras’ alleged indictment for impiety was probably as much political\\nas a sign of his danger to public religion (attacking Anaxagoras was an\\nindirect attack on Pericles), he was seen as important and influential\\nenough to qualify to some as an enemy of the polis.\",\n \"\\n\\nPhilosophically, Anaxagoras’ theories were also widely known and\\ninfluential. Some scholars have thought that the author of the Derveni\\nPapyrus (found in Northern Greece) was familiar with Anaxagoras’\\ntheories (Betegh 2004; Kouremenos et al. 2006), and once he introduced\\nMind as a cause, other thinkers followed him. Diogenes of Apollonia\\nclaimed that air (as mind and god) directs all things. Zeno of Elea\\n(perhaps) and Melissus (certainly) criticize his theory. Anaxagoras’\\nview that “each one is and was most manifestly those things of\\nwhich there are the most in it” (the principle of Predominance)\\nis echoed in Plato’s claims that sensible things acquire their\\ncharacters and names from the Forms in which they participate\\n(Phaedo 102a10 ff.). Plato even adopts Anaxagoras’ language\\nof sharing or participating in (see Furley 2002), and like Anaxagoras’ nous,\\nPlatonic forms are “themselves by themselves” in being\\nself-explanatory (see Herrmann, 2007). Aristotle, although impatient\\nwith the gaps in Anaxagoras’ account of nous, expresses\\nadmiration for his recognition that mind has a role to play in guiding\\nthe cosmos, and he treats Anaxagoras’ explanation of eclipses as a\\nmodel of scientific explanation.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"6. Anaxagoras’ Influence\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Diels, H. and W. Kranz, eds., 1974, Die Fragmente der\nVorsokratiker. Three Vols. Reprint of Sixth Edition, Berlin:\nWeidmann.","Curd, P., 2007, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae: Fragments. Text and\nTranslation with Notes and Essays, Toronto: University of Toronto\nPress.","Gemelli Marciano, L.M., 2007–2010, Die Vorsokratiker 3 volumes. Düsseldorf and Mannheim: Artemis and Winkler.","Graham, D. W., 2010, The Texts of the Early Greek\nPhilosophers: The Complete Fragments and Selected Testimonies of the\nMajor Presocratics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Jöhrens, O., 1939, Die Fragmente des Anaxagoras,\nBochum-Langendreer: Heinrich Pöppinghaus.","Laks, A. and Most, G. 2016a, Les débuts de la philosophie. Des premiers penseurs Grecs à Socrate, Paris: Fayard.","–––, 2016b, Early Greek Philosophy 9 volumes. Cambridge MA, London: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press.","Lanza, D., 1966, Anassagora: Testimonianze e Frammenti,\nFlorence: La Nuova Italia.","Schaubach, E., 1827, Anaxagorae Clazomenii Fragmenta quae\nsupersunt omnia, Leipzig, 1827.","Sider, D., 2005, The Fragments of Anaxagoras: Edited with an\nIntroduction and Commentary. Second Edition, Sankt Augustin:\nAcademia Verlag.","Althoff, J., 2012, “Presocratic Discourse in Poetry and Prose: The case of Empedocles and Anaxagoras,“ Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 43: 293–299.","Barnes, J., 1982, The Presocratic Philosophers, London:\nRoutledge.","Betegh, G., 2004, The Derveni Papyrus: Cosmology, Theology,\nand Interpretation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Burnet, J., 1930, Early Greek Philosophy (4th ed.),\nLondon: Adam and Charles Black.","Cornford, F. M., 1930, “Anaxagoras’ Theory of\nMatter,” Classical Quarterly, 24: 14–30; 83–95.","–––, 1934, “Innumerable Worlds in\nPresocratic Philosophy,” Classical Quarterly, 28:\n1–16.","Curd, P., 2004, The Legacy of Parmenides: Eleatic Monism and\nLater Presocratic Thought, Princeton: Princeton University Press,\n1998; rev. edn. Las Vegas: Parmenides Press.","–––, 2008, “Anaxagoras and the Theory of\nEverything,” in Curd and Graham, 2008, 230–249.","–––, 2009, “Thought and Body in Heraclitus\nand Anaxagoras,” in G. Guertler and W. Wians, Proceedings of\nthe Boston Area Collquium in Ancient Philosophy, Leiden: Brill:\n1–20; 39–41.","Curd, P. and D. H. Graham (eds.), 2008, The Oxford\nHandbook of Presocratic Philosophy, New York: Oxford University\nPress.","Denyer, N.C., 1983, “Plato’s Theory of Stuffs,”\nPhilosophy, 58: 315–27.","Fränkel, H., 1969, Wege und Formen\nfrühgriechischen Denkens, Munich: C. H. Beck,\n3rd Edition.","Frede, M., 1985, “Substance in Aristotle’s\nMetaphysics,” in A. Gotthelf, ed. Aristotle on Nature and\nLiving Things, Pittsburgh, PA: Mathesis: 17–26.","Furley, D. J., 1976, “Anaxagoras in Response to\nParmenides,” in New Essays in Plato and the\nPre-Socratics, R. A. Shiner, J. King-Farlow, eds., Canadian\nJournal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume 2: 61–85.","–––, 2002, “Anaxagoras, Plato, and the\nNaming of Parts,” in Presocratic Philosophy: Essays in\nHonour of A. P. D. Mourelatos, ed. V. Caston and D. Graham,\nAldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.: 119–126.","Furth, M., 1991, “A ‘Philosophical Hero?’\nAnaxagoras and the Eleatics,” Oxford Studies in Ancient\nPhilosophy, 9: 95–129.","Galzerano, M., 2019, “Aristotle against Anaxagoras?” Philologus, 163(1): 150–155.","Graham, D. W., 1994, “The Postulates of Anaxagoras,”\nApeiron, 27: 77–121.","–––, 1999, “Empedocles and Anaxagoras:\nResponses to Parmenides,” in Long, 1999: 159–180.","–––, 2002, “La lumière de la lune\ndans la pensée grecque archaïque,” in Laks and\nLouget (eds.): 351–380.","–––, 2004, “Was Anaxagoras a\nReductionist?” Ancient Philosophy, 24: 1–18.","–––, 2006, Explaining the Cosmos: The Ionian\nTradition of Scientific Philosophy, Princeton: Princeton\nUniversity Press.","–––, 2009, Review of Sedley 2007, Ancient\nPhilosophy, 29: 423–27.","–––, 2013a, “Anaxagoras and the Comet,” Ancient Philosophy 33 (1): 1–18.","–––, 2013b, “Anaxagoras: Science and\nSpeculation in the Golden Age,” in Early Greek Philosophy:\nThe Presocratics and the Emergence of Reason, ed. J. McCoy,\nWashington DC: The Catholic University Press of America:\n139–156.","–––, 2013c, Science Before Socrates:\nParmenides, Anaxagoras, and the New Astronomy, Oxford and New\nYork: Oxford University Press.","Graham, D. W. and E. Hintz, 2007, “Anaxagoras and the Solar\nEclipse of 478 BC,” Apeiron, 40: 319–44.","Gregory, A., 2007, Ancient Greek Cosmogony, London: Duckworth.","–––, 2013, The Presocratics and the\nSupernatural: Magic, Science, and Philosophy in Early Greece,\nLondon: Bloomsbury.","Guthrie, W.K.C., 1965, A History of Greek Philosophy,\nVol. II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Herrmann, H.-G., 2007, Words and Ideas, Swansea: The\nClassical Press of Wales.","Inwood, B., 1986, “Anaxagoras and Infinite Divisibility,”\nIllinois Classical Studies, 11: 17–33.","Kouremenos, Theokritos, George M. Parássoglou, Kyriakos\nTsantsanoglou, 2006, The Derveni Papyrus. Edited with Introduction\nand Commentary. Studi e testi per il “Corpus dei papiri\nfilosofici greci e latini”, vol. 13, Florence: Casa Editrice Leo\nS. Olschki.","Laks, A., 1993, “Mind’s Crisis: On Anaxagoras’\nNOUS,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 31\n(Supplementary Volume): 19–38.","–––, 1999, “Soul, Sensation, and Thought,”\nin Long, 1999: 250–70.","–––, 2002, “Les fonctions de\nl’intellect. À propos, derechef, du Nous d’Anaxagore,”\nMethodos, 2: 7–31.","Laks, A. and C. Louguet, (eds.), 2002, Qu’est-ce que la\nPhilosophie présocratique?, Lille: Presses Universitaires\ndu Septentrion.","Lesher, J., 1992, Xenophanes of Colophon: Fragments,\nToronto: University of Toronto Press.","–––, 1995, “Mind’s Knowledge and Powers of\nControl in Anaxagoras DK B12,” Phronesis, 40: 125–142.","Lewis, E., 2000, “Anaxagoras and the Seeds of a Physical\nTheory,” Apeiron, 33: 1–23.","Long, A. A. (ed.), 1999, The Cambridge Companion to Early\nGreek Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Louguet, C. 2002, “Note sur le fragment B4a d’Anaxagore:\nPourquoi les autres mondes doivent-ils être semblables au\nnotre?” in Laks and Louguet (eds.), 2002: 497–530","–––, 2013a, “Anaxagore: Analogie, Proportion, Identité,”, Philosophie Antique 13: 117–145.","–––, 2013b, “L’Anaxagore de Diego Lanza: Quelques Réflexions,”, in P. Rousseau and S. Cottone (eds.), Diego Lanza, Lecteur des ouvres de l’Antiquité: Poésie, Philosophie, Histoire de Philologie, Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion: 51–84.","Macé, A., 2011, “Une Science Athénienne de la Nature. La Promesse et les Testament d’Anaxagore”, Méthexis, 24: 21–43.","Mann, W.-R., 2000, The Discovery of Things: Aristotle’s\nCategories and their Context, Princeton: Princeton University\nPress.","Mansfeld, J., 1979, “The Chronology of Anaxagoras’ Athenian\nPeriod and the Date of his Trial” Part I: “The Length and\nDating of the Athenian Period,” Mnemosyne, 32:\n39–69.","–––, 1980, “Anaxagoras’ Other\nWorld,” Phronesis, 25: 1–4.","–––, 2011, “Aristotle on Anaxagoras in\nRelation to Empedocles,” Philologus, 155: 361–66.","Marmodoro, A., 2015, “Anaxagoras’s Qualitative\nGunk,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy,\n23: 402–422.","–––, 2017, Everything in Everything: Anaxagoras’s Metaphysics, New York: Oxford University Press.","Matthews, G., 2002, “On the Idea of There Being Something of\nEverything in Everything,” Analysis, 62: 1–4.","–––, 2005, “Anaxagoras\nRe-Defended,“ Ancient Philosophy, 25: 245–46.","Mourelatos, A. P. D., 2008a, The Route of Parmenides, New\nHaven: Yale, 1970; revised and expanded edition, Las Vegas: Parmenides\nPublishing.","–––, 2008b, “The Cloud-Astrophysics\nof Xenophanes and Ionian Material Monism,” in Curd and Graham,\n2008: 134–168.","O’Brien, D., 1968, “The Relation of Anaxagoras and\nEmpedocles,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 88:\n93–113.","Palmer, J. A., 2009, Parmenides and Presocratic\nPhilosophy, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.","Renehan, R., 1980, “On the Greek Origins of the Concepts of\nIncorporeality and Immateriality”, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine\nStudies, 21: 105–138.","Schofield, M., 1975, “Doxographica Anaxagorea,”\nHermes, 103: 1–24.","–––, 1980. An Essay on\nAnaxagoras, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","–––, 1996, “Anaxagoras’ Other World\nRevisited,” in K. Algra, P. Van der Horst, and D. T. Runia,\neds. Polyhistor: Studies in the History and Historiography of\nAncient Philosophy, Leiden: Brill: 3–20.","Sedley, D., 2007, Creationism and its Critics, Berkeley:\nUniversity of California Press.","Silverman, A., 2002, The Dialectic of Essence: A Study of\nPlato’s Metaphysics, Princeton: Princeton University\nPress.","Sisko, J., 2003, “Anaxagoras’ Parmenidean Cosmology: Worlds\nwithin Worlds within the One,” Apeiron, 26:\n87–114.","–––, 2005, “Anaxagoras and Recursive\nRefinement,” Ancient Philosophy, 25: 239–245.","–––, 2009, “On the Question of\nHomoeomreity in Anaxagorean Physics,” Apeiron, 42:\n89–103.","–––, 2010a, “Anaxagoras Betwixt Parmenides\nand Plato,” Philosophy Compass, 5/6: 432–442.","–––, 2010b, “Anaxagoras on Matter, Motion,\nand Multiple Worlds,” Philosophy Compass, 5/6:\n443–454."," –––, 2013, “Anaxagoras and Empedocles in\nthe Shadow of Elea,” The Routledge Companion to Ancient\nPhilosophy, eds. J. Warren and F. Sheffield, London:\nRoutledge: 49–64. ","Spanu, H., 1987–88, “Inhalt und Form der Theorie von\nAnaxagoras,” Archaiognosia, 5: 11–19.","Stokes, M. C., 1965, “On Anaxagoras,” Archiv\nfür Geschichte der Philosophie, 47: “Part I:\nAnaxagoras’ Theory of Matter,” 1–19; “Part II: The Order\nof Cosmogony,” 217–250.","Strang, C., 1963, “The Physical Theory of Anaxagoras,”\nArchiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 45: 101–118.","Taub, L., 2003, Ancient Meteorology, London and New York:\nRoutledge.","Tannery, P., 1886, “La Théorie de la Matière\nd’Anaxagore,” Revue Philosophique, 22:\n255–274.","Therme, A.-L. and Macé, A., 2013 “Anaxagore et Homère? Trier les Moutons, Trier les Hommes, Trier l’Univers,” in M.-L. Desclos and F. Fronterotta (eds.), La Sagesse Présocratique. Communication de savoirs en Gréce Archaïque: des Lieux et des Hommes, Paris: Armand Colin, 235–261.","Torrijos-Castrillejo, D., 2018, “La Noción de Homeomería en Anaxágoras,” Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress in Philosophy 2.1: 55–69.","Tzamalikos, P., 2016, Anaxagoras, Origen, and Neoplatonism: The Legacy of Anaxagoras to Classical and Late Antiquity, Berlin/Boston, de Gruyter.","Vlastos, G., 1950, “The Physical Theory of\nAnaxagoras,” Philosophical Review, 59: 31–57; reprinted\nin G. Vlastos (D. Graham, ed.), Studies in Greek Philosophy,\nVol. I: The Presocratics, Princeton: Princeton University Press,\n1995: 303–327.","–––, 1975, “One World or Many in\nAnaxagoras?” in Studies in Presocratic Philosophy,\nVol. II, R.E. Allen and D. Furley (eds.), London: Routledge and\nKegan Paul: 354–60.","Warren, J., 2007, “Anaxagoras on Perception, Pleasure, and\nPain,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 33:\n19–54.","White, S., 2008, “Milesian Measures,” in Curd and\nGraham, 2008: 89–133.","Woodbury, L, 1981, “Anaxagoras and Athens,”\nPhoenix, 35: 295–315.","Zeller, E. 1923, Die Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer\nGeschichtlichen Entwicklung, W. Nestle (ed.), Seventh Edition,\nLeipzig."],"string":"[\n \"Diels, H. and W. Kranz, eds., 1974, Die Fragmente der\\nVorsokratiker. Three Vols. Reprint of Sixth Edition, Berlin:\\nWeidmann.\",\n \"Curd, P., 2007, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae: Fragments. Text and\\nTranslation with Notes and Essays, Toronto: University of Toronto\\nPress.\",\n \"Gemelli Marciano, L.M., 2007–2010, Die Vorsokratiker 3 volumes. Düsseldorf and Mannheim: Artemis and Winkler.\",\n \"Graham, D. W., 2010, The Texts of the Early Greek\\nPhilosophers: The Complete Fragments and Selected Testimonies of the\\nMajor Presocratics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Jöhrens, O., 1939, Die Fragmente des Anaxagoras,\\nBochum-Langendreer: Heinrich Pöppinghaus.\",\n \"Laks, A. and Most, G. 2016a, Les débuts de la philosophie. Des premiers penseurs Grecs à Socrate, Paris: Fayard.\",\n \"–––, 2016b, Early Greek Philosophy 9 volumes. Cambridge MA, London: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Lanza, D., 1966, Anassagora: Testimonianze e Frammenti,\\nFlorence: La Nuova Italia.\",\n \"Schaubach, E., 1827, Anaxagorae Clazomenii Fragmenta quae\\nsupersunt omnia, Leipzig, 1827.\",\n \"Sider, D., 2005, The Fragments of Anaxagoras: Edited with an\\nIntroduction and Commentary. Second Edition, Sankt Augustin:\\nAcademia Verlag.\",\n \"Althoff, J., 2012, “Presocratic Discourse in Poetry and Prose: The case of Empedocles and Anaxagoras,“ Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 43: 293–299.\",\n \"Barnes, J., 1982, The Presocratic Philosophers, London:\\nRoutledge.\",\n \"Betegh, G., 2004, The Derveni Papyrus: Cosmology, Theology,\\nand Interpretation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Burnet, J., 1930, Early Greek Philosophy (4th ed.),\\nLondon: Adam and Charles Black.\",\n \"Cornford, F. M., 1930, “Anaxagoras’ Theory of\\nMatter,” Classical Quarterly, 24: 14–30; 83–95.\",\n \"–––, 1934, “Innumerable Worlds in\\nPresocratic Philosophy,” Classical Quarterly, 28:\\n1–16.\",\n \"Curd, P., 2004, The Legacy of Parmenides: Eleatic Monism and\\nLater Presocratic Thought, Princeton: Princeton University Press,\\n1998; rev. edn. Las Vegas: Parmenides Press.\",\n \"–––, 2008, “Anaxagoras and the Theory of\\nEverything,” in Curd and Graham, 2008, 230–249.\",\n \"–––, 2009, “Thought and Body in Heraclitus\\nand Anaxagoras,” in G. Guertler and W. Wians, Proceedings of\\nthe Boston Area Collquium in Ancient Philosophy, Leiden: Brill:\\n1–20; 39–41.\",\n \"Curd, P. and D. H. Graham (eds.), 2008, The Oxford\\nHandbook of Presocratic Philosophy, New York: Oxford University\\nPress.\",\n \"Denyer, N.C., 1983, “Plato’s Theory of Stuffs,”\\nPhilosophy, 58: 315–27.\",\n \"Fränkel, H., 1969, Wege und Formen\\nfrühgriechischen Denkens, Munich: C. H. Beck,\\n3rd Edition.\",\n \"Frede, M., 1985, “Substance in Aristotle’s\\nMetaphysics,” in A. Gotthelf, ed. Aristotle on Nature and\\nLiving Things, Pittsburgh, PA: Mathesis: 17–26.\",\n \"Furley, D. J., 1976, “Anaxagoras in Response to\\nParmenides,” in New Essays in Plato and the\\nPre-Socratics, R. A. Shiner, J. King-Farlow, eds., Canadian\\nJournal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume 2: 61–85.\",\n \"–––, 2002, “Anaxagoras, Plato, and the\\nNaming of Parts,” in Presocratic Philosophy: Essays in\\nHonour of A. P. D. Mourelatos, ed. V. Caston and D. Graham,\\nAldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.: 119–126.\",\n \"Furth, M., 1991, “A ‘Philosophical Hero?’\\nAnaxagoras and the Eleatics,” Oxford Studies in Ancient\\nPhilosophy, 9: 95–129.\",\n \"Galzerano, M., 2019, “Aristotle against Anaxagoras?” Philologus, 163(1): 150–155.\",\n \"Graham, D. W., 1994, “The Postulates of Anaxagoras,”\\nApeiron, 27: 77–121.\",\n \"–––, 1999, “Empedocles and Anaxagoras:\\nResponses to Parmenides,” in Long, 1999: 159–180.\",\n \"–––, 2002, “La lumière de la lune\\ndans la pensée grecque archaïque,” in Laks and\\nLouget (eds.): 351–380.\",\n \"–––, 2004, “Was Anaxagoras a\\nReductionist?” Ancient Philosophy, 24: 1–18.\",\n \"–––, 2006, Explaining the Cosmos: The Ionian\\nTradition of Scientific Philosophy, Princeton: Princeton\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"–––, 2009, Review of Sedley 2007, Ancient\\nPhilosophy, 29: 423–27.\",\n \"–––, 2013a, “Anaxagoras and the Comet,” Ancient Philosophy 33 (1): 1–18.\",\n \"–––, 2013b, “Anaxagoras: Science and\\nSpeculation in the Golden Age,” in Early Greek Philosophy:\\nThe Presocratics and the Emergence of Reason, ed. J. McCoy,\\nWashington DC: The Catholic University Press of America:\\n139–156.\",\n \"–––, 2013c, Science Before Socrates:\\nParmenides, Anaxagoras, and the New Astronomy, Oxford and New\\nYork: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Graham, D. W. and E. Hintz, 2007, “Anaxagoras and the Solar\\nEclipse of 478 BC,” Apeiron, 40: 319–44.\",\n \"Gregory, A., 2007, Ancient Greek Cosmogony, London: Duckworth.\",\n \"–––, 2013, The Presocratics and the\\nSupernatural: Magic, Science, and Philosophy in Early Greece,\\nLondon: Bloomsbury.\",\n \"Guthrie, W.K.C., 1965, A History of Greek Philosophy,\\nVol. II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Herrmann, H.-G., 2007, Words and Ideas, Swansea: The\\nClassical Press of Wales.\",\n \"Inwood, B., 1986, “Anaxagoras and Infinite Divisibility,”\\nIllinois Classical Studies, 11: 17–33.\",\n \"Kouremenos, Theokritos, George M. Parássoglou, Kyriakos\\nTsantsanoglou, 2006, The Derveni Papyrus. Edited with Introduction\\nand Commentary. Studi e testi per il “Corpus dei papiri\\nfilosofici greci e latini”, vol. 13, Florence: Casa Editrice Leo\\nS. Olschki.\",\n \"Laks, A., 1993, “Mind’s Crisis: On Anaxagoras’\\nNOUS,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 31\\n(Supplementary Volume): 19–38.\",\n \"–––, 1999, “Soul, Sensation, and Thought,”\\nin Long, 1999: 250–70.\",\n \"–––, 2002, “Les fonctions de\\nl’intellect. À propos, derechef, du Nous d’Anaxagore,”\\nMethodos, 2: 7–31.\",\n \"Laks, A. and C. Louguet, (eds.), 2002, Qu’est-ce que la\\nPhilosophie présocratique?, Lille: Presses Universitaires\\ndu Septentrion.\",\n \"Lesher, J., 1992, Xenophanes of Colophon: Fragments,\\nToronto: University of Toronto Press.\",\n \"–––, 1995, “Mind’s Knowledge and Powers of\\nControl in Anaxagoras DK B12,” Phronesis, 40: 125–142.\",\n \"Lewis, E., 2000, “Anaxagoras and the Seeds of a Physical\\nTheory,” Apeiron, 33: 1–23.\",\n \"Long, A. A. (ed.), 1999, The Cambridge Companion to Early\\nGreek Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Louguet, C. 2002, “Note sur le fragment B4a d’Anaxagore:\\nPourquoi les autres mondes doivent-ils être semblables au\\nnotre?” in Laks and Louguet (eds.), 2002: 497–530\",\n \"–––, 2013a, “Anaxagore: Analogie, Proportion, Identité,”, Philosophie Antique 13: 117–145.\",\n \"–––, 2013b, “L’Anaxagore de Diego Lanza: Quelques Réflexions,”, in P. Rousseau and S. Cottone (eds.), Diego Lanza, Lecteur des ouvres de l’Antiquité: Poésie, Philosophie, Histoire de Philologie, Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion: 51–84.\",\n \"Macé, A., 2011, “Une Science Athénienne de la Nature. La Promesse et les Testament d’Anaxagore”, Méthexis, 24: 21–43.\",\n \"Mann, W.-R., 2000, The Discovery of Things: Aristotle’s\\nCategories and their Context, Princeton: Princeton University\\nPress.\",\n \"Mansfeld, J., 1979, “The Chronology of Anaxagoras’ Athenian\\nPeriod and the Date of his Trial” Part I: “The Length and\\nDating of the Athenian Period,” Mnemosyne, 32:\\n39–69.\",\n \"–––, 1980, “Anaxagoras’ Other\\nWorld,” Phronesis, 25: 1–4.\",\n \"–––, 2011, “Aristotle on Anaxagoras in\\nRelation to Empedocles,” Philologus, 155: 361–66.\",\n \"Marmodoro, A., 2015, “Anaxagoras’s Qualitative\\nGunk,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy,\\n23: 402–422.\",\n \"–––, 2017, Everything in Everything: Anaxagoras’s Metaphysics, New York: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Matthews, G., 2002, “On the Idea of There Being Something of\\nEverything in Everything,” Analysis, 62: 1–4.\",\n \"–––, 2005, “Anaxagoras\\nRe-Defended,“ Ancient Philosophy, 25: 245–46.\",\n \"Mourelatos, A. P. D., 2008a, The Route of Parmenides, New\\nHaven: Yale, 1970; revised and expanded edition, Las Vegas: Parmenides\\nPublishing.\",\n \"–––, 2008b, “The Cloud-Astrophysics\\nof Xenophanes and Ionian Material Monism,” in Curd and Graham,\\n2008: 134–168.\",\n \"O’Brien, D., 1968, “The Relation of Anaxagoras and\\nEmpedocles,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 88:\\n93–113.\",\n \"Palmer, J. A., 2009, Parmenides and Presocratic\\nPhilosophy, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Renehan, R., 1980, “On the Greek Origins of the Concepts of\\nIncorporeality and Immateriality”, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine\\nStudies, 21: 105–138.\",\n \"Schofield, M., 1975, “Doxographica Anaxagorea,”\\nHermes, 103: 1–24.\",\n \"–––, 1980. An Essay on\\nAnaxagoras, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1996, “Anaxagoras’ Other World\\nRevisited,” in K. Algra, P. Van der Horst, and D. T. Runia,\\neds. Polyhistor: Studies in the History and Historiography of\\nAncient Philosophy, Leiden: Brill: 3–20.\",\n \"Sedley, D., 2007, Creationism and its Critics, Berkeley:\\nUniversity of California Press.\",\n \"Silverman, A., 2002, The Dialectic of Essence: A Study of\\nPlato’s Metaphysics, Princeton: Princeton University\\nPress.\",\n \"Sisko, J., 2003, “Anaxagoras’ Parmenidean Cosmology: Worlds\\nwithin Worlds within the One,” Apeiron, 26:\\n87–114.\",\n \"–––, 2005, “Anaxagoras and Recursive\\nRefinement,” Ancient Philosophy, 25: 239–245.\",\n \"–––, 2009, “On the Question of\\nHomoeomreity in Anaxagorean Physics,” Apeiron, 42:\\n89–103.\",\n \"–––, 2010a, “Anaxagoras Betwixt Parmenides\\nand Plato,” Philosophy Compass, 5/6: 432–442.\",\n \"–––, 2010b, “Anaxagoras on Matter, Motion,\\nand Multiple Worlds,” Philosophy Compass, 5/6:\\n443–454.\",\n \" –––, 2013, “Anaxagoras and Empedocles in\\nthe Shadow of Elea,” The Routledge Companion to Ancient\\nPhilosophy, eds. J. Warren and F. Sheffield, London:\\nRoutledge: 49–64. \",\n \"Spanu, H., 1987–88, “Inhalt und Form der Theorie von\\nAnaxagoras,” Archaiognosia, 5: 11–19.\",\n \"Stokes, M. C., 1965, “On Anaxagoras,” Archiv\\nfür Geschichte der Philosophie, 47: “Part I:\\nAnaxagoras’ Theory of Matter,” 1–19; “Part II: The Order\\nof Cosmogony,” 217–250.\",\n \"Strang, C., 1963, “The Physical Theory of Anaxagoras,”\\nArchiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 45: 101–118.\",\n \"Taub, L., 2003, Ancient Meteorology, London and New York:\\nRoutledge.\",\n \"Tannery, P., 1886, “La Théorie de la Matière\\nd’Anaxagore,” Revue Philosophique, 22:\\n255–274.\",\n \"Therme, A.-L. and Macé, A., 2013 “Anaxagore et Homère? Trier les Moutons, Trier les Hommes, Trier l’Univers,” in M.-L. Desclos and F. Fronterotta (eds.), La Sagesse Présocratique. Communication de savoirs en Gréce Archaïque: des Lieux et des Hommes, Paris: Armand Colin, 235–261.\",\n \"Torrijos-Castrillejo, D., 2018, “La Noción de Homeomería en Anaxágoras,” Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress in Philosophy 2.1: 55–69.\",\n \"Tzamalikos, P., 2016, Anaxagoras, Origen, and Neoplatonism: The Legacy of Anaxagoras to Classical and Late Antiquity, Berlin/Boston, de Gruyter.\",\n \"Vlastos, G., 1950, “The Physical Theory of\\nAnaxagoras,” Philosophical Review, 59: 31–57; reprinted\\nin G. Vlastos (D. Graham, ed.), Studies in Greek Philosophy,\\nVol. I: The Presocratics, Princeton: Princeton University Press,\\n1995: 303–327.\",\n \"–––, 1975, “One World or Many in\\nAnaxagoras?” in Studies in Presocratic Philosophy,\\nVol. II, R.E. Allen and D. Furley (eds.), London: Routledge and\\nKegan Paul: 354–60.\",\n \"Warren, J., 2007, “Anaxagoras on Perception, Pleasure, and\\nPain,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 33:\\n19–54.\",\n \"White, S., 2008, “Milesian Measures,” in Curd and\\nGraham, 2008: 89–133.\",\n \"Woodbury, L, 1981, “Anaxagoras and Athens,”\\nPhoenix, 35: 295–315.\",\n \"Zeller, E. 1923, Die Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer\\nGeschichtlichen Entwicklung, W. Nestle (ed.), Seventh Edition,\\nLeipzig.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../democritus/","text":"Democritus"},{"href":"../doxography-ancient/","text":"doxography of ancient philosophy"},{"href":"../empedocles/","text":"Empedocles"},{"href":"../parmenides/","text":"Parmenides"},{"href":"../plato/","text":"Plato"},{"href":"../presocratics/","text":"Presocratic Philosophy"},{"href":"../ancient-soul/","text":"soul, ancient theories of"},{"href":"../zeno-elea/","text":"Zeno of Elea"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../democritus/\",\n \"text\": \"Democritus\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../doxography-ancient/\",\n \"text\": \"doxography of ancient philosophy\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../empedocles/\",\n \"text\": \"Empedocles\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../parmenides/\",\n \"text\": \"Parmenides\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../plato/\",\n \"text\": \"Plato\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../presocratics/\",\n \"text\": \"Presocratic Philosophy\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../ancient-soul/\",\n \"text\": \"soul, ancient theories of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../zeno-elea/\",\n \"text\": \"Zeno of Elea\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":58,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"pyrrho"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Pyrrho"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Mon Aug 5, 2002; substantive revision Thu Sep 15, 2022"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nPyrrho was the starting-point for a philosophical movement known as\nPyrrhonism that flourished beginning several centuries after his own\ntime. This later Pyrrhonism was one of the two major traditions of\nsceptical thought in the Greco-Roman world (the other being located in\nPlato’s Academy during much of the Hellenistic period). Perhaps\nthe central question about Pyrrho is whether or to what extent he\nhimself was a sceptic in the later Pyrrhonist mold. The later\nPyrrhonists claimed inspiration from him; and, as we shall see, there\nis undeniably some basis for this. But it does not follow that\nPyrrho’s philosophy was identical to that of this later\nmovement, or even that the later Pyrrhonists thought that it was\nidentical; the claims of indebtedness that are expressed by or\nattributed to members of the later Pyrrhonist tradition are broad and\ngeneral in character (and in Sextus Empiricus’ case notably\ncautious—see Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.7), and do not in\nthemselves point to any particular reconstruction of Pyrrho’s\nthought. It is necessary, therefore, to focus on the meager evidence\nbearing explicitly upon Pyrrho’s own ideas and attitudes. How we\nread this evidence will also, of course, affect our conception of\nPyrrho’s relations with his own philosophical contemporaries and\npredecessors."],"string":"[\n \"\\nPyrrho was the starting-point for a philosophical movement known as\\nPyrrhonism that flourished beginning several centuries after his own\\ntime. This later Pyrrhonism was one of the two major traditions of\\nsceptical thought in the Greco-Roman world (the other being located in\\nPlato’s Academy during much of the Hellenistic period). Perhaps\\nthe central question about Pyrrho is whether or to what extent he\\nhimself was a sceptic in the later Pyrrhonist mold. The later\\nPyrrhonists claimed inspiration from him; and, as we shall see, there\\nis undeniably some basis for this. But it does not follow that\\nPyrrho’s philosophy was identical to that of this later\\nmovement, or even that the later Pyrrhonists thought that it was\\nidentical; the claims of indebtedness that are expressed by or\\nattributed to members of the later Pyrrhonist tradition are broad and\\ngeneral in character (and in Sextus Empiricus’ case notably\\ncautious—see Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.7), and do not in\\nthemselves point to any particular reconstruction of Pyrrho’s\\nthought. It is necessary, therefore, to focus on the meager evidence\\nbearing explicitly upon Pyrrho’s own ideas and attitudes. How we\\nread this evidence will also, of course, affect our conception of\\nPyrrho’s relations with his own philosophical contemporaries and\\npredecessors.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Life","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. Ancient Sources and the Nature of the Evidence","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"3. The Aristocles Passage","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"4. Other Reports on Pyrrho’s General Approach","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"5. Reports on Pyrrho’s Demeanor and Lifestyle","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"6. “The Nature of the Divine and the Good”","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"7. Influences on Pyrrho","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"8. Pyrrho’s Influence","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":["Ancient Texts","Secondary Literature"]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Life\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Ancient Sources and the Nature of the Evidence\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. The Aristocles Passage\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Other Reports on Pyrrho’s General Approach\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Reports on Pyrrho’s Demeanor and Lifestyle\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. “The Nature of the Divine and the Good”\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"7. Influences on Pyrrho\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"8. Pyrrho’s Influence\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"Ancient Texts\",\n \"Secondary Literature\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\nPyrrho appears to have lived from around 365–360 BCE until\naround 275–270 BCE (for the evidence see von Fritz (1963), 90).\nWe have several reports of philosophers from whom he learned, the most\nsignificant (and the most reliable) of which concern his association\nwith Anaxarchus of Abdera. Alongside Anaxarchus (and several other\nphilosophers) he allegedly accompanied Alexander the Great on his\nexpedition to India. We are told that in the course of this expedition\nhe encountered some “naked wise men”\n(gumnosophistai); Diogenes Laertius (9.61) claims that his\nphilosophy developed as a result of this meeting, but it is not clear\nwhat basis, if any, he has for this assertion. In any case, after his\nreturn to Greece Pyrrho did espouse a philosophy that attracted\nnumerous followers, of whom the most important was Timon of Phlius.\nThe travel writer Pausanias reports (6.24.5) seeing a statue of him in\nthe marketplace in Pyrrho’s home town of Elis in the\nPeloponnese; Diogenes also reports (9.64) that he was made high\npriest, and that in his honor philosophers were made exempt from city\ntaxation. While Pausanias’ report is easier to accept at face\nvalue than Diogenes’, both suggest that (at least locally) he\nachieved considerable celebrity. However, there is no good reason to\nbelieve that a Pyrrhonist ‘movement’ continued beyond his\nown immediate followers; it was not until the first century BCE that\nPyrrhonism became the name of an ongoing philosophical tradition."],"section_title":"1. Life","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nWith the exception of poetry allegedly written while on\nAlexander’s expedition (which, as far as we can tell, did not\nsurvive that expedition), Pyrrho wrote nothing; we are therefore\nobliged to try to reconstruct his philosophy from reports by others.\nUnfortunately the reports that we have are fragmentary and, in many\ncases, of doubtful reliability. Pyrrho’s follower Timon wrote\nnumerous poems and prose works; but of these only fragments and in\nsome cases second-hand reports survive. It is likely that much of what\nwe hear about Pyrrho in later sources also derives indirectly from\nTimon, but it is frequently not possible to judge, in individual\ncases, whether or not this is so. Other difficulties concerning\nTimon’s evidence are, first, that he writes as a devotee rather\nthan as a neutral reporter, and second, that the great majority of\nTimon’s fragments derive from a poem called Silloi\n(Lampoons), and consist of satirical thumbnail sketches of\nother philosophers rather than any kind of direct exposition of\nPyrrho’s outlook. (See the entry on Timon, section 2, for\ndetails.) Nevertheless, Timon is clearly the most important and\nthe most trustworthy source of information about Pyrrho. Of the\nevidence from Timon, one piece looks to be especially important.\nThis is a summary, by the Peripatetic Aristocles of Messene (late 1st\nc. BCE), of an account by Timon of what appear to\nbe Pyrrho’s most general philosophical attitudes. It is\nwidely agreed that this passage must be the centerpiece of any\ninterpretation of Pyrrho’s philosophy. However, its usefulness\nfor this purpose depends in part on how much of it is actually talking\nabout Pyrrho’s attitudes, as opposed to Timon’s own\ndevelopments or expansions of them. As we shall see, this is one of\nmany difficulties in interpreting the passage.","\nWith the exception of a very few snippets of information, the only\nother source of evidence on Pyrrho that is close to contemporary is\nAntigonus of Carystus, a biographer of the mid-third century BCE.\nDiogenes Laertius, whose life of Pyrrho is our major source of\nbiographical anecdotes, frequently cites Antigonus, and is probably\nindebted to him in many places even when he does not cite him;\nAntigonus is also mentioned by Aristocles, and is likely to be the\norigin of much or even most of the surviving biographical material on\nPyrrho. But Antigonus needs to be handled even more carefully than\nTimon. He was not a philosopher, and there is no reason to think that\nhe was capable of or particularly interested in comprehending\nphilosophical nuances. Nor is it clear that accuracy was high on his\nlist of priorities; on the contrary, what we know about him suggests\nthat he was a purveyor of sensationalist gossip rather than a reliable\nhistorian. His account probably did contain genuine information about\nPyrrho’s demeanor and activities; but it would certainly be\nunwise to take his anecdotes as a group on trust.","\nCicero refers to Pyrrho about ten times, and Cicero is, in general, a\nresponsible reporter of other people’s views. Unfortunately his\ninformation about Pyrrho appears to be very incomplete, and, as we\nshall see, the impression he conveys of him may very well be\ninaccurate. With one exception, he never mentions him except in\nconjunction with the famously non-orthodox Stoics Aristo and\n(sometimes) Herillus, and the remarks in question always concern the\nsame one or two points in ethics; it looks as if his knowledge of\nPyrrho derives almost entirely from a single source that conveyed\nlittle or nothing about Pyrrho individually. In addition, a number of\nauthors in later antiquity make isolated comments about Pyrrho. But\nsince these comments postdate the rise of the later Pyrrhonist\nmovement, there is often room for suspicion as to whether they reflect\ngenuine information about Pyrrho himself, as opposed to the later\nphilosophy that took his name.","\nEven given the difficulty referred to above, any attempt to interpret\nPyrrho’s philosophy must pay close attention to the summary of\nTimon in Aristocles. If the entire passage is summarizing the\nviews of Pyrrho (as Timon understood them), it clearly takes\nprecedence, in detail and trustworthiness, over the remaining\nevidence — pace Green (2017), who proposes a more holistic\napproach. If, on the other hand, much of the passage conveys the views\nof Timon, and only part of it the views of Pyrrho, the holistic\napproach has more to recommend it, despite the paucity of the\nremaining evidence. Even on this assumption, however, the Aristocles\npassage remains as important as anything else, and to this we now\nturn."],"section_title":"2. Ancient Sources and the Nature of the Evidence","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nA word, first, about the provenance and evidential value of the\nAristocles passage. Several chapters from book 8 of Aristocles’\nPeri philosophias (On Philosophy) appear in\nquotation in the Praeparatio evangelica of Eusebius, the\nfourth-century bishop of Caesarea. These chapters expound, and then\nattack from an Aristotelian perspective, a number of philosophies that\nimpugn the reliability of one or other of our cognitive faculties.\nAmong these Aristocles counts Pyrrhonism, as represented by Pyrrho\nhimself and by the initiator of the later Pyrrhonist tradition,\nAenesidemus; Aristocles speaks of Aenesidemus (first century BCE,\nq.v.), as recent, and is apparently not aware of any subsequent\nmembers of the Pyrrhonist tradition. The chapter on Pyrrhonism opens\nwith a brief summary of the early Pyrrhonist outlook, as reported by\nTimon, who refers to Pyrrho (14.18.1–5).","\nThis convoluted transmission might lead one to doubt how much\nauthentic information can be extracted from the passage. But there is\nno reason, first, to doubt Eusebius’ explicit claim to be\nquoting Aristocles verbatim. Aristocles is not quoting Timon verbatim;\nsome of the vocabulary in this passage is clearly reminiscent of\nAristocles’ own vocabulary in other chapters. However, other\nterms in the passage are quite distinct both from Aristocles’\nown normal usage and from any of the terminology familiar to us from\nlater Pyrrhonism, yet were in use prior to Timon’s day; it seems\neasiest to account for these as authentic reproductions of\nTimon’s own language. In addition, the frequent mention of Timon\neither by name or by the word phêsi, ‘he\nsays’, suggests that Aristocles is taking pains to reproduce the\nessentials of his account as faithfully as possible. And finally,\nAristocles’ other chapters, where we are in a position to check\nhis summaries against other evidence of the views being summarized,\nsuggest that he is in general a reliable reporter of other\npeople’s views, even views to which he himself is strongly\nopposed—or at least, that he is reliable when he has access to\nsystematic written expositions of those views, as seems to be the case\nhere. As for Timon’s reliability as a source for Pyrrho’s\nviews, we cannot be sure, but we cannot do better; he is clearly\ncloser to Pyrrho than any other source who discusses him.\nHowever, as already noted, there is a further question concerning how\nfar the passage is a report of Pyrrho’s ideas and how far it gives\nus Timon’s creative development of them.","\nEven aside from that question, the interpretation of the\nAristocles passage is fraught with controversy. It follows that the\ncharacter of Pyrrho’s thinking is, at its very core, a matter\nfor sharp disagreement. The present survey will begin by assuming that\nthe passage is all about Pyrrho, laying out the two main\nalternatives (given this assumption) and exploring the\nconsequences of each. (Numerous other readings besides these two have\nbeen proposed; in particular, the interpretation of Svavarsson (2004)\nis an intriguing, though arguably unstable, hybrid of the two. But it\nis fair to say that these two are the ones that have commanded by far\nthe most scholarly attention.) It will then explain why some scholars\nhave questioned this assumption, and what difference this would\nmake to our understanding of Pyrrho and of Timon’s\nrelation to him. First, then, on the assumption that the whole\npassage is Timon’s summary of Pyrrho’s thought:","\nTimon is reported as telling us that in order to be happy, one must\npay attention to three connected questions: first, what are things\nlike by nature? second, how should we be disposed towards things\n(given our answer to the first question)? and third, what will be the\noutcome for those who adopt the disposition recommended in the answer\nto the second question? And the passage then gives us answers to\neach of the three questions in order.","\nThe answer to the question “what are things like by\nnature?” is given by a sequence of three epithets; things are\nsaid to be adiaphora and astathmêta and\nanepikrita. Taken by themselves, these epithets can be\nunderstood in two importantly different ways: they may be taken as\ncharacterizing how things are (by nature) in themselves, or they may\nbe taken as commenting on human beings’ lack (by our nature) of\ncognitive access to things. Adiaphora is normally translated\n‘indifferent’. But this might be taken as referring either\nto an intrinsic characteristic of things—namely that, in\nthemselves and by nature, they possess no differentiating features\n— or to our natural inability to discern any such features. In\nthe latter case ‘undifferentiable’ might be a more\nperspicuous translation. (Beckwith (2011) plausibly connects the focus\non differentiating features, or the lack of them, with the\nAristotelian notion of differentiae; on either of the readings to be\nexplored, Aristotle’s picture of the world and of our ability to\nunderstand it would indeed be a prime example of the kind of view from\nwhich Pyrrho is anxious to distance himself.) Similarly,\nastathmêta might mean ‘unstable’ or\n‘unbalanced’, describing an objective property of things;\nor it might mean ‘not subject to being placed on a\nbalance’, and hence ‘unmeasurable’, which would\nagain place the focus on our cognitive inabilities. And\nanepikrita might mean ‘indeterminate’, referring\nto an objective lack of any definite features, or\n‘indeterminable’, pointing to an inability on our part to\ndetermine the features of things. The statement as a whole, then, is\neither answering the question “what are things like by\nnature?” by stating that things are, in their very nature,\nindefinite or indeterminate in various ways — the precise nature\nof the thesis would be a matter for further speculation—or by\nstating that we human beings are not in a position to pin down or\ndetermine the nature of things. Let us call these the metaphysical and\nthe epistemological interpretations respectively.","\nIt is clear that the metaphysical interpretation gives us a Pyrrho who\nis not in any recognizable sense a sceptic. Pyrrho, on this\ninterpretation, is issuing a declaration about the nature of things in\nthemselves—precisely what the later Pyrrhonists who called\nthemselves sceptics were careful to avoid. On the epistemological\ninterpretation, on the other hand, Pyrrho is very much closer to the\ntradition that took his name. There is still some distance between\nthem. To say that we cannot determine the nature of things\n— as opposed to saying that we have so far failed to determine\nthe natural features of things—is already a departure from the\nsceptical suspension of judgement promoted by Sextus Empiricus. And to\nput it, as on this reading Pyrrho does put it, by saying that\nthings are indeterminable, is a further departure, in that it\ndoes attribute at least one feature to things in themselves —\nnamely, being such that humans cannot determine them. Nevertheless,\nthe epistemological interpretation clearly portrays Pyrrho as a\nforerunner—a naive and unsophisticated forerunner, perhaps\n— of later Pyrrhonist scepticism, whereas the metaphysical\ninterpretation puts him in a substantially different light.","\nThe natural way to try to choose between these two interpretations is\nto see which of them fits best with the logic of the passage as a\nwhole. Unfortunately, a neutral decision on this does not seem be\npossible. According to the manuscripts, the phrase that\nfollows the words we have been discussing reads “for\nthis reason (dia touto) neither our sensations nor our\nopinions tell the truth or lie”. On the metaphysical\ninterpretation, the idea would be that, since things are in\ntheir real nature indeterminate, our sensations and opinions, which\nrepresent things as having certain determinate features, are neither\ntrue nor false. They are not true, since reality is not the way they\npresent it as being. It might then seem that they are false. But\nif reality is indeterminate because it is constantly changing\n(as the sensible world is sometimes portrayed, for example, in Plato),\nthen one might say that our perceptions of the fleeting, temporary\nfeatures of things are not simply false. Because these\nfeatures are temporary and fleeting, they do not belong to the real\nnature of things, so the perceptions do not qualify as\ntrue; but (assuming our senses are functioning normally) they are\nfeatures the things do actually manifest on particular occasions.","\nAs for the epistemological interpretation, some scholars have\nsuggested that the manuscripts are in error at this point, and that\nwhat the text should say is “on account of the fact\nthat (dia to) neither our sensations nor our opinions\ntell the truth or lie”. The change is justified on linguistic\ngrounds; it is alleged that the text in the manuscripts as they stand\nis not acceptable Greek. The considerations for and against this\nproposal are technical, and debate has yielded no consensus on this\nquestion. However, it is clear that if one does make this small\nalteration to the text, the direction of the inference is reversed;\nthe point about our sensations and opinions now becomes a reason for\nthe point about the nature of things, not an inference from it. And\nthis, it has been argued, points towards the epistemological\ninterpretation. The idea would then be that, since our sensations and\nopinions fail to be consistent deliverers of true reports (or, for\nthat matter, false reports) about the world around us, there is no\nprospect of our being able to determine the nature of things. However,\neven if we retain the manuscript text, the epistemological reading may\nstill be possible (so Green (2017)). The idea would be that, in order\nfor our sensations and opinions to tell the truth or lie, they would\nhave to do two things: 1) present an appearance of things and 2)\npresent this appearance as how things really are. But since\nwe are not able to determine the latter (as we were just told in the\nstatement about the nature of things), our sensations and opinions\ncannot do this; they can only register appearances, and that is not\nenough for them to tell either truths or falsehoods.","\nThe immediate inference from the statement about the nature of things,\nthen, is not decisive. And the remainder of the Aristocles\npassage can be also read so as to fit with either the\nmetaphysical or the epistemological reading of his answer to the\nquestion about the nature of things. The Aristocles passage continues\nwith the answer to the second question, namely the question of the\nattitude we should adopt given the answer to the first question. We\nare told, first, that we should not trust our sensations and opinions,\nbut should adopt an unopinionated attitude. On the epistemological\nreading, the significance of this is obvious. But on the metaphysical\nreading, too, we have already been told that our sensations and\nopinions are not true, which is presumably reason enough for us not to\ntrust them; and the unopinionated attitude that is here recommended\nmay be understood as one in which one refrains from positing any\ndefinite characteristics as inherent in the nature of\nthings—given that their real nature is wholly indefinite. (To\nthe objection that this thesis of indefiniteness is itself an opinion,\nit may be replied that doxa, ‘opinion’, is\nregularly used in earlier Greek philosophy, especially in Parmenides\nand Plato, to refer to those opinions—misguided opinions, in the\nview of these authors—that take on trust a view of the world as\nconforming more or less to the way it appears in ordinary experience.\nIn this usage, the claim that reality is indefinite would not be a\n(mere) opinion, but would be a statement of the truth.)","\nThe passage now introduces a certain form of speech that is supposed\nto reflect this unopinionated attitude. We are supposed to say\n“about each single thing that it no more is than is not or both\nis and is not or neither is nor is not”. There are a number of\nintricate questions about the exact relations between the various\nparts of this complicated utterance, and especially about the role and\nsignificance of the ‘both’ and ‘neither’\ncomponents. But it is clear that this too is susceptible of being read\nalong the lines of either of the two interpretations introduced above.\nOn the metaphysical interpretation, we are being asked to adopt a form\nof words that reflects the utter indefiniteness of the way things are;\nwe should not say of anything that it is any particular way\nany more than that it is not that way (with ‘is’\nbeing understood, as commonly in Greek philosophy, as shorthand for\n‘is F’, where F stands for any arbitrary\npredicate). On the epistemological interpretation, we are being asked\nto use a manner of speaking that expresses our suspension of judgement\nabout how things are. Sextus Empiricus specifically tells us that\n‘no more’ (ou mallon) is a term used by the\nsceptics to express suspension of judgement, and its occurrence in the\nAristocles passage can be taken as an early example of the same type\nof usage.","\nFinally, in answer to the third question, we are told that the result\nfor those who adopt the unopinionated attitude just recommended is\nfirst aphasia and then ataraxia. Ataraxia,\n‘freedom from worry’, is familiar to us from later\nPyrrhonism; this is said by the later Pyrrhonists to be the result of\nthe suspension of judgement that they claimed to be able to induce.\nThe precise sense of aphasia is less clear. Beckwith (2011)\nactually argues that the transmitted text is erroneous, and that we\nshould instead read apatheia, “lack of passion”.\nThis is an attractive suggestion; apatheia is indeed a term\nused not infrequently of Pyrrho’s untroubled attitude (see\nsection 5), whereas a reference to aphasia would be\nunparalleled in the other evidence on Pyrrho. However, the proposal is\ninevitably speculative, and aphasia is a term in use in later\nPyrrhonism; it seems worth trying to elucidate it on the assumption\nthat the transmitted text is correct. It might mean\n‘non-assertion’, as in Sextus—that is, a refusal to\ncommit oneself to definite alternatives; or it might mean, more\nliterally, ‘speechlessness’, which could in turn be taken\nto be an initial reaction of stunned silence to the radical position\nwith which one has been presented (an uncomfortable reaction that is\nsubsequently replaced by ataraxia—the passage does say\nthat aphasia comes first and ataraxia comes later).\nBut the decision between these two ways of understanding the term is\nindependent of the broader interpretive issues bearing upon the\npassage as a whole. For some form of ‘non-assertion’ is\nclearly licensed by either the metaphysical or the epistemological\ninterpretation; and on either interpretation, the view proposed might\nindeed render someone (initially) uncomfortable to the point of\n‘speechlessness’. The important point, though, is that\nataraxia is the end result; and this links back to the\nintroductory remark to the effect that the train of thought to be\nsummarized has the effect of making one happy.","\nWe have, then, two major possibilities. On the one hand, Pyrrho can be\nread as advancing a sweeping metaphysical thesis, that things are in\ntheir real nature indefinite or indeterminate, and encouraging us to\nembrace the consequences of that thesis by refusing to attribute any\ndefinite features to things (at least, as belonging to their real\nnature) and by refusing to accept at face value (again, as revelatory\nof the real nature of things) those myriad aspects of our ordinary\nexperience that represent things as having certain definite features.\nOr, on the other hand, Pyrrho can be read as declaring that the nature\nof things is inaccessible to us, and encouraging us to withdraw our\ntrust (and to speak in such a way as to express our withdrawal of\ntrust) in ordinary experience as a guide to the nature of things. As\nnoted earlier, the second, epistemological interpretation makes\nPyrrho’s outlook a great deal closer to that of the later\nPyrrhonists who took him as an inspiration. But that is not in itself\nany reason for favoring this interpretation over the other,\nmetaphysical one. For on either interpretation Pyrrho is said to\npromise ataraxia, the later Pyrrhonists’ goal, and to\npromise it as a result of a certain kind of withdrawal of\ntrust in the veracity of our everyday impressions of things; the\nconnection between these two points aligns Pyrrho with the later\nPyrrhonists, and sets him apart from every other Greek philosophical\nmovement that preceded later Pyrrhonism. The fact that this later\nsceptical tradition took Pyrrho as an inspiration is therefore readily\nunderstandable whichever of the two interpretations is correct (or\nwhichever they thought was correct). It is also true that, on the\nmetaphysical interpretation of the passage, the grounds on which\nPyrrho advanced his metaphysical thesis of indeterminacy are never\nspecified; this too, like the precise character of the thesis itself,\nmust be a matter for speculative reconstruction. But Aristocles only\npurports to be giving the key points of Timon’s summary; the\nlack of detail, though disappointing, would not be surprising.","\nSo far we have assumed that the Aristocles passage is supposed to\nrepresent the thought of Pyrrho. But, as noted earlier, some scholars\nhave questioned that assumption (see especially Brunschwig\n(1994), Marchand (2018)). Their reason is that there is only one place\nin the Aristocles passage that reads “Timon says that Pyrrho says\n…”; this is the threefold statement about the nature of things.\nElsewhere Aristocles says “Timon says”, but nowhere else are we\nspecifically told that Timon is conveying the thought of Pyrrho.\nAdmittedly Aristocles introduces Pyrrho as one of those who question\nour ability to know things, but he may have thought that Timon’s own\n(written) ideas are the closest we can get to Pyrrho’s (unwritten)\nideas. Hence it is not obvious that anything beyond the threefold\nstatement about the nature of things should actually be attributed to\nPyrrho himself. Of course, when Aristocles says “Timon says”, he\nmay have meant this as short for “Timon says Pyrrho says”,\nbut he may also have intended to distinguish between the contributions\nof Pyrrho and of Timon.","\nIf we limit Pyrrho’s contribution in this way, what difference does it\nmake? There is still the question whether the statement about the\nnature of things is about how things are in themselves or about\nour inability to grasp them. But in this case, all the mention of\nsensations and opinions, of their truth or falsehood, and of what we\nshould say belongs to Timon, not to Pyrrho. And this opens the\npossibility that the main philosophical outlook expressed in the\nAristocles passage, whether one reads it metaphysically or\nepistemologically, is Timon’s construction, building on a single idea\nof Pyrrho’s that may have been rather less broad in scope or ambitious\nin character. In particular, as we shall see, much of the other\nevidence on Pyrrho seems to depict him as focused on questions of\nvalue, questioning our characterizations of things as good or bad\nand doubting whether our views on such matters are stable or\nreliable. His statement of the “indifferent” nature of things, as\nreported in the Aristocles passage, may also have been of an\nevaluative kind: things do not really — or, we cannot tell\nwhether things really — have the positive or negative evaluative\nqualities we accord them."],"section_title":"3. The Aristocles Passage","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nThe other evidence bearing upon Pyrrho’s central philosophical\nattitudes does nothing to settle the dispute between these various\npossible interpretations of the Aristocles passage. A number of texts\nexplicitly or implicitly represent Pyrrho’s outlook as\nessentially identical to the sceptical outlook of the later\nPyrrhonists. However, all of these texts postdate the rise of later\nPyrrhonism itself, and none of them contains anything like the level\nof detail of the Aristocles passage; there is no particular reason to\nsuppose that any of them represents a genuine understanding of Pyrrho\nas distinct from the later Pyrrhonists. There are also a few texts\nthat appear to offer a picture of Pyrrho’s thought that is\ncongenial to the metaphysical interpretation. The most significant of\nthese is a passage from near the beginning of Diogenes Laertius’\nlife of Pyrrho (9.61); Pyrrho, we are told, “said that nothing\nis either fine or ignoble or just or unjust; and similarly in all\ncases that nothing is the case in reality (mêden einai\ntêi alêtheiai), but that human beings do everything\nby convention and habit; for each thing is no more this than\nthat”. This looks as if it is attributing to Pyrrho a\nmetaphysical thesis, and a thesis according to which things have no\ndefinite features; it does not seem to be portraying Pyrrho as an\nadvocate of suspension of judgement. However, the passage is\nundoubtedly in some way confused. For immediately beforehand we are\ntold that Pyrrho was the one who initiated the type of philosophy\nconsisting of “inapprehensibility and suspension of\njudgement”, which sounds epistemic; and the previously quoted\npassage is then cited as confirmation of this. In addition, while\n“nothing is the case in reality” and “each thing is\nno more this than that” sound wholly general, Diogenes’\nexamples are all in the domain of values, which ties in with the\npossibility that Pyrrho’s statement about the nature of things,\nin the Aristocles passage, was only about values and that most of that\npassage represents Timon’s views rather than\nPyrrho’s. This passage of Diogenes, then, cannot be used as\nsupport for any particular understanding of Pyrrho."],"section_title":"4. Other Reports on Pyrrho’s General Approach","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nMost of the remaining evidence about Pyrrho has to do with his\npractical attitudes and behavior. There are a number of biographical\nanecdotes, and there are a few fragments of Timon that purport to\ndepict Pyrrho’s state of mind. Some of the biographical\nanecdotes are clearly polemical inventions. For example, Diogenes\n(9.62) reports Antigonus as saying that Pyrrho’s lack of trust\nin his senses led him to ignore precipices, oncoming wagons and\ndangerous dogs, and that his friends had to follow him around to\nprotect him from these various everyday hazards. But he then reports\nthe dissenting verdict of Aenesidemus, according to which Pyrrho was\nperfectly capable of conducting himself in a sensible manner. This\nreflects a longstanding ancient dispute as to whether it is possible\nto live if one radically abandons common-sense attitudes to the world.\nAntigonus has transformed a hostile criticism of Pyrrho—that, if\none really were to adopt the attitudes he recommends, one\nwould be unable consistently to live as a sane human being\n— into an account of how Pyrrho actually did act; but there is\nno reason to take this seriously as biography. (It does, however,\nraise the question of what it means to mistrust the senses—as\nthe Aristocles passage tells us that either Timon or Pyrrho\ndid—if this is to be consistent with self-preservation in\none’s ordinary behavior; we shall return to this point at the\nend of this section.)","\nBut there are many other anecdotes, preserved in Diogenes and\nelsewhere, that cannot be dismissed in this fashion. The dominant\nimpression they convey as a group is of an extraordinary impassivity\nor imperturbability; with rare exceptions (which he himself is\nportrayed as regretting), Pyrrho is depicted as maintaining his calm\nand untroubled attitude no matter what happens to him. (The exceptions\nhave led Pyrrho’s outlook to be labeled\n“aspirationalism”; see Ribeiro (2022). But while his\nattainment of tranquility was admittedly not perfect, the picture we\nget is of someone who was truly exceptional in this respect.) This\nextends even to extreme physical pain—he is reported not to have\nflinched when subjected to the horrific techniques of ancient\nsurgery—but it also encompasses dangers such as being on a ship\nin a storm. (This is not to say that he did not avoid such troubles if\nhe could, as suggested by the apocryphal stories mentioned in the\nprevious paragraph; it is just to say that he did not lose his\ncomposure in the face of life’s inevitable hardships.) There is\nanother aspect to this untroubled attitude as well. In numerous\nanecdotes Pyrrho is shown as unconcerned with adhering to the normal\nconventions of society; he wanders off for days on end by himself, and\nhe performs tasks that would normally be left to social inferiors,\nsuch as housework and even washing a pig. Here, too, the suggestion is\nthat he does not care about things that ordinary people do care about\n— in this case, the disapproval of others. (The passage from\nDiogenes quoted in the previous section, according to which Pyrrho\nheld “that human beings do everything by convention and\nhabit” is not necessarily in conflict with this; by ‘human\nbeings’ Pyrrho might have meant ordinary human beings,\namong whom he would not have included himself.)","\nThe fragments of Timon also emphasize Pyrrho’s exceptional\ntranquility, and add a further, more philosophical dimension to it.\nSeveral fragments suggest that this tranquility results from his not\nengaging in theoretical inquiry like other philosophers, and with his\nnot engaging in debate with those philosophers. Other thinkers are\nperturbed by their need to discover how the universe works, and their\nneed to prevail in arguments with their rivals; Pyrrho is unconcerned\nabout any of this.","\nClearly it would be foolish to accept every detail of this composite\naccount. Timon’s picture is no doubt idealized, and the\nbiographical material surely includes a measure of embellishment.\nCollectively, however, these fragments and anecdotes add up to a\nhighly consistent portrait; it does not seem overconfident to take\nthis at least as reflecting an ideal towards which Pyrrho strived, and\nwhich he achieved to a sufficient degree to have attracted notice.","\nWhat connections can be drawn between this portrait of Pyrrho’s\ndemeanor and the philosophy expounded in the Aristocles passage? What\nwe have here, plainly, is a fuller specification of the\nataraxia that the Aristocles passage promised as the outcome\nof the process of responding in the recommended way to the three\nquestions. (And it confirms that, even if the process of reaching\nataraxia, as explained in the Aristocles passage, was largely\nTimon’s rather than Pyrrho’s, the ideal of\nataraxia itself was one to which Pyrrho adhered.) But\nwhy should thinking as Pyrrho did, according to that passage,\nyield ataraxia, and why should this outcome take the specific\nform suggested by the material discussed in this section? Now is a\nconvenient point to address these questions (as we did not do in\ninitially examining the Aristocles passage). We may distinguish the\noverall emotional tranquility depicted in the biographical material\nand the particular tranquility, derived from the avoidance of\ntheoretical inquiry, that is emphasized in the fragments of Timon.","\nThe most obvious explanation for the overall emotional tranquility\nwould seem to be along the following lines. If one adopts the position\nrecommended in the Aristocles passage, one will not hold any\ndefinite beliefs, about any object or state of affairs, to the effect\nthat the object or state of affairs really is good, or valuable, or\nworth seeking—or, on the other hand, bad or to be avoided. (This\nwill be true on either the metaphysical or the epistemological\ninterpretations of the Aristocles passage, and it will be true of\nPyrrho, given his answer to the first question, even if the rest is\nTimon’s development.) Hence one will attach far less importance to the\nattainment or the avoidance of any particular objects, or the\noccurrence or non-occurrence of any particular state of affairs, than\none would if one thought that these things really did have some kind\nof positive or negative value; nothing will matter to one to anything\nlike the same extent as it matters to most people. If this is on the\nright lines, then Pyrrho’s route to ataraxia closely\nresembles the one described in several places by Sextus Empiricus\n(PH 1.25–30, 3.235–8, M\n11.110–67); the account I have given is in fact modeled after\nSextus’ explanation of how suspension of judgement produces\nataraxia. Indeed, it is difficult to see how else the process\nis to be reconstructed. One difference, however, between the practical\nattitudes of Pyrrho and Sextus is that Sextus attributes an important\nrole to convention in the shaping of one’s behavior; more on\nthis in a moment.","\nAs for the avoidance of theoretical inquiry and debate, if Pyrrho was\nprimarily a moralist and the Aristocles passage mostly contains\nTimon’s ideas, such inquiry and debate would simply have been\noutside Pyrrho’s sphere of interest. But if the Aristocles\npassage as a whole represents Pyrrho’s own thought, it is fair\nto assume that he will have regarded such inquiry and debate as\ntroublesome because it is necessarily fruitless and interminable. If\nthe real nature of things is indeterminable by us, as the\nepistemological interpretation would have it, then to attempt to\ndetermine the nature of things, and to provide cogent grounds for the\nsuperiority of one’s own theories, is to attempt the impossible;\nsuch matters are simply beyond our grasp. But if, as the metaphysical\ninterpretation would have it, the world is in its real nature\nindefinite, then one is also attempting the impossible, though for a\ndifferent reason; one is attempting to determine a fixed character for\nthings that inherently lack any fixed character. Of course, the thesis\nthat reality is indefinite is itself a definite statement. But it\nfollows from this statement that any attempt to establish fixed and\ndefinite characteristics for specific items in the universe is doomed\nto failure. And it seems to be this kind of theoretical inquiry that\nTimon represents Pyrrho as eschewing; as one fragment puts it\n(addressing Pyrrho), “you were not concerned to inquire what\nwinds hold sway over Greece, from where everything comes and into what\nit passes” (Diogenes Laertius 9.65). On this reading, then,\nPyrrho’s avoidance of inquiry and debate resembles the disdain\nfor physical speculation that is apparent in some writings of Plato\n(Phaedo for example); physical speculation is fruitless\nbecause the physical world is not susceptible to rational inquiry.","\nHere another difference may be discerned from the Pyrrhonism of Sextus\nEmpiricus. For although Sextus certainly does not claim to have\ndefinite answers of his own concerning the nature of things, he has no\nqualms about engaging with his opponents in debate, or about pitting\nthem against one another. Indeed, the Pyrrhonism of Sextus depends on\na constant interplay of competing arguments on as many topics as\npossible. One’s suspension of judgement results from one’s\nexperience of the ‘equal strength’ (isostheneia)\nof the competing considerations on all sides of a given issue; but\nthis requires that one be regularly exposed to such competing\nconsiderations, and the works of Sextus are themselves bountiful\nsources for this. Sextus may agree with Pyrrho that such debates are\ninterminable, but they have an important role in later Pyrrhonist\npractice nonetheless. Pyrrho’s own practice is quite different,\nbecause his ataraxia flows not from an ongoing practice of\nintellectual juggling, but from a conclusion about the nature\nof things, as reported in the Aristocles passage. As we have seen,\nthis conclusion may be interpreted in several different ways, but\nhowever we interpret it, it is a firm view of his.","\nWe have seen that Pyrrho was unconcerned, or aspired to be\nunconcerned, about things that most of us care about very deeply. But\nhow does one make any decisions at all, if one adopts this kind of\nattitude? Unless we are to believe the stories of Pyrrho as a madman\ndepending on his friends to rescue him from precipices and dogs, we\nare entitled to expect an answer to this question. There is some\nevidence to suggest that the answer proposed—if not by Pyrrho\nhimself, then at least by Timon—was that one relies on the\nappearances. If this is correct, we have another link, at least at a\ngeneral level, with the Pyrrhonism of Sextus, for whom appearances are\nwhat he calls the “criterion of action”. One difference,\nas mentioned earlier, is that Sextus lists laws and customs as one of\nthe four main varieties of appearances that one may use to guide\none’s behavior; on Sextus’ account, then, certain courses\nof action will appear to one as desirable or undesirable given that\nthey are approved or disapproved of by the prevailing mores. But\nPyrrho seems to have been thoroughly unconventional in some aspects of\nhis behavior. It is impossible to say specifically what kinds of\nphenomena were included for him and Timon under the heading of\n‘the appearances’ — or whether they had anything\nvery precise in mind here. Nevertheless, it looks as if the early or\nproto-Pyrrhonist answer to the question of how one acts and makes\ndecisions is that one does so in light of the way things appear to\none. Depending on how we read the Aristocles passage, this might\namount to “in light of the characteristics that things seem to\nhave (but, for all we know, may not really have)”, or it\nmight amount to “in light of the temporary and contingent\ncharacteristics that things manifest on any given occasion (but that\nare no part of how they really are, since how they really are\nis indefinite)”. In either case, the way in which one mistrusts\nsensations and common-sense opinions, as the Aristocles passage\nrecommends, is not that one pays no attention to them in one’s\neveryday behavior; one mistrusts them simply in that one does not take\nthem as a guide to the underlying nature of things."],"section_title":"5. Reports on Pyrrho’s Demeanor and Lifestyle","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nThere is one further, highly problematic fragment of Timon that seems\nto belong in the area of practical philosophy. This is a set of four\nlines of verse that make reference to “the nature of the divine\nand the good”. There is no consensus on how to translate these\nlines, and different translations yield very different consequences\nfor interpretation. The first two lines can be rendered either","\nThe second two lines can be rendered either","\nThere are numerous other disputes over the translation, but these\nalternatives put on display most of the central options for\ninterpretation.","\nThe lines are quoted by Sextus Empiricus (M 11.20); there is\nno further trace of them in the surviving record. The context in which\nSextus introduces them shows that he is inclined to understand the\nfirst couplet according to reading (A) rather than reading( B); but he\nsuggests that he is not sure about this. The speaker into whose mouth\nTimon put these lines is never identified, but it has generally been\nassumed to be Pyrrho.","\nIf one understands the second couplet according to reading (C), then\nthe speaker is apparently endorsing a position that attributes\ndefinite natures to things; and this appears flatly inconsistent with\nthe Pyrrho of the Aristocles passage, on any of the readings we\nhave considered. The tension is especially bad if one reads the first\ncouplet according to reading (B), in which case the speaker is\ninsisting that he is in possession of the truth. But even on reading\n(A), where the effect is to weaken the assertion to one about what\nappears to the speaker to be the case, the statement about “the\nnature of the divine and the good” seems strikingly out of\nkeeping with the rest of what we hear about Pyrrho’s philosophy.\nIt has been suggested that Pyrrho made an exception, in the case of\nthe divine and the good, to his general prohibition on attributing\ndefinite natures to things; but it is hard to see the motivation for\nsuch a move, and this interpretation has not been generally accepted.\nIt is true that Cicero speaks of Pyrrho as holding that virtue is the\nsole good, and that no distinctions of value are to be drawn among\nthings other than virtue and vice. However, as was mentioned earlier,\nCicero always attributes this view to Pyrrho alongside the unorthodox\nStoic Aristo of Chios; he never gives any details about Pyrrho’s\nthinking specifically. We know from other sources that Aristo did hold\nthis position; and, as we have seen, there is good reason to think\nthat Pyrrho did refrain quite generally from attributing positive or\nnegative value to ordinary objects of concern (things other than\nvirtue and vice), which is one part of the position Cicero attributes\nto him and Aristo. So it looks as if Cicero has been misled (probably\nby the sketchiness of the information in his source) into thinking\nthat Pyrrho agreed with Aristo in both parts of his position rather\nthan in just one part. At any rate, Cicero cannot be regarded as\noffering any credible support for an interpretation of Pyrrho that has\nhim believing in a natural good; again, this is just too discordant\nwith the remainder of the evidence.","\nReading (D) of Timon’s second couplet (which is due, with minor\nmodifications, to Burnyeat (1980)) is intended to eliminate the\ntroublesome reference to an eternal real nature. According to this\ninterpretation, the phrase “the nature of the divine and the\ngood” refers simply to a characteristic that is attributed to\nPyrrho, and labeled by poetic hyperbole as ‘divine’, in\nanother fragment of Timon, namely his extraordinary tranquility; the\ncouplet as a whole, then, is saying that tranquility is the source of\nan even-tempered life. And if one combines this with the less dogmatic\nreading (A) of the first couplet, this yields a set of remarks that\nare not obviously in conflict with anything else in the record on\nPyrrho.","\nThe acceptability of the translation in reading (D) is not beyond\nquestion. There is also some question whether the claim that\ntranquility is the source of an even-tempered life is anything more\nthan vacuous. However, if one assumes that Pyrrho is the speaker of\nthese lines, then this interpretation or something close to it seems\nto be the only way to rescue his thought (as reported by Timon) from\ninconsistency. Another possibility, an interpretatively less\nburdensome one, is to drop the assumption that Pyrrho is the speaker;\nin this case, there is no reason to assume that the thought expressed\nby the lines must be consistent with what we know of Pyrrho’s\nphilosophy. But if one takes this option, one must devise an\nalternative explanation for why Timon would have written these\nlines—including some account of who else the speaker might be.\nThis challenge has recently been taken up in Clayman (2009), chapter\n2. Clayman argues that the speaker is Timon himself, and that the\nlines serve a programmatic function at the opening of the poem; in\nlight of parallel passages in other early Hellenistic poetry, the\nreference to truth is understood as an allusion to poetic\nverisimilitude rather than to anything philosophically problematic.\nFinally, it has been suggested (in Svavarsson 2002) that\nmuthon, rendered in both readings (A) and (B) by\n“word”, should rather be understood as “myth”\nin the sense of “fiction” (and “of truth”\nlinked instead, as is linguistically quite possible, with\n“standard”). In this case, again, there is no difficulty\nin understanding the second couplet as expressing a dogmatic position;\nindeed, such a reading is only to be expected, since the position is\nbeing debunked, not advocated. Green (2017) has extended\nSvavarsson’s suggestion by proposing that “word of\ntruth” and “correct standard” are to be understood\nsarcastically rather than at face value, making fun of other\nthinkers’ belief in these things (which would also render the\nthought less dogmatic; it would not simply be a declaration of\nfalsehood). But whether the word muthos, all by itself, can\ncarry this weight of significance—or whether, if that is what\nTimon had intended, he would not have chosen some less ambiguous means\nof expressing it—is open to question. It is fair to say that no\nresolution of these matters is in sight."],"section_title":"6. “The Nature of the Divine and the Good”","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nMany different philosophical antecedents have been claimed for Pyrrho.\nSince we know very little about which philosophical currents Pyrrho\nmay have been acquainted with, such claims are bound to be in large\nmeasure speculative. There are, however, a couple of exceptions to\nthis; as noted at the outset, Pyrrho was associated with Anaxarchus\nand was reported to have encountered some unnamed Indian thinkers. The\nlittle that we know of Anaxarchus seems to suggest that his philosophy\nhad a good deal in common with Pyrrho’s. Diogenes Laertius\n(9.60) ascribes to him an attitude of apatheia and\neukolia, ‘freedom from emotion’ and\n‘contentedness’; as noted earlier, apatheia is\nused in some sources to describe Pyrrho’s attitude as well, and\nthe combination of the two terms seems to describe something close to\nthe state cultivated by Pyrrho. We also hear from Sextus Empiricus\nthat Anaxarchus “likened existing things to stage-painting and\ntook them to be similar to the things which strike us while asleep or\ninsane” (M 7.88). This has often been taken as an early\nexpression of a form of epistemological scepticism. But it may also be\ntaken as an ontological comment on the insubstantiality of the world\naround us; it is things (as opposed to our impressions of\nthings) that are assimilated to stage-sets and the contents of dreams\nand fantasies. Either way, the remark looks like an anticipation of\nthe position expounded in the Aristocles passage; the first\nreading conforms to the epistemological interpretation of that\npassage, and the second to the metaphysical interpretation. It\nappears, then, that Pyrrho may have borrowed to a considerable extent\nfrom Anaxarchus, especially if the Aristocles passage as a whole\nrepresents Pyrrho’s thought.","\nWe do not know the identity of the “naked wise men” whom\nPyrrho met in India, or what they thought. There are reports of other\nmeetings between Indian and Greek thinkers during Alexander’s\nexpedition, and these tend to emphasize the Indians’\nextraordinary impassivity and insensitivity to pain and hardship. It\nis not unlikely that Pyrrho, too, was impressed by traits of this\nkind. Though precedents for his ideal of ataraxia exist in\nearlier Greek philosophy as well, his reported ability to withstand\nsurgery without flinching is exceptional in the Greek context (and\nquite distinct from anything in later Pyrrhonism); if we believe this\nstory, it is tempting to explain it by way of some form of training\nfrom the Indians. Some scholars have sought to establish more detailed\nlinks between the thought of the Aristocles passage and various\ncurrents in ancient Indian philosophy; and Beckwith (2015) finds in\nPyrrho an authentic representative of early Buddhism. But there is at\nleast room for debate about how far these similarities really go. From\nan opposing perspective, some have suggested that the linguistic\nbarriers would have ruled out an interchange of any great\nphilosophical subtlety between the Indians and Pyrrho. But this may be\noverly pessimistic; the expedition lasted a number of years, and some\npeople manage to learn new languages remarkably quickly.","\nBeyond these figures with attested connections to Pyrrho, it is\nplausible to suppose a certain influence on Pyrrho from Democritus.\nPyrrho is reported to have had a special admiration for Democritus\n(Diogenes Laertius 9.67, citing Pyrrho’s associate Philo);\nDemocritus is one of the few philosophers besides Pyrrho himself who\nseems to escape serious criticism in Timon’s Lampoons;\nand Anaxarchus belonged in the tradition of thinkers stemming from\nDemocritus. The influence may have been mainly in the ethical area;\nDemocritus, too, had an ethical ideal that is recognizably a\nforerunner to Pyrrho’s ataraxia. If one adopts the\nepistemological interpretation of Pyrrho’s philosophy, one may\nsee an additional area of influence in Democritus’ sceptical\npronouncements about the prospects for knowledge of the world around\nus.","\nAlternatively, if one interprets Pyrrho along metaphysical lines, one\nmay be inclined to look to Plato and the Eleatics as possible\ninfluences. Timon’s verdicts on these figures in the\nLampoons are at least partially favorable; and, as was hinted\nat earlier on, the dim view of sensibles that is suggested by a number\nof Plato’s dialogues—but also anticipated by the\nEleatics—seems to have something in common with Pyrrho’s\nview of reality (on the metaphysical interpretation) as indeterminate.\nThe difference, of course, is that Pyrrho does not suggest any higher\nlevel of reality such as Plato’s Forms or the Eleatic Being."],"section_title":"7. Influences on Pyrrho","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nPyrrho’s relation to the later Pyrrhonists has already been\ndiscussed. Given the importance of Pyrrhonism in earlier modern\nphilosophy, Pyrrho’s indirect influence may be thought of as\nvery considerable. But beyond his being adopted as a figurehead in\nlater Pyrrhonism—itself never a widespread philosophical\nmovement — Pyrrho seems to have had very little impact in the\nancient world after his own lifetime. Both Cicero and Seneca refer to\nPyrrho as a neglected figure without a following, and the surviving\ntestimonia do not contradict this impression. It is possible that he\nhad some influence on the form of scepticism adopted by Arcesilaus and\nother members of the Academy; the extent to which this is so is\ndisputed and difficult to assess. It is also possible that the\nEpicureans, whose aim was also ataraxia, learned something\nfrom Pyrrho; there are indications of an association between Pyrrho\nand Nausiphanes, the teacher of Epicurus. But if so, the extent of the\nEpicureans’ borrowing was strictly limited. For them,\nataraxia is to be attained by coming to understand that the\nuniverse consists of atoms and void; and the Epicureans’\nattitude towards the senses was anything but one of mistrust."],"section_title":"8. Pyrrho’s Influence","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nPyrrho appears to have lived from around 365–360 BCE until\\naround 275–270 BCE (for the evidence see von Fritz (1963), 90).\\nWe have several reports of philosophers from whom he learned, the most\\nsignificant (and the most reliable) of which concern his association\\nwith Anaxarchus of Abdera. Alongside Anaxarchus (and several other\\nphilosophers) he allegedly accompanied Alexander the Great on his\\nexpedition to India. We are told that in the course of this expedition\\nhe encountered some “naked wise men”\\n(gumnosophistai); Diogenes Laertius (9.61) claims that his\\nphilosophy developed as a result of this meeting, but it is not clear\\nwhat basis, if any, he has for this assertion. In any case, after his\\nreturn to Greece Pyrrho did espouse a philosophy that attracted\\nnumerous followers, of whom the most important was Timon of Phlius.\\nThe travel writer Pausanias reports (6.24.5) seeing a statue of him in\\nthe marketplace in Pyrrho’s home town of Elis in the\\nPeloponnese; Diogenes also reports (9.64) that he was made high\\npriest, and that in his honor philosophers were made exempt from city\\ntaxation. While Pausanias’ report is easier to accept at face\\nvalue than Diogenes’, both suggest that (at least locally) he\\nachieved considerable celebrity. However, there is no good reason to\\nbelieve that a Pyrrhonist ‘movement’ continued beyond his\\nown immediate followers; it was not until the first century BCE that\\nPyrrhonism became the name of an ongoing philosophical tradition.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Life\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nWith the exception of poetry allegedly written while on\\nAlexander’s expedition (which, as far as we can tell, did not\\nsurvive that expedition), Pyrrho wrote nothing; we are therefore\\nobliged to try to reconstruct his philosophy from reports by others.\\nUnfortunately the reports that we have are fragmentary and, in many\\ncases, of doubtful reliability. Pyrrho’s follower Timon wrote\\nnumerous poems and prose works; but of these only fragments and in\\nsome cases second-hand reports survive. It is likely that much of what\\nwe hear about Pyrrho in later sources also derives indirectly from\\nTimon, but it is frequently not possible to judge, in individual\\ncases, whether or not this is so. Other difficulties concerning\\nTimon’s evidence are, first, that he writes as a devotee rather\\nthan as a neutral reporter, and second, that the great majority of\\nTimon’s fragments derive from a poem called Silloi\\n(Lampoons), and consist of satirical thumbnail sketches of\\nother philosophers rather than any kind of direct exposition of\\nPyrrho’s outlook. (See the entry on Timon, section 2, for\\ndetails.) Nevertheless, Timon is clearly the most important and\\nthe most trustworthy source of information about Pyrrho. Of the\\nevidence from Timon, one piece looks to be especially important.\\nThis is a summary, by the Peripatetic Aristocles of Messene (late 1st\\nc. BCE), of an account by Timon of what appear to\\nbe Pyrrho’s most general philosophical attitudes. It is\\nwidely agreed that this passage must be the centerpiece of any\\ninterpretation of Pyrrho’s philosophy. However, its usefulness\\nfor this purpose depends in part on how much of it is actually talking\\nabout Pyrrho’s attitudes, as opposed to Timon’s own\\ndevelopments or expansions of them. As we shall see, this is one of\\nmany difficulties in interpreting the passage.\",\n \"\\nWith the exception of a very few snippets of information, the only\\nother source of evidence on Pyrrho that is close to contemporary is\\nAntigonus of Carystus, a biographer of the mid-third century BCE.\\nDiogenes Laertius, whose life of Pyrrho is our major source of\\nbiographical anecdotes, frequently cites Antigonus, and is probably\\nindebted to him in many places even when he does not cite him;\\nAntigonus is also mentioned by Aristocles, and is likely to be the\\norigin of much or even most of the surviving biographical material on\\nPyrrho. But Antigonus needs to be handled even more carefully than\\nTimon. He was not a philosopher, and there is no reason to think that\\nhe was capable of or particularly interested in comprehending\\nphilosophical nuances. Nor is it clear that accuracy was high on his\\nlist of priorities; on the contrary, what we know about him suggests\\nthat he was a purveyor of sensationalist gossip rather than a reliable\\nhistorian. His account probably did contain genuine information about\\nPyrrho’s demeanor and activities; but it would certainly be\\nunwise to take his anecdotes as a group on trust.\",\n \"\\nCicero refers to Pyrrho about ten times, and Cicero is, in general, a\\nresponsible reporter of other people’s views. Unfortunately his\\ninformation about Pyrrho appears to be very incomplete, and, as we\\nshall see, the impression he conveys of him may very well be\\ninaccurate. With one exception, he never mentions him except in\\nconjunction with the famously non-orthodox Stoics Aristo and\\n(sometimes) Herillus, and the remarks in question always concern the\\nsame one or two points in ethics; it looks as if his knowledge of\\nPyrrho derives almost entirely from a single source that conveyed\\nlittle or nothing about Pyrrho individually. In addition, a number of\\nauthors in later antiquity make isolated comments about Pyrrho. But\\nsince these comments postdate the rise of the later Pyrrhonist\\nmovement, there is often room for suspicion as to whether they reflect\\ngenuine information about Pyrrho himself, as opposed to the later\\nphilosophy that took his name.\",\n \"\\nEven given the difficulty referred to above, any attempt to interpret\\nPyrrho’s philosophy must pay close attention to the summary of\\nTimon in Aristocles. If the entire passage is summarizing the\\nviews of Pyrrho (as Timon understood them), it clearly takes\\nprecedence, in detail and trustworthiness, over the remaining\\nevidence — pace Green (2017), who proposes a more holistic\\napproach. If, on the other hand, much of the passage conveys the views\\nof Timon, and only part of it the views of Pyrrho, the holistic\\napproach has more to recommend it, despite the paucity of the\\nremaining evidence. Even on this assumption, however, the Aristocles\\npassage remains as important as anything else, and to this we now\\nturn.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Ancient Sources and the Nature of the Evidence\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nA word, first, about the provenance and evidential value of the\\nAristocles passage. Several chapters from book 8 of Aristocles’\\nPeri philosophias (On Philosophy) appear in\\nquotation in the Praeparatio evangelica of Eusebius, the\\nfourth-century bishop of Caesarea. These chapters expound, and then\\nattack from an Aristotelian perspective, a number of philosophies that\\nimpugn the reliability of one or other of our cognitive faculties.\\nAmong these Aristocles counts Pyrrhonism, as represented by Pyrrho\\nhimself and by the initiator of the later Pyrrhonist tradition,\\nAenesidemus; Aristocles speaks of Aenesidemus (first century BCE,\\nq.v.), as recent, and is apparently not aware of any subsequent\\nmembers of the Pyrrhonist tradition. The chapter on Pyrrhonism opens\\nwith a brief summary of the early Pyrrhonist outlook, as reported by\\nTimon, who refers to Pyrrho (14.18.1–5).\",\n \"\\nThis convoluted transmission might lead one to doubt how much\\nauthentic information can be extracted from the passage. But there is\\nno reason, first, to doubt Eusebius’ explicit claim to be\\nquoting Aristocles verbatim. Aristocles is not quoting Timon verbatim;\\nsome of the vocabulary in this passage is clearly reminiscent of\\nAristocles’ own vocabulary in other chapters. However, other\\nterms in the passage are quite distinct both from Aristocles’\\nown normal usage and from any of the terminology familiar to us from\\nlater Pyrrhonism, yet were in use prior to Timon’s day; it seems\\neasiest to account for these as authentic reproductions of\\nTimon’s own language. In addition, the frequent mention of Timon\\neither by name or by the word phêsi, ‘he\\nsays’, suggests that Aristocles is taking pains to reproduce the\\nessentials of his account as faithfully as possible. And finally,\\nAristocles’ other chapters, where we are in a position to check\\nhis summaries against other evidence of the views being summarized,\\nsuggest that he is in general a reliable reporter of other\\npeople’s views, even views to which he himself is strongly\\nopposed—or at least, that he is reliable when he has access to\\nsystematic written expositions of those views, as seems to be the case\\nhere. As for Timon’s reliability as a source for Pyrrho’s\\nviews, we cannot be sure, but we cannot do better; he is clearly\\ncloser to Pyrrho than any other source who discusses him.\\nHowever, as already noted, there is a further question concerning how\\nfar the passage is a report of Pyrrho’s ideas and how far it gives\\nus Timon’s creative development of them.\",\n \"\\nEven aside from that question, the interpretation of the\\nAristocles passage is fraught with controversy. It follows that the\\ncharacter of Pyrrho’s thinking is, at its very core, a matter\\nfor sharp disagreement. The present survey will begin by assuming that\\nthe passage is all about Pyrrho, laying out the two main\\nalternatives (given this assumption) and exploring the\\nconsequences of each. (Numerous other readings besides these two have\\nbeen proposed; in particular, the interpretation of Svavarsson (2004)\\nis an intriguing, though arguably unstable, hybrid of the two. But it\\nis fair to say that these two are the ones that have commanded by far\\nthe most scholarly attention.) It will then explain why some scholars\\nhave questioned this assumption, and what difference this would\\nmake to our understanding of Pyrrho and of Timon’s\\nrelation to him. First, then, on the assumption that the whole\\npassage is Timon’s summary of Pyrrho’s thought:\",\n \"\\nTimon is reported as telling us that in order to be happy, one must\\npay attention to three connected questions: first, what are things\\nlike by nature? second, how should we be disposed towards things\\n(given our answer to the first question)? and third, what will be the\\noutcome for those who adopt the disposition recommended in the answer\\nto the second question? And the passage then gives us answers to\\neach of the three questions in order.\",\n \"\\nThe answer to the question “what are things like by\\nnature?” is given by a sequence of three epithets; things are\\nsaid to be adiaphora and astathmêta and\\nanepikrita. Taken by themselves, these epithets can be\\nunderstood in two importantly different ways: they may be taken as\\ncharacterizing how things are (by nature) in themselves, or they may\\nbe taken as commenting on human beings’ lack (by our nature) of\\ncognitive access to things. Adiaphora is normally translated\\n‘indifferent’. But this might be taken as referring either\\nto an intrinsic characteristic of things—namely that, in\\nthemselves and by nature, they possess no differentiating features\\n— or to our natural inability to discern any such features. In\\nthe latter case ‘undifferentiable’ might be a more\\nperspicuous translation. (Beckwith (2011) plausibly connects the focus\\non differentiating features, or the lack of them, with the\\nAristotelian notion of differentiae; on either of the readings to be\\nexplored, Aristotle’s picture of the world and of our ability to\\nunderstand it would indeed be a prime example of the kind of view from\\nwhich Pyrrho is anxious to distance himself.) Similarly,\\nastathmêta might mean ‘unstable’ or\\n‘unbalanced’, describing an objective property of things;\\nor it might mean ‘not subject to being placed on a\\nbalance’, and hence ‘unmeasurable’, which would\\nagain place the focus on our cognitive inabilities. And\\nanepikrita might mean ‘indeterminate’, referring\\nto an objective lack of any definite features, or\\n‘indeterminable’, pointing to an inability on our part to\\ndetermine the features of things. The statement as a whole, then, is\\neither answering the question “what are things like by\\nnature?” by stating that things are, in their very nature,\\nindefinite or indeterminate in various ways — the precise nature\\nof the thesis would be a matter for further speculation—or by\\nstating that we human beings are not in a position to pin down or\\ndetermine the nature of things. Let us call these the metaphysical and\\nthe epistemological interpretations respectively.\",\n \"\\nIt is clear that the metaphysical interpretation gives us a Pyrrho who\\nis not in any recognizable sense a sceptic. Pyrrho, on this\\ninterpretation, is issuing a declaration about the nature of things in\\nthemselves—precisely what the later Pyrrhonists who called\\nthemselves sceptics were careful to avoid. On the epistemological\\ninterpretation, on the other hand, Pyrrho is very much closer to the\\ntradition that took his name. There is still some distance between\\nthem. To say that we cannot determine the nature of things\\n— as opposed to saying that we have so far failed to determine\\nthe natural features of things—is already a departure from the\\nsceptical suspension of judgement promoted by Sextus Empiricus. And to\\nput it, as on this reading Pyrrho does put it, by saying that\\nthings are indeterminable, is a further departure, in that it\\ndoes attribute at least one feature to things in themselves —\\nnamely, being such that humans cannot determine them. Nevertheless,\\nthe epistemological interpretation clearly portrays Pyrrho as a\\nforerunner—a naive and unsophisticated forerunner, perhaps\\n— of later Pyrrhonist scepticism, whereas the metaphysical\\ninterpretation puts him in a substantially different light.\",\n \"\\nThe natural way to try to choose between these two interpretations is\\nto see which of them fits best with the logic of the passage as a\\nwhole. Unfortunately, a neutral decision on this does not seem be\\npossible. According to the manuscripts, the phrase that\\nfollows the words we have been discussing reads “for\\nthis reason (dia touto) neither our sensations nor our\\nopinions tell the truth or lie”. On the metaphysical\\ninterpretation, the idea would be that, since things are in\\ntheir real nature indeterminate, our sensations and opinions, which\\nrepresent things as having certain determinate features, are neither\\ntrue nor false. They are not true, since reality is not the way they\\npresent it as being. It might then seem that they are false. But\\nif reality is indeterminate because it is constantly changing\\n(as the sensible world is sometimes portrayed, for example, in Plato),\\nthen one might say that our perceptions of the fleeting, temporary\\nfeatures of things are not simply false. Because these\\nfeatures are temporary and fleeting, they do not belong to the real\\nnature of things, so the perceptions do not qualify as\\ntrue; but (assuming our senses are functioning normally) they are\\nfeatures the things do actually manifest on particular occasions.\",\n \"\\nAs for the epistemological interpretation, some scholars have\\nsuggested that the manuscripts are in error at this point, and that\\nwhat the text should say is “on account of the fact\\nthat (dia to) neither our sensations nor our opinions\\ntell the truth or lie”. The change is justified on linguistic\\ngrounds; it is alleged that the text in the manuscripts as they stand\\nis not acceptable Greek. The considerations for and against this\\nproposal are technical, and debate has yielded no consensus on this\\nquestion. However, it is clear that if one does make this small\\nalteration to the text, the direction of the inference is reversed;\\nthe point about our sensations and opinions now becomes a reason for\\nthe point about the nature of things, not an inference from it. And\\nthis, it has been argued, points towards the epistemological\\ninterpretation. The idea would then be that, since our sensations and\\nopinions fail to be consistent deliverers of true reports (or, for\\nthat matter, false reports) about the world around us, there is no\\nprospect of our being able to determine the nature of things. However,\\neven if we retain the manuscript text, the epistemological reading may\\nstill be possible (so Green (2017)). The idea would be that, in order\\nfor our sensations and opinions to tell the truth or lie, they would\\nhave to do two things: 1) present an appearance of things and 2)\\npresent this appearance as how things really are. But since\\nwe are not able to determine the latter (as we were just told in the\\nstatement about the nature of things), our sensations and opinions\\ncannot do this; they can only register appearances, and that is not\\nenough for them to tell either truths or falsehoods.\",\n \"\\nThe immediate inference from the statement about the nature of things,\\nthen, is not decisive. And the remainder of the Aristocles\\npassage can be also read so as to fit with either the\\nmetaphysical or the epistemological reading of his answer to the\\nquestion about the nature of things. The Aristocles passage continues\\nwith the answer to the second question, namely the question of the\\nattitude we should adopt given the answer to the first question. We\\nare told, first, that we should not trust our sensations and opinions,\\nbut should adopt an unopinionated attitude. On the epistemological\\nreading, the significance of this is obvious. But on the metaphysical\\nreading, too, we have already been told that our sensations and\\nopinions are not true, which is presumably reason enough for us not to\\ntrust them; and the unopinionated attitude that is here recommended\\nmay be understood as one in which one refrains from positing any\\ndefinite characteristics as inherent in the nature of\\nthings—given that their real nature is wholly indefinite. (To\\nthe objection that this thesis of indefiniteness is itself an opinion,\\nit may be replied that doxa, ‘opinion’, is\\nregularly used in earlier Greek philosophy, especially in Parmenides\\nand Plato, to refer to those opinions—misguided opinions, in the\\nview of these authors—that take on trust a view of the world as\\nconforming more or less to the way it appears in ordinary experience.\\nIn this usage, the claim that reality is indefinite would not be a\\n(mere) opinion, but would be a statement of the truth.)\",\n \"\\nThe passage now introduces a certain form of speech that is supposed\\nto reflect this unopinionated attitude. We are supposed to say\\n“about each single thing that it no more is than is not or both\\nis and is not or neither is nor is not”. There are a number of\\nintricate questions about the exact relations between the various\\nparts of this complicated utterance, and especially about the role and\\nsignificance of the ‘both’ and ‘neither’\\ncomponents. But it is clear that this too is susceptible of being read\\nalong the lines of either of the two interpretations introduced above.\\nOn the metaphysical interpretation, we are being asked to adopt a form\\nof words that reflects the utter indefiniteness of the way things are;\\nwe should not say of anything that it is any particular way\\nany more than that it is not that way (with ‘is’\\nbeing understood, as commonly in Greek philosophy, as shorthand for\\n‘is F’, where F stands for any arbitrary\\npredicate). On the epistemological interpretation, we are being asked\\nto use a manner of speaking that expresses our suspension of judgement\\nabout how things are. Sextus Empiricus specifically tells us that\\n‘no more’ (ou mallon) is a term used by the\\nsceptics to express suspension of judgement, and its occurrence in the\\nAristocles passage can be taken as an early example of the same type\\nof usage.\",\n \"\\nFinally, in answer to the third question, we are told that the result\\nfor those who adopt the unopinionated attitude just recommended is\\nfirst aphasia and then ataraxia. Ataraxia,\\n‘freedom from worry’, is familiar to us from later\\nPyrrhonism; this is said by the later Pyrrhonists to be the result of\\nthe suspension of judgement that they claimed to be able to induce.\\nThe precise sense of aphasia is less clear. Beckwith (2011)\\nactually argues that the transmitted text is erroneous, and that we\\nshould instead read apatheia, “lack of passion”.\\nThis is an attractive suggestion; apatheia is indeed a term\\nused not infrequently of Pyrrho’s untroubled attitude (see\\nsection 5), whereas a reference to aphasia would be\\nunparalleled in the other evidence on Pyrrho. However, the proposal is\\ninevitably speculative, and aphasia is a term in use in later\\nPyrrhonism; it seems worth trying to elucidate it on the assumption\\nthat the transmitted text is correct. It might mean\\n‘non-assertion’, as in Sextus—that is, a refusal to\\ncommit oneself to definite alternatives; or it might mean, more\\nliterally, ‘speechlessness’, which could in turn be taken\\nto be an initial reaction of stunned silence to the radical position\\nwith which one has been presented (an uncomfortable reaction that is\\nsubsequently replaced by ataraxia—the passage does say\\nthat aphasia comes first and ataraxia comes later).\\nBut the decision between these two ways of understanding the term is\\nindependent of the broader interpretive issues bearing upon the\\npassage as a whole. For some form of ‘non-assertion’ is\\nclearly licensed by either the metaphysical or the epistemological\\ninterpretation; and on either interpretation, the view proposed might\\nindeed render someone (initially) uncomfortable to the point of\\n‘speechlessness’. The important point, though, is that\\nataraxia is the end result; and this links back to the\\nintroductory remark to the effect that the train of thought to be\\nsummarized has the effect of making one happy.\",\n \"\\nWe have, then, two major possibilities. On the one hand, Pyrrho can be\\nread as advancing a sweeping metaphysical thesis, that things are in\\ntheir real nature indefinite or indeterminate, and encouraging us to\\nembrace the consequences of that thesis by refusing to attribute any\\ndefinite features to things (at least, as belonging to their real\\nnature) and by refusing to accept at face value (again, as revelatory\\nof the real nature of things) those myriad aspects of our ordinary\\nexperience that represent things as having certain definite features.\\nOr, on the other hand, Pyrrho can be read as declaring that the nature\\nof things is inaccessible to us, and encouraging us to withdraw our\\ntrust (and to speak in such a way as to express our withdrawal of\\ntrust) in ordinary experience as a guide to the nature of things. As\\nnoted earlier, the second, epistemological interpretation makes\\nPyrrho’s outlook a great deal closer to that of the later\\nPyrrhonists who took him as an inspiration. But that is not in itself\\nany reason for favoring this interpretation over the other,\\nmetaphysical one. For on either interpretation Pyrrho is said to\\npromise ataraxia, the later Pyrrhonists’ goal, and to\\npromise it as a result of a certain kind of withdrawal of\\ntrust in the veracity of our everyday impressions of things; the\\nconnection between these two points aligns Pyrrho with the later\\nPyrrhonists, and sets him apart from every other Greek philosophical\\nmovement that preceded later Pyrrhonism. The fact that this later\\nsceptical tradition took Pyrrho as an inspiration is therefore readily\\nunderstandable whichever of the two interpretations is correct (or\\nwhichever they thought was correct). It is also true that, on the\\nmetaphysical interpretation of the passage, the grounds on which\\nPyrrho advanced his metaphysical thesis of indeterminacy are never\\nspecified; this too, like the precise character of the thesis itself,\\nmust be a matter for speculative reconstruction. But Aristocles only\\npurports to be giving the key points of Timon’s summary; the\\nlack of detail, though disappointing, would not be surprising.\",\n \"\\nSo far we have assumed that the Aristocles passage is supposed to\\nrepresent the thought of Pyrrho. But, as noted earlier, some scholars\\nhave questioned that assumption (see especially Brunschwig\\n(1994), Marchand (2018)). Their reason is that there is only one place\\nin the Aristocles passage that reads “Timon says that Pyrrho says\\n…”; this is the threefold statement about the nature of things.\\nElsewhere Aristocles says “Timon says”, but nowhere else are we\\nspecifically told that Timon is conveying the thought of Pyrrho.\\nAdmittedly Aristocles introduces Pyrrho as one of those who question\\nour ability to know things, but he may have thought that Timon’s own\\n(written) ideas are the closest we can get to Pyrrho’s (unwritten)\\nideas. Hence it is not obvious that anything beyond the threefold\\nstatement about the nature of things should actually be attributed to\\nPyrrho himself. Of course, when Aristocles says “Timon says”, he\\nmay have meant this as short for “Timon says Pyrrho says”,\\nbut he may also have intended to distinguish between the contributions\\nof Pyrrho and of Timon.\",\n \"\\nIf we limit Pyrrho’s contribution in this way, what difference does it\\nmake? There is still the question whether the statement about the\\nnature of things is about how things are in themselves or about\\nour inability to grasp them. But in this case, all the mention of\\nsensations and opinions, of their truth or falsehood, and of what we\\nshould say belongs to Timon, not to Pyrrho. And this opens the\\npossibility that the main philosophical outlook expressed in the\\nAristocles passage, whether one reads it metaphysically or\\nepistemologically, is Timon’s construction, building on a single idea\\nof Pyrrho’s that may have been rather less broad in scope or ambitious\\nin character. In particular, as we shall see, much of the other\\nevidence on Pyrrho seems to depict him as focused on questions of\\nvalue, questioning our characterizations of things as good or bad\\nand doubting whether our views on such matters are stable or\\nreliable. His statement of the “indifferent” nature of things, as\\nreported in the Aristocles passage, may also have been of an\\nevaluative kind: things do not really — or, we cannot tell\\nwhether things really — have the positive or negative evaluative\\nqualities we accord them.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. The Aristocles Passage\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe other evidence bearing upon Pyrrho’s central philosophical\\nattitudes does nothing to settle the dispute between these various\\npossible interpretations of the Aristocles passage. A number of texts\\nexplicitly or implicitly represent Pyrrho’s outlook as\\nessentially identical to the sceptical outlook of the later\\nPyrrhonists. However, all of these texts postdate the rise of later\\nPyrrhonism itself, and none of them contains anything like the level\\nof detail of the Aristocles passage; there is no particular reason to\\nsuppose that any of them represents a genuine understanding of Pyrrho\\nas distinct from the later Pyrrhonists. There are also a few texts\\nthat appear to offer a picture of Pyrrho’s thought that is\\ncongenial to the metaphysical interpretation. The most significant of\\nthese is a passage from near the beginning of Diogenes Laertius’\\nlife of Pyrrho (9.61); Pyrrho, we are told, “said that nothing\\nis either fine or ignoble or just or unjust; and similarly in all\\ncases that nothing is the case in reality (mêden einai\\ntêi alêtheiai), but that human beings do everything\\nby convention and habit; for each thing is no more this than\\nthat”. This looks as if it is attributing to Pyrrho a\\nmetaphysical thesis, and a thesis according to which things have no\\ndefinite features; it does not seem to be portraying Pyrrho as an\\nadvocate of suspension of judgement. However, the passage is\\nundoubtedly in some way confused. For immediately beforehand we are\\ntold that Pyrrho was the one who initiated the type of philosophy\\nconsisting of “inapprehensibility and suspension of\\njudgement”, which sounds epistemic; and the previously quoted\\npassage is then cited as confirmation of this. In addition, while\\n“nothing is the case in reality” and “each thing is\\nno more this than that” sound wholly general, Diogenes’\\nexamples are all in the domain of values, which ties in with the\\npossibility that Pyrrho’s statement about the nature of things,\\nin the Aristocles passage, was only about values and that most of that\\npassage represents Timon’s views rather than\\nPyrrho’s. This passage of Diogenes, then, cannot be used as\\nsupport for any particular understanding of Pyrrho.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Other Reports on Pyrrho’s General Approach\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nMost of the remaining evidence about Pyrrho has to do with his\\npractical attitudes and behavior. There are a number of biographical\\nanecdotes, and there are a few fragments of Timon that purport to\\ndepict Pyrrho’s state of mind. Some of the biographical\\nanecdotes are clearly polemical inventions. For example, Diogenes\\n(9.62) reports Antigonus as saying that Pyrrho’s lack of trust\\nin his senses led him to ignore precipices, oncoming wagons and\\ndangerous dogs, and that his friends had to follow him around to\\nprotect him from these various everyday hazards. But he then reports\\nthe dissenting verdict of Aenesidemus, according to which Pyrrho was\\nperfectly capable of conducting himself in a sensible manner. This\\nreflects a longstanding ancient dispute as to whether it is possible\\nto live if one radically abandons common-sense attitudes to the world.\\nAntigonus has transformed a hostile criticism of Pyrrho—that, if\\none really were to adopt the attitudes he recommends, one\\nwould be unable consistently to live as a sane human being\\n— into an account of how Pyrrho actually did act; but there is\\nno reason to take this seriously as biography. (It does, however,\\nraise the question of what it means to mistrust the senses—as\\nthe Aristocles passage tells us that either Timon or Pyrrho\\ndid—if this is to be consistent with self-preservation in\\none’s ordinary behavior; we shall return to this point at the\\nend of this section.)\",\n \"\\nBut there are many other anecdotes, preserved in Diogenes and\\nelsewhere, that cannot be dismissed in this fashion. The dominant\\nimpression they convey as a group is of an extraordinary impassivity\\nor imperturbability; with rare exceptions (which he himself is\\nportrayed as regretting), Pyrrho is depicted as maintaining his calm\\nand untroubled attitude no matter what happens to him. (The exceptions\\nhave led Pyrrho’s outlook to be labeled\\n“aspirationalism”; see Ribeiro (2022). But while his\\nattainment of tranquility was admittedly not perfect, the picture we\\nget is of someone who was truly exceptional in this respect.) This\\nextends even to extreme physical pain—he is reported not to have\\nflinched when subjected to the horrific techniques of ancient\\nsurgery—but it also encompasses dangers such as being on a ship\\nin a storm. (This is not to say that he did not avoid such troubles if\\nhe could, as suggested by the apocryphal stories mentioned in the\\nprevious paragraph; it is just to say that he did not lose his\\ncomposure in the face of life’s inevitable hardships.) There is\\nanother aspect to this untroubled attitude as well. In numerous\\nanecdotes Pyrrho is shown as unconcerned with adhering to the normal\\nconventions of society; he wanders off for days on end by himself, and\\nhe performs tasks that would normally be left to social inferiors,\\nsuch as housework and even washing a pig. Here, too, the suggestion is\\nthat he does not care about things that ordinary people do care about\\n— in this case, the disapproval of others. (The passage from\\nDiogenes quoted in the previous section, according to which Pyrrho\\nheld “that human beings do everything by convention and\\nhabit” is not necessarily in conflict with this; by ‘human\\nbeings’ Pyrrho might have meant ordinary human beings,\\namong whom he would not have included himself.)\",\n \"\\nThe fragments of Timon also emphasize Pyrrho’s exceptional\\ntranquility, and add a further, more philosophical dimension to it.\\nSeveral fragments suggest that this tranquility results from his not\\nengaging in theoretical inquiry like other philosophers, and with his\\nnot engaging in debate with those philosophers. Other thinkers are\\nperturbed by their need to discover how the universe works, and their\\nneed to prevail in arguments with their rivals; Pyrrho is unconcerned\\nabout any of this.\",\n \"\\nClearly it would be foolish to accept every detail of this composite\\naccount. Timon’s picture is no doubt idealized, and the\\nbiographical material surely includes a measure of embellishment.\\nCollectively, however, these fragments and anecdotes add up to a\\nhighly consistent portrait; it does not seem overconfident to take\\nthis at least as reflecting an ideal towards which Pyrrho strived, and\\nwhich he achieved to a sufficient degree to have attracted notice.\",\n \"\\nWhat connections can be drawn between this portrait of Pyrrho’s\\ndemeanor and the philosophy expounded in the Aristocles passage? What\\nwe have here, plainly, is a fuller specification of the\\nataraxia that the Aristocles passage promised as the outcome\\nof the process of responding in the recommended way to the three\\nquestions. (And it confirms that, even if the process of reaching\\nataraxia, as explained in the Aristocles passage, was largely\\nTimon’s rather than Pyrrho’s, the ideal of\\nataraxia itself was one to which Pyrrho adhered.) But\\nwhy should thinking as Pyrrho did, according to that passage,\\nyield ataraxia, and why should this outcome take the specific\\nform suggested by the material discussed in this section? Now is a\\nconvenient point to address these questions (as we did not do in\\ninitially examining the Aristocles passage). We may distinguish the\\noverall emotional tranquility depicted in the biographical material\\nand the particular tranquility, derived from the avoidance of\\ntheoretical inquiry, that is emphasized in the fragments of Timon.\",\n \"\\nThe most obvious explanation for the overall emotional tranquility\\nwould seem to be along the following lines. If one adopts the position\\nrecommended in the Aristocles passage, one will not hold any\\ndefinite beliefs, about any object or state of affairs, to the effect\\nthat the object or state of affairs really is good, or valuable, or\\nworth seeking—or, on the other hand, bad or to be avoided. (This\\nwill be true on either the metaphysical or the epistemological\\ninterpretations of the Aristocles passage, and it will be true of\\nPyrrho, given his answer to the first question, even if the rest is\\nTimon’s development.) Hence one will attach far less importance to the\\nattainment or the avoidance of any particular objects, or the\\noccurrence or non-occurrence of any particular state of affairs, than\\none would if one thought that these things really did have some kind\\nof positive or negative value; nothing will matter to one to anything\\nlike the same extent as it matters to most people. If this is on the\\nright lines, then Pyrrho’s route to ataraxia closely\\nresembles the one described in several places by Sextus Empiricus\\n(PH 1.25–30, 3.235–8, M\\n11.110–67); the account I have given is in fact modeled after\\nSextus’ explanation of how suspension of judgement produces\\nataraxia. Indeed, it is difficult to see how else the process\\nis to be reconstructed. One difference, however, between the practical\\nattitudes of Pyrrho and Sextus is that Sextus attributes an important\\nrole to convention in the shaping of one’s behavior; more on\\nthis in a moment.\",\n \"\\nAs for the avoidance of theoretical inquiry and debate, if Pyrrho was\\nprimarily a moralist and the Aristocles passage mostly contains\\nTimon’s ideas, such inquiry and debate would simply have been\\noutside Pyrrho’s sphere of interest. But if the Aristocles\\npassage as a whole represents Pyrrho’s own thought, it is fair\\nto assume that he will have regarded such inquiry and debate as\\ntroublesome because it is necessarily fruitless and interminable. If\\nthe real nature of things is indeterminable by us, as the\\nepistemological interpretation would have it, then to attempt to\\ndetermine the nature of things, and to provide cogent grounds for the\\nsuperiority of one’s own theories, is to attempt the impossible;\\nsuch matters are simply beyond our grasp. But if, as the metaphysical\\ninterpretation would have it, the world is in its real nature\\nindefinite, then one is also attempting the impossible, though for a\\ndifferent reason; one is attempting to determine a fixed character for\\nthings that inherently lack any fixed character. Of course, the thesis\\nthat reality is indefinite is itself a definite statement. But it\\nfollows from this statement that any attempt to establish fixed and\\ndefinite characteristics for specific items in the universe is doomed\\nto failure. And it seems to be this kind of theoretical inquiry that\\nTimon represents Pyrrho as eschewing; as one fragment puts it\\n(addressing Pyrrho), “you were not concerned to inquire what\\nwinds hold sway over Greece, from where everything comes and into what\\nit passes” (Diogenes Laertius 9.65). On this reading, then,\\nPyrrho’s avoidance of inquiry and debate resembles the disdain\\nfor physical speculation that is apparent in some writings of Plato\\n(Phaedo for example); physical speculation is fruitless\\nbecause the physical world is not susceptible to rational inquiry.\",\n \"\\nHere another difference may be discerned from the Pyrrhonism of Sextus\\nEmpiricus. For although Sextus certainly does not claim to have\\ndefinite answers of his own concerning the nature of things, he has no\\nqualms about engaging with his opponents in debate, or about pitting\\nthem against one another. Indeed, the Pyrrhonism of Sextus depends on\\na constant interplay of competing arguments on as many topics as\\npossible. One’s suspension of judgement results from one’s\\nexperience of the ‘equal strength’ (isostheneia)\\nof the competing considerations on all sides of a given issue; but\\nthis requires that one be regularly exposed to such competing\\nconsiderations, and the works of Sextus are themselves bountiful\\nsources for this. Sextus may agree with Pyrrho that such debates are\\ninterminable, but they have an important role in later Pyrrhonist\\npractice nonetheless. Pyrrho’s own practice is quite different,\\nbecause his ataraxia flows not from an ongoing practice of\\nintellectual juggling, but from a conclusion about the nature\\nof things, as reported in the Aristocles passage. As we have seen,\\nthis conclusion may be interpreted in several different ways, but\\nhowever we interpret it, it is a firm view of his.\",\n \"\\nWe have seen that Pyrrho was unconcerned, or aspired to be\\nunconcerned, about things that most of us care about very deeply. But\\nhow does one make any decisions at all, if one adopts this kind of\\nattitude? Unless we are to believe the stories of Pyrrho as a madman\\ndepending on his friends to rescue him from precipices and dogs, we\\nare entitled to expect an answer to this question. There is some\\nevidence to suggest that the answer proposed—if not by Pyrrho\\nhimself, then at least by Timon—was that one relies on the\\nappearances. If this is correct, we have another link, at least at a\\ngeneral level, with the Pyrrhonism of Sextus, for whom appearances are\\nwhat he calls the “criterion of action”. One difference,\\nas mentioned earlier, is that Sextus lists laws and customs as one of\\nthe four main varieties of appearances that one may use to guide\\none’s behavior; on Sextus’ account, then, certain courses\\nof action will appear to one as desirable or undesirable given that\\nthey are approved or disapproved of by the prevailing mores. But\\nPyrrho seems to have been thoroughly unconventional in some aspects of\\nhis behavior. It is impossible to say specifically what kinds of\\nphenomena were included for him and Timon under the heading of\\n‘the appearances’ — or whether they had anything\\nvery precise in mind here. Nevertheless, it looks as if the early or\\nproto-Pyrrhonist answer to the question of how one acts and makes\\ndecisions is that one does so in light of the way things appear to\\none. Depending on how we read the Aristocles passage, this might\\namount to “in light of the characteristics that things seem to\\nhave (but, for all we know, may not really have)”, or it\\nmight amount to “in light of the temporary and contingent\\ncharacteristics that things manifest on any given occasion (but that\\nare no part of how they really are, since how they really are\\nis indefinite)”. In either case, the way in which one mistrusts\\nsensations and common-sense opinions, as the Aristocles passage\\nrecommends, is not that one pays no attention to them in one’s\\neveryday behavior; one mistrusts them simply in that one does not take\\nthem as a guide to the underlying nature of things.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Reports on Pyrrho’s Demeanor and Lifestyle\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThere is one further, highly problematic fragment of Timon that seems\\nto belong in the area of practical philosophy. This is a set of four\\nlines of verse that make reference to “the nature of the divine\\nand the good”. There is no consensus on how to translate these\\nlines, and different translations yield very different consequences\\nfor interpretation. The first two lines can be rendered either\",\n \"\\nThe second two lines can be rendered either\",\n \"\\nThere are numerous other disputes over the translation, but these\\nalternatives put on display most of the central options for\\ninterpretation.\",\n \"\\nThe lines are quoted by Sextus Empiricus (M 11.20); there is\\nno further trace of them in the surviving record. The context in which\\nSextus introduces them shows that he is inclined to understand the\\nfirst couplet according to reading (A) rather than reading( B); but he\\nsuggests that he is not sure about this. The speaker into whose mouth\\nTimon put these lines is never identified, but it has generally been\\nassumed to be Pyrrho.\",\n \"\\nIf one understands the second couplet according to reading (C), then\\nthe speaker is apparently endorsing a position that attributes\\ndefinite natures to things; and this appears flatly inconsistent with\\nthe Pyrrho of the Aristocles passage, on any of the readings we\\nhave considered. The tension is especially bad if one reads the first\\ncouplet according to reading (B), in which case the speaker is\\ninsisting that he is in possession of the truth. But even on reading\\n(A), where the effect is to weaken the assertion to one about what\\nappears to the speaker to be the case, the statement about “the\\nnature of the divine and the good” seems strikingly out of\\nkeeping with the rest of what we hear about Pyrrho’s philosophy.\\nIt has been suggested that Pyrrho made an exception, in the case of\\nthe divine and the good, to his general prohibition on attributing\\ndefinite natures to things; but it is hard to see the motivation for\\nsuch a move, and this interpretation has not been generally accepted.\\nIt is true that Cicero speaks of Pyrrho as holding that virtue is the\\nsole good, and that no distinctions of value are to be drawn among\\nthings other than virtue and vice. However, as was mentioned earlier,\\nCicero always attributes this view to Pyrrho alongside the unorthodox\\nStoic Aristo of Chios; he never gives any details about Pyrrho’s\\nthinking specifically. We know from other sources that Aristo did hold\\nthis position; and, as we have seen, there is good reason to think\\nthat Pyrrho did refrain quite generally from attributing positive or\\nnegative value to ordinary objects of concern (things other than\\nvirtue and vice), which is one part of the position Cicero attributes\\nto him and Aristo. So it looks as if Cicero has been misled (probably\\nby the sketchiness of the information in his source) into thinking\\nthat Pyrrho agreed with Aristo in both parts of his position rather\\nthan in just one part. At any rate, Cicero cannot be regarded as\\noffering any credible support for an interpretation of Pyrrho that has\\nhim believing in a natural good; again, this is just too discordant\\nwith the remainder of the evidence.\",\n \"\\nReading (D) of Timon’s second couplet (which is due, with minor\\nmodifications, to Burnyeat (1980)) is intended to eliminate the\\ntroublesome reference to an eternal real nature. According to this\\ninterpretation, the phrase “the nature of the divine and the\\ngood” refers simply to a characteristic that is attributed to\\nPyrrho, and labeled by poetic hyperbole as ‘divine’, in\\nanother fragment of Timon, namely his extraordinary tranquility; the\\ncouplet as a whole, then, is saying that tranquility is the source of\\nan even-tempered life. And if one combines this with the less dogmatic\\nreading (A) of the first couplet, this yields a set of remarks that\\nare not obviously in conflict with anything else in the record on\\nPyrrho.\",\n \"\\nThe acceptability of the translation in reading (D) is not beyond\\nquestion. There is also some question whether the claim that\\ntranquility is the source of an even-tempered life is anything more\\nthan vacuous. However, if one assumes that Pyrrho is the speaker of\\nthese lines, then this interpretation or something close to it seems\\nto be the only way to rescue his thought (as reported by Timon) from\\ninconsistency. Another possibility, an interpretatively less\\nburdensome one, is to drop the assumption that Pyrrho is the speaker;\\nin this case, there is no reason to assume that the thought expressed\\nby the lines must be consistent with what we know of Pyrrho’s\\nphilosophy. But if one takes this option, one must devise an\\nalternative explanation for why Timon would have written these\\nlines—including some account of who else the speaker might be.\\nThis challenge has recently been taken up in Clayman (2009), chapter\\n2. Clayman argues that the speaker is Timon himself, and that the\\nlines serve a programmatic function at the opening of the poem; in\\nlight of parallel passages in other early Hellenistic poetry, the\\nreference to truth is understood as an allusion to poetic\\nverisimilitude rather than to anything philosophically problematic.\\nFinally, it has been suggested (in Svavarsson 2002) that\\nmuthon, rendered in both readings (A) and (B) by\\n“word”, should rather be understood as “myth”\\nin the sense of “fiction” (and “of truth”\\nlinked instead, as is linguistically quite possible, with\\n“standard”). In this case, again, there is no difficulty\\nin understanding the second couplet as expressing a dogmatic position;\\nindeed, such a reading is only to be expected, since the position is\\nbeing debunked, not advocated. Green (2017) has extended\\nSvavarsson’s suggestion by proposing that “word of\\ntruth” and “correct standard” are to be understood\\nsarcastically rather than at face value, making fun of other\\nthinkers’ belief in these things (which would also render the\\nthought less dogmatic; it would not simply be a declaration of\\nfalsehood). But whether the word muthos, all by itself, can\\ncarry this weight of significance—or whether, if that is what\\nTimon had intended, he would not have chosen some less ambiguous means\\nof expressing it—is open to question. It is fair to say that no\\nresolution of these matters is in sight.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"6. “The Nature of the Divine and the Good”\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nMany different philosophical antecedents have been claimed for Pyrrho.\\nSince we know very little about which philosophical currents Pyrrho\\nmay have been acquainted with, such claims are bound to be in large\\nmeasure speculative. There are, however, a couple of exceptions to\\nthis; as noted at the outset, Pyrrho was associated with Anaxarchus\\nand was reported to have encountered some unnamed Indian thinkers. The\\nlittle that we know of Anaxarchus seems to suggest that his philosophy\\nhad a good deal in common with Pyrrho’s. Diogenes Laertius\\n(9.60) ascribes to him an attitude of apatheia and\\neukolia, ‘freedom from emotion’ and\\n‘contentedness’; as noted earlier, apatheia is\\nused in some sources to describe Pyrrho’s attitude as well, and\\nthe combination of the two terms seems to describe something close to\\nthe state cultivated by Pyrrho. We also hear from Sextus Empiricus\\nthat Anaxarchus “likened existing things to stage-painting and\\ntook them to be similar to the things which strike us while asleep or\\ninsane” (M 7.88). This has often been taken as an early\\nexpression of a form of epistemological scepticism. But it may also be\\ntaken as an ontological comment on the insubstantiality of the world\\naround us; it is things (as opposed to our impressions of\\nthings) that are assimilated to stage-sets and the contents of dreams\\nand fantasies. Either way, the remark looks like an anticipation of\\nthe position expounded in the Aristocles passage; the first\\nreading conforms to the epistemological interpretation of that\\npassage, and the second to the metaphysical interpretation. It\\nappears, then, that Pyrrho may have borrowed to a considerable extent\\nfrom Anaxarchus, especially if the Aristocles passage as a whole\\nrepresents Pyrrho’s thought.\",\n \"\\nWe do not know the identity of the “naked wise men” whom\\nPyrrho met in India, or what they thought. There are reports of other\\nmeetings between Indian and Greek thinkers during Alexander’s\\nexpedition, and these tend to emphasize the Indians’\\nextraordinary impassivity and insensitivity to pain and hardship. It\\nis not unlikely that Pyrrho, too, was impressed by traits of this\\nkind. Though precedents for his ideal of ataraxia exist in\\nearlier Greek philosophy as well, his reported ability to withstand\\nsurgery without flinching is exceptional in the Greek context (and\\nquite distinct from anything in later Pyrrhonism); if we believe this\\nstory, it is tempting to explain it by way of some form of training\\nfrom the Indians. Some scholars have sought to establish more detailed\\nlinks between the thought of the Aristocles passage and various\\ncurrents in ancient Indian philosophy; and Beckwith (2015) finds in\\nPyrrho an authentic representative of early Buddhism. But there is at\\nleast room for debate about how far these similarities really go. From\\nan opposing perspective, some have suggested that the linguistic\\nbarriers would have ruled out an interchange of any great\\nphilosophical subtlety between the Indians and Pyrrho. But this may be\\noverly pessimistic; the expedition lasted a number of years, and some\\npeople manage to learn new languages remarkably quickly.\",\n \"\\nBeyond these figures with attested connections to Pyrrho, it is\\nplausible to suppose a certain influence on Pyrrho from Democritus.\\nPyrrho is reported to have had a special admiration for Democritus\\n(Diogenes Laertius 9.67, citing Pyrrho’s associate Philo);\\nDemocritus is one of the few philosophers besides Pyrrho himself who\\nseems to escape serious criticism in Timon’s Lampoons;\\nand Anaxarchus belonged in the tradition of thinkers stemming from\\nDemocritus. The influence may have been mainly in the ethical area;\\nDemocritus, too, had an ethical ideal that is recognizably a\\nforerunner to Pyrrho’s ataraxia. If one adopts the\\nepistemological interpretation of Pyrrho’s philosophy, one may\\nsee an additional area of influence in Democritus’ sceptical\\npronouncements about the prospects for knowledge of the world around\\nus.\",\n \"\\nAlternatively, if one interprets Pyrrho along metaphysical lines, one\\nmay be inclined to look to Plato and the Eleatics as possible\\ninfluences. Timon’s verdicts on these figures in the\\nLampoons are at least partially favorable; and, as was hinted\\nat earlier on, the dim view of sensibles that is suggested by a number\\nof Plato’s dialogues—but also anticipated by the\\nEleatics—seems to have something in common with Pyrrho’s\\nview of reality (on the metaphysical interpretation) as indeterminate.\\nThe difference, of course, is that Pyrrho does not suggest any higher\\nlevel of reality such as Plato’s Forms or the Eleatic Being.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"7. Influences on Pyrrho\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nPyrrho’s relation to the later Pyrrhonists has already been\\ndiscussed. Given the importance of Pyrrhonism in earlier modern\\nphilosophy, Pyrrho’s indirect influence may be thought of as\\nvery considerable. But beyond his being adopted as a figurehead in\\nlater Pyrrhonism—itself never a widespread philosophical\\nmovement — Pyrrho seems to have had very little impact in the\\nancient world after his own lifetime. Both Cicero and Seneca refer to\\nPyrrho as a neglected figure without a following, and the surviving\\ntestimonia do not contradict this impression. It is possible that he\\nhad some influence on the form of scepticism adopted by Arcesilaus and\\nother members of the Academy; the extent to which this is so is\\ndisputed and difficult to assess. It is also possible that the\\nEpicureans, whose aim was also ataraxia, learned something\\nfrom Pyrrho; there are indications of an association between Pyrrho\\nand Nausiphanes, the teacher of Epicurus. But if so, the extent of the\\nEpicureans’ borrowing was strictly limited. For them,\\nataraxia is to be attained by coming to understand that the\\nuniverse consists of atoms and void; and the Epicureans’\\nattitude towards the senses was anything but one of mistrust.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"8. Pyrrho’s Influence\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Decleva Caizzi, F., 1981, Pirrone: Testimonianze, Naples:\nBibliopolis. Complete collection of texts referring to Pyrrho, with\nItalian translation and commentary.","–––, 2020, Pirroniana, Milan: LED. A\nsecond edition of the previous item, with new material including\nan English translation of the texts by Mauro Bonazzi and David\nSedley.","Long, A. A. and D. N. Sedley, 1987, The Hellenistic\nPhilosophers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2 vols),\nsections 1–3. Vol. 1 contains texts in English translation with\nphilosophical commentary; vol. 2 contains original texts with\nphilological commentary.","Beckwith, C., 2011, “Pyrrho’s Logic: A Re-examination\nof Aristocles’ Record of Timon’s Account”,\nElenchos, 32: 287–327.","–––, 2015, Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s\nEncounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia, Princeton:\nPrinceton University Press.","Bett, R., 2000, Pyrrho, his Antecedents and his Legacy,\nOxford: Oxford University Press.","–––, 2012, Review of Clayman (2009),\nGnomon, 84: 107–12.","Brennan, T., 1998, “Pyrrho on the Criterion”,\nAncient Philosophy, 18: 417–34.","Brunschwig, J., 1994, “Once again on Eusebius on Aristocles\non Timon on Pyrrho”, in J. Brunschwig, Papers in Hellenistic\nPhilosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press:\n190–211.","Burnyeat, M., 1980, “Tranquility without a Stop: Timon,\nFrag. 68”, Classical Quarterly (New Series), 30:\n86–93.","Castagnoli, L., 2002, Review of Bett (2000), Ancient\nPhilosophy, 22: 443–457.","Clayman, D., 2009, Timon of Phlius: Pyrrhonism into\nPoetry, Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter.","Green, J., 2017, “Was Pyrrho a Pyrrhonian?”,\nApeiron, 50: 335–65.","Hankinson, J., 1995, The Sceptics, London:\nRoutledge.","Marchand, S., 2018. Le scepticisme: vivre sans opinions,\nParis: Vrin, chapter 1.","Perin, C., 2018. “Pyrrho and Timon”, in D. Machuca and\nB. Reed (eds.), Skepticism: From Antiquity to the Present,\nLondon/New York: Bloomsbury, 24–35.","Ribeiro, B., 2022. “Aspirationalism in Pyrrho’s\nProject of Living Suspensively”, Sképsis: Revista de\nFilosofia, 24: 1–11.","Stopper, M., 1983, “Schizzi Pirroniani”,\nPhronesis, 28: 265–97.","Svavarsson, S., 2002, “Pyrrho’s Dogmatic\nNature”, Classical Quarterly, 52(1):\n248–256.","–––, 2004, “Pyrrho’s Undecidable\nNature”, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 27:\n249–295.","–––, 2010, “Pyrrho and Early\nPyrrhonism”, in R. Bett (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to\nAncient Scepticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,\n36–57.","von Fritz, K., 1963, “Pyrrhon”, in Paulys\nRealencyclopädie der Classischen Altertumswissenschaft,\nxxiv: 89–106."],"string":"[\n \"Decleva Caizzi, F., 1981, Pirrone: Testimonianze, Naples:\\nBibliopolis. Complete collection of texts referring to Pyrrho, with\\nItalian translation and commentary.\",\n \"–––, 2020, Pirroniana, Milan: LED. A\\nsecond edition of the previous item, with new material including\\nan English translation of the texts by Mauro Bonazzi and David\\nSedley.\",\n \"Long, A. A. and D. N. Sedley, 1987, The Hellenistic\\nPhilosophers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2 vols),\\nsections 1–3. Vol. 1 contains texts in English translation with\\nphilosophical commentary; vol. 2 contains original texts with\\nphilological commentary.\",\n \"Beckwith, C., 2011, “Pyrrho’s Logic: A Re-examination\\nof Aristocles’ Record of Timon’s Account”,\\nElenchos, 32: 287–327.\",\n \"–––, 2015, Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s\\nEncounter with Early Buddhism in Central Asia, Princeton:\\nPrinceton University Press.\",\n \"Bett, R., 2000, Pyrrho, his Antecedents and his Legacy,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2012, Review of Clayman (2009),\\nGnomon, 84: 107–12.\",\n \"Brennan, T., 1998, “Pyrrho on the Criterion”,\\nAncient Philosophy, 18: 417–34.\",\n \"Brunschwig, J., 1994, “Once again on Eusebius on Aristocles\\non Timon on Pyrrho”, in J. Brunschwig, Papers in Hellenistic\\nPhilosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press:\\n190–211.\",\n \"Burnyeat, M., 1980, “Tranquility without a Stop: Timon,\\nFrag. 68”, Classical Quarterly (New Series), 30:\\n86–93.\",\n \"Castagnoli, L., 2002, Review of Bett (2000), Ancient\\nPhilosophy, 22: 443–457.\",\n \"Clayman, D., 2009, Timon of Phlius: Pyrrhonism into\\nPoetry, Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter.\",\n \"Green, J., 2017, “Was Pyrrho a Pyrrhonian?”,\\nApeiron, 50: 335–65.\",\n \"Hankinson, J., 1995, The Sceptics, London:\\nRoutledge.\",\n \"Marchand, S., 2018. Le scepticisme: vivre sans opinions,\\nParis: Vrin, chapter 1.\",\n \"Perin, C., 2018. “Pyrrho and Timon”, in D. Machuca and\\nB. Reed (eds.), Skepticism: From Antiquity to the Present,\\nLondon/New York: Bloomsbury, 24–35.\",\n \"Ribeiro, B., 2022. “Aspirationalism in Pyrrho’s\\nProject of Living Suspensively”, Sképsis: Revista de\\nFilosofia, 24: 1–11.\",\n \"Stopper, M., 1983, “Schizzi Pirroniani”,\\nPhronesis, 28: 265–97.\",\n \"Svavarsson, S., 2002, “Pyrrho’s Dogmatic\\nNature”, Classical Quarterly, 52(1):\\n248–256.\",\n \"–––, 2004, “Pyrrho’s Undecidable\\nNature”, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 27:\\n249–295.\",\n \"–––, 2010, “Pyrrho and Early\\nPyrrhonism”, in R. Bett (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to\\nAncient Scepticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,\\n36–57.\",\n \"von Fritz, K., 1963, “Pyrrhon”, in Paulys\\nRealencyclopädie der Classischen Altertumswissenschaft,\\nxxiv: 89–106.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../ethics-ancient/","text":"ethics: ancient"},{"href":"../sextus-empiricus/","text":"Sextus Empiricus"},{"href":"../skepticism-ancient/","text":"skepticism: ancient"},{"href":"../timon-phlius/","text":"Timon of Phlius"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../ethics-ancient/\",\n \"text\": \"ethics: ancient\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../sextus-empiricus/\",\n \"text\": \"Sextus Empiricus\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../skepticism-ancient/\",\n \"text\": \"skepticism: ancient\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../timon-phlius/\",\n \"text\": \"Timon of Phlius\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":59,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"anderson-john"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"John Anderson"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Mon Oct 22, 2012; substantive revision Mon Nov 8, 2021"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nJohn Anderson (1893–1962) was a Scottish philosopher who worked\nprimarily in Australia. In 1927 he was appointed to the Challis Chair\nof Philosophy at the University of Sydney and occupied this position\nuntil his retirement in 1958. In relative isolation he developed a\ndistinctive realist philosophy which was inspirational for generations\nof students at Sydney. While developing this position, he carried most\nof the teaching load in philosophy at the university, wrote the\narticles for which he is primarily known, and as contributor and\neditor kept the Australasian Journal of Psychology and\nPhilosophy going. Shortly after his arrival in Sydney he acted as\ntheoretical advisor to the Communist Party of Australia, but moved\naway from the party through the 1930s and finally adopted a strongly\nanti-communist stance. He remained active throughout his career,\nhowever, in a series of public controversies concerning censorship,\nuniversity reform, academic freedom and opposition to religious\ninstruction in education. Depending upon one’s perspective,\nthese activities diverted him from serious philosophical work or were\nthe natural expression of his philosophical outlook. On either view\nhis intellectual impact at Sydney was overwhelming. Philosophers such\nas David Malet Armstrong, John Passmore, John Leslie Mackie, Eugene\nKamenka, Jim Baker and David Stove all acknowledged Anderson’s\nformative influence. From his early teaching at Edinburgh, Anderson\ninfluenced the social and political thought of Rush Rhees, and so also\nindirectly that of Alasdair Macintyre who came to recognise and value\ncommon themes in his own sociological and historical view of ethics.\nOutside the academy, Anderson’s criticisms of conventional\nmorality and his account of positive ethical goods promoting a stance\nof commitment, endeavour, risk and critical opposition to merely\ncustomary expectations was a powerful tonic for a small but\ninfluential group of anti-careerist intellectuals, lawyers,\njournalists and artists collectively known as the “Sydney\nPush”. "],"string":"[\n \"\\nJohn Anderson (1893–1962) was a Scottish philosopher who worked\\nprimarily in Australia. In 1927 he was appointed to the Challis Chair\\nof Philosophy at the University of Sydney and occupied this position\\nuntil his retirement in 1958. In relative isolation he developed a\\ndistinctive realist philosophy which was inspirational for generations\\nof students at Sydney. While developing this position, he carried most\\nof the teaching load in philosophy at the university, wrote the\\narticles for which he is primarily known, and as contributor and\\neditor kept the Australasian Journal of Psychology and\\nPhilosophy going. Shortly after his arrival in Sydney he acted as\\ntheoretical advisor to the Communist Party of Australia, but moved\\naway from the party through the 1930s and finally adopted a strongly\\nanti-communist stance. He remained active throughout his career,\\nhowever, in a series of public controversies concerning censorship,\\nuniversity reform, academic freedom and opposition to religious\\ninstruction in education. Depending upon one’s perspective,\\nthese activities diverted him from serious philosophical work or were\\nthe natural expression of his philosophical outlook. On either view\\nhis intellectual impact at Sydney was overwhelming. Philosophers such\\nas David Malet Armstrong, John Passmore, John Leslie Mackie, Eugene\\nKamenka, Jim Baker and David Stove all acknowledged Anderson’s\\nformative influence. From his early teaching at Edinburgh, Anderson\\ninfluenced the social and political thought of Rush Rhees, and so also\\nindirectly that of Alasdair Macintyre who came to recognise and value\\ncommon themes in his own sociological and historical view of ethics.\\nOutside the academy, Anderson’s criticisms of conventional\\nmorality and his account of positive ethical goods promoting a stance\\nof commitment, endeavour, risk and critical opposition to merely\\ncustomary expectations was a powerful tonic for a small but\\ninfluential group of anti-careerist intellectuals, lawyers,\\njournalists and artists collectively known as the “Sydney\\nPush”. \"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Life and Work","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. Outline of Anderson’s Philosophy","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"3. Difficulties in Understanding Anderson’s Work","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"4. A Systematic Realism","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"5. Specific Fields","sub_toc":["5.1 Logic","5.2 Metaphysics","5.3 Epistemology","5.4 Ethics","5.5 Social and Political Thought","5.6 Education"]},{"content_title":"6. Influence Beyond the University","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"7. Conclusion","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Life and Work\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Outline of Anderson’s Philosophy\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Difficulties in Understanding Anderson’s Work\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. A Systematic Realism\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Specific Fields\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"5.1 Logic\",\n \"5.2 Metaphysics\",\n \"5.3 Epistemology\",\n \"5.4 Ethics\",\n \"5.5 Social and Political Thought\",\n \"5.6 Education\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. Influence Beyond the University\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"7. Conclusion\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\nJohn Anderson was born in 1893 in the weaving and coal-mining village\nof Stonehouse, Lanarkshire (about 20km from Glasgow). His father was\nschoolmaster in the village and politically active in the Independent\nLabour Party. In 1911 Anderson began his university studies at the\nUniversity of Glasgow, enrolling in two successive honours degrees:\nmathematics/natural philosophy (including laboratory training) and\nlogic/moral philosophy (including political economy). His\nundergraduate studies extended throughout the years of the World War,\nculminating in 1917 with his Masters thesis on the philosophy of\nWilliam James. Declared medically unfit for service, his experience of\nthe war was dominated by the Red Clydeside industrial and rental\ndisputes, characterised by workers’ resistance to state and\nindustry attempts to re-organise work practices and personnel in the\ninterests of a supposed common national interest. The disputes\nultimately led to state suppression at the conclusion of the war when\nBritish troops and artillery were deployed to Glasgow.","\nAnderson’s philosophical direction was powerfully influenced by\nthe Australian-born philosopher, Samuel Alexander, who delivered the\nGifford Lectures at Glasgow in 1918. In the previous year Anderson had\nbeen awarded for an essay supporting Henry Jones’ practical\nidealist view of the state as a moral agent. Following\nAlexander’s lectures (later published as Space, Time and\nDeity) Anderson accepted the case for the complete rejection of\nthis form of idealism in favour of a new and systematic realist\nprogramme.","\nIn 1919 Anderson married fellow philosophy student Jenny Baillie, was\nappointed assistant lecturer at University College of South Wales\n(where he also provided Workers’ Education Classes) and was\nsubsequently appointed assistant lecturer in logic at the University\nof Glasgow. In 1920 he was appointed lecturer at the University of\nEdinburgh and so became the main exponent of realism in Norman Kemp\nSmith’s Department of Logic and Metaphysics. In the same year,\nhis brother William accepted the Chair of Mental and Moral Philosophy\nat Auckland University College, New Zealand.","\nBy 1926 Anderson had become dispirited by the rejection for\npublication of a textbook on logic that he had been working on since\n1922. He had also become politically isolated in the department\nbecause of his support for the General Strike in Britain. Such factors\nmay have moved him to accept the Challis Chair of Philosophy at the\nUniversity of Sydney, although as with his brother, the movement of\nScottish philosophers to Commonwealth universities was not unusual. In\n1927 he moved with Jennie and their young son Alexander\n(“Sandy”) to Sydney.","\nAnderson’s first serious professional engagement was in a\ncritical discussion of F. C. S. Schiller’s logic,\n“Propositions and Judgments” and “The Truth of\nPropositions” (1926). The first outlines of a distinctive\nrealist position were made in “Empiricism” and “The\nKnower and the Known” (1927). After his arrival at Sydney,\nAnderson was intent upon developing this position and was dismissive\nof the fragmentary nature of most international philosophy in the wake\nof the “linguistic turn”. The important philosophical work\nin Anderson’s view was to establish and preserve a school of\nrealist philosophy as the repository of a tradition of critical\ninquiry that would remain alert to the dangers of corrupting external\nforces and expectations. ","\nShortly after his arrival at Sydney, Anderson became a\n“theoretical advisor” to the Australian Communist Party\nand so began a long history of antagonising conservative political and\ncultural representatives in the city. He was repeatedly accused of\ndisloyalty and communist sympathies by returned servicemen\norganisations, the churches and the conservative political parties.\nThe University Senate ultimately debated censure although a motion to\ndeclare him unfit to occupy the Chair of Philosophy was defeated. ","\nIn 1930 James Joyce’s Ulysses was banned in Australia\nand the Freethought Society was formed with Anderson as President.\nAnderson’s political influence at Sydney primarily took the form\nof a libertarian pluralism, particularly concerned with issues of\nstate and religious censorship and interference in education. By the\n1940s and 1950s his political position was strongly anti-communist.\nYet he remained unpopular with conservative politicians and clerics\nand was criticised for “corrupting the city’s youth”\nas late as 1961.","\nIn 1935 Anderson became the editor of The Australasian Journal of\nPsychology and Philosophy. He had previously contributed\nsignificantly to the journal with his articles “Determinism and\nEthics” (1928), “The Non-Existence of\nConsciousness”, “‘Universals’ and\nOccurrences” (1929), “The Place of Hegel in the History of\nPhilosophy”, “Utilitarianism” (1932), “Realism\nand Some of its Critics” (1933), and “Mind as\nFeeling” (1934). He retained editorial responsibility for the\njournal until 1947 when it passed to John Passmore with the new name\nThe Australasian Journal of Philosophy.","\nIn 1958 Anderson retired and in 1962 died at his home in\nSydney’s northern suburbs. The Challis Chair of Philosophy was\noccupied for the next 30 years by Anderson’s students, J. L.\nMackie (1959–1963) and D. M. Armstrong (1964–1991). Both\nphilosophers were critical of Anderson’s philosophy and were\nmore engaged with contemporary philosophical debates, but both also\nacknowledged Anderson’s formative influence on their work.","\nIn 1972 members of the Department of Philosophy at the University of\nSydney were caught in a bitter dispute concerning subject matter,\neducational practices and the nature of philosophical study itself,\nand by the start of 1974 the department had split into two separate\nunits. D. M. Armstrong led the minority Department of Traditional and\nModern Philosophy away from what he perceived to be the politically\nradical but philosophically barren Department of General Philosophy.\nPolitical disruptions throughout the academic world in the early 1970s\nwere not uncommon, but the particular intransigence and secessionist\ntendencies which characterised both sides of the conflict at Sydney\nmay well have been at least in part a legacy of Anderson’s\nteaching and practice. The department eventually reunited some thirty\nyears later."],"section_title":"1. Life and Work","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nThe emphasis of Anderson’s realism is upon\nindependence, directed particularly at the notion of\nconstitutive relations (which he takes to be the central error of\nidealism), but also employed in qualifying reductivist and\ninstrumentalist forms of scientific explanation. His position is that\nalthough whatever exists has relations and is conditioned, it is\nnonetheless a specific existing thing with qualities of its own. It is\nthe aim of critical inquiry in any given field to identify relevant\nqualities and characteristics and to state the issue in the form of\nobjective and communicable truth. Whatever our interests draw our\nattention to, the truth of the matter is independent of our\nconsideration. Whatever innovative and imaginative uses we make of\nparticular things, those uses are available to us because of existing\nproperties in the things themselves. For Anderson, two aspects of\nphilosophical speculation have been linked throughout the history of\nthe subject, and his own thought can be considered as a single system\nwith these complementary aspects: the logical and the ethical.","\nFirst, there is a single way of being, that of ordinary things\nbehaving in ordinary ways in space and time. All theories of higher\nand lower realities can only be stated in terms of the common reality\nwe all know and share. Anderson applied this thesis across the board:\nthere are not different kinds or degrees of truth, only\nsomething’s being the case or not; universals and values do not\nexist above the world of space and time in a transcendent sphere of\noperation; powers are not entities distinct from the processes they\nexplain; the mental realm cannot be conceived as operating in a sphere\nseparate from or other than space and time. There is no absolute or\nlogical distinction between universals and particulars –\nuniversals exist within the ordinary world, but never apart from the\nparticulars they describe; that is, there is no ontological level\nabove or below that of the state of affairs or the fact of a\npredicated subject. As the study of the formal features of facts,\nlogic provides an account of what is objectively real: logic entails a\ngeneral ontology.","\nSecond, Anderson emphasised both the objective and subjective\ndifficulties inherent in the endeavour to see things as they are, and\nthe necessary discipline acquired in ongoing traditions of critical\ninquiry. Confronting the reality of our existence entails recognising\nand not turning away from the ubiquity of conflict, tension and strife\nin all spheres. For Anderson ethical goods exist in the world in such\nactivities as intellectual inquiry, artistic production and scientific\ninvestigation. Ethical investigation is primarily concerned with\nidentifying those human activities which are driven by internal\nstandards of correctness and value and not by concern for external\nrewards or utilities. But these activities exist perilously in a world\nseriously inclined towards stasis and corruption. There is an almost\ntheological depth to Anderson’s pessimism in this regard. ","\nAnderson’s views in normative philosophy are outlined in\nwritings in ethical inquiry, narrowly construed, aesthetics, political\nthought and educational philosophy. Ethics is the study of\nthe real qualities of human activities, not of what is right or\nobligatory, these latter questions being relegated to the study of\ncustomary norms and expectations arising from particular practices and\nways of life. Similarly, aesthetics is the study of the\nqualities of beautiful things, and is neither a study of feelings,\nexpressions or judgments, nor a source of directives for artists. A\nwork of art succeeds to the extent that it objectively portrays its\ntheme, accounts for what is the case (for example, anger\nconsidered as the “theme” of The Iliad). Literary\ncriticism consists in assessing whether the artist has succeeded,\nobjectively, in capturing or portraying the chosen theme. In his\nsocial and political thought, Anderson holds that society is\na complex of competing and cooperating movements neither united by\ninclusive social purpose, nor reducible to its individual members.","\nUnderlying both logical and ethical aspects of Anderson’s\nthought is the identification of systematic confusions and errors in\nphilosophical thought. One persistent confusion is the\nmisidentification of relations as qualities. Most commonly, being in\nsome relation is thought to constitute the “nature” of\nsome special status entity. But whereas a term together with a quality\nis a complete unit just as it stands, a term and a relation is simply\nincomplete without a second term. Anderson applied this thesis widely:\nthere are no such things whose nature it is to be known or perceived\n(“ideas”); there is no such thing whose nature it is to\nknow (“consciousness”); there are no such things whose\nnature it is to be pursued or whose nature it is to direct action\n(“values” conceived as standing over and above the goods\nand values of this life). Relations are often more evident to us than\nthe underlying qualities of the things related and so relational\nexplanations suggest themselves to us quite naturally. On the other\nhand, significant intellectual effort is required in any given field\nto understand the illusory nature of such explanations and the manner\nin which they obstruct the identification and assertion of real\nissues.","\nAccording to Anderson, one central confusion infecting modern\nphilosophy since Descartes has been its obsession with epistemological\nquestions, the attempt to provide unshakeable foundations for our\nknowledge of the external world. There is no gap between mind and\nworld that needs to be bridged because mentality belongs to the\nspatio-temporal world along with everything else. This is not to say\nthat misunderstanding is impossible, just that understanding is\npossible. It is possible to know various conditions and characters of\nthings in the first place only because things have these\ncharacters independently of our inquiries. And since as knowers we\noccupy the single world of space and time we come under the same\nconditions and so come into relations with those things that we are\ninvestigating. All knowledge depends upon empirical investigation and\nso is fallible: it is not built upon any more immediate or reliable\nentities such as sense data or self-evident ideas. Epistemological and\nontological bedrock is the complex situation of being there and\nso, a particular’s being of a certain kind. Knowing minds\nare themselves complex spatio-temporal things, societies of emotions\nand feelings without a unifying consciousness to which these might\nbelong nor some ultimate self which could conceivably take a stand\nsomehow outside and beyond the world of space and time. Modern\nphilosophy’s epistemological obsession can be regarded as an\nillogical attempt to look behind the proposition, to gain a sideways\nview of how our propositions hook up to the real world."],"section_title":"2. Outline of Anderson’s Philosophy","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nGilbert Ryle listed Anderson among the “seniors” who had\npreceded his own generation: philosophers such as Russell, Moore,\nWittgenstein, Bradley, Stout, McTaggart, Alexander, Laird, and Kemp\nSmith. For Ryle, Anderson’s generation represented “the\nold gang”, many the products of “those dominating Scots\nteachers” who had established philosophy as an academic\ndiscipline in English-speaking universities around the world. Anderson\nwas an exact contemporary of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, yet only\nseven years older than Ryle himself. But Ryle seems to have a point in\nsuggesting a generational gap that separated him from that earlier\ngeneration’s “pieties, lores, sagacities, equipments\n– yes, and fetishes too” (Ryle 1976: 383). Ryle was\ndescribing the generation of philosophers who were adult prior to or\nduring the Great War. He only became acquainted with Anderson in the\n1950s and was struck by the manner in which Anderson had continued a\nform of philosophy into modern times that had given way elsewhere to\nphilosophies more concerned with linguistic usage. Despite this\nrecognition of interpretive challenges, for many of Anderson’s\nfollowers Ryle at that time radically misunderstood Anderson’s\nwork (Ryle 1950), reading it from the perspective of the\n“linguistic turn”.","\nFor current readers there are indeed several obstacles to approaching\nAnderson’s work. His published works, primarily articles for the\nAustralasian Journal of Philosophy and Psychology and in\nlocal journals and newspapers, are difficult without the context of\nAnderson’s broader teaching. They are generally regarded as\nsubsidiary to the lectures and syllabus of an Andersonian\napprenticeship. It seems that they were written for the benefit of the\nstudents who already had the value of his personal contact. Without\nthis contact, we must rely on the publication of several series of\nlecture notes from Anderson’s papers by Sydney University Press\n(see Bibliography). Anderson’s isolation from his intellectual\npeers and his seeming reluctance to engage in international debate\nalso deprives contemporary students of the opportunity to locate his\nwork within more familiar territory.","\nOne point of access to Anderson’s work for contemporary\nstudents, of course, lies in the work of his students such as D. M.\nArmstrong, John Passmore, and J. L. Mackie. But there is a danger even\nhere that their specialisations may distort our view of\nAnderson’s work as a whole. Anderson, as Passmore noted, was a\ngeneralist (Passmore, Introduction to Anderson’s posthumous\nwork, Studies in Empirical Philosophy, hereafter\nEMP). Unlike the next generation, he expected all\nspheres of philosophical inquiry to open up to his investigation and\nhis philosophy extended to all spheres: logic, metaphysics, ethics,\npolitical thought, aesthetics, education.","\nAnderson describes his position variously as empiricist, realist,\nnaturalist, physicalist, positivist and pluralist, conceiving each of\nthese as different aspects of the one truly empirical philosophy. But\nhis use of these terms is problematic for the uninitiated.\nAnderson’s empiricism has no time for representational\nviews of truth, nor for the traditional empiricist entities of sense\ndata or ideas. Empiricism for Anderson is an ontological doctrine\nasserting a single way of being to which we as investigators belong.\nWhile undoubtedly committed to empirical investigation and the\nfallible nature of all propositional claims, Anderson’s\nempiricism is only secondarily an epistemological viewpoint relating\nto how we come to know things within this spatio-temporal world.\nAnderson’s realism rejects the traditional\nrealist-nominalist options concerning the existence of universals.\nUniversals are brought down to (spatio-temporal) earth, but there are\nno such things as pure universals nor pure particulars outside their\nroles within complex states of affairs. Mentality is a\nproduct of physico-chemical processes in the brain but this does not\npreclude our inquiry into the nature of mind as a field of conflicted\ntendencies, feelings and emotions. Whatever the special sciences tell\nus about their particular subject matters, philosophy retains its\nauthority in questions of logic, that is to say, concerning the\nconditions of possibility of discourse. Indeed, modern science is\nbadly infected by instrumentalist and technological views of its\ninvestigations and needs to become more truly philosophical and\ncritical, more concerned with establishing what is the case within\nspecific fields, and less with being practical and useful in relation\nto perceived societal needs (EMP, 290).\nPositivism then is for Anderson a commitment to what is\nobjectively and positively the case, and not a program of instrumental\nor operational truth, nor a means of distinguishing meaningful from\nmeaningless utterances. Anderson’s call for a “science of\nethics” is not an assimilation of ethical inquiry to the\nstandards of the special sciences. It is a plea for an objective\ninvestigation of the ethical, focussed on the existing ethical\nqualities of human activities, rather than on the pieties of\ntraditional moral philosophy: the questions of right, obligation, duty\nand so forth. ","\nRyle was only the first of many to be accused of misreading Anderson.\nCriticisms of Anderson’s position from within mainstream\nEnglish-language philosophy have always seemed to his followers to\nmiss their mark. They have generally failed to recognise the\nontological, non-representational, non-semantic basis for his\nempiricism. Robert Brandom’s recent criticism and rejection of\nthe “theoretical, explanatory and strategic commitments”\nmotivating Anglo-American philosophy in the 20th century lists these\nas: empiricism, naturalism, representationalism, semantic atomism,\nformalism about logic, instrumentalism about practical norms (Brandom\n2000). Anderson would reject all of these criticisms of his own work\nas they stand. Brandom regards the notion of “facts” and\n“states of affairs” as emblematic of atomistic,\nrepresentationalist thought. Anderson would have replied imperiously\nas he did to Gilbert Ryle’s “representationist”\ncriticisms: “That is nothing to me”. ","\nMany of the problems contemporary readers encounter in\nAnderson’s work result from his relative international\nisolation. But for many of his students it was precisely\nAnderson’s secessionist traditional stance that was the key to\nthe great value of an Andersonian education. He may have failed in his\nproject, but he kept alive at Sydney enduring values of traditional\nphilosophical inquiry at a time when mainstream philosophy was either\nobsessed with linguistic usage on the one hand or in deference to the\nnatural sciences on the other. Many of Anderson’s students\nexpected his philosophy to re-emerge stronger following the inevitable\ndecline of linguistic philosophy and the renewed interest in\nmetaphysical questions which followed this decline. But if his work\nplayed any role in this renewal it was only indirectly through the\nwork of his student D. M. Armstrong. Contemporary philosophers\ninterested in metaphysical questions do not refer to Anderson’s\nwork and are frankly baffled by Armstrong’s enthusiasm for his\nteacher’s work. Anderson exists today almost exclusively in the\nfootnotes of his more engaged and accomplished students."],"section_title":"3. Difficulties in Understanding Anderson’s Work","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nIn Anderson’s view the realist movement initiated by Russell and\nMoore had ended in failure because it had attempted to overcome\nHegelian philosophy by a return to pre-idealist certainties\n(EMP, 89). As a result, realism had been left without\na school from which to challenge the newly emerging schools of\nidealism and pragmatism (STP, 161). Hegel’s\nall-encompassing system of thought was an example for a new and\nsystematic realism to emulate.","\nIn brief, Hegel’s attempt to formulate his sequence of outlooks\nrelies upon a realist view of the proposition which is incompatible\nwith his whole theory of outlooks or categories and their varying\nadequacy to reality as a whole. Hegel “unwittingly is proceeding\nin terms of the proposition” but is caught up with the illusory\nattempt to establish an overarching truth (“that whereby a true\nproposition can be true”), instead of the task of establishing\ntrue propositions (JAA, Lectures on William\nJames, 1935). The same criticism of Hegel seems to be made by Brandom\nin the service of his very different expressionist project (Brandom\n2000). But for Anderson, Hegel’s doctrine of outlooks\n“rests on an inability to grasp the independence of\ntruths” (EMP, 81). On the other hand, we need\nonly reject Hegel’s doctrine of expressions to find that we are\nleft with actual states of affairs rather than abstract\nbeing.","\nNeither Cartesian rationalism nor English empiricism could replace\nHegel’s philosophy with any philosophical position of comparable\nrange. Hegel was right to emphasise system, but not as totality (a\npretended solution to real problems), but in the form of a single\nlogic. He was also right to see this logic as historical, but wrong to\nattempt to replace a “logic of things developing” with the\nnotion of a “developing logic” (EMP, 80).\nAnderson summarises the position as follows. The only way to answer\nHegel would be to drop the modern fixation with epistemological\nquestions altogether and return to a Greek consideration of things. In\naddition to Greek directness, a true replacement for Hegelian idealism\nwould incorporate three major components: a positive theory of the\nmind as feeling and as non-unitary, as much a part of spatial and\ntemporal reality as any non-mental things and events; a true\nempiricism which recognised relations and generals as being as real\n(and as knowable) as the particulars related; and a conception of\nspace and time as conditions of existence rather than of human\nknowledge as in Kant’s transcendental idealism. Anderson\nproposed to replace Hegel’s totality by developing a systematic\nrealism which would incorporate the work of John Burnet on Greek\nphilosophy, of Sigmund Freud on mind, of William James’ radical\nempiricism and of Samuel Alexander’s reworking of Kant’s\ntranscendental aesthetic (EMP, 80). Anderson does not\nmention here another possible source for his direct realism, namely,\nScottish common sense philosophy, but he does consider this in his\nLectures on Thomas Reid of 1935 (LMP).","\nRichard Rorty has suggested that English language philosophy in the\nearly 20th century emerged from the dominance of Hegelian idealism by\ndeferring to the natural sciences, partly because the alternative\nassociation with modernist literature seemed to threaten “a kind\nof privatised aestheticism which contained disturbing strains of\nirrationalism” (Rorty 1985, p. 748). Superficially,\nAnderson’s work suggests an attempt of some kind to assimilate\nphilosophy to the sciences. But he was a true modernist in relation to\nliterary culture: his articles and addresses include critical works on\nsuch figures as, in particular, James Joyce, but also Lawrence, Shaw,\nWells, Grahame, Belloc, Wilde, Hardy, Ibsen, Meredith, Dostoevsky and\nMelville, as well as on the genre of detective fiction. Literature for\nAnderson had a special character as the embodiment or repository of\nculture (JAA, Lectures on the Educational Theories of\nSpencer and Dewey, 1949). At Sydney in the 1930s he championed both\nthe works of James Joyce (recently banned) and the importance of\nFreudian psychoanalysis to our understanding of mentality as\nconflicted and passionate, and to cultural inquiry more generally\n(cf., Damousi 2005). He thought the pre-modernist “literary\nphilosophers” of romanticism and idealism had shown\n“greater tenacity” than those philosophers who professed\nscientific exactitude (EMP, 80). But they had also\ntended to promote forms of moralising and theologising which were\nopposed to precision and independence of thought and which were\n“detrimental to culture in general” (EMP,\n87). Anderson thought his interpretation of traditional Aristotelian\nlogic had an important role to play in the new world of literary\nculture as much as in the natural sciences.","\nOne major achievement of Hegel for Anderson was the encouragement he\ngave to the study of Greek philosophers. Anderson’s lectures\nexplored the historical background to his propositional view of\nreality in the issues raised by the pre-Socratics and later in\nPlato’s Dialogues. Like other modernist philosophers and\nnovelists (and Hegel himself), Anderson found in Heraclitus an\ninspirational alternative to what he came to regard as the sentimental\nand intellectually stifling idealism of his teachers.","\nThis world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or man has made;\nbut it was ever, is now, and ever shall be an ever-living Fire, with\nmeasures of it kindling and measures going out. (Heraclitus Fragment\n20. trans. John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy 4th Ed., 1930,\np.134.)\n","\nAnderson acknowledged that Heraclitus’ emphasis on the element\nFire might be read as a typically Ionian response to the question\n“what is the world made of”, but the more important theme\nis his treatment of fire purely as process, as transaction and\nexchange, as the paradigm element of strife and harmony. In embryo\nAnderson found in Heraclitus so many of his own principles: the close\nlink between logic and ethics (ethics as the field in which conflict\ncomes primarily to the fore); the single way of being, of “what\nis common” (the search for a general logic, a theory of the\ncommensurability of things in terms of a theory of process); the\nrecognition of complexity, conflict and strife underlying existing\nthings; the anti-sentimentality and pessimism which refuses to find\nsolace in unity; the hidden harmony of forces in balance preferable to\nthe open harmony of illusory unity; the unremitting attack on\nsubjectivist illusions of desiring or imagining things as we would\nlike them to be (unchanging and secure) rather than seeing them for\nwhat they are.","\nFor Anderson’s Heraclitus, “seeing things as they\nare” is seeing them as complex, active and changing; a\nperspective opposed to the optimistic, rationalist illusion of the\nsimple, fixed and static. It is to see things as moving, historical,\nin process, and yet as in balance. Heraclitean “strife” is\nharmony: the things of everyday experience are positive and concrete\nbecause they are contingent and historical. Anderson described this\n“fundamental strain” in all fields of inquiry as that\n“between objectivism and subjectivism”, between\n“critical thinking” recognising complexity and tension\neverywhere, and “rationalist illusion” seeking the fixed\nand simple (JAA, Lectures on Criticism 1955, number 11.).\nRationalism here shared with more primitive mythological thinking the\nquest for stability, security and moral uplift. Both have looked for\nsolutions at a higher level than the problems being addressed.","\nAnderson’s teaching and writings constantly refer to the history\nof philosophy, but Anderson was not a scholarly historian. He thought\nthat persistent philosophical issues and positions were evident\nthroughout history (eleaticism, for example, was a highly instructive\nand critical stage recurring throughout the history of the subject\n– for example in Green’s criticisms of Hume’s\nparticulars). The history of philosophy helped to emphasise the value\nof his own position. On the other hand, his lectures and writings are\nladen with references to philosophers, scientists, novelists,\npsychoanalysts and revolutionaries. Nothing seems alien to even the\nmost abstruse topic of discussion in his work. And his lectures were\n“great starters of hares” (Partridge’s reflections\non Anderson’s teaching, in EAI). John Passmore\nacknowledges the inspiration of Anderson’s lectures in his own\nworks on Hume, philosophical reasoning, Ralph Cudworth, perfectibility\nand his history of one hundred years of philosophy."],"section_title":"4. A Systematic Realism","subsections":[]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"5. Specific Fields","subsections":[{"content":["\nAnderson wrote a Textbook on Logic in the early 1920s\n(JAA, Textbook on Logic, released 2010) and its fate\ntells us much about his philosophical ambitions. According to his\nbiographer, Anderson submitted the manuscript not to narrowly academic\npublishers but to A. R. Orage, the editor of The New Age\n(Kennedy 1995 p. 64), described by the historian of Scottish\nphilosophy, George Davie, as serving a readership “of\nlibertarian and often leftist autodidacts” (Davie 1977 p. 57).\nUnder Orage the journal was nonetheless a highly influential avant\ngarde modernist vehicle for literary and political criticism. Anderson\nconceived his logic to have wider cultural aims than merely codifying\nforms of reasoning and when Orage rejected the work due to its\nsupposed eccentricity Anderson was deeply disappointed.","\nLogic for Anderson is concerned with statements, and not with\nquestions, commands, prescriptions, exhortations or other forms of\nexpression. Logic is concerned fundamentally with statements that\nraise an “objective issue” and these other forms of speech\ndo so only indirectly (JAA, Lectures on Scientific\nMethod, c.1950). Discourse implies a common logic of assertion,\nimplication and definition (EMP, 6). Apparent\ndifferences in logical form are due simply to different modes of\nexpression. Any statement, if it is saying anything at all, can be\nshown by transformation into logical form to be asserting some matter\nof fact: a description of a certain thing as being of a certain kind,\na claim that something is the case. Anderson’s students were set\na range of statements to be transformed into one of the four\nAristotelian propositional forms, traditionally designated as the A,\nE, I and O forms. In any field, until questions or issues are posed in\none of these four propositional forms they will inevitably be confused\nand potentially misleading bases for inquiry.","\nSo, from typical examination papers in Andersonian logic:","\nIn Anderson’s view of traditional logic, the universal\nproposition “All As are B” asserts the\nsimple fact that all As are B; a thing’s being of\na certain sort is the irreducible minimum of a fact or state of\naffairs; there is no assertion of some “general\nconnection” over and above that fact. Nor does the universal\nproposition assert that some class relation holds between A and\nB – the assertion of a class relation is just a way of\nsaying that certain propositions are true. Nor is it about some\ntotality A: it asserts simply of each and every A that\nit is B. And although it does not directly assert the existence\nof A, it certainly presupposes it. It is indeed the great\nvirtue for Anderson of his version of traditional logic that it fully\nbrings out the existential presuppositions of the proposition. In\naddition, Anderson thinks that what are often taken to be supreme\nlogical truths (for example, identity statements) are not truths at\nall, for they say nothing. There is no analytic truth: if a\nproposition says anything at all, it can be false. Anderson rejects\nthe view that mathematical truths are so only within a calculus, that\nis, derivable from a given set of chosen postulates.","\nAnderson rejects Mill’s view that universal statements are\ngeneralisations from experience. Universal propositions cannot be\nderived by generalisation from particular experiences, because there\nsimply are no such immediate experiences. Such truths are derived from\nother universal propositions and tested in experience. In discussing\nthe functions of subjects, predicates and the copula in propositions\nand the logical relations between propositions, logic is already\ndiscussing universals, individuals, identity, space-time and\ncausality. And, contra Mill’s inductivism, because we have\ndirect experience of generality and of relations, a single instance is\nsufficient to establish the universal proposition (say, that all glass\nis brittle). Further investigation may challenge such assertions since\nall our beliefs are fallible but wholesale doubt is simply not an\noption. The logical gap between particulars and universals that\ninductive reasoning proposes is a gap that no amount of human\nreasoning could hope to span. Hume was right in this, but instead of\nembracing skepticism he should have concluded as did William James\nthat generality and relations are as much a part of our experience as\nare particulars.","\nThe validity of the syllogism is fundamental and Anderson rejects the\nabsolute independence from syllogistic reasoning of other forms of\nreasoning such as the relational, hypothetical and disjunctive. The\nsyllogism demonstrates clearly that the subject in one proposition can\nfunction as the predicate in another. The difference between subject\nand predicate is purely one of function: the function of the subject\nterm is to locate, that of the predicate to describe. There are not\ntwo classes of entities involved here; that is, there are no pure\nlocations/particulars/substances, just as there are no pure\ndescriptions/universals. There is no logical gap that needs to be\nspanned between subject and predicate terms: any term can play the\nrole of particular or general, subject or predicate. ","\nFor Anderson logic is the science of the most general features of\nreality. Logic is not simply a useful calculus following on from an\ninitial choice of primitives, and Anderson’s logic is not simply\none version of predicate calculus among others. His view is that logic\ndescribes the general structure of facts and the relations between\nthem. It provides the conditions of possibility for all discourse, but\nit is not about forms of language nor about special status entities\nsuch as universals. It is about the most general features of facts.\nUnderlying this propositional view of reality is the thesis that\nthings within space and time are irreducibly complex. Every situation\nhas both particular and general aspects represented by the subject and\npredicate functions within the proposition. Every predicate can be the\nsubject of a further proposition. The simplest unit is a being there\nand so, a state of affairs in which a particular is characterised in\nsome specific way, but neither the particular nor the universal could\nexist independently. We never arrive at absolutely simple elements in\nany field. The quest for such simples urged by Russell, Moore and the\nearly Wittgenstein indicated a residual rationalist element in their\nthinking. On the other hand, against the idealist opponents of these\nearly realists, Anderson of course insisted that no entities could be\nconstituted, wholly or in part, by their relations\n(EMP, 43). ","\nMackie described Anderson as the last of the Aristotelian logicians\nand observed some awkward consequences for his conception of logic:\nthe problem of false propositions; the absence of a way of\ndealing with singular propositions; an inability to deal with multiple\nquantification; the difficulty in expressing relational propositions\nin subject-predicate and syllogistic form. For Mackie, any logic\ndealing with false propositions, relations of contradiction and\ncontrariety, entertained arguments, falsifications and reductions\nad absurdum must be something more than an account of\npropositions as what is there (Mackie 1985).","\nAnderson distinguished idealism’s substance-attribute logic that\nhad been condemned by Russell from his own subject-predicate logic.\nNonetheless, his Aristotelian logic of everyday experience did seem to\nsit uneasily with the broader search for logics that could more\nadequately capture forms of reasoning across a wide variety of\ndomains. Ontological logics like Anderson’s came to seem\n“naively realistic and Aristotelian”, and “hard to\nhang on to” in the history of twentieth century philosophy\n(Rorty 1986). It is not just that 20th century philosophy’s\n“counter-intuitive redescription and relativisation to choice of\nprimitives” (Rorty 1986) ignored Anderson’s insistence\nthat logic is not a calculus. Technical developments in the logic of\nmodal, tense and relational terms proceeded without reference to\nAnderson’s form of onto-logic."],"subsection_title":"5.1 Logic"},{"content":["\nNonetheless, a traditional form of metaphysics did make a resurgence\nin the last quarter of the century in the work of Anderson’s\nstudent, D. M. Armstrong. Armstrong accepts against Anderson that the\nnature of space and time is a matter for scientific investigation, as\nis the identification of real properties – Anderson’s view\nof three-dimensional space and one-dimensional time as\n“ontological bed-rock”, for example, simply cannot be\nsustained (Armstrong, introduction to STC). But he\nfinds real interest in Anderson’s conception of the categories,\nas elaborated in the lectures on Samuel Alexander, recently published\nas Space, Time and the Categories: Lectures on Metaphysics\n(STC – published from typescript lectures in\nArmstrong’s possession and originally presented in\n1949–50). In his introduction to these lectures, Armstrong\nwrites:","\nThe categories of being dive so deep that though quantum physics and\nother physics may have interesting things to say to philosophy –\nin particular whether causation is in fact deterministic – the\nissues are not susceptible of being resolved at the level of\nexperimental science, yet seem to be real issues. Science may be able\nto cast light on whether causation is irreducibly statistical or not,\nbut how can it decide what causation is in itself? Is it just a\nuniversal or statistical regularity? Or is it something deeper in the\nnature of things? What of the properties and quantities in which\nscience inevitably traffics? Are they just concepts in our minds, or\nsomethings in the objects that our concepts merely reflect?\n(STC, x)\n","\nIn these lectures Anderson systematically derived the number of\ncategories and their ordering from the nature of the proposition and\nits subject-predicate structure. The result was a scheme of 13\ncategories, laid out in Hegel-like “succession” organized\nin three groups with the categories of Universality and Quantity\nacting as “link categories” in the two transitions between\nthe groups.","\nArmstrong concludes:","\n[W]ith this scheme, John Anderson joins a very distinguished line of\nphilosophers who have presented us with a set of categories. We have\nfirst Plato (the doctrine of Highest Kinds in his dialogue The\nSophist), then Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Samuel Alexander.\n(STC, xiii)\n","\nDespite his appreciation of Hegel, Anderson thought that Kant had laid\n“the foundations for a logic of things as historical” and\nhere “Hegel can be regarded only as reactionary”\n(EMP, 83). Kant had shown that the objects of science\nare just the objects of observation, that “matter” is\nsomething we perceive and not something lying behind our perceptions.\nKant’s answer to Hume was that things perceived are connected\nwith one another; they pass through and affect one another in various\nways because they are related in space and time. We are aware of such\nrelations in being aware of anything at all. But Anderson insists\nagainst Kant that relations are known on the same level as the\nrelated. Kant was still subject to the assumptions of\nrepresentationalism, and thought of the objects of science as mere\nphenomena. Kant viewed space and time as forms of intuition under\nwhich we must experience the world. He viewed the categories such as\ncausality and substance as forms of understanding under which we must\nunderstand the world. Things-in-themselves are not given to us in\nexperience, and so remain beyond our cognitive grasp. In this way Kant\nset up an untenable division in reality between phenomena and\nthings-in-themselves, and along with this division the idea that our\nthoughts, practices and forms of inquiry in some way create or\nconstitute the reality we inhabit, act upon and investigate. Anderson,\nfollowing Samuel Alexander, proposed a realist alternative such that\nspace and time would be considered not as forms of intuition, but as\nforms of being, the categories not as forms of understanding but as\ncategories of being, categories under which all being must fall. On\nsuch a proposal we can recognise the objects of science as\nthings-in-themselves.","\nAnderson claimed to have avoided the pitfalls of traditional\nmetaphysical questions concerning the reality of universals through\nhis account of the proposition (cf., “‘Universals’\nand Occurrences”, EMP). H. O. Mounce has\nsuggested that Anderson’s realism may not be able to avoid the\nissue. In particular, his account of universals is in danger of\ncollapsing into nominalism on the question of whether the directly\nperceived relation (say, of causality) is on separate occasions\none and the same (for Mounce, anything less than complete\nidentity would be a retreat to nominalism – Mounce 1989). Mounce\nsuggests that Anderson may not be able to hold off a Humean challenge\nhere. He would be drawn back to a familiar realist-nominalist debate\non the nature of universals, which may explain why Armstrong’s\nphilosophy takes seriously Plato’s question of the one and the\nmany as the starting point for metaphysical reflection (Armstrong\n1997). From a Quinean perspective, however, Armstrong’s\nmetaphysics, despite its improved scientific credentials, remains\nattentive to old school pseudo-questions (Quine 1953). (Michael Devitt\nexplicitly associates Armstrong with Quine’s parody of the\ntraditional Scottish metaphysician “McX” in Devitt\n2010.)","\nFor his more empirically-minded students, Anderson’s logic\nseemed to rely upon an unwelcome element of a priorism. Any\nweakening of our confidence in Anderson’s identification of\nlogic and ontology, for example, would critically undermine\nsignificant components of the position. First, it would no longer be\nclear that things spoken of together must exist in the same way\n– the notion of a single level of being would become a matter\nfor investigation (what kinds of differences exist) rather than\ndetermined by general principle (Mackie 1985). Regarding his social\nthought, the importance of individuals’ behaviour in explaining\nthe nature and operation of social movements and institutions would\nrequire investigation, rather than a pronouncement based purely on\ngeneral grounds. Again, Anderson’s rejection of the rationalist\nview that there must be simple or ultimate units upon which\ncomplex things can be built would not lead without further argument to\nthe view that there cannot be such simple parts or totalities\n(Mackie 1985).","\nAccording to Anderson, David Hume’s skepticism was a direct\nresult of his inability to work out a logic, to create a coherent\naccount of existence. But his mentor at Edinburgh, Norman Kemp Smith,\nhad long argued that Hume’s importance was in demonstrating the\nfactual limits of all logic. If Hume had failed to work out a logic to\nAnderson’s satisfaction this was because in his view\nphilosophers should resist the temptation of this kind of\n“systematic working out” altogether (Davie 1977).\nHume’s reservations about a “systematic working out”\nhave emerged in another form with the “linguistic\nreturn” proposed by Huw Price, who became the first\nappointment to the Challis Chair of Philosophy within a united\ndepartment at Sydney since the split of 1974. Price describes the\nproject as a “linguistic retooling of metaphysics” (Price\n2011, p. 18) and the attempt specifically to avoid Mackie’s\n“placement” issue which arises from an obsession with the\nrepresentational aspect of language (although Mackie himself regarded\nthis with Anderson as an ontological issue – see section 5.4\nbelow). On Price’s view plurality exists in the world of an\nentirely familiar kind: a plurality of ways of talking and ways of\nbehaviour which don’t need to be mirrored in an ontology of any\nkind.","\nIt has been observed that Anderson’s most prominent students\naccepted in fact very little of his system. It is still the case that\ntheir most fundamental philosophical commitments can be traced to the\nboldness of Anderson’s position. And Armstrong suggests that the\nphilosopher at some point can only outline his or her most basic\ncommitments. Stephen Mumford summarises Armstrong’s own position as\nfollows: no God, no non-spatial minds, no abstract\nentities beyond space-time, no Platonic forms or realm of universals;\nan austere ontology without transcendent universals, realm of numbers,\ntranscendent standards of value, timeless propositions, non-existent\nobjects, possibilia, possible worlds, abstract classes (Mumford 2007\np. 5). Armstrong diverges from Anderson in his emphasis upon\nscientific naturalism, in the position that the world is to be\ncompletely described in terms of a completed physics. What properties\nexist will ultimately be determined solely by science, and the results\nwill inevitably seem counter-intuitive within the perspective of\nAristotelian common sense. But for Armstrong this scientific view can\nbe reconciled with a form of metaphysical realism derived from\nAnderson’s teaching which takes universals to exist immanently\nrather than in a transcendent realm; which takes the world to contain\nnothing but particulars having properties and being related to each\nother; which takes the world to be nothing but a single\nspatio-temporal system; which regards reality as a world of states of\naffairs conceived as particulars bearing properties; which insists\nthat states of affairs are the smallest units of existence since\nneither particulars nor universals are capable of independent\nexistence. "],"subsection_title":"5.2 Metaphysics"},{"content":["\nThe Greeks, according to Anderson,","\nare far clearer on many questions than modern philosophers …\nthey avoid many modern errors, and especially … they are not,\nlike the moderns, obsessed with ‘the problem of knowledge’\n– they do not set out to discover (i.e., to know!) how, or how\nmuch, we can know, before they are prepared to know anything. This\n‘criticism of the instrument’ amounts to scientific\ndefeatism, and the instrumental view of mind has both prevented a\nknowledge of minds themselves, and hampered the direct inquiry into\nlogical and other scientific problems. (EMP, 82)\n","\nAnderson’s Hegelian diagnoses of the obsessions of modern\nphilosophy and Cartesianism with epistemology are likely to elicit\nrecognition and appreciation from many contemporary readers.\nCartesianism in modern philosophy represented for Anderson an\nanti-classicist movement: an antipathy towards history and tradition.\nModern philosophy searched within abstract rationality as the ground\nof human knowledge, rather than in concrete and many-sided culture.\nThe whole modern era was characterised by this lack of concreteness\n(EMP, 195). ","\nHegel in this regard stands out as a lonely classical figure within\nthe history of modern philosophy (EMP, 201).\nPhilosophy since Descartes has become infected by practicalism and\nprogressivism and logic has been reduced to the status of an\ninstrument, a generalised method for acquiring new knowledge. Along\nwith this instrumental view of logic came contempt for the syllogism,\nreplaced by Bacon with “inductive reasoning” and by\nDescartes with rational intuition. ","\nEmpiricism for Anderson is primarily the denial of any higher form of\nbeing, any other reality by which experienced reality can be found\nwanting, or dependent, or in a position of striving to emulate, and so\nforth. So also, the importance of modern realism lies not in its\naccount of knowledge, but its development of a theory of independence,\nthe rejection of any conception of relative existence and the\ndevelopment of a logic of situations (JAA, Philosophy\nII Distinction Lectures, 1937).","\nThere is no criterion of “truth”, “nothing by\nbelieving which we believe something else”\n(EMP, 55). Truth is simply what is conveyed by the\ncopula, the “is” of the proposition. It cannot reside in\ncorrespondence between a believed proposition and something else we\ncall reality, nor in relations between propositions in terms of\ncoherence. Propositions are not forms of words: we convey our beliefs\nby words, but what we are putting forward for acceptance is not the\nform of words but the state of affairs itself. Representionalist and\ncorrespondence theories of truth are “attempts to get behind the\nproposition – to maintain (in words!) that we mean more than we\ncan say.” (EMP, 5). We must abandon the notion\nof “thought” as something contrasted with or identified\nwith things. Our thoughts are just our dealings with things –\nAnderson shared with Norman Kemp Smith a quasi-Calvinist conception of\nknowledge as a striving and grappling with problems rather than\nmirroring an external reality. Anderson dismisses most contemporary\nphilosophies as “varieties of representationalism”\n(EMP, 87). The proposition is not “about”\nanything in the sense of representing an external reality. ","\nOne of Anderson’s most audacious articles was the 1934\n“Mind as Feeling” which attempts to work out exactly how\nmentality should be conceived as belonging to the spatio-temporal\nrealm. Anderson believed that once we admit the spatial nature of mind\nor of anything mental, “Cartesianism goes”\n(JAA, Lectures on Reid, 1935.) The mental realm\nconsists as much of situations as the natural and social world, so our\nknowledge of mind is on the same footing as the non-mental. He\nrepudiates the Cartesian subject-object model which sees\nphilosophy’s task as the study of the medium for knowledge\nunderstood as the relation whereby one entity reproduces within itself\nthe essence or intrinsic characteristics of some other entity. There\nis no such medium for there are not different entities within space\nand time requiring such mediation. There is no “knower”\nconceived as a point of consciousness that has stepped outside\nhistory, outside of space and time. In our striving and grappling with\nillusions so as to come to terms with ourselves and the things around\nus we never step outside the movement of things, nor see behind the\nproposition; never reach outside the realm of propositional claim and\ncounter-claim.","\nWhat is this thing that strives? Anderson adopts a Nietzschean,\npre-Socratic view of mentality as a social structure of instincts and\npassions competing and cooperating. It is the emotions or feelings\nthemselves that strive. The passion of curiosity, for example, is the\nactual agent of inquiry. There is no entity of conscious willing that\ndirects our attention on the world. “Part of the deception, of\ncourse, part of the ‘analytic’ myth, is of an egoistic\ncharacter (‘what do I find when I set my analysis\nmachine rumbling?’), and this is opposed to the fact that\nlanguage and inquiry are inherent in social life, are at all stages\npart of communication.” (EMP, 181.)","\nThat critical inquiry itself rests on the existence of specific ways\nof carrying on and proceeds from within some definite way of life,\nprovides one important link with the ethical aspect of\nAnderson’s thought. Such ways of life which lift individuals out\nof their humdrum existence and base material concerns are what\nAnderson regards as the embodiment of ethical goodness. For Anderson\nif the good exists we must find it as a natural quality in this world,\njust as we come to know and identify other natural qualities. However,\nthe good is not merely something we discover, but “that by which\nwe discover things” (EMP, 266). Anderson was\naware that his view of the good as a natural quality would not\nconvince everyone, and that he could do little to convert the\ndoubters. But he claimed that there will be those who recognise the\ntruth of his position, seeing this view of the good as\n“something with which they have long been in a certain way\nacquainted” (EMP, 267)."],"subsection_title":"5.3 Epistemology"},{"content":["\n“We do not, in fact, step out of the movement of things, ask\n‘What am I to do?’ and, having obtained an answer, step in\nagain. All our actions, all our questionings and answerings, are part\nof the movement of things.” (EMP, 241). ","\nPositive ethical inquiry for Anderson is concerned with the\nidentification of good as a natural quality and he finds that this\nmost naturally pertains to certain actually existing practices and\nways of living in the world of common experience. Traditionally the\ngood has been identified abstractly as an end to be achieved or aimed\nfor, either as a transcendent reality to which we can only aspire (but\nwhich in some unexplained way is supposed to guide our moral actions)\nor as an end external to our actions in the real world and by which\nthose actions may be evaluated; for example, some optimal quantum of\nhappiness or welfare for the greatest number of people involved. In\neither case, a relational explanation is mistakenly offered in place\nof identifying a real quality. This has been the problem with\nvirtually all moral thought since the Greeks, although Anderson\nthought that G. E. Moore had made important advances in our thinking\non these matters. Anderson proposes that the good exists in forms of\nenterprise, productive activities capable of developing in a special\nway by means of “communication” – individuals are\ncaught up in these goods and in the process transcend their more\nimmediate and mundane goals and demands. Any theory of social life\nmust take account of activities with no formulated end: customs,\nregular forms of behaviour, and practices which precede the\nformulation of ends (JAA, Philosophical Implications\nof Marxism, 1945).","\nValues have objective reality, but not in a transcendent realm\ndivorced from this world of facts or states of affairs. Anderson\nagrees that “the way things are” includes moral facts:\n“it is impossible to discuss social processes except in terms of\nways of living or forms of enterprise, and that is moral\ncharacterisation” (EMP, 330). But he cannot\naccept that moral characterisation entails moral prescription because\nthis would commit us to a morality of commands, and to programmes for\naction and reform designed to achieve a merely external good. The\nimportance of ethical inquiry is in giving an account of\nproductive activities which entail the operation of a certain\nmentality or spirit. Within such activities there is no question of\nexternal ends or rewards to be achieved. Goodness exists in free,\nspontaneous participation in such movements and activities (although\nnot of course in the metaphysical sense of undetermined free will\n– such practices, social movements and ways of life are not\nthings we as individuals “opt into” at will; they in a\nsense adopt us). Acting because we feel obliged so\nto act is on this view an indication of the absence of\ngoodness. Although the notion of “virtue” does not much\nappeal to him, Anderson’s emphasis upon the transformative role\nof practices and ways of life upon the ethical outlook of the\nindividual does seem to accord with many of the major preoccupations\nof virtue ethicists. Alasdair Macintyre recognises the value to\ncontemporary Aristotelian virtue ethics of Anderson’s\nHeraclitean appreciation of conflict and the importance he attributes\nto critical traditions (Macintyre 1981).","\nEthics is especially concerned to bring out the facts of conflict, the\nopposition of different strains in things in general, but in human and\nmental life most particularly. The category of causality is central to\nthe ethical sphere – false views of causality represent the\nattempt to escape conflict, to gain a standpoint above that of strife\nand interlocking tensions (JAA, Lectures on\nCriticism, 1954). Positive ethics exhibits the good life as constantly\nstruggling with difficulties and other types of life driven by\nexternal or instrumental considerations (JAA,\nLectures on Greek Theories of Education, 1954). The good exists in\nstruggle and so cannot be made secure (JAA,\nPhilosophy I Lectures, 1943). In all spheres of life the good can only\nmake its stand. Attempts at reconciliation and compromise often\nobscure the issues and may well prove detrimental to the good. The\nresulting Heraclitean harmony is best served by this stance of\nindependence and intransigence.","\nSociological inquiry is appropriate for the bulk of traditional moral\nterms. Forms of social organisation develop regular habits of action\nwhich come to be seen as obligatory: rights, duties and so forth are\neasily understood by those involved in the same way of life. Bourgeois\nsociety is based on commodification and contractual relations. The\nmarket destroys folk life and with it one important source by which\nculture can be refreshed (JAA, Lectures on Marx,\n1950). Marxism has made important advances in this area but Anderson\nnotes the “simple-mindedness” of most Marxists on moral\nquestions – altruism seems to be the peak of their thinking\nabout morality (Cf., remarks on Kautsky, EMP, 321)\nand little consideration is given to the importance of a plurality of\nways of living.","\nParticipation in disinterested activities represents the ethical value\nof “devotion to a cause”. Anderson even offers a\nsociological interpretation of sin as a person’s sense of\ninadequacy to social movements, one’s inability to keep the flag\nflying, to devote oneself thoroughly to these kinds of activity. Sin\nappears then as a kind of backsliding and subjectivism: the individual\nsetting him or herself up as the standard. Anderson was opposed to all\nforms of religious instruction and interference in educational\npractice, but he occasionally shocked his students with a\nquasi-theological appreciation of the existence of evil in the world.\nPassmore commented that forms of religion that emphasise that our life\nis not of our making and that it goes on independently of our plans,\nare far more preferable in Anderson’s view to any form of\nsecular sentimental humanism (Passmore, Introduction to\nEMP).","\nJ. L. Mackie regarded Anderson’s positive conception of goods as\nbeing “hopeless as an account of moral talk and reasoning”\n(Mackie 1985). However, despite being one of the current standard\nbearers for anti-realism in ethics the manner in which Mackie posed\nthe question of the subjectivity of values owes much to\nAnderson’s ontological standpoint. Mackie seemed at pains to\nexplain that his subjectivist view of ethical terms complied with\nAnderson’s main concern. Subjectivism in ethics is for Mackie\nthe doctrine that objective facts in this field do not include any\ndescriptive assignment of goodness or rightness of actions. It is\n“precisely because we want to distinguish what is simply and\nabsolutely the case that we say values/obligations are\nrelative.” (Mackie 1985). Mackie suggested that linguistic\nphilosophy had made the realist-antirealist opposition a philosophical\npseudo-question, and that with renewed interest in ontological issues\nthis opposition returned in a pressing form in the\n“placement” issue regarding various “queer”\nentities in the world.","\nRush Rhees was a student of Anderson’s at Edinburgh and, of\ncourse, later of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s. Like Mackie, he was\ncritical of Anderson’s ethical theory, but from the other pole\nin that he was more inclined towards Anderson’s positive view of\nethics. He regarded Anderson’s notion of a “way of\nlife” as at some level the same as Wittgenstein’s (Rhees\n1969). But he came to think that Anderson paid too little attention to\nthe ways in which moral questions are posed for individuals, that\nAnderson too readily portrayed individual concerns as base,\negocentric, low concerns in contrast with the uplifting concerns\nresulting from participation in social movements. Anderson, Rhees\nconcluded, had no appreciation for the urgency with which moral\nquestions presented themselves to individuals (Rhees 1999, p. xiii),\nnor their distinctive character compared to more practical questions\nof how to go on. However, Rhees always emphasised the Andersonian\nlesson that values are rooted in different traditions and movements.\nWe have to resist the temptation to locate values in a realm which\ntranscends these contexts. It is futile to argue that the moral\nindividual is located in a realm outside history, outside the\nparticularities of space and time. Only in these contexts do the\nindividual’s convictions, problems, struggles and difficulties\nhave their sense. Resources for criticism of moral codes exist within\nmovements, and criticism develops only within ways of living. Notions\nof the “common good” generally conceal special interests\n(Rhees 1989, p. 53)."],"subsection_title":"5.4 Ethics"},{"content":["\nAnderson’s moral and political thought was strongly influenced\nby the writings of the French socialist Georges Sorel (and before him\nthe libertarian socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon). Although Anderson\nabandoned communism and socialism as movements whose time had passed,\nthe influence of these thinkers for whom socialism was a moral\nmovement remained with him (Cole 2009). In all fields of human\nactivity, there is a conflict between what Sorel described as the\n“ethic of the producer”, characterised by spontaneous and\ncooperative endeavour, and the ethic of the consumer, characterised by\nan instrumental morality of reward and punishment, obligation and\nexpectation, an ethic most perfectly suited in sociological terms to\nthe marketplace (and in purely psychological terms to the compulsive\nobligations of the neurotic personality). More accurately, for\nAnderson, the ethic of the consumer is an ethic without a\ntheme. In history there are classical periods of cultural\nachievement in contrast with periods in which we struggle to find a\ntheme at all; that is, periods in which nothing really happens,\nnothing develops from within. Anderson also admired Vico’s\ncyclical view of history and by the 1940s had not only resigned\nhimself to the collapse of heroic 19th century socialism, but\ndiscerned in the era of post-war optimism and state planning the early\nstages of one of Vico’s periods of barbarism\n(EMP, 290). More positively, for Anderson the\nrejection of all totalising views, the thesis that “no formula\ncovers all things”, has the practical consequence of supporting\nand encouraging “a life of responsibility and adventure”\nfor those prepared to face the situation (EMP,\n86).","\nAnderson intended to combat the influence of idealism in our thinking\non political issues evident since Plato’s Republic. The\nmodernist, realist project he meant to develop in opposition to the\npolitical outlook of British Idealism would draw upon the major\ntheorists of conflict, struggle and cyclic historical movement:\nHeraclitus, Vico and Sorel. In place of a simple contrast between\nindividual and state Anderson insisted upon the complex interplay of\nmovements, institutions and traditions. In place of an unargued\ntendency towards ever greater social harmony he insisted on the\ninevitability of conflict and constant adjustment, the persistent\ndanger of regress, and the consequent need for clear lines of critical\nengagement. Order is a Heraclitean state of balance between complex\ninteracting forces rather than a normative standard by which to\nmeasure existing social and political formations. Conflict is not an\nindication of social dysfunction which needs to be overcome or\nrationalised away, but a necessary feature of any social institution.\nAny notion of an ideal state without such features can have no bearing\non our present real life situation.","\nAnderson’s political thought is distinctive for his rejection of\nthe state as the fundamental object of political investigation and\nreflection. This aspect of his thought aligns rather strongly with\nmodern Nietzschean and anti-humanist political thought. For Anderson\nthe social is not reducible to agreements among atomic individuals. In\nhis anti-individualist statements, however, he seems to echo an\nidealist view of social movements portrayed, for example, by Bernard\nBosanquet who similarly decried the “repellent isolation”\nof atomist individualism. Culture and human achievement depend upon\nthe capacity of human beings to engage in activities that take them\noutside themselves. Apart from these struggles with nature or within\nbroad social movements, a person collapses into non-entity (Bosanquet\n1899, pp. xxxiii ff.). ","\nAnderson’s rejection of good as an end to be achieved applied to\nhis ultimate rejection of socialism as a progressive movement and of\nMarxism in particular. “The doctrine of history as struggle is\nat once the liberal and the scientific part of Marxism; the doctrine\nof socialism as something to be established (‘classless\nsociety’) is its servile part” (EMP,\n339). Socialism for Anderson was not a goal to be achieved but a\nmovement to be joined. The amelioration of social conditions of the\nworkers would be achieved by the workers themselves in the process of\nasserting the value and validity of their way of life within the wider\nsocio-political sphere. But once alleviation became the primary goal\nof the workers’ movement and representatives, that movement was\nfinished as a progressive and liberating force. It could be bought off\nby employers and the state. Socialism understood as a force lobbying\nfor state action and funding to redress market inequities had become\nmired in “servility” as a matter of historical fact."],"subsection_title":"5.5 Social and Political Thought"},{"content":["\nIn the 1950s, Anderson retreated from broad political theory which had\nbeen a feature of his lectures and writings of the 1940s, and attended\nmore to local and institutional questions. This new emphasis emerged\nin his lectures on education and on criticism. Central to\nAnderson’s view of education is the rejection of any utilitarian\nor instrumental view of education, the view of education as a means to\nsome other purpose. Education needs to be understood as an activity\nwith positive characteristics of its own. Education is critical,\ndevoted to developing and discarding hypotheses, to seeing through\npretensions of all kinds. It means for the individual “finding a\nway of life” and it affects the whole life of the educated\nindividual. Critical intellectual life survives as a social tradition,\na “movement” to which individuals are attracted and in\nwhich they are caught up.","\nAnderson’s classicism promotes the history of European culture\nfrom the early Greeks as a tradition of critical thought that can\nrefresh and fortify contemporary education against the predations of\npracticalism and servility in the modern world. Education is concerned\nwith training in taste and judgement. The educated individual is not\nshackled by the assumptions of his society or group\n(JAA, Lectures on the Educational Theories of Spencer\nand Dewey, 1949). But to play its part, education must resist outside\nstandards (such as those set by the attitudes and capacities of\ncommercial society, or by the vocational needs of business) as to what\nis to be allowed and valued in institutions of education. Rhees\nsuggested that Anderson was primarily concerned with a “grammar\nschool education”, one not suited to the “masses”\n(Rhees 1969 p. 168). In particular, for Anderson, vocational and\nmoralistic standards have to be resisted. True learning is not easy\nand cannot be made easy – it advances only through overcoming\nresistances. The inquiring life has to stand up for itself. It is just\nas real, just as practical, just as positive a part of society as\nother activities (J. L. Mackie, in EAI).","\nAny activity or institution of learning can proceed only along the\nlines of certain traditions with custodians and in terms of common\nactivities (JAA, Lectures on Greek Theories of\nEducation, 1954). For education is simply one struggling tendency in\nsociety itself among others – even within institutions\nsupposedly devoted to educational aims, true educational values have\nto be fought for. ","\nAnderson’s lectures on education are of interest because they\ninclude the most extensive account of his appreciation for the\nclassicism of Matthew Arnold, but more particularly of his attitude\ntowards the philosophy of John Dewey. Besides his early\nacknowledgement of the importance of William James (at least the more\nmetaphysical writings on radical empiricism) and his critical articles\non F. C. S. Schiller, the consideration of Dewey’s educational\ntheory is the most important reflection on American pragmatism in\nAnderson’s work. The question of the relation of theory to\npractice was one that exercised Anderson repeatedly. His position was\nthat the connection was a close one, but not in the direction that he\nassumed pragmatism urged. Theory was not dependent upon practice for\nthe validity of its findings. Rather inquiry proceeded from particular\nkinds of practice. Certain forms of life made possible an objective\nview of things. Moreover, theory was not subsidiary to practice in an\ninstrumental sense because it was itself a distinct form of practice\nwith its own requirements and standards. Anderson reflected upon this\nquestion both in the lectures on education but also in his lectures on\nMarxism and most particularly on Marx’s Theses on\nFeuerbach where he was concerned to dispute Sidney Hook’s\npragmatist reading of the theses (JAA, Philosophical\nImplications of Marxism). Both the fact of his consideration of the\nenigmatic Theses and his substantial conclusions on the\nrelation of theory to practice would have resonated with the\nAlthusserian Marxists in the Department of General Philosophy in the\n1970s. "],"subsection_title":"5.6 Education"},{"content":["\nAnderson’s influence extended beyond the confines of the\nacademy. One of Anderson’s students, a young man from the\nPacific island of Tonga, Futa Helu, later claimed that John\nAnderson’s realism had revolutionised his thinking, particularly\nwith reference to the notion of “tapu” or the sacred, as\nthe cover-up for the special demands of the ruling class in Tonga.\nReturning to Tonga in the early 1960s, he founded the Atenisi (Athens)\nInstitute as an independent high school based on the ideals of Greek\nphilosophy. He added “Atenisi University” in 1975, where\nthe philosophical thought of Heraclitus as interpreted by Anderson\nbecame the backbone of philosophy courses. Following Anderson’s\nexample of public engagement, Helu is credited as one of the\nintellectual architects of the democracy movement in Tonga (Keith\nCampbell, personal communication).","\nAnderson’s influence on the self-styled “Sydney\nPush” is more widely known. The latter was a diffuse sub-culture\nof anarchist libertarians who met around Sydney’s inner city in\nthe 1950s and 1960s. Members were imbued with a spirit of\nanti-careerism, and a major influence in their meetings, talks and\ndrinking sessions was the philosophy of John Anderson who had lectured\nmany of them on the value of risk, endeavour, withdrawal from\nconsumerist society and the overriding value of criticism to the\nhealth of a society. Through his influence on many of these figures,\nAnderson affected the tone of intellectual debate and discussion in\nSydney and beyond. If the key figures of the movement are relatively\nunknown, there were more famous figures who moved through this\nenvironment and were on their own accounts deeply affected by its\nintellectual stimulus: such figures as Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes\nand Clive James.","\nMore centrally involved with the life of the Push over an extended\nperiod and more particularly with the direct teachings of John\nAnderson was the anarchist activist and philosopher George Molnar. He\nattended Anderson’s lectures in the 1950s and was active in\ndebates on metaphysical questions in the 1960s associated with\nArmstrong and C. B. Martin. Students recall Armstrong and Molnar in\nthe university quadrangle around 1970 arguing about dispositions and\npowers with an intensity no doubt propelled by their political\ndisagreements at the time. Molnar conducted courses on anarchism and\neducation theory in the early 1970s but in 1976 resigned his position\nat the university, a move consistent with the anti-careerist ethos of\nthe Push and of the radical politics of the time. Perhaps he also\nfound his philosophical interests on the wrong side of an\nirreconcilable split within the department. Some thirty years later,\nhe returned to academic life to take up a part-time position as John\nAnderson Research Fellow at the University of Sydney, but died\nunexpectedly in 2002. His book Powers: a study in metaphysics\nwas published posthumously in 2007 by Oxford University Press at the\nurging of his old adversary D. M. Armstrong."],"subsection_title":"6. Influence Beyond the University: the Sydney Push"}]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nJohn Anderson was born in 1893 in the weaving and coal-mining village\\nof Stonehouse, Lanarkshire (about 20km from Glasgow). His father was\\nschoolmaster in the village and politically active in the Independent\\nLabour Party. In 1911 Anderson began his university studies at the\\nUniversity of Glasgow, enrolling in two successive honours degrees:\\nmathematics/natural philosophy (including laboratory training) and\\nlogic/moral philosophy (including political economy). His\\nundergraduate studies extended throughout the years of the World War,\\nculminating in 1917 with his Masters thesis on the philosophy of\\nWilliam James. Declared medically unfit for service, his experience of\\nthe war was dominated by the Red Clydeside industrial and rental\\ndisputes, characterised by workers’ resistance to state and\\nindustry attempts to re-organise work practices and personnel in the\\ninterests of a supposed common national interest. The disputes\\nultimately led to state suppression at the conclusion of the war when\\nBritish troops and artillery were deployed to Glasgow.\",\n \"\\nAnderson’s philosophical direction was powerfully influenced by\\nthe Australian-born philosopher, Samuel Alexander, who delivered the\\nGifford Lectures at Glasgow in 1918. In the previous year Anderson had\\nbeen awarded for an essay supporting Henry Jones’ practical\\nidealist view of the state as a moral agent. Following\\nAlexander’s lectures (later published as Space, Time and\\nDeity) Anderson accepted the case for the complete rejection of\\nthis form of idealism in favour of a new and systematic realist\\nprogramme.\",\n \"\\nIn 1919 Anderson married fellow philosophy student Jenny Baillie, was\\nappointed assistant lecturer at University College of South Wales\\n(where he also provided Workers’ Education Classes) and was\\nsubsequently appointed assistant lecturer in logic at the University\\nof Glasgow. In 1920 he was appointed lecturer at the University of\\nEdinburgh and so became the main exponent of realism in Norman Kemp\\nSmith’s Department of Logic and Metaphysics. In the same year,\\nhis brother William accepted the Chair of Mental and Moral Philosophy\\nat Auckland University College, New Zealand.\",\n \"\\nBy 1926 Anderson had become dispirited by the rejection for\\npublication of a textbook on logic that he had been working on since\\n1922. He had also become politically isolated in the department\\nbecause of his support for the General Strike in Britain. Such factors\\nmay have moved him to accept the Challis Chair of Philosophy at the\\nUniversity of Sydney, although as with his brother, the movement of\\nScottish philosophers to Commonwealth universities was not unusual. In\\n1927 he moved with Jennie and their young son Alexander\\n(“Sandy”) to Sydney.\",\n \"\\nAnderson’s first serious professional engagement was in a\\ncritical discussion of F. C. S. Schiller’s logic,\\n“Propositions and Judgments” and “The Truth of\\nPropositions” (1926). The first outlines of a distinctive\\nrealist position were made in “Empiricism” and “The\\nKnower and the Known” (1927). After his arrival at Sydney,\\nAnderson was intent upon developing this position and was dismissive\\nof the fragmentary nature of most international philosophy in the wake\\nof the “linguistic turn”. The important philosophical work\\nin Anderson’s view was to establish and preserve a school of\\nrealist philosophy as the repository of a tradition of critical\\ninquiry that would remain alert to the dangers of corrupting external\\nforces and expectations. \",\n \"\\nShortly after his arrival at Sydney, Anderson became a\\n“theoretical advisor” to the Australian Communist Party\\nand so began a long history of antagonising conservative political and\\ncultural representatives in the city. He was repeatedly accused of\\ndisloyalty and communist sympathies by returned servicemen\\norganisations, the churches and the conservative political parties.\\nThe University Senate ultimately debated censure although a motion to\\ndeclare him unfit to occupy the Chair of Philosophy was defeated. \",\n \"\\nIn 1930 James Joyce’s Ulysses was banned in Australia\\nand the Freethought Society was formed with Anderson as President.\\nAnderson’s political influence at Sydney primarily took the form\\nof a libertarian pluralism, particularly concerned with issues of\\nstate and religious censorship and interference in education. By the\\n1940s and 1950s his political position was strongly anti-communist.\\nYet he remained unpopular with conservative politicians and clerics\\nand was criticised for “corrupting the city’s youth”\\nas late as 1961.\",\n \"\\nIn 1935 Anderson became the editor of The Australasian Journal of\\nPsychology and Philosophy. He had previously contributed\\nsignificantly to the journal with his articles “Determinism and\\nEthics” (1928), “The Non-Existence of\\nConsciousness”, “‘Universals’ and\\nOccurrences” (1929), “The Place of Hegel in the History of\\nPhilosophy”, “Utilitarianism” (1932), “Realism\\nand Some of its Critics” (1933), and “Mind as\\nFeeling” (1934). He retained editorial responsibility for the\\njournal until 1947 when it passed to John Passmore with the new name\\nThe Australasian Journal of Philosophy.\",\n \"\\nIn 1958 Anderson retired and in 1962 died at his home in\\nSydney’s northern suburbs. The Challis Chair of Philosophy was\\noccupied for the next 30 years by Anderson’s students, J. L.\\nMackie (1959–1963) and D. M. Armstrong (1964–1991). Both\\nphilosophers were critical of Anderson’s philosophy and were\\nmore engaged with contemporary philosophical debates, but both also\\nacknowledged Anderson’s formative influence on their work.\",\n \"\\nIn 1972 members of the Department of Philosophy at the University of\\nSydney were caught in a bitter dispute concerning subject matter,\\neducational practices and the nature of philosophical study itself,\\nand by the start of 1974 the department had split into two separate\\nunits. D. M. Armstrong led the minority Department of Traditional and\\nModern Philosophy away from what he perceived to be the politically\\nradical but philosophically barren Department of General Philosophy.\\nPolitical disruptions throughout the academic world in the early 1970s\\nwere not uncommon, but the particular intransigence and secessionist\\ntendencies which characterised both sides of the conflict at Sydney\\nmay well have been at least in part a legacy of Anderson’s\\nteaching and practice. The department eventually reunited some thirty\\nyears later.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Life and Work\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe emphasis of Anderson’s realism is upon\\nindependence, directed particularly at the notion of\\nconstitutive relations (which he takes to be the central error of\\nidealism), but also employed in qualifying reductivist and\\ninstrumentalist forms of scientific explanation. His position is that\\nalthough whatever exists has relations and is conditioned, it is\\nnonetheless a specific existing thing with qualities of its own. It is\\nthe aim of critical inquiry in any given field to identify relevant\\nqualities and characteristics and to state the issue in the form of\\nobjective and communicable truth. Whatever our interests draw our\\nattention to, the truth of the matter is independent of our\\nconsideration. Whatever innovative and imaginative uses we make of\\nparticular things, those uses are available to us because of existing\\nproperties in the things themselves. For Anderson, two aspects of\\nphilosophical speculation have been linked throughout the history of\\nthe subject, and his own thought can be considered as a single system\\nwith these complementary aspects: the logical and the ethical.\",\n \"\\nFirst, there is a single way of being, that of ordinary things\\nbehaving in ordinary ways in space and time. All theories of higher\\nand lower realities can only be stated in terms of the common reality\\nwe all know and share. Anderson applied this thesis across the board:\\nthere are not different kinds or degrees of truth, only\\nsomething’s being the case or not; universals and values do not\\nexist above the world of space and time in a transcendent sphere of\\noperation; powers are not entities distinct from the processes they\\nexplain; the mental realm cannot be conceived as operating in a sphere\\nseparate from or other than space and time. There is no absolute or\\nlogical distinction between universals and particulars –\\nuniversals exist within the ordinary world, but never apart from the\\nparticulars they describe; that is, there is no ontological level\\nabove or below that of the state of affairs or the fact of a\\npredicated subject. As the study of the formal features of facts,\\nlogic provides an account of what is objectively real: logic entails a\\ngeneral ontology.\",\n \"\\nSecond, Anderson emphasised both the objective and subjective\\ndifficulties inherent in the endeavour to see things as they are, and\\nthe necessary discipline acquired in ongoing traditions of critical\\ninquiry. Confronting the reality of our existence entails recognising\\nand not turning away from the ubiquity of conflict, tension and strife\\nin all spheres. For Anderson ethical goods exist in the world in such\\nactivities as intellectual inquiry, artistic production and scientific\\ninvestigation. Ethical investigation is primarily concerned with\\nidentifying those human activities which are driven by internal\\nstandards of correctness and value and not by concern for external\\nrewards or utilities. But these activities exist perilously in a world\\nseriously inclined towards stasis and corruption. There is an almost\\ntheological depth to Anderson’s pessimism in this regard. \",\n \"\\nAnderson’s views in normative philosophy are outlined in\\nwritings in ethical inquiry, narrowly construed, aesthetics, political\\nthought and educational philosophy. Ethics is the study of\\nthe real qualities of human activities, not of what is right or\\nobligatory, these latter questions being relegated to the study of\\ncustomary norms and expectations arising from particular practices and\\nways of life. Similarly, aesthetics is the study of the\\nqualities of beautiful things, and is neither a study of feelings,\\nexpressions or judgments, nor a source of directives for artists. A\\nwork of art succeeds to the extent that it objectively portrays its\\ntheme, accounts for what is the case (for example, anger\\nconsidered as the “theme” of The Iliad). Literary\\ncriticism consists in assessing whether the artist has succeeded,\\nobjectively, in capturing or portraying the chosen theme. In his\\nsocial and political thought, Anderson holds that society is\\na complex of competing and cooperating movements neither united by\\ninclusive social purpose, nor reducible to its individual members.\",\n \"\\nUnderlying both logical and ethical aspects of Anderson’s\\nthought is the identification of systematic confusions and errors in\\nphilosophical thought. One persistent confusion is the\\nmisidentification of relations as qualities. Most commonly, being in\\nsome relation is thought to constitute the “nature” of\\nsome special status entity. But whereas a term together with a quality\\nis a complete unit just as it stands, a term and a relation is simply\\nincomplete without a second term. Anderson applied this thesis widely:\\nthere are no such things whose nature it is to be known or perceived\\n(“ideas”); there is no such thing whose nature it is to\\nknow (“consciousness”); there are no such things whose\\nnature it is to be pursued or whose nature it is to direct action\\n(“values” conceived as standing over and above the goods\\nand values of this life). Relations are often more evident to us than\\nthe underlying qualities of the things related and so relational\\nexplanations suggest themselves to us quite naturally. On the other\\nhand, significant intellectual effort is required in any given field\\nto understand the illusory nature of such explanations and the manner\\nin which they obstruct the identification and assertion of real\\nissues.\",\n \"\\nAccording to Anderson, one central confusion infecting modern\\nphilosophy since Descartes has been its obsession with epistemological\\nquestions, the attempt to provide unshakeable foundations for our\\nknowledge of the external world. There is no gap between mind and\\nworld that needs to be bridged because mentality belongs to the\\nspatio-temporal world along with everything else. This is not to say\\nthat misunderstanding is impossible, just that understanding is\\npossible. It is possible to know various conditions and characters of\\nthings in the first place only because things have these\\ncharacters independently of our inquiries. And since as knowers we\\noccupy the single world of space and time we come under the same\\nconditions and so come into relations with those things that we are\\ninvestigating. All knowledge depends upon empirical investigation and\\nso is fallible: it is not built upon any more immediate or reliable\\nentities such as sense data or self-evident ideas. Epistemological and\\nontological bedrock is the complex situation of being there and\\nso, a particular’s being of a certain kind. Knowing minds\\nare themselves complex spatio-temporal things, societies of emotions\\nand feelings without a unifying consciousness to which these might\\nbelong nor some ultimate self which could conceivably take a stand\\nsomehow outside and beyond the world of space and time. Modern\\nphilosophy’s epistemological obsession can be regarded as an\\nillogical attempt to look behind the proposition, to gain a sideways\\nview of how our propositions hook up to the real world.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Outline of Anderson’s Philosophy\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nGilbert Ryle listed Anderson among the “seniors” who had\\npreceded his own generation: philosophers such as Russell, Moore,\\nWittgenstein, Bradley, Stout, McTaggart, Alexander, Laird, and Kemp\\nSmith. For Ryle, Anderson’s generation represented “the\\nold gang”, many the products of “those dominating Scots\\nteachers” who had established philosophy as an academic\\ndiscipline in English-speaking universities around the world. Anderson\\nwas an exact contemporary of Wittgenstein and Heidegger, yet only\\nseven years older than Ryle himself. But Ryle seems to have a point in\\nsuggesting a generational gap that separated him from that earlier\\ngeneration’s “pieties, lores, sagacities, equipments\\n– yes, and fetishes too” (Ryle 1976: 383). Ryle was\\ndescribing the generation of philosophers who were adult prior to or\\nduring the Great War. He only became acquainted with Anderson in the\\n1950s and was struck by the manner in which Anderson had continued a\\nform of philosophy into modern times that had given way elsewhere to\\nphilosophies more concerned with linguistic usage. Despite this\\nrecognition of interpretive challenges, for many of Anderson’s\\nfollowers Ryle at that time radically misunderstood Anderson’s\\nwork (Ryle 1950), reading it from the perspective of the\\n“linguistic turn”.\",\n \"\\nFor current readers there are indeed several obstacles to approaching\\nAnderson’s work. His published works, primarily articles for the\\nAustralasian Journal of Philosophy and Psychology and in\\nlocal journals and newspapers, are difficult without the context of\\nAnderson’s broader teaching. They are generally regarded as\\nsubsidiary to the lectures and syllabus of an Andersonian\\napprenticeship. It seems that they were written for the benefit of the\\nstudents who already had the value of his personal contact. Without\\nthis contact, we must rely on the publication of several series of\\nlecture notes from Anderson’s papers by Sydney University Press\\n(see Bibliography). Anderson’s isolation from his intellectual\\npeers and his seeming reluctance to engage in international debate\\nalso deprives contemporary students of the opportunity to locate his\\nwork within more familiar territory.\",\n \"\\nOne point of access to Anderson’s work for contemporary\\nstudents, of course, lies in the work of his students such as D. M.\\nArmstrong, John Passmore, and J. L. Mackie. But there is a danger even\\nhere that their specialisations may distort our view of\\nAnderson’s work as a whole. Anderson, as Passmore noted, was a\\ngeneralist (Passmore, Introduction to Anderson’s posthumous\\nwork, Studies in Empirical Philosophy, hereafter\\nEMP). Unlike the next generation, he expected all\\nspheres of philosophical inquiry to open up to his investigation and\\nhis philosophy extended to all spheres: logic, metaphysics, ethics,\\npolitical thought, aesthetics, education.\",\n \"\\nAnderson describes his position variously as empiricist, realist,\\nnaturalist, physicalist, positivist and pluralist, conceiving each of\\nthese as different aspects of the one truly empirical philosophy. But\\nhis use of these terms is problematic for the uninitiated.\\nAnderson’s empiricism has no time for representational\\nviews of truth, nor for the traditional empiricist entities of sense\\ndata or ideas. Empiricism for Anderson is an ontological doctrine\\nasserting a single way of being to which we as investigators belong.\\nWhile undoubtedly committed to empirical investigation and the\\nfallible nature of all propositional claims, Anderson’s\\nempiricism is only secondarily an epistemological viewpoint relating\\nto how we come to know things within this spatio-temporal world.\\nAnderson’s realism rejects the traditional\\nrealist-nominalist options concerning the existence of universals.\\nUniversals are brought down to (spatio-temporal) earth, but there are\\nno such things as pure universals nor pure particulars outside their\\nroles within complex states of affairs. Mentality is a\\nproduct of physico-chemical processes in the brain but this does not\\npreclude our inquiry into the nature of mind as a field of conflicted\\ntendencies, feelings and emotions. Whatever the special sciences tell\\nus about their particular subject matters, philosophy retains its\\nauthority in questions of logic, that is to say, concerning the\\nconditions of possibility of discourse. Indeed, modern science is\\nbadly infected by instrumentalist and technological views of its\\ninvestigations and needs to become more truly philosophical and\\ncritical, more concerned with establishing what is the case within\\nspecific fields, and less with being practical and useful in relation\\nto perceived societal needs (EMP, 290).\\nPositivism then is for Anderson a commitment to what is\\nobjectively and positively the case, and not a program of instrumental\\nor operational truth, nor a means of distinguishing meaningful from\\nmeaningless utterances. Anderson’s call for a “science of\\nethics” is not an assimilation of ethical inquiry to the\\nstandards of the special sciences. It is a plea for an objective\\ninvestigation of the ethical, focussed on the existing ethical\\nqualities of human activities, rather than on the pieties of\\ntraditional moral philosophy: the questions of right, obligation, duty\\nand so forth. \",\n \"\\nRyle was only the first of many to be accused of misreading Anderson.\\nCriticisms of Anderson’s position from within mainstream\\nEnglish-language philosophy have always seemed to his followers to\\nmiss their mark. They have generally failed to recognise the\\nontological, non-representational, non-semantic basis for his\\nempiricism. Robert Brandom’s recent criticism and rejection of\\nthe “theoretical, explanatory and strategic commitments”\\nmotivating Anglo-American philosophy in the 20th century lists these\\nas: empiricism, naturalism, representationalism, semantic atomism,\\nformalism about logic, instrumentalism about practical norms (Brandom\\n2000). Anderson would reject all of these criticisms of his own work\\nas they stand. Brandom regards the notion of “facts” and\\n“states of affairs” as emblematic of atomistic,\\nrepresentationalist thought. Anderson would have replied imperiously\\nas he did to Gilbert Ryle’s “representationist”\\ncriticisms: “That is nothing to me”. \",\n \"\\nMany of the problems contemporary readers encounter in\\nAnderson’s work result from his relative international\\nisolation. But for many of his students it was precisely\\nAnderson’s secessionist traditional stance that was the key to\\nthe great value of an Andersonian education. He may have failed in his\\nproject, but he kept alive at Sydney enduring values of traditional\\nphilosophical inquiry at a time when mainstream philosophy was either\\nobsessed with linguistic usage on the one hand or in deference to the\\nnatural sciences on the other. Many of Anderson’s students\\nexpected his philosophy to re-emerge stronger following the inevitable\\ndecline of linguistic philosophy and the renewed interest in\\nmetaphysical questions which followed this decline. But if his work\\nplayed any role in this renewal it was only indirectly through the\\nwork of his student D. M. Armstrong. Contemporary philosophers\\ninterested in metaphysical questions do not refer to Anderson’s\\nwork and are frankly baffled by Armstrong’s enthusiasm for his\\nteacher’s work. Anderson exists today almost exclusively in the\\nfootnotes of his more engaged and accomplished students.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Difficulties in Understanding Anderson’s Work\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nIn Anderson’s view the realist movement initiated by Russell and\\nMoore had ended in failure because it had attempted to overcome\\nHegelian philosophy by a return to pre-idealist certainties\\n(EMP, 89). As a result, realism had been left without\\na school from which to challenge the newly emerging schools of\\nidealism and pragmatism (STP, 161). Hegel’s\\nall-encompassing system of thought was an example for a new and\\nsystematic realism to emulate.\",\n \"\\nIn brief, Hegel’s attempt to formulate his sequence of outlooks\\nrelies upon a realist view of the proposition which is incompatible\\nwith his whole theory of outlooks or categories and their varying\\nadequacy to reality as a whole. Hegel “unwittingly is proceeding\\nin terms of the proposition” but is caught up with the illusory\\nattempt to establish an overarching truth (“that whereby a true\\nproposition can be true”), instead of the task of establishing\\ntrue propositions (JAA, Lectures on William\\nJames, 1935). The same criticism of Hegel seems to be made by Brandom\\nin the service of his very different expressionist project (Brandom\\n2000). But for Anderson, Hegel’s doctrine of outlooks\\n“rests on an inability to grasp the independence of\\ntruths” (EMP, 81). On the other hand, we need\\nonly reject Hegel’s doctrine of expressions to find that we are\\nleft with actual states of affairs rather than abstract\\nbeing.\",\n \"\\nNeither Cartesian rationalism nor English empiricism could replace\\nHegel’s philosophy with any philosophical position of comparable\\nrange. Hegel was right to emphasise system, but not as totality (a\\npretended solution to real problems), but in the form of a single\\nlogic. He was also right to see this logic as historical, but wrong to\\nattempt to replace a “logic of things developing” with the\\nnotion of a “developing logic” (EMP, 80).\\nAnderson summarises the position as follows. The only way to answer\\nHegel would be to drop the modern fixation with epistemological\\nquestions altogether and return to a Greek consideration of things. In\\naddition to Greek directness, a true replacement for Hegelian idealism\\nwould incorporate three major components: a positive theory of the\\nmind as feeling and as non-unitary, as much a part of spatial and\\ntemporal reality as any non-mental things and events; a true\\nempiricism which recognised relations and generals as being as real\\n(and as knowable) as the particulars related; and a conception of\\nspace and time as conditions of existence rather than of human\\nknowledge as in Kant’s transcendental idealism. Anderson\\nproposed to replace Hegel’s totality by developing a systematic\\nrealism which would incorporate the work of John Burnet on Greek\\nphilosophy, of Sigmund Freud on mind, of William James’ radical\\nempiricism and of Samuel Alexander’s reworking of Kant’s\\ntranscendental aesthetic (EMP, 80). Anderson does not\\nmention here another possible source for his direct realism, namely,\\nScottish common sense philosophy, but he does consider this in his\\nLectures on Thomas Reid of 1935 (LMP).\",\n \"\\nRichard Rorty has suggested that English language philosophy in the\\nearly 20th century emerged from the dominance of Hegelian idealism by\\ndeferring to the natural sciences, partly because the alternative\\nassociation with modernist literature seemed to threaten “a kind\\nof privatised aestheticism which contained disturbing strains of\\nirrationalism” (Rorty 1985, p. 748). Superficially,\\nAnderson’s work suggests an attempt of some kind to assimilate\\nphilosophy to the sciences. But he was a true modernist in relation to\\nliterary culture: his articles and addresses include critical works on\\nsuch figures as, in particular, James Joyce, but also Lawrence, Shaw,\\nWells, Grahame, Belloc, Wilde, Hardy, Ibsen, Meredith, Dostoevsky and\\nMelville, as well as on the genre of detective fiction. Literature for\\nAnderson had a special character as the embodiment or repository of\\nculture (JAA, Lectures on the Educational Theories of\\nSpencer and Dewey, 1949). At Sydney in the 1930s he championed both\\nthe works of James Joyce (recently banned) and the importance of\\nFreudian psychoanalysis to our understanding of mentality as\\nconflicted and passionate, and to cultural inquiry more generally\\n(cf., Damousi 2005). He thought the pre-modernist “literary\\nphilosophers” of romanticism and idealism had shown\\n“greater tenacity” than those philosophers who professed\\nscientific exactitude (EMP, 80). But they had also\\ntended to promote forms of moralising and theologising which were\\nopposed to precision and independence of thought and which were\\n“detrimental to culture in general” (EMP,\\n87). Anderson thought his interpretation of traditional Aristotelian\\nlogic had an important role to play in the new world of literary\\nculture as much as in the natural sciences.\",\n \"\\nOne major achievement of Hegel for Anderson was the encouragement he\\ngave to the study of Greek philosophers. Anderson’s lectures\\nexplored the historical background to his propositional view of\\nreality in the issues raised by the pre-Socratics and later in\\nPlato’s Dialogues. Like other modernist philosophers and\\nnovelists (and Hegel himself), Anderson found in Heraclitus an\\ninspirational alternative to what he came to regard as the sentimental\\nand intellectually stifling idealism of his teachers.\",\n \"\\nThis world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or man has made;\\nbut it was ever, is now, and ever shall be an ever-living Fire, with\\nmeasures of it kindling and measures going out. (Heraclitus Fragment\\n20. trans. John Burnet, Early Greek Philosophy 4th Ed., 1930,\\np.134.)\\n\",\n \"\\nAnderson acknowledged that Heraclitus’ emphasis on the element\\nFire might be read as a typically Ionian response to the question\\n“what is the world made of”, but the more important theme\\nis his treatment of fire purely as process, as transaction and\\nexchange, as the paradigm element of strife and harmony. In embryo\\nAnderson found in Heraclitus so many of his own principles: the close\\nlink between logic and ethics (ethics as the field in which conflict\\ncomes primarily to the fore); the single way of being, of “what\\nis common” (the search for a general logic, a theory of the\\ncommensurability of things in terms of a theory of process); the\\nrecognition of complexity, conflict and strife underlying existing\\nthings; the anti-sentimentality and pessimism which refuses to find\\nsolace in unity; the hidden harmony of forces in balance preferable to\\nthe open harmony of illusory unity; the unremitting attack on\\nsubjectivist illusions of desiring or imagining things as we would\\nlike them to be (unchanging and secure) rather than seeing them for\\nwhat they are.\",\n \"\\nFor Anderson’s Heraclitus, “seeing things as they\\nare” is seeing them as complex, active and changing; a\\nperspective opposed to the optimistic, rationalist illusion of the\\nsimple, fixed and static. It is to see things as moving, historical,\\nin process, and yet as in balance. Heraclitean “strife” is\\nharmony: the things of everyday experience are positive and concrete\\nbecause they are contingent and historical. Anderson described this\\n“fundamental strain” in all fields of inquiry as that\\n“between objectivism and subjectivism”, between\\n“critical thinking” recognising complexity and tension\\neverywhere, and “rationalist illusion” seeking the fixed\\nand simple (JAA, Lectures on Criticism 1955, number 11.).\\nRationalism here shared with more primitive mythological thinking the\\nquest for stability, security and moral uplift. Both have looked for\\nsolutions at a higher level than the problems being addressed.\",\n \"\\nAnderson’s teaching and writings constantly refer to the history\\nof philosophy, but Anderson was not a scholarly historian. He thought\\nthat persistent philosophical issues and positions were evident\\nthroughout history (eleaticism, for example, was a highly instructive\\nand critical stage recurring throughout the history of the subject\\n– for example in Green’s criticisms of Hume’s\\nparticulars). The history of philosophy helped to emphasise the value\\nof his own position. On the other hand, his lectures and writings are\\nladen with references to philosophers, scientists, novelists,\\npsychoanalysts and revolutionaries. Nothing seems alien to even the\\nmost abstruse topic of discussion in his work. And his lectures were\\n“great starters of hares” (Partridge’s reflections\\non Anderson’s teaching, in EAI). John Passmore\\nacknowledges the inspiration of Anderson’s lectures in his own\\nworks on Hume, philosophical reasoning, Ralph Cudworth, perfectibility\\nand his history of one hundred years of philosophy.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. A Systematic Realism\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Specific Fields\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAnderson wrote a Textbook on Logic in the early 1920s\\n(JAA, Textbook on Logic, released 2010) and its fate\\ntells us much about his philosophical ambitions. According to his\\nbiographer, Anderson submitted the manuscript not to narrowly academic\\npublishers but to A. R. Orage, the editor of The New Age\\n(Kennedy 1995 p. 64), described by the historian of Scottish\\nphilosophy, George Davie, as serving a readership “of\\nlibertarian and often leftist autodidacts” (Davie 1977 p. 57).\\nUnder Orage the journal was nonetheless a highly influential avant\\ngarde modernist vehicle for literary and political criticism. Anderson\\nconceived his logic to have wider cultural aims than merely codifying\\nforms of reasoning and when Orage rejected the work due to its\\nsupposed eccentricity Anderson was deeply disappointed.\",\n \"\\nLogic for Anderson is concerned with statements, and not with\\nquestions, commands, prescriptions, exhortations or other forms of\\nexpression. Logic is concerned fundamentally with statements that\\nraise an “objective issue” and these other forms of speech\\ndo so only indirectly (JAA, Lectures on Scientific\\nMethod, c.1950). Discourse implies a common logic of assertion,\\nimplication and definition (EMP, 6). Apparent\\ndifferences in logical form are due simply to different modes of\\nexpression. Any statement, if it is saying anything at all, can be\\nshown by transformation into logical form to be asserting some matter\\nof fact: a description of a certain thing as being of a certain kind,\\na claim that something is the case. Anderson’s students were set\\na range of statements to be transformed into one of the four\\nAristotelian propositional forms, traditionally designated as the A,\\nE, I and O forms. In any field, until questions or issues are posed in\\none of these four propositional forms they will inevitably be confused\\nand potentially misleading bases for inquiry.\",\n \"\\nSo, from typical examination papers in Andersonian logic:\",\n \"\\nIn Anderson’s view of traditional logic, the universal\\nproposition “All As are B” asserts the\\nsimple fact that all As are B; a thing’s being of\\na certain sort is the irreducible minimum of a fact or state of\\naffairs; there is no assertion of some “general\\nconnection” over and above that fact. Nor does the universal\\nproposition assert that some class relation holds between A and\\nB – the assertion of a class relation is just a way of\\nsaying that certain propositions are true. Nor is it about some\\ntotality A: it asserts simply of each and every A that\\nit is B. And although it does not directly assert the existence\\nof A, it certainly presupposes it. It is indeed the great\\nvirtue for Anderson of his version of traditional logic that it fully\\nbrings out the existential presuppositions of the proposition. In\\naddition, Anderson thinks that what are often taken to be supreme\\nlogical truths (for example, identity statements) are not truths at\\nall, for they say nothing. There is no analytic truth: if a\\nproposition says anything at all, it can be false. Anderson rejects\\nthe view that mathematical truths are so only within a calculus, that\\nis, derivable from a given set of chosen postulates.\",\n \"\\nAnderson rejects Mill’s view that universal statements are\\ngeneralisations from experience. Universal propositions cannot be\\nderived by generalisation from particular experiences, because there\\nsimply are no such immediate experiences. Such truths are derived from\\nother universal propositions and tested in experience. In discussing\\nthe functions of subjects, predicates and the copula in propositions\\nand the logical relations between propositions, logic is already\\ndiscussing universals, individuals, identity, space-time and\\ncausality. And, contra Mill’s inductivism, because we have\\ndirect experience of generality and of relations, a single instance is\\nsufficient to establish the universal proposition (say, that all glass\\nis brittle). Further investigation may challenge such assertions since\\nall our beliefs are fallible but wholesale doubt is simply not an\\noption. The logical gap between particulars and universals that\\ninductive reasoning proposes is a gap that no amount of human\\nreasoning could hope to span. Hume was right in this, but instead of\\nembracing skepticism he should have concluded as did William James\\nthat generality and relations are as much a part of our experience as\\nare particulars.\",\n \"\\nThe validity of the syllogism is fundamental and Anderson rejects the\\nabsolute independence from syllogistic reasoning of other forms of\\nreasoning such as the relational, hypothetical and disjunctive. The\\nsyllogism demonstrates clearly that the subject in one proposition can\\nfunction as the predicate in another. The difference between subject\\nand predicate is purely one of function: the function of the subject\\nterm is to locate, that of the predicate to describe. There are not\\ntwo classes of entities involved here; that is, there are no pure\\nlocations/particulars/substances, just as there are no pure\\ndescriptions/universals. There is no logical gap that needs to be\\nspanned between subject and predicate terms: any term can play the\\nrole of particular or general, subject or predicate. \",\n \"\\nFor Anderson logic is the science of the most general features of\\nreality. Logic is not simply a useful calculus following on from an\\ninitial choice of primitives, and Anderson’s logic is not simply\\none version of predicate calculus among others. His view is that logic\\ndescribes the general structure of facts and the relations between\\nthem. It provides the conditions of possibility for all discourse, but\\nit is not about forms of language nor about special status entities\\nsuch as universals. It is about the most general features of facts.\\nUnderlying this propositional view of reality is the thesis that\\nthings within space and time are irreducibly complex. Every situation\\nhas both particular and general aspects represented by the subject and\\npredicate functions within the proposition. Every predicate can be the\\nsubject of a further proposition. The simplest unit is a being there\\nand so, a state of affairs in which a particular is characterised in\\nsome specific way, but neither the particular nor the universal could\\nexist independently. We never arrive at absolutely simple elements in\\nany field. The quest for such simples urged by Russell, Moore and the\\nearly Wittgenstein indicated a residual rationalist element in their\\nthinking. On the other hand, against the idealist opponents of these\\nearly realists, Anderson of course insisted that no entities could be\\nconstituted, wholly or in part, by their relations\\n(EMP, 43). \",\n \"\\nMackie described Anderson as the last of the Aristotelian logicians\\nand observed some awkward consequences for his conception of logic:\\nthe problem of false propositions; the absence of a way of\\ndealing with singular propositions; an inability to deal with multiple\\nquantification; the difficulty in expressing relational propositions\\nin subject-predicate and syllogistic form. For Mackie, any logic\\ndealing with false propositions, relations of contradiction and\\ncontrariety, entertained arguments, falsifications and reductions\\nad absurdum must be something more than an account of\\npropositions as what is there (Mackie 1985).\",\n \"\\nAnderson distinguished idealism’s substance-attribute logic that\\nhad been condemned by Russell from his own subject-predicate logic.\\nNonetheless, his Aristotelian logic of everyday experience did seem to\\nsit uneasily with the broader search for logics that could more\\nadequately capture forms of reasoning across a wide variety of\\ndomains. Ontological logics like Anderson’s came to seem\\n“naively realistic and Aristotelian”, and “hard to\\nhang on to” in the history of twentieth century philosophy\\n(Rorty 1986). It is not just that 20th century philosophy’s\\n“counter-intuitive redescription and relativisation to choice of\\nprimitives” (Rorty 1986) ignored Anderson’s insistence\\nthat logic is not a calculus. Technical developments in the logic of\\nmodal, tense and relational terms proceeded without reference to\\nAnderson’s form of onto-logic.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.1 Logic\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nNonetheless, a traditional form of metaphysics did make a resurgence\\nin the last quarter of the century in the work of Anderson’s\\nstudent, D. M. Armstrong. Armstrong accepts against Anderson that the\\nnature of space and time is a matter for scientific investigation, as\\nis the identification of real properties – Anderson’s view\\nof three-dimensional space and one-dimensional time as\\n“ontological bed-rock”, for example, simply cannot be\\nsustained (Armstrong, introduction to STC). But he\\nfinds real interest in Anderson’s conception of the categories,\\nas elaborated in the lectures on Samuel Alexander, recently published\\nas Space, Time and the Categories: Lectures on Metaphysics\\n(STC – published from typescript lectures in\\nArmstrong’s possession and originally presented in\\n1949–50). In his introduction to these lectures, Armstrong\\nwrites:\",\n \"\\nThe categories of being dive so deep that though quantum physics and\\nother physics may have interesting things to say to philosophy –\\nin particular whether causation is in fact deterministic – the\\nissues are not susceptible of being resolved at the level of\\nexperimental science, yet seem to be real issues. Science may be able\\nto cast light on whether causation is irreducibly statistical or not,\\nbut how can it decide what causation is in itself? Is it just a\\nuniversal or statistical regularity? Or is it something deeper in the\\nnature of things? What of the properties and quantities in which\\nscience inevitably traffics? Are they just concepts in our minds, or\\nsomethings in the objects that our concepts merely reflect?\\n(STC, x)\\n\",\n \"\\nIn these lectures Anderson systematically derived the number of\\ncategories and their ordering from the nature of the proposition and\\nits subject-predicate structure. The result was a scheme of 13\\ncategories, laid out in Hegel-like “succession” organized\\nin three groups with the categories of Universality and Quantity\\nacting as “link categories” in the two transitions between\\nthe groups.\",\n \"\\nArmstrong concludes:\",\n \"\\n[W]ith this scheme, John Anderson joins a very distinguished line of\\nphilosophers who have presented us with a set of categories. We have\\nfirst Plato (the doctrine of Highest Kinds in his dialogue The\\nSophist), then Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Samuel Alexander.\\n(STC, xiii)\\n\",\n \"\\nDespite his appreciation of Hegel, Anderson thought that Kant had laid\\n“the foundations for a logic of things as historical” and\\nhere “Hegel can be regarded only as reactionary”\\n(EMP, 83). Kant had shown that the objects of science\\nare just the objects of observation, that “matter” is\\nsomething we perceive and not something lying behind our perceptions.\\nKant’s answer to Hume was that things perceived are connected\\nwith one another; they pass through and affect one another in various\\nways because they are related in space and time. We are aware of such\\nrelations in being aware of anything at all. But Anderson insists\\nagainst Kant that relations are known on the same level as the\\nrelated. Kant was still subject to the assumptions of\\nrepresentationalism, and thought of the objects of science as mere\\nphenomena. Kant viewed space and time as forms of intuition under\\nwhich we must experience the world. He viewed the categories such as\\ncausality and substance as forms of understanding under which we must\\nunderstand the world. Things-in-themselves are not given to us in\\nexperience, and so remain beyond our cognitive grasp. In this way Kant\\nset up an untenable division in reality between phenomena and\\nthings-in-themselves, and along with this division the idea that our\\nthoughts, practices and forms of inquiry in some way create or\\nconstitute the reality we inhabit, act upon and investigate. Anderson,\\nfollowing Samuel Alexander, proposed a realist alternative such that\\nspace and time would be considered not as forms of intuition, but as\\nforms of being, the categories not as forms of understanding but as\\ncategories of being, categories under which all being must fall. On\\nsuch a proposal we can recognise the objects of science as\\nthings-in-themselves.\",\n \"\\nAnderson claimed to have avoided the pitfalls of traditional\\nmetaphysical questions concerning the reality of universals through\\nhis account of the proposition (cf., “‘Universals’\\nand Occurrences”, EMP). H. O. Mounce has\\nsuggested that Anderson’s realism may not be able to avoid the\\nissue. In particular, his account of universals is in danger of\\ncollapsing into nominalism on the question of whether the directly\\nperceived relation (say, of causality) is on separate occasions\\none and the same (for Mounce, anything less than complete\\nidentity would be a retreat to nominalism – Mounce 1989). Mounce\\nsuggests that Anderson may not be able to hold off a Humean challenge\\nhere. He would be drawn back to a familiar realist-nominalist debate\\non the nature of universals, which may explain why Armstrong’s\\nphilosophy takes seriously Plato’s question of the one and the\\nmany as the starting point for metaphysical reflection (Armstrong\\n1997). From a Quinean perspective, however, Armstrong’s\\nmetaphysics, despite its improved scientific credentials, remains\\nattentive to old school pseudo-questions (Quine 1953). (Michael Devitt\\nexplicitly associates Armstrong with Quine’s parody of the\\ntraditional Scottish metaphysician “McX” in Devitt\\n2010.)\",\n \"\\nFor his more empirically-minded students, Anderson’s logic\\nseemed to rely upon an unwelcome element of a priorism. Any\\nweakening of our confidence in Anderson’s identification of\\nlogic and ontology, for example, would critically undermine\\nsignificant components of the position. First, it would no longer be\\nclear that things spoken of together must exist in the same way\\n– the notion of a single level of being would become a matter\\nfor investigation (what kinds of differences exist) rather than\\ndetermined by general principle (Mackie 1985). Regarding his social\\nthought, the importance of individuals’ behaviour in explaining\\nthe nature and operation of social movements and institutions would\\nrequire investigation, rather than a pronouncement based purely on\\ngeneral grounds. Again, Anderson’s rejection of the rationalist\\nview that there must be simple or ultimate units upon which\\ncomplex things can be built would not lead without further argument to\\nthe view that there cannot be such simple parts or totalities\\n(Mackie 1985).\",\n \"\\nAccording to Anderson, David Hume’s skepticism was a direct\\nresult of his inability to work out a logic, to create a coherent\\naccount of existence. But his mentor at Edinburgh, Norman Kemp Smith,\\nhad long argued that Hume’s importance was in demonstrating the\\nfactual limits of all logic. If Hume had failed to work out a logic to\\nAnderson’s satisfaction this was because in his view\\nphilosophers should resist the temptation of this kind of\\n“systematic working out” altogether (Davie 1977).\\nHume’s reservations about a “systematic working out”\\nhave emerged in another form with the “linguistic\\nreturn” proposed by Huw Price, who became the first\\nappointment to the Challis Chair of Philosophy within a united\\ndepartment at Sydney since the split of 1974. Price describes the\\nproject as a “linguistic retooling of metaphysics” (Price\\n2011, p. 18) and the attempt specifically to avoid Mackie’s\\n“placement” issue which arises from an obsession with the\\nrepresentational aspect of language (although Mackie himself regarded\\nthis with Anderson as an ontological issue – see section 5.4\\nbelow). On Price’s view plurality exists in the world of an\\nentirely familiar kind: a plurality of ways of talking and ways of\\nbehaviour which don’t need to be mirrored in an ontology of any\\nkind.\",\n \"\\nIt has been observed that Anderson’s most prominent students\\naccepted in fact very little of his system. It is still the case that\\ntheir most fundamental philosophical commitments can be traced to the\\nboldness of Anderson’s position. And Armstrong suggests that the\\nphilosopher at some point can only outline his or her most basic\\ncommitments. Stephen Mumford summarises Armstrong’s own position as\\nfollows: no God, no non-spatial minds, no abstract\\nentities beyond space-time, no Platonic forms or realm of universals;\\nan austere ontology without transcendent universals, realm of numbers,\\ntranscendent standards of value, timeless propositions, non-existent\\nobjects, possibilia, possible worlds, abstract classes (Mumford 2007\\np. 5). Armstrong diverges from Anderson in his emphasis upon\\nscientific naturalism, in the position that the world is to be\\ncompletely described in terms of a completed physics. What properties\\nexist will ultimately be determined solely by science, and the results\\nwill inevitably seem counter-intuitive within the perspective of\\nAristotelian common sense. But for Armstrong this scientific view can\\nbe reconciled with a form of metaphysical realism derived from\\nAnderson’s teaching which takes universals to exist immanently\\nrather than in a transcendent realm; which takes the world to contain\\nnothing but particulars having properties and being related to each\\nother; which takes the world to be nothing but a single\\nspatio-temporal system; which regards reality as a world of states of\\naffairs conceived as particulars bearing properties; which insists\\nthat states of affairs are the smallest units of existence since\\nneither particulars nor universals are capable of independent\\nexistence. \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.2 Metaphysics\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe Greeks, according to Anderson,\",\n \"\\nare far clearer on many questions than modern philosophers …\\nthey avoid many modern errors, and especially … they are not,\\nlike the moderns, obsessed with ‘the problem of knowledge’\\n– they do not set out to discover (i.e., to know!) how, or how\\nmuch, we can know, before they are prepared to know anything. This\\n‘criticism of the instrument’ amounts to scientific\\ndefeatism, and the instrumental view of mind has both prevented a\\nknowledge of minds themselves, and hampered the direct inquiry into\\nlogical and other scientific problems. (EMP, 82)\\n\",\n \"\\nAnderson’s Hegelian diagnoses of the obsessions of modern\\nphilosophy and Cartesianism with epistemology are likely to elicit\\nrecognition and appreciation from many contemporary readers.\\nCartesianism in modern philosophy represented for Anderson an\\nanti-classicist movement: an antipathy towards history and tradition.\\nModern philosophy searched within abstract rationality as the ground\\nof human knowledge, rather than in concrete and many-sided culture.\\nThe whole modern era was characterised by this lack of concreteness\\n(EMP, 195). \",\n \"\\nHegel in this regard stands out as a lonely classical figure within\\nthe history of modern philosophy (EMP, 201).\\nPhilosophy since Descartes has become infected by practicalism and\\nprogressivism and logic has been reduced to the status of an\\ninstrument, a generalised method for acquiring new knowledge. Along\\nwith this instrumental view of logic came contempt for the syllogism,\\nreplaced by Bacon with “inductive reasoning” and by\\nDescartes with rational intuition. \",\n \"\\nEmpiricism for Anderson is primarily the denial of any higher form of\\nbeing, any other reality by which experienced reality can be found\\nwanting, or dependent, or in a position of striving to emulate, and so\\nforth. So also, the importance of modern realism lies not in its\\naccount of knowledge, but its development of a theory of independence,\\nthe rejection of any conception of relative existence and the\\ndevelopment of a logic of situations (JAA, Philosophy\\nII Distinction Lectures, 1937).\",\n \"\\nThere is no criterion of “truth”, “nothing by\\nbelieving which we believe something else”\\n(EMP, 55). Truth is simply what is conveyed by the\\ncopula, the “is” of the proposition. It cannot reside in\\ncorrespondence between a believed proposition and something else we\\ncall reality, nor in relations between propositions in terms of\\ncoherence. Propositions are not forms of words: we convey our beliefs\\nby words, but what we are putting forward for acceptance is not the\\nform of words but the state of affairs itself. Representionalist and\\ncorrespondence theories of truth are “attempts to get behind the\\nproposition – to maintain (in words!) that we mean more than we\\ncan say.” (EMP, 5). We must abandon the notion\\nof “thought” as something contrasted with or identified\\nwith things. Our thoughts are just our dealings with things –\\nAnderson shared with Norman Kemp Smith a quasi-Calvinist conception of\\nknowledge as a striving and grappling with problems rather than\\nmirroring an external reality. Anderson dismisses most contemporary\\nphilosophies as “varieties of representationalism”\\n(EMP, 87). The proposition is not “about”\\nanything in the sense of representing an external reality. \",\n \"\\nOne of Anderson’s most audacious articles was the 1934\\n“Mind as Feeling” which attempts to work out exactly how\\nmentality should be conceived as belonging to the spatio-temporal\\nrealm. Anderson believed that once we admit the spatial nature of mind\\nor of anything mental, “Cartesianism goes”\\n(JAA, Lectures on Reid, 1935.) The mental realm\\nconsists as much of situations as the natural and social world, so our\\nknowledge of mind is on the same footing as the non-mental. He\\nrepudiates the Cartesian subject-object model which sees\\nphilosophy’s task as the study of the medium for knowledge\\nunderstood as the relation whereby one entity reproduces within itself\\nthe essence or intrinsic characteristics of some other entity. There\\nis no such medium for there are not different entities within space\\nand time requiring such mediation. There is no “knower”\\nconceived as a point of consciousness that has stepped outside\\nhistory, outside of space and time. In our striving and grappling with\\nillusions so as to come to terms with ourselves and the things around\\nus we never step outside the movement of things, nor see behind the\\nproposition; never reach outside the realm of propositional claim and\\ncounter-claim.\",\n \"\\nWhat is this thing that strives? Anderson adopts a Nietzschean,\\npre-Socratic view of mentality as a social structure of instincts and\\npassions competing and cooperating. It is the emotions or feelings\\nthemselves that strive. The passion of curiosity, for example, is the\\nactual agent of inquiry. There is no entity of conscious willing that\\ndirects our attention on the world. “Part of the deception, of\\ncourse, part of the ‘analytic’ myth, is of an egoistic\\ncharacter (‘what do I find when I set my analysis\\nmachine rumbling?’), and this is opposed to the fact that\\nlanguage and inquiry are inherent in social life, are at all stages\\npart of communication.” (EMP, 181.)\",\n \"\\nThat critical inquiry itself rests on the existence of specific ways\\nof carrying on and proceeds from within some definite way of life,\\nprovides one important link with the ethical aspect of\\nAnderson’s thought. Such ways of life which lift individuals out\\nof their humdrum existence and base material concerns are what\\nAnderson regards as the embodiment of ethical goodness. For Anderson\\nif the good exists we must find it as a natural quality in this world,\\njust as we come to know and identify other natural qualities. However,\\nthe good is not merely something we discover, but “that by which\\nwe discover things” (EMP, 266). Anderson was\\naware that his view of the good as a natural quality would not\\nconvince everyone, and that he could do little to convert the\\ndoubters. But he claimed that there will be those who recognise the\\ntruth of his position, seeing this view of the good as\\n“something with which they have long been in a certain way\\nacquainted” (EMP, 267).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.3 Epistemology\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n“We do not, in fact, step out of the movement of things, ask\\n‘What am I to do?’ and, having obtained an answer, step in\\nagain. All our actions, all our questionings and answerings, are part\\nof the movement of things.” (EMP, 241). \",\n \"\\nPositive ethical inquiry for Anderson is concerned with the\\nidentification of good as a natural quality and he finds that this\\nmost naturally pertains to certain actually existing practices and\\nways of living in the world of common experience. Traditionally the\\ngood has been identified abstractly as an end to be achieved or aimed\\nfor, either as a transcendent reality to which we can only aspire (but\\nwhich in some unexplained way is supposed to guide our moral actions)\\nor as an end external to our actions in the real world and by which\\nthose actions may be evaluated; for example, some optimal quantum of\\nhappiness or welfare for the greatest number of people involved. In\\neither case, a relational explanation is mistakenly offered in place\\nof identifying a real quality. This has been the problem with\\nvirtually all moral thought since the Greeks, although Anderson\\nthought that G. E. Moore had made important advances in our thinking\\non these matters. Anderson proposes that the good exists in forms of\\nenterprise, productive activities capable of developing in a special\\nway by means of “communication” – individuals are\\ncaught up in these goods and in the process transcend their more\\nimmediate and mundane goals and demands. Any theory of social life\\nmust take account of activities with no formulated end: customs,\\nregular forms of behaviour, and practices which precede the\\nformulation of ends (JAA, Philosophical Implications\\nof Marxism, 1945).\",\n \"\\nValues have objective reality, but not in a transcendent realm\\ndivorced from this world of facts or states of affairs. Anderson\\nagrees that “the way things are” includes moral facts:\\n“it is impossible to discuss social processes except in terms of\\nways of living or forms of enterprise, and that is moral\\ncharacterisation” (EMP, 330). But he cannot\\naccept that moral characterisation entails moral prescription because\\nthis would commit us to a morality of commands, and to programmes for\\naction and reform designed to achieve a merely external good. The\\nimportance of ethical inquiry is in giving an account of\\nproductive activities which entail the operation of a certain\\nmentality or spirit. Within such activities there is no question of\\nexternal ends or rewards to be achieved. Goodness exists in free,\\nspontaneous participation in such movements and activities (although\\nnot of course in the metaphysical sense of undetermined free will\\n– such practices, social movements and ways of life are not\\nthings we as individuals “opt into” at will; they in a\\nsense adopt us). Acting because we feel obliged so\\nto act is on this view an indication of the absence of\\ngoodness. Although the notion of “virtue” does not much\\nappeal to him, Anderson’s emphasis upon the transformative role\\nof practices and ways of life upon the ethical outlook of the\\nindividual does seem to accord with many of the major preoccupations\\nof virtue ethicists. Alasdair Macintyre recognises the value to\\ncontemporary Aristotelian virtue ethics of Anderson’s\\nHeraclitean appreciation of conflict and the importance he attributes\\nto critical traditions (Macintyre 1981).\",\n \"\\nEthics is especially concerned to bring out the facts of conflict, the\\nopposition of different strains in things in general, but in human and\\nmental life most particularly. The category of causality is central to\\nthe ethical sphere – false views of causality represent the\\nattempt to escape conflict, to gain a standpoint above that of strife\\nand interlocking tensions (JAA, Lectures on\\nCriticism, 1954). Positive ethics exhibits the good life as constantly\\nstruggling with difficulties and other types of life driven by\\nexternal or instrumental considerations (JAA,\\nLectures on Greek Theories of Education, 1954). The good exists in\\nstruggle and so cannot be made secure (JAA,\\nPhilosophy I Lectures, 1943). In all spheres of life the good can only\\nmake its stand. Attempts at reconciliation and compromise often\\nobscure the issues and may well prove detrimental to the good. The\\nresulting Heraclitean harmony is best served by this stance of\\nindependence and intransigence.\",\n \"\\nSociological inquiry is appropriate for the bulk of traditional moral\\nterms. Forms of social organisation develop regular habits of action\\nwhich come to be seen as obligatory: rights, duties and so forth are\\neasily understood by those involved in the same way of life. Bourgeois\\nsociety is based on commodification and contractual relations. The\\nmarket destroys folk life and with it one important source by which\\nculture can be refreshed (JAA, Lectures on Marx,\\n1950). Marxism has made important advances in this area but Anderson\\nnotes the “simple-mindedness” of most Marxists on moral\\nquestions – altruism seems to be the peak of their thinking\\nabout morality (Cf., remarks on Kautsky, EMP, 321)\\nand little consideration is given to the importance of a plurality of\\nways of living.\",\n \"\\nParticipation in disinterested activities represents the ethical value\\nof “devotion to a cause”. Anderson even offers a\\nsociological interpretation of sin as a person’s sense of\\ninadequacy to social movements, one’s inability to keep the flag\\nflying, to devote oneself thoroughly to these kinds of activity. Sin\\nappears then as a kind of backsliding and subjectivism: the individual\\nsetting him or herself up as the standard. Anderson was opposed to all\\nforms of religious instruction and interference in educational\\npractice, but he occasionally shocked his students with a\\nquasi-theological appreciation of the existence of evil in the world.\\nPassmore commented that forms of religion that emphasise that our life\\nis not of our making and that it goes on independently of our plans,\\nare far more preferable in Anderson’s view to any form of\\nsecular sentimental humanism (Passmore, Introduction to\\nEMP).\",\n \"\\nJ. L. Mackie regarded Anderson’s positive conception of goods as\\nbeing “hopeless as an account of moral talk and reasoning”\\n(Mackie 1985). However, despite being one of the current standard\\nbearers for anti-realism in ethics the manner in which Mackie posed\\nthe question of the subjectivity of values owes much to\\nAnderson’s ontological standpoint. Mackie seemed at pains to\\nexplain that his subjectivist view of ethical terms complied with\\nAnderson’s main concern. Subjectivism in ethics is for Mackie\\nthe doctrine that objective facts in this field do not include any\\ndescriptive assignment of goodness or rightness of actions. It is\\n“precisely because we want to distinguish what is simply and\\nabsolutely the case that we say values/obligations are\\nrelative.” (Mackie 1985). Mackie suggested that linguistic\\nphilosophy had made the realist-antirealist opposition a philosophical\\npseudo-question, and that with renewed interest in ontological issues\\nthis opposition returned in a pressing form in the\\n“placement” issue regarding various “queer”\\nentities in the world.\",\n \"\\nRush Rhees was a student of Anderson’s at Edinburgh and, of\\ncourse, later of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s. Like Mackie, he was\\ncritical of Anderson’s ethical theory, but from the other pole\\nin that he was more inclined towards Anderson’s positive view of\\nethics. He regarded Anderson’s notion of a “way of\\nlife” as at some level the same as Wittgenstein’s (Rhees\\n1969). But he came to think that Anderson paid too little attention to\\nthe ways in which moral questions are posed for individuals, that\\nAnderson too readily portrayed individual concerns as base,\\negocentric, low concerns in contrast with the uplifting concerns\\nresulting from participation in social movements. Anderson, Rhees\\nconcluded, had no appreciation for the urgency with which moral\\nquestions presented themselves to individuals (Rhees 1999, p. xiii),\\nnor their distinctive character compared to more practical questions\\nof how to go on. However, Rhees always emphasised the Andersonian\\nlesson that values are rooted in different traditions and movements.\\nWe have to resist the temptation to locate values in a realm which\\ntranscends these contexts. It is futile to argue that the moral\\nindividual is located in a realm outside history, outside the\\nparticularities of space and time. Only in these contexts do the\\nindividual’s convictions, problems, struggles and difficulties\\nhave their sense. Resources for criticism of moral codes exist within\\nmovements, and criticism develops only within ways of living. Notions\\nof the “common good” generally conceal special interests\\n(Rhees 1989, p. 53).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.4 Ethics\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAnderson’s moral and political thought was strongly influenced\\nby the writings of the French socialist Georges Sorel (and before him\\nthe libertarian socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon). Although Anderson\\nabandoned communism and socialism as movements whose time had passed,\\nthe influence of these thinkers for whom socialism was a moral\\nmovement remained with him (Cole 2009). In all fields of human\\nactivity, there is a conflict between what Sorel described as the\\n“ethic of the producer”, characterised by spontaneous and\\ncooperative endeavour, and the ethic of the consumer, characterised by\\nan instrumental morality of reward and punishment, obligation and\\nexpectation, an ethic most perfectly suited in sociological terms to\\nthe marketplace (and in purely psychological terms to the compulsive\\nobligations of the neurotic personality). More accurately, for\\nAnderson, the ethic of the consumer is an ethic without a\\ntheme. In history there are classical periods of cultural\\nachievement in contrast with periods in which we struggle to find a\\ntheme at all; that is, periods in which nothing really happens,\\nnothing develops from within. Anderson also admired Vico’s\\ncyclical view of history and by the 1940s had not only resigned\\nhimself to the collapse of heroic 19th century socialism, but\\ndiscerned in the era of post-war optimism and state planning the early\\nstages of one of Vico’s periods of barbarism\\n(EMP, 290). More positively, for Anderson the\\nrejection of all totalising views, the thesis that “no formula\\ncovers all things”, has the practical consequence of supporting\\nand encouraging “a life of responsibility and adventure”\\nfor those prepared to face the situation (EMP,\\n86).\",\n \"\\nAnderson intended to combat the influence of idealism in our thinking\\non political issues evident since Plato’s Republic. The\\nmodernist, realist project he meant to develop in opposition to the\\npolitical outlook of British Idealism would draw upon the major\\ntheorists of conflict, struggle and cyclic historical movement:\\nHeraclitus, Vico and Sorel. In place of a simple contrast between\\nindividual and state Anderson insisted upon the complex interplay of\\nmovements, institutions and traditions. In place of an unargued\\ntendency towards ever greater social harmony he insisted on the\\ninevitability of conflict and constant adjustment, the persistent\\ndanger of regress, and the consequent need for clear lines of critical\\nengagement. Order is a Heraclitean state of balance between complex\\ninteracting forces rather than a normative standard by which to\\nmeasure existing social and political formations. Conflict is not an\\nindication of social dysfunction which needs to be overcome or\\nrationalised away, but a necessary feature of any social institution.\\nAny notion of an ideal state without such features can have no bearing\\non our present real life situation.\",\n \"\\nAnderson’s political thought is distinctive for his rejection of\\nthe state as the fundamental object of political investigation and\\nreflection. This aspect of his thought aligns rather strongly with\\nmodern Nietzschean and anti-humanist political thought. For Anderson\\nthe social is not reducible to agreements among atomic individuals. In\\nhis anti-individualist statements, however, he seems to echo an\\nidealist view of social movements portrayed, for example, by Bernard\\nBosanquet who similarly decried the “repellent isolation”\\nof atomist individualism. Culture and human achievement depend upon\\nthe capacity of human beings to engage in activities that take them\\noutside themselves. Apart from these struggles with nature or within\\nbroad social movements, a person collapses into non-entity (Bosanquet\\n1899, pp. xxxiii ff.). \",\n \"\\nAnderson’s rejection of good as an end to be achieved applied to\\nhis ultimate rejection of socialism as a progressive movement and of\\nMarxism in particular. “The doctrine of history as struggle is\\nat once the liberal and the scientific part of Marxism; the doctrine\\nof socialism as something to be established (‘classless\\nsociety’) is its servile part” (EMP,\\n339). Socialism for Anderson was not a goal to be achieved but a\\nmovement to be joined. The amelioration of social conditions of the\\nworkers would be achieved by the workers themselves in the process of\\nasserting the value and validity of their way of life within the wider\\nsocio-political sphere. But once alleviation became the primary goal\\nof the workers’ movement and representatives, that movement was\\nfinished as a progressive and liberating force. It could be bought off\\nby employers and the state. Socialism understood as a force lobbying\\nfor state action and funding to redress market inequities had become\\nmired in “servility” as a matter of historical fact.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.5 Social and Political Thought\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIn the 1950s, Anderson retreated from broad political theory which had\\nbeen a feature of his lectures and writings of the 1940s, and attended\\nmore to local and institutional questions. This new emphasis emerged\\nin his lectures on education and on criticism. Central to\\nAnderson’s view of education is the rejection of any utilitarian\\nor instrumental view of education, the view of education as a means to\\nsome other purpose. Education needs to be understood as an activity\\nwith positive characteristics of its own. Education is critical,\\ndevoted to developing and discarding hypotheses, to seeing through\\npretensions of all kinds. It means for the individual “finding a\\nway of life” and it affects the whole life of the educated\\nindividual. Critical intellectual life survives as a social tradition,\\na “movement” to which individuals are attracted and in\\nwhich they are caught up.\",\n \"\\nAnderson’s classicism promotes the history of European culture\\nfrom the early Greeks as a tradition of critical thought that can\\nrefresh and fortify contemporary education against the predations of\\npracticalism and servility in the modern world. Education is concerned\\nwith training in taste and judgement. The educated individual is not\\nshackled by the assumptions of his society or group\\n(JAA, Lectures on the Educational Theories of Spencer\\nand Dewey, 1949). But to play its part, education must resist outside\\nstandards (such as those set by the attitudes and capacities of\\ncommercial society, or by the vocational needs of business) as to what\\nis to be allowed and valued in institutions of education. Rhees\\nsuggested that Anderson was primarily concerned with a “grammar\\nschool education”, one not suited to the “masses”\\n(Rhees 1969 p. 168). In particular, for Anderson, vocational and\\nmoralistic standards have to be resisted. True learning is not easy\\nand cannot be made easy – it advances only through overcoming\\nresistances. The inquiring life has to stand up for itself. It is just\\nas real, just as practical, just as positive a part of society as\\nother activities (J. L. Mackie, in EAI).\",\n \"\\nAny activity or institution of learning can proceed only along the\\nlines of certain traditions with custodians and in terms of common\\nactivities (JAA, Lectures on Greek Theories of\\nEducation, 1954). For education is simply one struggling tendency in\\nsociety itself among others – even within institutions\\nsupposedly devoted to educational aims, true educational values have\\nto be fought for. \",\n \"\\nAnderson’s lectures on education are of interest because they\\ninclude the most extensive account of his appreciation for the\\nclassicism of Matthew Arnold, but more particularly of his attitude\\ntowards the philosophy of John Dewey. Besides his early\\nacknowledgement of the importance of William James (at least the more\\nmetaphysical writings on radical empiricism) and his critical articles\\non F. C. S. Schiller, the consideration of Dewey’s educational\\ntheory is the most important reflection on American pragmatism in\\nAnderson’s work. The question of the relation of theory to\\npractice was one that exercised Anderson repeatedly. His position was\\nthat the connection was a close one, but not in the direction that he\\nassumed pragmatism urged. Theory was not dependent upon practice for\\nthe validity of its findings. Rather inquiry proceeded from particular\\nkinds of practice. Certain forms of life made possible an objective\\nview of things. Moreover, theory was not subsidiary to practice in an\\ninstrumental sense because it was itself a distinct form of practice\\nwith its own requirements and standards. Anderson reflected upon this\\nquestion both in the lectures on education but also in his lectures on\\nMarxism and most particularly on Marx’s Theses on\\nFeuerbach where he was concerned to dispute Sidney Hook’s\\npragmatist reading of the theses (JAA, Philosophical\\nImplications of Marxism). Both the fact of his consideration of the\\nenigmatic Theses and his substantial conclusions on the\\nrelation of theory to practice would have resonated with the\\nAlthusserian Marxists in the Department of General Philosophy in the\\n1970s. \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.6 Education\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAnderson’s influence extended beyond the confines of the\\nacademy. One of Anderson’s students, a young man from the\\nPacific island of Tonga, Futa Helu, later claimed that John\\nAnderson’s realism had revolutionised his thinking, particularly\\nwith reference to the notion of “tapu” or the sacred, as\\nthe cover-up for the special demands of the ruling class in Tonga.\\nReturning to Tonga in the early 1960s, he founded the Atenisi (Athens)\\nInstitute as an independent high school based on the ideals of Greek\\nphilosophy. He added “Atenisi University” in 1975, where\\nthe philosophical thought of Heraclitus as interpreted by Anderson\\nbecame the backbone of philosophy courses. Following Anderson’s\\nexample of public engagement, Helu is credited as one of the\\nintellectual architects of the democracy movement in Tonga (Keith\\nCampbell, personal communication).\",\n \"\\nAnderson’s influence on the self-styled “Sydney\\nPush” is more widely known. The latter was a diffuse sub-culture\\nof anarchist libertarians who met around Sydney’s inner city in\\nthe 1950s and 1960s. Members were imbued with a spirit of\\nanti-careerism, and a major influence in their meetings, talks and\\ndrinking sessions was the philosophy of John Anderson who had lectured\\nmany of them on the value of risk, endeavour, withdrawal from\\nconsumerist society and the overriding value of criticism to the\\nhealth of a society. Through his influence on many of these figures,\\nAnderson affected the tone of intellectual debate and discussion in\\nSydney and beyond. If the key figures of the movement are relatively\\nunknown, there were more famous figures who moved through this\\nenvironment and were on their own accounts deeply affected by its\\nintellectual stimulus: such figures as Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes\\nand Clive James.\",\n \"\\nMore centrally involved with the life of the Push over an extended\\nperiod and more particularly with the direct teachings of John\\nAnderson was the anarchist activist and philosopher George Molnar. He\\nattended Anderson’s lectures in the 1950s and was active in\\ndebates on metaphysical questions in the 1960s associated with\\nArmstrong and C. B. Martin. Students recall Armstrong and Molnar in\\nthe university quadrangle around 1970 arguing about dispositions and\\npowers with an intensity no doubt propelled by their political\\ndisagreements at the time. Molnar conducted courses on anarchism and\\neducation theory in the early 1970s but in 1976 resigned his position\\nat the university, a move consistent with the anti-careerist ethos of\\nthe Push and of the radical politics of the time. Perhaps he also\\nfound his philosophical interests on the wrong side of an\\nirreconcilable split within the department. Some thirty years later,\\nhe returned to academic life to take up a part-time position as John\\nAnderson Research Fellow at the University of Sydney, but died\\nunexpectedly in 2002. His book Powers: a study in metaphysics\\nwas published posthumously in 2007 by Oxford University Press at the\\nurging of his old adversary D. M. Armstrong.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6. Influence Beyond the University: the Sydney Push\"\n }\n ]\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Armstrong, D. M., 1977, “On Metaphysics”,\nQuadrant, 21 (7): 64–69.","–––, 1997, Universals and Scientific\nRealism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","–––, 2001, “Interview”, Matters\nof the Mind: Poems, Essays and Interviews in Honour of Leonie\nKramer, Lee Jobling and Catherine Runcie (eds.), Sydney:\nUniversity of Sydney Press, 322–32.","Baker, A. J., 1979, The Social Thought and Political Life of\nProfessor John Anderson, Sydney: Angus and Robertson.","–––, 1986, Australian Realism: the\nSystematic Philosophy of John Anderson, Cambridge: Cambridge\nUniversity Press.","Barcun, A., 2002, Radical Students: the Old left at Sydney\nUniversity, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.","Birchall, B., 1983, “The Problem of Form”,\nInternational Studies in Philosophy, 15: 15–40.","Bosanquet, Bernard, 1899, The Philosophical Theory of the\nState, London: Macmillan.","Boucher, David, 1990, “Practical Hegelianism: Henry\nJones’s Lecture Tour of Australia”, Journal of the\nHistory of Ideas, 51(3): 423–52.","Brandom, Robert, 2000, Articulating Reasons: an introduction\nto inferentialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Cole, Creagh McLean, 2009, “John Anderson’s Political\nThought Revisited”, Australian Journal of Political\nScience, 44(2): 229–44.","–––, 2010, “The Ethic of the Producers:\nSorel, Anderson and Macintyre”, History of Political\nThought, 31(1): 155–76.","Damousi, Joy, 2005, Freud in the Antipodes: A Cultural History\nof Psychoanalysis in Australia, Sydney: University of New South\nWales Press.","Davie, George, 1961, The Democratic intellect: Scotland and\nHer Universities in the Nineteenth Century, Edinburgh: Edinburgh\nUniversity Press.","–––, 1977, “John Anderson in\nScotland”, Quadrant, 21(7): 55–57.","Devitt, Michael, 2010, “‘Ostrich Nominalism’ or\n‘Mirage Realism’”, in Putting Metaphysics First:\nEssays on Metaphysics and Epistemology, Oxford: Oxford University\nPress.","Eddy, Harry, 1944, “Ethics and Politics”,\nAustralasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, 22:\n70–92.","Franklin, James, 2003, Corrupting the Youth: a History of\nPhilosophy in Australia, Sydney: Macleay Press.","Gasking, D. A. T., 1949, “Anderson and the Tractatus\nLogico-Philosophicus”, Australasian Journal of\nPhilosophy, 27(1): 1–26.","Hibberd, Fiona, 2009, “John Anderson’s Development of\n(Situational) Realism and its Bearing on Psychology Today”,\nHistory of the Human Sciences, 22(4): 63–92.","Hylton, Peter, 1990, Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of\nAnalytic Philosophy, Oxford: Clarendon Press.","Kennedy, Brian, 1995, A Passion to Oppose: John Anderson,\nPhilosopher, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.","Macintyre, Alasdair, 1981, After Virtue: a Study in Moral\nTheory. London: Duckworth.","–––, 1988, Whose Justice; Which\nRationality, London: Duckworth.","Mackie, J. L., 1946, “A Refutation of Morals”,\nAustralasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy,\n24(1–2): 77–90.","–––, 1951, “Logic and Professor\nAnderson”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 29(2):\n109–113.","–––, 1985, “The Philosophy of John\nAnderson”, Logic and Knowledge: Selected Papers (Volume\nI), Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 1–20.","Mounce, H. O., 1989, “Anderson on Generality”,\nWittgenstein: Attention to Particulars. Essays in Honour of Rush\nRhees (1905–89), D. Z. Phillips and Peter Winch (eds.),\nLondon: Macmillan.","Mumford, Stephen, 2007, David Armstrong, Durham:\nAcumen.","Passmore, John, 1943, “Logical Positivism” (Parts I\nand II), Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy,\n21(2–3): 65–92; 22(3): 129–53.","–––, 1948, “Logical Positivism”\n(Part III), Australasian Journal Philosophy, 26(1):\n1–19.","–––, 1962, “John Anderson and Twentieth\nCentury Philosophy”, Introduction to John Anderson’s\nposthumous work, Studies in Empirical Philosophy, Sydney:\nAngus and Robertson, pp. ix-xxiv.","–––, 1963, “Philosophy”, in The\nPattern of Australian Culture, A. L. McLeod (ed.), New York:\nCornell University Press.","–––, 1997, Memoirs of a Semi-Detached\nAustralian, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.","Price, Huw, 2011, Naturalism Without Mirrors, Oxford:\nOxford University Press.","Quine, W. V. O., 1953, From a Logical Point of View,\nCambridge MA: Harvard University Press.","Redding, Paul, 2007, Analytic Philosophy and the Return of\nHegelian Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Reinhardt, Lloyd, 1980, “Olympian Pessimist”,\nQuadrant, 24(4): 48–52.","Rhees, Rush, 1969, Without Answers, London: Routledge and\nKegan Paul.","–––, 1999, Moral Questions, London:\nMacmillan.","Rorty, Richard, 1986, “From Language to Play”,\nProceedings of the American Philosophical Association, 59(5):\n747–53.","Ryle, Gilbert, 1950, “Logic and Professor Anderson”,\nAustralasian Journal of Philosophy, 28(3): 137–53.","–––, 1976, “Fifty Years of Philosophy and\nPhilosophers”, Philosophy, 51(198): 381–89.","Schiller, F. C. S., 1926, “Judgments and\nPropositions”, Mind (New Series), 35(139):\n337–43.","–––, 1927, “The Two Logics”,\nMind (New Series), 36(141): 64–68.","Stavropoulos, Pam, 1992, “Conservative Radical”,\nAustralian Journal of Anthropology, 3: 67–79.","Stewart, A. W., 2009, “A Debate about Anderson’s\nLogic”, History and Philosophy of Logic, 30(2):\n157–69.","Weblin, Mark, 2003, “Introduction”, in M. Weblin\n(ed.), A Perilous and Fighting Life: Political Writings of John\nAnderson, London: Pluto Press.","–––, 2007, “John Anderson”,\nDictionary of Twentieth Century British Philosophers, London:\nBloomsbury Academic.","–––, 2007, “John Anderson on Reid and\nScottish Philosophy”, Monist, 90: 310.","–––, 2010, “John Anderson and\nIdealism”, Biographical Encyclopedia of British\nIdealism, London: Bloomsbury Academic.","–––, 2014, “John Anderson Arrives:\n1930s”, History of Philosophy in Australia and New\nZealand, Graham Oppy and Nick Trakakis (eds.), Dordrecht:\nSpringer, pp. 55–87."],"string":"[\n \"Armstrong, D. M., 1977, “On Metaphysics”,\\nQuadrant, 21 (7): 64–69.\",\n \"–––, 1997, Universals and Scientific\\nRealism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2001, “Interview”, Matters\\nof the Mind: Poems, Essays and Interviews in Honour of Leonie\\nKramer, Lee Jobling and Catherine Runcie (eds.), Sydney:\\nUniversity of Sydney Press, 322–32.\",\n \"Baker, A. J., 1979, The Social Thought and Political Life of\\nProfessor John Anderson, Sydney: Angus and Robertson.\",\n \"–––, 1986, Australian Realism: the\\nSystematic Philosophy of John Anderson, Cambridge: Cambridge\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Barcun, A., 2002, Radical Students: the Old left at Sydney\\nUniversity, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.\",\n \"Birchall, B., 1983, “The Problem of Form”,\\nInternational Studies in Philosophy, 15: 15–40.\",\n \"Bosanquet, Bernard, 1899, The Philosophical Theory of the\\nState, London: Macmillan.\",\n \"Boucher, David, 1990, “Practical Hegelianism: Henry\\nJones’s Lecture Tour of Australia”, Journal of the\\nHistory of Ideas, 51(3): 423–52.\",\n \"Brandom, Robert, 2000, Articulating Reasons: an introduction\\nto inferentialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Cole, Creagh McLean, 2009, “John Anderson’s Political\\nThought Revisited”, Australian Journal of Political\\nScience, 44(2): 229–44.\",\n \"–––, 2010, “The Ethic of the Producers:\\nSorel, Anderson and Macintyre”, History of Political\\nThought, 31(1): 155–76.\",\n \"Damousi, Joy, 2005, Freud in the Antipodes: A Cultural History\\nof Psychoanalysis in Australia, Sydney: University of New South\\nWales Press.\",\n \"Davie, George, 1961, The Democratic intellect: Scotland and\\nHer Universities in the Nineteenth Century, Edinburgh: Edinburgh\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"–––, 1977, “John Anderson in\\nScotland”, Quadrant, 21(7): 55–57.\",\n \"Devitt, Michael, 2010, “‘Ostrich Nominalism’ or\\n‘Mirage Realism’”, in Putting Metaphysics First:\\nEssays on Metaphysics and Epistemology, Oxford: Oxford University\\nPress.\",\n \"Eddy, Harry, 1944, “Ethics and Politics”,\\nAustralasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, 22:\\n70–92.\",\n \"Franklin, James, 2003, Corrupting the Youth: a History of\\nPhilosophy in Australia, Sydney: Macleay Press.\",\n \"Gasking, D. A. T., 1949, “Anderson and the Tractatus\\nLogico-Philosophicus”, Australasian Journal of\\nPhilosophy, 27(1): 1–26.\",\n \"Hibberd, Fiona, 2009, “John Anderson’s Development of\\n(Situational) Realism and its Bearing on Psychology Today”,\\nHistory of the Human Sciences, 22(4): 63–92.\",\n \"Hylton, Peter, 1990, Russell, Idealism and the Emergence of\\nAnalytic Philosophy, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"Kennedy, Brian, 1995, A Passion to Oppose: John Anderson,\\nPhilosopher, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.\",\n \"Macintyre, Alasdair, 1981, After Virtue: a Study in Moral\\nTheory. London: Duckworth.\",\n \"–––, 1988, Whose Justice; Which\\nRationality, London: Duckworth.\",\n \"Mackie, J. L., 1946, “A Refutation of Morals”,\\nAustralasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy,\\n24(1–2): 77–90.\",\n \"–––, 1951, “Logic and Professor\\nAnderson”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 29(2):\\n109–113.\",\n \"–––, 1985, “The Philosophy of John\\nAnderson”, Logic and Knowledge: Selected Papers (Volume\\nI), Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 1–20.\",\n \"Mounce, H. O., 1989, “Anderson on Generality”,\\nWittgenstein: Attention to Particulars. Essays in Honour of Rush\\nRhees (1905–89), D. Z. Phillips and Peter Winch (eds.),\\nLondon: Macmillan.\",\n \"Mumford, Stephen, 2007, David Armstrong, Durham:\\nAcumen.\",\n \"Passmore, John, 1943, “Logical Positivism” (Parts I\\nand II), Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy,\\n21(2–3): 65–92; 22(3): 129–53.\",\n \"–––, 1948, “Logical Positivism”\\n(Part III), Australasian Journal Philosophy, 26(1):\\n1–19.\",\n \"–––, 1962, “John Anderson and Twentieth\\nCentury Philosophy”, Introduction to John Anderson’s\\nposthumous work, Studies in Empirical Philosophy, Sydney:\\nAngus and Robertson, pp. ix-xxiv.\",\n \"–––, 1963, “Philosophy”, in The\\nPattern of Australian Culture, A. L. McLeod (ed.), New York:\\nCornell University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1997, Memoirs of a Semi-Detached\\nAustralian, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.\",\n \"Price, Huw, 2011, Naturalism Without Mirrors, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press.\",\n \"Quine, W. V. O., 1953, From a Logical Point of View,\\nCambridge MA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Redding, Paul, 2007, Analytic Philosophy and the Return of\\nHegelian Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Reinhardt, Lloyd, 1980, “Olympian Pessimist”,\\nQuadrant, 24(4): 48–52.\",\n \"Rhees, Rush, 1969, Without Answers, London: Routledge and\\nKegan Paul.\",\n \"–––, 1999, Moral Questions, London:\\nMacmillan.\",\n \"Rorty, Richard, 1986, “From Language to Play”,\\nProceedings of the American Philosophical Association, 59(5):\\n747–53.\",\n \"Ryle, Gilbert, 1950, “Logic and Professor Anderson”,\\nAustralasian Journal of Philosophy, 28(3): 137–53.\",\n \"–––, 1976, “Fifty Years of Philosophy and\\nPhilosophers”, Philosophy, 51(198): 381–89.\",\n \"Schiller, F. C. S., 1926, “Judgments and\\nPropositions”, Mind (New Series), 35(139):\\n337–43.\",\n \"–––, 1927, “The Two Logics”,\\nMind (New Series), 36(141): 64–68.\",\n \"Stavropoulos, Pam, 1992, “Conservative Radical”,\\nAustralian Journal of Anthropology, 3: 67–79.\",\n \"Stewart, A. W., 2009, “A Debate about Anderson’s\\nLogic”, History and Philosophy of Logic, 30(2):\\n157–69.\",\n \"Weblin, Mark, 2003, “Introduction”, in M. Weblin\\n(ed.), A Perilous and Fighting Life: Political Writings of John\\nAnderson, London: Pluto Press.\",\n \"–––, 2007, “John Anderson”,\\nDictionary of Twentieth Century British Philosophers, London:\\nBloomsbury Academic.\",\n \"–––, 2007, “John Anderson on Reid and\\nScottish Philosophy”, Monist, 90: 310.\",\n \"–––, 2010, “John Anderson and\\nIdealism”, Biographical Encyclopedia of British\\nIdealism, London: Bloomsbury Academic.\",\n \"–––, 2014, “John Anderson Arrives:\\n1930s”, History of Philosophy in Australia and New\\nZealand, Graham Oppy and Nick Trakakis (eds.), Dordrecht:\\nSpringer, pp. 55–87.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../aristotle-logic/","text":"Aristotle, General Topics: logic"},{"href":"../bosanquet/","text":"Bosanquet, Bernard"},{"href":"../medieval-categories/","text":"categories: medieval theories of"},{"href":"../causation-counterfactual/","text":"causation: counterfactual theories of"},{"href":"../ethics-virtue/","text":"ethics: virtue"},{"href":"../facts/","text":"facts"},{"href":"../green/","text":"Green, Thomas Hill"},{"href":"../heraclitus/","text":"Heraclitus"},{"href":"../logic-classical/","text":"logic: classical"},{"href":"../logic-informal/","text":"logic: informal"},{"href":"../logic-ontology/","text":"logic and ontology"},{"href":"../metaphysics/","text":"metaphysics"},{"href":"../parmenides/","text":"Parmenides"},{"href":"../realism-sem-challenge/","text":"realism: challenges to metaphysical"},{"href":"../reid/","text":"Reid, Thomas"},{"href":"../russell/","text":"Russell, Bertrand"},{"href":"../ryle/","text":"Ryle, Gilbert"},{"href":"../scottish-19th/","text":"Scottish Philosophy: in the 19th century"},{"href":"../square/","text":"square of opposition"},{"href":"../states-of-affairs/","text":"states of affairs"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotle-logic/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotle, General Topics: logic\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../bosanquet/\",\n \"text\": \"Bosanquet, Bernard\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../medieval-categories/\",\n \"text\": \"categories: medieval theories of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../causation-counterfactual/\",\n \"text\": \"causation: counterfactual theories of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../ethics-virtue/\",\n \"text\": \"ethics: virtue\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../facts/\",\n \"text\": \"facts\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../green/\",\n \"text\": \"Green, Thomas Hill\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../heraclitus/\",\n \"text\": \"Heraclitus\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../logic-classical/\",\n \"text\": \"logic: classical\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../logic-informal/\",\n \"text\": \"logic: informal\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../logic-ontology/\",\n \"text\": \"logic and ontology\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../metaphysics/\",\n \"text\": \"metaphysics\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../parmenides/\",\n \"text\": \"Parmenides\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../realism-sem-challenge/\",\n \"text\": \"realism: challenges to metaphysical\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../reid/\",\n \"text\": \"Reid, Thomas\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../russell/\",\n \"text\": \"Russell, Bertrand\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../ryle/\",\n \"text\": \"Ryle, Gilbert\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../scottish-19th/\",\n \"text\": \"Scottish Philosophy: in the 19th century\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../square/\",\n \"text\": \"square of opposition\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../states-of-affairs/\",\n \"text\": \"states of affairs\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":60,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"aristotle-commentators"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Commentators on Aristotle"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Thu Aug 11, 2005; substantive revision Fri Sep 24, 2021"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nOne important mode of philosophical expression from the end of the\nHellenistic period and into Late Antiquity was the philosophical\ncommentary. During this time Plato and Aristotle were regarded as\nphilosophical authorities and their works were subject to intense\nstudy. This entry offers a concise account of how the revival of\ninterest in the philosophy of Aristotle that took place toward the end\nof the Hellenistic period eventually developed into a new literary\nproduction: the philosophical commentary. It also follows the\ncommentary tradition into Late Antiquity in order to account for the\nvitality and richness of this tradition. Special emphasis is given to\nthe ancient study of the Categories because this short but\ndifficult treatise played a central role in the post-Hellenistic\nreturn to Aristotle. The reader should keep in mind that the study of\nAristotle in the form of the commentary did not mean the cessation of\ngenuine philosophical thought. Quite the contrary: philosophers\ncustomarily used the commentary format not only to expound the works\nof Aristotle, but also as a vehicle for original philosophical\ntheorizing. One consequence of this approach was that, at least at the\nbeginning, the return to Aristotle did not involve the acceptance of\nany definite set of doctrines. More directly (and more boldly): there\nwas no definite set of doctrines that a Peripatetic philosopher in the\n1st century BCE was expected to accept. At the time\nAristotle was considered an authority not because he was above\ncriticism, but because he deserved to be studied carefully."],"string":"[\n \"\\nOne important mode of philosophical expression from the end of the\\nHellenistic period and into Late Antiquity was the philosophical\\ncommentary. During this time Plato and Aristotle were regarded as\\nphilosophical authorities and their works were subject to intense\\nstudy. This entry offers a concise account of how the revival of\\ninterest in the philosophy of Aristotle that took place toward the end\\nof the Hellenistic period eventually developed into a new literary\\nproduction: the philosophical commentary. It also follows the\\ncommentary tradition into Late Antiquity in order to account for the\\nvitality and richness of this tradition. Special emphasis is given to\\nthe ancient study of the Categories because this short but\\ndifficult treatise played a central role in the post-Hellenistic\\nreturn to Aristotle. The reader should keep in mind that the study of\\nAristotle in the form of the commentary did not mean the cessation of\\ngenuine philosophical thought. Quite the contrary: philosophers\\ncustomarily used the commentary format not only to expound the works\\nof Aristotle, but also as a vehicle for original philosophical\\ntheorizing. One consequence of this approach was that, at least at the\\nbeginning, the return to Aristotle did not involve the acceptance of\\nany definite set of doctrines. More directly (and more boldly): there\\nwas no definite set of doctrines that a Peripatetic philosopher in the\\n1st century BCE was expected to accept. At the time\\nAristotle was considered an authority not because he was above\\ncriticism, but because he deserved to be studied carefully.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Introduction","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. The Pre-History of the Commentary Tradition: The Fortune of the ","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"3. Alexander of Aphrodisias and the Aristotelian Tradition in the 1","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"4. The Commentary Tradition in Late Antiquity: The Place of the ","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"5. The Exegetical Labor on the ","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"6. Boethius and the Latin Tradition","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"7. Conclusion","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":["A. Primary Sources in Translation","B. Secondary Sources"]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Introduction\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. The Pre-History of the Commentary Tradition: The Fortune of the \",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Alexander of Aphrodisias and the Aristotelian Tradition in the 1\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. The Commentary Tradition in Late Antiquity: The Place of the \",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. The Exegetical Labor on the \",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. Boethius and the Latin Tradition\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"7. Conclusion\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"A. Primary Sources in Translation\",\n \"B. Secondary Sources\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\nThe primary purpose of a commentary is to explain a text. Typically,\nthe text is divided into lemmata (plural of lemma). A lemma is what is quoted from a\ntext in order to explain and interpret it. Some times the text is\nquoted in its entirety. Other times only its beginning is recalled.\nThe lemma is always followed by an analysis of the text. Commentaries\nwere not written exclusively on philosophical works. Any poetical or\nscientific work that came to be regarded as authoritative could become\nthe object of a commentary. For instance, the tradition of writing\ncommentaries on the Hippocratic corpus started very early. Although\nmost of this tradition is lost, the commentaries that Galen wrote on\nthe Hippocratic corpus have come down to us. Galen was a doctor who\nlived and wrote in the second half of the 2nd\ncentury CE. Interestingly enough, his exegetical activity was not\nconfined to Hippocrates. Galen wrote commentaries on several of\nAristotle’s works, specifically on the De\nInterpretatione, the Prior and Posterior\nAnalytics, and the Categories (Galen, On my Own\nBooks, XIX 47). In all probability, these commentaries were not\nintended for publication but only for the use of a small group of\nfriends and students. Here is what Galen says about his commentary on\nthe Categories:","\nOn Aristotle’s work on The Ten Categories I had not\npreviously written any commentary, either for myself or for others;\nwhen subsequently somebody asked me for something on the solution\nposed on that work, <I wrote a commentary> with the firm\ninstruction that he should only show it to students who had already\nread the book with a teacher, or at least made a start with some other\ncommentaries, such as those of Adrastus and Aspasius (Galen, On My\nOwn Books, XIX 42, Kühn, trans. Singer).\n","\nGalen makes clear that he regards the commentator as a teacher and as\nan expositor of a text with an audience of students in mind. Moreover,\nas Galen presents the matter, the commentary was a teaching tool\naddressed to students with specific levels of knowledge. The students\nwho were expected to read Galen on the Categories were not\nabsolute beginners. They were students who either had previously\nbenefited from the study of this treatise with a teacher or had become\nacquainted with the Categories through some more elementary\ncommentaries. Galen refers to the commentaries written by Adrastus and\nAspasius. By so doing, he gives us an idea of the profusion of\ncommentaries that were written on the Categories. These\ncommentaries were written one after the other as part of an already\nconsolidated exegetical practice. Most of these commentaries have not\nreached us. We no longer have the commentaries that Adrastus and\nAspasius wrote on the Categories, nor do we have the\ncommentary that Galen wrote on the same treatise. This frustrating (at\nleast for us) fact is ultimately due to the very nature of this\nliterary production. Each generation of commentators read and\ninterpreted Aristotle in the light of their own theoretical\npreoccupations and proclivities, only to be replaced by the next\ngeneration of commentators. One remarkable exception is Alexander of\nAphrodisias, a younger contemporary of Galen. His commentaries survive\nbecause they were adopted as exemplary models by later commentators.\nBut not all of them have come down to us. For example, Alexander wrote\na commentary on the Categories (Simplicius, In Cat.\n1.16). This commentary suffered the same fate as those written by\nAdrastus, Aspasius, Galen, and others. Today it survives only in\nfragmentary form, incorporated in the commentaries that a later\ngeneration of interpreters wrote on the Categories. "],"section_title":"1. Introduction","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nThe critical engagement with Aristotle that began toward the end of\nthe Hellenistic age and continued throughout the centuries that\nfollowed was directed to works such as the Categories, which\nhad been largely ignored in the preceding centuries. This engagement\npresupposes the availability of Aristotle’s writings in a form\nthat suited the interests and needs of the time. Although the\ninformation in our possession is slim, it strongly suggests that an\nintense editorial activity took place in the 1st century\nBCE. Apellicon of Teos, a bibliophile rather than a philosopher, seems\nto have produced copies of Aristotle’s works in the 90s (Strabo,\nGeo. XIII I 54); Tyrannion of Amisus, a grammarian and\nenthusiast of Aristotle (philaristotelês), who had\naccess to Apellicon’s books, may have done the same in the 60s\n(but our sources do not say that he edited the works of Aristotle;\nthey only say that he “put in order the books of\nAristotle”; Strabo, Geo. XIII I 54; Plutarch,\nSulla 26 468 B-C). According to the tradition, these\neditorial labors were surpassed by that of Andronicus of Rhodes, who\nis credited with the production of the first reliable edition of\nAristotle; an edition that exercised an enormous influence on the\nPost-Hellenistic return to Aristotle. More information on Andronicus\nand his putative edition of Aristotle is available in the","\n Supplement on Andronicus of Rhodes.\n ","\nIn reality, Andronicus could not be entirely responsible for the\nrevival of interest in the philosophy of Aristotle. This revival was,\nat least in part, independent of him. Moreover, a close study of the\nfortune that the Categories enjoyed in this context suggests\nthat the return to Aristotle took different forms and involved a great\nvariety of exegetical positions not necessarily related to one\nanother. Finally, the return to Aristotle did not necessarily involve\neither the acceptance of the views stated by Aristotle or their\ncodification in the form of a commentary. In short, there was no\northodoxy in the Aristotelian tradition at this early stage\n(pace Moraux 1973, pages xii–xx, especially\nxvi–xvii).","\nWe have the names of five ancient interpreters (palaioi\nexêgêtai) of the Categories whose activity\nis placed in the 1st century BCE: Andronicus, Boethus,\nAthenodorus, Ariston, and Eudorus (Simplicius, In Cat.\n159.32–33). It is likely that, of these five philosophers, only\nBoethus of Sidon wrote a commentary on the Categories.\nBoethus’ activity can be dated to the second half of the\n1st century BCE. Simplicius contrasts his\n“word-by-word exegesis” to that of Andronicus, who is said\n“to have paraphrased the Categories” (Simplicius,\nIn Cat. 29.28–30.5). We cannot exclude that Simplicius\nprojected his own literary conventions onto Andronicus and Boethus,\nand that by his own standards Boethus and Andronicus were\nengaged in two different exegetical exercises. On the one hand, there\nis some clear evidence that Andronicus did rephrase and clarify\nAristotle’s text in order to extract Aristotle’s\nintentions. On the other hand, there is no reason to think that\nAndronicus wrote in the style that will later be codified as\nparaphrase. Themistius was the champion of this particular form of\nexegesis in antiquity. Themistius does not give\nus names of predecessors. His silence is open to different\ninterpretations: either Themistius did not know of Andronicus’\nwork on the Categories or this work was not written in the\nstyle of a paraphrase. Fortunately, it is not essential for us to\nestablish whether or not Andronicus was the first paraphraser of\nAristotle. What matters is that his style of exegesis was perceived as\ndifferent from that of Boethus. Unlike Andronicus, Boethus was engaged\nin an in-depth examination of whole book of the Categories in\nthe form of a word-by-word commentary. Boethus was highly regarded in\nantiquity. Simplicius refers to him as “the amazing\nBoethus” (In Cat. 1.18), “the noble\nBoethus” (In Cat. 379.32), and prizes “the\nsharpness of his mind” (In Cat. 1.23 and 434.18).\nExcept for a few testimonies, his commentary has not survived. From\nthese few testimonies, however, it is clear that Boethus concerned\nhimself with the difficulties that the Stoics raised against\nAristotle’s Categories. The Stoics attacked the\nCategories on the assumption that this treatise is on\nlanguage and about linguistic expressions. They argued that as a\ntreatise on language and about linguistic expressions the\nCategories was incomplete. Boethus resisted this reading of\nthe Categories and anticipated a line of interpretation that\nwas then followed, among others, by Porphyry. ","\nBoethus’ defense of the Categories documents that this\ntreatise was intensely read and studied, and not only among\nphilosophers friendly to Aristotle. The Stoic philosopher Athenodorus\nis credited with a book (Simplicius, In Cat. 86.22) or books\n(Porphyry, In Cat. 62.25–26) significantly entitled\nAgainst Aristotle’s Categories. We know very little\nabout Athenodorus. If he is the same person as Athenodorus of\nTarsus, who was a friend and adviser of the Emperor Augustus and was\nappointed by him as governor of Taurus, then Athenodorus was active in\nthe second half of the 1st century BCE. There is no\ncompelling reason to think that his critique of the\nCategories was written in the form of a commentary.\nAthenodorus could have been content with offering a series of\nobjections and difficulties, just as the Platonist Lucius and\nNicostratus would do more than a hundred years later (Simplicius,\nIn Cat 1.18–20: “Others have chosen simply to\npresent a series of difficulties (aporiai) arising from the\ntext, which is what has been done by Lucius, and after him by\nNicostratus, who took over for himself the job of Lucius”).","\nThe temptation to credit all ancient interpreters of the\nCategories with a commentary must be resisted also in the\ncase of Eudorus of Alexandria. It is generally assumed that Eudorus\nflourished in the middle of the first century BCE. Simplicius is not\ncontent to enumerate Eudorus among the ancient interpreters of the\nCategories. He preserves nine testimonies in which Eudorus\ntook issue with Aristotle. But no inference about the form of his\nliterary production is possible. The only safe inference is that the\nstudy of the Categories was not confined to the school of\nAristotle. In fact, Eudorus was not a Peripatetic philosopher.\nSimplicius refers to him as the “Academic Eudorus” (In\nCat. 187.10).","\nThe last name on list of ancient interpreters of the\nCategories is that of Ariston of Alexandria. From Cicero\n(Lucullus §§ 11–12), we learn that Ariston\nwas among the learned men who attended the conversations that took\nplace in Alexandria in 87 BCE between Heraclitus of Tyrus, a former\nstudent of Clitomachus and Philo of Larissa, and Antiochus of Ascalon.\nCicero depicts Ariston as a pupil of Antiochus. That Ariston was a\npupil of Antiochus is confirmed by the Index Academicorum, a\nhistory of the Academy written by Philodemus in the 1st\ncentury BCE. There, we are told that Antiochus “took over\n<the Academy>” (XXXIV 34 Dorandi). A list of his students\nis also given. The list includes the names of Aristus,\nAntiochus’ brother; Ariston and Dio of Alexandria; and Cratippus\nof Pergamum (XXXV 1–6 Dorandi). What immediately follows is\nextremely interesting: “Ariston of Alexandria and Cratippus of\nPegamum deserted the Academy and turned Peripatetic” (XXXV\n10–16 Dorandi). We are not told the reasons for their defection\nto Peripatetic philosophy. In the case of Ariston it is also difficult\nto see what this defection really involved. From the information in\nour possession we can only say that he wrote about the\nCategories. But there is no evidence that Ariston wrote in\nthe form of a commentary. His case is significantly different from\nthat of Andronicus and Boethus. Andronicus and Boethus made an attempt\nto organise, clarify, and indeed defend, the philosophy of Aristotle.\nThis does not seem to apply to Ariston. His name is never related to\nthose of Andronicus and Boethus. In addition, there is no evidence\nthat Ariston was aware of the existence of Andronicus and Boethus, or\nthat he was influenced by their works or their activity as interpreters of\nAristotle. That the edition of Andronicus played a role in the\nconversion of Ariston to the philosophy of Aristotle is merely a\nconjecture.","\nThere is a wealth of information in the subsequent commentary\ntradition about the early (that is, 1st century BCE)\nreception of the Categories. Even the expert reader is often\nleft wondering how best to organize it. The reader of this entry will\nfind a useful presentation of the extant evidence in a recent\nmonograph produced by Michael Griffin (Griffin 2015, to be read along\nwith the critical comments offered in Falcon 2018 and Menn 2018;\nwith a response by Griffin in Griffin 2020). According to Griffin,\nAndronicus of Rhodes played a key role in the Post-Hellenistic surge\nof interest in Aristotle’Categories. Andronicus placed\nthe Categories at the outset of his catalogue\n(pinakes) of Aristotle’s writings. He saw in this\ntreatise a useful introduction to Aristotle’s theory of\npredication, aimed at (absolute) beginners in Aristotelian logic. In\nthe end, what Andronicus thought of the Categories did not\nmatter; what mattered was the place that he assigned to this work in\nhis pinakes. The prominence assigned to the work in his\npinakes contributed to attract attention to an hitherto\nobscure work.","\nWhat do we learn from the rich and complex story of the early\nreception of Aristotle’s Categories? We learn that the\nreturn to Aristotle attracted thinkers with a diverse philosophical\nbackground and a different philosophical agenda. We also learn that\ntheir critical engagement with Aristotle resulted in a few creative\nreadings of the Categories. To the extent that those readings\ncan be reconstructed, they do not take us any closer to\nAristotle’s original intentions. More directly, and more boldly:\nthere existed, and still exists, a gap between\nAristotle’Categories and all his interpreters. This gap\nopened up early on in the Hellenistic times. As a result, all his\nsubsequent (that is, Post-Hellenistic) interpreters struggled to close\nthis gap. Early interpreters of the Categories such as\nAndronicus of Rhodes and Boethus of Sidon are no exception to the rule.\nTheir efforts, just like ours, had a mixed success at best. In the\nend, Aristotle’Categories was then, and still remains\nnow, an elusive work."],"section_title":"2. The Pre-History of the Commentary Tradition: The Fortune of the Categories in the 1st century BCE","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nThe revival of interest in the philosophy of Aristotle outlived the\n1st century BCE. The exegetical activity on\nAristotle’works continued to flourish in the 1st and\n2nd century CE. New layers of interpretation were added in\nthese two centuries. They greatly contributed to the formation of the\nexegetical tradition that found its culmination in the commentaries of\nAlexander of Aphrodisias.","\nAlexander of Aegae wrote about the Categories (Simplicius,\nIn Cat. 10.20; 13.16) and the De caelo (Simplicius,\nIn DC 430.29–32). Since he is said to have been teacher\nof the Emperor Nero, his exegetical activity can be dated to the first\nhalf of the 1st century CE. Nothing can be said about the\nform of his literary production. This is also the case of two other\ninterpreters of the Categories: Sotion and Achaius\n(Simplicius, In Cat. 159.23). Although their exegetical\nactivity is much more difficult to date, there is one line of argument\nthat places it in the 1st century CE. The information at\nour disposal is frustratingly meagre, but it is hard to escape the\nconclusion that the Categories continued to be at the centre\nof the exegetical activity on the philosophy of Aristotle. The\nsituation did not change in the first half of the 2nd\ncentury CE. From Galen we learn that Adrastus of Aphrodisias and\nAspasius wrote elementary commentaries on the Categories.\nFrom the way Galen refers to these commentaries, they must have been\neasily available and routinely used to introduce students to the\nCategories. Adrastus and Aspasius established themselves as\nrespected interpreters of Aristotle. We know that their commentaries\nwere still used about one hundred years later by the great Plotinus\n(Porphyry, Life of Plotinus. 14.12–14). Aspasius did\nnot confine his exegetical activity to the Categories. He\nwrote commentaries on the De Interpretatione, the\nPhysics, and the Metaphysics. These commentaries\nwere used and quoted by later generations of commentators. The\nreputation that Aspasius enjoyed in antiquity explains why his\ncommentary on Aristotle’s Ethics has survived. This\ncommentary is the earliest surviving commentary on an Aristotelian\ntext.","\nOne significant impact on the way the practice of philosophy developed\ntoward the end of the 2nd century CE was the intervention\nof the imperial power in matters of education. This intervention seems\nto go as far back as the Emperor Antoninus Pius, who is said to have\nestablished public chairs of rhetoric and philosophy in the provinces.\nBut it was Marcus Aurelius who first established Imperial chairs of\nphilosophy in Athens in 176 CE. From our ancient sources we are told\nthat those chairs were in Platonic, Stoic, Peripatetic, and Epicurean\nphilosophy. In all probability, the first holder of the chair in\nAristotelian philosophy was Alexander of Damascus, an older\ncontemporary of Galen described by him as “knowledgeable about\nthe doctrines of Plato but more inclined to those of Aristotle”\n(Galen, De praenotione XIV 627–628 Kühn). The\nholder of the Imperial chairs of philosophy was a public teacher and\nreceived an annual salary. His teaching consisted in lecturing on the\ntexts of the founder of the school. Alexander of Aphrodisias was one\nof these teachers publicly appointed to a chair of Aristotelian\nphilosophy. Alexander refers to himself as a teacher—namely, a\ndidaskalos (De fato 164.15). As a teacher of\nAristotelian philosophy, Alexander was concerned not only with\nexplicating this philosophy but also with defending it in the context\nof debates between philosophical schools. His attitude toward\nAristotle is best expressed at the very beginning of his De\nanima. This treatise is not a commentary on Aristotle’s\nDe anima but an investigation of the soul based on the\nprinciples established in Aristotle’s De anima. The\ntask that here Alexander sets for himself is that of clarifying and\npromoting the views of Aristotle:","\nIn all philosophical questions, the present writer cherishes a special\nregard for the authority of Aristotle, in the conviction that his\nteaching on these matters has greater claim to truth than that of\nother philosophers. The purpose of this present treatise will\ntherefore be satisfactorily accomplished if the doctrine of the soul\nwhich I here set forth is as clear an exposition as possible of what\nAristotle has said on this subject; and I shall limit my own\ncontribution to explanations of the specific points that Aristotle\nhimself has so excellently stated. (Alexander, De anima 2.\n5–9, translation after Fotinis)\n","\nAlexander wrote commentaries on most (but not all) of\nAristotle’s treatises. His commentaries on the Prior\nAnalytics (Book 1), Topics, Meteorology, and\nthe work On Sense and Sense Objects have survived. Fragments\nfrom his lost commentaries on the Posterior Analytics and\nPhysics have been collected and edited (in Moraux 1979 and\nRashed 2011, respectively). A long excerpt from his lost commentary on\nGeneration and Corruption, extant only in the Arabic\ntradition, is now available in English translation (Gannagé\n2005). Of the commentary on the Metaphysics that is\ntransmitted under his name, only the first five books (Alfa\nto Delta) are genuine. Since Praetcher (Praetcher 1906) the\ncommentary on the other books (Epsilon to Nu) is\ngenerally attributed to Michael of Ephesus. This attribution is now\nvindicated (in Luna 2001) except for book Epsilon, which\nshould be attributed to Stephanus of Alexandria (Golitsis 2016b). The\ncommentary on the Sophistical Refutations, traditionally\nattributed to Alexander, is spurious. It should be attributed to\nMichael of Ephesus (Ebbesen 1981, I: 268–285).","Although Alexander is best known for his\ncommentaries on Aristotle, his exegetical activity extended to include\nshort discussions on specific points of interpretation within\nAristotelian philosophy. These discussions are collected in four books\nof Problems and Solutions and in a further book traditionally\nknown as Mantissa (literally, “Makeweight”). These\ncollections offer an eloquent illustration of the extraordinary\nvariety of exegetical methods deployed in the exposition of\nAristotle’s philosophy. Up to a point, the deployment of such a\nvariety of exegetical methods can be explained with reference to the\npedagogic function of these writings, which were used as teaching\ntools in the instruction of students with different levels of\nknowledge of Aristotle’s philosophy. ","\nAlexander’s exegetical activity ultimately consisted in an\neffort of systematization combined with an attempt to extract what he\nregarded as the genuine thought of Aristotle. It was this loyalty to\nthe philosophy of the master coupled with the finesse of his\ninterpretation that gained Alexander the reputation of “the most\nauthentic interpreter of Aristotle” (Simplicius, In\nPhys. 80.16). His commentaries set standards of interpretations\nthat remained largely unsurpassed in antiquity and beyond. But it is\nimportant to realize that his extraordinary accomplishment was the\nculmination of the exegetical tradition that had started in the\n1st century BCE. More to the point: Alexander was not the\nfirst but rather the last authentic interpreter of Aristotle. Although\nsubsequent generations of commentators were profoundly influenced by\nAlexander, they were motivated by a very different exegetical\nideal. Their primary aim was no longer to recover and preserve\nAristotle’s thought for its own sake, but rather for the sake of\nfinding agreement between Aristotle and Plato and presenting the two\nphilosophers as part of one and the same philosophical outlook. (For\nfurther information on Alexander as a commentator and a philosopher, I\nrefer the reader to Sections 2 and 3 of the entry on Alexander of Aphrodisias.)\n "],"section_title":"3. Alexander of Aphrodisias and the Aristotelian Tradition in the 1st and 2nd century CE","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nThe study of Aristotle through close textual reading of his works\ncontinued, if not increased, in Late Antiquity. So did the supply of\ncommentaries on all his major works. Unlike Alexander of Aphrodisias,\nmost of these commentators considered themselves followers of Plato\n(that is, Platonists.) By their lights, Plato’s philosophy was\nsuperior to all the systems of thought that came later. In addition,\nthey believed that all these later systems started out as more or less\nfaithful developments of Plato’s philosophy. Aristotle was no\nexception to the rule. On the contrary, these commentators viewed\nAristotle as a true descendant of Plato. This explains why, by\nreverting to Plato, they did not mean to reject Aristotle’s\nphilosophy. On the contrary, they were convinced that this philosophy\ncould be integrated into a Platonic framework. The Platonism of Late\nAntiquity was so comprehensive as a system of thought that it could\nharbor Aristotle’s philosophy as one of its elements. In this\nframe of mind, a major exegetical concern became that of finding\nsubstantial agreement between Plato and Aristotle. For most of these\ncommentators, the disagreement on specific issues between Aristotle\nand Plato did not preclude harmony between the two philosophers on a\ndeeper level.","\nIn reality, the conciliation of Plato and Aristotle attempted by these\ncommentators consisted in an appropriation of Aristotle’s works\nas a pre-requisite for the study of Plato’s philosophy. Among\nthese works, the Categories continued to enjoy a special\nstatus. Following a tradition that may go all the way back to\nAndronicus of Rhodes (see the section on the early fortune of the\nCategories), this treatise was considered an elementary\nintroduction to the whole of philosophy and as such it was used to\nteach beginners with little or no knowledge of philosophy (Porphyry,\nIn Cat. 56. 28–29). For this reason the exegetical\nactivity on this short but difficult treatise never stopped but in\nfact increased in Late Antiquity. The key figure for the reception of\nthe Categories during this period was undoubtedly Porphyry\n(ca 234–305 CE). The latter wrote a commentary in seven\nbooks addressed to a student named Gedalius. In this commentary,\nPorphyry offered a complete interpretation of the Categories,\nincluding a resolution of all previous aporiai (Simplicius,\nIn Cat. 2. 6–9). He also dealt with the traditional\ncriticism of the Categories, including a comprehensive\ndiscussion of the objections leveled by the earlier interpreters of\nthe Categories (e.g., the Stoic Athenodorus and Cornutus, and\nthe Platonic Lucius and Nicostratus). His defense of the\nCategories relied, and indeed expanded, on the Peripatetic\ntradition (e.g., Boethus of Sidon, Alexander of Aphrodisias). An\nexcerpt from this commentary has been recently discovered in what is\nknown as the Archimedes Palimpsest (See R. Chiaradonna, M. Rashed, and\nD. Sedley 2013). Porphyry wrote another commentary on the\nCategories. This second commentary has reached us. The\nresults achieved in the more comprehensive commentary are here\nabbreviated, simplified, and made accessible in the form of a dialogue\nbetween a teacher and a pupil. The existence of two commentaries\nwritten in a different format on the very same treatise by the same\nauthor has to be understood in the light of the fact that these\ncommentaries were teaching tools and were used to teach students with\ndifferent skills and different levels of familiarity with the\nCategories. Finally, Porphyry is the author of the\nIsagoge (literally, “Introduction”).\nThis short book is an introduction to Aristotle’s theory of\npredication. It is addressed to absolute beginners in philosophy whose\nreading curriculum then continued with Aristotle’s logic,\nbeginning with the Categories.","\nThe commentary addressed to Gedalius became an instant success and an\nexample to imitate. Iamblichus (ca 242–325 CE) is known\nto have written a commentary on the Categories that closely\nfollowed this commentary, abbreviating the argument and making the\noverall interpretation clearer. He is also known to have amplified the\nPorphyrian interpretation with the help of the book that the\nPythagorean Archytas wrote on the doctrine of the categories\n(Simplicius, In Cat. 2.9–14). The writing in question\nis a late forgery intended to claim Aristotle’s doctrine of the\nten categories for the Pythagorean school. Iamblichus considered this\nforgery an authentic anticipation of Aristotle’s\nCategories and a vindication of his vision of philosophy as a\nsingle tradition of wisdom, starting with Pythagoras and continuing\nwith Plato and Aristotle. Iamblichus is reported to have made use of\nthe considerations of Archytas in the attempt to demonstrate the\noverall agreement between Aristotle and the Pythagorean doctrine.","\nIamblichus’ commentary is lost, but we can form an idea of the\ncontribution that this commentary made to the ancient debate on the\nCategories thanks to Dexippus. Nothing is known about\nDexippus besides the fact that he was a pupil of Iamblichus. His\nsurviving commentary provides a concise and clear presentation of the\nsolutions offered to the aporiai leveled against\nAristotle’s Categories. Dexippus opted for the\nquestion-and-answer format, which better suited his purpose to provide\na brief and relatively simple summary of the exegetical results\nachieved by his predecessors, especially Porphyry and Iamblichus.\nDexippus was not an original thinker. According to Simplicius, he\nadded virtually nothing to the considerations of Porphyry and\nIamblichus (Simplicius, In Cat. 2. 29–30).","\nAfter having mastered the Categories, the student of\nphilosophy was expected to read the rest of the Aristotelian corpus\nbefore turning to Plato’s dialogues. Syrianus, the teacher of\nProclus (ca 410–485 CE), exposed his students to both\nPlato and Aristotle, starting with Aristotle. Proclus arrived in\nAthens around 430 CE, at a time when Plutarch, the previous head of\nthe school, was an old man and Syrianus had already taken over. As a\nyoung and gifted student, Proclus read Aristotle’s De\nanima and Plato’s Phaedo with Plutarch. But when\nPlutarch died, Syrianus became responsible for his philosophical\neducation. Under the direction of Syrianus, Proclus mastered in less\nthan two years the entire Aristotelian corpus. He studied the logical,\nethical, political, physical works and finished up with theology\n(Marinus, Life of Proclus, chapters 12 and 13). The sequence\nlogic-ethics-politics-physics-theology reflected not only a certain\norganization of the teaching but also a particular conception of\nphilosophy. To begin with, the first place assigned to\nAristotle’s logical writings was not neutral with respect to a\ncertain view of the nature of logic. By this time logic was regarded\nas a tool for philosophy. This conception of logic and its relation to\nthe rest of philosophy is reflected in the collective title\nOrganon that we still use to refer to Aristotle’s\nlogical writings. Moreover, the non-theological writings were\npreliminary to the study of theology as it is offered in the\nMetaphysics. This treatise was the last of Aristotle’s\nworks to be studied. The conception of God as an intellect and a\nliving being enjoying the state of perfect actuality was designed by\nSyrianus as the culmination of his course on Aristotle’s\nphilosophy. Once Proclus had mastered the Metaphysics and\nlearned about the Aristotelian conception of the divine, Syrianus\ndirected him to Plato, whose dialogues were also read in a definite\nsequence, culminating with the Timaeus and the\nParmenides.","\nThis attitude toward the philosophy of Aristotle and Plato was passed\nfrom Syrianus to Proclus, and from Proclus to Ammonius (ca\n440–520 CE). The commentaries of Ammonius on the\nCategories, the De Interpretatione, the Prior\nAnalytics, and Porphyry’s Isagoge have come down\nto us. The last is the earliest extant commentary on the\nIsagoge. By this time the Isagoge had already\nestablished itself as part of the reading curriculum of philosophy,\nwhich continued with the Categories, the De\nInterpretatione and the Prior Analytics. Note, however,\nthat Ammonius did not write his commentaries on the\nCategories, the Prior Analytics, and perhaps the\nIsagoge. They were produced by pupils who attended his\nlectures on Aristotle. (For further information and discussion of his\ncommentaries, see Section 1.2 of the entry on\n Ammonius.)\n Other commentaries originated in the lecture room as a transcription\nof the oral exposition delivered by the teacher. The commentaries on\nthe Categories based on the lectures offered by Olympiodorus\n(ca 495–565 CE) and his pupil Elias (David) have\nreached us. Philoponus (ca 490–570 CE) edited his own\nlectures on the Categories. However, the most influential of\nthese later commentaries was the one that Simplicius wrote after 529\nCE. Simplicius was a man of vast learning and extraordinary synthetic\npowers. He was also acutely aware of writing at the end of a long and\nvenerable exegetical tradition. He consciously tried to assimilate and\nblend together the various strands of this tradition. By so doing he\nleft us the most comprehensive and informative survey of the reception\nof the Categories in antiquity. At first sight Simplicius may\nlook like a modern scholar. His commentary shows the great care and\nprecision of a thoughtful and dedicated interpreter who is explicating\nthe Categories through a close reading of the text. Yet there\nis one important difference that must not be overlooked. Simplicius\nwas a Platonist and his exegetical activity was intended to show that\nPlato and Aristotle were in substantial agreement. Simplicius is\nadamantly clear on his own exegetical ideal:","\n<the worthy interpreter> must, I believe, not convict the\nphilosopher of discordance by looking only at the letter of what\n<Aristotle> says against Plato; but he must look towards the\nspirit, and track down the harmony which reigns between them on the\nmajority of points (Simplicius, In Cat. 7. 29–32,\ntrans. Michael Case)\n","\nThe commentary tradition that found its culmination in Simplicius\nconsisted in a sincere attempt to arrive at a better understanding of\nthe Categories. By reading Simplicius’ commentary one\nstill gets a sense of the extraordinary ingenuity that this tradition\nemployed in explicating this short yet elusive treatise. But\none also gets the impression that this tradition had no privileged\naccess to this text. Quite the opposite: from the beginning of the\nrevival of interest in the philosophy of Aristotle and into Late\nAntiquity, the Categories remained a tantalizing puzzle. Not\nonly its title, but also its unity, structure, and place in the\nAristotelian corpus were intensely discussed. For instance, various\ntitles are attested in the commentary tradition: Introduction to\nthe Topics, On the Genera of Being, On the Ten\nGenera, The Ten Categories, Categories\n(Simplicius, In Cat. 15. 26–30). Each of these titles\nreflected a certain interpretation of what the treatise is\nabout. Andronicus is the first interpreter who is known to have\npreferred the title Categories. He rejected the title\nIntroduction to the Topics and considered the final chapters\nof the Categories—the so-called\nPostpraedicamenta—a later addition contrary to the\npurpose of the book. He held that the people who added those chapters\nalso inscribed the book with the title Introduction to the\nTopics (Simplicius, In Cat. 279. 8–10). By\ncontrast, Adrastus of Aphrodisias defended the relationship between\nthe Categories and the Topics in a work entitled\nConcerning the Order of Aristotle’s Treatises\n(Simplicius, In Cat. 16. 1–4). The dispute was not\nconfined to the organization Aristotle’s works, but it extended\nto the philosophical significance of the treatise. The title\nCategories eventually prevailed and, along with the title, a\ncertain interpretation of the treatise imposed itself."],"section_title":"4. The Commentary Tradition in Late Antiquity: The Place of the Categories in the Reading Curriculum","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nThe impression that, from very early on, the interpreters were\nstruggling to understand Aristotle is confirmed by the commentary\ntradition on the De anima. Consider, for example, De\nanima 3.5. There, Aristotle famously argues for the existence of\nan intellect that is separate, unaffected, and unmixed (De\nanima 430 a 17–18). In antiquity commentators traditionally\nreferred to this intellect as the active (or productive) intellect,\nnous poiêtikos. Discussion on how exactly this\nintellect is to be understood started very early. There is evidence\nthat already Theophrastus puzzled over it (Themistius, In De\nanima 110.18–28). Among other things, it is not obvious\nwhat sort of thing the active intellect is supposed to be. More\ndirectly, it is not clear whether it is a human or a divine intellect.\nWhat Aristotle says outside of the De anima is equally\nperplexing. In his work On the Generation of Animals\nAristotle speaks of an intellect that enters “from\nwithout” (736 b 27). But it is not at all clear how the comment\nthat Aristotle makes in this context is to be understood. What exactly\nis the status of this enigmatic intellect? How does it fit with the\ndiscussion offered in the De anima?","\nAlexander of Aphrodisias developed a line of interpretation that made\nthe active intellect a non-human intellect and identified it with God.\nHis commentary on the De anima is lost. Instead we have the\nDe anima that he wrote following the principles that\nAristotle had established in his own De anima. There,\nAlexander identifies the active intellect with “the first cause,\nwhich is the cause and principle of existence to all the other\nthings” (Alexander, De anima 89. 9–10). The\nintellect so understood is not only the cause of human thought; it is\nalso the cause of the existence of everything that there is in the\nuniverse. This intellect can also be an object of thought. When this\nhappens, this intellect enters in us from without: “this is the\nintellect from without which comes to be in us and is\nimperishable” (Alexander, De anima 90.19–20).\nAlexander makes it abundantly clear that this intellect alone is\nimperishable and as such it is also divine. A similar but not\nidentical attempt to expand on the elliptical remarks that Aristotle\nhas left on the active intellect can be found in the On\nIntellect, a short essay attributed to Alexander of Aphrodisias\nand preserved in the collection of brief exegetical writings known to\nus as Mantissa.","\nAnother text that has important implications for the reception of\nAristotle’s treatment of the intellect is the paraphrase of the\nDe anima that Themistius wrote around 350 CE. There,\nThemistius argues that the active intellect is the most accurate\nspecification of the human form (In De anima\n100.35–36). Put differently, our essence as human beings is the\nactive intellect (In De anima 100.36–101.1). Although\nThemistius does not name names, he is clearly reacting against the\nreading advanced by Alexander of Aphrodisias. For Themistius the\nactive intellect is not God or the supreme principle upon which\neverything depends for its existence. For him, the active intellect is\nan integral part of the human soul: “the active intellect is in\nthe soul and it is like the most honourable part of the human\nsoul” (In De anima 103.4–5). Although the active\nintellect so understood is a human intellect, it is emphatically not\nconceived of as a personal intellect. Themistius is adamantly clear\nthat there is only one separate, unmixed, and unaffected active\nintellect. Likewise, there is only one separate, unmixed, and\nunaffected potential intellect, nous dunamei. According to\nThemistius, both the active and the potential intellects are not\nsubject to generation and perishing. What is perishable is only the\ncommon or passive intellect, koinon or pathêtikos\nnous. This third intellect is mixed with the body and its fate is\nto perish along with the body (In De anima 105.28–29;\n106.14–15)."],"section_title":"5. The Exegetical Labor on the De anima","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nBeginning some time in the fourth century CE, Aristotle’s\nOrganon established itself as part of the reading curriculum\nin the Latin tradition. Like the Greek tradition, the Latin tradition\nemployed a great variety of exegetical tools in the teaching of\nAristotle: paraphrases, elementary as well as more advanced\ncommentaries. In addition, the Latin tradition was confronted with the\nspecific problem of providing the students with adequate translations\nof the relevant texts.","\nThe tradition credits Marius Victorinus (fourth century CE) with a\ntranslation of the Categories, the De\nInterpretatione, and Porphyry’s Isagoge\n(Cassiodorus, Instit. II, 3, 18). The same tradition credits\nhim with a commentary in eight books on the Categories. A few\nyears later Vettius Agorius Praetextatus is known to have translated\nthe Greek paraphrases of the Prior and Posterior\nAnalytics produced by Themistius (Boethius, De\nInt.2 3.6–4.3). None of these works have reached\nus, with the exception of excerpts from Victorinus’ translation\nof the Isagoge. An anonymous paraphrase of the\nCategories falsely attributed to Augustine and traditionally\nknown as Categoriae Decem has survived only because it was\nwidely read and used in the early Middle Ages. Finally, an incomplete\nparaphrase of the Categories is preserved in Martianus\nCapella’s On Dialectic (the forth book of his The\nMarriage of Philosophy and Mercury, an influential textbook on\nthe seven liberal arts dating from the fifth century CE). Even these\nfew remarks suffice to document a sustained effort to provide the\nstudents with a Latin Organon that reflected the teaching\nneeds of the time.","\nThe key figure for the reception of Aristotle in the Latin world was\nBoethius. Best known for his Consolation of Philosophy,\nBoethius (ca 475–526) was the transmitter of the\nAristotelian logical tradition to the early Middle Ages. His attitude\nto the text of Aristotle and Plato was not different from that of the\nother commentators of Late Antiquity. He regarded Plato and Aristotle\nas philosophical authorities and was persuaded that the best way to do\nphilosophy was to read and comment on their works. Like the Platonists\nof Late Antiquity, he was convinced that Plato and Aristotle were in\nbasic agreement, and that Aristotle’s thought was to be\nunderstood as a genuine development of Plato’s. In this frame of\nmind, Boethius planned to translate all the works of Aristotle that he\ncould find along with all the dialogues of Plato, and to comment on\nall of them in order to show that Plato and Aristotle agreed on the\nmost significant philosophical points (Boethius De\nInt.2 79. 9–80.9).","\nBoethius was able to execute this plan only in part. He managed to\ntranslate the Categories, the De Interpretatione,\nthe Prior Analytics, the Topics and the\nSophistical Refutations. In addition, he translated\nPorphyry’s Isagoge. Boethius produced two commentaries\non the Isagoge. Along with these commentaries, he\nwrote two commentaries on the De Interpretatione.","\nThe practice of writing double commentaries is to be understood in the\nlight of the concern for pedagogy that motivates the entire commentary\ntradition. Here is how Boethius explains why he wrote two commentaries\n(or rather two versions of the same commentary) on the De\nInterpretatione:","\nIt has been my plan to disclose Aristotle’s subtlest doctrines\nin a commentary organized in two versions; for what the first version\ncontains prepares, to some extent, an easier path for those who are\nentering into these more profound and subtle matters. But because the\nsecond version develops in connection with the expositor’s\nsubtler doctrines, it is presented to be read and studied by those who\nare advanced in this inquiry and study (Boethius, In De\nInt.2 186. 2–9 after Kretzmann).\n","\nBoethius also wrote a commentary on the Categories. This\ncommentary was intended to be an elementary exposition of the\ntreatise. Boethius planned to write a second exposition, addressed to\nmore advanced students (Boethius In Cat. 160 A-B). It is just\nunclear whether he was able to produce this more advanced commentary.\n(For further information on Boethius as a commentator, see Section 2\nof the entry on\n Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius.)","\nThe exegetical labor on the Isagoge, the Categories\nand the De Intepretatione continued after Boethius. This\nlabor took often the form of glosses, that is, annotations written in\nmargin of copies of the Isagoge, the Categories and\nthe De Interpretatione. A survey of the exegetical results\nreached in the early Latin Medieval tradition goes beyond the scope of\nthis entry. I refer the reader to the Bibliography for further reading\non the commentary tradition in the early Middle Ages."],"section_title":"6. Boethius and the Latin Tradition","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nThere is no philosophy of the commentators in the sense of a definite\nset of doctrines that all the ancient commentators on Aristotle\nshared. What the ancient commentators shared was the practice of\nreading and commenting on the texts of Aristotle on the crucial\nassumption that Aristotle was a philosophical authority and his\nwritings deserved to be studied with great care.","\nDue to the almost complete loss of the relevant literature, we know\nvery little about the first generation of interpreters of Aristotle.\nNo picture of unity emerges from the little that has reached us. The\nnotion that all these interpreters wrote commentaries is not supported\nby the information in our possession. The commentary eventually became\nthe standard form of exegesis. But even within the commentary\ntradition there was room for a plurality of exegetical positions.\nDifferent commentators developed different lines of interpretations in\nthe light of the different (often competing) concerns that motivated\ntheir exegesis. The exegetical tradition that finds its culmination in\nAlexander of Aphrodisias was primarily (but not exclusively) motivated\nby an attempt to defend the philosophy of Aristotle in the context of\nthe ancient debate between philosophical schools. Alexander of\nAphrodisias viewed Aristotle as his master and devoted his exegetical\nworks to explicate and extract Aristotle’s distinctive\nphilosophical position. While the Platonists of Late Antiquity put\nthemselves in continuity with this tradition, their exegesis was\nlargely an attempt to develop a philosophy that insisted on the\ncontinuity between Plato and Aristotle. They wrote their commentaries\non the assumption that Aristotle and Plato were in substantial\nagreement."],"section_title":"7. Conclusion","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe primary purpose of a commentary is to explain a text. Typically,\\nthe text is divided into lemmata (plural of lemma). A lemma is what is quoted from a\\ntext in order to explain and interpret it. Some times the text is\\nquoted in its entirety. Other times only its beginning is recalled.\\nThe lemma is always followed by an analysis of the text. Commentaries\\nwere not written exclusively on philosophical works. Any poetical or\\nscientific work that came to be regarded as authoritative could become\\nthe object of a commentary. For instance, the tradition of writing\\ncommentaries on the Hippocratic corpus started very early. Although\\nmost of this tradition is lost, the commentaries that Galen wrote on\\nthe Hippocratic corpus have come down to us. Galen was a doctor who\\nlived and wrote in the second half of the 2nd\\ncentury CE. Interestingly enough, his exegetical activity was not\\nconfined to Hippocrates. Galen wrote commentaries on several of\\nAristotle’s works, specifically on the De\\nInterpretatione, the Prior and Posterior\\nAnalytics, and the Categories (Galen, On my Own\\nBooks, XIX 47). In all probability, these commentaries were not\\nintended for publication but only for the use of a small group of\\nfriends and students. Here is what Galen says about his commentary on\\nthe Categories:\",\n \"\\nOn Aristotle’s work on The Ten Categories I had not\\npreviously written any commentary, either for myself or for others;\\nwhen subsequently somebody asked me for something on the solution\\nposed on that work, <I wrote a commentary> with the firm\\ninstruction that he should only show it to students who had already\\nread the book with a teacher, or at least made a start with some other\\ncommentaries, such as those of Adrastus and Aspasius (Galen, On My\\nOwn Books, XIX 42, Kühn, trans. Singer).\\n\",\n \"\\nGalen makes clear that he regards the commentator as a teacher and as\\nan expositor of a text with an audience of students in mind. Moreover,\\nas Galen presents the matter, the commentary was a teaching tool\\naddressed to students with specific levels of knowledge. The students\\nwho were expected to read Galen on the Categories were not\\nabsolute beginners. They were students who either had previously\\nbenefited from the study of this treatise with a teacher or had become\\nacquainted with the Categories through some more elementary\\ncommentaries. Galen refers to the commentaries written by Adrastus and\\nAspasius. By so doing, he gives us an idea of the profusion of\\ncommentaries that were written on the Categories. These\\ncommentaries were written one after the other as part of an already\\nconsolidated exegetical practice. Most of these commentaries have not\\nreached us. We no longer have the commentaries that Adrastus and\\nAspasius wrote on the Categories, nor do we have the\\ncommentary that Galen wrote on the same treatise. This frustrating (at\\nleast for us) fact is ultimately due to the very nature of this\\nliterary production. Each generation of commentators read and\\ninterpreted Aristotle in the light of their own theoretical\\npreoccupations and proclivities, only to be replaced by the next\\ngeneration of commentators. One remarkable exception is Alexander of\\nAphrodisias, a younger contemporary of Galen. His commentaries survive\\nbecause they were adopted as exemplary models by later commentators.\\nBut not all of them have come down to us. For example, Alexander wrote\\na commentary on the Categories (Simplicius, In Cat.\\n1.16). This commentary suffered the same fate as those written by\\nAdrastus, Aspasius, Galen, and others. Today it survives only in\\nfragmentary form, incorporated in the commentaries that a later\\ngeneration of interpreters wrote on the Categories. \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Introduction\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe critical engagement with Aristotle that began toward the end of\\nthe Hellenistic age and continued throughout the centuries that\\nfollowed was directed to works such as the Categories, which\\nhad been largely ignored in the preceding centuries. This engagement\\npresupposes the availability of Aristotle’s writings in a form\\nthat suited the interests and needs of the time. Although the\\ninformation in our possession is slim, it strongly suggests that an\\nintense editorial activity took place in the 1st century\\nBCE. Apellicon of Teos, a bibliophile rather than a philosopher, seems\\nto have produced copies of Aristotle’s works in the 90s (Strabo,\\nGeo. XIII I 54); Tyrannion of Amisus, a grammarian and\\nenthusiast of Aristotle (philaristotelês), who had\\naccess to Apellicon’s books, may have done the same in the 60s\\n(but our sources do not say that he edited the works of Aristotle;\\nthey only say that he “put in order the books of\\nAristotle”; Strabo, Geo. XIII I 54; Plutarch,\\nSulla 26 468 B-C). According to the tradition, these\\neditorial labors were surpassed by that of Andronicus of Rhodes, who\\nis credited with the production of the first reliable edition of\\nAristotle; an edition that exercised an enormous influence on the\\nPost-Hellenistic return to Aristotle. More information on Andronicus\\nand his putative edition of Aristotle is available in the\",\n \"\\n Supplement on Andronicus of Rhodes.\\n \",\n \"\\nIn reality, Andronicus could not be entirely responsible for the\\nrevival of interest in the philosophy of Aristotle. This revival was,\\nat least in part, independent of him. Moreover, a close study of the\\nfortune that the Categories enjoyed in this context suggests\\nthat the return to Aristotle took different forms and involved a great\\nvariety of exegetical positions not necessarily related to one\\nanother. Finally, the return to Aristotle did not necessarily involve\\neither the acceptance of the views stated by Aristotle or their\\ncodification in the form of a commentary. In short, there was no\\northodoxy in the Aristotelian tradition at this early stage\\n(pace Moraux 1973, pages xii–xx, especially\\nxvi–xvii).\",\n \"\\nWe have the names of five ancient interpreters (palaioi\\nexêgêtai) of the Categories whose activity\\nis placed in the 1st century BCE: Andronicus, Boethus,\\nAthenodorus, Ariston, and Eudorus (Simplicius, In Cat.\\n159.32–33). It is likely that, of these five philosophers, only\\nBoethus of Sidon wrote a commentary on the Categories.\\nBoethus’ activity can be dated to the second half of the\\n1st century BCE. Simplicius contrasts his\\n“word-by-word exegesis” to that of Andronicus, who is said\\n“to have paraphrased the Categories” (Simplicius,\\nIn Cat. 29.28–30.5). We cannot exclude that Simplicius\\nprojected his own literary conventions onto Andronicus and Boethus,\\nand that by his own standards Boethus and Andronicus were\\nengaged in two different exegetical exercises. On the one hand, there\\nis some clear evidence that Andronicus did rephrase and clarify\\nAristotle’s text in order to extract Aristotle’s\\nintentions. On the other hand, there is no reason to think that\\nAndronicus wrote in the style that will later be codified as\\nparaphrase. Themistius was the champion of this particular form of\\nexegesis in antiquity. Themistius does not give\\nus names of predecessors. His silence is open to different\\ninterpretations: either Themistius did not know of Andronicus’\\nwork on the Categories or this work was not written in the\\nstyle of a paraphrase. Fortunately, it is not essential for us to\\nestablish whether or not Andronicus was the first paraphraser of\\nAristotle. What matters is that his style of exegesis was perceived as\\ndifferent from that of Boethus. Unlike Andronicus, Boethus was engaged\\nin an in-depth examination of whole book of the Categories in\\nthe form of a word-by-word commentary. Boethus was highly regarded in\\nantiquity. Simplicius refers to him as “the amazing\\nBoethus” (In Cat. 1.18), “the noble\\nBoethus” (In Cat. 379.32), and prizes “the\\nsharpness of his mind” (In Cat. 1.23 and 434.18).\\nExcept for a few testimonies, his commentary has not survived. From\\nthese few testimonies, however, it is clear that Boethus concerned\\nhimself with the difficulties that the Stoics raised against\\nAristotle’s Categories. The Stoics attacked the\\nCategories on the assumption that this treatise is on\\nlanguage and about linguistic expressions. They argued that as a\\ntreatise on language and about linguistic expressions the\\nCategories was incomplete. Boethus resisted this reading of\\nthe Categories and anticipated a line of interpretation that\\nwas then followed, among others, by Porphyry. \",\n \"\\nBoethus’ defense of the Categories documents that this\\ntreatise was intensely read and studied, and not only among\\nphilosophers friendly to Aristotle. The Stoic philosopher Athenodorus\\nis credited with a book (Simplicius, In Cat. 86.22) or books\\n(Porphyry, In Cat. 62.25–26) significantly entitled\\nAgainst Aristotle’s Categories. We know very little\\nabout Athenodorus. If he is the same person as Athenodorus of\\nTarsus, who was a friend and adviser of the Emperor Augustus and was\\nappointed by him as governor of Taurus, then Athenodorus was active in\\nthe second half of the 1st century BCE. There is no\\ncompelling reason to think that his critique of the\\nCategories was written in the form of a commentary.\\nAthenodorus could have been content with offering a series of\\nobjections and difficulties, just as the Platonist Lucius and\\nNicostratus would do more than a hundred years later (Simplicius,\\nIn Cat 1.18–20: “Others have chosen simply to\\npresent a series of difficulties (aporiai) arising from the\\ntext, which is what has been done by Lucius, and after him by\\nNicostratus, who took over for himself the job of Lucius”).\",\n \"\\nThe temptation to credit all ancient interpreters of the\\nCategories with a commentary must be resisted also in the\\ncase of Eudorus of Alexandria. It is generally assumed that Eudorus\\nflourished in the middle of the first century BCE. Simplicius is not\\ncontent to enumerate Eudorus among the ancient interpreters of the\\nCategories. He preserves nine testimonies in which Eudorus\\ntook issue with Aristotle. But no inference about the form of his\\nliterary production is possible. The only safe inference is that the\\nstudy of the Categories was not confined to the school of\\nAristotle. In fact, Eudorus was not a Peripatetic philosopher.\\nSimplicius refers to him as the “Academic Eudorus” (In\\nCat. 187.10).\",\n \"\\nThe last name on list of ancient interpreters of the\\nCategories is that of Ariston of Alexandria. From Cicero\\n(Lucullus §§ 11–12), we learn that Ariston\\nwas among the learned men who attended the conversations that took\\nplace in Alexandria in 87 BCE between Heraclitus of Tyrus, a former\\nstudent of Clitomachus and Philo of Larissa, and Antiochus of Ascalon.\\nCicero depicts Ariston as a pupil of Antiochus. That Ariston was a\\npupil of Antiochus is confirmed by the Index Academicorum, a\\nhistory of the Academy written by Philodemus in the 1st\\ncentury BCE. There, we are told that Antiochus “took over\\n<the Academy>” (XXXIV 34 Dorandi). A list of his students\\nis also given. The list includes the names of Aristus,\\nAntiochus’ brother; Ariston and Dio of Alexandria; and Cratippus\\nof Pergamum (XXXV 1–6 Dorandi). What immediately follows is\\nextremely interesting: “Ariston of Alexandria and Cratippus of\\nPegamum deserted the Academy and turned Peripatetic” (XXXV\\n10–16 Dorandi). We are not told the reasons for their defection\\nto Peripatetic philosophy. In the case of Ariston it is also difficult\\nto see what this defection really involved. From the information in\\nour possession we can only say that he wrote about the\\nCategories. But there is no evidence that Ariston wrote in\\nthe form of a commentary. His case is significantly different from\\nthat of Andronicus and Boethus. Andronicus and Boethus made an attempt\\nto organise, clarify, and indeed defend, the philosophy of Aristotle.\\nThis does not seem to apply to Ariston. His name is never related to\\nthose of Andronicus and Boethus. In addition, there is no evidence\\nthat Ariston was aware of the existence of Andronicus and Boethus, or\\nthat he was influenced by their works or their activity as interpreters of\\nAristotle. That the edition of Andronicus played a role in the\\nconversion of Ariston to the philosophy of Aristotle is merely a\\nconjecture.\",\n \"\\nThere is a wealth of information in the subsequent commentary\\ntradition about the early (that is, 1st century BCE)\\nreception of the Categories. Even the expert reader is often\\nleft wondering how best to organize it. The reader of this entry will\\nfind a useful presentation of the extant evidence in a recent\\nmonograph produced by Michael Griffin (Griffin 2015, to be read along\\nwith the critical comments offered in Falcon 2018 and Menn 2018;\\nwith a response by Griffin in Griffin 2020). According to Griffin,\\nAndronicus of Rhodes played a key role in the Post-Hellenistic surge\\nof interest in Aristotle’Categories. Andronicus placed\\nthe Categories at the outset of his catalogue\\n(pinakes) of Aristotle’s writings. He saw in this\\ntreatise a useful introduction to Aristotle’s theory of\\npredication, aimed at (absolute) beginners in Aristotelian logic. In\\nthe end, what Andronicus thought of the Categories did not\\nmatter; what mattered was the place that he assigned to this work in\\nhis pinakes. The prominence assigned to the work in his\\npinakes contributed to attract attention to an hitherto\\nobscure work.\",\n \"\\nWhat do we learn from the rich and complex story of the early\\nreception of Aristotle’s Categories? We learn that the\\nreturn to Aristotle attracted thinkers with a diverse philosophical\\nbackground and a different philosophical agenda. We also learn that\\ntheir critical engagement with Aristotle resulted in a few creative\\nreadings of the Categories. To the extent that those readings\\ncan be reconstructed, they do not take us any closer to\\nAristotle’s original intentions. More directly, and more boldly:\\nthere existed, and still exists, a gap between\\nAristotle’Categories and all his interpreters. This gap\\nopened up early on in the Hellenistic times. As a result, all his\\nsubsequent (that is, Post-Hellenistic) interpreters struggled to close\\nthis gap. Early interpreters of the Categories such as\\nAndronicus of Rhodes and Boethus of Sidon are no exception to the rule.\\nTheir efforts, just like ours, had a mixed success at best. In the\\nend, Aristotle’Categories was then, and still remains\\nnow, an elusive work.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. The Pre-History of the Commentary Tradition: The Fortune of the Categories in the 1st century BCE\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe revival of interest in the philosophy of Aristotle outlived the\\n1st century BCE. The exegetical activity on\\nAristotle’works continued to flourish in the 1st and\\n2nd century CE. New layers of interpretation were added in\\nthese two centuries. They greatly contributed to the formation of the\\nexegetical tradition that found its culmination in the commentaries of\\nAlexander of Aphrodisias.\",\n \"\\nAlexander of Aegae wrote about the Categories (Simplicius,\\nIn Cat. 10.20; 13.16) and the De caelo (Simplicius,\\nIn DC 430.29–32). Since he is said to have been teacher\\nof the Emperor Nero, his exegetical activity can be dated to the first\\nhalf of the 1st century CE. Nothing can be said about the\\nform of his literary production. This is also the case of two other\\ninterpreters of the Categories: Sotion and Achaius\\n(Simplicius, In Cat. 159.23). Although their exegetical\\nactivity is much more difficult to date, there is one line of argument\\nthat places it in the 1st century CE. The information at\\nour disposal is frustratingly meagre, but it is hard to escape the\\nconclusion that the Categories continued to be at the centre\\nof the exegetical activity on the philosophy of Aristotle. The\\nsituation did not change in the first half of the 2nd\\ncentury CE. From Galen we learn that Adrastus of Aphrodisias and\\nAspasius wrote elementary commentaries on the Categories.\\nFrom the way Galen refers to these commentaries, they must have been\\neasily available and routinely used to introduce students to the\\nCategories. Adrastus and Aspasius established themselves as\\nrespected interpreters of Aristotle. We know that their commentaries\\nwere still used about one hundred years later by the great Plotinus\\n(Porphyry, Life of Plotinus. 14.12–14). Aspasius did\\nnot confine his exegetical activity to the Categories. He\\nwrote commentaries on the De Interpretatione, the\\nPhysics, and the Metaphysics. These commentaries\\nwere used and quoted by later generations of commentators. The\\nreputation that Aspasius enjoyed in antiquity explains why his\\ncommentary on Aristotle’s Ethics has survived. This\\ncommentary is the earliest surviving commentary on an Aristotelian\\ntext.\",\n \"\\nOne significant impact on the way the practice of philosophy developed\\ntoward the end of the 2nd century CE was the intervention\\nof the imperial power in matters of education. This intervention seems\\nto go as far back as the Emperor Antoninus Pius, who is said to have\\nestablished public chairs of rhetoric and philosophy in the provinces.\\nBut it was Marcus Aurelius who first established Imperial chairs of\\nphilosophy in Athens in 176 CE. From our ancient sources we are told\\nthat those chairs were in Platonic, Stoic, Peripatetic, and Epicurean\\nphilosophy. In all probability, the first holder of the chair in\\nAristotelian philosophy was Alexander of Damascus, an older\\ncontemporary of Galen described by him as “knowledgeable about\\nthe doctrines of Plato but more inclined to those of Aristotle”\\n(Galen, De praenotione XIV 627–628 Kühn). The\\nholder of the Imperial chairs of philosophy was a public teacher and\\nreceived an annual salary. His teaching consisted in lecturing on the\\ntexts of the founder of the school. Alexander of Aphrodisias was one\\nof these teachers publicly appointed to a chair of Aristotelian\\nphilosophy. Alexander refers to himself as a teacher—namely, a\\ndidaskalos (De fato 164.15). As a teacher of\\nAristotelian philosophy, Alexander was concerned not only with\\nexplicating this philosophy but also with defending it in the context\\nof debates between philosophical schools. His attitude toward\\nAristotle is best expressed at the very beginning of his De\\nanima. This treatise is not a commentary on Aristotle’s\\nDe anima but an investigation of the soul based on the\\nprinciples established in Aristotle’s De anima. The\\ntask that here Alexander sets for himself is that of clarifying and\\npromoting the views of Aristotle:\",\n \"\\nIn all philosophical questions, the present writer cherishes a special\\nregard for the authority of Aristotle, in the conviction that his\\nteaching on these matters has greater claim to truth than that of\\nother philosophers. The purpose of this present treatise will\\ntherefore be satisfactorily accomplished if the doctrine of the soul\\nwhich I here set forth is as clear an exposition as possible of what\\nAristotle has said on this subject; and I shall limit my own\\ncontribution to explanations of the specific points that Aristotle\\nhimself has so excellently stated. (Alexander, De anima 2.\\n5–9, translation after Fotinis)\\n\",\n \"\\nAlexander wrote commentaries on most (but not all) of\\nAristotle’s treatises. His commentaries on the Prior\\nAnalytics (Book 1), Topics, Meteorology, and\\nthe work On Sense and Sense Objects have survived. Fragments\\nfrom his lost commentaries on the Posterior Analytics and\\nPhysics have been collected and edited (in Moraux 1979 and\\nRashed 2011, respectively). A long excerpt from his lost commentary on\\nGeneration and Corruption, extant only in the Arabic\\ntradition, is now available in English translation (Gannagé\\n2005). Of the commentary on the Metaphysics that is\\ntransmitted under his name, only the first five books (Alfa\\nto Delta) are genuine. Since Praetcher (Praetcher 1906) the\\ncommentary on the other books (Epsilon to Nu) is\\ngenerally attributed to Michael of Ephesus. This attribution is now\\nvindicated (in Luna 2001) except for book Epsilon, which\\nshould be attributed to Stephanus of Alexandria (Golitsis 2016b). The\\ncommentary on the Sophistical Refutations, traditionally\\nattributed to Alexander, is spurious. It should be attributed to\\nMichael of Ephesus (Ebbesen 1981, I: 268–285).\",\n \"Although Alexander is best known for his\\ncommentaries on Aristotle, his exegetical activity extended to include\\nshort discussions on specific points of interpretation within\\nAristotelian philosophy. These discussions are collected in four books\\nof Problems and Solutions and in a further book traditionally\\nknown as Mantissa (literally, “Makeweight”). These\\ncollections offer an eloquent illustration of the extraordinary\\nvariety of exegetical methods deployed in the exposition of\\nAristotle’s philosophy. Up to a point, the deployment of such a\\nvariety of exegetical methods can be explained with reference to the\\npedagogic function of these writings, which were used as teaching\\ntools in the instruction of students with different levels of\\nknowledge of Aristotle’s philosophy. \",\n \"\\nAlexander’s exegetical activity ultimately consisted in an\\neffort of systematization combined with an attempt to extract what he\\nregarded as the genuine thought of Aristotle. It was this loyalty to\\nthe philosophy of the master coupled with the finesse of his\\ninterpretation that gained Alexander the reputation of “the most\\nauthentic interpreter of Aristotle” (Simplicius, In\\nPhys. 80.16). His commentaries set standards of interpretations\\nthat remained largely unsurpassed in antiquity and beyond. But it is\\nimportant to realize that his extraordinary accomplishment was the\\nculmination of the exegetical tradition that had started in the\\n1st century BCE. More to the point: Alexander was not the\\nfirst but rather the last authentic interpreter of Aristotle. Although\\nsubsequent generations of commentators were profoundly influenced by\\nAlexander, they were motivated by a very different exegetical\\nideal. Their primary aim was no longer to recover and preserve\\nAristotle’s thought for its own sake, but rather for the sake of\\nfinding agreement between Aristotle and Plato and presenting the two\\nphilosophers as part of one and the same philosophical outlook. (For\\nfurther information on Alexander as a commentator and a philosopher, I\\nrefer the reader to Sections 2 and 3 of the entry on Alexander of Aphrodisias.)\\n \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Alexander of Aphrodisias and the Aristotelian Tradition in the 1st and 2nd century CE\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe study of Aristotle through close textual reading of his works\\ncontinued, if not increased, in Late Antiquity. So did the supply of\\ncommentaries on all his major works. Unlike Alexander of Aphrodisias,\\nmost of these commentators considered themselves followers of Plato\\n(that is, Platonists.) By their lights, Plato’s philosophy was\\nsuperior to all the systems of thought that came later. In addition,\\nthey believed that all these later systems started out as more or less\\nfaithful developments of Plato’s philosophy. Aristotle was no\\nexception to the rule. On the contrary, these commentators viewed\\nAristotle as a true descendant of Plato. This explains why, by\\nreverting to Plato, they did not mean to reject Aristotle’s\\nphilosophy. On the contrary, they were convinced that this philosophy\\ncould be integrated into a Platonic framework. The Platonism of Late\\nAntiquity was so comprehensive as a system of thought that it could\\nharbor Aristotle’s philosophy as one of its elements. In this\\nframe of mind, a major exegetical concern became that of finding\\nsubstantial agreement between Plato and Aristotle. For most of these\\ncommentators, the disagreement on specific issues between Aristotle\\nand Plato did not preclude harmony between the two philosophers on a\\ndeeper level.\",\n \"\\nIn reality, the conciliation of Plato and Aristotle attempted by these\\ncommentators consisted in an appropriation of Aristotle’s works\\nas a pre-requisite for the study of Plato’s philosophy. Among\\nthese works, the Categories continued to enjoy a special\\nstatus. Following a tradition that may go all the way back to\\nAndronicus of Rhodes (see the section on the early fortune of the\\nCategories), this treatise was considered an elementary\\nintroduction to the whole of philosophy and as such it was used to\\nteach beginners with little or no knowledge of philosophy (Porphyry,\\nIn Cat. 56. 28–29). For this reason the exegetical\\nactivity on this short but difficult treatise never stopped but in\\nfact increased in Late Antiquity. The key figure for the reception of\\nthe Categories during this period was undoubtedly Porphyry\\n(ca 234–305 CE). The latter wrote a commentary in seven\\nbooks addressed to a student named Gedalius. In this commentary,\\nPorphyry offered a complete interpretation of the Categories,\\nincluding a resolution of all previous aporiai (Simplicius,\\nIn Cat. 2. 6–9). He also dealt with the traditional\\ncriticism of the Categories, including a comprehensive\\ndiscussion of the objections leveled by the earlier interpreters of\\nthe Categories (e.g., the Stoic Athenodorus and Cornutus, and\\nthe Platonic Lucius and Nicostratus). His defense of the\\nCategories relied, and indeed expanded, on the Peripatetic\\ntradition (e.g., Boethus of Sidon, Alexander of Aphrodisias). An\\nexcerpt from this commentary has been recently discovered in what is\\nknown as the Archimedes Palimpsest (See R. Chiaradonna, M. Rashed, and\\nD. Sedley 2013). Porphyry wrote another commentary on the\\nCategories. This second commentary has reached us. The\\nresults achieved in the more comprehensive commentary are here\\nabbreviated, simplified, and made accessible in the form of a dialogue\\nbetween a teacher and a pupil. The existence of two commentaries\\nwritten in a different format on the very same treatise by the same\\nauthor has to be understood in the light of the fact that these\\ncommentaries were teaching tools and were used to teach students with\\ndifferent skills and different levels of familiarity with the\\nCategories. Finally, Porphyry is the author of the\\nIsagoge (literally, “Introduction”).\\nThis short book is an introduction to Aristotle’s theory of\\npredication. It is addressed to absolute beginners in philosophy whose\\nreading curriculum then continued with Aristotle’s logic,\\nbeginning with the Categories.\",\n \"\\nThe commentary addressed to Gedalius became an instant success and an\\nexample to imitate. Iamblichus (ca 242–325 CE) is known\\nto have written a commentary on the Categories that closely\\nfollowed this commentary, abbreviating the argument and making the\\noverall interpretation clearer. He is also known to have amplified the\\nPorphyrian interpretation with the help of the book that the\\nPythagorean Archytas wrote on the doctrine of the categories\\n(Simplicius, In Cat. 2.9–14). The writing in question\\nis a late forgery intended to claim Aristotle’s doctrine of the\\nten categories for the Pythagorean school. Iamblichus considered this\\nforgery an authentic anticipation of Aristotle’s\\nCategories and a vindication of his vision of philosophy as a\\nsingle tradition of wisdom, starting with Pythagoras and continuing\\nwith Plato and Aristotle. Iamblichus is reported to have made use of\\nthe considerations of Archytas in the attempt to demonstrate the\\noverall agreement between Aristotle and the Pythagorean doctrine.\",\n \"\\nIamblichus’ commentary is lost, but we can form an idea of the\\ncontribution that this commentary made to the ancient debate on the\\nCategories thanks to Dexippus. Nothing is known about\\nDexippus besides the fact that he was a pupil of Iamblichus. His\\nsurviving commentary provides a concise and clear presentation of the\\nsolutions offered to the aporiai leveled against\\nAristotle’s Categories. Dexippus opted for the\\nquestion-and-answer format, which better suited his purpose to provide\\na brief and relatively simple summary of the exegetical results\\nachieved by his predecessors, especially Porphyry and Iamblichus.\\nDexippus was not an original thinker. According to Simplicius, he\\nadded virtually nothing to the considerations of Porphyry and\\nIamblichus (Simplicius, In Cat. 2. 29–30).\",\n \"\\nAfter having mastered the Categories, the student of\\nphilosophy was expected to read the rest of the Aristotelian corpus\\nbefore turning to Plato’s dialogues. Syrianus, the teacher of\\nProclus (ca 410–485 CE), exposed his students to both\\nPlato and Aristotle, starting with Aristotle. Proclus arrived in\\nAthens around 430 CE, at a time when Plutarch, the previous head of\\nthe school, was an old man and Syrianus had already taken over. As a\\nyoung and gifted student, Proclus read Aristotle’s De\\nanima and Plato’s Phaedo with Plutarch. But when\\nPlutarch died, Syrianus became responsible for his philosophical\\neducation. Under the direction of Syrianus, Proclus mastered in less\\nthan two years the entire Aristotelian corpus. He studied the logical,\\nethical, political, physical works and finished up with theology\\n(Marinus, Life of Proclus, chapters 12 and 13). The sequence\\nlogic-ethics-politics-physics-theology reflected not only a certain\\norganization of the teaching but also a particular conception of\\nphilosophy. To begin with, the first place assigned to\\nAristotle’s logical writings was not neutral with respect to a\\ncertain view of the nature of logic. By this time logic was regarded\\nas a tool for philosophy. This conception of logic and its relation to\\nthe rest of philosophy is reflected in the collective title\\nOrganon that we still use to refer to Aristotle’s\\nlogical writings. Moreover, the non-theological writings were\\npreliminary to the study of theology as it is offered in the\\nMetaphysics. This treatise was the last of Aristotle’s\\nworks to be studied. The conception of God as an intellect and a\\nliving being enjoying the state of perfect actuality was designed by\\nSyrianus as the culmination of his course on Aristotle’s\\nphilosophy. Once Proclus had mastered the Metaphysics and\\nlearned about the Aristotelian conception of the divine, Syrianus\\ndirected him to Plato, whose dialogues were also read in a definite\\nsequence, culminating with the Timaeus and the\\nParmenides.\",\n \"\\nThis attitude toward the philosophy of Aristotle and Plato was passed\\nfrom Syrianus to Proclus, and from Proclus to Ammonius (ca\\n440–520 CE). The commentaries of Ammonius on the\\nCategories, the De Interpretatione, the Prior\\nAnalytics, and Porphyry’s Isagoge have come down\\nto us. The last is the earliest extant commentary on the\\nIsagoge. By this time the Isagoge had already\\nestablished itself as part of the reading curriculum of philosophy,\\nwhich continued with the Categories, the De\\nInterpretatione and the Prior Analytics. Note, however,\\nthat Ammonius did not write his commentaries on the\\nCategories, the Prior Analytics, and perhaps the\\nIsagoge. They were produced by pupils who attended his\\nlectures on Aristotle. (For further information and discussion of his\\ncommentaries, see Section 1.2 of the entry on\\n Ammonius.)\\n Other commentaries originated in the lecture room as a transcription\\nof the oral exposition delivered by the teacher. The commentaries on\\nthe Categories based on the lectures offered by Olympiodorus\\n(ca 495–565 CE) and his pupil Elias (David) have\\nreached us. Philoponus (ca 490–570 CE) edited his own\\nlectures on the Categories. However, the most influential of\\nthese later commentaries was the one that Simplicius wrote after 529\\nCE. Simplicius was a man of vast learning and extraordinary synthetic\\npowers. He was also acutely aware of writing at the end of a long and\\nvenerable exegetical tradition. He consciously tried to assimilate and\\nblend together the various strands of this tradition. By so doing he\\nleft us the most comprehensive and informative survey of the reception\\nof the Categories in antiquity. At first sight Simplicius may\\nlook like a modern scholar. His commentary shows the great care and\\nprecision of a thoughtful and dedicated interpreter who is explicating\\nthe Categories through a close reading of the text. Yet there\\nis one important difference that must not be overlooked. Simplicius\\nwas a Platonist and his exegetical activity was intended to show that\\nPlato and Aristotle were in substantial agreement. Simplicius is\\nadamantly clear on his own exegetical ideal:\",\n \"\\n<the worthy interpreter> must, I believe, not convict the\\nphilosopher of discordance by looking only at the letter of what\\n<Aristotle> says against Plato; but he must look towards the\\nspirit, and track down the harmony which reigns between them on the\\nmajority of points (Simplicius, In Cat. 7. 29–32,\\ntrans. Michael Case)\\n\",\n \"\\nThe commentary tradition that found its culmination in Simplicius\\nconsisted in a sincere attempt to arrive at a better understanding of\\nthe Categories. By reading Simplicius’ commentary one\\nstill gets a sense of the extraordinary ingenuity that this tradition\\nemployed in explicating this short yet elusive treatise. But\\none also gets the impression that this tradition had no privileged\\naccess to this text. Quite the opposite: from the beginning of the\\nrevival of interest in the philosophy of Aristotle and into Late\\nAntiquity, the Categories remained a tantalizing puzzle. Not\\nonly its title, but also its unity, structure, and place in the\\nAristotelian corpus were intensely discussed. For instance, various\\ntitles are attested in the commentary tradition: Introduction to\\nthe Topics, On the Genera of Being, On the Ten\\nGenera, The Ten Categories, Categories\\n(Simplicius, In Cat. 15. 26–30). Each of these titles\\nreflected a certain interpretation of what the treatise is\\nabout. Andronicus is the first interpreter who is known to have\\npreferred the title Categories. He rejected the title\\nIntroduction to the Topics and considered the final chapters\\nof the Categories—the so-called\\nPostpraedicamenta—a later addition contrary to the\\npurpose of the book. He held that the people who added those chapters\\nalso inscribed the book with the title Introduction to the\\nTopics (Simplicius, In Cat. 279. 8–10). By\\ncontrast, Adrastus of Aphrodisias defended the relationship between\\nthe Categories and the Topics in a work entitled\\nConcerning the Order of Aristotle’s Treatises\\n(Simplicius, In Cat. 16. 1–4). The dispute was not\\nconfined to the organization Aristotle’s works, but it extended\\nto the philosophical significance of the treatise. The title\\nCategories eventually prevailed and, along with the title, a\\ncertain interpretation of the treatise imposed itself.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. The Commentary Tradition in Late Antiquity: The Place of the Categories in the Reading Curriculum\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe impression that, from very early on, the interpreters were\\nstruggling to understand Aristotle is confirmed by the commentary\\ntradition on the De anima. Consider, for example, De\\nanima 3.5. There, Aristotle famously argues for the existence of\\nan intellect that is separate, unaffected, and unmixed (De\\nanima 430 a 17–18). In antiquity commentators traditionally\\nreferred to this intellect as the active (or productive) intellect,\\nnous poiêtikos. Discussion on how exactly this\\nintellect is to be understood started very early. There is evidence\\nthat already Theophrastus puzzled over it (Themistius, In De\\nanima 110.18–28). Among other things, it is not obvious\\nwhat sort of thing the active intellect is supposed to be. More\\ndirectly, it is not clear whether it is a human or a divine intellect.\\nWhat Aristotle says outside of the De anima is equally\\nperplexing. In his work On the Generation of Animals\\nAristotle speaks of an intellect that enters “from\\nwithout” (736 b 27). But it is not at all clear how the comment\\nthat Aristotle makes in this context is to be understood. What exactly\\nis the status of this enigmatic intellect? How does it fit with the\\ndiscussion offered in the De anima?\",\n \"\\nAlexander of Aphrodisias developed a line of interpretation that made\\nthe active intellect a non-human intellect and identified it with God.\\nHis commentary on the De anima is lost. Instead we have the\\nDe anima that he wrote following the principles that\\nAristotle had established in his own De anima. There,\\nAlexander identifies the active intellect with “the first cause,\\nwhich is the cause and principle of existence to all the other\\nthings” (Alexander, De anima 89. 9–10). The\\nintellect so understood is not only the cause of human thought; it is\\nalso the cause of the existence of everything that there is in the\\nuniverse. This intellect can also be an object of thought. When this\\nhappens, this intellect enters in us from without: “this is the\\nintellect from without which comes to be in us and is\\nimperishable” (Alexander, De anima 90.19–20).\\nAlexander makes it abundantly clear that this intellect alone is\\nimperishable and as such it is also divine. A similar but not\\nidentical attempt to expand on the elliptical remarks that Aristotle\\nhas left on the active intellect can be found in the On\\nIntellect, a short essay attributed to Alexander of Aphrodisias\\nand preserved in the collection of brief exegetical writings known to\\nus as Mantissa.\",\n \"\\nAnother text that has important implications for the reception of\\nAristotle’s treatment of the intellect is the paraphrase of the\\nDe anima that Themistius wrote around 350 CE. There,\\nThemistius argues that the active intellect is the most accurate\\nspecification of the human form (In De anima\\n100.35–36). Put differently, our essence as human beings is the\\nactive intellect (In De anima 100.36–101.1). Although\\nThemistius does not name names, he is clearly reacting against the\\nreading advanced by Alexander of Aphrodisias. For Themistius the\\nactive intellect is not God or the supreme principle upon which\\neverything depends for its existence. For him, the active intellect is\\nan integral part of the human soul: “the active intellect is in\\nthe soul and it is like the most honourable part of the human\\nsoul” (In De anima 103.4–5). Although the active\\nintellect so understood is a human intellect, it is emphatically not\\nconceived of as a personal intellect. Themistius is adamantly clear\\nthat there is only one separate, unmixed, and unaffected active\\nintellect. Likewise, there is only one separate, unmixed, and\\nunaffected potential intellect, nous dunamei. According to\\nThemistius, both the active and the potential intellects are not\\nsubject to generation and perishing. What is perishable is only the\\ncommon or passive intellect, koinon or pathêtikos\\nnous. This third intellect is mixed with the body and its fate is\\nto perish along with the body (In De anima 105.28–29;\\n106.14–15).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. The Exegetical Labor on the De anima\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nBeginning some time in the fourth century CE, Aristotle’s\\nOrganon established itself as part of the reading curriculum\\nin the Latin tradition. Like the Greek tradition, the Latin tradition\\nemployed a great variety of exegetical tools in the teaching of\\nAristotle: paraphrases, elementary as well as more advanced\\ncommentaries. In addition, the Latin tradition was confronted with the\\nspecific problem of providing the students with adequate translations\\nof the relevant texts.\",\n \"\\nThe tradition credits Marius Victorinus (fourth century CE) with a\\ntranslation of the Categories, the De\\nInterpretatione, and Porphyry’s Isagoge\\n(Cassiodorus, Instit. II, 3, 18). The same tradition credits\\nhim with a commentary in eight books on the Categories. A few\\nyears later Vettius Agorius Praetextatus is known to have translated\\nthe Greek paraphrases of the Prior and Posterior\\nAnalytics produced by Themistius (Boethius, De\\nInt.2 3.6–4.3). None of these works have reached\\nus, with the exception of excerpts from Victorinus’ translation\\nof the Isagoge. An anonymous paraphrase of the\\nCategories falsely attributed to Augustine and traditionally\\nknown as Categoriae Decem has survived only because it was\\nwidely read and used in the early Middle Ages. Finally, an incomplete\\nparaphrase of the Categories is preserved in Martianus\\nCapella’s On Dialectic (the forth book of his The\\nMarriage of Philosophy and Mercury, an influential textbook on\\nthe seven liberal arts dating from the fifth century CE). Even these\\nfew remarks suffice to document a sustained effort to provide the\\nstudents with a Latin Organon that reflected the teaching\\nneeds of the time.\",\n \"\\nThe key figure for the reception of Aristotle in the Latin world was\\nBoethius. Best known for his Consolation of Philosophy,\\nBoethius (ca 475–526) was the transmitter of the\\nAristotelian logical tradition to the early Middle Ages. His attitude\\nto the text of Aristotle and Plato was not different from that of the\\nother commentators of Late Antiquity. He regarded Plato and Aristotle\\nas philosophical authorities and was persuaded that the best way to do\\nphilosophy was to read and comment on their works. Like the Platonists\\nof Late Antiquity, he was convinced that Plato and Aristotle were in\\nbasic agreement, and that Aristotle’s thought was to be\\nunderstood as a genuine development of Plato’s. In this frame of\\nmind, Boethius planned to translate all the works of Aristotle that he\\ncould find along with all the dialogues of Plato, and to comment on\\nall of them in order to show that Plato and Aristotle agreed on the\\nmost significant philosophical points (Boethius De\\nInt.2 79. 9–80.9).\",\n \"\\nBoethius was able to execute this plan only in part. He managed to\\ntranslate the Categories, the De Interpretatione,\\nthe Prior Analytics, the Topics and the\\nSophistical Refutations. In addition, he translated\\nPorphyry’s Isagoge. Boethius produced two commentaries\\non the Isagoge. Along with these commentaries, he\\nwrote two commentaries on the De Interpretatione.\",\n \"\\nThe practice of writing double commentaries is to be understood in the\\nlight of the concern for pedagogy that motivates the entire commentary\\ntradition. Here is how Boethius explains why he wrote two commentaries\\n(or rather two versions of the same commentary) on the De\\nInterpretatione:\",\n \"\\nIt has been my plan to disclose Aristotle’s subtlest doctrines\\nin a commentary organized in two versions; for what the first version\\ncontains prepares, to some extent, an easier path for those who are\\nentering into these more profound and subtle matters. But because the\\nsecond version develops in connection with the expositor’s\\nsubtler doctrines, it is presented to be read and studied by those who\\nare advanced in this inquiry and study (Boethius, In De\\nInt.2 186. 2–9 after Kretzmann).\\n\",\n \"\\nBoethius also wrote a commentary on the Categories. This\\ncommentary was intended to be an elementary exposition of the\\ntreatise. Boethius planned to write a second exposition, addressed to\\nmore advanced students (Boethius In Cat. 160 A-B). It is just\\nunclear whether he was able to produce this more advanced commentary.\\n(For further information on Boethius as a commentator, see Section 2\\nof the entry on\\n Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius.)\",\n \"\\nThe exegetical labor on the Isagoge, the Categories\\nand the De Intepretatione continued after Boethius. This\\nlabor took often the form of glosses, that is, annotations written in\\nmargin of copies of the Isagoge, the Categories and\\nthe De Interpretatione. A survey of the exegetical results\\nreached in the early Latin Medieval tradition goes beyond the scope of\\nthis entry. I refer the reader to the Bibliography for further reading\\non the commentary tradition in the early Middle Ages.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"6. Boethius and the Latin Tradition\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThere is no philosophy of the commentators in the sense of a definite\\nset of doctrines that all the ancient commentators on Aristotle\\nshared. What the ancient commentators shared was the practice of\\nreading and commenting on the texts of Aristotle on the crucial\\nassumption that Aristotle was a philosophical authority and his\\nwritings deserved to be studied with great care.\",\n \"\\nDue to the almost complete loss of the relevant literature, we know\\nvery little about the first generation of interpreters of Aristotle.\\nNo picture of unity emerges from the little that has reached us. The\\nnotion that all these interpreters wrote commentaries is not supported\\nby the information in our possession. The commentary eventually became\\nthe standard form of exegesis. But even within the commentary\\ntradition there was room for a plurality of exegetical positions.\\nDifferent commentators developed different lines of interpretations in\\nthe light of the different (often competing) concerns that motivated\\ntheir exegesis. The exegetical tradition that finds its culmination in\\nAlexander of Aphrodisias was primarily (but not exclusively) motivated\\nby an attempt to defend the philosophy of Aristotle in the context of\\nthe ancient debate between philosophical schools. Alexander of\\nAphrodisias viewed Aristotle as his master and devoted his exegetical\\nworks to explicate and extract Aristotle’s distinctive\\nphilosophical position. While the Platonists of Late Antiquity put\\nthemselves in continuity with this tradition, their exegesis was\\nlargely an attempt to develop a philosophy that insisted on the\\ncontinuity between Plato and Aristotle. They wrote their commentaries\\non the assumption that Aristotle and Plato were in substantial\\nagreement.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"7. Conclusion\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Sorabji, R., 2005, The Philosophy of the Commentators\n200–600 AD. A Sourcebook. (Volume 1:\nPsychology; Volume 2: Physics; Volume 3: Logic and Metaphysics),\nLondon, Ithaca, NY: Duckworth, Cornell University Press.","Alessandro di Afrodisia. Commento al De caelo di Aristotele.\nFrammenti del primo libro, A. Rescigno (ed.), Amsterdam: Hakkert,\n2004.","–––. Commento al De caelo di Aristotele.\nFrammenti del secondo, terzo, e quarto libro, A. Rescigno (ed.),\nAmsterdam: Hakkert, 2008.","Alexander of Aphrodisias, On Aristotle Prior Analytics\n1.1–7, J. Barnes, S. Bobzien, K. Flannery, K. Ierodiakonou\n(trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University Press,\n1991.","–––, On Aristotle Prior Analytics\n1.8–13, J. B. Gould, and I. Müller (trans.), London,\nDuckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.","–––, On Aristotle Prior Analytics\n1.14–22, J. B. Gould, and I. Müller (trans.), Ithaca:\nCornell University Press, 1999.","–––, On Aristotle Prior Analytics\n1.23–31, I. Müller (trans.), London: Duckworth and\nIthaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.","–––, On Aristotle Prior Analytics\n1.32–46, I. Müller (trans.), London: Duckworth and\nIthaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.","–––, On Aristotle Topics 1, J. van\nOphuijsen (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University\nPress, 2001.","–––, On Aristotle Topics 2, L. Castelli\n(trans.), London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.","–––, On Aristotle On Coming-to-Be and\nPerishing 2.2–5, E. Gannagé (trans.), Ithaca:\nCornell University Press, 2005.","–––, On Aristotle Meteorology 4, E.\nLewis (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University\nPress, 1996.","–––, On Aristotle Metaphysics 1, W. E.\nDooley (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University\nPress, 1989.","–––, On Aristotle Metaphysics 2 and 3,\nW. E. Dooley, and A. Madigan (trans.), Ithaca: Cornell University\nPress, 1992.","–––, On Aristotle Metaphysics 4, A.\nMadigan (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University\nPress, 1993.","–––, On Aristotle Metaphysics 5, W. E.\nDooley (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University\nPress, 1993.","–––, On Aristotle On Sense Perception,\nJ. A. Towey (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University\nPress, 2000.","–––, On Fate, R. W. Sharples (ed.),\nLondon: Duckworth, 1983.","–––, On the Soul (Part 1), V. Caston\n(trans.), Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2012.","–––, The De anima of Alexander of\nAphrodisias, A. P. Fotinis (trans.), Washington, D.C.: University\nPress of America, 1979.","–––, Quaestiones 1.1–2.15, R. W.\nSharples (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University\nPress, 1992.","–––, Quaestiones 1.16–3.15, R. W.\nSharples (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University\nPress, 1994.","–––, Ethical Problems, R. W. Sharples\n(trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University Press,\n1990.","–––, Supplement to “On the\nSoul”, R. W. Sharples (trans.), London: Duckworth and\nIthaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.","–––, Le commentaire aux “Second\nAnalytiques”, P. Moraux (ed.), Berlin, New York: Walter de\nGruyter, 1979.","–––, Commentaire perdu à la\n“Physique” d’Aristote (Livres IV–VIII),\nM. Rashed (ed.), Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2011.","[Alexander of Aphrodisias], On Aristotle Metaphysics 12,\nF. Miller (trans.), London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.","Ammonius, On Aristotle Categories, S. M. Cohen, and G. B.\nMatthews (trans.), Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.","–––, On Aristotle On Interpretation\n1.1–8, D. Blank (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca:\nCornell University Press, 1996.","–––, On Aristotle on Interpretation 9,\nD. Blank (trans), with Boethius, On Aristotle On Interpretation\n9, N. Kretzmann (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell\nUniversity Press, 1998.","Aspasius, On Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1–4,\n7–8 D. Konstan (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca:\nCornell University Press, 2006.","Aspasius, Michael of Ephesus, Anonymous, On Aristotle\nNicomachean Ethics 8–9 D. Konstan (trans.), London,\nDuckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.","Boethius, On Aristotle On Interpretation, 1–3, A.\nSmith (trans.), Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2010.","–––, On Aristotle On Interpretation, 4–6, A.\nSmith (trans.), Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2011.","Cicero, Lucullus, in Cicero: On Academic\nScepticism, C. Brittan (trans.), Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing\nCompany, 2006.","Dexippus, On Aristotle’s Categories, J. Dillon\n(trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, NY,\n1990.","Galen, On My Own Books, in C. Kühn (ed.), Galeni\nopera omnia (20 vols. In 22), Leipzig: C. Knolbloch,\n1819–1833.","Marinus, Life of Proclus, in Proclus ou sur le\nbonheur, H. D. Saffrey and A. P. Segonds (eds.), Paris: Les\nBelles Lettres, 2002.","Philodemus, History of the Academy, in Filodemo,\nStoria dei filosofia. Platone e l’Accademia. T. Dorandi\n(ed.), Napoli: Bibliopolis, 1991.","Philoponus, On Aristotle‘s Categories 1–5, R.\nSirkel, T. Tweedale, J. Harris (trans.), Bristol: Bristol Classical\nPress, 2015.","–––, On Aristotle‘s Categories\n6–15, M. Share (trans.), London: Bloomsbury Publishing,\n2019.","–––, On Aristotle Posterior Analytics\n1.9–18, R. McKirahan (trans.), Bristol: Bristol Classical\nPress, 2012.","–––, On Aristotle Posterior Analytics\n1.19–34, O. Goldin, M. Martijn (trans.), Bristol: Bristol\nClassical Press, 2012.","–––, On Aristotle On Coming-to-Be and\nPerishing 1.1–5, C. J. F. Williams, Ithaca: Cornell\nUniversity Press, 1999.","–––, On Aristotle On Coming-to-Be and\nPerishing 1.6–2.4, C. J. F. Williams, Ithaca: Cornell\nUniversity Press, 2000.","–––, On Aristotle On Coming-to-Be and\nPerishing 2.5–11, I. Kupreeva (trans.), Ithaca: Cornell\nUniversity Press, 2005.","–––, On Aristotle Meteorology\n1.1–3, I. Kupreeva (trans.), Bristol: Bristol Classical\nPress, 2011.","–––, On Aristotle Meteorology 1.4–9,\n12, I. Kupreeva (trans.), Bristol: Bristol Classical Press,\n2012.","–––, On Aristotle Physics 1.1–3,\nC. Osborne (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University\nPress, 2006.","–––, On Aristotle Physics 1.4–9,\nC. Osborne (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University\nPress, 2006.","–––, On Aristotle Physics 2, A. R.\nLacey (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University\nPress, 1993.","–––, On Aristotle Physics 3, M. Edwards\n(trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University Press,\n1994.","–––, On Aristotle Physics 4.1–5,\nK. Algra, J. van Ophuijsen (trans.), Bristol: Bristol Classical Press,\n2013.","–––, On Aristotle Physics 4.6–9,\nP. Huby (trans.), Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2012.","–––, On Aristotle Physics\n4.10–14, S. Broadie (trans.), Bristol: Pristol Classical\nPress, 2011.","–––, On Aristotle Physics 5–8, P.\nLettinck (trans.) with Simplicius, On Aristotle on the Void,\nJ. O. Urmson (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell\nUniversity Press, 1994.","–––, Corollaries on Place and Void, D.\nFurley (trans.), with Simplicius, Against Philoponus On the\nEternity of the World, Ch. Wildberg (trans.), London: Duckworth\nand Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.","–––, On Aristotle On the Intellect, W.\nCharlton, and F. Bossier (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca:\nCornell University Press, 1991.","–––, On Aristotle On the Soul\n1.1–2, Ph. van der Eijk (trans.), London: Duckworth and\nIthaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.","–––, On Aristotle On the Soul\n1.3–5, Ph. van der Eijk (trans.), London: Duckworth and\nIthaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.","–––, On Aristotle On the Soul\n2.1–6, W. Charlton (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca:\nCornell University Press, 2005.","–––, On Aristotle On the Soul\n2.7–12, W. Charlton (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca:\nCornell University Press, 2005.","–––, On Aristotle On the soul\n3.1–8, W. Charlton (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca:\nCornell University Press, 2000.","–––, On Aristotle On the Soul\n3.9–13, W. Charlton (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca:\nCornell University Press, 2000.","Plutarch, Sulla, in Plutarch, Vitae parallelae,\nK. Ziegler (ed.), Leipzig: Teubner, 1973.","Porphyre, Commentaire aux Catégories d’\nAristote, R. Bodéüs (ed.), Paris: Vrin, 2008. [This\nis a new edition of the text with French translation and notes.]","–––, On Aristotle’s Categories,\nS. K. Strange (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell\nUniversity Press, 1992.","–––, Introduction, J. Barnes (trans.),\nOxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.","Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, in Plotini opera, P.\nHenry and H.-R. Schwyzer (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press,\n1964–1982.","Porphyry, Ad Gedalium, see Chiaradonna, Rashed, &\nSedley 2013.","Ptolémée “al–Gharîb”,\nÉpître à Gallus: sur la vie, le testament et\nles écrits d’Aristote, M. Rashed (ed.). Paris: Les\nBelles Lettres, 2021.","Simplicius, On Aristotle’s Categories 1–4, M.\nChase (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University\nPress, 2003.","–––, On Aristotle’s Categories\n5–6, Frans A. J. de Haas, and B. Fleet (trans.), London:\nDuckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.","–––, On Aristotle’s Categories\n7–8, B. Fleet (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca:\nCornell University Press 2002.","–––, On Aristotle’s Categories\n9–15, R. Gaskin (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca:\nCornell University Press, 2000.","–––, Commentaire sur les\nCatégories, I: Introduction, Première\npartie. Traduction de Ph. Hoffmann. Commentaire et notes par I.\nHadot, Leiden, New York/Cologne, Copenhagen: Brill, 1990.","–––, Commentaire sur les\nCatégories, III: Préambule aux\nCatégories. Commentaire au premier chapitre des\nCatégories. Traduction de Ph. Hoffmann. Commentaire et\nnotes à la traduction de C. Luna, Leiden, New York, Cologne,\nCopenhague: Brill, 1990.","–––, Commentaire sur les Catégories,\nChapitres 2–4. Traduction de Ph. Hoffmann. Commentaire et\nnotes à la traduction de C. Luna, Paris: Les Belles Lettres,\n2001.","–––, On Aristotle Physics 1.3–4.\nP. Huby and C. C. W. Taylor (trans.), Bristol: Bristol Classical\nPress, 2011.","–––, On Aristotle Physics 1.5–9.\nH. Baltussen, M. Atkinson, M. 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Ierodiakonou\\n(trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University Press,\\n1991.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Prior Analytics\\n1.8–13, J. B. Gould, and I. Müller (trans.), London,\\nDuckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Prior Analytics\\n1.14–22, J. B. Gould, and I. Müller (trans.), Ithaca:\\nCornell University Press, 1999.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Prior Analytics\\n1.23–31, I. Müller (trans.), London: Duckworth and\\nIthaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Prior Analytics\\n1.32–46, I. Müller (trans.), London: Duckworth and\\nIthaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Topics 1, J. van\\nOphuijsen (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University\\nPress, 2001.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Topics 2, L. Castelli\\n(trans.), London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle On Coming-to-Be and\\nPerishing 2.2–5, E. Gannagé (trans.), Ithaca:\\nCornell University Press, 2005.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Meteorology 4, E.\\nLewis (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University\\nPress, 1996.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Metaphysics 1, W. E.\\nDooley (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University\\nPress, 1989.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Metaphysics 2 and 3,\\nW. E. Dooley, and A. Madigan (trans.), Ithaca: Cornell University\\nPress, 1992.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Metaphysics 4, A.\\nMadigan (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University\\nPress, 1993.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Metaphysics 5, W. E.\\nDooley (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University\\nPress, 1993.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle On Sense Perception,\\nJ. A. Towey (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University\\nPress, 2000.\",\n \"–––, On Fate, R. W. Sharples (ed.),\\nLondon: Duckworth, 1983.\",\n \"–––, On the Soul (Part 1), V. Caston\\n(trans.), Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2012.\",\n \"–––, The De anima of Alexander of\\nAphrodisias, A. P. Fotinis (trans.), Washington, D.C.: University\\nPress of America, 1979.\",\n \"–––, Quaestiones 1.1–2.15, R. W.\\nSharples (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University\\nPress, 1992.\",\n \"–––, Quaestiones 1.16–3.15, R. W.\\nSharples (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University\\nPress, 1994.\",\n \"–––, Ethical Problems, R. W. Sharples\\n(trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University Press,\\n1990.\",\n \"–––, Supplement to “On the\\nSoul”, R. W. Sharples (trans.), London: Duckworth and\\nIthaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.\",\n \"–––, Le commentaire aux “Second\\nAnalytiques”, P. Moraux (ed.), Berlin, New York: Walter de\\nGruyter, 1979.\",\n \"–––, Commentaire perdu à la\\n“Physique” d’Aristote (Livres IV–VIII),\\nM. Rashed (ed.), Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2011.\",\n \"[Alexander of Aphrodisias], On Aristotle Metaphysics 12,\\nF. Miller (trans.), London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021.\",\n \"Ammonius, On Aristotle Categories, S. M. Cohen, and G. B.\\nMatthews (trans.), Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle On Interpretation\\n1.1–8, D. Blank (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca:\\nCornell University Press, 1996.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle on Interpretation 9,\\nD. Blank (trans), with Boethius, On Aristotle On Interpretation\\n9, N. Kretzmann (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell\\nUniversity Press, 1998.\",\n \"Aspasius, On Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics 1–4,\\n7–8 D. Konstan (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca:\\nCornell University Press, 2006.\",\n \"Aspasius, Michael of Ephesus, Anonymous, On Aristotle\\nNicomachean Ethics 8–9 D. Konstan (trans.), London,\\nDuckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.\",\n \"Boethius, On Aristotle On Interpretation, 1–3, A.\\nSmith (trans.), Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2010.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle On Interpretation, 4–6, A.\\nSmith (trans.), Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2011.\",\n \"Cicero, Lucullus, in Cicero: On Academic\\nScepticism, C. Brittan (trans.), Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing\\nCompany, 2006.\",\n \"Dexippus, On Aristotle’s Categories, J. Dillon\\n(trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, NY,\\n1990.\",\n \"Galen, On My Own Books, in C. Kühn (ed.), Galeni\\nopera omnia (20 vols. In 22), Leipzig: C. Knolbloch,\\n1819–1833.\",\n \"Marinus, Life of Proclus, in Proclus ou sur le\\nbonheur, H. D. Saffrey and A. P. Segonds (eds.), Paris: Les\\nBelles Lettres, 2002.\",\n \"Philodemus, History of the Academy, in Filodemo,\\nStoria dei filosofia. Platone e l’Accademia. T. Dorandi\\n(ed.), Napoli: Bibliopolis, 1991.\",\n \"Philoponus, On Aristotle‘s Categories 1–5, R.\\nSirkel, T. Tweedale, J. Harris (trans.), Bristol: Bristol Classical\\nPress, 2015.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle‘s Categories\\n6–15, M. Share (trans.), London: Bloomsbury Publishing,\\n2019.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Posterior Analytics\\n1.9–18, R. McKirahan (trans.), Bristol: Bristol Classical\\nPress, 2012.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Posterior Analytics\\n1.19–34, O. Goldin, M. Martijn (trans.), Bristol: Bristol\\nClassical Press, 2012.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle On Coming-to-Be and\\nPerishing 1.1–5, C. J. F. Williams, Ithaca: Cornell\\nUniversity Press, 1999.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle On Coming-to-Be and\\nPerishing 1.6–2.4, C. J. F. Williams, Ithaca: Cornell\\nUniversity Press, 2000.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle On Coming-to-Be and\\nPerishing 2.5–11, I. Kupreeva (trans.), Ithaca: Cornell\\nUniversity Press, 2005.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Meteorology\\n1.1–3, I. Kupreeva (trans.), Bristol: Bristol Classical\\nPress, 2011.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Meteorology 1.4–9,\\n12, I. Kupreeva (trans.), Bristol: Bristol Classical Press,\\n2012.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Physics 1.1–3,\\nC. Osborne (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University\\nPress, 2006.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Physics 1.4–9,\\nC. Osborne (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University\\nPress, 2006.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Physics 2, A. R.\\nLacey (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University\\nPress, 1993.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Physics 3, M. Edwards\\n(trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University Press,\\n1994.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Physics 4.1–5,\\nK. Algra, J. van Ophuijsen (trans.), Bristol: Bristol Classical Press,\\n2013.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Physics 4.6–9,\\nP. Huby (trans.), Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 2012.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Physics\\n4.10–14, S. Broadie (trans.), Bristol: Pristol Classical\\nPress, 2011.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Physics 5–8, P.\\nLettinck (trans.) with Simplicius, On Aristotle on the Void,\\nJ. O. Urmson (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell\\nUniversity Press, 1994.\",\n \"–––, Corollaries on Place and Void, D.\\nFurley (trans.), with Simplicius, Against Philoponus On the\\nEternity of the World, Ch. Wildberg (trans.), London: Duckworth\\nand Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle On the Intellect, W.\\nCharlton, and F. Bossier (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca:\\nCornell University Press, 1991.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle On the Soul\\n1.1–2, Ph. van der Eijk (trans.), London: Duckworth and\\nIthaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle On the Soul\\n1.3–5, Ph. van der Eijk (trans.), London: Duckworth and\\nIthaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle On the Soul\\n2.1–6, W. Charlton (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca:\\nCornell University Press, 2005.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle On the Soul\\n2.7–12, W. Charlton (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca:\\nCornell University Press, 2005.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle On the soul\\n3.1–8, W. Charlton (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca:\\nCornell University Press, 2000.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle On the Soul\\n3.9–13, W. Charlton (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca:\\nCornell University Press, 2000.\",\n \"Plutarch, Sulla, in Plutarch, Vitae parallelae,\\nK. Ziegler (ed.), Leipzig: Teubner, 1973.\",\n \"Porphyre, Commentaire aux Catégories d’\\nAristote, R. Bodéüs (ed.), Paris: Vrin, 2008. [This\\nis a new edition of the text with French translation and notes.]\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle’s Categories,\\nS. K. Strange (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell\\nUniversity Press, 1992.\",\n \"–––, Introduction, J. Barnes (trans.),\\nOxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.\",\n \"Porphyry, Life of Plotinus, in Plotini opera, P.\\nHenry and H.-R. Schwyzer (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press,\\n1964–1982.\",\n \"Porphyry, Ad Gedalium, see Chiaradonna, Rashed, &\\nSedley 2013.\",\n \"Ptolémée “al–Gharîb”,\\nÉpître à Gallus: sur la vie, le testament et\\nles écrits d’Aristote, M. Rashed (ed.). Paris: Les\\nBelles Lettres, 2021.\",\n \"Simplicius, On Aristotle’s Categories 1–4, M.\\nChase (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University\\nPress, 2003.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle’s Categories\\n5–6, Frans A. J. de Haas, and B. Fleet (trans.), London:\\nDuckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle’s Categories\\n7–8, B. Fleet (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca:\\nCornell University Press 2002.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle’s Categories\\n9–15, R. Gaskin (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca:\\nCornell University Press, 2000.\",\n \"–––, Commentaire sur les\\nCatégories, I: Introduction, Première\\npartie. Traduction de Ph. Hoffmann. Commentaire et notes par I.\\nHadot, Leiden, New York/Cologne, Copenhagen: Brill, 1990.\",\n \"–––, Commentaire sur les\\nCatégories, III: Préambule aux\\nCatégories. Commentaire au premier chapitre des\\nCatégories. Traduction de Ph. Hoffmann. Commentaire et\\nnotes à la traduction de C. Luna, Leiden, New York, Cologne,\\nCopenhague: Brill, 1990.\",\n \"–––, Commentaire sur les Catégories,\\nChapitres 2–4. Traduction de Ph. Hoffmann. Commentaire et\\nnotes à la traduction de C. Luna, Paris: Les Belles Lettres,\\n2001.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Physics 1.3–4.\\nP. Huby and C. C. W. Taylor (trans.), Bristol: Bristol Classical\\nPress, 2011.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Physics 1.5–9.\\nH. Baltussen, M. Atkinson, M. Share, I. Mueller (trans.), Bristol:\\nBristol Classical Press, 2012.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Physics 2, B. Fleet\\n(trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University Press,\\n1997.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Physics 3, J. O.\\nUrmson and P. Lautner (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell\\nUniversity Press, 2001.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Physics 4.1–5 and\\n10–14, J. O Urmson (trans.), Ithaca: Cornell University\\nPress, 1992.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Physics 5, J. O.\\nUrmson (trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University\\nPress, 1997.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Physics 6, D. Konstan\\n(trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University Press,\\n1989.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Physics 7, C. Hagen\\n(trans.), London: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University Press,\\n1994.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Physics 8.1–5,\\nM. Share, I. Bodnár, M. Chase (trans.), Bristol: Bristol\\nClassical Press, 2013.\",\n \"–––, On Aristotle Physics 8.6–10,\\nR. 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Schofield (ed.), Plato,\\nAristotle, Pythagoras in the First Century BC, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press, pp. 1–27.\",\n \"–––, 2016, “Andronicus of Rhodes and the\\nConstruction of the Corpus Aristotelicum”, in A. Falcon (ed.),\\nBrill’s Companion to the Reception of Aristotle in\\nAntiquity, Leiden and Boston: Brill, pp. 81–100.\",\n \"Hein, Ch.,1985, Definition und Einteilung der Philosophie: von\\nder spätantiken Einleitungsliteratur zur arabischen\\nEnzyklopädie, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.\",\n \"Hoffmann, Ph., 1998, “La fonction des prologues\\nexégétiques dans la pensée pédagogique\\nnéoplatonicienne”, in B. Roussel and J.-D. Dubois (eds.),\\nEntrer en matière, Paris: CERF, pp.\\n209–245.\",\n \"–––, 2006, “What was Commentary in Late\\nAntiquity? The Example of the Late Neoplatonic Commentaries”, in\\nM. L. Gill and P. Pellegrin (eds.), A Companion to Ancient\\nPhilosophy, London: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 597–622.\",\n \"Karamanolis, G., 2004, “Porphyry: The First Platonist\\nCommentator on Aristotle”, in P. Adamson, H. Baltussen, M. Stone\\n(eds.), Philosophy, Science and Exegesis in Greek, Arabic and\\nLatin Commentaries, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical\\nStudies (Supplementary Volume) 83(1): pp. 97–120.\",\n \"–––, 2006, “Plato and Aristotle in\\nAgreement? Platonists on Aristotle from Antiochus to Porphyry”,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Longo, A. (ed.), 2009, Syrianus et la métaphysique de\\nl’antiquité tardive, Naples: Bibliopolis.\",\n \"Lynch, J.P., 1972, Aristotle School, Berkeley, Los\\nAngeles: University of California Press.\",\n \"Luna, C., 2001, Trois études sur la tradition des\\ncommentaires anciens à la Métaphysique, Leiden,\\nBoston, Köln: Brill.\",\n \"Mansfeld, J., 1994, Prolegomena: Questions to be Settled\\nbefore the Study of an Author, or a Text, Leiden, Boston,\\nKöln: Brill.\",\n \"Marenbon, J., 1993, “Medieval Latin Commentaries and Glosses\\non Aristotelian Logical Texts, Before c. 1150 AD”, in\\nC. Burnett (ed.), Glosses and Commentaries on Aristotelian Logical\\nTexts: The Syriac, Arabic, and Medieval Latin Traditions, London:\\nThe Warburg Institute, pp. 77–127; reprinted as chapter 2 in J.\\nMarenbon, 2000, Aristotelian Logic, Platonism and the Context of\\nEarly Medieval Philosophy in the West, Aldershot: Ashgate\\nPublishing.\",\n \"–––, 1997, “Glosses and Commentaries on\\nthe Categories and De Interpretatione before\\nAbelard”, in J. Fried (ed.) Dialektik und Rhetorik im\\nfrüheren und hohen Mittelalter, Münich, pp.\\n21–49; reprinted as chapter 9 in J. Marenbon, 2000,\\nAristotelian Logic, Platonism, and the Context of Early Medieval\\nPhilosophy in the West, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.\",\n \"Menn, S., 2018, “Andronicus and Boethus: Reflections on M.\\nGriffin, Aristotle’s Categories in the Early Roman\\nEmpire”, in Documenti e studi sulla tradizione\\nfilosofica medievale, 29: 13–43.\",\n \"Merlan, P., 1967, “The Peripatos”, in A.H. Armstrong\\n(ed.), The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval\\nPhilosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.\\n899–949.\",\n \"Minio-Paluello, L., 1945, “The Text of the\\nCategories: the Latin Tradition”, Classical\\nQuarterly 39: 63–74; reprinted in L. Minio-Paluello,\\n1972, Opuscula: The Latin Aristotle, Amsterdam, pp.\\n28–39.\",\n \"Most, G.W. (ed.), 1999, Commentaries-Kommentare,\\nGöttingen: Vandenhoeck-Ruprecht.\",\n \"Moraux, P., 1942, Alexandre d’Aphrodise:\\nexégète de la noetique d’Aristote\\nLiège and Paris: Faculté des Lettres and E. Droz.\",\n \"–––, 1973, Der Aristotelismus bei den\\nGriechen, volume 1: Die Renaissance des Aristotelismus im I.\\nJh. v. Chr, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.\",\n \"–––, 1984, Der Aristotelismus bei den\\nGriechen, volume 2: Der Aristotelismus im I und II Jh. n.\\nChr., Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.\",\n \"–––, 1986, “Porphyre, commentateur de la\\n”Physique“ d’Aristote”, in Ch. Rutten and A,\\nMotte (eds.), Aristotelica: Mélanges offert à Marcel\\nCorte, Bruxelles: Ousia, pp. 327–344.\",\n \"–––, 1986, “Les début de la\\nphilologie aristotélicienne”, in G. Cambiano (ed.),\\nStoriografia e dossografia nella filosofia antica, Turin:\\nTirrenia Stampatori, pp. 127–147.\",\n \"–––, 2001, Der Aristotelismus bei den\\nGriechen, volume 3: Alexander von Aphrodisias, J.\\nWiesner (ed.), Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter.\",\n \"Perkams, M., 2019, “The Date and Place of\\nAndronicus’Edition of Aristotle’’s Works According\\nto a Neglected Arabic Source”, in Archiv für\\nGeschichte der Philosophie, 101: 445–468.\",\n \"Praetcher, K., 1906, “Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca XXII\\n2”, in Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen, 11:\\n861–907.\",\n \"–––, 1909, “Die griechischen\\nAristoteleskommentare, Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca”, in\\nByzantinische Zeitschrift 18: 516–538; reprinted in\\nEnglish translation in R. Sorabji (ed.), Aristotle Transformed:\\nThe Ancient Commentators and their Influence, London: Duckworth\\n1990, pp. 31–54.\",\n \"Primavesi, O., 2007, “Ein Blick in den Stollen von Skepsis:\\nvier Kapitel zur frühen Überlieferung der Corpus\\nAristotelicum”, Philologus 151: 51–77.\",\n \"–––, 2021, “Werk und Überlieferung”,\\nin Ch. Rapp and K. Corcilius (eds.), Aristoteles Handbuch,\\nStuttgart: J. B. Metzler, second, augmented edition, pp.\\n67–74.\",\n \"Rashed, M., 2007, Essentialisme: Alexandre d’Aphrodise\\nentre logique, physique et cosmologie, Berlin and New York:\\nWalter de Gruyter.\",\n \"–––, 2014, L’héritage\\naristotélicien. Textes inédits de\\nl’antiquité, Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Second,\\naugmented, edition.\",\n \"Reinhardt, T., 2007, “Andronicus of Rhodes and Boethus of\\nSidon on Aristotle’s Categories”, in R. Sorabji\\nand R. W. Sharples (eds.), Greek and Roman Philosophy 100 BC-200\\nAD, London: Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies\\n(Supplementary Volume 94), pp. 513–529.\",\n \"Richard, M., 1950, “Apo phonês”,\\nByzantion, 20: 191–222.\",\n \"Schofield, M., 2012, Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras in the\\nFirst Century B.C., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Sellars, J., 2004, “The Aristotelian Commentators: A\\nBiographical Guide”, in P. Adamson, H. Baltussen, M. Stone\\n(eds.), Philosophy, Science and Exegesis in Greek, Arabic and\\nLatin Commentaries, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical\\nStudies (Supplementary Volume), 83(2): 239–268.\",\n \"Sharples, R.W., 1987, “Alexander of Aphrodisias:\\nScholasticism and Innovation”, in H. Temporini and W. Haase\\n(eds.), Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt\\n(Volume 36, Number 2), Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, pp.\\n1176–1243.\",\n \"–––, 1997, “The Peripatetic School”,\\nin D. J. Furley (ed.), Routledge History of Philosophy,\\nvolume 2: From Aristotle to Augustine, London: Routledge, pp.\\n147–187.\",\n \"–––, 1998, “Alexander and pseudo-Alexander\\nof Aphrodisias, scripta minima. Questions and\\nproblems, makeweights and prospects”, in W.\\nKullmann, J. Althoff, and M. Asper (eds.), Gattungen\\nwissenschaftlicher Literatur in der Antike, Tübingen:\\nGünter Narr Verla, pp. 383–403.\",\n \"–––, 2007, “Aristotle’s Exoteric and\\nEsoteric Works: Summaries and Commentaries”, in R. Sorabji and\\nR. W. Sharples (eds.), Greek and Roman Philosophy 100 BC-200\\nAD, London: University of London, Institute of Classical Studies,\\nsupplementary volume 94, pp. 505–512.\",\n \"–––, 2008, “Habent sua fata libelli:\\nAristotle’s Categories in the 1st Century\\nBC”, Acta antiqua Hungarica, 48: 273–287.\",\n \"–––, 2010, Peripatetic Philosophy, 200 B.C.\\nto A.D. 200. An Introduction and Collection of Sources in\\nTranslation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Shiel, J., 1990, “Boethius’ commentaries on\\nAristotle” in R. Sorabji (ed.), Aristotle Transformed,\\nLondon: Duckworth and Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp.\\n349–372.\",\n \"Schroeder, F. M., Todd, R. B. (eds.), 1990, Two Greek\\nAristotelian commentators on the Intellect, Toronto: Pontifical\\nInstitute of Medieval Studies.\",\n \"Solmsen, F., 1944, “Boethius and the History of the\\nOrganon”, in American Journal of Philology,\\n65: 69–74.\",\n \"Sorabji, R. (ed.), 1990, Aristotle Transformed: The Ancient\\nCommentators and their Influence, London: Duckworth.\",\n \"–––, 2016, Aristotle Re–interpreted:\\nNew Findings on Seven Hundred Years of the Ancient Commentators,\\nLondon: Bloomsbury Publishing.\",\n \"Tarán, L., 1981, “Aristotelianism in the\\n1st century BC”, Gnomon 57:\\n721–750; reprinted in L. Taràn, 2001, Collected\\nPapers, Leiden, Boston, Köln: Brill, pp. 479–524.\",\n \"Tuominen, M., 2009, The Ancient Commentators on Plato and\\nAristotle, Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California\\nPress.\",\n \"Watts, E., 2006, City and School in Late Antiquity: Athens and\\nAlexandria, Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California\\nPress.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../alexander-aphrodisias/","text":"Alexander of Aphrodisias"},{"href":"../ammonius/","text":"Ammonius"},{"href":"../aristotelianism-renaissance/","text":"Aristotelianism: in the Renaissance"},{"href":"../aristotle/","text":"Aristotle"},{"href":"../aristotle-categories/","text":"Aristotle, General Topics: categories"},{"href":"../boethius/","text":"Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus"},{"href":"../david/","text":"David"},{"href":"../elias/","text":"Elias"},{"href":"../neoplatonism/","text":"Neoplatonism"},{"href":"../olympiodorus/","text":"Olympiodorus"},{"href":"../philoponus/","text":"Philoponus"},{"href":"../plato/","text":"Plato"},{"href":"../plotinus/","text":"Plotinus"},{"href":"../porphyry/","text":"Porphyry"},{"href":"../simplicius/","text":"Simplicius"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../alexander-aphrodisias/\",\n \"text\": \"Alexander of Aphrodisias\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../ammonius/\",\n \"text\": \"Ammonius\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotelianism-renaissance/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotelianism: in the Renaissance\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotle/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotle\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotle-categories/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotle, General Topics: categories\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../boethius/\",\n \"text\": \"Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../david/\",\n \"text\": \"David\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../elias/\",\n \"text\": \"Elias\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../neoplatonism/\",\n \"text\": \"Neoplatonism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../olympiodorus/\",\n \"text\": \"Olympiodorus\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../philoponus/\",\n \"text\": \"Philoponus\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../plato/\",\n \"text\": \"Plato\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../plotinus/\",\n \"text\": \"Plotinus\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../porphyry/\",\n \"text\": \"Porphyry\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../simplicius/\",\n \"text\": \"Simplicius\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":61,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"animalism"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Animalism"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Mon Apr 7, 2014; substantive revision Mon Jul 15, 2019"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nAmong the questions to be raised under the heading of “personal\nidentity” are these: “What are we?” (fundamental\nnature question) and “Under what conditions do we persist\nthrough time?” (persistence question). Against the dominant\nneo-Lockean approach to these questions, the view known as animalism\nanswers that each of us is an organism of the species Homo\nsapiens and that the conditions of our persistence are those of\nanimals. Beyond describing the content and historical background of\nanimalism and its rivals, this entry explores some of the arguments\nfor and objections to this controversial account of our nature and\npersistence."],"string":"[\n \"\\nAmong the questions to be raised under the heading of “personal\\nidentity” are these: “What are we?” (fundamental\\nnature question) and “Under what conditions do we persist\\nthrough time?” (persistence question). Against the dominant\\nneo-Lockean approach to these questions, the view known as animalism\\nanswers that each of us is an organism of the species Homo\\nsapiens and that the conditions of our persistence are those of\\nanimals. Beyond describing the content and historical background of\\nanimalism and its rivals, this entry explores some of the arguments\\nfor and objections to this controversial account of our nature and\\npersistence.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Formulating Animalism","sub_toc":["1.1 Our Fundamental Nature","1.2 Our Persistence"]},{"content_title":"2. The Lockean Legacy","sub_toc":["2.1 Locke’s Human/Person Distinction","2.2 Animalism and the Human/Person Distinction","2.3 Animalism(s) vs. Neo-Lockeanism(s)"]},{"content_title":"3. Arguments for and Objections to Animalism","sub_toc":["3.1 Thinking Animal Argument","3.2 Replies to the Thinking Animal Argument","3.3 Animal Ancestors Argument","3.4 Further Objections, Implications, and Questions"]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Formulating Animalism\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"1.1 Our Fundamental Nature\",\n \"1.2 Our Persistence\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. The Lockean Legacy\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"2.1 Locke’s Human/Person Distinction\",\n \"2.2 Animalism and the Human/Person Distinction\",\n \"2.3 Animalism(s) vs. Neo-Lockeanism(s)\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Arguments for and Objections to Animalism\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"3.1 Thinking Animal Argument\",\n \"3.2 Replies to the Thinking Animal Argument\",\n \"3.3 Animal Ancestors Argument\",\n \"3.4 Further Objections, Implications, and Questions\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\nDespite its Aristotelian heritage, animalism is a relative newcomer to\nthe personal identity debate. While early intimations of the view can\nbe found in work by Wiggins (1980) and Wollheim (1984), those\nprimarily responsible for injecting the view into the contemporary\ndebate over personal identity include Ayers (1991), Carter (1989,\n1999), Olson (1997), Snowdon (1990, 1991, 1995), and van Inwagen\n(1990). Though its supporters appear to remain in the minority,\nanimalism has since attracted other advocates, including Bailey (2016,\n2017), Blatti (2012), DeGrazia (2005), Hacker (2007), Hershenov\n(2005a), D. Mackie (1999a,b), Merricks (2001), and Wiggins (2001).\nNotable critics include Baker (2000, 2016), Johnston (2007, 2016),\nMcMahan (2002), Noonan (1998, 1989 [2019]), Parfit (2012), and S.\nShoemaker (1999, 2011, 2016), among others.","\nThe name ‘animalism’ was conferred by Snowdon (1991: 109)\nand has been widely adopted. The view is also sometimes referred to as\n“the organism view” (e.g., Liao 2006), the\n“biological criterion” (e.g., D. Shoemaker 2009), or\n“the biological approach” (e.g., Olson 1997)."],"section_title":"1. Formulating Animalism","subsections":[{"content":["\nAnimalism’s hallmark claim concerns our basic metaphysical\nnature: whether we are material or immaterial; simple or composite;\nsubstance, property, process, or event; organic or inorganic; etc. In\nthis context, the animalist asserts simply:","\nDespite its plainness, (1′) is easily misinterpreted (for\ndiscussion, see D. Mackie 1999b: 230–33; Olson 2003:\n318–21; and Snowdon 2014: ch. 1). According to the intended\nreading, the ‘we’ picks out human persons such as you and\nme. Nevertheless, (1′) should not be taken to assert that\nall persons are animals. It leaves open the possibilities of\nboth non-animal people (e.g., robots, angels, aliens, deities) and\nhuman animals that are not people (e.g., patients in persistent\nvegetative states, human fetuses). The ‘are’ reflects the\n‘is’ of numerical identity. Consequently, animalism is not\nthe view that each of us is “constituted by” a particular\norganism, in the way that a statue is sometimes said to be\nnon-identically constituted by the hunk of matter with which it\ncoincides (see\n section 2.3).\n Nor still should (1′) be understood to claim that each of us\nhas a body that is an animal—as if you were one thing\nand your animal body another. Finally, ‘animals’ refers to\nbiological organisms—members of the primate species Homo\nsapiens. While participants on both sides of the debate over\nanimalism tend to treat these terms interchangeably, some prominent\ncritics distinguish ‘animals’ from ‘organisms’\nand deny that these terms co-refer (e.g., Johnston 2007: 55–56,\nS. Shoemaker 2011: 353).","\nExpressed in logical notation and individualized, (1′) is\nsometimes presented in the following form:","\nThis says: necessarily, for any object x, if x is a\nhuman person, then x is an animal, i.e., necessarily, human\npersons are animals. While neither (1′) nor (1″) is\nunproblematic (see, e.g., Johansson 2007 and Toner 2011), it is clear\nenough what they do not suggest. According to the animalism\naccount of our most fundamental nature, we are not","\nHaving said that, this entry will focus primarily on animalism’s\npositive assertions, rather than on animalist criticisms of each of\nits rival views. The interested reader is directed to Olson 2007 and\nSnowdon 2014, which not only include qualified defenses of (1), but\nalso raise a host of criticisms of the foregoing\nalternatives—criticisms that, if not motivated by an acceptance\nof (1), are at least consistent with its truth.","\nIt bears mention that animalism is sometimes formulated slightly\ndifferently as:","\nOn this construal, animalism is the view that we could not exist\nexcept as animals. Indeed, some have alleged that a commitment to\n(1′) is insufficient to qualify anyone as an animalist and that\nthis label should be reserved only for those committed to\nboth (1′) and (1‴) (Belshaw 2011: 401; cf. Olson\n2007: 26–27, Snowdon 1990). Insistence on this point is probably\ninnocuous, however, since most philosophers accept that all animals\n(human and otherwise) are essentially animals, in which case,\n(1‴) follows immediately from (1′)."],"subsection_title":"1.1 Our Fundamental Nature"},{"content":["\nWhile it is a claim about our fundamental nature that is most readily\nassociated with the name, animalism also incorporates a view about our\npersistence. Stated in its most general form, this view asserts the\nfollowing:","\nAll animalists subscribe to (2), so far as it goes. But it does not go\nvery far. What exactly are the conditions of (human) animal\ncontinuity? Although animalists are mostly in agreement, there is a\nsubtle and seldom acknowledged rift between two camps of animalist\nthinking about the answer to this question.","\nAccording to the first camp, remaining alive is both a necessary and a\nsufficient condition for the persistence of human animals.\nHuman-animal persistence thus consists in the continuation of those\nprocesses constitutive of biological life. As Olson puts it,\n“one survives just in case one’s purely animal\nfunctions—metabolism, the capacity to breathe and circulate\none’s blood, and the like—continue” (1997: 16). On\nthis view, an animal’s life is understood as","\n\n\na self-organizing biological event that maintains the organism’s\ncomplex internal structure. The materials that organisms are made up\nof are intrinsically unstable and must therefore be constantly\nrepaired and renewed, or else the organism dies and its remains decay.\nAn organism must constantly take in new particles, reconfigure and\nassimilate them into its living fabric, and expel those that are no\nlonger useful to it. An organism’s life enables it to persist\nand retain its characteristic structure despite constant material\nturnover. (Olson 2007: 28)\n","\nThis first animalist answer to the persistence question, then, can be\nglossed as follows:","\nOnce (2a) is conjoined with the animalist answer to the fundamental\nnature question, (1), we have a view that might be labeled\n“organic animalism”. Notable advocates of this view\ninclude Olson and van Inwagen (1990). Of course, it follows from the\norganicist view that death will constitute the end of our existence.\nWhatever else may remain following our deaths, each of us will cease\nto exist when we die. Indeed, strictly speaking on this view, there is\nno such thing as a dead animal (or perhaps—if ‘dead’\nis a non-attributive adjective like ‘fake’—that a\n“dead animal” is not an animal).","\nThose in the second animalist camp deny that being alive is a\nnecessary condition for the persistence of human animals. On their\nview, a human animal (like all organisms) is a functionally organized\nphysical object whose membership in a particular species is attributed\nto its origin and structure. Only if it is so gruesome as to destroy\nthis structure will an organism’s death bring about its\nnonexistence. We persist, David Mackie puts it, “as long as this\norganisation of [our] constituent parts remains sufficiently nearly\nintact” (1999b: 237).","\nBut this focus on the functional organization of animal bodies should\nbe taken neither as discounting altogether the significance of the\nlife processes emphasized by organicists nor as affirming a\ntraditional bodily criterion of persistence. On the contrary, on this\nview, a human animal’s ","\n\n\nlife is both a consequence or inseparable function of its origin and\nthe continuing explanation of its structure and parts at any moment of\nits existence. Life is essential to the thing in so far as it is\ninconceivable that it (this thing) should have come into existence as\na non-living thing. (Ayers 1991: vol. 2: 224)\n","\n“But”, Ayers continues, “that is not to say that\nwhen it dies the thing itself will cease to exist: merely that an\nexplanation of the existence and structure of the thing will then\nrefer to a life that is over” (ibid.).","\nIn contrast with their organicist counterparts, these animalists\nanswer the persistence question along the following lines:","\n\n\nthe persistence of biological organisms depends on their retaining\n(enough of) the organisation of parts that is the product of their\nnatural biological development, and that makes them apt for life,\nwhile stopping short of saying that life itself is necessary. (D.\nMackie 1999b: 236) \n","\nIn short:","\nHereafter, ‘somatic animalism’ will refer to the\nconjunction of (1) and (2b). In addition to Ayers and Mackie, notable\nsomaticists include Carter (1989, 1999) and Feldman (1992).","\nIt is worth emphasizing that the debate between somatic and organic\nanimalists is not merely verbal and that the sort of linguistic\nevidence sometimes marshaled (e.g., by D. Mackie 1999b) is—while\ngermane—unlikely to settle the question at issue. The debate\nbetween somaticist and organicist conceptions of the conditions of\nanimal continuity reflects a substantive (if, as yet, inadequately\nexplored) disagreement about the nature of (human) animals. (Are they\nessentially living? How ought life itself be understood?) Moreover,\nwhile the issue of whether something can be both an animal and dead\nillustrates the somaticist-organicist debate, it is hardly\nthe only context in which that debate manifests itself. The same\ndebate could be illustrated when considering unborn human fetuses,\nhuman animals in suspended animation, etc."],"subsection_title":"1.2 Our Persistence"}]},{"main_content":["\nToward the end of his magisterial two-volume commentary on John Locke,\nAyers writes that ","\n\n\nfor all the transformation of our motives, indeed, of our general\nphilosophical theory … the debate on personal identity has\nhardly moved on since the innovations of the seventeenth and\neighteenth centuries. (1991: vol. 2: 281)\n","\nIn a similar spirit, S. Shoemaker recently adapted Whitehead’s\nfamous remark, observing that “the history of the topic of\npersonal identity has been a series of footnotes to Locke”\n(2008: 313). It is certainly undeniable that no single discussion of\npersonal identity has done more to shape the current debate than the\nchapter titled “Of Identity and Diversity” that Locke\nadded to the second edition of his Essay Concerning Human\nUnderstanding (II.xxvii). (Hereafter, all textual references to \nLocke are to this work, Locke 1689 [1975].) Also undeniable is the \neffect these\npages have had on the emergence of the animalist alternative to the\nLockean approach to personal identity. For whatever intuitive appeal\nanimalism may seem to have in our secular, post-Darwinian climate, in\nthe wake of Locke’s work, the falsity of animalism was long\ntaken for granted."],"section_title":"2. The Lockean Legacy","subsections":[{"content":["\nFrom an animalist perspective, the most significant aspect of\nLocke’s famous discussion is the sharp distinction he draws\nbetween the human animal (“man”) and the person. Unlike a\nmass of matter—which consists merely in “the Cohesion of\nParticles … any how united” (II.xxvii.4)—a living\norganism (e.g., oak tree, horse, human animal) is a structurally\ncomplex material object whose functional organization is conducive to\ncontinued life. A person, by contrast, is a \n“thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and \ncan\nconsider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different\ntimes and places; which it does by that consciousness, which is\ninseparable from thinking” (II.xxvii.9).","\nBy classifying “man” with other organisms and then drawing\na distinction between organisms and persons, Locke recognizes that he\nis prying apart the traditional notion of “man” as\nrational, on the one hand, and animal, on the other. Against this\ntraditional understanding, he introduces a thought experiment\ninvolving a rational parrot (II.xxvii.8). Our unwillingness to call\nthis parrot a “man” simply because it is an animal\npossessed of language and reason illustrates that not all rational\nanimals are men. Nor are all men rational animals: “whoever\nshould see a Creature of his own Shape and Make, though it had no more\nreason all its Life, than a Cat or a Parrot, would\ncall him still a Man” (ibid.). The human/person\ndistinction gains traction once it is coupled with one of\nthe Essay’s key insights, viz. that sortal concepts\n(e.g., human animal, person) are often (though not\nalways) associated with different identity criteria.\n“Identity”—as he puts it in the title of the section\nin which this insight is first registered—is “suited to\nthe Idea”: “such as is the Idea\nbelonging to [a] Name, such must be the Identity”\n(II.xxvii.7). Locke is keenly aware of the significance of this\nprinciple; “if it had been a little more carefully attended\nto”, he admonishes, it “would possibly have prevented a\ngreat deal of that Confusion, which often occurs about this Matter\n… especially concerning\nPersonal Identity” (ibid.). And indeed, it is this\ninsight about the association of sortal concepts and identity criteria\nthat encourages the thought in Locke that human animals and persons\nare governed by different criteria of identity. Whereas a human animal\npersists just in case “the same continued Life [is] communicated\nto different Particles of Matter, as they happen successively to be\nunited to that organiz’d living Body” (II.xxvii.8), when\none “consider[s] what Person stands for”, Locke\ncontends, one finds that its persistence consists in “the\nsameness of a rational Being”. He explains: “as far as\nthis consciousness can be extended backwards to any past Action or\nThought, so far reaches the Identity of that\nPerson” (II.xxvii.9).","\nThe impetus behind Locke’s human/person distinction was the\nongoing debate amongst seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theologians\nand philosophers concerning the metaphysics of resurrection. Their\nchallenge was to account for the Biblical prediction that the dead\nwould be resurrected on judgment day. But what is it exactly that gets\nresurrected? The physical particles associated with a living organism\nare in a state of constant flux. The set of particles associated with\nan organism changes from one moment to the next and may turnover\ncompletely (perhaps several times) during the course of an\norganism’s life. Moreover, whether due to decomposition and/or\nbecause they are consumed by other organisms, the particles associated\nwith an organism at its death will be widely dispersed. These facts\nalone make it unlikely, if not impossible, that the resurrection of\neach individual will involve the reconstitution of that\nindividual’s former “body”. The human/person\ndistinction supplies Locke with the resources to resolve this problem\nbecause, on his view, something is a person not because of\nthe material or immaterial substance in which it is grounded—a\nquestion on which Locke remains steadfastly agnostic, though he is\ninclined to think the underlying substance is immaterial\n(II.xxvii.25)—but in virtue of the psychological capacities it\nexercises, viz. self-consciousness and rationality. And a person\npersists “as far as” the exercise of those capacities\n“reaches” (II.xxvii.9): “For the same consciousness\nbeing preserv’d, whether in the same or different Substances,\nthe personal Identity is preserv’d” (II.xxvii.13). Thus\nthe way is clear for Locke to assert that one and the same person may\nbe resurrected even if that person comes to inhabit an altogether\ndifferent body than any with which she was previously associated\n(II.xxvii.15).","\nIt is in the context of his solution to this problem that Locke\nintroduces the famous thought experiment involving the prince and the\ncobbler—not as a puzzle in need of explanation, but as a case\nwhose apparent plausibility vindicates the human/person distinction\n(and thereby, his solution to the problem of the resurrection). If\n\n“the soul of the prince, carrying with it the consciousness of\nthe Prince’s past Life, [were to] enter and inform the Body of a\nCobler as soon as deserted by his own Soul”, Locke enjoins his\nreader, “every one sees, he would be the same Person\nwith the Prince, accountable only for the Prince’s Actions: But\nwho would say it was the same Man?” (II.xxvii.15, emphasis\nadded). This thought experiment is often taken to support a\npsychological criterion of personal identity. The precise form of such\na criterion has been the subject of much dispute, both in\nLocke’s time and subsequently. Locke himself is sometimes said\n(probably incorrectly) to have advocated a memory criterion, according\nto which a person,\nx, existing at one time, \\(t_1\\), and a person, y,\nexisting at a later time, \\(t_2\\), y is identical with x\nif and only if y remembers experiences had by x. Whether\nor not this was Locke’s view, generally speaking, psychological\ncriteria of personal identity assert that a psychological relation of\nsome sort (i.e. a relation involving memory, characteristics and\ndispositions, beliefs, desires, rationality, etc.) is necessary and/or\nsufficient for each of us to persist through time.","\nAnother important dimension of the human/person distinction is also\nsignaled in this example, viz. the person as locus of moral\naccountability. On Locke’s view, it is in virtue of their\ncapacities for self-consciousness and rationality that persons not\nonly persist through time, but also are prudentially concerned and\nmorally and legally responsible for actions committed at other times.\nAccording to Locke, a person should be punished only for those actions\nthat she can remember having committed (II.xxvii.20). This is true not\nonly in the case of divine law carried out on judgment day—when\n“the secrets of all Hearts shall be laid open”\nand rewards and punishments meted out for the good and bad deeds\nundertaken throughout the course of our lives (II.xxvii.26)—but\nalso, more generally, in the course of everyday legal and moral\naffairs. So it is that ‘person’ functions as “a\nForensick Term appropriating Actions and their Merit” (ibid.)\nand in “personal Identity is founded all the Right and\nJustice of Reward and Punishment” (II.xxvii.18).","\nIn discussing these normative aspects of personhood, Locke raises and\nanswers an obvious objection in a way that anticipates some strains of\nthe contemporary debate. “Suppose”, he says,","\n\n\nI wholly lose the memory of some parts of my Life, beyond a\npossibility of retrieving them, so that perhaps I shall never be\nconscious of them again; yet am I not the same Person, that did those\nActions, had those Thoughts, that I was once conscious of, though I\nhave now forgot them? (II.xxvii.20)\n","\nLocke replies that, although they typically refer to both the same\nhuman animal and the same person, self-referring personal pronouns can\nbe equivocal. So the question “Did I do such and so?” can\nbe ambiguous as between “Did the person to which ‘I’\npresently refers do such and so?” and “Did the human\nanimal to which ‘I’ presently refers do such and\nso?” In Locke’s amnesiac case, the answer to the first\nquestion is no, while the answer to the second question is yes:\n“the Word I is applied to … the Man only”\n(ibid.).","\nTwo aspects of Locke’s discussion of this case are salient to\nthe contemporary discussion. The first, of course, is the view that,\nif I am incapable of recalling having done this or that, then the\nperson responsible for the action in question is not the person I am,\neven if the person who is responsible for that action occupied the\nsame human animal presently occupied by the person I am (see Johansson\n2016, D. Shoemaker 2009, 2016, and Sauchelli 2017a). The second is the\nidea that the first-person pronoun can refer equivocally in a way that\n tracks the human/person distinction (see\n section 3.2).","\nA host of interpretive questions can be raised concerning the\nhistorical distinction between human animals and persons, and some of\nthese may be of interest to participants in the contemporary debate\nbetween animalism and its rivals. For example, whether Locke’s\ndistinction reflects a conceptual or an ontological difference remains\na point of controversy amongst historians of the period (e.g., Bolton\n1994; Chappell 1989; Thiel 1997 and 1998). But setting aside these\nscholarly matters, the features of Locke’s distinction that are\nuncontroversially endorsed by Locke as well as especially relevant for\nthe current debate include the following:"],"subsection_title":"2.1 Locke’s Human/Person Distinction"},{"content":["\nIt should be emphasized at this point that animalists do not deny that\nthere is a distinction to be drawn between human animals and persons.\nThis, in part, is why the formulation of (1) that is sometimes\nascribed to animalists—“persons are human\nanimals”—is misleading. In fact, there are several aspects\nof Locke’s discussion that animalists uphold.","\nFor example, animalists often ally their answer to the persistence\nquestion with Locke’s identity criteria for human animals (e.g.,\nOlson 2007: 28). Of course, since organic animalists affirm and\nsomatic animalists deny that being alive is a necessary condition of\nour persistence, Locke cannot be an ally to both camps. For his part,\nD. Mackie (1999b: 235–39) classifies Locke as an organicist.\nHowever, enough passages from the Essay suggest otherwise\n(some of which Mackie himself acknowledges—e.g., in\nII.xxvii.4–5) that the more circumspect conclusion may be that\nLocke was either inconsistent or just ambivalent on the matter.\nAnimalists are also sympathetic to Locke’s account of\npersonhood—albeit with a different understanding of the type of\nconcept person is—and this alternative understanding\nallows animalists to endorse element (d) above.","\nWhat animalists reject is Locke’s claim that\n‘person’ names a sortal concept (e.g., Snowdon 2014: ch.\n3). Rather, following Olson (1997: ch. 2), most animalists insist that\n‘person’ names only a phase sortal concept (or\nstatus concept, see Hacker 2007). (The idea of a\n“phased sortal”, as he called them, is due to Wiggins\n[1967, 2001].) Unlike a sortal concept, which determines the\npersistence conditions of its instances, a phase sortal concept is a\nconcept to which its instances belong temporarily, for only a phase of\ntheir existence (e.g., teenager). Simply by reaching a\nparticular age, for example, something that was not a teenager can\nbecome a teenager without ceasing to exist. Likewise, something that\nwas a teenager can cease to be a teenager without ceasing to exist. So\ntoo, animalists say, with person. Personhood, they claim, is\na phase that something begins upon acquiring the psychological\ncapacities that Locke identifies (self-consciousness and rationality)\nand concludes upon losing those capacities. In this way, being a\nperson is a matter of what something can do, rather than what\nsomething is. In Olson terminology, person is a\n“functional kind”, akin to locomotor (1997:\n31–37). A locomotor is anything that is able to move about under\nits own power, be it a garden slug or a ballistic missile. Likewise,\nOlson argues (following Locke), a person is anything that is able to\nthink in certain ways—anything that “is rational, …\nordinarily conscious and aware of itself as tracing a path through\ntime and space, … [and] morally accountable for its\nactions” (1997: 32). Many things besides human animals can be\npersons on this view: an angel, a god, a machine, an animal, an\nimmaterial soul, an alien, etc.. In the case of human animals, we\nordinarily become persons not at conception or at birth, but around\nthe age of two. And while it is possible for a human animal to go out\nof existence at the same moment that she ceases to be a person (e.g.,\nif she steps on an active landmine), it is also possible for a human\nanimal to continue existing long after he has ceased to be a person\n(e.g., if he lapses into a persistent vegetative state)."],"subsection_title":"2.2 Animalism and the Human/Person Distinction"},{"content":["\nAnimalism’s principal rival is not infrequently identified as\n“neo-Lockeanism”. This way of staging the debate dates\nback at least as far as a prominent exchange between Noonan (1998,\n2001) and D. Mackie (1999a). Also, the first monograph dedicated to\nanimalism mounts a sustained attack on the “psychological\napproach” to personal identity—an approach whose\n“best-known advocate … is, of course, Locke” (Olson\n1997: 20). And the “animalism vs. neo-Lockeanism”\nopposition remains common in contemporary discussions (e.g., S.\nCampbell 2001; Hershenov 2012; Johnston 2010; Robinson 2016; S.\nShoemaker 2008).","\nIn one respect, setting things up in this way is fairly harmless.\nViews classified as “neo-Lockean” share a common\ncommitment to a psychological criterion of personal identity (whether\nthat criterion requires direct psychological connectedness or merely\noverlapping chains of psychological continuity) that animalists\nuniversally oppose. But ultimately, the simple “animalism vs.\nneo-Lockeanism” dichotomy is too coarse-grained and exclusionary\nto provide a particularly informative taxonomy of the contemporary\ndebate. For example, whilst all animalists resist a psychological\ncriterion of persistence, the distinction between organic and somatic\nanimalisms\n (section 1.2)\n shows us that the source of this resistance varies significantly.\nAnd, as the list given above indicates\n (section 1.1),\n animalism’s answer to the fundamental nature question is\nopposed by a wide range of views, not all of which are properly\nclassified as neo-Lockean. Moreover, as we shall see in what follows,\nthe “neo-Lockeanism” label both obscures importantly\ndifferent varieties of neo-Lockeanism and ignores different rationales\ngiven for those views.","\nWhilst a comprehensive taxonomy of alternatives to animalism is\nneither feasible nor necessary in the present context, one step in the\nright direction would be to differentiate those neo-Lockean views that\nrely on the notion of material constitution from those that do not.\nThose that do—call this type of view “constitutionalist\nneo-Lockeanism”—are today regarded as the leading\nopposition to animalism. Advocates of this form of neo-Lockeanism\n(including Baker, Johnston, and S. Shoemaker) contend that each of us\n“is” an animal only in the sense that (according to some)\na statue “is” the piece of marble, viz. by being\nmaterially colocated and yet distinguished by one or more modal,\ntemporal, and/or relational properties. On this view, we are persons\nnon-identically constituted by human animals.","\nDespite this common reliance on the notion of material constitution,\nthere are significant differences between the views advocated by\nanimalism’s constitutionalist neo-Lockean opponents. According\nto S. Shoemaker (1984), for instance, it is the capacity for thought\nthat distinguishes the mental subject you are from the human animal\nthat constitutes you. Partly because it is embedded within his\nbroader, functionalist response to the mind/body problem,\nShoemaker’s arguments against animalism and animal thought are\ncomplex (see\n section 3.2\n for further discussion). But roughly, on his view, animals are\nincapable of thinking because they do not persist under the\nappropriate conditions. Psychological continuity is sufficient for the\npersistence of any being endowed with the capacity to think, and since\npsychological continuity is not sufficient for a (human) animal to\npersist, animals are not thinking beings. And because each of us is a\nthinking being, we are not animals. (For a thorough presentation of\nShoemaker’s most recent thinking on this topic, see his 1999,\n2004, 2008, 2011, 2016.)","\nPerhaps the most extensive elaboration of the constitutionalist\napproach has been given by Baker (2000, 2002, 2007). On her view, the\nproperty that distinguishes the persons we are from the human animals\nthat constitute us is a form of self-consciousness that she calls the\n“first-person perspective” (2000: ch. 3). It is from this\nperspective that “one thinks of oneself as an individual facing\na world, as a subject distinct from everything else”; it is what\nenables us “to conceive of one’s body and mental states as\none’s own” (2000: 60, 4). On her view, persons have their\nfirst-person perspectives essentially, and they “persist as long\nas [their] first-person perspectives are exemplified” (2016: 51;\nsee also 2000: 132–41).","\nAt the heart of this view is what Baker has recently labeled her\n“Key Distinction” (2007: 43; 2016: 53). Constitutionalists\nmaintain that constituting objects (e.g., pieces of marble) and\nconstituted objects (e.g., statues) can share some of their\nproperties. For instance, a statue shares its physical and aesthetic\nproperties with the piece of marble that constitutes it; likewise,\nBaker will claim, a person shares its physical and psychological\nproperties with the human animal that constitutes it. But these\nobjects cannot share all of their properties in the same way, or else\nthere would be no difference between the constituting and the\nconstituted. So Baker draws an exhaustive and mutually exclusive\ndistinction between two ways that objects can instantiate properties:\nderivatively or nonderivatively. Roughly, an object has a property\nderivatively if it instantiates it only in virtue of being colocated\nwith another object, whereas an object instantiates a property\nnonderivatively if it instantiates that property independently of\nbeing colocated with another object. We might express this distinction\nmore perspicuously as follows. If one object (x) constitutes\nanother object (y) and both objects instantiate some property\n(F), then","\nConsider, for example, a marble statue of a giant ogre. In this case,\n(i) the piece of marble instantiates the property of being three\nmeters tall nonderivatively (because it would be three meters tall\neven if it did not constitute the statue); (ii) the statue\ninstantiates the property of being ugly nonderivatively (because the\npiece of marble with which it is colocated would not be ugly if it did\nnot constitute a statue); and (iii) the statue instantiates the\nproperty of being three meters tall derivatively (because the piece of\nmarble would be three meters tall even if it did not constitute the\nstatue). (Still more precise elaborations of Baker’s Key\nDistinction are given in her 2000: 46–58 and 2007: 166–69.\nA number of critics have argued that the distinction generates more\nheat than light; see, e.g., Hershenov 2009; Olson 2007: ch. 3;\nZimmerman 2002; and contributions to the \nField Guide to the Philosophy of Mind \nonline symposium on Baker 2000.)","\nBaker argues by analogy that, as it goes for marble statues, so it\ngoes for human persons. On her view, each of us is an animal, but\n(contra the animalist) only derivatively. Baker’s\nanswer to the fundamental nature question is that we are persons; each\nof us possesses the first-person perspective essentially and\nnonderivatively. In the course of ordinary development, a human animal\ndevelops increasingly sophisticated psychological capacities (just\nlike the piece of marble develops aesthetic characteristics as the\nsculptor chisels away at it). Once these capacities include a\nfirst-person perspective, a person comes into existence, and this\nperson is constituted by the human animal (2000: 115–16; cf.\n2007: 72–82). Since the animal would not have a first-person\nperspective if it did not come to constitute the person, it shares\nthis perspective with the person in the same way that the piece of\nmarble shares the property of being ugly with the statue of the ogre,\nviz. derivatively.","\nOn Baker’s view, the first-person perspective is unique to\npersons. Without this perspective, she argues, a being cannot refer to\nitself using first-person pronouns, for this ability requires that one\nbe able to conceive of oneself both as the subject of mental events\nand as the object that embodies the subject of those events. Because\nthe human animal that constitutes you possesses a first-person\nperspective only derivatively, then, it is unable to self-refer. That\nsaid, Baker does not claim that person-constituting human animals lack\ncognitive and experiential capacities altogether. Nor does she claim\nthat they possess these capacities only derivatively. Like many of the\n“higher” nonhuman animals, human animals are subjects of\nan array of mental phenomena, including pains and pleasures, beliefs\nand desires. Such phenomena require not the “strong” or\n“robust” first-person perspective characteristic of\npersons, but only what Baker calls a “weak” or\n“rudimentary” first-person perspective—roughly, the\ncapacity to experience the world from an egocentric point of view\n(2000: 60–64). And just as the statue inherits the property of\nbeing three meters tall from the piece of marble, so too the person\npossesses these lesser psychological capacities only derivatively\nbecause the human animal would possess these capacities even if it did\nnot constitute the person.","\nNeo-Lockean resistance to animalism that is not linked to\nconstitutionalism is an even more diverse lot. One of the prevailing\nviews in the non-constitutionalist neo-Lockeanism category rejects\nanimalism by identifying the person with a proper part of the human\nanimal—typically, the brain or one of its (spatial or temporal)\nparts. On this view, the human animal thinks only derivatively, in\nvirtue of having a thinking brain as a part. Among those who advocate\nviews along this line are Puccetti (1973), Persson (1999), McMahan\n(2002), Hudson (2001), and more recently Parfit (2012). Animalist\nresponses to these views are given by Hershenov (2005b, 2016) and\nOlson (2007: ch. 4). Also relevant are the various thought experiments\nraised by non-constitutionalist neo-Lockeans (e.g., Lewis 1976; Parfit\n1984) that seem to count against animalism; for instance, thought\nexperiments involving teletransportation and transplantation. See\n section 3.4\n for some discussion of these cases."],"subsection_title":"2.3 Animalism(s) vs. Neo-Lockeanism(s)"}]},{"main_content":["\nParticularly when introduced in isolation, animalism—especially\n(1)—might strike one as obviously true. In his book-length\ntreatment of the view, Snowdon demonstrates at length how animalism\n“represents the default conception of ourselves” (2014:\n106). And in an earlier article, he notes:","\n\n\nThe central claim of animalism is in some ways a curious proposition\nto assert. It is natural to respond to its assertion in the words of\nWittgenstein: “Only whom are we informing of this? And on what\noccasion?”. (1995: 72; Wittgenstein 1953: 101e)\n","\nOlson echoes this sentiment, writing that we certainly","\n\n\nseem to be animals. When you eat or sleep or talk, a human\nanimal eats, sleeps, or talks. When you look in the mirror, and animal\nlooks back at you. Most ordinary people suppose that we are animals.\n… Compared with [competing] proposals, the idea that we are\nanimals looks like plain common sense. (2007: 23)\n","\nBut common sense will not settle the issue because some of\nanimalism’s rivals are supported by other, equally intuitive\nconsiderations. In addition to common sense, then, what arguments can\nbe marshaled in support of animalism?"],"section_title":"3. Arguments for and Objections to Animalism","subsections":[{"content":["\nThe standard argument for (1) is variously referred to as the\n“thinking animal argument” (Olson 1997, 2003), the\n“too many minds objection” (S. Shoemaker 1999), the\n“two lives objection” (S. Campbell 2006), and the\n“too many thinkers problem” (Parfit 2012: 7). It was\ndeveloped by Snowdon (1990: 91), Carter (1988), McDowell (1997: 237),\nand Ayers (1991, vol. 2: 283). It has since been sharpened and\npopularized by Olson (1997: 106–09, 2003: 325–30, 2007:\n29–39). Here it is:","\nWhilst none of (P1), (P2), and (P3) is incontestable, nor is any one\nof them easily contested. Save perhaps for far-reaching metaphysical\nreasons (e.g., an antecedent commitment to idealism), few would deny\nthe very existence of animals, nor the fact that a perfectly good\nspecimen of the species Homo sapiens is presently seated in\nyour chair. So (P1) is not easily rejected.","\nMoreover, concerning (P2), since it would be odd (to say the least) to\ndeny that human animals think while accepting that porpoises and\nporcupines do, and since we can assume that the human animal in your\nchair is not atypical of its kind, whatever reasons one has for\naccepting that various nonhuman animals think apply equally to the\nhuman animal in your chair. While there are those who deny (in a\nsense) that any animal can think (e.g., Descartes, Johnston, S.\nShoemaker), their positions strain empirical credibility and/or depend\non fairly sophisticated metaphysical machinery. At first glance,\nanyway, (P2) is much easier to accept.","\n(P3) is also difficult to resist, since its denial would seem to\nrequire positing the existence of a thinking being in your chair other\nthan yourself. For if (P1) and (P2) are true, and if it is true that\nyou exist and are thinking, then denying (P3) results in the\nimplication that you are but one of (at least) two thinkers seated in\nyour chair. Such a view faces a host of difficult questions: practical\nquestions (e.g., which of these beings owns the car parked out\nfront?), epistemic questions (how do you determine which of these\nbeings you are?), linguistic questions (to which of these beings do\ninstances of the first-person pronoun refer?), ontological questions\n(what is the relationship between you and the qualitatively identical\nbeing with which you are associated?), and so on. These challenges\nhave not passed unnoticed, and serious attempts have been made to\naddress them. But, the animalist says, the trouble can be avoided from\nthe start simply by conceding the truth of (P3).","\nSo, while not necessarily unanswerable or insurmountable, the\nquestions and problems that await one who rejects any of (P1) through\n(P3) are not insignificant. Animalism, then, has at least this much\ngoing for it."],"subsection_title":"3.1 Thinking Animal Argument"},{"content":["\nNot all replies to the thinking animal argument have focused\nexclusively on, or even addressed themselves directly, to one or the\nother of the three premises that make up that argument. Nevertheless,\nmany replies to animalism do concern questions raised by the thinking\nanimal argument and may fruitfully be seen as addressing one or\nanother of its premises.","\nFor instance, according to Baker’s (2000, 2007) constitution\nview, (P3) should be rejected, since “thinking being sitting in\nyour chair” is ambiguous as between the constituted person who\nthinks nonderivatively and the constituting human animal who thinks\nderivatively\n (section 2.3).\n And Noonan (1998, 2001) also detects an ambiguity in (P2) and (P3).\nAccording to his revisionist view of personal pronoun use,\nfirst-person thoughts and utterances refer only to persons, not to\nanimals. On his view, we must distinguish between the referent of\nfirst-person thoughts and utterances, on the one hand, and the thinker\nof those thoughts and utterances, on the other hand. Noonan does not\ndeny that the human animal sitting in your chair is capable of\nfirst-personal thinking. Nor does he deny that such thoughts (and the\nutterances that express them) successfully refer. But he does insist\nthat, when the animal has a first-person thought or utters\n‘I’, that thought or utterance refers not to the animal\nwho thinks the thought but to the person with whom the animal shares\nits thoughts. (For further discussion, see Noonan 2012 and Olson\n2002a, 2007: 37–39.)","\nAnd, although not initially developed as a response to the thinking\nanimal argument, S. Shoemaker’s (1984, 1999, 2004) view\nrepresents a direct and formidable challenge to (P2). On his account,\nthe human animal sitting in your chair is not thinking because no\nanimal is capable of thinking. This in turn is because the capacity\nfor thought requires persistence conditions that all animals, human or\notherwise, lack: “mental properties”, Shoemaker writes,\n“can belong only to things having psychological persistence\nconditions” (2004: 528). A thinker’s psychological states\nplay characteristic causal roles, and these states (in combination\nwith others) tend to cause the thinking being whose states they are to\nbehave in certain ways. Thus, for example, the state of being in pain\nmay be caused by bodily damage of some kind and may dispose the one\nwho is in pain to cry out or recoil.","\nThe linchpin of Shoemaker’s view is his claim that the causal\nrole of any psychological state as well as any other states involved\nin that causal role must all be states of one and the same thinking\nbeing (1999: 300). In other words, the effects typically brought about\nby a being’s psychological states cannot fail to occur in that\nvery being. Olson summarizes the consequence of this commitment as\nfollows:","\n\n\nif your cerebrum gets put into my head tomorrow, your current mental\nstates will have their characteristic effects in the being who ends up\nwith that organ, and not in the empty-headed thing left behind. By\nShoemaker’s reasoning, the subject of those\nstates—you—must therefore be the being who ends up with\nyour transplanted cerebrum. Any being whose later states or actions\nare caused in the appropriate way by your current mental states must\nbe you. In other words, psychological continuity of a sort must\nsuffice for you or any other mental being to persist through time.\nSince no sort of psychological continuity suffices for any organism to\npersist … it follows that no organism could have mental\nproperties. The nature of mental properties makes it metaphysically\nimpossible for animals to think. (Olson 2007: 33–34.)\n","\nShoemaker’s functionalist theory of mind has received\nconsiderable attention in the philosophy of mind. His view that\nanimals cannot think and the implications of that claim for the\nthinking animal argument are discussed in Árnadóttir\n2010, Hershenov 2006, Olson 2002b, and S. Shoemaker 2004, 2008, 2011,\n2016.","\nBeyond these discussions of (P2) and (P3), much of the recent\ndiscussion concerning animalism has focused on such questions as\nwhether one or more than one thinker is sitting in your chair; if more\nthan one, which one is doing the thinking; and in what sense.\nZimmerman (2008), for instance, objects to (P1) by noting that the\nrationale for the claim that a human animal is located where you\nare—in effect, that it is just obvious that there is an instance\nof the species Homo sapiens currently located where you\nare—extends equally to such things as “mere hunk of\nmatter”, “mere body”, “psychological\nperson”, and the like. Since the animalist does not accept that\nwe are identical to any of these non-animals, the evident truth of\n(P1) will not be sufficient to establish the thinking animal\nargument’s conclusion. What is required, in other words, is not\nsimply a reason for believing that (P1) is true—animalists, let\nus assume, are correct in insisting that few would deny it—but\nalso a reason for denying the presence of other things besides a human\nanimal. This is the “rival candidates problem”.","\nClosely related to this problem is another. The “thinking parts\nproblem” charges that, even if you are a thinking being, no\nreason has been given to suppose that you are a thinking\nanimal rather than any of the other thinking beings currently\nlocated where you are. To begin, consider all the parts of a human\nanimal that are plausibly regarded as thinking: the head, the brain,\nthe right-leg complement (i.e., the entire animal body minus the right\nleg), the entire animal from the waist up (torso, neck, and head), the\nleft-arm complement minus a single electron in the animal’s\nliver, the left-arm complement minus a different electron in the\nanimal’s liver, etc. For each of these thinking parts, an\nargument structurally analogous to the thinking animal argument could\nbe constructed. For instance:","\nLikewise:","\nAnd so on. If the thinking animal argument were sound, then it would\nfollow (per impossibile) that you are identical with each of\nan infinite number of nonidentical thinking parts. Since you could be\nidentical with no more than one of those things, and since the\nanimalist has provided no principled explanation for why you are the\nwhole animal and not one or another of the animal’s thinking\nparts, the thinking animal argument should be rejected.","\nMuch of the discussion about animalism has been concerned with the\nrival candidates and thinking parts problems. (See, for instance,\nBlatti 2016; Lowe 2001; Madden 2016a; Olson 2007: 215–19 and\n2015; Parfit 2012; Yang 2015.) One line of response draws on van\nInwagen’s (1990) view of composite material beings. According to\nvan Inwagen’s answer to what he calls the “special\ncomposition question”, the only composite objects that exist are\nliving organisms. Only a living organism unifies the particles that\ncompose it at any given moment, on this view. Such things as\n“mere hunk of matter” and “right-leg\ncomplement” are gerrymandered objects. And since they are not\ngenuine composite objects, they are neither genuine rivals nor genuine\nthinkers. Olson (2008: 38–42) is, however, quick to acknowledge\nthat this riposte will be welcomed only by those antecedently\npersuaded of van Inwagen’s view. And proponents of the rival\ncandidates and thinking parts problems are particularly unlikely to\ncount among van Inwagen’s supporters."],"subsection_title":"3.2 Replies to the Thinking Animal Argument"},{"content":["\nEven if these objections to the thinking animal argument can be\nanswered, there is some irony in the fact that the fate of the\nhallmark argument for animalism should hang in the balance of disputes\nover the nature of mental properties and the individuation of\nthinkers. Thought is an essential ingredient not in animalism’s\ntheory of our fundamental nature, but in the theories advanced by\nanimalism’s neo-Lockean rivals. It is precisely our capacity for\nthought that animalists deny is essential to us; on the contrary,\nanimalists say, each of us was once a non-thinking fetus and each of\nus may yet become a non-thinking persistent-vegetative-state\npatient.","\nThus, a second argument attempts to ground animalism’s defense\nin a broader naturalistic context. The “animal ancestors\nargument” takes the form of a reductio. If (1) is false and we\nare not animals, then nor are our parents animals, in which case nor\nare our parents’ parents, nor our parents’ grandparents,\nand so on, as far back as our ancestries extend. But in that case, the\nfalsity of animalism entails the rejection of evolutionary theory (or\nat least that theory’s applicability to us), since it denies\nthat our distant ancestries includes beings who were animals. But,\nsince the rejection of evolutionary theory is too high a price to pay,\nit is instead the assumption of animalism’s falsity that ought\nto be rejected. Whilst Blatti (2012) argues that this argument\nwithstands a number of extant objections, it also faces challenges\n(Daly and Liggins 2013, Gillett 2013)."],"subsection_title":"3.3 Animal Ancestors Argument"}]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nDespite its Aristotelian heritage, animalism is a relative newcomer to\\nthe personal identity debate. While early intimations of the view can\\nbe found in work by Wiggins (1980) and Wollheim (1984), those\\nprimarily responsible for injecting the view into the contemporary\\ndebate over personal identity include Ayers (1991), Carter (1989,\\n1999), Olson (1997), Snowdon (1990, 1991, 1995), and van Inwagen\\n(1990). Though its supporters appear to remain in the minority,\\nanimalism has since attracted other advocates, including Bailey (2016,\\n2017), Blatti (2012), DeGrazia (2005), Hacker (2007), Hershenov\\n(2005a), D. Mackie (1999a,b), Merricks (2001), and Wiggins (2001).\\nNotable critics include Baker (2000, 2016), Johnston (2007, 2016),\\nMcMahan (2002), Noonan (1998, 1989 [2019]), Parfit (2012), and S.\\nShoemaker (1999, 2011, 2016), among others.\",\n \"\\nThe name ‘animalism’ was conferred by Snowdon (1991: 109)\\nand has been widely adopted. The view is also sometimes referred to as\\n“the organism view” (e.g., Liao 2006), the\\n“biological criterion” (e.g., D. Shoemaker 2009), or\\n“the biological approach” (e.g., Olson 1997).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Formulating Animalism\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAnimalism’s hallmark claim concerns our basic metaphysical\\nnature: whether we are material or immaterial; simple or composite;\\nsubstance, property, process, or event; organic or inorganic; etc. In\\nthis context, the animalist asserts simply:\",\n \"\\nDespite its plainness, (1′) is easily misinterpreted (for\\ndiscussion, see D. Mackie 1999b: 230–33; Olson 2003:\\n318–21; and Snowdon 2014: ch. 1). According to the intended\\nreading, the ‘we’ picks out human persons such as you and\\nme. Nevertheless, (1′) should not be taken to assert that\\nall persons are animals. It leaves open the possibilities of\\nboth non-animal people (e.g., robots, angels, aliens, deities) and\\nhuman animals that are not people (e.g., patients in persistent\\nvegetative states, human fetuses). The ‘are’ reflects the\\n‘is’ of numerical identity. Consequently, animalism is not\\nthe view that each of us is “constituted by” a particular\\norganism, in the way that a statue is sometimes said to be\\nnon-identically constituted by the hunk of matter with which it\\ncoincides (see\\n section 2.3).\\n Nor still should (1′) be understood to claim that each of us\\nhas a body that is an animal—as if you were one thing\\nand your animal body another. Finally, ‘animals’ refers to\\nbiological organisms—members of the primate species Homo\\nsapiens. While participants on both sides of the debate over\\nanimalism tend to treat these terms interchangeably, some prominent\\ncritics distinguish ‘animals’ from ‘organisms’\\nand deny that these terms co-refer (e.g., Johnston 2007: 55–56,\\nS. Shoemaker 2011: 353).\",\n \"\\nExpressed in logical notation and individualized, (1′) is\\nsometimes presented in the following form:\",\n \"\\nThis says: necessarily, for any object x, if x is a\\nhuman person, then x is an animal, i.e., necessarily, human\\npersons are animals. While neither (1′) nor (1″) is\\nunproblematic (see, e.g., Johansson 2007 and Toner 2011), it is clear\\nenough what they do not suggest. According to the animalism\\naccount of our most fundamental nature, we are not\",\n \"\\nHaving said that, this entry will focus primarily on animalism’s\\npositive assertions, rather than on animalist criticisms of each of\\nits rival views. The interested reader is directed to Olson 2007 and\\nSnowdon 2014, which not only include qualified defenses of (1), but\\nalso raise a host of criticisms of the foregoing\\nalternatives—criticisms that, if not motivated by an acceptance\\nof (1), are at least consistent with its truth.\",\n \"\\nIt bears mention that animalism is sometimes formulated slightly\\ndifferently as:\",\n \"\\nOn this construal, animalism is the view that we could not exist\\nexcept as animals. Indeed, some have alleged that a commitment to\\n(1′) is insufficient to qualify anyone as an animalist and that\\nthis label should be reserved only for those committed to\\nboth (1′) and (1‴) (Belshaw 2011: 401; cf. Olson\\n2007: 26–27, Snowdon 1990). Insistence on this point is probably\\ninnocuous, however, since most philosophers accept that all animals\\n(human and otherwise) are essentially animals, in which case,\\n(1‴) follows immediately from (1′).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.1 Our Fundamental Nature\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nWhile it is a claim about our fundamental nature that is most readily\\nassociated with the name, animalism also incorporates a view about our\\npersistence. Stated in its most general form, this view asserts the\\nfollowing:\",\n \"\\nAll animalists subscribe to (2), so far as it goes. But it does not go\\nvery far. What exactly are the conditions of (human) animal\\ncontinuity? Although animalists are mostly in agreement, there is a\\nsubtle and seldom acknowledged rift between two camps of animalist\\nthinking about the answer to this question.\",\n \"\\nAccording to the first camp, remaining alive is both a necessary and a\\nsufficient condition for the persistence of human animals.\\nHuman-animal persistence thus consists in the continuation of those\\nprocesses constitutive of biological life. As Olson puts it,\\n“one survives just in case one’s purely animal\\nfunctions—metabolism, the capacity to breathe and circulate\\none’s blood, and the like—continue” (1997: 16). On\\nthis view, an animal’s life is understood as\",\n \"\\n\\n\\na self-organizing biological event that maintains the organism’s\\ncomplex internal structure. The materials that organisms are made up\\nof are intrinsically unstable and must therefore be constantly\\nrepaired and renewed, or else the organism dies and its remains decay.\\nAn organism must constantly take in new particles, reconfigure and\\nassimilate them into its living fabric, and expel those that are no\\nlonger useful to it. An organism’s life enables it to persist\\nand retain its characteristic structure despite constant material\\nturnover. (Olson 2007: 28)\\n\",\n \"\\nThis first animalist answer to the persistence question, then, can be\\nglossed as follows:\",\n \"\\nOnce (2a) is conjoined with the animalist answer to the fundamental\\nnature question, (1), we have a view that might be labeled\\n“organic animalism”. Notable advocates of this view\\ninclude Olson and van Inwagen (1990). Of course, it follows from the\\norganicist view that death will constitute the end of our existence.\\nWhatever else may remain following our deaths, each of us will cease\\nto exist when we die. Indeed, strictly speaking on this view, there is\\nno such thing as a dead animal (or perhaps—if ‘dead’\\nis a non-attributive adjective like ‘fake’—that a\\n“dead animal” is not an animal).\",\n \"\\nThose in the second animalist camp deny that being alive is a\\nnecessary condition for the persistence of human animals. On their\\nview, a human animal (like all organisms) is a functionally organized\\nphysical object whose membership in a particular species is attributed\\nto its origin and structure. Only if it is so gruesome as to destroy\\nthis structure will an organism’s death bring about its\\nnonexistence. We persist, David Mackie puts it, “as long as this\\norganisation of [our] constituent parts remains sufficiently nearly\\nintact” (1999b: 237).\",\n \"\\nBut this focus on the functional organization of animal bodies should\\nbe taken neither as discounting altogether the significance of the\\nlife processes emphasized by organicists nor as affirming a\\ntraditional bodily criterion of persistence. On the contrary, on this\\nview, a human animal’s \",\n \"\\n\\n\\nlife is both a consequence or inseparable function of its origin and\\nthe continuing explanation of its structure and parts at any moment of\\nits existence. Life is essential to the thing in so far as it is\\ninconceivable that it (this thing) should have come into existence as\\na non-living thing. (Ayers 1991: vol. 2: 224)\\n\",\n \"\\n“But”, Ayers continues, “that is not to say that\\nwhen it dies the thing itself will cease to exist: merely that an\\nexplanation of the existence and structure of the thing will then\\nrefer to a life that is over” (ibid.).\",\n \"\\nIn contrast with their organicist counterparts, these animalists\\nanswer the persistence question along the following lines:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nthe persistence of biological organisms depends on their retaining\\n(enough of) the organisation of parts that is the product of their\\nnatural biological development, and that makes them apt for life,\\nwhile stopping short of saying that life itself is necessary. (D.\\nMackie 1999b: 236) \\n\",\n \"\\nIn short:\",\n \"\\nHereafter, ‘somatic animalism’ will refer to the\\nconjunction of (1) and (2b). In addition to Ayers and Mackie, notable\\nsomaticists include Carter (1989, 1999) and Feldman (1992).\",\n \"\\nIt is worth emphasizing that the debate between somatic and organic\\nanimalists is not merely verbal and that the sort of linguistic\\nevidence sometimes marshaled (e.g., by D. Mackie 1999b) is—while\\ngermane—unlikely to settle the question at issue. The debate\\nbetween somaticist and organicist conceptions of the conditions of\\nanimal continuity reflects a substantive (if, as yet, inadequately\\nexplored) disagreement about the nature of (human) animals. (Are they\\nessentially living? How ought life itself be understood?) Moreover,\\nwhile the issue of whether something can be both an animal and dead\\nillustrates the somaticist-organicist debate, it is hardly\\nthe only context in which that debate manifests itself. The same\\ndebate could be illustrated when considering unborn human fetuses,\\nhuman animals in suspended animation, etc.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.2 Our Persistence\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nToward the end of his magisterial two-volume commentary on John Locke,\\nAyers writes that \",\n \"\\n\\n\\nfor all the transformation of our motives, indeed, of our general\\nphilosophical theory … the debate on personal identity has\\nhardly moved on since the innovations of the seventeenth and\\neighteenth centuries. (1991: vol. 2: 281)\\n\",\n \"\\nIn a similar spirit, S. Shoemaker recently adapted Whitehead’s\\nfamous remark, observing that “the history of the topic of\\npersonal identity has been a series of footnotes to Locke”\\n(2008: 313). It is certainly undeniable that no single discussion of\\npersonal identity has done more to shape the current debate than the\\nchapter titled “Of Identity and Diversity” that Locke\\nadded to the second edition of his Essay Concerning Human\\nUnderstanding (II.xxvii). (Hereafter, all textual references to \\nLocke are to this work, Locke 1689 [1975].) Also undeniable is the \\neffect these\\npages have had on the emergence of the animalist alternative to the\\nLockean approach to personal identity. For whatever intuitive appeal\\nanimalism may seem to have in our secular, post-Darwinian climate, in\\nthe wake of Locke’s work, the falsity of animalism was long\\ntaken for granted.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. The Lockean Legacy\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nFrom an animalist perspective, the most significant aspect of\\nLocke’s famous discussion is the sharp distinction he draws\\nbetween the human animal (“man”) and the person. Unlike a\\nmass of matter—which consists merely in “the Cohesion of\\nParticles … any how united” (II.xxvii.4)—a living\\norganism (e.g., oak tree, horse, human animal) is a structurally\\ncomplex material object whose functional organization is conducive to\\ncontinued life. A person, by contrast, is a \\n“thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and \\ncan\\nconsider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different\\ntimes and places; which it does by that consciousness, which is\\ninseparable from thinking” (II.xxvii.9).\",\n \"\\nBy classifying “man” with other organisms and then drawing\\na distinction between organisms and persons, Locke recognizes that he\\nis prying apart the traditional notion of “man” as\\nrational, on the one hand, and animal, on the other. Against this\\ntraditional understanding, he introduces a thought experiment\\ninvolving a rational parrot (II.xxvii.8). Our unwillingness to call\\nthis parrot a “man” simply because it is an animal\\npossessed of language and reason illustrates that not all rational\\nanimals are men. Nor are all men rational animals: “whoever\\nshould see a Creature of his own Shape and Make, though it had no more\\nreason all its Life, than a Cat or a Parrot, would\\ncall him still a Man” (ibid.). The human/person\\ndistinction gains traction once it is coupled with one of\\nthe Essay’s key insights, viz. that sortal concepts\\n(e.g., human animal, person) are often (though not\\nalways) associated with different identity criteria.\\n“Identity”—as he puts it in the title of the section\\nin which this insight is first registered—is “suited to\\nthe Idea”: “such as is the Idea\\nbelonging to [a] Name, such must be the Identity”\\n(II.xxvii.7). Locke is keenly aware of the significance of this\\nprinciple; “if it had been a little more carefully attended\\nto”, he admonishes, it “would possibly have prevented a\\ngreat deal of that Confusion, which often occurs about this Matter\\n… especially concerning\\nPersonal Identity” (ibid.). And indeed, it is this\\ninsight about the association of sortal concepts and identity criteria\\nthat encourages the thought in Locke that human animals and persons\\nare governed by different criteria of identity. Whereas a human animal\\npersists just in case “the same continued Life [is] communicated\\nto different Particles of Matter, as they happen successively to be\\nunited to that organiz’d living Body” (II.xxvii.8), when\\none “consider[s] what Person stands for”, Locke\\ncontends, one finds that its persistence consists in “the\\nsameness of a rational Being”. He explains: “as far as\\nthis consciousness can be extended backwards to any past Action or\\nThought, so far reaches the Identity of that\\nPerson” (II.xxvii.9).\",\n \"\\nThe impetus behind Locke’s human/person distinction was the\\nongoing debate amongst seventeenth- and eighteenth-century theologians\\nand philosophers concerning the metaphysics of resurrection. Their\\nchallenge was to account for the Biblical prediction that the dead\\nwould be resurrected on judgment day. But what is it exactly that gets\\nresurrected? The physical particles associated with a living organism\\nare in a state of constant flux. The set of particles associated with\\nan organism changes from one moment to the next and may turnover\\ncompletely (perhaps several times) during the course of an\\norganism’s life. Moreover, whether due to decomposition and/or\\nbecause they are consumed by other organisms, the particles associated\\nwith an organism at its death will be widely dispersed. These facts\\nalone make it unlikely, if not impossible, that the resurrection of\\neach individual will involve the reconstitution of that\\nindividual’s former “body”. The human/person\\ndistinction supplies Locke with the resources to resolve this problem\\nbecause, on his view, something is a person not because of\\nthe material or immaterial substance in which it is grounded—a\\nquestion on which Locke remains steadfastly agnostic, though he is\\ninclined to think the underlying substance is immaterial\\n(II.xxvii.25)—but in virtue of the psychological capacities it\\nexercises, viz. self-consciousness and rationality. And a person\\npersists “as far as” the exercise of those capacities\\n“reaches” (II.xxvii.9): “For the same consciousness\\nbeing preserv’d, whether in the same or different Substances,\\nthe personal Identity is preserv’d” (II.xxvii.13). Thus\\nthe way is clear for Locke to assert that one and the same person may\\nbe resurrected even if that person comes to inhabit an altogether\\ndifferent body than any with which she was previously associated\\n(II.xxvii.15).\",\n \"\\nIt is in the context of his solution to this problem that Locke\\nintroduces the famous thought experiment involving the prince and the\\ncobbler—not as a puzzle in need of explanation, but as a case\\nwhose apparent plausibility vindicates the human/person distinction\\n(and thereby, his solution to the problem of the resurrection). If\\n\\n“the soul of the prince, carrying with it the consciousness of\\nthe Prince’s past Life, [were to] enter and inform the Body of a\\nCobler as soon as deserted by his own Soul”, Locke enjoins his\\nreader, “every one sees, he would be the same Person\\nwith the Prince, accountable only for the Prince’s Actions: But\\nwho would say it was the same Man?” (II.xxvii.15, emphasis\\nadded). This thought experiment is often taken to support a\\npsychological criterion of personal identity. The precise form of such\\na criterion has been the subject of much dispute, both in\\nLocke’s time and subsequently. Locke himself is sometimes said\\n(probably incorrectly) to have advocated a memory criterion, according\\nto which a person,\\nx, existing at one time, \\\\(t_1\\\\), and a person, y,\\nexisting at a later time, \\\\(t_2\\\\), y is identical with x\\nif and only if y remembers experiences had by x. Whether\\nor not this was Locke’s view, generally speaking, psychological\\ncriteria of personal identity assert that a psychological relation of\\nsome sort (i.e. a relation involving memory, characteristics and\\ndispositions, beliefs, desires, rationality, etc.) is necessary and/or\\nsufficient for each of us to persist through time.\",\n \"\\nAnother important dimension of the human/person distinction is also\\nsignaled in this example, viz. the person as locus of moral\\naccountability. On Locke’s view, it is in virtue of their\\ncapacities for self-consciousness and rationality that persons not\\nonly persist through time, but also are prudentially concerned and\\nmorally and legally responsible for actions committed at other times.\\nAccording to Locke, a person should be punished only for those actions\\nthat she can remember having committed (II.xxvii.20). This is true not\\nonly in the case of divine law carried out on judgment day—when\\n“the secrets of all Hearts shall be laid open”\\nand rewards and punishments meted out for the good and bad deeds\\nundertaken throughout the course of our lives (II.xxvii.26)—but\\nalso, more generally, in the course of everyday legal and moral\\naffairs. So it is that ‘person’ functions as “a\\nForensick Term appropriating Actions and their Merit” (ibid.)\\nand in “personal Identity is founded all the Right and\\nJustice of Reward and Punishment” (II.xxvii.18).\",\n \"\\nIn discussing these normative aspects of personhood, Locke raises and\\nanswers an obvious objection in a way that anticipates some strains of\\nthe contemporary debate. “Suppose”, he says,\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nI wholly lose the memory of some parts of my Life, beyond a\\npossibility of retrieving them, so that perhaps I shall never be\\nconscious of them again; yet am I not the same Person, that did those\\nActions, had those Thoughts, that I was once conscious of, though I\\nhave now forgot them? (II.xxvii.20)\\n\",\n \"\\nLocke replies that, although they typically refer to both the same\\nhuman animal and the same person, self-referring personal pronouns can\\nbe equivocal. So the question “Did I do such and so?” can\\nbe ambiguous as between “Did the person to which ‘I’\\npresently refers do such and so?” and “Did the human\\nanimal to which ‘I’ presently refers do such and\\nso?” In Locke’s amnesiac case, the answer to the first\\nquestion is no, while the answer to the second question is yes:\\n“the Word I is applied to … the Man only”\\n(ibid.).\",\n \"\\nTwo aspects of Locke’s discussion of this case are salient to\\nthe contemporary discussion. The first, of course, is the view that,\\nif I am incapable of recalling having done this or that, then the\\nperson responsible for the action in question is not the person I am,\\neven if the person who is responsible for that action occupied the\\nsame human animal presently occupied by the person I am (see Johansson\\n2016, D. Shoemaker 2009, 2016, and Sauchelli 2017a). The second is the\\nidea that the first-person pronoun can refer equivocally in a way that\\n tracks the human/person distinction (see\\n section 3.2).\",\n \"\\nA host of interpretive questions can be raised concerning the\\nhistorical distinction between human animals and persons, and some of\\nthese may be of interest to participants in the contemporary debate\\nbetween animalism and its rivals. For example, whether Locke’s\\ndistinction reflects a conceptual or an ontological difference remains\\na point of controversy amongst historians of the period (e.g., Bolton\\n1994; Chappell 1989; Thiel 1997 and 1998). But setting aside these\\nscholarly matters, the features of Locke’s distinction that are\\nuncontroversially endorsed by Locke as well as especially relevant for\\nthe current debate include the following:\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.1 Locke’s Human/Person Distinction\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIt should be emphasized at this point that animalists do not deny that\\nthere is a distinction to be drawn between human animals and persons.\\nThis, in part, is why the formulation of (1) that is sometimes\\nascribed to animalists—“persons are human\\nanimals”—is misleading. In fact, there are several aspects\\nof Locke’s discussion that animalists uphold.\",\n \"\\nFor example, animalists often ally their answer to the persistence\\nquestion with Locke’s identity criteria for human animals (e.g.,\\nOlson 2007: 28). Of course, since organic animalists affirm and\\nsomatic animalists deny that being alive is a necessary condition of\\nour persistence, Locke cannot be an ally to both camps. For his part,\\nD. Mackie (1999b: 235–39) classifies Locke as an organicist.\\nHowever, enough passages from the Essay suggest otherwise\\n(some of which Mackie himself acknowledges—e.g., in\\nII.xxvii.4–5) that the more circumspect conclusion may be that\\nLocke was either inconsistent or just ambivalent on the matter.\\nAnimalists are also sympathetic to Locke’s account of\\npersonhood—albeit with a different understanding of the type of\\nconcept person is—and this alternative understanding\\nallows animalists to endorse element (d) above.\",\n \"\\nWhat animalists reject is Locke’s claim that\\n‘person’ names a sortal concept (e.g., Snowdon 2014: ch.\\n3). Rather, following Olson (1997: ch. 2), most animalists insist that\\n‘person’ names only a phase sortal concept (or\\nstatus concept, see Hacker 2007). (The idea of a\\n“phased sortal”, as he called them, is due to Wiggins\\n[1967, 2001].) Unlike a sortal concept, which determines the\\npersistence conditions of its instances, a phase sortal concept is a\\nconcept to which its instances belong temporarily, for only a phase of\\ntheir existence (e.g., teenager). Simply by reaching a\\nparticular age, for example, something that was not a teenager can\\nbecome a teenager without ceasing to exist. Likewise, something that\\nwas a teenager can cease to be a teenager without ceasing to exist. So\\ntoo, animalists say, with person. Personhood, they claim, is\\na phase that something begins upon acquiring the psychological\\ncapacities that Locke identifies (self-consciousness and rationality)\\nand concludes upon losing those capacities. In this way, being a\\nperson is a matter of what something can do, rather than what\\nsomething is. In Olson terminology, person is a\\n“functional kind”, akin to locomotor (1997:\\n31–37). A locomotor is anything that is able to move about under\\nits own power, be it a garden slug or a ballistic missile. Likewise,\\nOlson argues (following Locke), a person is anything that is able to\\nthink in certain ways—anything that “is rational, …\\nordinarily conscious and aware of itself as tracing a path through\\ntime and space, … [and] morally accountable for its\\nactions” (1997: 32). Many things besides human animals can be\\npersons on this view: an angel, a god, a machine, an animal, an\\nimmaterial soul, an alien, etc.. In the case of human animals, we\\nordinarily become persons not at conception or at birth, but around\\nthe age of two. And while it is possible for a human animal to go out\\nof existence at the same moment that she ceases to be a person (e.g.,\\nif she steps on an active landmine), it is also possible for a human\\nanimal to continue existing long after he has ceased to be a person\\n(e.g., if he lapses into a persistent vegetative state).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.2 Animalism and the Human/Person Distinction\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAnimalism’s principal rival is not infrequently identified as\\n“neo-Lockeanism”. This way of staging the debate dates\\nback at least as far as a prominent exchange between Noonan (1998,\\n2001) and D. Mackie (1999a). Also, the first monograph dedicated to\\nanimalism mounts a sustained attack on the “psychological\\napproach” to personal identity—an approach whose\\n“best-known advocate … is, of course, Locke” (Olson\\n1997: 20). And the “animalism vs. neo-Lockeanism”\\nopposition remains common in contemporary discussions (e.g., S.\\nCampbell 2001; Hershenov 2012; Johnston 2010; Robinson 2016; S.\\nShoemaker 2008).\",\n \"\\nIn one respect, setting things up in this way is fairly harmless.\\nViews classified as “neo-Lockean” share a common\\ncommitment to a psychological criterion of personal identity (whether\\nthat criterion requires direct psychological connectedness or merely\\noverlapping chains of psychological continuity) that animalists\\nuniversally oppose. But ultimately, the simple “animalism vs.\\nneo-Lockeanism” dichotomy is too coarse-grained and exclusionary\\nto provide a particularly informative taxonomy of the contemporary\\ndebate. For example, whilst all animalists resist a psychological\\ncriterion of persistence, the distinction between organic and somatic\\nanimalisms\\n (section 1.2)\\n shows us that the source of this resistance varies significantly.\\nAnd, as the list given above indicates\\n (section 1.1),\\n animalism’s answer to the fundamental nature question is\\nopposed by a wide range of views, not all of which are properly\\nclassified as neo-Lockean. Moreover, as we shall see in what follows,\\nthe “neo-Lockeanism” label both obscures importantly\\ndifferent varieties of neo-Lockeanism and ignores different rationales\\ngiven for those views.\",\n \"\\nWhilst a comprehensive taxonomy of alternatives to animalism is\\nneither feasible nor necessary in the present context, one step in the\\nright direction would be to differentiate those neo-Lockean views that\\nrely on the notion of material constitution from those that do not.\\nThose that do—call this type of view “constitutionalist\\nneo-Lockeanism”—are today regarded as the leading\\nopposition to animalism. Advocates of this form of neo-Lockeanism\\n(including Baker, Johnston, and S. Shoemaker) contend that each of us\\n“is” an animal only in the sense that (according to some)\\na statue “is” the piece of marble, viz. by being\\nmaterially colocated and yet distinguished by one or more modal,\\ntemporal, and/or relational properties. On this view, we are persons\\nnon-identically constituted by human animals.\",\n \"\\nDespite this common reliance on the notion of material constitution,\\nthere are significant differences between the views advocated by\\nanimalism’s constitutionalist neo-Lockean opponents. According\\nto S. Shoemaker (1984), for instance, it is the capacity for thought\\nthat distinguishes the mental subject you are from the human animal\\nthat constitutes you. Partly because it is embedded within his\\nbroader, functionalist response to the mind/body problem,\\nShoemaker’s arguments against animalism and animal thought are\\ncomplex (see\\n section 3.2\\n for further discussion). But roughly, on his view, animals are\\nincapable of thinking because they do not persist under the\\nappropriate conditions. Psychological continuity is sufficient for the\\npersistence of any being endowed with the capacity to think, and since\\npsychological continuity is not sufficient for a (human) animal to\\npersist, animals are not thinking beings. And because each of us is a\\nthinking being, we are not animals. (For a thorough presentation of\\nShoemaker’s most recent thinking on this topic, see his 1999,\\n2004, 2008, 2011, 2016.)\",\n \"\\nPerhaps the most extensive elaboration of the constitutionalist\\napproach has been given by Baker (2000, 2002, 2007). On her view, the\\nproperty that distinguishes the persons we are from the human animals\\nthat constitute us is a form of self-consciousness that she calls the\\n“first-person perspective” (2000: ch. 3). It is from this\\nperspective that “one thinks of oneself as an individual facing\\na world, as a subject distinct from everything else”; it is what\\nenables us “to conceive of one’s body and mental states as\\none’s own” (2000: 60, 4). On her view, persons have their\\nfirst-person perspectives essentially, and they “persist as long\\nas [their] first-person perspectives are exemplified” (2016: 51;\\nsee also 2000: 132–41).\",\n \"\\nAt the heart of this view is what Baker has recently labeled her\\n“Key Distinction” (2007: 43; 2016: 53). Constitutionalists\\nmaintain that constituting objects (e.g., pieces of marble) and\\nconstituted objects (e.g., statues) can share some of their\\nproperties. For instance, a statue shares its physical and aesthetic\\nproperties with the piece of marble that constitutes it; likewise,\\nBaker will claim, a person shares its physical and psychological\\nproperties with the human animal that constitutes it. But these\\nobjects cannot share all of their properties in the same way, or else\\nthere would be no difference between the constituting and the\\nconstituted. So Baker draws an exhaustive and mutually exclusive\\ndistinction between two ways that objects can instantiate properties:\\nderivatively or nonderivatively. Roughly, an object has a property\\nderivatively if it instantiates it only in virtue of being colocated\\nwith another object, whereas an object instantiates a property\\nnonderivatively if it instantiates that property independently of\\nbeing colocated with another object. We might express this distinction\\nmore perspicuously as follows. If one object (x) constitutes\\nanother object (y) and both objects instantiate some property\\n(F), then\",\n \"\\nConsider, for example, a marble statue of a giant ogre. In this case,\\n(i) the piece of marble instantiates the property of being three\\nmeters tall nonderivatively (because it would be three meters tall\\neven if it did not constitute the statue); (ii) the statue\\ninstantiates the property of being ugly nonderivatively (because the\\npiece of marble with which it is colocated would not be ugly if it did\\nnot constitute a statue); and (iii) the statue instantiates the\\nproperty of being three meters tall derivatively (because the piece of\\nmarble would be three meters tall even if it did not constitute the\\nstatue). (Still more precise elaborations of Baker’s Key\\nDistinction are given in her 2000: 46–58 and 2007: 166–69.\\nA number of critics have argued that the distinction generates more\\nheat than light; see, e.g., Hershenov 2009; Olson 2007: ch. 3;\\nZimmerman 2002; and contributions to the \\nField Guide to the Philosophy of Mind \\nonline symposium on Baker 2000.)\",\n \"\\nBaker argues by analogy that, as it goes for marble statues, so it\\ngoes for human persons. On her view, each of us is an animal, but\\n(contra the animalist) only derivatively. Baker’s\\nanswer to the fundamental nature question is that we are persons; each\\nof us possesses the first-person perspective essentially and\\nnonderivatively. In the course of ordinary development, a human animal\\ndevelops increasingly sophisticated psychological capacities (just\\nlike the piece of marble develops aesthetic characteristics as the\\nsculptor chisels away at it). Once these capacities include a\\nfirst-person perspective, a person comes into existence, and this\\nperson is constituted by the human animal (2000: 115–16; cf.\\n2007: 72–82). Since the animal would not have a first-person\\nperspective if it did not come to constitute the person, it shares\\nthis perspective with the person in the same way that the piece of\\nmarble shares the property of being ugly with the statue of the ogre,\\nviz. derivatively.\",\n \"\\nOn Baker’s view, the first-person perspective is unique to\\npersons. Without this perspective, she argues, a being cannot refer to\\nitself using first-person pronouns, for this ability requires that one\\nbe able to conceive of oneself both as the subject of mental events\\nand as the object that embodies the subject of those events. Because\\nthe human animal that constitutes you possesses a first-person\\nperspective only derivatively, then, it is unable to self-refer. That\\nsaid, Baker does not claim that person-constituting human animals lack\\ncognitive and experiential capacities altogether. Nor does she claim\\nthat they possess these capacities only derivatively. Like many of the\\n“higher” nonhuman animals, human animals are subjects of\\nan array of mental phenomena, including pains and pleasures, beliefs\\nand desires. Such phenomena require not the “strong” or\\n“robust” first-person perspective characteristic of\\npersons, but only what Baker calls a “weak” or\\n“rudimentary” first-person perspective—roughly, the\\ncapacity to experience the world from an egocentric point of view\\n(2000: 60–64). And just as the statue inherits the property of\\nbeing three meters tall from the piece of marble, so too the person\\npossesses these lesser psychological capacities only derivatively\\nbecause the human animal would possess these capacities even if it did\\nnot constitute the person.\",\n \"\\nNeo-Lockean resistance to animalism that is not linked to\\nconstitutionalism is an even more diverse lot. One of the prevailing\\nviews in the non-constitutionalist neo-Lockeanism category rejects\\nanimalism by identifying the person with a proper part of the human\\nanimal—typically, the brain or one of its (spatial or temporal)\\nparts. On this view, the human animal thinks only derivatively, in\\nvirtue of having a thinking brain as a part. Among those who advocate\\nviews along this line are Puccetti (1973), Persson (1999), McMahan\\n(2002), Hudson (2001), and more recently Parfit (2012). Animalist\\nresponses to these views are given by Hershenov (2005b, 2016) and\\nOlson (2007: ch. 4). Also relevant are the various thought experiments\\nraised by non-constitutionalist neo-Lockeans (e.g., Lewis 1976; Parfit\\n1984) that seem to count against animalism; for instance, thought\\nexperiments involving teletransportation and transplantation. See\\n section 3.4\\n for some discussion of these cases.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.3 Animalism(s) vs. Neo-Lockeanism(s)\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nParticularly when introduced in isolation, animalism—especially\\n(1)—might strike one as obviously true. In his book-length\\ntreatment of the view, Snowdon demonstrates at length how animalism\\n“represents the default conception of ourselves” (2014:\\n106). And in an earlier article, he notes:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nThe central claim of animalism is in some ways a curious proposition\\nto assert. It is natural to respond to its assertion in the words of\\nWittgenstein: “Only whom are we informing of this? And on what\\noccasion?”. (1995: 72; Wittgenstein 1953: 101e)\\n\",\n \"\\nOlson echoes this sentiment, writing that we certainly\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nseem to be animals. When you eat or sleep or talk, a human\\nanimal eats, sleeps, or talks. When you look in the mirror, and animal\\nlooks back at you. Most ordinary people suppose that we are animals.\\n… Compared with [competing] proposals, the idea that we are\\nanimals looks like plain common sense. (2007: 23)\\n\",\n \"\\nBut common sense will not settle the issue because some of\\nanimalism’s rivals are supported by other, equally intuitive\\nconsiderations. In addition to common sense, then, what arguments can\\nbe marshaled in support of animalism?\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Arguments for and Objections to Animalism\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe standard argument for (1) is variously referred to as the\\n“thinking animal argument” (Olson 1997, 2003), the\\n“too many minds objection” (S. Shoemaker 1999), the\\n“two lives objection” (S. Campbell 2006), and the\\n“too many thinkers problem” (Parfit 2012: 7). It was\\ndeveloped by Snowdon (1990: 91), Carter (1988), McDowell (1997: 237),\\nand Ayers (1991, vol. 2: 283). It has since been sharpened and\\npopularized by Olson (1997: 106–09, 2003: 325–30, 2007:\\n29–39). Here it is:\",\n \"\\nWhilst none of (P1), (P2), and (P3) is incontestable, nor is any one\\nof them easily contested. Save perhaps for far-reaching metaphysical\\nreasons (e.g., an antecedent commitment to idealism), few would deny\\nthe very existence of animals, nor the fact that a perfectly good\\nspecimen of the species Homo sapiens is presently seated in\\nyour chair. So (P1) is not easily rejected.\",\n \"\\nMoreover, concerning (P2), since it would be odd (to say the least) to\\ndeny that human animals think while accepting that porpoises and\\nporcupines do, and since we can assume that the human animal in your\\nchair is not atypical of its kind, whatever reasons one has for\\naccepting that various nonhuman animals think apply equally to the\\nhuman animal in your chair. While there are those who deny (in a\\nsense) that any animal can think (e.g., Descartes, Johnston, S.\\nShoemaker), their positions strain empirical credibility and/or depend\\non fairly sophisticated metaphysical machinery. At first glance,\\nanyway, (P2) is much easier to accept.\",\n \"\\n(P3) is also difficult to resist, since its denial would seem to\\nrequire positing the existence of a thinking being in your chair other\\nthan yourself. For if (P1) and (P2) are true, and if it is true that\\nyou exist and are thinking, then denying (P3) results in the\\nimplication that you are but one of (at least) two thinkers seated in\\nyour chair. Such a view faces a host of difficult questions: practical\\nquestions (e.g., which of these beings owns the car parked out\\nfront?), epistemic questions (how do you determine which of these\\nbeings you are?), linguistic questions (to which of these beings do\\ninstances of the first-person pronoun refer?), ontological questions\\n(what is the relationship between you and the qualitatively identical\\nbeing with which you are associated?), and so on. These challenges\\nhave not passed unnoticed, and serious attempts have been made to\\naddress them. But, the animalist says, the trouble can be avoided from\\nthe start simply by conceding the truth of (P3).\",\n \"\\nSo, while not necessarily unanswerable or insurmountable, the\\nquestions and problems that await one who rejects any of (P1) through\\n(P3) are not insignificant. Animalism, then, has at least this much\\ngoing for it.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.1 Thinking Animal Argument\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nNot all replies to the thinking animal argument have focused\\nexclusively on, or even addressed themselves directly, to one or the\\nother of the three premises that make up that argument. Nevertheless,\\nmany replies to animalism do concern questions raised by the thinking\\nanimal argument and may fruitfully be seen as addressing one or\\nanother of its premises.\",\n \"\\nFor instance, according to Baker’s (2000, 2007) constitution\\nview, (P3) should be rejected, since “thinking being sitting in\\nyour chair” is ambiguous as between the constituted person who\\nthinks nonderivatively and the constituting human animal who thinks\\nderivatively\\n (section 2.3).\\n And Noonan (1998, 2001) also detects an ambiguity in (P2) and (P3).\\nAccording to his revisionist view of personal pronoun use,\\nfirst-person thoughts and utterances refer only to persons, not to\\nanimals. On his view, we must distinguish between the referent of\\nfirst-person thoughts and utterances, on the one hand, and the thinker\\nof those thoughts and utterances, on the other hand. Noonan does not\\ndeny that the human animal sitting in your chair is capable of\\nfirst-personal thinking. Nor does he deny that such thoughts (and the\\nutterances that express them) successfully refer. But he does insist\\nthat, when the animal has a first-person thought or utters\\n‘I’, that thought or utterance refers not to the animal\\nwho thinks the thought but to the person with whom the animal shares\\nits thoughts. (For further discussion, see Noonan 2012 and Olson\\n2002a, 2007: 37–39.)\",\n \"\\nAnd, although not initially developed as a response to the thinking\\nanimal argument, S. Shoemaker’s (1984, 1999, 2004) view\\nrepresents a direct and formidable challenge to (P2). On his account,\\nthe human animal sitting in your chair is not thinking because no\\nanimal is capable of thinking. This in turn is because the capacity\\nfor thought requires persistence conditions that all animals, human or\\notherwise, lack: “mental properties”, Shoemaker writes,\\n“can belong only to things having psychological persistence\\nconditions” (2004: 528). A thinker’s psychological states\\nplay characteristic causal roles, and these states (in combination\\nwith others) tend to cause the thinking being whose states they are to\\nbehave in certain ways. Thus, for example, the state of being in pain\\nmay be caused by bodily damage of some kind and may dispose the one\\nwho is in pain to cry out or recoil.\",\n \"\\nThe linchpin of Shoemaker’s view is his claim that the causal\\nrole of any psychological state as well as any other states involved\\nin that causal role must all be states of one and the same thinking\\nbeing (1999: 300). In other words, the effects typically brought about\\nby a being’s psychological states cannot fail to occur in that\\nvery being. Olson summarizes the consequence of this commitment as\\nfollows:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nif your cerebrum gets put into my head tomorrow, your current mental\\nstates will have their characteristic effects in the being who ends up\\nwith that organ, and not in the empty-headed thing left behind. By\\nShoemaker’s reasoning, the subject of those\\nstates—you—must therefore be the being who ends up with\\nyour transplanted cerebrum. Any being whose later states or actions\\nare caused in the appropriate way by your current mental states must\\nbe you. In other words, psychological continuity of a sort must\\nsuffice for you or any other mental being to persist through time.\\nSince no sort of psychological continuity suffices for any organism to\\npersist … it follows that no organism could have mental\\nproperties. The nature of mental properties makes it metaphysically\\nimpossible for animals to think. (Olson 2007: 33–34.)\\n\",\n \"\\nShoemaker’s functionalist theory of mind has received\\nconsiderable attention in the philosophy of mind. His view that\\nanimals cannot think and the implications of that claim for the\\nthinking animal argument are discussed in Árnadóttir\\n2010, Hershenov 2006, Olson 2002b, and S. Shoemaker 2004, 2008, 2011,\\n2016.\",\n \"\\nBeyond these discussions of (P2) and (P3), much of the recent\\ndiscussion concerning animalism has focused on such questions as\\nwhether one or more than one thinker is sitting in your chair; if more\\nthan one, which one is doing the thinking; and in what sense.\\nZimmerman (2008), for instance, objects to (P1) by noting that the\\nrationale for the claim that a human animal is located where you\\nare—in effect, that it is just obvious that there is an instance\\nof the species Homo sapiens currently located where you\\nare—extends equally to such things as “mere hunk of\\nmatter”, “mere body”, “psychological\\nperson”, and the like. Since the animalist does not accept that\\nwe are identical to any of these non-animals, the evident truth of\\n(P1) will not be sufficient to establish the thinking animal\\nargument’s conclusion. What is required, in other words, is not\\nsimply a reason for believing that (P1) is true—animalists, let\\nus assume, are correct in insisting that few would deny it—but\\nalso a reason for denying the presence of other things besides a human\\nanimal. This is the “rival candidates problem”.\",\n \"\\nClosely related to this problem is another. The “thinking parts\\nproblem” charges that, even if you are a thinking being, no\\nreason has been given to suppose that you are a thinking\\nanimal rather than any of the other thinking beings currently\\nlocated where you are. To begin, consider all the parts of a human\\nanimal that are plausibly regarded as thinking: the head, the brain,\\nthe right-leg complement (i.e., the entire animal body minus the right\\nleg), the entire animal from the waist up (torso, neck, and head), the\\nleft-arm complement minus a single electron in the animal’s\\nliver, the left-arm complement minus a different electron in the\\nanimal’s liver, etc. For each of these thinking parts, an\\nargument structurally analogous to the thinking animal argument could\\nbe constructed. For instance:\",\n \"\\nLikewise:\",\n \"\\nAnd so on. If the thinking animal argument were sound, then it would\\nfollow (per impossibile) that you are identical with each of\\nan infinite number of nonidentical thinking parts. Since you could be\\nidentical with no more than one of those things, and since the\\nanimalist has provided no principled explanation for why you are the\\nwhole animal and not one or another of the animal’s thinking\\nparts, the thinking animal argument should be rejected.\",\n \"\\nMuch of the discussion about animalism has been concerned with the\\nrival candidates and thinking parts problems. (See, for instance,\\nBlatti 2016; Lowe 2001; Madden 2016a; Olson 2007: 215–19 and\\n2015; Parfit 2012; Yang 2015.) One line of response draws on van\\nInwagen’s (1990) view of composite material beings. According to\\nvan Inwagen’s answer to what he calls the “special\\ncomposition question”, the only composite objects that exist are\\nliving organisms. Only a living organism unifies the particles that\\ncompose it at any given moment, on this view. Such things as\\n“mere hunk of matter” and “right-leg\\ncomplement” are gerrymandered objects. And since they are not\\ngenuine composite objects, they are neither genuine rivals nor genuine\\nthinkers. Olson (2008: 38–42) is, however, quick to acknowledge\\nthat this riposte will be welcomed only by those antecedently\\npersuaded of van Inwagen’s view. And proponents of the rival\\ncandidates and thinking parts problems are particularly unlikely to\\ncount among van Inwagen’s supporters.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.2 Replies to the Thinking Animal Argument\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nEven if these objections to the thinking animal argument can be\\nanswered, there is some irony in the fact that the fate of the\\nhallmark argument for animalism should hang in the balance of disputes\\nover the nature of mental properties and the individuation of\\nthinkers. Thought is an essential ingredient not in animalism’s\\ntheory of our fundamental nature, but in the theories advanced by\\nanimalism’s neo-Lockean rivals. It is precisely our capacity for\\nthought that animalists deny is essential to us; on the contrary,\\nanimalists say, each of us was once a non-thinking fetus and each of\\nus may yet become a non-thinking persistent-vegetative-state\\npatient.\",\n \"\\nThus, a second argument attempts to ground animalism’s defense\\nin a broader naturalistic context. The “animal ancestors\\nargument” takes the form of a reductio. If (1) is false and we\\nare not animals, then nor are our parents animals, in which case nor\\nare our parents’ parents, nor our parents’ grandparents,\\nand so on, as far back as our ancestries extend. But in that case, the\\nfalsity of animalism entails the rejection of evolutionary theory (or\\nat least that theory’s applicability to us), since it denies\\nthat our distant ancestries includes beings who were animals. But,\\nsince the rejection of evolutionary theory is too high a price to pay,\\nit is instead the assumption of animalism’s falsity that ought\\nto be rejected. Whilst Blatti (2012) argues that this argument\\nwithstands a number of extant objections, it also faces challenges\\n(Daly and Liggins 2013, Gillett 2013).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.3 Animal Ancestors Argument\"\n }\n ]\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Árnadóttir, Steinvör Thöll, 2010,\n“Functionalism and Thinking Animals”, Philosophical\nStudies, 147(3): 347–354. doi:10.1007/s11098-008-9287-0","Atherton, Margaret, 1983, “Locke’s Theory of Personal\nIdentity”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 8: 273–293.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1475-4975.1983.tb00470.x","Ayers, Michael, 1991, Locke, 2 vols., London:\nRoutledge.","Baker, Lynne Rudder, 1997, “Why Constitution Is Not\nIdentity”, The Journal of Philosophy, 94(12): 599.\ndoi:10.2307/2564596","–––, 1999, “What Am I?”,\nPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research, 59(1):\n151–159. doi:10.2307/2653462","–––, 2000, Persons and Bodies: A\nConstitution View, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9781139173124","–––, 2002, “The Ontological Status of\nPersons”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,\n65(2): 370–388. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2002.tb00207.x","–––, 2007, The Metaphysics of Everyday Life:\nAn Essay in Practical Realism, Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511487545","–––, 2016, “Animalism vs.\nConstitutionalism”, in Blatti and Snowdon (eds) 2016: 50–63.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.003.0003","Bailey, Andrew M., 2016, “You Are an Animal”, Res\nPhilosophica, 93(1): 205–218.\ndoi:10.11612/resphil.2016.93.1.9","–––, 2017, “Our Animal Interests”,\nPhilosophical Studies, 174(9): 2315–2328.\ndoi:10.1007/s11098-016-0800-6","Belshaw, Christopher, 2011, “Animals, Identity and\nPersistence”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy,\n89(3): 401–419. doi:10.1080/00048402.2010.497190","Blatti, Stephan, 2007, “Animalism, Dicephalus, and\nBorderline Cases”, Philosophical Psychology, 20(5):\n595–608. doi:10.1080/09515080701540867","–––, 2012, “A New Argument for\nAnimalism”, Analysis, 72(4): 685–690.\ndoi:10.1093/analys/ans102","–––, 2016, “Headhunters”, in Blatti\nand Snowdon (eds.) 2016: 162–179.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.003.0008","Blatti, Stephan and Paul F. Snowdon (eds.), 2016, Animalism:\nNew Essays on Persons, Animals, and Identity, Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.001.0001","Bolton, Martha Brand, 1994, “Locke on Identity: The Scheme\nof Simple and Compounded Things”, in Individuation and\nIdentity in Early Modern Philosophy: Descartes to Kant, Kenneth\nF. Barber and Jorge J. E. Gracia (eds.), Albany, NY: State University\nof New York Press, 103–131.","Campbell, Scott, 2001, “Neo-Lockeanism and\nCircularity”, Philosophia, 28(1–4): 477–489.\ndoi:10.1007/BF02379796","–––, 2006, “The Conception of a Person as\na Series of Mental Events”, Philosophy and Phenomenological\nResearch, 73(2): 339–358.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2006.tb00621.x","Campbell, Tim and Jeff McMahan, 2016, “Animalism and the\nVarieties of Conjoined Twinning”, in Blatti and Snowdon (eds.)\n2016: 229–252. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.003.0011","Carruthers, Peter, 1986, Introducing Persons: Theories and\nArguments in the Philosophy of Mind, London: Routledge.","Carter, William R, 1984, “Death and Bodily\nTransfiguration”, Mind, 93(371): 412–418.\ndoi:10.1093/mind/XCIII.371.412","–––, 1988, “Our Bodies, Our Selves”,\nAustralasian Journal of Philosophy, 66(3): 308–319.\ndoi:10.1080/00048408812343391","–––, 1989, “How to Change Your\nMind”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 19(1): 1–14.\ndoi:10.1080/00455091.1989.10716464","–––, 1990, “Why Personal Identity Is\nAnimal Identity”, Logos (University of Santa Clara),\n11: 71–81.","–––, 1999, “Will I Be a Dead\nPerson?”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,\n59(1): 167–171. doi:10.2307/2653464","Chappell, Vere, 1989, “Locke and Relative Identity”,\nHistory of Philosophy Quarterly, 6(1): 69–83.","Chisholm, Roderick M., 1976, Person and Object: A Metaphysical\nStudy, La Salle, IL: Open Court.","–––, 1978 [1989], “Is There a Mind-Body\nProblem?”, Philosophic Exchange, 9(1): 25–34.\nReprinted 1989, in On Metaphysics, Minneapolis, MN:\nUniversity of Minnesota Press, 119–128.\n [Chisholm 1978 available online]","Daly, Chris and David Liggins, 2013, “Animalism and\nDeferentialism: Animalism and Deferentialism”,\nDialectica, 67(4): 605–609.\ndoi:10.1111/1746-8361.12047","DeGrazia, David, 2005, Human Identity and Bioethics,\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511614484","Descartes, René, 1984, The Philosophical Writings of\nDescartes, John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch\n(trans./eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511818998","Feldman, Fred, 1992, Confrontations with the Reaper: A\nPhilosophical Study of the Nature and Value of Death, Oxford:\nOxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195089288.001.0001","Foster, John, 1991, The Immaterial Self: A Defence of the\nCartesian Dualist Conception of the Mind, London: Routledge.","Gendler, Tamar Szabó, 2002, “Personal Identity and\nThought-Experiments”, The Philosophical Quarterly,\n52(206): 34–54. doi:10.1111/1467-9213.00251","Gillett, Carl, 2013, “What You Are and the Evolution of\nOrgans, Souls and Superorganisms: A Reply to Blatti”,\nAnalysis, 73(2): 271–279. doi:10.1093/analys/ant005","Hacker, P. M. S., 2007, Human Nature: The Categorial\nFramework, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.\ndoi:10.1002/9780470692165","Hershenov, David B., 2005a, “Do Dead Bodies Pose a Problem\nfor Biological Approaches to Personal Identity?”, Mind,\n114(453): 31–59. doi:10.1093/mind/fzi031","–––, 2005b, “Persons as Proper Parts of\nOrganisms”, Theoria, 71(1): 29–37.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1755-2567.2005.tb01003.x","–––, 2006, “Shoemaker’s Problem of Too\nMany Thinkers”, Proceedings of the American Catholic\nPhilosophical Association, 80: 225–236.\ndoi:10.5840/acpaproc20068017","–––, 2008, “A Hylomorphic Account of\nThought Experiments Concerning Personal Identity”:, American\nCatholic Philosophical Quarterly, 82(3): 481–502.\ndoi:10.5840/acpq200882332","–––, 2009, “Problems with a Constitution\nAccount of Persons”, Dialogue, 48(2): 291–312.\ndoi:10.1017/S001221730909026X","–––, 2012, “Personal Identity”, in\nContinuum Companion to Metaphysics, Neil A. Manson and Robert\nW. Barnard (eds.), London: Continuum Publishing, pp.\n198–222.","–––, 2016, “Four-Dimensional\nAnimalism”, in Blatti and Snowdon (eds.) 2016: 208–226.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.003.0010","Hume, David, 1738, A Treatise of Human Nature, L. A.\nSelby-Bigge (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.","Hudson, Hud, 2001, A Materialist Metaphysics of the Human\nPerson, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.","–––, 2007, “I Am Not an Animal!” in\nPersons: Human and Divine, Peter van Inwagen and Dean\nZimmerman (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.\n216–234.","Johansson, Jens, 2007, “What Is Animalism?”,\nRatio, 20(2): 194–205.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1467-9329.2007.00357.x","–––, 2016, “Animal Ethics”, in\nBlatti and Snowdon (eds.) 2016: 283–302.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.003.0014","Johnston, Mark, 1987, “Human Beings”, The Journal\nof Philosophy, 84(2): 59–83. doi:10.2307/2026626","–––, 1992, “Constitution Is Not\nIdentity”, Mind, 101(401): 89–106.\ndoi:10.1093/mind/101.401.89","–––, 2007, “‘Human Beings’\nRevisited: My Body is Not an Animal”, in Oxford Studies in\nMetaphysics, volume 3, Dean W. Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press, pp. 33–74.","–––, 2010, Surviving Death, Princeton,\nNJ: Princeton University Press.","–––, 2016, “Remnant Persons”, in\nBlatti and Snowdon (eds.) 2016: 89–127.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.003.0005","Lewis, D. K., 1976 [1983], “Survival and Identity”, in\nThe Identities of Persons, A. O. Rorty (ed.), Berkeley:\nUniversity of California Press, pp. 17–40; reprinted in\nPhilosophical Papers, Volume 1, Oxford: Oxford University\nPress, 1983, pp. 55–77.","Liao, S. Matthew, 2006, “The Organism View Defended”:,\nMonist, 89(3): 334–350. doi:10.5840/monist200689315","Locke, John, 1689 [1975], An Essay Concerning Human\nUnderstanding, Peter H. Nidditch (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon\nPress.","Lowe, E. J., 1996, Subjects of Experience, Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511598005","–––, 2001, “Identity, Constitution, and\nthe Simplicity of the Self”, in Soul, Body, and Survival:\nEssays on the Metaphysics of Human Persons, Kevin Corcoran (ed.),\nIthaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 139–158.","Luper, Steven, 2014, “Persimals”, Southern Journal\nof Philosophy, 52 (Spindel Supplement): 140–162.\ndoi:10.1111/sjp.12062","Mackie, David, 1999a, “Animalism versus Lockeanism: No\nContest”, The Philosophical Quarterly, 49(196):\n369–376. doi:10.1111/1467-9213.00148","–––, 1999b, “Personal Identity and Dead\nPeople”, Philosophical Studies, 95(3): 219–242.\ndoi:10.1023/A:1004239225105","Mackie, J. L., 1976, Problems from Locke, Oxford:\nClarendon Press. doi:10.1093/0198750366.001.0001","Madden, Rory, 2016a, “Thinking Parts”, in Blatti and\nSnowdon (eds.) 2016: 180–207.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.003.0009","–––, 2016b, “Human Persistence”,\nPhilosophers’ Imprint, 16(17): 1–18.\n [Madden 2016b available online]","Martin, Raymond and John Barresi (eds), 2003, Personal\nIdentity, Oxford: Blackwell.","–––, 2006, The Rise and Fall of Soul and\nSelf: An Intellectual History of Personal Identity, New York:\nColumbia University Press.","McDowell, John, 1997, “Reductionism and the First\nPerson”, in Reading Parfit, Jonathan Dancy (ed.),\nOxford: Blackwell, pp. 230–250.","McMahan, Jeff, 2002, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the\nMargins of Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/0195079981.001.0001","Merricks, Trenton, 2001, Objects and Persons, Oxford:\nOxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0199245363.001.0001","Miller, Kenneth, 1996, “Together Forever”,\nLife, April: 44–56.\n [Miller 1996 available online]","Nichols, Shaun and Michael Bruno, 2010, “Intuitions about\nPersonal Identity: An Empirical Study”, Philosophical\nPsychology, 23(3): 293–312.\ndoi:10.1080/09515089.2010.490939","Noonan, Harold W., 1998, “Animalism Versus Lockeanism: A\nCurrent Controversy”, The Philosophical Quarterly,\n48(192): 302–318. doi:10.1111/1467-9213.00102","–––, 2001, “Animalism versus Lockeanism:\n\nReply to Mackie”, The Philosophical Quarterly, 51(202):\n83–90. doi:10.1111/j.0031-8094.2001.00216.x","–––, 2012, “Personal Pronoun\nRevisionism—Asking the Right Question”, Analysis,\n72(2): 316–318. doi:10.1093/analys/ans037","–––, 1989 [2019], Personal Identity,\nLondon: Routledge, 3rd edition.","Olson, Eric T., 1997, The Human Animal: Personal Identity\nWithout Psychology, New York: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/0195134230.001.0001","–––, 2002a, “Thinking Animals and the\nReference of ‘I’”, Philosophical Topics,\n30(1): 189–207. doi:10.5840/philtopics20023016","–––, 2002b, “What Does Functionalism Tell\nUs about Personal Identity?”, Noûs, 36(4):\n682–698. doi:10.1111/1468-0068.00407","–––, 2003, “An Argument for\nAnimalism”, in Martin and Barresi (eds.) 2003:\n318–334.","–––, 2004, “Animalism and the Corpse\nProblem”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 82(2):\n265–274. doi:10.1080/713659837","–––, 2007, What Are We? A Study in Personal\nOntology, New York: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195176421.001.0001","–––, 2008, “Replies”,\nAbstracta, 1 (special issue): 32–42. (See\n Other Internet Resources.)","–––, 2014, “The Metaphysical Implications\nof Conjoined Twinning”, Southern Journal of Philosophy,\n52 (Spindel Supplement): 24–40. doi:10.1111/sjp.12073","–––, 2015, “On Parfit’s View that We\nAre Not Human Beings”, Royal Institute of Philosophy\nSupplement, 76: 39–56. doi:10.1017/S1358246115000107","Parfit, Derek, 1971, “Personal Identity”,\nPhilosophical Review, 80(1): 3–27.","–––, 1984, Reasons and Persons, Oxford:\nOxford University Press. doi:10.1093/019824908X.001.0001","–––, 1995 [2003], “The Unimportance of\nIdentity”, in Identity, Henry Harris (ed.), Oxford:\nOxford University Press, pp. 13–45; reprinted in Martin and\nBarresi (eds.) 2003: 292–317.","–––, 2007, “Persons, Bodies, and Human\nBeings”, in Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics,\nTheodore Sider, John Hawthorne, and Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Oxford:\nBlackwell, pp. 177–208.","–––, 2012, “We Are Not Human\nBeings”, Philosophy, 87(1): 5–28. in Blatti and\nSnowdon (eds.) 2016: 31–49. doi:10.1017/S0031819111000520\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.003.0002","Persson, Ingmar, 1999, “Our Identity and the Separability of\nPersons and Organisms”, Dialogue, 38(3): 519–534.\ndoi:10.1017/S0012217300046874","Puccetti, Roland, 1973, “Brain Bisection and Personal\nIdentity”, The British Journal for the Philosophy of\nScience, 24(4): 339–355. doi:10.1093/bjps/24.4.339","Reid, Mark D., 2016, “A Case in Which Two Persons Exist in\nOne Animal”, in Blatti and Snowdon (eds.) 2016: 253–265.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.003.0012","Robinson, Denis, 2007, “Human Beings, Human Animals, and\nMentalistic Survival”, in Oxford Studies in\nMetaphysics, vol. 3, Dean W. Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press, pp. 3–32.","–––, 2016, “Constitution and the Debate\nbetween Animalism and Psychological Views”, in Blatti and\nSnowdon (eds.) 2016: 64–88.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.003.0004","Rovane, Carol, 1998, The Bounds of Agency: An Essay in\nRevisionary Metaphysics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University\nPress.","Sauchelli, Andrea, 2017a, Personal Identity and Applied\nEthics: A Historical and Philosophical Introduction, London:\nRoutledge. doi:10.4324/9781315644288","–––, 2017b, “The Animal, the Corpse, and\nthe Remnant-Person”, Philosophical Studies, 174(1):\n205–218. doi:10.1007/s11098-016-0677-4","–––, forthcoming, “Animalism, Abortion,\nand a Future Like Ours”, The Journal of Ethics, first\nonline: 29 June 2019. doi:10.1007/s10892-019-09298-y","Shoemaker, David, 2009, Personal Identity and Ethics,\nLondon: Broadview Press.","–––, 2013, “Personal Identity and\nEthics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall\n2013 Edition), E. Zalta (ed.), URL =\n <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/identity-ethics/>.","–––, 2016, “The Stony Metaphysical Heart\nof Animalism”, in Blatti and Snowdon (eds.) 2016: 303–328.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.003.0015","Shoemaker, Sydney, 1963, Self-Knowledge and\nSelf-Identity, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.","–––, 1984, “Personal Identity: A\nMaterialist Account”, in Shoemaker and Swinburne 1984:\n67–132.","–––, 1997, “Self and Substance”, in\nPhilosophical Perspectives, 11: Mind, Causation, and World,\nOxford: Blackwell, pp. 283–304.","–––, 1999, “Self, Body, and\nCoincidence”, Aristotelian Society Supplementary\nVolume, 73: 287–306. doi:10.1111/1467-8349.00059","–––, 2004, “Functionalism and Personal\nIdentity—A Reply”, Noûs, 38(3): 525–533.\ndoi:10.1111/j.0029-4624.2004.00481.x","–––, 2008, “Persons, Animals, and\nIdentity”, Synthese, 162(3): 313–324.\ndoi:10.1007/s11229-007-9253-y","–––, 2011, “On What We Are”, in\nThe Oxford Handbook to the Self, Shaun Gallagher (ed.),\nOxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 352–371.\ndoi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199548019.003.0016","–––, 2016, “Thinking Animals Without\nAnimalism”, in Blatti and Snowdon (eds.) 2016: 128–142.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.003.0006","Shoemaker, Sydney and Richard Swinburne, 1984, Personal\nIdentity, (Great Debates in Philosophy), Oxford: Blackwell.","Snowdon, Paul F., 1990, “Persons, Animals, and\nOurselves”, in The Person and the Human Mind: Issues in\nAncient and Modern Philosophy, Christopher Gill (ed.), Oxford:\nClarendon Press, pp. 83–107.","–––, 1991, “Personal Identity and Brain\nTransplants”, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement,\nDavid Cockburn (ed.), (proceedings of the conference on Human Beings,\nJuly 1990, Lampteter, Wales), 29: 109–126.\ndoi:10.1017/S1358246100007499","–––, 1995, “Persons, Animals, and\nBodies”, in The Body and the Self, José Luis\nBermúdez, Anthony Marcel, and Naomi Eilan (eds.), Cambridge,\nMA: MIT Press, pp. 71–86.","–––, 1996, “Persons and Personal\nIdentity”, in Essays for David Wiggins: Identity, Truth and\nValue, Sabrina Lovibond and Stephen G. Williams (eds.), Oxford:\nBasil Blackwell, pp. 33–48.","–––, 2003, “Objections to\nAnimalism”, in On Human Persons, Klaus Petrus (ed.),\nFrankfurt: Ontos Verlag, pp. 47–66.","–––, 2014, Persons, Animals, Ourselves,\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198719618.001.0001","Swinburne, Richard, 1984, “Personal Identity: the Dualist\nTheory”, in Shoemaker and Swinburne 1984: 1–66.","Thiel, Udo, 1997, “‘Epistemologism’ and Early\nModern Debates about Individuation and Identity”, British\nJournal for the History of Philosophy, 5(2): 353–372.\ndoi:10.1080/09608789708570971","–––, 1998, “Personal Identity”, in\nThe Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy,\nvolume 1, Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge\nUniversity Press, 868–912. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521307635.028","–––, 2011, The Early Modern Subject:\nSelf-Consciousness and Personal Identity from Descartes to Hume,\nOxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199542499.001.0001","Thomson, Judith Jarvix, 1987, “Ruminations on an Account of\nPersonal Identity”, in On Being and Saying: Essays for\nRichard Cartwright, Judith Jarvis Thomson (ed.), Cambridge, MA:\nMIT Press, pp. 215–240.","–––, 1997, “People and their\nBodies”, in Reading Parfit, Jonathan Dancy (ed.),\nOxford: Blackwell, pp. 202–229.","Toner, Patrick, 2011, “Hylemorphic Animalism”,\nPhilosophical Studies, 155(1): 65–81.\ndoi:10.1007/s11098-010-9522-3","Unger, Peter, 1979a, “Why There Are No People”,\nMidwest Studies in Philosophy, 4: 177–222.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1475-4975.1979.tb00377.x","–––, 1979b, “I Do Not Exist”, in\nPerception and Identity: Essays Presented to A. J. Ayer with His\nReplies to Them, G. F. Macdonald (ed.), London: Macmillan,\n235–251. doi:10.1007/978-1-349-04862-5_10","–––, 1990, Identity, Consciousness, and\nValue, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","van Inwagen, Peter, 1990, Material Beings, Ithaca, NY:\nCornell University Press.","–––, 1997, “Materialism and the\nPsychological-Continuity Account of Personal Identity”, in\nPhilosophical Perspectives, 11, Mind, Causation, and World,\nOxford: Blackwell, 305–319.","Wiggins, David, 1967, Identity and Spatio-Temporal\nContinuity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.","–––, 1980, Sameness and Substance,\nOxford: Basil Blackwell.","–––, 1987, “The Person as Object of\nScience, as Subject of Experience, and as Locus of Value”, in\nPersons and Personality, A. Peacocke and G. Gillett (eds.),\nOxford: Blackwell, 56–74.","–––, 2001, Sameness and Substance\nRenewed, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511612756","Wilkes, Kathleen V., 1988, Real People: Personal Identity\nwithout Thought Experiments, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198240808.001.0001","Williams, Bernard A. O., 1957, “Personal Identity and\nIndividuation”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian\nSociety, 57: 229–252. reprinted in Problems of the\nSelf, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973, pp.\n1–18. doi:10.1093/aristotelian/57.1.229","Winkler, Kenneth, 1991, “Locke on Personal Identity”,\nJournal of the History of Philosophy, 29(2): 201–226.\ndoi:10.1353/hph.1991.0041","Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1953, Philosophical Investigations,\nG. E. M. Anscombe (trans.), Oxford: Blackwell.","Wollheim, Richard, 1984, The Thread of Life, Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press.","Yang, Eric, 2015, “Unrestricted Animalism and the Too Many\nCandidates Problem”, Philosophical Studies, 172(3):\n635–652. doi:10.1007/s11098-014-0323-y","Zimmerman, Dean W., 2002, “The Constitution of Persons by\nBodies: A Critique of Lynne Rudder Baker’s Theory of Material\nConstitution”, Philosophical Topics, 30(1): 295–338.\ndoi:10.5840/philtopics200230111","–––, 2008, “Problems for Animalism”,\nAbstracta, 1 (special issue): 23–31. (See\n Other Internet Resources.)"],"string":"[\n \"Árnadóttir, Steinvör Thöll, 2010,\\n“Functionalism and Thinking Animals”, Philosophical\\nStudies, 147(3): 347–354. doi:10.1007/s11098-008-9287-0\",\n \"Atherton, Margaret, 1983, “Locke’s Theory of Personal\\nIdentity”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 8: 273–293.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1475-4975.1983.tb00470.x\",\n \"Ayers, Michael, 1991, Locke, 2 vols., London:\\nRoutledge.\",\n \"Baker, Lynne Rudder, 1997, “Why Constitution Is Not\\nIdentity”, The Journal of Philosophy, 94(12): 599.\\ndoi:10.2307/2564596\",\n \"–––, 1999, “What Am I?”,\\nPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research, 59(1):\\n151–159. doi:10.2307/2653462\",\n \"–––, 2000, Persons and Bodies: A\\nConstitution View, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9781139173124\",\n \"–––, 2002, “The Ontological Status of\\nPersons”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,\\n65(2): 370–388. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2002.tb00207.x\",\n \"–––, 2007, The Metaphysics of Everyday Life:\\nAn Essay in Practical Realism, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511487545\",\n \"–––, 2016, “Animalism vs.\\nConstitutionalism”, in Blatti and Snowdon (eds) 2016: 50–63.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.003.0003\",\n \"Bailey, Andrew M., 2016, “You Are an Animal”, Res\\nPhilosophica, 93(1): 205–218.\\ndoi:10.11612/resphil.2016.93.1.9\",\n \"–––, 2017, “Our Animal Interests”,\\nPhilosophical Studies, 174(9): 2315–2328.\\ndoi:10.1007/s11098-016-0800-6\",\n \"Belshaw, Christopher, 2011, “Animals, Identity and\\nPersistence”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy,\\n89(3): 401–419. doi:10.1080/00048402.2010.497190\",\n \"Blatti, Stephan, 2007, “Animalism, Dicephalus, and\\nBorderline Cases”, Philosophical Psychology, 20(5):\\n595–608. doi:10.1080/09515080701540867\",\n \"–––, 2012, “A New Argument for\\nAnimalism”, Analysis, 72(4): 685–690.\\ndoi:10.1093/analys/ans102\",\n \"–––, 2016, “Headhunters”, in Blatti\\nand Snowdon (eds.) 2016: 162–179.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.003.0008\",\n \"Blatti, Stephan and Paul F. Snowdon (eds.), 2016, Animalism:\\nNew Essays on Persons, Animals, and Identity, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.001.0001\",\n \"Bolton, Martha Brand, 1994, “Locke on Identity: The Scheme\\nof Simple and Compounded Things”, in Individuation and\\nIdentity in Early Modern Philosophy: Descartes to Kant, Kenneth\\nF. Barber and Jorge J. E. Gracia (eds.), Albany, NY: State University\\nof New York Press, 103–131.\",\n \"Campbell, Scott, 2001, “Neo-Lockeanism and\\nCircularity”, Philosophia, 28(1–4): 477–489.\\ndoi:10.1007/BF02379796\",\n \"–––, 2006, “The Conception of a Person as\\na Series of Mental Events”, Philosophy and Phenomenological\\nResearch, 73(2): 339–358.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2006.tb00621.x\",\n \"Campbell, Tim and Jeff McMahan, 2016, “Animalism and the\\nVarieties of Conjoined Twinning”, in Blatti and Snowdon (eds.)\\n2016: 229–252. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.003.0011\",\n \"Carruthers, Peter, 1986, Introducing Persons: Theories and\\nArguments in the Philosophy of Mind, London: Routledge.\",\n \"Carter, William R, 1984, “Death and Bodily\\nTransfiguration”, Mind, 93(371): 412–418.\\ndoi:10.1093/mind/XCIII.371.412\",\n \"–––, 1988, “Our Bodies, Our Selves”,\\nAustralasian Journal of Philosophy, 66(3): 308–319.\\ndoi:10.1080/00048408812343391\",\n \"–––, 1989, “How to Change Your\\nMind”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 19(1): 1–14.\\ndoi:10.1080/00455091.1989.10716464\",\n \"–––, 1990, “Why Personal Identity Is\\nAnimal Identity”, Logos (University of Santa Clara),\\n11: 71–81.\",\n \"–––, 1999, “Will I Be a Dead\\nPerson?”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,\\n59(1): 167–171. doi:10.2307/2653464\",\n \"Chappell, Vere, 1989, “Locke and Relative Identity”,\\nHistory of Philosophy Quarterly, 6(1): 69–83.\",\n \"Chisholm, Roderick M., 1976, Person and Object: A Metaphysical\\nStudy, La Salle, IL: Open Court.\",\n \"–––, 1978 [1989], “Is There a Mind-Body\\nProblem?”, Philosophic Exchange, 9(1): 25–34.\\nReprinted 1989, in On Metaphysics, Minneapolis, MN:\\nUniversity of Minnesota Press, 119–128.\\n [Chisholm 1978 available online]\",\n \"Daly, Chris and David Liggins, 2013, “Animalism and\\nDeferentialism: Animalism and Deferentialism”,\\nDialectica, 67(4): 605–609.\\ndoi:10.1111/1746-8361.12047\",\n \"DeGrazia, David, 2005, Human Identity and Bioethics,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511614484\",\n \"Descartes, René, 1984, The Philosophical Writings of\\nDescartes, John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch\\n(trans./eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511818998\",\n \"Feldman, Fred, 1992, Confrontations with the Reaper: A\\nPhilosophical Study of the Nature and Value of Death, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195089288.001.0001\",\n \"Foster, John, 1991, The Immaterial Self: A Defence of the\\nCartesian Dualist Conception of the Mind, London: Routledge.\",\n \"Gendler, Tamar Szabó, 2002, “Personal Identity and\\nThought-Experiments”, The Philosophical Quarterly,\\n52(206): 34–54. doi:10.1111/1467-9213.00251\",\n \"Gillett, Carl, 2013, “What You Are and the Evolution of\\nOrgans, Souls and Superorganisms: A Reply to Blatti”,\\nAnalysis, 73(2): 271–279. doi:10.1093/analys/ant005\",\n \"Hacker, P. M. S., 2007, Human Nature: The Categorial\\nFramework, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.\\ndoi:10.1002/9780470692165\",\n \"Hershenov, David B., 2005a, “Do Dead Bodies Pose a Problem\\nfor Biological Approaches to Personal Identity?”, Mind,\\n114(453): 31–59. doi:10.1093/mind/fzi031\",\n \"–––, 2005b, “Persons as Proper Parts of\\nOrganisms”, Theoria, 71(1): 29–37.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1755-2567.2005.tb01003.x\",\n \"–––, 2006, “Shoemaker’s Problem of Too\\nMany Thinkers”, Proceedings of the American Catholic\\nPhilosophical Association, 80: 225–236.\\ndoi:10.5840/acpaproc20068017\",\n \"–––, 2008, “A Hylomorphic Account of\\nThought Experiments Concerning Personal Identity”:, American\\nCatholic Philosophical Quarterly, 82(3): 481–502.\\ndoi:10.5840/acpq200882332\",\n \"–––, 2009, “Problems with a Constitution\\nAccount of Persons”, Dialogue, 48(2): 291–312.\\ndoi:10.1017/S001221730909026X\",\n \"–––, 2012, “Personal Identity”, in\\nContinuum Companion to Metaphysics, Neil A. Manson and Robert\\nW. Barnard (eds.), London: Continuum Publishing, pp.\\n198–222.\",\n \"–––, 2016, “Four-Dimensional\\nAnimalism”, in Blatti and Snowdon (eds.) 2016: 208–226.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.003.0010\",\n \"Hume, David, 1738, A Treatise of Human Nature, L. A.\\nSelby-Bigge (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.\",\n \"Hudson, Hud, 2001, A Materialist Metaphysics of the Human\\nPerson, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2007, “I Am Not an Animal!” in\\nPersons: Human and Divine, Peter van Inwagen and Dean\\nZimmerman (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.\\n216–234.\",\n \"Johansson, Jens, 2007, “What Is Animalism?”,\\nRatio, 20(2): 194–205.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1467-9329.2007.00357.x\",\n \"–––, 2016, “Animal Ethics”, in\\nBlatti and Snowdon (eds.) 2016: 283–302.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.003.0014\",\n \"Johnston, Mark, 1987, “Human Beings”, The Journal\\nof Philosophy, 84(2): 59–83. doi:10.2307/2026626\",\n \"–––, 1992, “Constitution Is Not\\nIdentity”, Mind, 101(401): 89–106.\\ndoi:10.1093/mind/101.401.89\",\n \"–––, 2007, “‘Human Beings’\\nRevisited: My Body is Not an Animal”, in Oxford Studies in\\nMetaphysics, volume 3, Dean W. Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press, pp. 33–74.\",\n \"–––, 2010, Surviving Death, Princeton,\\nNJ: Princeton University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2016, “Remnant Persons”, in\\nBlatti and Snowdon (eds.) 2016: 89–127.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.003.0005\",\n \"Lewis, D. K., 1976 [1983], “Survival and Identity”, in\\nThe Identities of Persons, A. O. Rorty (ed.), Berkeley:\\nUniversity of California Press, pp. 17–40; reprinted in\\nPhilosophical Papers, Volume 1, Oxford: Oxford University\\nPress, 1983, pp. 55–77.\",\n \"Liao, S. Matthew, 2006, “The Organism View Defended”:,\\nMonist, 89(3): 334–350. doi:10.5840/monist200689315\",\n \"Locke, John, 1689 [1975], An Essay Concerning Human\\nUnderstanding, Peter H. Nidditch (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon\\nPress.\",\n \"Lowe, E. J., 1996, Subjects of Experience, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511598005\",\n \"–––, 2001, “Identity, Constitution, and\\nthe Simplicity of the Self”, in Soul, Body, and Survival:\\nEssays on the Metaphysics of Human Persons, Kevin Corcoran (ed.),\\nIthaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 139–158.\",\n \"Luper, Steven, 2014, “Persimals”, Southern Journal\\nof Philosophy, 52 (Spindel Supplement): 140–162.\\ndoi:10.1111/sjp.12062\",\n \"Mackie, David, 1999a, “Animalism versus Lockeanism: No\\nContest”, The Philosophical Quarterly, 49(196):\\n369–376. doi:10.1111/1467-9213.00148\",\n \"–––, 1999b, “Personal Identity and Dead\\nPeople”, Philosophical Studies, 95(3): 219–242.\\ndoi:10.1023/A:1004239225105\",\n \"Mackie, J. L., 1976, Problems from Locke, Oxford:\\nClarendon Press. doi:10.1093/0198750366.001.0001\",\n \"Madden, Rory, 2016a, “Thinking Parts”, in Blatti and\\nSnowdon (eds.) 2016: 180–207.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.003.0009\",\n \"–––, 2016b, “Human Persistence”,\\nPhilosophers’ Imprint, 16(17): 1–18.\\n [Madden 2016b available online]\",\n \"Martin, Raymond and John Barresi (eds), 2003, Personal\\nIdentity, Oxford: Blackwell.\",\n \"–––, 2006, The Rise and Fall of Soul and\\nSelf: An Intellectual History of Personal Identity, New York:\\nColumbia University Press.\",\n \"McDowell, John, 1997, “Reductionism and the First\\nPerson”, in Reading Parfit, Jonathan Dancy (ed.),\\nOxford: Blackwell, pp. 230–250.\",\n \"McMahan, Jeff, 2002, The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the\\nMargins of Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/0195079981.001.0001\",\n \"Merricks, Trenton, 2001, Objects and Persons, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0199245363.001.0001\",\n \"Miller, Kenneth, 1996, “Together Forever”,\\nLife, April: 44–56.\\n [Miller 1996 available online]\",\n \"Nichols, Shaun and Michael Bruno, 2010, “Intuitions about\\nPersonal Identity: An Empirical Study”, Philosophical\\nPsychology, 23(3): 293–312.\\ndoi:10.1080/09515089.2010.490939\",\n \"Noonan, Harold W., 1998, “Animalism Versus Lockeanism: A\\nCurrent Controversy”, The Philosophical Quarterly,\\n48(192): 302–318. doi:10.1111/1467-9213.00102\",\n \"–––, 2001, “Animalism versus Lockeanism:\\n\\nReply to Mackie”, The Philosophical Quarterly, 51(202):\\n83–90. doi:10.1111/j.0031-8094.2001.00216.x\",\n \"–––, 2012, “Personal Pronoun\\nRevisionism—Asking the Right Question”, Analysis,\\n72(2): 316–318. doi:10.1093/analys/ans037\",\n \"–––, 1989 [2019], Personal Identity,\\nLondon: Routledge, 3rd edition.\",\n \"Olson, Eric T., 1997, The Human Animal: Personal Identity\\nWithout Psychology, New York: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/0195134230.001.0001\",\n \"–––, 2002a, “Thinking Animals and the\\nReference of ‘I’”, Philosophical Topics,\\n30(1): 189–207. doi:10.5840/philtopics20023016\",\n \"–––, 2002b, “What Does Functionalism Tell\\nUs about Personal Identity?”, Noûs, 36(4):\\n682–698. doi:10.1111/1468-0068.00407\",\n \"–––, 2003, “An Argument for\\nAnimalism”, in Martin and Barresi (eds.) 2003:\\n318–334.\",\n \"–––, 2004, “Animalism and the Corpse\\nProblem”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 82(2):\\n265–274. doi:10.1080/713659837\",\n \"–––, 2007, What Are We? A Study in Personal\\nOntology, New York: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195176421.001.0001\",\n \"–––, 2008, “Replies”,\\nAbstracta, 1 (special issue): 32–42. (See\\n Other Internet Resources.)\",\n \"–––, 2014, “The Metaphysical Implications\\nof Conjoined Twinning”, Southern Journal of Philosophy,\\n52 (Spindel Supplement): 24–40. doi:10.1111/sjp.12073\",\n \"–––, 2015, “On Parfit’s View that We\\nAre Not Human Beings”, Royal Institute of Philosophy\\nSupplement, 76: 39–56. doi:10.1017/S1358246115000107\",\n \"Parfit, Derek, 1971, “Personal Identity”,\\nPhilosophical Review, 80(1): 3–27.\",\n \"–––, 1984, Reasons and Persons, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press. doi:10.1093/019824908X.001.0001\",\n \"–––, 1995 [2003], “The Unimportance of\\nIdentity”, in Identity, Henry Harris (ed.), Oxford:\\nOxford University Press, pp. 13–45; reprinted in Martin and\\nBarresi (eds.) 2003: 292–317.\",\n \"–––, 2007, “Persons, Bodies, and Human\\nBeings”, in Contemporary Debates in Metaphysics,\\nTheodore Sider, John Hawthorne, and Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Oxford:\\nBlackwell, pp. 177–208.\",\n \"–––, 2012, “We Are Not Human\\nBeings”, Philosophy, 87(1): 5–28. in Blatti and\\nSnowdon (eds.) 2016: 31–49. doi:10.1017/S0031819111000520\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.003.0002\",\n \"Persson, Ingmar, 1999, “Our Identity and the Separability of\\nPersons and Organisms”, Dialogue, 38(3): 519–534.\\ndoi:10.1017/S0012217300046874\",\n \"Puccetti, Roland, 1973, “Brain Bisection and Personal\\nIdentity”, The British Journal for the Philosophy of\\nScience, 24(4): 339–355. doi:10.1093/bjps/24.4.339\",\n \"Reid, Mark D., 2016, “A Case in Which Two Persons Exist in\\nOne Animal”, in Blatti and Snowdon (eds.) 2016: 253–265.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.003.0012\",\n \"Robinson, Denis, 2007, “Human Beings, Human Animals, and\\nMentalistic Survival”, in Oxford Studies in\\nMetaphysics, vol. 3, Dean W. Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press, pp. 3–32.\",\n \"–––, 2016, “Constitution and the Debate\\nbetween Animalism and Psychological Views”, in Blatti and\\nSnowdon (eds.) 2016: 64–88.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.003.0004\",\n \"Rovane, Carol, 1998, The Bounds of Agency: An Essay in\\nRevisionary Metaphysics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University\\nPress.\",\n \"Sauchelli, Andrea, 2017a, Personal Identity and Applied\\nEthics: A Historical and Philosophical Introduction, London:\\nRoutledge. doi:10.4324/9781315644288\",\n \"–––, 2017b, “The Animal, the Corpse, and\\nthe Remnant-Person”, Philosophical Studies, 174(1):\\n205–218. doi:10.1007/s11098-016-0677-4\",\n \"–––, forthcoming, “Animalism, Abortion,\\nand a Future Like Ours”, The Journal of Ethics, first\\nonline: 29 June 2019. doi:10.1007/s10892-019-09298-y\",\n \"Shoemaker, David, 2009, Personal Identity and Ethics,\\nLondon: Broadview Press.\",\n \"–––, 2013, “Personal Identity and\\nEthics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall\\n2013 Edition), E. Zalta (ed.), URL =\\n <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/identity-ethics/>.\",\n \"–––, 2016, “The Stony Metaphysical Heart\\nof Animalism”, in Blatti and Snowdon (eds.) 2016: 303–328.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.003.0015\",\n \"Shoemaker, Sydney, 1963, Self-Knowledge and\\nSelf-Identity, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1984, “Personal Identity: A\\nMaterialist Account”, in Shoemaker and Swinburne 1984:\\n67–132.\",\n \"–––, 1997, “Self and Substance”, in\\nPhilosophical Perspectives, 11: Mind, Causation, and World,\\nOxford: Blackwell, pp. 283–304.\",\n \"–––, 1999, “Self, Body, and\\nCoincidence”, Aristotelian Society Supplementary\\nVolume, 73: 287–306. doi:10.1111/1467-8349.00059\",\n \"–––, 2004, “Functionalism and Personal\\nIdentity—A Reply”, Noûs, 38(3): 525–533.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.0029-4624.2004.00481.x\",\n \"–––, 2008, “Persons, Animals, and\\nIdentity”, Synthese, 162(3): 313–324.\\ndoi:10.1007/s11229-007-9253-y\",\n \"–––, 2011, “On What We Are”, in\\nThe Oxford Handbook to the Self, Shaun Gallagher (ed.),\\nOxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 352–371.\\ndoi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199548019.003.0016\",\n \"–––, 2016, “Thinking Animals Without\\nAnimalism”, in Blatti and Snowdon (eds.) 2016: 128–142.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608751.003.0006\",\n \"Shoemaker, Sydney and Richard Swinburne, 1984, Personal\\nIdentity, (Great Debates in Philosophy), Oxford: Blackwell.\",\n \"Snowdon, Paul F., 1990, “Persons, Animals, and\\nOurselves”, in The Person and the Human Mind: Issues in\\nAncient and Modern Philosophy, Christopher Gill (ed.), Oxford:\\nClarendon Press, pp. 83–107.\",\n \"–––, 1991, “Personal Identity and Brain\\nTransplants”, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement,\\nDavid Cockburn (ed.), (proceedings of the conference on Human Beings,\\nJuly 1990, Lampteter, Wales), 29: 109–126.\\ndoi:10.1017/S1358246100007499\",\n \"–––, 1995, “Persons, Animals, and\\nBodies”, in The Body and the Self, José Luis\\nBermúdez, Anthony Marcel, and Naomi Eilan (eds.), Cambridge,\\nMA: MIT Press, pp. 71–86.\",\n \"–––, 1996, “Persons and Personal\\nIdentity”, in Essays for David Wiggins: Identity, Truth and\\nValue, Sabrina Lovibond and Stephen G. Williams (eds.), Oxford:\\nBasil Blackwell, pp. 33–48.\",\n \"–––, 2003, “Objections to\\nAnimalism”, in On Human Persons, Klaus Petrus (ed.),\\nFrankfurt: Ontos Verlag, pp. 47–66.\",\n \"–––, 2014, Persons, Animals, Ourselves,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198719618.001.0001\",\n \"Swinburne, Richard, 1984, “Personal Identity: the Dualist\\nTheory”, in Shoemaker and Swinburne 1984: 1–66.\",\n \"Thiel, Udo, 1997, “‘Epistemologism’ and Early\\nModern Debates about Individuation and Identity”, British\\nJournal for the History of Philosophy, 5(2): 353–372.\\ndoi:10.1080/09608789708570971\",\n \"–––, 1998, “Personal Identity”, in\\nThe Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy,\\nvolume 1, Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge\\nUniversity Press, 868–912. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521307635.028\",\n \"–––, 2011, The Early Modern Subject:\\nSelf-Consciousness and Personal Identity from Descartes to Hume,\\nOxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199542499.001.0001\",\n \"Thomson, Judith Jarvix, 1987, “Ruminations on an Account of\\nPersonal Identity”, in On Being and Saying: Essays for\\nRichard Cartwright, Judith Jarvis Thomson (ed.), Cambridge, MA:\\nMIT Press, pp. 215–240.\",\n \"–––, 1997, “People and their\\nBodies”, in Reading Parfit, Jonathan Dancy (ed.),\\nOxford: Blackwell, pp. 202–229.\",\n \"Toner, Patrick, 2011, “Hylemorphic Animalism”,\\nPhilosophical Studies, 155(1): 65–81.\\ndoi:10.1007/s11098-010-9522-3\",\n \"Unger, Peter, 1979a, “Why There Are No People”,\\nMidwest Studies in Philosophy, 4: 177–222.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1475-4975.1979.tb00377.x\",\n \"–––, 1979b, “I Do Not Exist”, in\\nPerception and Identity: Essays Presented to A. J. Ayer with His\\nReplies to Them, G. F. Macdonald (ed.), London: Macmillan,\\n235–251. doi:10.1007/978-1-349-04862-5_10\",\n \"–––, 1990, Identity, Consciousness, and\\nValue, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"van Inwagen, Peter, 1990, Material Beings, Ithaca, NY:\\nCornell University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1997, “Materialism and the\\nPsychological-Continuity Account of Personal Identity”, in\\nPhilosophical Perspectives, 11, Mind, Causation, and World,\\nOxford: Blackwell, 305–319.\",\n \"Wiggins, David, 1967, Identity and Spatio-Temporal\\nContinuity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.\",\n \"–––, 1980, Sameness and Substance,\\nOxford: Basil Blackwell.\",\n \"–––, 1987, “The Person as Object of\\nScience, as Subject of Experience, and as Locus of Value”, in\\nPersons and Personality, A. Peacocke and G. Gillett (eds.),\\nOxford: Blackwell, 56–74.\",\n \"–––, 2001, Sameness and Substance\\nRenewed, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511612756\",\n \"Wilkes, Kathleen V., 1988, Real People: Personal Identity\\nwithout Thought Experiments, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198240808.001.0001\",\n \"Williams, Bernard A. O., 1957, “Personal Identity and\\nIndividuation”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian\\nSociety, 57: 229–252. reprinted in Problems of the\\nSelf, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973, pp.\\n1–18. doi:10.1093/aristotelian/57.1.229\",\n \"Winkler, Kenneth, 1991, “Locke on Personal Identity”,\\nJournal of the History of Philosophy, 29(2): 201–226.\\ndoi:10.1353/hph.1991.0041\",\n \"Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1953, Philosophical Investigations,\\nG. E. M. Anscombe (trans.), Oxford: Blackwell.\",\n \"Wollheim, Richard, 1984, The Thread of Life, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press.\",\n \"Yang, Eric, 2015, “Unrestricted Animalism and the Too Many\\nCandidates Problem”, Philosophical Studies, 172(3):\\n635–652. doi:10.1007/s11098-014-0323-y\",\n \"Zimmerman, Dean W., 2002, “The Constitution of Persons by\\nBodies: A Critique of Lynne Rudder Baker’s Theory of Material\\nConstitution”, Philosophical Topics, 30(1): 295–338.\\ndoi:10.5840/philtopics200230111\",\n \"–––, 2008, “Problems for Animalism”,\\nAbstracta, 1 (special issue): 23–31. (See\\n Other Internet Resources.)\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../cognition-animal/","text":"animal: cognition"},{"href":"../consciousness-animal/","text":"animal: consciousness"},{"href":"../moral-animal/","text":"animals, moral status of"},{"href":"../functionalism/","text":"functionalism"},{"href":"../identity/","text":"identity"},{"href":"../identity-time/","text":"identity: over time"},{"href":"../life/","text":"life"},{"href":"../locke/","text":"Locke, John"},{"href":"../identity-personal/","text":"personal identity"},{"href":"../identity-ethics/","text":"personal identity: and ethics"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../cognition-animal/\",\n \"text\": \"animal: cognition\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../consciousness-animal/\",\n \"text\": \"animal: consciousness\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../moral-animal/\",\n \"text\": \"animals, moral status of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../functionalism/\",\n \"text\": \"functionalism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../identity/\",\n \"text\": \"identity\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../identity-time/\",\n \"text\": \"identity: over time\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../life/\",\n \"text\": \"life\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../locke/\",\n \"text\": \"Locke, John\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../identity-personal/\",\n \"text\": \"personal identity\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../identity-ethics/\",\n \"text\": \"personal identity: and ethics\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":62,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"moral-animal"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"The Moral Status of Animals"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Tue Jul 1, 2003; substantive revision Wed Aug 23, 2017"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nIs there something distinctive about humanity that justifies the idea\nthat humans have moral status while non-humans do not? Providing an\nanswer to this question has become increasingly important among\nphilosophers as well as those outside of philosophy who are interested\nin our treatment of non-human animals. For some, answering this\nquestion will enable us to better understand the nature of human\nbeings and the proper scope of our moral obligations. Some argue that\nthere is an answer that can distinguish humans from the rest of the\nnatural world. Many of those who accept this answer are interested in\njustifying certain human practices towards non-humans—practices\nthat cause pain, discomfort, suffering and death. This latter group\nexpects that in answering the question in a particular way, humans\nwill be justified in granting moral consideration to other humans that\nis neither required nor justified when considering non-human animals.\nIn contrast to this view, an increasing number of philosophers have\nargued that while humans are different in a variety of ways from each\nother and other animals, these differences do not provide a\nphilosophical defense for denying non-human animals moral\nconsideration. What the basis of moral consideration is and what it\namounts to has been the source of much disagreement."],"string":"[\n \"\\nIs there something distinctive about humanity that justifies the idea\\nthat humans have moral status while non-humans do not? Providing an\\nanswer to this question has become increasingly important among\\nphilosophers as well as those outside of philosophy who are interested\\nin our treatment of non-human animals. For some, answering this\\nquestion will enable us to better understand the nature of human\\nbeings and the proper scope of our moral obligations. Some argue that\\nthere is an answer that can distinguish humans from the rest of the\\nnatural world. Many of those who accept this answer are interested in\\njustifying certain human practices towards non-humans—practices\\nthat cause pain, discomfort, suffering and death. This latter group\\nexpects that in answering the question in a particular way, humans\\nwill be justified in granting moral consideration to other humans that\\nis neither required nor justified when considering non-human animals.\\nIn contrast to this view, an increasing number of philosophers have\\nargued that while humans are different in a variety of ways from each\\nother and other animals, these differences do not provide a\\nphilosophical defense for denying non-human animals moral\\nconsideration. What the basis of moral consideration is and what it\\namounts to has been the source of much disagreement.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. The Moral Considerability of Animals","sub_toc":["1.1 Speciesism","1.2 Human Exceptionalism","1.3 Personhood","1.4 Sentience"]},{"content_title":"2. The Moral Significance of Animals’ Moral Claims","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"3. Alternative Perspectives on Human Relations to Other Animals","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":["References Cited","Further Reading"]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. The Moral Considerability of Animals\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"1.1 Speciesism\",\n \"1.2 Human Exceptionalism\",\n \"1.3 Personhood\",\n \"1.4 Sentience\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. The Moral Significance of Animals’ Moral Claims\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Alternative Perspectives on Human Relations to Other Animals\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"References Cited\",\n \"Further Reading\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\nTo say that a being deserves moral consideration is to say that there\nis a moral claim that this being can make on those who can recognize\nsuch claims. A morally considerable being is a being who can be\nwronged. It is often thought that because only humans can recognize\nmoral claims, it is only humans who are morally considerable. However,\nwhen we ask why we think humans are the only types of beings that can\nbe morally wronged, we begin to see that the class of beings able to\nrecognize moral claims and the class of beings who can suffer moral\nwrongs are not co-extensive."],"section_title":"1. The Moral Considerability of Animals","subsections":[{"content":["\nThe view that only humans are morally considered is sometimes referred\nto as “speciesism”. In the 1970s, Richard Ryder coined\nthis term while campaigning in Oxford to denote a ubiquitous type of human centered prejudice, which he\nthought was similar to racism. He objected to favoring one’s own\nspecies, while exploiting or harming members of other species. Peter\nSinger popularized the term and focused on the way speciesism, without\nmoral justification, favors the interests of humans: ","\n\n\nthe racist violates the principle of equality by giving greater weight\nto the interests of members of his own race, when there is a clash\nbetween their interests and the interests of those of another race.\nSimilarly the speciesist allows the interests of his own species to\noverride the greater interests of members of other species. The\npattern is the same in each case. (Singer 1974: 108) \n","\nDiscrimination based on race, like discrimination based on species is\nthought to be prejudicial, because these are not characteristics that\nmatter when it comes to making moral claims.","\nSpeciesist actions and attitudes are prejudicial because there is no\nprima facie reason for preferring the interests of beings\nbelonging to the species group to which one also belongs over the\ninterests of those who don’t. That humans are members of the\nspecies Homo sapiens is certainly a distinguishing feature of\nhumans—humans share a genetic make-up and a distinctive\nphysiology, we all emerge from a human pregnancy, but this is\nunimportant from the moral point of view. Species membership is a\nmorally irrelevant characteristic, a bit of luck that is no more\nmorally interesting than being born in Malaysia or Canada. As a\nmorally irrelevant characteristic it cannot serve as the basis for a\nview that holds that our species deserves moral consideration that is\nnot owed to members of other species.","\nOne might respond that it is not membership in a biological category\nthat matters morally, but rather the social meaning of those\ncategories, meanings that structure not only the institutions we\noperate within, but how we conceptualize ourselves and our world.\nHumans have developed moral systems as well as a wide range of other\nvaluable practices, and by creating these systems, we separate the\nhuman from the rest of the animal kingdom. But the category\n“human” itself is morally contested. Some argue, for\nexample, that racism is not simply, or even primarily about\ndiscrimination and prejudice, but rather a mechanism of dehumanizing\nblackness so as to provide the conditions that makes humans white (see\nFanon 1967; Kim 2015; Ko& Ko 2017). According\nto this line of thought, speciesism isn’t focused on\ndiscrimination or prejudice but is a central tool for creating human\n(and white) supremacy or exceptionalism."],"subsection_title":"1.1 Speciesism"},{"content":["\nLike speciesism, human exceptionalism can be understood in different\nways. The most common way of understanding it is to suggest that there\nare distinctly human capacities and it is on the basis of these\ncapacities that humans have moral status and other animals do not. But\nwhich capacities mark out all and only humans as the kinds of beings\nthat can be wronged? A number of candidate capacities have been\nproposed—developing family ties, solving social problems,\nexpressing emotions, starting wars, having sex for pleasure, using\nlanguage, or thinking abstractly, are just a few. As it turns out,\nnone of these activities is uncontroversially unique to human. Both\nscholarly and popular work on animal behavior suggests that many of\nthe activities that are thought to be distinct to humans occurs in\nnon-humans. For example, many species of non-humans develop long\nlasting kinship ties—orangutan mothers stay with their young for\neight to ten years and while they eventually part company, they\ncontinue to maintain their relationships. Less solitary animals, such\nas chimpanzees, baboons, wolves, and elephants maintain extended\nfamily units built upon complex individual relationships, for long\nperiods of time. Meerkats in the Kalahari desert are known to\nsacrifice their own safety by staying with sick or injured family\nmembers so that the fatally ill will not die alone. All animals living\nin socially complex groups must solve various problems that inevitably\narise in such groups. Canids and primates are particularly adept at\nit, yet even chickens and horses are known to recognize large numbers\nof individuals in their social hierarchies and to maneuver within\nthem. One of the ways that non-human animals negotiate their social\nenvironments is by being particularly attentive to the emotional\nstates of others around them. When a conspecific is angry, it is a\ngood idea to get out of his way. Animals that develop life-long bonds\nare known to suffer from the death of their partners. Some are even\nsaid to die of sorrow. Darwin reported this in The Descent of\nMan: “So intense is the grief of female monkeys for the\nloss of their young, that it invariably caused the death of certain\nkinds” (1871: 40). Jane Goodall’s report of the death of\nthe healthy 8 year old chimpanzee Flint just three weeks after the\ndeath of his mother Flo also suggests that sorrow can have a\ndevastating effect on non-human animals (see Goodall 2000:\n140–141 in Bekoff 2000). Coyotes, elephants and killer whales\nare also among the species for which profound effects of grief have\nbeen reported (Bekoff 2000) and many dog owners can provide similar\naccounts. While the lives of many, perhaps most, non-humans in the\nwild are consumed with struggle for survival, aggression and battle,\nthere are some non-humans whose lives are characterized by expressions\nof joy, playfulness, and a great deal of sex (Woods 2010). Recent\nstudies in cognitive ethology have suggested that some non-humans\nengage in manipulative and deceptive activity, can construct\n“cognitive maps” for navigation, and some non-humans\nappear to understand symbolic representation and are able to use\n language.[1]","\nIt appears that most of the capacities that are thought to distinguish\nhumans as morally considerable beings, have been observed, often in\nless elaborate form, in the non-human world. Because human behavior\nand cognition share deep roots with the behavior and cognition of\nother animals, approaches that try to find sharp behavioral or\ncognitive boundaries between humans and other animals remain\ncontroversial. For this reason, attempts to establish human uniqueness\nby identifying certain capacities, are not the most promising when it\ncomes to thinking hard about the moral status of animals."],"subsection_title":"1.2 Human Exceptionalism"},{"content":["\nNonetheless, there is something important that is thought to\ndistinguish humans from non-humans that is not reducible to the\nobservation of behavior best explained by possessing a certain\ncapacity and that is our “personhood”. The notion of\npersonhood identifies a category of morally considerable beings that\nis thought to be coextensive with humanity. Historically, Kant is the\nmost noted defender of personhood as the quality that makes a being\nvaluable and thus morally considerable (for a contemporary utilitarian\ndiscussion of personhood, see Varner 2012). Kant writes:","\n\n\n…every rational being, exists as an end in himself and not\nmerely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that\nwill…Beings whose existence depends not on our will but on\nnature have, nevertheless, if they are not rational beings, only a\nrelative value as means and are therefore called things. On the other\nhand, rational beings are called persons inasmuch as their nature\nalready marks them out as ends in themselves. (Kant [1785] 1998: [Ak\n4: 428])\n","\nAnd:","\n\nThe fact that the human being can have the representation\n“I” raises him infinitely above all the other beings on\nearth. By this he is a person….that is, a being altogether\ndifferent in rank and dignity from things, such as irrational animals,\nwith which one may deal and dispose at one’s discretion. (Kant\n[1798] 2010: 239 [Ak 7: 127])\n","\nMore recent work in a Kantian vein develops this idea. Christine\nKorsgaard, for example, argues that humans “uniquely” face\na problem, the problem of normativity. This problem emerges because of\nthe reflective structure of human consciousness. We can, and often do,\nthink about our desires and ask ourselves “Are these desires\nreasons for action? Do these impulses represent the kind of things I\nwant to act according to?” Our reflective capacities allow us\nand require us to step back from our mere impulses in order\nto determine when and whether to act on them. In stepping back we gain\na certain distance from which we can answer these questions and solve\nthe problem of normativity. We decide whether to treat our desires as\nreasons for action based on our conceptions of ourselves, on our\n“practical identities”. When we determine whether we\nshould take a particular desire as a reason to act we are engaging in\na further level of reflection, a level that requires an endorseable\ndescription of ourselves. This endorseable description of ourselves,\nthis practical identity, is a necessary moral identity because without\nit we cannot view our lives as worth living or our actions as worth\ndoing. Korsgaard suggests that humans face the problem of normativity\nin a way that non-humans apparently do not:","\n\n\nA lower animal’s attention is fixed on the world. Its\nperceptions are its beliefs and its desires are its will. It is\nengaged in conscious activities, but it is not conscious of\nthem. That is, they are not the objects of its attention. But we human\nanimals turn our attention on to our perceptions and desires\nthemselves, on to our own mental activities, and we are conscious\nof them. That is why we can think about\nthem…And this sets us a problem that no other animal has. It is\nthe problem of the normative…. The reflective mind cannot\nsettle for perception and desire, not just as such. It needs a reason.\n(Korsgaard 1996: 93)\n","\nHere, Korsgaard understands “reason” as “a kind of\nreflective success” and given that non-humans are thought to be\nunable to reflect in a way that would allow them this sort of success,\nit appears that they do not act on reasons, at least reasons of this\nkind. Since non-humans do not act on reasons they do not have a\npractical identity from which they reflect and for which they act. So\nhumans can be distinguished from non-humans because humans, we might\nsay, are sources of normativity and non-humans are not.","\nBut arguably, Kant’s view of personhood does not distinguish all\nand only humans as morally considerable. Personhood is not, in fact,\ncoextensive with humanity when understood as a general description of\nthe group to which human beings belong. And the serious part of this\nproblem is not that there may be some extra-terrestrials or deities\nwho have rational capacities. The serious problem is that many humans\nare not persons. Some humans—i.e., infants, children, people in\ncomas—do not have the rational, self-reflective capacities\nassociated with personhood. This problem, unfortunately known in the\nliterature as the problem of “marginal cases”, poses\nserious difficulties for “personhood” as the criterion of\nmoral considerability. Many beings whose positive moral value we have\ndeeply held intuitions about, and who we treat as morally\nconsiderable, will be excluded from consideration by this account.","\nThere are three ways to respond to this counter-intuitive conclusion.\nOne, which can be derived from one interpretation of Kant, is to\nsuggest that non-persons are morally considerable indirectly. Though\nKant believed that animals were mere things it appears he did not\ngenuinely believe we could dispose of them any way we wanted. In the\nLectures on Ethics he makes it clear that we have indirect\nduties to animals, duties that are not toward them, but in regard to\nthem insofar as our treatment of them can affect our duties to\npersons.","\n\n\nIf a man shoots his dog because the animal is no longer capable of\nservice, he does not fail in his duty to the dog, for the dog cannot\njudge, but his act is inhuman and damages in himself that humanity\nwhich it is his duty to show towards mankind. If he is not to stifle\nhis human feelings, he must practice kindness towards animals, for he\nwho is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men.\n([1784–5] 1997: 212 [Ak 27: 459])\n","\nAnd one could argue the same would be true of those human beings who\nare not persons. We disrespect our humanity when we act in inhumane\nways towards non-persons, whatever their species.","\nBut this indirect view is unsatisfying—it fails to capture the\nindependent wrong that is being done to the non-person. When someone\nrapes a woman in a coma, or whips a severely brain damaged child, or\nsets a cat on fire, they are not simply disrespecting humanity or\nthemselves as representatives of it, they are wronging these\nnon-persons. So, a second way to avoid the counter-intuitive\nconclusion is to argue that such non-persons stand in the proper\nrelations to “rational nature” such that they should be\nthought of as morally considerable. Allen Wood (1998) argues in this\nway and suggests that all beings that potentially have a rational\nnature, or who virtually have it, or who have had it, or who have part\nof it, or who have the necessary conditions of it, what he calls\n“the infrastructure of rational nature”, should be\ndirectly morally considerable. Insofar as a being stands in this\nrelation to rational nature, they are the kinds of beings that can be\nwronged.","\nThis response is not unlike that of noted animal rights proponent, Tom\nRegan, who argues that what is important for moral consideration are\nnot the differences between humans and non-humans but the\nsimilarities. Regan argues that because persons share with certain\nnon-persons (which includes those humans and non-humans who have a\ncertain level of organized cognitive function) the ability to be\nexperiencing subject of a life and to have an individual welfare that\nmatters to them regardless of what others might think, both deserve\nmoral consideration. Regan argues that subjects of a life:","\n\n\nwant and prefer things, believe and feel things, recall and expect\nthings. And all these dimensions of our life, including our pleasure\nand pain, our enjoyment and suffering, our satisfaction and\nfrustration, our continued existence or our untimely death—all\nmake a difference to the quality of our life as lived, as experienced,\nby us as individuals. As the same is true of … animals …\nthey too must be viewed as the experiencing subjects of a life, with\ninherent value of their own. (Regan 1985: 24) \n","\nA third way of addressing this problem has been taken up by Korsgaard\nwho maintains that there is a big difference between those with\nnormative, rational capacities and those without, but unlike Kant,\nbelieves both humans and non-humans are the proper objects of our\nmoral concern. She argues that those without normative, rational\ncapacities share certain “natural” capacities with\npersons, and these natural capacities are often the content of the\nmoral demands that persons make on each other. She writes, ","\n\n\nwhat we demand, when we demand … recognition, is that our\nnatural concerns—the objects of our natural desires and\ninterests and affections—be accorded the status of values,\nvalues that must be respected as far as possible by others. And many\nof those natural concerns—the desire to avoid pain is an obvious\nexample—spring from our animal nature, not from our rational\nnature. (Korsgaard 2007: 7) \n","\nWhat moral agents construct as valuable and normatively binding is not\nonly our rational or autonomous capacities, but the needs and desires\nwe have as living, embodied beings. Insofar as these needs and desires\nare valuable for agents, the ability to experience similar needs and\ndesires in patients should also be valued.","\nIn the courts, all humans and some corporations are considered persons\nin the legal sense. But all animals, infants and adults, are not legal\npersons, but rather, under the law they are considered property. There\nhave been a few attempts to change the legal status of some nonhuman\nanimals from property to persons. The Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP)\nfounded by Steven Wise, has filed a series of cases in the New York\ncourts seeking to establish legal personhood for particular\nchimpanzees being held in the state, with the goal of protecting their\nrights to bodily integrity and liberty, and allow them to seek remedy,\nthrough their proxies, when those rights are violated. Chimpanzees are\na good test case for establishing nonhuman legal personhood as they\nare, according to the documents filed by NhRP, autonomous beings with\nsophisticated cognitive abilities including ","\n\n\nepisodic memory, self-consciousness, self-knowing, self agency,\nreferential and intentional communication, mental time-travel,\nnumerosity, sequential learning, meditational learning, mental state\nmodeling, visual perspective taking, understanding the experiences of\nothers, intentional action, planning, imagination, empathy,\nmetacognition, working memory, decision-making, imitation, deferred\nimitation, emulation, innovation, material, social, and symbolic\nculture, cross-modal perception, tool-use, tool-making,\ncause-and-effect. (petition of NhRP v. Samuel Stanley, p. 12, see Other Internet Resources)\n","\nThe legal arguments to extend personhood beyond the human parallel\nmore general ethical arguments that extend ethical consideration\noutward from those who occupy the moral center. Turning to empirical\nwork designed to show that other animals are really similar to those\nconsidered legal persons, primatologists submitted affidavits\nattesting to what they have learned working with chimpanzees. Mary Lee\nJensvold suggests ","\n\nthere are numerous parallels in the way chimpanzee and human\ncommunication skills develop over time, suggesting a similar unfolding\ncognitive process across the two species and an underlying\nneurobiological continuity. (Jensvold affidavit, p. 4, in Other Internet Resources)\n\n","\nJames King notes ","\n\n\nchimpanzees and humans resemble each other in terms of their ability\nto experience happiness and the way in which it relates to individual\npersonality. (King affidavit, p. 8, in Other Internet Resources) \n","\nAnd Mathias Osvath makes remarkable claims about chimpanzee\npersonhood:","\nAutonoetic consciousness gives an individual of any species an\nautobiographical sense of it self with a future and a past. Chimps and\nother great apes clearly possess an autobiographical self, as they are\nable to prepare themselves for future actions… they likely can,\njust as humans, be in pain over an anticipated future event that has\nyet to occur. For instance, confining someone in a prison or cage for\na set time, or for life, would lose much of its power as punishment if\nthat individual had no self-concept. Every moment would be a new\nmoment with no conscious relation to the next. But, chimpanzees. and\nother great apes have a concept of their personal past and future and\ntherefore suffer the pain of not being able to fulfill one’s\ngoals or move around as one wants; like humans they experience the\npain of anticipating a never-ending situation. (Osvath affidavit, pp. 4–7, in Other Internet Resources)\n","\nThese claims, as well as those of others experts, identify the\nrelevantly similar capacities that chimpanzees and other great apes\nshare with humans and it is in virtue of these capacities that legal\npersonhood is sought."],"subsection_title":"1.3 Personhood"},{"content":["\nUsing rational nature or cognitive capacities as the touchstone of\nmoral considerability misses an important fact about animals, human\nand nonhuman. Our lives can go better or worse for us. Utilitarians\nhave traditionally argued that the truly morally important feature of\nbeings is unappreciated when we focus on personhood or the rational,\nself-reflective nature of humans, or the relation a being stands in to\nsuch nature, or being the subject of a life, or being legal persons.\nWhat is really important, utilitarians maintain, is the promotion of\nhappiness, or pleasure, or the satisfaction of interests, and the\navoidance of pain, or suffering, or frustration of interests. Bentham,\none of the more forceful defenders of this sentientist view of moral\nconsiderability, famously wrote:","\n\n\nOther animals, which, on account of their interests having been\nneglected by the insensibility of the ancient jurists, stand degraded\ninto the class of things. [original emphasis] … The\nday has been, I grieve it to say in many places it is not yet past, in\nwhich the greater part of the species, under the denomination of\nslaves, have been treated … upon the same footing as …\nanimals are still. The day may come, when the rest of the animal\ncreation may acquire those rights which never could have been\nwithholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have\nalready discovered that the blackness of skin is no reason why a human\nbeing should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a\ntormentor. It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of\nlegs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the\nossacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a\nsensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace\nthe insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps, the\nfaculty for discourse?…the question is not, Can they\nreason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they\nsuffer? (Bentham 1780/1789: chapter xvii, paragraph 6)\n"," Contemporary utilitarians, such as Peter Singer (1990, 1979\n[1993]), suggest that there is no morally justifiable way to exclude\nfrom moral consideration non-humans or non-persons who can clearly\nsuffer. Any being that has an interest in not suffering deserves to\nhave that interest taken into account. And a non-human who acts to\navoid pain can be thought to have just such an interest. Even\ncontemporary Kantians have acknowledged the moral force of the\nexperience of pain. Korsgaard, for example, writes “it is a\npain to be in pain. And that is not a trivial fact” (1996:\n154).","\n\n\nWhen you pity a suffering animal, it is because you are perceiving a\nreason. An animal’s cries express pain, and they mean that there\nis a reason, a reason to change its conditions. And you can no more\nhear the cries of an animal as mere noise than you can the words of a\nperson. Another animal can obligate you in exactly the same way\nanother person can. …So of course we have obligations to\nanimals. (Korsgaard 1996: 153)\n","\nWhen we encounter an animal in pain we recognize their claim on us,\nand thus beings who can suffer are morally considerable."],"subsection_title":"1.4 Sentience"}]},{"main_content":["\nThat non-human animals can make moral claims on us does not in itself\nindicate how such claims are to be assessed and conflicting claims\nadjudicated. Being morally considerable is like showing up on a moral\nradar screen—how strong the signal is or where it is located on\nthe screen are separate questions. Of course, how one argues for the\nmoral considerability of non-human animals will inform how we are to\nunderstand the force of an animal’s claims.","\nAccording to the view that an animal’s moral claim is equivalent\nto a moral right, any action that fails to treat the animal as a being\nwith inherent worth would violate that animal’s right and is\nthus morally objectionable. According to the animal rights position,\nto treat an animal as a means to some human end, as many humans do\nwhen they eat animals or experiment on them, is to violate that\nanimal’s right. As Tom Regan has written,","\n\n\n…animals are treated routinely, systematically as if their\nvalue were reducible to their usefulness to others, they are\nroutinely, systematically treated with a lack of respect, and thus are\ntheir rights routinely, systematically violated. (Regan 1985: 24).\n","\nThe animal rights position is an absolutist position. Any being that\nis a subject of a life has inherent worth and the rights that protect\nsuch worth, and all subjects of a life have these rights equally. Thus\nany practice that fails to respect the rights of those animals who\nhave them, e.g., eating animals, hunting animals, experimenting on\nanimals, using animals for entertainment, is wrong, irrespective of\nhuman need, context, or culture.","\nThe utilitarian position on animals, most commonly associated with\nPeter Singer and popularly, though erroneously, referred to as an\nanimal rights position, is actually quite distinct. Here the moral\nsignificance of the claims of animals depends on what other morally\nsignificant competing claims might be in play in any given situation.\nWhile the equal interests of all morally considerable beings are\nconsidered equally, the practices in question may end up violating or\nfrustrating some interests but would not be considered morally wrong\nif, when all equal interests are considered, more of these interests\nare satisfied than frustrated. For utilitarians like Singer, what\nmatters are the strength and nature of interests, not whose interests\nthese are. So, if the only options available in order to save the life\nof one morally considerable being is to cause harm, but not death, to\nanother morally considerable being, then according to a utilitarian\nposition, causing this harm may be morally justifiable. Similarly, if\nthere are two courses of action, one which causes extreme amounts of\nsuffering and ultimate death, and one which causes much less suffering\nand painless death, then the latter would be morally preferable to the\nformer.","\nConsider factory farming, the most common method used to convert\nanimal bodies into relatively inexpensive food in industrialized\nsocieties today. An estimated 8 billion animals in the United States\nare born, confined, biologically manipulated, transported and\nultimately slaughtered each year so that humans can consume them. The\nconditions in which these animals are raised and the method of\nslaughter causes vast amounts of suffering (see, for example, Mason\n& Singer 1980 [1990]). Given that animals suffer under such conditions\nand assuming that suffering is not in their interests, then the\npractice of factory farming would only be morally justifiable if its\nabolition were to cause greater suffering or a greater amount of\ninterest frustration. Certainly humans who take pleasure in eating\nanimals will find it harder to satisfy these interests in the absence\nof factory farms; it may cost more and require more effort to obtain\nanimal products. The factory farmers, and the industries that support\nfactory farming, will also have certain interests frustrated if\nfactory farming were to be abolished. How much interest frustration\nand interest satisfaction would be associated with the end to factory\nfarming is largely an empirical question. But utilitarians are not\nmaking unreasonable predictions when they argue that on balance the\nsuffering and interest frustration that animals experience in modern\nday meat production is greater than the suffering that humans would\nendure if they had to alter their current practices.","\nImportantly, the utilitarian argument for the moral significance of\nanimal suffering in meat production is not an argument for\nvegetarianism. If an animal lived a happy life and was painlessly\nkilled and then eaten by people who would otherwise suffer hunger or\nmalnutrition by not eating the animal, then painlessly killing and\neating the animal would be the morally justified thing to do. In many\nparts of the world where economic, cultural, or climate conditions\nmake it virtually impossible for people to sustain themselves on plant\nbased diets, killing and eating animals that previously led relatively\nunconstrained lives and are painlessly killed, would not be morally\nobjectionable. The utilitarian position can thus avoid certain charges\nof cultural chauvinism and moralism, charges that the animal rights\nposition apparently cannot avoid.","\nIt might be objected that to suggest that it is morally acceptable to\nhunt and eat animals for those people living in arctic regions, or for\nnomadic cultures, or for poor rural peoples, for example, is to\npotentially condone painlessly killing other morally considerable\nbeings, like humans, for food consumption in similar situations. If\nviolating the rights of an animal can be morally tolerated, especially\na right to life, then similar rights violations can be morally\ntolerated. In failing to recognize the inviolability of the moral\nclaims of all morally considerable beings, utilitarianism cannot\naccommodate one of our most basic prima facie principles, namely that\nkilling a morally considerable being is wrong.","\nThere are at least two replies to this sort of objection. The first\nappeals to the negative side effects that killing may promote. If, to\ndraw on an overused and sadly sophomoric counter-example, one person\ncan be kidnapped and painlessly killed in order to provide body parts\nfor four individuals who will die without them, there will inevitably\nbe negative side-effects that all things considered would make the\nkidnapping wrong. Healthy people, knowing they could be used for spare\nparts, might make themselves unhealthy to avoid such a fate or they\nmay have so much stress and fear that the overall state of affairs\nwould be worse than that in which four people died. Appealing to\nside-effects when it comes to the wrong of killing is certainly\nplausible, but it fails to capture what is directly wrong with\nkilling.","\nA more satisfying reply would have us adopt what might be called a\nmulti-factor perspective, one that takes into account the kinds of\ninterest that are possible for certain kinds of morally considerable\nbeings, the content of interests of the beings in question, their\nrelative weight, and the context of those who have them. Consider a\nseal who has spent his life freely roaming the oceans and ice flats\nand who is suddenly and painlessly killed to provide food for a human\nfamily struggling to survive a bitter winter in far northern climes.\nWhile it is probably true that the seal had an immediate interest in\navoiding suffering, it is less clear that the seal has a future\ndirected interest in continued existence. If the seal lacks this\nfuture directed interest, then painlessly killing him does not violate\nthis interest. The same cannot be said for the human explorer who\nfinds himself face to face with a hungry Inuit family. Persons\ngenerally have interests in continued existence, interests that,\narguably, non-persons do not have. So one factor that can be appealed\nto is that non-persons may not have the range of interests that\npersons do.","\nAn additional factor is the type of interest in question. We can think\nof interests as scalar; crucial interests are weightier than important\ninterests, important interests are weightier than replaceable\ninterests, and all are weightier than trivial interests or mere whims.\nWhen there is a conflict of interests, crucial interests will always\noverride important interests, important interests will always override\nreplaceable interests, etc. So if an animal has an interest in not\nsuffering, which is arguably a crucial interest, or at least an\nimportant one, and a person has an interest in eating that animal when\nthere are other things to eat, meaning that interest is replaceable,\nthen the animal has the stronger interest and it would be wrong to\nviolate that interest by killing the animal for food if there is\nanother source of food available.","\nOften, however, conflicts of interests are within the same category.\nThe Inuit’s interest in food is crucial and the explorer’s\ninterest in life is crucial. If we assume that the explorer cannot\notherwise provide food for the hunter, then it looks as if there is a\nconflict within the same category. If you take the interests of an\nindigenous hunter’s whole family into account, then their\ncombined interest in their own survival appears to outweigh the\nhapless explorer’s interest in continued existence. Indeed, if\npainlessly killing and eating the explorer were the only way for the\nfamily to survive, then perhaps this action would be morally condoned.\nBut this is a rather extreme sort of example, one in which even our\ndeepest held convictions are strained. So it is quite hard to know\nwhat to make of the clash between what a utilitarian would condone and\nwhat our intuitions tell us we should believe here. Our most basic\nprima facie principles arise and are accepted under ordinary\ncircumstances. Extraordinary circumstances are precisely those in\nwhich such principles or precepts give\n way.[2]","\nThe multi-factor utilitarian perspective is particularly helpful when\nconsidering the use of animals in medical research. According to the\nanimal rights position, the use of animals in experimental procedures\nis a clear violation of their rights—they are being used as a\nmere means to some possible end—and thus animal rights\nproponents are in favor of the abolition of all laboratory research.\nThe utilitarian position, particularly one that incorporates some kind\nof multi-factor perspective, might allow some research on animals\nunder very specific conditions. Before exploring what a utilitarian\nmight condone in the way of animal experimentation, let us first\nquickly consider what would be morally prohibited. All research that\ninvolves invasive procedures, constant confinement, and ultimate death\ncan be said to violate the animal’s crucial interests. Thus any\nexperiments that are designed to enhance the important, replaceable,\nor trivial interests of humans or other animals would be prohibited.\nThat would mean that experiments for cosmetics or household products\nare prohibited, as there are non-animal tested alternatives and many\noptions already available for consumers. Certain psychological\nexperiments, such as those in which infant primates are separated from\ntheir mothers and exposed to frightening stimuli in an effort to\nunderstand problems teenagers have when they enter high school, would\nalso come into question. There are many examples of experiments that\nviolate an animal’s crucial interests in the hopes of satisfying\nthe lesser interests of some other morally considerable being, all of\nwhich would be objectionable from this perspective.","\nThere are some laboratory experiments, however, that from a\nmulti-factor utilitarian perspective may be permitted. These are\nexperiments in which the probability of satisfying crucial or\nimportant interests for many who suffer from some debilitating or\nfatal disease is high, and the numbers of non-human animals whose\ncrucial interests are violated is low. The psychological complexity of\nthe non-humans may also be significant in determining whether the\nexperiment is morally justified. In the case of experimenting in these\nlimited number of cases, presumably a parallel argument could be made\nabout experimenting on humans. If the chances are very high that\nexperimenting on one human, who is a far superior experimental animal\nwhen it comes to human disease, can prevent great suffering or death\nin many humans, then the utilitarian may, if side effects are minimal,\ncondone such an experiment. Of course, it is easier to imagine this\nsort of extreme case in the abstract, what a utilitarian would think\nactually morally justified, again depends on the specific empirical\ndata.","\nIn sum, the animal rights position takes the significance of morally\nconsiderable claims to be absolute. Thus, any use of animals that\ninvolves a disregard for their moral claims is problematic. The\nsignificance of an animal’s morally considerable interests\naccording to a utilitarian is variable. Whether an action is morally\njustified or permissible will depend on a number of factors. The\nutilitarian position on animals would condemn a large number of\npractices that involve the suffering and death of billions of animals,\nbut there are cases in which some use of non-human animals, and\nperhaps even human animals, may be morally justified (Gruen 2011: ch.\n4; Gilbert, Kaebnick, & Murray 2012)."],"section_title":"2. The Moral Significance of Animals’ Moral Claims","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nGiven the long-standing view that non-humans are mere things, there\nare still many who reject the arguments presented here for the moral\nconsiderability of non-humans and the significance of their interests.\nNonetheless, most now realize that the task of arguing that humans\nhave a unique and exclusive moral status is rather difficult. Yet even\namongst those who do view animals as within the sphere of moral\nconcern, there is disagreement about the nature and usefulness of the\narguments presented on behalf of the moral status of animals.","\nIncreasingly, philosophers are arguing that while our behavior towards\nanimals is indeed subject to moral scrutiny, the kinds of ethical\narguments that are usually presented frame the issues in the wrong\nway. Some philosophers suggest that rational argumentation fails to\ncapture those features of moral experience that allow us to really see\nwhy treating animals badly is wrong. The point, according to\ncommentators such as Stephen R.L. Clark and Cora Diamond, for example,\nis that members of our communities, however we conceive of them, pull\non us and it is in virtue of this pull that we recognize what is wrong\nwith cruelty. Animals are individuals with whom we share a common life\nand this recognition allows us to see them as they are. Eating animals\nis wrong not because it is a violation of the animal’s rights or\nbecause on balance such an act creates more suffering than other acts,\nbut rather because in eating animals or using them in other harmful,\nviolent ways, we do not display the traits of character that kind,\nsensitive, compassionate, mature, and thoughtful members of a moral\ncommunity should display.","\nAccording to some in the virtue ethics tradition, carefully worked out\narguments in which the moral considerability and moral significance of\nanimals are laid out will have little if any grip on our thoughts and\nactions. Rather, by perceiving the attitudes that underlie the use and\nabuse of non-human animals as shallow or cruel, one interested in\nliving a virtuous life will change their attitudes and come to reject\ntreating animals as food or tools for research. As Rosalind Hursthouse\nrecognized after having been exposed to alternative ways of seeing\nanimals:","\n\n\nI began to see [my attitudes] that related to my conception of\nflesh-foods as unnecessary, greedy, self-indulgent, childish, my\nattitude to shopping and cooking in order to produce lavish dinner\nparties as parochial, gross, even dissolute. I saw my interest and\ndelight in nature programmes about the lives of animals on television\nand my enjoyment of meat as side by side at odds with one\nanother…Without thinking animals had rights, I began to see\nboth the wild ones and the ones we usually eat as having lives of\ntheir own, which they should be left to enjoy. And so I changed. My\nperception of the moral landscape and where I and the other animals\nwere situated in it shifted. (Hursthouse 2000: 165–166; see also\nDiamond 2001 [especially chs. 11 and 13], and Clarke 1977)\n","\nAlice Crary argues that shifting perceptions of our moral landscapes\noccur because these landscapes, and more precisely the rich worlds of\nthose who inhabit them, are not morally neutral. The characteristics\nthat philosophers tend to look for in other animals to determine\nwhether or not they are morally considerable, according to Crary, are\nalready infused with moral importance, “human beings and other\nanimals have empirically discoverable moral characteristics” (my\nemphasis, 2016: 85) that are, as she puts it “inside\nethics”. These values often sneak in under a supposedly neutral\ngloss. By explicitly locating these characteristics inside ethics, the\ntexture, quality, and purposes of our ethical reflection on moral\nconsiderability changes. Arriving at an adequate empirical\nunderstanding requires non-neutral methods, identifying historical and\ncultural perspectives as shaping how we consider other animals\nmorally. What ethical questions we think are important and how we\nframe and answer them, will be different if we see our lives and the\nlives of other animals as already imbued with moral values. ","\nOther feminist philosophers have taken issue with the supposedly\nmorally neutral methods of argumentation used to establish the moral\nstatus of animals. For many feminists the traditional methods of\nrational argumentation fail to take into account the feelings of\nsympathy or empathy that humans have towards non-humans, feelings they\nbelieve are central to a full account of what we owe non-humans and\nwhy (see Adams & Donovan 1995; Donovan & Adams 2007; Adams\n& Gruen 2014).","\nFeminist philosophers have also challenged the individualism that is\ncentral in the arguments for the moral status of animals. Rather than\nidentifying intrinsic or innate properties that non-humans share with\nhumans, some feminists have argued instead that we ought to understand\nmoral status in relational terms given that moral recognition is\ninvariably a social practice. As Elizabeth Anderson has written: ","\n\n\nMoral considerability is not an intrinsic property of any creature,\nnor is it supervenient on only its intrinsic properties, such as its\ncapacities. It depends, deeply, on the kind of relations they can have\nwith us. (Anderson 2004: 289).\n","\nAnd these relationships needn’t be direct. The reach of human\nactivity has expanded across the entire globe and humans are entangled\nwith each other and other animals in myriad ways. We participate in\nactivities and institutions that directly or indirectly harm others by\ncreating negative experiences, depriving them of their well-being, or\ndenying them opportunities to be who they are and pursue what they\ncare about. Philosophers Elisa Aaltola and Lori Gruen have argued for\nrefining our empathetic imagination in order to improve our\nrelationships with each other and other animals.","\nEven though it is challenging to understand what it is like to be\nanother, and even though we are limited by our inevitable\nanthropocentric perspectives, being in respectful ethical relation\ninvolves attempting to understand and respond to another’s\nneeds, interests, desires, vulnerabilities, hopes, and perspectives.\nWhat Gruen calls, “entangled empathy” is a process that\ninvolves both affect and cognition (Gruen 2015). Individuals who are\nempathizing with others respond to the other’s condition and\nreflectively imagine themselves in the distinct position of the other\nwhile staying attentive to both similarities and differences between\nherself and her situation and that of the fellow creature with whom\nshe is empathizing. Entangled empathy involves paying critical\nattention to the broader conditions that may negatively affect the\nexperiences and flourishing of those with whom one is empathizing, and\nthis requires those of us empathizing to attend to things we might not\nhave otherwise. It therefore also enhances our own experiences,\ndevelops our moral imagination, and helps us to become more sensitive\nperceivers. "],"section_title":"3. Alternative Perspectives on Human Relations to Other Animals","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nTo say that a being deserves moral consideration is to say that there\\nis a moral claim that this being can make on those who can recognize\\nsuch claims. A morally considerable being is a being who can be\\nwronged. It is often thought that because only humans can recognize\\nmoral claims, it is only humans who are morally considerable. However,\\nwhen we ask why we think humans are the only types of beings that can\\nbe morally wronged, we begin to see that the class of beings able to\\nrecognize moral claims and the class of beings who can suffer moral\\nwrongs are not co-extensive.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. The Moral Considerability of Animals\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe view that only humans are morally considered is sometimes referred\\nto as “speciesism”. In the 1970s, Richard Ryder coined\\nthis term while campaigning in Oxford to denote a ubiquitous type of human centered prejudice, which he\\nthought was similar to racism. He objected to favoring one’s own\\nspecies, while exploiting or harming members of other species. Peter\\nSinger popularized the term and focused on the way speciesism, without\\nmoral justification, favors the interests of humans: \",\n \"\\n\\n\\nthe racist violates the principle of equality by giving greater weight\\nto the interests of members of his own race, when there is a clash\\nbetween their interests and the interests of those of another race.\\nSimilarly the speciesist allows the interests of his own species to\\noverride the greater interests of members of other species. The\\npattern is the same in each case. (Singer 1974: 108) \\n\",\n \"\\nDiscrimination based on race, like discrimination based on species is\\nthought to be prejudicial, because these are not characteristics that\\nmatter when it comes to making moral claims.\",\n \"\\nSpeciesist actions and attitudes are prejudicial because there is no\\nprima facie reason for preferring the interests of beings\\nbelonging to the species group to which one also belongs over the\\ninterests of those who don’t. That humans are members of the\\nspecies Homo sapiens is certainly a distinguishing feature of\\nhumans—humans share a genetic make-up and a distinctive\\nphysiology, we all emerge from a human pregnancy, but this is\\nunimportant from the moral point of view. Species membership is a\\nmorally irrelevant characteristic, a bit of luck that is no more\\nmorally interesting than being born in Malaysia or Canada. As a\\nmorally irrelevant characteristic it cannot serve as the basis for a\\nview that holds that our species deserves moral consideration that is\\nnot owed to members of other species.\",\n \"\\nOne might respond that it is not membership in a biological category\\nthat matters morally, but rather the social meaning of those\\ncategories, meanings that structure not only the institutions we\\noperate within, but how we conceptualize ourselves and our world.\\nHumans have developed moral systems as well as a wide range of other\\nvaluable practices, and by creating these systems, we separate the\\nhuman from the rest of the animal kingdom. But the category\\n“human” itself is morally contested. Some argue, for\\nexample, that racism is not simply, or even primarily about\\ndiscrimination and prejudice, but rather a mechanism of dehumanizing\\nblackness so as to provide the conditions that makes humans white (see\\nFanon 1967; Kim 2015; Ko& Ko 2017). According\\nto this line of thought, speciesism isn’t focused on\\ndiscrimination or prejudice but is a central tool for creating human\\n(and white) supremacy or exceptionalism.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.1 Speciesism\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nLike speciesism, human exceptionalism can be understood in different\\nways. The most common way of understanding it is to suggest that there\\nare distinctly human capacities and it is on the basis of these\\ncapacities that humans have moral status and other animals do not. But\\nwhich capacities mark out all and only humans as the kinds of beings\\nthat can be wronged? A number of candidate capacities have been\\nproposed—developing family ties, solving social problems,\\nexpressing emotions, starting wars, having sex for pleasure, using\\nlanguage, or thinking abstractly, are just a few. As it turns out,\\nnone of these activities is uncontroversially unique to human. Both\\nscholarly and popular work on animal behavior suggests that many of\\nthe activities that are thought to be distinct to humans occurs in\\nnon-humans. For example, many species of non-humans develop long\\nlasting kinship ties—orangutan mothers stay with their young for\\neight to ten years and while they eventually part company, they\\ncontinue to maintain their relationships. Less solitary animals, such\\nas chimpanzees, baboons, wolves, and elephants maintain extended\\nfamily units built upon complex individual relationships, for long\\nperiods of time. Meerkats in the Kalahari desert are known to\\nsacrifice their own safety by staying with sick or injured family\\nmembers so that the fatally ill will not die alone. All animals living\\nin socially complex groups must solve various problems that inevitably\\narise in such groups. Canids and primates are particularly adept at\\nit, yet even chickens and horses are known to recognize large numbers\\nof individuals in their social hierarchies and to maneuver within\\nthem. One of the ways that non-human animals negotiate their social\\nenvironments is by being particularly attentive to the emotional\\nstates of others around them. When a conspecific is angry, it is a\\ngood idea to get out of his way. Animals that develop life-long bonds\\nare known to suffer from the death of their partners. Some are even\\nsaid to die of sorrow. Darwin reported this in The Descent of\\nMan: “So intense is the grief of female monkeys for the\\nloss of their young, that it invariably caused the death of certain\\nkinds” (1871: 40). Jane Goodall’s report of the death of\\nthe healthy 8 year old chimpanzee Flint just three weeks after the\\ndeath of his mother Flo also suggests that sorrow can have a\\ndevastating effect on non-human animals (see Goodall 2000:\\n140–141 in Bekoff 2000). Coyotes, elephants and killer whales\\nare also among the species for which profound effects of grief have\\nbeen reported (Bekoff 2000) and many dog owners can provide similar\\naccounts. While the lives of many, perhaps most, non-humans in the\\nwild are consumed with struggle for survival, aggression and battle,\\nthere are some non-humans whose lives are characterized by expressions\\nof joy, playfulness, and a great deal of sex (Woods 2010). Recent\\nstudies in cognitive ethology have suggested that some non-humans\\nengage in manipulative and deceptive activity, can construct\\n“cognitive maps” for navigation, and some non-humans\\nappear to understand symbolic representation and are able to use\\n language.[1]\",\n \"\\nIt appears that most of the capacities that are thought to distinguish\\nhumans as morally considerable beings, have been observed, often in\\nless elaborate form, in the non-human world. Because human behavior\\nand cognition share deep roots with the behavior and cognition of\\nother animals, approaches that try to find sharp behavioral or\\ncognitive boundaries between humans and other animals remain\\ncontroversial. For this reason, attempts to establish human uniqueness\\nby identifying certain capacities, are not the most promising when it\\ncomes to thinking hard about the moral status of animals.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.2 Human Exceptionalism\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nNonetheless, there is something important that is thought to\\ndistinguish humans from non-humans that is not reducible to the\\nobservation of behavior best explained by possessing a certain\\ncapacity and that is our “personhood”. The notion of\\npersonhood identifies a category of morally considerable beings that\\nis thought to be coextensive with humanity. Historically, Kant is the\\nmost noted defender of personhood as the quality that makes a being\\nvaluable and thus morally considerable (for a contemporary utilitarian\\ndiscussion of personhood, see Varner 2012). Kant writes:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n…every rational being, exists as an end in himself and not\\nmerely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that\\nwill…Beings whose existence depends not on our will but on\\nnature have, nevertheless, if they are not rational beings, only a\\nrelative value as means and are therefore called things. On the other\\nhand, rational beings are called persons inasmuch as their nature\\nalready marks them out as ends in themselves. (Kant [1785] 1998: [Ak\\n4: 428])\\n\",\n \"\\nAnd:\",\n \"\\n\\nThe fact that the human being can have the representation\\n“I” raises him infinitely above all the other beings on\\nearth. By this he is a person….that is, a being altogether\\ndifferent in rank and dignity from things, such as irrational animals,\\nwith which one may deal and dispose at one’s discretion. (Kant\\n[1798] 2010: 239 [Ak 7: 127])\\n\",\n \"\\nMore recent work in a Kantian vein develops this idea. Christine\\nKorsgaard, for example, argues that humans “uniquely” face\\na problem, the problem of normativity. This problem emerges because of\\nthe reflective structure of human consciousness. We can, and often do,\\nthink about our desires and ask ourselves “Are these desires\\nreasons for action? Do these impulses represent the kind of things I\\nwant to act according to?” Our reflective capacities allow us\\nand require us to step back from our mere impulses in order\\nto determine when and whether to act on them. In stepping back we gain\\na certain distance from which we can answer these questions and solve\\nthe problem of normativity. We decide whether to treat our desires as\\nreasons for action based on our conceptions of ourselves, on our\\n“practical identities”. When we determine whether we\\nshould take a particular desire as a reason to act we are engaging in\\na further level of reflection, a level that requires an endorseable\\ndescription of ourselves. This endorseable description of ourselves,\\nthis practical identity, is a necessary moral identity because without\\nit we cannot view our lives as worth living or our actions as worth\\ndoing. Korsgaard suggests that humans face the problem of normativity\\nin a way that non-humans apparently do not:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nA lower animal’s attention is fixed on the world. Its\\nperceptions are its beliefs and its desires are its will. It is\\nengaged in conscious activities, but it is not conscious of\\nthem. That is, they are not the objects of its attention. But we human\\nanimals turn our attention on to our perceptions and desires\\nthemselves, on to our own mental activities, and we are conscious\\nof them. That is why we can think about\\nthem…And this sets us a problem that no other animal has. It is\\nthe problem of the normative…. The reflective mind cannot\\nsettle for perception and desire, not just as such. It needs a reason.\\n(Korsgaard 1996: 93)\\n\",\n \"\\nHere, Korsgaard understands “reason” as “a kind of\\nreflective success” and given that non-humans are thought to be\\nunable to reflect in a way that would allow them this sort of success,\\nit appears that they do not act on reasons, at least reasons of this\\nkind. Since non-humans do not act on reasons they do not have a\\npractical identity from which they reflect and for which they act. So\\nhumans can be distinguished from non-humans because humans, we might\\nsay, are sources of normativity and non-humans are not.\",\n \"\\nBut arguably, Kant’s view of personhood does not distinguish all\\nand only humans as morally considerable. Personhood is not, in fact,\\ncoextensive with humanity when understood as a general description of\\nthe group to which human beings belong. And the serious part of this\\nproblem is not that there may be some extra-terrestrials or deities\\nwho have rational capacities. The serious problem is that many humans\\nare not persons. Some humans—i.e., infants, children, people in\\ncomas—do not have the rational, self-reflective capacities\\nassociated with personhood. This problem, unfortunately known in the\\nliterature as the problem of “marginal cases”, poses\\nserious difficulties for “personhood” as the criterion of\\nmoral considerability. Many beings whose positive moral value we have\\ndeeply held intuitions about, and who we treat as morally\\nconsiderable, will be excluded from consideration by this account.\",\n \"\\nThere are three ways to respond to this counter-intuitive conclusion.\\nOne, which can be derived from one interpretation of Kant, is to\\nsuggest that non-persons are morally considerable indirectly. Though\\nKant believed that animals were mere things it appears he did not\\ngenuinely believe we could dispose of them any way we wanted. In the\\nLectures on Ethics he makes it clear that we have indirect\\nduties to animals, duties that are not toward them, but in regard to\\nthem insofar as our treatment of them can affect our duties to\\npersons.\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nIf a man shoots his dog because the animal is no longer capable of\\nservice, he does not fail in his duty to the dog, for the dog cannot\\njudge, but his act is inhuman and damages in himself that humanity\\nwhich it is his duty to show towards mankind. If he is not to stifle\\nhis human feelings, he must practice kindness towards animals, for he\\nwho is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men.\\n([1784–5] 1997: 212 [Ak 27: 459])\\n\",\n \"\\nAnd one could argue the same would be true of those human beings who\\nare not persons. We disrespect our humanity when we act in inhumane\\nways towards non-persons, whatever their species.\",\n \"\\nBut this indirect view is unsatisfying—it fails to capture the\\nindependent wrong that is being done to the non-person. When someone\\nrapes a woman in a coma, or whips a severely brain damaged child, or\\nsets a cat on fire, they are not simply disrespecting humanity or\\nthemselves as representatives of it, they are wronging these\\nnon-persons. So, a second way to avoid the counter-intuitive\\nconclusion is to argue that such non-persons stand in the proper\\nrelations to “rational nature” such that they should be\\nthought of as morally considerable. Allen Wood (1998) argues in this\\nway and suggests that all beings that potentially have a rational\\nnature, or who virtually have it, or who have had it, or who have part\\nof it, or who have the necessary conditions of it, what he calls\\n“the infrastructure of rational nature”, should be\\ndirectly morally considerable. Insofar as a being stands in this\\nrelation to rational nature, they are the kinds of beings that can be\\nwronged.\",\n \"\\nThis response is not unlike that of noted animal rights proponent, Tom\\nRegan, who argues that what is important for moral consideration are\\nnot the differences between humans and non-humans but the\\nsimilarities. Regan argues that because persons share with certain\\nnon-persons (which includes those humans and non-humans who have a\\ncertain level of organized cognitive function) the ability to be\\nexperiencing subject of a life and to have an individual welfare that\\nmatters to them regardless of what others might think, both deserve\\nmoral consideration. Regan argues that subjects of a life:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nwant and prefer things, believe and feel things, recall and expect\\nthings. And all these dimensions of our life, including our pleasure\\nand pain, our enjoyment and suffering, our satisfaction and\\nfrustration, our continued existence or our untimely death—all\\nmake a difference to the quality of our life as lived, as experienced,\\nby us as individuals. As the same is true of … animals …\\nthey too must be viewed as the experiencing subjects of a life, with\\ninherent value of their own. (Regan 1985: 24) \\n\",\n \"\\nA third way of addressing this problem has been taken up by Korsgaard\\nwho maintains that there is a big difference between those with\\nnormative, rational capacities and those without, but unlike Kant,\\nbelieves both humans and non-humans are the proper objects of our\\nmoral concern. She argues that those without normative, rational\\ncapacities share certain “natural” capacities with\\npersons, and these natural capacities are often the content of the\\nmoral demands that persons make on each other. She writes, \",\n \"\\n\\n\\nwhat we demand, when we demand … recognition, is that our\\nnatural concerns—the objects of our natural desires and\\ninterests and affections—be accorded the status of values,\\nvalues that must be respected as far as possible by others. And many\\nof those natural concerns—the desire to avoid pain is an obvious\\nexample—spring from our animal nature, not from our rational\\nnature. (Korsgaard 2007: 7) \\n\",\n \"\\nWhat moral agents construct as valuable and normatively binding is not\\nonly our rational or autonomous capacities, but the needs and desires\\nwe have as living, embodied beings. Insofar as these needs and desires\\nare valuable for agents, the ability to experience similar needs and\\ndesires in patients should also be valued.\",\n \"\\nIn the courts, all humans and some corporations are considered persons\\nin the legal sense. But all animals, infants and adults, are not legal\\npersons, but rather, under the law they are considered property. There\\nhave been a few attempts to change the legal status of some nonhuman\\nanimals from property to persons. The Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP)\\nfounded by Steven Wise, has filed a series of cases in the New York\\ncourts seeking to establish legal personhood for particular\\nchimpanzees being held in the state, with the goal of protecting their\\nrights to bodily integrity and liberty, and allow them to seek remedy,\\nthrough their proxies, when those rights are violated. Chimpanzees are\\na good test case for establishing nonhuman legal personhood as they\\nare, according to the documents filed by NhRP, autonomous beings with\\nsophisticated cognitive abilities including \",\n \"\\n\\n\\nepisodic memory, self-consciousness, self-knowing, self agency,\\nreferential and intentional communication, mental time-travel,\\nnumerosity, sequential learning, meditational learning, mental state\\nmodeling, visual perspective taking, understanding the experiences of\\nothers, intentional action, planning, imagination, empathy,\\nmetacognition, working memory, decision-making, imitation, deferred\\nimitation, emulation, innovation, material, social, and symbolic\\nculture, cross-modal perception, tool-use, tool-making,\\ncause-and-effect. (petition of NhRP v. Samuel Stanley, p. 12, see Other Internet Resources)\\n\",\n \"\\nThe legal arguments to extend personhood beyond the human parallel\\nmore general ethical arguments that extend ethical consideration\\noutward from those who occupy the moral center. Turning to empirical\\nwork designed to show that other animals are really similar to those\\nconsidered legal persons, primatologists submitted affidavits\\nattesting to what they have learned working with chimpanzees. Mary Lee\\nJensvold suggests \",\n \"\\n\\nthere are numerous parallels in the way chimpanzee and human\\ncommunication skills develop over time, suggesting a similar unfolding\\ncognitive process across the two species and an underlying\\nneurobiological continuity. (Jensvold affidavit, p. 4, in Other Internet Resources)\\n\\n\",\n \"\\nJames King notes \",\n \"\\n\\n\\nchimpanzees and humans resemble each other in terms of their ability\\nto experience happiness and the way in which it relates to individual\\npersonality. (King affidavit, p. 8, in Other Internet Resources) \\n\",\n \"\\nAnd Mathias Osvath makes remarkable claims about chimpanzee\\npersonhood:\",\n \"\\nAutonoetic consciousness gives an individual of any species an\\nautobiographical sense of it self with a future and a past. Chimps and\\nother great apes clearly possess an autobiographical self, as they are\\nable to prepare themselves for future actions… they likely can,\\njust as humans, be in pain over an anticipated future event that has\\nyet to occur. For instance, confining someone in a prison or cage for\\na set time, or for life, would lose much of its power as punishment if\\nthat individual had no self-concept. Every moment would be a new\\nmoment with no conscious relation to the next. But, chimpanzees. and\\nother great apes have a concept of their personal past and future and\\ntherefore suffer the pain of not being able to fulfill one’s\\ngoals or move around as one wants; like humans they experience the\\npain of anticipating a never-ending situation. (Osvath affidavit, pp. 4–7, in Other Internet Resources)\\n\",\n \"\\nThese claims, as well as those of others experts, identify the\\nrelevantly similar capacities that chimpanzees and other great apes\\nshare with humans and it is in virtue of these capacities that legal\\npersonhood is sought.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.3 Personhood\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nUsing rational nature or cognitive capacities as the touchstone of\\nmoral considerability misses an important fact about animals, human\\nand nonhuman. Our lives can go better or worse for us. Utilitarians\\nhave traditionally argued that the truly morally important feature of\\nbeings is unappreciated when we focus on personhood or the rational,\\nself-reflective nature of humans, or the relation a being stands in to\\nsuch nature, or being the subject of a life, or being legal persons.\\nWhat is really important, utilitarians maintain, is the promotion of\\nhappiness, or pleasure, or the satisfaction of interests, and the\\navoidance of pain, or suffering, or frustration of interests. Bentham,\\none of the more forceful defenders of this sentientist view of moral\\nconsiderability, famously wrote:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nOther animals, which, on account of their interests having been\\nneglected by the insensibility of the ancient jurists, stand degraded\\ninto the class of things. [original emphasis] … The\\nday has been, I grieve it to say in many places it is not yet past, in\\nwhich the greater part of the species, under the denomination of\\nslaves, have been treated … upon the same footing as …\\nanimals are still. The day may come, when the rest of the animal\\ncreation may acquire those rights which never could have been\\nwithholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French have\\nalready discovered that the blackness of skin is no reason why a human\\nbeing should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a\\ntormentor. It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of\\nlegs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the\\nossacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a\\nsensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace\\nthe insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps, the\\nfaculty for discourse?…the question is not, Can they\\nreason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they\\nsuffer? (Bentham 1780/1789: chapter xvii, paragraph 6)\\n\",\n \" Contemporary utilitarians, such as Peter Singer (1990, 1979\\n[1993]), suggest that there is no morally justifiable way to exclude\\nfrom moral consideration non-humans or non-persons who can clearly\\nsuffer. Any being that has an interest in not suffering deserves to\\nhave that interest taken into account. And a non-human who acts to\\navoid pain can be thought to have just such an interest. Even\\ncontemporary Kantians have acknowledged the moral force of the\\nexperience of pain. Korsgaard, for example, writes “it is a\\npain to be in pain. And that is not a trivial fact” (1996:\\n154).\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nWhen you pity a suffering animal, it is because you are perceiving a\\nreason. An animal’s cries express pain, and they mean that there\\nis a reason, a reason to change its conditions. And you can no more\\nhear the cries of an animal as mere noise than you can the words of a\\nperson. Another animal can obligate you in exactly the same way\\nanother person can. …So of course we have obligations to\\nanimals. (Korsgaard 1996: 153)\\n\",\n \"\\nWhen we encounter an animal in pain we recognize their claim on us,\\nand thus beings who can suffer are morally considerable.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.4 Sentience\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThat non-human animals can make moral claims on us does not in itself\\nindicate how such claims are to be assessed and conflicting claims\\nadjudicated. Being morally considerable is like showing up on a moral\\nradar screen—how strong the signal is or where it is located on\\nthe screen are separate questions. Of course, how one argues for the\\nmoral considerability of non-human animals will inform how we are to\\nunderstand the force of an animal’s claims.\",\n \"\\nAccording to the view that an animal’s moral claim is equivalent\\nto a moral right, any action that fails to treat the animal as a being\\nwith inherent worth would violate that animal’s right and is\\nthus morally objectionable. According to the animal rights position,\\nto treat an animal as a means to some human end, as many humans do\\nwhen they eat animals or experiment on them, is to violate that\\nanimal’s right. As Tom Regan has written,\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n…animals are treated routinely, systematically as if their\\nvalue were reducible to their usefulness to others, they are\\nroutinely, systematically treated with a lack of respect, and thus are\\ntheir rights routinely, systematically violated. (Regan 1985: 24).\\n\",\n \"\\nThe animal rights position is an absolutist position. Any being that\\nis a subject of a life has inherent worth and the rights that protect\\nsuch worth, and all subjects of a life have these rights equally. Thus\\nany practice that fails to respect the rights of those animals who\\nhave them, e.g., eating animals, hunting animals, experimenting on\\nanimals, using animals for entertainment, is wrong, irrespective of\\nhuman need, context, or culture.\",\n \"\\nThe utilitarian position on animals, most commonly associated with\\nPeter Singer and popularly, though erroneously, referred to as an\\nanimal rights position, is actually quite distinct. Here the moral\\nsignificance of the claims of animals depends on what other morally\\nsignificant competing claims might be in play in any given situation.\\nWhile the equal interests of all morally considerable beings are\\nconsidered equally, the practices in question may end up violating or\\nfrustrating some interests but would not be considered morally wrong\\nif, when all equal interests are considered, more of these interests\\nare satisfied than frustrated. For utilitarians like Singer, what\\nmatters are the strength and nature of interests, not whose interests\\nthese are. So, if the only options available in order to save the life\\nof one morally considerable being is to cause harm, but not death, to\\nanother morally considerable being, then according to a utilitarian\\nposition, causing this harm may be morally justifiable. Similarly, if\\nthere are two courses of action, one which causes extreme amounts of\\nsuffering and ultimate death, and one which causes much less suffering\\nand painless death, then the latter would be morally preferable to the\\nformer.\",\n \"\\nConsider factory farming, the most common method used to convert\\nanimal bodies into relatively inexpensive food in industrialized\\nsocieties today. An estimated 8 billion animals in the United States\\nare born, confined, biologically manipulated, transported and\\nultimately slaughtered each year so that humans can consume them. The\\nconditions in which these animals are raised and the method of\\nslaughter causes vast amounts of suffering (see, for example, Mason\\n& Singer 1980 [1990]). Given that animals suffer under such conditions\\nand assuming that suffering is not in their interests, then the\\npractice of factory farming would only be morally justifiable if its\\nabolition were to cause greater suffering or a greater amount of\\ninterest frustration. Certainly humans who take pleasure in eating\\nanimals will find it harder to satisfy these interests in the absence\\nof factory farms; it may cost more and require more effort to obtain\\nanimal products. The factory farmers, and the industries that support\\nfactory farming, will also have certain interests frustrated if\\nfactory farming were to be abolished. How much interest frustration\\nand interest satisfaction would be associated with the end to factory\\nfarming is largely an empirical question. But utilitarians are not\\nmaking unreasonable predictions when they argue that on balance the\\nsuffering and interest frustration that animals experience in modern\\nday meat production is greater than the suffering that humans would\\nendure if they had to alter their current practices.\",\n \"\\nImportantly, the utilitarian argument for the moral significance of\\nanimal suffering in meat production is not an argument for\\nvegetarianism. If an animal lived a happy life and was painlessly\\nkilled and then eaten by people who would otherwise suffer hunger or\\nmalnutrition by not eating the animal, then painlessly killing and\\neating the animal would be the morally justified thing to do. In many\\nparts of the world where economic, cultural, or climate conditions\\nmake it virtually impossible for people to sustain themselves on plant\\nbased diets, killing and eating animals that previously led relatively\\nunconstrained lives and are painlessly killed, would not be morally\\nobjectionable. The utilitarian position can thus avoid certain charges\\nof cultural chauvinism and moralism, charges that the animal rights\\nposition apparently cannot avoid.\",\n \"\\nIt might be objected that to suggest that it is morally acceptable to\\nhunt and eat animals for those people living in arctic regions, or for\\nnomadic cultures, or for poor rural peoples, for example, is to\\npotentially condone painlessly killing other morally considerable\\nbeings, like humans, for food consumption in similar situations. If\\nviolating the rights of an animal can be morally tolerated, especially\\na right to life, then similar rights violations can be morally\\ntolerated. In failing to recognize the inviolability of the moral\\nclaims of all morally considerable beings, utilitarianism cannot\\naccommodate one of our most basic prima facie principles, namely that\\nkilling a morally considerable being is wrong.\",\n \"\\nThere are at least two replies to this sort of objection. The first\\nappeals to the negative side effects that killing may promote. If, to\\ndraw on an overused and sadly sophomoric counter-example, one person\\ncan be kidnapped and painlessly killed in order to provide body parts\\nfor four individuals who will die without them, there will inevitably\\nbe negative side-effects that all things considered would make the\\nkidnapping wrong. Healthy people, knowing they could be used for spare\\nparts, might make themselves unhealthy to avoid such a fate or they\\nmay have so much stress and fear that the overall state of affairs\\nwould be worse than that in which four people died. Appealing to\\nside-effects when it comes to the wrong of killing is certainly\\nplausible, but it fails to capture what is directly wrong with\\nkilling.\",\n \"\\nA more satisfying reply would have us adopt what might be called a\\nmulti-factor perspective, one that takes into account the kinds of\\ninterest that are possible for certain kinds of morally considerable\\nbeings, the content of interests of the beings in question, their\\nrelative weight, and the context of those who have them. Consider a\\nseal who has spent his life freely roaming the oceans and ice flats\\nand who is suddenly and painlessly killed to provide food for a human\\nfamily struggling to survive a bitter winter in far northern climes.\\nWhile it is probably true that the seal had an immediate interest in\\navoiding suffering, it is less clear that the seal has a future\\ndirected interest in continued existence. If the seal lacks this\\nfuture directed interest, then painlessly killing him does not violate\\nthis interest. The same cannot be said for the human explorer who\\nfinds himself face to face with a hungry Inuit family. Persons\\ngenerally have interests in continued existence, interests that,\\narguably, non-persons do not have. So one factor that can be appealed\\nto is that non-persons may not have the range of interests that\\npersons do.\",\n \"\\nAn additional factor is the type of interest in question. We can think\\nof interests as scalar; crucial interests are weightier than important\\ninterests, important interests are weightier than replaceable\\ninterests, and all are weightier than trivial interests or mere whims.\\nWhen there is a conflict of interests, crucial interests will always\\noverride important interests, important interests will always override\\nreplaceable interests, etc. So if an animal has an interest in not\\nsuffering, which is arguably a crucial interest, or at least an\\nimportant one, and a person has an interest in eating that animal when\\nthere are other things to eat, meaning that interest is replaceable,\\nthen the animal has the stronger interest and it would be wrong to\\nviolate that interest by killing the animal for food if there is\\nanother source of food available.\",\n \"\\nOften, however, conflicts of interests are within the same category.\\nThe Inuit’s interest in food is crucial and the explorer’s\\ninterest in life is crucial. If we assume that the explorer cannot\\notherwise provide food for the hunter, then it looks as if there is a\\nconflict within the same category. If you take the interests of an\\nindigenous hunter’s whole family into account, then their\\ncombined interest in their own survival appears to outweigh the\\nhapless explorer’s interest in continued existence. Indeed, if\\npainlessly killing and eating the explorer were the only way for the\\nfamily to survive, then perhaps this action would be morally condoned.\\nBut this is a rather extreme sort of example, one in which even our\\ndeepest held convictions are strained. So it is quite hard to know\\nwhat to make of the clash between what a utilitarian would condone and\\nwhat our intuitions tell us we should believe here. Our most basic\\nprima facie principles arise and are accepted under ordinary\\ncircumstances. Extraordinary circumstances are precisely those in\\nwhich such principles or precepts give\\n way.[2]\",\n \"\\nThe multi-factor utilitarian perspective is particularly helpful when\\nconsidering the use of animals in medical research. According to the\\nanimal rights position, the use of animals in experimental procedures\\nis a clear violation of their rights—they are being used as a\\nmere means to some possible end—and thus animal rights\\nproponents are in favor of the abolition of all laboratory research.\\nThe utilitarian position, particularly one that incorporates some kind\\nof multi-factor perspective, might allow some research on animals\\nunder very specific conditions. Before exploring what a utilitarian\\nmight condone in the way of animal experimentation, let us first\\nquickly consider what would be morally prohibited. All research that\\ninvolves invasive procedures, constant confinement, and ultimate death\\ncan be said to violate the animal’s crucial interests. Thus any\\nexperiments that are designed to enhance the important, replaceable,\\nor trivial interests of humans or other animals would be prohibited.\\nThat would mean that experiments for cosmetics or household products\\nare prohibited, as there are non-animal tested alternatives and many\\noptions already available for consumers. Certain psychological\\nexperiments, such as those in which infant primates are separated from\\ntheir mothers and exposed to frightening stimuli in an effort to\\nunderstand problems teenagers have when they enter high school, would\\nalso come into question. There are many examples of experiments that\\nviolate an animal’s crucial interests in the hopes of satisfying\\nthe lesser interests of some other morally considerable being, all of\\nwhich would be objectionable from this perspective.\",\n \"\\nThere are some laboratory experiments, however, that from a\\nmulti-factor utilitarian perspective may be permitted. These are\\nexperiments in which the probability of satisfying crucial or\\nimportant interests for many who suffer from some debilitating or\\nfatal disease is high, and the numbers of non-human animals whose\\ncrucial interests are violated is low. The psychological complexity of\\nthe non-humans may also be significant in determining whether the\\nexperiment is morally justified. In the case of experimenting in these\\nlimited number of cases, presumably a parallel argument could be made\\nabout experimenting on humans. If the chances are very high that\\nexperimenting on one human, who is a far superior experimental animal\\nwhen it comes to human disease, can prevent great suffering or death\\nin many humans, then the utilitarian may, if side effects are minimal,\\ncondone such an experiment. Of course, it is easier to imagine this\\nsort of extreme case in the abstract, what a utilitarian would think\\nactually morally justified, again depends on the specific empirical\\ndata.\",\n \"\\nIn sum, the animal rights position takes the significance of morally\\nconsiderable claims to be absolute. Thus, any use of animals that\\ninvolves a disregard for their moral claims is problematic. The\\nsignificance of an animal’s morally considerable interests\\naccording to a utilitarian is variable. Whether an action is morally\\njustified or permissible will depend on a number of factors. The\\nutilitarian position on animals would condemn a large number of\\npractices that involve the suffering and death of billions of animals,\\nbut there are cases in which some use of non-human animals, and\\nperhaps even human animals, may be morally justified (Gruen 2011: ch.\\n4; Gilbert, Kaebnick, & Murray 2012).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. The Moral Significance of Animals’ Moral Claims\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nGiven the long-standing view that non-humans are mere things, there\\nare still many who reject the arguments presented here for the moral\\nconsiderability of non-humans and the significance of their interests.\\nNonetheless, most now realize that the task of arguing that humans\\nhave a unique and exclusive moral status is rather difficult. Yet even\\namongst those who do view animals as within the sphere of moral\\nconcern, there is disagreement about the nature and usefulness of the\\narguments presented on behalf of the moral status of animals.\",\n \"\\nIncreasingly, philosophers are arguing that while our behavior towards\\nanimals is indeed subject to moral scrutiny, the kinds of ethical\\narguments that are usually presented frame the issues in the wrong\\nway. Some philosophers suggest that rational argumentation fails to\\ncapture those features of moral experience that allow us to really see\\nwhy treating animals badly is wrong. The point, according to\\ncommentators such as Stephen R.L. Clark and Cora Diamond, for example,\\nis that members of our communities, however we conceive of them, pull\\non us and it is in virtue of this pull that we recognize what is wrong\\nwith cruelty. Animals are individuals with whom we share a common life\\nand this recognition allows us to see them as they are. Eating animals\\nis wrong not because it is a violation of the animal’s rights or\\nbecause on balance such an act creates more suffering than other acts,\\nbut rather because in eating animals or using them in other harmful,\\nviolent ways, we do not display the traits of character that kind,\\nsensitive, compassionate, mature, and thoughtful members of a moral\\ncommunity should display.\",\n \"\\nAccording to some in the virtue ethics tradition, carefully worked out\\narguments in which the moral considerability and moral significance of\\nanimals are laid out will have little if any grip on our thoughts and\\nactions. Rather, by perceiving the attitudes that underlie the use and\\nabuse of non-human animals as shallow or cruel, one interested in\\nliving a virtuous life will change their attitudes and come to reject\\ntreating animals as food or tools for research. As Rosalind Hursthouse\\nrecognized after having been exposed to alternative ways of seeing\\nanimals:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nI began to see [my attitudes] that related to my conception of\\nflesh-foods as unnecessary, greedy, self-indulgent, childish, my\\nattitude to shopping and cooking in order to produce lavish dinner\\nparties as parochial, gross, even dissolute. I saw my interest and\\ndelight in nature programmes about the lives of animals on television\\nand my enjoyment of meat as side by side at odds with one\\nanother…Without thinking animals had rights, I began to see\\nboth the wild ones and the ones we usually eat as having lives of\\ntheir own, which they should be left to enjoy. And so I changed. My\\nperception of the moral landscape and where I and the other animals\\nwere situated in it shifted. (Hursthouse 2000: 165–166; see also\\nDiamond 2001 [especially chs. 11 and 13], and Clarke 1977)\\n\",\n \"\\nAlice Crary argues that shifting perceptions of our moral landscapes\\noccur because these landscapes, and more precisely the rich worlds of\\nthose who inhabit them, are not morally neutral. The characteristics\\nthat philosophers tend to look for in other animals to determine\\nwhether or not they are morally considerable, according to Crary, are\\nalready infused with moral importance, “human beings and other\\nanimals have empirically discoverable moral characteristics” (my\\nemphasis, 2016: 85) that are, as she puts it “inside\\nethics”. These values often sneak in under a supposedly neutral\\ngloss. By explicitly locating these characteristics inside ethics, the\\ntexture, quality, and purposes of our ethical reflection on moral\\nconsiderability changes. Arriving at an adequate empirical\\nunderstanding requires non-neutral methods, identifying historical and\\ncultural perspectives as shaping how we consider other animals\\nmorally. What ethical questions we think are important and how we\\nframe and answer them, will be different if we see our lives and the\\nlives of other animals as already imbued with moral values. \",\n \"\\nOther feminist philosophers have taken issue with the supposedly\\nmorally neutral methods of argumentation used to establish the moral\\nstatus of animals. For many feminists the traditional methods of\\nrational argumentation fail to take into account the feelings of\\nsympathy or empathy that humans have towards non-humans, feelings they\\nbelieve are central to a full account of what we owe non-humans and\\nwhy (see Adams & Donovan 1995; Donovan & Adams 2007; Adams\\n& Gruen 2014).\",\n \"\\nFeminist philosophers have also challenged the individualism that is\\ncentral in the arguments for the moral status of animals. Rather than\\nidentifying intrinsic or innate properties that non-humans share with\\nhumans, some feminists have argued instead that we ought to understand\\nmoral status in relational terms given that moral recognition is\\ninvariably a social practice. As Elizabeth Anderson has written: \",\n \"\\n\\n\\nMoral considerability is not an intrinsic property of any creature,\\nnor is it supervenient on only its intrinsic properties, such as its\\ncapacities. It depends, deeply, on the kind of relations they can have\\nwith us. (Anderson 2004: 289).\\n\",\n \"\\nAnd these relationships needn’t be direct. The reach of human\\nactivity has expanded across the entire globe and humans are entangled\\nwith each other and other animals in myriad ways. We participate in\\nactivities and institutions that directly or indirectly harm others by\\ncreating negative experiences, depriving them of their well-being, or\\ndenying them opportunities to be who they are and pursue what they\\ncare about. Philosophers Elisa Aaltola and Lori Gruen have argued for\\nrefining our empathetic imagination in order to improve our\\nrelationships with each other and other animals.\",\n \"\\nEven though it is challenging to understand what it is like to be\\nanother, and even though we are limited by our inevitable\\nanthropocentric perspectives, being in respectful ethical relation\\ninvolves attempting to understand and respond to another’s\\nneeds, interests, desires, vulnerabilities, hopes, and perspectives.\\nWhat Gruen calls, “entangled empathy” is a process that\\ninvolves both affect and cognition (Gruen 2015). Individuals who are\\nempathizing with others respond to the other’s condition and\\nreflectively imagine themselves in the distinct position of the other\\nwhile staying attentive to both similarities and differences between\\nherself and her situation and that of the fellow creature with whom\\nshe is empathizing. Entangled empathy involves paying critical\\nattention to the broader conditions that may negatively affect the\\nexperiences and flourishing of those with whom one is empathizing, and\\nthis requires those of us empathizing to attend to things we might not\\nhave otherwise. It therefore also enhances our own experiences,\\ndevelops our moral imagination, and helps us to become more sensitive\\nperceivers. \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Alternative Perspectives on Human Relations to Other Animals\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Aaltola, Elisa, 2013, “Empathy, Intersubjectivity and Animal\nEthics”, Environmental Philosophy, 10(2): 75–96.\ndoi:10.5840/envirophil201310215","Adams, Carol J. and Josephine Donovan (eds.), 1995, Animals\nand Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, Durham, NC: Duke\nUniversity Press.","Adams, Carol J. and Lori Gruen (eds.), 2014, Ecofeminism:\nFeminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth, New\nYork: Bloomsbury Press.","Anderson, Elizabeth, 2004, “Animal Rights and the Values of\nNonhuman Life”, in Animal Rights: Current Debates and New\nDirections, Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. 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Byrne (eds.), 1997,\nMachiavellian Intelligence II: Extensions and Evaluations,\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Whiten, A., J. Goodall, W.C. McGew, T. Nishida, V. Reynolds, Y.\nSugiyama, C.E.G. Tutin, R.W. Wrangham, & C. Boesch, 1999,\n“Cultures in chimpanzees”, Nature, 399(6737):\n682–685. doi:10.1038/21415","Wood, Allen W., 1998, “Kant on Duties Regarding Nonrational\nNature” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society\nSupplement, LXXII: 189–210.\ndoi:10.1111/1467-8349.00042","Woods, Vanessa, 2010, Bonobo Handshake: A Memoir of Love and\nAdventure in the Congo , New York: Gotham Books.","Beauchamp, Tom L. and R.G. Frey (eds.) 2011, The Oxford\nHandbook of Animal Ethics, New York: Oxford.\ndoi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195371963.001.0001","Brambell, Ben and Bob Fisher, 2015, The Moral Complexity of\nEating Meat, New York: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199353903.001.0001","Chignell, Andrew, Terence Cuneo, and Matthew C. Halteman (eds.)\n2015, Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments About the Ethics of\nEating, New York: Routledge.","Derrida, Jacques, 2008, The Animal That Therefore I Am\n(Animal que donc je suis), Mary-Louise Mallet (ed.) and David\nWills (trans.), New York: Fordham University Press.","Donaldson, Sue and Will Kymlicka, 2011, Zoopolis: A Political\nTheory of Animal Rights, New York: Oxford University Press.","Gruen, Lori, 2016, “Conscious Animals and the Value of\nExperience” in Stephen Gardiner and Allen Thompson (eds.)\nThe Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics, New York: Oxford\nUniversity Press, chapter 8.","Haraway, Donna, 2003, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs,\nPeople and Significant Otherness, Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm\nPress.","Jones, Robert C., 2013, “Science, Sentience, and Animal\nWelfare”, Biology and Philosophy, 28(1): 1–30.\ndoi:10.1007/s10539-012-9351-1","Kagan, Shelly, 2011, “Do I Make a Difference?”,\nPhilosophy & Public Affairs, 39(2): 105–141.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1088-4963.2011.01203.x","Korsgaard, Christine M., 2013, “Getting Animals in\nView”, The Point, 6.\n [Korsgaard 2013 available online]","McMahan, Jeff, 2008, “Eating Animals the Nice Way”,\nDaedalus, 127(1): 66–76.\ndoi:10.1162/daed.2008.137.1.66","Midgley, Mary, 1983, Animals and Why They Matter, Athens,\nGA: University of Georgia Press.","Pachirat, Timothy, 2011, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized\nSlaughter and the Politics of Sight, New Haven, CT: Yale\nUniversity Press.","Rachels, James, 1990, Created from Animals: The Moral\nImplications of Darwinism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","Rowlands, Mark, 2012, Can Animals Be Moral? New York:\nOxford University Press.","Ryder, Richard D., 1989, Animal Revolution: Changing Attitudes\nToward Speciesism, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.","Sapontzis, Steve F. (ed.), 2004, Food for Thought: The Debate\nOver Eating Meat, NY: Prometheus Press."],"string":"[\n \"Aaltola, Elisa, 2013, “Empathy, Intersubjectivity and Animal\\nEthics”, Environmental Philosophy, 10(2): 75–96.\\ndoi:10.5840/envirophil201310215\",\n \"Adams, Carol J. and Josephine Donovan (eds.), 1995, Animals\\nand Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, Durham, NC: Duke\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Adams, Carol J. and Lori Gruen (eds.), 2014, Ecofeminism:\\nFeminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth, New\\nYork: Bloomsbury Press.\",\n \"Anderson, Elizabeth, 2004, “Animal Rights and the Values of\\nNonhuman Life”, in Animal Rights: Current Debates and New\\nDirections, Cass R. Sunstein and Martha C. Nussbaum (eds.).\\nOxford: Oxford University Press, chapter 13.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195305104.003.0014\",\n \"Attenborough, David, 1998, The Life of Birds, Princeton:\\nPrinceton University Press.\\n [Attenborough 1998 excerpts available online,\\n PBS Online.]\",\n \"Bekoff, Marc, 2000, The Smile of a Dolphin: Remarkable\\nAccounts of Animal Emotion, New York: Discovery Books.\",\n \"–––, 2007, The Emotional Lives of Animals: A\\nLeading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy—and\\nWhy They Matter, Novato, California: New World Library.\",\n \"Bekoff, Marc and John A. Byers (eds.), 1998, Animal Play:\\nEvolutionary, Comparative, and Ecological Perspectives,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Bekoff, Marc, Colin Allen, and Gordon M. Burghardt (eds.), 2002,\\nThe Cognitive Animal, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.\",\n \"Bekoff, Marc and Jessica Pierce, 2009, Wild Justice: The Moral\\nLives of Animals, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.\",\n \"Bentham, Jeremy, [1780/1789] 1982, An Introduction to the Principles of\\nMorals and Legislation, edited by J.H. Burns and H.L.A. Hart,\\nLondon: Methuen, 1982 (Athlone Press 1970). \",\n \"Byrne, Richard W. Byrne and Andrew Whiten (eds.),\\n1988,Machiavellian Intelligence: Social Expertise and the\\nEvolution ofIntellect in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans I, Oxford:\\nClarendonPress.\",\n \"Cheney, Dorothy L. and Robert M. Seyfarth, 1990, How\\nMonkeysSee the World: Inside the Mind of Another Species,\\nChicago:University of Chicago Press.\",\n \"Chevalier-Skolnikoff, Suzanne, 1989, “Spontaneous\\nTool Use\\nand Sensorimotor Intelligence in Cebus Compared with other Monkeys and\\nApes”, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 12(3):\\n561–588. doi:10.1017/S0140525X00057678\",\n \"Clarke, Stephen R.L., 1977, The Moral Status of Animals,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Crary, Alice, 2016, Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral\\nThought, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Darwin, Charles, 1871, The Descent of Man (2 volumes),\\nLondon: John Murray, volume1.\\n [Darwin 1871 available online]\",\n \"DeGrazia, David, 1996, Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life\\nand Moral Status, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2002, Animal Rights: A Very Short\\nIntroduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Diamond, Cora, 2001, The Realistic Spirit, Cambridge, MA:\\nMIT Press.\",\n \"Donovan, Josephine and Carol J. Adams (eds.), 2007, The\\nFeminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics, New York: Columbia\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Fanon, Frantz, 1967, Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press.\",\n \"Galdikas, Birute M.F., 1995, Reflections of Eden: My Years\\nwith the Orangutans of Borneo, Boston: Little, Brown and\\nCompany.\",\n \"Gilbert, Susan, Gregory E. Kaebnick, and Thomas H. Murray, 2012,\\nAnimal Research Ethics: Evolving Views and Practices,\\nHastings Center Special Report, 42(6): S1–S40.\\n [Gilbert, Kaebnick, & Murray 2012 available online]\",\n \"Goodall, Jane, 1986, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of\\nBehavior, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2000, In the Shadow of Man,\\nrevised edition New York: Houghton Mifflin Co.\",\n \"Griffin, Donald R., 1992, Animal Minds, Chicago:\\nUniversity of Chicago Press.\",\n \"Gruen, Lori, 2011, Ethics and Animals: An Introduction,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2015, Entangled Empathy: An Alternative\\nEthic for Our Relationship with Animals, Brooklyn: Lantern\\nBooks.\",\n \"Hauser, Marc and Susan Carey, 1997, “Building a Cognitive\\nCreature from a Set of Primitives: Evolutionary and Developmental\\nInsights”, in Denise D. Cummins and Colin Allen (eds.), The\\nEvolution of Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press, chapter\\n3.\",\n \"Hursthouse, Rosalind, 2000, Ethics, Humans and Other\\nAnimals, London: Routledge.\",\n \"Jamieson, Dale, 2003, Morality’s Progress: Essays on\\nHumans, Other Animals, and the Rest of Nature, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Kant, Immanuel, [1785] 1998, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of\\nMorals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten), Mary J.\\nGregor (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, [1798] 2010, “Anthropology from a\\nPragmatic Point of View (1798)”, in Anthropology, History,\\nand Education, (Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant),\\nRobert Louden and Gunter Zoller (eds. and trans.), Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press, 227–429. Original is\\nAnthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, published in the\\nstandard Akademie der Wissenschaften edition, volume 7.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511791925\",\n \"–––, [1784–5] 1997, “Moral\\nPhilosophy: Collin’s Lecture Notes”, in Lectures on\\nEthics, (Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant) , P.\\nHeath and J.B. Schneewind (ed. and trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge\\nUniversity Press, pp. 37–222. Original is Anthropologie in\\npragmatischer Hinsicht, published in the standard Akademie\\nder Wissenschaften edition, volume 27.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9781107049512 \",\n \"Kheel, Marti, 2008, Nature Ethics: An Ecofeminist\\nPerspective, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.\",\n \"Kim, Claire Jean, 2015, Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species and\\nNature in a Multicultural Age, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress.\",\n \"King, Barbara J., 2013, How Animals Grieve, Chicago:\\nUniversity of Chicago Press.\",\n \"Ko, Aph and Syl Ko, 2017, Aphro-ism, New York: Lantern Books.\",\n \"Korsgaard, Christine M., 1996, The Sources of\\nNormativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2004, “Fellow Creatures: Kantian\\nEthics and Our Duties to Animals”, in The Tanner Lectures on\\nHuman Values, Grethe B. Peterson (ed.), Volume 25/26, Salt Lake\\nCity: University of Utah Press.\\n [Korsgaard 2004 available online]\",\n \"–––, 2007, “Facing the Animal You See in\\nthe Mirror”, Harvard Review of Philosophy, 16(1):\\n4–9. doi:10.5840/harvardreview20091611\",\n \"McMahan, Jeff, 2005, “Our Fellow Creatures” The\\nJournal of Ethics, 9(3–4): 353–80.\\ndoi:10.1007/s10892-005-3512-2\",\n \"Mason, Jim and Peter Singer, 1980 [1990], Animal\\nFactories, revised edition, New York: Harmony Books; first\\nedition, 1980.\",\n \"Nussbaum, Martha C., 2006, Frontiers of Justice: Disability,\\nNationality, and Species Membership, Cambridge: The Belknap\\nPress.\",\n \"Pepperberg, Irene Maxine, 1999, The Alex Studies: Cognitive\\nand Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots, Cambridge, MA:\\nHarvard University Press.\",\n \"Premack, David, 1986, Gavagai! or the Future History of the\\nAnimal Language Controversy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.\",\n \"Premack, David and Ann J. Premack 1984, The Mind of an\\nApe, New York: W W Norton & Co Inc.\",\n \"Regan, Tom, 1985, “The Case for Animal Rights”, in\\nPeter Singer (ed.), In Defence of Animals, Oxford: Basil\\nBlackwell, pp. 13–26.\\n [Regan 1985 available online]\",\n \"Rendell, Luke and Hal Whitehead, 2001, “Culture in Whales\\nand Dolphins”, Behavioral and Brian Sciences, 24(2):\\n309–324. doi:10.1017/S0140525X0100396X\",\n \"Roberts, W.A., 1998, Principles of Animal Cognition,\\nBoston: McGraw-Hill.\",\n \"Rumbaugh, Duane M. and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, 1999, “Primate\\nLanguage” in Robert A. Wilson & Frank Keil (eds.) The\\nMIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, Cambridge, MA: MIT\\nPress.\",\n \"Singer, Peter, 1990, Animal Liberation, second edition,\\nNew York: New York Review of Books.\",\n \"–––, 1979 [1993], Practical Ethics,\\nsecond edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; first edition,\\n1979.\",\n \"–––, 1974, “All Animals are Equal”,\\nPhilosophic Exchange, 5(1), Article 6,\\nSinger 1974 available online.\",\n \"Singer, Peter and Jim Mason, 2006, The Way We Eat: Why Our\\nFood Choices Matter/The Ethics of What We Eat, New York: Rodale\\nPress.\",\n \"Tomasello, Michael and Josep Call, 1997, Primate\\nCognition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"VanDeVeer, Donald, 1979, “Interspecific Justice”,\\nInquiry, 22(1–4): 55–79.\\ndoi:10.1080/00201747908601866\",\n \"Varner, Gary E., 1998, In Nature’s Interests, New\\nYork: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2012, Personhood, Ethics, and Animal\\nCognition: Situating Animals in Hare’s Two Level Utilitarianism Gary\\nE. Varner, New York: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199758784.001.0001\",\n \"Visalberghi, Elisabetta, 1997, “Success and Understanding in\\nCognitive Tasks: A Comparison Between Cebus apella and\\nPan troglodytes”, International Journal of\\nPrimatology, 18(5): 811–830.\\ndoi:10.1023/A:1026399930727\",\n \"de Waal, Frans B.M., 1989, Peacemaking Among Primates,\\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"de Waal, Frans B.M. and Frans Lanting, 1997, Bonobo: The\\nForgotten Ape, Berkeley: University of California Press.\",\n \"Walker, Rebecca L., 2007, “Animal Flourishing: What Virtue\\nRequires of Human Animals”, in Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics\\nand Contemporary Moral Problems, Rebecca Walker and Philip J.\\nIvanhoe (eds.) Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Weir, Alex A.S., Jackie Chappell, and Alex Kacelnik, 2002,\\n“Shaping of Hooks in New Caledonian Crows”,\\nScience, 297(5583): 981. doi:10.1126/science.1073433 \",\n \"Whiten, Andrew and Richard W. Byrne (eds.), 1997,\\nMachiavellian Intelligence II: Extensions and Evaluations,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Whiten, A., J. Goodall, W.C. McGew, T. Nishida, V. Reynolds, Y.\\nSugiyama, C.E.G. Tutin, R.W. Wrangham, & C. Boesch, 1999,\\n“Cultures in chimpanzees”, Nature, 399(6737):\\n682–685. doi:10.1038/21415\",\n \"Wood, Allen W., 1998, “Kant on Duties Regarding Nonrational\\nNature” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society\\nSupplement, LXXII: 189–210.\\ndoi:10.1111/1467-8349.00042\",\n \"Woods, Vanessa, 2010, Bonobo Handshake: A Memoir of Love and\\nAdventure in the Congo , New York: Gotham Books.\",\n \"Beauchamp, Tom L. and R.G. Frey (eds.) 2011, The Oxford\\nHandbook of Animal Ethics, New York: Oxford.\\ndoi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195371963.001.0001\",\n \"Brambell, Ben and Bob Fisher, 2015, The Moral Complexity of\\nEating Meat, New York: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199353903.001.0001\",\n \"Chignell, Andrew, Terence Cuneo, and Matthew C. Halteman (eds.)\\n2015, Philosophy Comes to Dinner: Arguments About the Ethics of\\nEating, New York: Routledge.\",\n \"Derrida, Jacques, 2008, The Animal That Therefore I Am\\n(Animal que donc je suis), Mary-Louise Mallet (ed.) and David\\nWills (trans.), New York: Fordham University Press.\",\n \"Donaldson, Sue and Will Kymlicka, 2011, Zoopolis: A Political\\nTheory of Animal Rights, New York: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Gruen, Lori, 2016, “Conscious Animals and the Value of\\nExperience” in Stephen Gardiner and Allen Thompson (eds.)\\nThe Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics, New York: Oxford\\nUniversity Press, chapter 8.\",\n \"Haraway, Donna, 2003, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs,\\nPeople and Significant Otherness, Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm\\nPress.\",\n \"Jones, Robert C., 2013, “Science, Sentience, and Animal\\nWelfare”, Biology and Philosophy, 28(1): 1–30.\\ndoi:10.1007/s10539-012-9351-1\",\n \"Kagan, Shelly, 2011, “Do I Make a Difference?”,\\nPhilosophy & Public Affairs, 39(2): 105–141.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1088-4963.2011.01203.x\",\n \"Korsgaard, Christine M., 2013, “Getting Animals in\\nView”, The Point, 6.\\n [Korsgaard 2013 available online]\",\n \"McMahan, Jeff, 2008, “Eating Animals the Nice Way”,\\nDaedalus, 127(1): 66–76.\\ndoi:10.1162/daed.2008.137.1.66\",\n \"Midgley, Mary, 1983, Animals and Why They Matter, Athens,\\nGA: University of Georgia Press.\",\n \"Pachirat, Timothy, 2011, Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized\\nSlaughter and the Politics of Sight, New Haven, CT: Yale\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Rachels, James, 1990, Created from Animals: The Moral\\nImplications of Darwinism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Rowlands, Mark, 2012, Can Animals Be Moral? New York:\\nOxford University Press.\",\n \"Ryder, Richard D., 1989, Animal Revolution: Changing Attitudes\\nToward Speciesism, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.\",\n \"Sapontzis, Steve F. (ed.), 2004, Food for Thought: The Debate\\nOver Eating Meat, NY: Prometheus Press.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../consciousness-animal/","text":"animal: consciousness"},{"href":"../bentham/","text":"Bentham, Jeremy"},{"href":"../consequentialism/","text":"consequentialism"},{"href":"../emotion/","text":"emotion"},{"href":"../feminism-ethics/","text":"feminist philosophy, interventions: ethics"},{"href":"../feminism-political/","text":"feminist philosophy, interventions: political philosophy"},{"href":"../kant/","text":"Kant, Immanuel"},{"href":"../rights/","text":"rights"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../consciousness-animal/\",\n \"text\": \"animal: consciousness\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../bentham/\",\n \"text\": \"Bentham, Jeremy\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../consequentialism/\",\n \"text\": \"consequentialism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../emotion/\",\n \"text\": \"emotion\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../feminism-ethics/\",\n \"text\": \"feminist philosophy, interventions: ethics\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../feminism-political/\",\n \"text\": \"feminist philosophy, interventions: political philosophy\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../kant/\",\n \"text\": \"Kant, Immanuel\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../rights/\",\n \"text\": \"rights\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":63,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"anomalous-monism"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Anomalous Monism"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Tue Nov 8, 2005; substantive revision Fri Sep 6, 2019"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nAnomalous Monism is a theory about the scientific status of\npsychology, the physical status of mental events, and the relation\nbetween these issues developed by Donald Davidson. It claims that\npsychology cannot be a science like basic physics, in that it cannot\nin principle yield exceptionless laws for predicting or explaining\nhuman thoughts and actions (mental anomalism). It also holds that\nthoughts and actions must be physical (monism, or token-identity).\nThus, according to Anomalous Monism, psychology cannot be reduced to\nphysics, but must nonetheless share a physical ontology.","\nWhile neither of these claims, on its own, is novel, their relation,\naccording to Anomalous Monism, is. It is precisely because\nthere can be no such strict laws governing mental events that those\nevents must be identical to physical events. Previous\nidentity theories of mind had held that claims concerning the identity\nof particular mental and physical events (tokens) depended upon the\ndiscovery of lawlike relations between mental and physical properties\n(types). Empirical evidence for psychophysical laws was thus held to\nbe required for particular token-identity claims. Token-identity\nclaims thus depended upon type-identity. Davidson’s position is\ndramatically different—it requires no empirical evidence and\ndepends on there being no lawlike relations between mental\nand physical properties. It in effect justifies the token-identity of\nmental and physical events through arguing for the impossibility of\ntype-identities between mental and physical properties. (For\ndiscussion of philosophical positions related to Anomalous Monism, see\nthe supplement on\n Related Views.)","\nThe appeal of Anomalous Monism is due to these enigmatic features, a\nfairly straightforward argumentative structure, and its attempt to\nbring together an intuitively acceptable metaphysics (monism) with a\nsophisticated understanding of the relation between psychological and\nphysical explanatory schemes (anomalism). Its explicit assumptions are\neach intended, on their own, to be acceptable to positions opposing\nmonism, but, when taken together, to show that monism is in fact\nrequired."],"string":"[\n \"\\nAnomalous Monism is a theory about the scientific status of\\npsychology, the physical status of mental events, and the relation\\nbetween these issues developed by Donald Davidson. It claims that\\npsychology cannot be a science like basic physics, in that it cannot\\nin principle yield exceptionless laws for predicting or explaining\\nhuman thoughts and actions (mental anomalism). It also holds that\\nthoughts and actions must be physical (monism, or token-identity).\\nThus, according to Anomalous Monism, psychology cannot be reduced to\\nphysics, but must nonetheless share a physical ontology.\",\n \"\\nWhile neither of these claims, on its own, is novel, their relation,\\naccording to Anomalous Monism, is. It is precisely because\\nthere can be no such strict laws governing mental events that those\\nevents must be identical to physical events. Previous\\nidentity theories of mind had held that claims concerning the identity\\nof particular mental and physical events (tokens) depended upon the\\ndiscovery of lawlike relations between mental and physical properties\\n(types). Empirical evidence for psychophysical laws was thus held to\\nbe required for particular token-identity claims. Token-identity\\nclaims thus depended upon type-identity. Davidson’s position is\\ndramatically different—it requires no empirical evidence and\\ndepends on there being no lawlike relations between mental\\nand physical properties. It in effect justifies the token-identity of\\nmental and physical events through arguing for the impossibility of\\ntype-identities between mental and physical properties. (For\\ndiscussion of philosophical positions related to Anomalous Monism, see\\nthe supplement on\\n Related Views.)\",\n \"\\nThe appeal of Anomalous Monism is due to these enigmatic features, a\\nfairly straightforward argumentative structure, and its attempt to\\nbring together an intuitively acceptable metaphysics (monism) with a\\nsophisticated understanding of the relation between psychological and\\nphysical explanatory schemes (anomalism). Its explicit assumptions are\\neach intended, on their own, to be acceptable to positions opposing\\nmonism, but, when taken together, to show that monism is in fact\\nrequired.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. The Argument for Anomalous Monism","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. Premise I: The Interaction Principle","sub_toc":["2.1 Mental and Physical Events","2.2 Mental Causation","2.3 Psychological Anomalism"]},{"content_title":"3. Premise II: The Cause-Law Principle","sub_toc":["3.1 Strict Laws","3.2 Justifying the Cause-Law Principle","3.3 Objections to the Cause-Law Principle"]},{"content_title":"4. Premise III: The Anomalism Principle","sub_toc":["4.1 The Holism/Indeterminacy Arguments","4.2 The Rationality Arguments","4.3 The Causal Definition Argument"]},{"content_title":"5. Monism","sub_toc":["5.1 Token Identity","5.2 Objections to Token Identity"," 5.3 Is Supervenience Consistent with Mental Anomalism?"]},{"content_title":"6. The Epiphenomenalism Objections","sub_toc":["6.1 Mental Properties and Explanatory Relevance","6.2 Interest-Relativity and the Dual Explananda Strategy","6.3 The Causal Constitution of Reasons"]},{"content_title":"7. Conclusion","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Views","sub_toc":["1. Spinoza’s Parallelism","2. Functionalism","3. Bare Materialism","4. Other Positions"]},{"content_title":"Related Issues","sub_toc":["1. Anomalous Monism and Scheme-Content Dualism","2. Mental Anomalism and Semantic Externalism","3. Anomalous Monism and Freedom"]},{"content_title":"Causal Closure of the Physical in the Argument for Monism","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Mental Properties and Causal Relevance","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Homonomic and Heteronomic Generalizations","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Explanatory Ephiphenomenalism","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Kim’s ","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Supervenience and the Explanatory Primacy of the Physical","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Token-Identity and Minimal Materialism","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. The Argument for Anomalous Monism\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Premise I: The Interaction Principle\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"2.1 Mental and Physical Events\",\n \"2.2 Mental Causation\",\n \"2.3 Psychological Anomalism\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Premise II: The Cause-Law Principle\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"3.1 Strict Laws\",\n \"3.2 Justifying the Cause-Law Principle\",\n \"3.3 Objections to the Cause-Law Principle\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Premise III: The Anomalism Principle\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"4.1 The Holism/Indeterminacy Arguments\",\n \"4.2 The Rationality Arguments\",\n \"4.3 The Causal Definition Argument\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Monism\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"5.1 Token Identity\",\n \"5.2 Objections to Token Identity\",\n \" 5.3 Is Supervenience Consistent with Mental Anomalism?\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. The Epiphenomenalism Objections\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"6.1 Mental Properties and Explanatory Relevance\",\n \"6.2 Interest-Relativity and the Dual Explananda Strategy\",\n \"6.3 The Causal Constitution of Reasons\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"7. Conclusion\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Views\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"1. Spinoza’s Parallelism\",\n \"2. Functionalism\",\n \"3. Bare Materialism\",\n \"4. Other Positions\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Issues\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"1. Anomalous Monism and Scheme-Content Dualism\",\n \"2. Mental Anomalism and Semantic Externalism\",\n \"3. Anomalous Monism and Freedom\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Causal Closure of the Physical in the Argument for Monism\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Mental Properties and Causal Relevance\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Homonomic and Heteronomic Generalizations\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Explanatory Ephiphenomenalism\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Kim’s \",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Supervenience and the Explanatory Primacy of the Physical\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Token-Identity and Minimal Materialism\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\nThe basic structure of the argument for Anomalous Monism is as\nfollows. We start with the plausible assumption that some mental\nevents, such as believing that it is raining, are caused by certain\nphysical events, in this case the rain. Similarly, it is assumed that\nsome physical events, such as one’s arm rising, are caused by\ncertain mental events, such as deciding to scratch one’s head.\nDavidson calls this the Principle of Causal Interaction; we shall call\nit the interaction principle:","\n\n\nThe Interaction Principle: Some mental events causally\ninteract with some physical events\n","\nDavidson presents this assumption as obvious and not in need of\njustification, but we shall see that motivations for it can be found\nin parts of his writings\n (2.2).\n To this interaction principle is added the requirement that all\nsingular causal interactions are covered by strict laws—laws\nwith fully articulated antecedents which guarantee some fully\narticulated consequence (for caveats and details,\n see 3.1).\n Davidson calls this the Principle of the Nomological Character of\nCausality; we shall call it the cause-law principle:","\n\n\nThe Cause-Law Principle: Events related as cause and effect\nare covered by strict laws\n","\nThis cause-law principle was also initially assumed without argument\nby Davidson, though we shall see below\n (3.2)\n how he later came to try to justify it. Now, the assumptions so far\nseem to point directly to the existence of strict psychophysical\nlaws—if some particular mental event m1 is\ncaused by some particular physical event p1, then,\ngiven the cause-law principle, it seems to follow that there must be a\nstrict law of the form\n‘P1 → M1’.\nThat is, whenever events of kind P1 occur, events\nof kind M1 must follow. However, Davidson then\nclaims that there can be no such laws. He calls this the Principle of\nthe Anomalism of the Mental, and it holds that mental properties are\nnot suitable for inclusion in strict laws of any kind; we shall call\nit the anomalism principle:","\n\n\nThe Anomalism Principle: There are no strict laws on the\nbasis of which mental events can predict, explain, or be predicted or\nexplained by other events\n","\nDavidson offered loose ruminations concerning rationality and\nrationalizing explanations, which purportedly constitute the very\nnature of mental properties, in support of the anomalism principle\n (4.2).\n All of this will be discussed in detail below.","\nWith the interaction principle, the cause-law principle, and the\nanomalism principle now in place, we can see that there is a tension\nin need of resolution. From the interaction and cause-law principles\nit follows that there must be strict laws covering the interaction\nbetween mental and physical events. But the anomalism principle\nentails that there are no strict psychophysical laws. How can all\nthree principles be held simultaneously?","\nTo resolve the tension, Davidson noted that while the cause-law\nprinciple requires that there be strict covering laws, it\ndoesn’t specify the vocabulary in which those laws must be\nformulated. If particular physical event p1 causes\nparticular mental event m1, and there must be some\nstrict law covering this interaction, but there is no strict law of\nthe form\n‘P1 → M1’,\nthen there must be some other law,\n‘?1 → ?2’, which\ncovers the causal relation between p1 and\nm1. That is, m1 and\np1 must instantiate properties suitable for\ninclusion in strict laws; but since we know that\nM1 is not a property of this kind,\nm1 must instantiate some other property.\nDavidson’s ingenious deduction at this point was that this\nproperty must be physical, since only the physical sciences hold out\nthe promise of a closed system of strict laws (Davidson 1970,\n223–24; on the notion of a closed system, see\n 5.1\n and the supplement on\n Causal Closure of the Physical in the Argument for Monism).\n Therefore, every causally interacting mental event must be\ntoken-identical to some physical event—hence, monism\n (5.1):","\n\n\nMonism: Every causally interacting mental event is\ntoken-identical to some physical event\n","\nIn arguing in this way, Davidson relies upon a key distinction between\nexplanation and causation. While explanation is, intuitively, an\nintensional notion—one sensitive to how events are\ndescribed—causation is extensional, obtaining between pairs of\nevents independently of how they are described. For example, a\nbridge’s collapse is explained by the explosion of a bomb. That\nexplosion, let us suppose, was the most newsworthy event of the day.\nWhile the most newsworthy event of the day caused the\nbridge’s collapse, ‘the most newsworthy event of the\nday’ does not explain that collapse. Telling someone\nthat it was the most newsworthy event of the day that explained the\nbridge’s collapse wouldn’t provide an explanation—it\nwouldn’t make the bridge’s collapse intelligible to the\naudience—though it would pick out its actual cause. How the\ncause is described is relevant to whether an explanation occurs.\nCauses and effects can be accurately picked out using a variety of\nexpressions, many of which are not explanatory. As we shall see, the\ndistinction between causation and explanation is crucial to Anomalous\nMonism\n (6.1–6.3; \nsee also related discussion of the intensionality\nof deterministic relations in \n Related Issues: 3.1 Anomalous Monism and Kant’s Theory of Freedom).\n","\nFinally, to alleviate certain concerns about the adequacy of the form\nof physicalism he was endorsing, Davidson endorsed a dependency\nrelation of supervenience of the mental on the physical, and claimed\nthat it was consistent with Anomalous Monism\n (5.1,\n 5.3) (Davidson 1970, 214; 1993; 1995a, 266):","\n\n\nSupervenience of the Mental on the Physical: if two events\nshare all of their physical properties, they will share all of their\nmental properties\n","\nIn what follows (2–5), each step of this argument will be\nanalyzed and discussed separately, but always with an eye to the\noverall argument. In 6, a central objection to Anomalous\nMonism—that it appears unable to account for the\ncausal/explanatory power of mental events and properties—will be\nexplained and discussed. (For discussion of the relationship between\nAnomalous Monism and two other pillars of Davidson’s\nphilosophy—his rejection of conceptual relativism and commitment\nto semantic externalism—see the supplement on\n Related Issues.)"],"section_title":"1. The Argument for Anomalous Monism","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nThe interaction principle states that some mental events causally\ninteract with some physical events. In this section we will look\nbriefly at a number of issues related to this principle: how mental\nand physical events are demarcated, the nature of events themselves,\nthe scope of the interaction principle, the relationship between\nmental events and causation, and the use of the interaction principle\nin establishing one component of mental\nanomalism—psychological anomalism, according to which\nthere can be no strict, purely psychological laws. Psychological\nanomalism is to be distinguished from psychophysical\nanomalism, which holds that there can be no strict psychophysical\nlaws. This latter thesis will be explored in detail in our discussion\nof the anomalism principle\n (4)."],"section_title":"2. Premise I: The Interaction Principle","subsections":[{"content":["\nDavidson restricts the class of mental events with which Anomalous\nMonism is concerned to that of the propositional\nattitudes—states and events with psychological verbs such as\n‘believes’, ‘desires’, ‘intends’\nand others that subtend ‘that-’ clauses, which relate\nsubjects to propositional contents such as ‘it is raining\noutside’. Anomalous Monism thus does not address the status of\nmental events such as pains, tickles and the\nlike—‘conscious’ or sentient mental events. It is\nconcerned exclusively with sapient mental events—thoughts with\npropositional content that appear to lack any distinctive\n‘feel’.","\nThough traditional and intuitive, this way of dividing up the domain\nof the mental isn’t without controversy. Generally, Davidson\nexpresses some skepticism about the possibility of formulating a clear\nand general definition of the class of mental phenomena (Davidson\n1970, 211). And he is suspicious about the idea of mental states given\nto, but uninterpreted by, concepts (Davidson 1974a), which is how\nphilosophers have often thought of conscious phenomena. But for\ncurrent purposes the class of propositional attitudes will suffice as\na criterion for the mental. One key reason for so limiting the reach\nof Anomalous Monism, as we shall see\n (4.2),\n is that it is the rational status of the relevant mental\nevents that Davidson usually cites as responsible for mental\nanomalism. Conscious events have traditionally been thought to occur\nin non-rational animals, a position with which Davidson shows some\nsympathy (Davidson 1985a). Such events thus appear to fall outside of\nthe domain of the rational, and thus outside of the purview of\nDavidson’s argument.","\nDavidson is even less helpful about offering a criterion for the\n‘physical’ (Davidson 1970, 211). One half-hearted attempt\ncomes in the statement that","\n\n\n[p]hysical theory promises to provide a comprehensive closed system\nguaranteed to yield a standardized, unique description of every\nphysical event couched in a vocabulary amenable to law. (Davidson\n1970, 224) \n","\nThis is at best a promissory note about some future language of\n‘physics’—the ‘true’ physics—and\nit incorporates a requirement of the causal closure of the physical\ndomain that creates problems for certain aspects of Anomalous Monism\n(see the supplement on\n Causal Closure of the Physical in the Argument for Anomalous Monism).\n It is probably best to take a ‘physical’ description\nsimply to be one that occurs in the language of a future science that\nis similar to what we call ‘physics’ today but with none\nof its inadequacies. One important component of such descriptions is\ntheir capacity to figure in strict laws of nature (see\n 3.1).\n While this is non-negotiable for physical terms, it is an open\nquestion for mental terms, and Davidson will be arguing\n (4)\n for a negative answer.","\nWhen Davidson first argued for Anomalous Monism he subscribed to a\ncausal criterion of event-individuation, according to which two events\n(event-descriptions) are identical (co-refer) if they share all the\nsame causes and effects (Davidson 1969). He much later came to reject\nthat criterion in favor of one according to which events are identical\nif and only if they occupy the same spatiotemporal region (Davidson\n1985b). The difference between these views will not, however, be\nreflected in our discussion. It does not appear to affect either the\nderivation or the essential nature of Anomalous Monism. For our\npurposes, Davidson’s central claims are that what makes an event\nmental (or physical) is that it has a mental (or physical)\ndescription, and the extensionalist thesis that events are concrete\nentities that can be described in many different ways (‘the\nflipping of the light switch’, ‘the illuminating of the\nroom’ and ‘the alerting of the burglar that someone is\nhome’ can all pick out the same one event in different terms).\n(For controversies concerning extensionalism, see\n 5.2\n and the supplement on\n Related Issues\n (Anomalous Monism and Scheme-Content Dualism).)","\nThe interaction principle states that at least some mental events\ncause and are caused by physical events (Davidson 1970, 208). This\nleaves open the possibility of mental events that do not causally\ninteract with physical events. However, given Davidson’s early\nviews about event-individuation (the causal criterion) it is unclear\nthat this possibility can be realized. His later views on\nevent-individuation appear to leave this possibility open, but his\ngeneral claims about the causal individuation of mental contents and\nattitudes (see\n 4.3\n and\n 6.3\n below) also stand in some tension with this possibility. In any case,\nDavidson goes on to say that he in fact believes that all mental\nevents causally interact with physical events (Davidson 1970, 208),\nbut he restricts his argument only to those that actually do. Given\nthe pressures just noted in favor of the inclusive reading of the\ninteraction principle, we shall assume it in what follows.","\nThe interaction claim itself should be understood as follows: some\nevents that have a mental description or instantiate a mental property\ncause and are caused by events that have a physical description or\ninstantiate a physical property. Formulating the interaction principle\nin this way both clears the way for an extensional reading of the\ncausal relation (events are causally related no matter how they are\ndescribed), and also leaves open the possibility, which Davidson will\nsubsequently argue for, that mental events in particular must have\nsome non-mental description/instantiate some non-mental property. At\nthis stage that possibility is left as an open question, but it is\nimportant to notice that for it to be an open question we need to at\nleast allow for a distinction between events and the ways in which\nthey are picked out in language."],"subsection_title":"2.1 Mental and Physical Events"},{"content":["\nThough this will be focused on separately below\n (6),\n it is also important to recognize that we are beginning with the\nassumption that mental events cause and are caused by physical events.\nMany critics of Anomalous Monism have claimed that it is difficult to\nsee how the position avoids epiphenomenalism—the view that\nmental events are causally/explanatorily impotent—and that\nAnomalous Monism is therefore unacceptable as an account of the place\nof the mental in the physical world. However, since Anomalous Monism\nis based upon the interaction principle, Davidson can claim\nin response that if Anomalous Monism is true, then mental events are\nalready known to have a kind of causal efficacy. As we shall see, this\npoint is not by itself sufficient to ward off all epiphenomenalist\nconcerns about Anomalous Monism. But it does serve to remind us of the\nfull framework within which challenges to Anomalous Monism must be\nassessed, and in particular brings out the reliance of that framework\non specific assumptions about causality (see Sections\n 4.3,\n 6, and Yalowitz 1998a).","\nWhat needs to be noted at this point is that Davidson argued early on\nfor the claim that mental events have causal efficacy, through noting\na problem for non-causal accounts of action explanation (Davidson\n1963). Mental events and states explain action by making it\nintelligible—rational—in light of the agent’s\nbeliefs and purposes. The challenge that Davidson raised for\nnon-causal theories of action explanation was to account for the fact\nthat, for any action performed, there may well be a large number of\nmental events and states true of the agent, and capable of\nrationalizing the action, but that don’t thereby\nexplain that action. The agent acted because of some\nspecific beliefs and purposes, but other beliefs and purposes of his\ncould just as easily rationalize that action, and thus be cited in its\nexplanation. Was the agent moving his hand as he did because he wanted\nto swat the fly, relieve a cramp, or wave in greeting? He may well\nhave wanted to achieve all three of these aims, but still only in fact\nperformed the action because of one of these reasons. How do\nwe understand ‘because’ so as to rule out the pretenders?\nDavidson’s claim was that it is only if we understand\n‘because’ as ‘was caused by’ that we can\njustifiably pick out the genuine explanans—thereby\nimputing causal potency to mental events.","\nWhat exactly does this argument show? It is intended to tell against\nnon-causal theories of action, which deny that reasons explain actions\nby causing them. There have been sophisticated attempts, on the behalf\nof non-causal theories of action explanation, to respond to this\nchallenge (von Wright 1971; Wilson 1985; Ginet 1995; for a good\noverview, see Stoutland 1976; and see related discussion in\n 6.3.)\n However, assuming the argument is successful, while it does establish\nmental efficacy of a kind, it does not by itself establish the\ninteraction principle. Establishing that reasons explain actions by\ncausing them, and that therefore reasons causally interact with\nactions, does not establish that reasons causally interact\nwith physical events. Dualists who reject the identity of\nmental and physical events will surely object.","\nA key point to grasp in many of the issues raised by Anomalous Monism\nis that there is an important distinction between action and behavior.\nAccording to Davidson, action is intentionally described\nbehavior—the moving of a hand through space in a certain way\nmay, but need not, be an action of waving or swatting or any action at\nall. It may simply be mere bodily behavior—as happens as the\nresult of a muscle twitch or a strong gust of wind. The behavior must\nbe caused by an agent’s beliefs and desires in order to be\naction. However, while this is necessary for action, it is not,\naccording to Davidson, sufficient. The behavior must be caused in\nthe right way by the beliefs and desires. Davidson notes the\npossibility of cases where an agent’s beliefs and desires cause\nbehavior which is not rationalized by those states, and thus not\naction. A mountain climber might become so unnerved by his desire to\nrid himself of an annoying second climber sharing his rope and belief\nthat jiggling the rope is a means for doing so that he unintentionally\njiggles the rope, leading to the loss of the second climber. This is\nnot an action—it is mere behavior that happens to him, no\ndifferent than if caused by a muscle twitch or gust of wind. It is\ncaused in the wrong way—a “deviant causal\nchain”—by the belief and desire, and so is not an action.\nDavidson is skeptical about the possibility of cashing out what it\nmeans to be caused in the right way (Davidson 1973b,\n78–9), for reasons relating to mental anomalism (Davidson 1973b,\n80; see\n 4\n for explicit discussion). The key point for now is that because\nDavidson rejects the possibility of analyzing action in terms of\nbehavior caused in a particular way by reasons, the point made by the\n‘because’ argument cannot be used to establish that mental\nevents cause physical events. It does not follow from the fact that\nreasons must cause actions in order to explain them that\nreasons must cause behavior or (the interaction principle)\nthat reasons do cause behavior. It does not entail that\nactions are physical behavior.","\nThis point is important when one considers the wider framework to\nwhich the interaction principle contributes. Since Davidson is\nattempting to derive monism from it and other principles that are\nthemselves neutral about the metaphysics of mind, he cannot assume\nthat action is (identical with) behavior on pain of circularity. Once\nmonism has been established, Davidson will be in a position to deploy\nthe ‘because’ point in order to argue for the claim that\nmental events are causally efficacious with respect to physical\nevents. How this relates to the wave of epiphenomenalist criticism\nabout Anomalous Monism will be explored in detail below\n (6,\n and see the supplement on\n Mental Properties and Causal Relevance).\n To summarize, the interaction principle is an unargued assumption in\nthe Davidsonian framework, one that does not assume monism, and the\n‘because’ argument, while important for ruling out\nnon-causal theories of action, does not itself establish the\ninteraction principle."],"subsection_title":"2.2 Mental Causation"},{"content":["\nDavidson uses the interaction principle to establish directly one part\nof mental anomalism—psychological anomalism, which\ndenies the possibility of strict, purely psychological laws of the\nform\n‘M1 & M2 → M3’\n(Davidson 1970, 224; 1974b, 243). For if physical events causally\nimpact on mental events, then the mental domain is ‘open’,\nand any laws in which mental predicates figure will have to take this\ninto account (for related discussion, see the supplement on\n Causal Closure of the Physical in the Argument for Anomalous Monism).\n More generally, physical conditions will always play some role in any\nplausible psychological generalizations, because physical intervention\n(e.g., injury) is always a possibility and can prevent the occurrence\nof the consequent ‘M3’. Thus, the only\npotentially true and strict laws in which psychological\npredicates can figure are variants of the psychophysical form\n‘P1 & M1 & M2 → M3’.\nPsychophysical anomalism, the other component of mental\nanomalism and the one that denies the possibility of such strict laws,\nis thus the view that Davidson focuses on establishing."],"subsection_title":"2.3 Psychological Anomalism"}]},{"main_content":["\nThe cause-law principle states that events related as cause and effect\nare covered by strict laws. In the earliest formulations of Anomalous\nMonism, Davidson assumed but did not argue for this principle. His\nlater argument in support of it will be considered below\n (3.2),\n along with objections to the principle\n (3.3).\n But we need to consider the nature of the requirement contained in\nthis claim, and how it relates to the framework out of which Anomalous\nMonism is deduced."],"section_title":"3. Premise II: The Cause-Law Principle","subsections":[{"content":["\nThe nature of the strict laws required by the cause-law principle is\nas follows. For any causal relationship between particular events\ne1 and e2, there must be a law\nof the form\n‘(C1 & D1) → D2’,\nwhere ‘C1’ states a set of standing\nconditions, and ‘D1’ is a description\nof e1 that is sufficient, given\nC1, for the occurrence of an event of the kind\n‘D2’, which is a description of\ne2. Traditionally, a strict law has been thought\nof as one where the condition and event-types specified in the\nantecedent are such as to guarantee that the condition or\nevent-types specified in the consequent occur—the latter\nmust occur if the former in fact obtain. But indeterministic\nor probabilistic versions of strict laws are possible as well\n(Davidson 1970, 219). The point that distinguishes strict laws is not\nso much the guaranteeing of the effect by satisfaction of the\nantecedent as the inclusion, in the antecedent, of all conditions and\nevents that can be stated that could possibly prevent the\noccurrence of the effect. A strict indeterministic law would\nbe one that specified everything required in order for some effect to\noccur. If the effect does not occur when those conditions obtain,\nthere is nothing else that could be cited in explanation of this\nfailure (other than the brute fact of an indeterministic universe).\nFor reasons of simplicity, we will assume determinism in this\ndiscussion, though what is said about strict laws could be carried\nover without remainder to strict indeterministic laws.","\nThe cause-law principle is aimed, in the first instance, at laws of\nsuccession, which cover singular causal relationships between\nevents at distinct times. However, as will become clearer below,\nmental anomalism also takes in bridge laws that would\ncorrelate simultaneous instantiations of mental and physical\npredicates as well—such as\n‘P1 → M1’,\n‘M1 → P1’,\nor\n‘P1 ↔ M1’.\nIndeed, mental anomalism rejects the possibility of any\nstrict law in which mental predicates figure (where those predicates\nfigure essentially, and are not redundant)—including (as we have\nseen\n (2.3))\n laws formulated with purely mental predicates\n(‘(M1 & M2) → M3’),\nas well as laws with mental predicates in either the antecedent or\nconsequent, such as\n‘(M1 & M2) → P1’\nand\n‘(P1 & P2) → M1’\nand mixed variants of these (see\n 4).","\nThe denial of strict laws of these forms is consistent with allowing\nhedged versions of them which are qualified by a ceteris\nparibus clause. ‘All things being equal’ or\n‘under normal conditions’, such psychological and\npsychophysical generalizations can, according to Davidson, be\njustifiably asserted (Davidson 1993, 9). As will be discussed below\n (4),\n denying the strict version of these generalizations amounts to\ndenying that the qualifying clause ‘ceteris\nparibus’ can be fully explicated. That is,\n‘ceteris paribus,\n((M1 & \nM2) → P1)’\ncannot be transformed into something like\n‘(P2 & P3 & \nM1 & M2 & M3) → \nP1’ (for a related discussion of this\nparticular issue, see the debate between Schiffer 1991 and Fodor\n1991).","\n(Davidson organizes his discussion of this transformation process, and\nAnomalous Monism more generally, around a distinction between\n‘homonomic’ and ‘heteronomic’ generalizations\n(Davidson 1970, 219). That distinction is extremely problematic for\nthe purposes of establishing Anomalous Monism, and is set aside here\nin favor of the related (but by no means identical) distinction\nbetween strict and ceteris paribus generalizations. For\ndiscussion of the former distinction, see the supplement on\n Homonomic and Heteronomic Generalizations.)"],"subsection_title":"3.1 Strict Laws"},{"content":["\nDavidson argues for the cause-law principle—that singular causal\nrelations require strict covering laws—on the basis of a\nconceptual interconnection between the concepts of physical\nobject, event and law. As he says, “our\nconcept of a physical object is the concept of an object whose changes\nare governed by laws” (Davidson 1995a, 274). The\ninterconnections are established partly in response to C.J.\nDucasse’s attempt, in reaction to Hume’s regularity theory\nof causation, to define singular causal relations without appeal to\ncovering laws (Ducasse 1926).","\nSimply put, Ducasse defined some particular event c as the\ncause of some effect e if and only if c was the only\nchange occurring in the immediate environment of e just prior\nto e. The striking of the match is the cause of the flaming\nmatch just insofar as the striking is the only change occurring in the\nimmediate vicinity of the flaming match just prior to the flaming of\nthe match. Ducasse intended this definition to rebut Hume’s\nclaim that singular causal relations between particular events must be\nanalyzed in terms of regularities between types of events (and thus\nlaws). Indeed, Ducasse claimed that Hume was wrong to deny that we\nhave the ability to perceive singular causal relations—this\ndenial being the basis for Hume’s subsequent regularity account\n (see 3.3).\n For, according to Ducasse, we can perceive that some event is the\nonly change in the immediate environment of some subsequent event just\nprior to that event’s occurrence. (We can, of course, be wrong\nin thinking that this is what we have in fact perceived. But as\nDucasse points out, the same problem plagues Hume’s own\naccount—we can be wrong that what we have perceived are\ninstances of types which bear a regular relation to each other. But\nthis does not lead Hume to hold that since we can’t infallibly\nperceive that some succession is an instance of a regularity, we\ncannot form the concept of causality in terms of regularity. The same\nthus applies to Ducasse’s own account.)","\nDavidson notes the heavy dependence, in Ducasse’s account, on\nthe notion of a ‘change’. And he asks whether we really\nhave a purchase on this concept absent appeal to laws. There are two\naspects of this concern. First, the notion of ‘change’ is\nshort for ‘change of predicate’—a change occurs when\na predicate true of some object (or not true of that object) ceases to\nbe true (or comes to be true) of that object. And this leads directly\nto questions about how predicates are individuated and their\nrelationship to laws (see below). Second, and at a more general level,\nthe notion of ‘change’ has itself changed over\ntime—for instance, Newtonian mechanics defines a change\ndifferently than Aristotelian physics, so that continuous motion\ncounts as a change, and thus requires an explanation, according to the\nlatter but not the former. Thus, the very notion of\n‘change’ is theory dependent, and therefore (Davidson\nholds) presupposes the notion of ‘law’, in the sense that\nsomething counts as a change, and thus as having a cause, only against\na background of theoretical principles.","\nThis second point does not appear to deliver the result Davidson is\nafter—establishing that each causal interaction must be covered\nby a particular strict law. The claim that something is a change, and\nthus has a cause, only if certain theoretical assumptions are in place\nis consistent with the claim that those assumptions (for instance,\nthat uniform rectilinear motion does not count as a change) cannot\nplay the explanatory role for specific causal interactions that strict\nlaws are supposed to play. They are simply of too general a\nnature—they don’t enable predictions or explanations of\nany particular events. And in any case, there appears to be nothing in\nDavidson’s considerations here that forces the requirement that\nthe covering laws be strict as opposed to irreducibly ceteris\nparibus. (As we have already seen\n (3.1),\n Davidson himself has insisted upon the legitimacy and ubiquity of\nsuch laws in scientific explanation.)","\nReturning to the first point about predicate-individuation, Davidson\nclaims that “it is just the predicates which are projectible,\nthe predicates that enter into valid inductions, that determine what\ncounts as a change” (Davidson 1995a, 272). We know from Nelson\nGoodman’s ‘new riddle of induction’ (Goodman 1983)\nthat we can invent predicates, such as ‘grue’ and\n‘bleen’ (where an object is grue if it is green and\nexamined before 2020 or otherwise blue, and an object is bleen if it\nis blue and examined before 2020 or otherwise green) so that a green\nobject goes from being grue to bleen over the course of time without\nhaving changed in any intuitive sense. It will continue to be green,\nthough it will also be true that it ceases to be grue and comes to be\nbleen. Contrary to much discussion of Goodman’s riddle, Davidson\nholds that such unusual predicates can be projectible, and figure in\nlaws, but only when appropriately paired with other such predicates (\n“All emeralds are grue” is not lawlike, but “All\nemerires are grue” is (where “emerire” is true of\nemeralds examined before 2020 or otherwise sapphires ). What is\ncrucial for Davidson is that to understand the notion of change, which\nis so closely tied to the notion of causation, one must understand the\nnotion of a projectible predicate—one appropriate for use in\nscience—and this notion inevitably brings in the notion of law.\nChanges are described by predicates suitable for inclusion within\nlaws. But how does this relate to the cause-law principle? Once again,\nit is unclear why Davidson would think that it is the notion of a\nstrict law in particular that this line of argument\nmotivates.","\nA related line of argument that Davidson offers (see\n 4.3)\n appears to suggest that dispositional predicates—those defined\nin terms of the effects they tend to bring about—are not\nsuitable for inclusion in strict laws (generalizations in which they\nfigure are always qualified by a ceteris paribus clause), but\nthere must be strict laws at the bottom, so to speak, of the\ndispositional vocabulary. Davidson’s discussion of this issue\nrefers back to an older debate about the status of dispositional\nterms—specifically, whether they are ‘place-holders’\nfor predicates that are non-dispositional (‘intrinsic’ or\n‘manifest’) (see Goodman 1983, 41ff). Whatever one’s\nview about that issue, it again does not appear that Davidson has\nprovided adequate argument for establishing that strict laws\n(as opposed to ceteris paribus laws) are required for our\ndispositional vocabulary to operate as it does. So Davidson does not\nappear to have provided the cause-law principle with a plausible\nrationale (for skepticism about the principle, see Anscombe 1971,\nCartwright 1983, McDowell 1985, Hornsby 1985 and 1993, and\n 3.3 below).\n This is not to say that it is false, or even that it is implausible\nto assume it in his argument for Anomalous Monism. Many find the\nprinciple highly intuitive, and it is worthwhile to explore its\nrelation to the other central claims in Davidson’s\nframework."],"subsection_title":"3.2 Justifying the Cause-Law Principle"},{"content":["\nThe cause-law principle has come in for a lot of criticism since it\nreceived its canonical formulation in Hume’s regularity theory\nof causation, and it is worth briefly reviewing some of the central\nobjections relevant to Davidson’s own discussions. This will\nmake clear how important it is, for an argument such as\nDavidson’s for Anomalous Monism, that some justification for the\nthesis ultimately be provided.","\nAn initial objection is that Hume’s analysis of singular causal\nstatements (‘a caused b’ is true if and\nonly if ‘whenever an A occurs, it is followed by an\noccurrence of a B’), which articulates his own version\nof the cause-law principle, is not an accurate rendering of the way in\nwhich we typically use the term ‘cause’. We are confident\nin judgments such as ‘Harry’s smoking caused his lung\ncancer’ while knowing that in fact not all smokers are stricken\nby lung cancer. This point is entirely general—we make singular\ncausal judgments all the time without believing in (indeed, while\nknowing the falsity of) the associated universal generalization (see\nAnscombe 1971). However, Davidson’s extensionalism about\ncausality provides a straightforward response to this concern. His\nview is that while we may not believe in the associated universal\ngeneralization, that is consistent with there being some\nuniversal generalization, stated in a different vocabulary than the\nsingular causal statement, which ‘covers’ that statement.\n(It is worth noting that Davidson rejects Hume’s\nanalysis of singular causal statements in terms of universal\ngeneralizations—he holds that the requirement of such a covering\ngeneralization is necessary but not sufficient for the truth of such a\nstatement (Davidson 1967).)","\nWhile this response does appear to meet the objection, it raises the\nfollowing concern, which is behind a related objection to the\ncause-law principle: no one in fact seems to know any true predictive\n‘strict’ laws (in the literal sense of that term). Now,\nwhile it is certainly consistent with this point that there are or\neven must be such laws, it becomes more pressing to know why we should\nthink this if we cannot even offer any examples. It is well and good\nfor Davidson to point to the possibility of strict covering laws that\ntranscend our current knowledge, but we need to know why we should\nbelieve in such things. Science seems to have done well for itself\nwithout any apparent use of them.","\nAnother objection to the cause-law principle comes from the state of\ncontemporary physics. According to quantum mechanics, it is not simply\ndifficult or impossible for us to state such laws for quantum\nphenomena. Rather, quantum theory appears to entail that determinism\nfails to obtain at the level of microparticles. What the theory and\nthe behavior of such particles tells us is that causation, at least at\nthe level of micro phenomena, is indeterministic. And this\nindeterminism is claimed to be inconsistent with the requirement of\nstrict laws. This objection to the cause-law principle, then, is that\nphilosophy should never dictate to science on empirical matters.\nObservation of the world tells us that strict laws are impossible in\nthis domain even while causation is present, in direct contradiction\nof the cause-law principle.","\nNow, we have already seen Davidson’s own response to this sort\nof objection\n (3.1).\n As traditionally construed, strict laws are supposed to guarantee the\nconsequent condition on the basis of the antecedent condition. But\nthey do not need to provide such a guarantee. What strict laws require\nis that the antecedent include all conditions and events that could\npossibly prevent the occurrence of the consequent. If the consequent\ndoes not occur when all these conditions have been accounted for,\nthere is nothing else to be cited in explanation of the non-occurrence\nother than the sheer brute fact of an indeterministic universe. So\nindeterministic causation is entirely consistent with the cause-law\nprinciple (Davidson 1970, 219). The determinist/indeterminist and\nstrict/nonstrict law distinctions do not map neatly onto each other.\nAn indeterministic law can be universal, exceptionless and true. This\npoint does not appear to be recognized by central proponents of the\nindeterministic objection to strict laws (see Cartwright 1983).","\nA final objection to the cause-law principle which is more internal to\nthe wider framework of Anomalous Monism has been put forth in McDowell\n1985. McDowell sees a tension between Davidson’s allegiance to\nthe cause-law principle and his rejection of ‘the dualism of\nscheme and content’ (Davidson 1974a). Briefly, the dualism\nDavidson opposes is the idea that, for instance, a perceptual judgment\nis the rational upshot of an interaction between a concept and an\nnonconceptualized experiential element—the sensory input. Given\nDavidson’s systematic rejection of this idea, McDowell believes\nhe ought to disavow the cause-law principle. McDowell doesn’t\nthink the principle is required for a minimal version of materialism\n(see the supplement on\n Related Views\n (Bare Materialism), and without the need to justify materialism\nMcDowell sees the principle as lacking any motivation in\nDavidson’s framework. For discussion of this issue and others\nrelated to scheme-content dualism and Anomalous Monism, see the\nsupplement on\n Related Issues\n (Anomalous Monism and Scheme-Content Dualism)."],"subsection_title":"3.3 Objections to the Cause-Law Principle"}]},{"main_content":["\nThe anomalism principle states that there are no strict laws on the\nbasis of which mental events can predict, explain, or be predicted or\nexplained by other events. In this section we look at different\ninterpretations of the argument for this principle. Davidson’s\nown formulations, while suggestive, are notoriously vague and often\nappeal to very different sorts of considerations, including aspects of\nlanguage and interpretation, questions about psychological\nexplanation, and the nature of causality and dispositions. We shall be\nlooking at specific interpretations as well as the problems they face\nin providing a compelling rationale for both the anomalism principle\nand Anomalous Monism.","\nWhile differing in important ways, the various formulations of the\nargument, as well as the objections to them, exhibit a discernible\npattern: proponents of mental anomalism highlight some feature of\nmental properties that is claimed to (1) sharply individuate them from\nphysical properties and (2) create a conceptual tension with physical\nproperties that precludes the possibility of strict lawful relations\nbetween these properties. According to the objections, however, the\nhighlighted feature of mental properties either does not serve to\ndistinguish it from physical properties or does not actually stand in\nany conceptual tension with physical properties that rules out lawlike\nrelations. We will consider each interpretation, and its problems, in\nturn. In a later section\n (5.3)\n we will look at another objection related to the anomalism\nprinciple—that it is inconsistent with Davidson’s\ninvocation of the doctrine that mental properties stand in a relation\nof supervenience to physical properties. For discussion of the\nrelation between the anomalism principle and Davidson’s views\nabout scheme-content dualism and semantic externalism, see the\nsupplement on\n Related Issues.","\nMental anomalism, as initially formulated by Davidson, holds that\nthere can be no strict laws on the basis of which mental events can be\npredicted and explained (Davidson 1970, 208). It is thus restricted to\nruling out strict laws of succession with mental predicates occurring\nin the consequent—laws such as\n‘P1 → M1’,\n‘(M1 & P1) → M2’,\nor\n‘M1 → M2’.\nIt thus denies that the occurrence of particular mental events such as\ncoming to believe or intend something, or intentionally acting in some\nway, can be explained by appeal to strict covering laws. But as\nbecomes clear, Davidson’s considered position rejects the\npossibility of any strict laws in which mental predicates\nfigure—and this includes, in particular, bridge laws of the form\n‘P1 ↔ M1’,\nwhich form the basis of type-identity theories of mind, as well as any\nstrict laws with mental antecedents. We have already seen how strict\npurely psychological laws are ruled out by the interaction principle\n (2.3).\n And, at a more general level, it rules out purported solutions to the\nproblem of deviant causal chains noted in\n 2.2,\n which would spell out, in terms of some required physical and also,\nperhaps, mental conditions, how behavior must be caused by reasons\n(“caused in the right way”) in order to be action. (That\nsome physical conditions are necessary in such an analysis is\nguaranteed, as we have seen\n (2.3),\n by the open nature of the mental and subsequent psychological\nanomalism.) Any such adequate analysis of action would entail\nparticular psychophysical laws of the form\n‘(M1 & M2 & M3 & P1) → P2’.\nFor such an analysis would state that whatever behavior\n(P2) which in fact is caused in the right way\n(M3 & P1) by\nreasons\n(M1 & M2) would\nbe the action that is rationalized by those reasons. This\nprovides a schema for generating strict psychophysical laws: by\nplugging in particular reasons and the causal conditions\nP1 and M3 proffered by the\nanalysis, we get a strict predictive psychophysical law simply by\nnoting what effect is produced by these causes. (In the course of an\nextended discussion of the problem of deviant causal chains, Bishop\n1989, 125–75, fails to see this connection between it and mental\nanomalism—see 164.) With strict purely psychological laws thus\nalready ruled out, the focus now is on strict psychophysical laws.","\nIt is useful to view Davidson’s attack against psychophysical\nlaws in light of an argument, in vogue in the 1950s and 1960s, against\nthe claim that reasons are causes of the actions they explain. This\nargument was referred to as the “Logical Connection\nArgument” (see Stoutland 1970). According to this argument,\nreasons cannot be held to explain actions by causing them because (1)\ncauses and effects must be logically distinct from each other (one of\nHume’s requirements on causality) but (2) reasons and the\nactions they explain bear a quasi-logical connection to each other, by\nvirtue of the rationalizing relation between them. That relationship\nis quasi-logical because not just any reason can explain any\naction—only those reasons which actually rationalize (make\nintelligible) an action can explain it. Davidson’s own\ninfluential response to this argument was to distinguish between\ncausal relations, which obtain between events no matter how they are\ndescribed, and logical relations, which obtain between particular\ndescriptions of events. The Logical Connection Argument fails to\nrecognize this simple distinction. The distinction allowed Davidson to\nmerge two key ideas in his theory of action—that reasons explain\nby causing, and that they explain by rationalizing (Davidson 1963,\n13–17). As we shall see below, however, Davidson appears to\naccept a basic distinction at the heart of the Logical Connection\nArgument—that the rationalizing relationship bears a certain key\nproperty (quasi-logical status) that is at odds with the relationship\nbetween physically described, causally related events."],"section_title":"4. Premise III: The Anomalism Principle","subsections":[{"content":["\nDavidson’s explicit considerations in favor of mental anomalism\nappeal to factors about the interpretation of action (linguistic as\nwell as non-linguistic) and the ascription of mental states and events\nto persons. Several distinguishable features are noted—holism\nwith respect to particular ascriptions, indeterminacy with respect to\nsystematic interpretative frameworks, and the responsiveness of mental\nascription to an ideal of rationality. According to holism, particular\nmental states can be cited in explanation of behavior only in the\ncontext of other mental states, which in turn depend upon others.\nDavidson claims that this dependency and holistic interrelatedness is\n“without limit” (Davidson 1970, 217). This echoes a\nrelated point he makes about the impossibility of definitional\nreduction of mental states in purely behavioristic terms, because of\nthe ineliminable need for mental caveats (e.g., that the person\nunderstands, or notices or cares….) qualifying any attempt to\nstate non-mental conditions for mental states.","\nDavidson presents these claims about definitional reduction as facts\nwhich “provide at best hints of why we should not expect\nnomological connections between the mental the physical”\n(Davidson 1970, 217). If definitional reduction of this kind were in\nfact impossible, it would rule out the possibility of a subclass of\nstrict psychophysical laws—those relating mental states with\nnon-intentionally described behavior—but the basis for this\nimpossibility would not have been explained. In fact, however, without\nknowing what that basis is supposed to be, we have no reason to accept\nDavidson’s claim that definitional reduction is indeed\nimpossible. What prevents us from articulating all the required\ncaveats? Without a rationale in hand, nothing prevents a reductionist\nfrom simply offering us detailed definitions and challenging us to\ncome up with counterexamples. Something both principled and convincing\nis clearly needed. Davidson’s concerns about definitional\nreduction are ‘hints’ concerning nomological reduction\nonly in the sense that they draw out our intuitions about something\nstanding in the way of formulating such laws. What that obstacle is\nneeds clear formulation.","\nAt times, Davidson appeared to flirt with the idea that the missing\nlink was provided by the thesis of the indeterminacy of translation,\ndeveloped by W.V Quine (1960) and endorsed by Davidson (1970, 222;\n1979). This thesis claims that there are empirically adequate but\nnon-equivalent complete frameworks for assigning linguistic meanings\nand mental states to a person on the basis of his behavior, and that\nthere is no fact of the matter that determines that one but not other\nsuch frameworks is correct. In particular, there are no physical\nfacts, inside a person’s body or head or outside in the external\nworld, that could settle whether a person’s words refer to some\ndeterminate range of objects rather than some other range, or whether\none rather than another systematically interdependent set of mental\nstates, with distinct distributions of truth values, is true of that\nperson (see Davidson 1979). If the indeterminacy thesis is true, then\non the face of it there would be some rationale for rejecting the\npossibility of psychophysical laws. For if all physical facts are\nconsistent with different psychological/semantic assignments, then it\nseems that knowing all the physical facts could not tell us whether\nsome mental states were true of some person, or some meaning true of\nher words—neither could be exceptionlessly predicted or\nexplained, just as mental anomalism maintains.","\nThere are two problems with this, however. First, this would do\nnothing to rule out certain psychophysical laws, such as those of the\nform\n‘M1 → P1’.\nAnd so it couldn’t ground the completely general thesis\nof mental anomalism. But more importantly, Davidson himself holds that\nthe least controversial versions of indeterminacy, having to do with\ndiverging reference schemes, amount to mere notational\nvariance—as he puts it, meaning is what is invariant between\nempirically adequate translation schemes (Davidson 1977, 225; 1999a,\n81). And given that such schemes are generated through a purely\nmechanical permutation function (Davidson 1979, 229–30) it is a\nrelatively simple technical trick to take these different schemes into\naccount when formulating psychophysical laws. The laws, for instance,\ncould be formulated with disjunctive predicates\n(‘P1 → (M1 ∨ M2 ∨ M3’).\nOr, if such predicates are considered problematic, the laws could be\nof the form\n‘P1 → M*’,\nwhere ‘M*’ picks out the invariant element\nbetween the empirically equivalent theories. So it is not at all clear\nthat indeterminacy in and of itself is capable of supporting an\nacross-the-board rejection of strict psychological or psychophysical\nlaws. And Davidson ultimately acknowledges this, in stating that\nanomalism would hold even if indeterminacy didn’t (Davidson\n1970, 222)."],"subsection_title":"4.1 The Holism/Indeterminacy Arguments"},{"content":["\nWhat is responsible for the possibility of indeterminacy, however, is\nthe role of the principle of charity in formulating a theory of\nanother person’s behavior (Davidson 1970, 222–23). And\nthis principle is closely aligned for Davidson with mental anomalism.\nAccording to this principle, we must “try for a theory that\nfinds him consistent, a believer of truths, and a lover of the good\n(all by our own lights, it goes without saying)” (Davidson 1970,\n222). In the process of coming to understand another, by ascribing\nmental states and events to him and meanings to his words, we must,\nDavidson claims, stand ready to adjust previous assignments of\nmeanings and mental states and events based upon new evidence about\nthe person and how it relates to the overall project of finding him\nand his behavior intelligible. There are two key points here that for\nDavidson suggest mental anomalism. First, we never have all possible\nevidence—we must maintain an openness to better interpretations\nof previous behavior as new evidence becomes available. Interpretation\nis always ongoing. And second, ‘better’ interpretations\nare those made in light of the constitutive ideal of rationality.\nConsequently, Davidson claims, ","\n\n\nthere cannot be tight connections between the realms [of the mental\nand the physical] if each is to retain allegiance to its proper source\nof evidence. (Davidson 1970, 222)\n","\nRationality is claimed by Davidson to be constitutive of the\nmental in the sense that something only counts as being a\nmind—and thus an appropriate object of psychological\nattributions—if it meets up to certain rational standards. This\nconstitutive idea is open to weaker and stronger interpretations. The\nweaker interpretation sees only very basic logical, semantic or\nconceptual constraints on understanding others—and thus what is\nconstitutive of minds—which allows for significant variation as\none moves further out from these to more substantive principles of\npractical reasoning and theoretical reasoning, and even more when\nextending out further to desires and values. The stronger\ninterpretation appears to be suggested in the quote from Davidson\nimmediately above. In requiring consistency, true beliefs and\nappropriate desires, it appears to require maximizing agreement\nbetween interpreter and interpreted, and thus a maximal conception of\nwhat is constitutive of minds. The weaker interpretation instead\nrequires merely minimizing inexplicable error on the part of the\ncreature being interpreted, thus allowing for significant deviations\nfrom psychological assignments that might be required by the stronger\ninterpretation. On this view, the interpreter puts himself into the\nshoes of the interpreted, acknowledging evidential and cognitive\nlimitations that might prevent her from achieving maximal rationality\n(Grandy 1973). As we will see in this section, how one interprets the\nnotion of rationality as constitutive directly affects how the\nargument for mental anomalism is interpreted to work.","\nWhile Davidson never offers any substantive account of what the proper\nsource of evidence is for the physical, he often invokes the notion of\nrationality as constraining mental ascription, and it is clear that\nwhatever constrains physical ascription is supposed to pull in a\ndifferent and potentially conflicting direction. One suggestive way of\ngetting at Davidson’s idea here is through the traditional\ndistinction between ‘normative’ and\n‘descriptive’ concepts. When we look to uncover\ngeneralizations in the physically described world, what we find to\nfollow from a certain set of physical conditions is a brute\nfact; our world is constituted in certain ways (in its governing\nlaws) that we could imagine to be different. We may come to an\nempirical investigation with certain theoretical commitments that\ninevitably lead us to read the data in some ways rather than others;\nand there may indeed, as Davidson himself suggests, be constitutive\na priori principles that govern very basic physical concepts\nsuch as ‘object’ and ‘event’ (Davidson 1970,\n220; 1974b, 239; 1973a, 254; see\n 3.2\n above). However, the constraints are far looser and allow for a wide\nvariation in terms of empirical content—of what physical events\nand states can follow from others. This is contrasted with mental\nascription, where the normative notion of rationality rules out the\npossibility of certain mental states following from others. This line\nof thinking is suggestive, but it is in need of considerable\ntightening.","\nJaegwon Kim’s account of Davidson’s position (Kim 1985)\nattempts to do just this. Kim argues that if there were strict lawlike\nrelations between mental and physical predicates, the ‘brute\nfactness’ and contingency of the physical would\n‘infect’ the mental. For instance, rationality\nconsiderations will typically lead us to attribute a belief that q to\na person if we attribute a belief that p and also attribute a\nbelief that p entails q. According to Kim’s account, beliefs\ninvolving very basic logical, semantic or conceptual relations like\nthis hold of necessity—we cannot make sense of possible worlds\nwhere beliefs of the first two kinds are attributed but not the\nthird.","\nNow, this may appear to be too strong a claim, in light of\nDavidson’s rejection of strict, purely psychological\nlaws—mental anomalism rejects the possibility of any strict laws\nin which mental predicates figure, but Kim here appears to be\ndeploying laws of the form\n‘M1 & M2 → M3’.\nKim would reply that Davidson is only interested in rejecting strict\ndescriptive (i.e., explanatory, predictive) laws, not strict normative\nlaws (see below). ","\nIf physical predicates stood in strict lawful relations to mental\npredicates, this contingency would ‘infect’ the mental in\nthe following sense. Suppose that there were strict bridge laws\ncorrelating the instantiation of mental and physical properties,\n‘P1 ↔ M1’\nand\n‘P2 ↔ M2’.\nThen, Kim argues, rational principles of the form\n‘M1 → \nM2’ would enable the logical derivation of\nphysical laws like\n‘P1 → P2’.\nIndeed, the reverse would be true as well; starting with the physical\nlaw\n‘P1 → P2’,\nand assuming the psychophysical bridge laws, one could derive the\nrational principle\n‘M1 → M2’.\nHowever, the metaphysical status of the rational principle and the\nphysical law are importantly different—rational principles are\nnecessary, true in all possible worlds, while physical laws, being\ncontingent, are not. In particular, with the bridge laws in place, a\ncontingent physical law could explain (through derivation) the\nrational principle, undermining its status as necessary. Since it is\nthe bridge laws that enable these troublemaking derivations,\nthey—and thus strict psychophysical laws—are to be\nrejected. This is how Kim makes sense of Davidson’s suggestive\nclaim that mental anomalism is grounded in the fact that mental and\nphysical explanation owe their allegiance to different sources of\nevidence. (For related discussion, see the supplement on\n Explanatory Epiphenomenalism.)","\nKim’s argument rests upon two central assumptions. First, it\nassumes that no distinction between strict and ceteris\nparibus laws need play any role in reconstructions of\nDavidson’s argument. It is, purportedly, not the scope\nof a psychological law which accounts for an asymmetry with physical\nlaws, but rather the point of each type of law (Kim 1985,\n381). Second, it assumes that there is a firm distinction between\ndescriptive laws and relations, on the one hand, and normative laws\nand relations, on the other, that can bear the weight of mental\nanomalism (Kim 1985, 383) The first assumption is clearly mistaken; as\nalready noted, Davidson heavily emphasizes the focus on strict laws in\nhis own discussions of Anomalous Monism, and explicitly allows for the\npossibility of hedged laws incorporating mental predicates.\nKim’s reductio strategy, then, would fail to uniquely\nidentify the culprit responsible for producing the trouble as the\nbridge laws rather than the rational principle, all of which\nare strict. And while Davidson does emphasize the normative status of\nmental predicates, he also recognizes, as we have already noted\n (3.2\n and\n 4.2),\n a normative component to the physical realm, in constitutive a\npriori principles. There does not appear to be a significant\ndistinction between descriptive and normative principles in\nDavidson’s framework that can bear the burden of mental\nanomalism, as required on Kim’s interpretation. (For further\ndiscussion of Kim’s interpretative strategy, see the supplement\non\n Kim’s Reductio Strategy for Establishing Mental Anomalism.)","\nJohn McDowell also focuses on the normative nature of rationality, but\nemphasizes a very strong conception of rationality as an ideal\nconstitutive of the mental, taking in more than merely the familiar\ndeductive relations—logical, semantic or\nconceptual—deployed in Kim’s reading (McDowell 1985,\n391–4). McDowell appears to be guided by some of\nDavidson’s broader formulations and discussions of the principle\nof charity\n (4.2),\n which extend to more general principles governing action and belief\nformation, highlighted in Davidson’s discussions of\nirrationality (see Davidson 1982). For example, the principle of\ncontinence requires one to act on the basis of all available\nconsiderations, and the principle of total evidence requires one to\nbelieve the hypothesis supported by all of one’s evidence. And\nthe broad formulations entail that our conception of rationality\nincludes conceptions of the Good, and so the formation of rationally\nappropriate desires, thus extending beyond constraints on belief and\naction. According to McDowell, those inclined to think that mere\ndeductive relations can be captured in physical terms (see Loar 1981)\nwill find mental anomalism much more difficult to deny when taking\ninto account this stronger conception of rationality. ","\nThis stronger conception of rationality puts McDowell in a position to\nexploit a crucial gap between rational norms and actual explanations\nof behavior:","\n\n\nFinding an action or propositional attitude intelligible, after\ninitial difficulty, may not only involve managing to articulate for\noneself some hitherto merely implicit aspect of one’s conception\nof rationality, but actually involve becoming convinced that\none’s conception of rationality needed correcting, so as to make\nroom for this novel way of being intelligible. (McDowell 1985,\n392)\n","\nJust as our beliefs about empirical matters can be mistaken in any\ngiven case, and we can make genuine discoveries about empirical\nreality, just so with rationality. Clearly this claim is much more\nplausible with the stronger conception of rationality that McDowell is\nurging than the weaker conception limited to mere deductive relations.\nMcDowell goes on to argue that because of this feature, we must be\nopen to the possible reinterpretation of a person’s behavior and\npsychological states in light of our changing conception of\nrationality, and how it changes cannot be anticipated in advance so\nthat rationality could be captured in a permanent set of principles\nfrom which strict laws could be fashioned. For this reason,\nrationality is uncodifiable. According to McDowell, this is\nwhat underlies mental anomalism.","\nOne might understand the reasoning here in the following way: because\nit is built into our conception of rationality that our own particular\ngrasp of rationality may be mistaken on any given occasion and is also\ninherently limited, no statement of psychological or psychophysical\ngeneralizations could exhaust, and therefore explain, our conception\nof rationality. If the concept of rationality does not simply\nconsist in one’s conception, at any given time, of\nrationality, then it cannot be captured in terms of the\nactual goings on in one’s brain (the same point applies\nif we substitute “everyone’s” for\n“one’s”). Therefore, strict lawlike relations\nbetween the mental and the physical are impossible. This contrasts\ninterestingly with Kim’s strategy: on McDowell’s reading,\nit is partly because no detailed statement of a rational principle\ncould be claimed to be necessarily true that there can be no\npsychophysical laws.","\nA number of questions arise in considering McDowell’s argument.\nIt appears to be heavily influenced by Davidson’s remarks about\nthe ongoing nature of interpretation (Davidson 1970, 223;\n see 4.2).\n However, Davidson appeals to the fact that new\nevidence—in the form of behavior and environmental\ncontext—is always coming in that can force us to revise existing\ninterpretations of an agent. There is no mention of shifting\nstandards, or unarticulated or inarticulable conceptions of\nrationality. Indeed, the implication is that a stable\nstandard, when taking into account new evidence, can lead to revised\ninterpretations of prior behavior. So McDowell appears to be going\nbeyond Davidson’s own views about the concept of rationality.\nIndeed, the idea that one is not able to fully articulate a concept in\nthe way suggested by McDowell—that it is in effect\nineffable –does not clearly sit comfortably with\nDavidson’s views about conceptual relativism and rejection of\nthe idea of untranslatable languages (see further the supplement on\n Related Issues\n (Anomalous Monism and Scheme-Content Dualism).","\nFurther, and more importantly, McDowell’s distinctive\nuncodifiability claim, which rests on this view of rationality, looks\nto be too general to underwrite a specific thesis like mental\nanomalism. This becomes apparent when one asks why the very same\nfeatures that he is insisting are true of our conception of\nrationality aren’t also true of the key concepts that figure in\nexplanations of the physical world. Surely our concepts of physical\nreality outstrip any particular conception we have at any given time,\nand the possibility of mistaken application is built into them. And\nscientists are in the same position as interpreters in terms of the\npossibility of new evidence and its bearing on how previous evidence\nwas understood. So far this looks to be nothing more than a\ncombination of a completely general point about concepts together with\nthe familiar problem of induction, which plagues all empirical\nenquiry. McDowell’s assertion that “someone who aims at\nexplanations of the ideal-involving kind must be alive to the thought\nthat there is sure to be a gap between actual current conception and\nideal structure in his own case as well as others” (McDowell\n1985, 392) doesn’t appear to uniquely pick out any particular\nexplanatory framework. It therefore cannot tell us anything\ndistinctive about the metaphysical status of psychology.","\nIf, however, the emphasis here falls on constitutive\nprinciples in particular—as surely it must—then two other\nproblems arise. First, McDowell’s reasoning doesn’t tell\nus what exactly it is about such principles that makes them resistant\nto reduction, since, as we’ve just seen, that reasoning has\nfailed to distinguish them from empirical concepts in the physical\nsciences. And second, as noted in\n 4.2,\n Davidson holds that there are constitutive a priori\nprinciples underlying the physical sciences which play a similar role\nthere that rationality plays in psychological explanation. So we are\nstill in need of an explanation of why psychology and physics cannot\nstand in strict lawlike relations. Now, we did note there that such\nphysical constitutive principles are far more lenient than\nrationality, allowing for a greater variety of empirical\ncontent—of what can follow from what. This indeed accounts for\nan important asymmetry between mental and physical explanation. And\nMcDowell heavily emphasizes this point in his discussion: that it is\nnot merely a brute fact that rationality marks the limits of\nintelligibility, while physical explanations do bottom out in brute\nfacts (McDowell 1985, 394). However, this point appears to be entirely\nseparable from the distinctive feature of McDowell’s reading of\nthe argument for mental anomalism—it has nothing especially to\ndo with the idea of rationality as uncodifiable in\nMcDowell’s specific sense. In fact, it is the key point behind\nKim’s strategy, and it appears to have no essential connection\nto McDowell’s stronger views about rationality. One can think of\nrationality as constitutive, as normative and as asymmetrical to the\nphysical in the way just noted—as Kim does—without buying\ninto McDowell’s distinctive picture of it. So it looks like the\nsalvageable part of McDowell’s actual argument for mental\nanomalism ultimately reduces to Kim’s. Uncodifiability appears\nto be a red herring.","\nTherefore, despite McDowell’s extremely subtle and interesting\nviews about the nature of the ideal of rationality, in the end those\nviews do not appear to provide a secure foundation for mental\nanomalism. It is only what is shared in common with Kim’s\nstrategy—the modal asymmetry between rational and physical\nexplanation—that bears directly on mental anomalism. And that\nleaves McDowell’s reading facing the sorts of concerns raised in\n 4.2.1.","\nAs we have seen above, Kim thinks that mental anomalism is susceptible\nof a kind of proof. This seems to be something stronger than Davidson\nhimself claims (Davidson 1970, 215). In light of Davidson’s\nmodesty about provability, and lack of explicit argumentation, some\ncommentators (Child 1992; see also McDowell 1979) have suggested that\nmere reflection on the kinds of generalizations that we draw upon in\ncoming to understand each other supports (but cannot prove) mental\nanomalism. Such generalizations are rules of thumb that hold only for\nthe most part, and require, for their application to a given case,\ndetailed contextual supplementation that cannot, by its nature, be\nincluded in anything like a universal generalization. The suggestion\nis that the sheer amount of contextual detail that would need to be\naccounted for in any statement with even a hope of being true is\ninappropriate for inclusion in strict lawful statements. A related\nstrategy is to point to a lack of fixed, predetermined ends that all\nhumans (or even any particular human over the course of her life) aim\nfor in situations of choice, or values to maximize when deciding what\nto believe (such as simplicity, scope, and consistency in the case of\ntheory choice) (Child 1992). The thought here is that if there are no\nsuch fixed ends or values, then no psychological generalization could\nbe complete—since in particular contexts such ends or values\nplay a crucial explanatory role in determining what to do or\nbelieve.","\nIt would seem, however, that reflection on the level of detail\nrequired for strict laws in the physical sciences fails to provide for\nan interesting asymmetry here. If one considers the number of factors\nthat would have to be taken in to account in order to state conditions\nthat guarantee that when a match is struck it will produce a flame,\nthe resulting strict law would be quite complex, and in a way not\nobviously different from any putative strict laws in which mental\npredicates figure, with contextual features included. And if there are\nindeed no fixed ends or values in the realm of choice and a decision,\nthis can be accommodated in the same way—the contextual ends or\nvalues could themselves be included in the putative strict laws. This\nwould complicate and expand the set of such laws, but as already noted\nthis is not something that would set mental generalizations apart from\nphysical ones. (For further discussion of rationality and the argument\nfor Anomalous Monism see Yalowitz 1997 and Latham 1999.)"],"subsection_title":"4.2 The Rationality Arguments"},{"content":["\nWe have been looking at different ways of making sense of and\njustifying Davidson’s claim that mental anomalism stems from the\nconstitutive role of rationality in mental ascription. In\nDavidson’s writings, however, another line of argument often\nsurfaces which focuses less on the rational nature of mental events\nand more on their causal nature. As we have already seen, in his\nearliest work on action Davidson argued that reasons explain actions\nby causing them, and he later came to emphasize that what makes mental\nstates and events what they are is determined in part by their causes\nand effects. Particular psychological explanations are causal (they\ninvoke causes—Davidson 1963), and are formulated in terms of\ncausally defined concepts (for propositional attitudes, see Davidson\n1987b, 41; for mental contents, see Davidson 1987a, 44). In later work\nhe frequently notes the anomic nature of causal concepts and causal\nexplanations, and how mental properties and reasons explanations are\nanomic because of this—“reason-explanations…are in\nsome sense low-grade; they explain less than the best explanations in\nthe hard sciences because of their heavy dependence on causal\npropensities” (Davidson 1987b, 42; see also Davidson 1991, 162).\nIf mental concepts are causally defined, and strict laws do not employ\ncausally defined concepts, then mental anomalism appears to follow\nstraight away, without need of any detour through issues concerning\nthe rationality of mental concepts.","\nExtending this reasoning, Davidson writes that","\n\n\n[m]ental concepts…appeal to causality because they are\ndesigned, like the concept of causality itself, to single out from the\ntotality of circumstances which conspire to cause a given event just\nthose factors that satisfy some particular explanatory interest.\n(Davidson 1991, 163)\n","\nThis appears to ground the causal definition of anomic properties\n(whether mental or otherwise) in the fact that they answer to\nparticular explanatory interests. This is contrasted with the case of\n‘ultimate physical’ properties: “Explanation in\nterms of the ultimate physics, though it answers to various interests,\nis not interest relative” (Davidson 1987b, 45). This seems to\ncollapse the distinction between psychology and all the other special\nsciences with respect to the question of anomalism. All of the latter\nanswer to particular explanatory interests, and are thus\nselective with respect to the total sufficient condition for\nan effect-type (see Davidson 1987b, 45); the causal definition, and\nthus anomalism, of their vocabularies is owed to this\ninterest-relativity and selectivity. ‘Ultimate physics’,\non the other hand, “treats everything without exception as a\ncause of an event if it lies within physical reach (falls within the\nlight cone leading to the effect)” (Davidson 1987b, 45).","\nDavidson repeats these sorts of claims about the anomic nature of\ncausally defined properties in a number of places in later writings,\nbut at no point does he clearly bring them into contact with his early\nremarks concerning the constitutive role of rationality in\npsychological ascription. And he never provides argument in support of\nthis general thesis concerning causality. It is natural to wonder why,\ngiven this general thesis about causally defined concepts, rationality\nshould be thought to underwrite mental anomalism. And it becomes\nimperative to know why that general thesis is plausible (for\ndiscussion, see Yalowitz 1998a).","\nWith regard to the first issue, there is some evidence that Davidson\nis confusing two distinct questions: why mental concepts cannot stand\nin lawlike relation to physical concepts, and why mental concepts\ncannot be eliminated in favor of physical concepts in the explanation\nof human behavior. Given the general thesis about causally defined\nproperties, we have an understanding of why mental concepts are\nanomic. But this leaves open the question whether we ought to continue\nto traffic in anomic concepts generally, and mental concepts in\nparticular. Why not eliminate them in favor of the nomic physical\nconcepts? Here, the rationality of mental concepts may be thought to\nprovide an answer. If we wish to understand why an agent performed the\naction that she did, as opposed to having a full sufficient causal\nexplanation of why her body moved as it did, we are interested in a\nselective explanation—that part of the total sufficient\ncondition that satisfies the particular explanatory interests behind\nreasons-explanations (Davidson 1991, 163). Those interests highlight\nthe normative nature of reason and action—their responsiveness\nto the principle of charity and ideal of rationality. Rationality, on\nthis line of thinking, does not account for mental anomalism; but it\ndoes speak to the question of mental realism (see further\n 6.2).\n (For further discussion of the anomic nature of causally defined\nconcepts and its bearing on Anomalous Monism, see Yalowitz 1998a. For\nmore on the relation between rational explanation and mental realism,\nsee the supplement on\n Explanatory Epiphenomenalism.\n For discussion of issues closely related to the causal definition\nargument, see\n 6.3\n and the supplement on\n Related Issues\n (Mental Anomalism and Semantic Externalism)."],"subsection_title":"4.3 The Causal Definition Argument"}]},{"main_content":["\nSo far we have looked at Davidson’s three premises in support of\nAnomalous Monism—the interaction, cause-law and anomalism\nprinciples. In this section, we examine the conclusion that Davidson\ndraws on the basis of these principles—the token-identity theory\nof mental events, according to which every causally interacting mental\nevent is token-identical to some physical event. We will look at the\nderivation and nature of this theory, some questions about its\nadequacy, as well as the additional thesis that mental properties\nsupervene on physical properties. As we shall see, both the\ntoken-identity and supervenience claims turn out to be controversial,\nin their motivation as well as in their consistency with mental\nanomalism. One key point to keep in mind at this point is that monism\nis supposed to be derived from the principles and other assumptions\nthat, taken individually, could be acceptable to positions opposing\nmonism.","\nTo begin with, it is worth pointing out that Davidson is concerned\nonly with the ontological status of events, and not substances.\nDescartes, for instance, argued for the claim that mind and body are\ndistinct entities. While Descartes’ position has implications\nfor accounts of mental events, the issues concerning event and\nsubstance identity are distinct (see Latham 2001). Davidson clearly\ntakes himself to be establishing something that is inconsistent with\nCartesian dualism, however, and it is useful briefly to look at how\nAnomalous Monism bears upon substance dualism.","\nAccording to Descartes, mind and body are distinct substances in part\nbecause they do not share essential properties in common. In\nparticular, minds do not occupy a spatial location, while bodies\nnecessarily do. Since mental events thus constitute changes occurring\nin a nonspatially-located entity, they also do not occupy a spatial\nregion. Bodily events, on the other hand, do occupy spatial locations\nby virtue of being changes in material substances, which themselves\nare spatially located. On Descartes’ view, then, particular\nmental and physical events cannot be token-identical, since they fail\nto share a crucial property in common without which identity is\nunintelligible. While Anomalous Monism is not officially concerned\nwith the ontological status of substances, it thus appears to have\nconsequences that are inconsistent with Descartes’ substance\ndualism—though it doesn’t by itself establish substance\nmonism, it does rule out the Cartesian thought that mental and\nphysical events fail to be identical, and so conflicts with one of the\nbases for Cartesian substance dualism."],"section_title":"5. Monism","subsections":[{"content":["\nThe structure of Davidson’s derivation of the token-identity of\ncausally interacting mental events with physical events appears to be\nstraightforward: causally interacting mental events (the interaction\nprinciple) must instantiate some strict law property (the cause-law\nprinciple) but mental properties are not suitable for inclusion in\nstrict laws (the anomalism principle). So mental events must\ninstantiate some other property, which is suitable for such inclusion.\nGiven Davidson’s invocation of the causal closure of the\nphysical domain, according to which every physical event has a\nphysical explanation, he moves rather quickly to the conclusion that\nthis other property must be physical, since closure entails that\nphysical properties have a privileged status, which suggests that they\nhold out the promise of strict laws. (Davidson also has a tendency\nsimply to identify as ‘physical’ those properties that\nfigure in strict laws (Davidson 1970, 224; 1995a, 266), but this would\nof course beg the question of mental anomalism.) Consequently,\ncausally interacting mental events must be token-identical with\nphysical events, ruling out Cartesian as well as other forms of\ndualism.","\nThere are serious problems with the assumption of causal closure of\nthe physical in Davidson’s framework (for discussion, see the\nsupplement on\n Causal Closure of the Physical in the Argument for Anomalous Monism).\n It is difficult, however, to see how Davidson can move from the claim\nthat mental events must instantiate non-mental, strict law properties\nto the claim that these properties must be physical without assuming\nclosure. Why assume that only ‘physical’ properties are\nnomic? This raises interesting issues about the nomic status of other\nspecial sciences—the relevant ones here being biology and\nchemistry—but there do not appear to be explicit, conclusive\nresources in Davidson’s own thinking for addressing this.\nYalowitz 1998a has, however, provided an interpretation of Anomalous\nMonism stressing Davidson’s views on causality and the nomic\nstatus of dispositions (see\n 4.3)\n in which causal closure is derived from the\ncause-law principle, token-identity and the anomalism of causally\ndefined properties. On this interpretation, the strict law properties\nthat mental events must instantiate turn out to be physical because\nonly physical properties are non-causally individuated—all\nspecial science properties are causally individuated, and all such\nproperties are anomic.","\nDavidson’s token-identity theory is dramatically different than\nprevious identity theories of mind, in both it’s a\npriori status as well as its stance towards the role of laws in\njustifying monism. Previous theories had argued that claims concerning\nthe identity of particular mental and physical events depended upon\nthe discovery of lawlike relations between mental and physical\nproperties. These theories thus held that empirical evidence\nsupporting such laws was required for particular identity claims.\nAccording to Anomalous Monism, however, it is precisely\nbecause there can be no such strict laws that causally\ninteracting mental events must be identical to some physical\nevent. The token-identity thesis thus requires no empirical evidence\nand depends on there being no lawlike relations. It in effect\njustifies the token-identity of mental and physical events through\narguing for the impossibility of type-identities between mental and\nphysical properties or kinds (Davidson 1970, 209, 212–13; see\nJohnston 1985).","\nAn important point to recognize in Davidson’s version of\ntoken-identity is that he is not simply deriving the conclusion that\nmental events bear some property that we would intuitively acknowledge\nas ‘physical’ (such as spatial location). As pointed out\nin\n 2.1,\n the relevant ‘physical’ properties would more likely have\nto resemble the sorts of properties currently invoked in physics, our\nmost mature science and the one closest to issuing in strict laws.\nThis point has generated numerous objections to Davidson’s\ntoken-identity theory, but it also has been overlooked by some\nobjectors (see below). Davidson’s central claim is that what\nmakes a mental event identical to a physical event is that the mental\nevent has a physical description. In Davidson’s original\nformulation, monism entailed that every mental event can be\nuniquely singled out using only physical concepts (1970,\n215). It is this position that became the target of some\nDavidson’s critics\n (5.2).\n However, Davidson eventually came to explicitly deny that his monism\ncommits him to the possibility of providing descriptions of mental\nevents or actions in physical terms suitable for strict laws (Davidson\n1999d, 639; 1999b, 653–4). He noted that strict laws will say\nsomething to the effect that “whenever there is a certain\ndistribution of forces and matter in a field of a certain size at time\nt, it will be followed by a certain distribution of forces\nand matter in a field of a certain size at time\nt′” (Davidson 1999d, 639). And he claimed that\nboth the antecedents and consequents of such laws, when covering\nparticular mental events and actions, will cover much larger regions\nof space than merely the agent or her action. Why? Because while\nsingular causal statements are singular, and therefore select\nfrom a complete set of causal factors those that are salient or in\nline with our particular explanatory interests, strict laws\ndon’t themselves select—“that’s what makes\nthem strict” (Davidson 1999d, 640; see Yalowitz 1998a for an\nextended discussion of this issue and its bearing on the argument for\nboth mental anomalism as well as monism). Davidson soft-pedals how\nthis view bears on the uniqueness claim in the official statement of\nAnomalous Monism, parsing away that claim in favor of the blander idea\nthat “some physical description applies to each mental\nevent” (Davidson 1999b, 654). As subtle as it seems, this\nappears to be a fundamental shift in Davidson’s thinking about\nmonism, though it goes unexplored in his later work and has failed to\nattract the attention of his critics.","\nIn any case, Anomalous Monism thus does not inherit the problem of how\nto justify specific identifications between mental and physical\nevents, because the claim that there is a physical description for\neach mental event is established purely a priori. And the\nphysical descriptions are not (indeed, cannot be) specifiable in\nprecise and uniquely identifying spatial and temporal terms. As we are\nabout to see\n (5.2),\n each of these points is overlooked by many of Davidson’s\ncritics. That the latter is overlooked is understandable, given its\nlate appearance. However, the former point has always been\nfundamental, and critics’ failure to appreciate it is\ncurious.","\nDavidson additionally claims that the relation between the mental and\nphysical properties is not merely haphazard or coincidental. A\nrelationship of supervenience obtains between the two (Davidson 1970,\n214; 1973a, 253; 1993; 1995a, 266). (Davidson never argues for\nsupervenience. For discussion, see the supplement on\n Supervenience and the Explanatory Primacy of the Physical.)\n A working statement of this relationship is that if two events fail\nto share a mental property, they will fail to share at least one\nphysical property (Davidson 1995a, 266)—or, equivalently, if two\nevents share all of their physical properties, they will share all of\ntheir mental properties. It is meant to articulate a kind of\ndependency of the mental on the physical, and correlatively a kind of\nexplanatory primacy to the physical, but without claiming any kind of\nreductive relation between the mental and the physical. The working\nstatement’s truth depends, it seems, on the thought that the\ndistribution of physical properties somehow explains the\ndistribution of mental properties—failure to share a mental\nproperty depends upon/is explained by failure to share at\nleast one physical property. The supervenience relation is usually\nunderstood to issue in generalizations of the following kind:\n‘P1 → M1’,\n‘P2 → M1’,\netc. (where antecedent and consequent occur at the same time). This\nallows for the empirical possibility that a number of different\nphysical state kinds underlie the same mental state kind (for more on\nthis, see the supplement on\n Related Issues\n (Mental Anomalism and Semantic Externalism)). However, it also\nappears to suggest the existence of lawlike relations between physical\nand mental properties, and so to be in tension with mental anomalism.\nThis issue will be explored in\n 5.3."],"subsection_title":"5.1 Token Identity"},{"content":["\nThe token-identity thesis has been the subject of a number of\ninteresting criticisms. Many of them, however, are difficult to bring\nfully into contact with Davidson’s own particular version of the\nthesis, primarily because Davidson’s version is derived a\npriori from the other premises in his framework. So, for\ninstance, it has been argued that mental events do not bear the burden\nof the spatiotemporal precision of physical events that they would\nneed to if the former were genuinely identical to the latter (Hornsby\n1981; Leder 1985). For example, it would seem arbitrary to identify\nthe deduction of some conclusion from a chain of reasoning with some\nparticular neural event or set of neural events occurring at a\nspecific time and place in the brain—especially given the\nmicro-precision of the neural framework. Compare attempting to provide\nphysical description for the action of paying back a debt—how\ndoes one determine the spatial and temporal parameters with the\nprecision demanded by the language of physics? Distinguishing between\n“the” physical event, as opposed to its causes and its\neffects, can seem daunting if not outright nonsensical (Leder 1985;\nsee also di Pinedo 2006). Further, it has been argued that the only\npossible empirical evidence for specific token-identity claims could\nbe type-identities between either those or other mental and physical\nproperties, because evidence needs to be drawn from variant cases in\norder to sort out merely coincident from identical events (Leder\n1985).","\nSuch criticisms become difficult to evaluate given Davidson’s\na priori procedure for establishing the token-identity\nthesis. He can respond that we already know, a priori, that\nany particular mental event must instantiate some physical property if\nit causally interacts with any mental or physical event, given the\ncause-law and anomalism principles. Questions about how this physical\nproperty, whatever it is, relates to properties currently invoked in\nneuroscience come later and are necessarily secondary to this monistic\nconclusion. And there is no guarantee (indeed, it is quite unlikely)\nthat neuroscientific properties currently in vogue are candidates for\nstrict-law properties. As we have just seen\n (5.1),\n Davidson eventually came to explicitly associate the physical\nproperties that cover mental events with broad descriptions covering\nlarge space-time regions. Further, it would confuse epistemology with\nmetaphysics to insist that, because we can only establish which\nphysical property some mental token event instantiates by leaning on\nsome type-correlations between other mental and physical properties,\ntoken-identity claims presuppose type-identity. How we discover the\nparticular physical properties is one thing; whether there can be\npsychophysical laws is quite another, and not settled by the method of\ndiscovery.","\nWe also need to keep in mind that Davidson embraces the possibility of\nsubstantive mental-physical correlations (ceteris paribus\npsychophysical laws), which directly address these epistemological\nissues. More generally, Davidson’s token-identity claim is that\nthe predicates that come to form the vocabulary of the as-yet unknown\nstrict-law science will be capable of being used to describe mental\nevents. While we cannot judge this claim by appealing to features of\ncurrent neuroscience, it also seems that it should be possible to\nadjudicate conceivability concerns. And, putting aside\nDavidson’s later views, while we are not currently in the\nbusiness of assigning fine-grained spatiotemporal parameters to mental\nevents, it does not seem obvious that we couldn’t come to accept\nsuch assignments on the basis of theoretical considerations without\nthereby committing ourselves to the existence of type-identities.\nHowever, Davidson’s official position, early and late, has\nalways been that we do not need to be capable of making such\nassignments in order to assert token-identity—there must simply\nbe such true assignments, and this is something we know on the basis\nof a purely a priori argument. (Davidson 1999b; for further\ndiscussion of this issue, see the supplement on\n Related Views\n (Bare Materialism); for a different criticism of token-identity, see\nthe supplement on\n Related Views\n (Other Positions). For a criticism based upon Davidson’s own\ntreatment of causal explanation, see Horgan and Tye 1985. For\ndiscussion of the criticism that Davidson’s monism is too weak\nto warrant the label ‘materialism’, see the supplement on\n Token-Identity and Minimal Materialism)."],"subsection_title":"5.2 Objections to Token Identity"},{"content":["\nWe have seen that Davidson supplements his monism with a claim of\nsupervenience. There are many different conceptions of the\nsupervenience relation (see Kim 1993b), and Davidson ultimately came\nto identify his version with what is called “weak”\nsupervenience, in contrast to “strong” and\n“global” supervenience. Briefly, the basic differences\nbetween these positions are as follows. Weak supervenience links\nspecific mental and physical properties within but not across possible\nworlds, while strong supervenience links those properties across\nworlds. Global supervenience links the class of mental properties as a\nwhole with the class of physical properties as a whole within but not\nacross worlds, but does not constrain relations between specific pairs\nof mental and physical properties. Weak supervenience comes down to\nthe view that mental properties depend upon those physical properties\nthey are correlated with within a particular possible world, but those\nvery same physical properties may, in another possible world,\ncorrelate with very different (or even no) mental properties. Weak\nsupervenience is thus stronger than global supervenience, in that it\nposits correlations between particular pairs of mental and physical\nproperties, but weaker than strong supervenience in that it recognizes\nthe possibility that these correlations can fail to obtain in other\npossible worlds. (It should be noted that Davidson never brought his\nviews on supervenience into contact with his later views, noted above,\nabout the broad nature of the physical properties that mental events\nmust instantiate according to Anomalous Monism. It is not at all clear\nwhether or how these views can be combined. In the following\ndiscussion of supervenience, this complication will be ignored, and it\nwill be assumed that the physical properties in question are not of\nthis broad nature, since this is how Davidson’s own discussions\nof supervenience seem to proceed, and certainly what his critics\npresuppose.)","\nThe puzzling aspect of Davidson’s doctrine of supervenience\narises independently of fine points of the disagreement between the\ncompeting conceptions of supervenience sketched above. Whether the\ndependency is between particular mental and physical properties, or\nsets of the two, and whether or not the dependency holds only within\nor also across possible worlds, it appears that it entails that there\nwill exist strict laws on the basis of which mental events can be\npredicted and explained that were supposed to be ruled out by the\nanomalism principle. Davidson sometimes claims (Davidson 1995a, 266)\nthat supervenience is actually entailed by Anomalous Monism,\nin which case it would appear to follow that Anomalous Monism itself\nis an inconsistent theory—entailing both that there cannot be\nany strict psychophysical laws (the anomalism principle) and that\nthere must be such laws (supervenience). But generally his position\nappears to be that Anomalous Monism is simply consistent with\nsupervenience (Davidson 1993, 7). If supervenience and Anomalous\nMonism are indeed inconsistent, and the former is rejected, the\nquestion of the plausibility of a materialist position with no\ndiscernible relation between mental and physical properties arises\n(see the supplement on\n Supervenience and the Explanatory Primacy of the Physical).\n (The caveat about the relation between Davidson’s later views\nabout physical descriptions and supervenience noted at the end of\n 5.1.\n should be kept in mind here.)","\nWhy does supervenience appear to generate strict laws? When Davidson\nfirst stated the supervenience claim, he articulated it in the\nfollowing terms: “there cannot be two events alike in all\nphysical respects but differing in some mental respects”\n(Davidson 1970, 214)). This formulation appears to entail strict\npsychophysical laws of the form\n‘P1 → \nM1’. Davidson later came to focus on the\ninversion of this formulation: “if two events fail to share a\nmental property, they will fail to share at least one physical\nproperty” (Davidson 1995a, 266). The advantage of this\nreformulation is that it brings out the fact that the requisite\nphysical differences need not be the same in each case of\nmental difference (see Davidson 1973a, 253–4). As Davidson says,\n","\n\n\nalthough supervenience entails that any change in a mental property\np of a particular event e will be accompanied by a\nchange in the physical properties of e, it does not entail\nthat a change in p in other events will be accompanied by an\nidentical change in the physical properties of those other events.\nOnly the latter entailment would conflict with [Anomalous Monism].\n(Davidson 1993, 7)\n","\nThere seem to be two problems here, however. First, the inverted\nreformulation actually entails the original thesis—that if two\nevents share all physical properties they will share all mental\nproperties—and so once again generates strict psychophysical\nlaws. Second, even if the accompanied physical changes can be\ndifferent, that simply generates more strict psychophysical\nlaws—‘\nP1 → M1’,\n‘P2 → M1’,\nand so on. So it is hard to see why Davidson thinks that the second\nformulation is consistent with the anomalism principle.","\nSome defenders of Davidson (Child 1992, 224; see also Davidson 1973,\n258) have responded to the apparent tension between supervenience and\nmental anomalism by emphasizing that the degree of detail that would\nhave to go into the formulation of such laws would make them useless\nfor prediction, since it is unlikely that the relevant initial\nconditions will repeat. But as we have seen\n (4.2.3),\n this seems to be true of any candidate for a strict law—it must\ntake into account all possible interfering conditions, and doing so\nbecomes quite unwieldy for generating predictions. And in any case,\nsuch laws would still provide strict explanations of mental\nevents, contrary to Davidson’s own formulation of mental\nanomalism. So the problem that supervenience ‘laws’ seem\nto pose for the anomalism principle remains.","\nOther defenders of Davidson (see Macdonalds 1986) have responded to\nthis problem by arguing that the existence of strict supervenience\nlaws is compatible with mental anomalism so long as we are not\nactually able to state any such laws and thus be in a position to use\nthem to predict and explain actual mental events—which is\ncertainly the case currently and likely for the foreseeable future.\nThis suggestion exploits a literal reading of Davidson’s\nofficial statement of the anomalism principle, which denies the\npossibility of strict laws on the basis of which mental events can\nbe explained or predicted. But in doing so, it makes Anomalous\nMonism into a much weaker position, dependent on the cognitive\nlimitations of human beings. It in effect becomes a contingent\nepistemological position rather than the necessary metaphysical\ndoctrine it purports to be.","\nDavidson in one place offers a very different suggestion in response\nto the problem. He claims that the supervenient relations between\nmental and physical predicates that he envisages are of a ceteris\nparibus nature. He accepts the requirement that any satisfactory\naccount of the relation between mental and physical properties must\npermit appeal to local correlations and dependencies between specific\nmental and physical properties (Davidson 1993, 9). But he blocks any\nentailment from this requirement to strict psychophysical laws,\nsuggesting that such ‘correlations’ and\n‘dependencies’ are of a ceteris paribus form.","\nSuch a ceteris paribus conception of supervenience has not\nbeen discussed in the extensive literature on the topic (its\npossibility is recognized and endorsed by Kim 1995, 136; however, see\nKim 1993, 24–25) and it is unclear whether it can deliver a\nsuitably strong notion of dependency to satisfy materialist\nintuitions. But it does seem to be an attractive way of reconciling\nsupervenience with mental anomalism so that Anomalous Monism remains a\nconsistent theory."],"subsection_title":"5.3 Is Supervenience Consistent with Mental Anomalism?"}]},{"main_content":["\nIt has been widely held that Anomalous Monism cannot avoid\nepiphenomenalism—the view that mental events lack\ncausal/explanatory powers. At a first approximation, the concern\nderives from a tension between mental anomalism and the apparently\nprivileged status assigned to physical properties in Davidson’s\nframework—in particular, that all events are physical, and all\nphysical events have a strict explanation in terms of other physical\nevents. It then becomes an important question what sort of\ncausal/explanatory role mental properties can play when all events\nalready have a physical explanation.","\nSome welcome this result, holding that mental events explain actions\nin a sui generis way not accountable for in the terms of\ntypical scientific explanations (see von Wright 1971; Stoutland 1976;\nWilson 1985; Ginet 1995; Campbell 1998 and 2005 and related discussion\nin the supplement on\n Explanatory Epiphenomenalism).\n Many, however, see this charge as devastating to the prospects of\nAnomalous Monism’s attempt to occupy a position between\nreductionist materialism and dualism. Without a distinctive causal\nrole for mental events to play in the explanation of action, many\nthink that they would lack the sort of robust reality needed to\ncompete with reductionism and dualism. On this way of thinking, only\ncausal powers can justify mental realism. So if Anomalous Monism\ncannot avoid epiphenomenalism, it appears to open the door to\neliminativist materialism, which holds that mental vocabulary and\nexplanations are vacuous and ought to be thrown out and replaced by\nneuroscience (assuming, which seems extremely doubtful, that\nneuroscience can itself supply strict laws—if not, then this\nline of thought would lead to throwing out all but\n‘physical’ strict law properties and explanations).","\nAs noted, the epiphenomenalist worry arises from two points that are\nabsolutely basic to Anomalous Monism—first, that mental events\nare at the same time physical events, and, second, that while mental\npredicates cannot figure into strict causal laws, physical predicates\nmust. Early critics moved quickly from these points to the\nepiphenomenalist conclusion that mental properties are causally\nirrelevant, because there are always strict law\nproperties—physical properties—to causally explain the\noccurrence of an event. (For detailed discussion of this line of\nargument, see the supplement on\n Mental Properties and Causal Relevance.)\n Among many other problems with this line of argument, however, there\nis the one immediately capitalized on by Davidson: that within the\nextensionalist metaphysical framework in which Anomalous Monism is\ndeveloped\n (2.1\n above), properties don’t cause anything, and so can be neither\ncausally relevant nor irrelevant. According the Davidson, only events\nare causal relata. He expresses general skepticism about\nepiphenomenalist objections to Anomalous Monism that depend on the\nidea that events cause ‘by virtue’ of the properties they\ninstantiate (Davidson 1993, 6, 13). This is closely connected to his\nsharp distinction between causation—a metaphysical relation\nbetween particular events independently of how they are\ndescribed—and explanation—which relates events only as\nthey are described in particular ways. But as we will now see, this\ndoesn’t end the concerns about epiphenomenalism. (For related\ndiscussion concerning epiphenomenalism and its bearing on the\nrelationship between Anomalous Monism and human freedom, see \n Related Issues: 3.2 Anomalous Monism and Contemporary Compatibilism.)"],"section_title":"6. The Epiphenomenalism Objections","subsections":[{"content":["\nCritics of this extensionalist line of defense insisted that related\nquestions remained about Anomalous Monism even taking into account the\ndistinction between causation and explanation. In particular, they\nquestioned whether mental properties could play any genuine\nexplanatory role—whether they had explanatory\nrelevance—given the priority assigned to physical\nproperties in Davidson’s framework. Why think that mental\nproperties explain anything given that the events which instantiate\nthem always also instantiate physical properties that figure in causal\nlaws? One thought here is that genuine explanations require laws, and\nmental anomalism, in ruling out psychological and psychophysical laws,\ncannot account for any explanatory role for mental properties vis a\nvis physical or mental events.","\nIn response, Davidson notes that while Anomalous Monism rejects the\npossibility of strict laws in which mental predicates can figure, it\nallows for ceteris paribus psychological and psychophysical\nlaws (Davidson 1993, 9–12). His point appears to be that if\nbacking by law is sufficient for explanatory relevance, then mental\nproperties are explanatorily relevant. (Davidson and his critics often\nslide between the issues of causal and explanatory relevance, but the\nlatter issue is clearly what is at stake given Davidson’s views\nabout causal efficacy and properties.) Second, Davidson appeals to the\nsupervenience of mental properties on physical properties in order to\nground the explanatory role of mental properties. Davidson says\nthat","\n\n\nproperties are causally efficacious if they make a difference to what\nindividual events cause, and supervenience ensures that\nmental properties do make a difference to what mental events cause.\n(Davidson 1993, 15)\n","\nThe first point does not get developed by Davidson in any systematic\nway, though it has been explored by others interested in defending\nnonreductive monism from epiphenomenalist concerns. Some have focused\non exploiting ceteris paribus covering laws for\npsychophysical causal relations, claiming that this allows mental\nproperties to be sufficient for their effects, thus providing the\nneeded type of explanatory role (McLaughlin 1989; Fodor 1989, 1991).\nOthers have attempted to sidestep the issue of covering laws entirely\nby appealing directly to the truth of psychological and psychophysical\ncounterfactuals in grounding the explanatory role of mental properties\n(LePore and Loewer 1987, 1989; Horgan 1989). Davidson himself instead\nfocused on supervenience (although as we are about to see, the\npossibility of ceteris paribus laws enters into his\naccount).","\nSupervenience implies that","\n\n\nif two events differ in their psychological properties, they differ in\ntheir physical properties (which we assume to be causally\nefficacious). If supervenience holds, psychological properties make a\ndifference to the causal relations of an event, for they matter to the\nphysical properties, and the physical properties matter to causal\nrelations. (Davidson 1993, 14) \n","\nThe point here is not simply that mental properties inherit or\npiggyback on the causal powers of the physical properties on which\nthey supervene. Rather, Davidson appears to be claiming that mental\nproperties influence the causal powers of their subvenient\nphysical properties.","\nOne problem with Davidson’s response here is its reversal of the\ndependency relationship between mental and physical properties\ntypically claimed in supervenience relationships. A central rationale\nfor positing supervenience is to mark a kind of explanatory primacy to\nthe subvenient properties (see the supplement on\n Supervenience and the Explanatory Primacy of the Physical).\n And this is reflected in the first part of Davidson’s\nformulation above—surely a difference in psychological\nproperties entails (requires) a difference in physical properties\nbecause the difference in physical properties is needed in\norder to explain the difference in psychological properties.\nSo the sense in which psychological properties ‘matter’ to\nphysical properties is that changing the former amounts to a change in\nthe latter because a change in the latter explains a change\nin the former. This does not appear to be helpful in establishing the\nexplanatory relevance of mental properties. Another problem, discussed\nabove\n (5.3),\n is that it is difficult to see how a supervenience relation of\nsufficient power to make mental properties explanatory of an\nevent’s physical properties in the way Davidson seems to suggest\ndoes not issue in strict laws. So it is unclear how supervenience is\nconsistent with the anomalism principle, and thus how it can help\nblock epiphenomenalist concerns, although we did previously note one\npotentially worthwhile but unexplored possibility—a ceteris\nparibus supervenience relation—which Davidson endorses."],"subsection_title":"6.1 Mental Properties and Explanatory Relevance"},{"content":["\nKim has explored a related but different route from Anomalous Monism\nto mental epiphenomenalism—the problem of explanatory exclusion\n(Kim 1989, 44). A causal explanation of an event cites a sufficient\ncondition for that event’s occurrence. This seems to exclude the\npossibility of other independent causes or explanations of that event.\nSo if, as Anomalous Monism entails, physics can provide a sufficient\nexplanation of any particular event, there appears to be no room for\nan independent and irreducible mental explanation of an event\n(Davidson 1993, 15). It is because the cause instantiated some\nparticular physical property that the effect (which happens to\ninstantiate a mental property) came about. Any mental properties that\nthe cause instantiates seem superfluous in explaining why the effect\noccurred—unless those properties are identical or related in\nsome strict lawlike way to the physical properties, something ruled\nout by the anomalism principle.","\nDavidson responds by arguing that citing only the physical properties\nof the cause to provide a sufficient explanation of an action does not\naddress the particular interests that psychological explanations of\nactions serve—providing the reasons of the agent in light of\nwhich she performed the action that she did. Serving these explanatory\ninterests compensates for the fact that such explanations cannot be\nsharpened into strict laws or folded neatly into physical laws\n(Davidson 1991, 163). We only understand why the agent waved her\nhand—why the effect is of the mental kind ‘waving\none’s hand’ (as opposed to merely ‘one’s hand\ngoing up and down’)—by citing mental properties\nof the causing event, such as her wanting to greet her friend. The\ncitation of physical properties of the causing event and the\nassociated mere bodily movement will not bring about such\nunderstanding, assuming mental anomalism, because of the lack of any\nreductive relationship between either the physical properties of the\ncause and the agent’s reasons or the physical properties of the\neffect and the agent’s action.","\nHere we see the interest-relativity of explanation and its bearing on\nexplanatory relevance (see the supplement on\n Mental Properties and Causal Relevance)\n playing an important role for Davidson. Mental properties must be\ncited if we want a rational explanation of mental\neffects. Davidson’s response to epiphenomenalist concerns can\nthus be described as a kind of ‘dual explananda’\ntheory of the explanatory role of mental properties. According to this\ntheory, for every (causally interacting) mental event there are two\ndistinct explananda in need of explanation: an event of a\ncertain physical type and an event of a certain mental type. Mental\nproperties are accorded an ineliminable and (given Anomalous Monism)\nirreducible explanatory role by virtue of their singular capacity to\nmake intelligible the occurrence of other mental properties through\nthe sui generis relation of rationalization. This reflects\nthe point made at the end of\n 4.3\n by the causal definition interpretation of the argument for mental\nanomalism: that rationality underlies, not mental anomalism, but\nrather mental realism. (For related discussion of the dual\nexplananda approach, see Macdonalds 1995 and Gibbons\n2006.)","\nIt should be noted, however, that it is not the case that\nonly mental properties can explain and be explained by the\noccurrence of mental properties. That would lead to an\n“outlet” problem, with mental properties being\nexplanatorily insulated from physical properties—something\ninconsistent with the way in which we ordinarily think of\nmental-physical interaction. A blow to the head can, for instance,\nexplain the occurrence of a thought. And a thought can explain the\nmovement of an object, as when my decision to quench my thirst leads\nto the movement of a glass of water to my lips. However, the blow\ncannot rationalize the thought, and the decision cannot rationalize\nthe movement of the glass (though it can rationalize the\naction of moving the glass). Davidson’s dual\nexplananda strategy provides no account of such phenomena\n(for discussion of the outlet problem, see Gibbons 2006). Nonetheless,\nso long as there are occurrences of mental properties in need of the\ndistinctive kind of explanation provided by rationalization, mental\nproperties occupy an ineliminable explanatory role. And given\nAnomalous Monism, that role is irreducible. It is worth noting that\nthis dual explananda strategy is consistent with\nDavidson’s commitment to the causal closure of the physical\ndomain (Crane 1995 seems to miss this point)—every physical\nevent can have a physical explanation, even if the mental component of\nsome physical events can be rationally explained only through appeal\nto mental components of the causing event. Therefore, however causal\nclosure ultimately enters into Anomalous Monism (see the supplement on\n Causal Closure of the Physical and Anomalous Monism),\n it does not appear to create any further problems for Anomalous\nMonism’s ability to account for the ineliminable, irreducible\nexplanatory role of mental properties.","\nThe interest-relativity of causal explanation is thus crucial in\nDavidson’s grounding of the ineliminable explanatory role of\nmental properties within the framework of Anomalous Monism. If, as\nAnomalous Monism contends, mental event-types such as actions are not\nreducible to physical-event types, then the only way to explain\nactions (as opposed to mere bodily movements) so as to make them\nintelligible is by appeal to the mental properties of the\ncause—reasons. (For discussion of whether, in light of this,\nreason explanations can still be maintained to be causal\nexplanations within the framework of Anomalous Monism, see the\nsupplement on\n Explanatory Epiphenomenalism.)"],"subsection_title":"6.2 Interest-Relativity and the Dual Explananda Strategy"},{"content":["\nA final point to consider in evaluating the epiphenomenalist\nobjections to Anomalous Monism is the way in which causality enters\ninto the constitution of reasons and reasons-explanations according to\nDavidson. Before we have established the anomalism principle, or go on\nto derive monism, we already know that reasons explain actions by\ncausing them (the ‘because’ problem discussed in\n 2.2).\n And, as we have seen\n (4.3),\n we know that propositional attitudes and mental contents are\nindividuated, and thus defined, partially in terms of what they are\ncaused by and cause (for attitudes, see Davidson 1987b, 41; for\ncontents, see Davidson 1987a, 444, and extended discussion in the\nsupplement on\n Related Issues\n (Mental Anomalism and Semantic Externalism)). But if something cannot\neven be recognized as a reason unless it is a cause, then the charge\nthat mental properties are causally impotent appears to have\ndifficulty getting any traction. And since these claims are prior to\nthe argument for monism, they are neutral about whatever else reasons\nmust be in order to be causes. So reasons must be recognized as causes\nprior to any discovery that they are also physical events. This\nappears to secure the causal potency of reasons in a way entirely\nindependent of the claim of token-identity. Within Davidson’s\nframework, reasons can only play the rationalizing and explanatory\nrole that they do by virtue of their causal nature.","\nMany of Anomalous Monism’s epiphenomenalist critics do not\naddress this rich causal background. As we have seen, the background\nis not sufficient by itself to silence all epiphenomenalist concerns.\nBut it does significantly affect how those concerns can be formulated\nand addressed. Anomalous Monism is clearly deeply committed, at a\nnumber of levels, to the causal explanatory relevance of the mental,\nand so charity suggests that we try to understood it in a way such\nthat these commitments are respected. The dual explananda\nstrategy discussed above\n (6.2)\n provides one promising framework for doing this, while at the same\ntime displaying sensitivity to the sorts of concerns driving the\nepiphenomenalist objections."],"subsection_title":"6.3 The Causal Constitution of Reasons"}]},{"main_content":["\nDespite the initial appearance of simplicity in its assumptions,\nstructure and argumentation, we have turned up several important\nproblems and lacunae that stand in the way of any overall final\nassessment of the plausibility of Anomalous Monism. While the central\nobjections it has faced have derived from epiphenomenalist concerns,\nthe force of these objections is not clear. Arguably, the most serious\ndifficulties for Anomalous Monism are not with its adequacy but with\nits justification. We still stand in need of a clear argument for how\nrationality leads to the anomalism principle; there are the\nsubstantial problems surrounding the status of the causal closure of\nthe physical and its bearing on monism; and the cause-law\nprinciple’s strictness requirement is still in need of a\ncompelling rationale. Even with these problems, Anomalous Monism\ncontinues to provide an extremely useful framework for exploring\nfundamental issues and problems in the philosophy of mind, and has\nearned a central place on the rather short list of important positions\non the relation between mental and physical events and properties."],"section_title":"7. Conclusion","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe basic structure of the argument for Anomalous Monism is as\\nfollows. We start with the plausible assumption that some mental\\nevents, such as believing that it is raining, are caused by certain\\nphysical events, in this case the rain. Similarly, it is assumed that\\nsome physical events, such as one’s arm rising, are caused by\\ncertain mental events, such as deciding to scratch one’s head.\\nDavidson calls this the Principle of Causal Interaction; we shall call\\nit the interaction principle:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nThe Interaction Principle: Some mental events causally\\ninteract with some physical events\\n\",\n \"\\nDavidson presents this assumption as obvious and not in need of\\njustification, but we shall see that motivations for it can be found\\nin parts of his writings\\n (2.2).\\n To this interaction principle is added the requirement that all\\nsingular causal interactions are covered by strict laws—laws\\nwith fully articulated antecedents which guarantee some fully\\narticulated consequence (for caveats and details,\\n see 3.1).\\n Davidson calls this the Principle of the Nomological Character of\\nCausality; we shall call it the cause-law principle:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nThe Cause-Law Principle: Events related as cause and effect\\nare covered by strict laws\\n\",\n \"\\nThis cause-law principle was also initially assumed without argument\\nby Davidson, though we shall see below\\n (3.2)\\n how he later came to try to justify it. Now, the assumptions so far\\nseem to point directly to the existence of strict psychophysical\\nlaws—if some particular mental event m1 is\\ncaused by some particular physical event p1, then,\\ngiven the cause-law principle, it seems to follow that there must be a\\nstrict law of the form\\n‘P1 → M1’.\\nThat is, whenever events of kind P1 occur, events\\nof kind M1 must follow. However, Davidson then\\nclaims that there can be no such laws. He calls this the Principle of\\nthe Anomalism of the Mental, and it holds that mental properties are\\nnot suitable for inclusion in strict laws of any kind; we shall call\\nit the anomalism principle:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nThe Anomalism Principle: There are no strict laws on the\\nbasis of which mental events can predict, explain, or be predicted or\\nexplained by other events\\n\",\n \"\\nDavidson offered loose ruminations concerning rationality and\\nrationalizing explanations, which purportedly constitute the very\\nnature of mental properties, in support of the anomalism principle\\n (4.2).\\n All of this will be discussed in detail below.\",\n \"\\nWith the interaction principle, the cause-law principle, and the\\nanomalism principle now in place, we can see that there is a tension\\nin need of resolution. From the interaction and cause-law principles\\nit follows that there must be strict laws covering the interaction\\nbetween mental and physical events. But the anomalism principle\\nentails that there are no strict psychophysical laws. How can all\\nthree principles be held simultaneously?\",\n \"\\nTo resolve the tension, Davidson noted that while the cause-law\\nprinciple requires that there be strict covering laws, it\\ndoesn’t specify the vocabulary in which those laws must be\\nformulated. If particular physical event p1 causes\\nparticular mental event m1, and there must be some\\nstrict law covering this interaction, but there is no strict law of\\nthe form\\n‘P1 → M1’,\\nthen there must be some other law,\\n‘?1 → ?2’, which\\ncovers the causal relation between p1 and\\nm1. That is, m1 and\\np1 must instantiate properties suitable for\\ninclusion in strict laws; but since we know that\\nM1 is not a property of this kind,\\nm1 must instantiate some other property.\\nDavidson’s ingenious deduction at this point was that this\\nproperty must be physical, since only the physical sciences hold out\\nthe promise of a closed system of strict laws (Davidson 1970,\\n223–24; on the notion of a closed system, see\\n 5.1\\n and the supplement on\\n Causal Closure of the Physical in the Argument for Monism).\\n Therefore, every causally interacting mental event must be\\ntoken-identical to some physical event—hence, monism\\n (5.1):\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nMonism: Every causally interacting mental event is\\ntoken-identical to some physical event\\n\",\n \"\\nIn arguing in this way, Davidson relies upon a key distinction between\\nexplanation and causation. While explanation is, intuitively, an\\nintensional notion—one sensitive to how events are\\ndescribed—causation is extensional, obtaining between pairs of\\nevents independently of how they are described. For example, a\\nbridge’s collapse is explained by the explosion of a bomb. That\\nexplosion, let us suppose, was the most newsworthy event of the day.\\nWhile the most newsworthy event of the day caused the\\nbridge’s collapse, ‘the most newsworthy event of the\\nday’ does not explain that collapse. Telling someone\\nthat it was the most newsworthy event of the day that explained the\\nbridge’s collapse wouldn’t provide an explanation—it\\nwouldn’t make the bridge’s collapse intelligible to the\\naudience—though it would pick out its actual cause. How the\\ncause is described is relevant to whether an explanation occurs.\\nCauses and effects can be accurately picked out using a variety of\\nexpressions, many of which are not explanatory. As we shall see, the\\ndistinction between causation and explanation is crucial to Anomalous\\nMonism\\n (6.1–6.3; \\nsee also related discussion of the intensionality\\nof deterministic relations in \\n Related Issues: 3.1 Anomalous Monism and Kant’s Theory of Freedom).\\n\",\n \"\\nFinally, to alleviate certain concerns about the adequacy of the form\\nof physicalism he was endorsing, Davidson endorsed a dependency\\nrelation of supervenience of the mental on the physical, and claimed\\nthat it was consistent with Anomalous Monism\\n (5.1,\\n 5.3) (Davidson 1970, 214; 1993; 1995a, 266):\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nSupervenience of the Mental on the Physical: if two events\\nshare all of their physical properties, they will share all of their\\nmental properties\\n\",\n \"\\nIn what follows (2–5), each step of this argument will be\\nanalyzed and discussed separately, but always with an eye to the\\noverall argument. In 6, a central objection to Anomalous\\nMonism—that it appears unable to account for the\\ncausal/explanatory power of mental events and properties—will be\\nexplained and discussed. (For discussion of the relationship between\\nAnomalous Monism and two other pillars of Davidson’s\\nphilosophy—his rejection of conceptual relativism and commitment\\nto semantic externalism—see the supplement on\\n Related Issues.)\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. The Argument for Anomalous Monism\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe interaction principle states that some mental events causally\\ninteract with some physical events. In this section we will look\\nbriefly at a number of issues related to this principle: how mental\\nand physical events are demarcated, the nature of events themselves,\\nthe scope of the interaction principle, the relationship between\\nmental events and causation, and the use of the interaction principle\\nin establishing one component of mental\\nanomalism—psychological anomalism, according to which\\nthere can be no strict, purely psychological laws. Psychological\\nanomalism is to be distinguished from psychophysical\\nanomalism, which holds that there can be no strict psychophysical\\nlaws. This latter thesis will be explored in detail in our discussion\\nof the anomalism principle\\n (4).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Premise I: The Interaction Principle\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nDavidson restricts the class of mental events with which Anomalous\\nMonism is concerned to that of the propositional\\nattitudes—states and events with psychological verbs such as\\n‘believes’, ‘desires’, ‘intends’\\nand others that subtend ‘that-’ clauses, which relate\\nsubjects to propositional contents such as ‘it is raining\\noutside’. Anomalous Monism thus does not address the status of\\nmental events such as pains, tickles and the\\nlike—‘conscious’ or sentient mental events. It is\\nconcerned exclusively with sapient mental events—thoughts with\\npropositional content that appear to lack any distinctive\\n‘feel’.\",\n \"\\nThough traditional and intuitive, this way of dividing up the domain\\nof the mental isn’t without controversy. Generally, Davidson\\nexpresses some skepticism about the possibility of formulating a clear\\nand general definition of the class of mental phenomena (Davidson\\n1970, 211). And he is suspicious about the idea of mental states given\\nto, but uninterpreted by, concepts (Davidson 1974a), which is how\\nphilosophers have often thought of conscious phenomena. But for\\ncurrent purposes the class of propositional attitudes will suffice as\\na criterion for the mental. One key reason for so limiting the reach\\nof Anomalous Monism, as we shall see\\n (4.2),\\n is that it is the rational status of the relevant mental\\nevents that Davidson usually cites as responsible for mental\\nanomalism. Conscious events have traditionally been thought to occur\\nin non-rational animals, a position with which Davidson shows some\\nsympathy (Davidson 1985a). Such events thus appear to fall outside of\\nthe domain of the rational, and thus outside of the purview of\\nDavidson’s argument.\",\n \"\\nDavidson is even less helpful about offering a criterion for the\\n‘physical’ (Davidson 1970, 211). One half-hearted attempt\\ncomes in the statement that\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n[p]hysical theory promises to provide a comprehensive closed system\\nguaranteed to yield a standardized, unique description of every\\nphysical event couched in a vocabulary amenable to law. (Davidson\\n1970, 224) \\n\",\n \"\\nThis is at best a promissory note about some future language of\\n‘physics’—the ‘true’ physics—and\\nit incorporates a requirement of the causal closure of the physical\\ndomain that creates problems for certain aspects of Anomalous Monism\\n(see the supplement on\\n Causal Closure of the Physical in the Argument for Anomalous Monism).\\n It is probably best to take a ‘physical’ description\\nsimply to be one that occurs in the language of a future science that\\nis similar to what we call ‘physics’ today but with none\\nof its inadequacies. One important component of such descriptions is\\ntheir capacity to figure in strict laws of nature (see\\n 3.1).\\n While this is non-negotiable for physical terms, it is an open\\nquestion for mental terms, and Davidson will be arguing\\n (4)\\n for a negative answer.\",\n \"\\nWhen Davidson first argued for Anomalous Monism he subscribed to a\\ncausal criterion of event-individuation, according to which two events\\n(event-descriptions) are identical (co-refer) if they share all the\\nsame causes and effects (Davidson 1969). He much later came to reject\\nthat criterion in favor of one according to which events are identical\\nif and only if they occupy the same spatiotemporal region (Davidson\\n1985b). The difference between these views will not, however, be\\nreflected in our discussion. It does not appear to affect either the\\nderivation or the essential nature of Anomalous Monism. For our\\npurposes, Davidson’s central claims are that what makes an event\\nmental (or physical) is that it has a mental (or physical)\\ndescription, and the extensionalist thesis that events are concrete\\nentities that can be described in many different ways (‘the\\nflipping of the light switch’, ‘the illuminating of the\\nroom’ and ‘the alerting of the burglar that someone is\\nhome’ can all pick out the same one event in different terms).\\n(For controversies concerning extensionalism, see\\n 5.2\\n and the supplement on\\n Related Issues\\n (Anomalous Monism and Scheme-Content Dualism).)\",\n \"\\nThe interaction principle states that at least some mental events\\ncause and are caused by physical events (Davidson 1970, 208). This\\nleaves open the possibility of mental events that do not causally\\ninteract with physical events. However, given Davidson’s early\\nviews about event-individuation (the causal criterion) it is unclear\\nthat this possibility can be realized. His later views on\\nevent-individuation appear to leave this possibility open, but his\\ngeneral claims about the causal individuation of mental contents and\\nattitudes (see\\n 4.3\\n and\\n 6.3\\n below) also stand in some tension with this possibility. In any case,\\nDavidson goes on to say that he in fact believes that all mental\\nevents causally interact with physical events (Davidson 1970, 208),\\nbut he restricts his argument only to those that actually do. Given\\nthe pressures just noted in favor of the inclusive reading of the\\ninteraction principle, we shall assume it in what follows.\",\n \"\\nThe interaction claim itself should be understood as follows: some\\nevents that have a mental description or instantiate a mental property\\ncause and are caused by events that have a physical description or\\ninstantiate a physical property. Formulating the interaction principle\\nin this way both clears the way for an extensional reading of the\\ncausal relation (events are causally related no matter how they are\\ndescribed), and also leaves open the possibility, which Davidson will\\nsubsequently argue for, that mental events in particular must have\\nsome non-mental description/instantiate some non-mental property. At\\nthis stage that possibility is left as an open question, but it is\\nimportant to notice that for it to be an open question we need to at\\nleast allow for a distinction between events and the ways in which\\nthey are picked out in language.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.1 Mental and Physical Events\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThough this will be focused on separately below\\n (6),\\n it is also important to recognize that we are beginning with the\\nassumption that mental events cause and are caused by physical events.\\nMany critics of Anomalous Monism have claimed that it is difficult to\\nsee how the position avoids epiphenomenalism—the view that\\nmental events are causally/explanatorily impotent—and that\\nAnomalous Monism is therefore unacceptable as an account of the place\\nof the mental in the physical world. However, since Anomalous Monism\\nis based upon the interaction principle, Davidson can claim\\nin response that if Anomalous Monism is true, then mental events are\\nalready known to have a kind of causal efficacy. As we shall see, this\\npoint is not by itself sufficient to ward off all epiphenomenalist\\nconcerns about Anomalous Monism. But it does serve to remind us of the\\nfull framework within which challenges to Anomalous Monism must be\\nassessed, and in particular brings out the reliance of that framework\\non specific assumptions about causality (see Sections\\n 4.3,\\n 6, and Yalowitz 1998a).\",\n \"\\nWhat needs to be noted at this point is that Davidson argued early on\\nfor the claim that mental events have causal efficacy, through noting\\na problem for non-causal accounts of action explanation (Davidson\\n1963). Mental events and states explain action by making it\\nintelligible—rational—in light of the agent’s\\nbeliefs and purposes. The challenge that Davidson raised for\\nnon-causal theories of action explanation was to account for the fact\\nthat, for any action performed, there may well be a large number of\\nmental events and states true of the agent, and capable of\\nrationalizing the action, but that don’t thereby\\nexplain that action. The agent acted because of some\\nspecific beliefs and purposes, but other beliefs and purposes of his\\ncould just as easily rationalize that action, and thus be cited in its\\nexplanation. Was the agent moving his hand as he did because he wanted\\nto swat the fly, relieve a cramp, or wave in greeting? He may well\\nhave wanted to achieve all three of these aims, but still only in fact\\nperformed the action because of one of these reasons. How do\\nwe understand ‘because’ so as to rule out the pretenders?\\nDavidson’s claim was that it is only if we understand\\n‘because’ as ‘was caused by’ that we can\\njustifiably pick out the genuine explanans—thereby\\nimputing causal potency to mental events.\",\n \"\\nWhat exactly does this argument show? It is intended to tell against\\nnon-causal theories of action, which deny that reasons explain actions\\nby causing them. There have been sophisticated attempts, on the behalf\\nof non-causal theories of action explanation, to respond to this\\nchallenge (von Wright 1971; Wilson 1985; Ginet 1995; for a good\\noverview, see Stoutland 1976; and see related discussion in\\n 6.3.)\\n However, assuming the argument is successful, while it does establish\\nmental efficacy of a kind, it does not by itself establish the\\ninteraction principle. Establishing that reasons explain actions by\\ncausing them, and that therefore reasons causally interact with\\nactions, does not establish that reasons causally interact\\nwith physical events. Dualists who reject the identity of\\nmental and physical events will surely object.\",\n \"\\nA key point to grasp in many of the issues raised by Anomalous Monism\\nis that there is an important distinction between action and behavior.\\nAccording to Davidson, action is intentionally described\\nbehavior—the moving of a hand through space in a certain way\\nmay, but need not, be an action of waving or swatting or any action at\\nall. It may simply be mere bodily behavior—as happens as the\\nresult of a muscle twitch or a strong gust of wind. The behavior must\\nbe caused by an agent’s beliefs and desires in order to be\\naction. However, while this is necessary for action, it is not,\\naccording to Davidson, sufficient. The behavior must be caused in\\nthe right way by the beliefs and desires. Davidson notes the\\npossibility of cases where an agent’s beliefs and desires cause\\nbehavior which is not rationalized by those states, and thus not\\naction. A mountain climber might become so unnerved by his desire to\\nrid himself of an annoying second climber sharing his rope and belief\\nthat jiggling the rope is a means for doing so that he unintentionally\\njiggles the rope, leading to the loss of the second climber. This is\\nnot an action—it is mere behavior that happens to him, no\\ndifferent than if caused by a muscle twitch or gust of wind. It is\\ncaused in the wrong way—a “deviant causal\\nchain”—by the belief and desire, and so is not an action.\\nDavidson is skeptical about the possibility of cashing out what it\\nmeans to be caused in the right way (Davidson 1973b,\\n78–9), for reasons relating to mental anomalism (Davidson 1973b,\\n80; see\\n 4\\n for explicit discussion). The key point for now is that because\\nDavidson rejects the possibility of analyzing action in terms of\\nbehavior caused in a particular way by reasons, the point made by the\\n‘because’ argument cannot be used to establish that mental\\nevents cause physical events. It does not follow from the fact that\\nreasons must cause actions in order to explain them that\\nreasons must cause behavior or (the interaction principle)\\nthat reasons do cause behavior. It does not entail that\\nactions are physical behavior.\",\n \"\\nThis point is important when one considers the wider framework to\\nwhich the interaction principle contributes. Since Davidson is\\nattempting to derive monism from it and other principles that are\\nthemselves neutral about the metaphysics of mind, he cannot assume\\nthat action is (identical with) behavior on pain of circularity. Once\\nmonism has been established, Davidson will be in a position to deploy\\nthe ‘because’ point in order to argue for the claim that\\nmental events are causally efficacious with respect to physical\\nevents. How this relates to the wave of epiphenomenalist criticism\\nabout Anomalous Monism will be explored in detail below\\n (6,\\n and see the supplement on\\n Mental Properties and Causal Relevance).\\n To summarize, the interaction principle is an unargued assumption in\\nthe Davidsonian framework, one that does not assume monism, and the\\n‘because’ argument, while important for ruling out\\nnon-causal theories of action, does not itself establish the\\ninteraction principle.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.2 Mental Causation\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nDavidson uses the interaction principle to establish directly one part\\nof mental anomalism—psychological anomalism, which\\ndenies the possibility of strict, purely psychological laws of the\\nform\\n‘M1 & M2 → M3’\\n(Davidson 1970, 224; 1974b, 243). For if physical events causally\\nimpact on mental events, then the mental domain is ‘open’,\\nand any laws in which mental predicates figure will have to take this\\ninto account (for related discussion, see the supplement on\\n Causal Closure of the Physical in the Argument for Anomalous Monism).\\n More generally, physical conditions will always play some role in any\\nplausible psychological generalizations, because physical intervention\\n(e.g., injury) is always a possibility and can prevent the occurrence\\nof the consequent ‘M3’. Thus, the only\\npotentially true and strict laws in which psychological\\npredicates can figure are variants of the psychophysical form\\n‘P1 & M1 & M2 → M3’.\\nPsychophysical anomalism, the other component of mental\\nanomalism and the one that denies the possibility of such strict laws,\\nis thus the view that Davidson focuses on establishing.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.3 Psychological Anomalism\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe cause-law principle states that events related as cause and effect\\nare covered by strict laws. In the earliest formulations of Anomalous\\nMonism, Davidson assumed but did not argue for this principle. His\\nlater argument in support of it will be considered below\\n (3.2),\\n along with objections to the principle\\n (3.3).\\n But we need to consider the nature of the requirement contained in\\nthis claim, and how it relates to the framework out of which Anomalous\\nMonism is deduced.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Premise II: The Cause-Law Principle\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe nature of the strict laws required by the cause-law principle is\\nas follows. For any causal relationship between particular events\\ne1 and e2, there must be a law\\nof the form\\n‘(C1 & D1) → D2’,\\nwhere ‘C1’ states a set of standing\\nconditions, and ‘D1’ is a description\\nof e1 that is sufficient, given\\nC1, for the occurrence of an event of the kind\\n‘D2’, which is a description of\\ne2. Traditionally, a strict law has been thought\\nof as one where the condition and event-types specified in the\\nantecedent are such as to guarantee that the condition or\\nevent-types specified in the consequent occur—the latter\\nmust occur if the former in fact obtain. But indeterministic\\nor probabilistic versions of strict laws are possible as well\\n(Davidson 1970, 219). The point that distinguishes strict laws is not\\nso much the guaranteeing of the effect by satisfaction of the\\nantecedent as the inclusion, in the antecedent, of all conditions and\\nevents that can be stated that could possibly prevent the\\noccurrence of the effect. A strict indeterministic law would\\nbe one that specified everything required in order for some effect to\\noccur. If the effect does not occur when those conditions obtain,\\nthere is nothing else that could be cited in explanation of this\\nfailure (other than the brute fact of an indeterministic universe).\\nFor reasons of simplicity, we will assume determinism in this\\ndiscussion, though what is said about strict laws could be carried\\nover without remainder to strict indeterministic laws.\",\n \"\\nThe cause-law principle is aimed, in the first instance, at laws of\\nsuccession, which cover singular causal relationships between\\nevents at distinct times. However, as will become clearer below,\\nmental anomalism also takes in bridge laws that would\\ncorrelate simultaneous instantiations of mental and physical\\npredicates as well—such as\\n‘P1 → M1’,\\n‘M1 → P1’,\\nor\\n‘P1 ↔ M1’.\\nIndeed, mental anomalism rejects the possibility of any\\nstrict law in which mental predicates figure (where those predicates\\nfigure essentially, and are not redundant)—including (as we have\\nseen\\n (2.3))\\n laws formulated with purely mental predicates\\n(‘(M1 & M2) → M3’),\\nas well as laws with mental predicates in either the antecedent or\\nconsequent, such as\\n‘(M1 & M2) → P1’\\nand\\n‘(P1 & P2) → M1’\\nand mixed variants of these (see\\n 4).\",\n \"\\nThe denial of strict laws of these forms is consistent with allowing\\nhedged versions of them which are qualified by a ceteris\\nparibus clause. ‘All things being equal’ or\\n‘under normal conditions’, such psychological and\\npsychophysical generalizations can, according to Davidson, be\\njustifiably asserted (Davidson 1993, 9). As will be discussed below\\n (4),\\n denying the strict version of these generalizations amounts to\\ndenying that the qualifying clause ‘ceteris\\nparibus’ can be fully explicated. That is,\\n‘ceteris paribus,\\n((M1 & \\nM2) → P1)’\\ncannot be transformed into something like\\n‘(P2 & P3 & \\nM1 & M2 & M3) → \\nP1’ (for a related discussion of this\\nparticular issue, see the debate between Schiffer 1991 and Fodor\\n1991).\",\n \"\\n(Davidson organizes his discussion of this transformation process, and\\nAnomalous Monism more generally, around a distinction between\\n‘homonomic’ and ‘heteronomic’ generalizations\\n(Davidson 1970, 219). That distinction is extremely problematic for\\nthe purposes of establishing Anomalous Monism, and is set aside here\\nin favor of the related (but by no means identical) distinction\\nbetween strict and ceteris paribus generalizations. For\\ndiscussion of the former distinction, see the supplement on\\n Homonomic and Heteronomic Generalizations.)\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.1 Strict Laws\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nDavidson argues for the cause-law principle—that singular causal\\nrelations require strict covering laws—on the basis of a\\nconceptual interconnection between the concepts of physical\\nobject, event and law. As he says, “our\\nconcept of a physical object is the concept of an object whose changes\\nare governed by laws” (Davidson 1995a, 274). The\\ninterconnections are established partly in response to C.J.\\nDucasse’s attempt, in reaction to Hume’s regularity theory\\nof causation, to define singular causal relations without appeal to\\ncovering laws (Ducasse 1926).\",\n \"\\nSimply put, Ducasse defined some particular event c as the\\ncause of some effect e if and only if c was the only\\nchange occurring in the immediate environment of e just prior\\nto e. The striking of the match is the cause of the flaming\\nmatch just insofar as the striking is the only change occurring in the\\nimmediate vicinity of the flaming match just prior to the flaming of\\nthe match. Ducasse intended this definition to rebut Hume’s\\nclaim that singular causal relations between particular events must be\\nanalyzed in terms of regularities between types of events (and thus\\nlaws). Indeed, Ducasse claimed that Hume was wrong to deny that we\\nhave the ability to perceive singular causal relations—this\\ndenial being the basis for Hume’s subsequent regularity account\\n (see 3.3).\\n For, according to Ducasse, we can perceive that some event is the\\nonly change in the immediate environment of some subsequent event just\\nprior to that event’s occurrence. (We can, of course, be wrong\\nin thinking that this is what we have in fact perceived. But as\\nDucasse points out, the same problem plagues Hume’s own\\naccount—we can be wrong that what we have perceived are\\ninstances of types which bear a regular relation to each other. But\\nthis does not lead Hume to hold that since we can’t infallibly\\nperceive that some succession is an instance of a regularity, we\\ncannot form the concept of causality in terms of regularity. The same\\nthus applies to Ducasse’s own account.)\",\n \"\\nDavidson notes the heavy dependence, in Ducasse’s account, on\\nthe notion of a ‘change’. And he asks whether we really\\nhave a purchase on this concept absent appeal to laws. There are two\\naspects of this concern. First, the notion of ‘change’ is\\nshort for ‘change of predicate’—a change occurs when\\na predicate true of some object (or not true of that object) ceases to\\nbe true (or comes to be true) of that object. And this leads directly\\nto questions about how predicates are individuated and their\\nrelationship to laws (see below). Second, and at a more general level,\\nthe notion of ‘change’ has itself changed over\\ntime—for instance, Newtonian mechanics defines a change\\ndifferently than Aristotelian physics, so that continuous motion\\ncounts as a change, and thus requires an explanation, according to the\\nlatter but not the former. Thus, the very notion of\\n‘change’ is theory dependent, and therefore (Davidson\\nholds) presupposes the notion of ‘law’, in the sense that\\nsomething counts as a change, and thus as having a cause, only against\\na background of theoretical principles.\",\n \"\\nThis second point does not appear to deliver the result Davidson is\\nafter—establishing that each causal interaction must be covered\\nby a particular strict law. The claim that something is a change, and\\nthus has a cause, only if certain theoretical assumptions are in place\\nis consistent with the claim that those assumptions (for instance,\\nthat uniform rectilinear motion does not count as a change) cannot\\nplay the explanatory role for specific causal interactions that strict\\nlaws are supposed to play. They are simply of too general a\\nnature—they don’t enable predictions or explanations of\\nany particular events. And in any case, there appears to be nothing in\\nDavidson’s considerations here that forces the requirement that\\nthe covering laws be strict as opposed to irreducibly ceteris\\nparibus. (As we have already seen\\n (3.1),\\n Davidson himself has insisted upon the legitimacy and ubiquity of\\nsuch laws in scientific explanation.)\",\n \"\\nReturning to the first point about predicate-individuation, Davidson\\nclaims that “it is just the predicates which are projectible,\\nthe predicates that enter into valid inductions, that determine what\\ncounts as a change” (Davidson 1995a, 272). We know from Nelson\\nGoodman’s ‘new riddle of induction’ (Goodman 1983)\\nthat we can invent predicates, such as ‘grue’ and\\n‘bleen’ (where an object is grue if it is green and\\nexamined before 2020 or otherwise blue, and an object is bleen if it\\nis blue and examined before 2020 or otherwise green) so that a green\\nobject goes from being grue to bleen over the course of time without\\nhaving changed in any intuitive sense. It will continue to be green,\\nthough it will also be true that it ceases to be grue and comes to be\\nbleen. Contrary to much discussion of Goodman’s riddle, Davidson\\nholds that such unusual predicates can be projectible, and figure in\\nlaws, but only when appropriately paired with other such predicates (\\n“All emeralds are grue” is not lawlike, but “All\\nemerires are grue” is (where “emerire” is true of\\nemeralds examined before 2020 or otherwise sapphires ). What is\\ncrucial for Davidson is that to understand the notion of change, which\\nis so closely tied to the notion of causation, one must understand the\\nnotion of a projectible predicate—one appropriate for use in\\nscience—and this notion inevitably brings in the notion of law.\\nChanges are described by predicates suitable for inclusion within\\nlaws. But how does this relate to the cause-law principle? Once again,\\nit is unclear why Davidson would think that it is the notion of a\\nstrict law in particular that this line of argument\\nmotivates.\",\n \"\\nA related line of argument that Davidson offers (see\\n 4.3)\\n appears to suggest that dispositional predicates—those defined\\nin terms of the effects they tend to bring about—are not\\nsuitable for inclusion in strict laws (generalizations in which they\\nfigure are always qualified by a ceteris paribus clause), but\\nthere must be strict laws at the bottom, so to speak, of the\\ndispositional vocabulary. Davidson’s discussion of this issue\\nrefers back to an older debate about the status of dispositional\\nterms—specifically, whether they are ‘place-holders’\\nfor predicates that are non-dispositional (‘intrinsic’ or\\n‘manifest’) (see Goodman 1983, 41ff). Whatever one’s\\nview about that issue, it again does not appear that Davidson has\\nprovided adequate argument for establishing that strict laws\\n(as opposed to ceteris paribus laws) are required for our\\ndispositional vocabulary to operate as it does. So Davidson does not\\nappear to have provided the cause-law principle with a plausible\\nrationale (for skepticism about the principle, see Anscombe 1971,\\nCartwright 1983, McDowell 1985, Hornsby 1985 and 1993, and\\n 3.3 below).\\n This is not to say that it is false, or even that it is implausible\\nto assume it in his argument for Anomalous Monism. Many find the\\nprinciple highly intuitive, and it is worthwhile to explore its\\nrelation to the other central claims in Davidson’s\\nframework.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.2 Justifying the Cause-Law Principle\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe cause-law principle has come in for a lot of criticism since it\\nreceived its canonical formulation in Hume’s regularity theory\\nof causation, and it is worth briefly reviewing some of the central\\nobjections relevant to Davidson’s own discussions. This will\\nmake clear how important it is, for an argument such as\\nDavidson’s for Anomalous Monism, that some justification for the\\nthesis ultimately be provided.\",\n \"\\nAn initial objection is that Hume’s analysis of singular causal\\nstatements (‘a caused b’ is true if and\\nonly if ‘whenever an A occurs, it is followed by an\\noccurrence of a B’), which articulates his own version\\nof the cause-law principle, is not an accurate rendering of the way in\\nwhich we typically use the term ‘cause’. We are confident\\nin judgments such as ‘Harry’s smoking caused his lung\\ncancer’ while knowing that in fact not all smokers are stricken\\nby lung cancer. This point is entirely general—we make singular\\ncausal judgments all the time without believing in (indeed, while\\nknowing the falsity of) the associated universal generalization (see\\nAnscombe 1971). However, Davidson’s extensionalism about\\ncausality provides a straightforward response to this concern. His\\nview is that while we may not believe in the associated universal\\ngeneralization, that is consistent with there being some\\nuniversal generalization, stated in a different vocabulary than the\\nsingular causal statement, which ‘covers’ that statement.\\n(It is worth noting that Davidson rejects Hume’s\\nanalysis of singular causal statements in terms of universal\\ngeneralizations—he holds that the requirement of such a covering\\ngeneralization is necessary but not sufficient for the truth of such a\\nstatement (Davidson 1967).)\",\n \"\\nWhile this response does appear to meet the objection, it raises the\\nfollowing concern, which is behind a related objection to the\\ncause-law principle: no one in fact seems to know any true predictive\\n‘strict’ laws (in the literal sense of that term). Now,\\nwhile it is certainly consistent with this point that there are or\\neven must be such laws, it becomes more pressing to know why we should\\nthink this if we cannot even offer any examples. It is well and good\\nfor Davidson to point to the possibility of strict covering laws that\\ntranscend our current knowledge, but we need to know why we should\\nbelieve in such things. Science seems to have done well for itself\\nwithout any apparent use of them.\",\n \"\\nAnother objection to the cause-law principle comes from the state of\\ncontemporary physics. According to quantum mechanics, it is not simply\\ndifficult or impossible for us to state such laws for quantum\\nphenomena. Rather, quantum theory appears to entail that determinism\\nfails to obtain at the level of microparticles. What the theory and\\nthe behavior of such particles tells us is that causation, at least at\\nthe level of micro phenomena, is indeterministic. And this\\nindeterminism is claimed to be inconsistent with the requirement of\\nstrict laws. This objection to the cause-law principle, then, is that\\nphilosophy should never dictate to science on empirical matters.\\nObservation of the world tells us that strict laws are impossible in\\nthis domain even while causation is present, in direct contradiction\\nof the cause-law principle.\",\n \"\\nNow, we have already seen Davidson’s own response to this sort\\nof objection\\n (3.1).\\n As traditionally construed, strict laws are supposed to guarantee the\\nconsequent condition on the basis of the antecedent condition. But\\nthey do not need to provide such a guarantee. What strict laws require\\nis that the antecedent include all conditions and events that could\\npossibly prevent the occurrence of the consequent. If the consequent\\ndoes not occur when all these conditions have been accounted for,\\nthere is nothing else to be cited in explanation of the non-occurrence\\nother than the sheer brute fact of an indeterministic universe. So\\nindeterministic causation is entirely consistent with the cause-law\\nprinciple (Davidson 1970, 219). The determinist/indeterminist and\\nstrict/nonstrict law distinctions do not map neatly onto each other.\\nAn indeterministic law can be universal, exceptionless and true. This\\npoint does not appear to be recognized by central proponents of the\\nindeterministic objection to strict laws (see Cartwright 1983).\",\n \"\\nA final objection to the cause-law principle which is more internal to\\nthe wider framework of Anomalous Monism has been put forth in McDowell\\n1985. McDowell sees a tension between Davidson’s allegiance to\\nthe cause-law principle and his rejection of ‘the dualism of\\nscheme and content’ (Davidson 1974a). Briefly, the dualism\\nDavidson opposes is the idea that, for instance, a perceptual judgment\\nis the rational upshot of an interaction between a concept and an\\nnonconceptualized experiential element—the sensory input. Given\\nDavidson’s systematic rejection of this idea, McDowell believes\\nhe ought to disavow the cause-law principle. McDowell doesn’t\\nthink the principle is required for a minimal version of materialism\\n(see the supplement on\\n Related Views\\n (Bare Materialism), and without the need to justify materialism\\nMcDowell sees the principle as lacking any motivation in\\nDavidson’s framework. For discussion of this issue and others\\nrelated to scheme-content dualism and Anomalous Monism, see the\\nsupplement on\\n Related Issues\\n (Anomalous Monism and Scheme-Content Dualism).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.3 Objections to the Cause-Law Principle\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe anomalism principle states that there are no strict laws on the\\nbasis of which mental events can predict, explain, or be predicted or\\nexplained by other events. In this section we look at different\\ninterpretations of the argument for this principle. Davidson’s\\nown formulations, while suggestive, are notoriously vague and often\\nappeal to very different sorts of considerations, including aspects of\\nlanguage and interpretation, questions about psychological\\nexplanation, and the nature of causality and dispositions. We shall be\\nlooking at specific interpretations as well as the problems they face\\nin providing a compelling rationale for both the anomalism principle\\nand Anomalous Monism.\",\n \"\\nWhile differing in important ways, the various formulations of the\\nargument, as well as the objections to them, exhibit a discernible\\npattern: proponents of mental anomalism highlight some feature of\\nmental properties that is claimed to (1) sharply individuate them from\\nphysical properties and (2) create a conceptual tension with physical\\nproperties that precludes the possibility of strict lawful relations\\nbetween these properties. According to the objections, however, the\\nhighlighted feature of mental properties either does not serve to\\ndistinguish it from physical properties or does not actually stand in\\nany conceptual tension with physical properties that rules out lawlike\\nrelations. We will consider each interpretation, and its problems, in\\nturn. In a later section\\n (5.3)\\n we will look at another objection related to the anomalism\\nprinciple—that it is inconsistent with Davidson’s\\ninvocation of the doctrine that mental properties stand in a relation\\nof supervenience to physical properties. For discussion of the\\nrelation between the anomalism principle and Davidson’s views\\nabout scheme-content dualism and semantic externalism, see the\\nsupplement on\\n Related Issues.\",\n \"\\nMental anomalism, as initially formulated by Davidson, holds that\\nthere can be no strict laws on the basis of which mental events can be\\npredicted and explained (Davidson 1970, 208). It is thus restricted to\\nruling out strict laws of succession with mental predicates occurring\\nin the consequent—laws such as\\n‘P1 → M1’,\\n‘(M1 & P1) → M2’,\\nor\\n‘M1 → M2’.\\nIt thus denies that the occurrence of particular mental events such as\\ncoming to believe or intend something, or intentionally acting in some\\nway, can be explained by appeal to strict covering laws. But as\\nbecomes clear, Davidson’s considered position rejects the\\npossibility of any strict laws in which mental predicates\\nfigure—and this includes, in particular, bridge laws of the form\\n‘P1 ↔ M1’,\\nwhich form the basis of type-identity theories of mind, as well as any\\nstrict laws with mental antecedents. We have already seen how strict\\npurely psychological laws are ruled out by the interaction principle\\n (2.3).\\n And, at a more general level, it rules out purported solutions to the\\nproblem of deviant causal chains noted in\\n 2.2,\\n which would spell out, in terms of some required physical and also,\\nperhaps, mental conditions, how behavior must be caused by reasons\\n(“caused in the right way”) in order to be action. (That\\nsome physical conditions are necessary in such an analysis is\\nguaranteed, as we have seen\\n (2.3),\\n by the open nature of the mental and subsequent psychological\\nanomalism.) Any such adequate analysis of action would entail\\nparticular psychophysical laws of the form\\n‘(M1 & M2 & M3 & P1) → P2’.\\nFor such an analysis would state that whatever behavior\\n(P2) which in fact is caused in the right way\\n(M3 & P1) by\\nreasons\\n(M1 & M2) would\\nbe the action that is rationalized by those reasons. This\\nprovides a schema for generating strict psychophysical laws: by\\nplugging in particular reasons and the causal conditions\\nP1 and M3 proffered by the\\nanalysis, we get a strict predictive psychophysical law simply by\\nnoting what effect is produced by these causes. (In the course of an\\nextended discussion of the problem of deviant causal chains, Bishop\\n1989, 125–75, fails to see this connection between it and mental\\nanomalism—see 164.) With strict purely psychological laws thus\\nalready ruled out, the focus now is on strict psychophysical laws.\",\n \"\\nIt is useful to view Davidson’s attack against psychophysical\\nlaws in light of an argument, in vogue in the 1950s and 1960s, against\\nthe claim that reasons are causes of the actions they explain. This\\nargument was referred to as the “Logical Connection\\nArgument” (see Stoutland 1970). According to this argument,\\nreasons cannot be held to explain actions by causing them because (1)\\ncauses and effects must be logically distinct from each other (one of\\nHume’s requirements on causality) but (2) reasons and the\\nactions they explain bear a quasi-logical connection to each other, by\\nvirtue of the rationalizing relation between them. That relationship\\nis quasi-logical because not just any reason can explain any\\naction—only those reasons which actually rationalize (make\\nintelligible) an action can explain it. Davidson’s own\\ninfluential response to this argument was to distinguish between\\ncausal relations, which obtain between events no matter how they are\\ndescribed, and logical relations, which obtain between particular\\ndescriptions of events. The Logical Connection Argument fails to\\nrecognize this simple distinction. The distinction allowed Davidson to\\nmerge two key ideas in his theory of action—that reasons explain\\nby causing, and that they explain by rationalizing (Davidson 1963,\\n13–17). As we shall see below, however, Davidson appears to\\naccept a basic distinction at the heart of the Logical Connection\\nArgument—that the rationalizing relationship bears a certain key\\nproperty (quasi-logical status) that is at odds with the relationship\\nbetween physically described, causally related events.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Premise III: The Anomalism Principle\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nDavidson’s explicit considerations in favor of mental anomalism\\nappeal to factors about the interpretation of action (linguistic as\\nwell as non-linguistic) and the ascription of mental states and events\\nto persons. Several distinguishable features are noted—holism\\nwith respect to particular ascriptions, indeterminacy with respect to\\nsystematic interpretative frameworks, and the responsiveness of mental\\nascription to an ideal of rationality. According to holism, particular\\nmental states can be cited in explanation of behavior only in the\\ncontext of other mental states, which in turn depend upon others.\\nDavidson claims that this dependency and holistic interrelatedness is\\n“without limit” (Davidson 1970, 217). This echoes a\\nrelated point he makes about the impossibility of definitional\\nreduction of mental states in purely behavioristic terms, because of\\nthe ineliminable need for mental caveats (e.g., that the person\\nunderstands, or notices or cares….) qualifying any attempt to\\nstate non-mental conditions for mental states.\",\n \"\\nDavidson presents these claims about definitional reduction as facts\\nwhich “provide at best hints of why we should not expect\\nnomological connections between the mental the physical”\\n(Davidson 1970, 217). If definitional reduction of this kind were in\\nfact impossible, it would rule out the possibility of a subclass of\\nstrict psychophysical laws—those relating mental states with\\nnon-intentionally described behavior—but the basis for this\\nimpossibility would not have been explained. In fact, however, without\\nknowing what that basis is supposed to be, we have no reason to accept\\nDavidson’s claim that definitional reduction is indeed\\nimpossible. What prevents us from articulating all the required\\ncaveats? Without a rationale in hand, nothing prevents a reductionist\\nfrom simply offering us detailed definitions and challenging us to\\ncome up with counterexamples. Something both principled and convincing\\nis clearly needed. Davidson’s concerns about definitional\\nreduction are ‘hints’ concerning nomological reduction\\nonly in the sense that they draw out our intuitions about something\\nstanding in the way of formulating such laws. What that obstacle is\\nneeds clear formulation.\",\n \"\\nAt times, Davidson appeared to flirt with the idea that the missing\\nlink was provided by the thesis of the indeterminacy of translation,\\ndeveloped by W.V Quine (1960) and endorsed by Davidson (1970, 222;\\n1979). This thesis claims that there are empirically adequate but\\nnon-equivalent complete frameworks for assigning linguistic meanings\\nand mental states to a person on the basis of his behavior, and that\\nthere is no fact of the matter that determines that one but not other\\nsuch frameworks is correct. In particular, there are no physical\\nfacts, inside a person’s body or head or outside in the external\\nworld, that could settle whether a person’s words refer to some\\ndeterminate range of objects rather than some other range, or whether\\none rather than another systematically interdependent set of mental\\nstates, with distinct distributions of truth values, is true of that\\nperson (see Davidson 1979). If the indeterminacy thesis is true, then\\non the face of it there would be some rationale for rejecting the\\npossibility of psychophysical laws. For if all physical facts are\\nconsistent with different psychological/semantic assignments, then it\\nseems that knowing all the physical facts could not tell us whether\\nsome mental states were true of some person, or some meaning true of\\nher words—neither could be exceptionlessly predicted or\\nexplained, just as mental anomalism maintains.\",\n \"\\nThere are two problems with this, however. First, this would do\\nnothing to rule out certain psychophysical laws, such as those of the\\nform\\n‘M1 → P1’.\\nAnd so it couldn’t ground the completely general thesis\\nof mental anomalism. But more importantly, Davidson himself holds that\\nthe least controversial versions of indeterminacy, having to do with\\ndiverging reference schemes, amount to mere notational\\nvariance—as he puts it, meaning is what is invariant between\\nempirically adequate translation schemes (Davidson 1977, 225; 1999a,\\n81). And given that such schemes are generated through a purely\\nmechanical permutation function (Davidson 1979, 229–30) it is a\\nrelatively simple technical trick to take these different schemes into\\naccount when formulating psychophysical laws. The laws, for instance,\\ncould be formulated with disjunctive predicates\\n(‘P1 → (M1 ∨ M2 ∨ M3’).\\nOr, if such predicates are considered problematic, the laws could be\\nof the form\\n‘P1 → M*’,\\nwhere ‘M*’ picks out the invariant element\\nbetween the empirically equivalent theories. So it is not at all clear\\nthat indeterminacy in and of itself is capable of supporting an\\nacross-the-board rejection of strict psychological or psychophysical\\nlaws. And Davidson ultimately acknowledges this, in stating that\\nanomalism would hold even if indeterminacy didn’t (Davidson\\n1970, 222).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.1 The Holism/Indeterminacy Arguments\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nWhat is responsible for the possibility of indeterminacy, however, is\\nthe role of the principle of charity in formulating a theory of\\nanother person’s behavior (Davidson 1970, 222–23). And\\nthis principle is closely aligned for Davidson with mental anomalism.\\nAccording to this principle, we must “try for a theory that\\nfinds him consistent, a believer of truths, and a lover of the good\\n(all by our own lights, it goes without saying)” (Davidson 1970,\\n222). In the process of coming to understand another, by ascribing\\nmental states and events to him and meanings to his words, we must,\\nDavidson claims, stand ready to adjust previous assignments of\\nmeanings and mental states and events based upon new evidence about\\nthe person and how it relates to the overall project of finding him\\nand his behavior intelligible. There are two key points here that for\\nDavidson suggest mental anomalism. First, we never have all possible\\nevidence—we must maintain an openness to better interpretations\\nof previous behavior as new evidence becomes available. Interpretation\\nis always ongoing. And second, ‘better’ interpretations\\nare those made in light of the constitutive ideal of rationality.\\nConsequently, Davidson claims, \",\n \"\\n\\n\\nthere cannot be tight connections between the realms [of the mental\\nand the physical] if each is to retain allegiance to its proper source\\nof evidence. (Davidson 1970, 222)\\n\",\n \"\\nRationality is claimed by Davidson to be constitutive of the\\nmental in the sense that something only counts as being a\\nmind—and thus an appropriate object of psychological\\nattributions—if it meets up to certain rational standards. This\\nconstitutive idea is open to weaker and stronger interpretations. The\\nweaker interpretation sees only very basic logical, semantic or\\nconceptual constraints on understanding others—and thus what is\\nconstitutive of minds—which allows for significant variation as\\none moves further out from these to more substantive principles of\\npractical reasoning and theoretical reasoning, and even more when\\nextending out further to desires and values. The stronger\\ninterpretation appears to be suggested in the quote from Davidson\\nimmediately above. In requiring consistency, true beliefs and\\nappropriate desires, it appears to require maximizing agreement\\nbetween interpreter and interpreted, and thus a maximal conception of\\nwhat is constitutive of minds. The weaker interpretation instead\\nrequires merely minimizing inexplicable error on the part of the\\ncreature being interpreted, thus allowing for significant deviations\\nfrom psychological assignments that might be required by the stronger\\ninterpretation. On this view, the interpreter puts himself into the\\nshoes of the interpreted, acknowledging evidential and cognitive\\nlimitations that might prevent her from achieving maximal rationality\\n(Grandy 1973). As we will see in this section, how one interprets the\\nnotion of rationality as constitutive directly affects how the\\nargument for mental anomalism is interpreted to work.\",\n \"\\nWhile Davidson never offers any substantive account of what the proper\\nsource of evidence is for the physical, he often invokes the notion of\\nrationality as constraining mental ascription, and it is clear that\\nwhatever constrains physical ascription is supposed to pull in a\\ndifferent and potentially conflicting direction. One suggestive way of\\ngetting at Davidson’s idea here is through the traditional\\ndistinction between ‘normative’ and\\n‘descriptive’ concepts. When we look to uncover\\ngeneralizations in the physically described world, what we find to\\nfollow from a certain set of physical conditions is a brute\\nfact; our world is constituted in certain ways (in its governing\\nlaws) that we could imagine to be different. We may come to an\\nempirical investigation with certain theoretical commitments that\\ninevitably lead us to read the data in some ways rather than others;\\nand there may indeed, as Davidson himself suggests, be constitutive\\na priori principles that govern very basic physical concepts\\nsuch as ‘object’ and ‘event’ (Davidson 1970,\\n220; 1974b, 239; 1973a, 254; see\\n 3.2\\n above). However, the constraints are far looser and allow for a wide\\nvariation in terms of empirical content—of what physical events\\nand states can follow from others. This is contrasted with mental\\nascription, where the normative notion of rationality rules out the\\npossibility of certain mental states following from others. This line\\nof thinking is suggestive, but it is in need of considerable\\ntightening.\",\n \"\\nJaegwon Kim’s account of Davidson’s position (Kim 1985)\\nattempts to do just this. Kim argues that if there were strict lawlike\\nrelations between mental and physical predicates, the ‘brute\\nfactness’ and contingency of the physical would\\n‘infect’ the mental. For instance, rationality\\nconsiderations will typically lead us to attribute a belief that q to\\na person if we attribute a belief that p and also attribute a\\nbelief that p entails q. According to Kim’s account, beliefs\\ninvolving very basic logical, semantic or conceptual relations like\\nthis hold of necessity—we cannot make sense of possible worlds\\nwhere beliefs of the first two kinds are attributed but not the\\nthird.\",\n \"\\nNow, this may appear to be too strong a claim, in light of\\nDavidson’s rejection of strict, purely psychological\\nlaws—mental anomalism rejects the possibility of any strict laws\\nin which mental predicates figure, but Kim here appears to be\\ndeploying laws of the form\\n‘M1 & M2 → M3’.\\nKim would reply that Davidson is only interested in rejecting strict\\ndescriptive (i.e., explanatory, predictive) laws, not strict normative\\nlaws (see below). \",\n \"\\nIf physical predicates stood in strict lawful relations to mental\\npredicates, this contingency would ‘infect’ the mental in\\nthe following sense. Suppose that there were strict bridge laws\\ncorrelating the instantiation of mental and physical properties,\\n‘P1 ↔ M1’\\nand\\n‘P2 ↔ M2’.\\nThen, Kim argues, rational principles of the form\\n‘M1 → \\nM2’ would enable the logical derivation of\\nphysical laws like\\n‘P1 → P2’.\\nIndeed, the reverse would be true as well; starting with the physical\\nlaw\\n‘P1 → P2’,\\nand assuming the psychophysical bridge laws, one could derive the\\nrational principle\\n‘M1 → M2’.\\nHowever, the metaphysical status of the rational principle and the\\nphysical law are importantly different—rational principles are\\nnecessary, true in all possible worlds, while physical laws, being\\ncontingent, are not. In particular, with the bridge laws in place, a\\ncontingent physical law could explain (through derivation) the\\nrational principle, undermining its status as necessary. Since it is\\nthe bridge laws that enable these troublemaking derivations,\\nthey—and thus strict psychophysical laws—are to be\\nrejected. This is how Kim makes sense of Davidson’s suggestive\\nclaim that mental anomalism is grounded in the fact that mental and\\nphysical explanation owe their allegiance to different sources of\\nevidence. (For related discussion, see the supplement on\\n Explanatory Epiphenomenalism.)\",\n \"\\nKim’s argument rests upon two central assumptions. First, it\\nassumes that no distinction between strict and ceteris\\nparibus laws need play any role in reconstructions of\\nDavidson’s argument. It is, purportedly, not the scope\\nof a psychological law which accounts for an asymmetry with physical\\nlaws, but rather the point of each type of law (Kim 1985,\\n381). Second, it assumes that there is a firm distinction between\\ndescriptive laws and relations, on the one hand, and normative laws\\nand relations, on the other, that can bear the weight of mental\\nanomalism (Kim 1985, 383) The first assumption is clearly mistaken; as\\nalready noted, Davidson heavily emphasizes the focus on strict laws in\\nhis own discussions of Anomalous Monism, and explicitly allows for the\\npossibility of hedged laws incorporating mental predicates.\\nKim’s reductio strategy, then, would fail to uniquely\\nidentify the culprit responsible for producing the trouble as the\\nbridge laws rather than the rational principle, all of which\\nare strict. And while Davidson does emphasize the normative status of\\nmental predicates, he also recognizes, as we have already noted\\n (3.2\\n and\\n 4.2),\\n a normative component to the physical realm, in constitutive a\\npriori principles. There does not appear to be a significant\\ndistinction between descriptive and normative principles in\\nDavidson’s framework that can bear the burden of mental\\nanomalism, as required on Kim’s interpretation. (For further\\ndiscussion of Kim’s interpretative strategy, see the supplement\\non\\n Kim’s Reductio Strategy for Establishing Mental Anomalism.)\",\n \"\\nJohn McDowell also focuses on the normative nature of rationality, but\\nemphasizes a very strong conception of rationality as an ideal\\nconstitutive of the mental, taking in more than merely the familiar\\ndeductive relations—logical, semantic or\\nconceptual—deployed in Kim’s reading (McDowell 1985,\\n391–4). McDowell appears to be guided by some of\\nDavidson’s broader formulations and discussions of the principle\\nof charity\\n (4.2),\\n which extend to more general principles governing action and belief\\nformation, highlighted in Davidson’s discussions of\\nirrationality (see Davidson 1982). For example, the principle of\\ncontinence requires one to act on the basis of all available\\nconsiderations, and the principle of total evidence requires one to\\nbelieve the hypothesis supported by all of one’s evidence. And\\nthe broad formulations entail that our conception of rationality\\nincludes conceptions of the Good, and so the formation of rationally\\nappropriate desires, thus extending beyond constraints on belief and\\naction. According to McDowell, those inclined to think that mere\\ndeductive relations can be captured in physical terms (see Loar 1981)\\nwill find mental anomalism much more difficult to deny when taking\\ninto account this stronger conception of rationality. \",\n \"\\nThis stronger conception of rationality puts McDowell in a position to\\nexploit a crucial gap between rational norms and actual explanations\\nof behavior:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nFinding an action or propositional attitude intelligible, after\\ninitial difficulty, may not only involve managing to articulate for\\noneself some hitherto merely implicit aspect of one’s conception\\nof rationality, but actually involve becoming convinced that\\none’s conception of rationality needed correcting, so as to make\\nroom for this novel way of being intelligible. (McDowell 1985,\\n392)\\n\",\n \"\\nJust as our beliefs about empirical matters can be mistaken in any\\ngiven case, and we can make genuine discoveries about empirical\\nreality, just so with rationality. Clearly this claim is much more\\nplausible with the stronger conception of rationality that McDowell is\\nurging than the weaker conception limited to mere deductive relations.\\nMcDowell goes on to argue that because of this feature, we must be\\nopen to the possible reinterpretation of a person’s behavior and\\npsychological states in light of our changing conception of\\nrationality, and how it changes cannot be anticipated in advance so\\nthat rationality could be captured in a permanent set of principles\\nfrom which strict laws could be fashioned. For this reason,\\nrationality is uncodifiable. According to McDowell, this is\\nwhat underlies mental anomalism.\",\n \"\\nOne might understand the reasoning here in the following way: because\\nit is built into our conception of rationality that our own particular\\ngrasp of rationality may be mistaken on any given occasion and is also\\ninherently limited, no statement of psychological or psychophysical\\ngeneralizations could exhaust, and therefore explain, our conception\\nof rationality. If the concept of rationality does not simply\\nconsist in one’s conception, at any given time, of\\nrationality, then it cannot be captured in terms of the\\nactual goings on in one’s brain (the same point applies\\nif we substitute “everyone’s” for\\n“one’s”). Therefore, strict lawlike relations\\nbetween the mental and the physical are impossible. This contrasts\\ninterestingly with Kim’s strategy: on McDowell’s reading,\\nit is partly because no detailed statement of a rational principle\\ncould be claimed to be necessarily true that there can be no\\npsychophysical laws.\",\n \"\\nA number of questions arise in considering McDowell’s argument.\\nIt appears to be heavily influenced by Davidson’s remarks about\\nthe ongoing nature of interpretation (Davidson 1970, 223;\\n see 4.2).\\n However, Davidson appeals to the fact that new\\nevidence—in the form of behavior and environmental\\ncontext—is always coming in that can force us to revise existing\\ninterpretations of an agent. There is no mention of shifting\\nstandards, or unarticulated or inarticulable conceptions of\\nrationality. Indeed, the implication is that a stable\\nstandard, when taking into account new evidence, can lead to revised\\ninterpretations of prior behavior. So McDowell appears to be going\\nbeyond Davidson’s own views about the concept of rationality.\\nIndeed, the idea that one is not able to fully articulate a concept in\\nthe way suggested by McDowell—that it is in effect\\nineffable –does not clearly sit comfortably with\\nDavidson’s views about conceptual relativism and rejection of\\nthe idea of untranslatable languages (see further the supplement on\\n Related Issues\\n (Anomalous Monism and Scheme-Content Dualism).\",\n \"\\nFurther, and more importantly, McDowell’s distinctive\\nuncodifiability claim, which rests on this view of rationality, looks\\nto be too general to underwrite a specific thesis like mental\\nanomalism. This becomes apparent when one asks why the very same\\nfeatures that he is insisting are true of our conception of\\nrationality aren’t also true of the key concepts that figure in\\nexplanations of the physical world. Surely our concepts of physical\\nreality outstrip any particular conception we have at any given time,\\nand the possibility of mistaken application is built into them. And\\nscientists are in the same position as interpreters in terms of the\\npossibility of new evidence and its bearing on how previous evidence\\nwas understood. So far this looks to be nothing more than a\\ncombination of a completely general point about concepts together with\\nthe familiar problem of induction, which plagues all empirical\\nenquiry. McDowell’s assertion that “someone who aims at\\nexplanations of the ideal-involving kind must be alive to the thought\\nthat there is sure to be a gap between actual current conception and\\nideal structure in his own case as well as others” (McDowell\\n1985, 392) doesn’t appear to uniquely pick out any particular\\nexplanatory framework. It therefore cannot tell us anything\\ndistinctive about the metaphysical status of psychology.\",\n \"\\nIf, however, the emphasis here falls on constitutive\\nprinciples in particular—as surely it must—then two other\\nproblems arise. First, McDowell’s reasoning doesn’t tell\\nus what exactly it is about such principles that makes them resistant\\nto reduction, since, as we’ve just seen, that reasoning has\\nfailed to distinguish them from empirical concepts in the physical\\nsciences. And second, as noted in\\n 4.2,\\n Davidson holds that there are constitutive a priori\\nprinciples underlying the physical sciences which play a similar role\\nthere that rationality plays in psychological explanation. So we are\\nstill in need of an explanation of why psychology and physics cannot\\nstand in strict lawlike relations. Now, we did note there that such\\nphysical constitutive principles are far more lenient than\\nrationality, allowing for a greater variety of empirical\\ncontent—of what can follow from what. This indeed accounts for\\nan important asymmetry between mental and physical explanation. And\\nMcDowell heavily emphasizes this point in his discussion: that it is\\nnot merely a brute fact that rationality marks the limits of\\nintelligibility, while physical explanations do bottom out in brute\\nfacts (McDowell 1985, 394). However, this point appears to be entirely\\nseparable from the distinctive feature of McDowell’s reading of\\nthe argument for mental anomalism—it has nothing especially to\\ndo with the idea of rationality as uncodifiable in\\nMcDowell’s specific sense. In fact, it is the key point behind\\nKim’s strategy, and it appears to have no essential connection\\nto McDowell’s stronger views about rationality. One can think of\\nrationality as constitutive, as normative and as asymmetrical to the\\nphysical in the way just noted—as Kim does—without buying\\ninto McDowell’s distinctive picture of it. So it looks like the\\nsalvageable part of McDowell’s actual argument for mental\\nanomalism ultimately reduces to Kim’s. Uncodifiability appears\\nto be a red herring.\",\n \"\\nTherefore, despite McDowell’s extremely subtle and interesting\\nviews about the nature of the ideal of rationality, in the end those\\nviews do not appear to provide a secure foundation for mental\\nanomalism. It is only what is shared in common with Kim’s\\nstrategy—the modal asymmetry between rational and physical\\nexplanation—that bears directly on mental anomalism. And that\\nleaves McDowell’s reading facing the sorts of concerns raised in\\n 4.2.1.\",\n \"\\nAs we have seen above, Kim thinks that mental anomalism is susceptible\\nof a kind of proof. This seems to be something stronger than Davidson\\nhimself claims (Davidson 1970, 215). In light of Davidson’s\\nmodesty about provability, and lack of explicit argumentation, some\\ncommentators (Child 1992; see also McDowell 1979) have suggested that\\nmere reflection on the kinds of generalizations that we draw upon in\\ncoming to understand each other supports (but cannot prove) mental\\nanomalism. Such generalizations are rules of thumb that hold only for\\nthe most part, and require, for their application to a given case,\\ndetailed contextual supplementation that cannot, by its nature, be\\nincluded in anything like a universal generalization. The suggestion\\nis that the sheer amount of contextual detail that would need to be\\naccounted for in any statement with even a hope of being true is\\ninappropriate for inclusion in strict lawful statements. A related\\nstrategy is to point to a lack of fixed, predetermined ends that all\\nhumans (or even any particular human over the course of her life) aim\\nfor in situations of choice, or values to maximize when deciding what\\nto believe (such as simplicity, scope, and consistency in the case of\\ntheory choice) (Child 1992). The thought here is that if there are no\\nsuch fixed ends or values, then no psychological generalization could\\nbe complete—since in particular contexts such ends or values\\nplay a crucial explanatory role in determining what to do or\\nbelieve.\",\n \"\\nIt would seem, however, that reflection on the level of detail\\nrequired for strict laws in the physical sciences fails to provide for\\nan interesting asymmetry here. If one considers the number of factors\\nthat would have to be taken in to account in order to state conditions\\nthat guarantee that when a match is struck it will produce a flame,\\nthe resulting strict law would be quite complex, and in a way not\\nobviously different from any putative strict laws in which mental\\npredicates figure, with contextual features included. And if there are\\nindeed no fixed ends or values in the realm of choice and a decision,\\nthis can be accommodated in the same way—the contextual ends or\\nvalues could themselves be included in the putative strict laws. This\\nwould complicate and expand the set of such laws, but as already noted\\nthis is not something that would set mental generalizations apart from\\nphysical ones. (For further discussion of rationality and the argument\\nfor Anomalous Monism see Yalowitz 1997 and Latham 1999.)\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.2 The Rationality Arguments\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nWe have been looking at different ways of making sense of and\\njustifying Davidson’s claim that mental anomalism stems from the\\nconstitutive role of rationality in mental ascription. In\\nDavidson’s writings, however, another line of argument often\\nsurfaces which focuses less on the rational nature of mental events\\nand more on their causal nature. As we have already seen, in his\\nearliest work on action Davidson argued that reasons explain actions\\nby causing them, and he later came to emphasize that what makes mental\\nstates and events what they are is determined in part by their causes\\nand effects. Particular psychological explanations are causal (they\\ninvoke causes—Davidson 1963), and are formulated in terms of\\ncausally defined concepts (for propositional attitudes, see Davidson\\n1987b, 41; for mental contents, see Davidson 1987a, 44). In later work\\nhe frequently notes the anomic nature of causal concepts and causal\\nexplanations, and how mental properties and reasons explanations are\\nanomic because of this—“reason-explanations…are in\\nsome sense low-grade; they explain less than the best explanations in\\nthe hard sciences because of their heavy dependence on causal\\npropensities” (Davidson 1987b, 42; see also Davidson 1991, 162).\\nIf mental concepts are causally defined, and strict laws do not employ\\ncausally defined concepts, then mental anomalism appears to follow\\nstraight away, without need of any detour through issues concerning\\nthe rationality of mental concepts.\",\n \"\\nExtending this reasoning, Davidson writes that\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n[m]ental concepts…appeal to causality because they are\\ndesigned, like the concept of causality itself, to single out from the\\ntotality of circumstances which conspire to cause a given event just\\nthose factors that satisfy some particular explanatory interest.\\n(Davidson 1991, 163)\\n\",\n \"\\nThis appears to ground the causal definition of anomic properties\\n(whether mental or otherwise) in the fact that they answer to\\nparticular explanatory interests. This is contrasted with the case of\\n‘ultimate physical’ properties: “Explanation in\\nterms of the ultimate physics, though it answers to various interests,\\nis not interest relative” (Davidson 1987b, 45). This seems to\\ncollapse the distinction between psychology and all the other special\\nsciences with respect to the question of anomalism. All of the latter\\nanswer to particular explanatory interests, and are thus\\nselective with respect to the total sufficient condition for\\nan effect-type (see Davidson 1987b, 45); the causal definition, and\\nthus anomalism, of their vocabularies is owed to this\\ninterest-relativity and selectivity. ‘Ultimate physics’,\\non the other hand, “treats everything without exception as a\\ncause of an event if it lies within physical reach (falls within the\\nlight cone leading to the effect)” (Davidson 1987b, 45).\",\n \"\\nDavidson repeats these sorts of claims about the anomic nature of\\ncausally defined properties in a number of places in later writings,\\nbut at no point does he clearly bring them into contact with his early\\nremarks concerning the constitutive role of rationality in\\npsychological ascription. And he never provides argument in support of\\nthis general thesis concerning causality. It is natural to wonder why,\\ngiven this general thesis about causally defined concepts, rationality\\nshould be thought to underwrite mental anomalism. And it becomes\\nimperative to know why that general thesis is plausible (for\\ndiscussion, see Yalowitz 1998a).\",\n \"\\nWith regard to the first issue, there is some evidence that Davidson\\nis confusing two distinct questions: why mental concepts cannot stand\\nin lawlike relation to physical concepts, and why mental concepts\\ncannot be eliminated in favor of physical concepts in the explanation\\nof human behavior. Given the general thesis about causally defined\\nproperties, we have an understanding of why mental concepts are\\nanomic. But this leaves open the question whether we ought to continue\\nto traffic in anomic concepts generally, and mental concepts in\\nparticular. Why not eliminate them in favor of the nomic physical\\nconcepts? Here, the rationality of mental concepts may be thought to\\nprovide an answer. If we wish to understand why an agent performed the\\naction that she did, as opposed to having a full sufficient causal\\nexplanation of why her body moved as it did, we are interested in a\\nselective explanation—that part of the total sufficient\\ncondition that satisfies the particular explanatory interests behind\\nreasons-explanations (Davidson 1991, 163). Those interests highlight\\nthe normative nature of reason and action—their responsiveness\\nto the principle of charity and ideal of rationality. Rationality, on\\nthis line of thinking, does not account for mental anomalism; but it\\ndoes speak to the question of mental realism (see further\\n 6.2).\\n (For further discussion of the anomic nature of causally defined\\nconcepts and its bearing on Anomalous Monism, see Yalowitz 1998a. For\\nmore on the relation between rational explanation and mental realism,\\nsee the supplement on\\n Explanatory Epiphenomenalism.\\n For discussion of issues closely related to the causal definition\\nargument, see\\n 6.3\\n and the supplement on\\n Related Issues\\n (Mental Anomalism and Semantic Externalism).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.3 The Causal Definition Argument\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nSo far we have looked at Davidson’s three premises in support of\\nAnomalous Monism—the interaction, cause-law and anomalism\\nprinciples. In this section, we examine the conclusion that Davidson\\ndraws on the basis of these principles—the token-identity theory\\nof mental events, according to which every causally interacting mental\\nevent is token-identical to some physical event. We will look at the\\nderivation and nature of this theory, some questions about its\\nadequacy, as well as the additional thesis that mental properties\\nsupervene on physical properties. As we shall see, both the\\ntoken-identity and supervenience claims turn out to be controversial,\\nin their motivation as well as in their consistency with mental\\nanomalism. One key point to keep in mind at this point is that monism\\nis supposed to be derived from the principles and other assumptions\\nthat, taken individually, could be acceptable to positions opposing\\nmonism.\",\n \"\\nTo begin with, it is worth pointing out that Davidson is concerned\\nonly with the ontological status of events, and not substances.\\nDescartes, for instance, argued for the claim that mind and body are\\ndistinct entities. While Descartes’ position has implications\\nfor accounts of mental events, the issues concerning event and\\nsubstance identity are distinct (see Latham 2001). Davidson clearly\\ntakes himself to be establishing something that is inconsistent with\\nCartesian dualism, however, and it is useful briefly to look at how\\nAnomalous Monism bears upon substance dualism.\",\n \"\\nAccording to Descartes, mind and body are distinct substances in part\\nbecause they do not share essential properties in common. In\\nparticular, minds do not occupy a spatial location, while bodies\\nnecessarily do. Since mental events thus constitute changes occurring\\nin a nonspatially-located entity, they also do not occupy a spatial\\nregion. Bodily events, on the other hand, do occupy spatial locations\\nby virtue of being changes in material substances, which themselves\\nare spatially located. On Descartes’ view, then, particular\\nmental and physical events cannot be token-identical, since they fail\\nto share a crucial property in common without which identity is\\nunintelligible. While Anomalous Monism is not officially concerned\\nwith the ontological status of substances, it thus appears to have\\nconsequences that are inconsistent with Descartes’ substance\\ndualism—though it doesn’t by itself establish substance\\nmonism, it does rule out the Cartesian thought that mental and\\nphysical events fail to be identical, and so conflicts with one of the\\nbases for Cartesian substance dualism.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Monism\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe structure of Davidson’s derivation of the token-identity of\\ncausally interacting mental events with physical events appears to be\\nstraightforward: causally interacting mental events (the interaction\\nprinciple) must instantiate some strict law property (the cause-law\\nprinciple) but mental properties are not suitable for inclusion in\\nstrict laws (the anomalism principle). So mental events must\\ninstantiate some other property, which is suitable for such inclusion.\\nGiven Davidson’s invocation of the causal closure of the\\nphysical domain, according to which every physical event has a\\nphysical explanation, he moves rather quickly to the conclusion that\\nthis other property must be physical, since closure entails that\\nphysical properties have a privileged status, which suggests that they\\nhold out the promise of strict laws. (Davidson also has a tendency\\nsimply to identify as ‘physical’ those properties that\\nfigure in strict laws (Davidson 1970, 224; 1995a, 266), but this would\\nof course beg the question of mental anomalism.) Consequently,\\ncausally interacting mental events must be token-identical with\\nphysical events, ruling out Cartesian as well as other forms of\\ndualism.\",\n \"\\nThere are serious problems with the assumption of causal closure of\\nthe physical in Davidson’s framework (for discussion, see the\\nsupplement on\\n Causal Closure of the Physical in the Argument for Anomalous Monism).\\n It is difficult, however, to see how Davidson can move from the claim\\nthat mental events must instantiate non-mental, strict law properties\\nto the claim that these properties must be physical without assuming\\nclosure. Why assume that only ‘physical’ properties are\\nnomic? This raises interesting issues about the nomic status of other\\nspecial sciences—the relevant ones here being biology and\\nchemistry—but there do not appear to be explicit, conclusive\\nresources in Davidson’s own thinking for addressing this.\\nYalowitz 1998a has, however, provided an interpretation of Anomalous\\nMonism stressing Davidson’s views on causality and the nomic\\nstatus of dispositions (see\\n 4.3)\\n in which causal closure is derived from the\\ncause-law principle, token-identity and the anomalism of causally\\ndefined properties. On this interpretation, the strict law properties\\nthat mental events must instantiate turn out to be physical because\\nonly physical properties are non-causally individuated—all\\nspecial science properties are causally individuated, and all such\\nproperties are anomic.\",\n \"\\nDavidson’s token-identity theory is dramatically different than\\nprevious identity theories of mind, in both it’s a\\npriori status as well as its stance towards the role of laws in\\njustifying monism. Previous theories had argued that claims concerning\\nthe identity of particular mental and physical events depended upon\\nthe discovery of lawlike relations between mental and physical\\nproperties. These theories thus held that empirical evidence\\nsupporting such laws was required for particular identity claims.\\nAccording to Anomalous Monism, however, it is precisely\\nbecause there can be no such strict laws that causally\\ninteracting mental events must be identical to some physical\\nevent. The token-identity thesis thus requires no empirical evidence\\nand depends on there being no lawlike relations. It in effect\\njustifies the token-identity of mental and physical events through\\narguing for the impossibility of type-identities between mental and\\nphysical properties or kinds (Davidson 1970, 209, 212–13; see\\nJohnston 1985).\",\n \"\\nAn important point to recognize in Davidson’s version of\\ntoken-identity is that he is not simply deriving the conclusion that\\nmental events bear some property that we would intuitively acknowledge\\nas ‘physical’ (such as spatial location). As pointed out\\nin\\n 2.1,\\n the relevant ‘physical’ properties would more likely have\\nto resemble the sorts of properties currently invoked in physics, our\\nmost mature science and the one closest to issuing in strict laws.\\nThis point has generated numerous objections to Davidson’s\\ntoken-identity theory, but it also has been overlooked by some\\nobjectors (see below). Davidson’s central claim is that what\\nmakes a mental event identical to a physical event is that the mental\\nevent has a physical description. In Davidson’s original\\nformulation, monism entailed that every mental event can be\\nuniquely singled out using only physical concepts (1970,\\n215). It is this position that became the target of some\\nDavidson’s critics\\n (5.2).\\n However, Davidson eventually came to explicitly deny that his monism\\ncommits him to the possibility of providing descriptions of mental\\nevents or actions in physical terms suitable for strict laws (Davidson\\n1999d, 639; 1999b, 653–4). He noted that strict laws will say\\nsomething to the effect that “whenever there is a certain\\ndistribution of forces and matter in a field of a certain size at time\\nt, it will be followed by a certain distribution of forces\\nand matter in a field of a certain size at time\\nt′” (Davidson 1999d, 639). And he claimed that\\nboth the antecedents and consequents of such laws, when covering\\nparticular mental events and actions, will cover much larger regions\\nof space than merely the agent or her action. Why? Because while\\nsingular causal statements are singular, and therefore select\\nfrom a complete set of causal factors those that are salient or in\\nline with our particular explanatory interests, strict laws\\ndon’t themselves select—“that’s what makes\\nthem strict” (Davidson 1999d, 640; see Yalowitz 1998a for an\\nextended discussion of this issue and its bearing on the argument for\\nboth mental anomalism as well as monism). Davidson soft-pedals how\\nthis view bears on the uniqueness claim in the official statement of\\nAnomalous Monism, parsing away that claim in favor of the blander idea\\nthat “some physical description applies to each mental\\nevent” (Davidson 1999b, 654). As subtle as it seems, this\\nappears to be a fundamental shift in Davidson’s thinking about\\nmonism, though it goes unexplored in his later work and has failed to\\nattract the attention of his critics.\",\n \"\\nIn any case, Anomalous Monism thus does not inherit the problem of how\\nto justify specific identifications between mental and physical\\nevents, because the claim that there is a physical description for\\neach mental event is established purely a priori. And the\\nphysical descriptions are not (indeed, cannot be) specifiable in\\nprecise and uniquely identifying spatial and temporal terms. As we are\\nabout to see\\n (5.2),\\n each of these points is overlooked by many of Davidson’s\\ncritics. That the latter is overlooked is understandable, given its\\nlate appearance. However, the former point has always been\\nfundamental, and critics’ failure to appreciate it is\\ncurious.\",\n \"\\nDavidson additionally claims that the relation between the mental and\\nphysical properties is not merely haphazard or coincidental. A\\nrelationship of supervenience obtains between the two (Davidson 1970,\\n214; 1973a, 253; 1993; 1995a, 266). (Davidson never argues for\\nsupervenience. For discussion, see the supplement on\\n Supervenience and the Explanatory Primacy of the Physical.)\\n A working statement of this relationship is that if two events fail\\nto share a mental property, they will fail to share at least one\\nphysical property (Davidson 1995a, 266)—or, equivalently, if two\\nevents share all of their physical properties, they will share all of\\ntheir mental properties. It is meant to articulate a kind of\\ndependency of the mental on the physical, and correlatively a kind of\\nexplanatory primacy to the physical, but without claiming any kind of\\nreductive relation between the mental and the physical. The working\\nstatement’s truth depends, it seems, on the thought that the\\ndistribution of physical properties somehow explains the\\ndistribution of mental properties—failure to share a mental\\nproperty depends upon/is explained by failure to share at\\nleast one physical property. The supervenience relation is usually\\nunderstood to issue in generalizations of the following kind:\\n‘P1 → M1’,\\n‘P2 → M1’,\\netc. (where antecedent and consequent occur at the same time). This\\nallows for the empirical possibility that a number of different\\nphysical state kinds underlie the same mental state kind (for more on\\nthis, see the supplement on\\n Related Issues\\n (Mental Anomalism and Semantic Externalism)). However, it also\\nappears to suggest the existence of lawlike relations between physical\\nand mental properties, and so to be in tension with mental anomalism.\\nThis issue will be explored in\\n 5.3.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.1 Token Identity\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe token-identity thesis has been the subject of a number of\\ninteresting criticisms. Many of them, however, are difficult to bring\\nfully into contact with Davidson’s own particular version of the\\nthesis, primarily because Davidson’s version is derived a\\npriori from the other premises in his framework. So, for\\ninstance, it has been argued that mental events do not bear the burden\\nof the spatiotemporal precision of physical events that they would\\nneed to if the former were genuinely identical to the latter (Hornsby\\n1981; Leder 1985). For example, it would seem arbitrary to identify\\nthe deduction of some conclusion from a chain of reasoning with some\\nparticular neural event or set of neural events occurring at a\\nspecific time and place in the brain—especially given the\\nmicro-precision of the neural framework. Compare attempting to provide\\nphysical description for the action of paying back a debt—how\\ndoes one determine the spatial and temporal parameters with the\\nprecision demanded by the language of physics? Distinguishing between\\n“the” physical event, as opposed to its causes and its\\neffects, can seem daunting if not outright nonsensical (Leder 1985;\\nsee also di Pinedo 2006). Further, it has been argued that the only\\npossible empirical evidence for specific token-identity claims could\\nbe type-identities between either those or other mental and physical\\nproperties, because evidence needs to be drawn from variant cases in\\norder to sort out merely coincident from identical events (Leder\\n1985).\",\n \"\\nSuch criticisms become difficult to evaluate given Davidson’s\\na priori procedure for establishing the token-identity\\nthesis. He can respond that we already know, a priori, that\\nany particular mental event must instantiate some physical property if\\nit causally interacts with any mental or physical event, given the\\ncause-law and anomalism principles. Questions about how this physical\\nproperty, whatever it is, relates to properties currently invoked in\\nneuroscience come later and are necessarily secondary to this monistic\\nconclusion. And there is no guarantee (indeed, it is quite unlikely)\\nthat neuroscientific properties currently in vogue are candidates for\\nstrict-law properties. As we have just seen\\n (5.1),\\n Davidson eventually came to explicitly associate the physical\\nproperties that cover mental events with broad descriptions covering\\nlarge space-time regions. Further, it would confuse epistemology with\\nmetaphysics to insist that, because we can only establish which\\nphysical property some mental token event instantiates by leaning on\\nsome type-correlations between other mental and physical properties,\\ntoken-identity claims presuppose type-identity. How we discover the\\nparticular physical properties is one thing; whether there can be\\npsychophysical laws is quite another, and not settled by the method of\\ndiscovery.\",\n \"\\nWe also need to keep in mind that Davidson embraces the possibility of\\nsubstantive mental-physical correlations (ceteris paribus\\npsychophysical laws), which directly address these epistemological\\nissues. More generally, Davidson’s token-identity claim is that\\nthe predicates that come to form the vocabulary of the as-yet unknown\\nstrict-law science will be capable of being used to describe mental\\nevents. While we cannot judge this claim by appealing to features of\\ncurrent neuroscience, it also seems that it should be possible to\\nadjudicate conceivability concerns. And, putting aside\\nDavidson’s later views, while we are not currently in the\\nbusiness of assigning fine-grained spatiotemporal parameters to mental\\nevents, it does not seem obvious that we couldn’t come to accept\\nsuch assignments on the basis of theoretical considerations without\\nthereby committing ourselves to the existence of type-identities.\\nHowever, Davidson’s official position, early and late, has\\nalways been that we do not need to be capable of making such\\nassignments in order to assert token-identity—there must simply\\nbe such true assignments, and this is something we know on the basis\\nof a purely a priori argument. (Davidson 1999b; for further\\ndiscussion of this issue, see the supplement on\\n Related Views\\n (Bare Materialism); for a different criticism of token-identity, see\\nthe supplement on\\n Related Views\\n (Other Positions). For a criticism based upon Davidson’s own\\ntreatment of causal explanation, see Horgan and Tye 1985. For\\ndiscussion of the criticism that Davidson’s monism is too weak\\nto warrant the label ‘materialism’, see the supplement on\\n Token-Identity and Minimal Materialism).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.2 Objections to Token Identity\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nWe have seen that Davidson supplements his monism with a claim of\\nsupervenience. There are many different conceptions of the\\nsupervenience relation (see Kim 1993b), and Davidson ultimately came\\nto identify his version with what is called “weak”\\nsupervenience, in contrast to “strong” and\\n“global” supervenience. Briefly, the basic differences\\nbetween these positions are as follows. Weak supervenience links\\nspecific mental and physical properties within but not across possible\\nworlds, while strong supervenience links those properties across\\nworlds. Global supervenience links the class of mental properties as a\\nwhole with the class of physical properties as a whole within but not\\nacross worlds, but does not constrain relations between specific pairs\\nof mental and physical properties. Weak supervenience comes down to\\nthe view that mental properties depend upon those physical properties\\nthey are correlated with within a particular possible world, but those\\nvery same physical properties may, in another possible world,\\ncorrelate with very different (or even no) mental properties. Weak\\nsupervenience is thus stronger than global supervenience, in that it\\nposits correlations between particular pairs of mental and physical\\nproperties, but weaker than strong supervenience in that it recognizes\\nthe possibility that these correlations can fail to obtain in other\\npossible worlds. (It should be noted that Davidson never brought his\\nviews on supervenience into contact with his later views, noted above,\\nabout the broad nature of the physical properties that mental events\\nmust instantiate according to Anomalous Monism. It is not at all clear\\nwhether or how these views can be combined. In the following\\ndiscussion of supervenience, this complication will be ignored, and it\\nwill be assumed that the physical properties in question are not of\\nthis broad nature, since this is how Davidson’s own discussions\\nof supervenience seem to proceed, and certainly what his critics\\npresuppose.)\",\n \"\\nThe puzzling aspect of Davidson’s doctrine of supervenience\\narises independently of fine points of the disagreement between the\\ncompeting conceptions of supervenience sketched above. Whether the\\ndependency is between particular mental and physical properties, or\\nsets of the two, and whether or not the dependency holds only within\\nor also across possible worlds, it appears that it entails that there\\nwill exist strict laws on the basis of which mental events can be\\npredicted and explained that were supposed to be ruled out by the\\nanomalism principle. Davidson sometimes claims (Davidson 1995a, 266)\\nthat supervenience is actually entailed by Anomalous Monism,\\nin which case it would appear to follow that Anomalous Monism itself\\nis an inconsistent theory—entailing both that there cannot be\\nany strict psychophysical laws (the anomalism principle) and that\\nthere must be such laws (supervenience). But generally his position\\nappears to be that Anomalous Monism is simply consistent with\\nsupervenience (Davidson 1993, 7). If supervenience and Anomalous\\nMonism are indeed inconsistent, and the former is rejected, the\\nquestion of the plausibility of a materialist position with no\\ndiscernible relation between mental and physical properties arises\\n(see the supplement on\\n Supervenience and the Explanatory Primacy of the Physical).\\n (The caveat about the relation between Davidson’s later views\\nabout physical descriptions and supervenience noted at the end of\\n 5.1.\\n should be kept in mind here.)\",\n \"\\nWhy does supervenience appear to generate strict laws? When Davidson\\nfirst stated the supervenience claim, he articulated it in the\\nfollowing terms: “there cannot be two events alike in all\\nphysical respects but differing in some mental respects”\\n(Davidson 1970, 214)). This formulation appears to entail strict\\npsychophysical laws of the form\\n‘P1 → \\nM1’. Davidson later came to focus on the\\ninversion of this formulation: “if two events fail to share a\\nmental property, they will fail to share at least one physical\\nproperty” (Davidson 1995a, 266). The advantage of this\\nreformulation is that it brings out the fact that the requisite\\nphysical differences need not be the same in each case of\\nmental difference (see Davidson 1973a, 253–4). As Davidson says,\\n\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nalthough supervenience entails that any change in a mental property\\np of a particular event e will be accompanied by a\\nchange in the physical properties of e, it does not entail\\nthat a change in p in other events will be accompanied by an\\nidentical change in the physical properties of those other events.\\nOnly the latter entailment would conflict with [Anomalous Monism].\\n(Davidson 1993, 7)\\n\",\n \"\\nThere seem to be two problems here, however. First, the inverted\\nreformulation actually entails the original thesis—that if two\\nevents share all physical properties they will share all mental\\nproperties—and so once again generates strict psychophysical\\nlaws. Second, even if the accompanied physical changes can be\\ndifferent, that simply generates more strict psychophysical\\nlaws—‘\\nP1 → M1’,\\n‘P2 → M1’,\\nand so on. So it is hard to see why Davidson thinks that the second\\nformulation is consistent with the anomalism principle.\",\n \"\\nSome defenders of Davidson (Child 1992, 224; see also Davidson 1973,\\n258) have responded to the apparent tension between supervenience and\\nmental anomalism by emphasizing that the degree of detail that would\\nhave to go into the formulation of such laws would make them useless\\nfor prediction, since it is unlikely that the relevant initial\\nconditions will repeat. But as we have seen\\n (4.2.3),\\n this seems to be true of any candidate for a strict law—it must\\ntake into account all possible interfering conditions, and doing so\\nbecomes quite unwieldy for generating predictions. And in any case,\\nsuch laws would still provide strict explanations of mental\\nevents, contrary to Davidson’s own formulation of mental\\nanomalism. So the problem that supervenience ‘laws’ seem\\nto pose for the anomalism principle remains.\",\n \"\\nOther defenders of Davidson (see Macdonalds 1986) have responded to\\nthis problem by arguing that the existence of strict supervenience\\nlaws is compatible with mental anomalism so long as we are not\\nactually able to state any such laws and thus be in a position to use\\nthem to predict and explain actual mental events—which is\\ncertainly the case currently and likely for the foreseeable future.\\nThis suggestion exploits a literal reading of Davidson’s\\nofficial statement of the anomalism principle, which denies the\\npossibility of strict laws on the basis of which mental events can\\nbe explained or predicted. But in doing so, it makes Anomalous\\nMonism into a much weaker position, dependent on the cognitive\\nlimitations of human beings. It in effect becomes a contingent\\nepistemological position rather than the necessary metaphysical\\ndoctrine it purports to be.\",\n \"\\nDavidson in one place offers a very different suggestion in response\\nto the problem. He claims that the supervenient relations between\\nmental and physical predicates that he envisages are of a ceteris\\nparibus nature. He accepts the requirement that any satisfactory\\naccount of the relation between mental and physical properties must\\npermit appeal to local correlations and dependencies between specific\\nmental and physical properties (Davidson 1993, 9). But he blocks any\\nentailment from this requirement to strict psychophysical laws,\\nsuggesting that such ‘correlations’ and\\n‘dependencies’ are of a ceteris paribus form.\",\n \"\\nSuch a ceteris paribus conception of supervenience has not\\nbeen discussed in the extensive literature on the topic (its\\npossibility is recognized and endorsed by Kim 1995, 136; however, see\\nKim 1993, 24–25) and it is unclear whether it can deliver a\\nsuitably strong notion of dependency to satisfy materialist\\nintuitions. But it does seem to be an attractive way of reconciling\\nsupervenience with mental anomalism so that Anomalous Monism remains a\\nconsistent theory.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.3 Is Supervenience Consistent with Mental Anomalism?\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nIt has been widely held that Anomalous Monism cannot avoid\\nepiphenomenalism—the view that mental events lack\\ncausal/explanatory powers. At a first approximation, the concern\\nderives from a tension between mental anomalism and the apparently\\nprivileged status assigned to physical properties in Davidson’s\\nframework—in particular, that all events are physical, and all\\nphysical events have a strict explanation in terms of other physical\\nevents. It then becomes an important question what sort of\\ncausal/explanatory role mental properties can play when all events\\nalready have a physical explanation.\",\n \"\\nSome welcome this result, holding that mental events explain actions\\nin a sui generis way not accountable for in the terms of\\ntypical scientific explanations (see von Wright 1971; Stoutland 1976;\\nWilson 1985; Ginet 1995; Campbell 1998 and 2005 and related discussion\\nin the supplement on\\n Explanatory Epiphenomenalism).\\n Many, however, see this charge as devastating to the prospects of\\nAnomalous Monism’s attempt to occupy a position between\\nreductionist materialism and dualism. Without a distinctive causal\\nrole for mental events to play in the explanation of action, many\\nthink that they would lack the sort of robust reality needed to\\ncompete with reductionism and dualism. On this way of thinking, only\\ncausal powers can justify mental realism. So if Anomalous Monism\\ncannot avoid epiphenomenalism, it appears to open the door to\\neliminativist materialism, which holds that mental vocabulary and\\nexplanations are vacuous and ought to be thrown out and replaced by\\nneuroscience (assuming, which seems extremely doubtful, that\\nneuroscience can itself supply strict laws—if not, then this\\nline of thought would lead to throwing out all but\\n‘physical’ strict law properties and explanations).\",\n \"\\nAs noted, the epiphenomenalist worry arises from two points that are\\nabsolutely basic to Anomalous Monism—first, that mental events\\nare at the same time physical events, and, second, that while mental\\npredicates cannot figure into strict causal laws, physical predicates\\nmust. Early critics moved quickly from these points to the\\nepiphenomenalist conclusion that mental properties are causally\\nirrelevant, because there are always strict law\\nproperties—physical properties—to causally explain the\\noccurrence of an event. (For detailed discussion of this line of\\nargument, see the supplement on\\n Mental Properties and Causal Relevance.)\\n Among many other problems with this line of argument, however, there\\nis the one immediately capitalized on by Davidson: that within the\\nextensionalist metaphysical framework in which Anomalous Monism is\\ndeveloped\\n (2.1\\n above), properties don’t cause anything, and so can be neither\\ncausally relevant nor irrelevant. According the Davidson, only events\\nare causal relata. He expresses general skepticism about\\nepiphenomenalist objections to Anomalous Monism that depend on the\\nidea that events cause ‘by virtue’ of the properties they\\ninstantiate (Davidson 1993, 6, 13). This is closely connected to his\\nsharp distinction between causation—a metaphysical relation\\nbetween particular events independently of how they are\\ndescribed—and explanation—which relates events only as\\nthey are described in particular ways. But as we will now see, this\\ndoesn’t end the concerns about epiphenomenalism. (For related\\ndiscussion concerning epiphenomenalism and its bearing on the\\nrelationship between Anomalous Monism and human freedom, see \\n Related Issues: 3.2 Anomalous Monism and Contemporary Compatibilism.)\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"6. The Epiphenomenalism Objections\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nCritics of this extensionalist line of defense insisted that related\\nquestions remained about Anomalous Monism even taking into account the\\ndistinction between causation and explanation. In particular, they\\nquestioned whether mental properties could play any genuine\\nexplanatory role—whether they had explanatory\\nrelevance—given the priority assigned to physical\\nproperties in Davidson’s framework. Why think that mental\\nproperties explain anything given that the events which instantiate\\nthem always also instantiate physical properties that figure in causal\\nlaws? One thought here is that genuine explanations require laws, and\\nmental anomalism, in ruling out psychological and psychophysical laws,\\ncannot account for any explanatory role for mental properties vis a\\nvis physical or mental events.\",\n \"\\nIn response, Davidson notes that while Anomalous Monism rejects the\\npossibility of strict laws in which mental predicates can figure, it\\nallows for ceteris paribus psychological and psychophysical\\nlaws (Davidson 1993, 9–12). His point appears to be that if\\nbacking by law is sufficient for explanatory relevance, then mental\\nproperties are explanatorily relevant. (Davidson and his critics often\\nslide between the issues of causal and explanatory relevance, but the\\nlatter issue is clearly what is at stake given Davidson’s views\\nabout causal efficacy and properties.) Second, Davidson appeals to the\\nsupervenience of mental properties on physical properties in order to\\nground the explanatory role of mental properties. Davidson says\\nthat\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nproperties are causally efficacious if they make a difference to what\\nindividual events cause, and supervenience ensures that\\nmental properties do make a difference to what mental events cause.\\n(Davidson 1993, 15)\\n\",\n \"\\nThe first point does not get developed by Davidson in any systematic\\nway, though it has been explored by others interested in defending\\nnonreductive monism from epiphenomenalist concerns. Some have focused\\non exploiting ceteris paribus covering laws for\\npsychophysical causal relations, claiming that this allows mental\\nproperties to be sufficient for their effects, thus providing the\\nneeded type of explanatory role (McLaughlin 1989; Fodor 1989, 1991).\\nOthers have attempted to sidestep the issue of covering laws entirely\\nby appealing directly to the truth of psychological and psychophysical\\ncounterfactuals in grounding the explanatory role of mental properties\\n(LePore and Loewer 1987, 1989; Horgan 1989). Davidson himself instead\\nfocused on supervenience (although as we are about to see, the\\npossibility of ceteris paribus laws enters into his\\naccount).\",\n \"\\nSupervenience implies that\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nif two events differ in their psychological properties, they differ in\\ntheir physical properties (which we assume to be causally\\nefficacious). If supervenience holds, psychological properties make a\\ndifference to the causal relations of an event, for they matter to the\\nphysical properties, and the physical properties matter to causal\\nrelations. (Davidson 1993, 14) \\n\",\n \"\\nThe point here is not simply that mental properties inherit or\\npiggyback on the causal powers of the physical properties on which\\nthey supervene. Rather, Davidson appears to be claiming that mental\\nproperties influence the causal powers of their subvenient\\nphysical properties.\",\n \"\\nOne problem with Davidson’s response here is its reversal of the\\ndependency relationship between mental and physical properties\\ntypically claimed in supervenience relationships. A central rationale\\nfor positing supervenience is to mark a kind of explanatory primacy to\\nthe subvenient properties (see the supplement on\\n Supervenience and the Explanatory Primacy of the Physical).\\n And this is reflected in the first part of Davidson’s\\nformulation above—surely a difference in psychological\\nproperties entails (requires) a difference in physical properties\\nbecause the difference in physical properties is needed in\\norder to explain the difference in psychological properties.\\nSo the sense in which psychological properties ‘matter’ to\\nphysical properties is that changing the former amounts to a change in\\nthe latter because a change in the latter explains a change\\nin the former. This does not appear to be helpful in establishing the\\nexplanatory relevance of mental properties. Another problem, discussed\\nabove\\n (5.3),\\n is that it is difficult to see how a supervenience relation of\\nsufficient power to make mental properties explanatory of an\\nevent’s physical properties in the way Davidson seems to suggest\\ndoes not issue in strict laws. So it is unclear how supervenience is\\nconsistent with the anomalism principle, and thus how it can help\\nblock epiphenomenalist concerns, although we did previously note one\\npotentially worthwhile but unexplored possibility—a ceteris\\nparibus supervenience relation—which Davidson endorses.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.1 Mental Properties and Explanatory Relevance\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nKim has explored a related but different route from Anomalous Monism\\nto mental epiphenomenalism—the problem of explanatory exclusion\\n(Kim 1989, 44). A causal explanation of an event cites a sufficient\\ncondition for that event’s occurrence. This seems to exclude the\\npossibility of other independent causes or explanations of that event.\\nSo if, as Anomalous Monism entails, physics can provide a sufficient\\nexplanation of any particular event, there appears to be no room for\\nan independent and irreducible mental explanation of an event\\n(Davidson 1993, 15). It is because the cause instantiated some\\nparticular physical property that the effect (which happens to\\ninstantiate a mental property) came about. Any mental properties that\\nthe cause instantiates seem superfluous in explaining why the effect\\noccurred—unless those properties are identical or related in\\nsome strict lawlike way to the physical properties, something ruled\\nout by the anomalism principle.\",\n \"\\nDavidson responds by arguing that citing only the physical properties\\nof the cause to provide a sufficient explanation of an action does not\\naddress the particular interests that psychological explanations of\\nactions serve—providing the reasons of the agent in light of\\nwhich she performed the action that she did. Serving these explanatory\\ninterests compensates for the fact that such explanations cannot be\\nsharpened into strict laws or folded neatly into physical laws\\n(Davidson 1991, 163). We only understand why the agent waved her\\nhand—why the effect is of the mental kind ‘waving\\none’s hand’ (as opposed to merely ‘one’s hand\\ngoing up and down’)—by citing mental properties\\nof the causing event, such as her wanting to greet her friend. The\\ncitation of physical properties of the causing event and the\\nassociated mere bodily movement will not bring about such\\nunderstanding, assuming mental anomalism, because of the lack of any\\nreductive relationship between either the physical properties of the\\ncause and the agent’s reasons or the physical properties of the\\neffect and the agent’s action.\",\n \"\\nHere we see the interest-relativity of explanation and its bearing on\\nexplanatory relevance (see the supplement on\\n Mental Properties and Causal Relevance)\\n playing an important role for Davidson. Mental properties must be\\ncited if we want a rational explanation of mental\\neffects. Davidson’s response to epiphenomenalist concerns can\\nthus be described as a kind of ‘dual explananda’\\ntheory of the explanatory role of mental properties. According to this\\ntheory, for every (causally interacting) mental event there are two\\ndistinct explananda in need of explanation: an event of a\\ncertain physical type and an event of a certain mental type. Mental\\nproperties are accorded an ineliminable and (given Anomalous Monism)\\nirreducible explanatory role by virtue of their singular capacity to\\nmake intelligible the occurrence of other mental properties through\\nthe sui generis relation of rationalization. This reflects\\nthe point made at the end of\\n 4.3\\n by the causal definition interpretation of the argument for mental\\nanomalism: that rationality underlies, not mental anomalism, but\\nrather mental realism. (For related discussion of the dual\\nexplananda approach, see Macdonalds 1995 and Gibbons\\n2006.)\",\n \"\\nIt should be noted, however, that it is not the case that\\nonly mental properties can explain and be explained by the\\noccurrence of mental properties. That would lead to an\\n“outlet” problem, with mental properties being\\nexplanatorily insulated from physical properties—something\\ninconsistent with the way in which we ordinarily think of\\nmental-physical interaction. A blow to the head can, for instance,\\nexplain the occurrence of a thought. And a thought can explain the\\nmovement of an object, as when my decision to quench my thirst leads\\nto the movement of a glass of water to my lips. However, the blow\\ncannot rationalize the thought, and the decision cannot rationalize\\nthe movement of the glass (though it can rationalize the\\naction of moving the glass). Davidson’s dual\\nexplananda strategy provides no account of such phenomena\\n(for discussion of the outlet problem, see Gibbons 2006). Nonetheless,\\nso long as there are occurrences of mental properties in need of the\\ndistinctive kind of explanation provided by rationalization, mental\\nproperties occupy an ineliminable explanatory role. And given\\nAnomalous Monism, that role is irreducible. It is worth noting that\\nthis dual explananda strategy is consistent with\\nDavidson’s commitment to the causal closure of the physical\\ndomain (Crane 1995 seems to miss this point)—every physical\\nevent can have a physical explanation, even if the mental component of\\nsome physical events can be rationally explained only through appeal\\nto mental components of the causing event. Therefore, however causal\\nclosure ultimately enters into Anomalous Monism (see the supplement on\\n Causal Closure of the Physical and Anomalous Monism),\\n it does not appear to create any further problems for Anomalous\\nMonism’s ability to account for the ineliminable, irreducible\\nexplanatory role of mental properties.\",\n \"\\nThe interest-relativity of causal explanation is thus crucial in\\nDavidson’s grounding of the ineliminable explanatory role of\\nmental properties within the framework of Anomalous Monism. If, as\\nAnomalous Monism contends, mental event-types such as actions are not\\nreducible to physical-event types, then the only way to explain\\nactions (as opposed to mere bodily movements) so as to make them\\nintelligible is by appeal to the mental properties of the\\ncause—reasons. (For discussion of whether, in light of this,\\nreason explanations can still be maintained to be causal\\nexplanations within the framework of Anomalous Monism, see the\\nsupplement on\\n Explanatory Epiphenomenalism.)\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.2 Interest-Relativity and the Dual Explananda Strategy\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nA final point to consider in evaluating the epiphenomenalist\\nobjections to Anomalous Monism is the way in which causality enters\\ninto the constitution of reasons and reasons-explanations according to\\nDavidson. Before we have established the anomalism principle, or go on\\nto derive monism, we already know that reasons explain actions by\\ncausing them (the ‘because’ problem discussed in\\n 2.2).\\n And, as we have seen\\n (4.3),\\n we know that propositional attitudes and mental contents are\\nindividuated, and thus defined, partially in terms of what they are\\ncaused by and cause (for attitudes, see Davidson 1987b, 41; for\\ncontents, see Davidson 1987a, 444, and extended discussion in the\\nsupplement on\\n Related Issues\\n (Mental Anomalism and Semantic Externalism)). But if something cannot\\neven be recognized as a reason unless it is a cause, then the charge\\nthat mental properties are causally impotent appears to have\\ndifficulty getting any traction. And since these claims are prior to\\nthe argument for monism, they are neutral about whatever else reasons\\nmust be in order to be causes. So reasons must be recognized as causes\\nprior to any discovery that they are also physical events. This\\nappears to secure the causal potency of reasons in a way entirely\\nindependent of the claim of token-identity. Within Davidson’s\\nframework, reasons can only play the rationalizing and explanatory\\nrole that they do by virtue of their causal nature.\",\n \"\\nMany of Anomalous Monism’s epiphenomenalist critics do not\\naddress this rich causal background. As we have seen, the background\\nis not sufficient by itself to silence all epiphenomenalist concerns.\\nBut it does significantly affect how those concerns can be formulated\\nand addressed. Anomalous Monism is clearly deeply committed, at a\\nnumber of levels, to the causal explanatory relevance of the mental,\\nand so charity suggests that we try to understood it in a way such\\nthat these commitments are respected. The dual explananda\\nstrategy discussed above\\n (6.2)\\n provides one promising framework for doing this, while at the same\\ntime displaying sensitivity to the sorts of concerns driving the\\nepiphenomenalist objections.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.3 The Causal Constitution of Reasons\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nDespite the initial appearance of simplicity in its assumptions,\\nstructure and argumentation, we have turned up several important\\nproblems and lacunae that stand in the way of any overall final\\nassessment of the plausibility of Anomalous Monism. While the central\\nobjections it has faced have derived from epiphenomenalist concerns,\\nthe force of these objections is not clear. Arguably, the most serious\\ndifficulties for Anomalous Monism are not with its adequacy but with\\nits justification. We still stand in need of a clear argument for how\\nrationality leads to the anomalism principle; there are the\\nsubstantial problems surrounding the status of the causal closure of\\nthe physical and its bearing on monism; and the cause-law\\nprinciple’s strictness requirement is still in need of a\\ncompelling rationale. Even with these problems, Anomalous Monism\\ncontinues to provide an extremely useful framework for exploring\\nfundamental issues and problems in the philosophy of mind, and has\\nearned a central place on the rather short list of important positions\\non the relation between mental and physical events and properties.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"7. Conclusion\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Allison, H., 1983, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism,\nNew Haven: Yale University Press.","–––, 1990, Kant’s Theory of\nFreedom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Anscombe, G. E. M., 1971, Causality and Determination.\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Antony, M., 2003, “Davidson’s Argument for\nMonism”, Synthese, 135: 1–12.","Bishop, J., 1989, Natural Agency, Cambridge: Cambridge\nUniversity Press.","Block, N., 1980, “Troubles with Functionalism”, in\nBlock, N., Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume\n1, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.","Boghossian, P., 1989, “Content and Self-Knowledge,”\nPhilosophical Topics, 17: 5–26.","Burge, T., 1979, “Individualism and the Mental”,\nMidwest Studies in Philosophy, 4: 73–121.","–––, 1993, “Mind-Body Causation and\nExplanatory Practice”, in Heil and Mele 1993.","Campbell, N., 1998, “Anomalous Monism and the Charge of\nEpiphenomenalism”, Dialectica, 52(1): 23–39.","–––, 2003, Mental Causation and the\nPhilosophy of Mind, New York: Broadview Press.","–––, 2005, “Explanatory\nEpiphenomenalism”, Philosophical Quarterly, 55(220):\n437–451.","Cartwright, N., 1983, How the Laws of Physics Lie,\nOxford: Oxford University Press.","Chalmers, D., 1996, The Conscious Mind, Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press.","Child, W., 1992, “Anomalism, Uncodifiability and\nPsychophysical Relations”, The Philosophical Review,\n102(2): 215–245.","Crane, T., 1995, “The Mental Causation Debate”,\nProceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary, LXIX:\n211–236.","Cussins, A., 1992, “The Limitations of Pluralism”, in\nCharles, D. and Lennon, K. (eds.), Reduction, Explanation and\nRealism, Oxford: Clarendon Press.","Davidson, D., 1963, “Actions, Reasons and Causes”, in\nDavidson 1980.","–––, 1967, “Causal Relations”, in\nDavidson 1980.","–––, 1969, “The Individuation of\nEvents”, in Davidson 1980.","–––, 1970, “Mental Events”, in\nDavidson 1980.","–––, 1971, “Agency”, in Davidson\n1980.","–––, 1973a, “The Material Mind”, in\nDavidson 1980.","–––, 1973b, “Freedom to Act”, in\nDavidson 1980.","–––, 1974a, “On the Very Idea of a\nConceptual Scheme”, in Davidson 1984.","–––, 1974b, “Psychology as\nPhilosophy”, in Davidson 1980.","–––, 1974c, “Reply to Solomon”, in\nDavidson 1980.","–––, 1977, “Reality without\nReference”, in Davidson 1984.","–––, 1979, “The Inscrutability of\nReference”, in Davidson 1984.","–––, 1980, Essays on Actions and\nEvents, Oxford: Clarendon Press.","–––, 1982, “Paradoxes of\nRationality”, in Philosophical Essays on Freud, R.\nWollheim and J. Hopkins (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress.","–––, 1984, Inquiries into Truth and\nInterpretation, Oxford: Clarendon Press.","–––, 1985a, “Rational Animals”, in\nLePore and McLaughlin.","–––, 1985b, “Reply to Quine on\nEvents”, in LePore and McLaughlin.","–––, 1987a, “Knowing One’s Own\nMind”, Proceedings and Addresses of the American\nPhilosophical Association, 60: 441–58.","–––, 1987b, “Problems in the Explanation\nof Action” in Metaphysics and Morality, P. Pettit, R.\nSylvan, and J. Norman (eds.), Oxford: Basil Blackwell.","–––, 1989, “The Conditions of\nThought” in J.Brandl and W. Gombocz (eds.), The Mind of\nDonald Davidson, Grazer Philosophischen Studien, 36:\n193–200.","–––, 1990, “The Structure and Content of\nTruth”, The Journal of Philosophy, 87(6):\n279–328.","–––, 1991, “Three Varieties of\nKnowledge”, in A.J. Ayer: Memorial Essays, A.P\nGriffiths (ed.), New York: Cambridge University Press.","–––, 1993, “Thinking Causes”, in\nHeil and Mele.","–––, 1995a, “Laws and Cause”,\nDialectica, 49: 2–4: 263–279.","–––, 1995b, “Could there be a Science of\nRationality?”, International Journal of Philosophical\nStudies, 3: 1–16.","–––, 1999a, “Reply to Quine”, in\nHahn 1999.","–––, 1999b, “Reply to Bruce\nVermazen”, in Hahn 1999.","–––, 1999c, “Spinoza’s Causal Theory\nof the Affects”, in Desire and Affect: Spinoza as\nPsychologist, Y. Yovel (ed.), New York: Little Room Press.","–––, 1999d, “Reply to Jennifer\nHornsby”, in Hahn 1999.","Della Rocca, M., 1991, “Causation and Spinoza’s Claim\nof Identity”, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 8:\n265–276.","de Caro, M., 2020, ”Davidson and Putnam on the Antinomy of Free Will“, forthcoming in Chakraborty, S. and Conant, J. (eds.), Engaging Putnam, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, URL= https://www.academia.edu/40534172/Davidson_and_Putnam_on_Free_Will .","de Pinedo, M., 2006, “Anomalous Monism: Oscillating between\nDogmas”, Synthese, 148: 79–97.","Ducasse, C.J., 1926, “On the Nature and Observability of the\nCausal Relation”, Journal of Philosophy, 23:\n57–68.","Fischer, J., 1986, “Van Inwagen on Free Will”, The\nPhilosophical Quarterly, 36(143): 252–260.","–––, 1994, The Metaphysics of Free\nWill, Oxford: Blackwell.","Fischer, J., and Ravizza, M., 1994, “Responsibility and History”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XIX: 430–451.","–––, 1998, Responsibility and Control, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Fodor, J., 1974, “Special sciences and the disunity of\nscience as a working hypothesis”, Synthese, 28:\n77–115.","–––, 1989, “Making Mind Matter\nMore”, Philosophical Topics, 17: 59–80.","–––, 1991, “You Can Fool Some of the\nPeople All of the Time, Everything Else Being Equal: Hedged Laws and\nPsychological Explanations”, Mind, 100:\n19–34.","Frankfurt, H., 1969, “Alternate Possibilities and Moral\nResponsibility”, in Frankfurt 1998","–––, 1971, “Freedom of the Will and the\nConcept of a Person”, in Frankfurt 1998.","–––, 1975, “Three Concepts of Free\nAction”, in Frankfurt 1998","–––, 1987, “Identification and Wholeheartedness”, in Frankfurt 1998","–––, 1998, The Importance of What We Care\nAbout, New York: Cambridge University Press.","–––, 2003, “Some Thoughts Concerning\nPAP”, in Widerker, D. and McKenna, M. 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Macdonald and G. Macdonald\n(eds.), Philosophy of Psychology, Oxford: Blackwell\nPress.","Latham, N., 1999, “Kim and Davidson on Psychophysical\nLaws”, Synthese, 118: 121–143.","–––, 2001, “Substance Physicalism”,\nin Loewer and Gillett (eds.), Physicalism and its\nDiscontents, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","–––, 2003, “What is\nToken-Physicalism?”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly,\n84: 270–290.","–––, 2011, “Are Fundamental Laws Necessary\nor Contingent?”, in Carving Nature at its Joints: Natural\nKinds in Metaphysics and Science, J. Campbell, M. O’Rourke\nand M. Slater (eds.), Cambridge, MA: MIT.","Leder, D., 1985, “Troubles with Token Identity”,\nPhilosophical Studies, 47: 79–94.","LePore, E., and Loewer, B., 1987, “Mind Matters”,\nJournal of Philosophy, 84: 630–642.","–––, 1989, “More on Making Mind\nMatter”, Philosophical Topics, 17: 175–191.","LePore, E. and McLaughlin, B, (eds.), 1985, Actions and\nEvents: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, New\nYork: Blackwell.","Lewis, D., 1966, “An Argument for the Identity\nTheory”, Journal of Philosophy, 63(2):\n17–25.","–––, 1981, “Are We Free to Break the\nLaws?”, Theoria, 47: 113–121.","Loar, B., 1981, Mind and Meaning, Cambridge: Cambridge\nUniversity Press.","Macdonald, C. and G., 1986, “Mental Causes and Explanation\nof Action”, Philosophical Quarterly, 36(143):\n145–158.","–––, 1995, “How to be Psychologically\nRelevant”, in C. Macdonald and G. Macdonald (eds.),\nPhilosophy of Psychology: Debates on Psychological\nExplanation (Vol. 1), Oxford: Blackwell: 60–77.","McDowell, J., 1979, “Virtue and Reason”, The\nMonist 62: 331–350.","–––, 1985, “Functionalism and Anomalous\nMonism”, in LePore and McLaughlin 1985.","McLaughlin, B., 1985, “Anomalous Monism and the\nIrreducibility of the Mental”, in Lepore and McLaughlin:\n331–68.","–––, 1989, “Type Epiphenomenalism, Type\nDualism, and the Causal Priority of the Physical”,\nPhilosophical Perspectives, 3: 109–135.","Meerbote, R., 1984, “Kant on the Nondeterminate Character of\nHuman Actions”, in W. Harper and R. Meerbote (eds.), Kant on\nCausality, Freedom, and Objectivity, Minneapolis: University of\nMinnesota Press.","Mumford, S., 2009, “Laws and Dispositions”, in The\nRoutledge Companion to Metaphysics, R. le Poidevin, P. Simons,\nA. McGonigal and R. 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Curley (trans.), Princeton:\nPrinceton University Press.","Stoutland, F., 1970, “The Logical Connection\nArgument”, American Philosophical Quarterly, Monograph\nNo. 4, 117–29.","–––, 1976, “The Causation of\nBehavior”, in Essays on Wittgenstein in Honor of G.H. von\nWright, Acta Philosophica Fennica, 28(1–3):\n286–325.","van Inwagen, P., 1984, An Essay on Free Will, New York:\nOxford University Press.","von Wright, G.H., 1971, Explanation and Understanding,\nCornell: Cornell University Press.","Watson, G., 1975, “Free Action”, in Watson 2004.","–––, 1999, “Soft Libertarianism and Hard\nCompatibilism”, in Watson 2004.","–––, 2004, Agency and Answerability,\nOxford: Clarendon Press.","Widerker, D., 1995, “Libertarianism and Frankfurt’s\nAttack on the Principle of Alternate Possibilities”,\nPhilosophical Review, 104(2): 247–261.","Wilson, G., 1985, “Davidson on Intentional Action”, in\nLePore and McLaughlin 1985.","Yalowitz, S., 1997, “Rationality and the Argument for\nAnomalous Monism”, Philosophical Studies, 87(3):\n235–58.","–––, 1998a, “Causation in the Argument for\nAnomalous Monism”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy,\n28(2): 183–226.","–––, 1998b, “Semantic Determinants and\nPsychology as a Science”, Erkenntnis, 49:\n57–91."],"string":"[\n \"Allison, H., 1983, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism,\\nNew Haven: Yale University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1990, Kant’s Theory of\\nFreedom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Anscombe, G. E. M., 1971, Causality and Determination.\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Antony, M., 2003, “Davidson’s Argument for\\nMonism”, Synthese, 135: 1–12.\",\n \"Bishop, J., 1989, Natural Agency, Cambridge: Cambridge\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Block, N., 1980, “Troubles with Functionalism”, in\\nBlock, N., Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume\\n1, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Boghossian, P., 1989, “Content and Self-Knowledge,”\\nPhilosophical Topics, 17: 5–26.\",\n \"Burge, T., 1979, “Individualism and the Mental”,\\nMidwest Studies in Philosophy, 4: 73–121.\",\n \"–––, 1993, “Mind-Body Causation and\\nExplanatory Practice”, in Heil and Mele 1993.\",\n \"Campbell, N., 1998, “Anomalous Monism and the Charge of\\nEpiphenomenalism”, Dialectica, 52(1): 23–39.\",\n \"–––, 2003, Mental Causation and the\\nPhilosophy of Mind, New York: Broadview Press.\",\n \"–––, 2005, “Explanatory\\nEpiphenomenalism”, Philosophical Quarterly, 55(220):\\n437–451.\",\n \"Cartwright, N., 1983, How the Laws of Physics Lie,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Chalmers, D., 1996, The Conscious Mind, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Child, W., 1992, “Anomalism, Uncodifiability and\\nPsychophysical Relations”, The Philosophical Review,\\n102(2): 215–245.\",\n \"Crane, T., 1995, “The Mental Causation Debate”,\\nProceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary, LXIX:\\n211–236.\",\n \"Cussins, A., 1992, “The Limitations of Pluralism”, in\\nCharles, D. and Lennon, K. (eds.), Reduction, Explanation and\\nRealism, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"Davidson, D., 1963, “Actions, Reasons and Causes”, in\\nDavidson 1980.\",\n \"–––, 1967, “Causal Relations”, in\\nDavidson 1980.\",\n \"–––, 1969, “The Individuation of\\nEvents”, in Davidson 1980.\",\n \"–––, 1970, “Mental Events”, in\\nDavidson 1980.\",\n \"–––, 1971, “Agency”, in Davidson\\n1980.\",\n \"–––, 1973a, “The Material Mind”, in\\nDavidson 1980.\",\n \"–––, 1973b, “Freedom to Act”, in\\nDavidson 1980.\",\n \"–––, 1974a, “On the Very Idea of a\\nConceptual Scheme”, in Davidson 1984.\",\n \"–––, 1974b, “Psychology as\\nPhilosophy”, in Davidson 1980.\",\n \"–––, 1974c, “Reply to Solomon”, in\\nDavidson 1980.\",\n \"–––, 1977, “Reality without\\nReference”, in Davidson 1984.\",\n \"–––, 1979, “The Inscrutability of\\nReference”, in Davidson 1984.\",\n \"–––, 1980, Essays on Actions and\\nEvents, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"–––, 1982, “Paradoxes of\\nRationality”, in Philosophical Essays on Freud, R.\\nWollheim and J. Hopkins (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress.\",\n \"–––, 1984, Inquiries into Truth and\\nInterpretation, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"–––, 1985a, “Rational Animals”, in\\nLePore and McLaughlin.\",\n \"–––, 1985b, “Reply to Quine on\\nEvents”, in LePore and McLaughlin.\",\n \"–––, 1987a, “Knowing One’s Own\\nMind”, Proceedings and Addresses of the American\\nPhilosophical Association, 60: 441–58.\",\n \"–––, 1987b, “Problems in the Explanation\\nof Action” in Metaphysics and Morality, P. Pettit, R.\\nSylvan, and J. Norman (eds.), Oxford: Basil Blackwell.\",\n \"–––, 1989, “The Conditions of\\nThought” in J.Brandl and W. Gombocz (eds.), The Mind of\\nDonald Davidson, Grazer Philosophischen Studien, 36:\\n193–200.\",\n \"–––, 1990, “The Structure and Content of\\nTruth”, The Journal of Philosophy, 87(6):\\n279–328.\",\n \"–––, 1991, “Three Varieties of\\nKnowledge”, in A.J. Ayer: Memorial Essays, A.P\\nGriffiths (ed.), New York: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1993, “Thinking Causes”, in\\nHeil and Mele.\",\n \"–––, 1995a, “Laws and Cause”,\\nDialectica, 49: 2–4: 263–279.\",\n \"–––, 1995b, “Could there be a Science of\\nRationality?”, International Journal of Philosophical\\nStudies, 3: 1–16.\",\n \"–––, 1999a, “Reply to Quine”, in\\nHahn 1999.\",\n \"–––, 1999b, “Reply to Bruce\\nVermazen”, in Hahn 1999.\",\n \"–––, 1999c, “Spinoza’s Causal Theory\\nof the Affects”, in Desire and Affect: Spinoza as\\nPsychologist, Y. Yovel (ed.), New York: Little Room Press.\",\n \"–––, 1999d, “Reply to Jennifer\\nHornsby”, in Hahn 1999.\",\n \"Della Rocca, M., 1991, “Causation and Spinoza’s Claim\\nof Identity”, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 8:\\n265–276.\",\n \"de Caro, M., 2020, ”Davidson and Putnam on the Antinomy of Free Will“, forthcoming in Chakraborty, S. and Conant, J. (eds.), Engaging Putnam, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, URL= https://www.academia.edu/40534172/Davidson_and_Putnam_on_Free_Will .\",\n \"de Pinedo, M., 2006, “Anomalous Monism: Oscillating between\\nDogmas”, Synthese, 148: 79–97.\",\n \"Ducasse, C.J., 1926, “On the Nature and Observability of the\\nCausal Relation”, Journal of Philosophy, 23:\\n57–68.\",\n \"Fischer, J., 1986, “Van Inwagen on Free Will”, The\\nPhilosophical Quarterly, 36(143): 252–260.\",\n \"–––, 1994, The Metaphysics of Free\\nWill, Oxford: Blackwell.\",\n \"Fischer, J., and Ravizza, M., 1994, “Responsibility and History”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XIX: 430–451.\",\n \"–––, 1998, Responsibility and Control, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Fodor, J., 1974, “Special sciences and the disunity of\\nscience as a working hypothesis”, Synthese, 28:\\n77–115.\",\n \"–––, 1989, “Making Mind Matter\\nMore”, Philosophical Topics, 17: 59–80.\",\n \"–––, 1991, “You Can Fool Some of the\\nPeople All of the Time, Everything Else Being Equal: Hedged Laws and\\nPsychological Explanations”, Mind, 100:\\n19–34.\",\n \"Frankfurt, H., 1969, “Alternate Possibilities and Moral\\nResponsibility”, in Frankfurt 1998\",\n \"–––, 1971, “Freedom of the Will and the\\nConcept of a Person”, in Frankfurt 1998.\",\n \"–––, 1975, “Three Concepts of Free\\nAction”, in Frankfurt 1998\",\n \"–––, 1987, “Identification and Wholeheartedness”, in Frankfurt 1998\",\n \"–––, 1998, The Importance of What We Care\\nAbout, New York: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2003, “Some Thoughts Concerning\\nPAP”, in Widerker, D. and McKenna, M. (eds.), Moral\\nResponsibility and Alternative Possibilities, Burlington:\\nAshgate.\",\n \"Gibbons, J., 2006, “Mental Causation without Downward\\nCausation”, Philosophical Review, 115(1):\\n79–103.\",\n \"Ginet, C., 1995, “Reasons Explanations of Action”, in\\nAgents, Causes and Events, T. O’Connor (ed.), Oxford:\\nOxford University Press.\",\n \"Glannon, W., 1997, “Semicompatibilism and Anomalous Monism”, Philosophical Papers, 26(3): 211–231.\",\n \"Goodman, N., 1983, Fact, Forecast and Fiction, Cambridge,\\nMA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Grandy, R., 1973, “Reference, Meaning and Belief”,\\nJournal of Philosophy, 70(14): 439–52.\",\n \"Hahn, L.E. (ed.), 1999, The Philosophy of Donald\\nDavidson, Chicago: Open Court Press.\",\n \"Hancock, N., 2001, “Anomalous Monism and Physical\\nClosure”, Journal of Philosophical Research, XXVI:\\n175–85.\",\n \"Heil, J. and Mele, A.(eds.), 1993, Mental Causation,\\nOxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"Honderich, T., 1982, “The Argument for Anomalous\\nMonism”, Analysis, 42: 59–64.\",\n \"Horgan, T., 1989, “Mental Quasation”,\\nPhilosophical Perspectives, 3: 47–76.\",\n \"Horgan, T. and M. Tye, 1985, “Against the Token Identity\\nTheory”, in LePore and McLaughlin 1985.\",\n \"Hornsby, J., 1981, “Which Physical Events are Mental\\nEvents?”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 81:\\n73–92.\",\n \"–––, 1985, “Physicalism, Events, and\\nPart-Whole Relations”, in LePore and McLaughlin 1985.\",\n \"–––, 1993, “Agency and Causal\\nExplanation”, in Heil and Mele 1993.\",\n \"Hudson, H., 1994, Kant’s Compatibilism, Ithaca:\\nCornell University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2002, “Kant’s Third Antinomy\\nand Anomalous Monism”, in Pasternack, L. (ed.), Immanuel\\nKant: Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in Focus, London:\\nRoutledge.\",\n \"Hume, D., 1748 [1993], An Enquiry Concerning Human\\nUnderstanding, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993.\",\n \"Jarrett, C., 1991, “Spinoza’s Denial of Mind-Body\\nInteraction and the Explanation of Human Action”, The\\nSouthern Journal of Philosophy, 29(4): 465–485.\",\n \"Johnson, M., 1985, “Why Having a Mind Matters”, in\\nLePore and McLaughlin 1985.\",\n \"Kant, I., 1781/1786 [1996], Critique of Pure Reason, Guyer, P. and Wood, A., (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Kim, J., 1985, “Psychophysical Laws”, in LePore and\\nMcLaughlin 1985.\",\n \"–––, 1989, “The Myth of Nonreductive\\nMaterialism”, Proceedings and Addresses of the American\\nPhilosophical Association, 63: 31–47.\",\n \"–––, 1992, “Multiple Realization and the\\nMetaphysics of Reduction”, Philosophy and Phenomenological\\nResearch, 52 (1): 1–26.\",\n \"–––, 1993a, “Can Supervenience and\\n‘Non-Strict Laws’ Save Anomalous Monism?”, in Heil\\nand Mele 1993.\",\n \"–––, 1993b, Supervenience and Mind,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1995, “Explanatory Exclusion and the\\nProblem of Mental Causation”, in C. Macdonald and G. Macdonald\\n(eds.), Philosophy of Psychology, Oxford: Blackwell\\nPress.\",\n \"Latham, N., 1999, “Kim and Davidson on Psychophysical\\nLaws”, Synthese, 118: 121–143.\",\n \"–––, 2001, “Substance Physicalism”,\\nin Loewer and Gillett (eds.), Physicalism and its\\nDiscontents, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2003, “What is\\nToken-Physicalism?”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly,\\n84: 270–290.\",\n \"–––, 2011, “Are Fundamental Laws Necessary\\nor Contingent?”, in Carving Nature at its Joints: Natural\\nKinds in Metaphysics and Science, J. Campbell, M. O’Rourke\\nand M. Slater (eds.), Cambridge, MA: MIT.\",\n \"Leder, D., 1985, “Troubles with Token Identity”,\\nPhilosophical Studies, 47: 79–94.\",\n \"LePore, E., and Loewer, B., 1987, “Mind Matters”,\\nJournal of Philosophy, 84: 630–642.\",\n \"–––, 1989, “More on Making Mind\\nMatter”, Philosophical Topics, 17: 175–191.\",\n \"LePore, E. and McLaughlin, B, (eds.), 1985, Actions and\\nEvents: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, New\\nYork: Blackwell.\",\n \"Lewis, D., 1966, “An Argument for the Identity\\nTheory”, Journal of Philosophy, 63(2):\\n17–25.\",\n \"–––, 1981, “Are We Free to Break the\\nLaws?”, Theoria, 47: 113–121.\",\n \"Loar, B., 1981, Mind and Meaning, Cambridge: Cambridge\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Macdonald, C. and G., 1986, “Mental Causes and Explanation\\nof Action”, Philosophical Quarterly, 36(143):\\n145–158.\",\n \"–––, 1995, “How to be Psychologically\\nRelevant”, in C. Macdonald and G. Macdonald (eds.),\\nPhilosophy of Psychology: Debates on Psychological\\nExplanation (Vol. 1), Oxford: Blackwell: 60–77.\",\n \"McDowell, J., 1979, “Virtue and Reason”, The\\nMonist 62: 331–350.\",\n \"–––, 1985, “Functionalism and Anomalous\\nMonism”, in LePore and McLaughlin 1985.\",\n \"McLaughlin, B., 1985, “Anomalous Monism and the\\nIrreducibility of the Mental”, in Lepore and McLaughlin:\\n331–68.\",\n \"–––, 1989, “Type Epiphenomenalism, Type\\nDualism, and the Causal Priority of the Physical”,\\nPhilosophical Perspectives, 3: 109–135.\",\n \"Meerbote, R., 1984, “Kant on the Nondeterminate Character of\\nHuman Actions”, in W. Harper and R. Meerbote (eds.), Kant on\\nCausality, Freedom, and Objectivity, Minneapolis: University of\\nMinnesota Press.\",\n \"Mumford, S., 2009, “Laws and Dispositions”, in The\\nRoutledge Companion to Metaphysics, R. le Poidevin, P. Simons,\\nA. McGonigal and R. Cameron (eds.), London: Routledge,\\n471–9.\",\n \"Nagel, T., 1974, “What is it like to be a bat?”,\\nPhilosophical Review, 83: 435–456.\",\n \"Nelkin, D., 2000, “Two Standpoints and the Belief in Freedom”, Journal of Philosophy, 97(10): 564–576.\",\n \"Pereboom, D., 1995, “Determinism al Dente”,\\nNoûs, 29(1): 21–45.\",\n \"Quine, W.V., 1960, Word and Object, Cambridge, MA: MIT\\nPress.\",\n \"Schiffer, S., 1991, “Ceteris Paribus Laws”,\\nMind, 100: 1–17.\",\n \"Shea, N., 2003, “Does Externalism entail the Anomalism of\\nthe Mental?”, The Philosophical Quarterly, 53(211):\\n201–213.\",\n \"Smith, M., 2003, “Rational Capacities or: How to Distinguish Recklessness, Weakness, and Compulsion”, in Stroud, S. and Tappolet, C. (eds.), Weakness of Will and Practical Rationality, New York: Oxford\",\n \"Solomon, R., 1974, “Comment on Davidson” in Brown,\\nStuart (ed.), Philosophy of Psychology, London:\\nMacMillan.\",\n \"Spinoza, B., 1985 [1677], Ethics, in The Collected\\nWritings of Spinoza (Vol. I), E. Curley (trans.), Princeton:\\nPrinceton University Press.\",\n \"Stoutland, F., 1970, “The Logical Connection\\nArgument”, American Philosophical Quarterly, Monograph\\nNo. 4, 117–29.\",\n \"–––, 1976, “The Causation of\\nBehavior”, in Essays on Wittgenstein in Honor of G.H. von\\nWright, Acta Philosophica Fennica, 28(1–3):\\n286–325.\",\n \"van Inwagen, P., 1984, An Essay on Free Will, New York:\\nOxford University Press.\",\n \"von Wright, G.H., 1971, Explanation and Understanding,\\nCornell: Cornell University Press.\",\n \"Watson, G., 1975, “Free Action”, in Watson 2004.\",\n \"–––, 1999, “Soft Libertarianism and Hard\\nCompatibilism”, in Watson 2004.\",\n \"–––, 2004, Agency and Answerability,\\nOxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"Widerker, D., 1995, “Libertarianism and Frankfurt’s\\nAttack on the Principle of Alternate Possibilities”,\\nPhilosophical Review, 104(2): 247–261.\",\n \"Wilson, G., 1985, “Davidson on Intentional Action”, in\\nLePore and McLaughlin 1985.\",\n \"Yalowitz, S., 1997, “Rationality and the Argument for\\nAnomalous Monism”, Philosophical Studies, 87(3):\\n235–58.\",\n \"–––, 1998a, “Causation in the Argument for\\nAnomalous Monism”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy,\\n28(2): 183–226.\",\n \"–––, 1998b, “Semantic Determinants and\\nPsychology as a Science”, Erkenntnis, 49:\\n57–91.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../action/","text":"action"},{"href":"../davidson/","text":"Davidson, Donald"},{"href":"../dualism/","text":"dualism"},{"href":"../epiphenomenalism/","text":"epiphenomenalism"},{"href":"../events/","text":"events"},{"href":"../content-externalism/","text":"externalism about the mind"},{"href":"../functionalism/","text":"functionalism"},{"href":"../laws-of-nature/","text":"laws of nature"},{"href":"../mental-causation/","text":"mental causation"},{"href":"../content-causal/","text":"mental content: causal theories of"},{"href":"../mind-identity/","text":"mind/brain identity theory"},{"href":"../monism/","text":"monism"},{"href":"../multiple-realizability/","text":"multiple realizability"},{"href":"../physicalism/","text":"physicalism"},{"href":"../psychologism/","text":"psychologism"},{"href":"../quine/","text":"Quine, Willard Van Orman"},{"href":"../relativism/","text":"relativism"},{"href":"../scientific-explanation/","text":"scientific explanation"},{"href":"../spinoza/","text":"Spinoza, Baruch"},{"href":"../supervenience/","text":"supervenience"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../action/\",\n \"text\": \"action\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../davidson/\",\n \"text\": \"Davidson, Donald\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../dualism/\",\n \"text\": \"dualism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../epiphenomenalism/\",\n \"text\": \"epiphenomenalism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../events/\",\n \"text\": \"events\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../content-externalism/\",\n \"text\": \"externalism about the mind\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../functionalism/\",\n \"text\": \"functionalism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../laws-of-nature/\",\n \"text\": \"laws of nature\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../mental-causation/\",\n \"text\": \"mental causation\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../content-causal/\",\n \"text\": \"mental content: causal theories of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../mind-identity/\",\n \"text\": \"mind/brain identity theory\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../monism/\",\n \"text\": \"monism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../multiple-realizability/\",\n \"text\": \"multiple realizability\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../physicalism/\",\n \"text\": \"physicalism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../psychologism/\",\n \"text\": \"psychologism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../quine/\",\n \"text\": \"Quine, Willard Van Orman\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../relativism/\",\n \"text\": \"relativism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../scientific-explanation/\",\n \"text\": \"scientific explanation\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../spinoza/\",\n \"text\": \"Spinoza, Baruch\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../supervenience/\",\n \"text\": \"supervenience\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":64,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"anscombe"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Tue Jul 21, 2009; substantive revision Mon May 30, 2022"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nGertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe was one of the most important\nphilosophers of the twentieth century. She worked on an unusually\nbroad array of topics: the entire range of the history of philosophy\n(ancient, medieval, modern, recent), metaphysics, epistemology,\nphilosophy of language, philosophy of mind/psychology, philosophy of\naction, moral philosophy, political philosophy, and the philosophy of\nreligion. As a result, this entry will have to be very selective.\nDespite the fact that her work is often cryptic and difficult, it\ngreatly influences philosophers working in action theory, moral\nphilosophy, and the philosophy of mind. Like the work of her mentor\nLudwig Wittgenstein, studying Anscombe’s work generates insight\nafter study and struggle."],"string":"[\n \"\\nGertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe was one of the most important\\nphilosophers of the twentieth century. She worked on an unusually\\nbroad array of topics: the entire range of the history of philosophy\\n(ancient, medieval, modern, recent), metaphysics, epistemology,\\nphilosophy of language, philosophy of mind/psychology, philosophy of\\naction, moral philosophy, political philosophy, and the philosophy of\\nreligion. As a result, this entry will have to be very selective.\\nDespite the fact that her work is often cryptic and difficult, it\\ngreatly influences philosophers working in action theory, moral\\nphilosophy, and the philosophy of mind. Like the work of her mentor\\nLudwig Wittgenstein, studying Anscombe’s work generates insight\\nafter study and struggle.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Life","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. Moral and Political Philosophy","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"3. Metaphysics","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"4. Action Theory","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"5. Philosophy of Perception","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"6. Testimony","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"7. Conclusion","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":["Anscombe’s Writings","Translations by Anscombe","General Bibliography"]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Life\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Moral and Political Philosophy\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Metaphysics\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Action Theory\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Philosophy of Perception\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. Testimony\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"7. Conclusion\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"Anscombe’s Writings\",\n \"Translations by Anscombe\",\n \"General Bibliography\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\nShe was born in Limerick, Ireland 18 March 1919 to Allen Wells\nAnscombe and Gertrude Elizabeth Anscombe (née Thomas). At the\ntime of her birth her father was serving in the British Army. The\nfamily later returned to England where her father resumed his career\nas a schoolmaster, while her mother, a classical scholar, worked as a\nheadmistress.","\nAn inquisitive child, Anscombe decided to convert to Roman Catholicism\nin her early teens. She attended the Sydenham School, graduating in\n1937, and went on to St. Hugh’s College, Oxford. During her\nearly years at Oxford she met three young women who also had\nremarkable careers in philosophy: Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley, and,\nabove all, Philippa Foot, with whom she developed a deep friendship\nher entire life (Mac Cumhaill & Wiseman 2022). Anscombe received a\nFirst in Literae Humaniores (Classics and Philosophy) in 1941. After\nher graduation she remained at St. Hugh’s as a research student,\nand in 1942 moved to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she met Ludwig\nWittgenstein. She believed that attending Wittgenstein’s\nlectures freed her from the trap of phenomenalism that had so plagued\nher (MPM, ix). In 1946 she was offered a Research Fellowship at\nSomerville College, Oxford, and was appointed to a teaching Fellowship\nthere in 1964. She moved from Oxford to Cambridge in 1970 when she was\nawarded a Chair of Philosophy at Cambridge – the Chair formerly\noccupied by Wittgenstein. She remained at Cambridge until her\nretirement in 1986.","\nIn 1938, at Oxford, she met the philosopher Peter Geach, who then was\nstudying at Balliol. They were both receiving instruction from the\nsame Dominican priest. They were married in 1941, and had three sons\nand four daughters.","\nIn 1948, the young Anscombe read a paper [CSL] to the Socratic Club\nattacking an argument offered by C. S. Lewis in his book\nMiracles. In Chapter 3 of that book Lewis argued that\nnaturalism is self-refuting. Lewis attended her talk, and, although\naccounts vary, some acquaintances report that he was crushed by her\nwithering criticism. In any case, Lewis significantly rewrote the\nrelevant chapter in the subsequent edition of his book.","\nAnscombe also became one of Wittgenstein’s good friends and\nthen, after his death in 1951, the chief translator of his work into\nEnglish. Ray Monk wrote that Anscombe was “…one of\nWittgenstein’s closest friends and one of his most trusted\nstudents, an exception to his general dislike of academic women and\nespecially of female philosophers.” (Monk 1991, 498).","\nAnscombe did not avoid controversy. In 1956 she publicly opposed\nOxford University’s decision to award an honorary degree to\nHarry Truman, whom she considered a murderer for intentionally killing\nthe civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. She also courted\ncontroversy by coming out in print against contraception (see below),\nand engaging in civil disobedience at abortion clinics.","\nAnscombe famously flouted gender conventions: she did not take her\nhusband’s name, she frequently wore men’s clothes, she\nsmoked cigars, and she was prone to cursing and vulgar speech.\nAlthough influenced by several men – Frege, Wittgenstein, Geach,\nvarious Catholic thinkers historical and contemporaneous –\nAnscombe was a fiercely independent and original philosopher. Those\nwho suspect she merely echoed or applied the views of another person\nare sorely mistaken.","\nAnscombe continued to produce original work beyond her retirement.\nPeter Geach, for example, reported in Analysis that she had\nconstructed a novel paradox late in life (Geach 2006,\n266–7).","\nAnscombe died in Cambridge on 5 January 2001."],"section_title":"1. Life","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nAnscombe’s philosophical work does not form a system. But\nunderstanding her thoughts in moral and political philosophy helps one\ngrasp some of her wider philosophical motivations, especially those on\nthe topics of action and intention. We will first discuss several of\nher most well-known papers in moral and political philosophy, for this\nwill shed light on her interest in these other areas.","\nIn her infamous pamphlet “Mr. Truman’s Degree” (MTD)\n(1958), Anscombe protested Oxford’s decision to award Harry\nTruman an honorary doctorate. Some of the ideas in this pamphlet were\nlater developed in “War and Murder” (WAM) (1972), written\nfor a Christian venue.","\nShe opposed Oxford’s decision to honor Truman on the grounds\nthat Truman was a murderer. He was a murderer, because “choosing\nto kill the innocent as a means to your ends is always murder”\n(MTD, 66). The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were by and large\nnoncombatants, neither fighting the Allies nor supplying Japan with\nthe means of fighting them. She argued that killing these innocent\npeople seemed necessary only because the Allies stupidly insisted that\nJapan unconditionally surrender.","\nOne defense of Truman that she mentions and briefly opposes goes like\nthis: Truman didn’t really kill anybody; he merely\nsigned a piece of paper. Another goes like this: if killing innocent\npeople were really murderous, then it would be murderous to kill enemy\nsoldiers while they are sleeping, for at that moment they aren’t\nharming anyone (MTD, 67). Both of these moves rest on an implicit view\nof what action (e.g. killing, harming) is. Opposing this view of\naction motivated Anscombe’s own later work on action and\nintention, discussed below in Section 4.","\nIn WAM, Anscombe wrote at greater length about the difference between\nmurdering and other forms of killing. She distinguished choosing to\nkill the innocent as a means to your end, which is always murder, from\nchoosing to do something else which you know as a statistical\ncertainty will kill the innocent. Bombing civilian populations in\norder to provoke surrender is clearly a case of the former. The\nlatter might or might not also be murder – it depends upon some\ndetails. It’s possible to administer a drug to alleviate the\nhorrid pain of someone in mortal illness, knowing full well that,\nalas, the patient will thereby die sooner, but not thereby murder your\npatient. The patient’s death might not have been your end, nor a\nmeans to any such end. This difference in an action’s\nstructure bears upon whether it constitutes murder. That is,\nwhat makes some forms of killing murder is not our opposition to it,\nnor the fact that it is unjust or wrong. Rather, some forms of killing\nare aptly described as murder, which we then might condemn\nand oppose.","\nIn WAM, Anscombe also argued that human society is essential to human\ngood, that the state is necessary for such society, and thus the state\nmust have some right to use even deadly violence against those who\nattack it. (She defends some of these claims in greater detail in\nSAS.) But while pacifism is misguided, so too is the view that the\nstate or its officers may do anything to defend itself. Killing is\nsometimes unjust, sometimes not. But warriors and police are often\ntempted to kill even those who are not unjustly attacking it, and, she\nholds, to kill the innocent deliberately is always murder, and,\nmoreover, murder is always unjust.","\nTo kill someone deliberately, she notes, is to kill someone either for\nits own sake or as a means to some further end. Such killing is\nintentional. By contrast, Anscombe claims that the distinction between\nthe intended and the merely foreseen is “absolutely\nessential” to Christian ethics. Some actions (e.g. murder)\nChristian ethics always prohibits or forbids, and intentional killing\nof the innocent is on this list.","\nSome people had instead held that one can direct one’s\nintentions a certain way to achieve the desired result with moral\nimpunity. If, for example, one tells oneself that by doing y\none is really only intending x, then one is off the hook,\neven if y is forbidden.","\nThe devout Catholic bomber secures by a “direction of\nintention” that any shedding of innocent blood that occurs is\n“accidental.” I know a Catholic boy who was puzzled at\nbeing told by his schoolmaster that it was an accident that\nthe people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were there to be killed; in fact,\nhowever absurd it seems, such thoughts are common among priests who\nknow that they are forbidden by the divine law to justify the direct\nkilling of the innocent (WAM, 59).\n","\nThis teaching strikes Anscombe as quite absurd. She chalks this\nmisunderstanding up to “Cartesian” psychology, a\nphilosophy of psychology she works to oppose elsewhere.","\nA philosophical understanding of intention (and thus not just Catholic\ndoctrine) is needed to show that killing innocent people as a\nmeans to ending a war (or whatever) just is intentionally\nkilling the innocent, despite whatever thoughts are running through\nthe mind of the killer at the time. Thus she argues for a proper\nunderstanding of Aquinas’s idea that it matters whether some\naction’s effect is intended or merely foreseen, something we\nmust grasp if we are to see what motivates the Principle or Doctrine\nof Double Effect (See SEP entry for more about the pros and cons of\nthe Doctrine of Double Effect). Anscombe does not so much argue for\nthe principle, as insist that it has not been adequately understood.\nSo to defend the Principle of Double Effect, a principle of ethics, we\nfirst need a sound understanding of the concepts of action and of\nintention. More on this in Section 4.","\nWe will see the same need to understand the concepts of action and\nintention by studying her most well-known paper, “Modern Moral\nPhilosophy” (MMP). There Anscombe presses three theses. First,\ndoing moral philosophy is useless, and will remain so until we have an\nadequate philosophy of psychology, which is a long way away. Second,\nmoral philosophers in any case should abandon the concepts of moral\nobligation, moral duty, and the moral “ought”, for these\nconcepts make sense only in several conceptions of ethics none of\nwhich generally survives. Third, there are no important differences\namong the well-known English moral philosophers from Sidgwick onwards.\nEach of Anscombe’s three theses is bold; taken together, they\nare shocking.","\nWe will start with her last thesis. Anscombe notes that despite their\nmany differences, “every one of the best known English academic\nmoral philosophers” thinks that killing the innocent is\nsometimes right, such as when the foreseeable consequences of\nnot killing them would be catastrophic. She traces this to\nSidgwick’s definition of intention, according to which one\nintends any and every foreseen consequence of one’s\nvoluntary action. While the moral philosophers she criticizes\ndon’t necessarily accept Sidgwick’s definition of\nintention, they do accept an ethical thesis based upon it: a person is\nalways equally responsible for the intended and the merely\nforeseeable consequences of their voluntary actions. Anscombe\nidentifies this move as the difference between the\nUtilitarianism of John Stuart Mill, who rejected the thought that it\ncould ever be apt to calculate whether to kill an innocent person, and\nthe consequentialism (a term she invented) of later English\nphilosophers. Consequentialism, as she explains, is not directly a\ndoctrine about what makes an action right – this meaning came\nabout only later in the recent history of philosophy. Instead,\nconsequentialism is about what one is responsible for. But the two\ntopics are connected: if you are equally responsible for intentionally\nkilling innocent people and for merely foreseeably killing innocent\npeople, then why would it be wrong to kill one innocent person to save\nfive? For if you don’t, you’d be just as responsible for\nthe death of the five as if you had killed them yourself. Thus even\nmany deontologists (like W.D. Ross) agree with Sidgwick that in some\ncircumstances you have a moral duty to kill innocent people. (See also\nMTD, 71.) But Anscombe instead held that the consequentialist view of\nresponsibility ultimately rests on a false view of what it is to act\nintentionally.","\nHere and elsewhere, MMP touched a nerve with the philosophers she\ntargeted. One reason for this was the rather dismissive tone she took\nin some of her criticisms. Another is her rich use of irony. In\naddition to criticizing her contemporaries, she brusquely and perhaps\nuncharitably attacks Butler, Hume, Kant, Bentham, and Mill. One might\nsometimes guess that Anscombe is complaining about her colleagues\nbecause they favor new radical ideas, preferring philosophy that\nleaves everything in its place. But in fact she criticizes them on the\ngrounds that the standards from which they begin are, in practice, the\nones that happen to be current in their own society, and so modern\nmoral philosophers wind up being very conventional. This was also the\nthrust of her BBC radio lecture “Does Oxford Moral Philosophy\nCorrupt the Youth?”, which she answered in the negative, on the\ngrounds that English culture was already corrupt, and\ncontemporary moral philosophy merely reflected rather than generated\nor opposed this turpitude.","\nThe second thesis of MMP is that moral philosophers ought to abandon\nthe concepts of moral obligation, moral duty,\nmoral “ought”, and the like. (The generic\n‘ought’ is fine.) These concepts, Anscombe argues, have a\npoint only in a law-based ethics: if a moral legislator (e.g. God)\ncommands you to do something, then you have a moral obligation or\nmoral duty to do it. But in forms of ethics not based upon such a\nlegislator, talk about moral obligation or moral duty is akin to those\narguing about what is criminal in a society lacking criminal law or\ncourts, or, alternatively, to castaways talking about whether their\nclothing accords with the new company policy – the necessary\nsocial framework for making such talk meaningful is absent. Unlike J.\nL. Mackie, who thought that moral thought and talk was false, Anscombe\nargued that it was nonsense, which is probably worse. She held that\nethicists would do better to classify actions instead as, say,\ntruthful or untruthful, just or unjust, … rather than as\nmorally right or morally wrong.","\nAnscombe’s thought here resembled that of her contemporaries\nPhilippa Foot and Iris Murdoch. All were opposed to Utilitarianism,\nand were suspicious of its emphasis on ‘thin’ evaluative\nterms. Our moral thought is far richer than that. Of course, their\ncriticism was not restricted to Utilitarianism. Any moral theory\npredominantly employing thin moral concepts such as ‘morally\nright’ and ‘morally wrong’ were subject to this\ncritique. Thin moral concepts are opposed to ‘thick’ ones.\nBernard Williams famously characterized thick concepts this way:","\nIf a concept of this kind applies, this often provides someone with a\nreason for action … We may say, summarily, that such concepts\nare “action-guiding.” … At the same time, their\napplication is guided by the world. A concept of this sort may be\nrightly or wrongly applied, and people who have acquired it can agree\nthat it applies or fails to apply to some new situation …. We\ncan say, then, that the application of these concepts is at the same\ntime world-guided and action-guiding. (Williams, 1985, 140)\n","\nTo describe an action as ‘cowardly’ seems to provide much\nmore information than to describe it as ‘wrong’. Further,\nthin terms can lead us astray. In MMP, after describing the\nUtilitarian commitment to be open, in principle, to “…\njudicially punishing a man for what he is clearly understood not to\nhave done …”, which is clearly ‘unjust’, she\nwrites:","\nAnd here we see the superiority of the term ‘unjust’ over\nthe terms ‘morally right’ and ‘morally wrong’.\nFor in the context of English moral philosophy since Sidgwick it\nappears legitimate to discuss whether it might be ‘morally\nright’ in some circumstances to adopt that procedure; but it\ncannot be argued that the procedure would in any circumstances be\njust. (MMP, 16)\n","\nNo doubt Anscombe’s claims in MMP inspired some philosophers to\ndevelop modern versions of what’s now known as virtue ethics, a\ntheory designed to be a full-fledged alternative to Kantianism,\nexistentialism, utilitarianism, and other totalizing theories. But it\nis crucially important to notice that Anscombe herself did not\nadvocate this development, and this brings us to the first thesis of\nMMP: it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy\nuntil we have an adequate philosophy of psychology. Even if it would\nbe in some ways “better” to theorize about ethics by using\nvirtue concepts such as ‘truthful’ or ‘just’,\nrather than using concepts that now have no point, our efforts should\nreally be directed to the philosophy of psychology, and not to moral\nphilosophy at all. Even if we do know that some paths (e.g.\nthose which fixate on moral obligation) take us in the wrong\ndirection, we don’t know which of the many remaining paths to\ntake.","\nWhat did she have in mind by ‘philosophy of psychology’?\nIn MMP, she names several topics we would first need better\nconceptions of: ‘action’, ‘intention’,\n‘pleasure’, ‘wanting’, and maybe one day\n‘virtue’ and ‘flourishing’. She never\ndeveloped an adequate conception of virtue nor of flourishing, and so\nshe was never in a position even to begin doing moral\nphilosophy. But she did, of course, contribute to the development of\nbetter conceptions of action and intention.","\nThere is some controversy about whether Anscombe was being sincere in\narguing we should stop doing moral philosophy. Crisp 2004 suspected\nthat she was surreptitiously arguing for the superiority of a\nGod-based moral philosophy over any secular moral philosophy,\neven one like Aristotle’s. He worried that Anscombe’s view\nthat moral philosophers should turn to issues in moral psychology\nreally applies only to those who deny divine law, and that Christians\nlike her can continue to do moral philosophy.","\nIn a sense, Crisp is right. Anscombe did believe in a divine moral\nlaw, and so must have thought that a theistic moral philosophy would\nhave advantages over any other. And Anscombe, of course, did have\nviews about how to live, had arguments for some of these views, and\nrepeatedly opposed the zeitgeist by, say, protesting the use of atomic\nbombs and of abortion.","\nBut when Anscombe said we (we secular or at least disunified\nphilosophers) should stop doing moral philosophy until we have an\nadequate philosophy of psychology, she did not mean that we should\nabandon all of our ethical thought and talk. This is for two reasons.\nFirst, one need not think it’s profitable to do moral philosophy\nto have views about how to live or to coherently support or oppose\nvarious actions. Her plea to stop doing moral philosophy does\nnot conflict with her having strong views about what to oppose, just\nas one might have all kinds of views about what is and isn’t\nillegal even if one never does any legal philosophy. Echoing\nRousseau, you don’t need to be a philosopher in order to oppose\n(or support!) injustice.","\nSecond, she did indeed think that some classes of action (e.g. murder)\nwere “absolutely excluded” (MTD 71) for what we\nmight call moral reasons. But most of her argumentative writings on\nsuch topics were aimed at audiences who already shared her view that\none did not need the results of moral philosophy in order to live\nwell. In the preface to a posthumous collection of essays, Luke\nGormally explains that the bulk of her addresses in that volume were\ndelivered to Catholic audiences, where she assumed “acceptance\nof authoritative Church teaching” [FHG, x]. If you and your\naudience trust that God has promised each of you that it is in your\ninterest to avoid injustice, you don’t need to deeply understand\nthe concept of flourishing or of virtue in order to talk to one\nanother about how to live. Compare: if you trust your travel agent\nwhen she says that drinking alcohol on what appears to you to be a\nstateless island is in fact illegal, then you don’t need to do\npolitical philosophy in order to talk with your fellow travelers about\nwhether to leave the alcohol at home.","\nFinally, as Aquinas exemplified, it’s possible to think that\nmorality is based upon God and also believe that we need to understand\nthe nature of our psychology in order to adequately understand\nmorality. Her call to give moral philosophy a rest until we better\nunderstand the philosophy of psychology was addressed to us all, not\njust to a subset of moral philosophers."],"section_title":"2. Moral and Political Philosophy","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nSome of Anscombe’s most influential work was on the nature of\ncausation, a concept which is notoriously difficult to analyze. Part\nof her motivation for working on causation was to understand human\nfreedom. Her paper “Causality and Determination” [CAD]\nchallenged some of the empiricist orthodoxy of Hume’s account.\nShe is concerned to distinguish causality from determination, arguing\nthat one event can cause another even if the latter isn’t\ndetermined by its cause. When we note an event’s cause, we note\nfrom what it derived. She writes “Causality consists in the\nderivativeness of an effect from its causes” (CAD, 136). But\nthat Y derives from X does not entail that\nX necessitated Y. So, we need not assume that every\ncause necessitates its effect. If causation always relates\ntypes of events (“Whenever an X-like event\nhappens, a Y-like event happens”), then it might look\nlike a cause necessitates its effect. But she challenged the view that\nthe causal relation is actually characterized by constant conjunction\nof types, and thus whether causation entails necessitation. Discussing\nFeynman’s Geiger counter case, she writes:","\nAn example of a non-necessitating cause is mentioned by Feynman: a\nbomb is connected to a Geiger counter, so that it will go off if the\nGeiger counter registers a certain reading; whether it will or not is\nnot determined, for it is so placed near some radioactive material\nthat it may or may not register that reading. (CAD, 145)\n","\nAnd yet, if the bomb explodes it was caused by the Geiger counter\narrangement. Causation thus does not involve determination or\nnecessity. Since the radioactive decay was not sufficient for this\neffect, the case tells against viewing causes as sufficient\nconditions. There need be no general connection between cause and\neffect. This challenge to the Humean account would turn out to be very\ninfluential – it helped push philosophers towards the\ndevelopment of probabilistic accounts of causation to account for the\nabove type of case.","\nInstead, Anscombe was a singularist about causation, since she further\nrejected the Humean view that causation is not observable in a single\ninstance. In her view, some perceivable events are themselves\ninstances of causation. Anscombe produced examples from ordinary\nlanguage that seem to show that we do perceive causation. Such\nexamples are abundant. “I saw her clean the dishes”\nreports the perception of a causal process.","\nShe was also an indeterminist about freedom of action. Actions are\nmostly physical movements, and “if these physical movements are\nphysically predetermined by processes which I do not control, then my\nfreedom is perfectly illusory” (CAD, 146). Our actions are\nsurely caused, but not determined, and so there is still room for\nfreedom. Yet she also recognized that indeterminism does not suffice\nfor freedom; more is needed to establish that. We will need to\nunderstand what more is needed when we discuss her views about\naction.","\nIn her paper “The First Person” [TFP], originally\npublished in 1975, Anscombe argues for a thesis that seems patently\nfalse: the word “I” is not a referring expression. That\nis, while the function of a term like “Elizabeth\nAnscombe”, or “the daughter of Allen Anscombe”, or\n“that woman”, or “she” is\nreferential, the term “I” does not function in the same\nway. “I” thus refers to nothing at all. (Compare with the\nuse of ‘It’ in the thought “It is snowing.”)\n“The First Person” is probably Anscombe’s most\ndifficult article – which is saying something – and even\nsympathetic scholars disagree about what the argument is supposed to\nbe. She was clearly influenced by Geach 1957, and by\nCasteñada’s various papers on the first person. Later,\nLewis 1979 discussed this issue in a distinct but by then familiar\nway.","\nAnscombe focuses approvingly on some aspects of Descartes’ use\nof ‘I’ in the Meditations. Famously, he cannot\ndoubt ‘I exist.’ But on the same grounds that he can doubt\n‘I have a body’, he also can doubt ‘I am\nDescartes.’ After all, ‘Descartes’ is just the name\nof a human being, and he can doubt that he is any human being\nwhatsoever – he can wonder whether he’s instead a brain in\na vat. So, if the argument indeed establishes the non-identity of\nhimself with this body, it likewise establishes the non-identity of\nhimself with Descartes!","\nThis may seem strange, for this last thought may seem equivalent to\n“Descartes was not Descartes”, and that\ncan’t be coherently denied. But Anscombe argues that these two\nthoughts are not equivalent. Why’s that?","\nWe do tend to think of ‘I’ as simply being that\nexpression people use to refer to themselves. However,","\n“When John Smith spoke of James Robinson he was speaking of his\nbrother, but he did not know this.” That’s a possible\nsituation. So similarly is “When John Smith spoke of John\nHoratio Auberon Smith (named in a will perhaps) he was speaking of\nhimself, but he did not know this.” If so, then ‘speaking\nof’ or ‘referring to’ oneself is compatible with not\nknowing that the object one speaks of is oneself. (TFP, 47)\n","\nWe might then wish to say “Smith can speak of himself without\nrealizing that he is speaking of himself.” This shows\nthat there are two distinct kinds of reflexive pronouns: the ordinary\nreflexive pronoun and the indirect reflexive pronouns. The first\noccurrence of ‘himself’ immediately above is the ordinary\nreflexive pronoun, and it refers successfully just in case it picks\nout the same object as its antecedent. It doesn’t matter\nhow it does so, nor must the antecedent and pronoun share a\nsense. When above we say “Smith spoke of himself”, we are\nusing the ordinary reflexive pronoun, for the person to whom Smith\nthereby referred was indeed the person who spoke.","\nThings are different if we are tempted to say “The word\n‘I’ is a word each of us uses in speaking of\nhimself.” This use of ‘himself’ can’t\nbe the ordinary reflexive, because, as we just saw, a person can speak\nof himself in cases where he wouldn’t also use the word\n‘I’ to refer to the same thing. The word\n‘himself’ in this newer attempt at explaining the word\n‘I’ gets its distinctive sense from that of the\nword ‘I’. But since the sense of the indirect reflexive\npronoun ‘himself’ depends upon that of the word\n‘I’, we cannot use the indirect reflexive pronoun, as\nthough we understand it independently, to explain the word\n‘I’. Things instead are the other way around. This\ndiscussion displays the problem that ‘I’ poses, but it\ndoesn’t solve it.","\nHow do we solve it? Anscombe thinks you can’t. In the\nbulk of the paper, Anscombe argues that the word ‘I’\nisn’t a referring expression in a few steps. First, she argues\nthat ‘I’ isn’t like other referring expressions:\nproper names, other pronouns, demonstratives, definite descriptions,\nand so on. So we can’t assimilate the use of the word\n“I” to other more tractable types of referring\nexpressions. Second, she argues that the only remaining possibility is\nthat the word “I” refers to an immaterial substance (a\nCartesian ego), or at least a stretch of such a substance that exists\nso long as one is thinking a thought. But that would still leave us no\nway to identify the same referent in different\n“I”-thoughts at different times, an\n“intolerable” result. Moreover, Anscombe explicitly denied\nthat there are immaterial substances. She described the very\nconception of an immaterial substance as “a delusive one”\n(IOS, 71).","\nSo, having ruled out all the standard ways that terms refer, she\nconcludes that the function of the word ‘I’ is\nnon-referential. She says little about what its function is,\nalthough she notes that the word is dispensable – a language\nwhose verbs are conjugated to reflect what we call ‘the first\nperson’ (e.g. Latin, Spanish) can do without such a word. Her\nconclusion could be resisted if one produced a way of referring she\nhadn’t considered, or if one rebutted any of her arguments\nagainst the possibilities she does consider. Important discussions of\nthis paper can be found in Doyle 2018, O’Brien 1994, and many\nother places, and it has clearly inspired the work of Rödl\n2007."],"section_title":"3. Metaphysics","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nAnscombe’s Intention is one of the classics of 20th\ncentury philosophy. Indeed, it continues to be a standard point of\nreference for those working in action theory and philosophical\npsychology, so much so that contemporary theories of action are often\ncategorized as either Anscombean or Davidsonian.","\nOn its back cover, David Velleman aptly quips that Intention\nis “often quoted, sometimes read, rarely understood”. Many\nreaders are indeed puzzled by the significance and the lessons of what\nshe writes. Intention is a work on the nature of agency\nthrough an understanding of the concept of intention. As we saw above,\nAnscombe wrote Intention after opposing supporters of\nTruman:","\nPerplexed by defenders of Truman she came to the conclusion that they\nhad failed to understand the nature of his actions, and it was this\nthat led her to write Intention, in which she pointed out\nthat in doing one thing (moving one’s hand) one may\nintentionally be doing another (directing the death of human beings).\n(Haldane 2000, 1020)\n","\nIndeed we have seen many points in her work in moral philosophy where\nshe calls us to understand the concepts of action and of intention\nbetter.","\nThe best way to understand the argument of the book might be to\nconsider its claims in a different order than the way the book lays\nthem out. For the actual narrative of the books deliberately leads the\nreader into a bunch of dead ends and incomplete solutions before\nforwarding specific positive claims.","\nIn what might reasonably be considered to be the conclusion of the\nbook’s argument, she writes that “the term\n‘intentional’ has reference to a form of\ndescription of events” (INT, 84). To unpack this cryptic\nthought, note first that the events she has in mind are some of those\nthat we human beings are the subject of. It does not pick out things\nthat merely happen to us.","\nSecond, note that a single action can be described in various ways. Is\nhe moving his arm up and down? Pumping water? Doing his job? Clicking\nout a steady rhythm? Making a funny shadow on the rock behind him?\nWell, it could be that all of these descriptions are\ntrue.","\nThird, note that even if the same action can be described in multiple\nways, it usually won’t be intentional in every one of those ways\ndescribed. For example, even though a man is pumping water\nintentionally, he might not be making a funny shadow on the rock\nbehind him intentionally. But what determines which of the\ndescriptions of his action are indeed intentional?","\nAt first, Anscombe answers this disjunctively: she identifies several\ncases which are not intentional, and several other cases that\nare. If you ask someone “Why are you doing that?”, and\nthey give one of a few types of answers, this establishes that the\naction is not intentional. Such ways of answering can include 1)\n“I didn’t know I was doing that.”, 2) “I\n(merely) observed/inferred that I was doing that”, 3) “I\n(merely) observed/inferred how my physical movement was caused.”\nBy contrast, the following answers show that the action so described\nis indeed intentional: 1) an answer that mentions something future\n(“To end the war”), 2) an answer that interprets it\n(“Out of curiosity”) , 3) an answer that mentions\nsomething past that’s given as the ground for something good or\nbad for the person at whom it is aimed (“They attacked us\nfirst”), or, finally, 4) “No reason” (INT, 24).","\nSuch a hodgepodge of answers sheds little light upon the concept of\nintention, her quarry. Thus, she shifts methods. She emphasizes that\nin every case of doing something intentionally, you don’t need\nto observe yourself in order to know that that’s what you are up\nto. For example, you know that you are reading this encyclopedia\nentry, and you know this not because somebody told you, nor did you\nmerely infer it, nor did you see yourself in a mirror reading it.\nRather, you know it in some distinctive way, what later writers will\ncall a ‘first-personal’ way. Anscombe calls this knowledge\nof one’s own intentional actions “practical\nknowledge”, which is likewise obscure. But she concludes that\n“the notion of ‘practical knowledge’ can only be\nunderstood if we first understand ‘practical\nreasoning’” (INT, 57). Thus it is only by grasping what it\nis to reason practically that we will understand what practical\nknowledge and the concept of intention are.","\nWhat, then, is practical reasoning? There are two ways to think about\nit. One familiar way is via deliberation: we have some end, and we\nreason to some sufficient means to that end. Aristotle sketched things\nthis way. Anscombe focuses on another way (although it winds up being\nequivalent to the first). She notes that the various ways to describe\nwhat someone does can bear a particular order to one another.\nA man might be moving his arm up and down because (and not\njust, and) he is operating the pump, which he’s doing because\n(and not just, and) he’s pumping water to the house, and so on.\nThis is an order that really exists among events; it’s not\nmerely the sum of merely physically described events going on in the\nworld and, also somehow, what’s going on in his head.\nThis order is the order of intention.","\nOf course, the man himself is in a special position to grasp this\nactually-existing order among the ways of describing what he’s\ndoing. Anscombe compared this knowledge to the knowledge had by a man\nwho directs a project like the erection of a building simply by giving\norders for every little thing that anyone does, a project which he\ncan’t see and gets no reports on. If all goes well, the director\nknows what’s done, and his knowledge is practical knowledge. His\npractical knowledge is his grasping the order of the events that\nunfold. Practical knowledge, then, isn’t fundamentally knowledge\nof certain atomic actions, e.g. thinking of a number, blinking.\nIt’s knowledge of the entire means-end order among the things\none does, an order which of course includes the actions\nconstituting it. The man in the earlier example can say\n“I’m moving my arm up and down” because he\ncan say “I’m moving my arm up and down because I’m\npumping water”.","\nIndeed, many of the very concepts we use to describe movements\ninvolving human beings – e.g. ‘greeting’,\n‘hiring’, ‘sending for’, even\n‘offending’, ‘dropping’, ‘placing’\n– are concepts we’d lack were we to lack the concept of\nintention. So the term ‘intentional’ refers not only to\nthe aforementioned ‘because’ and what it structures, but\nto the very terms by which we conceptualize most human and animal\nmovement. Intention is thus not something ‘added’ on to\nmere behavior we somehow first separately conceptualize. Rather, the\norder of intention is baked into the ways we represent our lives from\nthe very start.","\nThere are a wealth of other sections from Intention that have\nbeen “often quoted” and yet “rarely\nunderstood”. Consider, for example, this famous passage:","\nLet us consider a man going round a town with a shopping list in his\nhand. Now it is clear that the relation of this list to the things he\nactually buys is one and the same whether his wife gave him the list\nor it is his own list; and that there is a different relation where a\nlist is made by a detective following him about. If he made the list\nitself, it was an expression of intention; if his wife gave it to him,\nit has the role of an order. What then is the identical relation to\nwhat happens, in the order and the intention, which is not shared by\nthe record? It is precisely this: if the list and the things that the\nman actually buys do not agree, and if this and this alone constitutes\na mistake, then the mistake is not in the list but in the man’s\nperformance (if his wife were to say: “Look, it says butter and\nyou have bought margarine”, he would hardly reply: “What a\nmistake! we must put that right” and alter the word on the list\nto “margarine”); whereas if the detective’s record\nand what the man actually buys do not agree, then the mistake is in\nthe record. (INT, 56).\n","\nAnscombe draws attention to the fact that when there is a discrepancy\nbetween a piece of paper and what happens, the source of the error\ndepends upon the “role” of the paper. If the paper has the\nrole of a record, the error is in the paper. But if the paper has the\nrole of an order or intention, the error is in what happens. Thus\nthere can be two ways to fail to know what happens: by\nmisrecording, and by misperforming. And one who practically knows\ndoesn’t misperform.","\nBeginning with Searle (1975), a different thesis gets very widely\nattributed to Anscombe in the literature: one about ‘mental\nstates’ like beliefs and desires, each of which supposedly has a\ndifferent “direction of fit”. Anscombe, however, says\nnothing here about believing or desiring or other kinds of mental\nstates; the example instead displays two ways of knowing. Her\npoint is that you can know something either by believing something\nthat is (already) true, or by intentionally doing something. Both are\nforms of knowledge, and indeed there can be two ways to know one and\nthe same thing. (See Frost 2014.)","\nAnscombe applied her views on intention to clarify her own positions\non controversial claims, such as the condemnation of contraception.\nOne puzzle in the Catholic doctrine condemning contraception, and yet\nallowing for the ‘rhythm method’ of avoiding pregnancy, is\nto reconcile the rationales in a consistent way. Many charged the\nChurch with inconsistency, since the intention to not get pregnant\nduring intercourse is present in both cases. Anscombe claims there is\nan important difference:","\nThe reason why people are confused about intention, and why they\nsometimes think there is no difference between contraceptive\nintercourse and the use of infertile times to avoid conception, is\nthis: They don’t notice the difference between\n“intention” when it means the intentionalness of the thing\nyou’re doing – that you’re doing this on\npurpose – and when it means a further or\naccompanying intention with which you do the thing.\n(CAC, 182)\n","\nHer claim is that the further intentions that accompany these actions\nmay be the same, but there is a significant difference between the\nacts themselves. Her claim is that contraceptive intercourse, unlike\ntiming intercourse to coincide with infertile periods, is a bad sort\nof action because in the case of contraceptive intercourse\n“…to intend such an act is not to intend a marriage act\nat all, whether or not we’re married” (CAC, 183). Having\nintercourse that has purposely been rendered infertile is itself a\ndifferent act from having intercourse at an infertile time. Even\nthough both types of action may have the further aim of, for example,\nlimiting family size, the acts themselves differ. The\n“perversion of the sex act in marriage is, in this one way, like\nwriting a forged check for a good cause”, she claims. The\nfurther intention of, let’s say, helping the needy is a worthy\none but does not vindicate the action of forging the check.","\nNeedless to say, this view was controversial. Bernard Williams and\nMichael Tanner criticized her argument for failing to consider one of\nher own theses – that actions, including sorts of actions, can\nfall under a variety of descriptions. On their view, she is picking\nand choosing descriptions of actions in order to get the outcome she\nwants – a distinction between the rhythm method and\ncontraception that isn’t just a trivial distinction. But, they\nargue, she cannot do this convincingly. They argue that couples who\nemploy the rhythm method are taking steps to achieve infertility just\nas those who take contraception are. Those steps are central to\nunderstanding the acts themselves, not simply the further purpose of\nthe acts. (Williams and Tanner 1972)"],"section_title":"4. Action Theory","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nWhat is it that we perceive? The world? Or only our ideas or\nsense-data? Something else? Anscombe deployed some of the conceptual\nmachinery she had developed in the philosophy of action to topics in\nthe philosophy of sense-perception. Three relevant theses from the\nphilosophy of action include:","\nAs we will see shortly, analogous claims can be made about sensation\nor perception.","\nBut first, note that Anscombe distinguished sharply between two senses\nof the word “object” – one of which is material\n(“There are ten objects on the bowling lane”), while the\nother is intentional (“Immortality was the object of his\ndesire”), which otherwise needn’t exist at all. An\nintentional object is given by a word or phrase which gives a\ndescription under which it is such (IOS, 9). She insists that\nneither sense of the word “object” is deviant nor\nphilosophically uninteresting, but they are easily confused with each\nother.","\nShe makes a foray into grammatical theory to illustrate the\npossibility of this distinction between senses of\n“object”. Consider the sentence “Luke gave Leia his\nlightsaber”. If asked “What object did Luke give\nLeia?”, we would reply “his lightsaber”. And if\nasked for the direct object of the sentence, we would again reply\n“his lightsaber”. But although “his\nlightsaber” is indeed the direct object of the sentence, Luke\ndid not give Leia a direct object; to think otherwise is to confuse\nthe two senses. Moreover, “his lightsaber” is the direct\nobject of this sentence, even though no lightsaber materially exists.\nIt would be foolish to object to the claim that the direct object of\nthe sentence is “his lightsaber” on the grounds that\nlightsabers aren’t real. Anscombe’s insight is that\nlikewise there are also objects of perception in both a material and\nan intentional sense.","\nIn light of the three claims above, Anscombe makes three analogous\nclaims about sense-perception:","\nAnscombe maintained that certain philosophical views look inescapable\nonly if we conflate these two distinct senses. Idealism is the view\nthat we see only sense data, taking what is the intentional object of\nperception also to be the material objection of perception. On the\nother hand, direct realism (or what she calls ‘ordinary language\nphilosophy’) holds that we see only material objects without any\nintermediaries, overlooking or dismissing the legitimate use of saying\nthings like “Now I see stars” after getting hit on the\nhead. They thereby ignore or misunderstand the relevance of the\nintentional sense of sense-perception. Thus neither idealism nor\ndirect realism recognizes the importance of the distinction between\ntwo ways of thinking about verbs of sense-perception. Both views thus\nfail to recognize the distinct intentionality of sensation.","\nAlthough these two senses are distinct, Anscombe notes that sometimes\npeople use the word “see” and other verbs of\nsense-perception without definitely intending it either only\nmaterially or only intentionally. Only further questioning would nudge\nthem to make their meaning more specific."],"section_title":"5. Philosophy of Perception","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nAmong the very many topics Anscombe worked on, her ideas about the\nrole of testimony have prefigured or influenced much contemporary\nthought on the topic. We will summarize three of her short but\nimportant papers on testimony: “Hume and Julius Caesar”\n(HJC), “What Is It to Believe Someone?” (WBS), and\n“Authority in Morals” (AIM), each of which heralds ideas\nthat gained prominence in philosophy only later.","\nIn HJC, she considers Hume’s answer to the question, how do we\nknow about historical events? For example, how do we know that Caesar\nwas killed on the Ides of March? How do we even know that Caesar was a\nreal man, and not a mythical figure like Electra? Hume’s answer\nwas essentially that you perceive or remember someone (perhaps your\nschool teacher) telling you about Caesar, and you next infer the cause\nof that – namely, that someone told them – and so on,\nuntil you infer that there were eyewitnesses in the Senate, who then\nwitnessed Caesar’s death. You thus infer the original event\nthrough a series of causes terminating in something you perceive or\nremember perceiving.","\nAnscombe argued that Hume’s answer cannot be right. First, is it\nreally true that we infer that Caesar was killed on the Ides of March\nfrom the thought there were many observant people in the\nSenate that day? No. If anything, it’s the other way around:\ngiven that we think that Caesar was killed then and there, we\ninfer that there must have been eyewitnesses to his death. It is not\nthat we first establish the presence of these people, and only then\ninfer what caused them to say what they said.","\nAnscombe also discussed “one of the rare pieces of stupidity in\nthe writings of Wittgenstein” (HJC, 89). He once wrote that if\nwe were to find a piece of writing saying Caesar never existed, and\nwas invented for other ends, this would be some evidence that Caesar\nnever existed. Anscombe pushes us to think further about this. If we\nwere to discover such a document, we would instead immediately\nconclude it to be worthless, this because it conflicts with so much we\nhave been taught about the history of the West. She thus opposed the\nidea that our belief in Caesar’s existence rests upon any\nevidence we have for it, rather than from our directly\ntrusting what we have been taught. A coherentist might reply that any\ndocument alleging Caesar’s nonexistence clashes with the\npreponderance of historical evidence we have about him, and that we\ncan check the claims of this document against these other sources of\nevidence. But Anscombe rejoins that these other sources of\n“evidence” are themselves historians who straightforwardly\nbelieve much of what they have been taught, and we believe them. Thus,\nwe cannot “reduce” testimony to some other source of\njustification. Believing testimony is basic.","\nShe provocatively concludes the essay","\n[N]ot everything can be put up for checking. Von Neurath’s image\nof the ship which we repair – and, I suppose, build on to\n– while it is afloat: if this suggests that we can go round\ntapping every plank for rottenness, and so we might end up with a\nwholly different ship, the analogy is not good. For there are things\nthat are on a level. A general epistemological reason for doubting one\nwill be a reason for doubting all, and then none of them would have\nanything to test it(HJC, 92)\n","\nShe thus opposes epistemological coherentism about justification, or\nat least a certain popular version of it. The many sources of\ninformation about Caesar’s life are themselves equally\nvulnerable to skepticism, and so we cannot actually test the former\nwhile trusting the latter. Without trusting what we have been taught,\nwe have almost no historical knowledge.","\nWell before C. A. J. Coady’s masterful monograph on testimony\n(1992) that revived widespread interest in the topic, Anscombe\npublished a little essay titled “What Is It to Believe\nSomeone?”, anticipating many points he and others later\ndeveloped. She wrote that the topic of believing someone is not merely\nneglected but actually unknown in the philosophical discussion of her\ntime. Yet she avers that it is “of great importance in\nphilosophy and in life”, for “the greater part of our\nknowledge of reality rests upon the belief that we repose in things we\nhave been taught and told”. What is it, then, for a\nperson, rather than a proposition, to be the object of\nbelief?","\nAnscombe distinguishes believing a person from believing what a person\nsays, for you can do the latter without the former – both when\nyou already believe what is said, and when you believe that the person\nis both misinformed and yet trying to deceive you. Anscombe describes\nmany “presuppositions” to believing someone: noticing the\nrelevant sound or inscription, understanding it as an attempt to\ncommunicate, noticing that it is addressed to oneself, understanding\nit properly, understanding that it was produced by the person indeed\nproducing it, and many more. Only once all these are in place do we\ncome to the situation where we can ask: “Does he believe\nher?”","\nIt is no small matter whether people trust you when you tell them\nthings. Anscombe claimed “It is an insult and it may be an\ninjury not to be believed” (WBS, 9). Although she does not\nelaborate upon the nature of the insult and injury, her claim\nforeshadows contemporary discussions of epistemic injustice.\nInterestingly, it can be insulting, she notes, not even to be\nheard as telling one something. For example, if you tell me\np, but I fail to note that you were telling me anything\n– perhaps I thought you were just venting aloud – you\nmight reasonably say that I disrespectfully failed to believe you. We\ncan wrong one another by refusing to accept one another’s word,\nan idea that has recently become widely discussed at the intersection\nof epistemology and ethics.","\nIn the third paper on testimony, “Authority in Morals”,\nAnscombe again considers a few related questions that only recently\nhave become widely discussed: can one person aptly tell another what\nto think about morality, and can the hearer aptly trust what they are\nthus told? Given that the paper was originally presented at a\nconference in an abbey, much of her discussion involves trusting a\nreligious authority about moral truths. But her points generalize.","\nAnscombe compares moral teaching to mathematical teaching: in both\ncases, one must do something to truly learn what is being\ntaught, rather than merely accepting something as to be believed.\nTeaching someone either morality or mathematics thus won’t just\ninvolve the formation of belief. Even so, she denies that a proper\nunderstanding of autonomy is incompatible with trusting moral\ntestimony: deciding to trust someone who tells you about a bit of\nmoral truth can be a way of thinking for oneself. A man who\ndoes this and acts on this testimony is still “his own\npilot” (AIM, 49).","\nYet there are limits to moral testimony. Although she thinks certain\ndogmatic truths are religiously revealed and could not otherwise be\nknown, this is not so for moral truths. Moral truths may be\nreligiously revealed only per accidens. In other words, moral\ntruths can always be known other than by trusting some\nsource. There seems to be no room for moral truths that per\nse can be taken only through trust.","\nOne way moral truths can be revealed per accidens is when\nsomeone relies on an authority for a moral claim that they in some\nsense could have thought out for themselves, but didn’t.\nAnscombe does not imply that so relying need be a sign of laziness;\nrather, she thinks that different people have already grasped\ndifferent parts of the moral law (AIM, 45), and so seems to think that\nsharing moral truths is much like sharing other truths. For example,\nif you tell me what you ate for lunch, I can reasonably trust you even\nif in principle it’s true that I could have instead spied on you\nto find out. Likewise, I might reasonably believe you when you tell me\nsome moral truth that I hadn’t worked out for myself (but, in\ntheory, could).","\nThe second way moral truths can be revealed per accidens is\nwhen their factual grounds are knowable only by religious revelation.\nFor example, consider the ascetic life. As Hume noted, there seems to\nbe nothing good about it. And so if someone were to tell you that it\nis indeed good, there would be no question of believing them.","\nBut now suppose you come to accept certain ordinary (non-moral) truths\nof revealed religion: the doctrine of original sin, and the\npossibility of joining your suffering with that of Christ. Now in\nlight of accepting these ideas, it becomes possible to see for\nyourself that there is indeed something good about the ascetic life.\nSo, you need not accept this moral claim itself on the basis of\nreligious revelation, but you accept it on the basis of other truths\nthemselves accepted as revelation. Moral truths, however,\nalways can in principle be graspable without needing to trust another.\nEven though there need be nothing bad about trusting an authority who\nteaches about morality, their teachings, if true, could be\narrived at otherwise."],"section_title":"6. Testimony","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nG. E. M. Anscombe’s work ranged over many years and many\ndifferent areas in philosophy. The breadth of her work is impressive.\nShe was systematic in her thinking, seeing and developing connections\nbetween metaphysics, moral psychology, and ethics that exhibited not\nsimply a grasp of one particular problem, but a world view. Much of\nher works remains unpublished, although newly accessible through the\nAnscombe Papers Project at the Collegium Institute for Catholic\nThought & Culture. Anscombe’s legacy is one of the broadest\nand deepest left by a 20th century philosopher."],"section_title":"7. Conclusion","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nShe was born in Limerick, Ireland 18 March 1919 to Allen Wells\\nAnscombe and Gertrude Elizabeth Anscombe (née Thomas). At the\\ntime of her birth her father was serving in the British Army. The\\nfamily later returned to England where her father resumed his career\\nas a schoolmaster, while her mother, a classical scholar, worked as a\\nheadmistress.\",\n \"\\nAn inquisitive child, Anscombe decided to convert to Roman Catholicism\\nin her early teens. She attended the Sydenham School, graduating in\\n1937, and went on to St. Hugh’s College, Oxford. During her\\nearly years at Oxford she met three young women who also had\\nremarkable careers in philosophy: Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley, and,\\nabove all, Philippa Foot, with whom she developed a deep friendship\\nher entire life (Mac Cumhaill & Wiseman 2022). Anscombe received a\\nFirst in Literae Humaniores (Classics and Philosophy) in 1941. After\\nher graduation she remained at St. Hugh’s as a research student,\\nand in 1942 moved to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she met Ludwig\\nWittgenstein. She believed that attending Wittgenstein’s\\nlectures freed her from the trap of phenomenalism that had so plagued\\nher (MPM, ix). In 1946 she was offered a Research Fellowship at\\nSomerville College, Oxford, and was appointed to a teaching Fellowship\\nthere in 1964. She moved from Oxford to Cambridge in 1970 when she was\\nawarded a Chair of Philosophy at Cambridge – the Chair formerly\\noccupied by Wittgenstein. She remained at Cambridge until her\\nretirement in 1986.\",\n \"\\nIn 1938, at Oxford, she met the philosopher Peter Geach, who then was\\nstudying at Balliol. They were both receiving instruction from the\\nsame Dominican priest. They were married in 1941, and had three sons\\nand four daughters.\",\n \"\\nIn 1948, the young Anscombe read a paper [CSL] to the Socratic Club\\nattacking an argument offered by C. S. Lewis in his book\\nMiracles. In Chapter 3 of that book Lewis argued that\\nnaturalism is self-refuting. Lewis attended her talk, and, although\\naccounts vary, some acquaintances report that he was crushed by her\\nwithering criticism. In any case, Lewis significantly rewrote the\\nrelevant chapter in the subsequent edition of his book.\",\n \"\\nAnscombe also became one of Wittgenstein’s good friends and\\nthen, after his death in 1951, the chief translator of his work into\\nEnglish. Ray Monk wrote that Anscombe was “…one of\\nWittgenstein’s closest friends and one of his most trusted\\nstudents, an exception to his general dislike of academic women and\\nespecially of female philosophers.” (Monk 1991, 498).\",\n \"\\nAnscombe did not avoid controversy. In 1956 she publicly opposed\\nOxford University’s decision to award an honorary degree to\\nHarry Truman, whom she considered a murderer for intentionally killing\\nthe civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. She also courted\\ncontroversy by coming out in print against contraception (see below),\\nand engaging in civil disobedience at abortion clinics.\",\n \"\\nAnscombe famously flouted gender conventions: she did not take her\\nhusband’s name, she frequently wore men’s clothes, she\\nsmoked cigars, and she was prone to cursing and vulgar speech.\\nAlthough influenced by several men – Frege, Wittgenstein, Geach,\\nvarious Catholic thinkers historical and contemporaneous –\\nAnscombe was a fiercely independent and original philosopher. Those\\nwho suspect she merely echoed or applied the views of another person\\nare sorely mistaken.\",\n \"\\nAnscombe continued to produce original work beyond her retirement.\\nPeter Geach, for example, reported in Analysis that she had\\nconstructed a novel paradox late in life (Geach 2006,\\n266–7).\",\n \"\\nAnscombe died in Cambridge on 5 January 2001.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Life\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nAnscombe’s philosophical work does not form a system. But\\nunderstanding her thoughts in moral and political philosophy helps one\\ngrasp some of her wider philosophical motivations, especially those on\\nthe topics of action and intention. We will first discuss several of\\nher most well-known papers in moral and political philosophy, for this\\nwill shed light on her interest in these other areas.\",\n \"\\nIn her infamous pamphlet “Mr. Truman’s Degree” (MTD)\\n(1958), Anscombe protested Oxford’s decision to award Harry\\nTruman an honorary doctorate. Some of the ideas in this pamphlet were\\nlater developed in “War and Murder” (WAM) (1972), written\\nfor a Christian venue.\",\n \"\\nShe opposed Oxford’s decision to honor Truman on the grounds\\nthat Truman was a murderer. He was a murderer, because “choosing\\nto kill the innocent as a means to your ends is always murder”\\n(MTD, 66). The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were by and large\\nnoncombatants, neither fighting the Allies nor supplying Japan with\\nthe means of fighting them. She argued that killing these innocent\\npeople seemed necessary only because the Allies stupidly insisted that\\nJapan unconditionally surrender.\",\n \"\\nOne defense of Truman that she mentions and briefly opposes goes like\\nthis: Truman didn’t really kill anybody; he merely\\nsigned a piece of paper. Another goes like this: if killing innocent\\npeople were really murderous, then it would be murderous to kill enemy\\nsoldiers while they are sleeping, for at that moment they aren’t\\nharming anyone (MTD, 67). Both of these moves rest on an implicit view\\nof what action (e.g. killing, harming) is. Opposing this view of\\naction motivated Anscombe’s own later work on action and\\nintention, discussed below in Section 4.\",\n \"\\nIn WAM, Anscombe wrote at greater length about the difference between\\nmurdering and other forms of killing. She distinguished choosing to\\nkill the innocent as a means to your end, which is always murder, from\\nchoosing to do something else which you know as a statistical\\ncertainty will kill the innocent. Bombing civilian populations in\\norder to provoke surrender is clearly a case of the former. The\\nlatter might or might not also be murder – it depends upon some\\ndetails. It’s possible to administer a drug to alleviate the\\nhorrid pain of someone in mortal illness, knowing full well that,\\nalas, the patient will thereby die sooner, but not thereby murder your\\npatient. The patient’s death might not have been your end, nor a\\nmeans to any such end. This difference in an action’s\\nstructure bears upon whether it constitutes murder. That is,\\nwhat makes some forms of killing murder is not our opposition to it,\\nnor the fact that it is unjust or wrong. Rather, some forms of killing\\nare aptly described as murder, which we then might condemn\\nand oppose.\",\n \"\\nIn WAM, Anscombe also argued that human society is essential to human\\ngood, that the state is necessary for such society, and thus the state\\nmust have some right to use even deadly violence against those who\\nattack it. (She defends some of these claims in greater detail in\\nSAS.) But while pacifism is misguided, so too is the view that the\\nstate or its officers may do anything to defend itself. Killing is\\nsometimes unjust, sometimes not. But warriors and police are often\\ntempted to kill even those who are not unjustly attacking it, and, she\\nholds, to kill the innocent deliberately is always murder, and,\\nmoreover, murder is always unjust.\",\n \"\\nTo kill someone deliberately, she notes, is to kill someone either for\\nits own sake or as a means to some further end. Such killing is\\nintentional. By contrast, Anscombe claims that the distinction between\\nthe intended and the merely foreseen is “absolutely\\nessential” to Christian ethics. Some actions (e.g. murder)\\nChristian ethics always prohibits or forbids, and intentional killing\\nof the innocent is on this list.\",\n \"\\nSome people had instead held that one can direct one’s\\nintentions a certain way to achieve the desired result with moral\\nimpunity. If, for example, one tells oneself that by doing y\\none is really only intending x, then one is off the hook,\\neven if y is forbidden.\",\n \"\\nThe devout Catholic bomber secures by a “direction of\\nintention” that any shedding of innocent blood that occurs is\\n“accidental.” I know a Catholic boy who was puzzled at\\nbeing told by his schoolmaster that it was an accident that\\nthe people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were there to be killed; in fact,\\nhowever absurd it seems, such thoughts are common among priests who\\nknow that they are forbidden by the divine law to justify the direct\\nkilling of the innocent (WAM, 59).\\n\",\n \"\\nThis teaching strikes Anscombe as quite absurd. She chalks this\\nmisunderstanding up to “Cartesian” psychology, a\\nphilosophy of psychology she works to oppose elsewhere.\",\n \"\\nA philosophical understanding of intention (and thus not just Catholic\\ndoctrine) is needed to show that killing innocent people as a\\nmeans to ending a war (or whatever) just is intentionally\\nkilling the innocent, despite whatever thoughts are running through\\nthe mind of the killer at the time. Thus she argues for a proper\\nunderstanding of Aquinas’s idea that it matters whether some\\naction’s effect is intended or merely foreseen, something we\\nmust grasp if we are to see what motivates the Principle or Doctrine\\nof Double Effect (See SEP entry for more about the pros and cons of\\nthe Doctrine of Double Effect). Anscombe does not so much argue for\\nthe principle, as insist that it has not been adequately understood.\\nSo to defend the Principle of Double Effect, a principle of ethics, we\\nfirst need a sound understanding of the concepts of action and of\\nintention. More on this in Section 4.\",\n \"\\nWe will see the same need to understand the concepts of action and\\nintention by studying her most well-known paper, “Modern Moral\\nPhilosophy” (MMP). There Anscombe presses three theses. First,\\ndoing moral philosophy is useless, and will remain so until we have an\\nadequate philosophy of psychology, which is a long way away. Second,\\nmoral philosophers in any case should abandon the concepts of moral\\nobligation, moral duty, and the moral “ought”, for these\\nconcepts make sense only in several conceptions of ethics none of\\nwhich generally survives. Third, there are no important differences\\namong the well-known English moral philosophers from Sidgwick onwards.\\nEach of Anscombe’s three theses is bold; taken together, they\\nare shocking.\",\n \"\\nWe will start with her last thesis. Anscombe notes that despite their\\nmany differences, “every one of the best known English academic\\nmoral philosophers” thinks that killing the innocent is\\nsometimes right, such as when the foreseeable consequences of\\nnot killing them would be catastrophic. She traces this to\\nSidgwick’s definition of intention, according to which one\\nintends any and every foreseen consequence of one’s\\nvoluntary action. While the moral philosophers she criticizes\\ndon’t necessarily accept Sidgwick’s definition of\\nintention, they do accept an ethical thesis based upon it: a person is\\nalways equally responsible for the intended and the merely\\nforeseeable consequences of their voluntary actions. Anscombe\\nidentifies this move as the difference between the\\nUtilitarianism of John Stuart Mill, who rejected the thought that it\\ncould ever be apt to calculate whether to kill an innocent person, and\\nthe consequentialism (a term she invented) of later English\\nphilosophers. Consequentialism, as she explains, is not directly a\\ndoctrine about what makes an action right – this meaning came\\nabout only later in the recent history of philosophy. Instead,\\nconsequentialism is about what one is responsible for. But the two\\ntopics are connected: if you are equally responsible for intentionally\\nkilling innocent people and for merely foreseeably killing innocent\\npeople, then why would it be wrong to kill one innocent person to save\\nfive? For if you don’t, you’d be just as responsible for\\nthe death of the five as if you had killed them yourself. Thus even\\nmany deontologists (like W.D. Ross) agree with Sidgwick that in some\\ncircumstances you have a moral duty to kill innocent people. (See also\\nMTD, 71.) But Anscombe instead held that the consequentialist view of\\nresponsibility ultimately rests on a false view of what it is to act\\nintentionally.\",\n \"\\nHere and elsewhere, MMP touched a nerve with the philosophers she\\ntargeted. One reason for this was the rather dismissive tone she took\\nin some of her criticisms. Another is her rich use of irony. In\\naddition to criticizing her contemporaries, she brusquely and perhaps\\nuncharitably attacks Butler, Hume, Kant, Bentham, and Mill. One might\\nsometimes guess that Anscombe is complaining about her colleagues\\nbecause they favor new radical ideas, preferring philosophy that\\nleaves everything in its place. But in fact she criticizes them on the\\ngrounds that the standards from which they begin are, in practice, the\\nones that happen to be current in their own society, and so modern\\nmoral philosophers wind up being very conventional. This was also the\\nthrust of her BBC radio lecture “Does Oxford Moral Philosophy\\nCorrupt the Youth?”, which she answered in the negative, on the\\ngrounds that English culture was already corrupt, and\\ncontemporary moral philosophy merely reflected rather than generated\\nor opposed this turpitude.\",\n \"\\nThe second thesis of MMP is that moral philosophers ought to abandon\\nthe concepts of moral obligation, moral duty,\\nmoral “ought”, and the like. (The generic\\n‘ought’ is fine.) These concepts, Anscombe argues, have a\\npoint only in a law-based ethics: if a moral legislator (e.g. God)\\ncommands you to do something, then you have a moral obligation or\\nmoral duty to do it. But in forms of ethics not based upon such a\\nlegislator, talk about moral obligation or moral duty is akin to those\\narguing about what is criminal in a society lacking criminal law or\\ncourts, or, alternatively, to castaways talking about whether their\\nclothing accords with the new company policy – the necessary\\nsocial framework for making such talk meaningful is absent. Unlike J.\\nL. Mackie, who thought that moral thought and talk was false, Anscombe\\nargued that it was nonsense, which is probably worse. She held that\\nethicists would do better to classify actions instead as, say,\\ntruthful or untruthful, just or unjust, … rather than as\\nmorally right or morally wrong.\",\n \"\\nAnscombe’s thought here resembled that of her contemporaries\\nPhilippa Foot and Iris Murdoch. All were opposed to Utilitarianism,\\nand were suspicious of its emphasis on ‘thin’ evaluative\\nterms. Our moral thought is far richer than that. Of course, their\\ncriticism was not restricted to Utilitarianism. Any moral theory\\npredominantly employing thin moral concepts such as ‘morally\\nright’ and ‘morally wrong’ were subject to this\\ncritique. Thin moral concepts are opposed to ‘thick’ ones.\\nBernard Williams famously characterized thick concepts this way:\",\n \"\\nIf a concept of this kind applies, this often provides someone with a\\nreason for action … We may say, summarily, that such concepts\\nare “action-guiding.” … At the same time, their\\napplication is guided by the world. A concept of this sort may be\\nrightly or wrongly applied, and people who have acquired it can agree\\nthat it applies or fails to apply to some new situation …. We\\ncan say, then, that the application of these concepts is at the same\\ntime world-guided and action-guiding. (Williams, 1985, 140)\\n\",\n \"\\nTo describe an action as ‘cowardly’ seems to provide much\\nmore information than to describe it as ‘wrong’. Further,\\nthin terms can lead us astray. In MMP, after describing the\\nUtilitarian commitment to be open, in principle, to “…\\njudicially punishing a man for what he is clearly understood not to\\nhave done …”, which is clearly ‘unjust’, she\\nwrites:\",\n \"\\nAnd here we see the superiority of the term ‘unjust’ over\\nthe terms ‘morally right’ and ‘morally wrong’.\\nFor in the context of English moral philosophy since Sidgwick it\\nappears legitimate to discuss whether it might be ‘morally\\nright’ in some circumstances to adopt that procedure; but it\\ncannot be argued that the procedure would in any circumstances be\\njust. (MMP, 16)\\n\",\n \"\\nNo doubt Anscombe’s claims in MMP inspired some philosophers to\\ndevelop modern versions of what’s now known as virtue ethics, a\\ntheory designed to be a full-fledged alternative to Kantianism,\\nexistentialism, utilitarianism, and other totalizing theories. But it\\nis crucially important to notice that Anscombe herself did not\\nadvocate this development, and this brings us to the first thesis of\\nMMP: it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy\\nuntil we have an adequate philosophy of psychology. Even if it would\\nbe in some ways “better” to theorize about ethics by using\\nvirtue concepts such as ‘truthful’ or ‘just’,\\nrather than using concepts that now have no point, our efforts should\\nreally be directed to the philosophy of psychology, and not to moral\\nphilosophy at all. Even if we do know that some paths (e.g.\\nthose which fixate on moral obligation) take us in the wrong\\ndirection, we don’t know which of the many remaining paths to\\ntake.\",\n \"\\nWhat did she have in mind by ‘philosophy of psychology’?\\nIn MMP, she names several topics we would first need better\\nconceptions of: ‘action’, ‘intention’,\\n‘pleasure’, ‘wanting’, and maybe one day\\n‘virtue’ and ‘flourishing’. She never\\ndeveloped an adequate conception of virtue nor of flourishing, and so\\nshe was never in a position even to begin doing moral\\nphilosophy. But she did, of course, contribute to the development of\\nbetter conceptions of action and intention.\",\n \"\\nThere is some controversy about whether Anscombe was being sincere in\\narguing we should stop doing moral philosophy. Crisp 2004 suspected\\nthat she was surreptitiously arguing for the superiority of a\\nGod-based moral philosophy over any secular moral philosophy,\\neven one like Aristotle’s. He worried that Anscombe’s view\\nthat moral philosophers should turn to issues in moral psychology\\nreally applies only to those who deny divine law, and that Christians\\nlike her can continue to do moral philosophy.\",\n \"\\nIn a sense, Crisp is right. Anscombe did believe in a divine moral\\nlaw, and so must have thought that a theistic moral philosophy would\\nhave advantages over any other. And Anscombe, of course, did have\\nviews about how to live, had arguments for some of these views, and\\nrepeatedly opposed the zeitgeist by, say, protesting the use of atomic\\nbombs and of abortion.\",\n \"\\nBut when Anscombe said we (we secular or at least disunified\\nphilosophers) should stop doing moral philosophy until we have an\\nadequate philosophy of psychology, she did not mean that we should\\nabandon all of our ethical thought and talk. This is for two reasons.\\nFirst, one need not think it’s profitable to do moral philosophy\\nto have views about how to live or to coherently support or oppose\\nvarious actions. Her plea to stop doing moral philosophy does\\nnot conflict with her having strong views about what to oppose, just\\nas one might have all kinds of views about what is and isn’t\\nillegal even if one never does any legal philosophy. Echoing\\nRousseau, you don’t need to be a philosopher in order to oppose\\n(or support!) injustice.\",\n \"\\nSecond, she did indeed think that some classes of action (e.g. murder)\\nwere “absolutely excluded” (MTD 71) for what we\\nmight call moral reasons. But most of her argumentative writings on\\nsuch topics were aimed at audiences who already shared her view that\\none did not need the results of moral philosophy in order to live\\nwell. In the preface to a posthumous collection of essays, Luke\\nGormally explains that the bulk of her addresses in that volume were\\ndelivered to Catholic audiences, where she assumed “acceptance\\nof authoritative Church teaching” [FHG, x]. If you and your\\naudience trust that God has promised each of you that it is in your\\ninterest to avoid injustice, you don’t need to deeply understand\\nthe concept of flourishing or of virtue in order to talk to one\\nanother about how to live. Compare: if you trust your travel agent\\nwhen she says that drinking alcohol on what appears to you to be a\\nstateless island is in fact illegal, then you don’t need to do\\npolitical philosophy in order to talk with your fellow travelers about\\nwhether to leave the alcohol at home.\",\n \"\\nFinally, as Aquinas exemplified, it’s possible to think that\\nmorality is based upon God and also believe that we need to understand\\nthe nature of our psychology in order to adequately understand\\nmorality. Her call to give moral philosophy a rest until we better\\nunderstand the philosophy of psychology was addressed to us all, not\\njust to a subset of moral philosophers.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Moral and Political Philosophy\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nSome of Anscombe’s most influential work was on the nature of\\ncausation, a concept which is notoriously difficult to analyze. Part\\nof her motivation for working on causation was to understand human\\nfreedom. Her paper “Causality and Determination” [CAD]\\nchallenged some of the empiricist orthodoxy of Hume’s account.\\nShe is concerned to distinguish causality from determination, arguing\\nthat one event can cause another even if the latter isn’t\\ndetermined by its cause. When we note an event’s cause, we note\\nfrom what it derived. She writes “Causality consists in the\\nderivativeness of an effect from its causes” (CAD, 136). But\\nthat Y derives from X does not entail that\\nX necessitated Y. So, we need not assume that every\\ncause necessitates its effect. If causation always relates\\ntypes of events (“Whenever an X-like event\\nhappens, a Y-like event happens”), then it might look\\nlike a cause necessitates its effect. But she challenged the view that\\nthe causal relation is actually characterized by constant conjunction\\nof types, and thus whether causation entails necessitation. Discussing\\nFeynman’s Geiger counter case, she writes:\",\n \"\\nAn example of a non-necessitating cause is mentioned by Feynman: a\\nbomb is connected to a Geiger counter, so that it will go off if the\\nGeiger counter registers a certain reading; whether it will or not is\\nnot determined, for it is so placed near some radioactive material\\nthat it may or may not register that reading. (CAD, 145)\\n\",\n \"\\nAnd yet, if the bomb explodes it was caused by the Geiger counter\\narrangement. Causation thus does not involve determination or\\nnecessity. Since the radioactive decay was not sufficient for this\\neffect, the case tells against viewing causes as sufficient\\nconditions. There need be no general connection between cause and\\neffect. This challenge to the Humean account would turn out to be very\\ninfluential – it helped push philosophers towards the\\ndevelopment of probabilistic accounts of causation to account for the\\nabove type of case.\",\n \"\\nInstead, Anscombe was a singularist about causation, since she further\\nrejected the Humean view that causation is not observable in a single\\ninstance. In her view, some perceivable events are themselves\\ninstances of causation. Anscombe produced examples from ordinary\\nlanguage that seem to show that we do perceive causation. Such\\nexamples are abundant. “I saw her clean the dishes”\\nreports the perception of a causal process.\",\n \"\\nShe was also an indeterminist about freedom of action. Actions are\\nmostly physical movements, and “if these physical movements are\\nphysically predetermined by processes which I do not control, then my\\nfreedom is perfectly illusory” (CAD, 146). Our actions are\\nsurely caused, but not determined, and so there is still room for\\nfreedom. Yet she also recognized that indeterminism does not suffice\\nfor freedom; more is needed to establish that. We will need to\\nunderstand what more is needed when we discuss her views about\\naction.\",\n \"\\nIn her paper “The First Person” [TFP], originally\\npublished in 1975, Anscombe argues for a thesis that seems patently\\nfalse: the word “I” is not a referring expression. That\\nis, while the function of a term like “Elizabeth\\nAnscombe”, or “the daughter of Allen Anscombe”, or\\n“that woman”, or “she” is\\nreferential, the term “I” does not function in the same\\nway. “I” thus refers to nothing at all. (Compare with the\\nuse of ‘It’ in the thought “It is snowing.”)\\n“The First Person” is probably Anscombe’s most\\ndifficult article – which is saying something – and even\\nsympathetic scholars disagree about what the argument is supposed to\\nbe. She was clearly influenced by Geach 1957, and by\\nCasteñada’s various papers on the first person. Later,\\nLewis 1979 discussed this issue in a distinct but by then familiar\\nway.\",\n \"\\nAnscombe focuses approvingly on some aspects of Descartes’ use\\nof ‘I’ in the Meditations. Famously, he cannot\\ndoubt ‘I exist.’ But on the same grounds that he can doubt\\n‘I have a body’, he also can doubt ‘I am\\nDescartes.’ After all, ‘Descartes’ is just the name\\nof a human being, and he can doubt that he is any human being\\nwhatsoever – he can wonder whether he’s instead a brain in\\na vat. So, if the argument indeed establishes the non-identity of\\nhimself with this body, it likewise establishes the non-identity of\\nhimself with Descartes!\",\n \"\\nThis may seem strange, for this last thought may seem equivalent to\\n“Descartes was not Descartes”, and that\\ncan’t be coherently denied. But Anscombe argues that these two\\nthoughts are not equivalent. Why’s that?\",\n \"\\nWe do tend to think of ‘I’ as simply being that\\nexpression people use to refer to themselves. However,\",\n \"\\n“When John Smith spoke of James Robinson he was speaking of his\\nbrother, but he did not know this.” That’s a possible\\nsituation. So similarly is “When John Smith spoke of John\\nHoratio Auberon Smith (named in a will perhaps) he was speaking of\\nhimself, but he did not know this.” If so, then ‘speaking\\nof’ or ‘referring to’ oneself is compatible with not\\nknowing that the object one speaks of is oneself. (TFP, 47)\\n\",\n \"\\nWe might then wish to say “Smith can speak of himself without\\nrealizing that he is speaking of himself.” This shows\\nthat there are two distinct kinds of reflexive pronouns: the ordinary\\nreflexive pronoun and the indirect reflexive pronouns. The first\\noccurrence of ‘himself’ immediately above is the ordinary\\nreflexive pronoun, and it refers successfully just in case it picks\\nout the same object as its antecedent. It doesn’t matter\\nhow it does so, nor must the antecedent and pronoun share a\\nsense. When above we say “Smith spoke of himself”, we are\\nusing the ordinary reflexive pronoun, for the person to whom Smith\\nthereby referred was indeed the person who spoke.\",\n \"\\nThings are different if we are tempted to say “The word\\n‘I’ is a word each of us uses in speaking of\\nhimself.” This use of ‘himself’ can’t\\nbe the ordinary reflexive, because, as we just saw, a person can speak\\nof himself in cases where he wouldn’t also use the word\\n‘I’ to refer to the same thing. The word\\n‘himself’ in this newer attempt at explaining the word\\n‘I’ gets its distinctive sense from that of the\\nword ‘I’. But since the sense of the indirect reflexive\\npronoun ‘himself’ depends upon that of the word\\n‘I’, we cannot use the indirect reflexive pronoun, as\\nthough we understand it independently, to explain the word\\n‘I’. Things instead are the other way around. This\\ndiscussion displays the problem that ‘I’ poses, but it\\ndoesn’t solve it.\",\n \"\\nHow do we solve it? Anscombe thinks you can’t. In the\\nbulk of the paper, Anscombe argues that the word ‘I’\\nisn’t a referring expression in a few steps. First, she argues\\nthat ‘I’ isn’t like other referring expressions:\\nproper names, other pronouns, demonstratives, definite descriptions,\\nand so on. So we can’t assimilate the use of the word\\n“I” to other more tractable types of referring\\nexpressions. Second, she argues that the only remaining possibility is\\nthat the word “I” refers to an immaterial substance (a\\nCartesian ego), or at least a stretch of such a substance that exists\\nso long as one is thinking a thought. But that would still leave us no\\nway to identify the same referent in different\\n“I”-thoughts at different times, an\\n“intolerable” result. Moreover, Anscombe explicitly denied\\nthat there are immaterial substances. She described the very\\nconception of an immaterial substance as “a delusive one”\\n(IOS, 71).\",\n \"\\nSo, having ruled out all the standard ways that terms refer, she\\nconcludes that the function of the word ‘I’ is\\nnon-referential. She says little about what its function is,\\nalthough she notes that the word is dispensable – a language\\nwhose verbs are conjugated to reflect what we call ‘the first\\nperson’ (e.g. Latin, Spanish) can do without such a word. Her\\nconclusion could be resisted if one produced a way of referring she\\nhadn’t considered, or if one rebutted any of her arguments\\nagainst the possibilities she does consider. Important discussions of\\nthis paper can be found in Doyle 2018, O’Brien 1994, and many\\nother places, and it has clearly inspired the work of Rödl\\n2007.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Metaphysics\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nAnscombe’s Intention is one of the classics of 20th\\ncentury philosophy. Indeed, it continues to be a standard point of\\nreference for those working in action theory and philosophical\\npsychology, so much so that contemporary theories of action are often\\ncategorized as either Anscombean or Davidsonian.\",\n \"\\nOn its back cover, David Velleman aptly quips that Intention\\nis “often quoted, sometimes read, rarely understood”. Many\\nreaders are indeed puzzled by the significance and the lessons of what\\nshe writes. Intention is a work on the nature of agency\\nthrough an understanding of the concept of intention. As we saw above,\\nAnscombe wrote Intention after opposing supporters of\\nTruman:\",\n \"\\nPerplexed by defenders of Truman she came to the conclusion that they\\nhad failed to understand the nature of his actions, and it was this\\nthat led her to write Intention, in which she pointed out\\nthat in doing one thing (moving one’s hand) one may\\nintentionally be doing another (directing the death of human beings).\\n(Haldane 2000, 1020)\\n\",\n \"\\nIndeed we have seen many points in her work in moral philosophy where\\nshe calls us to understand the concepts of action and of intention\\nbetter.\",\n \"\\nThe best way to understand the argument of the book might be to\\nconsider its claims in a different order than the way the book lays\\nthem out. For the actual narrative of the books deliberately leads the\\nreader into a bunch of dead ends and incomplete solutions before\\nforwarding specific positive claims.\",\n \"\\nIn what might reasonably be considered to be the conclusion of the\\nbook’s argument, she writes that “the term\\n‘intentional’ has reference to a form of\\ndescription of events” (INT, 84). To unpack this cryptic\\nthought, note first that the events she has in mind are some of those\\nthat we human beings are the subject of. It does not pick out things\\nthat merely happen to us.\",\n \"\\nSecond, note that a single action can be described in various ways. Is\\nhe moving his arm up and down? Pumping water? Doing his job? Clicking\\nout a steady rhythm? Making a funny shadow on the rock behind him?\\nWell, it could be that all of these descriptions are\\ntrue.\",\n \"\\nThird, note that even if the same action can be described in multiple\\nways, it usually won’t be intentional in every one of those ways\\ndescribed. For example, even though a man is pumping water\\nintentionally, he might not be making a funny shadow on the rock\\nbehind him intentionally. But what determines which of the\\ndescriptions of his action are indeed intentional?\",\n \"\\nAt first, Anscombe answers this disjunctively: she identifies several\\ncases which are not intentional, and several other cases that\\nare. If you ask someone “Why are you doing that?”, and\\nthey give one of a few types of answers, this establishes that the\\naction is not intentional. Such ways of answering can include 1)\\n“I didn’t know I was doing that.”, 2) “I\\n(merely) observed/inferred that I was doing that”, 3) “I\\n(merely) observed/inferred how my physical movement was caused.”\\nBy contrast, the following answers show that the action so described\\nis indeed intentional: 1) an answer that mentions something future\\n(“To end the war”), 2) an answer that interprets it\\n(“Out of curiosity”) , 3) an answer that mentions\\nsomething past that’s given as the ground for something good or\\nbad for the person at whom it is aimed (“They attacked us\\nfirst”), or, finally, 4) “No reason” (INT, 24).\",\n \"\\nSuch a hodgepodge of answers sheds little light upon the concept of\\nintention, her quarry. Thus, she shifts methods. She emphasizes that\\nin every case of doing something intentionally, you don’t need\\nto observe yourself in order to know that that’s what you are up\\nto. For example, you know that you are reading this encyclopedia\\nentry, and you know this not because somebody told you, nor did you\\nmerely infer it, nor did you see yourself in a mirror reading it.\\nRather, you know it in some distinctive way, what later writers will\\ncall a ‘first-personal’ way. Anscombe calls this knowledge\\nof one’s own intentional actions “practical\\nknowledge”, which is likewise obscure. But she concludes that\\n“the notion of ‘practical knowledge’ can only be\\nunderstood if we first understand ‘practical\\nreasoning’” (INT, 57). Thus it is only by grasping what it\\nis to reason practically that we will understand what practical\\nknowledge and the concept of intention are.\",\n \"\\nWhat, then, is practical reasoning? There are two ways to think about\\nit. One familiar way is via deliberation: we have some end, and we\\nreason to some sufficient means to that end. Aristotle sketched things\\nthis way. Anscombe focuses on another way (although it winds up being\\nequivalent to the first). She notes that the various ways to describe\\nwhat someone does can bear a particular order to one another.\\nA man might be moving his arm up and down because (and not\\njust, and) he is operating the pump, which he’s doing because\\n(and not just, and) he’s pumping water to the house, and so on.\\nThis is an order that really exists among events; it’s not\\nmerely the sum of merely physically described events going on in the\\nworld and, also somehow, what’s going on in his head.\\nThis order is the order of intention.\",\n \"\\nOf course, the man himself is in a special position to grasp this\\nactually-existing order among the ways of describing what he’s\\ndoing. Anscombe compared this knowledge to the knowledge had by a man\\nwho directs a project like the erection of a building simply by giving\\norders for every little thing that anyone does, a project which he\\ncan’t see and gets no reports on. If all goes well, the director\\nknows what’s done, and his knowledge is practical knowledge. His\\npractical knowledge is his grasping the order of the events that\\nunfold. Practical knowledge, then, isn’t fundamentally knowledge\\nof certain atomic actions, e.g. thinking of a number, blinking.\\nIt’s knowledge of the entire means-end order among the things\\none does, an order which of course includes the actions\\nconstituting it. The man in the earlier example can say\\n“I’m moving my arm up and down” because he\\ncan say “I’m moving my arm up and down because I’m\\npumping water”.\",\n \"\\nIndeed, many of the very concepts we use to describe movements\\ninvolving human beings – e.g. ‘greeting’,\\n‘hiring’, ‘sending for’, even\\n‘offending’, ‘dropping’, ‘placing’\\n– are concepts we’d lack were we to lack the concept of\\nintention. So the term ‘intentional’ refers not only to\\nthe aforementioned ‘because’ and what it structures, but\\nto the very terms by which we conceptualize most human and animal\\nmovement. Intention is thus not something ‘added’ on to\\nmere behavior we somehow first separately conceptualize. Rather, the\\norder of intention is baked into the ways we represent our lives from\\nthe very start.\",\n \"\\nThere are a wealth of other sections from Intention that have\\nbeen “often quoted” and yet “rarely\\nunderstood”. Consider, for example, this famous passage:\",\n \"\\nLet us consider a man going round a town with a shopping list in his\\nhand. Now it is clear that the relation of this list to the things he\\nactually buys is one and the same whether his wife gave him the list\\nor it is his own list; and that there is a different relation where a\\nlist is made by a detective following him about. If he made the list\\nitself, it was an expression of intention; if his wife gave it to him,\\nit has the role of an order. What then is the identical relation to\\nwhat happens, in the order and the intention, which is not shared by\\nthe record? It is precisely this: if the list and the things that the\\nman actually buys do not agree, and if this and this alone constitutes\\na mistake, then the mistake is not in the list but in the man’s\\nperformance (if his wife were to say: “Look, it says butter and\\nyou have bought margarine”, he would hardly reply: “What a\\nmistake! we must put that right” and alter the word on the list\\nto “margarine”); whereas if the detective’s record\\nand what the man actually buys do not agree, then the mistake is in\\nthe record. (INT, 56).\\n\",\n \"\\nAnscombe draws attention to the fact that when there is a discrepancy\\nbetween a piece of paper and what happens, the source of the error\\ndepends upon the “role” of the paper. If the paper has the\\nrole of a record, the error is in the paper. But if the paper has the\\nrole of an order or intention, the error is in what happens. Thus\\nthere can be two ways to fail to know what happens: by\\nmisrecording, and by misperforming. And one who practically knows\\ndoesn’t misperform.\",\n \"\\nBeginning with Searle (1975), a different thesis gets very widely\\nattributed to Anscombe in the literature: one about ‘mental\\nstates’ like beliefs and desires, each of which supposedly has a\\ndifferent “direction of fit”. Anscombe, however, says\\nnothing here about believing or desiring or other kinds of mental\\nstates; the example instead displays two ways of knowing. Her\\npoint is that you can know something either by believing something\\nthat is (already) true, or by intentionally doing something. Both are\\nforms of knowledge, and indeed there can be two ways to know one and\\nthe same thing. (See Frost 2014.)\",\n \"\\nAnscombe applied her views on intention to clarify her own positions\\non controversial claims, such as the condemnation of contraception.\\nOne puzzle in the Catholic doctrine condemning contraception, and yet\\nallowing for the ‘rhythm method’ of avoiding pregnancy, is\\nto reconcile the rationales in a consistent way. Many charged the\\nChurch with inconsistency, since the intention to not get pregnant\\nduring intercourse is present in both cases. Anscombe claims there is\\nan important difference:\",\n \"\\nThe reason why people are confused about intention, and why they\\nsometimes think there is no difference between contraceptive\\nintercourse and the use of infertile times to avoid conception, is\\nthis: They don’t notice the difference between\\n“intention” when it means the intentionalness of the thing\\nyou’re doing – that you’re doing this on\\npurpose – and when it means a further or\\naccompanying intention with which you do the thing.\\n(CAC, 182)\\n\",\n \"\\nHer claim is that the further intentions that accompany these actions\\nmay be the same, but there is a significant difference between the\\nacts themselves. Her claim is that contraceptive intercourse, unlike\\ntiming intercourse to coincide with infertile periods, is a bad sort\\nof action because in the case of contraceptive intercourse\\n“…to intend such an act is not to intend a marriage act\\nat all, whether or not we’re married” (CAC, 183). Having\\nintercourse that has purposely been rendered infertile is itself a\\ndifferent act from having intercourse at an infertile time. Even\\nthough both types of action may have the further aim of, for example,\\nlimiting family size, the acts themselves differ. The\\n“perversion of the sex act in marriage is, in this one way, like\\nwriting a forged check for a good cause”, she claims. The\\nfurther intention of, let’s say, helping the needy is a worthy\\none but does not vindicate the action of forging the check.\",\n \"\\nNeedless to say, this view was controversial. Bernard Williams and\\nMichael Tanner criticized her argument for failing to consider one of\\nher own theses – that actions, including sorts of actions, can\\nfall under a variety of descriptions. On their view, she is picking\\nand choosing descriptions of actions in order to get the outcome she\\nwants – a distinction between the rhythm method and\\ncontraception that isn’t just a trivial distinction. But, they\\nargue, she cannot do this convincingly. They argue that couples who\\nemploy the rhythm method are taking steps to achieve infertility just\\nas those who take contraception are. Those steps are central to\\nunderstanding the acts themselves, not simply the further purpose of\\nthe acts. (Williams and Tanner 1972)\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Action Theory\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nWhat is it that we perceive? The world? Or only our ideas or\\nsense-data? Something else? Anscombe deployed some of the conceptual\\nmachinery she had developed in the philosophy of action to topics in\\nthe philosophy of sense-perception. Three relevant theses from the\\nphilosophy of action include:\",\n \"\\nAs we will see shortly, analogous claims can be made about sensation\\nor perception.\",\n \"\\nBut first, note that Anscombe distinguished sharply between two senses\\nof the word “object” – one of which is material\\n(“There are ten objects on the bowling lane”), while the\\nother is intentional (“Immortality was the object of his\\ndesire”), which otherwise needn’t exist at all. An\\nintentional object is given by a word or phrase which gives a\\ndescription under which it is such (IOS, 9). She insists that\\nneither sense of the word “object” is deviant nor\\nphilosophically uninteresting, but they are easily confused with each\\nother.\",\n \"\\nShe makes a foray into grammatical theory to illustrate the\\npossibility of this distinction between senses of\\n“object”. Consider the sentence “Luke gave Leia his\\nlightsaber”. If asked “What object did Luke give\\nLeia?”, we would reply “his lightsaber”. And if\\nasked for the direct object of the sentence, we would again reply\\n“his lightsaber”. But although “his\\nlightsaber” is indeed the direct object of the sentence, Luke\\ndid not give Leia a direct object; to think otherwise is to confuse\\nthe two senses. Moreover, “his lightsaber” is the direct\\nobject of this sentence, even though no lightsaber materially exists.\\nIt would be foolish to object to the claim that the direct object of\\nthe sentence is “his lightsaber” on the grounds that\\nlightsabers aren’t real. Anscombe’s insight is that\\nlikewise there are also objects of perception in both a material and\\nan intentional sense.\",\n \"\\nIn light of the three claims above, Anscombe makes three analogous\\nclaims about sense-perception:\",\n \"\\nAnscombe maintained that certain philosophical views look inescapable\\nonly if we conflate these two distinct senses. Idealism is the view\\nthat we see only sense data, taking what is the intentional object of\\nperception also to be the material objection of perception. On the\\nother hand, direct realism (or what she calls ‘ordinary language\\nphilosophy’) holds that we see only material objects without any\\nintermediaries, overlooking or dismissing the legitimate use of saying\\nthings like “Now I see stars” after getting hit on the\\nhead. They thereby ignore or misunderstand the relevance of the\\nintentional sense of sense-perception. Thus neither idealism nor\\ndirect realism recognizes the importance of the distinction between\\ntwo ways of thinking about verbs of sense-perception. Both views thus\\nfail to recognize the distinct intentionality of sensation.\",\n \"\\nAlthough these two senses are distinct, Anscombe notes that sometimes\\npeople use the word “see” and other verbs of\\nsense-perception without definitely intending it either only\\nmaterially or only intentionally. Only further questioning would nudge\\nthem to make their meaning more specific.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Philosophy of Perception\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nAmong the very many topics Anscombe worked on, her ideas about the\\nrole of testimony have prefigured or influenced much contemporary\\nthought on the topic. We will summarize three of her short but\\nimportant papers on testimony: “Hume and Julius Caesar”\\n(HJC), “What Is It to Believe Someone?” (WBS), and\\n“Authority in Morals” (AIM), each of which heralds ideas\\nthat gained prominence in philosophy only later.\",\n \"\\nIn HJC, she considers Hume’s answer to the question, how do we\\nknow about historical events? For example, how do we know that Caesar\\nwas killed on the Ides of March? How do we even know that Caesar was a\\nreal man, and not a mythical figure like Electra? Hume’s answer\\nwas essentially that you perceive or remember someone (perhaps your\\nschool teacher) telling you about Caesar, and you next infer the cause\\nof that – namely, that someone told them – and so on,\\nuntil you infer that there were eyewitnesses in the Senate, who then\\nwitnessed Caesar’s death. You thus infer the original event\\nthrough a series of causes terminating in something you perceive or\\nremember perceiving.\",\n \"\\nAnscombe argued that Hume’s answer cannot be right. First, is it\\nreally true that we infer that Caesar was killed on the Ides of March\\nfrom the thought there were many observant people in the\\nSenate that day? No. If anything, it’s the other way around:\\ngiven that we think that Caesar was killed then and there, we\\ninfer that there must have been eyewitnesses to his death. It is not\\nthat we first establish the presence of these people, and only then\\ninfer what caused them to say what they said.\",\n \"\\nAnscombe also discussed “one of the rare pieces of stupidity in\\nthe writings of Wittgenstein” (HJC, 89). He once wrote that if\\nwe were to find a piece of writing saying Caesar never existed, and\\nwas invented for other ends, this would be some evidence that Caesar\\nnever existed. Anscombe pushes us to think further about this. If we\\nwere to discover such a document, we would instead immediately\\nconclude it to be worthless, this because it conflicts with so much we\\nhave been taught about the history of the West. She thus opposed the\\nidea that our belief in Caesar’s existence rests upon any\\nevidence we have for it, rather than from our directly\\ntrusting what we have been taught. A coherentist might reply that any\\ndocument alleging Caesar’s nonexistence clashes with the\\npreponderance of historical evidence we have about him, and that we\\ncan check the claims of this document against these other sources of\\nevidence. But Anscombe rejoins that these other sources of\\n“evidence” are themselves historians who straightforwardly\\nbelieve much of what they have been taught, and we believe them. Thus,\\nwe cannot “reduce” testimony to some other source of\\njustification. Believing testimony is basic.\",\n \"\\nShe provocatively concludes the essay\",\n \"\\n[N]ot everything can be put up for checking. Von Neurath’s image\\nof the ship which we repair – and, I suppose, build on to\\n– while it is afloat: if this suggests that we can go round\\ntapping every plank for rottenness, and so we might end up with a\\nwholly different ship, the analogy is not good. For there are things\\nthat are on a level. A general epistemological reason for doubting one\\nwill be a reason for doubting all, and then none of them would have\\nanything to test it(HJC, 92)\\n\",\n \"\\nShe thus opposes epistemological coherentism about justification, or\\nat least a certain popular version of it. The many sources of\\ninformation about Caesar’s life are themselves equally\\nvulnerable to skepticism, and so we cannot actually test the former\\nwhile trusting the latter. Without trusting what we have been taught,\\nwe have almost no historical knowledge.\",\n \"\\nWell before C. A. J. Coady’s masterful monograph on testimony\\n(1992) that revived widespread interest in the topic, Anscombe\\npublished a little essay titled “What Is It to Believe\\nSomeone?”, anticipating many points he and others later\\ndeveloped. She wrote that the topic of believing someone is not merely\\nneglected but actually unknown in the philosophical discussion of her\\ntime. Yet she avers that it is “of great importance in\\nphilosophy and in life”, for “the greater part of our\\nknowledge of reality rests upon the belief that we repose in things we\\nhave been taught and told”. What is it, then, for a\\nperson, rather than a proposition, to be the object of\\nbelief?\",\n \"\\nAnscombe distinguishes believing a person from believing what a person\\nsays, for you can do the latter without the former – both when\\nyou already believe what is said, and when you believe that the person\\nis both misinformed and yet trying to deceive you. Anscombe describes\\nmany “presuppositions” to believing someone: noticing the\\nrelevant sound or inscription, understanding it as an attempt to\\ncommunicate, noticing that it is addressed to oneself, understanding\\nit properly, understanding that it was produced by the person indeed\\nproducing it, and many more. Only once all these are in place do we\\ncome to the situation where we can ask: “Does he believe\\nher?”\",\n \"\\nIt is no small matter whether people trust you when you tell them\\nthings. Anscombe claimed “It is an insult and it may be an\\ninjury not to be believed” (WBS, 9). Although she does not\\nelaborate upon the nature of the insult and injury, her claim\\nforeshadows contemporary discussions of epistemic injustice.\\nInterestingly, it can be insulting, she notes, not even to be\\nheard as telling one something. For example, if you tell me\\np, but I fail to note that you were telling me anything\\n– perhaps I thought you were just venting aloud – you\\nmight reasonably say that I disrespectfully failed to believe you. We\\ncan wrong one another by refusing to accept one another’s word,\\nan idea that has recently become widely discussed at the intersection\\nof epistemology and ethics.\",\n \"\\nIn the third paper on testimony, “Authority in Morals”,\\nAnscombe again considers a few related questions that only recently\\nhave become widely discussed: can one person aptly tell another what\\nto think about morality, and can the hearer aptly trust what they are\\nthus told? Given that the paper was originally presented at a\\nconference in an abbey, much of her discussion involves trusting a\\nreligious authority about moral truths. But her points generalize.\",\n \"\\nAnscombe compares moral teaching to mathematical teaching: in both\\ncases, one must do something to truly learn what is being\\ntaught, rather than merely accepting something as to be believed.\\nTeaching someone either morality or mathematics thus won’t just\\ninvolve the formation of belief. Even so, she denies that a proper\\nunderstanding of autonomy is incompatible with trusting moral\\ntestimony: deciding to trust someone who tells you about a bit of\\nmoral truth can be a way of thinking for oneself. A man who\\ndoes this and acts on this testimony is still “his own\\npilot” (AIM, 49).\",\n \"\\nYet there are limits to moral testimony. Although she thinks certain\\ndogmatic truths are religiously revealed and could not otherwise be\\nknown, this is not so for moral truths. Moral truths may be\\nreligiously revealed only per accidens. In other words, moral\\ntruths can always be known other than by trusting some\\nsource. There seems to be no room for moral truths that per\\nse can be taken only through trust.\",\n \"\\nOne way moral truths can be revealed per accidens is when\\nsomeone relies on an authority for a moral claim that they in some\\nsense could have thought out for themselves, but didn’t.\\nAnscombe does not imply that so relying need be a sign of laziness;\\nrather, she thinks that different people have already grasped\\ndifferent parts of the moral law (AIM, 45), and so seems to think that\\nsharing moral truths is much like sharing other truths. For example,\\nif you tell me what you ate for lunch, I can reasonably trust you even\\nif in principle it’s true that I could have instead spied on you\\nto find out. Likewise, I might reasonably believe you when you tell me\\nsome moral truth that I hadn’t worked out for myself (but, in\\ntheory, could).\",\n \"\\nThe second way moral truths can be revealed per accidens is\\nwhen their factual grounds are knowable only by religious revelation.\\nFor example, consider the ascetic life. As Hume noted, there seems to\\nbe nothing good about it. And so if someone were to tell you that it\\nis indeed good, there would be no question of believing them.\",\n \"\\nBut now suppose you come to accept certain ordinary (non-moral) truths\\nof revealed religion: the doctrine of original sin, and the\\npossibility of joining your suffering with that of Christ. Now in\\nlight of accepting these ideas, it becomes possible to see for\\nyourself that there is indeed something good about the ascetic life.\\nSo, you need not accept this moral claim itself on the basis of\\nreligious revelation, but you accept it on the basis of other truths\\nthemselves accepted as revelation. Moral truths, however,\\nalways can in principle be graspable without needing to trust another.\\nEven though there need be nothing bad about trusting an authority who\\nteaches about morality, their teachings, if true, could be\\narrived at otherwise.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"6. Testimony\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nG. E. M. Anscombe’s work ranged over many years and many\\ndifferent areas in philosophy. The breadth of her work is impressive.\\nShe was systematic in her thinking, seeing and developing connections\\nbetween metaphysics, moral psychology, and ethics that exhibited not\\nsimply a grasp of one particular problem, but a world view. Much of\\nher works remains unpublished, although newly accessible through the\\nAnscombe Papers Project at the Collegium Institute for Catholic\\nThought & Culture. Anscombe’s legacy is one of the broadest\\nand deepest left by a 20th century philosopher.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"7. Conclusion\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["[IWT] An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,\nLondon: Hutchinson, 1959; 2nd edition, 1963; 3rd edition, 1971.","[INT] Intention, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957; 2nd\nedition, 1963. Reprinted in 2000 by Harvard University Press.","[THP] Three Philosophers: Aristotle, Aquinas, Frege, with\nPeter Geach, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2002.","[FPW] From Parmenides to Wittgenstein (The Collected\nPhilosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, Volume 1),\nMinneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1981.","[MPM] Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (The Collected\nPhilosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, Volume 2),\nMinneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1981.","[ERP] Ethics, Religion and Politics (The Collected\nPhilosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, Volume 3),\nMinneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1981.","[HAE] Human Life, Action, and Ethics: Essays by G. E. M.\nAnscombe (St. Andrews Studies in Philosophy and Public Affairs, Volume\nIV), M. Geach and L. Gormally (eds.), Exeter: Imprint Academic,\n2005.","[FPW] From Plato to Wittgenstein: Essays by G. E. M.\nAnscombe, M. Geach and L. Gormally (eds.), Exeter: Imprint\nAcademic, 2015.","[LTM] Logic, Truth and Meaning: Writings by G. E. M.\nAnscombe, M. Geach and L. Gormally (eds.), Exeter: Imprint\nAcademic, 2015.","[MTD] “Mr. Truman’s Degree” (privately produced\npamphlet); reprinted in [MPM], 62–71.","[WAM] “War and Murder,” in Nuclear Weapons: a\nCatholic Response, Walter Stein (ed.), London: Merlin, 1961,\n43–62; reprinted in [ERP], 51–61.","[SAS] “On the Source of the Authority of the State,”\nRatio 20 (1978); reprinted in [MPM], 130–155.","[MMP] “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy\n33 (1958): 1–19; reprinted in [ERP], 26–42. [CAD]\nCausality and Determination: An Inaugural Lecture, Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press, 1971; reprinted in [MPM],\n133–147.","[TFP] “The First Person,” in Mind and Language:\nWolfson College Lectures 1974, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975,\n45–64; reprinted in [MPM], 21–36.","[IOS] “The Immortality of the Soul” in [FHG],\n69–83; previously unpublished. [CSL] “A Reply to Mr. C.S.\nLewis’s Argument that ‘Naturalism’ is\nSelf-Refuting,” Socratic Digest 4:2 (1948), 7–16;\nreprinted in [MPM], 224–232.","[CAC] “Contraception and Chastity,” The Human World 9\n(1972): 41–51; reprinted in [FHG], 170–192.","[IOS] “The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical\nFeature,” Analytical Philosophy (second series), R. J.\nButler (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965; reprinted in\n[MPM], 3–20.","[HJC] “Hume and Julius Caesar,” Analysis 34\n(1973): 1–7; reprinted in [FPW], 86–93.","[WBS] “What Is It to Believe Someone?” in\nRationality and Religious Belief, C. F. Delaney (ed.), Notre\nDame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979, 141–151;\nreprinted in [FHG], 1–10.","[AIM] “Authority in Morals” in Problems of\nAuthority, J. Todd (ed.), London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1962;\nreprinted in [ERP], 43–50.","Descartes, René, Philosophical Writings,\ntranslated by G. E. M. Anscombe and Peter Geach, London: Thomas Nelson\nand Sons, 1954.","Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations,\ntranslated by G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953.","–––, Notebooks 1914–1916,\ntranslated by G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961.","–––, On Certainty, translated by Denis\nPaul and G. E. M. Anscombe and edited by G. H. von Wright and G. E. M.\nAnscombe, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969.","–––, Remarks on the Foundation of\nMathematics, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe and edited by G. H.\nvon Wright and R. Rhees, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956.","–––, Zettel, translated by G. E. M.\nAnscombe, Oxford: Blackwell, 1967.","Bennett, Jonathan, 1966. “Whatever the Consequences,”\nAnalysis, 26: 83–102.","–––, 1995. The Act Itself, Oxford:\nOxford University Press.","Boyle, Joseph, 1980. “Toward Understanding the Principle of\nDouble Effect,” Ethics, 90: 527–538.","Bratman, Michael, 1987. Intention, Plans, and Practical\nReason, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.","Coady, C. A. J., 1995. Testimony: A Philosophical Study,\nOxford: Oxford University Press.","Crisp, Roger and Michael Slote, 1996. Introduction to Virtue\nEthics, Roger Crisp and Michael Slote (eds.), Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press.","Crisp, Roger, 2004. “Does Modern Moral Philosophy Rest on a\nMistake?,” in Modern Moral Philosophy (Royal Institute\nof Philosophy, Supplement 54), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,\n75–94.","Davidson, Donald, 1963. “Actions, Reasons, and\nCauses,” Journal of Philosophy, 60: 685–700.","Diamond, Cora, 2019. Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going\non to Ethics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.","––– and Jenny Teichman (eds), 1979.\nIntention and Intentionality: Essays in Honour of G. E. M.\nAnscombe, Harvester Press.","Doyle, James, 2017. No Morality, No Self: Anscombe’s\nRadical Skepticism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.","Ford, Anton, 2015. “The Arithmetic of Intention,”\nAmerican Philosophical Quarterly, 52: 129–143.","–––, Jennifer Hornsby, and Frederick Stoutland\n(eds.), 2011. Essays on Anscombe’s Intention,\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.","Foot, Philippa, 2002. Virtues and Vices: And Other Essays in\nMoral Philosophy, Oxford, Oxford University Press.","Frey, Christopher & Frey, Jennifer A, 2017. “G. E. M.\nAnscombe on the Analogical Unity of Intention in Perception and\nAction,” Analytic Philosophy 58, 3: 202–247.","Frey, Jennifer A., 2019. “Anscombe on Practical Knowledge\nand the Good,” Ergo: An Open Access Journal of\nPhilosophy, 6.","Frost, Kim, 2014. “On the Very Idea of Direction of\nFit,” The Philosophical Review 123: 429–484.","Geach, Peter, 1957. “On Belief About Oneself,”\nAnalysis 18: 23–24.","–––, 2006. “The Labels,”\nAnalysis, 66: 266–67.","Gormally, Luke, David Albert Jones, and Roger Teichmann (eds.),\n2016. The Moral Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe. Imprint\nAcademic.","Haldane, John, 2000. “In Memoriam, G. E. M. Anscombe\n(1919–2001),” The Review of Metaphysics, 53:\n1019–1021.","––– (ed.), 2019. The Life and Philosophy of\nElizabeth Anscombe. Imprint Academic.","Hlobil, Ulf & Nieswandt, Katharina, 2016. “On\nAnscombe’s Philosophical Method,” Klēsis Revue\nPhilosophique 35: 180–198.","Hursthouse, Rosalind, 2000. “Intention” in Logic,\nCause and Action: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Anscombe, ed.\nTeichmann, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 83–105.","Lavin, Douglas, 2015. “Action as a form of temporal unity:\non Anscombe’s Intention,” Canadian Journal of\nPhilosophy 45:609–629.","Lewis, C. S., 1960. Miracles: A Preliminary Study, 2nd\nedition. London, Fontana.","Lewis, David, 1979. “Attitudes de dicto and de se,”\nPhilosophical Review 88: 513–543.","Mac Cumhaill, Clare & Wiseman, Rachael, 2022. Metaphysical\nAnimals, New York: Doubleday.","Mackie, J. L., 1977. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong,\nHarmondsworth: Penguin.","Monk, Ray, 1991. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius,\nLondon: Vintage.","Moran, Richard & Stone, Martin J., 2011. “Anscombe on\nexpression of intention: an exegesis” in Essays on\nAnscombe’s Intention, eds. Anton Ford, Jennifer Hornsby\n& Frederick Stoutland, Harvard University Press.","Murdoch, Iris, 1971. The Sovereignty of Good.\nRoutledge.","Nagel, Thomas, 1979. “War and Massacre,” in Mortal\nQuestions, New York: Cambridge University Press,\n53–74.","O’Brien, Lucy, 1994. “Anscombe and the Self-Reference\nRule,” Analysis 54: 277–281.","Passmore, John, 1966. A Hundred Years of Philosophy, 2nd\nedition, New York: Basic Books.","Rödl, Sebastian, 2007. Self-Consciousness,\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.","Schwenkler, John, 2019. Anscombe’s Intention: A\nGuide. New York, USA: Oxford University Press.","Searle, John R., 1975. “A Taxonomy of Illocutionary\nActs,” In Language, Mind and Knowledge, ed. K.\nGunderson, University of Minnesota Press, 344–369.","Teichman, Jenny, 2002. “Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret\nAnscombe: 1919–2001,” in Biographical Memoirs of\nFellows I (Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 115),\nOxford: Oxford University Press, 31–50.","Teichmann, Roger (ed.), 2000. Logic, Cause and Action: Essays\nin Honour of Elizabeth Anscombe, Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress.","–––, 2008. The Philosophy of Elizabeth\nAnscombe, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","Thompson, Michael, 2011. “Anscombe’s Intention and\npractical knowledge,” in Essays on Anscombe’s\nIntention, eds. Anton Ford, Jennifer Hornsby & Frederick\nStoutland, Harvard University Press.","Vogler, Candace, 2006. “Modern Moral Philosophy Again:\nIsolating the Promulgation Problem,” Proceedings of the\nAristotelian Society 106: 347–364.","–––, 2016. “Nothing Added: Intention\n§§19 and 20,” American Catholic Philosophical\nQuarterly 90: 229–247.","Williams, Bernard, 1985. Ethics and the Limits of\nPhilosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","––– and Michael Tanner, 1972. “Comment on\nContraception and Chastity,” The Human World, 9:\n41–51.","Wilson, George, 1989. The Intentionality of Human Action,\nStanford: Stanford University Press.","Wiseman, Rachael, 2016. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to\nAnscombe’s Intention. Routledge.","Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1980. Philosophical Remarks,\nChicago: University of Chicago Press."],"string":"[\n \"[IWT] An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,\\nLondon: Hutchinson, 1959; 2nd edition, 1963; 3rd edition, 1971.\",\n \"[INT] Intention, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957; 2nd\\nedition, 1963. Reprinted in 2000 by Harvard University Press.\",\n \"[THP] Three Philosophers: Aristotle, Aquinas, Frege, with\\nPeter Geach, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2002.\",\n \"[FPW] From Parmenides to Wittgenstein (The Collected\\nPhilosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, Volume 1),\\nMinneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1981.\",\n \"[MPM] Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind (The Collected\\nPhilosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, Volume 2),\\nMinneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1981.\",\n \"[ERP] Ethics, Religion and Politics (The Collected\\nPhilosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe, Volume 3),\\nMinneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1981.\",\n \"[HAE] Human Life, Action, and Ethics: Essays by G. E. M.\\nAnscombe (St. Andrews Studies in Philosophy and Public Affairs, Volume\\nIV), M. Geach and L. Gormally (eds.), Exeter: Imprint Academic,\\n2005.\",\n \"[FPW] From Plato to Wittgenstein: Essays by G. E. M.\\nAnscombe, M. Geach and L. Gormally (eds.), Exeter: Imprint\\nAcademic, 2015.\",\n \"[LTM] Logic, Truth and Meaning: Writings by G. E. M.\\nAnscombe, M. Geach and L. Gormally (eds.), Exeter: Imprint\\nAcademic, 2015.\",\n \"[MTD] “Mr. Truman’s Degree” (privately produced\\npamphlet); reprinted in [MPM], 62–71.\",\n \"[WAM] “War and Murder,” in Nuclear Weapons: a\\nCatholic Response, Walter Stein (ed.), London: Merlin, 1961,\\n43–62; reprinted in [ERP], 51–61.\",\n \"[SAS] “On the Source of the Authority of the State,”\\nRatio 20 (1978); reprinted in [MPM], 130–155.\",\n \"[MMP] “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy\\n33 (1958): 1–19; reprinted in [ERP], 26–42. [CAD]\\nCausality and Determination: An Inaugural Lecture, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press, 1971; reprinted in [MPM],\\n133–147.\",\n \"[TFP] “The First Person,” in Mind and Language:\\nWolfson College Lectures 1974, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975,\\n45–64; reprinted in [MPM], 21–36.\",\n \"[IOS] “The Immortality of the Soul” in [FHG],\\n69–83; previously unpublished. [CSL] “A Reply to Mr. C.S.\\nLewis’s Argument that ‘Naturalism’ is\\nSelf-Refuting,” Socratic Digest 4:2 (1948), 7–16;\\nreprinted in [MPM], 224–232.\",\n \"[CAC] “Contraception and Chastity,” The Human World 9\\n(1972): 41–51; reprinted in [FHG], 170–192.\",\n \"[IOS] “The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical\\nFeature,” Analytical Philosophy (second series), R. J.\\nButler (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965; reprinted in\\n[MPM], 3–20.\",\n \"[HJC] “Hume and Julius Caesar,” Analysis 34\\n(1973): 1–7; reprinted in [FPW], 86–93.\",\n \"[WBS] “What Is It to Believe Someone?” in\\nRationality and Religious Belief, C. F. Delaney (ed.), Notre\\nDame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979, 141–151;\\nreprinted in [FHG], 1–10.\",\n \"[AIM] “Authority in Morals” in Problems of\\nAuthority, J. Todd (ed.), London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1962;\\nreprinted in [ERP], 43–50.\",\n \"Descartes, René, Philosophical Writings,\\ntranslated by G. E. M. Anscombe and Peter Geach, London: Thomas Nelson\\nand Sons, 1954.\",\n \"Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations,\\ntranslated by G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953.\",\n \"–––, Notebooks 1914–1916,\\ntranslated by G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961.\",\n \"–––, On Certainty, translated by Denis\\nPaul and G. E. M. Anscombe and edited by G. H. von Wright and G. E. M.\\nAnscombe, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969.\",\n \"–––, Remarks on the Foundation of\\nMathematics, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe and edited by G. H.\\nvon Wright and R. Rhees, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956.\",\n \"–––, Zettel, translated by G. E. M.\\nAnscombe, Oxford: Blackwell, 1967.\",\n \"Bennett, Jonathan, 1966. “Whatever the Consequences,”\\nAnalysis, 26: 83–102.\",\n \"–––, 1995. The Act Itself, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press.\",\n \"Boyle, Joseph, 1980. “Toward Understanding the Principle of\\nDouble Effect,” Ethics, 90: 527–538.\",\n \"Bratman, Michael, 1987. Intention, Plans, and Practical\\nReason, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Coady, C. A. J., 1995. Testimony: A Philosophical Study,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Crisp, Roger and Michael Slote, 1996. Introduction to Virtue\\nEthics, Roger Crisp and Michael Slote (eds.), Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Crisp, Roger, 2004. “Does Modern Moral Philosophy Rest on a\\nMistake?,” in Modern Moral Philosophy (Royal Institute\\nof Philosophy, Supplement 54), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,\\n75–94.\",\n \"Davidson, Donald, 1963. “Actions, Reasons, and\\nCauses,” Journal of Philosophy, 60: 685–700.\",\n \"Diamond, Cora, 2019. Reading Wittgenstein with Anscombe, Going\\non to Ethics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"––– and Jenny Teichman (eds), 1979.\\nIntention and Intentionality: Essays in Honour of G. E. M.\\nAnscombe, Harvester Press.\",\n \"Doyle, James, 2017. No Morality, No Self: Anscombe’s\\nRadical Skepticism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Ford, Anton, 2015. “The Arithmetic of Intention,”\\nAmerican Philosophical Quarterly, 52: 129–143.\",\n \"–––, Jennifer Hornsby, and Frederick Stoutland\\n(eds.), 2011. Essays on Anscombe’s Intention,\\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Foot, Philippa, 2002. Virtues and Vices: And Other Essays in\\nMoral Philosophy, Oxford, Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Frey, Christopher & Frey, Jennifer A, 2017. “G. E. M.\\nAnscombe on the Analogical Unity of Intention in Perception and\\nAction,” Analytic Philosophy 58, 3: 202–247.\",\n \"Frey, Jennifer A., 2019. “Anscombe on Practical Knowledge\\nand the Good,” Ergo: An Open Access Journal of\\nPhilosophy, 6.\",\n \"Frost, Kim, 2014. “On the Very Idea of Direction of\\nFit,” The Philosophical Review 123: 429–484.\",\n \"Geach, Peter, 1957. “On Belief About Oneself,”\\nAnalysis 18: 23–24.\",\n \"–––, 2006. “The Labels,”\\nAnalysis, 66: 266–67.\",\n \"Gormally, Luke, David Albert Jones, and Roger Teichmann (eds.),\\n2016. The Moral Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe. Imprint\\nAcademic.\",\n \"Haldane, John, 2000. “In Memoriam, G. E. M. Anscombe\\n(1919–2001),” The Review of Metaphysics, 53:\\n1019–1021.\",\n \"––– (ed.), 2019. The Life and Philosophy of\\nElizabeth Anscombe. Imprint Academic.\",\n \"Hlobil, Ulf & Nieswandt, Katharina, 2016. “On\\nAnscombe’s Philosophical Method,” Klēsis Revue\\nPhilosophique 35: 180–198.\",\n \"Hursthouse, Rosalind, 2000. “Intention” in Logic,\\nCause and Action: Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Anscombe, ed.\\nTeichmann, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 83–105.\",\n \"Lavin, Douglas, 2015. “Action as a form of temporal unity:\\non Anscombe’s Intention,” Canadian Journal of\\nPhilosophy 45:609–629.\",\n \"Lewis, C. S., 1960. Miracles: A Preliminary Study, 2nd\\nedition. London, Fontana.\",\n \"Lewis, David, 1979. “Attitudes de dicto and de se,”\\nPhilosophical Review 88: 513–543.\",\n \"Mac Cumhaill, Clare & Wiseman, Rachael, 2022. Metaphysical\\nAnimals, New York: Doubleday.\",\n \"Mackie, J. L., 1977. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong,\\nHarmondsworth: Penguin.\",\n \"Monk, Ray, 1991. Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius,\\nLondon: Vintage.\",\n \"Moran, Richard & Stone, Martin J., 2011. “Anscombe on\\nexpression of intention: an exegesis” in Essays on\\nAnscombe’s Intention, eds. Anton Ford, Jennifer Hornsby\\n& Frederick Stoutland, Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Murdoch, Iris, 1971. The Sovereignty of Good.\\nRoutledge.\",\n \"Nagel, Thomas, 1979. “War and Massacre,” in Mortal\\nQuestions, New York: Cambridge University Press,\\n53–74.\",\n \"O’Brien, Lucy, 1994. “Anscombe and the Self-Reference\\nRule,” Analysis 54: 277–281.\",\n \"Passmore, John, 1966. A Hundred Years of Philosophy, 2nd\\nedition, New York: Basic Books.\",\n \"Rödl, Sebastian, 2007. Self-Consciousness,\\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Schwenkler, John, 2019. Anscombe’s Intention: A\\nGuide. New York, USA: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Searle, John R., 1975. “A Taxonomy of Illocutionary\\nActs,” In Language, Mind and Knowledge, ed. K.\\nGunderson, University of Minnesota Press, 344–369.\",\n \"Teichman, Jenny, 2002. “Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret\\nAnscombe: 1919–2001,” in Biographical Memoirs of\\nFellows I (Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 115),\\nOxford: Oxford University Press, 31–50.\",\n \"Teichmann, Roger (ed.), 2000. Logic, Cause and Action: Essays\\nin Honour of Elizabeth Anscombe, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress.\",\n \"–––, 2008. The Philosophy of Elizabeth\\nAnscombe, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Thompson, Michael, 2011. “Anscombe’s Intention and\\npractical knowledge,” in Essays on Anscombe’s\\nIntention, eds. Anton Ford, Jennifer Hornsby & Frederick\\nStoutland, Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Vogler, Candace, 2006. “Modern Moral Philosophy Again:\\nIsolating the Promulgation Problem,” Proceedings of the\\nAristotelian Society 106: 347–364.\",\n \"–––, 2016. “Nothing Added: Intention\\n§§19 and 20,” American Catholic Philosophical\\nQuarterly 90: 229–247.\",\n \"Williams, Bernard, 1985. Ethics and the Limits of\\nPhilosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"––– and Michael Tanner, 1972. “Comment on\\nContraception and Chastity,” The Human World, 9:\\n41–51.\",\n \"Wilson, George, 1989. The Intentionality of Human Action,\\nStanford: Stanford University Press.\",\n \"Wiseman, Rachael, 2016. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to\\nAnscombe’s Intention. Routledge.\",\n \"Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1980. Philosophical Remarks,\\nChicago: University of Chicago Press.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../action/","text":"action"},{"href":"../consequentialism/","text":"consequentialism"},{"href":"../davidson/","text":"Davidson, Donald"},{"href":"../double-effect/","text":"double effect, doctrine of"},{"href":"../epistemology-social/","text":"epistemology: social"},{"href":"../natural-law-ethics/","text":"ethics: natural law tradition"},{"href":"../ethics-virtue/","text":"ethics: virtue"},{"href":"../philippa-foot/","text":"Foot, Philippa"},{"href":"../moral-psych-emp/","text":"moral psychology: empirical approaches"},{"href":"../murdoch/","text":"Murdoch, Iris"},{"href":"../war/","text":"war"},{"href":"../wittgenstein/","text":"Wittgenstein, Ludwig"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../action/\",\n \"text\": \"action\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../consequentialism/\",\n \"text\": \"consequentialism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../davidson/\",\n \"text\": \"Davidson, Donald\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../double-effect/\",\n \"text\": \"double effect, doctrine of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../epistemology-social/\",\n \"text\": \"epistemology: social\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../natural-law-ethics/\",\n \"text\": \"ethics: natural law tradition\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../ethics-virtue/\",\n \"text\": \"ethics: virtue\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../philippa-foot/\",\n \"text\": \"Foot, Philippa\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../moral-psych-emp/\",\n \"text\": \"moral psychology: empirical approaches\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../murdoch/\",\n \"text\": \"Murdoch, Iris\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../war/\",\n \"text\": \"war\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../wittgenstein/\",\n \"text\": \"Wittgenstein, Ludwig\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":65,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"anselm"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Saint Anselm"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Thu May 18, 2000; substantive revision Tue Dec 8, 2020"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\n\nSaint Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) was the outstanding\nChristian philosopher and theologian of the eleventh century. He is\nbest known for the celebrated “ontological argument” for\nthe existence of God in the Proslogion, but his contributions\nto philosophical theology (and indeed to philosophy more generally) go\nwell beyond the ontological argument. In what follows I examine\nAnselm’s theistic proofs, his conception of the divine nature, and his\naccount of human freedom, sin, and redemption.\n"],"string":"[\n \"\\n\\nSaint Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) was the outstanding\\nChristian philosopher and theologian of the eleventh century. He is\\nbest known for the celebrated “ontological argument” for\\nthe existence of God in the Proslogion, but his contributions\\nto philosophical theology (and indeed to philosophy more generally) go\\nwell beyond the ontological argument. In what follows I examine\\nAnselm’s theistic proofs, his conception of the divine nature, and his\\naccount of human freedom, sin, and redemption.\\n\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Life and Works","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. The Theistic Proofs","sub_toc":["2.1 “Faith Seeking Understanding”: The character and purpose of Anselm’s theistic proofs","2.2 The arguments of the Monologion","2.3 The argument of the Proslogion"]},{"content_title":"3. The Divine Nature","sub_toc":["3.1 Proving the divine attributes","3.2 The consistency of the divine attributes"]},{"content_title":"4. Freedom, Sin, and Redemption","sub_toc":["4.1 Truth in statements and in the will","4.2 Freedom and sin","4.3 Grace and redemption"]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":["Critical Edition","Translations","Secondary Literature"]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Life and Works\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. The Theistic Proofs\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"2.1 “Faith Seeking Understanding”: The character and purpose of Anselm’s theistic proofs\",\n \"2.2 The arguments of the Monologion\",\n \"2.3 The argument of the Proslogion\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. The Divine Nature\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"3.1 Proving the divine attributes\",\n \"3.2 The consistency of the divine attributes\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Freedom, Sin, and Redemption\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"4.1 Truth in statements and in the will\",\n \"4.2 Freedom and sin\",\n \"4.3 Grace and redemption\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"Critical Edition\",\n \"Translations\",\n \"Secondary Literature\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\n\nAnselm was born in 1033 near Aosta, in those days a Burgundian town on\nthe frontier with Lombardy. Little is known of his early life. He left\nhome at twenty-three, and after three years of apparently aimless\ntravelling through Burgundy and France, he came to Normandy in 1059.\nOnce he was in Normandy, Anselm’s interest was captured by the\nBenedictine abbey at Bec, whose famous school was under the direction\nof Lanfranc, the abbey’s prior. Lanfranc was a scholar and\nteacher of wide reputation, and under his leadership the school at Bec\nhad become an important center of learning, especially in\ndialectic. In 1060 Anselm entered the abbey as a novice. His\nintellectual and spiritual gifts brought him rapid advancement, and\nwhen Lanfranc was appointed abbot of Caen in 1063, Anselm was elected\nto succeed him as prior. He was elected abbot in 1078 upon the death\nof Herluin, the founder and first abbot of Bec. Under Anselm’s\nleadership the reputation of Bec as an intellectual center grew, and\nAnselm managed to write a good deal of philosophy and theology in\naddition to his teaching, administrative duties, and extensive\ncorrespondence as an adviser and counselor to rulers and nobles all\nover Europe and beyond. His works while at Bec include the\nMonologion (1075–76), the Proslogion\n(1077–78), and his four philosophical dialogues: De\ngrammatico (probably 1059–60, though the dating of this\nwork is much disputed), and De veritate, De libertate\narbitrii, and De casu diaboli (1080–86). ","\n\nIn 1093 Anselm was enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury. The previous\nArchbishop, Anselm’s old master Lanfranc, had died four years\nearlier, but the King, William Rufus, had left the see vacant in order\nto plunder the archiepiscopal revenues. Anselm was understandably\nreluctant to undertake the primacy of the Church of England under a\nruler as ruthless and venal as William, and his tenure as Archbishop\nproved to be as turbulent and vexatious as he must have\nfeared. William was intent on maintaining royal authority over\necclesiastical affairs and would not be dictated to by Archbishop or\nPope or anyone else. So, for example, when Anselm went to Rome in 1097\nwithout the King’s permission, William would not allow him to\nreturn. When William was killed in 1100, his successor, Henry I,\ninvited Anselm to return to his see. But Henry was as intent as\nWilliam had been on maintaining royal jurisdiction over the Church,\nand Anselm found himself in exile again from 1103 to 1107. Despite\nthese distractions and troubles, Anselm continued to write. His works\nas Archbishop of Canterbury include the Epistola de Incarnatione\nVerbi (1094), Cur Deus Homo (1095–98), De\nconceptu virginali (1099), De processione Spiritus\nSancti (1102), the Epistola de sacrificio azymi et\nfermentati (1106–7), De sacramentis ecclesiae\n(1106–7), and De concordia (1107–8). Anselm died\non 21 April 1109. He was canonized in 1494 and named a Doctor of the\nChurch in 1720."],"section_title":"1. Life and Works","subsections":[]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"2. The Theistic Proofs","subsections":[{"content":["\n\nAnselm’s motto is “faith seeking understanding”\n(fides quaerens intellectum). This motto lends itself to at\nleast two misunderstandings. First, many philosophers have taken it to\nmean that Anselm hopes to replace faith with\nunderstanding. If one takes ‘faith’ to mean roughly\n‘belief on the basis of testimony’ and\n‘understanding’ to mean ‘belief on the basis of\nphilosophical insight’, one is likely to regard faith as an\nepistemically substandard position; any self-respecting philosopher\nwould surely want to leave faith behind as quickly as possible. The\ntheistic proofs are then interpreted as the means by which we come to\nhave philosophical insight into things we previously believed solely\non testimony. But Anselm is not hoping to replace faith with\nunderstanding. Faith for Anselm is more a volitional state than an\nepistemic state: it is love for God and a drive to act as God\nwills. In fact, Anselm describes the sort of faith that “merely\nbelieves what it ought to believe” as “dead”\n(M 78). (For the abbreviations used in references, see the\nBibliography below.) So “faith seeking understanding”\nmeans something like “an active love of God seeking a deeper\nknowledge of God.”","\n\nOther philosophers have noted that “faith seeking\nunderstanding” begins with “faith,” not with doubt\nor suspension of belief. Hence, they argue, the theistic\narguments proposed by faith seeking understanding are not really meant\nto convince unbelievers; they are intended solely for the edification\nof those who already believe. This too is a misreading of\nAnselm’s motto. For although the theistic proofs are borne of an\nactive love of God seeking a deeper knowledge of the beloved, the\nproofs themselves are intended to be convincing even to\nunbelievers. Thus Anselm opens the Monologion with these\nwords:","If anyone does not know, either because he has not heard or\nbecause he does not believe, that there is one nature, supreme among\nall existing things, who alone is self-sufficient in his eternal\nhappiness, who through his omnipotent goodness grants and brings it\nabout that all other things exist or have any sort of well-being, and a\ngreat many other things that we must believe about God or his creation,\nI think he could at least convince himself of most of these things by\nreason alone, if he is even moderately intelligent. (M\n1)","\n\nAnd in the Proslogion Anselm sets out to convince “the fool,”\nthat is, the person who “has said in his heart, ‘There is no\nGod’ ” (Psalm 14:1; 53:1). "],"subsection_title":"2.1 “Faith Seeking Understanding”: The character and purpose of Anselm’s theistic proofs"},{"content":["\n\nHaving clarified what Anselm takes himself to be doing in his theistic\nproofs, we can now examine the proofs themselves. In the first chapter\nof the Monologion Anselm argues that there must be some one\nthing that is supremely good, through which all good things have their\ngoodness. For whenever we say that different things are F in\ndifferent degrees, we must understand them as being F through\nF-ness; F-ness itself is the same in each of them.\nThus, for example, all more or less just things “must be more or\nless just through justice, which is not different in diverse\nthings” (M 1). Now we speak of things as being\ngood in different degrees. So by the principle just stated,\nthese things must be good through some one thing. Clearly that thing\nis itself a great good, since it is the source of the goodness of all\nother things. Moreover, that thing is good through itself;\nafter all, if all good things are good through that thing, it follows\ntrivially that that thing, being good, is good through itself. Things\nthat are good through another (i.e., things whose goodness derives\nfrom something other than themselves) cannot be equal to or greater\nthan the good thing that is good through itself, and so that which is\ngood through itself is supremely good. Anselm concludes,\n“Now that which is supremely good is also supremely great. There\nis, therefore, some one thing that is supremely good and supremely\ngreat – in other words, supreme among all existing things”\n(M 1). In chapter 2 he applies the principle of chapter 1 in\norder to derive (again) the conclusion that there is something\nsupremely great. ","\n\nIn chapter 3 Anselm argues that all existing things exist through\nsome one thing. Every existing thing, he begins, exists either through\nsomething or through nothing. But of course nothing exists through\nnothing, so every existing thing exists through something. There is,\nthen, either some one thing through which all existing things exist, or\nthere is more than one such thing. If there is more than one, either\n(i) they all exist through some one thing, or (ii) each of them exists\nthrough itself, or (iii) they exist through each other. (iii) makes no\nsense. If (ii) is true, then “there is surely some one power or nature\nof self-existing that they have in order to exist through themselves”\n(M 3); in that case, “all things exist more truly through that\none thing than through the several things that cannot exist without\nthat one thing” (M 3). So (ii) collapses into (i), and there\nis some one thing through which all things exist. That one thing, of\ncourse, exists through itself, and so it is greater than all the other\nthings. It is therefore “best and greatest and supreme among all\nexisting things” (M 3).","\n\nIn chapter 4 Anselm begins with the premise that things “are not all\nof equal dignity; rather, some of them are on different and unequal\nlevels” (M 4). For example, a horse is better than wood, and a\nhuman being is more excellent than a horse. Now it is absurd to think\nthat there is no limit to how high these levels can go, “so that there\nis no level so high that an even higher level cannot be found”\n(M 4). The only question is how many beings occupy that\nhighest level of all. Is there just one, or are there more than one?\nSuppose there are more than one. By hypothesis, they must all be\nequals. If they are equals, they are equals through the same thing.\nThat thing is either identical with them or distinct from them. If it\nis identical with them, then they are not in fact many, but one, since\nthey are all identical with some one thing. On the other hand, if that\nthing is distinct from them, then they do not occupy the highest level\nafter all. Instead, that thing is greater than they are. Either way,\nthere can be only one being occupying the highest level of all.","\n\nAnselm concludes the first four chapters by summarizing his\nresults:","Therefore, there is a certain nature or substance or\nessence who through himself is good and great and through himself is\nwhat he is; through whom exists whatever truly is good or great or\nanything at all; and who is the supreme good, the supreme great thing,\nthe supreme being or subsistent, that is, supreme among all existing\nthings. (M 4)","\n\nHe then goes on (in chapters 5–65) to derive the attributes that must\nbelong to the being who fits this description. But before we look at\nAnselm’s understanding of the divine attributes, we should turn to the\nfamous proof in the Proslogion. "],"subsection_title":"2.2 The arguments of the Monologion"},{"content":["\n\nLooking back on the sixty-five chapters of complicated argument in the\nMonologion, Anselm found himself wishing for a simpler way to\nestablish all the conclusions he wanted to prove. As he tells us in the\npreface to the Proslogion, he wanted to find ","a single argument that needed nothing but itself alone for\nproof, that would by itself be enough to show that God really exists;\nthat he is the supreme good, who depends on nothing else, but on whom\nall things depend for their being and for their well-being; and\nwhatever we believe about the divine nature. (P,\npreface)","\n\nThat “single argument” is the one that appears in chapter\n2 of the Proslogion. (Or so it is commonly said: but some interpreters\nunderstand the “one argument” as extending into chapter 3, and\nHolopainen 1996 argues that it is the formula “that than\nwhich a greater cannot be thought.”)","\n\nThe proper way to state Anselm’s argument is a matter of dispute, and\nany detailed statement of the argument will beg interpretative\nquestions. But on a fairly neutral or consensus reading of the\nargument (which I shall go on to reject), Anselm’s argument goes like\nthis. God is “that than which a greater cannot be\nthought”; in other words, he is a being so great, so full of\nmetaphysical oomph, that one cannot so much as conceive of a being who\nwould be greater than God. The Psalmist, however, tells us that\n“The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God’\n” (Psalm 14:1; 53:1). Is it possible to convince the fool that\nhe is wrong? It is. All we need is the characterization of God as\n“that than which a greater cannot be thought.” The fool\ndoes at least understand that definition. But whatever is understood\nexists in the understanding, just as the plan of a painting he has yet\nto execute already exists in the understanding of the painter. So that\nthan which a greater cannot be thought exists in the\nunderstanding. But if it exists in the understanding, it must also\nexist in reality. For it is greater to exist in reality than to exist\nmerely in the understanding. Therefore, if that than which a greater\ncan be thought existed only in the understanding, it would be possible\nto think of something greater than it (namely, that same being\nexisting in reality as well). It follows, then, that if that than\nwhich a greater cannot be thought existed only in the understanding,\nit would not be that than which a greater cannot be thought; and that,\nobviously, is a contradiction. So that than which a greater cannot be\nthought must exist in reality, not merely in the understanding.","\n\nVersions of this argument have been defended and criticized by a\nsuccession of philosophers from Anselm’s time through the present day\n(see\n ontological arguments).\n Our concern here is with Anselm’s own version, the\ncriticism he encountered, and his response to that criticism. A monk\nnamed Gaunilo wrote a “Reply on Behalf of the Fool,” contending that\nAnselm’s argument gave the Psalmist’s fool no good reason at all to\nbelieve that that than which a greater cannot be thought exists in\nreality. Gaunilo’s most famous objection is an argument intended to be\nexactly parallel to Anselm’s that generates an obviously absurd\nconclusion. Gaunilo proposes that instead of “that than which a\ngreater cannot be thought” we consider “that island than\nwhich a greater cannot be thought.” We understand what that\nexpression means, so (following Anselm’s reasoning) the greatest\nconceivable island exists in our understanding. But (again following\nAnselm’s reasoning) that island must exist in reality as well; for if\nit did not, we could imagine a greater island – namely, one that\nexisted in reality – and the greatest conceivable island would not\nbe the greatest conceivable island after all. Surely, though, it is\nabsurd to suppose that the greatest conceivable island actually exists\nin reality. Gaunilo concludes that Anselm’s reasoning is\nfallacious.","\n\nGaunilo’s counterargument is so ingenious that it stands out as by far\nthe most devastating criticism in his catalogue of Anselm’s errors.\nNot surprisingly, then, interpreters have read Anselm’s reply to\nGaunilo primarily in order to find his rejoinder to the Lost Island\nargument. Sympathetic interpreters (such as Klima 2000 and Ward 2018) have offered\nways for Anselm to respond, but at least one commentator (Wolterstorff\n1993) argues that Anselm offers no such rejoinder, precisely because\nhe knew Gaunilo’s criticism was unanswerable but could not bring\nhimself to admit that fact.","\n\nA more careful look at Anselm’s reply to Gaunilo, however, shows that\nAnselm offered no rejoinder to the Lost Island argument because he\nrejected Gaunilo’s interpretation of the original argument of the\nProslogion. Gaunilo had understood the argument in the way I\nstated it above. Anselm understood it quite differently. In\nparticular, Anselm insists that the original argument did not rely on\nany general principle to the effect that a thing is greater when it\nexists in reality than when it exists only in the\nunderstanding.[1] \nAnd since that is the principle that does the mischief in Gaunilo’s\ncounterargument, Anselm sees no need to respond to the Lost Island\nargument in particular.","\n\nCorrectly understood, Anselm says, the argument of the\nProslogion can be summarized as follows:","Therefore,","\n\nAnselm defends (1) by showing how we can form a conception of that\nthan which a greater cannot be thought on the basis of our\nexperience and understanding of those things than which a greater\ncan be thought. For example,","it is clear to every reasonable mind that by raising our\nthoughts from lesser goods to greater goods, we are quite capable of\nforming an idea of that than which a greater cannot be thought on the\nbasis of that than which a greater can be thought. Who, for example,\nis unable to think … that if something that has a beginning and\nend is good, then something that has a beginning but never ceases to\nexist is much better? And that just as the latter is better than the\nformer, so something that has neither beginning nor end is better\nstill, even if it is always moving from the past through the present\ninto the future? And that something that in no way needs or is\ncompelled to change or move is far better even than that, whether any\nsuch thing exists in reality or not? Can such a thing not be thought?\nCan anything greater than this be thought? Or rather, is not this an\nexample of forming an idea of that than which a greater cannot be\nthought on the basis of those things than which a greater can be\nthought? So there is in fact a way to form an idea of that than which\na greater cannot be thought. (Anselm’s Reply to Gaunilo\n8)","\n\nOnce we have formed this idea of that than which a greater cannot be\nthought, Anselm says, we can see that such a being has features that\ncannot belong to a possible but non-existent object – or, in\nother words, that (2) is true. For example, a being that is capable\nof non-existence is less great than a being that exists necessarily.\nIf that than which a greater cannot be thought does not exist, it is\nobviously capable of non-existence; and if it is capable of\nnon-existence, then even if it were to exist, it would not be that\nthan which a greater cannot be thought after all. So if that than\nwhich a greater cannot be thought can be thought – that is, if\nit is a possible being – it actually exists. (This reading of\nthe argument of the Proslogion is developed at length in\nVisser and Williams 2008, chapter 5.)"],"subsection_title":"2.3 The argument of the Proslogion"}]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"3. The Divine Nature","subsections":[{"content":["\n\nRecall that Anselm’s intention in the Proslogion was to offer\na single argument that would establish not only the existence of God\nbut also the various attributes that Christians believe God possesses.\nIf the argument of chapter 2 proved only the existence of God, leaving\nthe divine attributes to be established piecemeal as in the\nMonologion, Anselm would consider the Proslogion a\nfailure. But in fact the concept of that than which nothing greater can\nbe thought turns out to be marvelously fertile. God must, for example,\nbe omnipotent. For if he were not, we could conceive of a being greater\nthan he. But God is that than which no greater can be thought, so he\nmust be omnipotent. Similarly, God must be just, self-existent,\ninvulnerable to suffering, merciful, timelessly eternal, non-physical,\nnon-composite, and so forth. For if he lacked any of these qualities,\nhe would be less than the greatest conceivable being, which is\nimpossible. ","\n\nThe ontological argument thus works as a sort of\ndivine-attribute-generating machine. Admittedly, though, the\nappearance of theoretical simplicity is somewhat misleading. The\n“single argument” produces conclusions about the divine attributes\nonly when conjoined with certain beliefs about what is greater or\nbetter. That is, the ontological argument tells us that God has\nwhatever characteristics it is better or greater to have than to lack,\nbut it does not tell us which characteristics those are. We must have\nsome independent way of identifying them before we can plug them into\nthe ontological argument and generate a full-blown conception of the\ndivine nature. Anselm identifies these characteristics in part by\nappeal to intuitions about value, in part by independent argument. To\nillustrate Anselm’s method, I shall examine his discussions of God’s\nimpassibility, timelessness, and simplicity.","\n\nAccording to the doctrine of divine impassibility, God is invulnerable\nto suffering. Nothing can act upon him; he is in no way passive. He\ntherefore does not feel emotions, since emotions are states that one\nundergoes rather than actions one performs. Anselm does not find it\nnecessary to argue that impassibility is a perfection; he\nthinks it is perfectly obvious that “it is better to be …\nimpassible than not” (P 6), just as it is perfectly\nobvious that it is better to be just than not-just. His intuitions\nabout value are shaped by the Platonic-Augustinian tradition of which\nhe was a part. Augustine took from the Platonists the idea that the\nreally real things, the greatest and best of beings, are stable,\nuniform, and unchanging. He says in On Free Choice of the\nWill 2.10, “And you surely could not deny that the\nuncorrupted is better than the corrupt, the eternal than the temporal,\nand the invulnerable than the vulnerable”; his interlocutor\nreplies simply, “Could anyone?” Through Augustine (and\nothers) these ideas, and the conception of God to which they naturally\nlead, became the common view of Christian theologians for well over a\nmillennium. For Anselm, then, it is obvious that a being who is in no\nway passive, who cannot experience anything of which he is not himself\nthe origin, is better and greater than any being who can be acted upon\nby something outside himself. So God, being that than which nothing\ngreater can be thought, is wholly active; he is impassible.","\n\nNotice that Augustine also found it obvious that the eternal is better\nthan the temporal. According to Plato’s Timaeus, time is a\n“moving image of eternity” (37d). It is a shifting and\nshadowy reflection of the really real. As later Platonists, including\nAugustine, develop this idea, temporal beings have their existence\npiecemeal; they exist only in this tiny sliver of a now, which is\nconstantly flowing away from them and passing into nothingness. An\neternal being, by contrast, is (to use my earlier description) stable,\nuniform, and unchanging. What it has, it always has; what it is, it\nalways is; what it does, it always does. So it seems intuitively\nobvious to Anselm that if God is to be that than which nothing greater\ncan be thought, he must be eternal. That is, he must be not merely\neverlasting, but outside time \naltogether.[2]\n","\n\nIn addition to this strong intuitive consideration, Anselm at least\nhints at a further argument for the claim that it is better to be\neternal than temporal. He opens chapter 13 of the Proslogion\nby observing, “Everything that is at all enclosed in a place or time is\nless than that which is subject to no law of place or time” (P\n13). His idea seems to be that if God were in time (or in a place), he\nwould be bound by certain constraints inherent in the nature of time\n(or place). His discussion in Monologion 22 makes the problem\nclear:","This, then, is the condition of place and time: whatever is\nenclosed within their boundaries does not escape being characterized by\nparts, whether the sort of parts its place receives with respect to\nsize, or the sort its time suffers with respect to duration; nor can it\nin any way be contained as a whole all at once by different places or\ntimes. By contrast, if something is in no way constrained by\nconfinement in a place or time, no law of places or times forces it\ninto a multiplicity of parts or prevents it from being present as a\nwhole all at once in several places or times. (M\n22)","\n\nSo at least part of the reason for holding that God is timeless is that\nthe nature of time would impose constraints upon God, and of course it\nis better to be subject to no external constraints. ","\n\nThe other part of the reason, though, is that if God were in place or\ntime he would have parts. But what is so bad about having\nparts? This question brings us naturally to the doctrine of divine\nsimplicity, which is simply the doctrine that God has no parts of any\nkind. Even for an Augustinian like Anselm, the claim that it is better\nto lack parts than to have them is less than intuitively compelling,\nso Anselm offers further arguments for that claim. In the\nProslogion he argues that “whatever is composed of\nparts is not completely one. It is in some sense a plurality and not\nidentical with itself, and it can be broken up either in fact or at\nleast in the understanding” (P 18). The argument in\nthe Monologion goes somewhat differently. “Every\ncomposite,” Anselm argues, “needs the things of which it\nis composed if it is to subsist, and it owes its existence to them,\nsince whatever it is, it is through them, whereas those things are not\nthrough it what they are” (M 17). The argument in\nthe Proslogion, then, seeks to relate simplicity to the\nintuitive considerations that identify what is greatest and best with\nwhat is stable, uniform, and unchanging; the argument in the\nMonologion, by contrast, seeks to show that simplicity is\nnecessary if God is to be – as the theistic proofs have already\nestablished – the ultimate source of his own goodness and existence."],"subsection_title":"3.1 Proving the divine attributes"},{"content":["\n\nAnselm’s success in generating a whole host of divine attributes\nthrough the ontological argument does present him with a\nproblem. He must show that the attributes are consistent with\neach other – in other words, that it is possible for one and the\nsame being to have all of them. For example, there seems at first\nglance to be a conflict between justice and omnipotence. If God is\nperfectly just, he cannot lie. But if God is omnipotent, how can there\nbe something he cannot do? Anselm’s solution is to explain that\nomnipotence does not mean the ability to do everything; instead, it\nmeans the possession of unlimited power. Now the so-called\n“ability” or “power” to lie is not really a\npower at all; it is a kind of weakness. Being omnipotent, God has no\nweakness. So it turns out that omnipotence actually entails\nthe inability to lie. ","\n\nAnother apparent contradiction is between God’s mercy and his\njustice. If God is just, he will surely punish the wicked as they\ndeserve. But because he is merciful, he spares the wicked. Anselm\ntries to resolve this apparent contradiction by appeal to God’s\ngoodness. It is better, he says, for God “to be good both to the\ngood and to the wicked than to be good only to the good, and it is\nbetter to be good to the wicked both in punishing and in sparing them\nthan to be good only in punishing them” (P 9). So God’s\nsupreme goodness requires that he be both just and merciful. But\nAnselm is not content to resolve the apparent tension between justice\nand mercy by appealing to some other attribute, goodness, that entails\nboth justice and mercy; he goes on to argue that justice itself\nrequires mercy. Justice to sinners obviously requires that God punish\nthem; but God’s justice to himself requires that he exercise\nhis supreme goodness in sparing the wicked. “Thus,” Anselm\nsays to God, “in saving us whom you might justly destroy\n… you are just, not because you give us our due, but because you\ndo what is fitting for you who are supremely good” (P\n10). In spite of these arguments, Anselm acknowledges that there is a\nresidue of mystery here:","Thus your mercy is born of your justice, since it is just\nfor you to be so good that you are good even in sparing the wicked. And\nperhaps this is why the one who is supremely just can will good things\nfor the wicked. But even if one can somehow grasp why you can will to\nsave the wicked, certainly no reasoning can comprehend why, from those\nwho are alike in wickedness, you save some rather than others through\nyour supreme goodness and condemn some rather than others through your\nsupreme justice. (P 11)","\n\nIn other words, the philosopher can trace the conceptual relations\namong goodness, justice, and mercy, and show that God not only can but\nmust have all three; but no human reasoning can hope to show why God\ndisplays his justice and mercy in precisely the ways in which he\ndoes. (For a detailed and sympathetic reconstruction of Anselm’s arguments concerning justice and mercy, see Mann 2019.)"],"subsection_title":"3.2 The consistency of the divine attributes"}]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"4. Freedom, Sin, and Redemption","subsections":[{"content":["\n\nIn On Freedom of Choice (De libertate arbitrii)\nAnselm defines freedom of choice as “the power to preserve rectitude of\nwill for its own sake” (DLA 3). He explores the notion of\nrectitude of will most thoroughly in On Truth (De\nveritate), so in order to understand the definition of freedom of\nchoice, we must look first at Anselm’s discussion of truth. Truth\nis a much broader notion for Anselm than for us; he speaks of truth not\nonly in statements and opinions but also in the will, actions, the\nsenses, and even the essences of things. In every case, he argues,\ntruth consists in correctness or “rectitude.” Rectitude, in turn, is\nunderstood teleologically; a thing is correct whenever it is or does\nwhatever it ought, or was designed, to be or do. For example,\nstatements are made for the purpose of “signifying that what-is is”\n(DV 2). A statement therefore is correct (has rectitude) when,\nand only when, it signifies that what-is is. So Anselm holds a\ncorrespondence theory of truth, but it is a somewhat unusual\ncorrespondence theory. Statements are true when they correspond to\nreality, but only because corresponding to reality is what statements\nare for. That is, statements (like anything else) are true\nwhen they do what they were designed to do; and what they were designed\nto do, as it happens, is to correspond to reality. ","\n\nTruth in the will also turns out to be rectitude, again understood\nteleologically. Rectitude of will means willing what one ought to will\nor (in other words) willing that for the sake of which one was given a\nwill. So, just as the truth or rectitude of a statement is the\nstatement’s doing what statements were made to do, the truth or\nrectitude of a will is the will’s doing what wills were made to do. In\nDV 12 Anselm connects rectitude of will to both justice and\nmoral evaluation. In a broad sense of ‘just’, whatever is\nas it ought to be is just. Thus, an animal is just when it blindly\nfollows its appetites, because that is what animals were meant to do.\nBut in the narrower sense of ‘just’, in which justice is\nwhat deserves moral approval and injustice is what deserves reproach,\njustice is best defined as “rectitude of will preserved for its own\nsake” (DV 12). Such rectitude requires that agents perceive\nthe rectitude of their actions and will them for the sake of that\nrectitude. Anselm takes the second requirement to exclude both coercion\nand “being bribed by an extraneous reward” (DV 12). For an\nagent who is coerced into doing what is right is not willing rectitude\nfor its own sake; and similarly, an agent who must be bribed to do what\nis right is willing rectitude for the sake of the bribe, not for the\nsake of rectitude.","\n\nSince, as we have already seen, Anselm will define freedom as “the\npower to preserve rectitude of will for its own sake,” the arguments of\nOn Truth imply that freedom is also the capacity for justice\nand the capacity for moral praiseworthiness. Now it is both necessary\nand sufficient for justice, and thus for praiseworthiness, that an\nagent wills what is right, knowing it to be right, because it is right.\nThat an agent wills what is right because it is right entails that he\nis neither compelled nor bribed to perform the act. Freedom, then, must\nbe neither more nor less than the power to perform acts of that\nsort."],"subsection_title":"4.1 Truth in statements and in the will"},{"content":["\n\nThus Anselm takes it to be obvious that freedom is a power for\nsomething: its purpose is to preserve rectitude of will for its own\nsake. God and the good angels cannot sin, but they are still free,\nbecause they can (and do) preserve rectitude of will for its own sake.\nIn fact, they are freer than those who can sin: “someone who has what\nis fitting and expedient in such a way that he cannot lose it is freer\nthan someone who has it in such a way that he can lose it and be\nseduced into what is unfitting and inexpedient” (DLA 1). It\nobviously follows, as Anselm points out, that freedom of choice neither\nis nor entails the power to sin; God and the good angels have freedom\nof choice, but they are incapable of sinning. ","\n\nBut if free choice is the power to hold on to what is fitting and\nexpedient, and it is not the power to sin, does it make any sense to\nsay that the first human beings and the rebel angels sinned through\nfree choice? Anselm’s reply to this question is both subtle and\nplausible. In order to be able to preserve rectitude of will for its\nown sake, an agent must be able to perform an action that has its\nultimate origin in the agent him- or herself rather than in some\nexternal source. (For convenience I will refer to that power as “the\npower for self-initiated action.”) Any being that has freedom of\nchoice, therefore, will thereby have the power for self-initiated\naction. The first human beings and the rebel angels sinned through an\nexercise of their power for self-initiated action, and so it is\nappropriate to say that they sinned through free choice. \nNonetheless, free choice does not entail the power to sin. For free\nchoice can be perfected by something else, as yet unspecified, that\nrenders it incapable of sinning.","\n\nIn On the Fall of the Devil (De casu diaboli)\nAnselm extends his account of freedom and sin by discussing the first\nsin of the angels. In order for the angels to have the power to\npreserve rectitude of will for its own sake, they had to have both a\nwill for justice and a will for happiness. If God had given them only a\nwill for happiness, they would have been necessitated to will whatever\nthey thought would make them happy. Their willing of happiness would\nhave had its ultimate origin in God and not in the angels themselves.\nSo they would not have had the power for self-initiated action, which\nmeans that they would not have had free choice. The same thing would\nhave been true, mutatis mutandis, if God had given them only\nthe will for justice.","\n\nSince God gave them both the will for happiness and the will for justice, however, they had the power for\nself-initiated action. Whether they chose to subject their wills for\nhappiness to the demands of justice or to ignore the demands of justice\nin the interest of happiness, that choice had its ultimate origin in\nthe angels; it was not received from God. The rebel angels chose to\nabandon justice in an attempt to gain happiness for themselves, whereas\nthe good angels chose to persevere in justice even if it meant less\nhappiness. God punished the rebel angels by taking away their\nhappiness; he rewarded the good angels by granting them all the\nhappiness they could possibly want. For this reason, the good angels\nare no longer able to sin. Since there is no further happiness left for\nthem to will, their will for happiness can no longer entice them to\noverstep the bounds of justice. Thus Anselm finally explains what it is\nthat perfects free choice so that it becomes unable to sin."],"subsection_title":"4.2 Freedom and sin"}]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nAnselm was born in 1033 near Aosta, in those days a Burgundian town on\\nthe frontier with Lombardy. Little is known of his early life. He left\\nhome at twenty-three, and after three years of apparently aimless\\ntravelling through Burgundy and France, he came to Normandy in 1059.\\nOnce he was in Normandy, Anselm’s interest was captured by the\\nBenedictine abbey at Bec, whose famous school was under the direction\\nof Lanfranc, the abbey’s prior. Lanfranc was a scholar and\\nteacher of wide reputation, and under his leadership the school at Bec\\nhad become an important center of learning, especially in\\ndialectic. In 1060 Anselm entered the abbey as a novice. His\\nintellectual and spiritual gifts brought him rapid advancement, and\\nwhen Lanfranc was appointed abbot of Caen in 1063, Anselm was elected\\nto succeed him as prior. He was elected abbot in 1078 upon the death\\nof Herluin, the founder and first abbot of Bec. Under Anselm’s\\nleadership the reputation of Bec as an intellectual center grew, and\\nAnselm managed to write a good deal of philosophy and theology in\\naddition to his teaching, administrative duties, and extensive\\ncorrespondence as an adviser and counselor to rulers and nobles all\\nover Europe and beyond. His works while at Bec include the\\nMonologion (1075–76), the Proslogion\\n(1077–78), and his four philosophical dialogues: De\\ngrammatico (probably 1059–60, though the dating of this\\nwork is much disputed), and De veritate, De libertate\\narbitrii, and De casu diaboli (1080–86). \",\n \"\\n\\nIn 1093 Anselm was enthroned as Archbishop of Canterbury. The previous\\nArchbishop, Anselm’s old master Lanfranc, had died four years\\nearlier, but the King, William Rufus, had left the see vacant in order\\nto plunder the archiepiscopal revenues. Anselm was understandably\\nreluctant to undertake the primacy of the Church of England under a\\nruler as ruthless and venal as William, and his tenure as Archbishop\\nproved to be as turbulent and vexatious as he must have\\nfeared. William was intent on maintaining royal authority over\\necclesiastical affairs and would not be dictated to by Archbishop or\\nPope or anyone else. So, for example, when Anselm went to Rome in 1097\\nwithout the King’s permission, William would not allow him to\\nreturn. When William was killed in 1100, his successor, Henry I,\\ninvited Anselm to return to his see. But Henry was as intent as\\nWilliam had been on maintaining royal jurisdiction over the Church,\\nand Anselm found himself in exile again from 1103 to 1107. Despite\\nthese distractions and troubles, Anselm continued to write. His works\\nas Archbishop of Canterbury include the Epistola de Incarnatione\\nVerbi (1094), Cur Deus Homo (1095–98), De\\nconceptu virginali (1099), De processione Spiritus\\nSancti (1102), the Epistola de sacrificio azymi et\\nfermentati (1106–7), De sacramentis ecclesiae\\n(1106–7), and De concordia (1107–8). Anselm died\\non 21 April 1109. He was canonized in 1494 and named a Doctor of the\\nChurch in 1720.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Life and Works\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"2. The Theistic Proofs\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nAnselm’s motto is “faith seeking understanding”\\n(fides quaerens intellectum). This motto lends itself to at\\nleast two misunderstandings. First, many philosophers have taken it to\\nmean that Anselm hopes to replace faith with\\nunderstanding. If one takes ‘faith’ to mean roughly\\n‘belief on the basis of testimony’ and\\n‘understanding’ to mean ‘belief on the basis of\\nphilosophical insight’, one is likely to regard faith as an\\nepistemically substandard position; any self-respecting philosopher\\nwould surely want to leave faith behind as quickly as possible. The\\ntheistic proofs are then interpreted as the means by which we come to\\nhave philosophical insight into things we previously believed solely\\non testimony. But Anselm is not hoping to replace faith with\\nunderstanding. Faith for Anselm is more a volitional state than an\\nepistemic state: it is love for God and a drive to act as God\\nwills. In fact, Anselm describes the sort of faith that “merely\\nbelieves what it ought to believe” as “dead”\\n(M 78). (For the abbreviations used in references, see the\\nBibliography below.) So “faith seeking understanding”\\nmeans something like “an active love of God seeking a deeper\\nknowledge of God.”\",\n \"\\n\\nOther philosophers have noted that “faith seeking\\nunderstanding” begins with “faith,” not with doubt\\nor suspension of belief. Hence, they argue, the theistic\\narguments proposed by faith seeking understanding are not really meant\\nto convince unbelievers; they are intended solely for the edification\\nof those who already believe. This too is a misreading of\\nAnselm’s motto. For although the theistic proofs are borne of an\\nactive love of God seeking a deeper knowledge of the beloved, the\\nproofs themselves are intended to be convincing even to\\nunbelievers. Thus Anselm opens the Monologion with these\\nwords:\",\n \"If anyone does not know, either because he has not heard or\\nbecause he does not believe, that there is one nature, supreme among\\nall existing things, who alone is self-sufficient in his eternal\\nhappiness, who through his omnipotent goodness grants and brings it\\nabout that all other things exist or have any sort of well-being, and a\\ngreat many other things that we must believe about God or his creation,\\nI think he could at least convince himself of most of these things by\\nreason alone, if he is even moderately intelligent. (M\\n1)\",\n \"\\n\\nAnd in the Proslogion Anselm sets out to convince “the fool,”\\nthat is, the person who “has said in his heart, ‘There is no\\nGod’ ” (Psalm 14:1; 53:1). \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.1 “Faith Seeking Understanding”: The character and purpose of Anselm’s theistic proofs\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nHaving clarified what Anselm takes himself to be doing in his theistic\\nproofs, we can now examine the proofs themselves. In the first chapter\\nof the Monologion Anselm argues that there must be some one\\nthing that is supremely good, through which all good things have their\\ngoodness. For whenever we say that different things are F in\\ndifferent degrees, we must understand them as being F through\\nF-ness; F-ness itself is the same in each of them.\\nThus, for example, all more or less just things “must be more or\\nless just through justice, which is not different in diverse\\nthings” (M 1). Now we speak of things as being\\ngood in different degrees. So by the principle just stated,\\nthese things must be good through some one thing. Clearly that thing\\nis itself a great good, since it is the source of the goodness of all\\nother things. Moreover, that thing is good through itself;\\nafter all, if all good things are good through that thing, it follows\\ntrivially that that thing, being good, is good through itself. Things\\nthat are good through another (i.e., things whose goodness derives\\nfrom something other than themselves) cannot be equal to or greater\\nthan the good thing that is good through itself, and so that which is\\ngood through itself is supremely good. Anselm concludes,\\n“Now that which is supremely good is also supremely great. There\\nis, therefore, some one thing that is supremely good and supremely\\ngreat – in other words, supreme among all existing things”\\n(M 1). In chapter 2 he applies the principle of chapter 1 in\\norder to derive (again) the conclusion that there is something\\nsupremely great. \",\n \"\\n\\nIn chapter 3 Anselm argues that all existing things exist through\\nsome one thing. Every existing thing, he begins, exists either through\\nsomething or through nothing. But of course nothing exists through\\nnothing, so every existing thing exists through something. There is,\\nthen, either some one thing through which all existing things exist, or\\nthere is more than one such thing. If there is more than one, either\\n(i) they all exist through some one thing, or (ii) each of them exists\\nthrough itself, or (iii) they exist through each other. (iii) makes no\\nsense. If (ii) is true, then “there is surely some one power or nature\\nof self-existing that they have in order to exist through themselves”\\n(M 3); in that case, “all things exist more truly through that\\none thing than through the several things that cannot exist without\\nthat one thing” (M 3). So (ii) collapses into (i), and there\\nis some one thing through which all things exist. That one thing, of\\ncourse, exists through itself, and so it is greater than all the other\\nthings. It is therefore “best and greatest and supreme among all\\nexisting things” (M 3).\",\n \"\\n\\nIn chapter 4 Anselm begins with the premise that things “are not all\\nof equal dignity; rather, some of them are on different and unequal\\nlevels” (M 4). For example, a horse is better than wood, and a\\nhuman being is more excellent than a horse. Now it is absurd to think\\nthat there is no limit to how high these levels can go, “so that there\\nis no level so high that an even higher level cannot be found”\\n(M 4). The only question is how many beings occupy that\\nhighest level of all. Is there just one, or are there more than one?\\nSuppose there are more than one. By hypothesis, they must all be\\nequals. If they are equals, they are equals through the same thing.\\nThat thing is either identical with them or distinct from them. If it\\nis identical with them, then they are not in fact many, but one, since\\nthey are all identical with some one thing. On the other hand, if that\\nthing is distinct from them, then they do not occupy the highest level\\nafter all. Instead, that thing is greater than they are. Either way,\\nthere can be only one being occupying the highest level of all.\",\n \"\\n\\nAnselm concludes the first four chapters by summarizing his\\nresults:\",\n \"Therefore, there is a certain nature or substance or\\nessence who through himself is good and great and through himself is\\nwhat he is; through whom exists whatever truly is good or great or\\nanything at all; and who is the supreme good, the supreme great thing,\\nthe supreme being or subsistent, that is, supreme among all existing\\nthings. (M 4)\",\n \"\\n\\nHe then goes on (in chapters 5–65) to derive the attributes that must\\nbelong to the being who fits this description. But before we look at\\nAnselm’s understanding of the divine attributes, we should turn to the\\nfamous proof in the Proslogion. \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.2 The arguments of the Monologion\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nLooking back on the sixty-five chapters of complicated argument in the\\nMonologion, Anselm found himself wishing for a simpler way to\\nestablish all the conclusions he wanted to prove. As he tells us in the\\npreface to the Proslogion, he wanted to find \",\n \"a single argument that needed nothing but itself alone for\\nproof, that would by itself be enough to show that God really exists;\\nthat he is the supreme good, who depends on nothing else, but on whom\\nall things depend for their being and for their well-being; and\\nwhatever we believe about the divine nature. (P,\\npreface)\",\n \"\\n\\nThat “single argument” is the one that appears in chapter\\n2 of the Proslogion. (Or so it is commonly said: but some interpreters\\nunderstand the “one argument” as extending into chapter 3, and\\nHolopainen 1996 argues that it is the formula “that than\\nwhich a greater cannot be thought.”)\",\n \"\\n\\nThe proper way to state Anselm’s argument is a matter of dispute, and\\nany detailed statement of the argument will beg interpretative\\nquestions. But on a fairly neutral or consensus reading of the\\nargument (which I shall go on to reject), Anselm’s argument goes like\\nthis. God is “that than which a greater cannot be\\nthought”; in other words, he is a being so great, so full of\\nmetaphysical oomph, that one cannot so much as conceive of a being who\\nwould be greater than God. The Psalmist, however, tells us that\\n“The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God’\\n” (Psalm 14:1; 53:1). Is it possible to convince the fool that\\nhe is wrong? It is. All we need is the characterization of God as\\n“that than which a greater cannot be thought.” The fool\\ndoes at least understand that definition. But whatever is understood\\nexists in the understanding, just as the plan of a painting he has yet\\nto execute already exists in the understanding of the painter. So that\\nthan which a greater cannot be thought exists in the\\nunderstanding. But if it exists in the understanding, it must also\\nexist in reality. For it is greater to exist in reality than to exist\\nmerely in the understanding. Therefore, if that than which a greater\\ncan be thought existed only in the understanding, it would be possible\\nto think of something greater than it (namely, that same being\\nexisting in reality as well). It follows, then, that if that than\\nwhich a greater cannot be thought existed only in the understanding,\\nit would not be that than which a greater cannot be thought; and that,\\nobviously, is a contradiction. So that than which a greater cannot be\\nthought must exist in reality, not merely in the understanding.\",\n \"\\n\\nVersions of this argument have been defended and criticized by a\\nsuccession of philosophers from Anselm’s time through the present day\\n(see\\n ontological arguments).\\n Our concern here is with Anselm’s own version, the\\ncriticism he encountered, and his response to that criticism. A monk\\nnamed Gaunilo wrote a “Reply on Behalf of the Fool,” contending that\\nAnselm’s argument gave the Psalmist’s fool no good reason at all to\\nbelieve that that than which a greater cannot be thought exists in\\nreality. Gaunilo’s most famous objection is an argument intended to be\\nexactly parallel to Anselm’s that generates an obviously absurd\\nconclusion. Gaunilo proposes that instead of “that than which a\\ngreater cannot be thought” we consider “that island than\\nwhich a greater cannot be thought.” We understand what that\\nexpression means, so (following Anselm’s reasoning) the greatest\\nconceivable island exists in our understanding. But (again following\\nAnselm’s reasoning) that island must exist in reality as well; for if\\nit did not, we could imagine a greater island – namely, one that\\nexisted in reality – and the greatest conceivable island would not\\nbe the greatest conceivable island after all. Surely, though, it is\\nabsurd to suppose that the greatest conceivable island actually exists\\nin reality. Gaunilo concludes that Anselm’s reasoning is\\nfallacious.\",\n \"\\n\\nGaunilo’s counterargument is so ingenious that it stands out as by far\\nthe most devastating criticism in his catalogue of Anselm’s errors.\\nNot surprisingly, then, interpreters have read Anselm’s reply to\\nGaunilo primarily in order to find his rejoinder to the Lost Island\\nargument. Sympathetic interpreters (such as Klima 2000 and Ward 2018) have offered\\nways for Anselm to respond, but at least one commentator (Wolterstorff\\n1993) argues that Anselm offers no such rejoinder, precisely because\\nhe knew Gaunilo’s criticism was unanswerable but could not bring\\nhimself to admit that fact.\",\n \"\\n\\nA more careful look at Anselm’s reply to Gaunilo, however, shows that\\nAnselm offered no rejoinder to the Lost Island argument because he\\nrejected Gaunilo’s interpretation of the original argument of the\\nProslogion. Gaunilo had understood the argument in the way I\\nstated it above. Anselm understood it quite differently. In\\nparticular, Anselm insists that the original argument did not rely on\\nany general principle to the effect that a thing is greater when it\\nexists in reality than when it exists only in the\\nunderstanding.[1] \\nAnd since that is the principle that does the mischief in Gaunilo’s\\ncounterargument, Anselm sees no need to respond to the Lost Island\\nargument in particular.\",\n \"\\n\\nCorrectly understood, Anselm says, the argument of the\\nProslogion can be summarized as follows:\",\n \"Therefore,\",\n \"\\n\\nAnselm defends (1) by showing how we can form a conception of that\\nthan which a greater cannot be thought on the basis of our\\nexperience and understanding of those things than which a greater\\ncan be thought. For example,\",\n \"it is clear to every reasonable mind that by raising our\\nthoughts from lesser goods to greater goods, we are quite capable of\\nforming an idea of that than which a greater cannot be thought on the\\nbasis of that than which a greater can be thought. Who, for example,\\nis unable to think … that if something that has a beginning and\\nend is good, then something that has a beginning but never ceases to\\nexist is much better? And that just as the latter is better than the\\nformer, so something that has neither beginning nor end is better\\nstill, even if it is always moving from the past through the present\\ninto the future? And that something that in no way needs or is\\ncompelled to change or move is far better even than that, whether any\\nsuch thing exists in reality or not? Can such a thing not be thought?\\nCan anything greater than this be thought? Or rather, is not this an\\nexample of forming an idea of that than which a greater cannot be\\nthought on the basis of those things than which a greater can be\\nthought? So there is in fact a way to form an idea of that than which\\na greater cannot be thought. (Anselm’s Reply to Gaunilo\\n8)\",\n \"\\n\\nOnce we have formed this idea of that than which a greater cannot be\\nthought, Anselm says, we can see that such a being has features that\\ncannot belong to a possible but non-existent object – or, in\\nother words, that (2) is true. For example, a being that is capable\\nof non-existence is less great than a being that exists necessarily.\\nIf that than which a greater cannot be thought does not exist, it is\\nobviously capable of non-existence; and if it is capable of\\nnon-existence, then even if it were to exist, it would not be that\\nthan which a greater cannot be thought after all. So if that than\\nwhich a greater cannot be thought can be thought – that is, if\\nit is a possible being – it actually exists. (This reading of\\nthe argument of the Proslogion is developed at length in\\nVisser and Williams 2008, chapter 5.)\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.3 The argument of the Proslogion\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"3. The Divine Nature\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nRecall that Anselm’s intention in the Proslogion was to offer\\na single argument that would establish not only the existence of God\\nbut also the various attributes that Christians believe God possesses.\\nIf the argument of chapter 2 proved only the existence of God, leaving\\nthe divine attributes to be established piecemeal as in the\\nMonologion, Anselm would consider the Proslogion a\\nfailure. But in fact the concept of that than which nothing greater can\\nbe thought turns out to be marvelously fertile. God must, for example,\\nbe omnipotent. For if he were not, we could conceive of a being greater\\nthan he. But God is that than which no greater can be thought, so he\\nmust be omnipotent. Similarly, God must be just, self-existent,\\ninvulnerable to suffering, merciful, timelessly eternal, non-physical,\\nnon-composite, and so forth. For if he lacked any of these qualities,\\nhe would be less than the greatest conceivable being, which is\\nimpossible. \",\n \"\\n\\nThe ontological argument thus works as a sort of\\ndivine-attribute-generating machine. Admittedly, though, the\\nappearance of theoretical simplicity is somewhat misleading. The\\n“single argument” produces conclusions about the divine attributes\\nonly when conjoined with certain beliefs about what is greater or\\nbetter. That is, the ontological argument tells us that God has\\nwhatever characteristics it is better or greater to have than to lack,\\nbut it does not tell us which characteristics those are. We must have\\nsome independent way of identifying them before we can plug them into\\nthe ontological argument and generate a full-blown conception of the\\ndivine nature. Anselm identifies these characteristics in part by\\nappeal to intuitions about value, in part by independent argument. To\\nillustrate Anselm’s method, I shall examine his discussions of God’s\\nimpassibility, timelessness, and simplicity.\",\n \"\\n\\nAccording to the doctrine of divine impassibility, God is invulnerable\\nto suffering. Nothing can act upon him; he is in no way passive. He\\ntherefore does not feel emotions, since emotions are states that one\\nundergoes rather than actions one performs. Anselm does not find it\\nnecessary to argue that impassibility is a perfection; he\\nthinks it is perfectly obvious that “it is better to be …\\nimpassible than not” (P 6), just as it is perfectly\\nobvious that it is better to be just than not-just. His intuitions\\nabout value are shaped by the Platonic-Augustinian tradition of which\\nhe was a part. Augustine took from the Platonists the idea that the\\nreally real things, the greatest and best of beings, are stable,\\nuniform, and unchanging. He says in On Free Choice of the\\nWill 2.10, “And you surely could not deny that the\\nuncorrupted is better than the corrupt, the eternal than the temporal,\\nand the invulnerable than the vulnerable”; his interlocutor\\nreplies simply, “Could anyone?” Through Augustine (and\\nothers) these ideas, and the conception of God to which they naturally\\nlead, became the common view of Christian theologians for well over a\\nmillennium. For Anselm, then, it is obvious that a being who is in no\\nway passive, who cannot experience anything of which he is not himself\\nthe origin, is better and greater than any being who can be acted upon\\nby something outside himself. So God, being that than which nothing\\ngreater can be thought, is wholly active; he is impassible.\",\n \"\\n\\nNotice that Augustine also found it obvious that the eternal is better\\nthan the temporal. According to Plato’s Timaeus, time is a\\n“moving image of eternity” (37d). It is a shifting and\\nshadowy reflection of the really real. As later Platonists, including\\nAugustine, develop this idea, temporal beings have their existence\\npiecemeal; they exist only in this tiny sliver of a now, which is\\nconstantly flowing away from them and passing into nothingness. An\\neternal being, by contrast, is (to use my earlier description) stable,\\nuniform, and unchanging. What it has, it always has; what it is, it\\nalways is; what it does, it always does. So it seems intuitively\\nobvious to Anselm that if God is to be that than which nothing greater\\ncan be thought, he must be eternal. That is, he must be not merely\\neverlasting, but outside time \\naltogether.[2]\\n\",\n \"\\n\\nIn addition to this strong intuitive consideration, Anselm at least\\nhints at a further argument for the claim that it is better to be\\neternal than temporal. He opens chapter 13 of the Proslogion\\nby observing, “Everything that is at all enclosed in a place or time is\\nless than that which is subject to no law of place or time” (P\\n13). His idea seems to be that if God were in time (or in a place), he\\nwould be bound by certain constraints inherent in the nature of time\\n(or place). His discussion in Monologion 22 makes the problem\\nclear:\",\n \"This, then, is the condition of place and time: whatever is\\nenclosed within their boundaries does not escape being characterized by\\nparts, whether the sort of parts its place receives with respect to\\nsize, or the sort its time suffers with respect to duration; nor can it\\nin any way be contained as a whole all at once by different places or\\ntimes. By contrast, if something is in no way constrained by\\nconfinement in a place or time, no law of places or times forces it\\ninto a multiplicity of parts or prevents it from being present as a\\nwhole all at once in several places or times. (M\\n22)\",\n \"\\n\\nSo at least part of the reason for holding that God is timeless is that\\nthe nature of time would impose constraints upon God, and of course it\\nis better to be subject to no external constraints. \",\n \"\\n\\nThe other part of the reason, though, is that if God were in place or\\ntime he would have parts. But what is so bad about having\\nparts? This question brings us naturally to the doctrine of divine\\nsimplicity, which is simply the doctrine that God has no parts of any\\nkind. Even for an Augustinian like Anselm, the claim that it is better\\nto lack parts than to have them is less than intuitively compelling,\\nso Anselm offers further arguments for that claim. In the\\nProslogion he argues that “whatever is composed of\\nparts is not completely one. It is in some sense a plurality and not\\nidentical with itself, and it can be broken up either in fact or at\\nleast in the understanding” (P 18). The argument in\\nthe Monologion goes somewhat differently. “Every\\ncomposite,” Anselm argues, “needs the things of which it\\nis composed if it is to subsist, and it owes its existence to them,\\nsince whatever it is, it is through them, whereas those things are not\\nthrough it what they are” (M 17). The argument in\\nthe Proslogion, then, seeks to relate simplicity to the\\nintuitive considerations that identify what is greatest and best with\\nwhat is stable, uniform, and unchanging; the argument in the\\nMonologion, by contrast, seeks to show that simplicity is\\nnecessary if God is to be – as the theistic proofs have already\\nestablished – the ultimate source of his own goodness and existence.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.1 Proving the divine attributes\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nAnselm’s success in generating a whole host of divine attributes\\nthrough the ontological argument does present him with a\\nproblem. He must show that the attributes are consistent with\\neach other – in other words, that it is possible for one and the\\nsame being to have all of them. For example, there seems at first\\nglance to be a conflict between justice and omnipotence. If God is\\nperfectly just, he cannot lie. But if God is omnipotent, how can there\\nbe something he cannot do? Anselm’s solution is to explain that\\nomnipotence does not mean the ability to do everything; instead, it\\nmeans the possession of unlimited power. Now the so-called\\n“ability” or “power” to lie is not really a\\npower at all; it is a kind of weakness. Being omnipotent, God has no\\nweakness. So it turns out that omnipotence actually entails\\nthe inability to lie. \",\n \"\\n\\nAnother apparent contradiction is between God’s mercy and his\\njustice. If God is just, he will surely punish the wicked as they\\ndeserve. But because he is merciful, he spares the wicked. Anselm\\ntries to resolve this apparent contradiction by appeal to God’s\\ngoodness. It is better, he says, for God “to be good both to the\\ngood and to the wicked than to be good only to the good, and it is\\nbetter to be good to the wicked both in punishing and in sparing them\\nthan to be good only in punishing them” (P 9). So God’s\\nsupreme goodness requires that he be both just and merciful. But\\nAnselm is not content to resolve the apparent tension between justice\\nand mercy by appealing to some other attribute, goodness, that entails\\nboth justice and mercy; he goes on to argue that justice itself\\nrequires mercy. Justice to sinners obviously requires that God punish\\nthem; but God’s justice to himself requires that he exercise\\nhis supreme goodness in sparing the wicked. “Thus,” Anselm\\nsays to God, “in saving us whom you might justly destroy\\n… you are just, not because you give us our due, but because you\\ndo what is fitting for you who are supremely good” (P\\n10). In spite of these arguments, Anselm acknowledges that there is a\\nresidue of mystery here:\",\n \"Thus your mercy is born of your justice, since it is just\\nfor you to be so good that you are good even in sparing the wicked. And\\nperhaps this is why the one who is supremely just can will good things\\nfor the wicked. But even if one can somehow grasp why you can will to\\nsave the wicked, certainly no reasoning can comprehend why, from those\\nwho are alike in wickedness, you save some rather than others through\\nyour supreme goodness and condemn some rather than others through your\\nsupreme justice. (P 11)\",\n \"\\n\\nIn other words, the philosopher can trace the conceptual relations\\namong goodness, justice, and mercy, and show that God not only can but\\nmust have all three; but no human reasoning can hope to show why God\\ndisplays his justice and mercy in precisely the ways in which he\\ndoes. (For a detailed and sympathetic reconstruction of Anselm’s arguments concerning justice and mercy, see Mann 2019.)\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.2 The consistency of the divine attributes\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Freedom, Sin, and Redemption\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nIn On Freedom of Choice (De libertate arbitrii)\\nAnselm defines freedom of choice as “the power to preserve rectitude of\\nwill for its own sake” (DLA 3). He explores the notion of\\nrectitude of will most thoroughly in On Truth (De\\nveritate), so in order to understand the definition of freedom of\\nchoice, we must look first at Anselm’s discussion of truth. Truth\\nis a much broader notion for Anselm than for us; he speaks of truth not\\nonly in statements and opinions but also in the will, actions, the\\nsenses, and even the essences of things. In every case, he argues,\\ntruth consists in correctness or “rectitude.” Rectitude, in turn, is\\nunderstood teleologically; a thing is correct whenever it is or does\\nwhatever it ought, or was designed, to be or do. For example,\\nstatements are made for the purpose of “signifying that what-is is”\\n(DV 2). A statement therefore is correct (has rectitude) when,\\nand only when, it signifies that what-is is. So Anselm holds a\\ncorrespondence theory of truth, but it is a somewhat unusual\\ncorrespondence theory. Statements are true when they correspond to\\nreality, but only because corresponding to reality is what statements\\nare for. That is, statements (like anything else) are true\\nwhen they do what they were designed to do; and what they were designed\\nto do, as it happens, is to correspond to reality. \",\n \"\\n\\nTruth in the will also turns out to be rectitude, again understood\\nteleologically. Rectitude of will means willing what one ought to will\\nor (in other words) willing that for the sake of which one was given a\\nwill. So, just as the truth or rectitude of a statement is the\\nstatement’s doing what statements were made to do, the truth or\\nrectitude of a will is the will’s doing what wills were made to do. In\\nDV 12 Anselm connects rectitude of will to both justice and\\nmoral evaluation. In a broad sense of ‘just’, whatever is\\nas it ought to be is just. Thus, an animal is just when it blindly\\nfollows its appetites, because that is what animals were meant to do.\\nBut in the narrower sense of ‘just’, in which justice is\\nwhat deserves moral approval and injustice is what deserves reproach,\\njustice is best defined as “rectitude of will preserved for its own\\nsake” (DV 12). Such rectitude requires that agents perceive\\nthe rectitude of their actions and will them for the sake of that\\nrectitude. Anselm takes the second requirement to exclude both coercion\\nand “being bribed by an extraneous reward” (DV 12). For an\\nagent who is coerced into doing what is right is not willing rectitude\\nfor its own sake; and similarly, an agent who must be bribed to do what\\nis right is willing rectitude for the sake of the bribe, not for the\\nsake of rectitude.\",\n \"\\n\\nSince, as we have already seen, Anselm will define freedom as “the\\npower to preserve rectitude of will for its own sake,” the arguments of\\nOn Truth imply that freedom is also the capacity for justice\\nand the capacity for moral praiseworthiness. Now it is both necessary\\nand sufficient for justice, and thus for praiseworthiness, that an\\nagent wills what is right, knowing it to be right, because it is right.\\nThat an agent wills what is right because it is right entails that he\\nis neither compelled nor bribed to perform the act. Freedom, then, must\\nbe neither more nor less than the power to perform acts of that\\nsort.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.1 Truth in statements and in the will\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThus Anselm takes it to be obvious that freedom is a power for\\nsomething: its purpose is to preserve rectitude of will for its own\\nsake. God and the good angels cannot sin, but they are still free,\\nbecause they can (and do) preserve rectitude of will for its own sake.\\nIn fact, they are freer than those who can sin: “someone who has what\\nis fitting and expedient in such a way that he cannot lose it is freer\\nthan someone who has it in such a way that he can lose it and be\\nseduced into what is unfitting and inexpedient” (DLA 1). It\\nobviously follows, as Anselm points out, that freedom of choice neither\\nis nor entails the power to sin; God and the good angels have freedom\\nof choice, but they are incapable of sinning. \",\n \"\\n\\nBut if free choice is the power to hold on to what is fitting and\\nexpedient, and it is not the power to sin, does it make any sense to\\nsay that the first human beings and the rebel angels sinned through\\nfree choice? Anselm’s reply to this question is both subtle and\\nplausible. In order to be able to preserve rectitude of will for its\\nown sake, an agent must be able to perform an action that has its\\nultimate origin in the agent him- or herself rather than in some\\nexternal source. (For convenience I will refer to that power as “the\\npower for self-initiated action.”) Any being that has freedom of\\nchoice, therefore, will thereby have the power for self-initiated\\naction. The first human beings and the rebel angels sinned through an\\nexercise of their power for self-initiated action, and so it is\\nappropriate to say that they sinned through free choice. \\nNonetheless, free choice does not entail the power to sin. For free\\nchoice can be perfected by something else, as yet unspecified, that\\nrenders it incapable of sinning.\",\n \"\\n\\nIn On the Fall of the Devil (De casu diaboli)\\nAnselm extends his account of freedom and sin by discussing the first\\nsin of the angels. In order for the angels to have the power to\\npreserve rectitude of will for its own sake, they had to have both a\\nwill for justice and a will for happiness. If God had given them only a\\nwill for happiness, they would have been necessitated to will whatever\\nthey thought would make them happy. Their willing of happiness would\\nhave had its ultimate origin in God and not in the angels themselves.\\nSo they would not have had the power for self-initiated action, which\\nmeans that they would not have had free choice. The same thing would\\nhave been true, mutatis mutandis, if God had given them only\\nthe will for justice.\",\n \"\\n\\nSince God gave them both the will for happiness and the will for justice, however, they had the power for\\nself-initiated action. Whether they chose to subject their wills for\\nhappiness to the demands of justice or to ignore the demands of justice\\nin the interest of happiness, that choice had its ultimate origin in\\nthe angels; it was not received from God. The rebel angels chose to\\nabandon justice in an attempt to gain happiness for themselves, whereas\\nthe good angels chose to persevere in justice even if it meant less\\nhappiness. God punished the rebel angels by taking away their\\nhappiness; he rewarded the good angels by granting them all the\\nhappiness they could possibly want. For this reason, the good angels\\nare no longer able to sin. Since there is no further happiness left for\\nthem to will, their will for happiness can no longer entice them to\\noverstep the bounds of justice. Thus Anselm finally explains what it is\\nthat perfects free choice so that it becomes unable to sin.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.2 Freedom and sin\"\n }\n ]\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Niskanen, Samu, 2019. Letters of Anselm of Canterbury, Vol. I: The Bec Letters, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","Schmitt, Franciscus Salesius, 1936. “Ein neues\nunvollendetes Werk des hl. Anselm von Canterbury,”\nBeiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des\nMittelalters Band 33, Heft 3 (1936): 22–43.","Schmitt, Franciscus Salesius, 1968. S. Anselmi Cantuariensis\nArchiepiscopi Opera Omnia. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich\nFromann Verlag.","Davies, Brian, and G. R. Evans (ed.), 1998. Anselm of\nCanterbury: The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press.","Williams, Thomas, 2007. Anselm: Basic Writings.\nIndianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. As supplemented by the \nTranslations of Anselm, \n this is the only English translation by a single hand of all of\nAnselm’s treatises; it also includes selected prayers and\nletters and the Meditation on Human Redemption.","Baker, Lynne Rudder, 2013. “Updating Anselm\nAgain,” Res Philosophica, 90: 23–32.","Burgess-Jackson, Keith, 2014. “Does Anselm Beg the\nQuestion?,” International Journal for Philosophy of\nReligion, 76: 5–18.","Campbell, Richard, 2018. Rethinking Anselm’s Arguments: A\nVindication of His Proof for the Existence of God, Leiden:\nBrill.","Davies, Brian, and Brian Leftow (eds.), 2004. The Cambridge\nCompanion to Anselm, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Ekenberg, Tomas, 2016. “Voluntary Action and Rational Sin in\nAnselm of Canterbury,” International Journal for Philosophy\nof Religion, 24: 215–230.","Evans, G. R., 1978. Anselm and Talking about God, Oxford:\nClarendon Press.","–––, 1984. A Concordance to the Works of Saint\nAnselm, Millwood, NY: Kraus International Publications.","–––, 1989. Anselm, London:\nG. Chapman; reprinted 2001, London and New York: Continuum.","Gasper, G. E. M., and I. Logan (eds.), 2012. Saint Anselm of\nCanterbury and His Legacy, Toronto: Pontifical Institute of\nMedieval Studies.","Heathwood, Chris, 2011. “The Relevance of Kant’s Objection\nto Anselm’s Ontological Argument,” Religious Studies,\n47: 345–357.","Henry, Desmond Paul, 1967. The Logic of Saint Anselm,\nOxford: Clarendon Press.","Holopainen, Toivo, 1996. Dialectic and Theology in the\nEleventh Century, Leiden: E. J. Brill.","Hopkins, Jasper, 1972. A Companion to the Study of St.\nAnselm, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.","Klima, Gyula, 2000. “Saint Anselm’s Proof: A Problem\nof Reference, Intentional Identity and Mutual Understanding”, in\nG. Hintikka (ed.), Medieval Philosophy and Modern Times\n(Proceedings of “Medieval and Modern Philosophy of\nReligion”, Boston University, August 25–27, 1992),\nDordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 69–88.\n [Preprint of Klima 2000 available online]","Leftow, Brian, 1997. “Anselm on the Cost of Salvation,”\nMedieval Philosophy and Theology, 6: 73–92.","–––, 2009. “Anselmian Presentism,” \nFaith and Philosophy, 26: 297–319. \n [Leftow 2009 available online.]","Logan, Ian, 2009. Reading Anselm’s Proslogion: The History of\nAnselm’s Argument and its Significance Today, Aldershot:\nAshgate.","Mann, William E., 2019. “Anselm on Divine Justice and\nMercy,” Religious Studies, 55: 469–485.","Nash-Marshall, Siobhan, 2012. “Saint Anselm and the Problem of\nEvil, or On Freeing Evil from the Problem of\nEvil,” International Philosophical Quarterly, 52:\n455–470.","Oppenheimer, P., and Zalta, E., 1991. “On the Logic of the\nOntological Argument,” Philosophical Perspectives 5:\n509–529; reprinted in The Philosopher’s Annual: 1991, XIV\n(1993): 255–275.","–––, 2007. “Reflections on the Logic of\nthe Ontological Argument,” Studia Neoaristotelica,\n4(1): 28–34.","–––, 2011. “A Computationally-Discovered\nSimplification of the Ontological Argument,” Australasian\nJournal of Philosophy, 89(2): 333–349.","Plantinga, Alvin (ed.), 1965. The Ontological Argument,\nGarden City, NY: Anchor Books.","–––, 1974. God, Freedom, and Evil,\nGrand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans.","Rogers, Katherin A., 2007. “Anselmian Eternalism: The\nPresence of a Timeless God,” Faith and Philosophy, 24:\n3–27.\n [Rogers 2007 available online.]","–––, 2009. Anselm on Freedom, Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press.","–––, 2012. “Anselm on the Ontological Status of\nChoice,” International Philosophical Quarterly, 52:\n183–198.","Smith, A.D., 2014. Anselm’s Other Argument, Cambridge,\nMA: Harvard University Press.","Southern, R. W., 1990. Saint Anselm: A Portrait in\nLandscape, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Special Issue, 2011. International Journal for Philosophy of\nReligion, Volume 69.","Sweeney, Eileen, 2012. Anselm of Canterbury and the Desire for\nthe Word, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America\nPress.","Uckelman, Sara L., 2010. “The Ontological Argument and\nRussell’s Antinomy,” Logic and Logical Philosophy, 18:\n309–312.","Visser, Sandra, and Thomas Williams, 2008. Anselm (Great\nMedieval Thinkers), New York: Oxford University Press.","Ward, Thomas M., 2018. “Losing the Lost Island,”\nInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 83:\n127–134.","Williams, Thomas, 2016. “Anselm’s Quiet\nRadicalism,” British Journal for the History of\nPhilosophy, doi:10.1080/09608788.2015.1047734,\n [Preprint of Williams 2016 available online]","Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 1993. “In Defense of Gaunilo’s Defense of\nthe Fool,” in C. Stephen Evans and Merold Westphal (eds.), Christian\nPerspectives on Religious Knowledge, Grand Rapids, MI: William B.\nEerdmans Publishing Company, pp. 87–111. "],"string":"[\n \"Niskanen, Samu, 2019. Letters of Anselm of Canterbury, Vol. I: The Bec Letters, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Schmitt, Franciscus Salesius, 1936. “Ein neues\\nunvollendetes Werk des hl. Anselm von Canterbury,”\\nBeiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des\\nMittelalters Band 33, Heft 3 (1936): 22–43.\",\n \"Schmitt, Franciscus Salesius, 1968. S. Anselmi Cantuariensis\\nArchiepiscopi Opera Omnia. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Friedrich\\nFromann Verlag.\",\n \"Davies, Brian, and G. R. Evans (ed.), 1998. Anselm of\\nCanterbury: The Major Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Williams, Thomas, 2007. Anselm: Basic Writings.\\nIndianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. As supplemented by the \\nTranslations of Anselm, \\n this is the only English translation by a single hand of all of\\nAnselm’s treatises; it also includes selected prayers and\\nletters and the Meditation on Human Redemption.\",\n \"Baker, Lynne Rudder, 2013. “Updating Anselm\\nAgain,” Res Philosophica, 90: 23–32.\",\n \"Burgess-Jackson, Keith, 2014. “Does Anselm Beg the\\nQuestion?,” International Journal for Philosophy of\\nReligion, 76: 5–18.\",\n \"Campbell, Richard, 2018. Rethinking Anselm’s Arguments: A\\nVindication of His Proof for the Existence of God, Leiden:\\nBrill.\",\n \"Davies, Brian, and Brian Leftow (eds.), 2004. The Cambridge\\nCompanion to Anselm, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Ekenberg, Tomas, 2016. “Voluntary Action and Rational Sin in\\nAnselm of Canterbury,” International Journal for Philosophy\\nof Religion, 24: 215–230.\",\n \"Evans, G. R., 1978. Anselm and Talking about God, Oxford:\\nClarendon Press.\",\n \"–––, 1984. A Concordance to the Works of Saint\\nAnselm, Millwood, NY: Kraus International Publications.\",\n \"–––, 1989. Anselm, London:\\nG. Chapman; reprinted 2001, London and New York: Continuum.\",\n \"Gasper, G. E. M., and I. Logan (eds.), 2012. Saint Anselm of\\nCanterbury and His Legacy, Toronto: Pontifical Institute of\\nMedieval Studies.\",\n \"Heathwood, Chris, 2011. “The Relevance of Kant’s Objection\\nto Anselm’s Ontological Argument,” Religious Studies,\\n47: 345–357.\",\n \"Henry, Desmond Paul, 1967. The Logic of Saint Anselm,\\nOxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"Holopainen, Toivo, 1996. Dialectic and Theology in the\\nEleventh Century, Leiden: E. J. Brill.\",\n \"Hopkins, Jasper, 1972. A Companion to the Study of St.\\nAnselm, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.\",\n \"Klima, Gyula, 2000. “Saint Anselm’s Proof: A Problem\\nof Reference, Intentional Identity and Mutual Understanding”, in\\nG. Hintikka (ed.), Medieval Philosophy and Modern Times\\n(Proceedings of “Medieval and Modern Philosophy of\\nReligion”, Boston University, August 25–27, 1992),\\nDordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 69–88.\\n [Preprint of Klima 2000 available online]\",\n \"Leftow, Brian, 1997. “Anselm on the Cost of Salvation,”\\nMedieval Philosophy and Theology, 6: 73–92.\",\n \"–––, 2009. “Anselmian Presentism,” \\nFaith and Philosophy, 26: 297–319. \\n [Leftow 2009 available online.]\",\n \"Logan, Ian, 2009. Reading Anselm’s Proslogion: The History of\\nAnselm’s Argument and its Significance Today, Aldershot:\\nAshgate.\",\n \"Mann, William E., 2019. “Anselm on Divine Justice and\\nMercy,” Religious Studies, 55: 469–485.\",\n \"Nash-Marshall, Siobhan, 2012. “Saint Anselm and the Problem of\\nEvil, or On Freeing Evil from the Problem of\\nEvil,” International Philosophical Quarterly, 52:\\n455–470.\",\n \"Oppenheimer, P., and Zalta, E., 1991. “On the Logic of the\\nOntological Argument,” Philosophical Perspectives 5:\\n509–529; reprinted in The Philosopher’s Annual: 1991, XIV\\n(1993): 255–275.\",\n \"–––, 2007. “Reflections on the Logic of\\nthe Ontological Argument,” Studia Neoaristotelica,\\n4(1): 28–34.\",\n \"–––, 2011. “A Computationally-Discovered\\nSimplification of the Ontological Argument,” Australasian\\nJournal of Philosophy, 89(2): 333–349.\",\n \"Plantinga, Alvin (ed.), 1965. The Ontological Argument,\\nGarden City, NY: Anchor Books.\",\n \"–––, 1974. God, Freedom, and Evil,\\nGrand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans.\",\n \"Rogers, Katherin A., 2007. “Anselmian Eternalism: The\\nPresence of a Timeless God,” Faith and Philosophy, 24:\\n3–27.\\n [Rogers 2007 available online.]\",\n \"–––, 2009. Anselm on Freedom, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"–––, 2012. “Anselm on the Ontological Status of\\nChoice,” International Philosophical Quarterly, 52:\\n183–198.\",\n \"Smith, A.D., 2014. Anselm’s Other Argument, Cambridge,\\nMA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Southern, R. W., 1990. Saint Anselm: A Portrait in\\nLandscape, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Special Issue, 2011. International Journal for Philosophy of\\nReligion, Volume 69.\",\n \"Sweeney, Eileen, 2012. Anselm of Canterbury and the Desire for\\nthe Word, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America\\nPress.\",\n \"Uckelman, Sara L., 2010. “The Ontological Argument and\\nRussell’s Antinomy,” Logic and Logical Philosophy, 18:\\n309–312.\",\n \"Visser, Sandra, and Thomas Williams, 2008. Anselm (Great\\nMedieval Thinkers), New York: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Ward, Thomas M., 2018. “Losing the Lost Island,”\\nInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 83:\\n127–134.\",\n \"Williams, Thomas, 2016. “Anselm’s Quiet\\nRadicalism,” British Journal for the History of\\nPhilosophy, doi:10.1080/09608788.2015.1047734,\\n [Preprint of Williams 2016 available online]\",\n \"Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 1993. “In Defense of Gaunilo’s Defense of\\nthe Fool,” in C. Stephen Evans and Merold Westphal (eds.), Christian\\nPerspectives on Religious Knowledge, Grand Rapids, MI: William B.\\nEerdmans Publishing Company, pp. 87–111. \"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../augustine/","text":"Augustine, Saint"},{"href":"../duns-scotus/","text":"Duns Scotus, John"},{"href":"../freewill/","text":"free will"},{"href":"../medieval-philosophy/","text":"medieval philosophy"},{"href":"../ontological-arguments/","text":"ontological arguments"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../augustine/\",\n \"text\": \"Augustine, Saint\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../duns-scotus/\",\n \"text\": \"Duns Scotus, John\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../freewill/\",\n \"text\": \"free will\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../medieval-philosophy/\",\n \"text\": \"medieval philosophy\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../ontological-arguments/\",\n \"text\": \"ontological arguments\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":66,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"moral-anti-realism"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Moral Anti-Realism"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Mon Jul 30, 2007; substantive revision Mon May 24, 2021"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nIt might be expected that it would suffice for the entry for\n“moral anti-realism” to contain only some links to other\nentries in this encyclopedia. It could contain a link to “moral\nrealism” and stipulate the negation of the view described there.\nAlternatively, it could have links to the entries\n“anti-realism” and “morality” and could\nstipulate the conjunction of the materials contained therein. The fact\nthat neither of these approaches would be adequate—and, more\nstrikingly, that following the two procedures would yield\nsubstantively non-equivalent results—reveals the contentious and\nunsettled nature of the topic.","\n“Anti-realism,” “non-realism,” and\n“irrealism” may for most purposes be treated as\nsynonymous. Occasionally, distinctions have been suggested for local\npedagogic reasons (see, e.g., Wright 1988; Dreier 2004), but no such\ndistinction has generally taken hold. (“Quasi-realism”\ndenotes something very different, to be described below.) All three\nterms are to be defined in opposition to realism, but since there is\nno consensus on how “realism” is to be understood,\n“anti-realism” fares no better. Crispin Wright (1992: 1)\ncomments that “if there ever was a consensus of understanding\nabout ‘realism’, as a philosophical term of art, it has\nundoubtedly been fragmented by the pressures exerted by the various\ndebates—so much so that a philosopher who asserts that she is a\nrealist about theoretical science, for example, or ethics, has\nprobably, for most philosophical audiences, accomplished little more\nthan to clear her throat.” This entry doesn’t purport to\ndo justice to the intricacy and subtlety of the topic of realism; it\nshould be acknowledged at the outset that the fragmentation of which\nWright speaks renders it unlikely that the label “moral\nanti-realism” even succeeds in picking out a definite position.\nYet perhaps we can at least make an advance on clearing our\nthroats."],"string":"[\n \"\\nIt might be expected that it would suffice for the entry for\\n“moral anti-realism” to contain only some links to other\\nentries in this encyclopedia. It could contain a link to “moral\\nrealism” and stipulate the negation of the view described there.\\nAlternatively, it could have links to the entries\\n“anti-realism” and “morality” and could\\nstipulate the conjunction of the materials contained therein. The fact\\nthat neither of these approaches would be adequate—and, more\\nstrikingly, that following the two procedures would yield\\nsubstantively non-equivalent results—reveals the contentious and\\nunsettled nature of the topic.\",\n \"\\n“Anti-realism,” “non-realism,” and\\n“irrealism” may for most purposes be treated as\\nsynonymous. Occasionally, distinctions have been suggested for local\\npedagogic reasons (see, e.g., Wright 1988; Dreier 2004), but no such\\ndistinction has generally taken hold. (“Quasi-realism”\\ndenotes something very different, to be described below.) All three\\nterms are to be defined in opposition to realism, but since there is\\nno consensus on how “realism” is to be understood,\\n“anti-realism” fares no better. Crispin Wright (1992: 1)\\ncomments that “if there ever was a consensus of understanding\\nabout ‘realism’, as a philosophical term of art, it has\\nundoubtedly been fragmented by the pressures exerted by the various\\ndebates—so much so that a philosopher who asserts that she is a\\nrealist about theoretical science, for example, or ethics, has\\nprobably, for most philosophical audiences, accomplished little more\\nthan to clear her throat.” This entry doesn’t purport to\\ndo justice to the intricacy and subtlety of the topic of realism; it\\nshould be acknowledged at the outset that the fragmentation of which\\nWright speaks renders it unlikely that the label “moral\\nanti-realism” even succeeds in picking out a definite position.\\nYet perhaps we can at least make an advance on clearing our\\nthroats.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Characterizing Moral Anti-realism","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. Who Bears the Burden of Proof?","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"3. Arguing For and Against Moral Anti-realism","sub_toc":["3.1 Noncognitivism","3.2 Error Theory","3.3 Non-objectivism"]},{"content_title":"4. Conclusion","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Characterizing Moral Anti-realism\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Who Bears the Burden of Proof?\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Arguing For and Against Moral Anti-realism\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"3.1 Noncognitivism\",\n \"3.2 Error Theory\",\n \"3.3 Non-objectivism\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Conclusion\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\nTraditionally, to hold a realist position with respect to X\nis to hold that X exists objectively. On this view, moral\nanti-realism is the denial of the thesis that moral\nproperties—or facts, objects, relations, events, etc. (whatever\ncategories one is willing to countenance)—exist objectively.\nThis could involve either (1) the denial that moral properties exist\nat all, or (2) the acceptance that they do exist but this existence is\n(in the relevant sense) non-objective. There are broadly two ways of\nendorsing (1): moral noncognitivism and moral error theory. Proponents\nof (2) may be variously thought of as moral non-objectivists, or\nidealists, or constructivists. So understood, moral anti-realism is\nthe disjunction of three theses:","\nUsing such labels is not a precise science, nor an uncontroversial\nmatter; here they are employed just to situate ourselves roughly. In\nthis spirit of preliminary imprecision, these views can be initially\ncharacterized as follows:","\nMoral noncognitivism holds that our moral judgments\nare not in the business of aiming at truth. So, for example, A.J. Ayer\ndeclared that when we say “Stealing money is wrong” we do\nnot express a proposition that can be true or false, but rather it is\nas if we say “Stealing money!!” with the tone of\nvoice indicating that a special feeling of disapproval is being\nexpressed (Ayer [1936] 1971: 110). Note how the predicate\n“… is wrong” has disappeared in Ayer’s\ntranslation schema; thus the issues of whether the property of\nwrongness exists, and whether that existence is objective, also\ndisappear.","\nThe moral error theorist thinks that although our\nmoral judgments aim at the truth, they systematically fail to secure\nit: the world simply doesn’t contain the relevant\n“stuff” to render our moral judgments true. For a more\nfamiliar analogy, compare what an atheist usually claims about\nreligious judgments. On the face of it, religious discourse is\ncognitivist in nature: it would seem that when someone says “God\nexists” or “God loves you” they are usually\nasserting something that purports to be true. However, according to\nthe atheist, the world isn’t furnished with the right kind of\nstuff (gods, afterlife, miracles, etc.) necessary to render these\nassertions true. The moral error theorist claims that when we say\n“Stealing is morally wrong” we are asserting that the act\nof stealing instantiates the property of moral wrongness, but in fact\nthere is no such property, or at least nothing in the world\ninstantiates it, and thus the utterance is untrue.","\nNon-objectivism (as it will be called here) allows\nthat moral facts exist but holds that they are non-objective. The\nslogan version comes from Hamlet: “there is nothing either good\nor bad, but thinking makes it so.” For a quick example of a\nnon-objective fact, consider the different properties that a\nparticular diamond might have. It is true that the diamond is made of\ncarbon, and also true that the diamond is worth $1000, say. But the\nstatus of these facts seems different. That the diamond is carbon\nseems an objective fact: it doesn’t depend on what we think of\nthe matter. (We could all be under the impression that it is not\ncarbon, and all be wrong.) That the diamond is worth $1000, by\ncontrast, seems to depend on us. If we all thought that it was worth\nmore (or less), then it would be worth more (or less).","\n[This entry uses the label “non-objectivism” instead of\nthe simple “subjectivism” since there is an entrenched\nusage in metaethics for using the latter to denote the thesis that in\nmaking a moral judgment one is reporting (as opposed to expressing)\none’s own mental attitudes (e.g., “Stealing is morally\nwrong” means “I disapprove of stealing”). So\nunderstood, subjectivism is a kind of non-objectivist theory, but\nthere are many other kinds of non-objectivist theory, too.]","\nIt is tempting to construe this idea of non-objectivity as\n“mind-dependence,” though this, as we will see below, is a\ntricky notion, since something may be mind-independent in one sense\nand mind-dependent in another. Cars, for example, are designed and\nconstructed by creatures with minds, and yet in another sense cars are\nclearly concrete entities whose ongoing existence does not depend on\nour mental activity. Those who feel pessimistic that the notion of\nmind-dependence can be straightened out might prefer to characterize\nmoral realism in a way that makes no reference to objectivity. There\nis also the concern that the objectivity clause threatens to render\nmoral anti-realism trivially true, since there is little room for\ndoubting that the moral status of actions usually (if not always)\ndepends in some manner on mental phenomena, such as the\nintentions with which the action was performed or the episodes of\npleasure and pain that ensue from it. (See Sayre-McCord 1986; also his\nthe entry on\n moral realism.)\n Whether such pessimism is warranted is not something to be decided\nhastily. Perhaps the judicious course is to make a terminological\ndistinction between minimal moral realism—which is the\ndenial of noncognitivism and error theory—and robust moral\nrealism—which in addition asserts the objectivity of moral\nfacts. (See Rosen 1994 for this distinction.) In what follows,\nhowever, “moral realism” will continue to be used to\ndenote the traditional robust version.","\nIf moral anti-realism is understood in this manner, then there are\nseveral things with which it is important not to confuse it.","\nFirst, moral anti-realism is not a form of moral\nskepticism. If we take moral skepticism to be the claim that\nthere is no such thing as moral knowledge, and we take knowledge to be\njustified true belief, then there are three ways of being a moral\nskeptic: one can deny that moral judgments are beliefs, one can deny\nthat moral judgments are ever true, or one can deny that moral\njudgments are ever justified. The noncognitivist makes the first of\nthese denials, and the error theorist makes the second, thus\nnoncognitivists and error theorists count as both moral anti-realists\nand moral skeptics. However, since the non-objectivity of some fact\ndoes not pose a particular problem regarding the possibility of\none’s knowing it (I might know that a certain diamond is worth\n$1000, for example), then there is nothing to stop the moral\nnon-objectivist from accepting the existence of moral knowledge. So\nmoral non-objectivism is a form of moral anti-realism that need not be\na form of moral skepticism. Conversely, one might maintain that moral\njudgments are sometimes objectively true—thus being a moral\nrealist—while also maintaining that moral judgments always lack\njustification—thus being a moral skeptic. (See entry for\n moral skepticism.)","\nSpeaking more generally, moral anti-realism, as it has been defined\nhere, contains no epistemological clause: it is silent on the question\nof whether we are justified in making moral judgments. This is worth\nnoting since moral realists often want to support a view of morality\nthat would guarantee our justified access to a realm of objective\nmoral facts. But any such epistemic guarantee will need to be argued\nfor separately; it is not implied by realism itself. Indeed, if\nobjective facts are those that do not depend on our mental activity,\nthen they are precisely those facts that we can all be mistaken about,\nand thus it seems reasonable to suppose that the desire for moral\nfacts to be objective and the desire for a guarantee of epistemic\naccess to moral facts are desiderata that are in tension with each\nother.","\nSecond, it is worth stating explicitly that moral anti-realism is not\na form of moral relativism—or, perhaps more\nusefully noted: that moral relativism is not a form of moral\nanti-realism. Moral relativism is a form of cognitivism according to\nwhich moral claims contain an indexical element, such that the truth\nof any such claim requires relativization to some individual or group.\nAccording to a simple form of relativism, the claim “Stealing is\nmorally wrong” might be true when one person utters it, and\nfalse when someone else utters it. The important thing to note is that\nthis would not necessarily make moral wrongness non-objective. For\nexample, suppose someone were to make the relativistic claim that\ndifferent moral values, virtues, and duties apply to different groups\nof people due to, say, their social caste. If this person were asked\nin virtue of what these relativistic moral facts obtain, there is\nnothing to prevent them offering the full-blooded realist answer:\n“It’s just the way the universe objectively is.”\nRelativism does not stand opposite objectivism; it stands opposite\nabsolutism (the form of cognitivism according to which the truth of\nmoral claims does not require relativization to any individual or\ngroup). One can be both a moral relativist and a moral objectivist\n(and thus a moral realist); conversely, one can be both a moral\nnon-objectivist (and thus a moral anti-realist) and a moral\nabsolutist. (See entries for\n relativism\n and\n moral relativism.)","\nOf course, someone could simply stipulate that moral realism includes\nthe denial of moral relativism, and perhaps the philosophical\ncommunity could be persuaded to adopt this definition (in which case\nthis entry would need to be revised). But it seems reasonable to\nsuspect that the common tendency to think that moral realism and moral\nrelativism are opposed to each other is, more often than not, due a\nconfused conflation of the objectivism/non-objectivism distinction and\nthe absolutism/relativism distinction.","\nThird and finally, it might be helpful to clarify the relationship\nbetween moral anti-realism and moral naturalism. The\nmoral naturalist believes that moral facts exist and fit within the\nworldview presented by science. (For example, a utilitarian view that\nidentifies moral obligation with the production of happiness will\ncount as a form of moral naturalism, since there is nothing\nparticularly scientifically mysterious about happiness.) A moral\nnaturalist may maintain that moral facts are objective in nature, in\nwhich case this moral naturalist will count as a moral realist. But a\nmoral naturalist may instead maintain that the moral facts are not\nobjective in nature, in which case this moral naturalist will count as\na moral anti-realist. Consider, for example, a simplistic\nnon-objectivist theory that identifies moral goodness (say) with\nwhatever a person approves of. Such a view would be a form of\nanti-realism (in virtue of its non-objectivism), but since the\nphenomenon of people approving of things is something that can be\naccommodated smoothly within a scientific framework, it would also be\na form of moral naturalism. Conversely, if a moral realist maintains\nthat the objective moral facts cannot be accommodated within the\nscientific worldview, then this moral realist will count as a moral\nnon-naturalist. (See entries for\n naturalism\n and\n moral naturalism.)","\nThe noncognitivist and the error theorist, it should be noted, count\nas neither moral naturalists nor moral non-naturalists, since they do\nnot believe in moral facts at all. These kinds of moral anti-realist,\nhowever, may well be naturalists in a more general sense: they may\nmaintain that the only items that we should admit into our ontology\nare those that fit within the scientific worldview. Indeed, it is\nquite likely that it is their commitment to this more general\nontological naturalism that lies behind the noncognitivist’s and\nthe error theorist’s moral skepticism, since they may deem that\nmoral properties (were they to exist) would have to have\ncharacteristics that cannot be accommodated within a naturalistic\nframework.","\nSumming up: Some moral anti-realists will count as moral skeptics, but\nsome may believe in moral knowledge. Some moral anti-realists will be\nrelativists, but some may be moral absolutists (and many are neither).\nSome moral anti-realists will be moral naturalists, but some may be\nmoral non-naturalists, and some will be neither moral naturalists nor\nnon-naturalists. These various positions can be combined into a\npotentially bewildering array of possible complex metaethical\npositions (e.g., non-skeptical, relativistic, non-naturalistic moral\nanti-realism)—though, needless to say, these views may vary\ngreatly in plausibility."],"section_title":"1. Characterizing Moral Anti-realism","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nIt is widely assumed that moral realism enjoys some sort of\npresumption in its favor that the anti-realist has to work to\novercome. Jonathan Dancy writes that “we take moral value to be\npart of the fabric of the world; … and we should take it in the\nabsence of contrary considerations that actions and agents do have the\nsorts of moral properties we experience in them” (1986: 172). In\na similar vein, David McNaughton claims “The realist’s\ncontention is that he has only to rebut the arguments designed to\npersuade us that moral realism is philosophically untenable in order\nto have made out his case” (1988: 40–41). David Brink\nconcurs: “We begin as (tacit) cognitivists and realists about\nethics.… Moral Realism should be our metaethical starting\npoint, and we should give it up only if it does involve unacceptable\nmetaphysical and epistemological commitments” (1989:\n23–24).","\nIt may be questioned, however, whether moral realism really does enjoy\nintuitive support, and also questioned whether, if it does, this\nshould burden the anti-realist with extra labor.","\nOn the first matter, it may be argued that some of the distinctions\ndrawn in distinguishing moral realism from anti-realism are too\nfine-grained or abstruse for “the folk” to have any\ndeterminate opinion. It is, for example, radically unclear to what\nextent common sense embraces the objectivity of moral facts.\nThere have been some empirical investigations ostensibly examining the\nextent to which ordinary people endorse moral objectivism (e.g.,\nGoodwin & Darley 2008; Uttich et al. 2014), but, upon examination,\nmany of these studies seem in fact to examine the extent to which\nordinary people endorse moral absolutism. (See Hopster 2019.)\nAnd if even professional researchers struggle to grasp the concept of\nmoral objectivity, it is difficult to maintain confidently that\n“the folk” have a firm and determinate intuition on the\nsubject. Furthermore, even if empirical investigation of collective\nopinion were to locate strong intuitions in favor of a\nmind-independent morality, there may be other equally robust\nintuitions in favor of morality being mind-dependent. (For\nexample, the fact that we seem unwilling to defer to experts when\nforming moral views appears to count against realism; see McGrath\n2011. Similarly, the fact that we do not expect a person necessarily\nto accept others’ reasons for their moral views seems to reveal\nanti-realist tendencies; see Foot 1958 for discussion.) Given the\ndifficulties in deciding and articulating just what kind of\nobjectivity is relevant to the moral realism/anti-realism division,\nand given the range and potential subtlety of options, it might be\nthought rash to claim that common sense has a firm opinion one way or\nthe other on this subject.","\nOn the second matter: even if we were to identify a widespread\nunivocal intuition in favor of moral realism, it remains unclear to\nwhat extent we should adopt a methodology that rewards moral realism\nwith a dialectical advantage when it comes to metaethics. By\ncomparison, we do not think that physicists should endeavor to come up\nwith intuitive theories. (There is, for example, a widespread\nerroneous intuition that a fast-moving ball exiting a curved tube will\ncontinue to travel on a curving trajectory (McCloskey et al. 1980).\nThe fact that Newtonian physics predicts that the ball will in fact\ncontinue on a straight trajectory is surely in no sense a mark against\nthe theory.) Moreover, it is important to distinguish between any such\npro-realist intuitions ex ante and ex post. Once\nsomeone has accepted considerations and arguments in favor of moral\nanti-realism, then any counter-intuitiveness that this conclusion\nhas—ex ante—may be considered irrelevant. One noteworthy\ntype of strategy here is the “debunking argument,” which\nseeks to undermine moral intuitions by showing that they are the\nproduct of processes that we have no grounds for thinking are reliable\nindicators of truth. (See Street 2006; O’Neill 2015; Joyce 2013,\n2016.) To the extent that the anti-realist can provide a plausible\nexplanation for why humans would tend to think of morality as\nobjective, even if it is not objective, then any counter-intuitiveness\nin the anti-realist’s failure to accommodate objectivity can no\nlonger be raised as an ongoing consideration against moral\nanti-realism.","\nA theory’s clashing with common sense is not the only way in\nwhich it can face a burden of proof. Of two theories, A and B, if A\nexplains a range of observable phenomena more readily than B, then\nproponents of B will have to undertake extra labor of squaring their\ntheory with the available evidence—and this may be the case even\nif B strikes people as the more intuitive theory. For example, perhaps\nNewtonian physics is more intuitive than Einsteinian, but there is\nobservable data—e.g., the results of the famous solar eclipse\nexperiments of 1919—that the latter theory is much better\nequipped to explain.","\nWhat is it, then, that metaethical theories are expected to explain?\nThe range of phenomena is ill-defined and open-ended, but is typically\ntaken to include such things as the manifest features of moral\nlanguage, the importance of morality in our lives, moral practices and\ninstitutions, the way moral considerations engage motivation, the\ncharacter of moral disagreement, and the acquisition of moral\nattitudes.","\nConsider the first of these explananda: moral language. Here it seems\nreasonable to claim that the noncognitivist shoulders a burden of\nproof. Moral predicates appear to function linguistically like any\nother predicate: Just as the sentence “The cat is brown”\nmay be used as an antecedent of a conditional, as a premise of an\nargument, as the basis of a question (“Is the cat\nbrown?”), have its predicate nominalized (“Brownness is\nhad by the cat”), be embedded in a propositional attitude claim\n(“Mary believes that the cat is brown”), and have the\ntruth predicate applied to it (“‘The cat is brown’\nis true”)—so too can all these things be done, without\nobvious incoherence, with a moral sentence like “Stealing is\nmorally wrong.” This is entirely as the cognitivist would\npredict. By contrast, for a noncognitivist who maintains (as Ayer did)\nthat this moral judgment amounts to nothing more than\n“Stealing!” uttered in a special disapproval-expressing\ntone, all of this linguistic evidence represents a major (and perhaps\ninsurmountable) challenge.","\nOther explananda, on the other hand, may reveal that it is the moral\nrealist who has the extra explaining to do. If moral properties are\ntaken to have an essential normativity—in terms of, say, placing\npractical demands upon us—then the realist faces the challenge\nof explaining how any such thing could exist objectively. The\nmoral non-objectivist, by contrast, sees moral normativity as\nsomething that we create—that practical demands arise from our\ndesires, emotions, values, judgments, practices, or institutions. Thus\nthe task of providing a moral ontology that accommodates normativity\nseems a much easier one for the non-objectivist than for the moral\nrealist. (The noncognitivist and the error theorist would seem to have\nan even easier time, since for them there is no moral ontology at\nall.)","\nThere remains a great deal of dispute concerning what the phenomena\nare that a metaethical theory should be expected to explain; and even\nwhen some such phenomenon is roughly agreed upon, there is often\nsignificant disagreement over its exact nature. For example, pretty\nmuch everyone agrees that any decent metaethical theory should be able\nto explain the close connection between moral judgment and\nmotivation—but it is a live question whether that connection\nshould be construed as a necessary one, or whether a reliably\ncontingent connection will suffice. (See Svavardóttir 2006;\nRosati 2021.) Even when such disputes can be settled, there remains\nplenty of room for arguing over the importance of the explanandum in\nquestion (relative to other explananda), and for arguing whether a\ngiven theory does indeed adequately explain the phenomenon.","\nIn short, attempts to establish the burden of proof are as slippery\nand indecisive in the debate between the moral realist and the moral\nanti-realist as they tend to be generally in philosophy. The matter is\ncomplicated by the fact that there are two kinds of burden-of-proof\ncase that can be pressed, and here they tend to pull against each\nother. On the one hand, it is widely assumed that common sense favors\nthe moral realist. On the other hand, moral realists face a cluster of\nexplanatory challenges concerning the nature of moral facts (how they\nrelate to non-moral facts, how we have access to them, why they have\npractical importance)—challenges that seem much more tractable\nfor the moral non-objectivist and often simply don’t arise for\neither the noncognitivist or the error theorist. This tension between\nwhat is considered to be the intuitive position and what is\nconsidered to be the empirically, metaphysically, and\nepistemologically defensible position, motivates and animates\nmuch of the debate between the moral realist and moral\nanti-realist."],"section_title":"2. Who Bears the Burden of Proof?","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nGiven that moral anti-realism is a disjunction of three views, then\nany argument for any of those views is an argument for moral\nanti-realism. By the same token, any argument against any of the three\nviews can contribute to an argument for moral realism, and if one is\npersuaded by arguments against all three, then one is committed to\nmoral realism. Here is not the place to present such arguments in\ndetail, but offer a flavor of the kinds of considerations that push\nphilosophers to and fro on these matters."],"section_title":"3. Arguing For and Against Moral Anti-realism","subsections":[{"content":["\nOn the face of it, when we make a public moral judgment, like\n“That act of stealing was morally wrong,” what we are\ndoing is asserting that the act of stealing in question instantiates a\ncertain property: moral wrongness. This raises a number of extremely\nthorny metaethical questions: What kind of property is moral\nwrongness? How does it relate to the natural properties instantiated\nby the action? How do we have epistemic access to the property? How do\nwe confirm whether something does or does not instantiate the\nproperty? (And so on.) The difficulty of answering such questions may\nlead one to reject the presupposition that prompted them: One might\ndeny that in making a moral judgment we are engaging in the assignment\nof properties at all. Such a rejection is, roughly speaking, the\nnoncognitivist proposal. (See entry for\n moral cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism.)","\nIt is impossible to characterize noncognitivism in a way that will\nplease everyone. Sometimes it is presented as a view about mental\nstates and sometimes about moral language. This is because it is a\nclaim about “moral judgments,” and we can consider moral\njudgments either as private mental acts or as public utterances. If we\nare thinking of moral judgments as mental states, then noncognitivism\nis the claim that moral judgments are not beliefs. If we are thinking\nof moral judgments as speech acts, then noncognitivism is the view\nthat moral judgments do not express beliefs—i.e., it is\nthe view that moral judgments are not assertions. Here, for brevity,\nthe latter formulation will be preferred.","\nIf moral judgments are not assertions, then what are they? Here the\ndifferent kinds of answers give rise to different forms of\nnoncognitivism. Ayer, as was mentioned earlier, maintained that when\nwe make a moral judgment we are expressing certain feelings, such as\napproval or disapproval. Another influential kind of noncognitivism\ncalled “prescriptivism” claims that moral judgments are\nreally veiled commands whose true meaning should be captured using the\nimperative mood: Someone who says “Stealing is morally\nwrong” is really saying something like “Don’t\nsteal!” (see Carnap 1935: 24–25). R.M. Hare (1952, 1963)\nrestricted this to commands that one is willing to universalize.","\nIf noncognitivism is defined as the negation of cognitivism—as a\ntheory about what moral judgments are not—then the two theories\nare not just contraries but contradictories. However, a degree of\nbenign relaxation of criteria allows for the possibility of\n“mixed” theories. If we consider noncognitivism not as a\npurely negative thesis, but as a range of positive proposals (such as\nthose just mentioned), then it becomes possible that the nature of\nmoral judgments combines both cognitivist and noncognitivist elements.\nFor example, moral judgments (as speech acts) may be two\nthings: They may be assertions and ways of issuing commands.\n(By analogy: To call someone a “kraut” is both to assert\nthat they are German and to express a derogatory attitude toward\npeople of this nationality.) C.L. Stevenson held such a mixed view\n(1944); for modern versions, see Copp 2001; Schroeder 2009; Svoboda\n2011.","\nAs mentioned, one of the major attractions of noncognitivism is that\nit is a means of sidestepping a number of thorny puzzles about\nmorality. In addition, there are several features of morality that, it\nhas been argued, the noncognitivist can accommodate more readily than\nthe cognitivist. Here are three.","\nFirst, it has often been argued that noncognitivism does a good job of\naccounting for the motivational efficacy of moral judgment. If, when I\nsay “Stealing is morally wrong,” I am expressing my\ndisapproval of stealing, and if disapproval is a motivation-engaging\nstate, then it seems to follow that when I sincerely judge that\nstealing is morally wrong, I will also be motivated not to steal. By\ncontrast, if a Humean view of psychology is accepted, according to\nwhich beliefs alone can never motivate, then the cognitivist must\nallow that moral judgment alone cannot motivate; it requires\nthe presence of certain desires as well. A number of philosophers have\nargued that the cognitivist view of moral motivation seems inadequate\n(Smith 1994; Toppinen 2004; see also Carbonell 2013). See entry for\n moral motivation.","\nSecond, it has been argued that moral disagreements have certain\nqualities that are accommodated better by the noncognitivist than the\ncognitivist. The fact that moral disagreements are often both vehement\nand seemingly intractable, for example, might be taken as evidence\nthat what is really going on is a clash of emotional attitudes rather\nthan a clash of beliefs (Stevenson 1948; Gibbard 1992; Blackburn\n1998).","\nThird, it has often been observed that we are markedly uncomfortable\nwith the idea that anyone should come to hold a moral view on the\nbasis of having deferred to an expert on morality—in contrast to\nthe way that we are perfectly comfortable with the idea that a person\nshould defer to experts when forming beliefs about, say, plate\ntectonics. This reluctance to defer to experts in forming our moral\nviews would make sense if what we are doing when we make a moral\njudgment is expressing our emotional attitudes on the matter. (See\nMcGrath 2009: 322, 2011; Hills 2011.)","\nStanding against these considerations in favor of noncognitivism are a\nnumber of weighty problems. The most well-known challenge for\nnoncognitivism is the so-called Frege-Geach problem. If\n“Stealing is morally wrong” is not even the kind of thing\nthat can be true or false, then how can we make sense of it when it is\nembedded in logically complex contexts (such as “If stealing is\nmorally wrong, then encouraging your brother to steal is morally\nwrong”), and how are we to make sense of it as a premise in a\nvalid argument (since validity is, by definition, a truth-preserving\nrelation)?","\nThere have been considerable efforts on behalf of noncognitivism to\nanswer this challenge. Simon Blackburn, for example, has pursued what\nhe calls a “quasi-realist” program (Blackburn 1984, 1993,\n1998). The quasi-realist is someone who endorses an anti-realist\nmetaphysical stance but who seeks, through philosophical maneuvering,\nto earn the right for moral discourse to enjoy all the\ntrappings of realist talk. Such a view may hold that although the\nunderlying logical structure of the sentence “Stealing is\nmorally wrong” is nothing more than “Stealing:\nBoo!”, it is nevertheless legitimate for ordinary speakers to\nsay things like “If stealing is morally wrong, then encouraging\nyour brother to steal is wrong” or “‘Stealing is\nmorally wrong’ is true.” One might, for instance, argue\nthat all that is required to make it acceptable to consider\n“Stealing is morally wrong” true or false (and thus a\nlegitimate antecedent in a conditional) is that it has the appropriate\nsurface propositional grammar (“x is P”); and one might\nmaintain that choosing to employ such grammar to express one’s\nnoncognitive attitudes brings no ontological commitment to any\ntroublesome property of moral wrongness.","\nOne of the main challenges for the quasi-realist is to maintain a\ntheoretic distance from the moral realist. If the quasi-realist\nprogram succeeds in vindicating the use of the truth predicate for\nmoral sentences, and if in addition it makes it permissible to say\n“It is a fact that stealing is wrong,” “It is a\nmind-independent fact that stealing is wrong,” “Stealing\nwould be wrong even if our attitude toward it were different,”\nand so on—mimicking all and any of the moral realist’s\nassertions—then in what sense is quasi-realism\nquasi-realism?—Why has it not simply collapsed into the\nrobust moral realism that it set out to oppose? (See Wright 1988;\nDreier 2018.) [A quick note on terminology: Although I have here\npresented Blackburn’s quasi-realism as a potential avenue for\nthe noncognitivist to pursue, it should be noted that Blackburn\nhimself eschews the label “noncognitivism” to describe the\nposition he defends (Blackburn 1996); his preferred term is\n“projectivism.” (For discussion of the relation between\nthe two views—noncognitivism and projectivism—see Joyce\n2009.)]"],"subsection_title":"3.1 Noncognitivism"},{"content":["\nThe error theorist is a cognitivist: maintaining that moral judgment\nconsists of beliefs and assertions. However, the error theorist thinks\nthat these beliefs and assertions are never true. (The error theorist\ncontrasts here with what can be called the “success\ntheorist.”) Moral judgments are never true because the\nproperties that would be necessary to render them\ntrue—properties like moral wrongness, moral goodness, virtue,\nevil, etc.—simply don’t exist, or at least are not\ninstantiated. Defenders of moral error theory include Mackie 1977,\nHinckfuss 1987, Joyce 2001, and Olson 2014.","\nIf I assert that my dog is a reptile, then I’ve asserted\nsomething false—though in this case there are other things that\nare reptiles. If I assert that my dog is a unicorn then again\nI’ve asserted something false—though in this case\nthere’s nothing in the actual world to which I could attach the\npredicate “… is a unicorn” and end up with a true\nassertion. The error theorist thinks that employing moral discourse is\nrather like talking about unicorns, though in the case of unicorns\nmost people now know that they don’t exist, while in the case of\nmoral properties most people are unaware of the error. To be an error\ntheorist about unicorns doesn’t require that you think unicorns\nare impossible creatures; it’s enough that you think\nthat they simply don’t actually exist. In the same way, to be a\nmoral error theorist doesn’t require that you think that moral\nproperties couldn’t possibly exist; it would be enough to think\nthat they are never actually instantiated. (Note that there may be a\ndifference between saying “Property P is never actually\ninstantiated” and “Property P doesn’t exist,”\nbut that’s a problem for metaphysicians to sort out. Holding\neither view with respect to moral properties is enough to make one a\nmoral error theorist.)","\nTo be an error theorist about unicorns does not mean that every\nassertion involving the word “unicorn” is false. There\nwould be no error, for example, in asserting “Unicorns do not\nexist,” “The ancient Greeks believed that unicorns lived\nin India,” or “My dog is not a unicorn.” What is\ndistinctive about these three sentences is that one would not, in\nasserting them, be committing oneself to the existence of unicorns.\n(It would be rather troubling if this were not true of the first, in\nparticular!) Similarly, the moral error theorist may allow that the\nfollowing are true: “Moral wrongness does not exist,”\n“Augustine believed that stealing pears was wrong,” and\n“Stealing is not morally wrong.”","\nThe last example (“Stealing is not morally wrong”) calls\nfor an extra comment. In ordinary conversation—where,\npresumably, the possibility of moral error theory is not considered a\nlive option—someone who claims that X is not wrong\nwould be taken to be implying that X is morally good or at\nleast morally permissible. And if “X” denotes\nsomething awful, like torturing innocent people, then this can be used\nto make the error theorist look awful. But when we are doing\nmetaethics, and the possibility of moral error theory is on the table,\nthen this ordinary implication breaks down. The error theorist\ndoesn’t think that torturing innocent people is morally wrong,\nbut doesn’t think that it is morally good or morally permissible\neither. It is important that criticisms of the moral error theorist do\nnot trade on equivocating between the implications that hold in\nordinary contexts and the implications that hold in metaethical\ncontexts.","\nThe sentence “Unicorns exist” is false, but there are\nnevertheless various contexts where one might have reason to utter the\nsentence: telling a story, joking, acting, speaking metaphorically,\ngiving an example of a two-word sentence, etc. What is distinctive\nabout these contexts is that one would not be asserting the\nsentence, and thus (as before) one would not, in making these\nutterances, be committing oneself to the existence of unicorns.\nSimilarly, the moral error theorist might propose that we carry on\nsaying things like “Stealing is morally wrong” but in a\nmanner that deprives our utterances of ontological commitment to moral\nproperties and, thus, removes the error from our discourse.\nIf the error theorist proposes to accomplish this by modeling moral\nlanguage on a way that familiar engagement with fictions nullifies\ncommitment, then such a moral error theorist is a\nfictionalist. (See entry for\n fictionalism;\n see also Kalderon 2005; Joyce 2017.) Other moral error theorists may\nthink that we would be better off if we pretty much eliminated moral\ntalk from our thoughts and language. Such moral error theorists are\nknown as “abolitionists” or “eliminativists.”\n(I say “pretty much” since presumably even the\nabolitionist allows that we can carry on using moral language in the\ncontext of plays, jokes, etc.) (For debate between fictionalists and\nabolitionists, see Garner & Joyce 2019.)","\nError theory is commonly defined as the view that moral judgments are\n(i) truth-evaluable but (ii) always false. But there are various\nreasons for preferring to render (i) as a claim about speech\nacts—that moral judgments aim at the truth (i.e., they\nare assertions)—and (ii) as the broader claim that moral\njudgments are “untrue” rather than “false.”\nOne might, for example, be drawn to error theory because one thinks\nthat there is a sufficient amount of indeterminacy, fragmentation, or\nconfusion surrounding moral concepts that the judgments that employ\nthem, while satisfying the conditions for being beliefs and\nassertions, do not satisfy the conditions for having truth value.\nPerhaps, for example, moral concepts are historically derived from a\ntheistic framework within which they made sense, yet removed from\nwhich they are mere remnants that evoke strong intuitions but, upon\nexamination, make no sense. (See Anscombe 1958; MacIntyre 1984.) If\nthis is so, then it may be argued that the concept moral\nwrongness is just so ill-defined that someone who makes the moral\njudgment “Stealing is morally wrong” fails to put forward\na proposition that could be true; but since the speaker and audience\nare presumably unaware of this fact, the judgment should still count\nas an assertion. (One needs to tread carefully here. The proposal that\nmoral judgments lack truth value is traditionally associated with\nnoncognitivism. But the noncognitivist thinks that moral judgments\nlack truth value because they are not assertions at all. The error\ntheorist, by contrast, thinks that moral judgments are\n(typically) asserted, but that they fail to be true. Failing to have a\ntruth value is one way of failing to be true. Being false is the other\nway.)","\nMost arguments for moral error theory, however, presuppose that moral\nconcepts do have a reasonably determinate content, but that there is\nsimply nothing in the world to satisfy this content. The traditional\nform of argument for moral error theory, thus, has two steps. First,\nthe error theorist undertakes the conceptual step of\nestablishing that in participating in moral discourse we commit\nourselves to the world being a certain way (that it contains certain\ninstantiated properties, etc.). Then the error theorist undertakes the\nontological step of establishing that the world is not that\nway. The latter may be achieved (in principle, at least) either\nthrough a priori means or through a posteriori\nmethods.","\nOne example of an argument with this structure is as follows. First it\nis noted that “S morally ought to φ” is true\nonly if S is a moral agent. The further conceptual steps of\nthe argument then seek to establish that in order to be moral agent,\nS must have the capacity to perform actions that are morally\nblameworthy and praiseworthy, and that these capacities presuppose\nthat S has a certain kind of control over their actions. The\nontological step of the argument then seeks to establish that no such\nautonomous control exists in nature; it’s an illusion. (See\nentry for\n skepticism about moral responsibility.)\n A couple of iterations of modus tollens then take us to the\nconclusion that “S morally ought to φ” is\nnever true.","\nThe argument just sketched would locate the moral error in a mistake\nwe make about the kind of creatures we are. The more widely discussed\narguments, however, locate the moral error in a mistake we make about\nthe kind of world we inhabit. John Mackie (who coined the term\n“error theory” in 1977) argues that when we participate in\nmoral discourse we commit ourselves to the existence of objective\nvalues and objective prescriptions, but there are no such things.\nEssentially, Mackie argues that the moral realist is correct about\nmorality conceptually speaking—we are moral\nrealists—but the moral realist is incorrect about how the world\nactually is. Moral facts place demands upon us, but (Mackie asks) how\ncould such demands exist objectively? This would\nseem to require rules of conduct somehow written into the fabric of\nthe universe, and nothing in our understanding of the objective\nnaturalistic world (Mackie goes on) suggests that anything of the kind\nexists. Mackie famously calls such properties “queer” (in\nwhat seems now an increasingly anachronistic use of the term).","\nMackie occasionally cashes out his “argument from\nqueerness” in terms of practical reasons. He writes that\n“to say that [objective prescriptions] are intrinsically\naction-guiding [which is one way he sometimes describes the\nnormativity whose existence he denies] is to say that the reasons that\nthey give for doing or for not doing something are independent of that\nagent’s desires or purposes” (Mackie 1982: 115). Surely if\nsomeone is morally required to do something (Mackie thinks), then that\nperson must have a reason to do it. (After all, if one were to deny\nthis, then what kind of “normative teeth” would moral\nproperties have? “Yes, I know that X is morally wrong,\nbut I have no reason to avoid moral wrongness, so the wrongness of\nX is nothing to me” would become, in principle, an\nacceptable thing to say.) But since morality often seems to demand\nthat we do things that we don’t want to do, then morality seems\nto imply the existence of reasons to do things that we don’t\nwant to do. One could, at this point, simply throw up one’s\nhands and claim that such reasons would be too weird to countenance.\nBut one could also go beyond the “argument from queerness”\nby instead arguing methodically that a Humean (instrumentalist) theory\nof reasons for action—according to which reasons ultimately\ndepend on our ends—is superior to any form of practical\nnon-instrumentalism. (See entry for\n reason for action: internal and external.)\n According to such a view, the practical non-instrumentalist is\ncorrect about morality conceptually speaking—in\nengaging in moral discourse, we commit ourselves to\nnon-instrumentalist reasons—but the practical\nnon-instrumentalist is incorrect about how the world actually is: a\nHumean theory of reasons for action is more defensible. (It is worth\nnoting that endorsing Humean instrumentalism about reasons for action\ndoes not in any obvious way commit one to the endorsement of\ninstrumentalism about other kinds of reasons, such as epistemic\nreasons. See Joyce 2019; Cowie 2019.)","\nIf an argument for moral error theory has two steps—the\nconceptual and the ontological—then there are two places to\nobject. If we consider Mackie’s argument, for example, then one\nkind of opponent will agree that objective values and prescriptions\nwould be too weird to countenance, but maintain that it doesn’t\nmatter because moral discourse is not committed to the existence of\nsuch strange creatures. Another kind of opponent will agree with\nMackie that morality is committed to the existence of objective values\nand prescriptions, but maintain that there is nothing particularly\nstrange about them.","\nError theorists must be prepared to defend themselves on both fronts.\nThis job is made difficult by the fact that it may be hard to\narticulate precisely what it is that is so troubling about morality.\nThis failure need not be due to a lack of clear thinking or\nimagination on the error theorists’ part, for the thing that is\ntroubling them may be that there is something deeply mysterious about\nmorality. The moral error theorist may, for example, perceive that\nmoral imperatives are imbued with a kind of mystical practical\nauthority—a quality that, being mysterious, of course\ncannot be articulated in terms satisfactory to an analytic\nphilosopher. Such an error theorist is forced to fall back on vague\nmetaphors in presenting their case: Moral properties have a\n“to-be-pursuedness” to them (Mackie 1977: 40), moral facts\nwould require that “the universe takes sides” (Burgess\n[1978] 2007), moral believers are committed to “demands as real\nas trees and as authoritative as orders from headquarters”\n(Garner 1994: 61), and so on. Indeed, it may be the vague, equivocal,\nquasi-mystical, and/or ineliminably metaphorical imponderabilia of\nmoral discourse that so troubles the error theorist. (See Hussain\n2004.)","\nEven if the error theorist can articulate a clear and determinate\nproblematic feature of morality, the dispute over whether this quality\nshould count as a “non-negotiable component” of morality\nhas a tendency to lead quickly to impasse, for there is no accepted\nmethodology for deciding when a discourse is “centrally\ncommitted” to a given thesis. What is evidently needed is a\nworkable model of the identity criteria for concepts (allowing us\nconfidently to either affirm or deny such claims as “The concept\nof moral obligation is the concept of an objective\nrequirement”)—but we have no such model, and there is no\nconsensus even on what approximate shape such a model would take.","\nIt is also possible that the most reasonable account of conceptual\ncontent will leave many concepts with significantly indistinct\nborders. There may simply be no fact of the matter about whether moral\ndiscourse is committed to the existence of non-instrumental reasons\n(for example). Thinking along these lines, David Lewis makes use of\nthe distinction between speaking strictly and speaking loosely:\n“Strictly speaking, Mackie is right: genuine values would have\nto meet an impossible condition, so it is an error to think there are\nany. Loosely speaking, the name may go to a claimant that deserves it\nimperfectly … What to make of the situation is mainly a matter\nof temperament” (Lewis [1989] 2000: 93). Lewis’s own\ntemperament leads him to seek to vindicate value discourse, and he\nthinks that this can be done by supporting a dispositional theory of\nvalue (of a kind to be discussed in the next section). But since there\nis no logical or methodological requirement that we should prefer\nspeaking loosely over speaking strictly, or vice versa, then this\nwould leave the dispute between moral error theorists and success\ntheorists a fundamentally undecidable matter—there may simply be\nno fact of the matter about who is correct. (See Joyce 2012.)"],"subsection_title":"3.2 Error Theory"},{"content":["\nTo deny both noncognitivism and the moral error theory suffices to\nmake one a minimal moral realist. Traditionally, however, moral\nrealism has required the acceptance of a further thesis: the\nobjectivity of morality. “Moral non-objectivism” denotes\nthe view that moral facts exist and are mind-dependent (in the\nrelevant sense), while “moral objectivism” holds that they\nexist and are mind-independent. (Note that this taxonomy makes the two\ncontraries rather than contradictories; the error theorist and the\nnoncognitivist count as neither objectivists nor non-objectivists. The\nerror theorist may, however, be an objectivist in a different sense:\nin holding that objectivity is a feature of morality\nconceptually speaking.) Let us say that if one is a moral\ncognitivist and a moral success theorist and a moral\nobjectivist, then one is a robust\nmoral realist.","\nYet this third condition, even more than the first two, introduces a\ngreat deal of messiness into the dialectic, and the line between the\nrealist and the anti-realist becomes obscure (and, one might think,\nless interesting). The basic problem is that there are many\nnon-equivalent ways of understanding the relation of\nmind-(in)dependence, and thus one philosopher’s realism\nbecomes another philosopher’s anti-realism. At least one\nphilosopher, Gideon Rosen, has expressed pessimism that the relevant\nnotion of objectivity can be sharpened to a useful philosophical\npoint:","\nTo be sure, we do have “intuitions” of a sort about when\nthe rhetoric of objectivity is appropriate and when it isn’t.\nBut these intuitions are fragile, and every effort I know to find the\nprinciple that underlies them collapses. We sense that there\nis a heady metaphysical thesis at stake in these debates over realism\n… [b]ut after a point, when every attempt to say just what the\nissue is has come up empty, we have no real choice but to conclude\nthat despite all the wonderful, suggestive imagery, there is\nultimately nothing in the neighborhood to discuss. (1994: 279. See\nalso Dworkin 1996.)\n","\nAs Rosen says, metaphors to mark non-objectivism from objectivism are\neasy to come by and easy to motivate in the uninitiated. The\nobjectivist about X likens our X-oriented activity\nto astronomy, geography, or exploration; the non-objectivist likens it\nto sculpture or imaginative writing. (These are Michael\nDummett’s metaphors (1978: xxv).) The objectivist sees the goal\nof our inquiries as being to “carve the beast of reality at the\njoints” (as the popular paraphrase of Plato’s\nPhaedrus puts it); the non-objectivist sees our inquiries as\nthe application of a “cookie cutter”: imposing a\nnoncompulsory conceptual framework onto an undifferentiated reality\n(to use Hilary Putnam’s equally memorable image (1987: 19)). The\nobjectivist sees inquiry as a process of detection, our\njudgments aiming to reflect the extension of the truth\npredicate with respect to a certain subject; the non-objectivist sees\ninquiry as a process of projection, our judgments\ndetermining the extension of the truth predicate regarding\nthat subject.","\nThe claim “X is mind-(in)dependent” is certainly\ntoo coarse-grained to do serious work in capturing these powerful\nmetaphors; it is, perhaps, better thought of as a slogan or as a piece\nof shorthand. There are two conspicuous points at which the phrase\nrequires precisification. First, we need to decide what exactly the\nword “mind” stands for. It can be construed strictly and\nliterally, to mean mental activity, or it can be understood\nin a more liberal manner, to include such things as conceptual\nschemes, theories, methods of proof, linguistic practices,\nconventions, sentences, institutions, culture, means of epistemic\naccess, etc. Were the moral facts to depend on any of these\nanthropocentric things, the anti-realist imagery of humans as\ninventors of morality may seem more apt than that of humans as\ndiscoverers. Second, we need to decide what kind of relation is\ndenoted by “(in)dependent.” Consider the following\npossibilities, any of which might form the basis of the claim that\ngoodness depends on mental activity (in this case, for\nsimplicity, Mary’s attitude of approval):","\n\n\nx is good iff Mary approves of x.\n\n\nx is good iff Mary would approve of x (in\nsuch-and-such circumstances).\n\n\nx is good iff x merits Mary’s approval.\n","\nThe catalog can be made longer, depending on whether the\n“iff” is construed as necessary or contingent, conceptual,\na priori, or a posteriori. To illustrate further the\nubiquity of and variation among mind-dependence relations on the menu\nof moral theories, consider the following:","\nIndeed, it is difficult to think of any serious version of moral\nsuccess theory for which the moral facts depend in no way on\nmental activity. Yet to conclude that the distinction between minimal\nand robust realism cannot be upheld would be premature. Many\nmetaethicists who reject noncognitivism and the error theory, and thus\ncount as minimal realists, continue to define their position (often\nunder the label “constructivism”) in contrast to a realist\nview. (See Bagnoli 2002; Ronzoni 2010; Street 2010, 2012. See also the\nentry on\n constructivism in metaethics.)\n The challenge is to pick among the various mind-(in)dependence\nrelations in the hope of drawing a distinction that is philosophically\ninteresting and meshes satisfactorily with our preexisting\nphilosophical taxonomy, such that some success theorists count as\nrealists and some do not.","\nElizabeth Tropman (2018) argues that the best way of understanding\nmoral objectivity is as follows: The fact that x is\nM (where “… is M” is some moral\npredicate) is objective if and only if this fact doesn’t depend\nonly on any actual or hypothetical agent’s (i) belief or\nnoncognitive attitude about x’s being M, or\n(ii) noncognitive attitude about x. According to this view,\nmany of the aforementioned examples of moral theories, although making\nmoral facts dependent in various ways on various kinds of mental\nphenomena, will not count as non-objective. Consider, for example, the\nutilitarian view that what makes a particular action, φ, morally\nobligatory is that it produces maximal happiness. According to this\nview, although some agent’s (or agents’) mental\nstates—in this case, their happiness—may contribute to\nφ’s moral status, they do not exclusively determine it.\nOther factors also contribute to φ’s moral status, such as\nhow φ compares with other potential actions in terms of happiness\nproduction,. Therefore, on Tropman’s view, this form of\nutilitarianism would satisfy the requirements for morality to count as\nobjective.","\nThe attractions of moral non-objectivism are that it ticks a lot of\nboxes that its competitors fail to tick. Unlike noncognitivism or\nerror theory, moral non-objectivism is a form of moral anti-realism\nthat allows for the existence of moral beliefs, moral facts, and moral\ntruth, and thus also potentially makes conceptual space for such\nthings as moral progress and moral knowledge. Unlike moral realism, by\nmaking the moral facts depend on us, moral non-objectivism seems to\nhave an easier time accounting for a moral ontology that is both\nnaturalistic and normative.","\nGiven the wide variety of versions of moral non-objectivity,\nidentifying generic problems is not a straightforward task. One way of\nbringing out some potential worries is to see the non-objectivist as\nfacing a dilemma. Moral non-objectivism comes in both relativistic and\nabsolutist flavors, and either way one goes poses challenges.","\nConsider first an absolutist version on non-objectivism. Here we would\nhave to identify some agent or group of agents whose beliefs or\nnoncognitive attitudes determine the moral facts. Reasonable\ncontenders for this role are not going to be actual particular people.\nIt would not, for example, be a reasonable theory that maintained that\nthe moral facts for everyone throughout all time are determined by\nwhat Richard Joyce thinks on the matter. (The only plausible contender\nfor this role might be God, but such a theory faces its own\narray of problems.) Rather, absolutist non-objectivists are likely to\nplump for idealized hypothetical agents. Roderick Firth (1952), for\nexample, identifies moral properties with dispositions to prompt\nresponsive attitudes in an “ideal observer”—where\nthe ideal observer is defined in terms such as omniscience,\ndisinterestedness, and dispassionateness. (Slightly confusingly for\nour purposes, Firth explicitly characterizes this theory as an\nobjectivist one, but this is because he has in mind a kind of\nexistential mind-dependence relation. The moral status of an\naction, on this view, doesn’t depend on the existence of an\nideal observer’s mental activity; rather, it depends on how such\nan agent counterfactually would respond. We can consider this as\nfurther evidence of the difficulties in nailing down a fixed notion of\nmoral objectivity.) A structurally similar version of\nabsolutist non-objectivism is Ronald Milo’s contractarian\nconstructivism (1995), according to which the moral facts are\ndetermined by the choices that would be made by a hypothetical\nidealized group of rational contractors. (See also Scanlon 1998.)","\nThe challenge for such theories is to explain why one should\ncare about the moral status of actions. Since the person or\ngroup that determines the moral status of my actions is not\nme, and is not even someone I’ve ever met or\nnecessarily care about, then why should their hypothetical responses\nmatter to me? Any particular proposed action of mine will have an\ninfinity of dispositional properties. My proposed action of, say,\nstealing a newspaper may have the dispositional property that a\nFirthian ideal observer would disapprove of it, while simultaneously\nhaving the dispositional property that a Miloesque idealized group of\nrational contractors would choose to refrain from it. But it also has\na myriad of other dispositions to prompt responses in hypothetical\nagents: it may also be such that drunken Vikings would heartily cheer\nit, be such that zealous medieval samurai would think it dishonorable,\nbe such that Soviet communists seeking to promote the Workers’\nRevolution would regard it as obligatory, and so on. The question is\nwhy I, in trying to decide how to act, should care about any of these\ndispositional properties—or (perhaps more pointedly) why I\nshould care about one of them very much indeed while ignoring all the\nothers. Simply labeling one of these dispositional properties\n“moral wrongness” doesn’t make that property\nmatter.","\nOne response to this challenge is to make the idealized judges, whose\nbeliefs or noncognitive states determine the moral status of\nagents’ actions, versions of the agents themselves (see Carson\n1984). Perhaps I have reason to care about what I would think\nif I were, say, fully informed and had fully reflected on the matter.\nThis brings us back to the other horn of the dilemma: the relativistic\nversion on non-objectivism. The problem is that securing the practical\nsignificance of moral facts in this manner (something that the\nabsolutist version struggles to secure) comes at a price. If you and I\nare quite different people—with different desires, interests,\nand goals—then the idealized version of me may have a different\nresponse to a situation than the idealized version of you would have\n(see Sobel 1999). In this case, the very same action may be morally\nright relative to me and morally wrong relative to you, and\nthat’s all there is to it: there would be no way for you and me\nto settle our moral disagreement. Indeed, there may not even\nbe a disagreement, since if when I say “X is\nmorally right” I mean … relative to idealized\nme, and when you say “No, X is not morally\nright” you mean … relative to idealized you,\nthen we are not really contradicting each other. (See entry for\n moral relativism.)\n If relativistic non-objectivism makes moral disagreement disappear,\nthen it very probably also makes the notion of moral progress\ndisappear. If the moral views I held in the past were true\nrelative to me then (though false relative to me now), and my\ncurrent very different moral views are true relative to me now (but\nfalse relative to past me), then the best one could say on behalf of\nmoral progress is that there has been progress from my current\npoint of view (something that will be seen as moral deterioration\nfrom my past point of view). To the extent, then, that we do wish to\naccommodate the existence of moral disagreement and moral progress,\nrelativistic non-objectivism has some explaining to do. (Note that the\nversion of relativistic non-objectivism just discussed is\nindividual-relative, but the same problems concerning disagreement and\nmoral progress would arise if a culture-oriented version of relativism\nwere examined instead.)","\nThe proposal that moral facts are non-objective—that morality is\nsomething created, not discovered—is often rejected in popular\ndiscussion because people have only crude versions of non-objectivism\nin mind, such as views that would make the moral facts for a person be\njust whatever whimsically suits them (e.g., “X is\nmorally wrong” = “I disapprove of X”). But\nno professional philosopher endorses such a view; nobody thinks that\nthe non-objectivity of morality would be like the non-objectivity of\nchoosing your favorite ice cream flavor. Serious forms of moral\nnon-objectivism are sophisticated and subtle. Still, there is a real\nworry that if the non-objectivism is too\nsophisticated—especially if it looks to the responses of highly\nidealized hypothetical agents as being determinative of the moral\nfacts—then the question of why, on this account, morality would\nmatter to non-idealized non-hypothetical agents comes to the\nfore."],"subsection_title":"3.3 Non-objectivism"}]},{"main_content":["\nThis entry has not attempted to adjudicate the rich and noisy debate\nbetween the moral realist and moral anti-realist, but rather has\nattempted to clarify just what their debate is about. But even this\nmuch more modest task is doomed to lead to unsatisfactory results, for\nthere is much confusion—perhaps a hopeless\nconfusion—about how the terms of the debate should be drawn up.\nIt is entirely possible that when subjected to acute critical\nexamination, the traditional dialectic between the moral realist and\nthe moral anti-realist will crumble into a bunch of evocative\nmetaphors from which well-formed philosophical theses cannot be\nextracted. If this is true, it would not follow that metaethics is\nbankrupt; far from it—it may be more accurate to think that\nmodern metaethics has prospered to such an extent that the old terms\nno longer fit its complex landscape.","\nBut for present, at least, the terms “moral realist” and\n“moral anti-realist” seem firmly entrenched. With so much\nill-defined, however, it would seem close to pointless to conduct\nmetaethical debate under these terms. This latitude means\nthat the terms “moral realist” and “moral\nanti-realist” are free to be bandied with rhetorical\nforce—more as badges of honor or terms of abuse (as the case may\nbe) than as useful descriptive labels. Rather like arguments over\nwhether some avant-garde gallery installation does or does not count\nas “art,” taxonomic bickering over whether a given\nphilosopher is or is not a “moral realist” is an activity\nas tiresome as it is fruitless.","\nJust as important as gaining a clear and distinct understanding of\nthese labels is gaining an appreciation of what of real consequence\nturns on the debate. This seems particularly pressing here because a\nnatural suspicion is that much of the opposition to moral anti-realism\ndevelops from a nebulous but nagging practical concern about what\nmight happen—to individuals, to the community, to\nsocial order—if moral anti-realism, in one guise or another,\nwere widely adopted. The embrace of moral anti-realism, it is assumed,\nwill have an insidious influence. This concern presupposes that most\nof the folk are already pretheoretically inclined toward\nmoral realism—an assumption that was queried earlier. But even\nif it is true that most people are naive moral realists, the question\nof what would happen if they ceased to be so is an empirical matter,\nconcerning which neither optimism nor pessimism seems prima facie more\nwarranted than the other. As with the opposition to moral\nnon-objectivism, the more general opposition to moral anti-realism is\nfrequently based on an under-estimation of the resources available to\nthe anti-realist—on an unexamined assumption that the silliest,\ncrudest, or most pernicious version will stand as a good\nrepresentative of a whole range of extremely varied and often\nsophisticated theories."],"section_title":"4. Conclusion","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nTraditionally, to hold a realist position with respect to X\\nis to hold that X exists objectively. On this view, moral\\nanti-realism is the denial of the thesis that moral\\nproperties—or facts, objects, relations, events, etc. (whatever\\ncategories one is willing to countenance)—exist objectively.\\nThis could involve either (1) the denial that moral properties exist\\nat all, or (2) the acceptance that they do exist but this existence is\\n(in the relevant sense) non-objective. There are broadly two ways of\\nendorsing (1): moral noncognitivism and moral error theory. Proponents\\nof (2) may be variously thought of as moral non-objectivists, or\\nidealists, or constructivists. So understood, moral anti-realism is\\nthe disjunction of three theses:\",\n \"\\nUsing such labels is not a precise science, nor an uncontroversial\\nmatter; here they are employed just to situate ourselves roughly. In\\nthis spirit of preliminary imprecision, these views can be initially\\ncharacterized as follows:\",\n \"\\nMoral noncognitivism holds that our moral judgments\\nare not in the business of aiming at truth. So, for example, A.J. Ayer\\ndeclared that when we say “Stealing money is wrong” we do\\nnot express a proposition that can be true or false, but rather it is\\nas if we say “Stealing money!!” with the tone of\\nvoice indicating that a special feeling of disapproval is being\\nexpressed (Ayer [1936] 1971: 110). Note how the predicate\\n“… is wrong” has disappeared in Ayer’s\\ntranslation schema; thus the issues of whether the property of\\nwrongness exists, and whether that existence is objective, also\\ndisappear.\",\n \"\\nThe moral error theorist thinks that although our\\nmoral judgments aim at the truth, they systematically fail to secure\\nit: the world simply doesn’t contain the relevant\\n“stuff” to render our moral judgments true. For a more\\nfamiliar analogy, compare what an atheist usually claims about\\nreligious judgments. On the face of it, religious discourse is\\ncognitivist in nature: it would seem that when someone says “God\\nexists” or “God loves you” they are usually\\nasserting something that purports to be true. However, according to\\nthe atheist, the world isn’t furnished with the right kind of\\nstuff (gods, afterlife, miracles, etc.) necessary to render these\\nassertions true. The moral error theorist claims that when we say\\n“Stealing is morally wrong” we are asserting that the act\\nof stealing instantiates the property of moral wrongness, but in fact\\nthere is no such property, or at least nothing in the world\\ninstantiates it, and thus the utterance is untrue.\",\n \"\\nNon-objectivism (as it will be called here) allows\\nthat moral facts exist but holds that they are non-objective. The\\nslogan version comes from Hamlet: “there is nothing either good\\nor bad, but thinking makes it so.” For a quick example of a\\nnon-objective fact, consider the different properties that a\\nparticular diamond might have. It is true that the diamond is made of\\ncarbon, and also true that the diamond is worth $1000, say. But the\\nstatus of these facts seems different. That the diamond is carbon\\nseems an objective fact: it doesn’t depend on what we think of\\nthe matter. (We could all be under the impression that it is not\\ncarbon, and all be wrong.) That the diamond is worth $1000, by\\ncontrast, seems to depend on us. If we all thought that it was worth\\nmore (or less), then it would be worth more (or less).\",\n \"\\n[This entry uses the label “non-objectivism” instead of\\nthe simple “subjectivism” since there is an entrenched\\nusage in metaethics for using the latter to denote the thesis that in\\nmaking a moral judgment one is reporting (as opposed to expressing)\\none’s own mental attitudes (e.g., “Stealing is morally\\nwrong” means “I disapprove of stealing”). So\\nunderstood, subjectivism is a kind of non-objectivist theory, but\\nthere are many other kinds of non-objectivist theory, too.]\",\n \"\\nIt is tempting to construe this idea of non-objectivity as\\n“mind-dependence,” though this, as we will see below, is a\\ntricky notion, since something may be mind-independent in one sense\\nand mind-dependent in another. Cars, for example, are designed and\\nconstructed by creatures with minds, and yet in another sense cars are\\nclearly concrete entities whose ongoing existence does not depend on\\nour mental activity. Those who feel pessimistic that the notion of\\nmind-dependence can be straightened out might prefer to characterize\\nmoral realism in a way that makes no reference to objectivity. There\\nis also the concern that the objectivity clause threatens to render\\nmoral anti-realism trivially true, since there is little room for\\ndoubting that the moral status of actions usually (if not always)\\ndepends in some manner on mental phenomena, such as the\\nintentions with which the action was performed or the episodes of\\npleasure and pain that ensue from it. (See Sayre-McCord 1986; also his\\nthe entry on\\n moral realism.)\\n Whether such pessimism is warranted is not something to be decided\\nhastily. Perhaps the judicious course is to make a terminological\\ndistinction between minimal moral realism—which is the\\ndenial of noncognitivism and error theory—and robust moral\\nrealism—which in addition asserts the objectivity of moral\\nfacts. (See Rosen 1994 for this distinction.) In what follows,\\nhowever, “moral realism” will continue to be used to\\ndenote the traditional robust version.\",\n \"\\nIf moral anti-realism is understood in this manner, then there are\\nseveral things with which it is important not to confuse it.\",\n \"\\nFirst, moral anti-realism is not a form of moral\\nskepticism. If we take moral skepticism to be the claim that\\nthere is no such thing as moral knowledge, and we take knowledge to be\\njustified true belief, then there are three ways of being a moral\\nskeptic: one can deny that moral judgments are beliefs, one can deny\\nthat moral judgments are ever true, or one can deny that moral\\njudgments are ever justified. The noncognitivist makes the first of\\nthese denials, and the error theorist makes the second, thus\\nnoncognitivists and error theorists count as both moral anti-realists\\nand moral skeptics. However, since the non-objectivity of some fact\\ndoes not pose a particular problem regarding the possibility of\\none’s knowing it (I might know that a certain diamond is worth\\n$1000, for example), then there is nothing to stop the moral\\nnon-objectivist from accepting the existence of moral knowledge. So\\nmoral non-objectivism is a form of moral anti-realism that need not be\\na form of moral skepticism. Conversely, one might maintain that moral\\njudgments are sometimes objectively true—thus being a moral\\nrealist—while also maintaining that moral judgments always lack\\njustification—thus being a moral skeptic. (See entry for\\n moral skepticism.)\",\n \"\\nSpeaking more generally, moral anti-realism, as it has been defined\\nhere, contains no epistemological clause: it is silent on the question\\nof whether we are justified in making moral judgments. This is worth\\nnoting since moral realists often want to support a view of morality\\nthat would guarantee our justified access to a realm of objective\\nmoral facts. But any such epistemic guarantee will need to be argued\\nfor separately; it is not implied by realism itself. Indeed, if\\nobjective facts are those that do not depend on our mental activity,\\nthen they are precisely those facts that we can all be mistaken about,\\nand thus it seems reasonable to suppose that the desire for moral\\nfacts to be objective and the desire for a guarantee of epistemic\\naccess to moral facts are desiderata that are in tension with each\\nother.\",\n \"\\nSecond, it is worth stating explicitly that moral anti-realism is not\\na form of moral relativism—or, perhaps more\\nusefully noted: that moral relativism is not a form of moral\\nanti-realism. Moral relativism is a form of cognitivism according to\\nwhich moral claims contain an indexical element, such that the truth\\nof any such claim requires relativization to some individual or group.\\nAccording to a simple form of relativism, the claim “Stealing is\\nmorally wrong” might be true when one person utters it, and\\nfalse when someone else utters it. The important thing to note is that\\nthis would not necessarily make moral wrongness non-objective. For\\nexample, suppose someone were to make the relativistic claim that\\ndifferent moral values, virtues, and duties apply to different groups\\nof people due to, say, their social caste. If this person were asked\\nin virtue of what these relativistic moral facts obtain, there is\\nnothing to prevent them offering the full-blooded realist answer:\\n“It’s just the way the universe objectively is.”\\nRelativism does not stand opposite objectivism; it stands opposite\\nabsolutism (the form of cognitivism according to which the truth of\\nmoral claims does not require relativization to any individual or\\ngroup). One can be both a moral relativist and a moral objectivist\\n(and thus a moral realist); conversely, one can be both a moral\\nnon-objectivist (and thus a moral anti-realist) and a moral\\nabsolutist. (See entries for\\n relativism\\n and\\n moral relativism.)\",\n \"\\nOf course, someone could simply stipulate that moral realism includes\\nthe denial of moral relativism, and perhaps the philosophical\\ncommunity could be persuaded to adopt this definition (in which case\\nthis entry would need to be revised). But it seems reasonable to\\nsuspect that the common tendency to think that moral realism and moral\\nrelativism are opposed to each other is, more often than not, due a\\nconfused conflation of the objectivism/non-objectivism distinction and\\nthe absolutism/relativism distinction.\",\n \"\\nThird and finally, it might be helpful to clarify the relationship\\nbetween moral anti-realism and moral naturalism. The\\nmoral naturalist believes that moral facts exist and fit within the\\nworldview presented by science. (For example, a utilitarian view that\\nidentifies moral obligation with the production of happiness will\\ncount as a form of moral naturalism, since there is nothing\\nparticularly scientifically mysterious about happiness.) A moral\\nnaturalist may maintain that moral facts are objective in nature, in\\nwhich case this moral naturalist will count as a moral realist. But a\\nmoral naturalist may instead maintain that the moral facts are not\\nobjective in nature, in which case this moral naturalist will count as\\na moral anti-realist. Consider, for example, a simplistic\\nnon-objectivist theory that identifies moral goodness (say) with\\nwhatever a person approves of. Such a view would be a form of\\nanti-realism (in virtue of its non-objectivism), but since the\\nphenomenon of people approving of things is something that can be\\naccommodated smoothly within a scientific framework, it would also be\\na form of moral naturalism. Conversely, if a moral realist maintains\\nthat the objective moral facts cannot be accommodated within the\\nscientific worldview, then this moral realist will count as a moral\\nnon-naturalist. (See entries for\\n naturalism\\n and\\n moral naturalism.)\",\n \"\\nThe noncognitivist and the error theorist, it should be noted, count\\nas neither moral naturalists nor moral non-naturalists, since they do\\nnot believe in moral facts at all. These kinds of moral anti-realist,\\nhowever, may well be naturalists in a more general sense: they may\\nmaintain that the only items that we should admit into our ontology\\nare those that fit within the scientific worldview. Indeed, it is\\nquite likely that it is their commitment to this more general\\nontological naturalism that lies behind the noncognitivist’s and\\nthe error theorist’s moral skepticism, since they may deem that\\nmoral properties (were they to exist) would have to have\\ncharacteristics that cannot be accommodated within a naturalistic\\nframework.\",\n \"\\nSumming up: Some moral anti-realists will count as moral skeptics, but\\nsome may believe in moral knowledge. Some moral anti-realists will be\\nrelativists, but some may be moral absolutists (and many are neither).\\nSome moral anti-realists will be moral naturalists, but some may be\\nmoral non-naturalists, and some will be neither moral naturalists nor\\nnon-naturalists. These various positions can be combined into a\\npotentially bewildering array of possible complex metaethical\\npositions (e.g., non-skeptical, relativistic, non-naturalistic moral\\nanti-realism)—though, needless to say, these views may vary\\ngreatly in plausibility.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Characterizing Moral Anti-realism\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nIt is widely assumed that moral realism enjoys some sort of\\npresumption in its favor that the anti-realist has to work to\\novercome. Jonathan Dancy writes that “we take moral value to be\\npart of the fabric of the world; … and we should take it in the\\nabsence of contrary considerations that actions and agents do have the\\nsorts of moral properties we experience in them” (1986: 172). In\\na similar vein, David McNaughton claims “The realist’s\\ncontention is that he has only to rebut the arguments designed to\\npersuade us that moral realism is philosophically untenable in order\\nto have made out his case” (1988: 40–41). David Brink\\nconcurs: “We begin as (tacit) cognitivists and realists about\\nethics.… Moral Realism should be our metaethical starting\\npoint, and we should give it up only if it does involve unacceptable\\nmetaphysical and epistemological commitments” (1989:\\n23–24).\",\n \"\\nIt may be questioned, however, whether moral realism really does enjoy\\nintuitive support, and also questioned whether, if it does, this\\nshould burden the anti-realist with extra labor.\",\n \"\\nOn the first matter, it may be argued that some of the distinctions\\ndrawn in distinguishing moral realism from anti-realism are too\\nfine-grained or abstruse for “the folk” to have any\\ndeterminate opinion. It is, for example, radically unclear to what\\nextent common sense embraces the objectivity of moral facts.\\nThere have been some empirical investigations ostensibly examining the\\nextent to which ordinary people endorse moral objectivism (e.g.,\\nGoodwin & Darley 2008; Uttich et al. 2014), but, upon examination,\\nmany of these studies seem in fact to examine the extent to which\\nordinary people endorse moral absolutism. (See Hopster 2019.)\\nAnd if even professional researchers struggle to grasp the concept of\\nmoral objectivity, it is difficult to maintain confidently that\\n“the folk” have a firm and determinate intuition on the\\nsubject. Furthermore, even if empirical investigation of collective\\nopinion were to locate strong intuitions in favor of a\\nmind-independent morality, there may be other equally robust\\nintuitions in favor of morality being mind-dependent. (For\\nexample, the fact that we seem unwilling to defer to experts when\\nforming moral views appears to count against realism; see McGrath\\n2011. Similarly, the fact that we do not expect a person necessarily\\nto accept others’ reasons for their moral views seems to reveal\\nanti-realist tendencies; see Foot 1958 for discussion.) Given the\\ndifficulties in deciding and articulating just what kind of\\nobjectivity is relevant to the moral realism/anti-realism division,\\nand given the range and potential subtlety of options, it might be\\nthought rash to claim that common sense has a firm opinion one way or\\nthe other on this subject.\",\n \"\\nOn the second matter: even if we were to identify a widespread\\nunivocal intuition in favor of moral realism, it remains unclear to\\nwhat extent we should adopt a methodology that rewards moral realism\\nwith a dialectical advantage when it comes to metaethics. By\\ncomparison, we do not think that physicists should endeavor to come up\\nwith intuitive theories. (There is, for example, a widespread\\nerroneous intuition that a fast-moving ball exiting a curved tube will\\ncontinue to travel on a curving trajectory (McCloskey et al. 1980).\\nThe fact that Newtonian physics predicts that the ball will in fact\\ncontinue on a straight trajectory is surely in no sense a mark against\\nthe theory.) Moreover, it is important to distinguish between any such\\npro-realist intuitions ex ante and ex post. Once\\nsomeone has accepted considerations and arguments in favor of moral\\nanti-realism, then any counter-intuitiveness that this conclusion\\nhas—ex ante—may be considered irrelevant. One noteworthy\\ntype of strategy here is the “debunking argument,” which\\nseeks to undermine moral intuitions by showing that they are the\\nproduct of processes that we have no grounds for thinking are reliable\\nindicators of truth. (See Street 2006; O’Neill 2015; Joyce 2013,\\n2016.) To the extent that the anti-realist can provide a plausible\\nexplanation for why humans would tend to think of morality as\\nobjective, even if it is not objective, then any counter-intuitiveness\\nin the anti-realist’s failure to accommodate objectivity can no\\nlonger be raised as an ongoing consideration against moral\\nanti-realism.\",\n \"\\nA theory’s clashing with common sense is not the only way in\\nwhich it can face a burden of proof. Of two theories, A and B, if A\\nexplains a range of observable phenomena more readily than B, then\\nproponents of B will have to undertake extra labor of squaring their\\ntheory with the available evidence—and this may be the case even\\nif B strikes people as the more intuitive theory. For example, perhaps\\nNewtonian physics is more intuitive than Einsteinian, but there is\\nobservable data—e.g., the results of the famous solar eclipse\\nexperiments of 1919—that the latter theory is much better\\nequipped to explain.\",\n \"\\nWhat is it, then, that metaethical theories are expected to explain?\\nThe range of phenomena is ill-defined and open-ended, but is typically\\ntaken to include such things as the manifest features of moral\\nlanguage, the importance of morality in our lives, moral practices and\\ninstitutions, the way moral considerations engage motivation, the\\ncharacter of moral disagreement, and the acquisition of moral\\nattitudes.\",\n \"\\nConsider the first of these explananda: moral language. Here it seems\\nreasonable to claim that the noncognitivist shoulders a burden of\\nproof. Moral predicates appear to function linguistically like any\\nother predicate: Just as the sentence “The cat is brown”\\nmay be used as an antecedent of a conditional, as a premise of an\\nargument, as the basis of a question (“Is the cat\\nbrown?”), have its predicate nominalized (“Brownness is\\nhad by the cat”), be embedded in a propositional attitude claim\\n(“Mary believes that the cat is brown”), and have the\\ntruth predicate applied to it (“‘The cat is brown’\\nis true”)—so too can all these things be done, without\\nobvious incoherence, with a moral sentence like “Stealing is\\nmorally wrong.” This is entirely as the cognitivist would\\npredict. By contrast, for a noncognitivist who maintains (as Ayer did)\\nthat this moral judgment amounts to nothing more than\\n“Stealing!” uttered in a special disapproval-expressing\\ntone, all of this linguistic evidence represents a major (and perhaps\\ninsurmountable) challenge.\",\n \"\\nOther explananda, on the other hand, may reveal that it is the moral\\nrealist who has the extra explaining to do. If moral properties are\\ntaken to have an essential normativity—in terms of, say, placing\\npractical demands upon us—then the realist faces the challenge\\nof explaining how any such thing could exist objectively. The\\nmoral non-objectivist, by contrast, sees moral normativity as\\nsomething that we create—that practical demands arise from our\\ndesires, emotions, values, judgments, practices, or institutions. Thus\\nthe task of providing a moral ontology that accommodates normativity\\nseems a much easier one for the non-objectivist than for the moral\\nrealist. (The noncognitivist and the error theorist would seem to have\\nan even easier time, since for them there is no moral ontology at\\nall.)\",\n \"\\nThere remains a great deal of dispute concerning what the phenomena\\nare that a metaethical theory should be expected to explain; and even\\nwhen some such phenomenon is roughly agreed upon, there is often\\nsignificant disagreement over its exact nature. For example, pretty\\nmuch everyone agrees that any decent metaethical theory should be able\\nto explain the close connection between moral judgment and\\nmotivation—but it is a live question whether that connection\\nshould be construed as a necessary one, or whether a reliably\\ncontingent connection will suffice. (See Svavardóttir 2006;\\nRosati 2021.) Even when such disputes can be settled, there remains\\nplenty of room for arguing over the importance of the explanandum in\\nquestion (relative to other explananda), and for arguing whether a\\ngiven theory does indeed adequately explain the phenomenon.\",\n \"\\nIn short, attempts to establish the burden of proof are as slippery\\nand indecisive in the debate between the moral realist and the moral\\nanti-realist as they tend to be generally in philosophy. The matter is\\ncomplicated by the fact that there are two kinds of burden-of-proof\\ncase that can be pressed, and here they tend to pull against each\\nother. On the one hand, it is widely assumed that common sense favors\\nthe moral realist. On the other hand, moral realists face a cluster of\\nexplanatory challenges concerning the nature of moral facts (how they\\nrelate to non-moral facts, how we have access to them, why they have\\npractical importance)—challenges that seem much more tractable\\nfor the moral non-objectivist and often simply don’t arise for\\neither the noncognitivist or the error theorist. This tension between\\nwhat is considered to be the intuitive position and what is\\nconsidered to be the empirically, metaphysically, and\\nepistemologically defensible position, motivates and animates\\nmuch of the debate between the moral realist and moral\\nanti-realist.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Who Bears the Burden of Proof?\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nGiven that moral anti-realism is a disjunction of three views, then\\nany argument for any of those views is an argument for moral\\nanti-realism. By the same token, any argument against any of the three\\nviews can contribute to an argument for moral realism, and if one is\\npersuaded by arguments against all three, then one is committed to\\nmoral realism. Here is not the place to present such arguments in\\ndetail, but offer a flavor of the kinds of considerations that push\\nphilosophers to and fro on these matters.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Arguing For and Against Moral Anti-realism\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nOn the face of it, when we make a public moral judgment, like\\n“That act of stealing was morally wrong,” what we are\\ndoing is asserting that the act of stealing in question instantiates a\\ncertain property: moral wrongness. This raises a number of extremely\\nthorny metaethical questions: What kind of property is moral\\nwrongness? How does it relate to the natural properties instantiated\\nby the action? How do we have epistemic access to the property? How do\\nwe confirm whether something does or does not instantiate the\\nproperty? (And so on.) The difficulty of answering such questions may\\nlead one to reject the presupposition that prompted them: One might\\ndeny that in making a moral judgment we are engaging in the assignment\\nof properties at all. Such a rejection is, roughly speaking, the\\nnoncognitivist proposal. (See entry for\\n moral cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism.)\",\n \"\\nIt is impossible to characterize noncognitivism in a way that will\\nplease everyone. Sometimes it is presented as a view about mental\\nstates and sometimes about moral language. This is because it is a\\nclaim about “moral judgments,” and we can consider moral\\njudgments either as private mental acts or as public utterances. If we\\nare thinking of moral judgments as mental states, then noncognitivism\\nis the claim that moral judgments are not beliefs. If we are thinking\\nof moral judgments as speech acts, then noncognitivism is the view\\nthat moral judgments do not express beliefs—i.e., it is\\nthe view that moral judgments are not assertions. Here, for brevity,\\nthe latter formulation will be preferred.\",\n \"\\nIf moral judgments are not assertions, then what are they? Here the\\ndifferent kinds of answers give rise to different forms of\\nnoncognitivism. Ayer, as was mentioned earlier, maintained that when\\nwe make a moral judgment we are expressing certain feelings, such as\\napproval or disapproval. Another influential kind of noncognitivism\\ncalled “prescriptivism” claims that moral judgments are\\nreally veiled commands whose true meaning should be captured using the\\nimperative mood: Someone who says “Stealing is morally\\nwrong” is really saying something like “Don’t\\nsteal!” (see Carnap 1935: 24–25). R.M. Hare (1952, 1963)\\nrestricted this to commands that one is willing to universalize.\",\n \"\\nIf noncognitivism is defined as the negation of cognitivism—as a\\ntheory about what moral judgments are not—then the two theories\\nare not just contraries but contradictories. However, a degree of\\nbenign relaxation of criteria allows for the possibility of\\n“mixed” theories. If we consider noncognitivism not as a\\npurely negative thesis, but as a range of positive proposals (such as\\nthose just mentioned), then it becomes possible that the nature of\\nmoral judgments combines both cognitivist and noncognitivist elements.\\nFor example, moral judgments (as speech acts) may be two\\nthings: They may be assertions and ways of issuing commands.\\n(By analogy: To call someone a “kraut” is both to assert\\nthat they are German and to express a derogatory attitude toward\\npeople of this nationality.) C.L. Stevenson held such a mixed view\\n(1944); for modern versions, see Copp 2001; Schroeder 2009; Svoboda\\n2011.\",\n \"\\nAs mentioned, one of the major attractions of noncognitivism is that\\nit is a means of sidestepping a number of thorny puzzles about\\nmorality. In addition, there are several features of morality that, it\\nhas been argued, the noncognitivist can accommodate more readily than\\nthe cognitivist. Here are three.\",\n \"\\nFirst, it has often been argued that noncognitivism does a good job of\\naccounting for the motivational efficacy of moral judgment. If, when I\\nsay “Stealing is morally wrong,” I am expressing my\\ndisapproval of stealing, and if disapproval is a motivation-engaging\\nstate, then it seems to follow that when I sincerely judge that\\nstealing is morally wrong, I will also be motivated not to steal. By\\ncontrast, if a Humean view of psychology is accepted, according to\\nwhich beliefs alone can never motivate, then the cognitivist must\\nallow that moral judgment alone cannot motivate; it requires\\nthe presence of certain desires as well. A number of philosophers have\\nargued that the cognitivist view of moral motivation seems inadequate\\n(Smith 1994; Toppinen 2004; see also Carbonell 2013). See entry for\\n moral motivation.\",\n \"\\nSecond, it has been argued that moral disagreements have certain\\nqualities that are accommodated better by the noncognitivist than the\\ncognitivist. The fact that moral disagreements are often both vehement\\nand seemingly intractable, for example, might be taken as evidence\\nthat what is really going on is a clash of emotional attitudes rather\\nthan a clash of beliefs (Stevenson 1948; Gibbard 1992; Blackburn\\n1998).\",\n \"\\nThird, it has often been observed that we are markedly uncomfortable\\nwith the idea that anyone should come to hold a moral view on the\\nbasis of having deferred to an expert on morality—in contrast to\\nthe way that we are perfectly comfortable with the idea that a person\\nshould defer to experts when forming beliefs about, say, plate\\ntectonics. This reluctance to defer to experts in forming our moral\\nviews would make sense if what we are doing when we make a moral\\njudgment is expressing our emotional attitudes on the matter. (See\\nMcGrath 2009: 322, 2011; Hills 2011.)\",\n \"\\nStanding against these considerations in favor of noncognitivism are a\\nnumber of weighty problems. The most well-known challenge for\\nnoncognitivism is the so-called Frege-Geach problem. If\\n“Stealing is morally wrong” is not even the kind of thing\\nthat can be true or false, then how can we make sense of it when it is\\nembedded in logically complex contexts (such as “If stealing is\\nmorally wrong, then encouraging your brother to steal is morally\\nwrong”), and how are we to make sense of it as a premise in a\\nvalid argument (since validity is, by definition, a truth-preserving\\nrelation)?\",\n \"\\nThere have been considerable efforts on behalf of noncognitivism to\\nanswer this challenge. Simon Blackburn, for example, has pursued what\\nhe calls a “quasi-realist” program (Blackburn 1984, 1993,\\n1998). The quasi-realist is someone who endorses an anti-realist\\nmetaphysical stance but who seeks, through philosophical maneuvering,\\nto earn the right for moral discourse to enjoy all the\\ntrappings of realist talk. Such a view may hold that although the\\nunderlying logical structure of the sentence “Stealing is\\nmorally wrong” is nothing more than “Stealing:\\nBoo!”, it is nevertheless legitimate for ordinary speakers to\\nsay things like “If stealing is morally wrong, then encouraging\\nyour brother to steal is wrong” or “‘Stealing is\\nmorally wrong’ is true.” One might, for instance, argue\\nthat all that is required to make it acceptable to consider\\n“Stealing is morally wrong” true or false (and thus a\\nlegitimate antecedent in a conditional) is that it has the appropriate\\nsurface propositional grammar (“x is P”); and one might\\nmaintain that choosing to employ such grammar to express one’s\\nnoncognitive attitudes brings no ontological commitment to any\\ntroublesome property of moral wrongness.\",\n \"\\nOne of the main challenges for the quasi-realist is to maintain a\\ntheoretic distance from the moral realist. If the quasi-realist\\nprogram succeeds in vindicating the use of the truth predicate for\\nmoral sentences, and if in addition it makes it permissible to say\\n“It is a fact that stealing is wrong,” “It is a\\nmind-independent fact that stealing is wrong,” “Stealing\\nwould be wrong even if our attitude toward it were different,”\\nand so on—mimicking all and any of the moral realist’s\\nassertions—then in what sense is quasi-realism\\nquasi-realism?—Why has it not simply collapsed into the\\nrobust moral realism that it set out to oppose? (See Wright 1988;\\nDreier 2018.) [A quick note on terminology: Although I have here\\npresented Blackburn’s quasi-realism as a potential avenue for\\nthe noncognitivist to pursue, it should be noted that Blackburn\\nhimself eschews the label “noncognitivism” to describe the\\nposition he defends (Blackburn 1996); his preferred term is\\n“projectivism.” (For discussion of the relation between\\nthe two views—noncognitivism and projectivism—see Joyce\\n2009.)]\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.1 Noncognitivism\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe error theorist is a cognitivist: maintaining that moral judgment\\nconsists of beliefs and assertions. However, the error theorist thinks\\nthat these beliefs and assertions are never true. (The error theorist\\ncontrasts here with what can be called the “success\\ntheorist.”) Moral judgments are never true because the\\nproperties that would be necessary to render them\\ntrue—properties like moral wrongness, moral goodness, virtue,\\nevil, etc.—simply don’t exist, or at least are not\\ninstantiated. Defenders of moral error theory include Mackie 1977,\\nHinckfuss 1987, Joyce 2001, and Olson 2014.\",\n \"\\nIf I assert that my dog is a reptile, then I’ve asserted\\nsomething false—though in this case there are other things that\\nare reptiles. If I assert that my dog is a unicorn then again\\nI’ve asserted something false—though in this case\\nthere’s nothing in the actual world to which I could attach the\\npredicate “… is a unicorn” and end up with a true\\nassertion. The error theorist thinks that employing moral discourse is\\nrather like talking about unicorns, though in the case of unicorns\\nmost people now know that they don’t exist, while in the case of\\nmoral properties most people are unaware of the error. To be an error\\ntheorist about unicorns doesn’t require that you think unicorns\\nare impossible creatures; it’s enough that you think\\nthat they simply don’t actually exist. In the same way, to be a\\nmoral error theorist doesn’t require that you think that moral\\nproperties couldn’t possibly exist; it would be enough to think\\nthat they are never actually instantiated. (Note that there may be a\\ndifference between saying “Property P is never actually\\ninstantiated” and “Property P doesn’t exist,”\\nbut that’s a problem for metaphysicians to sort out. Holding\\neither view with respect to moral properties is enough to make one a\\nmoral error theorist.)\",\n \"\\nTo be an error theorist about unicorns does not mean that every\\nassertion involving the word “unicorn” is false. There\\nwould be no error, for example, in asserting “Unicorns do not\\nexist,” “The ancient Greeks believed that unicorns lived\\nin India,” or “My dog is not a unicorn.” What is\\ndistinctive about these three sentences is that one would not, in\\nasserting them, be committing oneself to the existence of unicorns.\\n(It would be rather troubling if this were not true of the first, in\\nparticular!) Similarly, the moral error theorist may allow that the\\nfollowing are true: “Moral wrongness does not exist,”\\n“Augustine believed that stealing pears was wrong,” and\\n“Stealing is not morally wrong.”\",\n \"\\nThe last example (“Stealing is not morally wrong”) calls\\nfor an extra comment. In ordinary conversation—where,\\npresumably, the possibility of moral error theory is not considered a\\nlive option—someone who claims that X is not wrong\\nwould be taken to be implying that X is morally good or at\\nleast morally permissible. And if “X” denotes\\nsomething awful, like torturing innocent people, then this can be used\\nto make the error theorist look awful. But when we are doing\\nmetaethics, and the possibility of moral error theory is on the table,\\nthen this ordinary implication breaks down. The error theorist\\ndoesn’t think that torturing innocent people is morally wrong,\\nbut doesn’t think that it is morally good or morally permissible\\neither. It is important that criticisms of the moral error theorist do\\nnot trade on equivocating between the implications that hold in\\nordinary contexts and the implications that hold in metaethical\\ncontexts.\",\n \"\\nThe sentence “Unicorns exist” is false, but there are\\nnevertheless various contexts where one might have reason to utter the\\nsentence: telling a story, joking, acting, speaking metaphorically,\\ngiving an example of a two-word sentence, etc. What is distinctive\\nabout these contexts is that one would not be asserting the\\nsentence, and thus (as before) one would not, in making these\\nutterances, be committing oneself to the existence of unicorns.\\nSimilarly, the moral error theorist might propose that we carry on\\nsaying things like “Stealing is morally wrong” but in a\\nmanner that deprives our utterances of ontological commitment to moral\\nproperties and, thus, removes the error from our discourse.\\nIf the error theorist proposes to accomplish this by modeling moral\\nlanguage on a way that familiar engagement with fictions nullifies\\ncommitment, then such a moral error theorist is a\\nfictionalist. (See entry for\\n fictionalism;\\n see also Kalderon 2005; Joyce 2017.) Other moral error theorists may\\nthink that we would be better off if we pretty much eliminated moral\\ntalk from our thoughts and language. Such moral error theorists are\\nknown as “abolitionists” or “eliminativists.”\\n(I say “pretty much” since presumably even the\\nabolitionist allows that we can carry on using moral language in the\\ncontext of plays, jokes, etc.) (For debate between fictionalists and\\nabolitionists, see Garner & Joyce 2019.)\",\n \"\\nError theory is commonly defined as the view that moral judgments are\\n(i) truth-evaluable but (ii) always false. But there are various\\nreasons for preferring to render (i) as a claim about speech\\nacts—that moral judgments aim at the truth (i.e., they\\nare assertions)—and (ii) as the broader claim that moral\\njudgments are “untrue” rather than “false.”\\nOne might, for example, be drawn to error theory because one thinks\\nthat there is a sufficient amount of indeterminacy, fragmentation, or\\nconfusion surrounding moral concepts that the judgments that employ\\nthem, while satisfying the conditions for being beliefs and\\nassertions, do not satisfy the conditions for having truth value.\\nPerhaps, for example, moral concepts are historically derived from a\\ntheistic framework within which they made sense, yet removed from\\nwhich they are mere remnants that evoke strong intuitions but, upon\\nexamination, make no sense. (See Anscombe 1958; MacIntyre 1984.) If\\nthis is so, then it may be argued that the concept moral\\nwrongness is just so ill-defined that someone who makes the moral\\njudgment “Stealing is morally wrong” fails to put forward\\na proposition that could be true; but since the speaker and audience\\nare presumably unaware of this fact, the judgment should still count\\nas an assertion. (One needs to tread carefully here. The proposal that\\nmoral judgments lack truth value is traditionally associated with\\nnoncognitivism. But the noncognitivist thinks that moral judgments\\nlack truth value because they are not assertions at all. The error\\ntheorist, by contrast, thinks that moral judgments are\\n(typically) asserted, but that they fail to be true. Failing to have a\\ntruth value is one way of failing to be true. Being false is the other\\nway.)\",\n \"\\nMost arguments for moral error theory, however, presuppose that moral\\nconcepts do have a reasonably determinate content, but that there is\\nsimply nothing in the world to satisfy this content. The traditional\\nform of argument for moral error theory, thus, has two steps. First,\\nthe error theorist undertakes the conceptual step of\\nestablishing that in participating in moral discourse we commit\\nourselves to the world being a certain way (that it contains certain\\ninstantiated properties, etc.). Then the error theorist undertakes the\\nontological step of establishing that the world is not that\\nway. The latter may be achieved (in principle, at least) either\\nthrough a priori means or through a posteriori\\nmethods.\",\n \"\\nOne example of an argument with this structure is as follows. First it\\nis noted that “S morally ought to φ” is true\\nonly if S is a moral agent. The further conceptual steps of\\nthe argument then seek to establish that in order to be moral agent,\\nS must have the capacity to perform actions that are morally\\nblameworthy and praiseworthy, and that these capacities presuppose\\nthat S has a certain kind of control over their actions. The\\nontological step of the argument then seeks to establish that no such\\nautonomous control exists in nature; it’s an illusion. (See\\nentry for\\n skepticism about moral responsibility.)\\n A couple of iterations of modus tollens then take us to the\\nconclusion that “S morally ought to φ” is\\nnever true.\",\n \"\\nThe argument just sketched would locate the moral error in a mistake\\nwe make about the kind of creatures we are. The more widely discussed\\narguments, however, locate the moral error in a mistake we make about\\nthe kind of world we inhabit. John Mackie (who coined the term\\n“error theory” in 1977) argues that when we participate in\\nmoral discourse we commit ourselves to the existence of objective\\nvalues and objective prescriptions, but there are no such things.\\nEssentially, Mackie argues that the moral realist is correct about\\nmorality conceptually speaking—we are moral\\nrealists—but the moral realist is incorrect about how the world\\nactually is. Moral facts place demands upon us, but (Mackie asks) how\\ncould such demands exist objectively? This would\\nseem to require rules of conduct somehow written into the fabric of\\nthe universe, and nothing in our understanding of the objective\\nnaturalistic world (Mackie goes on) suggests that anything of the kind\\nexists. Mackie famously calls such properties “queer” (in\\nwhat seems now an increasingly anachronistic use of the term).\",\n \"\\nMackie occasionally cashes out his “argument from\\nqueerness” in terms of practical reasons. He writes that\\n“to say that [objective prescriptions] are intrinsically\\naction-guiding [which is one way he sometimes describes the\\nnormativity whose existence he denies] is to say that the reasons that\\nthey give for doing or for not doing something are independent of that\\nagent’s desires or purposes” (Mackie 1982: 115). Surely if\\nsomeone is morally required to do something (Mackie thinks), then that\\nperson must have a reason to do it. (After all, if one were to deny\\nthis, then what kind of “normative teeth” would moral\\nproperties have? “Yes, I know that X is morally wrong,\\nbut I have no reason to avoid moral wrongness, so the wrongness of\\nX is nothing to me” would become, in principle, an\\nacceptable thing to say.) But since morality often seems to demand\\nthat we do things that we don’t want to do, then morality seems\\nto imply the existence of reasons to do things that we don’t\\nwant to do. One could, at this point, simply throw up one’s\\nhands and claim that such reasons would be too weird to countenance.\\nBut one could also go beyond the “argument from queerness”\\nby instead arguing methodically that a Humean (instrumentalist) theory\\nof reasons for action—according to which reasons ultimately\\ndepend on our ends—is superior to any form of practical\\nnon-instrumentalism. (See entry for\\n reason for action: internal and external.)\\n According to such a view, the practical non-instrumentalist is\\ncorrect about morality conceptually speaking—in\\nengaging in moral discourse, we commit ourselves to\\nnon-instrumentalist reasons—but the practical\\nnon-instrumentalist is incorrect about how the world actually is: a\\nHumean theory of reasons for action is more defensible. (It is worth\\nnoting that endorsing Humean instrumentalism about reasons for action\\ndoes not in any obvious way commit one to the endorsement of\\ninstrumentalism about other kinds of reasons, such as epistemic\\nreasons. See Joyce 2019; Cowie 2019.)\",\n \"\\nIf an argument for moral error theory has two steps—the\\nconceptual and the ontological—then there are two places to\\nobject. If we consider Mackie’s argument, for example, then one\\nkind of opponent will agree that objective values and prescriptions\\nwould be too weird to countenance, but maintain that it doesn’t\\nmatter because moral discourse is not committed to the existence of\\nsuch strange creatures. Another kind of opponent will agree with\\nMackie that morality is committed to the existence of objective values\\nand prescriptions, but maintain that there is nothing particularly\\nstrange about them.\",\n \"\\nError theorists must be prepared to defend themselves on both fronts.\\nThis job is made difficult by the fact that it may be hard to\\narticulate precisely what it is that is so troubling about morality.\\nThis failure need not be due to a lack of clear thinking or\\nimagination on the error theorists’ part, for the thing that is\\ntroubling them may be that there is something deeply mysterious about\\nmorality. The moral error theorist may, for example, perceive that\\nmoral imperatives are imbued with a kind of mystical practical\\nauthority—a quality that, being mysterious, of course\\ncannot be articulated in terms satisfactory to an analytic\\nphilosopher. Such an error theorist is forced to fall back on vague\\nmetaphors in presenting their case: Moral properties have a\\n“to-be-pursuedness” to them (Mackie 1977: 40), moral facts\\nwould require that “the universe takes sides” (Burgess\\n[1978] 2007), moral believers are committed to “demands as real\\nas trees and as authoritative as orders from headquarters”\\n(Garner 1994: 61), and so on. Indeed, it may be the vague, equivocal,\\nquasi-mystical, and/or ineliminably metaphorical imponderabilia of\\nmoral discourse that so troubles the error theorist. (See Hussain\\n2004.)\",\n \"\\nEven if the error theorist can articulate a clear and determinate\\nproblematic feature of morality, the dispute over whether this quality\\nshould count as a “non-negotiable component” of morality\\nhas a tendency to lead quickly to impasse, for there is no accepted\\nmethodology for deciding when a discourse is “centrally\\ncommitted” to a given thesis. What is evidently needed is a\\nworkable model of the identity criteria for concepts (allowing us\\nconfidently to either affirm or deny such claims as “The concept\\nof moral obligation is the concept of an objective\\nrequirement”)—but we have no such model, and there is no\\nconsensus even on what approximate shape such a model would take.\",\n \"\\nIt is also possible that the most reasonable account of conceptual\\ncontent will leave many concepts with significantly indistinct\\nborders. There may simply be no fact of the matter about whether moral\\ndiscourse is committed to the existence of non-instrumental reasons\\n(for example). Thinking along these lines, David Lewis makes use of\\nthe distinction between speaking strictly and speaking loosely:\\n“Strictly speaking, Mackie is right: genuine values would have\\nto meet an impossible condition, so it is an error to think there are\\nany. Loosely speaking, the name may go to a claimant that deserves it\\nimperfectly … What to make of the situation is mainly a matter\\nof temperament” (Lewis [1989] 2000: 93). Lewis’s own\\ntemperament leads him to seek to vindicate value discourse, and he\\nthinks that this can be done by supporting a dispositional theory of\\nvalue (of a kind to be discussed in the next section). But since there\\nis no logical or methodological requirement that we should prefer\\nspeaking loosely over speaking strictly, or vice versa, then this\\nwould leave the dispute between moral error theorists and success\\ntheorists a fundamentally undecidable matter—there may simply be\\nno fact of the matter about who is correct. (See Joyce 2012.)\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.2 Error Theory\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nTo deny both noncognitivism and the moral error theory suffices to\\nmake one a minimal moral realist. Traditionally, however, moral\\nrealism has required the acceptance of a further thesis: the\\nobjectivity of morality. “Moral non-objectivism” denotes\\nthe view that moral facts exist and are mind-dependent (in the\\nrelevant sense), while “moral objectivism” holds that they\\nexist and are mind-independent. (Note that this taxonomy makes the two\\ncontraries rather than contradictories; the error theorist and the\\nnoncognitivist count as neither objectivists nor non-objectivists. The\\nerror theorist may, however, be an objectivist in a different sense:\\nin holding that objectivity is a feature of morality\\nconceptually speaking.) Let us say that if one is a moral\\ncognitivist and a moral success theorist and a moral\\nobjectivist, then one is a robust\\nmoral realist.\",\n \"\\nYet this third condition, even more than the first two, introduces a\\ngreat deal of messiness into the dialectic, and the line between the\\nrealist and the anti-realist becomes obscure (and, one might think,\\nless interesting). The basic problem is that there are many\\nnon-equivalent ways of understanding the relation of\\nmind-(in)dependence, and thus one philosopher’s realism\\nbecomes another philosopher’s anti-realism. At least one\\nphilosopher, Gideon Rosen, has expressed pessimism that the relevant\\nnotion of objectivity can be sharpened to a useful philosophical\\npoint:\",\n \"\\nTo be sure, we do have “intuitions” of a sort about when\\nthe rhetoric of objectivity is appropriate and when it isn’t.\\nBut these intuitions are fragile, and every effort I know to find the\\nprinciple that underlies them collapses. We sense that there\\nis a heady metaphysical thesis at stake in these debates over realism\\n… [b]ut after a point, when every attempt to say just what the\\nissue is has come up empty, we have no real choice but to conclude\\nthat despite all the wonderful, suggestive imagery, there is\\nultimately nothing in the neighborhood to discuss. (1994: 279. See\\nalso Dworkin 1996.)\\n\",\n \"\\nAs Rosen says, metaphors to mark non-objectivism from objectivism are\\neasy to come by and easy to motivate in the uninitiated. The\\nobjectivist about X likens our X-oriented activity\\nto astronomy, geography, or exploration; the non-objectivist likens it\\nto sculpture or imaginative writing. (These are Michael\\nDummett’s metaphors (1978: xxv).) The objectivist sees the goal\\nof our inquiries as being to “carve the beast of reality at the\\njoints” (as the popular paraphrase of Plato’s\\nPhaedrus puts it); the non-objectivist sees our inquiries as\\nthe application of a “cookie cutter”: imposing a\\nnoncompulsory conceptual framework onto an undifferentiated reality\\n(to use Hilary Putnam’s equally memorable image (1987: 19)). The\\nobjectivist sees inquiry as a process of detection, our\\njudgments aiming to reflect the extension of the truth\\npredicate with respect to a certain subject; the non-objectivist sees\\ninquiry as a process of projection, our judgments\\ndetermining the extension of the truth predicate regarding\\nthat subject.\",\n \"\\nThe claim “X is mind-(in)dependent” is certainly\\ntoo coarse-grained to do serious work in capturing these powerful\\nmetaphors; it is, perhaps, better thought of as a slogan or as a piece\\nof shorthand. There are two conspicuous points at which the phrase\\nrequires precisification. First, we need to decide what exactly the\\nword “mind” stands for. It can be construed strictly and\\nliterally, to mean mental activity, or it can be understood\\nin a more liberal manner, to include such things as conceptual\\nschemes, theories, methods of proof, linguistic practices,\\nconventions, sentences, institutions, culture, means of epistemic\\naccess, etc. Were the moral facts to depend on any of these\\nanthropocentric things, the anti-realist imagery of humans as\\ninventors of morality may seem more apt than that of humans as\\ndiscoverers. Second, we need to decide what kind of relation is\\ndenoted by “(in)dependent.” Consider the following\\npossibilities, any of which might form the basis of the claim that\\ngoodness depends on mental activity (in this case, for\\nsimplicity, Mary’s attitude of approval):\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nx is good iff Mary approves of x.\\n\\n\\nx is good iff Mary would approve of x (in\\nsuch-and-such circumstances).\\n\\n\\nx is good iff x merits Mary’s approval.\\n\",\n \"\\nThe catalog can be made longer, depending on whether the\\n“iff” is construed as necessary or contingent, conceptual,\\na priori, or a posteriori. To illustrate further the\\nubiquity of and variation among mind-dependence relations on the menu\\nof moral theories, consider the following:\",\n \"\\nIndeed, it is difficult to think of any serious version of moral\\nsuccess theory for which the moral facts depend in no way on\\nmental activity. Yet to conclude that the distinction between minimal\\nand robust realism cannot be upheld would be premature. Many\\nmetaethicists who reject noncognitivism and the error theory, and thus\\ncount as minimal realists, continue to define their position (often\\nunder the label “constructivism”) in contrast to a realist\\nview. (See Bagnoli 2002; Ronzoni 2010; Street 2010, 2012. See also the\\nentry on\\n constructivism in metaethics.)\\n The challenge is to pick among the various mind-(in)dependence\\nrelations in the hope of drawing a distinction that is philosophically\\ninteresting and meshes satisfactorily with our preexisting\\nphilosophical taxonomy, such that some success theorists count as\\nrealists and some do not.\",\n \"\\nElizabeth Tropman (2018) argues that the best way of understanding\\nmoral objectivity is as follows: The fact that x is\\nM (where “… is M” is some moral\\npredicate) is objective if and only if this fact doesn’t depend\\nonly on any actual or hypothetical agent’s (i) belief or\\nnoncognitive attitude about x’s being M, or\\n(ii) noncognitive attitude about x. According to this view,\\nmany of the aforementioned examples of moral theories, although making\\nmoral facts dependent in various ways on various kinds of mental\\nphenomena, will not count as non-objective. Consider, for example, the\\nutilitarian view that what makes a particular action, φ, morally\\nobligatory is that it produces maximal happiness. According to this\\nview, although some agent’s (or agents’) mental\\nstates—in this case, their happiness—may contribute to\\nφ’s moral status, they do not exclusively determine it.\\nOther factors also contribute to φ’s moral status, such as\\nhow φ compares with other potential actions in terms of happiness\\nproduction,. Therefore, on Tropman’s view, this form of\\nutilitarianism would satisfy the requirements for morality to count as\\nobjective.\",\n \"\\nThe attractions of moral non-objectivism are that it ticks a lot of\\nboxes that its competitors fail to tick. Unlike noncognitivism or\\nerror theory, moral non-objectivism is a form of moral anti-realism\\nthat allows for the existence of moral beliefs, moral facts, and moral\\ntruth, and thus also potentially makes conceptual space for such\\nthings as moral progress and moral knowledge. Unlike moral realism, by\\nmaking the moral facts depend on us, moral non-objectivism seems to\\nhave an easier time accounting for a moral ontology that is both\\nnaturalistic and normative.\",\n \"\\nGiven the wide variety of versions of moral non-objectivity,\\nidentifying generic problems is not a straightforward task. One way of\\nbringing out some potential worries is to see the non-objectivist as\\nfacing a dilemma. Moral non-objectivism comes in both relativistic and\\nabsolutist flavors, and either way one goes poses challenges.\",\n \"\\nConsider first an absolutist version on non-objectivism. Here we would\\nhave to identify some agent or group of agents whose beliefs or\\nnoncognitive attitudes determine the moral facts. Reasonable\\ncontenders for this role are not going to be actual particular people.\\nIt would not, for example, be a reasonable theory that maintained that\\nthe moral facts for everyone throughout all time are determined by\\nwhat Richard Joyce thinks on the matter. (The only plausible contender\\nfor this role might be God, but such a theory faces its own\\narray of problems.) Rather, absolutist non-objectivists are likely to\\nplump for idealized hypothetical agents. Roderick Firth (1952), for\\nexample, identifies moral properties with dispositions to prompt\\nresponsive attitudes in an “ideal observer”—where\\nthe ideal observer is defined in terms such as omniscience,\\ndisinterestedness, and dispassionateness. (Slightly confusingly for\\nour purposes, Firth explicitly characterizes this theory as an\\nobjectivist one, but this is because he has in mind a kind of\\nexistential mind-dependence relation. The moral status of an\\naction, on this view, doesn’t depend on the existence of an\\nideal observer’s mental activity; rather, it depends on how such\\nan agent counterfactually would respond. We can consider this as\\nfurther evidence of the difficulties in nailing down a fixed notion of\\nmoral objectivity.) A structurally similar version of\\nabsolutist non-objectivism is Ronald Milo’s contractarian\\nconstructivism (1995), according to which the moral facts are\\ndetermined by the choices that would be made by a hypothetical\\nidealized group of rational contractors. (See also Scanlon 1998.)\",\n \"\\nThe challenge for such theories is to explain why one should\\ncare about the moral status of actions. Since the person or\\ngroup that determines the moral status of my actions is not\\nme, and is not even someone I’ve ever met or\\nnecessarily care about, then why should their hypothetical responses\\nmatter to me? Any particular proposed action of mine will have an\\ninfinity of dispositional properties. My proposed action of, say,\\nstealing a newspaper may have the dispositional property that a\\nFirthian ideal observer would disapprove of it, while simultaneously\\nhaving the dispositional property that a Miloesque idealized group of\\nrational contractors would choose to refrain from it. But it also has\\na myriad of other dispositions to prompt responses in hypothetical\\nagents: it may also be such that drunken Vikings would heartily cheer\\nit, be such that zealous medieval samurai would think it dishonorable,\\nbe such that Soviet communists seeking to promote the Workers’\\nRevolution would regard it as obligatory, and so on. The question is\\nwhy I, in trying to decide how to act, should care about any of these\\ndispositional properties—or (perhaps more pointedly) why I\\nshould care about one of them very much indeed while ignoring all the\\nothers. Simply labeling one of these dispositional properties\\n“moral wrongness” doesn’t make that property\\nmatter.\",\n \"\\nOne response to this challenge is to make the idealized judges, whose\\nbeliefs or noncognitive states determine the moral status of\\nagents’ actions, versions of the agents themselves (see Carson\\n1984). Perhaps I have reason to care about what I would think\\nif I were, say, fully informed and had fully reflected on the matter.\\nThis brings us back to the other horn of the dilemma: the relativistic\\nversion on non-objectivism. The problem is that securing the practical\\nsignificance of moral facts in this manner (something that the\\nabsolutist version struggles to secure) comes at a price. If you and I\\nare quite different people—with different desires, interests,\\nand goals—then the idealized version of me may have a different\\nresponse to a situation than the idealized version of you would have\\n(see Sobel 1999). In this case, the very same action may be morally\\nright relative to me and morally wrong relative to you, and\\nthat’s all there is to it: there would be no way for you and me\\nto settle our moral disagreement. Indeed, there may not even\\nbe a disagreement, since if when I say “X is\\nmorally right” I mean … relative to idealized\\nme, and when you say “No, X is not morally\\nright” you mean … relative to idealized you,\\nthen we are not really contradicting each other. (See entry for\\n moral relativism.)\\n If relativistic non-objectivism makes moral disagreement disappear,\\nthen it very probably also makes the notion of moral progress\\ndisappear. If the moral views I held in the past were true\\nrelative to me then (though false relative to me now), and my\\ncurrent very different moral views are true relative to me now (but\\nfalse relative to past me), then the best one could say on behalf of\\nmoral progress is that there has been progress from my current\\npoint of view (something that will be seen as moral deterioration\\nfrom my past point of view). To the extent, then, that we do wish to\\naccommodate the existence of moral disagreement and moral progress,\\nrelativistic non-objectivism has some explaining to do. (Note that the\\nversion of relativistic non-objectivism just discussed is\\nindividual-relative, but the same problems concerning disagreement and\\nmoral progress would arise if a culture-oriented version of relativism\\nwere examined instead.)\",\n \"\\nThe proposal that moral facts are non-objective—that morality is\\nsomething created, not discovered—is often rejected in popular\\ndiscussion because people have only crude versions of non-objectivism\\nin mind, such as views that would make the moral facts for a person be\\njust whatever whimsically suits them (e.g., “X is\\nmorally wrong” = “I disapprove of X”). But\\nno professional philosopher endorses such a view; nobody thinks that\\nthe non-objectivity of morality would be like the non-objectivity of\\nchoosing your favorite ice cream flavor. Serious forms of moral\\nnon-objectivism are sophisticated and subtle. Still, there is a real\\nworry that if the non-objectivism is too\\nsophisticated—especially if it looks to the responses of highly\\nidealized hypothetical agents as being determinative of the moral\\nfacts—then the question of why, on this account, morality would\\nmatter to non-idealized non-hypothetical agents comes to the\\nfore.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.3 Non-objectivism\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThis entry has not attempted to adjudicate the rich and noisy debate\\nbetween the moral realist and moral anti-realist, but rather has\\nattempted to clarify just what their debate is about. But even this\\nmuch more modest task is doomed to lead to unsatisfactory results, for\\nthere is much confusion—perhaps a hopeless\\nconfusion—about how the terms of the debate should be drawn up.\\nIt is entirely possible that when subjected to acute critical\\nexamination, the traditional dialectic between the moral realist and\\nthe moral anti-realist will crumble into a bunch of evocative\\nmetaphors from which well-formed philosophical theses cannot be\\nextracted. If this is true, it would not follow that metaethics is\\nbankrupt; far from it—it may be more accurate to think that\\nmodern metaethics has prospered to such an extent that the old terms\\nno longer fit its complex landscape.\",\n \"\\nBut for present, at least, the terms “moral realist” and\\n“moral anti-realist” seem firmly entrenched. With so much\\nill-defined, however, it would seem close to pointless to conduct\\nmetaethical debate under these terms. This latitude means\\nthat the terms “moral realist” and “moral\\nanti-realist” are free to be bandied with rhetorical\\nforce—more as badges of honor or terms of abuse (as the case may\\nbe) than as useful descriptive labels. Rather like arguments over\\nwhether some avant-garde gallery installation does or does not count\\nas “art,” taxonomic bickering over whether a given\\nphilosopher is or is not a “moral realist” is an activity\\nas tiresome as it is fruitless.\",\n \"\\nJust as important as gaining a clear and distinct understanding of\\nthese labels is gaining an appreciation of what of real consequence\\nturns on the debate. This seems particularly pressing here because a\\nnatural suspicion is that much of the opposition to moral anti-realism\\ndevelops from a nebulous but nagging practical concern about what\\nmight happen—to individuals, to the community, to\\nsocial order—if moral anti-realism, in one guise or another,\\nwere widely adopted. The embrace of moral anti-realism, it is assumed,\\nwill have an insidious influence. This concern presupposes that most\\nof the folk are already pretheoretically inclined toward\\nmoral realism—an assumption that was queried earlier. But even\\nif it is true that most people are naive moral realists, the question\\nof what would happen if they ceased to be so is an empirical matter,\\nconcerning which neither optimism nor pessimism seems prima facie more\\nwarranted than the other. As with the opposition to moral\\nnon-objectivism, the more general opposition to moral anti-realism is\\nfrequently based on an under-estimation of the resources available to\\nthe anti-realist—on an unexamined assumption that the silliest,\\ncrudest, or most pernicious version will stand as a good\\nrepresentative of a whole range of extremely varied and often\\nsophisticated theories.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Conclusion\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Anscombe, G.E.M., 1958. “Modern moral philosophy,”\nPhilosophy, 33: 1–19.","Ayer, A.J., [1936] 1971. Language, Truth and Logic,\nHarmondsworth: Penguin.","Bagnoli, C., 2002. “Moral constructivism: A phenomenological\nargument,” Topoi, 21: 125–138.","Blackburn, S., 1984. Spreading the Word, Oxford:\nClarendon.","–––, 1993. Essays in Quasi-Realism,\nOxford: Oxford University Press.","–––, 1996. “Commentary on Ronald\nDworkin’s ‘Objectivity and truth: You’d better\nbelieve it.’” Brown Electronic Article Review Service\nin Moral and Political Philosophy, Volume 2\n [available online].","–––, 1998. Ruling Passions, Oxford:\nOxford University Press.","Boyd, R., 1988. “How to be a moral realist,” in G.\nSayre-McCord (ed.), Essays in Moral Realism, Ithaca: Cornell\nUniversity Press: 181–228.","Brink, D., 1989. Moral Realism and the Foundations of\nEthics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Burgess, J.P., [1978] 2007. “Against ethics,”\nEthical Theory and Moral Practice, 10: 427–439.","Carbonell, V., 2013. “De dicto desires and morality\nas fetish,” Philosophical Studies, 163:\n459–477.","Carnap, R., 1935. Philosophy and Logical Syntax, London:\nKegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.","Carson, T., 1984. The Status of Morality. Boston: D.\nReidel.","Copp, D., 2001. “Realist-expressivism,” Social\nPhilosophy and Policy, 18: 1–43.","Cowie, C., 2019. Morality and Epistemic Judgement: The\nArgument from Analogy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","Dancy, J., 1986. “Two conceptions of moral realism,”\nProceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Supplementary\nVolume), 60: 167–187.","Dreier, J., 2004. “Meta-ethics and the problem of creeping\nminimalism,” Philosophical Perspectives, 18:\n23–44.","–––, 2018. “The real and the quasi-real:\nProblems of distinction,” Canadian Journal of\nPhilosophy, 48: 532–547.","Dummett, M., 1978. Truth and Other Enigmas, London:\nDuckworth.","Dworkin, R., 1996. “Objectivity and truth: You’d\nbetter believe it,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 25:\n87–139.","Firth, R., 1952. “Ethical absolutism and the ideal\nobserver,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,\n12: 317–345.","Foot, P., 1958. “Moral arguments,” Mind, 67:\n502–513.","Garner, R., 1994. Beyond Morality, Philadelphia: Temple\nUniversity Press.","–––, 2010. “Abolishing morality,” in\nR. Joyce & S. 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Seay (eds.), Ethical\nNaturalism: Current Debates, Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress: 89–109.","–––, 2013. “Irrealism and the genealogy of\nmorals,” Ratio, 26: 351–372.","–––, 2016. “Evolution, truth-tracking, and\nmoral skepticism,” in his Essays in Moral Skepticism,\nOxford: Oxford University Press: 142–158.","–––, 2017. “Fictionalism in\nmetaethics,” in D. Plunkett & T. McPherson (eds.),\nRoutledge Handbook of Metaethics, New York: Routledge:\n72–86.","–––, 2019. “Moral and epistemic\nnormativity: The guilty and the innocent,” in C. Cowie & R.\nRowland (eds.), Companions in Guilt Arguments in Metaethics,\nNew York: Routledge: 53–72.","Kalderon, M., 2005. Moral Fictionalism, Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press.","Lewis, D.K., 1989. “Dispositional theories of value,”\nreprinted in his Papers in Ethics and Social Philosophy,\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 68–94.","MacIntyre, A., 1984. After Virtue, Indiana: University of\nNotre Dame Press.","Mackie, J.L., 1977. 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What We Owe To Each Other, Cambridge,\nMA: Harvard University Press.","Schroeder, M., 2009. “Hybrid expressivism: Virtues and\nvices,” Ethics, 119: 257–309.","Smith, M., 1994, The Moral Problem, Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press.","Sobel, D., 1999. “Do the desires of rational agents\nconverge?” Analysis, 59: 137–147.","Stevenson, C.L., 1944. Ethics and Language, New Haven:\nYale University Press.","–––, 1948. “The nature of ethical\ndisagreement,” reprinted in his Facts and Values, New\nHaven: Yale University Press, 1963.","Street, S., 2006. “A Darwinian dilemma for realist theories\nof value,” Philosophical Studies, 127:\n109–166.","–––, 2010. “What is constructivism in\nethics and metaethics?” Philosophy Compass, 5:\n363–384.","–––, 2012. “Coming to terms with\ncontingency: Humean constructivism about practical reason,” in\nJ. Lenman & Y. Shemmer (eds.), Constructivism in Practical\nPhilosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 40–59.","Svavarsdóttir, S., 2006. “How do moral judgments\nmotivate?” in J. Dreier (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Moral\nTheory, Malden, MA: Blackwell 163–181.","Svoboda, T., 2011. “Hybridizing moral expressivism and moral\nerror theory,” Journal of Value Inquiry, 45:\n37–48.","Toppinen, T., 2004. “Moral fetishism revisited,”\nProceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 104:\n307–315.","Tropman, E., 2018. “Formulating moral objectivity,”\nPhilosophia, 46: 1023–1040.","Uttich, K., Tsai, G., & Lombrozo, T., 2014. “Exploring\nmetaethical commitments: Moral objectivity and moral progress,”\nin H. Sarkissian & J. Wright (eds.), Advances in Experimental\nMoral Psychology, London: Bloomsbury Academic:\n188–208.","Wright, C., 1988, “Realism, antirealism, irrealism,\nquasi-realism,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 12:\n25–49.","–––, 1992. Truth and Objectivity,\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press."],"string":"[\n \"Anscombe, G.E.M., 1958. “Modern moral philosophy,”\\nPhilosophy, 33: 1–19.\",\n \"Ayer, A.J., [1936] 1971. Language, Truth and Logic,\\nHarmondsworth: Penguin.\",\n \"Bagnoli, C., 2002. “Moral constructivism: A phenomenological\\nargument,” Topoi, 21: 125–138.\",\n \"Blackburn, S., 1984. Spreading the Word, Oxford:\\nClarendon.\",\n \"–––, 1993. Essays in Quasi-Realism,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1996. “Commentary on Ronald\\nDworkin’s ‘Objectivity and truth: You’d better\\nbelieve it.’” Brown Electronic Article Review Service\\nin Moral and Political Philosophy, Volume 2\\n [available online].\",\n \"–––, 1998. Ruling Passions, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press.\",\n \"Boyd, R., 1988. “How to be a moral realist,” in G.\\nSayre-McCord (ed.), Essays in Moral Realism, Ithaca: Cornell\\nUniversity Press: 181–228.\",\n \"Brink, D., 1989. Moral Realism and the Foundations of\\nEthics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Burgess, J.P., [1978] 2007. “Against ethics,”\\nEthical Theory and Moral Practice, 10: 427–439.\",\n \"Carbonell, V., 2013. “De dicto desires and morality\\nas fetish,” Philosophical Studies, 163:\\n459–477.\",\n \"Carnap, R., 1935. Philosophy and Logical Syntax, London:\\nKegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.\",\n \"Carson, T., 1984. The Status of Morality. Boston: D.\\nReidel.\",\n \"Copp, D., 2001. “Realist-expressivism,” Social\\nPhilosophy and Policy, 18: 1–43.\",\n \"Cowie, C., 2019. Morality and Epistemic Judgement: The\\nArgument from Analogy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Dancy, J., 1986. “Two conceptions of moral realism,”\\nProceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Supplementary\\nVolume), 60: 167–187.\",\n \"Dreier, J., 2004. “Meta-ethics and the problem of creeping\\nminimalism,” Philosophical Perspectives, 18:\\n23–44.\",\n \"–––, 2018. “The real and the quasi-real:\\nProblems of distinction,” Canadian Journal of\\nPhilosophy, 48: 532–547.\",\n \"Dummett, M., 1978. Truth and Other Enigmas, London:\\nDuckworth.\",\n \"Dworkin, R., 1996. “Objectivity and truth: You’d\\nbetter believe it,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 25:\\n87–139.\",\n \"Firth, R., 1952. “Ethical absolutism and the ideal\\nobserver,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,\\n12: 317–345.\",\n \"Foot, P., 1958. “Moral arguments,” Mind, 67:\\n502–513.\",\n \"Garner, R., 1994. Beyond Morality, Philadelphia: Temple\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"–––, 2010. “Abolishing morality,” in\\nR. Joyce & S. Kirchin (eds.), A World Without Values: Essays\\non John Mackie’s Moral Error Theory, Dordrecht: Springer:\\n217–233.\",\n \"Garner, R. & Joyce, R. (eds.), 2019. The End of Morality:\\nTaking Moral Abolitionism Seriously, New York: Routledge.\",\n \"Gibbard, A., 1992. Wise Choices, Apt Feelings, Cambridge,\\nMA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Goodwin, G. & Darley, J., 2008. “The psychology of\\nmeta-ethics: Exploring objectivism,” Cognition, 106:\\n1339–1366.\",\n \"Hare, R.M., 1952. The Language of Morals, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"–––, 1963. Freedom and Reason, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press.\",\n \"Hills, A., 2011. “Moral epistemology,” in M. Brady\\n(ed.), New Waves in Metaethics, Basingstoke: Palgrave\\nMacmillan: 249–263.\",\n \"Hinckfuss, I., 1987. “The moral society: Its structure and\\neffects,” Discussion Papers in Environmental Philosophy\\n16, Philosophy Program (RSSS), Canberra: Australian National\\nUniversity.\",\n \"Hopster, J., 2019. “The metaethical significance of\\nexperiments about folk moral objectivism,” Philosophical\\nPsychology, 32: 831–852.\",\n \"Hussain, N.J.Z., 2004. “The return of moral\\nfictionalism,” Philosophical Perspectives, 18:\\n149–187.\",\n \"Jackson, F., 1998. From Metaphysics to Ethics, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press.\",\n \"Joyce, R., 2001. The Myth of Morality, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2009. “Is moral projectivism\\nempirically tractable?” Ethical Theory and Moral\\nPractice, 12: 53–75.\",\n \"–––, 2012. “Metaethical pluralism: How\\nboth moral naturalism and moral skepticism may be permissible\\npositions,” in S. Nuccetelli & G. Seay (eds.), Ethical\\nNaturalism: Current Debates, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress: 89–109.\",\n \"–––, 2013. “Irrealism and the genealogy of\\nmorals,” Ratio, 26: 351–372.\",\n \"–––, 2016. “Evolution, truth-tracking, and\\nmoral skepticism,” in his Essays in Moral Skepticism,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press: 142–158.\",\n \"–––, 2017. “Fictionalism in\\nmetaethics,” in D. Plunkett & T. McPherson (eds.),\\nRoutledge Handbook of Metaethics, New York: Routledge:\\n72–86.\",\n \"–––, 2019. “Moral and epistemic\\nnormativity: The guilty and the innocent,” in C. Cowie & R.\\nRowland (eds.), Companions in Guilt Arguments in Metaethics,\\nNew York: Routledge: 53–72.\",\n \"Kalderon, M., 2005. Moral Fictionalism, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Lewis, D.K., 1989. “Dispositional theories of value,”\\nreprinted in his Papers in Ethics and Social Philosophy,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 68–94.\",\n \"MacIntyre, A., 1984. After Virtue, Indiana: University of\\nNotre Dame Press.\",\n \"Mackie, J.L., 1977. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong,\\nHarmondsworth: Penguin.\",\n \"–––, 1982. The Miracle of Theism,\\nOxford: Clarendon.\",\n \"McCloskey, M., Caramazza, A., & Green, B., 1980.\\n“Curvilinear motion in the absence of external forces: Naive\\nbeliefs about the motion of objects,” Science, 210:\\n1139–1141.\",\n \"McGrath, S., 2009. “The puzzle of pure moral\\ndeference,” Philosophical Perspectives, 23:\\n321–344.\",\n \"–––, 2011. “Skepticism about moral\\nexpertise as a puzzle for moral realism,” Journal of\\nPhilosophy, 108: 111–137.\",\n \"McNaughton, D., 1988. Moral Vision, Oxford: Basil\\nBlackwell.\",\n \"Milo, R., 1995. “Contractarian constructivism,”\\nThe Journal of Philosophy, 92: 181–204.\",\n \"Olson, J., 2014. Moral Error Theory: History, Critique,\\nDefense, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"O’Neill, E., 2015. “Which causes of belief\\nmatter?” Philosophy of Science, 82:\\n1070–1080.\",\n \"Putnam, H., 1987. The Many Faces of Realism, La Salle,\\nIL.: Open Court.\",\n \"Railton, P., 1986. “Moral realism,” Philosophical\\nReview, 95: 163–207.\",\n \"Rawls, J., 1971. A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA.:\\nBelknap Press.\",\n \"Ronzoni, M., 2010. “Constructivism and practical reason: On\\nintersubjectivity, abstraction, and judgment,” Journal of\\nMoral Philosophy, 7: 74–104.\",\n \"Rosati, C., 2021. “Motivation internalism and\\nexternalism,” in R. Chang & K. Sylvan (eds.), The\\nRoutledge Handbook on Practical Reason, Oxford: Routledge:\\n237–250.\",\n \"Rosen, G., 1994. “Objectivity and modern idealism: What is\\nthe question?” in M. Michael & J. O’Leary-Hawthorne\\n(eds.) Philosophy In Mind, Dordrecht: Kluwer:\\n277–319.\",\n \"Sayre-McCord, G., 1986. “The many moral realisms,”\\nSouthern Journal of Philosophy (Supplementary Volume), 24:\\n1–22.\",\n \"Scanlon, T., 1998. What We Owe To Each Other, Cambridge,\\nMA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Schroeder, M., 2009. “Hybrid expressivism: Virtues and\\nvices,” Ethics, 119: 257–309.\",\n \"Smith, M., 1994, The Moral Problem, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Sobel, D., 1999. “Do the desires of rational agents\\nconverge?” Analysis, 59: 137–147.\",\n \"Stevenson, C.L., 1944. Ethics and Language, New Haven:\\nYale University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1948. “The nature of ethical\\ndisagreement,” reprinted in his Facts and Values, New\\nHaven: Yale University Press, 1963.\",\n \"Street, S., 2006. “A Darwinian dilemma for realist theories\\nof value,” Philosophical Studies, 127:\\n109–166.\",\n \"–––, 2010. “What is constructivism in\\nethics and metaethics?” Philosophy Compass, 5:\\n363–384.\",\n \"–––, 2012. “Coming to terms with\\ncontingency: Humean constructivism about practical reason,” in\\nJ. Lenman & Y. Shemmer (eds.), Constructivism in Practical\\nPhilosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 40–59.\",\n \"Svavarsdóttir, S., 2006. “How do moral judgments\\nmotivate?” in J. Dreier (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Moral\\nTheory, Malden, MA: Blackwell 163–181.\",\n \"Svoboda, T., 2011. “Hybridizing moral expressivism and moral\\nerror theory,” Journal of Value Inquiry, 45:\\n37–48.\",\n \"Toppinen, T., 2004. “Moral fetishism revisited,”\\nProceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 104:\\n307–315.\",\n \"Tropman, E., 2018. “Formulating moral objectivity,”\\nPhilosophia, 46: 1023–1040.\",\n \"Uttich, K., Tsai, G., & Lombrozo, T., 2014. “Exploring\\nmetaethical commitments: Moral objectivity and moral progress,”\\nin H. Sarkissian & J. Wright (eds.), Advances in Experimental\\nMoral Psychology, London: Bloomsbury Academic:\\n188–208.\",\n \"Wright, C., 1988, “Realism, antirealism, irrealism,\\nquasi-realism,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 12:\\n25–49.\",\n \"–––, 1992. Truth and Objectivity,\\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../moral-cognitivism/","text":"cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism, moral"},{"href":"../constructivism-metaethics/","text":"constructivism: in metaethics"},{"href":"../metaethics/","text":"metaethics"},{"href":"../moral-non-naturalism/","text":"moral non-naturalism"},{"href":"../moral-realism/","text":"moral realism"},{"href":"../moral-relativism/","text":"moral relativism"},{"href":"../skepticism-moral/","text":"moral skepticism"},{"href":"../naturalism-moral/","text":"naturalism: moral"},{"href":"../realism/","text":"realism"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../moral-cognitivism/\",\n \"text\": \"cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism, moral\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../constructivism-metaethics/\",\n \"text\": \"constructivism: in metaethics\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../metaethics/\",\n \"text\": \"metaethics\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../moral-non-naturalism/\",\n \"text\": \"moral non-naturalism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../moral-realism/\",\n \"text\": \"moral realism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../moral-relativism/\",\n \"text\": \"moral relativism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../skepticism-moral/\",\n \"text\": \"moral skepticism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../naturalism-moral/\",\n \"text\": \"naturalism: moral\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../realism/\",\n \"text\": \"realism\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":67,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"antiochus-ascalon"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Antiochus of Ascalon"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Tue Mar 1, 2005; substantive revision Thu Aug 6, 2020"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\n\nAntiochus, who was active in the latter part of the second and the\nearly part of the first centuries B.C.E., was a member of the Academy,\nPlato’s school, during its skeptical phase. After espousing skepticism\nhimself, he became a dogmatist. He defended an epistemological theory\nessentially the same as the Stoics’ and an ethical theory which\nsynthesized elements from the Stoa and Plato and Aristotle. In both\nareas he claimed to be reviving the doctrines of the Old Academy of\nPlato and his earliest successors and\nAristotle.\n"],"string":"[\n \"\\n\\nAntiochus, who was active in the latter part of the second and the\\nearly part of the first centuries B.C.E., was a member of the Academy,\\nPlato’s school, during its skeptical phase. After espousing skepticism\\nhimself, he became a dogmatist. He defended an epistemological theory\\nessentially the same as the Stoics’ and an ethical theory which\\nsynthesized elements from the Stoa and Plato and Aristotle. In both\\nareas he claimed to be reviving the doctrines of the Old Academy of\\nPlato and his earliest successors and\\nAristotle.\\n\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Life, Works and Background ","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. Overview of Antiochus’ Philosophy","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"3. Epistemology","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"4. Ethics","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":["Texts","Secondary Sources"]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Life, Works and Background \",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Overview of Antiochus’ Philosophy\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Epistemology\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Ethics\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"Texts\",\n \"Secondary Sources\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\n\nAntiochus was born in the latter part of the second century B.C.E. in\nAscalon (whose site is in present-day Israel) and died in 69/8\nB.C.E. (On Antiochus’ life, see Hatzimichali 2012). Early in life he\nmoved to Athens, at this time still the center of the ancient\nphilosophical world, where he became a member of the Academy, the\nphilosophical school founded by Plato in the fourth century B.C.E. He\nmay also have studied with certain of the Stoic philosophers then\nactive in Athens. His membership in the Academy dates from around 110\nB.C.E., the date when Philo of Larissa became the school’s head, or\nscholarch. At this time Philo championed a form of the skepticism that\nhad been defended in the Academy since the scholarchate of \n Arcesilaus,\nin the first half of the third century B.C.E. Antiochus was for many\nyears a student and follower of Philo, whose views he defended in his\nwritings, but at an uncertain point (though before 79 B.C.E.;\nsee Section 3) he broke sharply with Philo and\nrejected skepticism (Cicero, Acad. 2.69).","\nA measure of caution is in order. “Skeptic” is an ancient\nGreek term meaning inquirer. The Academics did not use it of\nthemselves; The descriptive appellation ‘skeptic[al] ’ was\nfirst applied by Pyrrhonians to their school in order to signal their\ncommitment to open-minded inquiry (see the overview in the entry on\n ancient skepticism). Understood in\nthis way, the term applies at least as well to the skeptical Academy\nas to the Pyrrhonian school, which was founded or revived by\nAenesidemus, an Academic who reacted against what he saw as an\nincreasingly dogmatic tendency in the Academy of his time in the first\ncentury B.C.E. Later in antiquity the term “skeptic” seems\nto have been applied to both schools. A range of arguments that, in\none way or another, call the existence or possibility of knowledge\ninto question, together with the positions or attitudes taken in\nresponse to, or expressed by, these arguments, have been styled\n“skeptical”, and several forms of skepticism were defended\nby different Academics in the course of the school’s history.","\n\nFrom his break with Philo Antiochus was a dogmatist, who maintained\nthat knowledge was possible and that there were truths known to him\nand other human beings. It is clear that he began a new school of\nthought and attracted followers. Later in antiquity, when different\nphases in the history of the Academy corresponding to changes in\ndoctrine and philosophical approach were distinguished, some people\nspoke of a fourth Academy of Philo and a fifth of Antiochus (Sextus\nEmpiricus [S.E.], Outlines of Pyrrhonism, i.e.,\nPyrrhoneae hypotyposes [PH] 1.220). These\ndistinctions were not meant to correspond to changes in the Academy as\nan institution, and evidence about institutional developments and the\nrelations between them and Antiochus’ change in intellectual direction\nis fragmentary and unclear. It is not plain, e.g., whether he began\nexpounding his new views while still a member of the Academy or after\nforming a group around himself, which he dubbed the ‘Old Academy’ in\norder to signal his allegiance to the original Old Academy of Plato\nand his immediate successors and to contrast it with the ‘New Academy’\nof Philo and his predecessors from the time of Arcesilaus (cf. Polito\n2012) ","\n\nPolitical instability in Athens led Philo to transfer his activities\nto Rome in 88 B.C.E. We know that Antiochus was in Alexandria the\nfollowing year in the company of Lucullus, a Roman general and\nstatesman, with whom he maintained ties for the rest of his life. He\nalso exerted an influence on other prominent Romans. Cicero, though\nnot a follower of his, studied with Antiochus in Athens in 79. Varro,\napart from Cicero the greatest Roman intellectual of the first century\nB.C.E., and Brutus, the assassin of Caesar, were adherents of\nAntiochus’ philosophy (on Varro, see Blank 2012).","\n\nNone of Antiochus’ books have survived, but we know something\nabout them. He wrote an epistemological work called Canonica\nin at least two books. The title comes from\n‘kanôn,’ meaning a ruler or straightedge, a\nterm that was used by philosophers in the Hellenistic period for the\nstandard or criterion of truth. It is cited by Sextus Empiricus in his\nsurvey of views about the criterion of truth at Against the\nprofessors, i.e., Adversus Mathematicos [M]\n7.162, 202, and modern scholars have conjectured that it was\nSextus’ source for much of that survey (cf. Tarrant, 1985,\n94–6; Sedley, 1992). The Sosus, possibly a dialogue,\nwas also an epistemological work and belonged to the last phase of\nAntiochus’ controversy with Philo\n(Cicero, Acad. 2.12). He wrote a book about the gods,\nconcerning which we know nothing more. He sent a book to the Roman\nStoic, Balbus, in which he maintained that, despite differences in\nterminology, the Stoics and Peripatetics (as Aristotle’s\nsuccessors in his school, the Peripatos, were called) were largely in\nagreement on matters of substance (Cicero, N.D. 1.16). And\nCicero informs us that he wrote in many places about his view of the\nrelation between happiness and virtue (T.D. 5.22)."],"section_title":"1. Life, Works and Background ","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\nAntiochus regarded the criterion of truth and the goal\n(telos, end) of human life as the two most important concerns\nof philosophy (Cicero, Acad. 2.29), and we are best informed\nabout his epistemological and ethical views. As we have seen, the\noccasion for his break from Philo was a disagreement about\nknowledge. After years of loyally defending the skepticism of Philo\nand his Academic predecessors, Antiochus came to embrace the opposing\ndogmatic position that knowledge is possible. What is more, he\nmaintained that the original or Old Academy of Plato and his immediate\nfollowers were of the same opinion. This put him in conflict with his\nmore immediate predecessors, some of whom had argued that Plato should\nalso be interpreted as a skeptic (Cicero, Acad. 1.46). Thus,\naccording to Antiochus, it was not he who was departing from Academic\ntradition, but the institution from the time of Arcesilaus to Philo\nthat had betrayed the true Academic inheritance of the original Old\nAcademy, which he was now restoring.","\n\nThere is a further complication. The epistemology that Antiochus\ndefended was Stoic in all essential points (Brittain 2012). This was\nobvious to his contemporaries, some of whom charged that, far from\nbeing an Academic of any kind, he was a Stoic and belonged in the Stoa\nrather than in the Academy (Acad. 2.69, 132, cf. 137;\nS.E. PH 1.235). In reply, Antiochus maintained that the Old\nAcademy, the Peripatos and the Stoa were in fundamental\nagreement. According to him, far from being an innovator, Zeno of\nCitium, the founder of Stoicism, was responsible mainly only for a new\nterminology and a handful of corrections to the Old Academic doctrine\n(Cicero,\nAcad. 1.35). Though unconvincing to many of his\ncontemporaries, this historical thesis explains how Antiochus could\ndefend Stoic epistemology against the arguments made by his Academic\npredecessors while claiming to revive the Old Academy. His arguments\nabout both epistemology and ethics were embedded in this\nreinterpretation of Academic history and thus were part of an argument\nabout who was the legitimate heir of the school’s\ntradition.","\n\nMatters were likely more complicated still, and the state of the\nevidence leaves much room for interpretative disagreement. Some\nscholars have argued that his engagement with Platonism was more\nthoroughgoing than ancient and modern interpreters who have emphasized\nhis debts to Stoicism tend to allow. The tantalizing fact that Zeno\nstudied with the Academic scholarch, Polemo, lends some plausibility\nto the idea that Stoicism was itself indebted to the Old Academy in\ncertain respects. And the case has been made that Antiochus exerted an\ninfluence on, or prefigured, developments in Middle Platonism (see\nBonazzi 2012).","\nEpistemology and ethics belong respectively to Logic and Ethics which,\ntogether with Physics, were the three parts of philosophy recognized\nin the Hellenistic era (cf. Ac. 1, 19). We are better informed about\nAntiochus’ epistemology and ethical theory than his Physics, which\naccurately reflects his own priorities, though, as we have seen, he\nwrote a book about the gods, a subject that belonged to Physics. For\nfirm evidence about Antiochean Physics we we are largely reliant on\nthe brief exposition of the views of the Old Academics and\nPeripatetics by the Antiochean spokesman, Varro, in Acad. 1\n(24–29), who also mentions a few “corrections” by Zeno,\nwhich Antiochus may have adopted (1. 39). Here as elsewhere it is hard\nto tell whether and to what extent the resemblance between Antiochus’\nview, according to which material reality is constituted by two things\nand their interaction, one active, one passive, and Stoic views\nreflects the influence of the latter on Antiochus or is evidence of an\nOld Academic influence on Stoicism (see Inwood 2012). "],"section_title":"2. Overview of Antiochus’ Philosophy","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\nAcademic skepticism arose out of the debate, initiated by Arcesilaus,\nabout the nature and possibility of knowledge between the Academy and\nrival schools of philosophy, chiefly the Stoics. The Academy’s method\nof argument was, in the first instance at least, dialectical. Their\nmodel was Socrates as depicted in Plato’s Socratic dialogues, where he\nputs questions to his interlocutors and deduces conclusions unwelcome\nto them from their replies. Following Socrates’ example, the Academics\ntook their premises from the doctrines of their Stoic opponents or\nfrom assumptions that the Stoics could reject only at a high cost in\nplausibility. By arguing in this way, the Academics hoped to enhance\ntheir and their opponents’ understanding of the issues and, if\npossible, to progress towards the discovery of the truth that would\nresolve the question in contention. The difficulties that the\nAcademics uncovered in this way were, then, in large part internal to\ntheir interlocutors’ position, and, in drawing them out, the Academics\ndid not necessarily commit themselves to a position of their own.","\n\nStoic epistemology attempts to show how it is possible for human\nbeings to attain wisdom, which the Stoics take to be a condition\nentirely free of opinion, i.e., false or insecure judgment (see the \nsection on Logic in the entry on\n Stoicism). For this to be possible, they\nmaintain, there must be a criterion of truth (see Striker 1990). In\ntheir theory, it is what they called a cognitive impression that plays\nthis part. This they define as an impression from what is, stamped\nand impressed in exact accordance with what is, and such as could not\nbe from what is not (cf. Annas 1990, Frede 1999, Sedley 2002).\nCognitive impressions, then, are true impressions which are, in\naddition, distinguished by a special character belongs only to true\nimpressions (though not to all of them) and which enables human beings\nto discriminate cognitive from non-cognitive impressions. In the\nparadigm case, which the definition has in view, cognitive impressions\nare perceptual, but in a broader sense of the term, non-perceptual\nimpressions that afford an equally secure grasp of their contents can\nalso be called cognitive. According to the Stoics, by confining assent\nto cognitive impressions, it is possible to avoid error entirely.","\n\nThe existence of the special character alleged to distinguish\ncognitive impressions from other impressions was the principal target\nof the Academics’ arguments (see Section 3 of the entry on\n Carneades). \n If such impressions do not exist, it follows immediately in the\ncontext of Stoic epistemology that nothing can be known. On the basis\nof this result and the Stoic doctrine that the wise, i.e., human\nbeings as they ought to be, do not hold (mere) opinions\n(S.E. M 7.155–7), the Academics went on to argue that one\nought to suspend judgement about all matters.","\n\nThese two doctrines—that nothing can be known, or a claim\nthat implied it in the Stoic context, and that one ought to suspend\njudgment—make up the skeptical Academic position, in the sense\nof the position put forward and defended by Academics if not\nnecessarily endorsed by them. The Stoics, followed by Antiochus in his\ndogmatic phase, argued that this position is self-refuting since to\nadopt a position is to assent to its component doctrines and assent is\nimpossible without taking oneself to know. The Stoics also argued,\nagain followed by Antiochus, that the skepticism called for by the\nAcademics’ arguments was a practical impossibility since action\nis impossible without assent.","\n\nEven though, as previously noted, the Academics were not necessarily\ncommitted to the skeptical position, they defended the possibility of\na life of committed skepticism in order to prevent the Stoics from\nescaping the difficulties raised for their position indirectly by\nmeans of these anti-skeptical arguments. Arcesilaus made a start, but\nit was Carneades, his successor in the 2nd century B.C.E., who did the\nmost, and who was responsible for the version of the defense with\nwhich Antiochus was familiar.","\n\nCarneades argued that, in the absence of cognitive impressions, a\nbasis for action and inquiry could be found in so-called probable\nimpressions (from probabilis, meaning that which lends itself\nto or invites approval, Cicero’s Latin for the Greek\npithanos, meaning persuasive) (see Section 3 of the entry\n on Carneades).\n ","\n\nBuilding on this account of probable impressions, Carneades defended\ntwo views about assent. According to one proposal, the wise\nperson will always withhold assent, but will be able to act and\ninquire by following or using probable impressions in a way that does\nnot amount to assent, and so does not involve holding opinions about\nanything (Acad. 2.59, 99, 108). According to the second, the\nwise person will assent to what is probable and so form opinions, but\nprovisionally and on the understanding that he may be wrong\n(Acad. 2.59, 67, 78, 112).","\n\nIt is a matter of controversy whether Carneades went beyond putting\nthese views forward for the sake of argument and actually subscribed\nto one of them. It appears, however, that some of his successors\nendorsed one or both of the skeptical doctrines. One tendency, led by\nClitomachus, Carneades’ student and eventual successor as scholarch,\nfavored what we may call a radical skeptical position embracing both\ndoctrines. Though Clitomachus rejected assent, he accepted Carneades’\nproposal that we could follow or use impressions without assenting to\nthem and adopted this attitude toward, among other impressions, the\nskeptical doctrines that nothing can be known and that one ought\ntherefore suspend judgment (Acad. 2.109–10). The other\ntendency endorsed a moderate or mitigated form of skepticism. Though\nit accepted the first skeptical doctrine, namely that nothing can be\nknown, this tendency permitted the wise to form opinions by assenting\nto non-cognitive impressions so long as they are sufficiently probable\nand the assent given to them is bestowed in the provisional spirit of\nCarneades’ second proposal. And this tendency took the opinion that\nnothing can be known to be among the impressions to which one should\nassent in this way. The appearance of paradox dissolves when one\nrealizes that in accepting that one does not know anything one is not\ntaking oneself to know this, but only opining that it is highly\nprobable. The most prominent proponent of this view was Antiochus’\nteacher, Philo, and it is this mitigated form of Academic skepticism\nthat Antiochus defended before his conversion to dogmatism.","\n\nWe are informed about Antiochus’ case against Academic\nskepticism by Cicero’s Academica, substantial parts of which\nhave survived intact. Antiochus seems to have followed the Stoics, who\nproduced a substantial literature defending their position and\nattacking the Academy’s probabilistic alternative, but also to have\nadded some elements of his own to the argument (cf. Striker 1997). He\ndefended the veracity of the senses. He seems to have argued that in\norder even to possess a concept of the truth we must indisputably\napprehend some truths in a way that is possible only if there are\ncognitive impressions (Acad. 2.33). He argued that probable\nimpressions are a wholly inadequate substitute for cognitive\nimpressions (Acad. 2.35–6), so that the charge that by\nabolishing the cognitive impression (as they think) the Academics\ndeprive human beings of a basis for action stands\n(Acad. 2.31, 33, 54, 62, 102–3, 110). And he argued that, in\nmaintaining the skeptical position, the Academics must take themselves\nto know at least one thing, viz., that nothing can be known\n(Acad. 2.28–9, 109; cf. Burnyeat 1997).","\n\nThere is one more twist in the story, however. After removing to Rome,\nPhilo published a pair of books – the so-called Roman Books –\nwhich, when they came to Antiochus’ attention in Alexandria, seemed to\nhim to represent a radical and intellectually untenable departure from\nhis teacher’s previous position. This was the occasion for\nthe Sosus, which contained a stinging riposte to Philo’s new\nideas. In opposition to Antiochus’ view that there were two Academies,\nan Old and a New, Philo maintained that there had only ever been\none. But he now held that the Academics from Plato to Philo himself\nwere not united by their skepticism, as we have seen some Academics\nbelieved. Rather they had never been skeptics because they had never\nmeant to challenge the possibility of knowledge. Philo did not deny\nthat Arcesilaus and Carneades had argued against the existence of\ncognitive impressions. Rather, he now maintained that these arguments\nshowed, and were always intended to show, not that cognition or\napprehension is impossible, but that it is impossible on the Stoic\nconception of apprehension, which is therefore mistaken\n(Acad. 2.18; S.E. PH 1.235).","\n\nPhilo’s Roman innovation, then, was to reject the Stoic account of\nknowledge while continuing to accept his predecessors’ arguments that\nthe requirement that cognitive impressions be set apart from other\nimpressions by a special character cannot be satisfied (cf. Barnes\n1989, 70–76). For there to be knowledge, he now held, it was\nenough that there be impressions which are true and accurately formed\n(Cicero Acad. 2.18). It is not hard to see why Antiochus was\ndisturbed, for, if this is right, Philo was the legitimate heir of a\nsingle unbroken Academic tradition stretching back to Plato in which\nthere was no place for alien Stoic doctrines. Cicero, who is our\nprincipal source, chose not to recount the details of this controversy\n(Acad. 2.12). But we know that Antiochus argued that, by\nabandoning the full Stoic account of cognition and its commitment to\ncognitive impressions satisfying the complete Stoic definition, Philo\nsucceeded only in bringing about the result he most wanted to avoid,\nnamely that knowledge is impossible (Acad. 2.18). Presumably\nAntiochus drew on the case he had already brought against Academic\nprobabilism to argue that impressions which fail to satisfy the full\nStoic definition of the cognitive impression cannot provide a basis\nfor judgment of any kind let alone judgments of the kind that deserve\nto be called knowledge."],"section_title":"3. Epistemology","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\nAntiochus maintained that his ethical theory was that of the\nPeripatetics and original Old Academics just as he had maintained that\nhis Stoicizing epistemology was in substance that of the Old Academy\n(Cicero, Fin. 5.7, 14; Acad. 1.22). He could make\nthis claim about his ethical theory with more justice. On the crucial\nquestion of whether to recognize external and bodily items as goods in\naddition to virtue, he agreed with Aristotle and the Peripatos and\ndisagreed with the Stoics, who made virtue the sole good. Nonetheless,\nhis theory is greatly indebted to the Stoa, and it draws on anti-Stoic\narguments of his predecessors in the Academy that also tend to\npresuppose Stoic ideas. Roughly speaking, Antiochus defended the\nPeripatetic view about goods on the basis of considerations and in the\ncontext of assumptions that belong to a Stoic and not an Aristotelian\nframework (cf. White 1978).","\n\nCicero expounds and criticizes Antiochus’ theory in book 5 of the\nDe finibus and draws on Antiochus in his critique of Stoic\nethics in book 4 (trans. in Annas and Woolf 2001). The Stoics\nmaintained that only virtue, which is identical with wisdom or the\nperfection of reason, is good and only vice, its opposite, evil,\nwhereas all the so-called goods, like health and strength, and their\nopposites, the so-called evils, were indifferent (see the section\nEthics in the entry on Stoicism).\nNonetheless the Stoics took some indifferents, often those generally\nregarded as goods by others, to be preferred and some, often those\ngenerally regarded as evils, to be dispreferred. This distinction\nfurnished the material or subject matter for rational\nselection. Virtue consists in fully rational selection among them. The\nwise or virtuous person acts with a view to obtaining preferred items\nand avoiding their opposites, but it is as an expression of his\nperfected reason that acts of selection are good, not because they\nsecure, or tend to secure, preferred items for him or protect, or tend\nto protect, him from their dispreferred opposites. According to the\nStoics, the sole necessary and sufficient condition for human good and\ntherefore happiness is the possession of virtue. Indifferent items\ncannot add to or detract from the goodness of such a life by their\npresence or absence.","\n\nTo judge by Cicero’s evidence from book 4 of the of the De\nfinibus, Antiochus appears to have argued against this position\nby confronting the Stoics with a dilemma. Either the so-called\npreferred indifferents really were absolutely and utterly\nindifferent. In that case, the Stoic position collapsed into that of\nphilosophers like the heterodox Stoic, Ariston of Chios, who refused\nto make distinctions of any kind among the indifferents, thus\nrendering virtue incapable of supplying practical guidance by\ndestroying the basis for rational selection among actions (Cicero,\nFin. 4.47, 60, 69). Or speaking of preferred indifferents\nwas a merely verbal innovation, and the Stoics really regarded the\nitems they called preferred as goods, albeit lesser goods, capable of\nmaking a life better by their presence and worse by their\nabsence. Antiochus favored the latter diagnosis (Cicero,\nFin. 5.74), and his own position was that virtue is the chief\ngood, but not the sole good; this is the Peripatetic view, which he\nmay well have been right to attribute to the original Old Academy as\nwell (Cicero, Fin. 4.60, 61; 5.14; Acad. 1.22).","\n\nThe way in which Antiochus appeals to human nature and its development\nin the exposition and defense of his ethics is modeled closely on\nStoic theory, however. To be sure, Aristotle assigns an important role\nto the development of character through habituation. But Antiochus\nfollows the Stoics and Epicureans in using what modern scholarship has\nbeen called the “cradle argument” (Fin. 5.55). The idea is\nthat by attending to the behavior of infants, who have not yet been\ncorrupted by contact with society, we will be able to isolate our\noriginal natural impulses and discover what the first objects of\nnatural concern or attachment are. If one accepts a general principle\naccording to which the object or objects with which we are naturally\nconcerned or to which we are attached by nature provide the basis for\ndetermining the human good, the cradle argument can be used to answer\nthe question what is the true goal of human life."," The Epicureans maintained that infants are naturally impelled to\npleasure, and that the goal for adult humans is a life of\npleasure. The Stoics argued that our first natural impulses were not\ntoward pleasure (and away from pain) but towards the “natural\nadvantages,” things like health and strength, bodily integrity and\nwell-functioning senses (and away from their opposites). But it was\nnot because they thought these items were goods; they insisted that\nthey are indifferent, though preferred. The infant’s natural concern\nfor them is the first stage of a development in which what is truly\ngood only appears later. According to the Stoics, if all goes well, a\nhuman being’s motives undergo a radical transformation from the\ninfant’s. Only at a later point does the human being recognize virtue\nand virtuous activity as the only human goods and act for the sake of\nthe true good. Preferred indifferents are the material or subject\nmatter for the rational selection in which virtue consists, but\nnothing more. Since the objects of our first natural impulses turn\nout not to be good but indifferent, to be the object of a natural\nimpulse, or to be in accord with our nature in the way such objects\nare, is not thereby to be good.","\n\nAntiochus agrees with the Stoics about the importance of the first\nnatural impulses and, by and large, about which items are the objects\nof those impulses. But unlike them, he accepts the principle that what\nagrees or accords with a creature’s fully developed adult nature, as\nit is expressed in its natural impulses, is good for that creature,\nand that the good life for human beings is therefore the life\ncharacterized by the fullest possible enjoyment of the goods\ncorresponding to our natural impulses (Cicero, Acad. 1.19,\n22; Fin. 5.24–5). He believes that he has an Old\nAcademic authority for this in Polemon (Cicero, Fin. 4.14;\nAcad. 2.131), head of the Academy at the end of the fourth\ncentury B.C.E. Nonetheless, despite admitting other goods, he holds\nthat virtue is the highest human good, and he believes that his theory\ncan explain why it is the chief human good without having to make it\nthe only good as the Stoics had done.","\n\nOn his view, the development which leads a human being to virtue does\nnot involve a radical transformation of the kind posited by the\nStoics. Rather, if all goes well, a human being comes to value reason,\nand hence virtue as the perfection of reason, above all other things\nbecause reason is the most important part of human nature. It is not\nso much the character of a human being’s motivation that is\ntransformed as he develops, according to Antiochus, but rather the\nself which is the object of his natural concern. As a result, though\nvirtue is the chief human good, there is room for other goods as well,\nbecause they are in accord with human nature too, albeit less\nimportant parts of it. Antiochus’ use of the Stoic framework puts him\nin a position to fault the Stoics for abandoning or forgetting the\nnature from which they set out (Cicero, Fin. 4.26, 43; 5.72)\nand for failing to see the difference between taking reason to be the\nmost important part of human nature—which is correct—and\nthinking that it is the only part (4.41).","\n\nLike the Stoics, however, Antiochus wants to claim that virtue is\nsufficient for happiness. Stoic ethics ensures this result by denying\nthat there are any goods or evils apart from virtue and vice and\ntherefore any items capable of affecting the goodness of a life except\nvirtue and vice. This option was not open to Antiochus because he\nthinks that there are other goods and evils, which do have this\npower. His solution, which is the most distinctive feature of his\nethical system and the one that seems to have drawn the most\ncriticism, is to distinguish between the happy life (vita\nbeata in Cicero’s Latin), for which virtue is sufficient, and the\ncompletely or entirely happy life (vita beatissima)\n(Fin. 5.71, 95; T.D. 5.22), which requires bodily\nand external goods as well (see Irwin 1992)."],"section_title":"4. Ethics","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nAntiochus was born in the latter part of the second century B.C.E. in\\nAscalon (whose site is in present-day Israel) and died in 69/8\\nB.C.E. (On Antiochus’ life, see Hatzimichali 2012). Early in life he\\nmoved to Athens, at this time still the center of the ancient\\nphilosophical world, where he became a member of the Academy, the\\nphilosophical school founded by Plato in the fourth century B.C.E. He\\nmay also have studied with certain of the Stoic philosophers then\\nactive in Athens. His membership in the Academy dates from around 110\\nB.C.E., the date when Philo of Larissa became the school’s head, or\\nscholarch. At this time Philo championed a form of the skepticism that\\nhad been defended in the Academy since the scholarchate of \\n Arcesilaus,\\nin the first half of the third century B.C.E. Antiochus was for many\\nyears a student and follower of Philo, whose views he defended in his\\nwritings, but at an uncertain point (though before 79 B.C.E.;\\nsee Section 3) he broke sharply with Philo and\\nrejected skepticism (Cicero, Acad. 2.69).\",\n \"\\nA measure of caution is in order. “Skeptic” is an ancient\\nGreek term meaning inquirer. The Academics did not use it of\\nthemselves; The descriptive appellation ‘skeptic[al] ’ was\\nfirst applied by Pyrrhonians to their school in order to signal their\\ncommitment to open-minded inquiry (see the overview in the entry on\\n ancient skepticism). Understood in\\nthis way, the term applies at least as well to the skeptical Academy\\nas to the Pyrrhonian school, which was founded or revived by\\nAenesidemus, an Academic who reacted against what he saw as an\\nincreasingly dogmatic tendency in the Academy of his time in the first\\ncentury B.C.E. Later in antiquity the term “skeptic” seems\\nto have been applied to both schools. A range of arguments that, in\\none way or another, call the existence or possibility of knowledge\\ninto question, together with the positions or attitudes taken in\\nresponse to, or expressed by, these arguments, have been styled\\n“skeptical”, and several forms of skepticism were defended\\nby different Academics in the course of the school’s history.\",\n \"\\n\\nFrom his break with Philo Antiochus was a dogmatist, who maintained\\nthat knowledge was possible and that there were truths known to him\\nand other human beings. It is clear that he began a new school of\\nthought and attracted followers. Later in antiquity, when different\\nphases in the history of the Academy corresponding to changes in\\ndoctrine and philosophical approach were distinguished, some people\\nspoke of a fourth Academy of Philo and a fifth of Antiochus (Sextus\\nEmpiricus [S.E.], Outlines of Pyrrhonism, i.e.,\\nPyrrhoneae hypotyposes [PH] 1.220). These\\ndistinctions were not meant to correspond to changes in the Academy as\\nan institution, and evidence about institutional developments and the\\nrelations between them and Antiochus’ change in intellectual direction\\nis fragmentary and unclear. It is not plain, e.g., whether he began\\nexpounding his new views while still a member of the Academy or after\\nforming a group around himself, which he dubbed the ‘Old Academy’ in\\norder to signal his allegiance to the original Old Academy of Plato\\nand his immediate successors and to contrast it with the ‘New Academy’\\nof Philo and his predecessors from the time of Arcesilaus (cf. Polito\\n2012) \",\n \"\\n\\nPolitical instability in Athens led Philo to transfer his activities\\nto Rome in 88 B.C.E. We know that Antiochus was in Alexandria the\\nfollowing year in the company of Lucullus, a Roman general and\\nstatesman, with whom he maintained ties for the rest of his life. He\\nalso exerted an influence on other prominent Romans. Cicero, though\\nnot a follower of his, studied with Antiochus in Athens in 79. Varro,\\napart from Cicero the greatest Roman intellectual of the first century\\nB.C.E., and Brutus, the assassin of Caesar, were adherents of\\nAntiochus’ philosophy (on Varro, see Blank 2012).\",\n \"\\n\\nNone of Antiochus’ books have survived, but we know something\\nabout them. He wrote an epistemological work called Canonica\\nin at least two books. The title comes from\\n‘kanôn,’ meaning a ruler or straightedge, a\\nterm that was used by philosophers in the Hellenistic period for the\\nstandard or criterion of truth. It is cited by Sextus Empiricus in his\\nsurvey of views about the criterion of truth at Against the\\nprofessors, i.e., Adversus Mathematicos [M]\\n7.162, 202, and modern scholars have conjectured that it was\\nSextus’ source for much of that survey (cf. Tarrant, 1985,\\n94–6; Sedley, 1992). The Sosus, possibly a dialogue,\\nwas also an epistemological work and belonged to the last phase of\\nAntiochus’ controversy with Philo\\n(Cicero, Acad. 2.12). He wrote a book about the gods,\\nconcerning which we know nothing more. He sent a book to the Roman\\nStoic, Balbus, in which he maintained that, despite differences in\\nterminology, the Stoics and Peripatetics (as Aristotle’s\\nsuccessors in his school, the Peripatos, were called) were largely in\\nagreement on matters of substance (Cicero, N.D. 1.16). And\\nCicero informs us that he wrote in many places about his view of the\\nrelation between happiness and virtue (T.D. 5.22).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Life, Works and Background \",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nAntiochus regarded the criterion of truth and the goal\\n(telos, end) of human life as the two most important concerns\\nof philosophy (Cicero, Acad. 2.29), and we are best informed\\nabout his epistemological and ethical views. As we have seen, the\\noccasion for his break from Philo was a disagreement about\\nknowledge. After years of loyally defending the skepticism of Philo\\nand his Academic predecessors, Antiochus came to embrace the opposing\\ndogmatic position that knowledge is possible. What is more, he\\nmaintained that the original or Old Academy of Plato and his immediate\\nfollowers were of the same opinion. This put him in conflict with his\\nmore immediate predecessors, some of whom had argued that Plato should\\nalso be interpreted as a skeptic (Cicero, Acad. 1.46). Thus,\\naccording to Antiochus, it was not he who was departing from Academic\\ntradition, but the institution from the time of Arcesilaus to Philo\\nthat had betrayed the true Academic inheritance of the original Old\\nAcademy, which he was now restoring.\",\n \"\\n\\nThere is a further complication. The epistemology that Antiochus\\ndefended was Stoic in all essential points (Brittain 2012). This was\\nobvious to his contemporaries, some of whom charged that, far from\\nbeing an Academic of any kind, he was a Stoic and belonged in the Stoa\\nrather than in the Academy (Acad. 2.69, 132, cf. 137;\\nS.E. PH 1.235). In reply, Antiochus maintained that the Old\\nAcademy, the Peripatos and the Stoa were in fundamental\\nagreement. According to him, far from being an innovator, Zeno of\\nCitium, the founder of Stoicism, was responsible mainly only for a new\\nterminology and a handful of corrections to the Old Academic doctrine\\n(Cicero,\\nAcad. 1.35). Though unconvincing to many of his\\ncontemporaries, this historical thesis explains how Antiochus could\\ndefend Stoic epistemology against the arguments made by his Academic\\npredecessors while claiming to revive the Old Academy. His arguments\\nabout both epistemology and ethics were embedded in this\\nreinterpretation of Academic history and thus were part of an argument\\nabout who was the legitimate heir of the school’s\\ntradition.\",\n \"\\n\\nMatters were likely more complicated still, and the state of the\\nevidence leaves much room for interpretative disagreement. Some\\nscholars have argued that his engagement with Platonism was more\\nthoroughgoing than ancient and modern interpreters who have emphasized\\nhis debts to Stoicism tend to allow. The tantalizing fact that Zeno\\nstudied with the Academic scholarch, Polemo, lends some plausibility\\nto the idea that Stoicism was itself indebted to the Old Academy in\\ncertain respects. And the case has been made that Antiochus exerted an\\ninfluence on, or prefigured, developments in Middle Platonism (see\\nBonazzi 2012).\",\n \"\\nEpistemology and ethics belong respectively to Logic and Ethics which,\\ntogether with Physics, were the three parts of philosophy recognized\\nin the Hellenistic era (cf. Ac. 1, 19). We are better informed about\\nAntiochus’ epistemology and ethical theory than his Physics, which\\naccurately reflects his own priorities, though, as we have seen, he\\nwrote a book about the gods, a subject that belonged to Physics. For\\nfirm evidence about Antiochean Physics we we are largely reliant on\\nthe brief exposition of the views of the Old Academics and\\nPeripatetics by the Antiochean spokesman, Varro, in Acad. 1\\n(24–29), who also mentions a few “corrections” by Zeno,\\nwhich Antiochus may have adopted (1. 39). Here as elsewhere it is hard\\nto tell whether and to what extent the resemblance between Antiochus’\\nview, according to which material reality is constituted by two things\\nand their interaction, one active, one passive, and Stoic views\\nreflects the influence of the latter on Antiochus or is evidence of an\\nOld Academic influence on Stoicism (see Inwood 2012). \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Overview of Antiochus’ Philosophy\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nAcademic skepticism arose out of the debate, initiated by Arcesilaus,\\nabout the nature and possibility of knowledge between the Academy and\\nrival schools of philosophy, chiefly the Stoics. The Academy’s method\\nof argument was, in the first instance at least, dialectical. Their\\nmodel was Socrates as depicted in Plato’s Socratic dialogues, where he\\nputs questions to his interlocutors and deduces conclusions unwelcome\\nto them from their replies. Following Socrates’ example, the Academics\\ntook their premises from the doctrines of their Stoic opponents or\\nfrom assumptions that the Stoics could reject only at a high cost in\\nplausibility. By arguing in this way, the Academics hoped to enhance\\ntheir and their opponents’ understanding of the issues and, if\\npossible, to progress towards the discovery of the truth that would\\nresolve the question in contention. The difficulties that the\\nAcademics uncovered in this way were, then, in large part internal to\\ntheir interlocutors’ position, and, in drawing them out, the Academics\\ndid not necessarily commit themselves to a position of their own.\",\n \"\\n\\nStoic epistemology attempts to show how it is possible for human\\nbeings to attain wisdom, which the Stoics take to be a condition\\nentirely free of opinion, i.e., false or insecure judgment (see the \\nsection on Logic in the entry on\\n Stoicism). For this to be possible, they\\nmaintain, there must be a criterion of truth (see Striker 1990). In\\ntheir theory, it is what they called a cognitive impression that plays\\nthis part. This they define as an impression from what is, stamped\\nand impressed in exact accordance with what is, and such as could not\\nbe from what is not (cf. Annas 1990, Frede 1999, Sedley 2002).\\nCognitive impressions, then, are true impressions which are, in\\naddition, distinguished by a special character belongs only to true\\nimpressions (though not to all of them) and which enables human beings\\nto discriminate cognitive from non-cognitive impressions. In the\\nparadigm case, which the definition has in view, cognitive impressions\\nare perceptual, but in a broader sense of the term, non-perceptual\\nimpressions that afford an equally secure grasp of their contents can\\nalso be called cognitive. According to the Stoics, by confining assent\\nto cognitive impressions, it is possible to avoid error entirely.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe existence of the special character alleged to distinguish\\ncognitive impressions from other impressions was the principal target\\nof the Academics’ arguments (see Section 3 of the entry on\\n Carneades). \\n If such impressions do not exist, it follows immediately in the\\ncontext of Stoic epistemology that nothing can be known. On the basis\\nof this result and the Stoic doctrine that the wise, i.e., human\\nbeings as they ought to be, do not hold (mere) opinions\\n(S.E. M 7.155–7), the Academics went on to argue that one\\nought to suspend judgement about all matters.\",\n \"\\n\\nThese two doctrines—that nothing can be known, or a claim\\nthat implied it in the Stoic context, and that one ought to suspend\\njudgment—make up the skeptical Academic position, in the sense\\nof the position put forward and defended by Academics if not\\nnecessarily endorsed by them. The Stoics, followed by Antiochus in his\\ndogmatic phase, argued that this position is self-refuting since to\\nadopt a position is to assent to its component doctrines and assent is\\nimpossible without taking oneself to know. The Stoics also argued,\\nagain followed by Antiochus, that the skepticism called for by the\\nAcademics’ arguments was a practical impossibility since action\\nis impossible without assent.\",\n \"\\n\\nEven though, as previously noted, the Academics were not necessarily\\ncommitted to the skeptical position, they defended the possibility of\\na life of committed skepticism in order to prevent the Stoics from\\nescaping the difficulties raised for their position indirectly by\\nmeans of these anti-skeptical arguments. Arcesilaus made a start, but\\nit was Carneades, his successor in the 2nd century B.C.E., who did the\\nmost, and who was responsible for the version of the defense with\\nwhich Antiochus was familiar.\",\n \"\\n\\nCarneades argued that, in the absence of cognitive impressions, a\\nbasis for action and inquiry could be found in so-called probable\\nimpressions (from probabilis, meaning that which lends itself\\nto or invites approval, Cicero’s Latin for the Greek\\npithanos, meaning persuasive) (see Section 3 of the entry\\n on Carneades).\\n \",\n \"\\n\\nBuilding on this account of probable impressions, Carneades defended\\ntwo views about assent. According to one proposal, the wise\\nperson will always withhold assent, but will be able to act and\\ninquire by following or using probable impressions in a way that does\\nnot amount to assent, and so does not involve holding opinions about\\nanything (Acad. 2.59, 99, 108). According to the second, the\\nwise person will assent to what is probable and so form opinions, but\\nprovisionally and on the understanding that he may be wrong\\n(Acad. 2.59, 67, 78, 112).\",\n \"\\n\\nIt is a matter of controversy whether Carneades went beyond putting\\nthese views forward for the sake of argument and actually subscribed\\nto one of them. It appears, however, that some of his successors\\nendorsed one or both of the skeptical doctrines. One tendency, led by\\nClitomachus, Carneades’ student and eventual successor as scholarch,\\nfavored what we may call a radical skeptical position embracing both\\ndoctrines. Though Clitomachus rejected assent, he accepted Carneades’\\nproposal that we could follow or use impressions without assenting to\\nthem and adopted this attitude toward, among other impressions, the\\nskeptical doctrines that nothing can be known and that one ought\\ntherefore suspend judgment (Acad. 2.109–10). The other\\ntendency endorsed a moderate or mitigated form of skepticism. Though\\nit accepted the first skeptical doctrine, namely that nothing can be\\nknown, this tendency permitted the wise to form opinions by assenting\\nto non-cognitive impressions so long as they are sufficiently probable\\nand the assent given to them is bestowed in the provisional spirit of\\nCarneades’ second proposal. And this tendency took the opinion that\\nnothing can be known to be among the impressions to which one should\\nassent in this way. The appearance of paradox dissolves when one\\nrealizes that in accepting that one does not know anything one is not\\ntaking oneself to know this, but only opining that it is highly\\nprobable. The most prominent proponent of this view was Antiochus’\\nteacher, Philo, and it is this mitigated form of Academic skepticism\\nthat Antiochus defended before his conversion to dogmatism.\",\n \"\\n\\nWe are informed about Antiochus’ case against Academic\\nskepticism by Cicero’s Academica, substantial parts of which\\nhave survived intact. Antiochus seems to have followed the Stoics, who\\nproduced a substantial literature defending their position and\\nattacking the Academy’s probabilistic alternative, but also to have\\nadded some elements of his own to the argument (cf. Striker 1997). He\\ndefended the veracity of the senses. He seems to have argued that in\\norder even to possess a concept of the truth we must indisputably\\napprehend some truths in a way that is possible only if there are\\ncognitive impressions (Acad. 2.33). He argued that probable\\nimpressions are a wholly inadequate substitute for cognitive\\nimpressions (Acad. 2.35–6), so that the charge that by\\nabolishing the cognitive impression (as they think) the Academics\\ndeprive human beings of a basis for action stands\\n(Acad. 2.31, 33, 54, 62, 102–3, 110). And he argued that, in\\nmaintaining the skeptical position, the Academics must take themselves\\nto know at least one thing, viz., that nothing can be known\\n(Acad. 2.28–9, 109; cf. Burnyeat 1997).\",\n \"\\n\\nThere is one more twist in the story, however. After removing to Rome,\\nPhilo published a pair of books – the so-called Roman Books –\\nwhich, when they came to Antiochus’ attention in Alexandria, seemed to\\nhim to represent a radical and intellectually untenable departure from\\nhis teacher’s previous position. This was the occasion for\\nthe Sosus, which contained a stinging riposte to Philo’s new\\nideas. In opposition to Antiochus’ view that there were two Academies,\\nan Old and a New, Philo maintained that there had only ever been\\none. But he now held that the Academics from Plato to Philo himself\\nwere not united by their skepticism, as we have seen some Academics\\nbelieved. Rather they had never been skeptics because they had never\\nmeant to challenge the possibility of knowledge. Philo did not deny\\nthat Arcesilaus and Carneades had argued against the existence of\\ncognitive impressions. Rather, he now maintained that these arguments\\nshowed, and were always intended to show, not that cognition or\\napprehension is impossible, but that it is impossible on the Stoic\\nconception of apprehension, which is therefore mistaken\\n(Acad. 2.18; S.E. PH 1.235).\",\n \"\\n\\nPhilo’s Roman innovation, then, was to reject the Stoic account of\\nknowledge while continuing to accept his predecessors’ arguments that\\nthe requirement that cognitive impressions be set apart from other\\nimpressions by a special character cannot be satisfied (cf. Barnes\\n1989, 70–76). For there to be knowledge, he now held, it was\\nenough that there be impressions which are true and accurately formed\\n(Cicero Acad. 2.18). It is not hard to see why Antiochus was\\ndisturbed, for, if this is right, Philo was the legitimate heir of a\\nsingle unbroken Academic tradition stretching back to Plato in which\\nthere was no place for alien Stoic doctrines. Cicero, who is our\\nprincipal source, chose not to recount the details of this controversy\\n(Acad. 2.12). But we know that Antiochus argued that, by\\nabandoning the full Stoic account of cognition and its commitment to\\ncognitive impressions satisfying the complete Stoic definition, Philo\\nsucceeded only in bringing about the result he most wanted to avoid,\\nnamely that knowledge is impossible (Acad. 2.18). Presumably\\nAntiochus drew on the case he had already brought against Academic\\nprobabilism to argue that impressions which fail to satisfy the full\\nStoic definition of the cognitive impression cannot provide a basis\\nfor judgment of any kind let alone judgments of the kind that deserve\\nto be called knowledge.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Epistemology\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nAntiochus maintained that his ethical theory was that of the\\nPeripatetics and original Old Academics just as he had maintained that\\nhis Stoicizing epistemology was in substance that of the Old Academy\\n(Cicero, Fin. 5.7, 14; Acad. 1.22). He could make\\nthis claim about his ethical theory with more justice. On the crucial\\nquestion of whether to recognize external and bodily items as goods in\\naddition to virtue, he agreed with Aristotle and the Peripatos and\\ndisagreed with the Stoics, who made virtue the sole good. Nonetheless,\\nhis theory is greatly indebted to the Stoa, and it draws on anti-Stoic\\narguments of his predecessors in the Academy that also tend to\\npresuppose Stoic ideas. Roughly speaking, Antiochus defended the\\nPeripatetic view about goods on the basis of considerations and in the\\ncontext of assumptions that belong to a Stoic and not an Aristotelian\\nframework (cf. White 1978).\",\n \"\\n\\nCicero expounds and criticizes Antiochus’ theory in book 5 of the\\nDe finibus and draws on Antiochus in his critique of Stoic\\nethics in book 4 (trans. in Annas and Woolf 2001). The Stoics\\nmaintained that only virtue, which is identical with wisdom or the\\nperfection of reason, is good and only vice, its opposite, evil,\\nwhereas all the so-called goods, like health and strength, and their\\nopposites, the so-called evils, were indifferent (see the section\\nEthics in the entry on Stoicism).\\nNonetheless the Stoics took some indifferents, often those generally\\nregarded as goods by others, to be preferred and some, often those\\ngenerally regarded as evils, to be dispreferred. This distinction\\nfurnished the material or subject matter for rational\\nselection. Virtue consists in fully rational selection among them. The\\nwise or virtuous person acts with a view to obtaining preferred items\\nand avoiding their opposites, but it is as an expression of his\\nperfected reason that acts of selection are good, not because they\\nsecure, or tend to secure, preferred items for him or protect, or tend\\nto protect, him from their dispreferred opposites. According to the\\nStoics, the sole necessary and sufficient condition for human good and\\ntherefore happiness is the possession of virtue. Indifferent items\\ncannot add to or detract from the goodness of such a life by their\\npresence or absence.\",\n \"\\n\\nTo judge by Cicero’s evidence from book 4 of the of the De\\nfinibus, Antiochus appears to have argued against this position\\nby confronting the Stoics with a dilemma. Either the so-called\\npreferred indifferents really were absolutely and utterly\\nindifferent. In that case, the Stoic position collapsed into that of\\nphilosophers like the heterodox Stoic, Ariston of Chios, who refused\\nto make distinctions of any kind among the indifferents, thus\\nrendering virtue incapable of supplying practical guidance by\\ndestroying the basis for rational selection among actions (Cicero,\\nFin. 4.47, 60, 69). Or speaking of preferred indifferents\\nwas a merely verbal innovation, and the Stoics really regarded the\\nitems they called preferred as goods, albeit lesser goods, capable of\\nmaking a life better by their presence and worse by their\\nabsence. Antiochus favored the latter diagnosis (Cicero,\\nFin. 5.74), and his own position was that virtue is the chief\\ngood, but not the sole good; this is the Peripatetic view, which he\\nmay well have been right to attribute to the original Old Academy as\\nwell (Cicero, Fin. 4.60, 61; 5.14; Acad. 1.22).\",\n \"\\n\\nThe way in which Antiochus appeals to human nature and its development\\nin the exposition and defense of his ethics is modeled closely on\\nStoic theory, however. To be sure, Aristotle assigns an important role\\nto the development of character through habituation. But Antiochus\\nfollows the Stoics and Epicureans in using what modern scholarship has\\nbeen called the “cradle argument” (Fin. 5.55). The idea is\\nthat by attending to the behavior of infants, who have not yet been\\ncorrupted by contact with society, we will be able to isolate our\\noriginal natural impulses and discover what the first objects of\\nnatural concern or attachment are. If one accepts a general principle\\naccording to which the object or objects with which we are naturally\\nconcerned or to which we are attached by nature provide the basis for\\ndetermining the human good, the cradle argument can be used to answer\\nthe question what is the true goal of human life.\",\n \" The Epicureans maintained that infants are naturally impelled to\\npleasure, and that the goal for adult humans is a life of\\npleasure. The Stoics argued that our first natural impulses were not\\ntoward pleasure (and away from pain) but towards the “natural\\nadvantages,” things like health and strength, bodily integrity and\\nwell-functioning senses (and away from their opposites). But it was\\nnot because they thought these items were goods; they insisted that\\nthey are indifferent, though preferred. The infant’s natural concern\\nfor them is the first stage of a development in which what is truly\\ngood only appears later. According to the Stoics, if all goes well, a\\nhuman being’s motives undergo a radical transformation from the\\ninfant’s. Only at a later point does the human being recognize virtue\\nand virtuous activity as the only human goods and act for the sake of\\nthe true good. Preferred indifferents are the material or subject\\nmatter for the rational selection in which virtue consists, but\\nnothing more. Since the objects of our first natural impulses turn\\nout not to be good but indifferent, to be the object of a natural\\nimpulse, or to be in accord with our nature in the way such objects\\nare, is not thereby to be good.\",\n \"\\n\\nAntiochus agrees with the Stoics about the importance of the first\\nnatural impulses and, by and large, about which items are the objects\\nof those impulses. But unlike them, he accepts the principle that what\\nagrees or accords with a creature’s fully developed adult nature, as\\nit is expressed in its natural impulses, is good for that creature,\\nand that the good life for human beings is therefore the life\\ncharacterized by the fullest possible enjoyment of the goods\\ncorresponding to our natural impulses (Cicero, Acad. 1.19,\\n22; Fin. 5.24–5). He believes that he has an Old\\nAcademic authority for this in Polemon (Cicero, Fin. 4.14;\\nAcad. 2.131), head of the Academy at the end of the fourth\\ncentury B.C.E. Nonetheless, despite admitting other goods, he holds\\nthat virtue is the highest human good, and he believes that his theory\\ncan explain why it is the chief human good without having to make it\\nthe only good as the Stoics had done.\",\n \"\\n\\nOn his view, the development which leads a human being to virtue does\\nnot involve a radical transformation of the kind posited by the\\nStoics. Rather, if all goes well, a human being comes to value reason,\\nand hence virtue as the perfection of reason, above all other things\\nbecause reason is the most important part of human nature. It is not\\nso much the character of a human being’s motivation that is\\ntransformed as he develops, according to Antiochus, but rather the\\nself which is the object of his natural concern. As a result, though\\nvirtue is the chief human good, there is room for other goods as well,\\nbecause they are in accord with human nature too, albeit less\\nimportant parts of it. Antiochus’ use of the Stoic framework puts him\\nin a position to fault the Stoics for abandoning or forgetting the\\nnature from which they set out (Cicero, Fin. 4.26, 43; 5.72)\\nand for failing to see the difference between taking reason to be the\\nmost important part of human nature—which is correct—and\\nthinking that it is the only part (4.41).\",\n \"\\n\\nLike the Stoics, however, Antiochus wants to claim that virtue is\\nsufficient for happiness. Stoic ethics ensures this result by denying\\nthat there are any goods or evils apart from virtue and vice and\\ntherefore any items capable of affecting the goodness of a life except\\nvirtue and vice. This option was not open to Antiochus because he\\nthinks that there are other goods and evils, which do have this\\npower. His solution, which is the most distinctive feature of his\\nethical system and the one that seems to have drawn the most\\ncriticism, is to distinguish between the happy life (vita\\nbeata in Cicero’s Latin), for which virtue is sufficient, and the\\ncompletely or entirely happy life (vita beatissima)\\n(Fin. 5.71, 95; T.D. 5.22), which requires bodily\\nand external goods as well (see Irwin 1992).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Ethics\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Cicero, De natura deorum, Academica (Loeb Classical\nLibrary), H. Rackham (trans.), Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press,\n1933.","–––, Akademische Abhandlungen,\nLucullus, C. Schäublin (trans.), Hamburg: Meiner, 1996.","–––, On Academic Scepticism,\nC. Brittain (trans.), Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006.","–––, De finibus (Loeb Classical\nLibrary), H. Rackham (trans.), Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press,\n1914.","–––, On Moral Ends, J. Annas (ed.),\nR. Woolf (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.","–––, Tusculan Disputations (Loeb\nClassical Library), J.E. King (trans.), Cambridge MA: Harvard\nUniversity Press, 2nd edition, 1943.","Long, A.A. and D.N. Sedley (eds. and trans.), The \nHellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge \nUniversity Press, 1987.","Luck, G., Der Akademiker Antiochos (Noctes Romanae 7),\nBerne: Paul Haupt, 1953.","Mette, H. J., “Philon von Larissa und Antiochos von\nAskalon”, Lustrum, 28–9 (1986–87):\n9–63.","Sedley, D., “Appendix: a guide to the testimonies for\nAntiochus”, Sedley (ed.) 2012: 334–36.","Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Against the\nProfessors (Loeb Classical Library), 4 vols. R.G. Bury (trans.),\nCambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1955.","–––, Outlines of Scepticism, J. Annas,\nJ. Barnes (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.","–––, Against the Logicians, R. Bett\n(trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.","Algra, K., J. Barnes, J. Mansfeld and M. Schofield (eds.),\n1999. The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press.","Allen, J., 1997. “Carneadean argument in Cicero’s\nAcademic books”, in Inwood and Mansfeld (ed.), 1997: 217–56.","–––, 2018. “Aporia and the New\nAcademy”, in The Aporetic Tradition in Ancient\nPhilosophy, G. Karamanolis and V. Politis (eds.), Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press, 172–91.","Annas, J., 1990. “Stoic Epistemology”,\nin Companions to Ancient Thought 1: Epistemology, S. Everson\n(ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","–––, 1993. The Morality of Happiness,\nOxford: Oxford University Press.","Barnes, J., 1989. “Antiochus of Ascalon”,\nin Philosophia Togata: Essays on Philosophy and Roman\nSociety, M. Griffin and J. Barnes (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University\nPress, 51–96.","Blank, D., 2012. “Varro and Antiochus”, in Sedley\n(ed.), 2012: 250–89.","Bonazzi, M., 2009. “Antiochus’ Ethics and the Subordination\nof Stoicism”, in The Origins of the Platonic System:\nPlatonisms of the Early Empire, M. Bonazzi and J. Opsomoer (eds.),\nParis: Peeters, 33–54.","–––, 2012. “Antiochus and\nPlatonism”, in Sedley (ed.), 2012: 307–33.","Brittain, C., 2001. Philo of Larissa: The Last of the \nAcademic Sceptics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","–––, 2012. “Antiochus Epistemology”,\nin Medley (ed.) 2012: 104–130.","Burnyeat, M., 1997. “Antipater and Self-Refutation”,\nin Inwood and Mansfeld (eds.), 1997: 277–310.","Chiaradonna, R., 2017. “Platonist approaches to Aristotle:\nfrom Antiochus of Ascalon to Eudorus of Alexandria (and\nbeyond)”, in Aristotle, Plato and Pythagoreanism in the\nFirst Century BC, M. Schofield (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge\nUniversity Press, 28–52.","Dillon, J., 1996. The Middle Platonists, 2nd edn. Ithaca:\nCornell University Press, Ch. 2.","Fladerer, L., 1996. Antiochos von Askalon: Hellenist und\nHumanist, Vienna: F Berger & Söhne.","Frede, M., 1999. “Stoic Epistemology”, in Algra,\nBarnes, Mansfeld and Schofield (eds.) 1999: 295–322.","Glucker, J., 1978. Antiochus and the Late Academy,\nGöttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.","Görler, W., 1994. “Älterer Pyrrhonismus,\nJüngere Akademie, §52 Antiochos aus Askalon”,\nin Die Philosophie der Antike (Volume IV), H. Flashar (ed.),\nBasel: Schwabe, 938–967.","Hatzimichali, M., 2012. “Antiochus’ biography”, in\nSedley (ed.), 2012: 9–30.","Inwood, B., Mansfeld, J. (eds.) 1997. Assent and Argument:\nStudies in Cicero’s Academic Books, Utrecht: Brill.","Inwood, B., 2012. “Antiochus on Physics”, in Sedley\n(ed.) 2012: 188–219.","Irwin, T., 2012. “Antiochus, Aristotle and the Stoics on\ndegrees”, in D. Sedley (ed.), 2012: 151–72.","Karamanolis, G., 2006. Plato and Aristotle in Agreement?\nPlatonists on Aristotle from Antiochus to Porphyry, Oxford:\nOxford University Press, Ch. 1.","Lévy, C., 2000. “Cicero and the New Academy”,\nin The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity\n(Volume 1), L. Gerson (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,\n99–62.","Polito, R., 2012. “Antiochus and the Academy”, in\nSedley (ed.) 2012, 31–54.","Prost, F., 2001. “L’éthique d’Antiochus\nd’Ascalon”, Philologus, 145: 244–68.","Sedley, D., 1992. “Sextus Empiricus and the Atomists’\ncriteria of truth”, Elenchos, 13: 19–56.","–––, 2002, “Zeno’s Definition of Phantasia\nKatalêptikê”, in Zeno of Citium and his Legacy: The\nPhilosophy of Zeno, T. Scaltsas and A. Mason (eds.), Municipality\nof Larnaca: Larnaka, 137–54.","––– (ed.), 2012. The Philosophy of\nAntiochus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Striker, G., 1990. “Sceptical Strategies”,\nin Doubt and Dogmatism, M. Schofield, M. Burnyeat,\nand J. Barnes (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 54–83.","–––, 1990. “The Problem of the\nCriterion”, in Epistemology, S. Everson (ed.),\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 150–65.","–––, 1997. “Academics fighting\nAcademics”, in Inwood and Mansfeld (eds.) 1997: 257–76.","Tarrant, H., 1985. Scepticism or Platonism? The Philosophy of\nthe Fourth Academy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","–––, 2007. “Antiochus: a new\nbeginning?”, in Greek and Roman Philosophy 100 BC –\n200 AD (Volume 2), R. Sorabji and R. W. Sharples (eds.), London:\nInstitute of Classical Studies, 317–32.","Tsouni, G., 2012. “Antiochus on contemplation and the happy\nlife”, in Sedley (ed.) 2012: 131–50.","–––, 2019. Antiochus and Peripatetic\nEthics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","White, N., 1978. “The Basis of Stoic\nEthics”, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 83:\n143–78."],"string":"[\n \"Cicero, De natura deorum, Academica (Loeb Classical\\nLibrary), H. Rackham (trans.), Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press,\\n1933.\",\n \"–––, Akademische Abhandlungen,\\nLucullus, C. Schäublin (trans.), Hamburg: Meiner, 1996.\",\n \"–––, On Academic Scepticism,\\nC. Brittain (trans.), Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006.\",\n \"–––, De finibus (Loeb Classical\\nLibrary), H. Rackham (trans.), Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press,\\n1914.\",\n \"–––, On Moral Ends, J. Annas (ed.),\\nR. Woolf (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.\",\n \"–––, Tusculan Disputations (Loeb\\nClassical Library), J.E. King (trans.), Cambridge MA: Harvard\\nUniversity Press, 2nd edition, 1943.\",\n \"Long, A.A. and D.N. Sedley (eds. and trans.), The \\nHellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge \\nUniversity Press, 1987.\",\n \"Luck, G., Der Akademiker Antiochos (Noctes Romanae 7),\\nBerne: Paul Haupt, 1953.\",\n \"Mette, H. J., “Philon von Larissa und Antiochos von\\nAskalon”, Lustrum, 28–9 (1986–87):\\n9–63.\",\n \"Sedley, D., “Appendix: a guide to the testimonies for\\nAntiochus”, Sedley (ed.) 2012: 334–36.\",\n \"Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Against the\\nProfessors (Loeb Classical Library), 4 vols. R.G. Bury (trans.),\\nCambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1955.\",\n \"–––, Outlines of Scepticism, J. Annas,\\nJ. Barnes (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.\",\n \"–––, Against the Logicians, R. Bett\\n(trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.\",\n \"Algra, K., J. Barnes, J. Mansfeld and M. Schofield (eds.),\\n1999. The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press.\",\n \"Allen, J., 1997. “Carneadean argument in Cicero’s\\nAcademic books”, in Inwood and Mansfeld (ed.), 1997: 217–56.\",\n \"–––, 2018. “Aporia and the New\\nAcademy”, in The Aporetic Tradition in Ancient\\nPhilosophy, G. Karamanolis and V. Politis (eds.), Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press, 172–91.\",\n \"Annas, J., 1990. “Stoic Epistemology”,\\nin Companions to Ancient Thought 1: Epistemology, S. Everson\\n(ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1993. The Morality of Happiness,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Barnes, J., 1989. “Antiochus of Ascalon”,\\nin Philosophia Togata: Essays on Philosophy and Roman\\nSociety, M. Griffin and J. Barnes (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University\\nPress, 51–96.\",\n \"Blank, D., 2012. “Varro and Antiochus”, in Sedley\\n(ed.), 2012: 250–89.\",\n \"Bonazzi, M., 2009. “Antiochus’ Ethics and the Subordination\\nof Stoicism”, in The Origins of the Platonic System:\\nPlatonisms of the Early Empire, M. Bonazzi and J. Opsomoer (eds.),\\nParis: Peeters, 33–54.\",\n \"–––, 2012. “Antiochus and\\nPlatonism”, in Sedley (ed.), 2012: 307–33.\",\n \"Brittain, C., 2001. Philo of Larissa: The Last of the \\nAcademic Sceptics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2012. “Antiochus Epistemology”,\\nin Medley (ed.) 2012: 104–130.\",\n \"Burnyeat, M., 1997. “Antipater and Self-Refutation”,\\nin Inwood and Mansfeld (eds.), 1997: 277–310.\",\n \"Chiaradonna, R., 2017. “Platonist approaches to Aristotle:\\nfrom Antiochus of Ascalon to Eudorus of Alexandria (and\\nbeyond)”, in Aristotle, Plato and Pythagoreanism in the\\nFirst Century BC, M. Schofield (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge\\nUniversity Press, 28–52.\",\n \"Dillon, J., 1996. The Middle Platonists, 2nd edn. Ithaca:\\nCornell University Press, Ch. 2.\",\n \"Fladerer, L., 1996. Antiochos von Askalon: Hellenist und\\nHumanist, Vienna: F Berger & Söhne.\",\n \"Frede, M., 1999. “Stoic Epistemology”, in Algra,\\nBarnes, Mansfeld and Schofield (eds.) 1999: 295–322.\",\n \"Glucker, J., 1978. Antiochus and the Late Academy,\\nGöttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.\",\n \"Görler, W., 1994. “Älterer Pyrrhonismus,\\nJüngere Akademie, §52 Antiochos aus Askalon”,\\nin Die Philosophie der Antike (Volume IV), H. Flashar (ed.),\\nBasel: Schwabe, 938–967.\",\n \"Hatzimichali, M., 2012. “Antiochus’ biography”, in\\nSedley (ed.), 2012: 9–30.\",\n \"Inwood, B., Mansfeld, J. (eds.) 1997. Assent and Argument:\\nStudies in Cicero’s Academic Books, Utrecht: Brill.\",\n \"Inwood, B., 2012. “Antiochus on Physics”, in Sedley\\n(ed.) 2012: 188–219.\",\n \"Irwin, T., 2012. “Antiochus, Aristotle and the Stoics on\\ndegrees”, in D. Sedley (ed.), 2012: 151–72.\",\n \"Karamanolis, G., 2006. Plato and Aristotle in Agreement?\\nPlatonists on Aristotle from Antiochus to Porphyry, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press, Ch. 1.\",\n \"Lévy, C., 2000. “Cicero and the New Academy”,\\nin The Cambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity\\n(Volume 1), L. Gerson (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,\\n99–62.\",\n \"Polito, R., 2012. “Antiochus and the Academy”, in\\nSedley (ed.) 2012, 31–54.\",\n \"Prost, F., 2001. “L’éthique d’Antiochus\\nd’Ascalon”, Philologus, 145: 244–68.\",\n \"Sedley, D., 1992. “Sextus Empiricus and the Atomists’\\ncriteria of truth”, Elenchos, 13: 19–56.\",\n \"–––, 2002, “Zeno’s Definition of Phantasia\\nKatalêptikê”, in Zeno of Citium and his Legacy: The\\nPhilosophy of Zeno, T. Scaltsas and A. Mason (eds.), Municipality\\nof Larnaca: Larnaka, 137–54.\",\n \"––– (ed.), 2012. The Philosophy of\\nAntiochus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Striker, G., 1990. “Sceptical Strategies”,\\nin Doubt and Dogmatism, M. Schofield, M. Burnyeat,\\nand J. Barnes (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 54–83.\",\n \"–––, 1990. “The Problem of the\\nCriterion”, in Epistemology, S. Everson (ed.),\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 150–65.\",\n \"–––, 1997. “Academics fighting\\nAcademics”, in Inwood and Mansfeld (eds.) 1997: 257–76.\",\n \"Tarrant, H., 1985. Scepticism or Platonism? The Philosophy of\\nthe Fourth Academy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2007. “Antiochus: a new\\nbeginning?”, in Greek and Roman Philosophy 100 BC –\\n200 AD (Volume 2), R. Sorabji and R. W. Sharples (eds.), London:\\nInstitute of Classical Studies, 317–32.\",\n \"Tsouni, G., 2012. “Antiochus on contemplation and the happy\\nlife”, in Sedley (ed.) 2012: 131–50.\",\n \"–––, 2019. Antiochus and Peripatetic\\nEthics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"White, N., 1978. “The Basis of Stoic\\nEthics”, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 83:\\n143–78.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../arcesilaus/","text":"Arcesilaus"},{"href":"../carneades/","text":"Carneades"},{"href":"../cicero/","text":"Cicero"},{"href":"../ethics-ancient/","text":"ethics: ancient"},{"href":"../philo-larissa/","text":"Philo of Larissa"},{"href":"../skepticism-ancient/","text":"skepticism: ancient"},{"href":"../stoicism/","text":"Stoicism"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../arcesilaus/\",\n \"text\": \"Arcesilaus\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../carneades/\",\n \"text\": \"Carneades\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../cicero/\",\n \"text\": \"Cicero\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../ethics-ancient/\",\n \"text\": \"ethics: ancient\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../philo-larissa/\",\n \"text\": \"Philo of Larissa\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../skepticism-ancient/\",\n \"text\": \"skepticism: ancient\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../stoicism/\",\n \"text\": \"Stoicism\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":68,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"apriori"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"A Priori Justification and Knowledge"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Sun Dec 9, 2007; substantive revision Wed May 6, 2020"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nA priori justification is a type of epistemic justification\nthat is, in some sense, independent of experience. Gettier examples\nhave led most philosophers to think that having a justified true\nbelief is not sufficient for knowledge\n (see Section 4.4, below,\n and the examples there), but many still believe that it is necessary.\nIn this entry, it will be assumed, for the most part, that even though\njustification is not sufficient for knowledge it is necessary and that\na priori knowledge is knowledge based on a priori\njustification. So much of the discussion will focus on a\npriori justification.","\nThere are a variety of views about whether a priori\njustification requires some sort of evidence or whether, instead, some\npropositions can be “default reasonable”, or that a person\ncan be entitled to accept certain propositions independent of any\nevidence, perhaps because they are reasonable presuppositions of some\narea of inquiry. Philosophers who think that a priori\njustification requires evidence differ about the details. Some think\nthat a priori evidence can be defeated (overridden or\nundercut) by other evidence, including evidence from sensory\nobservations. There are a variety of views about whether a\npriori justification, and knowledge, must be only of propositions\nabout what is possible or necessary, and if necessary, only of\nanalytic propositions, that is, propositions that are in some sense\n“true in virtue of their meaning” (as in examples\n 1a–8a,\n below). Those who think that a priori justification requires\nevidence often think that the evidence is provided by rational\nintuitions or insights, but there is disagreement about the nature of\nthose intuitions or insights, and critics deny that they really do\nconstitute evidence.","\nThe following list indicates the topics that will be presented and\naddressed."],"string":"[\n \"\\nA priori justification is a type of epistemic justification\\nthat is, in some sense, independent of experience. Gettier examples\\nhave led most philosophers to think that having a justified true\\nbelief is not sufficient for knowledge\\n (see Section 4.4, below,\\n and the examples there), but many still believe that it is necessary.\\nIn this entry, it will be assumed, for the most part, that even though\\njustification is not sufficient for knowledge it is necessary and that\\na priori knowledge is knowledge based on a priori\\njustification. So much of the discussion will focus on a\\npriori justification.\",\n \"\\nThere are a variety of views about whether a priori\\njustification requires some sort of evidence or whether, instead, some\\npropositions can be “default reasonable”, or that a person\\ncan be entitled to accept certain propositions independent of any\\nevidence, perhaps because they are reasonable presuppositions of some\\narea of inquiry. Philosophers who think that a priori\\njustification requires evidence differ about the details. Some think\\nthat a priori evidence can be defeated (overridden or\\nundercut) by other evidence, including evidence from sensory\\nobservations. There are a variety of views about whether a\\npriori justification, and knowledge, must be only of propositions\\nabout what is possible or necessary, and if necessary, only of\\nanalytic propositions, that is, propositions that are in some sense\\n“true in virtue of their meaning” (as in examples\\n 1a–8a,\\n below). Those who think that a priori justification requires\\nevidence often think that the evidence is provided by rational\\nintuitions or insights, but there is disagreement about the nature of\\nthose intuitions or insights, and critics deny that they really do\\nconstitute evidence.\",\n \"\\nThe following list indicates the topics that will be presented and\\naddressed.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Examples that illustrate the difference between ","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. What sorts of propositions can be ","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"3. Is ","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"4. What is the nature of ","sub_toc":["4.1 A priori justification is justification that is independent of experience","4.2 What is the content of intuitive judgments?","4.3 There is no significant difference between a priori and a posteriori justification and knowledge","4.4 Rational intuitions or insights as the bases of a priori justification","4.5 A priori justification does not require any nonexperiential source of evidence"]},{"content_title":"5. Should we think that rational intuitions provide evidence for the propositions that are their objects?","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"6. Should we doubt the evidential force of intellectual intuitions?","sub_toc":["6.1 What exactly is an intellectual seeming or rational intuition?","6.2 Experimental philosophy","6.3 Can intuitions be checked for accuracy?","6.4 Naturalized epistemology","6.5 Pragmatism"]},{"content_title":"7. Even if intuitions can justify, can they yield knowledge of the external world?","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"8. What is ","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Examples that illustrate the difference between \",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. What sorts of propositions can be \",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Is \",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. What is the nature of \",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"4.1 A priori justification is justification that is independent of experience\",\n \"4.2 What is the content of intuitive judgments?\",\n \"4.3 There is no significant difference between a priori and a posteriori justification and knowledge\",\n \"4.4 Rational intuitions or insights as the bases of a priori justification\",\n \"4.5 A priori justification does not require any nonexperiential source of evidence\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Should we think that rational intuitions provide evidence for the propositions that are their objects?\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. Should we doubt the evidential force of intellectual intuitions?\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"6.1 What exactly is an intellectual seeming or rational intuition?\",\n \"6.2 Experimental philosophy\",\n \"6.3 Can intuitions be checked for accuracy?\",\n \"6.4 Naturalized epistemology\",\n \"6.5 Pragmatism\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"7. Even if intuitions can justify, can they yield knowledge of the external world?\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"8. What is \",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\nA priori justification is a certain kind of justification\noften contrasted with empirical, or a posteriori,\njustification. Roughly speaking, a priori justification\nprovides reasons for thinking a proposition is true that comes from\nmerely understanding, or thinking about, that proposition. In\ncontrast, a posteriori justification requires more than\nmerely understanding a proposition. Observations based on our senses,\nor introspection about our current mental state, are needed for us to\nbe empirically, or a posteriori, justified in believing that\nsome proposition is true. Examples below bring out the contrast. The\nfirst proposition in each group is a prime candidate for being a\npriori justified, if justified at all, while the other\npropositions are prime candidates for being a posteriori\njustified, if justified at all. Some of the propositions are false,\nbut that does not mean that we could not be justified in believing\nthem before we had evidence that they are false.","\nIn each example, it is possible for someone to be justified in\nbelieving the first member in a way that is different from how it is\npossible for someone to be justified in believing the other members of\nthe example. The way the first members can be justified is called\na priori; the way the other members can be justified is\ncalled a posteriori (or empirically).","\nThe first question to discuss is what sorts of propositions can be\na priori justified and known."],"section_title":"1. Examples that illustrate the difference between a priori and a posteriori (empirical) justification","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nPhilosophers generally agree that we can be justified in believing\n 15bi\n and\n 15biii\n only empirically. Yet many believe that they are necessarily true. If\nthey are necessarily true, that would mean that it’s false that\nwe can be justified in believing necessary truths only a\npriori. But some philosophers think that\n 15bi\n and\n 15biii\n are not necessary truths and the relevant necessary truth that we can\nknow a priori is that the essence of any type of matter is\ngiven by the basic elements of which it is composed. On this view, in\nthe case of water and rubies, we discover empirically what those basic\nelements are and the propositions that state those discoveries are\ncontingent. Philosophers who hold that\n 15bi\n and\n 15biii\n do express necessary truths usually think that there are descriptions\nthat fix the reference of the terms, for example, for water, the\ndescription, ","\n\n\nthe stuff, whatever it is, that, in the actual world, has the\nproperties of quenching thirst, putting out certain fires, falling\nfrom the clouds as rain, filling the lakes and rivers, etc. \n","\nWhile the meaning of “water” is given by this\nreference-fixing description, and can be known a priori, the\nessence of water must be discovered empirically. The meaning of\nnatural kind terms does not give the essence of the kind directly in\nthe way it does with “bachelor” and “vixen”.\n","\nOne might think that\n 15a\n can be justified only empirically, but gemologists seem to think that\nit is conceptually necessary that rubies are red, that is,\nthat the meaning of “ruby” requires that rubies be red. So\ngiven how gemologists use “ruby”,\n 15a\n is knowable a priori. The notion of a ruby seems to be a\nhybrid notion: its color is knowable a priori but its\nmaterial essence as given in\n 15bi\n is knowable only empirically.","\nWhile it is widely believed that some necessary truths are capable of\njustification and can be known only empirically (e.g., “Water is\nH2O”), some contingent truths also seem justifiable, and\nknowable, a priori. Saul Kripke proposed that “the\nstandard meter stick, S, in Paris is a meter long at\n\\(t_0\\)” is such an example (Kripke 1972: 274–275).\n“The length of S in the actual world at\n\\(t_0\\)” rigidly designates that length, that is, it refers to\nlength L in every possible world. The reference of “one\nmeter” is given by that reference-fixing description, so\n“one meter” rigidly designates L. However,\n“the length of S at \\(t_0\\)” does not rigidly\ndesignate any particular length since at \\(t_0\\) in other possible\nworlds S will be longer or shorter than L. So the\nproposition that “S is a meter long at \\(t_0\\)” is\ncontingent because in other possible worlds that very same stick will\nbe shorter or longer than it was in the actual world at that time.\nStill, we can know a priori, that is, independent of any\nempirical evidence, that “S is a meter long at\n\\(t_0\\)” is true in the actual world given that we know how the\nreference of “one meter” is fixed by a description that\nrefers to the length of S in the actual world. If empirical\nevidence plays any role, it is only insofar as we need it to know that\nthere really is a stick, S, that was designated as the meter at\nsome particular time and place. ","\nA second candidate for being a contingent proposition that is knowable\na priori comes from John Turri. He claims that the\nproposition, “The most unlikely possible event is not presently\noccurring”, is contingent yet can be known simply in virtue of\nunderstanding its content, and hence is knowable a priori\n(2011: 337–338). “The most unlikely possible event”\nrefers to an event that is maximally improbable. So we know a\npriori that no one could have sufficient reason to believe that\nan event that fits that description is now occurring. Still, it is\npossible that such an event is presently occurring. Thus we can know\na priori that the contingent proposition that says that a\nmaximally improbable event is now occurring is false, and that its\ndenial is true.","\nA third candidate for being a contingent proposition that is knowable\na priori is offered by Gareth Evans. He thinks that we can be\na priori justified in believing, and know, propositions of\nthe form, “If actually p, then p”, and particular\ninstantiations of that form. Consider, “if any post is actually\nred, then it is red”. This proposition is contingent because the\npost could be red in the actual world but not red in some other\npossible world. So in some other possible world, \\(w_2\\), its\nantecedent can be true (because its antecedent is about the color of\nthe post in the actual world, \\(w_1\\)) and it’s consequent false\n(because the post is not red in \\(w_2\\) and the consequent is\nabout the color of the post in that world). A conditional that is\nnecessarily true cannot have a true antecedent and a false consequent\nin any possible world. However, we can know independently of\nexperience (that is, a priori) that if the post is actually\nred, then it’s red since it is true in the actual world (cf.,\nEvans 1979: 83–85, for his discussion of this topic).","\nAnother candidate for the contingent a priori is the\nproposition expressed by, “I am here now”. That sentence\nexpresses a contingent proposition, since I do not have to exist, much\nless do I have to be where I actually am at the present time. Yet a\nperson can know it is true wherever and whenever she utters it\nregardless of the experiences she is currently having or has had in\nthe past, and so independently of experience.","\nLeaving aside now the question of whether there can be contingent\npropositions that are knowable a priori, there seems to be a\ndifference within the class of necessarily true propositions that can\nbe known, or justifiably believed, a priori. The propositions\nexpressed by\n 10a–14a\n seem different from the propositions expressed by\n 1a–8a.\n Each of the latter propositions seem to be analytic, that is, in each\ncase the sentence that expresses the proposition will express a\nlogical truth if relevant terms and expressions in it are replaced by\nappropriate synonyms. So, for instance, “all vixens are\nfemale” will express a logical truth of the form if \\(A \\amp\nB\\), then A if we substitute for “vixen”,\n“female fox”, for it will then say: if something is a\nfemale fox, it is a female. But no substitution of synonyms for terms\nor expressions in\n 10a–14a\n will yield a logical truth. The propositions expressed by\n 10a–14a\n are often said to be synthetic a priori propositions because\nthey are not analytic (they are not true in virtue of their meaning,\nas it is sometimes put) but are a priori knowable and\njustifiable. "],"section_title":"2. What sorts of propositions can be a priori justified and known: all, and only, modal propositions?","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nA type of justification (say, via perception) is fallible if and only\nif it is possible to be justified in that way in holding a false\nbelief. A type of justification is defeasible if and only if that\njustification could be overridden by further evidence that goes\nagainst the truth of the proposition or undercut by considerations\nthat call into question whether there really is justification (say,\npoor lighting conditions that call into question whether vision\nprovides evidence in those circumstances).","\nJust as we can be empirically justified in believing a false\nproposition (e.g.,\n 9b:\n two quarts of water plus two quarts of carbon tetrachloride do not\ncombine to yield four quarts of liquid), philosophers argue that we\ncan also be a priori justified in believing a false\nproposition. Perhaps Kant was a priori justified in believing\nthat every event has a cause. He thought that the proposition had that\nstatus. Yet many physicists believe that there are genuinely random\nevents at the subatomic level, and reasonably believe it false that\nevery event has a cause. You might initially be a priori\njustified in believing that no matter how happiness has been produced\nit is intrinsically good\n (12a),\n or that it is always wrong to punish an innocent person\n (13a).\n You might later think of counterexamples to such claims (e.g., by\nconsidering happiness produced through the suffering of others or\npunishing an innocent person to prevent some evil men from punishing\nhim and many other innocent people). Then your initial a\npriori justification would be defeated. John Hawthorne notes how\neven paradigmatic instances of a priori justification, such\nas someone’s carefully working through a mathematical proof, can\nbe undercut if the person gets empirical evidence that he is mad or\nthat his proof is probably mistaken (based on evidence provided by\nexpert testimony, a bad track record, or of distorting background\nconditions, etc.) (Hawthorne 2013: 2009). These examples seem to show\nthat a priori justification is fallible and defeasible (i.e.,\nit can be defeated by further a priori or empirical\nevidence).","\nConsider another example that makes this point. A sorites paradox\ninvolving heaps consists of the general claim that if you take one\nbean away from a heap of beans, you still have a heap, and a more\nspecific claim that, say, any cone-shaped stack of a thousand beans is\na heap. These two premises will lead you, bean by bean, to the\nconclusion that one, or even no beans, is a heap! It seems that we are\na priori justified in believing both the general and the more\nspecific claim are true, but at least one of them must not be true\n(perhaps the general claim is false, or even neither true nor false)\nbecause together they lead to an absurd conclusion. So this is another\nreason to think that a priori justification is fallible. (See\nSosa 1998: 258–259, for an example about heaps.) George Bealer\nargues that philosophical paradoxes show that intuition is fallible\n(1998: 202). With a paradox, you are justified in believing each of a\nset of propositions taken separately, but at least one of them must be\nfalse because the set is inconsistent.","\nWhy have some thought that a proposition that is a priori\njustified cannot be defeated by empirical evidence? Kant said that\na priori knowledge is “knowledge that is absolutely\nindependent of all experience” (Kant 1787 [1965: 43(B3)]). But\nit might be that the requirement that a priori knowledge be\nabsolutely independent of all experience is\ntoo stringent. Enabling experiences may be required. It avoids this\ndifficulty to hold instead that a priori knowledge and\njustification are independent of all experience beyond what is\nneeded to grasp the relevant concepts involved in the relevant\nproposition (see, below,\n sec. 4.1).\n The fact that a priori knowledge is not independent of all\nexperience does not show that it is empirically defeasible, but it\ndoes defeat the argument that it is not empirically defeasible\nbecause it is independent of all experience.","\nWhen it is just a matter of a priori justification, not\nknowledge, Philip Kitcher thinks that if there is such a thing as all\nthings considered a priori justification, then “a\nperson is entitled to ignore empirical information about the type of\nworld she inhabits” (Kitcher 1983: 30; see, also, 24,\n80–87). This view seems to rest on Kant’s idea but applied\nto justification, not just knowledge. If a priori\njustification is independent of all empirical experience,\nthen no such experience can count either for or against a\nproposition that is justified a priori. Hilary Putnam thinks\nthat if there is a priori justification, then there are\n“truths which it is always rational to believe” (Putnam\n1983: 90). On Kitcher’s understanding of a priori\njustification, it is not defeasible by empirical information;\non Putnam’s, it is not defeasible at all.","\nIt’s hard to see how either view is defensible in light of the\nobjections by Sosa, Bealer, and Hawthorne. Insofar as justification is\nrelative to the evidence a person has, or should have, it seems\npossible for further evidence, either empirical or from intuition or\nrational insight, to override or undercut a person’s current\nevidence and thereby destroy that person’s current justification\nand knowledge. Nothing in the nature of a priori\njustification rules out that possibility. (See the discussion of\nHartry Field, in\n Section 4.5\n below, for more on why it is possible for empirical evidence\nin particular to defeat a priori justification.)","\nUp to this point, the discussion has focused on the sorts of\npropositions that can be justified, or known, a priori, and\nwhether a priori justification is fallible and defeasible.\nBut what does it mean to say that someone is a priori\njustified in believing propositions like those expressed by each of\nthe first sentences in the fifteen examples above, that is, by\n 1a–15a?\n The discussion will now focus on that question.","\nThen I will turn to the three main views about the nature of a\npriori justification. One view is that a priori\njustification is not significantly different from empirical\njustification. A second view is that it rests on a distinct type of\ninternal mental state often called rational intuition or rational\ninsight and that those intuitions or insights can provide evidence for\nor against certain propositions. A third view is that a person can be\na priori entitled to believe certain propositions\nindependently of any evidence, or can be default reasonable in\naccepting a proposition independent of any evidence."],"section_title":"3. Is a priori justification fallible and defeasible?","subsections":[]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"4. What is the nature of a priori justification?","subsections":[{"content":["\nA standard answer to the question about the difference between a\npriori and empirical justification is that a priori\njustification is independent of experience and empirical justification\nis not, and this seems to explain the contrasts present in the fifteen\nexamples above. But various things have been meant by\n“experience”. On a narrow account,\n“experience” refers to sense experience, that is, to\nexperiences that come from the use of our five senses: sight, touch,\nhearing, smell, and taste. However, this narrow account implies that\njustification based on introspection, proprioception (our kinesthetic\nsense of the position and movements of our body), memory, and\ntestimony are kinds of a priori justification. And if we had\ndifferent senses, like those of bats (echolocation) and duck-billed\nplatypuses (electrolocation), experiences based on those senses would\nprovide a priori, not empirical, justification on this\naccount which takes a priori justification to be independent\nof experiences based on the senses we have.","\nGiven these considerations, perhaps “experience” should be\ntaken to mean “sense experience of any sort, introspection,\nproprioception, memory, and testimony”. This sounds like a\nhodgepodge of various sources of justification but perhaps what unites\nthem is that, leaving aside memory and testimony, these sources\nprovide us with information either about the physical world or our\ninner world, either the outer world through perception or the inner\nworld of what we are feeling or thinking, or information about our\nbodies, through introspection and proprioception. Memory and testimony\nare not primary sources of justification; their primary epistemic\nfunction is to transmit either a priori or empirical\njustification. So the proposal should be seen as a way of\ndistinguishing the primary sources of justification into two\ncategories of justification: a priori and empirical.","\nAs noted above (see,\n sec. 3)\n and below\n (secs. 4.4 and 4.5),\n “independent of experience” should not be taken to mean\nindependent of all experience, but, as a first approximation,\nto mean “independent of all experience beyond what is needed\nto grasp the relevant concepts involved in the\nproposition”. It is sometimes said that a priori\njustification can depend on experience insofar as it enables\nthe person to acquire the concepts needed to grasp the meaning of the\nproposition which is the object of justification, but experience\ncannot play an evidential role in that justification\n(Williamson 2013: 293). Later we will see that the notion of enabling\nexperience might better be expanded to include experience needed to\nacquire certain intellectual skills such as those needed to construct\ncertain proofs or create counterexamples (see,\n secs. 4.4 and 4.5,\n below).","\nSuppose there is a significant difference between a priori\nand empirical justification. This still does not tell us what the\nbasis of a priori justification is. One view is that rational\nintuitions or insights are the bases of a priori\njustification; experiences, as construed above, the bases of empirical\njustification. Before discussing the nature of rational intuitions or\ninsights, we should first distinguish between intuitions and\nintuitive judgments and consider what the content of\nintuitive judgments evoked in thought experiments is."],"subsection_title":"4.1 A priori justification is justification that is independent of experience"},{"content":["\nAnna-Sara Malmgren holds that intuitions are certain kinds of\nmental states some of which are candidates as justifiers of\nintuitive judgments that are made in response to\nphilosophical thought experiments (2011: 267–268). What is\nthe content of such intuitive judgments? Malmgren notes that\nthere are several different ways to characterize intuitive judgments,\nbut because they are all controversial, she characterizes them by\nreference to examples. For her, “an intuitive judgment is any\njudgment relevantly similar to certain paradigms or examples”\n(Malmgren 2011: 268). Her paradigm examples are of judgments that are\nevoked in Gettier cases where a person is in some sense lucky to have\na true belief given his evidence, Twin Earth cases where a term or\nphrase does not refer to the same thing in different possible worlds,\nand the trolley case where a heavy man is pushed in front of a trolley\nto stop it from running over five people further down the tracks.\nOthers offer as examples the judgment that it is morally permissible\nto unhook a violinist who has been connected to your kidneys without\nyour consent, even if that will kill him (an example made famous by\nJudith Thomson in the abortion debate), the judgment that it is\nirrational for a man who grants that his life in the future will be\nhappy, not a burden on others, virtuous, productive, with many friends\nand adventures, and will otherwise be worthwhile, to refuse to take a\nlife-saving pill (Derek Parfit’s Early Death 2011:\n270-71), and the judgment that it is irrational for a person now not\nto care about his suffering on any future Tuesday just because\nit’s a Tuesday (Parfit’s Future Tuesday\nIndifference 1984: 124).","\nMalmgren argues against Timothy Williamson’s view that the\ncontent of intuitive judgments involves counterfactual judgments.\nWilliamson says that in typical Gettier cases we make two judgments: a\njudgment that such a case is possible and a counterfactual judgment\nthat if the case had occurred, it would be a case of a justified true\nbelief without knowledge. These two judgments entail that it is\npossible for a person to have a justified true belief without\nknowledge in a situation like that described in the Gettier example\n(Williamson 2004: 110). While Malmgren agrees that a possibility\njudgment is the content of the intuitive judgments in Gettier cases\n(2011: 281), she denies that it need be reached via the counterfactual\njudgment that Williamson proposes.","\nMalmgren thinks that descriptions of cases in thought experiments are\nincomplete, and that certain ways of completing them are deviant\nbecause they involve interpretations of the cases that misunderstand\nwhat is intended (2011: 274–275). In the famous Nogot/Havit\nGettier case, the issue is whether Smith knows that someone in his\noffice owns a Ford. Smith sees Nogot driving around in a Ford and,\nsay, believes that Nogot has shown him current ownership papers to a\nFord. But Nogot actually drives a rental car, does not own a Ford, and\nhas shown Smith ownership papers to a Ford he used to own. It would be\na deviant understanding of the example to assume also that Smith has\ngood independent evidence that Havit, who also works in his office,\nowns a Ford. Of course, in that case Smith would know that someone in\nhis office owns a Ford. Malmgren thinks that the interpretation that\nassumes that Smith is hallucinating and has a poor memory of what\npapers he has seen is also deviant. In that case, Smith would not be\njustified in believing that Nogot, and so someone in his office, owns\na Ford.","\nThe intuitive judgment in the case is: it is possible that a person in\na situation like that described in the example has a justified true\nbelief without knowledge. Williamson thinks that this judgment is\nbased on the counterfactual: if the case had occurred, it would be a\ncase of justified true belief without knowledge. But in the deviant\ncases, it would not be a case of justified true belief without\nknowledge, either because it would be a case of knowledge (the extra\nreasons case where Smith has evidence that Havit owns a Ford) or not a\ncase of justified belief (where Smith is hallucinating, has a poor\nmemory, etc.). However, those deviant cases could occur in the\npossible world that is most similar to the actual world, sometimes\ncalled the “nearest possible world” by philosophers.\nBecause of this, as counterfactuals are usually understood by\nphilosophers, what Williamson takes to be the relevant counterfactual\nwould be false. In the nearest possible world where the standard\ndescription of the case holds, the consequent of the counterfactual\nwould be false. So the case would offer no support for the intuitive\nmodal judgment: it is possible that a person has a justified true\nbelief without knowledge. It seems clear to Malmgren that the case\ndoes support that possibility judgment regardless of whether nearby\nworlds are deviant (making the consequent of the relevant\ncounterfactual false) or not (Malmgren 2011: 278–279). So\nWilliamson must be mistaken in thinking that some counterfactual\njudgment must be the basis of the modal intuitive judgment: it is\npossible to have a justified true belief without knowledge in a case\nlike the one described in the example."],"subsection_title":"4.2 What is the content of intuitive judgments?"},{"content":["\nOne way to answer the question about the nature of a priori\njustification and knowledge is to adopt a bottom up approach. Start\nwith contrasting examples like the fifteen above and construct a\ntheory that explains the difference. Timothy Williamson objects to\nthis approach on the grounds that it may result “in a\ndistinction of no special significance like a taxonomy of plants and\nanimals based on color” or the classification of plants into\nbushes and non-bushes (2013: 291 and 309). Ultimately, that is what he\nargues: the difference between a priori and a\nposteriori knowledge is insignificant.","\nWilliamson imagines that through perceptual experiences and relevant\nfeedback a person has acquired the ability to reliably judge distances\nin terms of inches, and separately, by the same means, to judge them\nin terms of centimeters. But she has not yet realized that there is a\nrelationship between distance in inches and distance in centimeters.\nThen one day she uses her perceptual capacity to judge distances in\ninches and centimeters “offline” by forming side-by-side\nvisual images of marks nine inches apart and nineteen centimeters\napart and sees that D is true: If two marks had been nine\ninches apart, they would have been at least nineteen centimeters\napart. She has never measured how far apart the front and back\nlegs of an ant are, but in a similar way she uses her imagination and\nsees that A is true: If two marks had been nine inches\napart, they would have been further apart than the front and back legs\nof an ant.","\nIn both cases, experience is the basis of a capacity to make judgments\nin imagination and what goes on in imagination is what provides the\njustification for those judgments.","\nWilliamson’s argument against the significance of the\ndistinction between a priori and a posteriori\njustification rests on comparing how D and A (and other\nsimilar pairs of propositions like 4a and 4b in the examples above)\nare justified. He contends that they are both justified by relevant\nmanipulations in imagination. But on traditional accounts of\njustification, D would be a paradigm case of some proposition\nthat can only be a priori justified and A a paradigm\ncase of some proposition that can only be a posteriori\njustified. Williamson seems happy to concede that there is some sort\nof difference (2013: 294–295, 296–297) between these two\ntypes of justification but to deny that it is a significant difference\ngiven the way that each type relies on manipulations in imagination.\nHe might grant that the difference is like the difference between\nseeing something through a microscope or telescope as opposed to\nseeing something with the naked eye. There is a difference, but it is\nnot a significant difference since these three types of seeing all\nrely on visual perceptions.","\nDefenders of a significant distinction between a priori and\na posteriori justification could grant that there is no\nsignificant difference insofar as imagination plays the role in\njustification that Williamson proposes. And sometimes it does play\nthat role in a priori justification as Elijah Chudnoff\nillustrates with many examples involving geometric propositions and\naccompanying figures (2011a: 636–38; 2013a: 370–372).\nHowever, there are other ways to justify propositions a\npriori. Some seemingly a priori propositions\ncan be justified by reflection. One example that Chudnoff often\nappeals to involves the proposition: if \\(a\\lt 1\\), then \\(2 -2a \\gt\n0\\). To justify that proposition, you might first let \\(a = 1\\) and\nsee that \\(2 - 2a = 0\\). You might then reflect that when\n“a” is a number less than one but greater than or\nequal to zero, \\((2 - 2a)\\) is greater than zero. Finally, you might\nreflect that if “a” is a negative number, \\((-2a)\\)\nwill be a positive number, so \\((2 - 2a)\\) will be a number larger\nthan 2, and so greater than zero. So by reflection on a few relevant\ncases, we can come to see a priori that if \\(a\\lt 1\\), then\n\\((2 - 2a) \\gt 0\\). This way is much different than the way we might\ncome via imagination to see A = If two marks had been nine\ninches apart, they would have been further apart than the front and\nback legs of an ant.","\nIn the case of proposition D, we might learn that one inch\nequals 2.54 centimeters, do the math and see that nine inches equals\n22.86 centimeters, and thereby see that nine inches is greater than\nnineteen centimeters. There are other ways to be a priori\njustified in believing some proposition is true than by what\nWilliamson calls the method of simulation. And those ways of\njustifying a proposition a priori are significantly different\nfrom a posteriori ways of justifying a proposition.","\nIn a forthcoming essay in a book in which Williamson and Paul\nBoghossian debate the a priori (forthcomingb), Boghossian\ndefends three different ways (none of which involve the method of\nsimulation) by which we might be a priori justified in\nbelieving a proposition: two ways in which our understanding might be\nthe source of a priori justification, and a third way that\nappeals to rational intuitions that do not have a distinctive\nphenomenology and, according to Boghossian, are not the product of our\nunderstanding concepts.","\nIn many essays and a book, Elijah Chudnoff argues that intuitions have\nwhat he calls a “presentational phenomenology” that\nparallels that of perception. For him, intuitions are intellectual\nperceptions that sometimes reveal abstract reality in the way that\nsensory perceptions sometimes reveal concrete reality. So on his view,\na priori justification is similar to, but significantly\ndifferent from, a posteriori justification. For Chudnoff,\nintuitions can be evoked through imagination, reflection, and even\nreasoning from premises to a conclusion, but it is their nature, not\ntheir source, that is the basis of their ability to provide\njustification. His argument parallels an argument that says\nperceptions justify because they are the mental states they are, not\nbecause of their source. That is why they can provide justification in\na demon world or the Matrix, even though their source is a demon or\nsuper computers and not real objects.","\nLike Boghossian and Chudnoff, and unlike Williamson, Albert Casullo\nthinks that there is a significant difference between a\npriori and a posteriori justification based on the\ndifference between support by nonexperiential and\nexperiential evidence. He also thinks that there is something\nlike justification (namely, positive epistemic status) that does not\nrest on evidence at all (2012c: 318–326). For Casullo and\nothers, positive epistemic status can stem from what you are entitled\nto accept given certain ends or projects. This sort of view will be\ndiscussed in\n Section 4.5\n below."],"subsection_title":"4.3 There is no significant difference between a priori and a posteriori justification and knowledge"},{"content":["\nSuppose a priori justification rests on output (evidence)\nfrom some nonexperiential source. What sort of evidence could\nthat be? A standard answer is that intuition, or rational insight, is\nthe basis of a priori justification. And what are intuitions,\nor rational insights?","\nAs we’ve seen, Malmgren distinguishes between intuitions and\nintuitive judgments, where an intuition is a distinctive type of\nmental state that can justify a judgment (2011: 267–268). But\nnot everyone means the same thing by “intuition”. In\nThinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman argues that\nintuitions often lead us to accept false beliefs. He offers Herbert\nSimon’s definition of an intuition, “Intuition is nothing\nmore and nothing less than recognition [of some cue stored in\nmemory]” (2011: 11, 237). But Kahneman is thinking of fast,\nautomatic, immediate judgments when he writes of intuitions and\nintuitive judgments based on them. He often thinks of them as issuing\nfrom “gut feelings”, as in his example of “the chief\ninvestment officer of a large financial firm” who decided to\ninvest tens of millions of dollars in Ford Stock after recently\nattending an auto show where Ford vehicles were on display (2011: 12).\nAnd he describes an intuitive answer as “the first one that\ncomes to mind” (2011: 6). Elijah Chudnoff has a different\nconception of intuitions because he thinks that “there are\nhard-won intuitions which take deliberate effort to have” and\nother intuitions that require an expert to guide a person before she\ncan have them (Chudnoff forthcoming).","\nPhilosophers do not mean what Kahneman means when they refer to the\nintuitions people typically have when considering Gettier cases and\nthe other paradigmatic cases listed above. While intuitions are\nnon-inferential, some can appear only after much reflection and effort\n(see, again, Chudnoff forthcoming). Nor are they what George Bealer\nmeans by a “physical intuition”, such as the one that\nfounds the intuitive judgment that a house undermined will fall\n(Bealer 1992: 102; 1998: 207, 211). They are some sort of intellectual\nseeming (Bealer) or rational insight (BonJour). For Bealer and\nBonJour, taken in the broadest sense, intuitions are non-inferential\nin that they are not the conclusion of some piece of reasoning. For\nChudnoff, intuitions can be produced by reasoning though their\njustificatory force does not come from that reasoning. The reasoning\njust leads you to a proposition that seems true in itself. Like\nsensations, intuitions must be occurrent, and so are unlike beliefs,\nwhich need not be. You can have a belief that P while not\nconsidering P, but you cannot have an intuition that P\nwhile not considering P. ","\nWhen it is a matter of perception, in the Mueller-Lyer figure the line\nwith the arrowheads pointing inward appears longer than the\none with them pointing outward even if you know it is not really\nlonger. To some people at least, in the Monty Hall example it\nseems that there is a 50-50 chance that the grand prize is\nbehind either of the two doors that are left unopened after Monty has\nopened one of them, even though they know that the probability it is\nbehind the door the contestant did not choose is 2/3 (see Russell\n2010: 464, for the Monty Hall example). So intuitions are a type of\nappearing; physical and philosophical intuitions have this in common.\nGeorge Bealer characterizes a rational intuition as an\nintellectual seeming that some proposition is\nnecessarily, or possibly, true (Bealer 1998:\n207–208). He contrasts this with the physical intuition that a\nhouse undermined will fall which is not about what is necessarily or\npossibly true. Also, philosophical intuitions are based solely on\nunderstanding the proposition which is their object while physical\nintuitions are based on understanding something about the physical\nworld. Bealer contrasts intuitions with “judgments, guesses, and\nhunches” (1998: 210–211), common sense, belief, and even\nan inclination to believe (1998: 208–209). And, of course, they\nare not just “gut feelings”, which are not based solely on\nunderstanding some proposition,","\nLaurence BonJour thinks that a rational insight is an immediate,\nnon-inferential grasp, apprehension, or “seeing” that some\nproposition is necessarily true (BonJour 1998: 106). He goes on to\nargue that a proposition’s appearing to be necessarily\ntrue is the foundation of a priori justification, because he\nwants to allow that such justification can be fallible and defeasible.\nSo for BonJour it is apparent rational insights that are the\nevidence on which a priori justification rests, not rational\ninsights themselves (1998: 112–113, 1998: §§4.5, 4.6).\nAfter publishing In Defense of Pure Reason (1998), and in\nresponse to comments by Paul Boghossian (2001), BonJour wrote that\nthese appearances are not propositional, that is, they are not\nappearances that something is the case (BonJour 2001a:\n677–678). In this respect, they are unlike beliefs and more like\nperceptual sensations.","\nJohn Hawthorne questions whether apparent rational insights or\nrational intuitions as understood by BonJour and Bealer, respectively,\nprovide evidence for the beliefs which are based on them. He assumes\nthat these intellectual seemings manifest themselves to inner\nconsciousness “by a special kind of phenomenology”\n(Hawthorne 2013: 215). He then wonders whether any of the following\nwould provide evidence: a seeming without the relevant phenomenology\nhe calls Glow, a seeming with a Glow of which the person is unaware\n(if this is even possible), a seeming with a known Glow which is\nunreliable. He seems to think that good answers to these questions\nwould require abandoning the “internalist mandate” that\ndrives these views that “allow only that which is\n‘accessible’ from the inside to count as relevant to\njustification” (Hawthorne 2013: 216). As we’ve seen,\nChudnoff thinks that intuitions have a distinctive phenomenology that\nprovides reason to believe that the propositions which are their\nobjects are true (2011b, esp. secs. 6 & 7); others think that they\nneed not have a distinctive phenomenology (Sosa 2013; Boghossian\nforthcomingb). One might maintain that at least in certain\ncircumstance, being in the mental state with the relevant\nphenomenology necessarily gives you prima facie reason to\nbelieve the proposition consideration of which caused that intuition,\nthat is, gives you a reason to believe that proposition even though\nthat reason might be undermined or overridden by further\nconsiderations.","\nFurther, Bealer may have an answer for those who think that\nreliability is a necessary condition of justification because he\nargues that intellectual seemings are necessarily reliable when had in\ncertain conditions. He calls his view modal reliabilism (1998:\n215–217), which holds that a certain kind of concept possession\n(namely, full understanding of the concept) in ideal conditions\nguarantees the sort of reliability that some think evidence requires.\nOn this view, it does not matter what, if any, phenomenology is\nassociated with the relevant intellectual seemings (cf. Sosa 2013).\nWhat matters is whether the person fully understands the relevant\nconcepts involved. That could even be the basis for justification of\nintuitive mathematical judgments that are not\naccompanied by any intuitions with Glow (a possibility\nmentioned by Hawthorne above (2013: 217)). So a defender of views like\nBonjour’s and Bealer’s can answer Hawthorne’s\nquestions by arguing that the relevant intuitions or insights are\nreliable whether they are accompanied by Glows, unknown Glows, or no\nGlows at all.","\nThose who hold that intuitions can justify because they are based on\nthe understanding think, for instance, that our understanding the\nconcept knowledge is the source of our intuition that a correct lucky\nguess is not knowledge. Hawthorne’s criticisms of basing a\npriori justification on the understanding (as Boghossian\nforthcomingb proposes) is that there seem to be instances of a\npriori justification that require skill in “sophisticated\nproof techniques that are quite obviously not preconditions of\nanything in the domain” (Hawthorne 2013: 213). For instance,\nsophisticated proof techniques were required to prove Fermat’s\nLast Theorem even though it is easy to understand what the theorem\nsays, namely, that the equation \\(x^n + y^n = z^n\\) has no solutions\nwhen n is a positive integer greater than two. A possible\nresponse to this objection is to expand the notion of enabling\nexperiences to include those needed to acquire intellectual\nskills which are needed to employ intellectual seemings in reasoning\n(see, secs.\n 4.1\n above and\n 4.5\n below) and are different from perceptual skills. But possessing those\ntechniques without also understanding the connections between the\npremises would not yield justification. It is possible to hold that\nthe important difference between a priori and a\nposteriori justification is that once the concepts and the\nrelevant techniques are acquired, nothing more is needed for\na priori justification (that is the sense in which a\npriori justification is independent of experience), but further\nexperience is needed for a posteriori justification. Further,\nHawthorne’s criticism seems not to affect whether intellectual\nintuitions that are evoked by thought experiments (as in standard\nGettier cases) can provide evidence since no special techniques are\nrequired there.","\nWhile Hawthorne questions whether intuitions provide any evidence for\nor against philosophical theories, Brian Weatherson grants that they\ndo but questions how much evidential weight they have. Gettier\nexamples are taken by many to be a conclusive refutation of the view\nthat having a justified true belief is sufficient for knowledge, but\nnot by Weatherson. He says, ","\n\n\nIn short, the true theory of knowledge is the one that does best at\n(a) accounting for as many as possible of our intuitions about\nknowledge while (b) remaining systematic. (2003: 7) \n","\nHe thinks that it may be best to accept the JTB theory of knowledge\neven in the face of Gettier examples if no other systematic theory of\nknowledge is available. Systematic theories should not have too many\nunacceptable (that is, counterintuitive) theoretical consequences,\nshould involve the analysis of a theoretically significant concept in\ntheoretically significant terms, and should be simple (2003:\n8–9). Weatherson says that, ","\n\n\nWhile a theory can be reformist, it can’t be revolutionary. A\ntheory that disagreed with virtually all intuitions about possible\ncases is, for that reason, false.\n","\nStopped Clock is a case in which a person correctly believes\nthat the time is, say, 1:00 p.m. on the basis of looking at a clock\nthat reads 1:00 o’clock, and which he is justified in thinking\nis working properly. However, the clock stopped working exactly\ntwenty-four hours earlier. Still, that person has a justified true\nbelief that it is 1:00 p.m. Sheep is a case where a jokester\nfarmer breeds poodles to look like sheep, and grooms them so they are\nindistinguishable from real sheep. He puts them in his field for\ntourists to see, and his real sheep are in that field but out of sight\nbehind some large boulders where he feeds them. Jones drives by and\nforms the justified true belief that there are sheep in the field. It\nseems that the intuitions that knowledge is absent, but JTB present,\nin Stopped Clock and Sheep are enough to make it\nreasonable to reject the JTB theory of knowledge. A few really strong\nintuitions seem enough by themselves to make it reasonable to reject a\ntheory. Contra Weatherson, reasonable rejection does not require that\nthe theory disagree with virtually all intuitions.\nTheoretical virtues are not enough to overcome such intuitive\nshortcomings even if there is not a competing virtuous theoretical\nanalysis available. ","\nA promising account of a priori justification in terms of a\nnonexperiential source of evidence is one that sees\nintellectual intuition, rational insight, or apparent\nrational insight, as providing the relevant a priori evidence\nwith its source being reason. This rational capacity is not some\nspecial faculty of intuition analogous, say, to sight, which is a\nsource of empirical evidence. One function of reason involves\n“seeing” how evidence supports a conclusion, and\nin deductive reasoning, “seeing” how conclusions\nfollow from premises. This same ability is exercised when\nreason “sees” that some proposition is true, or\nnecessarily true, simply in virtue of the person’s understanding\nthe proposition. However, this intellectual “seeing” need\nnot have distinctive conscious qualities, qualia, associated with it,\nunlike perceptual seeing, which does. Apparent rational\ninsights need not be accompanied by appearances, if\n“appearances” necessarily involve qualia. The metaphor of\n“seeing” logical connections or that certain propositions\nare true should not mislead us into thinking that there is a special,\nquasi-perceptual faculty along with sight, touch, hearing, etc. It is\nplausible to hold that reason can “grasp” and\n“see” without there being any analogue to having certain\ntouch or visual sensations. (In several essays, Chudnoff disagrees:\n2011a, 2011b.)"],"subsection_title":"4.4 Rational intuitions or insights as the bases of a priori justification"},{"content":["\nRecently some philosophers have thought that a person can be justified\nin believing, or accepting, a proposition without having any evidence\nto support it, and so even if there is no nonexperiential\nsource of evidence for that belief or acceptance. As we have\nseen, Timothy Williamson has argued that certain acquired\nskills can be used to provide justification for believing a\nproposition for which the person does not have evidence, namely, the\nskill of bringing ideas together in imagination. His proposal is that\nin the case of the inches/centimeters proposition it is this\nskill at making comparisons of length in imagination, and\nthen observing the results, not a person’s perceptual evidence,\nthat justifies him in believing that proposition.","\nEven if true, it seems that we can distinguish empirically based from\nunderstanding based employment of a skill. Manipulating in imagination\ntwo circles of unequal radii can bring a person to understand that\nthey cannot intersect in more than two points. Creating an\nimage of a line nine inches long next to an image of a typical ant can\nbring a person to believe that the distance between the front and back\nlegs of a typical ant is less than nine inches, but not that it\nmust be. Science fiction films sometimes depict giant ants that\ncould have been actual. Further, skills at judging, say, that\nin Sheep you do not know that there are sheep in the field is\nbased on your understanding the concept “knowledge”. But\nyour skill in judging that sheep have wool requires more to qualify as\nknowledge than understanding that proposition: you need to know what\nsheep in fact are like. A detective’s skill at deducing via\ndisjunctive syllogism that Jones is the murderer is similar to a\ngeometer’s deducing that a quadrilateral has four interior\nangles or that the Pythagorean Theorem is true, but the nature of the\npremises can make all the difference between whether the reasoning is\na posteriori or a priori. So even if the exercise of\nrelevant skills can provide justification apart from evidence, how the\nskill is used, and in particular on what subject matter, seems to be a\nbasis for distinguishing a priori from a posteriori\n(empirical) justification.","\nAnother view that rejects the idea that a justified belief must be\nfounded on evidence says that all of our beliefs are\nprima facie justified so all of them are what one might call\n“default reasonable”, that is, justified barring reasons\nto reject them (this is what Gilbert Harman (2001) calls\n“general foundationalism”). On some accounts of a\npriori justification, namely those that hold that a\npriori justification is justification independent of\nempirical evidence, general foundationalism would imply that all\nof a person’s beliefs are prima facie (or weakly) a\npriori justified since that justification would stem merely from\nthe fact that the person believes them, not from any empirical\nevidence that supports them. On this view, and contrary to\ninitial appearances, there is really no difference in the way the\npropositions at the start of this essay are prima facie\njustified since they are all weakly a priori justified if you\naccept them. The general foundationalist view might add that, if some\nare all things considered less justified than others, it is\nbecause of the relationships between them. Coherence considerations\naccount for all things considered justification and are what upset\ninitially equal prima facie justification. Further, this view\nhas the implication that you could be prima facie justified\nin believing extremely bizarre propositions, say, beliefs about what\nhappens on the planet Gliese 581d, a planet scientists have\njudged may be “friendly to life” (Russell 2012: 100), even\nthough you have no empirical or testimonial evidence to support your\nbeliefs about this alien planet. You may, but need not, also believe\nthat the Gliesians are in touch with you (but not others) via\ntelepathy because you are “the chosen one”. Insofar as you\nhave no defeating evidence, you could even be all things\nconsidered justified in believing all those things about the\nGlieseans, despite having no evidence to support your beliefs. But it\nseems that a coherent set of beliefs about Gliese 581d would not\nprovide a priori justification of all of them even if it\nprovided some sort of justification for them. That would be drawing\nthe boundaries of the a priori too broadly.","\nHartry Field also holds that belief in certain propositions can be\n“default reasonable”, that is, justified but not on the\nbasis of evidence. He seems to think that if a belief’s being\n“default reasonable” were sufficient for its being a\npriori justified, too many beliefs would count as being a\npriori justified. That’s because he thinks, for example,\nthat “People usually tell the truth” is default reasonable\nbut not a priori justified. So he adds the requirement that\nan a priori justified belief cannot be empirically\ndefeasible (Field 2000: 119–120; cited in Casullo 2012c:\n318–320). But we have seen above that paradigm cases of a\npriori justification can be defeated by empirical considerations\n(see above,\n sec. 3).\n So by adding the requirement of no empirical defeat, Field’s\nview will imply that there are no a priori justifiable\npropositions. On the other hand, if he drops that requirement, he\nfaces the same problem as Harman in drawing the boundaries of a\npriori justification too broadly.","\nA final view of a priori justification according to which it\ndoes not rest on nonexperiential evidence holds that we are\nentitled to accept certain propositions on no evidence and\nthat entitlement on no grounds or evidence is what a priori\njustification amounts to. To be entitled to accept, or trust, some\npresupposition is for it to be rational to accept or trust\nit, though this is supposed to be different from being justified in\nbelieving it. Crispin Wright proposes that the laws of logic\nand the presupposition that we are not now in the midst of a coherent\nand continuing dream, not now brains-in-a vat, etc., are rational\npresuppositions, some of which are standard presuppositions of\nscience. That’s because certain “cognitive projects”\n(i) could not be pursued without presupposing those things, (ii) there\nis no evidence to think that those presuppositions are false (even if\nalso none to think them true), and (iii) nothing will be lost, and\nsomething may be gained, by accepting these presuppositions (see\nJenkins 2007). The gains and losses must not be pragmatic gains and\nlosses such as gains and losses in happiness, prestige,\naccomplishments, wealth and the like. Otherwise all that would follow\nis that it is practically rational to accept the\npresuppositions. The gains and losses must be epistemic, that is,\nhaving to do with truth, or probable truth, or with evidence because\nWright wants the rational acceptance of such presuppositions to be an\nanswer to the skeptic about knowledge and epistemic justification.","\nCarrie Jenkins has questioned whether the project-relative rationality\nof a presupposition that Wright proposes is enough to make it rational\nto accept that presupposition (Jenkins 2007). For instance, when\nconducting certain inquiries, it might be rational relative to\nsome project or kind of inquiry to accept that the world is a\npretty orderly place, yet not epistemically rational to accept the\npresupposition itself. Maybe we should suspend judgment about that\nuntil we go look at the world.","\nWe might think of these presuppositions as heuristics, rules that if\nfollowed usually aid us in the pursuit of truth but in certain\ncontexts can be rationally doubted. Perhaps they do not necessarily\ndetermine what it is rational to believe or accept. In moral\nphilosophy, anti-utilitarians often claim that there are many moral\nrules that prohibit lying, cheating, stealing, torturing, etc, and\nthat these rules sometimes require people not to maximize utility. Act\nutilitarians often respond by saying that these are useful guides to\ndoing what has the best consequences, but they are not definitive of\nwhat makes actions right or wrong. Wright’s presuppositions seem\nto be analogous to what act utilitarians see as heuristics or\nsecondary rules.","\nIn summary, it seems that accounts of a priori justification\nthat do not hold that it rests on evidence provided by a\nnonexperiential source are in danger of counting certain beliefs or\nacceptances as a priori justified that, intuitively, do not\nseem to be. They are in danger of drawing the circle of a\npriori justification too broadly (Harman), to include\npropositions that are “default reasonable” (Field), or are\npresuppositions of science (Wright) that may be justified but do not\nseem to be a priori justified. The attempt by Field to narrow\nthat circle seems to rest on a doubtful assumption, namely, that a\npriori justification cannot be defeated by empirical\nevidence.","\nIf one thinks that some sort of justification can derive from what is\ndefault reasonable or through relevant entitlements, one might adopt\nCasullo’s view that there are different types of knowledge or\njustification, broadly construed: a priori which rests on\nnonexperiential evidence; a posteriori which rests on\nempirical evidence; and a third type of justification that does not\nrest on any evidence (Casullo 2012c: 324–326). This section has\nraised some problems for this third conception of justification.","\nWe turn next to considerations that seem to count for the view that\nintellectual intuitions are evidence for the propositions that are\ntheir objects."],"subsection_title":"4.5 A priori justification does not require any nonexperiential source of evidence"}]},{"main_content":["\nThe answer to this question requires first answering another question:\nwhat are intuitions? As noted above, Bealer distinguishes between\nphysical intuitions, such as the intuition that a house undermined\nwill fall (1998: 207, 211, 213; 1992: 102, 104), and rational\nintuitions. Here are several of Bealer’s examples of rational\nintuitions from (1998): if P, then not not P (207); if\nP or Q, then it is not the case that both not P\nand not Q (210); that Gettier situations are possible (207:\n211–12); that phenomenal colors are incompatible (211); that if\nspatial region x is a part of spatial region y and\nspatial region y is part of spatial region z, then\nspatial region x is part of spatial region z (212). At\none point Bealer says that the difference between a physical and a\nrational intuition is that a rational intuition “presents itself\nas necessary”, but he immediately goes on to say that he does\nnot know exactly how to analyze this notion. A proposal he offers is\nthe following: if x (rationally) intuits P, then it\nseems to x that P and also that necessarily P.\nBut later he says that in Gettier cases there are rational intuitions\nabout the situation described being possible (1998: 206, 207,\n211–12), and he explicitly says, “Without possibility\nintuitions, philosophy would be fatally flawed” (1998: 212;\nmy italics). It seems that what Bealer holds is that a rational\nintuition that P is one where it either seems that P and\nalso necessarily that P, OR it seems that it is possible that\nP. As we have seen, Malmgren argued that in Gettier cases the\nrelevant intuition is that it is possible that a person in\nthe relevant circumstances have a justified true belief but lack\nknowledge. Bealer’s remark about an intuition’s presenting\nitself as necessary was only meant as a way of contrasting the\nphysical intuition that a house undermined will fall with some other\nrational intuitions. For Bealer, rational intuitions involve modal\nseemings, either about what is necessary or possible.","\nBealer offers a complicated multi-stage argument for why intuitions,\nso understood, provide evidence. Part of his argument involves\ndistinguishing basic from derivative sources of evidence. Some\ncontingent sources of evidence provide justification but only because\nsome basic source justifies their use. Perhaps perception is a basic\nsource of evidence and testimony derivative. But what makes a source\nof evidence basic? For Bealer, a source of evidence is basic if and\nonly if its deliverances have an appropriate kind of modal\ntie to the truth (1998: 218). His view is that a source has the\nappropriate modal tie if and only if, necessarily, its deliverances\nwould be true for the most part, that is, would be reliable, when that\nsource is employed by someone in cognitive conditions of suitable high\nquality (for short, in ideal conditions) (1998: 219). In short, the\nappropriate modal tie to the truth is the source’s being\nnecessarily reliable when the person using it is in ideal cognitive\ncircumstances. This account of a basic source of evidence explains why\nguessing is not a basic source of evidence for a person who happens to\nbe a reliable guesser: guessing in that special world would be\nreliable but not in all other possible worlds. But is rational\nintuition a basic source of evidence on this account?","\nBealer argues that rational intuitions depend on concept possession\nand if one fully understands a concept, they will be necessarily\nreliable in ideal cognitive conditions in applying that concept. A\nperson can misunderstand a concept such as arthritis and apply it to\npains in the thigh, or incompletely understand it by not knowing\nwhether it applies to a certain case or not. For example, someone\nmight not understand the concept of a contract well enough to know\nwhether it applies to any oral agreements (1998: 221). But full\nunderstanding of concepts is incompatible with any misunderstanding or\nincomplete understanding.","\nBealer says, “Our intuitions are what seem to be so concerning\nthe applicability of concepts to cases presented to pure\nthought” (1998: 231). And what seems to be so is modal,\nsomething’s being possible or necessary. For instance, if a\nperson who fully understands the concept knowledge is presented a\nGettier case, the relevant intuition for Bealer will be that it seems\npossible for the person in the Gettier scenario to have a\njustified true belief but lack knowledge. If a person who fully\nunderstands “spatial part” is asked whether it’s\ntrue that if x is a part of y, and y a part of\nz, then x is a part of z, the relevant intuition\nfor Bealer will be that it seems necessarily true.","\nBealer further maintains that we are not now in the relevant ideal\nconditions. However, he does say that, ","\n\n\nif we limit ourselves to suitably elementary propositions, then\nrelative to them we approximate ideal cognitive conditions,\n\n","\nand that ","\n\n\nthe deliverances of our basic sources would provide in an approximate\nway the kind of pathway to the truth they would have generally in\nideal conditions. (1998: 219) \n","\nHe is saying that even in our current non-ideal cognitive condition\nthe deliverances of our basic sources, which include rational\nintuitions, can be somewhat reliable even if not as reliable as they\nwould be in ideal conditions. He also thinks that for many of us the\nclass of elementary propositions “would not be\ninconsiderable” (1998: 219). Bealer is probably thinking of the\nmany readily accessible conceptual connections such as those in\n 1a–15a\n given near the beginning of this entry.","\nCasullo recommends a different approach to defending rationalism. He\nthinks rationalists should start from common ground and that they\nshould “enlist empirical support for the existence of a priori\nknowledge” (2012a: 248–249). This may be because he thinks\nthat nonexperiential mental states are the basis of a priori\njustification and “nonexperiential mental state” is a\nnatural kind term. This seems plausible because Casullo thinks that\n“experience” is a natural kind term (see, below,\n sec. 6.4).\n He may think that the reference of all natural kind terms must be\ndiscovered empirically and so think that what he takes as the basis of\na priori justification must be discovered empirically.\nSuppose the nonexperiential mental states that Casullo thinks are the\nbases of a priori justification are what other philosophers\ncall “intuitions”. If a priori knowledge rests\npartly on a priori justification, and that rests on\n“intuitions”, that could explain why Casullo recommends\nempirical inquiry as a means to discover what intuitions are like as a\nfirst step in explaining how they can provide a priori\njustification.","\nBealer seems to disagree with Casullo about the nature of intuitions.\nHe has written that empirical investigation into people’s\n“intuitions” is irrelevant because they do not investigate\nintuitions in the relevant sense, that is, intuitions understood as\nresponses to fully understanding propositions (1998: 202). Casullo\nseems to understand intuitions differently, as a certain kind of\nmental state whose nature must be discovered empirically. Insofar as a\ndefense of rationalism involves a defense of the epistemic role of\nintuitions, it is not surprising that Bealer and Casullo suggest\ndifferent ways of defending rationalism given that they have different\nviews about the nature of intuitions."],"section_title":"5. Should we think that rational intuitions provide evidence for the propositions that are their objects?","subsections":[]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"6. Should we doubt the evidential force of intellectual intuitions?","subsections":[{"content":["\nWe have seen that Bealer thinks that a rational intuition is a modal\nseeming: either a seeming to be true and necessarily true, or a\nseeming to be possible. In other places Russell (2017: 232) defines an\na priori intuition as the psychological state people are in\nwhen some proposition seems true to them solely on the basis\nof their understanding that proposition. This definition of an a\npriori intuition allows us to distinguish between what Bealer\ncalled a physical intuition that a house undermined will fall, because\nit does not seem true to us solely on the basis of understanding what\nit says, and the intuition that if P, then not not P, or\nthat if someone knows P, then she believes P and\nP is true. Unlike on Bealer’s account of rational\nintuitions, this account of intuition does not require that the\npropositions that are the objects of intuitions be modal. It provides\na way of distinguishing a priori justifiable necessary\npropositions such as Necessarily, all bachelors are unmarried\nmales from empirically justifiable necessary propositions such as\nNecessarily, water is H2O since an intuition that\nthe former proposition is true can be based solely on a person’s\nunderstanding it but an intuition that the latter is true must be\nbased partly on understanding how things are in the external world.\nThis account of intuition also allows that what are called synthetic\na priori proposition (like\n 10a–14a)\n can be the objects of a priori intuitions since they can\nseem true to a person solely on the basis of her understanding\nthem.","\nSeveral philosophers appeal to the understanding in their accounts of\na priori justification: Bealer in all his many essays;\nBonJour 1998; Jackson 2000; Peacocke 2000; Sosa 2013: 199; Boghossian:\nforthcomingb. But the view also has its critics. Though Paul\nBoghossian thinks that some a priori justification stems from\nthat source, he thinks that a priori intuitions about\nsubstantive normative propositions can provide justification but they\ndo not rest on our understanding those propositions (forthcomingb).\nConsider the proposition that It is always wrong to torture\nchildren just for the fun of it. His argument is that if such\nintuitions were based on understanding the concept\n“wrong”, then it would not make sense to ask whether that\nsort of act merits disapproval or should be punished, assuming for the\nsake of argument that the correct account of the non-substantive\nmeaning of “wrong” is in terms of what merits disapproval\nor should be punished. But he thinks that this question always makes\nsense. So it follows that a priori normative intuitions of\nthis sort are not based on understanding the relevant normative\nconcepts. Boghossian seems to think that this argument generalizes to\napply to all a priori intuitions whose objects are synthetic\npropositions, not just to intuitions about substantive normative\npropositions.","\nA possible response to Boghossian is that full or\ndeep understanding of normative concepts like\n“wrong” requires understanding that certain paradigm cases\nare wrong, though a more superficial understanding which can be\ncaptured by non-substantive account of wrong does not. An analogy with\ncausation might help. A superficial understanding of why opium causes\nsleep is that it has dormative powers. But a deeper, more detailed\nunderstanding would involve understanding how the chemicals in opium\naffect the neurons in the brain and how those in turn cause sleep.\nProblems will remain with the “lack of deep understanding”\nreply to Boghossian’s argument: how does one explain the fact\nthat professional moral philosophers sometimes have different\nintuitions about substantive claims about what is wrong? One would\nexpect them to have equally deep understanding of the relevant\nnormative concepts and so to have the same a priori\nintuitions on the understanding-based account of intuitions that\nBoghossian argues against. But sometimes they do not, as Boghossian\nnotes (forthcomingb). At the same time, he offers an explanation of\nwhy the intuitions of philosophers diverge: the theories they hold can\naffect the intuitions they have."],"subsection_title":"6.1 What exactly is an intellectual seeming or rational intuition?"},{"content":["\nA new branch of philosophy called experimental philosophy (X-phi for\nshort) has studied the intuitive judgments of people (often\nstudents) when presented with well-known examples in epistemology and\nethics. They ask these people (often from different ethnic, cultural,\neconomic, and educational backgrounds) whether someone in a\nhypothetical scenario knows, or only believes, that some proposition\nis true, say, in Sheep whether the person knows, or only\nbelieves, that there are sheep in the field. In ethics they may\npresent the subjects with a case and ask them if it is wrong, or not\nwrong, to do what is described. In a case often called\nTransplant, five innocent people are desperately in need of\ncertain vital organs, and the only way to save them is to cut up some\ninnocent person and distribute his organs to the five (transplant\nsurgery has been perfected and our potential donor is a perfect match\nto all five). Experimental philosophers will ask their subjects\nwhether it is wrong, or not wrong, to cut up the one to save the five,\nand then record their intuitive judgments. In another case\noften called Trolley, a runaway trolley is on track A\nand headed for five innocent people who are trapped on that track. All\nperson S can do to keep the trolley from running over the five\nis to turn the trolley down track B where one innocent person\nis trapped. If S does nothing, five will die; if he throws the\nswitch via a remote device, the one on track B will be killed.\nOr what if someone pushed a heavy person in front of the trolley to\nstop it from running over the five? Experimental philosophers ask\nwhether it would be wrong, or not wrong, for S to throw the\nswitch or push the man. They record the data, which they take to be\nintuitive judgments on the cases, and note differences in the\nresponses, say, between different ethnic or economic groups.","\nSome of the initial studies that seemed to show that there are\ndifferences along ethnic, cultural, and economic lines in response to\nexamples have not been replicated (see Turri 2018; Wykstra 2018 for an\noverview of the work in X-Phi.). Other studies have been criticized\nbecause of their experimental design. Apart from these experimental\nflaws, claims about disagreements in intuition have been criticized as\nepistemically irrelevant because the so-called\n“intuitions” of subjects are not what philosophers have in\nmind when they refer to a priori or rational intuitions\n(Bealer 1998: 202, 213). If what philosophers mean by\n“intuitions” requires that they stem from full\nunderstanding of concepts in ideal cognitive circumstances, then the\n“intuitions” that experimental subjects have do not\nqualify, for they lack full understanding and the cognitive\ncircumstances they are in probably do not qualify as ideal.","\nOne might think that from an epistemic standpoint, the\n“intuitions” that philosophers have when considering\n“suitably elementary propositions” are what should be\nstudied because, as Bealer said, “if we limit ourselves to\nsuitably elementary propositions, then relative to them we\napproximate ideal cognitive conditions”, and\nphilosophers come nearer to having a full understanding of the\nrelevant concepts. Studies of that sort are being done (see\nSchwitzgebel & Cushman 2012, 2015). Some results suggest that\nphilosophers’ intuitions, like those of non-philosophers, are\naffected by how an example is described (called “framing\neffects”) and by the order in which the examples are presented\n(“ordering effects”). This suggests that the intuitions of\nphilosophers are no more reliable than those of non-philosophers. But\nperhaps the experimental situation is not ideal and that ideal\nconditions are the ordinary settings in which philosophers do their\nwork. (See, Kahneman’s description (2011: 234–235) of the\napproach taken by Gary Klein and his followers who criticize\nartificial experiments and recommend studying “real people doing\nthings that matter” (Kahneman 2011: 235)."],"subsection_title":"6.2 Experimental philosophy"},{"content":["\nA different sort of objection to intuitions as a source of a\npriori evidence assumes that a source of justification must be\ncapable of being calibrated to determine whether it is accurate\n(Cummins 1998: 116–118). What we see through a telescope\njustifies us in believing that the moon has mountains because we have\ndone things like looking through telescopes at distant mountains on\nearth and then gone to them and discovered that the telescopes\npresented an accurate picture of the mountains. But what, the\nobjection goes, can intuitions be checked against? Other intuitions?\nBut that is like checking a crystal ball against itself.","\nBonJour has argued that many errors involving apparent rational\ninsights (intuitions) can be corrected internally by further\nreflection, or by appealing to coherence (BonJour 1998:\n116–119). Others have replied that neither perception nor memory\n(Goldman 2007: 5) can be checked either, except against themselves,\nbut that does not prevent these sources from providing justification\nin certain circumstances.","\nIn reply to this sort of response, critics of intuition-based views of\na priori justification have said that at least different\ntypes of perception can be checked against each other, say, vision\nagainst touch (Weatherson 2003: 4). The critics of intuition add that\nwhile we can distinguish circumstances where, say, vision is\nunreliable from circumstance where it is not, nothing similar can be\ndone when it is a matter of intuitions. For instance, we can\ndistinguish conditions where the lighting conditions, or the\nperson’s eyesight, are bad from ones where they are not. We can\nknow whether we are in a desert where optical illusions occur and\nwhether we are not. At least sometimes we can tell whether we are\nhallucinating or not.","\nFirst, the thought that a potential source of justification must be\ncapable of being calibrated if it is to provide justification seems\nfalse. The people inside Plato’s cave who can only see shadows\ncast on the wall in front of them can be justified in believing that\nthose shadows have a certain shape based on what they see and the\nreports of others. A priori intuitions involve a kind of\nintellectual “seeing”, and they can be checked against\nother people’s reports of their intuitions. That one type of\nperception can be checked against another (say, sight against touch)\ndoes not seem to count for much epistemically. Perhaps a ouija board\ncan be checked against a crystal ball, but without some further\nexplanation, neither agreement, nor disagreement, between them would\nhave significant epistemic implications. Perhaps intellectual or\nrational intuitions produced under certain circumstances should be\ndiscounted, viz., those produced by people who are angry, depressed,\ndrunk, tired, etc., or who are not impartial, have something at stake\nin the outcome, or have not reflected carefully on the relevant\nconcept. But that does not mean that all of them should be discounted.\nCalibration may not be necessary for justification. And in some\ncircumstances it seems insufficient, as when there is good reason to\nthink that agreement is accidental or the result of causes irrelevant\nfrom an epistemic standpoint."],"subsection_title":"6.3 Can intuitions be checked for accuracy?"},{"content":["\nThere are other objections to the reliance on intuitions in philosophy\nthat do not call into question their reliability. They call into\nquestion their relevance. Casullo (2003) proposes to treat\n“experience” as a natural kind term, and Hilary Kornblith\nand Philip Kitcher propose to treat epistemic terms such as\n“knowledge” and “justification” in that way\ntoo. Kornblith thinks that intuitions can help direct us to the\nappropriate objects, or phenomena, of investigation but not much more.\nFor instance, we have an intuition that knowledge is not a type of\nfurniture so we should not start our empirical investigation into the\nessential nature of knowledge by looking at furniture (Kornblith 1998,\n2005, 2006). If we think of normative terms such as\n“wrong” as natural kind terms, and so as analogous to a\nnatural kind term like “water”, there would be some\nreference-fixing description associated with “wrong” as\nthere is for “water”. For “water” that\ndescription is something like: the stuff, whatever it is,\nthat in the actual world has the properties of quenching\nthirst, putting out certain fires, falling from the clouds as rain,\nfilling the lakes and rivers, etc., on the planet on which we live.\nEmpirical investigation is then needed to discover what this\nreference-fixing description in fact refers to. On Kornblith’s\nview, there is little room for rational intuitions to play in\ndiscovering the essential nature of knowledge or normative kinds. They\ndo not play a role in determining the content of any relevant\nreference-fixing description and, at most, tell us where not\nto look to find what does fulfill a given description.","\nIt would be a mistake to take “cube” to be a natural kind\nterm understood through some reference-fixing description such as: a\nthree-dimensional solid that looks such-and-such a way when looked at\nfrom various angles and that feels so-and-so when turned around in\nyour hands; is able to fit snugly through square holes cut out of a\nboard, etc. “Cube” is not a natural kind term and we\nunderstand what a cube is through understanding its definition,\nnamely, a three-dimensional solid with six faces all of which are\nsquares.","\nRational intuitions seem relevant to testing proposed definitions of\n“cube”, but not proposed reference-fixing descriptions of\n“water”. If someone thought that the correct definition of\n“cube” is: a three-dimensional solid with six faces\nall of which are parallelograms with equal sides, we could show\nit is not a correct definition of “cube” by imagining a\n“squished” cube that satisfies that definition but,\nintuitively, is not a cube. None of the properties mentioned in the\nreference-fixing description for water are either necessary, or taken\nsingly or together, sufficient conditions of a liquid’s being\nwater. So it does not seem that rational intuitions could play much of\na role in determining what the essential nature of knowledge is if\n“knowledge” were a natural kind term whose reference is\nfixed by some description. People would have to empirically discover\nthe nature of knowledge with the aid of its reference-fixing\ndescription, just as they had to empirically discover the nature of\nwater. The same thing would seem to apply to normative terms like\n“right” or “what there is most reason to do (or\nbelieve)” if they were natural kind terms.","\nOn the basis of thinking about these examples involving\n“water” and “cube”, a person might think that\nwhether rational intuitions have a small or a large role in\ndiscovering the essential nature of normative concepts, and other\nconcepts of interest to philosophers, depends on whether those\nconcepts are like the concept of water or instead like that\nof cube. But Peter Railton’s view that normative terms\nare natural kind terms allows for a large role for rational intuitions\nin determining their reference-fixing descriptions.","\nRailton calls a reference-fixing description a “job\ndescription”. He is interested in normative concepts like\nright and what there is most reason to do, and\ndescribes in general terms what a job description might include.\nRailton says that there may not be much to say about “the\nconcept of a reason full stop”. Perhaps all we can say\nin that regard is that a reason is a consideration that counts in\nfavor of something: an action, a desire, an emotion, a belief, etc.\nBut Railton thinks that the concept most reason to do has\n","\n\n\na distinctive, all-important role in your conceptual scheme—it\nexpresses “stops the buck” in deliberating and deciding\nwhat we ought to do, what ultimately matters. \n","\nHe goes on to add that the relevant “job description”\nincludes reference to paradigm cases. For example, it is assumed that\nagony gives everyone some reason to avoid performing actions that\nproduce it, that vengeance is not itself a reason to do something, and\nthat acrophobia sometimes is not a sufficient reason to avoid doing\nsomething that will save your life (Railton 2017a: 51).","\nIn another essay on Parfit’s On What Matters, Vol III,\nRailton says that the job description of rightness is ","\n\n\nnecessarily connected to the guidance of deliberation,…,has\nanalytic connections to ought claims about action and\nmotivation,…,has certain paradigm cases, etc. \n","\nHe thinks that the job description of minimizing suffering is\ncompletely different (Railton 2017b: 118–119). Nevertheless,\nRailton thinks that the two concepts might refer to the same thing in\nthe way that water and H2O refer to the\nsame thing despite being different concepts. That will be true if the\nacts that have the naturalistic property of minimizing suffering\nuniquely (or best) fulfill the job description associated with the\nnormative concept rightness.","\nRational intuitions might play a role in Railton’s view that\nnormative terms are natural kind terms by supplying the paradigm cases\nthat are elements of the job descriptions associated with normative\nconcepts. He says that it is “inconceivable” that there\nnot be reason to stop prolonged agony that is being inflicted on\nsomeone just for amusement (2017a: 56). On Railton’s view, to\ndetermine what the natures of right, reason, most reason, etc., are\nyou need to consider more than just what rational intuitions might\nreveal. They can help determine what paradigm cases should be included\nin the relevant “job description”, but that description\nincludes more than just paradigm cases. On Railton’s view,\ninsofar as “old style” analytic philosophy only considered\nthe data supplied by rational intuitions, it mistakenly left important\ndata aside. This is true of attempts to analyze normative concepts but\nalso true of attempts to analyze other concepts that have been of\ninterest to philosophers, for example, knowledge, causality,\npersonal identity, justice, being morally responsible, acting\nfreely, etc.","\nRailton’s view is that normative concepts are hybrid concepts,\nsomewhat like the concept of ruby as a red gemstone\nwith such-and-such chemical structure (see\n example 15)\n or of an ice cube. “Ice” is a natural kind term,\nor at least its definition as “frozen water” is partly\ngiven by the natural kind term, “water”. But, as we have\nseen, “cube” is not a natural kind terms. So “ice\ncube” is partly a natural kind term and partly not."],"subsection_title":"6.4 Naturalized epistemology"},{"content":["\nAnother approach that discounts the role of intuitions in philosophy,\nespecially in epistemology, is pragmatic. The idea is to first\ndetermine what epistemic goals we want principles to serve, and then\nto discover empirically which epistemic principles, if adhered to,\nwill best serve those goals (Weinberg 2006). For instance, your goal\nmight be to have lots of true beliefs or, alternatively, to have few\nfalse ones. Or your goal might be to have beliefs that make you happy.\nProbably the best set of rules to follow to obtain lots of true\nbeliefs will be different from, and more lenient than, the best set of\nrules to follow to avoid having false beliefs. Probably those sets of\nrules will be different from the set of rules you should adopt if you\nare interested in having beliefs that make you happy. It’s\nreasonable to think that intuitions will have to be appealed to in\ndetermining what makes a goal an epistemic goal rather than\nsome other sort of goal, and what precisely that epistemic goal is.\nLehrer (1986: 6–7) holds that the epistemic goal is not\nto maximize true beliefs or minimize false ones. For him, it is the\nfollowing: for any proposition, P, that a person is\nconsidering, believe P if and only if it is true. Intuition\nmust be relied on to determine what the epistemic goal is.\nIntuitively, Pascal’s Wager is about whether belief in God pays,\nnot about whether there is good evidence to believe that God exists or\ndoes not exist. The goal of the argument is not epistemic but\npragmatic in a narrow sense, namely, to believe what will make your\nlife, including your afterlife, go best for you. Intuitively, the goal\nof having beliefs that will make your life go well is not an epistemic\ngoal. Epistemic goals have to do with truth, fitting your beliefs to\nthe evidence, having evidentially justified beliefs, etc.","\nThe pragmatic approach that sketched here seems doomed at the outset:\nit cannot avoid appealing to intuitions in order to determine what the\ncorrect epistemic goal is. And if it is appropriate to appeal to\nintuitions to determine the correct epistemic goal, why not also other\nepistemic intuitions to determine what knowledge, justification, etc.,\nare?"],"subsection_title":"6.5 Pragmatism"}]},{"main_content":["\nSuppose, for the sake of argument, we grant that intuitions\nproperly understood and had under ideal conditions by people with\na deep understanding of the relevant concepts can justify certain\npropositions. But can they yield knowledge about the external\nworld? Carrie Jenkins has argued that they can insofar as the\nconcepts that play a role in a priori justification have been\nshaped by experience. She thinks that for knowledge (not\njustification) our concepts must be grounded. By this she\nmeans that they must accurately and non-accidentally represent the\nworld. So the concept table can be grounded for a person in a\nworld where there are tables but not for a brain-in-a-vat (BIV)\n(Jenkins 2008a: 128–29). For a concept to be\njustified for Jenkins is for it to be\n“respectable” for us to rely on it (by which, I believe,\nshe means that we would be epistemically blameless in relying on it)\nas “a relevantly accurate guide to the world” (Jenkins\n2008a: 129). So a BIV can have a justified, though not a grounded\nconcept, about things existing in the external world.","\nJenkins thinks that our concepts are grounded. Her argument for\nthinking this is that our basic concepts are useful, and in that\nrespect they are sort of like maps. If they did not fit the world\n(weren’t grounded) even though they are founded on sensory\ninput, their usefulness would be a miracle. They would be like a map\nthat fits the world that was based on a dream. Since we should not\nbelieve in miracles, those concepts must fit the world. The best\nexplanation of the usefulness of our concepts is that they accurately\nrepresent features of the world that produce our sensory inputs that\nallow us to navigate successfully in the world. She thinks that this\nNo-Miracles Argument shows that it is reasonable to think that our\nconcepts (or groups of concepts) mirror the world’s structure\n(Jenkins 2008a: 139). If we have justified concepts, ones we\nhave reason to think fit the world, we can examine them to see what\nthey involve and then have a priori justification for\nbelieving that certain propositions that involve them are true of\nthe world. So, on her view, we (but not BIVs) could know a\npriori, merely on the basis of examining our concepts,\nthat all vixens are female and that there are (or at least\nwere) vixens, and that all bachelors are unmarried and that\nthere are (or at least were) bachelors. If we have grounded\nconcepts, we (but not BIVs) can have a priori knowledge that\nall of these propositions are true. Yet gaining this sort of knowledge\nabout our external environment a priori seems impossible.","\nFurther, it is not obvious that all a priori knowledge rests\non grounded concepts. Normative or mathematical concepts might map the\nnormative and mathematical domains but not the external world. We can\nknow a priori that it is wrong to torture children just for\nthe fun of it and that two is the only even prime regardless of what\nthe external world is like. Perhaps we can also know a priori\nthat some general normative principles are true, such as the principle\nof inference to the best explanation (IBE). Roughly, this principle\nsays that we are justified in believing some hypothesis if it is the\nbest explanation of what we observe. For instance, it says that we are\njustified in believing that someone recently walked along the beach\nbecause that best explains our observation of footprints in the sand.\nBut we could not be justified in accepting IBE because it is useful\nand the best explanation of its usefulness is that it fits the way the\nworld is. That would be a circular argument for accepting IBE. Lastly,\nit seems possible for even a BIV to know certain conditional\npropositions, for instance, to know that that IF something is a vixen,\nit is a female fox and IF someone is bachelor, he is an unmarried\nmale.","\nJenkins allows that some concepts can be grounded, even if they are\nnot directly grounded, provided they are constituted by grounded\nconcepts, but it is hard to see how the concepts spiritual\nand immaterial could be so constituted. Still, it seems that\nwe can know a priori that if there are angels, there are\nspiritual beings and if there are immaterial beings, they do\nnot occupy space.","\nIt is one thing to hold that a priori knowledge requires\nenabling empirical experience to acquire the concepts that are the\nbasis of that sort of knowledge, and quite another thing to hold that\nthose concepts must be grounded in such experience. The latter rules\nout some seemingly obvious kinds of a priori knowledge (viz.,\nsome mathematical and normative knowledge, and knowledge of certain\nconditional propositions which seem merely to be about the\nrelationship of concepts), and so seems too strong. It also seems to\nallow in a priori knowledge of the existence of, say, foxes\nand bachelors, and so seems too weak."],"section_title":"7. Even if intuitions can justify, can they yield knowledge of the external world?","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nIt is widely, though not universally, held that knowledge is partly\nanalyzable in terms of justified true belief. But, as we’ve\nseen, Gettier examples show that having a justified true belief is not\nsufficient for knowledge. We need some anti-luck condition in addition\nto JTB to rule out cases where there is a JTB but not knowledge\nbecause, in some sense, the person in the Gettier situation is lucky\nto have a true belief given the way his evidence is related to the\ntruth of his belief.","\nThe Lottery Paradox suggests that even more than JTB and an anti-luck\ncondition are required for knowledge. The chances that you hold the\nwinning ticket in a one million ticket lottery is one in a million,\nand that you hold a losing ticket, 999,999 in a million. Suppose you\nknow what the probability of your holding a losing ticket is and that\nyou in fact have a losing ticket. Then you seem to have a justified\nbelief that your ticket is a loser (because you know that’s very\nlikely true), and it is true that it is a loser. Assume, also, that\nyou are not in a Gettier situation. Still, you do not seem to know\nthat your ticket is a losing one. It seems that you need further\nconfirmation from a trustworthy source to know your ticket has\nlost.","\nIf knowledge in general is justified true belief plus some condition\nto handle Gettier cases and another to handle the Lottery Paradox,\nthen on the account of knowledge that requires you to have a justified\ntrue belief, a priori knowledge will be a priori\njustified true belief plus some conditions to deal with Gettier and\nLottery Paradox cases. Specific versions of this view of a\npriori knowledge will depend on specific versions of a\npriori justification.","\nBut there are rival accounts of knowledge that reject the view that\nknowledge is partly analyzable in terms of justification. One such\nview is called knowledge reliabilism; the other, the “knowledge\nfirst” view. Knowledge reliabilism is the view that a person\nknows P if and only if she has a reliably produced true belief,\nand a priori knowledge reliabilism would say a similar thing\nabout a priori knowledge. Perhaps just having reliable\nintuitions would be enough to have a priori knowledge\nregardless of whether they provided justification or not.","\nThere are well-known examples that count against the idea that\nreliably produced true belief is sufficient for knowledge. Let\nTruenorth be a person who has true beliefs about what direction is\nnorth, south, etc., even when blindfolded. He has a kind of internal\ncompass like the ones found in migratory birds. But assume that\nTruenorth has no reason to think that his beliefs about compass\ndirections are accurate; he has never received confirmation of their\naccuracy, neither from the testimony of others nor by checking things\nout himself. Nevertheless, he is confident that his beliefs about what\ndirection is north, etc., are correct. Assume, also, that he has no\nreason to think that others in his society have, nor that they lack,\nhis directional ability. In general, assume that there are no\nundefeated defeaters of Truenorth’s beliefs about what direction\nis north, etc. Intuitively, it seems that if he believes that some\ndirection he points to is north, he is not justified in believing,\nnor does he know, that it is north, even if what he believes\nregarding compass directions is always true.","\nIf this is a problem for reliabilists about empirical\nknowledge, it may also be a problem for reliabilists when it comes to\na priori knowledge. Mere reliability does not seem sufficient\nfor knowledge. What seems missing in the case of Truenorth is any\nreason for him to think that his beliefs about compass directions are\nreliable. Perhaps what is missing on reliabilist accounts of a\npriori knowledge is similar, namely, that the subject lacks any\nreason to think that her a priori intuitions are reliable\neven if they are.","\nBrian Weatherson offers an example involving a person he calls\n“Tamati”, a young mathematician who has a sudden strong\nconviction that there is no largest prime upon noticing that as primes\nget larger the gap between them also gets larger (2019: 125–26).\nTamati believes that there is no largest prime on the basis of his\nstrong conviction, and Weatherson explains how Tamati’s strong\nconvictions about mathematical propositions are reliable. But,\nintuitively, Tamati is not justified in believing, nor does he know,\nthat there is no largest prime without a proof that it’s true.\nSo reliability is not sufficient for justification or knowledge even\nin the realm of the a priori.","\nViews that see knowledge as resting on justification, whether\nempirical or a priori, might be said to make justification\nfirst. A “knowledge first” view sees justification as\nderivative at best. It equates one’s total evidence with\none’s total knowledge (Williamson 2014: 8; see, also, 4). If\njustification is a function of evidence, knowledge implies\njustification, but according to Williamson justification is not part\nof what knowledge is. He holds that knowledge is not analyzable even\npartly in terms of justification.","\nThere seem to be clear counterexamples to the knowledge first view.\nSuppose you are driving out in the country and first pass by one of\nmany fields where sheep are grazing, and then a little later pass by\nthe field with the poodles that look just like sheep. In the first\ncases, you knew there were sheep in the field, but in the last case\nyou did not. Still, weren’t you just as justified, didn’t\nyou have the same sort of evidence, in the last case as in the first\nones? No, says Williamson, a defender of the knowledge first view. You\nare just as epistemically blameless in the last case as in\nthe earlier ones because, for all you know, you are looking at real\nsheep. You have a legitimate excuse for believing that you are looking\nat sheep, but you don’t have evidence, nor are you justified in\nbelieving, that you are looking at sheep when you are looking at\npoodles (Williamson 2014: 4–5).","\nWilliamson’s criticism of any justified true belief account of\nknowledge would rest on the fact that no one has yet been able to\nsolve the Gettier problem (2014: 1–2), nor give a good account\nof what it is for beliefs to be justified because they fit the\nevidence. According to him, the attempt to analyze knowledge is in a\nshambles, and the knowledge first approach promises to shed light on\nthe nature of indiscriminability, norms of assertion, and epistemic\nlogic (2014: 6–7). So it promises to be fruitful while the old\napproach of analyzing knowledge has left behind a path strewn with\nfailures. This, says Williamson, is a good reason to change horses.\nBut Williamson’s view seems to have its own liabilities. On the\nknowledge-first approach that he develops, you don’t have any\nevidence that there are sheep in the field when you are looking at the\npoodles, and human footprints in the sand are not evidence that\nsomeone recently walked there if they were made by a monkey wearing\nrubber feet. The new horse bucks."],"section_title":"8. What is a priori knowledge?","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nA priori justification is a certain kind of justification\\noften contrasted with empirical, or a posteriori,\\njustification. Roughly speaking, a priori justification\\nprovides reasons for thinking a proposition is true that comes from\\nmerely understanding, or thinking about, that proposition. In\\ncontrast, a posteriori justification requires more than\\nmerely understanding a proposition. Observations based on our senses,\\nor introspection about our current mental state, are needed for us to\\nbe empirically, or a posteriori, justified in believing that\\nsome proposition is true. Examples below bring out the contrast. The\\nfirst proposition in each group is a prime candidate for being a\\npriori justified, if justified at all, while the other\\npropositions are prime candidates for being a posteriori\\njustified, if justified at all. Some of the propositions are false,\\nbut that does not mean that we could not be justified in believing\\nthem before we had evidence that they are false.\",\n \"\\nIn each example, it is possible for someone to be justified in\\nbelieving the first member in a way that is different from how it is\\npossible for someone to be justified in believing the other members of\\nthe example. The way the first members can be justified is called\\na priori; the way the other members can be justified is\\ncalled a posteriori (or empirically).\",\n \"\\nThe first question to discuss is what sorts of propositions can be\\na priori justified and known.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Examples that illustrate the difference between a priori and a posteriori (empirical) justification\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nPhilosophers generally agree that we can be justified in believing\\n 15bi\\n and\\n 15biii\\n only empirically. Yet many believe that they are necessarily true. If\\nthey are necessarily true, that would mean that it’s false that\\nwe can be justified in believing necessary truths only a\\npriori. But some philosophers think that\\n 15bi\\n and\\n 15biii\\n are not necessary truths and the relevant necessary truth that we can\\nknow a priori is that the essence of any type of matter is\\ngiven by the basic elements of which it is composed. On this view, in\\nthe case of water and rubies, we discover empirically what those basic\\nelements are and the propositions that state those discoveries are\\ncontingent. Philosophers who hold that\\n 15bi\\n and\\n 15biii\\n do express necessary truths usually think that there are descriptions\\nthat fix the reference of the terms, for example, for water, the\\ndescription, \",\n \"\\n\\n\\nthe stuff, whatever it is, that, in the actual world, has the\\nproperties of quenching thirst, putting out certain fires, falling\\nfrom the clouds as rain, filling the lakes and rivers, etc. \\n\",\n \"\\nWhile the meaning of “water” is given by this\\nreference-fixing description, and can be known a priori, the\\nessence of water must be discovered empirically. The meaning of\\nnatural kind terms does not give the essence of the kind directly in\\nthe way it does with “bachelor” and “vixen”.\\n\",\n \"\\nOne might think that\\n 15a\\n can be justified only empirically, but gemologists seem to think that\\nit is conceptually necessary that rubies are red, that is,\\nthat the meaning of “ruby” requires that rubies be red. So\\ngiven how gemologists use “ruby”,\\n 15a\\n is knowable a priori. The notion of a ruby seems to be a\\nhybrid notion: its color is knowable a priori but its\\nmaterial essence as given in\\n 15bi\\n is knowable only empirically.\",\n \"\\nWhile it is widely believed that some necessary truths are capable of\\njustification and can be known only empirically (e.g., “Water is\\nH2O”), some contingent truths also seem justifiable, and\\nknowable, a priori. Saul Kripke proposed that “the\\nstandard meter stick, S, in Paris is a meter long at\\n\\\\(t_0\\\\)” is such an example (Kripke 1972: 274–275).\\n“The length of S in the actual world at\\n\\\\(t_0\\\\)” rigidly designates that length, that is, it refers to\\nlength L in every possible world. The reference of “one\\nmeter” is given by that reference-fixing description, so\\n“one meter” rigidly designates L. However,\\n“the length of S at \\\\(t_0\\\\)” does not rigidly\\ndesignate any particular length since at \\\\(t_0\\\\) in other possible\\nworlds S will be longer or shorter than L. So the\\nproposition that “S is a meter long at \\\\(t_0\\\\)” is\\ncontingent because in other possible worlds that very same stick will\\nbe shorter or longer than it was in the actual world at that time.\\nStill, we can know a priori, that is, independent of any\\nempirical evidence, that “S is a meter long at\\n\\\\(t_0\\\\)” is true in the actual world given that we know how the\\nreference of “one meter” is fixed by a description that\\nrefers to the length of S in the actual world. If empirical\\nevidence plays any role, it is only insofar as we need it to know that\\nthere really is a stick, S, that was designated as the meter at\\nsome particular time and place. \",\n \"\\nA second candidate for being a contingent proposition that is knowable\\na priori comes from John Turri. He claims that the\\nproposition, “The most unlikely possible event is not presently\\noccurring”, is contingent yet can be known simply in virtue of\\nunderstanding its content, and hence is knowable a priori\\n(2011: 337–338). “The most unlikely possible event”\\nrefers to an event that is maximally improbable. So we know a\\npriori that no one could have sufficient reason to believe that\\nan event that fits that description is now occurring. Still, it is\\npossible that such an event is presently occurring. Thus we can know\\na priori that the contingent proposition that says that a\\nmaximally improbable event is now occurring is false, and that its\\ndenial is true.\",\n \"\\nA third candidate for being a contingent proposition that is knowable\\na priori is offered by Gareth Evans. He thinks that we can be\\na priori justified in believing, and know, propositions of\\nthe form, “If actually p, then p”, and particular\\ninstantiations of that form. Consider, “if any post is actually\\nred, then it is red”. This proposition is contingent because the\\npost could be red in the actual world but not red in some other\\npossible world. So in some other possible world, \\\\(w_2\\\\), its\\nantecedent can be true (because its antecedent is about the color of\\nthe post in the actual world, \\\\(w_1\\\\)) and it’s consequent false\\n(because the post is not red in \\\\(w_2\\\\) and the consequent is\\nabout the color of the post in that world). A conditional that is\\nnecessarily true cannot have a true antecedent and a false consequent\\nin any possible world. However, we can know independently of\\nexperience (that is, a priori) that if the post is actually\\nred, then it’s red since it is true in the actual world (cf.,\\nEvans 1979: 83–85, for his discussion of this topic).\",\n \"\\nAnother candidate for the contingent a priori is the\\nproposition expressed by, “I am here now”. That sentence\\nexpresses a contingent proposition, since I do not have to exist, much\\nless do I have to be where I actually am at the present time. Yet a\\nperson can know it is true wherever and whenever she utters it\\nregardless of the experiences she is currently having or has had in\\nthe past, and so independently of experience.\",\n \"\\nLeaving aside now the question of whether there can be contingent\\npropositions that are knowable a priori, there seems to be a\\ndifference within the class of necessarily true propositions that can\\nbe known, or justifiably believed, a priori. The propositions\\nexpressed by\\n 10a–14a\\n seem different from the propositions expressed by\\n 1a–8a.\\n Each of the latter propositions seem to be analytic, that is, in each\\ncase the sentence that expresses the proposition will express a\\nlogical truth if relevant terms and expressions in it are replaced by\\nappropriate synonyms. So, for instance, “all vixens are\\nfemale” will express a logical truth of the form if \\\\(A \\\\amp\\nB\\\\), then A if we substitute for “vixen”,\\n“female fox”, for it will then say: if something is a\\nfemale fox, it is a female. But no substitution of synonyms for terms\\nor expressions in\\n 10a–14a\\n will yield a logical truth. The propositions expressed by\\n 10a–14a\\n are often said to be synthetic a priori propositions because\\nthey are not analytic (they are not true in virtue of their meaning,\\nas it is sometimes put) but are a priori knowable and\\njustifiable. \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. What sorts of propositions can be a priori justified and known: all, and only, modal propositions?\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nA type of justification (say, via perception) is fallible if and only\\nif it is possible to be justified in that way in holding a false\\nbelief. A type of justification is defeasible if and only if that\\njustification could be overridden by further evidence that goes\\nagainst the truth of the proposition or undercut by considerations\\nthat call into question whether there really is justification (say,\\npoor lighting conditions that call into question whether vision\\nprovides evidence in those circumstances).\",\n \"\\nJust as we can be empirically justified in believing a false\\nproposition (e.g.,\\n 9b:\\n two quarts of water plus two quarts of carbon tetrachloride do not\\ncombine to yield four quarts of liquid), philosophers argue that we\\ncan also be a priori justified in believing a false\\nproposition. Perhaps Kant was a priori justified in believing\\nthat every event has a cause. He thought that the proposition had that\\nstatus. Yet many physicists believe that there are genuinely random\\nevents at the subatomic level, and reasonably believe it false that\\nevery event has a cause. You might initially be a priori\\njustified in believing that no matter how happiness has been produced\\nit is intrinsically good\\n (12a),\\n or that it is always wrong to punish an innocent person\\n (13a).\\n You might later think of counterexamples to such claims (e.g., by\\nconsidering happiness produced through the suffering of others or\\npunishing an innocent person to prevent some evil men from punishing\\nhim and many other innocent people). Then your initial a\\npriori justification would be defeated. John Hawthorne notes how\\neven paradigmatic instances of a priori justification, such\\nas someone’s carefully working through a mathematical proof, can\\nbe undercut if the person gets empirical evidence that he is mad or\\nthat his proof is probably mistaken (based on evidence provided by\\nexpert testimony, a bad track record, or of distorting background\\nconditions, etc.) (Hawthorne 2013: 2009). These examples seem to show\\nthat a priori justification is fallible and defeasible (i.e.,\\nit can be defeated by further a priori or empirical\\nevidence).\",\n \"\\nConsider another example that makes this point. A sorites paradox\\ninvolving heaps consists of the general claim that if you take one\\nbean away from a heap of beans, you still have a heap, and a more\\nspecific claim that, say, any cone-shaped stack of a thousand beans is\\na heap. These two premises will lead you, bean by bean, to the\\nconclusion that one, or even no beans, is a heap! It seems that we are\\na priori justified in believing both the general and the more\\nspecific claim are true, but at least one of them must not be true\\n(perhaps the general claim is false, or even neither true nor false)\\nbecause together they lead to an absurd conclusion. So this is another\\nreason to think that a priori justification is fallible. (See\\nSosa 1998: 258–259, for an example about heaps.) George Bealer\\nargues that philosophical paradoxes show that intuition is fallible\\n(1998: 202). With a paradox, you are justified in believing each of a\\nset of propositions taken separately, but at least one of them must be\\nfalse because the set is inconsistent.\",\n \"\\nWhy have some thought that a proposition that is a priori\\njustified cannot be defeated by empirical evidence? Kant said that\\na priori knowledge is “knowledge that is absolutely\\nindependent of all experience” (Kant 1787 [1965: 43(B3)]). But\\nit might be that the requirement that a priori knowledge be\\nabsolutely independent of all experience is\\ntoo stringent. Enabling experiences may be required. It avoids this\\ndifficulty to hold instead that a priori knowledge and\\njustification are independent of all experience beyond what is\\nneeded to grasp the relevant concepts involved in the relevant\\nproposition (see, below,\\n sec. 4.1).\\n The fact that a priori knowledge is not independent of all\\nexperience does not show that it is empirically defeasible, but it\\ndoes defeat the argument that it is not empirically defeasible\\nbecause it is independent of all experience.\",\n \"\\nWhen it is just a matter of a priori justification, not\\nknowledge, Philip Kitcher thinks that if there is such a thing as all\\nthings considered a priori justification, then “a\\nperson is entitled to ignore empirical information about the type of\\nworld she inhabits” (Kitcher 1983: 30; see, also, 24,\\n80–87). This view seems to rest on Kant’s idea but applied\\nto justification, not just knowledge. If a priori\\njustification is independent of all empirical experience,\\nthen no such experience can count either for or against a\\nproposition that is justified a priori. Hilary Putnam thinks\\nthat if there is a priori justification, then there are\\n“truths which it is always rational to believe” (Putnam\\n1983: 90). On Kitcher’s understanding of a priori\\njustification, it is not defeasible by empirical information;\\non Putnam’s, it is not defeasible at all.\",\n \"\\nIt’s hard to see how either view is defensible in light of the\\nobjections by Sosa, Bealer, and Hawthorne. Insofar as justification is\\nrelative to the evidence a person has, or should have, it seems\\npossible for further evidence, either empirical or from intuition or\\nrational insight, to override or undercut a person’s current\\nevidence and thereby destroy that person’s current justification\\nand knowledge. Nothing in the nature of a priori\\njustification rules out that possibility. (See the discussion of\\nHartry Field, in\\n Section 4.5\\n below, for more on why it is possible for empirical evidence\\nin particular to defeat a priori justification.)\",\n \"\\nUp to this point, the discussion has focused on the sorts of\\npropositions that can be justified, or known, a priori, and\\nwhether a priori justification is fallible and defeasible.\\nBut what does it mean to say that someone is a priori\\njustified in believing propositions like those expressed by each of\\nthe first sentences in the fifteen examples above, that is, by\\n 1a–15a?\\n The discussion will now focus on that question.\",\n \"\\nThen I will turn to the three main views about the nature of a\\npriori justification. One view is that a priori\\njustification is not significantly different from empirical\\njustification. A second view is that it rests on a distinct type of\\ninternal mental state often called rational intuition or rational\\ninsight and that those intuitions or insights can provide evidence for\\nor against certain propositions. A third view is that a person can be\\na priori entitled to believe certain propositions\\nindependently of any evidence, or can be default reasonable in\\naccepting a proposition independent of any evidence.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Is a priori justification fallible and defeasible?\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"4. What is the nature of a priori justification?\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nA standard answer to the question about the difference between a\\npriori and empirical justification is that a priori\\njustification is independent of experience and empirical justification\\nis not, and this seems to explain the contrasts present in the fifteen\\nexamples above. But various things have been meant by\\n“experience”. On a narrow account,\\n“experience” refers to sense experience, that is, to\\nexperiences that come from the use of our five senses: sight, touch,\\nhearing, smell, and taste. However, this narrow account implies that\\njustification based on introspection, proprioception (our kinesthetic\\nsense of the position and movements of our body), memory, and\\ntestimony are kinds of a priori justification. And if we had\\ndifferent senses, like those of bats (echolocation) and duck-billed\\nplatypuses (electrolocation), experiences based on those senses would\\nprovide a priori, not empirical, justification on this\\naccount which takes a priori justification to be independent\\nof experiences based on the senses we have.\",\n \"\\nGiven these considerations, perhaps “experience” should be\\ntaken to mean “sense experience of any sort, introspection,\\nproprioception, memory, and testimony”. This sounds like a\\nhodgepodge of various sources of justification but perhaps what unites\\nthem is that, leaving aside memory and testimony, these sources\\nprovide us with information either about the physical world or our\\ninner world, either the outer world through perception or the inner\\nworld of what we are feeling or thinking, or information about our\\nbodies, through introspection and proprioception. Memory and testimony\\nare not primary sources of justification; their primary epistemic\\nfunction is to transmit either a priori or empirical\\njustification. So the proposal should be seen as a way of\\ndistinguishing the primary sources of justification into two\\ncategories of justification: a priori and empirical.\",\n \"\\nAs noted above (see,\\n sec. 3)\\n and below\\n (secs. 4.4 and 4.5),\\n “independent of experience” should not be taken to mean\\nindependent of all experience, but, as a first approximation,\\nto mean “independent of all experience beyond what is needed\\nto grasp the relevant concepts involved in the\\nproposition”. It is sometimes said that a priori\\njustification can depend on experience insofar as it enables\\nthe person to acquire the concepts needed to grasp the meaning of the\\nproposition which is the object of justification, but experience\\ncannot play an evidential role in that justification\\n(Williamson 2013: 293). Later we will see that the notion of enabling\\nexperience might better be expanded to include experience needed to\\nacquire certain intellectual skills such as those needed to construct\\ncertain proofs or create counterexamples (see,\\n secs. 4.4 and 4.5,\\n below).\",\n \"\\nSuppose there is a significant difference between a priori\\nand empirical justification. This still does not tell us what the\\nbasis of a priori justification is. One view is that rational\\nintuitions or insights are the bases of a priori\\njustification; experiences, as construed above, the bases of empirical\\njustification. Before discussing the nature of rational intuitions or\\ninsights, we should first distinguish between intuitions and\\nintuitive judgments and consider what the content of\\nintuitive judgments evoked in thought experiments is.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.1 A priori justification is justification that is independent of experience\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAnna-Sara Malmgren holds that intuitions are certain kinds of\\nmental states some of which are candidates as justifiers of\\nintuitive judgments that are made in response to\\nphilosophical thought experiments (2011: 267–268). What is\\nthe content of such intuitive judgments? Malmgren notes that\\nthere are several different ways to characterize intuitive judgments,\\nbut because they are all controversial, she characterizes them by\\nreference to examples. For her, “an intuitive judgment is any\\njudgment relevantly similar to certain paradigms or examples”\\n(Malmgren 2011: 268). Her paradigm examples are of judgments that are\\nevoked in Gettier cases where a person is in some sense lucky to have\\na true belief given his evidence, Twin Earth cases where a term or\\nphrase does not refer to the same thing in different possible worlds,\\nand the trolley case where a heavy man is pushed in front of a trolley\\nto stop it from running over five people further down the tracks.\\nOthers offer as examples the judgment that it is morally permissible\\nto unhook a violinist who has been connected to your kidneys without\\nyour consent, even if that will kill him (an example made famous by\\nJudith Thomson in the abortion debate), the judgment that it is\\nirrational for a man who grants that his life in the future will be\\nhappy, not a burden on others, virtuous, productive, with many friends\\nand adventures, and will otherwise be worthwhile, to refuse to take a\\nlife-saving pill (Derek Parfit’s Early Death 2011:\\n270-71), and the judgment that it is irrational for a person now not\\nto care about his suffering on any future Tuesday just because\\nit’s a Tuesday (Parfit’s Future Tuesday\\nIndifference 1984: 124).\",\n \"\\nMalmgren argues against Timothy Williamson’s view that the\\ncontent of intuitive judgments involves counterfactual judgments.\\nWilliamson says that in typical Gettier cases we make two judgments: a\\njudgment that such a case is possible and a counterfactual judgment\\nthat if the case had occurred, it would be a case of a justified true\\nbelief without knowledge. These two judgments entail that it is\\npossible for a person to have a justified true belief without\\nknowledge in a situation like that described in the Gettier example\\n(Williamson 2004: 110). While Malmgren agrees that a possibility\\njudgment is the content of the intuitive judgments in Gettier cases\\n(2011: 281), she denies that it need be reached via the counterfactual\\njudgment that Williamson proposes.\",\n \"\\nMalmgren thinks that descriptions of cases in thought experiments are\\nincomplete, and that certain ways of completing them are deviant\\nbecause they involve interpretations of the cases that misunderstand\\nwhat is intended (2011: 274–275). In the famous Nogot/Havit\\nGettier case, the issue is whether Smith knows that someone in his\\noffice owns a Ford. Smith sees Nogot driving around in a Ford and,\\nsay, believes that Nogot has shown him current ownership papers to a\\nFord. But Nogot actually drives a rental car, does not own a Ford, and\\nhas shown Smith ownership papers to a Ford he used to own. It would be\\na deviant understanding of the example to assume also that Smith has\\ngood independent evidence that Havit, who also works in his office,\\nowns a Ford. Of course, in that case Smith would know that someone in\\nhis office owns a Ford. Malmgren thinks that the interpretation that\\nassumes that Smith is hallucinating and has a poor memory of what\\npapers he has seen is also deviant. In that case, Smith would not be\\njustified in believing that Nogot, and so someone in his office, owns\\na Ford.\",\n \"\\nThe intuitive judgment in the case is: it is possible that a person in\\na situation like that described in the example has a justified true\\nbelief without knowledge. Williamson thinks that this judgment is\\nbased on the counterfactual: if the case had occurred, it would be a\\ncase of justified true belief without knowledge. But in the deviant\\ncases, it would not be a case of justified true belief without\\nknowledge, either because it would be a case of knowledge (the extra\\nreasons case where Smith has evidence that Havit owns a Ford) or not a\\ncase of justified belief (where Smith is hallucinating, has a poor\\nmemory, etc.). However, those deviant cases could occur in the\\npossible world that is most similar to the actual world, sometimes\\ncalled the “nearest possible world” by philosophers.\\nBecause of this, as counterfactuals are usually understood by\\nphilosophers, what Williamson takes to be the relevant counterfactual\\nwould be false. In the nearest possible world where the standard\\ndescription of the case holds, the consequent of the counterfactual\\nwould be false. So the case would offer no support for the intuitive\\nmodal judgment: it is possible that a person has a justified true\\nbelief without knowledge. It seems clear to Malmgren that the case\\ndoes support that possibility judgment regardless of whether nearby\\nworlds are deviant (making the consequent of the relevant\\ncounterfactual false) or not (Malmgren 2011: 278–279). So\\nWilliamson must be mistaken in thinking that some counterfactual\\njudgment must be the basis of the modal intuitive judgment: it is\\npossible to have a justified true belief without knowledge in a case\\nlike the one described in the example.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.2 What is the content of intuitive judgments?\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nOne way to answer the question about the nature of a priori\\njustification and knowledge is to adopt a bottom up approach. Start\\nwith contrasting examples like the fifteen above and construct a\\ntheory that explains the difference. Timothy Williamson objects to\\nthis approach on the grounds that it may result “in a\\ndistinction of no special significance like a taxonomy of plants and\\nanimals based on color” or the classification of plants into\\nbushes and non-bushes (2013: 291 and 309). Ultimately, that is what he\\nargues: the difference between a priori and a\\nposteriori knowledge is insignificant.\",\n \"\\nWilliamson imagines that through perceptual experiences and relevant\\nfeedback a person has acquired the ability to reliably judge distances\\nin terms of inches, and separately, by the same means, to judge them\\nin terms of centimeters. But she has not yet realized that there is a\\nrelationship between distance in inches and distance in centimeters.\\nThen one day she uses her perceptual capacity to judge distances in\\ninches and centimeters “offline” by forming side-by-side\\nvisual images of marks nine inches apart and nineteen centimeters\\napart and sees that D is true: If two marks had been nine\\ninches apart, they would have been at least nineteen centimeters\\napart. She has never measured how far apart the front and back\\nlegs of an ant are, but in a similar way she uses her imagination and\\nsees that A is true: If two marks had been nine inches\\napart, they would have been further apart than the front and back legs\\nof an ant.\",\n \"\\nIn both cases, experience is the basis of a capacity to make judgments\\nin imagination and what goes on in imagination is what provides the\\njustification for those judgments.\",\n \"\\nWilliamson’s argument against the significance of the\\ndistinction between a priori and a posteriori\\njustification rests on comparing how D and A (and other\\nsimilar pairs of propositions like 4a and 4b in the examples above)\\nare justified. He contends that they are both justified by relevant\\nmanipulations in imagination. But on traditional accounts of\\njustification, D would be a paradigm case of some proposition\\nthat can only be a priori justified and A a paradigm\\ncase of some proposition that can only be a posteriori\\njustified. Williamson seems happy to concede that there is some sort\\nof difference (2013: 294–295, 296–297) between these two\\ntypes of justification but to deny that it is a significant difference\\ngiven the way that each type relies on manipulations in imagination.\\nHe might grant that the difference is like the difference between\\nseeing something through a microscope or telescope as opposed to\\nseeing something with the naked eye. There is a difference, but it is\\nnot a significant difference since these three types of seeing all\\nrely on visual perceptions.\",\n \"\\nDefenders of a significant distinction between a priori and\\na posteriori justification could grant that there is no\\nsignificant difference insofar as imagination plays the role in\\njustification that Williamson proposes. And sometimes it does play\\nthat role in a priori justification as Elijah Chudnoff\\nillustrates with many examples involving geometric propositions and\\naccompanying figures (2011a: 636–38; 2013a: 370–372).\\nHowever, there are other ways to justify propositions a\\npriori. Some seemingly a priori propositions\\ncan be justified by reflection. One example that Chudnoff often\\nappeals to involves the proposition: if \\\\(a\\\\lt 1\\\\), then \\\\(2 -2a \\\\gt\\n0\\\\). To justify that proposition, you might first let \\\\(a = 1\\\\) and\\nsee that \\\\(2 - 2a = 0\\\\). You might then reflect that when\\n“a” is a number less than one but greater than or\\nequal to zero, \\\\((2 - 2a)\\\\) is greater than zero. Finally, you might\\nreflect that if “a” is a negative number, \\\\((-2a)\\\\)\\nwill be a positive number, so \\\\((2 - 2a)\\\\) will be a number larger\\nthan 2, and so greater than zero. So by reflection on a few relevant\\ncases, we can come to see a priori that if \\\\(a\\\\lt 1\\\\), then\\n\\\\((2 - 2a) \\\\gt 0\\\\). This way is much different than the way we might\\ncome via imagination to see A = If two marks had been nine\\ninches apart, they would have been further apart than the front and\\nback legs of an ant.\",\n \"\\nIn the case of proposition D, we might learn that one inch\\nequals 2.54 centimeters, do the math and see that nine inches equals\\n22.86 centimeters, and thereby see that nine inches is greater than\\nnineteen centimeters. There are other ways to be a priori\\njustified in believing some proposition is true than by what\\nWilliamson calls the method of simulation. And those ways of\\njustifying a proposition a priori are significantly different\\nfrom a posteriori ways of justifying a proposition.\",\n \"\\nIn a forthcoming essay in a book in which Williamson and Paul\\nBoghossian debate the a priori (forthcomingb), Boghossian\\ndefends three different ways (none of which involve the method of\\nsimulation) by which we might be a priori justified in\\nbelieving a proposition: two ways in which our understanding might be\\nthe source of a priori justification, and a third way that\\nappeals to rational intuitions that do not have a distinctive\\nphenomenology and, according to Boghossian, are not the product of our\\nunderstanding concepts.\",\n \"\\nIn many essays and a book, Elijah Chudnoff argues that intuitions have\\nwhat he calls a “presentational phenomenology” that\\nparallels that of perception. For him, intuitions are intellectual\\nperceptions that sometimes reveal abstract reality in the way that\\nsensory perceptions sometimes reveal concrete reality. So on his view,\\na priori justification is similar to, but significantly\\ndifferent from, a posteriori justification. For Chudnoff,\\nintuitions can be evoked through imagination, reflection, and even\\nreasoning from premises to a conclusion, but it is their nature, not\\ntheir source, that is the basis of their ability to provide\\njustification. His argument parallels an argument that says\\nperceptions justify because they are the mental states they are, not\\nbecause of their source. That is why they can provide justification in\\na demon world or the Matrix, even though their source is a demon or\\nsuper computers and not real objects.\",\n \"\\nLike Boghossian and Chudnoff, and unlike Williamson, Albert Casullo\\nthinks that there is a significant difference between a\\npriori and a posteriori justification based on the\\ndifference between support by nonexperiential and\\nexperiential evidence. He also thinks that there is something\\nlike justification (namely, positive epistemic status) that does not\\nrest on evidence at all (2012c: 318–326). For Casullo and\\nothers, positive epistemic status can stem from what you are entitled\\nto accept given certain ends or projects. This sort of view will be\\ndiscussed in\\n Section 4.5\\n below.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.3 There is no significant difference between a priori and a posteriori justification and knowledge\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nSuppose a priori justification rests on output (evidence)\\nfrom some nonexperiential source. What sort of evidence could\\nthat be? A standard answer is that intuition, or rational insight, is\\nthe basis of a priori justification. And what are intuitions,\\nor rational insights?\",\n \"\\nAs we’ve seen, Malmgren distinguishes between intuitions and\\nintuitive judgments, where an intuition is a distinctive type of\\nmental state that can justify a judgment (2011: 267–268). But\\nnot everyone means the same thing by “intuition”. In\\nThinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman argues that\\nintuitions often lead us to accept false beliefs. He offers Herbert\\nSimon’s definition of an intuition, “Intuition is nothing\\nmore and nothing less than recognition [of some cue stored in\\nmemory]” (2011: 11, 237). But Kahneman is thinking of fast,\\nautomatic, immediate judgments when he writes of intuitions and\\nintuitive judgments based on them. He often thinks of them as issuing\\nfrom “gut feelings”, as in his example of “the chief\\ninvestment officer of a large financial firm” who decided to\\ninvest tens of millions of dollars in Ford Stock after recently\\nattending an auto show where Ford vehicles were on display (2011: 12).\\nAnd he describes an intuitive answer as “the first one that\\ncomes to mind” (2011: 6). Elijah Chudnoff has a different\\nconception of intuitions because he thinks that “there are\\nhard-won intuitions which take deliberate effort to have” and\\nother intuitions that require an expert to guide a person before she\\ncan have them (Chudnoff forthcoming).\",\n \"\\nPhilosophers do not mean what Kahneman means when they refer to the\\nintuitions people typically have when considering Gettier cases and\\nthe other paradigmatic cases listed above. While intuitions are\\nnon-inferential, some can appear only after much reflection and effort\\n(see, again, Chudnoff forthcoming). Nor are they what George Bealer\\nmeans by a “physical intuition”, such as the one that\\nfounds the intuitive judgment that a house undermined will fall\\n(Bealer 1992: 102; 1998: 207, 211). They are some sort of intellectual\\nseeming (Bealer) or rational insight (BonJour). For Bealer and\\nBonJour, taken in the broadest sense, intuitions are non-inferential\\nin that they are not the conclusion of some piece of reasoning. For\\nChudnoff, intuitions can be produced by reasoning though their\\njustificatory force does not come from that reasoning. The reasoning\\njust leads you to a proposition that seems true in itself. Like\\nsensations, intuitions must be occurrent, and so are unlike beliefs,\\nwhich need not be. You can have a belief that P while not\\nconsidering P, but you cannot have an intuition that P\\nwhile not considering P. \",\n \"\\nWhen it is a matter of perception, in the Mueller-Lyer figure the line\\nwith the arrowheads pointing inward appears longer than the\\none with them pointing outward even if you know it is not really\\nlonger. To some people at least, in the Monty Hall example it\\nseems that there is a 50-50 chance that the grand prize is\\nbehind either of the two doors that are left unopened after Monty has\\nopened one of them, even though they know that the probability it is\\nbehind the door the contestant did not choose is 2/3 (see Russell\\n2010: 464, for the Monty Hall example). So intuitions are a type of\\nappearing; physical and philosophical intuitions have this in common.\\nGeorge Bealer characterizes a rational intuition as an\\nintellectual seeming that some proposition is\\nnecessarily, or possibly, true (Bealer 1998:\\n207–208). He contrasts this with the physical intuition that a\\nhouse undermined will fall which is not about what is necessarily or\\npossibly true. Also, philosophical intuitions are based solely on\\nunderstanding the proposition which is their object while physical\\nintuitions are based on understanding something about the physical\\nworld. Bealer contrasts intuitions with “judgments, guesses, and\\nhunches” (1998: 210–211), common sense, belief, and even\\nan inclination to believe (1998: 208–209). And, of course, they\\nare not just “gut feelings”, which are not based solely on\\nunderstanding some proposition,\",\n \"\\nLaurence BonJour thinks that a rational insight is an immediate,\\nnon-inferential grasp, apprehension, or “seeing” that some\\nproposition is necessarily true (BonJour 1998: 106). He goes on to\\nargue that a proposition’s appearing to be necessarily\\ntrue is the foundation of a priori justification, because he\\nwants to allow that such justification can be fallible and defeasible.\\nSo for BonJour it is apparent rational insights that are the\\nevidence on which a priori justification rests, not rational\\ninsights themselves (1998: 112–113, 1998: §§4.5, 4.6).\\nAfter publishing In Defense of Pure Reason (1998), and in\\nresponse to comments by Paul Boghossian (2001), BonJour wrote that\\nthese appearances are not propositional, that is, they are not\\nappearances that something is the case (BonJour 2001a:\\n677–678). In this respect, they are unlike beliefs and more like\\nperceptual sensations.\",\n \"\\nJohn Hawthorne questions whether apparent rational insights or\\nrational intuitions as understood by BonJour and Bealer, respectively,\\nprovide evidence for the beliefs which are based on them. He assumes\\nthat these intellectual seemings manifest themselves to inner\\nconsciousness “by a special kind of phenomenology”\\n(Hawthorne 2013: 215). He then wonders whether any of the following\\nwould provide evidence: a seeming without the relevant phenomenology\\nhe calls Glow, a seeming with a Glow of which the person is unaware\\n(if this is even possible), a seeming with a known Glow which is\\nunreliable. He seems to think that good answers to these questions\\nwould require abandoning the “internalist mandate” that\\ndrives these views that “allow only that which is\\n‘accessible’ from the inside to count as relevant to\\njustification” (Hawthorne 2013: 216). As we’ve seen,\\nChudnoff thinks that intuitions have a distinctive phenomenology that\\nprovides reason to believe that the propositions which are their\\nobjects are true (2011b, esp. secs. 6 & 7); others think that they\\nneed not have a distinctive phenomenology (Sosa 2013; Boghossian\\nforthcomingb). One might maintain that at least in certain\\ncircumstance, being in the mental state with the relevant\\nphenomenology necessarily gives you prima facie reason to\\nbelieve the proposition consideration of which caused that intuition,\\nthat is, gives you a reason to believe that proposition even though\\nthat reason might be undermined or overridden by further\\nconsiderations.\",\n \"\\nFurther, Bealer may have an answer for those who think that\\nreliability is a necessary condition of justification because he\\nargues that intellectual seemings are necessarily reliable when had in\\ncertain conditions. He calls his view modal reliabilism (1998:\\n215–217), which holds that a certain kind of concept possession\\n(namely, full understanding of the concept) in ideal conditions\\nguarantees the sort of reliability that some think evidence requires.\\nOn this view, it does not matter what, if any, phenomenology is\\nassociated with the relevant intellectual seemings (cf. Sosa 2013).\\nWhat matters is whether the person fully understands the relevant\\nconcepts involved. That could even be the basis for justification of\\nintuitive mathematical judgments that are not\\naccompanied by any intuitions with Glow (a possibility\\nmentioned by Hawthorne above (2013: 217)). So a defender of views like\\nBonjour’s and Bealer’s can answer Hawthorne’s\\nquestions by arguing that the relevant intuitions or insights are\\nreliable whether they are accompanied by Glows, unknown Glows, or no\\nGlows at all.\",\n \"\\nThose who hold that intuitions can justify because they are based on\\nthe understanding think, for instance, that our understanding the\\nconcept knowledge is the source of our intuition that a correct lucky\\nguess is not knowledge. Hawthorne’s criticisms of basing a\\npriori justification on the understanding (as Boghossian\\nforthcomingb proposes) is that there seem to be instances of a\\npriori justification that require skill in “sophisticated\\nproof techniques that are quite obviously not preconditions of\\nanything in the domain” (Hawthorne 2013: 213). For instance,\\nsophisticated proof techniques were required to prove Fermat’s\\nLast Theorem even though it is easy to understand what the theorem\\nsays, namely, that the equation \\\\(x^n + y^n = z^n\\\\) has no solutions\\nwhen n is a positive integer greater than two. A possible\\nresponse to this objection is to expand the notion of enabling\\nexperiences to include those needed to acquire intellectual\\nskills which are needed to employ intellectual seemings in reasoning\\n(see, secs.\\n 4.1\\n above and\\n 4.5\\n below) and are different from perceptual skills. But possessing those\\ntechniques without also understanding the connections between the\\npremises would not yield justification. It is possible to hold that\\nthe important difference between a priori and a\\nposteriori justification is that once the concepts and the\\nrelevant techniques are acquired, nothing more is needed for\\na priori justification (that is the sense in which a\\npriori justification is independent of experience), but further\\nexperience is needed for a posteriori justification. Further,\\nHawthorne’s criticism seems not to affect whether intellectual\\nintuitions that are evoked by thought experiments (as in standard\\nGettier cases) can provide evidence since no special techniques are\\nrequired there.\",\n \"\\nWhile Hawthorne questions whether intuitions provide any evidence for\\nor against philosophical theories, Brian Weatherson grants that they\\ndo but questions how much evidential weight they have. Gettier\\nexamples are taken by many to be a conclusive refutation of the view\\nthat having a justified true belief is sufficient for knowledge, but\\nnot by Weatherson. He says, \",\n \"\\n\\n\\nIn short, the true theory of knowledge is the one that does best at\\n(a) accounting for as many as possible of our intuitions about\\nknowledge while (b) remaining systematic. (2003: 7) \\n\",\n \"\\nHe thinks that it may be best to accept the JTB theory of knowledge\\neven in the face of Gettier examples if no other systematic theory of\\nknowledge is available. Systematic theories should not have too many\\nunacceptable (that is, counterintuitive) theoretical consequences,\\nshould involve the analysis of a theoretically significant concept in\\ntheoretically significant terms, and should be simple (2003:\\n8–9). Weatherson says that, \",\n \"\\n\\n\\nWhile a theory can be reformist, it can’t be revolutionary. A\\ntheory that disagreed with virtually all intuitions about possible\\ncases is, for that reason, false.\\n\",\n \"\\nStopped Clock is a case in which a person correctly believes\\nthat the time is, say, 1:00 p.m. on the basis of looking at a clock\\nthat reads 1:00 o’clock, and which he is justified in thinking\\nis working properly. However, the clock stopped working exactly\\ntwenty-four hours earlier. Still, that person has a justified true\\nbelief that it is 1:00 p.m. Sheep is a case where a jokester\\nfarmer breeds poodles to look like sheep, and grooms them so they are\\nindistinguishable from real sheep. He puts them in his field for\\ntourists to see, and his real sheep are in that field but out of sight\\nbehind some large boulders where he feeds them. Jones drives by and\\nforms the justified true belief that there are sheep in the field. It\\nseems that the intuitions that knowledge is absent, but JTB present,\\nin Stopped Clock and Sheep are enough to make it\\nreasonable to reject the JTB theory of knowledge. A few really strong\\nintuitions seem enough by themselves to make it reasonable to reject a\\ntheory. Contra Weatherson, reasonable rejection does not require that\\nthe theory disagree with virtually all intuitions.\\nTheoretical virtues are not enough to overcome such intuitive\\nshortcomings even if there is not a competing virtuous theoretical\\nanalysis available. \",\n \"\\nA promising account of a priori justification in terms of a\\nnonexperiential source of evidence is one that sees\\nintellectual intuition, rational insight, or apparent\\nrational insight, as providing the relevant a priori evidence\\nwith its source being reason. This rational capacity is not some\\nspecial faculty of intuition analogous, say, to sight, which is a\\nsource of empirical evidence. One function of reason involves\\n“seeing” how evidence supports a conclusion, and\\nin deductive reasoning, “seeing” how conclusions\\nfollow from premises. This same ability is exercised when\\nreason “sees” that some proposition is true, or\\nnecessarily true, simply in virtue of the person’s understanding\\nthe proposition. However, this intellectual “seeing” need\\nnot have distinctive conscious qualities, qualia, associated with it,\\nunlike perceptual seeing, which does. Apparent rational\\ninsights need not be accompanied by appearances, if\\n“appearances” necessarily involve qualia. The metaphor of\\n“seeing” logical connections or that certain propositions\\nare true should not mislead us into thinking that there is a special,\\nquasi-perceptual faculty along with sight, touch, hearing, etc. It is\\nplausible to hold that reason can “grasp” and\\n“see” without there being any analogue to having certain\\ntouch or visual sensations. (In several essays, Chudnoff disagrees:\\n2011a, 2011b.)\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.4 Rational intuitions or insights as the bases of a priori justification\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nRecently some philosophers have thought that a person can be justified\\nin believing, or accepting, a proposition without having any evidence\\nto support it, and so even if there is no nonexperiential\\nsource of evidence for that belief or acceptance. As we have\\nseen, Timothy Williamson has argued that certain acquired\\nskills can be used to provide justification for believing a\\nproposition for which the person does not have evidence, namely, the\\nskill of bringing ideas together in imagination. His proposal is that\\nin the case of the inches/centimeters proposition it is this\\nskill at making comparisons of length in imagination, and\\nthen observing the results, not a person’s perceptual evidence,\\nthat justifies him in believing that proposition.\",\n \"\\nEven if true, it seems that we can distinguish empirically based from\\nunderstanding based employment of a skill. Manipulating in imagination\\ntwo circles of unequal radii can bring a person to understand that\\nthey cannot intersect in more than two points. Creating an\\nimage of a line nine inches long next to an image of a typical ant can\\nbring a person to believe that the distance between the front and back\\nlegs of a typical ant is less than nine inches, but not that it\\nmust be. Science fiction films sometimes depict giant ants that\\ncould have been actual. Further, skills at judging, say, that\\nin Sheep you do not know that there are sheep in the field is\\nbased on your understanding the concept “knowledge”. But\\nyour skill in judging that sheep have wool requires more to qualify as\\nknowledge than understanding that proposition: you need to know what\\nsheep in fact are like. A detective’s skill at deducing via\\ndisjunctive syllogism that Jones is the murderer is similar to a\\ngeometer’s deducing that a quadrilateral has four interior\\nangles or that the Pythagorean Theorem is true, but the nature of the\\npremises can make all the difference between whether the reasoning is\\na posteriori or a priori. So even if the exercise of\\nrelevant skills can provide justification apart from evidence, how the\\nskill is used, and in particular on what subject matter, seems to be a\\nbasis for distinguishing a priori from a posteriori\\n(empirical) justification.\",\n \"\\nAnother view that rejects the idea that a justified belief must be\\nfounded on evidence says that all of our beliefs are\\nprima facie justified so all of them are what one might call\\n“default reasonable”, that is, justified barring reasons\\nto reject them (this is what Gilbert Harman (2001) calls\\n“general foundationalism”). On some accounts of a\\npriori justification, namely those that hold that a\\npriori justification is justification independent of\\nempirical evidence, general foundationalism would imply that all\\nof a person’s beliefs are prima facie (or weakly) a\\npriori justified since that justification would stem merely from\\nthe fact that the person believes them, not from any empirical\\nevidence that supports them. On this view, and contrary to\\ninitial appearances, there is really no difference in the way the\\npropositions at the start of this essay are prima facie\\njustified since they are all weakly a priori justified if you\\naccept them. The general foundationalist view might add that, if some\\nare all things considered less justified than others, it is\\nbecause of the relationships between them. Coherence considerations\\naccount for all things considered justification and are what upset\\ninitially equal prima facie justification. Further, this view\\nhas the implication that you could be prima facie justified\\nin believing extremely bizarre propositions, say, beliefs about what\\nhappens on the planet Gliese 581d, a planet scientists have\\njudged may be “friendly to life” (Russell 2012: 100), even\\nthough you have no empirical or testimonial evidence to support your\\nbeliefs about this alien planet. You may, but need not, also believe\\nthat the Gliesians are in touch with you (but not others) via\\ntelepathy because you are “the chosen one”. Insofar as you\\nhave no defeating evidence, you could even be all things\\nconsidered justified in believing all those things about the\\nGlieseans, despite having no evidence to support your beliefs. But it\\nseems that a coherent set of beliefs about Gliese 581d would not\\nprovide a priori justification of all of them even if it\\nprovided some sort of justification for them. That would be drawing\\nthe boundaries of the a priori too broadly.\",\n \"\\nHartry Field also holds that belief in certain propositions can be\\n“default reasonable”, that is, justified but not on the\\nbasis of evidence. He seems to think that if a belief’s being\\n“default reasonable” were sufficient for its being a\\npriori justified, too many beliefs would count as being a\\npriori justified. That’s because he thinks, for example,\\nthat “People usually tell the truth” is default reasonable\\nbut not a priori justified. So he adds the requirement that\\nan a priori justified belief cannot be empirically\\ndefeasible (Field 2000: 119–120; cited in Casullo 2012c:\\n318–320). But we have seen above that paradigm cases of a\\npriori justification can be defeated by empirical considerations\\n(see above,\\n sec. 3).\\n So by adding the requirement of no empirical defeat, Field’s\\nview will imply that there are no a priori justifiable\\npropositions. On the other hand, if he drops that requirement, he\\nfaces the same problem as Harman in drawing the boundaries of a\\npriori justification too broadly.\",\n \"\\nA final view of a priori justification according to which it\\ndoes not rest on nonexperiential evidence holds that we are\\nentitled to accept certain propositions on no evidence and\\nthat entitlement on no grounds or evidence is what a priori\\njustification amounts to. To be entitled to accept, or trust, some\\npresupposition is for it to be rational to accept or trust\\nit, though this is supposed to be different from being justified in\\nbelieving it. Crispin Wright proposes that the laws of logic\\nand the presupposition that we are not now in the midst of a coherent\\nand continuing dream, not now brains-in-a vat, etc., are rational\\npresuppositions, some of which are standard presuppositions of\\nscience. That’s because certain “cognitive projects”\\n(i) could not be pursued without presupposing those things, (ii) there\\nis no evidence to think that those presuppositions are false (even if\\nalso none to think them true), and (iii) nothing will be lost, and\\nsomething may be gained, by accepting these presuppositions (see\\nJenkins 2007). The gains and losses must not be pragmatic gains and\\nlosses such as gains and losses in happiness, prestige,\\naccomplishments, wealth and the like. Otherwise all that would follow\\nis that it is practically rational to accept the\\npresuppositions. The gains and losses must be epistemic, that is,\\nhaving to do with truth, or probable truth, or with evidence because\\nWright wants the rational acceptance of such presuppositions to be an\\nanswer to the skeptic about knowledge and epistemic justification.\",\n \"\\nCarrie Jenkins has questioned whether the project-relative rationality\\nof a presupposition that Wright proposes is enough to make it rational\\nto accept that presupposition (Jenkins 2007). For instance, when\\nconducting certain inquiries, it might be rational relative to\\nsome project or kind of inquiry to accept that the world is a\\npretty orderly place, yet not epistemically rational to accept the\\npresupposition itself. Maybe we should suspend judgment about that\\nuntil we go look at the world.\",\n \"\\nWe might think of these presuppositions as heuristics, rules that if\\nfollowed usually aid us in the pursuit of truth but in certain\\ncontexts can be rationally doubted. Perhaps they do not necessarily\\ndetermine what it is rational to believe or accept. In moral\\nphilosophy, anti-utilitarians often claim that there are many moral\\nrules that prohibit lying, cheating, stealing, torturing, etc, and\\nthat these rules sometimes require people not to maximize utility. Act\\nutilitarians often respond by saying that these are useful guides to\\ndoing what has the best consequences, but they are not definitive of\\nwhat makes actions right or wrong. Wright’s presuppositions seem\\nto be analogous to what act utilitarians see as heuristics or\\nsecondary rules.\",\n \"\\nIn summary, it seems that accounts of a priori justification\\nthat do not hold that it rests on evidence provided by a\\nnonexperiential source are in danger of counting certain beliefs or\\nacceptances as a priori justified that, intuitively, do not\\nseem to be. They are in danger of drawing the circle of a\\npriori justification too broadly (Harman), to include\\npropositions that are “default reasonable” (Field), or are\\npresuppositions of science (Wright) that may be justified but do not\\nseem to be a priori justified. The attempt by Field to narrow\\nthat circle seems to rest on a doubtful assumption, namely, that a\\npriori justification cannot be defeated by empirical\\nevidence.\",\n \"\\nIf one thinks that some sort of justification can derive from what is\\ndefault reasonable or through relevant entitlements, one might adopt\\nCasullo’s view that there are different types of knowledge or\\njustification, broadly construed: a priori which rests on\\nnonexperiential evidence; a posteriori which rests on\\nempirical evidence; and a third type of justification that does not\\nrest on any evidence (Casullo 2012c: 324–326). This section has\\nraised some problems for this third conception of justification.\",\n \"\\nWe turn next to considerations that seem to count for the view that\\nintellectual intuitions are evidence for the propositions that are\\ntheir objects.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.5 A priori justification does not require any nonexperiential source of evidence\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe answer to this question requires first answering another question:\\nwhat are intuitions? As noted above, Bealer distinguishes between\\nphysical intuitions, such as the intuition that a house undermined\\nwill fall (1998: 207, 211, 213; 1992: 102, 104), and rational\\nintuitions. Here are several of Bealer’s examples of rational\\nintuitions from (1998): if P, then not not P (207); if\\nP or Q, then it is not the case that both not P\\nand not Q (210); that Gettier situations are possible (207:\\n211–12); that phenomenal colors are incompatible (211); that if\\nspatial region x is a part of spatial region y and\\nspatial region y is part of spatial region z, then\\nspatial region x is part of spatial region z (212). At\\none point Bealer says that the difference between a physical and a\\nrational intuition is that a rational intuition “presents itself\\nas necessary”, but he immediately goes on to say that he does\\nnot know exactly how to analyze this notion. A proposal he offers is\\nthe following: if x (rationally) intuits P, then it\\nseems to x that P and also that necessarily P.\\nBut later he says that in Gettier cases there are rational intuitions\\nabout the situation described being possible (1998: 206, 207,\\n211–12), and he explicitly says, “Without possibility\\nintuitions, philosophy would be fatally flawed” (1998: 212;\\nmy italics). It seems that what Bealer holds is that a rational\\nintuition that P is one where it either seems that P and\\nalso necessarily that P, OR it seems that it is possible that\\nP. As we have seen, Malmgren argued that in Gettier cases the\\nrelevant intuition is that it is possible that a person in\\nthe relevant circumstances have a justified true belief but lack\\nknowledge. Bealer’s remark about an intuition’s presenting\\nitself as necessary was only meant as a way of contrasting the\\nphysical intuition that a house undermined will fall with some other\\nrational intuitions. For Bealer, rational intuitions involve modal\\nseemings, either about what is necessary or possible.\",\n \"\\nBealer offers a complicated multi-stage argument for why intuitions,\\nso understood, provide evidence. Part of his argument involves\\ndistinguishing basic from derivative sources of evidence. Some\\ncontingent sources of evidence provide justification but only because\\nsome basic source justifies their use. Perhaps perception is a basic\\nsource of evidence and testimony derivative. But what makes a source\\nof evidence basic? For Bealer, a source of evidence is basic if and\\nonly if its deliverances have an appropriate kind of modal\\ntie to the truth (1998: 218). His view is that a source has the\\nappropriate modal tie if and only if, necessarily, its deliverances\\nwould be true for the most part, that is, would be reliable, when that\\nsource is employed by someone in cognitive conditions of suitable high\\nquality (for short, in ideal conditions) (1998: 219). In short, the\\nappropriate modal tie to the truth is the source’s being\\nnecessarily reliable when the person using it is in ideal cognitive\\ncircumstances. This account of a basic source of evidence explains why\\nguessing is not a basic source of evidence for a person who happens to\\nbe a reliable guesser: guessing in that special world would be\\nreliable but not in all other possible worlds. But is rational\\nintuition a basic source of evidence on this account?\",\n \"\\nBealer argues that rational intuitions depend on concept possession\\nand if one fully understands a concept, they will be necessarily\\nreliable in ideal cognitive conditions in applying that concept. A\\nperson can misunderstand a concept such as arthritis and apply it to\\npains in the thigh, or incompletely understand it by not knowing\\nwhether it applies to a certain case or not. For example, someone\\nmight not understand the concept of a contract well enough to know\\nwhether it applies to any oral agreements (1998: 221). But full\\nunderstanding of concepts is incompatible with any misunderstanding or\\nincomplete understanding.\",\n \"\\nBealer says, “Our intuitions are what seem to be so concerning\\nthe applicability of concepts to cases presented to pure\\nthought” (1998: 231). And what seems to be so is modal,\\nsomething’s being possible or necessary. For instance, if a\\nperson who fully understands the concept knowledge is presented a\\nGettier case, the relevant intuition for Bealer will be that it seems\\npossible for the person in the Gettier scenario to have a\\njustified true belief but lack knowledge. If a person who fully\\nunderstands “spatial part” is asked whether it’s\\ntrue that if x is a part of y, and y a part of\\nz, then x is a part of z, the relevant intuition\\nfor Bealer will be that it seems necessarily true.\",\n \"\\nBealer further maintains that we are not now in the relevant ideal\\nconditions. However, he does say that, \",\n \"\\n\\n\\nif we limit ourselves to suitably elementary propositions, then\\nrelative to them we approximate ideal cognitive conditions,\\n\\n\",\n \"\\nand that \",\n \"\\n\\n\\nthe deliverances of our basic sources would provide in an approximate\\nway the kind of pathway to the truth they would have generally in\\nideal conditions. (1998: 219) \\n\",\n \"\\nHe is saying that even in our current non-ideal cognitive condition\\nthe deliverances of our basic sources, which include rational\\nintuitions, can be somewhat reliable even if not as reliable as they\\nwould be in ideal conditions. He also thinks that for many of us the\\nclass of elementary propositions “would not be\\ninconsiderable” (1998: 219). Bealer is probably thinking of the\\nmany readily accessible conceptual connections such as those in\\n 1a–15a\\n given near the beginning of this entry.\",\n \"\\nCasullo recommends a different approach to defending rationalism. He\\nthinks rationalists should start from common ground and that they\\nshould “enlist empirical support for the existence of a priori\\nknowledge” (2012a: 248–249). This may be because he thinks\\nthat nonexperiential mental states are the basis of a priori\\njustification and “nonexperiential mental state” is a\\nnatural kind term. This seems plausible because Casullo thinks that\\n“experience” is a natural kind term (see, below,\\n sec. 6.4).\\n He may think that the reference of all natural kind terms must be\\ndiscovered empirically and so think that what he takes as the basis of\\na priori justification must be discovered empirically.\\nSuppose the nonexperiential mental states that Casullo thinks are the\\nbases of a priori justification are what other philosophers\\ncall “intuitions”. If a priori knowledge rests\\npartly on a priori justification, and that rests on\\n“intuitions”, that could explain why Casullo recommends\\nempirical inquiry as a means to discover what intuitions are like as a\\nfirst step in explaining how they can provide a priori\\njustification.\",\n \"\\nBealer seems to disagree with Casullo about the nature of intuitions.\\nHe has written that empirical investigation into people’s\\n“intuitions” is irrelevant because they do not investigate\\nintuitions in the relevant sense, that is, intuitions understood as\\nresponses to fully understanding propositions (1998: 202). Casullo\\nseems to understand intuitions differently, as a certain kind of\\nmental state whose nature must be discovered empirically. Insofar as a\\ndefense of rationalism involves a defense of the epistemic role of\\nintuitions, it is not surprising that Bealer and Casullo suggest\\ndifferent ways of defending rationalism given that they have different\\nviews about the nature of intuitions.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Should we think that rational intuitions provide evidence for the propositions that are their objects?\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"6. Should we doubt the evidential force of intellectual intuitions?\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nWe have seen that Bealer thinks that a rational intuition is a modal\\nseeming: either a seeming to be true and necessarily true, or a\\nseeming to be possible. In other places Russell (2017: 232) defines an\\na priori intuition as the psychological state people are in\\nwhen some proposition seems true to them solely on the basis\\nof their understanding that proposition. This definition of an a\\npriori intuition allows us to distinguish between what Bealer\\ncalled a physical intuition that a house undermined will fall, because\\nit does not seem true to us solely on the basis of understanding what\\nit says, and the intuition that if P, then not not P, or\\nthat if someone knows P, then she believes P and\\nP is true. Unlike on Bealer’s account of rational\\nintuitions, this account of intuition does not require that the\\npropositions that are the objects of intuitions be modal. It provides\\na way of distinguishing a priori justifiable necessary\\npropositions such as Necessarily, all bachelors are unmarried\\nmales from empirically justifiable necessary propositions such as\\nNecessarily, water is H2O since an intuition that\\nthe former proposition is true can be based solely on a person’s\\nunderstanding it but an intuition that the latter is true must be\\nbased partly on understanding how things are in the external world.\\nThis account of intuition also allows that what are called synthetic\\na priori proposition (like\\n 10a–14a)\\n can be the objects of a priori intuitions since they can\\nseem true to a person solely on the basis of her understanding\\nthem.\",\n \"\\nSeveral philosophers appeal to the understanding in their accounts of\\na priori justification: Bealer in all his many essays;\\nBonJour 1998; Jackson 2000; Peacocke 2000; Sosa 2013: 199; Boghossian:\\nforthcomingb. But the view also has its critics. Though Paul\\nBoghossian thinks that some a priori justification stems from\\nthat source, he thinks that a priori intuitions about\\nsubstantive normative propositions can provide justification but they\\ndo not rest on our understanding those propositions (forthcomingb).\\nConsider the proposition that It is always wrong to torture\\nchildren just for the fun of it. His argument is that if such\\nintuitions were based on understanding the concept\\n“wrong”, then it would not make sense to ask whether that\\nsort of act merits disapproval or should be punished, assuming for the\\nsake of argument that the correct account of the non-substantive\\nmeaning of “wrong” is in terms of what merits disapproval\\nor should be punished. But he thinks that this question always makes\\nsense. So it follows that a priori normative intuitions of\\nthis sort are not based on understanding the relevant normative\\nconcepts. Boghossian seems to think that this argument generalizes to\\napply to all a priori intuitions whose objects are synthetic\\npropositions, not just to intuitions about substantive normative\\npropositions.\",\n \"\\nA possible response to Boghossian is that full or\\ndeep understanding of normative concepts like\\n“wrong” requires understanding that certain paradigm cases\\nare wrong, though a more superficial understanding which can be\\ncaptured by non-substantive account of wrong does not. An analogy with\\ncausation might help. A superficial understanding of why opium causes\\nsleep is that it has dormative powers. But a deeper, more detailed\\nunderstanding would involve understanding how the chemicals in opium\\naffect the neurons in the brain and how those in turn cause sleep.\\nProblems will remain with the “lack of deep understanding”\\nreply to Boghossian’s argument: how does one explain the fact\\nthat professional moral philosophers sometimes have different\\nintuitions about substantive claims about what is wrong? One would\\nexpect them to have equally deep understanding of the relevant\\nnormative concepts and so to have the same a priori\\nintuitions on the understanding-based account of intuitions that\\nBoghossian argues against. But sometimes they do not, as Boghossian\\nnotes (forthcomingb). At the same time, he offers an explanation of\\nwhy the intuitions of philosophers diverge: the theories they hold can\\naffect the intuitions they have.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.1 What exactly is an intellectual seeming or rational intuition?\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nA new branch of philosophy called experimental philosophy (X-phi for\\nshort) has studied the intuitive judgments of people (often\\nstudents) when presented with well-known examples in epistemology and\\nethics. They ask these people (often from different ethnic, cultural,\\neconomic, and educational backgrounds) whether someone in a\\nhypothetical scenario knows, or only believes, that some proposition\\nis true, say, in Sheep whether the person knows, or only\\nbelieves, that there are sheep in the field. In ethics they may\\npresent the subjects with a case and ask them if it is wrong, or not\\nwrong, to do what is described. In a case often called\\nTransplant, five innocent people are desperately in need of\\ncertain vital organs, and the only way to save them is to cut up some\\ninnocent person and distribute his organs to the five (transplant\\nsurgery has been perfected and our potential donor is a perfect match\\nto all five). Experimental philosophers will ask their subjects\\nwhether it is wrong, or not wrong, to cut up the one to save the five,\\nand then record their intuitive judgments. In another case\\noften called Trolley, a runaway trolley is on track A\\nand headed for five innocent people who are trapped on that track. All\\nperson S can do to keep the trolley from running over the five\\nis to turn the trolley down track B where one innocent person\\nis trapped. If S does nothing, five will die; if he throws the\\nswitch via a remote device, the one on track B will be killed.\\nOr what if someone pushed a heavy person in front of the trolley to\\nstop it from running over the five? Experimental philosophers ask\\nwhether it would be wrong, or not wrong, for S to throw the\\nswitch or push the man. They record the data, which they take to be\\nintuitive judgments on the cases, and note differences in the\\nresponses, say, between different ethnic or economic groups.\",\n \"\\nSome of the initial studies that seemed to show that there are\\ndifferences along ethnic, cultural, and economic lines in response to\\nexamples have not been replicated (see Turri 2018; Wykstra 2018 for an\\noverview of the work in X-Phi.). Other studies have been criticized\\nbecause of their experimental design. Apart from these experimental\\nflaws, claims about disagreements in intuition have been criticized as\\nepistemically irrelevant because the so-called\\n“intuitions” of subjects are not what philosophers have in\\nmind when they refer to a priori or rational intuitions\\n(Bealer 1998: 202, 213). If what philosophers mean by\\n“intuitions” requires that they stem from full\\nunderstanding of concepts in ideal cognitive circumstances, then the\\n“intuitions” that experimental subjects have do not\\nqualify, for they lack full understanding and the cognitive\\ncircumstances they are in probably do not qualify as ideal.\",\n \"\\nOne might think that from an epistemic standpoint, the\\n“intuitions” that philosophers have when considering\\n“suitably elementary propositions” are what should be\\nstudied because, as Bealer said, “if we limit ourselves to\\nsuitably elementary propositions, then relative to them we\\napproximate ideal cognitive conditions”, and\\nphilosophers come nearer to having a full understanding of the\\nrelevant concepts. Studies of that sort are being done (see\\nSchwitzgebel & Cushman 2012, 2015). Some results suggest that\\nphilosophers’ intuitions, like those of non-philosophers, are\\naffected by how an example is described (called “framing\\neffects”) and by the order in which the examples are presented\\n(“ordering effects”). This suggests that the intuitions of\\nphilosophers are no more reliable than those of non-philosophers. But\\nperhaps the experimental situation is not ideal and that ideal\\nconditions are the ordinary settings in which philosophers do their\\nwork. (See, Kahneman’s description (2011: 234–235) of the\\napproach taken by Gary Klein and his followers who criticize\\nartificial experiments and recommend studying “real people doing\\nthings that matter” (Kahneman 2011: 235).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.2 Experimental philosophy\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nA different sort of objection to intuitions as a source of a\\npriori evidence assumes that a source of justification must be\\ncapable of being calibrated to determine whether it is accurate\\n(Cummins 1998: 116–118). What we see through a telescope\\njustifies us in believing that the moon has mountains because we have\\ndone things like looking through telescopes at distant mountains on\\nearth and then gone to them and discovered that the telescopes\\npresented an accurate picture of the mountains. But what, the\\nobjection goes, can intuitions be checked against? Other intuitions?\\nBut that is like checking a crystal ball against itself.\",\n \"\\nBonJour has argued that many errors involving apparent rational\\ninsights (intuitions) can be corrected internally by further\\nreflection, or by appealing to coherence (BonJour 1998:\\n116–119). Others have replied that neither perception nor memory\\n(Goldman 2007: 5) can be checked either, except against themselves,\\nbut that does not prevent these sources from providing justification\\nin certain circumstances.\",\n \"\\nIn reply to this sort of response, critics of intuition-based views of\\na priori justification have said that at least different\\ntypes of perception can be checked against each other, say, vision\\nagainst touch (Weatherson 2003: 4). The critics of intuition add that\\nwhile we can distinguish circumstances where, say, vision is\\nunreliable from circumstance where it is not, nothing similar can be\\ndone when it is a matter of intuitions. For instance, we can\\ndistinguish conditions where the lighting conditions, or the\\nperson’s eyesight, are bad from ones where they are not. We can\\nknow whether we are in a desert where optical illusions occur and\\nwhether we are not. At least sometimes we can tell whether we are\\nhallucinating or not.\",\n \"\\nFirst, the thought that a potential source of justification must be\\ncapable of being calibrated if it is to provide justification seems\\nfalse. The people inside Plato’s cave who can only see shadows\\ncast on the wall in front of them can be justified in believing that\\nthose shadows have a certain shape based on what they see and the\\nreports of others. A priori intuitions involve a kind of\\nintellectual “seeing”, and they can be checked against\\nother people’s reports of their intuitions. That one type of\\nperception can be checked against another (say, sight against touch)\\ndoes not seem to count for much epistemically. Perhaps a ouija board\\ncan be checked against a crystal ball, but without some further\\nexplanation, neither agreement, nor disagreement, between them would\\nhave significant epistemic implications. Perhaps intellectual or\\nrational intuitions produced under certain circumstances should be\\ndiscounted, viz., those produced by people who are angry, depressed,\\ndrunk, tired, etc., or who are not impartial, have something at stake\\nin the outcome, or have not reflected carefully on the relevant\\nconcept. But that does not mean that all of them should be discounted.\\nCalibration may not be necessary for justification. And in some\\ncircumstances it seems insufficient, as when there is good reason to\\nthink that agreement is accidental or the result of causes irrelevant\\nfrom an epistemic standpoint.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.3 Can intuitions be checked for accuracy?\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThere are other objections to the reliance on intuitions in philosophy\\nthat do not call into question their reliability. They call into\\nquestion their relevance. Casullo (2003) proposes to treat\\n“experience” as a natural kind term, and Hilary Kornblith\\nand Philip Kitcher propose to treat epistemic terms such as\\n“knowledge” and “justification” in that way\\ntoo. Kornblith thinks that intuitions can help direct us to the\\nappropriate objects, or phenomena, of investigation but not much more.\\nFor instance, we have an intuition that knowledge is not a type of\\nfurniture so we should not start our empirical investigation into the\\nessential nature of knowledge by looking at furniture (Kornblith 1998,\\n2005, 2006). If we think of normative terms such as\\n“wrong” as natural kind terms, and so as analogous to a\\nnatural kind term like “water”, there would be some\\nreference-fixing description associated with “wrong” as\\nthere is for “water”. For “water” that\\ndescription is something like: the stuff, whatever it is,\\nthat in the actual world has the properties of quenching\\nthirst, putting out certain fires, falling from the clouds as rain,\\nfilling the lakes and rivers, etc., on the planet on which we live.\\nEmpirical investigation is then needed to discover what this\\nreference-fixing description in fact refers to. On Kornblith’s\\nview, there is little room for rational intuitions to play in\\ndiscovering the essential nature of knowledge or normative kinds. They\\ndo not play a role in determining the content of any relevant\\nreference-fixing description and, at most, tell us where not\\nto look to find what does fulfill a given description.\",\n \"\\nIt would be a mistake to take “cube” to be a natural kind\\nterm understood through some reference-fixing description such as: a\\nthree-dimensional solid that looks such-and-such a way when looked at\\nfrom various angles and that feels so-and-so when turned around in\\nyour hands; is able to fit snugly through square holes cut out of a\\nboard, etc. “Cube” is not a natural kind term and we\\nunderstand what a cube is through understanding its definition,\\nnamely, a three-dimensional solid with six faces all of which are\\nsquares.\",\n \"\\nRational intuitions seem relevant to testing proposed definitions of\\n“cube”, but not proposed reference-fixing descriptions of\\n“water”. If someone thought that the correct definition of\\n“cube” is: a three-dimensional solid with six faces\\nall of which are parallelograms with equal sides, we could show\\nit is not a correct definition of “cube” by imagining a\\n“squished” cube that satisfies that definition but,\\nintuitively, is not a cube. None of the properties mentioned in the\\nreference-fixing description for water are either necessary, or taken\\nsingly or together, sufficient conditions of a liquid’s being\\nwater. So it does not seem that rational intuitions could play much of\\na role in determining what the essential nature of knowledge is if\\n“knowledge” were a natural kind term whose reference is\\nfixed by some description. People would have to empirically discover\\nthe nature of knowledge with the aid of its reference-fixing\\ndescription, just as they had to empirically discover the nature of\\nwater. The same thing would seem to apply to normative terms like\\n“right” or “what there is most reason to do (or\\nbelieve)” if they were natural kind terms.\",\n \"\\nOn the basis of thinking about these examples involving\\n“water” and “cube”, a person might think that\\nwhether rational intuitions have a small or a large role in\\ndiscovering the essential nature of normative concepts, and other\\nconcepts of interest to philosophers, depends on whether those\\nconcepts are like the concept of water or instead like that\\nof cube. But Peter Railton’s view that normative terms\\nare natural kind terms allows for a large role for rational intuitions\\nin determining their reference-fixing descriptions.\",\n \"\\nRailton calls a reference-fixing description a “job\\ndescription”. He is interested in normative concepts like\\nright and what there is most reason to do, and\\ndescribes in general terms what a job description might include.\\nRailton says that there may not be much to say about “the\\nconcept of a reason full stop”. Perhaps all we can say\\nin that regard is that a reason is a consideration that counts in\\nfavor of something: an action, a desire, an emotion, a belief, etc.\\nBut Railton thinks that the concept most reason to do has\\n\",\n \"\\n\\n\\na distinctive, all-important role in your conceptual scheme—it\\nexpresses “stops the buck” in deliberating and deciding\\nwhat we ought to do, what ultimately matters. \\n\",\n \"\\nHe goes on to add that the relevant “job description”\\nincludes reference to paradigm cases. For example, it is assumed that\\nagony gives everyone some reason to avoid performing actions that\\nproduce it, that vengeance is not itself a reason to do something, and\\nthat acrophobia sometimes is not a sufficient reason to avoid doing\\nsomething that will save your life (Railton 2017a: 51).\",\n \"\\nIn another essay on Parfit’s On What Matters, Vol III,\\nRailton says that the job description of rightness is \",\n \"\\n\\n\\nnecessarily connected to the guidance of deliberation,…,has\\nanalytic connections to ought claims about action and\\nmotivation,…,has certain paradigm cases, etc. \\n\",\n \"\\nHe thinks that the job description of minimizing suffering is\\ncompletely different (Railton 2017b: 118–119). Nevertheless,\\nRailton thinks that the two concepts might refer to the same thing in\\nthe way that water and H2O refer to the\\nsame thing despite being different concepts. That will be true if the\\nacts that have the naturalistic property of minimizing suffering\\nuniquely (or best) fulfill the job description associated with the\\nnormative concept rightness.\",\n \"\\nRational intuitions might play a role in Railton’s view that\\nnormative terms are natural kind terms by supplying the paradigm cases\\nthat are elements of the job descriptions associated with normative\\nconcepts. He says that it is “inconceivable” that there\\nnot be reason to stop prolonged agony that is being inflicted on\\nsomeone just for amusement (2017a: 56). On Railton’s view, to\\ndetermine what the natures of right, reason, most reason, etc., are\\nyou need to consider more than just what rational intuitions might\\nreveal. They can help determine what paradigm cases should be included\\nin the relevant “job description”, but that description\\nincludes more than just paradigm cases. On Railton’s view,\\ninsofar as “old style” analytic philosophy only considered\\nthe data supplied by rational intuitions, it mistakenly left important\\ndata aside. This is true of attempts to analyze normative concepts but\\nalso true of attempts to analyze other concepts that have been of\\ninterest to philosophers, for example, knowledge, causality,\\npersonal identity, justice, being morally responsible, acting\\nfreely, etc.\",\n \"\\nRailton’s view is that normative concepts are hybrid concepts,\\nsomewhat like the concept of ruby as a red gemstone\\nwith such-and-such chemical structure (see\\n example 15)\\n or of an ice cube. “Ice” is a natural kind term,\\nor at least its definition as “frozen water” is partly\\ngiven by the natural kind term, “water”. But, as we have\\nseen, “cube” is not a natural kind terms. So “ice\\ncube” is partly a natural kind term and partly not.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.4 Naturalized epistemology\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAnother approach that discounts the role of intuitions in philosophy,\\nespecially in epistemology, is pragmatic. The idea is to first\\ndetermine what epistemic goals we want principles to serve, and then\\nto discover empirically which epistemic principles, if adhered to,\\nwill best serve those goals (Weinberg 2006). For instance, your goal\\nmight be to have lots of true beliefs or, alternatively, to have few\\nfalse ones. Or your goal might be to have beliefs that make you happy.\\nProbably the best set of rules to follow to obtain lots of true\\nbeliefs will be different from, and more lenient than, the best set of\\nrules to follow to avoid having false beliefs. Probably those sets of\\nrules will be different from the set of rules you should adopt if you\\nare interested in having beliefs that make you happy. It’s\\nreasonable to think that intuitions will have to be appealed to in\\ndetermining what makes a goal an epistemic goal rather than\\nsome other sort of goal, and what precisely that epistemic goal is.\\nLehrer (1986: 6–7) holds that the epistemic goal is not\\nto maximize true beliefs or minimize false ones. For him, it is the\\nfollowing: for any proposition, P, that a person is\\nconsidering, believe P if and only if it is true. Intuition\\nmust be relied on to determine what the epistemic goal is.\\nIntuitively, Pascal’s Wager is about whether belief in God pays,\\nnot about whether there is good evidence to believe that God exists or\\ndoes not exist. The goal of the argument is not epistemic but\\npragmatic in a narrow sense, namely, to believe what will make your\\nlife, including your afterlife, go best for you. Intuitively, the goal\\nof having beliefs that will make your life go well is not an epistemic\\ngoal. Epistemic goals have to do with truth, fitting your beliefs to\\nthe evidence, having evidentially justified beliefs, etc.\",\n \"\\nThe pragmatic approach that sketched here seems doomed at the outset:\\nit cannot avoid appealing to intuitions in order to determine what the\\ncorrect epistemic goal is. And if it is appropriate to appeal to\\nintuitions to determine the correct epistemic goal, why not also other\\nepistemic intuitions to determine what knowledge, justification, etc.,\\nare?\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.5 Pragmatism\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nSuppose, for the sake of argument, we grant that intuitions\\nproperly understood and had under ideal conditions by people with\\na deep understanding of the relevant concepts can justify certain\\npropositions. But can they yield knowledge about the external\\nworld? Carrie Jenkins has argued that they can insofar as the\\nconcepts that play a role in a priori justification have been\\nshaped by experience. She thinks that for knowledge (not\\njustification) our concepts must be grounded. By this she\\nmeans that they must accurately and non-accidentally represent the\\nworld. So the concept table can be grounded for a person in a\\nworld where there are tables but not for a brain-in-a-vat (BIV)\\n(Jenkins 2008a: 128–29). For a concept to be\\njustified for Jenkins is for it to be\\n“respectable” for us to rely on it (by which, I believe,\\nshe means that we would be epistemically blameless in relying on it)\\nas “a relevantly accurate guide to the world” (Jenkins\\n2008a: 129). So a BIV can have a justified, though not a grounded\\nconcept, about things existing in the external world.\",\n \"\\nJenkins thinks that our concepts are grounded. Her argument for\\nthinking this is that our basic concepts are useful, and in that\\nrespect they are sort of like maps. If they did not fit the world\\n(weren’t grounded) even though they are founded on sensory\\ninput, their usefulness would be a miracle. They would be like a map\\nthat fits the world that was based on a dream. Since we should not\\nbelieve in miracles, those concepts must fit the world. The best\\nexplanation of the usefulness of our concepts is that they accurately\\nrepresent features of the world that produce our sensory inputs that\\nallow us to navigate successfully in the world. She thinks that this\\nNo-Miracles Argument shows that it is reasonable to think that our\\nconcepts (or groups of concepts) mirror the world’s structure\\n(Jenkins 2008a: 139). If we have justified concepts, ones we\\nhave reason to think fit the world, we can examine them to see what\\nthey involve and then have a priori justification for\\nbelieving that certain propositions that involve them are true of\\nthe world. So, on her view, we (but not BIVs) could know a\\npriori, merely on the basis of examining our concepts,\\nthat all vixens are female and that there are (or at least\\nwere) vixens, and that all bachelors are unmarried and that\\nthere are (or at least were) bachelors. If we have grounded\\nconcepts, we (but not BIVs) can have a priori knowledge that\\nall of these propositions are true. Yet gaining this sort of knowledge\\nabout our external environment a priori seems impossible.\",\n \"\\nFurther, it is not obvious that all a priori knowledge rests\\non grounded concepts. Normative or mathematical concepts might map the\\nnormative and mathematical domains but not the external world. We can\\nknow a priori that it is wrong to torture children just for\\nthe fun of it and that two is the only even prime regardless of what\\nthe external world is like. Perhaps we can also know a priori\\nthat some general normative principles are true, such as the principle\\nof inference to the best explanation (IBE). Roughly, this principle\\nsays that we are justified in believing some hypothesis if it is the\\nbest explanation of what we observe. For instance, it says that we are\\njustified in believing that someone recently walked along the beach\\nbecause that best explains our observation of footprints in the sand.\\nBut we could not be justified in accepting IBE because it is useful\\nand the best explanation of its usefulness is that it fits the way the\\nworld is. That would be a circular argument for accepting IBE. Lastly,\\nit seems possible for even a BIV to know certain conditional\\npropositions, for instance, to know that that IF something is a vixen,\\nit is a female fox and IF someone is bachelor, he is an unmarried\\nmale.\",\n \"\\nJenkins allows that some concepts can be grounded, even if they are\\nnot directly grounded, provided they are constituted by grounded\\nconcepts, but it is hard to see how the concepts spiritual\\nand immaterial could be so constituted. Still, it seems that\\nwe can know a priori that if there are angels, there are\\nspiritual beings and if there are immaterial beings, they do\\nnot occupy space.\",\n \"\\nIt is one thing to hold that a priori knowledge requires\\nenabling empirical experience to acquire the concepts that are the\\nbasis of that sort of knowledge, and quite another thing to hold that\\nthose concepts must be grounded in such experience. The latter rules\\nout some seemingly obvious kinds of a priori knowledge (viz.,\\nsome mathematical and normative knowledge, and knowledge of certain\\nconditional propositions which seem merely to be about the\\nrelationship of concepts), and so seems too strong. It also seems to\\nallow in a priori knowledge of the existence of, say, foxes\\nand bachelors, and so seems too weak.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"7. Even if intuitions can justify, can they yield knowledge of the external world?\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nIt is widely, though not universally, held that knowledge is partly\\nanalyzable in terms of justified true belief. But, as we’ve\\nseen, Gettier examples show that having a justified true belief is not\\nsufficient for knowledge. We need some anti-luck condition in addition\\nto JTB to rule out cases where there is a JTB but not knowledge\\nbecause, in some sense, the person in the Gettier situation is lucky\\nto have a true belief given the way his evidence is related to the\\ntruth of his belief.\",\n \"\\nThe Lottery Paradox suggests that even more than JTB and an anti-luck\\ncondition are required for knowledge. The chances that you hold the\\nwinning ticket in a one million ticket lottery is one in a million,\\nand that you hold a losing ticket, 999,999 in a million. Suppose you\\nknow what the probability of your holding a losing ticket is and that\\nyou in fact have a losing ticket. Then you seem to have a justified\\nbelief that your ticket is a loser (because you know that’s very\\nlikely true), and it is true that it is a loser. Assume, also, that\\nyou are not in a Gettier situation. Still, you do not seem to know\\nthat your ticket is a losing one. It seems that you need further\\nconfirmation from a trustworthy source to know your ticket has\\nlost.\",\n \"\\nIf knowledge in general is justified true belief plus some condition\\nto handle Gettier cases and another to handle the Lottery Paradox,\\nthen on the account of knowledge that requires you to have a justified\\ntrue belief, a priori knowledge will be a priori\\njustified true belief plus some conditions to deal with Gettier and\\nLottery Paradox cases. Specific versions of this view of a\\npriori knowledge will depend on specific versions of a\\npriori justification.\",\n \"\\nBut there are rival accounts of knowledge that reject the view that\\nknowledge is partly analyzable in terms of justification. One such\\nview is called knowledge reliabilism; the other, the “knowledge\\nfirst” view. Knowledge reliabilism is the view that a person\\nknows P if and only if she has a reliably produced true belief,\\nand a priori knowledge reliabilism would say a similar thing\\nabout a priori knowledge. Perhaps just having reliable\\nintuitions would be enough to have a priori knowledge\\nregardless of whether they provided justification or not.\",\n \"\\nThere are well-known examples that count against the idea that\\nreliably produced true belief is sufficient for knowledge. Let\\nTruenorth be a person who has true beliefs about what direction is\\nnorth, south, etc., even when blindfolded. He has a kind of internal\\ncompass like the ones found in migratory birds. But assume that\\nTruenorth has no reason to think that his beliefs about compass\\ndirections are accurate; he has never received confirmation of their\\naccuracy, neither from the testimony of others nor by checking things\\nout himself. Nevertheless, he is confident that his beliefs about what\\ndirection is north, etc., are correct. Assume, also, that he has no\\nreason to think that others in his society have, nor that they lack,\\nhis directional ability. In general, assume that there are no\\nundefeated defeaters of Truenorth’s beliefs about what direction\\nis north, etc. Intuitively, it seems that if he believes that some\\ndirection he points to is north, he is not justified in believing,\\nnor does he know, that it is north, even if what he believes\\nregarding compass directions is always true.\",\n \"\\nIf this is a problem for reliabilists about empirical\\nknowledge, it may also be a problem for reliabilists when it comes to\\na priori knowledge. Mere reliability does not seem sufficient\\nfor knowledge. What seems missing in the case of Truenorth is any\\nreason for him to think that his beliefs about compass directions are\\nreliable. Perhaps what is missing on reliabilist accounts of a\\npriori knowledge is similar, namely, that the subject lacks any\\nreason to think that her a priori intuitions are reliable\\neven if they are.\",\n \"\\nBrian Weatherson offers an example involving a person he calls\\n“Tamati”, a young mathematician who has a sudden strong\\nconviction that there is no largest prime upon noticing that as primes\\nget larger the gap between them also gets larger (2019: 125–26).\\nTamati believes that there is no largest prime on the basis of his\\nstrong conviction, and Weatherson explains how Tamati’s strong\\nconvictions about mathematical propositions are reliable. But,\\nintuitively, Tamati is not justified in believing, nor does he know,\\nthat there is no largest prime without a proof that it’s true.\\nSo reliability is not sufficient for justification or knowledge even\\nin the realm of the a priori.\",\n \"\\nViews that see knowledge as resting on justification, whether\\nempirical or a priori, might be said to make justification\\nfirst. A “knowledge first” view sees justification as\\nderivative at best. It equates one’s total evidence with\\none’s total knowledge (Williamson 2014: 8; see, also, 4). If\\njustification is a function of evidence, knowledge implies\\njustification, but according to Williamson justification is not part\\nof what knowledge is. He holds that knowledge is not analyzable even\\npartly in terms of justification.\",\n \"\\nThere seem to be clear counterexamples to the knowledge first view.\\nSuppose you are driving out in the country and first pass by one of\\nmany fields where sheep are grazing, and then a little later pass by\\nthe field with the poodles that look just like sheep. In the first\\ncases, you knew there were sheep in the field, but in the last case\\nyou did not. Still, weren’t you just as justified, didn’t\\nyou have the same sort of evidence, in the last case as in the first\\nones? No, says Williamson, a defender of the knowledge first view. You\\nare just as epistemically blameless in the last case as in\\nthe earlier ones because, for all you know, you are looking at real\\nsheep. You have a legitimate excuse for believing that you are looking\\nat sheep, but you don’t have evidence, nor are you justified in\\nbelieving, that you are looking at sheep when you are looking at\\npoodles (Williamson 2014: 4–5).\",\n \"\\nWilliamson’s criticism of any justified true belief account of\\nknowledge would rest on the fact that no one has yet been able to\\nsolve the Gettier problem (2014: 1–2), nor give a good account\\nof what it is for beliefs to be justified because they fit the\\nevidence. According to him, the attempt to analyze knowledge is in a\\nshambles, and the knowledge first approach promises to shed light on\\nthe nature of indiscriminability, norms of assertion, and epistemic\\nlogic (2014: 6–7). So it promises to be fruitful while the old\\napproach of analyzing knowledge has left behind a path strewn with\\nfailures. This, says Williamson, is a good reason to change horses.\\nBut Williamson’s view seems to have its own liabilities. On the\\nknowledge-first approach that he develops, you don’t have any\\nevidence that there are sheep in the field when you are looking at the\\npoodles, and human footprints in the sand are not evidence that\\nsomeone recently walked there if they were made by a monkey wearing\\nrubber feet. The new horse bucks.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"8. What is a priori knowledge?\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Audi, Robert, 1997, Moral Knowledge and Ethical\nCharacter, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","–––, 2001, The Architecture of Reason: The\nStructure and Substance of Rationality, Oxford: Oxford University\nPress. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195158427.001.0001","Bealer, George, 1987, “The Philosophical Limits of\nScientific Essentialism”, Philosophical Perspectives,\n1: 289–365. doi:10.2307/2214149","–––, 1992, “The Incoherence of\nEmpiricism”, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume,\n66: 99–137. doi:10.1093/aristoteliansupp/66.1.99","–––, 1996a, “A Priori Knowledge\nand the Scope of Philosophy” and “A Priori\nKnowledge: Replies to William Lycan and Ernest Sosa”,\nPhilosophical Studies, 81)2–3): 121–142 and\n163–174, respectively; Bealer’s essay is reprinted in\n2008, Epistemology: An Anthology, 2nd edition,\nErnest Sosa, et al. (eds.), Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, pp.\n612–624. doi:10.1007/BF00372777 doi:10.1007/BF00372780","–––, 1996b, “On the Possibility of\nPhilosophical Knowledge”, Philosophical Perspectives,\n10: 1–34. doi:10.2307/2216234","–––, 1998, “Intuition and the Autonomy of\nPhilosophy”, in DePaul and Ramsey 1998: 201–239.","–––, 1999, “The A Priori”, in Greco\nand Sosa 1999: 243–270.","Beebe, James R., 2011, “A Priori Skepticism”,\nPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research, 83(3):\n583–602. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2010.00488.x","–––, 2012, “Experimental\nEpistemology”, in Cullison 2012: 248–269 (Ch. 13).","Boghossian, Paul, 2001, “Inference and Insight”,\nPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research, 63(3):\n633–640. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2001.tb00130.x","–––, forthcominga, “Do We Have Reason to\nDoubt the Importance of the Distinction Between A Priori and A\nPosteriori Knowledge? A Reply to Williamson”, in Boghossian and\nWilliamson forthcoming.","–––, forthcomingb, “Intuition,\nUnderstanding, and the A Priori”, in Boghossian and Williamson\nforthcoming.","Boghossian, Paul and Christopher Peacocke (eds.), 2000, New\nEssays on the A Priori, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\ndoi:10.1093/0199241279.001.0001","Boghossian, Paul and Timothy Williamson, forthcoming, Debating\nthe A Priori, New York: Oxford University Press.","BonJour, Laurence, 1985, The Structure of Empirical\nKnowledge, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.","–––, 1998, In Defense of Pure Reason: A\nRationalist Account of A Priori Justification, Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511625176","–––, 2001a, “Précis of In Defense of\nPure Reason” and “Replies”, Philosophy and\nPhenomenological Research, 63(3): 625–631, 673–698.\nPart of a Book Symposium on BonJour’s In Defense of Pure\nReason. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2001.tb00129.x\ndoi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2001.tb00135.x","–––, 2001b, “Review of Rethinking\nIntuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical\nInquiry” (DePaul and Ramsey 1998), The British Journal\nfor the Philosophy of Science, 52(1): 151–158.\ndoi:10.1093/bjps/52.1.151","–––, 2005a, “In Defense of the A\nPriori”, in Steup and Sosa 2005: 98–105.","–––, 2005b, “Reply to Devitt”, in\nSteup and Sosa 2005: 115–118.","–––, 2005c, “Last Rejoinder”, in\nSteup and Sosa 2005: 120–121.","Butchvarov, Panyot, 1970, The Concept of Knowledge,\nEvanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.","Cappelen, Herman, 2012, Philosophy Without Intuitions,\nOxford: Oxford University Press.","Casullo, Albert, 2001, “Experience and A Priori\nJustification”, Philosophy and Phenomenological\nResearch, 63(3): 665–671.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2001.tb00134.x","–––, 2002, “A Priori Knowledge”, in\nThe Oxford Handbook of Epistemology, Paul Moser (ed.),\nOxford: Oxford University Press, 95–143. This is a condensed\nversion of Casullo 2003.","–––, 2003, A Priori Justification,\nOxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0195115058.001.0001","–––, 2009, “Analyzing a Priori\nKnowledge”, Philosophical Studies, 142(1): 77–90.\ndoi:10.1007/s11098-008-9302-5","–––, 2012a, Essays on A Priori Knowledge and\nJustification, New York: Oxford University Press. This is a\ncollection of Casullo’s previously published essays, plus four\nunpublished essays and an annotated bibliography on a priori\nknowledge. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199777860.001.0001","–––, 2012b, “Intuitions, Thought\nExperiments, and the A Priori”, in Casullo 2012a:\n233–250.","–––, 2012c, “Articulating the A Priori-A\nPosteriori Distinction”, in Casullo 2012a: 289–327.","–––, 2013, “Articulating the A Priori-A\nPosteriori Distinction”, in Casullo and Thurow 2013:\n248–271 (Ch. 11).\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695331.003.0012","Casullo, Albert and Joshua C. Thurow (eds.), 2013, The A\nPriori in Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695331.001.0001","Chisholm, Roderick, 1989, Theory of Knowledge,\n3rd edition, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc.","Christensen, David and Jennifer Lackey (eds.), 2013, The\nEpistemology of Disagreement: New Essays, Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199698370.001.0001","Chudnoff, Elijah, 2011a, “What Intuitions Are Like”,\nPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research, 82(3):\n625–654. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2010.00463.x","–––, 2011b, “The Nature of Intuitive\nJustification”, Philosophical Studies, 153(2):\n313–333. doi:10.1007/s11098-010-9495-2","–––, 2013a, “Intuitive Knowledge”,\nPhilosophical Studies, 162(2): 359–378.\ndoi:10.1007/s11098-011-9770-x","–––, 2013b, Intuition, Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199683000.001.0001","–––, 2014a, “Intuition in\nMathematics”, in Rational Intuition, Lisa M. Osbeck and\nBarbara S. Held (eds.), New York: Cambridge University Press,\n174–191. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139136419.010","–––, 2014b, “Is Intuition Based On\nUnderstanding?”, Philosophy and Phenomenological\nResearch, 89(1): 42–67. doi:10.1111/phpr.12001","–––, 2016, “Intuition, Presentational\nPhenomenology, and Awareness of Abstract Objects: Replies to Manning\nand Witmer”, Florida Philosophical Review, 16(1):\n117–127.","–––, 2017, “The Reality of the\nIntuitive”, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of\nPhilosophy, 60(4): 371–385.\ndoi:10.1080/0020174X.2016.1220640","–––, 2018, “Intuition in Gettier”,\nin Classical Philosophical Arguments: The Gettier Problem,\nStephen Hetherington (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress.","–––, forthcoming, “In Search of\nIntuition”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, first\nonline: 5 November 2019. doi:10.1080/00048402.2019.1658121","Cullison, Andrew (ed.), 2012, The Continuum Companion to\nEpistemology, London: Continuum Press.","Cummins, Robert, 1998, “Reflection on Reflective\nEquilibrium”, in DePaul and Ramsey 1998: 113–127.","DePaul, Michael and William Ramsey (eds.), 1998, Rethinking\nIntuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical\nInquiry, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.","Devitt, Michael, 2006a, “There is No a\nPriori”, in Steup and Sosa 2005: 105–115.","–––, 2006b, “Reply to BonJour”, in\nSteup and Sosa 2005: 118–120.","Donnellan, Keith S., 1977, “The Contingent A Priori\nand Rigid Designators”, in Midwest Studies in Philosophy\nVolume II: Studies in the Philosophy of Language, Peter A.\nFrench, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein (eds.),\nMorris, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 12–27.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1475-4975.1977.tb00025.x","Evans, Gareth, 1979, “Reference and Contingency”:,\nMonist, 62(2): 161–189.\ndoi:10.5840/monist197962220","Feldman, Richard, 1999, “Methodological Naturalism in\nEpistemology”, in Greco and Sosa 1999: 170–186.","–––, 2003, Epistemology, Upper Saddle\nRiver, NJ: Prentice Hall","–––, 2006, “Epistemological Puzzles about\nDisagreement”, in Hetherington 2006: 216–236.","Feldman, Richard and Ted A. Warfield (eds.), 2010,\nDisagreement, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199226078.001.0001","Field, Hartry, 2000, “Aprioricity as an Evaluative\nNotion”, in Boghossian and Peacocke 2000: 117–149.\ndoi:10.1093/0199241279.003.0006","Gendler, Tamar Szabó, 2000, Thought Experiment: On the Powers\nand Limits of Imaginary Cases, New York: Routledge.","–––, 2001, “Empiricism, Rationalism and\nthe Limits of Justification”, Philosophy and\nPhenomenological Research, 63(3): 641–648.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2001.tb00131.x","Gettier, Edmund L., 1963, “Is Justified True Belief\nKnowledge?”, Analysis, 23(6): 121–123.\ndoi:10.1093/analys/23.6.121","Goldberg, Sanford C., 2009, “Reliabilism in\nPhilosophy”, Philosophical Studies, 142(1):\n105–117. doi:10.1007/s11098-008-9300-7","–––, 2013, “Defending Philosophy in the\nFace of Systematic Disagreement”, in Machuca 2013:\n277–294.","Goldman, Alvin I., 2007, “Philosophical Intuitions: Their\nTarget, Their Source, and Their Epistemic Status”, Grazer\nPhilosophische Studien, 74(1): 1–26.\ndoi:10.1163/9789401204651_002","–––, 2012, “Philosophical Naturalism and\nIntuitional Methodology”, in his Reliabilism and\nContemporary Epistemology: Essays, Oxford: Oxford University\nPress, pp. 280–316 (Ch. 11).","–––, 2013, “Philosophical Naturalism and\nIntuitional Methodology”, in Casullo and Thurow 2013:\n11–44 (Ch. 1).\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695331.003.0002","Goldman, Alvin and Joel Pust, 1998, “Philosophical Theory\nand Intuitional Evidence”, in DePaul and Ramsey 1998:\n179–197.","Greco, John and Ernest Sosa (eds.), 1999, The Blackwell Guide\nto Epistemology, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.","Harman, Gilbert, 1994 [1999], “Doubts About Conceptual\nAnalysis”, in Philosophy in Mind, Michaelis Michael and\nJohn O’Leary-Hawthorne (eds.), Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands,\n43–48. Reprinted in Harman 1999a: 138–143.\ndoi:10.1007/978-94-011-1008-2_4","–––, 1999, Reasoning, Meaning, and\nMind, Oxford: Clarendon Press. A collection of Harman’s\nearlier essays; chpts. 6 and 7 especially relevant to the issue of\na priori knowledge. doi:10.1093/0198238029.001.0001","–––, 2001, “General Foundations versus\nRational Insight”, Philosophy and Phenomenological\nResearch, 63(3): 657–663. Discussion of Lawrence\nBonJour’s In Defense of Pure Reason (1998).\ndoi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2001.tb00133.x","–––, 2003, “The Future of the A\nPriori”, Journal of Philosophical Research,\n28(supplement): 23–34. doi:10.5840/jpr_2003_1","Hauser, Marc, 2006, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our\nUniversal Sense of Right and Wrong, New York: Harper Collins.\nSome of the ideas in this book may have been anticipated by John\nMikhail (2011), though published after Hauser’s book; see\nMikhail entry below.","Hawthorne, John, 2013, “A Priority and Externalism”,\nin Internalism and Externalism in Semantics and Epistemology,\nSanford Goldberg (ed.), New York: Oxford University Press, pp.\n201–218.","Hetherington, Stephen (ed.), 2006, Epistemology Futures,\nOxford: Oxford University Press.","Huston, Mark, 2003, Intuition: A Discussion of Recent\nPhilosophical Views, Ph.D dissertation, Wayne State\nUniversity.","Ichikawa, Jonathan Jenkins, “Experimental Philosophy and\nApriority”, in Casullo and Thurow 2013: 45–66 (Ch. 2).\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695331.003.0003","Jackson, Frank, 1998, From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of\nConceptual Analysis, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\ndoi:10.1093/0198250614.001.0001","–––, 2000, “Representation, Scepticism,\nand the A Priori”, in Boghossian and Peacock 2000:\n320–332. doi:10.1093/0199241279.003.0013","Jenkins, Carrie S., 2007, “Entitlement and\nRationality”, Synthese, 157(1): 25–45.\ndoi:10.1007/s11229-006-0012-2","–––, 2008a, Grounding Concepts: An Empirical\nBasis for Arithmetical Knowledge, New York: Oxford University\nPress. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199231577.001.0001","–––, 2008b, “A Priori Knowledge: Debates\nand Developments”, Philosophy Compass, 3(3):\n436–450. doi:10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00136.x","–––, 2010a, “Apriorism About Modality:\nReply to Scott Sturgeon”, in Modality: Metaphysics, Logic,\nand Epistemology, Bob Hale and Aviv Hoffman (eds.), New York:\nOxford University Press, pp. 310–317.","–––, 2010b, “Concepts, Experience and\nModal Knowledge”, Philosophical Perspectives, 24:\n255–279. doi:10.1111/j.1520-8583.2010.00193.x","–––, 2012a, “A Priori Knowledge: The\nConceptual Approach”, in Cullison 2012: 180–198.","–––, 2013, “Naturalistic Challenges to the\nA Priori”, in Casullo and Thurow 2013: 274–290 (Ch. 12).\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695331.003.0013","Kahneman, Daniel, 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow, London,\nPenguin Books.","Kant, Immanuel, 1787 [1965], Critique of Pure Reason,\nNorman Kemp Smith (transl.), New York: St. Martin’s Press,\n1965.","Kitcher, Philip, 1983, The Nature of Mathematical\nKnowledge, New York: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/0195035410.001.0001","Kornblith, Hilary, 1998, “The Role of Intuition in\nPhilosophical Inquiry: An Account with No Unnatural\nIngredients”, in DePaul and Ramsey 1998: 129–141.","–––, 1999, “In Defense of Naturalized\nEpistemology”, in Greco and Sosa 1999: 158–169.","–––, 2000, “The Impurity of Reason”,\nPacific Philosophical Quarterly, 81(1): 67–89.\ndoi:10.1111/1468-0114.00095","–––, 2005, “Précis of Knowledge and\nIts Place in Nature” and “Replies to Alvin Goldman,\nMartin Kusch and William Talbott”, Philosophy and\nPhenomenological Research, 71(2): 399–402 and\n427–441. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2005.tb00456.x\ndoi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2005.tb00460.x","–––, 2006, “Intuitions and\nEpistemology”, in Hetherington 2006: 10–25.","–––, 2009, “Review: Timothy Williamson’s\nThe Philosophy of Philosophy”, Analysis,\n69(1): 109–116. doi:10.1093/analys/ann039","–––, 2010, “Belief in the Face of\nControversy”, in Feldman and Warfield 2010: 29–52.","–––, 2013, “Is Philosophical Knowledge\nPossible?” in Machuca 2013: 260–276 (Ch. 13).","Kripke, Saul, 1972, “Naming and Necessity”, in\nSemantics of Natural Language, Donald Davidson and Gilbert\nHarman (eds.), Dordrecht: D. Reidel, pp. 253–355.\ndoi:10.1007/978-94-010-2557-7_9","Lehrer, Keith, 1986, “The Coherence Theory of\nKnowledge”:, Philosophical Topics, 14(1): 5–25.\ndoi:10.5840/philtopics198614112","–––, 1990, Theory of Knowledge,\nBoulder, CO: West View Press, Inc.","–––, 1996, “Proper Function versus\nSystematic Coherence”, in Warrant in Contemporary\nEpistemology: Essays in Honor of Plantinga’s Theory of\nKnowledge, Jonathan L. Kvanvig (ed.), Lanham, MD: Rowman &\nLittlefield Publishers, Inc., pp. 25–45.","Lycan, William G., 1996, “Bealer on the Possibility of\nPhilosophical Knowledge”, Philosophical Studies,\n81(2–3): 143–150. doi:10.1007/BF00372778","–––, 2006, “On the Gettier Problem\nproblem”, in Hetherington 2006: 148–168.","Machuca, Diego E. (ed.), 2013, Disagreement and\nSkepticism, Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis.\ndoi:10.4324/9780203073346","Malmgren, Anna-Sara, 2011, “Rationalism and the Content of\nIntuitive Judgements”, Mind, 120(478): 263–327.\ndoi:10.1093/mind/fzr039","–––, 2013a, “Review of Herman\nCappelen’s Philosophy Without Intuitions (Cappelen\n2012)”, Notre Dame Philosophical Review,\n2013.04.27.","–––, 2013b, “A Priori Testimony\nRevisited”, in Casullo and Thurow 2013: 158–185 (Ch. 7).\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695331.003.0008","McKinsey, Michael, 1987, “Apriorism in the Philosophy of\nLanguage”, Philosophical Studies, 52(1): 1–32.\ndoi:10.1007/BF00354156","Mikhail, John, 2011, Elements of Moral Cognition: Rawls’\nLinguistic Analogy and the Cognitive Science of Moral and Legal\nJudgment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511780578","Parfit, Derek, 1984, Reasons and Persons, New York:\nOxford University Press.","–––, 2011, On What Matters (Volume 2),\nNew York: Oxford University Press.","Peacocke, Christopher, 2000, “Explaining the A Priori: The\nProgramme of Moderate Rationalism”, in Boghossian and Peacocke\n2000: 255–285. doi:10.1093/0199241279.003.0011","Philosophical Studies, 1998, 92(1–2), guest editor,\nJohn O’Leary-Hawthorne. This entire issue is devoted to the\ntopic of a priori knowledge.","Plantinga, Alvin, 2011, Where the Conflict Really Lies:\nScience, Religion, and Naturalism, New York: Oxford University\nPress. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199812097.001.0001","Putnam, Hilary, 1983, “ ‘Two Dogmas’\nRevisited”, in Realism and Reason: Philosophical\nPapers, vol. 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Quine, Willard Van Orman, 1963, From A Logical Point of\nView, New York: Harper & Row, Harper Torchbook.","Railton, Peter, 2017a, “Two Sides of the Meta-Ethical\nMountain”, in Singer 2017: 35–59.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199653836.003.0002","–––, 2017b, “Railton’s\nCommentary”, in Derek Parfit, On What Matters, Vol.\nIII, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 113–127.","Rey, Georges, 2001, “Digging Deeper for the A Priori”,\nPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research, 63(3):\n649–656. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2001.tb00132.x","–––, 1998, “A Naturalistic A\nPriori”, Philosophical Studies, 92(1/2): 25–43.\ndoi:10.1023/A:1017155400164","Russell, Bruce, 2010, “Intuition in Epistemology”, in\nA Companion to Epistemology, 2nd edition, Jonathan\nDancy, Ernest Sosa, and Matthias Steup (eds.), Malden, MA:\nWiley-Blackwell, pp. 464–68.","–––, 2012, “Rock Bottom: Coherentism’s\nSoft Spot”, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 50(1):\n94–111. doi:10.1111/j.2041-6962.2011.00085.x","–––, 2013, “Moral Intuitionism”, in\nthe International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Hugh LaFollette\n(ed.), New York: Routledge.","–––, 2017 “A Defense of Moral\nIntuitionism”, in Singer 2017: 231–258.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199653836.003.0011","–––, 2018, “Philosophical intuition: just\nwhat is ‘a priori’ justification?” Aeon, 2\nMarch 2018. URL =\n <https://aeon.co/ideas/philosophical-intuition-just-what-is-a-priori-justification>","Russell, Gillian, 2008, Truth in Virtue of Meaning: A Defence\nof the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction, Oxford: Oxford University\nPress. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199232192.001.0001","Schwitzgebel, Eric and Fiery Cushman, 2012, “Expertise in\nMoral Reasoning? Order Effects on Moral Judgment in Professional\nPhilosophers and Non-Philosophers”, Mind &\nLanguage, 27(2): 135–153.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1468-0017.2012.01438.x","–––, 2015, “Philosophers’ Biased\nJudgments Persist despite Training, Expertise and Reflection”,\nCognition, 141: 127–137.\ndoi:10.1016/j.cognition.2015.04.015","Singer, Peter (ed.), 2017, Does Anything Really Matter? Essays\non Parfit on Objectivity, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199653836.001.0001","Sosa, Ernest, 1996, “Rational Intuition: Bealer on Its\nNature and Epistemic Status”, Philosophical Studies,\n81(2–3): 151–162. doi:10.1007/BF00372779","–––, 1998, “Minimal Intuition”, in\nDePaul and Ramsey 1998: 257–269.","–––, 2013, “Intuitions and Foundations:\nThe Relevance of Moore and Wittgenstein”, in Casullo and Thurow\n2013: 186–200 (Ch. 8).\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695331.003.0009","Sosa, Ernest and Enrique Villanueva (eds.), 2004,\nEpistemology: Philosophical Issues, Volume 14, Malden, MA:\nBlackwell Publishing, Ltd.","Steup, Matthias and Ernest Sosa (eds.), 2005, Contemporary\nDebates in Epistemology, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing\nLtd.","Steup, Matthias, John Turri, and Ernest Sosa (eds.), 2014,\nContemporary Debates in Epistemology,2nd edition,\nMalden, MA: Wiley Blackwell.","Stratton-Lake, Philip (ed.), 2002, Ethical Intuitionism:\nRe-Evaluations, Oxford: Clarendon Press.","Thomson, Judith Jarvis, 1990, “Introduction” to\nThe Realm of Rights, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,\npp. 1–33.","Thurow, Joshua C., 2013, “The Implicit Conception and\nIntuition Theory of the A Priori, With Implications for Experimental\nPhilosophy”, in Casullo and Thurow 2013: 67–91 (Ch. 3).\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695331.003.0004","Turri, John, 2011, “Contingent A Priori Knowledge”,\nPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research, 83(2):\n327–44.","–––, 2018, “Experimental Epistomology and\n’Gettier Cases’ ”, in S. Hetherington (ed.),\nThe Gettier Problem, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press:\n199–217.","Unger, Peter, 1996, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion\nof Innocence, New York: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/0195108590.001.0001","Weatherson, Brian, 2003, “What Good Are\nCounterexamples?”, Philosophical Studies, 115(1):\n1–31. doi:10.1023/A:1024961917413","–––, 2017, “Analytic–Synthetic and A\nPriori–A Posteriori History”, in The Oxford Handbook\nof Philosophical Methodology, Herman Cappelen, Tamar Szabó\nGendler, and John Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press,\n231–248. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199668779.013.24","–––, 2019, “Normative Externalism”,\nNew York: Oxford University Press.","Weinberg, Jonathan M., 2003, “Meta-Skepticism in\nEthno-Epistemology”, in The Skeptics: Contemporary\nEssays, Steven Luper (ed.), Aldershot, England: Ashgate\nPublishing, pp. 227–247.","–––, 2006, “What’s Epistemology For?\nThe Case for Neopragmatism in Normative Metaepistemology” in\nHetherington 2006: 26–47.","–––, 2013, “The Prospects for an\nExperimentalist Rationalism or Why It’s OK if the A Priori is\nonly 99.44 Percent Empirically Pure”, in Casullo and Thurow\n2013: 92–108 (Ch. 4).\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695331.003.0005","–––, 2017, “Intuitions”, in The\nOxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, Herman Cappelen,\nTamar Szabó Gendler, and John Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press, 282–308.\ndoi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199668779.013.25","Weinberg, Jonathan M., Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich, 2001,\n“Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions”, Philosophical\nTopics, 29(1): 429–460.\ndoi:10.5840/philtopics2001291/217","Williamson, Timothy, 2004, “Philosphical ‘Intuitions’\nand Scepticism about Judgement”, Dialectica, 58(1):\n109–153. doi:10.1111/j.1746-8361.2004.tb00294.x","–––, 2005, “Armchair Philosophy,\nMetaphysical Modality and Counterfactual Thinking”,\nProceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 105(1): 1–23.\ndoi:10.1111/j.0066-7373.2004.00100.x","–––, 2007a, “Philosophical Knowledge and\nKnowledge of Counterfactuals”, Grazer Philosophische\nStudien, 74(1): 89–123. doi:10.1163/9789401204651_006","–––, 2007b, The Philosophy of\nPhilosophy, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.","–––, 2013, “How Deep is the Distinction\nbetween A Priori and A Posteriori Knowledge”, in Casullo and\nThurow 2013: 291–312 (Ch. 13).\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695331.003.0014","–––, 2014, “Should Knowledge Come\nFirst?” and “Knowledge Still First”, in Steup,\nTurri, and Sosa 2014: 1–9 and 22–25.","Wright, Crispin, 2004a, “Warrant for Nothing (and\nFoundations for Free)?”, Aristotelian Society Supplementary\nVolume, 78: 167–212.\ndoi:10.1111/j.0309-7013.2004.00121.x","–––, 2004, “Intuition, Entitlement and the\nEpistemology of Logical Laws”, Dialectica, 58(1):\n155–175. doi:10.1111/j.1746-8361.2004.tb00295.x","Wykstra, Stephanie, 2018, “Out of the Armchair”,\nAeon, 1 May 2018. URL =\n <https://aeon.co/essays/beyond-the-armchair-must-philosophy-become-experimental>"],"string":"[\n \"Audi, Robert, 1997, Moral Knowledge and Ethical\\nCharacter, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2001, The Architecture of Reason: The\\nStructure and Substance of Rationality, Oxford: Oxford University\\nPress. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195158427.001.0001\",\n \"Bealer, George, 1987, “The Philosophical Limits of\\nScientific Essentialism”, Philosophical Perspectives,\\n1: 289–365. doi:10.2307/2214149\",\n \"–––, 1992, “The Incoherence of\\nEmpiricism”, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume,\\n66: 99–137. doi:10.1093/aristoteliansupp/66.1.99\",\n \"–––, 1996a, “A Priori Knowledge\\nand the Scope of Philosophy” and “A Priori\\nKnowledge: Replies to William Lycan and Ernest Sosa”,\\nPhilosophical Studies, 81)2–3): 121–142 and\\n163–174, respectively; Bealer’s essay is reprinted in\\n2008, Epistemology: An Anthology, 2nd edition,\\nErnest Sosa, et al. (eds.), Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, pp.\\n612–624. doi:10.1007/BF00372777 doi:10.1007/BF00372780\",\n \"–––, 1996b, “On the Possibility of\\nPhilosophical Knowledge”, Philosophical Perspectives,\\n10: 1–34. doi:10.2307/2216234\",\n \"–––, 1998, “Intuition and the Autonomy of\\nPhilosophy”, in DePaul and Ramsey 1998: 201–239.\",\n \"–––, 1999, “The A Priori”, in Greco\\nand Sosa 1999: 243–270.\",\n \"Beebe, James R., 2011, “A Priori Skepticism”,\\nPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research, 83(3):\\n583–602. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2010.00488.x\",\n \"–––, 2012, “Experimental\\nEpistemology”, in Cullison 2012: 248–269 (Ch. 13).\",\n \"Boghossian, Paul, 2001, “Inference and Insight”,\\nPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research, 63(3):\\n633–640. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2001.tb00130.x\",\n \"–––, forthcominga, “Do We Have Reason to\\nDoubt the Importance of the Distinction Between A Priori and A\\nPosteriori Knowledge? A Reply to Williamson”, in Boghossian and\\nWilliamson forthcoming.\",\n \"–––, forthcomingb, “Intuition,\\nUnderstanding, and the A Priori”, in Boghossian and Williamson\\nforthcoming.\",\n \"Boghossian, Paul and Christopher Peacocke (eds.), 2000, New\\nEssays on the A Priori, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/0199241279.001.0001\",\n \"Boghossian, Paul and Timothy Williamson, forthcoming, Debating\\nthe A Priori, New York: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"BonJour, Laurence, 1985, The Structure of Empirical\\nKnowledge, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1998, In Defense of Pure Reason: A\\nRationalist Account of A Priori Justification, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511625176\",\n \"–––, 2001a, “Précis of In Defense of\\nPure Reason” and “Replies”, Philosophy and\\nPhenomenological Research, 63(3): 625–631, 673–698.\\nPart of a Book Symposium on BonJour’s In Defense of Pure\\nReason. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2001.tb00129.x\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2001.tb00135.x\",\n \"–––, 2001b, “Review of Rethinking\\nIntuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical\\nInquiry” (DePaul and Ramsey 1998), The British Journal\\nfor the Philosophy of Science, 52(1): 151–158.\\ndoi:10.1093/bjps/52.1.151\",\n \"–––, 2005a, “In Defense of the A\\nPriori”, in Steup and Sosa 2005: 98–105.\",\n \"–––, 2005b, “Reply to Devitt”, in\\nSteup and Sosa 2005: 115–118.\",\n \"–––, 2005c, “Last Rejoinder”, in\\nSteup and Sosa 2005: 120–121.\",\n \"Butchvarov, Panyot, 1970, The Concept of Knowledge,\\nEvanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.\",\n \"Cappelen, Herman, 2012, Philosophy Without Intuitions,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Casullo, Albert, 2001, “Experience and A Priori\\nJustification”, Philosophy and Phenomenological\\nResearch, 63(3): 665–671.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2001.tb00134.x\",\n \"–––, 2002, “A Priori Knowledge”, in\\nThe Oxford Handbook of Epistemology, Paul Moser (ed.),\\nOxford: Oxford University Press, 95–143. This is a condensed\\nversion of Casullo 2003.\",\n \"–––, 2003, A Priori Justification,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0195115058.001.0001\",\n \"–––, 2009, “Analyzing a Priori\\nKnowledge”, Philosophical Studies, 142(1): 77–90.\\ndoi:10.1007/s11098-008-9302-5\",\n \"–––, 2012a, Essays on A Priori Knowledge and\\nJustification, New York: Oxford University Press. This is a\\ncollection of Casullo’s previously published essays, plus four\\nunpublished essays and an annotated bibliography on a priori\\nknowledge. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199777860.001.0001\",\n \"–––, 2012b, “Intuitions, Thought\\nExperiments, and the A Priori”, in Casullo 2012a:\\n233–250.\",\n \"–––, 2012c, “Articulating the A Priori-A\\nPosteriori Distinction”, in Casullo 2012a: 289–327.\",\n \"–––, 2013, “Articulating the A Priori-A\\nPosteriori Distinction”, in Casullo and Thurow 2013:\\n248–271 (Ch. 11).\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695331.003.0012\",\n \"Casullo, Albert and Joshua C. Thurow (eds.), 2013, The A\\nPriori in Philosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695331.001.0001\",\n \"Chisholm, Roderick, 1989, Theory of Knowledge,\\n3rd edition, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc.\",\n \"Christensen, David and Jennifer Lackey (eds.), 2013, The\\nEpistemology of Disagreement: New Essays, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199698370.001.0001\",\n \"Chudnoff, Elijah, 2011a, “What Intuitions Are Like”,\\nPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research, 82(3):\\n625–654. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2010.00463.x\",\n \"–––, 2011b, “The Nature of Intuitive\\nJustification”, Philosophical Studies, 153(2):\\n313–333. doi:10.1007/s11098-010-9495-2\",\n \"–––, 2013a, “Intuitive Knowledge”,\\nPhilosophical Studies, 162(2): 359–378.\\ndoi:10.1007/s11098-011-9770-x\",\n \"–––, 2013b, Intuition, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199683000.001.0001\",\n \"–––, 2014a, “Intuition in\\nMathematics”, in Rational Intuition, Lisa M. Osbeck and\\nBarbara S. Held (eds.), New York: Cambridge University Press,\\n174–191. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139136419.010\",\n \"–––, 2014b, “Is Intuition Based On\\nUnderstanding?”, Philosophy and Phenomenological\\nResearch, 89(1): 42–67. doi:10.1111/phpr.12001\",\n \"–––, 2016, “Intuition, Presentational\\nPhenomenology, and Awareness of Abstract Objects: Replies to Manning\\nand Witmer”, Florida Philosophical Review, 16(1):\\n117–127.\",\n \"–––, 2017, “The Reality of the\\nIntuitive”, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of\\nPhilosophy, 60(4): 371–385.\\ndoi:10.1080/0020174X.2016.1220640\",\n \"–––, 2018, “Intuition in Gettier”,\\nin Classical Philosophical Arguments: The Gettier Problem,\\nStephen Hetherington (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress.\",\n \"–––, forthcoming, “In Search of\\nIntuition”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, first\\nonline: 5 November 2019. doi:10.1080/00048402.2019.1658121\",\n \"Cullison, Andrew (ed.), 2012, The Continuum Companion to\\nEpistemology, London: Continuum Press.\",\n \"Cummins, Robert, 1998, “Reflection on Reflective\\nEquilibrium”, in DePaul and Ramsey 1998: 113–127.\",\n \"DePaul, Michael and William Ramsey (eds.), 1998, Rethinking\\nIntuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical\\nInquiry, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc.\",\n \"Devitt, Michael, 2006a, “There is No a\\nPriori”, in Steup and Sosa 2005: 105–115.\",\n \"–––, 2006b, “Reply to BonJour”, in\\nSteup and Sosa 2005: 118–120.\",\n \"Donnellan, Keith S., 1977, “The Contingent A Priori\\nand Rigid Designators”, in Midwest Studies in Philosophy\\nVolume II: Studies in the Philosophy of Language, Peter A.\\nFrench, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein (eds.),\\nMorris, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 12–27.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1475-4975.1977.tb00025.x\",\n \"Evans, Gareth, 1979, “Reference and Contingency”:,\\nMonist, 62(2): 161–189.\\ndoi:10.5840/monist197962220\",\n \"Feldman, Richard, 1999, “Methodological Naturalism in\\nEpistemology”, in Greco and Sosa 1999: 170–186.\",\n \"–––, 2003, Epistemology, Upper Saddle\\nRiver, NJ: Prentice Hall\",\n \"–––, 2006, “Epistemological Puzzles about\\nDisagreement”, in Hetherington 2006: 216–236.\",\n \"Feldman, Richard and Ted A. Warfield (eds.), 2010,\\nDisagreement, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199226078.001.0001\",\n \"Field, Hartry, 2000, “Aprioricity as an Evaluative\\nNotion”, in Boghossian and Peacocke 2000: 117–149.\\ndoi:10.1093/0199241279.003.0006\",\n \"Gendler, Tamar Szabó, 2000, Thought Experiment: On the Powers\\nand Limits of Imaginary Cases, New York: Routledge.\",\n \"–––, 2001, “Empiricism, Rationalism and\\nthe Limits of Justification”, Philosophy and\\nPhenomenological Research, 63(3): 641–648.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2001.tb00131.x\",\n \"Gettier, Edmund L., 1963, “Is Justified True Belief\\nKnowledge?”, Analysis, 23(6): 121–123.\\ndoi:10.1093/analys/23.6.121\",\n \"Goldberg, Sanford C., 2009, “Reliabilism in\\nPhilosophy”, Philosophical Studies, 142(1):\\n105–117. doi:10.1007/s11098-008-9300-7\",\n \"–––, 2013, “Defending Philosophy in the\\nFace of Systematic Disagreement”, in Machuca 2013:\\n277–294.\",\n \"Goldman, Alvin I., 2007, “Philosophical Intuitions: Their\\nTarget, Their Source, and Their Epistemic Status”, Grazer\\nPhilosophische Studien, 74(1): 1–26.\\ndoi:10.1163/9789401204651_002\",\n \"–––, 2012, “Philosophical Naturalism and\\nIntuitional Methodology”, in his Reliabilism and\\nContemporary Epistemology: Essays, Oxford: Oxford University\\nPress, pp. 280–316 (Ch. 11).\",\n \"–––, 2013, “Philosophical Naturalism and\\nIntuitional Methodology”, in Casullo and Thurow 2013:\\n11–44 (Ch. 1).\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695331.003.0002\",\n \"Goldman, Alvin and Joel Pust, 1998, “Philosophical Theory\\nand Intuitional Evidence”, in DePaul and Ramsey 1998:\\n179–197.\",\n \"Greco, John and Ernest Sosa (eds.), 1999, The Blackwell Guide\\nto Epistemology, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.\",\n \"Harman, Gilbert, 1994 [1999], “Doubts About Conceptual\\nAnalysis”, in Philosophy in Mind, Michaelis Michael and\\nJohn O’Leary-Hawthorne (eds.), Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands,\\n43–48. Reprinted in Harman 1999a: 138–143.\\ndoi:10.1007/978-94-011-1008-2_4\",\n \"–––, 1999, Reasoning, Meaning, and\\nMind, Oxford: Clarendon Press. A collection of Harman’s\\nearlier essays; chpts. 6 and 7 especially relevant to the issue of\\na priori knowledge. doi:10.1093/0198238029.001.0001\",\n \"–––, 2001, “General Foundations versus\\nRational Insight”, Philosophy and Phenomenological\\nResearch, 63(3): 657–663. Discussion of Lawrence\\nBonJour’s In Defense of Pure Reason (1998).\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2001.tb00133.x\",\n \"–––, 2003, “The Future of the A\\nPriori”, Journal of Philosophical Research,\\n28(supplement): 23–34. doi:10.5840/jpr_2003_1\",\n \"Hauser, Marc, 2006, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our\\nUniversal Sense of Right and Wrong, New York: Harper Collins.\\nSome of the ideas in this book may have been anticipated by John\\nMikhail (2011), though published after Hauser’s book; see\\nMikhail entry below.\",\n \"Hawthorne, John, 2013, “A Priority and Externalism”,\\nin Internalism and Externalism in Semantics and Epistemology,\\nSanford Goldberg (ed.), New York: Oxford University Press, pp.\\n201–218.\",\n \"Hetherington, Stephen (ed.), 2006, Epistemology Futures,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Huston, Mark, 2003, Intuition: A Discussion of Recent\\nPhilosophical Views, Ph.D dissertation, Wayne State\\nUniversity.\",\n \"Ichikawa, Jonathan Jenkins, “Experimental Philosophy and\\nApriority”, in Casullo and Thurow 2013: 45–66 (Ch. 2).\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695331.003.0003\",\n \"Jackson, Frank, 1998, From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of\\nConceptual Analysis, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/0198250614.001.0001\",\n \"–––, 2000, “Representation, Scepticism,\\nand the A Priori”, in Boghossian and Peacock 2000:\\n320–332. doi:10.1093/0199241279.003.0013\",\n \"Jenkins, Carrie S., 2007, “Entitlement and\\nRationality”, Synthese, 157(1): 25–45.\\ndoi:10.1007/s11229-006-0012-2\",\n \"–––, 2008a, Grounding Concepts: An Empirical\\nBasis for Arithmetical Knowledge, New York: Oxford University\\nPress. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199231577.001.0001\",\n \"–––, 2008b, “A Priori Knowledge: Debates\\nand Developments”, Philosophy Compass, 3(3):\\n436–450. doi:10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00136.x\",\n \"–––, 2010a, “Apriorism About Modality:\\nReply to Scott Sturgeon”, in Modality: Metaphysics, Logic,\\nand Epistemology, Bob Hale and Aviv Hoffman (eds.), New York:\\nOxford University Press, pp. 310–317.\",\n \"–––, 2010b, “Concepts, Experience and\\nModal Knowledge”, Philosophical Perspectives, 24:\\n255–279. doi:10.1111/j.1520-8583.2010.00193.x\",\n \"–––, 2012a, “A Priori Knowledge: The\\nConceptual Approach”, in Cullison 2012: 180–198.\",\n \"–––, 2013, “Naturalistic Challenges to the\\nA Priori”, in Casullo and Thurow 2013: 274–290 (Ch. 12).\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695331.003.0013\",\n \"Kahneman, Daniel, 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow, London,\\nPenguin Books.\",\n \"Kant, Immanuel, 1787 [1965], Critique of Pure Reason,\\nNorman Kemp Smith (transl.), New York: St. Martin’s Press,\\n1965.\",\n \"Kitcher, Philip, 1983, The Nature of Mathematical\\nKnowledge, New York: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/0195035410.001.0001\",\n \"Kornblith, Hilary, 1998, “The Role of Intuition in\\nPhilosophical Inquiry: An Account with No Unnatural\\nIngredients”, in DePaul and Ramsey 1998: 129–141.\",\n \"–––, 1999, “In Defense of Naturalized\\nEpistemology”, in Greco and Sosa 1999: 158–169.\",\n \"–––, 2000, “The Impurity of Reason”,\\nPacific Philosophical Quarterly, 81(1): 67–89.\\ndoi:10.1111/1468-0114.00095\",\n \"–––, 2005, “Précis of Knowledge and\\nIts Place in Nature” and “Replies to Alvin Goldman,\\nMartin Kusch and William Talbott”, Philosophy and\\nPhenomenological Research, 71(2): 399–402 and\\n427–441. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2005.tb00456.x\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2005.tb00460.x\",\n \"–––, 2006, “Intuitions and\\nEpistemology”, in Hetherington 2006: 10–25.\",\n \"–––, 2009, “Review: Timothy Williamson’s\\nThe Philosophy of Philosophy”, Analysis,\\n69(1): 109–116. doi:10.1093/analys/ann039\",\n \"–––, 2010, “Belief in the Face of\\nControversy”, in Feldman and Warfield 2010: 29–52.\",\n \"–––, 2013, “Is Philosophical Knowledge\\nPossible?” in Machuca 2013: 260–276 (Ch. 13).\",\n \"Kripke, Saul, 1972, “Naming and Necessity”, in\\nSemantics of Natural Language, Donald Davidson and Gilbert\\nHarman (eds.), Dordrecht: D. Reidel, pp. 253–355.\\ndoi:10.1007/978-94-010-2557-7_9\",\n \"Lehrer, Keith, 1986, “The Coherence Theory of\\nKnowledge”:, Philosophical Topics, 14(1): 5–25.\\ndoi:10.5840/philtopics198614112\",\n \"–––, 1990, Theory of Knowledge,\\nBoulder, CO: West View Press, Inc.\",\n \"–––, 1996, “Proper Function versus\\nSystematic Coherence”, in Warrant in Contemporary\\nEpistemology: Essays in Honor of Plantinga’s Theory of\\nKnowledge, Jonathan L. Kvanvig (ed.), Lanham, MD: Rowman &\\nLittlefield Publishers, Inc., pp. 25–45.\",\n \"Lycan, William G., 1996, “Bealer on the Possibility of\\nPhilosophical Knowledge”, Philosophical Studies,\\n81(2–3): 143–150. doi:10.1007/BF00372778\",\n \"–––, 2006, “On the Gettier Problem\\nproblem”, in Hetherington 2006: 148–168.\",\n \"Machuca, Diego E. (ed.), 2013, Disagreement and\\nSkepticism, Hoboken, NJ: Taylor and Francis.\\ndoi:10.4324/9780203073346\",\n \"Malmgren, Anna-Sara, 2011, “Rationalism and the Content of\\nIntuitive Judgements”, Mind, 120(478): 263–327.\\ndoi:10.1093/mind/fzr039\",\n \"–––, 2013a, “Review of Herman\\nCappelen’s Philosophy Without Intuitions (Cappelen\\n2012)”, Notre Dame Philosophical Review,\\n2013.04.27.\",\n \"–––, 2013b, “A Priori Testimony\\nRevisited”, in Casullo and Thurow 2013: 158–185 (Ch. 7).\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695331.003.0008\",\n \"McKinsey, Michael, 1987, “Apriorism in the Philosophy of\\nLanguage”, Philosophical Studies, 52(1): 1–32.\\ndoi:10.1007/BF00354156\",\n \"Mikhail, John, 2011, Elements of Moral Cognition: Rawls’\\nLinguistic Analogy and the Cognitive Science of Moral and Legal\\nJudgment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511780578\",\n \"Parfit, Derek, 1984, Reasons and Persons, New York:\\nOxford University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2011, On What Matters (Volume 2),\\nNew York: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Peacocke, Christopher, 2000, “Explaining the A Priori: The\\nProgramme of Moderate Rationalism”, in Boghossian and Peacocke\\n2000: 255–285. doi:10.1093/0199241279.003.0011\",\n \"Philosophical Studies, 1998, 92(1–2), guest editor,\\nJohn O’Leary-Hawthorne. This entire issue is devoted to the\\ntopic of a priori knowledge.\",\n \"Plantinga, Alvin, 2011, Where the Conflict Really Lies:\\nScience, Religion, and Naturalism, New York: Oxford University\\nPress. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199812097.001.0001\",\n \"Putnam, Hilary, 1983, “ ‘Two Dogmas’\\nRevisited”, in Realism and Reason: Philosophical\\nPapers, vol. 3, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Quine, Willard Van Orman, 1963, From A Logical Point of\\nView, New York: Harper & Row, Harper Torchbook.\",\n \"Railton, Peter, 2017a, “Two Sides of the Meta-Ethical\\nMountain”, in Singer 2017: 35–59.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199653836.003.0002\",\n \"–––, 2017b, “Railton’s\\nCommentary”, in Derek Parfit, On What Matters, Vol.\\nIII, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 113–127.\",\n \"Rey, Georges, 2001, “Digging Deeper for the A Priori”,\\nPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research, 63(3):\\n649–656. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2001.tb00132.x\",\n \"–––, 1998, “A Naturalistic A\\nPriori”, Philosophical Studies, 92(1/2): 25–43.\\ndoi:10.1023/A:1017155400164\",\n \"Russell, Bruce, 2010, “Intuition in Epistemology”, in\\nA Companion to Epistemology, 2nd edition, Jonathan\\nDancy, Ernest Sosa, and Matthias Steup (eds.), Malden, MA:\\nWiley-Blackwell, pp. 464–68.\",\n \"–––, 2012, “Rock Bottom: Coherentism’s\\nSoft Spot”, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 50(1):\\n94–111. doi:10.1111/j.2041-6962.2011.00085.x\",\n \"–––, 2013, “Moral Intuitionism”, in\\nthe International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Hugh LaFollette\\n(ed.), New York: Routledge.\",\n \"–––, 2017 “A Defense of Moral\\nIntuitionism”, in Singer 2017: 231–258.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199653836.003.0011\",\n \"–––, 2018, “Philosophical intuition: just\\nwhat is ‘a priori’ justification?” Aeon, 2\\nMarch 2018. URL =\\n <https://aeon.co/ideas/philosophical-intuition-just-what-is-a-priori-justification>\",\n \"Russell, Gillian, 2008, Truth in Virtue of Meaning: A Defence\\nof the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction, Oxford: Oxford University\\nPress. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199232192.001.0001\",\n \"Schwitzgebel, Eric and Fiery Cushman, 2012, “Expertise in\\nMoral Reasoning? Order Effects on Moral Judgment in Professional\\nPhilosophers and Non-Philosophers”, Mind &\\nLanguage, 27(2): 135–153.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1468-0017.2012.01438.x\",\n \"–––, 2015, “Philosophers’ Biased\\nJudgments Persist despite Training, Expertise and Reflection”,\\nCognition, 141: 127–137.\\ndoi:10.1016/j.cognition.2015.04.015\",\n \"Singer, Peter (ed.), 2017, Does Anything Really Matter? Essays\\non Parfit on Objectivity, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199653836.001.0001\",\n \"Sosa, Ernest, 1996, “Rational Intuition: Bealer on Its\\nNature and Epistemic Status”, Philosophical Studies,\\n81(2–3): 151–162. doi:10.1007/BF00372779\",\n \"–––, 1998, “Minimal Intuition”, in\\nDePaul and Ramsey 1998: 257–269.\",\n \"–––, 2013, “Intuitions and Foundations:\\nThe Relevance of Moore and Wittgenstein”, in Casullo and Thurow\\n2013: 186–200 (Ch. 8).\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695331.003.0009\",\n \"Sosa, Ernest and Enrique Villanueva (eds.), 2004,\\nEpistemology: Philosophical Issues, Volume 14, Malden, MA:\\nBlackwell Publishing, Ltd.\",\n \"Steup, Matthias and Ernest Sosa (eds.), 2005, Contemporary\\nDebates in Epistemology, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing\\nLtd.\",\n \"Steup, Matthias, John Turri, and Ernest Sosa (eds.), 2014,\\nContemporary Debates in Epistemology,2nd edition,\\nMalden, MA: Wiley Blackwell.\",\n \"Stratton-Lake, Philip (ed.), 2002, Ethical Intuitionism:\\nRe-Evaluations, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"Thomson, Judith Jarvis, 1990, “Introduction” to\\nThe Realm of Rights, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,\\npp. 1–33.\",\n \"Thurow, Joshua C., 2013, “The Implicit Conception and\\nIntuition Theory of the A Priori, With Implications for Experimental\\nPhilosophy”, in Casullo and Thurow 2013: 67–91 (Ch. 3).\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695331.003.0004\",\n \"Turri, John, 2011, “Contingent A Priori Knowledge”,\\nPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research, 83(2):\\n327–44.\",\n \"–––, 2018, “Experimental Epistomology and\\n’Gettier Cases’ ”, in S. Hetherington (ed.),\\nThe Gettier Problem, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press:\\n199–217.\",\n \"Unger, Peter, 1996, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion\\nof Innocence, New York: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/0195108590.001.0001\",\n \"Weatherson, Brian, 2003, “What Good Are\\nCounterexamples?”, Philosophical Studies, 115(1):\\n1–31. doi:10.1023/A:1024961917413\",\n \"–––, 2017, “Analytic–Synthetic and A\\nPriori–A Posteriori History”, in The Oxford Handbook\\nof Philosophical Methodology, Herman Cappelen, Tamar Szabó\\nGendler, and John Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press,\\n231–248. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199668779.013.24\",\n \"–––, 2019, “Normative Externalism”,\\nNew York: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Weinberg, Jonathan M., 2003, “Meta-Skepticism in\\nEthno-Epistemology”, in The Skeptics: Contemporary\\nEssays, Steven Luper (ed.), Aldershot, England: Ashgate\\nPublishing, pp. 227–247.\",\n \"–––, 2006, “What’s Epistemology For?\\nThe Case for Neopragmatism in Normative Metaepistemology” in\\nHetherington 2006: 26–47.\",\n \"–––, 2013, “The Prospects for an\\nExperimentalist Rationalism or Why It’s OK if the A Priori is\\nonly 99.44 Percent Empirically Pure”, in Casullo and Thurow\\n2013: 92–108 (Ch. 4).\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695331.003.0005\",\n \"–––, 2017, “Intuitions”, in The\\nOxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology, Herman Cappelen,\\nTamar Szabó Gendler, and John Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press, 282–308.\\ndoi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199668779.013.25\",\n \"Weinberg, Jonathan M., Shaun Nichols, and Stephen Stich, 2001,\\n“Normativity and Epistemic Intuitions”, Philosophical\\nTopics, 29(1): 429–460.\\ndoi:10.5840/philtopics2001291/217\",\n \"Williamson, Timothy, 2004, “Philosphical ‘Intuitions’\\nand Scepticism about Judgement”, Dialectica, 58(1):\\n109–153. doi:10.1111/j.1746-8361.2004.tb00294.x\",\n \"–––, 2005, “Armchair Philosophy,\\nMetaphysical Modality and Counterfactual Thinking”,\\nProceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 105(1): 1–23.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.0066-7373.2004.00100.x\",\n \"–––, 2007a, “Philosophical Knowledge and\\nKnowledge of Counterfactuals”, Grazer Philosophische\\nStudien, 74(1): 89–123. doi:10.1163/9789401204651_006\",\n \"–––, 2007b, The Philosophy of\\nPhilosophy, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.\",\n \"–––, 2013, “How Deep is the Distinction\\nbetween A Priori and A Posteriori Knowledge”, in Casullo and\\nThurow 2013: 291–312 (Ch. 13).\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199695331.003.0014\",\n \"–––, 2014, “Should Knowledge Come\\nFirst?” and “Knowledge Still First”, in Steup,\\nTurri, and Sosa 2014: 1–9 and 22–25.\",\n \"Wright, Crispin, 2004a, “Warrant for Nothing (and\\nFoundations for Free)?”, Aristotelian Society Supplementary\\nVolume, 78: 167–212.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.0309-7013.2004.00121.x\",\n \"–––, 2004, “Intuition, Entitlement and the\\nEpistemology of Logical Laws”, Dialectica, 58(1):\\n155–175. doi:10.1111/j.1746-8361.2004.tb00295.x\",\n \"Wykstra, Stephanie, 2018, “Out of the Armchair”,\\nAeon, 1 May 2018. URL =\\n <https://aeon.co/essays/beyond-the-armchair-must-philosophy-become-experimental>\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../analytic-synthetic/","text":"analytic/synthetic distinction"},{"href":"../epistemology-naturalized/","text":"epistemology: naturalism in"},{"href":"../experimental-philosophy/","text":"experimental philosophy"},{"href":"../natural-kinds/","text":"natural kinds"},{"href":"../rationalism-empiricism/","text":"rationalism vs. empiricism"},{"href":"../reasoning-defeasible/","text":"reasoning: defeasible"},{"href":"../reliabilism/","text":"reliabilist epistemology"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../analytic-synthetic/\",\n \"text\": \"analytic/synthetic distinction\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../epistemology-naturalized/\",\n \"text\": \"epistemology: naturalism in\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../experimental-philosophy/\",\n \"text\": \"experimental philosophy\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../natural-kinds/\",\n \"text\": \"natural kinds\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../rationalism-empiricism/\",\n \"text\": \"rationalism vs. empiricism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../reasoning-defeasible/\",\n \"text\": \"reasoning: defeasible\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../reliabilism/\",\n \"text\": \"reliabilist epistemology\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":69,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"aquinas"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Thomas Aquinas"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Wed Dec 7, 2022"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\n[Editor’s Note: The following new entry by Robert Pasnau\nreplaces the\n former entry\n on this topic by the previous authors.] ","\nBetween antiquity and modernity stands Thomas Aquinas (ca.\n1225–1274). The greatest figure of thirteenth-century Europe in\nthe two preeminent sciences of the era, philosophy and theology, he\nepitomizes the scholastic method of the newly founded universities.\nLike\n Dante\n or Michelangelo, Aquinas takes inspiration from antiquity, especially\n Aristotle,\n and builds something entirely new. Viewed through a theological lens,\nAquinas has often been seen as the summit of the Christian tradition\nthat runs back to\n Augustine\n and the early Church. Viewed as a philosopher, he is a foundational\nfigure of modern thought. His efforts at a systematic reworking of\nAristotelianism reshaped Western philosophy and provoked countless\nelaborations and disputations among later medieval and modern\nphilosophers."],"string":"[\n \"\\n[Editor’s Note: The following new entry by Robert Pasnau\\nreplaces the\\n former entry\\n on this topic by the previous authors.] \",\n \"\\nBetween antiquity and modernity stands Thomas Aquinas (ca.\\n1225–1274). The greatest figure of thirteenth-century Europe in\\nthe two preeminent sciences of the era, philosophy and theology, he\\nepitomizes the scholastic method of the newly founded universities.\\nLike\\n Dante\\n or Michelangelo, Aquinas takes inspiration from antiquity, especially\\n Aristotle,\\n and builds something entirely new. Viewed through a theological lens,\\nAquinas has often been seen as the summit of the Christian tradition\\nthat runs back to\\n Augustine\\n and the early Church. Viewed as a philosopher, he is a foundational\\nfigure of modern thought. His efforts at a systematic reworking of\\nAristotelianism reshaped Western philosophy and provoked countless\\nelaborations and disputations among later medieval and modern\\nphilosophers.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Life and Works","sub_toc":["1.1 Life","1.2 Works"]},{"content_title":"2. God","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"3. The Created World","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"4. Form and Matter","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"5. Soul and Body","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"6. Cognitive Theory","sub_toc":["6.1 Perception","6.2 Thought","6.3 Knowledge and Science"]},{"content_title":"7. Will and Freedom","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"8. Ethics","sub_toc":["8.1 Happiness","8.2 Natural Law","8.3 Virtue Theory"]},{"content_title":"9. Influence","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":["A. Aquinas’s Works","B. Secondary Sources"]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Life and Works\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"1.1 Life\",\n \"1.2 Works\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. God\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. The Created World\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Form and Matter\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Soul and Body\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. Cognitive Theory\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"6.1 Perception\",\n \"6.2 Thought\",\n \"6.3 Knowledge and Science\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"7. Will and Freedom\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"8. Ethics\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"8.1 Happiness\",\n \"8.2 Natural Law\",\n \"8.3 Virtue Theory\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"9. Influence\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"A. Aquinas’s Works\",\n \"B. Secondary Sources\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":[],"section_title":"1. Life and Works","subsections":[{"content":["\nThomas Aquinas was born near Aquino, halfway between Rome and Naples,\naround the year 1225. He was the youngest of at least nine children,\nand born into a wealthy family that presided over a prominent castle\nin Roccasecca. As a teenage student in Naples, he fell under the sway\nof the Dominicans, a newly founded order of priests devoted to\npreaching and learning. Joining the order at the age of nineteen, he\nwas assigned to Paris for further study, but his plans were delayed by\nthe intransigency of his parents, who had hoped he would play a\nleading role at the venerable local monastery, Monte Cassino, where he\nhad studied as a child. After confining him to Roccasecca for a year,\nhis parents yielded and Thomas went to Paris as a Dominican friar.","\nThomas spent three years in Paris, studying philosophy, and then was\nsent to Cologne, in 1248, under the supervision of\n Albert the Great.\n This older Dominican proved to be the ideal mentor. Albert was at the\ntime the leading figure in the newly prominent program of melding\nChristian theology with Greek and Arabic philosophy. He possessed an\nencyclopedic grasp of the sciences of the day, which had been\nexpanding at a dizzying pace thanks to the new availability of the\nAristotelian corpus in Latin translation. It was Albert’s firm\nconviction, which became Aquinas’s own, that the Christian faith\ncould only benefit from a profound engagement with philosophy and\nscience.","\nThomas evidently flourished under Albert’s influence, for when\nAlbert was asked in 1252 to nominate a student to pursue an advanced\ndegree in theology at the University of Paris, he chose Thomas, even\nthough he was still two years younger than the minimum required age.\nAfter four years as a bachelor of theology, lecturing on the Bible and\non Peter Lombard’s Sentences, Aquinas received his\ndoctorate and was immediately appointed master of theology, once again\nat an earlier age than the statutes officially allowed. From 1256\nuntil 1259, he held the Dominican chair of theology in Paris,\npreaching, lecturing on the Bible, and presiding over various\nphilosophical and theological disputations.","\nAlthough some masters at the University of Paris spent decades\nteaching there, it was the custom of the Dominican order (as with the\nFranciscans) to rotate scholars through these positions. Accordingly,\nin 1259 Aquinas was sent back to Italy, where he spent most of the\nfollowing decade in several Dominican houses of study, first in\nOrvieto (in Umbria) and then in Rome. During these years, while he\ncontinued to preach, lecture on the Bible, and conduct academic\ndisputations, he found the time to develop his two most important\nworks, the Summa contra gentiles and the Summa\ntheologiae.","\nIn 1268, Aquinas was asked to return to Paris for an unusual second\nterm as master of theology. Here he put his now venerable reputation\nto work in attempting to steer the philosophical conversation away\nfrom various extreme positions that were dividing scholars. He wrote a\nbrief treatise arguing for a middle ground on the vexed question of\nwhether the world could be proved to be eternal or created in time\n(§3), and a somewhat longer treatise against the view that all\nhuman beings share a single intellect (§6.2). These years were\ndominated, though, by his efforts to complete the Summa\ntheologiae and at the same time write commentaries on all of\nAristotle’s principal works. When his second four-year term in\nParis came to an end he returned to Italy, this time to Naples, in\n1272. During these final years he nearly, but not quite, finished both\nthe Summa theologiae and his commentary series. Instead,\nafter a year and a half in Naples, he stopped writing, famously\nexplaining that “All that I have written seems to me like straw\ncompared with what has now been revealed to me.” A few months\nafter that he died, in the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova, on March 7,\n1274.","\nThis chronology of Aquinas’s life is fairly well attested. There\nare also many colorful stories about his life, many of which stem from\ntestimony given during his canonization inquiry in 1319. The\nauthenticity of these stories is unknowable. Aquinas himself, in his\nwritings, reveals almost nothing about his personal life. (For\nbiography see Porro 2012 [2016]; Torrell 1993 [2022]; Legge 2022.)"],"subsection_title":"1.1 Life"},{"content":["\nOver a mere two decades of literary activity, Aquinas left behind more\nthan eight million words (eight times more than has survived, for\ninstance, from Aristotle). It is a measure of Aquinas’s\nimmediate and lasting influence that—quite unlike the situation\nwith other medieval philosophers—essentially everything he wrote\nhas survived and has been lovingly edited and translated into English\nand many other modern languages. In outline, there are five categories\nof works:","\nThe bibliography below contains further details about individual works\nand their chronology.","\nThe Summa theologiae (ST) generally represents\nAquinas’s most considered thought on a given topic, and the work\nis comprehensive enough that it contains at least some discussion of\nalmost all of Aquinas’s intellectual concerns. It divides into\nfour parts:","\nThe treatments in ST are deliberately brief. Aquinas writes\nin the preface that “our intent in this work is to develop those\nissues that concern the Christian religion in a way that suits the\neducation of those who are just beginning.” Today, no one thinks\nof ST as a work for beginners, although its scope and\nconcision make it a useful place to start. A serious engagement with\nAquinas’s work, however, requires comparing ST with\nparallel treatments elsewhere, such as the earlier Summa contra\ngentiles (SCG) and the still earlier commentary on\nLombard’s Sentences. Moreover, since all three of these\nlong works are written as theological treatises, it is useful\nalso to compare these discussions with his accounts in the more\nphilosophically focused and often more detailed disputed questions. In\ngeneral, given how much Aquinas wrote and how often he reconsidered\nthe same issue from a slightly different perspective, a careful study\nof his work requires comparing multiple treatments of the same issue.\nAnd since he did not begin to circulate his work until he was 30, and\nlived for only two decades more, those various treatments tend to\nreinforce rather than conflict with each other. (Naturally, scholars\nhave long debated whether his thought evolves on one topic or another,\non which see Pini 2012.)","\nMost of Aquinas’s central texts are written in the distinctive\nscholastic style of the disputed question, in which the topic to be\ndiscussed is posed at the start as a question. The dispute begins with\na series of arguments on one side. These, however, almost always\nrepresent the opposite of Aquinas’s own position, and so, after\nthe initial arguments, one or more arguments are posed to the contrary\n(sed contra), and then Aquinas makes his own main reply in\nthe body (corpus) of the article, and finally he responds to\nthe initial arguments (ad 1, ad 2, etc.). This structure is\nbased on actual classroom procedures, even if Aquinas’s\ncarefully composed works are never a literal record of an actual\nclassroom debate. It is a method that lends itself to argumentative\nrigor, but often is best digested by reading the text in something\nother than the order in which it appears on the page. (I myself like\nto begin with the main reply.)","\nAn important exception to the disputed-question format is\nAquinas’s commentaries. These are often extremely useful for\nunderstanding his own philosophical thought. This is true most\nobviously of the philosophical commentaries, which cover most of\nAristotle’s key works. The point holds true, however, for his\nbiblical commentaries as well, because they regularly contain\ninteresting discussions of wide-ranging philosophical topics (Stump\n2010). One has to approach all of Aquinas’s commentaries with\nsome caution, however, because his principal method of commentary is\nto produce a word-by-word paraphrase. This means that, if one does not\nread these works with one eye on the text being commented upon, a\npassage that may seem to represent Aquinas’s thought may instead\nbe a rephrased version of what Aristotle (or Isaiah or Paul) said.\nWhether or not Aquinas’s paraphrase of a passage from Aristotle\nshould be treated as a reflection of Aquinas’s own thought is a\nmatter of some dispute (Jenkins 1996; Elders 2009), but readers should\nat least be aware of how these commentaries are structured. The\npassages most likely to shed light on Aquinas’s own thought are\nthose where he breaks away from his line-by-line paraphrase to offer a\nbrief lecture on some issue germane to a proper understanding of the\nunderlying text.","\nIt is tempting, for modern readers, to divide Aquinas’s work\ninto the theological and philosophical, but lines here are difficult\nto draw. The medieval university did formally distinguish between the\nhigher-level discipline of theology and the undergraduate arts\nfaculty, whose curriculum consisted largely in the works of Aristotle.\nBut many of the questions of the theologians—such as the\nworkings of intellect, the nature of freedom, the systematization of\nethical theory—are now seen as paradigmatically philosophical.\nAt the same time, much of Aristotle, and therefore much of the arts\nfaculty curriculum, looks to us more scientific than philosophical.\nAquinas, unlike his teacher Albert the Great, only occasionally\ndwelled on what we now think of as scientific questions. Conversely,\nas a professor of theology, he considered at great length various\nmatters that depend on\n divine revelation, such as the\nnature of the Trinity and the character of Christ’s humanity. A\ncomplete understanding of Aquinas’s thought thus requires\nspending considerable time with such properly theological\nquestions. At the same time, it is appropriate today to number Aquinas\namong the philosophers, because he was particularly interested in and\nhad particularly innovative things to say about what we now think of\nas philosophical questions. The tremendous energy he put into\ncommenting on Aristotle’s works is a testimony both to the\nimportance he gives philosophy for a proper understanding of theology,\nand to his confidence that progress in philosophy will only benefit\nthe Christian faith. As he famously wrote, “if anything is found\nin the words of the philosophers that is contrary to the faith, this\nis not philosophy but rather an abuse of philosophy, due to a failure\nof reason” (Comm. Boethius De trinitate 2.3c). \n\n","\nFor book-length general surveys of Aquinas's thought see Stump 2003,\nDavies and Stump 2012, Shields and Pasnau 2016, Stump and White\n2022."],"subsection_title":"1.2 Works"}]},{"main_content":["\nAquinas believes that natural reason can demonstratively prove\nGod’s existence. The first step is to show that, for everything\nin the changeable world around us, there is a first cause, or prime\nmover, in virtue of which all other things have their existence, their\nmotion, their qualities and direction. This is the result he gets in\nhis much discussed “five ways” of proving God’s\nexistence (ST 1a 2.3c). Aquinas denies that Anselm’s\n ontological argument\n has any force as a proof (ST 1a 2.1 ad 2; SCG\nI.10–11). Instead, the first three ways are\n cosmological arguments,\n based on the impossibility of an infinite series of causes.\nCommentators generally agree that what Aquinas means to exclude is an\ninfinite series of simultaneous causes, a “vertical”\nseries as opposed to an infinite “horizontal” series of\ncauses going back in time, which he does not think can be proved to be\nimpossible (§3). Each of the five brief arguments ends with a\nvariation on the formula “this is what everyone calls\nGod.” He puts his claim cautiously at this point, because to\ndemonstrate the existence of a prime mover falls well short of\ndemonstrating the existence of a being worthy of being called God. For\nall we have seen so far, for instance, this first cause might itself\nbe a body. But Aquinas thinks natural reason—what we now call\n natural theology—can\n go well beyond the five ways. ST 1a goes on to establish\nthat this first cause is not a body (3.1), nor composite in any way\nand hence entirely\n simple\n (3.7), perfect in every respect (4.2), the highest good (6.2),\ninfinite (7.1),\n omnipresent\n (8.2), completely unchangeable (9.1), eternal (10.2), supremely one\n(11.4), and possessing\n the most perfect knowledge\n (14.1). These results establish the existence of something worthy of\nbeing called God. (On Aquinas’s natural theology in general see\nKretzmann 1997; Wippel 2000 chs. 10–13; Stump 2003 pt. I. On the\nfive ways see Kenny 1969; MacDonald 1991a; Martin 1997; Pawl 2012;\nCohoe 2013.)","\nThe successes of natural theology, for Aquinas, have their limit. For\nalthough natural reason can establish the existence of a perfect\nbeing, it is incapable of establishing many of the features that\ndistinctively characterize the Christian God, such as God’s\ntriune nature and God’s incarnation as a human being. Here is a\nplace where philosophy alone, unaided by revelation, fails to yield an\nadequate theology. Since the ultimate goal of human life, salvation in\nthe life to come (§8.1), requires some grasp of these Christian\ntruths, “it was necessary for the sake of human salvation that\ncertain truths that surpass human reason be made known to us through\ndivine revelation” (ST 1a 1.1). The study of revealed\ntheology is important, moreover, not only with respect to these\nso-called mysteries of the faith, but also in cases where the results\nof natural reason are too precarious to be counted on. Without direct\naccess through revelation, “the truth about God investigated by\nreason would be available only to a few people, after a long time, and\nwith the admixture of many errors.” Accordingly, “beyond\nthe philosophical disciplines investigated by human reason, it was\nnecessary to have a sacred teaching through revelation” (ibid.).\nThis sacred teaching (sacra doctrina) is the work of\ntheology.","\nOne of the most difficult and most discussed issues in Aquinas’s\nnatural theology is the limits he places on our ability to understand\nGod’s nature. A sign of the difficulties to come emerges just\nafter he sets out his initial five-way proof, when he remarks,","\nOnce it is grasped that something exists, it remains to be\ninvestigated how it exists, in order that what it is may be\nknown. But because it is not possible for us to know what God\nis, but rather what God is not, we cannot consider\nhow God exists, but rather how God does not exist. (ST 1a\n3pr; see Davies 2018)\n","\nThat Aquinas in fact honors this constraint is far from obvious, given\nthe seemingly positive claims he makes regarding the divine nature. To\nunderstand his approach one must come to grips with his theory of\n analogical predication.\n In a case like God’s goodness, for instance, Aquinas does not\nmean only to deny God’s badness. It can be truly said, he\nthinks, that God is good. The difficulty is that the word\n‘good,’ when truly applied to God, has a different sense\nfrom what it has in cases familiar to our own experience. The two\nsenses are thus not univocal, but nor are they purely equivocal, as if\nGod’s goodness were wholly unrelated to the goodness we\nexperience. Instead, the usages are analogical (ST\n1a 13.5). So, “when we say God is good, the sense is not that\nGod is the cause of goodness or that God is not bad; rather, the sense\nis that what we call good in creatures preexists in God, albeit in a\nhigher mode” (ST 1a 13.2c). We can say with confidence,\non the basis of this analysis, that God is good, indeed preeminently\nso. To the extent that we are good, it is so only by participation in\nGod’s goodness. But our cognitive limitations preclude a more\nadequate account of this “higher mode” in which God is\ngood. (On analogy in Aquinas see McInerny 1996; Montagnes 1963 [2004];\nDewan 2007; Ashworth 2014; Hochschild 2019.)"],"section_title":"2. God","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nThe mainstream of philosophical tradition as Aquinas knew it, running\nfrom Aristotle through the Greek commentators and into the Arabic\ntradition, held that the material world, and all the kinds of living\nthings in it, had always existed. These earlier Aristotelians still\nthought there was a place for God, as the first mover, but they\nunderstood God to be the initial, remote source of motions that had\nalways existed, rather than an eternal being who created the universe\nanew. Aquinas understood Christianity to be committed to the latter\nview. He holds that the changeable universe around us has existed for\nonly a finite amount of time; that God, in contrast, has existed\neternally and unchangingly; and that God freely chose to create the\nchangeable universe from nothing (ex nihilo). To bring a\nthing into existence ex nihilo is the defining feature of\n creation,\n in the strict sense of that term, and only God can do it (ST\n1a 45). Everything else in the natural world causes new things to come\ninto existence by modifying what is here already. The proper\nterminology for these natural changes is generation and\ncorruption, which refer to a substance’s coming into or\ngoing out of existence by natural means, and alteration,\nwhich refers to a substance’s undergoing accidental change:\ncontinuing to exist through change to its shape, color, and other\nnon-essential properties.","\nAristotle and many of his followers believed they could prove that the\nworld had always existed. Conversely, many of Aquinas’s\ncontemporaries thought they could prove the opposite, that the world\nhad to have a beginning in time, and the debate between these rival\nphilosophical accounts was one of the most acrimonious issues in the\nearly medieval university (Dales 1990). Aquinas took up the question\nin detail in his treatise On the Eternity of the World,\nconcluding that no demonstrative argument is possible either way. For\nall we can tell, God could have created the world in such a way that\nit had always existed. That we think otherwise is another deliverance\nof the faith, not susceptible to philosophical proof. This measured\nconclusion is characteristic of his thought in many domains. On the\none hand, he has complete confidence that philosophical reasoning,\nproperly pursued, will not yield results that are a threat to\nChristianity. On the other hand, he thinks it discredits the faith to\ndefend it through dubious attempts at demonstration. The key is to see\nwhere philosophy can be of service, and where it must give way to\nrevealed doctrine (Wippel 1995c; Kretzmann 1999 ch. 5).","\nIt is not easy to think about God’s relationship to the created\nworld, because without such a world there can be neither space nor\ntime (ST 1a 46.1, 46.3). Not space, because space is nothing\nmore than the existence of bodies, where bodies are beings that\npossess parts outside of parts, and so constitute the\nthree-dimensional extension that we think of as space. Accordingly,\nwhere there are no bodies there is no space. (Aquinas, following\nAristotle, denies that void space is coherent.) Not time, because\nAquinas accepts Aristotle’s definition of time as the measure of\nmotion. In a world without motion, then, there is no time, which means\nthat the first moment of time was the first moment of the created\nworld. Although it is hard to resist thinking of God as having existed\n“before” there was a material universe, God’s mode\nof existence, in a world without bodies, must be an existence outside\nof space and time. This need not entail, however, that God even now\nexists outside of space and time. God’s\n omnipresence\n was commonly understood as a literal presence everywhere (Pasnau 2011\nch. 16), and Aquinas characterizes God’s eternity not as a mode\nof existence outside of time, but as “being present to every\ntime or instant of time” (SCG I.66.8). It is, however,\nfar from clear what “present” amounts to in such a claim\n(Leftow 1990). These difficulties are of a piece with the general\ndifficulty we have in thinking about God using the concepts familiar\nto us from the world around us.","\nHowever these metaphysical issues are resolved, it is clear that God\nis constantly, everywhere engaged with the world. Because “a\nthing’s existence cannot remain after the cessation of the\naction of the agent causing the effect” (ST 1a 104.1c),\nthe created world must have not just an initial creative cause but\nalso an ongoing cause that\n conserves\n it from moment to moment. Since God is necessarily perfect, the\ncreated world cannot be beneficial for God, and since a universe with\na perfect being is itself already perfect, God’s goodness does\nnot necessitate his creating anything at all. Moreover, since for\neverything God creates he could create something better (ST\n1a 25.6c), there is no sense to be made of the idea of a best of all\npossible worlds. Accordingly, God is free to create otherwise than he\ndid, and free even not to create anything at all: “Since\nGod’s goodness is perfect, and he can exist without other\nthings, … it follows that there is no absolute necessity that\nhe will things other than himself” (ST 1a 19.3c).\nStill, creation has a purpose: God “intends only to share his\nperfection, which is his goodness” (ST 1a 44.4c). Among\ncreatures, those beings who possess intellects—angels and human\nbeings—are preeminent, in virtue of their capacity to love and\nunderstand their creator. Accordingly, the rest of creation is\norganized for their sake (SCG III.112). Ultimately, however,\nthe purpose of the created world is to reflect God’s goodness\nand glory: “the whole universe, with its individual parts, is\nordered to God as its end, inasmuch as, by a kind of imitation, the\nuniverse represents divine goodness for the glory of God”\n(ST 1a 65.2c). So it is that Aquinas takes everything in the\ncreated world to be subject to God’s providential order\n(§7). (For a broad study of Aquinas on creation see Kretzmann\n1999.)"],"section_title":"3. The Created World","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nGiven the preeminence of intellectual beings in the created order, it\nshould be no surprise that most of God’s creative efforts went\ninto their establishment. This is, primarily, the domain of the\nangels, who “exceed in number, incomparably, material\nsubstances” (ST 1a 50.3c). The angels are wholly\nimmaterial beings, which makes them unlike us (§5) and unlike the\ncreated world with which we are directly acquainted, which is a\nmaterial world. So, if we set aside the realm of immaterial\nminds—God, angels, the human soul—we are left with a world\nof material objects, suitable to be understood in terms of an\nAristotelian hylomorphic (matter–form) analysis.","\nWithin this material domain, a material substratum underlies all\nchange, and real change typically involves the gain or loss of some\nform. This can be made to look straightforward enough when examples\nare carefully chosen. If a tree’s limbs are bent under the\nweight of an early fall snowstorm, then the tree undergoes alteration\n(accidental change) in virtue of taking on a new shape (a new\naccidental form), while the material substance (the tree itself)\nendures. If the storm in fact kills the tree, then the substance is\ncorrupted (a substantial change), in virtue of losing its substantial\nform, which is the internal principle that gives the substance its\nnature. In cases like this, where the substance is destroyed, Aquinas\nadvances a metaphysical claim that is quite surprising: that all that\nendures through the change is the most basic material substratum,\nprime matter, which lacks all form. (Aquinas’s early\nOn the Principles of Nature summarizes the basic story. For\ngeneral discussions of Aquinas’s metaphysics of material bodies\nsee Wippel 2000 chs. 7–9, Brower 2014. On causation at the level\nof creatures see Frost 2022.)","\nThe resulting picture seems to postulate, as the constituents of\nsubstances, three types of basic entities: prime matter, substantial\nforms, and accidental forms. How exactly to understand each of these\nhas been subject to a great deal of discussion over the centuries.\nWith respect to accidental forms, one of the chief puzzles is to\ndefine those cases in which we have a genuine change of form. Aquinas\nclearly thinks, for instance, that colors and other proper sensibles\nare accidental forms. But does he think, as the above example of the\ntree implied, that shapes too are accidental forms? It is not entirely\nclear, and depends on difficult questions about how he understands\nAristotle’s theory of the\n categories\n (Wippel 2000 ch. 7; Pasnau 2011 ch. 12). With respect to substantial\nform there is an analogous problem arising from unclarity over what\nexactly the substances are (Pasnau 2002 ch. 3; Rota 2004; Marmodoro\nand Page 2016). He clearly takes all living things to be substances,\nalthough there are puzzles here about how to define the beginning and\nend of life (Van Dyke 2012; Amerini 2009 [2013]). When it comes to\nnonliving things the situation is still less clear. He clearly thinks\nthat artifacts like a house are not substances. Water is a substance,\nbut it is not clear whether a puddle of water is a single substance or\na collection of substances. Aquinas does not discuss these issues in\nthe sort of detail that later medieval authors would, and as a result\nthere is little scholarly consensus about his views. But one important\nguide to his thinking about substances is that they have unity in a\nvery strong sense: “whatever is one in substance is one\nabsolutely (simpliciter)” (ST 1a2ae 17.4c). Of\ncourse, no creature has the sort of unity that God has; God’s\nperfect simplicity precludes even the composition of essence and\nexistence, which is found in all created substances, even in\nimmaterial angels (Wippel 2000 ch. 5). Material substances, being\ncomposites of form and matter, have less unity than the angels. Even\nso, Aquinas thinks there can be complex material substances, unified\nby their substantial form. How does a substantial form unify? An\nimportant part of his answer is that a substantial form actualizes not\nonly the whole substance, but each part: “a form of the whole\nthat does not give existence to the individual parts of the body,\n… such as the form of a house, is an accidental form”\n(ST 1a 76.8c).","\nSubstantial forms both unify a substance at a given time and\nindividuate a substance over time. To play this role, they must be\nparticulars rather than\n universals.\n In general, it seems that Aquinas thinks that no forms are universals\nexcept inasmuch as we conceive of them in abstraction from\nparticulars. In external reality (in re), “no\ncommonness is found in Socrates; rather, whatever is in him has been\nindividuated” (On Being and Essence 3.80–2;\nLeftow 2003; Brower 2016). The principle of individuation, for forms,\nis matter (King 2000; Klima 2000). The account of individuation, then,\ncomes in two stages: matter individuates the form at the start, when\nthe form first inheres in that matter, and from that point forward the\nform possesses a fixed identity of its own. If it is a substantial\nform, it subsequently individuates the substance as a whole.","\nFundamental to Aquinas’s hylomorphism is his coordinate\ndistinction between potentiality and actuality. His brief treatise\nOn the Principles of Nature, perhaps his earliest work,\nbegins with this remark:","\nOne should know that some things can be, although they are not, and\nsome things are. That which can be is said to be in potentiality; that\nwhich is now is said to be in actuality.\n","\nHe goes on to associate potentiality with matter, and actuality with\nform, and draws the distinctions we would expect between the various\nkinds of matters and forms. He also remarks at this point that being\nis of two kinds, and that the being of a substance is “something\ndifferent” from accidental being. This signals his commitment to\nAristotle’s doctrine of the multivocity (or homonymy) of being.\nWhat it means for a substance to exist is different from what it means\nfor an accidental aggregation of a substance with its accidents (say,\na pale man) to exist. In general, what properly exists is substances,\nwhereas “forms, accidents, and other things of this sort are\ncalled beings not because they themselves exist, but because it is\nby them that something exists” (ST 1a 45.4c).\nMoreover, even among substances, God does not exist in the same way\nthat creatures do, but only in an analogous way (§2). This denial\nof the univocity of being was contentious among later medieval authors\n(most notably\n John Duns Scotus)\n and its correct interpretation remains controversial today (Brower\n2014; Pasnau 2018). Even more problematic is Aquinas’s\nconception of prime matter, which he characterizes as pure\npotentiality: “being in actuality is incompatible with\nmatter’s nature, since matter is a potential existent by its\nvery nature” (Quodlibet III.1.1). Although later\nmedieval Aristotelians accepted that substantial change requires a\nmaterial substratum, hardly anyone endorsed Aquinas’s suggestion\nthat it is pure potentiality, because they were convinced that what\nlacks actuality does not exist. Readers of Aquinas have disputed how\nhe himself could have evaded that outcome (Brower 2014 ch. 5), or\nwhether perhaps it is an outcome he intended (Pasnau 2002 ch. 1)."],"section_title":"4. Form and Matter","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nFor living things, their substantial form is their soul\n(anima). In saying this, Aquinas should not be understood to\nbe ascribing some special sort of spirituality to plants and animals:\nhe thinks they are material objects just as much as rocks and streams\nare. Rather, he is following the lead of Aristotle’s De\nanima in treating the soul as the first principle of life,\nwhatever that may be. Since Aquinas thinks that the primary internal\nexplanation for the existence of any substance is its substantial form\n(§4), it follows that every living substance has a soul that is\nits substantial form.","\nAs with any substantial form, the primary function of a soul is to\naccount for the substance’s nature as a certain kind of thing,\npossessed of the unity and persistence that characterizes substances.\nThis actualizing role is what Aquinas calls the soul’s essence\n(ST 1a 77.1c). The ongoing existence of living things also\nrequires that they carry out distinctive operations: taking\nnourishment and reproducing, moving and perceiving (in the case of\nanimals), and reasoning (in the human case). Corresponding to these\noperations are the powers of the soul. Medieval authors had long\npuzzled over the relationship between the soul and its powers. Aquinas\ntakes a strong position that would be the subject of much later\ndispute: that the soul’s powers, being potentialities, are\nreally distinct from the soul’s essence, which is an actuality\n(ST 1a 77, Quest. on the Soul 12).","\nYet even though Aquinas insists on a distinction between the soul and\nits powers, he rejects the common medieval view that living things\nhave multiple souls or multiple substantial forms. Because of his\ncommitment to the absolute unity of a substance, he thinks that\nnothing could count as a substance unless it possesses a unique\nsubstantial form that provides unity, at a time and over time, to the\nsubstance as a whole.","\nOne thing simpliciter is produced out of many actually\nexisting things only if there is something uniting and in some way\ntying them to each other. In this way, then, if Socrates were an\nanimal and were rational in virtue of different forms, then these two,\nin order to be united simpliciter, would need something to\nmake them one. Therefore, since nothing is available to do this, the\nresult will be that a human being is one thing only as an aggregate,\nlike a heap. (Quest. on the Soul 11c; also ST 1a\n76.3–4, Quest. on Spiritual Creatures 3)\n","\nSuch remarks engendered a long dispute between those who favored this\nsort of “unitarian” approach and those who took one or\nanother “pluralist” position. The pluralists argued that\nliving things contain one substantial form for their body (their\nbodily form, forma corporeitatis) and at least one further\ndistinct form, their soul, in virtue of which they have life (Adams\n1987 ch. 15; Cross 1998 ch. 4; Pasnau 2011 ch. 25). The principal\nargument in favor of pluralism was that it explained how the body of a\nliving thing could persist after the departure of the living\nthing’s soul at death. Aquinas and other unitarians claimed that\nsuch persistence was merely apparent, and that strictly speaking the\nonly thing that endures through a substance’s corruption is\nprime matter.","\nGiven the tight connection that Aquinas describes between form and\nmatter, it is hard to characterize his theory of souls in general as\n dualistic.\n To be sure, in some sense, material substances are a composite of\nsubstantial form and prime matter (with accidents on the outside, so\nto speak, unified only accidentally with the substance). Still,\nAquinas takes pains to stress that it is the substance as a whole that\nproperly exists. And he definitely does not think that material\nsubstances are a composite of form and body, since the\nmaterial substance is the body. His unitarian framework\ndeliberately makes it incoherent to speak of the body of a living\nthing (or of any substance) as something distinct from that\nsubstance.","\nThe situation is much more complex, however, when we focus on the\nhuman case. If a dualist is someone who thinks that human beings\nconsist in a material body and an immaterial, spiritual mind, then\nAquinas clearly qualifies, even if he works very hard to get the\nresult that these two aspects of human nature are unified as a single\nsubstance (Bazán 1997; Klima 1997 [2002]; Stump 2003 ch. 6).\nAlthough the human soul’s essential role is to actualize a human\nbody, the human soul has a power—its intellect—that\noperates independently of the body. Aquinas has a variety of much\ndiscussed arguments aimed at showing that human thought, given its\nuniversal scope and abstract content, cannot be carried out through\nthe brain or any other bodily instrument (ST 1a 75.2, 75.5;\nQuest. on the Soul 2; Klima 2001; Wood 2020). As a result,\nthe human soul has a unique and puzzling status: it is both the form\nof a body and “an incorporeal and subsistent principle”\n(ST 1a 75.2c). From here, Aquinas further argues that the\nhuman soul is incorruptible (ST 1a 75.6, Quest. on the\nSoul 14). For although ordinary subsistent things—material\nsubstances—routinely come into and go out of existence, with the\ncorruption of their bodies, a subsistent entity that is not a body has\nno natural basis for its ceasing to exist. Hence, once God creates a\nhuman soul (in coordination with the biological process of sexual\nreproduction), that soul exists forever.","\nGiven that the human body is corrupted at death, the soul’s\nincorruptibility entails that, after death, it will continue to exist\nwithout the body. Aquinas devotes considerable attention to the\nquestion of how it will function in that separated state (ST\n1a 89; Quest. on the Soul 15–20). Prior to the delicate\nbut all-important question of what such lives will be like (a paradise\nor a hell), there is a still more basic question of whether a human\nperson’s separated soul continues to be that same person. Recent\ncommentators have been divided. Aquinas is very clear that, in this\nlife, a human being is the whole composite substance, form and matter\n(ST 1a 75.4). Also clear is that Aquinas thinks our souls\nwill not be separated from their bodies forever; in the fullness of\ntime, on the Day of Judgment, they will be reunited with their\nresurrected bodies (SCG IV.79–97). The situation\nbecomes less clear, however, when Aquinas argues, as he repeatedly\ndoes, that a resurrection of bodies is required because otherwise\nwe would not survive. “Abraham’s soul’s\nhaving life would not suffice for Abraham’s being alive….\nThe life of the whole compound is required, soul and body”\n(Sentences IV.43.1.1.1 ad 2). This seems to show\nthat Aquinas thinks a person’s soul, surviving apart from its\nbody, is not sufficient for that person’s survival, and some\nscholars (the “corruptionists”) read Aquinas in this way\n(Toner 2009; Van Dyke 2012; Nevitt 2014). But to others (the\n“survivalists”) this looks like an incredible result, in\ntension with claims that Aquinas makes elsewhere and with fundamental\nChristian doctrine (Brown 2007; Brower 2014 ch. 12; Stump 2022)."],"section_title":"5. Soul and Body","subsections":[]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"6. Cognitive Theory","subsections":[{"content":["\nBy definition, the living things that we call animals are those that\nhave the power of perception. Aquinas accepts the conventional list of\nthe five senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch—and\nargues that we arrive at this list of five because there are five\ndiscrete kinds of qualities that make an impression on our bodies.\nThese objects are the proper sensibles—color, sound,\nodor, flavor, hot–cold—so-called because they “make\nan impression on the senses primarily and per se”\n(ST 1a 78.3 ad 2). In contrast to these are the common\nsensibles—size, shape, number, motion, rest—which\n“do not move the senses primary and of themselves, but on\naccount of a sensible quality, as a surface does on account of its\ncolor” (ibid.). Whereas each proper sensible is capable of being\nperceived only by its corresponding sense, the common sensibles are\nso-called because they can be grasped by multiple senses, as when we\nboth see and hear a thing move. To these two categories of sense\nobjects Aquinas adds a third category, the accidental\nsensibles, as when I see that someone is alive (Comm. de\nanima II.13.184–90). This is, however, not a purely sensory\noperation, but an act of seeing that occurs in conjunction with a\nconceptual judgment that the observed motions are a sign of life. (For\ndiscussions of the perceptual process see Pasnau 2002 chs. 6, 9;\nLisska 2016; De Haan 2019; Cory 2022.)","\nBeyond these five external senses are the four internal\nsenses that use the brain as their organ. Following the lead of\n Ibn Sīnā\n (Avicenna), Aquinas puts considerable weight on these sensory powers\nto explain the sophisticated behavior of animals. In contrast to the\nconsensus over the number of external senses, there had been a great\ndeal of historical disagreement over how many internal senses there\nare. Aquinas settles on this list of four:","\nThe precise role of these four faculties is not easy to evaluate on\nthe basis of Aquinas’s limited and scattered remarks, but\naccording to his most prominent account the common sense is what\nallows us to make cross-modal sensory judgments (seeing something as\nwhite and sweet) and to have second-order awareness, for instance\n“when someone sees that he is seeing” (ST 1a 78.4\nad 2). The imagination—Aquinas uses both imaginatio and\nphantasia to refer to this faculty—retains images\nacquired through the external senses. The estimative power perceives\nwhat the Arabic tradition referred to as the “intentions”\n(maʿānī) that lie behind the sensible\nqualities: for instance, that wolves are dangerous and that straw is\nuseful for nest building. (Aquinas refers to the more sophisticated\nhuman capacity for grasping intentions as the cogitative power.)\nMemory preserves these intentions. All of the internal senses are\nrichly engaged in human cognitive activity, which is to say that the\nbrain—despite not being the power of intellect—plays a\ncritical role in human cognition.","\nThe senses are not wholly immaterial faculties in the way that the\nintellect is, but the respect in which Aquinas thinks they are\nmaterial is a matter of some dispute. He remarks that the senses\noperate “through a corporeal organ but not through any corporeal\nquality” (ST 1a 78.1c). By this he intends a contrast\nwith ordinary physical causation, as when a fire, through the quality\nof heat, brings water to a boil. In contrast, when we perceive heat,\neven though the skin is heated in the same way that water is, still\nthe perception itself is not the skin’s being made hot. Rather,\n“the senses and intellect receive the forms of things\nspiritually and immaterially, in virtue of a kind of intentional\nexistence” (Comm. de sensu 18.208–10). In\ngeneral, Aquinas treats the ability to receive forms intentionally as\na mark of the mental:","\nThings that cognize are distinguished from things that do not cognize\nin this: that the non-cognizers have nothing but their own form alone,\nwhereas that which cognizes is naturally suited to have the form of\nanother thing as well. (ST 1a 14.1c)\n","\nSuch forms, received intentionally in the external senses, are known\nas sensible species. Received in the internal senses, they are known\nas phantasms. Received in the intellect, they are known as\nintelligible species. Such forms—for instance, the sensible\nspecies of heat—are that in virtue of which we perceive, for\ninstance, the heat of external bodies. That such forms do not make\npossessor actually hot (etc.) is perhaps just what it is for a form to\nexist intentionally. But there is scholarly disagreement over what it\nmeans to say that such forms are “spiritual” and\n“immaterial” (Hoffman 2014).","\nAs these passages make clear, perception (and cognition in general)\nworks through the reception of the very form of the thing that is\nbeing perceived. This has led to much discussion over whether Aquinas\nthereby subscribes to a strong form of direct realism, according to\nwhich what we perceive (and what we think about) is the thing itself.\nIn favor of this reading is that Aquinas seems entirely unconcerned\nabout these intentionally existing species as intermediaries lying\nbetween us and the things themselves. Why should he be concerned, the\nthought goes, since the species just is the form itself of the thing\nout in the world? (see Perler 2000; Băltuță 2013)\nAgainst this reading is that the species (of heat, say) is not\nnumerically the same form as the one that inheres in the fire, and\nthat Aquinas does, at least sometimes, seem to think of these species\nas representations that mediate our access to external things (Pasnau\n1997 ch. 3; Panaccio 2001; see also Brower and Brower-Toland\n2008)."],"subsection_title":"6.1 Perception"},{"content":["\nAquinas thinks that a great deal of complex cognition occurs within\nthe internal senses of the brain, but that those material powers are\nincapable of abstract thought. To be more precise, he thinks that\nmaterial cognitive powers can represent things only as particulars,\nand that universal concepts can be formed only within the immaterial\nintellect. He writes,","\nIf the intellective soul were composed of form and matter, then the\nforms of things would be received in it as individuals; then it would\ncognize only singular things, as happens in the sensory capacities,\nwhich receive the forms of things in a corporeal organ. (ST\n1a 75.5c)\n","\nThe senses, both external and internal, can represent only this or\nthat particular cat. It takes the intellect to form the abstract\nconcept of cat. Conversely, Aquinas thinks that the human intellect is\nincapable of grasping particulars (ST 1a 86.1). This means\nthat when we engage in a routine task like apprehending that a thing\nis a cat we are simultaneously using both intellect and sense, using\nthe senses to apprehend the particular, and using the intellect to\nconceptualize what it is. In our more theoretical reflections, we rely\non the internal senses to frame images that aid us in the process of\nabstract reasoning.","\nFollowing Aristotle’s lead in De anima III.5, Aquinas\ndistinguishes between two distinct intellectual powers, the possible\nintellect and the agent intellect. The first starts out in\npotentiality to all intelligibles, a tabula rasa, “like\na tablet on which nothing has been written” (ST 1a\n79.2c), and gradually becomes actualized, taking in universal concepts\nthat are then stored there as dispositions. But because such concepts\nare not immediately available through sensory experience—one\ncannot grasp what it is to be a cat just by looking at a\ncat—there must also be an active intellectual power, “a\npower on the side of intellect to actualize intelligible things by\nabstracting the species from material conditions” (ST\n1a 79.3c). By Aquinas’s time, generations of Aristotelians had\nalready argued over the correct understanding of these two powers,\nwith some treating the agent intellect as a single higher mind,\nseparate from human beings, and perhaps even to be identified with\nGod.\n Ibn Rushd\n (Averroes), the Spanish philosopher active a half century before\nAquinas, had even proposed treating the possible intellect as\na single higher power to which every human being has shared access.\nAquinas, in contrast, thinks that each human being has their own\nintellect, agent and possible. That we all share in a single agent\nintellect is, he thinks, wrong but not incredible—it has\naffinities with the venerable Augustinian doctrine of\n divine illumination—but\n Aquinas regards the Averroistic doctrine of a separate possible\nintellect as not just contrary to the faith but entirely preposterous,\nsince it would make it impossible to explain how we are each capable\nof individual acts of thought. As he describes the absurd implication\nin his treatise On the Unity of the Intellect against the\nAverroists, “if I think about stone and you do likewise,\nthen it would be necessary that you and I have one and the same\nintellectual operation” (4.101–3; see Ogden 2022).","\nAquinas distinguishes between three principal stages of intellectual\noperation: first, the formation of concepts; second, the composition\nof judgments (propositions) built from concepts; third, inferential\nreasoning from one judgment to another. These last two stages were the\nsubject of intensive study within medieval logic, but Aquinas has\nrelatively little to say about logic, and is most interested in the\ninitial stage of concept formation. Here, the possible intellect\npassively receives concepts that the agent intellect has abstracted\nfrom sensory impressions (phantasms). The possible intellect starts\nout as a blank slate, which is to say that Aquinas rejects the theory\nof innate ideas, at least as far as the possible intellect is\nconcerned. Moreover, he is very clear that all our concepts arise from\nsensory experience: “the source of our cognition comes from the\nsenses” (ST 1a 84.6sc). From this vantagepoint, he\nlooks more like an empiricist than a rationalist. The role of agent\nintellect, however, complicates the situation. Whereas the possible\nintellect starts out as unformed potentiality, the agent intellect has\nthe actuality to abstract universal concepts from sensory experience.\nIt is not easy to say how abstraction occurs; indeed, for the whole of\nthe Aristotelian tradition, the agent intellect has been something of\na black box whose operation is taken as a brute fact rather than\nanalyzed. Sometimes Aquinas suggests that the transformation of\nsingular content into universal content occurs via the conversion of\nmaterial phantasms into immaterial intelligible species, but the link\nbetween immateriality and universality is not entirely clear. (On\nabstraction see King 1994, Cory 2015)."],"subsection_title":"6.2 Thought"},{"content":["\nAquinas uses a variety of terms to talk about knowledge, including\nscientia, cognitio and notitia. Often he\nseems to use these terms interchangeably, and he shows no interest in\ntrying to define anything like knowledge in its loose and popular\nsense. He is, however, very much interested in articulating what it\nwould be to have an ideal grasp of some subject, and he refers to such\na thing, speaking strictly, as scientia. This is what both\nthe theologian and the philosopher seek, which is to say that this is\nwhat Aquinas himself seeks. Each of these fields, theology and\nphilosophy, can be described as a single complex\nscientia—that is, as a science. We can also refer to\nthe myriad individual conclusions obtained in these fields as\nscientiae—that is, as items of scientific knowledge.\nPhilosophy itself, moreover, can be divided into various discrete\nfields of science: logic, physics, astronomy, biology, metaphysics,\nethics, and so on. Until the seventeenth century the physical sciences\nwere understood to be contained, in this way, within the field of\nphilosophy. Accordingly, the domains of scientia, conceived\nmost widely, were philosophy and theology.","\nThe fundamentals of Aquinas’s thinking about knowledge in this\nideal sense come from Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics.\nIn particular, he takes the discussion in Book I chapter 2 to offer a\ndefinition of scientia (in Greek,\nepistēmē), which in his commentary he articulates\nas follows (quotations are from Comm. Post. An. I.4):","\nEach of these bullet points raises a host of further questions, but,\nin broad outline, Aquinas understands scientia as the\napprehension, with certainty, of an entity, event or proposition,\nbased on a demonstrative proof grounded in the essential nature of the\nthing in question. As befits intellectual understanding (§6.2),\nscientia will concern universal truths. Because it concerns\nthe essences of things, it will concern necessary truths and will get\nat the underlying cause of a thing’s being so (MacDonald\n1993).","\nEventually, the demand that premises be “better known”\nleads back to the first principles of the science, which are\nself-evident (per se nota) in the sense that they are known\nto be true simply in virtue of their terms (Comm. Post.\nAnalytics I.7.8). Nothing could be better known than such a\nprinciple, but because these principles are self-evident there is also\nno need for any further demonstration. Each science has its own\nstarting points—its own first principles—which are not\nsusceptible to demonstration within that science. But not all such\nfirst principles are strictly self-evident. Within physics, for\ninstance, it is a first principle that there is motion, but that is\nneither absolutely necessary nor strictly self-evident. Accordingly,\nagain following Aristotle, Aquinas orders the various sciences\naccording to relations of “subalternation”, such that\nbiology is subalternate to physics, and physics to metaphysics. In\ngeneral, “the principles of a lower science are proved by the\nprinciples of a higher science” (Comm. Post. Analytics\nI.17.5). Among the natural speculative sciences—that is, setting\ntheology and ethics aside—the preeminent science is metaphysics,\nor first philosophy, “from which all the other sciences follow,\ntaking their principles from it” (Comm. Boethius De\ntrin. 5.1c). (On the structure of the sciences see Maurer 1986;\nWippel 1995a; Dougherty 2004.)","\nThis sort of foundationalist, infallibilist theory of knowledge is now\nthought of as Cartesian, but\n Descartes\n is simply following the Aristotelian tradition for which Aquinas\nbecame the preeminent spokesman. For Aquinas himself, however, the\naccount just described serves as an aspirational ideal rather than a\ndescription of something we have actually attained. In practice, even\nwhere we have demonstrative knowledge, we usually cannot trace the\nprinciples all the way back to ultimate first principles like the law\nof non-contradiction. Critical questions, like the non-eternity of the\nworld (§3), are contingent on the free choice of God and so have\nto be taken on faith. Even in places where certainty is possible in\nprinciple, large gaps in our knowledge remain. In general, “our\ncognition is so weak that no philosopher could have ever completely\ninvestigated the nature of a single fly” (On the\nApostles’ Creed [Collatio in symbolum\nApostolorum], proem). Accordingly, Aquinas distinguishes among\nvarious non-ideal cases. A demonstration that grasps the cause of a\nthing is a demonstration propter quid, but often—as in\nproving God’s existence—the best we can have is a\ndemonstration quia, which tells us only that a thing\nis so. Much of what we know holds true only for the most part, and so\nfails to be necessary, and often the premises of an argument cannot be\ntraced back to self-evident principles, in which case our argument is\ndialectical rather than demonstrative, yielding a conclusion\nthat is merely plausible (probabilis) rather than\napodictic.","\nIn all of this, Aquinas is following Aristotle and the later\nAristotelian tradition fairly closely, and thus the framework for\nscience and knowledge just sketched comes to be commonly accepted by\nthe later scholastic tradition all the way into the seventeenth\ncentury."],"subsection_title":"6.3 Knowledge and Science"}]},{"main_content":["\nThe immaterial human mind, as Aquinas understands it, is not just the\nintellect. The mind is an ensemble of three discrete powers, agent and\npossible intellect working in conjunction with the will. The rise of\nthe will as a faculty of the soul is a distinctively medieval idea,\nbut has strong roots in Augustine and, before him, in late\n Stoicism.\n These late-ancient sources had ascribed a prominent role in human\nagency to desire (appetitus) or volition (voluntas),\nand particularly to those desires that we endorse as our own, and\nwhich thus give rise to voluntary action. Among these earlier authors,\nour will is conceived of as something that we need to control, if we\nare to lead our lives as we should. By Aquinas’s time, however,\nthe will (voluntas) had come to be identified not just as a\npower of the soul but as the power that is principally in control of\nhuman agency, directing both our thoughts and our actions. Thus,\nwhereas Augustine and\n Boethius\n had wondered about how we have free choice (liberum\narbitrium) over our wills, Aquinas identifies the two, concluding\nthat “the will and free choice are not two powers, but\none” (ST 1a 83.4c). He was by no means the first to\nconceive of the power of will in this way, but the cogency and\ninfluence of his account ensured that this framework would dominate\nlater discussions.","\nThe will is one of three appetitive powers within us, distinguished\nfrom the irascible and concupiscible powers in being not a sensual\nappetite, the source of the passions (King 1998; Miner 2009), but a\nrational appetite, the source of voluntary agency. Its\nrationality consists in the way it is coordinate with intellect,\ntaking as its inputs the intellect’s practical judgments\nregarding what is to be done. Since the will’s function is\nstrictly appetitive, it cannot render its own practical judgments, and\nto that extent can act only on the basis of intellect: “every\nchoice and actual will within us is immediately caused by an\nintelligible apprehension” (SCG III.85.3). But that is\nby no means to say that the will is determined by the\nintellect’s judgment, because ultimately our will has the power\nto control what we think about: “the will moves both itself and\nall other capacities. For I think when I want to, and likewise I use\nall my other capacities and dispositions because I want to”\n(Quest. on Evil 6c). To be sure, by its very nature, the will\ncan desire only what is presented to it as a good (ST 1a2ae\n8.1). Accordingly, since our ultimate happiness (beatitudo)\nis good in every respect, “human beings have an appetite of\nnecessity for happiness” (ST 1a2ae 10.2c; see\n§8.1). But, with regard to any specific course of action, there\nare always multiple perspectives from which the situation can be\njudged, and the will can control how we think about\nthings—whether, for instance, we decide to focus on how\nrewarding a thing would be or on how tiring it would be. Even in the\ncase of our ultimate happiness, moreover, the will can choose not to\nthink about it, and so even in that extreme case the will’s\nchoices are not necessitated. On this basis Aquinas adamantly insists\non human freedom of choice, and treats claims that the will is\nnecessitated as “contrary to the faith and subverting all of the\nprinciples of moral philosophy” (Quest. on Evil\n6c).","\nUp to this point, Aquinas’s position is fairly clear. There has\nbeen considerable controversy over the centuries, however, regarding\nwhether Aquinas wants to go further and characterize the will’s\nagency as\n nondeterministic—as\n its being, in other words, a first and undetermined cause of free\naction. Within a few years of his death, after the\n Condemnation of 1277,\n views of this sort came to dominate scholastic philosophy, yielding a\nbroad consensus that held until the rise of seventeenth-century\nanti-scholasticism. Readers of Aquinas have been sharply divided,\nhowever, over where he fits into that history. At first glance it\nmight seem obvious that Aquinas is an opponent of determinism, given\nhis adamant opposition to the will’s being necessitated. Yet\nAquinas writes at a time at which the governing form of\nAristotelianism, drawn from the Arabic tradition of Ibn Sīnā\nand Ibn Rushd, is explicitly deterministic. In general, Aquinas\nstrives where he can to harmonize the faith with the mainstream of\nphilosophical opinion, and here in particular he shows signs of\nendorsing causal determinism as applied to the created world. Thus he\nascribes to Ibn Rushd (“the Commentator”) the doctrine\nthat “from that which is open both ways (ad utrumlibet)\nno action follows, unless it is inclined one way by something\nelse” (ST 1a 19.3 obj. 5). He hastens to reject this\nprinciple when applied to God, who is able to determine freely\nGod’s own choices. But outside the case of God he accepts the\nprinciple: “a cause that is of itself contingent must be\ndetermined to its effect by something external” (ibid., ad 5).\nAccordingly, he explicitly insists that the will’s freedom does\nnot require it to be its own first cause. Instead, he characterizes\nthe will’s operations as entwined over time with the operation\nof intellect, running backward through an agent’s history, with\none cause preceding another, all the way back to God’s initial\ncreation of the human soul (Quest. on Evil 6, ST 1a\n83.1 ad 3, ST 1a2ae 9.4c). This insistence on determining\ncauses might seem to fit well with his strict conception of\n divine providence:","\nEverything that happens here, insofar as it is brought back to the\nfirst divine cause, is found to be ordered rather than to exist\naccidentally, even if in comparison to other causes it is found to\nexist accidentally. This is why the Catholic faith says that nothing\nin the world happens aimlessly or fortuitously, and that all things\nare subject to divine providence. (Comm. Metaphys. VI.3.26;\nsee Goris 1997)\n","\nOn this reading of Aquinas, causal determinism fits with God’s\npreordained plan for the universe, and freedom is thus compatible with\nboth causal and theological determinism (Hause 1997; Kenny 1993 ch. 6;\nLoughran 1999; Pasnau 2002 ch. 7; Shanley 2007).","\nMany scholars, however, have denied that Aquinas is any sort of\ncompatibilist. That there is room for doubt is suggested in a passage\nthat, at first, looks to support a compatibilist account:","\nFreedom does not necessarily require that what is free be the first\ncause of itself, just as one thing’s being the cause of another\ndoes not require that it be the first cause of that other. God, then,\nis the first cause, moving both natural and voluntary causes. And just\nas his moving natural causes does not take away from their acts’\nbeing natural, so his moving voluntary causes does not take away from\ntheir actions’ being voluntary. Instead, he makes this be so for\nthem, because he works within each thing in accord with its own\ncharacter. (ST 1a 83.1 ad 3)\n","\nAlthough the passage begins in a way that looks friendly to causal\ndeterminism, the passage goes on to suggest the situation is more\ncomplicated. For although God is the first cause of our voluntary\nactions, God’s efficacy there is different from how it is with\nnatural causes: God somehow acts on the will in a way that “does\nnot take away” from its voluntariness. And Aquinas takes just\nthe same line in explaining how divine providence is consistent with\nhuman freedom (ST 1a 23.6c; SCG III.72–73;\nComm. Metaphys. VI.3.30–32; Comm. De interp.\nI.14.22).","\nAmong those who think that Aquinas’s God leaves room for\nindeterministic human agency, there remains a fundamental difference\nof opinion. Some (e.g., Stump 2003 ch. 9) think that such freedom, for\nAquinas, requires only that the will be an ultimate source, a first\ncreaturely cause. Others think that, in addition to this, Aquinas\nfurther requires the leeway to choose among alternative possibilities\n(e.g., Hoffmann and Michon 2017). Either way, a libertarian reading of\nAquinas is likely to stress his claim that the will is a self-mover:\n“Just as the will moves other capacities, so it also moves\nitself” (Quest. on Evil 6c; Gallagher 1994). This is an\nidea, moreover, that Aquinas had urged from his very first discussion\nof free choice in his Sentences commentary, where he argued\nthat free choice is possessed only by beings who “determine for\nthemselves their end and their action toward that end”\n(Sentences II.25.1c). In some sense, then, the will is free\nbecause it is self-determining. This distinguishes it from natural,\nnon-voluntary agents, whose determination comes from without.\nAquinas’s focus on the will’s role in such\nself-determination—a tendency that becomes more prominent in his\nlater works—makes it reasonable to include him in the\nthirteenth-century movement away from ancient intellectualism and\ntoward a voluntaristic conception of human nature. In emphasizing the\nwill’s overarching control, Aquinas can appeal to the critical\nimportance of the will’s various operations and dispositions.\nThe act of love, foundational to any Christian ethics, is an operation\nof will. The dispositions of justice and charity—the central\nvirtues of philosophy and theology, respectively—are both\nvirtues of the will. But it is not clear that Aquinas goes so\nfar—as\n Peter John Olivi,\n Henry of Ghent, and Scotus, among many others, soon would—as to\nexempt the will from the determinism that was agreed to characterize\nthe rest of the natural world. There remains a lively debate among\nscholars over this issue."],"section_title":"7. Will and Freedom","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nAquinas’s ethics is difficult to study because it is so vast and\nmultifaceted. Around half of the Summa theologiae, the\nmassive second part, is concerned with moral questions, suggesting\nsomething of the importance Aquinas ascribes to ethics in theology. To\nbring some order to this large topic, we can distinguish between three\nparts of the theory:","\n(For wide-ranging treatments of Aquinas’s ethics see McInerny\n1997; MacDonald and Stump 1998; Pope 2002; Irwin 2007: chs\n16–24; DeYoung, McCluskey, and Van Dyke 2009; McCluskey\n2017.)"],"section_title":"8. Ethics","subsections":[{"content":["\nAquinas’s worldview is thoroughly teleological, inasmuch as he\nholds “it is necessary that all agents act for the sake of an\nend” (ST 1a2ae 1.2c). There is a distinction to be\ndrawn, however, between those agents that are unable to understand\ntheir end and rational agents, who “move themselves to their end\nbecause they have control over their acts through free choice”\n(ibid.). It is for rational agents that ethical questions arise.\nAquinas follows Aristotle in supposing that human choices must be\nordered toward a single ultimate end: “there must be some\nultimate end on account of which all other things are desired, whereas\nthis end itself is not desired on account of anything else”\n(Comm. Nic. Ethics I.1.22). This ultimate end, whatever it\nis, can be referred to as happiness (beatitudo). In the\nTreatise on Happiness from the start of ST 1a2ae, after\nworking through various predictably unsatisfactory candidates for our\nultimate end—not riches, not honor, not pleasure, and so\non—Aquinas arrives at the view that happiness consists primarily\nin intellectual contemplation. And since the highest truth and the\ngreatest good are of course God, our ultimate happiness must lie\nthere: “final and complete happiness can consist in nothing\nother than the vision of the divine essence” (ST 1a2ae\n3.8c). Human beings possess this most fully in the life to come (Brown\n2021), but even in this life Aquinas’s conception of happiness\nis strongly intellectualist: “it is clear that people who give\nthemselves to the contemplation of truth are the happiest a person in\nthis life can be” (Comm. Nic. Ethics X.12.2110).","\nThis eudaimonistic framework—to use the Greek term for ethical\ntheories aimed at happiness—shapes all of Aquinas’s\nethical thinking. It is perhaps the most striking instance of his\nconfidence in Aristotelianism as the proper philosophical foundation\nfor a Christian worldview. Predictably, that confidence was met with\nvarious sorts of challenges. One concerns his insistence that our\nultimate end is intellectual rather than volitional. For many\nsubsequent theorists, Christian and secular, the ultimate end of human\nlife should not be intellectual contemplation but instead should be\nlove. Aquinas agrees—indeed, he stresses—that love is an\nessential complement to happiness, pulling us toward our end and\nrejoicing in its grasp. Still, the goal of life properly speaking is\nto understand God and God’s creation (ST 1a2ae 3.4).\n(For nuanced discussions see Stenberg 2016a and Stump 2022.)","\nA second concern, which troubles eudaimonism in all of its forms, is\nthat Aquinas rests the foundations of ethics on a self-directed\nconcern for our own happiness. That is liable to look like a doubtful\nstrategy for any ethical theory, and particularly for\nJudeo–Christian ethics given its radically altruistic\norientation, as epitomized in the twin injunctions to “Love the\nLord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all\nyour mind” and to “Love your neighbor as yourself”\n(Matthew 22:37–39, quoting Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18).\nOn its face, the eudaimonistic approach might seem to conflict\ndirectly with these injunctions, given the way that it grounds all\nhuman agency in our ultimate pursuit of happiness:","\nThe will naturally tends towards its ultimate end: for every human\nbeing naturally wills happiness. And this natural willing is the cause\nof all other willings, since whatever a human being wills, he wills\nfor the sake of an end. (ST 1a 60.2c)\n","\nAquinas is unflinching in his insistence that our final end is our own\nhappiness. But it has to be remembered that ‘happiness’ is\njust a generic label for the human activity that is ultimately best\nfor us. And what is ultimately best for us is not the selfish pursuit\nof our own wellbeing, which is surely an ambition that would make\nanyone miserable. What we should seek, as we have seen already, is an\nunderstanding of the world and its Creator. This, again speaking\nteleologically, is what we were created to do. By pursuing this\nsubstantive goal, and actualizing our intellectual capacities to the\nutmost, we make ourselves as good as we can be, and we contribute to\nthe universe as a whole’s being as good as it can be. How does\nsuch intellectual activity ground a theory of ethics? It does so\nbecause when we understand God and the created order, we understand\nwhy we should love God preeminently and why we should love our\nneighbor. But to see how these ideas get developed, we need to turn to\nhis theory of the moral law. (For general discussions of\nAquinas’s eudaimonistic framework see MacDonald 1991b; Bradley\n1997; Kenny 1998; Osborne 2005; Stenberg 2016b.)"],"subsection_title":"8.1 Happiness"},{"content":["\nAquinas’s moral theory does not offer the sort of brief and\ncomprehensive criterion for rightness and wrongness that draws\nstudents toward\n consequentialism\n or\n Kant’s moral philosophy.\n What he offers instead is a deep and systematic explanation of where\nmorality comes from, yielding a moral code that is impressively\nresponsive to the changing circumstances of human life.","\nThe key text for Aquinas’s thinking about the moral law is his\nTreatise on Law (ST 1a2ae 90–108). There he\ndistinguishes between four kinds of law that play a role in guiding\nright human action:","\nThe eternal law governs everything, but can serve to guide us only\nwhen it is somehow transmitted to us. One way in which it is\ntransmitted is through divine law, preeminently through the Bible, and\nhere Aquinas distinguishes between the old law of the Hebrew Bible\n(qq. 98–105) and the new law described in the Gospel (qq.\n106–8). The other form of transmission, philosophically the most\ninteresting part of his account, is the\n natural law.\n Whereas human law is the contingent result of social and political\norganization, the natural law is innate within us. Since Aquinas\nthinks that God orders everything to its proper end (§8.1), there\nis a sense in which all things follow a natural law by which they\nparticipate in the eternal law. But when Aquinas refers to natural law\nin a moral context, he means the distinctive way in which rational\nagents have been ordered to achieve their proper end; hence he has in\nmind a law that governs the mind. Thus, “the law of nature is\nnothing other than the light of intellect, placed within us by God,\nthrough which we grasp what is to be done and what is to be\navoided” (On the Ten Commandments [Collationes in\ndecem praeceptis] proem).","\nSo described, natural law might be nothing more than an innate\ninclination to accept a fixed set of moral laws prescribed by God. In\nfact, however, Aquinas’s theory offers something more complex\nand nuanced, because he thinks the moral law arises not out of brutely\ninnate inclination but out of rational reflection on the good (Finnis\n1998 ch. 3; Rhonheimer 1987 [2000]). Mirroring the way he develops\ntheoretical science out of first principles (§6.3), he thinks\nmoral reasoning also rises out of self-evident first principles, the\ngrasp of which is the defining task of the intellect’s power of\nsynderesis (ST 1a 79.12). The most fundamental such precept\nis this:","\nThe good should be done and pursued, and the bad should be avoided.\n(ST 1a2ae 94.2c)\n","\nAquinas takes this to be self-evident, because he accepts\nAristotle’s claim at the start of the Nicomachean\nEthics that the good is what all things desire. By beginning\nhere, Aquinas builds into the ground floor of his account a\nsubstantive story about\n moral motivation.\n The story requires tying the ensuing development of his theory to\nfacts about what human beings actually desire; without that tie, the\ntheory would equivocate on what it means by the good. Aquinas\nexplicitly recognizes as much, remarking that “the order of the\nprecepts of natural law accords with the order of natural\ninclinations” (ST 1a2ae 94.2c). At this point, Aquinas\ncould appeal to eudaimonism: that all human beings desire happiness as\ntheir ultimate end (§8.1). A very thin conception of natural law\nmight suppose that human beings are given only this much innate\ndirection, and thereafter left to sort out for themselves what will\nmake them happy. But Aquinas’s conception of natural law is much\nthicker, both in the sense that he articulates a rich and substantive\nnotion of the happiness that is our ultimate end (as above), and in\nthe sense that he thinks we have been given various further innate\ninclinations, intended to provide us with specific guidance toward\nthat ultimate end. Among these are inclinations to preserve our own\nlives, toward sexual activity, toward educating the young, toward\nknowing the truth about God, and toward living in society (ST\n1a2ae 94.2c; see also SCG III.129). These innate\ninclinations, combined with the first practical principle (“The\ngood should be done…”) and Aquinas’s substantive\nconception of happiness, are the foundations from which arises a\ncomprehensive account of the moral law, relying on\n conscience\n as the rational activity of working out what ought to be done from a\nmoral point of view (ST 1a 79.13).","\nInasmuch as the moral point of view is no different from the point of\nview that seeks our own happiness, Aquinas shares with ancient ethics\nthe conviction that rational self-interest provides an adequate\nfoundation for morality (Irwin 2007: ch. 19). But the weight Aquinas\nputs on our innate inclinations in shaping the moral law gives his\naccount a distinctive character. Among its champions, this approach\nhas been celebrated for the way it grounds traditional values in facts\nabout human nature. To its critics, the view looks intellectually\ndubious twice over: on scientific grounds inasmuch as it makes false\nclaims about the universality of various inclinations (Massey 1999);\nand philosophically inasmuch as it grounds\n normativity in metaethics\n on descriptive facts about human nature. Such criticisms, however,\nmiss the philosophical sophistication of the overarching framework. To\nbe sure, we now understand the diversity of human\ninclinations—for instance, regarding gender and\nsexuality—much better than we did even a century ago.\nAquinas’s theory can survive when we update these assumptions,\nand indeed may generate surprisingly modern results (Oliva 2015). As\nfor the complaint that the theory conflates normativity with nature,\nthat would have real force only supposing that we had some better\naccount of the basis of normative value. As things are, if there is a\nGod, then it seems plausible to suppose that God would want us to be\nhappy and would create our natures to guide us in seeking such\nhappiness. On the other hand, if there is no God, then it is not clear\nwhat foundation for ethics there might be other than facts about the\nnature of human beings and how we best thrive in the world we live in.\n(The literature on the natural law in Aquinas is large and\ncontentious. For a sample see Grisez 1965; Lisska 1996; Murphy 2001;\nJensen 2015; Porter 2018. For an introduction to the variety of recent\nperspectives see Angier 2021. For a sense of the complexity of the\ncontested issues see\n Aquinas’ moral, political, and legal philosophy.)"],"subsection_title":"8.2 Natural Law"},{"content":["\nThe theory of natural law gives us Aquinas’s moral theory: it\nidentifies the foundations of ethics and frames the general contours\nof the moral law. For us to adhere to that law, however, it is not\nenough to trust to the light of intellect and our natural\ninclinations. Reliably moral agents must, in addition, cultivate the\nright sorts of virtuous dispositions. Accordingly, Aquinas develops a\ncomplex\n virtue ethics\n to frame his account of our moral psychology.","\nThe virtues are a certain kind of psychological disposition\n(habitus): they are the perfections of those powers of the\nsoul that are under our voluntary control. Aquinas devotes roughly a\nquarter of the Summa theologiae—mainly the\n2a2ae—to his theory of the virtues, and also dedicates a series\nof disputed questions to the subject. He takes from Aristotle the\nfamiliar idea that it is through the repetition of certain kinds of\nactions that we acquire the virtues (as well, of course, as the\nvices): by acting honestly we acquire, over time, the virtue of\nhonesty. Less familiarly, he imposes a very high standard on what\ncounts as a virtue: it must be incapable of giving rise to an immoral\nact.","\nTwo things are required for an act’s perfection: first, the act\nmust be right; second, the [underlying] disposition must be incapable\nof being the source of a contrary act. For that which is the source of\ngood and bad acts cannot, of itself, be the perfect source of a good\nact. (Quest. on the Virtues in General 2c)\n","\nThis is not to say that a person with the virtue of honesty cannot be\ndishonest. Just as virtues can be acquired through practice, so they\ncan be lost through the wrong kind of practice, and that loss must\nbegin somewhere. Still, in such a case, the dishonesty will not arise\nthrough the virtue. Any characterization of a virtue that would make\nits possession a mixed blessing would have failed to delimit a true\nvirtue.","\nThe reason that the virtues are so important to Aquinas’s ethics\nis that he thinks that we cannot, over time, act morally without them.\nHe highlights three reasons why moral activity requires the virtues\n(Quest. on the Virtues in General 1c):","\nThese are not meant to be necessary conditions on an act’s\ngoodness, but Aquinas thinks they are required for a person’s\nactions to count as wholly praiseworthy. In contrast to the effortful\ncalculations of a utilitarian striving to maximize the beneficial\nconsequences of every act, he thinks moral goodness requires a\ndispositional stability in our underlying psychology. And given\nmorality’s ultimate basis in Aquinas’s overarching theory\nof happiness, it should be no surprise that he thinks happiness, in\nthis life, consists in our acting through these virtues (ST\n1a2ae 5.5–6).","\nAmong the many fine-grained distinctions that Aquinas makes between\nvarious virtues and vices, he treats as preeminent the traditional\nfour cardinal virtues and the three theological virtues. The cardinal\nvirtues are","\nUnlike some of his contemporaries, who argued that all the virtues\nshould be dispositions of the will (Kent 1995), Aquinas thinks that\neach of these four virtues perfects a different power of the soul.\nBravery and temperance, indeed, are not perfections of rational powers\nat all. They are, however, defined in terms of right reason, and this\nboth connects his virtue theory to the theory of natural law and helps\nto explain why the virtues cannot be the cause of immoral actions. The\nperson who is “brave” in a foolhardy way would not\nstrictly count as brave. Deepening the connection between these\nvirtues and right reason is that Aquinas treats the intellectual\nvirtue of prudence (prudentia, or phronēsis in\nGreek) as foundational to all the other cardinal virtues:\n“rightness and full goodness in all the other virtues comes from\nprudence” (Quest. on the Virtues in General 6c; see\nWestberg 1994). Without prudence, none of the other virtues are\npossible. Conversely, prudence itself requires the proper disposition\nof our various appetitive powers. Accordingly, Aquinas endorses the\ntraditional doctrine of the unity of the virtues: one cannot have any\nof them without having all of them (ST 1a2ae 65.1).","\nAlthough the four cardinal virtues, as their name suggests, have\nhistorically been given pride of place within philosophy, Aquinas\ngives greater preeminence to the theological virtues that Paul\ndescribes in 1 Corinthians 13:","\nFor these to count as theological virtues, rather than as\ngeneric dispositions, they must each be further defined as having God\nas their object. They must also be understood to be infused in us by\nGod, because the humanly attainable versions of these virtues are not\nsufficient for our moral perfection (ST 1a2ae 62.1). Indeed,\nfor similar reasons, moral perfection requires that even the cardinal\nvirtues be infused by God (ST 1a2ae 63.3). To receive the\nvirtues from God requires grace, which is something we can never fully\nmerit, and which God freely chooses to give or to withhold: “no\nmatter how much someone prepares himself, he does not receive grace\nfrom God necessarily” (ST 1a2ae 112.3sc). Only through\nthis grace, and the infused virtues it brings, can we achieve the\nperfect happiness that is our ultimate end. (On the cardinal virtues\nsee Hause 2007; Stump 2011. On the theological virtues see Wawrykow\n2012; Porter 2019. On the infused cardinal virtues see Mattison 2011;\nGoris and Schoot 2017; Knobel 2021. On grace see Torrell 1996 [2003]\nchs. 6–9; Stump 2018 ch. 7; Hoffmann 2022.)"],"subsection_title":"8.3 Virtue Theory"}]},{"main_content":["\nDuring his lifetime, Aquinas was recognized as an extraordinary figure\nboth for his intellectual achievements and for his personal sanctity.\nThe immense number of surviving manuscripts and the wide range of his\ninfluence testifies to the first. As for the second, his death in\nFossanova immediately gave rise to the sort of veneration reserved for\nthe saints: claims of miracles at once arose, and a long-running\ndispute began over where the holy relic of his body would be kept.\nThis process culminated in his canonization on July 18, 1323.","\nThese developments notwithstanding, many of Aquinas’s specific\nviews—particularly in philosophy—were extremely\ncontroversial. Among the 219 articles condemned in Paris in 1277 are a\nsignificant number that seem to implicate Aquinas’s teachings\n(Hissette 1977; Wippel 1995b). It would have been lost on no one at\nthe time that these articles were promulgated three years, to the day,\nafter his death. It seems likely that the authorities in Paris were\nplanning an explicit censure of certain of Aquinas’s core\ntheses—especially his unitarian theory of substantial form\n(§5) and his conception of prime matter as pure potentiality\n(§4)—until higher authorities cut this process short\n(Torrell 1993 [2022] ch. 16). Later in March 1277, in Oxford,\nArchbishop\n Robert Kilwardby\n condemned a series of theses that explicitly includes those two\ndistinctively Aquinian doctrines. Also around this time, the\nFranciscan William de la Mare published a lengthy Correctorium\nfratris Thomae, with verbatim quotations from Aquinas’s\ncorpus paired with putative “corrections”. Soon after,\nvarious disciples of Aquinas rallied to his defense, in a series of\nworks entitled the Correctorium Corruptorii Thomae (Glorieux\n1927; Jordan 1982). For the quarter century after Aquinas’s\ndeath, scholasticism took shape around his Dominican supporters and\nhis Franciscan critics.","\nIn the early fourteenth century, Aquinas’s influence had to\ncompete against the emergence of two brilliantly original Franciscans:\nfirst Scotus and his expansive realism; then\n William Ockham\n and his parsimonious nominalism. In the face of these and many other\ncomplex crosscurrents, Aquinas’s views came to seem both less\nurgent and less dangerous. Two years after his canonization, the\nbishop of Paris clarified that the 1277 condemnations should not be\nheld to apply to Aquinas’s teaching, though the bishop made\nclear that this should not be taken as an endorsement. Among the many\nemerging rival views, Aquinas continued to have his vociferous\nsupporters, particularly among the Dominicans, who were statutorily\nrequired to promote his teaching. In the early fifteenth century, John\nCapreolus emerged as a champion of Thomism as a systematic philosophy,\nand a century later Cajetan (Thomas de Vio) made further systematic\ndevelopments. In 1567, Pope Pius V numbered Aquinas among the doctors\nof the Church, a title previously reserved for the ancient Church\nfathers. When the Jesuit order came to prominence, around this same\ntime, its members—including\n Francisco Suárez—were\n enjoined to adhere to those views that were safest and best\nestablished, and especially to those of Aquinas, “because of his\nauthority and his more secure and approved teachings” (Pasnau\n2011, 436).","\nEven as Thomism gradually became ascendant within scholastic\nAristotelianism, that whole tradition started to look more and more\nhidebound, as it moved into its increasingly mannerist and then\nbaroque stages.\n Martin Luther’s\n hostility toward the Roman Catholic Church mirrored his hostility\ntoward scholastic philosophy and theology: “soon no Thomist,\nAlbertist, Scotist, or Ockhamist will be left in the world, but all\nwill be simple children of God and true Christians” (Oberman\n1966, 18–19). The Italian humanists attacked from a different\ndirection, prizing historical scholarship over intricate metaphysics.\nBy the seventeenth century,\n Thomas Hobbes\n and his contemporaries flaunted their scorn for the scholastics, who\n“converse in questions of matters incomprehensible”\n(Leviathan viii.27). It would not be until the eighteenth\ncentury, however, that these “moderns” began to drive the\nThomists and other scholastics out of the universities. (On the\nreception of Aquinas over the centuries see Levering and Plested\n2021.)","\nIn 1879, Pope Leo XIII called for a revival in the study and teaching\nof Aquinas. One fruit of this encyclical was the founding of the\ndefinitive Leonine edition of Aquinas’s work. Another was a\nrenewal of the old Thomistic picture of Aquinas as standing at the\nsummit of philosophical and theological achievement, leaving\nsubsequent developments—from Scotus to Descartes, Kant and\nbeyond—to be dismissed as just so much decline and decay. Such\nzeal was hardly likely to be sustained for long, however, and the\ntwentieth century witnessed a flourishing of Thomisms of all kinds, in\nscholars like\n Jacques Maritain,\n Etienne Gilson,\n Elizabeth Anscombe,\n and Alasdair MacIntyre. As more recent scholarship has deepened our\nunderstanding both of Aquinas and of his successors, we now have a\nmuch fuller picture of the richness of later medieval philosophy.\nAquinas today, viewed as a philosopher, looks not so much like the\nculmination of an era, but rather like the brilliant beginning of\nEurope’s philosophical renaissance."],"section_title":"9. Influence","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Life and Works\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThomas Aquinas was born near Aquino, halfway between Rome and Naples,\\naround the year 1225. He was the youngest of at least nine children,\\nand born into a wealthy family that presided over a prominent castle\\nin Roccasecca. As a teenage student in Naples, he fell under the sway\\nof the Dominicans, a newly founded order of priests devoted to\\npreaching and learning. Joining the order at the age of nineteen, he\\nwas assigned to Paris for further study, but his plans were delayed by\\nthe intransigency of his parents, who had hoped he would play a\\nleading role at the venerable local monastery, Monte Cassino, where he\\nhad studied as a child. After confining him to Roccasecca for a year,\\nhis parents yielded and Thomas went to Paris as a Dominican friar.\",\n \"\\nThomas spent three years in Paris, studying philosophy, and then was\\nsent to Cologne, in 1248, under the supervision of\\n Albert the Great.\\n This older Dominican proved to be the ideal mentor. Albert was at the\\ntime the leading figure in the newly prominent program of melding\\nChristian theology with Greek and Arabic philosophy. He possessed an\\nencyclopedic grasp of the sciences of the day, which had been\\nexpanding at a dizzying pace thanks to the new availability of the\\nAristotelian corpus in Latin translation. It was Albert’s firm\\nconviction, which became Aquinas’s own, that the Christian faith\\ncould only benefit from a profound engagement with philosophy and\\nscience.\",\n \"\\nThomas evidently flourished under Albert’s influence, for when\\nAlbert was asked in 1252 to nominate a student to pursue an advanced\\ndegree in theology at the University of Paris, he chose Thomas, even\\nthough he was still two years younger than the minimum required age.\\nAfter four years as a bachelor of theology, lecturing on the Bible and\\non Peter Lombard’s Sentences, Aquinas received his\\ndoctorate and was immediately appointed master of theology, once again\\nat an earlier age than the statutes officially allowed. From 1256\\nuntil 1259, he held the Dominican chair of theology in Paris,\\npreaching, lecturing on the Bible, and presiding over various\\nphilosophical and theological disputations.\",\n \"\\nAlthough some masters at the University of Paris spent decades\\nteaching there, it was the custom of the Dominican order (as with the\\nFranciscans) to rotate scholars through these positions. Accordingly,\\nin 1259 Aquinas was sent back to Italy, where he spent most of the\\nfollowing decade in several Dominican houses of study, first in\\nOrvieto (in Umbria) and then in Rome. During these years, while he\\ncontinued to preach, lecture on the Bible, and conduct academic\\ndisputations, he found the time to develop his two most important\\nworks, the Summa contra gentiles and the Summa\\ntheologiae.\",\n \"\\nIn 1268, Aquinas was asked to return to Paris for an unusual second\\nterm as master of theology. Here he put his now venerable reputation\\nto work in attempting to steer the philosophical conversation away\\nfrom various extreme positions that were dividing scholars. He wrote a\\nbrief treatise arguing for a middle ground on the vexed question of\\nwhether the world could be proved to be eternal or created in time\\n(§3), and a somewhat longer treatise against the view that all\\nhuman beings share a single intellect (§6.2). These years were\\ndominated, though, by his efforts to complete the Summa\\ntheologiae and at the same time write commentaries on all of\\nAristotle’s principal works. When his second four-year term in\\nParis came to an end he returned to Italy, this time to Naples, in\\n1272. During these final years he nearly, but not quite, finished both\\nthe Summa theologiae and his commentary series. Instead,\\nafter a year and a half in Naples, he stopped writing, famously\\nexplaining that “All that I have written seems to me like straw\\ncompared with what has now been revealed to me.” A few months\\nafter that he died, in the Cistercian abbey of Fossanova, on March 7,\\n1274.\",\n \"\\nThis chronology of Aquinas’s life is fairly well attested. There\\nare also many colorful stories about his life, many of which stem from\\ntestimony given during his canonization inquiry in 1319. The\\nauthenticity of these stories is unknowable. Aquinas himself, in his\\nwritings, reveals almost nothing about his personal life. (For\\nbiography see Porro 2012 [2016]; Torrell 1993 [2022]; Legge 2022.)\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.1 Life\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nOver a mere two decades of literary activity, Aquinas left behind more\\nthan eight million words (eight times more than has survived, for\\ninstance, from Aristotle). It is a measure of Aquinas’s\\nimmediate and lasting influence that—quite unlike the situation\\nwith other medieval philosophers—essentially everything he wrote\\nhas survived and has been lovingly edited and translated into English\\nand many other modern languages. In outline, there are five categories\\nof works:\",\n \"\\nThe bibliography below contains further details about individual works\\nand their chronology.\",\n \"\\nThe Summa theologiae (ST) generally represents\\nAquinas’s most considered thought on a given topic, and the work\\nis comprehensive enough that it contains at least some discussion of\\nalmost all of Aquinas’s intellectual concerns. It divides into\\nfour parts:\",\n \"\\nThe treatments in ST are deliberately brief. Aquinas writes\\nin the preface that “our intent in this work is to develop those\\nissues that concern the Christian religion in a way that suits the\\neducation of those who are just beginning.” Today, no one thinks\\nof ST as a work for beginners, although its scope and\\nconcision make it a useful place to start. A serious engagement with\\nAquinas’s work, however, requires comparing ST with\\nparallel treatments elsewhere, such as the earlier Summa contra\\ngentiles (SCG) and the still earlier commentary on\\nLombard’s Sentences. Moreover, since all three of these\\nlong works are written as theological treatises, it is useful\\nalso to compare these discussions with his accounts in the more\\nphilosophically focused and often more detailed disputed questions. In\\ngeneral, given how much Aquinas wrote and how often he reconsidered\\nthe same issue from a slightly different perspective, a careful study\\nof his work requires comparing multiple treatments of the same issue.\\nAnd since he did not begin to circulate his work until he was 30, and\\nlived for only two decades more, those various treatments tend to\\nreinforce rather than conflict with each other. (Naturally, scholars\\nhave long debated whether his thought evolves on one topic or another,\\non which see Pini 2012.)\",\n \"\\nMost of Aquinas’s central texts are written in the distinctive\\nscholastic style of the disputed question, in which the topic to be\\ndiscussed is posed at the start as a question. The dispute begins with\\na series of arguments on one side. These, however, almost always\\nrepresent the opposite of Aquinas’s own position, and so, after\\nthe initial arguments, one or more arguments are posed to the contrary\\n(sed contra), and then Aquinas makes his own main reply in\\nthe body (corpus) of the article, and finally he responds to\\nthe initial arguments (ad 1, ad 2, etc.). This structure is\\nbased on actual classroom procedures, even if Aquinas’s\\ncarefully composed works are never a literal record of an actual\\nclassroom debate. It is a method that lends itself to argumentative\\nrigor, but often is best digested by reading the text in something\\nother than the order in which it appears on the page. (I myself like\\nto begin with the main reply.)\",\n \"\\nAn important exception to the disputed-question format is\\nAquinas’s commentaries. These are often extremely useful for\\nunderstanding his own philosophical thought. This is true most\\nobviously of the philosophical commentaries, which cover most of\\nAristotle’s key works. The point holds true, however, for his\\nbiblical commentaries as well, because they regularly contain\\ninteresting discussions of wide-ranging philosophical topics (Stump\\n2010). One has to approach all of Aquinas’s commentaries with\\nsome caution, however, because his principal method of commentary is\\nto produce a word-by-word paraphrase. This means that, if one does not\\nread these works with one eye on the text being commented upon, a\\npassage that may seem to represent Aquinas’s thought may instead\\nbe a rephrased version of what Aristotle (or Isaiah or Paul) said.\\nWhether or not Aquinas’s paraphrase of a passage from Aristotle\\nshould be treated as a reflection of Aquinas’s own thought is a\\nmatter of some dispute (Jenkins 1996; Elders 2009), but readers should\\nat least be aware of how these commentaries are structured. The\\npassages most likely to shed light on Aquinas’s own thought are\\nthose where he breaks away from his line-by-line paraphrase to offer a\\nbrief lecture on some issue germane to a proper understanding of the\\nunderlying text.\",\n \"\\nIt is tempting, for modern readers, to divide Aquinas’s work\\ninto the theological and philosophical, but lines here are difficult\\nto draw. The medieval university did formally distinguish between the\\nhigher-level discipline of theology and the undergraduate arts\\nfaculty, whose curriculum consisted largely in the works of Aristotle.\\nBut many of the questions of the theologians—such as the\\nworkings of intellect, the nature of freedom, the systematization of\\nethical theory—are now seen as paradigmatically philosophical.\\nAt the same time, much of Aristotle, and therefore much of the arts\\nfaculty curriculum, looks to us more scientific than philosophical.\\nAquinas, unlike his teacher Albert the Great, only occasionally\\ndwelled on what we now think of as scientific questions. Conversely,\\nas a professor of theology, he considered at great length various\\nmatters that depend on\\n divine revelation, such as the\\nnature of the Trinity and the character of Christ’s humanity. A\\ncomplete understanding of Aquinas’s thought thus requires\\nspending considerable time with such properly theological\\nquestions. At the same time, it is appropriate today to number Aquinas\\namong the philosophers, because he was particularly interested in and\\nhad particularly innovative things to say about what we now think of\\nas philosophical questions. The tremendous energy he put into\\ncommenting on Aristotle’s works is a testimony both to the\\nimportance he gives philosophy for a proper understanding of theology,\\nand to his confidence that progress in philosophy will only benefit\\nthe Christian faith. As he famously wrote, “if anything is found\\nin the words of the philosophers that is contrary to the faith, this\\nis not philosophy but rather an abuse of philosophy, due to a failure\\nof reason” (Comm. Boethius De trinitate 2.3c). \\n\\n\",\n \"\\nFor book-length general surveys of Aquinas's thought see Stump 2003,\\nDavies and Stump 2012, Shields and Pasnau 2016, Stump and White\\n2022.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.2 Works\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nAquinas believes that natural reason can demonstratively prove\\nGod’s existence. The first step is to show that, for everything\\nin the changeable world around us, there is a first cause, or prime\\nmover, in virtue of which all other things have their existence, their\\nmotion, their qualities and direction. This is the result he gets in\\nhis much discussed “five ways” of proving God’s\\nexistence (ST 1a 2.3c). Aquinas denies that Anselm’s\\n ontological argument\\n has any force as a proof (ST 1a 2.1 ad 2; SCG\\nI.10–11). Instead, the first three ways are\\n cosmological arguments,\\n based on the impossibility of an infinite series of causes.\\nCommentators generally agree that what Aquinas means to exclude is an\\ninfinite series of simultaneous causes, a “vertical”\\nseries as opposed to an infinite “horizontal” series of\\ncauses going back in time, which he does not think can be proved to be\\nimpossible (§3). Each of the five brief arguments ends with a\\nvariation on the formula “this is what everyone calls\\nGod.” He puts his claim cautiously at this point, because to\\ndemonstrate the existence of a prime mover falls well short of\\ndemonstrating the existence of a being worthy of being called God. For\\nall we have seen so far, for instance, this first cause might itself\\nbe a body. But Aquinas thinks natural reason—what we now call\\n natural theology—can\\n go well beyond the five ways. ST 1a goes on to establish\\nthat this first cause is not a body (3.1), nor composite in any way\\nand hence entirely\\n simple\\n (3.7), perfect in every respect (4.2), the highest good (6.2),\\ninfinite (7.1),\\n omnipresent\\n (8.2), completely unchangeable (9.1), eternal (10.2), supremely one\\n(11.4), and possessing\\n the most perfect knowledge\\n (14.1). These results establish the existence of something worthy of\\nbeing called God. (On Aquinas’s natural theology in general see\\nKretzmann 1997; Wippel 2000 chs. 10–13; Stump 2003 pt. I. On the\\nfive ways see Kenny 1969; MacDonald 1991a; Martin 1997; Pawl 2012;\\nCohoe 2013.)\",\n \"\\nThe successes of natural theology, for Aquinas, have their limit. For\\nalthough natural reason can establish the existence of a perfect\\nbeing, it is incapable of establishing many of the features that\\ndistinctively characterize the Christian God, such as God’s\\ntriune nature and God’s incarnation as a human being. Here is a\\nplace where philosophy alone, unaided by revelation, fails to yield an\\nadequate theology. Since the ultimate goal of human life, salvation in\\nthe life to come (§8.1), requires some grasp of these Christian\\ntruths, “it was necessary for the sake of human salvation that\\ncertain truths that surpass human reason be made known to us through\\ndivine revelation” (ST 1a 1.1). The study of revealed\\ntheology is important, moreover, not only with respect to these\\nso-called mysteries of the faith, but also in cases where the results\\nof natural reason are too precarious to be counted on. Without direct\\naccess through revelation, “the truth about God investigated by\\nreason would be available only to a few people, after a long time, and\\nwith the admixture of many errors.” Accordingly, “beyond\\nthe philosophical disciplines investigated by human reason, it was\\nnecessary to have a sacred teaching through revelation” (ibid.).\\nThis sacred teaching (sacra doctrina) is the work of\\ntheology.\",\n \"\\nOne of the most difficult and most discussed issues in Aquinas’s\\nnatural theology is the limits he places on our ability to understand\\nGod’s nature. A sign of the difficulties to come emerges just\\nafter he sets out his initial five-way proof, when he remarks,\",\n \"\\nOnce it is grasped that something exists, it remains to be\\ninvestigated how it exists, in order that what it is may be\\nknown. But because it is not possible for us to know what God\\nis, but rather what God is not, we cannot consider\\nhow God exists, but rather how God does not exist. (ST 1a\\n3pr; see Davies 2018)\\n\",\n \"\\nThat Aquinas in fact honors this constraint is far from obvious, given\\nthe seemingly positive claims he makes regarding the divine nature. To\\nunderstand his approach one must come to grips with his theory of\\n analogical predication.\\n In a case like God’s goodness, for instance, Aquinas does not\\nmean only to deny God’s badness. It can be truly said, he\\nthinks, that God is good. The difficulty is that the word\\n‘good,’ when truly applied to God, has a different sense\\nfrom what it has in cases familiar to our own experience. The two\\nsenses are thus not univocal, but nor are they purely equivocal, as if\\nGod’s goodness were wholly unrelated to the goodness we\\nexperience. Instead, the usages are analogical (ST\\n1a 13.5). So, “when we say God is good, the sense is not that\\nGod is the cause of goodness or that God is not bad; rather, the sense\\nis that what we call good in creatures preexists in God, albeit in a\\nhigher mode” (ST 1a 13.2c). We can say with confidence,\\non the basis of this analysis, that God is good, indeed preeminently\\nso. To the extent that we are good, it is so only by participation in\\nGod’s goodness. But our cognitive limitations preclude a more\\nadequate account of this “higher mode” in which God is\\ngood. (On analogy in Aquinas see McInerny 1996; Montagnes 1963 [2004];\\nDewan 2007; Ashworth 2014; Hochschild 2019.)\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. God\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe mainstream of philosophical tradition as Aquinas knew it, running\\nfrom Aristotle through the Greek commentators and into the Arabic\\ntradition, held that the material world, and all the kinds of living\\nthings in it, had always existed. These earlier Aristotelians still\\nthought there was a place for God, as the first mover, but they\\nunderstood God to be the initial, remote source of motions that had\\nalways existed, rather than an eternal being who created the universe\\nanew. Aquinas understood Christianity to be committed to the latter\\nview. He holds that the changeable universe around us has existed for\\nonly a finite amount of time; that God, in contrast, has existed\\neternally and unchangingly; and that God freely chose to create the\\nchangeable universe from nothing (ex nihilo). To bring a\\nthing into existence ex nihilo is the defining feature of\\n creation,\\n in the strict sense of that term, and only God can do it (ST\\n1a 45). Everything else in the natural world causes new things to come\\ninto existence by modifying what is here already. The proper\\nterminology for these natural changes is generation and\\ncorruption, which refer to a substance’s coming into or\\ngoing out of existence by natural means, and alteration,\\nwhich refers to a substance’s undergoing accidental change:\\ncontinuing to exist through change to its shape, color, and other\\nnon-essential properties.\",\n \"\\nAristotle and many of his followers believed they could prove that the\\nworld had always existed. Conversely, many of Aquinas’s\\ncontemporaries thought they could prove the opposite, that the world\\nhad to have a beginning in time, and the debate between these rival\\nphilosophical accounts was one of the most acrimonious issues in the\\nearly medieval university (Dales 1990). Aquinas took up the question\\nin detail in his treatise On the Eternity of the World,\\nconcluding that no demonstrative argument is possible either way. For\\nall we can tell, God could have created the world in such a way that\\nit had always existed. That we think otherwise is another deliverance\\nof the faith, not susceptible to philosophical proof. This measured\\nconclusion is characteristic of his thought in many domains. On the\\none hand, he has complete confidence that philosophical reasoning,\\nproperly pursued, will not yield results that are a threat to\\nChristianity. On the other hand, he thinks it discredits the faith to\\ndefend it through dubious attempts at demonstration. The key is to see\\nwhere philosophy can be of service, and where it must give way to\\nrevealed doctrine (Wippel 1995c; Kretzmann 1999 ch. 5).\",\n \"\\nIt is not easy to think about God’s relationship to the created\\nworld, because without such a world there can be neither space nor\\ntime (ST 1a 46.1, 46.3). Not space, because space is nothing\\nmore than the existence of bodies, where bodies are beings that\\npossess parts outside of parts, and so constitute the\\nthree-dimensional extension that we think of as space. Accordingly,\\nwhere there are no bodies there is no space. (Aquinas, following\\nAristotle, denies that void space is coherent.) Not time, because\\nAquinas accepts Aristotle’s definition of time as the measure of\\nmotion. In a world without motion, then, there is no time, which means\\nthat the first moment of time was the first moment of the created\\nworld. Although it is hard to resist thinking of God as having existed\\n“before” there was a material universe, God’s mode\\nof existence, in a world without bodies, must be an existence outside\\nof space and time. This need not entail, however, that God even now\\nexists outside of space and time. God’s\\n omnipresence\\n was commonly understood as a literal presence everywhere (Pasnau 2011\\nch. 16), and Aquinas characterizes God’s eternity not as a mode\\nof existence outside of time, but as “being present to every\\ntime or instant of time” (SCG I.66.8). It is, however,\\nfar from clear what “present” amounts to in such a claim\\n(Leftow 1990). These difficulties are of a piece with the general\\ndifficulty we have in thinking about God using the concepts familiar\\nto us from the world around us.\",\n \"\\nHowever these metaphysical issues are resolved, it is clear that God\\nis constantly, everywhere engaged with the world. Because “a\\nthing’s existence cannot remain after the cessation of the\\naction of the agent causing the effect” (ST 1a 104.1c),\\nthe created world must have not just an initial creative cause but\\nalso an ongoing cause that\\n conserves\\n it from moment to moment. Since God is necessarily perfect, the\\ncreated world cannot be beneficial for God, and since a universe with\\na perfect being is itself already perfect, God’s goodness does\\nnot necessitate his creating anything at all. Moreover, since for\\neverything God creates he could create something better (ST\\n1a 25.6c), there is no sense to be made of the idea of a best of all\\npossible worlds. Accordingly, God is free to create otherwise than he\\ndid, and free even not to create anything at all: “Since\\nGod’s goodness is perfect, and he can exist without other\\nthings, … it follows that there is no absolute necessity that\\nhe will things other than himself” (ST 1a 19.3c).\\nStill, creation has a purpose: God “intends only to share his\\nperfection, which is his goodness” (ST 1a 44.4c). Among\\ncreatures, those beings who possess intellects—angels and human\\nbeings—are preeminent, in virtue of their capacity to love and\\nunderstand their creator. Accordingly, the rest of creation is\\norganized for their sake (SCG III.112). Ultimately, however,\\nthe purpose of the created world is to reflect God’s goodness\\nand glory: “the whole universe, with its individual parts, is\\nordered to God as its end, inasmuch as, by a kind of imitation, the\\nuniverse represents divine goodness for the glory of God”\\n(ST 1a 65.2c). So it is that Aquinas takes everything in the\\ncreated world to be subject to God’s providential order\\n(§7). (For a broad study of Aquinas on creation see Kretzmann\\n1999.)\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. The Created World\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nGiven the preeminence of intellectual beings in the created order, it\\nshould be no surprise that most of God’s creative efforts went\\ninto their establishment. This is, primarily, the domain of the\\nangels, who “exceed in number, incomparably, material\\nsubstances” (ST 1a 50.3c). The angels are wholly\\nimmaterial beings, which makes them unlike us (§5) and unlike the\\ncreated world with which we are directly acquainted, which is a\\nmaterial world. So, if we set aside the realm of immaterial\\nminds—God, angels, the human soul—we are left with a world\\nof material objects, suitable to be understood in terms of an\\nAristotelian hylomorphic (matter–form) analysis.\",\n \"\\nWithin this material domain, a material substratum underlies all\\nchange, and real change typically involves the gain or loss of some\\nform. This can be made to look straightforward enough when examples\\nare carefully chosen. If a tree’s limbs are bent under the\\nweight of an early fall snowstorm, then the tree undergoes alteration\\n(accidental change) in virtue of taking on a new shape (a new\\naccidental form), while the material substance (the tree itself)\\nendures. If the storm in fact kills the tree, then the substance is\\ncorrupted (a substantial change), in virtue of losing its substantial\\nform, which is the internal principle that gives the substance its\\nnature. In cases like this, where the substance is destroyed, Aquinas\\nadvances a metaphysical claim that is quite surprising: that all that\\nendures through the change is the most basic material substratum,\\nprime matter, which lacks all form. (Aquinas’s early\\nOn the Principles of Nature summarizes the basic story. For\\ngeneral discussions of Aquinas’s metaphysics of material bodies\\nsee Wippel 2000 chs. 7–9, Brower 2014. On causation at the level\\nof creatures see Frost 2022.)\",\n \"\\nThe resulting picture seems to postulate, as the constituents of\\nsubstances, three types of basic entities: prime matter, substantial\\nforms, and accidental forms. How exactly to understand each of these\\nhas been subject to a great deal of discussion over the centuries.\\nWith respect to accidental forms, one of the chief puzzles is to\\ndefine those cases in which we have a genuine change of form. Aquinas\\nclearly thinks, for instance, that colors and other proper sensibles\\nare accidental forms. But does he think, as the above example of the\\ntree implied, that shapes too are accidental forms? It is not entirely\\nclear, and depends on difficult questions about how he understands\\nAristotle’s theory of the\\n categories\\n (Wippel 2000 ch. 7; Pasnau 2011 ch. 12). With respect to substantial\\nform there is an analogous problem arising from unclarity over what\\nexactly the substances are (Pasnau 2002 ch. 3; Rota 2004; Marmodoro\\nand Page 2016). He clearly takes all living things to be substances,\\nalthough there are puzzles here about how to define the beginning and\\nend of life (Van Dyke 2012; Amerini 2009 [2013]). When it comes to\\nnonliving things the situation is still less clear. He clearly thinks\\nthat artifacts like a house are not substances. Water is a substance,\\nbut it is not clear whether a puddle of water is a single substance or\\na collection of substances. Aquinas does not discuss these issues in\\nthe sort of detail that later medieval authors would, and as a result\\nthere is little scholarly consensus about his views. But one important\\nguide to his thinking about substances is that they have unity in a\\nvery strong sense: “whatever is one in substance is one\\nabsolutely (simpliciter)” (ST 1a2ae 17.4c). Of\\ncourse, no creature has the sort of unity that God has; God’s\\nperfect simplicity precludes even the composition of essence and\\nexistence, which is found in all created substances, even in\\nimmaterial angels (Wippel 2000 ch. 5). Material substances, being\\ncomposites of form and matter, have less unity than the angels. Even\\nso, Aquinas thinks there can be complex material substances, unified\\nby their substantial form. How does a substantial form unify? An\\nimportant part of his answer is that a substantial form actualizes not\\nonly the whole substance, but each part: “a form of the whole\\nthat does not give existence to the individual parts of the body,\\n… such as the form of a house, is an accidental form”\\n(ST 1a 76.8c).\",\n \"\\nSubstantial forms both unify a substance at a given time and\\nindividuate a substance over time. To play this role, they must be\\nparticulars rather than\\n universals.\\n In general, it seems that Aquinas thinks that no forms are universals\\nexcept inasmuch as we conceive of them in abstraction from\\nparticulars. In external reality (in re), “no\\ncommonness is found in Socrates; rather, whatever is in him has been\\nindividuated” (On Being and Essence 3.80–2;\\nLeftow 2003; Brower 2016). The principle of individuation, for forms,\\nis matter (King 2000; Klima 2000). The account of individuation, then,\\ncomes in two stages: matter individuates the form at the start, when\\nthe form first inheres in that matter, and from that point forward the\\nform possesses a fixed identity of its own. If it is a substantial\\nform, it subsequently individuates the substance as a whole.\",\n \"\\nFundamental to Aquinas’s hylomorphism is his coordinate\\ndistinction between potentiality and actuality. His brief treatise\\nOn the Principles of Nature, perhaps his earliest work,\\nbegins with this remark:\",\n \"\\nOne should know that some things can be, although they are not, and\\nsome things are. That which can be is said to be in potentiality; that\\nwhich is now is said to be in actuality.\\n\",\n \"\\nHe goes on to associate potentiality with matter, and actuality with\\nform, and draws the distinctions we would expect between the various\\nkinds of matters and forms. He also remarks at this point that being\\nis of two kinds, and that the being of a substance is “something\\ndifferent” from accidental being. This signals his commitment to\\nAristotle’s doctrine of the multivocity (or homonymy) of being.\\nWhat it means for a substance to exist is different from what it means\\nfor an accidental aggregation of a substance with its accidents (say,\\na pale man) to exist. In general, what properly exists is substances,\\nwhereas “forms, accidents, and other things of this sort are\\ncalled beings not because they themselves exist, but because it is\\nby them that something exists” (ST 1a 45.4c).\\nMoreover, even among substances, God does not exist in the same way\\nthat creatures do, but only in an analogous way (§2). This denial\\nof the univocity of being was contentious among later medieval authors\\n(most notably\\n John Duns Scotus)\\n and its correct interpretation remains controversial today (Brower\\n2014; Pasnau 2018). Even more problematic is Aquinas’s\\nconception of prime matter, which he characterizes as pure\\npotentiality: “being in actuality is incompatible with\\nmatter’s nature, since matter is a potential existent by its\\nvery nature” (Quodlibet III.1.1). Although later\\nmedieval Aristotelians accepted that substantial change requires a\\nmaterial substratum, hardly anyone endorsed Aquinas’s suggestion\\nthat it is pure potentiality, because they were convinced that what\\nlacks actuality does not exist. Readers of Aquinas have disputed how\\nhe himself could have evaded that outcome (Brower 2014 ch. 5), or\\nwhether perhaps it is an outcome he intended (Pasnau 2002 ch. 1).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Form and Matter\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nFor living things, their substantial form is their soul\\n(anima). In saying this, Aquinas should not be understood to\\nbe ascribing some special sort of spirituality to plants and animals:\\nhe thinks they are material objects just as much as rocks and streams\\nare. Rather, he is following the lead of Aristotle’s De\\nanima in treating the soul as the first principle of life,\\nwhatever that may be. Since Aquinas thinks that the primary internal\\nexplanation for the existence of any substance is its substantial form\\n(§4), it follows that every living substance has a soul that is\\nits substantial form.\",\n \"\\nAs with any substantial form, the primary function of a soul is to\\naccount for the substance’s nature as a certain kind of thing,\\npossessed of the unity and persistence that characterizes substances.\\nThis actualizing role is what Aquinas calls the soul’s essence\\n(ST 1a 77.1c). The ongoing existence of living things also\\nrequires that they carry out distinctive operations: taking\\nnourishment and reproducing, moving and perceiving (in the case of\\nanimals), and reasoning (in the human case). Corresponding to these\\noperations are the powers of the soul. Medieval authors had long\\npuzzled over the relationship between the soul and its powers. Aquinas\\ntakes a strong position that would be the subject of much later\\ndispute: that the soul’s powers, being potentialities, are\\nreally distinct from the soul’s essence, which is an actuality\\n(ST 1a 77, Quest. on the Soul 12).\",\n \"\\nYet even though Aquinas insists on a distinction between the soul and\\nits powers, he rejects the common medieval view that living things\\nhave multiple souls or multiple substantial forms. Because of his\\ncommitment to the absolute unity of a substance, he thinks that\\nnothing could count as a substance unless it possesses a unique\\nsubstantial form that provides unity, at a time and over time, to the\\nsubstance as a whole.\",\n \"\\nOne thing simpliciter is produced out of many actually\\nexisting things only if there is something uniting and in some way\\ntying them to each other. In this way, then, if Socrates were an\\nanimal and were rational in virtue of different forms, then these two,\\nin order to be united simpliciter, would need something to\\nmake them one. Therefore, since nothing is available to do this, the\\nresult will be that a human being is one thing only as an aggregate,\\nlike a heap. (Quest. on the Soul 11c; also ST 1a\\n76.3–4, Quest. on Spiritual Creatures 3)\\n\",\n \"\\nSuch remarks engendered a long dispute between those who favored this\\nsort of “unitarian” approach and those who took one or\\nanother “pluralist” position. The pluralists argued that\\nliving things contain one substantial form for their body (their\\nbodily form, forma corporeitatis) and at least one further\\ndistinct form, their soul, in virtue of which they have life (Adams\\n1987 ch. 15; Cross 1998 ch. 4; Pasnau 2011 ch. 25). The principal\\nargument in favor of pluralism was that it explained how the body of a\\nliving thing could persist after the departure of the living\\nthing’s soul at death. Aquinas and other unitarians claimed that\\nsuch persistence was merely apparent, and that strictly speaking the\\nonly thing that endures through a substance’s corruption is\\nprime matter.\",\n \"\\nGiven the tight connection that Aquinas describes between form and\\nmatter, it is hard to characterize his theory of souls in general as\\n dualistic.\\n To be sure, in some sense, material substances are a composite of\\nsubstantial form and prime matter (with accidents on the outside, so\\nto speak, unified only accidentally with the substance). Still,\\nAquinas takes pains to stress that it is the substance as a whole that\\nproperly exists. And he definitely does not think that material\\nsubstances are a composite of form and body, since the\\nmaterial substance is the body. His unitarian framework\\ndeliberately makes it incoherent to speak of the body of a living\\nthing (or of any substance) as something distinct from that\\nsubstance.\",\n \"\\nThe situation is much more complex, however, when we focus on the\\nhuman case. If a dualist is someone who thinks that human beings\\nconsist in a material body and an immaterial, spiritual mind, then\\nAquinas clearly qualifies, even if he works very hard to get the\\nresult that these two aspects of human nature are unified as a single\\nsubstance (Bazán 1997; Klima 1997 [2002]; Stump 2003 ch. 6).\\nAlthough the human soul’s essential role is to actualize a human\\nbody, the human soul has a power—its intellect—that\\noperates independently of the body. Aquinas has a variety of much\\ndiscussed arguments aimed at showing that human thought, given its\\nuniversal scope and abstract content, cannot be carried out through\\nthe brain or any other bodily instrument (ST 1a 75.2, 75.5;\\nQuest. on the Soul 2; Klima 2001; Wood 2020). As a result,\\nthe human soul has a unique and puzzling status: it is both the form\\nof a body and “an incorporeal and subsistent principle”\\n(ST 1a 75.2c). From here, Aquinas further argues that the\\nhuman soul is incorruptible (ST 1a 75.6, Quest. on the\\nSoul 14). For although ordinary subsistent things—material\\nsubstances—routinely come into and go out of existence, with the\\ncorruption of their bodies, a subsistent entity that is not a body has\\nno natural basis for its ceasing to exist. Hence, once God creates a\\nhuman soul (in coordination with the biological process of sexual\\nreproduction), that soul exists forever.\",\n \"\\nGiven that the human body is corrupted at death, the soul’s\\nincorruptibility entails that, after death, it will continue to exist\\nwithout the body. Aquinas devotes considerable attention to the\\nquestion of how it will function in that separated state (ST\\n1a 89; Quest. on the Soul 15–20). Prior to the delicate\\nbut all-important question of what such lives will be like (a paradise\\nor a hell), there is a still more basic question of whether a human\\nperson’s separated soul continues to be that same person. Recent\\ncommentators have been divided. Aquinas is very clear that, in this\\nlife, a human being is the whole composite substance, form and matter\\n(ST 1a 75.4). Also clear is that Aquinas thinks our souls\\nwill not be separated from their bodies forever; in the fullness of\\ntime, on the Day of Judgment, they will be reunited with their\\nresurrected bodies (SCG IV.79–97). The situation\\nbecomes less clear, however, when Aquinas argues, as he repeatedly\\ndoes, that a resurrection of bodies is required because otherwise\\nwe would not survive. “Abraham’s soul’s\\nhaving life would not suffice for Abraham’s being alive….\\nThe life of the whole compound is required, soul and body”\\n(Sentences IV.43.1.1.1 ad 2). This seems to show\\nthat Aquinas thinks a person’s soul, surviving apart from its\\nbody, is not sufficient for that person’s survival, and some\\nscholars (the “corruptionists”) read Aquinas in this way\\n(Toner 2009; Van Dyke 2012; Nevitt 2014). But to others (the\\n“survivalists”) this looks like an incredible result, in\\ntension with claims that Aquinas makes elsewhere and with fundamental\\nChristian doctrine (Brown 2007; Brower 2014 ch. 12; Stump 2022).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Soul and Body\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"6. Cognitive Theory\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nBy definition, the living things that we call animals are those that\\nhave the power of perception. Aquinas accepts the conventional list of\\nthe five senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch—and\\nargues that we arrive at this list of five because there are five\\ndiscrete kinds of qualities that make an impression on our bodies.\\nThese objects are the proper sensibles—color, sound,\\nodor, flavor, hot–cold—so-called because they “make\\nan impression on the senses primarily and per se”\\n(ST 1a 78.3 ad 2). In contrast to these are the common\\nsensibles—size, shape, number, motion, rest—which\\n“do not move the senses primary and of themselves, but on\\naccount of a sensible quality, as a surface does on account of its\\ncolor” (ibid.). Whereas each proper sensible is capable of being\\nperceived only by its corresponding sense, the common sensibles are\\nso-called because they can be grasped by multiple senses, as when we\\nboth see and hear a thing move. To these two categories of sense\\nobjects Aquinas adds a third category, the accidental\\nsensibles, as when I see that someone is alive (Comm. de\\nanima II.13.184–90). This is, however, not a purely sensory\\noperation, but an act of seeing that occurs in conjunction with a\\nconceptual judgment that the observed motions are a sign of life. (For\\ndiscussions of the perceptual process see Pasnau 2002 chs. 6, 9;\\nLisska 2016; De Haan 2019; Cory 2022.)\",\n \"\\nBeyond these five external senses are the four internal\\nsenses that use the brain as their organ. Following the lead of\\n Ibn Sīnā\\n (Avicenna), Aquinas puts considerable weight on these sensory powers\\nto explain the sophisticated behavior of animals. In contrast to the\\nconsensus over the number of external senses, there had been a great\\ndeal of historical disagreement over how many internal senses there\\nare. Aquinas settles on this list of four:\",\n \"\\nThe precise role of these four faculties is not easy to evaluate on\\nthe basis of Aquinas’s limited and scattered remarks, but\\naccording to his most prominent account the common sense is what\\nallows us to make cross-modal sensory judgments (seeing something as\\nwhite and sweet) and to have second-order awareness, for instance\\n“when someone sees that he is seeing” (ST 1a 78.4\\nad 2). The imagination—Aquinas uses both imaginatio and\\nphantasia to refer to this faculty—retains images\\nacquired through the external senses. The estimative power perceives\\nwhat the Arabic tradition referred to as the “intentions”\\n(maʿānī) that lie behind the sensible\\nqualities: for instance, that wolves are dangerous and that straw is\\nuseful for nest building. (Aquinas refers to the more sophisticated\\nhuman capacity for grasping intentions as the cogitative power.)\\nMemory preserves these intentions. All of the internal senses are\\nrichly engaged in human cognitive activity, which is to say that the\\nbrain—despite not being the power of intellect—plays a\\ncritical role in human cognition.\",\n \"\\nThe senses are not wholly immaterial faculties in the way that the\\nintellect is, but the respect in which Aquinas thinks they are\\nmaterial is a matter of some dispute. He remarks that the senses\\noperate “through a corporeal organ but not through any corporeal\\nquality” (ST 1a 78.1c). By this he intends a contrast\\nwith ordinary physical causation, as when a fire, through the quality\\nof heat, brings water to a boil. In contrast, when we perceive heat,\\neven though the skin is heated in the same way that water is, still\\nthe perception itself is not the skin’s being made hot. Rather,\\n“the senses and intellect receive the forms of things\\nspiritually and immaterially, in virtue of a kind of intentional\\nexistence” (Comm. de sensu 18.208–10). In\\ngeneral, Aquinas treats the ability to receive forms intentionally as\\na mark of the mental:\",\n \"\\nThings that cognize are distinguished from things that do not cognize\\nin this: that the non-cognizers have nothing but their own form alone,\\nwhereas that which cognizes is naturally suited to have the form of\\nanother thing as well. (ST 1a 14.1c)\\n\",\n \"\\nSuch forms, received intentionally in the external senses, are known\\nas sensible species. Received in the internal senses, they are known\\nas phantasms. Received in the intellect, they are known as\\nintelligible species. Such forms—for instance, the sensible\\nspecies of heat—are that in virtue of which we perceive, for\\ninstance, the heat of external bodies. That such forms do not make\\npossessor actually hot (etc.) is perhaps just what it is for a form to\\nexist intentionally. But there is scholarly disagreement over what it\\nmeans to say that such forms are “spiritual” and\\n“immaterial” (Hoffman 2014).\",\n \"\\nAs these passages make clear, perception (and cognition in general)\\nworks through the reception of the very form of the thing that is\\nbeing perceived. This has led to much discussion over whether Aquinas\\nthereby subscribes to a strong form of direct realism, according to\\nwhich what we perceive (and what we think about) is the thing itself.\\nIn favor of this reading is that Aquinas seems entirely unconcerned\\nabout these intentionally existing species as intermediaries lying\\nbetween us and the things themselves. Why should he be concerned, the\\nthought goes, since the species just is the form itself of the thing\\nout in the world? (see Perler 2000; Băltuță 2013)\\nAgainst this reading is that the species (of heat, say) is not\\nnumerically the same form as the one that inheres in the fire, and\\nthat Aquinas does, at least sometimes, seem to think of these species\\nas representations that mediate our access to external things (Pasnau\\n1997 ch. 3; Panaccio 2001; see also Brower and Brower-Toland\\n2008).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.1 Perception\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAquinas thinks that a great deal of complex cognition occurs within\\nthe internal senses of the brain, but that those material powers are\\nincapable of abstract thought. To be more precise, he thinks that\\nmaterial cognitive powers can represent things only as particulars,\\nand that universal concepts can be formed only within the immaterial\\nintellect. He writes,\",\n \"\\nIf the intellective soul were composed of form and matter, then the\\nforms of things would be received in it as individuals; then it would\\ncognize only singular things, as happens in the sensory capacities,\\nwhich receive the forms of things in a corporeal organ. (ST\\n1a 75.5c)\\n\",\n \"\\nThe senses, both external and internal, can represent only this or\\nthat particular cat. It takes the intellect to form the abstract\\nconcept of cat. Conversely, Aquinas thinks that the human intellect is\\nincapable of grasping particulars (ST 1a 86.1). This means\\nthat when we engage in a routine task like apprehending that a thing\\nis a cat we are simultaneously using both intellect and sense, using\\nthe senses to apprehend the particular, and using the intellect to\\nconceptualize what it is. In our more theoretical reflections, we rely\\non the internal senses to frame images that aid us in the process of\\nabstract reasoning.\",\n \"\\nFollowing Aristotle’s lead in De anima III.5, Aquinas\\ndistinguishes between two distinct intellectual powers, the possible\\nintellect and the agent intellect. The first starts out in\\npotentiality to all intelligibles, a tabula rasa, “like\\na tablet on which nothing has been written” (ST 1a\\n79.2c), and gradually becomes actualized, taking in universal concepts\\nthat are then stored there as dispositions. But because such concepts\\nare not immediately available through sensory experience—one\\ncannot grasp what it is to be a cat just by looking at a\\ncat—there must also be an active intellectual power, “a\\npower on the side of intellect to actualize intelligible things by\\nabstracting the species from material conditions” (ST\\n1a 79.3c). By Aquinas’s time, generations of Aristotelians had\\nalready argued over the correct understanding of these two powers,\\nwith some treating the agent intellect as a single higher mind,\\nseparate from human beings, and perhaps even to be identified with\\nGod.\\n Ibn Rushd\\n (Averroes), the Spanish philosopher active a half century before\\nAquinas, had even proposed treating the possible intellect as\\na single higher power to which every human being has shared access.\\nAquinas, in contrast, thinks that each human being has their own\\nintellect, agent and possible. That we all share in a single agent\\nintellect is, he thinks, wrong but not incredible—it has\\naffinities with the venerable Augustinian doctrine of\\n divine illumination—but\\n Aquinas regards the Averroistic doctrine of a separate possible\\nintellect as not just contrary to the faith but entirely preposterous,\\nsince it would make it impossible to explain how we are each capable\\nof individual acts of thought. As he describes the absurd implication\\nin his treatise On the Unity of the Intellect against the\\nAverroists, “if I think about stone and you do likewise,\\nthen it would be necessary that you and I have one and the same\\nintellectual operation” (4.101–3; see Ogden 2022).\",\n \"\\nAquinas distinguishes between three principal stages of intellectual\\noperation: first, the formation of concepts; second, the composition\\nof judgments (propositions) built from concepts; third, inferential\\nreasoning from one judgment to another. These last two stages were the\\nsubject of intensive study within medieval logic, but Aquinas has\\nrelatively little to say about logic, and is most interested in the\\ninitial stage of concept formation. Here, the possible intellect\\npassively receives concepts that the agent intellect has abstracted\\nfrom sensory impressions (phantasms). The possible intellect starts\\nout as a blank slate, which is to say that Aquinas rejects the theory\\nof innate ideas, at least as far as the possible intellect is\\nconcerned. Moreover, he is very clear that all our concepts arise from\\nsensory experience: “the source of our cognition comes from the\\nsenses” (ST 1a 84.6sc). From this vantagepoint, he\\nlooks more like an empiricist than a rationalist. The role of agent\\nintellect, however, complicates the situation. Whereas the possible\\nintellect starts out as unformed potentiality, the agent intellect has\\nthe actuality to abstract universal concepts from sensory experience.\\nIt is not easy to say how abstraction occurs; indeed, for the whole of\\nthe Aristotelian tradition, the agent intellect has been something of\\na black box whose operation is taken as a brute fact rather than\\nanalyzed. Sometimes Aquinas suggests that the transformation of\\nsingular content into universal content occurs via the conversion of\\nmaterial phantasms into immaterial intelligible species, but the link\\nbetween immateriality and universality is not entirely clear. (On\\nabstraction see King 1994, Cory 2015).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.2 Thought\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAquinas uses a variety of terms to talk about knowledge, including\\nscientia, cognitio and notitia. Often he\\nseems to use these terms interchangeably, and he shows no interest in\\ntrying to define anything like knowledge in its loose and popular\\nsense. He is, however, very much interested in articulating what it\\nwould be to have an ideal grasp of some subject, and he refers to such\\na thing, speaking strictly, as scientia. This is what both\\nthe theologian and the philosopher seek, which is to say that this is\\nwhat Aquinas himself seeks. Each of these fields, theology and\\nphilosophy, can be described as a single complex\\nscientia—that is, as a science. We can also refer to\\nthe myriad individual conclusions obtained in these fields as\\nscientiae—that is, as items of scientific knowledge.\\nPhilosophy itself, moreover, can be divided into various discrete\\nfields of science: logic, physics, astronomy, biology, metaphysics,\\nethics, and so on. Until the seventeenth century the physical sciences\\nwere understood to be contained, in this way, within the field of\\nphilosophy. Accordingly, the domains of scientia, conceived\\nmost widely, were philosophy and theology.\",\n \"\\nThe fundamentals of Aquinas’s thinking about knowledge in this\\nideal sense come from Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics.\\nIn particular, he takes the discussion in Book I chapter 2 to offer a\\ndefinition of scientia (in Greek,\\nepistēmē), which in his commentary he articulates\\nas follows (quotations are from Comm. Post. An. I.4):\",\n \"\\nEach of these bullet points raises a host of further questions, but,\\nin broad outline, Aquinas understands scientia as the\\napprehension, with certainty, of an entity, event or proposition,\\nbased on a demonstrative proof grounded in the essential nature of the\\nthing in question. As befits intellectual understanding (§6.2),\\nscientia will concern universal truths. Because it concerns\\nthe essences of things, it will concern necessary truths and will get\\nat the underlying cause of a thing’s being so (MacDonald\\n1993).\",\n \"\\nEventually, the demand that premises be “better known”\\nleads back to the first principles of the science, which are\\nself-evident (per se nota) in the sense that they are known\\nto be true simply in virtue of their terms (Comm. Post.\\nAnalytics I.7.8). Nothing could be better known than such a\\nprinciple, but because these principles are self-evident there is also\\nno need for any further demonstration. Each science has its own\\nstarting points—its own first principles—which are not\\nsusceptible to demonstration within that science. But not all such\\nfirst principles are strictly self-evident. Within physics, for\\ninstance, it is a first principle that there is motion, but that is\\nneither absolutely necessary nor strictly self-evident. Accordingly,\\nagain following Aristotle, Aquinas orders the various sciences\\naccording to relations of “subalternation”, such that\\nbiology is subalternate to physics, and physics to metaphysics. In\\ngeneral, “the principles of a lower science are proved by the\\nprinciples of a higher science” (Comm. Post. Analytics\\nI.17.5). Among the natural speculative sciences—that is, setting\\ntheology and ethics aside—the preeminent science is metaphysics,\\nor first philosophy, “from which all the other sciences follow,\\ntaking their principles from it” (Comm. Boethius De\\ntrin. 5.1c). (On the structure of the sciences see Maurer 1986;\\nWippel 1995a; Dougherty 2004.)\",\n \"\\nThis sort of foundationalist, infallibilist theory of knowledge is now\\nthought of as Cartesian, but\\n Descartes\\n is simply following the Aristotelian tradition for which Aquinas\\nbecame the preeminent spokesman. For Aquinas himself, however, the\\naccount just described serves as an aspirational ideal rather than a\\ndescription of something we have actually attained. In practice, even\\nwhere we have demonstrative knowledge, we usually cannot trace the\\nprinciples all the way back to ultimate first principles like the law\\nof non-contradiction. Critical questions, like the non-eternity of the\\nworld (§3), are contingent on the free choice of God and so have\\nto be taken on faith. Even in places where certainty is possible in\\nprinciple, large gaps in our knowledge remain. In general, “our\\ncognition is so weak that no philosopher could have ever completely\\ninvestigated the nature of a single fly” (On the\\nApostles’ Creed [Collatio in symbolum\\nApostolorum], proem). Accordingly, Aquinas distinguishes among\\nvarious non-ideal cases. A demonstration that grasps the cause of a\\nthing is a demonstration propter quid, but often—as in\\nproving God’s existence—the best we can have is a\\ndemonstration quia, which tells us only that a thing\\nis so. Much of what we know holds true only for the most part, and so\\nfails to be necessary, and often the premises of an argument cannot be\\ntraced back to self-evident principles, in which case our argument is\\ndialectical rather than demonstrative, yielding a conclusion\\nthat is merely plausible (probabilis) rather than\\napodictic.\",\n \"\\nIn all of this, Aquinas is following Aristotle and the later\\nAristotelian tradition fairly closely, and thus the framework for\\nscience and knowledge just sketched comes to be commonly accepted by\\nthe later scholastic tradition all the way into the seventeenth\\ncentury.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.3 Knowledge and Science\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe immaterial human mind, as Aquinas understands it, is not just the\\nintellect. The mind is an ensemble of three discrete powers, agent and\\npossible intellect working in conjunction with the will. The rise of\\nthe will as a faculty of the soul is a distinctively medieval idea,\\nbut has strong roots in Augustine and, before him, in late\\n Stoicism.\\n These late-ancient sources had ascribed a prominent role in human\\nagency to desire (appetitus) or volition (voluntas),\\nand particularly to those desires that we endorse as our own, and\\nwhich thus give rise to voluntary action. Among these earlier authors,\\nour will is conceived of as something that we need to control, if we\\nare to lead our lives as we should. By Aquinas’s time, however,\\nthe will (voluntas) had come to be identified not just as a\\npower of the soul but as the power that is principally in control of\\nhuman agency, directing both our thoughts and our actions. Thus,\\nwhereas Augustine and\\n Boethius\\n had wondered about how we have free choice (liberum\\narbitrium) over our wills, Aquinas identifies the two, concluding\\nthat “the will and free choice are not two powers, but\\none” (ST 1a 83.4c). He was by no means the first to\\nconceive of the power of will in this way, but the cogency and\\ninfluence of his account ensured that this framework would dominate\\nlater discussions.\",\n \"\\nThe will is one of three appetitive powers within us, distinguished\\nfrom the irascible and concupiscible powers in being not a sensual\\nappetite, the source of the passions (King 1998; Miner 2009), but a\\nrational appetite, the source of voluntary agency. Its\\nrationality consists in the way it is coordinate with intellect,\\ntaking as its inputs the intellect’s practical judgments\\nregarding what is to be done. Since the will’s function is\\nstrictly appetitive, it cannot render its own practical judgments, and\\nto that extent can act only on the basis of intellect: “every\\nchoice and actual will within us is immediately caused by an\\nintelligible apprehension” (SCG III.85.3). But that is\\nby no means to say that the will is determined by the\\nintellect’s judgment, because ultimately our will has the power\\nto control what we think about: “the will moves both itself and\\nall other capacities. For I think when I want to, and likewise I use\\nall my other capacities and dispositions because I want to”\\n(Quest. on Evil 6c). To be sure, by its very nature, the will\\ncan desire only what is presented to it as a good (ST 1a2ae\\n8.1). Accordingly, since our ultimate happiness (beatitudo)\\nis good in every respect, “human beings have an appetite of\\nnecessity for happiness” (ST 1a2ae 10.2c; see\\n§8.1). But, with regard to any specific course of action, there\\nare always multiple perspectives from which the situation can be\\njudged, and the will can control how we think about\\nthings—whether, for instance, we decide to focus on how\\nrewarding a thing would be or on how tiring it would be. Even in the\\ncase of our ultimate happiness, moreover, the will can choose not to\\nthink about it, and so even in that extreme case the will’s\\nchoices are not necessitated. On this basis Aquinas adamantly insists\\non human freedom of choice, and treats claims that the will is\\nnecessitated as “contrary to the faith and subverting all of the\\nprinciples of moral philosophy” (Quest. on Evil\\n6c).\",\n \"\\nUp to this point, Aquinas’s position is fairly clear. There has\\nbeen considerable controversy over the centuries, however, regarding\\nwhether Aquinas wants to go further and characterize the will’s\\nagency as\\n nondeterministic—as\\n its being, in other words, a first and undetermined cause of free\\naction. Within a few years of his death, after the\\n Condemnation of 1277,\\n views of this sort came to dominate scholastic philosophy, yielding a\\nbroad consensus that held until the rise of seventeenth-century\\nanti-scholasticism. Readers of Aquinas have been sharply divided,\\nhowever, over where he fits into that history. At first glance it\\nmight seem obvious that Aquinas is an opponent of determinism, given\\nhis adamant opposition to the will’s being necessitated. Yet\\nAquinas writes at a time at which the governing form of\\nAristotelianism, drawn from the Arabic tradition of Ibn Sīnā\\nand Ibn Rushd, is explicitly deterministic. In general, Aquinas\\nstrives where he can to harmonize the faith with the mainstream of\\nphilosophical opinion, and here in particular he shows signs of\\nendorsing causal determinism as applied to the created world. Thus he\\nascribes to Ibn Rushd (“the Commentator”) the doctrine\\nthat “from that which is open both ways (ad utrumlibet)\\nno action follows, unless it is inclined one way by something\\nelse” (ST 1a 19.3 obj. 5). He hastens to reject this\\nprinciple when applied to God, who is able to determine freely\\nGod’s own choices. But outside the case of God he accepts the\\nprinciple: “a cause that is of itself contingent must be\\ndetermined to its effect by something external” (ibid., ad 5).\\nAccordingly, he explicitly insists that the will’s freedom does\\nnot require it to be its own first cause. Instead, he characterizes\\nthe will’s operations as entwined over time with the operation\\nof intellect, running backward through an agent’s history, with\\none cause preceding another, all the way back to God’s initial\\ncreation of the human soul (Quest. on Evil 6, ST 1a\\n83.1 ad 3, ST 1a2ae 9.4c). This insistence on determining\\ncauses might seem to fit well with his strict conception of\\n divine providence:\",\n \"\\nEverything that happens here, insofar as it is brought back to the\\nfirst divine cause, is found to be ordered rather than to exist\\naccidentally, even if in comparison to other causes it is found to\\nexist accidentally. This is why the Catholic faith says that nothing\\nin the world happens aimlessly or fortuitously, and that all things\\nare subject to divine providence. (Comm. Metaphys. VI.3.26;\\nsee Goris 1997)\\n\",\n \"\\nOn this reading of Aquinas, causal determinism fits with God’s\\npreordained plan for the universe, and freedom is thus compatible with\\nboth causal and theological determinism (Hause 1997; Kenny 1993 ch. 6;\\nLoughran 1999; Pasnau 2002 ch. 7; Shanley 2007).\",\n \"\\nMany scholars, however, have denied that Aquinas is any sort of\\ncompatibilist. That there is room for doubt is suggested in a passage\\nthat, at first, looks to support a compatibilist account:\",\n \"\\nFreedom does not necessarily require that what is free be the first\\ncause of itself, just as one thing’s being the cause of another\\ndoes not require that it be the first cause of that other. God, then,\\nis the first cause, moving both natural and voluntary causes. And just\\nas his moving natural causes does not take away from their acts’\\nbeing natural, so his moving voluntary causes does not take away from\\ntheir actions’ being voluntary. Instead, he makes this be so for\\nthem, because he works within each thing in accord with its own\\ncharacter. (ST 1a 83.1 ad 3)\\n\",\n \"\\nAlthough the passage begins in a way that looks friendly to causal\\ndeterminism, the passage goes on to suggest the situation is more\\ncomplicated. For although God is the first cause of our voluntary\\nactions, God’s efficacy there is different from how it is with\\nnatural causes: God somehow acts on the will in a way that “does\\nnot take away” from its voluntariness. And Aquinas takes just\\nthe same line in explaining how divine providence is consistent with\\nhuman freedom (ST 1a 23.6c; SCG III.72–73;\\nComm. Metaphys. VI.3.30–32; Comm. De interp.\\nI.14.22).\",\n \"\\nAmong those who think that Aquinas’s God leaves room for\\nindeterministic human agency, there remains a fundamental difference\\nof opinion. Some (e.g., Stump 2003 ch. 9) think that such freedom, for\\nAquinas, requires only that the will be an ultimate source, a first\\ncreaturely cause. Others think that, in addition to this, Aquinas\\nfurther requires the leeway to choose among alternative possibilities\\n(e.g., Hoffmann and Michon 2017). Either way, a libertarian reading of\\nAquinas is likely to stress his claim that the will is a self-mover:\\n“Just as the will moves other capacities, so it also moves\\nitself” (Quest. on Evil 6c; Gallagher 1994). This is an\\nidea, moreover, that Aquinas had urged from his very first discussion\\nof free choice in his Sentences commentary, where he argued\\nthat free choice is possessed only by beings who “determine for\\nthemselves their end and their action toward that end”\\n(Sentences II.25.1c). In some sense, then, the will is free\\nbecause it is self-determining. This distinguishes it from natural,\\nnon-voluntary agents, whose determination comes from without.\\nAquinas’s focus on the will’s role in such\\nself-determination—a tendency that becomes more prominent in his\\nlater works—makes it reasonable to include him in the\\nthirteenth-century movement away from ancient intellectualism and\\ntoward a voluntaristic conception of human nature. In emphasizing the\\nwill’s overarching control, Aquinas can appeal to the critical\\nimportance of the will’s various operations and dispositions.\\nThe act of love, foundational to any Christian ethics, is an operation\\nof will. The dispositions of justice and charity—the central\\nvirtues of philosophy and theology, respectively—are both\\nvirtues of the will. But it is not clear that Aquinas goes so\\nfar—as\\n Peter John Olivi,\\n Henry of Ghent, and Scotus, among many others, soon would—as to\\nexempt the will from the determinism that was agreed to characterize\\nthe rest of the natural world. There remains a lively debate among\\nscholars over this issue.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"7. Will and Freedom\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nAquinas’s ethics is difficult to study because it is so vast and\\nmultifaceted. Around half of the Summa theologiae, the\\nmassive second part, is concerned with moral questions, suggesting\\nsomething of the importance Aquinas ascribes to ethics in theology. To\\nbring some order to this large topic, we can distinguish between three\\nparts of the theory:\",\n \"\\n(For wide-ranging treatments of Aquinas’s ethics see McInerny\\n1997; MacDonald and Stump 1998; Pope 2002; Irwin 2007: chs\\n16–24; DeYoung, McCluskey, and Van Dyke 2009; McCluskey\\n2017.)\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"8. Ethics\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAquinas’s worldview is thoroughly teleological, inasmuch as he\\nholds “it is necessary that all agents act for the sake of an\\nend” (ST 1a2ae 1.2c). There is a distinction to be\\ndrawn, however, between those agents that are unable to understand\\ntheir end and rational agents, who “move themselves to their end\\nbecause they have control over their acts through free choice”\\n(ibid.). It is for rational agents that ethical questions arise.\\nAquinas follows Aristotle in supposing that human choices must be\\nordered toward a single ultimate end: “there must be some\\nultimate end on account of which all other things are desired, whereas\\nthis end itself is not desired on account of anything else”\\n(Comm. Nic. Ethics I.1.22). This ultimate end, whatever it\\nis, can be referred to as happiness (beatitudo). In the\\nTreatise on Happiness from the start of ST 1a2ae, after\\nworking through various predictably unsatisfactory candidates for our\\nultimate end—not riches, not honor, not pleasure, and so\\non—Aquinas arrives at the view that happiness consists primarily\\nin intellectual contemplation. And since the highest truth and the\\ngreatest good are of course God, our ultimate happiness must lie\\nthere: “final and complete happiness can consist in nothing\\nother than the vision of the divine essence” (ST 1a2ae\\n3.8c). Human beings possess this most fully in the life to come (Brown\\n2021), but even in this life Aquinas’s conception of happiness\\nis strongly intellectualist: “it is clear that people who give\\nthemselves to the contemplation of truth are the happiest a person in\\nthis life can be” (Comm. Nic. Ethics X.12.2110).\",\n \"\\nThis eudaimonistic framework—to use the Greek term for ethical\\ntheories aimed at happiness—shapes all of Aquinas’s\\nethical thinking. It is perhaps the most striking instance of his\\nconfidence in Aristotelianism as the proper philosophical foundation\\nfor a Christian worldview. Predictably, that confidence was met with\\nvarious sorts of challenges. One concerns his insistence that our\\nultimate end is intellectual rather than volitional. For many\\nsubsequent theorists, Christian and secular, the ultimate end of human\\nlife should not be intellectual contemplation but instead should be\\nlove. Aquinas agrees—indeed, he stresses—that love is an\\nessential complement to happiness, pulling us toward our end and\\nrejoicing in its grasp. Still, the goal of life properly speaking is\\nto understand God and God’s creation (ST 1a2ae 3.4).\\n(For nuanced discussions see Stenberg 2016a and Stump 2022.)\",\n \"\\nA second concern, which troubles eudaimonism in all of its forms, is\\nthat Aquinas rests the foundations of ethics on a self-directed\\nconcern for our own happiness. That is liable to look like a doubtful\\nstrategy for any ethical theory, and particularly for\\nJudeo–Christian ethics given its radically altruistic\\norientation, as epitomized in the twin injunctions to “Love the\\nLord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all\\nyour mind” and to “Love your neighbor as yourself”\\n(Matthew 22:37–39, quoting Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18).\\nOn its face, the eudaimonistic approach might seem to conflict\\ndirectly with these injunctions, given the way that it grounds all\\nhuman agency in our ultimate pursuit of happiness:\",\n \"\\nThe will naturally tends towards its ultimate end: for every human\\nbeing naturally wills happiness. And this natural willing is the cause\\nof all other willings, since whatever a human being wills, he wills\\nfor the sake of an end. (ST 1a 60.2c)\\n\",\n \"\\nAquinas is unflinching in his insistence that our final end is our own\\nhappiness. But it has to be remembered that ‘happiness’ is\\njust a generic label for the human activity that is ultimately best\\nfor us. And what is ultimately best for us is not the selfish pursuit\\nof our own wellbeing, which is surely an ambition that would make\\nanyone miserable. What we should seek, as we have seen already, is an\\nunderstanding of the world and its Creator. This, again speaking\\nteleologically, is what we were created to do. By pursuing this\\nsubstantive goal, and actualizing our intellectual capacities to the\\nutmost, we make ourselves as good as we can be, and we contribute to\\nthe universe as a whole’s being as good as it can be. How does\\nsuch intellectual activity ground a theory of ethics? It does so\\nbecause when we understand God and the created order, we understand\\nwhy we should love God preeminently and why we should love our\\nneighbor. But to see how these ideas get developed, we need to turn to\\nhis theory of the moral law. (For general discussions of\\nAquinas’s eudaimonistic framework see MacDonald 1991b; Bradley\\n1997; Kenny 1998; Osborne 2005; Stenberg 2016b.)\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"8.1 Happiness\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAquinas’s moral theory does not offer the sort of brief and\\ncomprehensive criterion for rightness and wrongness that draws\\nstudents toward\\n consequentialism\\n or\\n Kant’s moral philosophy.\\n What he offers instead is a deep and systematic explanation of where\\nmorality comes from, yielding a moral code that is impressively\\nresponsive to the changing circumstances of human life.\",\n \"\\nThe key text for Aquinas’s thinking about the moral law is his\\nTreatise on Law (ST 1a2ae 90–108). There he\\ndistinguishes between four kinds of law that play a role in guiding\\nright human action:\",\n \"\\nThe eternal law governs everything, but can serve to guide us only\\nwhen it is somehow transmitted to us. One way in which it is\\ntransmitted is through divine law, preeminently through the Bible, and\\nhere Aquinas distinguishes between the old law of the Hebrew Bible\\n(qq. 98–105) and the new law described in the Gospel (qq.\\n106–8). The other form of transmission, philosophically the most\\ninteresting part of his account, is the\\n natural law.\\n Whereas human law is the contingent result of social and political\\norganization, the natural law is innate within us. Since Aquinas\\nthinks that God orders everything to its proper end (§8.1), there\\nis a sense in which all things follow a natural law by which they\\nparticipate in the eternal law. But when Aquinas refers to natural law\\nin a moral context, he means the distinctive way in which rational\\nagents have been ordered to achieve their proper end; hence he has in\\nmind a law that governs the mind. Thus, “the law of nature is\\nnothing other than the light of intellect, placed within us by God,\\nthrough which we grasp what is to be done and what is to be\\navoided” (On the Ten Commandments [Collationes in\\ndecem praeceptis] proem).\",\n \"\\nSo described, natural law might be nothing more than an innate\\ninclination to accept a fixed set of moral laws prescribed by God. In\\nfact, however, Aquinas’s theory offers something more complex\\nand nuanced, because he thinks the moral law arises not out of brutely\\ninnate inclination but out of rational reflection on the good (Finnis\\n1998 ch. 3; Rhonheimer 1987 [2000]). Mirroring the way he develops\\ntheoretical science out of first principles (§6.3), he thinks\\nmoral reasoning also rises out of self-evident first principles, the\\ngrasp of which is the defining task of the intellect’s power of\\nsynderesis (ST 1a 79.12). The most fundamental such precept\\nis this:\",\n \"\\nThe good should be done and pursued, and the bad should be avoided.\\n(ST 1a2ae 94.2c)\\n\",\n \"\\nAquinas takes this to be self-evident, because he accepts\\nAristotle’s claim at the start of the Nicomachean\\nEthics that the good is what all things desire. By beginning\\nhere, Aquinas builds into the ground floor of his account a\\nsubstantive story about\\n moral motivation.\\n The story requires tying the ensuing development of his theory to\\nfacts about what human beings actually desire; without that tie, the\\ntheory would equivocate on what it means by the good. Aquinas\\nexplicitly recognizes as much, remarking that “the order of the\\nprecepts of natural law accords with the order of natural\\ninclinations” (ST 1a2ae 94.2c). At this point, Aquinas\\ncould appeal to eudaimonism: that all human beings desire happiness as\\ntheir ultimate end (§8.1). A very thin conception of natural law\\nmight suppose that human beings are given only this much innate\\ndirection, and thereafter left to sort out for themselves what will\\nmake them happy. But Aquinas’s conception of natural law is much\\nthicker, both in the sense that he articulates a rich and substantive\\nnotion of the happiness that is our ultimate end (as above), and in\\nthe sense that he thinks we have been given various further innate\\ninclinations, intended to provide us with specific guidance toward\\nthat ultimate end. Among these are inclinations to preserve our own\\nlives, toward sexual activity, toward educating the young, toward\\nknowing the truth about God, and toward living in society (ST\\n1a2ae 94.2c; see also SCG III.129). These innate\\ninclinations, combined with the first practical principle (“The\\ngood should be done…”) and Aquinas’s substantive\\nconception of happiness, are the foundations from which arises a\\ncomprehensive account of the moral law, relying on\\n conscience\\n as the rational activity of working out what ought to be done from a\\nmoral point of view (ST 1a 79.13).\",\n \"\\nInasmuch as the moral point of view is no different from the point of\\nview that seeks our own happiness, Aquinas shares with ancient ethics\\nthe conviction that rational self-interest provides an adequate\\nfoundation for morality (Irwin 2007: ch. 19). But the weight Aquinas\\nputs on our innate inclinations in shaping the moral law gives his\\naccount a distinctive character. Among its champions, this approach\\nhas been celebrated for the way it grounds traditional values in facts\\nabout human nature. To its critics, the view looks intellectually\\ndubious twice over: on scientific grounds inasmuch as it makes false\\nclaims about the universality of various inclinations (Massey 1999);\\nand philosophically inasmuch as it grounds\\n normativity in metaethics\\n on descriptive facts about human nature. Such criticisms, however,\\nmiss the philosophical sophistication of the overarching framework. To\\nbe sure, we now understand the diversity of human\\ninclinations—for instance, regarding gender and\\nsexuality—much better than we did even a century ago.\\nAquinas’s theory can survive when we update these assumptions,\\nand indeed may generate surprisingly modern results (Oliva 2015). As\\nfor the complaint that the theory conflates normativity with nature,\\nthat would have real force only supposing that we had some better\\naccount of the basis of normative value. As things are, if there is a\\nGod, then it seems plausible to suppose that God would want us to be\\nhappy and would create our natures to guide us in seeking such\\nhappiness. On the other hand, if there is no God, then it is not clear\\nwhat foundation for ethics there might be other than facts about the\\nnature of human beings and how we best thrive in the world we live in.\\n(The literature on the natural law in Aquinas is large and\\ncontentious. For a sample see Grisez 1965; Lisska 1996; Murphy 2001;\\nJensen 2015; Porter 2018. For an introduction to the variety of recent\\nperspectives see Angier 2021. For a sense of the complexity of the\\ncontested issues see\\n Aquinas’ moral, political, and legal philosophy.)\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"8.2 Natural Law\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe theory of natural law gives us Aquinas’s moral theory: it\\nidentifies the foundations of ethics and frames the general contours\\nof the moral law. For us to adhere to that law, however, it is not\\nenough to trust to the light of intellect and our natural\\ninclinations. Reliably moral agents must, in addition, cultivate the\\nright sorts of virtuous dispositions. Accordingly, Aquinas develops a\\ncomplex\\n virtue ethics\\n to frame his account of our moral psychology.\",\n \"\\nThe virtues are a certain kind of psychological disposition\\n(habitus): they are the perfections of those powers of the\\nsoul that are under our voluntary control. Aquinas devotes roughly a\\nquarter of the Summa theologiae—mainly the\\n2a2ae—to his theory of the virtues, and also dedicates a series\\nof disputed questions to the subject. He takes from Aristotle the\\nfamiliar idea that it is through the repetition of certain kinds of\\nactions that we acquire the virtues (as well, of course, as the\\nvices): by acting honestly we acquire, over time, the virtue of\\nhonesty. Less familiarly, he imposes a very high standard on what\\ncounts as a virtue: it must be incapable of giving rise to an immoral\\nact.\",\n \"\\nTwo things are required for an act’s perfection: first, the act\\nmust be right; second, the [underlying] disposition must be incapable\\nof being the source of a contrary act. For that which is the source of\\ngood and bad acts cannot, of itself, be the perfect source of a good\\nact. (Quest. on the Virtues in General 2c)\\n\",\n \"\\nThis is not to say that a person with the virtue of honesty cannot be\\ndishonest. Just as virtues can be acquired through practice, so they\\ncan be lost through the wrong kind of practice, and that loss must\\nbegin somewhere. Still, in such a case, the dishonesty will not arise\\nthrough the virtue. Any characterization of a virtue that would make\\nits possession a mixed blessing would have failed to delimit a true\\nvirtue.\",\n \"\\nThe reason that the virtues are so important to Aquinas’s ethics\\nis that he thinks that we cannot, over time, act morally without them.\\nHe highlights three reasons why moral activity requires the virtues\\n(Quest. on the Virtues in General 1c):\",\n \"\\nThese are not meant to be necessary conditions on an act’s\\ngoodness, but Aquinas thinks they are required for a person’s\\nactions to count as wholly praiseworthy. In contrast to the effortful\\ncalculations of a utilitarian striving to maximize the beneficial\\nconsequences of every act, he thinks moral goodness requires a\\ndispositional stability in our underlying psychology. And given\\nmorality’s ultimate basis in Aquinas’s overarching theory\\nof happiness, it should be no surprise that he thinks happiness, in\\nthis life, consists in our acting through these virtues (ST\\n1a2ae 5.5–6).\",\n \"\\nAmong the many fine-grained distinctions that Aquinas makes between\\nvarious virtues and vices, he treats as preeminent the traditional\\nfour cardinal virtues and the three theological virtues. The cardinal\\nvirtues are\",\n \"\\nUnlike some of his contemporaries, who argued that all the virtues\\nshould be dispositions of the will (Kent 1995), Aquinas thinks that\\neach of these four virtues perfects a different power of the soul.\\nBravery and temperance, indeed, are not perfections of rational powers\\nat all. They are, however, defined in terms of right reason, and this\\nboth connects his virtue theory to the theory of natural law and helps\\nto explain why the virtues cannot be the cause of immoral actions. The\\nperson who is “brave” in a foolhardy way would not\\nstrictly count as brave. Deepening the connection between these\\nvirtues and right reason is that Aquinas treats the intellectual\\nvirtue of prudence (prudentia, or phronēsis in\\nGreek) as foundational to all the other cardinal virtues:\\n“rightness and full goodness in all the other virtues comes from\\nprudence” (Quest. on the Virtues in General 6c; see\\nWestberg 1994). Without prudence, none of the other virtues are\\npossible. Conversely, prudence itself requires the proper disposition\\nof our various appetitive powers. Accordingly, Aquinas endorses the\\ntraditional doctrine of the unity of the virtues: one cannot have any\\nof them without having all of them (ST 1a2ae 65.1).\",\n \"\\nAlthough the four cardinal virtues, as their name suggests, have\\nhistorically been given pride of place within philosophy, Aquinas\\ngives greater preeminence to the theological virtues that Paul\\ndescribes in 1 Corinthians 13:\",\n \"\\nFor these to count as theological virtues, rather than as\\ngeneric dispositions, they must each be further defined as having God\\nas their object. They must also be understood to be infused in us by\\nGod, because the humanly attainable versions of these virtues are not\\nsufficient for our moral perfection (ST 1a2ae 62.1). Indeed,\\nfor similar reasons, moral perfection requires that even the cardinal\\nvirtues be infused by God (ST 1a2ae 63.3). To receive the\\nvirtues from God requires grace, which is something we can never fully\\nmerit, and which God freely chooses to give or to withhold: “no\\nmatter how much someone prepares himself, he does not receive grace\\nfrom God necessarily” (ST 1a2ae 112.3sc). Only through\\nthis grace, and the infused virtues it brings, can we achieve the\\nperfect happiness that is our ultimate end. (On the cardinal virtues\\nsee Hause 2007; Stump 2011. On the theological virtues see Wawrykow\\n2012; Porter 2019. On the infused cardinal virtues see Mattison 2011;\\nGoris and Schoot 2017; Knobel 2021. On grace see Torrell 1996 [2003]\\nchs. 6–9; Stump 2018 ch. 7; Hoffmann 2022.)\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"8.3 Virtue Theory\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nDuring his lifetime, Aquinas was recognized as an extraordinary figure\\nboth for his intellectual achievements and for his personal sanctity.\\nThe immense number of surviving manuscripts and the wide range of his\\ninfluence testifies to the first. As for the second, his death in\\nFossanova immediately gave rise to the sort of veneration reserved for\\nthe saints: claims of miracles at once arose, and a long-running\\ndispute began over where the holy relic of his body would be kept.\\nThis process culminated in his canonization on July 18, 1323.\",\n \"\\nThese developments notwithstanding, many of Aquinas’s specific\\nviews—particularly in philosophy—were extremely\\ncontroversial. Among the 219 articles condemned in Paris in 1277 are a\\nsignificant number that seem to implicate Aquinas’s teachings\\n(Hissette 1977; Wippel 1995b). It would have been lost on no one at\\nthe time that these articles were promulgated three years, to the day,\\nafter his death. It seems likely that the authorities in Paris were\\nplanning an explicit censure of certain of Aquinas’s core\\ntheses—especially his unitarian theory of substantial form\\n(§5) and his conception of prime matter as pure potentiality\\n(§4)—until higher authorities cut this process short\\n(Torrell 1993 [2022] ch. 16). Later in March 1277, in Oxford,\\nArchbishop\\n Robert Kilwardby\\n condemned a series of theses that explicitly includes those two\\ndistinctively Aquinian doctrines. Also around this time, the\\nFranciscan William de la Mare published a lengthy Correctorium\\nfratris Thomae, with verbatim quotations from Aquinas’s\\ncorpus paired with putative “corrections”. Soon after,\\nvarious disciples of Aquinas rallied to his defense, in a series of\\nworks entitled the Correctorium Corruptorii Thomae (Glorieux\\n1927; Jordan 1982). For the quarter century after Aquinas’s\\ndeath, scholasticism took shape around his Dominican supporters and\\nhis Franciscan critics.\",\n \"\\nIn the early fourteenth century, Aquinas’s influence had to\\ncompete against the emergence of two brilliantly original Franciscans:\\nfirst Scotus and his expansive realism; then\\n William Ockham\\n and his parsimonious nominalism. In the face of these and many other\\ncomplex crosscurrents, Aquinas’s views came to seem both less\\nurgent and less dangerous. Two years after his canonization, the\\nbishop of Paris clarified that the 1277 condemnations should not be\\nheld to apply to Aquinas’s teaching, though the bishop made\\nclear that this should not be taken as an endorsement. Among the many\\nemerging rival views, Aquinas continued to have his vociferous\\nsupporters, particularly among the Dominicans, who were statutorily\\nrequired to promote his teaching. In the early fifteenth century, John\\nCapreolus emerged as a champion of Thomism as a systematic philosophy,\\nand a century later Cajetan (Thomas de Vio) made further systematic\\ndevelopments. In 1567, Pope Pius V numbered Aquinas among the doctors\\nof the Church, a title previously reserved for the ancient Church\\nfathers. When the Jesuit order came to prominence, around this same\\ntime, its members—including\\n Francisco Suárez—were\\n enjoined to adhere to those views that were safest and best\\nestablished, and especially to those of Aquinas, “because of his\\nauthority and his more secure and approved teachings” (Pasnau\\n2011, 436).\",\n \"\\nEven as Thomism gradually became ascendant within scholastic\\nAristotelianism, that whole tradition started to look more and more\\nhidebound, as it moved into its increasingly mannerist and then\\nbaroque stages.\\n Martin Luther’s\\n hostility toward the Roman Catholic Church mirrored his hostility\\ntoward scholastic philosophy and theology: “soon no Thomist,\\nAlbertist, Scotist, or Ockhamist will be left in the world, but all\\nwill be simple children of God and true Christians” (Oberman\\n1966, 18–19). The Italian humanists attacked from a different\\ndirection, prizing historical scholarship over intricate metaphysics.\\nBy the seventeenth century,\\n Thomas Hobbes\\n and his contemporaries flaunted their scorn for the scholastics, who\\n“converse in questions of matters incomprehensible”\\n(Leviathan viii.27). It would not be until the eighteenth\\ncentury, however, that these “moderns” began to drive the\\nThomists and other scholastics out of the universities. (On the\\nreception of Aquinas over the centuries see Levering and Plested\\n2021.)\",\n \"\\nIn 1879, Pope Leo XIII called for a revival in the study and teaching\\nof Aquinas. One fruit of this encyclical was the founding of the\\ndefinitive Leonine edition of Aquinas’s work. Another was a\\nrenewal of the old Thomistic picture of Aquinas as standing at the\\nsummit of philosophical and theological achievement, leaving\\nsubsequent developments—from Scotus to Descartes, Kant and\\nbeyond—to be dismissed as just so much decline and decay. Such\\nzeal was hardly likely to be sustained for long, however, and the\\ntwentieth century witnessed a flourishing of Thomisms of all kinds, in\\nscholars like\\n Jacques Maritain,\\n Etienne Gilson,\\n Elizabeth Anscombe,\\n and Alasdair MacIntyre. As more recent scholarship has deepened our\\nunderstanding both of Aquinas and of his successors, we now have a\\nmuch fuller picture of the richness of later medieval philosophy.\\nAquinas today, viewed as a philosopher, looks not so much like the\\nculmination of an era, but rather like the brilliant beginning of\\nEurope’s philosophical renaissance.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"9. Influence\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Scriptum super libros Sententiarum (The Commentary on Peter\nLombard’s Sentences) (1252–56)\n\n\nA massive and wide-ranging work, composed during Aquinas’s term\nas bachelor of theology and the first part of his first term as master\nof theology. Until the Leonine version is published, the best Latin\ntext is the edition by Pierre Mandonnet and Maria F. Moos (Paris: P.\nLéthielleux, 1929–47), which is complete through book IV\ndistinction 22. The\n Aquinas Institute\n (Wyoming) is producing an online English translation that is nearing\ncompletion and looks to be of high quality. ","Summa contra gentiles (1259–65)\n\n\nThis is Aquinas’s second-most important work, after the\nSumma theologiae. Remarkably, the autograph manuscript has\nsurvived for much of this work and can be admired\n online\n (although Aquinas’s handwriting is notoriously difficult to\nread, even for experts). The best complete English translation, with\nthe Latin text in a parallel column, is available\n online.\n ","Summa theologiae (1267–73, unfinished after 3a 90)\n\n\nAquinas’s masterpiece, which he began in Rome and worked on\nuntil near the end his life. The Leonine volumes for this work, from\nthe nineteenth century, are no longer considered adequate, and will\neventually be reedited. The best (and now mostly complete) full\nEnglish translation is that of Alfred Freddoso, available\n online.\n ","On Truth (1256–59)\n\n\nAquinas’s first and largest set of disputed questions, from his\nfirst term as master in Paris. The title refers to just the first of\nthe 29 questions; the other 28 (making a total of 253 articles) take\nup many wide-ranging topics. ","On God’s Power (1265–66)","On the Soul (1266–67)","On Spiritual Creatures (1267–68)","On Evil (De malo) (1270–71)","On the Virtues (1271–72)","On the Union of the Incarnate Word (1272)","Quodlibetal Questions (1256–59, 1268–72)\n\n\nBy tradition, masters at Paris participated in disputations during\nAdvent and Lent at which audience members might propose any topic at\nall. Aquinas’s large and varied collection of Quodlibetal\nQuestions is split between his two terms as master, with\nquodlibets 7–11 dating from his first term and quodlibets\n1–6 and 12 dating from his second term. There is now an English\ntranslation by Nevitt and Davies (OUP 2019). ","On the Principles of Nature (De principiis\nnaturae) (early 1250s)\n\n\nA rather conventional summary of medieval natural philosophy, written\nno later than Aquinas’s term in Paris as a bachelor and perhaps,\njudging from its content, even earlier than that. Its brevity and\nphilosophical focus makes it useful for novices today. Stump and\nChanderbhan translate it in the Hackett Basic Works\nvolume. ","On Being and Essence (De ente et essentia)\n(1252–56).\n\n\nA famous brief treatise on various foundational questions in\nmetaphysics, dating from Aquinas’s time as bachelor in Paris.\nPeter King translates it in the Hackett Basic Works\nvolume. ","Compendium theologiae (begun in the early 1260s,\nunfinished)\n\n\nA relatively brief digest of material found at much greater length in\nthe Summa theologiae and elsewhere. ","On Kingship (De regno, or De regimine principum)\n(1266–67?, unfinished)","On the Unity of the Intellect (De unitate intellectus contra\nAverroistas) (1270)","On the Eternity of the World (1271)","On Separate Substances (1271 or later, unfinished)","On the Mixture of Elements (1269?)","On the Hidden Workings of Nature (De occultis operationibus\nnaturae) (1268–72?)","On the Motion of the Heart (De motu cordis)\n(1273?)","De anima (1267–68)","De sensu et sensato (1268–69)","Physics (1269–70)","De interpretatione (Peri hermeneias) (1271, unfinished\nfrom ch. 10, 19b26)","Posterior Analytics (1271–72)","Nicomachean Ethics (1271–72)","Politics (around 1269–72, unfinished after III.8,\n1280a7)","Metaphysics (around 1270–73)","De caelo et mundo (1272–73, unfinished from III.4,\n302b29)","Meteorology (1273, unfinished after II.5, 363a20)","On Generation and Corruption (1272–73, unfinished\nafter I.5, 322a33)","Boethius’s De trinitate (1257–59,\nunfinished)","Boethius’s De hebdomadibus (1271–72?)","Pseudo-Dionysius’s On the Divine Names\n(1266–68)","Liber de causis (1272)","Isaiah (1251–52)","Jeremiah (1251–53)","Job (1263–65)","Catena aurea (1263–1268) — a continuous\nexposition of the Gospels, interweaving Patristic glosses","Matthew (1269–70)","John (1270–72)","Paul (1261?–73) — a sequence of commentaries\ncovering all of the Pauline epistles","Psalms (1272–73, unfinished after Psalm 54)","Adams, Marilyn McCord, 1987, William Ockham, 2 volumes,\nNotre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.","Amerini, Fabrizio, 2009 [2013], Tommaso d’Aquino:\nOrigine e fine della vita umana, Pisa: Edizioni ETS. Translated\nas Aquinas on the Beginning and End of Human Life, Mark\nHenninger (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.","Angier, Tom, 2021, Natural Law Theory, Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108580793","Ashworth, E. Jennifer, 2014, “Aquinas on Analogy”, in\nJeffrey Hause (ed.), Debates in Medieval Philosophy, New\nYork: Routledge, 232–42.","Băltuță [Baltuta], Elena, 2013, “Aquinas on\nIntellectual Cognition: The Case of Intelligible Species”,\nPhilosophia, 41(3): 589–602.\ndoi:10.1007/s11406-013-9481-y","Bazán, Bernardo C., 1997, “The Human Soul: From\nand Substance? Thomas Aquinas’s Critique of Eclectic\nAristotelianism”, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et\nlittéraire du moyen âge, 64: 95–126.","Bradley, Denis J. M., 1997, Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good:\nReason and Human Happiness in Aquinas’s Moral Science,\nWashington, DC: Catholic University of America Press.","Brower, Jeffrey E., 2014, Aquinas’s Ontology of the\nMaterial World: Change, Hylomorphism, and Material Objects, New\nYork/Oxford: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198714293.001.0001","–––, 2016, “Aquinas on the Problem of\nUniversals”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,\n92(3): 715–35. doi:10.1111/phpr.12176","Brower, Jeffrey E., and Susan Brower-Toland, 2008, “Aquinas\non Mental Representation: Concepts and Intentionality”,\nPhilosophical Review, 117(2): 193–243.\ndoi:10.1215/00318108-2007-036","Brown, Christopher M., 2007, “Souls, Ships, and\nSubstances”, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly,\n81(4): 655–68. doi:10.5840/acpq20078147","–––, 2021, Eternal Life and Human Happiness:\nPhilosophical Problems, Thomistic Solutions, Washington, DC:\nCatholic University of America Press.","Cohoe, Caleb, 2013, “There Must Be a First: Why Thomas\nAquinas Rejects Infinite, Essentially Ordered, Causal Series”,\nBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy, 21(5):\n838–56. doi:10.1080/09608788.2013.816934","Cory, Therese Scarpelli, 2015, “Rethinking Abstractionism:\nAquinas’s Intellectual Light and Some Arabic Sources”,\nJournal of the History of Philosophy, 53(4): 607–46.\ndoi:10.1353/hph.2015.0074","–––, 2022, “The Nature of Cognition and\nKnowledge”, in Stump and White (eds) 2022: 153–83 (ch. 7).\ndoi:10.1017/9781009043595.011","Cross, Richard, 1998, The Physics of Duns Scotus: The\nScientific Context of a Theological Vision, Oxford: Clarendon\nPress. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269748.001.0001","Dales, Richard C., 1990, Medieval Discussions of the Eternity\nof the World, Leiden: Brill. doi:10.1163/9789004246676","Davies, Brian, 2018, “The Summa Theologiae on What\nGod Is Not”, in Hause (ed.) 2018: 47–67.","Davies, Brian and Eleonore Stump (eds.), 2012, The Oxford\nHandbook of Aquinas, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195326093.001.0001","De Haan, Daniel, 2019, “Aquinas on Sensing, Perceiving,\nThinking, Understanding, and Cognizing Individuals”, in E.\nBăltuță (ed.), Medieval Perceptual Puzzles:\nTheories of Sense Perception in the 13th and\n14th Centuries, Leiden: Brill, 238–68.","Dewan, Lawrence, 2007, “St. Thomas and Analogy: The Logician\nand the Metaphysician”, in R. E. Houser (ed.), Laudemus\nviros gloriosos: Essays in Honor of Armand Maurer, Notre Dame,\nIN: University of Notre Dame Press, 132–45.","DeYoung, Rebecca Konyndyk, Colleen McCluskey, and Christina Van\nDyke, 2009, Aquinas’s Ethics: Metaphysical Foundations,\nMoral Theory, and Theological Context, Notre Dame, IN: University\nof Notre Dame Press.","Dougherty, Michael V., 2004, “On the Alleged Subalternate\nCharacter of Sacra Doctrina in Aquinas”,\nProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical\nAssociation, 77: 101–10. doi:10.5840/acpaproc20037716","Elders, Leo, 2009, “The Aristotelian Commentaries of St.\nThomas Aquinas”, Review of Metaphysics, 63(1):\n29–53.","Finnis, John, 1998, Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal\nTheory, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.","Frost, Gloria, 2022, Aquinas on Efficient Causation and Causal\nPowers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\ndoi:10.1017/9781009225403","Gallagher, David M., 1994, “Free Choice and Free Judgment in\nThomas Aquinas”, Archiv für Geschichte der\nPhilosophie, 76(3): 247–77.\ndoi:10.1515/agph.1994.76.3.247","Glorieux, Palémon, 1927, Les premières\npolémiques Thomistes: le Correctorium Corruptorii\n“Quare”, Kain: Le Saulchoir.","Goris, Harm J. M. J., 1997, Free Creatures of an Eternal God:\nThomas Aquinas on God’s Infallible Foreknowledge and\nIrresistible Will, Leuven: Peeters.","Goris, Harm J. M. J and Henk J. M. Schoot, 2017, The Virtuous\nLife: Thomas Aquinas on the Theological Nature of Moral Virtues,\nLeuven: Peeters.","Grisez, Germain, 1965, “The First Principle of Practical\nReason: A Commentary on the Summa Theologiae, 1–2,\nQuestion 94, Article 2”, Natural Law Forum, 10:\n168–201.","Hause, Jeffrey, 1997, “Thomas Aquinas and the\nVoluntarists”, Medieval Philosophy and Theology, 6(2):\n167–82. doi:10.5840/medievalpt1997628","–––, 2007, “Aquinas on the Function of\nMoral Virtue”, American Catholic Philosophical\nQuarterly, 81(1): 1–20. doi:10.5840/acpq200781145","––– (ed.), 2018, Aquinas’s Summa\nTheologiae: A Critical Guide,\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316271490","Hissette, Roland, 1977, Enquête sur les 219 articles\ncondamnés à Paris le 7 mars 1277, Louvain:\nPublications universitaires.","Hobbes, Thomas, 1651 [1994], Leviathan, E. Curley (ed.),\nIndianapolis: Hackett.","Hochschild, Joshua P., 2019, “Aquinas’s Two Concepts\nof Analogy and a Complex Semantics for Naming the Simple God”,\nThomist, 83(2): 155–84. doi:10.1353/tho.2019.0013","Hoffman, Paul, 2014, “Aquinas on Spiritual Change”, in\nRobert Pasnau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy, volume\n2, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 98–103.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718468.003.0005","Hoffmann, Tobias, 2022, “Grace and Free Will”, in\nStump and White (eds.) 2022: 233–56 (ch. 10).\ndoi:10.1017/9781009043595.015","Hoffmann, Tobias and Cyrille Michon, 2017, “Aquinas on Free\nWill and Intellectual Determinism”, Philosophers’\nImprint, 17(10): 1–36.\n [Hoffmann and Michon 2017 available online]","Irwin, Terence, 2007, The Development of Ethics: A Historical\nand Critical Study (Volume 1: From Socrates to the\nReformation), Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198242673.001.0001","Jenkins, John I., 1996, “Expositions of the Text:\nAquinas’s Aristotelian Commentaries”, Medieval\nPhilosophy and Theology, 5(1): 39–62.\n [Jenkins 1996 available online]","Jensen, Steven J., 2015, Knowing the Natural Law: From\nPrecepts and Inclinations to Deriving Oughts, Washington, DC:\nCatholic University of America Press.","Jordan, Mark D., 1982, “The Controversy of the\nCorrectoria and the Limits of Metaphysics”,\nSpeculum, 57(2): 292–314. doi:10.2307/2847458","Kenny, Anthony, 1969, The Five Ways: St. Thomas\nAquinas’s Proofs of God’s Existence, London:\nRoutledge.","–––, 1993, Aquinas on Mind, London/New\nYork: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203004944 ","–––, 1998, “Aquinas on Aristotelian\nHappiness”, in MacDonald and Stump (eds) 1998: 15–27.","Kent, Bonnie, 1995, Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of\nEthics in the Late Thirteenth Century, Washington, DC: Catholic\nUniversity of America Press.","King, Peter, 1994, “Scholasticism and the Philosophy of\nMind: The Failure of Aristotelian Psychology”, in Tamara\nHorowitz and Allen I. Janis (eds.), Scientific Failure,\nLanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 109–38.","–––, 1998, “Aquinas on the\nPassions”, in MacDonald and Stump (eds) 1998: 101–32.","–––, 2000, “The Problem of Individuation\nin the Middle Ages”, Theoria, 66: 159–84.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1755-2567.2000.tb01161.x","Klima, Gyula, 1997 [2002], “Man = Body + Soul:\nAquinas’s Arithmetic of Human Nature”, in Timo Koistinen\nand Tommi Lehtonen (eds.), Philosophical Studies in Religion,\nMetaphysics, and Ethics: Essays in Honour of Heikki Kirjavainen,\nHelsinki: Luther Agricola Society. Reprinted in Brian Davies (ed.),\nThomas Aquinas: Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives,\nOxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, 257–73 (ch. 10).","–––, 2000, “Aquinas on One and\nMany”, Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica\nmedievale, 11: 195–215.","–––, 2001, “Aquinas’ Proofs of the\nImmateriality of the Intellect from the Universality of\nThought”, Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and\nMetaphysics, 1: 19–28.","Knobel, Angela, 2021, Aquinas and the Infused Moral\nVirtues, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.","Kretzmann, Norman, 1997, The Metaphysics of Theism:\nAquinas’s Natural Theology in Summa Contra\nGentiles I, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\ndoi:10.1093/019924653X.001.0001","–––, 1999, The Metaphysics of Creation:\nAquinas’s Natural Theology in Summa Contra\nGentiles II, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\ndoi:10.1093/0199246548.001.0001","Leftow, Brian, 1990, “Aquinas on Time and Eternity”,\nAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 64(3):\n387–99. doi:10.5840/acpq199064315","–––, 2003, “Aquinas on Attributes”,\nMedieval Philosophy and Theology, 11(1): 1–41.\ndoi:10.1017/S105706080300001X","Legge, Dominic, 2022, “Thomas Aquinas: A Life Pursuing\nWisdom”, in Stump and White (eds) 2022: 7–28 (ch. 1).\ndoi:10.1017/9781009043595.003","Levering, Matthew and Marcus Plested (eds), 2021, The Oxford\nHandbook of the Reception of Aquinas, Oxford: Oxford University\nPress. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198798026.001.0001","Lisska, Anthony J., 1996, Aquinas’s Theory of Natural\nLaw: An Analytic Reconstruction, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269670.001.0001","–––, 2016, Aquinas’s Theory of\nPerception: An Analytic Reconstruction, Oxford: Oxford University\nPress. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198777908.001.0001","Loughran, Thomas J., 1999, “Aquinas, Compatibilist”,\nin F. Michael McLain and W. Mark Richardson (eds), Human and\nDivine Agency: Anglican, Catholic, and Lutheran Perspectives, New\nYork: University Press of America, 1–39.","MacDonald, Scott, 1991a, “Aquinas’s Parasitic\nCosmological Argument”, Medieval Philosophy and\nTheology, 1: 119–55.\n [MacDonald 1991a available online]","–––, 1991b, “Ultimate Ends in Practical\nReasoning”, Philosophical Review, 100(1): 31–66.\ndoi:10.2307/2185514","–––, 1993, “Theory of Knowledge”, in\nNorman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (eds.), Cambridge Companion to\nAquinas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 160–95.\ndoi:10.1017/CCOL0521431956.007","MacDonald, Scott and Eleonore Stump (eds), 1998,\nAquinas’s Moral Theory: Essays in Honor of Norman\nKretzmann, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.","Marmodoro, Anna and Ben Page, 2016, “Aquinas on Forms,\nSubstances and Artifacts”, Vivarium, 54(1): 1–21.\ndoi:10.1163/15685349-12341310","Martin, C. F. J., 1997, Thomas Aquinas: God and\nExplanations, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.","Massey, Gerald J., 1999, “Medieval Sociobiology: Thomas\nAquinas’s Theory of Sexual Morality”, Philosophical\nTopics, 27(1): 69–86. doi:10.5840/philtopics199927117","Mattison, William C., 2011, “Can Christians Possess the\nAcquired Cardinal Virtues?” Theological Studies, 72(3):\n558–85. doi:10.1177/004056391107200304","Maurer, Armand, 1986, “Introduction”, in Thomas\nAquinas, The Division and Methods of the Sciences: Questions V and\nVI of his Commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius, 4th revised\nedition, Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies,\nVII–XLI.","McCluskey, Colleen, 2017, Thomas Aquinas on Moral\nWrongdoing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\ndoi:10.1017/9781316796917","McInerny, Ralph, 1996, Aquinas and Analogy, Washington,\nDC: Catholic University of America Press.","–––, 1997, Ethica Thomistica: The Moral\nPhilosophy of Thomas Aquinas, revised edition, Washington, DC:\nCatholic University of America Press.","Miner, Robert C., 2009, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions: A\nStudy of Summa theologiae 1a2ae\n22–48, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511576560","Montagnes, Bernard, 1963 [2004], La Doctrine de\nl’analogie de l’être d’après Saint\nThomas D’Aquin, Louvain: Publications universitaires.\nTranslated as The Doctrine of the Analogy of Being according to\nThomas Aquinas, E. M. Macierowski and Pol Vandevelde (trans),\nAndrew Tallon (ed.), Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2004.","Murphy, Mark C., 2001, Natural Law and Practical\nRationality, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.","Nevitt, Turner C., 2014, “Survivalism, Corruptionism, and\nIntermittent Existence in Aquinas”, History of Philosophy\nQuarterly, 31(1): 1–19.","Oberman, Heiko A. (ed.), 1966, Forerunners of the Reformation:\nThe Shape of Late Medieval Thought, New York: Holt, Rinehart and\nWinston.","Ogden, Stephen R., 2022, Averroes on Intellect: From\nAristotelian Origins to Aquinas’ Critique, Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780192896117.001.0001","Oliva, Adriano, 2015, Amours: L’église, les\ndivorcés remariés, les couples homosexuels, Paris:\nCerf.","Osborne, Thomas M., Jr., 2005, Love of Self and Love of God in\nThirteenth-Century Ethics, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre\nDame Press.","Panaccio, Claude, 2001, “Aquinas on Intellectual\nRepresentation”, in Dominik Perler (ed.) Ancient and\nMedieval Theories of Intentionality, Leiden: Brill,\n185–202. doi:10.1163/9789004453296_012","Pasnau, Robert, 1997, Theories of Cognition in the Later\nMiddle Ages, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.","–––, 2002, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature: A\nPhilosophical Study of Summa theologiae 1a\n75–89, New York: Cambridge University Press.\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511613180","–––, 2011, Metaphysical Themes\n1274–1671, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199567911.001.0001","–––, 2018, “On What There Is in\nAquinas”, in Hause (ed.) 2018: 10–28.","Pawl, Timothy, 2012, “The Five Ways”, in Davies and\nStump (eds.) 2012: 115–31 (ch. 9).\ndoi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195326093.013.0010","Perler, Dominik, 2000, “Essentialism and Direct Realism.\nSome Late Medieval Perspectives”, Topoi, 19(2):\n111–22. doi:10.1023/A:1006425008627","Pini, Giorgio, 2012, “The Development of Aquinas’s\nThought”, in Davies and Stump (eds) 2012: 491–510 (ch.\n37). doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195326093.013.0038","Pope, Stephen J. (ed.), 2002, The Ethics of Aquinas,\nWashington, DC: Georgetown University Press.","Porro, Pasquale, 2012 [2016], Tommaso d’Aquino: Un\nProfile storic-filosofico, Roma: Carocci editore. translated as\nThomas Aquinas: A Historical and Philosophical Profile,\nJoseph G. Trabbic and Roger W. Nutt (trans.), Washington, DC: Catholic\nUniversity of America Press, 2016.","Porter, Jean, 2018, “The Natural Law”, in Hause (ed.)\n2018: 170–87.","–––, 2019, “Moral Virtues, Charity, and\nGrace: Why the Infused and Acquired Virtues Cannot Co-Exist”,\nJournal of Moral Theology, 8(2): 40–66.","Rhonheimer, Martin, 1987 [2000], Natur als Grundlage der\nMoral: die personale Struktur des Naturgesetzes bei Thomas von Aquin:\neine Auseinandersetzung mit autonomer und teleologischer Ethik,\nInnsbruck: Tyrolia-Verlag. Translated as Natural Law and Practical\nReason: A Thomist View of Moral Autonomy, Gerald Malsbary\n(trans.), (Moral Philosophy and Moral Theology 1), New York: Fordham\nUniversity Press, 2000.","Rota, Michael W., 2004, “Substance and Artifact in Thomas\nAquinas”, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 21(3):\n241–59.","Shanley, Brian J., 2007, “Beyond Libertarianism and\nCompatibilism: Thomas Aquinas on Created Freedom”, in Richard\nVelkley (ed.), Freedom and the Human Person, Washington, DC:\nCatholic University of America Press, 70–89.","Shields, Christopher and Robert Pasnau, 2016, The Philosophy\nof Aquinas, 2nd edition, New York: Oxford University\nPress. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199301232.001.0001","Stenberg, Joseph, 2016a, “Aquinas on the Relationship\nBetween the Vision and Delight in Perfect Happiness”,\nAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 90(4):\n665–80. doi:10.5840/acpq201691499","–––, 2016b, “Considerandum est quid\nsit beatitudo: Aquinas on What Happiness Really Is”,\nRes Philosophica, 93(1): 161–84.\ndoi:10.11612/resphil.2016.93.1.11","Stump, Eleonore, 2003, Aquinas, London: Routledge.\ndoi:10.4324/9780203928356 ","–––, 2010, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative\nand the Problem of Suffering, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199277421.001.0001","–––, 2011, “The Non-Aristotelian Character\nof Aquinas’s Ethics: Aquinas on the Passions”, Faith\nand Philosophy, 28(1): 29–43.\ndoi:10.5840/faithphil201128114","–––, 2018, Atonement, Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198813866.001.0001","–––, 2022, “The Nature of Human\nBeings”, in Stump and White (eds) 2022: 126–50 (ch. 6).\ndoi:10.1017/9781009043595.009","Stump, Eleonore and Thomas Joseph White (eds.), 2022, The New\nCambridge Companion to Aquinas, Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress. doi:10.1017/9781009043595","Toner, Patrick, 2009, “Personhood and Death in St. Thomas\nAquinas”, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 26(2):\n121–38.","Torrell, Jean-Pierre, 1993 [2022], L’Initiation à\nSaint Thomas d'Aquin: Sa personne et son oeuvre, Paris: Cerf.\nTranslated as Saint Thomas Aquinas (Volume 1: The Person\nand His Work), Matthew K. Minerd and Robert Royal (trans),\n3rd edition, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America\nPress, 2022.","–––, 1996 [2003], Saint Thomas\nd’Aquin, Maître Spirituel, Paris: Cerf; translated as\nSaint Thomas Aquinas (Volume 2: Spiritual Master),\nRobert Royal (trans.), Washington, DC: Catholic University of America\nPress, 2003.","Van Dyke, Christina, 2012, “The End of (Human) Life as We\nKnow It: Thomas Aquinas on Persons, Bodies, and Death”,\nModern Schoolman, 89(3): 243–57.\ndoi:10.5840/schoolman2012893/416","Wawrykow, Joseph P., 2012, “The Theological Virtues”,\nin Davies and Stump (eds.) 2012: 287–307 (ch. 22).\ndoi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195326093.013.0023","Westberg, Daniel, 1994, Right Practical Reason: Aristotle,\nAction, and Prudence in Aquinas, Oxford: Clarendon Press.","Wippel, John F., 1995a, “‘First Philosophy’\naccording to Thomas Aquinas”, in his Metaphysical Themes in\nThomas Aquinas, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America\nPress, 55–67.","–––, 1995b, “Thomas Aquinas and the\nCondemnations of 1277”, Modern Schoolman, 72(2):\n232–72. doi:10.5840/schoolman1995722/317","–––, 1995c, “Thomas Aquinas on the\nPossibility of Eternal Creation”, in his Metaphysical Themes\nin Thomas Aquinas, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America\nPress, 191–214.","–––, 2000, The Metaphysical Thought of\nThomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being, Washington,\nDC: Catholic University of America Press.","Wood, Adam, 2020, Thomas Aquinas on the Immateriality of the\nHuman Intellect, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America\nPress."],"string":"[\n \"Scriptum super libros Sententiarum (The Commentary on Peter\\nLombard’s Sentences) (1252–56)\\n\\n\\nA massive and wide-ranging work, composed during Aquinas’s term\\nas bachelor of theology and the first part of his first term as master\\nof theology. Until the Leonine version is published, the best Latin\\ntext is the edition by Pierre Mandonnet and Maria F. Moos (Paris: P.\\nLéthielleux, 1929–47), which is complete through book IV\\ndistinction 22. The\\n Aquinas Institute\\n (Wyoming) is producing an online English translation that is nearing\\ncompletion and looks to be of high quality. \",\n \"Summa contra gentiles (1259–65)\\n\\n\\nThis is Aquinas’s second-most important work, after the\\nSumma theologiae. Remarkably, the autograph manuscript has\\nsurvived for much of this work and can be admired\\n online\\n (although Aquinas’s handwriting is notoriously difficult to\\nread, even for experts). The best complete English translation, with\\nthe Latin text in a parallel column, is available\\n online.\\n \",\n \"Summa theologiae (1267–73, unfinished after 3a 90)\\n\\n\\nAquinas’s masterpiece, which he began in Rome and worked on\\nuntil near the end his life. The Leonine volumes for this work, from\\nthe nineteenth century, are no longer considered adequate, and will\\neventually be reedited. The best (and now mostly complete) full\\nEnglish translation is that of Alfred Freddoso, available\\n online.\\n \",\n \"On Truth (1256–59)\\n\\n\\nAquinas’s first and largest set of disputed questions, from his\\nfirst term as master in Paris. The title refers to just the first of\\nthe 29 questions; the other 28 (making a total of 253 articles) take\\nup many wide-ranging topics. \",\n \"On God’s Power (1265–66)\",\n \"On the Soul (1266–67)\",\n \"On Spiritual Creatures (1267–68)\",\n \"On Evil (De malo) (1270–71)\",\n \"On the Virtues (1271–72)\",\n \"On the Union of the Incarnate Word (1272)\",\n \"Quodlibetal Questions (1256–59, 1268–72)\\n\\n\\nBy tradition, masters at Paris participated in disputations during\\nAdvent and Lent at which audience members might propose any topic at\\nall. Aquinas’s large and varied collection of Quodlibetal\\nQuestions is split between his two terms as master, with\\nquodlibets 7–11 dating from his first term and quodlibets\\n1–6 and 12 dating from his second term. There is now an English\\ntranslation by Nevitt and Davies (OUP 2019). \",\n \"On the Principles of Nature (De principiis\\nnaturae) (early 1250s)\\n\\n\\nA rather conventional summary of medieval natural philosophy, written\\nno later than Aquinas’s term in Paris as a bachelor and perhaps,\\njudging from its content, even earlier than that. Its brevity and\\nphilosophical focus makes it useful for novices today. Stump and\\nChanderbhan translate it in the Hackett Basic Works\\nvolume. \",\n \"On Being and Essence (De ente et essentia)\\n(1252–56).\\n\\n\\nA famous brief treatise on various foundational questions in\\nmetaphysics, dating from Aquinas’s time as bachelor in Paris.\\nPeter King translates it in the Hackett Basic Works\\nvolume. \",\n \"Compendium theologiae (begun in the early 1260s,\\nunfinished)\\n\\n\\nA relatively brief digest of material found at much greater length in\\nthe Summa theologiae and elsewhere. \",\n \"On Kingship (De regno, or De regimine principum)\\n(1266–67?, unfinished)\",\n \"On the Unity of the Intellect (De unitate intellectus contra\\nAverroistas) (1270)\",\n \"On the Eternity of the World (1271)\",\n \"On Separate Substances (1271 or later, unfinished)\",\n \"On the Mixture of Elements (1269?)\",\n \"On the Hidden Workings of Nature (De occultis operationibus\\nnaturae) (1268–72?)\",\n \"On the Motion of the Heart (De motu cordis)\\n(1273?)\",\n \"De anima (1267–68)\",\n \"De sensu et sensato (1268–69)\",\n \"Physics (1269–70)\",\n \"De interpretatione (Peri hermeneias) (1271, unfinished\\nfrom ch. 10, 19b26)\",\n \"Posterior Analytics (1271–72)\",\n \"Nicomachean Ethics (1271–72)\",\n \"Politics (around 1269–72, unfinished after III.8,\\n1280a7)\",\n \"Metaphysics (around 1270–73)\",\n \"De caelo et mundo (1272–73, unfinished from III.4,\\n302b29)\",\n \"Meteorology (1273, unfinished after II.5, 363a20)\",\n \"On Generation and Corruption (1272–73, unfinished\\nafter I.5, 322a33)\",\n \"Boethius’s De trinitate (1257–59,\\nunfinished)\",\n \"Boethius’s De hebdomadibus (1271–72?)\",\n \"Pseudo-Dionysius’s On the Divine Names\\n(1266–68)\",\n \"Liber de causis (1272)\",\n \"Isaiah (1251–52)\",\n \"Jeremiah (1251–53)\",\n \"Job (1263–65)\",\n \"Catena aurea (1263–1268) — a continuous\\nexposition of the Gospels, interweaving Patristic glosses\",\n \"Matthew (1269–70)\",\n \"John (1270–72)\",\n \"Paul (1261?–73) — a sequence of commentaries\\ncovering all of the Pauline epistles\",\n \"Psalms (1272–73, unfinished after Psalm 54)\",\n \"Adams, Marilyn McCord, 1987, William Ockham, 2 volumes,\\nNotre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.\",\n \"Amerini, Fabrizio, 2009 [2013], Tommaso d’Aquino:\\nOrigine e fine della vita umana, Pisa: Edizioni ETS. Translated\\nas Aquinas on the Beginning and End of Human Life, Mark\\nHenninger (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Angier, Tom, 2021, Natural Law Theory, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108580793\",\n \"Ashworth, E. Jennifer, 2014, “Aquinas on Analogy”, in\\nJeffrey Hause (ed.), Debates in Medieval Philosophy, New\\nYork: Routledge, 232–42.\",\n \"Băltuță [Baltuta], Elena, 2013, “Aquinas on\\nIntellectual Cognition: The Case of Intelligible Species”,\\nPhilosophia, 41(3): 589–602.\\ndoi:10.1007/s11406-013-9481-y\",\n \"Bazán, Bernardo C., 1997, “The Human Soul: From\\nand Substance? Thomas Aquinas’s Critique of Eclectic\\nAristotelianism”, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et\\nlittéraire du moyen âge, 64: 95–126.\",\n \"Bradley, Denis J. M., 1997, Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good:\\nReason and Human Happiness in Aquinas’s Moral Science,\\nWashington, DC: Catholic University of America Press.\",\n \"Brower, Jeffrey E., 2014, Aquinas’s Ontology of the\\nMaterial World: Change, Hylomorphism, and Material Objects, New\\nYork/Oxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198714293.001.0001\",\n \"–––, 2016, “Aquinas on the Problem of\\nUniversals”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,\\n92(3): 715–35. doi:10.1111/phpr.12176\",\n \"Brower, Jeffrey E., and Susan Brower-Toland, 2008, “Aquinas\\non Mental Representation: Concepts and Intentionality”,\\nPhilosophical Review, 117(2): 193–243.\\ndoi:10.1215/00318108-2007-036\",\n \"Brown, Christopher M., 2007, “Souls, Ships, and\\nSubstances”, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly,\\n81(4): 655–68. doi:10.5840/acpq20078147\",\n \"–––, 2021, Eternal Life and Human Happiness:\\nPhilosophical Problems, Thomistic Solutions, Washington, DC:\\nCatholic University of America Press.\",\n \"Cohoe, Caleb, 2013, “There Must Be a First: Why Thomas\\nAquinas Rejects Infinite, Essentially Ordered, Causal Series”,\\nBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy, 21(5):\\n838–56. doi:10.1080/09608788.2013.816934\",\n \"Cory, Therese Scarpelli, 2015, “Rethinking Abstractionism:\\nAquinas’s Intellectual Light and Some Arabic Sources”,\\nJournal of the History of Philosophy, 53(4): 607–46.\\ndoi:10.1353/hph.2015.0074\",\n \"–––, 2022, “The Nature of Cognition and\\nKnowledge”, in Stump and White (eds) 2022: 153–83 (ch. 7).\\ndoi:10.1017/9781009043595.011\",\n \"Cross, Richard, 1998, The Physics of Duns Scotus: The\\nScientific Context of a Theological Vision, Oxford: Clarendon\\nPress. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269748.001.0001\",\n \"Dales, Richard C., 1990, Medieval Discussions of the Eternity\\nof the World, Leiden: Brill. doi:10.1163/9789004246676\",\n \"Davies, Brian, 2018, “The Summa Theologiae on What\\nGod Is Not”, in Hause (ed.) 2018: 47–67.\",\n \"Davies, Brian and Eleonore Stump (eds.), 2012, The Oxford\\nHandbook of Aquinas, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195326093.001.0001\",\n \"De Haan, Daniel, 2019, “Aquinas on Sensing, Perceiving,\\nThinking, Understanding, and Cognizing Individuals”, in E.\\nBăltuță (ed.), Medieval Perceptual Puzzles:\\nTheories of Sense Perception in the 13th and\\n14th Centuries, Leiden: Brill, 238–68.\",\n \"Dewan, Lawrence, 2007, “St. Thomas and Analogy: The Logician\\nand the Metaphysician”, in R. E. Houser (ed.), Laudemus\\nviros gloriosos: Essays in Honor of Armand Maurer, Notre Dame,\\nIN: University of Notre Dame Press, 132–45.\",\n \"DeYoung, Rebecca Konyndyk, Colleen McCluskey, and Christina Van\\nDyke, 2009, Aquinas’s Ethics: Metaphysical Foundations,\\nMoral Theory, and Theological Context, Notre Dame, IN: University\\nof Notre Dame Press.\",\n \"Dougherty, Michael V., 2004, “On the Alleged Subalternate\\nCharacter of Sacra Doctrina in Aquinas”,\\nProceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical\\nAssociation, 77: 101–10. doi:10.5840/acpaproc20037716\",\n \"Elders, Leo, 2009, “The Aristotelian Commentaries of St.\\nThomas Aquinas”, Review of Metaphysics, 63(1):\\n29–53.\",\n \"Finnis, John, 1998, Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal\\nTheory, Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Frost, Gloria, 2022, Aquinas on Efficient Causation and Causal\\nPowers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/9781009225403\",\n \"Gallagher, David M., 1994, “Free Choice and Free Judgment in\\nThomas Aquinas”, Archiv für Geschichte der\\nPhilosophie, 76(3): 247–77.\\ndoi:10.1515/agph.1994.76.3.247\",\n \"Glorieux, Palémon, 1927, Les premières\\npolémiques Thomistes: le Correctorium Corruptorii\\n“Quare”, Kain: Le Saulchoir.\",\n \"Goris, Harm J. M. J., 1997, Free Creatures of an Eternal God:\\nThomas Aquinas on God’s Infallible Foreknowledge and\\nIrresistible Will, Leuven: Peeters.\",\n \"Goris, Harm J. M. J and Henk J. M. Schoot, 2017, The Virtuous\\nLife: Thomas Aquinas on the Theological Nature of Moral Virtues,\\nLeuven: Peeters.\",\n \"Grisez, Germain, 1965, “The First Principle of Practical\\nReason: A Commentary on the Summa Theologiae, 1–2,\\nQuestion 94, Article 2”, Natural Law Forum, 10:\\n168–201.\",\n \"Hause, Jeffrey, 1997, “Thomas Aquinas and the\\nVoluntarists”, Medieval Philosophy and Theology, 6(2):\\n167–82. doi:10.5840/medievalpt1997628\",\n \"–––, 2007, “Aquinas on the Function of\\nMoral Virtue”, American Catholic Philosophical\\nQuarterly, 81(1): 1–20. doi:10.5840/acpq200781145\",\n \"––– (ed.), 2018, Aquinas’s Summa\\nTheologiae: A Critical Guide,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316271490\",\n \"Hissette, Roland, 1977, Enquête sur les 219 articles\\ncondamnés à Paris le 7 mars 1277, Louvain:\\nPublications universitaires.\",\n \"Hobbes, Thomas, 1651 [1994], Leviathan, E. Curley (ed.),\\nIndianapolis: Hackett.\",\n \"Hochschild, Joshua P., 2019, “Aquinas’s Two Concepts\\nof Analogy and a Complex Semantics for Naming the Simple God”,\\nThomist, 83(2): 155–84. doi:10.1353/tho.2019.0013\",\n \"Hoffman, Paul, 2014, “Aquinas on Spiritual Change”, in\\nRobert Pasnau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy, volume\\n2, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 98–103.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198718468.003.0005\",\n \"Hoffmann, Tobias, 2022, “Grace and Free Will”, in\\nStump and White (eds.) 2022: 233–56 (ch. 10).\\ndoi:10.1017/9781009043595.015\",\n \"Hoffmann, Tobias and Cyrille Michon, 2017, “Aquinas on Free\\nWill and Intellectual Determinism”, Philosophers’\\nImprint, 17(10): 1–36.\\n [Hoffmann and Michon 2017 available online]\",\n \"Irwin, Terence, 2007, The Development of Ethics: A Historical\\nand Critical Study (Volume 1: From Socrates to the\\nReformation), Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198242673.001.0001\",\n \"Jenkins, John I., 1996, “Expositions of the Text:\\nAquinas’s Aristotelian Commentaries”, Medieval\\nPhilosophy and Theology, 5(1): 39–62.\\n [Jenkins 1996 available online]\",\n \"Jensen, Steven J., 2015, Knowing the Natural Law: From\\nPrecepts and Inclinations to Deriving Oughts, Washington, DC:\\nCatholic University of America Press.\",\n \"Jordan, Mark D., 1982, “The Controversy of the\\nCorrectoria and the Limits of Metaphysics”,\\nSpeculum, 57(2): 292–314. doi:10.2307/2847458\",\n \"Kenny, Anthony, 1969, The Five Ways: St. Thomas\\nAquinas’s Proofs of God’s Existence, London:\\nRoutledge.\",\n \"–––, 1993, Aquinas on Mind, London/New\\nYork: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203004944 \",\n \"–––, 1998, “Aquinas on Aristotelian\\nHappiness”, in MacDonald and Stump (eds) 1998: 15–27.\",\n \"Kent, Bonnie, 1995, Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of\\nEthics in the Late Thirteenth Century, Washington, DC: Catholic\\nUniversity of America Press.\",\n \"King, Peter, 1994, “Scholasticism and the Philosophy of\\nMind: The Failure of Aristotelian Psychology”, in Tamara\\nHorowitz and Allen I. Janis (eds.), Scientific Failure,\\nLanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 109–38.\",\n \"–––, 1998, “Aquinas on the\\nPassions”, in MacDonald and Stump (eds) 1998: 101–32.\",\n \"–––, 2000, “The Problem of Individuation\\nin the Middle Ages”, Theoria, 66: 159–84.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1755-2567.2000.tb01161.x\",\n \"Klima, Gyula, 1997 [2002], “Man = Body + Soul:\\nAquinas’s Arithmetic of Human Nature”, in Timo Koistinen\\nand Tommi Lehtonen (eds.), Philosophical Studies in Religion,\\nMetaphysics, and Ethics: Essays in Honour of Heikki Kirjavainen,\\nHelsinki: Luther Agricola Society. Reprinted in Brian Davies (ed.),\\nThomas Aquinas: Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, 257–73 (ch. 10).\",\n \"–––, 2000, “Aquinas on One and\\nMany”, Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica\\nmedievale, 11: 195–215.\",\n \"–––, 2001, “Aquinas’ Proofs of the\\nImmateriality of the Intellect from the Universality of\\nThought”, Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and\\nMetaphysics, 1: 19–28.\",\n \"Knobel, Angela, 2021, Aquinas and the Infused Moral\\nVirtues, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.\",\n \"Kretzmann, Norman, 1997, The Metaphysics of Theism:\\nAquinas’s Natural Theology in Summa Contra\\nGentiles I, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/019924653X.001.0001\",\n \"–––, 1999, The Metaphysics of Creation:\\nAquinas’s Natural Theology in Summa Contra\\nGentiles II, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/0199246548.001.0001\",\n \"Leftow, Brian, 1990, “Aquinas on Time and Eternity”,\\nAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 64(3):\\n387–99. doi:10.5840/acpq199064315\",\n \"–––, 2003, “Aquinas on Attributes”,\\nMedieval Philosophy and Theology, 11(1): 1–41.\\ndoi:10.1017/S105706080300001X\",\n \"Legge, Dominic, 2022, “Thomas Aquinas: A Life Pursuing\\nWisdom”, in Stump and White (eds) 2022: 7–28 (ch. 1).\\ndoi:10.1017/9781009043595.003\",\n \"Levering, Matthew and Marcus Plested (eds), 2021, The Oxford\\nHandbook of the Reception of Aquinas, Oxford: Oxford University\\nPress. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198798026.001.0001\",\n \"Lisska, Anthony J., 1996, Aquinas’s Theory of Natural\\nLaw: An Analytic Reconstruction, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269670.001.0001\",\n \"–––, 2016, Aquinas’s Theory of\\nPerception: An Analytic Reconstruction, Oxford: Oxford University\\nPress. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198777908.001.0001\",\n \"Loughran, Thomas J., 1999, “Aquinas, Compatibilist”,\\nin F. Michael McLain and W. Mark Richardson (eds), Human and\\nDivine Agency: Anglican, Catholic, and Lutheran Perspectives, New\\nYork: University Press of America, 1–39.\",\n \"MacDonald, Scott, 1991a, “Aquinas’s Parasitic\\nCosmological Argument”, Medieval Philosophy and\\nTheology, 1: 119–55.\\n [MacDonald 1991a available online]\",\n \"–––, 1991b, “Ultimate Ends in Practical\\nReasoning”, Philosophical Review, 100(1): 31–66.\\ndoi:10.2307/2185514\",\n \"–––, 1993, “Theory of Knowledge”, in\\nNorman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (eds.), Cambridge Companion to\\nAquinas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 160–95.\\ndoi:10.1017/CCOL0521431956.007\",\n \"MacDonald, Scott and Eleonore Stump (eds), 1998,\\nAquinas’s Moral Theory: Essays in Honor of Norman\\nKretzmann, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.\",\n \"Marmodoro, Anna and Ben Page, 2016, “Aquinas on Forms,\\nSubstances and Artifacts”, Vivarium, 54(1): 1–21.\\ndoi:10.1163/15685349-12341310\",\n \"Martin, C. F. J., 1997, Thomas Aquinas: God and\\nExplanations, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.\",\n \"Massey, Gerald J., 1999, “Medieval Sociobiology: Thomas\\nAquinas’s Theory of Sexual Morality”, Philosophical\\nTopics, 27(1): 69–86. doi:10.5840/philtopics199927117\",\n \"Mattison, William C., 2011, “Can Christians Possess the\\nAcquired Cardinal Virtues?” Theological Studies, 72(3):\\n558–85. doi:10.1177/004056391107200304\",\n \"Maurer, Armand, 1986, “Introduction”, in Thomas\\nAquinas, The Division and Methods of the Sciences: Questions V and\\nVI of his Commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius, 4th revised\\nedition, Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies,\\nVII–XLI.\",\n \"McCluskey, Colleen, 2017, Thomas Aquinas on Moral\\nWrongdoing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/9781316796917\",\n \"McInerny, Ralph, 1996, Aquinas and Analogy, Washington,\\nDC: Catholic University of America Press.\",\n \"–––, 1997, Ethica Thomistica: The Moral\\nPhilosophy of Thomas Aquinas, revised edition, Washington, DC:\\nCatholic University of America Press.\",\n \"Miner, Robert C., 2009, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions: A\\nStudy of Summa theologiae 1a2ae\\n22–48, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511576560\",\n \"Montagnes, Bernard, 1963 [2004], La Doctrine de\\nl’analogie de l’être d’après Saint\\nThomas D’Aquin, Louvain: Publications universitaires.\\nTranslated as The Doctrine of the Analogy of Being according to\\nThomas Aquinas, E. M. Macierowski and Pol Vandevelde (trans),\\nAndrew Tallon (ed.), Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2004.\",\n \"Murphy, Mark C., 2001, Natural Law and Practical\\nRationality, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Nevitt, Turner C., 2014, “Survivalism, Corruptionism, and\\nIntermittent Existence in Aquinas”, History of Philosophy\\nQuarterly, 31(1): 1–19.\",\n \"Oberman, Heiko A. (ed.), 1966, Forerunners of the Reformation:\\nThe Shape of Late Medieval Thought, New York: Holt, Rinehart and\\nWinston.\",\n \"Ogden, Stephen R., 2022, Averroes on Intellect: From\\nAristotelian Origins to Aquinas’ Critique, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780192896117.001.0001\",\n \"Oliva, Adriano, 2015, Amours: L’église, les\\ndivorcés remariés, les couples homosexuels, Paris:\\nCerf.\",\n \"Osborne, Thomas M., Jr., 2005, Love of Self and Love of God in\\nThirteenth-Century Ethics, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre\\nDame Press.\",\n \"Panaccio, Claude, 2001, “Aquinas on Intellectual\\nRepresentation”, in Dominik Perler (ed.) Ancient and\\nMedieval Theories of Intentionality, Leiden: Brill,\\n185–202. doi:10.1163/9789004453296_012\",\n \"Pasnau, Robert, 1997, Theories of Cognition in the Later\\nMiddle Ages, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2002, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature: A\\nPhilosophical Study of Summa theologiae 1a\\n75–89, New York: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511613180\",\n \"–––, 2011, Metaphysical Themes\\n1274–1671, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199567911.001.0001\",\n \"–––, 2018, “On What There Is in\\nAquinas”, in Hause (ed.) 2018: 10–28.\",\n \"Pawl, Timothy, 2012, “The Five Ways”, in Davies and\\nStump (eds.) 2012: 115–31 (ch. 9).\\ndoi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195326093.013.0010\",\n \"Perler, Dominik, 2000, “Essentialism and Direct Realism.\\nSome Late Medieval Perspectives”, Topoi, 19(2):\\n111–22. doi:10.1023/A:1006425008627\",\n \"Pini, Giorgio, 2012, “The Development of Aquinas’s\\nThought”, in Davies and Stump (eds) 2012: 491–510 (ch.\\n37). doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195326093.013.0038\",\n \"Pope, Stephen J. (ed.), 2002, The Ethics of Aquinas,\\nWashington, DC: Georgetown University Press.\",\n \"Porro, Pasquale, 2012 [2016], Tommaso d’Aquino: Un\\nProfile storic-filosofico, Roma: Carocci editore. translated as\\nThomas Aquinas: A Historical and Philosophical Profile,\\nJoseph G. Trabbic and Roger W. Nutt (trans.), Washington, DC: Catholic\\nUniversity of America Press, 2016.\",\n \"Porter, Jean, 2018, “The Natural Law”, in Hause (ed.)\\n2018: 170–87.\",\n \"–––, 2019, “Moral Virtues, Charity, and\\nGrace: Why the Infused and Acquired Virtues Cannot Co-Exist”,\\nJournal of Moral Theology, 8(2): 40–66.\",\n \"Rhonheimer, Martin, 1987 [2000], Natur als Grundlage der\\nMoral: die personale Struktur des Naturgesetzes bei Thomas von Aquin:\\neine Auseinandersetzung mit autonomer und teleologischer Ethik,\\nInnsbruck: Tyrolia-Verlag. Translated as Natural Law and Practical\\nReason: A Thomist View of Moral Autonomy, Gerald Malsbary\\n(trans.), (Moral Philosophy and Moral Theology 1), New York: Fordham\\nUniversity Press, 2000.\",\n \"Rota, Michael W., 2004, “Substance and Artifact in Thomas\\nAquinas”, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 21(3):\\n241–59.\",\n \"Shanley, Brian J., 2007, “Beyond Libertarianism and\\nCompatibilism: Thomas Aquinas on Created Freedom”, in Richard\\nVelkley (ed.), Freedom and the Human Person, Washington, DC:\\nCatholic University of America Press, 70–89.\",\n \"Shields, Christopher and Robert Pasnau, 2016, The Philosophy\\nof Aquinas, 2nd edition, New York: Oxford University\\nPress. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199301232.001.0001\",\n \"Stenberg, Joseph, 2016a, “Aquinas on the Relationship\\nBetween the Vision and Delight in Perfect Happiness”,\\nAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 90(4):\\n665–80. doi:10.5840/acpq201691499\",\n \"–––, 2016b, “Considerandum est quid\\nsit beatitudo: Aquinas on What Happiness Really Is”,\\nRes Philosophica, 93(1): 161–84.\\ndoi:10.11612/resphil.2016.93.1.11\",\n \"Stump, Eleonore, 2003, Aquinas, London: Routledge.\\ndoi:10.4324/9780203928356 \",\n \"–––, 2010, Wandering in Darkness: Narrative\\nand the Problem of Suffering, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199277421.001.0001\",\n \"–––, 2011, “The Non-Aristotelian Character\\nof Aquinas’s Ethics: Aquinas on the Passions”, Faith\\nand Philosophy, 28(1): 29–43.\\ndoi:10.5840/faithphil201128114\",\n \"–––, 2018, Atonement, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198813866.001.0001\",\n \"–––, 2022, “The Nature of Human\\nBeings”, in Stump and White (eds) 2022: 126–50 (ch. 6).\\ndoi:10.1017/9781009043595.009\",\n \"Stump, Eleonore and Thomas Joseph White (eds.), 2022, The New\\nCambridge Companion to Aquinas, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress. doi:10.1017/9781009043595\",\n \"Toner, Patrick, 2009, “Personhood and Death in St. Thomas\\nAquinas”, History of Philosophy Quarterly, 26(2):\\n121–38.\",\n \"Torrell, Jean-Pierre, 1993 [2022], L’Initiation à\\nSaint Thomas d'Aquin: Sa personne et son oeuvre, Paris: Cerf.\\nTranslated as Saint Thomas Aquinas (Volume 1: The Person\\nand His Work), Matthew K. Minerd and Robert Royal (trans),\\n3rd edition, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America\\nPress, 2022.\",\n \"–––, 1996 [2003], Saint Thomas\\nd’Aquin, Maître Spirituel, Paris: Cerf; translated as\\nSaint Thomas Aquinas (Volume 2: Spiritual Master),\\nRobert Royal (trans.), Washington, DC: Catholic University of America\\nPress, 2003.\",\n \"Van Dyke, Christina, 2012, “The End of (Human) Life as We\\nKnow It: Thomas Aquinas on Persons, Bodies, and Death”,\\nModern Schoolman, 89(3): 243–57.\\ndoi:10.5840/schoolman2012893/416\",\n \"Wawrykow, Joseph P., 2012, “The Theological Virtues”,\\nin Davies and Stump (eds.) 2012: 287–307 (ch. 22).\\ndoi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195326093.013.0023\",\n \"Westberg, Daniel, 1994, Right Practical Reason: Aristotle,\\nAction, and Prudence in Aquinas, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"Wippel, John F., 1995a, “‘First Philosophy’\\naccording to Thomas Aquinas”, in his Metaphysical Themes in\\nThomas Aquinas, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America\\nPress, 55–67.\",\n \"–––, 1995b, “Thomas Aquinas and the\\nCondemnations of 1277”, Modern Schoolman, 72(2):\\n232–72. doi:10.5840/schoolman1995722/317\",\n \"–––, 1995c, “Thomas Aquinas on the\\nPossibility of Eternal Creation”, in his Metaphysical Themes\\nin Thomas Aquinas, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America\\nPress, 191–214.\",\n \"–––, 2000, The Metaphysical Thought of\\nThomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being, Washington,\\nDC: Catholic University of America Press.\",\n \"Wood, Adam, 2020, Thomas Aquinas on the Immateriality of the\\nHuman Intellect, Washington, DC: Catholic University of America\\nPress.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../analogy-medieval/","text":"analogy: medieval theories of"},{"href":"../aquinas-moral-political/","text":"Aquinas, Thomas: moral, political, and legal philosophy"},{"href":"../arabic-islamic-influence/","text":"Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, historical and 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}\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":70,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"arcesilaus"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Arcesilaus"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Fri Jan 14, 2005; substantive revision Fri Jul 2, 2021"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\n\nArcesilaus (315/4–241/40 BCE) was a member and later leader of\nPlato’s Academy. He initiated the skeptical phase of the Platonic\nschool (‘Academic skepticism’) and was an influential\ncritic of the Stoics, especially of their epistemology.","\n\nThe ancient evidence about Arcesilaus’ philosophy is difficult\nto evaluate and, in some respects, inconsistent. As a result, scholars\ninterpret his skepticism in several ways. Some see his philosophical\nactivity as entirely negative or destructive of all views. Others take\nhim to have held positive views, but not on any philosophical topic,\nincluding the possibility of knowledge. Some regard him as having\nsupposed on the basis of arguments that nothing could be known, while\nstill others view him as someone who refused to accept any\nphilosophical theory or proposition as rationally warranted, insisting\nthat further examination is always required."],"string":"[\n \"\\n\\nArcesilaus (315/4–241/40 BCE) was a member and later leader of\\nPlato’s Academy. He initiated the skeptical phase of the Platonic\\nschool (‘Academic skepticism’) and was an influential\\ncritic of the Stoics, especially of their epistemology.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe ancient evidence about Arcesilaus’ philosophy is difficult\\nto evaluate and, in some respects, inconsistent. As a result, scholars\\ninterpret his skepticism in several ways. Some see his philosophical\\nactivity as entirely negative or destructive of all views. Others take\\nhim to have held positive views, but not on any philosophical topic,\\nincluding the possibility of knowledge. Some regard him as having\\nsupposed on the basis of arguments that nothing could be known, while\\nstill others view him as someone who refused to accept any\\nphilosophical theory or proposition as rationally warranted, insisting\\nthat further examination is always required.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Life and work","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. Skepticism: method or doctrine","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"3. Criticism of Stoic epistemology","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"4. ","sub_toc":["4.1 The Non-Rational Non-Belief interpretation","4.2 The Rational Non-Belief interpretation","4.3 The Non-Rational Belief interpretation"]},{"content_title":"5. The practical criterion","sub_toc":["5.1 The Non-Rational Non-Belief interpretation","5.2 The Rational Non-Belief interpretation","5.3 The Non-Rational Belief interpretation"]},{"content_title":"6. Priority of method","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"7. Conclusion","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":["Sources","Arcesilaus’ life and philosophical activity","Arcesilaus’ skeptical position","Arcesilaus’ relation to other philosophers"]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Life and work\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Skepticism: method or doctrine\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Criticism of Stoic epistemology\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. \",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"4.1 The Non-Rational Non-Belief interpretation\",\n \"4.2 The Rational Non-Belief interpretation\",\n \"4.3 The Non-Rational Belief interpretation\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. The practical criterion\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"5.1 The Non-Rational Non-Belief interpretation\",\n \"5.2 The Rational Non-Belief interpretation\",\n \"5.3 The Non-Rational Belief interpretation\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. Priority of method\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"7. Conclusion\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"Sources\",\n \"Arcesilaus’ life and philosophical activity\",\n \"Arcesilaus’ skeptical position\",\n \"Arcesilaus’ relation to other philosophers\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\n\nAfter an early education in geometry and astronomy in his native\nPitanê (in Aeolis, the northwest Aegean coast of modern Turkey),\nArcesilaus escaped to Athens against his guardian’s wishes. There he is\nsaid to have studied rhetoric in association with Theophrastus\n(Aristotle’s successor) until c. 295–290 BCE, when he abandoned\nit to study philosophy in Plato’s Academy with Crantor (d. 276/5) and\nits leaders Polemo (d. 270/69) and Crates (d.268/7). He became the head\nof the Academy (‘scholarch’) after Crates’ death and\nled the school for more than 25 years until his own death in 241/40\nBCE.","\n\nLike Socrates, his philosophical model, and Carneades, who carried\nforward his skepticism in the 2nd c. BCE, Arcesilaus did not\nwrite any philosophical works. His arguments were initially preserved\nby his students—including Pythodorus, who wrote up some of\nthem, and Lakydes, his successor as scholarch—and in the work\nof his opponents, most notably, the Stoic Chrysippus, whose\nreformulation of Stoicism was prompted by Arcesilaus’ criticisms\nof the views of the first generation of Stoics. But Arcesilaus’\narguments were later overlaid by Carneadean elaborations and subsumed\ninto the general Academic and anti-Academic traditions; so it is only\nthrough those later traditions that we know about them. Our knowledge\nof his work depends on scraps from the biographical tradition\n(preserved in Diogenes Laertius and Philodemus) and brief general\nreports from later skeptical writers—Cicero and Sextus\nEmpiricus and Plutarch—and their opponents—Antiochus\nand Numenius (preserved in Cicero and Eusebius respectively). But since\nthese offer incompatible interpretations of Arcesilaus’\nphilosophical position, reflecting the writers’ distinctive views\nabout later developments in the skeptical Academy, the precise nature\nof his skepticism remains controversial."],"section_title":"1. Life and work","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\nThe central question presented by the inconsistent evidence for\nArcesilaus’ skepticism is how to reconcile his Socratic method\nwith the ‘doctrines’ he is reported to have accepted:","\n\nOur sources agree that Arcesilaus’ dialectical method\nconstituted the core of his philosophical activity (see e.g., Diogenes\nLaertius 4.28). This method presents two basic difficulties for any\nattempt to reconcile it with these doctrines.","\n\nFirst, his method was dialectical, such that rather than arguing in\nfavor of any doctrine or set of doctrines, Arcesilaus restricted\nhimself to arguing against the views proposed by his opponents or\ninterlocutors. At first sight, this method may not look incompatible\nwith affirming inapprehensibility and universal\nsuspension of assent if the repeated result of practicing it\nwas that the views argued against did not stand up to criticism. Such\nrepeated failures could suggest that in fact nothing can be known and\nthat one should form no beliefs at all.","\n\nWe can see why Arcesilaus’ dialectical method cautions against\naccepting this suggestion by looking at the model he claimed to be\nfollowing: Socrates’ practice in the dialogues of Plato (see\nCicero, Academica 1.44–5, De oratore 3.67,\nDe finibus 2.2, On the Nature of the Gods 1.11). In\nPlato’s Socratic dialogues, at least, Socrates challenges the\npretensions of his interlocutors to knowledge by showing, through\npremises they accept, that they are committed to inconsistent beliefs.\nTo achieve this result, it is crucial that the arguments—the\npremises, the inferences, and the conclusions—depend entirely on\nthe beliefs of the interlocutors. If they do, the result of a\nsuccessful Socratic encounter will be that the interlocutor is at a\nloss: the interlocutors now recognize that they have inconsistent\nbeliefs, since they have both their initial reasons for the thesis or\nknowledge-claim they made and their newly-discerned reasons against\nit. If they also hold some generally accepted views about knowledge\n(for example, that one can’t know something about which one holds\ninconsistent beliefs), the interlocutors will be rationally\nconstrained to aver that they don’t know whether their thesis is true\nor false, and hence to suspend assent on the thesis while awaiting\nfurther investigation and argument. But no such result holds for\nSocrates. For, although he represents himself as being in the same\naporetic boat—and may in fact be perplexed for exactly the same\nreasons—his method does not commit him to the premises,\ninferences or conclusions of the arguments, or even to the regulating\nideas about knowledge. His views (if he has any) are not at issue in\nthe argument.","\n\nThere is good evidence that Arcesilaus followed the Socratic model\nconsistently. It is clear that he went to some lengths not to make\npositive affirmations of any sort in his own right in his arguments\n(see Diogenes Laertius 4.36, Philodemus Index Academicorum\n20.1–4, cf. 18.40–19.9). Our sources also confirm that\nArcesilaus took his method to entail that he did not reveal his own\nview on the matter in question in any case, if he had one, including,\nfor instance, the view that the claim argued against is false (see\ne.g., Cicero De oratore 3.67). Further, our most\ndetailed sources actually identify the radical change of position in\nthe Platonic school he introduced—the transition from the Old\nAcademy to the skeptical Academy—in terms of his adoption of\nthis method (see Diogenes Laertius 4.28, Philodemus Index\nAcademicorum 18.7–16 & 21.36–42 and Sextus\nOutlines of Pyrrhonism 1.220–35, esp. 232). And this\nexplains his reputation as a ‘dialectician’ (or, more\nnegatively, as a ‘sophist’ or ‘eristic’ or\n‘magician’), as well as why the skeptical Academy came to\nbe defined primarily by its critical stance towards the doctrines of\nother schools (and particularly towards the energetic philosophical\nprograms of the new movements initiated by Epicurus and Zeno during his\nlifetime). But if Arcesilaus followed this model consistently by\narguing against every philosophical position that came to his notice\nand refraining from making any positive arguments or affirmations on\nany philosophical question, it is hard to see why we should think that\nhe accepted any doctrines, including inapprehensibility and\nuniversal suspension of assent. Thus, the first difficulty is\nthat Arcesilaus’ method in principle obscures any views he may\nhave held.","\n\nThe second difficulty involved in reconciling Arcesilaus’\ndialectical method with doctrines [i]–[iii] is more\nstraightforward: they are conclusions of some of his best known\narguments, but since these are clearly dialectical anti-Stoic\narguments, they depend crucially on Stoic premises. In epistemology, he\nargued that, despite the Stoics’ commitment to readily accessible\nknowledge, certain premises accepted by the Stoics entail that nothing\nis known and that we should suspend assent universally (see below,\nsect. 3.). Likewise, the theory of action Arcesilaus defended is\nparasitic on the Stoics’ and relies on their ethical premises\n(see below, sect. 5). Given his Socratic method, we only have reason to\nascribe these doctrines to Arcesilaus himself if we have independent\nevidence that he accepted those premises shared by Stoics. But there is\nreason to think that Arcesilaus did not accept anything of Stoic\nepistemology or ethics. The second difficulty, then, is that the\nevidence does not give a consistent picture of which, if any,\nconclusions of his dialectical arguments Arcesilaus may have accepted\nin his own right.","\n\nThe first question about Arcesilaus’ skepticism is thus\nwhether it involved any commitment to doctrines at all. A negative\nanswer to this question—based on something like the two\ndifficulties given above—yields what is called a\ndialectical interpretation of Arcesilaus (adopted by e.g.,\nCouissin 1929 and Striker 1980; see Castagnoli 2018 on the senses of\n‘dialectical’). The primary drawback to this interpretation\nis that it involves the rejection of a central claim about him in all\nof our major sources except Philodemus: Cicero, Numenius, Sextus,\nDiogenes and Plutarch ascribe some degree of commitment to at least one\nof these doctrines—that of universal suspension ([ii]\nabove). Rejecting this evidence might be justified by the lateness of\nthese sources and their associations with later Academic developments;\nbut this seems hard to maintain when we learn that Arcesilaus’\ncontemporary opponents, including Chrysippus, also ascribed\nuniversal suspension to him (see Plutarch On\nStoic Self-Contradictions 1036a with 1037a, and Against\nColotes 1122a). A dialectical interpretation also risks failing\nas an interpretation: it cannot explain why Arcesilaus argued\nas he did, whether because it denies him any commitments or because it\nclaims they are entirely opaque to us (see Perin 2013).","\n\nIf we accept that these considerations constrain us to look for a\npositive answer to the first question, at least as regards the\nrecommendation of suspending assent about everything, the second\nquestion is which of the three candidate doctrines—viz., [i]\ninapprehensibility, [ii] universal suspension, and\n[iii] a theory of action without assent—was Arcesilaus\ncommitted to. Since, as numerous sources suggest, universal\nsuspension is the prescriptive claim that one ought not to form\nany beliefs, then Arcesilaus cannot follow it and at the same time\nbelieve it, or anything else, to be true. If we do not wish to saddle\nArcesilaus with a self-defeating skepticism, we are then faced with a\nthird question: what was the nature of Arcesilaus’ commitment to\nhis doctrines? The answers to these two questions remain open. But the\ndominant solutions on offer fall roughly into three groups, each\nidentifying a different kind of commitment compatible with\nuniversal suspension, and so a different answer to the third\nquestion. If the sort of commitment prohibited by universal\nsuspension is rational belief, then three weaker kinds of\ncommitment seem to have been open to Arcesilaus:","\n\nNRNB supposes that the skeptic universally suspends assent\nas a natural, psychological reaction to equally convincing (or\nequipollent) and opposing arguments. Universal suspension, on\nthis view, is not a prescription justified through the\nargument that one ought to suspend assent about everything because\nknowledge is impossible. Rather, since the skeptic’s belief-forming faculties are\nparalyzed in the face of opposing reasons, she acts by impulse,\npursuing what appears appropriate (see sect. 5.1). On an NRNB\ninterpretation Arcesilaus’ commitments to [ii] universal\nsuspension and [iii] a practical criterion were founded neither on\nbelief nor on a prior consideration of reasons (see e.g., Ioppolo 1986;\n2009; 2018).","\n\nRNB allows the skeptic to accept doctrines on rational\ngrounds, by distinguishing beliefs from other attitudes that can take the\nplace of beliefs in chains of inference: in particular,\nbelief-like suppositions that function as hypotheses (see Striker 1980,\nBett 1990, and Reinhardt 2018). On the RNB view Arcesilaus\naccepted [i]–[iii] hypothetically (see Schofield 1999, Perin\n2010, and Thorsrud 2018).","\n\nNRB denies the skeptic accepts doctrines on the basis of\nany premises that purport to warrant them. On this view, [i]\ninapprehensibility and [ii] universal suspension were\nthe residual and rationally unwarranted beliefs Arcesilaus was left\nwith as a result of his philosophical activity (see Frede 1979 &\n1984, Cooper 2004, Brittain 2005 [2008], and Thorsrud 2009).","\n\nAs we will see in sects. 4–5, these three accounts of\nArcesilaus’ skepticism privilege the evidence for his arguments\nin competing ways. To understand and evaluate their interpretive\nstrategies, we first need to examine Arcesilaus’ principal\narguments against Stoic epistemology."],"section_title":"2. Skepticism: method or doctrine","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\nArcesilaus’ best known arguments, and the only ones that\nsurvive in any detail, are his criticisms of Stoic epistemology (Sextus\nAgainst the Logicians [‘M.’]\n7.150–9, Cicero Academica 2\npassim, esp. 2.66–7 & 2.77).","\n\nThe Stoic theory of knowledge represented a radical shift in\nepistemology, since it offered an empirically-based route to the kind\nof wisdom Socrates had sought (see Frede 1999). Its basis was three\nnovel claims made by Zeno, the founder of the Stoa (see Cicero\nAcademica 1.40–2). First, Zeno proposed a new\npsychological theory: to form a belief of any kind is to give one’s\nassent to one’s ‘impression’ (or ‘appearance’:\n‘phantasia’ in Greek) about the matter.\nSecondly, he claimed that some of our perceptual impressions are\n‘cognitive’ or self-warranting, so that assenting to them\nconstitutes a cognition or apprehension\n(‘katalêpsis’) of their objects.\nAnd, thirdly, he argued that we ought to restrict our assent to just\ncognitive impressions, since it is contrary to reason to form\n‘opinions’—that is, mere beliefs whether true or\nfalse—by assenting to inadequately warranted, non-cognitive\nimpressions. But, given that there are cognitive impressions, we can\nattain infallible knowledge or wisdom by restricting our assent to\nthem, since our thoughts will then be constituted entirely by\ncognitions derived from perception or from concepts warranted by\nperceptual cognitions.","\n\nThe focus of Arcesilaus’ attack on Zeno’s theory was its\ncenterpiece, the theory of cognitive impressions. Zeno defined a\ncognitive impression as one that comes from what is, is stamped and\nimpressed exactly in accordance with it, and is such that it could not\nbe false (Sextus M. 7.248, Cicero Academica 2.77).\nThis means, roughly, that an impression is cognitive if and only if\n[a] its propositional content is true, [b] it is caused in the\nappropriate way for correctly representing its object, and [c] its\ntruth is thus warranted by the inimitable richness and detail of the\nrepresentational character guaranteed by its causal history—such\nthat [a] is entailed by [b]. Arcesilaus’ tactic was to grant\nthat conditions [a] and [b] are often met, as Zeno claimed, but to\nargue that condition [c] never obtained (M.\n7.154, Academica 2.77). Although his detailed arguments for\nthis have not survived, it is fairly clear from later Academic and\nStoic arguments that he followed two main lines of attack. One line\ndepended on the existence of indistinguishable—or, at any rate,\nindiscernibly distinct—objects, such as twins, or pairs of eggs,\nmanufactured items (statues or impressions on wax of the same\nletter-seal), and grains of sand (Academica 2.54–8\n& 2.84–6, M. 7.408–10). Any of these could\nbe mistaken for another no matter how good one’s impression of it\nwas. The second depended on abnormal states of mind, such as dreams,\nillusions, and fits of madness (Academica 2.47–53 &\n2.88–90, M. 7.402–8). In either case, Arcesilaus\nargued that, whether the nature of the objects or of our minds is at\nfault, it is always possible to have a false impression with exactly\nthe same propositional content and representational character as a\ntrue one that meets condition [b]. But if so, no impression can be\nself-warranting in virtue of the way in which its content is\nrepresented. So condition [c] never obtains. Hence, on the Stoic view\nof the requirements for cognition, there is no cognition. And if\nknowledge is derived entirely from perceptual cognition and concepts\nwarranted by it, as Zeno supposed, it follows that nothing can be\nknown. (Intricate Stoic-Academic debates on these issues lasted for\nanother 150 years; they can best be traced through the arguments of\nChrysippus and Carneades, preserved in some detail in\nCicero’s Academica and Sextus M. 7.)","\n\nThe argument is standardly summarized as follows:","\n\nAnd, since for Zeno knowledge itself depends on assent to cognitive\nimpressions, this argument leads to the further conclusion that nothing\ncan be known (inapprehensibility).","\n\nArcesilaus followed up this argument against the cognitive\nimpression with a briefer argument against Zeno’s ideal of wisdom:","\n\nThat is, Arcesilaus pointed out to the Stoics that if his argument\n[1]–[5] against the cognitive\nimpression is successful, they are also committed to the conclusion\nthat it is irrational to assent to anything (universal\nsuspension).","\n\nThese arguments are presented in two very different ways in our two\nsources. In Sextus’ account (followed above), they are presented\nas explicitly dialectical arguments, relying on clearly marked Stoic\nviews, and leading to the conclusion that the Stoic sage will have no\nbeliefs. In the report of Cicero in Academica 2, however, we\nare informed that Arcesilaus was in some way committed to premises and\nconclusions of both arguments: that is, he agreed that condition [c] of\nthe Stoic definition of the cognitive impression could never be met,\nand hence that nothing can be known; and he maintained premises [5] and\n[6] of the second argument, and hence concluded that assent to any\nimpression was irrational (Academica 2.66–7 & 2.77).\nThis historical interpretation of Arcesilaus’ skepticism is\nsupported elsewhere in Cicero’s dialogues, where we find histories of\nphilosophy that have Arcesilaus following Socrates and Plato (and\nPresocratic philosophers such as Democritus, Parmenides and Empedocles)\nin concluding that nothing can be known by perception or reason, and\nhence adopting a method of argument that would lead others to refrain\nfrom all assent (De oratore 3.67 &\nAcademica 1.43–6; see also Plutarch Against\nColotes 1121f).","\n\nCicero’s interpretation in Academica 2.66–7 &\n2.77 faces two problems. The first is that the argument against the\nexistence of cognitive impressions depends on many facets of the\nepistemological framework of the Stoics. For the conclusion doesn’t\nfollow unless it is true that there are impressions, that some are\ntrue, that there are no other routes to cognition, that the Stoic\ndefinition of cognition gives necessary and sufficient conditions for\nknowledge, etc. And there is reason to doubt Cicero’s testimony that\nArcesilaus subscribed to these Stoic views, since we have some evidence\nthat he argued against every aspect of Stoic epistemology and\npsychology. Plutarch, for instance, mentions an objection to the Stoic\ntheory of the soul’s interaction with the body, which implies that\nArcesilaus argued against the fundamental mechanism of impression in\nZeno’s account (On Common Conceptions 1078c). Another fragment\nfrom Plutarch suggests that Arcesilaus argued against Zeno’s causal\ntheory of perception (Fragment 215a). And Sextus reports that\nArcesilaus also objected to Zeno’s conception of belief as assent to an\nimpression, on the ground that assent is a matter of reason or thought,\nrather than the acceptance of a physiological item, the impression\n(M. 7.154).","\n\nIn these cases, as with his argument against the satisfiability of\ncondition [c] of the Stoic definition of the cognitive impression, it\nseems possible to trace a definite strategy behind Arcesilaus’\narguments: he argued against Zeno’s empiricist presuppositions by\ndeploying Platonic objections and theories (see Schofield 1999,\nTrabattoni 2005, Vezzoli 2016, and von Staden 1978). One might\nconclude, as some did in antiquity, that Arcesilaus therefore had a\nhidden objective of undermining Stoic or Epicurean empiricism in favor\nof Platonic doctrine (see Sextus Outlines of Pyrrhonism\n1.234). But Arcesilaus’ method implies that he would argue\nagainst Platonic doctrines as well, if anyone proposed them. So if he\ndid hold the view that nothing can be known, it seems more plausible to\nthink that he held it due to the success of his arguments against all\nconceptions of knowledge, rather than solely as the conclusion of an\nargument relying on a particular epistemological theory. Cicero’s\naccount, then, may give only a partial story of the grounds of\nArcesilaus’ skeptical views.","\n\nThe second problem with the interpretation of Arcesilaus’\nskepticism in Academica 2.66–7 & 2.77 is that it\nrisks self-defeat. The problem lies not in knowing that nothing can be\nknown, since, on one account\n(Cicero Academica 1.45), Arcesilaus, unlike\nSocrates, explicitly disclaimed such second-order knowledge. It lies\nrather in believing that nothing can be known in conjunction with the\nbelief that it is irrational to hold opinions in the absence of\nknowledge. If the former is true, it is irrational (and so one ought\nnot) to believe the premises of the arguments that support both\ninapprehensibility and universal suspension."],"section_title":"3. Criticism of Stoic epistemology","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\nThere are two approaches to resolving this second problem, that\naccepting inapprehensibility and universal suspension\nmay be self-defeating. The NRNB view takes a negative route,\ndenying that Arcesilaus was committed to inapprehensibility\nand universal suspension, at least as a prescriptive claim\nabout the irrationality of assent (see [7] in sect. 3). By contrast,\nthe RNB and NRB views positively ascribe\ninapprehensibility and universal suspension to\nArcesilaus, but they maintain that his acceptance of them is not\nexplained in terms of rational belief of the sort which would lead a\nStoic convinced by Arcesilaus to a self-defeating position (see sect.\n2)."],"section_title":"4. Inapprehensibility and Universal Suspension of Assent","subsections":[{"content":["\n\nThe NRNB view of Arcesilaus argues that he was not\ncommitted to inapprehensibility and universal\nsuspension, as a prescriptive claim about the\nirrationality of assent (see [7] in sect. 3). On this view, the two\nsources for the anti-Stoic arguments still imply that Arcesilaus was\n‘committed’ to universal suspension, but this is\nunderstood as the descriptive claim that the skeptic does not\nassent to anything due to the balance of opposing arguments; and he was\ncommitted to it only in the sense that he acted in accordance with his\nunreflective impressions (see sect. 5.1 below). Thus, there is no\nconflict between the anti-Stoic sources, Sextus and Cicero, and those\nthat report that Arcesilaus’ universal suspension is\ncaused by the equipollence of arguments without mentioning his\ncriticism of Stoic epistemology (viz., Diogenes Laertius 4.28, Cicero\nAcademica 1.45, & Sextus Outlines of Pyrrhonism\n1.232).","\n\nThis interpretation takes Sextus to imply that Arcesilaus’\ncommitment to a descriptive version of universal suspension is\nprior to his anti-Stoic argument (M. 7.156–7),\noutlined above in sect. 3 (see e.g., Ioppolo 2002; 2009). In this\nargument he holds that the Stoic who concedes the non-existence of\ncognitive impressions is forced to conclude that it is rational to\n‘withhold assent’ (‘asugkatathetein’)\nabout everything (see [10] below). This conclusion is sufficient to\noppose the Stoic thesis that some assents are rational. The full\nversion of the argument outlined in sect. 3 is:","\n\nThat Arcesilaus used premise [11] to move from withholding assent to\nthe suspension of judgment (‘epochê’)\nindicates, on this account, a commitment to epochê that\nis independent of Stoic notions like assent and the irrationality of\nholding opinions, because it is reached only through the equipollence\nof arguments.","\n\nThe NRNB view also interprets Cicero as confirming that\nArcesilaus was committed to the descriptive version of universal\nsuspension, even though Cicero Academica 2.66–7\n& 77 reports that Arcesilaus was committed to various components of\nhis anti-Stoic arguments (see sect. 3): that there are no cognitive\nimpressions, that nothing can be known, that it is irrational to hold\nopinions, and that it is rational to suspend assent. Cicero may be\nunreliable here, because he is biased by his own, later conception of\nradical skepticism, and in his text one may yet find an alternative\nview (see Ioppolo 2008): at Academica 2.32, Cicero’s pro-Stoic\ncharacter Lucullus refers to skeptical Academics who concede that\neverything is uncertain (‘adêla’) without\npreferring any views; and these Academics appear to be followers of\nArcesilaus (cf. Academica 2.16 & 59). Since these\nAcademics’ suspension of judgment is based on the notion of\nuncertainty, which is not necessarily Stoic, their skeptical views do\nnot depend on an anti-Stoic critique.","\n\nHowever, there are strong reasons not to read Sextus and Cicero as\nconfirming that Arcesilaus’ commitment to a descriptive version\nof universal suspension is independent of his anti-Stoic\narguments. Even if Arcesilaus developed a notion of suspension\n(‘epochê’) before his criticisms of the\nStoa, premise [11] above conceptualizes it in Stoic terms. It is true\nthat Arcesilaus in Sextus M. 7.156–7 goes beyond the\npoint sufficient to oppose the Stoic—viz., that the wise person\ndoes not assent to anything (see [9] above). But he continued the\nargument because there is a conceptual difference between not assenting\nand withholding assent (see e.g., Friedman 2013), and because\nepochê refers to the latter. Withholding assent\npresupposes a prior examination of evidence and the recognition of an\nequipollence among the reasons for competing beliefs. (See also Maconi\n1988 and Bénatouïl 2011.) As for the evidence of Cicero,\neven if Lucullus thinks Arcesilaus himself belongs to the group of\nAcademics who say that everything is non-evident, he also accuses\nArcesilaus of appealing to the authority of Presocratics to promote his\nview of inapprehensibility, which crucially presupposes Stoic\nconditions on knowledge (Academica 2.15). So even Lucullus\nthinks Arcesilaus’ skepticism is related to his anti-Stoic\narguments.","\n\nThere are further problems with the NRNB view, separate\nfrom the issues of interpretation mentioned above. For one, it narrowly\nrestricts the skeptic to a life of unreflective reaction (see sect.\n5.1), and therefore does not seem compatible with the patterns of\nrationality and inquiry that Arcesilaus engaged with. Its narrow\nrestriction on the scope of skeptical action is also overly dogmatic:\nwere the NRNB view true, it seems implausible Arcesilaus would\nsee the need for a theory of skeptical action, let alone use the\nStoic model of non-rational animals."],"subsection_title":"4.1 The Non-Rational Non-Belief interpretation"},{"content":["\n\nThe RNB view of Arcesilaus denies that his acceptance of\ninapprehensibility and universal suspension is\nexplained in terms of belief in the premises and hence in the\nconclusions of his arguments. Rather, on this account Arcesilaus\nguides his rational activity by something like a supposition or\nhypothesis—a set of notions deployed variously in Plato’s\ndialogues, Theophrastus’ dialectic, and geometrical theory (see\nSchofield 1999 and Thorsrud 2018; cf. Bénatouïl & El\nMurr 2010). Even the Stoics distinguished hypotheticals from\nassertions and arguments, such that one can accept hypotheses and what\nfollows from them without asserting them (see Barnes 1997). Arcesilaus\ncould have adapted this kind of theory to account for the rational\nactivities of the skeptic. Accounts of impression and assent also\nafford a distinction between beliefs and belief-like imaginings such\nas suppositions, which may then take the place of beliefs in chains of\ninference. This distinction allows for a reasoned commitment\nthat falls short of assent (see Striker 1980, Bett 1990, and\nReinhardt 2018). Arcesilaus, on this view, supposes that we ought to\nlive without realist commitments that fix our view of the world. His supposition may have been based on\npremises—some of which he shared with Zeno—as well as on a\ngeneralization from his philosophical experience, after repeatedly\nfinding that rational inquiry does not justify assent.","\n\nHowever, this proposal must address several problems. For instance,\nit seems doubtful that a rational life can be based on hypotheticals\nwithout a large web of background beliefs (see Frede 1979 and Bett\n1989). Without them, the skeptic seems unable to decide which\nhypotheses to suppose and when to suppose them. And even if such a life\nis possible, it is not clear how it would be practically\ndistinguishable from, and so preferable to, a life based wholly on\nbelief. If the skeptic regards as hypothetical the very same things we\nordinarily believe, then skepticism seems unmotivated. (See Thorsrud\n2010 and Perin 2013 for other objections.) Perhaps one could defend\nthe possibility of a radically skeptical life of this kind by saying\nthat, while its development requires starting with beliefs, over time\nan increasing number of background beliefs may be substituted with\nhypotheses, and that the benefits of the skeptical life are of a\nsecond-order, affecting the ease with which the skeptic can change the\nguiding assumptions of her life."],"subsection_title":"4.2 The Rational Non-Belief interpretation"},{"content":["\n\nThe NRB view instead argues that universal\nsuspension isn’t opposed to beliefs per se, but only to\nbeliefs justified through philosophical theory or reasons generally.\nThe Stoics maintain that the mind is essentially rational, so that its\nassent is necessarily reason-responsive (see Coope 2016).\nArcesilaus’ skepticism, on this view, challenges the rationalist\npresupposition that belief is necessarily and explicitly grounded in\nreason. This doesn’t preclude that Arcesilaus found himself—as\na result of the inadequacy of the arguments for any position, and of\nthe equally convincing arguments against it—with the belief\nthat nothing can be known. Thus, inapprehensibility is neither\nthe conclusion of a deductive argument relying on a theory of knowledge\nor of our cognitive faculties, nor an inductive inference from prior\ninvestigations; it is not a theoretical or even rationally warranted\nbelief, but just the way things strike him (see Cooper 2004 and\nThorsrud 2009).","\n\nBut in the case of universal suspension, it seems that the\nview that it is irrational to hold unwarranted beliefs is\nheld—at least in part—on the basis of a theoretical belief\nthat knowledge is very important to acquire and that mere belief is to\nbe avoided. Cicero, for instance, stresses that Arcesilaus agreed with\nZeno that it is irrational to hold opinions, i.e., inadequately\nwarranted assents (premise [6] in sect. 3, above); and Sextus suggests\nthat he thought that individual cases of suspended\nbelief—presumably in the light of inconclusive\narguments—were good (Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.233). And\nthe view that it is irrational to hold mere beliefs (that is,\nopinions) depends on a further set of epistemological beliefs about\nthe nature of belief and knowledge. If Arcesilaus was not rationally\ncommitted to any set of assumptions about the nature and requirements\nof rationality or about belief and knowledge—which he ought not\nto be, given that he had argued against the various views on offer,\nand hence, ex hypothesi, suspended belief about them—it\ndoesn’t look like he can believe that one ought not to take beliefs to\nbe justified.","\n\nThe NRB view thus takes universal\nsuspension to be a belief that is not rationally warranted, as\nwell as the views on which it causally depends. That is, Arcesilaus\nbegan inquiry motivated by a pre-theoretical belief, that philosophical\nknowledge is important and mere belief inadequate. And his repeated and\nextensive investigations left him with the realization that even these\nregulating assumptions of his philosophical practice have failed to be\nwarranted and that no beliefs are justified.","\n\nOn this view, the radical skeptic has beliefs but doesn’t take them\nto be justified. This proposal raises problems, too (see Burnyeat\n1983). It seems that a large part of being a rational agent is to\nexercise some control over one’s beliefs. Since this control takes the\nform of a responsiveness to reasons, it does not seem possible for\nrational agents to give up practices of justification. A related\nobjection is to maintain that even having beliefs, which involves the\nuse of concepts, is necessarily responsive to reasons (see Williams\n2004). To have a belief, according to this view, requires making a\nconscious inference about the proper use of concepts, and conscious\ninferences are made in virtue of reasons. One may respond that the\nskeptic isn’t precluding herself from a responsiveness to reasons but\nrather lacks confidence in them, and that such rationalist theories of\nagency and belief are stricter even than the Stoics’, against\nwhich Arcesilaus argued (see sect. 5 below)."],"subsection_title":"4.3 The Non-Rational Belief interpretation"}]},{"main_content":["\n\nThe third doctrine we might ascribe to Arcesilaus on the basis of\nhis sources is a so-called practical criterion, i.e., a theory that\nmakes action without assent possible (see [iii] in sect. 2).\n Arcesilaus’ argument for a ‘practical\ncriterion’ responds to two Stoic objections of\n‘inaction’ (apraxia). The first, found in\nPlutarch, is that action is impossible without assent, since action is\ncaused by assent to an impression of something suited to the agent’s\nnature, i.e., ‘oikeion’ (Against\nColotes 1122a–d; cf. Cicero Academica\n2.37–8). The second objection, reported by Sextus, is that a good\nor successful life is impossible without assent, since a good life\nrequires action based on knowledge of what is good and bad, and hence\nassent (M. 7.158; cf. Cicero Academica 2.39).\nArcesilaus’ reported replies to these objections are brief, and\naccordingly difficult to interpret (see Bett 1989). His counter to the\nfirst objection is the suggestion that action is possible without\nassent, since even on the Stoic account animal action is triggered\ndirectly by their impressions of something oikeion: the\naddition of assent, and so a belief that the object is in fact\nnaturally suited to the agent, is redundant and liable to be a\ncause of error. In response to the second objection, Arcesilaus argued\nthat the person who suspends assent universally will successfully guide\ntheir actions in light of their sense of what is\n‘reasonable’ (‘eulogon’).","\n\nThe three doctrinal interpretations of Arcesilaus’ skepticism under consideration take these arguments in Plutarch and Sextus to support, in different ways, their distinct views of his commitment to inapprehensibility and/or universal suspension."],"section_title":"5. The practical criterion","subsections":[{"content":["\n\nProponents of the NRNB view take the argument of Plutarch\nto give a general theory of action that supports universal\nsuspension of judgment as a natural reaction to equally balanced\narguments. On this theory all actions are merely impulsive, i.e.,\ncaused just by impressions of what appears suitable\n(‘oikeion’). Since the skeptic doesn’t make\njudgments, the only sense in which she is committed to her impressions\nis that she acts on them. It is unclear how this is compatible with the\nevidence of Sextus on ‘the reasonable’, where the skeptic\nconsiders reasonable justifications in deciding what to do. But some\nadvocates of NRNB combine the two so that a class of impulsive\nactions count as voluntary if, after their performance, one can\nreasonably justify them as successful (e.g., Ioppolo 1981; 1986; 2000).","\n\nEven allowing for this attenuated sense of the voluntary, it is\nunclear why Arcesilaus would come to accept this impulsivist theory of\naction, if it were true: since—as the theory\nmaintains—theory doesn’t inform action, it is difficult to\nexplain theoretical commitments solely in terms of what appears suited\nto an agent (see Maconi 1988, Trabattoni 2005, and Vezzoli\n2016). An NRNB reading of ‘the reasonable’\ntherefore concedes that Sextus may have elided important details (see\nIoppolo 2018)."],"subsection_title":"5.1 The Non-Rational Non-Belief interpretation"},{"content":["\n\nThe RNB view opens up a more promising way to read the\nbrief counter-arguments in Plutarch and Sextus as a positive theory of\nArcesilaus. His counter in Plutarch is that action isn’t always caused\nby occurrent beliefs—we sometimes act through habit, or by\ninstinct. By itself, this doesn’t go very far, however, since the\nStoics will have objected that, even if this were possible, this\naccount couldn’t describe the voluntary and responsible actions of a\nrational agent. (The Stoics defined responsible or voluntary action in\nterms of assent, since this was the mechanism through which our\nrationality acts on the world.) But one can read the counter-argument\nin Sextus as supplementing that response: there is space for\nrationality and responsibility, on this view, in the production of the\nimpressions or thoughts motivating us when we act. We can act in\naccordance with what strikes us as the reasonable thing to do upon\nreflection, but still refrain from assent, i.e., refrain from forming\nthe belief that this is the right thing to do.","\n\nThere are two problems facing this interpretation of ‘the\nreasonable’. The first is that it does not look to be supported\nby the evidence to which it appeals. Sextus, the source for the notion\nof ‘the reasonable’ as the criterion, says that Arcesilaus\nand his followers did not define a criterion and that, when they\nseemed to, they did so “a counterblast to that of the\nStoics” (M. 7.150, Bury trans.). (Sextus’ later\naccount of Arcesilaus in another work is also incompatible with his\nhypothesizing such a theory; see Outlines of Pyrrhonism\n1.232–3.) And Cicero and Numenius, our other sources for the\nview that Arcesilas was committed to inapprehensibility\nand universal suspension, do not mention his adoption of a\npractical criterion—in fact, in both authors it is suggested\nthat Arcesilaus did not offer a position on how one might live without\nassent, and that Carneades significantly revised the Academic position\nin this respect (Academica 2.32; Numenius fr. 27.14–32,\ncf. Numenius fr. 26.107–11).","\n\nThe second problem is that even if the context does not explicitly\ndemand that Arcesilaus’ practical criterion was a dialectical\nploy, the argument Arcesilaus used to support it makes the most sense\nif it is construed dialectically. The argument he gives is something\nlike this (Sextus M. 7.158):","\n\nTwo difficulties face this non-dialectical reading. One is that\nthere is no other evidence that Arcesilaus was committed to premises\n[13] through [16], and they are also ones that Arcesilaus may have\nargued against, since it is reported that he argued not just against\nthe Stoic theory but against all ethical views (Philodemus Index\nAcademicorum 18.40–19.9, Diogenes Laertius 7.171, Numenius\nfr. 25.154–61, cf. fr. 25.41–5).","\n\nThe second, more pressing difficulty is that, although these premises\nare adapted to the Arcesilean context in which nothing can be known\nand the wise person does not assent to anything, they are manifestly\nvariants of the Stoic theory. The Stoics claimed that a good life is\nthe result of performing ‘appropriate\nactions’—defined as “those that, once done, have a\nreasonable defense”—from a disposition of wisdom, i.e.,\nknowledge of what is good, bad and neither. But if nothing can be\nknown, as Arcesilaus has already argued ([5]–[7] in sect. 3,\nabove), the wisdom of the sage consists in not having any\nbeliefs. This disposition will still allow the sage to perform\nappropriate actions, however, if, as the Stoics claim, they are\ndefined by reasonable defenses or justifications. The connection\nbetween performing such actions through a wise disposition and success\nis, Arcesilaus suggests, something that the Stoics can’t deny, because\nthey agree that opinion is the cause of error (this is the\njustification for premise [6] in sect. 3, above). Hence, the perfect\nexercise of our rationality—reflection without assent, as\nArcesilaus has argued—will lead us to find the action that is\nappropriate to us as rational animals, i.e., the reasonable thing to\ndo, and this guarantees success. Arcesilaus therefore employs the\nStoic definition of appropriate action to defend acting on views that\nare reasonably justified. But, for the Stoics, what is reasonably\njustified is what conforms with the sage’s knowledge of what is\ngood, bad, and neither. Arcesilaus, it seems, cannot borrow his\nopponents’ theory without also accepting the possibility of\nknowledge."],"subsection_title":"5.2 The Rational Non-Belief interpretation"},{"content":["\n\nThe NRB view can instead deny that Arcesilaus was\npersonally committed to defending the life of universal\nsuspension against Stoic counterattack. The Stoics pointed out\nthat Arcesilaus’ subversive argument for the rationality of\nuniversally suspending assent cannot be true, because it makes action,\nor at least rational and virtuous action, impossible—but these\nare plainly possible (cf. Cicero Academica 2.37–39). But\neven if this objection did not target his own skeptical view,\nArcesilaus was bound by his method to counter it. Hence it is\nunreasonable to think that he was invested in rationalizing the life of\nthe skeptic with a theory of action (see Stopper 1983; for a\ndifferent view of the polemic, see, e.g., Ioppolo 1986, Maconi 1988,\nand Thorsrud 2009)."],"subsection_title":"5.3 The Non-Rational Belief interpretation"}]},{"main_content":["\n\nSection 2 noted that the central question for the interpretation of\nArcesilaus’ skepticism is how to reconcile his method with his\nskeptical commitments, and sections 4–5 set out three accounts of\nhow his commitments are compatible with his method. A further question\nrelates to the purpose of Arcesilaus’ philosophical activity.\nCompeting histories of Arcesilaus’ intentions in Cicero’s\nAcademica offer different answers (see Allen 2018): at one\npoint Cicero suggests that Arcesilaus adopted a Socratic method\nafter he accepted inapprehensibility and\nuniversal suspension, in order to facilitate suspension of\nassent (Academica 1.44–45; cf. Sextus Outlines of\nPyrrhonism 1.232); but elsewhere he says that Arcesilaus’\naim in questioning Zeno was to discover the truth (Academica\n2.76; cf. Cicero On the Nature of the Gods 1.11). So\nin question is whether Arcesilaus’ method was\nin the service of inquiry—independently of his commitments to\ninapprehensibility or universal suspension—or\na revival of a Socratic methodology that only reflected skeptical\nconclusions he already reached.","\n\nAn argument in favor of the latter is as follows (see Görler\n1994): if Arcesilaus indeed shared the views that knowledge is\nimpossible and that holding opinions is irrational—as both the\nRNB and NRB interpretations say—then he could\nnot have genuinely been in the business of inquiry, which aims at\nknowledge of the truth; hence the only motivation for dialectical\nargument Arcesilaus might be left with is the promotion of\nuniversal suspension. But this argument ignores the context\nfrom which Arcesilaus’ skeptical views emerged and the effects\nthey could reasonably be expected to have had on his philosophical\npractice.","\n\nOn the RNB view, the Academic skeptic, at the start of her\nphilosophical career, inherits a rational method of inquiry, as well as\nguiding views about belief and knowledge. But her inheritance is so far\nuntested (at least by her). As she goes about putting it to work, she\nmight at first believe that her method and its norms help her to get at\nthe truth. But she then finds that by arguing in accordance with those\nnorms she is wildly successful at combatting any and all positions. She\ntherefore comes to suppose on rational grounds—which may\ninclude particular arguments against Stoic cognition, the inadequacy of\nall non-skeptical theories of knowledge, and her experiences in\nargument generally—that the norms cannot successfully guide her\nto truths. But she doesn’t quit her life of inquiry because her\nskeptical view of the inadequacy of her method depends on that very\nmethod; it makes little sense for her to act on a view that rejects its\nown grounds. Instead she continues to inquire, now treating her\ninherited norms and guiding views about belief and knowledge only as\nhypotheses rather than as given. On the RNB view, therefore,\nArcesilaus’ skepticism was self-defeating only insofar as it\ncould not justify abandoning reason.","\n\nA similar story can be told with the NRB view. The skeptic\nlooks for the truth, on the assumption that obtaining it is of crucial\nimportance for her life. But since she consistently fails to find it,\nit begins to strike her that perhaps she never will. Perhaps, it was\nnot, after all, so important for her life to have it: maybe mere\nbelief is all we need. But it doesn’t follow that she should give up\n(as false) her belief that it is irrational to hold opinions, since it\nwould only be correct to give it up if it actually is true that mere\nbelief is all she needs—but this is something that her arguments\ndon’t warrant, any more than they warrant the opposite\nconclusion. An NRB view, then, suggests that\nArcesilaus’ beliefs in the importance of knowledge and the\ninadequacy of opinion were explicitly non-rational, in the sense that\nhe was not persuaded that they were warranted by a rational argument\nor theory, or even by the extensive arguments he devoted his life\nto. He believed that he hadn’t found knowledge and that it is\nirrational to assent to anything without knowledge, but realized, as a\nresult of the unrestricted application of his Socratic method, that\nthere were strong reasons against these beliefs. He was thus not in a\nposition to give his rational assent to the belief that it is\nirrational to hold opinions—he just found that that was how\nthings striked him, i.e., that’s what he believed. The Academic\nskeptic, on this view, is someone whose sustained but pre-theoretical\ncommitment to rational investigation undermines her confidence in\nrationality. The result is not a negative theory—e.g., the\ntheory that we can’t acquire knowledge owing to the limitations of our\ncognitive or rational capacities—but a pervasive lack of theory\nsustained by a dialectical method.","\n\nIf either of these stories is correct, we don’t need to deny\nArcesilaus seached for the truth, and the basic philosophical puzzle\nabout his radical skepticism is not whether it is possible to live\nwithout rational beliefs, but whether it is possible to be committed to\nrationality and yet sufficiently detached from it to recognise that,\nwhatever it is, it may not work."],"section_title":"6. Priority of Method","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\nIt is clear that any interpretation of Arcesilaus must take into\naccount both his reputation as a master dialectician who deployed\nSocrates’ method ruthlessly against his philosophical\ncontemporaries, and his notorious advocacy of\ninapprehensibility and universal suspension. Given\nthe contradictory nature and scarcity of the evidence, it is perhaps\nnot surprising that modern critics do not agree about the success of\nthe ‘dialectical’ or various ‘doctrinal’\ninterpretations of Arcesilaus or about the consistency of the very\ndifferent kinds of skepticism the latter propose. But further progress\nis not ruled out, since it is open to us to offer more sophisticated\nphilosophical elaborations of those forms of skepticism and to test\ntheir historical plausibility by appealing to the diverse, but better\nattested traditions in the later Academy."],"section_title":"7. Conclusion","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nAfter an early education in geometry and astronomy in his native\\nPitanê (in Aeolis, the northwest Aegean coast of modern Turkey),\\nArcesilaus escaped to Athens against his guardian’s wishes. There he is\\nsaid to have studied rhetoric in association with Theophrastus\\n(Aristotle’s successor) until c. 295–290 BCE, when he abandoned\\nit to study philosophy in Plato’s Academy with Crantor (d. 276/5) and\\nits leaders Polemo (d. 270/69) and Crates (d.268/7). He became the head\\nof the Academy (‘scholarch’) after Crates’ death and\\nled the school for more than 25 years until his own death in 241/40\\nBCE.\",\n \"\\n\\nLike Socrates, his philosophical model, and Carneades, who carried\\nforward his skepticism in the 2nd c. BCE, Arcesilaus did not\\nwrite any philosophical works. His arguments were initially preserved\\nby his students—including Pythodorus, who wrote up some of\\nthem, and Lakydes, his successor as scholarch—and in the work\\nof his opponents, most notably, the Stoic Chrysippus, whose\\nreformulation of Stoicism was prompted by Arcesilaus’ criticisms\\nof the views of the first generation of Stoics. But Arcesilaus’\\narguments were later overlaid by Carneadean elaborations and subsumed\\ninto the general Academic and anti-Academic traditions; so it is only\\nthrough those later traditions that we know about them. Our knowledge\\nof his work depends on scraps from the biographical tradition\\n(preserved in Diogenes Laertius and Philodemus) and brief general\\nreports from later skeptical writers—Cicero and Sextus\\nEmpiricus and Plutarch—and their opponents—Antiochus\\nand Numenius (preserved in Cicero and Eusebius respectively). But since\\nthese offer incompatible interpretations of Arcesilaus’\\nphilosophical position, reflecting the writers’ distinctive views\\nabout later developments in the skeptical Academy, the precise nature\\nof his skepticism remains controversial.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Life and work\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThe central question presented by the inconsistent evidence for\\nArcesilaus’ skepticism is how to reconcile his Socratic method\\nwith the ‘doctrines’ he is reported to have accepted:\",\n \"\\n\\nOur sources agree that Arcesilaus’ dialectical method\\nconstituted the core of his philosophical activity (see e.g., Diogenes\\nLaertius 4.28). This method presents two basic difficulties for any\\nattempt to reconcile it with these doctrines.\",\n \"\\n\\nFirst, his method was dialectical, such that rather than arguing in\\nfavor of any doctrine or set of doctrines, Arcesilaus restricted\\nhimself to arguing against the views proposed by his opponents or\\ninterlocutors. At first sight, this method may not look incompatible\\nwith affirming inapprehensibility and universal\\nsuspension of assent if the repeated result of practicing it\\nwas that the views argued against did not stand up to criticism. Such\\nrepeated failures could suggest that in fact nothing can be known and\\nthat one should form no beliefs at all.\",\n \"\\n\\nWe can see why Arcesilaus’ dialectical method cautions against\\naccepting this suggestion by looking at the model he claimed to be\\nfollowing: Socrates’ practice in the dialogues of Plato (see\\nCicero, Academica 1.44–5, De oratore 3.67,\\nDe finibus 2.2, On the Nature of the Gods 1.11). In\\nPlato’s Socratic dialogues, at least, Socrates challenges the\\npretensions of his interlocutors to knowledge by showing, through\\npremises they accept, that they are committed to inconsistent beliefs.\\nTo achieve this result, it is crucial that the arguments—the\\npremises, the inferences, and the conclusions—depend entirely on\\nthe beliefs of the interlocutors. If they do, the result of a\\nsuccessful Socratic encounter will be that the interlocutor is at a\\nloss: the interlocutors now recognize that they have inconsistent\\nbeliefs, since they have both their initial reasons for the thesis or\\nknowledge-claim they made and their newly-discerned reasons against\\nit. If they also hold some generally accepted views about knowledge\\n(for example, that one can’t know something about which one holds\\ninconsistent beliefs), the interlocutors will be rationally\\nconstrained to aver that they don’t know whether their thesis is true\\nor false, and hence to suspend assent on the thesis while awaiting\\nfurther investigation and argument. But no such result holds for\\nSocrates. For, although he represents himself as being in the same\\naporetic boat—and may in fact be perplexed for exactly the same\\nreasons—his method does not commit him to the premises,\\ninferences or conclusions of the arguments, or even to the regulating\\nideas about knowledge. His views (if he has any) are not at issue in\\nthe argument.\",\n \"\\n\\nThere is good evidence that Arcesilaus followed the Socratic model\\nconsistently. It is clear that he went to some lengths not to make\\npositive affirmations of any sort in his own right in his arguments\\n(see Diogenes Laertius 4.36, Philodemus Index Academicorum\\n20.1–4, cf. 18.40–19.9). Our sources also confirm that\\nArcesilaus took his method to entail that he did not reveal his own\\nview on the matter in question in any case, if he had one, including,\\nfor instance, the view that the claim argued against is false (see\\ne.g., Cicero De oratore 3.67). Further, our most\\ndetailed sources actually identify the radical change of position in\\nthe Platonic school he introduced—the transition from the Old\\nAcademy to the skeptical Academy—in terms of his adoption of\\nthis method (see Diogenes Laertius 4.28, Philodemus Index\\nAcademicorum 18.7–16 & 21.36–42 and Sextus\\nOutlines of Pyrrhonism 1.220–35, esp. 232). And this\\nexplains his reputation as a ‘dialectician’ (or, more\\nnegatively, as a ‘sophist’ or ‘eristic’ or\\n‘magician’), as well as why the skeptical Academy came to\\nbe defined primarily by its critical stance towards the doctrines of\\nother schools (and particularly towards the energetic philosophical\\nprograms of the new movements initiated by Epicurus and Zeno during his\\nlifetime). But if Arcesilaus followed this model consistently by\\narguing against every philosophical position that came to his notice\\nand refraining from making any positive arguments or affirmations on\\nany philosophical question, it is hard to see why we should think that\\nhe accepted any doctrines, including inapprehensibility and\\nuniversal suspension of assent. Thus, the first difficulty is\\nthat Arcesilaus’ method in principle obscures any views he may\\nhave held.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe second difficulty involved in reconciling Arcesilaus’\\ndialectical method with doctrines [i]–[iii] is more\\nstraightforward: they are conclusions of some of his best known\\narguments, but since these are clearly dialectical anti-Stoic\\narguments, they depend crucially on Stoic premises. In epistemology, he\\nargued that, despite the Stoics’ commitment to readily accessible\\nknowledge, certain premises accepted by the Stoics entail that nothing\\nis known and that we should suspend assent universally (see below,\\nsect. 3.). Likewise, the theory of action Arcesilaus defended is\\nparasitic on the Stoics’ and relies on their ethical premises\\n(see below, sect. 5). Given his Socratic method, we only have reason to\\nascribe these doctrines to Arcesilaus himself if we have independent\\nevidence that he accepted those premises shared by Stoics. But there is\\nreason to think that Arcesilaus did not accept anything of Stoic\\nepistemology or ethics. The second difficulty, then, is that the\\nevidence does not give a consistent picture of which, if any,\\nconclusions of his dialectical arguments Arcesilaus may have accepted\\nin his own right.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe first question about Arcesilaus’ skepticism is thus\\nwhether it involved any commitment to doctrines at all. A negative\\nanswer to this question—based on something like the two\\ndifficulties given above—yields what is called a\\ndialectical interpretation of Arcesilaus (adopted by e.g.,\\nCouissin 1929 and Striker 1980; see Castagnoli 2018 on the senses of\\n‘dialectical’). The primary drawback to this interpretation\\nis that it involves the rejection of a central claim about him in all\\nof our major sources except Philodemus: Cicero, Numenius, Sextus,\\nDiogenes and Plutarch ascribe some degree of commitment to at least one\\nof these doctrines—that of universal suspension ([ii]\\nabove). Rejecting this evidence might be justified by the lateness of\\nthese sources and their associations with later Academic developments;\\nbut this seems hard to maintain when we learn that Arcesilaus’\\ncontemporary opponents, including Chrysippus, also ascribed\\nuniversal suspension to him (see Plutarch On\\nStoic Self-Contradictions 1036a with 1037a, and Against\\nColotes 1122a). A dialectical interpretation also risks failing\\nas an interpretation: it cannot explain why Arcesilaus argued\\nas he did, whether because it denies him any commitments or because it\\nclaims they are entirely opaque to us (see Perin 2013).\",\n \"\\n\\nIf we accept that these considerations constrain us to look for a\\npositive answer to the first question, at least as regards the\\nrecommendation of suspending assent about everything, the second\\nquestion is which of the three candidate doctrines—viz., [i]\\ninapprehensibility, [ii] universal suspension, and\\n[iii] a theory of action without assent—was Arcesilaus\\ncommitted to. Since, as numerous sources suggest, universal\\nsuspension is the prescriptive claim that one ought not to form\\nany beliefs, then Arcesilaus cannot follow it and at the same time\\nbelieve it, or anything else, to be true. If we do not wish to saddle\\nArcesilaus with a self-defeating skepticism, we are then faced with a\\nthird question: what was the nature of Arcesilaus’ commitment to\\nhis doctrines? The answers to these two questions remain open. But the\\ndominant solutions on offer fall roughly into three groups, each\\nidentifying a different kind of commitment compatible with\\nuniversal suspension, and so a different answer to the third\\nquestion. If the sort of commitment prohibited by universal\\nsuspension is rational belief, then three weaker kinds of\\ncommitment seem to have been open to Arcesilaus:\",\n \"\\n\\nNRNB supposes that the skeptic universally suspends assent\\nas a natural, psychological reaction to equally convincing (or\\nequipollent) and opposing arguments. Universal suspension, on\\nthis view, is not a prescription justified through the\\nargument that one ought to suspend assent about everything because\\nknowledge is impossible. Rather, since the skeptic’s belief-forming faculties are\\nparalyzed in the face of opposing reasons, she acts by impulse,\\npursuing what appears appropriate (see sect. 5.1). On an NRNB\\ninterpretation Arcesilaus’ commitments to [ii] universal\\nsuspension and [iii] a practical criterion were founded neither on\\nbelief nor on a prior consideration of reasons (see e.g., Ioppolo 1986;\\n2009; 2018).\",\n \"\\n\\nRNB allows the skeptic to accept doctrines on rational\\ngrounds, by distinguishing beliefs from other attitudes that can take the\\nplace of beliefs in chains of inference: in particular,\\nbelief-like suppositions that function as hypotheses (see Striker 1980,\\nBett 1990, and Reinhardt 2018). On the RNB view Arcesilaus\\naccepted [i]–[iii] hypothetically (see Schofield 1999, Perin\\n2010, and Thorsrud 2018).\",\n \"\\n\\nNRB denies the skeptic accepts doctrines on the basis of\\nany premises that purport to warrant them. On this view, [i]\\ninapprehensibility and [ii] universal suspension were\\nthe residual and rationally unwarranted beliefs Arcesilaus was left\\nwith as a result of his philosophical activity (see Frede 1979 &\\n1984, Cooper 2004, Brittain 2005 [2008], and Thorsrud 2009).\",\n \"\\n\\nAs we will see in sects. 4–5, these three accounts of\\nArcesilaus’ skepticism privilege the evidence for his arguments\\nin competing ways. To understand and evaluate their interpretive\\nstrategies, we first need to examine Arcesilaus’ principal\\narguments against Stoic epistemology.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Skepticism: method or doctrine\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nArcesilaus’ best known arguments, and the only ones that\\nsurvive in any detail, are his criticisms of Stoic epistemology (Sextus\\nAgainst the Logicians [‘M.’]\\n7.150–9, Cicero Academica 2\\npassim, esp. 2.66–7 & 2.77).\",\n \"\\n\\nThe Stoic theory of knowledge represented a radical shift in\\nepistemology, since it offered an empirically-based route to the kind\\nof wisdom Socrates had sought (see Frede 1999). Its basis was three\\nnovel claims made by Zeno, the founder of the Stoa (see Cicero\\nAcademica 1.40–2). First, Zeno proposed a new\\npsychological theory: to form a belief of any kind is to give one’s\\nassent to one’s ‘impression’ (or ‘appearance’:\\n‘phantasia’ in Greek) about the matter.\\nSecondly, he claimed that some of our perceptual impressions are\\n‘cognitive’ or self-warranting, so that assenting to them\\nconstitutes a cognition or apprehension\\n(‘katalêpsis’) of their objects.\\nAnd, thirdly, he argued that we ought to restrict our assent to just\\ncognitive impressions, since it is contrary to reason to form\\n‘opinions’—that is, mere beliefs whether true or\\nfalse—by assenting to inadequately warranted, non-cognitive\\nimpressions. But, given that there are cognitive impressions, we can\\nattain infallible knowledge or wisdom by restricting our assent to\\nthem, since our thoughts will then be constituted entirely by\\ncognitions derived from perception or from concepts warranted by\\nperceptual cognitions.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe focus of Arcesilaus’ attack on Zeno’s theory was its\\ncenterpiece, the theory of cognitive impressions. Zeno defined a\\ncognitive impression as one that comes from what is, is stamped and\\nimpressed exactly in accordance with it, and is such that it could not\\nbe false (Sextus M. 7.248, Cicero Academica 2.77).\\nThis means, roughly, that an impression is cognitive if and only if\\n[a] its propositional content is true, [b] it is caused in the\\nappropriate way for correctly representing its object, and [c] its\\ntruth is thus warranted by the inimitable richness and detail of the\\nrepresentational character guaranteed by its causal history—such\\nthat [a] is entailed by [b]. Arcesilaus’ tactic was to grant\\nthat conditions [a] and [b] are often met, as Zeno claimed, but to\\nargue that condition [c] never obtained (M.\\n7.154, Academica 2.77). Although his detailed arguments for\\nthis have not survived, it is fairly clear from later Academic and\\nStoic arguments that he followed two main lines of attack. One line\\ndepended on the existence of indistinguishable—or, at any rate,\\nindiscernibly distinct—objects, such as twins, or pairs of eggs,\\nmanufactured items (statues or impressions on wax of the same\\nletter-seal), and grains of sand (Academica 2.54–8\\n& 2.84–6, M. 7.408–10). Any of these could\\nbe mistaken for another no matter how good one’s impression of it\\nwas. The second depended on abnormal states of mind, such as dreams,\\nillusions, and fits of madness (Academica 2.47–53 &\\n2.88–90, M. 7.402–8). In either case, Arcesilaus\\nargued that, whether the nature of the objects or of our minds is at\\nfault, it is always possible to have a false impression with exactly\\nthe same propositional content and representational character as a\\ntrue one that meets condition [b]. But if so, no impression can be\\nself-warranting in virtue of the way in which its content is\\nrepresented. So condition [c] never obtains. Hence, on the Stoic view\\nof the requirements for cognition, there is no cognition. And if\\nknowledge is derived entirely from perceptual cognition and concepts\\nwarranted by it, as Zeno supposed, it follows that nothing can be\\nknown. (Intricate Stoic-Academic debates on these issues lasted for\\nanother 150 years; they can best be traced through the arguments of\\nChrysippus and Carneades, preserved in some detail in\\nCicero’s Academica and Sextus M. 7.)\",\n \"\\n\\nThe argument is standardly summarized as follows:\",\n \"\\n\\nAnd, since for Zeno knowledge itself depends on assent to cognitive\\nimpressions, this argument leads to the further conclusion that nothing\\ncan be known (inapprehensibility).\",\n \"\\n\\nArcesilaus followed up this argument against the cognitive\\nimpression with a briefer argument against Zeno’s ideal of wisdom:\",\n \"\\n\\nThat is, Arcesilaus pointed out to the Stoics that if his argument\\n[1]–[5] against the cognitive\\nimpression is successful, they are also committed to the conclusion\\nthat it is irrational to assent to anything (universal\\nsuspension).\",\n \"\\n\\nThese arguments are presented in two very different ways in our two\\nsources. In Sextus’ account (followed above), they are presented\\nas explicitly dialectical arguments, relying on clearly marked Stoic\\nviews, and leading to the conclusion that the Stoic sage will have no\\nbeliefs. In the report of Cicero in Academica 2, however, we\\nare informed that Arcesilaus was in some way committed to premises and\\nconclusions of both arguments: that is, he agreed that condition [c] of\\nthe Stoic definition of the cognitive impression could never be met,\\nand hence that nothing can be known; and he maintained premises [5] and\\n[6] of the second argument, and hence concluded that assent to any\\nimpression was irrational (Academica 2.66–7 & 2.77).\\nThis historical interpretation of Arcesilaus’ skepticism is\\nsupported elsewhere in Cicero’s dialogues, where we find histories of\\nphilosophy that have Arcesilaus following Socrates and Plato (and\\nPresocratic philosophers such as Democritus, Parmenides and Empedocles)\\nin concluding that nothing can be known by perception or reason, and\\nhence adopting a method of argument that would lead others to refrain\\nfrom all assent (De oratore 3.67 &\\nAcademica 1.43–6; see also Plutarch Against\\nColotes 1121f).\",\n \"\\n\\nCicero’s interpretation in Academica 2.66–7 &\\n2.77 faces two problems. The first is that the argument against the\\nexistence of cognitive impressions depends on many facets of the\\nepistemological framework of the Stoics. For the conclusion doesn’t\\nfollow unless it is true that there are impressions, that some are\\ntrue, that there are no other routes to cognition, that the Stoic\\ndefinition of cognition gives necessary and sufficient conditions for\\nknowledge, etc. And there is reason to doubt Cicero’s testimony that\\nArcesilaus subscribed to these Stoic views, since we have some evidence\\nthat he argued against every aspect of Stoic epistemology and\\npsychology. Plutarch, for instance, mentions an objection to the Stoic\\ntheory of the soul’s interaction with the body, which implies that\\nArcesilaus argued against the fundamental mechanism of impression in\\nZeno’s account (On Common Conceptions 1078c). Another fragment\\nfrom Plutarch suggests that Arcesilaus argued against Zeno’s causal\\ntheory of perception (Fragment 215a). And Sextus reports that\\nArcesilaus also objected to Zeno’s conception of belief as assent to an\\nimpression, on the ground that assent is a matter of reason or thought,\\nrather than the acceptance of a physiological item, the impression\\n(M. 7.154).\",\n \"\\n\\nIn these cases, as with his argument against the satisfiability of\\ncondition [c] of the Stoic definition of the cognitive impression, it\\nseems possible to trace a definite strategy behind Arcesilaus’\\narguments: he argued against Zeno’s empiricist presuppositions by\\ndeploying Platonic objections and theories (see Schofield 1999,\\nTrabattoni 2005, Vezzoli 2016, and von Staden 1978). One might\\nconclude, as some did in antiquity, that Arcesilaus therefore had a\\nhidden objective of undermining Stoic or Epicurean empiricism in favor\\nof Platonic doctrine (see Sextus Outlines of Pyrrhonism\\n1.234). But Arcesilaus’ method implies that he would argue\\nagainst Platonic doctrines as well, if anyone proposed them. So if he\\ndid hold the view that nothing can be known, it seems more plausible to\\nthink that he held it due to the success of his arguments against all\\nconceptions of knowledge, rather than solely as the conclusion of an\\nargument relying on a particular epistemological theory. Cicero’s\\naccount, then, may give only a partial story of the grounds of\\nArcesilaus’ skeptical views.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe second problem with the interpretation of Arcesilaus’\\nskepticism in Academica 2.66–7 & 2.77 is that it\\nrisks self-defeat. The problem lies not in knowing that nothing can be\\nknown, since, on one account\\n(Cicero Academica 1.45), Arcesilaus, unlike\\nSocrates, explicitly disclaimed such second-order knowledge. It lies\\nrather in believing that nothing can be known in conjunction with the\\nbelief that it is irrational to hold opinions in the absence of\\nknowledge. If the former is true, it is irrational (and so one ought\\nnot) to believe the premises of the arguments that support both\\ninapprehensibility and universal suspension.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Criticism of Stoic epistemology\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThere are two approaches to resolving this second problem, that\\naccepting inapprehensibility and universal suspension\\nmay be self-defeating. The NRNB view takes a negative route,\\ndenying that Arcesilaus was committed to inapprehensibility\\nand universal suspension, at least as a prescriptive claim\\nabout the irrationality of assent (see [7] in sect. 3). By contrast,\\nthe RNB and NRB views positively ascribe\\ninapprehensibility and universal suspension to\\nArcesilaus, but they maintain that his acceptance of them is not\\nexplained in terms of rational belief of the sort which would lead a\\nStoic convinced by Arcesilaus to a self-defeating position (see sect.\\n2).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Inapprehensibility and Universal Suspension of Assent\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThe NRNB view of Arcesilaus argues that he was not\\ncommitted to inapprehensibility and universal\\nsuspension, as a prescriptive claim about the\\nirrationality of assent (see [7] in sect. 3). On this view, the two\\nsources for the anti-Stoic arguments still imply that Arcesilaus was\\n‘committed’ to universal suspension, but this is\\nunderstood as the descriptive claim that the skeptic does not\\nassent to anything due to the balance of opposing arguments; and he was\\ncommitted to it only in the sense that he acted in accordance with his\\nunreflective impressions (see sect. 5.1 below). Thus, there is no\\nconflict between the anti-Stoic sources, Sextus and Cicero, and those\\nthat report that Arcesilaus’ universal suspension is\\ncaused by the equipollence of arguments without mentioning his\\ncriticism of Stoic epistemology (viz., Diogenes Laertius 4.28, Cicero\\nAcademica 1.45, & Sextus Outlines of Pyrrhonism\\n1.232).\",\n \"\\n\\nThis interpretation takes Sextus to imply that Arcesilaus’\\ncommitment to a descriptive version of universal suspension is\\nprior to his anti-Stoic argument (M. 7.156–7),\\noutlined above in sect. 3 (see e.g., Ioppolo 2002; 2009). In this\\nargument he holds that the Stoic who concedes the non-existence of\\ncognitive impressions is forced to conclude that it is rational to\\n‘withhold assent’ (‘asugkatathetein’)\\nabout everything (see [10] below). This conclusion is sufficient to\\noppose the Stoic thesis that some assents are rational. The full\\nversion of the argument outlined in sect. 3 is:\",\n \"\\n\\nThat Arcesilaus used premise [11] to move from withholding assent to\\nthe suspension of judgment (‘epochê’)\\nindicates, on this account, a commitment to epochê that\\nis independent of Stoic notions like assent and the irrationality of\\nholding opinions, because it is reached only through the equipollence\\nof arguments.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe NRNB view also interprets Cicero as confirming that\\nArcesilaus was committed to the descriptive version of universal\\nsuspension, even though Cicero Academica 2.66–7\\n& 77 reports that Arcesilaus was committed to various components of\\nhis anti-Stoic arguments (see sect. 3): that there are no cognitive\\nimpressions, that nothing can be known, that it is irrational to hold\\nopinions, and that it is rational to suspend assent. Cicero may be\\nunreliable here, because he is biased by his own, later conception of\\nradical skepticism, and in his text one may yet find an alternative\\nview (see Ioppolo 2008): at Academica 2.32, Cicero’s pro-Stoic\\ncharacter Lucullus refers to skeptical Academics who concede that\\neverything is uncertain (‘adêla’) without\\npreferring any views; and these Academics appear to be followers of\\nArcesilaus (cf. Academica 2.16 & 59). Since these\\nAcademics’ suspension of judgment is based on the notion of\\nuncertainty, which is not necessarily Stoic, their skeptical views do\\nnot depend on an anti-Stoic critique.\",\n \"\\n\\nHowever, there are strong reasons not to read Sextus and Cicero as\\nconfirming that Arcesilaus’ commitment to a descriptive version\\nof universal suspension is independent of his anti-Stoic\\narguments. Even if Arcesilaus developed a notion of suspension\\n(‘epochê’) before his criticisms of the\\nStoa, premise [11] above conceptualizes it in Stoic terms. It is true\\nthat Arcesilaus in Sextus M. 7.156–7 goes beyond the\\npoint sufficient to oppose the Stoic—viz., that the wise person\\ndoes not assent to anything (see [9] above). But he continued the\\nargument because there is a conceptual difference between not assenting\\nand withholding assent (see e.g., Friedman 2013), and because\\nepochê refers to the latter. Withholding assent\\npresupposes a prior examination of evidence and the recognition of an\\nequipollence among the reasons for competing beliefs. (See also Maconi\\n1988 and Bénatouïl 2011.) As for the evidence of Cicero,\\neven if Lucullus thinks Arcesilaus himself belongs to the group of\\nAcademics who say that everything is non-evident, he also accuses\\nArcesilaus of appealing to the authority of Presocratics to promote his\\nview of inapprehensibility, which crucially presupposes Stoic\\nconditions on knowledge (Academica 2.15). So even Lucullus\\nthinks Arcesilaus’ skepticism is related to his anti-Stoic\\narguments.\",\n \"\\n\\nThere are further problems with the NRNB view, separate\\nfrom the issues of interpretation mentioned above. For one, it narrowly\\nrestricts the skeptic to a life of unreflective reaction (see sect.\\n5.1), and therefore does not seem compatible with the patterns of\\nrationality and inquiry that Arcesilaus engaged with. Its narrow\\nrestriction on the scope of skeptical action is also overly dogmatic:\\nwere the NRNB view true, it seems implausible Arcesilaus would\\nsee the need for a theory of skeptical action, let alone use the\\nStoic model of non-rational animals.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.1 The Non-Rational Non-Belief interpretation\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThe RNB view of Arcesilaus denies that his acceptance of\\ninapprehensibility and universal suspension is\\nexplained in terms of belief in the premises and hence in the\\nconclusions of his arguments. Rather, on this account Arcesilaus\\nguides his rational activity by something like a supposition or\\nhypothesis—a set of notions deployed variously in Plato’s\\ndialogues, Theophrastus’ dialectic, and geometrical theory (see\\nSchofield 1999 and Thorsrud 2018; cf. Bénatouïl & El\\nMurr 2010). Even the Stoics distinguished hypotheticals from\\nassertions and arguments, such that one can accept hypotheses and what\\nfollows from them without asserting them (see Barnes 1997). Arcesilaus\\ncould have adapted this kind of theory to account for the rational\\nactivities of the skeptic. Accounts of impression and assent also\\nafford a distinction between beliefs and belief-like imaginings such\\nas suppositions, which may then take the place of beliefs in chains of\\ninference. This distinction allows for a reasoned commitment\\nthat falls short of assent (see Striker 1980, Bett 1990, and\\nReinhardt 2018). Arcesilaus, on this view, supposes that we ought to\\nlive without realist commitments that fix our view of the world. His supposition may have been based on\\npremises—some of which he shared with Zeno—as well as on a\\ngeneralization from his philosophical experience, after repeatedly\\nfinding that rational inquiry does not justify assent.\",\n \"\\n\\nHowever, this proposal must address several problems. For instance,\\nit seems doubtful that a rational life can be based on hypotheticals\\nwithout a large web of background beliefs (see Frede 1979 and Bett\\n1989). Without them, the skeptic seems unable to decide which\\nhypotheses to suppose and when to suppose them. And even if such a life\\nis possible, it is not clear how it would be practically\\ndistinguishable from, and so preferable to, a life based wholly on\\nbelief. If the skeptic regards as hypothetical the very same things we\\nordinarily believe, then skepticism seems unmotivated. (See Thorsrud\\n2010 and Perin 2013 for other objections.) Perhaps one could defend\\nthe possibility of a radically skeptical life of this kind by saying\\nthat, while its development requires starting with beliefs, over time\\nan increasing number of background beliefs may be substituted with\\nhypotheses, and that the benefits of the skeptical life are of a\\nsecond-order, affecting the ease with which the skeptic can change the\\nguiding assumptions of her life.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.2 The Rational Non-Belief interpretation\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThe NRB view instead argues that universal\\nsuspension isn’t opposed to beliefs per se, but only to\\nbeliefs justified through philosophical theory or reasons generally.\\nThe Stoics maintain that the mind is essentially rational, so that its\\nassent is necessarily reason-responsive (see Coope 2016).\\nArcesilaus’ skepticism, on this view, challenges the rationalist\\npresupposition that belief is necessarily and explicitly grounded in\\nreason. This doesn’t preclude that Arcesilaus found himself—as\\na result of the inadequacy of the arguments for any position, and of\\nthe equally convincing arguments against it—with the belief\\nthat nothing can be known. Thus, inapprehensibility is neither\\nthe conclusion of a deductive argument relying on a theory of knowledge\\nor of our cognitive faculties, nor an inductive inference from prior\\ninvestigations; it is not a theoretical or even rationally warranted\\nbelief, but just the way things strike him (see Cooper 2004 and\\nThorsrud 2009).\",\n \"\\n\\nBut in the case of universal suspension, it seems that the\\nview that it is irrational to hold unwarranted beliefs is\\nheld—at least in part—on the basis of a theoretical belief\\nthat knowledge is very important to acquire and that mere belief is to\\nbe avoided. Cicero, for instance, stresses that Arcesilaus agreed with\\nZeno that it is irrational to hold opinions, i.e., inadequately\\nwarranted assents (premise [6] in sect. 3, above); and Sextus suggests\\nthat he thought that individual cases of suspended\\nbelief—presumably in the light of inconclusive\\narguments—were good (Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.233). And\\nthe view that it is irrational to hold mere beliefs (that is,\\nopinions) depends on a further set of epistemological beliefs about\\nthe nature of belief and knowledge. If Arcesilaus was not rationally\\ncommitted to any set of assumptions about the nature and requirements\\nof rationality or about belief and knowledge—which he ought not\\nto be, given that he had argued against the various views on offer,\\nand hence, ex hypothesi, suspended belief about them—it\\ndoesn’t look like he can believe that one ought not to take beliefs to\\nbe justified.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe NRB view thus takes universal\\nsuspension to be a belief that is not rationally warranted, as\\nwell as the views on which it causally depends. That is, Arcesilaus\\nbegan inquiry motivated by a pre-theoretical belief, that philosophical\\nknowledge is important and mere belief inadequate. And his repeated and\\nextensive investigations left him with the realization that even these\\nregulating assumptions of his philosophical practice have failed to be\\nwarranted and that no beliefs are justified.\",\n \"\\n\\nOn this view, the radical skeptic has beliefs but doesn’t take them\\nto be justified. This proposal raises problems, too (see Burnyeat\\n1983). It seems that a large part of being a rational agent is to\\nexercise some control over one’s beliefs. Since this control takes the\\nform of a responsiveness to reasons, it does not seem possible for\\nrational agents to give up practices of justification. A related\\nobjection is to maintain that even having beliefs, which involves the\\nuse of concepts, is necessarily responsive to reasons (see Williams\\n2004). To have a belief, according to this view, requires making a\\nconscious inference about the proper use of concepts, and conscious\\ninferences are made in virtue of reasons. One may respond that the\\nskeptic isn’t precluding herself from a responsiveness to reasons but\\nrather lacks confidence in them, and that such rationalist theories of\\nagency and belief are stricter even than the Stoics’, against\\nwhich Arcesilaus argued (see sect. 5 below).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.3 The Non-Rational Belief interpretation\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThe third doctrine we might ascribe to Arcesilaus on the basis of\\nhis sources is a so-called practical criterion, i.e., a theory that\\nmakes action without assent possible (see [iii] in sect. 2).\\n Arcesilaus’ argument for a ‘practical\\ncriterion’ responds to two Stoic objections of\\n‘inaction’ (apraxia). The first, found in\\nPlutarch, is that action is impossible without assent, since action is\\ncaused by assent to an impression of something suited to the agent’s\\nnature, i.e., ‘oikeion’ (Against\\nColotes 1122a–d; cf. Cicero Academica\\n2.37–8). The second objection, reported by Sextus, is that a good\\nor successful life is impossible without assent, since a good life\\nrequires action based on knowledge of what is good and bad, and hence\\nassent (M. 7.158; cf. Cicero Academica 2.39).\\nArcesilaus’ reported replies to these objections are brief, and\\naccordingly difficult to interpret (see Bett 1989). His counter to the\\nfirst objection is the suggestion that action is possible without\\nassent, since even on the Stoic account animal action is triggered\\ndirectly by their impressions of something oikeion: the\\naddition of assent, and so a belief that the object is in fact\\nnaturally suited to the agent, is redundant and liable to be a\\ncause of error. In response to the second objection, Arcesilaus argued\\nthat the person who suspends assent universally will successfully guide\\ntheir actions in light of their sense of what is\\n‘reasonable’ (‘eulogon’).\",\n \"\\n\\nThe three doctrinal interpretations of Arcesilaus’ skepticism under consideration take these arguments in Plutarch and Sextus to support, in different ways, their distinct views of his commitment to inapprehensibility and/or universal suspension.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. The practical criterion\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nProponents of the NRNB view take the argument of Plutarch\\nto give a general theory of action that supports universal\\nsuspension of judgment as a natural reaction to equally balanced\\narguments. On this theory all actions are merely impulsive, i.e.,\\ncaused just by impressions of what appears suitable\\n(‘oikeion’). Since the skeptic doesn’t make\\njudgments, the only sense in which she is committed to her impressions\\nis that she acts on them. It is unclear how this is compatible with the\\nevidence of Sextus on ‘the reasonable’, where the skeptic\\nconsiders reasonable justifications in deciding what to do. But some\\nadvocates of NRNB combine the two so that a class of impulsive\\nactions count as voluntary if, after their performance, one can\\nreasonably justify them as successful (e.g., Ioppolo 1981; 1986; 2000).\",\n \"\\n\\nEven allowing for this attenuated sense of the voluntary, it is\\nunclear why Arcesilaus would come to accept this impulsivist theory of\\naction, if it were true: since—as the theory\\nmaintains—theory doesn’t inform action, it is difficult to\\nexplain theoretical commitments solely in terms of what appears suited\\nto an agent (see Maconi 1988, Trabattoni 2005, and Vezzoli\\n2016). An NRNB reading of ‘the reasonable’\\ntherefore concedes that Sextus may have elided important details (see\\nIoppolo 2018).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.1 The Non-Rational Non-Belief interpretation\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThe RNB view opens up a more promising way to read the\\nbrief counter-arguments in Plutarch and Sextus as a positive theory of\\nArcesilaus. His counter in Plutarch is that action isn’t always caused\\nby occurrent beliefs—we sometimes act through habit, or by\\ninstinct. By itself, this doesn’t go very far, however, since the\\nStoics will have objected that, even if this were possible, this\\naccount couldn’t describe the voluntary and responsible actions of a\\nrational agent. (The Stoics defined responsible or voluntary action in\\nterms of assent, since this was the mechanism through which our\\nrationality acts on the world.) But one can read the counter-argument\\nin Sextus as supplementing that response: there is space for\\nrationality and responsibility, on this view, in the production of the\\nimpressions or thoughts motivating us when we act. We can act in\\naccordance with what strikes us as the reasonable thing to do upon\\nreflection, but still refrain from assent, i.e., refrain from forming\\nthe belief that this is the right thing to do.\",\n \"\\n\\nThere are two problems facing this interpretation of ‘the\\nreasonable’. The first is that it does not look to be supported\\nby the evidence to which it appeals. Sextus, the source for the notion\\nof ‘the reasonable’ as the criterion, says that Arcesilaus\\nand his followers did not define a criterion and that, when they\\nseemed to, they did so “a counterblast to that of the\\nStoics” (M. 7.150, Bury trans.). (Sextus’ later\\naccount of Arcesilaus in another work is also incompatible with his\\nhypothesizing such a theory; see Outlines of Pyrrhonism\\n1.232–3.) And Cicero and Numenius, our other sources for the\\nview that Arcesilas was committed to inapprehensibility\\nand universal suspension, do not mention his adoption of a\\npractical criterion—in fact, in both authors it is suggested\\nthat Arcesilaus did not offer a position on how one might live without\\nassent, and that Carneades significantly revised the Academic position\\nin this respect (Academica 2.32; Numenius fr. 27.14–32,\\ncf. Numenius fr. 26.107–11).\",\n \"\\n\\nThe second problem is that even if the context does not explicitly\\ndemand that Arcesilaus’ practical criterion was a dialectical\\nploy, the argument Arcesilaus used to support it makes the most sense\\nif it is construed dialectically. The argument he gives is something\\nlike this (Sextus M. 7.158):\",\n \"\\n\\nTwo difficulties face this non-dialectical reading. One is that\\nthere is no other evidence that Arcesilaus was committed to premises\\n[13] through [16], and they are also ones that Arcesilaus may have\\nargued against, since it is reported that he argued not just against\\nthe Stoic theory but against all ethical views (Philodemus Index\\nAcademicorum 18.40–19.9, Diogenes Laertius 7.171, Numenius\\nfr. 25.154–61, cf. fr. 25.41–5).\",\n \"\\n\\nThe second, more pressing difficulty is that, although these premises\\nare adapted to the Arcesilean context in which nothing can be known\\nand the wise person does not assent to anything, they are manifestly\\nvariants of the Stoic theory. The Stoics claimed that a good life is\\nthe result of performing ‘appropriate\\nactions’—defined as “those that, once done, have a\\nreasonable defense”—from a disposition of wisdom, i.e.,\\nknowledge of what is good, bad and neither. But if nothing can be\\nknown, as Arcesilaus has already argued ([5]–[7] in sect. 3,\\nabove), the wisdom of the sage consists in not having any\\nbeliefs. This disposition will still allow the sage to perform\\nappropriate actions, however, if, as the Stoics claim, they are\\ndefined by reasonable defenses or justifications. The connection\\nbetween performing such actions through a wise disposition and success\\nis, Arcesilaus suggests, something that the Stoics can’t deny, because\\nthey agree that opinion is the cause of error (this is the\\njustification for premise [6] in sect. 3, above). Hence, the perfect\\nexercise of our rationality—reflection without assent, as\\nArcesilaus has argued—will lead us to find the action that is\\nappropriate to us as rational animals, i.e., the reasonable thing to\\ndo, and this guarantees success. Arcesilaus therefore employs the\\nStoic definition of appropriate action to defend acting on views that\\nare reasonably justified. But, for the Stoics, what is reasonably\\njustified is what conforms with the sage’s knowledge of what is\\ngood, bad, and neither. Arcesilaus, it seems, cannot borrow his\\nopponents’ theory without also accepting the possibility of\\nknowledge.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.2 The Rational Non-Belief interpretation\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThe NRB view can instead deny that Arcesilaus was\\npersonally committed to defending the life of universal\\nsuspension against Stoic counterattack. The Stoics pointed out\\nthat Arcesilaus’ subversive argument for the rationality of\\nuniversally suspending assent cannot be true, because it makes action,\\nor at least rational and virtuous action, impossible—but these\\nare plainly possible (cf. Cicero Academica 2.37–39). But\\neven if this objection did not target his own skeptical view,\\nArcesilaus was bound by his method to counter it. Hence it is\\nunreasonable to think that he was invested in rationalizing the life of\\nthe skeptic with a theory of action (see Stopper 1983; for a\\ndifferent view of the polemic, see, e.g., Ioppolo 1986, Maconi 1988,\\nand Thorsrud 2009).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.3 The Non-Rational Belief interpretation\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nSection 2 noted that the central question for the interpretation of\\nArcesilaus’ skepticism is how to reconcile his method with his\\nskeptical commitments, and sections 4–5 set out three accounts of\\nhow his commitments are compatible with his method. A further question\\nrelates to the purpose of Arcesilaus’ philosophical activity.\\nCompeting histories of Arcesilaus’ intentions in Cicero’s\\nAcademica offer different answers (see Allen 2018): at one\\npoint Cicero suggests that Arcesilaus adopted a Socratic method\\nafter he accepted inapprehensibility and\\nuniversal suspension, in order to facilitate suspension of\\nassent (Academica 1.44–45; cf. Sextus Outlines of\\nPyrrhonism 1.232); but elsewhere he says that Arcesilaus’\\naim in questioning Zeno was to discover the truth (Academica\\n2.76; cf. Cicero On the Nature of the Gods 1.11). So\\nin question is whether Arcesilaus’ method was\\nin the service of inquiry—independently of his commitments to\\ninapprehensibility or universal suspension—or\\na revival of a Socratic methodology that only reflected skeptical\\nconclusions he already reached.\",\n \"\\n\\nAn argument in favor of the latter is as follows (see Görler\\n1994): if Arcesilaus indeed shared the views that knowledge is\\nimpossible and that holding opinions is irrational—as both the\\nRNB and NRB interpretations say—then he could\\nnot have genuinely been in the business of inquiry, which aims at\\nknowledge of the truth; hence the only motivation for dialectical\\nargument Arcesilaus might be left with is the promotion of\\nuniversal suspension. But this argument ignores the context\\nfrom which Arcesilaus’ skeptical views emerged and the effects\\nthey could reasonably be expected to have had on his philosophical\\npractice.\",\n \"\\n\\nOn the RNB view, the Academic skeptic, at the start of her\\nphilosophical career, inherits a rational method of inquiry, as well as\\nguiding views about belief and knowledge. But her inheritance is so far\\nuntested (at least by her). As she goes about putting it to work, she\\nmight at first believe that her method and its norms help her to get at\\nthe truth. But she then finds that by arguing in accordance with those\\nnorms she is wildly successful at combatting any and all positions. She\\ntherefore comes to suppose on rational grounds—which may\\ninclude particular arguments against Stoic cognition, the inadequacy of\\nall non-skeptical theories of knowledge, and her experiences in\\nargument generally—that the norms cannot successfully guide her\\nto truths. But she doesn’t quit her life of inquiry because her\\nskeptical view of the inadequacy of her method depends on that very\\nmethod; it makes little sense for her to act on a view that rejects its\\nown grounds. Instead she continues to inquire, now treating her\\ninherited norms and guiding views about belief and knowledge only as\\nhypotheses rather than as given. On the RNB view, therefore,\\nArcesilaus’ skepticism was self-defeating only insofar as it\\ncould not justify abandoning reason.\",\n \"\\n\\nA similar story can be told with the NRB view. The skeptic\\nlooks for the truth, on the assumption that obtaining it is of crucial\\nimportance for her life. But since she consistently fails to find it,\\nit begins to strike her that perhaps she never will. Perhaps, it was\\nnot, after all, so important for her life to have it: maybe mere\\nbelief is all we need. But it doesn’t follow that she should give up\\n(as false) her belief that it is irrational to hold opinions, since it\\nwould only be correct to give it up if it actually is true that mere\\nbelief is all she needs—but this is something that her arguments\\ndon’t warrant, any more than they warrant the opposite\\nconclusion. An NRB view, then, suggests that\\nArcesilaus’ beliefs in the importance of knowledge and the\\ninadequacy of opinion were explicitly non-rational, in the sense that\\nhe was not persuaded that they were warranted by a rational argument\\nor theory, or even by the extensive arguments he devoted his life\\nto. He believed that he hadn’t found knowledge and that it is\\nirrational to assent to anything without knowledge, but realized, as a\\nresult of the unrestricted application of his Socratic method, that\\nthere were strong reasons against these beliefs. He was thus not in a\\nposition to give his rational assent to the belief that it is\\nirrational to hold opinions—he just found that that was how\\nthings striked him, i.e., that’s what he believed. The Academic\\nskeptic, on this view, is someone whose sustained but pre-theoretical\\ncommitment to rational investigation undermines her confidence in\\nrationality. The result is not a negative theory—e.g., the\\ntheory that we can’t acquire knowledge owing to the limitations of our\\ncognitive or rational capacities—but a pervasive lack of theory\\nsustained by a dialectical method.\",\n \"\\n\\nIf either of these stories is correct, we don’t need to deny\\nArcesilaus seached for the truth, and the basic philosophical puzzle\\nabout his radical skepticism is not whether it is possible to live\\nwithout rational beliefs, but whether it is possible to be committed to\\nrationality and yet sufficiently detached from it to recognise that,\\nwhatever it is, it may not work.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"6. Priority of Method\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nIt is clear that any interpretation of Arcesilaus must take into\\naccount both his reputation as a master dialectician who deployed\\nSocrates’ method ruthlessly against his philosophical\\ncontemporaries, and his notorious advocacy of\\ninapprehensibility and universal suspension. Given\\nthe contradictory nature and scarcity of the evidence, it is perhaps\\nnot surprising that modern critics do not agree about the success of\\nthe ‘dialectical’ or various ‘doctrinal’\\ninterpretations of Arcesilaus or about the consistency of the very\\ndifferent kinds of skepticism the latter propose. But further progress\\nis not ruled out, since it is open to us to offer more sophisticated\\nphilosophical elaborations of those forms of skepticism and to test\\ntheir historical plausibility by appealing to the diverse, but better\\nattested traditions in the later Academy.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"7. Conclusion\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Inwood, Brad and Lloyd Gerson (eds.), 1997, Hellenistic\nPhilosophy: Introductory Readings, second edition, Indianapolis,\nIN: Hackett.\n\n[English translation of several of the sources for\nArcesilaus.]","Mette, Hans Joachim, 1984, “Zwei Akademiker heute: Krantor\nvon Soloi und Arkesilaos von Pitane,” Lustrum 26:\n7–94.\n\n[The evidence on Arcesilaus in Greek and Latin, with German\ntranslations.]","Long, A. A. and D. N. Sedley (eds.), 1987, The Hellenistic\nPhilosophers, vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress.\n\n[English translation of several of the sources for\nArcesilaus.]","Vezzoli, Simone, 2016, Arcesilao di Pitane: l’origine\ndel Platonismo neoaccademico, Turnhout: Brepols, pp.\n149–268.\n\n[The evidence on Arcesilaus in Greek and Latin, with Italian\ntranslations.]\n","Cicero, On Academic Scepticism, Charles Brittain\n(trans.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2006.\n\n[English translation of Academica.]","–––, On the Ideal Orator, James May and\nJakob Wisse (trans.), Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,\n2001.\n\n[English translation of De oratore.]","–––, On the Nature of the Gods,\nAcademica (Loeb Classical Library 268/Cicero XIX), H. Rackham\n(trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933.\n\n[Loeb edition with English translation.]","–––, De finibus bonorum et malorum (Loeb\nClassical Library 40/Cicero XVII), H. Rackham (trans.), Cambridge, MA:\nHarvard University Press, 1914.\n\n[Loeb edition with English translation.]","–––, De Oratore Book III, in On the\nOrator: Book 3. On Fate. Stoic Paradoxes.\nDivisions of Oratory (Loeb Classical Library 349/Cicero IV),\nH. Rackham (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,\n1942.\n\n[Loeb edition with English translation.]","–––, On Moral Ends, Raphael Woolf\n(trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511803659\n\n[English translation of De finibus.]","Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers,\nTiziano Dorandi (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511843440\n\n[Greek text of Diogenes Laertius.]","–––, Lives of Eminent Philosophers I\n& II (Loeb Classical Library 184/5), R. Hicks (trans.), Cambridge,\nMA: Harvard University Press, 1925.\n\n[Loeb edition with English translation.]","–––, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers,\nPamela Mensch (trans.), Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,\n2018.\n\n[English translation of Dorandi’s edition.]","Numenius, Platonist Philosophy 80 BC to AD 250: An Introduction\nand Collection of Sources in Translation, George Boys-Stones (ed.),\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 40–45.\n\n[1F = English translation of Numenius frs. 24–25 Des\nPlaces.]","–––, Fragments, E. Des Places (ed.),\nParis: Belles Lettres, 1973.\n\n[Greek text with French translation.]","–––, 1903, Eusebii Pamphili\nEvangelicae Praeparationis Libri XV, 4 vols., E. H.\nGifford (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903.\n\n[Greek text with English translation of Eusebius; book 14.4–9\ncontains Numenius’ fragments.]","Philodemus, Storia dei filosofi [.] Platone e\nl’Academia, Tiziano Dorandi (ed.), Naples: Bibliopolis, 1991.\n\n[Greek text with Italian translation of Philodemus’ Index\nAcademicorum.]","–––, “Philodemus’ History of the\nPhilosophers: Plato and the Academy (PHerc. 1021 and 164),”\nPaul Kalligas and Voula Tsouna (trans.), in Paul Kalligas, Chloe Balla, Effie\nBaziotopoulou-Valavani, and Vassilis Karasmanis (eds.),\nPlato’s Academy: Its Workings and Its History,\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. 276–383.\n\n[Greek text, adapted from Dorandi’s edition, with English\ntranslation of Philodemus’ Index Academicorum.]","Plutarch, Moralia XIII Part 2: Stoic\nEssays (Loeb Classical Library 470), Harold\nCherniss (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,\n1976.\n\n[Loeb edition with English translation of Plutarch’s\nOn Stoic Self-Contraditions and Common\nConceptions.]","–––, Moralia XIV (Loeb Classical Library\n428), Benedict Einarson and Phillip De Lacy (eds.), Cambridge, MA:\nHarvard University Press, 1967.\n\n[Loeb edition with English translation of Plutarch’s\nAgainst Colotes.]","–––, Moralia XV: Fragments (Loeb\nClassical Library 429), F. H. Sandbach (trans.), Cambridge,\nMA: Harvard University Press, 1969.\n\n[Loeb edition with English translation of some of the\ntestimonia for Arcesilaus.]","Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, Julia Annas and\nJonathan Barnes (trans.), New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994,\nsecond edition 2000.\n\n[English translation of Outlines of Pyrrhonism.]","–––, [M] Against the Logicians\n[Adversus Mathematicos 7–8], Richard Bett (trans.),\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.","–––, Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Loeb\nClassical Library 273/Sextus Empiricus I), R. G. Bury (trans.),\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933.\n\n[Loeb edition with English translation.]","–––, Against Logicians (Loeb Classical\nLibrary 291/Sextus Empiricus II), R. G. Bury (trans.), Cambridge, MA:\nHarvard University Press, 1935.\n\n[Loeb edition with English translation.]","Beghini, Andrea, 2016, “Arcesilao e Numenio: Note a Fr. 25\nDes Places (= Eus. Praep. Ev. XIV, 5, 12–13 Des Places),”\nStudi Classici e Orientali 62: 297–314.","Dorandi, Tiziano, 1989, “Arcesilas de Pitane,” in\nDictionnaire des philosophes antiques, vol. 1, Richard Goulet\n(ed.), Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, pp.\n326–30 (no. 302).","Görler, Woldemar, 1994, “Älterer Pyrrhonismus\n– Jüngere Akademie, Antiochos aus Askalon, § 47\nArkesilaos,” in Die Philosophie der Antike 4: Die\nHellenistische Philosophie, Helmut Flashar (ed.), Basel:\nSchwabe & Co., pp. 786–96.","Habicht, Christian, 1994, “Hellenistic Athens and her\nphilosophers,” in Athen in Hellenistischer Zeit,\nChristian Habicht, Munich: C.H. Beck, pp. 231–47.","Long, A. A., 1986, “Diogenes Laertius, the Life of\nArcesilaus,” Elenchos 7: 429–49.","Lurie, Michael, 2014, “Der schiffbrüchige Odysseus oder:\nWie Arkesilaos zum Skeptiker wurde,” Philologus 58:\n183–6.","Savalli-Lestrade, Ivana, 2017, “Le monde d’Arcésilas\nde Pitanè,” Revue des études anciennes\n119: 521–50.","von Arnim, Hans, 1895, “Arkesilaos von Pitane,”\nRE 2: 1164–68.","Allen, James, 2018, “Aporia and the New Academy,” in\nThe Aporetic Tradition in Ancient Philosophy, George\nKaramanolis and Vasilis Politis (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress, pp. 172–91.","Annas, Julia, 1988, “The Heirs of Socrates,”\nPhronesis 33: 100–112.","Bénatouïl, Thomas, 2011, “Anna Maria Ioppolo,\nLa testimonianza di Sesto Empirico sull’ Accademia\nscettica,” Philosophie antique 11:\n229–36.","Bett, Richard, 1989, “Carneades’ Pithanon: A\nReappraisal of its Role and Status,” Oxford Studies in\nAncient Philosophy 7: 59–94.","Brittain, Charles, 2005 [2008], “Arcesilaus,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/arcesilaus/>.","Cooper, John, 2004, “Arcesilaus: Socratic and Sceptic,”\nin Knowledge, Nature, and the Good, John Cooper, Princeton:\nPrinceton University Press, pp. 81–103.","Couissin, Pierre, 1929, “Le Stoicisme de la Nouvelle\nAdadémie,” Revue d’histoire de la\nphilosophie 3: 241–76 [= “The Stoicism of the New\nAcademy,” trans. Jonathan Barnes and Myles Burnyeat, in Myles\nBurnyeat (ed.), 1983, The Skeptical Tradition,\nLondon: University of California Press, pp. 31–63].","Frede, Michael, 1979, “Des Skeptikers Meinungen,”\nNeue Hefte für Philosophie, Aktualität der\nAntike 15/16: 102–29. Translated as “The Skeptic’s\nBeliefs,” in his, 1987, Essays in Ancient Philosophy,\nMinneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 179–200;\nreprinted as “The Sceptic’s Beliefs” in Myles Burnyeat and\nMichael Frede (eds.), 1997, The Original Sceptics,\nIndianapolis, IN: Hackett, pp. 1–24.]","–––, 1984, “The Sceptic’s Two Kinds of\nAssent and the Question of the Possibility of Knowledge,” in Philosophy in History, Richard Rorty, Jerome Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 255–278; reprinted as “The Skeptic’s Two Kinds of\nAssent and the Question of the Possibility of Knowledge,” in his, 1987, Essays in Ancient Philosophy,\nMinneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 201–22; reprinted\nin Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede (eds.), 1997, The Original\nSceptics, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, pp. 127–51.","Friedman, Jane, 2013, “Suspended Judgment,”\nPhilosophical Studies 162: 165–81.","Görler, Woldemar, 1994, “Älterer Pyrrhonismus\n– Jüngere Akademie, Antiochos aus Askalon, § 47\nArkesilaos,” in Die Philosophie der Antike 4: Die\nHellenistische Philosophie, Helmut Flashar (ed.), Basel:\nSchwabe & Co., pp. 796–824.","Gourinat, Jean-Baptiste, 2014, “Comment se détermine\nle kathekon? Remarques sur la conformité à la\nnature et le raisonnable,” Philosophie antique 14:\n13–39.","Ioppolo, Anna-Maria, 1981, “Il concetto di\n‘eulogon’ nella filosofia di Arcesilao,” in Lo\nscetticismo antico, Gabriele Giannantoni (ed.), vol. 1, Naples:\nBibliopolis, pp. 143–61.","–––, 1986, Opinione e scienza, Naples:\nBibliopolis.","–––, 2000, “Su alcune recenti\ninterpretazioni dello scetticismo dell’Accademia,”\nElenchos 21: 334–60.","–––, 2008, “Arcésilas dans le\nLucullus de Cicéron,” Revue de\nmétaphysique et de morale 57: 21–44.","–––, 2009, La testimonianza di Sesto Empirico\nsull’Accademia scettica, Naples: Bibliopolis.","–––, 2011, “L’epochê chez\nArcésilas: réponse à Thomas\nBénatouïl,” Philosophie antique 11:\n237–45.","–––, 2018, “Arcesilaus,” in\nSkepticism: From Antiquity to the Present, Diego Machuca and\nBaron Reed (eds.), London: Bloomsbury, pp. 36–50.","Lévy, Carlos, 1978, “Scepticisme et dogmatisme dans\nl’Académie: l’ésotérisme\nd’Arcésilas,” Revue des études\nlatines 56: 335–348.","Maconi, Henry, 1988, “Nova non philosophandi\nphilosophia,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 6:\n231–53.","Perin, Casey, 2010, “Scepticism and belief,” in The\nCambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism, Richard Bett (ed.),\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 145–64.","–––, 2013, “Making Sense of\nArcesilaus,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 45:\n313–40.","Schofield, Malcolm, 1999, “Academic epistemology,” in\nThe Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, Keimpe Algra,\nJonathan Barnes, Jaap Mansfeld and Malcolm Schofield (eds.), Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press, pp. 323–51.","Sedley, David, 1983, “The Motivation of Greek\nSkepticism,” in The Skeptical Tradition, Myles Burnyeat\n(ed.), London: University of California Press, pp. 9–29.","Snyder, Charles, 2014, “The Socratic Benevolence of\nArcesilaus’ Dialectic,” Ancient Philosophy 34:\n341–63.","Striker, Gisela, 1980, “Skeptical Strategies,” in\nDoubt and Dogmatism, Malcolm Schofield, Myles\nBurnyeat and Jonathan Barnes (eds.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp.\n54–83; reprinted in Striker, Gisela, 1996, Essays on\nHellenistic Epistemology and Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge\nUniversity Press, pp. 92–115.","Stopper, M. R., 1983, “Schizzi Pirroniani,”\nPhronesis 28: 265–97, pp. 275–78.","Thorsrud, Harold, 2009, Ancient Scepticism, Stocksfield:\nAcumen, pp. 36–58.","–––, 2010, “Arcesilaus and\nCarneades,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ancient\nScepticism, Richard Bett (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress, pp. 58–70.","–––, 2018, “Arcesilaus: Socratic Skepticism\nin Plato’s Academy,” Lexicon Philosophicum 6:\n195–220.","Vezzoli, Simone, 2016, Arcesilao di Pitane: l’origine\ndel Platonismo neoaccademico, Turnhout: Brepols, pp.\n17–78.","Annas, Julia, 1992, “Plato the Sceptic,” Oxford\nStudies in Ancient Philosophy, suppl. vol.: 43–72.","Barnes, Jonathan, 1997, Logic and the Imperial Stoa,\nLeiden: Brill.","Beghini, Andrea, 2019, “Il caso ‘Crantore’:\nContributo alla storia dell’Academia ellenistica,” Antiquorum\nPhilosophia 13: 101–25.","Bénatouïl, Thomas and Dimitri El Murr, 2010,\n“L’Académie et les géomètres: usages et\nlimites de la géométrie de Platon à\nCarnéade,” Philosophie antique 10:\n151–62.","Bett, Richard, 1990,\n“Carneades’ Distinction between Assent and Approval,” The Monist 73.1:\n3–20.","Brennan, Tad, 1996, “Reasonable Impressions in\nStoicism,” Phronesis 41: 318–34.","Brittain, Charles, 2001, Philo of Larissa, Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press.","–––, and John Palmer, 2001, “The New\nAcademy’s Appeals to the Presocratics,” Phronesis 46:\n38–72.","Burnyeat, Myles, 1980, “Can the Sceptic Live His Scepticism?”, in Doubt and Dogmatism, Malcolm Schofield, Myles Burnyeat and Jonathan Barnes (eds.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 20–53; reprinted in Myles Burnyeat (ed.), 1983, The Skeptical Tradition, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 117–48; reprinted in Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede (eds.), 1997, The Original Sceptics, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, pp. 25–57.","Castagnoli, Luca, 2018, “Dialectic in the Hellenistic Academy,” in Dialectic after Plato and Aristotle, Thomas Bénatouïl and Katerina Ierodiakonou (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge\nUniversity Press, pp. 168–217.","Coope, Ursula, 2016, “Rational Assent and Self-Reversion: A\nNeoplatonist Response to the Stoics,” Oxford Studies in\nAncient Philosophy 50: 237–88.","Couissin, Pierre, 1929, “L’origine et l’évolution de\nl’epoche,” Revue des études grecs 42:\n373–97.","Decleva Caizzi, Fernanda, 1986, “Pirroniani ed Accademici nel\nIII secolo a.c.,” in Aspects de la philosophie\nHellénistique, Helmut Flashar and Olof Gigon (eds.),\nEntretiens sur l’antiquité classique 32, Geneva: Fondation\nHardt, pp. 147–83.","Frede, Michael, 1983, “Stoics and Skeptics on Clear and\nDistinct Impressions,” in The Skeptical\nTradition, Myles Burnyeat (ed.), London: University of\nCalifornia Press, pp. 65–93; reprinted in his, 1987,\nEssays in Ancient Philosophy, Minneapolis: University\nof Minnesota Press, pp. 151–76.","–––, 1999, “Stoic Epistemology,” in\nThe Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, Keimpe Algra,\nJonathan Barnes, Jaap Mansfeld and Malcolm Schofield (eds.), Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press, pp. 295–322.","Ioppolo, Anna-Maria, 1990, “Presentation and Assent: A\nPhysical and Cognitive Problem in Early Stoicism,” Classical\nQuarterly 40: 433–49.","–––, 2002, “Gli Accademici\n“neôteroi” nel secondo secolo d.C.,”\nMéthexis 15: 45–70.","–––, 2013, “Elenchos socratico e\ngenesi della strategia argomentativa dell’Accademia scettica”, in\nArgument und literarische Form in antiker Philosophie, Michael\nErler and Jan Hessler (eds.), Berlin: De Gruyter, pp.\n355–69.","Lévy, Carlos, 2007, “The New Academy and its\nRivals,” in A Companion to Ancient Philosophy, Mary\nLouise Gill and Pierre Pellegrin (eds.), Oxford: Blackwell, pp.\n448–64.","Long, A. A., 1978, “Timon of Phlius: Pyrrhonist and\nSatirist,” PCPS 204 ns 24: 69–91.","Reinhardt, Tobias, 2018, “Pithana and\nprobabilia,” in Dialectic after Plato and\nAristotle, Thomas Bénatouïl and Katerina Ierodiakonou\n(eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 218–53.","Sedley, David, 1977, “Diodorus Cronus and Hellenistic\nphilosophy,” PCPS ns 23: 74–120.","Snyder, Charles, 2018, “On the Teaching of Ethics from Polemo\nto Arcesilaus,” Études platoniciennes 14:\n1–25.","Striker, Gisela, 1981, “Über den Unterschied zwischen\nden Pyrrhoneern und den Akademikern,” Phronesis 26:\n153–71. Translated as “On the difference between the\nPyrrhonists and the Academics,” in Gisela Striker, 1996,\nEssays on Hellenistic Epistemology and Ethics,\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 135–49.","Trabattoni, F., 2005, “Arcesilao platonico?” in\nL’eredità platonica: Studi sul platonismo da Arcesilao a\nProclo, Mauro Bonazzi and Vincenza Celluprica (eds.), Naples:\nBibliopolis, pp. 13–50.","vander Waerdt, Paul, 1989, “Colotes and the Epicurean\nrefutation of scepticism,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine\nStudies 30: 225–67.","Vezzoli, Simone, 2016, Arcesilao di Pitane: l’origine\ndel Platonismo neoaccademico, Turnhout: Brepols, pp.\n79–147.","von Staden, Heinrich, 1978, “The Stoic Theory of Perception\nand its ‘Platonic’ Critics,” in Studies in\nPerception, Peter Machamer and Robert Turnbull (eds.), Columbus,\nOhio: Ohio State University Press, pp. 96–136.","Williams, Michael, 2004, “The Agrippan Argument and Two Forms\nof Skepticism,” in Pyrrhonian Skepticism, Walter\nSinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.\n121–45."],"string":"[\n \"Inwood, Brad and Lloyd Gerson (eds.), 1997, Hellenistic\\nPhilosophy: Introductory Readings, second edition, Indianapolis,\\nIN: Hackett.\\n\\n[English translation of several of the sources for\\nArcesilaus.]\",\n \"Mette, Hans Joachim, 1984, “Zwei Akademiker heute: Krantor\\nvon Soloi und Arkesilaos von Pitane,” Lustrum 26:\\n7–94.\\n\\n[The evidence on Arcesilaus in Greek and Latin, with German\\ntranslations.]\",\n \"Long, A. A. and D. N. Sedley (eds.), 1987, The Hellenistic\\nPhilosophers, vol. 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress.\\n\\n[English translation of several of the sources for\\nArcesilaus.]\",\n \"Vezzoli, Simone, 2016, Arcesilao di Pitane: l’origine\\ndel Platonismo neoaccademico, Turnhout: Brepols, pp.\\n149–268.\\n\\n[The evidence on Arcesilaus in Greek and Latin, with Italian\\ntranslations.]\\n\",\n \"Cicero, On Academic Scepticism, Charles Brittain\\n(trans.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2006.\\n\\n[English translation of Academica.]\",\n \"–––, On the Ideal Orator, James May and\\nJakob Wisse (trans.), Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,\\n2001.\\n\\n[English translation of De oratore.]\",\n \"–––, On the Nature of the Gods,\\nAcademica (Loeb Classical Library 268/Cicero XIX), H. Rackham\\n(trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933.\\n\\n[Loeb edition with English translation.]\",\n \"–––, De finibus bonorum et malorum (Loeb\\nClassical Library 40/Cicero XVII), H. Rackham (trans.), Cambridge, MA:\\nHarvard University Press, 1914.\\n\\n[Loeb edition with English translation.]\",\n \"–––, De Oratore Book III, in On the\\nOrator: Book 3. On Fate. Stoic Paradoxes.\\nDivisions of Oratory (Loeb Classical Library 349/Cicero IV),\\nH. Rackham (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,\\n1942.\\n\\n[Loeb edition with English translation.]\",\n \"–––, On Moral Ends, Raphael Woolf\\n(trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511803659\\n\\n[English translation of De finibus.]\",\n \"Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers,\\nTiziano Dorandi (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511843440\\n\\n[Greek text of Diogenes Laertius.]\",\n \"–––, Lives of Eminent Philosophers I\\n& II (Loeb Classical Library 184/5), R. Hicks (trans.), Cambridge,\\nMA: Harvard University Press, 1925.\\n\\n[Loeb edition with English translation.]\",\n \"–––, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers,\\nPamela Mensch (trans.), Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,\\n2018.\\n\\n[English translation of Dorandi’s edition.]\",\n \"Numenius, Platonist Philosophy 80 BC to AD 250: An Introduction\\nand Collection of Sources in Translation, George Boys-Stones (ed.),\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 40–45.\\n\\n[1F = English translation of Numenius frs. 24–25 Des\\nPlaces.]\",\n \"–––, Fragments, E. Des Places (ed.),\\nParis: Belles Lettres, 1973.\\n\\n[Greek text with French translation.]\",\n \"–––, 1903, Eusebii Pamphili\\nEvangelicae Praeparationis Libri XV, 4 vols., E. H.\\nGifford (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903.\\n\\n[Greek text with English translation of Eusebius; book 14.4–9\\ncontains Numenius’ fragments.]\",\n \"Philodemus, Storia dei filosofi [.] Platone e\\nl’Academia, Tiziano Dorandi (ed.), Naples: Bibliopolis, 1991.\\n\\n[Greek text with Italian translation of Philodemus’ Index\\nAcademicorum.]\",\n \"–––, “Philodemus’ History of the\\nPhilosophers: Plato and the Academy (PHerc. 1021 and 164),”\\nPaul Kalligas and Voula Tsouna (trans.), in Paul Kalligas, Chloe Balla, Effie\\nBaziotopoulou-Valavani, and Vassilis Karasmanis (eds.),\\nPlato’s Academy: Its Workings and Its History,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, pp. 276–383.\\n\\n[Greek text, adapted from Dorandi’s edition, with English\\ntranslation of Philodemus’ Index Academicorum.]\",\n \"Plutarch, Moralia XIII Part 2: Stoic\\nEssays (Loeb Classical Library 470), Harold\\nCherniss (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,\\n1976.\\n\\n[Loeb edition with English translation of Plutarch’s\\nOn Stoic Self-Contraditions and Common\\nConceptions.]\",\n \"–––, Moralia XIV (Loeb Classical Library\\n428), Benedict Einarson and Phillip De Lacy (eds.), Cambridge, MA:\\nHarvard University Press, 1967.\\n\\n[Loeb edition with English translation of Plutarch’s\\nAgainst Colotes.]\",\n \"–––, Moralia XV: Fragments (Loeb\\nClassical Library 429), F. H. Sandbach (trans.), Cambridge,\\nMA: Harvard University Press, 1969.\\n\\n[Loeb edition with English translation of some of the\\ntestimonia for Arcesilaus.]\",\n \"Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, Julia Annas and\\nJonathan Barnes (trans.), New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994,\\nsecond edition 2000.\\n\\n[English translation of Outlines of Pyrrhonism.]\",\n \"–––, [M] Against the Logicians\\n[Adversus Mathematicos 7–8], Richard Bett (trans.),\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.\",\n \"–––, Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Loeb\\nClassical Library 273/Sextus Empiricus I), R. G. Bury (trans.),\\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933.\\n\\n[Loeb edition with English translation.]\",\n \"–––, Against Logicians (Loeb Classical\\nLibrary 291/Sextus Empiricus II), R. G. Bury (trans.), Cambridge, MA:\\nHarvard University Press, 1935.\\n\\n[Loeb edition with English translation.]\",\n \"Beghini, Andrea, 2016, “Arcesilao e Numenio: Note a Fr. 25\\nDes Places (= Eus. Praep. Ev. XIV, 5, 12–13 Des Places),”\\nStudi Classici e Orientali 62: 297–314.\",\n \"Dorandi, Tiziano, 1989, “Arcesilas de Pitane,” in\\nDictionnaire des philosophes antiques, vol. 1, Richard Goulet\\n(ed.), Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, pp.\\n326–30 (no. 302).\",\n \"Görler, Woldemar, 1994, “Älterer Pyrrhonismus\\n– Jüngere Akademie, Antiochos aus Askalon, § 47\\nArkesilaos,” in Die Philosophie der Antike 4: Die\\nHellenistische Philosophie, Helmut Flashar (ed.), Basel:\\nSchwabe & Co., pp. 786–96.\",\n \"Habicht, Christian, 1994, “Hellenistic Athens and her\\nphilosophers,” in Athen in Hellenistischer Zeit,\\nChristian Habicht, Munich: C.H. Beck, pp. 231–47.\",\n \"Long, A. A., 1986, “Diogenes Laertius, the Life of\\nArcesilaus,” Elenchos 7: 429–49.\",\n \"Lurie, Michael, 2014, “Der schiffbrüchige Odysseus oder:\\nWie Arkesilaos zum Skeptiker wurde,” Philologus 58:\\n183–6.\",\n \"Savalli-Lestrade, Ivana, 2017, “Le monde d’Arcésilas\\nde Pitanè,” Revue des études anciennes\\n119: 521–50.\",\n \"von Arnim, Hans, 1895, “Arkesilaos von Pitane,”\\nRE 2: 1164–68.\",\n \"Allen, James, 2018, “Aporia and the New Academy,” in\\nThe Aporetic Tradition in Ancient Philosophy, George\\nKaramanolis and Vasilis Politis (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress, pp. 172–91.\",\n \"Annas, Julia, 1988, “The Heirs of Socrates,”\\nPhronesis 33: 100–112.\",\n \"Bénatouïl, Thomas, 2011, “Anna Maria Ioppolo,\\nLa testimonianza di Sesto Empirico sull’ Accademia\\nscettica,” Philosophie antique 11:\\n229–36.\",\n \"Bett, Richard, 1989, “Carneades’ Pithanon: A\\nReappraisal of its Role and Status,” Oxford Studies in\\nAncient Philosophy 7: 59–94.\",\n \"Brittain, Charles, 2005 [2008], “Arcesilaus,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/arcesilaus/>.\",\n \"Cooper, John, 2004, “Arcesilaus: Socratic and Sceptic,”\\nin Knowledge, Nature, and the Good, John Cooper, Princeton:\\nPrinceton University Press, pp. 81–103.\",\n \"Couissin, Pierre, 1929, “Le Stoicisme de la Nouvelle\\nAdadémie,” Revue d’histoire de la\\nphilosophie 3: 241–76 [= “The Stoicism of the New\\nAcademy,” trans. Jonathan Barnes and Myles Burnyeat, in Myles\\nBurnyeat (ed.), 1983, The Skeptical Tradition,\\nLondon: University of California Press, pp. 31–63].\",\n \"Frede, Michael, 1979, “Des Skeptikers Meinungen,”\\nNeue Hefte für Philosophie, Aktualität der\\nAntike 15/16: 102–29. Translated as “The Skeptic’s\\nBeliefs,” in his, 1987, Essays in Ancient Philosophy,\\nMinneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 179–200;\\nreprinted as “The Sceptic’s Beliefs” in Myles Burnyeat and\\nMichael Frede (eds.), 1997, The Original Sceptics,\\nIndianapolis, IN: Hackett, pp. 1–24.]\",\n \"–––, 1984, “The Sceptic’s Two Kinds of\\nAssent and the Question of the Possibility of Knowledge,” in Philosophy in History, Richard Rorty, Jerome Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 255–278; reprinted as “The Skeptic’s Two Kinds of\\nAssent and the Question of the Possibility of Knowledge,” in his, 1987, Essays in Ancient Philosophy,\\nMinneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 201–22; reprinted\\nin Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede (eds.), 1997, The Original\\nSceptics, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, pp. 127–51.\",\n \"Friedman, Jane, 2013, “Suspended Judgment,”\\nPhilosophical Studies 162: 165–81.\",\n \"Görler, Woldemar, 1994, “Älterer Pyrrhonismus\\n– Jüngere Akademie, Antiochos aus Askalon, § 47\\nArkesilaos,” in Die Philosophie der Antike 4: Die\\nHellenistische Philosophie, Helmut Flashar (ed.), Basel:\\nSchwabe & Co., pp. 796–824.\",\n \"Gourinat, Jean-Baptiste, 2014, “Comment se détermine\\nle kathekon? Remarques sur la conformité à la\\nnature et le raisonnable,” Philosophie antique 14:\\n13–39.\",\n \"Ioppolo, Anna-Maria, 1981, “Il concetto di\\n‘eulogon’ nella filosofia di Arcesilao,” in Lo\\nscetticismo antico, Gabriele Giannantoni (ed.), vol. 1, Naples:\\nBibliopolis, pp. 143–61.\",\n \"–––, 1986, Opinione e scienza, Naples:\\nBibliopolis.\",\n \"–––, 2000, “Su alcune recenti\\ninterpretazioni dello scetticismo dell’Accademia,”\\nElenchos 21: 334–60.\",\n \"–––, 2008, “Arcésilas dans le\\nLucullus de Cicéron,” Revue de\\nmétaphysique et de morale 57: 21–44.\",\n \"–––, 2009, La testimonianza di Sesto Empirico\\nsull’Accademia scettica, Naples: Bibliopolis.\",\n \"–––, 2011, “L’epochê chez\\nArcésilas: réponse à Thomas\\nBénatouïl,” Philosophie antique 11:\\n237–45.\",\n \"–––, 2018, “Arcesilaus,” in\\nSkepticism: From Antiquity to the Present, Diego Machuca and\\nBaron Reed (eds.), London: Bloomsbury, pp. 36–50.\",\n \"Lévy, Carlos, 1978, “Scepticisme et dogmatisme dans\\nl’Académie: l’ésotérisme\\nd’Arcésilas,” Revue des études\\nlatines 56: 335–348.\",\n \"Maconi, Henry, 1988, “Nova non philosophandi\\nphilosophia,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 6:\\n231–53.\",\n \"Perin, Casey, 2010, “Scepticism and belief,” in The\\nCambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism, Richard Bett (ed.),\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 145–64.\",\n \"–––, 2013, “Making Sense of\\nArcesilaus,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 45:\\n313–40.\",\n \"Schofield, Malcolm, 1999, “Academic epistemology,” in\\nThe Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, Keimpe Algra,\\nJonathan Barnes, Jaap Mansfeld and Malcolm Schofield (eds.), Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press, pp. 323–51.\",\n \"Sedley, David, 1983, “The Motivation of Greek\\nSkepticism,” in The Skeptical Tradition, Myles Burnyeat\\n(ed.), London: University of California Press, pp. 9–29.\",\n \"Snyder, Charles, 2014, “The Socratic Benevolence of\\nArcesilaus’ Dialectic,” Ancient Philosophy 34:\\n341–63.\",\n \"Striker, Gisela, 1980, “Skeptical Strategies,” in\\nDoubt and Dogmatism, Malcolm Schofield, Myles\\nBurnyeat and Jonathan Barnes (eds.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp.\\n54–83; reprinted in Striker, Gisela, 1996, Essays on\\nHellenistic Epistemology and Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge\\nUniversity Press, pp. 92–115.\",\n \"Stopper, M. R., 1983, “Schizzi Pirroniani,”\\nPhronesis 28: 265–97, pp. 275–78.\",\n \"Thorsrud, Harold, 2009, Ancient Scepticism, Stocksfield:\\nAcumen, pp. 36–58.\",\n \"–––, 2010, “Arcesilaus and\\nCarneades,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ancient\\nScepticism, Richard Bett (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress, pp. 58–70.\",\n \"–––, 2018, “Arcesilaus: Socratic Skepticism\\nin Plato’s Academy,” Lexicon Philosophicum 6:\\n195–220.\",\n \"Vezzoli, Simone, 2016, Arcesilao di Pitane: l’origine\\ndel Platonismo neoaccademico, Turnhout: Brepols, pp.\\n17–78.\",\n \"Annas, Julia, 1992, “Plato the Sceptic,” Oxford\\nStudies in Ancient Philosophy, suppl. vol.: 43–72.\",\n \"Barnes, Jonathan, 1997, Logic and the Imperial Stoa,\\nLeiden: Brill.\",\n \"Beghini, Andrea, 2019, “Il caso ‘Crantore’:\\nContributo alla storia dell’Academia ellenistica,” Antiquorum\\nPhilosophia 13: 101–25.\",\n \"Bénatouïl, Thomas and Dimitri El Murr, 2010,\\n“L’Académie et les géomètres: usages et\\nlimites de la géométrie de Platon à\\nCarnéade,” Philosophie antique 10:\\n151–62.\",\n \"Bett, Richard, 1990,\\n“Carneades’ Distinction between Assent and Approval,” The Monist 73.1:\\n3–20.\",\n \"Brennan, Tad, 1996, “Reasonable Impressions in\\nStoicism,” Phronesis 41: 318–34.\",\n \"Brittain, Charles, 2001, Philo of Larissa, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"–––, and John Palmer, 2001, “The New\\nAcademy’s Appeals to the Presocratics,” Phronesis 46:\\n38–72.\",\n \"Burnyeat, Myles, 1980, “Can the Sceptic Live His Scepticism?”, in Doubt and Dogmatism, Malcolm Schofield, Myles Burnyeat and Jonathan Barnes (eds.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 20–53; reprinted in Myles Burnyeat (ed.), 1983, The Skeptical Tradition, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 117–48; reprinted in Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede (eds.), 1997, The Original Sceptics, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, pp. 25–57.\",\n \"Castagnoli, Luca, 2018, “Dialectic in the Hellenistic Academy,” in Dialectic after Plato and Aristotle, Thomas Bénatouïl and Katerina Ierodiakonou (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge\\nUniversity Press, pp. 168–217.\",\n \"Coope, Ursula, 2016, “Rational Assent and Self-Reversion: A\\nNeoplatonist Response to the Stoics,” Oxford Studies in\\nAncient Philosophy 50: 237–88.\",\n \"Couissin, Pierre, 1929, “L’origine et l’évolution de\\nl’epoche,” Revue des études grecs 42:\\n373–97.\",\n \"Decleva Caizzi, Fernanda, 1986, “Pirroniani ed Accademici nel\\nIII secolo a.c.,” in Aspects de la philosophie\\nHellénistique, Helmut Flashar and Olof Gigon (eds.),\\nEntretiens sur l’antiquité classique 32, Geneva: Fondation\\nHardt, pp. 147–83.\",\n \"Frede, Michael, 1983, “Stoics and Skeptics on Clear and\\nDistinct Impressions,” in The Skeptical\\nTradition, Myles Burnyeat (ed.), London: University of\\nCalifornia Press, pp. 65–93; reprinted in his, 1987,\\nEssays in Ancient Philosophy, Minneapolis: University\\nof Minnesota Press, pp. 151–76.\",\n \"–––, 1999, “Stoic Epistemology,” in\\nThe Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, Keimpe Algra,\\nJonathan Barnes, Jaap Mansfeld and Malcolm Schofield (eds.), Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press, pp. 295–322.\",\n \"Ioppolo, Anna-Maria, 1990, “Presentation and Assent: A\\nPhysical and Cognitive Problem in Early Stoicism,” Classical\\nQuarterly 40: 433–49.\",\n \"–––, 2002, “Gli Accademici\\n“neôteroi” nel secondo secolo d.C.,”\\nMéthexis 15: 45–70.\",\n \"–––, 2013, “Elenchos socratico e\\ngenesi della strategia argomentativa dell’Accademia scettica”, in\\nArgument und literarische Form in antiker Philosophie, Michael\\nErler and Jan Hessler (eds.), Berlin: De Gruyter, pp.\\n355–69.\",\n \"Lévy, Carlos, 2007, “The New Academy and its\\nRivals,” in A Companion to Ancient Philosophy, Mary\\nLouise Gill and Pierre Pellegrin (eds.), Oxford: Blackwell, pp.\\n448–64.\",\n \"Long, A. A., 1978, “Timon of Phlius: Pyrrhonist and\\nSatirist,” PCPS 204 ns 24: 69–91.\",\n \"Reinhardt, Tobias, 2018, “Pithana and\\nprobabilia,” in Dialectic after Plato and\\nAristotle, Thomas Bénatouïl and Katerina Ierodiakonou\\n(eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 218–53.\",\n \"Sedley, David, 1977, “Diodorus Cronus and Hellenistic\\nphilosophy,” PCPS ns 23: 74–120.\",\n \"Snyder, Charles, 2018, “On the Teaching of Ethics from Polemo\\nto Arcesilaus,” Études platoniciennes 14:\\n1–25.\",\n \"Striker, Gisela, 1981, “Über den Unterschied zwischen\\nden Pyrrhoneern und den Akademikern,” Phronesis 26:\\n153–71. Translated as “On the difference between the\\nPyrrhonists and the Academics,” in Gisela Striker, 1996,\\nEssays on Hellenistic Epistemology and Ethics,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 135–49.\",\n \"Trabattoni, F., 2005, “Arcesilao platonico?” in\\nL’eredità platonica: Studi sul platonismo da Arcesilao a\\nProclo, Mauro Bonazzi and Vincenza Celluprica (eds.), Naples:\\nBibliopolis, pp. 13–50.\",\n \"vander Waerdt, Paul, 1989, “Colotes and the Epicurean\\nrefutation of scepticism,” Greek, Roman and Byzantine\\nStudies 30: 225–67.\",\n \"Vezzoli, Simone, 2016, Arcesilao di Pitane: l’origine\\ndel Platonismo neoaccademico, Turnhout: Brepols, pp.\\n79–147.\",\n \"von Staden, Heinrich, 1978, “The Stoic Theory of Perception\\nand its ‘Platonic’ Critics,” in Studies in\\nPerception, Peter Machamer and Robert Turnbull (eds.), Columbus,\\nOhio: Ohio State University Press, pp. 96–136.\",\n \"Williams, Michael, 2004, “The Agrippan Argument and Two Forms\\nof Skepticism,” in Pyrrhonian Skepticism, Walter\\nSinnott-Armstrong (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.\\n121–45.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../belief/","text":"belief"},{"href":"../carneades/","text":"Carneades"},{"href":"../cicero/","text":"Cicero"},{"href":"../dialectical-school/","text":"Dialectical School"},{"href":"../philo-larissa/","text":"Philo of Larissa"},{"href":"../pyrrho/","text":"Pyrrho"},{"href":"../sextus-empiricus/","text":"Sextus Empiricus"},{"href":"../skepticism-ancient/","text":"skepticism: ancient"},{"href":"../socrates/","text":"Socrates"},{"href":"../stoicism/","text":"Stoicism"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../belief/\",\n \"text\": \"belief\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../carneades/\",\n \"text\": \"Carneades\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../cicero/\",\n \"text\": \"Cicero\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../dialectical-school/\",\n \"text\": \"Dialectical School\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../philo-larissa/\",\n \"text\": \"Philo of Larissa\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../pyrrho/\",\n \"text\": \"Pyrrho\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../sextus-empiricus/\",\n \"text\": \"Sextus Empiricus\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../skepticism-ancient/\",\n \"text\": \"skepticism: ancient\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../socrates/\",\n \"text\": \"Socrates\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../stoicism/\",\n \"text\": \"Stoicism\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":71,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"architecture"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Philosophy of Architecture"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Wed Sep 9, 2015"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["This article offers an overview of issues in the philosophy of\narchitecture. Central issues include foundational matters regarding\nthe nature of:","Yet other questions engage applied philosophical concerns regarding\narchitecture, such as the character of architectural notation;\nintellectual property rights; and client-architect obligations.","A far-reaching philosophy of architecture extends beyond even a\nbroadly aesthetics-based assessment, to include considerations of\nethics, social and political philosophy, and philosophical reflections\non psychology and the behavioral sciences. The aesthetics of\narchitecture, by itself, spans traditional issues mooted in philosophy\nof art, as well as aesthetics of the everyday, and environmental\naesthetics. Such traditional issues include the nature of the work;\nthe possibility of classes, kinds, or types in the domain; the\ncharacter and roles of representation, intentionality, and expression;\nand the warranted foundations for criticism. The ethics of\narchitecture also addresses traditional issues, including delineation\nof rights, responsibilities, the good, virtues, and justice in\narchitectural milieus. Still other aspects of philosophy of\narchitecture concern social and technological characteristics."],"string":"[\n \"This article offers an overview of issues in the philosophy of\\narchitecture. Central issues include foundational matters regarding\\nthe nature of:\",\n \"Yet other questions engage applied philosophical concerns regarding\\narchitecture, such as the character of architectural notation;\\nintellectual property rights; and client-architect obligations.\",\n \"A far-reaching philosophy of architecture extends beyond even a\\nbroadly aesthetics-based assessment, to include considerations of\\nethics, social and political philosophy, and philosophical reflections\\non psychology and the behavioral sciences. The aesthetics of\\narchitecture, by itself, spans traditional issues mooted in philosophy\\nof art, as well as aesthetics of the everyday, and environmental\\naesthetics. Such traditional issues include the nature of the work;\\nthe possibility of classes, kinds, or types in the domain; the\\ncharacter and roles of representation, intentionality, and expression;\\nand the warranted foundations for criticism. The ethics of\\narchitecture also addresses traditional issues, including delineation\\nof rights, responsibilities, the good, virtues, and justice in\\narchitectural milieus. Still other aspects of philosophy of\\narchitecture concern social and technological characteristics.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Introduction","sub_toc":["1.1 Architecture as Relatively Neglected by Philosophy ","1.2 A Word on Terminology"]},{"content_title":"2. What is Architecture?","sub_toc":["2.1 The Sort of Enterprise Architecture Is","2.2 Architecture and Essential Features","2.3 The Kinds of Things Architecture Makes"]},{"content_title":"3. Metaphysics","sub_toc":["3.1 Ontology","3.2 Part-Whole Relations","3.3 Causality"]},{"content_title":"4. Architectural Language and Notation","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"5. Formalism and Anti-formalism","sub_toc":["5.1 Formalism","5.2 Anti-Formalism and Functional Beauty"]},{"content_title":"6. Architectural Experience, Knowledge, and Appreciation","sub_toc":["6.1 Experience of Architecture","6.2 Architectural Knowledge","6.3 Architectural Appreciation"]},{"content_title":"7. Architectural Ethics","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"8. Architecture and Social and Political Philosophy","sub_toc":["8.1 Socially Constitutive Features of Architecture","8.2 Socially Efficacious Features on, and of, Architecture","8.3 Architecture and the Political"]},{"content_title":"9. Further Issues in Philosophy of Architecture","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Introduction\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"1.1 Architecture as Relatively Neglected by Philosophy \",\n \"1.2 A Word on Terminology\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. What is Architecture?\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"2.1 The Sort of Enterprise Architecture Is\",\n \"2.2 Architecture and Essential Features\",\n \"2.3 The Kinds of Things Architecture Makes\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Metaphysics\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"3.1 Ontology\",\n \"3.2 Part-Whole Relations\",\n \"3.3 Causality\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Architectural Language and Notation\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Formalism and Anti-formalism\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"5.1 Formalism\",\n \"5.2 Anti-Formalism and Functional Beauty\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. Architectural Experience, Knowledge, and Appreciation\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"6.1 Experience of Architecture\",\n \"6.2 Architectural Knowledge\",\n \"6.3 Architectural Appreciation\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"7. Architectural Ethics\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"8. Architecture and Social and Political Philosophy\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"8.1 Socially Constitutive Features of Architecture\",\n \"8.2 Socially Efficacious Features on, and of, Architecture\",\n \"8.3 Architecture and the Political\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"9. Further Issues in Philosophy of Architecture\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":[],"section_title":"1. Introduction","subsections":[{"content":["Over the course of Western philosophy, including the history of\naesthetics, architecture has largely failed to attract sustained,\ndetailed attention—particularly as compared with other\nartforms. Neither philosophical issues prompted by architecture, nor\nthe fit of architectural phenomena into larger philosophical debates,\nhave captured the philosophical imagination as have, for example,\nliterature or painting. Some contributions across the span of Western\nphilosophy—including those of Wolff and Schopenhauer—rank\nas historically significant; other, more recent accounts are\nbroad-ranging and gravid with conceptual concerns, including those of\nScruton and Harries. Further, some philosophers have even dabbled in\narchitectural projects: Dewey contributed to plans for the Chicago\nLaboratory School, Wittgenstein collaborated on designing a house for\nhis sister, and Bentham sketched the Panopticon design as a plan for\nprison reform. Yet the overall state of philosophical reflection on\narchitecture—even in the present day—is less lively than\nlike discussions focused on artforms of far more recent origin, such\nas film or comics. Some philosophers working in the Continental\ntradition have offered accounts of the experience of architecture or\nits social ramifications; a deficiency is more marked in analytic\naesthetics.","For more on the background and context of conceptual explorations\nof architecture, see the supplementary documents:","\nPhilosophy of Architecture in Historical Perspective\nPhilosophy and the Tradition of Architectural Theory\n "],"subsection_title":"1.1 Architecture as Relatively Neglected by Philosophy"},{"content":[" This essay refers generally to the basic creative output of\narchitects, in any (unspecified) form, as “architectural\nobjects”. This is in parallel with the term “art\nobjects” in use, across aesthetics and philosophy of art, to\nrefer to objects created by artists independent of the artform and\nwithout regard to ontological or other discussions where other terms\nmay evoke one or another particular stance. It may turn out that\n“architectural object” proves value-laden. Yet this is\nless likely than with common alternatives in the literature:\n“architectural works”, perhaps wedded to creator intent,\nstatus as extant or integral whole, or aesthetic ranking; or\n“buildings”, certainly wedded to built, hence concrete,\nstructures. “Built structures” is used here (except in\nhistorical reference) to refer to the generic built output resulting\nfrom architectural design, in recognition of a domain some view as\nbroader than buildings per se."],"subsection_title":"1.2 A Word on Terminology"}]},{"main_content":["Fundamental questions about the nature of architecture motivate\nmuch of contemporary philosophy of architecture: what sort of\nenterprise architecture is; whether architecture has essential\nfeatures; what kinds of things architecture makes—yielding the\nfurther issue as to whether architecture always, only sometimes, or\nnever is an artform; what renders architecture distinct from other\nartforms (if it is one); and whether architecture includes all built\nstructures."],"section_title":"2. What is Architecture?","subsections":[{"content":["One approach to grasping the true nature of architecture is to\ndefine it in terms of the discipline. We may embrace the disciplinary\ndeterminism of the British architect Cedric Price: “Architecture\nis what architects do”. Defining the discipline or practice of\narchitecture may seem a simple empirical affair. Even if we have\ndifficulty assessing what architectural objects or products are, we\ncan point to thousands of architects over several millennia around the\nworld engaged in one or another sets of activities that conventionally\nhave been associated with architectural practice, and generate a long\ndisjunctive claim about what architects do. An empirically rooted\napproach has a long history: Vitruvius devises his normative account\nof the virtuous architect on the basis of his familiarity with\nthen-contemporary practice. The same is true of other traditional\naccounts of virtue in architects or builders, as in the sixth to\neighth century Indian Mānasāra\n(मानसार) (Acharya 1928) and\neleventh century Chinese Yingzao fashi\n(營造法式) (Feng 2012). In the present-day,\nsociology of the architectural profession offers a detailed empirical\nperspective (Gutman 1988), and this can be extended to a sociology of\narchitectural worlds, modeled on Becker’s sociology of art\nworlds. ","A problem arises, though, if we look to history or sociology for a\nunified account with common features of an architectural\ndiscipline. While architectural practice has remained stable in\ncertain respects, change over its history greatly limits common\nfeatures, perhaps, to a core set of basic tools and rudimentary\nprinciples of structural engineering. This suggests that, at root, the\npractice of architecture must involve engineering or related\ndesign. But architecture can’t be reduced to a form of\nengineering, if we think architectural ideals, taste, and expertise\ncontribute something over and above engineering facts, rules, and\npractical knowledge. These further contributions suggest an art or\nart-like role for architectural practice. However, the historical\nrecord is mixed on the matter of whether architects are at the same\ntime pursuing art (or what we now consider as art) or should be\nthought of as artists. Moreover, the historical record and resulting\ndisjunctive claim do not address cases where even the most basic tools\nor structural principles are not deployed. Some such cases of not\nobserving basic structural principles, as fantasy architecture, may be\ndeemed marginal; other such cases, as landscape architecture, are\nnot.","Another dimension of defining architecture as a practice is\nspecifying the sorts of structures that architects design. At a bare\nminimum, we can say that they feature some connection to human\nuse. But attempts to render this as non-trivial introduce further\npuzzles (see §2.3)."],"subsection_title":"2.1 The Sort of Enterprise Architecture Is"},{"content":["A contrasting definitional approach suggests that, as a matter of\nreasoned judgment, we can attribute to architectural practice—or\nto the domain of architectural objects—core or even essential\nfeatures. A dominant reading of the Vitruvian tradition has it that\narchitecture embodies and is best understood through the three aspects\nof beauty, structural integrity, and utility. An essentialist variant\nsuggests that architects must observe all three aspects or that any\nstructure aspiring to architectural status features all three. Other\nprominent views advance a single aspect, generally function or form,\nas primary. Thus, functionalist architectural doctrine places function\nor utility at the heart of the architectural enterprise, with other\naspects of architecture subordinate thereto.","A hard-line functional essentialist holds that, if a built\nstructure has no function, then it is not architecture. As a modest\ndissent, Graham (1989) proposes that such a structure is an\narchitectural work—but a failure at such. One brand of\nmore radical rejection suggests that some architectural\nobjects—perhaps including follies, memorials, or\nmonuments—need have no function at all. As a competing\nessentialism, formalist architectural doctrine suggests that an object\nis architectural just in case it features forms proper to the\ndomain. A common interpretation says that forms proper to architecture\ncan be chosen off a stylistic menu (or combination of menus), leaving\narchitects great latitude while upholding the possibility of\ncontrasting, non-architectural forms (this is difficult to square,\nhowever, with some experimental architecture).","In weighting architecture’s aspects as essential, core, or\nsome lesser status, a related question is whether one or another\naspect is primary or necessary to any of the others. As Graham notes\n(1989), the traditional question in architectural theory of whether\nform trumps or precedes function may be cast in such terms.","Against these traditional brands of essentialism, two further kinds\nof doubt may be cast. First, it may be that the Vitruvian triad, or\nsome single aspect thereof, does not represent the right list—we\nshould include either further aspects or different aspects\naltogether. Alternatives might include dimensions such as context,\nrelations among architectural objects, systemic features,\nsustainability, and psychological or social features. Some theorists\npropose other candidates as essential architectural aspects, including\nspace (Zevi 1978) or the organizing concept of the parti\n(Malo 1999).","Second, it may be that essentialism represents a false start. On\none non-essentialist view, the nature of an architectural object is as\nwe experience it, a matter upon which we may agree but which depends\nin part on subjective perception and reception of, and interaction\nwith, the work (Scruton 1979/2013). This leaves open the possibility\nthat architecture has essential aspects but we simply don’t\nexperience them as such. A more determined nominalist has it that\ndiversity among architectural objects is sufficient to quash the\nprospect that they share any essential aspects."],"subsection_title":"2.2 Architecture and Essential Features"},{"content":["Yet another way to pose the question of what architecture is\nfocuses on the sorts of things architectural objects are. In\nparticular, and relative to architecture’s possible status as\nartform, architecture as a domain may be defined variously in terms of\nits objects being art objects (or not), being distinctive sorts of art\nobjects, or belonging exhaustively to a special class of\nbuilt structures (rather than including all such structures). ","Whether architecture always, only sometimes, or never is an\nartform. At the negative extreme, architecture may be viewed\nlike any engineered artifact that only incidentally bears aesthetic\nvalue. Any view of even slightly more positive valence bows in the\ndirection of intent to generate aesthetic value. The classic Vitruvian\nview, for example, has it that engineered design and aesthetic design\nare conjoint intentional elements of architectural objects. At the\npositive extreme, that is, the suggestion that architecture is always\nand in all ways an art, we may lose any means of discriminating among\nbuilt structures as art or not. This is a troubling prospect to\nexclusivists who see architecture as a high art only (see below). ","In the negative camp, S. Davies (1994) argues that mere production\nof occasional artworks does not suffice to constitute an\nartform—crafts being a notable example—and the aim of\narchitecture is frequently, or even typically, not the production of\nart but useful items that do not aim at artistic value. In the\npositive camp, Stecker (2010) responds that we can carve out a\nsubclass of architectural objects that are art even if not all are. He\nadds, by way of historical argument, that architecture was included\namong the artforms, by early agreement among aestheticians. We might\nhave grounds for dismissing architecture from the canonical list if\nthe nature of architecture has changed, and in this vein Stecker notes\na rising tide of building design that is functionally oriented without\nsignificant aesthetic investment. A further alternative is to say that\narchitectural objects are all art works, or at least intended as such,\nwithin bounds. To make sense of the term “vernacular\narchitecture” requires that we see architectural objects as\ntypically art objects, while we make allowance for a broad class of\narchitectural objects that are low-art rather than high-art. ","If the negative view is correct, then we need at least a workable\nset of criteria by which to discriminate architectural objects as\nart. To this end, we may draw on our intuitions, norms, or socially\nexpressed views. Further considerations may include the pertinent\ncultural tradition in which an architectural object is created,\nwhether particular sorts of aesthetic qualities count more towards\nartwork status, or whether there is instrumental benefit in\nconsidering the object as art.","What renders architecture distinct from other artforms (if\nit is one). If architecture counts among the artforms, we may\nthink that it has distinctive features as such. For example, Scruton\n(1979/2013) suggests that architecture is a\nnon-representational artform since it need not—and\ngenerally does not—represent any content. Despite\narchitecture’s non-representational status, Scruton agrees with\nLanger (1953) (and anticipates Goodman (1985)) that architectural\nobjects can express or refer; in his view, to thoughts associated with\nexpressed properties. Others focus on architecture’s distinctive\ncommitments to creator or user engagement. Winters (2011) sees\narchitecture as a “critical” artform, requiring the\ncreator’s engagement in the environment where other artforms may\ntolerate a creator’s detached stance. Another distinctive mark\nof architecture among the artforms is its nontraditional status as a\nnarrative medium: the design of circulatory pathways allows\narchitectural objects to communicate a sequence of events through the\nmovement of visitors or inhabitants.","Whether architecture includes all built\nstructures. Among the issues noted here, that of the greatest\nconsequence is the question of what counts among architectural\nobjects. On an inclusivist or expansive conception,\narchitectural objects are those designed objects ranging over the\nwhole of the built environment; on an exclusivist conception,\nthe range describes only some coherent subset of the whole of the\nbuilt environment. Examples of exclusivist subsets include (a) only\nbuilt structures that people can occupy (typically: houses, temples,\noffice buildings, factories, etc.), or (b) only built structures\ndesigned in primarily aesthetic (rather than purely functional)\nterms. An inclusivist conception entails a vastly larger architectural\ndomain of objects—and areas of practice and inquiry.","Proponents of exclusivity (S. Davies 1994, Scruton 1979/2013) are\neager to protect architecture as the preserve of just those objects in\nthe built environment with abundant, apparent, and appreciable\naesthetic qualities; clear creator’s intentions to generate art;\nor the panache of high art and engagement with art historical\ntrajectories. Stecker (2010) offers a putative variation, allowing\nthat as a broader creative medium architecture has an inclusivist\ncharacter—though, as an artform, architecture is\nexclusivist. Scruton, for his part, identifies a specific intent to\nexalt: architecture as a pursuit has lofty goals or purposes,\nsuch that architectural objects do as well. One commonsense\njustification for exclusivity overlaps with an institutionalist\nperspective: laymen and connoisseurs alike can differentiate between\nthe striking work of an architect and the humdrum, cookie-cutter\nbuilding design of a draftsman.","Arguments for inclusivity include Carlson’s appeal (1999) to\nconsider the class of architectural objects as of a continuum with the\nbroader class of everyday designed objects, where everything admits of\npossible aesthetic appreciation. Then, contra Stecker, we can\neffortlessly count all built structures as architecture, though some\nsuch things—like garage doors or drainage ditches—will\nneither look like, nor be, art. Another line of attack is to respond\nto exclusivists that architects simply have intentions to create\nobjects that are, in one aspect, art—and that they may fail as\nart is beside the point. Further, it may be that recognizing\nintentions is irrelevant to judging a built structure as architecture,\nas when we judge as architecture the vernacular structures of foreign\ncultures. In response to Scruton’s exaltation criterion, the\ninclusivist may note that for all artforms, there are typically\ninnumerable objects in the domain with no such goals—and\npossibly no goals at all. Finally, inclusivism has its own commonsense\njustification: we standardly refer to a creator of a mundane built\nstructure as the architect, which seems less a linguistic shortcut\nthan recognition of the training and ethos attached to the creator of\narchitectural objects.","It is not clear how to craft intermediary positions between\ninclusivism and exclusivism, given that the various brands of\nexclusivism are not absolute and test cases are instead subject to\njudgment along any number of parameters. Stecker’s exclusivism\nfor only architecture as art represents one such relativized\nstance. Inclusivism, by contrast—along with any attached views\non, for example, architectural appreciation or the nature of aesthetic\nsuccess in architecture—is an absolutist doctrine. All elements\nof the built environment—and much else besides—must count\nas architectural objects, or else the view fails. "],"subsection_title":"2.3 The Kinds of Things Architecture Makes"}]},{"main_content":["The metaphysics of architecture covers a surprising range of\nquestions for those who see in architecture no more than\nmetaphysically mundane built structures or stones, wood, metal, and\nconcrete arranged in a pleasing fashion: the nature of architectural\nobjects and their properties and types, the relations of architectural\nparts and wholes, and the prospect of architectural causality."],"section_title":"3. Metaphysics","subsections":[{"content":["Given the familiarity of architecture in, and as constitutive of,\nour physical surroundings, it is strongly intuitive to think of\narchitectural objects simply as buildings, in the way we think of the\nobjects of the sculpture artform as sculptures, or the objects of\ncutlery as forks, knives, and spoons. Yet such intuitions may be\nmisguided. For one, though some built structures—including\nroadways, bazaars, and newspaper kiosks—are not buildings\nper se, we may take them to have architectural properties and\nthereby consider them as architectural objects. For another, the\noutputs of architecture are not limited to built structures but\ninclude as well models, sketches, and plans, and this variety prompts\nquestions as to whether these are all reasonably considered\narchitectural objects and which, if any, such form of output\nrepresents a primary sort of object in architecture. A third\nconsideration is the focus in architecture, not solely on whole or\nindividual buildings, but also on parts of buildings and buildings\nconsidered in context, among other buildings and in landscapes\n(downwards and upwards compositionality or modularity). A fourth\nconsideration is that—as with music and photography—where\nmultiple instantiations of a given work are possible, we may dispute\nwhether the work is identical to the instancing built objects or else\nto the common entity (e.g., plan) on which those instances are\nmodeled. In addition to such challenges, the intuitive view must best\nalternative views.","Instantiating architectural objects. To address\none sort of question about the identity of an architectural object, we\nseek kind-wise criteria that establish when an object is\narchitectural, instead of being non-architectural altogether\nor only derivatively so. To address another sort of identity question,\nwe look for instance-wise criteria that establish when an\nobject is this or that singular object, or an instance of a multiple\nobject. Ready criteria for identifying object instances in\narchitecture include historical, environmental, stylistic, and formal\nfeatures—all of which may be read as signaling intentions to\ndesign particular, self-contained architectural objects. One issue,\nhowever, is whether traditional criteria (or others as may be posed)\nare sufficiently specific so as to skirt vagueness problems that all\nsuch artifacts may face (Thomasson 2005) and provide markers of being\na bona fide instance of a multiple work or a replica of all\nother bona fide instances (Goodman 1968/1976). ","Architectural objects as ontologically\ndistinctive. Yet another way to pick out architectural\nobjects is to set them apart from other art objects or artifacts.\nAssuming there is more than one art ontology (see\nLivingston 2013), we might look to define a distinctive architectural\nontology by reference to specifically architectural qualities, such as\n“mass” (degrees of heaviness and lightness) or\ndirectedness (in circulatory pathways); or utility considerations,\nsuch as functional design, use, and change; or everyday artifactual\nfeatures. An inclusivist may add features special to the built\nenvironment beyond the realm of buildings.","Kinds of architectural ontologies.\nArchitecture’s distinctive qualities may help sort among\ncandidate ontologies. One option is concretism, which—in keeping\nwith standard causal efficacy claims and expressed intentions of\narchitects, clients, and users—suggests that architectural\nobjects are either built structures or, on one variant, otherwise\nphysically instantiated designs for such structures (such as\nmodels). Concretism is supported by an artifactual ontology that\nsubsumes architectural objects into the class of objects that are the\nproduct of intentions, designs, and choices (on the view that\nall art objects are best so understood, see Dutton 1979,\nS. Davies 1991, Thomasson 1999, and Levinson 2007.) One version of\narchitectural artifactualism identifies buildings as systems (Handler\n1970). As against concretism, intentionality may be the mark of\nmaterially constituted, designed architectural objects but that need\nnot commit us to their existence alone or their primacy among such\nobjects. Moreover, taking intentions as determinative leaves the\nconcretist with the problem of shifting intentions and unintended\ngoals attached to built structures over time.","Abstractist alternatives follow a well-worn path in aesthetics\n(Kivy 1983; Dodd 2007; critics include S. Davies 1991; Trivedi 2002;\nKania 2008; D. Davies 2009) and accommodate an expansive architectural\ndomain that includes historical, fantasy, and unbuilt works. Per\nclassic Platonism, abstractism allows identification of an\narchitectural object and concrete counterparts—including\nmultiple replicas—by reference to a single, fixed, and\nunchanging background source of what real world structures (or fantasy\nstructures) are and should look like.","Against abstractism, some architectural objects are apparently\nsingular because historically and geographically contingent (Ingarden\n1962); it is unclear what an experiential account of\narchitectural abstracta looks like; and abstracta are not created\nwhereas architectural objects are. De Clercq (2012) further proposes\nthat, even if there were abstract architectural objects, we\ndon’t refer to them. If I refer to “10 Downing\nStreet”, my expression picks out the built structure, not the\nplan, nor any other abstract representation or entity to which the\nbuilt structure at 10 Downing Street corresponds. However, a plausible\nalternate interpretation of the referent is as “the abstract\nobject physically instantiated by the structure I am perceiving (or\nhave perceived)”.","As an alternative to an abstractist-concretist divide, a pluralist\nontology (per Danto 1993), allows “material\nbases” and “aesthetic ideas” as different sorts of\narchitectural objects. Goodman’s account (1968/1976) lends\nitself to a pluralist, or at least aspectual, reading. He suggests\nthat, but for certain conditions unmet, an architectural object could\nbe identified as those structures that perfectly realize a\ncorresponding plan or other suitable architectural notation (see §4). On his nominalist view, the\nobjects turn out to be the built structures but an available realist\ninterpretation—which may better accommodate the multiples that\nare key to his story—takes the objects to be the class of such\nstructures. ","Another alternative suggests that architecture consists in actions\nor performances (per Currie 1989; D. Davies 2004), rendering\nderivative any concrete structures or “traditional”\nabstract entities. Lopes (2007) proposes the possibility of an events\nor temporal parts ontology for a kind of built structure that passes\nin and out of existence, though De Clercq (2008, 2012) counters that\nsuch can be rendered in a material objects ontology through temporal\nindexing. Yet other ontologies are contextual or social\nconstructivist, proposing that architectural objects exist, beyond\ntheir status as structured materials, in virtue of ways our reality is\nframed, psychologically, socially, or culturally (per\nHartmann 1953, Margolis 1958). A shift in any such frame may bring\nabout shifting identity in an architectural object, in the manner of\nBorgesian art indiscernibles (Danto 1964), and it may count in favor of\nthose ontologies that architectural indiscernibles are all around, in\nthe form of repurposed built structures.","Picking an ontology has wide-ranging significance, relative to\nquestions of material constitution, composition, part-whole relations,\nproperties, and relations in architecture, as well as the character of\narchitectural notation, language, cognition, or behavior; there are\nalso ramifications for simplicity and complexity, and the nature of\nornament, proportion, context, and style. In architectural practice,\nthe ontology of choice also colors perspectives on such matters as\nintellectual property rights, collaborative work, and preservation of\narchitectural structures. "],"subsection_title":"3.1 Ontology"},{"content":["On one customary view of architectural objects, individual built\nstructures (or their abstract counterparts) represent the primary unit\nof our aesthetic or, for that matter, any architectural, concern; all\nother ways of carving up the architectural world are derivative. This\nview is consonant with an equally customary perspective identifying\narchitectural objects with architectural works. Alternative views\ninclude a “mereology”, in which parts of built structures\n(or their abstract counterparts) constitute independent architectural\nobjects; and an environmental contextualism, in which collections of\nbuilt structures (or their abstract counterparts) constitute\nindependent objects. Both alternatives share a commitment to some form\nof compositionality among architectural objects, that putting bits\ntogether yields aesthetically meaningful and utility-bearing\ncomposites, and taking them apart yields like results. In this, the\nmereological view represents a downward-compositionalism,\nsuggesting that architectural aesthetics demands our focus on\nstructural or other elements that can be meaningfully\ndistinguished. Environmental contextualism represents an\nupward-compositionalism, suggesting that architectural\naesthetics cannot be pursued entirely separately from the aesthetics\nof cities or towns (per Scruton 1979/2013)."],"subsection_title":"3.2 Part-Whole Relations"},{"content":["Questions about causality may seem out of place in discussions of\nimmobile objects, such as most architecture represents. Yet\narchitectural objects appear to have a role in causing events to\nhappen or other things to come into being. For example,\nsocio-psychological evidence suggests that architectural objects cause\nbehavior, and much of architectural design is predicated on this\nclaim. A further question is whether one architectural object may\n“cause” another. Thus, the presence of one or more\narchitectural objects might have a causal effect on the genesis or\ncharacter of one or more further works by dint of social utility,\nplanning needs, or aesthetic drivers. If true, then—as with\nconsequentialism in ethics—further questions arise regarding the\nrange of causal possibilities. Where ethicists ask whether a bad may\ngenerate a good, we may ask whether the presence or construction of a\nfunctionally or aesthetically impoverished architectural object might\noccasion the presence or construction of a more useful or pleasing\narchitectural object."],"subsection_title":"3.3 Causality"}]},{"main_content":["The notion that there is or should be an architectural\nlanguage—or more than one—has a provenance dating to\nancient times. In classic form, the architecture-as-language thesis\nruns from the Vitruvian suggestion that the orders present rules for\ncombination and ordering of architectural parts, through\nAlberti’s rhetoric-inspired model for architectural description\n(van Eck 2000), and an analogy common among Renaissance and early\nmodern authors (such as Wren) of architectural rules and expressive\ncapacity with the Latin language. Lavin (1992) suggests that\nQuatremère de Quincy (1803) develops the thesis, from a\ntraditional view of the classical orders as grammatical building\nblocks directly representing primitive structures, to a modern view of\nstructural elements broadly representing social and moral ideas and\nprinciples. Variations of the thesis range over elements of an\narchitectural language, how it may be used, and from whence it may be\nderived.","The core idea, in its most prominent form, is that architecture as\na corpus of design ideas (realized or otherwise) features a set of\nfundamental design and style elements which can be combined and\nrelated according to a set of rules (syntax), capable of constituting\nor parlaying meaning (semantics), and subject to contextual\nsensitivity and internal or relational constraints on deployment and\nrealization (pragmatics). Beyond these structural parallels with basic\nfacets of natural language, it is held that the purposes and\npossibilities of architecture qua language yield further\nparallels, best explained by the notion that architecture has, or even\nis, a language.","Proponents of such views tend to subscribe, however, to defenses\nrooted in one or another feature of language. On\nsyntactically-inspired views—the perspectives most indebted to\nthe Vitruvian account—there is at least one architectural\ngrammar or set of rules for guiding proper assemblage of parts and\norientation, relation, and combination of whole architectural\nobjects. Some late twentieth century architectural theory embraced a\ngrammar framework (Alexander et al. 1977; Hillier and Hanson 1984);\nsuch a view also underwrites a formalist vision for CAAD (Mitchell\n1990). Adherents of the\nview (Summerson 1966) assign themselves the central task of\nidentifying such rules. Even if this is achieved, though, a greater\npuzzle is whether there are identifiably preferable\nsyntaxes—and what the criteria should look like. ","On a semantics-inspired view, architectural objects or their\ncomponent parts bear meanings. A primary motivation for this view is\nthat, like objects of other artforms, architectural objects are\nexpressive, which suggests that what they express is meaning (Donougho\n1987). Proponents point to an array of architectural meanings,\ninternal or external to the object. The former tells us something\nabout the architectural object (its function or internal composition)\nor how it relates to other architectural objects (stylistic\nconventions); the latter tells us something about the world, as for\nexample, national or cultural associations (per\ngeographically variant design vocabularies), theological or spiritual\nsignificance (per religious design vocabularies), or\nper Hegel (1826), the Absolute Spirit. A more ambitious\nproposal (Baird 1969) has it that architectural objects exhibit such\nsemantic phenomena as metaphor, metonymy, or ambiguity.","Goodman (1985) proposes that buildings have meaning in that they\nfunction symbolically relative to properties, feelings, or ideas,\nsometimes through “standard” denotation, as when\nrepresenting symbolically (whether as building part or whole) some\nother object in the world. Primarily, though, buildings function\nsymbolically through exemplification (literal or explicit denotation)\nor expression (metaphorical exemplification) of properties of ideas,\nsentiments, or objects in the world. Buildings only constitute\narchitecture per se, in Goodman’s view, if they bear\nmeaning in one or more of these ways. While Goodman may have\nidentified a denotative role for buildings, this is not clearly a\nsemantic role. ","A third approach, rooted in semiotics, emphasizes the role of\narchitectural objects as signs that prompt spectator behavior (Koenig\n1964, 1970) or indicate aspects of themselves, such as function (Eco\n1968). In either case, architectural objects are taken to operate\nas communicative systems (Donougho 1987). A semiotics program was\nembraced by the late 20th century postmodernist movement in\narchitecture (Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, 1972/1977; Jencks\n1977).","The architectural language thesis, in its various forms, is widely\ndiscredited in recent philosophy of architecture. To begin with,\narchitecture features some qualities and exhibits some phenomena\nresembling those of natural language, but the parallels are neither\ncomprehensive nor fully compelling. On the syntactic side,\narchitecture may feature some brand of compositionality but different\nparts of architectural objects do not appear to function as do phrases\nor clauses (Donougho 1987). Syntactic “wholes” do no\nbetter, as there are no architectural assertions (Scruton\n1979/2013). As regards semantics, no likely candidate for an\narchitectural vocabulary regularly yields any specific class or\ninstance of meaning. Whereas for Vitruvius the Ionic order connotes\nfemale sensibility, it has a scholarly or deliberative meaning for\nRenaissance architects, “gravitas” for Blondel\n(1675–1683), and good governance for the architects of New\nYork’s City Hall. Nor are there truth conditions such as might\nsupply the meaning of a well-defined architectural sequence (Taurens\n2008). It’s not even clear that architectural communication is\nbest understood as sequential; Langer (1967), for example,\nsuggests that the symbolic communication of architectural objects is\ninstead holistic. As for pragmatics, there is no clear parallel with\nimplicature or related phenomena, hence architecture is incapable of\nthe accuracy or concision of expression we associate with language\n(Clarke and Crossley 2000). Finally, relative to semiotics, not\nall—or even many—buildings signify and we would only\nwant some to do so. ","On the bright side, it’s not clear that we should want\narchitecture to be more language-like. Regarding semantics, whatever\nwe gain in fixing particular meanings to architectural objects, we\nstand to lose in fungibility of their forms. Regarding syntax,\nadherence to grammars brings the utility of standards and,\nper Scruton and Harries, a template for the community’s\nvoice—but for some may represent stifling constraints on the\naesthetic imagination.","In the end, it is useful to ask what work we expect the\narchitecture-as-language thesis to do. One view (Alexander et\nal. 1977; Alexander 1979) takes the thesis to underscore the robust\nnature of design patterns and known design solutions and, for a given\nculture, a common vocabulary (Donougho 1987). However, it may be\nsufficient to highlight ways in which architecture is like a\nlanguage, though they do not add up to an architectural language\n(Forty 2000). If so, then the thesis works best as a powerful metaphor\nrather than as literal truth. ","An alternate take on linguistic phenomena in architecture appears\nin Goodman’s proposal (1968) that we think of notational systems\nor schemes for the arts as symbolic systems with potentially\nlanguage-like features. Goodman suggests that architecture is a\nborderline case of an allographic artform, as its notational\nschemes—in the form of plans—are intended to guarantee\nthat all objects as are compliant are genuine instances of the\nwork. (Said intention, Goodman proposes, is not fulfilled.) That an\nobject instance the work just when compliant with the notation would\nindicate the notation’s satisfaction of syntactic and semantic\ncriteria providing requisite grounds for identity across instances,\nand signal a corresponding insignificance of historical context and\nconditions of production to the object’s identity. Goodman, for\nhis part, balks at taking architecture to be truly allographic given\nthe core role of history and context in generating particular\nstructures, and notational ambiguity that marks the analog medium of\ntraditional plans. Digital design may well resolve the ambiguity\nproblem, however, and allow indexing for history and context,\nrendering architecture allographic per Goodmanian criteria\n(S. Fisher 2000b). The term\n“architectural language” then takes on a\ndifferent—and more plausible—sense."],"section_title":"4. Architectural Language and Notation","subsections":[]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"5. Formalism and Anti-formalism","subsections":[{"content":["In its most general sense, formalism works in architecture as it\ndoes (or doesn’t) in other artforms. Thus, architectural\nformalism suggests that the sum total of aesthetic properties of an\narchitectural object are or arise from formal properties, such that\nour aesthetic judgments are warranted based on experience and\nassessment of just those properties. As architectural objects are\ntypically non-representational and designed with manipulation and\nrelation of forms as a primary task, it is natural that their formal\nproperties be seen as playing a central role in our aesthetic\nappreciation of them. The question posed to the traditional\n(“hard”) formalist is whether those properties are\nunique or at least dominant drivers of aesthetic properties\nand judgment, a question underlined by important roles of history,\nstyles, and other contexts in our grasp of the architectural\nenterprise and individual architectural objects. Our aesthetic\njudgment of I. M. Pei’s Louvre Pyramids is surely to some degree\nin reaction to their “pure” form but—for the aware\nspectator—perhaps just as much in reaction to their relationship\nto historical context (the Giza pyramids as emblematic of pyramidal\nform in architecture, and of monumental architecture altogether) or\nsetting (in contrast to the ornate neo-Baroque Louvre buildings that\nsurround them, but in keeping with traditional French emphasis on\ngeometric form in design).","Variants of architectural formalism take formal properties as the\nproperties of (or arising from) the material or physical properties of\nbuilt structures (as consonant with concretism), or as the properties\nof (or arising from) the total properties specified by a set of formal\nparameters we identify with the architectural object (as consonant\nwith abstractism). Further architectural strains are characterized by\nmoderation (per Zangwill 2001), suggesting that some\narchitectural objects are best understood by appealing to their formal\nproperties, others not; or by assimilation of canonically non-formal\nproperties to a formalist scheme (in the manner of Levinson’s\n“indicated structures”; see S. Fisher 2000b); or by a\n“mereological” view wherein some parts of a given\narchitectural object may be best understood and judged by their formal\nproperties, others not. For the merelogico-formalist, it might count\nin favor of considering such parts as independent architectural\nobjects that we can judge those parts on a formal basis alone.","Formalism appears in some traditional architectural theories as a\nnormative practical or critical guideline, namely, that our best\ndesign thinking takes as central an architectural object’s\nshape, color, and other formal elements. Other, non-formal aspects of\nan architectural object are discounted as contributing to its\nsuccess. Mitrovic (2011, 2013) embraces a normative formalist approach\nto criticism, on the grounds that the deeply visual nature of much\ncognition militates against basing appreciation or evaluation of\narchitectural objects exclusively or primarily on features we\nunderstand through non-visual means (such as context or history\nprovide). "],"subsection_title":"5.1 Formalism"},{"content":["The anti-formalist traditionally focuses on the importance to\naesthetic judgment about non-formal properties, including historical\ncontext; other, categorial forms of context (Walton 1970); or\nnon-cognitive properties. As an architectural application would have\nit, we likely judge Jefferson’s University of Virginia campus as\nstately or dignified or evocative of democratic ideals because of the\nneo-classical design, the campus’ place in histories of American\narchitecture and university architecture, and its continuous\nrededication through the everyday functioning of an enduring, living\nuniversity. None of this judgment appears to have particular roots in\nforms Jefferson deployed, except as befit a neo-classical\nstyle—which style may be best grasped in historicist terms.","Aside from historicism, a principal variant of architectural\nanti-formalism derives from functional beauty theory, which has its\nroots in (a) a late modern tradition of judging an object beautiful if\nfit for its intended function (Parsons and Carlson (2008) find this\ntradition in Berkeley's Alciphron (1732) and Hume's related\nsuggestion (Treatise (1739-40)) that beauty of artifacts consists in\ntheir appearing to bear utility), and (b) Kant’s proposal that\narchitecture is an artform capable of generating dependent beauty. (In\nthe latter case, beauty stands in relation to concepts with which we\nassociate architectural objects, which for such objects are typically\nthe ends towards which they are created.) One modern version proposes\ngauging the beauty of a designed object by reference to\ndesigner’s intent in crafting a functional solution; for\nS. Davies (2006), where an object displays functional beauty,\naesthetic considerations and the object’s primary function each\nact to shape the other. Per Parsons and Carlson (2008), the\nproblem with such intentionalist accounts in architecture (or\nelsewhere where functional beauty pertains) is that functions\nchange. To work around this difficulty, they suggest, we need\na theory focused on “proper functions” for the artifacts\nin question. This view is modeled on a selected effects account of\nbiological functions, as translated into a marketplace-driven scheme,\nwhere evolution of design solutions is driven by demand over time.","Functional beauty faces several challenges. Even in their advocacy,\nParsons and Carlson caution against the suggestion that function\nsolely determines form, as that would neglect other features\nof artifacts not possibly highlighted by their functions. Such\nfeatures include cultural significance or aspects of\nnon-dependent beauty as may be found in, for example, architectural\nornament. (In Davies’ picture, there is no such neglect because\nthe functioning of artifacts—including art and architectural\nobjects—may have a cultural, spiritual, or otherwise\nnon-mechanical cast.) In the architectural realm, another challenge is\nposed by ruins, which may be beautiful but have no functions. To the\ncharge that these represent counterexamples to functional beauty\ntheory, one tack is to answer that if ruins represent architectural\nobjects, they are dysfunctional and their beauty is manifest in\nnon-functional ways (Parsons and Carlson). Functional beauty theory is\nsaved on the whole but not as universally characteristic of\narchitectural objects.","A further challenge casts doubt on seeing functional beauty as the\nonly variant of dependent beauty, or beauty as the sole aesthetic\nvalence of interest to a viable notion of dependent aesthetic\nproperties. In an architectural vein, those variants may include\nspiritual, emotional, or conceptual frameworks we bring to our grasp\nof such built structures as houses of worship, memorials, or triumphal\narches. We can tell functional stories about these sorts of structures\nin sociological or psychological analyses but not (or not only), as\nfunctional beauty accounts would have it, in terms of their mechanical\nor system-wise functioning. ","Looking beyond functional beauty—or more broadly, dependent\nbeauty—accounts of architecture, an inclusivist will seek the\nthread that ties together architectural objects with aesthetic\nproperties of all description, be they functional, otherwise\ndependent, or freely (independently) endowed with beauty or other such\nproperties. Thus, a modernist gas station and a Tschumi folie\nmay share an elegance unrelated to functional ascription or\nthe lack thereof. A general theory of architectural objects, along\ninclusivist lines, suggests at least a moderate formalism."],"subsection_title":"5.2 Anti-Formalism and Functional Beauty"}]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"6. Architectural Experience, Knowledge, and Appreciation","subsections":[{"content":["A staple of philosophy of art is that our experience of art\nobjects—direct or otherwise—is central to basic belief\nformation about them (first and foremost, aesthetic belief and\nappreciation of art objects). The philosophy of architecture is\ngenerally in agreement, though architectural objects may be of special\ncharacter in this regard, as our experiences of them gives rise to or\ninfluences an extended range of psychological states. Beyond pleasure\nin architectural beauty or other “positive” aesthetic\nproperties, experience of built structures also contributes to neutral\nand less positive states of mind, and shapes how we broadly take in\nour environment. A piece of that environmental understanding is local\nto the built structure itself: the ways we experience architectural\nobjects may contribute to how we comprehend, and interact with, those\nobjects.","In addition to facilitating understanding, appreciation, or use of\narchitectural objects, experience might also play—or\nreflect—a constitutive role. On Scruton’s view, experience\nconstitutes for us the architectural object as an aesthetic\nobject (1979/2013). For Ingarden (1962), architectural experience\nentails not only our cognitive grasp of the built structure’s\nphysicality but as well our grasp of its designation as a specifically\narchitectural object rather than, say, as an arrangement of\nbricks that happens to have the structure of a house.","The content and corresponding faculties of architectural experience\nlikely include some mix of the cognitive, emotive, and sensual.\nWhereas an abstractist may claim that experience of architectural\nobjects is solely a matter of intellectual grasp, even an\nanti-abstractist formalist needs the sensory as well to account for\nexperience of concrete shapes. Abstractist intellectualism\nnotwithstanding, accounts of architectural experience typically focus\non multiple content modalities. Sauchelli (2012a) proposes the use of\ncognition in grasping pleasure (“intellectual pleasure”)\nas a central feature of architectural experience. The idea is that\nfully comprehending the pleasure of the experience and thereby\nestablishing its aesthetic value requires cognition, in the form of\nattention to details and understanding of the architectural\nobject. ","A blend of the cognitive and sensual is also characteristic of\nScruton’s proposed “imaginative\nperception”—the notion that we may perceive the\ndetails of built structures in various ways, depending on directions\nthat our imagination takes us. Scruton (1979/2013) takes this\ncognitive act—reminiscent of seeing-as and free play of the\nimagination—as crucial to architectural experience. We are at\nall turns required to make interpretative choices in parsing ambiguous\nor multiform aspects of the built environment. Scruton focuses on\nvoluntary deployment of the imagination in perception at a\nmacro-level, concerning such matters as whether we see a sequence of\ncolumns as grouped one way or another, or see pilasters as ornamental\nor structural. The voluntary aspect of this account is critical to\nScruton’s emphasis on the importance of taste and discrimination\nto architectural aesthetics. In this, he loosely tracks Geoffrey\nScott’s view of architectural experience as “sensuous\nperception” interpreted through attendant values\n(1914/1924).","A generalized version of this account looks to perceptual tasks at\na more granular level. Our experiences of space and spatial\npositioning, depth, edge detection, color, and light yield multiple\ninterpretative possibilities across architectural objects, including\nthe simplest forms and smallest or largest parts of objects. These\nperceptual tasks are pervasive and constant; sometimes involuntary and\nin the background, and other times as shaped by our willful\nimagining. If the involuntary tasks also represent or shape\ninterpretative acts, architectural experience by Scruton’s\nmeasure is that much less subject to aesthetic taste or\ndiscrimination.","The dimensions of architectural experience are even larger when\ntaking into account the full breadth of the sensual. Following a long\ntradition of viewing architecture through art historical lenses,\nScruton focuses on architectural experience as primarily visual and\nstatic. In addition, though, other sensory modalities are factors:\nchanges in aesthetic judgments follow changes in those other sensory\nexperiences (Sauchelli 2012a). Such modalities among the non-visual\ninclude the tactile, aural, and olfactory. Moreover, much\narchitectural experience is proprioceptive, incorporating visual\ninformation into a broader set of stimuli to grasp bodily position and\nmovement in relation to the built environment.","Sensation of movement might seem irrelevant to experiencing an\nimmobile object, save for the fact that, in architecture (as in\nsculpture) not all facets of a given whole work, or many other\narchitectural objects, can be perceived at the same time. The\nspectator or user must move around or within the object to perceive\nany significant percentage of it, much less the whole. Experience of\nmovement around architectural objects highlights for us the design\nfeature of circulatory paths and contributes to grasping an\nobject’s formal features (such as rhythm in spatial patterns)\nand perhaps, at least derivatively, its aesthetic features (such as\nsomberness) (Sauchelli 2012a; Rasmussen 1959). These aspects of\narchitectural experience capture the immersive nature of a\nspectator’s or user’s relationship to a built\nstructure. Further aspects of our experience may capture the\narchitectural object’s immersion in its larger\nenvironment and surroundings, its “localized nature” or\ncontext and “sense of location” (Carlson 1994). As\narchitectural objects standardly shape our actual, imagined, or\nremembered bodily engagement, so are our richest experiences of\narchitecture informed by such engagement (J. Robinson 2012).","Central as bodily experience may be, it cannot be the only source\nof architectural beliefs. Considering the great breadth of the\narchitectural enterprise, it may not even be the best source. Other\nsources include access to beliefs about works through standard\nrepresentational modes that are not the works themselves, transmission\nof tacit working knowledge through apprenticeship learning, and\ncollective belief formation through client briefings and studio group\ncritical assessment (“crits”). On these and other bases an\narchitectural knowledge of special character is built."],"subsection_title":"6.1 Experience of Architecture"},{"content":["Knowledge of a building or other architectural objects follows\nwell-worn paths in some aspects of general knowledge of art. In\nparticular, architectural beliefs encompass judgments of aesthetic\nproperties of the built environment, are norm-governed in some\nfashion, and may be transmissible via testimony. Yet other aspects of\nknowing architectural objects diverge from the well-worn path, as\nreflective of special characteristics of the architectural enterprise\nand its products and consumption.","One traditional division of architectural knowledge promoted by\narchitectural historians, theorists, and practitioners—and\nfocusing squarely on creator’s knowledge—has it that there\nare two basic kinds: the theoretical/historical and the practical\n(J. W. Robinson 2001). Theoretical and historical\nbrands of architectural knowledge encompass viable beliefs about\nfamiliar core concerns of architecture, including basic design\nelements of the built environment; their combinations, relations, and\nproperties; their style; external factors (social, economic, cultural,\netc.) which shape design; and historical contexts into which they\nfit. Some such beliefs are empirically supported; others\nnot. Practical brands of architectural knowledge encompass\nviable beliefs about the engineering and technical means of\nconstructing architectural objects, ensuring structural integrity, and\nguaranteeing mechanical function, socially, industrially, or\necologically beneficial use. Such beliefs—particularly as\nhitched to formalized, experimental, or predictive dimensions of the\nenterprise—are sometimes seen as constituting an\narchitectural science. They are typically (though not\nexclusively) empirical in character and, to some tastes, relegated to\na status of adjunct architectural knowledge, that is, useful\nfor architecture but outside the domain proper. What counts as\npractical knowledge in architecture is often seen as encompassing\nbeliefs of a largely non-aesthetic nature.","Yet other categories reflect a range of types and sources of\narchitectural knowledge. Another division distinguishes between\narchitectural beliefs associated with creators and users. My\nexperience of a built structure qua creator is perforce\ndifferent than my experience of the same structure qua user,\nand the sorts of beliefs I arrive at may differ accordingly. As\narchitect, Jones believes that an arch of one design but not another\nwill keep the bridge up; as someone strolling underneath the bridge,\nSmith believes that an arch of a different design would have been a\ngreater aesthetic success. This much accords with other artforms\nfeaturing practical functions. Further, architectural beliefs may\ndiffer by their technical or non-technical nature; by perspective and\nrole of the belief-holder; or by facts about physical experience of\nthe work or other modalities of belief acquisition.","Architectural knowledge in broader context. To see\nhow architectural knowledge may be similar to, or differ from,\naesthetic knowledge generally, consider two dimensions of aesthetic\nknowledge, knowing through art and knowing about art\n(Kieran and Lopes 2006). As concerns knowing through\narchitecture, cognitive content arises in reflecting—to varying\ndegrees—taste and style sensibilities of its creators,\nstructural properties per engineering principles deployed;\nand cultural and social values of historical, communal, and economic\ncontexts. To know a built structure in this regard is to know such\nmatters as the tradition in which it is built; design aspirations of\nthe architect and initial occupants; and intentions relative to\ncontributing to the built or natural landscape. The success of this\nthesis is predicated on successful communication through architectural\nobjects, whether as symbols or otherwise. ","Architectural belief and knowledge have as well wholly distinctive\nfeatures, reflective of special characteristics of the domain, its\npractice, and its objects. These include:","Beliefs about systems. Architectural objects (as wholes)\nare systems or system-like, in that they constitute sets of\ninterrelated structural components, with characteristic behavior or\nprocesses yielding outputs from inputs, and where the parts are\nconnected by distinctive structural and behavioral relations (Boyce\n1969). That we take whole architectural objects to be (or to be\nrepresented as) systems or system-like suggests how architectural\nbeliefs are distinctive among beliefs about artworks. In particular,\nwe have beliefs about architectural objects that reflect functions and\ninteractions of (1) components individually and as parts of systemic\nwholes, (2) systems as parts of broader environmental contexts, and\n(3) persons’ behaviors within the systems. Whereas the first\ntwo functional and interactional features are typical to all design,\nthe third feature marks architecture as an artform that, in providing\nan immersive and systemic physical environment, intensely draws on and\nshapes social, psychological, and economic features of experience. Our\nbeliefs about architectural objects and interactions with and in them\nare shaped correspondingly, in ways that do not arise in engagement\nwith other artforms. ","Partial and full information. Representation in\narchitecture encompasses multiple modes, including built objects,\nphysical models, virtual models, data arrays, plans, sketches,\nphotographs, and drawings. Each such mode may be viable as\nrepresenting an architectural object just in case some\nfeatures of the object are adequately, accurately, regularly, and\noptimally represented through the mode. This view of viable\nrepresentation in architecture is at odds with the standards for such\nin other artforms. Consider a representation of the Mona Lisa. If you\ndo not have complete visual access through the representation (from\nany acceptable angle) to the full tableau, you may be said to lack\nfull acquaintance with the work through the representation, and your\nconsequent aesthetic beliefs about the Mona Lisa may be discounted\naccordingly. By contrast, if architectural beliefs required anything\nlike full acquaintance with the object or fully\ninformed testimony to be viable, our architectural beliefs would\nnot typically or frequently be viable. Rare is the case where\nacquaintance is full or testimony fully informed—even among\nthose whom we might expect to have the greatest acquaintance, such as\na built structure’s architect or developer.","Socially constructed knowledge. In architecture, as in\nother design fields, design problems are not thoroughly or fully\narticulated all at once or by any particular individual. The primary\ncomponents of design knowledge—problems and their possible\nsolutions—are instead distributed across persons. This fact\nabout architectural production—and, to a degree, its\nuse—suggests that beliefs we form about architectural objects\nare formed amidst, and influenced by, such social relations (see §8.1). Art and architecture worlds\nper se are undoubtedly not a sole source of epistemic\nnorms. Yet social relations and circumstances among\narchitecture’s stakeholders present constitutive conditions for\na wide swath of architectural beliefs, suggesting at least a moderate\nsocial constructivism.","It may be thought that qualities of architecture such as\nsystematicity and the deeply social character of the discipline are\nimmaterial to aesthetic beliefs. However, architecture is a\nholistic enterprise: a design decision to cantilever a terrace is at\nonce of aesthetic and engineering significance. In like fashion, that\narchitectural objects constitute systems is pertinent in shaping\naesthetic beliefs because there are more and less attractive ways to\nshape the flow of persons, or even electricity, through a built\nstructure. And that architectural objects are designed through social\nprocesses has import for corresponding aesthetic beliefs. For example,\naesthetic properties of a given design are subject to crits, the very\npurpose of which is to influence the creator’s further aesthetic\nbeliefs about the same design."],"subsection_title":"6.2 Architectural Knowledge"},{"content":["As distinct from mere experience of architectural objects,\nappreciation of architectural objects brings to bear\ncognition and other inputs, such as history and context. Appreciation\ngoes beyond knowledge, too, insofar as we may know an\narchitectural object and its qualities without appreciating it. Thus,\nWinters (2007) proposes that appreciating architecture consists in\nenjoyment of architectural objects (from experience, tout\ncourt), as wed to understanding them, where the latter\nconsists in grasping their aesthetic significance in specifically\nvisual fashion, and critically assessing the judgment of architects in\naddressing design challenges. Architectural appreciation may be built\non the judgment of others; it is essential to rendering\njudgment. Accordingly, learning to appreciate architectural objects is\na cornerstone of architectural education. A key contributing feature\nin this last regard is acquiring agility with classifying in the\ndomain (Leder et al. 2004).","The appreciation and judgment of architectural objects are\ntypically thought to reflect aesthetic and utility-wise\nconsiderations, and engage individual perspective, experience,\nreasoning, and reflection such as we associate with appreciating and\njudging in other artforms. Drivers in appreciation and judgment\nspecial to architecture include social framing and\nenvironmental psychological factors that are a consequence of\narchitecture’s intensely public nature.","Exceptionalism. One question regarding\nappreciation is whether there is a special mode attached to\narchitectural objects. We might think this is so given that, unlike\nmost arts (though very like other design forms), appreciation in\narchitecture is aesthetic and utility-oriented. A resulting\npuzzle is whether, and under what circumstances, we might have one\nwithout the other. We might think as much if, say, it is possible to\nappreciate the Roman Coliseum’s stately and antique features\nwithout any appreciation of its intended function or actual use. On\nthe other hand, a view of appreciation embracing functional beauty\ntheory may suggest that the Coliseum’s functional and free\nbeauty are on at least equal footing—or that the\nColiseum’s stately aesthetic and its role as amphitheater for\nstaging spectacles (for example) cannot be separated altogether.","Further questions regarding appreciation concern the relative roles\nin appreciation of individual experience of architecture, as against\nthe social or the environmental.","Individual Appreciation. The prevailing\nphilosophical view of architectural appreciation is a psychological\naccount with debts to the Kantian tradition: direct, immediate\naesthetic experiences of architectural objects among individuals\nconstitute the basis of appreciation. (Iseminger 1981 provides a\ngeneral aesthetics account in this vein.) A primary variant has it\nthat architectural appreciation is the product of individual cognition\nof the content, form, properties, and relations of architectural\nobjects. A recent variation suggests that, in addition to (or in\nlieu of) cognitive response, physiological experience\n(proprioception) is a central source of beliefs associated with\narchitectural appreciation. On either model, it is experience of\nindividuals that feeds and influences appreciation.","Social and Environmental Role in Architectural\nAppreciation. Direct, immediate individual experience is not\nthe only source of information shaping architectural\nappreciation. Considering the breadth of the architectural enterprise,\nit may not even be the best source. Others include access to\ninformation about works through standard representational modes that\nare not the works themselves (for example, drawings or photographs),\ntransmission of tacit working knowledge through apprenticeship\nlearning, and collective belief formation through client briefings and\nstudio crits.","Architectural appreciation is social in building on our\nunderstanding of architectural objects as it develops, and matures, in\nexperience of a built structure with and in relation to other\nindividuals and groups of people. It is also social in that we learn\nmarkers of appreciation among those with whom we share such\nexperiences or (per Scruton 1979/2013) imagine ourselves to\ndo so. Indeed, a central goal of architectural education is structured\nimparting of collective wisdom as to how to best classify\narchitectural objects and, relatedly, what the markers of appreciation\nhave looked like, or should look like—as well as how they\narticulate with practical knowledge.","Further, architectural appreciation is environmental in\nbuilding on our understanding of architectural objects based on\nexperiences in relation to their natural and built surroundings. On\none view, an architectural object may be more difficult to appreciate\nif we find that relation unexpected, or contrary to normative\nsensibility (Carlson 1999). If, however, appreciation does not require\nenjoyment or satisfaction of any sort—and instead engages our\nunderstanding of, for example, what was intended and why—we may\nwell appreciate in its own right an architectural object that has a\nsurprising, even obnoxious relation to its surroundings."],"subsection_title":"6.3 Architectural Appreciation"}]},{"main_content":["Some problems of architectural ethics are characteristic of a range\nof typical moral dilemmas—agent-centered, norms-oriented\nconcerns—as may arise for architects. In addition to a\ntraditional set of questions applied to the architectural domain,\narchitectural ethics also addresses problems special to the discipline\nand practice—as shaped by its social, public, practical, and\nartistic nature. ","As conceptually prior to a normative ethics of architectural\npractice, a meta-ethics of architecture assesses alternate ethical\nmodalities, such as whether architecture might be considered moral or\nimmoral relative to its objects (built structures) or to its practices\nas a set of institutions or social phenomena. Another meta-ethical\nissue concerns whether moralism or autonomism best characterizes the\nrelationship of aesthetics to ethics, as that plays out in\narchitecture.","Ethical modalities of architecture. There are\nthree typical candidate modalities of ethics in architecture. For one,\nthere is the establishment of criteria for ethical norms of the\nenterprise such as architects in practice may observe. For example,\narchitects can craft designs in ways that lower the likelihood of cost\noverruns and enhance safety. In an interpersonal vein, architects can\nrepresent their work honestly to clients or contractors. Another\nmodality—beyond enterprise-defined ethical norms—is\npursuit of criteria to gauge architects as moral agents broadly\nproducing or doing good or bad in the world. For example, architects\nmay create objects that uplift or constrain individual users and\ninhabitants; other architects may promote social utility by designing\nhousing for those in need of shelter. Finally, there is the modality\nof seeking criteria to judge architectural objects as morally good or\nbad insofar as they directly produce pleasure or pain. As an\nindirect example, a hospital design is intended to facilitate\nthe minimizing of pain, by fostering environmental conditions\nconducive to excellence in health care and patient well-being. As a\nmore direct case, a bus shelter is intended to reduce exposure to the\nelements and corresponding discomfort. This last candidate may be\nattractive if we see architecture primarily as a product rather than\nas a practice; it is noxious if we are unwilling to assign moral\nvalues to artifacts as we do to actions or their properties. A built\nstructure might be inhumane in that it is bleak or uninhabitable,\nthough it does not follow that the structure itself bears inhumane\nvalues. ","Value Interaction. Vitruvian principles underlying\nmuch of architectural theory suggest a tendency to link the aesthetic\nand the utility-promoting. So, too, functional beauty theory\nrecommends that aesthetic and ethical considerations are linked in\narchitecture. To crystallize the matter, we may ask if it is possible\nfor a built structure to be good though not aesthetically so. The\nquestion as to how aesthetic and ethical value might be related is a\nsubject of broader concern, with a “moralist” stance that\nsays the two sorts of value are or should be connected (Carroll 1996,\nGaut 1998) and an “autonomist” stance that takes the two\nas (or better off as) independent (Anderson and Dean 1998, Kieran\n2001).","In this debate, architecture would seem a promising domain in which\nto find robust relations. At a moralist extreme, there is the\nsuggestion—supported by some traditions in architectural theory\n(Pugin 1841, Ruskin 1849)—that aesthetic tasks in architecture\nsimply are ethical tasks, reflecting ethical choices. One\nprominent moralist perspective locates the ethical element of\naesthetic architectural choice in obligations to a sort of honesty, in\ndesigning works that accurately represent underlying structural\nprinciples or operational capacities. Harries (1997) and Scruton\n(1979/2013) arrive at similar ethical commitments to architectural\ndesign as expressive in a particular fashion, though of shared\ncommunity values, rather than of function or structural features.\nFrom another angle, moralists point to the emotional impact of built\nenvironments as indicative of a union of the aesthetically gripping\nand morally compelling (Ginsburg 1994), though it may be noted that\neven where we detect such a union we need not judge the aesthetics of\nthe architectural object on the basis of any ethical import so\ncommunicated.","At the other extreme, autonomists propose that problems of ethics\nand aesthetics neither need arise at once, nor need be resolved at\nonce, in architectural design. If we see a correlation in some\narchitectural objects of ethically and aesthetically compelling design\nsolutions, we see in other objects no correlation at all. Thus, the\nmodern city is replete with instances of built structures that are\nwell-functioning, high-utility, and facilitate much good in the world\nyet meet no one’s standards of aesthetically worthy design.\nThere is good reason to uncouple these values just in case they\nmust conflict. Suppose there is an ethical premium, for\nexample, on the need to create environmentally sustaining structures,\nand that we identify resolutions of that problem as generally bearing\nthe greatest mark of moral worth. Suppose further that crafting the\noptimal moral solution (vis-à-vis the environment)\nalways generates the most unattractive design—and that the\ninverse holds as well (the better the design aesthetically, the worse\nthe design for the environment). Then a connection between ethics and\naesthetics in architecture seems improbable.","A third position altogether proposes a pluralism. Sometimes ethical\nand aesthetic value march hand-in-hand, other times not—and\ntheir ways of matching up are diverse and run in various\ndirections. So one architectural design may be aesthetically\ncompelling as it reflects its ethically upstanding character, whereas\nanother design may be aesthetically compelling as it reflects its\nethically deficient character. What is required for cases of this last\nsort is that the evaluator can identify the aesthetic success as\ngrounded, per functional beauty theory, in effective\nexpression of the structure’s ethically deficient function\n(Sauchelli 2012b). An even more generalized pluralism would suggest\nthat a wide range of aesthetic and ethical valences can be matched up\nin different ways; we might value a war memorial for the way it grimly\nexpresses the horrors of war.","Traditional questions of architectural ethics. One\nreason that architectural ethics is central to philosophy of\narchitecture is that architects’ actions bear great influence\nover other people’s moral lives. Architects design structures\nand environments for people, with concomitant effects on personal\nbehavior, capacity to choose courses of action, and ability to satisfy\npreferences, visit harm, generate benefit, or exercise rights. As\narchitects’ acts shape spaces, boundaries, and pathways that\nstructure individual behaviors and social acts, they prompt normative\nethical exploration along traditional lines.","To begin with, a traditional architectural ethics requires an\naccount of architectural responsibilities. Any such account\nshould outline architects’ obligations to other persons, ethical\nstandards on which such obligations may be based, how to ensure such\nstandards might be met, and any other sorts of obligations architects\nmight have, as for example, to historic preservation or environmental\nprotection. As concerns obligations to persons, the range of\nstakeholders in architecture is great, hence ethical responsibility is\ndiffuse.","A further set of questions concerns rights. It is\nrelatively novel to speak of authorial or community rights in\narchitecture; owner or client rights are historically parasitic on\nproperty or sovereign rights. Other possibilities include rights of\ndevelopers, builders, engineers, environments, and societies. As that\nlist grows, two further questions concern the sorts of rights that can\nbe attributed to such parties or entities, and the criteria for\ndistributing and prioritizing them given aesthetic as well as moral\nconsiderations.","Architectural utility is familiar as a Vitruvian concept\nbut has a wholly other sense in an agent-centered normative ethics,\nwith a possible moral weighting not found in classic architectural\ntheory. Guidelines are needed to determine the usefulness of\narchitectural goods such as built structures, restorations,\nreconstructions, or plans. These might include their social character,\nor individual preferences of the architect, owner, end-users, or\npublic. A utilitarian approach to architectural ethics is attractive\nin capturing the aims of architecture to promote well-being, and\nrelying on a ready marker of architectural value. However, it also\ndiscounts other traditional architectural imperatives such as a\nVitruvian-style pluralist may honor, including beauty and structural\nintegrity (Spector 2001). ","Finally, a traditionalist picture of architectural ethics requires\nan account of virtues in the domain (though these may be\northogonal to normative ethics). Here is potential consonance with the\nVitruvian tradition (and similarly virtue-oriented non-Western\ntraditions)—if we see the “good”, morally educated\narchitect’s virtue and character as our best guarantee of proper\nand productive weighting of values under differing circumstances\n(Spector 2001).","Future-Focused Architectural Ethics. The focus of\nethical rights and responsibilities in architecture is typically taken\nas relative to present or past. Thus, we speak of obligations to\ndesign and build in ethically responsible fashion, or preserve past\narchitectural objects. There are future-focused obligations, as\nwell. Sustainable design is forward-looking even as it is centered on\nwhat we design and build today. Further ethical issues may arise\nrelative to future architectural objects. As to obligations to future\narchitectural objects, we see as much in the short-term\ninstance of planning around near-future buildings. More puzzling is\nwhether we might have “long-haul” future-facing\nobligations—apart from utility or prudential\nconsiderations—in planning, for example, new cities or\naccommodations to climate change.","Special ethical questions of architecture.\nArchitectural practice generates special moral issues as befit its\nproper, idiosyncratic features, distinctive among the arts, the\nprofessions, and social practices. Most notably, an array of ethical\nissues of social import arises from architecture’s commitments\nto creation of a socially beneficial and functional art. Such issues\ninclude the nature of “better” housing (and under varying\nconditions), what (if anything) makes housing an obligation, and ways\nthat such an obligation may accrue to, or be satisfied by,\narchitects. Yet other ethical issues special to architecture range\nover matters of personal and social spaces and the articulations\nthereof, including criteria for designing around concerns related to\nprivacy, accessibility (for the public generally and handicapped in\nparticular), respecting community and neighborly preferences, and\npromoting civic values.","Other ethical matters special to architecture are particularly\nvisible in global perspective. For example, there is inequitable\ndistribution of housing across the developed and developing nations,\nand part of the solution may be architectural (Caicco 2005). Further,\narchitecture incurs special environmental obligations given that waste\nand degradation affect, and are affected by, architectural design. One\nconceptual challenge of sustainability facing architects is to\ndetermine whether development is, in principle, a countervailing\ninterest. This is to ask, once environmental obligations are defined,\nhow they may be factored into or weighed against infrastructural and\ndesign interests and preferences.","Professional Ethics. Architectural professional\nethics focuses on architects’ moral choices in the context of\npractice (Wasserman, Sullivan, and Palermo 2000; T. Fisher\n2010). Professional ethical codes govern conduct in (and thereby\nprotect) the architectural profession and avert problems related to\nbusiness, fiduciary, insurance, or liability functions; the design\nfunction is an ethical focus relative to disability. Architectural law\nhighlights professional ethics matters as concern property, liability,\nand honesty. The law clarifies responsibilities among parties to\narchitectural practice; defines who or what in commercial\narchitectural interactions has moral agency—hence rights; and\ndescribes utility-wise or financial measures of distribution in\narchitecture. Legal regulations and judgments prompt conceptual\nquestions regarding such issues as intellectual property in\narchitecture, architects as arbitrators, and architects’\nresponsibilities to others (S. Fisher 2000a).","Intellectual Property. One conceptual issue concerning\narchitectural intellectual property is how such rights are to be\nweighed against other sorts of property rights, such as domestic or\ncommercial rights. A further issue is determined on the basis of\njudging architecture to be a service or product. Taking architecture\nas service means that architects do not have a stake on\ncopyright, as they would then be creators-by-contract; tradition has\nit that rights to expression of ideas so created accrue to the\ncontracting party. Taking architecture as product supports\narchitects’ claim to copyright, given that expression is their\ncreation—whatever services are performed (Greenstreet 1998;\nCushman and Hedemann 1995). Copyright raises other concerns. Even as\nthe law may license creation of an architectural object reflecting\ncore design aspects found in another object created by a different\narchitect, we may find morally blameworthy any cognizant\n“borrowing” without attribution or\npermission. Alternatively, we might view this as a routine episode in\nthe history of architectural copying without attribution or\npermission. The challenge is to define relevant obligations of one\narchitect to others, present or past.","Architect as judge in owner-contractor disputes.\nArchitects have a dual role, serving as designer and administrator of\narchitectural projects, and in this capacity may adjudicate between\nowner and contractor in matters of dispute. Standard issues concern\nconflicts of interest, grounds for adjudication, and criteria of\nfairness. Ethical issues of a particularly architectural\nstripe include the degree to which specifications are poorly satisfied\nsuch as warrants reckoning; maintenance of fealty to owners’\ninterests alongside fairness to contractors and to satisfactory\nrealization of one’s own design; and identification of virtues\nappropriate to judgment in design-related disputes, along with facets\nof being an architect that promote (or limit) such virtues.","Responsibility to others’ design. Architectural\nobjects often develop over time in cumulative and mutable fashion,\nthrough additions and alterations that—perhaps more frequently\nthan not—change the design of a different, original architect\n(or that of a prior alteration). For any particular changes, or in\nconsideration of design changes overall, we may stipulate obligations\nto respect original or prior intent and execution. One brand of such\nobligations, recognized in historic preservation and landmark laws,\nrequires that aesthetic concerns in the public interest trump private\ninterests. Key conceptual questions concern how to determine the\nsource and conditions of any such obligations—and the sorts of\nresponsibilities architects should have to existing structures. Those\nresponsibilities may extend to commitment to the integrity of work by\nfellow architects."],"section_title":"7. Architectural Ethics","subsections":[]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"8. Architecture and Social and Political Philosophy","subsections":[{"content":["While all artforms admit of a certain social character,\narchitecture enjoys a particularly social nature, and may even be said\nto be an intrinsically social artform. There are two\nprominent candidate reasons as to why this is so. For one, a central\naim of architecture is to design shelter and so meet a variety of\nsocial needs. For another, architecture as practice is a social\nprocess or activity as it engages people in interpersonal relations of\na social cast.","The first candidate reason stands or falls on whether, in\nfulfilling social needs, architecture is thereby rendered a social\nart. For an artform to be intrinsically social, any such need\nfulfilled should be critical rather than discretionary or\nextravagant. Thus, for example, addressing housing demands overall\nmeets the criticality test—though addressing design demands for\na third home does not. The first reason looks right because architects\noften integrate social needs into design thinking. Armed with socially\nminded intentions, they create built structures which serve myriad\nsocial ends. A difficulty arises, however, in consistently upholding\nsuch intentions as a mark of the social if (a) such intentions are\nunclear from experiencing architectural objects, instantiations, or\nrepresentations thereof, (b) built structures are repurposed, or (c)\nthere are architectural objects with no corresponding relevant\nintentions. (As an instance, we might consider “found”\narchitectural objects like inhabited caves.)","A second candidate reason that architecture is a social art is that\nprocesses of making architecture are thoroughly and ineluctably social\nphenomena, constituted by interactions of social groupings created and\ngoverned by social conventions and arrangements. On this view, the\nsocial nature of architecture consists in the status of the discipline\nas shaped by social convention—where such convention is\ndesignated by, and guides actions of, architects and other relevant\nagents. (This reason directly links the social nature of architecture\nto its social impact—hence to sociology of architecture; see §8.2.) Architectural phenomena are\nsocial, then, because they occur as a result of contracts, meetings,\nfirms, charettes, crits, juries, projects, competitions, exhibitions,\npartnerships, professional organizations, negotiations, workflow\norganization, division of labor, and myriad other conventional and\nagreement-bound purposive actions and groupings of architects and\nother architectural stakeholders. One might object that, on an\ninstitutional theory, all artforms are social in just these\nways. However, as played out in art worlds, institutional theories\ntell us what counts as an art object rather than how such objects are\nconstituted to begin with. Proponents of this candidate must rule out\na naïve architecture scenario, the possibility of a lone\narchitect who has no socially significant engagements such as shape\nher creations.","Either view is temporally sensitive. These parameters and how they\nconstitute architecture’s sociality will change over time, along\nwith vicissitudes in social needs, conventions, and relations."],"subsection_title":"8.1 Socially Constitutive Features of Architecture"},{"content":["Architecture as object and pursuit produces a great range of\neffects on social structures and phenomena, in particularly acute\nfashion in relation to housing, land use, and urban planning. In turn,\narchitecture is shaped by such social concerns as scarcity, justice,\nand social relations and obligations. Some of this shaping results\nfrom social group and institution requirements for space and the\nstructured organization thereof, to promote group or institutional\nfunction and identity (Halbwachs 1938). In addition, other social\nrequirements stem from architecture’s roles in meeting concerns\nand needs for society as a whole.","Causal direction. We might see social forces as\nprimarily shaping architecture or else architecture as primarily\nshaping social forces. Proponents of architecture as\n“shaper” suggest that architecture provides a means of\norganizing society, a core Modernist claim but also a thesis of\nbroader currency. Detractors counter that we cannot shape society\nthrough the built environment—or we ought not do so. What rests\non directionality is how we parse not only theoretical relations but\nalso practical consequences and perspectives concerning a host of\nsocial phenomena. To take one example, how we gauge and address the\npossibilities that architecture offers relative to social inequality\nis likely a function of whether architecture contributes to, or\ninstead reflects, social classes and social hierarchies. We might\nwonder whether architects can design so as to promote class\nequality—or solidarity, justice, autonomy, or other social\nphenomena as we might foster.","On a third, holistic option, causality runs in both directions. Two\nexamples of such are (a) systems analyses, which take built structures\nas social systems that contribute to social function, and (b)\nurban sociology, which takes the city en gros as social\nstructuring of space which shapes its habitants, who in turn shape the\ncity (Simmel 1903). As expanded to environmental sociology,\nthe suggestion is that built environments promote patterns of living,\nworking, shopping, and otherwise conducting commerce among groups and\nin relation to other individuals.","Other social science domains suggest attendant conceptual\nissues. For example, one sociological perspective takes relations of\nindividuals and groups to built structures to be analogous to\nconsumption (Essbach 2004); we may ask whether architectural objects\nenjoy a reception of this particular social sort, a range of such\nsorts (perhaps as context-dependent), or perhaps, on an individualist\nread, no sort we would call “social”. For another,\nsociology of architecture also studies the profession: the backgrounds\nand relations of architects and other stakeholders, norms governing\nbehavior, and social structures of an architecture world constitute a\nspecies of artworld. This last suggestion prompts the question as to\nwhat influence we should attribute to an architecture world on the\nstatus of architectural objects. The architecture world\nraises issues beyond those motivating Danto or Dickie, engaging many\nparties whose interests and preferences are not primarily aesthetic or\neven economic but driven by social, commercial, engineering, planning,\nand various other factors. For a third, a Science and Technology\nStudies perspective (Gieryn 2002) investigates how\narchitecture—primarily in its optimization focus, qua\nengineered technology—shapes knowledge formation (for example,\nin laboratory or university design) and organizes social behavior (for\nexample, in architecture for tourism or retail sales). Conceptual\nissues here include whether there are global principles of\noptimization of architectural design for social advancement, and what\nsorts of moral constraints are appropriate to such optimization."],"subsection_title":"8.2 Socially Efficacious Features on, and of, Architecture"},{"content":["That architecture has some political aspects is a widely\nheld, if not entirely uncontested thesis, with weaker and stronger\nvariants. One weak version suggests that designing built structures\nentails political engagement through interactions of architects and\nthe public. For example, architects solicit political support of\ngovernment officials for development projects, governments engage\narchitects to design built structures that express political\nprogrammatic messages, and citizens do political battle amongst\nthemselves over architectural designs or preservation decisions. A\nstronger version highlights a possible role for architecture as an\ninstrument of politics. Thus, Sparshott (1994) characterizes\narchitecture as “…above all the coercive organization of\nsocial space”. In other words, designing built structures\nentails political engagement through the control by force of behaviors\nand attitudes of people who interact with those structures.","That architecture might have any significant role in politics, or\nthe other way around, calls for explanation. One account stresses that\nthe two domains are oriented around utility-maximization. Utility\ncriteria deployed to judge the worth of architectural objects are\nexemplary subjects of democratic debate, policy analysis, or community\nconsensus. The appeal to utility is an advocacy strategy for\narchitectural design that dates to Bentham’s Panopticon\n(1787) or before. Further, traditional architectural promotion of\nurban and social planning may be linked to social utility criteria for\narchitectural quality; that relationship might run in either\ndirection. In distinct progressive and utopian traditions in\narchitectural thought (Eaton 2002), advancement of social utility is a\ncentral motivation in architectural attempts to realize idealistic\nvisions of modes of living and societal organization. (For a critique,\nsee Harries 1997.)","Power, control, and change. Architecture’s\npolitical cast is also manifest in use as a means of social\ncontrol. This is not an obvious use in societies where individuals\nfreely choose dwellings or other structures with which they\ninteract. The less choice available in this regard, the greater the\npossibility of defining people’s choices (a) concerning the\nbuilt environment they occupy and (b) as a function of that\nenvironment. Prominent such architectural types include prisons and\nrefugee camps. Some see potential in architecture for more globally\npromoting maintenance of power through behavior regulating norms that\nsuch built structures represent (Foucault 1975).","Even in generally free or open social settings, though, at the\nlevel of urban planning architecture indirectly determines behavior in\npolitically shaped ways. Architects and others planning urban or other\ndensely settled environments take into account such political aims as\nhonoring community values, promoting civic virtues, maximizing social\nutility, fulfilling professional or public responsibilities, and\nrespecting citizen or leadership preferences (Haldane 1990, Paden\n2001, Thompson 2012). The politically hued results of such planning\nand design efforts, whether pursued in authoritative, consultative, or\nparticipatory processes, are architectural objects that change,\nencourage, or reward particular behaviors.","Ideology and agency. Architecture is also used to\npromote political views, culture, or control, by conveying symbolic\nmessages of power, nationalism, liberation, cooperation, justice, or\nother political themes or notions (Wren c1670s). One issue concerns\nthe architect’s agency in promoting an official political\nideology. In government commissions, the architect generally cedes\ndesign control, at a certain point, to the government. Yet the\narchitect is the creator of record. This leaves open whether\narchitects so engaged are promoting the given ideology—or else\nmerely acting as proxies for such promotion. It may seem odd to\nsuggest that, from an aesthetic standpoint the design is of architect\nX but from a political standpoint the same design is not\nattributable to X.","Political agency among architects is a special version of the more\ngeneral issue of architect agency relative to clients, including as\nwell corporate and individual clients. Architects have obligations to\nthe client’s aesthetic and utility concerns, and in virtue of\nthose obligations, the responsibility, blame, and praise for a given\narchitectural object cannot be wholly attached to the architect\nalone. One question is what scenarios or conditions would need to\npertain to justify apportioning more or less agency—and,\ncorrespondingly, political or moral responsibility—to the\narchitect or to the client, in design and build phases of realizing an\narchitectural object. The phases matter. The design phase appears, at\nleast initially, to be the agency-wise province of the architect, and\nany post-build phase appears to be generally the province of the\nclient and any relevant user-base (until any such renovation or\nrepurposing as may occur). What happens in phases en route to\npost-build is murkier, though."],"subsection_title":"8.3 Architecture and the Political"}]},{"main_content":["Architectural Failure. Failed architecture is not\na straightforward subspecies of failed art or failed\nartifacts. Architectural objects may rate as aesthetic disasters yet\nin some overall sense as successes, unlike non-architecture art\nobjects. And architectural objects may cease to function—or\nnever have functioned at all—yet count as overall successes,\nunlike a range of (though not all) non-architecture artifacts. Another\nfeature of architectural failure—in keeping with general design\nphenomena—is that architectural objects may count as successes\nor failures depending on different states of affairs, context, or\nremarkably small differences. Thus, a given architectural object may\nbe a failure as an active and integral built structure but not as a\nruin (or vice-versa). This suggests that background\nintentions may matter at one early stage, and less so at later stages\nin the life of a built structure—and that failure may have one\ncriterion for architectural abstracta and other criteria for\ncounterpart concreta. Further, among architectural objects with\nstandard, closely related variants, some may fail while others\nsucceed—perhaps because of a minor distinction such as a\ngarishly painted exterior. A viable account of architectural failure\naccommodates such features or else devolves failure to the level of\nsome single dimension of architectural objects, such as their putative\nnature as art objects (failed or otherwise).","Corruption, Ruins, and Preservation. Architectural\nobjects as physically instantiated are corrupted or fall apart over\ntime, and may develop new forms in disrepair or as ruins. From an\ninclusivist, concretist standpoint, a ruin is not any lesser an\narchitectural object than its corresponding newly built structure. An\ninclusivism is available to the abstractist, too, though she will not\nsee them as the same object—and will rate them both as somehow\nlesser than the originary object. If we take them as the same\narchitectural objects, we need an account as to how they relate to one\nanother—apparently not by reference to intentions. Even if an\narchitect designed a path to a ruin state, the actual ruin-state would\nlikely take on a wholly different shape. Some may take this as an\nargument against inclusivism.","Architects typically embrace the Vitruvian premium on\nfirmitas and reasonably assume that built objects should\nendure—and that they serve intended functions for as long as is\ndesirable. That pair of assumptions in design thinking is at odds with\nconcretism, given corruption and decay of physical constructions as\nwell as routine repurposing in the lives of built structures. The\nfirst assumption is consistent with an abstractist vision of\neverlasting architectural objects. Endurance of serving intended\nfunctions is another story: for architectural abstracta, stipulation\nof repurposing may not change the nature of a given, selfsame\nobject. Depending on degrees of stringency in defining an\nobject’s parameters, corresponding changes in design may bring\nabout an entirely new object or nearby counterpart.","Corruption brings not only total destruction and absence of\npreviously intact built structures, but also enduring ruins or flawed,\ndamaged structures. There is a longstanding premium on ruins in\narchitectural culture as promoting historical perspective, nostalgia,\nand at least one style (Romanticism). Yet ruins fit awkwardly, if at\nall, into standard architectural ontologies. The cultural premium is\nhard to explain for the abstractist, for whom ruins represent\ndefective physical instantiations, which are already substandard in\nthe abstractist worldview. They are even harder to match up with a\nconcretist account as there aren’t underlying creative\nintentions to build (except in ironic or kitsch building of “new\nruins”). Corresponding intentions instead typically concern\npreservation, restoration, or elimination. Alternatively, Bicknell\n(2014) suggests we think of ruins as part-objects that, along with\nfull-blown “architectural ghosts”, represent past objects\nin their intact, built glory and as corresponded to creator\nintent. ","Preservation and conservation possibilities prompt additional\nconsiderations, such as whether restoration or maintenance of a built\nstructure sustains it as an authentic architectural whole—and if\nthis is independent of functional integrity, or holds for wholesale\nreconstructions (Wicks 1994); what conditions warrant preserving or\nconserving a built structure; and what principles guide warranted\nalterations or completions of built structures—and whether other\nconsiderations may include creativity, fancy, or sensitivity to\ncontemporary needs and context (Capdevila-Werning 2013). As concerns\ncompleting unfinished structures, one issue is whether it is possible\nto discern original design intent altogether. Taken together with\ncontemporary norms that shape our understanding of past architecture\n(Spector 2001), preservation and conservation are at least partly\nbound to present-day design conceptions.","Built Versus Natural Environment. We typically\ntake built and natural environments to be clearly distinct. This\ndistinction does at least two kinds of work in philosophy of\narchitecture. For one, it helps establish what sorts of things we\nwould discount as architecture even on an inclusivist\nconception—and even there, we might accept lived-in caves as\nfound architecture but reject most other elements of the\nnatural environment as non-architecture (because neither built nor\nfound). For another, we get a defined sense of natural contexts into\nwhich built environments fit (or not), without which any such notions\nof fit are incoherent. If this is a viable (and desirable)\ndistinction, it is perhaps less clear in what it consists. One\ncandidate view is that we may distinguish the kinds of environments by\ntheir different sorts of objects and properties: we find columns in\nbuilt environments and trees in natural environments and never the\nother way around. Alternatives highlight the ascribable functions and\nintent that mark built environments but not natural environments; or\ndifferent sorts of behavior and obligations attached to the two kinds\nof environments. While an artifact-centered view of architecture\nweighs in favor of functions and intent as the most relevant\ndistinction, decaying value of design intent over the life of a built\nstructure may give pause.","Human and Non-Human Architecture. What we\ntypically refer to as “architecture” is human\narchitecture. This raises the question as to whether human\narchitecture is assimilable to a larger class of animal-built\nstructures. That would suggest, in turn, that we could assess human\narchitecture—including settlement patterns, individual\nstructures, and built community environments—in ecological,\nanimal behavioral, and evolutionary terms (Hansell 2007). If these are\nfundamental vantage points for understanding human architecture, that\nwould suggest a need to translate all going accounts—whether\nfocused on aesthetics, utility, or other concerns—into\ncorresponding biological terms. One way to resist this move is to mark\nhuman architecture as a particularly human endeavor and\ncreation—likely by reference to intentionality, as flows into\naesthetic focus. However, this may just forestall the question as to\nhow to account for that wrinkle—a particularly talented\nanimal builder with notable design intent—in the larger story of\nanimal builders most of whom have less or no such intent.","Environmental Psychology as Magic Pill. Another\nscientific challenge to traditional philosophy of architecture emerges\nin environmental psychology, which identifies ways that environmental\nfactors such as color, shape, light, and circulatory pattern shape our\nvisual reactions and behavioral patterns within and around the built\nenvironment. From such empirical insights, we can fashion constraints\non architectural design principles that guide architectural creation,\nand devise corresponding solutions to particular design problems. As\narchitects learn to exploit this information to advance design, we may\nask whether an architectural object may be optimized by the lights of\nenvironmental psychology yet—and even\nconsequently—deficient in some other, architecturally\ncentral respect. Satisfying an architectural object’s intended\nfunction or maximizing its utility may well include, or be advanced\nby, keen attention to environmental factors that influence attitudes\nto and use of that object. By contrast, moral or aesthetic\ndeficiencies where environmental conditions are optimal seem real\npossibilities. A resulting question is whether, and to what degree, we\ncould or should abandon moral or aesthetic drivers in architectural\ndesign if in the future we could design architectural objects to\noptimize environmental factors and so meet cognitive and emotional\nneeds, thereby enhancing an architectural object’s reception but\nat moral or aesthetic expense."],"section_title":"9. Further Issues in Philosophy of Architecture","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Introduction\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Over the course of Western philosophy, including the history of\\naesthetics, architecture has largely failed to attract sustained,\\ndetailed attention—particularly as compared with other\\nartforms. Neither philosophical issues prompted by architecture, nor\\nthe fit of architectural phenomena into larger philosophical debates,\\nhave captured the philosophical imagination as have, for example,\\nliterature or painting. Some contributions across the span of Western\\nphilosophy—including those of Wolff and Schopenhauer—rank\\nas historically significant; other, more recent accounts are\\nbroad-ranging and gravid with conceptual concerns, including those of\\nScruton and Harries. Further, some philosophers have even dabbled in\\narchitectural projects: Dewey contributed to plans for the Chicago\\nLaboratory School, Wittgenstein collaborated on designing a house for\\nhis sister, and Bentham sketched the Panopticon design as a plan for\\nprison reform. Yet the overall state of philosophical reflection on\\narchitecture—even in the present day—is less lively than\\nlike discussions focused on artforms of far more recent origin, such\\nas film or comics. Some philosophers working in the Continental\\ntradition have offered accounts of the experience of architecture or\\nits social ramifications; a deficiency is more marked in analytic\\naesthetics.\",\n \"For more on the background and context of conceptual explorations\\nof architecture, see the supplementary documents:\",\n \"\\nPhilosophy of Architecture in Historical Perspective\\nPhilosophy and the Tradition of Architectural Theory\\n \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.1 Architecture as Relatively Neglected by Philosophy\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \" This essay refers generally to the basic creative output of\\narchitects, in any (unspecified) form, as “architectural\\nobjects”. This is in parallel with the term “art\\nobjects” in use, across aesthetics and philosophy of art, to\\nrefer to objects created by artists independent of the artform and\\nwithout regard to ontological or other discussions where other terms\\nmay evoke one or another particular stance. It may turn out that\\n“architectural object” proves value-laden. Yet this is\\nless likely than with common alternatives in the literature:\\n“architectural works”, perhaps wedded to creator intent,\\nstatus as extant or integral whole, or aesthetic ranking; or\\n“buildings”, certainly wedded to built, hence concrete,\\nstructures. “Built structures” is used here (except in\\nhistorical reference) to refer to the generic built output resulting\\nfrom architectural design, in recognition of a domain some view as\\nbroader than buildings per se.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.2 A Word on Terminology\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"Fundamental questions about the nature of architecture motivate\\nmuch of contemporary philosophy of architecture: what sort of\\nenterprise architecture is; whether architecture has essential\\nfeatures; what kinds of things architecture makes—yielding the\\nfurther issue as to whether architecture always, only sometimes, or\\nnever is an artform; what renders architecture distinct from other\\nartforms (if it is one); and whether architecture includes all built\\nstructures.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. What is Architecture?\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"One approach to grasping the true nature of architecture is to\\ndefine it in terms of the discipline. We may embrace the disciplinary\\ndeterminism of the British architect Cedric Price: “Architecture\\nis what architects do”. Defining the discipline or practice of\\narchitecture may seem a simple empirical affair. Even if we have\\ndifficulty assessing what architectural objects or products are, we\\ncan point to thousands of architects over several millennia around the\\nworld engaged in one or another sets of activities that conventionally\\nhave been associated with architectural practice, and generate a long\\ndisjunctive claim about what architects do. An empirically rooted\\napproach has a long history: Vitruvius devises his normative account\\nof the virtuous architect on the basis of his familiarity with\\nthen-contemporary practice. The same is true of other traditional\\naccounts of virtue in architects or builders, as in the sixth to\\neighth century Indian Mānasāra\\n(मानसार) (Acharya 1928) and\\neleventh century Chinese Yingzao fashi\\n(營造法式) (Feng 2012). In the present-day,\\nsociology of the architectural profession offers a detailed empirical\\nperspective (Gutman 1988), and this can be extended to a sociology of\\narchitectural worlds, modeled on Becker’s sociology of art\\nworlds. \",\n \"A problem arises, though, if we look to history or sociology for a\\nunified account with common features of an architectural\\ndiscipline. While architectural practice has remained stable in\\ncertain respects, change over its history greatly limits common\\nfeatures, perhaps, to a core set of basic tools and rudimentary\\nprinciples of structural engineering. This suggests that, at root, the\\npractice of architecture must involve engineering or related\\ndesign. But architecture can’t be reduced to a form of\\nengineering, if we think architectural ideals, taste, and expertise\\ncontribute something over and above engineering facts, rules, and\\npractical knowledge. These further contributions suggest an art or\\nart-like role for architectural practice. However, the historical\\nrecord is mixed on the matter of whether architects are at the same\\ntime pursuing art (or what we now consider as art) or should be\\nthought of as artists. Moreover, the historical record and resulting\\ndisjunctive claim do not address cases where even the most basic tools\\nor structural principles are not deployed. Some such cases of not\\nobserving basic structural principles, as fantasy architecture, may be\\ndeemed marginal; other such cases, as landscape architecture, are\\nnot.\",\n \"Another dimension of defining architecture as a practice is\\nspecifying the sorts of structures that architects design. At a bare\\nminimum, we can say that they feature some connection to human\\nuse. But attempts to render this as non-trivial introduce further\\npuzzles (see §2.3).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.1 The Sort of Enterprise Architecture Is\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"A contrasting definitional approach suggests that, as a matter of\\nreasoned judgment, we can attribute to architectural practice—or\\nto the domain of architectural objects—core or even essential\\nfeatures. A dominant reading of the Vitruvian tradition has it that\\narchitecture embodies and is best understood through the three aspects\\nof beauty, structural integrity, and utility. An essentialist variant\\nsuggests that architects must observe all three aspects or that any\\nstructure aspiring to architectural status features all three. Other\\nprominent views advance a single aspect, generally function or form,\\nas primary. Thus, functionalist architectural doctrine places function\\nor utility at the heart of the architectural enterprise, with other\\naspects of architecture subordinate thereto.\",\n \"A hard-line functional essentialist holds that, if a built\\nstructure has no function, then it is not architecture. As a modest\\ndissent, Graham (1989) proposes that such a structure is an\\narchitectural work—but a failure at such. One brand of\\nmore radical rejection suggests that some architectural\\nobjects—perhaps including follies, memorials, or\\nmonuments—need have no function at all. As a competing\\nessentialism, formalist architectural doctrine suggests that an object\\nis architectural just in case it features forms proper to the\\ndomain. A common interpretation says that forms proper to architecture\\ncan be chosen off a stylistic menu (or combination of menus), leaving\\narchitects great latitude while upholding the possibility of\\ncontrasting, non-architectural forms (this is difficult to square,\\nhowever, with some experimental architecture).\",\n \"In weighting architecture’s aspects as essential, core, or\\nsome lesser status, a related question is whether one or another\\naspect is primary or necessary to any of the others. As Graham notes\\n(1989), the traditional question in architectural theory of whether\\nform trumps or precedes function may be cast in such terms.\",\n \"Against these traditional brands of essentialism, two further kinds\\nof doubt may be cast. First, it may be that the Vitruvian triad, or\\nsome single aspect thereof, does not represent the right list—we\\nshould include either further aspects or different aspects\\naltogether. Alternatives might include dimensions such as context,\\nrelations among architectural objects, systemic features,\\nsustainability, and psychological or social features. Some theorists\\npropose other candidates as essential architectural aspects, including\\nspace (Zevi 1978) or the organizing concept of the parti\\n(Malo 1999).\",\n \"Second, it may be that essentialism represents a false start. On\\none non-essentialist view, the nature of an architectural object is as\\nwe experience it, a matter upon which we may agree but which depends\\nin part on subjective perception and reception of, and interaction\\nwith, the work (Scruton 1979/2013). This leaves open the possibility\\nthat architecture has essential aspects but we simply don’t\\nexperience them as such. A more determined nominalist has it that\\ndiversity among architectural objects is sufficient to quash the\\nprospect that they share any essential aspects.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.2 Architecture and Essential Features\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Yet another way to pose the question of what architecture is\\nfocuses on the sorts of things architectural objects are. In\\nparticular, and relative to architecture’s possible status as\\nartform, architecture as a domain may be defined variously in terms of\\nits objects being art objects (or not), being distinctive sorts of art\\nobjects, or belonging exhaustively to a special class of\\nbuilt structures (rather than including all such structures). \",\n \"Whether architecture always, only sometimes, or never is an\\nartform. At the negative extreme, architecture may be viewed\\nlike any engineered artifact that only incidentally bears aesthetic\\nvalue. Any view of even slightly more positive valence bows in the\\ndirection of intent to generate aesthetic value. The classic Vitruvian\\nview, for example, has it that engineered design and aesthetic design\\nare conjoint intentional elements of architectural objects. At the\\npositive extreme, that is, the suggestion that architecture is always\\nand in all ways an art, we may lose any means of discriminating among\\nbuilt structures as art or not. This is a troubling prospect to\\nexclusivists who see architecture as a high art only (see below). \",\n \"In the negative camp, S. Davies (1994) argues that mere production\\nof occasional artworks does not suffice to constitute an\\nartform—crafts being a notable example—and the aim of\\narchitecture is frequently, or even typically, not the production of\\nart but useful items that do not aim at artistic value. In the\\npositive camp, Stecker (2010) responds that we can carve out a\\nsubclass of architectural objects that are art even if not all are. He\\nadds, by way of historical argument, that architecture was included\\namong the artforms, by early agreement among aestheticians. We might\\nhave grounds for dismissing architecture from the canonical list if\\nthe nature of architecture has changed, and in this vein Stecker notes\\na rising tide of building design that is functionally oriented without\\nsignificant aesthetic investment. A further alternative is to say that\\narchitectural objects are all art works, or at least intended as such,\\nwithin bounds. To make sense of the term “vernacular\\narchitecture” requires that we see architectural objects as\\ntypically art objects, while we make allowance for a broad class of\\narchitectural objects that are low-art rather than high-art. \",\n \"If the negative view is correct, then we need at least a workable\\nset of criteria by which to discriminate architectural objects as\\nart. To this end, we may draw on our intuitions, norms, or socially\\nexpressed views. Further considerations may include the pertinent\\ncultural tradition in which an architectural object is created,\\nwhether particular sorts of aesthetic qualities count more towards\\nartwork status, or whether there is instrumental benefit in\\nconsidering the object as art.\",\n \"What renders architecture distinct from other artforms (if\\nit is one). If architecture counts among the artforms, we may\\nthink that it has distinctive features as such. For example, Scruton\\n(1979/2013) suggests that architecture is a\\nnon-representational artform since it need not—and\\ngenerally does not—represent any content. Despite\\narchitecture’s non-representational status, Scruton agrees with\\nLanger (1953) (and anticipates Goodman (1985)) that architectural\\nobjects can express or refer; in his view, to thoughts associated with\\nexpressed properties. Others focus on architecture’s distinctive\\ncommitments to creator or user engagement. Winters (2011) sees\\narchitecture as a “critical” artform, requiring the\\ncreator’s engagement in the environment where other artforms may\\ntolerate a creator’s detached stance. Another distinctive mark\\nof architecture among the artforms is its nontraditional status as a\\nnarrative medium: the design of circulatory pathways allows\\narchitectural objects to communicate a sequence of events through the\\nmovement of visitors or inhabitants.\",\n \"Whether architecture includes all built\\nstructures. Among the issues noted here, that of the greatest\\nconsequence is the question of what counts among architectural\\nobjects. On an inclusivist or expansive conception,\\narchitectural objects are those designed objects ranging over the\\nwhole of the built environment; on an exclusivist conception,\\nthe range describes only some coherent subset of the whole of the\\nbuilt environment. Examples of exclusivist subsets include (a) only\\nbuilt structures that people can occupy (typically: houses, temples,\\noffice buildings, factories, etc.), or (b) only built structures\\ndesigned in primarily aesthetic (rather than purely functional)\\nterms. An inclusivist conception entails a vastly larger architectural\\ndomain of objects—and areas of practice and inquiry.\",\n \"Proponents of exclusivity (S. Davies 1994, Scruton 1979/2013) are\\neager to protect architecture as the preserve of just those objects in\\nthe built environment with abundant, apparent, and appreciable\\naesthetic qualities; clear creator’s intentions to generate art;\\nor the panache of high art and engagement with art historical\\ntrajectories. Stecker (2010) offers a putative variation, allowing\\nthat as a broader creative medium architecture has an inclusivist\\ncharacter—though, as an artform, architecture is\\nexclusivist. Scruton, for his part, identifies a specific intent to\\nexalt: architecture as a pursuit has lofty goals or purposes,\\nsuch that architectural objects do as well. One commonsense\\njustification for exclusivity overlaps with an institutionalist\\nperspective: laymen and connoisseurs alike can differentiate between\\nthe striking work of an architect and the humdrum, cookie-cutter\\nbuilding design of a draftsman.\",\n \"Arguments for inclusivity include Carlson’s appeal (1999) to\\nconsider the class of architectural objects as of a continuum with the\\nbroader class of everyday designed objects, where everything admits of\\npossible aesthetic appreciation. Then, contra Stecker, we can\\neffortlessly count all built structures as architecture, though some\\nsuch things—like garage doors or drainage ditches—will\\nneither look like, nor be, art. Another line of attack is to respond\\nto exclusivists that architects simply have intentions to create\\nobjects that are, in one aspect, art—and that they may fail as\\nart is beside the point. Further, it may be that recognizing\\nintentions is irrelevant to judging a built structure as architecture,\\nas when we judge as architecture the vernacular structures of foreign\\ncultures. In response to Scruton’s exaltation criterion, the\\ninclusivist may note that for all artforms, there are typically\\ninnumerable objects in the domain with no such goals—and\\npossibly no goals at all. Finally, inclusivism has its own commonsense\\njustification: we standardly refer to a creator of a mundane built\\nstructure as the architect, which seems less a linguistic shortcut\\nthan recognition of the training and ethos attached to the creator of\\narchitectural objects.\",\n \"It is not clear how to craft intermediary positions between\\ninclusivism and exclusivism, given that the various brands of\\nexclusivism are not absolute and test cases are instead subject to\\njudgment along any number of parameters. Stecker’s exclusivism\\nfor only architecture as art represents one such relativized\\nstance. Inclusivism, by contrast—along with any attached views\\non, for example, architectural appreciation or the nature of aesthetic\\nsuccess in architecture—is an absolutist doctrine. All elements\\nof the built environment—and much else besides—must count\\nas architectural objects, or else the view fails. \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.3 The Kinds of Things Architecture Makes\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"The metaphysics of architecture covers a surprising range of\\nquestions for those who see in architecture no more than\\nmetaphysically mundane built structures or stones, wood, metal, and\\nconcrete arranged in a pleasing fashion: the nature of architectural\\nobjects and their properties and types, the relations of architectural\\nparts and wholes, and the prospect of architectural causality.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Metaphysics\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Given the familiarity of architecture in, and as constitutive of,\\nour physical surroundings, it is strongly intuitive to think of\\narchitectural objects simply as buildings, in the way we think of the\\nobjects of the sculpture artform as sculptures, or the objects of\\ncutlery as forks, knives, and spoons. Yet such intuitions may be\\nmisguided. For one, though some built structures—including\\nroadways, bazaars, and newspaper kiosks—are not buildings\\nper se, we may take them to have architectural properties and\\nthereby consider them as architectural objects. For another, the\\noutputs of architecture are not limited to built structures but\\ninclude as well models, sketches, and plans, and this variety prompts\\nquestions as to whether these are all reasonably considered\\narchitectural objects and which, if any, such form of output\\nrepresents a primary sort of object in architecture. A third\\nconsideration is the focus in architecture, not solely on whole or\\nindividual buildings, but also on parts of buildings and buildings\\nconsidered in context, among other buildings and in landscapes\\n(downwards and upwards compositionality or modularity). A fourth\\nconsideration is that—as with music and photography—where\\nmultiple instantiations of a given work are possible, we may dispute\\nwhether the work is identical to the instancing built objects or else\\nto the common entity (e.g., plan) on which those instances are\\nmodeled. In addition to such challenges, the intuitive view must best\\nalternative views.\",\n \"Instantiating architectural objects. To address\\none sort of question about the identity of an architectural object, we\\nseek kind-wise criteria that establish when an object is\\narchitectural, instead of being non-architectural altogether\\nor only derivatively so. To address another sort of identity question,\\nwe look for instance-wise criteria that establish when an\\nobject is this or that singular object, or an instance of a multiple\\nobject. Ready criteria for identifying object instances in\\narchitecture include historical, environmental, stylistic, and formal\\nfeatures—all of which may be read as signaling intentions to\\ndesign particular, self-contained architectural objects. One issue,\\nhowever, is whether traditional criteria (or others as may be posed)\\nare sufficiently specific so as to skirt vagueness problems that all\\nsuch artifacts may face (Thomasson 2005) and provide markers of being\\na bona fide instance of a multiple work or a replica of all\\nother bona fide instances (Goodman 1968/1976). \",\n \"Architectural objects as ontologically\\ndistinctive. Yet another way to pick out architectural\\nobjects is to set them apart from other art objects or artifacts.\\nAssuming there is more than one art ontology (see\\nLivingston 2013), we might look to define a distinctive architectural\\nontology by reference to specifically architectural qualities, such as\\n“mass” (degrees of heaviness and lightness) or\\ndirectedness (in circulatory pathways); or utility considerations,\\nsuch as functional design, use, and change; or everyday artifactual\\nfeatures. An inclusivist may add features special to the built\\nenvironment beyond the realm of buildings.\",\n \"Kinds of architectural ontologies.\\nArchitecture’s distinctive qualities may help sort among\\ncandidate ontologies. One option is concretism, which—in keeping\\nwith standard causal efficacy claims and expressed intentions of\\narchitects, clients, and users—suggests that architectural\\nobjects are either built structures or, on one variant, otherwise\\nphysically instantiated designs for such structures (such as\\nmodels). Concretism is supported by an artifactual ontology that\\nsubsumes architectural objects into the class of objects that are the\\nproduct of intentions, designs, and choices (on the view that\\nall art objects are best so understood, see Dutton 1979,\\nS. Davies 1991, Thomasson 1999, and Levinson 2007.) One version of\\narchitectural artifactualism identifies buildings as systems (Handler\\n1970). As against concretism, intentionality may be the mark of\\nmaterially constituted, designed architectural objects but that need\\nnot commit us to their existence alone or their primacy among such\\nobjects. Moreover, taking intentions as determinative leaves the\\nconcretist with the problem of shifting intentions and unintended\\ngoals attached to built structures over time.\",\n \"Abstractist alternatives follow a well-worn path in aesthetics\\n(Kivy 1983; Dodd 2007; critics include S. Davies 1991; Trivedi 2002;\\nKania 2008; D. Davies 2009) and accommodate an expansive architectural\\ndomain that includes historical, fantasy, and unbuilt works. Per\\nclassic Platonism, abstractism allows identification of an\\narchitectural object and concrete counterparts—including\\nmultiple replicas—by reference to a single, fixed, and\\nunchanging background source of what real world structures (or fantasy\\nstructures) are and should look like.\",\n \"Against abstractism, some architectural objects are apparently\\nsingular because historically and geographically contingent (Ingarden\\n1962); it is unclear what an experiential account of\\narchitectural abstracta looks like; and abstracta are not created\\nwhereas architectural objects are. De Clercq (2012) further proposes\\nthat, even if there were abstract architectural objects, we\\ndon’t refer to them. If I refer to “10 Downing\\nStreet”, my expression picks out the built structure, not the\\nplan, nor any other abstract representation or entity to which the\\nbuilt structure at 10 Downing Street corresponds. However, a plausible\\nalternate interpretation of the referent is as “the abstract\\nobject physically instantiated by the structure I am perceiving (or\\nhave perceived)”.\",\n \"As an alternative to an abstractist-concretist divide, a pluralist\\nontology (per Danto 1993), allows “material\\nbases” and “aesthetic ideas” as different sorts of\\narchitectural objects. Goodman’s account (1968/1976) lends\\nitself to a pluralist, or at least aspectual, reading. He suggests\\nthat, but for certain conditions unmet, an architectural object could\\nbe identified as those structures that perfectly realize a\\ncorresponding plan or other suitable architectural notation (see §4). On his nominalist view, the\\nobjects turn out to be the built structures but an available realist\\ninterpretation—which may better accommodate the multiples that\\nare key to his story—takes the objects to be the class of such\\nstructures. \",\n \"Another alternative suggests that architecture consists in actions\\nor performances (per Currie 1989; D. Davies 2004), rendering\\nderivative any concrete structures or “traditional”\\nabstract entities. Lopes (2007) proposes the possibility of an events\\nor temporal parts ontology for a kind of built structure that passes\\nin and out of existence, though De Clercq (2008, 2012) counters that\\nsuch can be rendered in a material objects ontology through temporal\\nindexing. Yet other ontologies are contextual or social\\nconstructivist, proposing that architectural objects exist, beyond\\ntheir status as structured materials, in virtue of ways our reality is\\nframed, psychologically, socially, or culturally (per\\nHartmann 1953, Margolis 1958). A shift in any such frame may bring\\nabout shifting identity in an architectural object, in the manner of\\nBorgesian art indiscernibles (Danto 1964), and it may count in favor of\\nthose ontologies that architectural indiscernibles are all around, in\\nthe form of repurposed built structures.\",\n \"Picking an ontology has wide-ranging significance, relative to\\nquestions of material constitution, composition, part-whole relations,\\nproperties, and relations in architecture, as well as the character of\\narchitectural notation, language, cognition, or behavior; there are\\nalso ramifications for simplicity and complexity, and the nature of\\nornament, proportion, context, and style. In architectural practice,\\nthe ontology of choice also colors perspectives on such matters as\\nintellectual property rights, collaborative work, and preservation of\\narchitectural structures. \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.1 Ontology\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"On one customary view of architectural objects, individual built\\nstructures (or their abstract counterparts) represent the primary unit\\nof our aesthetic or, for that matter, any architectural, concern; all\\nother ways of carving up the architectural world are derivative. This\\nview is consonant with an equally customary perspective identifying\\narchitectural objects with architectural works. Alternative views\\ninclude a “mereology”, in which parts of built structures\\n(or their abstract counterparts) constitute independent architectural\\nobjects; and an environmental contextualism, in which collections of\\nbuilt structures (or their abstract counterparts) constitute\\nindependent objects. Both alternatives share a commitment to some form\\nof compositionality among architectural objects, that putting bits\\ntogether yields aesthetically meaningful and utility-bearing\\ncomposites, and taking them apart yields like results. In this, the\\nmereological view represents a downward-compositionalism,\\nsuggesting that architectural aesthetics demands our focus on\\nstructural or other elements that can be meaningfully\\ndistinguished. Environmental contextualism represents an\\nupward-compositionalism, suggesting that architectural\\naesthetics cannot be pursued entirely separately from the aesthetics\\nof cities or towns (per Scruton 1979/2013).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.2 Part-Whole Relations\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Questions about causality may seem out of place in discussions of\\nimmobile objects, such as most architecture represents. Yet\\narchitectural objects appear to have a role in causing events to\\nhappen or other things to come into being. For example,\\nsocio-psychological evidence suggests that architectural objects cause\\nbehavior, and much of architectural design is predicated on this\\nclaim. A further question is whether one architectural object may\\n“cause” another. Thus, the presence of one or more\\narchitectural objects might have a causal effect on the genesis or\\ncharacter of one or more further works by dint of social utility,\\nplanning needs, or aesthetic drivers. If true, then—as with\\nconsequentialism in ethics—further questions arise regarding the\\nrange of causal possibilities. Where ethicists ask whether a bad may\\ngenerate a good, we may ask whether the presence or construction of a\\nfunctionally or aesthetically impoverished architectural object might\\noccasion the presence or construction of a more useful or pleasing\\narchitectural object.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.3 Causality\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"The notion that there is or should be an architectural\\nlanguage—or more than one—has a provenance dating to\\nancient times. In classic form, the architecture-as-language thesis\\nruns from the Vitruvian suggestion that the orders present rules for\\ncombination and ordering of architectural parts, through\\nAlberti’s rhetoric-inspired model for architectural description\\n(van Eck 2000), and an analogy common among Renaissance and early\\nmodern authors (such as Wren) of architectural rules and expressive\\ncapacity with the Latin language. Lavin (1992) suggests that\\nQuatremère de Quincy (1803) develops the thesis, from a\\ntraditional view of the classical orders as grammatical building\\nblocks directly representing primitive structures, to a modern view of\\nstructural elements broadly representing social and moral ideas and\\nprinciples. Variations of the thesis range over elements of an\\narchitectural language, how it may be used, and from whence it may be\\nderived.\",\n \"The core idea, in its most prominent form, is that architecture as\\na corpus of design ideas (realized or otherwise) features a set of\\nfundamental design and style elements which can be combined and\\nrelated according to a set of rules (syntax), capable of constituting\\nor parlaying meaning (semantics), and subject to contextual\\nsensitivity and internal or relational constraints on deployment and\\nrealization (pragmatics). Beyond these structural parallels with basic\\nfacets of natural language, it is held that the purposes and\\npossibilities of architecture qua language yield further\\nparallels, best explained by the notion that architecture has, or even\\nis, a language.\",\n \"Proponents of such views tend to subscribe, however, to defenses\\nrooted in one or another feature of language. On\\nsyntactically-inspired views—the perspectives most indebted to\\nthe Vitruvian account—there is at least one architectural\\ngrammar or set of rules for guiding proper assemblage of parts and\\norientation, relation, and combination of whole architectural\\nobjects. Some late twentieth century architectural theory embraced a\\ngrammar framework (Alexander et al. 1977; Hillier and Hanson 1984);\\nsuch a view also underwrites a formalist vision for CAAD (Mitchell\\n1990). Adherents of the\\nview (Summerson 1966) assign themselves the central task of\\nidentifying such rules. Even if this is achieved, though, a greater\\npuzzle is whether there are identifiably preferable\\nsyntaxes—and what the criteria should look like. \",\n \"On a semantics-inspired view, architectural objects or their\\ncomponent parts bear meanings. A primary motivation for this view is\\nthat, like objects of other artforms, architectural objects are\\nexpressive, which suggests that what they express is meaning (Donougho\\n1987). Proponents point to an array of architectural meanings,\\ninternal or external to the object. The former tells us something\\nabout the architectural object (its function or internal composition)\\nor how it relates to other architectural objects (stylistic\\nconventions); the latter tells us something about the world, as for\\nexample, national or cultural associations (per\\ngeographically variant design vocabularies), theological or spiritual\\nsignificance (per religious design vocabularies), or\\nper Hegel (1826), the Absolute Spirit. A more ambitious\\nproposal (Baird 1969) has it that architectural objects exhibit such\\nsemantic phenomena as metaphor, metonymy, or ambiguity.\",\n \"Goodman (1985) proposes that buildings have meaning in that they\\nfunction symbolically relative to properties, feelings, or ideas,\\nsometimes through “standard” denotation, as when\\nrepresenting symbolically (whether as building part or whole) some\\nother object in the world. Primarily, though, buildings function\\nsymbolically through exemplification (literal or explicit denotation)\\nor expression (metaphorical exemplification) of properties of ideas,\\nsentiments, or objects in the world. Buildings only constitute\\narchitecture per se, in Goodman’s view, if they bear\\nmeaning in one or more of these ways. While Goodman may have\\nidentified a denotative role for buildings, this is not clearly a\\nsemantic role. \",\n \"A third approach, rooted in semiotics, emphasizes the role of\\narchitectural objects as signs that prompt spectator behavior (Koenig\\n1964, 1970) or indicate aspects of themselves, such as function (Eco\\n1968). In either case, architectural objects are taken to operate\\nas communicative systems (Donougho 1987). A semiotics program was\\nembraced by the late 20th century postmodernist movement in\\narchitecture (Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, 1972/1977; Jencks\\n1977).\",\n \"The architectural language thesis, in its various forms, is widely\\ndiscredited in recent philosophy of architecture. To begin with,\\narchitecture features some qualities and exhibits some phenomena\\nresembling those of natural language, but the parallels are neither\\ncomprehensive nor fully compelling. On the syntactic side,\\narchitecture may feature some brand of compositionality but different\\nparts of architectural objects do not appear to function as do phrases\\nor clauses (Donougho 1987). Syntactic “wholes” do no\\nbetter, as there are no architectural assertions (Scruton\\n1979/2013). As regards semantics, no likely candidate for an\\narchitectural vocabulary regularly yields any specific class or\\ninstance of meaning. Whereas for Vitruvius the Ionic order connotes\\nfemale sensibility, it has a scholarly or deliberative meaning for\\nRenaissance architects, “gravitas” for Blondel\\n(1675–1683), and good governance for the architects of New\\nYork’s City Hall. Nor are there truth conditions such as might\\nsupply the meaning of a well-defined architectural sequence (Taurens\\n2008). It’s not even clear that architectural communication is\\nbest understood as sequential; Langer (1967), for example,\\nsuggests that the symbolic communication of architectural objects is\\ninstead holistic. As for pragmatics, there is no clear parallel with\\nimplicature or related phenomena, hence architecture is incapable of\\nthe accuracy or concision of expression we associate with language\\n(Clarke and Crossley 2000). Finally, relative to semiotics, not\\nall—or even many—buildings signify and we would only\\nwant some to do so. \",\n \"On the bright side, it’s not clear that we should want\\narchitecture to be more language-like. Regarding semantics, whatever\\nwe gain in fixing particular meanings to architectural objects, we\\nstand to lose in fungibility of their forms. Regarding syntax,\\nadherence to grammars brings the utility of standards and,\\nper Scruton and Harries, a template for the community’s\\nvoice—but for some may represent stifling constraints on the\\naesthetic imagination.\",\n \"In the end, it is useful to ask what work we expect the\\narchitecture-as-language thesis to do. One view (Alexander et\\nal. 1977; Alexander 1979) takes the thesis to underscore the robust\\nnature of design patterns and known design solutions and, for a given\\nculture, a common vocabulary (Donougho 1987). However, it may be\\nsufficient to highlight ways in which architecture is like a\\nlanguage, though they do not add up to an architectural language\\n(Forty 2000). If so, then the thesis works best as a powerful metaphor\\nrather than as literal truth. \",\n \"An alternate take on linguistic phenomena in architecture appears\\nin Goodman’s proposal (1968) that we think of notational systems\\nor schemes for the arts as symbolic systems with potentially\\nlanguage-like features. Goodman suggests that architecture is a\\nborderline case of an allographic artform, as its notational\\nschemes—in the form of plans—are intended to guarantee\\nthat all objects as are compliant are genuine instances of the\\nwork. (Said intention, Goodman proposes, is not fulfilled.) That an\\nobject instance the work just when compliant with the notation would\\nindicate the notation’s satisfaction of syntactic and semantic\\ncriteria providing requisite grounds for identity across instances,\\nand signal a corresponding insignificance of historical context and\\nconditions of production to the object’s identity. Goodman, for\\nhis part, balks at taking architecture to be truly allographic given\\nthe core role of history and context in generating particular\\nstructures, and notational ambiguity that marks the analog medium of\\ntraditional plans. Digital design may well resolve the ambiguity\\nproblem, however, and allow indexing for history and context,\\nrendering architecture allographic per Goodmanian criteria\\n(S. Fisher 2000b). The term\\n“architectural language” then takes on a\\ndifferent—and more plausible—sense.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Architectural Language and Notation\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Formalism and Anti-formalism\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"In its most general sense, formalism works in architecture as it\\ndoes (or doesn’t) in other artforms. Thus, architectural\\nformalism suggests that the sum total of aesthetic properties of an\\narchitectural object are or arise from formal properties, such that\\nour aesthetic judgments are warranted based on experience and\\nassessment of just those properties. As architectural objects are\\ntypically non-representational and designed with manipulation and\\nrelation of forms as a primary task, it is natural that their formal\\nproperties be seen as playing a central role in our aesthetic\\nappreciation of them. The question posed to the traditional\\n(“hard”) formalist is whether those properties are\\nunique or at least dominant drivers of aesthetic properties\\nand judgment, a question underlined by important roles of history,\\nstyles, and other contexts in our grasp of the architectural\\nenterprise and individual architectural objects. Our aesthetic\\njudgment of I. M. Pei’s Louvre Pyramids is surely to some degree\\nin reaction to their “pure” form but—for the aware\\nspectator—perhaps just as much in reaction to their relationship\\nto historical context (the Giza pyramids as emblematic of pyramidal\\nform in architecture, and of monumental architecture altogether) or\\nsetting (in contrast to the ornate neo-Baroque Louvre buildings that\\nsurround them, but in keeping with traditional French emphasis on\\ngeometric form in design).\",\n \"Variants of architectural formalism take formal properties as the\\nproperties of (or arising from) the material or physical properties of\\nbuilt structures (as consonant with concretism), or as the properties\\nof (or arising from) the total properties specified by a set of formal\\nparameters we identify with the architectural object (as consonant\\nwith abstractism). Further architectural strains are characterized by\\nmoderation (per Zangwill 2001), suggesting that some\\narchitectural objects are best understood by appealing to their formal\\nproperties, others not; or by assimilation of canonically non-formal\\nproperties to a formalist scheme (in the manner of Levinson’s\\n“indicated structures”; see S. Fisher 2000b); or by a\\n“mereological” view wherein some parts of a given\\narchitectural object may be best understood and judged by their formal\\nproperties, others not. For the merelogico-formalist, it might count\\nin favor of considering such parts as independent architectural\\nobjects that we can judge those parts on a formal basis alone.\",\n \"Formalism appears in some traditional architectural theories as a\\nnormative practical or critical guideline, namely, that our best\\ndesign thinking takes as central an architectural object’s\\nshape, color, and other formal elements. Other, non-formal aspects of\\nan architectural object are discounted as contributing to its\\nsuccess. Mitrovic (2011, 2013) embraces a normative formalist approach\\nto criticism, on the grounds that the deeply visual nature of much\\ncognition militates against basing appreciation or evaluation of\\narchitectural objects exclusively or primarily on features we\\nunderstand through non-visual means (such as context or history\\nprovide). \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.1 Formalism\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"The anti-formalist traditionally focuses on the importance to\\naesthetic judgment about non-formal properties, including historical\\ncontext; other, categorial forms of context (Walton 1970); or\\nnon-cognitive properties. As an architectural application would have\\nit, we likely judge Jefferson’s University of Virginia campus as\\nstately or dignified or evocative of democratic ideals because of the\\nneo-classical design, the campus’ place in histories of American\\narchitecture and university architecture, and its continuous\\nrededication through the everyday functioning of an enduring, living\\nuniversity. None of this judgment appears to have particular roots in\\nforms Jefferson deployed, except as befit a neo-classical\\nstyle—which style may be best grasped in historicist terms.\",\n \"Aside from historicism, a principal variant of architectural\\nanti-formalism derives from functional beauty theory, which has its\\nroots in (a) a late modern tradition of judging an object beautiful if\\nfit for its intended function (Parsons and Carlson (2008) find this\\ntradition in Berkeley's Alciphron (1732) and Hume's related\\nsuggestion (Treatise (1739-40)) that beauty of artifacts consists in\\ntheir appearing to bear utility), and (b) Kant’s proposal that\\narchitecture is an artform capable of generating dependent beauty. (In\\nthe latter case, beauty stands in relation to concepts with which we\\nassociate architectural objects, which for such objects are typically\\nthe ends towards which they are created.) One modern version proposes\\ngauging the beauty of a designed object by reference to\\ndesigner’s intent in crafting a functional solution; for\\nS. Davies (2006), where an object displays functional beauty,\\naesthetic considerations and the object’s primary function each\\nact to shape the other. Per Parsons and Carlson (2008), the\\nproblem with such intentionalist accounts in architecture (or\\nelsewhere where functional beauty pertains) is that functions\\nchange. To work around this difficulty, they suggest, we need\\na theory focused on “proper functions” for the artifacts\\nin question. This view is modeled on a selected effects account of\\nbiological functions, as translated into a marketplace-driven scheme,\\nwhere evolution of design solutions is driven by demand over time.\",\n \"Functional beauty faces several challenges. Even in their advocacy,\\nParsons and Carlson caution against the suggestion that function\\nsolely determines form, as that would neglect other features\\nof artifacts not possibly highlighted by their functions. Such\\nfeatures include cultural significance or aspects of\\nnon-dependent beauty as may be found in, for example, architectural\\nornament. (In Davies’ picture, there is no such neglect because\\nthe functioning of artifacts—including art and architectural\\nobjects—may have a cultural, spiritual, or otherwise\\nnon-mechanical cast.) In the architectural realm, another challenge is\\nposed by ruins, which may be beautiful but have no functions. To the\\ncharge that these represent counterexamples to functional beauty\\ntheory, one tack is to answer that if ruins represent architectural\\nobjects, they are dysfunctional and their beauty is manifest in\\nnon-functional ways (Parsons and Carlson). Functional beauty theory is\\nsaved on the whole but not as universally characteristic of\\narchitectural objects.\",\n \"A further challenge casts doubt on seeing functional beauty as the\\nonly variant of dependent beauty, or beauty as the sole aesthetic\\nvalence of interest to a viable notion of dependent aesthetic\\nproperties. In an architectural vein, those variants may include\\nspiritual, emotional, or conceptual frameworks we bring to our grasp\\nof such built structures as houses of worship, memorials, or triumphal\\narches. We can tell functional stories about these sorts of structures\\nin sociological or psychological analyses but not (or not only), as\\nfunctional beauty accounts would have it, in terms of their mechanical\\nor system-wise functioning. \",\n \"Looking beyond functional beauty—or more broadly, dependent\\nbeauty—accounts of architecture, an inclusivist will seek the\\nthread that ties together architectural objects with aesthetic\\nproperties of all description, be they functional, otherwise\\ndependent, or freely (independently) endowed with beauty or other such\\nproperties. Thus, a modernist gas station and a Tschumi folie\\nmay share an elegance unrelated to functional ascription or\\nthe lack thereof. A general theory of architectural objects, along\\ninclusivist lines, suggests at least a moderate formalism.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.2 Anti-Formalism and Functional Beauty\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"6. Architectural Experience, Knowledge, and Appreciation\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"A staple of philosophy of art is that our experience of art\\nobjects—direct or otherwise—is central to basic belief\\nformation about them (first and foremost, aesthetic belief and\\nappreciation of art objects). The philosophy of architecture is\\ngenerally in agreement, though architectural objects may be of special\\ncharacter in this regard, as our experiences of them gives rise to or\\ninfluences an extended range of psychological states. Beyond pleasure\\nin architectural beauty or other “positive” aesthetic\\nproperties, experience of built structures also contributes to neutral\\nand less positive states of mind, and shapes how we broadly take in\\nour environment. A piece of that environmental understanding is local\\nto the built structure itself: the ways we experience architectural\\nobjects may contribute to how we comprehend, and interact with, those\\nobjects.\",\n \"In addition to facilitating understanding, appreciation, or use of\\narchitectural objects, experience might also play—or\\nreflect—a constitutive role. On Scruton’s view, experience\\nconstitutes for us the architectural object as an aesthetic\\nobject (1979/2013). For Ingarden (1962), architectural experience\\nentails not only our cognitive grasp of the built structure’s\\nphysicality but as well our grasp of its designation as a specifically\\narchitectural object rather than, say, as an arrangement of\\nbricks that happens to have the structure of a house.\",\n \"The content and corresponding faculties of architectural experience\\nlikely include some mix of the cognitive, emotive, and sensual.\\nWhereas an abstractist may claim that experience of architectural\\nobjects is solely a matter of intellectual grasp, even an\\nanti-abstractist formalist needs the sensory as well to account for\\nexperience of concrete shapes. Abstractist intellectualism\\nnotwithstanding, accounts of architectural experience typically focus\\non multiple content modalities. Sauchelli (2012a) proposes the use of\\ncognition in grasping pleasure (“intellectual pleasure”)\\nas a central feature of architectural experience. The idea is that\\nfully comprehending the pleasure of the experience and thereby\\nestablishing its aesthetic value requires cognition, in the form of\\nattention to details and understanding of the architectural\\nobject. \",\n \"A blend of the cognitive and sensual is also characteristic of\\nScruton’s proposed “imaginative\\nperception”—the notion that we may perceive the\\ndetails of built structures in various ways, depending on directions\\nthat our imagination takes us. Scruton (1979/2013) takes this\\ncognitive act—reminiscent of seeing-as and free play of the\\nimagination—as crucial to architectural experience. We are at\\nall turns required to make interpretative choices in parsing ambiguous\\nor multiform aspects of the built environment. Scruton focuses on\\nvoluntary deployment of the imagination in perception at a\\nmacro-level, concerning such matters as whether we see a sequence of\\ncolumns as grouped one way or another, or see pilasters as ornamental\\nor structural. The voluntary aspect of this account is critical to\\nScruton’s emphasis on the importance of taste and discrimination\\nto architectural aesthetics. In this, he loosely tracks Geoffrey\\nScott’s view of architectural experience as “sensuous\\nperception” interpreted through attendant values\\n(1914/1924).\",\n \"A generalized version of this account looks to perceptual tasks at\\na more granular level. Our experiences of space and spatial\\npositioning, depth, edge detection, color, and light yield multiple\\ninterpretative possibilities across architectural objects, including\\nthe simplest forms and smallest or largest parts of objects. These\\nperceptual tasks are pervasive and constant; sometimes involuntary and\\nin the background, and other times as shaped by our willful\\nimagining. If the involuntary tasks also represent or shape\\ninterpretative acts, architectural experience by Scruton’s\\nmeasure is that much less subject to aesthetic taste or\\ndiscrimination.\",\n \"The dimensions of architectural experience are even larger when\\ntaking into account the full breadth of the sensual. Following a long\\ntradition of viewing architecture through art historical lenses,\\nScruton focuses on architectural experience as primarily visual and\\nstatic. In addition, though, other sensory modalities are factors:\\nchanges in aesthetic judgments follow changes in those other sensory\\nexperiences (Sauchelli 2012a). Such modalities among the non-visual\\ninclude the tactile, aural, and olfactory. Moreover, much\\narchitectural experience is proprioceptive, incorporating visual\\ninformation into a broader set of stimuli to grasp bodily position and\\nmovement in relation to the built environment.\",\n \"Sensation of movement might seem irrelevant to experiencing an\\nimmobile object, save for the fact that, in architecture (as in\\nsculpture) not all facets of a given whole work, or many other\\narchitectural objects, can be perceived at the same time. The\\nspectator or user must move around or within the object to perceive\\nany significant percentage of it, much less the whole. Experience of\\nmovement around architectural objects highlights for us the design\\nfeature of circulatory paths and contributes to grasping an\\nobject’s formal features (such as rhythm in spatial patterns)\\nand perhaps, at least derivatively, its aesthetic features (such as\\nsomberness) (Sauchelli 2012a; Rasmussen 1959). These aspects of\\narchitectural experience capture the immersive nature of a\\nspectator’s or user’s relationship to a built\\nstructure. Further aspects of our experience may capture the\\narchitectural object’s immersion in its larger\\nenvironment and surroundings, its “localized nature” or\\ncontext and “sense of location” (Carlson 1994). As\\narchitectural objects standardly shape our actual, imagined, or\\nremembered bodily engagement, so are our richest experiences of\\narchitecture informed by such engagement (J. Robinson 2012).\",\n \"Central as bodily experience may be, it cannot be the only source\\nof architectural beliefs. Considering the great breadth of the\\narchitectural enterprise, it may not even be the best source. Other\\nsources include access to beliefs about works through standard\\nrepresentational modes that are not the works themselves, transmission\\nof tacit working knowledge through apprenticeship learning, and\\ncollective belief formation through client briefings and studio group\\ncritical assessment (“crits”). On these and other bases an\\narchitectural knowledge of special character is built.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.1 Experience of Architecture\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Knowledge of a building or other architectural objects follows\\nwell-worn paths in some aspects of general knowledge of art. In\\nparticular, architectural beliefs encompass judgments of aesthetic\\nproperties of the built environment, are norm-governed in some\\nfashion, and may be transmissible via testimony. Yet other aspects of\\nknowing architectural objects diverge from the well-worn path, as\\nreflective of special characteristics of the architectural enterprise\\nand its products and consumption.\",\n \"One traditional division of architectural knowledge promoted by\\narchitectural historians, theorists, and practitioners—and\\nfocusing squarely on creator’s knowledge—has it that there\\nare two basic kinds: the theoretical/historical and the practical\\n(J. W. Robinson 2001). Theoretical and historical\\nbrands of architectural knowledge encompass viable beliefs about\\nfamiliar core concerns of architecture, including basic design\\nelements of the built environment; their combinations, relations, and\\nproperties; their style; external factors (social, economic, cultural,\\netc.) which shape design; and historical contexts into which they\\nfit. Some such beliefs are empirically supported; others\\nnot. Practical brands of architectural knowledge encompass\\nviable beliefs about the engineering and technical means of\\nconstructing architectural objects, ensuring structural integrity, and\\nguaranteeing mechanical function, socially, industrially, or\\necologically beneficial use. Such beliefs—particularly as\\nhitched to formalized, experimental, or predictive dimensions of the\\nenterprise—are sometimes seen as constituting an\\narchitectural science. They are typically (though not\\nexclusively) empirical in character and, to some tastes, relegated to\\na status of adjunct architectural knowledge, that is, useful\\nfor architecture but outside the domain proper. What counts as\\npractical knowledge in architecture is often seen as encompassing\\nbeliefs of a largely non-aesthetic nature.\",\n \"Yet other categories reflect a range of types and sources of\\narchitectural knowledge. Another division distinguishes between\\narchitectural beliefs associated with creators and users. My\\nexperience of a built structure qua creator is perforce\\ndifferent than my experience of the same structure qua user,\\nand the sorts of beliefs I arrive at may differ accordingly. As\\narchitect, Jones believes that an arch of one design but not another\\nwill keep the bridge up; as someone strolling underneath the bridge,\\nSmith believes that an arch of a different design would have been a\\ngreater aesthetic success. This much accords with other artforms\\nfeaturing practical functions. Further, architectural beliefs may\\ndiffer by their technical or non-technical nature; by perspective and\\nrole of the belief-holder; or by facts about physical experience of\\nthe work or other modalities of belief acquisition.\",\n \"Architectural knowledge in broader context. To see\\nhow architectural knowledge may be similar to, or differ from,\\naesthetic knowledge generally, consider two dimensions of aesthetic\\nknowledge, knowing through art and knowing about art\\n(Kieran and Lopes 2006). As concerns knowing through\\narchitecture, cognitive content arises in reflecting—to varying\\ndegrees—taste and style sensibilities of its creators,\\nstructural properties per engineering principles deployed;\\nand cultural and social values of historical, communal, and economic\\ncontexts. To know a built structure in this regard is to know such\\nmatters as the tradition in which it is built; design aspirations of\\nthe architect and initial occupants; and intentions relative to\\ncontributing to the built or natural landscape. The success of this\\nthesis is predicated on successful communication through architectural\\nobjects, whether as symbols or otherwise. \",\n \"Architectural belief and knowledge have as well wholly distinctive\\nfeatures, reflective of special characteristics of the domain, its\\npractice, and its objects. These include:\",\n \"Beliefs about systems. Architectural objects (as wholes)\\nare systems or system-like, in that they constitute sets of\\ninterrelated structural components, with characteristic behavior or\\nprocesses yielding outputs from inputs, and where the parts are\\nconnected by distinctive structural and behavioral relations (Boyce\\n1969). That we take whole architectural objects to be (or to be\\nrepresented as) systems or system-like suggests how architectural\\nbeliefs are distinctive among beliefs about artworks. In particular,\\nwe have beliefs about architectural objects that reflect functions and\\ninteractions of (1) components individually and as parts of systemic\\nwholes, (2) systems as parts of broader environmental contexts, and\\n(3) persons’ behaviors within the systems. Whereas the first\\ntwo functional and interactional features are typical to all design,\\nthe third feature marks architecture as an artform that, in providing\\nan immersive and systemic physical environment, intensely draws on and\\nshapes social, psychological, and economic features of experience. Our\\nbeliefs about architectural objects and interactions with and in them\\nare shaped correspondingly, in ways that do not arise in engagement\\nwith other artforms. \",\n \"Partial and full information. Representation in\\narchitecture encompasses multiple modes, including built objects,\\nphysical models, virtual models, data arrays, plans, sketches,\\nphotographs, and drawings. Each such mode may be viable as\\nrepresenting an architectural object just in case some\\nfeatures of the object are adequately, accurately, regularly, and\\noptimally represented through the mode. This view of viable\\nrepresentation in architecture is at odds with the standards for such\\nin other artforms. Consider a representation of the Mona Lisa. If you\\ndo not have complete visual access through the representation (from\\nany acceptable angle) to the full tableau, you may be said to lack\\nfull acquaintance with the work through the representation, and your\\nconsequent aesthetic beliefs about the Mona Lisa may be discounted\\naccordingly. By contrast, if architectural beliefs required anything\\nlike full acquaintance with the object or fully\\ninformed testimony to be viable, our architectural beliefs would\\nnot typically or frequently be viable. Rare is the case where\\nacquaintance is full or testimony fully informed—even among\\nthose whom we might expect to have the greatest acquaintance, such as\\na built structure’s architect or developer.\",\n \"Socially constructed knowledge. In architecture, as in\\nother design fields, design problems are not thoroughly or fully\\narticulated all at once or by any particular individual. The primary\\ncomponents of design knowledge—problems and their possible\\nsolutions—are instead distributed across persons. This fact\\nabout architectural production—and, to a degree, its\\nuse—suggests that beliefs we form about architectural objects\\nare formed amidst, and influenced by, such social relations (see §8.1). Art and architecture worlds\\nper se are undoubtedly not a sole source of epistemic\\nnorms. Yet social relations and circumstances among\\narchitecture’s stakeholders present constitutive conditions for\\na wide swath of architectural beliefs, suggesting at least a moderate\\nsocial constructivism.\",\n \"It may be thought that qualities of architecture such as\\nsystematicity and the deeply social character of the discipline are\\nimmaterial to aesthetic beliefs. However, architecture is a\\nholistic enterprise: a design decision to cantilever a terrace is at\\nonce of aesthetic and engineering significance. In like fashion, that\\narchitectural objects constitute systems is pertinent in shaping\\naesthetic beliefs because there are more and less attractive ways to\\nshape the flow of persons, or even electricity, through a built\\nstructure. And that architectural objects are designed through social\\nprocesses has import for corresponding aesthetic beliefs. For example,\\naesthetic properties of a given design are subject to crits, the very\\npurpose of which is to influence the creator’s further aesthetic\\nbeliefs about the same design.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.2 Architectural Knowledge\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"As distinct from mere experience of architectural objects,\\nappreciation of architectural objects brings to bear\\ncognition and other inputs, such as history and context. Appreciation\\ngoes beyond knowledge, too, insofar as we may know an\\narchitectural object and its qualities without appreciating it. Thus,\\nWinters (2007) proposes that appreciating architecture consists in\\nenjoyment of architectural objects (from experience, tout\\ncourt), as wed to understanding them, where the latter\\nconsists in grasping their aesthetic significance in specifically\\nvisual fashion, and critically assessing the judgment of architects in\\naddressing design challenges. Architectural appreciation may be built\\non the judgment of others; it is essential to rendering\\njudgment. Accordingly, learning to appreciate architectural objects is\\na cornerstone of architectural education. A key contributing feature\\nin this last regard is acquiring agility with classifying in the\\ndomain (Leder et al. 2004).\",\n \"The appreciation and judgment of architectural objects are\\ntypically thought to reflect aesthetic and utility-wise\\nconsiderations, and engage individual perspective, experience,\\nreasoning, and reflection such as we associate with appreciating and\\njudging in other artforms. Drivers in appreciation and judgment\\nspecial to architecture include social framing and\\nenvironmental psychological factors that are a consequence of\\narchitecture’s intensely public nature.\",\n \"Exceptionalism. One question regarding\\nappreciation is whether there is a special mode attached to\\narchitectural objects. We might think this is so given that, unlike\\nmost arts (though very like other design forms), appreciation in\\narchitecture is aesthetic and utility-oriented. A resulting\\npuzzle is whether, and under what circumstances, we might have one\\nwithout the other. We might think as much if, say, it is possible to\\nappreciate the Roman Coliseum’s stately and antique features\\nwithout any appreciation of its intended function or actual use. On\\nthe other hand, a view of appreciation embracing functional beauty\\ntheory may suggest that the Coliseum’s functional and free\\nbeauty are on at least equal footing—or that the\\nColiseum’s stately aesthetic and its role as amphitheater for\\nstaging spectacles (for example) cannot be separated altogether.\",\n \"Further questions regarding appreciation concern the relative roles\\nin appreciation of individual experience of architecture, as against\\nthe social or the environmental.\",\n \"Individual Appreciation. The prevailing\\nphilosophical view of architectural appreciation is a psychological\\naccount with debts to the Kantian tradition: direct, immediate\\naesthetic experiences of architectural objects among individuals\\nconstitute the basis of appreciation. (Iseminger 1981 provides a\\ngeneral aesthetics account in this vein.) A primary variant has it\\nthat architectural appreciation is the product of individual cognition\\nof the content, form, properties, and relations of architectural\\nobjects. A recent variation suggests that, in addition to (or in\\nlieu of) cognitive response, physiological experience\\n(proprioception) is a central source of beliefs associated with\\narchitectural appreciation. On either model, it is experience of\\nindividuals that feeds and influences appreciation.\",\n \"Social and Environmental Role in Architectural\\nAppreciation. Direct, immediate individual experience is not\\nthe only source of information shaping architectural\\nappreciation. Considering the breadth of the architectural enterprise,\\nit may not even be the best source. Others include access to\\ninformation about works through standard representational modes that\\nare not the works themselves (for example, drawings or photographs),\\ntransmission of tacit working knowledge through apprenticeship\\nlearning, and collective belief formation through client briefings and\\nstudio crits.\",\n \"Architectural appreciation is social in building on our\\nunderstanding of architectural objects as it develops, and matures, in\\nexperience of a built structure with and in relation to other\\nindividuals and groups of people. It is also social in that we learn\\nmarkers of appreciation among those with whom we share such\\nexperiences or (per Scruton 1979/2013) imagine ourselves to\\ndo so. Indeed, a central goal of architectural education is structured\\nimparting of collective wisdom as to how to best classify\\narchitectural objects and, relatedly, what the markers of appreciation\\nhave looked like, or should look like—as well as how they\\narticulate with practical knowledge.\",\n \"Further, architectural appreciation is environmental in\\nbuilding on our understanding of architectural objects based on\\nexperiences in relation to their natural and built surroundings. On\\none view, an architectural object may be more difficult to appreciate\\nif we find that relation unexpected, or contrary to normative\\nsensibility (Carlson 1999). If, however, appreciation does not require\\nenjoyment or satisfaction of any sort—and instead engages our\\nunderstanding of, for example, what was intended and why—we may\\nwell appreciate in its own right an architectural object that has a\\nsurprising, even obnoxious relation to its surroundings.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.3 Architectural Appreciation\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"Some problems of architectural ethics are characteristic of a range\\nof typical moral dilemmas—agent-centered, norms-oriented\\nconcerns—as may arise for architects. In addition to a\\ntraditional set of questions applied to the architectural domain,\\narchitectural ethics also addresses problems special to the discipline\\nand practice—as shaped by its social, public, practical, and\\nartistic nature. \",\n \"As conceptually prior to a normative ethics of architectural\\npractice, a meta-ethics of architecture assesses alternate ethical\\nmodalities, such as whether architecture might be considered moral or\\nimmoral relative to its objects (built structures) or to its practices\\nas a set of institutions or social phenomena. Another meta-ethical\\nissue concerns whether moralism or autonomism best characterizes the\\nrelationship of aesthetics to ethics, as that plays out in\\narchitecture.\",\n \"Ethical modalities of architecture. There are\\nthree typical candidate modalities of ethics in architecture. For one,\\nthere is the establishment of criteria for ethical norms of the\\nenterprise such as architects in practice may observe. For example,\\narchitects can craft designs in ways that lower the likelihood of cost\\noverruns and enhance safety. In an interpersonal vein, architects can\\nrepresent their work honestly to clients or contractors. Another\\nmodality—beyond enterprise-defined ethical norms—is\\npursuit of criteria to gauge architects as moral agents broadly\\nproducing or doing good or bad in the world. For example, architects\\nmay create objects that uplift or constrain individual users and\\ninhabitants; other architects may promote social utility by designing\\nhousing for those in need of shelter. Finally, there is the modality\\nof seeking criteria to judge architectural objects as morally good or\\nbad insofar as they directly produce pleasure or pain. As an\\nindirect example, a hospital design is intended to facilitate\\nthe minimizing of pain, by fostering environmental conditions\\nconducive to excellence in health care and patient well-being. As a\\nmore direct case, a bus shelter is intended to reduce exposure to the\\nelements and corresponding discomfort. This last candidate may be\\nattractive if we see architecture primarily as a product rather than\\nas a practice; it is noxious if we are unwilling to assign moral\\nvalues to artifacts as we do to actions or their properties. A built\\nstructure might be inhumane in that it is bleak or uninhabitable,\\nthough it does not follow that the structure itself bears inhumane\\nvalues. \",\n \"Value Interaction. Vitruvian principles underlying\\nmuch of architectural theory suggest a tendency to link the aesthetic\\nand the utility-promoting. So, too, functional beauty theory\\nrecommends that aesthetic and ethical considerations are linked in\\narchitecture. To crystallize the matter, we may ask if it is possible\\nfor a built structure to be good though not aesthetically so. The\\nquestion as to how aesthetic and ethical value might be related is a\\nsubject of broader concern, with a “moralist” stance that\\nsays the two sorts of value are or should be connected (Carroll 1996,\\nGaut 1998) and an “autonomist” stance that takes the two\\nas (or better off as) independent (Anderson and Dean 1998, Kieran\\n2001).\",\n \"In this debate, architecture would seem a promising domain in which\\nto find robust relations. At a moralist extreme, there is the\\nsuggestion—supported by some traditions in architectural theory\\n(Pugin 1841, Ruskin 1849)—that aesthetic tasks in architecture\\nsimply are ethical tasks, reflecting ethical choices. One\\nprominent moralist perspective locates the ethical element of\\naesthetic architectural choice in obligations to a sort of honesty, in\\ndesigning works that accurately represent underlying structural\\nprinciples or operational capacities. Harries (1997) and Scruton\\n(1979/2013) arrive at similar ethical commitments to architectural\\ndesign as expressive in a particular fashion, though of shared\\ncommunity values, rather than of function or structural features.\\nFrom another angle, moralists point to the emotional impact of built\\nenvironments as indicative of a union of the aesthetically gripping\\nand morally compelling (Ginsburg 1994), though it may be noted that\\neven where we detect such a union we need not judge the aesthetics of\\nthe architectural object on the basis of any ethical import so\\ncommunicated.\",\n \"At the other extreme, autonomists propose that problems of ethics\\nand aesthetics neither need arise at once, nor need be resolved at\\nonce, in architectural design. If we see a correlation in some\\narchitectural objects of ethically and aesthetically compelling design\\nsolutions, we see in other objects no correlation at all. Thus, the\\nmodern city is replete with instances of built structures that are\\nwell-functioning, high-utility, and facilitate much good in the world\\nyet meet no one’s standards of aesthetically worthy design.\\nThere is good reason to uncouple these values just in case they\\nmust conflict. Suppose there is an ethical premium, for\\nexample, on the need to create environmentally sustaining structures,\\nand that we identify resolutions of that problem as generally bearing\\nthe greatest mark of moral worth. Suppose further that crafting the\\noptimal moral solution (vis-à-vis the environment)\\nalways generates the most unattractive design—and that the\\ninverse holds as well (the better the design aesthetically, the worse\\nthe design for the environment). Then a connection between ethics and\\naesthetics in architecture seems improbable.\",\n \"A third position altogether proposes a pluralism. Sometimes ethical\\nand aesthetic value march hand-in-hand, other times not—and\\ntheir ways of matching up are diverse and run in various\\ndirections. So one architectural design may be aesthetically\\ncompelling as it reflects its ethically upstanding character, whereas\\nanother design may be aesthetically compelling as it reflects its\\nethically deficient character. What is required for cases of this last\\nsort is that the evaluator can identify the aesthetic success as\\ngrounded, per functional beauty theory, in effective\\nexpression of the structure’s ethically deficient function\\n(Sauchelli 2012b). An even more generalized pluralism would suggest\\nthat a wide range of aesthetic and ethical valences can be matched up\\nin different ways; we might value a war memorial for the way it grimly\\nexpresses the horrors of war.\",\n \"Traditional questions of architectural ethics. One\\nreason that architectural ethics is central to philosophy of\\narchitecture is that architects’ actions bear great influence\\nover other people’s moral lives. Architects design structures\\nand environments for people, with concomitant effects on personal\\nbehavior, capacity to choose courses of action, and ability to satisfy\\npreferences, visit harm, generate benefit, or exercise rights. As\\narchitects’ acts shape spaces, boundaries, and pathways that\\nstructure individual behaviors and social acts, they prompt normative\\nethical exploration along traditional lines.\",\n \"To begin with, a traditional architectural ethics requires an\\naccount of architectural responsibilities. Any such account\\nshould outline architects’ obligations to other persons, ethical\\nstandards on which such obligations may be based, how to ensure such\\nstandards might be met, and any other sorts of obligations architects\\nmight have, as for example, to historic preservation or environmental\\nprotection. As concerns obligations to persons, the range of\\nstakeholders in architecture is great, hence ethical responsibility is\\ndiffuse.\",\n \"A further set of questions concerns rights. It is\\nrelatively novel to speak of authorial or community rights in\\narchitecture; owner or client rights are historically parasitic on\\nproperty or sovereign rights. Other possibilities include rights of\\ndevelopers, builders, engineers, environments, and societies. As that\\nlist grows, two further questions concern the sorts of rights that can\\nbe attributed to such parties or entities, and the criteria for\\ndistributing and prioritizing them given aesthetic as well as moral\\nconsiderations.\",\n \"Architectural utility is familiar as a Vitruvian concept\\nbut has a wholly other sense in an agent-centered normative ethics,\\nwith a possible moral weighting not found in classic architectural\\ntheory. Guidelines are needed to determine the usefulness of\\narchitectural goods such as built structures, restorations,\\nreconstructions, or plans. These might include their social character,\\nor individual preferences of the architect, owner, end-users, or\\npublic. A utilitarian approach to architectural ethics is attractive\\nin capturing the aims of architecture to promote well-being, and\\nrelying on a ready marker of architectural value. However, it also\\ndiscounts other traditional architectural imperatives such as a\\nVitruvian-style pluralist may honor, including beauty and structural\\nintegrity (Spector 2001). \",\n \"Finally, a traditionalist picture of architectural ethics requires\\nan account of virtues in the domain (though these may be\\northogonal to normative ethics). Here is potential consonance with the\\nVitruvian tradition (and similarly virtue-oriented non-Western\\ntraditions)—if we see the “good”, morally educated\\narchitect’s virtue and character as our best guarantee of proper\\nand productive weighting of values under differing circumstances\\n(Spector 2001).\",\n \"Future-Focused Architectural Ethics. The focus of\\nethical rights and responsibilities in architecture is typically taken\\nas relative to present or past. Thus, we speak of obligations to\\ndesign and build in ethically responsible fashion, or preserve past\\narchitectural objects. There are future-focused obligations, as\\nwell. Sustainable design is forward-looking even as it is centered on\\nwhat we design and build today. Further ethical issues may arise\\nrelative to future architectural objects. As to obligations to future\\narchitectural objects, we see as much in the short-term\\ninstance of planning around near-future buildings. More puzzling is\\nwhether we might have “long-haul” future-facing\\nobligations—apart from utility or prudential\\nconsiderations—in planning, for example, new cities or\\naccommodations to climate change.\",\n \"Special ethical questions of architecture.\\nArchitectural practice generates special moral issues as befit its\\nproper, idiosyncratic features, distinctive among the arts, the\\nprofessions, and social practices. Most notably, an array of ethical\\nissues of social import arises from architecture’s commitments\\nto creation of a socially beneficial and functional art. Such issues\\ninclude the nature of “better” housing (and under varying\\nconditions), what (if anything) makes housing an obligation, and ways\\nthat such an obligation may accrue to, or be satisfied by,\\narchitects. Yet other ethical issues special to architecture range\\nover matters of personal and social spaces and the articulations\\nthereof, including criteria for designing around concerns related to\\nprivacy, accessibility (for the public generally and handicapped in\\nparticular), respecting community and neighborly preferences, and\\npromoting civic values.\",\n \"Other ethical matters special to architecture are particularly\\nvisible in global perspective. For example, there is inequitable\\ndistribution of housing across the developed and developing nations,\\nand part of the solution may be architectural (Caicco 2005). Further,\\narchitecture incurs special environmental obligations given that waste\\nand degradation affect, and are affected by, architectural design. One\\nconceptual challenge of sustainability facing architects is to\\ndetermine whether development is, in principle, a countervailing\\ninterest. This is to ask, once environmental obligations are defined,\\nhow they may be factored into or weighed against infrastructural and\\ndesign interests and preferences.\",\n \"Professional Ethics. Architectural professional\\nethics focuses on architects’ moral choices in the context of\\npractice (Wasserman, Sullivan, and Palermo 2000; T. Fisher\\n2010). Professional ethical codes govern conduct in (and thereby\\nprotect) the architectural profession and avert problems related to\\nbusiness, fiduciary, insurance, or liability functions; the design\\nfunction is an ethical focus relative to disability. Architectural law\\nhighlights professional ethics matters as concern property, liability,\\nand honesty. The law clarifies responsibilities among parties to\\narchitectural practice; defines who or what in commercial\\narchitectural interactions has moral agency—hence rights; and\\ndescribes utility-wise or financial measures of distribution in\\narchitecture. Legal regulations and judgments prompt conceptual\\nquestions regarding such issues as intellectual property in\\narchitecture, architects as arbitrators, and architects’\\nresponsibilities to others (S. Fisher 2000a).\",\n \"Intellectual Property. One conceptual issue concerning\\narchitectural intellectual property is how such rights are to be\\nweighed against other sorts of property rights, such as domestic or\\ncommercial rights. A further issue is determined on the basis of\\njudging architecture to be a service or product. Taking architecture\\nas service means that architects do not have a stake on\\ncopyright, as they would then be creators-by-contract; tradition has\\nit that rights to expression of ideas so created accrue to the\\ncontracting party. Taking architecture as product supports\\narchitects’ claim to copyright, given that expression is their\\ncreation—whatever services are performed (Greenstreet 1998;\\nCushman and Hedemann 1995). Copyright raises other concerns. Even as\\nthe law may license creation of an architectural object reflecting\\ncore design aspects found in another object created by a different\\narchitect, we may find morally blameworthy any cognizant\\n“borrowing” without attribution or\\npermission. Alternatively, we might view this as a routine episode in\\nthe history of architectural copying without attribution or\\npermission. The challenge is to define relevant obligations of one\\narchitect to others, present or past.\",\n \"Architect as judge in owner-contractor disputes.\\nArchitects have a dual role, serving as designer and administrator of\\narchitectural projects, and in this capacity may adjudicate between\\nowner and contractor in matters of dispute. Standard issues concern\\nconflicts of interest, grounds for adjudication, and criteria of\\nfairness. Ethical issues of a particularly architectural\\nstripe include the degree to which specifications are poorly satisfied\\nsuch as warrants reckoning; maintenance of fealty to owners’\\ninterests alongside fairness to contractors and to satisfactory\\nrealization of one’s own design; and identification of virtues\\nappropriate to judgment in design-related disputes, along with facets\\nof being an architect that promote (or limit) such virtues.\",\n \"Responsibility to others’ design. Architectural\\nobjects often develop over time in cumulative and mutable fashion,\\nthrough additions and alterations that—perhaps more frequently\\nthan not—change the design of a different, original architect\\n(or that of a prior alteration). For any particular changes, or in\\nconsideration of design changes overall, we may stipulate obligations\\nto respect original or prior intent and execution. One brand of such\\nobligations, recognized in historic preservation and landmark laws,\\nrequires that aesthetic concerns in the public interest trump private\\ninterests. Key conceptual questions concern how to determine the\\nsource and conditions of any such obligations—and the sorts of\\nresponsibilities architects should have to existing structures. Those\\nresponsibilities may extend to commitment to the integrity of work by\\nfellow architects.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"7. Architectural Ethics\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"8. Architecture and Social and Political Philosophy\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"While all artforms admit of a certain social character,\\narchitecture enjoys a particularly social nature, and may even be said\\nto be an intrinsically social artform. There are two\\nprominent candidate reasons as to why this is so. For one, a central\\naim of architecture is to design shelter and so meet a variety of\\nsocial needs. For another, architecture as practice is a social\\nprocess or activity as it engages people in interpersonal relations of\\na social cast.\",\n \"The first candidate reason stands or falls on whether, in\\nfulfilling social needs, architecture is thereby rendered a social\\nart. For an artform to be intrinsically social, any such need\\nfulfilled should be critical rather than discretionary or\\nextravagant. Thus, for example, addressing housing demands overall\\nmeets the criticality test—though addressing design demands for\\na third home does not. The first reason looks right because architects\\noften integrate social needs into design thinking. Armed with socially\\nminded intentions, they create built structures which serve myriad\\nsocial ends. A difficulty arises, however, in consistently upholding\\nsuch intentions as a mark of the social if (a) such intentions are\\nunclear from experiencing architectural objects, instantiations, or\\nrepresentations thereof, (b) built structures are repurposed, or (c)\\nthere are architectural objects with no corresponding relevant\\nintentions. (As an instance, we might consider “found”\\narchitectural objects like inhabited caves.)\",\n \"A second candidate reason that architecture is a social art is that\\nprocesses of making architecture are thoroughly and ineluctably social\\nphenomena, constituted by interactions of social groupings created and\\ngoverned by social conventions and arrangements. On this view, the\\nsocial nature of architecture consists in the status of the discipline\\nas shaped by social convention—where such convention is\\ndesignated by, and guides actions of, architects and other relevant\\nagents. (This reason directly links the social nature of architecture\\nto its social impact—hence to sociology of architecture; see §8.2.) Architectural phenomena are\\nsocial, then, because they occur as a result of contracts, meetings,\\nfirms, charettes, crits, juries, projects, competitions, exhibitions,\\npartnerships, professional organizations, negotiations, workflow\\norganization, division of labor, and myriad other conventional and\\nagreement-bound purposive actions and groupings of architects and\\nother architectural stakeholders. One might object that, on an\\ninstitutional theory, all artforms are social in just these\\nways. However, as played out in art worlds, institutional theories\\ntell us what counts as an art object rather than how such objects are\\nconstituted to begin with. Proponents of this candidate must rule out\\na naïve architecture scenario, the possibility of a lone\\narchitect who has no socially significant engagements such as shape\\nher creations.\",\n \"Either view is temporally sensitive. These parameters and how they\\nconstitute architecture’s sociality will change over time, along\\nwith vicissitudes in social needs, conventions, and relations.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"8.1 Socially Constitutive Features of Architecture\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Architecture as object and pursuit produces a great range of\\neffects on social structures and phenomena, in particularly acute\\nfashion in relation to housing, land use, and urban planning. In turn,\\narchitecture is shaped by such social concerns as scarcity, justice,\\nand social relations and obligations. Some of this shaping results\\nfrom social group and institution requirements for space and the\\nstructured organization thereof, to promote group or institutional\\nfunction and identity (Halbwachs 1938). In addition, other social\\nrequirements stem from architecture’s roles in meeting concerns\\nand needs for society as a whole.\",\n \"Causal direction. We might see social forces as\\nprimarily shaping architecture or else architecture as primarily\\nshaping social forces. Proponents of architecture as\\n“shaper” suggest that architecture provides a means of\\norganizing society, a core Modernist claim but also a thesis of\\nbroader currency. Detractors counter that we cannot shape society\\nthrough the built environment—or we ought not do so. What rests\\non directionality is how we parse not only theoretical relations but\\nalso practical consequences and perspectives concerning a host of\\nsocial phenomena. To take one example, how we gauge and address the\\npossibilities that architecture offers relative to social inequality\\nis likely a function of whether architecture contributes to, or\\ninstead reflects, social classes and social hierarchies. We might\\nwonder whether architects can design so as to promote class\\nequality—or solidarity, justice, autonomy, or other social\\nphenomena as we might foster.\",\n \"On a third, holistic option, causality runs in both directions. Two\\nexamples of such are (a) systems analyses, which take built structures\\nas social systems that contribute to social function, and (b)\\nurban sociology, which takes the city en gros as social\\nstructuring of space which shapes its habitants, who in turn shape the\\ncity (Simmel 1903). As expanded to environmental sociology,\\nthe suggestion is that built environments promote patterns of living,\\nworking, shopping, and otherwise conducting commerce among groups and\\nin relation to other individuals.\",\n \"Other social science domains suggest attendant conceptual\\nissues. For example, one sociological perspective takes relations of\\nindividuals and groups to built structures to be analogous to\\nconsumption (Essbach 2004); we may ask whether architectural objects\\nenjoy a reception of this particular social sort, a range of such\\nsorts (perhaps as context-dependent), or perhaps, on an individualist\\nread, no sort we would call “social”. For another,\\nsociology of architecture also studies the profession: the backgrounds\\nand relations of architects and other stakeholders, norms governing\\nbehavior, and social structures of an architecture world constitute a\\nspecies of artworld. This last suggestion prompts the question as to\\nwhat influence we should attribute to an architecture world on the\\nstatus of architectural objects. The architecture world\\nraises issues beyond those motivating Danto or Dickie, engaging many\\nparties whose interests and preferences are not primarily aesthetic or\\neven economic but driven by social, commercial, engineering, planning,\\nand various other factors. For a third, a Science and Technology\\nStudies perspective (Gieryn 2002) investigates how\\narchitecture—primarily in its optimization focus, qua\\nengineered technology—shapes knowledge formation (for example,\\nin laboratory or university design) and organizes social behavior (for\\nexample, in architecture for tourism or retail sales). Conceptual\\nissues here include whether there are global principles of\\noptimization of architectural design for social advancement, and what\\nsorts of moral constraints are appropriate to such optimization.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"8.2 Socially Efficacious Features on, and of, Architecture\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"That architecture has some political aspects is a widely\\nheld, if not entirely uncontested thesis, with weaker and stronger\\nvariants. One weak version suggests that designing built structures\\nentails political engagement through interactions of architects and\\nthe public. For example, architects solicit political support of\\ngovernment officials for development projects, governments engage\\narchitects to design built structures that express political\\nprogrammatic messages, and citizens do political battle amongst\\nthemselves over architectural designs or preservation decisions. A\\nstronger version highlights a possible role for architecture as an\\ninstrument of politics. Thus, Sparshott (1994) characterizes\\narchitecture as “…above all the coercive organization of\\nsocial space”. In other words, designing built structures\\nentails political engagement through the control by force of behaviors\\nand attitudes of people who interact with those structures.\",\n \"That architecture might have any significant role in politics, or\\nthe other way around, calls for explanation. One account stresses that\\nthe two domains are oriented around utility-maximization. Utility\\ncriteria deployed to judge the worth of architectural objects are\\nexemplary subjects of democratic debate, policy analysis, or community\\nconsensus. The appeal to utility is an advocacy strategy for\\narchitectural design that dates to Bentham’s Panopticon\\n(1787) or before. Further, traditional architectural promotion of\\nurban and social planning may be linked to social utility criteria for\\narchitectural quality; that relationship might run in either\\ndirection. In distinct progressive and utopian traditions in\\narchitectural thought (Eaton 2002), advancement of social utility is a\\ncentral motivation in architectural attempts to realize idealistic\\nvisions of modes of living and societal organization. (For a critique,\\nsee Harries 1997.)\",\n \"Power, control, and change. Architecture’s\\npolitical cast is also manifest in use as a means of social\\ncontrol. This is not an obvious use in societies where individuals\\nfreely choose dwellings or other structures with which they\\ninteract. The less choice available in this regard, the greater the\\npossibility of defining people’s choices (a) concerning the\\nbuilt environment they occupy and (b) as a function of that\\nenvironment. Prominent such architectural types include prisons and\\nrefugee camps. Some see potential in architecture for more globally\\npromoting maintenance of power through behavior regulating norms that\\nsuch built structures represent (Foucault 1975).\",\n \"Even in generally free or open social settings, though, at the\\nlevel of urban planning architecture indirectly determines behavior in\\npolitically shaped ways. Architects and others planning urban or other\\ndensely settled environments take into account such political aims as\\nhonoring community values, promoting civic virtues, maximizing social\\nutility, fulfilling professional or public responsibilities, and\\nrespecting citizen or leadership preferences (Haldane 1990, Paden\\n2001, Thompson 2012). The politically hued results of such planning\\nand design efforts, whether pursued in authoritative, consultative, or\\nparticipatory processes, are architectural objects that change,\\nencourage, or reward particular behaviors.\",\n \"Ideology and agency. Architecture is also used to\\npromote political views, culture, or control, by conveying symbolic\\nmessages of power, nationalism, liberation, cooperation, justice, or\\nother political themes or notions (Wren c1670s). One issue concerns\\nthe architect’s agency in promoting an official political\\nideology. In government commissions, the architect generally cedes\\ndesign control, at a certain point, to the government. Yet the\\narchitect is the creator of record. This leaves open whether\\narchitects so engaged are promoting the given ideology—or else\\nmerely acting as proxies for such promotion. It may seem odd to\\nsuggest that, from an aesthetic standpoint the design is of architect\\nX but from a political standpoint the same design is not\\nattributable to X.\",\n \"Political agency among architects is a special version of the more\\ngeneral issue of architect agency relative to clients, including as\\nwell corporate and individual clients. Architects have obligations to\\nthe client’s aesthetic and utility concerns, and in virtue of\\nthose obligations, the responsibility, blame, and praise for a given\\narchitectural object cannot be wholly attached to the architect\\nalone. One question is what scenarios or conditions would need to\\npertain to justify apportioning more or less agency—and,\\ncorrespondingly, political or moral responsibility—to the\\narchitect or to the client, in design and build phases of realizing an\\narchitectural object. The phases matter. The design phase appears, at\\nleast initially, to be the agency-wise province of the architect, and\\nany post-build phase appears to be generally the province of the\\nclient and any relevant user-base (until any such renovation or\\nrepurposing as may occur). What happens in phases en route to\\npost-build is murkier, though.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"8.3 Architecture and the Political\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"Architectural Failure. Failed architecture is not\\na straightforward subspecies of failed art or failed\\nartifacts. Architectural objects may rate as aesthetic disasters yet\\nin some overall sense as successes, unlike non-architecture art\\nobjects. And architectural objects may cease to function—or\\nnever have functioned at all—yet count as overall successes,\\nunlike a range of (though not all) non-architecture artifacts. Another\\nfeature of architectural failure—in keeping with general design\\nphenomena—is that architectural objects may count as successes\\nor failures depending on different states of affairs, context, or\\nremarkably small differences. Thus, a given architectural object may\\nbe a failure as an active and integral built structure but not as a\\nruin (or vice-versa). This suggests that background\\nintentions may matter at one early stage, and less so at later stages\\nin the life of a built structure—and that failure may have one\\ncriterion for architectural abstracta and other criteria for\\ncounterpart concreta. Further, among architectural objects with\\nstandard, closely related variants, some may fail while others\\nsucceed—perhaps because of a minor distinction such as a\\ngarishly painted exterior. A viable account of architectural failure\\naccommodates such features or else devolves failure to the level of\\nsome single dimension of architectural objects, such as their putative\\nnature as art objects (failed or otherwise).\",\n \"Corruption, Ruins, and Preservation. Architectural\\nobjects as physically instantiated are corrupted or fall apart over\\ntime, and may develop new forms in disrepair or as ruins. From an\\ninclusivist, concretist standpoint, a ruin is not any lesser an\\narchitectural object than its corresponding newly built structure. An\\ninclusivism is available to the abstractist, too, though she will not\\nsee them as the same object—and will rate them both as somehow\\nlesser than the originary object. If we take them as the same\\narchitectural objects, we need an account as to how they relate to one\\nanother—apparently not by reference to intentions. Even if an\\narchitect designed a path to a ruin state, the actual ruin-state would\\nlikely take on a wholly different shape. Some may take this as an\\nargument against inclusivism.\",\n \"Architects typically embrace the Vitruvian premium on\\nfirmitas and reasonably assume that built objects should\\nendure—and that they serve intended functions for as long as is\\ndesirable. That pair of assumptions in design thinking is at odds with\\nconcretism, given corruption and decay of physical constructions as\\nwell as routine repurposing in the lives of built structures. The\\nfirst assumption is consistent with an abstractist vision of\\neverlasting architectural objects. Endurance of serving intended\\nfunctions is another story: for architectural abstracta, stipulation\\nof repurposing may not change the nature of a given, selfsame\\nobject. Depending on degrees of stringency in defining an\\nobject’s parameters, corresponding changes in design may bring\\nabout an entirely new object or nearby counterpart.\",\n \"Corruption brings not only total destruction and absence of\\npreviously intact built structures, but also enduring ruins or flawed,\\ndamaged structures. There is a longstanding premium on ruins in\\narchitectural culture as promoting historical perspective, nostalgia,\\nand at least one style (Romanticism). Yet ruins fit awkwardly, if at\\nall, into standard architectural ontologies. The cultural premium is\\nhard to explain for the abstractist, for whom ruins represent\\ndefective physical instantiations, which are already substandard in\\nthe abstractist worldview. They are even harder to match up with a\\nconcretist account as there aren’t underlying creative\\nintentions to build (except in ironic or kitsch building of “new\\nruins”). Corresponding intentions instead typically concern\\npreservation, restoration, or elimination. Alternatively, Bicknell\\n(2014) suggests we think of ruins as part-objects that, along with\\nfull-blown “architectural ghosts”, represent past objects\\nin their intact, built glory and as corresponded to creator\\nintent. \",\n \"Preservation and conservation possibilities prompt additional\\nconsiderations, such as whether restoration or maintenance of a built\\nstructure sustains it as an authentic architectural whole—and if\\nthis is independent of functional integrity, or holds for wholesale\\nreconstructions (Wicks 1994); what conditions warrant preserving or\\nconserving a built structure; and what principles guide warranted\\nalterations or completions of built structures—and whether other\\nconsiderations may include creativity, fancy, or sensitivity to\\ncontemporary needs and context (Capdevila-Werning 2013). As concerns\\ncompleting unfinished structures, one issue is whether it is possible\\nto discern original design intent altogether. Taken together with\\ncontemporary norms that shape our understanding of past architecture\\n(Spector 2001), preservation and conservation are at least partly\\nbound to present-day design conceptions.\",\n \"Built Versus Natural Environment. We typically\\ntake built and natural environments to be clearly distinct. This\\ndistinction does at least two kinds of work in philosophy of\\narchitecture. For one, it helps establish what sorts of things we\\nwould discount as architecture even on an inclusivist\\nconception—and even there, we might accept lived-in caves as\\nfound architecture but reject most other elements of the\\nnatural environment as non-architecture (because neither built nor\\nfound). For another, we get a defined sense of natural contexts into\\nwhich built environments fit (or not), without which any such notions\\nof fit are incoherent. If this is a viable (and desirable)\\ndistinction, it is perhaps less clear in what it consists. One\\ncandidate view is that we may distinguish the kinds of environments by\\ntheir different sorts of objects and properties: we find columns in\\nbuilt environments and trees in natural environments and never the\\nother way around. Alternatives highlight the ascribable functions and\\nintent that mark built environments but not natural environments; or\\ndifferent sorts of behavior and obligations attached to the two kinds\\nof environments. While an artifact-centered view of architecture\\nweighs in favor of functions and intent as the most relevant\\ndistinction, decaying value of design intent over the life of a built\\nstructure may give pause.\",\n \"Human and Non-Human Architecture. What we\\ntypically refer to as “architecture” is human\\narchitecture. This raises the question as to whether human\\narchitecture is assimilable to a larger class of animal-built\\nstructures. That would suggest, in turn, that we could assess human\\narchitecture—including settlement patterns, individual\\nstructures, and built community environments—in ecological,\\nanimal behavioral, and evolutionary terms (Hansell 2007). If these are\\nfundamental vantage points for understanding human architecture, that\\nwould suggest a need to translate all going accounts—whether\\nfocused on aesthetics, utility, or other concerns—into\\ncorresponding biological terms. One way to resist this move is to mark\\nhuman architecture as a particularly human endeavor and\\ncreation—likely by reference to intentionality, as flows into\\naesthetic focus. However, this may just forestall the question as to\\nhow to account for that wrinkle—a particularly talented\\nanimal builder with notable design intent—in the larger story of\\nanimal builders most of whom have less or no such intent.\",\n \"Environmental Psychology as Magic Pill. Another\\nscientific challenge to traditional philosophy of architecture emerges\\nin environmental psychology, which identifies ways that environmental\\nfactors such as color, shape, light, and circulatory pattern shape our\\nvisual reactions and behavioral patterns within and around the built\\nenvironment. From such empirical insights, we can fashion constraints\\non architectural design principles that guide architectural creation,\\nand devise corresponding solutions to particular design problems. As\\narchitects learn to exploit this information to advance design, we may\\nask whether an architectural object may be optimized by the lights of\\nenvironmental psychology yet—and even\\nconsequently—deficient in some other, architecturally\\ncentral respect. Satisfying an architectural object’s intended\\nfunction or maximizing its utility may well include, or be advanced\\nby, keen attention to environmental factors that influence attitudes\\nto and use of that object. By contrast, moral or aesthetic\\ndeficiencies where environmental conditions are optimal seem real\\npossibilities. A resulting question is whether, and to what degree, we\\ncould or should abandon moral or aesthetic drivers in architectural\\ndesign if in the future we could design architectural objects to\\noptimize environmental factors and so meet cognitive and emotional\\nneeds, thereby enhancing an architectural object’s reception but\\nat moral or aesthetic expense.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"9. Further Issues in Philosophy of Architecture\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Acharya, Prasanna Kumar, 1928, Indian Architecture according\nto Mānasāra-śilpaśāstra\n[Mānasāra English trans.] London: Oxford University Press.","Alberti, Leon Battista, 1485, On the Art of Building in Ten\nBooks (De re aedificatoria, Florence: Niccolò di\nLorenzo), Joseph Rykwert, Robert Tavernor, and Neil Leach (trans.),\nCambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1988.","Alexander, Christopher, 1979, The Timeless Way of\nBuilding. Oxford: Oxford University Press.","Alexander, Christopher, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein,\n1977, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction,\nOxford: Oxford University Press.","Anderson, James C. and Jeffrey T. 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Marshall (rev. trans.), London and NY:\\nContinuum, 2nd edition, 1989.\",\n \"Gaut, Berys, 1998, “The Ethical Criticism of Art”, in\\nJerrold Levinson (ed.), Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the\\nIntersection, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.\\n182–203.\",\n \"Gieryn, Thomas F., 2002, “What Buildings Do”,\\nTheory and Society, 31(1): 35–74.\",\n \"Ginsburg Robert, 1994, “Aesthetics in Hiroshima”, in\\nMitias 1994: 221–234.\",\n \"Göller, Adolf, 1887, “What is the Cause of the\\nPerpetual Style Change in Architecture”, (“Was ist die\\nUrsache der immerwährenden Stilveränderung in der\\nArchitectur”, in Zur Aesthetik der Architektur:\\nVorträge und Studien, Stuttgart: Konrad Wittwer, 1887,\\npp. 1–48), in Mallgrave and Ikonomou 1994, pp. 193–225.\",\n \"Goodman, Nelson, 1968/1976, Languages of Art,\\nIndianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2nd\\nedition.\",\n \"–––, 1985, “How Buildings Mean”,\\nCritical Inquiry, 11(4): 642–653.\",\n \"Graham, Gordon, 1989, “Art and Architecture”,\\nBritish Journal of Aesthetics, 29(3): 248–257.\",\n \"–––, 2012, “Scruton on\\nArchitecture”, in Andy Hamilton, Nick Zangwill (eds.),\\nScruton’s Aesthetics, London: Palgrave Macmillan,\\npp. 164–176.\",\n \"Greenstreet, Robert, 1998, “The Case for Copyright:\\nProtecting Originality and the Architect’s Rights of\\nOwnership”, AIArchitect, (March): 20.\",\n \"Gutman, Robert, 1988, Architectural Practice: A Critical\\nView, Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press.\",\n \"Guyer, Paul, 2014, “18th Century German Aesthetics”\\n(Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford\\nEncyclopedia of Philosophy, URL = \\n<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/aesthetics-18th-german/>\",\n \"–––, 2011, “Kant and the Philosophy of\\nArchitecture”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,\\n69: 7–19.\",\n \"Halbwachs, Maurice, 1938,Population and society:\\nintroduction to social morphology (Morphologie sociale,\\nParis: Librairie Armand Colin), Otis Dudley Duncan and Harold\\nW. Pfautz (trans.), Glencoe, Ill., Free Press, 1960.\",\n \"Haldane, John, 1990, “Architecture, Philosophy and the\\nPublic World”, British Journal of Aesthetics, 30:\\n207–213.\",\n \"Handler, A. Benjamin, 1970, Systems Approach to\\nArchitecture, New York: American Elsevier Pub. Co.\",\n \"Hansell, Mike, 2007, Built by Animals, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Harries, Karsten, 1997, The Ethical Function of\\nArchitecture, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.\",\n \"Hartmann, Nicolai, 1953, Ästhetik, Berlin: De\\nGruyter.\",\n \"Hatfield, Gary, 1993, “Helmholtz and Classicism: The Science\\nof Aesthetics and the Aesthetics of Science”, in David Cahan\\n(ed.), Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of\\nNineteenth-Century Science, Berkeley: University of California\\nPress, pp. 522–58.\",\n \"Hegel, G.W.F., 1826, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine\\nArt, T.M. Knox (trans.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.\",\n \"Heidegger, Martin, 1951, “Building, dwelling,\\nthinking”, in Poetry, Language, Thought, Albert\\nHofstadter (trans.), New York: Harper and Row, 1975, pp. 145–161.\",\n \"Hillier, Bill and Julienne Hanson, 1984, The Social Logic of\\nSpace, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Hintikka, Jaakko, 1974, “Practical vs. Theoretical\\nReason—An Ambiguous Legacy”, in Stephan Körner (ed.),\\nPractical Reason, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp.\\n83–102.\",\n \"Holl, Steven, Juhani Pallasmaa, and Alberto\\nPérez-Gómez, 1994, “Questions of Perception:\\nPhenomenology of Architecture”, special issue of Architecture\\nand Urbanism, (July), Tokyo: A + U Publishing.\",\n \"Hume, David, 1739-40, A Treatise of Human Nature,\\nL. A. Selby-Bigge (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960.\",\n \"Ingarden, Roman, 1962, The Ontology of the Work of\\nArt (Untersuchungen zur Ontologie der Kunst: Musikwerk. Bild.\\nArchitektur. Film., Tübingen: Max Niemeyer), Raymond Meyer\\nwith John T. Goldthwait (trans.), Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1989.\",\n \"Iseminger, Gary, 1981, “Aesthetic Appreciation”,\\nJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 39(4):\\n389–397\",\n \"Jencks, Charles, 1969, “Semiology and Architecture”,\\nin Jencks and Baird 1969: 10–25.\",\n \"–––, 1977, The Language of Post-Modern\\nArchitecture, New York: Rizzoli.\",\n \"Jencks, Charles and George Baird (eds.), 1969, Meaning in\\nArchitecture, London: Barrie and Jenkins.\",\n \"Johnson, Paul-Allen, 1994, The Theory of\\nArchitecture—Concepts, Themes, and Practices. New York: Van\\nNostrand Reinhold.\",\n \"Kania, Andrew, 2008, “New Waves in Musical Ontology”,\\nin New Waves in Aesthetics, Kathleen Stock and Katherine\\nThomson-Jones (ed.), Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan,\\npp. 20–40.\",\n \"Kant, Immanuel, 1790, Critique of the Power of\\nJudgment, Paul Guyer (ed.); Paul Guyer and Eric Mathews (trans.),\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.\",\n \"Kieran, Matthew, 2001, “In Defence of the Ethical Evaluation\\nof Art”, British Journal of Aesthetics, 41:\\n337–351.\",\n \"Kieran, Matthew and Dominic McIver Lopes (eds.), 2006, Knowing\\nArt: Essays in Aesthetics and Epistemology, Dordrecht:\\nSpringer.\",\n \"Kivy, Peter, 1983, “Platonism in Music: A Kind of\\nDefense”, Grazer Philosophische Studien, 19:\\n109–129.\",\n \"Koenig, Giovanni Klaus, 1964, Analisi del linguaggio\\narchitettonico, Firenze: Libreria editrice fiorentina.\",\n \"–––, 1970, Architettura e\\ncommunicazione, Firenze: Libreria editrice fiorentina.\",\n \"Koolhaas Rem, 1978, Delirious New York: a retroactive\\nmanifesto for Manhattan, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Korab-Karpowicz, W. Julian, 2012, “Schopenhauer’s\\nTheory of Architecture”, in Bart Vandenabeele (ed.), A\\n\\nCompanion to Schopenhauer, London: Blackwell Publishing,\\npp. 178–192.\",\n \"Krier, Léon, 2009, The Architecture of Community,\\nDhiru A. Thadani & Peter J. Hetzel (eds.), Washington, DC: Island\\nPress.\",\n \"Kruft, Hanno-Walter, 1994, A History of Architectural Theory:\\nFrom Vitruvius to the Present, Princeton: Princeton Architectural\\nPress.\",\n \"Langer, Susanne K., 1953, Feeling and Form, New York:\\nMacmillan Publishing Company.\",\n \"–––, 1967, Mind: An Essay on Human\\nFeeling, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.\",\n \"Laugier, Marc Antoine, 1753/1755, Essai sur\\nl’architecture, Paris: Duchesne.\",\n \"Lavin, Sylvia, 1992, Quatremère de Quincy and the\\nInvention of a Modern Language of Architecture, Cambridge, MA:\\nThe MIT Press.\",\n \"–––, 2004, Form Follows Libido: Architecture\\nand Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture, Cambridge, MA:\\nThe MIT Press.\",\n \"Le Corbusier, 1923, Toward A New Architecture\\n(Vers Une Architecture, Paris: G. Crès et Cie),\\nFrederick Etchells (trans.), New York: Praeger, 1960; John Goodman (trans.)\\nSanta Monica, CA: Getty Publications, 2007.\",\n \"Leder, Helmut; Benno Belke; Andries Oeberst; and Dorothee\\nAugustin, 2004, “A Model of Aesthetic Appreciation and Aesthetic\\nJudgments”, British Journal of Psychology, 95(4):\\n489–508.\",\n \"Lefebvre, Henri, 1970, The Urban Revolution (La\\nrévolution urbaine, Paris: Gallimard), Robert Bononno\\n(trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.\",\n \"–––, 1974, The Production of Space\\n(La production de l’espace, Paris: Anthropos), Donald\\nNicholson-Smith (trans.), Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.\",\n \"Levinson, Jerrold, 2007, “Artworks as Artifacts”, in\\nEric Margolis and Stephen Laurence (eds.), Creations of the Mind:\\nTheories of Artifacts and Their Representation, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press, pp. 74–84.\",\n \"Livingston, Paisley, 2011, revised 2013, “History of the\\nOntology of Art” (Summer 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),\\nThe Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, URL= <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2013/entries/art-ontology-history/>\",\n \"Loos, Adolf, 1913, “Ornament and Crime”\\n(“Ornement et crime”, Cahiers d'aujourd'hui (5):\\n247–256), in Ulrich Conrads (ed.), Programs and Manifestoes\\non 20th Century Architecture, Cambridge, MA: The MIT\\nPress, 1970, pp. 19–24.\",\n \"Lopes, Dominic Mciver, 2007, “Shikinen Sengu and the\\nOntology of Architecture in Japan”, Journal of Aesthetics\\nand Art Criticism, 65(1): 77–84.\",\n \"Mallgrave, Harry Francis, 2005, Modern Architectural Theory: A\\nHistorical Survey, 1673–1969, Cambridge: Cambridge\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Mallgrave, Harry Francis and Eleftherios Ikonomou (eds. and\\ntrans.), 1994, Empathy, Form and Space: Problems in German\\nAesthetics, 1873–1893, Santa Monica: Getty Centre for the\\nHistory of Art and the Humanities.\",\n \"Malo, Paul, 1999, Personal correspondence.\",\n \"Margolis, Joseph, 1958, “The Mode of Existence of a Work of\\nArt”, Review of Metaphysics, 12(1): 26–34.\",\n \"Matravers, Derek, 1999, “Revising Principles of\\nArchitecture”, The Journal of Architecture, 4(1):\\n39–45.\",\n \"Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1945,\\nPhénoménologie de la perception, Paris: Gallimard, 1998.\",\n \"Mitchell, William J., 1990, The Logic of Architecture: Design,\\nComputation, and Cognition, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.\",\n \"Mitias, Michael (ed.), 1994, Philosophy and Architecture,\\nAmsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi.\",\n \"––– (ed.), 1999a, Architecture and\\nCivilization, Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi.\",\n \"–––, 1999b, “The Aesthetic Experience of\\nthe Architectural Work”, Journal of Aesthetic\\nEducation, 33(3): 61–77.\",\n \"Mitrovic, Branko, 2011, Philosophy for Architects,\\nPrinceton: Princeton Architectural Press.\",\n \"–––, 2013, Visuality for Architects:\\nArchitectural Creativity and Modern Theories of Perception and\\nImagination, Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia\\nPress.\",\n \"Norberg-Schulz, Christian, 1965, Intentions in\\nArchitecture, Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.\",\n \"–––, 1980, Genius Loci: Towards a\\nPhenomenology of Architecture, London: Academy Editions; New\\nYork: Rizzoli.\",\n \"Oliver, Paul (ed.), 1969, Shelter and Society, New York:\\nPraeger.\",\n \"Paden, Roger, 2001, “The Two Professions of Hippodamus of\\nMiletus”, Philosophy and Geography, 4(1):\\n25–48.\",\n \"Palladio Andrea, 1570, The Four Books of\\nArchitecture (I Quattro Libri dell’Architecttura,\\nVenice: Dominico de’ Franceschi), Richard Schofield and Robert\\nTavernor (trans.), Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.\",\n \"Pallasmaa, Juhani, 2005, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture\\nand the Senses, Chichester: Wiley-Academy.\",\n \"–––, 2012, Encounters 1: Architectural\\nEssays, Peter MacKeith (ed.), Diana C. Tullberg, Michael\\nWynne-Ellis (trans.), Helsinki, Finland: Rakennustieto Oy.\",\n \"Parsons, Glenn, 2008, “Nature, Aesthetic Values and Urban\\nDesign: Building the Natural City”, in Peter Vermaas, Pieter\\nKroes, Andrew Light, and Steven A. Moore (ed.), Philosophy and\\nDesign: From Engineering to Architecture, New York/Heidelberg:\\nSpringer, pp. 341–354.\",\n \"Parsons, Glenn, and Allen Carlson, 2008, Functional\\nBeauty, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"Pérez-Gómez, Alberto, 1983, Architecture and the\\nCrisis of Modern Science, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.\",\n \"Portoghesi, Paolo, 2000, Nature and Architecture, Erika\\nG. Young (trans.), Thames & Hudson.\",\n \"Pugin, A.W.N., 1841, The True Principles of Christian or\\nPointed Architecture, London: John Weale.\",\n \"–––, 1843, An Apology for the Revival of\\nChristian Architecture in England, London: John Weale.\",\n \"Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine-Chrysostome, 1803, De\\nl’Architecture égyptienne considérée dans\\nson origine, ses principes et son goût, et comparée sous\\nles mêmes rapports à l’architecture grecque,\\nParis: Barrois l’aîné et Fils.\",\n \"Rapoport, Amos, 1969, House Form and Culture, Englewood\\nCliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.\",\n \"Rasmussen, Steen Eiler, 1959, Experiencing Architecture,\\nCambridge, MA: The MIT Press.\",\n \"Robinson, Jenefer, 2012, “On Being Moved By\\nArchitecture”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,\\n70(4): 337–353.\",\n \"Robinson, Julia Williams, 2001, “The Form and Structure of\\nArchitectural Knowledge: From Practice to Discipline”, in\\nAndrzej Piotrowski and Julia Williams Robinson (eds.), The\\nDiscipline of Architecture, Minneapolis, MN: University of\\nMinnesota Press, pp. 61–82.\",\n \"Ruskin, John, 1849, The Seven Lamps of Architecture\\n(London: Smith, Elder, and Co.), New York: Dover Publications, 1989.\",\n \"Sauchelli, Andrea, 2012a, “The Structure and Content of\\nArchitectural Experience: Scruton on Architecture as Art”,\\nEstetika, The Central European Journal of Aesthetics,\\n49/5(1): 26–44.\",\n \"–––, 2012b, “Functional Beauty,\\nArchitecture, and Morality: A Beautiful\\nKonzentrationslager?”, The Philosophical\\nQuarterly, 62(246): 128–147.\",\n \"Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1818/1844 [WWR], The\\nWorld as Will and Representation, Two volumes (Die Welt als\\nWille und Vorstellung), E. F. J. Payne (trans.), New York: Dover\\nPublications, 1958/1969.\",\n \"Schwarzer, Mitchell, 1996, “Schopenhauer’s Philosophy\\nof Architecture”, in Dale Jacquette (ed.), Schopenhauer,\\nPhilosophy and the Arts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,\\npp. 277–298.\",\n \"Scott, Geoffrey, 1914/1924, The Architecture of\\nHumanism. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 2nd\\nedition; reprint edition, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954.\",\n \"Scruton, Roger, 1979/2013, The Aesthetics of\\nArchitecture, Princeton: Princeton University\\nPress. 2nd edition.\",\n \"–––, 1994, The Classical Vernacular:\\nArchitectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism, New York:\\nSt. Martin’s Press.\",\n \"Semper, Gottfried, 1860, Style in the Technical and\\nTectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics (Der Stil in der\\ntechnischen und tektonischen Künsten, 1860), Harry Francis\\nMallgrave and Michael Robinson (trans.), Santa Monica, Getty Center\\nfor the History of Art and the Humanities, 2004.\",\n \"Simmel, Georg, 1903, “The Metropolis and Mental\\nLife”, (“Die Großstädte und das\\nGeistesleben”, in Thomas Petermann (ed.), Die Grossstadt.\\nVorträge und Aufsätze zur Städteausstellung\\n(Jahrbuch der Gehe-Stiftung Dresden, 9), Dresden, pp.\\n185–206), in Kurt Wolff (trans.) The Sociology of Georg\\nSimmel, New York: Free Press, 1950, pp. 409–424.\",\n \"Sitte, Camillo, 1889, City Planning According to Artistic\\nPrinciples (Der Städtebau: nach seinen\\nkünstlerischen Grundsätzen, Vienna: Graeser), in\\nCamillo Sitte: The Birth of Modern City Planning, George\\nR. Collins and Christiane Crasemann Collins (trans.), New York:\\nRizzoli, 1986.\",\n \"Smith, Korydon (ed.), 2012, Introducing Architectural Theory:\\nDebating a Discipline, New York: Routledge.\",\n \"Sparshott, Francis, 1994, “The Aesthesis of Architecture and\\nthe Politics of Space”, in Mitias 1994: 3–20.\",\n \"Spector, Tom, 2001, The Ethical Architect: The Dilemma of\\nContemporary Practice, New York: Princeton Architectural\\nPress.\",\n \"Stecker, Robert, 2010, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of\\nArt, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.\",\n \"Sullivan, Louis, 1896, “The Tall Office Building\\nArtistically Considered”, Lippincott’s Magazine,\\n57(March): 403–409.\",\n \"Summerson, John, 1966, The Classical Language of\\nArchitecture, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. \",\n \"Suppes, Patrick, 1991, “Rules of Proportion in\\nArchitecture”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 16(1):\\n352–358.\",\n \"Tafuri, Manfredo, 1973, Architecture and Utopia. Design\\nand Capitalist Development (Progetto e utopia: Architettura e\\nsviluppo capitalistico. Bari, Laterza), Barbara Luigia La Penta\\n(trans.), Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1976.\",\n \"Taurens, Jānis, 2008, “‘Meaning’ and\\n‘Context’ in the Language of Architecture”, KOHT\\nja PAIK / PLACE and LOCATION - Studies in Environmental Aesthetics and\\nSemiotics, VI: 71–82.\",\n \"Thomasson, Amie, 1999, Fiction and Metaphysics,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2005, “The Ontology of Art and\\nKnowledge in Aesthetics”, Journal of Aesthetics and Art\\nCriticism, 63(3): 221–229.\",\n \"Thompson, J. Phillip, 2012, “The Politics of\\nPlanning”, in Randall Crane and Rachel Weber (eds.), The\\nOxford Handbook of Urban Planning, pp. 739–760.\",\n \"Trivedi, Saam, 2002, “Against Musical Works as Eternal\\nTypes”, British Journal of Aesthetics, 42(1):\\n73–82.\",\n \"van Eck, Caroline, 2000, “Architecture, language, and\\nrhetoric in Alberti’s De re aedificatoria”, in\\nGeorgia Clarke and Paul Crossley (eds.), Architecture and\\nlanguage: constructing identity in European architecture,\\nc. 1000-c. 1650, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,\\npp. 72–81.\",\n \"Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown, & Steven Izenour,\\n1972/1977, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of\\nArchitectural Form, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, revised\\nedition.\",\n \"Vesely, Dalibor, 2004, Architecture in the Age of Divided\\nRepresentation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of\\nProduction, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.\",\n \"Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène-Emmanuel, 1863–1872,\\nEntretiens sur l’architecture, Paris: A. Morel.\",\n \"Vitruvius, 15 BCE, De architectura; Ten\\nBooks on Architecture, Morris H. Morgan (trans.), Cambridge, MA:\\nHarvard University Press, 1914; New York: Dover, 1960.\",\n \"Volkelt, Johannnes I., 1905, System der Ästhetik, I,\\nMunich: Beck.\",\n \"Wagner, Otto, 1896, Modern Architecture: A Guidebook for\\nHis Students to This Field of Art (Moderne Architektur,\\n1896), Harry Francis Mallgrave (trans.), Santa Monica, CA: Getty\\nCenter for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1988.\",\n \"Walton, Kendall L., 1970, “Categories of Art”, The\\nPhilosophical Review 79 (3): 334–367.\",\n \"Wasserman, Barry, Patrick J. Sullivan, and Gregory Palermo, 2000,\\nEthics and the Practice of Architecture, New York: John\\nWiley.\",\n \"Watkin, David, 1984/2001, Morality and Architecture\\nRevisited, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.\",\n \"Wicks, Robert, 1994, “Architectural Restoration:\\nResurrection or Replication?”, British Journal of\\nAesthetics,34(2): 163–169.\",\n \"Wigley, Mark, 1993, The Architecture of Deconstruction:\\nDerrida’s Haunt, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.\",\n \"Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 1764, Geschichte der Kunst des\\nAlterthums, Dresden: Walther.\",\n \"Winters, Edward, 2007, Aesthetics and Architecture,\\nLondon and New York: Continuum.\",\n \"–––, 2011, “A Dance to the Music of\\nArchitecture”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art\\nCriticism, 69(1): 61–67.\",\n \"Wolff, Christian, 1746, Discursus praeliminaris de\\nphilosophia in genere: Philosophia rationalis; sive, Logica, methodo\\nscientii ca pertractata …, modern edition in Jean\\nÉcole, et al. (eds.), Gesammelte Werke II.1,\\n1–3, Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1983; Preliminary Discourse\\non Philosophy in General, Richard Blackwell (trans.),\\nIndianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963.\",\n \"–––, 1750–57, Anfangsgründe\\nder Baukunst (The Principles of Architecture), in\\nDie Anfangsgründe aller Mathematischen Wissenschaften:\\nWelcher die Baukunst, Artillerie und Fortification in sich\\nenthält, bande 2, Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Halle:\\nRenger; modern edition in Jean École, et al. (eds.),\\nGesammelte Werke I.12, Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1999.\",\n \"–––, 1751, Vernünftige Gedanken\\nvon Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen (German\\nMetaphysics), modern edition in Jean École, et al. (eds.),\\nGesammelte Werke I.2, 1–2, Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1997.\",\n \"Wölfflin, Heinrich, 1886, “Prolegomena to a Psychology\\nof Architecture”, (“Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der\\nArchitektur”.), in Mallgrave and Ikonomou 1994,\\npp. 149–187.\",\n \"Wotton, Henry, 1624, The Elements of Architecture,\\nLondon: I. Bill.\",\n \"Wren, Christopher, c1670s, “Of Architecture, Tract I-V”,\\n(Parentalia, London: T. Osborn and R. Dodsley, 1750), in\\nLydia M. Soo, 2007, Wren’s “Tracts” on\\nArchitecture and Other Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress, pp. 153-195.\",\n \"Wundt, Wilhelm, 1896/1907, Outlines of Psychology\\n[Grundriss der Psychologie, Leipzig: Engelmann], C. H. Judd\\n(trans.), St. Clair Shores, MI: Scholarly Press, 1969.\",\n \"Yeang, Ken, 2006, Ecodesign: A Manual for Ecological\\nDesign, London: Wiley-Academy.\",\n \"Zangwill, Nick, 2001, The Metaphysics of Beauty, Ithaca:\\nCornell University Press.\",\n \"Zevi, Bruno, 1978, The Modern Language of Architecture,\\nSeattle: University of Washington Press.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../aesthetic-judgment/","text":"aesthetics: aesthetic judgment"},{"href":"../environmental-aesthetics/","text":"aesthetics: environmental"},{"href":"../aesthetics-18th-german/","text":"aesthetics: German, in the 18th century"},{"href":"../art-definition/","text":"art, definition of"},{"href":"../artifact/","text":"artifact"},{"href":"../beauty/","text":"beauty"},{"href":"../goodman-aesthetics/","text":"Goodman, Nelson: aesthetics"},{"href":"../ingarden/","text":"Ingarden, Roman"},{"href":"../art-ontology-history/","text":"ontology of art, history of"},{"href":"../schopenhauer-aesthetics/","text":"Schopenhauer, Arthur: aesthetics"},{"href":"../wolff-christian/","text":"Wolff, Christian"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../aesthetic-judgment/\",\n \"text\": \"aesthetics: aesthetic judgment\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../environmental-aesthetics/\",\n \"text\": \"aesthetics: environmental\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aesthetics-18th-german/\",\n \"text\": \"aesthetics: German, in the 18th century\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../art-definition/\",\n \"text\": \"art, definition of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../artifact/\",\n \"text\": \"artifact\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../beauty/\",\n \"text\": \"beauty\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../goodman-aesthetics/\",\n \"text\": \"Goodman, Nelson: aesthetics\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../ingarden/\",\n \"text\": \"Ingarden, Roman\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../art-ontology-history/\",\n \"text\": \"ontology of art, history of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../schopenhauer-aesthetics/\",\n \"text\": \"Schopenhauer, Arthur: aesthetics\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../wolff-christian/\",\n \"text\": \"Wolff, Christian\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":72,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"archytas"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Archytas"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Thu Jun 26, 2003; substantive revision Thu Nov 5, 2020"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nArchytas of Tarentum was a Greek mathematician, political leader and\nphilosopher, active in the first half of the fourth century BC (i.e.,\nduring Plato’s lifetime). He was the last prominent figure in\nthe early Pythagorean tradition and the dominant political figure in\nTarentum, being elected general seven consecutive times. He sent a\nship to rescue Plato from the clutches of the tyrant of Syracuse,\nDionysius II, in 361, but his personal and philosophical connections\nto Plato are complex, and there are many signs of disagreement between\nthe two philosophers. A great number of pseudepigrapha were written in\nArchytas’ name starting in the first century BC, and only four\nfragments of his genuine work survive, although these are supplemented\nby a number of important testimonia. Archytas was the first to solve\none of the most celebrated mathematical problems in antiquity, the\nduplication of the cube. We also have his proof showing that ratios of\nthe form (n+1) : n, which are important in music\ntheory, cannot be divided by a mean proportional. He was the most\nsophisticated of the Pythagorean harmonic theorists and provided\nmathematical accounts of musical scales used by the practicing\nmusicians of his day. Fr. 1 of Archytas may be the earliest text to\nidentify the group of four canonical sciences (logistic [arithmetic],\ngeometry, astronomy and music), which would become known as the\nquadrivium in the middle ages. There are also some\nindications that he contributed to the development of the science of\noptics and laid the mathematical foundations for the science of\nmechanics. He saw the ultimate goal of the sciences as the description\nof individual things in the world in terms of ratio and proportion and\naccordingly regarded logistic, the science of number and proportion,\nas the master science. Rational calculation and an understanding of\nproportion were also the bases of the just state and of the good life\nfor an individual. He gave definitions of things that took account of\nboth their matter and their form. Although we have little information\nabout his cosmology, he developed the most famous argument for the\ninfinity of the universe in antiquity."],"string":"[\n \"\\nArchytas of Tarentum was a Greek mathematician, political leader and\\nphilosopher, active in the first half of the fourth century BC (i.e.,\\nduring Plato’s lifetime). He was the last prominent figure in\\nthe early Pythagorean tradition and the dominant political figure in\\nTarentum, being elected general seven consecutive times. He sent a\\nship to rescue Plato from the clutches of the tyrant of Syracuse,\\nDionysius II, in 361, but his personal and philosophical connections\\nto Plato are complex, and there are many signs of disagreement between\\nthe two philosophers. A great number of pseudepigrapha were written in\\nArchytas’ name starting in the first century BC, and only four\\nfragments of his genuine work survive, although these are supplemented\\nby a number of important testimonia. Archytas was the first to solve\\none of the most celebrated mathematical problems in antiquity, the\\nduplication of the cube. We also have his proof showing that ratios of\\nthe form (n+1) : n, which are important in music\\ntheory, cannot be divided by a mean proportional. He was the most\\nsophisticated of the Pythagorean harmonic theorists and provided\\nmathematical accounts of musical scales used by the practicing\\nmusicians of his day. Fr. 1 of Archytas may be the earliest text to\\nidentify the group of four canonical sciences (logistic [arithmetic],\\ngeometry, astronomy and music), which would become known as the\\nquadrivium in the middle ages. There are also some\\nindications that he contributed to the development of the science of\\noptics and laid the mathematical foundations for the science of\\nmechanics. He saw the ultimate goal of the sciences as the description\\nof individual things in the world in terms of ratio and proportion and\\naccordingly regarded logistic, the science of number and proportion,\\nas the master science. Rational calculation and an understanding of\\nproportion were also the bases of the just state and of the good life\\nfor an individual. He gave definitions of things that took account of\\nboth their matter and their form. Although we have little information\\nabout his cosmology, he developed the most famous argument for the\\ninfinity of the universe in antiquity.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Life and Works","sub_toc":["1.1 Family, Teachers, and Pupils; Date","1.2 Sources","1.3 Archytas and Tarentum","1.4 Archytas and Plato","1.5 The Authenticity Question","1.6 Pseudepigrapha Ascribed to Archytas","1.7 Genuine Works and Testimonia"]},{"content_title":"2. Archytas as Mathematician and Harmonic Theorist","sub_toc":["2.1 Doubling the Cube","2.2 Music and Mathematics","2.3 Evaluation of Archytas as Mathematician"]},{"content_title":"3. Archytas and the Sciences","sub_toc":["3.1 The Value of the Sciences","3.2 “Logistic” as the Master Science","3.3 Optics and Mechanics"]},{"content_title":"4. Definitions","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"5. Cosmology and Physics","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"6. Ethics and Political Philosophy","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"7. Importance and Influence","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Life and Works\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"1.1 Family, Teachers, and Pupils; Date\",\n \"1.2 Sources\",\n \"1.3 Archytas and Tarentum\",\n \"1.4 Archytas and Plato\",\n \"1.5 The Authenticity Question\",\n \"1.6 Pseudepigrapha Ascribed to Archytas\",\n \"1.7 Genuine Works and Testimonia\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Archytas as Mathematician and Harmonic Theorist\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"2.1 Doubling the Cube\",\n \"2.2 Music and Mathematics\",\n \"2.3 Evaluation of Archytas as Mathematician\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Archytas and the Sciences\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"3.1 The Value of the Sciences\",\n \"3.2 “Logistic” as the Master Science\",\n \"3.3 Optics and Mechanics\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Definitions\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Cosmology and Physics\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. Ethics and Political Philosophy\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"7. Importance and Influence\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":[],"section_title":"1. Life and Works","subsections":[{"content":["\nArchytas, son of Hestiaeus (see Aristoxenus in Diels-Kranz 1952, chap.\n47, passage A1; abbreviated as DK47 A1), lived in the Greek city of\nTarentum, on the heel of the boot of Italy. The later tradition almost\nuniversally identifies him as a Pythagorean (e.g., A1, A2, A7, A16).\nAristotle and his pupil Eudemus do not explicitly call Archytas a\nPythagorean and appear to treat him as an important independent\nthinker. Plato never refers to Archytas by name except in the\nSeventh Letter, if that is by Plato, and he is not called a\nPythagorean there. In the Republic, however, when Plato\nquotes a sentence which appears in Fr. 1 of Archytas (DK47 B1), he\nexplicitly labels it as part of Pythagorean harmonics (530d). Cicero\n(de Orat. III 34. 139) reports that Archytas was the pupil of\nPhilolaus, and this is not improbable. Philolaus was the most\nprominent Pythagorean of the preceding generation (ca. 470–390)\nand may have taught in Tarentum. Archytas’ achievements in\nmathematics depend on the work of Hippocrates of Chios, but we have no\nevidence that he studied with Hippocrates. The only pupil of Archytas\nwho is more than a name, is Eudoxus (ca. 390–340), the prominent\nmathematician. Eudoxus presumably did not learn his famous hedonism\nfrom Archytas (see DK47 A9), and it is specifically geometry that he\nis said to have studied with Archytas (Diogenes Laertius VIII 86).","\nArchytas was, roughly speaking, a contemporary of Plato, but it is\ndifficult to be more precise about his dates. Aristotle’s pupil,\nEudemus, presents him as the contemporary of Plato (born 428/7) and\nLeodamas (born ca. 430), on the one hand, and of Theaetetus (born ca.\n415), on the other (A6). Since it would be difficult to call him the\ncontemporary of Theaetetus, if he were born much earlier than 435,\nthis is the earliest he was likely to have been born. On the other\nhand, he could have been born as late as 410 and still be considered a\ncontemporary of Plato. Strabo associates Archytas with the flourishing\nof Tarentum, before a period of decline, in which Tarentum hired\nmercenary generals (A4). Since the mercenaries appear ca. 340, it\nseems likely that Archytas was dead by 350 at the latest. Such a date\nis in accord with other evidence (A5 = [Demosthenes], Erot.\nOr. 61.46), which connects Archytas to Timotheus, who died ca.\n355, and with Plato’s (?) Seventh Letter (350a), which\npresents Archytas as still active in Tarentum in 361. Thus Archytas\nwas born between 435 and 410 and died between 360 and 350.","\nSome scholars (e.g., Ciaceri 1927–32: III 4) have supposed that\nthe speaker of the Roman poet, Horace’s, Archytas Ode (I 28 =\nA3) is Archytas himself and hence have concluded that Archytas died in\na shipwreck. The standard interpretation, however, rightly recognizes\nthat the speaker is not Archytas but a shipwrecked sailor who\napostrophizes Archytas (Nisbet and Hubbard 1970, 317ff.). The ode\ntells us nothing about Archytas’ death, but it is one of many\npieces of evidence for the fascination with Archytas by Roman authors\nof the first century BC (Propertius IV 1b.77; Varro in B8; Cicero,\nRep. I 38.59, I 10.16; Fin. V 29.87; Tusc.\nIV 36.78, V 23.64, de Orat. III 34.139; Amic. XXIII\n88; Sen. XII 39–41), perhaps because Pythagoreanism had\ncome to be seen as a native Italian philosophy, and not a Greek import\n(Burkert 1961; Powell 1995, 11 ff.)."],"subsection_title":"1.1 Family, Teachers, and Pupils; Date"},{"content":["\nApart from the surviving fragments of his writings, our knowledge of\nArchytas’ life and work depends heavily on authors who wrote in\nthe second half of the fourth century, in the fifty years after\nArchytas’ death. Archytas’ importance both as an\nintellectual and as a political leader is reflected in the number of\nwritings about him in this period, although only fragments of these\nworks have been preserved. Aristotle wrote a work in three volumes on\nthe philosophy of Archytas, more than on any other of his\npredecessors, as well as a second work, consisting of a summary of\nPlato’s Timaeus and the writings of Archytas (A13).\nUnfortunately almost nothing of these works has survived. Scholars\nhave generally regarded them as authentic (Huffman 2005: 583–94)\nbut Schofield has recently raised some doubts (2014: 81–2).\nAristotle’s pupil Eudemus discussed Archytas prominently in his\nhistory of geometry (A6 and A14) and in his work on physics (A23 and\nA24). Another pupil of Aristotle’s, Aristoxenus, wrote a\nLife of Archytas, which is the basis for much of the\nbiographical tradition about him (A1, A7, A9). Aristoxenus (375-ca.\n300) was in a good position to have accurate information about\nArchytas. He was born in Tarentum and grew up during the height of\nArchytas’ prominence in the city. In addition to whatever\npersonal knowledge he had of Archytas, he draws on his own father\nSpintharus, who was a younger contemporary of Archytas, as a source\n(e.g., A7). Aristoxenus began his philosophical career as a\nPythagorean and studied with the Pythagorean Xenophilus at Athens, so\nthat it is not surprising that his portrayal of Archytas is largely\npositive. Nonetheless, Archytas’ opponents are given a fair\nhearing (e.g., Polyarchus in A9), and Archytas himself is represented\nas not without small flaws of character (A7). Other fourth-century\nsources such as the Seventh Letter in the Platonic corpus and\nDemosthenes’ (?) Erotic Oration focus on the connection\nbetween Archytas and Plato (see below)."],"subsection_title":"1.2 Sources"},{"content":["\nArchytas is unique among Greek philosophers for the prominent role he\nplayed in the politics of his native city. He was elected general\n(stratêgos) seven years in succession at one point in\nhis career (A1), a record that reminds us of Pericles at Athens. His\nelection was an exception to a law, which forbade election in\nsuccessive years, and thus attests to his reputation in Tarentum.\nAristoxenus reports that Archytas was never defeated in battle and\nthat, when at one point he was forced to withdraw from his post by the\nenvy of his enemies, the Tarentines immediately suffered defeat (A1).\nHe probably served as part of a board of generals (there was a board\nof ten at Athens). The analogy with Athens suggests that as a general\nhe may also have had special privileges in addressing the assembly at\nTarentum on issues of importance to the city, so that his position as\ngeneral gave him considerable political as well as military power. At\nsome point in his career, he may have been designated as a general\nautokratôr (“plenipotentiary”) (A2), which\ngave him special latitude in dealing with diplomatic and military\nmatters without consulting the assembly, although this was not\ndictatorial power and all arrangements probably required the eventual\napproval of the assembly. We do not know when Archytas served his\nseven successive years as general. Some have supposed that they must\ncoincide with the seven year period which includes Plato’s\nsecond and third visits to Italy and Sicily, 367–361 (e.g.,\nWuilleumier 1939, 68–9), but Archytas need not have been\nstratêgos to play the role assigned to him during these\nyears in the Seventh Letter. The evidence suggests that most\nof Archytas’ military campaigns were directed not at other\nGreeks but at native Italic peoples such as the Messapians and\nLucanians, with whom Tarentum had been in constant conflict since its\nfounding.","\nIt is important to recognize that the Tarentum in which Archytas\nexercised such influence was not some insignificant backwater. Spartan\ncolonists founded it in 706. It was initially overshadowed by other\nGreek colonies in southern Italy such as Croton, although it had the\nbest harbor on the south coast of Italy and was the natural stopping\npoint for any ships sailing west from mainland Greece. Archytas will\nhave grown up in a Tarentum that, in accord with its foundation by\nSparta, took the Peloponnesian and Syracusan side against Athens in\nthe Peloponnesian War (Thuc. VI 44; VI 104; VII 91). Athens allied\nwith the Messapians (Thuc. VII 33), the long-standing enemy of the\nTarentines, against whom Archytas would later lead expeditions (A7).\nAfter the Peloponnesian War, Tarentum appears to have avoided direct\ninvolvement in the conflict between the tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius\nI, and a league of Greek cities in southern Italy headed by Croton.\nAfter Dionysius crushed the league, Tarentum emerged as the most\npowerful Greek state in southern Italy and probably became the new\nhead of the league of Italiot Greek cities (A2). In the period from\n380–350, when Archytas was in his prime and old age, Tarentum\nwas one of the most powerful cities in the Greek world (Purcell 1994,\n388). Strabo’s description of its military might (VI 3.4)\ncompares favorably with Thucydides’ account of Athens at the\nbeginning of the Peloponnesian war (II. 13).","\nDespite its ancestral connections to Sparta, which was an oligarchy,\nTarentum appears to have been a democracy during Archytas’\nlifetime. According to Aristotle (Pol. 1303a), the democracy\nwas founded after a large part of the Tarentine aristocracy was killed\nin a battle with a native people, the Iapygians, in 473. Herodotus\nconfirms that this was the greatest slaughter of Greeks of which he\nwas aware (VII 170). There is no evidence that Tarentum was anything\nbut a democracy between the founding of the democracy in 473 and\nArchytas’ death ca. 350. Some scholars have argued that\nTarentum’s ties to Sparta and the supposed predilection of the\nPythagoreans for aristocracy will have insured that Tarentum did not\nremain a democracy long and that it was not a democracy under Archytas\n(Minar 1942, 88–90; Ciaceri 1927–32, II 446–7).\nStrabo, however, explicitly describes Tarentum as a democracy at the\ntime of its flourishing under Archytas (A4), and the descriptions of\nArchytas’ power in Tarentum stress his popularity with the\nmasses and his election as general by the citizens (A1 and A2).\nFinally, Aristotle’s account of the structure of the Tarentine\ngovernment in the fourth century (Pol. 1291b14), while\npossibly consistent with other forms of government, makes most sense\nif Tarentum was a democracy. The same is true of fr. B3 of Archytas,\nwith its emphasis on a more equal distribution of wealth."],"subsection_title":"1.3 Archytas and Tarentum"},{"content":["\nArchytas was most famous in antiquity and is most famous in the modern\nworld for having sent a ship to rescue Plato from the tyrant of\nSyracuse, Dionysius II, in 361. In both the surviving ancient lives of\nArchytas (by Diogenes Laertius, VIII 79–83, and in the\nSuda) the first thing mentioned about him, after the name of\nhis city-state and his father, is his rescue of Plato (A1 and A2).\nThis story is told in greatest detail in the Seventh Letter\nascribed to Plato. It has accordingly been typical to identify\nArchytas as “the friend of Plato” (Mathieu 1987). Archytas\nfirst met Plato over twenty years earlier, when Plato visited southern\nItaly and Sicily for the first time in 388/7, during his travels after\nthe death of Socrates (Pl. [?], Ep. VII 324a, 326b-d; Cicero,\nRep. I 10. 16; Philodemus, Acad. Ind. X 5–11;\ncf. D.L. III 6). Some scholars have seen Archytas as the dominant\nfigure in the relationship (Zhmud 2006, 93) and even as the “new\nmodel philosopher for Plato” (Vlastos 1991, 129) and the\narchetype of Plato’s philosopher-king (Guthrie 1962, 333). The\nactual situation appears to be considerably more complicated. The\nancient evidence, apart from the Seventh Letter, presents the\nrelationship between Archytas and Plato in diametrically opposed ways.\nOne tradition does present Archytas as the Pythagorean master at whose\nfeet Plato sat, after Socrates had died (e.g., Cicero, Rep. I\n10.16), but another tradition makes Archytas the student of Plato, to\nwhom he owed his fame and success in Tarentum (Demosthenes [?],\nErotic Oration 44).","\nThe Seventh Letter itself is of contested authenticity. Many\nscholars regard it either as the work of Plato himself or of a student\nof Plato who had considerable familiarity with Plato’s\ninvolvement in events in Sicily (see e.g., Brisson 1987; Lloyd 1990;\nSchofield 2000), but grave doubts about this view have been raised by\nBurnyeat and Frede (2015). The letter appears to serve as an apologia\nfor Plato’s involvement in events in Sicily. Lloyd has argued,\nhowever, that the letter also serves to distance Plato from\nPythagoreanism and from Archytas (1990). Nothing in the letter\nsuggests that Plato was ever the pupil of Archytas; instead the\nrelationship is much closer to that presented in the Erotic\nOration. Plato is presented as the dominant figure upon whom\nArchytas depends both philosophically and politically. Archytas writes\nto Plato claiming that Dionysius II has made great progress in\nphilosophy, in order to urge Plato to come to Sicily a third time\n(339d-e). These claims are belied as soon as Plato arrives (340b). The\nletter thus suggests that, far from being the Pythagorean master from\nwhom Plato learned his philosophy, Archytas had a very imperfect\nunderstanding of what Plato considered philosophy to be. The letter\nmakes clear that Plato does have a relationship of xenia,\n“guest-friendship,” with Archytas and others at Tarentum\n(339e, 350a). This relationship could have been established on\nPlato’s first visit in 388/7, since Plato uses it as a basis to\nestablish a similar relationship between Archytas and Dionysius II\nduring his second visit in 367 (338c). It is also the relationship in\nterms of which Plato appeals to Archytas for help, when he is in\ndanger after the third trip to Sicily goes badly (350a). Such a\nfriendship need not imply any close personal intimacy, however.\nAristotle classifies xenia as a friendship for utility and\npoints out that such friends do not necessarily spend much time\ntogether or even find each other’s company pleasant (EN\n1156a26 ff.). Apart from Archytas’ rescue of Plato in 361 (even\nthis is described as devised by Plato [350a]), Plato is clearly the\ndominant figure in the relationship. Archytas is portrayed as\nPlato’s inferior in his understanding of philosophy, and Plato\nis even presented as responsible for some of Archytas’ political\nsuccess, insofar as he establishes the relationship between Archytas\nand Dionysius II, which is described as of considerable political\nimportance (339d).","\nHow are we to unravel the true nature of the relationship between\nPlato and Archytas in the light of this conflicting evidence? Apart\nfrom the Seventh Letter, Plato never makes a direct reference\nto Archytas. He does, however, virtually quote a sentence from\nArchytas’ book on harmonics in Book VII of the Republic\n(530d), and his discussions of the science of stereometry shortly\nbefore this are likely to have some connections to Archytas’\nwork in solid geometry (528d). It is thus in the context of the\ndiscussion of the sciences that Plato refers to Archytas, and the\nremains of Archytas’ work focus precisely on the sciences (e.g.,\nfr. B1). Both strands of the tradition can be reconciled, if we\nsuppose that Plato’s first visit to Italy and Sicily was at\nleast in part motivated by his desire to meet Archytas, as the first\ntradition claims, but that he sought Archytas out not as a new\n“model philosopher” but rather as an expert in the\nmathematical sciences, in which Plato had developed a deep interest.\nIn Republic VII, Plato is critical of Pythagorean harmonics\nand of current work in solid geometry on philosophical grounds, so\nthat, while he undoubtedly learned a considerable amount of\nmathematics from Archytas, he clearly disagreed with Archytas’\nunderstanding of the philosophical uses of the sciences. In 388\nTarentum had not yet reached the height of its power, and Archytas is\nnot likely to have achieved his political dominance yet, so that there\nmay also be some truth to the claim of the second tradition that\nArchytas did not achieve his great practical success until after his\ncontact with Plato; whether or not that success had any direct\nrelationship to his contact with Plato is more doubtful. On their\nfirst meeting in 388/7, Plato and Archytas established a relationship\nof guest-friendship, which obligated them to further each\nother’s interests, which they did, as the events of\n367–361 show. Plato and Archytas need not have been in agreement\non philosophical issues and are perhaps better seen as competitive\ncolleagues engaged in an ongoing debate as to the value of the\nsciences for philosophy (Huffman 2005, 32–42)."],"subsection_title":"1.4 Archytas and Plato"},{"content":["\nMore pages of text have been preserved in Archytas’ name than in\nthe name of any other Pythagorean. Unfortunately the vast majority of\nthis material is rightly regarded as spurious. The same is true of the\nPythagorean tradition in general; the vast majority of texts which\npurport to be by early Pythagoreans are, in fact, later forgeries.\nSome of these forgeries were produced for purely monetary reasons; a\ntext of a “rare” work by a famous Pythagorean could fetch\na considerable sum from book collectors. There were characteristics\nunique to the Pythagorean tradition, however, that led to a\nproliferation of forgeries. Starting as early as the later fourth\ncentury BC, Pythagoras came to be regarded, in some circles, as the\nphilosopher par excellence, to whom all truth had been revealed. All\nlater philosophy, insofar as it was true, was a restatement of this\noriginal revelation (see, e.g., O’Meara 1989). In order to\nsupport this view of Pythagoras, texts were forged in the name of\nPythagoras and other early Pythagoreans, to show that they had, in\nfact, anticipated the most important ideas of Plato and Aristotle.\nThese pseudo-Pythagorean texts are thus characterized by the use of\ncentral Platonic and Aristotelian ideas, expressed in the technical\nterminology used by Plato and Aristotle. Some of the forgeries even\nattempt to improve on Plato and Aristotle by adding refinements to\ntheir positions, which were first advanced several hundred years after\ntheir deaths. The date and place of origin of these pseudo-Pythagorean\ntreatises is difficult to determine, but most seem to have been\ncomposed between 150 BC and 100 AD (Burkert 1972b; Centrone 1990;\nMoraux 1984); Rome (Burkert 1972b) and Alexandria (Centrone 1990) are\nthe most likely places of origin. Archytas is the dominant figure in\nthis pseudo-Pythagorean tradition, probably because of his connection\nto Plato (Zhmud 2019). In Thesleff 1965’s collection of the\npseudo-Pythagorean writings, forty-five of the two-hundred and\nforty-five pages (2-48), about 20%, comprising some 1,200 lines, are\ndevoted to texts forged in Archytas’ name. On the other hand,\nthe fragments likely to be genuine, which are collected in DK, fill\nout only a hundred lines of text. Thus, over ten times more spurious\nthan genuine material has been preserved in Archytas’ name. It\nmay well be that the style and Doric dialect of the pseudo-Pythagorean\nwritings were also based on the model of Archytas’ genuine\nwritings."],"subsection_title":"1.5 The Authenticity Question"},{"content":["\nThe treatises under Archytas’ name collected in Thesleff 1965\nhave been almost universally regarded as not by the historical\nArchytas, except for On Law and Justice, where there has been\nconsiderable controversy. Most are only preserved in fragments,\nalthough there are two brief complete works. The most famous of these\npseudepigrapha is Concerning the Whole System [sc. of\nCategories] or Concerning the Ten Categories (preserved\ncomplete, see Szlezak 1972). This work along with the treatise On\nOpposites (Thesleff 1965, 15.3–19.2) and the much later\nTen Universal Assertions (preserved complete, first ascribed\nto Archytas in the 15th century AD; see Szlezak 1972)\nrepresent the attempt to claim Aristotle’s doctrine of\ncategories for Archytas and the Pythagoreans (see also Griffin 2015).\nThis attempt was to some extent successful; both Simplicius and\nIamblichus regarded the Archytan works on categories as genuine\nanticipations of Aristotle (CAG VIII. 2, 9–25).\nConcerning the Ten Categories and On Opposites are\nvery frequently cited in the ancient commentaries on Aristotle’s\nCategories. Pseudo-Archytas identifies ten categories with\nnames that are virtually identical to those used by Aristotle, and his\nlanguage follows Aristotle closely in many places. The division of\nArchytas’ work into two treatises, Concerning the Ten\nCategories and On Opposites, reflects the work of\nAndronicus of Rhodes, who first separated the last six chapters of\nAristotle’s Categories from the rest. Thus, the works\nin Archytas’ name must have been composed after\nAndronicus’ work in the first century BC. Other pseudepigrapha\nin metaphysics and epistemology include On Principles\n(Thesleff 1965, 19.3 – 20.17) and On Intelligence and\nPerception (Thesleff 1965, 36.12–39.25), which includes a\nparaphrase of the divided line passage in Plato’s\nRepublic. Mansfeld has recently shown that Fragment 1 of the\nlatter work in Thesleff’s collection belongs to the former work\n(Mansfeld 2019). De Cesaris and Horky (2018) provide commentary on\nOn Intelligence and Perception, but much remains obscure in\nthis difficult work. Mansfeld (2019) shows that On Intelligence\nand Perception is not likely to have been an influence on the\naccount of Pythagorean principles in Aetius Placita 1.3.8 as\nhas been suggested by De Cesaris and Horky (2018). Ulacco (2017)\nestablishes new texts (with commentary) for On Principles,\nOn Intelligence and Perception and On Opposites.\nFurther metaphysical and epistemological works include On\nBeing (Thesleff 1965, 40.1–16) and On Wisdom\n(Thesleff 1965, 43.24–45.4). The authenticity of this latter\nwork has recently been defended on the grounds that its admitted\nsimilarities to passages in Aristotle are a result of Archytas’\ninfluence on Aristotle rather than an indication that the work was\nforged on the basis of Aristotle (Johnson 2008, 193–194). It is\nindeed true that Aristotle devoted several lost works to Archytas and\nmust have been familiar with his thought. However, the issue of\nauthenticity within the Pythagorean tradition has a different\ncharacter than is the case with other ancient authors. In the case of\nan author such as Plato, where the vast majority of surviving works\nare surely authentic, the onus of proof is on anyone who wants to\nargue that a work is spurious. In the Pythagorean tradition, on the\nother hand, where surely spurious works far outnumber genuine ones,\nthe situation is reversed. The onus of proof rests on anyone who\nregards a Pythagorean work as genuine to show that it does not fit the\npattern of the forged Pythagorean treatises and that its contents can\nbe corroborated by evidence dating before the third century, when the\nPythagorean pseudepigrapha start to be generated. Since On\nWisdom does share with the pseudepigrapha the characteristic of\nusing important Aristotelian distinctions (Huffman 2005,\n598–599), even if it is not as blatant a copy of\nAristotle’s ideas as the works on categories ascribed to\nArchytas, it is much more likely that it was forged on the basis of\nAristotle than that Aristotle is using On Wisdom without\nattribution. In order for the latter situation to be probable there\nwould need to be fourth-century evidence independent of On\nWisdom which ascribed the ideas found in it to Archytas. Horky\n2015 includes On Wisdom among the pseudepigrapha and provides\nanalysis of it. For recent discussions of the nature of the\npseudepigrapha ascribed to Archytas see Bonazzi 2013 and Centrone\n2014. For the nature of the appropriation of Aristotle in\npseudepigrapha ascribed to Archytas and other early Pythagoreans see\nUlacco 2016.","\nThere are also fragments of two pseudepigrapha on ethics and politics,\nwhich have recent editions with commentary: On the Good and Happy\nMan (Centrone 1990), which shows connections to Arius Didymus, an\nauthor of the first century BC, and On Moral Education\n(Centrone 1990), which has ties to Carneades (2nd c. BC). The status\nof one final treatise is less clear. The fragments of On Law and\nJustice (Thesleff 1965, 33.1–36.11) were studied in some\ndetail by Delatte (1922), who showed that the treatise deals with the\npolitical conceptions of the fourth century and who came to the modest\nconclusion that the work might be by Archytas, since there were no\npositive indications of late composition. Thesleff similarly concluded\nthat the treatise “may be authentic or at least comparatively\nold” (1961, 112), while Minar maintained that “it has an\nexcellent claim to authenticity” (1942, 111). Its authenticity\nwas supported by Johnson (2008, 194–198) but more recently Horky\nand Johnson argue that it was not written by Archytas himself and\npropose the somewhat Byzantine theory that it was written by an author\nwho based it on a speech which they hypothesize that Aristoxenus\nassigned to Archytas in his Life of Archytas (2020:\n459–460). On the other hand, DK did not include the fragments of\nOn Law and Justice among the genuine fragments, and most\nrecent scholars have argued that the treatise is spurious. Aalders\nprovides the most detailed treatment, although a number of his\narguments are inconclusive (1968, 13–20). Other opponents of\nauthenticity are Burkert (1972a), Moraux (1984, 670–677),\nCentrone (2000) and most recently Schofield (2014). The connections of\nOn Law and Justice to the genuine Fr. B2 of Archytas speak\nfor its authenticity, but its similarities, sometimes word for word,\nto pseudo-Pythagorean treatises by “Diotogenes” (Thesleff\n76.2–3, 71. 21–2), “Damippos” (Thesleff 68.26)\nand “Metopos” (Thesleff 119.28) argue for its\nspuriousness. Moreover, the authentic Fr. 3 of Archytas shows that\ncalculation (logismos) was the key concept in his political\nphilosophy. Its total absence from On Law and Justice, whose\nfocus is political philosophy, along with the absence of other key\nterms in Fr. 3 (e.g., pleonexia, homonoia and\nisotēs) is hard to explain, if On Law and\nJustice is authentic (Huffman 2005, 599–606). For a recent\nargument against the authenticity of On Law and Justice,\nwhich further contrasts it with the authentic Fr. 3, see Schofield\n2014: 82–5. Even if the work belongs among the pseudepigrapha\nHorky and Johnson are surely right that the controversy about its\nauthenticity has led scholars to neglect the philosophic content of\nthe treatise (Horky and Johnson 2020: 487) and they provide a\ncommentary that attempts to elucidate this difficult text. They regard\nthe text as closely tied to genuine fragments of Archytas and suggest\nthat it can help us understand those fragments, but the similarities\nare of a very general sort. As Zhmud has recently argued there is very\nlittle that is genuinely Pythagorean in the pseudepigrapha (Zhmud\n2019) and that also appears to be true of On Law and Justice.\n","\nSome testimonia suggest that there were even more pseudo-Archytan\ntreatises, which have not survived even in fragments (Thesleff 47.8\nff.). Two spurious letters of Archytas survive. One is the letter to\nwhich the pseudo-Platonic Twelfth Letter is responding (D.L.\nVIII 79–80), and the other is the purported letter of Archytas\nto Dionysius II, which was sent along with the ship in order to secure\nPlato’s release in 361 (D.L. III 21–2). Archytas was a\npopular figure in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, when works\ncontinued to be written in his name, usually with the spelling\nArchitas or Archita. The Ars geometriae, which is ascribed to\nBoethius, but was in reality composed in the 12th century\n(Folkerts 1970, 105), ascribes discoveries in mathematics to Architas\nwhich are clearly spurious (Burkert 1972a, 406). Several alchemical\nrecipes involving the wax of the left ear of a dog and the heart of a\nwolf are ascribed to Architas in ps.-Albertus Magnus, The Marvels\nof the World (De mirabilibus mundi –\n13th century AD). Numerous selections from a book entitled\nOn Events in Nature (de eventibus in natura, also\ncited as de effectibus in natura and as de eventibus\nfuturorum) by Archita Tharentinus (or Tharentinus, or just\nTharen) are preserved in the medieval texts known as The Light of\nthe Soul (Lumen Animae), which were composed in the\nfourteenth century and circulated widely in Europe in the fifteenth\ncentury as a manual for preachers (Rouse 1971; Thorndike 1934, III\n546–60). An apocryphal work, The Circular Theory of the\nThings in the Heaven, by Archytas Maximus [!], which has never\nbeen published in full, is preserved in Codex Ambrosianus D 27 sup.\n(See Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum, ed. F. Cumont\net al., Vol. III, p. 11). "],"subsection_title":"1.6 Pseudepigrapha Ascribed to Archytas"},{"content":["\nNo list of Archytas’ works has come down to us from antiquity,\nso that we don’t know how many books he wrote. In the face of\nthe large mass of spurious works, it is disappointing that only a few\nfragments of genuine works have survived. Most scholars accept as\ngenuine the four fragments printed by Diels and Kranz (B1–4).\nBurkert (1972a, 220 n.14 and 379 n. 46) raised some concerns about the\nauthenticity of even some of these fragments, but see the responses of\nBowen (1982) and Huffman (1985 and 2005). Our evidence for the titles\nof Archytas’ genuine writings depends largely on the citations\ngiven by the authors who quote the fragments. Fragments B1 and B2 are\nreported to come from a treatise entitled Harmonics, and the\nmajor testimonia about Archytas’ harmonic theory are likely to\nbe ultimately based on this book (A16–19). This treatise began\nwith a discussion of the basic principles of acoustics (B1), defined\nthe three types of mean which are of importance in music theory (B2),\nand went on to present Archytas’ mathematical descriptions of\nthe tetrachord (the fourth) in the three main genera (chromatic,\ndiatonic, and enharmonic – A16-A19). B3 probably comes from a\nwork On Sciences, which may have been a more general\ndiscussion of the value of mathematics for human life in general and\nfor the establishment of a just state in particular. New support for\nits authenticity has been provided by Schofield (2009). B4 comes from\na work entitled Discourses (Diatribai). The fragment\nitself asserts the priority of the science of calculation (ha\nlogistika, “logistic”) to the other sciences, such as\ngeometry, and thus suggests a technical work of mathematics. The title\nDiatribai would more normally suggest a treatise of ethical\ncontent, however, so that in this work the sciences may have been\nevaluated in terms of their contribution to the wisdom that leads to a\ngood life.","\nA relatively rich set of testimonia, many from authors of the fourth\ncentury BC, indicate that Archytas wrote other books as well.\nArchytas’ famous argument for the unlimited extent of the\nuniverse (A24), his theory of vision (A25), and his account of motion\n(A23, A23a) all suggest that he may have written a work on cosmology.\nAristotle’s comments in the Metaphysics suggest that\nArchytas may have written a book on definition (A22), and A20 and A21\nmight suggest a work on arithmetic. Perhaps there was a treatise on\ngeometry or solid geometry in which Archytas’ solution to the\nproblem of doubling the cube (A14–15) was published. There is\nalso a tradition of anecdotes about Archytas, which probably\nultimately derives from Aristoxenus’ Life of Archytas\n(A7, A8, A9, A11). It is possible that even the testimonia for\nArchytas’ argument for an unlimited universe and his theory of\nvision were derived from anecdotes preserved by Aristoxenus, and not\nat all from works of Archytas’ own.","\nIt is uncertain whether the treatises On Flutes (B6), On\nMachines (B1 and B7), and On Agriculture (B1 and B8),\nwhich were in circulation under the name of Archytas, were in fact by\nArchytas of Tarentum or by other men of the same name. Diogenes\nLaertius lists three other writers with the name Archytas (VIII 82).\nThe treatise On the Decad mentioned by Theon (B5) might be by\nArchytas, but the treatise by Philolaus with which it is paired is\nspurious (Huffman 1993, 347–350), thus suggesting that the same\nmay be true of the treatise under Archytas’ name."],"subsection_title":"1.7 Genuine Works and Testimonia"}]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"2. Archytas as Mathematician and Harmonic Theorist","subsections":[{"content":["\nArchytas was the first person to arrive at a solution to one of the\nmost famous mathematical puzzles in antiquity, the duplication of the\ncube. The most romantic version of the story, which occurs in many\nvariations and ultimately goes back to Eratosthenes (3rd c. BC),\nreports that the inhabitants of the Greek island of Delos were beset\nby a plague and, when they consulted an oracle for advice, were told\nthat, if they doubled the size of a certain altar, which had the form\nof a cube, the plague would stop (Eutocius, in Archim. sphaer. et\ncyl. II [III 88.3–96.27 Heiberg/Stamatis]). The\nsimple-minded response to the oracle, which is actually assigned to\nthe Delians in some versions, is to build a second altar identical to\nthe first one and set it on top of the first (Philoponus, In Anal.\npost., CAG XIII.3, 102.12–22). The resulting altar does\nindeed have a volume twice that of the first altar, but it is no\nlonger a cube. The next simple-minded response is to assume that,\nsince we want an altar that is double in volume, while still remaining\na cube, we should build the new altar with a side that is double the\nlength of the side of the original altar. This approach fails as well.\nDoubling the side of the altar produces a new altar that is not twice\nthe volume of the original altar but eight times the volume. If the\noriginal altar had a side of two, then its volume would be\n23 or 8, while an altar built on a side twice as long will\nhave a volume of 43 or 64. What then is the length of the\nside which will produce a cube with twice the volume of the original\ncube? The Delians were at a loss and presented their problem to Plato\nin the Academy. Plato then posed the “Delian Problem,” as\nit came to be known, to mathematicians associated with the Academy,\nand no less than three solutions were devised, those of Eudoxus,\nMenaechmus, and Archytas.","\nIt is not clear whether or not the story about the Delians has any\nbasis in fact. Even if it does, it should not be understood to suggest\nthat the problem of doubling the cube first arose in the fourth\ncentury with the Delians. We are told that the mathematician,\nHippocrates of Chios, who was active in the second half of the fifth\ncentury, had already confronted the problem and had reduced it to a\nslightly different problem (Eutocius, in Archim. sphaer. et\ncyl. II [III 88.3–96.27 Heiberg/Stamatis]). Hippocrates\nrecognized that if we could find two mean proportionals between the\nlength of the side of the original cube G, and length D, where D = 2G,\nso that G : x :: x : y :: y : D, then the cube on length x will be\ndouble the cube on length G. Exactly how Hippocrates came to see this\nis conjectural and need not concern us here, but that he was right can\nbe seen relatively easily. Each of the values in the continued\nproportion G : x :: x : y :: y : D is equal to G : x, so we can set\nthem all equal to G : x. If we do this and multiply the three ratios\ntogether we get the value G3 : x3. On the other\nhand, if we take the same continued proportion and carry out the\nmultiplication in the original terms, then G : x times x : y yields G\n: y, and G : y times the remaining term gives G : D. Thus G : D =\nG3 : x3, but D is twice G so x3 is\ntwice G3. Remember that G was the length of the side of the\noriginal cube, so the cube that is twice the cube built on G, will be\nthe cube built on x. The Greeks did not think of the problem as a\nproblem in algebra but rather as a problem in geometry. After\nHippocrates the problem of doubling the cube was always seen as the\nproblem of finding two lines such that they were mean proportionals\nbetween G, the length of the side of the original cube, and D, a\nlength which is double G. It was to this form of the problem that\nArchytas provided the first solution.","\nArchytas’ solution has been rightly hailed as “the most\nremarkable of all [the solutions]” and as a “bold\nconstruction in three dimensions” (Heath 1921, 246); Mueller\ncalls it “a tour de force of the spatial\nimagination” (1997, 312 n. 23). We owe the preservation of\nArchytas’ solution to Eutocius, who in the sixth century AD\ncollected some eleven solutions to the problem as part of his\ncommentary on the second book of Archimedes’ On the Sphere\nand Cylinder. Eutocius’ source for Archytas’ solution\nwas ultimately Aristotle’s pupil Eudemus, who in the late fourth\ncentury BC wrote a history of geometry. The solution is complex and it\nis not possible to go through it step by step here (see Huffman 2005,\n342–401 for a detailed treatment of the solution). Archytas\nproceeds by constructing a series of four similar triangles (see\nFigure 1 below) and then showing that the sides are proportional so\nthat AM : AI :: AI : AK :: AK : AD, where AM was equal to the side of\nthe original cube (G) and AD was twice AM. Thus the cube double the\nvolume of the cube on AM should be built on AI. The real difficulty\nwas in constructing the four similar triangles, where the given length\nof the side of the original cube and a length double that magnitude\nwere two of the sides in the similar triangles. The key point for the\nconstruction of these triangles, point K, was determined as the\nintersection of two rotating plane figures. The first figure is a\nsemicircle, which is perpendicular to the plane of the circle ABDZ and\nwhich starts on the diameter AED and, with point A remaining fixed,\nrotates to position AKD. The second is the triangle APD, which rotates\nup out of the plane of the circle ABDZ to position ALD. As each of\nthese figures rotates, it traces a line on the surface of a\nsemicylinder, which is perpendicular to the plane of ABDZ and has ABD\nas its base. The boldness and the imagination of the construction lies\nin envisioning the intersection at point K of the line drawn by the\nrotating semicircle on the surface of the semicylinder with the line\ndrawn by the rotating triangle on the same surface. We simply\ndon’t know what led Archytas to produce this amazing feat of\nspatial imagination, in order to construct the triangles with the\nsides in appropriate proportion. For a recent attempt to situate\nArchytas’ solution in the mathematics of his time and make it\nless “miraculous,” see Menn 2015. ","\n\n\n\n\nFigure 1\n","\nIn the later tradition, Plato is reported to have criticized\nArchytas’ solution for appealing to “constructions that\nuse instruments and that are mechanical” (Plutarch, Table\nTalk VIII 2.1 [718e]; Marc. XIV 5–6). Plato argued\nthat the value of geometry and of the rest of mathematics resided in\ntheir ability to turn the soul from the sensible to intelligible\nrealm. The cube with which geometry deals is not a physical cube or\neven a drawing of a cube but rather an intelligible cube that fits the\ndefinition of the cube but is not a sense object. By employing\nphysical instruments, which “required much common\nhandicraft,” and in effect constructing machines to determine\nthe two mean proportionals, Archytas was focusing not on the\nintelligible world but on the physical world and hence destroying the\nvalue of geometry. Plato’s quarrel with Archytas is a charming\nstory, but it is hard to reconcile with Archytas’ actual\nsolution, which, as we have seen, makes no appeal to any instruments\nor machines. The story of the quarrel, which is first reported in\nPlutarch in the first century AD, is also hard to reconcile with our\nearliest source for the story of the Delian problem, Eratosthenes.\nEratosthenes had himself invented an instrument to determine mean\nproportionals, the mesolab (“mean-getter”), and\nhe tells the story of the Delian problem precisely to emphasize that\nearlier solutions, including that of Archytas, were in the form of\ngeometrical demonstrations, which could not be employed for practical\npurposes. He specifically labels Archytas’ solution as\ndysmêchana, “hardly mechanical.” Some\nscholars attempt to reconcile Plutarch’s and Eratosthenes’\nversions by focusing on their different literary goals (Knorr 1986,\n22; van der Waerden 1963, 161; Wolfer 1954, 12 ff.; Sachs 1917, 150);\nsome suggest that the rotation of the semicircle and the triangle in\nArchytas’ solution, might be regarded as mechanical, since\nmotion is involved (Knorr 1986, 22). It may be, however, that\nPlutarch’s story of a quarrel between Plato and Archytas over\nthe use of mechanical devices in geometry is an invention of the later\ntradition (Riginos 1976, 146; Zhmud 1998, 217) and perhaps served as a\nsort of foundation myth for the science of mechanics, a myth which\nexplained the separation of mechanics from philosophy as the result of\na quarrel between two philosophers. In the Republic, Plato is\ncritical of the solid geometry of his day, but his criticism makes no\nmention of the use of instruments. His criticism instead focuses on\nthe failure of solid geometry to be developed into a coherent\ndiscipline alongside geometry and astronomy (528b-d). This neglect of\nsolid geometry is ascribed to the failure of the Greek city-states to\nhold these difficult studies in honor, the lack of a director to\norganize the studies, and the arrogance of the current experts in the\nfield, who would not submit to such a director. Since Archytas’\nduplication of the cube shows him to be one of the leading solid\ngeometers of the time, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Plato\nregarded him as one of the arrogant experts, who focused on solving\ncharming problems but failed to produce a coherent discipline of solid\ngeometry. Since Archytas was a leading political figure in Tarentum,\nit is also possible that Plato was criticizing him for not making\nTarentum a state which held solid geometry in esteem. ","\nBrisson (2013) takes a sceptical stance towards the evidence and\nconcludes that Archytas never solved the problem of the duplication of\nthe cube. He argues that Plato would have mentioned a solution to the\nproblem if one existed in his day and that the mathematics of the\nsolution ascribed to Archytas is impossible for someone of his time,\nsince it employs conic sections, which were not developed until the\nthird century (2013: 220–1). However, while Plato does criticize\nthe state of stereometry (solid geometry) in his day, he also affirms\nthat there are people studying it and that some of their results have\ncharm and beauty (Rep. 528c-d). There is no reason that\nArchytas’ duplication could not be included among these results.\nMoreover, the mathematics used in Archytas’ solution in no way\nrelies on conic sections but relies on mathematics found in\nEuclid’s Elements Books 1, 3, 4, 6, and 11, which rely\non geometry of the fourth century when Archytas was active (Heath\n1921, Knorr 1986, Mueller 1997 and Menn 2015 all regard the\nmathematics as appropriate for Archytas). Menaechmus, who lived two\ngenerations after Archytas, is the first person to solve the problem\nusing conic sections (see Menn 2015: 415–6). Brisson has to\ndiscount the explicit tradition that already in the fourth century\nEudemus knew of Archytas’ solution and assume that the solution\nwas developed by a compiler in the latter tradition, but it is\nimplausible that such a compiler could have developed the\nsophisticated mathematics of the solution and that, if he were such an\naccomplished mathematician, he would ascribe it to Archytas."],"subsection_title":"2.1 Doubling the Cube"},{"content":["\nOne of the most startling discoveries of early Greek science was that\nthe fundamental intervals of music, the octave, the fourth, and the\nfifth, corresponded to whole number ratios of string length. Thus, if\nwe pluck a string of length x and then a string of length\n2x, we will hear the interval of an octave between the two\nsounds. If the two string lengths are in the ratio 4 : 3, we will hear\na fourth, and, if the ratio is 3 : 2, we will hear a fifth. This\ndiscovery that the phenomena of musical sound are governed by whole\nnumber ratios must have played a central role in the Pythagorean\nconception, first expressed by Philolaus, that all things are known\nthrough number (DK 44 B4). The next step in harmonic theory was to\ndescribe an entire octave length scale in terms of mathematical\nratios. The earliest such description of a scale is found in Philolaus\nfr. B6. Philolaus recognizes that, if we go up the interval of a\nfourth from any given note, and then up the interval of a fifth, the\nfinal note will be an octave above the first note. Thus, the octave is\nmade up of a fourth and a fifth. In mathematical terms, the ratios\nthat govern the fifth (3 : 2) and fourth (4 : 3) are added by\nmultiplying the terms and thus produce an octave (3 : 2 × 4 : 3\n= 12 : 6 = 2 : 1). The interval between the note that is a fourth up\nfrom the starting note and the note that is a fifth up was regarded as\nthe basic unit of the scale, the whole tone, which corresponded to the\nratio of 9 : 8 (subtraction of ratios is carried out by dividing the\nterms, or cross multiplying: 3 : 2 / 4 : 3 = 9 : 8). The fifth was\nthus regarded as a fourth plus a whole tone, and the octave can be\nregarded as two fourths plus a whole tone. The fourth consists of two\nwhole tones with a remainder, which has the unlovely ratio of 256 :\n243 (4 : 3 / 9 : 8 = 32 : 27 / 9 : 8 = 256 : 243). Philolaus’\nscale thus consisted of the following intervals: 9 : 8, 9 : 8, 256 :\n243 [these three intervals take us up a fourth], 9 : 8, 9 : 8, 9 : 8,\n256 : 243 [these four intervals make up a fifth and complete the\noctave from our staring note]. This scale is known as the Pythagorean\ndiatonic and is the scale that Plato adopted in the construction of\nthe world soul in the Timaeus (36a-b).","\nArchytas took harmonic theory to a whole new level of theoretical and\nmathematical sophistication. Ptolemy, writing in the second century\nAD, identifies Archytas as having “engaged in the study of music\nmost of all the Pythagoreans” (A16). First, Archytas provided a\ngeneral explanation of pitch, arguing that the pitch of a sound\ndepends on the speed with which the sound is propagated and travels\n(B1). Thus, if a stick is waved back and forth rapidly, it will\nproduce a sound that travels rapidly through the air, which will be\nperceived as of a higher pitch than the sound produced by a stick\nwaved more slowly. Archytas is correct to associate pitch with speed,\nbut he misunderstood the role of speed. The pitch does not depend on\nthe speed with which a sound reaches us but rather on the frequency of\nimpacts in a given period of time. A string that vibrates more rapidly\nproduces a sound of a higher pitch, but all sounds, regardless of\npitch, travel at an equal velocity, if the medium is the same.\nAlthough Archytas’ account of pitch was ultimately incorrect, it\nwas very influential. It was taken over and adapted by both Plato and\nAristotle and remained the dominant theory throughout antiquity\n(Barker 1989, 41 n. 47; Barker 2014: 187). Second, Archytas introduced\nnew mathematical rigor into Pythagorean harmonics. One of the\nimportant results of the analysis of music in terms of whole number\nratios is the recognition that it is not possible to divide the basic\nmusical intervals in half. The octave is not divided into two equal\nhalves but into a fourth and a fifth, the fourth is not divided into\ntwo equal halves but into two whole tones and a remainder. The whole\ntone cannot be divided into two equal half tones. On the other hand,\nit is possible to divide a double octave in half. Mathematically this\ncan be seen by recognizing that it is possible to insert a mean\nproportional between the terms of the ratio corresponding to the\ndouble octave (4 : 1) so that 4 : 2 :: 2 : 1. The double octave can\nthus be divided into two equal parts each having a ratio of 2 : 1. The\nratios which govern the basic musical intervals (2 : 1, 4 : 3, 3 : 2,\n9 : 8), all belong to a type of ratio known as a superparticular ratio\n– roughly speaking, ratios of the form (n + 1) :\nn. Archytas made a crucial contribution by providing a rigorous\nproof that there is no mean proportional between numbers in\nsuperparticular ratio (A19) and hence that the basic musical intervals\ncannot be divided in half. Archytas’ proof was later taken over\nand modified slightly in the Sectio Canonis ascribed to\nEuclid (Prop. 3; see Barker 1989, 195). On Archytas’ proof see\nHuffman 2005: 451–70 and Barker 2007: 303–5.","\nArchytas’ final contribution to music theory has to do with the\nstructure of the scale (for a more detailed account than what follows\nsee Huffman 2005: 402–25 and Barker 2007: 292–302). The\nGreeks used a number of different scales, which were distinguished by\nthe way in which the fourth, or tetrachord, was constructed. These\nscales were grouped into three main types or genera. One genus was\ncalled the diatonic; one example of this is the Pythagorean diatonic\ndescribed above, which is built on the tetrachord with the intervals 9\n: 8, 9 : 8 and 256 : 243 and was used by Philolaus and Plato. There is\nno doubt that Archytas knew of this diatonic scale, but his own\ndiatonic tetrachord was somewhat different, being composed of the\nintervals 9 : 8, 8 : 7 and 28 : 27. Archytas also defined scales in\nthe two other major genera, the enharmonic and chromatic.\nArchytas’ enharmonic tetrachord is composed of the intervals 5 :\n4, 36 : 35 and 28 : 27 and his chromatic tetrachord of the intervals\n32 : 27, 243 : 224, and 28 : 27. There are several puzzles about the\ntetrachords which Archytas adopts in each of the genera. First, why\ndoes Archytas reject the Pythagorean diatonic used by Philolaus and\nPlato? Second, Ptolemy, who is our major source for Archytas’\ntetrachords (A16), argues that Archytas adopted as a principle that\nall concordant intervals should correspond to superparticular ratios.\nThe ratios in Archytas’ diatonic and enharmonic tetrachords are\nindeed superparticular, but two of the ratios in his chromatic\ntetrachord are not superparticular (32 : 27 and 243 : 224). Why are\nthese ratios not superparticular as well? Finally, Plato criticizes\nPythagorean harmonics in the Republic for seeking numbers in\nheard harmonies rather than ascending to generalized problems (531c).\nCan any sense be made of this criticism in light of Archytas’\ntetrachords? The basis for an answer to all of these questions is\ncontained in the work of Winnington-Ingram (1932) and Barker (1989,\n46-52). The crucial point is that Archytas’ account of the\ntetrachords in each of the three genera can be shown to correspond to\nthe musical practice of his day; Ptolemy’s criticisms miss the\nmark because of his ignorance of musical practice in Archytas’\nday, some 500 years before Ptolemy (Winnington-Ingram 1932, 207).\nArchytas is giving mathematical descriptions of scales actually in\nuse; although mathematical considerations did play a role (Barker\n2007: 295–302), he arrived at his numbers in part by observation\nof the way in which musicians tuned their instruments (Barker 1989,\n50–51). He did not follow the Pythagorean diatonic scale because\nit did not correspond to any scale actually in use, although it does\ncorrespond to a method of tuning. The unusual numbers in\nArchytas’ chromatic tetrachord do correspond to a chromatic\nscale in use in Archytas’ day. Ptolemy was wrong to suggest that\nArchytas adhered to the principle that all concordant intervals should\nhave superparticular ratios (Huffman 2005: 422–3), although\nBarker suggests that he may have been following a different but\nrelated principle (2007: 301). Archytas thus provides a brilliant\nanalysis of the music of his day, but it is precisely his focus on\nactual musical practice that draws Plato’s ire. Plato does not\nwant him to focus on the music he hears about him (“heard\nharmonies”) but rather to ascend to consider quite abstract\nquestions about which numbers are harmonious with which. Plato might\nwell have welcomed a principle of concordance based solely on\nmathematical considerations, such as the principle that only\nsuperparticular ratios are concordant, but Archytas wanted to explain\nthe numbers of the music he actually heard played. There is an\nimportant metaphysical issue at stake here. Plato is calling for the\nstudy of number in itself, apart from the sensible world, while\nArchytas, like Pythagoreans before him, envisages no split between a\nsensible and an intelligible world and is looking for the numbers\nwhich govern sensible things. For discussions of Archytas as the\ntarget of Plato’s complaints in the Republic see\nHuffman 2005: 423–5 and Barker 2014:192–3."],"subsection_title":"2.2 Music and Mathematics"},{"content":["\nThere have been tendencies both to overvalue and to undervalue\nArchytas’ achievement as a mathematician. Van der Waerden went\nso far as to add to Archytas’ accomplishments both Book VIII of\nEuclid’s Elements and the treatise on the mathematics\nof music known as the Sectio Canonis, which is ascribed to\nEuclid in the ancient tradition (1962, 152–5). Although later\nscholars (e.g., Knorr 1975: 244) repeat these assertions, they are\nbased in part on a very subjective analysis of Archytas’ style.\nArchytas influenced the Sectio Canonis, since Proposition 3\nis based on a proof by Archytas (A19), but the treatise cannot be by\nArchytas, because its theory of pitch and its account of the diatonic\nand enharmonic tetrachords differ from those of Archytas. On the other\nhand, some scholars have cast doubt on Archytas’ prowess as a\nmathematician, arguing that some of his work looks like “mere\narithmology” and “mathematical mystification”\n(Burkert 1972a, 386; Mueller 1997, 289). This judgment rests largely\non a text (A17) that has been mistakenly interpreted as presenting\nArchytas’ own views, whereas, in fact, it presents\nArchytas’ report of his predecessors (Huffman 2005:\n428–37; Barker 2007: 193–5). The duplication of the cube\nand Archytas’ contributions to the mathematics of music (Barker\n2007: 287 calls him “a heroic figure in the early history of\nmathematical harmonics”) show that there can be no doubt that he\nwas one of the leading mathematicians of the first part of the fourth\ncentury BC. This was certainly the judgment of antiquity. In his\nhistory of geometry, Eudemus identified Archytas along with Leodamas\nand Theaetetus as the three most prominent mathematicians of\nPlato’s generation (A6 = Proclus, in Eucl., prol. II\n66, 14). Netz (2014) has recently argued that there were two networks\nthat accounted for most of the progress in ancient Greek mathematics.\nThe later used Archimedes as the paradigmatic figure, while the\nearlier used Archytas. Netz suggests that we should apply Bertrand\nRussell’s description of Pythagoras as “one of the most\nimportant men that ever lived” to Archytas instead both because\nof his mathematical genius and also because of his pivotal position in\nthree different groups: (1) South Italian Pythagoreans, (2) Greek\nmathematicians, and (3) philosophers whose work was in dialogue with\nPlato (2014: 181–2). "],"subsection_title":"2.3 Evaluation of Archytas as Mathematician"}]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"3. Archytas on the Sciences","subsections":[{"content":["\nArchytas B1 is the beginning of his book on harmonics, and most of it\nis devoted to the basic principles of his theory of acoustics and, in\nparticular, to his theory of pitch described in section 2.2 above. In\nthe first five lines, however, Archytas provides a proem on the value\nof the sciences (mathêmata) in general. There are\nseveral important features of this proem. First, Archytas identifies a\nset of four sciences: astronomy, geometry, “logistic”\n(arithmetic) and music. B1 is thus probably the earliest text to\nidentify the set of sciences that became known as the\nquadrivium in the middle ages and that constitute four of the\nseven liberal arts. Second, Archytas does not present this\nclassification of sciences as his own discovery but instead begins\nwith praise of his predecessors who have worked in these fields. Some\nscholars argue that, when he praises “those concerned with the\nsciences,” he is thinking only of the Pythagoreans (e.g., Zhmud\n1997, 198 and Lasserre 1954, 36), but this is wrongly to assume that\nall early Greek mathematics is Pythagorean. Archytas gives no hint\nthat he is limiting his remarks to Pythagoreans, and, in areas where\nwe can identify those who influenced him most, these figures are not\nlimited to Pythagoreans (e.g., Hippocrates of Chios in geometry, see\nsection 2.1). He praises his predecessors in the sciences, because,\n“having discerned well about the nature of wholes, they were\nlikely also to see well how things are in their parts” and to\n“have correct understanding about individual things as they\nare.” It is here that Archytas is putting forth his own\nunderstanding of the nature and value of the sciences; because of the\nbrevity of the passage, much remains unclear. Archytas appears to be\npraising those concerned with the sciences for their discernment,\ntheir ability to make distinctions (diagignôskein). He\nargues that they begin by distinguishing the nature of wholes, the\nuniversal concepts of a science, and, because they do this well, they\nare able to understand particular objects (the parts). Archytas\nappears to follow exactly this procedure in his Harmonics. He\nbegins by defining the most universal concept of the science, sound,\nand explains it in terms of other concepts such as impact, before\ngoing on to distinguish between audible and inaudible sounds and\nsounds of high and low pitch. The goal of the science is not the\nmaking of these distinctions concerning universal concepts, however,\nbut knowledge of the true nature of individual things. Thus,\nArchytas’ harmonics ends with the mathematical description of\nthe musical intervals that we hear practicing musicians use (see\nsection 2.2 above). Astronomy will end with a mathematical description\nof the periods, risings and settings of the planets. One way to\nunderstand Archytas’ project is to see him as working out the\nprogram suggested by his predecessor in the Pythagorean tradition,\nPhilolaus. One of Philolaus’ central theses was that we only\ngain knowledge of things insofar as we can give an account of them in\nterms of numbers (DK 44 B4). While Philolaus only took the first steps\nin this project, Archytas is much more successful in giving an account\nof individual things in the phenomenal world in terms of numbers, as\nhis description of the musical intervals shows.","\nPlato’s account of the sciences in Book VII of the\nRepublic can be seen as a response to Archytas’ view of\nthe sciences. First Plato identifies a group of five rather than four\nsciences and decries the neglect of his proposed fifth science,\nstereometry (solid geometry), with a probable allusion to Archytas\n(see section 2.1). Plato quotes with approval Archytas’\nassertion that “these sciences seem to be akin” (B1),\nalthough he applies it just to harmonics and astronomy rather than to\nArchytas’ quadrivium and does not mention him by name.\nIn the same passage, however, Plato pointedly rejects the Pythagorean\nattempt to search for numbers in “heard harmonies.” In\ndoing so Plato is disagreeing with Archytas’ attempt to\ndetermine the numbers that govern things in the sensible world. For\nPlato, the value of the sciences is their ability to turn the eye of\nthe soul from the sensible to the intelligible realm. Book VII of the\nRepublic with its elaborate argument for the distinction\nbetween the intelligible and sensible realm, between the cave and the\nintelligible world outside the cave, may be in large part directed at\nArchytas’ attempt to use mathematics to explain the sensible\nworld. As Aristotle repeatedly emphasizes, the Pythagoreans differed\nfrom Plato precisely in their refusal to separate numbers from things\n(e.g., Metaph. 987b27)."],"subsection_title":"3.1 The Value of the Sciences"},{"content":["\nIn B4, Archytas asserts that “logistic seems to be far superior\nindeed to the other arts in regard to wisdom.” What does\nArchytas mean by “logistic”? It appears to be\nArchytas’ term for the science of number, which was mentioned as\none of the four sister sciences in B1. There is simply not enough\ncontext in B4 or other texts of Archytas to determine the meaning of\nlogistic from Archytas’ usage alone. It is necessary to rely to\nsome extent on Plato, who is the only other early figure to use the\nterm extensively. A later conception of logistic, as something that\ndeals with numbered things rather than numbers themselves, which is\nfound in, e.g., Geminus, should not be ascribed to Plato or Archytas\n(Klein 1968; Burkert 1972a, 447 n. 119). In Plato,\n“logistic” can refer to everyday calculation, what we\nwould call arithmetic (e.g. 3 × 700 = 2,100; see, Hp.\nMi. 366c). In other passages, however, Plato defines logistic in\nparallel with arithmêtikê, and treats the two of\nthem as together constituting the science of number, on which\npractical manipulation of number is based (Klein 1968, 23–24).\nBoth arithmêtikê and logistic deal with the even\nand the odd. Arithmêtikê focuses not on\nquantities but on kinds of numbers (Grg. 451b), beginning\nwith the even and the odd and presumably continuing with the types we\nfind later in Nicomachus (Ar. 1.8 – 1.13), such as\nprime, composite and even-times even. Logistic, on the other hand,\nfocuses on quantity, the “amount the odd and even have both in\nthemselves and in respect to one another” (Grg. 451c).\nAn example of one part of logistic might be the study of various sorts\nof means and proportions, which focus on the quantitative relations of\nnumbers to one another (e.g., Nicomachus, Ar. II. 21 ff.). In\nB2, Archytas would probably consider himself to be doing logistic,\nwhen he defines the three types of means which are relevant to music\n(geometric, arithmetic, and harmonic). The geometric mean arises\nwhenever three terms are so related that, as the first is to the\nsecond, so the second is to the third (e.g., 8 : 4 :: 4 : 2) and the\narithmetic, when three terms are so related that the first exceeds the\nsecond by the same amount as the second exceeds the third (e.g., 6 : 4\n:: 4 : 2). Archytas, like Plato (R. 525c), uses logistic not\njust in this narrow sense of the study of relative quantity, but also\nto designate the entire science of numbers including\narithmêtikê.","\nWhy does Archytas think that logistic is superior to the other\nsciences? In B4, he particularly compares it to geometry, arguing that\nlogistic (1) “deals with what it wishes more vividly than\ngeometry” and (2) “completes demonstrations” where\ngeometry cannot, even “if there is any investigation concerning\nshapes.” This last remark is surprising, since the study of\nshapes would appear to be the proper domain of geometry. The most\ncommon way of explaining Archytas’ remark is to suppose that he\nis arguing that logistic is mathematically superior to geometry, in\nthat certain proofs can only be completed by an appeal to logistic.\nBurkert sees this as a reason for doubting the authenticity of the\nfragment, since the exact opposite seems to be true. Archytas could\ndetermine the cube root of two geometrically, through his solution to\nthe duplication of the cube, but could not do so arithmetically, since\nthe cube root of two is an irrational number (1972a, 220 n. 14). Other\nscholars have pointed out, however, that certain proofs in geometry do\nrequire an appeal to logistic (Knorr 1975, 311; Mueller 1992b, 90 n.\n12), e.g., logistic is required to recognize the incomensurability of\nthe diagonal with the side of the square, since incommensurability\narises when two magnitudes “have not to one another the ratio\nwhich number has to number” (Euclid X 7). These\nsuggestions show that logistic can be superior to geometry in certain\ncases, but they do not explain Archytas’ more general assertion\nthat logistic deals with whatever problems it wants more clearly than\ngeometry.","\nHowever, it may be that B4 is not in fact comparing logistic to the\nother sciences as sciences – in terms of their relative success\nin providing demonstrations. The title of the work from which B4 is\nsaid to come, Discourses (Diatribai), is most\ncommonly used of ethical treatises. Moreover, it is specifically with\nregard to wisdom (sophia) that logistic is said to be\nsuperior, and, while sophia can refer to technical expertise,\nit more commonly refers to the highest sort of intellectual\nexcellence, often the excellence that allows us to live a good life\n(Arist., EN 1141a12; Pl., R. 428d ff.). Is there any\nsense in which logistic makes us wiser than the other sciences? Since\nArchytas evidently agreed with Philolaus that we only understand\nindividual things in the world insofar as we grasp the numbers that\ngovern them, it seems quite plausible that Archytas would regard\nlogistic as the science that makes us wise about the world. It is in\nthis sense that logistic will always be superior to geometry, even\nwhen dealing with shapes. Perhaps the most famous statue of the\nclassical period is the Doryphoros by the Argive sculptor Polyclitus,\nwhich he also referred to as the Canon (i.e., the standard). Although\nPolyclitus undoubtedly made use of geometry in constructing this\nmagnificent shape, in a famous sentence from his book, also entitled\nCanon, he asserts that his statue came to be not through many\nshapes but “through many numbers” (DK40 B2, see\nHuffman 2002a). Geometrical relations alone will not determine the\nform of a given object, we have to assign specific proportions,\nspecific numbers. Archytas also thought that numbers and logistic were\nthe basis of the just state and hence the good life. In B3 he argues\nthat it is rational calculation (logismos) that produces the\nfairness on which the state depends. Justice is a relation that needs\nto be stated numerically and it is through such a statement that rich\nand poor can live together, each seeing that he has what is fair.\nLogistic will always be superior to the other sciences, because those\nsciences will in the end rely on numbers to give us knowledge of the\nsounds we hear, the shapes we see and the movements of the heavenly\nbodies which we observe."],"subsection_title":"3.2 Logistic as the Master Science"},{"content":["\nAristotle is the first Greek author to mention the sciences of optics\nand mechanics, describing optics as a subordinate science to geometry\nand mechanics as a subordinate science to solid geometry\n(APo. 78b34). Archytas does not mention either of these\nsciences in B1, when describing the work of his predecessors in the\nsciences, nor does Plato mention them. This silence suggests that the\ntwo disciplines may have first developed in the first half of the\nfourth century, when Archytas was most active, and it is possible that\nhe played an important role in the development of both of them. In a\nrecently identified fragment from his book on the Pythagoreans\n(Iamblichus, Comm. Math. XXV; see Burkert 1972a, 50 n. 112),\nAristotle assigns a hitherto unrecognized importance to optics in\nPythagoreanism. Just as the Pythagoreans were impressed with the fact\nthat musical intervals were based on whole number ratios, so they were\nimpressed that the phenomena of optics could be explained in terms of\ngeometrical diagrams. In addition to being an accomplished\nmathematician, Archytas had a theory of vision and evidently tried to\nexplain some of the phenomena involved in mirrors. In contrast to\nPlato, who argued that the visual ray, which proceeded from the eye,\nrequires the support of and coalesces with external light, Archytas\nexplained vision in terms of the visual ray alone (A25). It is\ntempting, then, to suppose that Archytas played a major role in the\ndevelopment of the mathematically based Pythagorean optics, to which\nAristotle refers. On the other hand, when Aristotle refers to\nPythagoreans, he generally means Pythagoreans of the fifth century.\nElsewhere he treats Archytas independently of the Pythagorean\ntradition, writing works on Archytas which were distinct from his work\non the Pythagoreans. It would thus be more natural to read\nAristotle’s reference to Pythagorean optics as alluding to\nfifth-century Pythagoreans such as Philolaus. Archytas will then have\nbeen responsible for developing an already existing Pythagorean\noptical tradition into a science, rather than founding such a\ntradition.","\nDiogenes Laertius reports that Archytas was “the first to\nsystematize mechanics by using mathematical first principles”\n(VIII 83 = A1), and Archytas is accordingly sometimes hailed by modern\nscholars as the founder of the science of mechanics. There is a\npuzzle, however, since, no ancient Greek author in the later\nmechanical tradition (e.g., Heron, Pappus, Archimedes, Philon) ever\nascribes any work in the field to Archytas. What did the ancients mean\nby mechanics? A rough definition would be “the description and\nexplanation of the operation of machines” (Knorr 1996). The\nearliest treatise in mechanics, the Mechanical Problems\nascribed to Aristotle, begins with problems having to do with a simple\nmachine, the lever. Pappus (AD 320) refers to machines used to lift\ngreat weights, machines of war such as the catapult, water lifting\nmachines, amazing devices (automata), and machines that served as\nmodels of the heavens (1024.12 – 1025.4, on Pappus, see Cuomo\n2000). Pappus emphasizes, however, that, in addition to this practical\npart of mechanics, there is a theoretical part that is heavily\nmathematical (1022. 13–15). Given his interest in describing\nphysical phenomena in mathematical terms, it might seem logical that\nArchytas would make important contributions to mechanics. The actual\nevidence is less conclusive. A great part of the tendency to assign\nArchytas a role in the development of mechanics can be traced to\nPlutarch’s story about the quarrel between Plato and Archytas\nover Archytas’ supposed mechanical solution to the problem of\ndoubling the cube. This story is likely to be false (see 2.1 above).\nSome scholars have argued that Archytas devised machines of war (Diels\n1965; Cambiano 1998), as Archimedes did later, but this conclusion is\nbased on questionable inferences and no ancient source ascribes such\nmachines to Archytas. The only mechanical device that can with some\nprobability be assigned to Archytas, apart from the children’s\ntoy known as a “clapper” (A10), is an automaton in the\nform of a wooden dove, which was connected to a pulley and\ncounterweight and “flew” up from a lower perch to a higher\none, when set in motion by a puff of air (A10a). Kingsley is deeply\ncritical of scholars who see these inventions as toys and suggests\nconnections to earlier Chinese inventors who produced a wooden bird\nthat could fly for military purposes (2014: 155–9). Others have\nsuggested that, since ancient siege devices were called by the names\nof animals (e.g., “tortoise” and “crow”),\nArchytas’ “dove” might have been an early catapult\nof his devising, or a projectile hurled by such a catapult, which was\nlater misunderstood to be a mechanical dove (Berryman 2003: 355; 2009:\n78). However, no ancient source explains the dove in this way. A\ncomplicating factor here is that Diogenes Laertius reports (A1) that\nthere was a book on mechanics in circulation, which some thought to be\nby a different Archytas, so that it is possible that the flying dove\nis, in fact, the work of a separate Archytas. Archytas’ solution\nto the duplication of the cube, although it was not mechanical itself,\nwas of enormous importance for mechanics, since the solution to the\nproblem allows one not just to double a cube but also to construct\nbodies that are larger or smaller than a given body in any given\nratio. Thus, the solution permits the construction of a full-scale\nmachine on the basis of a working model. Pappus cites the solution to\nthe duplication of the cube as one of the three most crucial\ngeometrical theorems for practical mechanics (Math. Coll.\n1028. 18–21). It may then be that Archytas’ primary\ncontribution to mechanics was precisely his solution to the\nduplication of the cube and that it is this solution which constituted\nthe mathematical first principles which Archytas provided for\nmechanics. For a recent discussion of these issues seen Berryman 2009:\n87–97. It is more doubtful that Archytas wrote a treatise on\nmechanics. Schofield has recently argued that the evidence for\nArchytas’ work both in optics and in mechanics is so meagre that\nwe should “be skeptical about Archytas’ alleged\nrole” (2014: 86)."],"subsection_title":"3.3 Optics and Mechanics"}]},{"main_content":["\nIn the Metaphysics, Aristotle praises Archytas for having\noffered definitions which took account of both form and matter\n(1043a14–26 = A22). The examples given are\n“windlessness” (nênemia), which is defined\nas “stillness [the form] in a quantity of air [the\nmatter],” and “calm-on-the-ocean”\n(galênê), which is defined as “levelness\n[the form] of sea [the matter].” The terms form and matter are\nAristotle’s, and we cannot be sure how Archytas conceptualized\nthe two parts of his definitions. A plausible suggestion is that he\nfollowed his predecessor Philolaus in adopting limiters and unlimiteds\nas his basic metaphysical principles and that he saw his definitions\nas combinations of limiters, such as levelness and stillness, with\nunlimiteds, such as air and sea. The oddity of\n“windlessness” and “calm-on-the-sea” as\nexamples suggests that they were not the by-products of some other\nsort of investigation, e.g. cosmology, but were chosen precisely to\nillustrate principles of definition. Archytas may thus have devoted a\ntreatise to the topic. Aristotle elsewhere comments on the use of\nproportion in developing definitions and uses these same examples\n(Top. 108a7). The ability to recognize likeness in things of\ndifferent genera is said to be the key. “Windlessness” and\n“calm-on-the-ocean” are recognized as alike, and this\nlikeness can be expressed in the following proportion: as\nnênemia is to the air so galênê is\nto the sea. It is tempting to suppose that Archytas, who saw the world\nas explicable in terms of number and proportion, also saw proportion\nas the key in developing definitions. This would explain another\nreference to Archytas in Aristotle. At Rhetoric\n1412a9–17 (= A12) Aristotle praises Archytas precisely for his\nability to see similarity, even in things which differ greatly, and\ngives as an example Archytas’ assertion that an arbitrator and\nan altar are the same. DK oddly include this text among the testimonia\nfor Archytas’ life, but it clearly is part of Archytas’\nwork on definition. The definitions of both an altar and an arbitrator\nwill appeal to their common functions as a refuge, while recognizing\nthe different context and way in which this function is carried out.\nFor doubts about this reconstruction of Archytas’ theory of\ndefinition, see Barker 2006, 314–318 and Schofield 2014, 80."],"section_title":"4. Definitions","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nWe have very little evidence for Archytas’ cosmology, yet he was\nresponsible for one of the most famous cosmological arguments in\nantiquity, an argument which has been hailed as “the most\ncompelling argument ever produced for the infinity of space”\n(Sorabji 1988, 125). The argument is ascribed to Archytas in a\nfragment of Eudemus preserved by Simplicius (= A24), and it is\nprobably to Archytas that Aristotle is referring when he describes the\nfifth and “most important” reason that people believe in\nthe existence of the unlimited (Ph. 203b22 ff.). Archytas\nasks anyone who argues that the universe is limited to engage in a\nthought experiment (this is one of the first recorded thought\nexperiments in antiquity): “If I arrived at the outermost edge\nof the heaven, could I extend my hand or staff into what is outside or\nnot? It would be paradoxical [given our normal assumptions about the\nnature of space] not to be able to extend it.” The end of the\nstaff, once extended will mark a new limit. Archytas can advance to\nthe new limit and ask the same question again, so that there will\nalways be something, into which his staff can be extended, beyond the\nsupposed limit, and hence that something is clearly unlimited. Neither\nPlato nor Aristotle accepted this argument, and both believed that the\nuniverse was limited. Nonetheless, Archytas’ argument had great\ninfluence and was taken over and adapted by the Stoics, Epicureans\n(Lucretius I 968–983), Locke and Newton, among others, while\neliciting responses from Alexander and Simplicius (Sorabji 1988,\n125–141). For a discussion of the relation between\nArchytas’ thought experiment and other thought experiments in\nantiquity see Ierodiakonou 2011. Not all scholars have been impressed\nby the argument (see Barnes 1982, 362), and modern notions of space\nallow for it to be finite without having an edge, and without an edge\nArchytas’ argument cannot get started (but see Sorabji 1988,\n160–163). Beyond this argument, there is only exiguous evidence\nfor Archytas’ system of the physical world. Eudemus praises\nArchytas for recognizing that the unequal and uneven are not identical\nwith motion as Plato supposed (see Ti. 52e and 57e) but\nrather the causes of motion (A23). Another testimonium suggests that\nArchytas thought that all things are moved in accordance with\nproportion (Arist., Prob. 915a25–32 = A23a). The same\ntestimonium indicates that different sorts of proportion defined\ndifferent sorts of motion. Archytas asserted that “the\nproportion of equality” (arithmetic proportion?) defined natural\nmotion, which he regarded as curved motion (for a different account of\nthe proportion of equality see De Groot 2014: 195–207). This\nexplanation of natural motion is supposed to explain why certain parts\nof plants and animals (e.g. the stem, thighs, arms and trunk) are\nrounded rather than triangular or polygonal. Some scholars argue that\nit was the influence of Archytas that led Plato and Eudemus to\nemphasize uniform circular movement in explaining the heavens (Zhmud\n2006: 97). An explanation of motion in terms of proportion fits well\nwith the rest of evidence for Archytas, but the details remain\nobscure."],"section_title":"5. Cosmology and Physics","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nArchytas’ search for the numbers in things was not limited to\nthe natural world. Political relationships and the moral action of\nindividuals were also explained in terms of number and proportion. In\nFr. 3, rational calculation is identified as the basis of the stable\nstate:","\nOnce calculation (logismos) was discovered, it stopped\ndiscord and increased concord. For people do not want more than their\nshare, and equality exists, once this has come into being. For by\nmeans of calculation we will seek reconciliation in our dealings with\nothers. Through this, then, the poor receive from the powerful, and\nthe wealthy give to the needy, both in the confidence that they will\nhave what is fair on account of this.","\nThis glorification of calculation is reminiscent of Plato’s\npraise for “geometrical equality” in the Gorgias\n(507e6–508a8) and Plato may be thinking of Archytas Fr. 3\n(Palmer 2014: 205–6; Huffman 2013: 259–61). The emphasis\non equality (isotas) and fairness (to ison) suggests\nthat Archytas envisages rational calculation (logismos) as\nheavily mathematical. On the other hand, logismos is not\nidentical to the technical science of number (logistic – see 3.2\nabove) but is rather a practical ability to understand numerical\ncalculations, including basic proportions, an ability that is shared\nby most human beings. It is the clarity of calculation and proportion\nthat does away with the constant striving for more\n(pleonexia), which produces discord in the state. Since the\nstate is based on a widely shared human ability to calculate, an\nability that the rich and poor share, Archytas was led to support a\nmore democratic constitution (see 1.3 above) than Plato, who\nemphasizes the expert mathematical knowledge of a few (R.\n546a ff.). Zhmud (2006: 60–76) points out connections between B3\nand Isocrates and argues that Isocrates is referring to Archytas, when\nhe says that some praise the sciences for their utility and others try\nto demonstrate that they contribute greatly to virtue\n(Busiris 23). However, Archytas seems to accept both of these\nviews about the sciences, while Isocrates refers to two different\ngroups of people. Isocrates’ reference is also very general and\nmakes no allusion to the central terms of B3 so that it is doubtful\nthat he has Archytas in mind. For further discussion of the argument\nof B3 see Huffman 2005: 182–224 and Schofield 2008. ","\nMost of our evidence for Archytas’ ethical views is,\nunfortunately, not based on fragments of his writings but rather on\nanecdotes, which probably ultimately derive from Aristoxenus’\nLife of Archytas. The good life of the individual, no less\nthan the stability of the state, appears to have been founded on\nrational calculation. Aristoxenus presented a confrontation between\nthe Syracusan hedonist, Polyarchus, and Archytas. Polyarchus’\nlong speech is preserved by Athenaeus and Archytas’ response by\nCicero (A9 = Deip. 545a and Sen. XII 39–41\nrespectively). Schofield (2014: 70, n.2) raises doubts about whether\nCicero really preserves Archytas’ response (See Huffman 2005:\n323–37). Horky (2011: 120) assumes without argument that\nAristoxenus presented Archytas as delivering his speech in the\npresence of Plato and the Samnite C. Pontius, but this is part of\nCicero’s frame story and there is no evidence that it derives\nfrom Aristoxenus. Polyarchus’ defense of always striving for\nmore (pleonexia) and of the pursuit of pleasure is\nreminiscent of Plato’s presentations of Callicles and\nThrasymachus, but is not derived from those presentations and is\nbetter seen as an important parallel development (Huffman 2002b).\nArchytas bases his response on the premise that reason (= rational\ncalculation) is the best part of us and the part that should govern\nour actions. Polyarchus might grant such a premise, since his is a\nrational hedonism. Archytas responds once again with a thought\nexperiment. We are to imagine someone in the throes of the greatest\npossible bodily pleasure (sexual orgasm?). Surely we must agree that a\nperson in such a state is not able to engage in rational calculation.\nIt thus appears that bodily pleasure is in itself antithetical to\nreason and that, the more we succeed in obtaining it, the less we are\nable to reason. Aristotle appears to refer to this argument in the\nNicomachean Ethics (1152b16–18). Archytas’\nargument is specifically directed against bodily pleasure and he did\nnot think that all pleasure was disruptive; he enjoyed playing with\nchildren (A8) and recognized that the pleasures of friendship were\npart of a good life (Cicero, Amic. XXIII 88). Other anecdotes\nemphasize that our actions must be governed by reason rather than the\nemotions: Archytas refused to punish the serious misdeeds of his\nslaves, because he had become angry and did not want to act out of\nanger (A7); he restrained himself from swearing aloud by writing his\ncurses on a wall instead (A11). Palmer argues that Archytas was\nworking with a Pythagorean conception of the soul as divided into two\nparts: the intellect and a part responsible for the affective states\nsuch as emotions and appetites (2014: 209). "],"section_title":"6. Ethics and Political Philosophy","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nArchytas fits the common stereotype of a Pythagorean better than\nanyone else does. He is by far the most accomplished Pythagorean\nmathematician, making important contributions to geometry,\nlogistic/arithmetic and harmonics. He was more successful as a\npolitical leader than any other ancient philosopher, and there is a\nrich anecdotal tradition about his personal self-control. It is\nstriking, however, that there are essentially no testimonia connecting\nArchytas to metempsychosis or the religious aspect of Pythagoreanism.\nArchytas is a prominent figure in the rebirth of interest in\nPythagoreanism in first century BC Rome: Horace, Propertius and Cicero\nall highlight him. As the last prominent member of the early\nPythagorean tradition, more pseudo-Pythagorean works came to be forged\nin his name than any other Pythagorean, including Pythagoras himself.\nHis name, with the spelling Architas, continued to exert power in\nMedieval and Renaissance texts, although the accomplishments assigned\nto him in those texts are fanciful.","\nScholars have typically emphasized the continuities between Plato and\nArchytas (e.g., Kahn 2001, 56), but the evidence suggests that\nArchytas and Plato were in serious disagreement on a number of issues.\nPlato’s only certain reference to Archytas is part of a\ncriticism of his approach to harmonics in Book VII of the\nRepublic, where there is probably also a criticism of his\nwork in solid geometry. Plato’s attempt to argue for the split\nbetween the intelligible and sensible world in Books VI and VII of the\nRepublic may well be a protreptic directed at Archytas, who\nrefused to separate numbers from things. It is sometimes thought that\nthe eponymous primary speaker in Plato’s Timaeus, who\nis described as a leading political figure and philosopher from\nsouthern Italy (20a), must be a stand-in for Archytas. The\nTimaeus, however, is a most un-Archytan document (Huffman\n2013: 263-8). It is based on the split between the sensible and\nintelligible world, which Archytas did not accept. Plato argues that\nthe universe is limited, while Archytas is famous for this argument to\nshow that it is unlimited. Plato constructs the world soul according\nto ratios that are important in harmonic theory, but he uses\nPhilolaus’ ratios rather than Archytas’. Plato does adopt\nArchytas’ theory of pitch with some modification, but Archytas\nand Plato disagree on the explanation of sight. For a different view\nof the relation between Plato and Archytas see Kingsley 2014:\n156–7. Archytas’ refusal to split the intelligible from\nthe sensible may have made him a more attractive figure to Aristotle,\nwho devoted four books to him (Huffman 2005: 583–594) and\npraised his definitions for treating the composite of matter and form,\nnot of form separate from matter (Metaph. 1043a14–26).\nArchytas’ vision of the role of mathematics in the state is\ncloser to Aristotle’s mathematical account of distributive and\nredistributive justice (EN 1130b30 ff.) than to Plato’s\nemphasis on the expert mathematical knowledge of the guardians.\nClearly Archytas was an important influence on both Plato and\nAristotle, but the exact nature of those philosophical relationships\nis complex."],"section_title":"7. Importance and Influence","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Life and Works\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nArchytas, son of Hestiaeus (see Aristoxenus in Diels-Kranz 1952, chap.\\n47, passage A1; abbreviated as DK47 A1), lived in the Greek city of\\nTarentum, on the heel of the boot of Italy. The later tradition almost\\nuniversally identifies him as a Pythagorean (e.g., A1, A2, A7, A16).\\nAristotle and his pupil Eudemus do not explicitly call Archytas a\\nPythagorean and appear to treat him as an important independent\\nthinker. Plato never refers to Archytas by name except in the\\nSeventh Letter, if that is by Plato, and he is not called a\\nPythagorean there. In the Republic, however, when Plato\\nquotes a sentence which appears in Fr. 1 of Archytas (DK47 B1), he\\nexplicitly labels it as part of Pythagorean harmonics (530d). Cicero\\n(de Orat. III 34. 139) reports that Archytas was the pupil of\\nPhilolaus, and this is not improbable. Philolaus was the most\\nprominent Pythagorean of the preceding generation (ca. 470–390)\\nand may have taught in Tarentum. Archytas’ achievements in\\nmathematics depend on the work of Hippocrates of Chios, but we have no\\nevidence that he studied with Hippocrates. The only pupil of Archytas\\nwho is more than a name, is Eudoxus (ca. 390–340), the prominent\\nmathematician. Eudoxus presumably did not learn his famous hedonism\\nfrom Archytas (see DK47 A9), and it is specifically geometry that he\\nis said to have studied with Archytas (Diogenes Laertius VIII 86).\",\n \"\\nArchytas was, roughly speaking, a contemporary of Plato, but it is\\ndifficult to be more precise about his dates. Aristotle’s pupil,\\nEudemus, presents him as the contemporary of Plato (born 428/7) and\\nLeodamas (born ca. 430), on the one hand, and of Theaetetus (born ca.\\n415), on the other (A6). Since it would be difficult to call him the\\ncontemporary of Theaetetus, if he were born much earlier than 435,\\nthis is the earliest he was likely to have been born. On the other\\nhand, he could have been born as late as 410 and still be considered a\\ncontemporary of Plato. Strabo associates Archytas with the flourishing\\nof Tarentum, before a period of decline, in which Tarentum hired\\nmercenary generals (A4). Since the mercenaries appear ca. 340, it\\nseems likely that Archytas was dead by 350 at the latest. Such a date\\nis in accord with other evidence (A5 = [Demosthenes], Erot.\\nOr. 61.46), which connects Archytas to Timotheus, who died ca.\\n355, and with Plato’s (?) Seventh Letter (350a), which\\npresents Archytas as still active in Tarentum in 361. Thus Archytas\\nwas born between 435 and 410 and died between 360 and 350.\",\n \"\\nSome scholars (e.g., Ciaceri 1927–32: III 4) have supposed that\\nthe speaker of the Roman poet, Horace’s, Archytas Ode (I 28 =\\nA3) is Archytas himself and hence have concluded that Archytas died in\\na shipwreck. The standard interpretation, however, rightly recognizes\\nthat the speaker is not Archytas but a shipwrecked sailor who\\napostrophizes Archytas (Nisbet and Hubbard 1970, 317ff.). The ode\\ntells us nothing about Archytas’ death, but it is one of many\\npieces of evidence for the fascination with Archytas by Roman authors\\nof the first century BC (Propertius IV 1b.77; Varro in B8; Cicero,\\nRep. I 38.59, I 10.16; Fin. V 29.87; Tusc.\\nIV 36.78, V 23.64, de Orat. III 34.139; Amic. XXIII\\n88; Sen. XII 39–41), perhaps because Pythagoreanism had\\ncome to be seen as a native Italian philosophy, and not a Greek import\\n(Burkert 1961; Powell 1995, 11 ff.).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.1 Family, Teachers, and Pupils; Date\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nApart from the surviving fragments of his writings, our knowledge of\\nArchytas’ life and work depends heavily on authors who wrote in\\nthe second half of the fourth century, in the fifty years after\\nArchytas’ death. Archytas’ importance both as an\\nintellectual and as a political leader is reflected in the number of\\nwritings about him in this period, although only fragments of these\\nworks have been preserved. Aristotle wrote a work in three volumes on\\nthe philosophy of Archytas, more than on any other of his\\npredecessors, as well as a second work, consisting of a summary of\\nPlato’s Timaeus and the writings of Archytas (A13).\\nUnfortunately almost nothing of these works has survived. Scholars\\nhave generally regarded them as authentic (Huffman 2005: 583–94)\\nbut Schofield has recently raised some doubts (2014: 81–2).\\nAristotle’s pupil Eudemus discussed Archytas prominently in his\\nhistory of geometry (A6 and A14) and in his work on physics (A23 and\\nA24). Another pupil of Aristotle’s, Aristoxenus, wrote a\\nLife of Archytas, which is the basis for much of the\\nbiographical tradition about him (A1, A7, A9). Aristoxenus (375-ca.\\n300) was in a good position to have accurate information about\\nArchytas. He was born in Tarentum and grew up during the height of\\nArchytas’ prominence in the city. In addition to whatever\\npersonal knowledge he had of Archytas, he draws on his own father\\nSpintharus, who was a younger contemporary of Archytas, as a source\\n(e.g., A7). Aristoxenus began his philosophical career as a\\nPythagorean and studied with the Pythagorean Xenophilus at Athens, so\\nthat it is not surprising that his portrayal of Archytas is largely\\npositive. Nonetheless, Archytas’ opponents are given a fair\\nhearing (e.g., Polyarchus in A9), and Archytas himself is represented\\nas not without small flaws of character (A7). Other fourth-century\\nsources such as the Seventh Letter in the Platonic corpus and\\nDemosthenes’ (?) Erotic Oration focus on the connection\\nbetween Archytas and Plato (see below).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.2 Sources\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nArchytas is unique among Greek philosophers for the prominent role he\\nplayed in the politics of his native city. He was elected general\\n(stratêgos) seven years in succession at one point in\\nhis career (A1), a record that reminds us of Pericles at Athens. His\\nelection was an exception to a law, which forbade election in\\nsuccessive years, and thus attests to his reputation in Tarentum.\\nAristoxenus reports that Archytas was never defeated in battle and\\nthat, when at one point he was forced to withdraw from his post by the\\nenvy of his enemies, the Tarentines immediately suffered defeat (A1).\\nHe probably served as part of a board of generals (there was a board\\nof ten at Athens). The analogy with Athens suggests that as a general\\nhe may also have had special privileges in addressing the assembly at\\nTarentum on issues of importance to the city, so that his position as\\ngeneral gave him considerable political as well as military power. At\\nsome point in his career, he may have been designated as a general\\nautokratôr (“plenipotentiary”) (A2), which\\ngave him special latitude in dealing with diplomatic and military\\nmatters without consulting the assembly, although this was not\\ndictatorial power and all arrangements probably required the eventual\\napproval of the assembly. We do not know when Archytas served his\\nseven successive years as general. Some have supposed that they must\\ncoincide with the seven year period which includes Plato’s\\nsecond and third visits to Italy and Sicily, 367–361 (e.g.,\\nWuilleumier 1939, 68–9), but Archytas need not have been\\nstratêgos to play the role assigned to him during these\\nyears in the Seventh Letter. The evidence suggests that most\\nof Archytas’ military campaigns were directed not at other\\nGreeks but at native Italic peoples such as the Messapians and\\nLucanians, with whom Tarentum had been in constant conflict since its\\nfounding.\",\n \"\\nIt is important to recognize that the Tarentum in which Archytas\\nexercised such influence was not some insignificant backwater. Spartan\\ncolonists founded it in 706. It was initially overshadowed by other\\nGreek colonies in southern Italy such as Croton, although it had the\\nbest harbor on the south coast of Italy and was the natural stopping\\npoint for any ships sailing west from mainland Greece. Archytas will\\nhave grown up in a Tarentum that, in accord with its foundation by\\nSparta, took the Peloponnesian and Syracusan side against Athens in\\nthe Peloponnesian War (Thuc. VI 44; VI 104; VII 91). Athens allied\\nwith the Messapians (Thuc. VII 33), the long-standing enemy of the\\nTarentines, against whom Archytas would later lead expeditions (A7).\\nAfter the Peloponnesian War, Tarentum appears to have avoided direct\\ninvolvement in the conflict between the tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius\\nI, and a league of Greek cities in southern Italy headed by Croton.\\nAfter Dionysius crushed the league, Tarentum emerged as the most\\npowerful Greek state in southern Italy and probably became the new\\nhead of the league of Italiot Greek cities (A2). In the period from\\n380–350, when Archytas was in his prime and old age, Tarentum\\nwas one of the most powerful cities in the Greek world (Purcell 1994,\\n388). Strabo’s description of its military might (VI 3.4)\\ncompares favorably with Thucydides’ account of Athens at the\\nbeginning of the Peloponnesian war (II. 13).\",\n \"\\nDespite its ancestral connections to Sparta, which was an oligarchy,\\nTarentum appears to have been a democracy during Archytas’\\nlifetime. According to Aristotle (Pol. 1303a), the democracy\\nwas founded after a large part of the Tarentine aristocracy was killed\\nin a battle with a native people, the Iapygians, in 473. Herodotus\\nconfirms that this was the greatest slaughter of Greeks of which he\\nwas aware (VII 170). There is no evidence that Tarentum was anything\\nbut a democracy between the founding of the democracy in 473 and\\nArchytas’ death ca. 350. Some scholars have argued that\\nTarentum’s ties to Sparta and the supposed predilection of the\\nPythagoreans for aristocracy will have insured that Tarentum did not\\nremain a democracy long and that it was not a democracy under Archytas\\n(Minar 1942, 88–90; Ciaceri 1927–32, II 446–7).\\nStrabo, however, explicitly describes Tarentum as a democracy at the\\ntime of its flourishing under Archytas (A4), and the descriptions of\\nArchytas’ power in Tarentum stress his popularity with the\\nmasses and his election as general by the citizens (A1 and A2).\\nFinally, Aristotle’s account of the structure of the Tarentine\\ngovernment in the fourth century (Pol. 1291b14), while\\npossibly consistent with other forms of government, makes most sense\\nif Tarentum was a democracy. The same is true of fr. B3 of Archytas,\\nwith its emphasis on a more equal distribution of wealth.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.3 Archytas and Tarentum\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nArchytas was most famous in antiquity and is most famous in the modern\\nworld for having sent a ship to rescue Plato from the tyrant of\\nSyracuse, Dionysius II, in 361. In both the surviving ancient lives of\\nArchytas (by Diogenes Laertius, VIII 79–83, and in the\\nSuda) the first thing mentioned about him, after the name of\\nhis city-state and his father, is his rescue of Plato (A1 and A2).\\nThis story is told in greatest detail in the Seventh Letter\\nascribed to Plato. It has accordingly been typical to identify\\nArchytas as “the friend of Plato” (Mathieu 1987). Archytas\\nfirst met Plato over twenty years earlier, when Plato visited southern\\nItaly and Sicily for the first time in 388/7, during his travels after\\nthe death of Socrates (Pl. [?], Ep. VII 324a, 326b-d; Cicero,\\nRep. I 10. 16; Philodemus, Acad. Ind. X 5–11;\\ncf. D.L. III 6). Some scholars have seen Archytas as the dominant\\nfigure in the relationship (Zhmud 2006, 93) and even as the “new\\nmodel philosopher for Plato” (Vlastos 1991, 129) and the\\narchetype of Plato’s philosopher-king (Guthrie 1962, 333). The\\nactual situation appears to be considerably more complicated. The\\nancient evidence, apart from the Seventh Letter, presents the\\nrelationship between Archytas and Plato in diametrically opposed ways.\\nOne tradition does present Archytas as the Pythagorean master at whose\\nfeet Plato sat, after Socrates had died (e.g., Cicero, Rep. I\\n10.16), but another tradition makes Archytas the student of Plato, to\\nwhom he owed his fame and success in Tarentum (Demosthenes [?],\\nErotic Oration 44).\",\n \"\\nThe Seventh Letter itself is of contested authenticity. Many\\nscholars regard it either as the work of Plato himself or of a student\\nof Plato who had considerable familiarity with Plato’s\\ninvolvement in events in Sicily (see e.g., Brisson 1987; Lloyd 1990;\\nSchofield 2000), but grave doubts about this view have been raised by\\nBurnyeat and Frede (2015). The letter appears to serve as an apologia\\nfor Plato’s involvement in events in Sicily. Lloyd has argued,\\nhowever, that the letter also serves to distance Plato from\\nPythagoreanism and from Archytas (1990). Nothing in the letter\\nsuggests that Plato was ever the pupil of Archytas; instead the\\nrelationship is much closer to that presented in the Erotic\\nOration. Plato is presented as the dominant figure upon whom\\nArchytas depends both philosophically and politically. Archytas writes\\nto Plato claiming that Dionysius II has made great progress in\\nphilosophy, in order to urge Plato to come to Sicily a third time\\n(339d-e). These claims are belied as soon as Plato arrives (340b). The\\nletter thus suggests that, far from being the Pythagorean master from\\nwhom Plato learned his philosophy, Archytas had a very imperfect\\nunderstanding of what Plato considered philosophy to be. The letter\\nmakes clear that Plato does have a relationship of xenia,\\n“guest-friendship,” with Archytas and others at Tarentum\\n(339e, 350a). This relationship could have been established on\\nPlato’s first visit in 388/7, since Plato uses it as a basis to\\nestablish a similar relationship between Archytas and Dionysius II\\nduring his second visit in 367 (338c). It is also the relationship in\\nterms of which Plato appeals to Archytas for help, when he is in\\ndanger after the third trip to Sicily goes badly (350a). Such a\\nfriendship need not imply any close personal intimacy, however.\\nAristotle classifies xenia as a friendship for utility and\\npoints out that such friends do not necessarily spend much time\\ntogether or even find each other’s company pleasant (EN\\n1156a26 ff.). Apart from Archytas’ rescue of Plato in 361 (even\\nthis is described as devised by Plato [350a]), Plato is clearly the\\ndominant figure in the relationship. Archytas is portrayed as\\nPlato’s inferior in his understanding of philosophy, and Plato\\nis even presented as responsible for some of Archytas’ political\\nsuccess, insofar as he establishes the relationship between Archytas\\nand Dionysius II, which is described as of considerable political\\nimportance (339d).\",\n \"\\nHow are we to unravel the true nature of the relationship between\\nPlato and Archytas in the light of this conflicting evidence? Apart\\nfrom the Seventh Letter, Plato never makes a direct reference\\nto Archytas. He does, however, virtually quote a sentence from\\nArchytas’ book on harmonics in Book VII of the Republic\\n(530d), and his discussions of the science of stereometry shortly\\nbefore this are likely to have some connections to Archytas’\\nwork in solid geometry (528d). It is thus in the context of the\\ndiscussion of the sciences that Plato refers to Archytas, and the\\nremains of Archytas’ work focus precisely on the sciences (e.g.,\\nfr. B1). Both strands of the tradition can be reconciled, if we\\nsuppose that Plato’s first visit to Italy and Sicily was at\\nleast in part motivated by his desire to meet Archytas, as the first\\ntradition claims, but that he sought Archytas out not as a new\\n“model philosopher” but rather as an expert in the\\nmathematical sciences, in which Plato had developed a deep interest.\\nIn Republic VII, Plato is critical of Pythagorean harmonics\\nand of current work in solid geometry on philosophical grounds, so\\nthat, while he undoubtedly learned a considerable amount of\\nmathematics from Archytas, he clearly disagreed with Archytas’\\nunderstanding of the philosophical uses of the sciences. In 388\\nTarentum had not yet reached the height of its power, and Archytas is\\nnot likely to have achieved his political dominance yet, so that there\\nmay also be some truth to the claim of the second tradition that\\nArchytas did not achieve his great practical success until after his\\ncontact with Plato; whether or not that success had any direct\\nrelationship to his contact with Plato is more doubtful. On their\\nfirst meeting in 388/7, Plato and Archytas established a relationship\\nof guest-friendship, which obligated them to further each\\nother’s interests, which they did, as the events of\\n367–361 show. Plato and Archytas need not have been in agreement\\non philosophical issues and are perhaps better seen as competitive\\ncolleagues engaged in an ongoing debate as to the value of the\\nsciences for philosophy (Huffman 2005, 32–42).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.4 Archytas and Plato\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nMore pages of text have been preserved in Archytas’ name than in\\nthe name of any other Pythagorean. Unfortunately the vast majority of\\nthis material is rightly regarded as spurious. The same is true of the\\nPythagorean tradition in general; the vast majority of texts which\\npurport to be by early Pythagoreans are, in fact, later forgeries.\\nSome of these forgeries were produced for purely monetary reasons; a\\ntext of a “rare” work by a famous Pythagorean could fetch\\na considerable sum from book collectors. There were characteristics\\nunique to the Pythagorean tradition, however, that led to a\\nproliferation of forgeries. Starting as early as the later fourth\\ncentury BC, Pythagoras came to be regarded, in some circles, as the\\nphilosopher par excellence, to whom all truth had been revealed. All\\nlater philosophy, insofar as it was true, was a restatement of this\\noriginal revelation (see, e.g., O’Meara 1989). In order to\\nsupport this view of Pythagoras, texts were forged in the name of\\nPythagoras and other early Pythagoreans, to show that they had, in\\nfact, anticipated the most important ideas of Plato and Aristotle.\\nThese pseudo-Pythagorean texts are thus characterized by the use of\\ncentral Platonic and Aristotelian ideas, expressed in the technical\\nterminology used by Plato and Aristotle. Some of the forgeries even\\nattempt to improve on Plato and Aristotle by adding refinements to\\ntheir positions, which were first advanced several hundred years after\\ntheir deaths. The date and place of origin of these pseudo-Pythagorean\\ntreatises is difficult to determine, but most seem to have been\\ncomposed between 150 BC and 100 AD (Burkert 1972b; Centrone 1990;\\nMoraux 1984); Rome (Burkert 1972b) and Alexandria (Centrone 1990) are\\nthe most likely places of origin. Archytas is the dominant figure in\\nthis pseudo-Pythagorean tradition, probably because of his connection\\nto Plato (Zhmud 2019). In Thesleff 1965’s collection of the\\npseudo-Pythagorean writings, forty-five of the two-hundred and\\nforty-five pages (2-48), about 20%, comprising some 1,200 lines, are\\ndevoted to texts forged in Archytas’ name. On the other hand,\\nthe fragments likely to be genuine, which are collected in DK, fill\\nout only a hundred lines of text. Thus, over ten times more spurious\\nthan genuine material has been preserved in Archytas’ name. It\\nmay well be that the style and Doric dialect of the pseudo-Pythagorean\\nwritings were also based on the model of Archytas’ genuine\\nwritings.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.5 The Authenticity Question\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe treatises under Archytas’ name collected in Thesleff 1965\\nhave been almost universally regarded as not by the historical\\nArchytas, except for On Law and Justice, where there has been\\nconsiderable controversy. Most are only preserved in fragments,\\nalthough there are two brief complete works. The most famous of these\\npseudepigrapha is Concerning the Whole System [sc. of\\nCategories] or Concerning the Ten Categories (preserved\\ncomplete, see Szlezak 1972). This work along with the treatise On\\nOpposites (Thesleff 1965, 15.3–19.2) and the much later\\nTen Universal Assertions (preserved complete, first ascribed\\nto Archytas in the 15th century AD; see Szlezak 1972)\\nrepresent the attempt to claim Aristotle’s doctrine of\\ncategories for Archytas and the Pythagoreans (see also Griffin 2015).\\nThis attempt was to some extent successful; both Simplicius and\\nIamblichus regarded the Archytan works on categories as genuine\\nanticipations of Aristotle (CAG VIII. 2, 9–25).\\nConcerning the Ten Categories and On Opposites are\\nvery frequently cited in the ancient commentaries on Aristotle’s\\nCategories. Pseudo-Archytas identifies ten categories with\\nnames that are virtually identical to those used by Aristotle, and his\\nlanguage follows Aristotle closely in many places. The division of\\nArchytas’ work into two treatises, Concerning the Ten\\nCategories and On Opposites, reflects the work of\\nAndronicus of Rhodes, who first separated the last six chapters of\\nAristotle’s Categories from the rest. Thus, the works\\nin Archytas’ name must have been composed after\\nAndronicus’ work in the first century BC. Other pseudepigrapha\\nin metaphysics and epistemology include On Principles\\n(Thesleff 1965, 19.3 – 20.17) and On Intelligence and\\nPerception (Thesleff 1965, 36.12–39.25), which includes a\\nparaphrase of the divided line passage in Plato’s\\nRepublic. Mansfeld has recently shown that Fragment 1 of the\\nlatter work in Thesleff’s collection belongs to the former work\\n(Mansfeld 2019). De Cesaris and Horky (2018) provide commentary on\\nOn Intelligence and Perception, but much remains obscure in\\nthis difficult work. Mansfeld (2019) shows that On Intelligence\\nand Perception is not likely to have been an influence on the\\naccount of Pythagorean principles in Aetius Placita 1.3.8 as\\nhas been suggested by De Cesaris and Horky (2018). Ulacco (2017)\\nestablishes new texts (with commentary) for On Principles,\\nOn Intelligence and Perception and On Opposites.\\nFurther metaphysical and epistemological works include On\\nBeing (Thesleff 1965, 40.1–16) and On Wisdom\\n(Thesleff 1965, 43.24–45.4). The authenticity of this latter\\nwork has recently been defended on the grounds that its admitted\\nsimilarities to passages in Aristotle are a result of Archytas’\\ninfluence on Aristotle rather than an indication that the work was\\nforged on the basis of Aristotle (Johnson 2008, 193–194). It is\\nindeed true that Aristotle devoted several lost works to Archytas and\\nmust have been familiar with his thought. However, the issue of\\nauthenticity within the Pythagorean tradition has a different\\ncharacter than is the case with other ancient authors. In the case of\\nan author such as Plato, where the vast majority of surviving works\\nare surely authentic, the onus of proof is on anyone who wants to\\nargue that a work is spurious. In the Pythagorean tradition, on the\\nother hand, where surely spurious works far outnumber genuine ones,\\nthe situation is reversed. The onus of proof rests on anyone who\\nregards a Pythagorean work as genuine to show that it does not fit the\\npattern of the forged Pythagorean treatises and that its contents can\\nbe corroborated by evidence dating before the third century, when the\\nPythagorean pseudepigrapha start to be generated. Since On\\nWisdom does share with the pseudepigrapha the characteristic of\\nusing important Aristotelian distinctions (Huffman 2005,\\n598–599), even if it is not as blatant a copy of\\nAristotle’s ideas as the works on categories ascribed to\\nArchytas, it is much more likely that it was forged on the basis of\\nAristotle than that Aristotle is using On Wisdom without\\nattribution. In order for the latter situation to be probable there\\nwould need to be fourth-century evidence independent of On\\nWisdom which ascribed the ideas found in it to Archytas. Horky\\n2015 includes On Wisdom among the pseudepigrapha and provides\\nanalysis of it. For recent discussions of the nature of the\\npseudepigrapha ascribed to Archytas see Bonazzi 2013 and Centrone\\n2014. For the nature of the appropriation of Aristotle in\\npseudepigrapha ascribed to Archytas and other early Pythagoreans see\\nUlacco 2016.\",\n \"\\nThere are also fragments of two pseudepigrapha on ethics and politics,\\nwhich have recent editions with commentary: On the Good and Happy\\nMan (Centrone 1990), which shows connections to Arius Didymus, an\\nauthor of the first century BC, and On Moral Education\\n(Centrone 1990), which has ties to Carneades (2nd c. BC). The status\\nof one final treatise is less clear. The fragments of On Law and\\nJustice (Thesleff 1965, 33.1–36.11) were studied in some\\ndetail by Delatte (1922), who showed that the treatise deals with the\\npolitical conceptions of the fourth century and who came to the modest\\nconclusion that the work might be by Archytas, since there were no\\npositive indications of late composition. Thesleff similarly concluded\\nthat the treatise “may be authentic or at least comparatively\\nold” (1961, 112), while Minar maintained that “it has an\\nexcellent claim to authenticity” (1942, 111). Its authenticity\\nwas supported by Johnson (2008, 194–198) but more recently Horky\\nand Johnson argue that it was not written by Archytas himself and\\npropose the somewhat Byzantine theory that it was written by an author\\nwho based it on a speech which they hypothesize that Aristoxenus\\nassigned to Archytas in his Life of Archytas (2020:\\n459–460). On the other hand, DK did not include the fragments of\\nOn Law and Justice among the genuine fragments, and most\\nrecent scholars have argued that the treatise is spurious. Aalders\\nprovides the most detailed treatment, although a number of his\\narguments are inconclusive (1968, 13–20). Other opponents of\\nauthenticity are Burkert (1972a), Moraux (1984, 670–677),\\nCentrone (2000) and most recently Schofield (2014). The connections of\\nOn Law and Justice to the genuine Fr. B2 of Archytas speak\\nfor its authenticity, but its similarities, sometimes word for word,\\nto pseudo-Pythagorean treatises by “Diotogenes” (Thesleff\\n76.2–3, 71. 21–2), “Damippos” (Thesleff 68.26)\\nand “Metopos” (Thesleff 119.28) argue for its\\nspuriousness. Moreover, the authentic Fr. 3 of Archytas shows that\\ncalculation (logismos) was the key concept in his political\\nphilosophy. Its total absence from On Law and Justice, whose\\nfocus is political philosophy, along with the absence of other key\\nterms in Fr. 3 (e.g., pleonexia, homonoia and\\nisotēs) is hard to explain, if On Law and\\nJustice is authentic (Huffman 2005, 599–606). For a recent\\nargument against the authenticity of On Law and Justice,\\nwhich further contrasts it with the authentic Fr. 3, see Schofield\\n2014: 82–5. Even if the work belongs among the pseudepigrapha\\nHorky and Johnson are surely right that the controversy about its\\nauthenticity has led scholars to neglect the philosophic content of\\nthe treatise (Horky and Johnson 2020: 487) and they provide a\\ncommentary that attempts to elucidate this difficult text. They regard\\nthe text as closely tied to genuine fragments of Archytas and suggest\\nthat it can help us understand those fragments, but the similarities\\nare of a very general sort. As Zhmud has recently argued there is very\\nlittle that is genuinely Pythagorean in the pseudepigrapha (Zhmud\\n2019) and that also appears to be true of On Law and Justice.\\n\",\n \"\\nSome testimonia suggest that there were even more pseudo-Archytan\\ntreatises, which have not survived even in fragments (Thesleff 47.8\\nff.). Two spurious letters of Archytas survive. One is the letter to\\nwhich the pseudo-Platonic Twelfth Letter is responding (D.L.\\nVIII 79–80), and the other is the purported letter of Archytas\\nto Dionysius II, which was sent along with the ship in order to secure\\nPlato’s release in 361 (D.L. III 21–2). Archytas was a\\npopular figure in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, when works\\ncontinued to be written in his name, usually with the spelling\\nArchitas or Archita. The Ars geometriae, which is ascribed to\\nBoethius, but was in reality composed in the 12th century\\n(Folkerts 1970, 105), ascribes discoveries in mathematics to Architas\\nwhich are clearly spurious (Burkert 1972a, 406). Several alchemical\\nrecipes involving the wax of the left ear of a dog and the heart of a\\nwolf are ascribed to Architas in ps.-Albertus Magnus, The Marvels\\nof the World (De mirabilibus mundi –\\n13th century AD). Numerous selections from a book entitled\\nOn Events in Nature (de eventibus in natura, also\\ncited as de effectibus in natura and as de eventibus\\nfuturorum) by Archita Tharentinus (or Tharentinus, or just\\nTharen) are preserved in the medieval texts known as The Light of\\nthe Soul (Lumen Animae), which were composed in the\\nfourteenth century and circulated widely in Europe in the fifteenth\\ncentury as a manual for preachers (Rouse 1971; Thorndike 1934, III\\n546–60). An apocryphal work, The Circular Theory of the\\nThings in the Heaven, by Archytas Maximus [!], which has never\\nbeen published in full, is preserved in Codex Ambrosianus D 27 sup.\\n(See Catalogus Codicum Astrologorum Graecorum, ed. F. Cumont\\net al., Vol. III, p. 11). \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.6 Pseudepigrapha Ascribed to Archytas\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nNo list of Archytas’ works has come down to us from antiquity,\\nso that we don’t know how many books he wrote. In the face of\\nthe large mass of spurious works, it is disappointing that only a few\\nfragments of genuine works have survived. Most scholars accept as\\ngenuine the four fragments printed by Diels and Kranz (B1–4).\\nBurkert (1972a, 220 n.14 and 379 n. 46) raised some concerns about the\\nauthenticity of even some of these fragments, but see the responses of\\nBowen (1982) and Huffman (1985 and 2005). Our evidence for the titles\\nof Archytas’ genuine writings depends largely on the citations\\ngiven by the authors who quote the fragments. Fragments B1 and B2 are\\nreported to come from a treatise entitled Harmonics, and the\\nmajor testimonia about Archytas’ harmonic theory are likely to\\nbe ultimately based on this book (A16–19). This treatise began\\nwith a discussion of the basic principles of acoustics (B1), defined\\nthe three types of mean which are of importance in music theory (B2),\\nand went on to present Archytas’ mathematical descriptions of\\nthe tetrachord (the fourth) in the three main genera (chromatic,\\ndiatonic, and enharmonic – A16-A19). B3 probably comes from a\\nwork On Sciences, which may have been a more general\\ndiscussion of the value of mathematics for human life in general and\\nfor the establishment of a just state in particular. New support for\\nits authenticity has been provided by Schofield (2009). B4 comes from\\na work entitled Discourses (Diatribai). The fragment\\nitself asserts the priority of the science of calculation (ha\\nlogistika, “logistic”) to the other sciences, such as\\ngeometry, and thus suggests a technical work of mathematics. The title\\nDiatribai would more normally suggest a treatise of ethical\\ncontent, however, so that in this work the sciences may have been\\nevaluated in terms of their contribution to the wisdom that leads to a\\ngood life.\",\n \"\\nA relatively rich set of testimonia, many from authors of the fourth\\ncentury BC, indicate that Archytas wrote other books as well.\\nArchytas’ famous argument for the unlimited extent of the\\nuniverse (A24), his theory of vision (A25), and his account of motion\\n(A23, A23a) all suggest that he may have written a work on cosmology.\\nAristotle’s comments in the Metaphysics suggest that\\nArchytas may have written a book on definition (A22), and A20 and A21\\nmight suggest a work on arithmetic. Perhaps there was a treatise on\\ngeometry or solid geometry in which Archytas’ solution to the\\nproblem of doubling the cube (A14–15) was published. There is\\nalso a tradition of anecdotes about Archytas, which probably\\nultimately derives from Aristoxenus’ Life of Archytas\\n(A7, A8, A9, A11). It is possible that even the testimonia for\\nArchytas’ argument for an unlimited universe and his theory of\\nvision were derived from anecdotes preserved by Aristoxenus, and not\\nat all from works of Archytas’ own.\",\n \"\\nIt is uncertain whether the treatises On Flutes (B6), On\\nMachines (B1 and B7), and On Agriculture (B1 and B8),\\nwhich were in circulation under the name of Archytas, were in fact by\\nArchytas of Tarentum or by other men of the same name. Diogenes\\nLaertius lists three other writers with the name Archytas (VIII 82).\\nThe treatise On the Decad mentioned by Theon (B5) might be by\\nArchytas, but the treatise by Philolaus with which it is paired is\\nspurious (Huffman 1993, 347–350), thus suggesting that the same\\nmay be true of the treatise under Archytas’ name.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.7 Genuine Works and Testimonia\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Archytas as Mathematician and Harmonic Theorist\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nArchytas was the first person to arrive at a solution to one of the\\nmost famous mathematical puzzles in antiquity, the duplication of the\\ncube. The most romantic version of the story, which occurs in many\\nvariations and ultimately goes back to Eratosthenes (3rd c. BC),\\nreports that the inhabitants of the Greek island of Delos were beset\\nby a plague and, when they consulted an oracle for advice, were told\\nthat, if they doubled the size of a certain altar, which had the form\\nof a cube, the plague would stop (Eutocius, in Archim. sphaer. et\\ncyl. II [III 88.3–96.27 Heiberg/Stamatis]). The\\nsimple-minded response to the oracle, which is actually assigned to\\nthe Delians in some versions, is to build a second altar identical to\\nthe first one and set it on top of the first (Philoponus, In Anal.\\npost., CAG XIII.3, 102.12–22). The resulting altar does\\nindeed have a volume twice that of the first altar, but it is no\\nlonger a cube. The next simple-minded response is to assume that,\\nsince we want an altar that is double in volume, while still remaining\\na cube, we should build the new altar with a side that is double the\\nlength of the side of the original altar. This approach fails as well.\\nDoubling the side of the altar produces a new altar that is not twice\\nthe volume of the original altar but eight times the volume. If the\\noriginal altar had a side of two, then its volume would be\\n23 or 8, while an altar built on a side twice as long will\\nhave a volume of 43 or 64. What then is the length of the\\nside which will produce a cube with twice the volume of the original\\ncube? The Delians were at a loss and presented their problem to Plato\\nin the Academy. Plato then posed the “Delian Problem,” as\\nit came to be known, to mathematicians associated with the Academy,\\nand no less than three solutions were devised, those of Eudoxus,\\nMenaechmus, and Archytas.\",\n \"\\nIt is not clear whether or not the story about the Delians has any\\nbasis in fact. Even if it does, it should not be understood to suggest\\nthat the problem of doubling the cube first arose in the fourth\\ncentury with the Delians. We are told that the mathematician,\\nHippocrates of Chios, who was active in the second half of the fifth\\ncentury, had already confronted the problem and had reduced it to a\\nslightly different problem (Eutocius, in Archim. sphaer. et\\ncyl. II [III 88.3–96.27 Heiberg/Stamatis]). Hippocrates\\nrecognized that if we could find two mean proportionals between the\\nlength of the side of the original cube G, and length D, where D = 2G,\\nso that G : x :: x : y :: y : D, then the cube on length x will be\\ndouble the cube on length G. Exactly how Hippocrates came to see this\\nis conjectural and need not concern us here, but that he was right can\\nbe seen relatively easily. Each of the values in the continued\\nproportion G : x :: x : y :: y : D is equal to G : x, so we can set\\nthem all equal to G : x. If we do this and multiply the three ratios\\ntogether we get the value G3 : x3. On the other\\nhand, if we take the same continued proportion and carry out the\\nmultiplication in the original terms, then G : x times x : y yields G\\n: y, and G : y times the remaining term gives G : D. Thus G : D =\\nG3 : x3, but D is twice G so x3 is\\ntwice G3. Remember that G was the length of the side of the\\noriginal cube, so the cube that is twice the cube built on G, will be\\nthe cube built on x. The Greeks did not think of the problem as a\\nproblem in algebra but rather as a problem in geometry. After\\nHippocrates the problem of doubling the cube was always seen as the\\nproblem of finding two lines such that they were mean proportionals\\nbetween G, the length of the side of the original cube, and D, a\\nlength which is double G. It was to this form of the problem that\\nArchytas provided the first solution.\",\n \"\\nArchytas’ solution has been rightly hailed as “the most\\nremarkable of all [the solutions]” and as a “bold\\nconstruction in three dimensions” (Heath 1921, 246); Mueller\\ncalls it “a tour de force of the spatial\\nimagination” (1997, 312 n. 23). We owe the preservation of\\nArchytas’ solution to Eutocius, who in the sixth century AD\\ncollected some eleven solutions to the problem as part of his\\ncommentary on the second book of Archimedes’ On the Sphere\\nand Cylinder. Eutocius’ source for Archytas’ solution\\nwas ultimately Aristotle’s pupil Eudemus, who in the late fourth\\ncentury BC wrote a history of geometry. The solution is complex and it\\nis not possible to go through it step by step here (see Huffman 2005,\\n342–401 for a detailed treatment of the solution). Archytas\\nproceeds by constructing a series of four similar triangles (see\\nFigure 1 below) and then showing that the sides are proportional so\\nthat AM : AI :: AI : AK :: AK : AD, where AM was equal to the side of\\nthe original cube (G) and AD was twice AM. Thus the cube double the\\nvolume of the cube on AM should be built on AI. The real difficulty\\nwas in constructing the four similar triangles, where the given length\\nof the side of the original cube and a length double that magnitude\\nwere two of the sides in the similar triangles. The key point for the\\nconstruction of these triangles, point K, was determined as the\\nintersection of two rotating plane figures. The first figure is a\\nsemicircle, which is perpendicular to the plane of the circle ABDZ and\\nwhich starts on the diameter AED and, with point A remaining fixed,\\nrotates to position AKD. The second is the triangle APD, which rotates\\nup out of the plane of the circle ABDZ to position ALD. As each of\\nthese figures rotates, it traces a line on the surface of a\\nsemicylinder, which is perpendicular to the plane of ABDZ and has ABD\\nas its base. The boldness and the imagination of the construction lies\\nin envisioning the intersection at point K of the line drawn by the\\nrotating semicircle on the surface of the semicylinder with the line\\ndrawn by the rotating triangle on the same surface. We simply\\ndon’t know what led Archytas to produce this amazing feat of\\nspatial imagination, in order to construct the triangles with the\\nsides in appropriate proportion. For a recent attempt to situate\\nArchytas’ solution in the mathematics of his time and make it\\nless “miraculous,” see Menn 2015. \",\n \"\\n\\n\\n\\n\\nFigure 1\\n\",\n \"\\nIn the later tradition, Plato is reported to have criticized\\nArchytas’ solution for appealing to “constructions that\\nuse instruments and that are mechanical” (Plutarch, Table\\nTalk VIII 2.1 [718e]; Marc. XIV 5–6). Plato argued\\nthat the value of geometry and of the rest of mathematics resided in\\ntheir ability to turn the soul from the sensible to intelligible\\nrealm. The cube with which geometry deals is not a physical cube or\\neven a drawing of a cube but rather an intelligible cube that fits the\\ndefinition of the cube but is not a sense object. By employing\\nphysical instruments, which “required much common\\nhandicraft,” and in effect constructing machines to determine\\nthe two mean proportionals, Archytas was focusing not on the\\nintelligible world but on the physical world and hence destroying the\\nvalue of geometry. Plato’s quarrel with Archytas is a charming\\nstory, but it is hard to reconcile with Archytas’ actual\\nsolution, which, as we have seen, makes no appeal to any instruments\\nor machines. The story of the quarrel, which is first reported in\\nPlutarch in the first century AD, is also hard to reconcile with our\\nearliest source for the story of the Delian problem, Eratosthenes.\\nEratosthenes had himself invented an instrument to determine mean\\nproportionals, the mesolab (“mean-getter”), and\\nhe tells the story of the Delian problem precisely to emphasize that\\nearlier solutions, including that of Archytas, were in the form of\\ngeometrical demonstrations, which could not be employed for practical\\npurposes. He specifically labels Archytas’ solution as\\ndysmêchana, “hardly mechanical.” Some\\nscholars attempt to reconcile Plutarch’s and Eratosthenes’\\nversions by focusing on their different literary goals (Knorr 1986,\\n22; van der Waerden 1963, 161; Wolfer 1954, 12 ff.; Sachs 1917, 150);\\nsome suggest that the rotation of the semicircle and the triangle in\\nArchytas’ solution, might be regarded as mechanical, since\\nmotion is involved (Knorr 1986, 22). It may be, however, that\\nPlutarch’s story of a quarrel between Plato and Archytas over\\nthe use of mechanical devices in geometry is an invention of the later\\ntradition (Riginos 1976, 146; Zhmud 1998, 217) and perhaps served as a\\nsort of foundation myth for the science of mechanics, a myth which\\nexplained the separation of mechanics from philosophy as the result of\\na quarrel between two philosophers. In the Republic, Plato is\\ncritical of the solid geometry of his day, but his criticism makes no\\nmention of the use of instruments. His criticism instead focuses on\\nthe failure of solid geometry to be developed into a coherent\\ndiscipline alongside geometry and astronomy (528b-d). This neglect of\\nsolid geometry is ascribed to the failure of the Greek city-states to\\nhold these difficult studies in honor, the lack of a director to\\norganize the studies, and the arrogance of the current experts in the\\nfield, who would not submit to such a director. Since Archytas’\\nduplication of the cube shows him to be one of the leading solid\\ngeometers of the time, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Plato\\nregarded him as one of the arrogant experts, who focused on solving\\ncharming problems but failed to produce a coherent discipline of solid\\ngeometry. Since Archytas was a leading political figure in Tarentum,\\nit is also possible that Plato was criticizing him for not making\\nTarentum a state which held solid geometry in esteem. \",\n \"\\nBrisson (2013) takes a sceptical stance towards the evidence and\\nconcludes that Archytas never solved the problem of the duplication of\\nthe cube. He argues that Plato would have mentioned a solution to the\\nproblem if one existed in his day and that the mathematics of the\\nsolution ascribed to Archytas is impossible for someone of his time,\\nsince it employs conic sections, which were not developed until the\\nthird century (2013: 220–1). However, while Plato does criticize\\nthe state of stereometry (solid geometry) in his day, he also affirms\\nthat there are people studying it and that some of their results have\\ncharm and beauty (Rep. 528c-d). There is no reason that\\nArchytas’ duplication could not be included among these results.\\nMoreover, the mathematics used in Archytas’ solution in no way\\nrelies on conic sections but relies on mathematics found in\\nEuclid’s Elements Books 1, 3, 4, 6, and 11, which rely\\non geometry of the fourth century when Archytas was active (Heath\\n1921, Knorr 1986, Mueller 1997 and Menn 2015 all regard the\\nmathematics as appropriate for Archytas). Menaechmus, who lived two\\ngenerations after Archytas, is the first person to solve the problem\\nusing conic sections (see Menn 2015: 415–6). Brisson has to\\ndiscount the explicit tradition that already in the fourth century\\nEudemus knew of Archytas’ solution and assume that the solution\\nwas developed by a compiler in the latter tradition, but it is\\nimplausible that such a compiler could have developed the\\nsophisticated mathematics of the solution and that, if he were such an\\naccomplished mathematician, he would ascribe it to Archytas.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.1 Doubling the Cube\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nOne of the most startling discoveries of early Greek science was that\\nthe fundamental intervals of music, the octave, the fourth, and the\\nfifth, corresponded to whole number ratios of string length. Thus, if\\nwe pluck a string of length x and then a string of length\\n2x, we will hear the interval of an octave between the two\\nsounds. If the two string lengths are in the ratio 4 : 3, we will hear\\na fourth, and, if the ratio is 3 : 2, we will hear a fifth. This\\ndiscovery that the phenomena of musical sound are governed by whole\\nnumber ratios must have played a central role in the Pythagorean\\nconception, first expressed by Philolaus, that all things are known\\nthrough number (DK 44 B4). The next step in harmonic theory was to\\ndescribe an entire octave length scale in terms of mathematical\\nratios. The earliest such description of a scale is found in Philolaus\\nfr. B6. Philolaus recognizes that, if we go up the interval of a\\nfourth from any given note, and then up the interval of a fifth, the\\nfinal note will be an octave above the first note. Thus, the octave is\\nmade up of a fourth and a fifth. In mathematical terms, the ratios\\nthat govern the fifth (3 : 2) and fourth (4 : 3) are added by\\nmultiplying the terms and thus produce an octave (3 : 2 × 4 : 3\\n= 12 : 6 = 2 : 1). The interval between the note that is a fourth up\\nfrom the starting note and the note that is a fifth up was regarded as\\nthe basic unit of the scale, the whole tone, which corresponded to the\\nratio of 9 : 8 (subtraction of ratios is carried out by dividing the\\nterms, or cross multiplying: 3 : 2 / 4 : 3 = 9 : 8). The fifth was\\nthus regarded as a fourth plus a whole tone, and the octave can be\\nregarded as two fourths plus a whole tone. The fourth consists of two\\nwhole tones with a remainder, which has the unlovely ratio of 256 :\\n243 (4 : 3 / 9 : 8 = 32 : 27 / 9 : 8 = 256 : 243). Philolaus’\\nscale thus consisted of the following intervals: 9 : 8, 9 : 8, 256 :\\n243 [these three intervals take us up a fourth], 9 : 8, 9 : 8, 9 : 8,\\n256 : 243 [these four intervals make up a fifth and complete the\\noctave from our staring note]. This scale is known as the Pythagorean\\ndiatonic and is the scale that Plato adopted in the construction of\\nthe world soul in the Timaeus (36a-b).\",\n \"\\nArchytas took harmonic theory to a whole new level of theoretical and\\nmathematical sophistication. Ptolemy, writing in the second century\\nAD, identifies Archytas as having “engaged in the study of music\\nmost of all the Pythagoreans” (A16). First, Archytas provided a\\ngeneral explanation of pitch, arguing that the pitch of a sound\\ndepends on the speed with which the sound is propagated and travels\\n(B1). Thus, if a stick is waved back and forth rapidly, it will\\nproduce a sound that travels rapidly through the air, which will be\\nperceived as of a higher pitch than the sound produced by a stick\\nwaved more slowly. Archytas is correct to associate pitch with speed,\\nbut he misunderstood the role of speed. The pitch does not depend on\\nthe speed with which a sound reaches us but rather on the frequency of\\nimpacts in a given period of time. A string that vibrates more rapidly\\nproduces a sound of a higher pitch, but all sounds, regardless of\\npitch, travel at an equal velocity, if the medium is the same.\\nAlthough Archytas’ account of pitch was ultimately incorrect, it\\nwas very influential. It was taken over and adapted by both Plato and\\nAristotle and remained the dominant theory throughout antiquity\\n(Barker 1989, 41 n. 47; Barker 2014: 187). Second, Archytas introduced\\nnew mathematical rigor into Pythagorean harmonics. One of the\\nimportant results of the analysis of music in terms of whole number\\nratios is the recognition that it is not possible to divide the basic\\nmusical intervals in half. The octave is not divided into two equal\\nhalves but into a fourth and a fifth, the fourth is not divided into\\ntwo equal halves but into two whole tones and a remainder. The whole\\ntone cannot be divided into two equal half tones. On the other hand,\\nit is possible to divide a double octave in half. Mathematically this\\ncan be seen by recognizing that it is possible to insert a mean\\nproportional between the terms of the ratio corresponding to the\\ndouble octave (4 : 1) so that 4 : 2 :: 2 : 1. The double octave can\\nthus be divided into two equal parts each having a ratio of 2 : 1. The\\nratios which govern the basic musical intervals (2 : 1, 4 : 3, 3 : 2,\\n9 : 8), all belong to a type of ratio known as a superparticular ratio\\n– roughly speaking, ratios of the form (n + 1) :\\nn. Archytas made a crucial contribution by providing a rigorous\\nproof that there is no mean proportional between numbers in\\nsuperparticular ratio (A19) and hence that the basic musical intervals\\ncannot be divided in half. Archytas’ proof was later taken over\\nand modified slightly in the Sectio Canonis ascribed to\\nEuclid (Prop. 3; see Barker 1989, 195). On Archytas’ proof see\\nHuffman 2005: 451–70 and Barker 2007: 303–5.\",\n \"\\nArchytas’ final contribution to music theory has to do with the\\nstructure of the scale (for a more detailed account than what follows\\nsee Huffman 2005: 402–25 and Barker 2007: 292–302). The\\nGreeks used a number of different scales, which were distinguished by\\nthe way in which the fourth, or tetrachord, was constructed. These\\nscales were grouped into three main types or genera. One genus was\\ncalled the diatonic; one example of this is the Pythagorean diatonic\\ndescribed above, which is built on the tetrachord with the intervals 9\\n: 8, 9 : 8 and 256 : 243 and was used by Philolaus and Plato. There is\\nno doubt that Archytas knew of this diatonic scale, but his own\\ndiatonic tetrachord was somewhat different, being composed of the\\nintervals 9 : 8, 8 : 7 and 28 : 27. Archytas also defined scales in\\nthe two other major genera, the enharmonic and chromatic.\\nArchytas’ enharmonic tetrachord is composed of the intervals 5 :\\n4, 36 : 35 and 28 : 27 and his chromatic tetrachord of the intervals\\n32 : 27, 243 : 224, and 28 : 27. There are several puzzles about the\\ntetrachords which Archytas adopts in each of the genera. First, why\\ndoes Archytas reject the Pythagorean diatonic used by Philolaus and\\nPlato? Second, Ptolemy, who is our major source for Archytas’\\ntetrachords (A16), argues that Archytas adopted as a principle that\\nall concordant intervals should correspond to superparticular ratios.\\nThe ratios in Archytas’ diatonic and enharmonic tetrachords are\\nindeed superparticular, but two of the ratios in his chromatic\\ntetrachord are not superparticular (32 : 27 and 243 : 224). Why are\\nthese ratios not superparticular as well? Finally, Plato criticizes\\nPythagorean harmonics in the Republic for seeking numbers in\\nheard harmonies rather than ascending to generalized problems (531c).\\nCan any sense be made of this criticism in light of Archytas’\\ntetrachords? The basis for an answer to all of these questions is\\ncontained in the work of Winnington-Ingram (1932) and Barker (1989,\\n46-52). The crucial point is that Archytas’ account of the\\ntetrachords in each of the three genera can be shown to correspond to\\nthe musical practice of his day; Ptolemy’s criticisms miss the\\nmark because of his ignorance of musical practice in Archytas’\\nday, some 500 years before Ptolemy (Winnington-Ingram 1932, 207).\\nArchytas is giving mathematical descriptions of scales actually in\\nuse; although mathematical considerations did play a role (Barker\\n2007: 295–302), he arrived at his numbers in part by observation\\nof the way in which musicians tuned their instruments (Barker 1989,\\n50–51). He did not follow the Pythagorean diatonic scale because\\nit did not correspond to any scale actually in use, although it does\\ncorrespond to a method of tuning. The unusual numbers in\\nArchytas’ chromatic tetrachord do correspond to a chromatic\\nscale in use in Archytas’ day. Ptolemy was wrong to suggest that\\nArchytas adhered to the principle that all concordant intervals should\\nhave superparticular ratios (Huffman 2005: 422–3), although\\nBarker suggests that he may have been following a different but\\nrelated principle (2007: 301). Archytas thus provides a brilliant\\nanalysis of the music of his day, but it is precisely his focus on\\nactual musical practice that draws Plato’s ire. Plato does not\\nwant him to focus on the music he hears about him (“heard\\nharmonies”) but rather to ascend to consider quite abstract\\nquestions about which numbers are harmonious with which. Plato might\\nwell have welcomed a principle of concordance based solely on\\nmathematical considerations, such as the principle that only\\nsuperparticular ratios are concordant, but Archytas wanted to explain\\nthe numbers of the music he actually heard played. There is an\\nimportant metaphysical issue at stake here. Plato is calling for the\\nstudy of number in itself, apart from the sensible world, while\\nArchytas, like Pythagoreans before him, envisages no split between a\\nsensible and an intelligible world and is looking for the numbers\\nwhich govern sensible things. For discussions of Archytas as the\\ntarget of Plato’s complaints in the Republic see\\nHuffman 2005: 423–5 and Barker 2014:192–3.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.2 Music and Mathematics\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThere have been tendencies both to overvalue and to undervalue\\nArchytas’ achievement as a mathematician. Van der Waerden went\\nso far as to add to Archytas’ accomplishments both Book VIII of\\nEuclid’s Elements and the treatise on the mathematics\\nof music known as the Sectio Canonis, which is ascribed to\\nEuclid in the ancient tradition (1962, 152–5). Although later\\nscholars (e.g., Knorr 1975: 244) repeat these assertions, they are\\nbased in part on a very subjective analysis of Archytas’ style.\\nArchytas influenced the Sectio Canonis, since Proposition 3\\nis based on a proof by Archytas (A19), but the treatise cannot be by\\nArchytas, because its theory of pitch and its account of the diatonic\\nand enharmonic tetrachords differ from those of Archytas. On the other\\nhand, some scholars have cast doubt on Archytas’ prowess as a\\nmathematician, arguing that some of his work looks like “mere\\narithmology” and “mathematical mystification”\\n(Burkert 1972a, 386; Mueller 1997, 289). This judgment rests largely\\non a text (A17) that has been mistakenly interpreted as presenting\\nArchytas’ own views, whereas, in fact, it presents\\nArchytas’ report of his predecessors (Huffman 2005:\\n428–37; Barker 2007: 193–5). The duplication of the cube\\nand Archytas’ contributions to the mathematics of music (Barker\\n2007: 287 calls him “a heroic figure in the early history of\\nmathematical harmonics”) show that there can be no doubt that he\\nwas one of the leading mathematicians of the first part of the fourth\\ncentury BC. This was certainly the judgment of antiquity. In his\\nhistory of geometry, Eudemus identified Archytas along with Leodamas\\nand Theaetetus as the three most prominent mathematicians of\\nPlato’s generation (A6 = Proclus, in Eucl., prol. II\\n66, 14). Netz (2014) has recently argued that there were two networks\\nthat accounted for most of the progress in ancient Greek mathematics.\\nThe later used Archimedes as the paradigmatic figure, while the\\nearlier used Archytas. Netz suggests that we should apply Bertrand\\nRussell’s description of Pythagoras as “one of the most\\nimportant men that ever lived” to Archytas instead both because\\nof his mathematical genius and also because of his pivotal position in\\nthree different groups: (1) South Italian Pythagoreans, (2) Greek\\nmathematicians, and (3) philosophers whose work was in dialogue with\\nPlato (2014: 181–2). \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.3 Evaluation of Archytas as Mathematician\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Archytas on the Sciences\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nArchytas B1 is the beginning of his book on harmonics, and most of it\\nis devoted to the basic principles of his theory of acoustics and, in\\nparticular, to his theory of pitch described in section 2.2 above. In\\nthe first five lines, however, Archytas provides a proem on the value\\nof the sciences (mathêmata) in general. There are\\nseveral important features of this proem. First, Archytas identifies a\\nset of four sciences: astronomy, geometry, “logistic”\\n(arithmetic) and music. B1 is thus probably the earliest text to\\nidentify the set of sciences that became known as the\\nquadrivium in the middle ages and that constitute four of the\\nseven liberal arts. Second, Archytas does not present this\\nclassification of sciences as his own discovery but instead begins\\nwith praise of his predecessors who have worked in these fields. Some\\nscholars argue that, when he praises “those concerned with the\\nsciences,” he is thinking only of the Pythagoreans (e.g., Zhmud\\n1997, 198 and Lasserre 1954, 36), but this is wrongly to assume that\\nall early Greek mathematics is Pythagorean. Archytas gives no hint\\nthat he is limiting his remarks to Pythagoreans, and, in areas where\\nwe can identify those who influenced him most, these figures are not\\nlimited to Pythagoreans (e.g., Hippocrates of Chios in geometry, see\\nsection 2.1). He praises his predecessors in the sciences, because,\\n“having discerned well about the nature of wholes, they were\\nlikely also to see well how things are in their parts” and to\\n“have correct understanding about individual things as they\\nare.” It is here that Archytas is putting forth his own\\nunderstanding of the nature and value of the sciences; because of the\\nbrevity of the passage, much remains unclear. Archytas appears to be\\npraising those concerned with the sciences for their discernment,\\ntheir ability to make distinctions (diagignôskein). He\\nargues that they begin by distinguishing the nature of wholes, the\\nuniversal concepts of a science, and, because they do this well, they\\nare able to understand particular objects (the parts). Archytas\\nappears to follow exactly this procedure in his Harmonics. He\\nbegins by defining the most universal concept of the science, sound,\\nand explains it in terms of other concepts such as impact, before\\ngoing on to distinguish between audible and inaudible sounds and\\nsounds of high and low pitch. The goal of the science is not the\\nmaking of these distinctions concerning universal concepts, however,\\nbut knowledge of the true nature of individual things. Thus,\\nArchytas’ harmonics ends with the mathematical description of\\nthe musical intervals that we hear practicing musicians use (see\\nsection 2.2 above). Astronomy will end with a mathematical description\\nof the periods, risings and settings of the planets. One way to\\nunderstand Archytas’ project is to see him as working out the\\nprogram suggested by his predecessor in the Pythagorean tradition,\\nPhilolaus. One of Philolaus’ central theses was that we only\\ngain knowledge of things insofar as we can give an account of them in\\nterms of numbers (DK 44 B4). While Philolaus only took the first steps\\nin this project, Archytas is much more successful in giving an account\\nof individual things in the phenomenal world in terms of numbers, as\\nhis description of the musical intervals shows.\",\n \"\\nPlato’s account of the sciences in Book VII of the\\nRepublic can be seen as a response to Archytas’ view of\\nthe sciences. First Plato identifies a group of five rather than four\\nsciences and decries the neglect of his proposed fifth science,\\nstereometry (solid geometry), with a probable allusion to Archytas\\n(see section 2.1). Plato quotes with approval Archytas’\\nassertion that “these sciences seem to be akin” (B1),\\nalthough he applies it just to harmonics and astronomy rather than to\\nArchytas’ quadrivium and does not mention him by name.\\nIn the same passage, however, Plato pointedly rejects the Pythagorean\\nattempt to search for numbers in “heard harmonies.” In\\ndoing so Plato is disagreeing with Archytas’ attempt to\\ndetermine the numbers that govern things in the sensible world. For\\nPlato, the value of the sciences is their ability to turn the eye of\\nthe soul from the sensible to the intelligible realm. Book VII of the\\nRepublic with its elaborate argument for the distinction\\nbetween the intelligible and sensible realm, between the cave and the\\nintelligible world outside the cave, may be in large part directed at\\nArchytas’ attempt to use mathematics to explain the sensible\\nworld. As Aristotle repeatedly emphasizes, the Pythagoreans differed\\nfrom Plato precisely in their refusal to separate numbers from things\\n(e.g., Metaph. 987b27).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.1 The Value of the Sciences\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIn B4, Archytas asserts that “logistic seems to be far superior\\nindeed to the other arts in regard to wisdom.” What does\\nArchytas mean by “logistic”? It appears to be\\nArchytas’ term for the science of number, which was mentioned as\\none of the four sister sciences in B1. There is simply not enough\\ncontext in B4 or other texts of Archytas to determine the meaning of\\nlogistic from Archytas’ usage alone. It is necessary to rely to\\nsome extent on Plato, who is the only other early figure to use the\\nterm extensively. A later conception of logistic, as something that\\ndeals with numbered things rather than numbers themselves, which is\\nfound in, e.g., Geminus, should not be ascribed to Plato or Archytas\\n(Klein 1968; Burkert 1972a, 447 n. 119). In Plato,\\n“logistic” can refer to everyday calculation, what we\\nwould call arithmetic (e.g. 3 × 700 = 2,100; see, Hp.\\nMi. 366c). In other passages, however, Plato defines logistic in\\nparallel with arithmêtikê, and treats the two of\\nthem as together constituting the science of number, on which\\npractical manipulation of number is based (Klein 1968, 23–24).\\nBoth arithmêtikê and logistic deal with the even\\nand the odd. Arithmêtikê focuses not on\\nquantities but on kinds of numbers (Grg. 451b), beginning\\nwith the even and the odd and presumably continuing with the types we\\nfind later in Nicomachus (Ar. 1.8 – 1.13), such as\\nprime, composite and even-times even. Logistic, on the other hand,\\nfocuses on quantity, the “amount the odd and even have both in\\nthemselves and in respect to one another” (Grg. 451c).\\nAn example of one part of logistic might be the study of various sorts\\nof means and proportions, which focus on the quantitative relations of\\nnumbers to one another (e.g., Nicomachus, Ar. II. 21 ff.). In\\nB2, Archytas would probably consider himself to be doing logistic,\\nwhen he defines the three types of means which are relevant to music\\n(geometric, arithmetic, and harmonic). The geometric mean arises\\nwhenever three terms are so related that, as the first is to the\\nsecond, so the second is to the third (e.g., 8 : 4 :: 4 : 2) and the\\narithmetic, when three terms are so related that the first exceeds the\\nsecond by the same amount as the second exceeds the third (e.g., 6 : 4\\n:: 4 : 2). Archytas, like Plato (R. 525c), uses logistic not\\njust in this narrow sense of the study of relative quantity, but also\\nto designate the entire science of numbers including\\narithmêtikê.\",\n \"\\nWhy does Archytas think that logistic is superior to the other\\nsciences? In B4, he particularly compares it to geometry, arguing that\\nlogistic (1) “deals with what it wishes more vividly than\\ngeometry” and (2) “completes demonstrations” where\\ngeometry cannot, even “if there is any investigation concerning\\nshapes.” This last remark is surprising, since the study of\\nshapes would appear to be the proper domain of geometry. The most\\ncommon way of explaining Archytas’ remark is to suppose that he\\nis arguing that logistic is mathematically superior to geometry, in\\nthat certain proofs can only be completed by an appeal to logistic.\\nBurkert sees this as a reason for doubting the authenticity of the\\nfragment, since the exact opposite seems to be true. Archytas could\\ndetermine the cube root of two geometrically, through his solution to\\nthe duplication of the cube, but could not do so arithmetically, since\\nthe cube root of two is an irrational number (1972a, 220 n. 14). Other\\nscholars have pointed out, however, that certain proofs in geometry do\\nrequire an appeal to logistic (Knorr 1975, 311; Mueller 1992b, 90 n.\\n12), e.g., logistic is required to recognize the incomensurability of\\nthe diagonal with the side of the square, since incommensurability\\narises when two magnitudes “have not to one another the ratio\\nwhich number has to number” (Euclid X 7). These\\nsuggestions show that logistic can be superior to geometry in certain\\ncases, but they do not explain Archytas’ more general assertion\\nthat logistic deals with whatever problems it wants more clearly than\\ngeometry.\",\n \"\\nHowever, it may be that B4 is not in fact comparing logistic to the\\nother sciences as sciences – in terms of their relative success\\nin providing demonstrations. The title of the work from which B4 is\\nsaid to come, Discourses (Diatribai), is most\\ncommonly used of ethical treatises. Moreover, it is specifically with\\nregard to wisdom (sophia) that logistic is said to be\\nsuperior, and, while sophia can refer to technical expertise,\\nit more commonly refers to the highest sort of intellectual\\nexcellence, often the excellence that allows us to live a good life\\n(Arist., EN 1141a12; Pl., R. 428d ff.). Is there any\\nsense in which logistic makes us wiser than the other sciences? Since\\nArchytas evidently agreed with Philolaus that we only understand\\nindividual things in the world insofar as we grasp the numbers that\\ngovern them, it seems quite plausible that Archytas would regard\\nlogistic as the science that makes us wise about the world. It is in\\nthis sense that logistic will always be superior to geometry, even\\nwhen dealing with shapes. Perhaps the most famous statue of the\\nclassical period is the Doryphoros by the Argive sculptor Polyclitus,\\nwhich he also referred to as the Canon (i.e., the standard). Although\\nPolyclitus undoubtedly made use of geometry in constructing this\\nmagnificent shape, in a famous sentence from his book, also entitled\\nCanon, he asserts that his statue came to be not through many\\nshapes but “through many numbers” (DK40 B2, see\\nHuffman 2002a). Geometrical relations alone will not determine the\\nform of a given object, we have to assign specific proportions,\\nspecific numbers. Archytas also thought that numbers and logistic were\\nthe basis of the just state and hence the good life. In B3 he argues\\nthat it is rational calculation (logismos) that produces the\\nfairness on which the state depends. Justice is a relation that needs\\nto be stated numerically and it is through such a statement that rich\\nand poor can live together, each seeing that he has what is fair.\\nLogistic will always be superior to the other sciences, because those\\nsciences will in the end rely on numbers to give us knowledge of the\\nsounds we hear, the shapes we see and the movements of the heavenly\\nbodies which we observe.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.2 Logistic as the Master Science\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAristotle is the first Greek author to mention the sciences of optics\\nand mechanics, describing optics as a subordinate science to geometry\\nand mechanics as a subordinate science to solid geometry\\n(APo. 78b34). Archytas does not mention either of these\\nsciences in B1, when describing the work of his predecessors in the\\nsciences, nor does Plato mention them. This silence suggests that the\\ntwo disciplines may have first developed in the first half of the\\nfourth century, when Archytas was most active, and it is possible that\\nhe played an important role in the development of both of them. In a\\nrecently identified fragment from his book on the Pythagoreans\\n(Iamblichus, Comm. Math. XXV; see Burkert 1972a, 50 n. 112),\\nAristotle assigns a hitherto unrecognized importance to optics in\\nPythagoreanism. Just as the Pythagoreans were impressed with the fact\\nthat musical intervals were based on whole number ratios, so they were\\nimpressed that the phenomena of optics could be explained in terms of\\ngeometrical diagrams. In addition to being an accomplished\\nmathematician, Archytas had a theory of vision and evidently tried to\\nexplain some of the phenomena involved in mirrors. In contrast to\\nPlato, who argued that the visual ray, which proceeded from the eye,\\nrequires the support of and coalesces with external light, Archytas\\nexplained vision in terms of the visual ray alone (A25). It is\\ntempting, then, to suppose that Archytas played a major role in the\\ndevelopment of the mathematically based Pythagorean optics, to which\\nAristotle refers. On the other hand, when Aristotle refers to\\nPythagoreans, he generally means Pythagoreans of the fifth century.\\nElsewhere he treats Archytas independently of the Pythagorean\\ntradition, writing works on Archytas which were distinct from his work\\non the Pythagoreans. It would thus be more natural to read\\nAristotle’s reference to Pythagorean optics as alluding to\\nfifth-century Pythagoreans such as Philolaus. Archytas will then have\\nbeen responsible for developing an already existing Pythagorean\\noptical tradition into a science, rather than founding such a\\ntradition.\",\n \"\\nDiogenes Laertius reports that Archytas was “the first to\\nsystematize mechanics by using mathematical first principles”\\n(VIII 83 = A1), and Archytas is accordingly sometimes hailed by modern\\nscholars as the founder of the science of mechanics. There is a\\npuzzle, however, since, no ancient Greek author in the later\\nmechanical tradition (e.g., Heron, Pappus, Archimedes, Philon) ever\\nascribes any work in the field to Archytas. What did the ancients mean\\nby mechanics? A rough definition would be “the description and\\nexplanation of the operation of machines” (Knorr 1996). The\\nearliest treatise in mechanics, the Mechanical Problems\\nascribed to Aristotle, begins with problems having to do with a simple\\nmachine, the lever. Pappus (AD 320) refers to machines used to lift\\ngreat weights, machines of war such as the catapult, water lifting\\nmachines, amazing devices (automata), and machines that served as\\nmodels of the heavens (1024.12 – 1025.4, on Pappus, see Cuomo\\n2000). Pappus emphasizes, however, that, in addition to this practical\\npart of mechanics, there is a theoretical part that is heavily\\nmathematical (1022. 13–15). Given his interest in describing\\nphysical phenomena in mathematical terms, it might seem logical that\\nArchytas would make important contributions to mechanics. The actual\\nevidence is less conclusive. A great part of the tendency to assign\\nArchytas a role in the development of mechanics can be traced to\\nPlutarch’s story about the quarrel between Plato and Archytas\\nover Archytas’ supposed mechanical solution to the problem of\\ndoubling the cube. This story is likely to be false (see 2.1 above).\\nSome scholars have argued that Archytas devised machines of war (Diels\\n1965; Cambiano 1998), as Archimedes did later, but this conclusion is\\nbased on questionable inferences and no ancient source ascribes such\\nmachines to Archytas. The only mechanical device that can with some\\nprobability be assigned to Archytas, apart from the children’s\\ntoy known as a “clapper” (A10), is an automaton in the\\nform of a wooden dove, which was connected to a pulley and\\ncounterweight and “flew” up from a lower perch to a higher\\none, when set in motion by a puff of air (A10a). Kingsley is deeply\\ncritical of scholars who see these inventions as toys and suggests\\nconnections to earlier Chinese inventors who produced a wooden bird\\nthat could fly for military purposes (2014: 155–9). Others have\\nsuggested that, since ancient siege devices were called by the names\\nof animals (e.g., “tortoise” and “crow”),\\nArchytas’ “dove” might have been an early catapult\\nof his devising, or a projectile hurled by such a catapult, which was\\nlater misunderstood to be a mechanical dove (Berryman 2003: 355; 2009:\\n78). However, no ancient source explains the dove in this way. A\\ncomplicating factor here is that Diogenes Laertius reports (A1) that\\nthere was a book on mechanics in circulation, which some thought to be\\nby a different Archytas, so that it is possible that the flying dove\\nis, in fact, the work of a separate Archytas. Archytas’ solution\\nto the duplication of the cube, although it was not mechanical itself,\\nwas of enormous importance for mechanics, since the solution to the\\nproblem allows one not just to double a cube but also to construct\\nbodies that are larger or smaller than a given body in any given\\nratio. Thus, the solution permits the construction of a full-scale\\nmachine on the basis of a working model. Pappus cites the solution to\\nthe duplication of the cube as one of the three most crucial\\ngeometrical theorems for practical mechanics (Math. Coll.\\n1028. 18–21). It may then be that Archytas’ primary\\ncontribution to mechanics was precisely his solution to the\\nduplication of the cube and that it is this solution which constituted\\nthe mathematical first principles which Archytas provided for\\nmechanics. For a recent discussion of these issues seen Berryman 2009:\\n87–97. It is more doubtful that Archytas wrote a treatise on\\nmechanics. Schofield has recently argued that the evidence for\\nArchytas’ work both in optics and in mechanics is so meagre that\\nwe should “be skeptical about Archytas’ alleged\\nrole” (2014: 86).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.3 Optics and Mechanics\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nIn the Metaphysics, Aristotle praises Archytas for having\\noffered definitions which took account of both form and matter\\n(1043a14–26 = A22). The examples given are\\n“windlessness” (nênemia), which is defined\\nas “stillness [the form] in a quantity of air [the\\nmatter],” and “calm-on-the-ocean”\\n(galênê), which is defined as “levelness\\n[the form] of sea [the matter].” The terms form and matter are\\nAristotle’s, and we cannot be sure how Archytas conceptualized\\nthe two parts of his definitions. A plausible suggestion is that he\\nfollowed his predecessor Philolaus in adopting limiters and unlimiteds\\nas his basic metaphysical principles and that he saw his definitions\\nas combinations of limiters, such as levelness and stillness, with\\nunlimiteds, such as air and sea. The oddity of\\n“windlessness” and “calm-on-the-sea” as\\nexamples suggests that they were not the by-products of some other\\nsort of investigation, e.g. cosmology, but were chosen precisely to\\nillustrate principles of definition. Archytas may thus have devoted a\\ntreatise to the topic. Aristotle elsewhere comments on the use of\\nproportion in developing definitions and uses these same examples\\n(Top. 108a7). The ability to recognize likeness in things of\\ndifferent genera is said to be the key. “Windlessness” and\\n“calm-on-the-ocean” are recognized as alike, and this\\nlikeness can be expressed in the following proportion: as\\nnênemia is to the air so galênê is\\nto the sea. It is tempting to suppose that Archytas, who saw the world\\nas explicable in terms of number and proportion, also saw proportion\\nas the key in developing definitions. This would explain another\\nreference to Archytas in Aristotle. At Rhetoric\\n1412a9–17 (= A12) Aristotle praises Archytas precisely for his\\nability to see similarity, even in things which differ greatly, and\\ngives as an example Archytas’ assertion that an arbitrator and\\nan altar are the same. DK oddly include this text among the testimonia\\nfor Archytas’ life, but it clearly is part of Archytas’\\nwork on definition. The definitions of both an altar and an arbitrator\\nwill appeal to their common functions as a refuge, while recognizing\\nthe different context and way in which this function is carried out.\\nFor doubts about this reconstruction of Archytas’ theory of\\ndefinition, see Barker 2006, 314–318 and Schofield 2014, 80.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Definitions\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nWe have very little evidence for Archytas’ cosmology, yet he was\\nresponsible for one of the most famous cosmological arguments in\\nantiquity, an argument which has been hailed as “the most\\ncompelling argument ever produced for the infinity of space”\\n(Sorabji 1988, 125). The argument is ascribed to Archytas in a\\nfragment of Eudemus preserved by Simplicius (= A24), and it is\\nprobably to Archytas that Aristotle is referring when he describes the\\nfifth and “most important” reason that people believe in\\nthe existence of the unlimited (Ph. 203b22 ff.). Archytas\\nasks anyone who argues that the universe is limited to engage in a\\nthought experiment (this is one of the first recorded thought\\nexperiments in antiquity): “If I arrived at the outermost edge\\nof the heaven, could I extend my hand or staff into what is outside or\\nnot? It would be paradoxical [given our normal assumptions about the\\nnature of space] not to be able to extend it.” The end of the\\nstaff, once extended will mark a new limit. Archytas can advance to\\nthe new limit and ask the same question again, so that there will\\nalways be something, into which his staff can be extended, beyond the\\nsupposed limit, and hence that something is clearly unlimited. Neither\\nPlato nor Aristotle accepted this argument, and both believed that the\\nuniverse was limited. Nonetheless, Archytas’ argument had great\\ninfluence and was taken over and adapted by the Stoics, Epicureans\\n(Lucretius I 968–983), Locke and Newton, among others, while\\neliciting responses from Alexander and Simplicius (Sorabji 1988,\\n125–141). For a discussion of the relation between\\nArchytas’ thought experiment and other thought experiments in\\nantiquity see Ierodiakonou 2011. Not all scholars have been impressed\\nby the argument (see Barnes 1982, 362), and modern notions of space\\nallow for it to be finite without having an edge, and without an edge\\nArchytas’ argument cannot get started (but see Sorabji 1988,\\n160–163). Beyond this argument, there is only exiguous evidence\\nfor Archytas’ system of the physical world. Eudemus praises\\nArchytas for recognizing that the unequal and uneven are not identical\\nwith motion as Plato supposed (see Ti. 52e and 57e) but\\nrather the causes of motion (A23). Another testimonium suggests that\\nArchytas thought that all things are moved in accordance with\\nproportion (Arist., Prob. 915a25–32 = A23a). The same\\ntestimonium indicates that different sorts of proportion defined\\ndifferent sorts of motion. Archytas asserted that “the\\nproportion of equality” (arithmetic proportion?) defined natural\\nmotion, which he regarded as curved motion (for a different account of\\nthe proportion of equality see De Groot 2014: 195–207). This\\nexplanation of natural motion is supposed to explain why certain parts\\nof plants and animals (e.g. the stem, thighs, arms and trunk) are\\nrounded rather than triangular or polygonal. Some scholars argue that\\nit was the influence of Archytas that led Plato and Eudemus to\\nemphasize uniform circular movement in explaining the heavens (Zhmud\\n2006: 97). An explanation of motion in terms of proportion fits well\\nwith the rest of evidence for Archytas, but the details remain\\nobscure.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Cosmology and Physics\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nArchytas’ search for the numbers in things was not limited to\\nthe natural world. Political relationships and the moral action of\\nindividuals were also explained in terms of number and proportion. In\\nFr. 3, rational calculation is identified as the basis of the stable\\nstate:\",\n \"\\nOnce calculation (logismos) was discovered, it stopped\\ndiscord and increased concord. For people do not want more than their\\nshare, and equality exists, once this has come into being. For by\\nmeans of calculation we will seek reconciliation in our dealings with\\nothers. Through this, then, the poor receive from the powerful, and\\nthe wealthy give to the needy, both in the confidence that they will\\nhave what is fair on account of this.\",\n \"\\nThis glorification of calculation is reminiscent of Plato’s\\npraise for “geometrical equality” in the Gorgias\\n(507e6–508a8) and Plato may be thinking of Archytas Fr. 3\\n(Palmer 2014: 205–6; Huffman 2013: 259–61). The emphasis\\non equality (isotas) and fairness (to ison) suggests\\nthat Archytas envisages rational calculation (logismos) as\\nheavily mathematical. On the other hand, logismos is not\\nidentical to the technical science of number (logistic – see 3.2\\nabove) but is rather a practical ability to understand numerical\\ncalculations, including basic proportions, an ability that is shared\\nby most human beings. It is the clarity of calculation and proportion\\nthat does away with the constant striving for more\\n(pleonexia), which produces discord in the state. Since the\\nstate is based on a widely shared human ability to calculate, an\\nability that the rich and poor share, Archytas was led to support a\\nmore democratic constitution (see 1.3 above) than Plato, who\\nemphasizes the expert mathematical knowledge of a few (R.\\n546a ff.). Zhmud (2006: 60–76) points out connections between B3\\nand Isocrates and argues that Isocrates is referring to Archytas, when\\nhe says that some praise the sciences for their utility and others try\\nto demonstrate that they contribute greatly to virtue\\n(Busiris 23). However, Archytas seems to accept both of these\\nviews about the sciences, while Isocrates refers to two different\\ngroups of people. Isocrates’ reference is also very general and\\nmakes no allusion to the central terms of B3 so that it is doubtful\\nthat he has Archytas in mind. For further discussion of the argument\\nof B3 see Huffman 2005: 182–224 and Schofield 2008. \",\n \"\\nMost of our evidence for Archytas’ ethical views is,\\nunfortunately, not based on fragments of his writings but rather on\\nanecdotes, which probably ultimately derive from Aristoxenus’\\nLife of Archytas. The good life of the individual, no less\\nthan the stability of the state, appears to have been founded on\\nrational calculation. Aristoxenus presented a confrontation between\\nthe Syracusan hedonist, Polyarchus, and Archytas. Polyarchus’\\nlong speech is preserved by Athenaeus and Archytas’ response by\\nCicero (A9 = Deip. 545a and Sen. XII 39–41\\nrespectively). Schofield (2014: 70, n.2) raises doubts about whether\\nCicero really preserves Archytas’ response (See Huffman 2005:\\n323–37). Horky (2011: 120) assumes without argument that\\nAristoxenus presented Archytas as delivering his speech in the\\npresence of Plato and the Samnite C. Pontius, but this is part of\\nCicero’s frame story and there is no evidence that it derives\\nfrom Aristoxenus. Polyarchus’ defense of always striving for\\nmore (pleonexia) and of the pursuit of pleasure is\\nreminiscent of Plato’s presentations of Callicles and\\nThrasymachus, but is not derived from those presentations and is\\nbetter seen as an important parallel development (Huffman 2002b).\\nArchytas bases his response on the premise that reason (= rational\\ncalculation) is the best part of us and the part that should govern\\nour actions. Polyarchus might grant such a premise, since his is a\\nrational hedonism. Archytas responds once again with a thought\\nexperiment. We are to imagine someone in the throes of the greatest\\npossible bodily pleasure (sexual orgasm?). Surely we must agree that a\\nperson in such a state is not able to engage in rational calculation.\\nIt thus appears that bodily pleasure is in itself antithetical to\\nreason and that, the more we succeed in obtaining it, the less we are\\nable to reason. Aristotle appears to refer to this argument in the\\nNicomachean Ethics (1152b16–18). Archytas’\\nargument is specifically directed against bodily pleasure and he did\\nnot think that all pleasure was disruptive; he enjoyed playing with\\nchildren (A8) and recognized that the pleasures of friendship were\\npart of a good life (Cicero, Amic. XXIII 88). Other anecdotes\\nemphasize that our actions must be governed by reason rather than the\\nemotions: Archytas refused to punish the serious misdeeds of his\\nslaves, because he had become angry and did not want to act out of\\nanger (A7); he restrained himself from swearing aloud by writing his\\ncurses on a wall instead (A11). Palmer argues that Archytas was\\nworking with a Pythagorean conception of the soul as divided into two\\nparts: the intellect and a part responsible for the affective states\\nsuch as emotions and appetites (2014: 209). \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"6. Ethics and Political Philosophy\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nArchytas fits the common stereotype of a Pythagorean better than\\nanyone else does. He is by far the most accomplished Pythagorean\\nmathematician, making important contributions to geometry,\\nlogistic/arithmetic and harmonics. He was more successful as a\\npolitical leader than any other ancient philosopher, and there is a\\nrich anecdotal tradition about his personal self-control. It is\\nstriking, however, that there are essentially no testimonia connecting\\nArchytas to metempsychosis or the religious aspect of Pythagoreanism.\\nArchytas is a prominent figure in the rebirth of interest in\\nPythagoreanism in first century BC Rome: Horace, Propertius and Cicero\\nall highlight him. As the last prominent member of the early\\nPythagorean tradition, more pseudo-Pythagorean works came to be forged\\nin his name than any other Pythagorean, including Pythagoras himself.\\nHis name, with the spelling Architas, continued to exert power in\\nMedieval and Renaissance texts, although the accomplishments assigned\\nto him in those texts are fanciful.\",\n \"\\nScholars have typically emphasized the continuities between Plato and\\nArchytas (e.g., Kahn 2001, 56), but the evidence suggests that\\nArchytas and Plato were in serious disagreement on a number of issues.\\nPlato’s only certain reference to Archytas is part of a\\ncriticism of his approach to harmonics in Book VII of the\\nRepublic, where there is probably also a criticism of his\\nwork in solid geometry. Plato’s attempt to argue for the split\\nbetween the intelligible and sensible world in Books VI and VII of the\\nRepublic may well be a protreptic directed at Archytas, who\\nrefused to separate numbers from things. It is sometimes thought that\\nthe eponymous primary speaker in Plato’s Timaeus, who\\nis described as a leading political figure and philosopher from\\nsouthern Italy (20a), must be a stand-in for Archytas. The\\nTimaeus, however, is a most un-Archytan document (Huffman\\n2013: 263-8). It is based on the split between the sensible and\\nintelligible world, which Archytas did not accept. Plato argues that\\nthe universe is limited, while Archytas is famous for this argument to\\nshow that it is unlimited. Plato constructs the world soul according\\nto ratios that are important in harmonic theory, but he uses\\nPhilolaus’ ratios rather than Archytas’. Plato does adopt\\nArchytas’ theory of pitch with some modification, but Archytas\\nand Plato disagree on the explanation of sight. For a different view\\nof the relation between Plato and Archytas see Kingsley 2014:\\n156–7. Archytas’ refusal to split the intelligible from\\nthe sensible may have made him a more attractive figure to Aristotle,\\nwho devoted four books to him (Huffman 2005: 583–594) and\\npraised his definitions for treating the composite of matter and form,\\nnot of form separate from matter (Metaph. 1043a14–26).\\nArchytas’ vision of the role of mathematics in the state is\\ncloser to Aristotle’s mathematical account of distributive and\\nredistributive justice (EN 1130b30 ff.) than to Plato’s\\nemphasis on the expert mathematical knowledge of the guardians.\\nClearly Archytas was an important influence on both Plato and\\nAristotle, but the exact nature of those philosophical relationships\\nis complex.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"7. Importance and Influence\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Diels, H. and W. Kranz, 1952, Die Fragmente der\nVorsokratiker (in three volumes), 6th edition, Dublin\nand Zürich: Weidmann. The Archytas material is in Volume 1,\nChapter 47, pp. 421–439 (Greek texts of the fragments and\ntestimonia with translations in German). Referred to as DK.","Huffman, C. A., 2005, Archytas of Tarentum: Pythagorean,\nPhilosopher and Mathematician King, Cambridge: Cambridge\nUniversity Press (The most complete and up-to-date collection of\nfragments and testimonia with translations and commentary in\nEnglish).","Timpanaro Cardini, M., 1958–64, Pitagorici,\nTestimonianze e frammenti, 3 vols., Firenze: La Nuova Italia,\nVol. 2, 262–385 (Greek texts of the fragments and testimonia\nwith translations and commentary in Italian).","Barker, A. D., 1989, Greek Musical Writings, Vol. II: Harmonic\nand Acoustic Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A\ngood account of Archytas’ harmonic theory.)","–––, 1994, ‘Ptolemy’s Pythagoreans,\nArchytas, and Plato’s conception of mathematics’,\nPhronesis, 39(2): 113–135.","–––, 2006, ‘Archytas Unbound: A Discussion\nof Carl A. Huffman, Archytas of Tarentum’, Oxford\nStudies in Ancient Philosophy, 31: 297–321.","–––, 2007, The Science of Harmonics in\nClassical Greece, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","–––, 2014, ‘Pythagorean Harmonics’,\nin Huffman (ed.), 2014: 185–203.","Barnes, J., 1982, The Presocratic Philosophers, London:\nRoutledge.","Berryman, Sylvia, 2003, ‘Ancient Automata and Mechanical\nExplanation’, Phronesis, 48(4): 344–369.","–––, 2009, The Mechanical Hypothesis in\nAncient Greek Natural Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress.","Blass, F., 1884, ‘De Archytae Tarentini fragmentis\nmathematicis’, in Mélanges Graux, Paris: Ernest\nThorin, pp. 573–584. ","Bonazzi, M., 2013, ‘Eudorus of Alexandria and the “\nPythagorean” Pseudepigrapha’, in On\nPythagoreanism, G. Cornelli, R. McKirahan and C. Macris (eds.),\nBerlin: De Gruyter, pp. 385–404.","Bowen, A. C., 1982, ‘The foundations of early Pythagorean\nharmonic science: Archytas, fragment 1’, Ancient\nPhilosophy, 2: 79–104.","Brisson, Luc, 1987, Platon: Lettres, Paris:\nFlammarion.","–––, 2013, ‘Archytas and the Duplication\nof the Cube’, in On Pythagoreanism, G. Cornelli, R.\nMcKirahn, and C. Macris (eds.), Berlin: De Gruyter, pp.\n203–33.","Burkert, W., 1961, ‘Hellenistische Pseudopythagorica’,\nPhilologus, 105: 16–43, 226–246.","–––, 1972a, Lore and Science in Ancient\nPythagoreanism, E. Minar (tr.), Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard\nUniversity Press; 1st German edn., 1962.","–––, 1972b, ‘Zur geistesgeschichtlichen\nEinordnung einiger Pseudopythagorica’, in Pseudepigrapha\nI, Fondation Hardt Entretiens XVIII, Vandoeuvres-Genève,\npp. 25–55.","Burnyeat, Myles and Frede, Michael, 2015, The Seventh Platonic\nLetter; A Seminar, Dominic Scott (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University\nPress.","Cambiano, Giuseppe, 1998, ‘Archimede Meccanico et La\nMeccanica di Archita’, Elenchos, 19(2):\n291–324.","Cassio, Albio Cesare, 1988, ‘Nicomachus of Gerasa and the\nDialect of Archytas, Fr. 1’, Classical Quarterly (New\nSeries), 38: 135–139.","Centrone, Bruno, 1990, Pseudopythagorica Ethica, Naples:\nBibliopolis.","–––, 1994a, ‘Archytas de Tarente’,\nin Dictionnaire des Philosophes Antiques, vol. 1, Richard\nGoulet (ed.), Paris: CNRS Éditions, pp. 339–342.","–––, 1994b, ‘Pseudo-Archytas’, in\nDictionnaire des Philosophes Antiques, vol. 1, Richard Goulet\n(ed.), Paris: CNRS Éditions, pp. 342–345.","–––, 2000, ‘Platonism and Pythagoreanism\nin the early empire’, in The Cambridge History of Greek and\nRoman Political Thought, Christopher Rowe and Malcolm Schofield\n(eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 559–584.","–––, 2014, ‘The pseudo-Pythagorean\nWritings’, in Huffman 2014: 315–40.","Ciaceri, E., 1927–32, Storia della Magna Grecia,\nI–III, Milan-Rome: Albrighi, Segati & C.","Cuomo, S., 2000, Pappus of Alexandria and the Mathematics of\nLate Antiquity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","De Cesaris, G. and Horky, P. S., 2018, ‘Hellenistic\nPythagorean Epistemology’, Lexicon Philosophicum,\nSpecial Issue: Hellenistic Theories of Knowledge, F. Verde\nand M. Catapano (eds.), Rome: CNR-ILIESI, pp. 221-262."," De Groot, J., 2014, Aristotle’s Empiricism, Las\nVegas: Parmenides Publishing.","Delatte, A., 1922, Essai sur la politique\npythagoricienne, Liège and Paris: H. Vaillant-Carmanne and\nÉdouard Champion.","Diels, H., 1965, Antike Technik, 3rd edition,\nOsnabrück: Otto Zeller.","Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, R. D.\nHicks (tr.), Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925.","Eutocius, 1915, Archimedis opera omnia cum commentariis\nEutocii (Volume 3), J. L. Heiberg and E. 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S., 2011, ‘Herennius Pontius: The Construction of\na Samnite Philosopher’, Classical Antiquity, 30(1):\n119–47.","–––, 2015, ‘Pseudo-Archytas’\nProtreptics? On Wisdom in its Contexts’, in Second\nSailing: Alternative Perspectives on Plato, D. Nails and H.\nTarrant (eds.), Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, pp.\n21-39.","Horky, P. S. and Johnson, M. R., 2020, ‘On Law and\nJustice: Attributed to Archytas of Tarentum’, in Early\nGreek Ethics, D. Wolfsdorf (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University\nPress, pp. 455–490.","Huffman, C. A., 1985, ‘The Authenticity of Archytas Fr.\n1’, Classical Quarterly, 35(2): 344–348.","–––, 1993, Philolaus of Croton: Pythagorean\nand Presocratic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","–––, 2002a, ‘Polyclète et les\nPrésocratiques’, in Qu’ est-ce que la\nPhilosophie Présocratique?, André Laks and Claire\nLouguet (eds.), Villeneuve d’Ascq: Septentrion, pp.\n303–327.","–––, 2002b, ‘Archytas and the\nSophists’, in Presocratic Philosophy: Essays in Honour of\nAlexander Mourelatos, Victor Caston and Daniel W. Graham (eds.),\nAldershot: Ashgate, pp. 251–270.","–––, 2013, ‘Plato and the\nPythagoreans’, in On Pythagoreanism, G. Cornelli, R.\nMcKirahan and C. Macris (eds.), Berlin: De Gruyter, pp.\n237–70.","–––, (ed.), 2014, A History of\nPythagoreanism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Ierodiakonou, K., 2011, ‘Remarks on the History of an\nAncient Thought Experiment’, in Thought Experiments in\nMethodological and Historical Contexts, K. 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R., 1979, Magic, Reason, and Experience,\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.","–––, 1987, The Revolutions of Wisdom,\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.","–––, 1990, ‘Plato and Archytas in the\nSeventh Letter’, Phronesis, 35(2): 159–174.","Mansfeld, J., 2019, ‘Pythagoras’ and ps.-Archytas\nOn Principles’, Elenchos, 40(1):\n123–135.","Masia, R., 2016, ‘A New Reading of Archytas’ Doubling\nof the Cube and its Implications’, Archive for History of\nExact Sciences, 70: 175–204.","Mathieu, Bernard, 1987, ‘Archytas de Tarente pythagoricien\net ami de Platon’, Bulletin de l’Association G.\nBudé, 3: 239–255."," Menn, S., 2015, ‘How Archytas Doubled the Cube’, in\nThe Frontiers of Ancient Science: Essays in Honor of Heinrich von\nStaden, B. Holmes and K.-D. Fisher (eds.), Berlin: De Gruyter,\npp. 407–35.","Minar, Edwin L., 1942, Early Pythagorean Politics in Practice\nand Theory, Baltimore: Waverly Press.","Moraux, P., 1984, Der Aristotelismus bei den Griechen von\nAndronikos bis Alexander von Aphrodisias, Zweiter Band: Der\nAristotelismus im I. und II. Jh. n. Chr., Berlin: Walter De\nGruyter.","Mueller, I., 1997, ‘Greek arithmetic, geometry and\nharmonics: Thales to Plato’, in Routledge History of\nPhilosophy (Volume I: From the Beginning to Plato),\nC. C. W. Taylor (ed.), London: Routledge, pp. 271–322.","Netz, R., 1999, The Shaping of Deduction in Greek\nMathematics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","–––, 2014, ‘The Problem of Pythagorean\nMathematics’, in Huffman 2014: 167–84.","Nisbet, R.G.M. and Hubbard, M.A., 1970, A Commentary on\nHorace: Odes, Book 1, Oxford: Clarendon Press.","O’Meara, D. J., 1989, Pythagoras Revived. 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L., 1943, ‘Die Harmonielehre der\nPythagoreer’, Hermes, 78: 163–199.","–––, 1947–9, ‘Die Arithmetik der\nPythagoreer’, Mathematische Annalen, 120:\n127–153, 676–700.","–––, 1963, Science Awakening, A.\nDresden (tr.), New York: John Wiley & Sons.","Winnington-Ingram, R. P., 1932, ‘Aristoxenus and the\nIntervals of Greek Music’, Classical Quarterly, 26:\n195–208.","Wolfer, E. P., 1954, Eratosthenes von Kyrene als Mathematiker\nund Philosoph, Groningen: P. Noordhoff.","Wuilleumier, Pierre, 1939, Tarente des Origines à la\nConquête Romaine, Paris: E. De Boccard.","Zhmud, L., 1997, Wissenschaft, Philosophie und Religion im\nfrühen Pythagoreismus, Berlin: Akademie Verlag.","–––, 1998, ‘Plato as Architect of\nScience’, Phronesis, 43(3): 210–244.","–––, 2002, ‘Eudemus’ History of\nMathematics’, in Eudemus of Rhodes, W. W. Fortenbaugh\nand I. Bodnar (eds.), New Brunswick: Transaction, pp.\n263–306.","–––, 2006, The Origin of the History of\nScience in Classical Antiquity, Berlin: De Gruyter.","–––, 2012, Pythagoras and the Early\nPythagoreans, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","–––, 2019, ‘What is Pythagorean in the\nPseudo-Pythagorean Literature’, Philologus, 163(1):\n72–94."],"string":"[\n \"Diels, H. and W. Kranz, 1952, Die Fragmente der\\nVorsokratiker (in three volumes), 6th edition, Dublin\\nand Zürich: Weidmann. The Archytas material is in Volume 1,\\nChapter 47, pp. 421–439 (Greek texts of the fragments and\\ntestimonia with translations in German). Referred to as DK.\",\n \"Huffman, C. A., 2005, Archytas of Tarentum: Pythagorean,\\nPhilosopher and Mathematician King, Cambridge: Cambridge\\nUniversity Press (The most complete and up-to-date collection of\\nfragments and testimonia with translations and commentary in\\nEnglish).\",\n \"Timpanaro Cardini, M., 1958–64, Pitagorici,\\nTestimonianze e frammenti, 3 vols., Firenze: La Nuova Italia,\\nVol. 2, 262–385 (Greek texts of the fragments and testimonia\\nwith translations and commentary in Italian).\",\n \"Barker, A. D., 1989, Greek Musical Writings, Vol. II: Harmonic\\nand Acoustic Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (A\\ngood account of Archytas’ harmonic theory.)\",\n \"–––, 1994, ‘Ptolemy’s Pythagoreans,\\nArchytas, and Plato’s conception of mathematics’,\\nPhronesis, 39(2): 113–135.\",\n \"–––, 2006, ‘Archytas Unbound: A Discussion\\nof Carl A. Huffman, Archytas of Tarentum’, Oxford\\nStudies in Ancient Philosophy, 31: 297–321.\",\n \"–––, 2007, The Science of Harmonics in\\nClassical Greece, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2014, ‘Pythagorean Harmonics’,\\nin Huffman (ed.), 2014: 185–203.\",\n \"Barnes, J., 1982, The Presocratic Philosophers, London:\\nRoutledge.\",\n \"Berryman, Sylvia, 2003, ‘Ancient Automata and Mechanical\\nExplanation’, Phronesis, 48(4): 344–369.\",\n \"–––, 2009, The Mechanical Hypothesis in\\nAncient Greek Natural Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress.\",\n \"Blass, F., 1884, ‘De Archytae Tarentini fragmentis\\nmathematicis’, in Mélanges Graux, Paris: Ernest\\nThorin, pp. 573–584. \",\n \"Bonazzi, M., 2013, ‘Eudorus of Alexandria and the “\\nPythagorean” Pseudepigrapha’, in On\\nPythagoreanism, G. Cornelli, R. McKirahan and C. Macris (eds.),\\nBerlin: De Gruyter, pp. 385–404.\",\n \"Bowen, A. C., 1982, ‘The foundations of early Pythagorean\\nharmonic science: Archytas, fragment 1’, Ancient\\nPhilosophy, 2: 79–104.\",\n \"Brisson, Luc, 1987, Platon: Lettres, Paris:\\nFlammarion.\",\n \"–––, 2013, ‘Archytas and the Duplication\\nof the Cube’, in On Pythagoreanism, G. Cornelli, R.\\nMcKirahn, and C. Macris (eds.), Berlin: De Gruyter, pp.\\n203–33.\",\n \"Burkert, W., 1961, ‘Hellenistische Pseudopythagorica’,\\nPhilologus, 105: 16–43, 226–246.\",\n \"–––, 1972a, Lore and Science in Ancient\\nPythagoreanism, E. Minar (tr.), Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard\\nUniversity Press; 1st German edn., 1962.\",\n \"–––, 1972b, ‘Zur geistesgeschichtlichen\\nEinordnung einiger Pseudopythagorica’, in Pseudepigrapha\\nI, Fondation Hardt Entretiens XVIII, Vandoeuvres-Genève,\\npp. 25–55.\",\n \"Burnyeat, Myles and Frede, Michael, 2015, The Seventh Platonic\\nLetter; A Seminar, Dominic Scott (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University\\nPress.\",\n \"Cambiano, Giuseppe, 1998, ‘Archimede Meccanico et La\\nMeccanica di Archita’, Elenchos, 19(2):\\n291–324.\",\n \"Cassio, Albio Cesare, 1988, ‘Nicomachus of Gerasa and the\\nDialect of Archytas, Fr. 1’, Classical Quarterly (New\\nSeries), 38: 135–139.\",\n \"Centrone, Bruno, 1990, Pseudopythagorica Ethica, Naples:\\nBibliopolis.\",\n \"–––, 1994a, ‘Archytas de Tarente’,\\nin Dictionnaire des Philosophes Antiques, vol. 1, Richard\\nGoulet (ed.), Paris: CNRS Éditions, pp. 339–342.\",\n \"–––, 1994b, ‘Pseudo-Archytas’, in\\nDictionnaire des Philosophes Antiques, vol. 1, Richard Goulet\\n(ed.), Paris: CNRS Éditions, pp. 342–345.\",\n \"–––, 2000, ‘Platonism and Pythagoreanism\\nin the early empire’, in The Cambridge History of Greek and\\nRoman Political Thought, Christopher Rowe and Malcolm Schofield\\n(eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 559–584.\",\n \"–––, 2014, ‘The pseudo-Pythagorean\\nWritings’, in Huffman 2014: 315–40.\",\n \"Ciaceri, E., 1927–32, Storia della Magna Grecia,\\nI–III, Milan-Rome: Albrighi, Segati & C.\",\n \"Cuomo, S., 2000, Pappus of Alexandria and the Mathematics of\\nLate Antiquity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"De Cesaris, G. and Horky, P. S., 2018, ‘Hellenistic\\nPythagorean Epistemology’, Lexicon Philosophicum,\\nSpecial Issue: Hellenistic Theories of Knowledge, F. Verde\\nand M. Catapano (eds.), Rome: CNR-ILIESI, pp. 221-262.\",\n \" De Groot, J., 2014, Aristotle’s Empiricism, Las\\nVegas: Parmenides Publishing.\",\n \"Delatte, A., 1922, Essai sur la politique\\npythagoricienne, Liège and Paris: H. Vaillant-Carmanne and\\nÉdouard Champion.\",\n \"Diels, H., 1965, Antike Technik, 3rd edition,\\nOsnabrück: Otto Zeller.\",\n \"Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, R. D.\\nHicks (tr.), Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1925.\",\n \"Eutocius, 1915, Archimedis opera omnia cum commentariis\\nEutocii (Volume 3), J. L. Heiberg and E. Stamatis (eds.), Leipzig:\\nTeubner; reprinted, Stuttgart, 1972.\",\n \"Folkerts, M.,1970, “Boethius” Geometrie II: Ein\\nMathematisches Lehrbuch des Mittelalters, Wiesbaden: Franz\\nSteiner.\",\n \"Frank, E., 1923, Plato und die sogenannten Pythagoreer: Ein\\nKapitel aus der Geschichte des griechischen Geistes, Halle: Max\\nNiemeyer.\",\n \"Frischer, Bernard, 1984, ‘Horace and the Monuments: A New\\nInterpretation of the Archytas Ode (C.1.28)’, Harvard\\nStudies in Classical Philology, 88: 71–102.\",\n \"Griffin, M. J., 2015, Aristotle’s Categories in\\nthe Early Roman Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Gruppe, O. F., 1840, Über die Fragmente des Archytas und\\nder ältern Pythagoreer, Berlin: O. Sichler.\",\n \"Guthrie, W. K. C., 1962, A History of Greek Philosophy\\n(Volume 1), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Harvey, F. D., 1965–66, ‘Two Kinds of Equality’,\\nClassica et Mediaevalia, 26: 101–146.\",\n \"Heath, T. L., 1921, A History of Greek Mathematics, 2\\nvolumes, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"Horky, P. S., 2011, ‘Herennius Pontius: The Construction of\\na Samnite Philosopher’, Classical Antiquity, 30(1):\\n119–47.\",\n \"–––, 2015, ‘Pseudo-Archytas’\\nProtreptics? On Wisdom in its Contexts’, in Second\\nSailing: Alternative Perspectives on Plato, D. Nails and H.\\nTarrant (eds.), Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, pp.\\n21-39.\",\n \"Horky, P. S. and Johnson, M. R., 2020, ‘On Law and\\nJustice: Attributed to Archytas of Tarentum’, in Early\\nGreek Ethics, D. Wolfsdorf (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University\\nPress, pp. 455–490.\",\n \"Huffman, C. A., 1985, ‘The Authenticity of Archytas Fr.\\n1’, Classical Quarterly, 35(2): 344–348.\",\n \"–––, 1993, Philolaus of Croton: Pythagorean\\nand Presocratic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2002a, ‘Polyclète et les\\nPrésocratiques’, in Qu’ est-ce que la\\nPhilosophie Présocratique?, André Laks and Claire\\nLouguet (eds.), Villeneuve d’Ascq: Septentrion, pp.\\n303–327.\",\n \"–––, 2002b, ‘Archytas and the\\nSophists’, in Presocratic Philosophy: Essays in Honour of\\nAlexander Mourelatos, Victor Caston and Daniel W. Graham (eds.),\\nAldershot: Ashgate, pp. 251–270.\",\n \"–––, 2013, ‘Plato and the\\nPythagoreans’, in On Pythagoreanism, G. Cornelli, R.\\nMcKirahan and C. Macris (eds.), Berlin: De Gruyter, pp.\\n237–70.\",\n \"–––, (ed.), 2014, A History of\\nPythagoreanism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Ierodiakonou, K., 2011, ‘Remarks on the History of an\\nAncient Thought Experiment’, in Thought Experiments in\\nMethodological and Historical Contexts, K. Ierodiakonou and S.\\nRoux (eds.), Leiden: Brill, pp. 37–49.\",\n \"Johnson, Monte Ransome, 2008, ‘Sources for the Philosophy of\\nArchytas’, Ancient Philosophy, 28: 173–199.\",\n \"Kahn, C., 2001, Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans,\\nIndianapolis: Hackett.\",\n \"Kingsley, P., 2010, A Story Waiting to Pierce You, Point\\nReyes: Golden Sufi Center.\",\n \"Knorr, W. R., 1975, The Evolution of the Euclidean\\nElements, Dordrecht: D. Reidel.\",\n \"–––, 1986, The Ancient Tradition of\\nGeometric Problems, Boston: Birkhäuser.\",\n \"–––, 1989, Textual Studies in Ancient and\\nMedieval Geometry, Boston: Birkhäuser.\",\n \"–––, 1996, “Mechanics”, entry in\\nOxford Classical Dictionary (3rd edition), S. Hornblower and\\nA. Spawforth (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Krafft, Fritz, 1970, Dynamishce und Statische\\nBetrachtungsweise in der Antiken Mechanik, Wiesbaden: Franz\\nSteiner.\",\n \"Krischer, Tilman (1995) ‘Die Rolle der Magna Graecia in der\\nGeschichte der Mechanik’, Antike und Abendland, 41:\\n60–71.\",\n \"Lloyd, G. E. R., 1979, Magic, Reason, and Experience,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1987, The Revolutions of Wisdom,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1990, ‘Plato and Archytas in the\\nSeventh Letter’, Phronesis, 35(2): 159–174.\",\n \"Mansfeld, J., 2019, ‘Pythagoras’ and ps.-Archytas\\nOn Principles’, Elenchos, 40(1):\\n123–135.\",\n \"Masia, R., 2016, ‘A New Reading of Archytas’ Doubling\\nof the Cube and its Implications’, Archive for History of\\nExact Sciences, 70: 175–204.\",\n \"Mathieu, Bernard, 1987, ‘Archytas de Tarente pythagoricien\\net ami de Platon’, Bulletin de l’Association G.\\nBudé, 3: 239–255.\",\n \" Menn, S., 2015, ‘How Archytas Doubled the Cube’, in\\nThe Frontiers of Ancient Science: Essays in Honor of Heinrich von\\nStaden, B. Holmes and K.-D. Fisher (eds.), Berlin: De Gruyter,\\npp. 407–35.\",\n \"Minar, Edwin L., 1942, Early Pythagorean Politics in Practice\\nand Theory, Baltimore: Waverly Press.\",\n \"Moraux, P., 1984, Der Aristotelismus bei den Griechen von\\nAndronikos bis Alexander von Aphrodisias, Zweiter Band: Der\\nAristotelismus im I. und II. Jh. n. Chr., Berlin: Walter De\\nGruyter.\",\n \"Mueller, I., 1997, ‘Greek arithmetic, geometry and\\nharmonics: Thales to Plato’, in Routledge History of\\nPhilosophy (Volume I: From the Beginning to Plato),\\nC. C. W. Taylor (ed.), London: Routledge, pp. 271–322.\",\n \"Netz, R., 1999, The Shaping of Deduction in Greek\\nMathematics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2014, ‘The Problem of Pythagorean\\nMathematics’, in Huffman 2014: 167–84.\",\n \"Nisbet, R.G.M. and Hubbard, M.A., 1970, A Commentary on\\nHorace: Odes, Book 1, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"O’Meara, D. J., 1989, Pythagoras Revived. Mathematics\\nand Philosophy in Late Antiquity, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"–––, 2003, Platonopolis: Platonic Political\\nPhilosophy in Late Antiquity, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2003, third edition, Simon\\nHornblower and Antony Spawforth (eds.), Oxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"Palmer, J. 2014, ‘The Pythagoreans and Plato’, in\\nHuffman 2014: 204–226.\",\n \"Pappus, 1876–78, Pappi Alexandrini collectionis quae\\nsupersunt, F. Hultsch (ed.), Berlin: Weidmann.\",\n \"Powell, J. G. F., 1995, Cicero the Philosopher, Oxford:\\nClarendon Press.\",\n \"Purcell, Nicholas, 1994, ‘South Italy in the Fourth Century\\nB. C.’, in The Cambridge Ancient History: Volume VI: The\\nFourth Century B.C., D. M. Lewis, John Boardman, Simon Hornblower\\nand M. Ostwald (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.\\n381–403.\",\n \"Riginos, A. S., 1976, Platonica, Leiden: Brill.\",\n \"Rouse, M.A. and R. H., 1971, ‘The Texts called Lumen\\nAnimae’, Archivum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 41:\\n5–113.\",\n \"Sachs, E., 1917, Die fünf Platonischen Körper,\\nBerlin: Weidmann.\",\n \"Schmidt, W., 1904, ‘Aus der antiken Mechanik’,\\nNeue Jahrbücher für das Klassische Altertum, 13:\\n329–51.\",\n \"Schofield, M., 2000, ‘Plato and Practical Politics’,\\nin The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political\\nThought, Christopher Rowe and Malcolm Schofield (eds.),\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 293–302.\",\n \"–––, 2009, ‘Review of C. Huffman,\\nArchytas of Tarentum’, Philosophical Review,\\n118(1): 108–112.\",\n \"–––, 2014, ‘Archytas’, in Huffman\\n(ed.), 2014: 69–87.\",\n \"Schürmann, Astrid, 1991, Griechische Mechanik und Antike\\nGesellschaft, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner.\",\n \"Sorabji, Richard, 1988, Matter, Space and Motion, Ithaca:\\nCornell University Press.\",\n \"Strabo, 1917, Geography, Horace Leonard Jones (tr.),\\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Szlezak, T. A., 1972, Pseudo-Archytas über Die\\nKategorien, Berlin: Walter De Gruyter.\",\n \"Tannery, P., 1887, La Géométrie Grecque,\\nParis: Gauthier-Villars.\",\n \"–––, 1905, ‘Un traité Grec\\nd’arithmétique antérieur à Euclide’,\\nBibliotheca Mathematica, 3(6): 225–229, reprinted in\\nMémoires scientifiques, III: 244–250.\",\n \"–––, 1912–15., Mémoires\\nscientifiques, 3 volumes, Toulouse: Privat and Paris:\\nGauthier-Villars.\",\n \"Thesleff, H., 1961, An Introduction to the Pythagorean\\nWritings of the Hellenistic Period, Åbo: Åbo\\nAkademi.\",\n \"–––, 1962, ‘Okkelos, Archytas and\\nPlato’, Eranos, 60: 8–36.\",\n \"–––, 1965, The Pythagorean Texts of the\\nHellenistic Period, Åbo: Åbo Akademi.\",\n \"–––, 1972, ‘On the Problem of the Doric\\nPseudo-Pythagorica. An Alternative Theory of Date and Purpose’,\\nPseudepigrapha I, Fondation Hardt Entretiens XVIII,\\nVandoeuvres-Genève, pp. 59-87.\",\n \"Thorndike, Lynn, 1934, A History of Magic and Experimental\\nScience, New York: Columbia University Press.\",\n \"Ulacco, A., 2016, ‘The Appropriation of Aristotle in the\\nPseudopythagorean Treatises’, in Brill’s Companion to\\nthe Reception of Aristotle in Antiquity, A. Falcon (ed.), Brill:\\nLeiden, pp. 202–217.\",\n \"–––, 2017, Pseudopythagorica Dorica: I\\ntrattati di argomento metafisico, logico ed epistemologico attributi\\nad Archita ed Brotino, Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter.\",\n \"Vlastos, G., 1991, Socrates: Ironist and Moral\\nPhilosopher, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.\",\n \"de Vogel, C. J., 1966, Pythagoras and Early\\nPythagoreanism, Assen: Van Gorcum.\",\n \"van der Waerden, B. L., 1943, ‘Die Harmonielehre der\\nPythagoreer’, Hermes, 78: 163–199.\",\n \"–––, 1947–9, ‘Die Arithmetik der\\nPythagoreer’, Mathematische Annalen, 120:\\n127–153, 676–700.\",\n \"–––, 1963, Science Awakening, A.\\nDresden (tr.), New York: John Wiley & Sons.\",\n \"Winnington-Ingram, R. P., 1932, ‘Aristoxenus and the\\nIntervals of Greek Music’, Classical Quarterly, 26:\\n195–208.\",\n \"Wolfer, E. P., 1954, Eratosthenes von Kyrene als Mathematiker\\nund Philosoph, Groningen: P. Noordhoff.\",\n \"Wuilleumier, Pierre, 1939, Tarente des Origines à la\\nConquête Romaine, Paris: E. De Boccard.\",\n \"Zhmud, L., 1997, Wissenschaft, Philosophie und Religion im\\nfrühen Pythagoreismus, Berlin: Akademie Verlag.\",\n \"–––, 1998, ‘Plato as Architect of\\nScience’, Phronesis, 43(3): 210–244.\",\n \"–––, 2002, ‘Eudemus’ History of\\nMathematics’, in Eudemus of Rhodes, W. W. Fortenbaugh\\nand I. Bodnar (eds.), New Brunswick: Transaction, pp.\\n263–306.\",\n \"–––, 2006, The Origin of the History of\\nScience in Classical Antiquity, Berlin: De Gruyter.\",\n \"–––, 2012, Pythagoras and the Early\\nPythagoreans, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2019, ‘What is Pythagorean in the\\nPseudo-Pythagorean Literature’, Philologus, 163(1):\\n72–94.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../aristotle/","text":"Aristotle"},{"href":"../philolaus/","text":"Philolaus"},{"href":"../plato/","text":"Plato"},{"href":"../pythagoras/","text":"Pythagoras"},{"href":"../pythagoreanism/","text":"Pythagoreanism"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotle/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotle\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../philolaus/\",\n \"text\": \"Philolaus\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../plato/\",\n \"text\": \"Plato\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../pythagoras/\",\n \"text\": \"Pythagoras\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../pythagoreanism/\",\n \"text\": \"Pythagoreanism\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":73,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"arendt"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Hannah Arendt"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Thu Jul 27, 2006; substantive revision Fri Jan 11, 2019"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\n\nHannah Arendt (1906–1975) was one of the most influential political\nphilosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a German-Jewish\nfamily, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and lived in Paris for\nthe next eight years, working for a number of Jewish refugee\norganisations. In 1941 she immigrated to the United States and soon\nbecame part of a lively intellectual circle in New York. She held a\nnumber of academic positions at various American universities until\nher death in 1975. She is best known for two works that had a major\nimpact both within and outside the academic community. The first,\nThe Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, was a\nstudy of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes that generated a wide-ranging\ndebate on the nature and historical antecedents of the totalitarian\nphenomenon. The second, The Human Condition, published in\n1958, was an original philosophical study that investigated the\nfundamental categories of the vita activa (labor, work,\naction). In addition to these two important works, Arendt published a\nnumber of influential essays on topics such as the nature of\nrevolution, freedom, authority, tradition and the modern age. At the\ntime of her death in 1975, she had completed the first two volumes of\nher last major philosophical work, The Life of the Mind,\nwhich examined the three fundamental faculties of the vita\ncontemplativa (thinking, willing, judging)."],"string":"[\n \"\\n\\nHannah Arendt (1906–1975) was one of the most influential political\\nphilosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a German-Jewish\\nfamily, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and lived in Paris for\\nthe next eight years, working for a number of Jewish refugee\\norganisations. In 1941 she immigrated to the United States and soon\\nbecame part of a lively intellectual circle in New York. She held a\\nnumber of academic positions at various American universities until\\nher death in 1975. She is best known for two works that had a major\\nimpact both within and outside the academic community. The first,\\nThe Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, was a\\nstudy of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes that generated a wide-ranging\\ndebate on the nature and historical antecedents of the totalitarian\\nphenomenon. The second, The Human Condition, published in\\n1958, was an original philosophical study that investigated the\\nfundamental categories of the vita activa (labor, work,\\naction). In addition to these two important works, Arendt published a\\nnumber of influential essays on topics such as the nature of\\nrevolution, freedom, authority, tradition and the modern age. At the\\ntime of her death in 1975, she had completed the first two volumes of\\nher last major philosophical work, The Life of the Mind,\\nwhich examined the three fundamental faculties of the vita\\ncontemplativa (thinking, willing, judging).\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Biographical Sketch","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. Introduction","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"3. Arendt’s Conception of Modernity","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"4. Arendt’s Theory of Action","sub_toc":["4.1 Action, Freedom, and Plurality","4.2 Action and Speech as Disclosure","4.3 Action, Narrative, and Remembrance","4.4 Action, Power, and the Space of Appearance","4.5 Action, Unpredictability, and Irreversibility"]},{"content_title":"5. Arendt’s Theory of Judgment","sub_toc":["5.1 Judgment: Two Models","5.2 Judgment and the Vita Contemplativa","5.3 Judgment and the Wind of Thought","5.4 Judgment and Kant’s Aesthetics","5.5 Judgment and the Vita Activa","5.6 Judgment and Validity"]},{"content_title":"6. Arendt’s Conception of Citizenship","sub_toc":["6.1 Citizenship and the Public Sphere","6.2 Citizenship, Agency, and Collective Identity"]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":["Works by Arendt","Secondary Literature"]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Biographical Sketch\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Introduction\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Arendt’s Conception of Modernity\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Arendt’s Theory of Action\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"4.1 Action, Freedom, and Plurality\",\n \"4.2 Action and Speech as Disclosure\",\n \"4.3 Action, Narrative, and Remembrance\",\n \"4.4 Action, Power, and the Space of Appearance\",\n \"4.5 Action, Unpredictability, and Irreversibility\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Arendt’s Theory of Judgment\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"5.1 Judgment: Two Models\",\n \"5.2 Judgment and the Vita Contemplativa\",\n \"5.3 Judgment and the Wind of Thought\",\n \"5.4 Judgment and Kant’s Aesthetics\",\n \"5.5 Judgment and the Vita Activa\",\n \"5.6 Judgment and Validity\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. Arendt’s Conception of Citizenship\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"6.1 Citizenship and the Public Sphere\",\n \"6.2 Citizenship, Agency, and Collective Identity\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"Works by Arendt\",\n \"Secondary Literature\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\n\nHannah Arendt, one of the leading political thinkers of the twentieth\ncentury, was born in 1906 in Hanover and died in New York in 1975. In\n1924, after having completed her high school studies, she went to\nMarburg University to study with Martin Heidegger. The encounter with\nHeidegger, with whom she had a brief but intense love-affair, had a\nlasting influence on her thought. After a year of study in Marburg,\nshe moved to Freiburg University where she spent one semester\nattending the lectures of Edmund Husserl. In the spring of 1926 she\nwent to Heidelberg University to study with Karl Jaspers, a\nphilosopher with whom she established a long-lasting intellectual and\npersonal friendship. She completed her doctoral dissertation, entitled\nDer Liebesbegriff bei Augustin (hereafter LA) under Jaspers’s\nsupervision in 1929. She was forced to flee Germany in 1933 as a\nresult of Hitler’s rise to power, and after a brief stay in Prague and\nGeneva she moved to Paris where for six years (1933–39) she worked for\na number of Jewish refugee organisations. In 1936 she separated from\nher first husband, Günther Stern, and started to live with\nHeinrich Blücher, whom she married in 1940. During her stay in\nParis she continued to work on her biography of Rahel\nVarnhagen, which was not published until 1957 (hereafter RV). In\n1941 she was forced to leave France and moved to New York with her\nhusband and mother. In New York she soon became part of an influential\ncircle of writers and intellectuals gathered around the journal\nPartisan Review. During the post-war period she lectured at a\nnumber of American universities, including Princeton, Berkeley and\nChicago, but was most closely associated with the New School for\nSocial Research, where she was a professor of political philosophy\nuntil her death in 1975. In 1951 she published The Origins of\nTotalitarianism (hereafter OT), a major study of the Nazi and\nStalinist regimes that soon became a classic, followed by The\nHuman Condition in 1958 (hereafter HC), her most important\nphilosophical work. In 1961 she attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann\nin Jerusalem as a reporter for The New Yorker magazine, and\ntwo years later published Eichmann in Jerusalem (hereafter\nEJ), which caused a deep controversy in Jewish circles. The same year\nsaw the publication of On Revolution (hereafter OR), a\ncomparative analysis of the American and French revolutions. A number\nof important essays were also published during the 1960s and early\n1970s: a first collection was entitled Between Past and Future\n(hereafter BPF), a second Men in Dark Times (hereafter MDT),\nand a third Crises of the Republic (hereafter CR). At the\ntime of her death in 1975, she had completed the first two volumes on\nThinking and Willing of her last major philosophical\nwork, The Life of the Mind, which was published posthumously\nin 1978 (hereafter LM). The third volume, on Judging, was\nleft unfinished, but some background material and lecture notes were\npublished in 1982 under the title Lectures on Kant’s Political\nPhilosophy (hereafter LKPP)."],"section_title":"1. Biographical Sketch","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\nHannah Arendt was one of the seminal political thinkers of the\ntwentieth century. The power and originality of her thinking was\nevident in works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism,\nThe Human Condition, On Revolution and The Life\nof the Mind. In these works and in numerous essays she grappled\nwith the most crucial political events of her time, trying to grasp\ntheir meaning and historical import, and showing how they affected our\ncategories of moral and political judgment. What was required, in her\nview, was a new framework that could enable us to come to terms with\nthe twin horrors of the twentieth century, Nazism and Stalinism. She\nprovided such framework in her book on totalitarianism, and went on to\ndevelop a new set of philosophical categories that could illuminate\nthe human condition and provide a fresh perspective on the nature of\npolitical life.","\n\nAlthough some of her works now belong to the classics of the Western\ntradition of political thought, she has always remained difficult to\nclassify. Her political philosophy cannot be characterized in terms of\nthe traditional categories of conservatism, liberalism, and socialism.\nNor can her thinking be assimilated to the recent revival of\ncommunitarian political thought, to be found, for example, in the\nwritings of A. MacIntyre, M. Sandel, C. Taylor and M. Walzer. Her name\nhas been invoked by a number of critics of the liberal tradition, on\nthe grounds that she presented a vision of politics that stood in\nopposition some key liberal principles. There are many strands of\nArendt’s thought that could justify such a claim, in particular, her\ncritique of representative democracy, her stress on civic engagement\nand political deliberation, her separation of morality from politics,\nand her praise of the revolutionary tradition. However, it would be a\nmistake to view Arendt as an anti-liberal thinker. Arendt was in fact\na stern defender of constitutionalism and the rule of law, an advocate\nof fundamental human rights (among which she included not only the\nright to life, liberty, and freedom of expression, but also the right\nto action and to opinion), and a critic of all forms of political\ncommunity based on traditional ties and customs, as well as those\nbased on religious, ethnic, or racial identity.","\n\nArendt’s political thought cannot, in this sense, be identified either\nwith the liberal tradition or with the claims advanced by a number of\nits critics. Arendt did not conceive of politics as a means for the\nsatisfaction of individual preferences, nor as a way to integrate\nindividuals around a shared conception of the good. Her conception of\npolitics is based instead on the idea of active citizenship, that is,\non the value and importance of civic engagement and collective\ndeliberation about all matters affecting the political community. If\nthere is a tradition of thought with which Arendt can be identified,\nit is the classical tradition of civic republicanism originating in\nAristotle and embodied in the writings of Machiavelli, Montesquieu,\nJefferson, and Tocqueville. According to this tradition politics finds\nits authentic expression whenever citizens gather together in a public\nspace to deliberate and decide about matters of collective\nconcern. Political activity is valued not because it may lead to\nagreement or to a shared conception of the good, but because it\nenables each citizen to exercise his or her powers of agency, to\ndevelop the capacities for judgment and to attain by concerted action\nsome measure of political efficacy.","\n\nIn what follows, we reconstruct Arendt’s political philosophy\nalong four major themes: (1) her conception of modernity, (2) her\ntheory of action, (3) her theory of judgment, and (4) her conception\nof citizenship."],"section_title":"2. Introduction","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\nIn her major philosophical work, The Human Condition, and in\nsome of the essays collected in Between Past and Future,\nArendt articulated a fairly negative conception of modernity. In these\nwritings Arendt is primarily concerned with the losses incurred as a\nresult of the eclipse of tradition, religion, and authority, but she\noffers a number of illuminating suggestions with respect to the\nresources that the modern age can still provide to address questions\nof meaning, identity, and value.","\n\nFor Arendt modernity is characterized by the loss of the\nworld, by which she means the restriction or elimination of the\npublic sphere of action and speech in favor of the private world of\nintrospection and the private pursuit of economic interests. Modernity\nis the age of mass society, of the rise of the social out of\na previous distinction between the public and the private, and of the\nvictory of animal laborans over homo faber and the\nclassical conception of man as zoon politikon. Modernity is\nthe age of bureaucratic administration and anonymous labor, rather\nthan politics and action, of elite domination and the manipulation of\npublic opinion. It is the age when totalitarian forms of government,\nsuch as Nazism and Stalinism, have emerged as a result of the\ninstitutionalization of terror and violence. It is the age where\nhistory as a “natural process” has replaced history as a\nfabric of actions and events, where homogeneity and conformity have\nreplaced plurality and freedom, and where isolation and loneliness\nhave eroded human solidarity and all spontaneous forms of living\ntogether. Modernity is the age where the past no longer carries any\ncertainty of evaluation, where individuals, having lost their\ntraditional standards and values, must search for new grounds of human\ncommunity as such.","\n\nThis is Arendt’s vision of modernity, a vision which, at first sight,\nappears quite stark and unredeeming. It is worth pointing out,\nhowever, that Arendt’s negative appraisal of modernity was shaped by\nher experience of totalitarianism in the twentieth century, and that\nher work provides a number of important insights that may help us to\naddress certain problematic features of the modern age. In her\npolitical writings, and especially in The Origins of\nTotalitarianism, Arendt claimed that the phenomenon of\ntotalitarianism has broken the continuity of Occidental history, and\nhas rendered meaningless most of our moral and political categories.\nThe break in our tradition has become irrevocable after the tragic\nevents of the twentieth century and the triumph of totalitarian\nmovements East and West. In the form of Stalinism and Nazism,\ntotalitarianism has exploded the established categories of political\nthought and the accepted standards of moral judgment, and has thereby\nbroken the continuity of our history. Faced with the tragic events of\nthe Holocaust and the Gulag, we can no longer go back to traditional\nconcepts and values, so as to explain the unprecedented by means of\nprecedents, or to understand the monstrous by means of the familiar.\nThe burden of our time must be faced without the aid of tradition, or\nas Arendt once put it, “without a bannister” (RPW, 336).\nOur inherited concepts and criteria for judgment have been dissolved\nunder the impact of modern political events, and the task now is to\nre-establish the meaning of the past outside the framework of any\ntradition, since none have retained their original validity. It is the\npast, then, and not tradition, that Arendt attempts to preserve from\nthe rupture in modern time-consciousness. Only by reappropriating the\npast by means of what Arendt called “the deadly impact of new\nthoughts” (MDT, 201) can we hope to restore meaning to the\npresent and throw some light on the contemporary situation.","\n\nThe hermeneutic strategy that Arendt employed to re-establish a link\nwith the past is indebted to both Walter Benjamin and Martin\nHeidegger. From Benjamin she took the idea of a fragmentary\nhistoriography, one that seeks to identify the moments of rupture,\ndisplacement and dislocation in history. Such fragmentary\nhistoriography enables one to recover the lost potentials of the past\nin the hope that they may find actualization in the present. From\nHeidegger she took the idea of a deconstructive reading of the Western\nphilosophical tradition, one that seeks to uncover the original\nmeaning of our categories and to liberate them from the distorting\nincrustations of tradition. Such deconstructive hermeneutics enables\none to recover those primordial experiences (Urphaenomene)\nwhich have been occluded or forgotten by the philosophical tradition,\nand thereby to recover the lost origins of our philosophical concepts\nand categories.","\n\nBy relying on these two hermeneutic strategies Arendt hopes to redeem\nfrom the past its lost or “forgotten treasure,” that is,\nthose fragments from the past that might still be of significance to\nus. In her view it is no longer possible, after the collapse of\ntradition, to save the past as a whole; the task, rather, is to redeem\nfrom oblivion those elements of the past that are still able to\nilluminate our situation. To re-establish a linkage with the past is\nnot an antiquarian exercise; on the contrary, without the critical\nreappropriation of the past our temporal horizon becomes disrupted,\nour experience precarious, and our identity more fragile. In Arendt’s\nview, then, it is necessary to redeem from the past those moments\nworth preserving, to save those fragments from past treasures that are\nsignificant for us. Only by means of this critical reappropriation can\nwe discover the past anew, endow it with relevance and meaning for the\npresent, and make it a source of inspiration for the future.","\n\nThis critical reappropriation is facilitated, in part, by the fact\nthat after the rupture in modern time-consciousness the past may\n“open up to us with unexpected freshness and tell us things no\none has yet had ears to hear” (BPF, 94). The breakdown of\ntradition may in fact provide the great chance to look upon the past\n“with eyes undistorted by any tradition, with a directness which\nhas disappeared from Occidental reading and hearing ever since Roman\ncivilization submitted to the authority of Greek thought” (BPF,\n28–9).","\n\nArendt’s return to the original experience of the Greek polis\nrepresents, in this sense, an attempt to break the fetters of a\nworn-out tradition and to rediscover a past over which tradition has\nno longer a claim. Against tradition Arendt sets the criterion of\ngenuineness, against the authoritative that which is forgotten,\nconcealed, or displaced at the margins of history. Only by operating\nagainst the grain of traditionalism and the claims of conventional\nhistoriography can the past be made meaningful again, provide sources\nof illumination for the present, and yield its treasures to those who\nsearch for them with “new thoughts” and saving acts of\nremembrance.","\n\nArendt articulates her conception of modernity around a number of key\nfeatures: these are world alienation, earth\nalienation, the rise of the social, and the victory of\nanimal laborans. World alienation refers to the loss of an\nintersubjectively constituted world of experience and action by means\nof which we establish our self-identity and an adequate sense of\nreality. Earth alienation refers to the attempt to escape from the\nconfines of the earth; spurred by modern science and technology, we\nhave searched for ways to overcome our earth-bound condition by\nsetting out on the exploration of space, by attempting to recreate\nlife under laboratory conditions, and by trying to extend our given\nlife-span. The rise of the social refers to the expansion of the\nmarket economy from the early modern period and the ever increasing\naccumulation of capital and social wealth. With the rise of the social\neverything has become an object of production and consumption, of\nacquisition and exchange; moreover, its constant expansion has\nresulted in the blurring of the distinction between the private and\nthe public. The victory of animal laborans refers to the\ntriumph of the values of labor over those of homo faber and\nof man as zoon politikon. All the values characteristic of\nthe world of fabrication — permanence, stability, durability\n— as well as those characteristic of the world of action and\nspeech — freedom, plurality, solidarity — are sacrificed\nin favor of the values of life, productivity and abundance.","\n\nArendt identifies two main stages in the emergence of modernity: the\nfirst, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, corresponds to\nworld alienation and the rise of the social, the second, from the\nbeginning of the twentieth century, corresponds to earth alienation and\nthe victory of animal laborans. She also identifies a number\nof causes: the discovery of America and the corresponding shrinking of\nthe earth, the waves of expropriation started during the Reformation,\nthe invention of the telescope challenging the adequacy of the senses,\nthe rise of modern science and philosophy and subsequently of a\nconception of man as part of a process of Nature and History, and the\nexpansion of the realm of the economy, of the production and\naccumulation of social wealth.","\n\nArendt’s interpretation of modernity can be criticized on a\nnumber of grounds. We focus attention here on two categories employed\nby Arendt, those of nature, and the social. With\nrespect to the category of nature, Arendt oscillates between two\ncontrasting accounts. According to the first account, the modern age,\nby elevating labor, the most natural of human activities, to the\nhighest position within the vita activa, has brought us too\nclose to nature. Instead of building and preserving the human artifice\nand creating public spaces for action and deliberation, we are reduced\nto engage in the activity of sheer survival and in the production of\nthings that are by definition perishable. According to the second\naccount, however, the modern age is characterized by a growing\nartificiality, by the rejection of anything that is not\nman-made. Arendt cites the fact that natural processes, including that\nof life itself, have been recreated artificially by means of\nscientific experiment, that our natural environment has been\nextensively transformed and in some instances entirely replaced by\ntechnology, and that we have searched for ways to overcome our natural\ncondition as earth-bound creatures by setting out on the exploration\nof space and envisaging the possibility of inhabiting other\nplanets. All this leads to a situation where nothing around us will be\na naturally given event, object, or process, but will instead be the\nproduct of our instruments and the will to refashion the world in our\nimage.","\n\nThese two accounts are difficult to reconcile, since in the former we\nhave nature intruding upon and even destroying the human artifice,\nwhile in the latter we have art (techne) expanding upon and\nreplacing everything natural or merely given. The result is to endow\nnature with an ambiguous status, since in the former case the victory\nof animal laborans indicates our subjection to natural\nprocesses, while in the latter case the expansion of scientific\nknowledge and of technological mastery indicates the overcoming of all\nnatural limits. The modern world would thus appear to be too natural\nand too artificial, too much under the dominance of labor and the\nlife-process of the species, as well as too much under the dominance\nof techne.","\n\nWith respect to the second category, that of the social, Arendt was\nunable to account for certain important features of the modern\nworld. Arendt identifies the social with all those activities formerly\nrestricted to the private sphere of the household and having to do\nwith the necessities of life. Her claim is that, with the tremendous\nexpansion of the economy from the end of the eighteenth century, all\nsuch activities have taken over the public realm and transformed it\ninto a sphere for the satisfaction of our material needs. Society has\nthus invaded and conquered the public realm, turning it into a\nfunction of what previously were private needs and concerns, and has\nthereby destroyed the boundary separating the public and the\nprivate. Arendt also claims that with the expansion of the social\nrealm the tripartite division of human activities has been undermined\nto the point of becoming meaningless. In her view, once the social\nrealm has established its monopoly, the distinction between labor,\nwork and action is lost, since every effort is now expended on\nreproducing our material conditions of existence. Obsessed with life,\nproductivity, and consumption, we have turned into a society of\nlaborers and jobholders who no longer appreciate the values associated\nwith work, nor those associated with action.","\n\nFrom this brief account it is clear that Arendt’s concept of the\nsocial plays a crucial role in her assessment of modernity. However\nsome have argued that this may have led her to a series of\nquestionable judgments:"],"section_title":"3. Arendt’s Conception of Modernity","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\nArendt’s theory of action and her revival of the ancient notion of\npraxis represent one of the most original contributions to\ntwentieth century political thought. By distinguishing action\n(praxis) from fabrication (poiesis), by linking it\nto freedom and plurality, and by showing its connection to speech and\nremembrance, Arendt is able to articulate a conception of politics in\nwhich questions of meaning and identity can be addressed in a fresh\nand original manner. Moreover, by viewing action as a mode of human\ntogetherness, Arendt is able to develop a conception of participatory\ndemocracy which stands in direct contrast to the bureaucratized and\nelitist forms of politics so characteristic of the modern epoch.","\n\nIn what follows, we focus on some of the key components of\nArendt’s theory of action, such as freedom, plurality and\ndisclosure. We then examine the links between action and narrative,\nthe importance of remembrance, and of what may be called\n“communities of memory.” We then show the connection\nbetween action, power and the space of appearance. Lastly, we look at\nthe remedies for the unpredictability and irreversibility of action,\nnamely, the power of promise and the power to forgive."],"section_title":"4. Arendt’s Theory of Action","subsections":[{"content":["\n\nAction, the only activity that goes on directly between men without\nthe intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human\ncondition of plurality … this plurality is specifically the\ncondition — not only the conditio sine qua non, but the\nconditio per quam — of all political life. (HC,\n7)","\n\nFor Arendt, action is one of the fundamental categories of the human\ncondition and constitutes the highest realization of the vita\nactiva. Arendt analyzes the vita activa via three\ncategories which correspond to the three fundamental activities of our\nbeing-in-the-world: labor, work, and action. Labor is the activity\nwhich is tied to the human condition of life, work the activity which\nis tied to the condition of worldliness, and action the activity tied\nto the condition of plurality. For Arendt each activity is autonomous,\nin the sense of having its own distinctive principles and of being\njudged by different criteria. Labor is judged by its ability to\nsustain human life, to cater to our biological needs of consumption\nand reproduction, work is judged by its ability to build and maintain\na world fit for human use, and action is judged by its ability to\ndisclose the identity of the agent, to affirm the reality of the\nworld, and to actualize our capacity for freedom.","\n\nAlthough Arendt considers the three activities of labor, work and\naction equally necessary to a complete human life, in the sense that\neach contributes in its distinctive way to the realization of our\nhuman capacities, it is clear from her writings that she takes action\nto be the differentia specifica of human beings, that which\ndistinguishes them from both the life of animals (who are similar to\nus insofar as they need to labor to sustain and reproduce themselves)\nand the life of the gods (with whom we share, intermittently, the\nactivity of contemplation). In this respect the categories of labor\nand work, while significant in themselves, must be seen as\ncounterpoints to the category of action, helping to differentiate and\nhighlight the place of action within the order of the vita\nactiva.","\n\nThe two central features of action are freedom and\nplurality. By freedom Arendt does not mean the\nability to choose among a set of possible alternatives (the freedom of\nchoice so dear to the liberal tradition) or the faculty of liberum\narbitrium which, according to Christian doctrine, was given to us\nby God. Rather, by freedom Arendt means the capacity to begin, to\nstart something new, to do the unexpected, with which all human beings\nare endowed by virtue of being born. Action as the realization of\nfreedom is therefore rooted in natality, in the fact that\neach birth represents a new beginning and the introduction of novelty\nin the world.","\n\nTo be sure, Arendt recognizes that all activities are in some way\nrelated to the phenomenon of natality, since both labor and work are\nnecessary to create and preserve a world into which new human beings\nare constantly born. However, of the three activities, action is the\none most closely connected with natality, because by acting\nindividuals re-enact the miracle of beginning inherent in their\nbirth. For Arendt, the beginning that each of us represents by virtue\nof being born is actualized every time we act, that is, every time we\nbegin something new. As she puts it: “the new beginning inherent\nin birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer\npossesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting\n” (HC, 9).","\n\nArendt also stresses the fact that since action as beginning is rooted\nin natality, since it is the actualization of freedom, it carries with\nit the capacity to perform miracles, that is, to introduce what is\ntotally unexpected. “It is in the nature of beginning”\n— she claims — “that something new is started which\ncannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This\ncharacter of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings\n… The fact that man is capable of action means that the\nunexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what\nis infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each\nman is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes\ninto the world ” (HC, 177–8).","\n\nThe birth of every individual is thus the promise of a new beginning:\nto act means to be able to disclose one’s self and to do the\nunanticipated; and it is entirely in keeping with this conception that\nmost of the concrete examples of action in the modern age that Arendt\ndiscusses are cases of revolutions and popular uprisings. Her claim is\nthat “revolutions are the only political events which confront\nus directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning,” (OR,\n21) since they represent the attempt to found a new political space, a\nspace where freedom can appear as a worldly reality. The favorite\nexample for Arendt is the American Revolution, because there the act\nof foundation took the form of a constitution of liberty. Her other\nexamples are the revolutionary clubs of the French Revolution, the\nParis Commune of 1871, the creation of Soviets during the Russian\nRevolution, the French Resistance to Hitler in the Second World War,\nand the Hungarian revolt of 1956. In all these cases individual men\nand women had the courage to interrupt their routine activities, to\nstep forward from their private lives in order to create a public\nspace where freedom could appear, and to act in such a way that the\nmemory of their deeds could become a source of inspiration for the\nfuture. In doing so, according to Arendt, they rediscovered the truth\nknown to the ancient Greeks that action is the supreme blessing of\nhuman life, that which bestows significance to the lives of\nindividuals.","\n\nIn the book On Revolution Arendt devotes much attention to\nthe rediscovery of this truth by those who participated in the\nAmerican Revolution. In her view the Founding Fathers, although they\nmight have pretended that they longed for private life and engaged in\npolitics only out of a sense of duty, made clear in their letters and\nrecollections that they had discovered unexpected delights in action\nand had acquired a taste for public freedom and for earning\ndistinction among their peers.","\n\nPlurality, to which we may now turn, is the other\ncentral feature of action. For if to act means to take the initiative,\nto introduce the novum and the unexpected into the world, it\nalso means that it is not something that can be done in isolation from\nothers, that is, independently of the presence of a plurality of\nactors who from their different perspectives can judge the quality of\nwhat is being enacted. In this respect action needs plurality in the\nsame way that performance artists need an audience; without the\npresence and acknowledgment of others, action would cease to be a\nmeaningful activity. Action, to the extent that it requires appearing\nin public, making oneself known through words and deeds, and eliciting\nthe consent of others, can only exist in a context defined by\nplurality.","\n\nArendt establishes the connection between action and plurality by\nmeans of an anthropological argument. In her view just as\nlife is the condition that corresponds to the activity of\nlabor and worldliness the condition that corresponds to the\nactivity of work, so plurality is the condition that\ncorresponds to action. She defines plurality as “the fact that\nmen, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world,” and says\nthat it is the condition of human action “because we are all the\nsame, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as\nanyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live ” (HC,\n7–8). Plurality thus refers both to equality and\ndistinction, to the fact that all human beings belong to the\nsame species and are sufficiently alike to understand one another, but\nyet no two of them are ever interchangeable, since each of them is an\nindividual endowed with a unique biography and perspective on the\nworld.","\n\nIt is by virtue of plurality that each of us is capable of acting and\nrelating to others in ways that are unique and distinctive, and in so\ndoing of contributing to a network of actions and relationships that\nis infinitely complex and unpredictable. This network of actions is\nwhat makes up the realm of human affairs, that space where individuals\nrelate directly without the intermediary of things or matter —\nthat is, through language. Let us examine briefly this connection\nbetween action and language.","\n In The Human Condition Arendt stresses repeatedly that\naction is primarily symbolic in character and that the web of human\nrelationships is sustained by communicative interaction (HC,\n178–9, 184–6, 199–200). We may formulate it as\nfollows. Action entails speech: by means of language we are\nable to articulate the meaning of our actions and to coordinate the\nactions of a plurality of agents. Conversely, speech entails\naction, not only in the sense that speech itself is a form of\naction, or that most acts are performed in the manner of speech, but\nin the sense that action is often the means whereby we check the\nsincerity of the speaker. Thus, just as action without speech runs the\nrisk of being meaningless and would be impossible to coordinate with\nthe actions of others, so speech without action would lack one of the\nmeans by which we may confirm the veracity of the speaker. As we shall\nsee, this link between action and speech is central to Arendt’s\ncharacterization of power, that potential which springs up between\npeople when they act “in concert,” and which is actualized\n“only where word and deed have not parted company, where words\nare not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil\nintentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to\nviolate and destroy but to establish relations and create new\nrealities ” (HC, 200)."],"subsection_title":"4.1 Action, Freedom, and Plurality"},{"content":["\n\nLet us now turn to an examination of the disclosing power of action\nand speech. In the opening section of the chapter on action in The\nHuman Condition Arendt discusses one of its central functions,\nnamely, the disclosure of the identity of the agent. In action and\nspeech, she maintains, individuals reveal themselves as the unique\nindividuals they are, disclose to the world their distinct\npersonalities. In terms of Arendt’s distinction, they reveal\n“who” they are as distinct to “what” they are\n— the latter referring to individual abilities and talents, as well as\ndeficiencies and shortcomings, which are traits all human beings\nshare. Neither labor nor work enable individuals to disclose their\nidentities, to reveal “who” they are as distinct from\n“what” they are. In labor the individuality of each person\nis submerged by being bound to a chain of natural necessities, to the\nconstraints imposed by biological survival. When we engage in labor we\ncan only show our sameness, the fact that we all belong to the human\nspecies and must attend to the needs of our bodies. In this sphere we\ndo indeed “behave,” “perform roles,” and\n“fulfill functions,” since we all obey the same\nimperatives. In work there is more scope for individuality, in that\neach work of art or production bears the mark of its maker; but the\nmaker is still subordinate to the end product, both in the sense of\nbeing guided by a model, and in the sense that the product will\ngenerally outlast the maker. Moreover, the end product reveals little\nabout the maker except the fact that he or she was able to make it. It\ndoes not tell us who the creator was, only that he or she had certain\nabilities and talents. It is thus only in action and speech, in\ninteracting with others through words and deeds, that individuals\nreveal who they personally are and can affirm their unique identities.\nAction and speech are in this sense very closely related because both\ncontain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: “Who\nare you?” This disclosure of the “who” is made\npossible by both deeds and words, but of the two it is speech that has\nthe closest affinity to revelation. Without the accompaniment of\nspeech, action would lose its revelatory quality and could no longer\nbe identified with an agent. It would lack, as it were, the conditions\nof ascription of agency."],"subsection_title":"4.2 Action and Speech as Disclosure"},{"content":["\n\nWe have seen, then, how through action and speech individuals are able\nto disclose their identities, to reveal their specific uniqueness\n— their who — as distinct from their personal\nabilities and talents — their what. However, while\nengaging in speech and action individuals can never be sure what kind\nof self they will reveal. Only retrospectively, that is, only through\nthe stories that will arise from their deeds and performances, will\ntheir identity become fully manifest. The function of the storyteller\nis thus crucial not only for the preservation of the doings and\nsayings of actors, but also for the full disclosure of the identity of\nthe actor. The narratives of a storyteller, Arendt claims, “tell\nus more about their subjects, the ‘hero’ in the center of\neach story, than any product of human hands ever tells us about the\nmaster who produced it” (HC, 184). Without a Plato to tell us\nwho Socrates was, what his conversations with fellow Athenian citizens\nwere like, without a Thucydides to set down Pericles’ Funeral\nSpeech and refashion it in his powerful and dramatic style, we would\nnot have known what made Socrates and Pericles such outstanding\npersonalities, nor would the reason for their uniqueness have been\nmade fully manifest. Indeed, it is one of Arendt’s most important\nclaims that the meaning of action itself is dependent upon the\narticulation retrospectively given to it by historians and\nnarrators.","\n\nStorytelling, or the weaving of a narrative out of the actions and\npronouncements of individuals, is partly constitutive of their\nmeaning, because it enables the retrospective articulation of their\nsignificance and import, both for the actors themselves and for the\nspectators. Being absorbed by their immediate aims and concerns, not\naware of the full implications of their actions, actors are often not\nin a position to assess the true significance of their doings, or to\nbe fully aware of their own motives and intentions. Only when action\nhas run a certain course, and its relationship to other actions has\nunfolded, can its significance be made fully manifest and be embodied\nin a narrative, whether of poets or historians. The fact that this\nnarrative is temporally deferred, that it is at some distance from the\nevents it describes, is one of the reasons why it can provide further\ninsight into the motives and aims of the actors.","\n\nNarratives can thus provide a measure of truthfulness and a greater\ndegree of significance to the actions of individuals. But they also\npreserve the memory of deeds through time, and in so doing, they\nenable these deeds to become sources of inspiration for the future,\nthat is, models to be imitated, and, if possible, surpassed. One of\nthe principal drawbacks of action, Arendt maintains, is to be\nextremely fragile, to be subject to the erosion of time and to\nforgetfulness; unlike the products of the activity of work, which\nacquire a measure of permanence by virtue of their sheer facticity,\ndeeds and words do not survive their enactment unless they are\nremembered. Remembrance alone, the retelling of deeds as\nstories, can save the lives and deeds of actors from oblivion and\nfutility. And it is precisely for this reason, Arendt points out, that\nthe Greeks valued poetry and history so highly, because they rescued\nthe glorious (as well as the less glorious) deeds of the past for the\nbenefit of future generations (HC, 192 ff; BPF, 63–75). It was\nthe poet’s and the historian’s political function to preserve the\nmemory of past actions and to make them a source of instruction for\nthe future. Homer was known as the “educator of Hellas,”\nsince he immortalized for all those who came after him the events of\nthe Trojan War; Thucydides, in his History of the Peloponnesian\nWar, told a story of human ambition and folly, of courage and\nunchecked greed, of ruthless struggle and inevitable defeat. In their\nwork the past became a repository of instruction, of actions to be\nemulated as well as deeds to be shunned. Through their narratives the\nfragility and perishability of human action was overcome and made to\noutlast the lives of their doers and the limited life-span of their\ncontemporaries.","\n\nHowever, to be preserved, such narratives needed in turn an audience,\nthat is, a community of hearers who became the transmitters of the\ndeeds that had been immortalized. As Sheldon Wolin has aptly put it,\n“audience is a metaphor for the political community whose nature\nis to be a community of remembrance” (Wolin 1977, 97). In other\nwords, behind the actor stands the storyteller, but behind the\nstoryteller stands a community of memory.","\n\nIt was one of the primary functions of the polis to be\nprecisely such a community, to preserve the words and deeds of its\ncitizens from oblivion and the ravages of time, and thereby to leave a\ntestament for future generations. The Greek polis, beyond\nmaking possible the sharing of words and deeds and multiplying the\noccasions to win immortal fame, was meant to remedy the frailty of\nhuman affairs. It did this by establishing a framework where action\nand speech could be recorded and transformed into stories, where every\ncitizen could be a witness and thereby a potential narrator. What the\npolis established, then, was a space where organized\nremembrance could take place, and where, as a result, the\nmortality of actors and the fragility of human deeds could be\npartially overcome."],"subsection_title":"4.3 Action, Narrative, and Remembrance"},{"content":["\n\nThe metaphor of the polis recurs constantly in the writings\nof Arendt. This is indeed a ‘metaphor’ because in\nemploying this term Arendt is not simply referring to the political\ninstitutions of the Greek city-states, bounded as they were to their\ntime and circumstance, but to all those instances in history where a\npublic realm of action and speech was set up among a community of free\nand equal citizens. “The polis, properly speaking, is\nnot the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of\nthe people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its\ntrue space lies between people living together for this purpose, no\nmatter where they happen to be” (HC, 198). Thus the famous\nmotto: “Wherever you go, you will be a polis”\nexpressed the conviction among the Greek colonists that the kind of\npolitical association they had set up originally could be reproduced\nin their new settlements, that the space created by the “sharing\nof words and deeds” could find its proper location almost\nanywhere.","\n\nFor Arendt, therefore, the polis stands for the\nspace of appearance, for that space “where I\nappear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely\nlike other living or inanimate things, but to make their appearance\nexplicitly.” Such public space of appearance can be always\nrecreated anew wherever individuals gather together politically, that\nis, “wherever men are together in the manner of speech and\naction” (HC, 198–9). However, since it is a creation of action,\nthis space of appearance is highly fragile and exists only when\nactualized through the performance of deeds or the utterance of words.\nIts peculiarity, as Arendt says, is that “unlike the spaces which\nare the work of our hands, it does not survive the actuality of the\nmovement which brought it into being, but disappears not only with the\ndispersal of men — as in the case of great catastrophes when the body\npolitic of a people is destroyed — but with the disappearance or arrest\nof the activities themselves. Wherever people gather together, it is\npotentially there, but only potentially, not necessarily and not\nforever” (HC, 199).","\n\nThe space of appearance must be continually recreated by action; its\nexistence is secured whenever actors gather together for the purpose\nof discussing and deliberating about matters of public concern, and it\ndisappears the moment these activities cease. It is always a potential\nspace that finds its actualization in the actions and speeches of\nindividuals who have come together to undertake some common\nproject. It may arise suddenly, as in the case of revolutions, or it\nmay develop slowly out of the efforts to change some specific piece of\nlegislation or policy. Historically, it has been recreated whenever\npublic spaces of action and deliberation have been set up, from town\nhall meetings to workers’ councils, from demonstrations and\nsit-ins to struggles for justice and equal rights.","\n\nThis capacity to act in concert for a public-political purpose is what\nArendt calls power. Power needs to be distinguished\nfrom strength, force, and violence (CR, 143–55). Unlike\nstrength, it is not the property of an individual, but of a plurality\nof actors joining together for some common political purpose. Unlike\nforce, it is not a natural phenomenon but a human creation, the\noutcome of collective engagement. And unlike violence, it is based not\non coercion but on consent and rational persuasion.","\n\nFor Arendt, power is a sui generis phenomenon, since it is a\nproduct of action and rests entirely on persuasion. It is a product of\naction because it arises out of the concerted activities of a\nplurality of agents, and it rests on persuasion because it consists in\nthe ability to secure the consent of others through unconstrained\ndiscussion and debate. Its only limitation is the existence of other\npeople, but this limitation, she notes, “is not accidental,\nbecause human power corresponds to the condition of plurality to begin\nwith” (HC, 201). It is actualized in all those cases where\naction is undertaken for communicative (rather than strategic or\ninstrumental) purposes, and where speech is employed to disclose our\nintentions and to articulate our motives to others.","\n\nArendt maintains that the legitimacy of power is derived from the\ninitial getting together of people, that is, from the original pact of\nassociation that establishes a political community, and is reaffirmed\nwhenever individuals act in concert through the medium of speech and\npersuasion. For her “power needs no justification, being\ninherent in the very existence of political communities; what it does\nneed is legitimacy ... Power springs up whenever people get together\nand act in concert, but it derives its legitimacy from the initial\ngetting together rather than from any action that then may\nfollow” (CR, 151).","\n\nBeyond appealing to the past, power also relies for its continued\nlegitimacy on the rationally binding commitments that arise out of a\nprocess of free and undistorted communication. Because of this, power\nis highly independent of material factors: it is sustained not by\neconomic, bureaucratic or military means, but by the power of common\nconvictions that result from a process of fair and unconstrained\ndeliberation.","\n\nPower is also not something that can be relied upon at all times or\naccumulated and stored for future use. Rather, it exists only as a\npotential which is actualized when actors gather together for\npolitical action and public deliberation. It is thus closely connected\nto the space of appearance, that public space which arises out of the\nactions and speeches of individuals. Indeed, for Arendt, “power\nis what keeps the public realm, the potential space of appearance\nbetween acting and speaking men, in existence.” Like the space\nof appearance, power is always “a power potential and not an\nunchangeable, measurable and reliable entity like force or strength\n… [it] springs up between men when they act together and\nvanishes the moment they disperse” (HC, 200).","\n\nPower, then, lies at the basis of every political community and is the\nexpression of a potential that is always available to actors. It is\nalso the source of legitimacy of political and governmental\ninstitutions, the means whereby they are transformed and adapted to\nnew circumstances and made to respond to the opinions and needs of the\ncitizens. “It is the people’s support that lends power to the\ninstitutions of a country, and this support is but the continuation of\nthe consent that brought the laws into existence to begin with\n… All political institutions are manifestations and\nmaterializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the\nliving power of the people ceases to uphold them” (CR, 140).","\n\nThe legitimacy of political institutions is dependent on the power,\nthat is, the active consent of the people; and insofar as governments\nmay be viewed as attempts to preserve power for future generations by\ninstitutionalizing it, they require for their vitality the continuing\nsupport and active involvement of all citizens."],"subsection_title":"4.4 Action, Power, and the Space of Appearance"},{"content":["\n\nThe discussion of Arendt’s theory of action so far has stressed\na number of features, chief among which is action’s capacity to\ndisclose the identity of the agent, to enable freedom to appear and be\nactualized as a worldly reality, to create and sustain a public space\nof appearance, and to make possible the generation of power. We have\nalso emphasized the importance of narrative and remembrance, of the\nretrospective articulation of the meaning of action by means of\nstorytelling and its preservation through a community of memory. In\nconclusion, we examine two other features of action,\nnamely, unpredictability and\nirreversibility, and their respective remedies, the\npower of promise and the power to forgive.","\n\nAction is unpredictable because it is a manifestation of freedom, of\nthe capacity to innovate and to alter situations by engaging in them;\nbut also, and primarily, because it takes place within the web of\nhuman relationships, within a context defined by plurality, so that no\nactor can control its final outcome. Each actor sets off processes and\nenters into the inextricable web of actions and events to which all\nother actors also contribute, with the result that the outcome can\nnever be predicted from the intentions of any particular actor. The\nopen and unpredictable nature of action is a consequence of human\nfreedom and plurality: by acting we are free to start processes and\nbring about new events, but no actor has the power to control the\nconsequences of his or her deeds.","\n\nAnother and related reason for the unpredictability of action is that\nits consequences are boundless: every act sets in motion an unlimited\nnumber of actions and reactions which have literally no end. As\nArendt puts it: “The reason why we are never able to foretell\nwith certainty the outcome and end of any action is simply that action\nhas no end” (HC, 233). This is because action “though it\nmay proceed from nowhere, so to speak, acts into a medium where every\naction becomes a chain reaction and where every process is the cause\nof new processes … the smallest act in the most limited\ncircumstances bears the seed of the same boundlessness, because one\ndeed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every\nconstellation” (HC, 190).","\n\nClosely connected to the boundlessness and unpredictability of action\nis its irreversibility. Every action sets off processes which cannot\nbe undone or retrieved in the way, say, we are able to undo a faulty\nproduct of our hands. If one builds an artifact and is not satisfied\nwith it, it can always be destroyed and recreated again. This is\nimpossible where action is concerned, because action always takes\nplace within an already existing web of human relationships, where\nevery action becomes a reaction, every deed a source of future deeds,\nand none of these can be stopped or subsequently undone. The\nconsequences of each act are thus not only unpredictable but also\nirreversible; the processes started by action can neither be\ncontrolled nor be reversed.","\n\nThe remedy which the tradition of Western thought has proposed for the\nunpredictability and irreversibility of action has consisted in\nabstaining from action altogether, in the withdrawal from the sphere\nof interaction with others, in the hope that one’s freedom and\nintegrity could thereby be preserved. Platonism, Stoicism and\nChristianity elevated the sphere of contemplation above the sphere of\naction, precisely because in the former one could be free from the\nentanglements and frustrations of action. Arendt’s proposal, by\ncontrast, is not to turn one’s back on the realm of human affairs, but\nto rely on two faculties inherent in action itself, the faculty of\nforgiving and the faculty of\npromising. These two faculties are closely connected,\nthe former mitigating the irreversibility of action by absolving the\nactor from the unintended consequences of his or her deeds, the latter\nmoderating the uncertainty of its outcome by binding actors to certain\ncourses of action and thereby setting some limit to the\nunpredictability of the future. Both faculties are, in this respect,\nconnected to temporality: from the standpoint of the present\nforgiving looks backward to what has happened and absolves the actor\nfrom what was unintentionally done, while promising looks forward as\nit seeks to establish islands of security in an otherwise uncertain\nand unpredictable future.","\n\nForgiving enables us to come to terms with the past and liberates us\nto some extent from the burden of irreversibility; promising allows us\nto face the future and to set some bounds to its unpredictability. As\nArendt puts it: “Without being forgiven, released from the\nconsequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it\nwere, be confined to one single deed from which we could never\nrecover; we would remain the victims of its consequences\nforever.” On the other hand, “without being bound to the\nfulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our\nidentities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without\ndirection in the darkness of each man’s lonely heart” (HC,\n237). Both faculties, in this sense, depend on plurality, on\nthe presence and acting of others, for no one can forgive himself and\nno one can feel bound by a promise made only to one’s self. At the\nsame time, both faculties are an expression of human freedom,\nsince without the faculty to undo what we have done in the past, and\nwithout the ability to control at least partially the processes we\nhave started, we would be the victims “of an automatic necessity\nbearing all the marks of inexorable laws” (HC, 246)."],"subsection_title":"4.5 Action, Unpredictability, and Irreversibility"}]},{"main_content":["\n\nOne of the most enduring contributions of Arendt’s political\nthought is to be found in her reflections on judgment which were to\noccupy the last years of her life. Together with the theory of action,\nher unfinished theory of judgment represents her central legacy to\ntwentieth century political thought. We now explore some of the key\naspects of her theory of judgment, and will examine its place in the\narchitectonic of Arendt’s theory of politics."],"section_title":"5. Arendt’s Theory of Judgment","subsections":[{"content":["\n\nArendt’s theory of judgment was never developed as systematically or\nextensively as her theory of action. She intended to complete her\nstudy of the life of the mind by devoting the third volume to the\nfaculty of judgment, but was not able to do so because of her untimely\ndeath in 1975. What she left was a number of reflections scattered in\nthe first two volumes on Thinking and Willing (LM,\nvol. I; vol. II), a series of lectures on Kant’s political philosophy\ndelivered at the New School for Social Research in the Fall of 1970\n(LKPP), an essay entitled “Thinking and Moral\nConsiderations” written at the time she was composing The\nLife of the Mind (TMC, 417–46), and two articles included in\nBetween Past and Future where judgment and opinion are\ntreated in relation to culture and taste (“The Crisis in\nCulture” – BPF, 197–226) and with respect to the question\nof truth (“Truth and Politics” – BPF,\n227–64). However, these writings do not present a unified theory of\njudgment but, rather, two distinct models, one based on the standpoint\nof the actor, the other on the standpoint of the spectator, which are\nsomewhat at odds with each other. Arendt’s writings on the theme of\njudgment can be seen to fall into two more or less distinct phases, an\nearly one in which judgment is the faculty of political actors acting\nin the public realm, and a later one in which it is the privilege of\nnon-participating spectators, primarily poets and historians, who seek\nto understand the meaning of the past and to reconcile us to what has\nhappened. In this later formulation Arendt is no longer concerned with\njudging as a feature of political life as such, as the faculty which\nis exercised by actors in order to decide how to act in the public\nrealm, but with judgment as a component in the life of the mind, the\nfaculty through which the privileged spectators can recover meaning\nfrom the past and thereby reconcile themselves to time and,\nretrospectively, to tragedy.","\n\nIn addition to presenting us with two models of judgment which stand\nin tension with each other, Arendt did not clarify the status of\njudgment with respect to two of its philosophical sources, Aristotle\nand Kant. The two conceptions seem to pull in opposite directions, the\nAristotelian toward a concern with the particular, the Kantian toward\na concern with universality and impartiality.","\n It would appear, therefore, that Arendt’s theory of judgment not only\nincorporates two models, the actor’s — judging in order to act\n— and the spectator’s — judging in order to cull meaning\nfrom the past — but that the philosophical sources it draws upon\nare somewhat at odds with each other."],"subsection_title":"5.1 Judgment: Two Models"},{"content":["\n\nArendt’s concern with judgment as the faculty of retrospective\nassessment that allows meaning to be redeemed from the past originated\nin her attempt to come to terms with the twin political tragedies of\nthe twentieth century, Nazism and Stalinism. Faced with the horrors of\nthe extermination camps and what is now termed the Gulag, Arendt\nstrove to understand these phenomena in their own terms, neither\ndeducing them from precedents nor placing them in some overarching\nscheme of historical necessity. This need to come to terms with the\ntraumatic events of the twentieth century, and to understand them in a\nmanner that does not explain them away but faces them in all their\nstarkness and unprecedentedness, is something to which Arendt returns\nagain and again. Our inherited framework for judgment fails us\n“as soon as we try to apply it honestly to the central political\nexperiences of our own time” (UP, 379). Even our ordinary\ncommon-sense judgment is rendered ineffective, since “we are\nliving in a topsy-turvy world, a world where we cannot find our way by\nabiding by the rules of what once was common sense” (UP,\n383).","\n\nThe crisis in understanding is therefore coeval with a crisis in\njudgment, insofar as understanding for Arendt is “so closely\nrelated to and interrelated with judging that one must describe both\nas the subsumption of something particular under a universal\nrule” (UP, 383). Once these rules have lost their validity we\nare no longer able to understand and to judge the particulars, that\nis, we are no longer able to subsume them under our accepted\ncategories of moral and political thought. Arendt, however, does not\nbelieve that the loss of these categories has brought to an end our\ncapacity to judge; on the contrary, since human beings are\ndistinguished by their capacity to begin anew, they are able to\nfashion new categories and to formulate new standards of judgment for\nthe events that have come to pass and for those that may emerge in the\nfuture.","\n\nFor Arendt, therefore, the enormity and unprecedentedness of\ntotalitarianism have not destroyed, strictly speaking, our ability to\njudge; rather, they have destroyed our accepted standards of judgment\nand our conventional categories of interpretation and assessment, be\nthey moral or political. And in this situation the only recourse is to\nappeal to the imagination, which allows us to view things in\ntheir proper perspective and to judge them without the benefit of a\npre-given rule or universal. For Arendt, the imagination enables us to\ncreate the distance which is necessary for an impartial judgment,\nwhile at the same time allowing for the closeness that makes\nunderstanding possible. In this way it makes possible our\nreconciliation with reality, even with the tragic reality of the\ntwentieth century.","\n\nArendt’s participation at the trial of Eichmann in the early sixties\nmade her once more aware of the need to come to terms with a reality\nthat initially defied human comprehension. How could such an ordinary,\nlaw-abiding, and all-too-human individual have committed such\natrocities? The impact of the trial also forced her to raise another\nproblem concerning judgment, namely, whether we are entitled to\npresuppose “an independent human faculty, unsupported by law and\npublic opinion, that judges anew in full spontaneity every deed and\nintent whenever the occasion arises” (PRD, 187)."],"subsection_title":"5.2 Judgment and the Vita Contemplativa"},{"content":["\n\nArendt returned to this issue in The Life of the Mind, a work\nwhich was meant to encompass the three faculties of thinking, willing,\nand judging. In the introduction to the first volume she declared that\nthe immediate impulse to write it came from attending the Eichmann\ntrial in Jerusalem, while the second, equally important motive, was to\nprovide an account of our mental activities that was missing from her\nprevious work on the vita activa. It was Eichmann’s absence\nof thinking, his “thoughtlessness,” that struck her most,\nbecause it was responsible in her view for his inability to judge in\nthose circumstances where judgment was most needed. “It was this\nabsence of thinking,” she wrote, “that awakened my\ninterest. Is evil-doing … possible in default of not just\n‘base motives’ ... but of any motives whatever …\nMight the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from\nwrong, be connected with our faculty of thought?” (LM, vol. I,\n4–5).","\n\nArendt attempted a reply by connecting the activity of thinking to\nthat of judging in a twofold manner. First, thinking — the\nsilent dialogue of me and myself — dissolves our fixed habits of\nthought and the accepted rules of conduct, and thus prepares the way\nfor the activity of judging particulars without the aid of\npre-established universals. It is not that thinking provides judgment\nwith new rules for subsuming the particular under the\nuniversal. Rather, it loosens the grip of the universal over the\nparticular, thereby releasing judgment from ossified categories of\nthought and conventional standards of assessment. It is in times of\nhistorical crisis that thinking ceases to be a marginal affair,\nbecause by undermining all established criteria and values, it\nprepares the individual to judge for him or herself instead of being\ncarried away by the actions and opinions of the majority.","\n\nThe second way in which Arendt connected the activity of thinking with\nthat of judging is by showing that thinking, by actualizing the\ndialogue of me and myself which is given in consciousness, produces\nconscience as a by-product. This conscience, unlike the voice\nof God or what later thinkers called lumen naturale, gives no\npositive prescriptions; it only tells us what not to do, what\nto avoid in our actions and dealings with others, as well as what to\nrepent of. Arendt notes in this context that Socrates’ dictum\n“It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong,” and his\nproposition that “It would be better for me that my lyre or a\nchorus I directed should be out of tune and loud with discord, and\nthat multitudes of men should disagree with me, rather than that I,\nbeing one, should be out of harmony with myself and\ncontradict me,” derive their validity from the idea that there\nis a silent partner within ourselves to whom we render account of our\nactions (TMC, 29–30; 35). What we fear most is the anticipation of the\npresence of this partner (i.e., our conscience) who awaits us at the\nend of the day.","\n\nArendt also remarks that thinking, as the actualization of the\ndifference given in consciousness, “is not a prerogative of the\nfew but an ever-present faculty in everybody; by the same token,\ninability to think is not a failing of the many who lack brain power,\nbut an ever-present possibility for everybody” (LM, vol. I,\n191). For those who do engage in thinking, however, conscience emerges\nas an inevitable by-product. As the side-effect of thinking,\nconscience has its counterpart in judgment as the by-product of the\nliberating activity of thought. If conscience represents the inner\ncheck by which we evaluate our actions, judgment represents the outer\nmanifestation of our capacity to think critically. Both faculties\nrelate to the question of right and wrong, but while conscience\ndirects attention to the self, judgment directs attention to the\nworld. In this respect, judgment makes possible what Arendt calls\n“the manifestation of the wind of thought” in the sphere\nof appearance."],"subsection_title":"5.3 Judgment and the Wind of Thought"},{"content":["\n\nThe foregoing account has explored the way in which Arendt attempted\nto connect the activity of thinking to our capacity to judge. To be\nsure, this connection of thinking and judging seems to operate only in\nemergencies, in those exceptional moments where individuals, faced\nwith the collapse of traditional standards, must come up with new ones\nand judge according to their own autonomous values. There is, however,\na second, more elaborated view of judgment which does not restrict it\nto moments of crisis, but which identifies it with the capacity to\nthink representatively, that is, from the standpoint of everyone\nelse. Arendt called this capacity to think representatively an\n“enlarged mentality,” adopting the same terms that Kant\nemployed in his Third Critique to characterize aesthetic judgment. It\nis to this work that we must now turn our attention, since Arendt\nbased her theory of political judgment on Kant’s aesthetics rather\nthan on his moral philosophy.","\n\nAt first sight this might seem a puzzling choice, since Kant himself\nbased his moral and political philosophy on practical reason and not\non our aesthetic faculties. Arendt, however, claimed that the\nCritique of Judgment contained Kant’s unwritten political\nphilosophy, and that the first part of it, the “Critique of\nAesthetic Judgment,” was the most fruitful basis on which to\nbuild a theory of political judgment, since it dealt with the world of\nappearances from the point of view of the judging spectator and took\nas its starting point the faculty of taste, understood as a faculty of\nconcrete and embodied subjects (BPF, 219–20).","\n\nFor Arendt the capacity to judge is a specifically political ability\ninsofar as it enables individuals to orient themselves in the public\nrealm and to judge the phenomena that are disclosed within it from a\nstandpoint that is relatively detached and impartial. She credits Kant\nwith having dislodged the prejudice that judgments of taste lie\naltogether outside the political realm, since they supposedly concern\nonly aesthetic matters. She believes, in fact, that by linking taste\nto that wider manner of thinking which Kant called an “enlarged\nmentality” the way was opened to a revaluation of judgment as a\nspecific political ability, namely, as the ability to think in the\nplace of everybody else. It is only in Kant’s Critique of\nJudgment that we find a conception of judgment as the ability to\ndeal with particulars in their particularity, that is, without\nsubsuming them under a pre-given universal, but actively searching the\nuniversal out of the particular. Kant formulated this distinction as\nthat between determinant and reflective judgments.\nFor him judgment in general is the faculty of thinking the particular\nas contained under the universal. If the universal, (the rule,\nprinciple, or law) is given, then the judgment which subsumes the\nparticular under it is determinant. If, however, only the particular\nis given and the universal has to be found for it, then the judgment\nis reflective. For Kant determinant judgments were cognitive, while\nreflective judgments were non-cognitive. Reflective judgment is seen\nas the capacity to ascend from the particular to the universal without\nthe mediation of determinate concepts given in advance; it is\nreasoning about particulars in their relation to the universal rather\nthan reasoning about universals in their relation to the\nparticular. In the case of aesthetic judgment this means that one can\nunderstand and apply the universal predicate of beauty only through\nexperiencing a particular object that exemplifies it. Thus, upon\nencountering a flower, a unique landscape, or a particular painting, one\nis able to say that it is an example of beauty, that it possesses\n“exemplary validity.”","\n\nFor Arendt this notion of exemplary validity is not restricted to\naesthetic objects or to individuals who exemplified certain virtues.\nRather, she wants to extend this notion to events in the past that\ncarry a meaning beyond their sheer enactment, that is, to events that\ncould be seen as exemplary for those who came after. It is here that\naesthetic judgment joins with the retrospective judgment of the\nhistorian. The American and French Revolutions, the Paris Commune, the\nRussian soviets, the German revolutionary councils of 1918–19, the\nHungarian uprising of 1956, all these events possess the kind of\nexemplary validity that makes them of universal significance, while\nstill retaining their own specificity and uniqueness. Thus, by\nattending to these events in their particularity the historian or\njudging spectator is able to illuminate their universal import and\nthereby preserve them as “examples” for posterity.","\n\nFor Arendt it is the spectators who have the privilege of judging\nimpartially and disinterestedly, and in doing so they exercise two\ncrucial faculties, imagination and common sense.\nImagination is the faculty of representing in one’s mind that which\nhas already appeared to one’s senses. Through the imagination one can\nrepresent objects that are no longer present and thus establish the\ndistance necessary for an impartial judgment. Once this distancing has\noccurred, one is in a position to reflect upon these representations\nfrom a number of different perspectives, and thereby to reach a\njudgment about the proper value of an object.","\n\nThe other faculty that spectators have to appeal to is common sense or\nsensus communis, since without it they could not share their\njudgments or overcome their individual idiosyncrasies. Kant believed\nthat for our judgments to be valid we must transcend our private or\nsubjective conditions in favor of public and intersubjective ones, and\nwe are able to do this by appealing to our community sense, our\nsensus communis.","\n\nThe criterion for judgment, then, is communicability, and the\nstandard for deciding whether our judgments are indeed communicable is\nto see whether they could fit with the sensus communis of\nothers. Arendt points out that the emphasis on the communicability of\njudgments of taste, and the correlative notion of an enlarged\nmentality, link up effortlessly with Kant’s idea of a united mankind\nliving in eternal peace. She argues that “It is by virtue of\nthis idea of mankind, present in every single man, that men are human,\nand they can be called civilized or humane to the extent that this\nidea becomes the principle not only of their judgments but of their\nactions. It is at this point that actor and\nspectator become united; the maxim of the actor and the\nmaxim, the ‘standard,’ according to which the spectator\njudges the spectacle of the world, become one” (LKPP, 75).","\n\nIn her reflections on Kant’s Third Critique Arendt acknowledges the\nlinks between the standpoint of the actor and that of the\nspectator. Let us now examine the way in which judgment operates from\nthe standpoint of the actor."],"subsection_title":"5.4 Judgment and Kant’s Aesthetics"},{"content":["\n\nArendt presented a model of judgment in the essays “The Crisis\nin Culture” and “Truth and Politics” which could be\ncharacterized as far more ‘political’ than the one\npresented so far. In these essays, in fact, she treated judgment as a\nfaculty that enables political actors to decide what courses of action\nto undertake in the public realm, what kind of objectives are most\nappropriate or worth pursuing, as well as who to praise or blame for\npast actions or for the consequences of past decisions. In this model\njudgment is viewed as a specifically political ability,\nnamely, as “the ability to see things not only from one’s own\npoint of view but from the perspective of all those who happen to be\npresent,” and as being “one of the fundamental abilities\nof man as a political being insofar as it enables him to orient\nhimself in the public realm, in the common world” (BPF,\n221). Arendt claims that “the Greeks called this ability [to\njudge] phronesis, or insight, and they considered it the\nprincipal virtue or excellence of the statesman in distinction from\nthe wisdom of the philosopher. The difference between this judging\ninsight and speculative thought lies in that the former has its roots\nin what we usually call common sense, which the latter constantly\ntranscends. Common sense … discloses to us the nature of the\nworld insofar as it is a common world; we owe to it the fact that our\nstrictly private and ‘subjective’ five senses and their\nsensory data can adjust themselves to a non-subjective and\n‘objective’ world which we have in common and share with\nothers. Judging is one, if not the most, important activity in which\nthis sharing-the-world-with-others comes to pass” (BPF,\n221).","\n\nMoreover, in discussing the non-coercive character of judgment, the\nfact that it can only appeal to but never force the agreement of\nothers, she claims that “this ‘wooing’ or persuading\ncorresponds closely to what the Greeks called peithein, the\nconvincing and persuading speech which they regarded as the typically\npolitical form of people talking with one another” (BPF, 222).\nSome commentators have claimed that there is a contradiction in\nArendt’s employment of the Aristotelian notion of phronesis\nalongside Kant’s idea of an “enlarged mentality,” since\nthey supposedly pull in opposite directions, the former toward a\nconcern with the particular, the latter toward universality and\nimpartiality. However, this contradiction is more apparent than real,\nsince Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment is a theory of\nreflective judgment, that is, of those judgments where the\nuniversal is not given but must be searched out of the particular. In\nthis respect the theory of aesthetic judgment to which Arendt appeals\ndoes have close affinities with Aristotle’s notion of\nphronesis: both are concerned with the judgment of\nparticulars qua particulars, not with their subsumption under\nuniversal rules. If a distinction is to be made, it has more to do\nwith the mode of asserting validity: In Aristotle\nphronesis is the privilege of a few experienced individuals\n(the phronimoi) who, over time, have shown themselves to be\nwise in practical matters; the only criterion of validity is their\nexperience and their past record of judiciuos actions. In the case of\njudgments of taste, on the other hand, individuals have to appeal to\nthe judgments and opinions of others, and thus the validity of their\njudgments rests on the consent they can elicit from a community of\ndifferently situated subjects.","\n\nFor Arendt the validity of political judgment depends on our ability\nto think “representatively,” that is, from the standpoint\nof everyone else, so that we are able to look at the world from a\nnumber of different perspectives. And this ability, in turn, can only\nbe acquired and tested in a public forum where individuals have the\nopportunity to exchange their opinions on particular matters and see\nwhether they accord with the opinions of others. In this respect the\nprocess of opinion formation is never a solitary activity; rather, it\nrequires a genuine encounter with different opinions so that a\nparticular issue may be examined from every possible standpoint until,\nas she puts it, “it is flooded and made transparent by the full\nlight of human comprehension” (BPF, 242). Debate and discussion,\nand the capacity to enlarge one’s perspective, are indeed crucial to\nthe formation of opinions that can claim more than subjective\nvalidity; individuals may hold personal opinions on many subject\nmatters, but they can form representative opinions only by\nenlarging their standpoint to incorporate those of others. As Arendt\nsays:","Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by\nconsidering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present\nto my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I\nrepresent them … The more people’s standpoints I have present\nin my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can\nimagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the\nstronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more\nvalid my final conclusions, my opinion. (BPF, 241)","\nOpinions, in fact, are never self-evident. In matters of opinion, but\nnot in matters of truth, “our thinking is truly discursive,\nrunning, as it were, from place to place, from one part of the world\nto another, through all kinds of conflicting views, until it finally\nascends from these particularities to some impartial generality”\n(BPF, 242). In this respect one is never alone while forming an\nopinion; as Arendt notes, “even if I shun all company or am\ncompletely isolated while forming an opinion, I am not simply together\nonly with myself in the solitude of philosophical thought; I remain in\nthis world of universal interdependence, where I can make myself the\nrepresentative of everybody else” (BPF, 242)."],"subsection_title":"5.5 Judgment and the Vita Activa"},{"content":["\n\nThe representative character of judgment and opinion has important\nimplications for the question of validity. Arendt always stressed that\nthe formation of valid opinions requires a public space where\nindividuals can test and purify their views through a process of\nmutual debate and enlightenment. She was, however, quite opposed to\nthe idea that opinions should be measured by the standard of truth, or\nthat debate should be conducted according to strict scientific\nstandards of validity. In her view, truth belongs to the realm of\ncognition, the realm of logic, mathematics and the strict sciences,\nand carries always an element of coercion, since it precludes debate\nand must be accepted by every individual in possession of her rational\nfaculties. Set against the plurality of opinions, truth has a despotic\ncharacter: it compels universal assent, leaves the mind little freedom\nof movement, eliminates the diversity of views and reduces the\nrichness of human discourse. In this respect, truth is anti-political,\nsince by eliminating debate and diversity it eliminates the very\nprinciples of political life. As Arendt writes, “The trouble is\nthat factual truth, like all other truth, peremptorily claims to be\nacknowledged and precludes debate, and debate constitutes the very\nessence of political life. The modes of thought and communication that\ndeal with truth, if seen from the political perspective, are\nnecessarily domineering; they don’t take into account other people’s\nopinions, and taking these into account is the hallmark of all\nstrictly political thinking” (BPF, 241).","\n\nArendt’s defense of opinion is motivated not just by her belief that\ntruth leaves no room for debate or dissent, or for the acknowledgment\nof difference, but also by her conviction that our reasoning faculties\ncan only flourish in a dialogic context. She cites Kant’s remark that\n“the external power that deprives man of the freedom to\ncommunicate his thoughts publicly deprives him at the same time of his\nfreedom to think,” and underlines the fact that for Kant the\nonly guarantee of the correctness of our thinking is that “we\nthink, as it were, in community with others to whom we communicate our\nthoughts as they communicate theirs to us” (BPF, 234–5). She\nalso quotes Madison’s statement that “the reason of man, like\nman himself, is timid and cautious when left alone, and acquires\nfirmness and confidence in proportion to the number with which it is\nassociated” (BPF, 234).","\n\nThe appeal to Kant and Madison is meant to vindicate the power and\ndignity of opinion against those thinkers, from Plato to Hobbes, who\nsaw it as mere illusion, as a confused or inadequate grasp of the\ntruth. For Arendt opinion is not a defective form of knowledge that\nshould be transcended or left behind as soon as one is in possession\nof the truth. Rather, it is a distinct form of knowledge which arises\nout of the collective deliberation of citizens, and which requires the\nuse of the imagination and the capacity to think\n“representatively.” By deliberating in common and engaging\nin “representative thinking” citizens are in fact able to\nform opinions that can claim intersubjective validity. It is important\nto stress that Arendt does not want to dismiss the philosophers’\nattempt to find universal or absolute standards of knowledge and\ncognition, but to check their desire to impose those standards upon\nthe sphere of human affairs, since they would eliminate its plurality\nand essential relativity. The imposition of a single or absolute\nstandard into the domain of praxis would do away with the\nneed to persuade others of the relative merits of an opinion, to\nelicit their consent to a specific proposal, or to obtain their\nagreement with respect to a particular policy. Indeed, for Arendt the\nimposition of such a standard would mean that individuals would no\nlonger be required to exercise their judgment, develop their\nimagination, or cultivate an “enlarged mentality,” since\nthey would no longer need to deliberate in common. Strict\ndemonstration, rather than persuasive argumentation, would then become\nthe only legitimate form of discourse.","\n\nNow, we must be careful not to impute to Arendt the view that truth\nhas no legitimate role to play in politics or in the sphere of human\naffairs. She does indeed assert that “All truths — not\nonly the various kinds of rational truth but also factual truth\n— are opposed to opinion in their mode of asserting\nvalidity” (BPF, 239), since they all carry an element of\ncompulsion. However, she is only preoccupied with the negative\nconsequences of rational truth when applied to the sphere of politics\nand collective deliberation, while she defends the importance of\nfactual truth for the preservation of an accurate account of the past\nand for the very existence of political communities. Factual truth,\nshe writes, “is always related to other people: it concerns\nevents and circumstances in which many are involved; it is established\nby witnesses and depends upon testimony … It is political by\nnature.” It follows, therefore, that “facts and opinions,\nthough they must be kept apart, are not antagonistic to each other;\nthey belong to the same realm. Facts inform opinions, and opinions,\ninspired by different interests and passions, can differ widely and\nstill be legitimate as long as they respect factual truth. Freedom of\nopinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the\nfacts themselves are not in dispute. In other words, factual truth\ninforms political thought just as rational truth informs philosophical\nspeculation” (BPF, 238).","\n\nThe relationship between facts and opinions is thus one of mutual\nentailment: if opinions were not based on correct information and the\nfree access to all relevant facts they could scarcely claim any\nvalidity. And if they were to be based on fantasy, self-deception, or\ndeliberate falsehood, then no possibility of genuine debate and\nargumentation could be sustained. Both factual truth and the general\nhabit of truth-telling are therefore basic to the formation of sound\nopinions and to the flourishing of political debate. Moreover, if the\nrecord of the past were to be destroyed by organized lying, or be\ndistorted by an attempt to rewrite history, political life would be\ndeprived of one of its essential and stabilizing elements. In sum,\nboth factual truth and the practice of truth-telling are essential to\npolitical life. The antagonism for Arendt is between rational\ntruth and well-grounded opinion, since the former does not allow for\ndebate and dissent, while the latter thrives on it. Arendt’s defense\nof opinion must therefore be understood as a defense of political\ndeliberation, and of the role that persuasion and dissuasion play in\nall matters affecting the political community. Against Plato and\nHobbes, who denigrated the role of opinion in political matters,\nArendt reasserts the value and importance of political discourse, of\ndeliberation and persuasion, and thus of a politics that acknowledges\ndifference and the plurality of opinions."],"subsection_title":"5.6 Judgment and Validity"}]},{"main_content":["\n\nIn this last section, we reconstruct Arendt’s conception of\ncitizenship around two themes: (1) the public sphere, and (2)\npolitical agency and collective identity, and to highlight the\ncontribution of Arendt’s conception to a theory of democratic\ncitizenship."],"section_title":"6. Arendt’s Conception of Citizenship","subsections":[{"content":["\n\nFor Arendt the public sphere comprises two distinct but interrelated\ndimensions. The first is the space of appearance, a space of\npolitical freedom and equality which comes into being whenever\ncitizens act in concert through the medium of speech and\npersuasion. The second is the common world, a shared and\npublic world of human artifacts, institutions and settings which\nseparates us from nature and which provides a relatively permanent and\ndurable context for our activities. Both dimensions are essential to\nthe practice of citizenship, the former providing the spaces where it\ncan flourish, the latter providing the stable background from which\npublic spaces of action and deliberation can arise. For Arendt the\nreactivation of citizenship in the modern world depends upon both the\nrecovery of a common, shared world and the creation of numerous spaces\nof appearance in which individuals can disclose their identities and\nestablish relations of reciprocity and solidarity.","\n\nThere are three features of the public sphere and of the sphere of\npolitics in general that are central to Arendt’s conception of\ncitizenship. These are, first, its artificial or constructed\nquality; second, its spatial quality; and, third, the\ndistinction between public and private\ninterests.","\n\nAs regards the first feature, Arendt always stressed the artificiality\nof public life and of political activities in general, the fact that\nthey are man-made and constructed rather than natural or given. She\nregarded this artificiality as something to be celebrated rather than\ndeplored. Politics for her was not the result of some natural\npredisposition, or the realization of the inherent traits of human\nnature. Rather, it was a cultural achievement of the first order,\nenabling individuals to transcend the necessities of life and to\nfashion a world within which free political action and discourse could\nflourish.","\n\nThe stress on the artificiality of politics has a number of important\nconsequences. For example, Arendt emphasized that the principle of\npolitical equality does not rest on a theory of natural rights or on\nsome natural condition that precedes the constitution of the political\nrealm. Rather, it is an attribute of citizenship which individuals\nacquire upon entering the public realm and which can be secured only by\ndemocratic political institutions.","\n\nAnother consequence of Arendt’s stress on the artificiality of\npolitical life is evident in her rejection of all neo-romantic appeals\nto the volk and to ethnic identity as the basis for political\ncommunity. She maintained that one’s ethnic, religious, or racial\nidentity was irrelevant to one’s identity as a citizen, and that it\nshould never be made the basis of membership in a political\ncommunity.","\n\nArendt’s emphasis on the formal qualities of citizenship made her\nposition rather distant from those advocates of participation in the\n1960s who saw it in terms of recapturing a sense of intimacy, of\nwarmth and authenticity. For Arendt political participation was\nimportant because it permitted the establishment of relations of\ncivility and solidarity among citizens. She claimed that the ties of\nintimacy and warmth can never become political since they represent\npsychological substitutes for the loss of the common world. The only\ntruly political ties are those of civic friendship and solidarity,\nsince they make political demands and preserve reference to the\nworld. For Arendt, therefore, the danger of trying to recapture the\nsense of intimacy and warmth, of authenticity and communal feelings is\nthat one loses the public values of impartiality, civic friendship,\nand solidarity.","\n\nThe second feature stressed by Arendt has to do with the\nspatial quality of public life, with the fact that political\nactivities are located in a public space where citizens are able to\nmeet one another, exchange their opinions and debate their\ndifferences, and search for some collective solution to their\nproblems. Politics, for Arendt, is a matter of people sharing a common\nworld and a common space of appearance so that public concerns can\nemerge and be articulated from different perspectives. In her view, it\nis not enough to have a collection of private individuals voting\nseparately and anonymously according to their private\nopinions. Rather, these individuals must be able to see and talk to\none another in public, to meet in a public-political space, so that\ntheir differences as well as their commonalities can emerge and become\nthe subject of democratic debate.","\n\nThis notion of a common public space helps us to understand how\npolitical opinions can be formed which are neither reducible to\nprivate, idiosyncratic preferences, on the one hand, nor to a\nunanimous collective opinion, on the other. Arendt herself distrusted\nthe term “public opinion,” since it suggested the mindless\nunanimity of mass society. In her view representative opinions could\narise only when citizens actually confronted one another in a public\nspace, so that they could examine an issue from a number of different\nperspectives, modify their views, and enlarge their standpoint to\nincorporate that of others. Political opinions, she claimed, can never\nbe formed in private; rather, they are formed, tested, and enlarged\nonly within a public context of argumentation and debate.","\n\nAnother implication of Arendt’s stress on the spatial quality of\npolitics has to do with the question of how a collection of distinct\nindividuals can be united to form a political community. For Arendt\nthe unity that may be achieved in a political community is neither the\nresult of religious or ethnic affinity, not the expression of some\ncommon value system. Rather, the unity in question can be attained by\nsharing a public space and a set of political institutions, and\nengaging in the practices and activities which are characteristic of\nthat space and those institutions.","\n\nA further implication of Arendt’s conception of the spatial quality of\npolitics is that since politics is a public activity, one cannot be\npart of it without in some sense being present in a public space. To\nbe engaged in politics means actively participating in the various\npublic forums where the decisions affecting one’s community are\ntaken. Arendt’s insistence on the importance of direct participation\nin politics is thus based on the idea that, since politics is\nsomething that needs a worldly location and can only happen in a\npublic space, then if one is not present in such a space one is simply\nnot engaged in politics.","\n\nThis public or world-centered conception of politics lies also at the\nbasis of the third feature stressed by Arendt, the distinction between\npublic and private interests. According to Arendt,\npolitical activity is not a means to an end, but an end in itself; one\ndoes not engage in political action to promote one’s welfare, but to\nrealize the principles intrinsic to political life, such as freedom,\nequality, justice, and solidarity. In a late essay entitled\n“Public Rights and Private Interests” (PRPI) Arendt\ndiscusses the difference between one’s life as an individual and one’s\nlife as a citizen, between the life spent on one’s own and the life\nspent in common with others. She argues that our public interest as\ncitizens is quite distinct from our private interest as\nindividuals. The public interest is not the sum of private interests,\nnor their highest common denominator, nor even the total of\nenlightened self-interests. In fact, it has little to do with our\nprivate interests, since it concerns the world that lies beyond the\nself, that was there before our birth and that will be there after our\ndeath, a world that finds embodiment in activities and institutions\nwith their own intrinsic purposes which might often be at odds with\nour short-term and private interests. The public interest refers,\ntherefore, to the interests of a public world which we share as\ncitizens and which we can pursue and enjoy only by going beyond our\nprivate self-interest."],"subsection_title":"6.1 Citizenship and the Public Sphere"}]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nHannah Arendt, one of the leading political thinkers of the twentieth\\ncentury, was born in 1906 in Hanover and died in New York in 1975. In\\n1924, after having completed her high school studies, she went to\\nMarburg University to study with Martin Heidegger. The encounter with\\nHeidegger, with whom she had a brief but intense love-affair, had a\\nlasting influence on her thought. After a year of study in Marburg,\\nshe moved to Freiburg University where she spent one semester\\nattending the lectures of Edmund Husserl. In the spring of 1926 she\\nwent to Heidelberg University to study with Karl Jaspers, a\\nphilosopher with whom she established a long-lasting intellectual and\\npersonal friendship. She completed her doctoral dissertation, entitled\\nDer Liebesbegriff bei Augustin (hereafter LA) under Jaspers’s\\nsupervision in 1929. She was forced to flee Germany in 1933 as a\\nresult of Hitler’s rise to power, and after a brief stay in Prague and\\nGeneva she moved to Paris where for six years (1933–39) she worked for\\na number of Jewish refugee organisations. In 1936 she separated from\\nher first husband, Günther Stern, and started to live with\\nHeinrich Blücher, whom she married in 1940. During her stay in\\nParis she continued to work on her biography of Rahel\\nVarnhagen, which was not published until 1957 (hereafter RV). In\\n1941 she was forced to leave France and moved to New York with her\\nhusband and mother. In New York she soon became part of an influential\\ncircle of writers and intellectuals gathered around the journal\\nPartisan Review. During the post-war period she lectured at a\\nnumber of American universities, including Princeton, Berkeley and\\nChicago, but was most closely associated with the New School for\\nSocial Research, where she was a professor of political philosophy\\nuntil her death in 1975. In 1951 she published The Origins of\\nTotalitarianism (hereafter OT), a major study of the Nazi and\\nStalinist regimes that soon became a classic, followed by The\\nHuman Condition in 1958 (hereafter HC), her most important\\nphilosophical work. In 1961 she attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann\\nin Jerusalem as a reporter for The New Yorker magazine, and\\ntwo years later published Eichmann in Jerusalem (hereafter\\nEJ), which caused a deep controversy in Jewish circles. The same year\\nsaw the publication of On Revolution (hereafter OR), a\\ncomparative analysis of the American and French revolutions. A number\\nof important essays were also published during the 1960s and early\\n1970s: a first collection was entitled Between Past and Future\\n(hereafter BPF), a second Men in Dark Times (hereafter MDT),\\nand a third Crises of the Republic (hereafter CR). At the\\ntime of her death in 1975, she had completed the first two volumes on\\nThinking and Willing of her last major philosophical\\nwork, The Life of the Mind, which was published posthumously\\nin 1978 (hereafter LM). The third volume, on Judging, was\\nleft unfinished, but some background material and lecture notes were\\npublished in 1982 under the title Lectures on Kant’s Political\\nPhilosophy (hereafter LKPP).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Biographical Sketch\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nHannah Arendt was one of the seminal political thinkers of the\\ntwentieth century. The power and originality of her thinking was\\nevident in works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism,\\nThe Human Condition, On Revolution and The Life\\nof the Mind. In these works and in numerous essays she grappled\\nwith the most crucial political events of her time, trying to grasp\\ntheir meaning and historical import, and showing how they affected our\\ncategories of moral and political judgment. What was required, in her\\nview, was a new framework that could enable us to come to terms with\\nthe twin horrors of the twentieth century, Nazism and Stalinism. She\\nprovided such framework in her book on totalitarianism, and went on to\\ndevelop a new set of philosophical categories that could illuminate\\nthe human condition and provide a fresh perspective on the nature of\\npolitical life.\",\n \"\\n\\nAlthough some of her works now belong to the classics of the Western\\ntradition of political thought, she has always remained difficult to\\nclassify. Her political philosophy cannot be characterized in terms of\\nthe traditional categories of conservatism, liberalism, and socialism.\\nNor can her thinking be assimilated to the recent revival of\\ncommunitarian political thought, to be found, for example, in the\\nwritings of A. MacIntyre, M. Sandel, C. Taylor and M. Walzer. Her name\\nhas been invoked by a number of critics of the liberal tradition, on\\nthe grounds that she presented a vision of politics that stood in\\nopposition some key liberal principles. There are many strands of\\nArendt’s thought that could justify such a claim, in particular, her\\ncritique of representative democracy, her stress on civic engagement\\nand political deliberation, her separation of morality from politics,\\nand her praise of the revolutionary tradition. However, it would be a\\nmistake to view Arendt as an anti-liberal thinker. Arendt was in fact\\na stern defender of constitutionalism and the rule of law, an advocate\\nof fundamental human rights (among which she included not only the\\nright to life, liberty, and freedom of expression, but also the right\\nto action and to opinion), and a critic of all forms of political\\ncommunity based on traditional ties and customs, as well as those\\nbased on religious, ethnic, or racial identity.\",\n \"\\n\\nArendt’s political thought cannot, in this sense, be identified either\\nwith the liberal tradition or with the claims advanced by a number of\\nits critics. Arendt did not conceive of politics as a means for the\\nsatisfaction of individual preferences, nor as a way to integrate\\nindividuals around a shared conception of the good. Her conception of\\npolitics is based instead on the idea of active citizenship, that is,\\non the value and importance of civic engagement and collective\\ndeliberation about all matters affecting the political community. If\\nthere is a tradition of thought with which Arendt can be identified,\\nit is the classical tradition of civic republicanism originating in\\nAristotle and embodied in the writings of Machiavelli, Montesquieu,\\nJefferson, and Tocqueville. According to this tradition politics finds\\nits authentic expression whenever citizens gather together in a public\\nspace to deliberate and decide about matters of collective\\nconcern. Political activity is valued not because it may lead to\\nagreement or to a shared conception of the good, but because it\\nenables each citizen to exercise his or her powers of agency, to\\ndevelop the capacities for judgment and to attain by concerted action\\nsome measure of political efficacy.\",\n \"\\n\\nIn what follows, we reconstruct Arendt’s political philosophy\\nalong four major themes: (1) her conception of modernity, (2) her\\ntheory of action, (3) her theory of judgment, and (4) her conception\\nof citizenship.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Introduction\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nIn her major philosophical work, The Human Condition, and in\\nsome of the essays collected in Between Past and Future,\\nArendt articulated a fairly negative conception of modernity. In these\\nwritings Arendt is primarily concerned with the losses incurred as a\\nresult of the eclipse of tradition, religion, and authority, but she\\noffers a number of illuminating suggestions with respect to the\\nresources that the modern age can still provide to address questions\\nof meaning, identity, and value.\",\n \"\\n\\nFor Arendt modernity is characterized by the loss of the\\nworld, by which she means the restriction or elimination of the\\npublic sphere of action and speech in favor of the private world of\\nintrospection and the private pursuit of economic interests. Modernity\\nis the age of mass society, of the rise of the social out of\\na previous distinction between the public and the private, and of the\\nvictory of animal laborans over homo faber and the\\nclassical conception of man as zoon politikon. Modernity is\\nthe age of bureaucratic administration and anonymous labor, rather\\nthan politics and action, of elite domination and the manipulation of\\npublic opinion. It is the age when totalitarian forms of government,\\nsuch as Nazism and Stalinism, have emerged as a result of the\\ninstitutionalization of terror and violence. It is the age where\\nhistory as a “natural process” has replaced history as a\\nfabric of actions and events, where homogeneity and conformity have\\nreplaced plurality and freedom, and where isolation and loneliness\\nhave eroded human solidarity and all spontaneous forms of living\\ntogether. Modernity is the age where the past no longer carries any\\ncertainty of evaluation, where individuals, having lost their\\ntraditional standards and values, must search for new grounds of human\\ncommunity as such.\",\n \"\\n\\nThis is Arendt’s vision of modernity, a vision which, at first sight,\\nappears quite stark and unredeeming. It is worth pointing out,\\nhowever, that Arendt’s negative appraisal of modernity was shaped by\\nher experience of totalitarianism in the twentieth century, and that\\nher work provides a number of important insights that may help us to\\naddress certain problematic features of the modern age. In her\\npolitical writings, and especially in The Origins of\\nTotalitarianism, Arendt claimed that the phenomenon of\\ntotalitarianism has broken the continuity of Occidental history, and\\nhas rendered meaningless most of our moral and political categories.\\nThe break in our tradition has become irrevocable after the tragic\\nevents of the twentieth century and the triumph of totalitarian\\nmovements East and West. In the form of Stalinism and Nazism,\\ntotalitarianism has exploded the established categories of political\\nthought and the accepted standards of moral judgment, and has thereby\\nbroken the continuity of our history. Faced with the tragic events of\\nthe Holocaust and the Gulag, we can no longer go back to traditional\\nconcepts and values, so as to explain the unprecedented by means of\\nprecedents, or to understand the monstrous by means of the familiar.\\nThe burden of our time must be faced without the aid of tradition, or\\nas Arendt once put it, “without a bannister” (RPW, 336).\\nOur inherited concepts and criteria for judgment have been dissolved\\nunder the impact of modern political events, and the task now is to\\nre-establish the meaning of the past outside the framework of any\\ntradition, since none have retained their original validity. It is the\\npast, then, and not tradition, that Arendt attempts to preserve from\\nthe rupture in modern time-consciousness. Only by reappropriating the\\npast by means of what Arendt called “the deadly impact of new\\nthoughts” (MDT, 201) can we hope to restore meaning to the\\npresent and throw some light on the contemporary situation.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe hermeneutic strategy that Arendt employed to re-establish a link\\nwith the past is indebted to both Walter Benjamin and Martin\\nHeidegger. From Benjamin she took the idea of a fragmentary\\nhistoriography, one that seeks to identify the moments of rupture,\\ndisplacement and dislocation in history. Such fragmentary\\nhistoriography enables one to recover the lost potentials of the past\\nin the hope that they may find actualization in the present. From\\nHeidegger she took the idea of a deconstructive reading of the Western\\nphilosophical tradition, one that seeks to uncover the original\\nmeaning of our categories and to liberate them from the distorting\\nincrustations of tradition. Such deconstructive hermeneutics enables\\none to recover those primordial experiences (Urphaenomene)\\nwhich have been occluded or forgotten by the philosophical tradition,\\nand thereby to recover the lost origins of our philosophical concepts\\nand categories.\",\n \"\\n\\nBy relying on these two hermeneutic strategies Arendt hopes to redeem\\nfrom the past its lost or “forgotten treasure,” that is,\\nthose fragments from the past that might still be of significance to\\nus. In her view it is no longer possible, after the collapse of\\ntradition, to save the past as a whole; the task, rather, is to redeem\\nfrom oblivion those elements of the past that are still able to\\nilluminate our situation. To re-establish a linkage with the past is\\nnot an antiquarian exercise; on the contrary, without the critical\\nreappropriation of the past our temporal horizon becomes disrupted,\\nour experience precarious, and our identity more fragile. In Arendt’s\\nview, then, it is necessary to redeem from the past those moments\\nworth preserving, to save those fragments from past treasures that are\\nsignificant for us. Only by means of this critical reappropriation can\\nwe discover the past anew, endow it with relevance and meaning for the\\npresent, and make it a source of inspiration for the future.\",\n \"\\n\\nThis critical reappropriation is facilitated, in part, by the fact\\nthat after the rupture in modern time-consciousness the past may\\n“open up to us with unexpected freshness and tell us things no\\none has yet had ears to hear” (BPF, 94). The breakdown of\\ntradition may in fact provide the great chance to look upon the past\\n“with eyes undistorted by any tradition, with a directness which\\nhas disappeared from Occidental reading and hearing ever since Roman\\ncivilization submitted to the authority of Greek thought” (BPF,\\n28–9).\",\n \"\\n\\nArendt’s return to the original experience of the Greek polis\\nrepresents, in this sense, an attempt to break the fetters of a\\nworn-out tradition and to rediscover a past over which tradition has\\nno longer a claim. Against tradition Arendt sets the criterion of\\ngenuineness, against the authoritative that which is forgotten,\\nconcealed, or displaced at the margins of history. Only by operating\\nagainst the grain of traditionalism and the claims of conventional\\nhistoriography can the past be made meaningful again, provide sources\\nof illumination for the present, and yield its treasures to those who\\nsearch for them with “new thoughts” and saving acts of\\nremembrance.\",\n \"\\n\\nArendt articulates her conception of modernity around a number of key\\nfeatures: these are world alienation, earth\\nalienation, the rise of the social, and the victory of\\nanimal laborans. World alienation refers to the loss of an\\nintersubjectively constituted world of experience and action by means\\nof which we establish our self-identity and an adequate sense of\\nreality. Earth alienation refers to the attempt to escape from the\\nconfines of the earth; spurred by modern science and technology, we\\nhave searched for ways to overcome our earth-bound condition by\\nsetting out on the exploration of space, by attempting to recreate\\nlife under laboratory conditions, and by trying to extend our given\\nlife-span. The rise of the social refers to the expansion of the\\nmarket economy from the early modern period and the ever increasing\\naccumulation of capital and social wealth. With the rise of the social\\neverything has become an object of production and consumption, of\\nacquisition and exchange; moreover, its constant expansion has\\nresulted in the blurring of the distinction between the private and\\nthe public. The victory of animal laborans refers to the\\ntriumph of the values of labor over those of homo faber and\\nof man as zoon politikon. All the values characteristic of\\nthe world of fabrication — permanence, stability, durability\\n— as well as those characteristic of the world of action and\\nspeech — freedom, plurality, solidarity — are sacrificed\\nin favor of the values of life, productivity and abundance.\",\n \"\\n\\nArendt identifies two main stages in the emergence of modernity: the\\nfirst, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, corresponds to\\nworld alienation and the rise of the social, the second, from the\\nbeginning of the twentieth century, corresponds to earth alienation and\\nthe victory of animal laborans. She also identifies a number\\nof causes: the discovery of America and the corresponding shrinking of\\nthe earth, the waves of expropriation started during the Reformation,\\nthe invention of the telescope challenging the adequacy of the senses,\\nthe rise of modern science and philosophy and subsequently of a\\nconception of man as part of a process of Nature and History, and the\\nexpansion of the realm of the economy, of the production and\\naccumulation of social wealth.\",\n \"\\n\\nArendt’s interpretation of modernity can be criticized on a\\nnumber of grounds. We focus attention here on two categories employed\\nby Arendt, those of nature, and the social. With\\nrespect to the category of nature, Arendt oscillates between two\\ncontrasting accounts. According to the first account, the modern age,\\nby elevating labor, the most natural of human activities, to the\\nhighest position within the vita activa, has brought us too\\nclose to nature. Instead of building and preserving the human artifice\\nand creating public spaces for action and deliberation, we are reduced\\nto engage in the activity of sheer survival and in the production of\\nthings that are by definition perishable. According to the second\\naccount, however, the modern age is characterized by a growing\\nartificiality, by the rejection of anything that is not\\nman-made. Arendt cites the fact that natural processes, including that\\nof life itself, have been recreated artificially by means of\\nscientific experiment, that our natural environment has been\\nextensively transformed and in some instances entirely replaced by\\ntechnology, and that we have searched for ways to overcome our natural\\ncondition as earth-bound creatures by setting out on the exploration\\nof space and envisaging the possibility of inhabiting other\\nplanets. All this leads to a situation where nothing around us will be\\na naturally given event, object, or process, but will instead be the\\nproduct of our instruments and the will to refashion the world in our\\nimage.\",\n \"\\n\\nThese two accounts are difficult to reconcile, since in the former we\\nhave nature intruding upon and even destroying the human artifice,\\nwhile in the latter we have art (techne) expanding upon and\\nreplacing everything natural or merely given. The result is to endow\\nnature with an ambiguous status, since in the former case the victory\\nof animal laborans indicates our subjection to natural\\nprocesses, while in the latter case the expansion of scientific\\nknowledge and of technological mastery indicates the overcoming of all\\nnatural limits. The modern world would thus appear to be too natural\\nand too artificial, too much under the dominance of labor and the\\nlife-process of the species, as well as too much under the dominance\\nof techne.\",\n \"\\n\\nWith respect to the second category, that of the social, Arendt was\\nunable to account for certain important features of the modern\\nworld. Arendt identifies the social with all those activities formerly\\nrestricted to the private sphere of the household and having to do\\nwith the necessities of life. Her claim is that, with the tremendous\\nexpansion of the economy from the end of the eighteenth century, all\\nsuch activities have taken over the public realm and transformed it\\ninto a sphere for the satisfaction of our material needs. Society has\\nthus invaded and conquered the public realm, turning it into a\\nfunction of what previously were private needs and concerns, and has\\nthereby destroyed the boundary separating the public and the\\nprivate. Arendt also claims that with the expansion of the social\\nrealm the tripartite division of human activities has been undermined\\nto the point of becoming meaningless. In her view, once the social\\nrealm has established its monopoly, the distinction between labor,\\nwork and action is lost, since every effort is now expended on\\nreproducing our material conditions of existence. Obsessed with life,\\nproductivity, and consumption, we have turned into a society of\\nlaborers and jobholders who no longer appreciate the values associated\\nwith work, nor those associated with action.\",\n \"\\n\\nFrom this brief account it is clear that Arendt’s concept of the\\nsocial plays a crucial role in her assessment of modernity. However\\nsome have argued that this may have led her to a series of\\nquestionable judgments:\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Arendt’s Conception of Modernity\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nArendt’s theory of action and her revival of the ancient notion of\\npraxis represent one of the most original contributions to\\ntwentieth century political thought. By distinguishing action\\n(praxis) from fabrication (poiesis), by linking it\\nto freedom and plurality, and by showing its connection to speech and\\nremembrance, Arendt is able to articulate a conception of politics in\\nwhich questions of meaning and identity can be addressed in a fresh\\nand original manner. Moreover, by viewing action as a mode of human\\ntogetherness, Arendt is able to develop a conception of participatory\\ndemocracy which stands in direct contrast to the bureaucratized and\\nelitist forms of politics so characteristic of the modern epoch.\",\n \"\\n\\nIn what follows, we focus on some of the key components of\\nArendt’s theory of action, such as freedom, plurality and\\ndisclosure. We then examine the links between action and narrative,\\nthe importance of remembrance, and of what may be called\\n“communities of memory.” We then show the connection\\nbetween action, power and the space of appearance. Lastly, we look at\\nthe remedies for the unpredictability and irreversibility of action,\\nnamely, the power of promise and the power to forgive.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Arendt’s Theory of Action\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nAction, the only activity that goes on directly between men without\\nthe intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human\\ncondition of plurality … this plurality is specifically the\\ncondition — not only the conditio sine qua non, but the\\nconditio per quam — of all political life. (HC,\\n7)\",\n \"\\n\\nFor Arendt, action is one of the fundamental categories of the human\\ncondition and constitutes the highest realization of the vita\\nactiva. Arendt analyzes the vita activa via three\\ncategories which correspond to the three fundamental activities of our\\nbeing-in-the-world: labor, work, and action. Labor is the activity\\nwhich is tied to the human condition of life, work the activity which\\nis tied to the condition of worldliness, and action the activity tied\\nto the condition of plurality. For Arendt each activity is autonomous,\\nin the sense of having its own distinctive principles and of being\\njudged by different criteria. Labor is judged by its ability to\\nsustain human life, to cater to our biological needs of consumption\\nand reproduction, work is judged by its ability to build and maintain\\na world fit for human use, and action is judged by its ability to\\ndisclose the identity of the agent, to affirm the reality of the\\nworld, and to actualize our capacity for freedom.\",\n \"\\n\\nAlthough Arendt considers the three activities of labor, work and\\naction equally necessary to a complete human life, in the sense that\\neach contributes in its distinctive way to the realization of our\\nhuman capacities, it is clear from her writings that she takes action\\nto be the differentia specifica of human beings, that which\\ndistinguishes them from both the life of animals (who are similar to\\nus insofar as they need to labor to sustain and reproduce themselves)\\nand the life of the gods (with whom we share, intermittently, the\\nactivity of contemplation). In this respect the categories of labor\\nand work, while significant in themselves, must be seen as\\ncounterpoints to the category of action, helping to differentiate and\\nhighlight the place of action within the order of the vita\\nactiva.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe two central features of action are freedom and\\nplurality. By freedom Arendt does not mean the\\nability to choose among a set of possible alternatives (the freedom of\\nchoice so dear to the liberal tradition) or the faculty of liberum\\narbitrium which, according to Christian doctrine, was given to us\\nby God. Rather, by freedom Arendt means the capacity to begin, to\\nstart something new, to do the unexpected, with which all human beings\\nare endowed by virtue of being born. Action as the realization of\\nfreedom is therefore rooted in natality, in the fact that\\neach birth represents a new beginning and the introduction of novelty\\nin the world.\",\n \"\\n\\nTo be sure, Arendt recognizes that all activities are in some way\\nrelated to the phenomenon of natality, since both labor and work are\\nnecessary to create and preserve a world into which new human beings\\nare constantly born. However, of the three activities, action is the\\none most closely connected with natality, because by acting\\nindividuals re-enact the miracle of beginning inherent in their\\nbirth. For Arendt, the beginning that each of us represents by virtue\\nof being born is actualized every time we act, that is, every time we\\nbegin something new. As she puts it: “the new beginning inherent\\nin birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer\\npossesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting\\n” (HC, 9).\",\n \"\\n\\nArendt also stresses the fact that since action as beginning is rooted\\nin natality, since it is the actualization of freedom, it carries with\\nit the capacity to perform miracles, that is, to introduce what is\\ntotally unexpected. “It is in the nature of beginning”\\n— she claims — “that something new is started which\\ncannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This\\ncharacter of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings\\n… The fact that man is capable of action means that the\\nunexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what\\nis infinitely improbable. And this again is possible only because each\\nman is unique, so that with each birth something uniquely new comes\\ninto the world ” (HC, 177–8).\",\n \"\\n\\nThe birth of every individual is thus the promise of a new beginning:\\nto act means to be able to disclose one’s self and to do the\\nunanticipated; and it is entirely in keeping with this conception that\\nmost of the concrete examples of action in the modern age that Arendt\\ndiscusses are cases of revolutions and popular uprisings. Her claim is\\nthat “revolutions are the only political events which confront\\nus directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning,” (OR,\\n21) since they represent the attempt to found a new political space, a\\nspace where freedom can appear as a worldly reality. The favorite\\nexample for Arendt is the American Revolution, because there the act\\nof foundation took the form of a constitution of liberty. Her other\\nexamples are the revolutionary clubs of the French Revolution, the\\nParis Commune of 1871, the creation of Soviets during the Russian\\nRevolution, the French Resistance to Hitler in the Second World War,\\nand the Hungarian revolt of 1956. In all these cases individual men\\nand women had the courage to interrupt their routine activities, to\\nstep forward from their private lives in order to create a public\\nspace where freedom could appear, and to act in such a way that the\\nmemory of their deeds could become a source of inspiration for the\\nfuture. In doing so, according to Arendt, they rediscovered the truth\\nknown to the ancient Greeks that action is the supreme blessing of\\nhuman life, that which bestows significance to the lives of\\nindividuals.\",\n \"\\n\\nIn the book On Revolution Arendt devotes much attention to\\nthe rediscovery of this truth by those who participated in the\\nAmerican Revolution. In her view the Founding Fathers, although they\\nmight have pretended that they longed for private life and engaged in\\npolitics only out of a sense of duty, made clear in their letters and\\nrecollections that they had discovered unexpected delights in action\\nand had acquired a taste for public freedom and for earning\\ndistinction among their peers.\",\n \"\\n\\nPlurality, to which we may now turn, is the other\\ncentral feature of action. For if to act means to take the initiative,\\nto introduce the novum and the unexpected into the world, it\\nalso means that it is not something that can be done in isolation from\\nothers, that is, independently of the presence of a plurality of\\nactors who from their different perspectives can judge the quality of\\nwhat is being enacted. In this respect action needs plurality in the\\nsame way that performance artists need an audience; without the\\npresence and acknowledgment of others, action would cease to be a\\nmeaningful activity. Action, to the extent that it requires appearing\\nin public, making oneself known through words and deeds, and eliciting\\nthe consent of others, can only exist in a context defined by\\nplurality.\",\n \"\\n\\nArendt establishes the connection between action and plurality by\\nmeans of an anthropological argument. In her view just as\\nlife is the condition that corresponds to the activity of\\nlabor and worldliness the condition that corresponds to the\\nactivity of work, so plurality is the condition that\\ncorresponds to action. She defines plurality as “the fact that\\nmen, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world,” and says\\nthat it is the condition of human action “because we are all the\\nsame, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as\\nanyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live ” (HC,\\n7–8). Plurality thus refers both to equality and\\ndistinction, to the fact that all human beings belong to the\\nsame species and are sufficiently alike to understand one another, but\\nyet no two of them are ever interchangeable, since each of them is an\\nindividual endowed with a unique biography and perspective on the\\nworld.\",\n \"\\n\\nIt is by virtue of plurality that each of us is capable of acting and\\nrelating to others in ways that are unique and distinctive, and in so\\ndoing of contributing to a network of actions and relationships that\\nis infinitely complex and unpredictable. This network of actions is\\nwhat makes up the realm of human affairs, that space where individuals\\nrelate directly without the intermediary of things or matter —\\nthat is, through language. Let us examine briefly this connection\\nbetween action and language.\",\n \"\\n In The Human Condition Arendt stresses repeatedly that\\naction is primarily symbolic in character and that the web of human\\nrelationships is sustained by communicative interaction (HC,\\n178–9, 184–6, 199–200). We may formulate it as\\nfollows. Action entails speech: by means of language we are\\nable to articulate the meaning of our actions and to coordinate the\\nactions of a plurality of agents. Conversely, speech entails\\naction, not only in the sense that speech itself is a form of\\naction, or that most acts are performed in the manner of speech, but\\nin the sense that action is often the means whereby we check the\\nsincerity of the speaker. Thus, just as action without speech runs the\\nrisk of being meaningless and would be impossible to coordinate with\\nthe actions of others, so speech without action would lack one of the\\nmeans by which we may confirm the veracity of the speaker. As we shall\\nsee, this link between action and speech is central to Arendt’s\\ncharacterization of power, that potential which springs up between\\npeople when they act “in concert,” and which is actualized\\n“only where word and deed have not parted company, where words\\nare not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil\\nintentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to\\nviolate and destroy but to establish relations and create new\\nrealities ” (HC, 200).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.1 Action, Freedom, and Plurality\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nLet us now turn to an examination of the disclosing power of action\\nand speech. In the opening section of the chapter on action in The\\nHuman Condition Arendt discusses one of its central functions,\\nnamely, the disclosure of the identity of the agent. In action and\\nspeech, she maintains, individuals reveal themselves as the unique\\nindividuals they are, disclose to the world their distinct\\npersonalities. In terms of Arendt’s distinction, they reveal\\n“who” they are as distinct to “what” they are\\n— the latter referring to individual abilities and talents, as well as\\ndeficiencies and shortcomings, which are traits all human beings\\nshare. Neither labor nor work enable individuals to disclose their\\nidentities, to reveal “who” they are as distinct from\\n“what” they are. In labor the individuality of each person\\nis submerged by being bound to a chain of natural necessities, to the\\nconstraints imposed by biological survival. When we engage in labor we\\ncan only show our sameness, the fact that we all belong to the human\\nspecies and must attend to the needs of our bodies. In this sphere we\\ndo indeed “behave,” “perform roles,” and\\n“fulfill functions,” since we all obey the same\\nimperatives. In work there is more scope for individuality, in that\\neach work of art or production bears the mark of its maker; but the\\nmaker is still subordinate to the end product, both in the sense of\\nbeing guided by a model, and in the sense that the product will\\ngenerally outlast the maker. Moreover, the end product reveals little\\nabout the maker except the fact that he or she was able to make it. It\\ndoes not tell us who the creator was, only that he or she had certain\\nabilities and talents. It is thus only in action and speech, in\\ninteracting with others through words and deeds, that individuals\\nreveal who they personally are and can affirm their unique identities.\\nAction and speech are in this sense very closely related because both\\ncontain the answer to the question asked of every newcomer: “Who\\nare you?” This disclosure of the “who” is made\\npossible by both deeds and words, but of the two it is speech that has\\nthe closest affinity to revelation. Without the accompaniment of\\nspeech, action would lose its revelatory quality and could no longer\\nbe identified with an agent. It would lack, as it were, the conditions\\nof ascription of agency.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.2 Action and Speech as Disclosure\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nWe have seen, then, how through action and speech individuals are able\\nto disclose their identities, to reveal their specific uniqueness\\n— their who — as distinct from their personal\\nabilities and talents — their what. However, while\\nengaging in speech and action individuals can never be sure what kind\\nof self they will reveal. Only retrospectively, that is, only through\\nthe stories that will arise from their deeds and performances, will\\ntheir identity become fully manifest. The function of the storyteller\\nis thus crucial not only for the preservation of the doings and\\nsayings of actors, but also for the full disclosure of the identity of\\nthe actor. The narratives of a storyteller, Arendt claims, “tell\\nus more about their subjects, the ‘hero’ in the center of\\neach story, than any product of human hands ever tells us about the\\nmaster who produced it” (HC, 184). Without a Plato to tell us\\nwho Socrates was, what his conversations with fellow Athenian citizens\\nwere like, without a Thucydides to set down Pericles’ Funeral\\nSpeech and refashion it in his powerful and dramatic style, we would\\nnot have known what made Socrates and Pericles such outstanding\\npersonalities, nor would the reason for their uniqueness have been\\nmade fully manifest. Indeed, it is one of Arendt’s most important\\nclaims that the meaning of action itself is dependent upon the\\narticulation retrospectively given to it by historians and\\nnarrators.\",\n \"\\n\\nStorytelling, or the weaving of a narrative out of the actions and\\npronouncements of individuals, is partly constitutive of their\\nmeaning, because it enables the retrospective articulation of their\\nsignificance and import, both for the actors themselves and for the\\nspectators. Being absorbed by their immediate aims and concerns, not\\naware of the full implications of their actions, actors are often not\\nin a position to assess the true significance of their doings, or to\\nbe fully aware of their own motives and intentions. Only when action\\nhas run a certain course, and its relationship to other actions has\\nunfolded, can its significance be made fully manifest and be embodied\\nin a narrative, whether of poets or historians. The fact that this\\nnarrative is temporally deferred, that it is at some distance from the\\nevents it describes, is one of the reasons why it can provide further\\ninsight into the motives and aims of the actors.\",\n \"\\n\\nNarratives can thus provide a measure of truthfulness and a greater\\ndegree of significance to the actions of individuals. But they also\\npreserve the memory of deeds through time, and in so doing, they\\nenable these deeds to become sources of inspiration for the future,\\nthat is, models to be imitated, and, if possible, surpassed. One of\\nthe principal drawbacks of action, Arendt maintains, is to be\\nextremely fragile, to be subject to the erosion of time and to\\nforgetfulness; unlike the products of the activity of work, which\\nacquire a measure of permanence by virtue of their sheer facticity,\\ndeeds and words do not survive their enactment unless they are\\nremembered. Remembrance alone, the retelling of deeds as\\nstories, can save the lives and deeds of actors from oblivion and\\nfutility. And it is precisely for this reason, Arendt points out, that\\nthe Greeks valued poetry and history so highly, because they rescued\\nthe glorious (as well as the less glorious) deeds of the past for the\\nbenefit of future generations (HC, 192 ff; BPF, 63–75). It was\\nthe poet’s and the historian’s political function to preserve the\\nmemory of past actions and to make them a source of instruction for\\nthe future. Homer was known as the “educator of Hellas,”\\nsince he immortalized for all those who came after him the events of\\nthe Trojan War; Thucydides, in his History of the Peloponnesian\\nWar, told a story of human ambition and folly, of courage and\\nunchecked greed, of ruthless struggle and inevitable defeat. In their\\nwork the past became a repository of instruction, of actions to be\\nemulated as well as deeds to be shunned. Through their narratives the\\nfragility and perishability of human action was overcome and made to\\noutlast the lives of their doers and the limited life-span of their\\ncontemporaries.\",\n \"\\n\\nHowever, to be preserved, such narratives needed in turn an audience,\\nthat is, a community of hearers who became the transmitters of the\\ndeeds that had been immortalized. As Sheldon Wolin has aptly put it,\\n“audience is a metaphor for the political community whose nature\\nis to be a community of remembrance” (Wolin 1977, 97). In other\\nwords, behind the actor stands the storyteller, but behind the\\nstoryteller stands a community of memory.\",\n \"\\n\\nIt was one of the primary functions of the polis to be\\nprecisely such a community, to preserve the words and deeds of its\\ncitizens from oblivion and the ravages of time, and thereby to leave a\\ntestament for future generations. The Greek polis, beyond\\nmaking possible the sharing of words and deeds and multiplying the\\noccasions to win immortal fame, was meant to remedy the frailty of\\nhuman affairs. It did this by establishing a framework where action\\nand speech could be recorded and transformed into stories, where every\\ncitizen could be a witness and thereby a potential narrator. What the\\npolis established, then, was a space where organized\\nremembrance could take place, and where, as a result, the\\nmortality of actors and the fragility of human deeds could be\\npartially overcome.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.3 Action, Narrative, and Remembrance\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThe metaphor of the polis recurs constantly in the writings\\nof Arendt. This is indeed a ‘metaphor’ because in\\nemploying this term Arendt is not simply referring to the political\\ninstitutions of the Greek city-states, bounded as they were to their\\ntime and circumstance, but to all those instances in history where a\\npublic realm of action and speech was set up among a community of free\\nand equal citizens. “The polis, properly speaking, is\\nnot the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of\\nthe people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its\\ntrue space lies between people living together for this purpose, no\\nmatter where they happen to be” (HC, 198). Thus the famous\\nmotto: “Wherever you go, you will be a polis”\\nexpressed the conviction among the Greek colonists that the kind of\\npolitical association they had set up originally could be reproduced\\nin their new settlements, that the space created by the “sharing\\nof words and deeds” could find its proper location almost\\nanywhere.\",\n \"\\n\\nFor Arendt, therefore, the polis stands for the\\nspace of appearance, for that space “where I\\nappear to others as others appear to me, where men exist not merely\\nlike other living or inanimate things, but to make their appearance\\nexplicitly.” Such public space of appearance can be always\\nrecreated anew wherever individuals gather together politically, that\\nis, “wherever men are together in the manner of speech and\\naction” (HC, 198–9). However, since it is a creation of action,\\nthis space of appearance is highly fragile and exists only when\\nactualized through the performance of deeds or the utterance of words.\\nIts peculiarity, as Arendt says, is that “unlike the spaces which\\nare the work of our hands, it does not survive the actuality of the\\nmovement which brought it into being, but disappears not only with the\\ndispersal of men — as in the case of great catastrophes when the body\\npolitic of a people is destroyed — but with the disappearance or arrest\\nof the activities themselves. Wherever people gather together, it is\\npotentially there, but only potentially, not necessarily and not\\nforever” (HC, 199).\",\n \"\\n\\nThe space of appearance must be continually recreated by action; its\\nexistence is secured whenever actors gather together for the purpose\\nof discussing and deliberating about matters of public concern, and it\\ndisappears the moment these activities cease. It is always a potential\\nspace that finds its actualization in the actions and speeches of\\nindividuals who have come together to undertake some common\\nproject. It may arise suddenly, as in the case of revolutions, or it\\nmay develop slowly out of the efforts to change some specific piece of\\nlegislation or policy. Historically, it has been recreated whenever\\npublic spaces of action and deliberation have been set up, from town\\nhall meetings to workers’ councils, from demonstrations and\\nsit-ins to struggles for justice and equal rights.\",\n \"\\n\\nThis capacity to act in concert for a public-political purpose is what\\nArendt calls power. Power needs to be distinguished\\nfrom strength, force, and violence (CR, 143–55). Unlike\\nstrength, it is not the property of an individual, but of a plurality\\nof actors joining together for some common political purpose. Unlike\\nforce, it is not a natural phenomenon but a human creation, the\\noutcome of collective engagement. And unlike violence, it is based not\\non coercion but on consent and rational persuasion.\",\n \"\\n\\nFor Arendt, power is a sui generis phenomenon, since it is a\\nproduct of action and rests entirely on persuasion. It is a product of\\naction because it arises out of the concerted activities of a\\nplurality of agents, and it rests on persuasion because it consists in\\nthe ability to secure the consent of others through unconstrained\\ndiscussion and debate. Its only limitation is the existence of other\\npeople, but this limitation, she notes, “is not accidental,\\nbecause human power corresponds to the condition of plurality to begin\\nwith” (HC, 201). It is actualized in all those cases where\\naction is undertaken for communicative (rather than strategic or\\ninstrumental) purposes, and where speech is employed to disclose our\\nintentions and to articulate our motives to others.\",\n \"\\n\\nArendt maintains that the legitimacy of power is derived from the\\ninitial getting together of people, that is, from the original pact of\\nassociation that establishes a political community, and is reaffirmed\\nwhenever individuals act in concert through the medium of speech and\\npersuasion. For her “power needs no justification, being\\ninherent in the very existence of political communities; what it does\\nneed is legitimacy ... Power springs up whenever people get together\\nand act in concert, but it derives its legitimacy from the initial\\ngetting together rather than from any action that then may\\nfollow” (CR, 151).\",\n \"\\n\\nBeyond appealing to the past, power also relies for its continued\\nlegitimacy on the rationally binding commitments that arise out of a\\nprocess of free and undistorted communication. Because of this, power\\nis highly independent of material factors: it is sustained not by\\neconomic, bureaucratic or military means, but by the power of common\\nconvictions that result from a process of fair and unconstrained\\ndeliberation.\",\n \"\\n\\nPower is also not something that can be relied upon at all times or\\naccumulated and stored for future use. Rather, it exists only as a\\npotential which is actualized when actors gather together for\\npolitical action and public deliberation. It is thus closely connected\\nto the space of appearance, that public space which arises out of the\\nactions and speeches of individuals. Indeed, for Arendt, “power\\nis what keeps the public realm, the potential space of appearance\\nbetween acting and speaking men, in existence.” Like the space\\nof appearance, power is always “a power potential and not an\\nunchangeable, measurable and reliable entity like force or strength\\n… [it] springs up between men when they act together and\\nvanishes the moment they disperse” (HC, 200).\",\n \"\\n\\nPower, then, lies at the basis of every political community and is the\\nexpression of a potential that is always available to actors. It is\\nalso the source of legitimacy of political and governmental\\ninstitutions, the means whereby they are transformed and adapted to\\nnew circumstances and made to respond to the opinions and needs of the\\ncitizens. “It is the people’s support that lends power to the\\ninstitutions of a country, and this support is but the continuation of\\nthe consent that brought the laws into existence to begin with\\n… All political institutions are manifestations and\\nmaterializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the\\nliving power of the people ceases to uphold them” (CR, 140).\",\n \"\\n\\nThe legitimacy of political institutions is dependent on the power,\\nthat is, the active consent of the people; and insofar as governments\\nmay be viewed as attempts to preserve power for future generations by\\ninstitutionalizing it, they require for their vitality the continuing\\nsupport and active involvement of all citizens.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.4 Action, Power, and the Space of Appearance\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThe discussion of Arendt’s theory of action so far has stressed\\na number of features, chief among which is action’s capacity to\\ndisclose the identity of the agent, to enable freedom to appear and be\\nactualized as a worldly reality, to create and sustain a public space\\nof appearance, and to make possible the generation of power. We have\\nalso emphasized the importance of narrative and remembrance, of the\\nretrospective articulation of the meaning of action by means of\\nstorytelling and its preservation through a community of memory. In\\nconclusion, we examine two other features of action,\\nnamely, unpredictability and\\nirreversibility, and their respective remedies, the\\npower of promise and the power to forgive.\",\n \"\\n\\nAction is unpredictable because it is a manifestation of freedom, of\\nthe capacity to innovate and to alter situations by engaging in them;\\nbut also, and primarily, because it takes place within the web of\\nhuman relationships, within a context defined by plurality, so that no\\nactor can control its final outcome. Each actor sets off processes and\\nenters into the inextricable web of actions and events to which all\\nother actors also contribute, with the result that the outcome can\\nnever be predicted from the intentions of any particular actor. The\\nopen and unpredictable nature of action is a consequence of human\\nfreedom and plurality: by acting we are free to start processes and\\nbring about new events, but no actor has the power to control the\\nconsequences of his or her deeds.\",\n \"\\n\\nAnother and related reason for the unpredictability of action is that\\nits consequences are boundless: every act sets in motion an unlimited\\nnumber of actions and reactions which have literally no end. As\\nArendt puts it: “The reason why we are never able to foretell\\nwith certainty the outcome and end of any action is simply that action\\nhas no end” (HC, 233). This is because action “though it\\nmay proceed from nowhere, so to speak, acts into a medium where every\\naction becomes a chain reaction and where every process is the cause\\nof new processes … the smallest act in the most limited\\ncircumstances bears the seed of the same boundlessness, because one\\ndeed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every\\nconstellation” (HC, 190).\",\n \"\\n\\nClosely connected to the boundlessness and unpredictability of action\\nis its irreversibility. Every action sets off processes which cannot\\nbe undone or retrieved in the way, say, we are able to undo a faulty\\nproduct of our hands. If one builds an artifact and is not satisfied\\nwith it, it can always be destroyed and recreated again. This is\\nimpossible where action is concerned, because action always takes\\nplace within an already existing web of human relationships, where\\nevery action becomes a reaction, every deed a source of future deeds,\\nand none of these can be stopped or subsequently undone. The\\nconsequences of each act are thus not only unpredictable but also\\nirreversible; the processes started by action can neither be\\ncontrolled nor be reversed.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe remedy which the tradition of Western thought has proposed for the\\nunpredictability and irreversibility of action has consisted in\\nabstaining from action altogether, in the withdrawal from the sphere\\nof interaction with others, in the hope that one’s freedom and\\nintegrity could thereby be preserved. Platonism, Stoicism and\\nChristianity elevated the sphere of contemplation above the sphere of\\naction, precisely because in the former one could be free from the\\nentanglements and frustrations of action. Arendt’s proposal, by\\ncontrast, is not to turn one’s back on the realm of human affairs, but\\nto rely on two faculties inherent in action itself, the faculty of\\nforgiving and the faculty of\\npromising. These two faculties are closely connected,\\nthe former mitigating the irreversibility of action by absolving the\\nactor from the unintended consequences of his or her deeds, the latter\\nmoderating the uncertainty of its outcome by binding actors to certain\\ncourses of action and thereby setting some limit to the\\nunpredictability of the future. Both faculties are, in this respect,\\nconnected to temporality: from the standpoint of the present\\nforgiving looks backward to what has happened and absolves the actor\\nfrom what was unintentionally done, while promising looks forward as\\nit seeks to establish islands of security in an otherwise uncertain\\nand unpredictable future.\",\n \"\\n\\nForgiving enables us to come to terms with the past and liberates us\\nto some extent from the burden of irreversibility; promising allows us\\nto face the future and to set some bounds to its unpredictability. As\\nArendt puts it: “Without being forgiven, released from the\\nconsequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it\\nwere, be confined to one single deed from which we could never\\nrecover; we would remain the victims of its consequences\\nforever.” On the other hand, “without being bound to the\\nfulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our\\nidentities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without\\ndirection in the darkness of each man’s lonely heart” (HC,\\n237). Both faculties, in this sense, depend on plurality, on\\nthe presence and acting of others, for no one can forgive himself and\\nno one can feel bound by a promise made only to one’s self. At the\\nsame time, both faculties are an expression of human freedom,\\nsince without the faculty to undo what we have done in the past, and\\nwithout the ability to control at least partially the processes we\\nhave started, we would be the victims “of an automatic necessity\\nbearing all the marks of inexorable laws” (HC, 246).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.5 Action, Unpredictability, and Irreversibility\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nOne of the most enduring contributions of Arendt’s political\\nthought is to be found in her reflections on judgment which were to\\noccupy the last years of her life. Together with the theory of action,\\nher unfinished theory of judgment represents her central legacy to\\ntwentieth century political thought. We now explore some of the key\\naspects of her theory of judgment, and will examine its place in the\\narchitectonic of Arendt’s theory of politics.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Arendt’s Theory of Judgment\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nArendt’s theory of judgment was never developed as systematically or\\nextensively as her theory of action. She intended to complete her\\nstudy of the life of the mind by devoting the third volume to the\\nfaculty of judgment, but was not able to do so because of her untimely\\ndeath in 1975. What she left was a number of reflections scattered in\\nthe first two volumes on Thinking and Willing (LM,\\nvol. I; vol. II), a series of lectures on Kant’s political philosophy\\ndelivered at the New School for Social Research in the Fall of 1970\\n(LKPP), an essay entitled “Thinking and Moral\\nConsiderations” written at the time she was composing The\\nLife of the Mind (TMC, 417–46), and two articles included in\\nBetween Past and Future where judgment and opinion are\\ntreated in relation to culture and taste (“The Crisis in\\nCulture” – BPF, 197–226) and with respect to the question\\nof truth (“Truth and Politics” – BPF,\\n227–64). However, these writings do not present a unified theory of\\njudgment but, rather, two distinct models, one based on the standpoint\\nof the actor, the other on the standpoint of the spectator, which are\\nsomewhat at odds with each other. Arendt’s writings on the theme of\\njudgment can be seen to fall into two more or less distinct phases, an\\nearly one in which judgment is the faculty of political actors acting\\nin the public realm, and a later one in which it is the privilege of\\nnon-participating spectators, primarily poets and historians, who seek\\nto understand the meaning of the past and to reconcile us to what has\\nhappened. In this later formulation Arendt is no longer concerned with\\njudging as a feature of political life as such, as the faculty which\\nis exercised by actors in order to decide how to act in the public\\nrealm, but with judgment as a component in the life of the mind, the\\nfaculty through which the privileged spectators can recover meaning\\nfrom the past and thereby reconcile themselves to time and,\\nretrospectively, to tragedy.\",\n \"\\n\\nIn addition to presenting us with two models of judgment which stand\\nin tension with each other, Arendt did not clarify the status of\\njudgment with respect to two of its philosophical sources, Aristotle\\nand Kant. The two conceptions seem to pull in opposite directions, the\\nAristotelian toward a concern with the particular, the Kantian toward\\na concern with universality and impartiality.\",\n \"\\n It would appear, therefore, that Arendt’s theory of judgment not only\\nincorporates two models, the actor’s — judging in order to act\\n— and the spectator’s — judging in order to cull meaning\\nfrom the past — but that the philosophical sources it draws upon\\nare somewhat at odds with each other.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.1 Judgment: Two Models\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nArendt’s concern with judgment as the faculty of retrospective\\nassessment that allows meaning to be redeemed from the past originated\\nin her attempt to come to terms with the twin political tragedies of\\nthe twentieth century, Nazism and Stalinism. Faced with the horrors of\\nthe extermination camps and what is now termed the Gulag, Arendt\\nstrove to understand these phenomena in their own terms, neither\\ndeducing them from precedents nor placing them in some overarching\\nscheme of historical necessity. This need to come to terms with the\\ntraumatic events of the twentieth century, and to understand them in a\\nmanner that does not explain them away but faces them in all their\\nstarkness and unprecedentedness, is something to which Arendt returns\\nagain and again. Our inherited framework for judgment fails us\\n“as soon as we try to apply it honestly to the central political\\nexperiences of our own time” (UP, 379). Even our ordinary\\ncommon-sense judgment is rendered ineffective, since “we are\\nliving in a topsy-turvy world, a world where we cannot find our way by\\nabiding by the rules of what once was common sense” (UP,\\n383).\",\n \"\\n\\nThe crisis in understanding is therefore coeval with a crisis in\\njudgment, insofar as understanding for Arendt is “so closely\\nrelated to and interrelated with judging that one must describe both\\nas the subsumption of something particular under a universal\\nrule” (UP, 383). Once these rules have lost their validity we\\nare no longer able to understand and to judge the particulars, that\\nis, we are no longer able to subsume them under our accepted\\ncategories of moral and political thought. Arendt, however, does not\\nbelieve that the loss of these categories has brought to an end our\\ncapacity to judge; on the contrary, since human beings are\\ndistinguished by their capacity to begin anew, they are able to\\nfashion new categories and to formulate new standards of judgment for\\nthe events that have come to pass and for those that may emerge in the\\nfuture.\",\n \"\\n\\nFor Arendt, therefore, the enormity and unprecedentedness of\\ntotalitarianism have not destroyed, strictly speaking, our ability to\\njudge; rather, they have destroyed our accepted standards of judgment\\nand our conventional categories of interpretation and assessment, be\\nthey moral or political. And in this situation the only recourse is to\\nappeal to the imagination, which allows us to view things in\\ntheir proper perspective and to judge them without the benefit of a\\npre-given rule or universal. For Arendt, the imagination enables us to\\ncreate the distance which is necessary for an impartial judgment,\\nwhile at the same time allowing for the closeness that makes\\nunderstanding possible. In this way it makes possible our\\nreconciliation with reality, even with the tragic reality of the\\ntwentieth century.\",\n \"\\n\\nArendt’s participation at the trial of Eichmann in the early sixties\\nmade her once more aware of the need to come to terms with a reality\\nthat initially defied human comprehension. How could such an ordinary,\\nlaw-abiding, and all-too-human individual have committed such\\natrocities? The impact of the trial also forced her to raise another\\nproblem concerning judgment, namely, whether we are entitled to\\npresuppose “an independent human faculty, unsupported by law and\\npublic opinion, that judges anew in full spontaneity every deed and\\nintent whenever the occasion arises” (PRD, 187).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.2 Judgment and the Vita Contemplativa\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nArendt returned to this issue in The Life of the Mind, a work\\nwhich was meant to encompass the three faculties of thinking, willing,\\nand judging. In the introduction to the first volume she declared that\\nthe immediate impulse to write it came from attending the Eichmann\\ntrial in Jerusalem, while the second, equally important motive, was to\\nprovide an account of our mental activities that was missing from her\\nprevious work on the vita activa. It was Eichmann’s absence\\nof thinking, his “thoughtlessness,” that struck her most,\\nbecause it was responsible in her view for his inability to judge in\\nthose circumstances where judgment was most needed. “It was this\\nabsence of thinking,” she wrote, “that awakened my\\ninterest. Is evil-doing … possible in default of not just\\n‘base motives’ ... but of any motives whatever …\\nMight the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from\\nwrong, be connected with our faculty of thought?” (LM, vol. I,\\n4–5).\",\n \"\\n\\nArendt attempted a reply by connecting the activity of thinking to\\nthat of judging in a twofold manner. First, thinking — the\\nsilent dialogue of me and myself — dissolves our fixed habits of\\nthought and the accepted rules of conduct, and thus prepares the way\\nfor the activity of judging particulars without the aid of\\npre-established universals. It is not that thinking provides judgment\\nwith new rules for subsuming the particular under the\\nuniversal. Rather, it loosens the grip of the universal over the\\nparticular, thereby releasing judgment from ossified categories of\\nthought and conventional standards of assessment. It is in times of\\nhistorical crisis that thinking ceases to be a marginal affair,\\nbecause by undermining all established criteria and values, it\\nprepares the individual to judge for him or herself instead of being\\ncarried away by the actions and opinions of the majority.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe second way in which Arendt connected the activity of thinking with\\nthat of judging is by showing that thinking, by actualizing the\\ndialogue of me and myself which is given in consciousness, produces\\nconscience as a by-product. This conscience, unlike the voice\\nof God or what later thinkers called lumen naturale, gives no\\npositive prescriptions; it only tells us what not to do, what\\nto avoid in our actions and dealings with others, as well as what to\\nrepent of. Arendt notes in this context that Socrates’ dictum\\n“It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong,” and his\\nproposition that “It would be better for me that my lyre or a\\nchorus I directed should be out of tune and loud with discord, and\\nthat multitudes of men should disagree with me, rather than that I,\\nbeing one, should be out of harmony with myself and\\ncontradict me,” derive their validity from the idea that there\\nis a silent partner within ourselves to whom we render account of our\\nactions (TMC, 29–30; 35). What we fear most is the anticipation of the\\npresence of this partner (i.e., our conscience) who awaits us at the\\nend of the day.\",\n \"\\n\\nArendt also remarks that thinking, as the actualization of the\\ndifference given in consciousness, “is not a prerogative of the\\nfew but an ever-present faculty in everybody; by the same token,\\ninability to think is not a failing of the many who lack brain power,\\nbut an ever-present possibility for everybody” (LM, vol. I,\\n191). For those who do engage in thinking, however, conscience emerges\\nas an inevitable by-product. As the side-effect of thinking,\\nconscience has its counterpart in judgment as the by-product of the\\nliberating activity of thought. If conscience represents the inner\\ncheck by which we evaluate our actions, judgment represents the outer\\nmanifestation of our capacity to think critically. Both faculties\\nrelate to the question of right and wrong, but while conscience\\ndirects attention to the self, judgment directs attention to the\\nworld. In this respect, judgment makes possible what Arendt calls\\n“the manifestation of the wind of thought” in the sphere\\nof appearance.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.3 Judgment and the Wind of Thought\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThe foregoing account has explored the way in which Arendt attempted\\nto connect the activity of thinking to our capacity to judge. To be\\nsure, this connection of thinking and judging seems to operate only in\\nemergencies, in those exceptional moments where individuals, faced\\nwith the collapse of traditional standards, must come up with new ones\\nand judge according to their own autonomous values. There is, however,\\na second, more elaborated view of judgment which does not restrict it\\nto moments of crisis, but which identifies it with the capacity to\\nthink representatively, that is, from the standpoint of everyone\\nelse. Arendt called this capacity to think representatively an\\n“enlarged mentality,” adopting the same terms that Kant\\nemployed in his Third Critique to characterize aesthetic judgment. It\\nis to this work that we must now turn our attention, since Arendt\\nbased her theory of political judgment on Kant’s aesthetics rather\\nthan on his moral philosophy.\",\n \"\\n\\nAt first sight this might seem a puzzling choice, since Kant himself\\nbased his moral and political philosophy on practical reason and not\\non our aesthetic faculties. Arendt, however, claimed that the\\nCritique of Judgment contained Kant’s unwritten political\\nphilosophy, and that the first part of it, the “Critique of\\nAesthetic Judgment,” was the most fruitful basis on which to\\nbuild a theory of political judgment, since it dealt with the world of\\nappearances from the point of view of the judging spectator and took\\nas its starting point the faculty of taste, understood as a faculty of\\nconcrete and embodied subjects (BPF, 219–20).\",\n \"\\n\\nFor Arendt the capacity to judge is a specifically political ability\\ninsofar as it enables individuals to orient themselves in the public\\nrealm and to judge the phenomena that are disclosed within it from a\\nstandpoint that is relatively detached and impartial. She credits Kant\\nwith having dislodged the prejudice that judgments of taste lie\\naltogether outside the political realm, since they supposedly concern\\nonly aesthetic matters. She believes, in fact, that by linking taste\\nto that wider manner of thinking which Kant called an “enlarged\\nmentality” the way was opened to a revaluation of judgment as a\\nspecific political ability, namely, as the ability to think in the\\nplace of everybody else. It is only in Kant’s Critique of\\nJudgment that we find a conception of judgment as the ability to\\ndeal with particulars in their particularity, that is, without\\nsubsuming them under a pre-given universal, but actively searching the\\nuniversal out of the particular. Kant formulated this distinction as\\nthat between determinant and reflective judgments.\\nFor him judgment in general is the faculty of thinking the particular\\nas contained under the universal. If the universal, (the rule,\\nprinciple, or law) is given, then the judgment which subsumes the\\nparticular under it is determinant. If, however, only the particular\\nis given and the universal has to be found for it, then the judgment\\nis reflective. For Kant determinant judgments were cognitive, while\\nreflective judgments were non-cognitive. Reflective judgment is seen\\nas the capacity to ascend from the particular to the universal without\\nthe mediation of determinate concepts given in advance; it is\\nreasoning about particulars in their relation to the universal rather\\nthan reasoning about universals in their relation to the\\nparticular. In the case of aesthetic judgment this means that one can\\nunderstand and apply the universal predicate of beauty only through\\nexperiencing a particular object that exemplifies it. Thus, upon\\nencountering a flower, a unique landscape, or a particular painting, one\\nis able to say that it is an example of beauty, that it possesses\\n“exemplary validity.”\",\n \"\\n\\nFor Arendt this notion of exemplary validity is not restricted to\\naesthetic objects or to individuals who exemplified certain virtues.\\nRather, she wants to extend this notion to events in the past that\\ncarry a meaning beyond their sheer enactment, that is, to events that\\ncould be seen as exemplary for those who came after. It is here that\\naesthetic judgment joins with the retrospective judgment of the\\nhistorian. The American and French Revolutions, the Paris Commune, the\\nRussian soviets, the German revolutionary councils of 1918–19, the\\nHungarian uprising of 1956, all these events possess the kind of\\nexemplary validity that makes them of universal significance, while\\nstill retaining their own specificity and uniqueness. Thus, by\\nattending to these events in their particularity the historian or\\njudging spectator is able to illuminate their universal import and\\nthereby preserve them as “examples” for posterity.\",\n \"\\n\\nFor Arendt it is the spectators who have the privilege of judging\\nimpartially and disinterestedly, and in doing so they exercise two\\ncrucial faculties, imagination and common sense.\\nImagination is the faculty of representing in one’s mind that which\\nhas already appeared to one’s senses. Through the imagination one can\\nrepresent objects that are no longer present and thus establish the\\ndistance necessary for an impartial judgment. Once this distancing has\\noccurred, one is in a position to reflect upon these representations\\nfrom a number of different perspectives, and thereby to reach a\\njudgment about the proper value of an object.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe other faculty that spectators have to appeal to is common sense or\\nsensus communis, since without it they could not share their\\njudgments or overcome their individual idiosyncrasies. Kant believed\\nthat for our judgments to be valid we must transcend our private or\\nsubjective conditions in favor of public and intersubjective ones, and\\nwe are able to do this by appealing to our community sense, our\\nsensus communis.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe criterion for judgment, then, is communicability, and the\\nstandard for deciding whether our judgments are indeed communicable is\\nto see whether they could fit with the sensus communis of\\nothers. Arendt points out that the emphasis on the communicability of\\njudgments of taste, and the correlative notion of an enlarged\\nmentality, link up effortlessly with Kant’s idea of a united mankind\\nliving in eternal peace. She argues that “It is by virtue of\\nthis idea of mankind, present in every single man, that men are human,\\nand they can be called civilized or humane to the extent that this\\nidea becomes the principle not only of their judgments but of their\\nactions. It is at this point that actor and\\nspectator become united; the maxim of the actor and the\\nmaxim, the ‘standard,’ according to which the spectator\\njudges the spectacle of the world, become one” (LKPP, 75).\",\n \"\\n\\nIn her reflections on Kant’s Third Critique Arendt acknowledges the\\nlinks between the standpoint of the actor and that of the\\nspectator. Let us now examine the way in which judgment operates from\\nthe standpoint of the actor.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.4 Judgment and Kant’s Aesthetics\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nArendt presented a model of judgment in the essays “The Crisis\\nin Culture” and “Truth and Politics” which could be\\ncharacterized as far more ‘political’ than the one\\npresented so far. In these essays, in fact, she treated judgment as a\\nfaculty that enables political actors to decide what courses of action\\nto undertake in the public realm, what kind of objectives are most\\nappropriate or worth pursuing, as well as who to praise or blame for\\npast actions or for the consequences of past decisions. In this model\\njudgment is viewed as a specifically political ability,\\nnamely, as “the ability to see things not only from one’s own\\npoint of view but from the perspective of all those who happen to be\\npresent,” and as being “one of the fundamental abilities\\nof man as a political being insofar as it enables him to orient\\nhimself in the public realm, in the common world” (BPF,\\n221). Arendt claims that “the Greeks called this ability [to\\njudge] phronesis, or insight, and they considered it the\\nprincipal virtue or excellence of the statesman in distinction from\\nthe wisdom of the philosopher. The difference between this judging\\ninsight and speculative thought lies in that the former has its roots\\nin what we usually call common sense, which the latter constantly\\ntranscends. Common sense … discloses to us the nature of the\\nworld insofar as it is a common world; we owe to it the fact that our\\nstrictly private and ‘subjective’ five senses and their\\nsensory data can adjust themselves to a non-subjective and\\n‘objective’ world which we have in common and share with\\nothers. Judging is one, if not the most, important activity in which\\nthis sharing-the-world-with-others comes to pass” (BPF,\\n221).\",\n \"\\n\\nMoreover, in discussing the non-coercive character of judgment, the\\nfact that it can only appeal to but never force the agreement of\\nothers, she claims that “this ‘wooing’ or persuading\\ncorresponds closely to what the Greeks called peithein, the\\nconvincing and persuading speech which they regarded as the typically\\npolitical form of people talking with one another” (BPF, 222).\\nSome commentators have claimed that there is a contradiction in\\nArendt’s employment of the Aristotelian notion of phronesis\\nalongside Kant’s idea of an “enlarged mentality,” since\\nthey supposedly pull in opposite directions, the former toward a\\nconcern with the particular, the latter toward universality and\\nimpartiality. However, this contradiction is more apparent than real,\\nsince Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment is a theory of\\nreflective judgment, that is, of those judgments where the\\nuniversal is not given but must be searched out of the particular. In\\nthis respect the theory of aesthetic judgment to which Arendt appeals\\ndoes have close affinities with Aristotle’s notion of\\nphronesis: both are concerned with the judgment of\\nparticulars qua particulars, not with their subsumption under\\nuniversal rules. If a distinction is to be made, it has more to do\\nwith the mode of asserting validity: In Aristotle\\nphronesis is the privilege of a few experienced individuals\\n(the phronimoi) who, over time, have shown themselves to be\\nwise in practical matters; the only criterion of validity is their\\nexperience and their past record of judiciuos actions. In the case of\\njudgments of taste, on the other hand, individuals have to appeal to\\nthe judgments and opinions of others, and thus the validity of their\\njudgments rests on the consent they can elicit from a community of\\ndifferently situated subjects.\",\n \"\\n\\nFor Arendt the validity of political judgment depends on our ability\\nto think “representatively,” that is, from the standpoint\\nof everyone else, so that we are able to look at the world from a\\nnumber of different perspectives. And this ability, in turn, can only\\nbe acquired and tested in a public forum where individuals have the\\nopportunity to exchange their opinions on particular matters and see\\nwhether they accord with the opinions of others. In this respect the\\nprocess of opinion formation is never a solitary activity; rather, it\\nrequires a genuine encounter with different opinions so that a\\nparticular issue may be examined from every possible standpoint until,\\nas she puts it, “it is flooded and made transparent by the full\\nlight of human comprehension” (BPF, 242). Debate and discussion,\\nand the capacity to enlarge one’s perspective, are indeed crucial to\\nthe formation of opinions that can claim more than subjective\\nvalidity; individuals may hold personal opinions on many subject\\nmatters, but they can form representative opinions only by\\nenlarging their standpoint to incorporate those of others. As Arendt\\nsays:\",\n \"Political thought is representative. I form an opinion by\\nconsidering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present\\nto my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, I\\nrepresent them … The more people’s standpoints I have present\\nin my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can\\nimagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the\\nstronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more\\nvalid my final conclusions, my opinion. (BPF, 241)\",\n \"\\nOpinions, in fact, are never self-evident. In matters of opinion, but\\nnot in matters of truth, “our thinking is truly discursive,\\nrunning, as it were, from place to place, from one part of the world\\nto another, through all kinds of conflicting views, until it finally\\nascends from these particularities to some impartial generality”\\n(BPF, 242). In this respect one is never alone while forming an\\nopinion; as Arendt notes, “even if I shun all company or am\\ncompletely isolated while forming an opinion, I am not simply together\\nonly with myself in the solitude of philosophical thought; I remain in\\nthis world of universal interdependence, where I can make myself the\\nrepresentative of everybody else” (BPF, 242).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.5 Judgment and the Vita Activa\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThe representative character of judgment and opinion has important\\nimplications for the question of validity. Arendt always stressed that\\nthe formation of valid opinions requires a public space where\\nindividuals can test and purify their views through a process of\\nmutual debate and enlightenment. She was, however, quite opposed to\\nthe idea that opinions should be measured by the standard of truth, or\\nthat debate should be conducted according to strict scientific\\nstandards of validity. In her view, truth belongs to the realm of\\ncognition, the realm of logic, mathematics and the strict sciences,\\nand carries always an element of coercion, since it precludes debate\\nand must be accepted by every individual in possession of her rational\\nfaculties. Set against the plurality of opinions, truth has a despotic\\ncharacter: it compels universal assent, leaves the mind little freedom\\nof movement, eliminates the diversity of views and reduces the\\nrichness of human discourse. In this respect, truth is anti-political,\\nsince by eliminating debate and diversity it eliminates the very\\nprinciples of political life. As Arendt writes, “The trouble is\\nthat factual truth, like all other truth, peremptorily claims to be\\nacknowledged and precludes debate, and debate constitutes the very\\nessence of political life. The modes of thought and communication that\\ndeal with truth, if seen from the political perspective, are\\nnecessarily domineering; they don’t take into account other people’s\\nopinions, and taking these into account is the hallmark of all\\nstrictly political thinking” (BPF, 241).\",\n \"\\n\\nArendt’s defense of opinion is motivated not just by her belief that\\ntruth leaves no room for debate or dissent, or for the acknowledgment\\nof difference, but also by her conviction that our reasoning faculties\\ncan only flourish in a dialogic context. She cites Kant’s remark that\\n“the external power that deprives man of the freedom to\\ncommunicate his thoughts publicly deprives him at the same time of his\\nfreedom to think,” and underlines the fact that for Kant the\\nonly guarantee of the correctness of our thinking is that “we\\nthink, as it were, in community with others to whom we communicate our\\nthoughts as they communicate theirs to us” (BPF, 234–5). She\\nalso quotes Madison’s statement that “the reason of man, like\\nman himself, is timid and cautious when left alone, and acquires\\nfirmness and confidence in proportion to the number with which it is\\nassociated” (BPF, 234).\",\n \"\\n\\nThe appeal to Kant and Madison is meant to vindicate the power and\\ndignity of opinion against those thinkers, from Plato to Hobbes, who\\nsaw it as mere illusion, as a confused or inadequate grasp of the\\ntruth. For Arendt opinion is not a defective form of knowledge that\\nshould be transcended or left behind as soon as one is in possession\\nof the truth. Rather, it is a distinct form of knowledge which arises\\nout of the collective deliberation of citizens, and which requires the\\nuse of the imagination and the capacity to think\\n“representatively.” By deliberating in common and engaging\\nin “representative thinking” citizens are in fact able to\\nform opinions that can claim intersubjective validity. It is important\\nto stress that Arendt does not want to dismiss the philosophers’\\nattempt to find universal or absolute standards of knowledge and\\ncognition, but to check their desire to impose those standards upon\\nthe sphere of human affairs, since they would eliminate its plurality\\nand essential relativity. The imposition of a single or absolute\\nstandard into the domain of praxis would do away with the\\nneed to persuade others of the relative merits of an opinion, to\\nelicit their consent to a specific proposal, or to obtain their\\nagreement with respect to a particular policy. Indeed, for Arendt the\\nimposition of such a standard would mean that individuals would no\\nlonger be required to exercise their judgment, develop their\\nimagination, or cultivate an “enlarged mentality,” since\\nthey would no longer need to deliberate in common. Strict\\ndemonstration, rather than persuasive argumentation, would then become\\nthe only legitimate form of discourse.\",\n \"\\n\\nNow, we must be careful not to impute to Arendt the view that truth\\nhas no legitimate role to play in politics or in the sphere of human\\naffairs. She does indeed assert that “All truths — not\\nonly the various kinds of rational truth but also factual truth\\n— are opposed to opinion in their mode of asserting\\nvalidity” (BPF, 239), since they all carry an element of\\ncompulsion. However, she is only preoccupied with the negative\\nconsequences of rational truth when applied to the sphere of politics\\nand collective deliberation, while she defends the importance of\\nfactual truth for the preservation of an accurate account of the past\\nand for the very existence of political communities. Factual truth,\\nshe writes, “is always related to other people: it concerns\\nevents and circumstances in which many are involved; it is established\\nby witnesses and depends upon testimony … It is political by\\nnature.” It follows, therefore, that “facts and opinions,\\nthough they must be kept apart, are not antagonistic to each other;\\nthey belong to the same realm. Facts inform opinions, and opinions,\\ninspired by different interests and passions, can differ widely and\\nstill be legitimate as long as they respect factual truth. Freedom of\\nopinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the\\nfacts themselves are not in dispute. In other words, factual truth\\ninforms political thought just as rational truth informs philosophical\\nspeculation” (BPF, 238).\",\n \"\\n\\nThe relationship between facts and opinions is thus one of mutual\\nentailment: if opinions were not based on correct information and the\\nfree access to all relevant facts they could scarcely claim any\\nvalidity. And if they were to be based on fantasy, self-deception, or\\ndeliberate falsehood, then no possibility of genuine debate and\\nargumentation could be sustained. Both factual truth and the general\\nhabit of truth-telling are therefore basic to the formation of sound\\nopinions and to the flourishing of political debate. Moreover, if the\\nrecord of the past were to be destroyed by organized lying, or be\\ndistorted by an attempt to rewrite history, political life would be\\ndeprived of one of its essential and stabilizing elements. In sum,\\nboth factual truth and the practice of truth-telling are essential to\\npolitical life. The antagonism for Arendt is between rational\\ntruth and well-grounded opinion, since the former does not allow for\\ndebate and dissent, while the latter thrives on it. Arendt’s defense\\nof opinion must therefore be understood as a defense of political\\ndeliberation, and of the role that persuasion and dissuasion play in\\nall matters affecting the political community. Against Plato and\\nHobbes, who denigrated the role of opinion in political matters,\\nArendt reasserts the value and importance of political discourse, of\\ndeliberation and persuasion, and thus of a politics that acknowledges\\ndifference and the plurality of opinions.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.6 Judgment and Validity\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nIn this last section, we reconstruct Arendt’s conception of\\ncitizenship around two themes: (1) the public sphere, and (2)\\npolitical agency and collective identity, and to highlight the\\ncontribution of Arendt’s conception to a theory of democratic\\ncitizenship.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"6. Arendt’s Conception of Citizenship\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nFor Arendt the public sphere comprises two distinct but interrelated\\ndimensions. The first is the space of appearance, a space of\\npolitical freedom and equality which comes into being whenever\\ncitizens act in concert through the medium of speech and\\npersuasion. The second is the common world, a shared and\\npublic world of human artifacts, institutions and settings which\\nseparates us from nature and which provides a relatively permanent and\\ndurable context for our activities. Both dimensions are essential to\\nthe practice of citizenship, the former providing the spaces where it\\ncan flourish, the latter providing the stable background from which\\npublic spaces of action and deliberation can arise. For Arendt the\\nreactivation of citizenship in the modern world depends upon both the\\nrecovery of a common, shared world and the creation of numerous spaces\\nof appearance in which individuals can disclose their identities and\\nestablish relations of reciprocity and solidarity.\",\n \"\\n\\nThere are three features of the public sphere and of the sphere of\\npolitics in general that are central to Arendt’s conception of\\ncitizenship. These are, first, its artificial or constructed\\nquality; second, its spatial quality; and, third, the\\ndistinction between public and private\\ninterests.\",\n \"\\n\\nAs regards the first feature, Arendt always stressed the artificiality\\nof public life and of political activities in general, the fact that\\nthey are man-made and constructed rather than natural or given. She\\nregarded this artificiality as something to be celebrated rather than\\ndeplored. Politics for her was not the result of some natural\\npredisposition, or the realization of the inherent traits of human\\nnature. Rather, it was a cultural achievement of the first order,\\nenabling individuals to transcend the necessities of life and to\\nfashion a world within which free political action and discourse could\\nflourish.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe stress on the artificiality of politics has a number of important\\nconsequences. For example, Arendt emphasized that the principle of\\npolitical equality does not rest on a theory of natural rights or on\\nsome natural condition that precedes the constitution of the political\\nrealm. Rather, it is an attribute of citizenship which individuals\\nacquire upon entering the public realm and which can be secured only by\\ndemocratic political institutions.\",\n \"\\n\\nAnother consequence of Arendt’s stress on the artificiality of\\npolitical life is evident in her rejection of all neo-romantic appeals\\nto the volk and to ethnic identity as the basis for political\\ncommunity. She maintained that one’s ethnic, religious, or racial\\nidentity was irrelevant to one’s identity as a citizen, and that it\\nshould never be made the basis of membership in a political\\ncommunity.\",\n \"\\n\\nArendt’s emphasis on the formal qualities of citizenship made her\\nposition rather distant from those advocates of participation in the\\n1960s who saw it in terms of recapturing a sense of intimacy, of\\nwarmth and authenticity. For Arendt political participation was\\nimportant because it permitted the establishment of relations of\\ncivility and solidarity among citizens. She claimed that the ties of\\nintimacy and warmth can never become political since they represent\\npsychological substitutes for the loss of the common world. The only\\ntruly political ties are those of civic friendship and solidarity,\\nsince they make political demands and preserve reference to the\\nworld. For Arendt, therefore, the danger of trying to recapture the\\nsense of intimacy and warmth, of authenticity and communal feelings is\\nthat one loses the public values of impartiality, civic friendship,\\nand solidarity.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe second feature stressed by Arendt has to do with the\\nspatial quality of public life, with the fact that political\\nactivities are located in a public space where citizens are able to\\nmeet one another, exchange their opinions and debate their\\ndifferences, and search for some collective solution to their\\nproblems. Politics, for Arendt, is a matter of people sharing a common\\nworld and a common space of appearance so that public concerns can\\nemerge and be articulated from different perspectives. In her view, it\\nis not enough to have a collection of private individuals voting\\nseparately and anonymously according to their private\\nopinions. Rather, these individuals must be able to see and talk to\\none another in public, to meet in a public-political space, so that\\ntheir differences as well as their commonalities can emerge and become\\nthe subject of democratic debate.\",\n \"\\n\\nThis notion of a common public space helps us to understand how\\npolitical opinions can be formed which are neither reducible to\\nprivate, idiosyncratic preferences, on the one hand, nor to a\\nunanimous collective opinion, on the other. Arendt herself distrusted\\nthe term “public opinion,” since it suggested the mindless\\nunanimity of mass society. In her view representative opinions could\\narise only when citizens actually confronted one another in a public\\nspace, so that they could examine an issue from a number of different\\nperspectives, modify their views, and enlarge their standpoint to\\nincorporate that of others. Political opinions, she claimed, can never\\nbe formed in private; rather, they are formed, tested, and enlarged\\nonly within a public context of argumentation and debate.\",\n \"\\n\\nAnother implication of Arendt’s stress on the spatial quality of\\npolitics has to do with the question of how a collection of distinct\\nindividuals can be united to form a political community. For Arendt\\nthe unity that may be achieved in a political community is neither the\\nresult of religious or ethnic affinity, not the expression of some\\ncommon value system. Rather, the unity in question can be attained by\\nsharing a public space and a set of political institutions, and\\nengaging in the practices and activities which are characteristic of\\nthat space and those institutions.\",\n \"\\n\\nA further implication of Arendt’s conception of the spatial quality of\\npolitics is that since politics is a public activity, one cannot be\\npart of it without in some sense being present in a public space. To\\nbe engaged in politics means actively participating in the various\\npublic forums where the decisions affecting one’s community are\\ntaken. Arendt’s insistence on the importance of direct participation\\nin politics is thus based on the idea that, since politics is\\nsomething that needs a worldly location and can only happen in a\\npublic space, then if one is not present in such a space one is simply\\nnot engaged in politics.\",\n \"\\n\\nThis public or world-centered conception of politics lies also at the\\nbasis of the third feature stressed by Arendt, the distinction between\\npublic and private interests. According to Arendt,\\npolitical activity is not a means to an end, but an end in itself; one\\ndoes not engage in political action to promote one’s welfare, but to\\nrealize the principles intrinsic to political life, such as freedom,\\nequality, justice, and solidarity. In a late essay entitled\\n“Public Rights and Private Interests” (PRPI) Arendt\\ndiscusses the difference between one’s life as an individual and one’s\\nlife as a citizen, between the life spent on one’s own and the life\\nspent in common with others. She argues that our public interest as\\ncitizens is quite distinct from our private interest as\\nindividuals. The public interest is not the sum of private interests,\\nnor their highest common denominator, nor even the total of\\nenlightened self-interests. In fact, it has little to do with our\\nprivate interests, since it concerns the world that lies beyond the\\nself, that was there before our birth and that will be there after our\\ndeath, a world that finds embodiment in activities and institutions\\nwith their own intrinsic purposes which might often be at odds with\\nour short-term and private interests. The public interest refers,\\ntherefore, to the interests of a public world which we share as\\ncitizens and which we can pursue and enjoy only by going beyond our\\nprivate self-interest.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.1 Citizenship and the Public Sphere\"\n }\n ]\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Aschheim, S. (ed.), 2001, Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem,\nBerkeley: University of California Press.","Baehr, P., 2010, Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the\nSocial Sciences, Stanford: Stanford University Press.","Baluch, F., 2014, “Arendt’s Machiavellian\nMoment”, European Journal of Political Theory, 13 (2):\n154–177.","Barnouw, D., 1990, Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the\nGerman-Jewish Experience, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University\nPress.","Benhabib, S., 1996, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah\nArendt, London: Sage Publications.","–––, 2003, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah\nArendt. New Edition with a New Preface and an Appendix, New York:\nRowman and Littlefield Publishers.","––– (ed.), 2010, Politics in Dark Times:\nEncounters with Hannah Arendt, Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress.","Berkowitz, R., Keenan, T. and Katz, J. (eds.), 2009, Thinking\nin Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, New York:\nFordham University Press.","Bernauer, J. (ed.), 1987, Amor Mundi: Explorations in the Faith\nand Thought of Hannah Arendt, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff.","Bernstein, R., 1986, Philosophical Profiles, Cambridge:\nPolity Press.","–––, 1996, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish\nQuestion, Cambridge: Polity Press.","–––, 2018, Why Read Hannah Arendt Now?,\nCambridge: Polity Press.","Birmingham, P., 2006, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The\nPredicament of Common Responsibility, Bloomington: Indiana\nUniversity Press.","Bowen-Moore, P., 1989, Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of\nNatality, London: Macmillan.","Bradshaw, L., 1989, Acting and Thinking: The Political Thought\nof Hannah Arendt, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.","Calhoun, C. and McGowan, J. (eds.), 1997, Hannah Arendt and the\nMeaning of Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota\nPress.","Canovan, M., 1974, The Political Thought of Hannah\nArendt, London: J. M. Dent.","–––, 1992, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation\nof Her Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress.","Dietz, M., 2002, Turning Operations: Feminism, Arendt, and\nPolitics, New York and London: Routledge.","Disch, L., 1994, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of\nPhilosophy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.","Dossa, S., 1988, The Public Realm and The Public Self: The\nPolitical Theory of Hannah Arendt, Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred\nLaurier University Press.","Ettinger, E., 1995, Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger, New\nHaven, CT: Yale University Press.","Gottsegen, M., 1993, The Political Thought of Hannah\nArendt, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.","Hansen, P., 1993, Hannah Arendt: Politics, History and\nCitizenship, Cambridge: Polity Press.","Hill, M. (ed.), 1979, Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public\nWorld, New York: St. Martin’s Press.","Hinchman, L. and Hinchman, S. (eds.), 1994, Hannah Arendt:\nCritical Essays, Albany, NY: State University of New York\nPress.","Honig, B. (ed.), 1995, Feminist Interpretations of Hannah\nArendt, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University\nPress.","Isaac, J., 1992, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, New\nHaven, CT: Yale University Press.","Kaplan, G. and Kessler, C. (eds.), 1989, Hannah Arendt:\nThinking, Judging, Freedom, Sydney: Allen & Unwin.","Kateb. G., 1984, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience,\nEvil, Oxford: Martin Robertson.","Kielmansegg, P., Mewes, H. and Glaser-Schmidt, E. (eds.),\n1995, Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Emigrés and\nAmerican Political Thought after World War II, Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press.","Kohn, J. and May, L. (eds.), 1996, Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years\nLater, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.","Kristeva, J., 2001, Hannah Arendt, New York: Columbia\nUniversity Press.","Lederman, S., 2016, “Philosophy, Politics and Participatory\nDemocracy in Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought”,\nHistory of Political Thought, 37 (3): 480–508.","May, D., 1986, Hannah Arendt, Harmondsworth: Penguin\nBooks.","McGowan, J., 1998, Hannah Arendt: An Introduction,\nMinneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.","Nedelsky, J., and Beiner, R. (eds.), 2001, Judgment,\nImagination, and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt, New York:\nRowman and Littlefield Publishers.","Parekh, B., 1981, Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New\nPolitical Philosophy, London: Macmillan.","Passerin d’Entrèves, M., 1994, The Political Philosophy\nof Hannah Arendt, New York and London: Routledge.","Pitkin, H., 1998, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s\nConcept of the Social, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.","Ring, J., 1997, The Political Consequences of Thinking,\nAlbany, NY: State University of New York Press.","Taminiaux, J., 1997, The Thracian Maid and the Professional\nThinker: Arendt and Heidegger, Albany, NY: State University of\nNew York Press.","Villa, D., 1996, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the\nPolitical, Princeton: Princeton University Press.","–––, 1999, Politics, Philosophy, Terror:\nEssays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt, Princeton: Princeton\nUniversity Press.","––– (ed.), 2000, The Cambridge Companion to\nHannah Arendt, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Watson, D., 1992, Hannah Arendt, London: Fontana\nPress.","Whitfield, S., 1980, Into the Dark: Hannah Arendt and\nTotalitarianism, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.","Wolin, S., 1977, “Hannah Arendt and the Ordinance of\nTime,” Social Research, 44(1): 91–105.","Young-Bruehl, E., 1982, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the\nWorld, New Haven: Yale University Press. Second edition,\n2004.","–––, 2006, Why Arendt Matters, New\nHaven, CT: Yale University Press."],"string":"[\n \"Aschheim, S. (ed.), 2001, Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem,\\nBerkeley: University of California Press.\",\n \"Baehr, P., 2010, Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the\\nSocial Sciences, Stanford: Stanford University Press.\",\n \"Baluch, F., 2014, “Arendt’s Machiavellian\\nMoment”, European Journal of Political Theory, 13 (2):\\n154–177.\",\n \"Barnouw, D., 1990, Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the\\nGerman-Jewish Experience, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University\\nPress.\",\n \"Benhabib, S., 1996, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah\\nArendt, London: Sage Publications.\",\n \"–––, 2003, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah\\nArendt. New Edition with a New Preface and an Appendix, New York:\\nRowman and Littlefield Publishers.\",\n \"––– (ed.), 2010, Politics in Dark Times:\\nEncounters with Hannah Arendt, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress.\",\n \"Berkowitz, R., Keenan, T. and Katz, J. (eds.), 2009, Thinking\\nin Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, New York:\\nFordham University Press.\",\n \"Bernauer, J. (ed.), 1987, Amor Mundi: Explorations in the Faith\\nand Thought of Hannah Arendt, Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff.\",\n \"Bernstein, R., 1986, Philosophical Profiles, Cambridge:\\nPolity Press.\",\n \"–––, 1996, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish\\nQuestion, Cambridge: Polity Press.\",\n \"–––, 2018, Why Read Hannah Arendt Now?,\\nCambridge: Polity Press.\",\n \"Birmingham, P., 2006, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights: The\\nPredicament of Common Responsibility, Bloomington: Indiana\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Bowen-Moore, P., 1989, Hannah Arendt’s Philosophy of\\nNatality, London: Macmillan.\",\n \"Bradshaw, L., 1989, Acting and Thinking: The Political Thought\\nof Hannah Arendt, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.\",\n \"Calhoun, C. and McGowan, J. (eds.), 1997, Hannah Arendt and the\\nMeaning of Politics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota\\nPress.\",\n \"Canovan, M., 1974, The Political Thought of Hannah\\nArendt, London: J. M. Dent.\",\n \"–––, 1992, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation\\nof Her Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress.\",\n \"Dietz, M., 2002, Turning Operations: Feminism, Arendt, and\\nPolitics, New York and London: Routledge.\",\n \"Disch, L., 1994, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of\\nPhilosophy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.\",\n \"Dossa, S., 1988, The Public Realm and The Public Self: The\\nPolitical Theory of Hannah Arendt, Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfred\\nLaurier University Press.\",\n \"Ettinger, E., 1995, Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger, New\\nHaven, CT: Yale University Press.\",\n \"Gottsegen, M., 1993, The Political Thought of Hannah\\nArendt, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.\",\n \"Hansen, P., 1993, Hannah Arendt: Politics, History and\\nCitizenship, Cambridge: Polity Press.\",\n \"Hill, M. (ed.), 1979, Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public\\nWorld, New York: St. Martin’s Press.\",\n \"Hinchman, L. and Hinchman, S. (eds.), 1994, Hannah Arendt:\\nCritical Essays, Albany, NY: State University of New York\\nPress.\",\n \"Honig, B. (ed.), 1995, Feminist Interpretations of Hannah\\nArendt, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University\\nPress.\",\n \"Isaac, J., 1992, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, New\\nHaven, CT: Yale University Press.\",\n \"Kaplan, G. and Kessler, C. (eds.), 1989, Hannah Arendt:\\nThinking, Judging, Freedom, Sydney: Allen & Unwin.\",\n \"Kateb. G., 1984, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience,\\nEvil, Oxford: Martin Robertson.\",\n \"Kielmansegg, P., Mewes, H. and Glaser-Schmidt, E. (eds.),\\n1995, Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss: German Emigrés and\\nAmerican Political Thought after World War II, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press.\",\n \"Kohn, J. and May, L. (eds.), 1996, Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years\\nLater, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.\",\n \"Kristeva, J., 2001, Hannah Arendt, New York: Columbia\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Lederman, S., 2016, “Philosophy, Politics and Participatory\\nDemocracy in Hannah Arendt’s Political Thought”,\\nHistory of Political Thought, 37 (3): 480–508.\",\n \"May, D., 1986, Hannah Arendt, Harmondsworth: Penguin\\nBooks.\",\n \"McGowan, J., 1998, Hannah Arendt: An Introduction,\\nMinneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.\",\n \"Nedelsky, J., and Beiner, R. (eds.), 2001, Judgment,\\nImagination, and Politics: Themes from Kant and Arendt, New York:\\nRowman and Littlefield Publishers.\",\n \"Parekh, B., 1981, Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New\\nPolitical Philosophy, London: Macmillan.\",\n \"Passerin d’Entrèves, M., 1994, The Political Philosophy\\nof Hannah Arendt, New York and London: Routledge.\",\n \"Pitkin, H., 1998, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s\\nConcept of the Social, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.\",\n \"Ring, J., 1997, The Political Consequences of Thinking,\\nAlbany, NY: State University of New York Press.\",\n \"Taminiaux, J., 1997, The Thracian Maid and the Professional\\nThinker: Arendt and Heidegger, Albany, NY: State University of\\nNew York Press.\",\n \"Villa, D., 1996, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the\\nPolitical, Princeton: Princeton University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1999, Politics, Philosophy, Terror:\\nEssays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt, Princeton: Princeton\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"––– (ed.), 2000, The Cambridge Companion to\\nHannah Arendt, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Watson, D., 1992, Hannah Arendt, London: Fontana\\nPress.\",\n \"Whitfield, S., 1980, Into the Dark: Hannah Arendt and\\nTotalitarianism, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.\",\n \"Wolin, S., 1977, “Hannah Arendt and the Ordinance of\\nTime,” Social Research, 44(1): 91–105.\",\n \"Young-Bruehl, E., 1982, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the\\nWorld, New Haven: Yale University Press. Second edition,\\n2004.\",\n \"–––, 2006, Why Arendt Matters, New\\nHaven, CT: Yale University Press.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../aristotle/","text":"Aristotle"},{"href":"../benjamin/","text":"Benjamin, Walter"},{"href":"../existentialism/","text":"existentialism"},{"href":"../heidegger/","text":"Heidegger, Martin"},{"href":"../hobbes/","text":"Hobbes, Thomas"},{"href":"../husserl/","text":"Husserl, Edmund"},{"href":"../jaspers/","text":"Jaspers, Karl"},{"href":"../kant/","text":"Kant, Immanuel"},{"href":"../machiavelli/","text":"Machiavelli, Niccolò"},{"href":"../phenomenology/","text":"phenomenology"},{"href":"../plato/","text":"Plato"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotle/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotle\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../benjamin/\",\n \"text\": \"Benjamin, Walter\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../existentialism/\",\n \"text\": \"existentialism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../heidegger/\",\n \"text\": \"Heidegger, Martin\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../hobbes/\",\n \"text\": \"Hobbes, Thomas\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../husserl/\",\n \"text\": \"Husserl, Edmund\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../jaspers/\",\n \"text\": \"Jaspers, Karl\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../kant/\",\n \"text\": \"Kant, Immanuel\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../machiavelli/\",\n \"text\": \"Machiavelli, Niccolò\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../phenomenology/\",\n \"text\": \"phenomenology\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../plato/\",\n \"text\": \"Plato\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":74,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"ethics-ancient"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Ancient Ethical Theory"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Tue Aug 3, 2004; substantive revision Fri Feb 5, 2021"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nWhile moral theory does not invent morality, or even reflection on it,\nit does try to bring systematic thinking to bear on these activities.\nAncient moral theory, however, does not attempt to be a comprehensive\naccount of all the phenomena that fall under the heading of morality.\nRather, assuming piecemeal opinions and practices, it tries to capture\nits underlying essence. It is the nature of such an enterprise to\nevaluate and criticize some of these opinions and practices but that\nis not its primary goal. Ancient moral theory tries to provide a\nreflective account of an essential human activity so one can grasp\nwhat is of fundamental importance in pursuing it. In historical order,\nthe theories to be considered in this article are those of Socrates as\npresented in certain dialogues of Plato; Plato in the\nRepublic; Aristotle; the Cynics; Cyrenaic hedonism; Epicurus;\nthe Stoics; and Pyrrhonian skepticism."],"string":"[\n \"\\nWhile moral theory does not invent morality, or even reflection on it,\\nit does try to bring systematic thinking to bear on these activities.\\nAncient moral theory, however, does not attempt to be a comprehensive\\naccount of all the phenomena that fall under the heading of morality.\\nRather, assuming piecemeal opinions and practices, it tries to capture\\nits underlying essence. It is the nature of such an enterprise to\\nevaluate and criticize some of these opinions and practices but that\\nis not its primary goal. Ancient moral theory tries to provide a\\nreflective account of an essential human activity so one can grasp\\nwhat is of fundamental importance in pursuing it. In historical order,\\nthe theories to be considered in this article are those of Socrates as\\npresented in certain dialogues of Plato; Plato in the\\nRepublic; Aristotle; the Cynics; Cyrenaic hedonism; Epicurus;\\nthe Stoics; and Pyrrhonian skepticism.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Introduction","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. Socrates","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"3. Plato","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"4. Aristotle","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"5. Cynics","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"6. Cyrenaics","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"7. Epicurus","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"8. Stoics","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"9. Pyrrhonian Skeptics","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Introduction\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Socrates\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Plato\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Aristotle\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Cynics\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. Cyrenaics\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"7. Epicurus\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"8. Stoics\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"9. Pyrrhonian Skeptics\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\nIn their moral theories, the ancient philosophers depended on several\nimportant notions. These include virtue and the virtues, happiness\n(eudaimonia), and the soul. We can begin with virtue.","\nVirtue is a general term that translates the Greek word\naretê. Sometimes aretê is also\ntranslated as excellence. Many objects, natural or artificial, have\ntheir particular aretê or kind of excellence. There is\nthe excellence of a horse and the excellence of a knife. Then, of\ncourse, there is human excellence. Conceptions of human excellence\ninclude such disparate figures as the Homeric warrior chieftain and\nthe Athenian statesman of the period of its imperial expansion.\nPlato’s character Meno sums up one important strain of thought\nwhen he says that excellence for a man is managing the business of the\ncity so that he benefits his friends, harms his enemies, and comes to\nno harm himself (Meno 71e). From this description we can see\nthat some versions of human excellence have a problematic relation to\nthe moral virtues.","\nIn the ancient world, courage, moderation, justice and piety were\nleading instances of moral virtue. A virtue is a settled disposition\nto act in a certain way; justice, for instance, is the settled\ndisposition to act, let’s say, so that each one receives their\ndue. This settled disposition consists in a practical knowledge about\nhow to bring it about, in each situation, that each receives their\ndue. It also includes a strong positive attitude toward bringing it\nabout that each receives their due. Just people, then, are not ones\nwho occasionally act justly, or even who regularly act justly but do\nso out of some other motive; rather they are people who reliably act\nthat way because they place a positive, high intrinsic value on\nrendering to each their due and they are good at it. Courage is a\nsettled disposition that allows one to act reliably to pursue right\nends in fearful situations, because one values so acting\nintrinsically. Moderation is the virtue that deals similarly with\none’s appetites and emotions.","\nHuman excellence can be conceived in ways that do not include the\nmoral virtues. For instance, someone thought of as excellent for\nbenefiting friends and harming enemies can be cruel, arbitrary,\nrapacious, and ravenous of appetite. Most ancient philosophers,\nhowever, argue that human excellence must include the moral virtues\nand that the excellent human will be, above all, courageous, moderate,\nand just. This argument depends on making a link between the moral\nvirtues and happiness. While most ancient philosophers hold that\nhappiness is the proper goal or end of human life, the notion is both\nsimple and complicated, as Aristotle points out. It seems simple to\nsay everyone wants to be happy; it is complicated to say what\nhappiness is. We can approach the problem by discussing, first, the\nrelation of happiness to human excellence and, then, the relation of\nhuman excellence to the moral virtues.","\nIt is significant that synonyms for eudaimonia are living\nwell and doing well. These phrases imply certain activities associated\nwith human living. Ancient philosophers argued that whatever\nactivities constitute human living – e.g., those associated with\npleasure – one can engage in those activities in a mediocre or\neven a poor way. One can feel and react to pleasures sometimes\nappropriately and sometimes inappropriately; or one might always act\nshamefully and dishonorably. However, to carry out the activities that\nconstitute human living well over a whole lifetime, or long stretches\nof it, is living well or doing well. At this point the relation of\nhappiness to human excellence should be clear. Human excellence is the\npsychological basis for carrying out the activities of a human life\nwell; to that extent human excellence is also happiness.","\nSo described, human excellence is general and covers many activities\nof a human life. However, one can see how human excellence might at\nleast include the moral virtues. The moral virtue relevant to fear,\nfor instance, is courage. Courage is a reliable disposition to react\nto fear in an appropriate way. What counts as appropriate entails\nharnessing fear for good or honorable ends. Such ends are not confined\nto one’s own welfare but include, e.g., the welfare of\none’s city. In this way, moral virtues become the kind of human\nexcellence that is other-regarding. The moral virtues, then, are\nexcellent qualities of character – intrinsically valuable for\nthe one who has them; but they are also valuable for others. In rough\noutline, we can see one important way ancient moral theory tries to\nlink happiness to moral virtue by way of human excellence. Happiness\nderives from human excellence; human excellence includes the moral\nvirtues, which are implicitly or explicitly other-regarding.","\nSince happiness plays such a vital role in ancient moral theory, we\nshould note the difference between the Greek word eudaimonia\nand its usual translation as ‘happiness’. Although its\nusage varies, most often the English word ‘happiness’\nrefers to a feeling. For example, we say, “You can tell he feels\nhappy right now, from the way he looks and how he is behaving.”\nThe feeling is described as one of contentment or satisfaction,\nperhaps with the way one’s life as a whole is going. While some\nthink there is a distinction between feeling happy and feeling\ncontent, still happiness is a good and pleasant feeling. However,\n‘happiness’ has a secondary sense that does not focus on\nfeelings but rather on activities. For instance, one might say,\n“It was a happy time in my life; my work was going well.”\nThe speaker need not be referring to the feelings he or she was\nexperiencing but just to the fact that some important activity was\ngoing well. Of course, if their work is going well, they might feel\ncontentment. But in speaking of their happiness, they might just as\nwell be referring to their absorption in some successful activity. For\nancient philosophers eudaimonia is closer to the secondary\nsense of our own term. Happiness means not so much feeling a certain\nway, or feeling a certain way about how one’s life as a whole is\ngoing, but rather carrying out certain activities or functioning in a\ncertain way. This sort of happiness is an admirable and praiseworthy\naccomplishment, whereas achieving satisfaction or contentment may not\nbe.","\nIn this way, then, ancient philosophers typically justify moral\nvirtue. Being courageous, just, and moderate is valuable for the\nvirtuous person because these virtues are inextricably linked with\nhappiness. Everyone wants to be happy, so anyone who realizes the link\nbetween virtue and happiness will also want to be virtuous. This\nargument depends on two central ideas. First, human excellence is a\ngood of the soul – not a material or bodily good such as wealth\nor political power. Another way to put this idea is to say happiness\nis not something external, like wealth or political power, but an\ninternal, psychological good. The second central idea is that the most\nimportant good of the soul is moral virtue. By being virtuous one\nenjoys a psychological state whose value outweighs whatever other\nkinds of goods one might have by being vicious.","\nFinally, a few words about the soul are in order since, typically,\nphilosophers argue that virtue is a good of the soul. In some ways,\nthis claim is found in many traditions. Many thinkers argue that being\nmoral does not necessarily provide physical beauty, health, or\nprosperity. Rather, as something good, virtue must be understood as\nbelonging to the soul; it is a psychological good. However, in order\nto explain virtue as a good of the soul, one does not have to hold\nthat the soul is immortal. While Plato, for example, holds that the\nsoul is immortal and that its virtue is a good that transcends death,\nhis argument for virtue as a psychological good does not depend on the\nimmortality of the soul. He argues that virtue is a psychological good\nin this life. To live a mortal human life with this good is in itself\nhappiness.","\nThis position that links happiness and virtue is called eudaimonism\n– a word based on the principal Greek word for happiness,\neudaimonia. By eudaimonism, we will mean one of several\ntheses: (a) virtue, together with its active exercise, is identical\nwith happiness; (b) virtue, together with its activities, is the most\nimportant and dominant constituent of happiness; (c) virtue is the\nonly means to happiness. However, one must be cautious not to conclude\nthat ancient theories in general attempt to construe the value of\nvirtue simply as a means to achieving happiness. Each theory, as we\nshall see, has its own approach to the nature of the link between\nvirtue and happiness. It would not be advisable to see ancient\ntheories as concerned with such contemporary issues as whether moral\ndiscourse – i.e., discourse about what one ought to do –\ncan or should be reduced to non-moral discourse – i.e., to\ndiscourse about what is good for one.","\nThese reflections on virtue can provide an occasion for contrasting\nancient moral theory and modern. One way to put the contrast is to say\nthat ancient moral theory is agent-centered while modern\nmoral theory is action-centered. To say that it is\naction-centered means that, as a theory of morality, it explains\nmorality, to begin with, in terms of actions and their circumstances,\nand the ways in which actions are moral or immoral. We can roughly\ndivide modern thinkers into two groups. Those who judge the morality\nof an action on the basis of its known or expected consequences are\nconsequentialist; those who judge the morality of an action on the\nbasis of its conformity to certain kinds of laws, prohibitions, or\npositive commandments are deontologists. The former include, e.g.,\nthose utilitarians who say an action is moral if it provides the\ngreatest good for the greatest number. Deontologists say an action is\nmoral if it conforms to a moral principle, e.g., the obligation to\ntell the truth. While these thinkers are not uninterested in the moral\ndisposition to produce such actions, or in what disposition is\nrequired if they are to show any moral worth in the persons who do\nthem, their focus is on actions, their consequences, and the rules or\nother principles to which they conform. The result of these ways of\napproaching morality is that moral assessment falls on actions. This\nfocus explains, for instance, contemporary fascination with such\nquestions of casuistry as, e.g., the conditions under which an action\nlike abortion is morally permitted or immoral.","\nBy contrast, ancient moral theory explains morality in terms that\nfocus on the moral agent. These thinkers are interested in what\nconstitutes, e.g., a just person. They are concerned about the state\nof mind and character, the set of values, the attitudes to oneself and\nto others, and the conception of one’s own place in the common\nlife of a community that belong to just persons simply insofar as they\nare just. A modern might object that this way of proceeding is\nbackwards. Just actions are logically prior to just persons and must\nbe specifiable in advance of any account of what it is to be a just\nperson. Of course, the ancients had a rough idea of what just actions\nwere; and this rough idea certainly contributed to the notion of a\njust person, and his motivation and system of values. Still, the\nnotion of a just person is not exhausted by an account of the\nconsequences of just actions, or any principle for determining which\nactions are and which are not just. For the ancients, the just person\nis compared to a craftsman, e.g., a physician. Acting as a physician\nis not simply a collection of medically effective actions. It is\nknowing when such actions are appropriate, among other things; and\nthis kind of knowledge is not always definable. To understand what\nbeing a physician means one must turn to the physician’s\njudgment and even motivation. These are manifested in particular\nactions but are not reducible to those actions. In the same way, what\nconstitutes a just person is not exhausted by the actions he or she\ndoes nor, for that matter, by any catalogue of possible just actions.\nRather, being a just person entails qualities of character proper to\nthe just person, in the light of which they decide what actions\njustice requires of them and are inclined or disposed to act\naccordingly."],"section_title":"1. Introduction","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nIn this section we confine ourselves to the character Socrates in\nPlato’s dialogues, and indeed to only certain ones of the\ndialogues in which a Socrates character plays a role. In those\ndialogues in which he plays a major role, Socrates varies considerably\nbetween two extremes. On the one hand, there is the Socrates who\nclaims to know nothing about virtue and confines himself to asking\nother characters questions; this Socrates is found in the\nApology and in certain dialogues most of which end\ninconclusively. These dialogues, e.g., Charmides,\nLaches, Crito, Euthydemus, and\nEuthyphro, are called aporetic. On the other hand, in other\ndialogues we find a Socrates who expounds positive teachings about\nvirtue; this Socrates usually asks questions only to elicit agreement.\nThese dialogues are didactic, and conclusive in tone, e.g.,\nRepublic, Phaedo, Phaedrus, and Philebus. However,\nthese distinctions between kinds of dialogues and kinds of Socratic\ncharacters are not exclusive; there are dialogues that mix the\naporetic and conclusive styles, e.g., Protagoras, Meno, and\nGorgias. In observing these distinctions, we refer only to\nthe characteristic style of the dialogue and leave aside controversies\nabout the relative dates of composition of the dialogues. (See the\nentry on\n Plato,\n especially the section on\n Socrates\n and the section on\n the historical Socrates.)","\nThe significance of this distinction among dialogues is that one can\nisolate a strain of moral teaching in the aporetic and mixed\ndialogues. In spite of their inconclusive nature, in the aporetic\ndialogues the character Socrates maintains principles about morality\nthat he seems to take to be fundamental. In the mixed dialogues we\nfind similar teaching. This strain is distinct enough from the\naccounts of morality in the more didactic dialogues that it has been\ncalled Socratic, as opposed to Platonic, and associated with the\nhistorical personage’s own views. In what follows we limit\nourselves to this “Socratic” moral teaching –\nwithout taking a position about the relation of “Socratic”\nmoral teaching to that of the historical Socrates. For our purposes it\nis sufficient to point out a distinction between kinds of moral\nteaching in the dialogues. We will focus on the aporetic dialogues as\nwell as the mixed dialogues Protagoras, Gorgias, and\nMeno.","\nThe first feature of Socratic teaching is its heroic quality. In the\nApology, Socrates says that a man worth anything at all does\nnot reckon whether his course of action endangers his life or\nthreatens death. He looks only at one thing – whether what he\ndoes is just or not, the work of a good or of a bad man (28b–c).\nSaid in the context of his trial, this statement is both about himself\nand a fundamental claim of his moral teaching. Socrates puts moral\nconsiderations above all others. If we think of justice as, roughly,\nthe way we treat others, the just actions to which he refers cover a\nwide range. It is unjust to rob temples, betray friends, steal, break\noaths, commit adultery, and mistreat parents (Rep\n443a–b). A similarly strong statement about wrong-doing is found\nin the Crito, where the question is whether Socrates should\nsave his life by escaping from the jail in Athens and aborting the\nsentence of death. Socrates says that whether he should escape or not\nmust be governed only by whether it is just or unjust to do so (48d).\nObviously, by posing wrong-doing against losing one’s life,\nSocrates means to emphasize that nothing outweighs in positive value\nthe disvalue of doing unjust actions. In such passages, then, Socrates\nseems to be a moral hero, willing to sacrifice his very life rather\nthan commit an injustice, and to recommend such heroism to others.","\nHowever, this heroism also includes an important element of\nself-regard. In the passage from the Apology just quoted\nSocrates goes on to describe his approach to the citizens of Athens.\nHe chides them for being absorbed in the acquisition of wealth,\nreputation, and honor while they do not take care for nor think about\nwisdom, truth, and how to make their souls better (Ap.\n29d–e). As he develops this idea it becomes clear that the\nperfection of the soul, making it better, means acquiring and having\nmoral virtue. Rather than heaping up riches and honor, Athenians\nshould seek to perfect their souls in virtue. From this exhortation we\ncan conclude that for Socrates psychological good outweighs material\ngood and that virtue is a psychological good of the first importance.\nThe Crito gives another perspective on psychological good.\nSocrates says (as something obvious to everyone) that life is not\nworth living if that which is harmed by disease and benefited by\nhealth – i.e., the body – is ruined. But even more so, he\nadds, life is not worth living if that which is harmed by wrong-doing\n(to adikon) and benefited by the right – sc.\nthe soul – is ruined, insofar as the soul is more valuable than\nthe body (47e–48a). We can understand this claim in positive\nterms. Virtue is the chief psychological good; wrong-doing destroys\nvirtue. So Socrates’ strong commitment to virtue reflects his\nbelief in its value for the soul, as well as the importance of the\nsoul’s condition for the quality of our lives.","\nA second feature of Socratic teaching is its intellectualism. Socratic\nintellectualism is usually expressed in the claim that virtue is\nknowledge, implying that if one knows what is good one will do what is\ngood. We find a clear statement of the claim in Protagoras\n352c; but it underlies a lot of Socratic teaching. The idea is\nparadoxical because it flies in the face of what seems to be the\nordinary experience of knowingly doing what is not good, called\nakrasia or being overcome (sometimes anachronistically\ntranslated as weakness of will). However, Socrates defends the idea\nthat akrasia is impossible. First, he argues that virtue is\nall one needs for happiness. In the Apology (41c), Socrates\nsays that no evil at all can come to a good man either in living or in\ndying (…ouk esti andri agathô(i) kakon ouden oute\nzônti oute teleutêsanti), implying the good\nman’s virtue alone makes him proof against bad fortune. In the\nCrito (48b), he says living well and finely and justly are\nthe same thing (to de eu kai kalôs kai dikaiôs\n[zên] hoti tauton estin…). In turn, in the Meno\n(77c–78b), Socrates argues that everyone desires happiness,\ni.e., one’s own welfare. So, in the first place, one always has\na good reason for acting virtuously; doing so entails one’s own\nhappiness. However, even if the link between virtue and happiness is\ngranted, another problem remains. It is possible that one can,\nknowingly, act against one’s happiness, understood, as it is by\nSocrates, as one’s own welfare. It seems that an individual can\nchoose to do what is not in her own best interest. People can all too\neasily desire and go after the pastry that they know is bad for them.\nSocrates, however, seems to think that once one recognizes (i.e.,\nreally knows and fully appreciates) that the pastry is not good in\nthis way, one will cease to desire it. There is no residual desire\nfor, e.g., pleasure, that might compete with the desire for what is\ngood. This position is called intellectualism because it implies that\nwhat ultimately motivates any action is some cognitive state, rational\nor doxastic: if you know what is good you will do it, and if you do an\naction, and it is bad, that is because you thought somehow that it was\ngood. All error in such choices is due to ignorance.","\nIn support of the idea that if one knows what happiness is, one will\npursue it, Socrates argues, in the Euthydemus, that wisdom is\nnecessary and sufficient for happiness. While most of this dialogue is\ngiven over to Euthydemus’ and Dionysiodorus’ eristic\ndisplay, there are two Socratic interludes. In the first of these\n– in a passage that has a parallel in Meno (88a ff)\n– Socrates helps the young Cleinias to see that wisdom is a kind\nof knowledge that infallibly brings happiness. He uses an analogy with\ncraft (technê); a carpenter must not only have but know\nhow to use his tools and materials to be successful (Euthyd.\n280b–d). In turn, someone may have such goods as health, wealth,\ngood birth, and beauty, as well as the virtues of justice, moderation,\ncourage, and wisdom (279a–c). Wisdom is the most important,\nhowever, because, like carpentry, for example, it is a kind of\nknowledge, about how to use the other assets so that they are\nbeneficial (281b–c). Moreover, all of these other so-called\ngoods are useless – in fact, even harmful – without\nwisdom, because without it one will misuse any of the other assets one\nmay possess, so as to act not well but badly. Wisdom is the only\nunconditional good (281d–e). Socrates’ argument leaves it\nambiguous whether wisdom (taken together with its exercise) is\nidentical with happiness or whether it is the dominant and essential\ncomponent of happiness (282a–b).","\nIn this account, the focus is on a kind of knowledge as the active\ningredient in happiness. The other parts of the account are certain\nassets that seem as passive in relation to wisdom as wood and tools\nare to the carpenter. Socratic intellectualism has been criticized for\neither ignoring the non-rational, desiderative and volitional causes\nof human action or providing an implausibly rationalist account of\nthem. In either case, the common charge is that it fails to account\nfor or appreciate the apparent complexities of moral psychology."],"section_title":"2. Socrates","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nIf the objections to intellectualism are warranted, Plato makes\nsignificant progress by having his character Socrates suppose that the\nsoul has desires that are not always for what is good. This allows for\nthe complexities of moral psychology to become an important issue in\nthe account of virtue. That development is found in Plato’s\nmature moral theory. In the Republic, especially in its first\nfour books, Socrates presents the most thorough and detailed account\nof moral psychology and virtue in the dialogues.","\nIt all begins with the challenge to the very notion of morality,\nunderstood along traditional lines, mounted by Callicles in the second\nhalf of the Gorgias and by Thrasymachus in Republic\nI. Callicles thinks that moral convention is designed by the numerous\nweak people to intimidate the few strong ones, to keep the latter from\ntaking what they could if they would only use their strength. No truly\nstrong person should be taken in by such conventions (Gorg.\n482e ff). Thrasymachus argues that justice is the advantage of the\nmore powerful; he holds that justice is a social practice set up by\nthe powerful, i.e., rulers who require their subjects through that\npractice to act against their own individual and group self-interest\n(Rep. 338d ff). No sensible person should, and no\nstrong-willed person would, accept rules of justice as having any\nlegitimate authority over them. In answer to the latter challenge, in\nRepublic II, Glaucon and Adeimantus repeatedly urge Socrates\nto show what value justice has in itself, apart from its rewards and\nreputation. They gloss the intrinsic value of justice as what value it\nhas in the soul (358b–c), what it does to the soul simply and\nimmediately by its presence therein. Before giving what will be a new\naccount of the soul, Socrates introduces his famous comparison between\nthe soul and the city. As he develops his account of the city,\nhowever, it becomes clear that Socrates is talking about an ideal\ncity, which he proceeds to construct in his discussion.","\nThis city has three classes (genê) of citizens. The\nrulers are characterized by their knowledge about and devotion to the\nwelfare of the city. The auxiliaries are the warrior class that helps\nthe rulers. These two are collectively the guardians of the city\n(413c–414b; 428c–d). Finally, there are the farmers,\nartisans, and merchants – in general those concerned with the\nproduction of material goods necessary for daily life\n(369b–371e). The importance of this structure is that it allows\nSocrates to define virtues of the city by relations among its parts.\nThese virtues are justice, wisdom, courage, and moderation. For\ninstance, justice in the city is each one performing that function for\nwhich he is suited by nature and not doing the work that belongs to\nothers (433a–b). One’s function, in turn, is determined by\nthe class to which he belongs. So rulers should rule and not amass\nwealth, which is the function of the farmers, artisans, and merchants;\nif the rulers turn from ruling to money-making they are unjust.","\nCompleting the analogy, Socrates gives an account of the soul. He\nargues that it has three parts, each corresponding to one of the\nclasses in the city. At this point, we should note the difficulty of\ntalking about parts of the soul. In making his argument about conflict\nin the soul, Socrates does not usually use a word that easily\ncorresponds to the English ‘part.’ Sometimes he uses\n‘form’ (eidos) and ‘kind’\n(genos) (435b–c), other times a periphrasis such as\n‘that in the soul that calculates’ (439d–e),\nalthough in the subsequent account of virtue, we do find\nmeros, which means part (442b–d). So, insofar as\nvocabulary is concerned, one should be cautious about taking the\nsubdivisions of the soul to be independent agents. Perhaps the least\nmisleading way of thinking about the parts is as distinct functions.\nReason is the function of calculating, especially about what is good\nfor the soul. The appetites for food, drink, and sex are like the\nproducing class – they are necessary for bodily existence\n(439c–e). These two parts are familiar to the modern reader, who\nwill recognize the psychological capacity for reasoning and\ncalculating, on the one hand, and the bodily desires, on the other.\nLess familiar is the part of the soul that corresponds to the\nauxiliaries, the military class. This is the spirited part\n(thymos or thymoeides). Associated with the heart,\nit is an aggressive drive concerned with honor. Thumos is\nmanifested as anger with those who attack one’s honor. Perhaps\nmore importantly, it is manifested as anger with oneself when failing\nto do what one knows he should do (439e–440d).","\nThe importance of this account is that it is a moral psychology, an\naccount of the soul which serves as a basis for explaining the\nvirtues. Socrates’ account also introduces the idea that there\nis conflict in the soul. For instance, the appetites can lead one\ntoward pleasure which reason recognizes is not good for the whole\nsoul. In cases of conflict, Socrates says the spirited part sides with\nreason against appetite. Here we see in rough outline the chief\ncharacters in a well-known moral drama. Reason knows what is good both\nfor oneself and in the treatment of others. The appetites,\nshort-sighted and self-centered, pull in the opposite direction. The\nspirited part is the principle that sides with reason and enforces its\ndecrees.","\nWhile the opposition between reason and appetite establishes their\ndistinctness, it has another, more profound consequence. Most\ncommentators read this section of the argument as implying that reason\nlooks out for what is good for the soul while appetite seeks food,\ndrink, and sex, heedless of their benefit for the soul (437d ff).\nAlthough open to various interpretations, the difference between\nreason and appetite does seem aimed at one of the central paradoxes of\nSocratic intellectualism. Common experience seems to contradict the\nclaim that if one knows what is good he will do it; there seem to be\nobvious instances where someone does what she, in some sense, knows is\nnot good, while having options to act otherwise. By introducing\nnon-rational elements in the soul, the argument in the\nRepublic also introduces the possibility of doing what one\nknows, all things considered, not to be good. In such cases, one is\nmotivated by appetite, which lacks the capacity to conceive of what is\ngood, all things considered.","\nSome interpret this heedlessness as appetite’s being\ngood-independent, whereas reason is good-dependent. Thus, appetite\npursues what it pursues without reference to whether what it pursues\nis good; reason pursues what it pursues always understanding that what\nit pursues is good. In this kind of interpretation, Socrates in the\nRepublic accepts the possibility of akrasia because\nsome parts of the soul, which are indifferent to the good, can\nmotivate actions that do not aim at what is good. Others interpret\nthis heedlessness as appetite’s operating on a constrained\nnotion of good; for instance, for appetite only pleasure is good. By\ncontrast, reason operates on a larger notion, i.e., what is good, all\nthings considered. In this interpretation, akrasia is also\npossible, but now because some parts of the soul, which motivate\naction, do so with a constrained view of good. In any event, the stage\nis set for conflict in the soul between reason and appetite. If we\nassume that either can motive action on its own, the possibility\nexists for the soul’s pursuing bodily pleasure in spite of\nreason’s determination that doing so is not good, all things\nconsidered. This potential gives rise to a separate strain of thinking\nabout virtue. While, for Socratic intellectualism, virtue just is\nknowledge, in the aftermath of the argument for subdividing the soul,\nvirtue comes to have two aspects. The first is to acquire the\nknowledge which is the basis of virtue; the second is to instill in\nthe appetites and emotions – which cannot grasp the knowledge\n– a docility so that they react in a compliant way to what\nreason knows to be the best thing to do. Thus, non-rational parts of\nthe soul acquire reliable habits on which the moral virtues\ndepend.","\nGiven the complexity of the differences among the parts, we can now\nunderstand how their relations to one another define virtue in the\nsoul. Virtue reduces the potential for conflict to harmony. The master\nvirtue, justice, is each part doing its function and not interfering\nwith that of another (441d–e; 443d). Since the function of\nreason is to exercise forethought for the whole soul, it should rule.\nThe appetites, which seek only their immediate satisfaction, should\nnot rule. A soul ruled by appetites is the very picture of\npsychological injustice. Still, to fulfill its function of ruling,\nreason needs wisdom, the knowledge of what is beneficial for each of\nthe parts of the soul and for the whole. Moderation is a harmony among\nthe parts based on agreement that reason should rule. Courage is the\nspirited part carrying out the decrees of reason about what is to be\nfeared (442b–d). Any attentive reader of the dialogues must feel\nthat Socrates has now given an answer to the questions that started\nmany of the aporetic dialogues. At this point, we have the fully\ndeveloped moral psychology that allows the definition of the moral\nvirtues. They fall into place around the tripartite structure of the\nsoul.","\nOne might object, however, that all Socrates has accomplished is to\ndefine justice and the other virtues as they operate within\nthe soul. While each part treats the others justly, so to speak, it is\nnot clear what justice among the parts of someone’s soul has to\ndo with that person treating other people justly. Socrates at first\naddresses this issue rather brusquely, saying that someone with a just\nsoul would not embezzle funds, rob temples, steal, betray friends,\nbreak oaths, commit adultery, neglect parents, nor ignore the gods.\nThe reason for this is that each part in the soul does its own\nfunction in the matter of ruling and being ruled (443a–b).\nSocrates does not explain this connection between psychic harmony and\nmoral virtue. However, if we assume that injustice is based in\noverweening appetite or unbridled anger, then one can see the\nconnection between restrained appetites, well-governed anger and\ntreating others justly. The man whose sexual appetite is not governed\nby reason, e.g., would commit the injustice of adultery.","\nThis approach to the virtues by way of moral psychology, in fact,\nproves to be remarkably durable in ancient moral theory. In one way or\nanother, the various schools attempt to explain the virtues in terms\nof the soul, although there are, of course, variations in the\naccounts. Indeed, we can treat the theory of the Republic as\none such variation. While the account in Republic IV has\naffinities with that of Aristotle in Nicomachean\nEthics, for instance, further developments in\nRepublic V–VII make Plato’s overall account\naltogether unique. It is in these books that the theory of forms makes\nits appearance.","\nIn Republic V, Socrates returns to the issue of political\nrule by asking what change in actual cities would bring the ideal city\ncloser to realization. The famous answer is that philosophers should\nrule as kings (473d). Trying to make the scandalous, even ridiculous,\nanswer more palatable, Socrates immediately begins to explain what he\nmeans by philosophers. They are the ones who can distinguish between\nthe many beautiful things and the one beautiful itself. The beautiful\nitself, the good itself, and the just itself are what he calls forms.\nThe ability to understand such forms defines the philosopher\n(476a–c). Fully elaborated, this extraordinary theory holds that\nthere is a set of unchanging and unambiguous entities, collectively\nreferred to as being. These are known directly by reason in a way that\nis separate from the use of sensory perception. The objects of sensory\nperception are collectively referred to as becoming since they are\nchanging and ambiguous (508d). This infallible grasp means that one\nknows what goodness is, what beauty is, and what justice is. Because\nonly philosophers have this knowledge – an infallible grasp of\ngoodness, beauty, and justice – they and only they are fit to be\nrulers in the city.","\nWhile moral theory occupies a significant portion of the\nRepublic, Socrates does not say a lot about its relation to\nthe epistemology and metaphysics of the central books. For instance,\none might have expected the account to show how, e.g., reason might\nuse knowledge of the forms to govern the other parts of the soul.\nIndeed, in Book VI, Socrates does say that the philosopher will\nimitate in his own soul the order and harmony of the forms out of\nadmiration (500c–d). Since imitation is the heart of the account\nof moral education in Books II–III, the idea that one might\nimitate forms is intriguing; but it is not developed. In fact, the\nrelation between virtues in the soul and the metaphysics and\nepistemology of the forms is not an easy one. For instance, Socrates\nsays that virtue in the soul is happiness (580b–c). However, he\nalso says that knowledge and contemplation of the forms is happiness\n(517c–d). Since having or exercising the virtues of wisdom,\nmoderation, courage, and justice is different from knowledge and\ncontemplation of forms, the questions naturally arises about how to\nbring the two together into an integrated life. In the dialogues, the\nrelation between knowledge of forms and virtues such as moderation,\njustice, and courage is an issue that never seems to be fully resolved\nbecause it receives different treatments.","\nIn RepublicIX, Socrates offers a sketch of one way to bring\nthese two dimensions together. Toward the end of the book, Socrates\nconducts a three-part contest to show the philosophical, or\naristocratic, man is the happiest. In the second of these contests, he\nclaims that each part of the soul has its peculiar desire and\ncorresponding pleasure. Reason, for instance, desires to learn;\nsatisfying that desire is a pleasure distinct from the pleasure, e.g.,\nof eating (580d–e). One can now see that the functions of each\nof the parts has a new, affective dimension. Then, in the last of the\ncontests, Socrates makes an ontological distinction between true\npleasure of the soul and less true pleasure of the body. The former is\nthe pleasure of knowing being, i.e., the forms, and the latter is the\npleasure of filling bodily appetite. The less true pleasures also give\nrise to illusions and phantoms of pleasure; these illusions and\nphantoms recall the images and shadows in the allegory of the cave\n(583b–586c). Clearly, then, distinctions from the metaphysics\nand epistemology of the central books are being made relevant to the\ndivisions within the soul. Pleasures of reason are on a higher\nontological level than those of the bodily appetites; this difference\ncalls for a modification of the definitions of the virtues from Book\nIV. For instance, in Book IV, justice is each part fulfilling its own\nfunction; in Book IX, that function is specified in terms of the kinds\nof pleasure each part pursues. Reason pursues the true pleasure of\nknowing and the appetites the less true pleasure of the body. Appetite\ncommits injustice if it pursues pleasure not proper to it, i.e., if it\npursues bodily pleasures as though they were true pleasures\n(586d–587a). The result is an account of virtue which\ndiscriminates among pleasures, as any virtue ethics should; but the\ncriterion of discrimination reflects the distinction between being and\nbecoming. Rational pleasures are more real than bodily pleasures,\nalthough bodily pleasures are not negligible. Happiness, in turn,\nintegrates the virtue of managing bodily appetites and pleasures with\nthe pleasures of learning, but definitely gives greater weight to the\nlatter.","\nHowever, in the Phaedo, we find another approach to the\nrelation between knowledge of forms and virtues in the soul. Socrates\nidentifies wisdom with kowledge of such forms as beauty, justice, and\ngoodness (65d–e). The philosopher can know these only by reason\nthat is detached from the body as much as possible (65e–66a). In\nfact, pure knowledge is found only when the soul is completely\ndetached from the body in death. With such a severe account of the\nknowledge of the forms it is not surprising that courage, justice, and\nmoderation are subordinated to wisdom. When Socrates says the true\nexchange of pleasures, pains, and fears is for wisdom, he invokes\nmoderation, justice, and courage as virtues that serve this exchange\n(68b–69e). This passage suggests, for instance, that moderation\nwould control bodily pleasures and pains and fears so that reason\ncould be free of these disturbances in order to pursue knowledge. This\nnotion of virtues differs from the account in the first books of the\nRepublic in that the latter presents a comprehensive picture\nof the welfare of all the parts of the soul whereas the\nPhaedo, by implication, subordinates to reason those parts\ncharacterized by pleasures, pain, and fears.","\nIn the Symposium, we find yet another configuration of the\nrelation between virtue and the forms, in which the non-rational parts\nof the soul disappear – or are sublimated. In Diotima’s\ndiscourse on eros, she argues that the real purpose of love\nis to give birth in beauty (206b–c). This idea implies two\ndimensions: inspiration by what is itself beautiful and producing\nbeautiful objects. Although Diotima talks about the way these concepts\nwork in sexual procreation, her real interest is in their\npsychological manifestations. For instance, the lover, inspired by the\nphysical beauty of the beloved, will produce beautiful ideas. In turn,\nthe beauty of a soul will inspire ideas that will improve young men\n(210a–d). Finally, Diotima claims that the true object of erotic\nlove is not the beautiful body or even the beautiful soul – but\nbeauty itself. Unlike the beauty of bodies and of souls, this beauty\ndoes not come to be nor pass away, neither increases nor decreases.\nNor does it vary according to aspect or context. It is not in a face\nor hands but is itself by itself, one in form (211a–c). Since\nthis paradigm of beauty is the true object of eros, it\ninspires its own particular product, i.e., true virtue, distinct from\nthe images of virtue inspired by encounters with beauty in bodies and\nsouls (212a–c). While this passage highlights the relation\nbetween eros and the form of beauty in motivating virtue, it\nis almost silent on what this virtue might be. We do not know whether\nit just is the expression of love of beauty in the lover’s\nactions, or its concretization in the dispositions of the\nlover’s soul, or another manifestation. Clearly, this account in\nthe Symposium works without the elaborate theory about parts\nof the soul and their function in virtue, found in Republic\nI–IV.","\nAs with other ancient theories, this account of virtue can be called\neudaimonist. Plato’s theory is best represented as holding that\nvirtue, together with its active exercise, is the most important and\nthe dominant constituent of happiness (580b–c). One might object\nthat eudaimonist theories reduce morality to self-interest. We should\nrecall however that eudaimonia in this theory does not refer\nprimarily to a feeling. In the Republic, it refers to a state\nof the soul, and the active life to which it leads, whose value is\nmultifaceted. The order and harmony of the soul is, of course, good\nfor the soul because it provides what is good for each of the parts\nand the whole, and so makes the parts function well, for the benefit\nof each and of the whole person. In this way, the soul has the best\ninternal economy, so to speak. Still, we should not overlook the ways\nin which order and harmony in the soul are paired with order and\nharmony in the city. They are both modeled on the forms. As a\nconsequence, virtue in the soul is not a private concern artificially\njoined to the public function of ruling. Rather, the philosopher who\nimitates forms in ruling her soul is equally motivated to imitate\nforms in ruling the city. So, insofar as virtue consists in imitating\nthe forms, it is also a state of the soul best expressed by exercising\nrule in the city – or at least in the ideal city.\nEudaimonia, then, includes looking after the welfare of\nothers.","\nIndeed, the very nature of Plato’s account of virtue and\nhappiness leaves some aspects of the link between the two unclear.\nWhile virtue is the dominant factor in happiness, we still cannot tell\nwhether for Plato one can have a reason for being, e.g., courageous\nthat does not depend directly on happiness. Plato, even though he has\nforged a strong link between virtue and happiness, has not addressed\nsuch issues. In his account, it is still possible that one might\nbe courageous just for its own sake while at the same time believing\ncourage is also reliably linked to happiness. In the\nRepublic, Socrates tries to answer the question what value\njustice has by itself in the soul; it does not follow that he is\ntrying to convince Glaucon and Adeimantus that the value of justice is\nexhausted by its connection to one’s own happiness.","\n(For further developments in Plato’s moral theory in dialogues\nusually thought to postdate the Republic (especially\nPhilebus), see\n Plato\n entry, especially the section on\n Socrates\n and the section on\n Plato’s indirectness.)"],"section_title":"3. Plato","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nThe moral theory of Aristotle, like that of Plato, focuses on virtue,\nrecommending the virtuous way of life by its relation to happiness.\nHis most important ethical work, Nicomachean Ethics, devotes\nthe first book to a preliminary account of happiness, which is then\ncompleted in the last chapters of the final book, Book X. This account\nties happiness to excellent activity of the soul. In subsequent books,\nexcellent activity of the soul is tied to the moral virtues and to the\nvirtue of “practical wisdom” – excellence in\nthinking and deciding about how to behave. This approach to moral\ntheory depends on a moral psychology that shares a number of\naffinities with Plato’s. However, while for Plato the theory of\nforms has a role in justifying virtue, Aristotle notoriously rejects\nthat theory. Aristotle grounds his account of virtue in his theory\nabout the soul – a topic to which he devotes a separate\ntreatise, de Anima.","\nAristotle opens the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics by\npositing some one supreme good as the aim of human actions,\ninvestigations, and crafts (1094a). Identifying this good as\nhappiness, he immediately notes the variations in the notion\n(1095a15–25). Some think the happy life is the life of\nenjoyment; the more refined think it is the life of political\nactivity; others think it is the life of study or theoretical\ncontemplation (1095b10–20). The object of the life of enjoyment\nis bodily pleasure; that of political activity is honor or even\nvirtue. The object of the life of study is philosophical or scientific\nunderstanding. Arguing that the end of human life must be the most\ncomplete, he concludes that happiness is the most complete end.\nWhereas pleasure, honor, virtue, and understanding are choice-worthy\nin themselves, they are also chosen for the sake of happiness.\nHappiness is not chosen for the sake of anything else\n(1097a25–1097b5). That the other choice-worthy ends are chosen\nfor the sake of happiness might suggest that they are chosen only as\ninstrumental means to happiness, as though happiness were a separate\nstate. However, it is more likely that the other choice-worthy ends\nare constituents of happiness. As a consequence, the happy life is\ncomposed of such activities as virtuous pursuits, honorable acts, and\ncontemplation of truth. While conceiving these choice-worthy ends as\nconstituents of happiness might be illuminating, it does, in turn,\nraise the issue of whether happiness is a jumble of activities or\nwhether it requires organization – even prioritization –\nof the constituents.","\nNext, Aristotle turns to his own account of happiness, the summit of\nBook I. The account depends on an analogy with the notion of function\nor characteristic activity or work (ergon). A flutist has a\nfunction or work, i.e., playing the flute. The key idea for Aristotle\nis that the good of flute players (as such) is found in their\nfunctioning as a flutist. By analogy, if there is a human function,\nthe good for a human is found in this function (1097b20–30).\nAristotle then turns to the human soul. He argues that, in fact, there\nis a human function, to be found in the human soul’s\ncharacteristic activity, i.e., the exercise of reason\n(1098a1–20). Then, without explanation, he makes the claim that\nthis rational function is expressed in two distinct ways: by\ndeliberating and issuing commands, on the one hand, and by obeying\nsuch commands, on the other. The part that has reason in itself\ndeliberates about decisions, both for the short term and the long. The\npart that obeys reason is that aspect of the soul, such as the\nappetites, that functions in a human being under the influence of\nreason. The appetites can fail to obey reason; but they at least have\nthe capacity to obey (as, for example, such autonomic functions as\nnutritive and metabolic ones do not).","\nAristotle then argues that since the function of a human is to\nexercise the soul’s activities according to reason, the function\nof a good human is to exercise well and finely the soul’s\nactivities according to reason. Given the two aspects of reason that\nAristotle has distinguished, one can see that both can be well or\nbadly done. On the one hand, one can reason well or badly –\nabout what to do within the next five minutes, twenty-four hours, or\nten years. On the other, actions motivated by appetites can be well or\nbadly done, and likewise having an appetite at all can sometimes not\nbe a well done, but a badly done, activity of the soul. Acting on the\ndesire for a drink from the wine cooler at a banquet is not always a\ngood idea, nor is having such a desire. According to Aristotle, the\ngood human being has a soul in which these functions are consistently\ndone well. Thus, good persons reason well about plans, short term or\nlong; and when they satisfy their appetites, and even when they\nhave appetites, it is in conformity with reason. Returning to\nthe question of happiness, Aristotle says the good for a human is to\nlive the way the good human lives, that is, to live with one’s\nlife aimed at and structured by the same thing that the good human\nbeing aims at in his or her life. So, his account of happiness, i.e.,\nthe highest good for a human, is virtuous or excellent activity of the\nsoul. But he has not identified this virtuous activity with that of\nthe moral virtues, at this point. In fact, he says if there are many\nkinds of excellence, then human good is found in the active exercise\nof the highest. He is careful to point out that happiness is not just\nthe ability to function well in this way; it is the activity itself.\nMoreover, this activity must be carried out for a complete life. One\nswallow does not make a spring.","\nAlthough the reference here to parts or aspects of the soul is\ncursory, it is influenced by Aristotle’s theories in the de\nAnima. Fundamental to the human soul and to all living things,\nincluding plants, is nutrition and growth (415a20 ff). Next is\nsensation and locomotion; these functions are characteristic of\nanimals (416b30 ff). Aristotle associates appetite and desire with\nthis part of the soul (414b1–5). Thus we have a rough sketch of\nanimal life: animals, moved by appetite for food, go toward the\nobjects of desire, which are discerned by sensation. To these\nfunctions is added thought in the case of humans. Thought is both\ntheoretical and practical (427a 15–20). The bulk of the de\nAnima is devoted to explaining the nutritive, sensory, and\nrational functions; Aristotle considers desire and appetite as the\nsource of movement in other animals (432a15 ff), and these plus reason\nas its source in humans. In Nicomachean Ethics he focuses on\nthe role that appetite and desire, together with reason, play in the\nmoral drama of human life.","\nIn chapter 8 of Book I, Aristotle explicitly identifies human good\nwith psychological good. Dividing goods into external goods, those of\nthe body, and those of the soul, he states that his account of\nhappiness agrees with those who hold it is a good of the soul. In\nfact, in this account, happiness is closely related to traditionally\nconceived psychological goods such as pleasure and moral virtue,\nalthough the nature of the relation has yet to be shown\n(1098b10–30). Still, in Book I Aristotle is laying the\nfoundation in his moral psychology for showing the link between the\nmoral virtues and happiness. In Book II he completes this foundation\nwhen he turns to the question of which condition of the soul is to be\nidentified with (moral) virtue, or virtue of character.","\nIn II. 5, he says that conditions of the soul are either feelings\n(pathê), capacities for feeling (dynameis) or\ndispositions (hexeis). Feelings are such things as appetite,\nanger, fear and generally those conditions that are accompanied by\npleasure and pain. Capacities are, for example, the simple capacity to\nhave these feelings. Finally, disposition is that condition of the\nsoul whereby we are well or badly off with respect to feelings. For\ninstance, people are badly disposed with respect to anger who\ntypically get angry violently or who typically get angry weakly\n(1105b20–30). Virtue, as a condition of the soul, will be one of\nthese three. After arguing that virtue is neither feeling nor\ncapacity, Aristotle turns to what it means to be well or badly off\nwith respect to feelings. He says that in everything that is\ncontinuous and divisible it is possible to take more, less, or an\nequal amount (1106a25). This remark is puzzling until we realize that\nhe is actually talking about feelings. Feelings are continuous and\ndivisible; so one can take more, less, or an equal amount of them.\nPresumably, when it comes to feeling anger, e.g., one can feel too\nmuch, not enough, or a balanced amount. Aristotle thinks that what\ncounts as too much, not enough, or a balanced amount can vary to some\nextent from individual to individual. At this point he is ready to\ncome back to moral virtue for it is concerned with feelings and\nactions (to which feelings give rise), in which one can have excess,\ndeficiency, or the mean. To have a feeling like anger at the right\ntime, on the right occasion, towards the right people, for the right\npurpose and in the right manner is to feel the right amount, the mean\nbetween extremes of excess and deficiency; this is the mark of moral\nvirtue (1106a15–20). Finally, virtue is not a question only of\nfeelings since there is a mean between extremes of action. Presumably,\nAristotle means that the appropriate feeling – the mean between\nthe extremes in each situation – gives rise to the appropriate\naction.","\nAt last Aristotle is ready to discuss particular moral virtues.\nBeginning with courage, he mentions here two feelings, fear and\nconfidence. An excessive disposition to confidence is rashness and an\nexcessive disposition to fear and a deficiency in confidence is\ncowardice. When it comes to certain bodily pleasures and pains, the\nmean is moderation. While the excess is profligacy, deficiency in\nrespect of pleasures almost never occurs. Aristotle gives a fuller\naccount of both of these virtues in Book III; however, the basic idea\nremains. The virtue in each case is a mean between two extremes, the\nextremes being vices. Virtue, then, is a reliable disposition whereby\none reacts in relevant situations with the appropriate feeling –\nneither excessive nor deficient – and acts in the appropriate\nway – neither excessively nor deficiently.","\nTo complete the notion of moral virtue we must consider the role\nreason plays in moral actions. Summing up at Book II.6, Aristotle says\nvirtue is a disposition to choose, lying in the mean which is relative\nto us, determined by reason (1107a1). Since he is talking about\nchoosing actions, he is focusing on the way moral virtue issues in\nactions. In turn, it is the role of practical wisdom\n(phronêsis) to determine choice. While moral virtues,\nvirtues of character, belong to the part of the soul which can obey\nreason, practical wisdom is a virtue of the part of the soul that\nitself reasons. The virtues of thought, intellectual virtues, are\nknowledge (epistêmê), comprehension\n(nous), wisdom (sophia), craft\n(technê), and practical wisdom (1139b15–25). The\nfirst three grasp the truth about what cannot be otherwise and is not\ncontingent. A good example of knowledge about what cannot be otherwise\nis mathematics. Craft and practical wisdom pursue the truth that can\nbe had about what can be otherwise and is contingent. What can be\notherwise includes what is made – the province of craft –\nand what is done – the province of practical wisdom (1140a1).\nWhile Aristotle’s account of practical wisdom raises several\nproblems, we will focus on only two closely related issues. He says\nthat it is the mark of someone with practical wisdom to deliberate\nwell about what leads to the good for himself (to dunasthai\nkalôs bouleusasthai peri ta hautô(i) agatha). This\ngood is not specific, such as health and strength, but is living well\nin general (1140a25–30). This description of practical wisdom,\nfirst of all, implies that it deliberates about actions; it is a skill\nfor discerning those actions which hit the mean between the two\nextremes. However, the ambiguity of the phrase ‘what leads to\nthe good’ might suggest that practical wisdom deliberates only\nabout instrumental means to living well. Still since practical wisdom\ndetermines which actions hit the mean between two extremes, such\nactions are not instrumental means to living well – as though\nliving well were a separate state. Actions which hit the mean are\nparts of living well; the good life is composed of actions under the\nheadings of, for instance, honor and pleasure, which achieve the mean.\nIn addition, the deliberation of practical wisdom does not have to be\nconfined to determining which actions hit the mean. While Aristotle\nwould deny that anyone deliberates about whether happiness is the end\nof human life, we do deliberate about the constituents of happiness.\nSo, one might well deliberate about the ways in which honor and\npleasure fit into happiness.","\nNow we can discern the link between morality and happiness. While\nhappiness itself is excellent or virtuous activity of the soul, moral\nvirtue is a disposition to achieve the mean between two extremes in\nfeeling and in action. The missing link is that achieving the mean is\nalso excellent activity of the soul. Activity that expresses the\nvirtue of courage, for example, is also the best kind of activity when\nit comes to the emotion of fear. Activity that expresses the virtue of\nmoderation is also excellent activity when it comes to the bodily\nappetites. In this way, then, the happy person is also the virtuous\nperson. However, in Book I Aristotle has already pointed out the\nproblem of bodily and external goods in relation to happiness. Even if\nhappiness is virtuous activity of the soul, in some cases these goods\nare needed to be virtuous – for example, one must have money to\nbe generous. In fact, the lack of good birth, good children, and\nbeauty can mar one’s happiness for the happy person does not\nappear to be one who is altogether ugly, low born, solitary, or\nchildless, and even less so if he has friends and children who are\nbad, or good friends and children who then die\n(1099a30–1099b10). Aristotle is raising a problem that he does\nnot attempt to solve in this passage. Even if happiness is virtuous\nactivity of the soul, it does not confer immunity to the vicissitudes\nof life.","\nAristotle’s moral psychology has further implications for his\naccount of happiness. In Book I, chapter 7, he said that human good is\nvirtuous activity of the soul but was indefinite about the virtues. In\nmost of the Nicomachean Ethics he talks about the moral\nvirtues, leaving the impression that virtuous activity is the same as\nactivity associated with moral virtues. In Book X, however, Aristotle\nrevisits the issue of virtuous activity. If happiness, he says, is\nactivity in accordance with virtue, it will be activity in accordance\nwith the highest. The highest virtue belongs to the best part of the\nsoul, i.e., the intellect (nous) or the part that governs in\nthe soul and contemplates the fine and godly, being itself the divine\npart of the soul or that which is closest to the divine\n(1177a10–20). Up to this point, Aristotle has apparently been\ntalking about the man of political action and the happiness that is\nsuitable to rational, embodied human beings. Active in the life of the\ncity, this person exercises courage, moderation, liberality, and\njustice in the public arena. Now, instead of the life of an effective\nand successful citizen, Aristotle is holding up the life of study and\ncontemplation as the one that achieves happiness – that is, the\nhighest human good, the activity of the highest virtue. Such a life\nwould achieve the greatest possible self-sufficiency and\ninvulnerability (1177a30). Indeed, at first he portrays these two\nlives as so opposite that they seem incompatible.","\nIn the end, however, he palliates the differences, leaving the\npossibility for some way to harmonize the two (1178a30). The\ndifferences between the two lives are rooted in the different aspects\nof the soul. Moral virtues belong to the appetites and desires of the\nsensory soul – the part obviously associated with the active\npolitical life, when its activities are brought under the guidance and\ncontrol of excellent practical thought and judgment. The\n“highest” virtues, those belonging to the scientific or\nphilosophical intellect, belong to theoretical reason. To concentrate\non these activities one must be appropriately disengaged from active\npolitical life. While the latter description leads Aristotle to\nportray as possible a kind of human life that partakes of divine\ndetachment (1178b5 ff), finally human life is an indissolvable\ncomposite of intellect, reason, sensation, desires, and appetites. For\nAristotle, strictly speaking, happiness simply is the\nexercise of the highest virtues, those of theoretical reason and\nunderstanding. But even persons pursuing those activities as their\nhighest good, and making them central to their lives, will need to\nremain connected to daily life, and even to political affairs in the\ncommunity in which they live. Hence, they will possess and exercise\nthe moral virtues and those of practical thought, as well as those\nother, higher, virtues, throughout their lives. Clearly, this\nconception of happiness does not hold all virtue, moral and\nintellectual, to be of equal value. Rather, Aristotle means the\nintellectual virtue of study and contemplation to be the dominant part\nof happiness. However, problems remains since we can understand\ndominance in two ways. In the first version, the activity of\ntheoretical contemplation is the sole, exclusive component of\nhappiness and the exercise of the moral virtues and practical wisdom\nis an instrumental means to happiness, but not integral to it. The\nproblem with this version of dominance is that it undermines what\nAristotle has said about the intrinsic value of the virtuous activity\nof politically and socially engaged human beings, including\nfriendship. In a second version of dominance, we might understand\ncontemplation to be the principal, but not exclusive, constituent of\nhappiness. The problem with this version of dominance lies in\nintegrating such apparently incompatible activities into a coherent\nlife. If we give the proper weight to the divine good of theoretical\ncontemplation it may leave us little interest in the virtuous pursuits\nof the moral goods arising from our political nature, except, again,\nas means for establishing and maintaining the conditions in which we\nmay contemplate.","\nLike Plato, Aristotle is a eudaimonist in that he argues that virtue\n(including in some way the moral virtues of courage, justice and the\nrest) is the dominant and most important component of happiness.\nHowever, he is not claiming that the only reason to be morally\nvirtuous is that moral virtue is a constituent of happiness. He says\nthat we seek to have virtue and virtuous action for itself as well\n(Nicomachean Ethics, 1097b 1–10); not to do so is to\nfail even to be virtuous. In this regard, it is like\npleasure, which is also a constituent of the happy life. Like\npleasure, virtue is sought for its own sake. Still, as a constituent\nof happiness, virtuous action is grounded in the highest end for a\nhuman being. One can discern in the Nicomachean Ethics two\ndifferent types of argument for the link between virtue and happiness.\nOne is based on Aristotle’s account of human nature and\nculminates in the so-called function argument of Book I. If happiness\nis excellent or virtuous activity of the soul, the latter is\nunderstood by way of the uniquely human function. If one understands\nthe human function then one can understand what it is for that\nfunction to be done excellently (1098a5–15). This sort of\nargument has been criticized because it moves from a premise about\nwhat humans are to a conclusion about what they ought to be. Such\ncriticism reflects the modern claim that there is a fact-value\ndistinction. One defense of Aristotle’s argument holds that his\naccount of human nature is meant both to be objective and to offer the\nbasis for an understanding of excellence. The difference, then,\nbetween modern moral theory and ancient is over what counts as an\nobjective account of human nature. However, even if we accept this\ndefense, we can still ask why a human would consider it good to\nachieve human excellence as it is defined in the function argument. At\nthis point another argument for the link between happiness and virtue\n– one more dispersed in the text of the Nicomachean\nEthics – becomes relevant; it is based on value terms only\nand appeals to what a human might consider it good to achieve.\nAristotle describes virtuous activity of the soul as fine\n(kalos) and excellent (spoudaios). Finally, the link\nbetween virtue and happiness is forged if a human sees that it is good\nto live a life that one considers to be fine and excellent.","\n(For further detailed discussion, see entry on\n Aristotle’s ethics.)\n "],"section_title":"4. Aristotle","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nAlthough the Cynics had an impact on moral thinking in Athens after\nthe death of Socrates, it is through later, and highly controversial,\nreports of their deeds and sayings – rather than their writings\n– that we know of them. Diogenes the Cynic, the central figure,\nis famous for living in a wine jar (Diogenes Laertius [= DL] VI 23)\nand going about with a lantern looking for ‘a man’ –\ni.e., someone not corrupted (DL VI 41). He claimed to set courage over\nagainst fortune, nature against convention, and reason against passion\n(DL VI 38). Of this trio of opposites, the most characteristic for\nunderstanding the Cynics is nature against convention. Diogenes taught\nthat a life according to nature was better than one that conformed to\nconvention. First of all, natural life is simpler. Diogenes ate,\nslept, or conversed wherever it suited him and carried his food around\nwith him (DL VI 22). When he saw a child drinking out of its hand, he\nthrew away his cup, saying that a child had bested him in frugality\n(DL VI 37). He said the life of humans had been made easy by the gods\nbut that humans had lost sight of this through seeking after honeyed\ncakes, perfumes, and similar things (DL VI 44). With sufficient\ntraining the life according to nature is the happy life (DL VI\n71).","\nAccordingly Diogenes became famous for behavior that flouted\nconvention (DL VI 69). Still, he thought that the simple life not only\nfreed one from unnecessary concerns but was essential to virtue.\nAlthough he says nothing specific about the virtues, he does commend\ntraining for virtuous behavior (DL VI 70). His frugality certainly\nbespeaks self-control. He condemned love of money, praised good men,\nand held love to be the occupation of the idle (DL VI\n50–51).","\nBesides his contempt for convention, what is most noteworthy about\nDiogenes as a moral teacher is his emphasis on detachment from those\nthings most people consider good. In this emphasis, Diogenes seems to\nhave intensified a tendency found in Socrates. Certainly Socrates\ncould be heedless of convention and careless about providing for his\nbodily needs. To Plato, however, Diogenes seemed to be Socrates gone\nmad (DL VI 54). Still, in Diogenes’ attitude, we can see at\nleast the beginning of the idea that the end of life is a\npsychological state marked by detachment. Counseling the simple and\nuncomplicated satisfaction of one’s natural instincts and\ndesires, Diogenes urges detachment from those things held out by\nconvention to be good. While he is not so explicit, others develop the\ntheme of detachment into the notion of tranquility. The Stoics and\nEpicureans hold that happiness depends on detachment from vulnerable\nor difficult to obtain bodily and external goods and consists in a\npsychological state more under one’s own direct control. In this\nway, happiness becomes associated (for the Epicureans) with\ntranquility (ataraxia). Finally, in Skepticism, suspension of\njudgment is a kind of epistemic detachment that provides tranquility.\nSo in Diogenes we find the beginnings of an idea that will become\ncentral to later ancient moral theory."],"section_title":"5. Cynics","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nThe first of the Cyrenaic school was Aristippus, who came from Cyrene,\na Greek city on the north African coast. The account of his teachings,\nin Diogenes Laertius, can seem sometimes inconsistent. Nevertheless,\nAristippus is interesting because, as a thorough hedonist, he is\nsomething of a foil for Epicurus. First of all, pleasure is the end or\nthe goal of life – what everyone should seek in life. However,\nthe pleasure that is the end is not pleasure in general, or pleasure\nover the long term, but immediate, particular pleasures. Thus the end\nvaries situation by situation, action by action. The end is not\nhappiness because happiness is the sum of particular pleasures (DL II\n87–88). Accumulating the pleasures that produce happiness is\ntiresome (DL II 90). Particular pleasures are ones that are close-by\nor sure. Moreover, Aristippus said that pleasures do not differ from\none another, that one pleasure is not more pleasant than another. This\nsort of thinking would encourage one to choose a readily available\npleasure rather than wait for a “better” one in the\nfuture. This conclusion is reinforced by other parts of his teaching.\nHis school says that bodily pleasures are much better than mental\npleasures. While this claim would seem to contradict the idea that\npleasures do not differ, it does show preference for the immediately\nor easily available pleasures of bodily gratification over, e.g., the\nmental pleasure of a self-aware just person. In fact,\nAristippus’ school holds that pleasure is good even if it comes\nfrom the most unseemly things (DL II 88). Aristippus, then, seems to\nhave raised improvidence to the level of a principle.","\nStill, it is possible that the position is more than an elaborate\njustification for short-sighted pleasure-seeking. Cyrenaics taught\nthat a wise man (sophos) (one who always pursues immediate\ngratification) will in general live more pleasantly than a foolish\nman. That prudence or wisdom (phronêsis) is good, not\nin itself but in its consequences, suggests that some balance, perhaps\neven regarding others, is required in choosing pleasures (DL II 91).\nThe Cyrenaic attitude to punishment seems to be an example of\nprudence. They hold that nothing is just, fine, or base by nature but\nonly by convention and custom; still a good man will do nothing out of\nline through fear of punishment (DL II 93). Finally, they hold that\nfriendship is based in self-interest (DL II 91). These aspects of\nCyrenaic teaching suggest they are egoist hedonists. If so, there are\ngrounds for taking the interest of others into account as long as\ndoing so is based on what best provides an individual pleasure.","\nNevertheless, Aristippus’ school holds that the end of life is a\npsychological good, pleasure. Still, it is particular pleasures not\nthe accumulation of these that is the end. As a consequence, their\nmoral theory contrasts sharply with others in antiquity. If we take\nthe claims about the wise man, prudence, and friendship to be\nreferences to virtue, then Aristippus’ school denies that virtue\nis indispensable for achieving the end or goal of life. While they\nhold that virtue is good insofar as it leads to the end, they seem\nprepared to dispense with virtue in circumstances where it proves\nineffective. Even if they held virtue in more esteem, the Cyrenaics\nwould nonetheless not be eudaimonists since they deny that happiness\nis the end of life."],"section_title":"6. Cyrenaics","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nEpicurean moral theory is the most prominent hedonistic theory in the\nancient world. While Epicurus holds that pleasure is the sole\nintrinsic good and pain is what is intrinsically bad for humans, he is\nalso very careful about defining these two. Aware of the Cyrenaics who\nhold that pleasures, moral and immoral, are the end or goal of all\naction, Epicurus presents a sustained argument that pleasure,\ncorrectly understood, will coincide with virtue.","\nIn the Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus begins by making a\ndistinction among desires. Some desires are empty or groundless and\nothers are natural; the natural are further subdivided into the merely\nnatural and the necessary. Finally, the necessary are those necessary\nfor happiness, those necessary for the body’s freedom from\ndistress, and those necessary for life itself (Letter to\nMenoeceus 127). A helpful scholiast (cf. Principal\nDoctrines XXIX) gives us some examples; necessary desires are\nones that bring relief from unavoidable pain, such as drinking when\nthirsty – if we don’t drink when we need replenishment, we\nwill just get thirstier and thirstier, a painful experience. The\nnatural but not necessary are the ones that vary pleasure but are not\nneeded in order to motivate us to remove or ward off pain,\nsuch as the desire for expensive food: we do not need to want, or to\neat, expensive food in order to ward off the pain of prolonged hunger.\nFinally, the groundless desires are for such things as crowns and\nstatues bestowed as civic honors – these are things that when\ndesired at all are desired with intense and harmful cravings. Keeping\nthese distinctions in mind is a great help in one’s life because\nit shows us what we need to aim for. The aim of the blessed life is\nthe body’s health and the soul’s freedom from disturbance\n(ataraxia) (128).","\nAfter this austere introduction, Epicurus makes the bold claim that\npleasure is the beginning and end of the blessed life. Then he makes\nan important qualification. Just because pleasure is the good,\nEpicureans do not seek every pleasure. Some lead to greater pain. Just\nso, they do not avoid all pains; some lead to greater pleasures\n(128–29). Such a position sounds, of course, like common-sense\nhedonism. If one’s aim is to have as much pleasure as possible\nover the long term, it makes sense to avoid some smaller pleasures\nthat will be followed by larger pains. If one wants, for example, to\nhave as much pleasure from drinking wine as possible, then it would\nmake sense to exercise some judgment about how much to drink on an\noccasion since the next morning’s hangover will be very\nunpleasant, and might keep one from having wine the next day. However,\nhis distinction among groundless, natural, and necessary desires\nshould make us suspicious that Epicurus is no common-sense hedonist.\nThe aim of life is not maximizing pleasures in the way the above\nexample suggests. Rather, real pleasure, the aim of life, is what we\nexperience through freedom from pain and distress. So it is not the\npains of the hangover or the possible loss of further bouts of wine\ndrinking that should restrain my drinking on this occasion. Rather one\nshould be aiming at the pleasure given by freedom from bodily pain and\nmental distress (131–32).","\nThe usual way to understand the pleasure of freedom from pain and from\ndistress is by way of the distinction between kinetic pleasures and\nkatastematic, or what are, following Cicero, misleadingly called\n‘static’ ones (Diogenes Laertius X 136). The name of the\nformer implies motion and the name of the latter implies a state or\ncondition. The reason the distinction is important is that freedom\nfrom pain and from distress is a state or condition, not a motion.\nEpicurus holds not only that this state is a kind of pleasure but that\nit is the most complete pleasure (Principal Doctrines III).\nModern commentators have taken various approaches to explaining why\nthis state should be considered a pleasure, as opposed to, e.g., the\nattitude of taking pleasure in the fact that one is free of pain and\ndistress. After all, taking pleasure in a fact is not a feeling in the\nsame sense as the pleasure of drinking when thirsty. Since the latter\nis usually taken to be an example of kinetic pleasure (and is\nassociated with the pain of thirst), sometimes katastematic pleasure\nis said to be just kinetic pleasure free from pain and distress, e.g.,\nthe pleasure of satiety. A somewhat broader conception of katastematic\npleasure holds that it is the enjoyment of one’s natural\nconstitution when one is not distracted by bodily pain or mental\ndistress. Finally, some commentators hold the pleasure of freedom from\npain and from distress to be a feeling available only to the wise\nperson, who properly appreciates simple pleasures. Since eating plain\nbread and drinking water are usually not difficult to achieve, to the\nwise, their enjoyment is not overwhelmed by fear (130–31).\nAccordingly, the pleasure they take in these is free of pain and\ndistress. Of course, the wise do not have to confine themselves to\nsimple pleasures; they can enjoy luxurious ones as well – as\nlong as they avoid needing them, which entails fear.","\nAt this point, we can see that Epicurus has so refined the account of\npleasure and pain that he is able to tie them to virtue. In the\nLetter to Menoeceus, he claims, as a truth for which he does\nnot argue, that virtue and pleasure are inseparable and that living a\nprudent, honorable, and just life is the necessary and sufficient\nmeans to the pleasure that is the end of life (132). An example of\nwhat he might mean is found in Principal Doctrines, where\nEpicurus holds that justice is a contract among humans to avoid\nsuffering harm from one another. Then he argues that injustice is not\nbad per se but is bad because of the fear that arises from\nthe expectation that one will be punished for his misdeeds. He\nreinforces this claim by arguing that it is impossible for someone who\nviolates the compact to be confident that he will escape detection\n(Principal Doctrines XXXIV–V). While one might doubt\nthis claim about the malfactor’s state of mind, nevertheless, we\ncan see that Epicurus means to ground justice, understood as the rules\ngoverning human intercourse, in his moral psychology, i.e., the need\nto avoid distress.","\nEpicurus, like his predecessors in the ancient moral tradition,\nidentified the good as something psychological. However, instead of,\nfor example, the complex Aristotelian notion of excellent activity of\nthe soul, Epicurus settled on the fairly obvious psychological good of\npleasure. Of course, Aristotle argues that excellent activity of the\nsoul is intrinsically pleasurable (Nicomachean Ethics\n1099a5). Still, in his account pleasure seems something like a\ndividend of excellent activity (1175b30). By contrast, for Epicurus\npleasure itself is the end of life. However, since Epicureans hold\nfreedom from pain (aponia) and distress (ataraxia)\ngives the preferable pleasure, they emphasize tranquility\n(ataraxia) as the end of life. Modern utilitarians, for whom\nfreedom from pain and distress is not paramount, would include a\nbroader palate of pleasures.","\nEpicurus’ doctrine can be considered eudaimonist. While Plato\nand Aristotle maintain that virtue is constitutive of happiness,\nEpicurus holds that virtue is the only means to achieve happiness,\nwhere happiness is understood as a continuous experience of the\npleasure that comes from freedom from pain and from mental distress.\nThus, he is a eudaimonist in that he holds virtue is indispensable to\nhappiness; but he does not identify virtuous activity, in whole or in\npart, with happiness. Finally, Epicurus is usually interpreted to have\nheld a version of psychological hedonism – i.e., everything we\ndo is done for the sake of pleasure – rather than ethical\nhedonism – i.e., we ought to do everything for the sake of\npleasure. However, Principal Doctrine XXV suggests the latter\nposition; and when in the Letter to Menoeceus he says that\n“we” do everything in order not to be in pain or in fear,\nhe might mean to be referring to “we” Epicureans. If so,\nthe claim would be normative. Still, once all disturbance of the soul\nis dispelled, he says, one is no longer in need nor is there any other\ngood that could be added (128). Since this claim appears to be\ndescriptive, Epicurus could be taken, as he usually has been, to be\narguing that whatever we do is done for the sake of pleasure. In this\naccount, that aspect of human nature on which virtue is based is\nfairly straightforward. The account is certainly less complex than,\ne.g., Aristotle’s. In turn, Epicurus seems to have argued in\nsuch a way as to make pleasure the only reason for being virtuous. If\npsychological hedonism is true, then when one realizes the necessary\nlink between virtue and pleasure, one has all the reason one needs to\nbe virtuous and the only reason one can have."],"section_title":"7. Epicurus","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nThe Stoics are well known for their teaching that the good is to be\nidentified with virtue. Virtues include logic, physics, and ethics\n(Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta [=SVF]II 35), as well as wisdom,\nmoderation, justice, and courage. To our modern ears, the first three\nsound like academic subjects; but for the Stoics, they were virtues of\nthought. However, orthodox Stoics do not follow the Aristotelian\ndistinction between intellectual and moral virtues because – as\nwe shall see – they hold that all human psychological functions,\nincluding the affective and volitional, are rational in a single,\nunified sense. For them, consequently, all virtues form a unity around\nthe core concept of knowledge. Finally, all that is required for\nhappiness (i.e., the secure possession of the good, of what is needed\nto make one’s life a thoroughly good one) – and the only\nthing – is to lead a virtuous life. In this teaching Stoics are\naddressing the problem of bodily and external goods raised by\nAristotle. Their solution takes the radical course of dismissing such\nalleged goods from the account of happiness because they are not\nnecessary for virtue, and are not, in fact, in any way good at\nall.","\nThey argue that health, pleasure, beauty, strength, wealth, good\nreputation, and noble birth are neither good nor bad. Since they can\nbe used well or badly and the good is invariably good, these assets\nare not good. The virtues, however, are good (DL VII 102–103),\nsince they are perfections of our rationality, and only rationally\nperfected thoughts and decisions can possibly have the features of\nharmony and order in which goodness itself consists. Since possessing\nand exercising virtue is happiness, happiness does not include such\nthings as health, pleasure, and wealth. Still, the Stoics do not\ndismiss these assets altogether since they still have a kind of value.\nThese things are indifferent to happiness in that they do not add to\none’s virtue nor detract from it, and so they do not add to or\ntake away from one’s possession of the good. One is not more\nvirtuous because healthy nor less virtuous because ill. But being\nhealthy generally conforms with nature’s plans for the lives of\nanimals and plants, so it is preferable to be healthy, and one should\ntry to preserve and maintain one’s health. Health is, then, the\nkind of value they call a preferred indifferent; but it is not in any\nway a good, and it makes no contribution to the quality of one’s\nlife as a good or a bad one, happy or miserable.","\nIn order to understand the Stoic claims about the relation of virtue\nto happiness, we can begin with virtue. Chrysippus says that virtue is\na craft (technê) having to do with the things of life\n(SVF II 909). In other texts, we learn that the things of\nlife include impulse (hormê). Each animal has an\nimpulse for self-preservation; it has an awareness of its constitution\nand strives to preserve its integrity. There is also a natural impulse\nto care for offspring. Humans, then, are naturally inclined toward\npreserving life, health, and children. But then grown-up humans also\ndo these things under the guidance of reason; reason in the adult\nhuman case is the craftsman of impulse (DL VII 85–6). This\nlatter phrase is significant because it implies that just following\nnatural impulse is not enough. In fact, it is not even possible for an\nadult human, whose nature is such as to do everything they do\nby reason, even to follow the sort of natural impulses that\nanimals and immature humans do in their actions. In order to lead a\nvirtuous life, reason must shape our impulses and guide their\nexpression in action.","\nImpulse is the key to understanding the relation between virtue and\nhappiness. An impulse is a propositional attitude that, when assented\nto, leads to action, e.g., ‘I should eat this bread now.’\nHowever, impulses do not arise in a separate, non-rational part of the\nsoul. Stoics deny there are any non-rational desires of appetite\ncapable of impelling action. The soul, insofar as it provides\nmotivations and is the cause of our actions, consists of the\ncommanding faculty (hêgemonikon) which is also reason\n(SVF I 202). We can distinguish correct impulses into those\nwhich treat virtue as the only good and those which treat things\nindifferent as indifferent. By contrast, emotions or passions (\npathê) are incorrect impulses that treat what is\nindifferent as good. However, they do not come from a non-rational\npart of the soul but are false judgments about the good, where\njudgment is understood as assent to some impulse. Emotions, such as\ndesire, fear, pleasure, and pain, embody such erroneous judgments\n(SVF III 391, 393, 394). For instance, the desire for health\narises from assenting to the impulse that embodies the false judgment\nthat health is good, instead of a preferred indifferent. The sage\n– someone perfected in virtue – would never assent to such\nfalse propositions and thus would never have emotions in this sense,\nno feelings that carried him beyond reason’s true assessment. He\nwould, however, experience feelings attuned to reason, eupatheiai\n –literally good emotions or feelings. For instance, he\nwould feel joy over his virtue, but not pleasure – the latter\nbeing an emotion that treats the actual possession of an indifferent\nas a good.","\nKnowledge, then, about what is good, bad, and indifferent is the heart\nof virtue. Courage, e.g., is simply knowledge of what is to be\nendured: the impulse to endure or not, and the only impulse\nthat is needed by courage, then follows automatically, as a product or\naspect of that knowledge. This tight unity in the soul is the basis\nfor the Stoic teaching about the unity of the virtues. Zeno (the\nfounder of the school) defines wisdom (phronêsis), or\nrather practical knowledge, in matters requiring distribution\nas justice, in matters requiring choice as moderation, and in matters\nrequiring endurance as courage (Plutarch On Moral Virtue\n440E–441D). Practical knowledge, then, is a single,\ncomprehensive knowledge of what is good and bad in each of these kinds\nof circumstance.","\nAttending to this identification of virtue and practical knowledge is\na good way to understand the central Stoic teaching that virtue is\nliving in agreement with nature (SVF III 16). Nature includes\nnot only what produces natural impulses but also the rest of the\ngovernment of the cosmos, the natural world. The universe is governed\nby right reason that pervades everything and directs (causes) the way\nit functions – with the exception of the only rational animals\nthere are, the adult human beings: their actions are governed by\nthemselves, i.e., by assenting to, or withholding assent from\nparticular impulses. Nature is even identified with Zeus, who is said\nto be the director of the administration of all that exists (DL VII\n87–9). Since reason governs the universe for the good,\neverything happens of necessity and for the overall good. Virtue,\nthen, includes understanding both one’s individual nature as a\nhuman being and the way nature arranges the whole universe. At this\npoint, we can appreciate the role of logic and physics as virtue since\nthese entail knowledge of the universe. This understanding is the\nbasis for living in agreement with the government of the universe,\ni.e., with nature, by making one’s decisions and actions be such\nas to agree with Zeus’s or nature’s own plans, so far as\none can understand what those are.","\nIt is in this context that we can best understand the Stoic teaching\nabout indifferents, such as health and wealth. An individual’s\nhealth is vulnerable to being lost if right reason that governs the\nuniverse requires it for the good of the whole. If happiness depended\non having these assets and avoiding their opposites, then, in these\ncases, happiness would be impossible. However, if virtue is living in\nagreement with nature’s government of the universe and if virtue\nis the only good, one’s happiness is entirely determined by his\npatterns of assent and is therefore not vulnerable to being lost. If\none understands that the good of the whole dictates that in a\nparticular case one’s health must be sacrificed, then one\nrecognizes that his happiness does not require health. We should not,\nhowever, see this recognition as tantamount to renunciation. If the\nStoic notion of happiness has any relation at all to the ordinary\nsense, renunciation cannot be a part of it. Rather, the Stoic view of\nliving in accordance with nature should imply not only understanding\nthe way right reason rules the universe but agreeing with it and even\ndesiring that things happen as they do. We can best appreciate the\nnotion that virtue is the good, then, if we take virtue as both\nacknowledging that the universe is well governed and adopting the\npoint of view, so to speak, of the government (DL VII 87–9).","\nA refinement of the Stoic approach to indifferents gives us a way of\nunderstanding what living in agreement with nature might look like.\nAfter all, such things as health and wealth cannot just be dismissed\nsince they are something like the raw material of virtue. It is in\npursuing and using them that one exercises virtue, for instance. In\nthe attempt to integrate preferred indifferents into the pursuit of\nthe good, Stoics used an analogy with archery (On Ends\nIII.22). Since he aims to hit the target, the archer does everything\nin his power to hit the target. Trying everything in his power\nreflects the idea that such factors as a gust of wind – chance\nhappenings that cannot be controlled or foreseen – can intervene\nand keep him from achieving the goal. To account for this type of\nfactor, it is claimed that the goal of the archer is really trying\neverything in his power to attain the end. The analogy with the art of\nliving focuses on this shift from the goal of hitting the target to\nthe goal of trying everything in one’s power to hit the target\n(On Ends V.17–20). It is the art of trying everything\nin one’s power to attain such preferred indifferents as health\nand wealth. However, if right reason, which governs the universe,\ndecides that one will not have either, then the sage follows right\nreason. At this point the analogy with archery breaks down since, for\nthe sage, trying everything in one’s power does not mean\nstriving until one fails; rather, it means seeking preferred\nindifferents guided by right reason. By this reasoning, one should see\nthat virtue and happiness are not identified with achieving heath and\nwealth but with the way one seeks them and the evaluative propositions\none assents to. Finally, the art of living is best compared to such\nskills as acting and dancing (On Ends V. 24–5).","\nThis way of relating preferred indifferents to the end, i.e., to\nhappiness, was challenged in antiquity as incoherent. Plutarch, for\ninstance, argues that it is contrary to common understanding to say\nthat the end is different from the reference point of all action. If\nthe reference point of all action – what one does everything to\nachieve – is to have preferred indifferents such as health, then\nthe end is to have preferred indifferents. However, if the end is not\nto have preferred indifferents (but, say, always to act prudently),\nthen the reference point of all action cannot be the preferred\nindifferents (On Common Conceptions 1070F–1071E). The\nStoics are presented with a dilemma: either preferred indifferents are\nintegral to the end or they are not the object of choice.","\nThe Stoics are extreme eudaimonists compared to Plato or Aristotle,\nalthough they are clearly inspired by Socratic intellectualism. While\nPlato clearly associates virtue and happiness, he never squarely faces\nthe issue whether happiness may require other goods, e.g., wealth and\nhealth. Aristotle holds happiness to be virtuous activity of the soul;\nbut he raises – without solving – the problem of bodily\nand external goods and happiness. For these two, virtue, together with\nits active exercise, is the dominant and most important component of\nhappiness, while Stoics simply identify virtue and the good, and so\nmake it the only thing needed for a happy life. Still, Stoics do not\nreduce happiness to virtue, as though ‘happiness’ is just\na name for being perfectly just, courageous, and moderate. Rather they\nhave independent ways of describing happiness. Following Zeno, all the\nStoics say it is a good flow of life. Seneca says the happy life is\npeacefulness and constant tranquility. However, we should keep in mind\nthat, while they do not reduce happiness to virtue, their account of\nhappiness is not that of the common person. So in recommending virtue\nbecause it secures happiness the Stoics are relying on happiness in a\nspecial, although not idiosyncratic, sense. In fact, their idea of\nhappiness shares an important feature with the Epicurean, which puts a\npremium on tranquil pleasures. In Stoicism as well, deliverance from\nthe vicissitudes of fate leads to a notion of happiness that\nemphasizes tranquility. And, as we shall see, tranquility is a value\nfor the Skeptics.","\nClearly, the Stoic account of virtue and happiness depends on their\ntheory about human nature. For Aristotle, virtue is perfection of the\nhuman function and the Stoics follow in this line of thinking. While\ntheir notion of virtue builds on their notion of the underlying human\nnature, their account of the perfection of human nature is more\ncomplex than Aristotle’s. It includes accommodation to the\nnature of the universe. Virtue is the perfection of human nature that\nmakes it harmonious with the workings of fate, i.e. with Zeus’s\noverall plan, regarded as the ineluctable, though providential, cause\nof what happens in the world at large."],"section_title":"8. Stoics","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nPyrrho, a murky figure, roughly contemporary with Epicurus and Zeno\nthe Stoic, left no writings. In the late, anecdotal tradition he is\ncredited with introducing suspension of judgment (DL IX 61). He became\nthe eponymous hero for the founding of Pyrrhonian skepticism in the\nfirst century B.C. (See entry on\n Pyrrho\n and on\n Ancient Skepticism.)\n Having discovered that for every argument examined so far there is an\nopposing argument, Pyrrhonian Skeptics expressed no determinate\nopinions (DL IX 74). This attitude would seem to lead to a kind of\nepistemic paralysis. The Skeptics reply that they do not abolish,\ne.g., relying on sight. They do not say that it is unreliable and they\ndo not refuse, personally, ever to rely on it. Rather, they have the\nimpression that there is no reason why we are entitled to rely on it,\nin a given case or in general, even if we go ahead and rely on it\nanyhow (DL IX 103). For example, if one has the visual impression of a\ntower, that appearance is not in dispute. What is in dispute is\nwhether the tower is as it appears to be. For Skeptics, claiming that\nthe tower is as it appears to be is a dogmatic statement about the\nobject or the causal history of the appearance. As far as the Skeptic\nis concerned, all such statements have failed to be adequately\njustified, and all supporting arguments can be opposed by equally\nconvincing counter-arguments. Lacking any grounds on which to prefer\none dogmatic statement or view over another, he suspends judgment.","\nSuch views have an obvious impact on practical and moral issues. First\nof all, the Skeptics argue that, so far as we have been given any\ncompelling reason by philosophers to believe, there is nothing good or\nbad by nature (Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism\n[=PH] III 179–238, Adversus Mathematicos\n[=M] XI 42–109). And just in case he does find such\nreasons compelling, the Skeptic will resist the temptation to assent\nby posing a general counter-argument: what is good by nature would be\nrecognized by everyone, but clearly not everyone agrees – for\ninstance, Epicurus holds that pleasure is good by nature but\nAntisthenes holds that it is not (DL IX 101) – hence there is\nnothing good by nature (see section 4 of the entry on\n Moral Skepticism).\n The practical consequences of suspending judgment are illustrated by\ntwo traditions about the life of Pyrrho. In one, Pyrrho himself did\nnot avoid anything, whether it was wagons, precipices, or dogs. It\nwould appear that, suspending judgment about whether being hit by a\nwagon was naturally good or bad, Pyrrho might walk into its path, or\nnot bother to get out of the way. His less skeptical friends kept him\nalive – presumably by guiding him away from busy roads, vicious\ndogs, and deep gorges. Another tradition, however, says that he only\ntheorized about suspension of judgments, and took action to preserve\nhimself and otherwise lead a normal life, but doing so without any\njudgments as to natural good and bad. Living providently, he reached\nninety years of age (DL IX 62).","\nIn any event, Pyrrho’s suspension of judgment led to a certain\ndetachment. Not knowing what was good or bad by nature, he was\nindifferent where dogmatists would be unhappy or at least anxious. For\ninstance, he performed household chores usually done by women (DL IX\n63–66). Thus Pyrrho’s skepticism detached him from the\ndogmatic judgments of a culture in which a man’s performing\nwomen’s work was considered demeaning. In turn, his skepticism\nand suspension of judgment led to freedom from disturbance\n(ataraxia) (DL IX 68). It is significant that this\npsychological state, so important for Epicureans as part of the end of\nlife, should play a key role in Pyrrhonian skepticism at its beginning\nwith Pyrrho, but certainly in its development with Sextus\nEmpiricus.","\nWhile suspension of judgment in moral matters brings freedom from\ndisturbance, it does not lead to immoral behavior – anymore than\nit leads to the foolhardy behavior of the first tradition about\nPyrrho’s life. Sextus generalizes the Skeptic teaching about\nappearances to cover the whole area of practical activity. He says the\nrules of everyday conduct are divided into four parts: (1) the\nguidance from nature, (2) compulsion that comes from bodily states\nlike hunger and thirst, (3) traditional laws and customs about pious\nand good living, (4) the teachings of the crafts (PH, I\n21–24). The Skeptic is guided by all of these as by appearance,\nand thus undogmatically. For instance, he would follow the traditional\nlaws about pious and good living, accepting these laws as the way\nthings appear to him to be in matters of piety and goodness but\nclaiming no knowledge and holding no beliefs.","\nSextus says that the end of life is freedom from disturbance in\nmatters of belief, plus moderate states in matters of compulsion.\nSuspension of judgment provides the former in that one is not\ndisturbed about which of two opposing claims is true, when (as always\nseems to happen) one cannot rationally decide between them. Matters of\ncompulsion cover such things as bodily needs for food, drink, and\nwarmth. While the Skeptic undeniably suffers when hungry, thirsty, or\ncold, he achieves a moderate state with respect to these sufferings\nwhen compared to the person who both suffers them and believes they\nare naturally bad. The Skeptic’s suspension of judgment about\nwhether his suffering is naturally bad gives him a certain detachment\nfrom the suffering, and puts him in a better condition than those who\nalso believe their suffering is naturally bad (PH I\n25–30).","\nAs a consequence, the Skeptic conception of the end of life is similar\nin some ways to Epicurean and Stoic beliefs. For Epicureans the end is\nfreedom from pain and distress; the Stoic identification of virtue and\nthe good promises freedom from disturbance. While Pyrrho and Sextus\nhold freedom from disturbance to be the end of life, they differ from\nthe former over the means by which it is achieved. Both the Epicureans\nand Stoics, for example, hold that a tranquil life is impossible in\nthe absence of virtue. By contrast, Sextus does not have a lot to say\nin a positive vein about virtue, although he does recommend following\ntraditional laws about piety and goodness, and he indicates that the\nSkeptic may live virtuously (PH I 17). Rather, it is for the\nSkeptics an epistemic attitude embodied in a distinctive practice, not\nvirtue, that leads to the desired state. This alone would seem to be\nenough to disqualify Pyrrhonism as a form of eudaimonism.","\nSextus does however offer his skeptical practice as a corrective to\nthe dogmatists’ misleading path to eudaimonia: it is\nnot possible to be happy while supposing things are good or bad by\nnature (M XI 130, 144). It is the person who suspends\njudgment that enjoys the most complete happiness (M XI 160,\n140). It is important to observe that Sextus proposes his skeptical\npractice as an alternative to dogmatic theories. For\nthe Skeptic makes no commitments, or even assertions, regarding the\nsupposedly objective conditions that are supposed by other\nphilosophers to underlie our natural, human telos.\nAccordingly, some have objected that the kind of tranquility and\nhappiness that the Skeptic enjoys could just as well be produced\nthrough pharmacology or, we might add, Experience Machines. More\ngenerally speaking, the objection is that skeptical tranquility and\nhappiness comes at a cost we should not be willing to pay. By refusing\nto accept the world is ever as it appears, the Skeptic becomes a\ndetached, passive spectator, undisturbed by any of the thoughts that\npass through his mind. Such detachment might seem to threaten his\nability to care about other people as he observes all that happens to\nthem with the same tranquil indifference. Also, he would seem to be at\nbest a moral conformist, unable or at least unwilling to engage in any\nmoral deliberation, either hypothetically or as a means to directly\naddress a pressing moral issue.","\nSextus provides an example of the latter situation when he imagines\nthe Skeptic being compelled by a tyrant to commit some unspeakable\ndeed, or be tortured (M XI 164–66). Critics propose\nthat the Skeptic’s choice will necessarily reveal his evaluative\nconvictions, and thus his inconsistency in claiming to have no such\nconvictions. But Sextus replies that he will simply opt for one or the\nother in accordance with his family’s laws and customs. In other\nwords, he will rely on whatever moral sentiments and dispositions he\nhappens to have. These cognitive states will be neither the product of\nany rational consideration nor will they inform any premises for moral\nreasoning or philosophical deliberation. Like Sartre’s\nexistentialism, Sextus’ skepticism offers a way to respond to\nmoral dilemmas without supposing there is a correct, or even\nobjectively better, choice.","\nWe should note that it is not entirely fair to ask whether the\nPyrrhonist’s moral life is one that we, non-Skeptics, would deem\ngood or praise-worthy. For, as Sextus would say, we are part of the\ndispute regarding what kind of life is morally good and praise-worthy.\nTo claim that nothing really matters to the Skeptic, for example,\npresupposes some account of the mental state of caring. In the end,\nthe question of how or whether a Skeptic might be morally good is\nequivalent to asking what role belief, or knowledge, plays in the\nmoral goodness of people and their actions. If we suppose that one\nmust, at a minimum, have adequately justified evaluative beliefs\ninforming her actions in order for those actions, and the underlying\ncharacter, to count as morally good, then the Skeptic will be immoral,\nor at least amoral. On the other hand, if the Skeptic manages to\nundermine our confidence in that supposition, we will have to suspend\njudgment regarding whether the Skeptic, or anyone else for that\nmatter, is in fact capable of performing morally good and\npraise-worthy action, or whether their reasoned account of\neudaimonia is true.","\nThe question we should ask here is whether and in what respect those\nwith strong, rational convictions will be better off than the Skeptic\nwhen confronting moral dilemmas, or even everyday moral choices. If,\nlike the Skeptic, one suspects that the dogmatists’ have no\nknowledge, let alone adequately justified beliefs to guide them, then\nit seems that they are no better or worse off than those who simply\nconform to moral customs and norms."],"section_title":"9. Pyrrhonian Skeptics","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nIn their moral theories, the ancient philosophers depended on several\\nimportant notions. These include virtue and the virtues, happiness\\n(eudaimonia), and the soul. We can begin with virtue.\",\n \"\\nVirtue is a general term that translates the Greek word\\naretê. Sometimes aretê is also\\ntranslated as excellence. Many objects, natural or artificial, have\\ntheir particular aretê or kind of excellence. There is\\nthe excellence of a horse and the excellence of a knife. Then, of\\ncourse, there is human excellence. Conceptions of human excellence\\ninclude such disparate figures as the Homeric warrior chieftain and\\nthe Athenian statesman of the period of its imperial expansion.\\nPlato’s character Meno sums up one important strain of thought\\nwhen he says that excellence for a man is managing the business of the\\ncity so that he benefits his friends, harms his enemies, and comes to\\nno harm himself (Meno 71e). From this description we can see\\nthat some versions of human excellence have a problematic relation to\\nthe moral virtues.\",\n \"\\nIn the ancient world, courage, moderation, justice and piety were\\nleading instances of moral virtue. A virtue is a settled disposition\\nto act in a certain way; justice, for instance, is the settled\\ndisposition to act, let’s say, so that each one receives their\\ndue. This settled disposition consists in a practical knowledge about\\nhow to bring it about, in each situation, that each receives their\\ndue. It also includes a strong positive attitude toward bringing it\\nabout that each receives their due. Just people, then, are not ones\\nwho occasionally act justly, or even who regularly act justly but do\\nso out of some other motive; rather they are people who reliably act\\nthat way because they place a positive, high intrinsic value on\\nrendering to each their due and they are good at it. Courage is a\\nsettled disposition that allows one to act reliably to pursue right\\nends in fearful situations, because one values so acting\\nintrinsically. Moderation is the virtue that deals similarly with\\none’s appetites and emotions.\",\n \"\\nHuman excellence can be conceived in ways that do not include the\\nmoral virtues. For instance, someone thought of as excellent for\\nbenefiting friends and harming enemies can be cruel, arbitrary,\\nrapacious, and ravenous of appetite. Most ancient philosophers,\\nhowever, argue that human excellence must include the moral virtues\\nand that the excellent human will be, above all, courageous, moderate,\\nand just. This argument depends on making a link between the moral\\nvirtues and happiness. While most ancient philosophers hold that\\nhappiness is the proper goal or end of human life, the notion is both\\nsimple and complicated, as Aristotle points out. It seems simple to\\nsay everyone wants to be happy; it is complicated to say what\\nhappiness is. We can approach the problem by discussing, first, the\\nrelation of happiness to human excellence and, then, the relation of\\nhuman excellence to the moral virtues.\",\n \"\\nIt is significant that synonyms for eudaimonia are living\\nwell and doing well. These phrases imply certain activities associated\\nwith human living. Ancient philosophers argued that whatever\\nactivities constitute human living – e.g., those associated with\\npleasure – one can engage in those activities in a mediocre or\\neven a poor way. One can feel and react to pleasures sometimes\\nappropriately and sometimes inappropriately; or one might always act\\nshamefully and dishonorably. However, to carry out the activities that\\nconstitute human living well over a whole lifetime, or long stretches\\nof it, is living well or doing well. At this point the relation of\\nhappiness to human excellence should be clear. Human excellence is the\\npsychological basis for carrying out the activities of a human life\\nwell; to that extent human excellence is also happiness.\",\n \"\\nSo described, human excellence is general and covers many activities\\nof a human life. However, one can see how human excellence might at\\nleast include the moral virtues. The moral virtue relevant to fear,\\nfor instance, is courage. Courage is a reliable disposition to react\\nto fear in an appropriate way. What counts as appropriate entails\\nharnessing fear for good or honorable ends. Such ends are not confined\\nto one’s own welfare but include, e.g., the welfare of\\none’s city. In this way, moral virtues become the kind of human\\nexcellence that is other-regarding. The moral virtues, then, are\\nexcellent qualities of character – intrinsically valuable for\\nthe one who has them; but they are also valuable for others. In rough\\noutline, we can see one important way ancient moral theory tries to\\nlink happiness to moral virtue by way of human excellence. Happiness\\nderives from human excellence; human excellence includes the moral\\nvirtues, which are implicitly or explicitly other-regarding.\",\n \"\\nSince happiness plays such a vital role in ancient moral theory, we\\nshould note the difference between the Greek word eudaimonia\\nand its usual translation as ‘happiness’. Although its\\nusage varies, most often the English word ‘happiness’\\nrefers to a feeling. For example, we say, “You can tell he feels\\nhappy right now, from the way he looks and how he is behaving.”\\nThe feeling is described as one of contentment or satisfaction,\\nperhaps with the way one’s life as a whole is going. While some\\nthink there is a distinction between feeling happy and feeling\\ncontent, still happiness is a good and pleasant feeling. However,\\n‘happiness’ has a secondary sense that does not focus on\\nfeelings but rather on activities. For instance, one might say,\\n“It was a happy time in my life; my work was going well.”\\nThe speaker need not be referring to the feelings he or she was\\nexperiencing but just to the fact that some important activity was\\ngoing well. Of course, if their work is going well, they might feel\\ncontentment. But in speaking of their happiness, they might just as\\nwell be referring to their absorption in some successful activity. For\\nancient philosophers eudaimonia is closer to the secondary\\nsense of our own term. Happiness means not so much feeling a certain\\nway, or feeling a certain way about how one’s life as a whole is\\ngoing, but rather carrying out certain activities or functioning in a\\ncertain way. This sort of happiness is an admirable and praiseworthy\\naccomplishment, whereas achieving satisfaction or contentment may not\\nbe.\",\n \"\\nIn this way, then, ancient philosophers typically justify moral\\nvirtue. Being courageous, just, and moderate is valuable for the\\nvirtuous person because these virtues are inextricably linked with\\nhappiness. Everyone wants to be happy, so anyone who realizes the link\\nbetween virtue and happiness will also want to be virtuous. This\\nargument depends on two central ideas. First, human excellence is a\\ngood of the soul – not a material or bodily good such as wealth\\nor political power. Another way to put this idea is to say happiness\\nis not something external, like wealth or political power, but an\\ninternal, psychological good. The second central idea is that the most\\nimportant good of the soul is moral virtue. By being virtuous one\\nenjoys a psychological state whose value outweighs whatever other\\nkinds of goods one might have by being vicious.\",\n \"\\nFinally, a few words about the soul are in order since, typically,\\nphilosophers argue that virtue is a good of the soul. In some ways,\\nthis claim is found in many traditions. Many thinkers argue that being\\nmoral does not necessarily provide physical beauty, health, or\\nprosperity. Rather, as something good, virtue must be understood as\\nbelonging to the soul; it is a psychological good. However, in order\\nto explain virtue as a good of the soul, one does not have to hold\\nthat the soul is immortal. While Plato, for example, holds that the\\nsoul is immortal and that its virtue is a good that transcends death,\\nhis argument for virtue as a psychological good does not depend on the\\nimmortality of the soul. He argues that virtue is a psychological good\\nin this life. To live a mortal human life with this good is in itself\\nhappiness.\",\n \"\\nThis position that links happiness and virtue is called eudaimonism\\n– a word based on the principal Greek word for happiness,\\neudaimonia. By eudaimonism, we will mean one of several\\ntheses: (a) virtue, together with its active exercise, is identical\\nwith happiness; (b) virtue, together with its activities, is the most\\nimportant and dominant constituent of happiness; (c) virtue is the\\nonly means to happiness. However, one must be cautious not to conclude\\nthat ancient theories in general attempt to construe the value of\\nvirtue simply as a means to achieving happiness. Each theory, as we\\nshall see, has its own approach to the nature of the link between\\nvirtue and happiness. It would not be advisable to see ancient\\ntheories as concerned with such contemporary issues as whether moral\\ndiscourse – i.e., discourse about what one ought to do –\\ncan or should be reduced to non-moral discourse – i.e., to\\ndiscourse about what is good for one.\",\n \"\\nThese reflections on virtue can provide an occasion for contrasting\\nancient moral theory and modern. One way to put the contrast is to say\\nthat ancient moral theory is agent-centered while modern\\nmoral theory is action-centered. To say that it is\\naction-centered means that, as a theory of morality, it explains\\nmorality, to begin with, in terms of actions and their circumstances,\\nand the ways in which actions are moral or immoral. We can roughly\\ndivide modern thinkers into two groups. Those who judge the morality\\nof an action on the basis of its known or expected consequences are\\nconsequentialist; those who judge the morality of an action on the\\nbasis of its conformity to certain kinds of laws, prohibitions, or\\npositive commandments are deontologists. The former include, e.g.,\\nthose utilitarians who say an action is moral if it provides the\\ngreatest good for the greatest number. Deontologists say an action is\\nmoral if it conforms to a moral principle, e.g., the obligation to\\ntell the truth. While these thinkers are not uninterested in the moral\\ndisposition to produce such actions, or in what disposition is\\nrequired if they are to show any moral worth in the persons who do\\nthem, their focus is on actions, their consequences, and the rules or\\nother principles to which they conform. The result of these ways of\\napproaching morality is that moral assessment falls on actions. This\\nfocus explains, for instance, contemporary fascination with such\\nquestions of casuistry as, e.g., the conditions under which an action\\nlike abortion is morally permitted or immoral.\",\n \"\\nBy contrast, ancient moral theory explains morality in terms that\\nfocus on the moral agent. These thinkers are interested in what\\nconstitutes, e.g., a just person. They are concerned about the state\\nof mind and character, the set of values, the attitudes to oneself and\\nto others, and the conception of one’s own place in the common\\nlife of a community that belong to just persons simply insofar as they\\nare just. A modern might object that this way of proceeding is\\nbackwards. Just actions are logically prior to just persons and must\\nbe specifiable in advance of any account of what it is to be a just\\nperson. Of course, the ancients had a rough idea of what just actions\\nwere; and this rough idea certainly contributed to the notion of a\\njust person, and his motivation and system of values. Still, the\\nnotion of a just person is not exhausted by an account of the\\nconsequences of just actions, or any principle for determining which\\nactions are and which are not just. For the ancients, the just person\\nis compared to a craftsman, e.g., a physician. Acting as a physician\\nis not simply a collection of medically effective actions. It is\\nknowing when such actions are appropriate, among other things; and\\nthis kind of knowledge is not always definable. To understand what\\nbeing a physician means one must turn to the physician’s\\njudgment and even motivation. These are manifested in particular\\nactions but are not reducible to those actions. In the same way, what\\nconstitutes a just person is not exhausted by the actions he or she\\ndoes nor, for that matter, by any catalogue of possible just actions.\\nRather, being a just person entails qualities of character proper to\\nthe just person, in the light of which they decide what actions\\njustice requires of them and are inclined or disposed to act\\naccordingly.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Introduction\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nIn this section we confine ourselves to the character Socrates in\\nPlato’s dialogues, and indeed to only certain ones of the\\ndialogues in which a Socrates character plays a role. In those\\ndialogues in which he plays a major role, Socrates varies considerably\\nbetween two extremes. On the one hand, there is the Socrates who\\nclaims to know nothing about virtue and confines himself to asking\\nother characters questions; this Socrates is found in the\\nApology and in certain dialogues most of which end\\ninconclusively. These dialogues, e.g., Charmides,\\nLaches, Crito, Euthydemus, and\\nEuthyphro, are called aporetic. On the other hand, in other\\ndialogues we find a Socrates who expounds positive teachings about\\nvirtue; this Socrates usually asks questions only to elicit agreement.\\nThese dialogues are didactic, and conclusive in tone, e.g.,\\nRepublic, Phaedo, Phaedrus, and Philebus. However,\\nthese distinctions between kinds of dialogues and kinds of Socratic\\ncharacters are not exclusive; there are dialogues that mix the\\naporetic and conclusive styles, e.g., Protagoras, Meno, and\\nGorgias. In observing these distinctions, we refer only to\\nthe characteristic style of the dialogue and leave aside controversies\\nabout the relative dates of composition of the dialogues. (See the\\nentry on\\n Plato,\\n especially the section on\\n Socrates\\n and the section on\\n the historical Socrates.)\",\n \"\\nThe significance of this distinction among dialogues is that one can\\nisolate a strain of moral teaching in the aporetic and mixed\\ndialogues. In spite of their inconclusive nature, in the aporetic\\ndialogues the character Socrates maintains principles about morality\\nthat he seems to take to be fundamental. In the mixed dialogues we\\nfind similar teaching. This strain is distinct enough from the\\naccounts of morality in the more didactic dialogues that it has been\\ncalled Socratic, as opposed to Platonic, and associated with the\\nhistorical personage’s own views. In what follows we limit\\nourselves to this “Socratic” moral teaching –\\nwithout taking a position about the relation of “Socratic”\\nmoral teaching to that of the historical Socrates. For our purposes it\\nis sufficient to point out a distinction between kinds of moral\\nteaching in the dialogues. We will focus on the aporetic dialogues as\\nwell as the mixed dialogues Protagoras, Gorgias, and\\nMeno.\",\n \"\\nThe first feature of Socratic teaching is its heroic quality. In the\\nApology, Socrates says that a man worth anything at all does\\nnot reckon whether his course of action endangers his life or\\nthreatens death. He looks only at one thing – whether what he\\ndoes is just or not, the work of a good or of a bad man (28b–c).\\nSaid in the context of his trial, this statement is both about himself\\nand a fundamental claim of his moral teaching. Socrates puts moral\\nconsiderations above all others. If we think of justice as, roughly,\\nthe way we treat others, the just actions to which he refers cover a\\nwide range. It is unjust to rob temples, betray friends, steal, break\\noaths, commit adultery, and mistreat parents (Rep\\n443a–b). A similarly strong statement about wrong-doing is found\\nin the Crito, where the question is whether Socrates should\\nsave his life by escaping from the jail in Athens and aborting the\\nsentence of death. Socrates says that whether he should escape or not\\nmust be governed only by whether it is just or unjust to do so (48d).\\nObviously, by posing wrong-doing against losing one’s life,\\nSocrates means to emphasize that nothing outweighs in positive value\\nthe disvalue of doing unjust actions. In such passages, then, Socrates\\nseems to be a moral hero, willing to sacrifice his very life rather\\nthan commit an injustice, and to recommend such heroism to others.\",\n \"\\nHowever, this heroism also includes an important element of\\nself-regard. In the passage from the Apology just quoted\\nSocrates goes on to describe his approach to the citizens of Athens.\\nHe chides them for being absorbed in the acquisition of wealth,\\nreputation, and honor while they do not take care for nor think about\\nwisdom, truth, and how to make their souls better (Ap.\\n29d–e). As he develops this idea it becomes clear that the\\nperfection of the soul, making it better, means acquiring and having\\nmoral virtue. Rather than heaping up riches and honor, Athenians\\nshould seek to perfect their souls in virtue. From this exhortation we\\ncan conclude that for Socrates psychological good outweighs material\\ngood and that virtue is a psychological good of the first importance.\\nThe Crito gives another perspective on psychological good.\\nSocrates says (as something obvious to everyone) that life is not\\nworth living if that which is harmed by disease and benefited by\\nhealth – i.e., the body – is ruined. But even more so, he\\nadds, life is not worth living if that which is harmed by wrong-doing\\n(to adikon) and benefited by the right – sc.\\nthe soul – is ruined, insofar as the soul is more valuable than\\nthe body (47e–48a). We can understand this claim in positive\\nterms. Virtue is the chief psychological good; wrong-doing destroys\\nvirtue. So Socrates’ strong commitment to virtue reflects his\\nbelief in its value for the soul, as well as the importance of the\\nsoul’s condition for the quality of our lives.\",\n \"\\nA second feature of Socratic teaching is its intellectualism. Socratic\\nintellectualism is usually expressed in the claim that virtue is\\nknowledge, implying that if one knows what is good one will do what is\\ngood. We find a clear statement of the claim in Protagoras\\n352c; but it underlies a lot of Socratic teaching. The idea is\\nparadoxical because it flies in the face of what seems to be the\\nordinary experience of knowingly doing what is not good, called\\nakrasia or being overcome (sometimes anachronistically\\ntranslated as weakness of will). However, Socrates defends the idea\\nthat akrasia is impossible. First, he argues that virtue is\\nall one needs for happiness. In the Apology (41c), Socrates\\nsays that no evil at all can come to a good man either in living or in\\ndying (…ouk esti andri agathô(i) kakon ouden oute\\nzônti oute teleutêsanti), implying the good\\nman’s virtue alone makes him proof against bad fortune. In the\\nCrito (48b), he says living well and finely and justly are\\nthe same thing (to de eu kai kalôs kai dikaiôs\\n[zên] hoti tauton estin…). In turn, in the Meno\\n(77c–78b), Socrates argues that everyone desires happiness,\\ni.e., one’s own welfare. So, in the first place, one always has\\na good reason for acting virtuously; doing so entails one’s own\\nhappiness. However, even if the link between virtue and happiness is\\ngranted, another problem remains. It is possible that one can,\\nknowingly, act against one’s happiness, understood, as it is by\\nSocrates, as one’s own welfare. It seems that an individual can\\nchoose to do what is not in her own best interest. People can all too\\neasily desire and go after the pastry that they know is bad for them.\\nSocrates, however, seems to think that once one recognizes (i.e.,\\nreally knows and fully appreciates) that the pastry is not good in\\nthis way, one will cease to desire it. There is no residual desire\\nfor, e.g., pleasure, that might compete with the desire for what is\\ngood. This position is called intellectualism because it implies that\\nwhat ultimately motivates any action is some cognitive state, rational\\nor doxastic: if you know what is good you will do it, and if you do an\\naction, and it is bad, that is because you thought somehow that it was\\ngood. All error in such choices is due to ignorance.\",\n \"\\nIn support of the idea that if one knows what happiness is, one will\\npursue it, Socrates argues, in the Euthydemus, that wisdom is\\nnecessary and sufficient for happiness. While most of this dialogue is\\ngiven over to Euthydemus’ and Dionysiodorus’ eristic\\ndisplay, there are two Socratic interludes. In the first of these\\n– in a passage that has a parallel in Meno (88a ff)\\n– Socrates helps the young Cleinias to see that wisdom is a kind\\nof knowledge that infallibly brings happiness. He uses an analogy with\\ncraft (technê); a carpenter must not only have but know\\nhow to use his tools and materials to be successful (Euthyd.\\n280b–d). In turn, someone may have such goods as health, wealth,\\ngood birth, and beauty, as well as the virtues of justice, moderation,\\ncourage, and wisdom (279a–c). Wisdom is the most important,\\nhowever, because, like carpentry, for example, it is a kind of\\nknowledge, about how to use the other assets so that they are\\nbeneficial (281b–c). Moreover, all of these other so-called\\ngoods are useless – in fact, even harmful – without\\nwisdom, because without it one will misuse any of the other assets one\\nmay possess, so as to act not well but badly. Wisdom is the only\\nunconditional good (281d–e). Socrates’ argument leaves it\\nambiguous whether wisdom (taken together with its exercise) is\\nidentical with happiness or whether it is the dominant and essential\\ncomponent of happiness (282a–b).\",\n \"\\nIn this account, the focus is on a kind of knowledge as the active\\ningredient in happiness. The other parts of the account are certain\\nassets that seem as passive in relation to wisdom as wood and tools\\nare to the carpenter. Socratic intellectualism has been criticized for\\neither ignoring the non-rational, desiderative and volitional causes\\nof human action or providing an implausibly rationalist account of\\nthem. In either case, the common charge is that it fails to account\\nfor or appreciate the apparent complexities of moral psychology.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Socrates\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nIf the objections to intellectualism are warranted, Plato makes\\nsignificant progress by having his character Socrates suppose that the\\nsoul has desires that are not always for what is good. This allows for\\nthe complexities of moral psychology to become an important issue in\\nthe account of virtue. That development is found in Plato’s\\nmature moral theory. In the Republic, especially in its first\\nfour books, Socrates presents the most thorough and detailed account\\nof moral psychology and virtue in the dialogues.\",\n \"\\nIt all begins with the challenge to the very notion of morality,\\nunderstood along traditional lines, mounted by Callicles in the second\\nhalf of the Gorgias and by Thrasymachus in Republic\\nI. Callicles thinks that moral convention is designed by the numerous\\nweak people to intimidate the few strong ones, to keep the latter from\\ntaking what they could if they would only use their strength. No truly\\nstrong person should be taken in by such conventions (Gorg.\\n482e ff). Thrasymachus argues that justice is the advantage of the\\nmore powerful; he holds that justice is a social practice set up by\\nthe powerful, i.e., rulers who require their subjects through that\\npractice to act against their own individual and group self-interest\\n(Rep. 338d ff). No sensible person should, and no\\nstrong-willed person would, accept rules of justice as having any\\nlegitimate authority over them. In answer to the latter challenge, in\\nRepublic II, Glaucon and Adeimantus repeatedly urge Socrates\\nto show what value justice has in itself, apart from its rewards and\\nreputation. They gloss the intrinsic value of justice as what value it\\nhas in the soul (358b–c), what it does to the soul simply and\\nimmediately by its presence therein. Before giving what will be a new\\naccount of the soul, Socrates introduces his famous comparison between\\nthe soul and the city. As he develops his account of the city,\\nhowever, it becomes clear that Socrates is talking about an ideal\\ncity, which he proceeds to construct in his discussion.\",\n \"\\nThis city has three classes (genê) of citizens. The\\nrulers are characterized by their knowledge about and devotion to the\\nwelfare of the city. The auxiliaries are the warrior class that helps\\nthe rulers. These two are collectively the guardians of the city\\n(413c–414b; 428c–d). Finally, there are the farmers,\\nartisans, and merchants – in general those concerned with the\\nproduction of material goods necessary for daily life\\n(369b–371e). The importance of this structure is that it allows\\nSocrates to define virtues of the city by relations among its parts.\\nThese virtues are justice, wisdom, courage, and moderation. For\\ninstance, justice in the city is each one performing that function for\\nwhich he is suited by nature and not doing the work that belongs to\\nothers (433a–b). One’s function, in turn, is determined by\\nthe class to which he belongs. So rulers should rule and not amass\\nwealth, which is the function of the farmers, artisans, and merchants;\\nif the rulers turn from ruling to money-making they are unjust.\",\n \"\\nCompleting the analogy, Socrates gives an account of the soul. He\\nargues that it has three parts, each corresponding to one of the\\nclasses in the city. At this point, we should note the difficulty of\\ntalking about parts of the soul. In making his argument about conflict\\nin the soul, Socrates does not usually use a word that easily\\ncorresponds to the English ‘part.’ Sometimes he uses\\n‘form’ (eidos) and ‘kind’\\n(genos) (435b–c), other times a periphrasis such as\\n‘that in the soul that calculates’ (439d–e),\\nalthough in the subsequent account of virtue, we do find\\nmeros, which means part (442b–d). So, insofar as\\nvocabulary is concerned, one should be cautious about taking the\\nsubdivisions of the soul to be independent agents. Perhaps the least\\nmisleading way of thinking about the parts is as distinct functions.\\nReason is the function of calculating, especially about what is good\\nfor the soul. The appetites for food, drink, and sex are like the\\nproducing class – they are necessary for bodily existence\\n(439c–e). These two parts are familiar to the modern reader, who\\nwill recognize the psychological capacity for reasoning and\\ncalculating, on the one hand, and the bodily desires, on the other.\\nLess familiar is the part of the soul that corresponds to the\\nauxiliaries, the military class. This is the spirited part\\n(thymos or thymoeides). Associated with the heart,\\nit is an aggressive drive concerned with honor. Thumos is\\nmanifested as anger with those who attack one’s honor. Perhaps\\nmore importantly, it is manifested as anger with oneself when failing\\nto do what one knows he should do (439e–440d).\",\n \"\\nThe importance of this account is that it is a moral psychology, an\\naccount of the soul which serves as a basis for explaining the\\nvirtues. Socrates’ account also introduces the idea that there\\nis conflict in the soul. For instance, the appetites can lead one\\ntoward pleasure which reason recognizes is not good for the whole\\nsoul. In cases of conflict, Socrates says the spirited part sides with\\nreason against appetite. Here we see in rough outline the chief\\ncharacters in a well-known moral drama. Reason knows what is good both\\nfor oneself and in the treatment of others. The appetites,\\nshort-sighted and self-centered, pull in the opposite direction. The\\nspirited part is the principle that sides with reason and enforces its\\ndecrees.\",\n \"\\nWhile the opposition between reason and appetite establishes their\\ndistinctness, it has another, more profound consequence. Most\\ncommentators read this section of the argument as implying that reason\\nlooks out for what is good for the soul while appetite seeks food,\\ndrink, and sex, heedless of their benefit for the soul (437d ff).\\nAlthough open to various interpretations, the difference between\\nreason and appetite does seem aimed at one of the central paradoxes of\\nSocratic intellectualism. Common experience seems to contradict the\\nclaim that if one knows what is good he will do it; there seem to be\\nobvious instances where someone does what she, in some sense, knows is\\nnot good, while having options to act otherwise. By introducing\\nnon-rational elements in the soul, the argument in the\\nRepublic also introduces the possibility of doing what one\\nknows, all things considered, not to be good. In such cases, one is\\nmotivated by appetite, which lacks the capacity to conceive of what is\\ngood, all things considered.\",\n \"\\nSome interpret this heedlessness as appetite’s being\\ngood-independent, whereas reason is good-dependent. Thus, appetite\\npursues what it pursues without reference to whether what it pursues\\nis good; reason pursues what it pursues always understanding that what\\nit pursues is good. In this kind of interpretation, Socrates in the\\nRepublic accepts the possibility of akrasia because\\nsome parts of the soul, which are indifferent to the good, can\\nmotivate actions that do not aim at what is good. Others interpret\\nthis heedlessness as appetite’s operating on a constrained\\nnotion of good; for instance, for appetite only pleasure is good. By\\ncontrast, reason operates on a larger notion, i.e., what is good, all\\nthings considered. In this interpretation, akrasia is also\\npossible, but now because some parts of the soul, which motivate\\naction, do so with a constrained view of good. In any event, the stage\\nis set for conflict in the soul between reason and appetite. If we\\nassume that either can motive action on its own, the possibility\\nexists for the soul’s pursuing bodily pleasure in spite of\\nreason’s determination that doing so is not good, all things\\nconsidered. This potential gives rise to a separate strain of thinking\\nabout virtue. While, for Socratic intellectualism, virtue just is\\nknowledge, in the aftermath of the argument for subdividing the soul,\\nvirtue comes to have two aspects. The first is to acquire the\\nknowledge which is the basis of virtue; the second is to instill in\\nthe appetites and emotions – which cannot grasp the knowledge\\n– a docility so that they react in a compliant way to what\\nreason knows to be the best thing to do. Thus, non-rational parts of\\nthe soul acquire reliable habits on which the moral virtues\\ndepend.\",\n \"\\nGiven the complexity of the differences among the parts, we can now\\nunderstand how their relations to one another define virtue in the\\nsoul. Virtue reduces the potential for conflict to harmony. The master\\nvirtue, justice, is each part doing its function and not interfering\\nwith that of another (441d–e; 443d). Since the function of\\nreason is to exercise forethought for the whole soul, it should rule.\\nThe appetites, which seek only their immediate satisfaction, should\\nnot rule. A soul ruled by appetites is the very picture of\\npsychological injustice. Still, to fulfill its function of ruling,\\nreason needs wisdom, the knowledge of what is beneficial for each of\\nthe parts of the soul and for the whole. Moderation is a harmony among\\nthe parts based on agreement that reason should rule. Courage is the\\nspirited part carrying out the decrees of reason about what is to be\\nfeared (442b–d). Any attentive reader of the dialogues must feel\\nthat Socrates has now given an answer to the questions that started\\nmany of the aporetic dialogues. At this point, we have the fully\\ndeveloped moral psychology that allows the definition of the moral\\nvirtues. They fall into place around the tripartite structure of the\\nsoul.\",\n \"\\nOne might object, however, that all Socrates has accomplished is to\\ndefine justice and the other virtues as they operate within\\nthe soul. While each part treats the others justly, so to speak, it is\\nnot clear what justice among the parts of someone’s soul has to\\ndo with that person treating other people justly. Socrates at first\\naddresses this issue rather brusquely, saying that someone with a just\\nsoul would not embezzle funds, rob temples, steal, betray friends,\\nbreak oaths, commit adultery, neglect parents, nor ignore the gods.\\nThe reason for this is that each part in the soul does its own\\nfunction in the matter of ruling and being ruled (443a–b).\\nSocrates does not explain this connection between psychic harmony and\\nmoral virtue. However, if we assume that injustice is based in\\noverweening appetite or unbridled anger, then one can see the\\nconnection between restrained appetites, well-governed anger and\\ntreating others justly. The man whose sexual appetite is not governed\\nby reason, e.g., would commit the injustice of adultery.\",\n \"\\nThis approach to the virtues by way of moral psychology, in fact,\\nproves to be remarkably durable in ancient moral theory. In one way or\\nanother, the various schools attempt to explain the virtues in terms\\nof the soul, although there are, of course, variations in the\\naccounts. Indeed, we can treat the theory of the Republic as\\none such variation. While the account in Republic IV has\\naffinities with that of Aristotle in Nicomachean\\nEthics, for instance, further developments in\\nRepublic V–VII make Plato’s overall account\\naltogether unique. It is in these books that the theory of forms makes\\nits appearance.\",\n \"\\nIn Republic V, Socrates returns to the issue of political\\nrule by asking what change in actual cities would bring the ideal city\\ncloser to realization. The famous answer is that philosophers should\\nrule as kings (473d). Trying to make the scandalous, even ridiculous,\\nanswer more palatable, Socrates immediately begins to explain what he\\nmeans by philosophers. They are the ones who can distinguish between\\nthe many beautiful things and the one beautiful itself. The beautiful\\nitself, the good itself, and the just itself are what he calls forms.\\nThe ability to understand such forms defines the philosopher\\n(476a–c). Fully elaborated, this extraordinary theory holds that\\nthere is a set of unchanging and unambiguous entities, collectively\\nreferred to as being. These are known directly by reason in a way that\\nis separate from the use of sensory perception. The objects of sensory\\nperception are collectively referred to as becoming since they are\\nchanging and ambiguous (508d). This infallible grasp means that one\\nknows what goodness is, what beauty is, and what justice is. Because\\nonly philosophers have this knowledge – an infallible grasp of\\ngoodness, beauty, and justice – they and only they are fit to be\\nrulers in the city.\",\n \"\\nWhile moral theory occupies a significant portion of the\\nRepublic, Socrates does not say a lot about its relation to\\nthe epistemology and metaphysics of the central books. For instance,\\none might have expected the account to show how, e.g., reason might\\nuse knowledge of the forms to govern the other parts of the soul.\\nIndeed, in Book VI, Socrates does say that the philosopher will\\nimitate in his own soul the order and harmony of the forms out of\\nadmiration (500c–d). Since imitation is the heart of the account\\nof moral education in Books II–III, the idea that one might\\nimitate forms is intriguing; but it is not developed. In fact, the\\nrelation between virtues in the soul and the metaphysics and\\nepistemology of the forms is not an easy one. For instance, Socrates\\nsays that virtue in the soul is happiness (580b–c). However, he\\nalso says that knowledge and contemplation of the forms is happiness\\n(517c–d). Since having or exercising the virtues of wisdom,\\nmoderation, courage, and justice is different from knowledge and\\ncontemplation of forms, the questions naturally arises about how to\\nbring the two together into an integrated life. In the dialogues, the\\nrelation between knowledge of forms and virtues such as moderation,\\njustice, and courage is an issue that never seems to be fully resolved\\nbecause it receives different treatments.\",\n \"\\nIn RepublicIX, Socrates offers a sketch of one way to bring\\nthese two dimensions together. Toward the end of the book, Socrates\\nconducts a three-part contest to show the philosophical, or\\naristocratic, man is the happiest. In the second of these contests, he\\nclaims that each part of the soul has its peculiar desire and\\ncorresponding pleasure. Reason, for instance, desires to learn;\\nsatisfying that desire is a pleasure distinct from the pleasure, e.g.,\\nof eating (580d–e). One can now see that the functions of each\\nof the parts has a new, affective dimension. Then, in the last of the\\ncontests, Socrates makes an ontological distinction between true\\npleasure of the soul and less true pleasure of the body. The former is\\nthe pleasure of knowing being, i.e., the forms, and the latter is the\\npleasure of filling bodily appetite. The less true pleasures also give\\nrise to illusions and phantoms of pleasure; these illusions and\\nphantoms recall the images and shadows in the allegory of the cave\\n(583b–586c). Clearly, then, distinctions from the metaphysics\\nand epistemology of the central books are being made relevant to the\\ndivisions within the soul. Pleasures of reason are on a higher\\nontological level than those of the bodily appetites; this difference\\ncalls for a modification of the definitions of the virtues from Book\\nIV. For instance, in Book IV, justice is each part fulfilling its own\\nfunction; in Book IX, that function is specified in terms of the kinds\\nof pleasure each part pursues. Reason pursues the true pleasure of\\nknowing and the appetites the less true pleasure of the body. Appetite\\ncommits injustice if it pursues pleasure not proper to it, i.e., if it\\npursues bodily pleasures as though they were true pleasures\\n(586d–587a). The result is an account of virtue which\\ndiscriminates among pleasures, as any virtue ethics should; but the\\ncriterion of discrimination reflects the distinction between being and\\nbecoming. Rational pleasures are more real than bodily pleasures,\\nalthough bodily pleasures are not negligible. Happiness, in turn,\\nintegrates the virtue of managing bodily appetites and pleasures with\\nthe pleasures of learning, but definitely gives greater weight to the\\nlatter.\",\n \"\\nHowever, in the Phaedo, we find another approach to the\\nrelation between knowledge of forms and virtues in the soul. Socrates\\nidentifies wisdom with kowledge of such forms as beauty, justice, and\\ngoodness (65d–e). The philosopher can know these only by reason\\nthat is detached from the body as much as possible (65e–66a). In\\nfact, pure knowledge is found only when the soul is completely\\ndetached from the body in death. With such a severe account of the\\nknowledge of the forms it is not surprising that courage, justice, and\\nmoderation are subordinated to wisdom. When Socrates says the true\\nexchange of pleasures, pains, and fears is for wisdom, he invokes\\nmoderation, justice, and courage as virtues that serve this exchange\\n(68b–69e). This passage suggests, for instance, that moderation\\nwould control bodily pleasures and pains and fears so that reason\\ncould be free of these disturbances in order to pursue knowledge. This\\nnotion of virtues differs from the account in the first books of the\\nRepublic in that the latter presents a comprehensive picture\\nof the welfare of all the parts of the soul whereas the\\nPhaedo, by implication, subordinates to reason those parts\\ncharacterized by pleasures, pain, and fears.\",\n \"\\nIn the Symposium, we find yet another configuration of the\\nrelation between virtue and the forms, in which the non-rational parts\\nof the soul disappear – or are sublimated. In Diotima’s\\ndiscourse on eros, she argues that the real purpose of love\\nis to give birth in beauty (206b–c). This idea implies two\\ndimensions: inspiration by what is itself beautiful and producing\\nbeautiful objects. Although Diotima talks about the way these concepts\\nwork in sexual procreation, her real interest is in their\\npsychological manifestations. For instance, the lover, inspired by the\\nphysical beauty of the beloved, will produce beautiful ideas. In turn,\\nthe beauty of a soul will inspire ideas that will improve young men\\n(210a–d). Finally, Diotima claims that the true object of erotic\\nlove is not the beautiful body or even the beautiful soul – but\\nbeauty itself. Unlike the beauty of bodies and of souls, this beauty\\ndoes not come to be nor pass away, neither increases nor decreases.\\nNor does it vary according to aspect or context. It is not in a face\\nor hands but is itself by itself, one in form (211a–c). Since\\nthis paradigm of beauty is the true object of eros, it\\ninspires its own particular product, i.e., true virtue, distinct from\\nthe images of virtue inspired by encounters with beauty in bodies and\\nsouls (212a–c). While this passage highlights the relation\\nbetween eros and the form of beauty in motivating virtue, it\\nis almost silent on what this virtue might be. We do not know whether\\nit just is the expression of love of beauty in the lover’s\\nactions, or its concretization in the dispositions of the\\nlover’s soul, or another manifestation. Clearly, this account in\\nthe Symposium works without the elaborate theory about parts\\nof the soul and their function in virtue, found in Republic\\nI–IV.\",\n \"\\nAs with other ancient theories, this account of virtue can be called\\neudaimonist. Plato’s theory is best represented as holding that\\nvirtue, together with its active exercise, is the most important and\\nthe dominant constituent of happiness (580b–c). One might object\\nthat eudaimonist theories reduce morality to self-interest. We should\\nrecall however that eudaimonia in this theory does not refer\\nprimarily to a feeling. In the Republic, it refers to a state\\nof the soul, and the active life to which it leads, whose value is\\nmultifaceted. The order and harmony of the soul is, of course, good\\nfor the soul because it provides what is good for each of the parts\\nand the whole, and so makes the parts function well, for the benefit\\nof each and of the whole person. In this way, the soul has the best\\ninternal economy, so to speak. Still, we should not overlook the ways\\nin which order and harmony in the soul are paired with order and\\nharmony in the city. They are both modeled on the forms. As a\\nconsequence, virtue in the soul is not a private concern artificially\\njoined to the public function of ruling. Rather, the philosopher who\\nimitates forms in ruling her soul is equally motivated to imitate\\nforms in ruling the city. So, insofar as virtue consists in imitating\\nthe forms, it is also a state of the soul best expressed by exercising\\nrule in the city – or at least in the ideal city.\\nEudaimonia, then, includes looking after the welfare of\\nothers.\",\n \"\\nIndeed, the very nature of Plato’s account of virtue and\\nhappiness leaves some aspects of the link between the two unclear.\\nWhile virtue is the dominant factor in happiness, we still cannot tell\\nwhether for Plato one can have a reason for being, e.g., courageous\\nthat does not depend directly on happiness. Plato, even though he has\\nforged a strong link between virtue and happiness, has not addressed\\nsuch issues. In his account, it is still possible that one might\\nbe courageous just for its own sake while at the same time believing\\ncourage is also reliably linked to happiness. In the\\nRepublic, Socrates tries to answer the question what value\\njustice has by itself in the soul; it does not follow that he is\\ntrying to convince Glaucon and Adeimantus that the value of justice is\\nexhausted by its connection to one’s own happiness.\",\n \"\\n(For further developments in Plato’s moral theory in dialogues\\nusually thought to postdate the Republic (especially\\nPhilebus), see\\n Plato\\n entry, especially the section on\\n Socrates\\n and the section on\\n Plato’s indirectness.)\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Plato\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe moral theory of Aristotle, like that of Plato, focuses on virtue,\\nrecommending the virtuous way of life by its relation to happiness.\\nHis most important ethical work, Nicomachean Ethics, devotes\\nthe first book to a preliminary account of happiness, which is then\\ncompleted in the last chapters of the final book, Book X. This account\\nties happiness to excellent activity of the soul. In subsequent books,\\nexcellent activity of the soul is tied to the moral virtues and to the\\nvirtue of “practical wisdom” – excellence in\\nthinking and deciding about how to behave. This approach to moral\\ntheory depends on a moral psychology that shares a number of\\naffinities with Plato’s. However, while for Plato the theory of\\nforms has a role in justifying virtue, Aristotle notoriously rejects\\nthat theory. Aristotle grounds his account of virtue in his theory\\nabout the soul – a topic to which he devotes a separate\\ntreatise, de Anima.\",\n \"\\nAristotle opens the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics by\\npositing some one supreme good as the aim of human actions,\\ninvestigations, and crafts (1094a). Identifying this good as\\nhappiness, he immediately notes the variations in the notion\\n(1095a15–25). Some think the happy life is the life of\\nenjoyment; the more refined think it is the life of political\\nactivity; others think it is the life of study or theoretical\\ncontemplation (1095b10–20). The object of the life of enjoyment\\nis bodily pleasure; that of political activity is honor or even\\nvirtue. The object of the life of study is philosophical or scientific\\nunderstanding. Arguing that the end of human life must be the most\\ncomplete, he concludes that happiness is the most complete end.\\nWhereas pleasure, honor, virtue, and understanding are choice-worthy\\nin themselves, they are also chosen for the sake of happiness.\\nHappiness is not chosen for the sake of anything else\\n(1097a25–1097b5). That the other choice-worthy ends are chosen\\nfor the sake of happiness might suggest that they are chosen only as\\ninstrumental means to happiness, as though happiness were a separate\\nstate. However, it is more likely that the other choice-worthy ends\\nare constituents of happiness. As a consequence, the happy life is\\ncomposed of such activities as virtuous pursuits, honorable acts, and\\ncontemplation of truth. While conceiving these choice-worthy ends as\\nconstituents of happiness might be illuminating, it does, in turn,\\nraise the issue of whether happiness is a jumble of activities or\\nwhether it requires organization – even prioritization –\\nof the constituents.\",\n \"\\nNext, Aristotle turns to his own account of happiness, the summit of\\nBook I. The account depends on an analogy with the notion of function\\nor characteristic activity or work (ergon). A flutist has a\\nfunction or work, i.e., playing the flute. The key idea for Aristotle\\nis that the good of flute players (as such) is found in their\\nfunctioning as a flutist. By analogy, if there is a human function,\\nthe good for a human is found in this function (1097b20–30).\\nAristotle then turns to the human soul. He argues that, in fact, there\\nis a human function, to be found in the human soul’s\\ncharacteristic activity, i.e., the exercise of reason\\n(1098a1–20). Then, without explanation, he makes the claim that\\nthis rational function is expressed in two distinct ways: by\\ndeliberating and issuing commands, on the one hand, and by obeying\\nsuch commands, on the other. The part that has reason in itself\\ndeliberates about decisions, both for the short term and the long. The\\npart that obeys reason is that aspect of the soul, such as the\\nappetites, that functions in a human being under the influence of\\nreason. The appetites can fail to obey reason; but they at least have\\nthe capacity to obey (as, for example, such autonomic functions as\\nnutritive and metabolic ones do not).\",\n \"\\nAristotle then argues that since the function of a human is to\\nexercise the soul’s activities according to reason, the function\\nof a good human is to exercise well and finely the soul’s\\nactivities according to reason. Given the two aspects of reason that\\nAristotle has distinguished, one can see that both can be well or\\nbadly done. On the one hand, one can reason well or badly –\\nabout what to do within the next five minutes, twenty-four hours, or\\nten years. On the other, actions motivated by appetites can be well or\\nbadly done, and likewise having an appetite at all can sometimes not\\nbe a well done, but a badly done, activity of the soul. Acting on the\\ndesire for a drink from the wine cooler at a banquet is not always a\\ngood idea, nor is having such a desire. According to Aristotle, the\\ngood human being has a soul in which these functions are consistently\\ndone well. Thus, good persons reason well about plans, short term or\\nlong; and when they satisfy their appetites, and even when they\\nhave appetites, it is in conformity with reason. Returning to\\nthe question of happiness, Aristotle says the good for a human is to\\nlive the way the good human lives, that is, to live with one’s\\nlife aimed at and structured by the same thing that the good human\\nbeing aims at in his or her life. So, his account of happiness, i.e.,\\nthe highest good for a human, is virtuous or excellent activity of the\\nsoul. But he has not identified this virtuous activity with that of\\nthe moral virtues, at this point. In fact, he says if there are many\\nkinds of excellence, then human good is found in the active exercise\\nof the highest. He is careful to point out that happiness is not just\\nthe ability to function well in this way; it is the activity itself.\\nMoreover, this activity must be carried out for a complete life. One\\nswallow does not make a spring.\",\n \"\\nAlthough the reference here to parts or aspects of the soul is\\ncursory, it is influenced by Aristotle’s theories in the de\\nAnima. Fundamental to the human soul and to all living things,\\nincluding plants, is nutrition and growth (415a20 ff). Next is\\nsensation and locomotion; these functions are characteristic of\\nanimals (416b30 ff). Aristotle associates appetite and desire with\\nthis part of the soul (414b1–5). Thus we have a rough sketch of\\nanimal life: animals, moved by appetite for food, go toward the\\nobjects of desire, which are discerned by sensation. To these\\nfunctions is added thought in the case of humans. Thought is both\\ntheoretical and practical (427a 15–20). The bulk of the de\\nAnima is devoted to explaining the nutritive, sensory, and\\nrational functions; Aristotle considers desire and appetite as the\\nsource of movement in other animals (432a15 ff), and these plus reason\\nas its source in humans. In Nicomachean Ethics he focuses on\\nthe role that appetite and desire, together with reason, play in the\\nmoral drama of human life.\",\n \"\\nIn chapter 8 of Book I, Aristotle explicitly identifies human good\\nwith psychological good. Dividing goods into external goods, those of\\nthe body, and those of the soul, he states that his account of\\nhappiness agrees with those who hold it is a good of the soul. In\\nfact, in this account, happiness is closely related to traditionally\\nconceived psychological goods such as pleasure and moral virtue,\\nalthough the nature of the relation has yet to be shown\\n(1098b10–30). Still, in Book I Aristotle is laying the\\nfoundation in his moral psychology for showing the link between the\\nmoral virtues and happiness. In Book II he completes this foundation\\nwhen he turns to the question of which condition of the soul is to be\\nidentified with (moral) virtue, or virtue of character.\",\n \"\\nIn II. 5, he says that conditions of the soul are either feelings\\n(pathê), capacities for feeling (dynameis) or\\ndispositions (hexeis). Feelings are such things as appetite,\\nanger, fear and generally those conditions that are accompanied by\\npleasure and pain. Capacities are, for example, the simple capacity to\\nhave these feelings. Finally, disposition is that condition of the\\nsoul whereby we are well or badly off with respect to feelings. For\\ninstance, people are badly disposed with respect to anger who\\ntypically get angry violently or who typically get angry weakly\\n(1105b20–30). Virtue, as a condition of the soul, will be one of\\nthese three. After arguing that virtue is neither feeling nor\\ncapacity, Aristotle turns to what it means to be well or badly off\\nwith respect to feelings. He says that in everything that is\\ncontinuous and divisible it is possible to take more, less, or an\\nequal amount (1106a25). This remark is puzzling until we realize that\\nhe is actually talking about feelings. Feelings are continuous and\\ndivisible; so one can take more, less, or an equal amount of them.\\nPresumably, when it comes to feeling anger, e.g., one can feel too\\nmuch, not enough, or a balanced amount. Aristotle thinks that what\\ncounts as too much, not enough, or a balanced amount can vary to some\\nextent from individual to individual. At this point he is ready to\\ncome back to moral virtue for it is concerned with feelings and\\nactions (to which feelings give rise), in which one can have excess,\\ndeficiency, or the mean. To have a feeling like anger at the right\\ntime, on the right occasion, towards the right people, for the right\\npurpose and in the right manner is to feel the right amount, the mean\\nbetween extremes of excess and deficiency; this is the mark of moral\\nvirtue (1106a15–20). Finally, virtue is not a question only of\\nfeelings since there is a mean between extremes of action. Presumably,\\nAristotle means that the appropriate feeling – the mean between\\nthe extremes in each situation – gives rise to the appropriate\\naction.\",\n \"\\nAt last Aristotle is ready to discuss particular moral virtues.\\nBeginning with courage, he mentions here two feelings, fear and\\nconfidence. An excessive disposition to confidence is rashness and an\\nexcessive disposition to fear and a deficiency in confidence is\\ncowardice. When it comes to certain bodily pleasures and pains, the\\nmean is moderation. While the excess is profligacy, deficiency in\\nrespect of pleasures almost never occurs. Aristotle gives a fuller\\naccount of both of these virtues in Book III; however, the basic idea\\nremains. The virtue in each case is a mean between two extremes, the\\nextremes being vices. Virtue, then, is a reliable disposition whereby\\none reacts in relevant situations with the appropriate feeling –\\nneither excessive nor deficient – and acts in the appropriate\\nway – neither excessively nor deficiently.\",\n \"\\nTo complete the notion of moral virtue we must consider the role\\nreason plays in moral actions. Summing up at Book II.6, Aristotle says\\nvirtue is a disposition to choose, lying in the mean which is relative\\nto us, determined by reason (1107a1). Since he is talking about\\nchoosing actions, he is focusing on the way moral virtue issues in\\nactions. In turn, it is the role of practical wisdom\\n(phronêsis) to determine choice. While moral virtues,\\nvirtues of character, belong to the part of the soul which can obey\\nreason, practical wisdom is a virtue of the part of the soul that\\nitself reasons. The virtues of thought, intellectual virtues, are\\nknowledge (epistêmê), comprehension\\n(nous), wisdom (sophia), craft\\n(technê), and practical wisdom (1139b15–25). The\\nfirst three grasp the truth about what cannot be otherwise and is not\\ncontingent. A good example of knowledge about what cannot be otherwise\\nis mathematics. Craft and practical wisdom pursue the truth that can\\nbe had about what can be otherwise and is contingent. What can be\\notherwise includes what is made – the province of craft –\\nand what is done – the province of practical wisdom (1140a1).\\nWhile Aristotle’s account of practical wisdom raises several\\nproblems, we will focus on only two closely related issues. He says\\nthat it is the mark of someone with practical wisdom to deliberate\\nwell about what leads to the good for himself (to dunasthai\\nkalôs bouleusasthai peri ta hautô(i) agatha). This\\ngood is not specific, such as health and strength, but is living well\\nin general (1140a25–30). This description of practical wisdom,\\nfirst of all, implies that it deliberates about actions; it is a skill\\nfor discerning those actions which hit the mean between the two\\nextremes. However, the ambiguity of the phrase ‘what leads to\\nthe good’ might suggest that practical wisdom deliberates only\\nabout instrumental means to living well. Still since practical wisdom\\ndetermines which actions hit the mean between two extremes, such\\nactions are not instrumental means to living well – as though\\nliving well were a separate state. Actions which hit the mean are\\nparts of living well; the good life is composed of actions under the\\nheadings of, for instance, honor and pleasure, which achieve the mean.\\nIn addition, the deliberation of practical wisdom does not have to be\\nconfined to determining which actions hit the mean. While Aristotle\\nwould deny that anyone deliberates about whether happiness is the end\\nof human life, we do deliberate about the constituents of happiness.\\nSo, one might well deliberate about the ways in which honor and\\npleasure fit into happiness.\",\n \"\\nNow we can discern the link between morality and happiness. While\\nhappiness itself is excellent or virtuous activity of the soul, moral\\nvirtue is a disposition to achieve the mean between two extremes in\\nfeeling and in action. The missing link is that achieving the mean is\\nalso excellent activity of the soul. Activity that expresses the\\nvirtue of courage, for example, is also the best kind of activity when\\nit comes to the emotion of fear. Activity that expresses the virtue of\\nmoderation is also excellent activity when it comes to the bodily\\nappetites. In this way, then, the happy person is also the virtuous\\nperson. However, in Book I Aristotle has already pointed out the\\nproblem of bodily and external goods in relation to happiness. Even if\\nhappiness is virtuous activity of the soul, in some cases these goods\\nare needed to be virtuous – for example, one must have money to\\nbe generous. In fact, the lack of good birth, good children, and\\nbeauty can mar one’s happiness for the happy person does not\\nappear to be one who is altogether ugly, low born, solitary, or\\nchildless, and even less so if he has friends and children who are\\nbad, or good friends and children who then die\\n(1099a30–1099b10). Aristotle is raising a problem that he does\\nnot attempt to solve in this passage. Even if happiness is virtuous\\nactivity of the soul, it does not confer immunity to the vicissitudes\\nof life.\",\n \"\\nAristotle’s moral psychology has further implications for his\\naccount of happiness. In Book I, chapter 7, he said that human good is\\nvirtuous activity of the soul but was indefinite about the virtues. In\\nmost of the Nicomachean Ethics he talks about the moral\\nvirtues, leaving the impression that virtuous activity is the same as\\nactivity associated with moral virtues. In Book X, however, Aristotle\\nrevisits the issue of virtuous activity. If happiness, he says, is\\nactivity in accordance with virtue, it will be activity in accordance\\nwith the highest. The highest virtue belongs to the best part of the\\nsoul, i.e., the intellect (nous) or the part that governs in\\nthe soul and contemplates the fine and godly, being itself the divine\\npart of the soul or that which is closest to the divine\\n(1177a10–20). Up to this point, Aristotle has apparently been\\ntalking about the man of political action and the happiness that is\\nsuitable to rational, embodied human beings. Active in the life of the\\ncity, this person exercises courage, moderation, liberality, and\\njustice in the public arena. Now, instead of the life of an effective\\nand successful citizen, Aristotle is holding up the life of study and\\ncontemplation as the one that achieves happiness – that is, the\\nhighest human good, the activity of the highest virtue. Such a life\\nwould achieve the greatest possible self-sufficiency and\\ninvulnerability (1177a30). Indeed, at first he portrays these two\\nlives as so opposite that they seem incompatible.\",\n \"\\nIn the end, however, he palliates the differences, leaving the\\npossibility for some way to harmonize the two (1178a30). The\\ndifferences between the two lives are rooted in the different aspects\\nof the soul. Moral virtues belong to the appetites and desires of the\\nsensory soul – the part obviously associated with the active\\npolitical life, when its activities are brought under the guidance and\\ncontrol of excellent practical thought and judgment. The\\n“highest” virtues, those belonging to the scientific or\\nphilosophical intellect, belong to theoretical reason. To concentrate\\non these activities one must be appropriately disengaged from active\\npolitical life. While the latter description leads Aristotle to\\nportray as possible a kind of human life that partakes of divine\\ndetachment (1178b5 ff), finally human life is an indissolvable\\ncomposite of intellect, reason, sensation, desires, and appetites. For\\nAristotle, strictly speaking, happiness simply is the\\nexercise of the highest virtues, those of theoretical reason and\\nunderstanding. But even persons pursuing those activities as their\\nhighest good, and making them central to their lives, will need to\\nremain connected to daily life, and even to political affairs in the\\ncommunity in which they live. Hence, they will possess and exercise\\nthe moral virtues and those of practical thought, as well as those\\nother, higher, virtues, throughout their lives. Clearly, this\\nconception of happiness does not hold all virtue, moral and\\nintellectual, to be of equal value. Rather, Aristotle means the\\nintellectual virtue of study and contemplation to be the dominant part\\nof happiness. However, problems remains since we can understand\\ndominance in two ways. In the first version, the activity of\\ntheoretical contemplation is the sole, exclusive component of\\nhappiness and the exercise of the moral virtues and practical wisdom\\nis an instrumental means to happiness, but not integral to it. The\\nproblem with this version of dominance is that it undermines what\\nAristotle has said about the intrinsic value of the virtuous activity\\nof politically and socially engaged human beings, including\\nfriendship. In a second version of dominance, we might understand\\ncontemplation to be the principal, but not exclusive, constituent of\\nhappiness. The problem with this version of dominance lies in\\nintegrating such apparently incompatible activities into a coherent\\nlife. If we give the proper weight to the divine good of theoretical\\ncontemplation it may leave us little interest in the virtuous pursuits\\nof the moral goods arising from our political nature, except, again,\\nas means for establishing and maintaining the conditions in which we\\nmay contemplate.\",\n \"\\nLike Plato, Aristotle is a eudaimonist in that he argues that virtue\\n(including in some way the moral virtues of courage, justice and the\\nrest) is the dominant and most important component of happiness.\\nHowever, he is not claiming that the only reason to be morally\\nvirtuous is that moral virtue is a constituent of happiness. He says\\nthat we seek to have virtue and virtuous action for itself as well\\n(Nicomachean Ethics, 1097b 1–10); not to do so is to\\nfail even to be virtuous. In this regard, it is like\\npleasure, which is also a constituent of the happy life. Like\\npleasure, virtue is sought for its own sake. Still, as a constituent\\nof happiness, virtuous action is grounded in the highest end for a\\nhuman being. One can discern in the Nicomachean Ethics two\\ndifferent types of argument for the link between virtue and happiness.\\nOne is based on Aristotle’s account of human nature and\\nculminates in the so-called function argument of Book I. If happiness\\nis excellent or virtuous activity of the soul, the latter is\\nunderstood by way of the uniquely human function. If one understands\\nthe human function then one can understand what it is for that\\nfunction to be done excellently (1098a5–15). This sort of\\nargument has been criticized because it moves from a premise about\\nwhat humans are to a conclusion about what they ought to be. Such\\ncriticism reflects the modern claim that there is a fact-value\\ndistinction. One defense of Aristotle’s argument holds that his\\naccount of human nature is meant both to be objective and to offer the\\nbasis for an understanding of excellence. The difference, then,\\nbetween modern moral theory and ancient is over what counts as an\\nobjective account of human nature. However, even if we accept this\\ndefense, we can still ask why a human would consider it good to\\nachieve human excellence as it is defined in the function argument. At\\nthis point another argument for the link between happiness and virtue\\n– one more dispersed in the text of the Nicomachean\\nEthics – becomes relevant; it is based on value terms only\\nand appeals to what a human might consider it good to achieve.\\nAristotle describes virtuous activity of the soul as fine\\n(kalos) and excellent (spoudaios). Finally, the link\\nbetween virtue and happiness is forged if a human sees that it is good\\nto live a life that one considers to be fine and excellent.\",\n \"\\n(For further detailed discussion, see entry on\\n Aristotle’s ethics.)\\n \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Aristotle\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nAlthough the Cynics had an impact on moral thinking in Athens after\\nthe death of Socrates, it is through later, and highly controversial,\\nreports of their deeds and sayings – rather than their writings\\n– that we know of them. Diogenes the Cynic, the central figure,\\nis famous for living in a wine jar (Diogenes Laertius [= DL] VI 23)\\nand going about with a lantern looking for ‘a man’ –\\ni.e., someone not corrupted (DL VI 41). He claimed to set courage over\\nagainst fortune, nature against convention, and reason against passion\\n(DL VI 38). Of this trio of opposites, the most characteristic for\\nunderstanding the Cynics is nature against convention. Diogenes taught\\nthat a life according to nature was better than one that conformed to\\nconvention. First of all, natural life is simpler. Diogenes ate,\\nslept, or conversed wherever it suited him and carried his food around\\nwith him (DL VI 22). When he saw a child drinking out of its hand, he\\nthrew away his cup, saying that a child had bested him in frugality\\n(DL VI 37). He said the life of humans had been made easy by the gods\\nbut that humans had lost sight of this through seeking after honeyed\\ncakes, perfumes, and similar things (DL VI 44). With sufficient\\ntraining the life according to nature is the happy life (DL VI\\n71).\",\n \"\\nAccordingly Diogenes became famous for behavior that flouted\\nconvention (DL VI 69). Still, he thought that the simple life not only\\nfreed one from unnecessary concerns but was essential to virtue.\\nAlthough he says nothing specific about the virtues, he does commend\\ntraining for virtuous behavior (DL VI 70). His frugality certainly\\nbespeaks self-control. He condemned love of money, praised good men,\\nand held love to be the occupation of the idle (DL VI\\n50–51).\",\n \"\\nBesides his contempt for convention, what is most noteworthy about\\nDiogenes as a moral teacher is his emphasis on detachment from those\\nthings most people consider good. In this emphasis, Diogenes seems to\\nhave intensified a tendency found in Socrates. Certainly Socrates\\ncould be heedless of convention and careless about providing for his\\nbodily needs. To Plato, however, Diogenes seemed to be Socrates gone\\nmad (DL VI 54). Still, in Diogenes’ attitude, we can see at\\nleast the beginning of the idea that the end of life is a\\npsychological state marked by detachment. Counseling the simple and\\nuncomplicated satisfaction of one’s natural instincts and\\ndesires, Diogenes urges detachment from those things held out by\\nconvention to be good. While he is not so explicit, others develop the\\ntheme of detachment into the notion of tranquility. The Stoics and\\nEpicureans hold that happiness depends on detachment from vulnerable\\nor difficult to obtain bodily and external goods and consists in a\\npsychological state more under one’s own direct control. In this\\nway, happiness becomes associated (for the Epicureans) with\\ntranquility (ataraxia). Finally, in Skepticism, suspension of\\njudgment is a kind of epistemic detachment that provides tranquility.\\nSo in Diogenes we find the beginnings of an idea that will become\\ncentral to later ancient moral theory.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Cynics\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe first of the Cyrenaic school was Aristippus, who came from Cyrene,\\na Greek city on the north African coast. The account of his teachings,\\nin Diogenes Laertius, can seem sometimes inconsistent. Nevertheless,\\nAristippus is interesting because, as a thorough hedonist, he is\\nsomething of a foil for Epicurus. First of all, pleasure is the end or\\nthe goal of life – what everyone should seek in life. However,\\nthe pleasure that is the end is not pleasure in general, or pleasure\\nover the long term, but immediate, particular pleasures. Thus the end\\nvaries situation by situation, action by action. The end is not\\nhappiness because happiness is the sum of particular pleasures (DL II\\n87–88). Accumulating the pleasures that produce happiness is\\ntiresome (DL II 90). Particular pleasures are ones that are close-by\\nor sure. Moreover, Aristippus said that pleasures do not differ from\\none another, that one pleasure is not more pleasant than another. This\\nsort of thinking would encourage one to choose a readily available\\npleasure rather than wait for a “better” one in the\\nfuture. This conclusion is reinforced by other parts of his teaching.\\nHis school says that bodily pleasures are much better than mental\\npleasures. While this claim would seem to contradict the idea that\\npleasures do not differ, it does show preference for the immediately\\nor easily available pleasures of bodily gratification over, e.g., the\\nmental pleasure of a self-aware just person. In fact,\\nAristippus’ school holds that pleasure is good even if it comes\\nfrom the most unseemly things (DL II 88). Aristippus, then, seems to\\nhave raised improvidence to the level of a principle.\",\n \"\\nStill, it is possible that the position is more than an elaborate\\njustification for short-sighted pleasure-seeking. Cyrenaics taught\\nthat a wise man (sophos) (one who always pursues immediate\\ngratification) will in general live more pleasantly than a foolish\\nman. That prudence or wisdom (phronêsis) is good, not\\nin itself but in its consequences, suggests that some balance, perhaps\\neven regarding others, is required in choosing pleasures (DL II 91).\\nThe Cyrenaic attitude to punishment seems to be an example of\\nprudence. They hold that nothing is just, fine, or base by nature but\\nonly by convention and custom; still a good man will do nothing out of\\nline through fear of punishment (DL II 93). Finally, they hold that\\nfriendship is based in self-interest (DL II 91). These aspects of\\nCyrenaic teaching suggest they are egoist hedonists. If so, there are\\ngrounds for taking the interest of others into account as long as\\ndoing so is based on what best provides an individual pleasure.\",\n \"\\nNevertheless, Aristippus’ school holds that the end of life is a\\npsychological good, pleasure. Still, it is particular pleasures not\\nthe accumulation of these that is the end. As a consequence, their\\nmoral theory contrasts sharply with others in antiquity. If we take\\nthe claims about the wise man, prudence, and friendship to be\\nreferences to virtue, then Aristippus’ school denies that virtue\\nis indispensable for achieving the end or goal of life. While they\\nhold that virtue is good insofar as it leads to the end, they seem\\nprepared to dispense with virtue in circumstances where it proves\\nineffective. Even if they held virtue in more esteem, the Cyrenaics\\nwould nonetheless not be eudaimonists since they deny that happiness\\nis the end of life.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"6. Cyrenaics\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nEpicurean moral theory is the most prominent hedonistic theory in the\\nancient world. While Epicurus holds that pleasure is the sole\\nintrinsic good and pain is what is intrinsically bad for humans, he is\\nalso very careful about defining these two. Aware of the Cyrenaics who\\nhold that pleasures, moral and immoral, are the end or goal of all\\naction, Epicurus presents a sustained argument that pleasure,\\ncorrectly understood, will coincide with virtue.\",\n \"\\nIn the Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus begins by making a\\ndistinction among desires. Some desires are empty or groundless and\\nothers are natural; the natural are further subdivided into the merely\\nnatural and the necessary. Finally, the necessary are those necessary\\nfor happiness, those necessary for the body’s freedom from\\ndistress, and those necessary for life itself (Letter to\\nMenoeceus 127). A helpful scholiast (cf. Principal\\nDoctrines XXIX) gives us some examples; necessary desires are\\nones that bring relief from unavoidable pain, such as drinking when\\nthirsty – if we don’t drink when we need replenishment, we\\nwill just get thirstier and thirstier, a painful experience. The\\nnatural but not necessary are the ones that vary pleasure but are not\\nneeded in order to motivate us to remove or ward off pain,\\nsuch as the desire for expensive food: we do not need to want, or to\\neat, expensive food in order to ward off the pain of prolonged hunger.\\nFinally, the groundless desires are for such things as crowns and\\nstatues bestowed as civic honors – these are things that when\\ndesired at all are desired with intense and harmful cravings. Keeping\\nthese distinctions in mind is a great help in one’s life because\\nit shows us what we need to aim for. The aim of the blessed life is\\nthe body’s health and the soul’s freedom from disturbance\\n(ataraxia) (128).\",\n \"\\nAfter this austere introduction, Epicurus makes the bold claim that\\npleasure is the beginning and end of the blessed life. Then he makes\\nan important qualification. Just because pleasure is the good,\\nEpicureans do not seek every pleasure. Some lead to greater pain. Just\\nso, they do not avoid all pains; some lead to greater pleasures\\n(128–29). Such a position sounds, of course, like common-sense\\nhedonism. If one’s aim is to have as much pleasure as possible\\nover the long term, it makes sense to avoid some smaller pleasures\\nthat will be followed by larger pains. If one wants, for example, to\\nhave as much pleasure from drinking wine as possible, then it would\\nmake sense to exercise some judgment about how much to drink on an\\noccasion since the next morning’s hangover will be very\\nunpleasant, and might keep one from having wine the next day. However,\\nhis distinction among groundless, natural, and necessary desires\\nshould make us suspicious that Epicurus is no common-sense hedonist.\\nThe aim of life is not maximizing pleasures in the way the above\\nexample suggests. Rather, real pleasure, the aim of life, is what we\\nexperience through freedom from pain and distress. So it is not the\\npains of the hangover or the possible loss of further bouts of wine\\ndrinking that should restrain my drinking on this occasion. Rather one\\nshould be aiming at the pleasure given by freedom from bodily pain and\\nmental distress (131–32).\",\n \"\\nThe usual way to understand the pleasure of freedom from pain and from\\ndistress is by way of the distinction between kinetic pleasures and\\nkatastematic, or what are, following Cicero, misleadingly called\\n‘static’ ones (Diogenes Laertius X 136). The name of the\\nformer implies motion and the name of the latter implies a state or\\ncondition. The reason the distinction is important is that freedom\\nfrom pain and from distress is a state or condition, not a motion.\\nEpicurus holds not only that this state is a kind of pleasure but that\\nit is the most complete pleasure (Principal Doctrines III).\\nModern commentators have taken various approaches to explaining why\\nthis state should be considered a pleasure, as opposed to, e.g., the\\nattitude of taking pleasure in the fact that one is free of pain and\\ndistress. After all, taking pleasure in a fact is not a feeling in the\\nsame sense as the pleasure of drinking when thirsty. Since the latter\\nis usually taken to be an example of kinetic pleasure (and is\\nassociated with the pain of thirst), sometimes katastematic pleasure\\nis said to be just kinetic pleasure free from pain and distress, e.g.,\\nthe pleasure of satiety. A somewhat broader conception of katastematic\\npleasure holds that it is the enjoyment of one’s natural\\nconstitution when one is not distracted by bodily pain or mental\\ndistress. Finally, some commentators hold the pleasure of freedom from\\npain and from distress to be a feeling available only to the wise\\nperson, who properly appreciates simple pleasures. Since eating plain\\nbread and drinking water are usually not difficult to achieve, to the\\nwise, their enjoyment is not overwhelmed by fear (130–31).\\nAccordingly, the pleasure they take in these is free of pain and\\ndistress. Of course, the wise do not have to confine themselves to\\nsimple pleasures; they can enjoy luxurious ones as well – as\\nlong as they avoid needing them, which entails fear.\",\n \"\\nAt this point, we can see that Epicurus has so refined the account of\\npleasure and pain that he is able to tie them to virtue. In the\\nLetter to Menoeceus, he claims, as a truth for which he does\\nnot argue, that virtue and pleasure are inseparable and that living a\\nprudent, honorable, and just life is the necessary and sufficient\\nmeans to the pleasure that is the end of life (132). An example of\\nwhat he might mean is found in Principal Doctrines, where\\nEpicurus holds that justice is a contract among humans to avoid\\nsuffering harm from one another. Then he argues that injustice is not\\nbad per se but is bad because of the fear that arises from\\nthe expectation that one will be punished for his misdeeds. He\\nreinforces this claim by arguing that it is impossible for someone who\\nviolates the compact to be confident that he will escape detection\\n(Principal Doctrines XXXIV–V). While one might doubt\\nthis claim about the malfactor’s state of mind, nevertheless, we\\ncan see that Epicurus means to ground justice, understood as the rules\\ngoverning human intercourse, in his moral psychology, i.e., the need\\nto avoid distress.\",\n \"\\nEpicurus, like his predecessors in the ancient moral tradition,\\nidentified the good as something psychological. However, instead of,\\nfor example, the complex Aristotelian notion of excellent activity of\\nthe soul, Epicurus settled on the fairly obvious psychological good of\\npleasure. Of course, Aristotle argues that excellent activity of the\\nsoul is intrinsically pleasurable (Nicomachean Ethics\\n1099a5). Still, in his account pleasure seems something like a\\ndividend of excellent activity (1175b30). By contrast, for Epicurus\\npleasure itself is the end of life. However, since Epicureans hold\\nfreedom from pain (aponia) and distress (ataraxia)\\ngives the preferable pleasure, they emphasize tranquility\\n(ataraxia) as the end of life. Modern utilitarians, for whom\\nfreedom from pain and distress is not paramount, would include a\\nbroader palate of pleasures.\",\n \"\\nEpicurus’ doctrine can be considered eudaimonist. While Plato\\nand Aristotle maintain that virtue is constitutive of happiness,\\nEpicurus holds that virtue is the only means to achieve happiness,\\nwhere happiness is understood as a continuous experience of the\\npleasure that comes from freedom from pain and from mental distress.\\nThus, he is a eudaimonist in that he holds virtue is indispensable to\\nhappiness; but he does not identify virtuous activity, in whole or in\\npart, with happiness. Finally, Epicurus is usually interpreted to have\\nheld a version of psychological hedonism – i.e., everything we\\ndo is done for the sake of pleasure – rather than ethical\\nhedonism – i.e., we ought to do everything for the sake of\\npleasure. However, Principal Doctrine XXV suggests the latter\\nposition; and when in the Letter to Menoeceus he says that\\n“we” do everything in order not to be in pain or in fear,\\nhe might mean to be referring to “we” Epicureans. If so,\\nthe claim would be normative. Still, once all disturbance of the soul\\nis dispelled, he says, one is no longer in need nor is there any other\\ngood that could be added (128). Since this claim appears to be\\ndescriptive, Epicurus could be taken, as he usually has been, to be\\narguing that whatever we do is done for the sake of pleasure. In this\\naccount, that aspect of human nature on which virtue is based is\\nfairly straightforward. The account is certainly less complex than,\\ne.g., Aristotle’s. In turn, Epicurus seems to have argued in\\nsuch a way as to make pleasure the only reason for being virtuous. If\\npsychological hedonism is true, then when one realizes the necessary\\nlink between virtue and pleasure, one has all the reason one needs to\\nbe virtuous and the only reason one can have.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"7. Epicurus\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe Stoics are well known for their teaching that the good is to be\\nidentified with virtue. Virtues include logic, physics, and ethics\\n(Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta [=SVF]II 35), as well as wisdom,\\nmoderation, justice, and courage. To our modern ears, the first three\\nsound like academic subjects; but for the Stoics, they were virtues of\\nthought. However, orthodox Stoics do not follow the Aristotelian\\ndistinction between intellectual and moral virtues because – as\\nwe shall see – they hold that all human psychological functions,\\nincluding the affective and volitional, are rational in a single,\\nunified sense. For them, consequently, all virtues form a unity around\\nthe core concept of knowledge. Finally, all that is required for\\nhappiness (i.e., the secure possession of the good, of what is needed\\nto make one’s life a thoroughly good one) – and the only\\nthing – is to lead a virtuous life. In this teaching Stoics are\\naddressing the problem of bodily and external goods raised by\\nAristotle. Their solution takes the radical course of dismissing such\\nalleged goods from the account of happiness because they are not\\nnecessary for virtue, and are not, in fact, in any way good at\\nall.\",\n \"\\nThey argue that health, pleasure, beauty, strength, wealth, good\\nreputation, and noble birth are neither good nor bad. Since they can\\nbe used well or badly and the good is invariably good, these assets\\nare not good. The virtues, however, are good (DL VII 102–103),\\nsince they are perfections of our rationality, and only rationally\\nperfected thoughts and decisions can possibly have the features of\\nharmony and order in which goodness itself consists. Since possessing\\nand exercising virtue is happiness, happiness does not include such\\nthings as health, pleasure, and wealth. Still, the Stoics do not\\ndismiss these assets altogether since they still have a kind of value.\\nThese things are indifferent to happiness in that they do not add to\\none’s virtue nor detract from it, and so they do not add to or\\ntake away from one’s possession of the good. One is not more\\nvirtuous because healthy nor less virtuous because ill. But being\\nhealthy generally conforms with nature’s plans for the lives of\\nanimals and plants, so it is preferable to be healthy, and one should\\ntry to preserve and maintain one’s health. Health is, then, the\\nkind of value they call a preferred indifferent; but it is not in any\\nway a good, and it makes no contribution to the quality of one’s\\nlife as a good or a bad one, happy or miserable.\",\n \"\\nIn order to understand the Stoic claims about the relation of virtue\\nto happiness, we can begin with virtue. Chrysippus says that virtue is\\na craft (technê) having to do with the things of life\\n(SVF II 909). In other texts, we learn that the things of\\nlife include impulse (hormê). Each animal has an\\nimpulse for self-preservation; it has an awareness of its constitution\\nand strives to preserve its integrity. There is also a natural impulse\\nto care for offspring. Humans, then, are naturally inclined toward\\npreserving life, health, and children. But then grown-up humans also\\ndo these things under the guidance of reason; reason in the adult\\nhuman case is the craftsman of impulse (DL VII 85–6). This\\nlatter phrase is significant because it implies that just following\\nnatural impulse is not enough. In fact, it is not even possible for an\\nadult human, whose nature is such as to do everything they do\\nby reason, even to follow the sort of natural impulses that\\nanimals and immature humans do in their actions. In order to lead a\\nvirtuous life, reason must shape our impulses and guide their\\nexpression in action.\",\n \"\\nImpulse is the key to understanding the relation between virtue and\\nhappiness. An impulse is a propositional attitude that, when assented\\nto, leads to action, e.g., ‘I should eat this bread now.’\\nHowever, impulses do not arise in a separate, non-rational part of the\\nsoul. Stoics deny there are any non-rational desires of appetite\\ncapable of impelling action. The soul, insofar as it provides\\nmotivations and is the cause of our actions, consists of the\\ncommanding faculty (hêgemonikon) which is also reason\\n(SVF I 202). We can distinguish correct impulses into those\\nwhich treat virtue as the only good and those which treat things\\nindifferent as indifferent. By contrast, emotions or passions (\\npathê) are incorrect impulses that treat what is\\nindifferent as good. However, they do not come from a non-rational\\npart of the soul but are false judgments about the good, where\\njudgment is understood as assent to some impulse. Emotions, such as\\ndesire, fear, pleasure, and pain, embody such erroneous judgments\\n(SVF III 391, 393, 394). For instance, the desire for health\\narises from assenting to the impulse that embodies the false judgment\\nthat health is good, instead of a preferred indifferent. The sage\\n– someone perfected in virtue – would never assent to such\\nfalse propositions and thus would never have emotions in this sense,\\nno feelings that carried him beyond reason’s true assessment. He\\nwould, however, experience feelings attuned to reason, eupatheiai\\n –literally good emotions or feelings. For instance, he\\nwould feel joy over his virtue, but not pleasure – the latter\\nbeing an emotion that treats the actual possession of an indifferent\\nas a good.\",\n \"\\nKnowledge, then, about what is good, bad, and indifferent is the heart\\nof virtue. Courage, e.g., is simply knowledge of what is to be\\nendured: the impulse to endure or not, and the only impulse\\nthat is needed by courage, then follows automatically, as a product or\\naspect of that knowledge. This tight unity in the soul is the basis\\nfor the Stoic teaching about the unity of the virtues. Zeno (the\\nfounder of the school) defines wisdom (phronêsis), or\\nrather practical knowledge, in matters requiring distribution\\nas justice, in matters requiring choice as moderation, and in matters\\nrequiring endurance as courage (Plutarch On Moral Virtue\\n440E–441D). Practical knowledge, then, is a single,\\ncomprehensive knowledge of what is good and bad in each of these kinds\\nof circumstance.\",\n \"\\nAttending to this identification of virtue and practical knowledge is\\na good way to understand the central Stoic teaching that virtue is\\nliving in agreement with nature (SVF III 16). Nature includes\\nnot only what produces natural impulses but also the rest of the\\ngovernment of the cosmos, the natural world. The universe is governed\\nby right reason that pervades everything and directs (causes) the way\\nit functions – with the exception of the only rational animals\\nthere are, the adult human beings: their actions are governed by\\nthemselves, i.e., by assenting to, or withholding assent from\\nparticular impulses. Nature is even identified with Zeus, who is said\\nto be the director of the administration of all that exists (DL VII\\n87–9). Since reason governs the universe for the good,\\neverything happens of necessity and for the overall good. Virtue,\\nthen, includes understanding both one’s individual nature as a\\nhuman being and the way nature arranges the whole universe. At this\\npoint, we can appreciate the role of logic and physics as virtue since\\nthese entail knowledge of the universe. This understanding is the\\nbasis for living in agreement with the government of the universe,\\ni.e., with nature, by making one’s decisions and actions be such\\nas to agree with Zeus’s or nature’s own plans, so far as\\none can understand what those are.\",\n \"\\nIt is in this context that we can best understand the Stoic teaching\\nabout indifferents, such as health and wealth. An individual’s\\nhealth is vulnerable to being lost if right reason that governs the\\nuniverse requires it for the good of the whole. If happiness depended\\non having these assets and avoiding their opposites, then, in these\\ncases, happiness would be impossible. However, if virtue is living in\\nagreement with nature’s government of the universe and if virtue\\nis the only good, one’s happiness is entirely determined by his\\npatterns of assent and is therefore not vulnerable to being lost. If\\none understands that the good of the whole dictates that in a\\nparticular case one’s health must be sacrificed, then one\\nrecognizes that his happiness does not require health. We should not,\\nhowever, see this recognition as tantamount to renunciation. If the\\nStoic notion of happiness has any relation at all to the ordinary\\nsense, renunciation cannot be a part of it. Rather, the Stoic view of\\nliving in accordance with nature should imply not only understanding\\nthe way right reason rules the universe but agreeing with it and even\\ndesiring that things happen as they do. We can best appreciate the\\nnotion that virtue is the good, then, if we take virtue as both\\nacknowledging that the universe is well governed and adopting the\\npoint of view, so to speak, of the government (DL VII 87–9).\",\n \"\\nA refinement of the Stoic approach to indifferents gives us a way of\\nunderstanding what living in agreement with nature might look like.\\nAfter all, such things as health and wealth cannot just be dismissed\\nsince they are something like the raw material of virtue. It is in\\npursuing and using them that one exercises virtue, for instance. In\\nthe attempt to integrate preferred indifferents into the pursuit of\\nthe good, Stoics used an analogy with archery (On Ends\\nIII.22). Since he aims to hit the target, the archer does everything\\nin his power to hit the target. Trying everything in his power\\nreflects the idea that such factors as a gust of wind – chance\\nhappenings that cannot be controlled or foreseen – can intervene\\nand keep him from achieving the goal. To account for this type of\\nfactor, it is claimed that the goal of the archer is really trying\\neverything in his power to attain the end. The analogy with the art of\\nliving focuses on this shift from the goal of hitting the target to\\nthe goal of trying everything in one’s power to hit the target\\n(On Ends V.17–20). It is the art of trying everything\\nin one’s power to attain such preferred indifferents as health\\nand wealth. However, if right reason, which governs the universe,\\ndecides that one will not have either, then the sage follows right\\nreason. At this point the analogy with archery breaks down since, for\\nthe sage, trying everything in one’s power does not mean\\nstriving until one fails; rather, it means seeking preferred\\nindifferents guided by right reason. By this reasoning, one should see\\nthat virtue and happiness are not identified with achieving heath and\\nwealth but with the way one seeks them and the evaluative propositions\\none assents to. Finally, the art of living is best compared to such\\nskills as acting and dancing (On Ends V. 24–5).\",\n \"\\nThis way of relating preferred indifferents to the end, i.e., to\\nhappiness, was challenged in antiquity as incoherent. Plutarch, for\\ninstance, argues that it is contrary to common understanding to say\\nthat the end is different from the reference point of all action. If\\nthe reference point of all action – what one does everything to\\nachieve – is to have preferred indifferents such as health, then\\nthe end is to have preferred indifferents. However, if the end is not\\nto have preferred indifferents (but, say, always to act prudently),\\nthen the reference point of all action cannot be the preferred\\nindifferents (On Common Conceptions 1070F–1071E). The\\nStoics are presented with a dilemma: either preferred indifferents are\\nintegral to the end or they are not the object of choice.\",\n \"\\nThe Stoics are extreme eudaimonists compared to Plato or Aristotle,\\nalthough they are clearly inspired by Socratic intellectualism. While\\nPlato clearly associates virtue and happiness, he never squarely faces\\nthe issue whether happiness may require other goods, e.g., wealth and\\nhealth. Aristotle holds happiness to be virtuous activity of the soul;\\nbut he raises – without solving – the problem of bodily\\nand external goods and happiness. For these two, virtue, together with\\nits active exercise, is the dominant and most important component of\\nhappiness, while Stoics simply identify virtue and the good, and so\\nmake it the only thing needed for a happy life. Still, Stoics do not\\nreduce happiness to virtue, as though ‘happiness’ is just\\na name for being perfectly just, courageous, and moderate. Rather they\\nhave independent ways of describing happiness. Following Zeno, all the\\nStoics say it is a good flow of life. Seneca says the happy life is\\npeacefulness and constant tranquility. However, we should keep in mind\\nthat, while they do not reduce happiness to virtue, their account of\\nhappiness is not that of the common person. So in recommending virtue\\nbecause it secures happiness the Stoics are relying on happiness in a\\nspecial, although not idiosyncratic, sense. In fact, their idea of\\nhappiness shares an important feature with the Epicurean, which puts a\\npremium on tranquil pleasures. In Stoicism as well, deliverance from\\nthe vicissitudes of fate leads to a notion of happiness that\\nemphasizes tranquility. And, as we shall see, tranquility is a value\\nfor the Skeptics.\",\n \"\\nClearly, the Stoic account of virtue and happiness depends on their\\ntheory about human nature. For Aristotle, virtue is perfection of the\\nhuman function and the Stoics follow in this line of thinking. While\\ntheir notion of virtue builds on their notion of the underlying human\\nnature, their account of the perfection of human nature is more\\ncomplex than Aristotle’s. It includes accommodation to the\\nnature of the universe. Virtue is the perfection of human nature that\\nmakes it harmonious with the workings of fate, i.e. with Zeus’s\\noverall plan, regarded as the ineluctable, though providential, cause\\nof what happens in the world at large.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"8. Stoics\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nPyrrho, a murky figure, roughly contemporary with Epicurus and Zeno\\nthe Stoic, left no writings. In the late, anecdotal tradition he is\\ncredited with introducing suspension of judgment (DL IX 61). He became\\nthe eponymous hero for the founding of Pyrrhonian skepticism in the\\nfirst century B.C. (See entry on\\n Pyrrho\\n and on\\n Ancient Skepticism.)\\n Having discovered that for every argument examined so far there is an\\nopposing argument, Pyrrhonian Skeptics expressed no determinate\\nopinions (DL IX 74). This attitude would seem to lead to a kind of\\nepistemic paralysis. The Skeptics reply that they do not abolish,\\ne.g., relying on sight. They do not say that it is unreliable and they\\ndo not refuse, personally, ever to rely on it. Rather, they have the\\nimpression that there is no reason why we are entitled to rely on it,\\nin a given case or in general, even if we go ahead and rely on it\\nanyhow (DL IX 103). For example, if one has the visual impression of a\\ntower, that appearance is not in dispute. What is in dispute is\\nwhether the tower is as it appears to be. For Skeptics, claiming that\\nthe tower is as it appears to be is a dogmatic statement about the\\nobject or the causal history of the appearance. As far as the Skeptic\\nis concerned, all such statements have failed to be adequately\\njustified, and all supporting arguments can be opposed by equally\\nconvincing counter-arguments. Lacking any grounds on which to prefer\\none dogmatic statement or view over another, he suspends judgment.\",\n \"\\nSuch views have an obvious impact on practical and moral issues. First\\nof all, the Skeptics argue that, so far as we have been given any\\ncompelling reason by philosophers to believe, there is nothing good or\\nbad by nature (Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism\\n[=PH] III 179–238, Adversus Mathematicos\\n[=M] XI 42–109). And just in case he does find such\\nreasons compelling, the Skeptic will resist the temptation to assent\\nby posing a general counter-argument: what is good by nature would be\\nrecognized by everyone, but clearly not everyone agrees – for\\ninstance, Epicurus holds that pleasure is good by nature but\\nAntisthenes holds that it is not (DL IX 101) – hence there is\\nnothing good by nature (see section 4 of the entry on\\n Moral Skepticism).\\n The practical consequences of suspending judgment are illustrated by\\ntwo traditions about the life of Pyrrho. In one, Pyrrho himself did\\nnot avoid anything, whether it was wagons, precipices, or dogs. It\\nwould appear that, suspending judgment about whether being hit by a\\nwagon was naturally good or bad, Pyrrho might walk into its path, or\\nnot bother to get out of the way. His less skeptical friends kept him\\nalive – presumably by guiding him away from busy roads, vicious\\ndogs, and deep gorges. Another tradition, however, says that he only\\ntheorized about suspension of judgments, and took action to preserve\\nhimself and otherwise lead a normal life, but doing so without any\\njudgments as to natural good and bad. Living providently, he reached\\nninety years of age (DL IX 62).\",\n \"\\nIn any event, Pyrrho’s suspension of judgment led to a certain\\ndetachment. Not knowing what was good or bad by nature, he was\\nindifferent where dogmatists would be unhappy or at least anxious. For\\ninstance, he performed household chores usually done by women (DL IX\\n63–66). Thus Pyrrho’s skepticism detached him from the\\ndogmatic judgments of a culture in which a man’s performing\\nwomen’s work was considered demeaning. In turn, his skepticism\\nand suspension of judgment led to freedom from disturbance\\n(ataraxia) (DL IX 68). It is significant that this\\npsychological state, so important for Epicureans as part of the end of\\nlife, should play a key role in Pyrrhonian skepticism at its beginning\\nwith Pyrrho, but certainly in its development with Sextus\\nEmpiricus.\",\n \"\\nWhile suspension of judgment in moral matters brings freedom from\\ndisturbance, it does not lead to immoral behavior – anymore than\\nit leads to the foolhardy behavior of the first tradition about\\nPyrrho’s life. Sextus generalizes the Skeptic teaching about\\nappearances to cover the whole area of practical activity. He says the\\nrules of everyday conduct are divided into four parts: (1) the\\nguidance from nature, (2) compulsion that comes from bodily states\\nlike hunger and thirst, (3) traditional laws and customs about pious\\nand good living, (4) the teachings of the crafts (PH, I\\n21–24). The Skeptic is guided by all of these as by appearance,\\nand thus undogmatically. For instance, he would follow the traditional\\nlaws about pious and good living, accepting these laws as the way\\nthings appear to him to be in matters of piety and goodness but\\nclaiming no knowledge and holding no beliefs.\",\n \"\\nSextus says that the end of life is freedom from disturbance in\\nmatters of belief, plus moderate states in matters of compulsion.\\nSuspension of judgment provides the former in that one is not\\ndisturbed about which of two opposing claims is true, when (as always\\nseems to happen) one cannot rationally decide between them. Matters of\\ncompulsion cover such things as bodily needs for food, drink, and\\nwarmth. While the Skeptic undeniably suffers when hungry, thirsty, or\\ncold, he achieves a moderate state with respect to these sufferings\\nwhen compared to the person who both suffers them and believes they\\nare naturally bad. The Skeptic’s suspension of judgment about\\nwhether his suffering is naturally bad gives him a certain detachment\\nfrom the suffering, and puts him in a better condition than those who\\nalso believe their suffering is naturally bad (PH I\\n25–30).\",\n \"\\nAs a consequence, the Skeptic conception of the end of life is similar\\nin some ways to Epicurean and Stoic beliefs. For Epicureans the end is\\nfreedom from pain and distress; the Stoic identification of virtue and\\nthe good promises freedom from disturbance. While Pyrrho and Sextus\\nhold freedom from disturbance to be the end of life, they differ from\\nthe former over the means by which it is achieved. Both the Epicureans\\nand Stoics, for example, hold that a tranquil life is impossible in\\nthe absence of virtue. By contrast, Sextus does not have a lot to say\\nin a positive vein about virtue, although he does recommend following\\ntraditional laws about piety and goodness, and he indicates that the\\nSkeptic may live virtuously (PH I 17). Rather, it is for the\\nSkeptics an epistemic attitude embodied in a distinctive practice, not\\nvirtue, that leads to the desired state. This alone would seem to be\\nenough to disqualify Pyrrhonism as a form of eudaimonism.\",\n \"\\nSextus does however offer his skeptical practice as a corrective to\\nthe dogmatists’ misleading path to eudaimonia: it is\\nnot possible to be happy while supposing things are good or bad by\\nnature (M XI 130, 144). It is the person who suspends\\njudgment that enjoys the most complete happiness (M XI 160,\\n140). It is important to observe that Sextus proposes his skeptical\\npractice as an alternative to dogmatic theories. For\\nthe Skeptic makes no commitments, or even assertions, regarding the\\nsupposedly objective conditions that are supposed by other\\nphilosophers to underlie our natural, human telos.\\nAccordingly, some have objected that the kind of tranquility and\\nhappiness that the Skeptic enjoys could just as well be produced\\nthrough pharmacology or, we might add, Experience Machines. More\\ngenerally speaking, the objection is that skeptical tranquility and\\nhappiness comes at a cost we should not be willing to pay. By refusing\\nto accept the world is ever as it appears, the Skeptic becomes a\\ndetached, passive spectator, undisturbed by any of the thoughts that\\npass through his mind. Such detachment might seem to threaten his\\nability to care about other people as he observes all that happens to\\nthem with the same tranquil indifference. Also, he would seem to be at\\nbest a moral conformist, unable or at least unwilling to engage in any\\nmoral deliberation, either hypothetically or as a means to directly\\naddress a pressing moral issue.\",\n \"\\nSextus provides an example of the latter situation when he imagines\\nthe Skeptic being compelled by a tyrant to commit some unspeakable\\ndeed, or be tortured (M XI 164–66). Critics propose\\nthat the Skeptic’s choice will necessarily reveal his evaluative\\nconvictions, and thus his inconsistency in claiming to have no such\\nconvictions. But Sextus replies that he will simply opt for one or the\\nother in accordance with his family’s laws and customs. In other\\nwords, he will rely on whatever moral sentiments and dispositions he\\nhappens to have. These cognitive states will be neither the product of\\nany rational consideration nor will they inform any premises for moral\\nreasoning or philosophical deliberation. Like Sartre’s\\nexistentialism, Sextus’ skepticism offers a way to respond to\\nmoral dilemmas without supposing there is a correct, or even\\nobjectively better, choice.\",\n \"\\nWe should note that it is not entirely fair to ask whether the\\nPyrrhonist’s moral life is one that we, non-Skeptics, would deem\\ngood or praise-worthy. For, as Sextus would say, we are part of the\\ndispute regarding what kind of life is morally good and praise-worthy.\\nTo claim that nothing really matters to the Skeptic, for example,\\npresupposes some account of the mental state of caring. In the end,\\nthe question of how or whether a Skeptic might be morally good is\\nequivalent to asking what role belief, or knowledge, plays in the\\nmoral goodness of people and their actions. If we suppose that one\\nmust, at a minimum, have adequately justified evaluative beliefs\\ninforming her actions in order for those actions, and the underlying\\ncharacter, to count as morally good, then the Skeptic will be immoral,\\nor at least amoral. On the other hand, if the Skeptic manages to\\nundermine our confidence in that supposition, we will have to suspend\\njudgment regarding whether the Skeptic, or anyone else for that\\nmatter, is in fact capable of performing morally good and\\npraise-worthy action, or whether their reasoned account of\\neudaimonia is true.\",\n \"\\nThe question we should ask here is whether and in what respect those\\nwith strong, rational convictions will be better off than the Skeptic\\nwhen confronting moral dilemmas, or even everyday moral choices. If,\\nlike the Skeptic, one suspects that the dogmatists’ have no\\nknowledge, let alone adequately justified beliefs to guide them, then\\nit seems that they are no better or worse off than those who simply\\nconform to moral customs and norms.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"9. Pyrrhonian Skeptics\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Arnim, Joachim von (ed.), Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta,\nVolumes I–IV, Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1903–24.","Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1 and 2,\nJonathan Barnes (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press,\n1984.","Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum [‘On\nEnds’] (Loeb Classical Library), H. Rackham (trans.), Cambridge:\nHarvard University Press, 1914. (Latin text with old-fashioned and not\nalways philosophically precise English translation.)","–––, On Moral Ends, R. Woolf (trans.),\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.","Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Volumes\nI and II (Loeb Classical Library), R.D. Hicks (trans.), Cambridge:\nHarvard University Press, 1991.","Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, Principal\nDoctrines, and Vatican Sayings, in B. Inwood and L.\nGerson (eds.), Hellenistic Philosophy: An Introduction, 2nd\nedition, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1997, pp.\n28–40.","Long, A.A., and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic\nPhilosophers, Volumes 1 and 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress, 1987.","Plato, Plato’s Complete Works, John M. Cooper\n(ed.), Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1997.","Plutarch, Moralia, Volume VI (Loeb Classical Library),\nW.C. Helmbold (trans.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press,\n1993.","Sextus Empiricus: Against the Ethicists (Adversos Mathematicos\nXI), R. Bett (ed. and trans. with commentary) Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press, 1997.","Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Loeb Classical\nLibrary), R.G. Bury (trans.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press,\n1933. (Greek text together with inadequate English translation.)","Sextus Empiricus, Sextus Empiricus: Outlines of\nScepticism J. Annas, and J. Barnes (eds. and trans.), Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press, 1994.","Annas, Julia, 1993, The Morality of Happiness, New York:\nOxford University Press.","–––, 1999, Platonic Ethics, Old and\nNew, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.","Bett, Richard, 2010, “Scepticism and Ethics,” in R.\nBett (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism,\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.","–––, 2011, “How Ethical Can an Ancient\nSkeptic Be?” in D. Machua (ed.), Pyrrhonism in Ancient,\nModern, and Contemporary Philosophy, Dordecht: Springer","Bobonich, Christopher (ed.), 2017, The Cambridge Companion to\nAncient Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Brennan, Tad, 2003, “Stoic Moral Psychology,” in\nThe Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, Brad Inwood (ed.),\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.","–––, 2005, The Stoic Life, Oxford:\nClarendon Press.","Cooper, John M., 1999, Reason and Emotion, Princeton:\nPrinceton University Press.","–––, 2012, Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of\nLife in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus, Princeton:\nPrinceton University Press.","Gomez-Lobo, Alfonso, 1994, The Foundations of Socratic\nEthics, Indianapolis: Hackett.","Gosling, J.C.B., and C.C.W. Taylor, 1982, The Greeks on\nPleasure, Oxford: Clarendon Press.","Inwood, Brad, 1985, Ethics and Human Action in Early\nStoicism Oxford: Clarendon Press.","Irwin, Terence, 1995, Plato’s Ethics, New York:\nOxford University Press.","Kamtekar, Rachana, 2017, Plato’s Moral Psychology,\nOxford: Oxford University Press.","Lorenz, Hendrik, 2006, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in\nPlato and Aristotle, New York: Oxford University Press.","Mitsis, Phillip, 1988, Epicurus’ Ethical Theory,\nIthaca: Cornell University Press.","Moss, Jessica, 2006, “Pleasure and Illusion in Plato,”\nPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research, 72(3):\n503–535.","Nikolsky, Boris, 2001, “Epicurus on Pleasure,”\nPhronesis vol.46.","Nussbaum, Martha C., 1994, The Therapy of Desire,\nPrinceton: Princeton University Press.","Reeve, C.D.C., 1988, Philosopher-Kings, Princeton:\nPrinceton University Press.","Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg (ed.), 1980, Essays on\nAristotle’s Ethics, Berkeley: University of California\nPress.","Rudebusch, George, 1999, Socrates, Pleasure, and Value,\nNew York: Oxford University Press.","Schofield, Malcolm, 2003, “Stoic Ethics,” in The\nCambridge Companion to the Stoics, Brad Inwood (ed.), Ithaca:\nCornell Univeristy Press.","Segvic, Heda, 2000, “No One Errs Willingly: The Meaning of\nSocratic Intellectualism,” Oxford Studies in Ancient\nPhilosophy, vol. 19: 1–45.","Sellars, John, 2003, The Art of Living: the Stoics on the\nNature and Function of Philosophy, Burlington, VT: Ashgate.","Sorabji, Richard, 2000, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic\nAgitation to Christian Temptation, Oxford: Oxford University\nPress.","Vlastos, Gregory, 1991, Socrates, Ironist and Moral\nPhilosopher, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.","Wolfsdorf, David, 2013, Pleasure in Ancient Greek\nPhilosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","Woolf, Raphael, 2009, “Pleasure and Desire,” in\nThe Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism, James Warren (ed.),\npp. 158–178, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press."],"string":"[\n \"Arnim, Joachim von (ed.), Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta,\\nVolumes I–IV, Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1903–24.\",\n \"Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1 and 2,\\nJonathan Barnes (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press,\\n1984.\",\n \"Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum [‘On\\nEnds’] (Loeb Classical Library), H. Rackham (trans.), Cambridge:\\nHarvard University Press, 1914. (Latin text with old-fashioned and not\\nalways philosophically precise English translation.)\",\n \"–––, On Moral Ends, R. Woolf (trans.),\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.\",\n \"Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Volumes\\nI and II (Loeb Classical Library), R.D. Hicks (trans.), Cambridge:\\nHarvard University Press, 1991.\",\n \"Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, Principal\\nDoctrines, and Vatican Sayings, in B. Inwood and L.\\nGerson (eds.), Hellenistic Philosophy: An Introduction, 2nd\\nedition, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1997, pp.\\n28–40.\",\n \"Long, A.A., and D.N. Sedley, The Hellenistic\\nPhilosophers, Volumes 1 and 2, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress, 1987.\",\n \"Plato, Plato’s Complete Works, John M. Cooper\\n(ed.), Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1997.\",\n \"Plutarch, Moralia, Volume VI (Loeb Classical Library),\\nW.C. Helmbold (trans.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press,\\n1993.\",\n \"Sextus Empiricus: Against the Ethicists (Adversos Mathematicos\\nXI), R. Bett (ed. and trans. with commentary) Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press, 1997.\",\n \"Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Loeb Classical\\nLibrary), R.G. Bury (trans.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press,\\n1933. (Greek text together with inadequate English translation.)\",\n \"Sextus Empiricus, Sextus Empiricus: Outlines of\\nScepticism J. Annas, and J. Barnes (eds. and trans.), Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press, 1994.\",\n \"Annas, Julia, 1993, The Morality of Happiness, New York:\\nOxford University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1999, Platonic Ethics, Old and\\nNew, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.\",\n \"Bett, Richard, 2010, “Scepticism and Ethics,” in R.\\nBett (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Scepticism,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2011, “How Ethical Can an Ancient\\nSkeptic Be?” in D. Machua (ed.), Pyrrhonism in Ancient,\\nModern, and Contemporary Philosophy, Dordecht: Springer\",\n \"Bobonich, Christopher (ed.), 2017, The Cambridge Companion to\\nAncient Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Brennan, Tad, 2003, “Stoic Moral Psychology,” in\\nThe Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, Brad Inwood (ed.),\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2005, The Stoic Life, Oxford:\\nClarendon Press.\",\n \"Cooper, John M., 1999, Reason and Emotion, Princeton:\\nPrinceton University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2012, Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of\\nLife in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus, Princeton:\\nPrinceton University Press.\",\n \"Gomez-Lobo, Alfonso, 1994, The Foundations of Socratic\\nEthics, Indianapolis: Hackett.\",\n \"Gosling, J.C.B., and C.C.W. Taylor, 1982, The Greeks on\\nPleasure, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"Inwood, Brad, 1985, Ethics and Human Action in Early\\nStoicism Oxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"Irwin, Terence, 1995, Plato’s Ethics, New York:\\nOxford University Press.\",\n \"Kamtekar, Rachana, 2017, Plato’s Moral Psychology,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Lorenz, Hendrik, 2006, The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in\\nPlato and Aristotle, New York: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Mitsis, Phillip, 1988, Epicurus’ Ethical Theory,\\nIthaca: Cornell University Press.\",\n \"Moss, Jessica, 2006, “Pleasure and Illusion in Plato,”\\nPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research, 72(3):\\n503–535.\",\n \"Nikolsky, Boris, 2001, “Epicurus on Pleasure,”\\nPhronesis vol.46.\",\n \"Nussbaum, Martha C., 1994, The Therapy of Desire,\\nPrinceton: Princeton University Press.\",\n \"Reeve, C.D.C., 1988, Philosopher-Kings, Princeton:\\nPrinceton University Press.\",\n \"Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg (ed.), 1980, Essays on\\nAristotle’s Ethics, Berkeley: University of California\\nPress.\",\n \"Rudebusch, George, 1999, Socrates, Pleasure, and Value,\\nNew York: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Schofield, Malcolm, 2003, “Stoic Ethics,” in The\\nCambridge Companion to the Stoics, Brad Inwood (ed.), Ithaca:\\nCornell Univeristy Press.\",\n \"Segvic, Heda, 2000, “No One Errs Willingly: The Meaning of\\nSocratic Intellectualism,” Oxford Studies in Ancient\\nPhilosophy, vol. 19: 1–45.\",\n \"Sellars, John, 2003, The Art of Living: the Stoics on the\\nNature and Function of Philosophy, Burlington, VT: Ashgate.\",\n \"Sorabji, Richard, 2000, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic\\nAgitation to Christian Temptation, Oxford: Oxford University\\nPress.\",\n \"Vlastos, Gregory, 1991, Socrates, Ironist and Moral\\nPhilosopher, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.\",\n \"Wolfsdorf, David, 2013, Pleasure in Ancient Greek\\nPhilosophy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Woolf, Raphael, 2009, “Pleasure and Desire,” in\\nThe Cambridge Companion to Epicureanism, James Warren (ed.),\\npp. 158–178, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../aristotle-ethics/","text":"Aristotle, General Topics: ethics"},{"href":"../plato/","text":"Plato"},{"href":"../pyrrho/","text":"Pyrrho"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotle-ethics/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotle, General Topics: ethics\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../plato/\",\n \"text\": \"Plato\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../pyrrho/\",\n \"text\": \"Pyrrho\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":75,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"argument"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Argument and Argumentation"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Fri Jul 16, 2021"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nArgument is a central concept for philosophy. Philosophers rely\nheavily on arguments to justify claims, and these practices have been\nmotivating reflections on what arguments and argumentation are for\nmillennia. Moreover, argumentative practices are also pervasive \nelsewhere; they permeate scientific inquiry, legal procedures,\neducation, and political institutions. The study of argumentation is\nan inter-disciplinary field of inquiry, involving philosophers,\nlanguage theorists, legal scholars, cognitive scientists, computer\nscientists, and political scientists, among many others. This entry\nprovides an overview of the literature on argumentation drawing\nprimarily on philosophical sources, but also engaging extensively with\nrelevant sources from other disciplines."],"string":"[\n \"\\nArgument is a central concept for philosophy. Philosophers rely\\nheavily on arguments to justify claims, and these practices have been\\nmotivating reflections on what arguments and argumentation are for\\nmillennia. Moreover, argumentative practices are also pervasive \\nelsewhere; they permeate scientific inquiry, legal procedures,\\neducation, and political institutions. The study of argumentation is\\nan inter-disciplinary field of inquiry, involving philosophers,\\nlanguage theorists, legal scholars, cognitive scientists, computer\\nscientists, and political scientists, among many others. This entry\\nprovides an overview of the literature on argumentation drawing\\nprimarily on philosophical sources, but also engaging extensively with\\nrelevant sources from other disciplines.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Terminological Clarifications","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. Types of Arguments","sub_toc":["2.1 Deduction","2.2 Induction","2.3 Abduction","2.4 Analogy","2.5 Fallacies"]},{"content_title":"3. Types of Argumentation","sub_toc":["3.1 Adversarial and cooperative argumentation","3.2 Argumentation as an epistemic practice","3.3 Consensus-oriented argumentation","3.4 Argumentation and conflict management","3.5 Conclusion"]},{"content_title":"4. Argumentation Across Fields of Inquiry and Social Practices","sub_toc":["4.1 Argumentation theory","4.2 Artificial intelligence and computer science","4.3 Cognitive science and psychology","4.4 Language and communication","4.5 Argumentation in specific social practices"]},{"content_title":"5. Further Topics","sub_toc":["5.1 Argumentative injustice and virtuous argumentation","5.2 Emotions and argumentation","5.3 Cross-cultural perspectives on argumentation","5.4 Argumentation and the Internet"]},{"content_title":"6. Conclusion","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":["References for the Main Text","References for the Historical Supplement"]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Terminological Clarifications\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Types of Arguments\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"2.1 Deduction\",\n \"2.2 Induction\",\n \"2.3 Abduction\",\n \"2.4 Analogy\",\n \"2.5 Fallacies\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Types of Argumentation\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"3.1 Adversarial and cooperative argumentation\",\n \"3.2 Argumentation as an epistemic practice\",\n \"3.3 Consensus-oriented argumentation\",\n \"3.4 Argumentation and conflict management\",\n \"3.5 Conclusion\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Argumentation Across Fields of Inquiry and Social Practices\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"4.1 Argumentation theory\",\n \"4.2 Artificial intelligence and computer science\",\n \"4.3 Cognitive science and psychology\",\n \"4.4 Language and communication\",\n \"4.5 Argumentation in specific social practices\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Further Topics\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"5.1 Argumentative injustice and virtuous argumentation\",\n \"5.2 Emotions and argumentation\",\n \"5.3 Cross-cultural perspectives on argumentation\",\n \"5.4 Argumentation and the Internet\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. Conclusion\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"References for the Main Text\",\n \"References for the Historical Supplement\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\nAn argument can be defined as a complex symbolic structure where some\nparts, known as the premises, offer support to another part, the\nconclusion. Alternatively, an argument can be viewed as a complex\nspeech act consisting of one or more acts of premising (which assert\npropositions in favor of the conclusion), an act of concluding, and a\nstated or implicit marker (“hence”,\n“therefore”) that indicates that the conclusion follows\nfrom the premises (Hitchcock\n 2007).[1]\n The relation of support between premises and conclusion can be cashed\nout in different ways: the premises may guarantee the truth of the\nconclusion, or make its truth more probable; the premises may imply\nthe conclusion; the premises may make the conclusion more acceptable\n(or assertible).","\nFor theoretical purposes, arguments may be considered as freestanding\nentities, abstracted from their contexts of use in actual human\nactivities. But depending on one’s explanatory goals, there is\nalso much to be gained from considering arguments as they in fact\noccur in human communicative practices. The term generally used for\ninstances of exchange of arguments is argumentation. In what\nfollows, the convention of using “argument” to refer to\nstructures of premises and conclusion, and “argumentation”\nto refer to human practices and activities where arguments occur as\ncommunicative actions will be adopted.","\nArgumentation can be defined as the communicative activity of\nproducing and exchanging reasons in order to support claims or\ndefend/challenge positions, especially in situations of doubt or\ndisagreement (Lewiński & Mohammed 2016). It is arguably best\nconceived as a kind of dialogue, even if one can also\n“argue” with oneself, in long speeches or in writing (in\narticles or books) for an intended but silent audience, or in groups\nrather than in dyads (Lewiński & Aakhus 2014). But\nargumentation is a special kind of dialogue: indeed, most of\nthe dialogues we engage in are not instances of argumentation, for\nexample when asking someone if they know what time it is, or when\nsomeone shares details about their vacation. Argumentation only occurs\nwhen, upon making a claim, someone receives a request for further\nsupport for the claim in the form of reasons, or estimates herself\nthat further justification is required (Jackson & Jacobs 1980;\nJackson, 2019). In such cases, dialogues of “giving and asking\nfor reasons” ensue (Brandom, 1994; Bermejo Luque 2011). Since\nmost of what we know we learn from others, argumentation seems to be\nan important mechanism to filter the information we receive, instead\nof accepting what others tell us uncritically (Sperber,\nClément, et al. 2010).","\nThe study of arguments and argumentation is also closely connected to\nthe study of reasoning, understood as the process of reaching\nconclusions on the basis of careful, reflective consideration of the\navailable information, i.e., by an examination of reasons.\nAccording to a widespread view, reasoning and argumentation are\nrelated (as both concern reasons) but fundamentally different\nphenomena: reasoning would belong to the mental realm of\nthinking—an individual inferring new information from the\navailable information by means of careful consideration of\nreasons—whereas argumentation would belong to the public realm\nof the exchange of reasons, expressed in language or other\nsymbolic media and intended for an audience. However, a number of\nauthors have argued for a different view, namely that reasoning and\nargumentation are in fact two sides of the same coin, and that what is\nknown as reasoning is by and large the internalization of practices of\nargumentation (MacKenzie 1989; Mercier & Sperber 2017; Mercier\n2018). For the purposes of this entry, we can assume a close\nconnection between reasoning and argumentation so that relevant\nresearch on reasoning can be suitably included in the discussions to\ncome."],"section_title":"1. Terminological Clarifications","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nArguments come in many kinds. In some of them, the truth of the\npremises is supposed to guarantee the truth of the conclusion, and\nthese are known as deductive arguments. In others, the truth\nof the premises should make the truth of the conclusion more likely\nwhile not ensuring complete certainty; two well-known classes of such\narguments are inductive and abductive arguments (a\ndistinction introduced by Peirce, see entry on\n C.S. Peirce).\n Unlike deduction, induction and abduction are thought to be\nampliative: the conclusion goes beyond what is (logically) contained\nin the premises. Moreover, a type of argument that features\nprominently across different philosophical traditions, and yet does\nnot fit neatly into any of the categories so far discussed, are\nanalogical arguments. In this section, these four kinds of\narguments are presented. The section closes with a discussion of\nfallacious arguments, that is, arguments that seem legitimate and\n“good”, but in fact are\n not.[2]"],"section_title":"2. Types of Arguments","subsections":[{"content":["\nValid deductive arguments are those where the truth of the premises\nnecessitates the truth of the conclusion: the conclusion cannot\nbut be true if the premises are true. Arguments having this\nproperty are said to be deductively valid. A valid argument\nwhose premises are also true is said to be sound. Examples of\nvalid deductive arguments are the familiar syllogisms, such as:","\n\n\n\nAll humans are living beings.\n\nAll living beings are mortal.\n\nTherefore, all humans are mortal.\n\n","\nIn a deductively valid argument, the conclusion will be true in\nall situations where the premises are true, with no\nexceptions. A slightly more technical gloss of this idea goes as\nfollows: in all possible worlds where the premises hold, the\nconclusion will also hold. This means that, if I know the premises of\na deductively valid argument to be true of a given situation, then I\ncan conclude with absolute certainty that the conclusion is also true\nof that situation. An important property typically associated with\ndeductive arguments (but with exceptions, such as in relevant logic),\nand which differentiates them from inductive and abductive arguments,\nis the property of monotonicity: if premises A and\nB deductively imply conclusion C, then the addition of\nany arbitrary premise D will not invalidate the argument. In\nother words, if the argument “A and B; therefore\nC” is deductively valid, then the argument\n“A, B and D; therefore C” is\nequally deductively valid.","\nDeductive arguments are the objects of study of familiar logical\nsystems such as (classical) propositional and predicate logic, as well\nas of subclassical systems such as intuitionistic and relevant logics\n(although in relevant logic the property of monotonicity does not\nhold, as it may lead to violations of criteria of relevance between\npremises and conclusion—see entry on\n relevance logic).\n In each of these systems, the relation of logical consequence in\nquestion satisfies the property of necessary truth-preservation (see\nentry on\n logical consequence).\n This is not surprising, as these systems were originally designed to\ncapture arguments of a very specific kind, namely\nmathematical arguments (proofs), in the pioneering work of\nFrege, Russell, Hilbert, Gentzen, and others. Following a paradigm\nestablished in ancient Greek mathematics and famously captured in\nEuclid’s Elements, argumentative steps in mathematical\nproofs (in this tradition at least) must have the property of\nnecessary truth preservation (Netz 1999). This paradigm remained\ninfluential for millennia, and still codifies what can be described as\nthe “classical” conception of mathematical proof (Dutilh\nNovaes 2020a), even if practices of proof are ultimately also quite\ndiverse. (In fact, there is much more to argumentation in mathematics\nthan just deductive argumentation [Aberdein & Dove 2013].)","\nHowever, a number of philosophers have argued that deductive validity\nand necessary truth preservation in fact come apart. Some have reached\nthis conclusion motivated by the familiar logical paradoxes such as\nthe Liar or Curry’s paradox (Beall 2009; Field 2008; see entries\non the\n Liar paradox\n and on\n Curry’s paradox).\n Others have defended the idea that there are such things as\ncontingent logical truths (Kaplan 1989; Nelson & Zalta\n2012), which thus challenge the idea of necessary truth preservation.\nIt has also been suggested that what is preserved in the transition\nfrom premises to conclusions in deductive arguments is in fact\nwarrant or assertibility rather than truth (Restall 2004).\nYet others, such as proponents of preservationist approaches to\nparaconsistent logic, posit that what is preserved by the deductive\nconsequence relation is the coherence, or incoherence, of a set of\npremises (Schotch, Brown, & Jennings 2009; see entry on\n paraconsistent logic).\n Nevertheless, it is fair to say that the view that deductive validity\nis to be understood primarily in terms of necessary truth preservation\nis still the received view.","\nRelatedly, there are a number of pressing philosophical issues\npertaining to the justification of deduction, such as the exact nature\nof the necessity involved in deduction (metaphysical, logical,\nlinguistic, epistemic; Shapiro 2005), and the possibility of offering\na non-circular foundation for deduction (Dummett 1978). Furthermore,\nit is often remarked that the fact that a deductive argument is not\nampliative may entail that it cannot be informative, which in turn\nwould mean that its usefulness is quite limited; this problem has been\ndescribed as “the scandal of deduction” (Sequoiah-Grayson\n2008).","\nBe that as it may, deductive arguments have occupied a special place\nin philosophy and the sciences, ever since Aristotle presented the\nfirst fully-fledged theory of deductive argumentation and reasoning in\nthe Prior Analytics (and the corresponding theory of\nscientific demonstration in the Posterior Analytics; see\n Historical Supplement).\n The fascination for deductive arguments is understandable, given\ntheir allure of certainty and indubitability. The more\ngeometrico (a phrase introduced by Spinoza to describe the\nargumentative structure of his Ethics as following “a\ngeometrical style”—see entry on\n Spinoza)\n has been influential in many fields other than mathematics. However,\nthe focus on deductive arguments at the expense of other types of\narguments has arguably skewed investigations on argument and\nargumentation too much in one specific direction (see (Bermejo-Luque\n2020) for a critique of deductivism in the study of\nargumentation).","\nIn recent decades, the view that everyday reasoning and argumentation\nby and large do not follow the canons of deductive argumentation has\nbeen gaining traction. In psychology of reasoning, Oaksford and Chater\nwere the first to argue already in the 1980s that human reasoning\n“in the wild” is essentially probabilistic, following the\nbasic canons of Bayesian probabilities (Oaksford & Chater 2018;\nElqayam 2018; see\n section 5.3\n below). Computer scientists and artificial intelligence researchers\nhave also developed a strong interest in non-monotonic reasoning and\nargumentation (Reiter 1980), recognizing that, outside specific\nscientific contexts, human reasoning tends to be deeply\ndefeasible (Pollock 1987; see entries on\n non-monotonic logic\n and\n defeasible reasoning).\n Thus seen, deductive argumentation might be considered as the\nexception rather than the rule in human argumentative practices taken\nas a whole (Dutilh Novaes 2020a). But there are others, especially\nphilosophers, who still maintain that the use of deductive reasoning\nand argumentation is widespread and extends beyond niches of\nspecialists (Shapiro 2014; Williamson 2018)."],"subsection_title":"2.1 Deduction"},{"content":["\nInductive arguments are arguments where observations about past\ninstances and regularities lead to conclusions about future instances\nand general principles. For example, the observation that the sun has\nrisen in the east every single day until now leads to the conclusion\nthat it will rise in the east tomorrow, and to the general principle\n“the sun always rises in the east”. Generally speaking,\ninductive arguments are based on statistical frequencies, which then\nlead to generalizations beyond the sample of cases initially under\nconsideration: from the observed to the unobserved. In a good, i.e.,\ncogent, inductive argument, the truth of the premises\nprovides some degree of support for the truth of the conclusion. In\ncontrast with a deductively valid argument, in an inductive argument\nthe degree of support will never be maximal, as there is always the\npossibility of the conclusion being false given the truth of the\npremises. A gloss in terms of possible worlds might be that, while in\na deductively valid argument the conclusion will hold in all possible\nworlds where the premises hold, in a good inductive argument the\nconclusion will hold in a significant proportion of the possible\nworlds where the premises hold. The proportion of such worlds may give\na measure of the strength of support of the premises for the\nconclusion (see entry on\n inductive logic).","\nInductive arguments have been recognized and used in science and\nelsewhere for millennia. The concept of induction (epagoge in\nGreek) was understood by Aristotle as a progression from particulars\nto a universal, and figured prominently both in his conception of the\nscientific method and in dialectical practices (see entry on\n Aristotle’s logic, section 3.1).\n However, a deductivist conception of the scientific method remained\noverall more influential in Aristotelian traditions, inspired by the\ntheory of scientific demonstration of the Posterior\nAnalytics. It is only with the so-called “scientific\nrevolution” of the early modern period that experiments and\nobservation of individual cases became one of the pillars of\nscientific methodology, a transition that is strongly associated with\nthe figure of Francis Bacon (1561–1626; see entry on\n Francis Bacon).","\nInductive inferences/arguments are ubiquitous both in science and in\neveryday life, and for the most part quite reliable. The functioning\nof the world around us seems to display a fair amount of statistical\nregularity, and this is referred to as the “Uniformity\nPrinciple” in the literature on the problem of induction (to be\ndiscussed shortly). Moreover, it has been argued that generalizing\nfrom previously observed frequencies is the most basic principle of\nhuman cognition (Clark 2016).","\nHowever, it has long been recognized that inductive\ninferences/arguments are not unproblematic. Hume famously offered the\nfirst influential formulation of what became known as “the\nproblem of induction” in his Treatise of Human Nature\n(see entries on\n David Hume\n and on\n the problem of induction;\n Howson 2000). Hume raises the question of what grounds the\ncorrectness of inductive inferences/arguments, and posits that there\nmust be an argument establishing the validity of the Uniformity\nPrinciple for inductive inferences to be truly justified. He goes on\nto argue that this argument cannot be deductive, as it is not\ninconceivable that the course of nature may change. But it cannot be\nprobable either, as probable arguments already presuppose the validity\nof the Uniformity Principle; circularity would ensue. Since these are\nthe only two options, he concludes that the Uniformity Principle\ncannot be established by rational argument, and hence that induction\ncannot be justified.","\nA more recent influential critique of inductive arguments is the one\noffered in (Harman 1965). Harman argues that either enumerative\ninduction is not always warranted, or it is always warranted but\nconstitutes an uninteresting special case of the more general category\nof inference to the best explanation (see next section). The upshot is\nthat, for Harman, induction should not be considered a warranted form\nof inference in its own right.","\nGiven the centrality of induction for scientific practice, there have\nbeen numerous attempts to respond to the critics of induction, with\nvarious degrees of success. Among those, an influential recent\nresponse to the problem of induction is Norton’s material theory\nof induction (Norton 2003). But the problem has not prevented\nscientists and laypeople alike from continuing to use induction\nwidely. More recently, the use of statistical frequencies for social\ncategories to draw conclusions about specific individuals has become a\nmatter of contention, both at the individual level (see entry on\n implicit bias)\n and at the institutional level (e.g., the use of predictive\nalgorithms for law enforcement [Jorgensen Bolinger 2021]). These\ndebates can be seen as reoccurrences of Hume’s problem of\ninduction, now in the domain of social rather than of natural\nphenomena."],"subsection_title":"2.2 Induction"},{"content":["\nAn abductive argument is one where, from the observation of a few\nrelevant facts, a conclusion is drawn as to what could possibly\nexplain the occurrence of these facts (see entry on\n abduction).\n Abduction is widely thought to be ubiquitous both in science and in\neveryday life, as well as in other specific domains such as the law,\nmedical diagnosis, and explainable artificial intelligence (Josephson\n& Josephson 1994). Indeed, a good example of abduction is the\nclosing argument by a prosecutor in a court of law who, after\nsummarizing the available evidence, concludes that the most plausible\nexplanation for it is that the defendant must have committed the crime\nthey are accused of.","\nLike induction, and unlike deduction, abduction is not necessarily\ntruth-preserving: in the example above, it is still possible that the\ndefendant is not guilty after all, and that some other, unexpected\nphenomena caused the evidence to emerge. But abduction is\nsignificantly different from induction in that it does not only\nconcern the generalization of prior observation for prediction (though\nit may also involve statistical data): rather, abduction is often\nbackward-looking in that it seeks to explain something that has\nalready happened. The key notion is that of bringing together\napparently independent phenomena or events as explanatorily and/or\ncausally connected to each other, something that is absent from a\npurely inductive argument that only appeals to observed frequencies.\nCognitively, abduction taps into the well-known human tendency to seek\n(causal) explanations for phenomena (Keil 2006).","\nAs noted, deduction and induction have been recognized as important\nclasses of arguments for millennia; the concept of abduction is by\ncomparison a latecomer. It is important to notice though that\nexplanatory arguments as such are not latecomers; indeed,\nAristotle’s very conception of scientific demonstration is based\non the concept of explaining causes (see entry on\n Aristotle).\n What is recent is the conceptualization of abduction as a special\nclass of arguments, and the term itself. The term was introduced by\nPeirce as a third class of inferences distinct from deduction and\ninduction: for Peirce, abduction is understood as the process of\nforming explanatory hypotheses, thus leading to new ideas and concepts\n(whereas for him deduction and induction could not lead to new ideas\nor theories; see the entry on\n Peirce). Thus seen,\nabduction pertains to contexts of discovery, in which case it\nis not clear that it corresponds to instances of arguments, properly\nspeaking. In its modern meaning, however, abduction pertains to\ncontexts of justification, and thus to speak of abductive\narguments becomes appropriate. An abductive argument is now typically\nunderstood as an inference to the best explanation (Lipton\n1971 [2003]), although some authors contend that there are good\nreasons to distinguish the two concepts (Campos 2011).","\nWhile the main ideas behind abduction may seem simple enough, cashing\nout more precisely how exactly abduction works is a complex matter\n(see entry on\n abduction).\n Moreover, it is not clear that abductive arguments are always or even\ngenerally reliable and cogent. Humans seem to have a tendency to\novershoot in their quest for causal explanations, and often look for\nsimplicity where there is none to be found (Lombrozo 2007; but see\nSober 2015 on the significance of parsimony in scientific reasoning).\nThere are also a number of philosophical worries pertaining to the\njustification of abduction, especially in scientific contexts; one\ninfluential critique of abduction/inference to the best explanation is\nthe one articulated by van Fraassen (Fraassen 1989). A frequent\nconcern pertains to the connection between explanatory superiority and\ntruth: are we entitled to conclude that the conclusion of an abductive\nargument is true solely on the basis of it being a good (or even the\nbest) explanation for the phenomena in question? It seems that no\namount of philosophical a priori theorizing will provide justification\nfor the leap from explanatory superiority to truth. Instead, defenders\nof abduction tend to offer empirical arguments showing that abduction\ntends to be a reliable rule of inference. In this sense, abduction and\ninduction are comparable: they are widely used, grounded in very basic\nhuman cognitive tendencies, but they give rise to a number of\ndifficult philosophical problems."],"subsection_title":"2.3 Abduction"},{"content":["\nArguments by analogy are based on the idea that, if two things are\nsimilar, what is true of one of them is likely to be true of the other\nas well (see entry on\n analogy and analogical reasoning).\n Analogical arguments are widely used across different domains of\nhuman activity, for example in legal contexts (see entry on\n precedent and analogy in legal reasoning).\n As an example, take an argument for the wrongness of farming\nnon-human animals for food consumption: if an alien species farmed\nhumans for food, that would be wrong; so, by analogy, it is wrong for\nus humans to farm non-human animals for food. The general idea is\ncaptured in the following schema (adapted from the entry on\n analogy and analogical reasoning;\n S is the source domain and T the target domain of the\nanalogy):","\nThe first premise establishes the analogy between two situations,\nobjects, phenomena etc. The second premise states that the source\ndomain has a given property. The conclusion is then that the target\ndomain also has this property, or a suitable counterpart thereof.\nWhile informative, this schema does not differentiate between good and\nbad analogical arguments, and so does not offer much by way of\nexplaining what grounds (good) analogical arguments. Indeed,\ncontentious cases usually pertain to premise 1, and in particular to\nwhether S and T are sufficiently similar in a way that\nis relevant for having or not having feature Q.","\nAnalogical arguments are widely present in all known philosophical\ntraditions, including three major ancient traditions: Greek, Chinese,\nand Indian (see\n Historical Supplement).\n Analogies abound in ancient Greek philosophical texts, for example in\nPlato’s dialogues. In the Gorgias, for instance, the\nknack of rhetoric is compared to pastry-baking—seductive but\nultimately unhealthy—whereas philosophy would correspond to\nmedicine—potentially painful and unpleasant but good for the\nsoul/body (Irani 2017). Aristotle discussed analogy extensively in the\nPrior Analytics and in the Topics (see\n section 3.2 of the entry on analogy and analogical reasoning).\n In ancient Chinese philosophy, analogy occupies a very prominent\nposition; indeed, it is perhaps the main form of argumentation for\nChinese thinkers. Mohist thinkers were particularly interested in\nanalogical arguments (see entries on\n logic and language in early Chinese philosophy,\n Mohism and the\n Mohist canons).\n In the Latin medieval tradition too analogy received sustained\nattention, in particular in the domains of logic, theology and\nmetaphysics (see entry on\n medieval theories of analogy).","\nAnalogical arguments continue to occupy a central position in\nphilosophical discussions, and a number of the most prominent\nphilosophical arguments of the last decades are analogical arguments,\ne.g., Jarvis Thomson’s violinist argument purportedly showing\nthe permissibility of abortion (Thomson 1971), and Searle’s\nChinese Room argument purportedly showing that computers cannot\ndisplay real understanding (see entry on the\n Chinese Room argument).\n (Notice that these two arguments are often described as thought\nexperiments [see entry on\n thought experiments],\n but thought experiments are often based on analogical principles when\nseeking to make a point that transcends the thought experiment as\nsuch.) The Achilles’ heel of analogical arguments can be\nillustrated by these two examples: both arguments have been criticized\non the grounds that the purported similarity between the source and\nthe target domains is not sufficient to extrapolate the property of\nthe source domain (the permissibility of disconnecting from the\nviolinist; the absence of understanding in the Chinese room) to the\ntarget domain (abortion; digital computers and artificial\nintelligence).","\nIn sum, while analogical arguments in general perhaps confer a lesser\ndegree of conviction than the other three kinds of arguments\ndiscussed, they are widely used both in professional circles and in\neveryday life. They have rightly attracted a fair amount of attention\nfrom scholars in different disciplines, and remain an important object\nof study (see entry on\n analogy and analogical reasoning)."],"subsection_title":"2.4 Analogy"},{"content":["\nOne of the most extensively studied types of arguments throughout the\ncenturies are, perhaps surprisingly, arguments that appear legitimate\nbut are not, known as fallacious arguments.\nFrom early on, the investigation of such arguments occupied a\nprominent position in Aristotelian logical traditions, inspired in\nparticular by his book Sophistical Refutations\n(see\n Historical Supplement).\n The thought is that, to argue well, it is not sufficient to be able\nto produce and recognize good arguments; it is equally (or perhaps\neven more) important to be able to recognize bad arguments by others,\nand to avoid producing bad arguments oneself. This is particularly\ntrue of the tricky cases, namely arguments that appear legitimate but\nare not, i.e., fallacies.","\nSome well-know types of fallacies include (see entry on\n fallacies\n for a more extensive discussion):","\nBeyond their (presumed?) usefulness in teaching argumentative skills,\nthe literature on fallacies raises a number of important philosophical\ndiscussions, such as: What determines when an argument is fallacious or rather a\nlegitimate argument? (See\n section 4.3\n below on Bayesian accounts of fallacies) What causes certain arguments to be fallacious? Is the focus on fallacies a useful approach to arguments at all?\n(Massey 1981) Despite the occasional criticism, the concept of fallacies remains\ncentral in the study of arguments and argumentation."],"subsection_title":"2.5 Fallacies"}]},{"main_content":["\nJust as there are different types of arguments, there are different\ntypes of argumentative situations, depending on the communicative\ngoals of the persons involved and background conditions. Argumentation\nmay occur when people are trying to reach consensus in a situation of\ndissent, but it may also occur when scientists discuss their findings\nwith each other (to name but two examples). Specific rules of\nargumentative engagement may vary depending on these different types\nof argumentation.","\nA related point extensively discussed in the recent literature\npertains to the function(s) of\n argumentation.[3]\n What’s the point of arguing? While it is often recognized that\nargumentation may have multiple functions, different authors tend to\nemphasize specific functions for argumentation at the expense of\nothers. This section offers an overview of discussions on types of\nargumentation and its functions, demonstrating that argumentation is a\nmultifaceted phenomenon that has different applications in different\ncircumstances."],"section_title":"3. Types of Argumentation","subsections":[{"content":["\nA question that has received much attention in the literature of the\npast decades pertains to whether the activity of argumentation is\nprimarily adversarial or primarily cooperative. This question in fact\ncorresponds to two sub-questions: the descriptive question of\nwhether instances of argumentation are on the whole primarily\nadversarial or cooperative; and the normative question of\nwhether argumentation should be (primarily) adversarial or\ncooperative. A number of authors have answered “adversarial” to the\ndescriptive question and “cooperative” to the normative\nquestion, thus identifying a discrepancy between practices and\nnormative ideals that must be remedied (or so they claim; Cohen 1995).","\n\nA case in point: recently, a number of far-right Internet personalities\nhave advocated the idea that argumentation can be used to overpower\none’s opponents, as described in the book The Art of the\nArgument: Western Civilization’s Last Stand (2017) by the\nwhite supremacist S. Molyneux. Such aggressive practices reflect a\nvision of argumentation as a kind of competition or battle, where the\ngoal is to “score points” and “beat the\nopponent”. Authors who have criticized (overly) adversarial\npractices of argumentation include (Moulton 1983; Gilbert 1994; Rooney\n2012; Hundleby 2013; Bailin & Battersby 2016). Many (but not all)\nof these authors formulated their criticism specifically from a\nfeminist perspective (see entry on\n feminist perspectives on argumentation).","\nFeminist critiques of adversarial argumentation challenge ideals of\nargumentation as a form of competition, where masculine-coded values\nof aggression and violence prevail (Kidd 2020). For these authors,\nsuch ideals encourage argumentative performances where excessive use\nof forcefulness is on display. Instances of aggressive argumentation\nin turn have a number of problematic consequences: epistemic\nconsequences—the pursuit of truth is not best served by\nadversarial argumentation—as well as moral/ethical/political\nconsequences—these practices exclude a number of people from\nparticipating in argumentative encounters, namely those for whom\ndisplays of aggression do not constitute socially acceptable behavior\n(women and other socially disadvantaged groups in particular). These\nauthors defend alternative conceptions of argumentation as a\ncooperative, nurturing activity (Gilbert 1994; Bailin & Battersby\n2016), which are traditionally feminine-coded values. Crucially, they\nview adversarial conceptions of argumentation as optional,\nmaintaining that the alternatives are equally legitimate and that\ncooperative conceptions should be adopted and cultivated.","\nBy contrast, others have argued that adversariality, when suitably\nunderstood, can be seen as an integral and in fact desirable component\nof argumentation (Govier 1999; Aikin 2011; Casey 2020; but notice that\nthese authors each develop different accounts of adversariality in\nargumentation). Such authors answer “adversarial” both to\nthe descriptive and to the normative questions stated above. One\noverall theme is the need to draw a distinction between (excessive)\naggressiveness and adversariality as such. Govier, for example,\ndistinguishes between ancillary (negative) adversariality and minimal\nadversariality (Govier 1999). The thought is that, while the feminist\ncritique of excessive aggression in argumentation is well taken,\nadversariality conceived and practiced in different ways need not have\nthe detrimental consequences of more extreme versions of belligerent\nargumentation. Moreover, for these authors, adversariality in\nargumentation is simply not optional: it is an intrinsic feature of\nargumentative practices, but these practices also require a background\nof cooperation and agreement regarding, e.g., the accepted rules of\ninference.","\nBut ultimately, the presumed opposition between adversarial and\ncooperative conceptions of argumentation may well be merely apparent.\nIt may be argued for example that actual argumentative encounters\nought to be adversarial or cooperative to different degrees, as\ndifferent types of argumentation are required for different situations\n(Dutilh Novaes forthcoming). Indeed, perhaps we should not look for a\none-fits-all model of how argumentation ought to be conducted across\ndifferent contexts and situation, given the diversity of uses of\nargumentation."],"subsection_title":"3.1 Adversarial and cooperative argumentation"},{"content":["\nWe speak of argumentation as an epistemic practice when we take its\nprimary purpose to be that of improving our beliefs and increasing\nknowledge, or of fostering understanding. To engage in argumentation\ncan be a way to acquire more accurate beliefs: by examining critically\nreasons for and against a given position, we would be able to weed out\nweaker, poorly justified beliefs (likely to be false) and end up with\nstronger, suitably justified beliefs (likely to be true). From this\nperspective, the goal of engaging in argumentation is to\nlearn, i.e., to improve one’s epistemic position (as\nopposed to argumentation “to win” (Fisher & Keil\n2016)). Indeed, argumentation is often said to be\ntruth-conducive (Betz 2013).","\nThe idea that argumentation can be an epistemically beneficial process\nis as old as philosophy itself. In every major historical\nphilosophical tradition, argumentation is viewed as an essential\ncomponent of philosophical reflection precisely because it may be used\nto aim at the truth (indeed this is the core of Plato’s critique\nof the Sophists and their excessive focus on persuasion at the expense\nof truth (Irani 2017; see\n Historical Supplement).\n Recent proponents of an epistemological approach to argumentation\ninclude (Goldman 2004; Lumer 2005; Biro & Siegel 2006). Alvin\nGoldman captures this general idea in the following terms:","\n\n\nNorms of good argumentation are substantially dedicated to the\npromotion of truthful speech and the exposure of falsehood, whether\nintentional or unintentional. […] Norms of good argumentation\nare part of a practice to encourage the exchange of truths through\nsincere, non-negligent, and mutually corrective speech. (Goldman 1994:\n30)\n","\nOf course, it is at least in theory possible to engage in\nargumentation with oneself along these lines, solitarily weighing the\npros and cons of a position. But a number of philosophers, most\nnotably John Stuart Mill, maintain that interpersonal\nargumentative situations, involving people who truly disagree with\neach other, work best to realize the epistemic potential of\nargumentation to improve our beliefs (a point he developed in On\nLiberty (1859; see entry on\n John Stuart Mill).\n When our ideas are challenged by engagement with those who disagree\nwith us, we are forced to consider our own beliefs more thoroughly and\ncritically. The result is that the remaining beliefs, those that have\nsurvived critical challenge, will be better grounded than those we\nheld before such encounters. Dissenters thus force us to stay\nepistemically alert instead of becoming too comfortable with existing,\nentrenched beliefs. On this conception, arguers cooperate with each\nother precisely by being adversarial, i.e., by adopting a critical\nstance towards the positions one disagrees with.","\nThe view that argumentation aims at epistemic improvement is in many\nsenses appealing, but it is doubtful that it reflects the actual\noutcomes of argumentation in many real-life situations. Indeed, it\nseems that, more often than not, we are not Millians when arguing: we\ndo not tend to engage with dissenting opinions with an open mind.\nIndeed, there is quite some evidence suggesting that arguments are in\nfact not a very efficient means to change minds in most real-life\nsituations (Gordon-Smith 2019). People typically do not like to change\ntheir minds about firmly entrenched beliefs, and so when confronted\nwith arguments or evidence that contradict these beliefs, they tend to\neither look away or to discredit the source of the argument as\nunreliable (Dutilh Novaes 2020c)—a phenomenon also known as\n“confirmation bias” (Nickerson 1998).","\nIn particular, arguments that threaten our core beliefs and our sense\nof belonging to a group (e.g., political beliefs) typically trigger\nall kinds of motivated reasoning (Taber & Lodge 2006; Kahan 2017)\nwhereby one outright rejects those arguments without properly engaging\nwith their content. Relatedly, when choosing among a vast supply of\noptions, people tend to gravitate towards content and sources that\nconfirm their existing opinions, thus giving rise to so-called\n“echo chambers” and “epistemic bubbles”\n(Nguyen 2020). Furthermore, some arguments can be deceptively\nconvincing in that they look valid but are not (Tindale 2007; see\nentry on\n fallacies).\n Because most of us are arguably not very good at spotting fallacious\narguments, especially if they are arguments that lend support to the\nbeliefs we already hold, engaging in argumentation may in fact\ndecrease the accuracy of our beliefs by persuading us of\nfalse conclusions with incorrect arguments (Fantl 2018).","\nIn sum, despite the optimism of Mill and many others, it seems that\nengaging in argumentation will not automatically improve our beliefs\n(even if this may occur in some\n circumstances).[4]\n However, it may still be argued that an epistemological approach to\nargumentation can serve the purpose of providing a normative\nideal for argumentative practices, even if it is not always a\ndescriptively accurate account of these practices in the messy real\nworld. Moreover, at least some concrete instances of\nargumentation, in particular argumentation in science (see\n section 4.5\n below) seem to offer successful examples of epistemic-oriented\nargumentative practices."],"subsection_title":"3.2 Argumentation as an epistemic practice"},{"content":["\nAnother important strand in the literature on argumentation are\ntheories that view consensus as the primary goal of\nargumentative processes: to eliminate or resolve a difference of\n(expressed) opinion. The tradition of pragma-dialectics is a prominent\nrecent exponent of this strand (Eemeren & Grootendorst 2004).\nThese consensus-oriented approaches are motivated by the social\ncomplexity of human life, and the attribution of a role of social\ncoordination to argumentation. Because humans are social animals who\nmust often cooperate with other humans to successfully accomplish\ncertain tasks, they must have mechanisms to align their beliefs and\nintentions, and subsequently their actions (Tomasello 2014). The\nthought is that argumentation would be a particularly suitable\nmechanism for such alignment, as an exchange of reasons would make it\nmore likely that differences of opinion would decrease (Norman 2016).\nThis may happen precisely because argumentation would be a good way to\ntrack truths and avoid falsehoods, as discussed in the previous\nsection; by being involved in the same epistemic process of exchanging\nreasons, the participants in an argumentative situation would all come\nto converge towards the truth, and thus the upshot would be that they\nalso come to agree with each other. However, consensus-oriented views\nneed not presuppose that argumentation is truth-conducive: the\nultimate goal of such instances of argumentation is that of social\ncoordination, and for this tracking truth is not a requirement\n(Patterson 2011).","\nIn particular, the very notion of deliberative democracy is\nviewed as resting crucially on argumentative practices that aim for\nconsensus (Fishkin 2016; see entry on\n democracy).\n (For present purposes, “deliberation” and\n“argumentation” can be treated as roughly synonymous). In\na deliberative democracy, for a decision to be legitimate, it must be\npreceded by authentic public deliberation—a discussion of the\npros and cons of the different options—not merely the\naggregation of preferences that occurs in voting. Moreover, in\ndemocratic deliberation, when full consensus does not emerge, the\nparties involved may opt for a compromise solution, e.g., a\ncoalition-based political system.","\nA prominent theorist of deliberative democracy thus understood is\nJürgen Habermas, whose “discourse theory of law and\ndemocracy” relies heavily on practices of political\njustification and argumentation taking place in what he calls\n“the public sphere” (Habermas 1992 [1996]; 1981 [1984];\nsee entry on\n Habermas).\n He starts from the idea that politics allows for the collective\norganization of people’s lives, including the common rules they\nwill live by. Political argumentation is a form of communicative\npractice, so general assumptions for communicative practices in\ngeneral apply. However, additional assumptions apply as well (Olson\n2011 [2014]). In particular, deliberating participants must accept\nthat anyone can participate in these discursive practices (democratic\ndeliberation should be inclusive), and that anyone can introduce and\nchallenge claims that are made in the public sphere (democratic\ndeliberation should be free). They must also see one another as having\nequal status, at least for the purposes of deliberation (democratic\ndeliberation should be equal). In turn, critics of Habermas’s\naccount view it as unrealistic, as it presupposes an ideal situation\nwhere all citizens are treated equally and engage in public debates in\ngood faith (Mouffe 1999; Geuss 2019).","\nMore generally, it seems that it is only under quite specific\nconditions that argumentation reliably leads to consensus (as also\nsuggested by formal modeling of argumentative situations (Betz 2013;\nOlsson 2013; Mäs & Flache 2013)). Consensus-oriented\nargumentation seems to work well in cooperative contexts, but not so much in situations of conflict (Dutilh Novaes forthcoming). In\nparticular, the discussing parties must already have a significant\namount of background agreement—especially agreement on what\ncounts as a legitimate argument or compelling evidence—for\nargumentation and deliberation to lead to consensus. Especially in\nsituations of deep disagreement (Fogelin 1985), it seems that the\npotential of argumentation to lead to consensus is quite limited.\nInstead, in many real-life situations, argumentation often leads to\nthe opposite result; people disagree with each other even more after\nengaging in argumentation (Sunstein 2002). This is the well-documented\nphenomenon of group polarization, which occurs when an\ninitial position or tendency of individual members of a group becomes\nmore extreme after group discussion (Isenberg 1986).","\nIn fact, it may be argued that argumentation will often create or\nexacerbate conflict and adversariality, rather than leading to the\nresolution of differences of opinions. Furthermore, a focus on\nconsensus may end up reinforcing and perpetuating existing unequal\npower relations in a society. ","\n\n\nIn an unjust society, what purports to be a cooperative exchange of\nreasons really perpetuates patterns of oppression. (Goodwin 2007: 77)\n\n","\nThis general point has been made by a number of political thinkers\n(e.g., Young 2000), who have highlighted the exclusionary implications\nof consensus-oriented political deliberation. The upshot is that\nconsensus may not only be an unrealistic goal for argumentation; it\nmay not even be a desirable goal for argumentation in a\nnumber of situations (e.g., when there is great power imbalance).\nDespite these concerns, the view that the primary goal of\nargumentation is to aim for consensus remains influential in the\nliterature."],"subsection_title":"3.3 Consensus-oriented argumentation"},{"content":["\nFinally, a number of authors have attributed to argumentation the\npotential to manage (pre-existing) conflict. In a sense, the\nconsensus-oriented view of argumentation just discussed is a special\ncase of conflict management argumentation, based on the assumption\nthat the best way to manage conflict and disagreement is to aim for\nconsensus and thus eliminate conflict. But conflict can be\nmanaged in different ways, not all of them leading to consensus;\nindeed, some authors maintain that argumentation may help mitigate\nconflict even when the explicit aim is not that of reaching consensus.\nImportantly, authors who identify conflict management (or variations\nthereof) as a function for argumentation differ in their overall\nappreciation of the value of argumentation: some take it to be at best\nfutile and at worst\n destructive,[5]\n while others attribute a more positive role to argumentation in\nconflict management.","\nTo this category also belong the conceptualizations of\nargumentation-as-war discussed (and criticized) by a number of authors\n(Cohen 1995; Bailin & Battersby 2016); in such cases, conflict is\nnot so much managed but rather enacted (and possibly\nexacerbated) by means of argumentation. Thus seen, the function of\nargumentation would not be fundamentally different from the function\nof organized competitive activities such as sports or even war (with\nsuitable rules of engagement; Aikin 2011).","\nWhen conflict emerges, people have various options: they may choose\nnot to engage and instead prefer to flee; they may go into full-blown\nfighting mode, which may include physical aggression; or they may opt\nfor approaches somewhere in between the fight-or-flee extremes of the\nspectrum. Argumentation can be plausibly classified as an intermediary\nresponse:","\n\n\n[A]rgument literally is a form of pacifism—we are using words\ninstead of swords to settle our disputes. With argument, we settle our\ndisputes in ways that are most respectful of those who\ndisagree—we do not buy them off, we do not threaten them, and we\ndo not beat them into submission. Instead, we give them reasons that\nbear on the truth or falsity of their beliefs. However adversarial\nargument may be, it isn’t bombing. […] argument is a\npacifistic replacement for truly violent solutions to\ndisagreements…. (Aikin 2011: 256)\n","\nThis is not to say that argumentation will always or even typically be\nthe best approach to handle conflict and disagreement; the point is\nrather that argumentation at least has the potential to do so,\nprovided that the background conditions are suitable and that\nprovisions to mitigate escalation are in place (Aikin 2011). Versions\nof this view can be found in the work of proponents of agonistic\nconceptions of democracy and political deliberation (Wenman 2013; see\nentry on\n feminist political philosophy).\n For agonist thinkers, conflict and strife are inevitable features of\nhuman lives, and so cannot be eliminated; but they can be managed. One\nof them is Chantal Mouffe (Mouffe 2000), for whom democratic\npractices, including argumentation/deliberation, can serve to contain\nhostility and transform it into more constructive forms of contest.\nHowever, it is far from obvious that argumentation by itself will\nsuffice to manage conflict; typically, other kinds of intervention\nmust be involved (Young 2000), as the risk of argumentation being used\nto exercise power rather than as a tool to manage conflict always\nlooms large (van Laar & Krabbe 2019)."],"subsection_title":"3.4 Argumentation and conflict management"},{"content":["\nFrom these observations on different types of argumentation, a\npluralistic picture emerges: argumentation, understood as the exchange\nof reasons to justify claims, seems to have different applications in\ndifferent situations. However, it is not clear that some of the goals\noften attributed to argumentation such as epistemic improvement and\nreaching consensus can in fact be reliably achieved in many real life\nsituations. Does this mean that argumentation is useless and futile?\nNot necessarily, but it may mean that engaging in argumentation will\nnot always be the optimal response in a number of contexts."],"subsection_title":"3.5 Conclusion"}]},{"main_content":["\nArgumentation is practiced and studied in many fields of inquiry;\nphilosophers interested in argumentation have much to benefit from\nengaging with these bodies of research as well."],"section_title":"4. Argumentation Across Fields of Inquiry and Social Practices","subsections":[{"content":["\nTo understand the emergence of argumentation theory as a specific\nfield of research in the twentieth century, a brief discussion of\npreceding events is necessary. In the nineteenth century, a number of\ntextbooks aiming to improve everyday reasoning via public education\nemphasized logical and rhetorical concerns, such as those by Richard\nWhately (see entry on\n fallacies).\n As noted in\n section 3.2,\n John Stuart Mill also had a keen interest in argumentation and its\nrole in public discourse (Mill 1859), as well as an interest in logic\nand reasoning (see entries on\n Mill\n and on\n fallacies).\n But with the advent of mathematical logic in the final decades of the nineteenth century,\nlogic and the study of ordinary, everyday argumentation came apart, as\nlogicians such as Frege, Hilbert, Russell etc. were primarily\ninterested in mathematical reasoning and argumentation. As a\nresult, their logical systems are not particularly suitable to study\neveryday argumentation, as this is simply not what they were designed\nto\n do.[6]","\nNevertheless, in the twentieth century a number of authors took\ninspiration from developments in formal logic and expanded the use of\nlogical tools to the analysis of ordinary argumentation. A pioneer in\nthis tradition is Susan Stebbing, who wrote what can be seen as the\nfirst textbook in analytic philosophy, and then went on to write a\nnumber of books aimed at a general audience addressing everyday and\npublic discourse from a philosophical/logical perspective (see entry\non\n Susan Stebbing).\n Her 1939 book Thinking to Some Purpose, which can be\nconsidered as one of the first textbooks in critical thinking, was\nwidely read at the time, but did not become particularly influential\nfor the development of argumentation theory in the decades to\nfollow.","\nBy contrast, Stephen Toulmin’s 1958 book The Uses of\nArgument has been tremendously influential in a wide range of\nfields, including critical thinking education, rhetoric, speech\ncommunication, and computer science (perhaps even more so than in\nToulmin’s own original field, philosophy). Toulmin’s aim\nwas to criticize the assumption (widely held by Anglo-American\nphilosophers at the time) that any significant argument can be\nformulated in purely formal, deductive terms, using the formal logical\nsystems that had emerged in the preceding decades (see (Eemeren,\nGarssen, et al. 2014: ch. 4). While this critique was met with much\nhostility among fellow philosophers, it eventually gave rise to an\nalternative way of approaching argumentation, which is often described\nas “informal logic” (see entry on\n informal logic).\n This approach seeks to engage and analyze instances of argumentation\nin everyday life; it recognizes that, while useful, the tools of\ndeductive logic alone do not suffice to investigate argumentation in\nall its complexity and pragmatic import. In a similar vein, Charles\nHamblin’s 1970 book Fallacies reinvigorated the study\nof fallacies in the context of argumentation by re-emphasizing\n(following Aristotle) the importance of a dialectical-dialogical\nbackground when reflecting on fallacies in argumentation (see entry on\n fallacies).","\nAround the same time as Toulmin, Chaïm Perelman and Lucie\nOlbrechts-Tyteca were developing an approach to argumentation that\nemphasized its persuasive component. To this end, they turned to\nclassical theories of rhetoric, and adapted them to give rise to what\nthey described as the “New Rhetoric”. Their book\nTraité de l’argumentation: La nouvelle\nrhétorique was published in 1958 in French, and translated\ninto English in 1969. Its key idea: ","\n\n\nsince argumentation aims at securing the adherence of those to whom it\nis addressed, it is, in its entirety, relative to the audience to be\ninfluenced. (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca 1958 [1969: 19]) \n","\nThey introduced the influential distinction between universal\nand particular audiences: while every argument is directed at\na specific individual or group, the concept of a universal audience\nserves as a normative ideal encapsulating shared standards of\nagreement on what counts as legitimate argumentation (see Eemeren,\nGarssen, et al. 2014: ch. 5).","\nThe work of these pioneers provided the foundations for subsequent\nresearch in argumentation theory. One approach that became influential\nin the following decades is the pragma-dialectics tradition developed\nby Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst (Eemeren & Grootendorst\n1984, 2004). They also founded the journal Argumentation, one\nof the flagship journals in argumentation theory. Pragma-dialectics\nwas developed to study argumentation as a discourse activity, a\ncomplex speech act that occurs as part of interactional linguistic\nactivities with specific communicative goals (“pragma”\nrefers to the functional perspective of goals, and\n“dialectic” to the interactive component). For these\nauthors, argumentative discourse is primarily directed at the\nreasonable resolution of a difference of opinion. Pragma-dialectics\nhas a descriptive as well as a normative component, thus offering\ntools both for the analysis of concrete instances of argumentation and\nfor the evaluation of argumentation correctness and success (see\nEemeren, Garssen, et al. 2014: ch. 10).","\nAnother leading author in argumentation theory is Douglas Walton, who\npioneered the argument schemes approach to argumentation that borrows\ntools from formal logic but expands them so as to treat a wider range\nof arguments than those covered by traditional logical systems\n(Walton, Reed, & Macagno 2008). Walton also formulated an\ninfluential account of argumentation in dialogue in collaboration with\nErik Krabbe (Walton & Krabbe 1995). Ralph Johnson and Anthony\nBlair further helped to consolidate the field of argumentation theory\nand informal logic by founding the Centre for Research in Reasoning,\nArgumentation, and Rhetoric in Windsor (Ontario, Canada), and by\ninitiating the journal Informal Logic. Their textbook\nLogical Self-Defense (Johnson & Blair 1977) has also been\nparticularly influential."],"subsection_title":"4.1 Argumentation theory"},{"content":["\nThe study of argumentation within computer science and artificial\nintelligence is a thriving field of research, with dedicated journals\nsuch as Argument and Computation and regular conference\nseries such as COMMA (International Conference on Computational Models\nof Argument; see Rahwan & Simari 2009 and Eemeren, Garssen, et al.\n2014: ch. 11 for overviews).","\nThe historical roots of argumentation research in artificial\nintelligence can be traced back to work on non-monotonic logics (see\nentry on\n non-monotonic logics)\n and defeasible reasoning (see entry on\n defeasible reasoning).\n Since then, three main different perspectives have emerged (Eemeren,\nGarssen, et al. 2014: ch. 11): the theoretical systems perspective,\nwhere the focus is on theoretical and formal models of argumentation\n(following the tradition of philosophical and formal logic); the\nartificial systems perspective, where the aim is to build computer\nprograms that model or support argumentative tasks, for instance, in\nonline dialogue games or in expert systems; the natural systems\nperspective, which investigates argumentation in its natural form with\nthe help of computational tools (e.g., argumentation mining [Peldszus\n& Stede 2013; Habernal & Gurevych 2017], where computational\nmethods are used to identify argumentative structures in large corpora\nof texts).","\nAn influential approach in this research tradition is that of\nabstract argumentation frameworks, initiated by the\npioneering work of Dung (1995). Before that, argumentation in AI was\nstudied mostly under the inspiration of concepts coming from informal\nlogic such as argumentation schemes, context, stages of dialogues and\nargument moves. By contrast, the key notion in the framework proposed\nby Dung is that of argument attack, understood as an abstract\nformal relation roughly intended to capture the idea that it is\npossible to challenge an argument by means of another argument\n(assertions are understood as a special case of arguments with zero\npremises). Arguments can then be represented in networks of attacks\nand defenses: an argument A can attack an argument B,\nand B in turn may attack further arguments C and\nD (the connection with the notion of defeaters is a\nnatural one, which Dung also addresses).","\nBesides abstract argumentation, three other important lines of\nresearch in AI are: the (internal) structure of arguments;\nargumentation in multi-agent systems; applications to specific tasks\nand domains (Rahwan & Siwari 2009). The structural approach\ninvestigates formally features such as argument strength/force (e.g.,\na conclusive argument is stronger than a defeasible argument),\nargument schemes (Bex, Prakken, Reed, & Walton 2003) etc.\nArgumentation in multi-agent systems is a thriving subfield with its\nown dedicated conference series (ArgMAS), based on the recognition\nthat argumentation is a particularly suitable vehicle to facilitate\ninteraction in the artificial environments studied by AI researchers\nworking on multi-agent systems (see a special issue of the journal\nArgument & Computation [Atkinson, Cerutti, et al. 2016]).\nFinally, computational approaches in argumentation have also thrived\nwith respect to specific domains and applications, such as legal\nargumentation (Prakken & Sartor 2015). Recently, as a reaction to\nthe machine-learning paradigm, the idea of explainable AI has gotten\ntraction, and the concept of argumentation is thought to play a\nfundamental role for explainable AI (Sklar & Azhar 2018)."],"subsection_title":"4.2 Artificial intelligence and computer science"},{"content":["\nArgumentation is also an important topic of investigation within\ncognitive science and psychology. Researchers in these fields are\npredominantly interested in the descriptive question of how people in\nfact engage in argumentation, rather than in the normative question of\nhow they ought to do it (although some of them have also drawn\nnormative conclusions, e.g., Hahn & Oaksford 2006; Hahn &\nHornikx, 2016). Controlled experiments are one of the ways in which the descriptive question can be investigated.","\nSystematic research specifically on argumentation within\ncognitive science and psychology has significantly increased over the\nlast 10 years. Before that, there had been extensive research on\nreasoning conceived as an individual, internal process, much of which\nhad been conducted using task materials such as syllogistic arguments\n(Dutilh Novaes 2020b). But due to what may be described as an\nindividualist bias in cognitive science and psychology (Mercier 2018),\nthese researchers did not draw explicit connections between their\nfindings and the public acts of “giving and asking for\nreasons”. It is only somewhat recently that argumentation began\nto receive sustained attention from these researchers. The\ninvestigations of Hugo Mercier and colleagues (Mercier & Sperber\n2017; Mercier 2018) and of Ulrike Hahn and colleagues (Hahn &\nOaksford 2007; Hornikx & Hahn 2012; Collins & Hahn 2018) have\nbeen particularly influential. (See also Paglieri, Bonelli, &\nFelletti 2016, an edited volume containing a representative overview\nof research on the psychology of argumentation.) Another interesting\nline of research has been the study of the development of reasoning\nand argumentative skills in young children (Köymen, Mammen, &\nTomasello 2016; Köymen & Tomasello 2020).","\nMercier and Sperber defend an interactionist account of reasoning,\naccording to which the primary function of reasoning is for social\ninteractions, where reasons are exchanged and receivers of reasons\ndecide whether they find them convincing—in other words, for\nargumentation (Mercier & Sperber 2017). They review a wealth of\nevidence suggesting that reasoning is rather flawed when it comes to\ndrawing conclusions from premises in order to expand one’s\nknowledge. From this they conclude, on the basis of evolutionary\narguments, that the function of reasoning must be a different one,\nindeed one that responds to features of human sociality and the need\nto exercise epistemic vigilance when receiving information from\nothers. This account has inaugurated a rich research program which they have been pursuing with colleagues for over\na decade now, and which has delivered some interesting results—for\nexample, that we seem to be better at evaluating the quality of\narguments proposed by others than at formulating high-quality arguments\nourselves (Mercier 2018).","\nIn the context of the Bayesian (see entry on\n Bayes’ theorem)\n approach to reasoning that was first developed by Mike Oaksford and\nNick Chater in the 1980s (Oaksford & Chater 2018), Hahn and\ncolleagues have extended the Bayesian framework to the investigation\nof argumentation. They claim that Bayesian probabilities offer an\naccurate descriptive model of how people evaluate the strength of\narguments (Hahn & Oaksford 2007) as well as a solid perspective to\naddress normative questions pertaining to argument strength (Hahn\n& Oaksford 2006; Hahn & Hornikx 2016). The Bayesian approach\nallows for the formulation of probabilistic measures of argument\nstrength, showing that many so-called “fallacies” may\nnevertheless be good arguments in the sense that they considerably\nraise the probability of the conclusion. For example, deductively\ninvalid argument schemes (such as affirming the consequent (AC) and\ndenying the antecedent (DA)) can also provide considerable support for\na conclusion, depending on the contents in question. The extent to\nwhich this is the case depends primarily on the specific informational\ncontext, captured by the prior probability distribution, not on the\nstructure of the argument. This means that some instances of, say, AC,\nmay offer support to a conclusion while others may fail to do so (Eva\n& Hartmann 2018). Thus seen, Bayesian argumentation represents a\nsignificantly different approach to argumentation from those inspired\nby logic (e.g., argument schemes), but they are not necessarily incompatible;\nthey may well be complementary perspectives (see also [Zenker\n2013])."],"subsection_title":"4.3 Cognitive science and psychology"},{"content":["\nArgumentation is primarily (though not exclusively) a linguistic\nphenomenon. Accordingly, argumentation is extensively studied in\nfields dedicated to the study of language, such as rhetoric,\nlinguistics, discourse analysis, communication, and pragmatics, among\nothers (see Eemeren, Garssen, et al. 2014: chs 8 and 9). Researchers\nin these areas develop general theoretical models of argumentation and\ninvestigate concrete instances of argumentation in specific domains on\nthe basis of linguistic corpora, discourse analysis, and other methods\nused in the language sciences (see the edited volume Oswald, Herman,\n& Jacquin [2018] for a sample of the different lines of research).\nOverall, research on argumentation within the language sciences tends\nto focus primarily on concrete occurrences of arguments in a variety\nof domains, adopting a largely descriptive rather than normative\nperspective (though some of these researchers also tackle normative\nconsiderations).","\nSome of these analyses approach arguments and argumentation primarily\nas text or self-contained speeches, while others emphasize the\ninterpersonal, communicative nature of “face-to-face”\nargumentation (see Eemeren, Garssen, et al. 2014: section 8.9). One\nprominent approach in this tradition is due to communication scholars\nSally Jackson and Scott Jacobs. They have drawn on speech act theory\nand conversation analysis to investigate argumentation as a\ndisagreement-relevant expansion of speech acts that, through mutually\nrecognized reasons, allows us to manage disagreements despite the\nchallenges they pose for communication and coordination of activities\n(Jackson & Jacobs 1980; Jackson 2019). Moreover, they perceive\ninstitutionalized practices of argumentation and concrete\n“argumentation designs”—such as for example\nrandomized controlled trials in medicine—as interventions aimed\nat improving methods of disagreement management through\nargumentation.","\nAnother communication scholar, Dale Hample, has further argued for the\nimportance of approaching argumentation as an essentially\ninterpersonal communicative activity (Hample 2006, 2018). This\nperspective allows for the consideration of a broader range of\nfactors, not only the arguments themselves but also (and primarily)\nthe people involved in those processes: their motivations,\npsychological processes, and emotions. It also allows for the\nformulation of questions pertaining to individual as well as cultural\ndifferences in argumentative styles (see\n section 5.3\n below).","\nAnother illuminating perspective views argumentative practices as\ninherently tied to broader socio-cultural contexts (Amossy 2009). The\nJournal of Argumentation in Context was founded in 2012\nprecisely to promote a contextual approach to argumentation. Once\nargumentation is no longer only considered in abstraction from\nconcrete instances taking place in real-life situations, it becomes\nimperative to recognize that argumentation does not take place in a\nvacuum; typically, argumentative practices are embedded in other kinds\nof practices and institutions, against the background of specific\nsocio-cultural, political structures. The method of discourse analysis\nis particularly suitable for a broader perspective on argumentation,\nas shown by the work of Ruth Amossy (2002) and Marianne Doury (2009),\namong others."],"subsection_title":"4.4 Language and communication"},{"content":["\nArgumentation is crucial in a number of specific organized social\npractices, in particular in politics, science, law, and education. The\nrelevant argumentative practices are studied in each of the\ncorresponding knowledge domains; indeed, while some general principles\nmay govern argumentative practices across the board, some may be\nspecific to particular applications and domains.","\nAs already mentioned, argumentation is typically viewed as an\nessential component of political democratic practices, and as such it\nis of great interest to political scientists and political theorists\n(Habermas 1992 [1996]; Young 2000; Landemore 2013; Fishkin 2016; see\nentry on\n democracy).\n (The term typically used in this context is\n“deliberation” instead of “argumentation”, but\nthese can be viewed as roughly synonymous for our purposes.) General\ntheories of argumentation such as pragma-dialectic and the Toulmin\nmodel can be applied to political argumentation with illuminating\nresults (Wodak 2016; Mohammed 2016). More generally, political\ndiscourse seems to have a strong argumentative component, in\nparticular if argumentation is understood more broadly as not only\npertaining to rational discourse (logos) but as also\nincluding what rhetoricians refer to as pathos and\nethos (Zarefsky 2014; Amossy 2018). But critics of\nargumentation and deliberation in political contexts also point out\nthe limitations of the classical deliberative model (Sanders 1997;\nTalisse 2019).","\nMoreover, scientific communities seem to offer good examples of\n(largely) well-functioning argumentative practices. These are\ndisciplined systems of collective epistemic activity, with tacit but\nwidely endorsed norms for argumentative engagement for each domain\n(which does not mean that there are not disagreements on these very\nnorms). The case of mathematics has already been mentioned above:\npractices of mathematical proof are quite naturally understood as\nargumentative practices (Dutilh Novaes 2020a). Furthermore, when a\nscientist presents a new scientific claim, it must be backed by\narguments and evidence that her peers are likely to find convincing,\nas they follow from the application of widely agreed-upon scientific\nmethods (Longino 1990; Weinstein 1990; Rehg 2008; see entry on the\n social dimensions of scientific knowledge).\n Other scientists will in turn critically examine the evidence and\narguments provided, and will voice objections or concerns if they find\naspects of the theory to be insufficiently convincing. Thus seen,\nscience may be viewed as a “game of giving and asking for\nreasons” (Zamora Bonilla 2006). Certain features of scientific\nargumentation seem to ensure its success: scientists see other\nscientists as prima facie peers, and so (typically at least) place a\nfair amount of trust in other scientists by default; science is based\non the principle of “organized skepticism” (a term\nintroduced by the pioneer sociologist of science Robert Merton [Merton, 1942]), which\nmeans that asking for further reasons should not be perceived as a\npersonal attack. These are arguably aspects that distinguish\nargumentation in science from argumentation in other domains in virtue\nof these institutional factors (Mercier & Heintz 2014). But\nultimately, scientists are part of society as a whole, and thus the\nquestion of how scientific and political argumentation intersect\nbecomes particularly relevant (Kitcher 2001).","\nAnother area where argumentation is essential is the law, which also\ncorresponds to disciplined systems of collective activity with rules\nand principles for what counts as acceptable arguments and evidence.\n \nIn litigation (in particular in adversarial justice systems), there\nare typically two sides disagreeing on what is lawful or just, and the\nbasic idea is that each side will present its strongest arguments; it\nis the comparison between the two sets of arguments that should lead\nto the best judgment (Walton 2002). Legal reasoning and argumentation\nhave been extensively studied within jurisprudence for decades, in\nparticular since Ronald Dworkin’s (1977) and Neil\nMacCormick’s (1978) responses to HLA Hart’s highly\ninfluential The Concept of Law (1961). A number of other\nviews and approaches have been developed, in particular from the\nperspectives of natural law theory, legal positivism, common law, and\nrhetoric (see Feteris 2017 for an overview). Overall, legal\nargumentation is characterized by extensive uses of analogies (Lamond\n2014), abduction (Askeland 2020), and defeasible/non-monotonic\nreasoning (Bex & Verheij 2013). An interesting question is whether\nargumentation in law is fundamentally different from argumentation in\nother domains, or whether it follows the same overall canons and norms\nbut applied to legal topics (Raz 2001).","\nFinally, the development of argumentative skills is arguably a\nfundamental aspect of (formal) education (Muller Mirza &\nPerret-Clermont 2009). Ideally, when presented with arguments, a\nlearner should not simply accept what is being said at face value, but\nshould instead reflect on the reasons offered and come to her own\nconclusions. Argumentation thus fosters independent, critical\nthinking, which is viewed as an important goal for education (Siegel\n1995; see entry on\n critical thinking).\n A number of education theorists and developmental psychologists have\nempirically investigated the effects of emphasizing argumentative\nskills in educational settings, with encouraging results (Kuhn &\nCrowell 2011). There has been in particular much emphasis on\nargumentation specifically in science education, based on the\nassumption that argumentation is a key component of scientific\npractice (as noted above); the thought is that this feature of\nscientific practice should be reflected in science education (Driver,\nNewton, & Osborne 2000; Erduran & Jiménez-Aleixandre\n2007)."],"subsection_title":"4.5 Argumentation in specific social practices"}]},{"main_content":["\nArgumentation is a multi-faceted phenomenon, and the literature on\narguments and argumentation is massive and varied. This entry can only\nscratch the surface of the richness of this material, and many\ninteresting, relevant topics must be left out for reasons of space. In\nthis final section, a selection of topics that are likely to attract\nconsiderable interest in future research are discussed."],"section_title":"5. Further Topics","subsections":[{"content":["\nIn recent years, the concept of epistemic injustice has received much\nattention among philosophers (Fricker 2007; McKinnon 2016). Epistemic\ninjustice occurs when a person is unfairly treated qua knower on the\nbasis of prejudices pertaining to social categories such as gender,\nrace, class, ability etc. (see entry on\n feminist epistemology and philosophy of science).\n One of the main categories of epistemic injustice discussed\nin the literature pertains to testimony and is known as testimonial\ninjustice: this occurs when a testifier is not given a degree of\ncredibility commensurate to their actual expertise on the relevant\ntopic, as a result of prejudice. (Whether credibility excess is also a\nform of testimonial injustice is a moot point in the literature\n[Medina 2011].)","\nSince argumentation can be viewed as an important mechanism for\nsharing knowledge and information, i.e., as having significant\nepistemic import (Goldman 2004), the question arises whether there\nmight be instances of epistemic injustice pertaining specifically to\nargumentation, which may be described as argumentative\ninjustice, and which would be notably different from other\nrecognized forms of epistemic injustice such as testimonial injustice.\nBondy (Bondy 2010) presented a first articulation of the notion of\nargumentative injustice, modeled after Fricker’s notion of\nepistemic injustice and relying on a broadly epistemological\nconception of argumentation. However, Bondy’s analysis does not\ntake into account some of the structural elements that have become\ncentral to the analysis of epistemic injustice since Fricker’s\ninfluential work, so it seems further discussion of epistemic\ninjustice in argumentation is still needed. For example, in situations\nof disagreement, epistemic injustice can give rise to further\nobstacles to rational argumentation, leading to deep disagreement\n(Lagewaard 2021).","\nMoreover, as often noted by critics of adversarial approaches,\nargumentation can also be used as an instrument of domination and\noppression used to overpower and denigrate an interlocutor (Nozick\n1981), especially an interlocutor of “lower” status in the\ncontext in question (Moulton 1983; see entry on\n feminist approaches to argumentation).\n From this perspective, it is clear that argumentation may also be\nused to reinforce and exacerbate injustice, inequalities and power\ndifferentials (Goodwin 2007). Given this possibility, and in response\nto the perennial risk of excessive aggressiveness in argumentative\nsituations, a normative account of how argumentation ought to\nbe conducted so as to avoid these problematic outcomes seem to be\nrequired.","\nOne such approach is virtue argumentation theory. Drawing on\nvirtue ethics and virtue epistemology (see entries on\n virtue ethics\n and\n virtue epistemology),\n virtue argumentation theory seeks to theorize how to argue well in\nterms of the dispositions and character of arguers rather than, for\nexample, in terms of properties of arguments considered in abstraction\nfrom arguers (Aberdein & Cohen 2016). Some of the argumentative\nvirtues identified in the literature are: willingness to listen to\nothers (Cohen 2019), willingness to take a novel viewpoint seriously\n(Kwong 2016), humility (Kidd 2016), and open-mindedness (Tanesini\n2020).","\nBy the same token, defective argumentation is conceptualized not\n(only) in terms of structural properties of arguments (e.g.,\nfallacious argument patterns), but in terms of the vices displayed by\narguers such as arrogance and narrow-mindedness, among others\n(Aberdein 2016). Virtue argumentation theory now constitutes a vibrant\nresearch program, as attested by a special issue of Topoi\ndedicated to the topic (see [Aberdein & Cohen 2016] for its Introduction). It allows for\na reconceptualization of classical themes within argumentation theory\nwhile also promising to provide concrete recommendations on how to\nargue better. Whether it can fully counter the risk of epistemic\ninjustice and oppressive uses of argumentation is however debatable,\nat least as long as broader structural factors related to power\ndynamics are not sufficiently taken into account (Kukla 2014)."],"subsection_title":"5.1 Argumentative injustice and virtuous argumentation"},{"content":["\nOn some idealized construals, argumentation is conceived as a purely\nrational, emotionless endeavor. But the strong connection between\nargumentative activities and emotional responses has also long been\nrecognized (in particular in rhetorical analyses of argumentation),\nand more recently has become the object of extensive research (Walton\n1992; Gilbert 2004; Hample 2006: ch. 5). Importantly, the recognition\nof a role for emotions in argumentation does not entail a complete\nrejection of the “rationality” of argumentation; rather,\nit is based on the rejection of a strict dichotomy between reason and\nemotion (see entry on\n emotion),\n and on a more encompassing conception of argumentation as a\nmulti-layered human activity.","\nRather than dispassionate exchanges of reasons, instances of\nargumentation typically start against the background of existing\nemotional relations, and give rise to further affective\nresponses—often, though not necessarily, negative responses of\naggression and hostility. Indeed, it has been noted that, by itself,\nargumentation can give rise to conflict and friction where there was\nnone to be found prior to the argumentative engagement (Aikin 2011).\nThis occurs in particular because critical engagement and requests for\nreasons are at odds with default norms of credulity in most mundane\ndialogical interactions, thus creating a perception of antagonism. But\nargumentation may also give rise to positive affective responses if\nthe focus is on coalescence and cooperation rather than on hostility\n(Gilbert 1997).","\nThe descriptive claim that instances of argumentation are typically\nemotionally charged is not particularly controversial, though it\ndeserves to be further investigated; the details of affective\nresponses during instances of argumentation and how to deal with them\nare non-trivial (Krabbe & van Laar 2015). What is potentially more\ncontroversial is the normative claim that instances of\nargumentation may or should be emotionally charged,\ni.e., that emotions may or ought to be involved in argumentative\nprocesses, even if it may be necessary to regulate them in such\nsituations rather than giving them free rein (González,\nGómez, & Lemos 2019). The significance of emotions for\npersuasion has been recognized for millennia (see entry on\n Aristotle’s rhetoric),\n but more recently it has become clear that emotions also have a\nfundamental role to play for choices of what to focus on and what to\ncare about (Sinhababu 2017). This general point seems to apply to\ninstances of argumentation as well. For example, Howes and Hundleby\n(Howes & Hundleby 2018) argue that, contrary to what is often\nthought, anger can in fact make a positive contribution to\nargumentative encounters. Indeed, anger may have an important\nepistemological role in such encounters by drawing attention to\nrelevant premises and information that may otherwise go unnoticed.\n(They recognize that anger may also derail argumentation when the\nencounter becomes a full-on confrontation.)","\nIn sum, the study of the role of emotions for argumentation, both\ndescriptively and normatively speaking, has attracted the interest of\na number of scholars, traditionally in connection with rhetoric and\nmore recently also from the perspective of argumentation as\ninterpersonal communication (Hample 2006). And yet, much work remains\nto be done on the significance of emotions for argumentation, in\nparticular given that the view that argumentation should be a purely\nrational, dispassionate endeavor remains widely (even if tacitly)\nendorsed."],"subsection_title":"5.2 Emotions and argumentation"},{"content":["\nOnce we adopt the perspective of argumentation as a communicative\npractice, the question of the influence of cultural factors on\nargumentative practices naturally arises. Is there significant\nvariability in how people engage in argumentation depending on their\nsociocultural backgrounds? Or is argumentation largely the same\nphenomenon across different cultures? Actually, we may even ask\nourselves whether argumentation in fact occurs in all human cultures,\nor whether it is the product of specific, contingent background\nconditions, thus not being a human universal. For comparison: it had\nlong been assumed that practices of counting were present in all human\ncultures, even if with different degrees of complexity. But in recent\ndecades it has been shown that some cultures do not engage\nsystematically in practices of counting and basic arithmetic at all,\nsuch as the Pirahã in the Amazon (Gordon 2004; see entry on\n culture and cognitive science).\n By analogy, it seems that the purported universality of argumentative\npractices should not be taken for granted, but rather be treated as a\nlegitimate empirical question. (Incidentally, there is some anecdotal\nevidence that the Pirahã themselves engage in argumentative\nexchanges [Everett 2008], but to date their argumentative skills have\nnot been investigated systematically, as is the case with their\nnumerical skills.)","\nOf course, how widespread argumentative practices will be also depends\non how the concept of “argumentative practices” is defined\nand operationalized in the first place. If it is narrowly defined as\ncorresponding to regimented practices of reason-giving requiring clear\nmarkers and explicit criteria for what counts as premises, conclusions\nand relations of support between them, then argumentation may well be\nrestricted to cultures and subcultures where such practices have been\nexplicitly codified. By contrast, if argumentation is defined more\nloosely, then a wider range of communicative practices will be\nconsidered as instances of argumentation, and thus presumably more\ncultures will be found to engage in (what is thus viewed as)\nargumentation. This means that the spread of argumentative practices\nacross cultures is not only an empirical question; it also requires\nsignificant conceptual input to be addressed.","\nBut if (as appears to be the case) argumentation is not a strictly\nWEIRD phenomenon, restricted to Western, Educated, Industrialized,\nRich, and Democratic societies (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan\n2010), then the issue of cross-cultural variability in argumentative\npractices gives rise to a host of research questions, again both at\nthe descriptive and at the normative level. Indeed, even if at the\ndescriptive level considerable variability in argumentative practices\nis identified, the normative question of whether there should be\nuniversally valid canons for argumentation, or instead specific norms\nfor specific contexts, remains pressing. At the descriptive level, a\nnumber of researchers have investigated argumentative practices in\ndifferent WEIRD as well as non-WEIRD cultures, also addressing\nquestions of cultural variability (Hornikx & Hoeken 2007; Hornikx\n& de Best 2011).","\nA foundational work in this context is Edwin Hutchins’ 1980 book\nCulture and Inference, a study of the Trobriand\nIslanders’ system of land tenure in Papua New Guinea (Hutchins\n1980). While presented as a study of inference and reasoning among the\nTrobriand Islanders, what Hutchins in fact investigated were instances\nof legal argumentation in land courts by means of ethnographic\nobservation and interviews with litigants. This led to the formulation\nof a set of twelve basic propositions codifying knowledge about land\ntenure, as well as transfer formulas governing how this knowledge can\nbe applied to new disputes. Hutchins’ analysis showed that the\nTrobriand Islanders had a sophisticated argumentation system to\nresolve issues pertaining to land tenure, in many senses resembling\nargumentation and reasoning in so-called WEIRD societies in that it\nseemed to recognize as valid simple logical structures such as\nmodus ponens and modus tollens.","\nMore recently, Hugo Mercier and colleagues have been conducting\nstudies in countries such as Japan (Mercier, Deguchi, Van der Henst,\n& Yama 2016) and Guatemala (Castelain, Girotto, Jamet, &\nMercier 2016). While recognizing the significance and interest of\ncultural differences (Mercier 2013), Mercier maintains that\nargumentation is a human universal, as argumentative capacities and\ntendencies are a result of natural selection, genetically encoded in\nhuman cognition (Mercier 2011; Mercier & Sperber 2017). He takes\nthe results of the cross-cultural studies conducted so far as\nconfirming the universality of argumentation, even considering\ncultural differences (Mercier 2018).","\nAnother scholar who has been carrying out an extensive research\nprogram on cultural differences in argumentation is communication\ntheorist Dale Hample. With different sets of colleagues, he has\nconducted studies by means of surveys where participants (typically,\nuniversity undergraduates) self-report on their argumentative\npractices in countries such as China, Japan, Turkey, Chile, the\nNetherlands, Portugal, the United States (among others; Hample 2018:\nch. 7). His results overall show a number of similarities, which may\nbe partially explained by the specific demographic (university\nstudents) from which participants are usually recruited. But\ninteresting differences have also been identified, for example\ndifferent levels of willingness to engage in argumentative\nencounters.","\nIn a recent book (Tindale 2021), philosopher Chris Tindale adopts an\nanthropological perspective to investigate how argumentative practices\nemerge from the experiences of peoples with diverse backgrounds. He\nemphasizes the argumentative roles of place, orality, myth, narrative,\nand audience, also assessing the impacts of colonialism on the study\nof argumentation. Tindale reviews a wealth of anthropological and\nethnographic studies on argumentative practices in different cultures,\nthus providing what is to date perhaps the most comprehensive study on\nargumentation from an anthropological perspective.","\nOn the whole, the study of differences and commonalities in\nargumentative practices across cultures is an established line of\nresearch on argumentation, but arguably much work remains to be done\nto investigate these complex phenomena more thoroughly."],"subsection_title":"5.3 Cross-cultural perspectives on argumentation"},{"content":["\nSo far we have not yet considered the question of the different media\nthrough which argumentation can take place. Naturally, argumentation\ncan unfold orally in face-to-face encounters—discussions in\nparliament, political debates, in a court of law—as well as in\nwriting—in scientific articles, on the Internet, in newspaper\neditorials. Moreover, it can happen synchronically, with real-time\nexchanges of reasons, or asynchronically. While it is reasonable to\nexpect that there will be some commonalities across these different\nmedia and environments, it is also plausible that specific features of\ndifferent environments may significantly influence how argumentation\nis conducted: different environments present different kinds of\naffordances for arguers (Halpern & Gibbs 2013; Weger\n& Aakhus 2003; see entry on\n embodied cognition\n for the concept of affordance). Indeed, if the Internet represents a\nfundamentally novel cognitive ecology (Smart, Heersmink, & Clowes\n2017), then it will likely give rise to different forms of\nargumentative engagement (Lewiński 2010). Whether these new forms\nwill represent progress (according to some suitable metric)\nis however a moot point.","\nIn the early days of the Internet in the 1990s, there was much hope\nthat online spaces would finally realize the Habermasian ideal of a\npublic sphere for political deliberation (Hindman 2009). The Internet\nwas supposed to act as the great equalizer in the worldwide\nmarketplace of ideas, finally attaining the Millian ideal of free\nexchange of ideas (Mill 1859). Online, everyone’s voice would\nhave an equal chance of being heard, everyone could contribute to the\nconversation, and everyone could simultaneously be a journalist, news\nconsumer, engaged citizen, advocate, and activist.","\nA few decades later, these hopes have not really materialized. It is\nprobably true that most people now argue more—in social\nmedia, blogs, chat rooms, discussion boards etc.—but it is much\nless obvious that they argue better. Indeed, rather than\nenhancing democratic ideals, some have gone as far as claiming that\ninstead, the Internet is “killing democracy” (Bartlett\n2018). There is very little oversight when it comes to the spreading\nof propaganda and disinformation online (Benkler, Faris, & Roberts\n2018), which means that citizens are often being fed faulty\ninformation and arguments. Moreover, it seems that online environments\nmay lead to increased polarization when polemic topics are being\ndiscussed (Yardi & Boyd 2010), and to “intellectual\narrogance” (Lynch 2019). Some have argued that online\ndiscussions lead to more overly emotional engagement when compared to\nother forms of debate (Kramer, Guillory, & Hancock 2014). But not\neveryone is convinced that the Internet has only made things worse\nwhen it comes to argumentation, or in any case that it cannot be\nsuitably redesigned so as to foster rather than destroy democratic\nideals and deliberation (Sunstein 2017).","\nBe that as it may, the Internet is here to stay, and online\nargumentation is a pervasive phenomenon that argumentation theorists\nhave been studying and will continue to study for years to come. In\nfact, if anything, online argumentation is now more often\ninvestigated empirically than other forms of argumentation, among\nother reasons thanks to the development of argument mining techniques\n(see\n section 4.2\n above) which greatly facilitate the study of large corpora of textual\nmaterial such as those produced by online discussions. Beyond the very\nnumerous specific case studies available in the literature, there have\nbeen also attempts to reflect on the phenomenon of online\nargumentation in general, for example in journal special issues\ndedicated to argumentation in digital media such as in\nArgumentation and Advocacy (Volume 47(2), 2010) and\nPhilosophy & Technology (Volume 30(2), 2017). However, a\nsystematic analysis of online argumentation and how it differs from\nother forms of argumentation remains to be produced."],"subsection_title":"5.4 Argumentation and the Internet"}]},{"main_content":["\nArgument and argumentation are multifaceted phenomena that have\nattracted the interest of philosophers as well as scholars in other\nfields for millennia, and continue to be studied extensively in\nvarious domains. This entry presents an overview of the main strands\nin these discussions, while acknowledging the impossibility of fully\ndoing justice to the enormous literature on the topic. But the\nliterature references below should at least provide a useful starting\npoint for the interested reader."],"section_title":"6. Conclusion","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nAn argument can be defined as a complex symbolic structure where some\\nparts, known as the premises, offer support to another part, the\\nconclusion. Alternatively, an argument can be viewed as a complex\\nspeech act consisting of one or more acts of premising (which assert\\npropositions in favor of the conclusion), an act of concluding, and a\\nstated or implicit marker (“hence”,\\n“therefore”) that indicates that the conclusion follows\\nfrom the premises (Hitchcock\\n 2007).[1]\\n The relation of support between premises and conclusion can be cashed\\nout in different ways: the premises may guarantee the truth of the\\nconclusion, or make its truth more probable; the premises may imply\\nthe conclusion; the premises may make the conclusion more acceptable\\n(or assertible).\",\n \"\\nFor theoretical purposes, arguments may be considered as freestanding\\nentities, abstracted from their contexts of use in actual human\\nactivities. But depending on one’s explanatory goals, there is\\nalso much to be gained from considering arguments as they in fact\\noccur in human communicative practices. The term generally used for\\ninstances of exchange of arguments is argumentation. In what\\nfollows, the convention of using “argument” to refer to\\nstructures of premises and conclusion, and “argumentation”\\nto refer to human practices and activities where arguments occur as\\ncommunicative actions will be adopted.\",\n \"\\nArgumentation can be defined as the communicative activity of\\nproducing and exchanging reasons in order to support claims or\\ndefend/challenge positions, especially in situations of doubt or\\ndisagreement (Lewiński & Mohammed 2016). It is arguably best\\nconceived as a kind of dialogue, even if one can also\\n“argue” with oneself, in long speeches or in writing (in\\narticles or books) for an intended but silent audience, or in groups\\nrather than in dyads (Lewiński & Aakhus 2014). But\\nargumentation is a special kind of dialogue: indeed, most of\\nthe dialogues we engage in are not instances of argumentation, for\\nexample when asking someone if they know what time it is, or when\\nsomeone shares details about their vacation. Argumentation only occurs\\nwhen, upon making a claim, someone receives a request for further\\nsupport for the claim in the form of reasons, or estimates herself\\nthat further justification is required (Jackson & Jacobs 1980;\\nJackson, 2019). In such cases, dialogues of “giving and asking\\nfor reasons” ensue (Brandom, 1994; Bermejo Luque 2011). Since\\nmost of what we know we learn from others, argumentation seems to be\\nan important mechanism to filter the information we receive, instead\\nof accepting what others tell us uncritically (Sperber,\\nClément, et al. 2010).\",\n \"\\nThe study of arguments and argumentation is also closely connected to\\nthe study of reasoning, understood as the process of reaching\\nconclusions on the basis of careful, reflective consideration of the\\navailable information, i.e., by an examination of reasons.\\nAccording to a widespread view, reasoning and argumentation are\\nrelated (as both concern reasons) but fundamentally different\\nphenomena: reasoning would belong to the mental realm of\\nthinking—an individual inferring new information from the\\navailable information by means of careful consideration of\\nreasons—whereas argumentation would belong to the public realm\\nof the exchange of reasons, expressed in language or other\\nsymbolic media and intended for an audience. However, a number of\\nauthors have argued for a different view, namely that reasoning and\\nargumentation are in fact two sides of the same coin, and that what is\\nknown as reasoning is by and large the internalization of practices of\\nargumentation (MacKenzie 1989; Mercier & Sperber 2017; Mercier\\n2018). For the purposes of this entry, we can assume a close\\nconnection between reasoning and argumentation so that relevant\\nresearch on reasoning can be suitably included in the discussions to\\ncome.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Terminological Clarifications\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nArguments come in many kinds. In some of them, the truth of the\\npremises is supposed to guarantee the truth of the conclusion, and\\nthese are known as deductive arguments. In others, the truth\\nof the premises should make the truth of the conclusion more likely\\nwhile not ensuring complete certainty; two well-known classes of such\\narguments are inductive and abductive arguments (a\\ndistinction introduced by Peirce, see entry on\\n C.S. Peirce).\\n Unlike deduction, induction and abduction are thought to be\\nampliative: the conclusion goes beyond what is (logically) contained\\nin the premises. Moreover, a type of argument that features\\nprominently across different philosophical traditions, and yet does\\nnot fit neatly into any of the categories so far discussed, are\\nanalogical arguments. In this section, these four kinds of\\narguments are presented. The section closes with a discussion of\\nfallacious arguments, that is, arguments that seem legitimate and\\n“good”, but in fact are\\n not.[2]\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Types of Arguments\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nValid deductive arguments are those where the truth of the premises\\nnecessitates the truth of the conclusion: the conclusion cannot\\nbut be true if the premises are true. Arguments having this\\nproperty are said to be deductively valid. A valid argument\\nwhose premises are also true is said to be sound. Examples of\\nvalid deductive arguments are the familiar syllogisms, such as:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n\\nAll humans are living beings.\\n\\nAll living beings are mortal.\\n\\nTherefore, all humans are mortal.\\n\\n\",\n \"\\nIn a deductively valid argument, the conclusion will be true in\\nall situations where the premises are true, with no\\nexceptions. A slightly more technical gloss of this idea goes as\\nfollows: in all possible worlds where the premises hold, the\\nconclusion will also hold. This means that, if I know the premises of\\na deductively valid argument to be true of a given situation, then I\\ncan conclude with absolute certainty that the conclusion is also true\\nof that situation. An important property typically associated with\\ndeductive arguments (but with exceptions, such as in relevant logic),\\nand which differentiates them from inductive and abductive arguments,\\nis the property of monotonicity: if premises A and\\nB deductively imply conclusion C, then the addition of\\nany arbitrary premise D will not invalidate the argument. In\\nother words, if the argument “A and B; therefore\\nC” is deductively valid, then the argument\\n“A, B and D; therefore C” is\\nequally deductively valid.\",\n \"\\nDeductive arguments are the objects of study of familiar logical\\nsystems such as (classical) propositional and predicate logic, as well\\nas of subclassical systems such as intuitionistic and relevant logics\\n(although in relevant logic the property of monotonicity does not\\nhold, as it may lead to violations of criteria of relevance between\\npremises and conclusion—see entry on\\n relevance logic).\\n In each of these systems, the relation of logical consequence in\\nquestion satisfies the property of necessary truth-preservation (see\\nentry on\\n logical consequence).\\n This is not surprising, as these systems were originally designed to\\ncapture arguments of a very specific kind, namely\\nmathematical arguments (proofs), in the pioneering work of\\nFrege, Russell, Hilbert, Gentzen, and others. Following a paradigm\\nestablished in ancient Greek mathematics and famously captured in\\nEuclid’s Elements, argumentative steps in mathematical\\nproofs (in this tradition at least) must have the property of\\nnecessary truth preservation (Netz 1999). This paradigm remained\\ninfluential for millennia, and still codifies what can be described as\\nthe “classical” conception of mathematical proof (Dutilh\\nNovaes 2020a), even if practices of proof are ultimately also quite\\ndiverse. (In fact, there is much more to argumentation in mathematics\\nthan just deductive argumentation [Aberdein & Dove 2013].)\",\n \"\\nHowever, a number of philosophers have argued that deductive validity\\nand necessary truth preservation in fact come apart. Some have reached\\nthis conclusion motivated by the familiar logical paradoxes such as\\nthe Liar or Curry’s paradox (Beall 2009; Field 2008; see entries\\non the\\n Liar paradox\\n and on\\n Curry’s paradox).\\n Others have defended the idea that there are such things as\\ncontingent logical truths (Kaplan 1989; Nelson & Zalta\\n2012), which thus challenge the idea of necessary truth preservation.\\nIt has also been suggested that what is preserved in the transition\\nfrom premises to conclusions in deductive arguments is in fact\\nwarrant or assertibility rather than truth (Restall 2004).\\nYet others, such as proponents of preservationist approaches to\\nparaconsistent logic, posit that what is preserved by the deductive\\nconsequence relation is the coherence, or incoherence, of a set of\\npremises (Schotch, Brown, & Jennings 2009; see entry on\\n paraconsistent logic).\\n Nevertheless, it is fair to say that the view that deductive validity\\nis to be understood primarily in terms of necessary truth preservation\\nis still the received view.\",\n \"\\nRelatedly, there are a number of pressing philosophical issues\\npertaining to the justification of deduction, such as the exact nature\\nof the necessity involved in deduction (metaphysical, logical,\\nlinguistic, epistemic; Shapiro 2005), and the possibility of offering\\na non-circular foundation for deduction (Dummett 1978). Furthermore,\\nit is often remarked that the fact that a deductive argument is not\\nampliative may entail that it cannot be informative, which in turn\\nwould mean that its usefulness is quite limited; this problem has been\\ndescribed as “the scandal of deduction” (Sequoiah-Grayson\\n2008).\",\n \"\\nBe that as it may, deductive arguments have occupied a special place\\nin philosophy and the sciences, ever since Aristotle presented the\\nfirst fully-fledged theory of deductive argumentation and reasoning in\\nthe Prior Analytics (and the corresponding theory of\\nscientific demonstration in the Posterior Analytics; see\\n Historical Supplement).\\n The fascination for deductive arguments is understandable, given\\ntheir allure of certainty and indubitability. The more\\ngeometrico (a phrase introduced by Spinoza to describe the\\nargumentative structure of his Ethics as following “a\\ngeometrical style”—see entry on\\n Spinoza)\\n has been influential in many fields other than mathematics. However,\\nthe focus on deductive arguments at the expense of other types of\\narguments has arguably skewed investigations on argument and\\nargumentation too much in one specific direction (see (Bermejo-Luque\\n2020) for a critique of deductivism in the study of\\nargumentation).\",\n \"\\nIn recent decades, the view that everyday reasoning and argumentation\\nby and large do not follow the canons of deductive argumentation has\\nbeen gaining traction. In psychology of reasoning, Oaksford and Chater\\nwere the first to argue already in the 1980s that human reasoning\\n“in the wild” is essentially probabilistic, following the\\nbasic canons of Bayesian probabilities (Oaksford & Chater 2018;\\nElqayam 2018; see\\n section 5.3\\n below). Computer scientists and artificial intelligence researchers\\nhave also developed a strong interest in non-monotonic reasoning and\\nargumentation (Reiter 1980), recognizing that, outside specific\\nscientific contexts, human reasoning tends to be deeply\\ndefeasible (Pollock 1987; see entries on\\n non-monotonic logic\\n and\\n defeasible reasoning).\\n Thus seen, deductive argumentation might be considered as the\\nexception rather than the rule in human argumentative practices taken\\nas a whole (Dutilh Novaes 2020a). But there are others, especially\\nphilosophers, who still maintain that the use of deductive reasoning\\nand argumentation is widespread and extends beyond niches of\\nspecialists (Shapiro 2014; Williamson 2018).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.1 Deduction\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nInductive arguments are arguments where observations about past\\ninstances and regularities lead to conclusions about future instances\\nand general principles. For example, the observation that the sun has\\nrisen in the east every single day until now leads to the conclusion\\nthat it will rise in the east tomorrow, and to the general principle\\n“the sun always rises in the east”. Generally speaking,\\ninductive arguments are based on statistical frequencies, which then\\nlead to generalizations beyond the sample of cases initially under\\nconsideration: from the observed to the unobserved. In a good, i.e.,\\ncogent, inductive argument, the truth of the premises\\nprovides some degree of support for the truth of the conclusion. In\\ncontrast with a deductively valid argument, in an inductive argument\\nthe degree of support will never be maximal, as there is always the\\npossibility of the conclusion being false given the truth of the\\npremises. A gloss in terms of possible worlds might be that, while in\\na deductively valid argument the conclusion will hold in all possible\\nworlds where the premises hold, in a good inductive argument the\\nconclusion will hold in a significant proportion of the possible\\nworlds where the premises hold. The proportion of such worlds may give\\na measure of the strength of support of the premises for the\\nconclusion (see entry on\\n inductive logic).\",\n \"\\nInductive arguments have been recognized and used in science and\\nelsewhere for millennia. The concept of induction (epagoge in\\nGreek) was understood by Aristotle as a progression from particulars\\nto a universal, and figured prominently both in his conception of the\\nscientific method and in dialectical practices (see entry on\\n Aristotle’s logic, section 3.1).\\n However, a deductivist conception of the scientific method remained\\noverall more influential in Aristotelian traditions, inspired by the\\ntheory of scientific demonstration of the Posterior\\nAnalytics. It is only with the so-called “scientific\\nrevolution” of the early modern period that experiments and\\nobservation of individual cases became one of the pillars of\\nscientific methodology, a transition that is strongly associated with\\nthe figure of Francis Bacon (1561–1626; see entry on\\n Francis Bacon).\",\n \"\\nInductive inferences/arguments are ubiquitous both in science and in\\neveryday life, and for the most part quite reliable. The functioning\\nof the world around us seems to display a fair amount of statistical\\nregularity, and this is referred to as the “Uniformity\\nPrinciple” in the literature on the problem of induction (to be\\ndiscussed shortly). Moreover, it has been argued that generalizing\\nfrom previously observed frequencies is the most basic principle of\\nhuman cognition (Clark 2016).\",\n \"\\nHowever, it has long been recognized that inductive\\ninferences/arguments are not unproblematic. Hume famously offered the\\nfirst influential formulation of what became known as “the\\nproblem of induction” in his Treatise of Human Nature\\n(see entries on\\n David Hume\\n and on\\n the problem of induction;\\n Howson 2000). Hume raises the question of what grounds the\\ncorrectness of inductive inferences/arguments, and posits that there\\nmust be an argument establishing the validity of the Uniformity\\nPrinciple for inductive inferences to be truly justified. He goes on\\nto argue that this argument cannot be deductive, as it is not\\ninconceivable that the course of nature may change. But it cannot be\\nprobable either, as probable arguments already presuppose the validity\\nof the Uniformity Principle; circularity would ensue. Since these are\\nthe only two options, he concludes that the Uniformity Principle\\ncannot be established by rational argument, and hence that induction\\ncannot be justified.\",\n \"\\nA more recent influential critique of inductive arguments is the one\\noffered in (Harman 1965). Harman argues that either enumerative\\ninduction is not always warranted, or it is always warranted but\\nconstitutes an uninteresting special case of the more general category\\nof inference to the best explanation (see next section). The upshot is\\nthat, for Harman, induction should not be considered a warranted form\\nof inference in its own right.\",\n \"\\nGiven the centrality of induction for scientific practice, there have\\nbeen numerous attempts to respond to the critics of induction, with\\nvarious degrees of success. Among those, an influential recent\\nresponse to the problem of induction is Norton’s material theory\\nof induction (Norton 2003). But the problem has not prevented\\nscientists and laypeople alike from continuing to use induction\\nwidely. More recently, the use of statistical frequencies for social\\ncategories to draw conclusions about specific individuals has become a\\nmatter of contention, both at the individual level (see entry on\\n implicit bias)\\n and at the institutional level (e.g., the use of predictive\\nalgorithms for law enforcement [Jorgensen Bolinger 2021]). These\\ndebates can be seen as reoccurrences of Hume’s problem of\\ninduction, now in the domain of social rather than of natural\\nphenomena.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.2 Induction\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAn abductive argument is one where, from the observation of a few\\nrelevant facts, a conclusion is drawn as to what could possibly\\nexplain the occurrence of these facts (see entry on\\n abduction).\\n Abduction is widely thought to be ubiquitous both in science and in\\neveryday life, as well as in other specific domains such as the law,\\nmedical diagnosis, and explainable artificial intelligence (Josephson\\n& Josephson 1994). Indeed, a good example of abduction is the\\nclosing argument by a prosecutor in a court of law who, after\\nsummarizing the available evidence, concludes that the most plausible\\nexplanation for it is that the defendant must have committed the crime\\nthey are accused of.\",\n \"\\nLike induction, and unlike deduction, abduction is not necessarily\\ntruth-preserving: in the example above, it is still possible that the\\ndefendant is not guilty after all, and that some other, unexpected\\nphenomena caused the evidence to emerge. But abduction is\\nsignificantly different from induction in that it does not only\\nconcern the generalization of prior observation for prediction (though\\nit may also involve statistical data): rather, abduction is often\\nbackward-looking in that it seeks to explain something that has\\nalready happened. The key notion is that of bringing together\\napparently independent phenomena or events as explanatorily and/or\\ncausally connected to each other, something that is absent from a\\npurely inductive argument that only appeals to observed frequencies.\\nCognitively, abduction taps into the well-known human tendency to seek\\n(causal) explanations for phenomena (Keil 2006).\",\n \"\\nAs noted, deduction and induction have been recognized as important\\nclasses of arguments for millennia; the concept of abduction is by\\ncomparison a latecomer. It is important to notice though that\\nexplanatory arguments as such are not latecomers; indeed,\\nAristotle’s very conception of scientific demonstration is based\\non the concept of explaining causes (see entry on\\n Aristotle).\\n What is recent is the conceptualization of abduction as a special\\nclass of arguments, and the term itself. The term was introduced by\\nPeirce as a third class of inferences distinct from deduction and\\ninduction: for Peirce, abduction is understood as the process of\\nforming explanatory hypotheses, thus leading to new ideas and concepts\\n(whereas for him deduction and induction could not lead to new ideas\\nor theories; see the entry on\\n Peirce). Thus seen,\\nabduction pertains to contexts of discovery, in which case it\\nis not clear that it corresponds to instances of arguments, properly\\nspeaking. In its modern meaning, however, abduction pertains to\\ncontexts of justification, and thus to speak of abductive\\narguments becomes appropriate. An abductive argument is now typically\\nunderstood as an inference to the best explanation (Lipton\\n1971 [2003]), although some authors contend that there are good\\nreasons to distinguish the two concepts (Campos 2011).\",\n \"\\nWhile the main ideas behind abduction may seem simple enough, cashing\\nout more precisely how exactly abduction works is a complex matter\\n(see entry on\\n abduction).\\n Moreover, it is not clear that abductive arguments are always or even\\ngenerally reliable and cogent. Humans seem to have a tendency to\\novershoot in their quest for causal explanations, and often look for\\nsimplicity where there is none to be found (Lombrozo 2007; but see\\nSober 2015 on the significance of parsimony in scientific reasoning).\\nThere are also a number of philosophical worries pertaining to the\\njustification of abduction, especially in scientific contexts; one\\ninfluential critique of abduction/inference to the best explanation is\\nthe one articulated by van Fraassen (Fraassen 1989). A frequent\\nconcern pertains to the connection between explanatory superiority and\\ntruth: are we entitled to conclude that the conclusion of an abductive\\nargument is true solely on the basis of it being a good (or even the\\nbest) explanation for the phenomena in question? It seems that no\\namount of philosophical a priori theorizing will provide justification\\nfor the leap from explanatory superiority to truth. Instead, defenders\\nof abduction tend to offer empirical arguments showing that abduction\\ntends to be a reliable rule of inference. In this sense, abduction and\\ninduction are comparable: they are widely used, grounded in very basic\\nhuman cognitive tendencies, but they give rise to a number of\\ndifficult philosophical problems.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.3 Abduction\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nArguments by analogy are based on the idea that, if two things are\\nsimilar, what is true of one of them is likely to be true of the other\\nas well (see entry on\\n analogy and analogical reasoning).\\n Analogical arguments are widely used across different domains of\\nhuman activity, for example in legal contexts (see entry on\\n precedent and analogy in legal reasoning).\\n As an example, take an argument for the wrongness of farming\\nnon-human animals for food consumption: if an alien species farmed\\nhumans for food, that would be wrong; so, by analogy, it is wrong for\\nus humans to farm non-human animals for food. The general idea is\\ncaptured in the following schema (adapted from the entry on\\n analogy and analogical reasoning;\\n S is the source domain and T the target domain of the\\nanalogy):\",\n \"\\nThe first premise establishes the analogy between two situations,\\nobjects, phenomena etc. The second premise states that the source\\ndomain has a given property. The conclusion is then that the target\\ndomain also has this property, or a suitable counterpart thereof.\\nWhile informative, this schema does not differentiate between good and\\nbad analogical arguments, and so does not offer much by way of\\nexplaining what grounds (good) analogical arguments. Indeed,\\ncontentious cases usually pertain to premise 1, and in particular to\\nwhether S and T are sufficiently similar in a way that\\nis relevant for having or not having feature Q.\",\n \"\\nAnalogical arguments are widely present in all known philosophical\\ntraditions, including three major ancient traditions: Greek, Chinese,\\nand Indian (see\\n Historical Supplement).\\n Analogies abound in ancient Greek philosophical texts, for example in\\nPlato’s dialogues. In the Gorgias, for instance, the\\nknack of rhetoric is compared to pastry-baking—seductive but\\nultimately unhealthy—whereas philosophy would correspond to\\nmedicine—potentially painful and unpleasant but good for the\\nsoul/body (Irani 2017). Aristotle discussed analogy extensively in the\\nPrior Analytics and in the Topics (see\\n section 3.2 of the entry on analogy and analogical reasoning).\\n In ancient Chinese philosophy, analogy occupies a very prominent\\nposition; indeed, it is perhaps the main form of argumentation for\\nChinese thinkers. Mohist thinkers were particularly interested in\\nanalogical arguments (see entries on\\n logic and language in early Chinese philosophy,\\n Mohism and the\\n Mohist canons).\\n In the Latin medieval tradition too analogy received sustained\\nattention, in particular in the domains of logic, theology and\\nmetaphysics (see entry on\\n medieval theories of analogy).\",\n \"\\nAnalogical arguments continue to occupy a central position in\\nphilosophical discussions, and a number of the most prominent\\nphilosophical arguments of the last decades are analogical arguments,\\ne.g., Jarvis Thomson’s violinist argument purportedly showing\\nthe permissibility of abortion (Thomson 1971), and Searle’s\\nChinese Room argument purportedly showing that computers cannot\\ndisplay real understanding (see entry on the\\n Chinese Room argument).\\n (Notice that these two arguments are often described as thought\\nexperiments [see entry on\\n thought experiments],\\n but thought experiments are often based on analogical principles when\\nseeking to make a point that transcends the thought experiment as\\nsuch.) The Achilles’ heel of analogical arguments can be\\nillustrated by these two examples: both arguments have been criticized\\non the grounds that the purported similarity between the source and\\nthe target domains is not sufficient to extrapolate the property of\\nthe source domain (the permissibility of disconnecting from the\\nviolinist; the absence of understanding in the Chinese room) to the\\ntarget domain (abortion; digital computers and artificial\\nintelligence).\",\n \"\\nIn sum, while analogical arguments in general perhaps confer a lesser\\ndegree of conviction than the other three kinds of arguments\\ndiscussed, they are widely used both in professional circles and in\\neveryday life. They have rightly attracted a fair amount of attention\\nfrom scholars in different disciplines, and remain an important object\\nof study (see entry on\\n analogy and analogical reasoning).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.4 Analogy\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nOne of the most extensively studied types of arguments throughout the\\ncenturies are, perhaps surprisingly, arguments that appear legitimate\\nbut are not, known as fallacious arguments.\\nFrom early on, the investigation of such arguments occupied a\\nprominent position in Aristotelian logical traditions, inspired in\\nparticular by his book Sophistical Refutations\\n(see\\n Historical Supplement).\\n The thought is that, to argue well, it is not sufficient to be able\\nto produce and recognize good arguments; it is equally (or perhaps\\neven more) important to be able to recognize bad arguments by others,\\nand to avoid producing bad arguments oneself. This is particularly\\ntrue of the tricky cases, namely arguments that appear legitimate but\\nare not, i.e., fallacies.\",\n \"\\nSome well-know types of fallacies include (see entry on\\n fallacies\\n for a more extensive discussion):\",\n \"\\nBeyond their (presumed?) usefulness in teaching argumentative skills,\\nthe literature on fallacies raises a number of important philosophical\\ndiscussions, such as: What determines when an argument is fallacious or rather a\\nlegitimate argument? (See\\n section 4.3\\n below on Bayesian accounts of fallacies) What causes certain arguments to be fallacious? Is the focus on fallacies a useful approach to arguments at all?\\n(Massey 1981) Despite the occasional criticism, the concept of fallacies remains\\ncentral in the study of arguments and argumentation.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.5 Fallacies\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nJust as there are different types of arguments, there are different\\ntypes of argumentative situations, depending on the communicative\\ngoals of the persons involved and background conditions. Argumentation\\nmay occur when people are trying to reach consensus in a situation of\\ndissent, but it may also occur when scientists discuss their findings\\nwith each other (to name but two examples). Specific rules of\\nargumentative engagement may vary depending on these different types\\nof argumentation.\",\n \"\\nA related point extensively discussed in the recent literature\\npertains to the function(s) of\\n argumentation.[3]\\n What’s the point of arguing? While it is often recognized that\\nargumentation may have multiple functions, different authors tend to\\nemphasize specific functions for argumentation at the expense of\\nothers. This section offers an overview of discussions on types of\\nargumentation and its functions, demonstrating that argumentation is a\\nmultifaceted phenomenon that has different applications in different\\ncircumstances.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Types of Argumentation\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nA question that has received much attention in the literature of the\\npast decades pertains to whether the activity of argumentation is\\nprimarily adversarial or primarily cooperative. This question in fact\\ncorresponds to two sub-questions: the descriptive question of\\nwhether instances of argumentation are on the whole primarily\\nadversarial or cooperative; and the normative question of\\nwhether argumentation should be (primarily) adversarial or\\ncooperative. A number of authors have answered “adversarial” to the\\ndescriptive question and “cooperative” to the normative\\nquestion, thus identifying a discrepancy between practices and\\nnormative ideals that must be remedied (or so they claim; Cohen 1995).\",\n \"\\n\\nA case in point: recently, a number of far-right Internet personalities\\nhave advocated the idea that argumentation can be used to overpower\\none’s opponents, as described in the book The Art of the\\nArgument: Western Civilization’s Last Stand (2017) by the\\nwhite supremacist S. Molyneux. Such aggressive practices reflect a\\nvision of argumentation as a kind of competition or battle, where the\\ngoal is to “score points” and “beat the\\nopponent”. Authors who have criticized (overly) adversarial\\npractices of argumentation include (Moulton 1983; Gilbert 1994; Rooney\\n2012; Hundleby 2013; Bailin & Battersby 2016). Many (but not all)\\nof these authors formulated their criticism specifically from a\\nfeminist perspective (see entry on\\n feminist perspectives on argumentation).\",\n \"\\nFeminist critiques of adversarial argumentation challenge ideals of\\nargumentation as a form of competition, where masculine-coded values\\nof aggression and violence prevail (Kidd 2020). For these authors,\\nsuch ideals encourage argumentative performances where excessive use\\nof forcefulness is on display. Instances of aggressive argumentation\\nin turn have a number of problematic consequences: epistemic\\nconsequences—the pursuit of truth is not best served by\\nadversarial argumentation—as well as moral/ethical/political\\nconsequences—these practices exclude a number of people from\\nparticipating in argumentative encounters, namely those for whom\\ndisplays of aggression do not constitute socially acceptable behavior\\n(women and other socially disadvantaged groups in particular). These\\nauthors defend alternative conceptions of argumentation as a\\ncooperative, nurturing activity (Gilbert 1994; Bailin & Battersby\\n2016), which are traditionally feminine-coded values. Crucially, they\\nview adversarial conceptions of argumentation as optional,\\nmaintaining that the alternatives are equally legitimate and that\\ncooperative conceptions should be adopted and cultivated.\",\n \"\\nBy contrast, others have argued that adversariality, when suitably\\nunderstood, can be seen as an integral and in fact desirable component\\nof argumentation (Govier 1999; Aikin 2011; Casey 2020; but notice that\\nthese authors each develop different accounts of adversariality in\\nargumentation). Such authors answer “adversarial” both to\\nthe descriptive and to the normative questions stated above. One\\noverall theme is the need to draw a distinction between (excessive)\\naggressiveness and adversariality as such. Govier, for example,\\ndistinguishes between ancillary (negative) adversariality and minimal\\nadversariality (Govier 1999). The thought is that, while the feminist\\ncritique of excessive aggression in argumentation is well taken,\\nadversariality conceived and practiced in different ways need not have\\nthe detrimental consequences of more extreme versions of belligerent\\nargumentation. Moreover, for these authors, adversariality in\\nargumentation is simply not optional: it is an intrinsic feature of\\nargumentative practices, but these practices also require a background\\nof cooperation and agreement regarding, e.g., the accepted rules of\\ninference.\",\n \"\\nBut ultimately, the presumed opposition between adversarial and\\ncooperative conceptions of argumentation may well be merely apparent.\\nIt may be argued for example that actual argumentative encounters\\nought to be adversarial or cooperative to different degrees, as\\ndifferent types of argumentation are required for different situations\\n(Dutilh Novaes forthcoming). Indeed, perhaps we should not look for a\\none-fits-all model of how argumentation ought to be conducted across\\ndifferent contexts and situation, given the diversity of uses of\\nargumentation.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.1 Adversarial and cooperative argumentation\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nWe speak of argumentation as an epistemic practice when we take its\\nprimary purpose to be that of improving our beliefs and increasing\\nknowledge, or of fostering understanding. To engage in argumentation\\ncan be a way to acquire more accurate beliefs: by examining critically\\nreasons for and against a given position, we would be able to weed out\\nweaker, poorly justified beliefs (likely to be false) and end up with\\nstronger, suitably justified beliefs (likely to be true). From this\\nperspective, the goal of engaging in argumentation is to\\nlearn, i.e., to improve one’s epistemic position (as\\nopposed to argumentation “to win” (Fisher & Keil\\n2016)). Indeed, argumentation is often said to be\\ntruth-conducive (Betz 2013).\",\n \"\\nThe idea that argumentation can be an epistemically beneficial process\\nis as old as philosophy itself. In every major historical\\nphilosophical tradition, argumentation is viewed as an essential\\ncomponent of philosophical reflection precisely because it may be used\\nto aim at the truth (indeed this is the core of Plato’s critique\\nof the Sophists and their excessive focus on persuasion at the expense\\nof truth (Irani 2017; see\\n Historical Supplement).\\n Recent proponents of an epistemological approach to argumentation\\ninclude (Goldman 2004; Lumer 2005; Biro & Siegel 2006). Alvin\\nGoldman captures this general idea in the following terms:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nNorms of good argumentation are substantially dedicated to the\\npromotion of truthful speech and the exposure of falsehood, whether\\nintentional or unintentional. […] Norms of good argumentation\\nare part of a practice to encourage the exchange of truths through\\nsincere, non-negligent, and mutually corrective speech. (Goldman 1994:\\n30)\\n\",\n \"\\nOf course, it is at least in theory possible to engage in\\nargumentation with oneself along these lines, solitarily weighing the\\npros and cons of a position. But a number of philosophers, most\\nnotably John Stuart Mill, maintain that interpersonal\\nargumentative situations, involving people who truly disagree with\\neach other, work best to realize the epistemic potential of\\nargumentation to improve our beliefs (a point he developed in On\\nLiberty (1859; see entry on\\n John Stuart Mill).\\n When our ideas are challenged by engagement with those who disagree\\nwith us, we are forced to consider our own beliefs more thoroughly and\\ncritically. The result is that the remaining beliefs, those that have\\nsurvived critical challenge, will be better grounded than those we\\nheld before such encounters. Dissenters thus force us to stay\\nepistemically alert instead of becoming too comfortable with existing,\\nentrenched beliefs. On this conception, arguers cooperate with each\\nother precisely by being adversarial, i.e., by adopting a critical\\nstance towards the positions one disagrees with.\",\n \"\\nThe view that argumentation aims at epistemic improvement is in many\\nsenses appealing, but it is doubtful that it reflects the actual\\noutcomes of argumentation in many real-life situations. Indeed, it\\nseems that, more often than not, we are not Millians when arguing: we\\ndo not tend to engage with dissenting opinions with an open mind.\\nIndeed, there is quite some evidence suggesting that arguments are in\\nfact not a very efficient means to change minds in most real-life\\nsituations (Gordon-Smith 2019). People typically do not like to change\\ntheir minds about firmly entrenched beliefs, and so when confronted\\nwith arguments or evidence that contradict these beliefs, they tend to\\neither look away or to discredit the source of the argument as\\nunreliable (Dutilh Novaes 2020c)—a phenomenon also known as\\n“confirmation bias” (Nickerson 1998).\",\n \"\\nIn particular, arguments that threaten our core beliefs and our sense\\nof belonging to a group (e.g., political beliefs) typically trigger\\nall kinds of motivated reasoning (Taber & Lodge 2006; Kahan 2017)\\nwhereby one outright rejects those arguments without properly engaging\\nwith their content. Relatedly, when choosing among a vast supply of\\noptions, people tend to gravitate towards content and sources that\\nconfirm their existing opinions, thus giving rise to so-called\\n“echo chambers” and “epistemic bubbles”\\n(Nguyen 2020). Furthermore, some arguments can be deceptively\\nconvincing in that they look valid but are not (Tindale 2007; see\\nentry on\\n fallacies).\\n Because most of us are arguably not very good at spotting fallacious\\narguments, especially if they are arguments that lend support to the\\nbeliefs we already hold, engaging in argumentation may in fact\\ndecrease the accuracy of our beliefs by persuading us of\\nfalse conclusions with incorrect arguments (Fantl 2018).\",\n \"\\nIn sum, despite the optimism of Mill and many others, it seems that\\nengaging in argumentation will not automatically improve our beliefs\\n(even if this may occur in some\\n circumstances).[4]\\n However, it may still be argued that an epistemological approach to\\nargumentation can serve the purpose of providing a normative\\nideal for argumentative practices, even if it is not always a\\ndescriptively accurate account of these practices in the messy real\\nworld. Moreover, at least some concrete instances of\\nargumentation, in particular argumentation in science (see\\n section 4.5\\n below) seem to offer successful examples of epistemic-oriented\\nargumentative practices.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.2 Argumentation as an epistemic practice\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAnother important strand in the literature on argumentation are\\ntheories that view consensus as the primary goal of\\nargumentative processes: to eliminate or resolve a difference of\\n(expressed) opinion. The tradition of pragma-dialectics is a prominent\\nrecent exponent of this strand (Eemeren & Grootendorst 2004).\\nThese consensus-oriented approaches are motivated by the social\\ncomplexity of human life, and the attribution of a role of social\\ncoordination to argumentation. Because humans are social animals who\\nmust often cooperate with other humans to successfully accomplish\\ncertain tasks, they must have mechanisms to align their beliefs and\\nintentions, and subsequently their actions (Tomasello 2014). The\\nthought is that argumentation would be a particularly suitable\\nmechanism for such alignment, as an exchange of reasons would make it\\nmore likely that differences of opinion would decrease (Norman 2016).\\nThis may happen precisely because argumentation would be a good way to\\ntrack truths and avoid falsehoods, as discussed in the previous\\nsection; by being involved in the same epistemic process of exchanging\\nreasons, the participants in an argumentative situation would all come\\nto converge towards the truth, and thus the upshot would be that they\\nalso come to agree with each other. However, consensus-oriented views\\nneed not presuppose that argumentation is truth-conducive: the\\nultimate goal of such instances of argumentation is that of social\\ncoordination, and for this tracking truth is not a requirement\\n(Patterson 2011).\",\n \"\\nIn particular, the very notion of deliberative democracy is\\nviewed as resting crucially on argumentative practices that aim for\\nconsensus (Fishkin 2016; see entry on\\n democracy).\\n (For present purposes, “deliberation” and\\n“argumentation” can be treated as roughly synonymous). In\\na deliberative democracy, for a decision to be legitimate, it must be\\npreceded by authentic public deliberation—a discussion of the\\npros and cons of the different options—not merely the\\naggregation of preferences that occurs in voting. Moreover, in\\ndemocratic deliberation, when full consensus does not emerge, the\\nparties involved may opt for a compromise solution, e.g., a\\ncoalition-based political system.\",\n \"\\nA prominent theorist of deliberative democracy thus understood is\\nJürgen Habermas, whose “discourse theory of law and\\ndemocracy” relies heavily on practices of political\\njustification and argumentation taking place in what he calls\\n“the public sphere” (Habermas 1992 [1996]; 1981 [1984];\\nsee entry on\\n Habermas).\\n He starts from the idea that politics allows for the collective\\norganization of people’s lives, including the common rules they\\nwill live by. Political argumentation is a form of communicative\\npractice, so general assumptions for communicative practices in\\ngeneral apply. However, additional assumptions apply as well (Olson\\n2011 [2014]). In particular, deliberating participants must accept\\nthat anyone can participate in these discursive practices (democratic\\ndeliberation should be inclusive), and that anyone can introduce and\\nchallenge claims that are made in the public sphere (democratic\\ndeliberation should be free). They must also see one another as having\\nequal status, at least for the purposes of deliberation (democratic\\ndeliberation should be equal). In turn, critics of Habermas’s\\naccount view it as unrealistic, as it presupposes an ideal situation\\nwhere all citizens are treated equally and engage in public debates in\\ngood faith (Mouffe 1999; Geuss 2019).\",\n \"\\nMore generally, it seems that it is only under quite specific\\nconditions that argumentation reliably leads to consensus (as also\\nsuggested by formal modeling of argumentative situations (Betz 2013;\\nOlsson 2013; Mäs & Flache 2013)). Consensus-oriented\\nargumentation seems to work well in cooperative contexts, but not so much in situations of conflict (Dutilh Novaes forthcoming). In\\nparticular, the discussing parties must already have a significant\\namount of background agreement—especially agreement on what\\ncounts as a legitimate argument or compelling evidence—for\\nargumentation and deliberation to lead to consensus. Especially in\\nsituations of deep disagreement (Fogelin 1985), it seems that the\\npotential of argumentation to lead to consensus is quite limited.\\nInstead, in many real-life situations, argumentation often leads to\\nthe opposite result; people disagree with each other even more after\\nengaging in argumentation (Sunstein 2002). This is the well-documented\\nphenomenon of group polarization, which occurs when an\\ninitial position or tendency of individual members of a group becomes\\nmore extreme after group discussion (Isenberg 1986).\",\n \"\\nIn fact, it may be argued that argumentation will often create or\\nexacerbate conflict and adversariality, rather than leading to the\\nresolution of differences of opinions. Furthermore, a focus on\\nconsensus may end up reinforcing and perpetuating existing unequal\\npower relations in a society. \",\n \"\\n\\n\\nIn an unjust society, what purports to be a cooperative exchange of\\nreasons really perpetuates patterns of oppression. (Goodwin 2007: 77)\\n\\n\",\n \"\\nThis general point has been made by a number of political thinkers\\n(e.g., Young 2000), who have highlighted the exclusionary implications\\nof consensus-oriented political deliberation. The upshot is that\\nconsensus may not only be an unrealistic goal for argumentation; it\\nmay not even be a desirable goal for argumentation in a\\nnumber of situations (e.g., when there is great power imbalance).\\nDespite these concerns, the view that the primary goal of\\nargumentation is to aim for consensus remains influential in the\\nliterature.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.3 Consensus-oriented argumentation\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nFinally, a number of authors have attributed to argumentation the\\npotential to manage (pre-existing) conflict. In a sense, the\\nconsensus-oriented view of argumentation just discussed is a special\\ncase of conflict management argumentation, based on the assumption\\nthat the best way to manage conflict and disagreement is to aim for\\nconsensus and thus eliminate conflict. But conflict can be\\nmanaged in different ways, not all of them leading to consensus;\\nindeed, some authors maintain that argumentation may help mitigate\\nconflict even when the explicit aim is not that of reaching consensus.\\nImportantly, authors who identify conflict management (or variations\\nthereof) as a function for argumentation differ in their overall\\nappreciation of the value of argumentation: some take it to be at best\\nfutile and at worst\\n destructive,[5]\\n while others attribute a more positive role to argumentation in\\nconflict management.\",\n \"\\nTo this category also belong the conceptualizations of\\nargumentation-as-war discussed (and criticized) by a number of authors\\n(Cohen 1995; Bailin & Battersby 2016); in such cases, conflict is\\nnot so much managed but rather enacted (and possibly\\nexacerbated) by means of argumentation. Thus seen, the function of\\nargumentation would not be fundamentally different from the function\\nof organized competitive activities such as sports or even war (with\\nsuitable rules of engagement; Aikin 2011).\",\n \"\\nWhen conflict emerges, people have various options: they may choose\\nnot to engage and instead prefer to flee; they may go into full-blown\\nfighting mode, which may include physical aggression; or they may opt\\nfor approaches somewhere in between the fight-or-flee extremes of the\\nspectrum. Argumentation can be plausibly classified as an intermediary\\nresponse:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n[A]rgument literally is a form of pacifism—we are using words\\ninstead of swords to settle our disputes. With argument, we settle our\\ndisputes in ways that are most respectful of those who\\ndisagree—we do not buy them off, we do not threaten them, and we\\ndo not beat them into submission. Instead, we give them reasons that\\nbear on the truth or falsity of their beliefs. However adversarial\\nargument may be, it isn’t bombing. […] argument is a\\npacifistic replacement for truly violent solutions to\\ndisagreements…. (Aikin 2011: 256)\\n\",\n \"\\nThis is not to say that argumentation will always or even typically be\\nthe best approach to handle conflict and disagreement; the point is\\nrather that argumentation at least has the potential to do so,\\nprovided that the background conditions are suitable and that\\nprovisions to mitigate escalation are in place (Aikin 2011). Versions\\nof this view can be found in the work of proponents of agonistic\\nconceptions of democracy and political deliberation (Wenman 2013; see\\nentry on\\n feminist political philosophy).\\n For agonist thinkers, conflict and strife are inevitable features of\\nhuman lives, and so cannot be eliminated; but they can be managed. One\\nof them is Chantal Mouffe (Mouffe 2000), for whom democratic\\npractices, including argumentation/deliberation, can serve to contain\\nhostility and transform it into more constructive forms of contest.\\nHowever, it is far from obvious that argumentation by itself will\\nsuffice to manage conflict; typically, other kinds of intervention\\nmust be involved (Young 2000), as the risk of argumentation being used\\nto exercise power rather than as a tool to manage conflict always\\nlooms large (van Laar & Krabbe 2019).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.4 Argumentation and conflict management\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nFrom these observations on different types of argumentation, a\\npluralistic picture emerges: argumentation, understood as the exchange\\nof reasons to justify claims, seems to have different applications in\\ndifferent situations. However, it is not clear that some of the goals\\noften attributed to argumentation such as epistemic improvement and\\nreaching consensus can in fact be reliably achieved in many real life\\nsituations. Does this mean that argumentation is useless and futile?\\nNot necessarily, but it may mean that engaging in argumentation will\\nnot always be the optimal response in a number of contexts.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.5 Conclusion\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nArgumentation is practiced and studied in many fields of inquiry;\\nphilosophers interested in argumentation have much to benefit from\\nengaging with these bodies of research as well.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Argumentation Across Fields of Inquiry and Social Practices\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nTo understand the emergence of argumentation theory as a specific\\nfield of research in the twentieth century, a brief discussion of\\npreceding events is necessary. In the nineteenth century, a number of\\ntextbooks aiming to improve everyday reasoning via public education\\nemphasized logical and rhetorical concerns, such as those by Richard\\nWhately (see entry on\\n fallacies).\\n As noted in\\n section 3.2,\\n John Stuart Mill also had a keen interest in argumentation and its\\nrole in public discourse (Mill 1859), as well as an interest in logic\\nand reasoning (see entries on\\n Mill\\n and on\\n fallacies).\\n But with the advent of mathematical logic in the final decades of the nineteenth century,\\nlogic and the study of ordinary, everyday argumentation came apart, as\\nlogicians such as Frege, Hilbert, Russell etc. were primarily\\ninterested in mathematical reasoning and argumentation. As a\\nresult, their logical systems are not particularly suitable to study\\neveryday argumentation, as this is simply not what they were designed\\nto\\n do.[6]\",\n \"\\nNevertheless, in the twentieth century a number of authors took\\ninspiration from developments in formal logic and expanded the use of\\nlogical tools to the analysis of ordinary argumentation. A pioneer in\\nthis tradition is Susan Stebbing, who wrote what can be seen as the\\nfirst textbook in analytic philosophy, and then went on to write a\\nnumber of books aimed at a general audience addressing everyday and\\npublic discourse from a philosophical/logical perspective (see entry\\non\\n Susan Stebbing).\\n Her 1939 book Thinking to Some Purpose, which can be\\nconsidered as one of the first textbooks in critical thinking, was\\nwidely read at the time, but did not become particularly influential\\nfor the development of argumentation theory in the decades to\\nfollow.\",\n \"\\nBy contrast, Stephen Toulmin’s 1958 book The Uses of\\nArgument has been tremendously influential in a wide range of\\nfields, including critical thinking education, rhetoric, speech\\ncommunication, and computer science (perhaps even more so than in\\nToulmin’s own original field, philosophy). Toulmin’s aim\\nwas to criticize the assumption (widely held by Anglo-American\\nphilosophers at the time) that any significant argument can be\\nformulated in purely formal, deductive terms, using the formal logical\\nsystems that had emerged in the preceding decades (see (Eemeren,\\nGarssen, et al. 2014: ch. 4). While this critique was met with much\\nhostility among fellow philosophers, it eventually gave rise to an\\nalternative way of approaching argumentation, which is often described\\nas “informal logic” (see entry on\\n informal logic).\\n This approach seeks to engage and analyze instances of argumentation\\nin everyday life; it recognizes that, while useful, the tools of\\ndeductive logic alone do not suffice to investigate argumentation in\\nall its complexity and pragmatic import. In a similar vein, Charles\\nHamblin’s 1970 book Fallacies reinvigorated the study\\nof fallacies in the context of argumentation by re-emphasizing\\n(following Aristotle) the importance of a dialectical-dialogical\\nbackground when reflecting on fallacies in argumentation (see entry on\\n fallacies).\",\n \"\\nAround the same time as Toulmin, Chaïm Perelman and Lucie\\nOlbrechts-Tyteca were developing an approach to argumentation that\\nemphasized its persuasive component. To this end, they turned to\\nclassical theories of rhetoric, and adapted them to give rise to what\\nthey described as the “New Rhetoric”. Their book\\nTraité de l’argumentation: La nouvelle\\nrhétorique was published in 1958 in French, and translated\\ninto English in 1969. Its key idea: \",\n \"\\n\\n\\nsince argumentation aims at securing the adherence of those to whom it\\nis addressed, it is, in its entirety, relative to the audience to be\\ninfluenced. (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca 1958 [1969: 19]) \\n\",\n \"\\nThey introduced the influential distinction between universal\\nand particular audiences: while every argument is directed at\\na specific individual or group, the concept of a universal audience\\nserves as a normative ideal encapsulating shared standards of\\nagreement on what counts as legitimate argumentation (see Eemeren,\\nGarssen, et al. 2014: ch. 5).\",\n \"\\nThe work of these pioneers provided the foundations for subsequent\\nresearch in argumentation theory. One approach that became influential\\nin the following decades is the pragma-dialectics tradition developed\\nby Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst (Eemeren & Grootendorst\\n1984, 2004). They also founded the journal Argumentation, one\\nof the flagship journals in argumentation theory. Pragma-dialectics\\nwas developed to study argumentation as a discourse activity, a\\ncomplex speech act that occurs as part of interactional linguistic\\nactivities with specific communicative goals (“pragma”\\nrefers to the functional perspective of goals, and\\n“dialectic” to the interactive component). For these\\nauthors, argumentative discourse is primarily directed at the\\nreasonable resolution of a difference of opinion. Pragma-dialectics\\nhas a descriptive as well as a normative component, thus offering\\ntools both for the analysis of concrete instances of argumentation and\\nfor the evaluation of argumentation correctness and success (see\\nEemeren, Garssen, et al. 2014: ch. 10).\",\n \"\\nAnother leading author in argumentation theory is Douglas Walton, who\\npioneered the argument schemes approach to argumentation that borrows\\ntools from formal logic but expands them so as to treat a wider range\\nof arguments than those covered by traditional logical systems\\n(Walton, Reed, & Macagno 2008). Walton also formulated an\\ninfluential account of argumentation in dialogue in collaboration with\\nErik Krabbe (Walton & Krabbe 1995). Ralph Johnson and Anthony\\nBlair further helped to consolidate the field of argumentation theory\\nand informal logic by founding the Centre for Research in Reasoning,\\nArgumentation, and Rhetoric in Windsor (Ontario, Canada), and by\\ninitiating the journal Informal Logic. Their textbook\\nLogical Self-Defense (Johnson & Blair 1977) has also been\\nparticularly influential.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.1 Argumentation theory\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe study of argumentation within computer science and artificial\\nintelligence is a thriving field of research, with dedicated journals\\nsuch as Argument and Computation and regular conference\\nseries such as COMMA (International Conference on Computational Models\\nof Argument; see Rahwan & Simari 2009 and Eemeren, Garssen, et al.\\n2014: ch. 11 for overviews).\",\n \"\\nThe historical roots of argumentation research in artificial\\nintelligence can be traced back to work on non-monotonic logics (see\\nentry on\\n non-monotonic logics)\\n and defeasible reasoning (see entry on\\n defeasible reasoning).\\n Since then, three main different perspectives have emerged (Eemeren,\\nGarssen, et al. 2014: ch. 11): the theoretical systems perspective,\\nwhere the focus is on theoretical and formal models of argumentation\\n(following the tradition of philosophical and formal logic); the\\nartificial systems perspective, where the aim is to build computer\\nprograms that model or support argumentative tasks, for instance, in\\nonline dialogue games or in expert systems; the natural systems\\nperspective, which investigates argumentation in its natural form with\\nthe help of computational tools (e.g., argumentation mining [Peldszus\\n& Stede 2013; Habernal & Gurevych 2017], where computational\\nmethods are used to identify argumentative structures in large corpora\\nof texts).\",\n \"\\nAn influential approach in this research tradition is that of\\nabstract argumentation frameworks, initiated by the\\npioneering work of Dung (1995). Before that, argumentation in AI was\\nstudied mostly under the inspiration of concepts coming from informal\\nlogic such as argumentation schemes, context, stages of dialogues and\\nargument moves. By contrast, the key notion in the framework proposed\\nby Dung is that of argument attack, understood as an abstract\\nformal relation roughly intended to capture the idea that it is\\npossible to challenge an argument by means of another argument\\n(assertions are understood as a special case of arguments with zero\\npremises). Arguments can then be represented in networks of attacks\\nand defenses: an argument A can attack an argument B,\\nand B in turn may attack further arguments C and\\nD (the connection with the notion of defeaters is a\\nnatural one, which Dung also addresses).\",\n \"\\nBesides abstract argumentation, three other important lines of\\nresearch in AI are: the (internal) structure of arguments;\\nargumentation in multi-agent systems; applications to specific tasks\\nand domains (Rahwan & Siwari 2009). The structural approach\\ninvestigates formally features such as argument strength/force (e.g.,\\na conclusive argument is stronger than a defeasible argument),\\nargument schemes (Bex, Prakken, Reed, & Walton 2003) etc.\\nArgumentation in multi-agent systems is a thriving subfield with its\\nown dedicated conference series (ArgMAS), based on the recognition\\nthat argumentation is a particularly suitable vehicle to facilitate\\ninteraction in the artificial environments studied by AI researchers\\nworking on multi-agent systems (see a special issue of the journal\\nArgument & Computation [Atkinson, Cerutti, et al. 2016]).\\nFinally, computational approaches in argumentation have also thrived\\nwith respect to specific domains and applications, such as legal\\nargumentation (Prakken & Sartor 2015). Recently, as a reaction to\\nthe machine-learning paradigm, the idea of explainable AI has gotten\\ntraction, and the concept of argumentation is thought to play a\\nfundamental role for explainable AI (Sklar & Azhar 2018).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.2 Artificial intelligence and computer science\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nArgumentation is also an important topic of investigation within\\ncognitive science and psychology. Researchers in these fields are\\npredominantly interested in the descriptive question of how people in\\nfact engage in argumentation, rather than in the normative question of\\nhow they ought to do it (although some of them have also drawn\\nnormative conclusions, e.g., Hahn & Oaksford 2006; Hahn &\\nHornikx, 2016). Controlled experiments are one of the ways in which the descriptive question can be investigated.\",\n \"\\nSystematic research specifically on argumentation within\\ncognitive science and psychology has significantly increased over the\\nlast 10 years. Before that, there had been extensive research on\\nreasoning conceived as an individual, internal process, much of which\\nhad been conducted using task materials such as syllogistic arguments\\n(Dutilh Novaes 2020b). But due to what may be described as an\\nindividualist bias in cognitive science and psychology (Mercier 2018),\\nthese researchers did not draw explicit connections between their\\nfindings and the public acts of “giving and asking for\\nreasons”. It is only somewhat recently that argumentation began\\nto receive sustained attention from these researchers. The\\ninvestigations of Hugo Mercier and colleagues (Mercier & Sperber\\n2017; Mercier 2018) and of Ulrike Hahn and colleagues (Hahn &\\nOaksford 2007; Hornikx & Hahn 2012; Collins & Hahn 2018) have\\nbeen particularly influential. (See also Paglieri, Bonelli, &\\nFelletti 2016, an edited volume containing a representative overview\\nof research on the psychology of argumentation.) Another interesting\\nline of research has been the study of the development of reasoning\\nand argumentative skills in young children (Köymen, Mammen, &\\nTomasello 2016; Köymen & Tomasello 2020).\",\n \"\\nMercier and Sperber defend an interactionist account of reasoning,\\naccording to which the primary function of reasoning is for social\\ninteractions, where reasons are exchanged and receivers of reasons\\ndecide whether they find them convincing—in other words, for\\nargumentation (Mercier & Sperber 2017). They review a wealth of\\nevidence suggesting that reasoning is rather flawed when it comes to\\ndrawing conclusions from premises in order to expand one’s\\nknowledge. From this they conclude, on the basis of evolutionary\\narguments, that the function of reasoning must be a different one,\\nindeed one that responds to features of human sociality and the need\\nto exercise epistemic vigilance when receiving information from\\nothers. This account has inaugurated a rich research program which they have been pursuing with colleagues for over\\na decade now, and which has delivered some interesting results—for\\nexample, that we seem to be better at evaluating the quality of\\narguments proposed by others than at formulating high-quality arguments\\nourselves (Mercier 2018).\",\n \"\\nIn the context of the Bayesian (see entry on\\n Bayes’ theorem)\\n approach to reasoning that was first developed by Mike Oaksford and\\nNick Chater in the 1980s (Oaksford & Chater 2018), Hahn and\\ncolleagues have extended the Bayesian framework to the investigation\\nof argumentation. They claim that Bayesian probabilities offer an\\naccurate descriptive model of how people evaluate the strength of\\narguments (Hahn & Oaksford 2007) as well as a solid perspective to\\naddress normative questions pertaining to argument strength (Hahn\\n& Oaksford 2006; Hahn & Hornikx 2016). The Bayesian approach\\nallows for the formulation of probabilistic measures of argument\\nstrength, showing that many so-called “fallacies” may\\nnevertheless be good arguments in the sense that they considerably\\nraise the probability of the conclusion. For example, deductively\\ninvalid argument schemes (such as affirming the consequent (AC) and\\ndenying the antecedent (DA)) can also provide considerable support for\\na conclusion, depending on the contents in question. The extent to\\nwhich this is the case depends primarily on the specific informational\\ncontext, captured by the prior probability distribution, not on the\\nstructure of the argument. This means that some instances of, say, AC,\\nmay offer support to a conclusion while others may fail to do so (Eva\\n& Hartmann 2018). Thus seen, Bayesian argumentation represents a\\nsignificantly different approach to argumentation from those inspired\\nby logic (e.g., argument schemes), but they are not necessarily incompatible;\\nthey may well be complementary perspectives (see also [Zenker\\n2013]).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.3 Cognitive science and psychology\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nArgumentation is primarily (though not exclusively) a linguistic\\nphenomenon. Accordingly, argumentation is extensively studied in\\nfields dedicated to the study of language, such as rhetoric,\\nlinguistics, discourse analysis, communication, and pragmatics, among\\nothers (see Eemeren, Garssen, et al. 2014: chs 8 and 9). Researchers\\nin these areas develop general theoretical models of argumentation and\\ninvestigate concrete instances of argumentation in specific domains on\\nthe basis of linguistic corpora, discourse analysis, and other methods\\nused in the language sciences (see the edited volume Oswald, Herman,\\n& Jacquin [2018] for a sample of the different lines of research).\\nOverall, research on argumentation within the language sciences tends\\nto focus primarily on concrete occurrences of arguments in a variety\\nof domains, adopting a largely descriptive rather than normative\\nperspective (though some of these researchers also tackle normative\\nconsiderations).\",\n \"\\nSome of these analyses approach arguments and argumentation primarily\\nas text or self-contained speeches, while others emphasize the\\ninterpersonal, communicative nature of “face-to-face”\\nargumentation (see Eemeren, Garssen, et al. 2014: section 8.9). One\\nprominent approach in this tradition is due to communication scholars\\nSally Jackson and Scott Jacobs. They have drawn on speech act theory\\nand conversation analysis to investigate argumentation as a\\ndisagreement-relevant expansion of speech acts that, through mutually\\nrecognized reasons, allows us to manage disagreements despite the\\nchallenges they pose for communication and coordination of activities\\n(Jackson & Jacobs 1980; Jackson 2019). Moreover, they perceive\\ninstitutionalized practices of argumentation and concrete\\n“argumentation designs”—such as for example\\nrandomized controlled trials in medicine—as interventions aimed\\nat improving methods of disagreement management through\\nargumentation.\",\n \"\\nAnother communication scholar, Dale Hample, has further argued for the\\nimportance of approaching argumentation as an essentially\\ninterpersonal communicative activity (Hample 2006, 2018). This\\nperspective allows for the consideration of a broader range of\\nfactors, not only the arguments themselves but also (and primarily)\\nthe people involved in those processes: their motivations,\\npsychological processes, and emotions. It also allows for the\\nformulation of questions pertaining to individual as well as cultural\\ndifferences in argumentative styles (see\\n section 5.3\\n below).\",\n \"\\nAnother illuminating perspective views argumentative practices as\\ninherently tied to broader socio-cultural contexts (Amossy 2009). The\\nJournal of Argumentation in Context was founded in 2012\\nprecisely to promote a contextual approach to argumentation. Once\\nargumentation is no longer only considered in abstraction from\\nconcrete instances taking place in real-life situations, it becomes\\nimperative to recognize that argumentation does not take place in a\\nvacuum; typically, argumentative practices are embedded in other kinds\\nof practices and institutions, against the background of specific\\nsocio-cultural, political structures. The method of discourse analysis\\nis particularly suitable for a broader perspective on argumentation,\\nas shown by the work of Ruth Amossy (2002) and Marianne Doury (2009),\\namong others.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.4 Language and communication\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nArgumentation is crucial in a number of specific organized social\\npractices, in particular in politics, science, law, and education. The\\nrelevant argumentative practices are studied in each of the\\ncorresponding knowledge domains; indeed, while some general principles\\nmay govern argumentative practices across the board, some may be\\nspecific to particular applications and domains.\",\n \"\\nAs already mentioned, argumentation is typically viewed as an\\nessential component of political democratic practices, and as such it\\nis of great interest to political scientists and political theorists\\n(Habermas 1992 [1996]; Young 2000; Landemore 2013; Fishkin 2016; see\\nentry on\\n democracy).\\n (The term typically used in this context is\\n“deliberation” instead of “argumentation”, but\\nthese can be viewed as roughly synonymous for our purposes.) General\\ntheories of argumentation such as pragma-dialectic and the Toulmin\\nmodel can be applied to political argumentation with illuminating\\nresults (Wodak 2016; Mohammed 2016). More generally, political\\ndiscourse seems to have a strong argumentative component, in\\nparticular if argumentation is understood more broadly as not only\\npertaining to rational discourse (logos) but as also\\nincluding what rhetoricians refer to as pathos and\\nethos (Zarefsky 2014; Amossy 2018). But critics of\\nargumentation and deliberation in political contexts also point out\\nthe limitations of the classical deliberative model (Sanders 1997;\\nTalisse 2019).\",\n \"\\nMoreover, scientific communities seem to offer good examples of\\n(largely) well-functioning argumentative practices. These are\\ndisciplined systems of collective epistemic activity, with tacit but\\nwidely endorsed norms for argumentative engagement for each domain\\n(which does not mean that there are not disagreements on these very\\nnorms). The case of mathematics has already been mentioned above:\\npractices of mathematical proof are quite naturally understood as\\nargumentative practices (Dutilh Novaes 2020a). Furthermore, when a\\nscientist presents a new scientific claim, it must be backed by\\narguments and evidence that her peers are likely to find convincing,\\nas they follow from the application of widely agreed-upon scientific\\nmethods (Longino 1990; Weinstein 1990; Rehg 2008; see entry on the\\n social dimensions of scientific knowledge).\\n Other scientists will in turn critically examine the evidence and\\narguments provided, and will voice objections or concerns if they find\\naspects of the theory to be insufficiently convincing. Thus seen,\\nscience may be viewed as a “game of giving and asking for\\nreasons” (Zamora Bonilla 2006). Certain features of scientific\\nargumentation seem to ensure its success: scientists see other\\nscientists as prima facie peers, and so (typically at least) place a\\nfair amount of trust in other scientists by default; science is based\\non the principle of “organized skepticism” (a term\\nintroduced by the pioneer sociologist of science Robert Merton [Merton, 1942]), which\\nmeans that asking for further reasons should not be perceived as a\\npersonal attack. These are arguably aspects that distinguish\\nargumentation in science from argumentation in other domains in virtue\\nof these institutional factors (Mercier & Heintz 2014). But\\nultimately, scientists are part of society as a whole, and thus the\\nquestion of how scientific and political argumentation intersect\\nbecomes particularly relevant (Kitcher 2001).\",\n \"\\nAnother area where argumentation is essential is the law, which also\\ncorresponds to disciplined systems of collective activity with rules\\nand principles for what counts as acceptable arguments and evidence.\\n \\nIn litigation (in particular in adversarial justice systems), there\\nare typically two sides disagreeing on what is lawful or just, and the\\nbasic idea is that each side will present its strongest arguments; it\\nis the comparison between the two sets of arguments that should lead\\nto the best judgment (Walton 2002). Legal reasoning and argumentation\\nhave been extensively studied within jurisprudence for decades, in\\nparticular since Ronald Dworkin’s (1977) and Neil\\nMacCormick’s (1978) responses to HLA Hart’s highly\\ninfluential The Concept of Law (1961). A number of other\\nviews and approaches have been developed, in particular from the\\nperspectives of natural law theory, legal positivism, common law, and\\nrhetoric (see Feteris 2017 for an overview). Overall, legal\\nargumentation is characterized by extensive uses of analogies (Lamond\\n2014), abduction (Askeland 2020), and defeasible/non-monotonic\\nreasoning (Bex & Verheij 2013). An interesting question is whether\\nargumentation in law is fundamentally different from argumentation in\\nother domains, or whether it follows the same overall canons and norms\\nbut applied to legal topics (Raz 2001).\",\n \"\\nFinally, the development of argumentative skills is arguably a\\nfundamental aspect of (formal) education (Muller Mirza &\\nPerret-Clermont 2009). Ideally, when presented with arguments, a\\nlearner should not simply accept what is being said at face value, but\\nshould instead reflect on the reasons offered and come to her own\\nconclusions. Argumentation thus fosters independent, critical\\nthinking, which is viewed as an important goal for education (Siegel\\n1995; see entry on\\n critical thinking).\\n A number of education theorists and developmental psychologists have\\nempirically investigated the effects of emphasizing argumentative\\nskills in educational settings, with encouraging results (Kuhn &\\nCrowell 2011). There has been in particular much emphasis on\\nargumentation specifically in science education, based on the\\nassumption that argumentation is a key component of scientific\\npractice (as noted above); the thought is that this feature of\\nscientific practice should be reflected in science education (Driver,\\nNewton, & Osborne 2000; Erduran & Jiménez-Aleixandre\\n2007).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.5 Argumentation in specific social practices\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nArgumentation is a multi-faceted phenomenon, and the literature on\\narguments and argumentation is massive and varied. This entry can only\\nscratch the surface of the richness of this material, and many\\ninteresting, relevant topics must be left out for reasons of space. In\\nthis final section, a selection of topics that are likely to attract\\nconsiderable interest in future research are discussed.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Further Topics\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIn recent years, the concept of epistemic injustice has received much\\nattention among philosophers (Fricker 2007; McKinnon 2016). Epistemic\\ninjustice occurs when a person is unfairly treated qua knower on the\\nbasis of prejudices pertaining to social categories such as gender,\\nrace, class, ability etc. (see entry on\\n feminist epistemology and philosophy of science).\\n One of the main categories of epistemic injustice discussed\\nin the literature pertains to testimony and is known as testimonial\\ninjustice: this occurs when a testifier is not given a degree of\\ncredibility commensurate to their actual expertise on the relevant\\ntopic, as a result of prejudice. (Whether credibility excess is also a\\nform of testimonial injustice is a moot point in the literature\\n[Medina 2011].)\",\n \"\\nSince argumentation can be viewed as an important mechanism for\\nsharing knowledge and information, i.e., as having significant\\nepistemic import (Goldman 2004), the question arises whether there\\nmight be instances of epistemic injustice pertaining specifically to\\nargumentation, which may be described as argumentative\\ninjustice, and which would be notably different from other\\nrecognized forms of epistemic injustice such as testimonial injustice.\\nBondy (Bondy 2010) presented a first articulation of the notion of\\nargumentative injustice, modeled after Fricker’s notion of\\nepistemic injustice and relying on a broadly epistemological\\nconception of argumentation. However, Bondy’s analysis does not\\ntake into account some of the structural elements that have become\\ncentral to the analysis of epistemic injustice since Fricker’s\\ninfluential work, so it seems further discussion of epistemic\\ninjustice in argumentation is still needed. For example, in situations\\nof disagreement, epistemic injustice can give rise to further\\nobstacles to rational argumentation, leading to deep disagreement\\n(Lagewaard 2021).\",\n \"\\nMoreover, as often noted by critics of adversarial approaches,\\nargumentation can also be used as an instrument of domination and\\noppression used to overpower and denigrate an interlocutor (Nozick\\n1981), especially an interlocutor of “lower” status in the\\ncontext in question (Moulton 1983; see entry on\\n feminist approaches to argumentation).\\n From this perspective, it is clear that argumentation may also be\\nused to reinforce and exacerbate injustice, inequalities and power\\ndifferentials (Goodwin 2007). Given this possibility, and in response\\nto the perennial risk of excessive aggressiveness in argumentative\\nsituations, a normative account of how argumentation ought to\\nbe conducted so as to avoid these problematic outcomes seem to be\\nrequired.\",\n \"\\nOne such approach is virtue argumentation theory. Drawing on\\nvirtue ethics and virtue epistemology (see entries on\\n virtue ethics\\n and\\n virtue epistemology),\\n virtue argumentation theory seeks to theorize how to argue well in\\nterms of the dispositions and character of arguers rather than, for\\nexample, in terms of properties of arguments considered in abstraction\\nfrom arguers (Aberdein & Cohen 2016). Some of the argumentative\\nvirtues identified in the literature are: willingness to listen to\\nothers (Cohen 2019), willingness to take a novel viewpoint seriously\\n(Kwong 2016), humility (Kidd 2016), and open-mindedness (Tanesini\\n2020).\",\n \"\\nBy the same token, defective argumentation is conceptualized not\\n(only) in terms of structural properties of arguments (e.g.,\\nfallacious argument patterns), but in terms of the vices displayed by\\narguers such as arrogance and narrow-mindedness, among others\\n(Aberdein 2016). Virtue argumentation theory now constitutes a vibrant\\nresearch program, as attested by a special issue of Topoi\\ndedicated to the topic (see [Aberdein & Cohen 2016] for its Introduction). It allows for\\na reconceptualization of classical themes within argumentation theory\\nwhile also promising to provide concrete recommendations on how to\\nargue better. Whether it can fully counter the risk of epistemic\\ninjustice and oppressive uses of argumentation is however debatable,\\nat least as long as broader structural factors related to power\\ndynamics are not sufficiently taken into account (Kukla 2014).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.1 Argumentative injustice and virtuous argumentation\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nOn some idealized construals, argumentation is conceived as a purely\\nrational, emotionless endeavor. But the strong connection between\\nargumentative activities and emotional responses has also long been\\nrecognized (in particular in rhetorical analyses of argumentation),\\nand more recently has become the object of extensive research (Walton\\n1992; Gilbert 2004; Hample 2006: ch. 5). Importantly, the recognition\\nof a role for emotions in argumentation does not entail a complete\\nrejection of the “rationality” of argumentation; rather,\\nit is based on the rejection of a strict dichotomy between reason and\\nemotion (see entry on\\n emotion),\\n and on a more encompassing conception of argumentation as a\\nmulti-layered human activity.\",\n \"\\nRather than dispassionate exchanges of reasons, instances of\\nargumentation typically start against the background of existing\\nemotional relations, and give rise to further affective\\nresponses—often, though not necessarily, negative responses of\\naggression and hostility. Indeed, it has been noted that, by itself,\\nargumentation can give rise to conflict and friction where there was\\nnone to be found prior to the argumentative engagement (Aikin 2011).\\nThis occurs in particular because critical engagement and requests for\\nreasons are at odds with default norms of credulity in most mundane\\ndialogical interactions, thus creating a perception of antagonism. But\\nargumentation may also give rise to positive affective responses if\\nthe focus is on coalescence and cooperation rather than on hostility\\n(Gilbert 1997).\",\n \"\\nThe descriptive claim that instances of argumentation are typically\\nemotionally charged is not particularly controversial, though it\\ndeserves to be further investigated; the details of affective\\nresponses during instances of argumentation and how to deal with them\\nare non-trivial (Krabbe & van Laar 2015). What is potentially more\\ncontroversial is the normative claim that instances of\\nargumentation may or should be emotionally charged,\\ni.e., that emotions may or ought to be involved in argumentative\\nprocesses, even if it may be necessary to regulate them in such\\nsituations rather than giving them free rein (González,\\nGómez, & Lemos 2019). The significance of emotions for\\npersuasion has been recognized for millennia (see entry on\\n Aristotle’s rhetoric),\\n but more recently it has become clear that emotions also have a\\nfundamental role to play for choices of what to focus on and what to\\ncare about (Sinhababu 2017). This general point seems to apply to\\ninstances of argumentation as well. For example, Howes and Hundleby\\n(Howes & Hundleby 2018) argue that, contrary to what is often\\nthought, anger can in fact make a positive contribution to\\nargumentative encounters. Indeed, anger may have an important\\nepistemological role in such encounters by drawing attention to\\nrelevant premises and information that may otherwise go unnoticed.\\n(They recognize that anger may also derail argumentation when the\\nencounter becomes a full-on confrontation.)\",\n \"\\nIn sum, the study of the role of emotions for argumentation, both\\ndescriptively and normatively speaking, has attracted the interest of\\na number of scholars, traditionally in connection with rhetoric and\\nmore recently also from the perspective of argumentation as\\ninterpersonal communication (Hample 2006). And yet, much work remains\\nto be done on the significance of emotions for argumentation, in\\nparticular given that the view that argumentation should be a purely\\nrational, dispassionate endeavor remains widely (even if tacitly)\\nendorsed.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.2 Emotions and argumentation\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nOnce we adopt the perspective of argumentation as a communicative\\npractice, the question of the influence of cultural factors on\\nargumentative practices naturally arises. Is there significant\\nvariability in how people engage in argumentation depending on their\\nsociocultural backgrounds? Or is argumentation largely the same\\nphenomenon across different cultures? Actually, we may even ask\\nourselves whether argumentation in fact occurs in all human cultures,\\nor whether it is the product of specific, contingent background\\nconditions, thus not being a human universal. For comparison: it had\\nlong been assumed that practices of counting were present in all human\\ncultures, even if with different degrees of complexity. But in recent\\ndecades it has been shown that some cultures do not engage\\nsystematically in practices of counting and basic arithmetic at all,\\nsuch as the Pirahã in the Amazon (Gordon 2004; see entry on\\n culture and cognitive science).\\n By analogy, it seems that the purported universality of argumentative\\npractices should not be taken for granted, but rather be treated as a\\nlegitimate empirical question. (Incidentally, there is some anecdotal\\nevidence that the Pirahã themselves engage in argumentative\\nexchanges [Everett 2008], but to date their argumentative skills have\\nnot been investigated systematically, as is the case with their\\nnumerical skills.)\",\n \"\\nOf course, how widespread argumentative practices will be also depends\\non how the concept of “argumentative practices” is defined\\nand operationalized in the first place. If it is narrowly defined as\\ncorresponding to regimented practices of reason-giving requiring clear\\nmarkers and explicit criteria for what counts as premises, conclusions\\nand relations of support between them, then argumentation may well be\\nrestricted to cultures and subcultures where such practices have been\\nexplicitly codified. By contrast, if argumentation is defined more\\nloosely, then a wider range of communicative practices will be\\nconsidered as instances of argumentation, and thus presumably more\\ncultures will be found to engage in (what is thus viewed as)\\nargumentation. This means that the spread of argumentative practices\\nacross cultures is not only an empirical question; it also requires\\nsignificant conceptual input to be addressed.\",\n \"\\nBut if (as appears to be the case) argumentation is not a strictly\\nWEIRD phenomenon, restricted to Western, Educated, Industrialized,\\nRich, and Democratic societies (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan\\n2010), then the issue of cross-cultural variability in argumentative\\npractices gives rise to a host of research questions, again both at\\nthe descriptive and at the normative level. Indeed, even if at the\\ndescriptive level considerable variability in argumentative practices\\nis identified, the normative question of whether there should be\\nuniversally valid canons for argumentation, or instead specific norms\\nfor specific contexts, remains pressing. At the descriptive level, a\\nnumber of researchers have investigated argumentative practices in\\ndifferent WEIRD as well as non-WEIRD cultures, also addressing\\nquestions of cultural variability (Hornikx & Hoeken 2007; Hornikx\\n& de Best 2011).\",\n \"\\nA foundational work in this context is Edwin Hutchins’ 1980 book\\nCulture and Inference, a study of the Trobriand\\nIslanders’ system of land tenure in Papua New Guinea (Hutchins\\n1980). While presented as a study of inference and reasoning among the\\nTrobriand Islanders, what Hutchins in fact investigated were instances\\nof legal argumentation in land courts by means of ethnographic\\nobservation and interviews with litigants. This led to the formulation\\nof a set of twelve basic propositions codifying knowledge about land\\ntenure, as well as transfer formulas governing how this knowledge can\\nbe applied to new disputes. Hutchins’ analysis showed that the\\nTrobriand Islanders had a sophisticated argumentation system to\\nresolve issues pertaining to land tenure, in many senses resembling\\nargumentation and reasoning in so-called WEIRD societies in that it\\nseemed to recognize as valid simple logical structures such as\\nmodus ponens and modus tollens.\",\n \"\\nMore recently, Hugo Mercier and colleagues have been conducting\\nstudies in countries such as Japan (Mercier, Deguchi, Van der Henst,\\n& Yama 2016) and Guatemala (Castelain, Girotto, Jamet, &\\nMercier 2016). While recognizing the significance and interest of\\ncultural differences (Mercier 2013), Mercier maintains that\\nargumentation is a human universal, as argumentative capacities and\\ntendencies are a result of natural selection, genetically encoded in\\nhuman cognition (Mercier 2011; Mercier & Sperber 2017). He takes\\nthe results of the cross-cultural studies conducted so far as\\nconfirming the universality of argumentation, even considering\\ncultural differences (Mercier 2018).\",\n \"\\nAnother scholar who has been carrying out an extensive research\\nprogram on cultural differences in argumentation is communication\\ntheorist Dale Hample. With different sets of colleagues, he has\\nconducted studies by means of surveys where participants (typically,\\nuniversity undergraduates) self-report on their argumentative\\npractices in countries such as China, Japan, Turkey, Chile, the\\nNetherlands, Portugal, the United States (among others; Hample 2018:\\nch. 7). His results overall show a number of similarities, which may\\nbe partially explained by the specific demographic (university\\nstudents) from which participants are usually recruited. But\\ninteresting differences have also been identified, for example\\ndifferent levels of willingness to engage in argumentative\\nencounters.\",\n \"\\nIn a recent book (Tindale 2021), philosopher Chris Tindale adopts an\\nanthropological perspective to investigate how argumentative practices\\nemerge from the experiences of peoples with diverse backgrounds. He\\nemphasizes the argumentative roles of place, orality, myth, narrative,\\nand audience, also assessing the impacts of colonialism on the study\\nof argumentation. Tindale reviews a wealth of anthropological and\\nethnographic studies on argumentative practices in different cultures,\\nthus providing what is to date perhaps the most comprehensive study on\\nargumentation from an anthropological perspective.\",\n \"\\nOn the whole, the study of differences and commonalities in\\nargumentative practices across cultures is an established line of\\nresearch on argumentation, but arguably much work remains to be done\\nto investigate these complex phenomena more thoroughly.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.3 Cross-cultural perspectives on argumentation\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nSo far we have not yet considered the question of the different media\\nthrough which argumentation can take place. Naturally, argumentation\\ncan unfold orally in face-to-face encounters—discussions in\\nparliament, political debates, in a court of law—as well as in\\nwriting—in scientific articles, on the Internet, in newspaper\\neditorials. Moreover, it can happen synchronically, with real-time\\nexchanges of reasons, or asynchronically. While it is reasonable to\\nexpect that there will be some commonalities across these different\\nmedia and environments, it is also plausible that specific features of\\ndifferent environments may significantly influence how argumentation\\nis conducted: different environments present different kinds of\\naffordances for arguers (Halpern & Gibbs 2013; Weger\\n& Aakhus 2003; see entry on\\n embodied cognition\\n for the concept of affordance). Indeed, if the Internet represents a\\nfundamentally novel cognitive ecology (Smart, Heersmink, & Clowes\\n2017), then it will likely give rise to different forms of\\nargumentative engagement (Lewiński 2010). Whether these new forms\\nwill represent progress (according to some suitable metric)\\nis however a moot point.\",\n \"\\nIn the early days of the Internet in the 1990s, there was much hope\\nthat online spaces would finally realize the Habermasian ideal of a\\npublic sphere for political deliberation (Hindman 2009). The Internet\\nwas supposed to act as the great equalizer in the worldwide\\nmarketplace of ideas, finally attaining the Millian ideal of free\\nexchange of ideas (Mill 1859). Online, everyone’s voice would\\nhave an equal chance of being heard, everyone could contribute to the\\nconversation, and everyone could simultaneously be a journalist, news\\nconsumer, engaged citizen, advocate, and activist.\",\n \"\\nA few decades later, these hopes have not really materialized. It is\\nprobably true that most people now argue more—in social\\nmedia, blogs, chat rooms, discussion boards etc.—but it is much\\nless obvious that they argue better. Indeed, rather than\\nenhancing democratic ideals, some have gone as far as claiming that\\ninstead, the Internet is “killing democracy” (Bartlett\\n2018). There is very little oversight when it comes to the spreading\\nof propaganda and disinformation online (Benkler, Faris, & Roberts\\n2018), which means that citizens are often being fed faulty\\ninformation and arguments. Moreover, it seems that online environments\\nmay lead to increased polarization when polemic topics are being\\ndiscussed (Yardi & Boyd 2010), and to “intellectual\\narrogance” (Lynch 2019). Some have argued that online\\ndiscussions lead to more overly emotional engagement when compared to\\nother forms of debate (Kramer, Guillory, & Hancock 2014). But not\\neveryone is convinced that the Internet has only made things worse\\nwhen it comes to argumentation, or in any case that it cannot be\\nsuitably redesigned so as to foster rather than destroy democratic\\nideals and deliberation (Sunstein 2017).\",\n \"\\nBe that as it may, the Internet is here to stay, and online\\nargumentation is a pervasive phenomenon that argumentation theorists\\nhave been studying and will continue to study for years to come. In\\nfact, if anything, online argumentation is now more often\\ninvestigated empirically than other forms of argumentation, among\\nother reasons thanks to the development of argument mining techniques\\n(see\\n section 4.2\\n above) which greatly facilitate the study of large corpora of textual\\nmaterial such as those produced by online discussions. Beyond the very\\nnumerous specific case studies available in the literature, there have\\nbeen also attempts to reflect on the phenomenon of online\\nargumentation in general, for example in journal special issues\\ndedicated to argumentation in digital media such as in\\nArgumentation and Advocacy (Volume 47(2), 2010) and\\nPhilosophy & Technology (Volume 30(2), 2017). However, a\\nsystematic analysis of online argumentation and how it differs from\\nother forms of argumentation remains to be produced.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.4 Argumentation and the Internet\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nArgument and argumentation are multifaceted phenomena that have\\nattracted the interest of philosophers as well as scholars in other\\nfields for millennia, and continue to be studied extensively in\\nvarious domains. This entry presents an overview of the main strands\\nin these discussions, while acknowledging the impossibility of fully\\ndoing justice to the enormous literature on the topic. But the\\nliterature references below should at least provide a useful starting\\npoint for the interested reader.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"6. Conclusion\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Aberdein, Andrew, 2016, “The Vices of Argument”,\nTopoi, 35(2): 413–422.\ndoi:10.1007/s11245-015-9346-z","Aberdein, Andrew and Daniel H. Cohen, 2016, “Introduction:\nVirtues and Arguments”, Topoi, 35(2): 339–343.\ndoi:10.1007/s11245-016-9366-3","Aberdein, Andrew and Ian J Dove (eds.), 2013, The Argument of\nMathematics, Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.\ndoi:10.1007/978-94-007-6534-4","Aikin, Scott, 2011, “A Defense of War and Sport Metaphors in\nArgument”, Philosophy & Rhetoric, 44(3):\n250–272.","Amossy, Ruth, 2002, “How to Do Things with Doxa: Toward an\nAnalysis of Argumentation in Discourse”, Poetics Today,\n23(3): 465–487. doi:10.1215/03335372-23-3-465","–––, 2009, “Argumentation in Discourse: A\nSocio-Discursive Approach to Arguments”, Informal\nLogic, 29(3): 252–267. doi:10.22329/il.v29i3.2843","–––, 2018, “Understanding Political Issues\nthrough Argumentation Analysis”, in The Routledge Handbook\nof Language and Politics, Ruth Wodak and Bernard Forchtner\n(eds.), New York: Routledge, pp. 135–149.","Askeland, Bjarte, 2020, “The Potential of Abductive Legal\nReasoning”, Ratio Juris, 33(1): 66–81.\ndoi:10.1111/raju.12268","Atkinson, Katie, Federico Cerutti, Peter McBurney, Simon Parsons,\nand Iyad Rahwan (eds), 2016, Special Issue on Argumentation in\nMulti-Agent Systems, of Argument & Computation,\n7(2–3). ","Bailin, Sharon and Mark Battersby, 2016, “DAMed If You Do;\nDAMed If You Don’t: Cohen’s ‘Missed\nOpportunities’”, in Proceedings of the Ontario Society\nfor the Study of Argumentation Conference, Vol. 11.\n [Bailin and Battersby 2016 available online]","Ball, Linden J and Valerie A. Thompson (eds.), 2018,\nInternational Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, London:\nRoutledge. doi:10.4324/9781315725697","Bartlett, Jamie, 2018, The People vs Tech: How the Internet is\nKilling Democracy (and How We Can Save It), London: Ebury\nPress.","Beall, Jc, 2009, Spandrels of Truth, Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199268733.001.0001","Benkler, Yochai, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, 2018, Network\nPropaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in\nAmerican Politics, New York: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/oso/9780190923624.001.0001","Bermejo Luque, Lilian, 2011, Giving Reasons: A\nLinguistic-Pragmatic Approach to Argumentation Theory\n(Argumentation Library 20), Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.\ndoi:10.1007/978-94-007-1761-9","–––, 2020, “What Is Wrong with\nDeductivism?”, Informal Logic, 40(3): 295–316.\ndoi:10.22329/il.v40i30.6214","Betz, Gregor, 2013, Debate Dynamics: How Controversy Improves\nOur Beliefs, Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.\ndoi:10.1007/978-94-007-4599-5","Bex, Floris, Henry Prakken, Chris Reed, and Douglas Walton, 2003,\n“Towards a Formal Account of Reasoning about Evidence:\nArgumentation Schemes and Generalisations”, Artificial\nIntelligence and Law, 11(2/3): 125–165.\ndoi:10.1023/B:ARTI.0000046007.11806.9a","Bex, Floris and Bart Verheij, 2013, “Legal Stories and the\nProcess of Proof”, Artificial Intelligence and Law,\n21(3): 253–278. doi:10.1007/s10506-012-9137-4","Biro, John and Harvey Siegel, 2006, “In Defense of the\nObjective Epistemic Approach to Argumentation”, Informal\nLogic, 26(1): 91–101. doi:10.22329/il.v26i1.432","Bondy, Patrick, 2010, “Argumentative Injustice”,\nInformal Logic, 30(3): 263–278.\ndoi:10.22329/il.v30i3.3034","Brandom, Robert B., 1994, Making It Explicit: Reasoning,\nRepresenting, and Discursive Commitment, Cambridge, MA: Harvard\nUniversity Press.","Campos, Daniel G., 2011, “On the Distinction between\nPeirce’s Abduction and Lipton’s Inference to the Best\nExplanation”, Synthese, 180(3): 419–442.\ndoi:10.1007/s11229-009-9709-3","Casey, John, 2020, “Adversariality and Argumentation”,\nInformal Logic, 40(1): 77–108.\ndoi:10.22329/il.v40i1.5969","Castelain, Thomas, Vittorio Girotto, Frank Jamet, and Hugo\nMercier, 2016, “Evidence for Benefits of Argumentation in a\nMayan Indigenous Population”, Evolution and Human\nBehavior, 37(5): 337–342.\ndoi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2016.02.002","Clark, Andy, 2016, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action,\nand the Embodied Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190217013.001.0001","Cohen, Daniel H., 1995, “Argument Is War…and War Is\nHell: Philosophy, Education, and Metaphors for Argumentation”,\nInformal Logic, 17(2): 177–188.\ndoi:10.22329/il.v17i2.2406","–––, 2019, “Argumentative Virtues as\nConduits for Reason’s Causal Efficacy: Why the Practice of\nGiving Reasons Requires That We Practice Hearing Reasons”,\nTopoi, 38(4): 711–718.\ndoi:10.1007/s11245-015-9364-x","Collins, Peter J. and Ulrike Hahn, 2018, “Fallacies of\nArgumentation”, in Ball and Thomson 2018: 88–108.","Doury, Marianne, 2009, “Argument Schemes Typologies in\nPractice: The Case of Comparative Arguments”, in Pondering\non Problems of Argumentation, Frans H. van Eemeren and Bart\nGarssen (eds.), (Argumentation Library 14), Dordrecht: Springer\nNetherlands, pp. 141–155. doi:10.1007/978-1-4020-9165-0_11","Driver, Rosalind, Paul Newton, and Jonathan Osborne, 2000,\n“Establishing the Norms of Scientific Argumentation in\nClassrooms”, Science Education, 84(3): 287–312.\n","Dummett, Michael, 1978, “The Justification of\nDeduction”, in his Truth and Other Enigmas, Cambridge\nMA: Harvard University Press, pp. 290–318.","Dung, Phan Minh, 1995, “On the Acceptability of Arguments\nand Its Fundamental Role in Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Logic Programming\nand n-Person Games”, Artificial Intelligence,\n77(2): 321–357. doi:10.1016/0004-3702(94)00041-X","Dutilh Novaes, Catarina, 2015, “The Formal and the\nFormalized: The Cases of Syllogistic and Supposition Theory”,\nKriterion: Revista de Filosofia, 56(131): 253–270.\ndoi:10.1590/0100-512X2015n13114cdn","–––, 2020a, The Dialogical Roots of\nDeduction: Historical, Cognitive, and Philosophical Perspectives on\nReasoning, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\ndoi:10.1017/9781108800792","–––, 2020b, “Logic and the Psychology of\nReasoning”, in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of\nRelativism, Martin Kusch (ed.), London: Routledge,\npp. 445–454.","–––, 2020c, “The Role of Trust in\nArgumentation”, Informal Logic, 40(2): 205–236.\ndoi:10.22329/il.v40i2.6328","–––, forthcoming, “Who’s Afraid of\nAdversariality? Conflict and Cooperation in Argumentation”,\nTopoi, first online: 23 December 2020.\ndoi:10.1007/s11245-020-09736-9","Dworkin, Ronald, 1977, Taking Rights Seriously,\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.","Eemeren, Frans H. van and Rob Grootendorst, 1984, Speech Acts\nin Argumentative Discussions: A Theoretical Model for the Analysis of\nDiscussions Directed towards Solving Conflicts of Opinion,\nDordrecht: Foris Publications. doi:10.1515/9783110846089","–––, 2004, A Systematic Theory of\nArgumentation: The Pragma-Dialectical Approach, Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511616389","Eemeren, Frans H. van, Bart Garssen, Erik C. W. Krabbe, A.\nFrancisca Snoeck Henkemans, Bart Verheij, and Jean H. M. Wagemans,\n2014, Handbook of Argumentation Theory, Dordrecht: Springer\nNetherlands. doi:10.1007/978-90-481-9473-5","Eemeren, Frans H. van, Rob Grootendorst, Ralph H. Johnson,\nChristian Plantin, and Charles A. Willard, 1996, Fundamentals of\nArgumentation Theory: A Handbook of Historical Backgrounds and\nContemporary Developments, Mahwah, NJ: Routledge.\ndoi:10.4324/9780203811306","Elqayam, Shira, 2018, “The New Paradigm in Psychology of\nReasoning”, in Ball and Thomson 2018: 130–150.","Erduran, Sibel and María Pilar Jiménez-Aleixandre\n(eds.), 2007, Argumentation in Science Education: Perspectives\nfrom Classroom-Based Research (Science & Technology Education\nLibrary 35), Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.\ndoi:10.1007/978-1-4020-6670-2","Eva, Benjamin and Stephan Hartmann, 2018, “Bayesian\nArgumentation and the Value of Logical Validity”,\nPsychological Review, 125(5): 806–821.\ndoi:10.1037/rev0000114","Everett, Daniel Leonard, 2008, Don’t Sleep! There are\nSnakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, New York, NY:\nVintage Books.","Fantl, Jeremy, 2018, The Limitations of the Open Mind,\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/oso/9780198807957.001.0001","Feteris, Eveline T., 2017, Fundamentals of Legal\nArgumentation: A Survey of Theories on the Justification of Judicial\nDecisions, second edition, (Argumentation Library 1), Dordrecht:\nSpringer Netherlands. doi:10.1007/978-94-024-1129-4","Field, Hartry, 2008, Saving Truth From Paradox, Oxford:\nOxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230747.001.0001","Fisher, Matthew and Frank C. Keil, 2016, “The Trajectory of\nArgumentation and Its Multifaceted Functions”, in Paglieri,\nBonelli, and Felletti 2016: 347–362.","Fishkin, James, 2016, “Deliberative Democracy”, in\nEmerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Robert\nA. Scott and Marlis C. 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Erlbaum Associates.","–––, 2004, “Emotion, Argumentation and\nInformal Logic”, Informal Logic, 24(3): 245–264.\ndoi:10.22329/il.v24i3.2147","Goldman, Alvin I., 1994, “Argumentation and Social\nEpistemology”, Journal of Philosophy, 91(1):\n27–49. doi:10.2307/2940949","–––, 2004, “An Epistemological Approach to\nArgumentation”, Informal Logic, 23(1): 49–61.\ndoi:10.22329/il.v23i1.2153","González González, Manuela, Julder Gómez, and\nMariantonia Lemos, 2019, “Theoretical Considerations for the\nArticulation of Emotion and Argumentation in the Arguer: A Proposal\nfor Emotion Regulation in Deliberation”, Argumentation,\n33(3): 349–364. doi:10.1007/s10503-018-09476-6","Goodwin, Jean, 2007, “Argument Has No Function”,\nInformal Logic, 27(1): 69–90.\ndoi:10.22329/il.v27i1.465","Gordon, Peter, 2004, “Numerical Cognition Without Words:\nEvidence from Amazonia”, Science, 306(5695):\n496–499. doi:10.1126/science.1094492","Gordon-Smith, Eleanor, 2019, Stop Being Reasonable: How We\nReally Change Minds, New York: Public Affairs.","Govier, Trudy, 1999, The Philosophy of Argument, Newport\nNews, VA: Vale Press.","Habermas, Jürgen, 1981 [1984], Theorie des kommunikativen\nHandelns. Bd. 1, Handlungsrationalität und gesellschaftliche\nRationalisierung, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Translated as\nThe Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. I: Reason and the\nRationalization of Society, Thomas McCarthy (trans.), Boston:\nBeacon Press.","–––, 1992 [1996], Faktizität und\nGeltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des\ndemokratischen Rechtsstaats, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.\nTranslated as Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a\nDiscourse Theory of Law and Democracy, William Rehg (trans.),\nCambridge, MA: MIT Press.","Habernal, Ivan and Iryna Gurevych, 2017, “Argumentation\nMining in User-Generated Web Discourse”, Computational\nLinguistics, 43(1): 125–179. doi:10.1162/COLI_a_00276","Hahn, Ulrike and Jos Hornikx, 2016, “A Normative Framework\nfor Argument Quality: Argumentation Schemes with a Bayesian\nFoundation”, Synthese, 193(6): 1833–1873.\ndoi:10.1007/s11229-015-0815-0","Hahn, Ulrike and Mike Oaksford, 2006, “A Normative Theory of\nArgument Strength”, Informal Logic, 26(1): 1–24.\ndoi:10.22329/il.v26i1.428","–––, 2007, “The Rationality of Informal\nArgumentation: A Bayesian Approach to Reasoning Fallacies”,\nPsychological Review, 114(3): 704–732.\ndoi:10.1037/0033-295X.114.3.704","Halpern, Daniel and Jennifer Gibbs, 2013, “Social Media as a\nCatalyst for Online Deliberation? Exploring the Affordances of\nFacebook and YouTube for Political Expression”, Computers in\nHuman Behavior, 29(3): 1159–1168.\ndoi:10.1016/j.chb.2012.10.008","Hamblin, C. L., 1970, Fallacies, London: Methuen.","Hample, Dale, 2006, Arguing: Exchanging Reasons Face to\nFace, New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781410613486","–––, 2018, Interpersonal Arguing, New\nYork: Peter Lang.","Harman, Gilbert H., 1965, “The Inference to the Best\nExplanation”, The Philosophical Review, 74(1):\n88–95. doi:10.2307/2183532","Hart, H. L. A., 1961, The Concept of Law, Oxford:\nClarendon.","Henrich, Joseph, Steven J. 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Revised and translated as The Athenian Democracy\nin the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles, and Ideology,\nJ.A. 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Institute of Learning\nand Research.","Taber, John A., 2004, “Is Indian Logic Nonmonotonic?”,\nPhilosophy East and West, 54(2): 143–170.\ndoi:10.1353/pew.2004.0009","Wolfsdorf, David, 2013, “Socratic Philosophizing”, in\nThe Bloomsbury Companion to Socrates, John Bussanich and\nNicholas D. Smith (eds.), London; New York: Continuum,\npp. 34–67.","Young, Walter Edward, 2017, The Dialectical Forge,\n(Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning 9), Cham: Springer International\nPublishing. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-25522-4"],"string":"[\n \"Aberdein, Andrew, 2016, “The Vices of Argument”,\\nTopoi, 35(2): 413–422.\\ndoi:10.1007/s11245-015-9346-z\",\n \"Aberdein, Andrew and Daniel H. Cohen, 2016, “Introduction:\\nVirtues and Arguments”, Topoi, 35(2): 339–343.\\ndoi:10.1007/s11245-016-9366-3\",\n \"Aberdein, Andrew and Ian J Dove (eds.), 2013, The Argument of\\nMathematics, Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.\\ndoi:10.1007/978-94-007-6534-4\",\n \"Aikin, Scott, 2011, “A Defense of War and Sport Metaphors in\\nArgument”, Philosophy & Rhetoric, 44(3):\\n250–272.\",\n \"Amossy, Ruth, 2002, “How to Do Things with Doxa: Toward an\\nAnalysis of Argumentation in Discourse”, Poetics Today,\\n23(3): 465–487. doi:10.1215/03335372-23-3-465\",\n \"–––, 2009, “Argumentation in Discourse: A\\nSocio-Discursive Approach to Arguments”, Informal\\nLogic, 29(3): 252–267. doi:10.22329/il.v29i3.2843\",\n \"–––, 2018, “Understanding Political Issues\\nthrough Argumentation Analysis”, in The Routledge Handbook\\nof Language and Politics, Ruth Wodak and Bernard Forchtner\\n(eds.), New York: Routledge, pp. 135–149.\",\n \"Askeland, Bjarte, 2020, “The Potential of Abductive Legal\\nReasoning”, Ratio Juris, 33(1): 66–81.\\ndoi:10.1111/raju.12268\",\n \"Atkinson, Katie, Federico Cerutti, Peter McBurney, Simon Parsons,\\nand Iyad Rahwan (eds), 2016, Special Issue on Argumentation in\\nMulti-Agent Systems, of Argument & Computation,\\n7(2–3). \",\n \"Bailin, Sharon and Mark Battersby, 2016, “DAMed If You Do;\\nDAMed If You Don’t: Cohen’s ‘Missed\\nOpportunities’”, in Proceedings of the Ontario Society\\nfor the Study of Argumentation Conference, Vol. 11.\\n [Bailin and Battersby 2016 available online]\",\n \"Ball, Linden J and Valerie A. Thompson (eds.), 2018,\\nInternational Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, London:\\nRoutledge. doi:10.4324/9781315725697\",\n \"Bartlett, Jamie, 2018, The People vs Tech: How the Internet is\\nKilling Democracy (and How We Can Save It), London: Ebury\\nPress.\",\n \"Beall, Jc, 2009, Spandrels of Truth, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199268733.001.0001\",\n \"Benkler, Yochai, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, 2018, Network\\nPropaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in\\nAmerican Politics, New York: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/oso/9780190923624.001.0001\",\n \"Bermejo Luque, Lilian, 2011, Giving Reasons: A\\nLinguistic-Pragmatic Approach to Argumentation Theory\\n(Argumentation Library 20), Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.\\ndoi:10.1007/978-94-007-1761-9\",\n \"–––, 2020, “What Is Wrong with\\nDeductivism?”, Informal Logic, 40(3): 295–316.\\ndoi:10.22329/il.v40i30.6214\",\n \"Betz, Gregor, 2013, Debate Dynamics: How Controversy Improves\\nOur Beliefs, Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.\\ndoi:10.1007/978-94-007-4599-5\",\n \"Bex, Floris, Henry Prakken, Chris Reed, and Douglas Walton, 2003,\\n“Towards a Formal Account of Reasoning about Evidence:\\nArgumentation Schemes and Generalisations”, Artificial\\nIntelligence and Law, 11(2/3): 125–165.\\ndoi:10.1023/B:ARTI.0000046007.11806.9a\",\n \"Bex, Floris and Bart Verheij, 2013, “Legal Stories and the\\nProcess of Proof”, Artificial Intelligence and Law,\\n21(3): 253–278. doi:10.1007/s10506-012-9137-4\",\n \"Biro, John and Harvey Siegel, 2006, “In Defense of the\\nObjective Epistemic Approach to Argumentation”, Informal\\nLogic, 26(1): 91–101. doi:10.22329/il.v26i1.432\",\n \"Bondy, Patrick, 2010, “Argumentative Injustice”,\\nInformal Logic, 30(3): 263–278.\\ndoi:10.22329/il.v30i3.3034\",\n \"Brandom, Robert B., 1994, Making It Explicit: Reasoning,\\nRepresenting, and Discursive Commitment, Cambridge, MA: Harvard\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Campos, Daniel G., 2011, “On the Distinction between\\nPeirce’s Abduction and Lipton’s Inference to the Best\\nExplanation”, Synthese, 180(3): 419–442.\\ndoi:10.1007/s11229-009-9709-3\",\n \"Casey, John, 2020, “Adversariality and Argumentation”,\\nInformal Logic, 40(1): 77–108.\\ndoi:10.22329/il.v40i1.5969\",\n \"Castelain, Thomas, Vittorio Girotto, Frank Jamet, and Hugo\\nMercier, 2016, “Evidence for Benefits of Argumentation in a\\nMayan Indigenous Population”, Evolution and Human\\nBehavior, 37(5): 337–342.\\ndoi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2016.02.002\",\n \"Clark, Andy, 2016, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action,\\nand the Embodied Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190217013.001.0001\",\n \"Cohen, Daniel H., 1995, “Argument Is War…and War Is\\nHell: Philosophy, Education, and Metaphors for Argumentation”,\\nInformal Logic, 17(2): 177–188.\\ndoi:10.22329/il.v17i2.2406\",\n \"–––, 2019, “Argumentative Virtues as\\nConduits for Reason’s Causal Efficacy: Why the Practice of\\nGiving Reasons Requires That We Practice Hearing Reasons”,\\nTopoi, 38(4): 711–718.\\ndoi:10.1007/s11245-015-9364-x\",\n \"Collins, Peter J. and Ulrike Hahn, 2018, “Fallacies of\\nArgumentation”, in Ball and Thomson 2018: 88–108.\",\n \"Doury, Marianne, 2009, “Argument Schemes Typologies in\\nPractice: The Case of Comparative Arguments”, in Pondering\\non Problems of Argumentation, Frans H. van Eemeren and Bart\\nGarssen (eds.), (Argumentation Library 14), Dordrecht: Springer\\nNetherlands, pp. 141–155. doi:10.1007/978-1-4020-9165-0_11\",\n \"Driver, Rosalind, Paul Newton, and Jonathan Osborne, 2000,\\n“Establishing the Norms of Scientific Argumentation in\\nClassrooms”, Science Education, 84(3): 287–312.\\n\",\n \"Dummett, Michael, 1978, “The Justification of\\nDeduction”, in his Truth and Other Enigmas, Cambridge\\nMA: Harvard University Press, pp. 290–318.\",\n \"Dung, Phan Minh, 1995, “On the Acceptability of Arguments\\nand Its Fundamental Role in Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Logic Programming\\nand n-Person Games”, Artificial Intelligence,\\n77(2): 321–357. doi:10.1016/0004-3702(94)00041-X\",\n \"Dutilh Novaes, Catarina, 2015, “The Formal and the\\nFormalized: The Cases of Syllogistic and Supposition Theory”,\\nKriterion: Revista de Filosofia, 56(131): 253–270.\\ndoi:10.1590/0100-512X2015n13114cdn\",\n \"–––, 2020a, The Dialogical Roots of\\nDeduction: Historical, Cognitive, and Philosophical Perspectives on\\nReasoning, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/9781108800792\",\n \"–––, 2020b, “Logic and the Psychology of\\nReasoning”, in The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of\\nRelativism, Martin Kusch (ed.), London: Routledge,\\npp. 445–454.\",\n \"–––, 2020c, “The Role of Trust in\\nArgumentation”, Informal Logic, 40(2): 205–236.\\ndoi:10.22329/il.v40i2.6328\",\n \"–––, forthcoming, “Who’s Afraid of\\nAdversariality? Conflict and Cooperation in Argumentation”,\\nTopoi, first online: 23 December 2020.\\ndoi:10.1007/s11245-020-09736-9\",\n \"Dworkin, Ronald, 1977, Taking Rights Seriously,\\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Eemeren, Frans H. van and Rob Grootendorst, 1984, Speech Acts\\nin Argumentative Discussions: A Theoretical Model for the Analysis of\\nDiscussions Directed towards Solving Conflicts of Opinion,\\nDordrecht: Foris Publications. doi:10.1515/9783110846089\",\n \"–––, 2004, A Systematic Theory of\\nArgumentation: The Pragma-Dialectical Approach, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511616389\",\n \"Eemeren, Frans H. van, Bart Garssen, Erik C. W. Krabbe, A.\\nFrancisca Snoeck Henkemans, Bart Verheij, and Jean H. M. Wagemans,\\n2014, Handbook of Argumentation Theory, Dordrecht: Springer\\nNetherlands. doi:10.1007/978-90-481-9473-5\",\n \"Eemeren, Frans H. van, Rob Grootendorst, Ralph H. Johnson,\\nChristian Plantin, and Charles A. Willard, 1996, Fundamentals of\\nArgumentation Theory: A Handbook of Historical Backgrounds and\\nContemporary Developments, Mahwah, NJ: Routledge.\\ndoi:10.4324/9780203811306\",\n \"Elqayam, Shira, 2018, “The New Paradigm in Psychology of\\nReasoning”, in Ball and Thomson 2018: 130–150.\",\n \"Erduran, Sibel and María Pilar Jiménez-Aleixandre\\n(eds.), 2007, Argumentation in Science Education: Perspectives\\nfrom Classroom-Based Research (Science & Technology Education\\nLibrary 35), Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.\\ndoi:10.1007/978-1-4020-6670-2\",\n \"Eva, Benjamin and Stephan Hartmann, 2018, “Bayesian\\nArgumentation and the Value of Logical Validity”,\\nPsychological Review, 125(5): 806–821.\\ndoi:10.1037/rev0000114\",\n \"Everett, Daniel Leonard, 2008, Don’t Sleep! There are\\nSnakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, New York, NY:\\nVintage Books.\",\n \"Fantl, Jeremy, 2018, The Limitations of the Open Mind,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/oso/9780198807957.001.0001\",\n \"Feteris, Eveline T., 2017, Fundamentals of Legal\\nArgumentation: A Survey of Theories on the Justification of Judicial\\nDecisions, second edition, (Argumentation Library 1), Dordrecht:\\nSpringer Netherlands. doi:10.1007/978-94-024-1129-4\",\n \"Field, Hartry, 2008, Saving Truth From Paradox, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230747.001.0001\",\n \"Fisher, Matthew and Frank C. Keil, 2016, “The Trajectory of\\nArgumentation and Its Multifaceted Functions”, in Paglieri,\\nBonelli, and Felletti 2016: 347–362.\",\n \"Fishkin, James, 2016, “Deliberative Democracy”, in\\nEmerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, Robert\\nA. Scott and Marlis C. Buchmann, New York: Wiley.\",\n \"Fogelin, Robert, 1985, “The Logic of Deep\\nDisagreements”, Informal Logic, 7(1): 3–11.\\ndoi:10.22329/il.v7i1.2696\",\n \"Fraassen, Bas C. van, 1989, Laws and Symmetry, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0198248601.001.0001\",\n \"Fricker, Miranda, 2007, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the\\nEthics of Knowing, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198237907.001.0001\",\n \"Geuss, Raymond, 2019, “A Republic of Discussion: Habermas at\\nNinety”, The Point Magazine, 18 June 2019.\\n [Geuss 2019 available online]\",\n \"Gilbert, Michael A., 1994, “Feminism, Argumentation and\\nCoalescence”, Informal Logic, 16(2): 95–113.\\ndoi:10.22329/il.v16i2.2444\",\n \"–––, 1997, Coalescent Argumentation,\\nMahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates.\",\n \"–––, 2004, “Emotion, Argumentation and\\nInformal Logic”, Informal Logic, 24(3): 245–264.\\ndoi:10.22329/il.v24i3.2147\",\n \"Goldman, Alvin I., 1994, “Argumentation and Social\\nEpistemology”, Journal of Philosophy, 91(1):\\n27–49. doi:10.2307/2940949\",\n \"–––, 2004, “An Epistemological Approach to\\nArgumentation”, Informal Logic, 23(1): 49–61.\\ndoi:10.22329/il.v23i1.2153\",\n \"González González, Manuela, Julder Gómez, and\\nMariantonia Lemos, 2019, “Theoretical Considerations for the\\nArticulation of Emotion and Argumentation in the Arguer: A Proposal\\nfor Emotion Regulation in Deliberation”, Argumentation,\\n33(3): 349–364. doi:10.1007/s10503-018-09476-6\",\n \"Goodwin, Jean, 2007, “Argument Has No Function”,\\nInformal Logic, 27(1): 69–90.\\ndoi:10.22329/il.v27i1.465\",\n \"Gordon, Peter, 2004, “Numerical Cognition Without Words:\\nEvidence from Amazonia”, Science, 306(5695):\\n496–499. doi:10.1126/science.1094492\",\n \"Gordon-Smith, Eleanor, 2019, Stop Being Reasonable: How We\\nReally Change Minds, New York: Public Affairs.\",\n \"Govier, Trudy, 1999, The Philosophy of Argument, Newport\\nNews, VA: Vale Press.\",\n \"Habermas, Jürgen, 1981 [1984], Theorie des kommunikativen\\nHandelns. Bd. 1, Handlungsrationalität und gesellschaftliche\\nRationalisierung, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Translated as\\nThe Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. I: Reason and the\\nRationalization of Society, Thomas McCarthy (trans.), Boston:\\nBeacon Press.\",\n \"–––, 1992 [1996], Faktizität und\\nGeltung: Beiträge zur Diskurstheorie des Rechts und des\\ndemokratischen Rechtsstaats, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.\\nTranslated as Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a\\nDiscourse Theory of Law and Democracy, William Rehg (trans.),\\nCambridge, MA: MIT Press.\",\n \"Habernal, Ivan and Iryna Gurevych, 2017, “Argumentation\\nMining in User-Generated Web Discourse”, Computational\\nLinguistics, 43(1): 125–179. doi:10.1162/COLI_a_00276\",\n \"Hahn, Ulrike and Jos Hornikx, 2016, “A Normative Framework\\nfor Argument Quality: Argumentation Schemes with a Bayesian\\nFoundation”, Synthese, 193(6): 1833–1873.\\ndoi:10.1007/s11229-015-0815-0\",\n \"Hahn, Ulrike and Mike Oaksford, 2006, “A Normative Theory of\\nArgument Strength”, Informal Logic, 26(1): 1–24.\\ndoi:10.22329/il.v26i1.428\",\n \"–––, 2007, “The Rationality of Informal\\nArgumentation: A Bayesian Approach to Reasoning Fallacies”,\\nPsychological Review, 114(3): 704–732.\\ndoi:10.1037/0033-295X.114.3.704\",\n \"Halpern, Daniel and Jennifer Gibbs, 2013, “Social Media as a\\nCatalyst for Online Deliberation? Exploring the Affordances of\\nFacebook and YouTube for Political Expression”, Computers in\\nHuman Behavior, 29(3): 1159–1168.\\ndoi:10.1016/j.chb.2012.10.008\",\n \"Hamblin, C. L., 1970, Fallacies, London: Methuen.\",\n \"Hample, Dale, 2006, Arguing: Exchanging Reasons Face to\\nFace, New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781410613486\",\n \"–––, 2018, Interpersonal Arguing, New\\nYork: Peter Lang.\",\n \"Harman, Gilbert H., 1965, “The Inference to the Best\\nExplanation”, The Philosophical Review, 74(1):\\n88–95. doi:10.2307/2183532\",\n \"Hart, H. L. A., 1961, The Concept of Law, Oxford:\\nClarendon.\",\n \"Henrich, Joseph, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan, 2010,\\n“The Weirdest People in the World?”, Behavioral and\\nBrain Sciences, 33(2–3): 61–83.\\ndoi:10.1017/S0140525X0999152X\",\n \"Hindman, Matthew, 2009, The Myth of Digital Democracy,\\nPrinceton, NJ: Princeton University Press.\",\n \"Hintikka, Jaakko and Gabriel Sandu, 1997, “Game-Theoretical\\nSemantics”, in Handbook of Logic and Language, Johan\\nvan Benthem and Alice ter Meulen (eds), Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp.\\n361–410.\",\n \"Hitchcock, David, 2007, “Informal Logic and the Concept of\\nArgument”, in Philosophy of Logic, Dale Jacquette\\n(ed.), Amsterdam, Elsevier, pp. 101–129.\",\n \"Hornikx, Jos and Judith de Best, 2011, “Persuasive Evidence\\nin India: An Investigation of the Impact of Evidence Types and\\nEvidence Quality”, Argumentation and Advocacy, 47(4):\\n246–257. doi:10.1080/00028533.2011.11821750\",\n \"Hornikx, Jos and Ulrike Hahn, 2012, “Reasoning and\\nArgumentation: Towards an Integrated Psychology of\\nArgumentation”, Thinking & Reasoning, 18(3):\\n225–243. doi:10.1080/13546783.2012.674715\",\n \"Hornikx, Jos and Hans Hoeken, 2007, “Cultural Differences in\\nthe Persuasiveness of Evidence Types and Evidence Quality”,\\nCommunication Monographs, 74(4): 443–463.\\ndoi:10.1080/03637750701716578\",\n \"Howes, Moira and Catherine Hundleby, 2018, “The Epistemology\\nof Anger in Argumentation”, Symposion, 5(2):\\n229–254. doi:10.5840/symposion20185218\",\n \"Howson, Colin, 2000, Hume’s Problem: Induction and the\\nJustification of Belief, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/0198250371.001.0001\",\n \"Hundleby, Catherine, 2013, “Aggression, Politeness, and\\nAbstract Adversaries”, Informal Logic, 33(2):\\n238–262. doi:10.22329/il.v33i2.3895\",\n \"Hutchins, Edwin, 1980, Culture and Inference: A Trobriand Case\\nStudy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Irani, Tushar, 2017, Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art\\nof Argument in the ‘Gorgias’ and\\n‘Phaedrus’, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/9781316855621\",\n \"Isenberg, Daniel J., 1986, “Group Polarization: A Critical\\nReview and Meta-Analysis”, Journal of Personality and\\nSocial Psychology, 50(6): 1141–1151.\\ndoi:10.1037/0022-3514.50.6.1141\",\n \"Jackson, Sally, 2019, “Reason-Giving and the Natural\\nNormativity of Argumentation”, Topoi, 38(4):\\n631–643. doi:10.1007/s11245-018-9553-5\",\n \"Jackson, Sally and Scott Jacobs, 1980, “Structure of\\nConversational Argument: Pragmatic Bases for the Enthymeme”,\\nQuarterly Journal of Speech, 66(3): 251–265.\\ndoi:10.1080/00335638009383524\",\n \"Johnson, Ralph Henry and J. Anthony Blair, 1977, Logical\\nSelf-Defense, Toronto: McGraw Hill-Ryerson.\",\n \"Jorgensen Bolinger, Renée, 2021, “Demographic\\nStatistics in Defensive Decisions”, Synthese, 198(5):\\n4833–4850. doi:10.1007/s11229-019-02372-w\",\n \"Josephson, John R. and Susan G. Josephson (eds.), 1994,\\nAbductive Inference: Computation, Philosophy, Technology,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511530128\",\n \"Kahan, Dan M., 2017, Misconceptions, Misinformation, and the\\nLogic of Identity-Protective Cognition, Cultural Cognition\\nProject Working Paper 164, Yale Law School Public Law Research Paper\\n605; Yale Law & Economics Research Paper 575.\\n [Kahan 2017 available online]\",\n \"Kaplan, David, 1989, “Demonstratives: An Essay on the\\nSemantics, Logic, Metaphysics and Epistemology of Demonstratives and\\nother Indexicals”, in Themes From Kaplan, Joseph Almog,\\nJohn Perry, and Howard Wettstein, New York: Oxford University Press,\\npp. 481–563.\",\n \"Keil, Frank C., 2006, “Explanation and Understanding”,\\nAnnual Review of Psychology, 57: 227–254.\\ndoi:10.1146/annurev.psych.57.102904.190100\",\n \"Kidd, Ian James, 2016, “Intellectual Humility, Confidence,\\nand Argumentation”, Topoi, 35(2): 395–402.\\ndoi:10.1007/s11245-015-9324-5\",\n \"–––, 2020, “Martial Metaphors and\\nArgumentative Virtues and Vices”, in Polarisation,\\nArrogance, and Dogmatism: Philosophical Perspectives, Alessandra\\nTanesini and Michael Lynch, London: Routledge, pp. 25–38.\",\n \"Kitcher, Philip, 2001, Science, Truth, and Democracy,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0195145836.001.0001\",\n \"Köymen, Bahar, Maria Mammen, and Michael Tomasello, 2016,\\n“Preschoolers Use Common Ground in Their Justificatory Reasoning\\nwith Peers”, Developmental Psychology, 52(3):\\n423–429. doi:10.1037/dev0000089\",\n \"Köymen, Bahar and Michael Tomasello, 2020, “The Early\\nOntogeny of Reason Giving”, Child Development\\nPerspectives, 14(4): 215–220. doi:10.1111/cdep.12384\",\n \"Krabbe, Erik C. W. and Jan Albert van Laar, 2015,\\n“That’s No Argument! The Dialectic of\\nNon-Argumentation”, Synthese, 192(4): 1173–1197.\\ndoi:10.1007/s11229-014-0609-9\",\n \"Kramer, Adam D. I., Jamie E. Guillory, and Jeffrey T. Hancock,\\n2014, “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional\\nContagion through Social Networks”, Proceedings of the\\nNational Academy of Sciences, 111(24): 8788–8790.\\ndoi:10.1073/pnas.1320040111\",\n \"Kuhn, Deanna and Amanda Crowell, 2011, “Dialogic\\nArgumentation as a Vehicle for Developing Young Adolescents’\\nThinking”, Psychological Science, 22(4): 545–552.\\ndoi:10.1177/0956797611402512\",\n \"Kukla, Quill Rebecca, 2014, “Performative Force, Convention,\\nand Discursive Injustice”, Hypatia, 29(2):\\n440–457. doi:10.1111/j.1527-2001.2012.01316.x\",\n \"Kwong, Jack M. C., 2016, “Open-Mindedness as a Critical\\nVirtue”, Topoi, 35(2): 403–411.\\ndoi:10.1007/s11245-015-9317-4\",\n \"Lagewaard, T. J., 2021, “Epistemic Injustice and Deepened\\nDisagreement”, Philosophical Studies, 178(5):\\n1571–1592. doi:10.1007/s11098-020-01496-x\",\n \"Lamond, Grant, 2014, “Analogical Reasoning in the Common\\nLaw”, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 34(3):\\n567–588. doi:10.1093/ojls/gqu014\",\n \"Landemore, Hélène, 2013, Democratic Reason:\\nPolitics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many,\\nPrinceton, NJ: Princeton University Press.\",\n \"Lewiński, Marcin, 2010, “Collective Argumentative\\nCriticism in Informal Online Discussion Forums”,\\nArgumentation and Advocacy, 47(2): 86–105.\\ndoi:10.1080/00028533.2010.11821740\",\n \"Lewiński, Marcin and Mark Aakhus, 2014, “Argumentative\\nPolylogues in a Dialectical Framework: A Methodological\\nInquiry”, Argumentation, 28(2): 161–185.\\ndoi:10.1007/s10503-013-9307-x\",\n \"Lewiński, Marcin and Dima Mohammed, 2016,\\n“Argumentation Theory”, in The International\\nEncyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy, Klaus Bruhn\\nJensen, Robert T. Craig, Jefferson Pooley, and Eric W. Rothenbuhler\\n(eds.), Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. doi:10.1002/9781118766804.wbiect198\",\n \"Lipton, Peter, 1971 [2003], Inference to the Best\\nExplanation, London: Routledge. Second edition, 2003.\\ndoi:10.4324/9780203470855\",\n \"Lombrozo, Tania, 2007, “Simplicity and Probability in Causal\\nExplanation”, Cognitive Psychology, 55(3):\\n232–257. doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2006.09.006\",\n \"Longino, Helen E., 1990, Science as Social Knowledge: Values\\nand Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry, Princeton, NJ: Princeton\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Lorenzen, Paul and Kuno Lorenz, 1978, Dialogische Logik,\\nDarmstadt: Wissenschafstliche Buchgesellschaft.\",\n \"Lumer, Christoph, 2005, “Introduction: The Epistemological\\nApproach to Argumentation—A Map”, Informal Logic,\\n25(3): 189–212. doi:10.22329/il.v25i3.1134\",\n \"Lynch, Michael Patrick, 2019, Know-It-All Society: Truth and\\nArrogance in Political Culture, New York, NY: Liveright.\",\n \"Mäs, Michael and Andreas Flache, 2013, “Differentiation\\nwithout Distancing. Explaining Bi-Polarization of Opinions without\\nNegative Influence”, PLoS ONE, 8(11): e74516.\\ndoi:10.1371/journal.pone.0074516\",\n \"MacCormick, Neil, 1978, Legal Reasoning and Legal Theory,\\nOxford: Clarendon.\",\n \"Mackenzie, Jim, 1989, “Reasoning and Logic”,\\nSynthese, 79(1): 99–117. doi:10.1007/BF00873257\",\n \"Massey, Gerald J., 1981, “The Fallacy behind\\nFallacies”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 6:\\n489–500. doi:10.1111/j.1475-4975.1981.tb00454.x\",\n \"McKinnon, Rachel, 2016, “Epistemic Injustice”,\\nPhilosophy Compass, 11(8): 437–446.\\ndoi:10.1111/phc3.12336\",\n \"Medina, José, 2011, “The Relevance of Credibility\\nExcess in a Proportional View of Epistemic Injustice: Differential\\nEpistemic Authority and the Social Imaginary”, Social\\nEpistemology, 25(1): 15–35.\\ndoi:10.1080/02691728.2010.534568\",\n \"Mercier, Hugo, 2011, “On the Universality of Argumentative\\nReasoning”, Journal of Cognition and Culture,\\n11(1–2): 85–113. doi:10.1163/156853711X568707\",\n \"–––, 2013, “Introduction: Recording and\\nExplaining Cultural Differences in Argumentation”, Journal\\nof Cognition and Culture, 13(5): 409–417.\\ndoi:10.1163/15685373-12342101\",\n \"–––, 2018, “Reasoning and\\nArgumentation”, in Ball and Thomson 2018: 401–414.\",\n \"Mercier, Hugo and Christophe Heintz, 2014,\\n“Scientists’ Argumentative Reasoning”,\\nTopoi, 33(2): 513–524.\\ndoi:10.1007/s11245-013-9217-4\",\n \"Mercier, Hugo and Dan Sperber, 2017, The Enigma of\\nReason, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Mercier, Hugo, M. Deguchi, J.-B. Van der Henst, and H. Yama, 2016,\\n“The Benefits of Argumentation Are Cross-Culturally Robust: The\\nCase of Japan”, Thinking & Reasoning, 22(1):\\n1–15. doi:10.1080/13546783.2014.1002534\",\n \"Merton, Robert, 1942, The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.\",\n \"Mill, John Stuart, 1859, On Liberty, London: John W.\\nParker and Son. Reprinted Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1999.\",\n \"Mohammed, Dima, 2016, “Goals in Argumentation: A Proposal\\nfor the Analysis and Evaluation of Public Political Arguments”,\\nArgumentation, 30(3): 221–245.\\ndoi:10.1007/s10503-015-9370-6\",\n \"Mouffe, Chantal, 1999, “Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic\\nPluralism?”, Social Research, 66(3):\\n745–758.\",\n \"–––, 2000, The Democratic Paradox,\\nLondon: Verso.\",\n \"Moulton, Janice, 1983, “A Paradigm of Philosophy: The\\nAdversary Method”, in Discovering Reality, Sandra\\nHarding and Merrill B. Hintikka (eds.), (Synthese Library 161),\\nDordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 149–164.\\ndoi:10.1007/0-306-48017-4_9\",\n \"Muller Mirza, Nathalie and Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont (eds.),\\n2009, Argumentation and Education: Theoretical Foundations and\\nPractices, Boston, MA: Springer US.\\ndoi:10.1007/978-0-387-98125-3\",\n \"Nelson, Michael and Edward N. Zalta, 2012, “A Defense of\\nContingent Logical Truths”, Philosophical Studies,\\n157(1): 153–162. doi:10.1007/s11098-010-9624-y\",\n \"Netz, Reviel, 1999, The Shaping of Deduction in Greek\\nMathematics: A Study in Cognitive History, Cambridge: Cambridge\\nUniversity Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511543296\",\n \"Nguyen, C. Thi, 2020, “Echo Chambers and Epistemic\\nBubbles”, Episteme, 17(2): 141–161.\\ndoi:10.1017/epi.2018.32\",\n \"Nickerson, Raymond S., 1998, “Confirmation Bias: A\\nUbiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises”, Review of General\\nPsychology, 2(2): 175–220.\\ndoi:10.1037/1089-2680.2.2.175\",\n \"Norman, Andy, 2016, “Why We Reason: Intention-Alignment and\\nthe Genesis of Human Rationality”, Biology &\\nPhilosophy, 31(5): 685–704.\\ndoi:10.1007/s10539-016-9532-4\",\n \"Norton, John D., 2003, “A Material Theory of\\nInduction”, Philosophy of Science, 70(4):\\n647–670. doi:10.1086/378858\",\n \"Nozick, Robert, 1981, Philosophical Explanations,\\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Oaksford, Mike and Nick Chater, 2018, “Probabilities and\\nBayesian Rationality”, in Ball and Thomson 2018:\\n415–433.\",\n \"Olson, Kevin, 2011 [2014], “Deliberative Democracy”,\\nin Jürgen Habermas: Key Concepts, Barbara Fultner (ed.),\\nDurham, UK: Acument; reprinted London: Routledge, 2014,\\npp. 140–155.\",\n \"Olsson, Erik J., 2013, “A Bayesian Simulation Model of Group\\nDeliberation and Polarization”, in Zenker 2013: 113–133.\\ndoi:10.1007/978-94-007-5357-0_6\",\n \"Oswald, Steve, Thierry Herman, and Jérôme Jacquin\\n(eds.), 2018, Argumentation and Language — Linguistic,\\nCognitive and Discursive Explorations (Argumentation Library 32),\\nCham: Springer International Publishing.\\ndoi:10.1007/978-3-319-73972-4\",\n \"Paglieri, Fabio, Laura Bonelli, and Silvia Felletti, 2016, The\\nPsychology of Argument: Cognitive Approaches to Argumentation and\\nPersuasion, London: College Publications.\",\n \"Patterson, Steven W, 2011, “Functionalism, Normativity and\\nthe Concept of Argumentation”, Informal Logic, 31(1):\\n1–26. doi:10.22329/il.v31i1.3013\",\n \"Peldszus, Andreas and Manfred Stede, 2013, “From Argument\\nDiagrams to Argumentation Mining in Texts: A Survey”,\\nInternational Journal of Cognitive Informatics and Natural\\nIntelligence, 7(1): 1–31. doi:10.4018/jcini.2013010101\",\n \"Perelman, Chaim and Lucia Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1958 [1969],\\nTraité de l’argumentation; la nouvelle\\nrhétorique, Paris: Presses universitaires de France.\\nTranslated as The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation,\\nJohn Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (trans), Notre Dame, IN: University\\nof Notre Dame Press, 1969.\",\n \"Pollock, John L., 1987, “Defeasible Reasoning”,\\nCognitive Science, 11(4): 481–518.\\ndoi:10.1207/s15516709cog1104_4\",\n \"Prakken, Henry and Giovanni Sartor, 2015, “Law and Logic: A\\nReview from an Argumentation Perspective”, Artificial\\nIntelligence, 227(October): 214–245.\\ndoi:10.1016/j.artint.2015.06.005\",\n \"Rahwan, Iyad and Guillermo Simari (eds.), 2009, Argumentation\\nin Artificial Intelligence, Boston, MA: Springer US.\\ndoi:10.1007/978-0-387-98197-0\",\n \"Raz, J., 2001, “Reasoning with Rules”, Current\\nLegal Problems, 54(1): 1–18. doi:10.1093/clp/54.1.1\",\n \"Rehg, William, 2008, Cogent Science in Context: The Science\\nWars, Argumentation Theory, and Habermas, Cambridge, MA: MIT\\nPress.\",\n \"Reiter, R., 1980, “A Logic for Default Reasoning”,\\nArtificial Intelligence, 13(1–2): 81–132.\\ndoi:10.1016/0004-3702(80)90014-4\",\n \"Restall, Greg, 2004, “Logical Pluralism and the Preservation\\nof Warrant”, in Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of\\nScience, Shahid Rahman, John Symons, Dov M. Gabbay, and Jean Paul\\nvan Bendegem (eds.), Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, pp. 163–173.\\ndoi:10.1007/978-1-4020-2808-3_10\",\n \"Rooney, Phyllis, 2012, “When Philosophical Argumentation\\nImpedes Social and Political Progress”, Journal of Social\\nPhilosophy, 43(3): 317–333.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1467-9833.2012.01568.x\",\n \"Sanders, Lynn M., 1997, “Against Deliberation”,\\nPolitical Theory, 25(3): 347–376.\\ndoi:10.1177/0090591797025003002\",\n \"Schmitt, Carl, 1922 [2005], Politische Theologie: Vier Kapitel\\nzur Lehre von der Souveränität, München Und\\nLeipzig: Duncker & Humblot. Part translated as Political\\nTheology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, George\\nSchwab (trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.\\nTranslation reprinted 2005.\",\n \"Schotch, Peter K., Bryson Brown, and Raymond E. Jennings (eds.),\\n2009, On Preserving: Essays on Preservationism and Paraconsistent\\nLogic, (Toronto Studies in Philosophy), Toronto/Buffalo, NY:\\nUniversity of Toronto Press.\",\n \"Sequoiah-Grayson, Sebastian, 2008, “The Scandal of\\nDeduction: Hintikka on the Information Yield of Deductive\\nInferences”, Journal of Philosophical Logic, 37(1):\\n67–94. doi:10.1007/s10992-007-9060-4\",\n \"Shapiro, Stewart, 2005, “Logical Consequence, Proof Theory,\\nand Model Theory”, in Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of\\nMathematics and Logic, Stewart Shapiro (ed.), Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press, pp. 651–670.\",\n \"–––, 2014, Varieties of Logic, New\\nYork: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199696529.001.0001\",\n \"Siegel, Harvey, 1995, “Why Should Educators Care about\\nArgumentation?”, Informal Logic, 17(2): 159–176.\\ndoi:10.22329/il.v17i2.2405\",\n \"Sinhababu, Neil, 2017, Humean Nature: How Desire Explains\\nAction, Thought, and Feeling, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198783893.001.0001\",\n \"Sklar, Elizabeth I. and Mohammad Q. Azhar, 2018,\\n“Explanation through Argumentation”, in Proceedings of\\nthe 6th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction,\\nSouthampton, UK: ACM, pp. 277–285. doi:10.1145/3284432.3284470\",\n \"Smart, Paul, Richard Heersmink, and Robert W. Clowes, 2017,\\n“The Cognitive Ecology of the Internet”, in Cognition\\nBeyond the Brain: Computation, Interactivity and Human Artifice,\\nStephen J. 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Lynch (eds.), 2020,\\nPolarisation, Arrogance, and Dogmatism: Philosophical\\nPerspectives, London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780429291395\",\n \"Thomson, Judith Jarvis, 1971, “A Defense of Abortion”,\\nPhilosophy and Public Affairs, 1(1): 47–66.\",\n \"Tindale, Christopher W., 2007, Fallacies and Argument\\nAppraisal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511806544\",\n \"–––, 2021, The Anthropology of Argument:\\nCultural Foundations of Rhetoric and Reason, New York: Routledge.\\ndoi:10.4324/9781003107637\",\n \"Tomasello, Michael, 2014, A Natural History of Human\\nThinking, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Toulmin, Stephen E., 1958 [2003], The Uses of Argument,\\nCambridge University Press. Second edition, 2003.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511840005\",\n \"Van Laar, Jan Albert and Erik C. W. Krabbe, 2019, “Pressure\\nand Argumentation in Public Controversies”, Informal\\nLogic, 39(3): 205–227. doi:10.22329/il.v39i3.5739\",\n \"Walton, Douglas N., 1992, The Place of Emotion in\\nArgument, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University\\nPress.\",\n \"–––, 2002, Legal Argumentation and\\nEvidence, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University\\nPress.\",\n \"Walton, Douglas N. and Erik C.W. Krabbe, 1995, Commitment in\\nDialogue: Basic Concepts of Interpersonal Reasoning, Albany, NY:\\nState University of New York Press.\",\n \"Walton, Douglas N., Christopher Reed, and Fabrizio Macagno, 2008,\\nArgumentation Schemes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511802034\",\n \"Weger, Harry, Jr., and Mark Aakhus, 2003, “Arguing in\\nInternet Chat Rooms: Argumentative Adaptations to Chat Room Design and\\nSome Consequences for Public Deliberation at a Distance”,\\nArgumentation and Advocacy, 40(1): 23–38.\\ndoi:10.1080/00028533.2003.11821595\",\n \"Weinstein, Mark, 1990, “Towards an Account of Argumentation\\nin Science”, Argumentation, 4(3): 269–298.\\ndoi:10.1007/BF00173968\",\n \"Wenman, Mark, 2013, Agonistic Democracy: Constituent Power in\\nthe Era of Globalisation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511777158\",\n \"Williamson, Timothy, 2018, Doing Philosophy: From Common\\nCuriosity to Logical Reasoning, Oxford: Oxford University\\nPress.\",\n \"Wodak, Ruth, 2016, “Argumentation, Political”, in\\nThe International Encyclopedia of Political Communication,\\nGianpietro Mazzoleni (ed.), London: Blackwell, 9 pages.\",\n \"Yardi, Sarita and Danah Boyd, 2010, “Dynamic Debates: An\\nAnalysis of Group Polarization Over Time on Twitter”,\\nBulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 30(5):\\n316–327. doi:10.1177/0270467610380011\",\n \"Young, Iris Marion, 2000, Inclusion and Democracy,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0198297556.001.0001\",\n \"Zamora Bonilla, Jesús, 2006, “Science as a Persuasion\\nGame: An Inferentialist Approach”, Episteme, 2(3):\\n189–201. doi:10.3366/epi.2005.2.3.189\",\n \"Zarefsky, David, 2014, Political Argumentation in the United\\nStates, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.\",\n \"Zenker, Frank (ed.), 2013, Bayesian Argumentation: The\\nPractical Side of Probability, Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.\\ndoi:10.1007/978-94-007-5357-0\",\n \"Angelelli, Ignacio, 1970, “The Techniques of Disputation in\\nthe History of Logic”, The Journal of Philosophy,\\n67(20): 800–815. doi:10.2307/2024013\",\n \"Ashworth, E. J., 2011, “The scope of logic: Soto and Fonseca on dialectic and informal arguments”, in Methods and Methodologies: Aristotelian Logic East and West, 500–1500, Margaret Cameron and John Marenbon, Leiden: Brill, pp. 127–145.\",\n \"Bazán, B. C., J. W. Wippel, G. Fransen, and D. Jacquart,\\n1985, Les Questions Disputées et Les Questions\\nQuodlibétiques dans les Facultés de Théologie, de\\nDroit et de Médecine, Turnhout: Brepols.\",\n \"Castelnérac, Benoît and Mathieu Marion, 2009,\\n“Arguing for Inconsistency: Dialectical Games in the\\nAcademy”, in Acts of Knowledge: History, Philosophy and\\nLogic, Giuseppe Primiero and Shahid Rahman (eds), London: College\\nPublications, pp. 37–76.\",\n \"DiPasquale, David M., 2019, Alfarabi’s “Book of\\nDialectic (Kitāb al-Jadal)”: On the Starting Point of\\nIslamic Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/9781108277822\",\n \"Duncombe, Matthew and Catarina Dutilh Novaes, 2016,\\n“Dialectic and logic in Aristotle and his tradition”,\\nHistory and Philosophy of Logic, 37: 1–8.\",\n \"Dutilh Novaes, Catarina, 2017, “What is logic?”,\\nAeon Magazine, 12 January 2017.\\n [Dutilh Novaes 2017 available online]\",\n \"–––, 2020, The Dialogical Roots of\\nDeduction: Historical, Cognitive, and Philosophical Perspectives on\\nReasoning, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/9781108800792\",\n \"El-Rouayheb, Khaled, 2016, “Arabic Logic after\\nAvicenna”, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval\\nLogic, Catarina Dutilh Novaes and Stephen Read (eds.), Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press, pp. 67–93.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9781107449862.004\",\n \"Fink, Jakob L., 2012, “Introduction”, in The\\nDevelopment of Dialectic from Plato to Aristotle, Jakob Leth Fink\\n(ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–24.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511997969.001\",\n \"Fraser, Chris, 2013, “Distinctions, Judgment, and Reasoning\\nin Classical Chinese Thought”, History and Philosophy of\\nLogic, 34(1): 1–24. doi:10.1080/01445340.2012.724927\",\n \"Ganeri, Dr Jonardon, 2001, “Introduction: Indian Logic and\\nthe Colonization of Reason”, in his Indian Logic: A\\nReader, London: Routledge, pp. 1–25.\",\n \"Hansen, Chad, 1983, Language and Logic in Ancient China,\\nAnn Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.\",\n \"Hansen, Mogens Herman, 1977–88 [1991], Det Athenske\\nDemokrati. Revised and translated as The Athenian Democracy\\nin the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles, and Ideology,\\nJ.A. Crook (trans.), Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.\",\n \"Irani, Tushar, 2017, Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art\\nof Argument in the “Gorgias” and\\n“Phaedrus”, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/9781316855621\",\n \"Matilal, Bimal Krishna, 1998, The Character of Logic in\\nIndia, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.\",\n \"Miller, Larry Benjamin, 2020, Islamic Disputation Theory: The\\nUses & Rules of Argument in Medieval Islam, (Logic,\\nArgumentation & Reasoning 21), Cham: Springer International\\nPublishing. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-45012-0\",\n \"Nauta, Lodi, 2009, In Defense of Common Sense: Lorenzo\\nValla’s Humanist Critique of Scholastic Philosophy,\\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Nicholson, Hugh, 2010, “The Shift from Agonistic to\\nNon-Agonistic Debate in Early Nyāya”, Journal of Indian\\nPhilosophy, 38(1): 75–95.\\ndoi:10.1007/s10781-009-9081-0\",\n \"Notomi, Noburu, 2014, “The Sophists”, in Routledge\\nCompanion to Ancient Philosophy, Frisbee Sheffield and James\\nWarren (eds.), New York: Routledge, pp. 94–110.\",\n \"Novikoff, Alex J., 2013, The Medieval Culture of Disputation:\\nPedagogy, Practice, and Performance, Philadelphia, PA: University\\nof Pennsylvania Press.\",\n \"Phillips, Stephen H., 2017, “Fallacies and Defeaters in\\nEarly Navya Nyaya”, Indian Epistemology and\\nMetaphysics, Joerg Tuske (ed.), London: Bloomsbury Academic,\\npp. 33–52.\",\n \"Prets, Ernst, 2001, “Futile and False Rejoinders,\\nSophistical Arguments and Early Indian Logic”, Journal of\\nIndian Philosophy, 29(5/6): 545–558.\\ndoi:10.1023/A:1013894810880\",\n \"Siderits, Mark, 2003, “Deductive, Inductive, Both or\\nNeither?”, Journal of Indian Philosophy, 31(1/3):\\n303–321. doi:10.1023/A:1024691426770\",\n \"Solomon, Esther Abraham, 1976, Indian Dialectics: Methods of\\nPhilosophical Discussion, Ahmedabad: B.J. Institute of Learning\\nand Research.\",\n \"Taber, John A., 2004, “Is Indian Logic Nonmonotonic?”,\\nPhilosophy East and West, 54(2): 143–170.\\ndoi:10.1353/pew.2004.0009\",\n \"Wolfsdorf, David, 2013, “Socratic Philosophizing”, in\\nThe Bloomsbury Companion to Socrates, John Bussanich and\\nNicholas D. Smith (eds.), London; New York: Continuum,\\npp. 34–67.\",\n \"Young, Walter Edward, 2017, The Dialectical Forge,\\n(Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning 9), Cham: Springer International\\nPublishing. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-25522-4\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../abduction/","text":"abduction"},{"href":"../analogy-medieval/","text":"analogy: medieval theories of"},{"href":"../reasoning-analogy/","text":"analogy and analogical reasoning"},{"href":"../aristotle/","text":"Aristotle"},{"href":"../aristotle-logic/","text":"Aristotle, General Topics: logic"},{"href":"../aristotle-rhetoric/","text":"Aristotle, General Topics: rhetoric"},{"href":"../francis-bacon/","text":"Bacon, Francis"},{"href":"../bayes-theorem/","text":"Bayes’ Theorem"},{"href":"../implicit-bias/","text":"bias, implicit"},{"href":"../chinese-logic-language/","text":"Chinese Philosophy: logic and language in Early Chinese 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Jürgen"},{"href":"../hume/","text":"Hume, David"},{"href":"../induction-problem/","text":"induction: problem of"},{"href":"../legal-reas-prec/","text":"legal reasoning: precedent and analogy in"},{"href":"../liar-paradox/","text":"liar paradox"},{"href":"../logic-inductive/","text":"logic: inductive"},{"href":"../logic-informal/","text":"logic: informal"},{"href":"../logic-nonmonotonic/","text":"logic: non-monotonic"},{"href":"../logic-paraconsistent/","text":"logic: paraconsistent"},{"href":"../logic-relevance/","text":"logic: relevance"},{"href":"../logical-consequence/","text":"logical consequence"},{"href":"../peirce/","text":"Peirce, Charles Sanders"},{"href":"../reasoning-defeasible/","text":"reasoning: defeasible"},{"href":"../scientific-knowledge-social/","text":"scientific knowledge: social dimensions of"},{"href":"../spinoza/","text":"Spinoza, Baruch"},{"href":"../stebbing/","text":"Stebbing, Susan"},{"href":"../thought-experiment/","text":"thought experiments"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../abduction/\",\n \"text\": \"abduction\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../analogy-medieval/\",\n \"text\": \"analogy: medieval theories of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../reasoning-analogy/\",\n \"text\": \"analogy and analogical reasoning\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotle/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotle\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotle-logic/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotle, General Topics: logic\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotle-rhetoric/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotle, General Topics: rhetoric\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../francis-bacon/\",\n \"text\": \"Bacon, Francis\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../bayes-theorem/\",\n \"text\": \"Bayes’ Theorem\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../implicit-bias/\",\n \"text\": \"bias, implicit\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../chinese-logic-language/\",\n \"text\": \"Chinese Philosophy: logic and language in Early Chinese Philosophy\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../mohism/\",\n \"text\": \"Chinese Philosophy: Mohism\"\n },\n {\n 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Judged solely in terms of his philosophical\ninfluence, only Plato is his peer: Aristotle’s works shaped centuries\nof philosophy from Late Antiquity through the Renaissance, and even\ntoday continue to be studied with keen, non-antiquarian interest. A\nprodigious researcher and writer, Aristotle left a great body of work,\nperhaps numbering as many as two-hundred treatises, from which\napproximately thirty-one\n survive.[1] \n His extant writings span a wide range of\ndisciplines, from logic, metaphysics and philosophy of mind, through\nethics, political theory, aesthetics and rhetoric, and into such\nprimarily non-philosophical fields as empirical biology, where he\nexcelled at detailed plant and animal observation and description. \nIn all these areas, Aristotle’s theories have provided\nillumination, met with resistance, sparked debate, and generally\nstimulated the sustained interest of an abiding readership.","\n\nBecause of its wide range and its remoteness in time,\nAristotle’s philosophy defies easy encapsulation. The long\nhistory of interpretation and appropriation of Aristotelian texts and\nthemes—spanning over two millennia and comprising philosophers\nworking within a variety of religious and secular traditions—has\nrendered even basic points of interpretation controversial. The\nset of entries on Aristotle in this site addresses this situation by\nproceeding in three tiers. First, the present, general entry\noffers a brief account of Aristotle’s life and characterizes his\ncentral philosophical commitments, highlighting his most distinctive\nmethods and most influential\n achievements.[2] \n Second are General Topics, which offer detailed introductions\nto the main areas of Aristotle’s philosophical activity. Finally,\nthere follow Special Topics, which investigate in greater\ndetail more narrowly focused issues, especially those of central\nconcern in recent Aristotelian scholarship. "],"string":"[\n \"\\n\\nAristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) numbers among the greatest\\nphilosophers of all time. Judged solely in terms of his philosophical\\ninfluence, only Plato is his peer: Aristotle’s works shaped centuries\\nof philosophy from Late Antiquity through the Renaissance, and even\\ntoday continue to be studied with keen, non-antiquarian interest. A\\nprodigious researcher and writer, Aristotle left a great body of work,\\nperhaps numbering as many as two-hundred treatises, from which\\napproximately thirty-one\\n survive.[1] \\n His extant writings span a wide range of\\ndisciplines, from logic, metaphysics and philosophy of mind, through\\nethics, political theory, aesthetics and rhetoric, and into such\\nprimarily non-philosophical fields as empirical biology, where he\\nexcelled at detailed plant and animal observation and description. \\nIn all these areas, Aristotle’s theories have provided\\nillumination, met with resistance, sparked debate, and generally\\nstimulated the sustained interest of an abiding readership.\",\n \"\\n\\nBecause of its wide range and its remoteness in time,\\nAristotle’s philosophy defies easy encapsulation. The long\\nhistory of interpretation and appropriation of Aristotelian texts and\\nthemes—spanning over two millennia and comprising philosophers\\nworking within a variety of religious and secular traditions—has\\nrendered even basic points of interpretation controversial. The\\nset of entries on Aristotle in this site addresses this situation by\\nproceeding in three tiers. First, the present, general entry\\noffers a brief account of Aristotle’s life and characterizes his\\ncentral philosophical commitments, highlighting his most distinctive\\nmethods and most influential\\n achievements.[2] \\n Second are General Topics, which offer detailed introductions\\nto the main areas of Aristotle’s philosophical activity. Finally,\\nthere follow Special Topics, which investigate in greater\\ndetail more narrowly focused issues, especially those of central\\nconcern in recent Aristotelian scholarship. \"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Aristotle’s Life","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. The Aristotelian Corpus: Character and Primary Divisions","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"3. ","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"4. Logic, Science, and Dialectic","sub_toc":["4.1 Logic","4.2 Science","4.3 Dialectic"]},{"content_title":"5. Essentialism and Homonymy","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"6. Category Theory","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"7. The Four Causal Account of Explanatory Adequacy","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"8. Hylomorphism","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"9. Aristotelian Teleology","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"10. Substance","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"11. Living Beings","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"12. Happiness and Political Association","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"13. Rhetoric and the Arts","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"14. Aristotle’s Legacy","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":["A. Translations","B. Translations with Commentaries","C. General Works","D. Bibliography of Works Cited"]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Aristotle’s Life\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. The Aristotelian Corpus: Character and Primary Divisions\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. \",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Logic, Science, and Dialectic\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"4.1 Logic\",\n \"4.2 Science\",\n \"4.3 Dialectic\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Essentialism and Homonymy\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. Category Theory\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"7. The Four Causal Account of Explanatory Adequacy\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"8. Hylomorphism\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"9. Aristotelian Teleology\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"10. Substance\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"11. Living Beings\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"12. Happiness and Political Association\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"13. Rhetoric and the Arts\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"14. Aristotle’s Legacy\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"A. Translations\",\n \"B. Translations with Commentaries\",\n \"C. General Works\",\n \"D. Bibliography of Works Cited\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\n\n \nBorn in 384 B.C.E. in the Macedonian region of northeastern Greece in\nthe small city of Stagira (whence the moniker ‘the\nStagirite’, which one still occasionally encounters in\nAristotelian scholarship), Aristotle was sent to Athens at about the\nage of seventeen to study in Plato’s Academy, then a pre-eminent\nplace of learning in the Greek world. Once in Athens, Aristotle\nremained associated with the Academy until Plato’s death in 347,\nat which time he left for Assos, in Asia Minor, on the northwest coast\nof present-day Turkey. There he continued the philosophical activity\nhe had begun in the Academy, but in all likelihood also began to\nexpand his researches into marine biology. He remained at Assos for\napproximately three years, when, evidently upon the death of his host\nHermeias, a friend and former Academic who had been the ruler of\nAssos, Aristotle moved to the nearby coastal island of Lesbos. There\nhe continued his philosophical and empirical researches for an\nadditional two years, working in conjunction with Theophrastus, a\nnative of Lesbos who was also reported in antiquity to have been\nassociated with Plato’s Academy. While in Lesbos, Aristotle\nmarried Pythias, the niece of Hermeias, with whom he had a daughter,\nalso named Pythias.","\n\nIn 343, upon the request of Philip, the king of Macedon, Aristotle\nleft Lesbos for Pella, the Macedonian capital, in order to tutor the\nking’s thirteen-year-old son, Alexander—the boy who was\neventually to become Alexander the Great. Although speculation\nconcerning Aristotle’s influence upon the developing Alexander has\nproven irresistible to historians, in fact little concrete is known\nabout their interaction. On the balance, it seems reasonable to\nconclude that some tuition took place, but that it lasted only two or\nthree years, when Alexander was aged from thirteen to fifteen. By\nfifteen, Alexander was apparently already serving as a deputy military\ncommander for his father, a circumstance undermining, if\ninconclusively, the judgment of those historians who conjecture a\nlonger period of tuition. Be that as it may, some suppose that their\nassociation lasted as long as eight years.","\n\nIt is difficult to rule out that possibility decisively, since little\nis known about the period of Aristotle’s life from\n341–335. He evidently remained a further five years in Stagira\nor Macedon before returning to Athens for the second and final time,\nin 335. In Athens, Aristotle set up his own school in a public\nexercise area dedicated to the god Apollo Lykeios, whence its name,\nthe Lyceum. Those affiliated with Aristotle’s school\nlater came to be called Peripatetics, probably because of the\nexistence of an ambulatory (peripatos) on the school’s\nproperty adjacent to the exercise ground. Members of the Lyceum\nconducted research into a wide range of subjects, all of which were of\ninterest to Aristotle himself: botany, biology, logic, music,\nmathematics, astronomy, medicine, cosmology, physics, the history of\nphilosophy, metaphysics, psychology, ethics, theology, rhetoric,\npolitical history, government and political theory, and the arts. In\nall these areas, the Lyceum collected manuscripts, thereby, according\nto some ancient accounts, assembling the first great library of\nantiquity. ","\n\nDuring this period, Aristotle’s wife, Pythias, died and he\ndeveloped a new relationship with Herpyllis, perhaps like him a native\nof Stagira, though her origins are disputed, as is the question of her\nexact relationship to Aristotle. Some suppose that she was merely his\nslave; others infer from the provisions of Aristotle’s will that\nshe was a freed woman and likely his wife at the time of his\ndeath. In any event, they had children together, including a son,\nNicomachus, named for Aristotle’s father and after whom his\nNicomachean Ethics is presumably named.","\n\nAfter thirteen years in Athens, Aristotle once again found cause to\nretire from the city, in 323. Probably his departure was\noccasioned by a resurgence of the always-simmering anti-Macedonian\nsentiment in Athens, which was free to come to the boil after Alexander\nsuccumbed to disease in Babylon during that same year. Because of\nhis connections to Macedon, Aristotle reasonably feared for his safety\nand left Athens, remarking, as an oft-repeated ancient tale would tell\nit, that he saw no reason to permit Athens to sin twice against\nphilosophy. He withdrew directly to Chalcis, on Euboea, an island\noff the Attic coast, and died there of natural causes the following\nyear, in\n 322.[3]"],"section_title":"1. Aristotle’s Life","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n \nAristotle’s writings tend to present formidable difficulties to\nhis novice readers. To begin, he makes heavy use of unexplained\ntechnical terminology, and his sentence structure can at times prove\nfrustrating. Further, on occasion a chapter or even a full\ntreatise coming down to us under his name appears haphazardly\norganized, if organized at all; indeed, in several cases, scholars\ndispute whether a continuous treatise currently arranged under a single\ntitle was ever intended by Aristotle to be published in its present\nform or was rather stitched together by some later editor employing\nwhatever principles of organization he deemed\n suitable.[4] \n This helps explain why\nstudents who turn to Aristotle after first being introduced to the\nsupple and mellifluous prose on display in Plato’s dialogues\noften find the experience frustrating. Aristotle’s prose\nrequires some acclimatization.","\n \nAll the more puzzling, then, is Cicero’s observation that if\nPlato’s prose was silver, Aristotle’s was a flowing river\nof gold (Ac. Pr. 38.119, cf. Top. 1.3, De\nor. 1.2.49). Cicero was arguably the greatest prose stylist of\nLatin and was also without question an accomplished and fair-minded\ncritic of the prose styles of others writing in both Latin and\nGreek. We must assume, then, that Cicero had before him works of\nAristotle other than those we possess. In fact, we know that\nAristotle wrote dialogues, presumably while still in the Academy, and\nin their few surviving remnants we are afforded a glimpse of the style\nCicero describes. In most of what we possess, unfortunately, we\nfind work of a much less polished character. Rather,\nAristotle’s extant works read like what they very probably are:\nlecture notes, drafts first written and then reworked, ongoing records\nof continuing investigations, and, generally speaking, in-house\ncompilations intended not for a general audience but for an inner\ncircle of auditors. These are to be contrasted with the\n“exoteric” writings Aristotle sometimes mentions, his more\ngraceful compositions intended for a wider audience (Pol.\n1278b30; EE 1217b22, 1218b34). Unfortunately, then, we\nare left for the most part, though certainly not entirely, with\nunfinished works in progress rather than with finished and polished\nproductions. Still, many of those who persist with Aristotle come\nto appreciate the unembellished directness of his style.","\n\n \nMore importantly, the unvarnished condition of Aristotle’s\nsurviving treatises does not hamper our ability to come to grips with their\nphilosophical content. His thirty-one surviving works (that is,\nthose contained in the “Corpus Aristotelicum” of our\nmedieval manuscripts that are judged to be authentic) all contain\nrecognizably Aristotelian doctrine; and most of these contain theses\nwhose basic purport is clear, even where matters of detail and nuance\nare subject to exegetical controversy. ","\n\n \nThese works may be categorized in terms of the intuitive\norganizational principles preferred by Aristotle. He refers to the\nbranches of learning as “sciences”\n(epistêmai), best regarded as organized bodies of\nlearning completed for presentation rather than as ongoing records of\nempirical researches. Moreover, again in his terminology, natural\nsciences such as physics are but one branch of theoretical\nscience, which comprises both empirical and non-empirical\npursuits. He distinguishes theoretical science from more practically\noriented studies, some of which concern human conduct and others of\nwhich focus on the productive crafts. Thus, the Aristotelian sciences\ndivide into three: (i) theoretical, (ii) practical, and (iii)\nproductive. The principles of division are straightforward:\ntheoretical science seeks knowledge for its own sake; practical\nscience concerns conduct and goodness in action, both individual and\nsocietal; and productive science aims at the creation of beautiful or\nuseful objects (Top. 145a15–16;\nPhys. 192b8–12; DC 298a27–32,\nDA 403a27–b2; Met. 1025b25, 1026a18–19,\n1064a16–19, b1–3; EN 1139a26–28,\n1141b29–32).","\n\n(i) The theoretical sciences include prominently what\nAristotle calls first philosophy, or metaphysics as we now\ncall it, but also mathematics, and physics, or\nnatural philosophy. Physics studies the natural universe as a\nwhole, and tends in Aristotle’s hands to concentrate on\nconceptual puzzles pertaining to nature rather than on empirical research;\nbut it reaches further, so that it includes also a theory of causal\nexplanation and finally even a proof of an unmoved mover thought to be\nthe first and final cause of all motion. Many of the puzzles of primary\nconcern to Aristotle have proven perennially attractive to\nphilosophers, mathematicians, and theoretically inclined natural\nscientists. They include, as a small sample, Zeno’s\nparadoxes of motion, puzzles about time, the nature of place, and\ndifficulties encountered in thought about the infinite. ","\n\nNatural philosophy also incorporates the special sciences, including\nbiology, botany, and astronomical theory. Most contemporary\ncritics think that Aristotle treats psychology as a sub-branch of\nnatural philosophy, because he regards the soul (psuchê)\nas the basic principle of life, including all animal and plant\nlife. In fact, however, the evidence for this conclusion is\ninconclusive at best. It is instructive to note that earlier periods of\nAristotelian scholarship thought this controversial, so that, for\ninstance, even something as innocuous-sounding as the question of the\nproper home of psychology in Aristotle’s division of the sciences\nignited a multi-decade debate in the\n Renaissance.[5] ","\n\n(ii) Practical sciences are less contentious, at least as\nregards their range. These deal with conduct and action, both\nindividual and societal. Practical science thus contrasts with\ntheoretical science, which seeks knowledge for its own sake, and, less\nobviously, with the productive sciences, which deal with the creation\nof products external to sciences themselves. Both politics and\nethics fall under this branch.","\n\n(iii) Finally, then, the productive sciences are mainly\ncrafts aimed at the production of artefacts, or of human productions\nmore broadly construed. The productive sciences include, among\nothers, ship-building, agriculture, and medicine, but also the arts of\nmusic, theatre, and dance. Another form of productive science is\nrhetoric, which treats the principles of speech-making appropriate to\nvarious forensic and persuasive settings, including centrally political\nassemblies.","\n\nSignificantly, Aristotle’s tri-fold division of the sciences\nmakes no mention of logic. Although he did not use the word\n‘logic’ in our sense of the term, Aristotle in fact\ndeveloped the first formalized system of logic and valid\ninference. In Aristotle’s framework—although he is\nnowhere explicit about this—logic belongs to no one science, but\nrather formulates the principles of correct argumentation suitable to\nall areas of inquiry in common. It systematizes the principles\nlicensing acceptable inference, and helps to highlight at an abstract\nlevel seductive patterns of incorrect inference to be avoided by anyone\nwith a primary interest in truth. So, alongside his more\ntechnical work in logic and logical theory, Aristotle investigates\ninformal styles of argumentation and seeks to expose common patterns of\nfallacious reasoning.","\n\nAristotle’s investigations into logic and the forms of\nargumentation make up part of the group of works coming down to us from\nthe Middle Ages under the heading the Organon\n(organon = tool in Greek). Although not so\ncharacterized in these terms by Aristotle, the name is apt, so long as\nit is borne in mind that intellectual inquiry requires a broad range of\ntools. Thus, in addition to logic and argumentation (treated\nprimarily in the Prior Analytics and Topics), the\nworks included in the Organon deal with category theory, the\ndoctrine of propositions and terms, the structure of scientific theory,\nand to some extent the basic principles of epistemology.","\n\n \nWhen we slot Aristotle’s most important surviving authentic works\ninto this scheme, we end up with the following basic\ndivisions of his major writings:","\n\nThe titles in this list are those in most common use today in\nEnglish-language scholarship, followed by standard abbreviations in\nparentheses. For no discernible reason, Latin titles are\ncustomarily employed in some cases, English in others. Where\nLatin titles are in general use, English equivalents are given in\nsquare brackets."],"section_title":"2. The Aristotelian Corpus: Character and Primary Divisions","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\n \nAristotle’s basic approach to philosophy is best grasped initially by\nway of contrast. Whereas Descartes seeks to place philosophy and\nscience on firm foundations by subjecting all knowledge claims to a\nsearing methodological doubt, Aristotle begins with the conviction\nthat our perceptual and cognitive faculties are basically dependable,\nthat they for the most part put us into direct contact with the\nfeatures and divisions of our world, and that we need not dally with\nsceptical postures before engaging in substantive philosophy.\nAccordingly, he proceeds in all areas of inquiry in the manner of a\nmodern-day natural scientist, who takes it for granted that progress\nfollows the assiduous application of a well-trained mind and so, when\npresented with a problem, simply goes to work. When he goes to work,\nAristotle begins by considering how the world appears, reflecting on\nthe puzzles those appearances throw up, and reviewing what has been\nsaid about those puzzles to date. These methods comprise his twin\nappeals to phainomena and the endoxic method. ","\n\n \nThese two methods reflect in different ways Aristotle’s deepest\nmotivations for doing philosophy in the first place. “Human\nbeings began to do philosophy,” he says, “even as they do\nnow, because of wonder, at first because they wondered about the\nstrange things right in front of them, and then later, advancing\nlittle by little, because they came to find greater things\npuzzling” (Met. 982b12). Human beings philosophize,\naccording to Aristotle, because they find aspects of their experience\npuzzling. The sorts of puzzles we encounter in thinking about the\nuniverse and our place within it—aporiai, in\nAristotle’s terminology—tax our understanding and induce us to\nphilosophize.","\n\n \nAccording to Aristotle, it behooves us to begin philosophizing by\nlaying out the phainomena, the appearances, or, more\nfully, things appearing to be the case, and then also\ncollecting the endoxa, the credible opinions handed down\nregarding matters we find puzzling. As a typical example, in a\npassage of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle confronts a\npuzzle of human conduct, the fact that we are apparently sometimes\nakratic or weak-willed. When introducing this puzzle, Aristotle pauses\nto reflect upon a precept governing his approach to many areas of inquiry:","\n\nAs in other cases, we must set out the appearances\n(phainomena) and run through all the puzzles regarding\nthem. In this way we must prove the credible opinions\n(endoxa) about these sorts of experiences—ideally, all\nthe credible opinions, but if not all, then most of them, those which\nare the most important. For if the objections are answered and\nthe credible opinions remain, we shall have an adequate proof.\n(EN 1145b2–7)","\n\nScholars dispute concerning the degree to which Aristotle regards\nhimself as beholden to the credible opinions (endoxa) he\nrecounts and the basic appearances (phainomena) to which\n he\n appeals.[6] \n Of course, since the endoxa will sometimes conflict with one\nanother, often precisely because the phainomena generate\naporiai, or puzzles, it is not always possible to respect them\nin their entirety. So, as a group they must be re-interpreted and\nsystematized, and, where that does not suffice, some must be rejected\noutright. It is in any case abundantly clear that Aristotle is\nwilling to abandon some or all of the endoxa and\nphainomena whenever science or philosophy demands that he do\nso (Met. 1073b36, 1074b6; PA 644b5; EN\n1145b2–30).","\n\nStill, his attitude towards phainomena does betray a\npreference to conserve as many appearances as is practicable in a given\ndomain—not because the appearances are unassailably accurate, but\nrather because, as he supposes, appearances tend to track the\ntruth. We are outfitted with sense organs and powers of\nmind so structured as to put us into contact with the world and\nthus to provide us with data regarding its basic constituents and\ndivisions. While our faculties are not infallible, neither are\nthey systematically deceptive or misdirecting. Since\nphilosophy’s aim is truth and much of what appears to us proves\nupon analysis to be correct, phainomena provide both an\nimpetus to philosophize and a check on some of its more extravagant\nimpulses. ","\n\nOf course, it is not always clear what constitutes a\nphainomenon; still less is it clear which phainomenon\nis to be respected in the face of bona fide\ndisagreement. This is in part why Aristotle endorses his second\nand related methodological precept, that we ought to begin\nphilosophical discussions by collecting the most stable and entrenched\nopinions regarding the topic of inquiry handed down to us by our\npredecessors. Aristotle’s term for these privileged views,\nendoxa, is variously rendered as ‘reputable\nopinions’, ‘credible opinions’, ‘entrenched\nbeliefs’, ‘credible beliefs’, or ‘common\nbeliefs’. Each of these translations captures at least part of\nwhat Aristotle intends with this word, but it is important to\nappreciate that it is a fairly technical term for\nhim. An endoxon is the sort of opinion we spontaneously\nregard as reputable or worthy of respect, even if upon reflection we\nmay come to question its veracity. (Aristotle appropriates this term\nfrom ordinary Greek, in which an endoxos is a notable or\nhonourable man, a man of high repute whom we would spontaneously\nrespect—though we might, of course, upon closer inspection, find\ncause to criticize him.) As he explains his use of the\nterm, endoxa are widely shared opinions, often ultimately\nissuing from those we esteem most: ‘Endoxa are those\nopinions accepted by everyone, or by the majority, or by the\nwise—and among the wise, by all or most of them, or by those who\nare the most notable and having the highest reputation’\n(Top. 100b21–23). Endoxa play a special role\nin Aristotelian philosophy in part because they form a significant\nsub-class of phainomena (EN 1154b3–8): because they\nare the privileged opinions we find ourselves unreflectively endorsing\nand reaffirming after some reflection, they themselves come to qualify\nas appearances to be preserved where possible.","\n\nFor this reason, Aristotle’s method of beginning with the\nendoxa is more than a pious platitude to the effect that it\nbehooves us to mind our superiors. He does think this, as far as\nit goes, but he also maintains, more instructively, that we can be led\nastray by the terms within which philosophical problems are bequeathed\nto us. Very often, the puzzles confronting us were given crisp\nformulations by earlier thinkers and we find them puzzling precisely\nfor that reason. Equally often, however, if we reflect upon the\nterms within which the puzzles are cast, we find a way forward; when a\nformulation of a puzzle betrays an untenable structuring assumption, a\nsolution naturally commends itself. This is why in more abstract\ndomains of inquiry we are likely to find ourselves seeking guidance\nfrom our predecessors even as we call into question their\nways of articulating the problems we are confronting. ","\n\nAristotle applies his method of running through the\nphainomena and collecting the endoxa widely, in\nnearly every area of his philosophy. To take a typical\nillustration, we find the method clearly deployed in his discussion of\ntime in Physics iv 10–14. We begin with a\nphainomenon: we feel sure that time exists\nor at least that time passes. So much is, inescapably,\nhow our world appears: we experience time as passing, as\nunidirectional, as unrecoverable when lost. Yet when we move to\noffer an account of what time might be, we find ourselves\nflummoxed. For guidance, we turn to what has been said about time\nby those who have reflected upon its nature. It emerges directly\nthat both philosophers and natural scientists have raised problems\nabout time. ","\n\nAs Aristotle sets them out, these problems take the form of puzzles,\nor aporiai, regarding whether and if so how time exists\n(Phys. 218a8–30). If we say that time is the totality of the\npast, present and future, we immediately find someone objecting that\ntime exists but that the past and future do not. According to the\nobjector, only the present exists. If we retort then that time is\nwhat did exist, what exists at present and\nwhat will exist, then we notice first that our account is\ninsufficient: after all, there are many things which did, do, or will\nexist, but these are things that are in time and so not the\nsame as time itself. We further see that our account already threatens\ncircularity, since to say that something did or will\nexist seems only to say that it existed at an earlier time or\nwill come to exist at a later time. Then again we find\nsomeone objecting to our account that even the notion of the\npresent is troubling. After all, either the present is\nconstantly changing or it remains forever the same. If it remains\nforever the same, then the current present is the same as the present\nof 10,000 years ago; yet that is absurd. If it is constantly changing,\nthen no two presents are the same, in which case a past present must\nhave come into and out of existence before the present present. When?\nEither it went out of existence even as it came into existence, which\nseems odd to say the least, or it went out of existence at some\ninstant after it came into existence, in which case, again, two\npresents must have existed at the same instant. Now, Aristotle does\nnot endorse the claims set out in stating these sorts\nof aporiai; in fact, very often he cannot, because\nsome aporiai qualify as aporiai just because they\ncomprise individually plausible arguments generating incompatible\nconclusions. They thus serve as springboards to deeper, more\ndemanding analysis. ","\n\nIn general, then, in setting such aporiai, Aristotle does not\nmean to endorse any given endoxon on one side or the\nother. Rather, he thinks that such considerations present credible\npuzzles, reflection upon which may steer us towards a defensible\nunderstanding of the nature of time. In this way, aporiai\nbring into sharp relief the issues requiring attention if progress is\nto be made. Thus, by reflecting upon the aporiai regarding\ntime, we are led immediately to think about duration and divisibility,\nabout\nquanta and continua, and about a variety of\ncategorial questions. That is, if time exists, then what sort of\nthing is it? Is it the sort of thing which exists absolutely and\nindependently? Or is it rather the sort of thing which, like a\nsurface, depends upon other things for its existence? When we\nbegin to address these sorts of questions, we also begin to ascertain\nthe sorts of assumptions at play in the endoxa coming down to\nus regarding the nature of time. Consequently, when we\ncollect the endoxa and survey them critically, we learn\nsomething about our quarry, in this case about the nature of\ntime—and crucially also something about the constellation of\nconcepts which must be refined if we are to make genuine philosophical\nprogress with respect to it. What holds in the case of time, Aristotle implies, holds generally. This is why he\ncharacteristically begins a philosophical inquiry by presenting the\nphainomena, collecting the endoxa, and running\nthrough the puzzles to which they give rise. "],"section_title":"3. Phainomena and the Endoxic Method","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\n \nAristotle’s reliance on endoxa takes on a still greater\nsignificance given the role such opinions play in dialectic,\nwhich he regards as an important form of non-scientific\nreasoning. Dialectic, like science\n(epistêmê), trades in logical inference; but\nscience requires premises of a sort beyond the scope of ordinary\ndialectical reasoning. Whereas science relies upon premises which\nare necessary and known to be so, a dialectical discussion can proceed\nby relying on endoxa, and so can claim only to be as secure as\nthe endoxa upon which it relies. This is not a problem,\nsuggests Aristotle, since we often reason fruitfully and well in\ncircumstances where we cannot claim to have attained scientific\nunderstanding. Minimally, however, all\nreasoning—whether scientific or dialectical—must respect\nthe canons of logic and inference. "],"section_title":"4. Logic, Science, and Dialectic","subsections":[{"content":["\n\n \nAmong the great achievements to which Aristotle can lay claim is the\nfirst systematic treatment of the principles of correct reasoning, the\nfirst logic. Although today we recognize many forms of logic\nbeyond Aristotle’s, it remains true that he not only developed a\ntheory of deduction, now called syllogistic, but added to it a modal\nsyllogistic and went a long way towards proving some meta-theorems\npertinent to these systems. Of course, philosophers before\nAristotle reasoned well or reasoned poorly, and the competent among them\nhad a secure working grasp of the principles of validity and\nsoundness in argumentation. No-one before Aristotle, however, developed a\nsystematic treatment of the principles governing correct inference; and\nno-one before him attempted to codify the formal and syntactic\nprinciples at play in such inference. Aristotle somewhat\nuncharacteristically draws attention to this fact at the end of a\ndiscussion of logic inference and fallacy:","\n\nOnce you have surveyed our work, if it seems to you that our system\nhas developed adequately in comparison with other treatments arising\nfrom the tradition to date—bearing in mind how things were at the\nbeginning of our inquiry—it falls to you, our students, to be\nindulgent with respect to any omissions in our system, and to feel a\ngreat debt of gratitude for the discoveries it contains (Soph.\nRef. 184b2–8).","\n\nEven if we now regard it as commonplace that his logic is but a\nfraction of the logic we know and use, Aristotle’s accomplishment\nwas so encompassing that no less a figure than Kant, writing over two\nmillennia after the appearance of Aristotle’s treatises on logic,\nfound it easy to offer an appropriately laudatory judgment: ‘That\nfrom the earliest times logic has traveled a secure course can be seen\nfrom the fact that since the time of Aristotle it has not had to go a\nsingle step backwards…What is further remarkable about logic is\nthat until now it has also been unable to take a single step forward,\nand therefore seems to all appearance to be finished and\ncomplete’ (Critique of Pure Reason B vii).","\n\n \nIn Aristotle’s logic, the basic ingredients of reasoning are\ngiven in terms of inclusion and exclusion relations,\nof the sort graphically captured many years later by the device of Venn\ndiagrams. He begins with the notion of a patently correct sort of\nargument, one whose evident and unassailable acceptability induces\nAristotle to refer to is as a ‘perfect deduction’\n(APr. 24b22–25). Generally, a deduction\n(sullogismon), according to Aristotle, is a valid or\nacceptable argument. More exactly, a deduction is ‘an\nargument in which when certain things are laid down something else\nfollows of necessity in virtue of their being so’ (APr.\n24b18–20). His view of deductions is, then, akin to a notion of\nvalidity, though there are some minor differences. For\nexample, Aristotle maintains that irrelevant premises will ruin a\ndeduction, whereas validity is indifferent to irrelevance or indeed to\nthe addition of premises of any kind to an already valid\nargument. Moreover, Aristotle insists that deductions make\nprogress, whereas every inference from p to p is\ntrivially valid. Still, Aristotle’s general conception of\ndeduction is sufficiently close to validity that we may pass into\nspeaking in terms of valid structures when characterizing his\nsyllogistic. In general, he contends that a deduction is the sort\nof argument whose structure guarantees its validity,\nirrespective of the truth or falsity of its premises. This holds\nintuitively for the following structure:","\n\nAccordingly, anything taking this form will be a deduction in\nAristotle’s sense. Let the As,\nBs, and Cs be anything at all, and\nif indeed the As are Bs, and\nthe Bs Cs, then of necessity\nthe As will be Cs. This\nparticular deduction is perfect because its validity needs no\nproof, and perhaps because it admits of no proof either: any proof\nwould seem to rely ultimately upon the intuitive validity of this sort\nof argument. ","\n\nAristotle seeks to exploit the intuitive validity of perfect\ndeductions in a surprisingly bold way, given the infancy of his\nsubject: he thinks he can establish principles of transformation in\nterms of which every deduction (or, more precisely, every\nnon-modal deduction) can be translated into a perfect deduction. He\ncontends that by using such transformations we can place all\ndeduction on a firm footing.","\n\nIf we focus on just the simplest kinds of deduction,\nAristotle’s procedure comes quickly into view. The\nperfect deduction already presented is an instance of universal\naffirmation: all As are Bs; all\nBs Cs; and so, all\nAs are Cs. Now, contends\nAristotle, it is possible to run through all combinations of simple\npremises and display their basic inferential structures and then to\nrelate them back to this and similarly perfect deductions. Thus,\nif we vary the quantity of a proposition’s subject\n(universal all versus indeterminate some) along with\nthe quality or kind of the predication (positive\nversus negative), we arrive at all the possible combinations\nof the most basic kind of arguments.","\n\nIt turns out that some of these arguments are deductions, or valid\nsyllogisms, and some are not. Those which are not admit of\ncounterexamples, whereas those which are, of course, do not. There are\ncounterexamples to those, for instance, suffering from what came to be\ncalled undistributed middle terms, e.g.: all As\nare Bs; some\nBs are Cs; so, all\nAs are Cs (all university students are literate;\nsome literate people read poetry; so, all university students read\npoetry). There is no counterexample to the perfect deduction in the\nform of a universal affirmation: if all\nAs are Bs, and all\nBs Cs, then there is no escaping the fact that\nall As are Cs. So, if all the kinds of deductions\npossible can be reduced to the intuitively valid sorts, then the\nvalidity of all can be vouchsafed. ","\n\nTo effect this sort of reduction, Aristotle relies upon a series of\nmeta-theorems, some of which he proves and others of which he merely\nreports (though it turns out that they do all indeed admit of\nproofs). His principles are meta-theorems in the sense\nthat no argument can run afoul of them and still qualify as a genuine\ndeduction. They include such theorems as: (i) no deduction\ncontains two negative premises; (ii) a deduction with a negative\nconclusion must have a negative premise; (iii) a deduction with a\nuniversal conclusion requires two universal premises; and (iv) a\ndeduction with a negative conclusion requires exactly one negative\npremise. He does, in fact, offer proofs for the most significant of his\nmeta-theorems, so that we can be assured that all deductions in his\nsystem are valid, even when their validity is difficult to grasp\nimmediately.","\n\nIn developing and proving these meta-theorems of logic, Aristotle\ncharts territory left unexplored before him and unimproved for many\ncenturies after his death. ","\n\nFor a fuller account of Aristotle’s achievements in logic,\n see the entry on \n Aristotle’s Logic."],"subsection_title":"4.1 Logic"},{"content":["\n \nAristotle approaches the study of logic not as an end in itself, but\nwith a view to its role in human inquiry and explanation. Logic is a\ntool, he thinks, one making an important but incomplete contribution\nto science and dialectic. Its contribution is incomplete because\nscience (epistêmê) employs arguments which are\nmore than mere deductions. A deduction is minimally a valid syllogism,\nand certainly science must employ arguments passing this\nthreshold. Still, science needs more: a science proceeds\nby organizing the data in its domain into a series of\narguments which, beyond being deductions, feature premises which are\nnecessary and, as Aristotle says, “better known by\nnature”, or “more intelligible by nature”\n(gnôrimôteron phusei)\n(APo. 71b33–72a25; Top. 141b3–14;\nPhys. 184a16–23). By this he means that they should\nreveal the genuine, mind-independent natures of things. ","\n\nHe further insists that science\n(epistêmê)—a comparatively broad term in\nhis usage, since it extends to fields of inquiry like mathematics and\nmetaphysics no less than the empirical sciences—not only reports\nthe facts but also explains them by displaying their priority\nrelations (APo. 78a22–28). That is, science explains what is\nless well known by what is better known and more fundamental, and what\nis explanatorily anemic by what is explanatorily fruitful. ","\n\nWe may, for instance, wish to know why trees lose their leaves in the\nautumn. We may say, rightly, that this is due to the wind blowing\nthrough them. Still, this is not a deep or general explanation, since\nthe wind blows equally at other times of year without the same\nresult. A deeper explanation—one unavailable to Aristotle but\nillustrating his view nicely—is more general, and also more\ncausal in character: trees shed their leaves because diminished\nsunlight in the autumn inhibits the production of chlorophyll, which\nis required for photosynthesis, and without photosynthesis trees go\ndormant. Importantly, science should not only record these facts but\nalso display them in their correct explanatory order. That is,\nalthough a deciduous tree which fails to photosynthesize is also a\ntree lacking in chlorophyll production, its failing to produce\nchlorophyll explains its inability to photosynthesize and not the\nother way around. This sort of asymmetry must be captured in\nscientific explanation. Aristotle’s method of scientific exposition is\ndesigned precisely to discharge this requirement.","\n\nScience seeks to capture not only the causal priorities in nature,\nbut also its deep, invariant patterns. Consequently, in addition\nto being explanatorily basic, the first premise in a scientific\ndeduction will be necessary. So, says Aristotle:","\n\nWe think we understand a thing without qualification, and not in the\nsophistic, accidental way, whenever we think we know the cause in\nvirtue of which something is—that it is the cause of that very\nthing—and also know that this cannot be otherwise. \nClearly, knowledge (epistêmê) is something of this\nsort. After all, both those with knowledge and those without it\nsuppose that this is so—although only those with knowledge are\nactually in this condition. Hence, whatever is known without\nqualification cannot be otherwise. (APo 71b9–16; cf.\nAPo 71b33–72a5; Top. 141b3–14, Phys.\n184a10–23; Met. 1029b3–13) ","\n\nFor this reason, science requires more than mere deduction.\nAltogether, then, the currency of science is demonstration\n(apodeixis), where a demonstration is a deduction with\npremises revealing the causal structures of the world, set forth so as\nto capture what is necessary and to reveal what is better known and\nmore intelligible by nature (APo\n71b33–72a5, Phys. 184a16–23, EN 1095b2–4). ","\n \nAristotle’s approach to the appropriate form of scientific explanation\ninvites reflection upon a troubling epistemological question: how does\ndemonstration begin? If we are to lay out demonstrations such that the\nless well known is inferred by means of deduction from the better\nknown, then unless we reach rock-bottom, we will evidently be forced\neither to continue ever backwards towards the increasingly better\nknown, which seems implausibly endless, or lapse into some form of\ncircularity, which seems undesirable. The alternative seems to be\npermanent ignorance. Aristotle contends:","\n\nSome people think that since knowledge obtained via demonstration\nrequires the knowledge of primary things, there is no knowledge. \nOthers think that there is knowledge and that all knowledge is\ndemonstrable. Neither of these views is either true or\nnecessary. The first group, those supposing that there is\nno knowledge at all, contend that we are confronted with an infinite\nregress. They contend that we cannot know posterior things\nbecause of prior things if none of the prior things is primary. \nHere what they contend is correct: it is indeed impossible to traverse\nan infinite series. Yet, they maintain, if the regress comes to a\nhalt, and there are first principles, they will be unknowable, since\nsurely there will be no demonstration of first principles—given,\nas they maintain, that only what is demonstrated can be known. \nBut if it is not possible to know the primary things, then neither can\nwe know without qualification or in any proper way the things derived\nfrom them. Rather, we can know them instead only on the basis of\na hypothesis, to wit, if the primary things obtain, then so\ntoo do the things derived from them. The other group agrees that\nknowledge results only from demonstration, but believes that nothing\nstands in the way of demonstration, since they admit circular and\nreciprocal demonstration as possible. (APo. 72b5–21)","\n\nAristotle’s own preferred alternative is clear:","\n\nWe contend that not all knowledge is demonstrative: knowledge of the\nimmediate premises is indemonstrable. Indeed, the necessity here\nis apparent; for if it is necessary to know the prior things, that is,\nthose things from which the demonstration is derived, and if eventually\nthe regress comes to a standstill, it is necessary that these immediate\npremises be indemonstrable. (APo. 72b21–23)","\n\nIn sum, if all knowledge requires demonstration, and all\ndemonstration proceeds from what is more intelligible by nature to what\nis less so, then either the process goes on indefinitely or it comes to\na halt in undemonstrated first principles, which are known, and known\nsecurely. Aristotle dismisses the only remaining possibility,\nthat demonstration might be circular, rather curtly, with the remark\nthat this amounts to ‘simply saying that something is the\ncase if it is the case,’ by which device ‘it is easy to\nprove anything’ (APo. 72b32–73a6).","\n\n \nAristotle’s own preferred alternative, that there are first\nprinciples of the sciences graspable by those willing to engage in\nassiduous study, has caused consternation in many of his readers.\n In Posterior Analytics ii 19, he describes the\nprocess by which knowers move from perception to memory, and from memory\nto experience (empeiria)—which is a fairly technical\nterm in this connection, reflecting the point at which a single\nuniversal comes to take root in the mind—and finally from\nexperience to a grasp of first principles. This final\nintellectual state Aristotle characterizes as a kind of unmediated\nintellectual apprehension (nous) of first principles\n(APo. 100a10–b6).","\nScholars have understandably queried what seems a casually asserted\npassage from the contingent, given in sense experience, to the\nnecessary, as required for the first principles of science. Perhaps,\nhowever, Aristotle simply envisages a kind of a posteriori\nnecessity for the sciences, including the natural sciences. In any\nevent, he thinks that we can and do have knowledge, so that somehow we\nbegin in sense perception and build up to an understanding of the\nnecessary and invariant features of the world. This is the knowledge\nfeatured in genuine science (epistêmê). In\nreflecting on the sort of progression Aristotle envisages, some\ncommentators have charged him with an epistemological optimism\nbordering on the naïve; others contend that it is rather the\ncharge of naïveté which is itself naïve, betraying as\nit does an unargued and untenable alignment of the necessary and\nthe a\n priori.[7]"],"subsection_title":"4.2 Science"},{"content":["\n\n \nNot all rigorous reasoning qualifies as scientific. Indeed,\nlittle of Aristotle’s extant writing conforms to the demands for\nscientific presentation laid down in the Posterior\nAnalytics. As he recognizes, we often find ourselves\nreasoning from premises which have the status of endoxa,\nopinions widely believed or endorsed by the wise, even though they are\nnot known to be necessary. Still less often do we reason having\nfirst secured the first principles of our domain of inquiry. So,\nwe need some ‘method by which we will be able to reason\ndeductively about any matter proposed to us on the basis of\nendoxa, and to give an account of ourselves [when we are under\nexamination by an interlocutor] without lapsing into\ncontradiction’ (Top. 100a18–20). This method\nhe characterizes as dialectic. ","\n\n \nThe suggestion that we often use dialectic when engaged in\nphilosophical exchange reflects Aristotle’s supposition that\nthere are two sorts of dialectic: one negative, or destructive, and the\nother positive, or constructive. In fact, in his work dedicated\nto dialectic, the Topics, he identifies three roles for\ndialectic in intellectual inquiry, the first of which is mainly\npreparatory:","\n\nDialectic is useful for three purposes: for training, for\nconversational exchange, and for sciences of a philosophical\nsort. That it is useful for training purposes is directly evident\non the basis of these considerations: once we have a direction for our\ninquiry we will more readily be able to engage a subject proposed to\nus. It is useful for conversational exchange because once we have\nenumerated the beliefs of the many, we shall engage them not on the\nbasis of the convictions of others but on the basis of their own; and\nwe shall re-orient them whenever they appear to have said something\nincorrect to us. It is useful for philosophical sorts of sciences\nbecause when we are able to run through the puzzles on both sides of an\nissue we more readily perceive what is true and what is false. \nFurther, it is useful for uncovering what is primary among the\ncommitments of a science. For it is impossible to say anything\nregarding the first principles of a science on the basis of the first\nprinciples proper to the very science under discussion, since among all\nthe commitments of a science, the first principles are the primary\nones. This comes rather, necessarily, from discussion of the\ncredible beliefs (endoxa) belonging to the science. This\nis peculiar to dialectic, or is at least most proper to it. For\nsince it is what cross-examines, dialectic contains the way to the\nfirst principles of all inquiries. (Top. 101a26–b4)","\n\nThe first two of the three forms of dialectic identified by Aristotle\nare rather limited in scope. By contrast, the third is philosophically\nsignificant.","\n\n \nIn its third guise, dialectic has a role to play in ‘science\nconducted in a philosophical manner’ (pros tas kata\nphilosphian epistêmas; Top. 101a27–28, 101a34),\nwhere this sort of science includes what we actually find him pursuing\nin his major philosophical treatises. In these contexts,\ndialectic helps to sort the endoxa, relegating some to a\ndisputed status while elevating others; it submits endoxa to\ncross-examination in order to test their staying power; and, most\nnotably, according to Aristotle, dialectic puts us on the road to first\nprinciples (Top. 100a18–b4). If that is so, then\ndialectic plays a significant role in the order of philosophical\ndiscovery: we come to establish first principles in part by determining\nwhich among our initial endoxa withstand sustained\nscrutiny. Here, as elsewhere in his philosophy, Aristotle evinces\na noteworthy confidence in the powers of human reason and\ninvestigation."],"subsection_title":"4.3 Dialectic"}]},{"main_content":["\n \nHowever we arrive at secure principles in philosophy and science,\nwhether by some process leading to a rational grasping of necessary\ntruths, or by sustained dialectical investigation operating over\njudiciously selected endoxa, it does turn out, according to\nAristotle, that we can uncover and come to know genuinely necessary\nfeatures of reality. Such features, suggests Aristotle, are those\ncaptured in the essence-specifying definitions used in science (again\nin the broad sense of epistêmê). ","\n\n \nAristotle’s commitment to essentialism runs deep. He\nrelies upon a host of loosely related locutions when discussing the\nessences of things, and these give some clue to his general\norientation. Among the locutions one finds rendered as\nessence in contemporary translations of Aristotle into English\nare: (i) to ti esti (the what it is); (ii) to einai\n(being); (iii) ousia (being); (iv) hoper esti (precisely\nwhat something is) and, most importantly, (v) to ti ên\neinai (the what it was to be) (APo 83a7; Top.\n141b35; Phys. 190a17, 201a18–21; Gen. et Corr. 319b4;\nDA 424a25, 429b10; Met. 1003b24, 1006a32, 1006b13;\nEN 1102a30, 1130a12–13). Among these, the last locution\n(v) requires explication both because it is the most peculiar and\nbecause it is Aristotle’s favored technical term for\nessence. It is an abbreviated way of saying ‘that which it\nwas for an instance of kind K to be an instance of kind\nK,’ for instance ‘that which it was (all along)\nfor a human being to be a human being’. In speaking this\nway, Aristotle supposes that if we wish to know what a human being is,\nwe cannot identify transient or non-universal features of that kind;\nnor indeed can we identify even universal features which do not run\nexplanatorily deep. Rather, as his preferred locution indicates,\nhe is interested in what makes a human being human—and he\nassumes, first, that there is some feature F which all and only humans\nhave in common and, second, that F explains the other features which we\nfind across the range of humans. ","\n\n \nImportantly, this second feature of Aristotelian essentialism\ndifferentiates his approach from the now more common modal approach,\naccording to\n which:[8]","\n\nF is an essential property of\nx =df if x loses F,\nthen x ceases to exist.\n\n","\n\nAristotle rejects this approach for several reasons, including most\nnotably that he thinks that certain non-essential features satisfy the\ndefinition. Thus, beyond the categorical and logical features\n(everyone is such as to be either identical or not identical with the\nnumber nine), Aristotle recognizes a category of properties which he\ncalls idia (Cat. 3a21, 4a10; Top. 102a18–30,\n134a5–135b6), now usually known by their Medieval Latin rendering\npropria. Propria are non-essential properties which flow\nfrom the essence of a kind, such that they are necessary to that kind\neven without being essential. For instance, if we suppose that\nbeing rational is essential to human beings, then it will\nfollow that every human being is capable of grammar. \nBeing capable of grammar is not the same property as being rational,\nthough it follows from it. Aristotle assumes his readers will\nappreciate that being rational asymmetrically explains\nbeing capable of grammar, even though, necessarily, something\nis rational if and only if it is also capable of grammar. Thus,\nbecause it is explanatorily prior, being rational has a better\nclaim to being the essence of human beings than does being capable\nof grammar. Consequently, Aristotle’s\nessentialism is more fine-grained than mere modal essentialism. \nAristotelian essentialism holds:","\n\nF is an essential property of x =df (i) if\nx loses F, then x ceases to exist; and\n(ii) F is in an objective sense an explanatorily basic\nfeature of x.\n\n","\n\n In sum, in Aristotle’s approach, what it is to be, for\ninstance, a human being is just what it always has been and always will\nbe, namely being rational. Accordingly, this is\nthe feature to be captured in an essence-specifying account of human\nbeings (APo 75a42–b2; Met. 103b1–2, 1041a25–32).","\n\n \nAristotle believes for a broad range of cases that kinds have essences\ndiscoverable by diligent research. He in fact does not devote\nmuch energy to arguing for this contention; still less is he inclined\nto expend energy combating anti-realist challenges to essentialism,\nperhaps in part because he is impressed by the deep regularities he\nfinds, or thinks he finds, underwriting his results in biological\n investigation.[9] \n Still, he cannot be accused of profligacy regarding the prospects\nof essentialism. ","\n\nOn the contrary, he denies essentialism in many cases where others\nare prepared to embrace it. One finds this sort of denial\nprominently, though not exclusively, in his criticism of Plato. \nIndeed, it becomes a signature criticism of Plato and Platonists for\nAristotle that many of their preferred examples of sameness and\ninvariance in the world are actually cases of multivocity, or\nhomonymy in his technical terminology. In the opening of the\nCategories, Aristotle distinguishes between synonymy\nand homonymy (later called univocity and\nmultivocity). His preferred phrase for multivocity,\nwhich is extremely common in his writings, is ‘being spoken\nof in many ways’, or, more simply, ‘multiply meant’\n(pollachôs legomenon). All these locutions have a\nquasi-technical status for him. The least complex is\nunivocity:","\n\na and b are univocally F iff (i)\na is F, (ii) b is F, and (iii) the\naccounts of\nF-ness in ‘a is F’ and\n‘b is F’ are the same.\n\n","\n\nThus, for instance, since the accounts of ‘human’ in\n‘Socrates is human’ and ‘Plato is human’ will\nbe the same, ‘human’ is univocal or synonymous in these\napplications. (Note that Aristotle’s notion of the word ‘synonymy’ is\nnot the same as the contemporary English usage where it applies to\ndifferent words with the same meaning.) In cases of\nunivocity, we expect single, non-disjunctive definitions which capture\nand state the essence of the kinds in question. Let us allow once\nmore for purposes of illustration that the essence-specifying\ndefinition of human is rational animal. Then,\nsince human means rational animal across the range of\nits applications, there is some single essence to all members of the\nkind.","\n\n \nBy contrast, when synonymy fails we have homonymy. According to\nAristotle:","\n\na and b are homonymously F iff (i)\na is F, (ii) b is F, (iii) the\naccounts of F-ness in ‘a is F’\nand ‘b is F’ do not completely\noverlap.\n\n","\n\nTo take an easy example without philosophical significance,\nbank is homonymous in ‘Socrates and Alcibiades had a\npicnic on the bank’ and ‘Socrates and Alcibiades opened a\njoint account at the bank.’ This case is illustrative, if\nuninteresting, because the accounts of bank in these\noccurrences have nothing whatsoever in common. Part of the philosophical \ninterest in Aristotle’s account of homonymy resides in its\nallowing partial overlap. Matters become more interesting if we\nexamine whether—to use an illustration well suited to\nAristotle’s purposes but left largely unexplored by\nhim—conscious is synonymous across ‘Charlene was\nconscious of some awkwardness created by her remarks’ and\n‘Higher vertebrates, unlike mollusks, are conscious.’ \nIn these instances, the situation with respect to synonymy or homonymy\nis perhaps not immediately clear, and so requires reflection and\nphilosophical investigation. ","\n\n \nVery regularly, according to Aristotle, this sort of reflection leads\nto an interesting discovery, namely that we have been presuming a\nunivocal account where in fact none is forthcoming. This,\naccording to Aristotle, is where the Platonists go wrong: they presume\nunivocity where the world delivers homonymy or multivocity. (For\na vivid illustration of Plato’s univocity assumption at work, see\nMeno 71e1–72a5, where Socrates insists that there is but one\nkind of excellence (aretê) common to all kinds\nof excellent people, not a separate sort for men, women, slaves,\nchildren, and so on.) In one especially important example,\nAristotle parts company with Plato over the univocity of goodness:","\n\nWe had perhaps better consider the universal good and run through\nthe puzzles concerning what is meant by it—even though this sort\nof investigation is unwelcome to us, because those who introduced the\nForms are friends of ours. Yet presumably it would be the better\ncourse to destroy even what is close to us, as something necessary for\npreserving the truth—and all the more so, given that we are\nphilosophers. For though we love them both, piety bids us to\nhonour the truth before our friends. (EN\n1096a11–16) ","\n\nAristotle counters that Plato is wrong to assume that goodness is\n‘something universal, common to all good things, and\nsingle’ (EN 1096a28). Rather, goodness is different in\ndifferent cases. If he is right about this, far-reaching consequences\nregarding ethical theory and practice follow.","\n\n \nTo establish non-univocity, Aristotle’s appeals to a variety of\ntests in his Topics where, again, his idiom is linguistic but\nhis quarry is metaphysical. Consider the following sentences:","\n\nAmong the tests for non-univocity recommended in the Topics\nis a simple paraphrase test: if paraphrases yield distinct,\nnon-interchangeable accounts, then the predicate is\nmultivocal. So, for example, suitable paraphrases might\nbe:","\n\nSince we cannot interchange these paraphrases—we cannot say,\nfor instance, that crème brûlée is a just social\nsystem—good must be non-univocal across this range of\napplications. If that is correct, then Platonists are wrong to\nassume univocity in this case, since goodness exhibits complexity\nignored by their assumption.","\n\n \nSo far, then, Aristotle’s appeals to homonymy or multivocity are\nprimarily destructive, in the sense that they attempt to undermine a\nPlatonic presumption regarded by Aristotle as unsustainable. \nImportantly, just as Aristotle sees a positive as well as a negative\nrole for dialectic in philosophy, so he envisages in addition to its\ndestructive applications a philosophically constructive role for\nhomonymy. To appreciate his basic idea, it serves to reflect upon a\ncontinuum of positions in philosophical analysis ranging from pure\nPlatonic univocity to disaggregated Wittgensteinean family\nresemblance. One might in the face of a successful challenge to\nPlatonic univocity assume that, for instance, the various cases of\ngoodness have nothing in common across all cases, so that good things\nform at best a motley kind, of the sort championed by Wittgensteineans\nenamored of the metaphor of family resemblances: all good things belong\nto a kind only in the limited sense that they manifest a tapestry of\npartially overlapping properties, as every member of a single family is\nunmistakably a member of that family even though there is no one\nphysical attribute shared by all of those family members. ","\n\n \nAristotle insists that there is a tertium quid between family\nresemblance and pure univocity: he identifies, and trumpets, a kind of\ncore-dependent homonymy (also referred to in the literature,\nwith varying degrees of accuracy, as focal meaning and\nfocal\n connexion).[10] \n Core-dependent homonyms exhibit a kind\nof order in multiplicity: although shy of univocity, because\nhomonymous, such concepts do not devolve into patchwork family\nresemblances either. To rely upon one of Aristotle’s own\nfavorite illustrations, consider:","\n\nAristotle assumes that his readers will immediately appreciate two\nfeatures of these three predications of healthy. First,\nthey are non-univocal, since the second is paraphraseable roughly as\npromotes health and the third as is indicative of\nhealth, whereas the first means, rather, something more\nfundamental, like is sound of body or is functioning\nwell. Hence, healthy is non-univocal. Second,\neven so, the last two predications rely upon the first for their\nelucidations: each appeals to health in its core sense in an\nasymmetrical way. That is, any account of each of the latter two\npredications must allude to the first, whereas an account of\nthe first makes no reference to the second or third in its\naccount. So, suggests Aristotle, health is not only a\nhomonym, but a core-dependent homonym: while not univocal\nneither is it a case of rank multivocity. ","\n\n \nAristotle’s illustration does succeed in showing that there is\nconceptual space between mere family resemblance and pure\nunivocity. So, he is right that these are not exhaustive\noptions. The interest in this sort of result resides in its\nexportability to richer, if more abstract philosophical concepts. \nAristotle appeals to homonymy frequently, across a full range of\nphilosophical concepts including justice, causation,\nlove, life, sameness, goodness, and\nbody. His most celebrated appeal to core-dependent homonymy\ncomes in the case of a concept so highly abstract that it is difficult\nto gauge his success without extended metaphysical reflection. This is\nhis appeal to the core-dependent homonymy of being, which has\ninspired both philosophical and scholarly\ncontroversy.[11]\nAristotle denies that there could be a science of being, on the\ngrounds that there is no single genus being under which all\nand only beings fall (SE 11\n172a13–15–15; APr. 92b14; Met. B 3,\n998b22; EE i 8, 1217b33–35). One motivation for his\nreasoning this way may be that he regards the notion of a genus as\n ineliminably taxonomical and contrastive,[12] \n so that it makes ready sense to speak of\na genus of being only if one can equally well speak of a genus of\nnon-being—just as among living beings one can speak of the\nanimals and the non-animals, viz. the plant kingdom. Since there are\nno non-beings, there accordingly can be no genus of non-being, and so,\nultimately, no genus of being either. Consequently, since each\nscience studies one essential kind arrayed under a single genus, there\ncan be no science of being either.","\n\n \nSubsequently, without expressly reversing his judgment about the\nexistence of a science of being, Aristotle announces that there is\nnonetheless a science of being qua being (Met. iv 4),\nfirst philosophy, which takes as its subject matter beings insofar as\nthey are beings and thus considers all and only those features\npertaining to beings as such—to beings, that is, not insofar as\nthey are mathematical or physical or human beings, but insofar as they\nare beings, full stop. Although the matter is disputed, his\nrecognition of this science evidently turns crucially on his commitment\nto the core-dependent homonymy of being\n itself.[13] \n Although the case is not\nas clear and uncontroversial as Aristotle’s relatively easy\nappeal to health (which is why, after all, he selected it as\nan illustration), we are supposed to be able upon reflection to detect\nan analogous core-dependence in the following instances of\nexists:","\n\nOf course, the last three items on this list are rather awkward\nlocutions, but this is because they strive to make explicit that we can\nspeak of dependent beings as existing if we wish to do so—but\nonly because of their dependence upon the core instance of being,\nnamely substance. (Here it is noteworthy that ‘primary\nsubstance’ is the conventional and not very happy rendering of\nAristotle’s protê ousia in Greek, which\nmeans, more literally, ‘primary\n being’).[14] \n According to this\napproach, we would not have Socrates’ weighing anything at all or\nfeeling any way today were it not for the prior fact of his\nexistence. So, exists in the first instance serves as\nthe core instance of being, in terms of which the others are to be\nexplicated. If this is correct, then, implies Aristotle,\nbeing is a core-dependent homonym; further, a science of\nbeing—or, rather, a science of being qua\nbeing—becomes possible, even though there is no genus of being,\nsince it is finally possible to study all beings insofar as they are\nrelated to the core instance of being, and then also to study that\ncore instance, namely substance, insofar as it serves as the prime\noccasion of being."],"section_title":"5. Essentialism and Homonymy","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\n \nIn speaking of beings which depend upon substance for their existence,\nAristotle implicitly appeals to a foundational philosophical commitment\nwhich appears early in his thought and remains stable throughout his\nentire philosophical career: his theory of categories. In what is\nusually regarded as an early work, The Categories, Aristotle\nrather abruptly announces:","\n\nOf things said without combination, each signifies either: (i) a\nsubstance (ousia); (ii) a quantity; (iii) a quality; (iv) a\nrelative; (v) where; (vi) when; (vii) being in a position; (viii)\nhaving; (ix) acting upon; or (x) a being affected. (Cat.\n1b25–27)","\n\nAristotle does little to frame his theory of categories, offering no\nexplicit derivation of it, nor even specifying overtly what his theory\nof categories categorizes. If librarians categorize books and\nbotanists categorize plants, then what does the philosophical category\ntheorist categorize? ","\n\n \nAristotle does not say explicitly, but his examples make reasonably\nclear that he means to categorize the basic kinds of beings there may\nbe. If we again take some clues from linguistic data, without\ninferring that the ultimate objects of categorization are themselves\nlinguistic, we can contrast things said “with\ncombination”:","\n\nwith things said ‘without combination’:","\n\n‘Man runs’ is truth-evaluable, whereas neither \n‘man’ nor ‘runs’ is. Aristotle says that\nthings of this sort signify entities, evidently\nextra-linguistic entities, which are thus, correlatively, in the first\ncase sufficiently complex to be what makes the sentence ‘Man\nruns’ true, that is a man running, and in the second,\nitems below the level of truth-making, so, e.g., an entity a man,\ntaken by itself, and an action running, taken by itself. \nIf that is correct, the entities categorized by the categories are the\nsorts of basic beings that fall below the level of truth-makers, or\nfacts. Such beings evidently contribute, so to speak, to the\nfacticity of facts, just as, in their linguistic analogues, nouns and\nverbs, things said ‘without combination’, contribute to the\ntruth-evaluability of simple assertions. The constituents of\nfacts contribute to facts as the semantically relevant parts of a\nproposition contribute to its having the truth conditions it has. \nThus, the items categorized in Aristotle’s categories are the\nconstituents of facts. If it is a fact that Socrates is\npale, then the basic beings in view are Socrates and\nbeing pale. In Aristotle’s terms, the first\nis a substance and the second is a quality. ","\n\nImportantly, these beings may be basic without being\nabsolutely simple. After all, Socrates is made up of all\nmanner of parts—arms and legs, organs and bones, molecules and\natoms, and so on down. As a useful linguistic analogue, we may\nconsider phonemes, which are basic, relative to the morphemes\nof a linguistic theory, and yet also complex, since they are made up of\nsimpler sound components, which are irrelevant from the\nlinguist’s point of view because of their lying beneath the level\nof semantic relevance. ","\n\n \nThe theory of categories in total recognizes ten sorts of\nextra-linguistic basic beings:","\n\nAlthough he does not say so overtly in the Categories,\nAristotle evidently presumes that these ten categories of being are\nboth exhaustive and irreducible, so that while there are no other\nbasic beings, it is not possible to eliminate any one of these\ncategories in favor of another.","\n\n \nBoth claims have come in for criticism, and each surely\n requires\n defense.[15]\nAristotle offers neither conviction a defense in his\nCategories. Nor, indeed, does he offer any principled\ngrounding for just these categories of being, a circumstance which has\nleft him open to further criticism from later philosophers, including\nfamously Kant who, after lauding Aristotle for coming up with the idea\nof category theory, proceeds to excoriate him for selecting his\nparticular categories on no principled basis whatsoever. Kant\nalleges that Aristotle picked his categories of being just as he\nhappened to stumble upon them in his reveries (Critique of Pure\nReason, A81/B107). According to Kant, then,\nAristotle’s categories are ungrounded. \nPhilosophers and scholars both before and after Kant have sought to\nprovide the needed grounding, whereas Aristotle himself mainly tends to\njustify the theory of categories by putting it to work in his various\nphilosophical investigations.","\n\n \nWe have already implicitly encountered in passing two of\nAristotle’s appeals to category theory: (i) in his approach to\ntime, which he comes to treat as a non-substantial being; and (ii) in his\ncommitment to the core-dependent homonymy of being, which introduces\nsome rather more contentious considerations. These may be\nrevisited briefly to illustrate how Aristotle thinks that his doctrine\nof categories provides philosophical guidance where it is most\nneeded.","\n\nThinking first of time and its various puzzles, or aporiai,\nwe saw that Aristotle poses a simple question: does time exist? \nHe answers this question in the affirmative, but only because in the\nend he treats it as a categorically circumscribed question. \nHe claims that ‘time is the measure of motion with respect to the\nbefore and after’ (Phys. 219b1–2). By\noffering this definition, Aristotle is able to advance the judgment\nthat time does exist, because it is an entity in the category of\nquantity: time is to motion or change as length is to a line. \nTime thus exists, but like all items in any non-substance category, it\nexists in a dependent sort of way. Just as if there were no lines\nthere would be no length, so if there were no change there would be no\ntime. Now, this feature of Aristotle’s theory of time has\noccasioned both critical and favorable\n reactions.[16] \n In the present context,\nhowever, it is important only that it serves to demonstrate how\nAristotle handles questions of existence: they are, at root, questions\nabout category membership. A question as to whether, e.g.,\nuniversals or places or relations exist, is ultimately, for Aristotle,\nalso a question concerning their category of being, if any.","\n\n \nAs time is a dependent entity in Aristotle’s theory, so too are\nall entities in categories outside of substance. This helps\nexplain why Aristotle thinks it appropriate to deploy his apparatus of\ncore-dependent homonymy in the case of being. If we ask\nwhether qualities or quantities exist, Aristotle will answer in the\naffirmative, but then point out also that as dependent entities they do\nnot exist in the independent manner of substances. Thus, even in\nthe relatively rarified case of being, the theory of\ncategories provides a reason for uncovering core-dependent\nhomonymy. Since all other categories of being depend upon\nsubstance, it should be the case that an analysis of any one of them\nwill ultimately make asymmetrical reference to substance. Aristotle\ncontends in his Categories, relying on a distinction that\ntracks essential (said-of) and accidental (in)\npredication, that:","\n\nAll other things are either said-of primary\nsubstances, which are their subjects, or are in them as\nsubjects. Hence, if there were no primary substances, it would be\nimpossible for anything else to exist. (Cat. 2b5–6)\n ","\n\nIf this is so, then, Aristotle infers, all the non-substance\ncategories rely upon substance as the core of their being. So, he\nconcludes, being qualifies as a case of core-dependent homonymy.","\n\n \nNow, one may challenge Aristotle’s contentions here, first by\nquerying whether he has established the non-univocity of being\nbefore proceeding to argue for its core-dependence. Be that as it\nmay, if we allow its non-univocity, then, according to Aristotle, the\napparatus of the categories provides ample reason to conclude that\nbeing qualifies as a philosophically significant instance of\ncore-dependent homonymy.","\n\n \nIn this way, Aristotle’s philosophy of being and substance, like\nmuch else in his philosophy, relies upon an antecedent commitment to\nhis theory of categories. Indeed, the theory of categories\nspans his entire career and serves as a kind of scaffolding for much of\nhis philosophical theorizing, ranging from metaphysics and philosophy\nof nature to psychology and value theory. ","\n\n \nFor this reason, questions regarding the ultimate tenability of\nAristotle’s doctrine of categories take on a special urgency for\nevaluating much of his philosophy. ","\n\nFor more detail on the theory of categories and its grounding,\n see the entry on \n Aristotle’s Categories."],"section_title":"6. Category Theory","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\n \nEqually central to Aristotle’s thought is his four-causal\nexplanatory scheme. Judged in terms of its influence, this\ndoctrine is surely one of his most significant philosophical\ncontributions. Like other philosophers, Aristotle expects the\nexplanations he seeks in philosophy and science to meet certain\ncriteria of adequacy. Unlike some other philosophers, however, he\ntakes care to state his criteria for adequacy explicitly; then, having\ndone so, he finds frequent fault with his predecessors for failing to\nmeet its terms. He states his scheme in a methodological passage\nin the second book of his Physics:","\n \n One way in which cause is spoken of is that out of which a thing\ncomes to be and which persists, e.g. the bronze of the statue, the\nsilver of the bowl, and the genera of which the bronze and the silver\nare species.\n\n \n In another way cause is spoken of as the form or the pattern, i.e.\nwhat is mentioned in the account (logos) belonging to the\nessence and its genera, e.g. the cause of an octave is a ratio of 2:1,\nor number more generally, as well as the parts mentioned in the account\n(logos).\n\n \n Further, the primary source of the change and rest is spoken of as a\ncause, e.g. the man who deliberated is a cause, the father is the cause\nof the child, and generally the maker is the cause of what is made and\nwhat brings about change is a cause of what is changed.\n\n \n Further, the end (telos) is spoken of as a cause. \nThis is that for the sake of which (hou heneka) a\nthing is done, e.g. health is the cause of walking about. \n‘Why is he walking about?’ We say: ‘To be\nhealthy’—and, having said that, we think we have indicated\nthe cause.\n\n (Phys. 194b23–35)\n\n","\n\nAlthough some of Aristotle’s illustrations are not immediately\npellucid, his approach to explanation is reasonably\nstraightforward.","\n\nAristotle’s attitude towards explanation is best understood\nfirst by considering a simple example he proposes in Physics\nii 3. A bronze statue admits of various different dimensions of\nexplanation. If we were to confront a statue without first\nrecognizing what it was, we would, thinks Aristotle, spontaneously ask\na series of questions about it. We would wish to know what it\nis, what it is made of, what brought it about,\nandwhat it is for. In Aristotle’s terms, in\nasking these questions we are seeking knowledge of the statue’s\nfour causes (aitia): the formal, material, efficient,\nand final. According to Aristotle, when we have\nidentified these four causes, we have satisfied a reasonable demand for\nexplanatory adequacy. ","\n\nMore fully, the four-causal account of explanatory adequacy requires\nan investigator to cite these four causes:","\n\nIn Physics ii 3, Aristotle makes twin claims about this\nfour-causal schema: (i) that citing all four causes is\nnecessary for adequacy in explanation; and (ii) that these\nfour causes are sufficient for adequacy in explanation. \nEach of these claims requires some elaboration and also some\nqualification. ","\n\n \nAs for the necessity claim, Aristotle does not suppose that all\nphenomena admit of all four causes. Thus, for example,\ncoincidences lack final causes, since they do not occur for the sake of\nanything; that is, after all, what makes them coincidences. \nIf a debtor is on his way to the market to buy milk and she runs into\nher creditor, who is on his way to the same market to buy bread, then\nshe may agree to pay the money owed immediately. Although\nresulting in a wanted outcome, their meeting was not for the sake of\nsettling the debt; nor indeed was it for the sake of anything at\nall. It was a simple co-incidence. Hence, it lacks a final\ncause. Similarly, if we think that there are mathematical or\ngeometrical abstractions, for instance a triangle existing as an object\nof thought independent of any material realization, then the triangle\nwill trivially lack a material\n cause.[17] \n Still, these significant exceptions\naside, Aristotle expects the vast majority of explanations to conform\nto his four-causal schema. In non-exceptional cases, a failure to\nspecify all four of causes, is, he maintains, a failure in explanatory\nadequacy.","\n\n \nThe sufficiency claim is exceptionless, though it may yet be misleading\nif one pertinent issue is left unremarked. In providing his\nillustration of the material cause Aristotle first cites the bronze of\na statue and the silver of a bowl, and then mentions also ‘the\ngenera of which the bronze and the silver are species’\n(Phys. 194b25–27). By this he means the types of metal\nto which silver and bronze belong, or more generally still, simply\nmetal. That is, one might specify the material cause of\na statue more or less proximately, by specifying the character of the\nmatter more or less precisely. Hence, when he implies that citing\nall four causes is sufficient for explanation, Aristotle does not\nintend to suggest that a citation at any level of generality\nsuffices. He means to insist rather that there is no fifth kind\nof cause, that his preferred four cases subsume all kinds of\ncause. He does not argue for this conclusion fully, though he\ndoes challenge his readers to identify a kind of cause which qualifies\nas a sort distinct from the four mentioned (Phys.\n195a4–5). ","\n\n \nSo far, then, Aristotle’s four causal schema has whatever\nintuitive plausibility his illustrations may afford it. He does\nnot rest content there, however. Instead, he thinks he can argue\nforcefully for the four causes as real explanatory factors, that is, as\nfeatures which must be cited not merely because they make for\nsatisfying explanations, but because they are genuinely operative\ncausal factors, the omission of which renders any putative explanation\nobjectively incomplete and so inadequate. ","\n\n \nIt should be noted that Aristotle’s arguments for the four causes\ntaken individually all proceed against the backdrop of the general\nconnection he forges between causal explanation and knowledge. Because\nhe thinks that the four aitia feature in answers to\nknowledge-seeking questions (Phys. 194b18; A Po. 71 b\n9–11, 94 a 20), some scholars have come to understand them more as\nbecauses than as causes—that is, as\nexplanations rather than as causes narrowly\n construed.[18] \n Most such judgments\nreflect an antecedent commitment to one or another view of causation\nand explanation—that causation relates events rather than\npropositions; that explanations are inquiry-relative; that causation is\nextensional and explanation intensional; that explanations must adhere\nto some manner of nomic-deductive model, whereas causes need not; or\nthat causes must be prior in time to their effects, while explanations,\nespecially intentional explanations, may appeal to states of affairs\nposterior in time to the actions they explain. ","\n\nGenerally, Aristotle does not respect these sorts of\ncommitments. Thus, to the extent that they are defensible, his\napproach to aitia may be regarded as blurring the canons of\ncausation and explanation. It should certainly not, however, be\nceded up front that Aristotle is guilty of any such conflation, or even\nthat scholars who render his account of the four aitia in\ncausal terms have failed to come to grips with developments in causal\ntheory in the wake of Hume. Rather, because of the lack of\nuniformity in contemporary accounts of causation and explanation, and a\npersistent and justifiable tendency to regard causal explanations as\nfoundational relative to other sorts of explanations, we may\nlegitimately wonder whether Aristotle’s conception of the four\naitia is in any significant way discontinuous with later,\nHumean-inspired approaches, and then again, to the degree that it is,\nwhether Aristotle’s approach suffers for the comparison. Be that\nas it may, we will do well when considering Aristotle’s defense\nof his four aitia to bear in mind that controversy surrounds\nhow best to construe his knowledge-driven approach to causation and\nexplanation relative to some later approaches. ","\n\nFor more on the four causes in general, see the entry on\n Aristotle on Causality."],"section_title":"7. The Four Causal Account of Explanatory Adequacy","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\n \nCentral to Aristotle’s four-causal account of explanatory\nadequacy are the notions of matter (hulê) and\nform (eidos or morphê). Together, they\nconstitute one of his most fundamental philosophical commitments, to\nhylomorphism:","\n\nThe appeal in this definition to ‘ordinary objects’\nrequires reflection, but as a first approximation, it serves to rely on\nthe sorts of examples Aristotle himself employs when motivating\nhylomorphism: statues and houses, horses and humans. In general,\nwe may focus on artefacts and familiar living beings. \nHylomorphism holds that no such object is metaphysically simple, but\nrather comprises two distinct metaphysical elements, one formal and one\nmaterial.","\n\n \nAristotle’s hylomorphism was formulated originally to handle\nvarious puzzles about change. Among the endoxa\nconfronting Aristotle in his Physics are some striking\nchallenges to the coherence of the very notion of change, owing to\n Parmenides\n and\n Zeno. \nAristotle’s initial impulse in the face of such challenges, as we\nhave seen, is to preserve the appearances (phainomena), to\nexplain how change is possible. Key to Aristotle’s response\nto the challenges bequeathed him is his insistence that all change\ninvolves at least two factors: something persisting and something\ngained or lost. Thus, when Socrates goes to the beach and comes\naway sun-tanned, something continues to exist, namely Socrates, even\nwhile something is lost, his pallor, and something else gained, his\ntan. This is a change in the category of quality, whence the\ncommon locution ‘qualitative change’. If he gains\nweight, then again something remains, Socrates, and something is gained,\nin this case a quantity of matter. Accordingly, in this instance we\nhave not a qualitative but a quantitative change. ","\n\nIn general, argues Aristotle, in whatever category a change occurs,\nsomething is lost and something gained within that category,\neven while something else, a substance, remains in existence, as the\nsubject of that change. Of course, substances can come into or go out of\nexistence, in cases of\ngeneration or destruction; and these are changes in the category of\nsubstance. Evidently even in cases of change in this category, however,\nsomething persists. To take an example favourable to Aristotle,\nin the case of the generation of a statue, the bronze persists, but it\ncomes to acquire a new form, a substantial rather than accidental\nform. In all cases, whether substantial or accidental, the\ntwo-factor analysis obtains: something remains the same and something\nis gained or lost. ","\n\n \nIn its most rudimentary formulation, hylomorphism simply labels each of\nthe two factors: what persists is matter and what is gained is\nform. Aristotle’s hylomorphism quickly becomes\nmuch more complex, however, as the notions of matter and form are\npressed into philosophical service. Importantly, matter and form\ncome to be paired with another fundamental distinction, that between\npotentiality and actuality. Again in the case\nof the generation of a statue, we may say that the bronze is\npotentially a statue, but that it is an actual statue\nwhen and only when it is informed with the form of a\nstatue. Of course, before being made into a statue, the\nbronze was also in potentiality a fair number of other\nartefacts—a cannon, a steam-engine, or a goal on a football\npitch. Still, it was not in potentiality butter or a beach\nball. This shows that potentiality is not the same as\npossibility: to say that x is potentially F is to say that\nx already has actual features in virtue of which it might be\nmade to be F by the imposition of a F form upon it. So, given\nthese various connections, it becomes possible to define form and\nmatter generically as","\n\nOf course, these definitions are circular, but that is not in itself\na problem: actuality and potentiality are, for Aristotle, fundamental\nconcepts which admit of explication and description but do not admit of\nreductive analyses.","\n\n \nEncapsulating Aristotle’s discussions of change in\nPhysics i 7 and 8, and putting the matter more crisply than he\nhimself does, we have the following simple argument for matter and\nform: (1) a necessary condition of there being change is the existence\nof matter and form; (2) there is change; hence (3) there are matter and\nform. The second premise is a phainomenon; so, if that\nis accepted without further defense, only the first requires\njustification. The first premise is justified by the thought that since\nthere is no generation ex nihilo, in every instance of change\nsomething persists while something else is gained or lost. In\nsubstantial generation or destruction, a substantial form is gained or\nlost; in mere accidental change, the form gained or lost is itself\naccidental. Since these two ways of changing exhaust the kinds of\nchange there are, in every instance of change there are two\nfactors present. These are matter and form.","\n\n \nFor these reasons, Aristotle intends his hylomorphism to be much more\nthan a simple explanatory heuristic. On the contrary, he maintains,\nmatter and form are mind-independent features of the world and must,\ntherefore, be mentioned in any full explanation of its workings."],"section_title":"8. Hylomorphism","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\n \nWe may mainly pass over as uncontroversial the suggestion that there\nare efficient causes in favor of the most controversial and difficult\nof Aristotle four causes, the final\n cause.[19] \n We should note before doing so, however, that Aristotle’s commitment\nto efficient causation does receive a defense in Aristotle’s preferred\nterminology; he thus does more than many other philosophers who take\nit as given that causes of an efficient sort are operative. Partly by\nway of criticizing Plato’s theory of Forms, which he regards as\ninadequate because of its inability to account for change and\ngeneration, Aristotle observes that nothing potential can bring itself\ninto actuality without the agency of an actually operative efficient\ncause. Since what is potential is always in potentiality relative to\nsome range of actualities, and nothing becomes actual of its own\naccord—no pile of bricks, for instance, spontaneously organizes\nitself into a house or a wall—an actually operative agent is\nrequired for every instance of change. This is the efficient\ncause. These sorts of considerations also incline Aristotle to speak\nof the priority of actuality over potentiality: potentialities are\nmade actual by actualities, and indeed are always potentialities for\nsome actuality or other. The operation of some actuality upon some\npotentiality is an instance of efficient causation.","\nThat said, most of Aristotle’s readers do not find themselves in need\nof a defense of the existence of efficient causation. By contrast,\nmost think that Aristotle does need to provide a defense of final\ncausation. It is natural and easy for us to recognize final causal\nactivity in the products of human craft: computers and can-openers are\ndevices dedicated to the execution of certain tasks, and both their\nformal and material features will be explained by appeal to their\nfunctions. Nor is it a mystery where artefacts obtain their functions:\nwe give artefacts their functions. The ends of artefacts are the results of\nthe designing activities of intentional agents. Aristotle recognizes\nthese kinds of final causation, but also, and more problematically,\nenvisages a much greater role for teleology in natural explanation:\nnature exhibits teleology without design. He thinks, for instance,\nthat living organisms not only have parts which require teleological\nexplanation—that, for instance, kidneys are for\npurifying the blood and teeth are for tearing and chewing\nfood—but that whole organisms, human beings and other animals,\nalso have final causes. ","\n\nCrucially, Aristotle denies overtly that the causes operative in\nnature are intention-dependent. He thinks, that is, that\norganisms have final causes, but that they did not come to have them by\ndint of the designing activities of some intentional agent or\nother. He thus denies that a necessary condition of\nx’s having a final cause is x’s being\ndesigned. ","\n\nAlthough he has been persistently criticized for his commitment to\nsuch natural ends, Aristotle is not susceptible to a fair number of\nthe objections standardly made to his view. Indeed, it is evident\nthat whatever the merits of the most penetrating of such criticisms,\nmuch of the contumely directed at Aristotle is stunningly\n illiterate.[20] \n To take but one of any number of mind-numbing examples, the famous\nAmerican psychologist B. F. Skinner reveals that ‘Aristotle\nargued that a falling body accelerated because it grew more jubilant\nas it found itself nearer its home’ (1971, 6). To anyone who has\nactually read Aristotle, it is unsurprising that this ascription comes\nwithout an accompanying textual citation. For Aristotle, as Skinner\nwould portray him, rocks are conscious beings having end states which\nthey so delight in procuring that they accelerate themselves in\nexaltation as they grow ever closer to attaining them. There is no\nexcuse for this sort of intellectual slovenliness, when already by the\nlate-nineteenth century, the German scholar Zeller was able to say\nwith perfect accuracy that ‘The most important feature of the\nAristotelian teleology is the fact that it is neither anthropocentric\nnor is it due to the actions of a creator existing outside the world\nor even of a mere arranger of the world, but is always thought of as\nimmanent in nature’ (1883, §48).","\n\n \nIndeed, it is hardly necessary to caricature Aristotle’s\nteleological commitments in order to bring them into critical\nfocus. In fact, Aristotle offers two sorts of defenses of\nnon-intentional teleology in nature, the first of which is replete with\ndifficulty. He claims in Physics ii 8:","For these [viz. teeth and all other parts of natural\nbeings] and all other natural things come about as they do either\nalways or for the most part, whereas nothing which comes about due to\nchance or spontaneity comes about always or for the most part. \n… If, then, these are either the result of coincidence or for the\nsake of something, and they cannot be the result of coincidence or\nspontaneity, it follows that they must be for the sake of\nsomething. Moreover, even those making these sorts of claims\n[viz. that everything comes to be by necessity] will agree that such\nthings are natural. Therefore, that for the sake of which is\npresent among things which come to be and exist by nature.\n(Phys. 198b32–199a8)","\n\nThe argument here, which has been variously formulated\n by\n scholars,[21]\nseems doubly problematic. ","\n\n \nIn this argument Aristotle seems to introduce as a phainomenon\nthat nature exhibits regularity, so that the parts of nature come about\nin patterned and regular ways. Thus, for instance, humans\ntend to have teeth arranged in a predictable sort of way, with incisors\nin the front and molars in the back. He then seems to contend, as\nan exhaustive and exclusive disjunction, that things happen either by\nchance or for the sake of something, only to suggest, finally, that\nwhat is ‘always or for the most part’—what happens in\na patterned and predictable way—is not plausibly thought to be\ndue to chance. Hence, he concludes, whatever happens always or\nfor the most part must happen for the sake of something, and so must\nadmit of a teleological cause. Thus, teeth show up always or for\nthe most part with incisors in the front and molars in the back; since\nthis is a regular and predictable occurrence, it cannot be due to\nchance. Given that whatever is not due to chance has a final\ncause, teeth have a final cause.","\n\n \nIf so much captures Aristotle’s dominant argument for teleology, then\nhis view is unmotivated. The argument is problematic in the first\ninstance because it assumes an exhaustive and exclusive disjunction\nbetween what is by chance and what is for the sake of something. But\nthere are obviously other possibilities. Hearts beat not in order to\nmake noise, but they do so always and not by chance. Second, and this\nis perplexing if we have represented him correctly, Aristotle is\nhimself aware of one sort of counterexample to this view and is indeed\nkeen to point it out himself: although, he insists, bile is regularly\nand predictably yellow, its being yellow is neither due simply to\nchance nor for the sake of anything. Aristotle in fact mentions many\nsuch counterexamples (Part. An. 676b16–677b10,\nGen. An. 778a29–b6). It seems to follow, then, short of\nascribing a straight contradiction to him, either that he is not\ncorrectly represented as we have interpreted this argument or that he\nsimply changed his mind about the grounds of teleology. Taking up\nthe first alternative, one possibility is that Aristotle is not really\ntrying to argue for teleology from the ground up in\nPhysics ii 8, but is taking it as already established that\nthere are teleological causes, and restricting himself to observing\nthat many natural phenomena, namely those which occur always or for the\nmost part, are good candidates for admitting of teleological\nexplanation.","\n\n \nThat would leave open the possibility of a broader sort of motivation\nfor teleology, perhaps of the sort Aristotle offers elsewhere in the\nPhysics, when speaking about the impulse to find\nnon-intention-dependent teleological causes at work in nature:","This is most obvious in the case of animals other than man:\nthey make things using neither craft nor on the basis of inquiry nor by\ndeliberation. This is in fact a source of puzzlement for those\nwho wonder whether it is by reason or by some other faculty that these\ncreatures work—spiders, ants and the like. Advancing bit by\nbit in this same direction it becomes apparent that even in plants\nfeatures conducive to an end occur—leaves, for example, grow in\norder to provide shade for the fruit. If then it is both by\nnature and for an end that the swallow makes its nest and the spider\nits web, and plants grow leaves for the sake of the fruit and send\ntheir roots down rather than up for the sake of nourishment, it is\nplain that this kind of cause is operative in things which come to be\nand are by nature. And since nature is twofold, as matter and as\nform, the form is the end, and since all other things are for sake of\nthe end, the form must be the cause in the sense of that for the sake\nof which. (Phys. 199a20–32)","\n\nAs Aristotle quite rightly observes in this passage, we find\nourselves regularly and easily speaking in teleological terms when\ncharacterizing non-human animals and plants. It is consistent\nwith our so speaking, of course, that all of our easy language in these\ncontexts is rather too easy: it is in fact lax and careless, because unwarrantedly\nanthropocentric. We might yet demand that all such language be\nassiduously reduced to some non-teleological idiom when we are being\nscientifically strict and empirically serious, though we would first\nneed to survey the explanatory costs and benefits of our attempting to\ndo so. Aristotle considers and rejects some views hostile to\nteleology in Physics ii 8 and Generation and\nCorruption\n i.[22] "],"section_title":"9. Aristotelian Teleology","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\n \nOnce Aristotle has his four-causal explanatory schema fully on the\nscene, he relies upon it in virtually all of his most advanced\nphilosophical investigation. As he deploys it in various\nframeworks, we find him augmenting and refining the schema even as he\napplies it, sometimes with surprising results. One important\nquestion concerns how his hylomorphism intersects with the theory of\nsubstance advanced in the context of his theory of categories. \n","\n\nAs we have seen, Aristotle insists upon the primacy of primary\nsubstance in his Categories. According to that work, however,\nstar instances of primary substance are familiar living beings like\nSocrates or an individual horse (Cat. 2a11014). Yet with the\nadvent of hylomorphism, these primary substances are revealed to be\nmetaphysical complexes: Socrates is a compound of matter and form. So,\nnow we have not one but three potential candidates for primary\nsubstance: form, matter, and the compound of matter and form. The\nquestion thus arises: which among them is the primary substance? Is\nit the matter, the form, or the compound? The compound corresponds to\na basic object of experience and seems to be a basic subject of\npredication: we say that Socrates lives in Athens, not that his matter\nlives in Athens. Still, matter underlies the compound and in this way\nseems a more basic subject than the compound, at least in the sense\nthat it can exist before and after it does. On the other hand, the\nmatter is nothing definite at all until enformed; so, perhaps form, as\ndetermining what the compound is, has the best claim on\nsubstantiality. ","\n\n \nIn the middle books of his Metaphysics, which contain some of\nhis most complex and engaging investigations into basic being,\nAristotle settles on form (Met. vii 17). A\nquestion thus arises as to how form satisfies Aristotle’s final\ncriteria for substantiality. He expects a substance to be, as he says,\nsome particular thing (tode ti), but also to be something\nknowable, some essence or other. These criteria seem to pull in\ndifferent directions, the first in favor of particular substances, as\nthe primary substances of the Categories had been particulars,\nand the second in favor of universals as substances, because they alone\nare knowable. In the lively controversy surrounding these\nmatters, many scholars have concluded that Aristotle adopts a third way\nforward: form is both knowable and particular. This matter,\nhowever, remains very acutely\n disputed.[23] \n ","\n\n \nVery briefly, and not engaging these controversies, it becomes clear\nthat Aristotle prefers form in virtue of its role in generation and\ndiachronic persistence. When a statue is generated, or when a new\nanimal comes into being, something persists, namely the matter, which\ncomes to realize the substantial form in question. Even so,\ninsists Aristotle, the matter does not by itself provide the identity\nconditions for the new substance. First, as we have seen, the\nmatter is merely potentially some F until such time as it is made\nactually F by the presence of an F form. Further, the matter can\nbe replenished, and is replenished in the case of all\norganisms, and so seems to be form-dependent for its own diachronic\nidentity conditions. For these reasons, Aristotle thinks of the\nform as prior to the matter, and thus more fundamental than the\nmatter. This sort of matter, the form-dependent matter, Aristotle\nregards as proximate matter (Met. 1038b6, 1042b10),\nthus extending the notion of matter beyond its original role as\nmetaphysical substrate. ","\n\n \nFurther, in Metaphysics vii 17 Aristotle offers a suggestive\nargument to the effect that matter alone cannot be substance. Let the\nvarious bits of matter belonging to Socrates be labeled as a,\nb, c, …, n. Consistent with the\nnon-existence of Socrates is the existence\nof a, b, c, …, n, since\nthese elements exist when they are spread from here to Alpha Centauri,\nbut if that happens, of course, Socrates no longer exists. Heading in the\nother direction, Socrates can exist without just these elements, since\nhe may exist when some one of a, b, c,\n…, n is replaced or goes out of existence. So, in\naddition to his material elements, insists Aristotle, Socrates is also\nsomething else, something more (heteron ti; Met.\n1041b19–20). This something more is form, which is ‘not\nan element…but a primary cause of a thing’s being what it\nis’ (Met. 1041b28–30). The cause of a thing’s being\nthe actual thing it is, as we have seen, is form. Hence, concludes\nAristotle, as the source of being and unity, form is substance. ","\n\nEven if this much is granted—and to repeat, much of what has\njust been said is unavoidably controversial—many questions\nremain. For example, is form best understood as universal or\nparticular? However that issue is to be resolved, what is the\nrelation of form to the compound and to matter? If form is\nsubstance, then what is the fate of these other two candidates? \nAre they also substances, if to a lesser degree? It seems odd to\nconclude that they are nothing at all, or that the compound in\nparticular is nothing in actuality; yet it is difficult to contend that\nthey might belong to some category other than substance. ","\n\nFor an approach to some of these questions, see the entry on\n Aristotle’s Metaphysics.\n "],"section_title":"10. Substance","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\nHowever these and like issues are to be resolved, given the primacy of\nform as substance, it is unsurprising to find Aristotle identifying\nthe soul, which he introduces as a principle or source\n(archê) of all life, as the form of a living\ncompound. For Aristotle, in fact, all living things, and not only\nhuman beings, have souls: ‘what is ensouled is distinguished\nfrom what is unensouled by living’ (DA 431a20–22;\ncf. DA 412a13, 423a20–6; De Part. An.\n687a24–690a10; Met. 1075a16–25). It is\nappropriate, then, to treat all ensouled bodies in hylomorphic\nterms: ","\n\nThe soul is the cause and source of the living body. But\ncause and source are meant in many ways [or are\nhomonymous]. Similarly, the soul is a cause in accordance\nwith the ways delineated, which are three: it is (i) the cause as the\nsource of motion [=the efficient cause], (ii) that for the sake of\nwhich [=the final cause], and (iii) as the substance of ensouled\nbodies. That it is a cause as substance is clear, for substance\nis the cause of being for all things, and for living things, being is\nlife, and the soul is also the cause and source of life. (DA\n415b8–14; cf. PN 467b12–25, Phys. 255a56–10) \n\n","\n\nSo, the soul and body are simply special cases of form and\nmatter:","\n\nsoul : body :: form : matter ::\nactuality : potentiality\n\n","\n\nFurther, the soul, as the end of the compound organism, is also the\nfinal cause of the body. Minimally, this is to be understood as the\nview that any given body is the body that it is because it is\norganized around a function which serves to unify the entire\norganism. In this sense, the body’s unity derives from the fact it has\na single end, or single life directionality, a state of affairs that\nAristotle captures by characterizing the body as the sort of matter\nwhich is organic (organikon; DA 412a28). By\nthis he means that the body serves as a tool for implementing the\ncharacteristic life activities of the kind to which the organism\nbelongs (organon = tool in Greek). Taking all this\ntogether, Aristotle offers the view that the soul is the ‘first\nactuality of a natural organic body’ (DA\n412b5–6), that it is a ‘substance as form of a natural\nbody which has life in potentiality’ (DA \n412a20–1) and, again, that it ‘is a first actuality of a\nnatural body which has life in potentiality’ (DA \n412a27–8).","\n\nAristotle contends that his hylomorphism provides an attractive middle\nway between what he sees as the mirroring excesses of his\npredecessors. In one direction, he means to reject Presocratic kinds\nof materialism; in the other, he opposes Platonic dualism. He gives\nthe Presocratics credit for identifying the material causes of life,\nbut then faults them for failing to grasp its formal cause. By\ncontrast, Plato earns praise for grasping the formal cause of life;\nunfortunately, as Aristotle sees things, he then proceeds to neglect\nthe material cause, and comes to believe that the soul can exist\nwithout its material basis. Hylomorphism, in Aristotle’s view,\ncaptures what is right in both camps while eschewing the unwarranted\nmono-dimensionality of each. To account for living organisms,\nAristotle contends, the natural scientist must attend to both matter\nand form.","\n\nAristotle deploys hylomorphic analyses not only to the whole organism,\nbut to the individual faculties of the soul as well. Perception\ninvolves the reception of sensible forms without matter, and thinking,\nby analogy, consists in the mind’s being enformed by intelligible\nforms. With each of these extensions, Aristotle both expands and\ntaxes his basic hylomorphism, sometimes straining its basic framework\nalmost beyond recognition. ","\n\n \nFor more detail on Aristotle’s hylomorphism in psychological\nexplanation, see the entry on \n Aristotle’s Psychology."],"section_title":"11. Living Beings","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\n \nAristotle’s basic teleological framework extends to his ethical\nand political theories, which he regards as complementing one\nanother. He takes it as given that most people wish to lead\ngood lives; the question then becomes what the best life for human\nbeings consists in. Because he believes that the best life for a\nhuman being is not a matter of subjective preference, he also believes\nthat people can (and, sadly, often do) choose to lead sub-optimal\nlives. In order to avoid such unhappy eventualities, Aristotle\nrecommends reflection on the criteria any successful candidate for the\nbest life must satisfy. He proceeds to propose one kind of life\nas meeting those criteria uniquely and therefore promotes it as the\nsuperior form of human life. This is a life lived in accordance with\nreason. ","\n\nWhen stating the general criteria for the final good for human beings,\nAristotle invites his readers to review them (EN\n1094a22–27). This is advisable, since much of the work of\nsorting through candidate lives is in fact accomplished during the\nhigher-order task of determining the criteria appropriate to this\ntask. Once these are set, it becomes relatively straightforward for\nAristotle to dismiss some contenders, including for instance hedonism,\nthe perennially popular view that pleasure is the highest good for\nhuman beings. ","\n\nAccording to the criteria advanced, the final good for human beings\nmust: (i) be pursued for its own sake (EN 1094a1); (ii) be\nsuch that we wish for other things for its sake (EN 1094a19);\n(iii) be such that we do not wish for it on account of other things\n(EN 1094a21); (iv) be complete (teleion), in the\nsense that it is always choiceworthy and always chosen for itself\n(EN 1097a26–33); and finally (v) be self-sufficient\n(autarkês), in the sense that its presence suffices to\nmake a life lacking in nothing (EN 1097b6–16). Plainly\nsome candidates for the best life fall down in the face of these\ncriteria. According to Aristotle, neither the life of pleasure nor the\nlife of honour satisfies them all.","\n\n \nWhat does satisfy them all is happiness eudaimonia. Scholars in fact\ndispute whether eudaimonia is best rendered as\n‘happiness’ or ‘flourishing’ or ‘living\nwell’ or simply transliterated and left an untranslated\n technical\n term.[24] \n If we have already determined that happiness is some sort of\nsubjective state, perhaps simple desire fulfillment, then\n‘happiness’ will indeed be an inappropriate translation:\neudaimonia is achieved, according to Aristotle, by fully\nrealizing our natures, by actualizing to the highest degree our human\ncapacities, and neither our nature nor our endowment of human\ncapacities is a matter of choice for us. Still, as Aristotle frankly\nacknowledges, people will consent without hesitation to the suggestion\nthat happiness is our best good—even while differing materially\nabout how they understand what happiness is. So, while seeming to\nagree, people in fact disagree about the human good. Consequently, it\nis necessary to reflect on the nature of happiness\n(eudaimonia): ","\n\nBut perhaps saying that the highest good is happiness\n(eudaimonia) will appear to be a platitude and what is wanted\nis a much clearer expression of what this is. Perhaps this would come\nabout if the function (ergon) of a human being were\nidentified. For just as the good, and doing well, for a flute player,\na sculptor, and every sort of craftsman—and in general, for\nwhatever has a function and a characteristic action—seems to\ndepend upon function, so the same seems true for a human being, if\nindeed a human being has a function. Or do the carpenter and cobbler\nhave their functions, while a human being has none and is rather\nnaturally without a function (argon)? Or rather, just as\nthere seems to be some particular function for the eye and the hand\nand in general for each of the parts of a human being, should one in\nthe same way posit a particular function for the human being in\naddition to all these? Whatever might this be? For living is common\neven to plants, whereas something characteristic (idion) is\nwanted; so, one should set aside the life of nutrition and\ngrowth. Following that would be some sort of life of perception, yet\nthis is also common, to the horse and the bull and to every\nanimal. What remains, therefore, is a life of action belonging to the\nkind of soul that has reason. (EN\n1097b22–1098a4)","\n\nIn determining what eudaimonia consists in, Aristotle makes a crucial\nappeal to the human function (ergon), and thus to his\noverarching teleological framework. ","\n\nHe thinks that he can identify the human function in terms of\nreason, which then provides ample grounds for characterizing the happy\nlife as involving centrally the exercise of reason, whether practical\nor theoretical. Happiness turns out to be an activity of the\nrational soul, conducted in accordance with virtue or excellence, or,\nin what comes to the same thing, in rational activity executed\nexcellently (EN 1098a161–17). It bears noting in\nthis regard that Aristotle’s word for virtue,\naretê, is broader than the dominant sense of the English\nword ‘virtue’, since it comprises all manner of\nexcellences, thus including but extending beyond the moral virtues.\nThus when he says that happiness consists in an activity in\n‘accordance with virtue’ (kat’ aretên;\nEN 1098a18), Aristotle means that it is a kind of excellent\nactivity, and not merely morally virtuous activity.","\n\n \nThe suggestion that only excellently executed or\nvirtuously performed rational activity constitutes human\nhappiness provides the impetus for Aristotle’s virtue\nethics. Strikingly, first, he insists that the good life is a life of\nactivity; no state suffices, since we are commended and\npraised for living good lives, and we are rightly commended or praised\nonly for things we (do) (EN 1105b20–1106a13).\nFurther, given that we must not only act, but act excellently or\nvirtuously, it falls to the ethical theorist to determine what virtue\nor excellence consists in with respect to the individual human\nvirtues, including, for instance, courage and practical\nintelligence. This is why so much of Aristotle’s ethical writing\nis given over to an investigation of virtue, both in general and in\nparticular, and extending to both practical and theoretical forms.","\n\n For more on Aristotle’s virtue-based ethics, see the entry on \n Aristotle’s Ethics.","\n\nAristotle concludes his discussion of human happiness in his\nNicomachean Ethics by introducing political theory as a\ncontinuation and completion of ethical theory. Ethical\ntheory characterizes the best form of human life; political theory\ncharacterizes the forms of social organization best suited to its\nrealization (EN 1181b12–23). ","\n\n \nThe basic political unit for Aristotle is the polis, which is\nboth a state in the sense of being an authority-wielding\nmonopoly and a civil society in the sense of being a series of\norganized communities with varying degrees of converging\ninterest. Aristotle’s political theory is markedly\nunlike some later, liberal theories, in that he does not think that the\npolis requires justification as a body threatening to infringe\non antecedently existing human rights. Rather, he advances a form\nof political naturalism which treats human beings as by nature\npolitical animals, not only in the weak sense of being gregariously\ndisposed, nor even in the sense of their merely benefiting from mutual\ncommercial exchange, but in the strong sense of their flourishing as\nhuman beings at all only within the framework of an organized\npolis. The polis ‘comes into being for the sake\nof living, but it remains in existence for the sake of living\nwell’ (Pol. 1252b29–30; cf. 1253a31–37). ","\n\nThe polis is thus to be judged against the goal of\npromoting human happiness. A superior form of political organization\nenhances human life; an inferior form hampers and hinders\nit. One major question pursued in Aristotle’s\nPolitics is thus structured by just this question: what sort\nof political arrangement best meets the goal of developing and\naugmenting human flourishing? Aristotle considers a fair\nnumber of differing forms of political organization, and sets most\naside as inimical to the goal human happiness. For example, given\nhis overarching framework, he has no difficulty rejecting\ncontractarianism on the grounds that it treats as merely instrumental\nthose forms of political activity which are in fact partially\nconstitutive of human flourishing (Pol. iii 9). ","\n\nIn thinking about the possible kinds of political organization,\nAristotle relies on the structural observations that rulers may be one, few,\nor many, and that their forms of rule may be legitimate or\nillegitimate, as measured against the goal of promoting human\nflourishing (Pol. 1279a26–31). Taken together, these factors\nyield six possible forms of government, three correct and three\ndeviant:","\n\nThe correct are differentiated from the deviant by their relative\nabilities to realize the basic function of the polis: living\nwell. Given that we prize human happiness, we should, insists\nAristotle, prefer forms of political association best suited to this\ngoal. ","\n\nNecessary to the end of enhancing human flourishing, maintains\nAristotle, is the maintenance of a suitable level of distributive\njustice. Accordingly, he arrives at his classification of better\nand worse governments partly by considerations of distributive\njustice. He contends, in a manner directly analogous to his\nattitude towards eudaimonia, that everyone will find it easy\nto agree to the proposition that we should prefer a just state to an\nunjust state, and even to the formal proposal that the distribution of\njustice requires treating equal claims similarly and unequal claims\ndissimilarly. Still, here too people will differ about what\nconstitutes an equal or an unequal claim or, more generally, an equal\nor an unequal person. A democrat will presume that all citizens\nare equal, whereas an aristocrat will maintain that the best citizens\nare, quite obviously, superior to the inferior. Accordingly, the\ndemocrat will expect the formal constraint of justice to yield equal\ndistribution to all, whereas the aristocrat will take for granted that\nthe best citizens are entitled to more than the worst. ","\n\nWhen sorting through these claims, Aristotle relies upon his own\naccount of distributive justice, as advanced in Nicomachean\nEthics v 3. That account is deeply meritocratic. He\naccordingly disparages oligarchs, who suppose that justice requires\npreferential claims for the rich, but also democrats, who contend that\nthe state must boost liberty across all citizens irrespective of\nmerit. The best polis has neither function: its goal is\nto enhance human flourishing, an end to which liberty is at best\ninstrumental, and not something to be pursued for its own sake.","\n\nStill, we should also proceed with a sober eye on what is in fact\npossible for human beings, given our deep and abiding acquisitional\npropensities. Given these tendencies, it turns out that although\ndeviant, democracy may yet play a central role in the sort of mixed\nconstitution which emerges as the best form of political organization\navailable to us. Inferior though it is to polity (that is, rule\nby the many serving the goal of human flourishing), and especially to\naristocracy (government by the best humans, the aristoi, also\ndedicated to the goal of human flourishing), democracy, as the best\namongst the deviant forms of government, may also be the most we can\nrealistically hope to achieve. ","\n\nFor an in-depth discussion of Aristotle’s political theory,\nincluding his political naturalism, see the entry on \n Aristotle’s Politics."],"section_title":"12. Happiness and Political Association","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\n \nAristotle regards rhetoric and the arts as belonging to the productive\nsciences. As a family, these differ from the practical sciences\nof ethics and politics, which concern human conduct, and from the\ntheoretical sciences, which aim at truth for its own sake. \nBecause they are concerned with the creation of human products broadly\nconceived, the productive sciences include activities with obvious,\nartefactual products like ships and buildings, but also agriculture and\nmedicine, and even, more nebulously, rhetoric, which aims at the\nproduction of persuasive speech (Rhet. 1355b26; cf.\nTop. 149b5), and tragedy, which aims at\nthe production of edifying drama (Poet.\n1448b16–17). If we bear in mind that Aristotle\napproaches all these activities within the broader context of his\nteleological explanatory framework, then at least some of the highly\npolemicized interpretative difficulties which have grown up around his\nworks in this area, particularly the Poetics, may be sharply\ndelimited. ","\n\n \nOne such controversy centers on the question of whether\nAristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics are primarily\ndescriptive or prescriptive\n works.[25] \n To the degree that they are indeed\nprescriptive, one may wonder whether Aristotle has presumed in these\ntreatises to dictate to figures of the stature of Sophocles and\nEuripides how best to pursue their crafts. To some\nextent—but only to some extent—it may seem that he\ndoes. There are, at any rate, clearly prescriptive elements in\nboth these texts. Still, he does not arrive at these\nrecommendations a priori. Rather, it is plain that\nAristotle has collected the best works of forensic speech and tragedy\navailable to him, and has studied them to discern their more and less\nsuccessful features. In proceeding in this way, he aims to\ncapture and codify what is best in both rhetorical practice and\ntragedy, in each case relative to its appropriate productive goal.","\n\nThe general goal of rhetoric is clear. Rhetoric, says Aristotle,\n‘is the power to see, in each case, the possible ways to\npersuade’ (Rhet. 1355b26). Different contexts, however,\nrequire different techniques. Thus, suggests Aristotle, speakers will\nusually find themselves in one of three contexts where persuasion is\nparamount: deliberative (Rhet. i 4–8), epideictic\n(Rhet. i 9), and judicial (Rhet. i 10–14). In each\nof these contexts, speakers will have at their disposal three main\navenues of persuasion: the character of the speaker, the emotional\nconstitution of the audience, and the general argument\n(logos) of the speech itself (Rhet. i 3). Rhetoric\nthus examines techniques of persuasion pursuant to each of these\nareas. ","\n\nWhen discussing these techniques, Aristotle draws heavily upon topics\ntreated in his logical, ethical, and psychological writings. In this\nway, the Rhetoric illuminates Aristotle’s writings in these\ncomparatively theoretical areas by developing in concrete ways topics\ntreated more abstractly elsewhere. For example, because a successful\npersuasive speech proceeds alert to the emotional state of the\naudience on the occasion of its delivery, Aristotle’s\nRhetoric contains some of his most nuanced and specific\ntreatments of the emotions. Heading in another\ndirection, a close reading of the Rhetoric reveals that\nAristotle treats the art of persuasion as closely akin to dialectic\n(see §4.3 above). Like dialectic, rhetoric trades in\ntechniques that are not scientific in the strict sense (see §4.2\nabove), and though its goal is persuasion, it reaches its end best if\nit recognizes that people naturally find proofs and well-turned\narguments persuasive (Rhet. 1354a1, 1356a25,\n1356a30). Accordingly, rhetoric, again like dialectic,\nbegins with credible opinions (endoxa), though mainly of the\npopular variety rather than those endorsed most readily by the wise\n(Top. 100a29–35; 104a8–20; Rhet.\n1356b34). Finally, rhetoric proceeds from such opinions to\nconclusions which the audience will understand to follow by cogent\npatterns of inference (Rhet. 1354a12–18,\n1355a5–21). For this reason, too, the rhetorician will do\nwell understand the patterns of human reasoning. ","\n\nFor more on Aristotle’s rhetoric, see the entry on \n Aristotle’s Rhetoric.","\n\nBy highlighting and refining techniques for successful speech, the\nRhetoric is plainly prescriptive—but only relative to\nthe goal of persuasion. It does not, however, select its\nown goal or in any way dictate the end of persuasive speech: rather,\nthe end of rhetoric is given by the nature of the craft itself. \nIn this sense, the Rhetoric is like both the Nicomachean\nEthics and the Politics in bearing the stamp of\nAristotle’s broad and encompassing teleology. ","\n\nThe same holds true of the Poetics, but in this case the\nend is not easily or uncontroversially articulated. It is often\nassumed that the goal of tragedy is catharsis—the\npurification or purgation of the emotions aroused in a tragic\nperformance. Despite its prevalence, as an interpretation of what\nAristotle actually says in the Poetics this understanding is\nunderdetermined at best. When defining tragedy in a general way,\nAristotle claims:","\n\nTragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious and\ncomplete, and which has some greatness about it. It imitates in words\nwith pleasant accompaniments, each type belonging separately to the\ndifferent parts of the work. It imitates people performing actions and\ndoes not rely on narration. It achieves, through pity and fear, the\ncatharsis of these sorts of feelings. (Poet.\n1449b21–29)\n\n","\n\nAlthough he has been represented in countless works of scholarship\nas contending that tragedy is for the sake of catharsis,\nAristotle is in fact far more circumspect. While he does contend\nthat tragedy will effect or accomplish catharsis, in so speaking he\ndoes not use language which clearly implies that catharsis is in itself\nthe function of tragedy. Although a good blender will achieve a\nblade speed of 36,000 rotations per minute, this is not its function;\nrather, it achieves this speed in service of its function, namely\nblending. Similarly, then, on one approach, tragedy achieves\ncatharsis, though not because it is its function to do so. \nThis remains so, even if it is integral to realizing its function that\ntragedy achieve catharsis—as it is equally integral that it makes\nus of imitation (mimêsis), and does so by using words\nalong with pleasant accompaniments (namely, rhythm, harmony, and song;\nPoet. 1447b27). ","\n\n \nUnfortunately, Aristotle is not completely forthcoming on the question\nof the function of tragedy. One clue towards his attitude\ncomes from a passage in which he differentiates tragedy from historical\nwriting:","\n\nThe poet and the historian differ not in that one writes in meter and\nthe other not; for one could put the writings of Herodotus into verse\nand they would be history none the less, with or without meter. The\ndifference resides in this: the one speaks of what has happened, and\nthe other of what might be. Accordingly, poetry is more philosophical\nand more momentous than history. The poet speaks more of the\nuniversal, while the historian speaks of particulars. It is universal\nthat when certain things turn out a certain way someone will in all\nlikelihood or of necessity act or speak in a certain way—which\nis what the poet, though attaching particular names to the situation,\nstrives for (Poet. 1451a38–1451b10).\n\n ","\n\nIn characterizing poetry as more philosophical, universal, and\nmomentous than history, Aristotle praises poets for their ability to\nassay deep features of human character, to dissect the ways in which\nhuman fortune engages and tests character, and to display how human\nfoibles may be amplified in uncommon circumstances. We do not,\nhowever, reflect on character primarily for entertainment value. \nRather, and in general, Aristotle thinks of the goal of tragedy in\nbroadly intellectualist terms: the function of tragedy is\n‘learning, that is, figuring out what each thing is’\n(Poet. 1448b16–17). In Aristotle’s view,\ntragedy teaches us about ourselves. ","\n\n \nThat said, catharsis is undoubtedly a key concept in Aristotle’s\nPoetics, one which, along with imitation\n(mimêsis), has generated enormous\n controversy.[26] \n These\ncontroversies center around three poles of interpretation: the\nsubject of catharsis, the matter of the catharsis,\nand the nature of catharsis. To illustrate what is\nmeant: on a naïve understanding of catharsis—which may\nbe correct despite its naïveté—the audience\n(the subject) undergoes catharsis by having the emotions (the\nmatter) of pity and fear it experiences purged (the\nnature). By varying just these three possibilities, scholars have\nproduced a variety of interpretations—that it is the actors or\neven the plot of the tragedy which are the subjects of catharsis, that\nthe purification is cognitive or structural rather than emotional, and\nthat catharsis is purification rather than purgation. On this\nlast contrast, just as we might purify blood by filtering it, rather\nthan purging the body of blood by letting it, so we might refine our\nemotions, by cleansing them of their more unhealthy elements, rather\nthan ridding ourselves of the emotions by purging them\naltogether. The difference is considerable, since on one view the\nemotions are regarded as in themselves destructive and so to be purged,\nwhile on the other, the emotions may be perfectly healthy, even though,\nlike other psychological states, they may be improved by\nrefinement. The immediate context of the Poetics does\nnot by itself settle these disputes conclusively. ","\n\n \nAristotle says comparatively more about the second main concept of the\nPoetics, imitation (mimêsis). Although\nless controversial than catharsis, Aristotle’s conception of\nmimêsis has also been\n debated.[27] \n Aristotle thinks that\nimitation is a deeply ingrained human proclivity. Like political\nassociation, he contends, mimêsis is\nnatural. We engage in imitation from an early age,\nalready in language learning by aping competent speakers as we learn,\nand then also later, in the acquisition of character by treating others\nas role models. In both these ways, we imitate because we learn\nand grow by imitation, and for humans, learning is both natural and a\ndelight (Poet. 1148b4–24). This same tendency, in\nmore sophisticated and complex ways, leads us into the practice of\ndrama. As we engage in more advanced forms of\nmimêsis, imitation gives way to representation\nand depiction, where we need not be regarded as attempting to\ncopy anyone or anything in any narrow sense of the term. \nFor tragedy does not set out merely to copy what is the case, but\nrather, as we have seen in Aristotle’s differentiation of tragedy\nfrom history, to speak of what might be, to engage universal themes in\na philosophical manner, and to enlighten an audience by their\ndepiction. So, although mimêsis is at root simple\nimitation, as it comes to serve the goals of tragedy, it grows more\nsophisticated and powerful, especially in the hands of those poets able\nto deploy it to good effect. "],"section_title":"13. Rhetoric and the Arts","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\n \nAristotle’s influence is difficult to overestimate. After\nhis death, his school, the Lyceum, carried on for some period of time,\nthough precisely how long is unclear. In the century immediately\nafter his death, Aristotle’s works seem to have fallen out of\ncirculation; they reappear in the first century B.C.E., after which time\nthey began to be disseminated, at first narrowly, but then much more\nbroadly. They eventually came to form the backbone of some seven\ncenturies of philosophy, in the form of the\n commentary tradition,\n much of it original philosophy carried on in\na broadly Aristotelian framework. They also played a very\nsignificant, if subordinate role, in the Neoplatonic philosophy of\n Plotinus\n and\n Porphyry. \nThereafter, from the sixth through the twelfth centuries, although the\nbulk of Aristotle’s writings were lost to the West, they received\nextensive consideration in\n Byzantine Philosophy,\n and in Arabic Philosophy, where Aristotle was so\nprominent that be became known simply as The First Teacher (see\nthe entry on the\n influence of Arabic and Islamic philosophy on the Latin West).\n In this tradition, the notably rigorous and illuminating commentaries of\nAvicenna and Averroes interpreted and developed Aristotle’s views\nin striking ways. These commentaries in turn proved exceedingly\ninfluential in the earliest reception of the Aristotelian corpus into\nthe Latin West in the twelfth century.","\n \nAmong Aristotle’s greatest exponents during the early period of\nhis reintroduction to the West,\n Albertus Magnus,\n and above all his student\n Thomas Aquinas,\n sought to reconcile Aristotle’s philosophy with Christian\nthought. Some Aristotelians disdain Aquinas as bastardizing Aristotle,\nwhile some Christians disown Aquinas as pandering to pagan\nphilosophy. Many others in both camps take a much more positive view,\nseeing Thomism as a brilliant synthesis of two towering traditions;\narguably, the incisive commentaries written by Aquinas towards the end\nof his life aim not so much at synthesis as straightforward exegesis\nand exposition, and in these respects they have few equals in any\nperiod of philosophy. Partly due to the attention of Aquinas, but for\nmany other reasons as well, Aristotelian philosophy set the framework\nfor the Christian philosophy of the twelfth through the sixteenth\ncenturies, though, of course, that rich period contains a broad range\nof philosophical activity, some more and some less in sympathy with\nAristotelian themes. To see the extent of Aristotle’s influence, however,\nit is necessary only to recall that the two concepts forming the\nso-called\n binarium famosissimum\n (“the most famous pair”) of that\nperiod, namely universal hylomorphism and the doctrine of the plurality\nof forms, found their first formulations in Aristotle’s\ntexts.","\n\n \nInterest in Aristotle continued unabated throughout the renaissance in\nthe form of\n Renaissance Aristotelianism.\n The dominant figures of this period overlap\nwith the last flowerings of Medieval Aristotelian Scholasticism, which\nreached a rich and highly influential close in the figure of\nSuárez, whose life in turn overlaps with Descartes. From\nthe end of late Scholasticism, the study of Aristotle has undergone\nvarious periods of relative neglect and intense interest, but has been\ncarried forward unabated down to the present day. ","\n\nToday, philosophers of various stripes continue to look to Aristotle\nfor guidance and inspiration in many different areas, ranging from the\nphilosophy of mind to theories of the infinite, though perhaps\nAristotle’s influence is seen most overtly and avowedly in the\nresurgence of\n virtue ethics\n which began in the last half of the twentieth century. \nIt seems safe at this stage to predict that Aristotle’s stature\nis unlikely to diminish anytime in the foreseeable future. If it is any\nindication of the direction of things to come, a quick search of the\npresent Encyclopedia turns up more citations to ‘Aristotle’ and\n‘Aristotelianism’ than to any other philosopher or\nphilosophical movement. Only Plato comes close. "],"section_title":"14. Aristotle’s Legacy","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\n \\nBorn in 384 B.C.E. in the Macedonian region of northeastern Greece in\\nthe small city of Stagira (whence the moniker ‘the\\nStagirite’, which one still occasionally encounters in\\nAristotelian scholarship), Aristotle was sent to Athens at about the\\nage of seventeen to study in Plato’s Academy, then a pre-eminent\\nplace of learning in the Greek world. Once in Athens, Aristotle\\nremained associated with the Academy until Plato’s death in 347,\\nat which time he left for Assos, in Asia Minor, on the northwest coast\\nof present-day Turkey. There he continued the philosophical activity\\nhe had begun in the Academy, but in all likelihood also began to\\nexpand his researches into marine biology. He remained at Assos for\\napproximately three years, when, evidently upon the death of his host\\nHermeias, a friend and former Academic who had been the ruler of\\nAssos, Aristotle moved to the nearby coastal island of Lesbos. There\\nhe continued his philosophical and empirical researches for an\\nadditional two years, working in conjunction with Theophrastus, a\\nnative of Lesbos who was also reported in antiquity to have been\\nassociated with Plato’s Academy. While in Lesbos, Aristotle\\nmarried Pythias, the niece of Hermeias, with whom he had a daughter,\\nalso named Pythias.\",\n \"\\n\\nIn 343, upon the request of Philip, the king of Macedon, Aristotle\\nleft Lesbos for Pella, the Macedonian capital, in order to tutor the\\nking’s thirteen-year-old son, Alexander—the boy who was\\neventually to become Alexander the Great. Although speculation\\nconcerning Aristotle’s influence upon the developing Alexander has\\nproven irresistible to historians, in fact little concrete is known\\nabout their interaction. On the balance, it seems reasonable to\\nconclude that some tuition took place, but that it lasted only two or\\nthree years, when Alexander was aged from thirteen to fifteen. By\\nfifteen, Alexander was apparently already serving as a deputy military\\ncommander for his father, a circumstance undermining, if\\ninconclusively, the judgment of those historians who conjecture a\\nlonger period of tuition. Be that as it may, some suppose that their\\nassociation lasted as long as eight years.\",\n \"\\n\\nIt is difficult to rule out that possibility decisively, since little\\nis known about the period of Aristotle’s life from\\n341–335. He evidently remained a further five years in Stagira\\nor Macedon before returning to Athens for the second and final time,\\nin 335. In Athens, Aristotle set up his own school in a public\\nexercise area dedicated to the god Apollo Lykeios, whence its name,\\nthe Lyceum. Those affiliated with Aristotle’s school\\nlater came to be called Peripatetics, probably because of the\\nexistence of an ambulatory (peripatos) on the school’s\\nproperty adjacent to the exercise ground. Members of the Lyceum\\nconducted research into a wide range of subjects, all of which were of\\ninterest to Aristotle himself: botany, biology, logic, music,\\nmathematics, astronomy, medicine, cosmology, physics, the history of\\nphilosophy, metaphysics, psychology, ethics, theology, rhetoric,\\npolitical history, government and political theory, and the arts. In\\nall these areas, the Lyceum collected manuscripts, thereby, according\\nto some ancient accounts, assembling the first great library of\\nantiquity. \",\n \"\\n\\nDuring this period, Aristotle’s wife, Pythias, died and he\\ndeveloped a new relationship with Herpyllis, perhaps like him a native\\nof Stagira, though her origins are disputed, as is the question of her\\nexact relationship to Aristotle. Some suppose that she was merely his\\nslave; others infer from the provisions of Aristotle’s will that\\nshe was a freed woman and likely his wife at the time of his\\ndeath. In any event, they had children together, including a son,\\nNicomachus, named for Aristotle’s father and after whom his\\nNicomachean Ethics is presumably named.\",\n \"\\n\\nAfter thirteen years in Athens, Aristotle once again found cause to\\nretire from the city, in 323. Probably his departure was\\noccasioned by a resurgence of the always-simmering anti-Macedonian\\nsentiment in Athens, which was free to come to the boil after Alexander\\nsuccumbed to disease in Babylon during that same year. Because of\\nhis connections to Macedon, Aristotle reasonably feared for his safety\\nand left Athens, remarking, as an oft-repeated ancient tale would tell\\nit, that he saw no reason to permit Athens to sin twice against\\nphilosophy. He withdrew directly to Chalcis, on Euboea, an island\\noff the Attic coast, and died there of natural causes the following\\nyear, in\\n 322.[3]\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Aristotle’s Life\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n \\nAristotle’s writings tend to present formidable difficulties to\\nhis novice readers. To begin, he makes heavy use of unexplained\\ntechnical terminology, and his sentence structure can at times prove\\nfrustrating. Further, on occasion a chapter or even a full\\ntreatise coming down to us under his name appears haphazardly\\norganized, if organized at all; indeed, in several cases, scholars\\ndispute whether a continuous treatise currently arranged under a single\\ntitle was ever intended by Aristotle to be published in its present\\nform or was rather stitched together by some later editor employing\\nwhatever principles of organization he deemed\\n suitable.[4] \\n This helps explain why\\nstudents who turn to Aristotle after first being introduced to the\\nsupple and mellifluous prose on display in Plato’s dialogues\\noften find the experience frustrating. Aristotle’s prose\\nrequires some acclimatization.\",\n \"\\n \\nAll the more puzzling, then, is Cicero’s observation that if\\nPlato’s prose was silver, Aristotle’s was a flowing river\\nof gold (Ac. Pr. 38.119, cf. Top. 1.3, De\\nor. 1.2.49). Cicero was arguably the greatest prose stylist of\\nLatin and was also without question an accomplished and fair-minded\\ncritic of the prose styles of others writing in both Latin and\\nGreek. We must assume, then, that Cicero had before him works of\\nAristotle other than those we possess. In fact, we know that\\nAristotle wrote dialogues, presumably while still in the Academy, and\\nin their few surviving remnants we are afforded a glimpse of the style\\nCicero describes. In most of what we possess, unfortunately, we\\nfind work of a much less polished character. Rather,\\nAristotle’s extant works read like what they very probably are:\\nlecture notes, drafts first written and then reworked, ongoing records\\nof continuing investigations, and, generally speaking, in-house\\ncompilations intended not for a general audience but for an inner\\ncircle of auditors. These are to be contrasted with the\\n“exoteric” writings Aristotle sometimes mentions, his more\\ngraceful compositions intended for a wider audience (Pol.\\n1278b30; EE 1217b22, 1218b34). Unfortunately, then, we\\nare left for the most part, though certainly not entirely, with\\nunfinished works in progress rather than with finished and polished\\nproductions. Still, many of those who persist with Aristotle come\\nto appreciate the unembellished directness of his style.\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nMore importantly, the unvarnished condition of Aristotle’s\\nsurviving treatises does not hamper our ability to come to grips with their\\nphilosophical content. His thirty-one surviving works (that is,\\nthose contained in the “Corpus Aristotelicum” of our\\nmedieval manuscripts that are judged to be authentic) all contain\\nrecognizably Aristotelian doctrine; and most of these contain theses\\nwhose basic purport is clear, even where matters of detail and nuance\\nare subject to exegetical controversy. \",\n \"\\n\\n \\nThese works may be categorized in terms of the intuitive\\norganizational principles preferred by Aristotle. He refers to the\\nbranches of learning as “sciences”\\n(epistêmai), best regarded as organized bodies of\\nlearning completed for presentation rather than as ongoing records of\\nempirical researches. Moreover, again in his terminology, natural\\nsciences such as physics are but one branch of theoretical\\nscience, which comprises both empirical and non-empirical\\npursuits. He distinguishes theoretical science from more practically\\noriented studies, some of which concern human conduct and others of\\nwhich focus on the productive crafts. Thus, the Aristotelian sciences\\ndivide into three: (i) theoretical, (ii) practical, and (iii)\\nproductive. The principles of division are straightforward:\\ntheoretical science seeks knowledge for its own sake; practical\\nscience concerns conduct and goodness in action, both individual and\\nsocietal; and productive science aims at the creation of beautiful or\\nuseful objects (Top. 145a15–16;\\nPhys. 192b8–12; DC 298a27–32,\\nDA 403a27–b2; Met. 1025b25, 1026a18–19,\\n1064a16–19, b1–3; EN 1139a26–28,\\n1141b29–32).\",\n \"\\n\\n(i) The theoretical sciences include prominently what\\nAristotle calls first philosophy, or metaphysics as we now\\ncall it, but also mathematics, and physics, or\\nnatural philosophy. Physics studies the natural universe as a\\nwhole, and tends in Aristotle’s hands to concentrate on\\nconceptual puzzles pertaining to nature rather than on empirical research;\\nbut it reaches further, so that it includes also a theory of causal\\nexplanation and finally even a proof of an unmoved mover thought to be\\nthe first and final cause of all motion. Many of the puzzles of primary\\nconcern to Aristotle have proven perennially attractive to\\nphilosophers, mathematicians, and theoretically inclined natural\\nscientists. They include, as a small sample, Zeno’s\\nparadoxes of motion, puzzles about time, the nature of place, and\\ndifficulties encountered in thought about the infinite. \",\n \"\\n\\nNatural philosophy also incorporates the special sciences, including\\nbiology, botany, and astronomical theory. Most contemporary\\ncritics think that Aristotle treats psychology as a sub-branch of\\nnatural philosophy, because he regards the soul (psuchê)\\nas the basic principle of life, including all animal and plant\\nlife. In fact, however, the evidence for this conclusion is\\ninconclusive at best. It is instructive to note that earlier periods of\\nAristotelian scholarship thought this controversial, so that, for\\ninstance, even something as innocuous-sounding as the question of the\\nproper home of psychology in Aristotle’s division of the sciences\\nignited a multi-decade debate in the\\n Renaissance.[5] \",\n \"\\n\\n(ii) Practical sciences are less contentious, at least as\\nregards their range. These deal with conduct and action, both\\nindividual and societal. Practical science thus contrasts with\\ntheoretical science, which seeks knowledge for its own sake, and, less\\nobviously, with the productive sciences, which deal with the creation\\nof products external to sciences themselves. Both politics and\\nethics fall under this branch.\",\n \"\\n\\n(iii) Finally, then, the productive sciences are mainly\\ncrafts aimed at the production of artefacts, or of human productions\\nmore broadly construed. The productive sciences include, among\\nothers, ship-building, agriculture, and medicine, but also the arts of\\nmusic, theatre, and dance. Another form of productive science is\\nrhetoric, which treats the principles of speech-making appropriate to\\nvarious forensic and persuasive settings, including centrally political\\nassemblies.\",\n \"\\n\\nSignificantly, Aristotle’s tri-fold division of the sciences\\nmakes no mention of logic. Although he did not use the word\\n‘logic’ in our sense of the term, Aristotle in fact\\ndeveloped the first formalized system of logic and valid\\ninference. In Aristotle’s framework—although he is\\nnowhere explicit about this—logic belongs to no one science, but\\nrather formulates the principles of correct argumentation suitable to\\nall areas of inquiry in common. It systematizes the principles\\nlicensing acceptable inference, and helps to highlight at an abstract\\nlevel seductive patterns of incorrect inference to be avoided by anyone\\nwith a primary interest in truth. So, alongside his more\\ntechnical work in logic and logical theory, Aristotle investigates\\ninformal styles of argumentation and seeks to expose common patterns of\\nfallacious reasoning.\",\n \"\\n\\nAristotle’s investigations into logic and the forms of\\nargumentation make up part of the group of works coming down to us from\\nthe Middle Ages under the heading the Organon\\n(organon = tool in Greek). Although not so\\ncharacterized in these terms by Aristotle, the name is apt, so long as\\nit is borne in mind that intellectual inquiry requires a broad range of\\ntools. Thus, in addition to logic and argumentation (treated\\nprimarily in the Prior Analytics and Topics), the\\nworks included in the Organon deal with category theory, the\\ndoctrine of propositions and terms, the structure of scientific theory,\\nand to some extent the basic principles of epistemology.\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nWhen we slot Aristotle’s most important surviving authentic works\\ninto this scheme, we end up with the following basic\\ndivisions of his major writings:\",\n \"\\n\\nThe titles in this list are those in most common use today in\\nEnglish-language scholarship, followed by standard abbreviations in\\nparentheses. For no discernible reason, Latin titles are\\ncustomarily employed in some cases, English in others. Where\\nLatin titles are in general use, English equivalents are given in\\nsquare brackets.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. The Aristotelian Corpus: Character and Primary Divisions\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\n \\nAristotle’s basic approach to philosophy is best grasped initially by\\nway of contrast. Whereas Descartes seeks to place philosophy and\\nscience on firm foundations by subjecting all knowledge claims to a\\nsearing methodological doubt, Aristotle begins with the conviction\\nthat our perceptual and cognitive faculties are basically dependable,\\nthat they for the most part put us into direct contact with the\\nfeatures and divisions of our world, and that we need not dally with\\nsceptical postures before engaging in substantive philosophy.\\nAccordingly, he proceeds in all areas of inquiry in the manner of a\\nmodern-day natural scientist, who takes it for granted that progress\\nfollows the assiduous application of a well-trained mind and so, when\\npresented with a problem, simply goes to work. When he goes to work,\\nAristotle begins by considering how the world appears, reflecting on\\nthe puzzles those appearances throw up, and reviewing what has been\\nsaid about those puzzles to date. These methods comprise his twin\\nappeals to phainomena and the endoxic method. \",\n \"\\n\\n \\nThese two methods reflect in different ways Aristotle’s deepest\\nmotivations for doing philosophy in the first place. “Human\\nbeings began to do philosophy,” he says, “even as they do\\nnow, because of wonder, at first because they wondered about the\\nstrange things right in front of them, and then later, advancing\\nlittle by little, because they came to find greater things\\npuzzling” (Met. 982b12). Human beings philosophize,\\naccording to Aristotle, because they find aspects of their experience\\npuzzling. The sorts of puzzles we encounter in thinking about the\\nuniverse and our place within it—aporiai, in\\nAristotle’s terminology—tax our understanding and induce us to\\nphilosophize.\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nAccording to Aristotle, it behooves us to begin philosophizing by\\nlaying out the phainomena, the appearances, or, more\\nfully, things appearing to be the case, and then also\\ncollecting the endoxa, the credible opinions handed down\\nregarding matters we find puzzling. As a typical example, in a\\npassage of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle confronts a\\npuzzle of human conduct, the fact that we are apparently sometimes\\nakratic or weak-willed. When introducing this puzzle, Aristotle pauses\\nto reflect upon a precept governing his approach to many areas of inquiry:\",\n \"\\n\\nAs in other cases, we must set out the appearances\\n(phainomena) and run through all the puzzles regarding\\nthem. In this way we must prove the credible opinions\\n(endoxa) about these sorts of experiences—ideally, all\\nthe credible opinions, but if not all, then most of them, those which\\nare the most important. For if the objections are answered and\\nthe credible opinions remain, we shall have an adequate proof.\\n(EN 1145b2–7)\",\n \"\\n\\nScholars dispute concerning the degree to which Aristotle regards\\nhimself as beholden to the credible opinions (endoxa) he\\nrecounts and the basic appearances (phainomena) to which\\n he\\n appeals.[6] \\n Of course, since the endoxa will sometimes conflict with one\\nanother, often precisely because the phainomena generate\\naporiai, or puzzles, it is not always possible to respect them\\nin their entirety. So, as a group they must be re-interpreted and\\nsystematized, and, where that does not suffice, some must be rejected\\noutright. It is in any case abundantly clear that Aristotle is\\nwilling to abandon some or all of the endoxa and\\nphainomena whenever science or philosophy demands that he do\\nso (Met. 1073b36, 1074b6; PA 644b5; EN\\n1145b2–30).\",\n \"\\n\\nStill, his attitude towards phainomena does betray a\\npreference to conserve as many appearances as is practicable in a given\\ndomain—not because the appearances are unassailably accurate, but\\nrather because, as he supposes, appearances tend to track the\\ntruth. We are outfitted with sense organs and powers of\\nmind so structured as to put us into contact with the world and\\nthus to provide us with data regarding its basic constituents and\\ndivisions. While our faculties are not infallible, neither are\\nthey systematically deceptive or misdirecting. Since\\nphilosophy’s aim is truth and much of what appears to us proves\\nupon analysis to be correct, phainomena provide both an\\nimpetus to philosophize and a check on some of its more extravagant\\nimpulses. \",\n \"\\n\\nOf course, it is not always clear what constitutes a\\nphainomenon; still less is it clear which phainomenon\\nis to be respected in the face of bona fide\\ndisagreement. This is in part why Aristotle endorses his second\\nand related methodological precept, that we ought to begin\\nphilosophical discussions by collecting the most stable and entrenched\\nopinions regarding the topic of inquiry handed down to us by our\\npredecessors. Aristotle’s term for these privileged views,\\nendoxa, is variously rendered as ‘reputable\\nopinions’, ‘credible opinions’, ‘entrenched\\nbeliefs’, ‘credible beliefs’, or ‘common\\nbeliefs’. Each of these translations captures at least part of\\nwhat Aristotle intends with this word, but it is important to\\nappreciate that it is a fairly technical term for\\nhim. An endoxon is the sort of opinion we spontaneously\\nregard as reputable or worthy of respect, even if upon reflection we\\nmay come to question its veracity. (Aristotle appropriates this term\\nfrom ordinary Greek, in which an endoxos is a notable or\\nhonourable man, a man of high repute whom we would spontaneously\\nrespect—though we might, of course, upon closer inspection, find\\ncause to criticize him.) As he explains his use of the\\nterm, endoxa are widely shared opinions, often ultimately\\nissuing from those we esteem most: ‘Endoxa are those\\nopinions accepted by everyone, or by the majority, or by the\\nwise—and among the wise, by all or most of them, or by those who\\nare the most notable and having the highest reputation’\\n(Top. 100b21–23). Endoxa play a special role\\nin Aristotelian philosophy in part because they form a significant\\nsub-class of phainomena (EN 1154b3–8): because they\\nare the privileged opinions we find ourselves unreflectively endorsing\\nand reaffirming after some reflection, they themselves come to qualify\\nas appearances to be preserved where possible.\",\n \"\\n\\nFor this reason, Aristotle’s method of beginning with the\\nendoxa is more than a pious platitude to the effect that it\\nbehooves us to mind our superiors. He does think this, as far as\\nit goes, but he also maintains, more instructively, that we can be led\\nastray by the terms within which philosophical problems are bequeathed\\nto us. Very often, the puzzles confronting us were given crisp\\nformulations by earlier thinkers and we find them puzzling precisely\\nfor that reason. Equally often, however, if we reflect upon the\\nterms within which the puzzles are cast, we find a way forward; when a\\nformulation of a puzzle betrays an untenable structuring assumption, a\\nsolution naturally commends itself. This is why in more abstract\\ndomains of inquiry we are likely to find ourselves seeking guidance\\nfrom our predecessors even as we call into question their\\nways of articulating the problems we are confronting. \",\n \"\\n\\nAristotle applies his method of running through the\\nphainomena and collecting the endoxa widely, in\\nnearly every area of his philosophy. To take a typical\\nillustration, we find the method clearly deployed in his discussion of\\ntime in Physics iv 10–14. We begin with a\\nphainomenon: we feel sure that time exists\\nor at least that time passes. So much is, inescapably,\\nhow our world appears: we experience time as passing, as\\nunidirectional, as unrecoverable when lost. Yet when we move to\\noffer an account of what time might be, we find ourselves\\nflummoxed. For guidance, we turn to what has been said about time\\nby those who have reflected upon its nature. It emerges directly\\nthat both philosophers and natural scientists have raised problems\\nabout time. \",\n \"\\n\\nAs Aristotle sets them out, these problems take the form of puzzles,\\nor aporiai, regarding whether and if so how time exists\\n(Phys. 218a8–30). If we say that time is the totality of the\\npast, present and future, we immediately find someone objecting that\\ntime exists but that the past and future do not. According to the\\nobjector, only the present exists. If we retort then that time is\\nwhat did exist, what exists at present and\\nwhat will exist, then we notice first that our account is\\ninsufficient: after all, there are many things which did, do, or will\\nexist, but these are things that are in time and so not the\\nsame as time itself. We further see that our account already threatens\\ncircularity, since to say that something did or will\\nexist seems only to say that it existed at an earlier time or\\nwill come to exist at a later time. Then again we find\\nsomeone objecting to our account that even the notion of the\\npresent is troubling. After all, either the present is\\nconstantly changing or it remains forever the same. If it remains\\nforever the same, then the current present is the same as the present\\nof 10,000 years ago; yet that is absurd. If it is constantly changing,\\nthen no two presents are the same, in which case a past present must\\nhave come into and out of existence before the present present. When?\\nEither it went out of existence even as it came into existence, which\\nseems odd to say the least, or it went out of existence at some\\ninstant after it came into existence, in which case, again, two\\npresents must have existed at the same instant. Now, Aristotle does\\nnot endorse the claims set out in stating these sorts\\nof aporiai; in fact, very often he cannot, because\\nsome aporiai qualify as aporiai just because they\\ncomprise individually plausible arguments generating incompatible\\nconclusions. They thus serve as springboards to deeper, more\\ndemanding analysis. \",\n \"\\n\\nIn general, then, in setting such aporiai, Aristotle does not\\nmean to endorse any given endoxon on one side or the\\nother. Rather, he thinks that such considerations present credible\\npuzzles, reflection upon which may steer us towards a defensible\\nunderstanding of the nature of time. In this way, aporiai\\nbring into sharp relief the issues requiring attention if progress is\\nto be made. Thus, by reflecting upon the aporiai regarding\\ntime, we are led immediately to think about duration and divisibility,\\nabout\\nquanta and continua, and about a variety of\\ncategorial questions. That is, if time exists, then what sort of\\nthing is it? Is it the sort of thing which exists absolutely and\\nindependently? Or is it rather the sort of thing which, like a\\nsurface, depends upon other things for its existence? When we\\nbegin to address these sorts of questions, we also begin to ascertain\\nthe sorts of assumptions at play in the endoxa coming down to\\nus regarding the nature of time. Consequently, when we\\ncollect the endoxa and survey them critically, we learn\\nsomething about our quarry, in this case about the nature of\\ntime—and crucially also something about the constellation of\\nconcepts which must be refined if we are to make genuine philosophical\\nprogress with respect to it. What holds in the case of time, Aristotle implies, holds generally. This is why he\\ncharacteristically begins a philosophical inquiry by presenting the\\nphainomena, collecting the endoxa, and running\\nthrough the puzzles to which they give rise. \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Phainomena and the Endoxic Method\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\n \\nAristotle’s reliance on endoxa takes on a still greater\\nsignificance given the role such opinions play in dialectic,\\nwhich he regards as an important form of non-scientific\\nreasoning. Dialectic, like science\\n(epistêmê), trades in logical inference; but\\nscience requires premises of a sort beyond the scope of ordinary\\ndialectical reasoning. Whereas science relies upon premises which\\nare necessary and known to be so, a dialectical discussion can proceed\\nby relying on endoxa, and so can claim only to be as secure as\\nthe endoxa upon which it relies. This is not a problem,\\nsuggests Aristotle, since we often reason fruitfully and well in\\ncircumstances where we cannot claim to have attained scientific\\nunderstanding. Minimally, however, all\\nreasoning—whether scientific or dialectical—must respect\\nthe canons of logic and inference. \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Logic, Science, and Dialectic\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\n \\nAmong the great achievements to which Aristotle can lay claim is the\\nfirst systematic treatment of the principles of correct reasoning, the\\nfirst logic. Although today we recognize many forms of logic\\nbeyond Aristotle’s, it remains true that he not only developed a\\ntheory of deduction, now called syllogistic, but added to it a modal\\nsyllogistic and went a long way towards proving some meta-theorems\\npertinent to these systems. Of course, philosophers before\\nAristotle reasoned well or reasoned poorly, and the competent among them\\nhad a secure working grasp of the principles of validity and\\nsoundness in argumentation. No-one before Aristotle, however, developed a\\nsystematic treatment of the principles governing correct inference; and\\nno-one before him attempted to codify the formal and syntactic\\nprinciples at play in such inference. Aristotle somewhat\\nuncharacteristically draws attention to this fact at the end of a\\ndiscussion of logic inference and fallacy:\",\n \"\\n\\nOnce you have surveyed our work, if it seems to you that our system\\nhas developed adequately in comparison with other treatments arising\\nfrom the tradition to date—bearing in mind how things were at the\\nbeginning of our inquiry—it falls to you, our students, to be\\nindulgent with respect to any omissions in our system, and to feel a\\ngreat debt of gratitude for the discoveries it contains (Soph.\\nRef. 184b2–8).\",\n \"\\n\\nEven if we now regard it as commonplace that his logic is but a\\nfraction of the logic we know and use, Aristotle’s accomplishment\\nwas so encompassing that no less a figure than Kant, writing over two\\nmillennia after the appearance of Aristotle’s treatises on logic,\\nfound it easy to offer an appropriately laudatory judgment: ‘That\\nfrom the earliest times logic has traveled a secure course can be seen\\nfrom the fact that since the time of Aristotle it has not had to go a\\nsingle step backwards…What is further remarkable about logic is\\nthat until now it has also been unable to take a single step forward,\\nand therefore seems to all appearance to be finished and\\ncomplete’ (Critique of Pure Reason B vii).\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nIn Aristotle’s logic, the basic ingredients of reasoning are\\ngiven in terms of inclusion and exclusion relations,\\nof the sort graphically captured many years later by the device of Venn\\ndiagrams. He begins with the notion of a patently correct sort of\\nargument, one whose evident and unassailable acceptability induces\\nAristotle to refer to is as a ‘perfect deduction’\\n(APr. 24b22–25). Generally, a deduction\\n(sullogismon), according to Aristotle, is a valid or\\nacceptable argument. More exactly, a deduction is ‘an\\nargument in which when certain things are laid down something else\\nfollows of necessity in virtue of their being so’ (APr.\\n24b18–20). His view of deductions is, then, akin to a notion of\\nvalidity, though there are some minor differences. For\\nexample, Aristotle maintains that irrelevant premises will ruin a\\ndeduction, whereas validity is indifferent to irrelevance or indeed to\\nthe addition of premises of any kind to an already valid\\nargument. Moreover, Aristotle insists that deductions make\\nprogress, whereas every inference from p to p is\\ntrivially valid. Still, Aristotle’s general conception of\\ndeduction is sufficiently close to validity that we may pass into\\nspeaking in terms of valid structures when characterizing his\\nsyllogistic. In general, he contends that a deduction is the sort\\nof argument whose structure guarantees its validity,\\nirrespective of the truth or falsity of its premises. This holds\\nintuitively for the following structure:\",\n \"\\n\\nAccordingly, anything taking this form will be a deduction in\\nAristotle’s sense. Let the As,\\nBs, and Cs be anything at all, and\\nif indeed the As are Bs, and\\nthe Bs Cs, then of necessity\\nthe As will be Cs. This\\nparticular deduction is perfect because its validity needs no\\nproof, and perhaps because it admits of no proof either: any proof\\nwould seem to rely ultimately upon the intuitive validity of this sort\\nof argument. \",\n \"\\n\\nAristotle seeks to exploit the intuitive validity of perfect\\ndeductions in a surprisingly bold way, given the infancy of his\\nsubject: he thinks he can establish principles of transformation in\\nterms of which every deduction (or, more precisely, every\\nnon-modal deduction) can be translated into a perfect deduction. He\\ncontends that by using such transformations we can place all\\ndeduction on a firm footing.\",\n \"\\n\\nIf we focus on just the simplest kinds of deduction,\\nAristotle’s procedure comes quickly into view. The\\nperfect deduction already presented is an instance of universal\\naffirmation: all As are Bs; all\\nBs Cs; and so, all\\nAs are Cs. Now, contends\\nAristotle, it is possible to run through all combinations of simple\\npremises and display their basic inferential structures and then to\\nrelate them back to this and similarly perfect deductions. Thus,\\nif we vary the quantity of a proposition’s subject\\n(universal all versus indeterminate some) along with\\nthe quality or kind of the predication (positive\\nversus negative), we arrive at all the possible combinations\\nof the most basic kind of arguments.\",\n \"\\n\\nIt turns out that some of these arguments are deductions, or valid\\nsyllogisms, and some are not. Those which are not admit of\\ncounterexamples, whereas those which are, of course, do not. There are\\ncounterexamples to those, for instance, suffering from what came to be\\ncalled undistributed middle terms, e.g.: all As\\nare Bs; some\\nBs are Cs; so, all\\nAs are Cs (all university students are literate;\\nsome literate people read poetry; so, all university students read\\npoetry). There is no counterexample to the perfect deduction in the\\nform of a universal affirmation: if all\\nAs are Bs, and all\\nBs Cs, then there is no escaping the fact that\\nall As are Cs. So, if all the kinds of deductions\\npossible can be reduced to the intuitively valid sorts, then the\\nvalidity of all can be vouchsafed. \",\n \"\\n\\nTo effect this sort of reduction, Aristotle relies upon a series of\\nmeta-theorems, some of which he proves and others of which he merely\\nreports (though it turns out that they do all indeed admit of\\nproofs). His principles are meta-theorems in the sense\\nthat no argument can run afoul of them and still qualify as a genuine\\ndeduction. They include such theorems as: (i) no deduction\\ncontains two negative premises; (ii) a deduction with a negative\\nconclusion must have a negative premise; (iii) a deduction with a\\nuniversal conclusion requires two universal premises; and (iv) a\\ndeduction with a negative conclusion requires exactly one negative\\npremise. He does, in fact, offer proofs for the most significant of his\\nmeta-theorems, so that we can be assured that all deductions in his\\nsystem are valid, even when their validity is difficult to grasp\\nimmediately.\",\n \"\\n\\nIn developing and proving these meta-theorems of logic, Aristotle\\ncharts territory left unexplored before him and unimproved for many\\ncenturies after his death. \",\n \"\\n\\nFor a fuller account of Aristotle’s achievements in logic,\\n see the entry on \\n Aristotle’s Logic.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.1 Logic\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n \\nAristotle approaches the study of logic not as an end in itself, but\\nwith a view to its role in human inquiry and explanation. Logic is a\\ntool, he thinks, one making an important but incomplete contribution\\nto science and dialectic. Its contribution is incomplete because\\nscience (epistêmê) employs arguments which are\\nmore than mere deductions. A deduction is minimally a valid syllogism,\\nand certainly science must employ arguments passing this\\nthreshold. Still, science needs more: a science proceeds\\nby organizing the data in its domain into a series of\\narguments which, beyond being deductions, feature premises which are\\nnecessary and, as Aristotle says, “better known by\\nnature”, or “more intelligible by nature”\\n(gnôrimôteron phusei)\\n(APo. 71b33–72a25; Top. 141b3–14;\\nPhys. 184a16–23). By this he means that they should\\nreveal the genuine, mind-independent natures of things. \",\n \"\\n\\nHe further insists that science\\n(epistêmê)—a comparatively broad term in\\nhis usage, since it extends to fields of inquiry like mathematics and\\nmetaphysics no less than the empirical sciences—not only reports\\nthe facts but also explains them by displaying their priority\\nrelations (APo. 78a22–28). That is, science explains what is\\nless well known by what is better known and more fundamental, and what\\nis explanatorily anemic by what is explanatorily fruitful. \",\n \"\\n\\nWe may, for instance, wish to know why trees lose their leaves in the\\nautumn. We may say, rightly, that this is due to the wind blowing\\nthrough them. Still, this is not a deep or general explanation, since\\nthe wind blows equally at other times of year without the same\\nresult. A deeper explanation—one unavailable to Aristotle but\\nillustrating his view nicely—is more general, and also more\\ncausal in character: trees shed their leaves because diminished\\nsunlight in the autumn inhibits the production of chlorophyll, which\\nis required for photosynthesis, and without photosynthesis trees go\\ndormant. Importantly, science should not only record these facts but\\nalso display them in their correct explanatory order. That is,\\nalthough a deciduous tree which fails to photosynthesize is also a\\ntree lacking in chlorophyll production, its failing to produce\\nchlorophyll explains its inability to photosynthesize and not the\\nother way around. This sort of asymmetry must be captured in\\nscientific explanation. Aristotle’s method of scientific exposition is\\ndesigned precisely to discharge this requirement.\",\n \"\\n\\nScience seeks to capture not only the causal priorities in nature,\\nbut also its deep, invariant patterns. Consequently, in addition\\nto being explanatorily basic, the first premise in a scientific\\ndeduction will be necessary. So, says Aristotle:\",\n \"\\n\\nWe think we understand a thing without qualification, and not in the\\nsophistic, accidental way, whenever we think we know the cause in\\nvirtue of which something is—that it is the cause of that very\\nthing—and also know that this cannot be otherwise. \\nClearly, knowledge (epistêmê) is something of this\\nsort. After all, both those with knowledge and those without it\\nsuppose that this is so—although only those with knowledge are\\nactually in this condition. Hence, whatever is known without\\nqualification cannot be otherwise. (APo 71b9–16; cf.\\nAPo 71b33–72a5; Top. 141b3–14, Phys.\\n184a10–23; Met. 1029b3–13) \",\n \"\\n\\nFor this reason, science requires more than mere deduction.\\nAltogether, then, the currency of science is demonstration\\n(apodeixis), where a demonstration is a deduction with\\npremises revealing the causal structures of the world, set forth so as\\nto capture what is necessary and to reveal what is better known and\\nmore intelligible by nature (APo\\n71b33–72a5, Phys. 184a16–23, EN 1095b2–4). \",\n \"\\n \\nAristotle’s approach to the appropriate form of scientific explanation\\ninvites reflection upon a troubling epistemological question: how does\\ndemonstration begin? If we are to lay out demonstrations such that the\\nless well known is inferred by means of deduction from the better\\nknown, then unless we reach rock-bottom, we will evidently be forced\\neither to continue ever backwards towards the increasingly better\\nknown, which seems implausibly endless, or lapse into some form of\\ncircularity, which seems undesirable. The alternative seems to be\\npermanent ignorance. Aristotle contends:\",\n \"\\n\\nSome people think that since knowledge obtained via demonstration\\nrequires the knowledge of primary things, there is no knowledge. \\nOthers think that there is knowledge and that all knowledge is\\ndemonstrable. Neither of these views is either true or\\nnecessary. The first group, those supposing that there is\\nno knowledge at all, contend that we are confronted with an infinite\\nregress. They contend that we cannot know posterior things\\nbecause of prior things if none of the prior things is primary. \\nHere what they contend is correct: it is indeed impossible to traverse\\nan infinite series. Yet, they maintain, if the regress comes to a\\nhalt, and there are first principles, they will be unknowable, since\\nsurely there will be no demonstration of first principles—given,\\nas they maintain, that only what is demonstrated can be known. \\nBut if it is not possible to know the primary things, then neither can\\nwe know without qualification or in any proper way the things derived\\nfrom them. Rather, we can know them instead only on the basis of\\na hypothesis, to wit, if the primary things obtain, then so\\ntoo do the things derived from them. The other group agrees that\\nknowledge results only from demonstration, but believes that nothing\\nstands in the way of demonstration, since they admit circular and\\nreciprocal demonstration as possible. (APo. 72b5–21)\",\n \"\\n\\nAristotle’s own preferred alternative is clear:\",\n \"\\n\\nWe contend that not all knowledge is demonstrative: knowledge of the\\nimmediate premises is indemonstrable. Indeed, the necessity here\\nis apparent; for if it is necessary to know the prior things, that is,\\nthose things from which the demonstration is derived, and if eventually\\nthe regress comes to a standstill, it is necessary that these immediate\\npremises be indemonstrable. (APo. 72b21–23)\",\n \"\\n\\nIn sum, if all knowledge requires demonstration, and all\\ndemonstration proceeds from what is more intelligible by nature to what\\nis less so, then either the process goes on indefinitely or it comes to\\na halt in undemonstrated first principles, which are known, and known\\nsecurely. Aristotle dismisses the only remaining possibility,\\nthat demonstration might be circular, rather curtly, with the remark\\nthat this amounts to ‘simply saying that something is the\\ncase if it is the case,’ by which device ‘it is easy to\\nprove anything’ (APo. 72b32–73a6).\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nAristotle’s own preferred alternative, that there are first\\nprinciples of the sciences graspable by those willing to engage in\\nassiduous study, has caused consternation in many of his readers.\\n In Posterior Analytics ii 19, he describes the\\nprocess by which knowers move from perception to memory, and from memory\\nto experience (empeiria)—which is a fairly technical\\nterm in this connection, reflecting the point at which a single\\nuniversal comes to take root in the mind—and finally from\\nexperience to a grasp of first principles. This final\\nintellectual state Aristotle characterizes as a kind of unmediated\\nintellectual apprehension (nous) of first principles\\n(APo. 100a10–b6).\",\n \"\\nScholars have understandably queried what seems a casually asserted\\npassage from the contingent, given in sense experience, to the\\nnecessary, as required for the first principles of science. Perhaps,\\nhowever, Aristotle simply envisages a kind of a posteriori\\nnecessity for the sciences, including the natural sciences. In any\\nevent, he thinks that we can and do have knowledge, so that somehow we\\nbegin in sense perception and build up to an understanding of the\\nnecessary and invariant features of the world. This is the knowledge\\nfeatured in genuine science (epistêmê). In\\nreflecting on the sort of progression Aristotle envisages, some\\ncommentators have charged him with an epistemological optimism\\nbordering on the naïve; others contend that it is rather the\\ncharge of naïveté which is itself naïve, betraying as\\nit does an unargued and untenable alignment of the necessary and\\nthe a\\n priori.[7]\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.2 Science\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\n \\nNot all rigorous reasoning qualifies as scientific. Indeed,\\nlittle of Aristotle’s extant writing conforms to the demands for\\nscientific presentation laid down in the Posterior\\nAnalytics. As he recognizes, we often find ourselves\\nreasoning from premises which have the status of endoxa,\\nopinions widely believed or endorsed by the wise, even though they are\\nnot known to be necessary. Still less often do we reason having\\nfirst secured the first principles of our domain of inquiry. So,\\nwe need some ‘method by which we will be able to reason\\ndeductively about any matter proposed to us on the basis of\\nendoxa, and to give an account of ourselves [when we are under\\nexamination by an interlocutor] without lapsing into\\ncontradiction’ (Top. 100a18–20). This method\\nhe characterizes as dialectic. \",\n \"\\n\\n \\nThe suggestion that we often use dialectic when engaged in\\nphilosophical exchange reflects Aristotle’s supposition that\\nthere are two sorts of dialectic: one negative, or destructive, and the\\nother positive, or constructive. In fact, in his work dedicated\\nto dialectic, the Topics, he identifies three roles for\\ndialectic in intellectual inquiry, the first of which is mainly\\npreparatory:\",\n \"\\n\\nDialectic is useful for three purposes: for training, for\\nconversational exchange, and for sciences of a philosophical\\nsort. That it is useful for training purposes is directly evident\\non the basis of these considerations: once we have a direction for our\\ninquiry we will more readily be able to engage a subject proposed to\\nus. It is useful for conversational exchange because once we have\\nenumerated the beliefs of the many, we shall engage them not on the\\nbasis of the convictions of others but on the basis of their own; and\\nwe shall re-orient them whenever they appear to have said something\\nincorrect to us. It is useful for philosophical sorts of sciences\\nbecause when we are able to run through the puzzles on both sides of an\\nissue we more readily perceive what is true and what is false. \\nFurther, it is useful for uncovering what is primary among the\\ncommitments of a science. For it is impossible to say anything\\nregarding the first principles of a science on the basis of the first\\nprinciples proper to the very science under discussion, since among all\\nthe commitments of a science, the first principles are the primary\\nones. This comes rather, necessarily, from discussion of the\\ncredible beliefs (endoxa) belonging to the science. This\\nis peculiar to dialectic, or is at least most proper to it. For\\nsince it is what cross-examines, dialectic contains the way to the\\nfirst principles of all inquiries. (Top. 101a26–b4)\",\n \"\\n\\nThe first two of the three forms of dialectic identified by Aristotle\\nare rather limited in scope. By contrast, the third is philosophically\\nsignificant.\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nIn its third guise, dialectic has a role to play in ‘science\\nconducted in a philosophical manner’ (pros tas kata\\nphilosphian epistêmas; Top. 101a27–28, 101a34),\\nwhere this sort of science includes what we actually find him pursuing\\nin his major philosophical treatises. In these contexts,\\ndialectic helps to sort the endoxa, relegating some to a\\ndisputed status while elevating others; it submits endoxa to\\ncross-examination in order to test their staying power; and, most\\nnotably, according to Aristotle, dialectic puts us on the road to first\\nprinciples (Top. 100a18–b4). If that is so, then\\ndialectic plays a significant role in the order of philosophical\\ndiscovery: we come to establish first principles in part by determining\\nwhich among our initial endoxa withstand sustained\\nscrutiny. Here, as elsewhere in his philosophy, Aristotle evinces\\na noteworthy confidence in the powers of human reason and\\ninvestigation.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.3 Dialectic\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n \\nHowever we arrive at secure principles in philosophy and science,\\nwhether by some process leading to a rational grasping of necessary\\ntruths, or by sustained dialectical investigation operating over\\njudiciously selected endoxa, it does turn out, according to\\nAristotle, that we can uncover and come to know genuinely necessary\\nfeatures of reality. Such features, suggests Aristotle, are those\\ncaptured in the essence-specifying definitions used in science (again\\nin the broad sense of epistêmê). \",\n \"\\n\\n \\nAristotle’s commitment to essentialism runs deep. He\\nrelies upon a host of loosely related locutions when discussing the\\nessences of things, and these give some clue to his general\\norientation. Among the locutions one finds rendered as\\nessence in contemporary translations of Aristotle into English\\nare: (i) to ti esti (the what it is); (ii) to einai\\n(being); (iii) ousia (being); (iv) hoper esti (precisely\\nwhat something is) and, most importantly, (v) to ti ên\\neinai (the what it was to be) (APo 83a7; Top.\\n141b35; Phys. 190a17, 201a18–21; Gen. et Corr. 319b4;\\nDA 424a25, 429b10; Met. 1003b24, 1006a32, 1006b13;\\nEN 1102a30, 1130a12–13). Among these, the last locution\\n(v) requires explication both because it is the most peculiar and\\nbecause it is Aristotle’s favored technical term for\\nessence. It is an abbreviated way of saying ‘that which it\\nwas for an instance of kind K to be an instance of kind\\nK,’ for instance ‘that which it was (all along)\\nfor a human being to be a human being’. In speaking this\\nway, Aristotle supposes that if we wish to know what a human being is,\\nwe cannot identify transient or non-universal features of that kind;\\nnor indeed can we identify even universal features which do not run\\nexplanatorily deep. Rather, as his preferred locution indicates,\\nhe is interested in what makes a human being human—and he\\nassumes, first, that there is some feature F which all and only humans\\nhave in common and, second, that F explains the other features which we\\nfind across the range of humans. \",\n \"\\n\\n \\nImportantly, this second feature of Aristotelian essentialism\\ndifferentiates his approach from the now more common modal approach,\\naccording to\\n which:[8]\",\n \"\\n\\nF is an essential property of\\nx =df if x loses F,\\nthen x ceases to exist.\\n\\n\",\n \"\\n\\nAristotle rejects this approach for several reasons, including most\\nnotably that he thinks that certain non-essential features satisfy the\\ndefinition. Thus, beyond the categorical and logical features\\n(everyone is such as to be either identical or not identical with the\\nnumber nine), Aristotle recognizes a category of properties which he\\ncalls idia (Cat. 3a21, 4a10; Top. 102a18–30,\\n134a5–135b6), now usually known by their Medieval Latin rendering\\npropria. Propria are non-essential properties which flow\\nfrom the essence of a kind, such that they are necessary to that kind\\neven without being essential. For instance, if we suppose that\\nbeing rational is essential to human beings, then it will\\nfollow that every human being is capable of grammar. \\nBeing capable of grammar is not the same property as being rational,\\nthough it follows from it. Aristotle assumes his readers will\\nappreciate that being rational asymmetrically explains\\nbeing capable of grammar, even though, necessarily, something\\nis rational if and only if it is also capable of grammar. Thus,\\nbecause it is explanatorily prior, being rational has a better\\nclaim to being the essence of human beings than does being capable\\nof grammar. Consequently, Aristotle’s\\nessentialism is more fine-grained than mere modal essentialism. \\nAristotelian essentialism holds:\",\n \"\\n\\nF is an essential property of x =df (i) if\\nx loses F, then x ceases to exist; and\\n(ii) F is in an objective sense an explanatorily basic\\nfeature of x.\\n\\n\",\n \"\\n\\n In sum, in Aristotle’s approach, what it is to be, for\\ninstance, a human being is just what it always has been and always will\\nbe, namely being rational. Accordingly, this is\\nthe feature to be captured in an essence-specifying account of human\\nbeings (APo 75a42–b2; Met. 103b1–2, 1041a25–32).\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nAristotle believes for a broad range of cases that kinds have essences\\ndiscoverable by diligent research. He in fact does not devote\\nmuch energy to arguing for this contention; still less is he inclined\\nto expend energy combating anti-realist challenges to essentialism,\\nperhaps in part because he is impressed by the deep regularities he\\nfinds, or thinks he finds, underwriting his results in biological\\n investigation.[9] \\n Still, he cannot be accused of profligacy regarding the prospects\\nof essentialism. \",\n \"\\n\\nOn the contrary, he denies essentialism in many cases where others\\nare prepared to embrace it. One finds this sort of denial\\nprominently, though not exclusively, in his criticism of Plato. \\nIndeed, it becomes a signature criticism of Plato and Platonists for\\nAristotle that many of their preferred examples of sameness and\\ninvariance in the world are actually cases of multivocity, or\\nhomonymy in his technical terminology. In the opening of the\\nCategories, Aristotle distinguishes between synonymy\\nand homonymy (later called univocity and\\nmultivocity). His preferred phrase for multivocity,\\nwhich is extremely common in his writings, is ‘being spoken\\nof in many ways’, or, more simply, ‘multiply meant’\\n(pollachôs legomenon). All these locutions have a\\nquasi-technical status for him. The least complex is\\nunivocity:\",\n \"\\n\\na and b are univocally F iff (i)\\na is F, (ii) b is F, and (iii) the\\naccounts of\\nF-ness in ‘a is F’ and\\n‘b is F’ are the same.\\n\\n\",\n \"\\n\\nThus, for instance, since the accounts of ‘human’ in\\n‘Socrates is human’ and ‘Plato is human’ will\\nbe the same, ‘human’ is univocal or synonymous in these\\napplications. (Note that Aristotle’s notion of the word ‘synonymy’ is\\nnot the same as the contemporary English usage where it applies to\\ndifferent words with the same meaning.) In cases of\\nunivocity, we expect single, non-disjunctive definitions which capture\\nand state the essence of the kinds in question. Let us allow once\\nmore for purposes of illustration that the essence-specifying\\ndefinition of human is rational animal. Then,\\nsince human means rational animal across the range of\\nits applications, there is some single essence to all members of the\\nkind.\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nBy contrast, when synonymy fails we have homonymy. According to\\nAristotle:\",\n \"\\n\\na and b are homonymously F iff (i)\\na is F, (ii) b is F, (iii) the\\naccounts of F-ness in ‘a is F’\\nand ‘b is F’ do not completely\\noverlap.\\n\\n\",\n \"\\n\\nTo take an easy example without philosophical significance,\\nbank is homonymous in ‘Socrates and Alcibiades had a\\npicnic on the bank’ and ‘Socrates and Alcibiades opened a\\njoint account at the bank.’ This case is illustrative, if\\nuninteresting, because the accounts of bank in these\\noccurrences have nothing whatsoever in common. Part of the philosophical \\ninterest in Aristotle’s account of homonymy resides in its\\nallowing partial overlap. Matters become more interesting if we\\nexamine whether—to use an illustration well suited to\\nAristotle’s purposes but left largely unexplored by\\nhim—conscious is synonymous across ‘Charlene was\\nconscious of some awkwardness created by her remarks’ and\\n‘Higher vertebrates, unlike mollusks, are conscious.’ \\nIn these instances, the situation with respect to synonymy or homonymy\\nis perhaps not immediately clear, and so requires reflection and\\nphilosophical investigation. \",\n \"\\n\\n \\nVery regularly, according to Aristotle, this sort of reflection leads\\nto an interesting discovery, namely that we have been presuming a\\nunivocal account where in fact none is forthcoming. This,\\naccording to Aristotle, is where the Platonists go wrong: they presume\\nunivocity where the world delivers homonymy or multivocity. (For\\na vivid illustration of Plato’s univocity assumption at work, see\\nMeno 71e1–72a5, where Socrates insists that there is but one\\nkind of excellence (aretê) common to all kinds\\nof excellent people, not a separate sort for men, women, slaves,\\nchildren, and so on.) In one especially important example,\\nAristotle parts company with Plato over the univocity of goodness:\",\n \"\\n\\nWe had perhaps better consider the universal good and run through\\nthe puzzles concerning what is meant by it—even though this sort\\nof investigation is unwelcome to us, because those who introduced the\\nForms are friends of ours. Yet presumably it would be the better\\ncourse to destroy even what is close to us, as something necessary for\\npreserving the truth—and all the more so, given that we are\\nphilosophers. For though we love them both, piety bids us to\\nhonour the truth before our friends. (EN\\n1096a11–16) \",\n \"\\n\\nAristotle counters that Plato is wrong to assume that goodness is\\n‘something universal, common to all good things, and\\nsingle’ (EN 1096a28). Rather, goodness is different in\\ndifferent cases. If he is right about this, far-reaching consequences\\nregarding ethical theory and practice follow.\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nTo establish non-univocity, Aristotle’s appeals to a variety of\\ntests in his Topics where, again, his idiom is linguistic but\\nhis quarry is metaphysical. Consider the following sentences:\",\n \"\\n\\nAmong the tests for non-univocity recommended in the Topics\\nis a simple paraphrase test: if paraphrases yield distinct,\\nnon-interchangeable accounts, then the predicate is\\nmultivocal. So, for example, suitable paraphrases might\\nbe:\",\n \"\\n\\nSince we cannot interchange these paraphrases—we cannot say,\\nfor instance, that crème brûlée is a just social\\nsystem—good must be non-univocal across this range of\\napplications. If that is correct, then Platonists are wrong to\\nassume univocity in this case, since goodness exhibits complexity\\nignored by their assumption.\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nSo far, then, Aristotle’s appeals to homonymy or multivocity are\\nprimarily destructive, in the sense that they attempt to undermine a\\nPlatonic presumption regarded by Aristotle as unsustainable. \\nImportantly, just as Aristotle sees a positive as well as a negative\\nrole for dialectic in philosophy, so he envisages in addition to its\\ndestructive applications a philosophically constructive role for\\nhomonymy. To appreciate his basic idea, it serves to reflect upon a\\ncontinuum of positions in philosophical analysis ranging from pure\\nPlatonic univocity to disaggregated Wittgensteinean family\\nresemblance. One might in the face of a successful challenge to\\nPlatonic univocity assume that, for instance, the various cases of\\ngoodness have nothing in common across all cases, so that good things\\nform at best a motley kind, of the sort championed by Wittgensteineans\\nenamored of the metaphor of family resemblances: all good things belong\\nto a kind only in the limited sense that they manifest a tapestry of\\npartially overlapping properties, as every member of a single family is\\nunmistakably a member of that family even though there is no one\\nphysical attribute shared by all of those family members. \",\n \"\\n\\n \\nAristotle insists that there is a tertium quid between family\\nresemblance and pure univocity: he identifies, and trumpets, a kind of\\ncore-dependent homonymy (also referred to in the literature,\\nwith varying degrees of accuracy, as focal meaning and\\nfocal\\n connexion).[10] \\n Core-dependent homonyms exhibit a kind\\nof order in multiplicity: although shy of univocity, because\\nhomonymous, such concepts do not devolve into patchwork family\\nresemblances either. To rely upon one of Aristotle’s own\\nfavorite illustrations, consider:\",\n \"\\n\\nAristotle assumes that his readers will immediately appreciate two\\nfeatures of these three predications of healthy. First,\\nthey are non-univocal, since the second is paraphraseable roughly as\\npromotes health and the third as is indicative of\\nhealth, whereas the first means, rather, something more\\nfundamental, like is sound of body or is functioning\\nwell. Hence, healthy is non-univocal. Second,\\neven so, the last two predications rely upon the first for their\\nelucidations: each appeals to health in its core sense in an\\nasymmetrical way. That is, any account of each of the latter two\\npredications must allude to the first, whereas an account of\\nthe first makes no reference to the second or third in its\\naccount. So, suggests Aristotle, health is not only a\\nhomonym, but a core-dependent homonym: while not univocal\\nneither is it a case of rank multivocity. \",\n \"\\n\\n \\nAristotle’s illustration does succeed in showing that there is\\nconceptual space between mere family resemblance and pure\\nunivocity. So, he is right that these are not exhaustive\\noptions. The interest in this sort of result resides in its\\nexportability to richer, if more abstract philosophical concepts. \\nAristotle appeals to homonymy frequently, across a full range of\\nphilosophical concepts including justice, causation,\\nlove, life, sameness, goodness, and\\nbody. His most celebrated appeal to core-dependent homonymy\\ncomes in the case of a concept so highly abstract that it is difficult\\nto gauge his success without extended metaphysical reflection. This is\\nhis appeal to the core-dependent homonymy of being, which has\\ninspired both philosophical and scholarly\\ncontroversy.[11]\\nAristotle denies that there could be a science of being, on the\\ngrounds that there is no single genus being under which all\\nand only beings fall (SE 11\\n172a13–15–15; APr. 92b14; Met. B 3,\\n998b22; EE i 8, 1217b33–35). One motivation for his\\nreasoning this way may be that he regards the notion of a genus as\\n ineliminably taxonomical and contrastive,[12] \\n so that it makes ready sense to speak of\\na genus of being only if one can equally well speak of a genus of\\nnon-being—just as among living beings one can speak of the\\nanimals and the non-animals, viz. the plant kingdom. Since there are\\nno non-beings, there accordingly can be no genus of non-being, and so,\\nultimately, no genus of being either. Consequently, since each\\nscience studies one essential kind arrayed under a single genus, there\\ncan be no science of being either.\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nSubsequently, without expressly reversing his judgment about the\\nexistence of a science of being, Aristotle announces that there is\\nnonetheless a science of being qua being (Met. iv 4),\\nfirst philosophy, which takes as its subject matter beings insofar as\\nthey are beings and thus considers all and only those features\\npertaining to beings as such—to beings, that is, not insofar as\\nthey are mathematical or physical or human beings, but insofar as they\\nare beings, full stop. Although the matter is disputed, his\\nrecognition of this science evidently turns crucially on his commitment\\nto the core-dependent homonymy of being\\n itself.[13] \\n Although the case is not\\nas clear and uncontroversial as Aristotle’s relatively easy\\nappeal to health (which is why, after all, he selected it as\\nan illustration), we are supposed to be able upon reflection to detect\\nan analogous core-dependence in the following instances of\\nexists:\",\n \"\\n\\nOf course, the last three items on this list are rather awkward\\nlocutions, but this is because they strive to make explicit that we can\\nspeak of dependent beings as existing if we wish to do so—but\\nonly because of their dependence upon the core instance of being,\\nnamely substance. (Here it is noteworthy that ‘primary\\nsubstance’ is the conventional and not very happy rendering of\\nAristotle’s protê ousia in Greek, which\\nmeans, more literally, ‘primary\\n being’).[14] \\n According to this\\napproach, we would not have Socrates’ weighing anything at all or\\nfeeling any way today were it not for the prior fact of his\\nexistence. So, exists in the first instance serves as\\nthe core instance of being, in terms of which the others are to be\\nexplicated. If this is correct, then, implies Aristotle,\\nbeing is a core-dependent homonym; further, a science of\\nbeing—or, rather, a science of being qua\\nbeing—becomes possible, even though there is no genus of being,\\nsince it is finally possible to study all beings insofar as they are\\nrelated to the core instance of being, and then also to study that\\ncore instance, namely substance, insofar as it serves as the prime\\noccasion of being.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Essentialism and Homonymy\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\n \\nIn speaking of beings which depend upon substance for their existence,\\nAristotle implicitly appeals to a foundational philosophical commitment\\nwhich appears early in his thought and remains stable throughout his\\nentire philosophical career: his theory of categories. In what is\\nusually regarded as an early work, The Categories, Aristotle\\nrather abruptly announces:\",\n \"\\n\\nOf things said without combination, each signifies either: (i) a\\nsubstance (ousia); (ii) a quantity; (iii) a quality; (iv) a\\nrelative; (v) where; (vi) when; (vii) being in a position; (viii)\\nhaving; (ix) acting upon; or (x) a being affected. (Cat.\\n1b25–27)\",\n \"\\n\\nAristotle does little to frame his theory of categories, offering no\\nexplicit derivation of it, nor even specifying overtly what his theory\\nof categories categorizes. If librarians categorize books and\\nbotanists categorize plants, then what does the philosophical category\\ntheorist categorize? \",\n \"\\n\\n \\nAristotle does not say explicitly, but his examples make reasonably\\nclear that he means to categorize the basic kinds of beings there may\\nbe. If we again take some clues from linguistic data, without\\ninferring that the ultimate objects of categorization are themselves\\nlinguistic, we can contrast things said “with\\ncombination”:\",\n \"\\n\\nwith things said ‘without combination’:\",\n \"\\n\\n‘Man runs’ is truth-evaluable, whereas neither \\n‘man’ nor ‘runs’ is. Aristotle says that\\nthings of this sort signify entities, evidently\\nextra-linguistic entities, which are thus, correlatively, in the first\\ncase sufficiently complex to be what makes the sentence ‘Man\\nruns’ true, that is a man running, and in the second,\\nitems below the level of truth-making, so, e.g., an entity a man,\\ntaken by itself, and an action running, taken by itself. \\nIf that is correct, the entities categorized by the categories are the\\nsorts of basic beings that fall below the level of truth-makers, or\\nfacts. Such beings evidently contribute, so to speak, to the\\nfacticity of facts, just as, in their linguistic analogues, nouns and\\nverbs, things said ‘without combination’, contribute to the\\ntruth-evaluability of simple assertions. The constituents of\\nfacts contribute to facts as the semantically relevant parts of a\\nproposition contribute to its having the truth conditions it has. \\nThus, the items categorized in Aristotle’s categories are the\\nconstituents of facts. If it is a fact that Socrates is\\npale, then the basic beings in view are Socrates and\\nbeing pale. In Aristotle’s terms, the first\\nis a substance and the second is a quality. \",\n \"\\n\\nImportantly, these beings may be basic without being\\nabsolutely simple. After all, Socrates is made up of all\\nmanner of parts—arms and legs, organs and bones, molecules and\\natoms, and so on down. As a useful linguistic analogue, we may\\nconsider phonemes, which are basic, relative to the morphemes\\nof a linguistic theory, and yet also complex, since they are made up of\\nsimpler sound components, which are irrelevant from the\\nlinguist’s point of view because of their lying beneath the level\\nof semantic relevance. \",\n \"\\n\\n \\nThe theory of categories in total recognizes ten sorts of\\nextra-linguistic basic beings:\",\n \"\\n\\nAlthough he does not say so overtly in the Categories,\\nAristotle evidently presumes that these ten categories of being are\\nboth exhaustive and irreducible, so that while there are no other\\nbasic beings, it is not possible to eliminate any one of these\\ncategories in favor of another.\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nBoth claims have come in for criticism, and each surely\\n requires\\n defense.[15]\\nAristotle offers neither conviction a defense in his\\nCategories. Nor, indeed, does he offer any principled\\ngrounding for just these categories of being, a circumstance which has\\nleft him open to further criticism from later philosophers, including\\nfamously Kant who, after lauding Aristotle for coming up with the idea\\nof category theory, proceeds to excoriate him for selecting his\\nparticular categories on no principled basis whatsoever. Kant\\nalleges that Aristotle picked his categories of being just as he\\nhappened to stumble upon them in his reveries (Critique of Pure\\nReason, A81/B107). According to Kant, then,\\nAristotle’s categories are ungrounded. \\nPhilosophers and scholars both before and after Kant have sought to\\nprovide the needed grounding, whereas Aristotle himself mainly tends to\\njustify the theory of categories by putting it to work in his various\\nphilosophical investigations.\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nWe have already implicitly encountered in passing two of\\nAristotle’s appeals to category theory: (i) in his approach to\\ntime, which he comes to treat as a non-substantial being; and (ii) in his\\ncommitment to the core-dependent homonymy of being, which introduces\\nsome rather more contentious considerations. These may be\\nrevisited briefly to illustrate how Aristotle thinks that his doctrine\\nof categories provides philosophical guidance where it is most\\nneeded.\",\n \"\\n\\nThinking first of time and its various puzzles, or aporiai,\\nwe saw that Aristotle poses a simple question: does time exist? \\nHe answers this question in the affirmative, but only because in the\\nend he treats it as a categorically circumscribed question. \\nHe claims that ‘time is the measure of motion with respect to the\\nbefore and after’ (Phys. 219b1–2). By\\noffering this definition, Aristotle is able to advance the judgment\\nthat time does exist, because it is an entity in the category of\\nquantity: time is to motion or change as length is to a line. \\nTime thus exists, but like all items in any non-substance category, it\\nexists in a dependent sort of way. Just as if there were no lines\\nthere would be no length, so if there were no change there would be no\\ntime. Now, this feature of Aristotle’s theory of time has\\noccasioned both critical and favorable\\n reactions.[16] \\n In the present context,\\nhowever, it is important only that it serves to demonstrate how\\nAristotle handles questions of existence: they are, at root, questions\\nabout category membership. A question as to whether, e.g.,\\nuniversals or places or relations exist, is ultimately, for Aristotle,\\nalso a question concerning their category of being, if any.\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nAs time is a dependent entity in Aristotle’s theory, so too are\\nall entities in categories outside of substance. This helps\\nexplain why Aristotle thinks it appropriate to deploy his apparatus of\\ncore-dependent homonymy in the case of being. If we ask\\nwhether qualities or quantities exist, Aristotle will answer in the\\naffirmative, but then point out also that as dependent entities they do\\nnot exist in the independent manner of substances. Thus, even in\\nthe relatively rarified case of being, the theory of\\ncategories provides a reason for uncovering core-dependent\\nhomonymy. Since all other categories of being depend upon\\nsubstance, it should be the case that an analysis of any one of them\\nwill ultimately make asymmetrical reference to substance. Aristotle\\ncontends in his Categories, relying on a distinction that\\ntracks essential (said-of) and accidental (in)\\npredication, that:\",\n \"\\n\\nAll other things are either said-of primary\\nsubstances, which are their subjects, or are in them as\\nsubjects. Hence, if there were no primary substances, it would be\\nimpossible for anything else to exist. (Cat. 2b5–6)\\n \",\n \"\\n\\nIf this is so, then, Aristotle infers, all the non-substance\\ncategories rely upon substance as the core of their being. So, he\\nconcludes, being qualifies as a case of core-dependent homonymy.\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nNow, one may challenge Aristotle’s contentions here, first by\\nquerying whether he has established the non-univocity of being\\nbefore proceeding to argue for its core-dependence. Be that as it\\nmay, if we allow its non-univocity, then, according to Aristotle, the\\napparatus of the categories provides ample reason to conclude that\\nbeing qualifies as a philosophically significant instance of\\ncore-dependent homonymy.\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nIn this way, Aristotle’s philosophy of being and substance, like\\nmuch else in his philosophy, relies upon an antecedent commitment to\\nhis theory of categories. Indeed, the theory of categories\\nspans his entire career and serves as a kind of scaffolding for much of\\nhis philosophical theorizing, ranging from metaphysics and philosophy\\nof nature to psychology and value theory. \",\n \"\\n\\n \\nFor this reason, questions regarding the ultimate tenability of\\nAristotle’s doctrine of categories take on a special urgency for\\nevaluating much of his philosophy. \",\n \"\\n\\nFor more detail on the theory of categories and its grounding,\\n see the entry on \\n Aristotle’s Categories.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"6. Category Theory\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\n \\nEqually central to Aristotle’s thought is his four-causal\\nexplanatory scheme. Judged in terms of its influence, this\\ndoctrine is surely one of his most significant philosophical\\ncontributions. Like other philosophers, Aristotle expects the\\nexplanations he seeks in philosophy and science to meet certain\\ncriteria of adequacy. Unlike some other philosophers, however, he\\ntakes care to state his criteria for adequacy explicitly; then, having\\ndone so, he finds frequent fault with his predecessors for failing to\\nmeet its terms. He states his scheme in a methodological passage\\nin the second book of his Physics:\",\n \"\\n \\n One way in which cause is spoken of is that out of which a thing\\ncomes to be and which persists, e.g. the bronze of the statue, the\\nsilver of the bowl, and the genera of which the bronze and the silver\\nare species.\\n\\n \\n In another way cause is spoken of as the form or the pattern, i.e.\\nwhat is mentioned in the account (logos) belonging to the\\nessence and its genera, e.g. the cause of an octave is a ratio of 2:1,\\nor number more generally, as well as the parts mentioned in the account\\n(logos).\\n\\n \\n Further, the primary source of the change and rest is spoken of as a\\ncause, e.g. the man who deliberated is a cause, the father is the cause\\nof the child, and generally the maker is the cause of what is made and\\nwhat brings about change is a cause of what is changed.\\n\\n \\n Further, the end (telos) is spoken of as a cause. \\nThis is that for the sake of which (hou heneka) a\\nthing is done, e.g. health is the cause of walking about. \\n‘Why is he walking about?’ We say: ‘To be\\nhealthy’—and, having said that, we think we have indicated\\nthe cause.\\n\\n (Phys. 194b23–35)\\n\\n\",\n \"\\n\\nAlthough some of Aristotle’s illustrations are not immediately\\npellucid, his approach to explanation is reasonably\\nstraightforward.\",\n \"\\n\\nAristotle’s attitude towards explanation is best understood\\nfirst by considering a simple example he proposes in Physics\\nii 3. A bronze statue admits of various different dimensions of\\nexplanation. If we were to confront a statue without first\\nrecognizing what it was, we would, thinks Aristotle, spontaneously ask\\na series of questions about it. We would wish to know what it\\nis, what it is made of, what brought it about,\\nandwhat it is for. In Aristotle’s terms, in\\nasking these questions we are seeking knowledge of the statue’s\\nfour causes (aitia): the formal, material, efficient,\\nand final. According to Aristotle, when we have\\nidentified these four causes, we have satisfied a reasonable demand for\\nexplanatory adequacy. \",\n \"\\n\\nMore fully, the four-causal account of explanatory adequacy requires\\nan investigator to cite these four causes:\",\n \"\\n\\nIn Physics ii 3, Aristotle makes twin claims about this\\nfour-causal schema: (i) that citing all four causes is\\nnecessary for adequacy in explanation; and (ii) that these\\nfour causes are sufficient for adequacy in explanation. \\nEach of these claims requires some elaboration and also some\\nqualification. \",\n \"\\n\\n \\nAs for the necessity claim, Aristotle does not suppose that all\\nphenomena admit of all four causes. Thus, for example,\\ncoincidences lack final causes, since they do not occur for the sake of\\nanything; that is, after all, what makes them coincidences. \\nIf a debtor is on his way to the market to buy milk and she runs into\\nher creditor, who is on his way to the same market to buy bread, then\\nshe may agree to pay the money owed immediately. Although\\nresulting in a wanted outcome, their meeting was not for the sake of\\nsettling the debt; nor indeed was it for the sake of anything at\\nall. It was a simple co-incidence. Hence, it lacks a final\\ncause. Similarly, if we think that there are mathematical or\\ngeometrical abstractions, for instance a triangle existing as an object\\nof thought independent of any material realization, then the triangle\\nwill trivially lack a material\\n cause.[17] \\n Still, these significant exceptions\\naside, Aristotle expects the vast majority of explanations to conform\\nto his four-causal schema. In non-exceptional cases, a failure to\\nspecify all four of causes, is, he maintains, a failure in explanatory\\nadequacy.\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nThe sufficiency claim is exceptionless, though it may yet be misleading\\nif one pertinent issue is left unremarked. In providing his\\nillustration of the material cause Aristotle first cites the bronze of\\na statue and the silver of a bowl, and then mentions also ‘the\\ngenera of which the bronze and the silver are species’\\n(Phys. 194b25–27). By this he means the types of metal\\nto which silver and bronze belong, or more generally still, simply\\nmetal. That is, one might specify the material cause of\\na statue more or less proximately, by specifying the character of the\\nmatter more or less precisely. Hence, when he implies that citing\\nall four causes is sufficient for explanation, Aristotle does not\\nintend to suggest that a citation at any level of generality\\nsuffices. He means to insist rather that there is no fifth kind\\nof cause, that his preferred four cases subsume all kinds of\\ncause. He does not argue for this conclusion fully, though he\\ndoes challenge his readers to identify a kind of cause which qualifies\\nas a sort distinct from the four mentioned (Phys.\\n195a4–5). \",\n \"\\n\\n \\nSo far, then, Aristotle’s four causal schema has whatever\\nintuitive plausibility his illustrations may afford it. He does\\nnot rest content there, however. Instead, he thinks he can argue\\nforcefully for the four causes as real explanatory factors, that is, as\\nfeatures which must be cited not merely because they make for\\nsatisfying explanations, but because they are genuinely operative\\ncausal factors, the omission of which renders any putative explanation\\nobjectively incomplete and so inadequate. \",\n \"\\n\\n \\nIt should be noted that Aristotle’s arguments for the four causes\\ntaken individually all proceed against the backdrop of the general\\nconnection he forges between causal explanation and knowledge. Because\\nhe thinks that the four aitia feature in answers to\\nknowledge-seeking questions (Phys. 194b18; A Po. 71 b\\n9–11, 94 a 20), some scholars have come to understand them more as\\nbecauses than as causes—that is, as\\nexplanations rather than as causes narrowly\\n construed.[18] \\n Most such judgments\\nreflect an antecedent commitment to one or another view of causation\\nand explanation—that causation relates events rather than\\npropositions; that explanations are inquiry-relative; that causation is\\nextensional and explanation intensional; that explanations must adhere\\nto some manner of nomic-deductive model, whereas causes need not; or\\nthat causes must be prior in time to their effects, while explanations,\\nespecially intentional explanations, may appeal to states of affairs\\nposterior in time to the actions they explain. \",\n \"\\n\\nGenerally, Aristotle does not respect these sorts of\\ncommitments. Thus, to the extent that they are defensible, his\\napproach to aitia may be regarded as blurring the canons of\\ncausation and explanation. It should certainly not, however, be\\nceded up front that Aristotle is guilty of any such conflation, or even\\nthat scholars who render his account of the four aitia in\\ncausal terms have failed to come to grips with developments in causal\\ntheory in the wake of Hume. Rather, because of the lack of\\nuniformity in contemporary accounts of causation and explanation, and a\\npersistent and justifiable tendency to regard causal explanations as\\nfoundational relative to other sorts of explanations, we may\\nlegitimately wonder whether Aristotle’s conception of the four\\naitia is in any significant way discontinuous with later,\\nHumean-inspired approaches, and then again, to the degree that it is,\\nwhether Aristotle’s approach suffers for the comparison. Be that\\nas it may, we will do well when considering Aristotle’s defense\\nof his four aitia to bear in mind that controversy surrounds\\nhow best to construe his knowledge-driven approach to causation and\\nexplanation relative to some later approaches. \",\n \"\\n\\nFor more on the four causes in general, see the entry on\\n Aristotle on Causality.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"7. The Four Causal Account of Explanatory Adequacy\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\n \\nCentral to Aristotle’s four-causal account of explanatory\\nadequacy are the notions of matter (hulê) and\\nform (eidos or morphê). Together, they\\nconstitute one of his most fundamental philosophical commitments, to\\nhylomorphism:\",\n \"\\n\\nThe appeal in this definition to ‘ordinary objects’\\nrequires reflection, but as a first approximation, it serves to rely on\\nthe sorts of examples Aristotle himself employs when motivating\\nhylomorphism: statues and houses, horses and humans. In general,\\nwe may focus on artefacts and familiar living beings. \\nHylomorphism holds that no such object is metaphysically simple, but\\nrather comprises two distinct metaphysical elements, one formal and one\\nmaterial.\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nAristotle’s hylomorphism was formulated originally to handle\\nvarious puzzles about change. Among the endoxa\\nconfronting Aristotle in his Physics are some striking\\nchallenges to the coherence of the very notion of change, owing to\\n Parmenides\\n and\\n Zeno. \\nAristotle’s initial impulse in the face of such challenges, as we\\nhave seen, is to preserve the appearances (phainomena), to\\nexplain how change is possible. Key to Aristotle’s response\\nto the challenges bequeathed him is his insistence that all change\\ninvolves at least two factors: something persisting and something\\ngained or lost. Thus, when Socrates goes to the beach and comes\\naway sun-tanned, something continues to exist, namely Socrates, even\\nwhile something is lost, his pallor, and something else gained, his\\ntan. This is a change in the category of quality, whence the\\ncommon locution ‘qualitative change’. If he gains\\nweight, then again something remains, Socrates, and something is gained,\\nin this case a quantity of matter. Accordingly, in this instance we\\nhave not a qualitative but a quantitative change. \",\n \"\\n\\nIn general, argues Aristotle, in whatever category a change occurs,\\nsomething is lost and something gained within that category,\\neven while something else, a substance, remains in existence, as the\\nsubject of that change. Of course, substances can come into or go out of\\nexistence, in cases of\\ngeneration or destruction; and these are changes in the category of\\nsubstance. Evidently even in cases of change in this category, however,\\nsomething persists. To take an example favourable to Aristotle,\\nin the case of the generation of a statue, the bronze persists, but it\\ncomes to acquire a new form, a substantial rather than accidental\\nform. In all cases, whether substantial or accidental, the\\ntwo-factor analysis obtains: something remains the same and something\\nis gained or lost. \",\n \"\\n\\n \\nIn its most rudimentary formulation, hylomorphism simply labels each of\\nthe two factors: what persists is matter and what is gained is\\nform. Aristotle’s hylomorphism quickly becomes\\nmuch more complex, however, as the notions of matter and form are\\npressed into philosophical service. Importantly, matter and form\\ncome to be paired with another fundamental distinction, that between\\npotentiality and actuality. Again in the case\\nof the generation of a statue, we may say that the bronze is\\npotentially a statue, but that it is an actual statue\\nwhen and only when it is informed with the form of a\\nstatue. Of course, before being made into a statue, the\\nbronze was also in potentiality a fair number of other\\nartefacts—a cannon, a steam-engine, or a goal on a football\\npitch. Still, it was not in potentiality butter or a beach\\nball. This shows that potentiality is not the same as\\npossibility: to say that x is potentially F is to say that\\nx already has actual features in virtue of which it might be\\nmade to be F by the imposition of a F form upon it. So, given\\nthese various connections, it becomes possible to define form and\\nmatter generically as\",\n \"\\n\\nOf course, these definitions are circular, but that is not in itself\\na problem: actuality and potentiality are, for Aristotle, fundamental\\nconcepts which admit of explication and description but do not admit of\\nreductive analyses.\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nEncapsulating Aristotle’s discussions of change in\\nPhysics i 7 and 8, and putting the matter more crisply than he\\nhimself does, we have the following simple argument for matter and\\nform: (1) a necessary condition of there being change is the existence\\nof matter and form; (2) there is change; hence (3) there are matter and\\nform. The second premise is a phainomenon; so, if that\\nis accepted without further defense, only the first requires\\njustification. The first premise is justified by the thought that since\\nthere is no generation ex nihilo, in every instance of change\\nsomething persists while something else is gained or lost. In\\nsubstantial generation or destruction, a substantial form is gained or\\nlost; in mere accidental change, the form gained or lost is itself\\naccidental. Since these two ways of changing exhaust the kinds of\\nchange there are, in every instance of change there are two\\nfactors present. These are matter and form.\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nFor these reasons, Aristotle intends his hylomorphism to be much more\\nthan a simple explanatory heuristic. On the contrary, he maintains,\\nmatter and form are mind-independent features of the world and must,\\ntherefore, be mentioned in any full explanation of its workings.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"8. Hylomorphism\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\n \\nWe may mainly pass over as uncontroversial the suggestion that there\\nare efficient causes in favor of the most controversial and difficult\\nof Aristotle four causes, the final\\n cause.[19] \\n We should note before doing so, however, that Aristotle’s commitment\\nto efficient causation does receive a defense in Aristotle’s preferred\\nterminology; he thus does more than many other philosophers who take\\nit as given that causes of an efficient sort are operative. Partly by\\nway of criticizing Plato’s theory of Forms, which he regards as\\ninadequate because of its inability to account for change and\\ngeneration, Aristotle observes that nothing potential can bring itself\\ninto actuality without the agency of an actually operative efficient\\ncause. Since what is potential is always in potentiality relative to\\nsome range of actualities, and nothing becomes actual of its own\\naccord—no pile of bricks, for instance, spontaneously organizes\\nitself into a house or a wall—an actually operative agent is\\nrequired for every instance of change. This is the efficient\\ncause. These sorts of considerations also incline Aristotle to speak\\nof the priority of actuality over potentiality: potentialities are\\nmade actual by actualities, and indeed are always potentialities for\\nsome actuality or other. The operation of some actuality upon some\\npotentiality is an instance of efficient causation.\",\n \"\\nThat said, most of Aristotle’s readers do not find themselves in need\\nof a defense of the existence of efficient causation. By contrast,\\nmost think that Aristotle does need to provide a defense of final\\ncausation. It is natural and easy for us to recognize final causal\\nactivity in the products of human craft: computers and can-openers are\\ndevices dedicated to the execution of certain tasks, and both their\\nformal and material features will be explained by appeal to their\\nfunctions. Nor is it a mystery where artefacts obtain their functions:\\nwe give artefacts their functions. The ends of artefacts are the results of\\nthe designing activities of intentional agents. Aristotle recognizes\\nthese kinds of final causation, but also, and more problematically,\\nenvisages a much greater role for teleology in natural explanation:\\nnature exhibits teleology without design. He thinks, for instance,\\nthat living organisms not only have parts which require teleological\\nexplanation—that, for instance, kidneys are for\\npurifying the blood and teeth are for tearing and chewing\\nfood—but that whole organisms, human beings and other animals,\\nalso have final causes. \",\n \"\\n\\nCrucially, Aristotle denies overtly that the causes operative in\\nnature are intention-dependent. He thinks, that is, that\\norganisms have final causes, but that they did not come to have them by\\ndint of the designing activities of some intentional agent or\\nother. He thus denies that a necessary condition of\\nx’s having a final cause is x’s being\\ndesigned. \",\n \"\\n\\nAlthough he has been persistently criticized for his commitment to\\nsuch natural ends, Aristotle is not susceptible to a fair number of\\nthe objections standardly made to his view. Indeed, it is evident\\nthat whatever the merits of the most penetrating of such criticisms,\\nmuch of the contumely directed at Aristotle is stunningly\\n illiterate.[20] \\n To take but one of any number of mind-numbing examples, the famous\\nAmerican psychologist B. F. Skinner reveals that ‘Aristotle\\nargued that a falling body accelerated because it grew more jubilant\\nas it found itself nearer its home’ (1971, 6). To anyone who has\\nactually read Aristotle, it is unsurprising that this ascription comes\\nwithout an accompanying textual citation. For Aristotle, as Skinner\\nwould portray him, rocks are conscious beings having end states which\\nthey so delight in procuring that they accelerate themselves in\\nexaltation as they grow ever closer to attaining them. There is no\\nexcuse for this sort of intellectual slovenliness, when already by the\\nlate-nineteenth century, the German scholar Zeller was able to say\\nwith perfect accuracy that ‘The most important feature of the\\nAristotelian teleology is the fact that it is neither anthropocentric\\nnor is it due to the actions of a creator existing outside the world\\nor even of a mere arranger of the world, but is always thought of as\\nimmanent in nature’ (1883, §48).\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nIndeed, it is hardly necessary to caricature Aristotle’s\\nteleological commitments in order to bring them into critical\\nfocus. In fact, Aristotle offers two sorts of defenses of\\nnon-intentional teleology in nature, the first of which is replete with\\ndifficulty. He claims in Physics ii 8:\",\n \"For these [viz. teeth and all other parts of natural\\nbeings] and all other natural things come about as they do either\\nalways or for the most part, whereas nothing which comes about due to\\nchance or spontaneity comes about always or for the most part. \\n… If, then, these are either the result of coincidence or for the\\nsake of something, and they cannot be the result of coincidence or\\nspontaneity, it follows that they must be for the sake of\\nsomething. Moreover, even those making these sorts of claims\\n[viz. that everything comes to be by necessity] will agree that such\\nthings are natural. Therefore, that for the sake of which is\\npresent among things which come to be and exist by nature.\\n(Phys. 198b32–199a8)\",\n \"\\n\\nThe argument here, which has been variously formulated\\n by\\n scholars,[21]\\nseems doubly problematic. \",\n \"\\n\\n \\nIn this argument Aristotle seems to introduce as a phainomenon\\nthat nature exhibits regularity, so that the parts of nature come about\\nin patterned and regular ways. Thus, for instance, humans\\ntend to have teeth arranged in a predictable sort of way, with incisors\\nin the front and molars in the back. He then seems to contend, as\\nan exhaustive and exclusive disjunction, that things happen either by\\nchance or for the sake of something, only to suggest, finally, that\\nwhat is ‘always or for the most part’—what happens in\\na patterned and predictable way—is not plausibly thought to be\\ndue to chance. Hence, he concludes, whatever happens always or\\nfor the most part must happen for the sake of something, and so must\\nadmit of a teleological cause. Thus, teeth show up always or for\\nthe most part with incisors in the front and molars in the back; since\\nthis is a regular and predictable occurrence, it cannot be due to\\nchance. Given that whatever is not due to chance has a final\\ncause, teeth have a final cause.\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nIf so much captures Aristotle’s dominant argument for teleology, then\\nhis view is unmotivated. The argument is problematic in the first\\ninstance because it assumes an exhaustive and exclusive disjunction\\nbetween what is by chance and what is for the sake of something. But\\nthere are obviously other possibilities. Hearts beat not in order to\\nmake noise, but they do so always and not by chance. Second, and this\\nis perplexing if we have represented him correctly, Aristotle is\\nhimself aware of one sort of counterexample to this view and is indeed\\nkeen to point it out himself: although, he insists, bile is regularly\\nand predictably yellow, its being yellow is neither due simply to\\nchance nor for the sake of anything. Aristotle in fact mentions many\\nsuch counterexamples (Part. An. 676b16–677b10,\\nGen. An. 778a29–b6). It seems to follow, then, short of\\nascribing a straight contradiction to him, either that he is not\\ncorrectly represented as we have interpreted this argument or that he\\nsimply changed his mind about the grounds of teleology. Taking up\\nthe first alternative, one possibility is that Aristotle is not really\\ntrying to argue for teleology from the ground up in\\nPhysics ii 8, but is taking it as already established that\\nthere are teleological causes, and restricting himself to observing\\nthat many natural phenomena, namely those which occur always or for the\\nmost part, are good candidates for admitting of teleological\\nexplanation.\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nThat would leave open the possibility of a broader sort of motivation\\nfor teleology, perhaps of the sort Aristotle offers elsewhere in the\\nPhysics, when speaking about the impulse to find\\nnon-intention-dependent teleological causes at work in nature:\",\n \"This is most obvious in the case of animals other than man:\\nthey make things using neither craft nor on the basis of inquiry nor by\\ndeliberation. This is in fact a source of puzzlement for those\\nwho wonder whether it is by reason or by some other faculty that these\\ncreatures work—spiders, ants and the like. Advancing bit by\\nbit in this same direction it becomes apparent that even in plants\\nfeatures conducive to an end occur—leaves, for example, grow in\\norder to provide shade for the fruit. If then it is both by\\nnature and for an end that the swallow makes its nest and the spider\\nits web, and plants grow leaves for the sake of the fruit and send\\ntheir roots down rather than up for the sake of nourishment, it is\\nplain that this kind of cause is operative in things which come to be\\nand are by nature. And since nature is twofold, as matter and as\\nform, the form is the end, and since all other things are for sake of\\nthe end, the form must be the cause in the sense of that for the sake\\nof which. (Phys. 199a20–32)\",\n \"\\n\\nAs Aristotle quite rightly observes in this passage, we find\\nourselves regularly and easily speaking in teleological terms when\\ncharacterizing non-human animals and plants. It is consistent\\nwith our so speaking, of course, that all of our easy language in these\\ncontexts is rather too easy: it is in fact lax and careless, because unwarrantedly\\nanthropocentric. We might yet demand that all such language be\\nassiduously reduced to some non-teleological idiom when we are being\\nscientifically strict and empirically serious, though we would first\\nneed to survey the explanatory costs and benefits of our attempting to\\ndo so. Aristotle considers and rejects some views hostile to\\nteleology in Physics ii 8 and Generation and\\nCorruption\\n i.[22] \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"9. Aristotelian Teleology\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\n \\nOnce Aristotle has his four-causal explanatory schema fully on the\\nscene, he relies upon it in virtually all of his most advanced\\nphilosophical investigation. As he deploys it in various\\nframeworks, we find him augmenting and refining the schema even as he\\napplies it, sometimes with surprising results. One important\\nquestion concerns how his hylomorphism intersects with the theory of\\nsubstance advanced in the context of his theory of categories. \\n\",\n \"\\n\\nAs we have seen, Aristotle insists upon the primacy of primary\\nsubstance in his Categories. According to that work, however,\\nstar instances of primary substance are familiar living beings like\\nSocrates or an individual horse (Cat. 2a11014). Yet with the\\nadvent of hylomorphism, these primary substances are revealed to be\\nmetaphysical complexes: Socrates is a compound of matter and form. So,\\nnow we have not one but three potential candidates for primary\\nsubstance: form, matter, and the compound of matter and form. The\\nquestion thus arises: which among them is the primary substance? Is\\nit the matter, the form, or the compound? The compound corresponds to\\na basic object of experience and seems to be a basic subject of\\npredication: we say that Socrates lives in Athens, not that his matter\\nlives in Athens. Still, matter underlies the compound and in this way\\nseems a more basic subject than the compound, at least in the sense\\nthat it can exist before and after it does. On the other hand, the\\nmatter is nothing definite at all until enformed; so, perhaps form, as\\ndetermining what the compound is, has the best claim on\\nsubstantiality. \",\n \"\\n\\n \\nIn the middle books of his Metaphysics, which contain some of\\nhis most complex and engaging investigations into basic being,\\nAristotle settles on form (Met. vii 17). A\\nquestion thus arises as to how form satisfies Aristotle’s final\\ncriteria for substantiality. He expects a substance to be, as he says,\\nsome particular thing (tode ti), but also to be something\\nknowable, some essence or other. These criteria seem to pull in\\ndifferent directions, the first in favor of particular substances, as\\nthe primary substances of the Categories had been particulars,\\nand the second in favor of universals as substances, because they alone\\nare knowable. In the lively controversy surrounding these\\nmatters, many scholars have concluded that Aristotle adopts a third way\\nforward: form is both knowable and particular. This matter,\\nhowever, remains very acutely\\n disputed.[23] \\n \",\n \"\\n\\n \\nVery briefly, and not engaging these controversies, it becomes clear\\nthat Aristotle prefers form in virtue of its role in generation and\\ndiachronic persistence. When a statue is generated, or when a new\\nanimal comes into being, something persists, namely the matter, which\\ncomes to realize the substantial form in question. Even so,\\ninsists Aristotle, the matter does not by itself provide the identity\\nconditions for the new substance. First, as we have seen, the\\nmatter is merely potentially some F until such time as it is made\\nactually F by the presence of an F form. Further, the matter can\\nbe replenished, and is replenished in the case of all\\norganisms, and so seems to be form-dependent for its own diachronic\\nidentity conditions. For these reasons, Aristotle thinks of the\\nform as prior to the matter, and thus more fundamental than the\\nmatter. This sort of matter, the form-dependent matter, Aristotle\\nregards as proximate matter (Met. 1038b6, 1042b10),\\nthus extending the notion of matter beyond its original role as\\nmetaphysical substrate. \",\n \"\\n\\n \\nFurther, in Metaphysics vii 17 Aristotle offers a suggestive\\nargument to the effect that matter alone cannot be substance. Let the\\nvarious bits of matter belonging to Socrates be labeled as a,\\nb, c, …, n. Consistent with the\\nnon-existence of Socrates is the existence\\nof a, b, c, …, n, since\\nthese elements exist when they are spread from here to Alpha Centauri,\\nbut if that happens, of course, Socrates no longer exists. Heading in the\\nother direction, Socrates can exist without just these elements, since\\nhe may exist when some one of a, b, c,\\n…, n is replaced or goes out of existence. So, in\\naddition to his material elements, insists Aristotle, Socrates is also\\nsomething else, something more (heteron ti; Met.\\n1041b19–20). This something more is form, which is ‘not\\nan element…but a primary cause of a thing’s being what it\\nis’ (Met. 1041b28–30). The cause of a thing’s being\\nthe actual thing it is, as we have seen, is form. Hence, concludes\\nAristotle, as the source of being and unity, form is substance. \",\n \"\\n\\nEven if this much is granted—and to repeat, much of what has\\njust been said is unavoidably controversial—many questions\\nremain. For example, is form best understood as universal or\\nparticular? However that issue is to be resolved, what is the\\nrelation of form to the compound and to matter? If form is\\nsubstance, then what is the fate of these other two candidates? \\nAre they also substances, if to a lesser degree? It seems odd to\\nconclude that they are nothing at all, or that the compound in\\nparticular is nothing in actuality; yet it is difficult to contend that\\nthey might belong to some category other than substance. \",\n \"\\n\\nFor an approach to some of these questions, see the entry on\\n Aristotle’s Metaphysics.\\n \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"10. Substance\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nHowever these and like issues are to be resolved, given the primacy of\\nform as substance, it is unsurprising to find Aristotle identifying\\nthe soul, which he introduces as a principle or source\\n(archê) of all life, as the form of a living\\ncompound. For Aristotle, in fact, all living things, and not only\\nhuman beings, have souls: ‘what is ensouled is distinguished\\nfrom what is unensouled by living’ (DA 431a20–22;\\ncf. DA 412a13, 423a20–6; De Part. An.\\n687a24–690a10; Met. 1075a16–25). It is\\nappropriate, then, to treat all ensouled bodies in hylomorphic\\nterms: \",\n \"\\n\\nThe soul is the cause and source of the living body. But\\ncause and source are meant in many ways [or are\\nhomonymous]. Similarly, the soul is a cause in accordance\\nwith the ways delineated, which are three: it is (i) the cause as the\\nsource of motion [=the efficient cause], (ii) that for the sake of\\nwhich [=the final cause], and (iii) as the substance of ensouled\\nbodies. That it is a cause as substance is clear, for substance\\nis the cause of being for all things, and for living things, being is\\nlife, and the soul is also the cause and source of life. (DA\\n415b8–14; cf. PN 467b12–25, Phys. 255a56–10) \\n\\n\",\n \"\\n\\nSo, the soul and body are simply special cases of form and\\nmatter:\",\n \"\\n\\nsoul : body :: form : matter ::\\nactuality : potentiality\\n\\n\",\n \"\\n\\nFurther, the soul, as the end of the compound organism, is also the\\nfinal cause of the body. Minimally, this is to be understood as the\\nview that any given body is the body that it is because it is\\norganized around a function which serves to unify the entire\\norganism. In this sense, the body’s unity derives from the fact it has\\na single end, or single life directionality, a state of affairs that\\nAristotle captures by characterizing the body as the sort of matter\\nwhich is organic (organikon; DA 412a28). By\\nthis he means that the body serves as a tool for implementing the\\ncharacteristic life activities of the kind to which the organism\\nbelongs (organon = tool in Greek). Taking all this\\ntogether, Aristotle offers the view that the soul is the ‘first\\nactuality of a natural organic body’ (DA\\n412b5–6), that it is a ‘substance as form of a natural\\nbody which has life in potentiality’ (DA \\n412a20–1) and, again, that it ‘is a first actuality of a\\nnatural body which has life in potentiality’ (DA \\n412a27–8).\",\n \"\\n\\nAristotle contends that his hylomorphism provides an attractive middle\\nway between what he sees as the mirroring excesses of his\\npredecessors. In one direction, he means to reject Presocratic kinds\\nof materialism; in the other, he opposes Platonic dualism. He gives\\nthe Presocratics credit for identifying the material causes of life,\\nbut then faults them for failing to grasp its formal cause. By\\ncontrast, Plato earns praise for grasping the formal cause of life;\\nunfortunately, as Aristotle sees things, he then proceeds to neglect\\nthe material cause, and comes to believe that the soul can exist\\nwithout its material basis. Hylomorphism, in Aristotle’s view,\\ncaptures what is right in both camps while eschewing the unwarranted\\nmono-dimensionality of each. To account for living organisms,\\nAristotle contends, the natural scientist must attend to both matter\\nand form.\",\n \"\\n\\nAristotle deploys hylomorphic analyses not only to the whole organism,\\nbut to the individual faculties of the soul as well. Perception\\ninvolves the reception of sensible forms without matter, and thinking,\\nby analogy, consists in the mind’s being enformed by intelligible\\nforms. With each of these extensions, Aristotle both expands and\\ntaxes his basic hylomorphism, sometimes straining its basic framework\\nalmost beyond recognition. \",\n \"\\n\\n \\nFor more detail on Aristotle’s hylomorphism in psychological\\nexplanation, see the entry on \\n Aristotle’s Psychology.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"11. Living Beings\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\n \\nAristotle’s basic teleological framework extends to his ethical\\nand political theories, which he regards as complementing one\\nanother. He takes it as given that most people wish to lead\\ngood lives; the question then becomes what the best life for human\\nbeings consists in. Because he believes that the best life for a\\nhuman being is not a matter of subjective preference, he also believes\\nthat people can (and, sadly, often do) choose to lead sub-optimal\\nlives. In order to avoid such unhappy eventualities, Aristotle\\nrecommends reflection on the criteria any successful candidate for the\\nbest life must satisfy. He proceeds to propose one kind of life\\nas meeting those criteria uniquely and therefore promotes it as the\\nsuperior form of human life. This is a life lived in accordance with\\nreason. \",\n \"\\n\\nWhen stating the general criteria for the final good for human beings,\\nAristotle invites his readers to review them (EN\\n1094a22–27). This is advisable, since much of the work of\\nsorting through candidate lives is in fact accomplished during the\\nhigher-order task of determining the criteria appropriate to this\\ntask. Once these are set, it becomes relatively straightforward for\\nAristotle to dismiss some contenders, including for instance hedonism,\\nthe perennially popular view that pleasure is the highest good for\\nhuman beings. \",\n \"\\n\\nAccording to the criteria advanced, the final good for human beings\\nmust: (i) be pursued for its own sake (EN 1094a1); (ii) be\\nsuch that we wish for other things for its sake (EN 1094a19);\\n(iii) be such that we do not wish for it on account of other things\\n(EN 1094a21); (iv) be complete (teleion), in the\\nsense that it is always choiceworthy and always chosen for itself\\n(EN 1097a26–33); and finally (v) be self-sufficient\\n(autarkês), in the sense that its presence suffices to\\nmake a life lacking in nothing (EN 1097b6–16). Plainly\\nsome candidates for the best life fall down in the face of these\\ncriteria. According to Aristotle, neither the life of pleasure nor the\\nlife of honour satisfies them all.\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nWhat does satisfy them all is happiness eudaimonia. Scholars in fact\\ndispute whether eudaimonia is best rendered as\\n‘happiness’ or ‘flourishing’ or ‘living\\nwell’ or simply transliterated and left an untranslated\\n technical\\n term.[24] \\n If we have already determined that happiness is some sort of\\nsubjective state, perhaps simple desire fulfillment, then\\n‘happiness’ will indeed be an inappropriate translation:\\neudaimonia is achieved, according to Aristotle, by fully\\nrealizing our natures, by actualizing to the highest degree our human\\ncapacities, and neither our nature nor our endowment of human\\ncapacities is a matter of choice for us. Still, as Aristotle frankly\\nacknowledges, people will consent without hesitation to the suggestion\\nthat happiness is our best good—even while differing materially\\nabout how they understand what happiness is. So, while seeming to\\nagree, people in fact disagree about the human good. Consequently, it\\nis necessary to reflect on the nature of happiness\\n(eudaimonia): \",\n \"\\n\\nBut perhaps saying that the highest good is happiness\\n(eudaimonia) will appear to be a platitude and what is wanted\\nis a much clearer expression of what this is. Perhaps this would come\\nabout if the function (ergon) of a human being were\\nidentified. For just as the good, and doing well, for a flute player,\\na sculptor, and every sort of craftsman—and in general, for\\nwhatever has a function and a characteristic action—seems to\\ndepend upon function, so the same seems true for a human being, if\\nindeed a human being has a function. Or do the carpenter and cobbler\\nhave their functions, while a human being has none and is rather\\nnaturally without a function (argon)? Or rather, just as\\nthere seems to be some particular function for the eye and the hand\\nand in general for each of the parts of a human being, should one in\\nthe same way posit a particular function for the human being in\\naddition to all these? Whatever might this be? For living is common\\neven to plants, whereas something characteristic (idion) is\\nwanted; so, one should set aside the life of nutrition and\\ngrowth. Following that would be some sort of life of perception, yet\\nthis is also common, to the horse and the bull and to every\\nanimal. What remains, therefore, is a life of action belonging to the\\nkind of soul that has reason. (EN\\n1097b22–1098a4)\",\n \"\\n\\nIn determining what eudaimonia consists in, Aristotle makes a crucial\\nappeal to the human function (ergon), and thus to his\\noverarching teleological framework. \",\n \"\\n\\nHe thinks that he can identify the human function in terms of\\nreason, which then provides ample grounds for characterizing the happy\\nlife as involving centrally the exercise of reason, whether practical\\nor theoretical. Happiness turns out to be an activity of the\\nrational soul, conducted in accordance with virtue or excellence, or,\\nin what comes to the same thing, in rational activity executed\\nexcellently (EN 1098a161–17). It bears noting in\\nthis regard that Aristotle’s word for virtue,\\naretê, is broader than the dominant sense of the English\\nword ‘virtue’, since it comprises all manner of\\nexcellences, thus including but extending beyond the moral virtues.\\nThus when he says that happiness consists in an activity in\\n‘accordance with virtue’ (kat’ aretên;\\nEN 1098a18), Aristotle means that it is a kind of excellent\\nactivity, and not merely morally virtuous activity.\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nThe suggestion that only excellently executed or\\nvirtuously performed rational activity constitutes human\\nhappiness provides the impetus for Aristotle’s virtue\\nethics. Strikingly, first, he insists that the good life is a life of\\nactivity; no state suffices, since we are commended and\\npraised for living good lives, and we are rightly commended or praised\\nonly for things we (do) (EN 1105b20–1106a13).\\nFurther, given that we must not only act, but act excellently or\\nvirtuously, it falls to the ethical theorist to determine what virtue\\nor excellence consists in with respect to the individual human\\nvirtues, including, for instance, courage and practical\\nintelligence. This is why so much of Aristotle’s ethical writing\\nis given over to an investigation of virtue, both in general and in\\nparticular, and extending to both practical and theoretical forms.\",\n \"\\n\\n For more on Aristotle’s virtue-based ethics, see the entry on \\n Aristotle’s Ethics.\",\n \"\\n\\nAristotle concludes his discussion of human happiness in his\\nNicomachean Ethics by introducing political theory as a\\ncontinuation and completion of ethical theory. Ethical\\ntheory characterizes the best form of human life; political theory\\ncharacterizes the forms of social organization best suited to its\\nrealization (EN 1181b12–23). \",\n \"\\n\\n \\nThe basic political unit for Aristotle is the polis, which is\\nboth a state in the sense of being an authority-wielding\\nmonopoly and a civil society in the sense of being a series of\\norganized communities with varying degrees of converging\\ninterest. Aristotle’s political theory is markedly\\nunlike some later, liberal theories, in that he does not think that the\\npolis requires justification as a body threatening to infringe\\non antecedently existing human rights. Rather, he advances a form\\nof political naturalism which treats human beings as by nature\\npolitical animals, not only in the weak sense of being gregariously\\ndisposed, nor even in the sense of their merely benefiting from mutual\\ncommercial exchange, but in the strong sense of their flourishing as\\nhuman beings at all only within the framework of an organized\\npolis. The polis ‘comes into being for the sake\\nof living, but it remains in existence for the sake of living\\nwell’ (Pol. 1252b29–30; cf. 1253a31–37). \",\n \"\\n\\nThe polis is thus to be judged against the goal of\\npromoting human happiness. A superior form of political organization\\nenhances human life; an inferior form hampers and hinders\\nit. One major question pursued in Aristotle’s\\nPolitics is thus structured by just this question: what sort\\nof political arrangement best meets the goal of developing and\\naugmenting human flourishing? Aristotle considers a fair\\nnumber of differing forms of political organization, and sets most\\naside as inimical to the goal human happiness. For example, given\\nhis overarching framework, he has no difficulty rejecting\\ncontractarianism on the grounds that it treats as merely instrumental\\nthose forms of political activity which are in fact partially\\nconstitutive of human flourishing (Pol. iii 9). \",\n \"\\n\\nIn thinking about the possible kinds of political organization,\\nAristotle relies on the structural observations that rulers may be one, few,\\nor many, and that their forms of rule may be legitimate or\\nillegitimate, as measured against the goal of promoting human\\nflourishing (Pol. 1279a26–31). Taken together, these factors\\nyield six possible forms of government, three correct and three\\ndeviant:\",\n \"\\n\\nThe correct are differentiated from the deviant by their relative\\nabilities to realize the basic function of the polis: living\\nwell. Given that we prize human happiness, we should, insists\\nAristotle, prefer forms of political association best suited to this\\ngoal. \",\n \"\\n\\nNecessary to the end of enhancing human flourishing, maintains\\nAristotle, is the maintenance of a suitable level of distributive\\njustice. Accordingly, he arrives at his classification of better\\nand worse governments partly by considerations of distributive\\njustice. He contends, in a manner directly analogous to his\\nattitude towards eudaimonia, that everyone will find it easy\\nto agree to the proposition that we should prefer a just state to an\\nunjust state, and even to the formal proposal that the distribution of\\njustice requires treating equal claims similarly and unequal claims\\ndissimilarly. Still, here too people will differ about what\\nconstitutes an equal or an unequal claim or, more generally, an equal\\nor an unequal person. A democrat will presume that all citizens\\nare equal, whereas an aristocrat will maintain that the best citizens\\nare, quite obviously, superior to the inferior. Accordingly, the\\ndemocrat will expect the formal constraint of justice to yield equal\\ndistribution to all, whereas the aristocrat will take for granted that\\nthe best citizens are entitled to more than the worst. \",\n \"\\n\\nWhen sorting through these claims, Aristotle relies upon his own\\naccount of distributive justice, as advanced in Nicomachean\\nEthics v 3. That account is deeply meritocratic. He\\naccordingly disparages oligarchs, who suppose that justice requires\\npreferential claims for the rich, but also democrats, who contend that\\nthe state must boost liberty across all citizens irrespective of\\nmerit. The best polis has neither function: its goal is\\nto enhance human flourishing, an end to which liberty is at best\\ninstrumental, and not something to be pursued for its own sake.\",\n \"\\n\\nStill, we should also proceed with a sober eye on what is in fact\\npossible for human beings, given our deep and abiding acquisitional\\npropensities. Given these tendencies, it turns out that although\\ndeviant, democracy may yet play a central role in the sort of mixed\\nconstitution which emerges as the best form of political organization\\navailable to us. Inferior though it is to polity (that is, rule\\nby the many serving the goal of human flourishing), and especially to\\naristocracy (government by the best humans, the aristoi, also\\ndedicated to the goal of human flourishing), democracy, as the best\\namongst the deviant forms of government, may also be the most we can\\nrealistically hope to achieve. \",\n \"\\n\\nFor an in-depth discussion of Aristotle’s political theory,\\nincluding his political naturalism, see the entry on \\n Aristotle’s Politics.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"12. Happiness and Political Association\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\n \\nAristotle regards rhetoric and the arts as belonging to the productive\\nsciences. As a family, these differ from the practical sciences\\nof ethics and politics, which concern human conduct, and from the\\ntheoretical sciences, which aim at truth for its own sake. \\nBecause they are concerned with the creation of human products broadly\\nconceived, the productive sciences include activities with obvious,\\nartefactual products like ships and buildings, but also agriculture and\\nmedicine, and even, more nebulously, rhetoric, which aims at the\\nproduction of persuasive speech (Rhet. 1355b26; cf.\\nTop. 149b5), and tragedy, which aims at\\nthe production of edifying drama (Poet.\\n1448b16–17). If we bear in mind that Aristotle\\napproaches all these activities within the broader context of his\\nteleological explanatory framework, then at least some of the highly\\npolemicized interpretative difficulties which have grown up around his\\nworks in this area, particularly the Poetics, may be sharply\\ndelimited. \",\n \"\\n\\n \\nOne such controversy centers on the question of whether\\nAristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics are primarily\\ndescriptive or prescriptive\\n works.[25] \\n To the degree that they are indeed\\nprescriptive, one may wonder whether Aristotle has presumed in these\\ntreatises to dictate to figures of the stature of Sophocles and\\nEuripides how best to pursue their crafts. To some\\nextent—but only to some extent—it may seem that he\\ndoes. There are, at any rate, clearly prescriptive elements in\\nboth these texts. Still, he does not arrive at these\\nrecommendations a priori. Rather, it is plain that\\nAristotle has collected the best works of forensic speech and tragedy\\navailable to him, and has studied them to discern their more and less\\nsuccessful features. In proceeding in this way, he aims to\\ncapture and codify what is best in both rhetorical practice and\\ntragedy, in each case relative to its appropriate productive goal.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe general goal of rhetoric is clear. Rhetoric, says Aristotle,\\n‘is the power to see, in each case, the possible ways to\\npersuade’ (Rhet. 1355b26). Different contexts, however,\\nrequire different techniques. Thus, suggests Aristotle, speakers will\\nusually find themselves in one of three contexts where persuasion is\\nparamount: deliberative (Rhet. i 4–8), epideictic\\n(Rhet. i 9), and judicial (Rhet. i 10–14). In each\\nof these contexts, speakers will have at their disposal three main\\navenues of persuasion: the character of the speaker, the emotional\\nconstitution of the audience, and the general argument\\n(logos) of the speech itself (Rhet. i 3). Rhetoric\\nthus examines techniques of persuasion pursuant to each of these\\nareas. \",\n \"\\n\\nWhen discussing these techniques, Aristotle draws heavily upon topics\\ntreated in his logical, ethical, and psychological writings. In this\\nway, the Rhetoric illuminates Aristotle’s writings in these\\ncomparatively theoretical areas by developing in concrete ways topics\\ntreated more abstractly elsewhere. For example, because a successful\\npersuasive speech proceeds alert to the emotional state of the\\naudience on the occasion of its delivery, Aristotle’s\\nRhetoric contains some of his most nuanced and specific\\ntreatments of the emotions. Heading in another\\ndirection, a close reading of the Rhetoric reveals that\\nAristotle treats the art of persuasion as closely akin to dialectic\\n(see §4.3 above). Like dialectic, rhetoric trades in\\ntechniques that are not scientific in the strict sense (see §4.2\\nabove), and though its goal is persuasion, it reaches its end best if\\nit recognizes that people naturally find proofs and well-turned\\narguments persuasive (Rhet. 1354a1, 1356a25,\\n1356a30). Accordingly, rhetoric, again like dialectic,\\nbegins with credible opinions (endoxa), though mainly of the\\npopular variety rather than those endorsed most readily by the wise\\n(Top. 100a29–35; 104a8–20; Rhet.\\n1356b34). Finally, rhetoric proceeds from such opinions to\\nconclusions which the audience will understand to follow by cogent\\npatterns of inference (Rhet. 1354a12–18,\\n1355a5–21). For this reason, too, the rhetorician will do\\nwell understand the patterns of human reasoning. \",\n \"\\n\\nFor more on Aristotle’s rhetoric, see the entry on \\n Aristotle’s Rhetoric.\",\n \"\\n\\nBy highlighting and refining techniques for successful speech, the\\nRhetoric is plainly prescriptive—but only relative to\\nthe goal of persuasion. It does not, however, select its\\nown goal or in any way dictate the end of persuasive speech: rather,\\nthe end of rhetoric is given by the nature of the craft itself. \\nIn this sense, the Rhetoric is like both the Nicomachean\\nEthics and the Politics in bearing the stamp of\\nAristotle’s broad and encompassing teleology. \",\n \"\\n\\nThe same holds true of the Poetics, but in this case the\\nend is not easily or uncontroversially articulated. It is often\\nassumed that the goal of tragedy is catharsis—the\\npurification or purgation of the emotions aroused in a tragic\\nperformance. Despite its prevalence, as an interpretation of what\\nAristotle actually says in the Poetics this understanding is\\nunderdetermined at best. When defining tragedy in a general way,\\nAristotle claims:\",\n \"\\n\\nTragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious and\\ncomplete, and which has some greatness about it. It imitates in words\\nwith pleasant accompaniments, each type belonging separately to the\\ndifferent parts of the work. It imitates people performing actions and\\ndoes not rely on narration. It achieves, through pity and fear, the\\ncatharsis of these sorts of feelings. (Poet.\\n1449b21–29)\\n\\n\",\n \"\\n\\nAlthough he has been represented in countless works of scholarship\\nas contending that tragedy is for the sake of catharsis,\\nAristotle is in fact far more circumspect. While he does contend\\nthat tragedy will effect or accomplish catharsis, in so speaking he\\ndoes not use language which clearly implies that catharsis is in itself\\nthe function of tragedy. Although a good blender will achieve a\\nblade speed of 36,000 rotations per minute, this is not its function;\\nrather, it achieves this speed in service of its function, namely\\nblending. Similarly, then, on one approach, tragedy achieves\\ncatharsis, though not because it is its function to do so. \\nThis remains so, even if it is integral to realizing its function that\\ntragedy achieve catharsis—as it is equally integral that it makes\\nus of imitation (mimêsis), and does so by using words\\nalong with pleasant accompaniments (namely, rhythm, harmony, and song;\\nPoet. 1447b27). \",\n \"\\n\\n \\nUnfortunately, Aristotle is not completely forthcoming on the question\\nof the function of tragedy. One clue towards his attitude\\ncomes from a passage in which he differentiates tragedy from historical\\nwriting:\",\n \"\\n\\nThe poet and the historian differ not in that one writes in meter and\\nthe other not; for one could put the writings of Herodotus into verse\\nand they would be history none the less, with or without meter. The\\ndifference resides in this: the one speaks of what has happened, and\\nthe other of what might be. Accordingly, poetry is more philosophical\\nand more momentous than history. The poet speaks more of the\\nuniversal, while the historian speaks of particulars. It is universal\\nthat when certain things turn out a certain way someone will in all\\nlikelihood or of necessity act or speak in a certain way—which\\nis what the poet, though attaching particular names to the situation,\\nstrives for (Poet. 1451a38–1451b10).\\n\\n \",\n \"\\n\\nIn characterizing poetry as more philosophical, universal, and\\nmomentous than history, Aristotle praises poets for their ability to\\nassay deep features of human character, to dissect the ways in which\\nhuman fortune engages and tests character, and to display how human\\nfoibles may be amplified in uncommon circumstances. We do not,\\nhowever, reflect on character primarily for entertainment value. \\nRather, and in general, Aristotle thinks of the goal of tragedy in\\nbroadly intellectualist terms: the function of tragedy is\\n‘learning, that is, figuring out what each thing is’\\n(Poet. 1448b16–17). In Aristotle’s view,\\ntragedy teaches us about ourselves. \",\n \"\\n\\n \\nThat said, catharsis is undoubtedly a key concept in Aristotle’s\\nPoetics, one which, along with imitation\\n(mimêsis), has generated enormous\\n controversy.[26] \\n These\\ncontroversies center around three poles of interpretation: the\\nsubject of catharsis, the matter of the catharsis,\\nand the nature of catharsis. To illustrate what is\\nmeant: on a naïve understanding of catharsis—which may\\nbe correct despite its naïveté—the audience\\n(the subject) undergoes catharsis by having the emotions (the\\nmatter) of pity and fear it experiences purged (the\\nnature). By varying just these three possibilities, scholars have\\nproduced a variety of interpretations—that it is the actors or\\neven the plot of the tragedy which are the subjects of catharsis, that\\nthe purification is cognitive or structural rather than emotional, and\\nthat catharsis is purification rather than purgation. On this\\nlast contrast, just as we might purify blood by filtering it, rather\\nthan purging the body of blood by letting it, so we might refine our\\nemotions, by cleansing them of their more unhealthy elements, rather\\nthan ridding ourselves of the emotions by purging them\\naltogether. The difference is considerable, since on one view the\\nemotions are regarded as in themselves destructive and so to be purged,\\nwhile on the other, the emotions may be perfectly healthy, even though,\\nlike other psychological states, they may be improved by\\nrefinement. The immediate context of the Poetics does\\nnot by itself settle these disputes conclusively. \",\n \"\\n\\n \\nAristotle says comparatively more about the second main concept of the\\nPoetics, imitation (mimêsis). Although\\nless controversial than catharsis, Aristotle’s conception of\\nmimêsis has also been\\n debated.[27] \\n Aristotle thinks that\\nimitation is a deeply ingrained human proclivity. Like political\\nassociation, he contends, mimêsis is\\nnatural. We engage in imitation from an early age,\\nalready in language learning by aping competent speakers as we learn,\\nand then also later, in the acquisition of character by treating others\\nas role models. In both these ways, we imitate because we learn\\nand grow by imitation, and for humans, learning is both natural and a\\ndelight (Poet. 1148b4–24). This same tendency, in\\nmore sophisticated and complex ways, leads us into the practice of\\ndrama. As we engage in more advanced forms of\\nmimêsis, imitation gives way to representation\\nand depiction, where we need not be regarded as attempting to\\ncopy anyone or anything in any narrow sense of the term. \\nFor tragedy does not set out merely to copy what is the case, but\\nrather, as we have seen in Aristotle’s differentiation of tragedy\\nfrom history, to speak of what might be, to engage universal themes in\\na philosophical manner, and to enlighten an audience by their\\ndepiction. So, although mimêsis is at root simple\\nimitation, as it comes to serve the goals of tragedy, it grows more\\nsophisticated and powerful, especially in the hands of those poets able\\nto deploy it to good effect. \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"13. Rhetoric and the Arts\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\n \\nAristotle’s influence is difficult to overestimate. After\\nhis death, his school, the Lyceum, carried on for some period of time,\\nthough precisely how long is unclear. In the century immediately\\nafter his death, Aristotle’s works seem to have fallen out of\\ncirculation; they reappear in the first century B.C.E., after which time\\nthey began to be disseminated, at first narrowly, but then much more\\nbroadly. They eventually came to form the backbone of some seven\\ncenturies of philosophy, in the form of the\\n commentary tradition,\\n much of it original philosophy carried on in\\na broadly Aristotelian framework. They also played a very\\nsignificant, if subordinate role, in the Neoplatonic philosophy of\\n Plotinus\\n and\\n Porphyry. \\nThereafter, from the sixth through the twelfth centuries, although the\\nbulk of Aristotle’s writings were lost to the West, they received\\nextensive consideration in\\n Byzantine Philosophy,\\n and in Arabic Philosophy, where Aristotle was so\\nprominent that be became known simply as The First Teacher (see\\nthe entry on the\\n influence of Arabic and Islamic philosophy on the Latin West).\\n In this tradition, the notably rigorous and illuminating commentaries of\\nAvicenna and Averroes interpreted and developed Aristotle’s views\\nin striking ways. These commentaries in turn proved exceedingly\\ninfluential in the earliest reception of the Aristotelian corpus into\\nthe Latin West in the twelfth century.\",\n \"\\n \\nAmong Aristotle’s greatest exponents during the early period of\\nhis reintroduction to the West,\\n Albertus Magnus,\\n and above all his student\\n Thomas Aquinas,\\n sought to reconcile Aristotle’s philosophy with Christian\\nthought. Some Aristotelians disdain Aquinas as bastardizing Aristotle,\\nwhile some Christians disown Aquinas as pandering to pagan\\nphilosophy. Many others in both camps take a much more positive view,\\nseeing Thomism as a brilliant synthesis of two towering traditions;\\narguably, the incisive commentaries written by Aquinas towards the end\\nof his life aim not so much at synthesis as straightforward exegesis\\nand exposition, and in these respects they have few equals in any\\nperiod of philosophy. Partly due to the attention of Aquinas, but for\\nmany other reasons as well, Aristotelian philosophy set the framework\\nfor the Christian philosophy of the twelfth through the sixteenth\\ncenturies, though, of course, that rich period contains a broad range\\nof philosophical activity, some more and some less in sympathy with\\nAristotelian themes. To see the extent of Aristotle’s influence, however,\\nit is necessary only to recall that the two concepts forming the\\nso-called\\n binarium famosissimum\\n (“the most famous pair”) of that\\nperiod, namely universal hylomorphism and the doctrine of the plurality\\nof forms, found their first formulations in Aristotle’s\\ntexts.\",\n \"\\n\\n \\nInterest in Aristotle continued unabated throughout the renaissance in\\nthe form of\\n Renaissance Aristotelianism.\\n The dominant figures of this period overlap\\nwith the last flowerings of Medieval Aristotelian Scholasticism, which\\nreached a rich and highly influential close in the figure of\\nSuárez, whose life in turn overlaps with Descartes. From\\nthe end of late Scholasticism, the study of Aristotle has undergone\\nvarious periods of relative neglect and intense interest, but has been\\ncarried forward unabated down to the present day. \",\n \"\\n\\nToday, philosophers of various stripes continue to look to Aristotle\\nfor guidance and inspiration in many different areas, ranging from the\\nphilosophy of mind to theories of the infinite, though perhaps\\nAristotle’s influence is seen most overtly and avowedly in the\\nresurgence of\\n virtue ethics\\n which began in the last half of the twentieth century. \\nIt seems safe at this stage to predict that Aristotle’s stature\\nis unlikely to diminish anytime in the foreseeable future. If it is any\\nindication of the direction of things to come, a quick search of the\\npresent Encyclopedia turns up more citations to ‘Aristotle’ and\\n‘Aristotelianism’ than to any other philosopher or\\nphilosophical movement. Only Plato comes close. \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"14. Aristotle’s Legacy\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Barnes, J., ed. The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volumes\nI and II, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.","Irwin, T. and Fine., G.,\nAristotle: Selections, Translated with Introduction, Notes, and\nGlossary, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995.","Ackrill, J., Categories and De Interpretatione,\ntranslated with notes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963.","Annas, J., Metaphysics Books M and N, translated with a\ncommentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.","Balme, D., De Partibus Animalium I and De Generatione\nAnimalium I, (with passages from Book II. 1–3), translated with\nan introduction and notes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.","Barnes, J., Posterior Analytics, second edition,\ntranslated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press,\n1994.","Bostock, D., Metaphysics Books Z and H, translated with a\ncommentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.","Charlton, W., Physics Books I and II, translated with\nintroduction, commentary, Note on Recent Work, and revised\nBibliography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.","Graham, D., Physics, Book VIII, translated with a\ncommentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.","Hamlyn, D., De Anima II and III, with Passages from Book\nI, translated with a commentary, and with a review of recent work\nby Christopher Shields, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.","Hussey, E., Physics Books III and IV, translated with an\nintroduction and notes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983; new\nimpression with supplementary material, 1993.","Judson, L., Metaphysics Book Λ, edited, translated\nwith an introduction and commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press,\n2019.","Keyt, D., Politics, Books V and VI Animals, translated\nwith a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.","Kirwan, C., Metaphysics: Books gamma, delta, and\nepsilon, second edition, translated with notes,\nOxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.","Kraut, R., Politics Books VII and VIII, translated with a\ncommentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.","Lennox, J., On the Parts of Animals, translated with a\ncommentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.","Madigan, A., Aristotle: Metaphysics Books B and K 1–2,\ntranslated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.","Makin, S., Metaphysics Theta, translated with an\nintroduction and commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.","Pakaluk, M., Nicomachean Ethics, Books VIII and IX,\ntranslated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.","Robinson, R., Politics: Books III and IV, translated with\na commentary by Richard Robinson; with a supplementary essay by David\nKeyt, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.","Saunders, T., Politics: Books I and II, translated with a\ncommentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.","Shields, Christopher, De Anima, translated with an\nintroduction and commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.","Smith, R., Topics Books I and VIII, With\nexcerpts from related texts, translated with a commentary, Oxford:\nOxford University Press, 2009.","Striker, G., Prior Analytics,\ntranslated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press,\n1997.","Taylor, C., Nicomachean Ethics, Books II-IV, translated\nwith an introduction and commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press,\n2006.","Williams, C., De Generatione et Corruptione, translated\nwith a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.","Woods, M., Eudemian Ethics Books I, II, and VIII, second\nedition, edited, and translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press, 1992.","Ackrill, J., Aristotle the Philosopher, Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press, 1981.","Jaeger, W., Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of his\nDevelopment, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934.","Lear, J., Aristotle: the Desire to Understand, Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press, 1988.","Ross, W. D., Aristotle, London: Methuen and Co., 1923.","Shields, C., Aristotle 2nd edition, London: Routledge, 2014.","Barnes, J., The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle,\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.","Anagnostopoulos, G., The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle,\nOxford: Blackwell, 2007.","Shields, C., The Oxford Handbook on Aristotle, Oxford:\nOxford University Press, 2012. ","Natali, C., Aristotle: His Life and School, D. Hutchinson\n(ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.","Annas, J., 1982, ‘Aristotle on inefficient causes,’\nPhilosophical Quarterly, 32: 311–326.","Bakker, Paul J. J. M., 2007, ‘Natural Philosophy,\nMetaphysics, or Something in Between: Agostino Nifo, Pietro\nPompanazzi, and Marcantonio Genua on the Nature and Place of the\nScience of Soul,’ in J. J. M. Bakker and Johannes\nM. M. H. Thijssen (eds.), Mind, Cognition, and Representation: The\nTradition of Commentaries on Aristotle’s De Anima, London:\nAshgate, pp. 151–177.","Barnes, Jonathan, 1994, Posterior Analytics,\nsecond edition, translated with a commentary, \nOxford: Clarendon Press.","Biondi, Paolo C. (ed. and trans.), (2004), Aristotle: Posterior\nAnalytics ii 19, Paris: Librairie-Philosophique-J-Vrin.","Bostock, David, 1980/2006, ‘Aristotle’s Account of\nTime,‘ in Space, Time, Matter, and Form: Essays on\nAristotle’s Physics, Oxford: Oxford University Press,\npp. 135–157.","Charles, David, 2001, “Teleological Causation in the\nPhysics,” in L. Judson (ed.), Aristotle’s\nPhysics: A Collection of Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press,\npp. 101–128.","Cleary, John, 1994, ‘Phainomena in Aristotle’s\nPhilosophic Method,’ International Journal of Philosophical\nStudies, 2: 61–97.","Coope, Ursula, 2005, Time for Aristotle: Physics IV 10–14,\nOxford: Oxford University Press.","Duarte, Shane, 2014, ‘Aristotle’s Theology and its\nRelation to the Science of Being qua Being,’\nApeiron, 40: 267–318","Frede, M., 1980, ‘The Original Notion of Cause,’ in M.\nSchofield, M. Burnyeat, and J. Barnes (ed.), Doubt and\nDogmatism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, \npp. 217–249.","Furley, D. J., ‘What Kind of Cause is Aristotle’s Final\nCause?,’ in M. Frede and G. Stricker (eds.), Rationality in\nGreek Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999,\npp. 59–79.","Gill, M. L., ‘Aristotle’s Metaphysics\nReconsidered,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy, 43\n(2005): 223–251.","Gotthelf, A., 1987, ‘Aristotle’s Conception of Final\nCausality,’ in A. Gotthelf and J. G. Lennox (eds.),\nPhilosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology, Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press, pp. 204–242.","Grote, George, 1880, Aristotle, London: Thoemmes\nContinuum.","Halliwell, Stephen, 1986, Aristotle’s Poetics,\nChapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.","Hocutt, M., 1974, ‘Aristotle’s Four Becauses.’\nPhilosophy, 49: 385–399.","Irwin, Terence, 1981, ‘Homonymy in Aristotle,’\nReview of Metaphysics, 34: 523–544.","–––, 1988, Aristotle’s First\nPrinciples, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","Johnson, Monte Ransom, 2005, Aristotle on Teleology,\nOxford: Oxford University Press.","Kraut, Richard, 1979, ‘Two Conceptions of Happiness, \nPhilosophical Review, 88: 167–197.","Lewis, Frank A., 2004, ‘Aristotle on the Homonymy of\nBeing,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 68:\n1–36.","Loux, Michael, 1973, ‘Aristotle on the\nTranscendentals,’ Phronesis, 18: 225–239.","Moravcsik, J., 1975, ‘“Aitia” as\ngenerative factor in Aristotle’s philosophy,’\nDialogue, 14: 622–638.","Owen, G. E. L., 1960, ‘Logic and Metaphysics in Some Earlier\nWorks of Aristotle,’ in I. During and G. E. L. Owen (eds.),\nPlato and Aristotle in the Mid-Fourth Century, Göteborg:\nAlmquist and Wiksell, pp. 163–190.","–––, 1961/1986, ‘Tithenai ta\nphainomena,’ Logic, Science and Dialectic, London:\nDuckworth, pp. 239–251.","Owens, Joseph, 1978, The Doctrine of Being in the\nAristotelian Metaphysics, 3rd edition, Toronto: The\nPontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.","Patzig, Gunther, 1979, ‘Theology and Ontology in\nAristotle’s Metaphysics, in J. Barnes, M. Schofied, and R. Sorabji\n(eds.), Articles on Aristotle, Volume 3: Metaphysics, London:\nDuckworth, pp. 33–49.","Pellegrin, Pierre, 1996/2003, ‘Aristotle,’ in J.\nBrunschwig and G. E. R. Lloyd (eds.), A Guide to Greek Thought,\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 32–53.","Ross, W. D., 1923, Aristotle, London: Methuen and Co.","Sauvé Meyer, S., 1992, ‘Aristotle, Teleology, and\nReduction,’ Philosophical Review, 101: 791–825.","Shields, Christopher, 1999, Order in Multiplicity: Homonymy in\nthe Philosophy of Aristotle, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","–––, 2014, Aristotle, London: Routledge.","Shute, Richard, 1888, On the Process by which the Aristotelian\nWritings Arrived at their Present Form, Oxford: Oxford University\nPress.","Ward, Julie K., 2008, Aristotle on Homonymy, Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press.","Zeller, Eduard, 1883/1955, Outlines of the History of Greek\nPhilosophy, rev. by W. Nestle, trans. L. Palmer, London:\nRoutledge."],"string":"[\n \"Barnes, J., ed. The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volumes\\nI and II, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.\",\n \"Irwin, T. and Fine., G.,\\nAristotle: Selections, Translated with Introduction, Notes, and\\nGlossary, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995.\",\n \"Ackrill, J., Categories and De Interpretatione,\\ntranslated with notes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963.\",\n \"Annas, J., Metaphysics Books M and N, translated with a\\ncommentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.\",\n \"Balme, D., De Partibus Animalium I and De Generatione\\nAnimalium I, (with passages from Book II. 1–3), translated with\\nan introduction and notes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.\",\n \"Barnes, J., Posterior Analytics, second edition,\\ntranslated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press,\\n1994.\",\n \"Bostock, D., Metaphysics Books Z and H, translated with a\\ncommentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.\",\n \"Charlton, W., Physics Books I and II, translated with\\nintroduction, commentary, Note on Recent Work, and revised\\nBibliography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.\",\n \"Graham, D., Physics, Book VIII, translated with a\\ncommentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.\",\n \"Hamlyn, D., De Anima II and III, with Passages from Book\\nI, translated with a commentary, and with a review of recent work\\nby Christopher Shields, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.\",\n \"Hussey, E., Physics Books III and IV, translated with an\\nintroduction and notes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983; new\\nimpression with supplementary material, 1993.\",\n \"Judson, L., Metaphysics Book Λ, edited, translated\\nwith an introduction and commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press,\\n2019.\",\n \"Keyt, D., Politics, Books V and VI Animals, translated\\nwith a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.\",\n \"Kirwan, C., Metaphysics: Books gamma, delta, and\\nepsilon, second edition, translated with notes,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.\",\n \"Kraut, R., Politics Books VII and VIII, translated with a\\ncommentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.\",\n \"Lennox, J., On the Parts of Animals, translated with a\\ncommentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.\",\n \"Madigan, A., Aristotle: Metaphysics Books B and K 1–2,\\ntranslated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.\",\n \"Makin, S., Metaphysics Theta, translated with an\\nintroduction and commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.\",\n \"Pakaluk, M., Nicomachean Ethics, Books VIII and IX,\\ntranslated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.\",\n \"Robinson, R., Politics: Books III and IV, translated with\\na commentary by Richard Robinson; with a supplementary essay by David\\nKeyt, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.\",\n \"Saunders, T., Politics: Books I and II, translated with a\\ncommentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.\",\n \"Shields, Christopher, De Anima, translated with an\\nintroduction and commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.\",\n \"Smith, R., Topics Books I and VIII, With\\nexcerpts from related texts, translated with a commentary, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press, 2009.\",\n \"Striker, G., Prior Analytics,\\ntranslated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press,\\n1997.\",\n \"Taylor, C., Nicomachean Ethics, Books II-IV, translated\\nwith an introduction and commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press,\\n2006.\",\n \"Williams, C., De Generatione et Corruptione, translated\\nwith a commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.\",\n \"Woods, M., Eudemian Ethics Books I, II, and VIII, second\\nedition, edited, and translated with a commentary, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press, 1992.\",\n \"Ackrill, J., Aristotle the Philosopher, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press, 1981.\",\n \"Jaeger, W., Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of his\\nDevelopment, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934.\",\n \"Lear, J., Aristotle: the Desire to Understand, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press, 1988.\",\n \"Ross, W. D., Aristotle, London: Methuen and Co., 1923.\",\n \"Shields, C., Aristotle 2nd edition, London: Routledge, 2014.\",\n \"Barnes, J., The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.\",\n \"Anagnostopoulos, G., The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle,\\nOxford: Blackwell, 2007.\",\n \"Shields, C., The Oxford Handbook on Aristotle, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press, 2012. \",\n \"Natali, C., Aristotle: His Life and School, D. Hutchinson\\n(ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.\",\n \"Annas, J., 1982, ‘Aristotle on inefficient causes,’\\nPhilosophical Quarterly, 32: 311–326.\",\n \"Bakker, Paul J. J. M., 2007, ‘Natural Philosophy,\\nMetaphysics, or Something in Between: Agostino Nifo, Pietro\\nPompanazzi, and Marcantonio Genua on the Nature and Place of the\\nScience of Soul,’ in J. J. M. Bakker and Johannes\\nM. M. H. Thijssen (eds.), Mind, Cognition, and Representation: The\\nTradition of Commentaries on Aristotle’s De Anima, London:\\nAshgate, pp. 151–177.\",\n \"Barnes, Jonathan, 1994, Posterior Analytics,\\nsecond edition, translated with a commentary, \\nOxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"Biondi, Paolo C. (ed. and trans.), (2004), Aristotle: Posterior\\nAnalytics ii 19, Paris: Librairie-Philosophique-J-Vrin.\",\n \"Bostock, David, 1980/2006, ‘Aristotle’s Account of\\nTime,‘ in Space, Time, Matter, and Form: Essays on\\nAristotle’s Physics, Oxford: Oxford University Press,\\npp. 135–157.\",\n \"Charles, David, 2001, “Teleological Causation in the\\nPhysics,” in L. Judson (ed.), Aristotle’s\\nPhysics: A Collection of Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press,\\npp. 101–128.\",\n \"Cleary, John, 1994, ‘Phainomena in Aristotle’s\\nPhilosophic Method,’ International Journal of Philosophical\\nStudies, 2: 61–97.\",\n \"Coope, Ursula, 2005, Time for Aristotle: Physics IV 10–14,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Duarte, Shane, 2014, ‘Aristotle’s Theology and its\\nRelation to the Science of Being qua Being,’\\nApeiron, 40: 267–318\",\n \"Frede, M., 1980, ‘The Original Notion of Cause,’ in M.\\nSchofield, M. Burnyeat, and J. Barnes (ed.), Doubt and\\nDogmatism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, \\npp. 217–249.\",\n \"Furley, D. J., ‘What Kind of Cause is Aristotle’s Final\\nCause?,’ in M. Frede and G. Stricker (eds.), Rationality in\\nGreek Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999,\\npp. 59–79.\",\n \"Gill, M. L., ‘Aristotle’s Metaphysics\\nReconsidered,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy, 43\\n(2005): 223–251.\",\n \"Gotthelf, A., 1987, ‘Aristotle’s Conception of Final\\nCausality,’ in A. Gotthelf and J. G. Lennox (eds.),\\nPhilosophical Issues in Aristotle’s Biology, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press, pp. 204–242.\",\n \"Grote, George, 1880, Aristotle, London: Thoemmes\\nContinuum.\",\n \"Halliwell, Stephen, 1986, Aristotle’s Poetics,\\nChapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.\",\n \"Hocutt, M., 1974, ‘Aristotle’s Four Becauses.’\\nPhilosophy, 49: 385–399.\",\n \"Irwin, Terence, 1981, ‘Homonymy in Aristotle,’\\nReview of Metaphysics, 34: 523–544.\",\n \"–––, 1988, Aristotle’s First\\nPrinciples, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Johnson, Monte Ransom, 2005, Aristotle on Teleology,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Kraut, Richard, 1979, ‘Two Conceptions of Happiness, \\nPhilosophical Review, 88: 167–197.\",\n \"Lewis, Frank A., 2004, ‘Aristotle on the Homonymy of\\nBeing,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 68:\\n1–36.\",\n \"Loux, Michael, 1973, ‘Aristotle on the\\nTranscendentals,’ Phronesis, 18: 225–239.\",\n \"Moravcsik, J., 1975, ‘“Aitia” as\\ngenerative factor in Aristotle’s philosophy,’\\nDialogue, 14: 622–638.\",\n \"Owen, G. E. L., 1960, ‘Logic and Metaphysics in Some Earlier\\nWorks of Aristotle,’ in I. During and G. E. L. Owen (eds.),\\nPlato and Aristotle in the Mid-Fourth Century, Göteborg:\\nAlmquist and Wiksell, pp. 163–190.\",\n \"–––, 1961/1986, ‘Tithenai ta\\nphainomena,’ Logic, Science and Dialectic, London:\\nDuckworth, pp. 239–251.\",\n \"Owens, Joseph, 1978, The Doctrine of Being in the\\nAristotelian Metaphysics, 3rd edition, Toronto: The\\nPontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.\",\n \"Patzig, Gunther, 1979, ‘Theology and Ontology in\\nAristotle’s Metaphysics, in J. Barnes, M. Schofied, and R. Sorabji\\n(eds.), Articles on Aristotle, Volume 3: Metaphysics, London:\\nDuckworth, pp. 33–49.\",\n \"Pellegrin, Pierre, 1996/2003, ‘Aristotle,’ in J.\\nBrunschwig and G. E. R. Lloyd (eds.), A Guide to Greek Thought,\\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 32–53.\",\n \"Ross, W. D., 1923, Aristotle, London: Methuen and Co.\",\n \"Sauvé Meyer, S., 1992, ‘Aristotle, Teleology, and\\nReduction,’ Philosophical Review, 101: 791–825.\",\n \"Shields, Christopher, 1999, Order in Multiplicity: Homonymy in\\nthe Philosophy of Aristotle, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2014, Aristotle, London: Routledge.\",\n \"Shute, Richard, 1888, On the Process by which the Aristotelian\\nWritings Arrived at their Present Form, Oxford: Oxford University\\nPress.\",\n \"Ward, Julie K., 2008, Aristotle on Homonymy, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press.\",\n \"Zeller, Eduard, 1883/1955, Outlines of the History of Greek\\nPhilosophy, rev. by W. Nestle, trans. L. Palmer, London:\\nRoutledge.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../arabic-islamic-influence/","text":"Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, historical and methodological topics in: influence of Arabic and Islamic Philosophy on the Latin West"},{"href":"../aristotle-commentators/","text":"Aristotle, commentators on"},{"href":"../aristotle-aesthetics/","text":"Aristotle, General Topics: aesthetics"},{"href":"../aristotle-biology/","text":"Aristotle, General Topics: biology"},{"href":"../aristotle-categories/","text":"Aristotle, General Topics: categories"},{"href":"../aristotle-ethics/","text":"Aristotle, General Topics: ethics"},{"href":"../aristotle-logic/","text":"Aristotle, General Topics: logic"},{"href":"../aristotle-metaphysics/","text":"Aristotle, General Topics: metaphysics"},{"href":"../aristotle-politics/","text":"Aristotle, General Topics: political theory"},{"href":"../aristotle-psychology/","text":"Aristotle, General Topics: psychology"},{"href":"../aristotle-rhetoric/","text":"Aristotle, General Topics: rhetoric"},{"href":"../aristotle-causality/","text":"Aristotle, Special Topics: causality"},{"href":"../aristotle-mathematics/","text":"Aristotle, Special Topics: mathematics"},{"href":"../aristotle-natphil/","text":"Aristotle, Special Topics: natural philosophy"},{"href":"../aristotle-noncontradiction/","text":"Aristotle, Special Topics: on non-contradiction"},{"href":"../essential-accidental/","text":"essential vs. accidental properties"},{"href":"../form-matter/","text":"form vs. matter"},{"href":"../happiness/","text":"happiness"},{"href":"../hegel-dialectics/","text":"Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: dialectics"},{"href":"../substance/","text":"substance"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../arabic-islamic-influence/\",\n \"text\": \"Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, historical and methodological topics in: influence of Arabic and Islamic Philosophy on the Latin West\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotle-commentators/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotle, commentators on\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotle-aesthetics/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotle, General Topics: aesthetics\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotle-biology/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotle, General Topics: biology\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotle-categories/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotle, General Topics: categories\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotle-ethics/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotle, General Topics: ethics\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotle-logic/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotle, General Topics: logic\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotle-metaphysics/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotle, General Topics: metaphysics\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotle-politics/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotle, General Topics: political theory\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotle-psychology/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotle, General Topics: psychology\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotle-rhetoric/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotle, General Topics: rhetoric\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotle-causality/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotle, Special Topics: causality\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotle-mathematics/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotle, Special Topics: mathematics\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotle-natphil/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotle, Special Topics: natural philosophy\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotle-noncontradiction/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotle, Special Topics: on non-contradiction\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../essential-accidental/\",\n \"text\": \"essential vs. accidental properties\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../form-matter/\",\n \"text\": \"form vs. matter\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../happiness/\",\n \"text\": \"happiness\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../hegel-dialectics/\",\n \"text\": \"Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: dialectics\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../substance/\",\n \"text\": \"substance\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":77,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"arnauld"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Antoine Arnauld"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Sat Jan 27, 2007; substantive revision Fri Nov 5, 2021"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nAntoine Arnauld (1612–1694) was a powerful figure in the\nintellectual life of seventeenth-century Europe. He had a long and\nhighly controversial career as a theologian, and was an able and\ninfluential philosopher. His writings were published and widely read\nover a period of more than fifty years and were assembled in\n1775–1782 in forty-two large folio volumes.","\nEvaluations of Arnauld’s work as a theologian vary. Ian Hacking,\nfor example, says that Arnauld was “perhaps the most brilliant\ntheologian of his time” (Hacking 1975a, 25). Ronald Knox, on the\nother hand, says, “It was the fashion among the Jansenists to\nrepresent Antoine Arnauld as a great theologian; he should be\nremembered, rather as a great controversialist… A theologian by\ntrade, Arnauld was a barrister by instinct” (Knox 1950, 196). It\nis agreed on all sides, however, that Arnauld was acute and learned in\ntheology as well as in philosophy.","\nArnauld was an important participant in the philosophical debates of\nhis century, and carried out famous intellectual exchanges with\nDescartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz. In addition, the Port-Royal\nLogic, l’Art de penser, which he co-authored with\nPierre Nicole, was a standard text in the field for two centuries.\nLess attention has been paid to Arnauld’s lifelong efforts to\nreconcile the doctrine of grâce efficace par\nelle-même with freedom of will, though they have many\nconnections with the debate about determinism and free will that\ncontinues to this day."],"string":"[\n \"\\nAntoine Arnauld (1612–1694) was a powerful figure in the\\nintellectual life of seventeenth-century Europe. He had a long and\\nhighly controversial career as a theologian, and was an able and\\ninfluential philosopher. His writings were published and widely read\\nover a period of more than fifty years and were assembled in\\n1775–1782 in forty-two large folio volumes.\",\n \"\\nEvaluations of Arnauld’s work as a theologian vary. Ian Hacking,\\nfor example, says that Arnauld was “perhaps the most brilliant\\ntheologian of his time” (Hacking 1975a, 25). Ronald Knox, on the\\nother hand, says, “It was the fashion among the Jansenists to\\nrepresent Antoine Arnauld as a great theologian; he should be\\nremembered, rather as a great controversialist… A theologian by\\ntrade, Arnauld was a barrister by instinct” (Knox 1950, 196). It\\nis agreed on all sides, however, that Arnauld was acute and learned in\\ntheology as well as in philosophy.\",\n \"\\nArnauld was an important participant in the philosophical debates of\\nhis century, and carried out famous intellectual exchanges with\\nDescartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz. In addition, the Port-Royal\\nLogic, l’Art de penser, which he co-authored with\\nPierre Nicole, was a standard text in the field for two centuries.\\nLess attention has been paid to Arnauld’s lifelong efforts to\\nreconcile the doctrine of grâce efficace par\\nelle-même with freedom of will, though they have many\\nconnections with the debate about determinism and free will that\\ncontinues to this day.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Life and Works","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. Arnauld on the Distinction between Philosophy and Theology","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"3. Arnauld’s Cartesianism","sub_toc":["3.1 Philosophical method","3.2 Arnauld’s identification of ideas with perceptions, a new interpretation","3.3 Mind-body dualism","3.4 The Creation of the eternal truths","3.5 Are God’s actions reeasonable?"]},{"content_title":"4. Arnauld and Malebranche","sub_toc":["4.1 Malebranche’s position in the Treatise of Nature and Grace","4.2 Two themes in Arnauld’s criticism of the Treatise of Nature and Grace","4.3 Does God act only by general volitions?","4.4 Arnauld’s criticism of Malebranche’s occasionalism"]},{"content_title":"5. Arnauld and Leibniz","sub_toc":["5.1 Leibniz’s notion of an individual substance","5.2 Arnauld’s criticism of Leibniz’s modal metaphysics; Arnauld’s alternative"]},{"content_title":"6. Arnauld’s Compatibilism","sub_toc":["6.1 The Congregationes de Auxiliis and seventeenth-century controversy about grace","6.2 Bañez, Jansen, and Arnauld on the nature of efficacious actual grace of the will","6.3 The limits of Arnauld’s compatibilism","6.4 Arnauld’s late position on the nature of free will","6.5 The advantages Arnauld claims for his new theory over Jansen’s theory"]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":["Arnauld’s Works","Related Early Modern Works","Secondary Works Cited","Other Recommended Secondary Works"]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Life and Works\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Arnauld on the Distinction between Philosophy and Theology\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Arnauld’s Cartesianism\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"3.1 Philosophical method\",\n \"3.2 Arnauld’s identification of ideas with perceptions, a new interpretation\",\n \"3.3 Mind-body dualism\",\n \"3.4 The Creation of the eternal truths\",\n \"3.5 Are God’s actions reeasonable?\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Arnauld and Malebranche\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"4.1 Malebranche’s position in the Treatise of Nature and Grace\",\n \"4.2 Two themes in Arnauld’s criticism of the Treatise of Nature and Grace\",\n \"4.3 Does God act only by general volitions?\",\n \"4.4 Arnauld’s criticism of Malebranche’s occasionalism\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Arnauld and Leibniz\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"5.1 Leibniz’s notion of an individual substance\",\n \"5.2 Arnauld’s criticism of Leibniz’s modal metaphysics; Arnauld’s alternative\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. Arnauld’s Compatibilism\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"6.1 The Congregationes de Auxiliis and seventeenth-century controversy about grace\",\n \"6.2 Bañez, Jansen, and Arnauld on the nature of efficacious actual grace of the will\",\n \"6.3 The limits of Arnauld’s compatibilism\",\n \"6.4 Arnauld’s late position on the nature of free will\",\n \"6.5 The advantages Arnauld claims for his new theory over Jansen’s theory\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"Arnauld’s Works\",\n \"Related Early Modern Works\",\n \"Secondary Works Cited\",\n \"Other Recommended Secondary Works\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\nAntoine Arnauld was born in Paris on February 6, 1612, the twentieth\nand last child of an important French family. He is often referred to\nin the French literature as Le Grand Arnauld. Another famous\nmember of the family was his sister, Mère Angélique\nArnauld. Installed by her wealthy and powerful father as abbess of the\nconvent of Port-Royal in 1602 at the age of eleven, she later reformed\nthe convent and it became a center of intense religious life. Several\nof Arnauld’s sisters were nuns at Port-Royal, where his mother\njoined them after the death of his father in 1621.","\nThe young Antoine attended the Collège de\nCalvi-Sorbonne, where one of his fellow students was his nephew,\nIsaac Lemaître de Sacy. Arnauld went on to study philosophy at\nthe Collège de Lisieux, and then decided to follow in\nhis father’s steps as a lawyer. However, under the influence of\nhis mother and her confessor, Jean Duvergier, the abbé de\nSaint-Cyran¸ he changed his mind and began studies in\ntheology in 1633.","\nAbout 1640, he joined a small group of solitaires who lived\nin the countryside near Port-Royal and were associated with the\nconvent. They included Pierre Nicole, Claude Launcelot, and Sacy. The\nsolitaires initiated the petites écoles de\nPort-Royal which continued in various locations from the late\n1630s until 1660. Their students included the dramatist Jean Racine.\nLater on, Arnauld cooperated with Sacy in the first important French\ntranslation of the\n Bible.[1]\n He also co-authored the Grammaire générale et\nraisonnée with Lancelot and La Logique ou l’Art\nde penser (hereinafter Logic), with Nicole. All of these\ncollaborative projects had their origins in the petites\nécoles. Blaise Pascal was closely associated with the\nsolitaires beginning in 1655.","\nThe year 1641 was an eventful one for Arnauld. He was ordained a\npriest on September 21. During the year, he completed the\n“Fourth Objections” to Descartes’\nMeditations and wrote De la Fréquente\ncommunion (published in 1643). The first work established his\nreputation as a philosopher. The second went through many editions and\nhad an effect on Catholic sacramental practice up to the end of the\nnineteenth century. Jansen’s Augustinus was also\npublished in Paris in 1641, having been published posthumously in the\nNetherlands a year earlier. It was attacked by the official theologian\nof Paris, Isaac Habert, who preached a series of sermons against\nJansen in the cathedral of Paris during Lent, 1643. Arnauld, who had\narrived at an interpretation of Augustine similar to, though not\nidentical with, that of Jansen, undertook, at the request of\nSaint-Cyran, to defend Jansen against the accusation of heresy. This\nhe did in his Première Apologie pour Jansénius,\n1644, and Seconde Apologie, 1645. Although Arnauld did not\nagree with important details of Jansen’s view, he continued to\ndefend Jansen against the charge of heresy off and on for the rest of\nhis life.","\nIn 1653 the famous five propositions attributed to Jansen were\ndeclared to be heretical by Pope Innocent X in the Constitution\n“Cum Occasione.” Arnauld and most of the\nPort-Royal group claimed that the five propositions, although\nheretical on their most likely interpretation, were not in fact in\nJansen’s work. The dispute led to Arnauld’s expulsion from\nthe Sorbonne after a celebrated trial, which lasted from December 1,\n1655 to January 30, 1656. Pascal came to Arnauld’s defense with\nthe Provincial Letters, published in installments from\nJanuary 23, 1656 to May, 1657. The dispute lasted until 1669, when the\nFrench bishops who supported Arnauld worked out a compromise with Pope\nClement IX, and Arnauld enjoyed almost a decade in the good graces of\nboth the court and the Pope. During this time, Arnauld wrote\nvoluminously on the Eucharist, but he also found time to co-author the\nPort-Royal Grammar and Logic, and to write his\nNouveaux éléments de géométrie.\nHowever, in the late 1670s, the attacks on Port-Royal by civil and\nreligious authorities resumed, and in 1679 Arnauld fled to the\nNetherlands, where he remained until his death, in Liège, on\nAugust 8, 1694.","\nThe last fifteen years of Arnauld’s life, spent in self-imposed\nexile, were among his most fruitful in philosophy. During this period,\nhe carried on his debates with Malebranche and Leibniz, and also\nreexamined his position on human free will. Arnauld’s published\ncriticism of Malebranche began in 1683 with On True and False\nIdeas (hereinafter Ideas). But the central topic of the\nexchange was Malebranche’s use of occasionalism to explain how\nit is that not all human beings are saved. Arnauld provided a\nsystematic criticism of that position in the three volumes of\nRéflexions philosophiques et théologiques sur le\nnouveau système de la nature et de la grâce\n(hereinafter Réflexions), published in 1685 and 1686.\nArnauld’s famous correspondence with Leibniz was initiated by\nLeibniz in 1686, when he sent Arnauld the section headings of his\nprojected Discourse on Metaphysics."],"section_title":"1. Life and Works","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nArnauld considered it important to be clear about the distinction\nbetween philosophy and theology. This concern is present in his work\nfrom the beginning, in 1641, to the end of his published writings.\nThus, he divides the “Fourth Objections” to\nDescartes’ Meditations into “the possible\nphilosophical objections regarding the major issues of the nature of\nour mind and of God” and “the problems which a theologian\nmight come up against in the work as a whole”\n(Descartes, 2:169). One of Arnauld’s criticisms of\nMalebranche is that he does not establish many of the principles in\nhis system of nature and grace either by the proper methods of\nphilosophy or of theology. Again, in Règles du bon\nsens, written the year before his death, Arnauld warns,","\nBe very careful about the nature of the question in dispute, whether\nit is philosophical or theological. For if it is theological, it must\nbe decided principally by authority, whereas if it is philosophical,\nit must be decided principally by\n reason.[2]\n ","\nAccording to Arnauld, the chief purpose of theology is to defend the\ntruths revealed by God through Sacred Scripture and the teaching\ntradition of the Church. Part of the ceremony in which he received the\ndoctorate in theology from the Sorbonne was a vow, made before the\naltar of the Holy Martyrs, “that we will give our life before\nleaving the truth undefended.” In the speech he gave on that\noccasion, Arnauld emphasized the vow, which he said was instituted\nbecause","\nthe obligation to defend the truth with force and courage is so\nindispensable in a theologian that those whose courage in this regard\ncould weaken, should be committed to it by the holiness and piety of a\nsolemn public vow (Traduction du Discours latin prononcé\npar M. Arnauld en recevant le Bonnet de Docteur, OA, 43:12).\n","\nThis intense religious commitment to his role as a theologian\ncontinued throughout his life. Combined with his combative\npersonality, it helps to explain the passion with which he defended\nindividual theologians, especially Saint-Cyran and Jansen, as well as\nwhat he took to be the truths of revelation.","\nRegarding philosophy, Arnauld, like Descartes, held that its purpose\nwas to acquire useful knowledge through reason. That reason ought to\nbe employed only in the pursuit of useful knowledge is emphasized in\nthe opening pages of the Logic. Arnauld and Nicole say that\n“speculative sciences, such as geometry, astronomy, and\nphysics” can be used as instruments for perfecting judgment and\nreason. This provides a use for some of the “nooks and\ncrannies” of those sciences, which would otherwise be\n“completely worthless.” They go on to say,","\nPeople are not born to spend their time measuring lines, examining the\nrelations between angles, or contemplating different motions of\nmatter. The mind is too large, life too short, time too precious to\noccupy oneself with such trivial objects. But they are obligated to be\njust, fair, and judicious in all their speech, their actions, and the\nbusiness they conduct. Above all they ought to train and educate\nthemselves for this (Logic, 5).\n","\nArnauld did not think, however, that philosophical sciences are useful\nonly as instruments for acquiring virtues. Natural philosophy or\nphysics can be made to serve the good of human life in many ways and\neven metaphysics is useful in that it can help the theologian in the\ntask of defending the truth.","\nAn outstanding example of that sort of usefulness, in Arnauld’s\nview, was Descartes’ argument for the distinction of the soul or\nmind from the body. Arnauld refers to Descartes as a “Christian\nphilosopher,” echoing Descartes’ own use of the phrase in\nthe letter dedicating the Meditations on First Philosophy to\nthe Faculty of Theology of the Sorbonne, where Descartes says that he\ncarried out the injunction of the Fourth Lateran Council\n(1512–17) that “Christian philosophers” should try\nto prove the immateriality of the soul (Descartes, 2:4).","\nThe authorities most often cited by Arnauld are Augustine and Aquinas\nin theology, and Augustine, Aquinas, and Descartes in philosophy.\nArnauld’s attitude toward these predecessors is complex. From\nthe outset of his published work in philosophy, he claimed that\nAugustinian themes were present in Descartes. However, in his late\nwork, beginning with On True and False Ideas in 1683, he\nbegan to cite Aquinas frequently, as well as Augustine, both in\nphilosophy and theology. Thus, in the 181 folio pages of\nIdeas, which Arnauld describes as dealing with a purely\nphilosophical topic, he cites Augustine twenty times and Aquinas six\ntimes, always claiming that they agree with Descartes and with his own\nposition. Similarly, in the theological part of\nRéflexions, Arnauld relies heavily on Aquinas’s\nChristology while arguing that Malebranche’s theodicy leads him\ninto heterodox, if not downright heretical, positions (OA\n39:777). Again, in his late work on the problem of human free will and\ngrâce efficace par elle-même, Arnauld took over\nwhat he says is the Thomistic position that the will is free when it\nis a potestas ou facultas ad opposita. And in the controversy\nwith Nicole and others over Nicole’s theory of a grâce\ngénérale, Arnauld relied heavily on Aquinas’s\naccount of cognition. So frequently did Arnauld rely on Thomistic\nformulations in his late work that his friends reproached him for\n“abandoning Augustine in order to follow Aquinas, thus\npreferring the disciple to the master” (Règles du bon\nsens, OA, 10:154). This reproach had to do directly with\nArnauld’s rejection of the “Platonism” in Augustine\nand Jansen. But as shown below, Arnauld, late in his career, also\nparted company with Augustine and Jansen on the nature of human free\nwill, and with Jansen’s account of the nature of actual\ngrace.","\nArnauld had a scholarly knowledge of the history of philosophy and\ntheology, and was certainly aware of the important differences among\nAugustine, Aquinas, and Descartes on such issues as the role of sense\nperception in human knowledge, the relation of the mind to the body,\nand the nature of human freedom. But Arnauld wanted to emphasize the\ncontinuity of Descartes with the Christian past. Arnauld feared that\nDescartes’ philosophy would be made into a weapon against the\nChristian tradition. Emphasizing those elements in Descartes’\nphilosophy that are in continuity with Augustine and Aquinas was part\nof Arnauld’s effort to make of Cartesianism an ally, rather than\nan enemy, of the faith."],"section_title":"2. Arnauld on the Distinction between Philosophy and Theology","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nUnlike Saint-Cyran, Jansen, and most of the Port-royalists, Arnauld\nhad a positive appreciation of philosophy, and a lively interest in\nthe subject (See Nadler 1989, 18 ff.). His philosophy is typically,\nand correctly, classified as Cartesian. Indeed, Leibniz said, in 1691,\nthat Arnauld had been “in all ways for Descartes for a long\n time.”[3]\n Arnauld enthusiastically endorsed Descartes’ physics and the\napproach to mind-body dualism to which it gave rise. He also adopted\nsome parts of Descartes’ views on philosophical method.","\nArnauld’s Descartes, however, is unlike the Descartes who is\nseen as the father of the enlightenment and who anticipated many of\nthe preoccupations of recent analytical philosophy. Arnauld claims to\nset forth the gist of Descartes’ philosophy, but he did not\nhesitate to replace parts of Descartes’ philosophy with\ndifferent though related propositions, especially when doing so made\nDescartes a more reliable ally in what Arnauld took to be his primary\ntask, to defend the truths of the faith."],"section_title":"3. Arnauld’s Cartesianism","subsections":[{"content":["\nIn the Fourth Part of the Logic, “On Method,”\nArnauld and Nicole present an account of the distinction between\nanalysis and synthesis that they say is taken from a manuscript of\nDescartes lent to them by Clerselier. What they present is a free\ntranslation of Rule Thirteen of the Rules for the Direction of the\nMind. They then paraphrase the four rules given by Descartes in\nPart Two of the Discourse on the Method, saying that although\nthe rules are “often difficult to follow,” yet “it\nis always helpful to bear them in mind, and to heed them as much as\npossible whenever we try to find the truth by means of reason”\n(Logic, 234–39). But Arnauld developed the Cartesian\nposition on philosophical method in a distinctive way. In particular,\nhe reshaped the notion of an idea, of a confused idea, of a clear and\ndistinct idea, and of methodic doubt.","\nAn idea, according to Arnauld, is the same thing as a perception (in\nthe broad sense of the term characteristic of seventeenth-century\nphilosophy), and every perception has an object distinct from the\nperception itself. Every idea, i.e., every perception, is, in\naddition, a consciousness of itself. But this “implicit\nreflexion” makes present to the mind a perception that is, in\nthe first place, of an object distinct from itself. As Arnauld puts\nit, “I know myself in knowing other things”\n(Ideas, 6). It is obviously true, he says, that we can know\nobjects only through the mediation of our perceptions, i.e., our\nideas, of them:","\nBut if, by not knowing them immediately, is meant being able\nto know them only by representative beings distinct from\nperceptions, I hold that in this sense we can know material things, as\nwell as God and our soul, not only mediately but also\nimmediately, i.e., that we can know them without there being\nany intermediary between our perceptions and the object (Of True\nand False Ideas, hereinafter Ideas, 31).\n","\nArnauld says that the object of any perception has objective\nbeing in the perception. Furthermore, the object has objective\nbeing in the perception as having properties. If an object\nexists objectively in a given perception as having a given property,\nthen Arnauld says that the perception represents the object\nas having that property, that is, makes the object present to the mind\nas having that\n property.[4]\n Furthermore, an idea (or perception) can represent its object to the\nperceiving mind as having this or that property contingently or\nnecessarily. Arnauld cites the dictum, “it is in the idea of\neach thing that we see its properties,” and takes it to refer to\nan explicit reflection upon an idea that represents its object as\nhaving certain properties necessarily.","\nArnauld argues at length that this theory of ideas was also held by\nDescartes (Ideas, 26ff.). This claim has puzzled philosophers\nfrom Thomas Reid to the present (Reid 1785, 169). A good example of\nthe more common interpretation of Descartes’ theory is provided\nby Ian Hacking, who also attributes the theory, as he understands it,\nto the Port-Royal Logic. Hacking begins with the first\nsentence of the First Part of the Logic: “We have no\nknowledge of what is outside us except by the mediation of\nthe ideas within us,” and continues,","\nThe Cartesian ego has set the stage. The ego able to\ncontemplate what is within it ponders what lies outside. There are\nsome objects that we can contemplate without being logically committed\nto the existence of anything other than the ego. These objects are\nideas (Hacking 1975b, 29).\n","\nBorrowing an example from Elizabeth Anscombe’s comment on\nBerkeley, Hacking says that in the Cartesian (and Port-royalist)\ntheory, “Ideas [in the mind] are paradigm ‘objects’\nand coins [in a man’s pocket] are not” (Hacking 1975b,\n28–30). But the sentence that Hacking quotes from the First Part\nof the Logic does not demand the interpretation he gives it.\nIt is consistent with the position Arnauld develops in Ideas\n(published in the same year as the fifth and last edition of the\nLogic), according to which ideas are primarily perceptions of\nexternal objects distinct from the perceiver, objects like coins in a\nman’s pocket; and only secondarily objects of reflexive\nperception. Arnauld makes a good case for the claim that this position\nwas also held by Descartes, but the claim is not universally\naccepted.","\nArnauld’s account of clarity and distinctness, obscurity and\nconfusion of ideas can be found in the First Part, Chapter 9, of the\nLogic. The discussion proceeds by way of examples, rather\nthan general definitions, but it can be summarized as follows: The\nbasic properties of ideas are clarity and confusion. Clarity of ideas\nis the same as vividness, and this is a matter of degree; the opposite\nof clarity is obscurity. Confusion of ideas results when a number of\nideas are connected by false judgments, and confusion produces\nobscurity. Opposite to confusedness of ideas is distinctness. Arnauld\nand Nicole apply these distinctions to the idea of pain:","\nWe can say that all ideas are distinct insofar as they are clear, and\nthat their obscurity derives only from their confusion, just as in\npain the simple sensation which strikes us is clear and also distinct.\nBut what is confused, namely that the sensation is in the hand, is by\nno means clear in us (Logic, 48).\n","\nAgain, Arnauld and Nicole speak of “the obscure and confused\nideas we have of sensible qualities, the soul adding its false\njudgments to what nature causes us to know” (Logic,\n49–50). The simple idea of pain, for example, is a clear and\ndistinct idea of a sensory state in the mind, and the idea of the pain\nin the hand is a compound and confused idea of something in the hand\nthat exactly resembles pain. Being confused, the idea is also obscure,\nbecause what it is in the hand that exactly resembles pain is\n“by no means clear to us.” Arnauld’s theory of clear\nand confused ideas implies that ideas, as they are given to us by\nnature, and thus by God, are clear and distinct, and therefore cannot\nbe deceptive, or “materially false.” Any deceptiveness in\nour ideas derives from their confusedness and is the result of our\nmisuse of freedom. It is not God who confuses us, but we who confuse\nourselves.","\nArnauld’s comments on the idea of pain are part of a larger\nposition on “ideas of sensation.” In a famous passage in\nthe “Fourth Objections,” Arnauld objected to\nDescartes’ statement, “If cold is merely the absence of\nheat, the idea of cold which represents it to me as a positive thing\nwill be materially false” (Descartes, 2:145). As part\nof his reply, Descartes says,","\nIf cold is simply an absence, the idea of cold is not coldness itself\nas it exists objectively in the intellect, but something else, which I\nerroneously mistake for this absence, namely a sensation which in fact\nhas no existence outside the intellect (Descartes, 2:163).\n","\nArnauld developed a general account of sensory ideas that builds on\nthis part of Descartes’ reply. He sets out his account clearly\nin aIdeas: Sensory ideas, like the idea of pain and the idea\nof cold, are perceptions of mental states. Taken apart from the\njudgments in which we falsely identify these mental states with states\nof material things, sensory ideas are clear and distinct. They become\nconfused, and hence obscure, only as a result of the precipitous,\nfalse judgments of childhood. Arnauld quotes Descartes’\nPrinciples of Philosophy, Part I, #68 in support of his\naccount:","\nWe know pain, color and the other sensations clearly and distinctly\nwhen we consider them simply as thoughts, but when we would judge that\ncolor, pain, etc., are things which subsist outside our thought, we do\nnot conceive in any way what that color, that pain, etc., is (Quoted\nby Arnauld in Ideas, 132).\n","\nArnauld also gave a distinctive interpretation of Descartes’\nmethod of doubt. In the “Fourth Objections,” Arnauld\noffers, as the first of “the problems which a theologian might\ncome up against in the work as a whole,” the following: “I\nam afraid that the author’s somewhat free style of\nphilosophizing, which calls everything into doubt, may cause offence\nto some people” (Descartes, 2:151). Arnauld recommends\nthat the First Meditation be “furnished with a brief preface\nwhich explains that there is no serious doubt cast on these matters\nbut that the purpose is to isolate temporarily those matters which\nleave room for even the ‘slightest’ and most\n‘exaggerated’ doubt,” and that the clause\n“since I did not know the author of my being” be replaced\nby “since I was pretending that I did not know the author of my\nbeing.”","\nArnauld was asking Descartes to make clear that his method did not\ninvolve real doubt, but only a consideration of what would happen\nif one were to doubt. Consider this passage from the\nPort-Royal Logic:","\nIf there were people able to doubt that they were not sleeping or were\nnot mad, or who could even believe that the existence of everything\nexternal is uncertain … at least no one could doubt, as St.\nAugustine says, that one exists, that one is thinking, or that they\nare alive… From this clear, certain, and indubitable knowledge\none can form a rule for accepting as true all thoughts found to be as\nclear as this one appears to be (Logic, p.\n 228).[5]\n ","\nThis is as close as Arnauld comes to using methodic doubt, but it does\nnot imply that one can really doubt the existence of an external\nworld, much less that one ought to do so, even once in one’s\nlifetime.","\nIt is not clear to what extent Descartes would have agreed with that\ninterpretation of methodic doubt. He did not adopt the first of\nArnauld’s two suggested revisions. Perhaps he thought that the\npoint was covered in the “Synopsis” of the\nMeditations. But he did adopt Arnauld’s second\nrecommendation by adding some words in parentheses in the Sixth\nMeditation, thus:","\nThe second reason for doubt was that since I did not know the author\nof my being (or at least was pretending not to), I saw nothing to rule\nout the possibility that my natural constitution made me prone to\nerror even in matters which seemed to me most true\n(Descartes, 2:53).\n","\nOn the other hand, Descartes begins the Principles of\nPhilosophy with the remark,","\nIt seems that the only way of freeing ourselves from these [prejudices\nof childhood] is to make the effort, once in the course of our life,\nto doubt everything which we find to contain even the smallest\nsuspicion of error (Descartes, 1:193).\n","\nHere Descartes advocates an effort to develop a real doubt on a wide\nscale, the sort of advocacy that had aroused Arnauld’s\ntheological concern in the “Fourth\n Objections.”[6]"],"subsection_title":"3.1 Philosophical method"},{"content":["\nAs pointed out in 3.1 above, Arnauld identifies an idea with a\nperception (in the broad sense of the term characteristic of\nseventeenth-century philosophy). Kenneth L. Pearce employs the notion\nof an extrinsic denomination to throw new light on that position. In\nPearce’s words, “Arnauld does not intend a straightforward\nidentification of ideas with perceptions, for he draws a semantic\ndistinction between ‘perception’ and\n‘idea;’.” “Careful examination of this\nsemantic distinction,” he says, “will help us …\nachieve a proper understanding of the relationship between perceptions\nand ideas” (Pearce 2016, p. 380). To that end, he makes use of\nthe notion of an “extrinsic denomination,” a notion which\noccurs in Arnauld’s Ideas, in the statement,\n“Being conceived, in regard to the sun that is in the sky, is\nonly an extrinsic denomination, i.e., only a relation to the\nperception which I have of it” (quoted by Pearce on p. 382).\nPearce adds that:","\nThe Logic defines an ‘extrinsic denomination’ as\na mode “taken from something that is not in the substance, such\nas ‘loved’, ‘seen’, ‘desired’,\nnames derived from the actions of something else” (Pearce, 2016,\np 382).\n","\nTalking about perceptions and talking about ideas, Pearce says, are\ntwo different ways of describing a situation in which a person\nperceives an object:","\nSuch a situation is relational, involving a relation of the perceiver\nto the object and a relation of the object to the perceiver. The first\nrelation is a real mode in the perceiver; the second is not a real\nmode, but rather a mere extrinsic denomination in the object (Pearce,\n2016, p. 382).\n","\nPearce concludes:","\nThis explains the sense in which the perception and the idea are\nidentical: just as one and the same worldly state of affairs entitles\nMary to the (intrinsic) denomination ‘lover’ and John to\nthe (extrinsic) denomination ‘beloved’, so one and the\nsame worldly state of affairs entitles my mind to the (intrinsic)\ndenomination ‘perception’ [sic] and the sun to\nthe (extrinsic) denomination ‘idea’ (Peatce, 2016, p.\n382–83)\n","\nPearce suggests that “The reason Arnauld’s ideas are not\nobjectionable intrermediary entities is that they are not really\ndistinct from the external objects they represent” (p. 376). To\nput the point in another way,","\nArnauld denies that the idea is a distinct third term in perception\nnot by identifying it with the perceptual act, but rather by\nidentifying it with the external object conceived by me\n(Pearce, 2016, p. 389).\n","\nIn a subsequent article, Pearce shows how Arnauld uses the notion of\nan extrinsic denomination to resolve three apparent contradictions\nbetween what Arnauld says about representation and his","\nsparce Cartesian ontology on which there are just two kinds of\nsubstance, thinking and extended … [and] every feature of a\nthinking substance is a way of thinking, and every feature of an\nextended substance is a way of being extended (Pearce forthcoming, p.\n1–2).\n","\nThe first apparent contradiction arises because Arnauld maintains that\nwe directly perceive extended objects and yet that we do so by means\nof ideas in our mind. The solution is that the perception, e.g., of\nthe sun, is a real mode of thinking which essentially makes the sun\npresent to the mind, and in virtue of which the sun deserves the\nextrinsic denomination ‘idea of the sun’ (p. 22). The\nsecond apparent contradiction arises from the Port-Royal theory of\nlanguage. According to the Logic, language consists of sounds\nand visible characters which are signs of ideas. But signs are\nrepresentations and “representing is not a mode of extension and\ntherefore cannot modify an extended object such as a sound [or] a\nwritten word” (p. 19). The solution is that the idea which a\nword signifies “is connected to [the sign] only by a\nhabit,” the habit, namely “of conceiving of a certain\nobject whenever [the mind] perceives the symbol.” Consequently\n“the object is entitled to the name ‘sign’ on\naccount of the state of some mind or minds. In other words,\n‘sign’ is applied to the object by extrinsic\ndenomination” (p. 19–20). The third apparent contradiction\narises in Arnauld’s rejection of Malebranche’s position\nthat “the soul actually becomes red, blue or yellow [and] when\none smells a carcass the soul becomes formally putrid.” Arnauld\nagrees that colors and smells are modifications of the mind and not of\nextension. But this does not imply, Arnauld says, that “our soul\nshould be called either ‘green’, or ‘yellow’,\nor ‘putrid’” (p. 23). Arnauld adds, “There are\ninfinitely many names which suppose no modification in the\nthing to which they are given” (quoted by Pearce on p. 23 from\nArnauld’s Ideas ). Pearce comments, “The\napplication of a name that ‘supposes no modification in the\nthing to which [it is] given’ is extrinsic\ndenomination.”","\nPearce has also located Arnauld’s account of ideas in the wider\ncontext of early modern philosophy. He classifies accounts of ideas as\ndescriptivist or explanatory. In the explanatory approach,\n“ideas are to be understood as posits in an explanatory\ntheory” (Pearce forthcoming, p. 2). Malebranche is the paradigm\npractitioner of the explanatory approach. In the descriptivist\napproach, by contrast, “claims about ideas are to be justified\nonly by direct introspection, and not by inference to the best\nexplanation” (Pearce, forthcoming, p. 9). Arnauld is the chief\npractitioner of the descriptivist approach. He not only rejects\nMalebranche’s attempt to explain how the mind perceives external\nobjects, but he also maintains that no such explanation is needed. For\nI know clearly by introspection that my nature is to think, and that\nthinking is representational. As Arnauld puts it, “Just as it is\nclear that I think, it is also clear that I think of something, i.e.,\nthat I perceive and know something” (quoted by Pearce from\nIdeas in Pearce, forthcoming, p. 8). It is similarly clear\nwhat it is that I think of, perceive or know, and in particular it is\nclear that I think of, perceive or know extended things. Pearce argues\nthat Locke follows Arnauld in his descriptivism, although not in his\ndirect realism (Pearce, forthcoming, p. 10). Berkeley too adopted the\ndescriptivist approach, a fact which helps to explain the absence of\narguments for Berkeley’s view that we cannot form abstract\ngeneral\n ideas.[7]"],"subsection_title":"3.2 Arnauld’s identification of ideas with perceptions in the light of his notion of an extrinsic denomination"},{"content":["\nIf there is one part of Descartes’ philosophy that met with\nArnauld’s enthusiastic approval, it is Descartes’\nmind-body dualism. Yet even here Arnauld’s version of the\nCartesian philosophy departed in important ways from Descartes’\nown views. Arnauld’s departure did not have to do with the\ndistinction between mind and body; here he largely contents himself\nwith endorsing what Descartes\n says.[8]\n It had to do rather with the union of the mind and body in a human\nbeing. Arnauld rejected a claim at the core of Descartes’\nposition, namely, that the union of a person’s mind and body\nmakes it possible for the mind and the body to exercise real causal\naction on one another. Arnauld explicitly says that a person’s\nbody cannot act causally on his mind, and had at least some difficulty\nwith the notion that a person’s mind can act causally on his\nbody.","\nIn 1680 Arnauld wrote an extended defense of the “the philosophy\nof Descartes” regarding “the essence of body and the union\nof the soul with the body,” against an attack by Fr. Etienne Le\n Moine.[9]\n Throughout this work, Arnauld quotes Malebranche as representative of\nthe Cartesian position, and what he defends under the heading,\n“the philosophy of Descartes,” is actually a modified\nversion of\n Malebranche.[10]\n According to the Cartesian philosophy, says Arnauld,","\nAll the union (alliance) of the mind and the body which is\nknown to us consists in a natural and mutual correspondence of\nthoughts in the soul with traces in the brain and of emotions in the\nsoul with movements of the [animal] spirits.… It is not denied\nthat there may be something unknown to us in the union God has brought\nabout between our soul and our body (Examen, OA,\n38:141).\n","\nwhat we do know, however, suffices to show that the mind is not\nrelated to the body as a pilot to his ship, but rather that the two\nare united in “a greater and more intimate union” by which\nthey form a single whole (Examen, OA, 38:141).","\nArnauld next takes up a criticism directed by Le Moine against the\nCartesian account of sense perception, and this leads to the\nquestion,","\nwhether it is the bodily movements [in the eye] that cause the\nperceptions in the soul; or whether they are only the occasion on\nwhich the soul forms [the perceptions] in itself; or whether God gives\n[the perceptions] to [the soul](Examen, OA, 38:146).\n","\nArnauld says that it is “easy” to eliminate the first\nalternative: “For since the motion of a body can at best have no\nother effect than to move another body (I say at best because\nit may have not even that), who does not see that it can have no\neffect on a spiritual soul?” (Examen, OA,\n38:146). He adds that St. Augustine considered it beyond doubt that a\nbody can have an effect only on our body, and not on our soul. Arnauld\nrules out the second of his three alternatives on the grounds that the\nsoul cannot form sensible perceptions in itself on the occasion of\nparticular motions in the bodily sensory apparatus because the soul is\nnot aware of those motions (Examen, OA, 38: 147).\nThis leaves Arnauld with the third alternative, which he accepts,\nadding that God voluntarily undertakes to cause in our soul\nperceptions of sensible qualities whenever the corresponding motions\noccur in the sensory organs “according to the laws He himself\nhas established in nature” (Examen, OA,\n38:148). He summarizes this conclusion by saying that our body does\nnot act on our soul as a “physical cause (cause\nphysique)” but only as a “moral cause (cause\nmorale)” (Examen, OA, 38:150).","\nArnauld had a quite different position regarding the causation of\nvoluntary movements in the body. He held that, in general, it is\npossible for immaterial, thinking beings to act causally on material\nthings, and that, in fact, God has on occasion given angels the power\nto do so. He also held that the mind of Adam and of Eve had the power\nto bring about voluntary motions in their bodies before the Fall, and\nthat the minds of the blessed in heaven will enjoy that power. He\nsuggests that the voluntary bodily motions of human beings in this\nlife here below are not caused by the person’s volitions. His\nreason for this negative position is that post-lapsarian human beings\ndo not know how to bring about the movements of the animal spirits\nthat cause the motions of their muscles and limbs. Thus he says,","\nIf one can say [that God has not given our soul a real power\nto determine the course of the animal spirits toward the muscles of\nthe parts of our body that we want to move], it is not [on the grounds\nof a general occasionalism like Malebranche’s]… It is\nonly because our soul does not know what must be done in order to move\nour arm by means of the animal spirits (emphasis added;\nDissertation sur les Miracles de l’ancienne loi,\nOA, 38:690).\n","\nSteven Nadler cites this text while arguing that Arnauld was an\n“occasionalist” both about the causation of sensory\nperceptions by bodies, and about the causation of voluntary movements\nby the human mind (Nadler 1995, 138). Nadler recognizes that Arnauld\nhad quite different attitudes toward the two cases, but nevertheless\nsays that Arnauld “alone among Cartesians” recognized\nmind-body interaction as a specific problem in Descartes’\nmetaphysics, and “used an occasionalist solution” (Nadler\n1995, 144).","\nArnauld’s treatment of the union of mind and body shows that he\nwas not a docile follower of Descartes, and was prepared to develop\n“the philosophy of Descartes” in ways that Descartes would\nprobably not have accepted. It also shows that Arnauld was prepared to\nmodify Descartes’ philosophy in a way that increased its\nsimilarity to Augustine. It is well known that Arnauld pointed out\nsimilarities between Augustine and Descartes from the beginning of his\npublished work, in the “Fourth Objections.” In the present\ncase, however, Arnauld changes the philosophy of Descartes in a way\nthat increases its similarity to Augustine. Arnauld did not mention\nAquinas, though he could have done so, as another authority who held\nthat a material thing cannot produce an immaterial effect. It was only\na few years later, in Ideas, that Arnauld began to claim an\naffinity between the views of Descartes and those of Aquinas. But in\nhis development of the Cartesian position on the union of mind and\nbody, one can already see Arnauld attempting to make of Descartes a\nChristian philosopher standing in continuity with his great patristic\nand scholastic predecessors. (This attempt on Arnauld’s part is\nexplored in the journal Dix-Septieme Sciecle, 2013/2 no.\n259.)"],"subsection_title":"3.3 Mind-body dualism"},{"content":["\nThere is a continuing discussion of Arnauld’s attitude toward\nthe view which Descartes expressed in answer to Mersenne’s\nquestion “by what kind of causality God established the eternal\ntruths.” Descartes replied, “by the same kind of causality\nas he created all things, that is to say, as their efficient and total\ncause” (Descartes, p.\n 25).[11]\n The debate has been greatly influenced by Jean-Luc Marion’s\ninterpretation, in La théologie blanche de Descartes,\naccording to which Descartes’ position on the matter is\nfundamental to his metaphysics. Consequently, to the extent that\nArnauld, in his mature writings, adopted Descartes’ metaphysics,\nit has seemed reasonable to say that Arnauld agreed with Descartes\nabout “the creation of the eternal truths.” Indeed Denis\nMoreau says, “Arnauld is therefore one of the rare (and if we\ncan grant him the adjective, the only great) post-Cartesian to accept\nthe thesis of the creation of the eternal truths” (Moreau, 1999,\np. 180)."],"subsection_title":"3.4 The Creation of the eternal truths"},{"content":["\nSteven Nadler accepts Moreau’s conclusion about Arnauld and the\ncreation of the eternal truths. As Nadler puts it,","\nThere is no need for me to go into this question here in any detail,\nsince Denis Moreau, in his magnificent study of the\nArnauld-Malebranche debate, has, to my mind, persuasively shown that\nArnauld does, in fact – and despite his refusal explicitly to\nendorse (or reject) the doctrine – accept the creation of the\neternal truths (Nadler, 2008, p. 532).\n","\nBut he faults Moreau for not having gone “far enough along the\npath that Arnauld traces,” and thus having failed “to see\nhow radical Arnauld’s conception of God really is. For\neverything points to Arnauld’s God being an ultimately arbitrary\ndeity who does not act for reasons at all – indeed a deity who,\nin His being, transcends practical rationality altogether” (p.\n533). In Nadler’s view, Arnauld follows Descartes in holding\nthat God is absolutely simple and consequently that in God “will\nand understanding are one and the same thing,” not\ndistinguishable even by a distinction of reason. For Arnauld\n(following Descartes),","\nthe relationship between will and wisdom in God is so unlike their\nrelationship in human beings – where will and undertanding\nare distinct faculties of the mind, and the former cannot\nfunction unless the latter presents to it ideas for consideration\n– that no analogy can be drawn from the human for the purpose of\nunderstanding the divine (p.\n 532).[12]\n ","\nMoreau gives a very different account of Arnauld’s concept of\nGod. Invoking the doctrine of divine simplicity, Arnauld says that\nGod’s will is His wisdom, for God’s will\nis God Himself and God’s wisdom is God\nHimself. There can, therefore, be no question of God’s wisdom\nlimiting His will. Nevertheless, far from being a deity who does not\nact reasonably, “God’s action is both reasonable and\nreasoned; it is the action of a wisdom”(Moreau, 1999,\np. 281). Arnauld holds that Gods attributes are\n“integrated” and “unified”; Arnauld speaks of\nthe “reasonable will” of God and “affirms that\n‘God wills nothing except wisely, He wills nothing that His\nwisdom does not will. In God the will wills and reasons, and the\nreason reasons and wills.” But if pressed to give God’s\nreasons for doing what He does, Arnauld can only reply that “God\ndoes what He wills, we do not know why and can give no reason except\nHis will to do what he does” (Moreau, 1999, p. 295). In sum,\nGod’s reasons for what He does are\n“incomprehensible,” but His actions are not\n“irrational” (Moreau, 1999, p. 296, note 2).","\nIn “Arnauld’s God Reconsidered,” Eric Stencil has\nattempted to adjudicate this disagreement (Stencil, 2019).\nStencil’s attempt is divided into two parts. The first is\nfocussed on the doctrine of divine simplicity, and takes up the\nquestion of whether God’s wisdom is distinct in any way from His\nwill. The second takes up the question of whether God acts for\nreasons.","\nAs Stencil points out Moreau and Nadler agree that Arnauld subscribes\nto what Stencil calls “the identity thesis,” that God,\nGod’s action, and God’s attributes are identical.\nAccording to Nadler, however, Arnauld goes farther, and denies that\nGod’s wisdom and His will are distinct even by a\n“distinction of reason.” Stencil disagrees. Against the\nbackground of the treatment of abstraction in the Port Royal\nLogic, Stencil maintains that Arnauld holds “the\ndistinctness thesis,” that “God, God’s actions, and\nGod’s attributes are conceptually distinct” (Stencil,\n2019, p. 24–5). Reflection on the clear idea of God. and on the\nclear ideas of His attributes, which we form by abstraction, allows us\nto establish various truths about God and His attributes. But that\nreflection reequires that we distinguish conceptually among the\nvarious attributes. Arnauld also subscribes to “the nonpriority\nthesis,” the thesis “that there are no conceptual\npriorities among God, God’s actions, and God’s\nattributes” (Stencil, 2019, p. 21). To deny the nonpriority\nthesis is, in Arnauld’s view, to “anthropomorphize”\nGod, to make him “operate like a finite being.” Stencil\nconcludes, “So, contra Nadler, I suggest that we treat\nArnauld as allowing for conceptual distinctions – but not\nconceptual priorities – among God’s various\nattributes” (Stencil, 2019, p. 26–7).","\nStencil points out that his account of divine simplicity “is in\nsome ways a defense of Morearu’s interpretation against\nNadler’s objections” (Stencil, 2019, p.\n 27).[13]\n He then turns to the question of whether Arnauld’s God acts for\nreasons. Here he finds evidence on both sides of the issue:","\nMoreau has highlighted passages where Arnauld is explicit about not\ndenying that God acts for reasons or that God’s actions have\nends. Nevertheless, Nadler has presented systematic and compelling\nevidence for concluding that Arnauld’s God does not act for\nreasons. (p. 28)\n","\nStencil claims, nevertheless, that","\nIn fact, Arnauld offes a consistent position about whether God acts\nfor reasons. Arnauld is ‘agnostic’ about whether God acts\nfor reasons absolutely – whether God acts for reasons\nin any sense at all. (p. 29)\n","\nArnauld claims to know that “Malebranche’s account of how\nGod acts for reasons … treats God as a finite being – and\nthis makes his account unacceptable and false” (p. 29). But that\nleaves open the question of whether God acts for reasons in some other\nway. On Strencil’s interpretation, Arnauld says that we cannot\nknow the answer. If Stencil is right about Arnauld’s\nagnosticism, then the most that Nadler’s evidence can show is\nthat for Arnauld it is “beyond our epistemic means” to say\nthat God does, or that He does not, act for reasons. As for the\npassages cited by Moreau in which Arnauld refuses to deny that God\nacts for reasons, they do not affirm that God does not act for\nreasons, but simply refuse to deny what we cannot know to be\nfalse.","\nAn interesting example cited by Moreau is Augustine’s rhetorical\nquestion, “Who would dare to say that God created all things\nwithout reason?” (cited by Moreau on p. 295, note 2). Stencil\ntakes the question to be a way of saying “We dare not state or\ncould not prove a denial that God acts for reasons” (Stencil,\n2019, p. 29). Unfortunately Moreau does not explain the context in\nwhich Arnauld quotes Augustine’s question. The context is\nArnauld’s enthusiastic endorsement of Aquinas’ argument in\nSumma Theologiae, I, 19, 2 and 5 (Réflexions, II, 2,\nOA, XXXIX, 430–31). Article 2 has to do with whether\nGod wills things other than Himself. Aquinas says that “the will\nof God is directed to things other than Himself,” and this is\nbecause","\nit is a perfection of the will of God to communicate to other things\nthe good He possesses … So God wills that He be what He is and\nalso wills that other things be. But He wills Himself as the end and\nother things as related to the end, insofar as it is appropriate to\nthe divine goodness that other things participate in it. (translation\nof Arnauld’s French rendering of Aquinas by author)\n","\nArticle 5 addresses the question of whether the will of God has a\ncause. Arnauld comments,","\n[Aquinas] answers in the negative because it is not with God as it is\nwith men. A man wills an end; he wills to be cured of an illness. His\nwilling that end is the cause of his willing the means suitable for\nobtaining it. That is how [Malebranche] makes God act, not noticing\nthat he falls into the mistake which he often says must be avoided, of\nspeaking about God according to [our] ideas of the way that men act.\n","\nBecause God wills all things by a single act,","\nwe cannot say that He wills what is for the end (that is to say, the\ncreatures) because He wills the end, but we should say only that He\nwills that what is for the end be related to the end. He wills\nx to exist for the sake of y, but He does not will x\nfor the sake of y (VULT hoc esse propter hoc, sed non\npropter hoc vult\n hoc.)[14]\n ","\nAugustine’s rhetorical question is raised as an objection: If\nGod does not will to create things in order to accomplish an end,\nthen, contrary to the import of Augustine’s question, God\ncreates things without reason. Arnauld summarizes Aquinas’\nreply:","\nThe will of God is reasonable, not because He wills only if there is\nsome reason which causes Him to will (qui le fasse vouloir),\nbut because He wills that among the things He makes some exist for the\nsake of others (OA, XXXIX, 431).\n","\nHere Arnauld distinguishes the question of whether God’s\ncreative action is reasonable from the question of whether in creating\nGod acts for a reason. He answers the first question, but not the\nsecond, in the affirmative."],"subsection_title":"3.5 Are God’s actions reasonable?"}]},{"main_content":["\nNicolas Malebranche was born in 1638, when Arnauld was twenty-six\nyears old. In 1660, Malebranche joined the Oratory, a center for\npriests in Paris that had many connections with Port-Royal.\nMalebranche and Arnauld were on friendly terms in the early 1670s, but\nlate in the decade they had a falling out over Malebranche’s\nexplanation of the fact that not all men are saved, and related\n matters.[15]\n In 1680, Malebranche published his position, against Arnauld’s\nadvice, in the Treatise of Nature and Grace (hereinafter\nTNG). The ensuing public controversy between the two was a\ncentral event in the intellectual life of Europe in the late\nseventeenth century.","\nArnauld’s attack on TNG began in a surprising way, with\nthe publication of On True and False Ideas (hereinafter\nIdeas) in 1683. In it, Arnauld presents his own position on\nthe nature of ideas, which was described above, and argues that\nMalebranche’s view that we see all things (or at least all\nbodily things) in God and by means of God’s ideas is not only\nmistaken, but thoroughly confused and wrong-headed. This work\nengendered a preliminary debate that lasted for two years. The\npublication of Réflexions in 1685–86, preceded\nin 1685 by the publication of Arnauld’s Dissertation sur les\nmiracles de l’ancien loi, provoked further exchanges\nbetween the two in 1687, with a last gasp on Arnauld’s part in\n1694, the year of his death, and on Malebranche’s part ten years\nlater, in\n 1704.[16]"],"section_title":"4. Arnauld and Malebranche","subsections":[{"content":["\nTNG provides a general account of God’s reasons for\ncreating a world with the evils that the world contains. But\nMalebranche is mainly interested in one particular evil, namely, that\nnot all men are saved. That not all men are saved he took to be a\ndatum of revelation, plainly expressed in the Scriptures. But he\ndenied that it follows that God does not want all men to be saved.\nIndeed, he says his motive in writing TNG was to refute those\nwho concluded that God did not have a “sincere will” to\nsave all men:","\nIf there were not in this century people determined to hold that God\ndoes not have a sincere will to save all men, it would not be\nnecessary to establish principles suitable for destroying that unhappy\nopinion. But the need to combat errors brings to light principles\nsuitable to that end. I protest before God that that was the principal\nmotive that made me\n write.[17]\n ","\nIf God wants to save all men, something must prevent Him from doing\nwhat He wants to do. In the “Troisième\nEclaircissement” to TNG, Malebranche says that\nsince God is omnipotent, He can bring about whatever He wants to bring\nabout. But because His will is “the love He bears for His own\nattributes,” He cannot, by a “practical”\n will,[18]\n will anything or will in any way that is not wise: “The wisdom\nof God renders Him impotent in this sense that it does not permit him\nto will certain things, or to act in certain ways” (OM,\n5:180). What prevents God from carrying out His will to save all men,\nMalebranche concludes, must be that doing so would require ways or\nmanners of willing that are unwise. As he puts it a few pages later,\nGod’s wisdom “holds His volitions in check, in the sense\nthat not all of His volitions are practical volitions”\n(OM, 5:184).","\nMalebranche argues that God’s wisdom restrains Him from\nsanctifying and saving all men because it directs Him not only to\ncreate a world that is good, but also to create “in a way worthy\nof Him, by ways (par des voyes) that are simple, general,\nconstant, and uniform” (OM, 5:49). More precisely,\nGod’s wisdom directs Him to an act of creating that best\ncombines goodness or perfection of the created world with simplicity\nof ways of creating. An analogy may help explain Malebranche’s\nposition. Suppose that someone sets out to buy a car and wants to do\nthe best possible job of car-buying. Suppose further that the\nsecond-best car is available at a much better price than the best car.\nIn this case, doing the best job of car-buying might require buying\nless than the best car. In a somewhat similar way, Malebranche holds\nthat the best job of creating, the one most worthy of God, involves\ncreating a world less perfect than He might have made it, in\nparticular, a world in which not all human beings are saved.","\nMalebranche’s notion of the simplicity of God’s ways of\ncreating depends on his occasionalism. According to that theory of\nefficient causality, God is the only true efficient cause. When\ncreatures appear to be efficient causes, they are really only\noccasional causes. That is, the events in which the apparent created\ncauses take part are followed by other events in accordance with laws\nof nature, which are God’s general volitions. But the created\n“causes” do not really cause the events that follow. These\nevents, like every created reality, are really caused by\n God.[19]\n For Malebranche, the simplicity of God’s ways depends on there\nbeing a small number of laws of nature, and on there being few\nexceptions to the laws. Malebranche maintains that in order to do the\njob of creating that best combines goodness of the world created with\nsimplicity of ways of creating, God had to make a world with precisely\nthe natural evils (misshapen animals, human suffering, ugly\nlandscapes, etc.) that that are present in the world as it is.","\nThe anomalies in the order of grace are explained in a similar way.\nMalebranche divides grace, the divine assistance given to human\nbeings, into two kinds, which he calls “grace of light\n(lumière)” and “grace of feeling\n(sentiment)” (OM, 5:96–97; 131). The\nformer is, quite simply, knowledge. Malebranche also calls it\n“the grace of the Creator,” because it is given, in\ndifferent forms, both to Adam and Eve and to human beings after their\nFall. Grace of feeling is “the grace of Jesus Christ,” and\nwas merited for human beings by the life and death of Jesus.\nMalebranche also describes it as a “pleasure\n(délectation)” which makes a person love God\n(TNG, OM, 5:135). According to Malebranche, the\ngrace of the Creator is “dry, abstract, entirely pure and\nentirely intelligible” and does not lead us to love God. The\ngrace of Christ, in contrast, is “efficace par\nelle-même” in that it “always has its effect, always\ncarries us toward God” (OM, 5:132). Human beings, after\nthe fall of Adam, are unable to grow in holiness, or even to be saved\nfrom damnation, without the grace of Christ. But the love of God\nproduced by grace is a sort of instinctive love, which is not\nmeritorious and is not sufficient for salvation. Whether the person\nwho receives the grace of Christ is saved depends on the\nperson’s free consent to the movement toward God that grace\nproduces, which converts the instinctive love of God into a\n“free and rational” love. This consent is not produced by\ngrace.","\nNow Malebranche holds that God could give to each person grace that\nwould assure the person’s salvation:","\nGod is the master of hearts. He can give to the impious a grace such\nthat it will convert him, since God knows what degree of grace to\ngive, and when it must be given, in order that it bring about the\nconversion of the sinner (OM, 5:186).\n","\nSimilarly, God knows what sort of grace would ensure that any person\nis not only saved, but also attains the maximum holiness of which he\nor she is capable. But many who receive grace do not grow in holiness\nand are not saved. For example, many who enter the Church later fall\naway.","\nGod often distributes graces, without their having the effect that His\ngoodness makes us believe He would make them have. He makes the piety\nof some people increase right up to the end of their life, but sin\novercomes them at death and throws them into Hell. He makes the rain\nof grace fall upon hardened hearts as well as on earth that is\nprepared: people resist it and make it useless for their salvation.\n… How can that be reconciled with wisdom? (OM, 5:48).\n","\nMalebranche’s answer is that God’s wisdom dictates that He\nact, in the distribution of both sorts of grace, according general\nvolitions determined by created occasional causes to particular\neffects. In the case of the grace of the Creator, the general\nvolitions are laws of nature, and the occasional causes are “the\ndiverse movements of our will” and “the encounter of\nsensible objects that act on our mind” (TNG, 5:102).\nFor the grace of Jesus Christ, the occasional cause is Jesus Christ,\nin his human nature, and the general volition is that grace be given\nto human beings if and only if Jesus, in his human nature, asks that\nit be given. Jesus’ requests for grace are made in view of the\nneeds of the Church. But Jesus, in his human nature, does not always\nthink of “the future determination of the will” of those\nfor whom he requests grace. The result is that, often enough, people\nreceive grace that does not lead to their holiness and salvation, or\nfail to receive the grace that would have done so (TNG,\nOM, 5:83)."],"subsection_title":"4.1 Malebranche’s position in the Treatise of Nature and Grace"},{"content":["\nArnauld thought that Malebranche’s position was dangerous, and\nthat if accepted it would have ruinous consequences for the Catholic\nfaith. He was “furious,” as Denis Moreau has aptly said,\n“and decided to leave nothing standing in a philosophy that\nclearly frightened him” (Moreau 1999, 240). Here only the\ngeneral lines of Arnauld’s attack are set forth. First, two\npervasive themes in Arnauld’s criticism are described: (1) that\nMalebranche often did not proceed by the proper method of either\nphilosophy or theology; and (2) that Malebranche speaks of God in\nanthropomorphic terms, as if He were subject to the limitations of a\nhuman\n agent.[20]\n Then Arnauld’s criticisms of Malebranche’s position that\nGod acts by “general volitions” will be discussed.","\n1. Throughout Réflexions, beginning with the\n“Avant-Propos” to the work, Arnauld challenges Malebranche\nto make clear whether his claims are based on reason or on Scripture\nand\n tradition.[21]\n He had mounted this sort of challenge even earlier, in\nIdeas:","\nHe does not say that he learned those grand maxims on which all of\nthat [Treatise of Nature and Grace] turns by the revelation\nof God: that if God wills to act externally, it is because He\nwills to obtain an honor worthy of Himself; that He acts by the\nsimplest ways; that He does not act by particular volitions; but by\ngeneral volitions which are determined by occasional causes\n(Ideas, 174).\n","\nNor could all of those maxims be demonstrated, in Malebranche’s\nsense of the term. For Malebranche says that only necessary truths can\nbe demonstrated, and yet he admits that God does sometimes act by\nparticular volitions, namely, when He performs miracles. Hence\nMalebranche himself would have to admit that the third maxim, at\nleast, is not demonstrable. In Arnauld’s view, Malebranche came\nto accept such principles because he thought they made God more\nloveable and hence were favorable to the cause of religion. In this\nway Malebranche introduces, on the basis of religious considerations,\nprinciples that are not found in Scripture and tradition.","\nArnauld thought that this unholy introduction of religion into what\nought to be treated as philosophical questions began with\nMalebranche’s theory of ideas, according to which “we see\nall things in God.” Thus, in the “Conclusion” of his\nDéfense contre la Réponse au livre des vraies et des\nfausses Idées (OA, 38, 367–668; hereinafter\nDéfense), Arnauld takes up “two or three\nobjections” that might be raised against Ideas. The\nsecond objection is one that had been raised by Nicole: “I could\nhave avoided this philosophical topic [of the nature of ideas] so as\nnot to interrupt what I had begun to write about the Treatise of\nNature and Grace.” In reply, Arnauld says,","\nWhat was at the outset a question of philosophy … is not such\nfor [Malebranche]. For him it is a question of theology, very sublime\nand very elevated. He considers it a religious duty to devote his\nwhole mind to its defense. He finds it bad that others should disagree\nwith him, and even says that anyone who is not of his opinion must be\n‘either an unenlightened philosopher or a man insensitive to his\nduties.’ Thus he has changed the form of the dispute. He has\ninvolved religion, and has become so devoted to his novel thoughts as\nto hold that anyone who does not approve of them lacks respect for the\nwisdom of God Himself. (Défense, OA, 38:666)\n","\nIn Arnauld’s direct attack on TNG, he says again and\nagain that Malebranche relies on principles that have neither a proper\ntheological basis in Scripture and tradition, nor a proper\nphilosophical basis in reason. Clearly he thought that this criticism\napplied as well to Malebranche’s theory of ideas. But if Arnauld\ntook seriously the remark at the beginning of the Logic,\n“The reflections we can make on our ideas are perhaps the most\nimportant part of logic, since they are the foundation of everything\nelse,” he may well have thought that Malebranche’s theory\nof ideas was an important source of the confusion of theology with\nphilosophy that plagues TNG. That, in turn, would help\nexplain his decision to begin his attack on TNG with a\ntreatise on the nature of\n ideas.[22]","\n2. Arnauld agreed with Malebranche that God’s will is\nreasonable, but he disagreed with Malebranche’s way of\nconceiving God’s\n reasonableness.[23]\n In both Book I and Book II of Réflexions, he tries to\nshow that Malebranche conceives of God’s reasonableness as if it\nwere the reasonableness of a human being. In the second chapter of\nBook I, he reports a series of arguments given by Malebranche early in\nTNG for the conclusion that God acts in the order of nature\nonly by general volitions. These arguments, says Arnauld, are\n“only comparisons with men, which … cannot prove anything\nwith regard to God; or popular thoughts not worthy … of a\nphilosopher” (OA, 39:188). For example, Malebranche\nsays that God decides to create that which can be produced and\nconserved by the simplest laws because he is an excellent workman, and\n“an excellent workman … does not do by complicated ways\nwhat he could carry out by simpler ones” (TNG,\nOM, 5:28). Arnauld objects that there is no similarity\nbetween an excellent human workman and God,","\nsince all the ways of executing His plans are equally easy for Him,\nand ‘His power,’ as the author [Malebranche] recognizes,\n‘makes Him so much the master of all things, and so independent\nof help from elsewhere, that it suffices that He will, in order for\nHis volitions to be carried out’ (OA, 39:189–90).\n","\nHence God’s volitions are not based on reasoning about the means\nto achieve a desired end.","\nBook II of Réflexions, which deals with God’s\nway of acting in the order of grace, opens with a related criticism.\nArnauld begins by analyzing a line of thought that Malebranche\npresents in the Troisième Eclaircissement to\nTNG (OA, 39:425–51). The line of thought\nbegins with two claims: that “God can act only for Himself. If\nHe wills to act, it is because He wills to procure an honor worthy of\nHimself” and that “God can receive an honor worthy of\nHimself only from Himself.” Yet I am created, so I must be able\nto render to God an honor worthy of Him. This I can do, says\nMalebranche, only by becoming a part of the Church, of which the\nIncarnate Second Person of the Trinity is the cornerstone. More\ngenerally, “God’s great plan is to build in His own honor\na spiritual temple, of which Jesus Christ is the cornerstone …\nHis plan is that this Temple should be as large and perfect as\npossible.” Malebranche then draws an important conclusion:","\nGod wills that all men enter into this spiritual building, to enlarge\nit. God wills that all men be saved … God also hopes\nthat men will merit outstanding degrees of glory: His will is our\nsanctification. (OM, 5:183)\n","\nBut although God wants the salvation and sanctification of all men,\n“He loves His wisdom infinitely more,” and His wisdom\nrequires that He act in the way that is wisest and most worthy of\nHimself, that is, in “general, constant and uniform way,”\nwith the result that “He does not save all men, although He\ntruly wills that they all be saved” (OM, 5:185).","\nArnauld has much to say against that line of thought, and he begins be\nattacking its very first step, the claim that God “can act\nexternally only in order to procure an honor worthy of Himself”\n(OA,\n 39:428–40).[24]\n He objects that this is not a proper way to speak about an infinitely\nperfect being. Once again, Malebranche is guilty of anthropomorphism.\nFor he says, in effect,","\nthat [God] could resolve to create me, me and the other creatures,\nonly for some advantage He wanted to obtain for Himself by creating\nus…. That is how [Malebranche] lowers [God], by claiming that\nHe cannot decide to create anything externally, except to procure an\nhonor worthy of Himself. (OA, 39:429)\n","\nArnauld goes on to contrast Malebranche’s way of describing\nGod’s creation with that of St. Thomas, who say that the reason\nGod creates is that His goodness tends to overflow and communicate\nitself to other\n things.[25]","\nArnauld also says that to speak about God as consulting His\nwisdom before acting is to speak about God as one would about a human\nbeing who wills an end and is thereby caused to will the means to that\nend (OA, 39:432). It is to compare God to a man who consults\nhis wisdom about everything he wants to do “as if he were afraid\nof not acting well, and his will needed to be ruled by something other\nthan itself in order to do only what is good” (OA,\n39:599–600). “Is it an expression of rigorous\nexactitude to say of God that He consults His wisdom,\nand that is how it comes about that everything He wills is\nwise,” Arnauld asks,","\nas if the word consult is suitable for an infinitely perfect\nbeing when one professes not to speak in popular language? As if God\nneeded to consult His wisdom so that what He wills should be wise? As\nif His will were not His wisdom? As if everything He wills were not\nessentially wise, by virtue of the fact that He wills it?\n(OA, 39:578)\n","\nGod’s will is not a force that needs to be tamed. The truth,\naccording to Arnauld, is that it is impossible that God should have an\nactual (sincere) will for something that is not in fact wise.","\nIn a related criticism, Arnauld chides Malebranche for allowing\n“very little freedom and indifference” in God’s\ncreative action. Arnauld quotes Malebranche:","\nAssuming that God wills to produce outside of Himself a work worthy of\nHimself, He is not indifferent in the choice; He\nought to produce the most perfect work possible by relation to the\nsimplicity of the ways by which He acts; He owes it to Himself to\nfollow the rules of his wisdom. (Quoted by Arnauld at\nRéflexions, OA, 39:598, from TNG,\nOM, 5: 110).\n","\nMalebranche tries to save for God at least freedom and indifference\nwith regard to creating or not creating. But Arnauld suggests that\nthis move is ruled out by “the way in which he conceives\nGod’s action,” for supposedly, on Malebranche’s\nview, God would consult His wisdom before deciding whether to create\nor not, and just as His wisdom advises Him to create this world rather\nthan a less perfect one, assuming that the two could be created in an\nequally simple way, His wisdom would also advise Him that it is better\nto create than not to create (OA,\n 39:599–600).[26]"],"subsection_title":"4.2 Two themes in Arnauld’s criticism of the Treatise of Nature and Grace"},{"content":["\nArnauld devoted much of Réflexions to\nMalebranche’s position that God acts by general volitions and\nnot by particular volitions. In Book I of Réflexions,\nhis focus is on the order of nature and he tries to show that\nMalebranche’s claim that God acts only by general volitions is\nconfused and even self-contradictory. In Book II, his focus is on the\norder of grace and he attacks Malebranche’s claim that God does\nnot distribute grace by particular volitions.","\nArnauld begins his criticism in Book I by claiming that Malebranche\nconfuses acting by general volitions and acting according\nto general laws. Arnauld grants that God acts according to\ngeneral laws. But against the claim that God acts by general\nvolitions, he provides an argument that is simple, and, his view,\ndecisive:","\nWhatever [God] does, He does in particular, and not in general. But\nsince to will and to do, in God, are the same thing, given\nthat He creates each soul by a particular action, He must also will to\ncreate it by a particular will. (OA, 39:175)\n","\nIn some passages, Malebranche’s language suggests that\nGod’s wisdom dictates that He engage in the act of creating that\nbest combines the goodness of the world created with the simplicity of\nthe laws according to which the world is created, and not\nwith simplicity of the volition whereby God creates\n(TNG, OM, 5:147). This suggests that for Malebranche\nGod does will particular created effects, though He wills that they\ntake place according to certain laws. But Arnauld did not think that\nthis was Malebranche’s view. For suppose that God creates the\nworld according to a simple set of laws. Let these laws, as regards\nbodies, be the laws of motion. A world created according to such laws\nmight be more perfect than a world not created according to general\nlaws, or created according to a different set of laws. But that would\nbe of no help to Malebranche. For he does not say that a world\nregulated by simpler laws is a more perfect world. Rather he maintains\nthat creating such a world is a simpler act of creation in God\nHimself. But it is not at all clear how simplicity of laws according\nto which the world is created would make God’s way of creating\nsimpler, especially if God’s creative activity includes the will\nto create every particular part of the creative world.\nMalebranche’s real position, according to Arnauld, emerges in\nthose passages in which he identifies the “ways” in which\nthe word is created with the actions whereby God creates. An example\nis the passage, “An excellent workman ought to proportion his\naction to his work; he does not accomplish by highly complex ways\n(voyes) what He can execute by simpler ones” (TNG,\nOM, 5:28). To this Arnauld objects that the volitions by which\nGod creates are particular.","\nArnauld next points out that Malebranche does not say, without\nqualification, that God creates by general volitions. Rather,\nMalebranche says that God’s creative will is","\nthe cause of a particular effect; but he calls it general, because he\nholds that God has this will only when He is determined to have it by\nan occasional cause, which must be a creature. (OA, 39:176).\n","\nIn other words, according to Malebranche, God causes particular\neffects in creation, but the contribution of God’s volition, as\nopposed to the contribution of created occasional causes, is general.\nLater on, Arnauld says that, on Malebranche’s view, it is really\nonly the free volitions of creatures that can be said to determine\nGod, in view of His general volitions, to produce a particular effect.\nFor, according to Malebranche, God is the cause of every bodily event,\nincluding those which, together with the general laws, are supposed to\ndetermine any given consequent event. (OA, 39:230). But\nMalebranche is committed, so Arnauld argues, to the position that the\nfree volitions of creatures are not caused by God (OA,\n 39:248–57).[27]","\nArnauld goes farther and says that Malebranche’s position on\nGod’s creative will is, in fact, self-contradictory. For\nMalebranche","\nwas not of the opinion of those philosophers who believe that God\noriginally created all things, gave them the qualities necessary for\ntheir conservation and the powers they needed in order to act, and\nthen left them to act without further involving Himself.\n","\nOn the contrary, Malebranche insists that “God is the sole cause\nof everything in the world, up to the smallest movement of the\nsmallest atom.” But he also holds that God “acts in the\nworld only as a universal cause, whose general volitions are\ndetermined by the … changes … in creatures, as by so\nmany occasional causes.” Arnauld tries to show that these two\npositions are inconsistent with one another (OA,\n39:231–37).","\nNear the end of Book II of Réflexions, Arnauld takes\nup Malebranche’s arguments for the claim, “God does not\nact, in the order of grace, by particular volitions,” as\nsummarized by Malebranche in the Premier Eclaircissement to\nTNG (OA, 39:621). Malebranche says that the\nproposition in question can be proved by reason “in two ways;\nà priori & à posteriori; that is, by our\nidea of God, and by the effects of grace.” The chief “a\npriori” argument involves the claim that “to choose\noccasional causes, and to establish general laws for carrying out some\nwork, indicates an infinitely more extensive knowledge than to act by\nparticular volitions.” Arnauld retorts, “Is it something\nto be put up with, that human beings … should have the temerity\nto make themselves judges of what is a sign in God of greater\nintelligence and wisdom?” (OA, 39:624).","\nArnauld quotes Malebranche’s statement, “The à\npriori proofs are too abstract to convince most people of the\ntruth I am proposing. It is more à propos to prove it\nà posteriori,” and goes on to consider the a\nposteriori arguments (OA, 39:625–43). He is less\nsarcastic in dealing with these arguments than with the a priori ones.\nHe says that there are “three or four of them, but they all\namount to the same thing: There are graces that are inefficacious, and\nthis would not occur if God gave His graces by particular\nvolitions.” He mentions three such arguments, based on the\npremise that graces are given to sinners who are not entirely\nconverted; on the premise that grace often falls upon hearts disposed\nin such a way that the grace does not bear fruit; and, finally, on the\npremise that graces given to sinners sometimes end up making them even\nmore guilty.","\nArnauld assumes that these arguments have to do with “the true\ngrace of Jesus Christ, as defined by St. Augustine: Inspiratio\ndilectionis, ut cognita sancto amore faciamus, an inspiration of\nlove given to us so that we should do the good with holy\naffection.” Such grace is efficacious if it infallibly has its\neffect. But the effect in question may be either proximate\n(prochain) or remote (éloigné). As in\nthe famous example of Augustine, a grace may be efficacious in that it\nproduces the desire to be chaste, and yet not efficacious in that it\nfails to produces chastity itself. Similarly, Malebranche’s\narguments assume that “Every grace has the effect for which God\ngives it.” But once again, this phrase may refer to the effect\nfor which God gives the grace by His absolute will, or to the effect\nthat grace tends to produce by its nature and for which God gives the\ngrace by His antecedent will. Arnauld grants that if God gives\nefficacious graces by particular volitions, then there are none that\nfail to have the proximate effect, which God intends they have by His\nabsolute will. But they may well fail to have remote effects to which\nthey tend by their nature and which God wills only by His antecedent\nwill. For example, if an efficacious grace has the effect that a\nsinner repents, only to lapse back into sin, then the grace had the\nproximate effect God intended it to have by His absolute will, even\nthough it failed to have all the effect to which it tended by its\nnature and which God willed by His antecedent will. In this way, he\ndisposes of Malebranche’s three a posteriori arguments.","\nArnauld ends Book II with a consideration of what he takes to be\nMalebranche’s master argument. It is a fourth a posteriori\nargument. He quotes from the Troisième\nEclaircissement:","\nThere is no other way than [by saying that God does not act by\nparticular volitions] to reconcile the proposition in Holy Scripture,\n‘God wants to save all men,’ with this proposition,\n‘Not all men are saved’. (OA, 39:637)\n","\nArnauld rejects this argument mainly because, like the other three a\nposteriori ones, it assumes that “God wills, by a true volition,\nthe salvation of all men, and the conversion of sinners”\n(OA, 39:641).","\nArnauld agreed with Malebranche that God could have brought it about\nthat all men are saved and did not do so. But he favored an\nAugustinian view that “all men” in this context means\n“all sorts of men,” that is, men of all races,\noccupations, etc. He did not entirely reject the Thomistic view that\nGod’s will for the salvation of all men is God’s\n“antecedent will” rather than His “consequent\nwill,” that is, God’s will other things being equal rather\nthan God’s will all things considered. Arnauld points out that\nMalebranche’s position might be thought to be a version of the\nThomistic one, but adds that according to St. Thomas God’s\nantecedent will is a wish rather than an absolute volition (une\nvelleité plutôt qu’une volonté absolue)\n(Réflexions, OA, 39:198, cf.\n 39:576).[28]\n Arnauld firmly rejects any notion that God wills the sanctification\nand salvation of each and every person in a strong sense of\n“will” such that His will would be carried out unless\nthere were something to prevent it, or, in Malebranche’s words,\nto hold it in\n check.[29]"],"subsection_title":"4.3 Does God act only by general volitions?"},{"content":["\nArnauld opened a different line of attack in his Dissertation sur\nles miracles le l’ancien loi. This new attack is directed\nagainst the occasionalism which is assumed in Malebranche’s\naccount of the wisdom of God’s ways of creating. In a foreword\nto the Dissertation, Arnauld says that he had completed his\ntreatment of the first two books of the Réflexions,\nand was beginning work on the third, when he received the fourth\nedition of the\n Treatise:[30]","\nI had finished two books examining the new system of nature and grace,\nand there remained only one further book to complete the task, when I\nreceived from Rotterdam a new edition of the Treatise,\npublished that year, 1684, with several additions. The main one was a\nthird Éclaircissement, with the title: The\nfrequent miracles of the Old Law do not at all indicate that God often\nacts by particular volitions. And the only reason which the\nauthor of the system gives is that the miracles were done by the\nministry of the angels, who were their occasional causes.\n","\nArnauld interrupted his work on the Réflexions to\nwrite the Dissertation, which was published in 1685 together\nwith the first chapter of Book Three of the Reflexions, a\nchapter dealing with Malebranche’s position that Jesus Christ,\nin his human nature, is the occasional cause of the distribution of\ngrace. Arnauld raises theological objections to both positions, but\nalso attacks the underlying occasionalism. The Dissertation\ntouched off a rapid series of replies and ounter-replies in 1685. The\nfirst volume of Reflexions was published later in 1685, and\nthe second and third volumes in 1686.","\nArnauld begins his attack by citing the opening sentence of the\nDernier Éclaircissement, in which Malebranche says\nthat he expects his readers to agree with the principle that\n“God causes (fait) everything, and hence He\ncommunicates His power to creatures only by establishing them as\noccasional causes…” (OM, 5, 197). Arnauld adds that\nMalebranche","\ndoes not understand ‘God causes everything’ as ordinary\nphilosophers do, who say that the creature does not act at all unless\nGod acts with it, which they call ‘concurrence’ …\nBut what he means when he says that God causes everything is that He\ncauses everything that one imagines the creature causes, and that the\ncreature causes nothing at all.\n","\nIt is not difficult, Arnauld says, to show that the first conjunct, so\nunderstood, is false. For “it destroys the nature of intelligent\nbeings, who would not be free if they did not, as real causes, form in\nthemselves the determination of their will toward particular\ngoods”. (As Arnauld points out, the italicized words are\nMalebranche’s.) The second conjunct of the principle is\ndispatched in a similar way:","\nFor intelligent beings receive from God their power to form the\ndetermination of their will toward particular goods. But it is not\nonly as occasional causes but as real causes that they form in\nthemselves that determination of their will. (OA, 5, 198)\n","\nHaving established to his satisfaction that the principle “taken\ngenerally” is false, Arnauld goes on to say that there is no\nreason to deny that God has given angels power to move bodies and that\nthey are real, not mere occasional, causes of the miraculous events\nattributed to them. Again, “it is not so easy to\ndemonstrate” that our soul does not have the real power to move\nthe parts of the body to which it is united.","\nIn the exchange of publications that grew out of the\nDissertation, Arnauld objects in a similar way to\nMalebranche’s use of occasionalism to explain “how grace\nacts in us without wounding [liberty]” (OM, 5, 8). In his\nexplanation, Malebranche distinguishes the effect of grace, which is\nfrom God and is not free, from the recipient’s free response,\nwhich is from the recipient and not from God. Arnauld says that\nMalebranche would have done well to heed Aquinas’s advice that\none should not distinguish “between what is from grace and what\nis from free will, as if the same thing could not be from both”\n(OA, 39, 114).","\nBoth Malebranche and Arnauld continued to write about divine causality\nand human freedom in their later work. Arnauld’s late work on\nthe topic is describe in Section 6 below. Malebranche’s last\neffort on the topic was his Réflexions sur la Premotion\nPhysique, published in 1715, the year of his death."],"subsection_title":"4.4 Arnauld’s criticism of Malebranche’s occasionalism"}]},{"main_content":["\nOn February 11, 1686, while the controversy between Arnauld and\nMalebranche was at a peak of intensity, Leibniz wrote to Landgrave\nErnst von Hessen-Rheinfels, asking that the Landgrave send Arnauld a\nsummary of “a short discourse” on “questions of\ngrace, the concourse of God and creatures, the nature of miracles, the\ncause of sin and the origin of evil, the immortality of the soul,\nideas, etc.” (The Leibniz-Arnauld Correspondence,\nDie Philosophischen Schriften von Leibniz, herausgegeben von K. I.\nGerhardt, Vol. 2, hereinafter LA, 11). The ensuing\ncorrespondence occurred at a crucial point in the development of\nLeibniz’s philosophy. The Discourse on Metaphysics, the\nfinal version of the short discourse, marks the beginning of\nLeibniz’s mature metaphysics, and it shows the influence of the\ncorrespondence with Arnauld.","\nLeibniz had corresponded with Arnauld some fifteen years earlier, in\nconnection with Leibniz’s efforts to reunite the Christian\nchurches. These efforts took a new turn in March, 1672, when Leibniz,\nthen just 25 years old, left Mainz for Paris on a secret political\nmission for his patron, Baron Johann Christian von Boineburg, who was\nin turn minister to Johann Philipp von Schönborn, the Elector of\nMainz. Both men were converts from Lutheranism to Catholicism.\nLeibniz’s diplomatic mission was a failure, but he had other\nreasons for wanting to visit Paris. He was eager to enter into the\nbrilliant intellectual life of the French capital, and he stayed\nthere, with a brief sojourn in England, until 1676, making the\nacquaintance of a number of leading intellectuals. During this time,\nhe undertook for the first time the serious study of mathematics. But\nhe also continued to work toward a philosophical position that he\nhoped would help reunify the churches.","\nBefore coming to Paris, he had discussed the project of reunifying the\nchurches with his patron Boineburg, and had corresponded with Arnauld,\nin 1671, about the Eucharist, proposing an account of the real\npresence that he thought would be acceptable to both Lutherans and\nCatholics. But it was Leibniz’s interest in theodicy and related\nproblems about justification that flourished in Paris. There, in 1673,\nhe composed Confessio Philosophi, a dialogue in Latin between\na theologian and a philosopher that is sometimes referred to as\n“his first theodicy.” Thirty-seven years later in the\nTheodicy, Leibniz says,","\nWhile I was in France, I communicated to M. Arnauld a dialogue I had\nwritten in Latin on the cause of evil and the justice of God. This was\nnot only before his disputes with R. P. Malebranche, but even before\nthe book on The Search after Truth had appeared. The\nprinciple that I here maintain, that sin was permitted because it was\ninvolved in the best plan for the universe, was already employed\nthere, and M. Arnauld did not seem hostile to it. (Theodicy,\n#211).\n","\nSoon after Leibniz’s arrival in Paris, both Boineborg and von\nSchönborn died, and Leibniz turned for support to another\nimportant German noble and convert from Lutheranism to Catholicism,\nJohann Friedrich von Braunschweig-Lüneberg (Hannover). On 26\nMarch 1673, Leibniz wrote as follows to Johann Friedrich:","\nThe famous Arnauld is a man of the most profound and wide-ranging\nthought that a true philosopher can have; his aim is not only to\nilluminate hearts with the clarity of religion, but, further, to\nrevive the flame of reason, eclipsed by human passions; not only to\nconvert heretics, but, further, those who are today in the greatest\nheresy—the atheists and libertines; not only to vanquish his\nopponents, but, further, to improve those of his persuasion. His\nthoughts, then, come to seeking how, so far as it is possible, a\nreform of abuses, frankly wide-spread among dissidents, would overcome\nthe cause of the division. In this design, on several points of\nimportance, he has made the first step and, as a prudent man, he goes\nby degrees. I am distressed that we have lost von Boineburg just when\nI have struck up an acquaintance with Arnauld; for I had hoped to\nbring these two minds, so similar in their honest soundness, on the\nroad to a closer agreement, The Church, as well as the Fatherland, has\nsustained a loss with this man (Quoted in Sleigh 1990, 15–16).\n","\nThere is no record of any response by Arnauld to the Confessio\nPhilosophi, but when Leibniz returned to the problems of\ntheodicy, in 1686, he once again sought Arnauld’s cooperation by\nsending Arnauld the outline of the Discourse on Metaphysics\nthat was mentioned above. The outline sent to Arnauld was no more than\na list of the propositions that were to appear as the titles of the\nthirty-seven sections of the Discourse; the entire\ncorrespondence was carried out through the intermediary of\nHessen-Rheinfels; and the copies of letters received by the two major\ncorrespondents were sometimes defective. These facts, together with\nthe extreme subtlety of the philosophical contents of the letters,\nhave made interpretation of the correspondence very difficult."],"section_title":"5. Arnauld and Leibniz","subsections":[{"content":["\nProposition 8 in Leibniz’s outline is: “In order to\ndistinguish the actions of God from those of creatures, it is\nexplained wherein consists the notion of an individual\nsubstance” (LA,8). The notion of a substance is, for\nLeibniz, the notion of a thing that acts. To explain the notion of a\ncreated individual substance, therefore, he has to explain the notion\nof a created agent, which requires that he distinguish correctly\nbetween the actions of creatures and the actions of God. Part of\nLeibniz’s account of the notion of an individual substance is\ngiven in Proposition 13: “The individual notion of each person\nincludes once and for all everything that will ever happen to\nhim,” so that “one sees in [that notion] a priori\nproofs of the truth of each event, that is, why one [event] has\noccurred rather than another” (LA, 8). The debate\nbetween Arnauld and Leibniz begins here. Proposition 13, Arnauld said\nin his first letter to Leibniz, implies that “once God decided\nto create Adam, everything that has happened since and will ever\nhappen to the human race was and is obliged to happen with a more than\nfatal necessity” (LA, 27). For example, given\nproposition 13, if Adam exists, then necessarily Adam is father of\nCain and Abel as sons, grandfather of their children,\ngreat-grandfather of their children, etc., and everything that will\never happen to all of them is already determined.","\nAfter a complicated three-way exchange of letters, Arnauld withdrew\nhis complaint in a letter dated September 28, 1686. At the outset,\nArnauld assumed that according to Leibniz whatever is contained in the\nindividual notion of a person is contained there as a necessary\nproperty of the person. But in response to Arnauld, Leibniz says that\nhe does not “ask for more of a connection here” than that\nwhich obtains between an individual substance and its “external\ndenominations” (LA, p. 56). Given this understanding of\nthe way that individual notion of a person contains everything that\nwill ever happen to him, Arnauld was prepared to concede that\nLeibniz’s position did not involve fatalism (LA,\n63–64).","\nArnauld adds that he continues to have difficulty with Leibniz’s\naccount of “the possibility of things” and his conception\nof God as choosing the actual world out of an infinity of possible\nworlds, a point on which Leibniz agreed with Malebranche, and he asks\nLeibniz to clarify his “hypothesis of concomitance or agreement\nbetween substances,” and his statement that if a material thing\nis not merely an appearance, like a rainbow, or an accidental\naggregation of parts, like a pile of stones, it must have a\n“substantial form.” Leibniz had mentioned both of these\npoints in his immediately preceding letter (LA, 64–66,\n58). According to the hypothesis of concomitance no created substance\never acts upon any other created substance. But every later state of\nany given created substance is caused by an earlier state of the same\nsubstance, and the histories of the individuals are coordinated by God\nso that they fit together into the history of the actual world.\nLeibniz also says that one substance, x, may\n“express” another substance, y, more distinctly\nthan y expresses x, and in that case, one may say\nthat x causes changes to occur in y. He uses this\nposition to explain the relation of mind and body. Arnauld asked him\nto explain his view further by applying it to the example of a man who\nfeels pain when his arm is wounded, and the example of a man wants to\ntake off his hat and raises his arm. Arnauld also raises seven\nobjections to Leibniz’s claims about substantial forms\n(LA, 66–67) and defends the Cartesian view that\nextension is the real nature of matter, which he takes to imply that\nbodies have only varying degrees of “improper unity”\n(LA, 88).","\nLeibniz provided the further clarification Arnauld requested in\nseveral long letters, which drew two replies from Arnauld. Arnauld\ncontinued to find Leibniz’s position unclear. “I have no\nclear notion,” says Arnauld,","\nof what you mean by the word ‘expression’, when you say\nthat our soul expresses more distinctly (all other things being equal)\nwhat pertains to its body, since it is an expression even of the whole\nuniverse in a certain sense. (LA, 105)\n","\nHe takes Leibniz’s views about substantial forms to be a strange\nand unsuccessful attempt “to ascribe true unity to bodies [in\nparticular the bodies of animals] which would not otherwise have\nit” (LA, 107).","\nArnauld’s last letter to Leibniz is dated August 28, 1687.\nLeibniz tried to get Arnauld to continue the discussion, but Arnauld\nwas fully occupied with other projects. On August 31, 1687, Arnauld\nwrote to Hessen-Rheinfels, saying,","\nIt would be preferable if [Leibniz] gave up, at least for a time, this\nsort of speculation, and applied himself to the greatest business he\ncan have, the choice of the true religion… a decision that is\nof such importance for his salvation. (LA, 110)\n"],"subsection_title":"5.1 Leibniz’s notion of an individual substance"},{"content":["\nEric Stencil has provided a general discussion of the disagreement\nbetween Leibniz and Arnauld about Modal Metaphysics. “Modal\nmetaphysics,” Stencil says, “is the theory of possibility,\nnecessity, essence and God’s relation to each” (Stencil.\n2016, p. 2). Arnauld attacks Leibniz’s thesis that the\nindividual concept of each person contains once for all everything\nthat will ever happen to him, Leibniz’s claim that there are\n“purely possible” substances, and his associated view that\nGod creates by choosing one from a multitude of possible worlds.\nStencil argues that Arnauld’s criticisms are based on a positive\nview which Stencil describes as “a sophisticated essence-based\nmodal actualism,” containing three theses: (1) Everything that\nexists is actual (ontological actualism). (2) The actual world is\nirreducibly modal; there is no reductive analysis of modality (modal\nactualism). (3) All true de re counterfactuals are grounded\nin the irreducibly modal essences of actually existing things\n(essence-based modal actualism) (Stencil, 2016, p. 2–3). Stencil\nsays that Arnauld’s view “could be developed into a\nplausible view in its own right” and that,","\nwhen divorced from its theological motivations and with several\nimportant augmentations, could serve as a foundation for a plausible\nview that deserves to be considered in contemporary debates concerning\nmodal metaphysics. (p. 21)\n"],"subsection_title":"5.2 Arnauld’s criticism of Leibniz’s Modal Metaphysics; Arnauld’s alternative"}]},{"main_content":["\nThroughout his enormously active life as a philosopher and theologian,\nArnauld was above all concerned to defend the doctrine that human\nbeings, after the fall of Adam, can perform meritorious actions, but\nonly if the actions are the result of a supernatural grâce\nefficace par elle-même. Arnauld claimed to find this\ndoctrine in the writings of both Augustine and Aquinas and he defended\nJansen’s version of it against the charge of heresy, even though\nJansen’s version was significantly different from that espoused\nby Arnauld himself. But Arnauld, like Augustine, Aquinas, and Jansen,\nalso held that actions are meritorious only if they are free.\nFor this reason, Arnauld is sometimes said to be a\n“compatibilist.” For example, Robert Sleigh says,\n“It is worth noting that Leibniz and Arnauld both ascribed\ncompatibilism to St. Thomas and that both accepted compatibilism as\nwell” (Sleigh 1990, 29).","\nThe position Arnauld defended and attributed to Augustine and Aquinas\nis, however, quite different from what is nowadays referred to as\n“compatibilism.” The position is connected with\nArnauld’s treatment of free will during the last decade of his\nlife, at the time when he was wrestling with Malebranche’s\ntheory of nature and grace. At that time, Arnauld developd the\nposition that the human will is free when and only when it is a\n“potestas ou facultas ad opposita.” But\nfirst, it is necessary to provide some background for the notion of\ngrâce efficace par elle-même."],"section_title":"6. Arnauld’s Compatibilism","subsections":[{"content":["\nThe point of departure for the disputes about grace and free will in\nseventeenth-century Europe was the inconclusive ending of the\nCongregationes de Auxiliis Divinae\n Gratiae.[31]\n These were ad hoc committees of Cardinals convoked to\nresolve a dispute between the Jesuits and Dominicans about grace,\npredestination, and free will. The dispute was concerned with a work\nby the Jesuit Luis de Molina, whose lengthy title indicates the scope\nand complexity of the dispute: Concordia Liberi Arbitrii\ncum Gratia Donis, Divina Praescientia, Providentia, Praedestinatione\net Reprobatione ad Nonnullos Primae Partis Divi Thomae Articulos\n(The Agreement of Free will with the Gift of Grace, Divine\nForeknowledge, Providence, Predestination and Reprobation, according\nto several articles in the First Part of St. Thomas). The work\nwas published in 1588 and was immediately attacked by the Dominican\nschool of Salamanca, led by Domingo Bañez. The\nCongregationes were convoked by Pope Clement VIII with the\naim of resolving what had become a widespread struggle between the two\norders. His hope was frustrated; the meetings began on January 2, 1598\nand were terminated on August 28, 1607 (the feast day of St.\nAugustine!) by Pope Paul V, who declared that neither side was\nheretical and that both sides had merit.","\nA central question at the meetings of the Congregationes had\nto do with the relation of supernatural grace to free, meritorious\nacts of will. It was assumed on both sides that a human being cannot\nperform a meritorious act of will without supernatural assistance from\nGod, that God sometimes gives such assistance, and that it is\nsometimes part of God’s providential plan that the recipient\nfreely cooperate and thus perform the act in question. Meritorious\nacts of will include, among others, the decision to pray, to seek\nforgiveness for past sins, and to perform a good action for the love\nof God. It was assumed by both Jesuits and Dominicans that God’s\nprovidential plan is infallibly realized. Hence both sides agreed that\nsupernatural grace is, in at least some cases, infallibly\nefficacious (Vansteenberghe 1928, #2140). The issue was\nwhether the supernatural grace in question is efficacious by\nitself, in other words, intrinsically efficacious, or\nwhether it is efficacious only by virtue of the independent, divinely\nforeknown cooperation of the one who receives the grace\n(Vansteenberghe 1928, #2154–65). Several sorts of supernatural\ngrace were distinguished. For our purposes, the most important\ndistinctions are (a) between habitual grace (especially the\ntheological virtues of faith, hope, and charity) and actual grace; (b)\nbetween external actual grace (e.g., hearing a good sermon) and\ninternal actual grace (grace consisting in internal, mental acts); and\n(c) between internal actual grace of the intellect and internal actual\ngrace of the will. The question was whether the actual grace of the\nwill that infallibly produces a meritorious act of will is efficacious\nby itself, or whether instead its efficaciousness is explained in part\nby God’s knowledge that the recipient would cooperate with the\ngrace."],"subsection_title":"6.1 The Congregationes de Auxiliis and seventeenth-century controversy about grace"},{"content":["\nJansen and Arnauld, like Bañez, defended the position that\nactual grace of the will is sometimes intrinsically\n efficacious.[32]\n But they disagreed about the nature of such grace. According to\nBañez, efficacious grace is the supernatural counterpart of\n“physical premotion.” The elusive notion of physical\npremotion is part of a general account of God’s causation of the\nactions of creatures. According to this account, God is a cause of a\ncreature’s action by bringing about in the creature a\n“premotion” that results in the creature’s carrying\nout the action in question. For Bañez, then, the actual grace\nin question is a sort of supernatural beginning of volition that is\nproduced in the human being by God and that infallibly results in a\nmeritorious act of will. Jansen rejected this notion, arguing that it\nis an obscure hypothesis that explains nothing. He held that\nefficacious grace is, instead, a feeling of love, which he called a\n“delectatio victrix (victorious pleasure)” and\nwhich infallibly leads to a meritorious act.","\nArnauld accepted neither of those views. In a work published in 1656,\nhe considers two positions on the nature of efficacious grace, in so\nfar as it is the principle of good will: “Some say that such\ngrace consists in the mercy of God and in an inherent form [in the\ncreature],” while others say that it consists “only in the\nmercy of God, which brings about (operatur) the interior\nmovement of the mind.” Arnauld says “I am not far”\nfrom the second position, which he attributes to “Bradwardine,\nEstius, Tiphanius, and many other [Thomists]” (Dissertatio\ntheologica quadripartita, OA, 20:237).","\nWhen Arnauld returned to questions about efficacious grace and free\nwill toward the end of his life, he was more categorical:","\nThe true opinion of St. Augustine, St. Bernard, and St. Thomas\nconcerning actual grace, is that of Estius, who posits nothing created\nby God in the will in between the will of God, which he calls\nuncreated grace, and the free movement of the human will which the\nuncreated grace produces in the human will.\n","\nJansen was “surely mistaken,” Arnauld adds, when he\ndefined actual grace as a non-deliberate “victorious\npleasure” (Letter to du Vaucel, 8 May 1693, OA,\n 3:636).[33]\n In a short treatise on human freedom written almost a decade earlier,\nArnauld illustrates his criticism of Jansen (without mentioning him by\nname) with an example: “Suppose that a man who is not very\ngenerous is approached by a beggar who asks him for alms. He\ndeliberates, proposes to himself the commandment of Christ, and gives\nalms for the sake of God” (De la liberté de\nl’homme, OA, 10:620, hereinafter\nLiberté). Jansen assumes that there is a\nnon-deliberate act of victorious pleasure in between the man’s\ndeliberation and his decision to give alms for the sake of God, and\nthat this non-deliberate pleasure is the actual grace that enables him\nto act in a meritorious way. Arnauld rejects this position and instead\nidentifies the efficacious grace with God’s merciful will that\nthe man arrive at the deliberate decision to give alms for the sake of\nGod.","\nYet Arnauld also assumed that the man’s decision, like any\nmeritorious act of will, was free. Arnauld’s basic position on\nthe compatibility of the intrinsic efficacy of grace with the freedom\nof the volitions produced by the grace, is that we know from Scripture\nand Tradition, supported by philosophical reflection on God’s\nomnipotence (a) that the grace of Christ is intrinsically efficacious;\nand we know “from our own experience” (b) that our\nvolitions of the relevant kind are free. Hence we know that (a) and\n(b) are consistent, even though we have “great difficulty”\nin seeing how they fit together (OA, 10:436)."],"subsection_title":"6.2 Bañez, Jansen, and Arnauld on the nature of efficacious actual grace of the will"},{"content":["\nArnauld was, then, a compatibilist of sorts. The compatibilism he\nespoused and attributed to Aquinas, however, was limited, and differs\nin a number ways from the sort of position philosophers now label\n“compatibilism.”","\n1. Arnauld was not a determinist, nor did he attribute determinism to\nSt. Thomas. Arnauld cites Aquinas (Summa Theologicae I, 19,\n3) as an authority in favor of his own view that God’s will with\nregard to creatures is not necessary (OA, 39:598).","\n2. Arnauld held that freedom of human volitions is\nincompatible with the determination of the choices by laws of\nnature together with temporally antecedent events. Thus he responds to\nMalebranche’s statement that the destruction of Jerusalem by the\nRomans some seventy years after the death of Jesus was “a\nnecessary outcome of the laws of nature,” by saying, “It\nis clear … that a long series of diverse events, that depended\non an infinity of free movements of the wills of men, could have been,\nand indeed were, regulated by the providence of Him who has an\nalmighty power to move the hearts of men, and to direct them as He\npleases … But it cannot be said that it was a necessary\nconsequence of the laws of nature without degrading human beings,\nmaking them act like lower animals, and depriving them of their\nliberty, a position that has been declared anathema by the\nCouncil of Trent” (OA, 39:301). He repeats the\ncriticism a few pages later:","\nAs I have shown above, to hold that events that depended on an\ninfinity of free volitions of human beings were a necessary\nconsequence of laws of nature is to deprive human beings of their\nfreedom, after the example of Wycliffe. (OA,\n 39:316).[34]\n ","\n3. According to the position Arnauld attributes to Aquinas, the\nsinful choices of human beings are not determined by any\ncause exterior to the sinner. Arnauld agreed with Aquinas that God is\nthe sole exterior cause of the volitions of a human being, that is,\nthe only efficient cause of volitions outside the human being himself\nor herself, but God never causes a person to sin. Arnauld cites\nSumma Theologiae, I–IIae, 9, 6, ad 3, in which Aquinas\nanswers the objection that God cannot be the sole exterior cause of\nsinful choices. Aquinas says,","\nGod, as the universal mover, moves the will of man to the universal\nobject of the will, which is the good. And without this universal\nmovement man cannot will anything; but man through reason determines\nhimself to will this or that, whether it be a true or only an apparent\ngood. Nevertheless God sometimes moves some men especially to will\nsomething determinate that is good (interdum movet Deus\nspecialiter aliquos ad aliquid determinatè volendum quod est\nbonum), as in those He moves by grace. (Vera S. Thomae de\ngratia sufficiente et efficaci doctrina dilucide explanata,\nOA,\n 20:63).[35]\n ","\nArnauld’s purpose in citing this text is to show that, according\nto Aquinas, when one sins, one is not moved by\n grace.[36]\n But the text, together with the premise that there is no exterior\ncause of human volition other than God, implies that sinful choices\nare not determined by any cause outside the sinner."],"subsection_title":"6.3 The limits of Arnauld’s compatibilism"},{"content":["\nIn several letters toward the end of his life, Arnauld recommends a\n“little Latin text” on human freedom that he wrote at the\ntime he was wrestling with Malebranche’s theory of nature and\ngrace, saying that it is particularly helpful in connection with the\nproblem of reconciling intrinsically efficacious grace with freedom of\n will.[37]\n The core of Arnauld’s new theory is that the human soul has\nfreedom of will with respect to a true or apparent good when it has\nthe power to will that good and the power not to will it. In such\ncases, the soul “determines itself” to will or not will\nthe good in question. The human soul is said to have this power with\nrespect to any particular good it apprehends, as long as the\nparticular good does not encompass all the good toward which the will\ntends. Arnauld cites I–IIae, 13, 6 as part of the Thomistic origin of\nhis theory:","\nMan does not choose of necessity. And this is because that which is\npossible not to be, is not of necessity…. For man can will and\nnot will, act and not act; again, he can will this or that, and do\nthis or that. The reason of this is seated in the very power of the\nreason. For the will can tend to whatever the reason can apprehend as\ngood. Now the reason can apprehend as good, not only this, viz.\n“to will” or “to act,” but also this, viz.\n“not to will” or “not to act.” Again, in all\nparticular goods, the reason can consider an aspect of some good, and\nthe lack of some good, which has the aspect of evil: and in this\nrespect, it can apprehend any single one of such goods as to be chosen\nor to be avoided. The perfect good alone, which is happiness, cannot\nbe apprehended by the reason as an evil, or as lacking in any way.\nConsequently man wills happiness of necessity, nor can he will not to\nbe happy, or to be unhappy… Therefore man chooses not of\nnecessity, but freely. (cited at OA, 10:630–31)\n","\nArnauld follows Aquinas in saying that the will is not free with\nregard to two objects, first, happiness, apprehended as the ultimate\nobject of volition, and, second, God, seen face to face by the blessed\nin heaven. In these two cases, one wills (or loves) the object with\n“necessity of nature,” and hence not freely. In all other\ncases, the will is free, and when one wills, one does so\n freely.[38]\n Arnauld provides a compact formula for this theory: “The best\nand shortest notion one can have of free will is to say with St.\nThomas that it is a potestas ou facultas ad opposita”\n(Letter to Bossuet, juillet 1693, OA,\n 3:662).[39]"],"subsection_title":"6.4 Arnauld’s late position on the nature of free will"}]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nAntoine Arnauld was born in Paris on February 6, 1612, the twentieth\\nand last child of an important French family. He is often referred to\\nin the French literature as Le Grand Arnauld. Another famous\\nmember of the family was his sister, Mère Angélique\\nArnauld. Installed by her wealthy and powerful father as abbess of the\\nconvent of Port-Royal in 1602 at the age of eleven, she later reformed\\nthe convent and it became a center of intense religious life. Several\\nof Arnauld’s sisters were nuns at Port-Royal, where his mother\\njoined them after the death of his father in 1621.\",\n \"\\nThe young Antoine attended the Collège de\\nCalvi-Sorbonne, where one of his fellow students was his nephew,\\nIsaac Lemaître de Sacy. Arnauld went on to study philosophy at\\nthe Collège de Lisieux, and then decided to follow in\\nhis father’s steps as a lawyer. However, under the influence of\\nhis mother and her confessor, Jean Duvergier, the abbé de\\nSaint-Cyran¸ he changed his mind and began studies in\\ntheology in 1633.\",\n \"\\nAbout 1640, he joined a small group of solitaires who lived\\nin the countryside near Port-Royal and were associated with the\\nconvent. They included Pierre Nicole, Claude Launcelot, and Sacy. The\\nsolitaires initiated the petites écoles de\\nPort-Royal which continued in various locations from the late\\n1630s until 1660. Their students included the dramatist Jean Racine.\\nLater on, Arnauld cooperated with Sacy in the first important French\\ntranslation of the\\n Bible.[1]\\n He also co-authored the Grammaire générale et\\nraisonnée with Lancelot and La Logique ou l’Art\\nde penser (hereinafter Logic), with Nicole. All of these\\ncollaborative projects had their origins in the petites\\nécoles. Blaise Pascal was closely associated with the\\nsolitaires beginning in 1655.\",\n \"\\nThe year 1641 was an eventful one for Arnauld. He was ordained a\\npriest on September 21. During the year, he completed the\\n“Fourth Objections” to Descartes’\\nMeditations and wrote De la Fréquente\\ncommunion (published in 1643). The first work established his\\nreputation as a philosopher. The second went through many editions and\\nhad an effect on Catholic sacramental practice up to the end of the\\nnineteenth century. Jansen’s Augustinus was also\\npublished in Paris in 1641, having been published posthumously in the\\nNetherlands a year earlier. It was attacked by the official theologian\\nof Paris, Isaac Habert, who preached a series of sermons against\\nJansen in the cathedral of Paris during Lent, 1643. Arnauld, who had\\narrived at an interpretation of Augustine similar to, though not\\nidentical with, that of Jansen, undertook, at the request of\\nSaint-Cyran, to defend Jansen against the accusation of heresy. This\\nhe did in his Première Apologie pour Jansénius,\\n1644, and Seconde Apologie, 1645. Although Arnauld did not\\nagree with important details of Jansen’s view, he continued to\\ndefend Jansen against the charge of heresy off and on for the rest of\\nhis life.\",\n \"\\nIn 1653 the famous five propositions attributed to Jansen were\\ndeclared to be heretical by Pope Innocent X in the Constitution\\n“Cum Occasione.” Arnauld and most of the\\nPort-Royal group claimed that the five propositions, although\\nheretical on their most likely interpretation, were not in fact in\\nJansen’s work. The dispute led to Arnauld’s expulsion from\\nthe Sorbonne after a celebrated trial, which lasted from December 1,\\n1655 to January 30, 1656. Pascal came to Arnauld’s defense with\\nthe Provincial Letters, published in installments from\\nJanuary 23, 1656 to May, 1657. The dispute lasted until 1669, when the\\nFrench bishops who supported Arnauld worked out a compromise with Pope\\nClement IX, and Arnauld enjoyed almost a decade in the good graces of\\nboth the court and the Pope. During this time, Arnauld wrote\\nvoluminously on the Eucharist, but he also found time to co-author the\\nPort-Royal Grammar and Logic, and to write his\\nNouveaux éléments de géométrie.\\nHowever, in the late 1670s, the attacks on Port-Royal by civil and\\nreligious authorities resumed, and in 1679 Arnauld fled to the\\nNetherlands, where he remained until his death, in Liège, on\\nAugust 8, 1694.\",\n \"\\nThe last fifteen years of Arnauld’s life, spent in self-imposed\\nexile, were among his most fruitful in philosophy. During this period,\\nhe carried on his debates with Malebranche and Leibniz, and also\\nreexamined his position on human free will. Arnauld’s published\\ncriticism of Malebranche began in 1683 with On True and False\\nIdeas (hereinafter Ideas). But the central topic of the\\nexchange was Malebranche’s use of occasionalism to explain how\\nit is that not all human beings are saved. Arnauld provided a\\nsystematic criticism of that position in the three volumes of\\nRéflexions philosophiques et théologiques sur le\\nnouveau système de la nature et de la grâce\\n(hereinafter Réflexions), published in 1685 and 1686.\\nArnauld’s famous correspondence with Leibniz was initiated by\\nLeibniz in 1686, when he sent Arnauld the section headings of his\\nprojected Discourse on Metaphysics.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Life and Works\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nArnauld considered it important to be clear about the distinction\\nbetween philosophy and theology. This concern is present in his work\\nfrom the beginning, in 1641, to the end of his published writings.\\nThus, he divides the “Fourth Objections” to\\nDescartes’ Meditations into “the possible\\nphilosophical objections regarding the major issues of the nature of\\nour mind and of God” and “the problems which a theologian\\nmight come up against in the work as a whole”\\n(Descartes, 2:169). One of Arnauld’s criticisms of\\nMalebranche is that he does not establish many of the principles in\\nhis system of nature and grace either by the proper methods of\\nphilosophy or of theology. Again, in Règles du bon\\nsens, written the year before his death, Arnauld warns,\",\n \"\\nBe very careful about the nature of the question in dispute, whether\\nit is philosophical or theological. For if it is theological, it must\\nbe decided principally by authority, whereas if it is philosophical,\\nit must be decided principally by\\n reason.[2]\\n \",\n \"\\nAccording to Arnauld, the chief purpose of theology is to defend the\\ntruths revealed by God through Sacred Scripture and the teaching\\ntradition of the Church. Part of the ceremony in which he received the\\ndoctorate in theology from the Sorbonne was a vow, made before the\\naltar of the Holy Martyrs, “that we will give our life before\\nleaving the truth undefended.” In the speech he gave on that\\noccasion, Arnauld emphasized the vow, which he said was instituted\\nbecause\",\n \"\\nthe obligation to defend the truth with force and courage is so\\nindispensable in a theologian that those whose courage in this regard\\ncould weaken, should be committed to it by the holiness and piety of a\\nsolemn public vow (Traduction du Discours latin prononcé\\npar M. Arnauld en recevant le Bonnet de Docteur, OA, 43:12).\\n\",\n \"\\nThis intense religious commitment to his role as a theologian\\ncontinued throughout his life. Combined with his combative\\npersonality, it helps to explain the passion with which he defended\\nindividual theologians, especially Saint-Cyran and Jansen, as well as\\nwhat he took to be the truths of revelation.\",\n \"\\nRegarding philosophy, Arnauld, like Descartes, held that its purpose\\nwas to acquire useful knowledge through reason. That reason ought to\\nbe employed only in the pursuit of useful knowledge is emphasized in\\nthe opening pages of the Logic. Arnauld and Nicole say that\\n“speculative sciences, such as geometry, astronomy, and\\nphysics” can be used as instruments for perfecting judgment and\\nreason. This provides a use for some of the “nooks and\\ncrannies” of those sciences, which would otherwise be\\n“completely worthless.” They go on to say,\",\n \"\\nPeople are not born to spend their time measuring lines, examining the\\nrelations between angles, or contemplating different motions of\\nmatter. The mind is too large, life too short, time too precious to\\noccupy oneself with such trivial objects. But they are obligated to be\\njust, fair, and judicious in all their speech, their actions, and the\\nbusiness they conduct. Above all they ought to train and educate\\nthemselves for this (Logic, 5).\\n\",\n \"\\nArnauld did not think, however, that philosophical sciences are useful\\nonly as instruments for acquiring virtues. Natural philosophy or\\nphysics can be made to serve the good of human life in many ways and\\neven metaphysics is useful in that it can help the theologian in the\\ntask of defending the truth.\",\n \"\\nAn outstanding example of that sort of usefulness, in Arnauld’s\\nview, was Descartes’ argument for the distinction of the soul or\\nmind from the body. Arnauld refers to Descartes as a “Christian\\nphilosopher,” echoing Descartes’ own use of the phrase in\\nthe letter dedicating the Meditations on First Philosophy to\\nthe Faculty of Theology of the Sorbonne, where Descartes says that he\\ncarried out the injunction of the Fourth Lateran Council\\n(1512–17) that “Christian philosophers” should try\\nto prove the immateriality of the soul (Descartes, 2:4).\",\n \"\\nThe authorities most often cited by Arnauld are Augustine and Aquinas\\nin theology, and Augustine, Aquinas, and Descartes in philosophy.\\nArnauld’s attitude toward these predecessors is complex. From\\nthe outset of his published work in philosophy, he claimed that\\nAugustinian themes were present in Descartes. However, in his late\\nwork, beginning with On True and False Ideas in 1683, he\\nbegan to cite Aquinas frequently, as well as Augustine, both in\\nphilosophy and theology. Thus, in the 181 folio pages of\\nIdeas, which Arnauld describes as dealing with a purely\\nphilosophical topic, he cites Augustine twenty times and Aquinas six\\ntimes, always claiming that they agree with Descartes and with his own\\nposition. Similarly, in the theological part of\\nRéflexions, Arnauld relies heavily on Aquinas’s\\nChristology while arguing that Malebranche’s theodicy leads him\\ninto heterodox, if not downright heretical, positions (OA\\n39:777). Again, in his late work on the problem of human free will and\\ngrâce efficace par elle-même, Arnauld took over\\nwhat he says is the Thomistic position that the will is free when it\\nis a potestas ou facultas ad opposita. And in the controversy\\nwith Nicole and others over Nicole’s theory of a grâce\\ngénérale, Arnauld relied heavily on Aquinas’s\\naccount of cognition. So frequently did Arnauld rely on Thomistic\\nformulations in his late work that his friends reproached him for\\n“abandoning Augustine in order to follow Aquinas, thus\\npreferring the disciple to the master” (Règles du bon\\nsens, OA, 10:154). This reproach had to do directly with\\nArnauld’s rejection of the “Platonism” in Augustine\\nand Jansen. But as shown below, Arnauld, late in his career, also\\nparted company with Augustine and Jansen on the nature of human free\\nwill, and with Jansen’s account of the nature of actual\\ngrace.\",\n \"\\nArnauld had a scholarly knowledge of the history of philosophy and\\ntheology, and was certainly aware of the important differences among\\nAugustine, Aquinas, and Descartes on such issues as the role of sense\\nperception in human knowledge, the relation of the mind to the body,\\nand the nature of human freedom. But Arnauld wanted to emphasize the\\ncontinuity of Descartes with the Christian past. Arnauld feared that\\nDescartes’ philosophy would be made into a weapon against the\\nChristian tradition. Emphasizing those elements in Descartes’\\nphilosophy that are in continuity with Augustine and Aquinas was part\\nof Arnauld’s effort to make of Cartesianism an ally, rather than\\nan enemy, of the faith.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Arnauld on the Distinction between Philosophy and Theology\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nUnlike Saint-Cyran, Jansen, and most of the Port-royalists, Arnauld\\nhad a positive appreciation of philosophy, and a lively interest in\\nthe subject (See Nadler 1989, 18 ff.). His philosophy is typically,\\nand correctly, classified as Cartesian. Indeed, Leibniz said, in 1691,\\nthat Arnauld had been “in all ways for Descartes for a long\\n time.”[3]\\n Arnauld enthusiastically endorsed Descartes’ physics and the\\napproach to mind-body dualism to which it gave rise. He also adopted\\nsome parts of Descartes’ views on philosophical method.\",\n \"\\nArnauld’s Descartes, however, is unlike the Descartes who is\\nseen as the father of the enlightenment and who anticipated many of\\nthe preoccupations of recent analytical philosophy. Arnauld claims to\\nset forth the gist of Descartes’ philosophy, but he did not\\nhesitate to replace parts of Descartes’ philosophy with\\ndifferent though related propositions, especially when doing so made\\nDescartes a more reliable ally in what Arnauld took to be his primary\\ntask, to defend the truths of the faith.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Arnauld’s Cartesianism\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIn the Fourth Part of the Logic, “On Method,”\\nArnauld and Nicole present an account of the distinction between\\nanalysis and synthesis that they say is taken from a manuscript of\\nDescartes lent to them by Clerselier. What they present is a free\\ntranslation of Rule Thirteen of the Rules for the Direction of the\\nMind. They then paraphrase the four rules given by Descartes in\\nPart Two of the Discourse on the Method, saying that although\\nthe rules are “often difficult to follow,” yet “it\\nis always helpful to bear them in mind, and to heed them as much as\\npossible whenever we try to find the truth by means of reason”\\n(Logic, 234–39). But Arnauld developed the Cartesian\\nposition on philosophical method in a distinctive way. In particular,\\nhe reshaped the notion of an idea, of a confused idea, of a clear and\\ndistinct idea, and of methodic doubt.\",\n \"\\nAn idea, according to Arnauld, is the same thing as a perception (in\\nthe broad sense of the term characteristic of seventeenth-century\\nphilosophy), and every perception has an object distinct from the\\nperception itself. Every idea, i.e., every perception, is, in\\naddition, a consciousness of itself. But this “implicit\\nreflexion” makes present to the mind a perception that is, in\\nthe first place, of an object distinct from itself. As Arnauld puts\\nit, “I know myself in knowing other things”\\n(Ideas, 6). It is obviously true, he says, that we can know\\nobjects only through the mediation of our perceptions, i.e., our\\nideas, of them:\",\n \"\\nBut if, by not knowing them immediately, is meant being able\\nto know them only by representative beings distinct from\\nperceptions, I hold that in this sense we can know material things, as\\nwell as God and our soul, not only mediately but also\\nimmediately, i.e., that we can know them without there being\\nany intermediary between our perceptions and the object (Of True\\nand False Ideas, hereinafter Ideas, 31).\\n\",\n \"\\nArnauld says that the object of any perception has objective\\nbeing in the perception. Furthermore, the object has objective\\nbeing in the perception as having properties. If an object\\nexists objectively in a given perception as having a given property,\\nthen Arnauld says that the perception represents the object\\nas having that property, that is, makes the object present to the mind\\nas having that\\n property.[4]\\n Furthermore, an idea (or perception) can represent its object to the\\nperceiving mind as having this or that property contingently or\\nnecessarily. Arnauld cites the dictum, “it is in the idea of\\neach thing that we see its properties,” and takes it to refer to\\nan explicit reflection upon an idea that represents its object as\\nhaving certain properties necessarily.\",\n \"\\nArnauld argues at length that this theory of ideas was also held by\\nDescartes (Ideas, 26ff.). This claim has puzzled philosophers\\nfrom Thomas Reid to the present (Reid 1785, 169). A good example of\\nthe more common interpretation of Descartes’ theory is provided\\nby Ian Hacking, who also attributes the theory, as he understands it,\\nto the Port-Royal Logic. Hacking begins with the first\\nsentence of the First Part of the Logic: “We have no\\nknowledge of what is outside us except by the mediation of\\nthe ideas within us,” and continues,\",\n \"\\nThe Cartesian ego has set the stage. The ego able to\\ncontemplate what is within it ponders what lies outside. There are\\nsome objects that we can contemplate without being logically committed\\nto the existence of anything other than the ego. These objects are\\nideas (Hacking 1975b, 29).\\n\",\n \"\\nBorrowing an example from Elizabeth Anscombe’s comment on\\nBerkeley, Hacking says that in the Cartesian (and Port-royalist)\\ntheory, “Ideas [in the mind] are paradigm ‘objects’\\nand coins [in a man’s pocket] are not” (Hacking 1975b,\\n28–30). But the sentence that Hacking quotes from the First Part\\nof the Logic does not demand the interpretation he gives it.\\nIt is consistent with the position Arnauld develops in Ideas\\n(published in the same year as the fifth and last edition of the\\nLogic), according to which ideas are primarily perceptions of\\nexternal objects distinct from the perceiver, objects like coins in a\\nman’s pocket; and only secondarily objects of reflexive\\nperception. Arnauld makes a good case for the claim that this position\\nwas also held by Descartes, but the claim is not universally\\naccepted.\",\n \"\\nArnauld’s account of clarity and distinctness, obscurity and\\nconfusion of ideas can be found in the First Part, Chapter 9, of the\\nLogic. The discussion proceeds by way of examples, rather\\nthan general definitions, but it can be summarized as follows: The\\nbasic properties of ideas are clarity and confusion. Clarity of ideas\\nis the same as vividness, and this is a matter of degree; the opposite\\nof clarity is obscurity. Confusion of ideas results when a number of\\nideas are connected by false judgments, and confusion produces\\nobscurity. Opposite to confusedness of ideas is distinctness. Arnauld\\nand Nicole apply these distinctions to the idea of pain:\",\n \"\\nWe can say that all ideas are distinct insofar as they are clear, and\\nthat their obscurity derives only from their confusion, just as in\\npain the simple sensation which strikes us is clear and also distinct.\\nBut what is confused, namely that the sensation is in the hand, is by\\nno means clear in us (Logic, 48).\\n\",\n \"\\nAgain, Arnauld and Nicole speak of “the obscure and confused\\nideas we have of sensible qualities, the soul adding its false\\njudgments to what nature causes us to know” (Logic,\\n49–50). The simple idea of pain, for example, is a clear and\\ndistinct idea of a sensory state in the mind, and the idea of the pain\\nin the hand is a compound and confused idea of something in the hand\\nthat exactly resembles pain. Being confused, the idea is also obscure,\\nbecause what it is in the hand that exactly resembles pain is\\n“by no means clear to us.” Arnauld’s theory of clear\\nand confused ideas implies that ideas, as they are given to us by\\nnature, and thus by God, are clear and distinct, and therefore cannot\\nbe deceptive, or “materially false.” Any deceptiveness in\\nour ideas derives from their confusedness and is the result of our\\nmisuse of freedom. It is not God who confuses us, but we who confuse\\nourselves.\",\n \"\\nArnauld’s comments on the idea of pain are part of a larger\\nposition on “ideas of sensation.” In a famous passage in\\nthe “Fourth Objections,” Arnauld objected to\\nDescartes’ statement, “If cold is merely the absence of\\nheat, the idea of cold which represents it to me as a positive thing\\nwill be materially false” (Descartes, 2:145). As part\\nof his reply, Descartes says,\",\n \"\\nIf cold is simply an absence, the idea of cold is not coldness itself\\nas it exists objectively in the intellect, but something else, which I\\nerroneously mistake for this absence, namely a sensation which in fact\\nhas no existence outside the intellect (Descartes, 2:163).\\n\",\n \"\\nArnauld developed a general account of sensory ideas that builds on\\nthis part of Descartes’ reply. He sets out his account clearly\\nin aIdeas: Sensory ideas, like the idea of pain and the idea\\nof cold, are perceptions of mental states. Taken apart from the\\njudgments in which we falsely identify these mental states with states\\nof material things, sensory ideas are clear and distinct. They become\\nconfused, and hence obscure, only as a result of the precipitous,\\nfalse judgments of childhood. Arnauld quotes Descartes’\\nPrinciples of Philosophy, Part I, #68 in support of his\\naccount:\",\n \"\\nWe know pain, color and the other sensations clearly and distinctly\\nwhen we consider them simply as thoughts, but when we would judge that\\ncolor, pain, etc., are things which subsist outside our thought, we do\\nnot conceive in any way what that color, that pain, etc., is (Quoted\\nby Arnauld in Ideas, 132).\\n\",\n \"\\nArnauld also gave a distinctive interpretation of Descartes’\\nmethod of doubt. In the “Fourth Objections,” Arnauld\\noffers, as the first of “the problems which a theologian might\\ncome up against in the work as a whole,” the following: “I\\nam afraid that the author’s somewhat free style of\\nphilosophizing, which calls everything into doubt, may cause offence\\nto some people” (Descartes, 2:151). Arnauld recommends\\nthat the First Meditation be “furnished with a brief preface\\nwhich explains that there is no serious doubt cast on these matters\\nbut that the purpose is to isolate temporarily those matters which\\nleave room for even the ‘slightest’ and most\\n‘exaggerated’ doubt,” and that the clause\\n“since I did not know the author of my being” be replaced\\nby “since I was pretending that I did not know the author of my\\nbeing.”\",\n \"\\nArnauld was asking Descartes to make clear that his method did not\\ninvolve real doubt, but only a consideration of what would happen\\nif one were to doubt. Consider this passage from the\\nPort-Royal Logic:\",\n \"\\nIf there were people able to doubt that they were not sleeping or were\\nnot mad, or who could even believe that the existence of everything\\nexternal is uncertain … at least no one could doubt, as St.\\nAugustine says, that one exists, that one is thinking, or that they\\nare alive… From this clear, certain, and indubitable knowledge\\none can form a rule for accepting as true all thoughts found to be as\\nclear as this one appears to be (Logic, p.\\n 228).[5]\\n \",\n \"\\nThis is as close as Arnauld comes to using methodic doubt, but it does\\nnot imply that one can really doubt the existence of an external\\nworld, much less that one ought to do so, even once in one’s\\nlifetime.\",\n \"\\nIt is not clear to what extent Descartes would have agreed with that\\ninterpretation of methodic doubt. He did not adopt the first of\\nArnauld’s two suggested revisions. Perhaps he thought that the\\npoint was covered in the “Synopsis” of the\\nMeditations. But he did adopt Arnauld’s second\\nrecommendation by adding some words in parentheses in the Sixth\\nMeditation, thus:\",\n \"\\nThe second reason for doubt was that since I did not know the author\\nof my being (or at least was pretending not to), I saw nothing to rule\\nout the possibility that my natural constitution made me prone to\\nerror even in matters which seemed to me most true\\n(Descartes, 2:53).\\n\",\n \"\\nOn the other hand, Descartes begins the Principles of\\nPhilosophy with the remark,\",\n \"\\nIt seems that the only way of freeing ourselves from these [prejudices\\nof childhood] is to make the effort, once in the course of our life,\\nto doubt everything which we find to contain even the smallest\\nsuspicion of error (Descartes, 1:193).\\n\",\n \"\\nHere Descartes advocates an effort to develop a real doubt on a wide\\nscale, the sort of advocacy that had aroused Arnauld’s\\ntheological concern in the “Fourth\\n Objections.”[6]\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.1 Philosophical method\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAs pointed out in 3.1 above, Arnauld identifies an idea with a\\nperception (in the broad sense of the term characteristic of\\nseventeenth-century philosophy). Kenneth L. Pearce employs the notion\\nof an extrinsic denomination to throw new light on that position. In\\nPearce’s words, “Arnauld does not intend a straightforward\\nidentification of ideas with perceptions, for he draws a semantic\\ndistinction between ‘perception’ and\\n‘idea;’.” “Careful examination of this\\nsemantic distinction,” he says, “will help us …\\nachieve a proper understanding of the relationship between perceptions\\nand ideas” (Pearce 2016, p. 380). To that end, he makes use of\\nthe notion of an “extrinsic denomination,” a notion which\\noccurs in Arnauld’s Ideas, in the statement,\\n“Being conceived, in regard to the sun that is in the sky, is\\nonly an extrinsic denomination, i.e., only a relation to the\\nperception which I have of it” (quoted by Pearce on p. 382).\\nPearce adds that:\",\n \"\\nThe Logic defines an ‘extrinsic denomination’ as\\na mode “taken from something that is not in the substance, such\\nas ‘loved’, ‘seen’, ‘desired’,\\nnames derived from the actions of something else” (Pearce, 2016,\\np 382).\\n\",\n \"\\nTalking about perceptions and talking about ideas, Pearce says, are\\ntwo different ways of describing a situation in which a person\\nperceives an object:\",\n \"\\nSuch a situation is relational, involving a relation of the perceiver\\nto the object and a relation of the object to the perceiver. The first\\nrelation is a real mode in the perceiver; the second is not a real\\nmode, but rather a mere extrinsic denomination in the object (Pearce,\\n2016, p. 382).\\n\",\n \"\\nPearce concludes:\",\n \"\\nThis explains the sense in which the perception and the idea are\\nidentical: just as one and the same worldly state of affairs entitles\\nMary to the (intrinsic) denomination ‘lover’ and John to\\nthe (extrinsic) denomination ‘beloved’, so one and the\\nsame worldly state of affairs entitles my mind to the (intrinsic)\\ndenomination ‘perception’ [sic] and the sun to\\nthe (extrinsic) denomination ‘idea’ (Peatce, 2016, p.\\n382–83)\\n\",\n \"\\nPearce suggests that “The reason Arnauld’s ideas are not\\nobjectionable intrermediary entities is that they are not really\\ndistinct from the external objects they represent” (p. 376). To\\nput the point in another way,\",\n \"\\nArnauld denies that the idea is a distinct third term in perception\\nnot by identifying it with the perceptual act, but rather by\\nidentifying it with the external object conceived by me\\n(Pearce, 2016, p. 389).\\n\",\n \"\\nIn a subsequent article, Pearce shows how Arnauld uses the notion of\\nan extrinsic denomination to resolve three apparent contradictions\\nbetween what Arnauld says about representation and his\",\n \"\\nsparce Cartesian ontology on which there are just two kinds of\\nsubstance, thinking and extended … [and] every feature of a\\nthinking substance is a way of thinking, and every feature of an\\nextended substance is a way of being extended (Pearce forthcoming, p.\\n1–2).\\n\",\n \"\\nThe first apparent contradiction arises because Arnauld maintains that\\nwe directly perceive extended objects and yet that we do so by means\\nof ideas in our mind. The solution is that the perception, e.g., of\\nthe sun, is a real mode of thinking which essentially makes the sun\\npresent to the mind, and in virtue of which the sun deserves the\\nextrinsic denomination ‘idea of the sun’ (p. 22). The\\nsecond apparent contradiction arises from the Port-Royal theory of\\nlanguage. According to the Logic, language consists of sounds\\nand visible characters which are signs of ideas. But signs are\\nrepresentations and “representing is not a mode of extension and\\ntherefore cannot modify an extended object such as a sound [or] a\\nwritten word” (p. 19). The solution is that the idea which a\\nword signifies “is connected to [the sign] only by a\\nhabit,” the habit, namely “of conceiving of a certain\\nobject whenever [the mind] perceives the symbol.” Consequently\\n“the object is entitled to the name ‘sign’ on\\naccount of the state of some mind or minds. In other words,\\n‘sign’ is applied to the object by extrinsic\\ndenomination” (p. 19–20). The third apparent contradiction\\narises in Arnauld’s rejection of Malebranche’s position\\nthat “the soul actually becomes red, blue or yellow [and] when\\none smells a carcass the soul becomes formally putrid.” Arnauld\\nagrees that colors and smells are modifications of the mind and not of\\nextension. But this does not imply, Arnauld says, that “our soul\\nshould be called either ‘green’, or ‘yellow’,\\nor ‘putrid’” (p. 23). Arnauld adds, “There are\\ninfinitely many names which suppose no modification in the\\nthing to which they are given” (quoted by Pearce on p. 23 from\\nArnauld’s Ideas ). Pearce comments, “The\\napplication of a name that ‘supposes no modification in the\\nthing to which [it is] given’ is extrinsic\\ndenomination.”\",\n \"\\nPearce has also located Arnauld’s account of ideas in the wider\\ncontext of early modern philosophy. He classifies accounts of ideas as\\ndescriptivist or explanatory. In the explanatory approach,\\n“ideas are to be understood as posits in an explanatory\\ntheory” (Pearce forthcoming, p. 2). Malebranche is the paradigm\\npractitioner of the explanatory approach. In the descriptivist\\napproach, by contrast, “claims about ideas are to be justified\\nonly by direct introspection, and not by inference to the best\\nexplanation” (Pearce, forthcoming, p. 9). Arnauld is the chief\\npractitioner of the descriptivist approach. He not only rejects\\nMalebranche’s attempt to explain how the mind perceives external\\nobjects, but he also maintains that no such explanation is needed. For\\nI know clearly by introspection that my nature is to think, and that\\nthinking is representational. As Arnauld puts it, “Just as it is\\nclear that I think, it is also clear that I think of something, i.e.,\\nthat I perceive and know something” (quoted by Pearce from\\nIdeas in Pearce, forthcoming, p. 8). It is similarly clear\\nwhat it is that I think of, perceive or know, and in particular it is\\nclear that I think of, perceive or know extended things. Pearce argues\\nthat Locke follows Arnauld in his descriptivism, although not in his\\ndirect realism (Pearce, forthcoming, p. 10). Berkeley too adopted the\\ndescriptivist approach, a fact which helps to explain the absence of\\narguments for Berkeley’s view that we cannot form abstract\\ngeneral\\n ideas.[7]\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.2 Arnauld’s identification of ideas with perceptions in the light of his notion of an extrinsic denomination\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIf there is one part of Descartes’ philosophy that met with\\nArnauld’s enthusiastic approval, it is Descartes’\\nmind-body dualism. Yet even here Arnauld’s version of the\\nCartesian philosophy departed in important ways from Descartes’\\nown views. Arnauld’s departure did not have to do with the\\ndistinction between mind and body; here he largely contents himself\\nwith endorsing what Descartes\\n says.[8]\\n It had to do rather with the union of the mind and body in a human\\nbeing. Arnauld rejected a claim at the core of Descartes’\\nposition, namely, that the union of a person’s mind and body\\nmakes it possible for the mind and the body to exercise real causal\\naction on one another. Arnauld explicitly says that a person’s\\nbody cannot act causally on his mind, and had at least some difficulty\\nwith the notion that a person’s mind can act causally on his\\nbody.\",\n \"\\nIn 1680 Arnauld wrote an extended defense of the “the philosophy\\nof Descartes” regarding “the essence of body and the union\\nof the soul with the body,” against an attack by Fr. Etienne Le\\n Moine.[9]\\n Throughout this work, Arnauld quotes Malebranche as representative of\\nthe Cartesian position, and what he defends under the heading,\\n“the philosophy of Descartes,” is actually a modified\\nversion of\\n Malebranche.[10]\\n According to the Cartesian philosophy, says Arnauld,\",\n \"\\nAll the union (alliance) of the mind and the body which is\\nknown to us consists in a natural and mutual correspondence of\\nthoughts in the soul with traces in the brain and of emotions in the\\nsoul with movements of the [animal] spirits.… It is not denied\\nthat there may be something unknown to us in the union God has brought\\nabout between our soul and our body (Examen, OA,\\n38:141).\\n\",\n \"\\nwhat we do know, however, suffices to show that the mind is not\\nrelated to the body as a pilot to his ship, but rather that the two\\nare united in “a greater and more intimate union” by which\\nthey form a single whole (Examen, OA, 38:141).\",\n \"\\nArnauld next takes up a criticism directed by Le Moine against the\\nCartesian account of sense perception, and this leads to the\\nquestion,\",\n \"\\nwhether it is the bodily movements [in the eye] that cause the\\nperceptions in the soul; or whether they are only the occasion on\\nwhich the soul forms [the perceptions] in itself; or whether God gives\\n[the perceptions] to [the soul](Examen, OA, 38:146).\\n\",\n \"\\nArnauld says that it is “easy” to eliminate the first\\nalternative: “For since the motion of a body can at best have no\\nother effect than to move another body (I say at best because\\nit may have not even that), who does not see that it can have no\\neffect on a spiritual soul?” (Examen, OA,\\n38:146). He adds that St. Augustine considered it beyond doubt that a\\nbody can have an effect only on our body, and not on our soul. Arnauld\\nrules out the second of his three alternatives on the grounds that the\\nsoul cannot form sensible perceptions in itself on the occasion of\\nparticular motions in the bodily sensory apparatus because the soul is\\nnot aware of those motions (Examen, OA, 38: 147).\\nThis leaves Arnauld with the third alternative, which he accepts,\\nadding that God voluntarily undertakes to cause in our soul\\nperceptions of sensible qualities whenever the corresponding motions\\noccur in the sensory organs “according to the laws He himself\\nhas established in nature” (Examen, OA,\\n38:148). He summarizes this conclusion by saying that our body does\\nnot act on our soul as a “physical cause (cause\\nphysique)” but only as a “moral cause (cause\\nmorale)” (Examen, OA, 38:150).\",\n \"\\nArnauld had a quite different position regarding the causation of\\nvoluntary movements in the body. He held that, in general, it is\\npossible for immaterial, thinking beings to act causally on material\\nthings, and that, in fact, God has on occasion given angels the power\\nto do so. He also held that the mind of Adam and of Eve had the power\\nto bring about voluntary motions in their bodies before the Fall, and\\nthat the minds of the blessed in heaven will enjoy that power. He\\nsuggests that the voluntary bodily motions of human beings in this\\nlife here below are not caused by the person’s volitions. His\\nreason for this negative position is that post-lapsarian human beings\\ndo not know how to bring about the movements of the animal spirits\\nthat cause the motions of their muscles and limbs. Thus he says,\",\n \"\\nIf one can say [that God has not given our soul a real power\\nto determine the course of the animal spirits toward the muscles of\\nthe parts of our body that we want to move], it is not [on the grounds\\nof a general occasionalism like Malebranche’s]… It is\\nonly because our soul does not know what must be done in order to move\\nour arm by means of the animal spirits (emphasis added;\\nDissertation sur les Miracles de l’ancienne loi,\\nOA, 38:690).\\n\",\n \"\\nSteven Nadler cites this text while arguing that Arnauld was an\\n“occasionalist” both about the causation of sensory\\nperceptions by bodies, and about the causation of voluntary movements\\nby the human mind (Nadler 1995, 138). Nadler recognizes that Arnauld\\nhad quite different attitudes toward the two cases, but nevertheless\\nsays that Arnauld “alone among Cartesians” recognized\\nmind-body interaction as a specific problem in Descartes’\\nmetaphysics, and “used an occasionalist solution” (Nadler\\n1995, 144).\",\n \"\\nArnauld’s treatment of the union of mind and body shows that he\\nwas not a docile follower of Descartes, and was prepared to develop\\n“the philosophy of Descartes” in ways that Descartes would\\nprobably not have accepted. It also shows that Arnauld was prepared to\\nmodify Descartes’ philosophy in a way that increased its\\nsimilarity to Augustine. It is well known that Arnauld pointed out\\nsimilarities between Augustine and Descartes from the beginning of his\\npublished work, in the “Fourth Objections.” In the present\\ncase, however, Arnauld changes the philosophy of Descartes in a way\\nthat increases its similarity to Augustine. Arnauld did not mention\\nAquinas, though he could have done so, as another authority who held\\nthat a material thing cannot produce an immaterial effect. It was only\\na few years later, in Ideas, that Arnauld began to claim an\\naffinity between the views of Descartes and those of Aquinas. But in\\nhis development of the Cartesian position on the union of mind and\\nbody, one can already see Arnauld attempting to make of Descartes a\\nChristian philosopher standing in continuity with his great patristic\\nand scholastic predecessors. (This attempt on Arnauld’s part is\\nexplored in the journal Dix-Septieme Sciecle, 2013/2 no.\\n259.)\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.3 Mind-body dualism\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThere is a continuing discussion of Arnauld’s attitude toward\\nthe view which Descartes expressed in answer to Mersenne’s\\nquestion “by what kind of causality God established the eternal\\ntruths.” Descartes replied, “by the same kind of causality\\nas he created all things, that is to say, as their efficient and total\\ncause” (Descartes, p.\\n 25).[11]\\n The debate has been greatly influenced by Jean-Luc Marion’s\\ninterpretation, in La théologie blanche de Descartes,\\naccording to which Descartes’ position on the matter is\\nfundamental to his metaphysics. Consequently, to the extent that\\nArnauld, in his mature writings, adopted Descartes’ metaphysics,\\nit has seemed reasonable to say that Arnauld agreed with Descartes\\nabout “the creation of the eternal truths.” Indeed Denis\\nMoreau says, “Arnauld is therefore one of the rare (and if we\\ncan grant him the adjective, the only great) post-Cartesian to accept\\nthe thesis of the creation of the eternal truths” (Moreau, 1999,\\np. 180).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.4 The Creation of the eternal truths\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nSteven Nadler accepts Moreau’s conclusion about Arnauld and the\\ncreation of the eternal truths. As Nadler puts it,\",\n \"\\nThere is no need for me to go into this question here in any detail,\\nsince Denis Moreau, in his magnificent study of the\\nArnauld-Malebranche debate, has, to my mind, persuasively shown that\\nArnauld does, in fact – and despite his refusal explicitly to\\nendorse (or reject) the doctrine – accept the creation of the\\neternal truths (Nadler, 2008, p. 532).\\n\",\n \"\\nBut he faults Moreau for not having gone “far enough along the\\npath that Arnauld traces,” and thus having failed “to see\\nhow radical Arnauld’s conception of God really is. For\\neverything points to Arnauld’s God being an ultimately arbitrary\\ndeity who does not act for reasons at all – indeed a deity who,\\nin His being, transcends practical rationality altogether” (p.\\n533). In Nadler’s view, Arnauld follows Descartes in holding\\nthat God is absolutely simple and consequently that in God “will\\nand understanding are one and the same thing,” not\\ndistinguishable even by a distinction of reason. For Arnauld\\n(following Descartes),\",\n \"\\nthe relationship between will and wisdom in God is so unlike their\\nrelationship in human beings – where will and undertanding\\nare distinct faculties of the mind, and the former cannot\\nfunction unless the latter presents to it ideas for consideration\\n– that no analogy can be drawn from the human for the purpose of\\nunderstanding the divine (p.\\n 532).[12]\\n \",\n \"\\nMoreau gives a very different account of Arnauld’s concept of\\nGod. Invoking the doctrine of divine simplicity, Arnauld says that\\nGod’s will is His wisdom, for God’s will\\nis God Himself and God’s wisdom is God\\nHimself. There can, therefore, be no question of God’s wisdom\\nlimiting His will. Nevertheless, far from being a deity who does not\\nact reasonably, “God’s action is both reasonable and\\nreasoned; it is the action of a wisdom”(Moreau, 1999,\\np. 281). Arnauld holds that Gods attributes are\\n“integrated” and “unified”; Arnauld speaks of\\nthe “reasonable will” of God and “affirms that\\n‘God wills nothing except wisely, He wills nothing that His\\nwisdom does not will. In God the will wills and reasons, and the\\nreason reasons and wills.” But if pressed to give God’s\\nreasons for doing what He does, Arnauld can only reply that “God\\ndoes what He wills, we do not know why and can give no reason except\\nHis will to do what he does” (Moreau, 1999, p. 295). In sum,\\nGod’s reasons for what He does are\\n“incomprehensible,” but His actions are not\\n“irrational” (Moreau, 1999, p. 296, note 2).\",\n \"\\nIn “Arnauld’s God Reconsidered,” Eric Stencil has\\nattempted to adjudicate this disagreement (Stencil, 2019).\\nStencil’s attempt is divided into two parts. The first is\\nfocussed on the doctrine of divine simplicity, and takes up the\\nquestion of whether God’s wisdom is distinct in any way from His\\nwill. The second takes up the question of whether God acts for\\nreasons.\",\n \"\\nAs Stencil points out Moreau and Nadler agree that Arnauld subscribes\\nto what Stencil calls “the identity thesis,” that God,\\nGod’s action, and God’s attributes are identical.\\nAccording to Nadler, however, Arnauld goes farther, and denies that\\nGod’s wisdom and His will are distinct even by a\\n“distinction of reason.” Stencil disagrees. Against the\\nbackground of the treatment of abstraction in the Port Royal\\nLogic, Stencil maintains that Arnauld holds “the\\ndistinctness thesis,” that “God, God’s actions, and\\nGod’s attributes are conceptually distinct” (Stencil,\\n2019, p. 24–5). Reflection on the clear idea of God. and on the\\nclear ideas of His attributes, which we form by abstraction, allows us\\nto establish various truths about God and His attributes. But that\\nreflection reequires that we distinguish conceptually among the\\nvarious attributes. Arnauld also subscribes to “the nonpriority\\nthesis,” the thesis “that there are no conceptual\\npriorities among God, God’s actions, and God’s\\nattributes” (Stencil, 2019, p. 21). To deny the nonpriority\\nthesis is, in Arnauld’s view, to “anthropomorphize”\\nGod, to make him “operate like a finite being.” Stencil\\nconcludes, “So, contra Nadler, I suggest that we treat\\nArnauld as allowing for conceptual distinctions – but not\\nconceptual priorities – among God’s various\\nattributes” (Stencil, 2019, p. 26–7).\",\n \"\\nStencil points out that his account of divine simplicity “is in\\nsome ways a defense of Morearu’s interpretation against\\nNadler’s objections” (Stencil, 2019, p.\\n 27).[13]\\n He then turns to the question of whether Arnauld’s God acts for\\nreasons. Here he finds evidence on both sides of the issue:\",\n \"\\nMoreau has highlighted passages where Arnauld is explicit about not\\ndenying that God acts for reasons or that God’s actions have\\nends. Nevertheless, Nadler has presented systematic and compelling\\nevidence for concluding that Arnauld’s God does not act for\\nreasons. (p. 28)\\n\",\n \"\\nStencil claims, nevertheless, that\",\n \"\\nIn fact, Arnauld offes a consistent position about whether God acts\\nfor reasons. Arnauld is ‘agnostic’ about whether God acts\\nfor reasons absolutely – whether God acts for reasons\\nin any sense at all. (p. 29)\\n\",\n \"\\nArnauld claims to know that “Malebranche’s account of how\\nGod acts for reasons … treats God as a finite being – and\\nthis makes his account unacceptable and false” (p. 29). But that\\nleaves open the question of whether God acts for reasons in some other\\nway. On Strencil’s interpretation, Arnauld says that we cannot\\nknow the answer. If Stencil is right about Arnauld’s\\nagnosticism, then the most that Nadler’s evidence can show is\\nthat for Arnauld it is “beyond our epistemic means” to say\\nthat God does, or that He does not, act for reasons. As for the\\npassages cited by Moreau in which Arnauld refuses to deny that God\\nacts for reasons, they do not affirm that God does not act for\\nreasons, but simply refuse to deny what we cannot know to be\\nfalse.\",\n \"\\nAn interesting example cited by Moreau is Augustine’s rhetorical\\nquestion, “Who would dare to say that God created all things\\nwithout reason?” (cited by Moreau on p. 295, note 2). Stencil\\ntakes the question to be a way of saying “We dare not state or\\ncould not prove a denial that God acts for reasons” (Stencil,\\n2019, p. 29). Unfortunately Moreau does not explain the context in\\nwhich Arnauld quotes Augustine’s question. The context is\\nArnauld’s enthusiastic endorsement of Aquinas’ argument in\\nSumma Theologiae, I, 19, 2 and 5 (Réflexions, II, 2,\\nOA, XXXIX, 430–31). Article 2 has to do with whether\\nGod wills things other than Himself. Aquinas says that “the will\\nof God is directed to things other than Himself,” and this is\\nbecause\",\n \"\\nit is a perfection of the will of God to communicate to other things\\nthe good He possesses … So God wills that He be what He is and\\nalso wills that other things be. But He wills Himself as the end and\\nother things as related to the end, insofar as it is appropriate to\\nthe divine goodness that other things participate in it. (translation\\nof Arnauld’s French rendering of Aquinas by author)\\n\",\n \"\\nArticle 5 addresses the question of whether the will of God has a\\ncause. Arnauld comments,\",\n \"\\n[Aquinas] answers in the negative because it is not with God as it is\\nwith men. A man wills an end; he wills to be cured of an illness. His\\nwilling that end is the cause of his willing the means suitable for\\nobtaining it. That is how [Malebranche] makes God act, not noticing\\nthat he falls into the mistake which he often says must be avoided, of\\nspeaking about God according to [our] ideas of the way that men act.\\n\",\n \"\\nBecause God wills all things by a single act,\",\n \"\\nwe cannot say that He wills what is for the end (that is to say, the\\ncreatures) because He wills the end, but we should say only that He\\nwills that what is for the end be related to the end. He wills\\nx to exist for the sake of y, but He does not will x\\nfor the sake of y (VULT hoc esse propter hoc, sed non\\npropter hoc vult\\n hoc.)[14]\\n \",\n \"\\nAugustine’s rhetorical question is raised as an objection: If\\nGod does not will to create things in order to accomplish an end,\\nthen, contrary to the import of Augustine’s question, God\\ncreates things without reason. Arnauld summarizes Aquinas’\\nreply:\",\n \"\\nThe will of God is reasonable, not because He wills only if there is\\nsome reason which causes Him to will (qui le fasse vouloir),\\nbut because He wills that among the things He makes some exist for the\\nsake of others (OA, XXXIX, 431).\\n\",\n \"\\nHere Arnauld distinguishes the question of whether God’s\\ncreative action is reasonable from the question of whether in creating\\nGod acts for a reason. He answers the first question, but not the\\nsecond, in the affirmative.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.5 Are God’s actions reasonable?\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nNicolas Malebranche was born in 1638, when Arnauld was twenty-six\\nyears old. In 1660, Malebranche joined the Oratory, a center for\\npriests in Paris that had many connections with Port-Royal.\\nMalebranche and Arnauld were on friendly terms in the early 1670s, but\\nlate in the decade they had a falling out over Malebranche’s\\nexplanation of the fact that not all men are saved, and related\\n matters.[15]\\n In 1680, Malebranche published his position, against Arnauld’s\\nadvice, in the Treatise of Nature and Grace (hereinafter\\nTNG). The ensuing public controversy between the two was a\\ncentral event in the intellectual life of Europe in the late\\nseventeenth century.\",\n \"\\nArnauld’s attack on TNG began in a surprising way, with\\nthe publication of On True and False Ideas (hereinafter\\nIdeas) in 1683. In it, Arnauld presents his own position on\\nthe nature of ideas, which was described above, and argues that\\nMalebranche’s view that we see all things (or at least all\\nbodily things) in God and by means of God’s ideas is not only\\nmistaken, but thoroughly confused and wrong-headed. This work\\nengendered a preliminary debate that lasted for two years. The\\npublication of Réflexions in 1685–86, preceded\\nin 1685 by the publication of Arnauld’s Dissertation sur les\\nmiracles de l’ancien loi, provoked further exchanges\\nbetween the two in 1687, with a last gasp on Arnauld’s part in\\n1694, the year of his death, and on Malebranche’s part ten years\\nlater, in\\n 1704.[16]\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Arnauld and Malebranche\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nTNG provides a general account of God’s reasons for\\ncreating a world with the evils that the world contains. But\\nMalebranche is mainly interested in one particular evil, namely, that\\nnot all men are saved. That not all men are saved he took to be a\\ndatum of revelation, plainly expressed in the Scriptures. But he\\ndenied that it follows that God does not want all men to be saved.\\nIndeed, he says his motive in writing TNG was to refute those\\nwho concluded that God did not have a “sincere will” to\\nsave all men:\",\n \"\\nIf there were not in this century people determined to hold that God\\ndoes not have a sincere will to save all men, it would not be\\nnecessary to establish principles suitable for destroying that unhappy\\nopinion. But the need to combat errors brings to light principles\\nsuitable to that end. I protest before God that that was the principal\\nmotive that made me\\n write.[17]\\n \",\n \"\\nIf God wants to save all men, something must prevent Him from doing\\nwhat He wants to do. In the “Troisième\\nEclaircissement” to TNG, Malebranche says that\\nsince God is omnipotent, He can bring about whatever He wants to bring\\nabout. But because His will is “the love He bears for His own\\nattributes,” He cannot, by a “practical”\\n will,[18]\\n will anything or will in any way that is not wise: “The wisdom\\nof God renders Him impotent in this sense that it does not permit him\\nto will certain things, or to act in certain ways” (OM,\\n5:180). What prevents God from carrying out His will to save all men,\\nMalebranche concludes, must be that doing so would require ways or\\nmanners of willing that are unwise. As he puts it a few pages later,\\nGod’s wisdom “holds His volitions in check, in the sense\\nthat not all of His volitions are practical volitions”\\n(OM, 5:184).\",\n \"\\nMalebranche argues that God’s wisdom restrains Him from\\nsanctifying and saving all men because it directs Him not only to\\ncreate a world that is good, but also to create “in a way worthy\\nof Him, by ways (par des voyes) that are simple, general,\\nconstant, and uniform” (OM, 5:49). More precisely,\\nGod’s wisdom directs Him to an act of creating that best\\ncombines goodness or perfection of the created world with simplicity\\nof ways of creating. An analogy may help explain Malebranche’s\\nposition. Suppose that someone sets out to buy a car and wants to do\\nthe best possible job of car-buying. Suppose further that the\\nsecond-best car is available at a much better price than the best car.\\nIn this case, doing the best job of car-buying might require buying\\nless than the best car. In a somewhat similar way, Malebranche holds\\nthat the best job of creating, the one most worthy of God, involves\\ncreating a world less perfect than He might have made it, in\\nparticular, a world in which not all human beings are saved.\",\n \"\\nMalebranche’s notion of the simplicity of God’s ways of\\ncreating depends on his occasionalism. According to that theory of\\nefficient causality, God is the only true efficient cause. When\\ncreatures appear to be efficient causes, they are really only\\noccasional causes. That is, the events in which the apparent created\\ncauses take part are followed by other events in accordance with laws\\nof nature, which are God’s general volitions. But the created\\n“causes” do not really cause the events that follow. These\\nevents, like every created reality, are really caused by\\n God.[19]\\n For Malebranche, the simplicity of God’s ways depends on there\\nbeing a small number of laws of nature, and on there being few\\nexceptions to the laws. Malebranche maintains that in order to do the\\njob of creating that best combines goodness of the world created with\\nsimplicity of ways of creating, God had to make a world with precisely\\nthe natural evils (misshapen animals, human suffering, ugly\\nlandscapes, etc.) that that are present in the world as it is.\",\n \"\\nThe anomalies in the order of grace are explained in a similar way.\\nMalebranche divides grace, the divine assistance given to human\\nbeings, into two kinds, which he calls “grace of light\\n(lumière)” and “grace of feeling\\n(sentiment)” (OM, 5:96–97; 131). The\\nformer is, quite simply, knowledge. Malebranche also calls it\\n“the grace of the Creator,” because it is given, in\\ndifferent forms, both to Adam and Eve and to human beings after their\\nFall. Grace of feeling is “the grace of Jesus Christ,” and\\nwas merited for human beings by the life and death of Jesus.\\nMalebranche also describes it as a “pleasure\\n(délectation)” which makes a person love God\\n(TNG, OM, 5:135). According to Malebranche, the\\ngrace of the Creator is “dry, abstract, entirely pure and\\nentirely intelligible” and does not lead us to love God. The\\ngrace of Christ, in contrast, is “efficace par\\nelle-même” in that it “always has its effect, always\\ncarries us toward God” (OM, 5:132). Human beings, after\\nthe fall of Adam, are unable to grow in holiness, or even to be saved\\nfrom damnation, without the grace of Christ. But the love of God\\nproduced by grace is a sort of instinctive love, which is not\\nmeritorious and is not sufficient for salvation. Whether the person\\nwho receives the grace of Christ is saved depends on the\\nperson’s free consent to the movement toward God that grace\\nproduces, which converts the instinctive love of God into a\\n“free and rational” love. This consent is not produced by\\ngrace.\",\n \"\\nNow Malebranche holds that God could give to each person grace that\\nwould assure the person’s salvation:\",\n \"\\nGod is the master of hearts. He can give to the impious a grace such\\nthat it will convert him, since God knows what degree of grace to\\ngive, and when it must be given, in order that it bring about the\\nconversion of the sinner (OM, 5:186).\\n\",\n \"\\nSimilarly, God knows what sort of grace would ensure that any person\\nis not only saved, but also attains the maximum holiness of which he\\nor she is capable. But many who receive grace do not grow in holiness\\nand are not saved. For example, many who enter the Church later fall\\naway.\",\n \"\\nGod often distributes graces, without their having the effect that His\\ngoodness makes us believe He would make them have. He makes the piety\\nof some people increase right up to the end of their life, but sin\\novercomes them at death and throws them into Hell. He makes the rain\\nof grace fall upon hardened hearts as well as on earth that is\\nprepared: people resist it and make it useless for their salvation.\\n… How can that be reconciled with wisdom? (OM, 5:48).\\n\",\n \"\\nMalebranche’s answer is that God’s wisdom dictates that He\\nact, in the distribution of both sorts of grace, according general\\nvolitions determined by created occasional causes to particular\\neffects. In the case of the grace of the Creator, the general\\nvolitions are laws of nature, and the occasional causes are “the\\ndiverse movements of our will” and “the encounter of\\nsensible objects that act on our mind” (TNG, 5:102).\\nFor the grace of Jesus Christ, the occasional cause is Jesus Christ,\\nin his human nature, and the general volition is that grace be given\\nto human beings if and only if Jesus, in his human nature, asks that\\nit be given. Jesus’ requests for grace are made in view of the\\nneeds of the Church. But Jesus, in his human nature, does not always\\nthink of “the future determination of the will” of those\\nfor whom he requests grace. The result is that, often enough, people\\nreceive grace that does not lead to their holiness and salvation, or\\nfail to receive the grace that would have done so (TNG,\\nOM, 5:83).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.1 Malebranche’s position in the Treatise of Nature and Grace\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nArnauld thought that Malebranche’s position was dangerous, and\\nthat if accepted it would have ruinous consequences for the Catholic\\nfaith. He was “furious,” as Denis Moreau has aptly said,\\n“and decided to leave nothing standing in a philosophy that\\nclearly frightened him” (Moreau 1999, 240). Here only the\\ngeneral lines of Arnauld’s attack are set forth. First, two\\npervasive themes in Arnauld’s criticism are described: (1) that\\nMalebranche often did not proceed by the proper method of either\\nphilosophy or theology; and (2) that Malebranche speaks of God in\\nanthropomorphic terms, as if He were subject to the limitations of a\\nhuman\\n agent.[20]\\n Then Arnauld’s criticisms of Malebranche’s position that\\nGod acts by “general volitions” will be discussed.\",\n \"\\n1. Throughout Réflexions, beginning with the\\n“Avant-Propos” to the work, Arnauld challenges Malebranche\\nto make clear whether his claims are based on reason or on Scripture\\nand\\n tradition.[21]\\n He had mounted this sort of challenge even earlier, in\\nIdeas:\",\n \"\\nHe does not say that he learned those grand maxims on which all of\\nthat [Treatise of Nature and Grace] turns by the revelation\\nof God: that if God wills to act externally, it is because He\\nwills to obtain an honor worthy of Himself; that He acts by the\\nsimplest ways; that He does not act by particular volitions; but by\\ngeneral volitions which are determined by occasional causes\\n(Ideas, 174).\\n\",\n \"\\nNor could all of those maxims be demonstrated, in Malebranche’s\\nsense of the term. For Malebranche says that only necessary truths can\\nbe demonstrated, and yet he admits that God does sometimes act by\\nparticular volitions, namely, when He performs miracles. Hence\\nMalebranche himself would have to admit that the third maxim, at\\nleast, is not demonstrable. In Arnauld’s view, Malebranche came\\nto accept such principles because he thought they made God more\\nloveable and hence were favorable to the cause of religion. In this\\nway Malebranche introduces, on the basis of religious considerations,\\nprinciples that are not found in Scripture and tradition.\",\n \"\\nArnauld thought that this unholy introduction of religion into what\\nought to be treated as philosophical questions began with\\nMalebranche’s theory of ideas, according to which “we see\\nall things in God.” Thus, in the “Conclusion” of his\\nDéfense contre la Réponse au livre des vraies et des\\nfausses Idées (OA, 38, 367–668; hereinafter\\nDéfense), Arnauld takes up “two or three\\nobjections” that might be raised against Ideas. The\\nsecond objection is one that had been raised by Nicole: “I could\\nhave avoided this philosophical topic [of the nature of ideas] so as\\nnot to interrupt what I had begun to write about the Treatise of\\nNature and Grace.” In reply, Arnauld says,\",\n \"\\nWhat was at the outset a question of philosophy … is not such\\nfor [Malebranche]. For him it is a question of theology, very sublime\\nand very elevated. He considers it a religious duty to devote his\\nwhole mind to its defense. He finds it bad that others should disagree\\nwith him, and even says that anyone who is not of his opinion must be\\n‘either an unenlightened philosopher or a man insensitive to his\\nduties.’ Thus he has changed the form of the dispute. He has\\ninvolved religion, and has become so devoted to his novel thoughts as\\nto hold that anyone who does not approve of them lacks respect for the\\nwisdom of God Himself. (Défense, OA, 38:666)\\n\",\n \"\\nIn Arnauld’s direct attack on TNG, he says again and\\nagain that Malebranche relies on principles that have neither a proper\\ntheological basis in Scripture and tradition, nor a proper\\nphilosophical basis in reason. Clearly he thought that this criticism\\napplied as well to Malebranche’s theory of ideas. But if Arnauld\\ntook seriously the remark at the beginning of the Logic,\\n“The reflections we can make on our ideas are perhaps the most\\nimportant part of logic, since they are the foundation of everything\\nelse,” he may well have thought that Malebranche’s theory\\nof ideas was an important source of the confusion of theology with\\nphilosophy that plagues TNG. That, in turn, would help\\nexplain his decision to begin his attack on TNG with a\\ntreatise on the nature of\\n ideas.[22]\",\n \"\\n2. Arnauld agreed with Malebranche that God’s will is\\nreasonable, but he disagreed with Malebranche’s way of\\nconceiving God’s\\n reasonableness.[23]\\n In both Book I and Book II of Réflexions, he tries to\\nshow that Malebranche conceives of God’s reasonableness as if it\\nwere the reasonableness of a human being. In the second chapter of\\nBook I, he reports a series of arguments given by Malebranche early in\\nTNG for the conclusion that God acts in the order of nature\\nonly by general volitions. These arguments, says Arnauld, are\\n“only comparisons with men, which … cannot prove anything\\nwith regard to God; or popular thoughts not worthy … of a\\nphilosopher” (OA, 39:188). For example, Malebranche\\nsays that God decides to create that which can be produced and\\nconserved by the simplest laws because he is an excellent workman, and\\n“an excellent workman … does not do by complicated ways\\nwhat he could carry out by simpler ones” (TNG,\\nOM, 5:28). Arnauld objects that there is no similarity\\nbetween an excellent human workman and God,\",\n \"\\nsince all the ways of executing His plans are equally easy for Him,\\nand ‘His power,’ as the author [Malebranche] recognizes,\\n‘makes Him so much the master of all things, and so independent\\nof help from elsewhere, that it suffices that He will, in order for\\nHis volitions to be carried out’ (OA, 39:189–90).\\n\",\n \"\\nHence God’s volitions are not based on reasoning about the means\\nto achieve a desired end.\",\n \"\\nBook II of Réflexions, which deals with God’s\\nway of acting in the order of grace, opens with a related criticism.\\nArnauld begins by analyzing a line of thought that Malebranche\\npresents in the Troisième Eclaircissement to\\nTNG (OA, 39:425–51). The line of thought\\nbegins with two claims: that “God can act only for Himself. If\\nHe wills to act, it is because He wills to procure an honor worthy of\\nHimself” and that “God can receive an honor worthy of\\nHimself only from Himself.” Yet I am created, so I must be able\\nto render to God an honor worthy of Him. This I can do, says\\nMalebranche, only by becoming a part of the Church, of which the\\nIncarnate Second Person of the Trinity is the cornerstone. More\\ngenerally, “God’s great plan is to build in His own honor\\na spiritual temple, of which Jesus Christ is the cornerstone …\\nHis plan is that this Temple should be as large and perfect as\\npossible.” Malebranche then draws an important conclusion:\",\n \"\\nGod wills that all men enter into this spiritual building, to enlarge\\nit. God wills that all men be saved … God also hopes\\nthat men will merit outstanding degrees of glory: His will is our\\nsanctification. (OM, 5:183)\\n\",\n \"\\nBut although God wants the salvation and sanctification of all men,\\n“He loves His wisdom infinitely more,” and His wisdom\\nrequires that He act in the way that is wisest and most worthy of\\nHimself, that is, in “general, constant and uniform way,”\\nwith the result that “He does not save all men, although He\\ntruly wills that they all be saved” (OM, 5:185).\",\n \"\\nArnauld has much to say against that line of thought, and he begins be\\nattacking its very first step, the claim that God “can act\\nexternally only in order to procure an honor worthy of Himself”\\n(OA,\\n 39:428–40).[24]\\n He objects that this is not a proper way to speak about an infinitely\\nperfect being. Once again, Malebranche is guilty of anthropomorphism.\\nFor he says, in effect,\",\n \"\\nthat [God] could resolve to create me, me and the other creatures,\\nonly for some advantage He wanted to obtain for Himself by creating\\nus…. That is how [Malebranche] lowers [God], by claiming that\\nHe cannot decide to create anything externally, except to procure an\\nhonor worthy of Himself. (OA, 39:429)\\n\",\n \"\\nArnauld goes on to contrast Malebranche’s way of describing\\nGod’s creation with that of St. Thomas, who say that the reason\\nGod creates is that His goodness tends to overflow and communicate\\nitself to other\\n things.[25]\",\n \"\\nArnauld also says that to speak about God as consulting His\\nwisdom before acting is to speak about God as one would about a human\\nbeing who wills an end and is thereby caused to will the means to that\\nend (OA, 39:432). It is to compare God to a man who consults\\nhis wisdom about everything he wants to do “as if he were afraid\\nof not acting well, and his will needed to be ruled by something other\\nthan itself in order to do only what is good” (OA,\\n39:599–600). “Is it an expression of rigorous\\nexactitude to say of God that He consults His wisdom,\\nand that is how it comes about that everything He wills is\\nwise,” Arnauld asks,\",\n \"\\nas if the word consult is suitable for an infinitely perfect\\nbeing when one professes not to speak in popular language? As if God\\nneeded to consult His wisdom so that what He wills should be wise? As\\nif His will were not His wisdom? As if everything He wills were not\\nessentially wise, by virtue of the fact that He wills it?\\n(OA, 39:578)\\n\",\n \"\\nGod’s will is not a force that needs to be tamed. The truth,\\naccording to Arnauld, is that it is impossible that God should have an\\nactual (sincere) will for something that is not in fact wise.\",\n \"\\nIn a related criticism, Arnauld chides Malebranche for allowing\\n“very little freedom and indifference” in God’s\\ncreative action. Arnauld quotes Malebranche:\",\n \"\\nAssuming that God wills to produce outside of Himself a work worthy of\\nHimself, He is not indifferent in the choice; He\\nought to produce the most perfect work possible by relation to the\\nsimplicity of the ways by which He acts; He owes it to Himself to\\nfollow the rules of his wisdom. (Quoted by Arnauld at\\nRéflexions, OA, 39:598, from TNG,\\nOM, 5: 110).\\n\",\n \"\\nMalebranche tries to save for God at least freedom and indifference\\nwith regard to creating or not creating. But Arnauld suggests that\\nthis move is ruled out by “the way in which he conceives\\nGod’s action,” for supposedly, on Malebranche’s\\nview, God would consult His wisdom before deciding whether to create\\nor not, and just as His wisdom advises Him to create this world rather\\nthan a less perfect one, assuming that the two could be created in an\\nequally simple way, His wisdom would also advise Him that it is better\\nto create than not to create (OA,\\n 39:599–600).[26]\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.2 Two themes in Arnauld’s criticism of the Treatise of Nature and Grace\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nArnauld devoted much of Réflexions to\\nMalebranche’s position that God acts by general volitions and\\nnot by particular volitions. In Book I of Réflexions,\\nhis focus is on the order of nature and he tries to show that\\nMalebranche’s claim that God acts only by general volitions is\\nconfused and even self-contradictory. In Book II, his focus is on the\\norder of grace and he attacks Malebranche’s claim that God does\\nnot distribute grace by particular volitions.\",\n \"\\nArnauld begins his criticism in Book I by claiming that Malebranche\\nconfuses acting by general volitions and acting according\\nto general laws. Arnauld grants that God acts according to\\ngeneral laws. But against the claim that God acts by general\\nvolitions, he provides an argument that is simple, and, his view,\\ndecisive:\",\n \"\\nWhatever [God] does, He does in particular, and not in general. But\\nsince to will and to do, in God, are the same thing, given\\nthat He creates each soul by a particular action, He must also will to\\ncreate it by a particular will. (OA, 39:175)\\n\",\n \"\\nIn some passages, Malebranche’s language suggests that\\nGod’s wisdom dictates that He engage in the act of creating that\\nbest combines the goodness of the world created with the simplicity of\\nthe laws according to which the world is created, and not\\nwith simplicity of the volition whereby God creates\\n(TNG, OM, 5:147). This suggests that for Malebranche\\nGod does will particular created effects, though He wills that they\\ntake place according to certain laws. But Arnauld did not think that\\nthis was Malebranche’s view. For suppose that God creates the\\nworld according to a simple set of laws. Let these laws, as regards\\nbodies, be the laws of motion. A world created according to such laws\\nmight be more perfect than a world not created according to general\\nlaws, or created according to a different set of laws. But that would\\nbe of no help to Malebranche. For he does not say that a world\\nregulated by simpler laws is a more perfect world. Rather he maintains\\nthat creating such a world is a simpler act of creation in God\\nHimself. But it is not at all clear how simplicity of laws according\\nto which the world is created would make God’s way of creating\\nsimpler, especially if God’s creative activity includes the will\\nto create every particular part of the creative world.\\nMalebranche’s real position, according to Arnauld, emerges in\\nthose passages in which he identifies the “ways” in which\\nthe word is created with the actions whereby God creates. An example\\nis the passage, “An excellent workman ought to proportion his\\naction to his work; he does not accomplish by highly complex ways\\n(voyes) what He can execute by simpler ones” (TNG,\\nOM, 5:28). To this Arnauld objects that the volitions by which\\nGod creates are particular.\",\n \"\\nArnauld next points out that Malebranche does not say, without\\nqualification, that God creates by general volitions. Rather,\\nMalebranche says that God’s creative will is\",\n \"\\nthe cause of a particular effect; but he calls it general, because he\\nholds that God has this will only when He is determined to have it by\\nan occasional cause, which must be a creature. (OA, 39:176).\\n\",\n \"\\nIn other words, according to Malebranche, God causes particular\\neffects in creation, but the contribution of God’s volition, as\\nopposed to the contribution of created occasional causes, is general.\\nLater on, Arnauld says that, on Malebranche’s view, it is really\\nonly the free volitions of creatures that can be said to determine\\nGod, in view of His general volitions, to produce a particular effect.\\nFor, according to Malebranche, God is the cause of every bodily event,\\nincluding those which, together with the general laws, are supposed to\\ndetermine any given consequent event. (OA, 39:230). But\\nMalebranche is committed, so Arnauld argues, to the position that the\\nfree volitions of creatures are not caused by God (OA,\\n 39:248–57).[27]\",\n \"\\nArnauld goes farther and says that Malebranche’s position on\\nGod’s creative will is, in fact, self-contradictory. For\\nMalebranche\",\n \"\\nwas not of the opinion of those philosophers who believe that God\\noriginally created all things, gave them the qualities necessary for\\ntheir conservation and the powers they needed in order to act, and\\nthen left them to act without further involving Himself.\\n\",\n \"\\nOn the contrary, Malebranche insists that “God is the sole cause\\nof everything in the world, up to the smallest movement of the\\nsmallest atom.” But he also holds that God “acts in the\\nworld only as a universal cause, whose general volitions are\\ndetermined by the … changes … in creatures, as by so\\nmany occasional causes.” Arnauld tries to show that these two\\npositions are inconsistent with one another (OA,\\n39:231–37).\",\n \"\\nNear the end of Book II of Réflexions, Arnauld takes\\nup Malebranche’s arguments for the claim, “God does not\\nact, in the order of grace, by particular volitions,” as\\nsummarized by Malebranche in the Premier Eclaircissement to\\nTNG (OA, 39:621). Malebranche says that the\\nproposition in question can be proved by reason “in two ways;\\nà priori & à posteriori; that is, by our\\nidea of God, and by the effects of grace.” The chief “a\\npriori” argument involves the claim that “to choose\\noccasional causes, and to establish general laws for carrying out some\\nwork, indicates an infinitely more extensive knowledge than to act by\\nparticular volitions.” Arnauld retorts, “Is it something\\nto be put up with, that human beings … should have the temerity\\nto make themselves judges of what is a sign in God of greater\\nintelligence and wisdom?” (OA, 39:624).\",\n \"\\nArnauld quotes Malebranche’s statement, “The à\\npriori proofs are too abstract to convince most people of the\\ntruth I am proposing. It is more à propos to prove it\\nà posteriori,” and goes on to consider the a\\nposteriori arguments (OA, 39:625–43). He is less\\nsarcastic in dealing with these arguments than with the a priori ones.\\nHe says that there are “three or four of them, but they all\\namount to the same thing: There are graces that are inefficacious, and\\nthis would not occur if God gave His graces by particular\\nvolitions.” He mentions three such arguments, based on the\\npremise that graces are given to sinners who are not entirely\\nconverted; on the premise that grace often falls upon hearts disposed\\nin such a way that the grace does not bear fruit; and, finally, on the\\npremise that graces given to sinners sometimes end up making them even\\nmore guilty.\",\n \"\\nArnauld assumes that these arguments have to do with “the true\\ngrace of Jesus Christ, as defined by St. Augustine: Inspiratio\\ndilectionis, ut cognita sancto amore faciamus, an inspiration of\\nlove given to us so that we should do the good with holy\\naffection.” Such grace is efficacious if it infallibly has its\\neffect. But the effect in question may be either proximate\\n(prochain) or remote (éloigné). As in\\nthe famous example of Augustine, a grace may be efficacious in that it\\nproduces the desire to be chaste, and yet not efficacious in that it\\nfails to produces chastity itself. Similarly, Malebranche’s\\narguments assume that “Every grace has the effect for which God\\ngives it.” But once again, this phrase may refer to the effect\\nfor which God gives the grace by His absolute will, or to the effect\\nthat grace tends to produce by its nature and for which God gives the\\ngrace by His antecedent will. Arnauld grants that if God gives\\nefficacious graces by particular volitions, then there are none that\\nfail to have the proximate effect, which God intends they have by His\\nabsolute will. But they may well fail to have remote effects to which\\nthey tend by their nature and which God wills only by His antecedent\\nwill. For example, if an efficacious grace has the effect that a\\nsinner repents, only to lapse back into sin, then the grace had the\\nproximate effect God intended it to have by His absolute will, even\\nthough it failed to have all the effect to which it tended by its\\nnature and which God willed by His antecedent will. In this way, he\\ndisposes of Malebranche’s three a posteriori arguments.\",\n \"\\nArnauld ends Book II with a consideration of what he takes to be\\nMalebranche’s master argument. It is a fourth a posteriori\\nargument. He quotes from the Troisième\\nEclaircissement:\",\n \"\\nThere is no other way than [by saying that God does not act by\\nparticular volitions] to reconcile the proposition in Holy Scripture,\\n‘God wants to save all men,’ with this proposition,\\n‘Not all men are saved’. (OA, 39:637)\\n\",\n \"\\nArnauld rejects this argument mainly because, like the other three a\\nposteriori ones, it assumes that “God wills, by a true volition,\\nthe salvation of all men, and the conversion of sinners”\\n(OA, 39:641).\",\n \"\\nArnauld agreed with Malebranche that God could have brought it about\\nthat all men are saved and did not do so. But he favored an\\nAugustinian view that “all men” in this context means\\n“all sorts of men,” that is, men of all races,\\noccupations, etc. He did not entirely reject the Thomistic view that\\nGod’s will for the salvation of all men is God’s\\n“antecedent will” rather than His “consequent\\nwill,” that is, God’s will other things being equal rather\\nthan God’s will all things considered. Arnauld points out that\\nMalebranche’s position might be thought to be a version of the\\nThomistic one, but adds that according to St. Thomas God’s\\nantecedent will is a wish rather than an absolute volition (une\\nvelleité plutôt qu’une volonté absolue)\\n(Réflexions, OA, 39:198, cf.\\n 39:576).[28]\\n Arnauld firmly rejects any notion that God wills the sanctification\\nand salvation of each and every person in a strong sense of\\n“will” such that His will would be carried out unless\\nthere were something to prevent it, or, in Malebranche’s words,\\nto hold it in\\n check.[29]\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.3 Does God act only by general volitions?\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nArnauld opened a different line of attack in his Dissertation sur\\nles miracles le l’ancien loi. This new attack is directed\\nagainst the occasionalism which is assumed in Malebranche’s\\naccount of the wisdom of God’s ways of creating. In a foreword\\nto the Dissertation, Arnauld says that he had completed his\\ntreatment of the first two books of the Réflexions,\\nand was beginning work on the third, when he received the fourth\\nedition of the\\n Treatise:[30]\",\n \"\\nI had finished two books examining the new system of nature and grace,\\nand there remained only one further book to complete the task, when I\\nreceived from Rotterdam a new edition of the Treatise,\\npublished that year, 1684, with several additions. The main one was a\\nthird Éclaircissement, with the title: The\\nfrequent miracles of the Old Law do not at all indicate that God often\\nacts by particular volitions. And the only reason which the\\nauthor of the system gives is that the miracles were done by the\\nministry of the angels, who were their occasional causes.\\n\",\n \"\\nArnauld interrupted his work on the Réflexions to\\nwrite the Dissertation, which was published in 1685 together\\nwith the first chapter of Book Three of the Reflexions, a\\nchapter dealing with Malebranche’s position that Jesus Christ,\\nin his human nature, is the occasional cause of the distribution of\\ngrace. Arnauld raises theological objections to both positions, but\\nalso attacks the underlying occasionalism. The Dissertation\\ntouched off a rapid series of replies and ounter-replies in 1685. The\\nfirst volume of Reflexions was published later in 1685, and\\nthe second and third volumes in 1686.\",\n \"\\nArnauld begins his attack by citing the opening sentence of the\\nDernier Éclaircissement, in which Malebranche says\\nthat he expects his readers to agree with the principle that\\n“God causes (fait) everything, and hence He\\ncommunicates His power to creatures only by establishing them as\\noccasional causes…” (OM, 5, 197). Arnauld adds that\\nMalebranche\",\n \"\\ndoes not understand ‘God causes everything’ as ordinary\\nphilosophers do, who say that the creature does not act at all unless\\nGod acts with it, which they call ‘concurrence’ …\\nBut what he means when he says that God causes everything is that He\\ncauses everything that one imagines the creature causes, and that the\\ncreature causes nothing at all.\\n\",\n \"\\nIt is not difficult, Arnauld says, to show that the first conjunct, so\\nunderstood, is false. For “it destroys the nature of intelligent\\nbeings, who would not be free if they did not, as real causes, form in\\nthemselves the determination of their will toward particular\\ngoods”. (As Arnauld points out, the italicized words are\\nMalebranche’s.) The second conjunct of the principle is\\ndispatched in a similar way:\",\n \"\\nFor intelligent beings receive from God their power to form the\\ndetermination of their will toward particular goods. But it is not\\nonly as occasional causes but as real causes that they form in\\nthemselves that determination of their will. (OA, 5, 198)\\n\",\n \"\\nHaving established to his satisfaction that the principle “taken\\ngenerally” is false, Arnauld goes on to say that there is no\\nreason to deny that God has given angels power to move bodies and that\\nthey are real, not mere occasional, causes of the miraculous events\\nattributed to them. Again, “it is not so easy to\\ndemonstrate” that our soul does not have the real power to move\\nthe parts of the body to which it is united.\",\n \"\\nIn the exchange of publications that grew out of the\\nDissertation, Arnauld objects in a similar way to\\nMalebranche’s use of occasionalism to explain “how grace\\nacts in us without wounding [liberty]” (OM, 5, 8). In his\\nexplanation, Malebranche distinguishes the effect of grace, which is\\nfrom God and is not free, from the recipient’s free response,\\nwhich is from the recipient and not from God. Arnauld says that\\nMalebranche would have done well to heed Aquinas’s advice that\\none should not distinguish “between what is from grace and what\\nis from free will, as if the same thing could not be from both”\\n(OA, 39, 114).\",\n \"\\nBoth Malebranche and Arnauld continued to write about divine causality\\nand human freedom in their later work. Arnauld’s late work on\\nthe topic is describe in Section 6 below. Malebranche’s last\\neffort on the topic was his Réflexions sur la Premotion\\nPhysique, published in 1715, the year of his death.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.4 Arnauld’s criticism of Malebranche’s occasionalism\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nOn February 11, 1686, while the controversy between Arnauld and\\nMalebranche was at a peak of intensity, Leibniz wrote to Landgrave\\nErnst von Hessen-Rheinfels, asking that the Landgrave send Arnauld a\\nsummary of “a short discourse” on “questions of\\ngrace, the concourse of God and creatures, the nature of miracles, the\\ncause of sin and the origin of evil, the immortality of the soul,\\nideas, etc.” (The Leibniz-Arnauld Correspondence,\\nDie Philosophischen Schriften von Leibniz, herausgegeben von K. I.\\nGerhardt, Vol. 2, hereinafter LA, 11). The ensuing\\ncorrespondence occurred at a crucial point in the development of\\nLeibniz’s philosophy. The Discourse on Metaphysics, the\\nfinal version of the short discourse, marks the beginning of\\nLeibniz’s mature metaphysics, and it shows the influence of the\\ncorrespondence with Arnauld.\",\n \"\\nLeibniz had corresponded with Arnauld some fifteen years earlier, in\\nconnection with Leibniz’s efforts to reunite the Christian\\nchurches. These efforts took a new turn in March, 1672, when Leibniz,\\nthen just 25 years old, left Mainz for Paris on a secret political\\nmission for his patron, Baron Johann Christian von Boineburg, who was\\nin turn minister to Johann Philipp von Schönborn, the Elector of\\nMainz. Both men were converts from Lutheranism to Catholicism.\\nLeibniz’s diplomatic mission was a failure, but he had other\\nreasons for wanting to visit Paris. He was eager to enter into the\\nbrilliant intellectual life of the French capital, and he stayed\\nthere, with a brief sojourn in England, until 1676, making the\\nacquaintance of a number of leading intellectuals. During this time,\\nhe undertook for the first time the serious study of mathematics. But\\nhe also continued to work toward a philosophical position that he\\nhoped would help reunify the churches.\",\n \"\\nBefore coming to Paris, he had discussed the project of reunifying the\\nchurches with his patron Boineburg, and had corresponded with Arnauld,\\nin 1671, about the Eucharist, proposing an account of the real\\npresence that he thought would be acceptable to both Lutherans and\\nCatholics. But it was Leibniz’s interest in theodicy and related\\nproblems about justification that flourished in Paris. There, in 1673,\\nhe composed Confessio Philosophi, a dialogue in Latin between\\na theologian and a philosopher that is sometimes referred to as\\n“his first theodicy.” Thirty-seven years later in the\\nTheodicy, Leibniz says,\",\n \"\\nWhile I was in France, I communicated to M. Arnauld a dialogue I had\\nwritten in Latin on the cause of evil and the justice of God. This was\\nnot only before his disputes with R. P. Malebranche, but even before\\nthe book on The Search after Truth had appeared. The\\nprinciple that I here maintain, that sin was permitted because it was\\ninvolved in the best plan for the universe, was already employed\\nthere, and M. Arnauld did not seem hostile to it. (Theodicy,\\n#211).\\n\",\n \"\\nSoon after Leibniz’s arrival in Paris, both Boineborg and von\\nSchönborn died, and Leibniz turned for support to another\\nimportant German noble and convert from Lutheranism to Catholicism,\\nJohann Friedrich von Braunschweig-Lüneberg (Hannover). On 26\\nMarch 1673, Leibniz wrote as follows to Johann Friedrich:\",\n \"\\nThe famous Arnauld is a man of the most profound and wide-ranging\\nthought that a true philosopher can have; his aim is not only to\\nilluminate hearts with the clarity of religion, but, further, to\\nrevive the flame of reason, eclipsed by human passions; not only to\\nconvert heretics, but, further, those who are today in the greatest\\nheresy—the atheists and libertines; not only to vanquish his\\nopponents, but, further, to improve those of his persuasion. His\\nthoughts, then, come to seeking how, so far as it is possible, a\\nreform of abuses, frankly wide-spread among dissidents, would overcome\\nthe cause of the division. In this design, on several points of\\nimportance, he has made the first step and, as a prudent man, he goes\\nby degrees. I am distressed that we have lost von Boineburg just when\\nI have struck up an acquaintance with Arnauld; for I had hoped to\\nbring these two minds, so similar in their honest soundness, on the\\nroad to a closer agreement, The Church, as well as the Fatherland, has\\nsustained a loss with this man (Quoted in Sleigh 1990, 15–16).\\n\",\n \"\\nThere is no record of any response by Arnauld to the Confessio\\nPhilosophi, but when Leibniz returned to the problems of\\ntheodicy, in 1686, he once again sought Arnauld’s cooperation by\\nsending Arnauld the outline of the Discourse on Metaphysics\\nthat was mentioned above. The outline sent to Arnauld was no more than\\na list of the propositions that were to appear as the titles of the\\nthirty-seven sections of the Discourse; the entire\\ncorrespondence was carried out through the intermediary of\\nHessen-Rheinfels; and the copies of letters received by the two major\\ncorrespondents were sometimes defective. These facts, together with\\nthe extreme subtlety of the philosophical contents of the letters,\\nhave made interpretation of the correspondence very difficult.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Arnauld and Leibniz\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nProposition 8 in Leibniz’s outline is: “In order to\\ndistinguish the actions of God from those of creatures, it is\\nexplained wherein consists the notion of an individual\\nsubstance” (LA,8). The notion of a substance is, for\\nLeibniz, the notion of a thing that acts. To explain the notion of a\\ncreated individual substance, therefore, he has to explain the notion\\nof a created agent, which requires that he distinguish correctly\\nbetween the actions of creatures and the actions of God. Part of\\nLeibniz’s account of the notion of an individual substance is\\ngiven in Proposition 13: “The individual notion of each person\\nincludes once and for all everything that will ever happen to\\nhim,” so that “one sees in [that notion] a priori\\nproofs of the truth of each event, that is, why one [event] has\\noccurred rather than another” (LA, 8). The debate\\nbetween Arnauld and Leibniz begins here. Proposition 13, Arnauld said\\nin his first letter to Leibniz, implies that “once God decided\\nto create Adam, everything that has happened since and will ever\\nhappen to the human race was and is obliged to happen with a more than\\nfatal necessity” (LA, 27). For example, given\\nproposition 13, if Adam exists, then necessarily Adam is father of\\nCain and Abel as sons, grandfather of their children,\\ngreat-grandfather of their children, etc., and everything that will\\never happen to all of them is already determined.\",\n \"\\nAfter a complicated three-way exchange of letters, Arnauld withdrew\\nhis complaint in a letter dated September 28, 1686. At the outset,\\nArnauld assumed that according to Leibniz whatever is contained in the\\nindividual notion of a person is contained there as a necessary\\nproperty of the person. But in response to Arnauld, Leibniz says that\\nhe does not “ask for more of a connection here” than that\\nwhich obtains between an individual substance and its “external\\ndenominations” (LA, p. 56). Given this understanding of\\nthe way that individual notion of a person contains everything that\\nwill ever happen to him, Arnauld was prepared to concede that\\nLeibniz’s position did not involve fatalism (LA,\\n63–64).\",\n \"\\nArnauld adds that he continues to have difficulty with Leibniz’s\\naccount of “the possibility of things” and his conception\\nof God as choosing the actual world out of an infinity of possible\\nworlds, a point on which Leibniz agreed with Malebranche, and he asks\\nLeibniz to clarify his “hypothesis of concomitance or agreement\\nbetween substances,” and his statement that if a material thing\\nis not merely an appearance, like a rainbow, or an accidental\\naggregation of parts, like a pile of stones, it must have a\\n“substantial form.” Leibniz had mentioned both of these\\npoints in his immediately preceding letter (LA, 64–66,\\n58). According to the hypothesis of concomitance no created substance\\never acts upon any other created substance. But every later state of\\nany given created substance is caused by an earlier state of the same\\nsubstance, and the histories of the individuals are coordinated by God\\nso that they fit together into the history of the actual world.\\nLeibniz also says that one substance, x, may\\n“express” another substance, y, more distinctly\\nthan y expresses x, and in that case, one may say\\nthat x causes changes to occur in y. He uses this\\nposition to explain the relation of mind and body. Arnauld asked him\\nto explain his view further by applying it to the example of a man who\\nfeels pain when his arm is wounded, and the example of a man wants to\\ntake off his hat and raises his arm. Arnauld also raises seven\\nobjections to Leibniz’s claims about substantial forms\\n(LA, 66–67) and defends the Cartesian view that\\nextension is the real nature of matter, which he takes to imply that\\nbodies have only varying degrees of “improper unity”\\n(LA, 88).\",\n \"\\nLeibniz provided the further clarification Arnauld requested in\\nseveral long letters, which drew two replies from Arnauld. Arnauld\\ncontinued to find Leibniz’s position unclear. “I have no\\nclear notion,” says Arnauld,\",\n \"\\nof what you mean by the word ‘expression’, when you say\\nthat our soul expresses more distinctly (all other things being equal)\\nwhat pertains to its body, since it is an expression even of the whole\\nuniverse in a certain sense. (LA, 105)\\n\",\n \"\\nHe takes Leibniz’s views about substantial forms to be a strange\\nand unsuccessful attempt “to ascribe true unity to bodies [in\\nparticular the bodies of animals] which would not otherwise have\\nit” (LA, 107).\",\n \"\\nArnauld’s last letter to Leibniz is dated August 28, 1687.\\nLeibniz tried to get Arnauld to continue the discussion, but Arnauld\\nwas fully occupied with other projects. On August 31, 1687, Arnauld\\nwrote to Hessen-Rheinfels, saying,\",\n \"\\nIt would be preferable if [Leibniz] gave up, at least for a time, this\\nsort of speculation, and applied himself to the greatest business he\\ncan have, the choice of the true religion… a decision that is\\nof such importance for his salvation. (LA, 110)\\n\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.1 Leibniz’s notion of an individual substance\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nEric Stencil has provided a general discussion of the disagreement\\nbetween Leibniz and Arnauld about Modal Metaphysics. “Modal\\nmetaphysics,” Stencil says, “is the theory of possibility,\\nnecessity, essence and God’s relation to each” (Stencil.\\n2016, p. 2). Arnauld attacks Leibniz’s thesis that the\\nindividual concept of each person contains once for all everything\\nthat will ever happen to him, Leibniz’s claim that there are\\n“purely possible” substances, and his associated view that\\nGod creates by choosing one from a multitude of possible worlds.\\nStencil argues that Arnauld’s criticisms are based on a positive\\nview which Stencil describes as “a sophisticated essence-based\\nmodal actualism,” containing three theses: (1) Everything that\\nexists is actual (ontological actualism). (2) The actual world is\\nirreducibly modal; there is no reductive analysis of modality (modal\\nactualism). (3) All true de re counterfactuals are grounded\\nin the irreducibly modal essences of actually existing things\\n(essence-based modal actualism) (Stencil, 2016, p. 2–3). Stencil\\nsays that Arnauld’s view “could be developed into a\\nplausible view in its own right” and that,\",\n \"\\nwhen divorced from its theological motivations and with several\\nimportant augmentations, could serve as a foundation for a plausible\\nview that deserves to be considered in contemporary debates concerning\\nmodal metaphysics. (p. 21)\\n\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.2 Arnauld’s criticism of Leibniz’s Modal Metaphysics; Arnauld’s alternative\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThroughout his enormously active life as a philosopher and theologian,\\nArnauld was above all concerned to defend the doctrine that human\\nbeings, after the fall of Adam, can perform meritorious actions, but\\nonly if the actions are the result of a supernatural grâce\\nefficace par elle-même. Arnauld claimed to find this\\ndoctrine in the writings of both Augustine and Aquinas and he defended\\nJansen’s version of it against the charge of heresy, even though\\nJansen’s version was significantly different from that espoused\\nby Arnauld himself. But Arnauld, like Augustine, Aquinas, and Jansen,\\nalso held that actions are meritorious only if they are free.\\nFor this reason, Arnauld is sometimes said to be a\\n“compatibilist.” For example, Robert Sleigh says,\\n“It is worth noting that Leibniz and Arnauld both ascribed\\ncompatibilism to St. Thomas and that both accepted compatibilism as\\nwell” (Sleigh 1990, 29).\",\n \"\\nThe position Arnauld defended and attributed to Augustine and Aquinas\\nis, however, quite different from what is nowadays referred to as\\n“compatibilism.” The position is connected with\\nArnauld’s treatment of free will during the last decade of his\\nlife, at the time when he was wrestling with Malebranche’s\\ntheory of nature and grace. At that time, Arnauld developd the\\nposition that the human will is free when and only when it is a\\n“potestas ou facultas ad opposita.” But\\nfirst, it is necessary to provide some background for the notion of\\ngrâce efficace par elle-même.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"6. Arnauld’s Compatibilism\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe point of departure for the disputes about grace and free will in\\nseventeenth-century Europe was the inconclusive ending of the\\nCongregationes de Auxiliis Divinae\\n Gratiae.[31]\\n These were ad hoc committees of Cardinals convoked to\\nresolve a dispute between the Jesuits and Dominicans about grace,\\npredestination, and free will. The dispute was concerned with a work\\nby the Jesuit Luis de Molina, whose lengthy title indicates the scope\\nand complexity of the dispute: Concordia Liberi Arbitrii\\ncum Gratia Donis, Divina Praescientia, Providentia, Praedestinatione\\net Reprobatione ad Nonnullos Primae Partis Divi Thomae Articulos\\n(The Agreement of Free will with the Gift of Grace, Divine\\nForeknowledge, Providence, Predestination and Reprobation, according\\nto several articles in the First Part of St. Thomas). The work\\nwas published in 1588 and was immediately attacked by the Dominican\\nschool of Salamanca, led by Domingo Bañez. The\\nCongregationes were convoked by Pope Clement VIII with the\\naim of resolving what had become a widespread struggle between the two\\norders. His hope was frustrated; the meetings began on January 2, 1598\\nand were terminated on August 28, 1607 (the feast day of St.\\nAugustine!) by Pope Paul V, who declared that neither side was\\nheretical and that both sides had merit.\",\n \"\\nA central question at the meetings of the Congregationes had\\nto do with the relation of supernatural grace to free, meritorious\\nacts of will. It was assumed on both sides that a human being cannot\\nperform a meritorious act of will without supernatural assistance from\\nGod, that God sometimes gives such assistance, and that it is\\nsometimes part of God’s providential plan that the recipient\\nfreely cooperate and thus perform the act in question. Meritorious\\nacts of will include, among others, the decision to pray, to seek\\nforgiveness for past sins, and to perform a good action for the love\\nof God. It was assumed by both Jesuits and Dominicans that God’s\\nprovidential plan is infallibly realized. Hence both sides agreed that\\nsupernatural grace is, in at least some cases, infallibly\\nefficacious (Vansteenberghe 1928, #2140). The issue was\\nwhether the supernatural grace in question is efficacious by\\nitself, in other words, intrinsically efficacious, or\\nwhether it is efficacious only by virtue of the independent, divinely\\nforeknown cooperation of the one who receives the grace\\n(Vansteenberghe 1928, #2154–65). Several sorts of supernatural\\ngrace were distinguished. For our purposes, the most important\\ndistinctions are (a) between habitual grace (especially the\\ntheological virtues of faith, hope, and charity) and actual grace; (b)\\nbetween external actual grace (e.g., hearing a good sermon) and\\ninternal actual grace (grace consisting in internal, mental acts); and\\n(c) between internal actual grace of the intellect and internal actual\\ngrace of the will. The question was whether the actual grace of the\\nwill that infallibly produces a meritorious act of will is efficacious\\nby itself, or whether instead its efficaciousness is explained in part\\nby God’s knowledge that the recipient would cooperate with the\\ngrace.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.1 The Congregationes de Auxiliis and seventeenth-century controversy about grace\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nJansen and Arnauld, like Bañez, defended the position that\\nactual grace of the will is sometimes intrinsically\\n efficacious.[32]\\n But they disagreed about the nature of such grace. According to\\nBañez, efficacious grace is the supernatural counterpart of\\n“physical premotion.” The elusive notion of physical\\npremotion is part of a general account of God’s causation of the\\nactions of creatures. According to this account, God is a cause of a\\ncreature’s action by bringing about in the creature a\\n“premotion” that results in the creature’s carrying\\nout the action in question. For Bañez, then, the actual grace\\nin question is a sort of supernatural beginning of volition that is\\nproduced in the human being by God and that infallibly results in a\\nmeritorious act of will. Jansen rejected this notion, arguing that it\\nis an obscure hypothesis that explains nothing. He held that\\nefficacious grace is, instead, a feeling of love, which he called a\\n“delectatio victrix (victorious pleasure)” and\\nwhich infallibly leads to a meritorious act.\",\n \"\\nArnauld accepted neither of those views. In a work published in 1656,\\nhe considers two positions on the nature of efficacious grace, in so\\nfar as it is the principle of good will: “Some say that such\\ngrace consists in the mercy of God and in an inherent form [in the\\ncreature],” while others say that it consists “only in the\\nmercy of God, which brings about (operatur) the interior\\nmovement of the mind.” Arnauld says “I am not far”\\nfrom the second position, which he attributes to “Bradwardine,\\nEstius, Tiphanius, and many other [Thomists]” (Dissertatio\\ntheologica quadripartita, OA, 20:237).\",\n \"\\nWhen Arnauld returned to questions about efficacious grace and free\\nwill toward the end of his life, he was more categorical:\",\n \"\\nThe true opinion of St. Augustine, St. Bernard, and St. Thomas\\nconcerning actual grace, is that of Estius, who posits nothing created\\nby God in the will in between the will of God, which he calls\\nuncreated grace, and the free movement of the human will which the\\nuncreated grace produces in the human will.\\n\",\n \"\\nJansen was “surely mistaken,” Arnauld adds, when he\\ndefined actual grace as a non-deliberate “victorious\\npleasure” (Letter to du Vaucel, 8 May 1693, OA,\\n 3:636).[33]\\n In a short treatise on human freedom written almost a decade earlier,\\nArnauld illustrates his criticism of Jansen (without mentioning him by\\nname) with an example: “Suppose that a man who is not very\\ngenerous is approached by a beggar who asks him for alms. He\\ndeliberates, proposes to himself the commandment of Christ, and gives\\nalms for the sake of God” (De la liberté de\\nl’homme, OA, 10:620, hereinafter\\nLiberté). Jansen assumes that there is a\\nnon-deliberate act of victorious pleasure in between the man’s\\ndeliberation and his decision to give alms for the sake of God, and\\nthat this non-deliberate pleasure is the actual grace that enables him\\nto act in a meritorious way. Arnauld rejects this position and instead\\nidentifies the efficacious grace with God’s merciful will that\\nthe man arrive at the deliberate decision to give alms for the sake of\\nGod.\",\n \"\\nYet Arnauld also assumed that the man’s decision, like any\\nmeritorious act of will, was free. Arnauld’s basic position on\\nthe compatibility of the intrinsic efficacy of grace with the freedom\\nof the volitions produced by the grace, is that we know from Scripture\\nand Tradition, supported by philosophical reflection on God’s\\nomnipotence (a) that the grace of Christ is intrinsically efficacious;\\nand we know “from our own experience” (b) that our\\nvolitions of the relevant kind are free. Hence we know that (a) and\\n(b) are consistent, even though we have “great difficulty”\\nin seeing how they fit together (OA, 10:436).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.2 Bañez, Jansen, and Arnauld on the nature of efficacious actual grace of the will\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nArnauld was, then, a compatibilist of sorts. The compatibilism he\\nespoused and attributed to Aquinas, however, was limited, and differs\\nin a number ways from the sort of position philosophers now label\\n“compatibilism.”\",\n \"\\n1. Arnauld was not a determinist, nor did he attribute determinism to\\nSt. Thomas. Arnauld cites Aquinas (Summa Theologicae I, 19,\\n3) as an authority in favor of his own view that God’s will with\\nregard to creatures is not necessary (OA, 39:598).\",\n \"\\n2. Arnauld held that freedom of human volitions is\\nincompatible with the determination of the choices by laws of\\nnature together with temporally antecedent events. Thus he responds to\\nMalebranche’s statement that the destruction of Jerusalem by the\\nRomans some seventy years after the death of Jesus was “a\\nnecessary outcome of the laws of nature,” by saying, “It\\nis clear … that a long series of diverse events, that depended\\non an infinity of free movements of the wills of men, could have been,\\nand indeed were, regulated by the providence of Him who has an\\nalmighty power to move the hearts of men, and to direct them as He\\npleases … But it cannot be said that it was a necessary\\nconsequence of the laws of nature without degrading human beings,\\nmaking them act like lower animals, and depriving them of their\\nliberty, a position that has been declared anathema by the\\nCouncil of Trent” (OA, 39:301). He repeats the\\ncriticism a few pages later:\",\n \"\\nAs I have shown above, to hold that events that depended on an\\ninfinity of free volitions of human beings were a necessary\\nconsequence of laws of nature is to deprive human beings of their\\nfreedom, after the example of Wycliffe. (OA,\\n 39:316).[34]\\n \",\n \"\\n3. According to the position Arnauld attributes to Aquinas, the\\nsinful choices of human beings are not determined by any\\ncause exterior to the sinner. Arnauld agreed with Aquinas that God is\\nthe sole exterior cause of the volitions of a human being, that is,\\nthe only efficient cause of volitions outside the human being himself\\nor herself, but God never causes a person to sin. Arnauld cites\\nSumma Theologiae, I–IIae, 9, 6, ad 3, in which Aquinas\\nanswers the objection that God cannot be the sole exterior cause of\\nsinful choices. Aquinas says,\",\n \"\\nGod, as the universal mover, moves the will of man to the universal\\nobject of the will, which is the good. And without this universal\\nmovement man cannot will anything; but man through reason determines\\nhimself to will this or that, whether it be a true or only an apparent\\ngood. Nevertheless God sometimes moves some men especially to will\\nsomething determinate that is good (interdum movet Deus\\nspecialiter aliquos ad aliquid determinatè volendum quod est\\nbonum), as in those He moves by grace. (Vera S. Thomae de\\ngratia sufficiente et efficaci doctrina dilucide explanata,\\nOA,\\n 20:63).[35]\\n \",\n \"\\nArnauld’s purpose in citing this text is to show that, according\\nto Aquinas, when one sins, one is not moved by\\n grace.[36]\\n But the text, together with the premise that there is no exterior\\ncause of human volition other than God, implies that sinful choices\\nare not determined by any cause outside the sinner.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.3 The limits of Arnauld’s compatibilism\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIn several letters toward the end of his life, Arnauld recommends a\\n“little Latin text” on human freedom that he wrote at the\\ntime he was wrestling with Malebranche’s theory of nature and\\ngrace, saying that it is particularly helpful in connection with the\\nproblem of reconciling intrinsically efficacious grace with freedom of\\n will.[37]\\n The core of Arnauld’s new theory is that the human soul has\\nfreedom of will with respect to a true or apparent good when it has\\nthe power to will that good and the power not to will it. In such\\ncases, the soul “determines itself” to will or not will\\nthe good in question. The human soul is said to have this power with\\nrespect to any particular good it apprehends, as long as the\\nparticular good does not encompass all the good toward which the will\\ntends. Arnauld cites I–IIae, 13, 6 as part of the Thomistic origin of\\nhis theory:\",\n \"\\nMan does not choose of necessity. And this is because that which is\\npossible not to be, is not of necessity…. For man can will and\\nnot will, act and not act; again, he can will this or that, and do\\nthis or that. The reason of this is seated in the very power of the\\nreason. For the will can tend to whatever the reason can apprehend as\\ngood. Now the reason can apprehend as good, not only this, viz.\\n“to will” or “to act,” but also this, viz.\\n“not to will” or “not to act.” Again, in all\\nparticular goods, the reason can consider an aspect of some good, and\\nthe lack of some good, which has the aspect of evil: and in this\\nrespect, it can apprehend any single one of such goods as to be chosen\\nor to be avoided. The perfect good alone, which is happiness, cannot\\nbe apprehended by the reason as an evil, or as lacking in any way.\\nConsequently man wills happiness of necessity, nor can he will not to\\nbe happy, or to be unhappy… Therefore man chooses not of\\nnecessity, but freely. (cited at OA, 10:630–31)\\n\",\n \"\\nArnauld follows Aquinas in saying that the will is not free with\\nregard to two objects, first, happiness, apprehended as the ultimate\\nobject of volition, and, second, God, seen face to face by the blessed\\nin heaven. In these two cases, one wills (or loves) the object with\\n“necessity of nature,” and hence not freely. In all other\\ncases, the will is free, and when one wills, one does so\\n freely.[38]\\n Arnauld provides a compact formula for this theory: “The best\\nand shortest notion one can have of free will is to say with St.\\nThomas that it is a potestas ou facultas ad opposita”\\n(Letter to Bossuet, juillet 1693, OA,\\n 3:662).[39]\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.4 Arnauld’s late position on the nature of free will\"\n }\n ]\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Arnauld, Antoine, Oeuvres de Messire Antoine Arnauld (43\nvols.) (edited by G. Du Pac De Bellegarde and J. Hautefage, with a\nVie de Messire Antoine Arnauld by N. De Larrière)\nParis-Lausanne: Sigismond D’Arnay et Cie 1775-83. Cited as\nOA.","Oeuvres Philosophiques d’Arnauld (6 vols.) (edited\nand introduced by Elmar J. Kremer and Denis Moreau) Bristol: Thoemmes\nPress, 2003.","Des vraies et des fausses idées, Librairie\nArthème Fayard, 1986. (A reprinting of the original 1683 text,\nbut without the pagination of the original)","Des vraies et des fausses idées, a critical\nedition by Denis Moreau, Paris, J. Vrin, 2011.","Examen d’un Ecrit qui a pour titre: Traité de\nl’essence du corps, et de l’union de l’ame avec le\ncorps contre la philosophie de M. Descartes, Texte revu par\nEmmanuel Faye, Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1999.","Nouveau éléments de géometrie\nd’Arnauld, critical edition by Dominique Descotes, in\nGéometries du Port-Royal, Paris, Champion, 2009.","La logique ou l’Art de penser, Édition\ncritique par Pierre Clair et François Girbal, Seconde\nédition revue,","La Logique ou l’art de penser, critical edition by\nDominique Descartes, Paris, Champion, 2011.","Arnauld, Antoine, and Lancelot, Claude, General and Rational\nGrammar: The Port-Royal Grammar, translated by Jacques Rieux and\nBernard E. Rollin, The Hague: Mouton, 1975.","Arnauld, Antoine, The Art of Thinking, Port-Royal Logic,\ntranslated by James Dickhoff and Patricia James, New York: Library of\nLiberal Arts, 1964.","Arnauld, Antoine and Nicole, Pierre, Logic or the Art of\nThinking, translated by Jill Vance Buroker, Cambridge: Cambridge\nUniversity Press, 1996.","Arnauld, Antoine, On True and False Ideas, translated by\nElmar J. Kremer, Lewiston/Queenston: The Edwin Mellen Press,\n1990.","Arnauld, Antoine, On True and False Ideas, translated by\nStephen Gaukroger, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990.","Arnauld, Textes philosophiques, Introduction, traduction\net notes par Denis Moreau, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,\n2001.","Défense contre la Réponse au Livre des vraies et\ndes fausses Idées, OA, 38: 367–671.","De la fréquente communion, OA, 27:\n71–673.","Des vraies et des fausses idées, OA, 38:\n177–365.","Dissertation sur les Miracles de l’ancienne loi,\nOA, 38: 673–741.","Dissertatio theologica quadripartita, OA, 20:\n159–314.","Examen d’un Ecrit qui a pour titre: Traité de\nl’essence du corps, et de l’union de l’âme\navec le corps contre la philosophie de M. Descartes, OA,\n38: 89–176.","Grammaire génerale et raisonnée,\nOA, 16: 3–82.","Instruction, par demandes & par réponses touchant\nl’accord de la Grace avec la liberté, OA,\n10: 435–41.","Humanae Libertatis Notio, in Kremer and Moreau,\nOeuvres Philosophiques d’Arnauld, 2003, end of Volume\n6; and Moreau, Arnauld, Textes philosophiques, 2001, pp.\n236–59.","De la liberté de l’homme, OA, 10:\n610–14. (A French translation, by Pasquier Quesnel, of\nHumanae Libertatis Notio.)","La Logique ou l’Art de penser, OA, 16:\n99–416.","Nouvelle Défense de la Traduction du Nouveau Testament\nimprimée a Mons contre M. Mallet, OA, 7:\n67–915.","Nouveaux éléments de\ngéométrie, OA, 42: 1–342.","Neuf lettres de M. Arnauld au R.P. Malebranche sur les\nidées génerales, la grâce et\nl’étendue intelligible, OA, 39:\n1–153.","Première Apologie pour Jansénius,\nOA, 16: 39–323.","Réflexions philosophiques et théologiques sur le\nnouveau système de la nature et de la grâce,\nOA, 39: 155–848.","Règles du bon sens, OA, 40:\n153–260.","Traduction du Discours latin prononcé par M. Arnauld en\nrecevant le Bonnet de Docteur, OA, 43: 11–13.","Seconde Apologie pour Jansénius, OA, 17:\n1–637.","Vera S. Thomae de gratia sufficiente et efficaci doctrina\ndilucide explanatae, OA, 20: 39–77.","La Bible, traduction de LeMaître De Sacy,\n(préface et textes d’introduction établis par\nPhilippe Sellier) Paris: Robert Laffont, 1990.","The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (translated by\nJohn Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch) 2 volumes,\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–85. Cited as\nDescartes.","Briefwechsel Leibniz, Arnauld und dem Landgrafen Ernst von\nHessen-Rheinfels, in Die philosophischen schriften von\nGottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, herausgegeben von C. I. Gerhardt,\nBerlin, 1875–1890, reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1965, volume\n2. Cited as LA.","Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Discourse on Metaphysics,\nCorrespondence with Arnauld, Monadology, (translated by George R.\nMontgomery), LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Co., 1950","–––, Theodicy, Essays on the Goodness of\nGod, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil (translated by E.\nM. Huggard and edited with an introduction by Austin Farrer) La Salle,\nIL: Open Court Press, 1985.","Malebranche, Nicolas, Oeuvres complètes de\nMalebranche, (direction: André Robinet) 20 volumes, Paris:\nJ. Vrin, 1958–74. Cited as OM.","–––, Treatise on Nature and Grace\n(translated by Patrick Riley) Oxford: Clarendon University Press,\n1992. (Riley translates an early edition of the\nTraité, which does not contain some texts on which\nArnauld comments. Hence, the translations of the text found in volume\n5 of OM are by the author of this entry.)","Molina, Luis de, On Divine Foreknowledge (Part IV of the\nConcordia), (translated, with an introduction and notes, by\nAlfred J. Freddoso), Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,\n1988.","Reid, Thomas, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man\n(1785), (edited by Derek R. Brookes) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University\nPress, 2002.","Faye, Emmanuel, 2005, “The Cartesianism of Desgabets and\nArnauld and the Problem of Eternal Truths,” in D. Garber and S.\nNadler (eds.), Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosphy,\nOxford: Clarendon Press.","Hacking, Ian, 1975a, The Emergence of Probability,\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Hacking, Ian, 1975b, Why Does Language Matter to\nPhilosophy?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Knox, R.A., 1950, Enthusiasm, Oxford: Oxford University\nPress.","Kremer, Elmar J., 1995, “L’Accord de la Grace avec la\nLiberte selon Arnauld,” Chroniques de Port-Royal, Antoine\nArnauld (1612–1694) Philosophe, Ecrivain, Theologien,\nParis: Bibliotheque Mazarine.","Kremer, Elmar J., 2000, “Malebranche on Human\nFreedom,” in S. Nadler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to\nMalebranche, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","––– (ed.), 1996, Interpreting Arnauld,\nToronto: University of Toronto Press.","Moreau, Denis, 1999, Deux Cartésiens, Paris: J.\nVrin.","–––, 2011, “La ‘Philosophie\nd’Antoine Arnauld’: Un Bilan,” in Chroniques de\nPort-royal, 115-128.","Moreau, Denis, 2004, Malebranche, Paris: J. Vrin.","Marion, Jean-Luc, 1981, Sur la théologie blanche de\nDescartes, Paris: PUF.","Marušić, Jennifer Smalligan, 2014, “Propositions\nand Judgments in Locke and Arnauld: A Monstrous and Unholy\nUnion?” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 52(2):\n255–80.","Nadler, Steven, 1989, Arnauld and the Cartesian Philosophy of\nIdeas, Princeton: Princeton University Press.","–––, 1995, “Occasionalism and the Question\nof Arnauld’s Cartesianism,” in Ariew, Roger and Grene,\nMarjorie, editors, Descartes and His Contemporaries, Chicago:\nUniversity of Chicago Press, pp. 129–144.","–––, 2008, “Arnauld’s God,”\nJournal of the History of Philosophy, 46(4):\n517–38.","–––, 2011, “Conceptions of God,” in\nThe Oxford Hndbook of Philosophy in Early Modern Europe,\nedited by Desmond M. Clarke and Catherine Wilson, 2011.","Nelson, Alan, 1996, “The Falsity in Sensory Ideas: Descartes\nand Arnauld,” in Kremer (ed.) 1996, pp. 13–32.","Pearce, Kenneth L., 2016, “Arnauld’s Verbal\nDistinction between Ideas and Perceptions,” History and\nPbilosophy of Logic, 37(4): 375–90.","–––, 2019, “Locke, Arnauld, and Abstract\nIdeas,” British. Journal for the History of Philosophy,\n27(1): 75–94.","–––, 2021, “Ideas and Explanation in Early\nModern Philosophy”, Archiv für Geschichte der\nPhilosophie, 103(2): 252–80.","–––, forthcoming, “Thinking with the\nCartesians and Speaking with the Vulgar,” Journal of the\nHistory of Philosophy.","Sleigh, Jr., R.C., 1996, “Arnauld on Efficacious Grace and\nFree Choice,” in Kremer (ed.) 1996, pp. 164–75.","–––, 1990, Leibniz and Arnauld, a Commentary\non Their Correspondence, New Haven: Yale University Press.","Stencil, Eric, 2016, “Essence and Possibility in the\nLeibniz-Arnauld Correspendence,” Pacific Philosophical\nQuarterly, 97(1): 2–26.","–––, 2019, “Arnauld’s God\nReconsidered,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 36(1):\n19–38.","Stencil, Eric and Walsh, Julie, (2016), “Arnauld, Power, and\nthe Fallibility of Infallible Determination,” History of\nPhilosophy Quarterly, 33(3): 237–56","van der Schaar, Maria, 2008, “Locke and Arnauld on Judgments\nand Propositions,” History and Philosophy of Logic,\n29(4): 327–41.","Vansteenberghe, E., 1929, “Molinism,” in the\nDictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, sous la\ndirection de A. Vacant, E. Mangenot et É. Aman, Tome\nDixième Paris-VI: Librairie Letouzey et Ané, cols.\n2094–2187.","Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694), Philosophe,\nÉcrivain, Théologien, Chroniques de Port-Royal,\nNuméro 44, Paris: Bibliothèqie Mazarine, 1995.","Port-Royal et l’Oratoire, Chroniques de Port-Royal,\nNuméro 50, Paris: Bibliothèque Mazarine, 2001.","Cook, Monte, 1991, “Malebranche vs. Arnauld,”\nJournal of the History of Philosophy, 29(2):\n183–99.","Kilcullen, John, 1988, Sincerity and Truth: Essays on Arnauld,\nBayle and Toleration, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","Kremer, Elmar J. (ed.), 1994, The Great Arnauld and Some of\nHis Philosophical Correspondents, Toronto: University of Toronto\nPress.","Kremer, Elmar J. (ed.), 1996, Interpreting Arnauld,\nToronto: University of Toronto Press.","Laporte, Jean, 1922, La Doctrine de la Grace chez\nArnauld, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.","Martin, John N., 2011, “Existential Import in Cartesian\nSemantics,” History and Philosophy of Logic, 32(3):\n211–039.","–––, 2012, “Existential Commitment and the\nCartesian Semantics of the Port-Royal Logic,” in The Square\nof Opposition: A General Framework for Cognition, edited by\nJean-Yves Beziau and Gillman Payette, Bern: Peter Lang.","–––, 2017, “Extension in the Port-Royal\nLogic,” South American Journal of Logic, 3:\n291–311.","–––, 2020, The Cartesian Semantics of the\nPort-Royal Logic, New York: Routledge.","Michon, Cyrille, 2013, “Le compatibilisme thomiste\nd’Antoine Arnauld,” Dix-septième\nsiècle, 2(259): 265–279.","Ndiaye, A.-R., 1991, La Philosophie d’Antoine\nArnauld, Paris: J. Vrin.","Paola, Nicolas, 2013, “Arnauld et la foi implicite: un\nrefuge cartésien,” Dix-septième\nsiècle, 2(259): 249–63.","Pariente, Jean-Claude, 1995, Arnauld, Philosophie du langage\net de la connaissance, Paris: J. Vrin.","–––, 1985, L’analyse du langage\nà Port-Royal, Paris: Les Editions du Minuit.","Schmaltz, Tad M., 2002, Radical Cartesianism, The French\nReception of Descartes, Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress","Van Cleve, James, “Arnauld’s Silence on the Creation\nof the Eternal Truths,” Res Philosophica, 96(4):\n445–70.","Yolton, John, 1984, Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to\nReid, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press."],"string":"[\n \"Arnauld, Antoine, Oeuvres de Messire Antoine Arnauld (43\\nvols.) (edited by G. Du Pac De Bellegarde and J. Hautefage, with a\\nVie de Messire Antoine Arnauld by N. De Larrière)\\nParis-Lausanne: Sigismond D’Arnay et Cie 1775-83. Cited as\\nOA.\",\n \"Oeuvres Philosophiques d’Arnauld (6 vols.) (edited\\nand introduced by Elmar J. Kremer and Denis Moreau) Bristol: Thoemmes\\nPress, 2003.\",\n \"Des vraies et des fausses idées, Librairie\\nArthème Fayard, 1986. (A reprinting of the original 1683 text,\\nbut without the pagination of the original)\",\n \"Des vraies et des fausses idées, a critical\\nedition by Denis Moreau, Paris, J. Vrin, 2011.\",\n \"Examen d’un Ecrit qui a pour titre: Traité de\\nl’essence du corps, et de l’union de l’ame avec le\\ncorps contre la philosophie de M. Descartes, Texte revu par\\nEmmanuel Faye, Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1999.\",\n \"Nouveau éléments de géometrie\\nd’Arnauld, critical edition by Dominique Descotes, in\\nGéometries du Port-Royal, Paris, Champion, 2009.\",\n \"La logique ou l’Art de penser, Édition\\ncritique par Pierre Clair et François Girbal, Seconde\\nédition revue,\",\n \"La Logique ou l’art de penser, critical edition by\\nDominique Descartes, Paris, Champion, 2011.\",\n \"Arnauld, Antoine, and Lancelot, Claude, General and Rational\\nGrammar: The Port-Royal Grammar, translated by Jacques Rieux and\\nBernard E. Rollin, The Hague: Mouton, 1975.\",\n \"Arnauld, Antoine, The Art of Thinking, Port-Royal Logic,\\ntranslated by James Dickhoff and Patricia James, New York: Library of\\nLiberal Arts, 1964.\",\n \"Arnauld, Antoine and Nicole, Pierre, Logic or the Art of\\nThinking, translated by Jill Vance Buroker, Cambridge: Cambridge\\nUniversity Press, 1996.\",\n \"Arnauld, Antoine, On True and False Ideas, translated by\\nElmar J. Kremer, Lewiston/Queenston: The Edwin Mellen Press,\\n1990.\",\n \"Arnauld, Antoine, On True and False Ideas, translated by\\nStephen Gaukroger, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990.\",\n \"Arnauld, Textes philosophiques, Introduction, traduction\\net notes par Denis Moreau, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,\\n2001.\",\n \"Défense contre la Réponse au Livre des vraies et\\ndes fausses Idées, OA, 38: 367–671.\",\n \"De la fréquente communion, OA, 27:\\n71–673.\",\n \"Des vraies et des fausses idées, OA, 38:\\n177–365.\",\n \"Dissertation sur les Miracles de l’ancienne loi,\\nOA, 38: 673–741.\",\n \"Dissertatio theologica quadripartita, OA, 20:\\n159–314.\",\n \"Examen d’un Ecrit qui a pour titre: Traité de\\nl’essence du corps, et de l’union de l’âme\\navec le corps contre la philosophie de M. Descartes, OA,\\n38: 89–176.\",\n \"Grammaire génerale et raisonnée,\\nOA, 16: 3–82.\",\n \"Instruction, par demandes & par réponses touchant\\nl’accord de la Grace avec la liberté, OA,\\n10: 435–41.\",\n \"Humanae Libertatis Notio, in Kremer and Moreau,\\nOeuvres Philosophiques d’Arnauld, 2003, end of Volume\\n6; and Moreau, Arnauld, Textes philosophiques, 2001, pp.\\n236–59.\",\n \"De la liberté de l’homme, OA, 10:\\n610–14. (A French translation, by Pasquier Quesnel, of\\nHumanae Libertatis Notio.)\",\n \"La Logique ou l’Art de penser, OA, 16:\\n99–416.\",\n \"Nouvelle Défense de la Traduction du Nouveau Testament\\nimprimée a Mons contre M. Mallet, OA, 7:\\n67–915.\",\n \"Nouveaux éléments de\\ngéométrie, OA, 42: 1–342.\",\n \"Neuf lettres de M. Arnauld au R.P. Malebranche sur les\\nidées génerales, la grâce et\\nl’étendue intelligible, OA, 39:\\n1–153.\",\n \"Première Apologie pour Jansénius,\\nOA, 16: 39–323.\",\n \"Réflexions philosophiques et théologiques sur le\\nnouveau système de la nature et de la grâce,\\nOA, 39: 155–848.\",\n \"Règles du bon sens, OA, 40:\\n153–260.\",\n \"Traduction du Discours latin prononcé par M. Arnauld en\\nrecevant le Bonnet de Docteur, OA, 43: 11–13.\",\n \"Seconde Apologie pour Jansénius, OA, 17:\\n1–637.\",\n \"Vera S. Thomae de gratia sufficiente et efficaci doctrina\\ndilucide explanatae, OA, 20: 39–77.\",\n \"La Bible, traduction de LeMaître De Sacy,\\n(préface et textes d’introduction établis par\\nPhilippe Sellier) Paris: Robert Laffont, 1990.\",\n \"The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (translated by\\nJohn Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch) 2 volumes,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984–85. Cited as\\nDescartes.\",\n \"Briefwechsel Leibniz, Arnauld und dem Landgrafen Ernst von\\nHessen-Rheinfels, in Die philosophischen schriften von\\nGottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, herausgegeben von C. I. Gerhardt,\\nBerlin, 1875–1890, reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1965, volume\\n2. Cited as LA.\",\n \"Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Discourse on Metaphysics,\\nCorrespondence with Arnauld, Monadology, (translated by George R.\\nMontgomery), LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Co., 1950\",\n \"–––, Theodicy, Essays on the Goodness of\\nGod, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil (translated by E.\\nM. Huggard and edited with an introduction by Austin Farrer) La Salle,\\nIL: Open Court Press, 1985.\",\n \"Malebranche, Nicolas, Oeuvres complètes de\\nMalebranche, (direction: André Robinet) 20 volumes, Paris:\\nJ. Vrin, 1958–74. Cited as OM.\",\n \"–––, Treatise on Nature and Grace\\n(translated by Patrick Riley) Oxford: Clarendon University Press,\\n1992. (Riley translates an early edition of the\\nTraité, which does not contain some texts on which\\nArnauld comments. Hence, the translations of the text found in volume\\n5 of OM are by the author of this entry.)\",\n \"Molina, Luis de, On Divine Foreknowledge (Part IV of the\\nConcordia), (translated, with an introduction and notes, by\\nAlfred J. Freddoso), Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,\\n1988.\",\n \"Reid, Thomas, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man\\n(1785), (edited by Derek R. Brookes) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University\\nPress, 2002.\",\n \"Faye, Emmanuel, 2005, “The Cartesianism of Desgabets and\\nArnauld and the Problem of Eternal Truths,” in D. Garber and S.\\nNadler (eds.), Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosphy,\\nOxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"Hacking, Ian, 1975a, The Emergence of Probability,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Hacking, Ian, 1975b, Why Does Language Matter to\\nPhilosophy?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Knox, R.A., 1950, Enthusiasm, Oxford: Oxford University\\nPress.\",\n \"Kremer, Elmar J., 1995, “L’Accord de la Grace avec la\\nLiberte selon Arnauld,” Chroniques de Port-Royal, Antoine\\nArnauld (1612–1694) Philosophe, Ecrivain, Theologien,\\nParis: Bibliotheque Mazarine.\",\n \"Kremer, Elmar J., 2000, “Malebranche on Human\\nFreedom,” in S. Nadler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to\\nMalebranche, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"––– (ed.), 1996, Interpreting Arnauld,\\nToronto: University of Toronto Press.\",\n \"Moreau, Denis, 1999, Deux Cartésiens, Paris: J.\\nVrin.\",\n \"–––, 2011, “La ‘Philosophie\\nd’Antoine Arnauld’: Un Bilan,” in Chroniques de\\nPort-royal, 115-128.\",\n \"Moreau, Denis, 2004, Malebranche, Paris: J. Vrin.\",\n \"Marion, Jean-Luc, 1981, Sur la théologie blanche de\\nDescartes, Paris: PUF.\",\n \"Marušić, Jennifer Smalligan, 2014, “Propositions\\nand Judgments in Locke and Arnauld: A Monstrous and Unholy\\nUnion?” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 52(2):\\n255–80.\",\n \"Nadler, Steven, 1989, Arnauld and the Cartesian Philosophy of\\nIdeas, Princeton: Princeton University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1995, “Occasionalism and the Question\\nof Arnauld’s Cartesianism,” in Ariew, Roger and Grene,\\nMarjorie, editors, Descartes and His Contemporaries, Chicago:\\nUniversity of Chicago Press, pp. 129–144.\",\n \"–––, 2008, “Arnauld’s God,”\\nJournal of the History of Philosophy, 46(4):\\n517–38.\",\n \"–––, 2011, “Conceptions of God,” in\\nThe Oxford Hndbook of Philosophy in Early Modern Europe,\\nedited by Desmond M. Clarke and Catherine Wilson, 2011.\",\n \"Nelson, Alan, 1996, “The Falsity in Sensory Ideas: Descartes\\nand Arnauld,” in Kremer (ed.) 1996, pp. 13–32.\",\n \"Pearce, Kenneth L., 2016, “Arnauld’s Verbal\\nDistinction between Ideas and Perceptions,” History and\\nPbilosophy of Logic, 37(4): 375–90.\",\n \"–––, 2019, “Locke, Arnauld, and Abstract\\nIdeas,” British. Journal for the History of Philosophy,\\n27(1): 75–94.\",\n \"–––, 2021, “Ideas and Explanation in Early\\nModern Philosophy”, Archiv für Geschichte der\\nPhilosophie, 103(2): 252–80.\",\n \"–––, forthcoming, “Thinking with the\\nCartesians and Speaking with the Vulgar,” Journal of the\\nHistory of Philosophy.\",\n \"Sleigh, Jr., R.C., 1996, “Arnauld on Efficacious Grace and\\nFree Choice,” in Kremer (ed.) 1996, pp. 164–75.\",\n \"–––, 1990, Leibniz and Arnauld, a Commentary\\non Their Correspondence, New Haven: Yale University Press.\",\n \"Stencil, Eric, 2016, “Essence and Possibility in the\\nLeibniz-Arnauld Correspendence,” Pacific Philosophical\\nQuarterly, 97(1): 2–26.\",\n \"–––, 2019, “Arnauld’s God\\nReconsidered,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 36(1):\\n19–38.\",\n \"Stencil, Eric and Walsh, Julie, (2016), “Arnauld, Power, and\\nthe Fallibility of Infallible Determination,” History of\\nPhilosophy Quarterly, 33(3): 237–56\",\n \"van der Schaar, Maria, 2008, “Locke and Arnauld on Judgments\\nand Propositions,” History and Philosophy of Logic,\\n29(4): 327–41.\",\n \"Vansteenberghe, E., 1929, “Molinism,” in the\\nDictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, sous la\\ndirection de A. Vacant, E. Mangenot et É. Aman, Tome\\nDixième Paris-VI: Librairie Letouzey et Ané, cols.\\n2094–2187.\",\n \"Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694), Philosophe,\\nÉcrivain, Théologien, Chroniques de Port-Royal,\\nNuméro 44, Paris: Bibliothèqie Mazarine, 1995.\",\n \"Port-Royal et l’Oratoire, Chroniques de Port-Royal,\\nNuméro 50, Paris: Bibliothèque Mazarine, 2001.\",\n \"Cook, Monte, 1991, “Malebranche vs. Arnauld,”\\nJournal of the History of Philosophy, 29(2):\\n183–99.\",\n \"Kilcullen, John, 1988, Sincerity and Truth: Essays on Arnauld,\\nBayle and Toleration, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Kremer, Elmar J. (ed.), 1994, The Great Arnauld and Some of\\nHis Philosophical Correspondents, Toronto: University of Toronto\\nPress.\",\n \"Kremer, Elmar J. (ed.), 1996, Interpreting Arnauld,\\nToronto: University of Toronto Press.\",\n \"Laporte, Jean, 1922, La Doctrine de la Grace chez\\nArnauld, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.\",\n \"Martin, John N., 2011, “Existential Import in Cartesian\\nSemantics,” History and Philosophy of Logic, 32(3):\\n211–039.\",\n \"–––, 2012, “Existential Commitment and the\\nCartesian Semantics of the Port-Royal Logic,” in The Square\\nof Opposition: A General Framework for Cognition, edited by\\nJean-Yves Beziau and Gillman Payette, Bern: Peter Lang.\",\n \"–––, 2017, “Extension in the Port-Royal\\nLogic,” South American Journal of Logic, 3:\\n291–311.\",\n \"–––, 2020, The Cartesian Semantics of the\\nPort-Royal Logic, New York: Routledge.\",\n \"Michon, Cyrille, 2013, “Le compatibilisme thomiste\\nd’Antoine Arnauld,” Dix-septième\\nsiècle, 2(259): 265–279.\",\n \"Ndiaye, A.-R., 1991, La Philosophie d’Antoine\\nArnauld, Paris: J. Vrin.\",\n \"Paola, Nicolas, 2013, “Arnauld et la foi implicite: un\\nrefuge cartésien,” Dix-septième\\nsiècle, 2(259): 249–63.\",\n \"Pariente, Jean-Claude, 1995, Arnauld, Philosophie du langage\\net de la connaissance, Paris: J. Vrin.\",\n \"–––, 1985, L’analyse du langage\\nà Port-Royal, Paris: Les Editions du Minuit.\",\n \"Schmaltz, Tad M., 2002, Radical Cartesianism, The French\\nReception of Descartes, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress\",\n \"Van Cleve, James, “Arnauld’s Silence on the Creation\\nof the Eternal Truths,” Res Philosophica, 96(4):\\n445–70.\",\n \"Yolton, John, 1984, Perceptual Acquaintance from Descartes to\\nReid, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../aquinas/","text":"Aquinas, Thomas"},{"href":"../augustine/","text":"Augustine, Saint"},{"href":"../consciousness-17th/","text":"consciousness: seventeenth-century theories of"},{"href":"../descartes/","text":"Descartes, René"},{"href":"../leibniz/","text":"Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm"},{"href":"../malebranche/","text":"Malebranche, Nicolas"},{"href":"../pascal/","text":"Pascal, Blaise"},{"href":"../port-royal-logic/","text":"Port Royal Logic"},{"href":"../reid/","text":"Reid, Thomas"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../aquinas/\",\n \"text\": \"Aquinas, Thomas\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../augustine/\",\n \"text\": \"Augustine, Saint\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../consciousness-17th/\",\n \"text\": \"consciousness: seventeenth-century theories of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../descartes/\",\n \"text\": \"Descartes, René\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../leibniz/\",\n \"text\": \"Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../malebranche/\",\n \"text\": \"Malebranche, Nicolas\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../pascal/\",\n \"text\": \"Pascal, Blaise\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../port-royal-logic/\",\n \"text\": \"Port Royal Logic\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../reid/\",\n \"text\": \"Reid, Thomas\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":78,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"voltaire"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Voltaire"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Mon Aug 31, 2009; substantive revision Fri May 29, 2020"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["François-Marie d’Arouet (1694–1778), better known by his pen name Voltaire, was a French writer and public activist who played a singular role in defining the eighteenth-century movement called the Enlightenment. At the center of his work was a new conception of philosophy and the philosopher that in several crucial respects influenced the modern concept of each. Yet in other ways Voltaire was not a philosopher at all in the modern sense of the term. He wrote as many plays, stories, and poems as patently philosophical tracts, and he in fact directed many of his critical writings against the philosophical pretensions of recognized philosophers such as Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes. He was, however, a vigorous defender of a conception of natural science that served in his mind as the antidote to vain and fruitless philosophical investigation. In clarifying this new distinction between science and philosophy, and especially in fighting vigorously for it in public campaigns directed against the perceived enemies of fanaticism and superstition, Voltaire pointed modern philosophy down several paths that it subsequently followed.","To capture Voltaire’s unconventional place in the history of philosophy, this article will be structured in a particular way. First, a full account of Voltaire’s life is offered, not merely as background context for his philosophical work, but as an argument about the way that his particular career produced his particular contributions to European philosophy. Second, a survey of Voltaire’s philosophical views is offered so as to attach the legacy of what Voltaire did with the intellectual viewpoints that his activities reinforced."],"string":"[\n \"François-Marie d’Arouet (1694–1778), better known by his pen name Voltaire, was a French writer and public activist who played a singular role in defining the eighteenth-century movement called the Enlightenment. At the center of his work was a new conception of philosophy and the philosopher that in several crucial respects influenced the modern concept of each. Yet in other ways Voltaire was not a philosopher at all in the modern sense of the term. He wrote as many plays, stories, and poems as patently philosophical tracts, and he in fact directed many of his critical writings against the philosophical pretensions of recognized philosophers such as Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes. He was, however, a vigorous defender of a conception of natural science that served in his mind as the antidote to vain and fruitless philosophical investigation. In clarifying this new distinction between science and philosophy, and especially in fighting vigorously for it in public campaigns directed against the perceived enemies of fanaticism and superstition, Voltaire pointed modern philosophy down several paths that it subsequently followed.\",\n \"To capture Voltaire’s unconventional place in the history of philosophy, this article will be structured in a particular way. First, a full account of Voltaire’s life is offered, not merely as background context for his philosophical work, but as an argument about the way that his particular career produced his particular contributions to European philosophy. Second, a survey of Voltaire’s philosophical views is offered so as to attach the legacy of what Voltaire did with the intellectual viewpoints that his activities reinforced.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Voltaire’s Life: The Philosopher as Critic and Public Activist","sub_toc":["1.1 Voltaire’s Early Years (1694–1726)","1.2 The English Period (1726–1729)","1.3 Becoming a Philosophe","1.4 The Newton Wars (1732–1745)","1.5 From French Newtonian to Enlightenment Philosophe (1745–1755)","1.6 Fighting for Philosophie (1755–1778)","1.7 Voltaire, Philosophe Icon of Enlightenment Philosophie (1778–Present)"]},{"content_title":"2. Voltaire’s Enlightenment Philosophy","sub_toc":["2.1 Liberty","2.2 Hedonism","2.3 Skepticism","2.4 Newtonian Empirical Science","2.5 Toward Science without Metaphysics"]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":["Primary Literature","Primary Literature in Translation","Secondary Literature "]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Voltaire’s Life: The Philosopher as Critic and Public Activist\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"1.1 Voltaire’s Early Years (1694–1726)\",\n \"1.2 The English Period (1726–1729)\",\n \"1.3 Becoming a Philosophe\",\n \"1.4 The Newton Wars (1732–1745)\",\n \"1.5 From French Newtonian to Enlightenment Philosophe (1745–1755)\",\n \"1.6 Fighting for Philosophie (1755–1778)\",\n \"1.7 Voltaire, Philosophe Icon of Enlightenment Philosophie (1778–Present)\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Voltaire’s Enlightenment Philosophy\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"2.1 Liberty\",\n \"2.2 Hedonism\",\n \"2.3 Skepticism\",\n \"2.4 Newtonian Empirical Science\",\n \"2.5 Toward Science without Metaphysics\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"Primary Literature\",\n \"Primary Literature in Translation\",\n \"Secondary Literature \"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["Voltaire only began to identify himself with philosophy and the philosophe identity during middle age. His work Lettres philosophiques, published in 1734 when he was forty years old, was the key turning point in this transformation. Before this date, Voltaire’s life in no way pointed him toward the philosophical destiny that he was later to assume. His early orientation toward literature and libertine sociability, however, shaped his philosophical identity in crucial ways."],"section_title":"1. Voltaire’s Life: The Philosopher as Critic and Public Activist","subsections":[{"content":["François-Marie d’Arouet was born in 1694, the fourth of five children, to a well-to-do public official and his well bred aristocratic wife. In its fusion of traditional French aristocratic pedigree with the new wealth and power of royal bureaucratic administration, the d’Arouet family was representative of elite society in France during the reign of Louis XIV. The young François-Marie acquired from his parents the benefits of prosperity and political favor, and from the Jesuits at the prestigious Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris he also acquired a first-class education. François-Marie also acquired an introduction to modern letters from his father who was active in the literary culture of the period both in Paris and at the royal court of Versailles. François senior appears to have enjoyed the company of men of letters, yet his frustration with his son’s ambition to become a writer is notorious. From early in his youth, Voltaire aspired to emulate his idols Molière, Racine, and Corneille and become a playwright, yet Voltaire’s father strenuously opposed the idea, hoping to install his son instead in a position of public authority. First as a law student, then as a lawyer’s apprentice, and finally as a secretary to a French diplomat, Voltaire attempted to fulfill his father’s wishes. But in each case, he ended up abandoning his posts, sometimes amidst scandal.","Escaping from the burdens of these public obligations, Voltaire would retreat into the libertine sociability of Paris. It was here in the 1720s, during the culturally vibrant period of the Regency government between the reigns of Louis XIV and XV (1715–1723), that Voltaire established one dimension of his identity. His wit and congeniality were legendary even as a youth, so he had few difficulties establishing himself as a popular figure in Regency literary circles. He also learned how to play the patronage game so important to those with writerly ambitions. Thanks, therefore, to some artfully composed writings, a couple of well-made contacts, more than a few bon mots, and a little successful investing, especially during John Law’s Mississippi Bubble fiasco, Voltaire was able to establish himself as an independent man of letters in Paris. His literary debut occurred in 1718 with the publication of his Oedipe, a reworking of the ancient tragedy that evoked the French classicism of Racine and Corneille. The play was first performed at the home of the Duchesse du Maine at Sceaux, a sign of Voltaire’s quick ascent to the very pinnacle of elite literary society. Its published title page also announced the new pen name that Voltaire would ever after deploy.","During the Regency, Voltaire circulated widely in elite circles such as those that congregated at Sceaux, but he also cultivated more illicit and libertine sociability as well. This pairing was not at all uncommon during this time, and Voltaire’s intellectual work in the 1720s—a mix of poems and plays that shifted between playful libertinism and serious classicism seemingly without pause—illustrated perfectly the values of pleasure, honnêteté, and good taste that were the watchwords of this cultural milieu. Philosophy was also a part of this mix, and during the Regency the young Voltaire was especially shaped by his contacts with the English aristocrat, freethinker,and Jacobite Lord Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke lived in exile in France during the Regency period, and Voltaire was a frequent visitor to La Source, the Englishman’s estate near Orléans. The chateau served as a reunion point for a wide range of intellectuals, and many believe that Voltaire was first introduced to natural philosophy generally, and to the work of Locke and the English Newtonians specifically, at Bolingbroke’s estate. It was certainly true that these ideas, especially in their more deistic and libertine configurations, were at the heart of Bolingbroke’s identity."],"subsection_title":"1.1 Voltaire’s Early Years (1694–1726)"},{"content":["Yet even if Voltaire was introduced to English philosophy in this way, its influence on his thought was most shaped by his brief exile in England between 1726–29. The occasion for his departure was an affair of honor. A very powerful aristocrat, the Duc de Rohan, accused Voltaire of defamation, and in the face of this charge the untitled writer chose to save face and avoid more serious prosecution by leaving the country indefinitely. In the spring of 1726, therefore, Voltaire left Paris for England.","It was during his English period that Voltaire’s transition into his mature philosophe identity began. Bolingbroke, whose address Voltaire left in Paris as his own forwarding address, was one conduit of influence. In particular, Voltaire met through Bolingbroke Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and John Gay, writers who were at that moment beginning to experiment with the use of literary forms such as the novel and theater in the creation of a new kind of critical public politics. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which appeared only months before Voltaire’s arrival, is the most famous exemplar of this new fusion of writing with political criticism. Later the same year Bolingbroke also brought out the first issue of the Craftsman, a political journal that served as the public platform for his circle’s Tory opposition to the Whig oligarchy in England. The Craftsman helped to create English political journalism in the grand style, and for the next three years Voltaire moved in Bolingbroke’s circle, absorbing the culture and sharing in the public political contestation that was percolating all around him.","Voltaire did not restrict himself to Bolingbroke’s circle alone, however. After Bolingbroke, his primary contact in England was a merchant by the name of Everard Fawkener. Fawkener introduced Voltaire to a side of London life entirely different from that offered by Bolingbroke’s circle of Tory intellectuals. This included the Whig circles that Bolingbroke’s group opposed. It also included figures such as Samuel Clarke and other self-proclaimed Newtonians. Voltaire did not meet Newton himself before Sir Isaac’s death in March, 1727, but he did meet his sister—learning from her the famous myth of Newton’s apple, which Voltaire would play a major role in making famous. Voltaire also came to know the other Newtonians in Clarke’s circle, and since he became proficient enough with English to write letters and even fiction in the language, it is very likely that he immersed himself in their writings as well. Voltaire also visited Holland during these years, forming important contacts with Dutch journalists and publishers and meeting Willem’s Gravesande and other Dutch Newtonian savants. Given his other activities, it is also likely that Voltaire frequented the coffeehouses of London even if no firm evidence survives confirming that he did. It would not be surprising, therefore, to learn that Voltaire attended the Newtonian public lectures of John Theophilus Desaguliers or those of one of his rivals. Whatever the precise conduits, all of his encounters in England made Voltaire into a very knowledgeable student of English natural philosophy."],"subsection_title":"1.2 The English Period (1726–1729)"},{"content":["When French officials granted Voltaire permission to re-enter Paris in 1729, he was devoid of pensions and banned from the royal court at Versailles. But he was also a different kind of writer and thinker. It is no doubt overly grandiose to say with Lord Morley that, “Voltaire left France a poet and returned to it a sage.” It is also an exaggeration to say that he was transformed from a poet into a philosophe while in England. For one, these two sides of Voltaire’s intellectual identity were forever intertwined, and he never experienced an absolute transformation from one into the other at any point in his life. But the English years did trigger a transformation in him.","After his return to France, Voltaire worked hard to restore his sources of financial and political support. The financial problems were the easiest to solve. In 1729, the French government staged a sort of lottery to help amortize some of the royal debt. A friend perceived an opportunity for investors in the structure of the government’s offering, and at a dinner attended by Voltaire he formed a society to purchase shares. Voltaire participated, and in the fall of that year when the returns were posted he had made a fortune. Voltaire’s inheritance from his father also became available to him at the same time, and from this date forward Voltaire never again struggled financially. This result was no insignificant development since Voltaire’s financial independence effectively freed him from one dimension of the patronage system so necessary to aspiring writers and intellectuals in the period. In particular, while other writers were required to appeal to powerful financial patrons in order to secure the livelihood that made possible their intellectual careers, Voltaire was never again beholden to these imperatives.","The patronage structures of Old Regime France provided more than economic support to writers, however, and restoring the crédit upon which his reputation as a writer and thinker depended was far less simple. Gradually, however, through a combination of artfully written plays, poems, and essays and careful self-presentation in Parisian society, Voltaire began to regain his public stature. In the fall of 1732, when the next stage in his career began to unfold, Voltaire was residing at the royal court of Versailles, a sign that his re-establishment in French society was all but complete.","During this rehabilitation, Voltaire also formed a new relationship that was to prove profoundly influential in the subsequent decades. He became reacquainted with Emilie Le Tonnier de Breteuil,the daughter of one of his earliest patrons, who married in 1722 to become the Marquise du Châtelet. Emilie du Châtelet was twenty-nine years old in the spring of 1733 when Voltaire began his relationship with her. She was also a uniquely accomplished woman. Du Châtelet’s father, the Baron de Breteuil, hosted a regular gathering of men of letters that included Voltaire, and his daughter, ten years younger than Voltaire, shared in these associations. Her father also ensured that Emilie received an education that was exceptional for girls at the time. She studied Greek and Latin and trained in mathematics, and when Voltaire reconnected with her in 1733 she was a very knowledgeable thinker in her own right even if her own intellectual career, which would include an original treatise in natural philosophy and a complete French translation of Newton’s Principia Mathematica—still the only complete French translation ever published—had not yet begun. Her intellectual talents combined with her vivacious personality drew Voltaire to her, and although Du Châtelet was a titled aristocrat married to an important military officer, the couple was able to form a lasting partnership that did not interfere with Du Châtelet’s marriage. This arrangement proved especially beneficial to Voltaire when scandal forced him to flee Paris and to establish himself permanently at the Du Châtelet family estate at Cirey. From 1734, when this arrangement began, to 1749, when Du Châtelet died during childbirth, Cirey was the home to each along with the site of an intense intellectual collaboration. It was during this period that both Voltaire and Du Châtelet became widely known philosophical figures, and the intellectual history of each before 1749 is most accurately described as the history of the couple’s joint intellectual endeavors."],"subsection_title":"1.3 Becoming a Philosophe"},{"content":["For Voltaire, the events that sent him fleeing to Cirey were also the impetus for much of his work while there. While in England, Voltaire had begun to compose a set of letters framed according to the well-established genre of a traveler reporting to friends back home about foreign lands. Montesquieu’s 1721 Lettres Persanes, which offered a set of fictionalized letters by Persians allegedly traveling in France, and Swift’s 1726 Gulliver’s Travels were clear influences when Voltaire conceived his work. But unlike the authors of these overtly fictionalized accounts, Voltaire innovated by adopting a journalistic stance instead, one that offered readers an empirically recognizable account of several aspects of English society. Originally titled Letters on England, Voltaire left a draft of the text with a London publisher before returning home in 1729. Once in France, he began to expand the work, adding to the letters drafted while in England, which focused largely on the different religious sects of England and the English Parliament, several new letters including some on English philosophy. The new text, which included letters on Bacon, Locke, Newton and the details of Newtonian natural philosophy along with an account of the English practice of inoculation for smallpox, also acquired a new title when it was first published in France in 1734: Lettres philosophiques.","Before it appeared, Voltaire attempted to get official permission for the book from the royal censors, a requirement in France at the time. His publisher, however, ultimately released the book without these approvals and without Voltaire’s permission. This made the first edition of the Lettres philosophiques illicit, a fact that contributed to the scandal that it triggered, but one that in no way explains the furor the book caused. Historians in fact still scratch their heads when trying to understand why Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques proved to be so controversial. The only thing that is clear is that the work did cause a sensation that subsequently triggered a rapid and overwhelming response on the part of the French authorities. The book was publicly burned by the royal hangman several months after its release, and this act turned Voltaire into a widely known intellectual outlaw. Had it been executed, a royal lettre de cachet would have sent Voltaire to the royal prison of the Bastille as a result of his authorship of Lettres philosophiques; instead, he was able to flee with Du Châtelet to Cirey where the couple used the sovereignty granted by her aristocratic title to create a safe haven and base for Voltaire’s new position as a philosophical rebel and writer in exile.","Had Voltaire been able to avoid the scandal triggered by the Lettres philosophiques, it is highly likely that he would have chosen to do so. Yet once it was thrust upon him, he adopted the identity of the philosophical exile and outlaw writer with conviction, using it to create a new identity for himself, one that was to have far reaching consequences for the history of Western philosophy. At first, Newtonian science served as the vehicle for this transformation. In the decades before 1734, a series of controversies had erupted, especially in France, about the character and legitimacy of Newtonian science, especially the theory of universal gravitation and the physics of gravitational attraction through empty space. Voltaire positioned his Lettres philosophiques as an intervention into these controversies, drafting a famous and widely cited letter that used an opposition between Newton and Descartes to frame a set of fundamental differences between English and French philosophy at the time. He also included other letters about Newtonian science in the work while linking (or so he claimed) the philosophies of Bacon, Locke, and Newton into an English philosophical complex that he championed as a remedy for the perceived errors and illusions perpetuated on the French by René Descartes and Nicolas Malebranche. Voltaire did not invent this framework, but he did use it to enflame a set of debates that were then raging, debates that placed him and a small group of young members of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris into apparent opposition to the older and more established members of this bastion of official French science. Once installed at Cirey, both Voltaire and Du Châtelet further exploited this apparent division by engaging in a campaign on behalf of Newtonianism, one that continually targeted an imagined monolith called French Academic Cartesianism as the enemy against which they in the name of Newtonianism were fighting.","The centerpiece of this campaign was Voltaire’s Éléments de la Philosophie de Newton, which was first published in 1738 and then again in 1745 in a new and definitive edition that included a new section, first published in 1740, devoted to Newton’s metaphysics. Voltaire offered this book as a clear, accurate, and accessible account of Newton’s philosophy suitable for ignorant Frenchman (a group that he imagined to be large). But he also conceived of it as a machine de guerre directed against the Cartesian establishment, which he believed was holding France back from the modern light of scientific truth. Vociferous criticism of Voltaire and his work quickly erupted, with some critics emphasizing his rebellious and immoral proclivities while others focused on his precise scientific views. Voltaire collapsed both challenges into a singular vision of his enemy as “backward Cartesianism”. As he fought fiercely to defend his positions, an unprecedented culture war erupted in France centered on the character and value of Newtonian natural philosophy. Du Châtelet contributed to this campaign by writing a celebratory review of Voltaire’s Éléments in the Journal des savants, the most authoritative French learned periodical of the day. The couple also added to their scientific credibility by receiving separate honorable mentions in the 1738 Paris Academy prize contest on the nature of fire. Voltaire likewise worked tirelessly rebutting critics and advancing his positions in pamphlets and contributions to learned periodicals. By 1745, when the definitive edition of Voltaire’s Éléments was published, the tides of thought were turning his way, and by 1750 the perception had become widespread that France had been converted from backward, erroneous Cartesianism to modern, Enlightened Newtonianism thanks to the heroic intellectual efforts of figures like Voltaire."],"subsection_title":"1.4 The Newton Wars (1732–1745)"},{"content":["This apparent victory in the Newton Wars of the 1730s and 1740s allowed Voltaire’s new philosophical identity to solidify. Especially crucial was the way that it allowed Voltaire’s outlaw status, which he had never fully repudiated, to be rehabilitated in the public mind as a necessary and heroic defense of philosophical truth against the enemies of error and prejudice. From this perspective, Voltaire’s critical stance could be reintegrated into traditional Old Regime society as a new kind of legitimate intellectual martyrdom. Since Voltaire also coupled his explicitly philosophical writings and polemics during the 1730s and 1740s with an equally extensive stream of plays, poems, stories, and narrative histories, many of which were orthogonal in both tone and content to the explicit campaigns of the Newton Wars, Voltaire was further able to reestablish his old identity as an Old Regime man of letters despite the scandals of these years. In 1745, Voltaire was named the Royal Historiographer of France, a title bestowed upon him as a result of his histories of Louis XIV and the Swedish King Charles II. This royal office also triggered the writing of arguably Voltaire’s most widely read and influential book, at least in the eighteenth century, Essais sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (1751), a pioneering work of universal history. The position also legitimated him as an officially sanctioned savant. In 1749, after the death of du Châtelet, Voltaire reinforced this impression by accepting an invitation to join the court of the young Frederick the Great in Prussia, a move that further assimilated him into the power structures of Old Regime society.","Had this assimilationist trajectory continued during the remainder of Voltaire’s life, his legacy in the history of Western philosophy might not have been so great. Yet during the 1750s, a set of new developments pulled Voltaire back toward his more radical and controversial identity and allowed him to rekindle the critical philosophe persona that he had innovated during the Newton Wars. The first step in this direction involved a dispute with his onetime colleague and ally, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis. Maupertuis had preceded Voltaire as the first aggressive advocate for Newtonian science in France. When Voltaire was preparing his own Newtonian intervention in the Lettres philosophiques in 1732, he consulted with Maupertuis, who was by this date a pensioner in the French Royal Academy of Sciences. It was largely around Maupertuis that the young cohort of French academic Newtonians gathered during the Newton wars of 1730s and 40s, and with Voltaire fighting his own public campaigns on behalf of this same cause during the same period, the two men became the most visible faces of French Newtonianism even if they never really worked as a team in this effort. Like Voltaire, Maupertuis also shared a relationship with Emilie du Châtelet, one that included mathematical collaborations that far exceeded Voltaire’s capacities. Maupertuis was also an occasional guest at Cirey, and a correspondent with both du Châtelet and Voltaire throughout these years. But in 1745 Maupertuis surprised all of French society by moving to Berlin to accept the directorship of Frederick the Great’s newly reformed Berlin Academy of Sciences.","Maupertuis’s thought at the time of his departure for Prussia was turning toward the metaphysics and rationalist epistemology of Leibniz as a solution to certain questions in natural philosophy. Du Châtelet also shared this tendency, producing in 1740 her Institutions de physiques, a systematic attempt to wed Newtonian mechanics with Leibnizian rationalism and metaphysics. Voltaire found this Leibnizian turn dyspeptic, and he began to craft an anti-Leibnizian discourse in the 1740s that became a bulwark of his brand of Newtonianism. This placed him in opposition to Du Châtelet, even if this intellectual rift in no way soured their relationship. Yet after she died in 1749, and Voltaire joined Maupertuis at Frederick the Great’s court in Berlin, this anti-Leibnizianism became the centerpiece of a rift with Maupertuis. Voltaire’s public satire of the President of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Berlin published in late 1752, which presented Maupertuis as a despotic philosophical buffoon, forced Frederick to make a choice. He sided with Maupertuis, ordering Voltaire to either retract his libelous text or leave Berlin. Voltaire chose the latter, falling once again into the role of scandalous rebel and exile as a result of his writings."],"subsection_title":"1.5 From French Newtonian to Enlightenment Philosophe (1745–1755)"},{"content":["This event proved to be Voltaire’s last official rupture with establishment authority. Rather than returning home to Paris and restoring his reputation, Voltaire instead settled in Geneva. When this austere Calvinist enclave proved completely unwelcoming, he took further steps toward independence by using his personal fortune to buy a chateau of his own in the hinterlands between France and Switzerland. Voltaire installed himself permanently at Ferney in early 1759, and from this date until his death in 1778 he made the chateau his permanent home and capital, at least in the minds of his intellectual allies, of the emerging French Enlightenment.","During this period, Voltaire also adopted what would become his most famous and influential intellectual stance, announcing himself as a member of the “party of humanity” and devoting himself toward waging war against the twin hydras of fanaticism and superstition. While the singular defense of Newtonian science had focused Voltaire’s polemical energies in the 1730s and 1740s, after 1750 the program became the defense of philosophie tout court and the defeat of its perceived enemies within the ecclesiastical and aristo-monarchical establishment. In this way, Enlightenment philosophie became associated through Voltaire with the cultural and political program encapsulated in his famous motto, “Écrasez l’infâme!” (“Crush the infamy!”). This entanglement of philosophy with social criticism and reformist political action, a contingent historical outcome of Voltaire’s particular intellectual career, would become his most lasting contribution to the history of philosophy.","The first cause to galvanize this new program was Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. The first volume of this compendium of definitions appeared in 1751, and almost instantly the work became buried in the kind of scandal to which Voltaire had grown accustomed. Voltaire saw in the controversy a new call to action, and he joined forces with the project soon after its appearance, penning numerous articles that began to appear with volume 5 in 1755. Scandal continued to chase the Encyclopédie, however, and in 1759 the work’s publication privilege was revoked in France, an act that did not kill the project but forced it into illicit production in Switzerland. During these scandals, Voltaire fought vigorously alongside the project’s editors to defend the work, fusing the Encyclopédie’s enemies, particularly the Parisian Jesuits who edited the monthly periodical the Journal de Trevoux, into a monolithic “infamy” devoted to eradicating truth and light from the world. This framing was recapitulated by the opponents of the Encyclopédie, who began to speak of the loose assemblage of authors who contributed articles to the work as a subversive coterie of philosophes devoted to undermining legitimate social and moral order.","As this polemic crystallized and grew in both energy and influence, Voltaire embraced its terms and made them his cause. He formed particularly close ties with d’Alembert, and with him began to generalize a broad program for Enlightenment centered on rallying the newly self-conscious philosophes (a term often used synonymously with the Encyclopédistes) toward political and intellectual change. In this program, the philosophes were not unified by any shared philosophy but through a commitment to the program of defending philosophie itself against its perceived enemies. They were also imagined as activists fighting to eradicate error and superstition from the world. The ongoing defense of the Encyclopédie was one rallying point, and soon the removal of the Jesuits—the great enemies of Enlightenment, the philosophes proclaimed—became a second unifying cause. This effort achieved victory in 1763, and soon the philosophes were attempting to infiltrate the academies and other institutions of knowledge in France. One climax in this effort was reached in 1774 when the Encyclopédiste and friend of Voltaire and the philosophes, Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot, was named Controller-General of France, the most powerful ministerial position in the kingdom, by the newly crowned King Louis XVI. Voltaire and his allies had paved the way for this victory through a barrage of writings throughout the 1760s and 1770s that presented philosophie like that espoused by Turgot as an agent of enlightened reform and its critics as prejudicial defenders of an ossified tradition.","Voltaire did bring out one explicitly philosophical book in support this campaign, his Dictionnaire philosophique of 1764–1770. This book republished his articles from the original Encyclopédie while adding new entries conceived in the spirit of the original work. Yet to fully understand the brand of philosophie that Voltaire made foundational to the Enlightenment, one needs to recognize that it just as often circulated in fictional stories, satires, poems, pamphlets, and other less obviously philosophical genres. Voltaire’s most widely known text, for instance, Candide, ou l’Optimisme, first published in 1759, is a fictional story of a wandering traveler engaged in a set of farcical adventures. Yet contained in the text is a serious attack on Leibnizian philosophy, one that in many ways marks the culmination of Voltaire’s decades long attack on this philosophy started during the Newton wars. Philosophie à la Voltaire also came in the form of political activism, such as his public defense of Jean Calas who, Voltaire argued, was a victim of a despotic state and an irrational and brutal judicial system. Voltaire often attached philosophical reflection to this political advocacy, such as when he facilitated a French translation of Cesare Beccaria’s treatise on humanitarian justice and penal reform and then prefaced the work with his own essay on justice and religious toleration (Calas was a French protestant persecuted by a Catholic monarchy). Public philosophic campaigns such as these that channeled critical reason in a direct, oppositionalist way against the perceived injustices and absurdities of Old Regime life were the hallmark of philosophie as Voltaire understood the term."],"subsection_title":"1.6 Fighting for Philosophie (1755–1778)"},{"content":["Voltaire lived long enough to see some of his long-term legacies start to concretize. With the ascension of Louis XVI in 1774 and the appointment of Turgot as Controller-General, the French establishment began to embrace the philosophes and their agenda in a new way. Critics of Voltaire and his program for philosophie remained powerful, however, and they would continue to survive as the necessary backdrop to the positive image of the Enlightenment philosophe as a modernizer, progressive reformer, and courageous scourge against traditional authority that Voltaire bequeathed to later generations. During Voltaire’s lifetime, this new acceptance translated into a final return to Paris in early 1778. Here, as a frail and sickly octogenarian, Voltaire was welcomed by the city as the hero of the Enlightenment that he now personified. A statue was commissioned as a permanent shrine to his legacy, and a public performance of his play Irène was performed in a way that allowed its author to be celebrated as a national hero. Voltaire died several weeks after these events, but the canonization that they initiated has continued right up until the present.","Western philosophy was profoundly shaped by the conception of the philosophe and the program for Enlightenment philosophie that Voltaire came to personify. The model he offered of the philosophe as critical public citizen and advocate first and foremost, and as abstruse and systematic thinker only when absolutely necessary, was especially influential in the subsequent development of the European philosophy. Also influential was the example he offered of the philosopher measuring the value of any philosophy according by its ability to effect social change. In this respect, Karl Marx’s famous thesis that philosophy should aspire to change the world, not merely interpret it, owes more than a little debt Voltaire. The link between Voltaire and Marx was also established through the French revolutionary tradition, which similarly adopted Voltaire as one of its founding heroes. Voltaire was the first person to be honored with re-burial in the newly created Pantheon of the Great Men of France that the new revolutionary government created in 1791. This act served as a tribute to the connections that the revolutionaries saw between Voltaire’s philosophical program and the cause of revolutionary modernization as a whole. In a similar way, Voltaire remains today an iconic hero for everyone who sees a positive linkage between critical reason and political resistance in projects of progressive, modernizing reform."],"subsection_title":"1.7 Voltaire, Philosophe Icon of Enlightenment Philosophie (1778–Present)"}]},{"main_content":["Voltaire’s philosophical legacy ultimately resides as much in how he practiced philosophy, and in the ends toward which he directed his philosophical activity, as in any specific doctrine or original idea. Yet the particular philosophical positions he took, and the way that he used his wider philosophical campaigns to champion certain understandings while disparaging others, did create a constellation appropriately called Voltaire’s Enlightenment philosophy. True to Voltaire’s character, this constellation is best described as a set of intellectual stances and orientations rather than as a set of doctrines or systematically defended positions. Nevertheless, others found in Voltaire both a model of the well-oriented philosophe and a set of particular philosophical positions appropriate to this stance. Each side of this equation played a key role in defining the Enlightenment philosophie that Voltaire came to personify."],"section_title":"2. Voltaire’s Enlightenment Philosophy","subsections":[{"content":["Central to this complex is Voltaire’s conception of liberty. Around this category, Voltaire’s social activism and his relatively rare excursions into systematic philosophy also converged. In 1734, in the wake of the scandals triggered by the Lettres philosophiques, Voltaire wrote, but left unfinished at Cirey, a Traité de metaphysique that explored the question of human freedom in philosophical terms. The question was particularly central to European philosophical discussions at the time, and Voltaire’s work explicitly referenced thinkers like Hobbes and Leibniz while wrestling with the questions of materialism, determinism, and providential purpose that were then central to the writings of the so-called deists, figures such as John Toland and Anthony Collins. The great debate between Samuel Clarke and Leibniz over the principles of Newtonian natural philosophy was also influential as Voltaire struggled to understand the nature of human existence and ethics within a cosmos governed by rational principles and impersonal laws.","Voltaire adopted a stance in this text somewhere between the strict determinism of rationalist materialists and the transcendent spiritualism and voluntarism of contemporary Christian natural theologians. For Voltaire, humans are not deterministic machines of matter and motion, and free will thus exists. But humans are also natural beings governed by inexorable natural laws, and his ethics anchored right action in a self that possessed the natural light of reason immanently. This stance distanced him from more radical deists like Toland, and he reinforced this position by also adopting an elitist understanding of the role of religion in society. For Voltaire, those equipped to understand their own reason could find the proper course of free action themselves. But since many were incapable of such self-knowledge and self-control, religion, he claimed, was a necessary guarantor of social order. This stance distanced Voltaire from the republican politics of Toland and other materialists, and Voltaire echoed these ideas in his political musings, where he remained throughout his life a liberal, reform-minded monarchist and a skeptic with respect to republican and democratic ideas.","In the Lettres philosophiques, Voltaire had suggested a more radical position with respect to human determinism, especially in his letter on Locke, which emphasized the materialist reading of the Lockean soul that was then a popular figure in radical philosophical discourse. Some readers singled out this part of the book as the major source of its controversy, and in a similar vein the very materialist account of “Âme,” or the soul, which appeared in volume 1 of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, was also a flashpoint of controversy. Voltaire also defined his own understanding of the soul in similar terms in his own Dictionnaire philosophique. What these examples point to is Voltaire’s willingness, even eagerness, to publicly defend controversial views even when his own, more private and more considered writings often complicated the understanding that his more public and polemical writings insisted upon. In these cases, one often sees Voltaire defending less a carefully reasoned position on a complex philosophical problem than adopting a political position designed to assert his conviction that liberty of speech, no matter what the topic, is sacred and cannot be violated.","Voltaire never actually said “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Yet the myth that associates this dictum with his name remains very powerful, and one still hears his legacy invoked through the redeclaration of this pronouncement that he never actually declared. Part of the deep cultural tie that joins Voltaire to this dictum is the fact that even while he did not write these precise words, they do capture, however imprecisely, the spirit of his philosophy of liberty. In his voluminous correspondence especially, and in the details of many of his more polemical public texts, one does find Voltaire articulating a view of intellectual and civil liberty that makes him an unquestioned forerunner of modern civil libertarianism. He never authored any single philosophical treatise on this topic, however, yet the memory of his life and philosophical campaigns was influential in advancing these ideas nevertheless. Voltaire’s influence is palpably present, for example, in Kant’s famous argument in his essay “What is Enlightenment?” that Enlightenment stems from the free and public use of critical reason, and from the liberty that allows such critical debate to proceed untrammeled. The absence of a singular text that anchors this linkage in Voltaire’s collected works in no way removes the unmistakable presence of Voltaire’s influence upon Kant’s formulation."],"subsection_title":"2.1 Liberty"},{"content":["Voltaire’s notion of liberty also anchored his hedonistic morality, another key feature of Voltaire’s Enlightenment philosophy. One vehicle for this philosophy was Voltaire’s salacious poetry, a genre that both reflected in its eroticism and sexual innuendo the lived culture of libertinism that was an important feature of Voltaire’s biography. But Voltaire also contributed to philosophical libertinism and hedonism through his celebration of moral freedom through sexual liberty. Voltaire’s avowed hedonism became a central feature of his wider philosophical identity since his libertine writings and conduct were always invoked by those who wanted to indict him for being a reckless subversive devoted to undermining legitimate social order. Voltaire’s refusal to defer to such charges, and his vigor in opposing them through a defense of the very libertinism that was used against him, also injected a positive philosophical program into these public struggles that was very influential. In particular, through his cultivation of a happily libertine persona, and his application of philosophical reason toward the moral defense of this identity, often through the widely accessible vehicles of poetry and witty prose, Voltaire became a leading force in the wider Enlightenment articulation of a morality grounded in the positive valuation of personal, and especially bodily, pleasure, and an ethics rooted in a hedonistic calculus of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. He also advanced this cause by sustaining an unending attack upon the repressive and, to his mind, anti-human demands of traditional Christian asceticism, especially priestly celibacy, and the moral codes of sexual restraint and bodily self-abnegation that were still central to the traditional moral teachings of the day.","This same hedonistic ethics was also crucial to the development of liberal political economy during the Enlightenment, and Voltaire applied his own libertinism toward this project as well. In the wake of the scandals triggered by Mandeville’s famous argument in The Fable of the Bees (a poem, it should be remembered) that the pursuit of private vice, namely greed, leads to public benefits, namely economic prosperity, a French debate about the value of luxury as a moral good erupted that drew Voltaire’s pen. In the 1730s, he drafted a poem called Le Mondain that celebrated hedonistic worldly living as a positive force for society, and not as the corrupting element that traditional Christian morality held it to be. In his Essay sur les moeurs he also joined with other Enlightenment historians in celebrating the role of material acquisition and commerce in advancing the progress of civilization. Adam Smith would famously make similar arguments in his founding tract of Enlightenment liberalism, On the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. Voltaire was certainly no great contributor to the political economic science that Smith practiced, but he did contribute to the wider philosophical campaigns that made the concepts of liberty and hedonistic morality central to their work both widely known and more generally accepted.","The ineradicable good of personal and philosophical liberty is arguably the master theme in Voltaire’s philosophy, and if it is, then two other themes are closely related to it. One is the importance of skepticism, and the second is the importance of empirical science as a solvent to dogmatism and the pernicious authority it engenders."],"subsection_title":"2.2 Hedonism"},{"content":["Voltaire’s skepticism descended directly from the neo-Pyrrhonian revival of the Renaissance, and owes a debt in particular to Montaigne, whose essays wedded the stance of doubt with the positive construction of a self grounded in philosophical skepticism. Pierre Bayle’s skepticism was equally influential, and what Voltaire shared with these forerunners, and what separated him from other strands of skepticism, such as the one manifest in Descartes, is the insistence upon the value of the skeptical position in its own right as a final and complete philosophical stance. Among the philosophical tendencies that Voltaire most deplored, in fact, were those that he associated most powerfully with Descartes who, he believed, began in skepticism but then left it behind in the name of some positive philosophical project designed to eradicate or resolve it. Such urges usually led to the production of what Voltaire liked to call “philosophical romances,” which is to say systematic accounts that overcome doubt by appealing to the imagination and its need for coherent explanations. Such explanations, Voltaire argued, are fictions, not philosophy, and the philosopher needs to recognize that very often the most philosophical explanation of all is to offer no explanation at all.","Such skepticism often acted as bulwark for Voltaire’s defense of liberty since he argued that no authority, no matter how sacred, should be immune to challenge by critical reason. Voltaire’s views on religion as manifest in his private writings are complex, and based on the evidence of these texts it would be wrong to call Voltaire an atheist, or even an anti-Christian so long as one accepts a broad understanding of what Christianity can entail. But even if his personal religious views were subtle, Voltaire was unwavering in his hostility to church authority and the power of the clergy. For similar reasons, he also grew as he matured ever more hostile toward the sacred mysteries upon which monarchs and Old Regime aristocratic society based their authority. In these cases, Voltaire’s skepticism was harnessed to his libertarian convictions through his continual effort to use critical reason as a solvent for these “superstitions” and the authority they anchored. The philosophical authority of romanciers such as Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz was similarly subjected to the same critique, and here one sees how the defense of skepticism and liberty, more than any deeply held opposition to religiosity per se, was often the most powerful motivator for Voltaire.","From this perspective, Voltaire might fruitfully be compared with Socrates, another founding figure in Western philosophy who made a refusal to declaim systematic philosophical positions a central feature of his philosophical identity. Socrates’s repeated assertion that he knew nothing was echoed in Voltaire’s insistence that the true philosopher is the one who dares not to know and then has the courage to admit his ignorance publicly. Voltaire was also, like Socrates, a public critic and controversialist who defined philosophy primarily in terms of its power to liberate individuals from domination at the hands of authoritarian dogmatism and irrational prejudice. Yet while Socrates championed rigorous philosophical dialectic as the agent of this emancipation, Voltaire saw this same dialectical rationalism at the heart of the dogmatism that he sought to overcome. Voltaire often used satire, mockery and wit to undermine the alleged rigor of philosophical dialectic, and while Socrates saw this kind of rhetorical word play as the very essence of the erroneous sophism that he sought to alleviate, Voltaire cultivated linguistic cleverness as a solvent to the false and deceptive dialectic that anchored traditional philosophy."],"subsection_title":"2.3 Skepticism"},{"content":["Against the acceptance of ignorance that rigorous skepticism often demanded, and against the false escape from it found in sophistical knowledge—or what Voltaire called imaginative philosophical romances—Voltaire offered a different solution than the rigorous dialectical reasoning of Socrates: namely, the power and value of careful empirical science. Here one sees the debt that Voltaire owed to the currents of Newtonianism that played such a strong role in launching his career. Voltaire’s own critical discourse against imaginative philosophical romances originated, in fact, with English and Dutch Newtonians, many of whom were expatriate French Huguenots, who developed these tropes as rhetorical weapons in their battles with Leibniz and European Cartesians who challenged the innovations of Newtonian natural philosophy. In his Principia Mathematica (1687; 2nd rev. edition 1713), Newton had offered a complete mathematical and empirical description of how celestial and terrestrial bodies behaved. Yet when asked to explain how bodies were able to act in the way that he mathematically and empirically demonstrated that they did, Newton famously replied “I feign no hypotheses.” From the perspective of traditional natural philosophy, this was tantamount to hand waving since offering rigorous causal accounts of the nature of bodies in motion was the very essence of this branch of the sciences. Newton’s major philosophical innovation rested, however, in challenging this very epistemological foundation, and the assertion and defense of Newton’s position against its many critics, not least by Voltaire, became arguably the central dynamic of philosophical change in the first half of the eighteenth century.","While Newtonian epistemology admitted of many variations, at its core rested a new skepticism about the validity of apriori rationalist accounts of nature and a new assertion of brute empirical fact as a valid philosophical understanding in its own right. European Natural philosophers in the second half of the seventeenth century had thrown out the metaphysics and physics of Aristotle with its four part causality and teleological understanding of bodies, motion and the cosmic order. In its place, however, a new mechanical causality was introduced that attempted to explain the world in equally comprehensive terms through the mechanisms of an inert matter acting by direct contact and action alone. This approach lead to the vortical account of celestial mechanics, a view that held material bodies to be swimming in an ethereal sea whose action pushed and pulled objects in the manner we observe. What could not be observed, however, was the ethereal sea itself, or the other agents of this supposedly comprehensive mechanical cosmos. Yet rationality nevertheless dictated that such mechanisms must exist since without them philosophy would be returned to the occult causes of the Aristotelian natural tendencies and teleological principles. Figuring out what these point-contact mechanisms were and how they worked was, therefore, the charge of the new mechanical natural philosophy of the late seventeenth century. Figures such as Descartes, Huygens, and Leibniz established their scientific reputations through efforts to realize this goal.","Newton pointed natural philosophy in a new direction. He offered mathematical analysis anchored in inescapable empirical fact as the new foundation for a rigorous account of the cosmos. From this perspective, the great error of both Aristotelian and the new mechanical natural philosophy was its failure to adhere strictly enough to empirical facts. Vortical mechanics, for example, claimed that matter was moved by the action of an invisible agent, yet this, the Newtonians began to argue, was not to explain what is really happening but to imagine a fiction that gives us a speciously satisfactory rational explanation of it. Natural philosophy needs to resist the allure of such rational imaginings and to instead deal only with the empirically provable. Moreover, the Newtonians argued, if a set of irrefutable facts cannot be explained other then by accepting the brute facticity of their truth, this is not a failure of philosophical explanation so much as a devotion to appropriate rigor. Such epistemological battles became especially intense around Newton’s theory of universal gravitation. Few questioned that Newton had demonstrated an irrefutable mathematical law whereby bodies appear to attract one another in relation to their masses and in inverse relation to the square of the distance between them. But was this rigorous mathematical and empirical description a philosophical account of bodies in motion? Critics such as Leibniz said no, since mathematical description was not the same thing as philosophical explanation, and Newton refused to offer an explanation of how and why gravity operated the way that it did. The Newtonians countered that phenomenal descriptions were scientifically adequate so long as they were grounded in empirical facts, and since no facts had yet been discerned that explained what gravity is or how it works, no scientific account of it was yet possible. They further insisted that it was enough that gravity did operate the way that Newton said it did, and that this was its own justification for accepting his theory. They further mocked those who insisted on dreaming up chimeras like the celestial vortices as explanations for phenomena when no empirical evidence existed to support of such theories.","The previous summary describes the general core of the Newtonian position in the intense philosophical contests of the first decades of the eighteenth century. It also describes Voltaire’s own stance in these same battles. His contribution, therefore, was not centered on any innovation within these very familiar Newtonian themes; rather, it was his accomplishment to become a leading evangelist for this new Newtonian epistemology, and by consequence a major reason for its widespread dissemination and acceptance in France and throughout Europe. A comparison with David Hume’s role in this same development might help to illuminate the distinct contributions of each. Both Hume and Voltaire began with the same skepticism about rationalist philosophy, and each embraced the Newtonian criterion that made empirical fact the only guarantor of truth in philosophy. Yet Hume’s target remained traditional philosophy, and his contribution was to extend skepticism all the way to the point of denying the feasibility of transcendental philosophy itself. This argument would famously awake Kant’s dogmatic slumbers and lead to the reconstitution of transcendental philosophy in new terms, but Voltaire had different fish to fry. His attachment was to the new Newtonian empirical scientists, and while he was never more than a dilettante scientist himself, his devotion to this form of natural inquiry made him in some respects the leading philosophical advocate and ideologist for the new empirico-scientific conception of philosophy that Newton initiated.","For Voltaire (and many other eighteenth-century Newtonians) the most important project was defending empirical science as an alternative to traditional natural philosophy. This involved sharing in Hume’s critique of abstract rationalist systems, but it also involved the very different project of defending empirical induction and experimental reasoning as the new epistemology appropriate for a modern Enlightened philosophy. In particular, Voltaire fought vigorously against the rationalist epistemology that critics used to challenge Newtonian reasoning. His famous conclusion in Candide, for example, that optimism was a philosophical chimera produced when dialectical reason remains detached from brute empirical facts owed a great debt to his Newtonian convictions. His alternative offered in the same text of a life devoted to simple tasks with clear, tangible, and most importantly useful ends was also derived from the utilitarian discourse that Newtonians also used to justify their science. Voltaire’s campaign on behalf of smallpox inoculation, which began with his letter on the topic in the Lettres philosophiques, was similarly grounded in an appeal to the facts of the case as an antidote to the fears generated by logical deductions from seemingly sound axiomatic principles. All of Voltaire’s public campaigns, in fact, deployed empirical fact as the ultimate solvent for irrational prejudice and blind adherence to preexisting understandings. In this respect, his philosophy as manifest in each was deeply indebted to the epistemological convictions he gleaned from Newtonianism."],"subsection_title":"2.4 Newtonian Empirical Science"}]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"Voltaire only began to identify himself with philosophy and the philosophe identity during middle age. His work Lettres philosophiques, published in 1734 when he was forty years old, was the key turning point in this transformation. Before this date, Voltaire’s life in no way pointed him toward the philosophical destiny that he was later to assume. His early orientation toward literature and libertine sociability, however, shaped his philosophical identity in crucial ways.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Voltaire’s Life: The Philosopher as Critic and Public Activist\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"François-Marie d’Arouet was born in 1694, the fourth of five children, to a well-to-do public official and his well bred aristocratic wife. In its fusion of traditional French aristocratic pedigree with the new wealth and power of royal bureaucratic administration, the d’Arouet family was representative of elite society in France during the reign of Louis XIV. The young François-Marie acquired from his parents the benefits of prosperity and political favor, and from the Jesuits at the prestigious Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris he also acquired a first-class education. François-Marie also acquired an introduction to modern letters from his father who was active in the literary culture of the period both in Paris and at the royal court of Versailles. François senior appears to have enjoyed the company of men of letters, yet his frustration with his son’s ambition to become a writer is notorious. From early in his youth, Voltaire aspired to emulate his idols Molière, Racine, and Corneille and become a playwright, yet Voltaire’s father strenuously opposed the idea, hoping to install his son instead in a position of public authority. First as a law student, then as a lawyer’s apprentice, and finally as a secretary to a French diplomat, Voltaire attempted to fulfill his father’s wishes. But in each case, he ended up abandoning his posts, sometimes amidst scandal.\",\n \"Escaping from the burdens of these public obligations, Voltaire would retreat into the libertine sociability of Paris. It was here in the 1720s, during the culturally vibrant period of the Regency government between the reigns of Louis XIV and XV (1715–1723), that Voltaire established one dimension of his identity. His wit and congeniality were legendary even as a youth, so he had few difficulties establishing himself as a popular figure in Regency literary circles. He also learned how to play the patronage game so important to those with writerly ambitions. Thanks, therefore, to some artfully composed writings, a couple of well-made contacts, more than a few bon mots, and a little successful investing, especially during John Law’s Mississippi Bubble fiasco, Voltaire was able to establish himself as an independent man of letters in Paris. His literary debut occurred in 1718 with the publication of his Oedipe, a reworking of the ancient tragedy that evoked the French classicism of Racine and Corneille. The play was first performed at the home of the Duchesse du Maine at Sceaux, a sign of Voltaire’s quick ascent to the very pinnacle of elite literary society. Its published title page also announced the new pen name that Voltaire would ever after deploy.\",\n \"During the Regency, Voltaire circulated widely in elite circles such as those that congregated at Sceaux, but he also cultivated more illicit and libertine sociability as well. This pairing was not at all uncommon during this time, and Voltaire’s intellectual work in the 1720s—a mix of poems and plays that shifted between playful libertinism and serious classicism seemingly without pause—illustrated perfectly the values of pleasure, honnêteté, and good taste that were the watchwords of this cultural milieu. Philosophy was also a part of this mix, and during the Regency the young Voltaire was especially shaped by his contacts with the English aristocrat, freethinker,and Jacobite Lord Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke lived in exile in France during the Regency period, and Voltaire was a frequent visitor to La Source, the Englishman’s estate near Orléans. The chateau served as a reunion point for a wide range of intellectuals, and many believe that Voltaire was first introduced to natural philosophy generally, and to the work of Locke and the English Newtonians specifically, at Bolingbroke’s estate. It was certainly true that these ideas, especially in their more deistic and libertine configurations, were at the heart of Bolingbroke’s identity.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.1 Voltaire’s Early Years (1694–1726)\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Yet even if Voltaire was introduced to English philosophy in this way, its influence on his thought was most shaped by his brief exile in England between 1726–29. The occasion for his departure was an affair of honor. A very powerful aristocrat, the Duc de Rohan, accused Voltaire of defamation, and in the face of this charge the untitled writer chose to save face and avoid more serious prosecution by leaving the country indefinitely. In the spring of 1726, therefore, Voltaire left Paris for England.\",\n \"It was during his English period that Voltaire’s transition into his mature philosophe identity began. Bolingbroke, whose address Voltaire left in Paris as his own forwarding address, was one conduit of influence. In particular, Voltaire met through Bolingbroke Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and John Gay, writers who were at that moment beginning to experiment with the use of literary forms such as the novel and theater in the creation of a new kind of critical public politics. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, which appeared only months before Voltaire’s arrival, is the most famous exemplar of this new fusion of writing with political criticism. Later the same year Bolingbroke also brought out the first issue of the Craftsman, a political journal that served as the public platform for his circle’s Tory opposition to the Whig oligarchy in England. The Craftsman helped to create English political journalism in the grand style, and for the next three years Voltaire moved in Bolingbroke’s circle, absorbing the culture and sharing in the public political contestation that was percolating all around him.\",\n \"Voltaire did not restrict himself to Bolingbroke’s circle alone, however. After Bolingbroke, his primary contact in England was a merchant by the name of Everard Fawkener. Fawkener introduced Voltaire to a side of London life entirely different from that offered by Bolingbroke’s circle of Tory intellectuals. This included the Whig circles that Bolingbroke’s group opposed. It also included figures such as Samuel Clarke and other self-proclaimed Newtonians. Voltaire did not meet Newton himself before Sir Isaac’s death in March, 1727, but he did meet his sister—learning from her the famous myth of Newton’s apple, which Voltaire would play a major role in making famous. Voltaire also came to know the other Newtonians in Clarke’s circle, and since he became proficient enough with English to write letters and even fiction in the language, it is very likely that he immersed himself in their writings as well. Voltaire also visited Holland during these years, forming important contacts with Dutch journalists and publishers and meeting Willem’s Gravesande and other Dutch Newtonian savants. Given his other activities, it is also likely that Voltaire frequented the coffeehouses of London even if no firm evidence survives confirming that he did. It would not be surprising, therefore, to learn that Voltaire attended the Newtonian public lectures of John Theophilus Desaguliers or those of one of his rivals. Whatever the precise conduits, all of his encounters in England made Voltaire into a very knowledgeable student of English natural philosophy.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.2 The English Period (1726–1729)\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"When French officials granted Voltaire permission to re-enter Paris in 1729, he was devoid of pensions and banned from the royal court at Versailles. But he was also a different kind of writer and thinker. It is no doubt overly grandiose to say with Lord Morley that, “Voltaire left France a poet and returned to it a sage.” It is also an exaggeration to say that he was transformed from a poet into a philosophe while in England. For one, these two sides of Voltaire’s intellectual identity were forever intertwined, and he never experienced an absolute transformation from one into the other at any point in his life. But the English years did trigger a transformation in him.\",\n \"After his return to France, Voltaire worked hard to restore his sources of financial and political support. The financial problems were the easiest to solve. In 1729, the French government staged a sort of lottery to help amortize some of the royal debt. A friend perceived an opportunity for investors in the structure of the government’s offering, and at a dinner attended by Voltaire he formed a society to purchase shares. Voltaire participated, and in the fall of that year when the returns were posted he had made a fortune. Voltaire’s inheritance from his father also became available to him at the same time, and from this date forward Voltaire never again struggled financially. This result was no insignificant development since Voltaire’s financial independence effectively freed him from one dimension of the patronage system so necessary to aspiring writers and intellectuals in the period. In particular, while other writers were required to appeal to powerful financial patrons in order to secure the livelihood that made possible their intellectual careers, Voltaire was never again beholden to these imperatives.\",\n \"The patronage structures of Old Regime France provided more than economic support to writers, however, and restoring the crédit upon which his reputation as a writer and thinker depended was far less simple. Gradually, however, through a combination of artfully written plays, poems, and essays and careful self-presentation in Parisian society, Voltaire began to regain his public stature. In the fall of 1732, when the next stage in his career began to unfold, Voltaire was residing at the royal court of Versailles, a sign that his re-establishment in French society was all but complete.\",\n \"During this rehabilitation, Voltaire also formed a new relationship that was to prove profoundly influential in the subsequent decades. He became reacquainted with Emilie Le Tonnier de Breteuil,the daughter of one of his earliest patrons, who married in 1722 to become the Marquise du Châtelet. Emilie du Châtelet was twenty-nine years old in the spring of 1733 when Voltaire began his relationship with her. She was also a uniquely accomplished woman. Du Châtelet’s father, the Baron de Breteuil, hosted a regular gathering of men of letters that included Voltaire, and his daughter, ten years younger than Voltaire, shared in these associations. Her father also ensured that Emilie received an education that was exceptional for girls at the time. She studied Greek and Latin and trained in mathematics, and when Voltaire reconnected with her in 1733 she was a very knowledgeable thinker in her own right even if her own intellectual career, which would include an original treatise in natural philosophy and a complete French translation of Newton’s Principia Mathematica—still the only complete French translation ever published—had not yet begun. Her intellectual talents combined with her vivacious personality drew Voltaire to her, and although Du Châtelet was a titled aristocrat married to an important military officer, the couple was able to form a lasting partnership that did not interfere with Du Châtelet’s marriage. This arrangement proved especially beneficial to Voltaire when scandal forced him to flee Paris and to establish himself permanently at the Du Châtelet family estate at Cirey. From 1734, when this arrangement began, to 1749, when Du Châtelet died during childbirth, Cirey was the home to each along with the site of an intense intellectual collaboration. It was during this period that both Voltaire and Du Châtelet became widely known philosophical figures, and the intellectual history of each before 1749 is most accurately described as the history of the couple’s joint intellectual endeavors.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.3 Becoming a Philosophe\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"For Voltaire, the events that sent him fleeing to Cirey were also the impetus for much of his work while there. While in England, Voltaire had begun to compose a set of letters framed according to the well-established genre of a traveler reporting to friends back home about foreign lands. Montesquieu’s 1721 Lettres Persanes, which offered a set of fictionalized letters by Persians allegedly traveling in France, and Swift’s 1726 Gulliver’s Travels were clear influences when Voltaire conceived his work. But unlike the authors of these overtly fictionalized accounts, Voltaire innovated by adopting a journalistic stance instead, one that offered readers an empirically recognizable account of several aspects of English society. Originally titled Letters on England, Voltaire left a draft of the text with a London publisher before returning home in 1729. Once in France, he began to expand the work, adding to the letters drafted while in England, which focused largely on the different religious sects of England and the English Parliament, several new letters including some on English philosophy. The new text, which included letters on Bacon, Locke, Newton and the details of Newtonian natural philosophy along with an account of the English practice of inoculation for smallpox, also acquired a new title when it was first published in France in 1734: Lettres philosophiques.\",\n \"Before it appeared, Voltaire attempted to get official permission for the book from the royal censors, a requirement in France at the time. His publisher, however, ultimately released the book without these approvals and without Voltaire’s permission. This made the first edition of the Lettres philosophiques illicit, a fact that contributed to the scandal that it triggered, but one that in no way explains the furor the book caused. Historians in fact still scratch their heads when trying to understand why Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques proved to be so controversial. The only thing that is clear is that the work did cause a sensation that subsequently triggered a rapid and overwhelming response on the part of the French authorities. The book was publicly burned by the royal hangman several months after its release, and this act turned Voltaire into a widely known intellectual outlaw. Had it been executed, a royal lettre de cachet would have sent Voltaire to the royal prison of the Bastille as a result of his authorship of Lettres philosophiques; instead, he was able to flee with Du Châtelet to Cirey where the couple used the sovereignty granted by her aristocratic title to create a safe haven and base for Voltaire’s new position as a philosophical rebel and writer in exile.\",\n \"Had Voltaire been able to avoid the scandal triggered by the Lettres philosophiques, it is highly likely that he would have chosen to do so. Yet once it was thrust upon him, he adopted the identity of the philosophical exile and outlaw writer with conviction, using it to create a new identity for himself, one that was to have far reaching consequences for the history of Western philosophy. At first, Newtonian science served as the vehicle for this transformation. In the decades before 1734, a series of controversies had erupted, especially in France, about the character and legitimacy of Newtonian science, especially the theory of universal gravitation and the physics of gravitational attraction through empty space. Voltaire positioned his Lettres philosophiques as an intervention into these controversies, drafting a famous and widely cited letter that used an opposition between Newton and Descartes to frame a set of fundamental differences between English and French philosophy at the time. He also included other letters about Newtonian science in the work while linking (or so he claimed) the philosophies of Bacon, Locke, and Newton into an English philosophical complex that he championed as a remedy for the perceived errors and illusions perpetuated on the French by René Descartes and Nicolas Malebranche. Voltaire did not invent this framework, but he did use it to enflame a set of debates that were then raging, debates that placed him and a small group of young members of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris into apparent opposition to the older and more established members of this bastion of official French science. Once installed at Cirey, both Voltaire and Du Châtelet further exploited this apparent division by engaging in a campaign on behalf of Newtonianism, one that continually targeted an imagined monolith called French Academic Cartesianism as the enemy against which they in the name of Newtonianism were fighting.\",\n \"The centerpiece of this campaign was Voltaire’s Éléments de la Philosophie de Newton, which was first published in 1738 and then again in 1745 in a new and definitive edition that included a new section, first published in 1740, devoted to Newton’s metaphysics. Voltaire offered this book as a clear, accurate, and accessible account of Newton’s philosophy suitable for ignorant Frenchman (a group that he imagined to be large). But he also conceived of it as a machine de guerre directed against the Cartesian establishment, which he believed was holding France back from the modern light of scientific truth. Vociferous criticism of Voltaire and his work quickly erupted, with some critics emphasizing his rebellious and immoral proclivities while others focused on his precise scientific views. Voltaire collapsed both challenges into a singular vision of his enemy as “backward Cartesianism”. As he fought fiercely to defend his positions, an unprecedented culture war erupted in France centered on the character and value of Newtonian natural philosophy. Du Châtelet contributed to this campaign by writing a celebratory review of Voltaire’s Éléments in the Journal des savants, the most authoritative French learned periodical of the day. The couple also added to their scientific credibility by receiving separate honorable mentions in the 1738 Paris Academy prize contest on the nature of fire. Voltaire likewise worked tirelessly rebutting critics and advancing his positions in pamphlets and contributions to learned periodicals. By 1745, when the definitive edition of Voltaire’s Éléments was published, the tides of thought were turning his way, and by 1750 the perception had become widespread that France had been converted from backward, erroneous Cartesianism to modern, Enlightened Newtonianism thanks to the heroic intellectual efforts of figures like Voltaire.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.4 The Newton Wars (1732–1745)\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"This apparent victory in the Newton Wars of the 1730s and 1740s allowed Voltaire’s new philosophical identity to solidify. Especially crucial was the way that it allowed Voltaire’s outlaw status, which he had never fully repudiated, to be rehabilitated in the public mind as a necessary and heroic defense of philosophical truth against the enemies of error and prejudice. From this perspective, Voltaire’s critical stance could be reintegrated into traditional Old Regime society as a new kind of legitimate intellectual martyrdom. Since Voltaire also coupled his explicitly philosophical writings and polemics during the 1730s and 1740s with an equally extensive stream of plays, poems, stories, and narrative histories, many of which were orthogonal in both tone and content to the explicit campaigns of the Newton Wars, Voltaire was further able to reestablish his old identity as an Old Regime man of letters despite the scandals of these years. In 1745, Voltaire was named the Royal Historiographer of France, a title bestowed upon him as a result of his histories of Louis XIV and the Swedish King Charles II. This royal office also triggered the writing of arguably Voltaire’s most widely read and influential book, at least in the eighteenth century, Essais sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (1751), a pioneering work of universal history. The position also legitimated him as an officially sanctioned savant. In 1749, after the death of du Châtelet, Voltaire reinforced this impression by accepting an invitation to join the court of the young Frederick the Great in Prussia, a move that further assimilated him into the power structures of Old Regime society.\",\n \"Had this assimilationist trajectory continued during the remainder of Voltaire’s life, his legacy in the history of Western philosophy might not have been so great. Yet during the 1750s, a set of new developments pulled Voltaire back toward his more radical and controversial identity and allowed him to rekindle the critical philosophe persona that he had innovated during the Newton Wars. The first step in this direction involved a dispute with his onetime colleague and ally, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis. Maupertuis had preceded Voltaire as the first aggressive advocate for Newtonian science in France. When Voltaire was preparing his own Newtonian intervention in the Lettres philosophiques in 1732, he consulted with Maupertuis, who was by this date a pensioner in the French Royal Academy of Sciences. It was largely around Maupertuis that the young cohort of French academic Newtonians gathered during the Newton wars of 1730s and 40s, and with Voltaire fighting his own public campaigns on behalf of this same cause during the same period, the two men became the most visible faces of French Newtonianism even if they never really worked as a team in this effort. Like Voltaire, Maupertuis also shared a relationship with Emilie du Châtelet, one that included mathematical collaborations that far exceeded Voltaire’s capacities. Maupertuis was also an occasional guest at Cirey, and a correspondent with both du Châtelet and Voltaire throughout these years. But in 1745 Maupertuis surprised all of French society by moving to Berlin to accept the directorship of Frederick the Great’s newly reformed Berlin Academy of Sciences.\",\n \"Maupertuis’s thought at the time of his departure for Prussia was turning toward the metaphysics and rationalist epistemology of Leibniz as a solution to certain questions in natural philosophy. Du Châtelet also shared this tendency, producing in 1740 her Institutions de physiques, a systematic attempt to wed Newtonian mechanics with Leibnizian rationalism and metaphysics. Voltaire found this Leibnizian turn dyspeptic, and he began to craft an anti-Leibnizian discourse in the 1740s that became a bulwark of his brand of Newtonianism. This placed him in opposition to Du Châtelet, even if this intellectual rift in no way soured their relationship. Yet after she died in 1749, and Voltaire joined Maupertuis at Frederick the Great’s court in Berlin, this anti-Leibnizianism became the centerpiece of a rift with Maupertuis. Voltaire’s public satire of the President of the Royal Academy of Sciences of Berlin published in late 1752, which presented Maupertuis as a despotic philosophical buffoon, forced Frederick to make a choice. He sided with Maupertuis, ordering Voltaire to either retract his libelous text or leave Berlin. Voltaire chose the latter, falling once again into the role of scandalous rebel and exile as a result of his writings.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.5 From French Newtonian to Enlightenment Philosophe (1745–1755)\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"This event proved to be Voltaire’s last official rupture with establishment authority. Rather than returning home to Paris and restoring his reputation, Voltaire instead settled in Geneva. When this austere Calvinist enclave proved completely unwelcoming, he took further steps toward independence by using his personal fortune to buy a chateau of his own in the hinterlands between France and Switzerland. Voltaire installed himself permanently at Ferney in early 1759, and from this date until his death in 1778 he made the chateau his permanent home and capital, at least in the minds of his intellectual allies, of the emerging French Enlightenment.\",\n \"During this period, Voltaire also adopted what would become his most famous and influential intellectual stance, announcing himself as a member of the “party of humanity” and devoting himself toward waging war against the twin hydras of fanaticism and superstition. While the singular defense of Newtonian science had focused Voltaire’s polemical energies in the 1730s and 1740s, after 1750 the program became the defense of philosophie tout court and the defeat of its perceived enemies within the ecclesiastical and aristo-monarchical establishment. In this way, Enlightenment philosophie became associated through Voltaire with the cultural and political program encapsulated in his famous motto, “Écrasez l’infâme!” (“Crush the infamy!”). This entanglement of philosophy with social criticism and reformist political action, a contingent historical outcome of Voltaire’s particular intellectual career, would become his most lasting contribution to the history of philosophy.\",\n \"The first cause to galvanize this new program was Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. The first volume of this compendium of definitions appeared in 1751, and almost instantly the work became buried in the kind of scandal to which Voltaire had grown accustomed. Voltaire saw in the controversy a new call to action, and he joined forces with the project soon after its appearance, penning numerous articles that began to appear with volume 5 in 1755. Scandal continued to chase the Encyclopédie, however, and in 1759 the work’s publication privilege was revoked in France, an act that did not kill the project but forced it into illicit production in Switzerland. During these scandals, Voltaire fought vigorously alongside the project’s editors to defend the work, fusing the Encyclopédie’s enemies, particularly the Parisian Jesuits who edited the monthly periodical the Journal de Trevoux, into a monolithic “infamy” devoted to eradicating truth and light from the world. This framing was recapitulated by the opponents of the Encyclopédie, who began to speak of the loose assemblage of authors who contributed articles to the work as a subversive coterie of philosophes devoted to undermining legitimate social and moral order.\",\n \"As this polemic crystallized and grew in both energy and influence, Voltaire embraced its terms and made them his cause. He formed particularly close ties with d’Alembert, and with him began to generalize a broad program for Enlightenment centered on rallying the newly self-conscious philosophes (a term often used synonymously with the Encyclopédistes) toward political and intellectual change. In this program, the philosophes were not unified by any shared philosophy but through a commitment to the program of defending philosophie itself against its perceived enemies. They were also imagined as activists fighting to eradicate error and superstition from the world. The ongoing defense of the Encyclopédie was one rallying point, and soon the removal of the Jesuits—the great enemies of Enlightenment, the philosophes proclaimed—became a second unifying cause. This effort achieved victory in 1763, and soon the philosophes were attempting to infiltrate the academies and other institutions of knowledge in France. One climax in this effort was reached in 1774 when the Encyclopédiste and friend of Voltaire and the philosophes, Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot, was named Controller-General of France, the most powerful ministerial position in the kingdom, by the newly crowned King Louis XVI. Voltaire and his allies had paved the way for this victory through a barrage of writings throughout the 1760s and 1770s that presented philosophie like that espoused by Turgot as an agent of enlightened reform and its critics as prejudicial defenders of an ossified tradition.\",\n \"Voltaire did bring out one explicitly philosophical book in support this campaign, his Dictionnaire philosophique of 1764–1770. This book republished his articles from the original Encyclopédie while adding new entries conceived in the spirit of the original work. Yet to fully understand the brand of philosophie that Voltaire made foundational to the Enlightenment, one needs to recognize that it just as often circulated in fictional stories, satires, poems, pamphlets, and other less obviously philosophical genres. Voltaire’s most widely known text, for instance, Candide, ou l’Optimisme, first published in 1759, is a fictional story of a wandering traveler engaged in a set of farcical adventures. Yet contained in the text is a serious attack on Leibnizian philosophy, one that in many ways marks the culmination of Voltaire’s decades long attack on this philosophy started during the Newton wars. Philosophie à la Voltaire also came in the form of political activism, such as his public defense of Jean Calas who, Voltaire argued, was a victim of a despotic state and an irrational and brutal judicial system. Voltaire often attached philosophical reflection to this political advocacy, such as when he facilitated a French translation of Cesare Beccaria’s treatise on humanitarian justice and penal reform and then prefaced the work with his own essay on justice and religious toleration (Calas was a French protestant persecuted by a Catholic monarchy). Public philosophic campaigns such as these that channeled critical reason in a direct, oppositionalist way against the perceived injustices and absurdities of Old Regime life were the hallmark of philosophie as Voltaire understood the term.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.6 Fighting for Philosophie (1755–1778)\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Voltaire lived long enough to see some of his long-term legacies start to concretize. With the ascension of Louis XVI in 1774 and the appointment of Turgot as Controller-General, the French establishment began to embrace the philosophes and their agenda in a new way. Critics of Voltaire and his program for philosophie remained powerful, however, and they would continue to survive as the necessary backdrop to the positive image of the Enlightenment philosophe as a modernizer, progressive reformer, and courageous scourge against traditional authority that Voltaire bequeathed to later generations. During Voltaire’s lifetime, this new acceptance translated into a final return to Paris in early 1778. Here, as a frail and sickly octogenarian, Voltaire was welcomed by the city as the hero of the Enlightenment that he now personified. A statue was commissioned as a permanent shrine to his legacy, and a public performance of his play Irène was performed in a way that allowed its author to be celebrated as a national hero. Voltaire died several weeks after these events, but the canonization that they initiated has continued right up until the present.\",\n \"Western philosophy was profoundly shaped by the conception of the philosophe and the program for Enlightenment philosophie that Voltaire came to personify. The model he offered of the philosophe as critical public citizen and advocate first and foremost, and as abstruse and systematic thinker only when absolutely necessary, was especially influential in the subsequent development of the European philosophy. Also influential was the example he offered of the philosopher measuring the value of any philosophy according by its ability to effect social change. In this respect, Karl Marx’s famous thesis that philosophy should aspire to change the world, not merely interpret it, owes more than a little debt Voltaire. The link between Voltaire and Marx was also established through the French revolutionary tradition, which similarly adopted Voltaire as one of its founding heroes. Voltaire was the first person to be honored with re-burial in the newly created Pantheon of the Great Men of France that the new revolutionary government created in 1791. This act served as a tribute to the connections that the revolutionaries saw between Voltaire’s philosophical program and the cause of revolutionary modernization as a whole. In a similar way, Voltaire remains today an iconic hero for everyone who sees a positive linkage between critical reason and political resistance in projects of progressive, modernizing reform.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.7 Voltaire, Philosophe Icon of Enlightenment Philosophie (1778–Present)\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"Voltaire’s philosophical legacy ultimately resides as much in how he practiced philosophy, and in the ends toward which he directed his philosophical activity, as in any specific doctrine or original idea. Yet the particular philosophical positions he took, and the way that he used his wider philosophical campaigns to champion certain understandings while disparaging others, did create a constellation appropriately called Voltaire’s Enlightenment philosophy. True to Voltaire’s character, this constellation is best described as a set of intellectual stances and orientations rather than as a set of doctrines or systematically defended positions. Nevertheless, others found in Voltaire both a model of the well-oriented philosophe and a set of particular philosophical positions appropriate to this stance. Each side of this equation played a key role in defining the Enlightenment philosophie that Voltaire came to personify.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Voltaire’s Enlightenment Philosophy\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Central to this complex is Voltaire’s conception of liberty. Around this category, Voltaire’s social activism and his relatively rare excursions into systematic philosophy also converged. In 1734, in the wake of the scandals triggered by the Lettres philosophiques, Voltaire wrote, but left unfinished at Cirey, a Traité de metaphysique that explored the question of human freedom in philosophical terms. The question was particularly central to European philosophical discussions at the time, and Voltaire’s work explicitly referenced thinkers like Hobbes and Leibniz while wrestling with the questions of materialism, determinism, and providential purpose that were then central to the writings of the so-called deists, figures such as John Toland and Anthony Collins. The great debate between Samuel Clarke and Leibniz over the principles of Newtonian natural philosophy was also influential as Voltaire struggled to understand the nature of human existence and ethics within a cosmos governed by rational principles and impersonal laws.\",\n \"Voltaire adopted a stance in this text somewhere between the strict determinism of rationalist materialists and the transcendent spiritualism and voluntarism of contemporary Christian natural theologians. For Voltaire, humans are not deterministic machines of matter and motion, and free will thus exists. But humans are also natural beings governed by inexorable natural laws, and his ethics anchored right action in a self that possessed the natural light of reason immanently. This stance distanced him from more radical deists like Toland, and he reinforced this position by also adopting an elitist understanding of the role of religion in society. For Voltaire, those equipped to understand their own reason could find the proper course of free action themselves. But since many were incapable of such self-knowledge and self-control, religion, he claimed, was a necessary guarantor of social order. This stance distanced Voltaire from the republican politics of Toland and other materialists, and Voltaire echoed these ideas in his political musings, where he remained throughout his life a liberal, reform-minded monarchist and a skeptic with respect to republican and democratic ideas.\",\n \"In the Lettres philosophiques, Voltaire had suggested a more radical position with respect to human determinism, especially in his letter on Locke, which emphasized the materialist reading of the Lockean soul that was then a popular figure in radical philosophical discourse. Some readers singled out this part of the book as the major source of its controversy, and in a similar vein the very materialist account of “Âme,” or the soul, which appeared in volume 1 of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, was also a flashpoint of controversy. Voltaire also defined his own understanding of the soul in similar terms in his own Dictionnaire philosophique. What these examples point to is Voltaire’s willingness, even eagerness, to publicly defend controversial views even when his own, more private and more considered writings often complicated the understanding that his more public and polemical writings insisted upon. In these cases, one often sees Voltaire defending less a carefully reasoned position on a complex philosophical problem than adopting a political position designed to assert his conviction that liberty of speech, no matter what the topic, is sacred and cannot be violated.\",\n \"Voltaire never actually said “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Yet the myth that associates this dictum with his name remains very powerful, and one still hears his legacy invoked through the redeclaration of this pronouncement that he never actually declared. Part of the deep cultural tie that joins Voltaire to this dictum is the fact that even while he did not write these precise words, they do capture, however imprecisely, the spirit of his philosophy of liberty. In his voluminous correspondence especially, and in the details of many of his more polemical public texts, one does find Voltaire articulating a view of intellectual and civil liberty that makes him an unquestioned forerunner of modern civil libertarianism. He never authored any single philosophical treatise on this topic, however, yet the memory of his life and philosophical campaigns was influential in advancing these ideas nevertheless. Voltaire’s influence is palpably present, for example, in Kant’s famous argument in his essay “What is Enlightenment?” that Enlightenment stems from the free and public use of critical reason, and from the liberty that allows such critical debate to proceed untrammeled. The absence of a singular text that anchors this linkage in Voltaire’s collected works in no way removes the unmistakable presence of Voltaire’s influence upon Kant’s formulation.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.1 Liberty\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Voltaire’s notion of liberty also anchored his hedonistic morality, another key feature of Voltaire’s Enlightenment philosophy. One vehicle for this philosophy was Voltaire’s salacious poetry, a genre that both reflected in its eroticism and sexual innuendo the lived culture of libertinism that was an important feature of Voltaire’s biography. But Voltaire also contributed to philosophical libertinism and hedonism through his celebration of moral freedom through sexual liberty. Voltaire’s avowed hedonism became a central feature of his wider philosophical identity since his libertine writings and conduct were always invoked by those who wanted to indict him for being a reckless subversive devoted to undermining legitimate social order. Voltaire’s refusal to defer to such charges, and his vigor in opposing them through a defense of the very libertinism that was used against him, also injected a positive philosophical program into these public struggles that was very influential. In particular, through his cultivation of a happily libertine persona, and his application of philosophical reason toward the moral defense of this identity, often through the widely accessible vehicles of poetry and witty prose, Voltaire became a leading force in the wider Enlightenment articulation of a morality grounded in the positive valuation of personal, and especially bodily, pleasure, and an ethics rooted in a hedonistic calculus of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. He also advanced this cause by sustaining an unending attack upon the repressive and, to his mind, anti-human demands of traditional Christian asceticism, especially priestly celibacy, and the moral codes of sexual restraint and bodily self-abnegation that were still central to the traditional moral teachings of the day.\",\n \"This same hedonistic ethics was also crucial to the development of liberal political economy during the Enlightenment, and Voltaire applied his own libertinism toward this project as well. In the wake of the scandals triggered by Mandeville’s famous argument in The Fable of the Bees (a poem, it should be remembered) that the pursuit of private vice, namely greed, leads to public benefits, namely economic prosperity, a French debate about the value of luxury as a moral good erupted that drew Voltaire’s pen. In the 1730s, he drafted a poem called Le Mondain that celebrated hedonistic worldly living as a positive force for society, and not as the corrupting element that traditional Christian morality held it to be. In his Essay sur les moeurs he also joined with other Enlightenment historians in celebrating the role of material acquisition and commerce in advancing the progress of civilization. Adam Smith would famously make similar arguments in his founding tract of Enlightenment liberalism, On the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. Voltaire was certainly no great contributor to the political economic science that Smith practiced, but he did contribute to the wider philosophical campaigns that made the concepts of liberty and hedonistic morality central to their work both widely known and more generally accepted.\",\n \"The ineradicable good of personal and philosophical liberty is arguably the master theme in Voltaire’s philosophy, and if it is, then two other themes are closely related to it. One is the importance of skepticism, and the second is the importance of empirical science as a solvent to dogmatism and the pernicious authority it engenders.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.2 Hedonism\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Voltaire’s skepticism descended directly from the neo-Pyrrhonian revival of the Renaissance, and owes a debt in particular to Montaigne, whose essays wedded the stance of doubt with the positive construction of a self grounded in philosophical skepticism. Pierre Bayle’s skepticism was equally influential, and what Voltaire shared with these forerunners, and what separated him from other strands of skepticism, such as the one manifest in Descartes, is the insistence upon the value of the skeptical position in its own right as a final and complete philosophical stance. Among the philosophical tendencies that Voltaire most deplored, in fact, were those that he associated most powerfully with Descartes who, he believed, began in skepticism but then left it behind in the name of some positive philosophical project designed to eradicate or resolve it. Such urges usually led to the production of what Voltaire liked to call “philosophical romances,” which is to say systematic accounts that overcome doubt by appealing to the imagination and its need for coherent explanations. Such explanations, Voltaire argued, are fictions, not philosophy, and the philosopher needs to recognize that very often the most philosophical explanation of all is to offer no explanation at all.\",\n \"Such skepticism often acted as bulwark for Voltaire’s defense of liberty since he argued that no authority, no matter how sacred, should be immune to challenge by critical reason. Voltaire’s views on religion as manifest in his private writings are complex, and based on the evidence of these texts it would be wrong to call Voltaire an atheist, or even an anti-Christian so long as one accepts a broad understanding of what Christianity can entail. But even if his personal religious views were subtle, Voltaire was unwavering in his hostility to church authority and the power of the clergy. For similar reasons, he also grew as he matured ever more hostile toward the sacred mysteries upon which monarchs and Old Regime aristocratic society based their authority. In these cases, Voltaire’s skepticism was harnessed to his libertarian convictions through his continual effort to use critical reason as a solvent for these “superstitions” and the authority they anchored. The philosophical authority of romanciers such as Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz was similarly subjected to the same critique, and here one sees how the defense of skepticism and liberty, more than any deeply held opposition to religiosity per se, was often the most powerful motivator for Voltaire.\",\n \"From this perspective, Voltaire might fruitfully be compared with Socrates, another founding figure in Western philosophy who made a refusal to declaim systematic philosophical positions a central feature of his philosophical identity. Socrates’s repeated assertion that he knew nothing was echoed in Voltaire’s insistence that the true philosopher is the one who dares not to know and then has the courage to admit his ignorance publicly. Voltaire was also, like Socrates, a public critic and controversialist who defined philosophy primarily in terms of its power to liberate individuals from domination at the hands of authoritarian dogmatism and irrational prejudice. Yet while Socrates championed rigorous philosophical dialectic as the agent of this emancipation, Voltaire saw this same dialectical rationalism at the heart of the dogmatism that he sought to overcome. Voltaire often used satire, mockery and wit to undermine the alleged rigor of philosophical dialectic, and while Socrates saw this kind of rhetorical word play as the very essence of the erroneous sophism that he sought to alleviate, Voltaire cultivated linguistic cleverness as a solvent to the false and deceptive dialectic that anchored traditional philosophy.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.3 Skepticism\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Against the acceptance of ignorance that rigorous skepticism often demanded, and against the false escape from it found in sophistical knowledge—or what Voltaire called imaginative philosophical romances—Voltaire offered a different solution than the rigorous dialectical reasoning of Socrates: namely, the power and value of careful empirical science. Here one sees the debt that Voltaire owed to the currents of Newtonianism that played such a strong role in launching his career. Voltaire’s own critical discourse against imaginative philosophical romances originated, in fact, with English and Dutch Newtonians, many of whom were expatriate French Huguenots, who developed these tropes as rhetorical weapons in their battles with Leibniz and European Cartesians who challenged the innovations of Newtonian natural philosophy. In his Principia Mathematica (1687; 2nd rev. edition 1713), Newton had offered a complete mathematical and empirical description of how celestial and terrestrial bodies behaved. Yet when asked to explain how bodies were able to act in the way that he mathematically and empirically demonstrated that they did, Newton famously replied “I feign no hypotheses.” From the perspective of traditional natural philosophy, this was tantamount to hand waving since offering rigorous causal accounts of the nature of bodies in motion was the very essence of this branch of the sciences. Newton’s major philosophical innovation rested, however, in challenging this very epistemological foundation, and the assertion and defense of Newton’s position against its many critics, not least by Voltaire, became arguably the central dynamic of philosophical change in the first half of the eighteenth century.\",\n \"While Newtonian epistemology admitted of many variations, at its core rested a new skepticism about the validity of apriori rationalist accounts of nature and a new assertion of brute empirical fact as a valid philosophical understanding in its own right. European Natural philosophers in the second half of the seventeenth century had thrown out the metaphysics and physics of Aristotle with its four part causality and teleological understanding of bodies, motion and the cosmic order. In its place, however, a new mechanical causality was introduced that attempted to explain the world in equally comprehensive terms through the mechanisms of an inert matter acting by direct contact and action alone. This approach lead to the vortical account of celestial mechanics, a view that held material bodies to be swimming in an ethereal sea whose action pushed and pulled objects in the manner we observe. What could not be observed, however, was the ethereal sea itself, or the other agents of this supposedly comprehensive mechanical cosmos. Yet rationality nevertheless dictated that such mechanisms must exist since without them philosophy would be returned to the occult causes of the Aristotelian natural tendencies and teleological principles. Figuring out what these point-contact mechanisms were and how they worked was, therefore, the charge of the new mechanical natural philosophy of the late seventeenth century. Figures such as Descartes, Huygens, and Leibniz established their scientific reputations through efforts to realize this goal.\",\n \"Newton pointed natural philosophy in a new direction. He offered mathematical analysis anchored in inescapable empirical fact as the new foundation for a rigorous account of the cosmos. From this perspective, the great error of both Aristotelian and the new mechanical natural philosophy was its failure to adhere strictly enough to empirical facts. Vortical mechanics, for example, claimed that matter was moved by the action of an invisible agent, yet this, the Newtonians began to argue, was not to explain what is really happening but to imagine a fiction that gives us a speciously satisfactory rational explanation of it. Natural philosophy needs to resist the allure of such rational imaginings and to instead deal only with the empirically provable. Moreover, the Newtonians argued, if a set of irrefutable facts cannot be explained other then by accepting the brute facticity of their truth, this is not a failure of philosophical explanation so much as a devotion to appropriate rigor. Such epistemological battles became especially intense around Newton’s theory of universal gravitation. Few questioned that Newton had demonstrated an irrefutable mathematical law whereby bodies appear to attract one another in relation to their masses and in inverse relation to the square of the distance between them. But was this rigorous mathematical and empirical description a philosophical account of bodies in motion? Critics such as Leibniz said no, since mathematical description was not the same thing as philosophical explanation, and Newton refused to offer an explanation of how and why gravity operated the way that it did. The Newtonians countered that phenomenal descriptions were scientifically adequate so long as they were grounded in empirical facts, and since no facts had yet been discerned that explained what gravity is or how it works, no scientific account of it was yet possible. They further insisted that it was enough that gravity did operate the way that Newton said it did, and that this was its own justification for accepting his theory. They further mocked those who insisted on dreaming up chimeras like the celestial vortices as explanations for phenomena when no empirical evidence existed to support of such theories.\",\n \"The previous summary describes the general core of the Newtonian position in the intense philosophical contests of the first decades of the eighteenth century. It also describes Voltaire’s own stance in these same battles. His contribution, therefore, was not centered on any innovation within these very familiar Newtonian themes; rather, it was his accomplishment to become a leading evangelist for this new Newtonian epistemology, and by consequence a major reason for its widespread dissemination and acceptance in France and throughout Europe. A comparison with David Hume’s role in this same development might help to illuminate the distinct contributions of each. Both Hume and Voltaire began with the same skepticism about rationalist philosophy, and each embraced the Newtonian criterion that made empirical fact the only guarantor of truth in philosophy. Yet Hume’s target remained traditional philosophy, and his contribution was to extend skepticism all the way to the point of denying the feasibility of transcendental philosophy itself. This argument would famously awake Kant’s dogmatic slumbers and lead to the reconstitution of transcendental philosophy in new terms, but Voltaire had different fish to fry. His attachment was to the new Newtonian empirical scientists, and while he was never more than a dilettante scientist himself, his devotion to this form of natural inquiry made him in some respects the leading philosophical advocate and ideologist for the new empirico-scientific conception of philosophy that Newton initiated.\",\n \"For Voltaire (and many other eighteenth-century Newtonians) the most important project was defending empirical science as an alternative to traditional natural philosophy. This involved sharing in Hume’s critique of abstract rationalist systems, but it also involved the very different project of defending empirical induction and experimental reasoning as the new epistemology appropriate for a modern Enlightened philosophy. In particular, Voltaire fought vigorously against the rationalist epistemology that critics used to challenge Newtonian reasoning. His famous conclusion in Candide, for example, that optimism was a philosophical chimera produced when dialectical reason remains detached from brute empirical facts owed a great debt to his Newtonian convictions. His alternative offered in the same text of a life devoted to simple tasks with clear, tangible, and most importantly useful ends was also derived from the utilitarian discourse that Newtonians also used to justify their science. Voltaire’s campaign on behalf of smallpox inoculation, which began with his letter on the topic in the Lettres philosophiques, was similarly grounded in an appeal to the facts of the case as an antidote to the fears generated by logical deductions from seemingly sound axiomatic principles. All of Voltaire’s public campaigns, in fact, deployed empirical fact as the ultimate solvent for irrational prejudice and blind adherence to preexisting understandings. In this respect, his philosophy as manifest in each was deeply indebted to the epistemological convictions he gleaned from Newtonianism.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.4 Newtonian Empirical Science\"\n }\n ]\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, edited by A. Beuchot. 72 vols. Paris: Lefevre, 1829–1840.","Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, edited by L.E.D. Moland and G. Bengesco. 52 vols. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1877–1885.","Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, edited by Theodore Besterman. 135 vols. (projected) Geneva, Banbury, and Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1968–.","The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version, William F. Fleming (ed. and tr.), 21 vols., New York: E.R. Du Mont, 1901. [Complete edition available at the Online Library of Liberty]","The Portable Voltaire, Ben Ray Redman (ed.), New York: Penguin Books, 1977.","Selected Works of Voltaire, Joseph McCabe (ed.), London: Watts, 2007.","Shorter Writings of Voltaire, J.I. Rodale (ed.), New York: A.S. Barnes, 1960.","Voltaire in his Letters, Being a Selection of his Correspondence, S.G. Tallentyre (tr.), Honolulu, HI: University Press of the Pacific, 2004.","Voltaire on Religion: Selected Writings, Kenneth W. Applegate (ed.), New York: F. Ungar, 1974.","Voltaire: Selected Writings, Christopher Thacker (ed.), London: Dent, 1995.","Voltaire: Selections, Paul Edwards (ed.), New York: Macmillan, 1989.","Translations of Voltaire’s major plays are found in: The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version, William F. Fleming (ed. and tr.), New York: E.R. Du Mont, 1901. [Complete edition available at the Online Library of Liberty]","Seven Plays (Mérope (1737), Olympia (1761), Alzire (1734), Orestes (1749), Oedipus (1718), Zaire, Caesar), William Fleming (tr.), New York: Howard Fertig, 1988.","The Age of Louis XIV (1733) and other Selected Writings, J.H. Brumfitt (ed.), New York: Twayne, 1963.","The Age of Louis XIV (1733), Martyn P. Pollack (tr.), London and New York: Dutton, 1978.","History of Charles XII, King of Sweden (1727), Honolulu, HI: University Press of the Pacific, 2002.","History of Charles XII, King of Sweden (1727), Antonia White and Ragnhild Marie Hatton (eds.), New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1993.","The Philosophy of History (1764), New York: The Philosophical Library, 1965.","The Complete Tales of Voltaire, William Walton (tr.), 3 vols., New York: Howard Fertig, 1990.\n\n\t\n\t\tVol. 1: The Huron (1771), The History of Jenni (1774), The One-eyed Street Porter, Cosi-sancta (1715), An Incident of Memory (1773), The Travels of Reason (1774), The Man with Forty Crowns (1768), Timon (1755), The King of Boutan (1761), and The City of Cashmere (1760).\n\t\tVol. 2: The Letters of Amabed (1769), The Blind Judges of Colors (1766), The Princess of Babylon (1768), The Ears of Lord Chesterfield and Chaplain Goudman (1775), Story of a Good Brahman (1759), An Indian Adventure (1764), and Zadig, or, Destiny (1757).\n\t\tVol. 3: Micromegas (1738), Candide, or Optimism (1758), The World as it Goes (1750), The White and the Black (1764), Jeannot and Colin (1764), The Travels of Scarmentado (1756), The White Bull (1772), Memnon (1750), Plato’s Dream (1737), Bababec and the Fakirs (1750), and The Two Consoled Ones (1756).\n\t\n\t","Vol. 1: The Huron (1771), The History of Jenni (1774), The One-eyed Street Porter, Cosi-sancta (1715), An Incident of Memory (1773), The Travels of Reason (1774), The Man with Forty Crowns (1768), Timon (1755), The King of Boutan (1761), and The City of Cashmere (1760).","Vol. 2: The Letters of Amabed (1769), The Blind Judges of Colors (1766), The Princess of Babylon (1768), The Ears of Lord Chesterfield and Chaplain Goudman (1775), Story of a Good Brahman (1759), An Indian Adventure (1764), and Zadig, or, Destiny (1757).","Vol. 3: Micromegas (1738), Candide, or Optimism (1758), The World as it Goes (1750), The White and the Black (1764), Jeannot and Colin (1764), The Travels of Scarmentado (1756), The White Bull (1772), Memnon (1750), Plato’s Dream (1737), Bababec and the Fakirs (1750), and The Two Consoled Ones (1756).","The English Essays of 1727, David Williams and Richard Walker (eds.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996.","Epistle of M. Voltaire to the King of Prussia (1738), Glasgow, 1967.","The History of the Travels of Scarmentado (1756), Glasgow: The College Press, 1969.","Micromégas and other Short Fictions (1738), Theo Cuffe and Haydn Mason (eds.), London and New York: Penguin Books, 2002.","The Princess of Babylon (1768), London: Signet Books, 1969.","The Virgin of Orleans, or Joan of Arc (1755), Howard Nelson (tr.), Denver: A. Swallow, 1965.","Voltaire. Essay on Milton (1727), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954.","Voltaire’s Romances, New York: P. Eckler, 1986.","Zadig, or L’Ingénu (1757), London: Penguin Books, 1984.","Zadig, or the Book of Fate (1757), New York: Garland, 1974.","Zadig, or The Book of Fate an Oriental History (1757), Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications, 1982.","The Calas Affair: A Treatise on Tolerance (1762), Brian Masters (ed.), London: The Folio Society, 1994.","The Sermon of the Fifty (1759), J.A.R. Séguin (ed.), Jersey City, NJ: R. Paxton, 1963.","A Treatise on Toleration and Other Essays, Joseph McCabe (ed.), Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1994.","A Treatise on Tolerance and other Writings, edited by Brian Masters, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994","Voltaire. Political Writings, edited by David Williams, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994","The Elements of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy (1738; 2nd expanded edition, 1745)\n\n\t\n\t\tTranslated John Hanna. London: Cass, 1967.\n\t\tBirmingham, AL: Gryphon Editions, 1991.\n\t\n\t","Translated John Hanna. London: Cass, 1967.","Birmingham, AL: Gryphon Editions, 1991.","Philosophical Dictionary (1752)\n\t\n\t\tEdited by Theodore Besterman. London: Penguin Books, 2002.\n\t\tTranslated by Peter Gay. New York: Basic Books, 1962.\n\t\tPhilosophical Dictionary: A Compendium, Wade Baskin (ed.), New York: Philosophical Library, 1961.\n\t\tPhilosophical Dictionary: Selections, Chicago: The Great Books Foundation, 1965.\n\t\n\t","Edited by Theodore Besterman. London: Penguin Books, 2002.","Translated by Peter Gay. New York: Basic Books, 1962.","Philosophical Dictionary: A Compendium, Wade Baskin (ed.), New York: Philosophical Library, 1961.","Philosophical Dictionary: Selections, Chicago: The Great Books Foundation, 1965.","Philosophical Letters (Letters on the English Nation, Letters on England) (1734)\n\t\n\t\tJohn Leigh and Prudence L. Steiner (ed.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2007.\n\t\tLeonard Tancock (ed.), London and New York: Penguin Books, 2003.\n\t\tErnest Dilworth (ed.), Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003.\n\t\tNicholas Cronk (ed.), New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.\n\t\tF.A. Taylor (ed.), Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946.\n\t\tHarvard Classics, Vol. 34, Part 2. [Available online from Bartleby.com]\n\t\n\t","John Leigh and Prudence L. Steiner (ed.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2007.","Leonard Tancock (ed.), London and New York: Penguin Books, 2003.","Ernest Dilworth (ed.), Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003.","Nicholas Cronk (ed.), New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.","F.A. Taylor (ed.), Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946.","Harvard Classics, Vol. 34, Part 2. [Available online from Bartleby.com]","Voltaire’s Letters on the Quakers (1727), Philadelphia: William H. Allen, 1953.","Candide, or Optimism (1758). Hundreds of English editions of this text have been published, so this list is restricted to the most important scholarly editions published since 1960.\n\t\n\t\tC.H.R. Niven (ed.), London: Longman, 1980.\n\t\tCandide and other Writings, Haskell M. Block (ed.), New York: Modern Library, 1985.\n\t\tRichard Aldington, Ernest Dilworth, and others (eds.), New York: Modern Library, 1992.\n\t\tShane Weller (ed.), New York: Dover, 1993.\n\t\tCandide: A Dual Language Book, New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1993.\n\t\tRobert Martin Adams (ed.), New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.\n\t\tElectronic Scholarly Publishing Project, 1998. [Available online at Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project]\n\t\tDaniel Gordon (ed.), Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999.\n\t\tCandide and Related Texts, David Wooton (ed.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000.\n\t\tLowell Bair (ed.), New York: Bantam Books, 2003.\n\t\tCandide & Zadig, Lester G. Crocker (ed.), New York: Pocket Books, 2005.\n\t\tRaffael Burton (ed.), New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.\n\t\tTheo Cuffe (ed.), London and New York: Penguin Books, 2007.\n\t\tCandide and other Stories, Roger Pearson (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.\n\t\tCandide, Zadig, and Selected Stories, Donald Frame (tr. and ed.), New York: Signet Classic, 2009.\n\t\n\t","C.H.R. Niven (ed.), London: Longman, 1980.","Candide and other Writings, Haskell M. Block (ed.), New York: Modern Library, 1985.","Richard Aldington, Ernest Dilworth, and others (eds.), New York: Modern Library, 1992.","Shane Weller (ed.), New York: Dover, 1993.","Candide: A Dual Language Book, New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1993.","Robert Martin Adams (ed.), New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.","Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project, 1998. [Available online at Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project]","Daniel Gordon (ed.), Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999.","Candide and Related Texts, David Wooton (ed.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000.","Lowell Bair (ed.), New York: Bantam Books, 2003.","Candide & Zadig, Lester G. Crocker (ed.), New York: Pocket Books, 2005.","Raffael Burton (ed.), New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.","Theo Cuffe (ed.), London and New York: Penguin Books, 2007.","Candide and other Stories, Roger Pearson (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.","Candide, Zadig, and Selected Stories, Donald Frame (tr. and ed.), New York: Signet Classic, 2009.","Aldridge, Alfred Owen, 1975, Voltaire and the Century of Light, Princeton: Princeton University Press.","Badinter, Elizabeth, 1983, Émilie, Émilie, l’ambition féminine au XVIIIe siècle, Paris: Flammarion.","–––, 1999–2002, Les Passions intellectuelles, 2 volumes, Paris: Fayard.","Barber, W.H., 1955, Leibniz in France from Arnauld to Voltaire: A Study in French Reactions to Leibnizianism 1670–1760, Oxford: Clarendon Press.","Barrell, Rex A., 1988, Bolingbroke and France, Lanham, MD: University Press of America.","Besterman, Theodore, 1969, Voltaire, New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World.","Bird, Stephen, 2000, Reinventing Voltaire: The Politics of Commemoration in Nineteenth-century France, Oxford: Oxford University Studies on Enlightenment.","Brooks, Richard A., 1964, Voltaire and Leibniz, Geneva: Droz.","Brown, Harcourt, 1947, Voltaire and the Royal Society of London, Toronto: University of Toronto Quarterly.","Brumfitt, J.H., 1970, Voltaire: historian, London: Oxford University Press.","–––, 1973, The French Enlightenment, Cambridge: Schenkman Pub. Co.","Brunel, Lucien, 1967, Les Philosophes et l’académie française au dix-huitième siècle, Genève: Slatkine Reprints.","Brunet, Pierre, 1931, L’introduction des théories de Newton en France au XVIIIe siècle, Paris: A. Blanchard.","Collins, J. Churton, 1908, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau in England, London: E. Nash.","Conlon, Pierre M., 1961, Voltaire’s literary career from 1728 to 1750, Genève: Institut et Musée Voltaire.","Cottret, Bernard, 1992, Bolingbroke: exil et écriture au siècle des Lumières, Paris: Klincksieck.","Cronk, Nicolas, 2009, The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","–––, 2014, Voltaire: a very short introduction, Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation.","Darnton, Robert, 1979, The Business of Enlightenment: The Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.","–––, 1982, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.","Dickinson, H.T., 1970, Bolingbroke, London: Constable.","Dieckmann, Herbert, 1943, Le Philosophe: Texts and Interpretations, (Washington University Studies, New Series, Language and Literature, no. 18), St. Louis: Washington University Press.","Duchet, Michèle, 1971, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières Buffon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvetius, Diderot, Paris: F. Maspero.","Ehrman, Esther, 1986, Mme. du Châtelet: Scientist, Philosopher and Feminist of the Enlightenment, Leamington [Spa]: Berg.","Gandt, François de, 2001, Cirey dans la vie intellectuelle: la réception de Newton en France, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.","Gardiner Janik, Linda, 1982, “Searching for the Metaphysics of Science: The Structure and Composition of Mme. Du Châtelet’s Institutions de physiques, 1737–1740”, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 201: 85–113.","Gay, Peter, 1954, The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment, New York: Knopf.","Gay, Peter, 1969, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (Volume 1: The Science of Freedom), New York: Knopf.","–––, 1977, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (Volume 2: The Rise of Modern Paganism), New York: Knopf 1977.","–––, 1988, Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist, New Haven: Yale University Press.","Guerlac, Henry, 1981,Newton on the Continent, Ithaca.","Gurrado, Antonio, 2013, Voltaire cattolico, Torino: Lindau.","Hagengruber, Ruth (ed.), 2011, Emilie du Châtelet between Leibniz and Newton, Dordrecht: Springer.","Ḥadīd, Javādī, 2012, Voltaire et l’Islam, Ozoir la Ferriere : Albouraq.","Hellman, Lilian, 1980, Dorothy Parker, John La Touche, Richard Wilbur, and Leonard Bernstein, 1956–1957, Candide, An Operetta in Two Acts, New York: Jaini Publications.","Hutchison, Ross, 1991, Locke in France: 1688–1734, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.","Iltis, Carolyn, 1977, “Madame du Châtelet’s metaphysics and mechanics”, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 8: 29–48.","Israel, Jonathan, 2000, The Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","–––, 2006, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","–––, 2009, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","–––, 2011, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","–––, 2014, Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","Jacob, Margaret, 1981, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans, London: Cornerstone Book Publishers.","Kramnick, Isaac, 1968, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.","Lanson, Gustave, 1894, Histoire de la littérature française, Paris: Hachette.","Lanson, Gustave, 1906, Voltaire, Paris: Hachette.","Libby, Margaret Sherwood, 1935, The Attitude of Voltaire to Magic and the Sciences, New York: Columbia University Press, 1935.","Lilti, Antoine, 2005, Le monde des salons. Sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle, Paris: Fayard.","Mason, Haydn Trevor, 1963, Pierre Bayle and Voltaire, London: Oxford University Press.","–––, 1975, Voltaire, New York: St. Martin’s.","Masseau, Didier, 1994, L’Invention de l’intellectual dans l’Europe du XVIIIe siècle, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.","Mattei, Silvia, 2010, Voltaire et les voyages de la raison, Paris: Harmattan.","Maurois, André, 1935, Voltaire, Paris: Gallimard.","Mauzi, Robert, 1960, L’idée du bonheur dans la litterature et la pensée francaises au XVIIIe siècle, Paris: A. Colin.","McKenna, Antony, 1994, Écraser l’infame, 1759–1770, Voltaire en son temps (Volume 4), René Pomeau (ed.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.","McMahon, Darrin M., 2001, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-enlightenment and the Making of Modernity, New York: Oxford University Press.","McNutt, Jennifer Powell, 2013, Calvin meets Voltaire: the clergy of Geneva in the age of enlightenment, 1685–1798, Burlington: Ashgate.","Melton, James Van Horn, 2001, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Méricam-Bourdet, Myrtille, 2012, Voltaire et l’écriture de l’histoire: un enjeu politique, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.","Mervaud, Christiane, 1991, De la cour au jardin, 1750–1759, Voltaire en son temps (Volume 3), René Pomeau (ed.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.","Mitchell, Harvey, 2104, Voltaire’s Jews and modern Jewish identity: rethinking the Enlightenment, London: Routledge.","Morize, André, 1909, L’Apologie du luxe au XVIIIe Siècle: “Le Mondain” et ses Sources, Paris: H. Didier.","Neiertz, Patrick, 2012, Voltaire et l’économie politique, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.","Northeast, Catherine M., 1991, The Parisian Jesuits and the Enlightenment, 1700–1762, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.","Orieux, Jean, 1966, Voltaire, ou la Royauté de l’esprit, Paris: Flammarion.","Palmer, Robert R., 1939, Catholics and Unbelievers in 18th Century France, Princeton: Princeton University Press.","Pappas, John N., 1957, Berthier’s Journal de Trevoux and the Philosophes (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Volume 3), Geneva: Institut and Musée Voltaire.","–––, 1962, Voltaire and d’Alembert, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.","Pearson, Roger, 1993, The Fables of Reason: A Study of Voltaire’s “Contes philosophiques”, Oxford: Clarendon Press.","–––, 2005, Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom, London: Bloomsbury Publishing.","Perry, Norma, 1975, Sir Everard Fawkener, friend and correspondent of Voltaire, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.","Pettit, Alexander, 1997, Illusory Consensus: Bolingbroke and the Polemical Responses to Walpole, 1730–1737, Newark: University of Delaware Press.","Pomeau, René, 1969, La réligion de Voltaire, Paris: Nizet.","–––, 1985, D’Arouet à Voltaire, 1694–1734, Voltaire en son temps (Volume 1), René Pomeau (ed.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.","–––, 1994, On a voulu l’enterrer, 1770–1791, Voltaire en son temps (Volume 5), René Pomeau (ed.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.","Pomeau, René (ed)., 1985–1994, Voltaire en son temps, 5 vols., Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.","Popkin, Richard Henry, 1979, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza, Berkeley: University of California Press.","Proust, Jacques, 1962, Diderot et l’Encyclopédie, Paris: Slatkine.","Rasmussen, Dennis Carl, 2014, The pragmatic enlightenment: recovering the liberalism of Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Rousseau, André Michel, 1976, L’Angleterre et Voltaire (1718–1789), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.","Saigey, Émile, 1873, Les sciences au XVIIIe siècle: la physique de Voltaire, Paris: G. Baillière.","Schlereth, Thomas J., 1977, The cosmopolitan ideal in Enlightenment thought, its form and function in the ideas of Franklin, Hume, and Voltaire, 1694–1790, South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.","Shank, J.B., 2008, The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.","Sharpe, Matthew, 2015, “On a Neglected Argument in French Philosophy: Sceptical Humanism in Montaigne, Voltaire and Camus”, Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory, 16(1): 1–26.","Spink, John Stephenson, 1960, French Free-thought from Gassendi to Voltaire, London: University of London, Athlone Press.","Terrall, Mary, 2002, The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.","Tlili, Mahbouba Saï, 2009, Voltaire et l’Islam Tunis: Arabesques.","Torrey, Norman L., 1930, Voltaire and the English Deists, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2nd edition, Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1967.","–––,1938, The Spirit of Voltaire, New York: Russell and Russell, 2nd edition, 1968.","Undank, Jack, 1989, “Portrait of the Philosopher as Tramp”, in A New History of French Literature, Dennis Hollier (ed.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 421–428.","Vaillot, René, 1988, Avec madame Du Châtelet, 1734–1749, Voltaire en son temps (Volume 2), René Pomeau (ed.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.","Van Kley, Dale, 1975, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits in France, 1757–1767, New Haven: Yale University Press.","Vercruysse, Jeroom, 1966, Voltaire et la Holland, Genève: Institut et Musée Voltaire.","Vernière, Paul, 1954, Spinoza et la pensée française avant la Révolution, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.","Wade, Ira Owen, 1938, The Clandestine Organization and Diffusion of Philosophic Ideas in France from 1700 to 1750, Princeton: Princeton University Press.","–––, 1941, Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet: An Essay on the Intellectual Activity at Cirey, Princeton: Princeton University Press.","–––, 1947, Studies on Voltaire with Some Unpublished Papers of Mme. du Châtelet, Princeton: Princeton University Press.","–––, 1969, The Intellectual Devevelopment of Voltaire, Princeton: Princeton University Press.","Zinsser, Judith, 2006, La Dame d’Esprit: A Biography of the Marquise du Châtelet, New York: Viking.","Zinsser, Judith and Hayes, Julie (eds.), 2006, Emilie du Châtelet: Rewriting Enlightenment Philosophy and Science, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation."],"string":"[\n \"Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, edited by A. Beuchot. 72 vols. Paris: Lefevre, 1829–1840.\",\n \"Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, edited by L.E.D. Moland and G. Bengesco. 52 vols. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1877–1885.\",\n \"Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, edited by Theodore Besterman. 135 vols. (projected) Geneva, Banbury, and Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1968–.\",\n \"The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version, William F. Fleming (ed. and tr.), 21 vols., New York: E.R. Du Mont, 1901. [Complete edition available at the Online Library of Liberty]\",\n \"The Portable Voltaire, Ben Ray Redman (ed.), New York: Penguin Books, 1977.\",\n \"Selected Works of Voltaire, Joseph McCabe (ed.), London: Watts, 2007.\",\n \"Shorter Writings of Voltaire, J.I. Rodale (ed.), New York: A.S. Barnes, 1960.\",\n \"Voltaire in his Letters, Being a Selection of his Correspondence, S.G. Tallentyre (tr.), Honolulu, HI: University Press of the Pacific, 2004.\",\n \"Voltaire on Religion: Selected Writings, Kenneth W. Applegate (ed.), New York: F. Ungar, 1974.\",\n \"Voltaire: Selected Writings, Christopher Thacker (ed.), London: Dent, 1995.\",\n \"Voltaire: Selections, Paul Edwards (ed.), New York: Macmillan, 1989.\",\n \"Translations of Voltaire’s major plays are found in: The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version, William F. Fleming (ed. and tr.), New York: E.R. Du Mont, 1901. [Complete edition available at the Online Library of Liberty]\",\n \"Seven Plays (Mérope (1737), Olympia (1761), Alzire (1734), Orestes (1749), Oedipus (1718), Zaire, Caesar), William Fleming (tr.), New York: Howard Fertig, 1988.\",\n \"The Age of Louis XIV (1733) and other Selected Writings, J.H. Brumfitt (ed.), New York: Twayne, 1963.\",\n \"The Age of Louis XIV (1733), Martyn P. Pollack (tr.), London and New York: Dutton, 1978.\",\n \"History of Charles XII, King of Sweden (1727), Honolulu, HI: University Press of the Pacific, 2002.\",\n \"History of Charles XII, King of Sweden (1727), Antonia White and Ragnhild Marie Hatton (eds.), New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1993.\",\n \"The Philosophy of History (1764), New York: The Philosophical Library, 1965.\",\n \"The Complete Tales of Voltaire, William Walton (tr.), 3 vols., New York: Howard Fertig, 1990.\\n\\n\\t\\n\\t\\tVol. 1: The Huron (1771), The History of Jenni (1774), The One-eyed Street Porter, Cosi-sancta (1715), An Incident of Memory (1773), The Travels of Reason (1774), The Man with Forty Crowns (1768), Timon (1755), The King of Boutan (1761), and The City of Cashmere (1760).\\n\\t\\tVol. 2: The Letters of Amabed (1769), The Blind Judges of Colors (1766), The Princess of Babylon (1768), The Ears of Lord Chesterfield and Chaplain Goudman (1775), Story of a Good Brahman (1759), An Indian Adventure (1764), and Zadig, or, Destiny (1757).\\n\\t\\tVol. 3: Micromegas (1738), Candide, or Optimism (1758), The World as it Goes (1750), The White and the Black (1764), Jeannot and Colin (1764), The Travels of Scarmentado (1756), The White Bull (1772), Memnon (1750), Plato’s Dream (1737), Bababec and the Fakirs (1750), and The Two Consoled Ones (1756).\\n\\t\\n\\t\",\n \"Vol. 1: The Huron (1771), The History of Jenni (1774), The One-eyed Street Porter, Cosi-sancta (1715), An Incident of Memory (1773), The Travels of Reason (1774), The Man with Forty Crowns (1768), Timon (1755), The King of Boutan (1761), and The City of Cashmere (1760).\",\n \"Vol. 2: The Letters of Amabed (1769), The Blind Judges of Colors (1766), The Princess of Babylon (1768), The Ears of Lord Chesterfield and Chaplain Goudman (1775), Story of a Good Brahman (1759), An Indian Adventure (1764), and Zadig, or, Destiny (1757).\",\n \"Vol. 3: Micromegas (1738), Candide, or Optimism (1758), The World as it Goes (1750), The White and the Black (1764), Jeannot and Colin (1764), The Travels of Scarmentado (1756), The White Bull (1772), Memnon (1750), Plato’s Dream (1737), Bababec and the Fakirs (1750), and The Two Consoled Ones (1756).\",\n \"The English Essays of 1727, David Williams and Richard Walker (eds.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996.\",\n \"Epistle of M. Voltaire to the King of Prussia (1738), Glasgow, 1967.\",\n \"The History of the Travels of Scarmentado (1756), Glasgow: The College Press, 1969.\",\n \"Micromégas and other Short Fictions (1738), Theo Cuffe and Haydn Mason (eds.), London and New York: Penguin Books, 2002.\",\n \"The Princess of Babylon (1768), London: Signet Books, 1969.\",\n \"The Virgin of Orleans, or Joan of Arc (1755), Howard Nelson (tr.), Denver: A. Swallow, 1965.\",\n \"Voltaire. Essay on Milton (1727), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954.\",\n \"Voltaire’s Romances, New York: P. Eckler, 1986.\",\n \"Zadig, or L’Ingénu (1757), London: Penguin Books, 1984.\",\n \"Zadig, or the Book of Fate (1757), New York: Garland, 1974.\",\n \"Zadig, or The Book of Fate an Oriental History (1757), Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications, 1982.\",\n \"The Calas Affair: A Treatise on Tolerance (1762), Brian Masters (ed.), London: The Folio Society, 1994.\",\n \"The Sermon of the Fifty (1759), J.A.R. Séguin (ed.), Jersey City, NJ: R. Paxton, 1963.\",\n \"A Treatise on Toleration and Other Essays, Joseph McCabe (ed.), Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1994.\",\n \"A Treatise on Tolerance and other Writings, edited by Brian Masters, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994\",\n \"Voltaire. Political Writings, edited by David Williams, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994\",\n \"The Elements of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy (1738; 2nd expanded edition, 1745)\\n\\n\\t\\n\\t\\tTranslated John Hanna. London: Cass, 1967.\\n\\t\\tBirmingham, AL: Gryphon Editions, 1991.\\n\\t\\n\\t\",\n \"Translated John Hanna. London: Cass, 1967.\",\n \"Birmingham, AL: Gryphon Editions, 1991.\",\n \"Philosophical Dictionary (1752)\\n\\t\\n\\t\\tEdited by Theodore Besterman. London: Penguin Books, 2002.\\n\\t\\tTranslated by Peter Gay. New York: Basic Books, 1962.\\n\\t\\tPhilosophical Dictionary: A Compendium, Wade Baskin (ed.), New York: Philosophical Library, 1961.\\n\\t\\tPhilosophical Dictionary: Selections, Chicago: The Great Books Foundation, 1965.\\n\\t\\n\\t\",\n \"Edited by Theodore Besterman. London: Penguin Books, 2002.\",\n \"Translated by Peter Gay. New York: Basic Books, 1962.\",\n \"Philosophical Dictionary: A Compendium, Wade Baskin (ed.), New York: Philosophical Library, 1961.\",\n \"Philosophical Dictionary: Selections, Chicago: The Great Books Foundation, 1965.\",\n \"Philosophical Letters (Letters on the English Nation, Letters on England) (1734)\\n\\t\\n\\t\\tJohn Leigh and Prudence L. Steiner (ed.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2007.\\n\\t\\tLeonard Tancock (ed.), London and New York: Penguin Books, 2003.\\n\\t\\tErnest Dilworth (ed.), Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003.\\n\\t\\tNicholas Cronk (ed.), New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.\\n\\t\\tF.A. Taylor (ed.), Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946.\\n\\t\\tHarvard Classics, Vol. 34, Part 2. [Available online from Bartleby.com]\\n\\t\\n\\t\",\n \"John Leigh and Prudence L. Steiner (ed.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2007.\",\n \"Leonard Tancock (ed.), London and New York: Penguin Books, 2003.\",\n \"Ernest Dilworth (ed.), Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003.\",\n \"Nicholas Cronk (ed.), New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.\",\n \"F.A. Taylor (ed.), Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946.\",\n \"Harvard Classics, Vol. 34, Part 2. [Available online from Bartleby.com]\",\n \"Voltaire’s Letters on the Quakers (1727), Philadelphia: William H. Allen, 1953.\",\n \"Candide, or Optimism (1758). Hundreds of English editions of this text have been published, so this list is restricted to the most important scholarly editions published since 1960.\\n\\t\\n\\t\\tC.H.R. Niven (ed.), London: Longman, 1980.\\n\\t\\tCandide and other Writings, Haskell M. Block (ed.), New York: Modern Library, 1985.\\n\\t\\tRichard Aldington, Ernest Dilworth, and others (eds.), New York: Modern Library, 1992.\\n\\t\\tShane Weller (ed.), New York: Dover, 1993.\\n\\t\\tCandide: A Dual Language Book, New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1993.\\n\\t\\tRobert Martin Adams (ed.), New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.\\n\\t\\tElectronic Scholarly Publishing Project, 1998. [Available online at Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project]\\n\\t\\tDaniel Gordon (ed.), Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999.\\n\\t\\tCandide and Related Texts, David Wooton (ed.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000.\\n\\t\\tLowell Bair (ed.), New York: Bantam Books, 2003.\\n\\t\\tCandide & Zadig, Lester G. Crocker (ed.), New York: Pocket Books, 2005.\\n\\t\\tRaffael Burton (ed.), New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.\\n\\t\\tTheo Cuffe (ed.), London and New York: Penguin Books, 2007.\\n\\t\\tCandide and other Stories, Roger Pearson (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.\\n\\t\\tCandide, Zadig, and Selected Stories, Donald Frame (tr. and ed.), New York: Signet Classic, 2009.\\n\\t\\n\\t\",\n \"C.H.R. Niven (ed.), London: Longman, 1980.\",\n \"Candide and other Writings, Haskell M. Block (ed.), New York: Modern Library, 1985.\",\n \"Richard Aldington, Ernest Dilworth, and others (eds.), New York: Modern Library, 1992.\",\n \"Shane Weller (ed.), New York: Dover, 1993.\",\n \"Candide: A Dual Language Book, New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1993.\",\n \"Robert Martin Adams (ed.), New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.\",\n \"Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project, 1998. [Available online at Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project]\",\n \"Daniel Gordon (ed.), Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999.\",\n \"Candide and Related Texts, David Wooton (ed.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000.\",\n \"Lowell Bair (ed.), New York: Bantam Books, 2003.\",\n \"Candide & Zadig, Lester G. Crocker (ed.), New York: Pocket Books, 2005.\",\n \"Raffael Burton (ed.), New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.\",\n \"Theo Cuffe (ed.), London and New York: Penguin Books, 2007.\",\n \"Candide and other Stories, Roger Pearson (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.\",\n \"Candide, Zadig, and Selected Stories, Donald Frame (tr. and ed.), New York: Signet Classic, 2009.\",\n \"Aldridge, Alfred Owen, 1975, Voltaire and the Century of Light, Princeton: Princeton University Press.\",\n \"Badinter, Elizabeth, 1983, Émilie, Émilie, l’ambition féminine au XVIIIe siècle, Paris: Flammarion.\",\n \"–––, 1999–2002, Les Passions intellectuelles, 2 volumes, Paris: Fayard.\",\n \"Barber, W.H., 1955, Leibniz in France from Arnauld to Voltaire: A Study in French Reactions to Leibnizianism 1670–1760, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"Barrell, Rex A., 1988, Bolingbroke and France, Lanham, MD: University Press of America.\",\n \"Besterman, Theodore, 1969, Voltaire, New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World.\",\n \"Bird, Stephen, 2000, Reinventing Voltaire: The Politics of Commemoration in Nineteenth-century France, Oxford: Oxford University Studies on Enlightenment.\",\n \"Brooks, Richard A., 1964, Voltaire and Leibniz, Geneva: Droz.\",\n \"Brown, Harcourt, 1947, Voltaire and the Royal Society of London, Toronto: University of Toronto Quarterly.\",\n \"Brumfitt, J.H., 1970, Voltaire: historian, London: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1973, The French Enlightenment, Cambridge: Schenkman Pub. Co.\",\n \"Brunel, Lucien, 1967, Les Philosophes et l’académie française au dix-huitième siècle, Genève: Slatkine Reprints.\",\n \"Brunet, Pierre, 1931, L’introduction des théories de Newton en France au XVIIIe siècle, Paris: A. Blanchard.\",\n \"Collins, J. Churton, 1908, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau in England, London: E. Nash.\",\n \"Conlon, Pierre M., 1961, Voltaire’s literary career from 1728 to 1750, Genève: Institut et Musée Voltaire.\",\n \"Cottret, Bernard, 1992, Bolingbroke: exil et écriture au siècle des Lumières, Paris: Klincksieck.\",\n \"Cronk, Nicolas, 2009, The Cambridge Companion to Voltaire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2014, Voltaire: a very short introduction, Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation.\",\n \"Darnton, Robert, 1979, The Business of Enlightenment: The Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1982, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Dickinson, H.T., 1970, Bolingbroke, London: Constable.\",\n \"Dieckmann, Herbert, 1943, Le Philosophe: Texts and Interpretations, (Washington University Studies, New Series, Language and Literature, no. 18), St. Louis: Washington University Press.\",\n \"Duchet, Michèle, 1971, Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières Buffon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvetius, Diderot, Paris: F. Maspero.\",\n \"Ehrman, Esther, 1986, Mme. du Châtelet: Scientist, Philosopher and Feminist of the Enlightenment, Leamington [Spa]: Berg.\",\n \"Gandt, François de, 2001, Cirey dans la vie intellectuelle: la réception de Newton en France, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.\",\n \"Gardiner Janik, Linda, 1982, “Searching for the Metaphysics of Science: The Structure and Composition of Mme. Du Châtelet’s Institutions de physiques, 1737–1740”, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 201: 85–113.\",\n \"Gay, Peter, 1954, The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment, New York: Knopf.\",\n \"Gay, Peter, 1969, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (Volume 1: The Science of Freedom), New York: Knopf.\",\n \"–––, 1977, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (Volume 2: The Rise of Modern Paganism), New York: Knopf 1977.\",\n \"–––, 1988, Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist, New Haven: Yale University Press.\",\n \"Guerlac, Henry, 1981,Newton on the Continent, Ithaca.\",\n \"Gurrado, Antonio, 2013, Voltaire cattolico, Torino: Lindau.\",\n \"Hagengruber, Ruth (ed.), 2011, Emilie du Châtelet between Leibniz and Newton, Dordrecht: Springer.\",\n \"Ḥadīd, Javādī, 2012, Voltaire et l’Islam, Ozoir la Ferriere : Albouraq.\",\n \"Hellman, Lilian, 1980, Dorothy Parker, John La Touche, Richard Wilbur, and Leonard Bernstein, 1956–1957, Candide, An Operetta in Two Acts, New York: Jaini Publications.\",\n \"Hutchison, Ross, 1991, Locke in France: 1688–1734, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.\",\n \"Iltis, Carolyn, 1977, “Madame du Châtelet’s metaphysics and mechanics”, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 8: 29–48.\",\n \"Israel, Jonathan, 2000, The Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2006, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2009, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2011, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2014, Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Jacob, Margaret, 1981, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans, London: Cornerstone Book Publishers.\",\n \"Kramnick, Isaac, 1968, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Lanson, Gustave, 1894, Histoire de la littérature française, Paris: Hachette.\",\n \"Lanson, Gustave, 1906, Voltaire, Paris: Hachette.\",\n \"Libby, Margaret Sherwood, 1935, The Attitude of Voltaire to Magic and the Sciences, New York: Columbia University Press, 1935.\",\n \"Lilti, Antoine, 2005, Le monde des salons. Sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle, Paris: Fayard.\",\n \"Mason, Haydn Trevor, 1963, Pierre Bayle and Voltaire, London: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1975, Voltaire, New York: St. Martin’s.\",\n \"Masseau, Didier, 1994, L’Invention de l’intellectual dans l’Europe du XVIIIe siècle, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.\",\n \"Mattei, Silvia, 2010, Voltaire et les voyages de la raison, Paris: Harmattan.\",\n \"Maurois, André, 1935, Voltaire, Paris: Gallimard.\",\n \"Mauzi, Robert, 1960, L’idée du bonheur dans la litterature et la pensée francaises au XVIIIe siècle, Paris: A. Colin.\",\n \"McKenna, Antony, 1994, Écraser l’infame, 1759–1770, Voltaire en son temps (Volume 4), René Pomeau (ed.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.\",\n \"McMahon, Darrin M., 2001, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-enlightenment and the Making of Modernity, New York: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"McNutt, Jennifer Powell, 2013, Calvin meets Voltaire: the clergy of Geneva in the age of enlightenment, 1685–1798, Burlington: Ashgate.\",\n \"Melton, James Van Horn, 2001, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Méricam-Bourdet, Myrtille, 2012, Voltaire et l’écriture de l’histoire: un enjeu politique, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.\",\n \"Mervaud, Christiane, 1991, De la cour au jardin, 1750–1759, Voltaire en son temps (Volume 3), René Pomeau (ed.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.\",\n \"Mitchell, Harvey, 2104, Voltaire’s Jews and modern Jewish identity: rethinking the Enlightenment, London: Routledge.\",\n \"Morize, André, 1909, L’Apologie du luxe au XVIIIe Siècle: “Le Mondain” et ses Sources, Paris: H. Didier.\",\n \"Neiertz, Patrick, 2012, Voltaire et l’économie politique, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.\",\n \"Northeast, Catherine M., 1991, The Parisian Jesuits and the Enlightenment, 1700–1762, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.\",\n \"Orieux, Jean, 1966, Voltaire, ou la Royauté de l’esprit, Paris: Flammarion.\",\n \"Palmer, Robert R., 1939, Catholics and Unbelievers in 18th Century France, Princeton: Princeton University Press.\",\n \"Pappas, John N., 1957, Berthier’s Journal de Trevoux and the Philosophes (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, Volume 3), Geneva: Institut and Musée Voltaire.\",\n \"–––, 1962, Voltaire and d’Alembert, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.\",\n \"Pearson, Roger, 1993, The Fables of Reason: A Study of Voltaire’s “Contes philosophiques”, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"–––, 2005, Voltaire Almighty: A Life in Pursuit of Freedom, London: Bloomsbury Publishing.\",\n \"Perry, Norma, 1975, Sir Everard Fawkener, friend and correspondent of Voltaire, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.\",\n \"Pettit, Alexander, 1997, Illusory Consensus: Bolingbroke and the Polemical Responses to Walpole, 1730–1737, Newark: University of Delaware Press.\",\n \"Pomeau, René, 1969, La réligion de Voltaire, Paris: Nizet.\",\n \"–––, 1985, D’Arouet à Voltaire, 1694–1734, Voltaire en son temps (Volume 1), René Pomeau (ed.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.\",\n \"–––, 1994, On a voulu l’enterrer, 1770–1791, Voltaire en son temps (Volume 5), René Pomeau (ed.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.\",\n \"Pomeau, René (ed)., 1985–1994, Voltaire en son temps, 5 vols., Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.\",\n \"Popkin, Richard Henry, 1979, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza, Berkeley: University of California Press.\",\n \"Proust, Jacques, 1962, Diderot et l’Encyclopédie, Paris: Slatkine.\",\n \"Rasmussen, Dennis Carl, 2014, The pragmatic enlightenment: recovering the liberalism of Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Rousseau, André Michel, 1976, L’Angleterre et Voltaire (1718–1789), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.\",\n \"Saigey, Émile, 1873, Les sciences au XVIIIe siècle: la physique de Voltaire, Paris: G. Baillière.\",\n \"Schlereth, Thomas J., 1977, The cosmopolitan ideal in Enlightenment thought, its form and function in the ideas of Franklin, Hume, and Voltaire, 1694–1790, South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.\",\n \"Shank, J.B., 2008, The Newton Wars and the Beginning of the French Enlightenment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.\",\n \"Sharpe, Matthew, 2015, “On a Neglected Argument in French Philosophy: Sceptical Humanism in Montaigne, Voltaire and Camus”, Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory, 16(1): 1–26.\",\n \"Spink, John Stephenson, 1960, French Free-thought from Gassendi to Voltaire, London: University of London, Athlone Press.\",\n \"Terrall, Mary, 2002, The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.\",\n \"Tlili, Mahbouba Saï, 2009, Voltaire et l’Islam Tunis: Arabesques.\",\n \"Torrey, Norman L., 1930, Voltaire and the English Deists, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2nd edition, Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1967.\",\n \"–––,1938, The Spirit of Voltaire, New York: Russell and Russell, 2nd edition, 1968.\",\n \"Undank, Jack, 1989, “Portrait of the Philosopher as Tramp”, in A New History of French Literature, Dennis Hollier (ed.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 421–428.\",\n \"Vaillot, René, 1988, Avec madame Du Châtelet, 1734–1749, Voltaire en son temps (Volume 2), René Pomeau (ed.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.\",\n \"Van Kley, Dale, 1975, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits in France, 1757–1767, New Haven: Yale University Press.\",\n \"Vercruysse, Jeroom, 1966, Voltaire et la Holland, Genève: Institut et Musée Voltaire.\",\n \"Vernière, Paul, 1954, Spinoza et la pensée française avant la Révolution, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.\",\n \"Wade, Ira Owen, 1938, The Clandestine Organization and Diffusion of Philosophic Ideas in France from 1700 to 1750, Princeton: Princeton University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1941, Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet: An Essay on the Intellectual Activity at Cirey, Princeton: Princeton University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1947, Studies on Voltaire with Some Unpublished Papers of Mme. du Châtelet, Princeton: Princeton University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1969, The Intellectual Devevelopment of Voltaire, Princeton: Princeton University Press.\",\n \"Zinsser, Judith, 2006, La Dame d’Esprit: A Biography of the Marquise du Châtelet, New York: Viking.\",\n \"Zinsser, Judith and Hayes, Julie (eds.), 2006, Emilie du Châtelet: Rewriting Enlightenment Philosophy and Science, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../clarke/","text":"Clarke, Samuel"},{"href":"../descartes/","text":"Descartes, René"},{"href":"../hedonism/","text":"hedonism"},{"href":"../hume-newton/","text":"Hume, David: Newtonianism and Anti-Newtonianism"},{"href":"../leibniz/","text":"Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm"},{"href":"../liberty-positive-negative/","text":"liberty: positive and negative"},{"href":"../newton/","text":"Newton, Isaac"},{"href":"../skepticism/","text":"skepticism"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../clarke/\",\n \"text\": \"Clarke, Samuel\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../descartes/\",\n \"text\": \"Descartes, René\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../hedonism/\",\n \"text\": \"hedonism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../hume-newton/\",\n \"text\": \"Hume, David: Newtonianism and Anti-Newtonianism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../leibniz/\",\n \"text\": \"Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../liberty-positive-negative/\",\n \"text\": \"liberty: positive and negative\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../newton/\",\n \"text\": \"Newton, Isaac\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../skepticism/\",\n \"text\": \"skepticism\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":79,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"arrows-theorem"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Arrow’s Theorem"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Mon Oct 13, 2014; substantive revision Tue Nov 26, 2019"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nKenneth Arrow’s “impossibility” theorem—or\n“general possibility” theorem, as he called\nit—answers a very basic question in the theory of collective\ndecision-making. Say there are some alternatives to choose among. They\ncould be policies, public projects, candidates in an election,\ndistributions of income and labour requirements among the members of a\nsociety, or just about anything else. There are some people whose\npreferences will inform this choice, and the question is: which\nprocedures are there for deriving, from what is known or can be found\nout about their preferences, a collective or “social”\nordering of the alternatives from better to worse? The answer is\nstartling. Arrow’s theorem says there are no such procedures\nwhatsoever—none, anyway, that satisfy certain apparently quite\nreasonable assumptions concerning the autonomy of the people and the\nrationality of their preferences. The technical framework in which\nArrow gave the question of social orderings a precise sense and its\nrigorous answer is now widely used for studying problems in welfare\neconomics. The impossibility theorem itself set much of the agenda for\ncontemporary social choice theory. Arrow accomplished this while still\na graduate student. In 1972, he received the Nobel Prize in economics\nfor his contributions."],"string":"[\n \"\\nKenneth Arrow’s “impossibility” theorem—or\\n“general possibility” theorem, as he called\\nit—answers a very basic question in the theory of collective\\ndecision-making. Say there are some alternatives to choose among. They\\ncould be policies, public projects, candidates in an election,\\ndistributions of income and labour requirements among the members of a\\nsociety, or just about anything else. There are some people whose\\npreferences will inform this choice, and the question is: which\\nprocedures are there for deriving, from what is known or can be found\\nout about their preferences, a collective or “social”\\nordering of the alternatives from better to worse? The answer is\\nstartling. Arrow’s theorem says there are no such procedures\\nwhatsoever—none, anyway, that satisfy certain apparently quite\\nreasonable assumptions concerning the autonomy of the people and the\\nrationality of their preferences. The technical framework in which\\nArrow gave the question of social orderings a precise sense and its\\nrigorous answer is now widely used for studying problems in welfare\\neconomics. The impossibility theorem itself set much of the agenda for\\ncontemporary social choice theory. Arrow accomplished this while still\\na graduate student. In 1972, he received the Nobel Prize in economics\\nfor his contributions.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. The Will of the People?","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. Arrow’s Framework","sub_toc":["2.1 Individual Preferences","2.2 Multiple Profiles","2.3 Social Welfare Functions"]},{"content_title":"3. Impossibility","sub_toc":["3.1 These Conditions…","3.2 …are Incompatible"]},{"content_title":"4. The Conditions, again","sub_toc":["4.1 Unrestricted Domain","4.2 Social Ordering","4.3 Weak Pareto","4.4 Non-Dictatorship","4.5 Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives"]},{"content_title":"5. Possibilities","sub_toc":["5.1 Domain Restrictions","5.2 More Ordinal Information","5.3 Even More Ordinal Information: Scores and Grades","5.4 Cardinal Information"]},{"content_title":"6. Reinterpretations","sub_toc":["6.1 Judgment Aggregation","6.2 Multi-Criterial Decision","6.3 Overall Similarity"]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. The Will of the People?\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Arrow’s Framework\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"2.1 Individual Preferences\",\n \"2.2 Multiple Profiles\",\n \"2.3 Social Welfare Functions\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Impossibility\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"3.1 These Conditions…\",\n \"3.2 …are Incompatible\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. The Conditions, again\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"4.1 Unrestricted Domain\",\n \"4.2 Social Ordering\",\n \"4.3 Weak Pareto\",\n \"4.4 Non-Dictatorship\",\n \"4.5 Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Possibilities\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"5.1 Domain Restrictions\",\n \"5.2 More Ordinal Information\",\n \"5.3 Even More Ordinal Information: Scores and Grades\",\n \"5.4 Cardinal Information\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. Reinterpretations\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"6.1 Judgment Aggregation\",\n \"6.2 Multi-Criterial Decision\",\n \"6.3 Overall Similarity\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["Some of the trouble with social orderings is visible in a simple\nbut important example. Say there are three\nalternatives \\(A\\), \\(B\\) and \\(C\\) to choose\namong. There is a group of three people 1, 2 and 3 whose preferences\nare to inform this choice, and they are asked to rank the alternatives\nby their own lights from better to worse. Their individual preference\norderings turn out to be:","That is, person 1 prefers \\(A\\) to \\(B\\),\nprefers \\(B\\) to \\(C\\), and prefers \\(A\\)\nto \\(C\\); person 2 prefers \\(B\\) to \\(C\\), and so\non. Now, we might hope somehow to arrive at a single\n“social” ordering of the alternatives that reflects the\npreferences of all three. Then we could choose whichever alternative\nis, socially, best—or, if there is a tie for first place, we\ncould choose some alternative that is as good as any other. Suppose,\ntaking the alternatives pair by pair, we put the matter to a vote: we\ncount one alternative as socially preferred to another if\nthere are more voters who prefer it than there are who prefer the\nother one. We determine in this way that \\(A\\) is socially\npreferred to \\(B\\), since two voters (1 and 3) prefer \\(A\\)\nto \\(B\\), but only one (voter 2) prefers \\(B\\)\nto \\(A\\). Similarly, there is a social preference for \\(B\\)\nto \\(C\\). We might therefore expect to find that \\(A\\) is\nsocially preferred to \\(C\\). By this reckoning, though, it is\njust the other way around, since there are two voters who\nprefer \\(C\\) to \\(A\\). We do not have a\nsocial ordering of the alternatives at all. We have\na cycle. Starting from any alternative, moving to a socially\npreferred one, and from there to the next, you soon find\nyourself back where you \nstarted.[1]","This is the “paradox of voting”. Discovered by the\nMarquis de Condorcet (1785), it shows that possibilities for\nchoosing rationally can be lost when individual preferences are\naggregated into social preferences. Voter 1 has \\(A\\) at the top\nof his individual ordering. This voter’s preferences can\nbe maximized, by choosing \\(A\\). The preferences of 2 or\n3 can also be maximized, by choosing instead their maxima, \\(B\\)\nor \\(C\\). Pairwise majority decision doesn’t result in a social\nmaximum, though. \\(A\\) isn’t one because a majority prefers\nsomething else, \\(C\\). Likewise, \\(B\\) and \\(C\\) are\nnot social maxima. The individual preferences lend themselves to\nmaximization; but, because they cycle, the social preferences do\nnot.","Are there other aggregation procedures that are better than\npairwise majority decision, or do the different ones have shortcomings\nof their own? Condorcet, his contemporary Jean Charles de Borda\n(1781), and later Charles Dodgson (1844) and Duncan Black (1948),\namong others, all addressed this question by studying various\nprocedures and comparing their properties. Arrow broke new ground by\ncoming at it from the opposite direction. Starting with various\nrequirements that aggregation procedures might be expected to meet, he\nasked which procedures fill the bill. Among his requirements\nis Social Ordering, which insists that the result of\naggregation is always an ordering of the alternatives, never a\ncycle. After the introduction in\n Section 2 of\nthe technical framework that Arrow set up in order to study social\nchoice,\n Section 3.1 sets out further conditions\nthat he imposed. Briefly, these are: Unrestricted Domain\nwhich says that aggregation procedures must be able to handle any\nindividual preferences at all; Weak Pareto, which requires\nthem to respect unanimous individual\npreferences; Non-Dictatorship, which rules out procedures by\nwhich social preferences always agree with the strict preferences of\nsome one individual; and finally Independence of Irrelevant\nAlternatives, which says that the social comparison among any two\ngiven alternatives is to depend on individual preferences among only\nthat pair. Arrow’s theorem, stated in\n Section 3.2, tells us that, except in\n the very simplest of cases, no\naggregation procedure whatsoever meets all the requirements.","The tenor of Arrow’s theorem is deeply antithetical to the\npolitical ideals of the Enlightenment. It turns out that Condorcet’s\nparadox is indeed not an isolated anomaly, the failure of one specific\nvoting method. Rather, it manifests a much wider problem with the very\nidea of collecting many individual preferences into one. On the face\nof it, anyway, there simply cannot be a common will of all the people\nconcerning collective decisions, that assimilates the tastes and\nvalues of all the individual men and women who make up a society.","There are some who, following Riker (1982), take Arrow’s theorem to\nshow that democracy, conceived as government by the will of the\npeople, is an incoherent illusion. Others argue that some conditions\nof the theorem are unreasonable, and from their point of view the\nprospects for collective choice look much brighter. After presenting\nthe theorem itself, this entry will take up some main points of\ncritical discussion. Section 4 considers the\nmeaning and scope of Arrow’s conditions. Section 5\ndiscusses aggregation procedures that are available when not all of\nArrows conditions need be satisfied, or when different underlying\nassumptions are made about the nature of social\nchoice. Section 6 concludes with an overview of\nproposals to study within Arrow’s technical framework certain\naggregation problems other than the one that concerned him. ","Amartya Sen once expressed regret that the theory of social choice\ndoes not share with poetry the amiable characteristic of communicating\nbefore it is understood (Sen 1986). Arrow’s theorem is not especially\ndifficult to understand and much about it is readily communicated, if\nnot in poetry, then at least in plain English. Informal presentations\ngo only so far, though, and where they stop sometimes\nmisunderstandings start. This exposition uses a minimum of technical\nlanguage for the sake of clarity."],"section_title":"1. The Will of the People?","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["The problem of finding an aggregation procedure arises, as Arrow\nframed it, in connection with some given alternatives between which\nthere is a choice is to be made. The nature of these alternatives\ndepends on the kind of choice problem that is being studied. In the\ntheory of elections, the alternatives are people who might stand as\ncandidates in an election. In welfare economics they are different\nstates of a society, such as distributions of income and labour\nrequirements. The alternatives conventionally are referred to using\nlower case letters from the end of the alphabet\nas \\(x, y, z, \\ldots\\); the set of all\nthese alternatives is \\(X\\). The people whose tastes and values\nwill inform the choice are assumed to be finite in number, and they\nare enumerated \\(1, \\ldots, n\\).","Arrow’s problem arises, then, only after some alternatives\nand people have been fixed. It is for them that an aggregation\nprocedure is sought. Crucially, though, this problem\narises before relevant information about the people’s\npreferences among the alternatives has been gathered, whether that is\nby polling or some other method for eliciting or determining\npreferences. The question that Arrow’s theorem answers is, more\nprecisely, this: Which procedures are there for arriving at a social\nordering of some given alternatives, on the basis of some given\npeople’s preferences among them, no matter what these preferences turn\nout to be?","In practice, meanwhile, we sometimes must select a procedure for\nmaking social decisions without knowing for which alternatives and\npeople it will be used. In recurring elections for some public office,\nfor instance, there is a different slate of candidates each time, and\na different population of voters, and we must use the same voting\nmethod to determine the winner, no matter who the candidates and\nvoters are and no matter how many of them there happen to be. Such\nprocedures are not directly available for study within Arrow’s\nframework, with its fixed set \\(X\\) of alternatives and people\n\\(1, \\ldots, n\\). Arrow’s theorem is still relevant to them,\nthough. It tells us that even when the alternatives and\npeople are held fixed, then still there is no “good”\nmethod for deriving social orderings. Now, if there is no good method\nfor voting even once, with the particular candidates and voters who\nare involved on that occasion, then nor, presumably, is there a good\nmethod that can be used repeatedly, with different candidates and\nvoters each time."],"section_title":"2. Arrow’s Framework","subsections":[{"content":["Arrow assumed that social orderings will be derived, if at all,\nfrom information about people’s preferences. This information is, in\nhis framework, merely ordinal. It is the kind of information\nthat is implicated in Condorcet’s paradox of voting,\nin Section 1, where each person ranks the\nalternatives from better to worse but there is nothing beyond this\nabout how strong anybody’s preferences are, or about how the\npreferences of one person compare in strength to those of another. In\nconfining aggregation procedures to ordinal information, Arrow argued\nthat:\n"," [I]t seems to make no sense to add the utility of\none individual, a psychic magnitude in his mind, with the utility of\nanother individual. (Arrow 1951 [1963]: 11)\n"," His point was that even if people do have\nstronger and weaker preferences, and even if the strengths of their\npreferences can somehow be measured and made available as a basis for\nsocial decisions, nevertheless ordinal information is all that\nmatters because preferences are “interpersonally\nincomparable”. Intuitively, what this means is that there is no\nsaying how much more strongly someone must prefer one thing to\nanother in order to make up for the fact that someone else’s\npreference is just the other way around. Arrow saw no reason to\nprovide aggregation procedures with information about the strength of preferences\nbecause he thought that they cannot put such information to\nmeaningful use. ","Accordingly, the preferences of individual people are represented\nin Arrow’s framework by binary relations \\(R_{i}\\) among the\nalternatives: \\(xR_{i}y\\) means that individual \\(i\\) weakly\nprefers alternative \\(x\\) to alternative \\(y\\). That is, either\n\\(i\\) strictly prefers \\(x\\) to \\(y\\), or else \\(i\\)\nis indifferent between them, finding them equally good. Each\nindividual preference relation \\(R_{i}\\) is assumed to\nbe connected (for all alternatives \\(x\\) and \\(y\\), either\n\\(xR_{i}y\\), or \\(yR_{i}x\\), or both) and transitive (for all\n\\(x\\), \\(y\\) and \\(z\\), if \\(xR_{i}y\\) and \\(yR_{i}z\\), then\n\\(xR_{i}z\\)). That these relations have these structural properties\nwas, for Arrow, a matter of the “rationality” of the\npreferences they represent; for further discussion, see the entries on\nPreferences and Philosophy of Economics. Connected, transitive\nrelations are called weak orderings. They are\n“weak” in that they allow ties—in this connection,\nindifference.\n","A preference profile is a list \\(\\langle R_{1}, \\ldots,\nR_{n}\\rangle\\) of weak orderings of the set \\(X\\) of alternatives, one\nfor each of the people \\(1, \\ldots, n\\). The list of three\nindividual orderings in the paradox of voting is an example of a\npreference profile for the alternatives \\(A\\), \\(B\\), and \\(C\\) and people\n1, 2, and 3. A profile is a representation of the individual\npreferences of everybody who will be consulted in the choice among the\nalternatives. It is in the form of profiles that Arrow’s aggregation\nprocedures receive information about individual preferences. Often it\nis convenient to write \\(\\langle R_{i}\\rangle\\) instead of \\(\\langle\nR_{1}, \\ldots, R_{n}\\rangle\\). Other profiles are written \\(\\langle\nR^*_{i}\\rangle\\), and so on.","In restricting individual inputs to weak orderings of the\nalternatives, Arrow overlooked the possibility that people could input\ninformation about their preferences in the form of ordinal scores or\ngrades. Graded inputs enable an “escape” from Arrow’s\nimpossibility that is explained in Section\n5.3. Amartya Sen extended Arrow’s framework to take into account\nnot only ordinal information about people’s preferences among pairs of\nalternatives, but also cardinal information about the utility\nthey derive from each one. In this way he was able to investigate the\nconsequences of other assumptions than Arrow’s about the measurability\nand interpersonal comparability of individual\npreferences. See Section 5.4 and the\nentry social choice theory for details\nand references."],"subsection_title":"2.1 Individual Preferences"},{"content":["Arrow required aggregation procedures to derive social orderings\nfrom more than just a single profile, representing\neveryone’s actual preferences. In his framework they must\nreckon with many profiles, representing preferences that the\npeople could have.","Variety among preferences is the result, in Arrow’s account, of the\ndifferent standards by which we assess our options. Our preferences\ndepend on our “tastes” in personal consumption but\nimportantly, for social choice, they also depend on our socially\ndirected “values”. Now, we are to some extent free to have\nvarious tastes, values, and preferences; and we are free, also, to\nhave these independently of one another. Any individual can have a\nrange of preferences, then, and for any given sets of people and\nalternatives there are many possible preference profiles. One profile\n\\(\\langle R_{i}\\rangle\\) represents the preferences of these people\namong their alternatives in, if you will, one possible world. Another\nprofile \\(\\langle\nR^*_{i}\\rangle\\) represents preferences of the same\npeople, and among the same alternatives, but in another possible world\nwhere their tastes and values are different.","Arrow’s rationale for requiring aggregation procedures to handle\nmany profiles was epistemic. As he framed the question of collective\nchoice, a procedure is sought for deriving a social ordering of some\ngiven alternatives on the basis of some given people’s tastes and\nvalues. It is sought, though, before it is known just what these\ntastes and values happen to be. The variety among profiles to be\nreckoned with is a measure, in Arrow’s account of the matter, of how\nmuch is known or assumed about everybody’s preferences a\npriori, which is to say before these have been elicited. When\nless is known, there are more profiles from which a social ordering\nmight have to be derived. When more is known, there are fewer of\nthem.","There are other reasons for working with many profiles, even when\npeople’s actual preferences are known fully in advance. Serge Kolm (1996)\nsuggested that counterfactual preferences are relevant when we\ncome to justify the use of some given procedure.\nSensitivity analysis, used to manage uncertainty about errors in the\ninput, and to determine which information is critical in the sense\nthat the output turns on it, also requires that procedures handle a\nrange of inputs.","With many profiles in play there can be “interprofile”\nconditions on aggregation procedures. These coordinate the results of\naggregation at several profiles at once. One such condition that plays\na crucial role in Arrow’s theorem is Independence of Irrelevant\nAlternatives. It requires that whenever everybody’s preferences\namong two alternatives are in one profile the same as in another, the\ncollective ordering must also be the same at the two profiles, as far\nas these alternatives are concerned. There is to be this much\nsimilarity among social orderings even as people’s tastes and values\nchange. Sections 3.1\nand 4.5 discuss in more detail the meaning of\nthis controversial requirement, and the extent to which it is\nreasonable to impose it on aggregation procedures.","Ian Little raised the following objection in an early discussion\nof (Arrow 1951):","\nIf tastes change, we may expect a new ordering of all the\nconceivable states; but we do not require that the difference between\nthe new and the old ordering should bear any particular relation to\nthe changes of taste which have occurred. We have, so to speak, a new\nworld and a new order; and we do not demand correspondence between the\nchange in the world and the change in the order (Little 1952:\n423–424).\n","Little apparently agreed with Arrow that there might be a different\nsocial ordering were people’s tastes different, but unlike Arrow he\nthought that it wouldn’t have to be similar to the actual or current\nordering in any special way. Little’s objection was taken to support\nthe “single profile” approach to social welfare judgments\nof Abram Bergson (1938) and Paul Samuelson (1947), and there was a\ndebate about which approach was best, theirs or Arrow’s. Arguably,\nwhat was at issue in this debate was not—or should not have\nbeen—whether aggregation procedures must handle more than a\nsingle preference profile, but instead whether there should be any\ncoordination of the output at different profiles. Among others Sen\n(1977) and Fleurbaey and Mongin (2005) have made this point. If they\nare right then the substance of Little’s objection can be accommodated\nwithin Arrow’s multi-profile framework simply by not imposing any\ninterprofile constraints. Be this as it may, Arrow’s framework is\nnowadays the dominant one. "],"subsection_title":"2.2 Multiple Profiles"},{"content":["Sometimes a certain amount is known about everybody’s preferences\nbefore these have been elicited. Profiles that are compatible with\nwhat is known represent preferences that the people could have, and\nmight turn out actually to have, and it is from these\n“admissible” profiles that we may hope to derive social\norderings. Technically, a domain, in Arrow’s framework, is a\nset of admissible profiles, each concerning the same alternatives \\(X\\)\nand people \\(1, \\ldots, n\\). A social welfare function \\(f\\)\nassigns to each profile \\(\\langle R_{i}\\rangle\\) in some domain a binary\nrelation \\(f\\langle R_{i}\\rangle\\) on \\(X\\). Intuitively, \\(f\\) is an\naggregation procedure and \\(f\\langle R_{i}\\rangle\\) represents the\nsocial preferences that it derives from \\(\\langle R_{i}\\rangle\\).\nArrow’s social welfare functions are sometimes called\n“constitutions”.","Arrow incorporated into the notion of a social welfare function the\nfurther requirement that \\(f\\langle R_{i}\\rangle\\) is always a weak\nordering of the set \\(X\\) of alternatives. Informally speaking, this\nmeans that the output of the social welfare function must always be a\nranking of the alternatives from better to worse, perhaps with\nties. It may never be a cycle. This requirement will appear here, as\nit does in other contemporary presentations of Arrow’s theorem, as a\nseparate condition of Social Ordering that social welfare\nfunctions might be required to meet. See\n Section 3.1. This way, we can consider the\n consequences of dropping this\ncondition without changing any basic parts of the framework.\nSee Section 4.2.","Arrow established a convention that is still widely observed of\nusing ‘\\(R\\)’ to denote the social preference derived from\n“\\(\\langle R_{i}\\rangle\\)”. The social welfare function used to derive it\nis, in his notation, left implicit. One advantage of writing\n‘\\(f\\langle R_{i}\\rangle\\)’ instead of ‘\\(R\\)’ is\nthat when we state the conditions of the impossibility theorem, in the\nnext section, the social welfare function will figure explicitly in\nthem. This makes it quite clear that what these conditions constrain\nis the functional relationship between individual and social\npreferences. Focusing attention on this was an important innovation of\nArrow’s approach."],"subsection_title":"2.3 Social Welfare Functions"}]},{"main_content":["With the conceptual framework now in\nplace, Section 3.1 sets out the\n“conditions” or constraints that Arrow imposed on social\nwelfare functions, and Section 3.2 states the\ntheorem itself. Section 4 explains the\nconditions more fully, discusses reasons that Arrow gave for imposing\nthem, and considers whether it is proper to do so. ","Arrow’s conditions often are called axioms, and his approach is\nsaid to be axiomatic. This might be found misleading. Unlike axioms of\nlogic or geometry, Arrow’s conditions are not supposed to express more\nor less indubitable truths, or to constitute an implicit definition of\nthe object of study. Arrow himself took them to be questionable\n“value judgments” that “express the doctrines of\ncitizens’ sovereignty and rationality in a very general form”\n(Arrow 1951 [1963]: 31). Indeed, as we will see\nin Section 4, and as Arrow himself recognized,\nsometimes it is not even desirable that social welfare functions\nshould satisfy all conditions of the impossibility theorem.","Arrow restated the conditions in the second edition of Social\nChoice and Individual Values (Arrow 1963). They appear here in\nthe canonical form into which they have settled since then."],"section_title":"3. Impossibility","subsections":[{"content":["A first requirement is that the social welfare function \\(f\\) can\nhandle any combination of any individual preferences at all:","\nUnrestricted Domain (U): The domain of \\(f\\)\nincludes every list \\(\\langle R_{1}, \\ldots, R_{n}\\rangle\\) of \\(n\\)\nweak orderings of \\(X\\).\n","Condition U requires that \\(f\\) is defined for each\n“logically possible” profile of individual preferences. A\nsecond requirement is that, in each case, \\(f\\) produces an ordering of\nthe alternatives, perhaps with ties:","\nSocial Ordering (SO): For any profile \\(\\langle\nR_{i}\\rangle\\) in the domain, \\(f\\langle R_{i}\\rangle\\) is a weak\nordering of \\(X\\).\n","Notice that, as the paradox of voting in\n Section 1 shows, these two conditions\n U and SO by\nthemselves already rule out aggregating preferences by pairwise\nmajority decision, if there are at least three alternatives to choose\nbetween, and three people whose preferences are to be taken into\naccount.","To state the next requirements it is convenient to use some\nshorthand. For any given individual ordering \\(R_{i}\\), let \\(P_{i}\\) be\nthe strict or asymmetrical part of \\(R_{i}: xP_{i}y\\)\nif \\(xR_{i}y\\) but not \\(yR_{i}x\\). Intuitively, \\(xP_{i}y\\) means\nthat \\(i\\) really does prefer \\(x\\) to \\(y\\), in that \\(i\\) is not indifferent\nbetween them. Similarly, let \\(P\\) be the strict part of \\(f\\langle\nR_{i}\\rangle\\). The next condition of Arrow’s theorem is: ","\nWeak Pareto (WP): For any profile \\(\\langle\nR_{i}\\rangle\\) in the domain of \\(f\\), and any alternatives \\(x\\)\nand \\(y\\), if for all \\(i\\), \\(xP_{i}y\\),\nthen \\(xPy\\). \n","WP requires \\(f\\) to respect unanimous strict\npreferences. That is, whenever everyone strictly prefers one\nalternative to another, the social ordering that \\(f\\) derives must\nagree. Pairwise majority decision\nsatisfies \nWP.[2]\n Many other well-known voting methods such\nas Borda counting satisfy it as well (see\n Section 5.2). So WP requires\n that \\(f\\) is to this extent like\nthem.","The next condition ensures that social preferences are not based\nentirely on the preferences of any one person. Person \\(d\\) is\na dictator of \\(f\\) if for any alternatives \\(x\\) and \\(y\\), and\nfor any profile \\(\\langle\\ldots, R_{d},\\ldots\\rangle\\) in the domain of\n\\(f\\): if \\(xP_{d}y\\), then \\(xPy\\). When a dictator strictly prefers one\nthing to another, the society always does as well. Other people’s\npreferences can still influence social preferences. So can\n“non-welfare” features of the alternatives such as, in\nthe case of social states, the extent to which people are equal,\ntheir rights are respected, and so on. But all these can make a\ndifference only when the dictator is indifferent between two\nalternatives, having no strict preference one way or the other. The\ncondition is now simply:","\nNondictatorship (D): \\(f\\) has no dictator.\n","To illustrate, pick some person \\(d\\), any one at all, and from each\nprofile \\(\\langle R_{i}\\rangle\\) in the domain take the ordering \\(R_{d}\\)\nrepresenting the preferences of \\(d\\). Now, in each case, let the social\npreference be that. In other words, for each profile \\(\\langle\nR_{i}\\rangle\\), let \\(f\\langle R_{i}\\rangle\\) be \\(R_{d}\\). This social\nwelfare function \\(f\\) bases the social ordering entirely on the\npreferences of \\(d\\), its dictator. It is intuitively undemocratic\nand D rules it out.","To state the last condition of Arrow’s theorem, another piece of\nshorthand is handy. For any given relation \\(R\\), and any set \\(S\\), let\n\\(R|S\\) be the restriction of \\(R\\) to \\(S\\). It is that part of \\(R\\)\nconcerning just the elements of \n\\(S\\).[3]\n The restriction of \\(\\langle\nR_{1}, \\ldots, R_{n}\\rangle\\) to \\(S\\), written \\(\\langle\nR_{1}, \\ldots, R_{n}\\rangle|S\\), is just \\(\\langle R_{1}|S,\n\\ldots, R_{n}|S\\rangle\\). Take for instance the profile from the\nparadox of voting in Section 1:","Its restriction to the set \\(\\{A,C\\}\\) of alternatives is:","Now the remaining condition can be stated: ","\nIndependence of Irrelevant Alternatives (I): For\nall alternatives \\(x\\) and \\(y\\) in \\(X\\), and all profiles \\(\\langle\nR_{i}\\rangle\\) and \\(\\langle R^*_{i}\\rangle\\) in the domain of \\(f\\), if\n\\(\\langle R_{i}\\rangle|\\{x,y\\} = \\langle R^*_{i}\\rangle|\\{x,y\\}\\), then\n\\(f\\langle R_{i}\\rangle |\\{x,y\\} = f\\langle R^*_{i}\\rangle\n|\\{x,y\\}\\).\n","I says that whenever two profiles \\(\\langle R_{i}\\rangle\\)\nand \\(\\langle R^*_{i}\\rangle\\) are identical, as far as some\nalternatives \\(x\\) and \\(y\\) are concerned, so too must the social\npreference relations \\(f\\langle R_{i}\\rangle\\) and \\(f\\langle\nR^*_{i}\\rangle\\) be identical, as far as \\(x\\) and \\(y\\) are concerned. For\nexample, consider the profile:","Its restriction to the pair {\\(A\\),\\(C\\)} is identical to that of the\nprofile of the paradox of voting. Suppose the domain of a social\nwelfare function includes both of these profiles. Then, to\nsatisfy I, it must derive from each one the same social\npreference among \\(A\\) and \\(C\\). The social preference among \\(A\\) and \\(C\\)\nis, in this sense, to be “independent” of anybody’s\npreferences among either of them and the remaining\n“irrelevant” alternative \\(B\\). The same is to hold for any\ntwo profiles in the domain, and for any other pair taken from the set\n\\(X\\) = {\\(A\\), \\(B\\), \\(C\\)} of all alternatives. Some voting methods do not\nsatisfy I (see Section 5.2), but\npairwise majority decision does. To see whether \\(x\\) is socially\npreferred to \\(y\\), by this method, you need look no further than the\nindividual preferences among \\(x\\) and \\(y\\). "],"subsection_title":"3.1 These Conditions…"},{"content":["Arrow discovered that, except in the very simplest of cases, the\nfive conditions of Section 3.1 are\nincompatible.","\nArrow’s Theorem: Suppose there are more than two\nalternatives. Then no social welfare function \\(f\\)\nsatisfies U, SO, WP, D,\nand I.\n","Arrow (1951) has the original proof of this\n“impossibility” theorem. See among many other works Kelly\n1978, Campbell and Kelly 2002, Geanakoplos 2005 and Gaertner 2009 for\nvariants and different proofs."],"subsection_title":"3.2 …are Incompatible"}]},{"main_content":["Taken separately, the conditions of Arrow’s theorem do not seem\nsevere. Apparently, they ask of an aggregation procedure only that it\nwill come up with a social preference ordering no matter what\neverybody prefers (U and SO), that it will resemble\ncertain democratic arrangements in some ways (WP\nand I), and that it will not resemble certain undemocratic\narrangements in another way (D). Taken together, though,\nthese conditions exclude all possibility of deriving social\npreferences. It is time to consider them more closely. "],"section_title":"4. The Conditions, again","subsections":[{"content":["Arrow’s domain condition U says that the domain of the\nsocial welfare function includes every list of \\(n\\) weak orderings of\n\\(X\\). For example, suppose the alternatives are \\(A\\), \\(B\\), and \\(C\\), and\nthat the people are 1, 2, and 3. There are 13 weak orderings of three\nalternatives, so the unrestricted domain contains 2197 (that is,\n\\(13^{3}\\)) lists of weak orderings of \\(A\\), \\(B\\), and \\(C\\). A social\nwelfare function \\(f\\) for these alternatives and people, if it\nsatisfies U, maps each one of these “logically\npossible” preference profiles onto a collective preference among\n\\(A\\), \\(B\\), and \\(C\\).","In Arrow’s account, the different profiles in a domain represent\npreferences that the people might turn out to have. To\nimpose U, on his epistemic rationale, amounts to assuming\nthat they might have any preferences at all: it is only when their\npreferences could be anything that it makes sense to require the\nsocial welfare function to be ready for everything. Arrow wrote in\nsupport of U:\n"," If we do not wish to require any prior knowledge\nof the tastes of individuals before specifying our social welfare\nfunction, that function will have to be defined for every logically\npossible set of individual orderings. (Arrow 1951 [1963]: 24)\n","There have been misunderstandings. Some think U requires\nof social welfare functions that they can handle “any old”\nalternatives. It does nothing of the sort. What it requires is that the\nsocial welfare function can handle the widest possible range\nof preferences among whichever alternatives there are to\nchoose among, and whether there happen to be many of these or only a\nfew of them is beside the point: the domain of a social welfare\nfunction can be completely unrestricted even if there are in \\(X\\) just\ntwo alternatives. One way to sustain this unorthodox understanding\nof U is, perhaps, to think of Arrow’s \\(x, y, z, \\ldots\\) not as alternatives properly\nspeaking—not as candidates in elections, social states, or what\nhave you—but as names or labels that represent these on\ndifferent occasions for choosing. Then, it might be thought, variety\namong the alternatives to which the labels can be attached will generate\nvariety among the profiles that an aggregation procedure might be\nexpected to handle. Blackorby et al. (2006) toy with this idea at one\npoint, but they quickly set it aside. It does not seem to have been\nexplored in the literature.","Of course, there is nothing to keep anyone from reinterpreting\nArrow’s basic notions, including the set \\(X\\) of alternatives, in any\nway they like; a theorem is a theorem no matter what interpretation\nit is given. It is important to realize, though, that to interpret\n\\(x, y, z, \\ldots\\) as labels is not standard, and can\nonly make nonsense of much of the theory of social choice to which\nArrow’s theorem has given \nrise.[4]","Arrow already knew that U is a stronger domain condition\nthan is needed for an impossibility result. The free triple\nproperty and the chain property are weaker conditions\nthat replace U in some versions of Arrow’s theorem (Campbell\nand Kelly 2002). These versions, being more informative, are, from a\nlogical point of view, better. U is simpler to state than\ntheir domain conditions, though, and might be found more\nintuitive. Notice that the weaker domain conditions still require a\nlot of variety among profiles. A typical proof of an Arrow-style\nimpossibility theorem requires that the domain is unrestricted with\nrespect to some three alternatives. In this case there is always a\npreference profile like the one implicated in the paradox of voting\nin Section 1, from which pairwise majority\ndecision derives a cycle.","Whether it is sensible to impose U or any other domain\ncondition on a social welfare function depends very much on the\nparticulars of the choice problem being studied. Sometimes, in the\nnature of the alternatives under consideration, and the way in which\nindividual preferences among them are determined, imposing U\ncertainly is not appropriate. If for instance the alternatives are\ndifferent ways of dividing up a pie among some people, and it is known\nprior to selecting a social welfare function that these people are\nselfish, each caring only about the size of his own piece, then it\nmakes no obvious sense to require of a suitable function that it can\nhandle cases in which some people prefer to have less for themselves\nthan to have more. The social welfare function will never be called on\nto handle such cases for the simple reason that they will never arise.\nArrow made this point as follows:","\n[I]t has frequently been assumed or implied in welfare economics\nthat each individual values different social states solely according\nto his consumption under them. If this be the case, we should only\nrequire that our social welfare function be defined for those sets of\nindividual orderings which are of the type described; only such should\nbe admissible (Arrow 1951 [1963]: 24).\n","Section 5.1 considers some of the\npossibilities that open up when there is no need to reckon with all\n“logically possible” individual preferences."],"subsection_title":"4.1 Unrestricted Domain"},{"content":["Condition SO requires that the result of aggregating\nindividual preferences is always a weak ordering of the alternatives,\na binary relation among them that is both transitive and connected.\nIntuitively, the result has to be a ranking of the\nalternatives from better to worse, perhaps with ties. There is never\nto be a cycle of social preferences, like the one derived by pairwise\nmajority decision in the paradox of voting,\nin Section 1.","Arrow did not state SO as a separate\ncondition. He built it into the very notion of a social\nwelfare function, arguing that the result of aggregating\npreferences will have to be an ordering if it is to “reflect\nrational choice-making” (Arrow 1951 [1963]: 19). Criticized by\nBuchanan (1954) for transferring properties of individual\nchoice to collective choice, Arrow in the second edition of Social\nChoice and Individual Values gave a different rationale. There he\nargued that transitivity is important because it ensures that\ncollective choices are independent of the path taken to them (Arrow\n1951 [1963]: 120). He did not develop this idea further.","Charles Plott (1973) elaborated a suitable notion of path\nindependence. Suppose we arrive at our choice by what he\ncalled divide and conquer: first we divide the alternatives\ninto some smaller sets—say, because these are more\nmanageable—and we choose from each one. Then we gather together\nall the alternatives that we have chosen from the smaller sets, and we\nchoose again from among these. There are many ways of making the\ninitial division, and a choice procedure is said to be path\nindependent if the choice we arrive at in the end is independent\nof which division we start with (Plott 1973: 1080). In Arrow’s\naccount, social choices are made from some given\n“environment” \\(S\\) of feasible alternatives by maximizing a\nsocial ordering \\(R\\): the choice \\(C(S)\\) from among \\(S\\) is the set of\nthose \\(x\\) within \\(S\\) such that for any \\(y\\) within \\(S, xRy\\). It is not\ndifficult to see how intransitivity of \\(R\\) can result in path\ndependence. Consider again the paradox of voting\nof Section 1. \\(A\\) is strictly favoured above\n\\(B\\), and \\(B\\) above \\(C\\); but, contrary to transitivity, \\(C\\) is strictly\nfavoured above \\(A\\). Starting with the division \\(\\{\\{A,B\\}, \\{B,C\\}\\}\\),\nour choice from among \\(\\{A,B,C\\}\\) will be \\(\\{A\\}\\); but starting\ninstead with \\(\\{\\{A,C\\}, \\{B,C\\}\\}\\) we will arrive in the end at\n\\(\\{B\\}\\).","Plott’s analysis reveals a subtlety. The full strength\nof SO is not needed to secure path independence of\nchoice. It is sufficient that social preference is a (complete\nand) quasi-transitive relation, having a strict component\nthat is transitive but an indifference component that, perhaps, is\nnot transitive. Sen (1969: Theorem V) demonstrated the compatibility\nof this weaker requirement with all of Arrow’s other conditions, but\nnoted that the aggregation function he came up with would not\ngenerally be found attractive. Its unattractiveness was no\naccident. Allan Gibbard showed that the only social welfare functions\nmade available by allowing intransitivity of social indifference,\nwhile keeping Arrow’s other requirements in place, are what he\ncalled liberum veto oligarchies (Gibbard 1969, 2014). There\nhas in every case to be some group of individuals, the oligarchs,\nsuch that the society always strictly prefers one alternative to\nanother if all of the oligarchs strictly prefer it, but never does so\nif that would go against the strict preference of any\noligarch.[5] A\ndictatorship, in Arrow’s sense, is a liberum veto oligarchy of\none. Relaxing SO by limiting the transitivity requirement to\nstrict social preferences therefore does not seem a promising way of\nsecuring, in spite of Arrow’s theorem, the existence of acceptable\nsocial welfare functions.\n"],"subsection_title":"4.2 Social Ordering"},{"content":["Condition WP requires that whenever everybody ranks one\nalternative strictly above another the social ordering agrees. This\nhas long been a basic assumption in welfare economics and might seem\ncompletely uncontroversial. That the community should prefer one\nsocial state to another whenever each individual does, Arrow argued in\nconnection with compensation, is “not debatable except perhaps\non a philosophy of systematically denying people whatever they\nwant” (Arrow 1951 [1963]: 34).","But WP is not as harmless as it might seem, and in\ncombination with U it tightly constrains the possibilities\nfor social choice. This is evident from Sen’s (1970) demonstration\nthat these two conditions conflict with the idea that for each person\nthere is a personal domain of states of affairs, within which his\npreferences must prevail in case of conflict with others’. This\nimportant problem of the “Paretian libertarian” meanwhile\nhas its own extensive literature. For further discussion, see the\nentry social choice theory.","We may think of WP as a vestige of what Sen called:","\nWelfarism: The judgement of the relative goodness of\nalternative states of affairs must be based exclusively on, and taken\nas an increasing function of, the respective collections of\nindividual utilities in these states (Sen 1979: 468).\n","In Arrow’s ordinal framework, welfarism insists that individual\npreference orderings are the only basis for deriving social\npreferences. Non-welfare factors—physical characteristics of\nsocial states, people’s motives in having the preferences they do,\nrespect for rights, equality—none of these are to make any\ndifference except indirectly, through their reflections in individual\npreferences. WP asserts the demands of welfarism in the\nspecial case in which everybody’s strict preferences coincide. Sen\nargued that even these limited demands might be found excessive on\nmoral grounds (Sen 1979: Section IV). Section 4.5 \nhas further discussion of welfarism.\n\n"],"subsection_title":"4.3 Weak Pareto"},{"content":["Someone is a dictator, in Arrow’s sense, if whenever he strictly\nprefers one alternative to another the society always prefers it as\nwell. The preferences of people other than the dictator can still make\na difference, and so can non-welfare factors, but only when the\ndictator is indifferent between two alternatives, having no strict\npreference one way or the other. Arrow’s non-dictatorship\ncondition D says that there is to be no dictator. Plainly it\nrules out many undemocratic arrangements, such as identifying social\npreferences in every case with the individual preferences of some one\nperson. This apparently straightforward condition has attracted very\nlittle attention in the literature. ","In fact there is more to the non-dictatorship condition than meets\nthe eye. An Arrovian dictator is just someone whose strict preferences\ninvariably are a subset of the society’s strict preferences, and that\nby itself doesn’t mean that his preferences form a basis for social\npreferences, or that the dictator has any power or control over\nthese. Aanund Hylland once made a related point while objecting to the\nunreflective imposition of D in single profile analyses of\nsocial choice:","\nIn the single-profile model, a dictator is a\nperson whose individual preferences coincide with the social ones in\nthe one and only profile under consideration. Nothing is necessarily\nwrong with that; the decision process can be perfectly democratic, and\none person simply turns out to be on the winning side on all\nissues. (Hylland 1986: 51, footnote 10) ","The non-dictatorship condition for this reason sometimes goes too\nfar. Even pairwise majority voting, that paradigm of a democratic\nprocedure, is in Arrow’s sense sometimes a dictatorship. Consider\nZelig. He has no tastes, values or preferences of his own but\ntemporarily takes on those of another, whoever is close at hand. He is\na human chameleon, the ultimate\nconformist.[6]\nZelig one day finds himself on a committee of three that will choose\namong several options using the method of pairwise majority voting\nand, given his peculiar character, the range of individual orderings\nthat can arise is somewhat restricted. In each admissible profile, two\nof the three individual orderings are identical: Zelig’s and that of\nwhoever is seated closest to him at the committee\nmeeting.[7] Now\nsuppose it so happens that Zelig strictly prefers one option \\(x\\) to\nanother, \\(y\\). Then someone else does too; that makes two of the\nthree and so, when they vote, the result is a strict collective\npreference for \\(x\\) above \\(y\\). The committee’s decision procedure\nis, in Arrow’s sense, a dictatorship, and Zelig is the dictator. But\nof course really Zelig is a follower, not a leader, and majority\nvoting is as democratic as can be. It’s just that this one mad little\nfellow has a way of always ending up on the winning side.","Arrow imposed D in conjunction with the\nrequirement U that the domain is completely\nunrestricted. Perhaps this condition expresses something closer to its\nintended meaning then. With an unrestricted domain, a dictator, unlike\nZelig, is someone whose preferences conflict with everybody else’s in\na range of cases, and it is in each instance his preferences that\nagree with social preferences, not theirs. However this may be, the\nexample of Zelig shows that whether it is appropriate to\nimpose D on social welfare functions depends on the details\nof the choice problem at hand. The name of this condition is\nmisleading. Sometimes there is nothing undemocratic about having a\n“dictator”, in Arrow’s technical sense."],"subsection_title":"4.4 Non-Dictatorship"},{"content":["Arrow’s independence condition requires that whenever all\nindividual preferences among a pair of alternatives are the same in\none profile as they are in another, the social preference among these\nalternatives must also be the same for the two profiles. Speaking\nfiguratively, what this means is that when the social welfare function\ngoes about the work of aggregating individual orderings, it has to\ntake each pair of alternatives separately, paying no attention to\npreferences for alternatives other than them. Some aggregation\nprocedures work this way. Pairwise majority decision does: it counts\n\\(x\\) as weakly preferred to \\(y\\), socially, if as many people weakly\nprefer \\(x\\) to \\(y\\) as the other way around, and plainly there is no\nneed to look beyond \\(x\\) and \\(y\\) to find this out.","Condition I is not Arrow’s formulation. It is a simpler\none that has since become the standard in expositions of the\nimpossibility theorem. Arrow’s formulation concerns choices made from\nwithin various “environments” \\(S\\) of feasible options by\nmaximizing social orderings:","\nIndependence of Irrelevant Alternatives (choice\nversion): For all environments \\(S\\) within \\(X\\), and all profiles\n\\(\\langle R_{i}\\rangle\\) and \\(\\langle R^*_{i}\\rangle\\) in the domain of\n\\(f\\), if \\(\\langle R_{i}\\rangle|S = \\langle R^*_{i}\\rangle|S\\), then\n\\(C(S)= C^*(S)\\).\n","Here \\(C(S)\\) is the set of those options from \\(S\\) that are, in\nthe sense of the social ordering \\(f\\langle R_{i}\\rangle\\), as good as\nany other; and \\(C^*(S)\\) stands for the maxima by \\(f\\langle\nR^*_{i}\\rangle\\). This is Arrow’s Condition 3 (Arrow 1951 [1963]:\n27).[8] ","Iain McLean (2003) finds a first statement\nof Independence, and appreciation of its significance,\nalready in (Condorcet 1785). Meanwhile much controversy has surrounded\nthis condition, and not a little confusion. Some of each can be traced\nto an example with which Arrow sought to\nmotivate it. When one candidate in an election dies\nafter polling, he wrote,","\n[…] the choice to be made among the set \\(S\\) of surviving\ncandidates should be independent of the preferences of individuals for\ncandidates not in \\(S\\). […] Therefore, we may require of our\nsocial welfare function that the choice made by society from a given\nenvironment depend only on the orderings of individuals among the\nalternatives in that environment (Arrow 1951 [1963]: 26).\n","Evidently Arrow took this for his choice version\nof the independence condition. He continued:","\nAlternatively stated, if we consider two sets of individual\norderings such that, for each individual, his ordering of those\nparticular alternatives in a given environment is the same each time,\nthen we require that the choice made by society from that environment\nbe the same when individual values are given by the first set of\norderings as they are when given by the second (Arrow 1951 [1963]:\n26–27).\n","It is not clear why Arrow thought the case of the dead candidate\ninvolves different values and preference profiles. As he set the\nexample up, it is natural to imagine that everybody’s values and\npreferences stay the same while one candidate becomes unfeasible\n(“we’d all still prefer \\(A\\), but sadly he’s not with us any\nmore”). Apparently, then, Arrow’s example misses its mark. There\nhas been much discussion of this point in the literature. Hansson\n(1973) argues that Arrow confused his independence condition for\nanother; compare Bordes and Tideman (1991) for a contrary view. For\ndiscussion of several notions of independence whose differences have\nnot always been appreciated, see Ray (1973).","The following condition has also been called Independence\nof Irrelevant Alternatives:","\n(\\(I^*\\)) For all \\(x\\) and \\(y\\), and all \\(\\langle R_{i}\\rangle\\) and\n\\(\\langle R_{i}^*\\rangle\\) in the domain of \\(f\\), if for all \\(i: xR_{i}y\\)\nif and only if \\(xR^*_{i}y\\), then \\(x f\\langle R_{i}\\rangle y\\) if and\nonly if \\(x f\\langle R_{i}^*\\rangle y\\).\n","If the intention is to express Arrow’s independence condition this\nis a mistake because \\(I^*\\), though similar in appearance\nto I, has a different content. I says that whenever\neverybody’s preferences concerning a pair of options are the same in\none profile as they are in another, the social preference must also be\nthe same at the two profiles, as far as this pair is concerned. This\nis not what \\(I^*\\) says because the embedded antecedent ‘for\nall \\(i: xR_{i}y\\) if and only if \\(xR^*_{i}y\\)’ is satisfied\nnot only when everybody’s preferences among \\(x\\) and \\(y\\) are the\nsame in \\(\\langle R_{i}\\rangle\\) as they are in \\(\\langle\nR_{i}^*\\rangle\\), but in other instances as well. For example,\nsuppose that in \\(\\langle R_{i}\\rangle\\) everybody is indifferent\nbetween some social state \\(T\\) and another state \\(S\\) (in which case\nfor all \\(i\\), both \\(T R_{i} S\\) and \\(S R_{i} T\\)), while in\n\\(\\langle R_{i}^*\\rangle\\) everybody strictly prefers \\(T\\) to \\(S\\)\n(for all \\(i\\), \\(T R^*_{i} S\\) but not \\(S R^*_{i} T\\)). Then the\nantecedent ‘for all \\(i: T R_{i} S\\) if and only if \\(T R^*_{i}\nS\\)’ is satisfied, although individual preferences among \\(T\\)\nand \\(S\\) are not the same in the two profiles. \\(I^*\\) sometimes\nconstrains \\(f\\) though \\(I\\) does not and it is a more demanding\ncondition.","The additional demands of \\(I^*\\) are sometimes excessive. Let \\(T\\) be\nthe result of reforming some tried and true status quo, \\(S\\). Now\nsuppose we favor reform if it is generally thought that change will be\nfor the better, but not otherwise. Then we will be on the lookout for\na social welfare function \\(f\\) that derives a strict social preference\nfor \\(T\\) above \\(S\\) when everybody strictly prefers \\(T\\) to \\(S\\), but a\nstrict preference for \\(S\\) above \\(T\\) when everyone is indifferent\nbetween these states. \\(I^*\\) rules out\nevery \\(f\\) that conforms to this desideratum because it requires a weak\nsocial preference for \\(T\\) to \\(S\\) in both cases or in neither.","Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives might be said to\nrequire that the social comparison among any given pair of\nalternatives, say social states, depends only on individual\npreferences among this pair. This is correct but it leaves some room\nfor misunderstanding. I says that the\nonly preferences that count are those concerning just these\ntwo social states. That doesn’t mean that preferences are the only\nthing that counts, though. And, indeed, as far as I is\nconcerned, non-welfare features of the two states may also make a\ndifference. ","The doctrine that individual preferences are the only\nbasis for comparing the goodness of social states is welfarism\n(mentioned already in Section 4.3). An example\nillustrates how nasty it can be:","In the status quo \\(S\\), Peter is filthy rich and Paul is abjectly\npoor. Would it be better to take from Peter and give to Paul? Let \\(T\\)\nbe the social state resulting from transferring a little of Peter’s\nvast wealth to Paul. Paul prefers \\(T\\) to \\(S\\) (“I need to\neat”) and Peter prefers \\(S\\) to \\(T\\) (“not my\nproblem”). This is one case. Compare it to another. Social state\n\\(T^*\\) arises from a different status quo \\(S^*\\), also by taking from\nPeter and giving to Paul. This time, though, their fortunes are\nreversed. In \\(S^*\\) it is Peter who is poor and Paul is the rich one,\nso this is a matter of taking from the poor to give to the rich. Even\nso, we may assume, the pattern of Peter’s and Paul’s preferences is\nthe same in the second case as it is in the first, because each of\nthem prefers to have more for himself than to have less. Paul prefers\n\\(T^*\\) to \\(S^*\\) (“I need another Bugatti”) and Peter\nprefers \\(S^*\\) to \\(T^*\\) (“wish it were my problem”). Since\neverybody’s preferences are the same in the two cases, welfarism\nrequires that the relative social goodness is the same as well. In\nparticular, it allows us to count \\(T\\) socially better than \\(S\\) only if\nwe also count \\(T^*\\) better than \\(S^*\\). Whatever we think about taking\nfrom the rich to give to the poor, though, taking from the poor to\ngive to the rich is quite another thing. As Samuelson said of a\nsimilar case, “[o]ne need not be a doctrinaire egalitarian to be\nspeechless at this requirement” (Samuelson 1977: 83).","Condition I does not express welfarism. Applied to this\nexample, I states that there is to be no change in the social\ncomparison among the status quo \\(S\\) and the result \\(T\\) of\nredistribution unless Peter’s preferences among these states change,\nor Paul’s do (assume they are the only people involved). In this\nsense, the social preference among these states may be said to depend\n“only” on individual preferences among them. I\nsays the same about \\(S^*\\) and \\(T^*\\) or about any other pair of\nalternatives. But I is silent about any relationship between\nthe social comparison among \\(S\\) and \\(T\\), on the one hand, and the\nsocial comparison among \\(S^*\\) and \\(T^*\\), on the other. In particular,\nit leaves a social welfare function free to count \\(T\\) socially better\nthan \\(S\\) (for increasing equality), while also counting \\(T^*\\)\nworse than \\(S^*\\) (for decreasing equality). Intuitively\nspeaking, I allows a social welfare function to “shift\ngears” as we go from one pair of social states to the next,\ndepending on the non-welfare features encountered there. ","The condition that expresses welfarism is:","\nStrong Neutrality (SN): For all alternatives \\(x\\),\n\\(y\\), \\(z\\) and \\(w\\), and all profiles \\(\\langle R_{i}\\rangle\\) and \\(\\langle\nR_{i}^*\\rangle\\): IF for all \\(i\\): \\(xR_{i}y\\) if and only if \\(zR^*_{i}w\\),\nand \\(yR_{i}x\\) if and only if \\(wR^*_{i}z\\), THEN \\(x f\\langle\nR_{i}\\rangle y\\) if and only if \\(z f\\langle R_{i}^*\\rangle w\\), and \\(y\nf\\langle R_{i}\\rangle x\\) if and only if \\(w f\\langle R_{i}^*\\rangle\nz\\).\n"," SN is more demanding than \nI.[9]\n I requires consistency for each\npair of alternatives separately, as we go from one profile in the\ndomain to the next. SN also requires this, but in addition it requires consistency as\nwe go from one pair to the next, whether that is within a\nsingle profile or among several different ones. This is\nhow SN keeps non-welfare features from making any difference:\nby compelling the social welfare function to treat any two pairs of\nalternatives the same way, if the pattern of individual preference is\nthe same for both.","Since \\(I^*\\) and SN are logically stronger than I,\nobviously a version of Arrow’s theorem can be had using either one of\nthem instead of I. Such a theorem will be less interesting,\nthough—not only because it is logically weaker but also because,\nas we have seen, these more demanding conditions often are unreasonable.","The meaning of Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives is\nnot easily grasped, and its ramifications are not immediately obvious.\nIt is therefore surprising to see just how little has been said, over\nthe many decades that have passed since Arrow published his famous\ntheorem, to justify imposing this condition on social welfare\nfunctions. Let us turn, now, to some arguments for and against.","We have discussed Arrow’s attempt to motivate I using the\nexample of the dead candidate in an election. In the second edition\nof Social Choice and Individual Values he offered another\nrationale. Independence, he argued, embodies the principle\nthat welfare judgments are to be based on observable behavior. Having\nexpressed approval for Bergson’s use of indifference maps, Arrow\ncontinued:","\nThe Condition of Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives extends\nthe requirement of observability one step farther. Given the set of\nalternatives available for society to choose among, it could be\nexpected that, ideally, one could observe all preferences among the\navailable alternatives, but there would be no way to observe\npreferences among alternatives not feasible for society. (Arrow 1963:\n110)\n","Arrow seems to be saying that social decisions have to be made on\nthe basis of preferences for feasible alternatives because these are\nthe only ones that are observable. Arguably, though, this is\ninsufficient support. Arrow’s choice version of Independence,\nas we have seen, concerns all environments \\(S\\). The\nobservability argument, though, apparently just concerns some\n“given” feasible alternatives. See Hansson (1973: 38) on\nthis point.","Gerry Mackie (2003) argues that there has been equivocation on the\nnotion of irrelevance. It is true that we often take nonfeasible\nalternatives to be irrelevant. That presumably is why, in elections,\nwe do not ordinarily put the names of dead people on ballots, along\nwith those of the live candidates. But I also excludes from\nconsideration information on preferences for alternatives that, in an\nordinary sense, are relevant. An example illustrates Mackie’s\npoint. George W. Bush, Al Gore, and Ralph Nader ran in the United\nStates presidential election of 2000. Say we want to know whether\nthere was a social preference for Gore above Bush. I\nrequires that this question be answerable independently of whether the\npeople preferred either of them to, say, Abraham Lincoln, or preferred\nGeorge Washington to Lincoln. This seems right. Neither Lincoln nor\nWashington ran for President that year. They were, intuitively,\nirrelevant alternatives. But I also requires that the\nranking of Gore with respect to Bush should be independent of voters’\npreferences for Nader, and this does not seem right because\nhe was on the ballot and, in the ordinary sense, he was a\nrelevant alternative to them. Certainly Arrow’s observability\ncriterion does not rule out using information on preferences for\nNader. They were as observable as any in that election.","A different rationale has been suggested for\nimposing I specifically\nin the case of voting. Many voting procedures are known to present\nopportunities for voters to manipulate outcomes by misrepresenting\ntheir preferences. Section 5.2 discusses the\nexample of Borda counting, which allows voters to promote their own\nfavorite candidates by strategically putting others’ favorites at the\nbottom of their lists. Borda counting, it will be seen,\nviolates I. Proofs of the Gibbard-Sattherthwaite theorem\n(Gibbard 1973, Sattherthwaite 1975) associate vulnerability to\nstrategic voting systematically with violation of I, and Iain\nMcLean argues on this ground that voting methods ought to satisfy this\ncondition: “Take out [I] and you have gross\nmanipulability” (McLean 2003: 16). This matter of strategic\nvoting did not play a part in Arrow’s presentation of the\nimpossibility theorem, though, and was not dealt with seriously in\nthe literature until after its publication. See the entry\non social choice theory for discussion\nof this important theme in contemporary theory of social choice."],"subsection_title":"4.5 Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives"}]},{"main_content":["Arrow’s theorem, it has been said, is about the impossibility of\ntrying to do too much with too little information. This remark directs\nattention towards two main avenues leading from Arrow-inspired gloom\ntoward a sunnier view of the possibilities for collective decision\nmaking: not trying to do so much, and using more information. One way\nof not trying to do so much is to relax the requirement, it is a part\nof SO, that all social preferences are\ntransitive. Section 4.2 briefly considered this\nidea but found it unpromising. Another way is to soften the demand\nof U that there be a social ordering for each\n“logically possible” preference profile. That is, we can\nrestrict the domains of social welfare\nfunctions. Section 5.1 discusses this important\n“escape route” from Arrow’s theorem in some detail. One\nway of using more information is to loosen the independence\nconstraint I. This allows social welfare functions to make\nuse of more of the information that is carried by individual\npreference orderings. See Section 5.2. Another\nway is to extend Arrow’s framework so as to allow individuals to\ncontribute richer information than is carried by preference\norderings. This information can come in the form of scores or grades,\nas discussed in Section 5.3, or in the form of\ncardinal measurements of individual utilities,\nin Section 5.4."],"section_title":"5. Possibilities","subsections":[{"content":["Sometimes, in the nature of the alternatives under consideration\nand how individual preferences among them are determined, not all\nindividual preferences can arise. When studying such a case within\nArrow’s framework there is no need for a social welfare function that\ncan handle each and every \\(n\\)-tuple of individual orderings. Some but\nnot all profiles are admissible, and the domain is said to\nbe restricted. In fortunate cases, it is then possible to find a\nsocial welfare function that meets all assumptions and conditions of\nArrow’s theorem—apart, of course, from U. Such domains\nare said to be Arrow consistent. This Section considers some\nimportant examples of Arrow consistent domains.","For a simple illustration, consider the following profile: ","Here, two of the three people have the same strict preference\nordering. Reckoning the collective preference by pairwise majority\ndecision, it is easy to see that the result is the ordering of this\nmajority: ABC. Consider now a domain made up entirely of\nsuch profiles, in which most of the three voters share the same\nstrict preferences. On such a domain, pairwise majority decision\nalways derives an ordering and so it satisfies SO. This\nsocial welfare function is nondictatorial as well provided the\ndomain, though restricted, still retains a certain variety. In the\nabove profile, voter \\(3\\) strictly prefers \\(B\\) to \\(A\\). Both of the\nothers strictly prefer \\(A\\) to \\(B\\), though, and that is the\nsocial preference: with this profile in the domain, \\(3\\) is no\ndictator. Pairwise majority\ndecision satisfies \nD if each of the voters disagrees in this way with both of\nthe others, in some or other profile.[10]\nIt always satisfies WP\nand I. On such a domain, we have now seen, this aggregation\nprocedure satisfies all of Arrow’s non-domain conditions. Such a\ndomain is Arrow consistent.","Full identity of preferences is not needed for Arrow\nconsistency. It can be enough that everybody’s preferences are\nsimilar, even if they never entirely agree. An example illustrates the\ncase of single peaked domains.","Suppose three bears get together to decide how hot their common pot\nof porridge will be. Papa bear likes hot porridge, the hotter the\nbetter. Mama bear likes cold porridge, the colder the better. Baby\nbear most likes warm porridge; hot porridge is next best as far as he\nis concerned (“it will always cool off”), and he doesn’t\nlike cold porridge at all. These preferences among hot, warm and cold\nporridge can be represented as a preference profile:","Or else they can be pictured like this:","This preference profile is single peaked. Each bear has a\n“bliss point” somewhere along the ordering of the options\nby their temperature, and each bear likes options less and less as we\nmove along this common ordering away from the bliss point, on either\nside. Single peaked preferences arise with respect to the\nleft-right orientation of political candidates, the cost of\nalternative public projects, and other salient attributes of\noptions. Single peaked profiles, in which everybody’s\npreferences are single peaked with respect to a common ordering, arise\nnaturally when everybody cares about the same thing in the options\nunder consideration—temperature, left-right orientation, cost,\nor what have you—even if, as with the bears, there is no further\nconsensus about which options are better than which.","Duncan Black (1948) showed that if the number of\nvoters is odd, and their preference profile is single peaked,\npairwise majority decision always delivers up an\nordering.[11]\nFurthermore, he showed, the maximum of this ordering is the bliss\npoint of the median voter—the voter whose bliss point\nhas, on the common ordering, as many voters’ bliss points to one side\nas it has to the other. In the example this is Baby bear, and warm\nporridge is the collective maximum. This example illustrates the way\nin which single peakedness can facilitate compromise.","Say the number of voters is odd. Now consider a\nsingle-peaked domain—one that is made up entirely of\nsingle peaked profiles. Black’s result tells us that pairwise\nmajority decision on this domain satisfies SO. Provided the\ndomain is sufficiently inclusive (so that for each \\(i\\) there is\nwithin the domain some profile in which \\(i\\) is not the median voter)\nit also satisfies D. Pairwise majority decision always\nsatisfies WP and I, so such a domain is Arrow\nconsistent.","With an even number of voters, single peakedness\ndoes not ensure satisfaction of SO. For example, suppose\nthere are just two voters and that their individual orderings are:","Pairwise majority decision derives from this profile a weak social\npreference for \\(A\\) to \\(B\\), since there is one who weakly prefers \\(A\\)\nto \\(B\\), and one who weakly prefers \\(B\\) to \\(A\\). Similarly, it derives\na weak social preference for \\(B\\) to \\(C\\). Transitivity requires a weak\nsocial preference for \\(A\\) to \\(C\\), but there is none. On the contrary,\nthere is a strict social preference for \\(C\\) above \\(A\\), since that is\nthe unanimous preference of the voters. Still, this profile is\nsingle peaked with respect to the common ordering \\(BCA\\):","Majority decision with “phantom” voters can be used to\nestablish Arrow consistency when the number of people is even. Let\nthere be \\(2n\\) people, and let each profile in the domain be single\npeaked with respect to one and the same ordering of the\nalternatives. Let \\(R_{2n+1}\\) be an ordering that also is single peaked\nwith respect to this common ordering. \\(R_{2n+1}\\) represents the\npreferences of a “phantom” voter. Now take each profile\n\\(\\langle R_{1},\\ldots, R_{2n}\\rangle\\) in the domain and expand it\ninto \\(\\langle R_{1},\\ldots, R_{2n}, R_{2n+1}\\rangle\\), by adding\n\\(R_{2n+1}\\). The set of all the expanded profiles is a single peaked\ndomain and, because the real voters together with the phantom are odd\nin number, Black’s result applies to it. Let \\(g\\) be pairwise majority\ndecision for the expanded domain. We obtain a social welfare function\n\\(f\\) for the original domain by assigning to each profile the ordering\nthat \\(g\\) assigns to its expansion. That is, we put:","This \\(f\\) satisfies SO because \\(g\\) does. It\nsatisfies WP because there are more real voters than\nphantoms (\\(2n\\) to \\(1\\); we could have used any odd number of phantoms\nsmaller than \\(2n\\)). \\(f\\) satisfies I because the phantom\nordering is the same in all profiles of the expanded domain. If the\ndomain includes sufficient variety among profiles then \\(f\\) also\nsatisfies D and is Arrow consistent. This nice idea of\nphantom voters was introduced by Moulin (1980), who used it to\ncharacterize a class of voting schemes that are non-manipulable, in\nthat they do not provide opportunities for strategic\nvoting. ","Domain restrictions have been the focus of much\nresearch in recent decades. Gaertner (2001) provides a general\noverview. Le Breton and Weymark (2006) survey work on domain\nrestrictions that arise naturally when analyzing economic problems in\nArrow’s framework. Miller (1992) suggests that deliberation can\nfacilitate rational social choice by transforming initial preferences\ninto single peaked preferences. List and Dryzek (2003) argue that\ndeliberation can bring about a “structuration” of\nindividual preferences that facilitates democratic decision making\neven without achieving full single-peakedness. List et al. (2013)\npresent empirical evidence that deliberation sometimes does have this\neffect.","As Samuelson described it, the single profile approach might seem\nto amount to the most severe of domain restrictions:","\n\n[O]ne and only one of the […] possible\npatterns of individuals’ orderings is needed. […]\nFrom it (not from each of them all) comes a social\nordering. (Samuelson 1967: 48–49)\n"," According to Sen (1977), though, the\nBergson-Samuelson social welfare function has more than a single\nprofile in its domain. It has in fact a completely unrestricted\ndomain, for while according to Samuelson only one profile is needed\n“it could be any one” (Samuelson 1967: 49). What\ndistinguishes the single profile approach, on Sen’s way of\nunderstanding it, is that there is to be no coordinating the behavior\nof the social welfare function at several different profiles, by\nimposing on it interprofile conditions such as I\nand SN (see Section 4.5). Either\nway, though, and just as Samuelson insisted, Arrow’s theorem does not\nlimit the single profile approach because one of its conditions is\ninappropriate in connection with it. Either U is\ninappropriate (if there is a single profile in the domain) or\nelse I is inappropriate (if there are no interprofile\nconstraints).","Certain impossibility theorems that are closely related to Arrow’s\nhave been thought relevant to single-profile choice even so. These\ntheorems do not use Arrow’s interprofile condition \\(I\\) but\nuse instead an intraprofile neutrality condition. This\ncondition says that whenever within any single profile the\npattern of individual preferences for one pair \\(x\\),\\(y\\) of options is\nthe same as for another pair \\(z,w\\), the social ordering derived\nfrom this profile must also be the same for \\(x\\), \\(y\\) as it is for \\(z\\),\n\\(w\\):","\nSingle-Profile Neutrality (SPN): For any \\(\\langle\nR_{i}\\rangle\\), and any alternatives \\(x\\), \\(y\\), \\(z\\) and \\(w\\): IF for all\n\\(i: xR_{i}y\\) if and only if \\(zR_{i}w\\), and \\(yR_{i}x\\) if and only if\n\\(wR_{i}z\\), THEN \\(x f\\langle R_{i}\\rangle y\\) if and only if \\(z f\\langle\nR_{i}\\rangle w\\), and \\(y f\\langle R_{i}\\rangle x\\) if and only if \\(w\nf\\langle R_{i}\\rangle z\\).\n","SPN follows from the strong neutrality (SN)\ncondition of Section 4.5, on identifying\n\\(\\langle R_{i}\\rangle\\) with \\(\\langle R_{i}^*\\rangle\\). Parks (1976),\nand independently Kemp and Ng (1976), showed that there are\n“single profile” versions of Arrow’s theorem\nusing SPN instead of I. These theorems were\nsupposed to block the Bergson-Samuelson approach. In fact,\ncondition SPN is just as easily set aside as SN,\nand for the same reason: both exclude non-welfare information that is\nrelevant to the comparison of social states from an ethical\nstandpoint. Samuelson (1977) ridiculed SPN using an example\nabout redistributing chocolate. It is similar in structure to the\nexample of Peter and Paul, in\n Section 4.5."],"subsection_title":"5.1 Domain Restrictions"},{"content":["Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives severely limits\nwhich information about individual preferences may be used for\nwhat. It requires a social welfare function, when assembling the\nsocial preference among a pair of alternatives, to take into account\nonly those of people’s preferences that concern just this pair. This\nSection discusses two kinds of information that is implicit in\npreferences for other alternatives, and illustrates their use in social\ndecision making: information about the positions of alternatives in\nindividual orderings, and information about the fairness of social\nstates. ","Positional voting methods take into account where the\ncandidates come in the different individual orderings—whether it\nis first, or second, … or last. Borda counting is an\nimportant example. Named after Jean-Charles de Borda, a contemporary\nof Condorcet, it had already been proposed in the 13th\nCentury by the pioneering writer and social theorist Ramon\nLull. Nicholas of Cusa in the 15th Century recommended it\nfor electing Holy Roman Emperors. Borda counting is used in some\npolitical elections and on many other occasions for voting, in clubs\nand other organizations. Consider the profile:","Let each candidate receive four points for coming first in some\nvoter’s ordering, three for coming second, two for a third place and a\nsingle point for coming last; the alternatives then are ordered by the\ntotal number of points they receive, from all the voters. The Borda\ncount of \\(A\\) is then 10 (or \\(4+3+3\\)) and that of \\(B\\) is 11 \\((3+4+4)\\),\nso \\(B\\) outranks \\(A\\) in the social ordering. This method\napplies with the obvious adaptation to any election with a finite\nnumber of candidates.","Now suppose voter \\(1\\) moves \\(B\\) from second place to last on his\nown list, and we have the profile:","Then \\(B\\) will receive just 9 points \\((1+4+4)\\). \\(A\\) receives\nthe same 10 as before, though, and now outranks \\(B\\). This example\nillustrates two important points. First, Borda counting does not\nsatisfy Arrow’s condition I, since while each voter’s ranking\nof \\(A\\) with respect to \\(B\\) is the same in the two profiles, the\nsocial ordering of this pair is different. Second, Borda counting\nprovides opportunities for voters to manipulate the outcome of an\nelection by strategic voting. If everybody’s preferences are as in the\nfirst profile, voter \\(1\\) might do well to misrepresent his\npreferences by putting \\(B\\) at the bottom of his list. In this way,\nhe can promote his own favorite, \\(A\\), to the top of the social\nordering (he will get away with this, of course, only if the other\nvoters do not see what he is up to and adjust their own rankings\naccordingly, by putting his favorite \\(A\\) at the bottom). The\nsusceptibility of Borda counting to strategic voting has long been\nknown. When this was raised as an objection, Borda’s indignant\nresponse is said to have been that his scheme was intended for honest\npeople. Lull and Nicholas of Cusa recommended, before voting by this\nmethod, earnest oaths to tell the truth and stripping oneself of all\nsins.\n","For further discussion of positionalist voting methods, see the\nentries voting methods\nand social choice theory; for an\nanalytical overview, see Pattanaik’s (2002) handbook article. Barberà\n(2010) reviews what is known about strategic voting. ","Mark Fleurbaey (2007) has shown that social welfare functions need\nmore ordinal information than I allows them if they are to\nrespond appropriately to a certain fairness of social states. He gives\nthe example of Ann, who has ten apples and two oranges, and Bob, with\nthree apples and eleven oranges. This allocation is said to be\n“envy free” if, intuitively, she is at least as happy with\nher own basket of fruit as she would be with his and, similarly, he is\nas happy with his own basket as he would be with hers. Let the\ndistribution of fruit in one social state \\(S\\) be as described, and\nconsider the state \\(S^*\\) in which the allocations are reversed. That\nis, in \\(S^*\\) it is Ann that has three apples and eleven oranges,\nwhile Bob has ten apples and two oranges. More technically, \\(S\\)\nis envy free if Ann weakly prefers \\(S\\) to \\(S^*\\), and Bob\ndoes too. We might expect that, other things being equal, the envy\nfreeness of a social state will promote it in the social ordering\nabove an alternative state that is not envy free. But I does\nnot allow this.","\nTo see why not, consider whether it would be socially preferable,\nstarting from the status quo \\(S\\), to take one apple and one orange\nfrom Bob and give both of them to Ann. Let \\(T\\) be the state arising\nfrom this transfer. We assume for the sake of the example that Ann\nalways strictly prefers having more of everything for herself to\nhaving less, and that Bob’s preferences are similarly self-interested,\nso that in all admissible profiles Ann strictly prefers \\(T\\) to\n\\(S\\), while Bob strictly prefers \\(S\\) to \\(T\\). Their preferences\namong these states are opposite and do not by themselves entail a\nsocial preference one way or the other. Now, consider first a profile\nin which the status quo \\(S\\) is envy free but \\(T\\) is not. (Let both\nAnn and Bob be indifferent between the baskets each one has in \\(S\\)\nbut not between those in \\(T\\), in which both agree that Bob is worse\noff.) Relative to this profile, a social welfare function promoting\nenvy freeness comes out against the transfer from Bob to Ann by\nranking \\(S\\) strictly above \\(T\\). But consider another profile, in\nwhich it is \\(T\\) that is envy free (now Ann and Bob are indifferent\nbetween the baskets in \\(T\\), and agree that in \\(S\\) Ann is worse off\nthan Bob). Relative to this second profile, \\(T\\) outranks \\(S\\) in\nthe social ordering. In direct conflict with I, the social\npreference among \\(S\\) and \\(T\\) switches as we go from one profile to\nthe other, although the individual preferences among \\(S\\) and \\(T\\)\nstay the same. The social ranking of \\(S\\) and \\(T\\) turns on\npreferences among these states and the “irrelevant”\n\\(S^*\\) and similarly defined \\(T^*\\), because the fairness of \\(S\\)\nand \\(T\\) does.","Fleurbaey recommends a weaker condition, attributing it to Hansson\n(1973) and to Pazner (1979):","\nWeak Independence: Social preferences on a pair of options\nshould only depend on the population’s preferences on these two\noptions and on what options are indifferent to each of these options\nfor each individual (Fleurbaey 2007: 23).\n","Fleurbaey (2007) discusses social welfare functions satisfying weak\nindependence together with Arrow’s conditions apart, of course,\nfrom I. The approach to social welfare that is sketched there\nis developed at length in (Fleurbaey and Maniquet 2011)."],"subsection_title":"5.2 More Ordinal Information"},{"content":["\nAnother way to have social orderings in spite of Arrow’s theorem is to\nallow people to contribute more ordinal information about their\npreferences than is admissible within Arrow’s framework. Arrow’s\npurpose in limiting individual inputs to weak orderings of the\nalternatives was to exclude cardinal information about utilities. This\nlimitation, though, is too tight for its purpose. One way for people\nto communicate their preferences is to grade their\nalternatives. Now, although in general grades do not carry cardinal\ninformation, Arrow’s framework has no provision for people to input\ntheir preferences using them. This might seeem a small oversight on\nArrow’s part but it is critical, because there are ways of aggregating\ngraded inputs that are not avaliable for preferance orderings, and\nwith them comes another “escape” from Arrow’s\nimpossibility. Showing how it goes requires a slight extension of\nArrow’s framework.","\nLet a grade language \\(L\\) be a strictly ordered collection\nof expressions, the grades. The grades could be adjectival expressions\nof a natural language, such as excellent, \ngood, acceptable, poor and terrible,\nor they could be characters such as the familiar letter grades of\nacademic evaluation. They could be numerals (then often\ncalled scores) or the strings of stars commonly used to\nevaluate hotels and restaurants. They could be any symbols that come\nin some fixed order (from “top” to\n“bottom”).","\nA grade function \\(G_{i}\\) maps the set \\(X\\) of alternatives\ninto some given grade language \\(L\\). Intuitively, \\(G_{i}(x)\\) is\n\\(i\\)’s grade for alternative \\(x\\). A grade function \\(G_{i}\\)\ncontains as much information as some weak ordering \\(R_{i}\\)\nof the alternatives. This can be seen by putting \\(xR_{i}y\\) if\n\\(G_{i}(x) \\ge G_{i}(y)\\): \\(i\\) weakly prefers \\(x\\) to \\(y\\) if\n\\(i\\)’s grade for \\(x\\) is at least as high as \\(i\\)’s grade for\n\\(y\\). In general \\(G_{i}\\) contains more information than\nthe corresponding ordering because we cannot always go in reverse:\ndifferent grade functions correspond to the same ordering. For\ninstance, one way to convey that \\(A\\) is preferable to \\(B\\) is to\nsay that whereas \\(A\\) is good, \\(B\\) is\nmerely acceptable; another is to say that whereas \\(A\\)\nis good, \\(B\\) is terrible, but this doesn’t come to\nthe same thing because acceptable and terrible\ndon’t. The additional information in grades is in general not cardinal\ninformation because for instance the expressions \ngood, acceptable and terrible, ordinary\nadjectives of English, do not carry cardinal information about how\ngood \\(A\\) and \\(B\\) are.","\nA grade profile is a list \\(\\langle G_{1}, \\ldots,\nG_{n}\\rangle\\) of grade functions, one for each of the people \\(1,\n\\ldots, n\\). Notions of a multiprofile domain and a social welfare\nfunction \\(f\\) are defined as in Arrow’s framework, putting grade\nprofiles instead of Arrow’s profiles of weak orders (the output of a\nsocial welfare function is not a social grading of the alternatives\nbut a social ordering of them, just in Arrow’s original\nframework). The conditions of Arrow’s theorem are reformulated\naccordingly; for instance, the reformulated domain assumption is: ","\nUnrestricted Domain (U): The domain of \\(f\\)\nincludes every list \\(\\langle G_{1}, \\ldots, G_{n}\\rangle\\) of \\(n\\)\ngrade functions defined on \\(X\\). \n"," Arrow’s independence condition becomes:","\nIndependence of Irrelevant Alternatives (I): For\nall alternatives \\(x\\) and \\(y\\) in \\(X\\), and all profiles \\(\\langle\nG_{i}\\rangle\\) and \\(\\langle G^*_{i}\\rangle\\) in the domain of \\(f\\), if\n\\(\\langle G_{i}\\rangle|\\{x,y\\} = \\langle G^*_{i}\\rangle|\\{x,y\\}\\), then\n\\(f\\langle G_{i}\\rangle |\\{x,y\\} = f\\langle G^*_{i}\\rangle\n|\\{x,y\\}\\).\n","\nIntuitively, the reformulated independence assumption says that\nwhether one alternative ranks higher than another in the social\nordering depends only on everybody’s grades for these two\nalternatives. Other alternatives are in this matter\n“irrelevant.”","\nThere are social welfare functions that satisfy all conditions of\nArrow’s theorem, reformulated for graded inputs. With an odd number\n\\(n\\) of people, for instance, the social welfare function median\ngrading fills the bill. Given a profile \\(\\langle G_{i}\\rangle\\)\nof grade functions, the median grade for an alternative \\(x\\)\nis the grade that is in the middle, when we list all the grades\n\\(G_{1}(x), \\ldots, G_{n}(x)\\) for \\(x\\) in order, from top to\nbottom. The social ordering associated with this profile goes by the\nalternatives’ median grades: \\(x f\\langle G_{i}\\rangle y\\) means that\nthe median grade for \\(x\\) is either the same as the median grade for\n\\(y\\), or else it is higher.","\nTo verify that median grading satisfies the reformulated conditions,\ntake for instance the nondictatorship condition. A person \\(d\\) is\na dictator of \\(f\\) if for any alternatives \\(x\\) and \\(y\\),\nand for any profile \\(\\langle\\ldots, G_{d},\\ldots\\rangle\\) in the\ndomain of \\(f\\): if \\(xP_{d}y\\), then \\(xPy\\). When \\(f\\) is median\ngrading, this means that whenever a dictator expresses a strict\npreference for one alternative over another, by giving it a higher\ngrade, this alternative also ranks strictly higher in the social\nordering, having a higher median grade. Except in the trivial case of\na language with only a single grade (which makes it impossible to\nexpress strict preferences, giving everybody vacuous dictatorial\npowers), and provided there are at least two alternatives and three\npeople, median grading on an unrestricted domain has no dictator. To\nsee that it is so, consider any given person \\(p\\), and any two\nalternatives \\(A\\) and \\(B\\). In an unrestricted domain there is some\nprofile in which \\(p\\)’s grade for \\(A\\) is higher than \\(p\\)’s grade\nfor \\(B\\), but in which everybody else’s grades for these alternatives\nare just the other way around: everybody other than \\(p\\) gives to\n\\(B\\) the same grade that \\(p\\) gives to \\(A\\), and gives to \\(A\\) the\nsame grade that \\(p\\) gives to \\(B\\). In this profile, the median\ngrade for \\(A\\) is \\(p\\)’s grade for \\(B\\), and the median grade for\n\\(B\\) is \\(p\\)’s grade for \\(A\\), which is higher. So although \\(p\\)\nstrictly prefers \\(A\\) to \\(B\\), \\(B\\) ranks strictly higher than\n\\(A\\) in the social ordering, and \\(p\\) is not a dictator. Repeating\nthis demonstration for each person, no one else is a dictator\neither. Satisfaction of the other reformulated conditions on the\nunrestricted domain of grade profiles is similarly\nstraightforward.","\nMichel Balinski and Rida Laraki (2007) showed that scoring and grading\nenable an “escape” from Arrow’s impossibility while\nstaying within an ordinal framework. Their theory of majority\njudgment is a generalization of median grading that makes more\nuse than it does of the ordinal information in grade profiles\n(Balinski and Laraki 2010). Balinski and Laraki insist that people\nmust share what they call a “common language” of grades,\nwithout giving this notion a precise sense. Indeed it can be shown\nthat, when different people might have very different thresholds for\nawarding grades, there is in grade profiles no more information than\nin the corresponding profiles of weak orderings. Then a close relative\nof Arrow’s impossibility returns (Morreau 2016).","\nArrow came to realize, late in his life, that scoring and grading\ncreate possibilities for democracy that his framework unnecessarily\nrules out of consideration. In a 2012 interview he noted:","\nNow there’s another possible way of thinking about it, which is not\nincluded in my theorem \\(\\ldots\\) [E]ach voter does not just give a\nranking. But says, this is good. And this is not good. Or this is very\ngood. And this is bad. So I have three or four classes \\(\\ldots\\) This\nchanges the nature of voting.\n","\nFor a transcript of this interview, see the Other Internet Resources."],"subsection_title":"5.3 Even More Ordinal Information: Scores and Grades"},{"content":["\nAmartya Sen (1970) extended Arrow’s framework by representing the\npreferences of individuals \\(i\\) as utility functions \\(U_{i}\\) that\nmap the alternatives onto real numbers: \\(U_{i}(x)\\) is the utility\nthat \\(i\\) obtains from \\(x\\). A preference profile in Sen’s\nframework is a list \\(\\langle U_{1}, \\ldots, U_{n}\\rangle\\) of utility\nfunctions, and a domain is a set of these. An aggregation function,\nnow a social welfare functional, maps each profile in some\ndomain onto a weak ordering of the alternatives.","Sen showed how to study various assumptions concerning the\nmeasurability and interpersonal comparability of utilities by\ncoordinating the social orderings derived from profiles that,\ndepending on these assumptions, carry the same information. For\ninstance, ordinal measurement with interpersonal\nnoncomparability—built by Arrow right into his technical\nframework—amounts, in Sen’s more flexible set up, to a\nrequirement that the same social ordering is to be derived from any\nutility profiles that reduce to the same list of orderings. At the\nother extreme, utilities are measured on a ratio scale with full\ninterpersonal comparability if those profiles yield the same social\nordering that can be obtained from each other by rescaling, or\nmultiplying all utility functions by the same positive real number.\nSen explored different combinations of such assumptions.","One important finding was that having cardinal utilities is not by\nitself enough to avoid an impossibility result. In addition, utilities\nhave to be interpersonally comparable. Intuitively speaking, to put\ninformation about preference strengths to good use it has to be\npossible to compare the strengths of different individuals’\npreferences. See Sen (1970: Theorem 8*2). Interpersonal comparability\nopens up many possibilities for aggregating utilities and preferences.\nTwo important ones can be read off from classical utilitarianism and\nRawls’s difference principle. For details, see the entry\non social choice theory."],"subsection_title":"5.4 Cardinal Information"}]},{"main_content":["\nThe Arrow-Sen framework lends itself to the study of a range of\naggregation problems other than those for which it was originally\ndeveloped. This Section briefly discusses some of them. "],"section_title":"6. Reinterpretations","subsections":[{"content":["\nOn an epistemic conception, the value of democratic institutions lies,\nin part, in their tendency to arrive at the truth in matters relevant\nto public decisions (see Estlund 2008, but compare Peter 2011). This\nidea receives some support from Condorcet’s jury theorem. It tells us,\nsimply put, that if individual people are more likely than not to\njudge correctly in some matter of fact, independently of one another,\nthen the collective judgment of a sufficiently large group, arrived at\nby majority voting, is almost certain to be correct (Condorcet\n1785). The phenomenon of the “wisdom of crowds”,\nfacilitated by cognitive diversity among individuals, provides further\nand arguably better support for the epistemic conception (Page 2007,\nLandemore 2012). But there are theoretical limits to the possibilities\nfor collective judgment on matters of fact. Starting with Kornhauser\nand Sager’s (1986) discussion of group deliberation in legal settings,\nwork on the theory of judgment aggregation has explored paradoxes and\nimpossibility theorems closely related to those that Condorcet and\nArrow discovered in connection with preference aggregation. See List\n(2012) and the entry social choice\ntheory for overviews."],"subsection_title":"6.1 Judgment Aggregation"},{"content":["In many decision problems there are several criteria by which to\ncompare alternatives and, putting these criteria in place of people,\nit is natural to study such problems within the Arrow-Sen framework.\nArrow’s theorem, if analogues of its various assumptions and\nconditions are appropriate, then tells us that there is no procedure\nfor arriving at an “overall” ordering that assimilates\ndifferent criterial comparisons.","The Arrow-Sen framework has been used to study multi-criterial\nevaluation in industrial decision making (Arrow and Raynaud 1986) and\nin engineering design (Scott and Antonsson 2000; compare Franssen\n2005). Anandi Hattiangadi (forthcoming) argues that Arrow’s theorem\nlimits the possibilities for an interpretationist metasemantics, in\nwhich the correct interpretation of linguistic expressions is the one\nthat is, judging by relevant criteria, overall best.","Kenneth May (1954) used Arrow’s framework to study the\ndetermination of individual preferences. It had been found\nexperimentally that people’s preferences, elicited separately for\ndifferent pairs of options, often are cyclical. May explained this by\nanalogy with the paradox of voting as the result of preferring one\nalternative to another when it is better by more criteria than not.\nMore generally, he reinterpreted Arrow’s theorem as an argument that\nintransitivity of individual preferences is to be expected when\ndifferent criteria “pull in different directions”. Susan\nHurley (1985, 1989) considered a similar problem in practical\ndeliberation when the criteria are moral values. She argued that\nArrow’s theorem does not apply in this case. One strand of her\nargument is that, unlike a person, a moral criterion can rank any\ngiven alternatives just one way. It cannot “change its\nmind” about them (Hurley 1985: 511), and this makes it\ninappropriate to impose the analogue of the domain\ncondition U on procedures for weighing moral reasons. ","There are multicriterial problems in theoretical deliberation as\nwell. Okasha (2011) uses the Arrow-Sen framework to study the problem\nof choosing among rival scientific theories by criteria including fit\nto data, simplicity, and scope. He argues that the impossibility\ntheorem threatens the rationality of theory choice. See Morreau (2015)\nfor a reason to think that it does not apply to this problem, and\nMorreau (2014) for a demonstration that impossibility theorems\nrelevant to single profile choice (see \nSections 2.2 and 5.1) \nmight sometimes apply even so. In related work, Jacob Stegenga (2013)\nargues that Arrow’s theorem limits the possibilities for combining\ndifferent kinds of evidence. Eleonora Cresto and Diego Tajer\n(forthcoming) counter that confirmational holism requires a\nrestriction on the domains of evidence-aggregation functions that\nblocks Stegenga’s argument: they cast the Duhem problem in a positive\nlight as one aspect of a phenomenon that makes evidence aggregation\npossible."],"subsection_title":"6.2 Multi-Criterial Decision"}]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"Some of the trouble with social orderings is visible in a simple\\nbut important example. Say there are three\\nalternatives \\\\(A\\\\), \\\\(B\\\\) and \\\\(C\\\\) to choose\\namong. There is a group of three people 1, 2 and 3 whose preferences\\nare to inform this choice, and they are asked to rank the alternatives\\nby their own lights from better to worse. Their individual preference\\norderings turn out to be:\",\n \"That is, person 1 prefers \\\\(A\\\\) to \\\\(B\\\\),\\nprefers \\\\(B\\\\) to \\\\(C\\\\), and prefers \\\\(A\\\\)\\nto \\\\(C\\\\); person 2 prefers \\\\(B\\\\) to \\\\(C\\\\), and so\\non. Now, we might hope somehow to arrive at a single\\n“social” ordering of the alternatives that reflects the\\npreferences of all three. Then we could choose whichever alternative\\nis, socially, best—or, if there is a tie for first place, we\\ncould choose some alternative that is as good as any other. Suppose,\\ntaking the alternatives pair by pair, we put the matter to a vote: we\\ncount one alternative as socially preferred to another if\\nthere are more voters who prefer it than there are who prefer the\\nother one. We determine in this way that \\\\(A\\\\) is socially\\npreferred to \\\\(B\\\\), since two voters (1 and 3) prefer \\\\(A\\\\)\\nto \\\\(B\\\\), but only one (voter 2) prefers \\\\(B\\\\)\\nto \\\\(A\\\\). Similarly, there is a social preference for \\\\(B\\\\)\\nto \\\\(C\\\\). We might therefore expect to find that \\\\(A\\\\) is\\nsocially preferred to \\\\(C\\\\). By this reckoning, though, it is\\njust the other way around, since there are two voters who\\nprefer \\\\(C\\\\) to \\\\(A\\\\). We do not have a\\nsocial ordering of the alternatives at all. We have\\na cycle. Starting from any alternative, moving to a socially\\npreferred one, and from there to the next, you soon find\\nyourself back where you \\nstarted.[1]\",\n \"This is the “paradox of voting”. Discovered by the\\nMarquis de Condorcet (1785), it shows that possibilities for\\nchoosing rationally can be lost when individual preferences are\\naggregated into social preferences. Voter 1 has \\\\(A\\\\) at the top\\nof his individual ordering. This voter’s preferences can\\nbe maximized, by choosing \\\\(A\\\\). The preferences of 2 or\\n3 can also be maximized, by choosing instead their maxima, \\\\(B\\\\)\\nor \\\\(C\\\\). Pairwise majority decision doesn’t result in a social\\nmaximum, though. \\\\(A\\\\) isn’t one because a majority prefers\\nsomething else, \\\\(C\\\\). Likewise, \\\\(B\\\\) and \\\\(C\\\\) are\\nnot social maxima. The individual preferences lend themselves to\\nmaximization; but, because they cycle, the social preferences do\\nnot.\",\n \"Are there other aggregation procedures that are better than\\npairwise majority decision, or do the different ones have shortcomings\\nof their own? Condorcet, his contemporary Jean Charles de Borda\\n(1781), and later Charles Dodgson (1844) and Duncan Black (1948),\\namong others, all addressed this question by studying various\\nprocedures and comparing their properties. Arrow broke new ground by\\ncoming at it from the opposite direction. Starting with various\\nrequirements that aggregation procedures might be expected to meet, he\\nasked which procedures fill the bill. Among his requirements\\nis Social Ordering, which insists that the result of\\naggregation is always an ordering of the alternatives, never a\\ncycle. After the introduction in\\n Section 2 of\\nthe technical framework that Arrow set up in order to study social\\nchoice,\\n Section 3.1 sets out further conditions\\nthat he imposed. Briefly, these are: Unrestricted Domain\\nwhich says that aggregation procedures must be able to handle any\\nindividual preferences at all; Weak Pareto, which requires\\nthem to respect unanimous individual\\npreferences; Non-Dictatorship, which rules out procedures by\\nwhich social preferences always agree with the strict preferences of\\nsome one individual; and finally Independence of Irrelevant\\nAlternatives, which says that the social comparison among any two\\ngiven alternatives is to depend on individual preferences among only\\nthat pair. Arrow’s theorem, stated in\\n Section 3.2, tells us that, except in\\n the very simplest of cases, no\\naggregation procedure whatsoever meets all the requirements.\",\n \"The tenor of Arrow’s theorem is deeply antithetical to the\\npolitical ideals of the Enlightenment. It turns out that Condorcet’s\\nparadox is indeed not an isolated anomaly, the failure of one specific\\nvoting method. Rather, it manifests a much wider problem with the very\\nidea of collecting many individual preferences into one. On the face\\nof it, anyway, there simply cannot be a common will of all the people\\nconcerning collective decisions, that assimilates the tastes and\\nvalues of all the individual men and women who make up a society.\",\n \"There are some who, following Riker (1982), take Arrow’s theorem to\\nshow that democracy, conceived as government by the will of the\\npeople, is an incoherent illusion. Others argue that some conditions\\nof the theorem are unreasonable, and from their point of view the\\nprospects for collective choice look much brighter. After presenting\\nthe theorem itself, this entry will take up some main points of\\ncritical discussion. Section 4 considers the\\nmeaning and scope of Arrow’s conditions. Section 5\\ndiscusses aggregation procedures that are available when not all of\\nArrows conditions need be satisfied, or when different underlying\\nassumptions are made about the nature of social\\nchoice. Section 6 concludes with an overview of\\nproposals to study within Arrow’s technical framework certain\\naggregation problems other than the one that concerned him. \",\n \"Amartya Sen once expressed regret that the theory of social choice\\ndoes not share with poetry the amiable characteristic of communicating\\nbefore it is understood (Sen 1986). Arrow’s theorem is not especially\\ndifficult to understand and much about it is readily communicated, if\\nnot in poetry, then at least in plain English. Informal presentations\\ngo only so far, though, and where they stop sometimes\\nmisunderstandings start. This exposition uses a minimum of technical\\nlanguage for the sake of clarity.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. The Will of the People?\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"The problem of finding an aggregation procedure arises, as Arrow\\nframed it, in connection with some given alternatives between which\\nthere is a choice is to be made. The nature of these alternatives\\ndepends on the kind of choice problem that is being studied. In the\\ntheory of elections, the alternatives are people who might stand as\\ncandidates in an election. In welfare economics they are different\\nstates of a society, such as distributions of income and labour\\nrequirements. The alternatives conventionally are referred to using\\nlower case letters from the end of the alphabet\\nas \\\\(x, y, z, \\\\ldots\\\\); the set of all\\nthese alternatives is \\\\(X\\\\). The people whose tastes and values\\nwill inform the choice are assumed to be finite in number, and they\\nare enumerated \\\\(1, \\\\ldots, n\\\\).\",\n \"Arrow’s problem arises, then, only after some alternatives\\nand people have been fixed. It is for them that an aggregation\\nprocedure is sought. Crucially, though, this problem\\narises before relevant information about the people’s\\npreferences among the alternatives has been gathered, whether that is\\nby polling or some other method for eliciting or determining\\npreferences. The question that Arrow’s theorem answers is, more\\nprecisely, this: Which procedures are there for arriving at a social\\nordering of some given alternatives, on the basis of some given\\npeople’s preferences among them, no matter what these preferences turn\\nout to be?\",\n \"In practice, meanwhile, we sometimes must select a procedure for\\nmaking social decisions without knowing for which alternatives and\\npeople it will be used. In recurring elections for some public office,\\nfor instance, there is a different slate of candidates each time, and\\na different population of voters, and we must use the same voting\\nmethod to determine the winner, no matter who the candidates and\\nvoters are and no matter how many of them there happen to be. Such\\nprocedures are not directly available for study within Arrow’s\\nframework, with its fixed set \\\\(X\\\\) of alternatives and people\\n\\\\(1, \\\\ldots, n\\\\). Arrow’s theorem is still relevant to them,\\nthough. It tells us that even when the alternatives and\\npeople are held fixed, then still there is no “good”\\nmethod for deriving social orderings. Now, if there is no good method\\nfor voting even once, with the particular candidates and voters who\\nare involved on that occasion, then nor, presumably, is there a good\\nmethod that can be used repeatedly, with different candidates and\\nvoters each time.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Arrow’s Framework\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Arrow assumed that social orderings will be derived, if at all,\\nfrom information about people’s preferences. This information is, in\\nhis framework, merely ordinal. It is the kind of information\\nthat is implicated in Condorcet’s paradox of voting,\\nin Section 1, where each person ranks the\\nalternatives from better to worse but there is nothing beyond this\\nabout how strong anybody’s preferences are, or about how the\\npreferences of one person compare in strength to those of another. In\\nconfining aggregation procedures to ordinal information, Arrow argued\\nthat:\\n\",\n \" [I]t seems to make no sense to add the utility of\\none individual, a psychic magnitude in his mind, with the utility of\\nanother individual. (Arrow 1951 [1963]: 11)\\n\",\n \" His point was that even if people do have\\nstronger and weaker preferences, and even if the strengths of their\\npreferences can somehow be measured and made available as a basis for\\nsocial decisions, nevertheless ordinal information is all that\\nmatters because preferences are “interpersonally\\nincomparable”. Intuitively, what this means is that there is no\\nsaying how much more strongly someone must prefer one thing to\\nanother in order to make up for the fact that someone else’s\\npreference is just the other way around. Arrow saw no reason to\\nprovide aggregation procedures with information about the strength of preferences\\nbecause he thought that they cannot put such information to\\nmeaningful use. \",\n \"Accordingly, the preferences of individual people are represented\\nin Arrow’s framework by binary relations \\\\(R_{i}\\\\) among the\\nalternatives: \\\\(xR_{i}y\\\\) means that individual \\\\(i\\\\) weakly\\nprefers alternative \\\\(x\\\\) to alternative \\\\(y\\\\). That is, either\\n\\\\(i\\\\) strictly prefers \\\\(x\\\\) to \\\\(y\\\\), or else \\\\(i\\\\)\\nis indifferent between them, finding them equally good. Each\\nindividual preference relation \\\\(R_{i}\\\\) is assumed to\\nbe connected (for all alternatives \\\\(x\\\\) and \\\\(y\\\\), either\\n\\\\(xR_{i}y\\\\), or \\\\(yR_{i}x\\\\), or both) and transitive (for all\\n\\\\(x\\\\), \\\\(y\\\\) and \\\\(z\\\\), if \\\\(xR_{i}y\\\\) and \\\\(yR_{i}z\\\\), then\\n\\\\(xR_{i}z\\\\)). That these relations have these structural properties\\nwas, for Arrow, a matter of the “rationality” of the\\npreferences they represent; for further discussion, see the entries on\\nPreferences and Philosophy of Economics. Connected, transitive\\nrelations are called weak orderings. They are\\n“weak” in that they allow ties—in this connection,\\nindifference.\\n\",\n \"A preference profile is a list \\\\(\\\\langle R_{1}, \\\\ldots,\\nR_{n}\\\\rangle\\\\) of weak orderings of the set \\\\(X\\\\) of alternatives, one\\nfor each of the people \\\\(1, \\\\ldots, n\\\\). The list of three\\nindividual orderings in the paradox of voting is an example of a\\npreference profile for the alternatives \\\\(A\\\\), \\\\(B\\\\), and \\\\(C\\\\) and people\\n1, 2, and 3. A profile is a representation of the individual\\npreferences of everybody who will be consulted in the choice among the\\nalternatives. It is in the form of profiles that Arrow’s aggregation\\nprocedures receive information about individual preferences. Often it\\nis convenient to write \\\\(\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) instead of \\\\(\\\\langle\\nR_{1}, \\\\ldots, R_{n}\\\\rangle\\\\). Other profiles are written \\\\(\\\\langle\\nR^*_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\), and so on.\",\n \"In restricting individual inputs to weak orderings of the\\nalternatives, Arrow overlooked the possibility that people could input\\ninformation about their preferences in the form of ordinal scores or\\ngrades. Graded inputs enable an “escape” from Arrow’s\\nimpossibility that is explained in Section\\n5.3. Amartya Sen extended Arrow’s framework to take into account\\nnot only ordinal information about people’s preferences among pairs of\\nalternatives, but also cardinal information about the utility\\nthey derive from each one. In this way he was able to investigate the\\nconsequences of other assumptions than Arrow’s about the measurability\\nand interpersonal comparability of individual\\npreferences. See Section 5.4 and the\\nentry social choice theory for details\\nand references.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.1 Individual Preferences\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Arrow required aggregation procedures to derive social orderings\\nfrom more than just a single profile, representing\\neveryone’s actual preferences. In his framework they must\\nreckon with many profiles, representing preferences that the\\npeople could have.\",\n \"Variety among preferences is the result, in Arrow’s account, of the\\ndifferent standards by which we assess our options. Our preferences\\ndepend on our “tastes” in personal consumption but\\nimportantly, for social choice, they also depend on our socially\\ndirected “values”. Now, we are to some extent free to have\\nvarious tastes, values, and preferences; and we are free, also, to\\nhave these independently of one another. Any individual can have a\\nrange of preferences, then, and for any given sets of people and\\nalternatives there are many possible preference profiles. One profile\\n\\\\(\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) represents the preferences of these people\\namong their alternatives in, if you will, one possible world. Another\\nprofile \\\\(\\\\langle\\nR^*_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) represents preferences of the same\\npeople, and among the same alternatives, but in another possible world\\nwhere their tastes and values are different.\",\n \"Arrow’s rationale for requiring aggregation procedures to handle\\nmany profiles was epistemic. As he framed the question of collective\\nchoice, a procedure is sought for deriving a social ordering of some\\ngiven alternatives on the basis of some given people’s tastes and\\nvalues. It is sought, though, before it is known just what these\\ntastes and values happen to be. The variety among profiles to be\\nreckoned with is a measure, in Arrow’s account of the matter, of how\\nmuch is known or assumed about everybody’s preferences a\\npriori, which is to say before these have been elicited. When\\nless is known, there are more profiles from which a social ordering\\nmight have to be derived. When more is known, there are fewer of\\nthem.\",\n \"There are other reasons for working with many profiles, even when\\npeople’s actual preferences are known fully in advance. Serge Kolm (1996)\\nsuggested that counterfactual preferences are relevant when we\\ncome to justify the use of some given procedure.\\nSensitivity analysis, used to manage uncertainty about errors in the\\ninput, and to determine which information is critical in the sense\\nthat the output turns on it, also requires that procedures handle a\\nrange of inputs.\",\n \"With many profiles in play there can be “interprofile”\\nconditions on aggregation procedures. These coordinate the results of\\naggregation at several profiles at once. One such condition that plays\\na crucial role in Arrow’s theorem is Independence of Irrelevant\\nAlternatives. It requires that whenever everybody’s preferences\\namong two alternatives are in one profile the same as in another, the\\ncollective ordering must also be the same at the two profiles, as far\\nas these alternatives are concerned. There is to be this much\\nsimilarity among social orderings even as people’s tastes and values\\nchange. Sections 3.1\\nand 4.5 discuss in more detail the meaning of\\nthis controversial requirement, and the extent to which it is\\nreasonable to impose it on aggregation procedures.\",\n \"Ian Little raised the following objection in an early discussion\\nof (Arrow 1951):\",\n \"\\nIf tastes change, we may expect a new ordering of all the\\nconceivable states; but we do not require that the difference between\\nthe new and the old ordering should bear any particular relation to\\nthe changes of taste which have occurred. We have, so to speak, a new\\nworld and a new order; and we do not demand correspondence between the\\nchange in the world and the change in the order (Little 1952:\\n423–424).\\n\",\n \"Little apparently agreed with Arrow that there might be a different\\nsocial ordering were people’s tastes different, but unlike Arrow he\\nthought that it wouldn’t have to be similar to the actual or current\\nordering in any special way. Little’s objection was taken to support\\nthe “single profile” approach to social welfare judgments\\nof Abram Bergson (1938) and Paul Samuelson (1947), and there was a\\ndebate about which approach was best, theirs or Arrow’s. Arguably,\\nwhat was at issue in this debate was not—or should not have\\nbeen—whether aggregation procedures must handle more than a\\nsingle preference profile, but instead whether there should be any\\ncoordination of the output at different profiles. Among others Sen\\n(1977) and Fleurbaey and Mongin (2005) have made this point. If they\\nare right then the substance of Little’s objection can be accommodated\\nwithin Arrow’s multi-profile framework simply by not imposing any\\ninterprofile constraints. Be this as it may, Arrow’s framework is\\nnowadays the dominant one. \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.2 Multiple Profiles\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Sometimes a certain amount is known about everybody’s preferences\\nbefore these have been elicited. Profiles that are compatible with\\nwhat is known represent preferences that the people could have, and\\nmight turn out actually to have, and it is from these\\n“admissible” profiles that we may hope to derive social\\norderings. Technically, a domain, in Arrow’s framework, is a\\nset of admissible profiles, each concerning the same alternatives \\\\(X\\\\)\\nand people \\\\(1, \\\\ldots, n\\\\). A social welfare function \\\\(f\\\\)\\nassigns to each profile \\\\(\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) in some domain a binary\\nrelation \\\\(f\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) on \\\\(X\\\\). Intuitively, \\\\(f\\\\) is an\\naggregation procedure and \\\\(f\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) represents the\\nsocial preferences that it derives from \\\\(\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\).\\nArrow’s social welfare functions are sometimes called\\n“constitutions”.\",\n \"Arrow incorporated into the notion of a social welfare function the\\nfurther requirement that \\\\(f\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) is always a weak\\nordering of the set \\\\(X\\\\) of alternatives. Informally speaking, this\\nmeans that the output of the social welfare function must always be a\\nranking of the alternatives from better to worse, perhaps with\\nties. It may never be a cycle. This requirement will appear here, as\\nit does in other contemporary presentations of Arrow’s theorem, as a\\nseparate condition of Social Ordering that social welfare\\nfunctions might be required to meet. See\\n Section 3.1. This way, we can consider the\\n consequences of dropping this\\ncondition without changing any basic parts of the framework.\\nSee Section 4.2.\",\n \"Arrow established a convention that is still widely observed of\\nusing ‘\\\\(R\\\\)’ to denote the social preference derived from\\n“\\\\(\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\)”. The social welfare function used to derive it\\nis, in his notation, left implicit. One advantage of writing\\n‘\\\\(f\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\)’ instead of ‘\\\\(R\\\\)’ is\\nthat when we state the conditions of the impossibility theorem, in the\\nnext section, the social welfare function will figure explicitly in\\nthem. This makes it quite clear that what these conditions constrain\\nis the functional relationship between individual and social\\npreferences. Focusing attention on this was an important innovation of\\nArrow’s approach.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.3 Social Welfare Functions\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"With the conceptual framework now in\\nplace, Section 3.1 sets out the\\n“conditions” or constraints that Arrow imposed on social\\nwelfare functions, and Section 3.2 states the\\ntheorem itself. Section 4 explains the\\nconditions more fully, discusses reasons that Arrow gave for imposing\\nthem, and considers whether it is proper to do so. \",\n \"Arrow’s conditions often are called axioms, and his approach is\\nsaid to be axiomatic. This might be found misleading. Unlike axioms of\\nlogic or geometry, Arrow’s conditions are not supposed to express more\\nor less indubitable truths, or to constitute an implicit definition of\\nthe object of study. Arrow himself took them to be questionable\\n“value judgments” that “express the doctrines of\\ncitizens’ sovereignty and rationality in a very general form”\\n(Arrow 1951 [1963]: 31). Indeed, as we will see\\nin Section 4, and as Arrow himself recognized,\\nsometimes it is not even desirable that social welfare functions\\nshould satisfy all conditions of the impossibility theorem.\",\n \"Arrow restated the conditions in the second edition of Social\\nChoice and Individual Values (Arrow 1963). They appear here in\\nthe canonical form into which they have settled since then.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Impossibility\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"A first requirement is that the social welfare function \\\\(f\\\\) can\\nhandle any combination of any individual preferences at all:\",\n \"\\nUnrestricted Domain (U): The domain of \\\\(f\\\\)\\nincludes every list \\\\(\\\\langle R_{1}, \\\\ldots, R_{n}\\\\rangle\\\\) of \\\\(n\\\\)\\nweak orderings of \\\\(X\\\\).\\n\",\n \"Condition U requires that \\\\(f\\\\) is defined for each\\n“logically possible” profile of individual preferences. A\\nsecond requirement is that, in each case, \\\\(f\\\\) produces an ordering of\\nthe alternatives, perhaps with ties:\",\n \"\\nSocial Ordering (SO): For any profile \\\\(\\\\langle\\nR_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) in the domain, \\\\(f\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) is a weak\\nordering of \\\\(X\\\\).\\n\",\n \"Notice that, as the paradox of voting in\\n Section 1 shows, these two conditions\\n U and SO by\\nthemselves already rule out aggregating preferences by pairwise\\nmajority decision, if there are at least three alternatives to choose\\nbetween, and three people whose preferences are to be taken into\\naccount.\",\n \"To state the next requirements it is convenient to use some\\nshorthand. For any given individual ordering \\\\(R_{i}\\\\), let \\\\(P_{i}\\\\) be\\nthe strict or asymmetrical part of \\\\(R_{i}: xP_{i}y\\\\)\\nif \\\\(xR_{i}y\\\\) but not \\\\(yR_{i}x\\\\). Intuitively, \\\\(xP_{i}y\\\\) means\\nthat \\\\(i\\\\) really does prefer \\\\(x\\\\) to \\\\(y\\\\), in that \\\\(i\\\\) is not indifferent\\nbetween them. Similarly, let \\\\(P\\\\) be the strict part of \\\\(f\\\\langle\\nR_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\). The next condition of Arrow’s theorem is: \",\n \"\\nWeak Pareto (WP): For any profile \\\\(\\\\langle\\nR_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) in the domain of \\\\(f\\\\), and any alternatives \\\\(x\\\\)\\nand \\\\(y\\\\), if for all \\\\(i\\\\), \\\\(xP_{i}y\\\\),\\nthen \\\\(xPy\\\\). \\n\",\n \"WP requires \\\\(f\\\\) to respect unanimous strict\\npreferences. That is, whenever everyone strictly prefers one\\nalternative to another, the social ordering that \\\\(f\\\\) derives must\\nagree. Pairwise majority decision\\nsatisfies \\nWP.[2]\\n Many other well-known voting methods such\\nas Borda counting satisfy it as well (see\\n Section 5.2). So WP requires\\n that \\\\(f\\\\) is to this extent like\\nthem.\",\n \"The next condition ensures that social preferences are not based\\nentirely on the preferences of any one person. Person \\\\(d\\\\) is\\na dictator of \\\\(f\\\\) if for any alternatives \\\\(x\\\\) and \\\\(y\\\\), and\\nfor any profile \\\\(\\\\langle\\\\ldots, R_{d},\\\\ldots\\\\rangle\\\\) in the domain of\\n\\\\(f\\\\): if \\\\(xP_{d}y\\\\), then \\\\(xPy\\\\). When a dictator strictly prefers one\\nthing to another, the society always does as well. Other people’s\\npreferences can still influence social preferences. So can\\n“non-welfare” features of the alternatives such as, in\\nthe case of social states, the extent to which people are equal,\\ntheir rights are respected, and so on. But all these can make a\\ndifference only when the dictator is indifferent between two\\nalternatives, having no strict preference one way or the other. The\\ncondition is now simply:\",\n \"\\nNondictatorship (D): \\\\(f\\\\) has no dictator.\\n\",\n \"To illustrate, pick some person \\\\(d\\\\), any one at all, and from each\\nprofile \\\\(\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) in the domain take the ordering \\\\(R_{d}\\\\)\\nrepresenting the preferences of \\\\(d\\\\). Now, in each case, let the social\\npreference be that. In other words, for each profile \\\\(\\\\langle\\nR_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\), let \\\\(f\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) be \\\\(R_{d}\\\\). This social\\nwelfare function \\\\(f\\\\) bases the social ordering entirely on the\\npreferences of \\\\(d\\\\), its dictator. It is intuitively undemocratic\\nand D rules it out.\",\n \"To state the last condition of Arrow’s theorem, another piece of\\nshorthand is handy. For any given relation \\\\(R\\\\), and any set \\\\(S\\\\), let\\n\\\\(R|S\\\\) be the restriction of \\\\(R\\\\) to \\\\(S\\\\). It is that part of \\\\(R\\\\)\\nconcerning just the elements of \\n\\\\(S\\\\).[3]\\n The restriction of \\\\(\\\\langle\\nR_{1}, \\\\ldots, R_{n}\\\\rangle\\\\) to \\\\(S\\\\), written \\\\(\\\\langle\\nR_{1}, \\\\ldots, R_{n}\\\\rangle|S\\\\), is just \\\\(\\\\langle R_{1}|S,\\n\\\\ldots, R_{n}|S\\\\rangle\\\\). Take for instance the profile from the\\nparadox of voting in Section 1:\",\n \"Its restriction to the set \\\\(\\\\{A,C\\\\}\\\\) of alternatives is:\",\n \"Now the remaining condition can be stated: \",\n \"\\nIndependence of Irrelevant Alternatives (I): For\\nall alternatives \\\\(x\\\\) and \\\\(y\\\\) in \\\\(X\\\\), and all profiles \\\\(\\\\langle\\nR_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) and \\\\(\\\\langle R^*_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) in the domain of \\\\(f\\\\), if\\n\\\\(\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle|\\\\{x,y\\\\} = \\\\langle R^*_{i}\\\\rangle|\\\\{x,y\\\\}\\\\), then\\n\\\\(f\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle |\\\\{x,y\\\\} = f\\\\langle R^*_{i}\\\\rangle\\n|\\\\{x,y\\\\}\\\\).\\n\",\n \"I says that whenever two profiles \\\\(\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\)\\nand \\\\(\\\\langle R^*_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) are identical, as far as some\\nalternatives \\\\(x\\\\) and \\\\(y\\\\) are concerned, so too must the social\\npreference relations \\\\(f\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) and \\\\(f\\\\langle\\nR^*_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) be identical, as far as \\\\(x\\\\) and \\\\(y\\\\) are concerned. For\\nexample, consider the profile:\",\n \"Its restriction to the pair {\\\\(A\\\\),\\\\(C\\\\)} is identical to that of the\\nprofile of the paradox of voting. Suppose the domain of a social\\nwelfare function includes both of these profiles. Then, to\\nsatisfy I, it must derive from each one the same social\\npreference among \\\\(A\\\\) and \\\\(C\\\\). The social preference among \\\\(A\\\\) and \\\\(C\\\\)\\nis, in this sense, to be “independent” of anybody’s\\npreferences among either of them and the remaining\\n“irrelevant” alternative \\\\(B\\\\). The same is to hold for any\\ntwo profiles in the domain, and for any other pair taken from the set\\n\\\\(X\\\\) = {\\\\(A\\\\), \\\\(B\\\\), \\\\(C\\\\)} of all alternatives. Some voting methods do not\\nsatisfy I (see Section 5.2), but\\npairwise majority decision does. To see whether \\\\(x\\\\) is socially\\npreferred to \\\\(y\\\\), by this method, you need look no further than the\\nindividual preferences among \\\\(x\\\\) and \\\\(y\\\\). \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.1 These Conditions…\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Arrow discovered that, except in the very simplest of cases, the\\nfive conditions of Section 3.1 are\\nincompatible.\",\n \"\\nArrow’s Theorem: Suppose there are more than two\\nalternatives. Then no social welfare function \\\\(f\\\\)\\nsatisfies U, SO, WP, D,\\nand I.\\n\",\n \"Arrow (1951) has the original proof of this\\n“impossibility” theorem. See among many other works Kelly\\n1978, Campbell and Kelly 2002, Geanakoplos 2005 and Gaertner 2009 for\\nvariants and different proofs.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.2 …are Incompatible\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"Taken separately, the conditions of Arrow’s theorem do not seem\\nsevere. Apparently, they ask of an aggregation procedure only that it\\nwill come up with a social preference ordering no matter what\\neverybody prefers (U and SO), that it will resemble\\ncertain democratic arrangements in some ways (WP\\nand I), and that it will not resemble certain undemocratic\\narrangements in another way (D). Taken together, though,\\nthese conditions exclude all possibility of deriving social\\npreferences. It is time to consider them more closely. \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. The Conditions, again\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Arrow’s domain condition U says that the domain of the\\nsocial welfare function includes every list of \\\\(n\\\\) weak orderings of\\n\\\\(X\\\\). For example, suppose the alternatives are \\\\(A\\\\), \\\\(B\\\\), and \\\\(C\\\\), and\\nthat the people are 1, 2, and 3. There are 13 weak orderings of three\\nalternatives, so the unrestricted domain contains 2197 (that is,\\n\\\\(13^{3}\\\\)) lists of weak orderings of \\\\(A\\\\), \\\\(B\\\\), and \\\\(C\\\\). A social\\nwelfare function \\\\(f\\\\) for these alternatives and people, if it\\nsatisfies U, maps each one of these “logically\\npossible” preference profiles onto a collective preference among\\n\\\\(A\\\\), \\\\(B\\\\), and \\\\(C\\\\).\",\n \"In Arrow’s account, the different profiles in a domain represent\\npreferences that the people might turn out to have. To\\nimpose U, on his epistemic rationale, amounts to assuming\\nthat they might have any preferences at all: it is only when their\\npreferences could be anything that it makes sense to require the\\nsocial welfare function to be ready for everything. Arrow wrote in\\nsupport of U:\\n\",\n \" If we do not wish to require any prior knowledge\\nof the tastes of individuals before specifying our social welfare\\nfunction, that function will have to be defined for every logically\\npossible set of individual orderings. (Arrow 1951 [1963]: 24)\\n\",\n \"There have been misunderstandings. Some think U requires\\nof social welfare functions that they can handle “any old”\\nalternatives. It does nothing of the sort. What it requires is that the\\nsocial welfare function can handle the widest possible range\\nof preferences among whichever alternatives there are to\\nchoose among, and whether there happen to be many of these or only a\\nfew of them is beside the point: the domain of a social welfare\\nfunction can be completely unrestricted even if there are in \\\\(X\\\\) just\\ntwo alternatives. One way to sustain this unorthodox understanding\\nof U is, perhaps, to think of Arrow’s \\\\(x, y, z, \\\\ldots\\\\) not as alternatives properly\\nspeaking—not as candidates in elections, social states, or what\\nhave you—but as names or labels that represent these on\\ndifferent occasions for choosing. Then, it might be thought, variety\\namong the alternatives to which the labels can be attached will generate\\nvariety among the profiles that an aggregation procedure might be\\nexpected to handle. Blackorby et al. (2006) toy with this idea at one\\npoint, but they quickly set it aside. It does not seem to have been\\nexplored in the literature.\",\n \"Of course, there is nothing to keep anyone from reinterpreting\\nArrow’s basic notions, including the set \\\\(X\\\\) of alternatives, in any\\nway they like; a theorem is a theorem no matter what interpretation\\nit is given. It is important to realize, though, that to interpret\\n\\\\(x, y, z, \\\\ldots\\\\) as labels is not standard, and can\\nonly make nonsense of much of the theory of social choice to which\\nArrow’s theorem has given \\nrise.[4]\",\n \"Arrow already knew that U is a stronger domain condition\\nthan is needed for an impossibility result. The free triple\\nproperty and the chain property are weaker conditions\\nthat replace U in some versions of Arrow’s theorem (Campbell\\nand Kelly 2002). These versions, being more informative, are, from a\\nlogical point of view, better. U is simpler to state than\\ntheir domain conditions, though, and might be found more\\nintuitive. Notice that the weaker domain conditions still require a\\nlot of variety among profiles. A typical proof of an Arrow-style\\nimpossibility theorem requires that the domain is unrestricted with\\nrespect to some three alternatives. In this case there is always a\\npreference profile like the one implicated in the paradox of voting\\nin Section 1, from which pairwise majority\\ndecision derives a cycle.\",\n \"Whether it is sensible to impose U or any other domain\\ncondition on a social welfare function depends very much on the\\nparticulars of the choice problem being studied. Sometimes, in the\\nnature of the alternatives under consideration, and the way in which\\nindividual preferences among them are determined, imposing U\\ncertainly is not appropriate. If for instance the alternatives are\\ndifferent ways of dividing up a pie among some people, and it is known\\nprior to selecting a social welfare function that these people are\\nselfish, each caring only about the size of his own piece, then it\\nmakes no obvious sense to require of a suitable function that it can\\nhandle cases in which some people prefer to have less for themselves\\nthan to have more. The social welfare function will never be called on\\nto handle such cases for the simple reason that they will never arise.\\nArrow made this point as follows:\",\n \"\\n[I]t has frequently been assumed or implied in welfare economics\\nthat each individual values different social states solely according\\nto his consumption under them. If this be the case, we should only\\nrequire that our social welfare function be defined for those sets of\\nindividual orderings which are of the type described; only such should\\nbe admissible (Arrow 1951 [1963]: 24).\\n\",\n \"Section 5.1 considers some of the\\npossibilities that open up when there is no need to reckon with all\\n“logically possible” individual preferences.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.1 Unrestricted Domain\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Condition SO requires that the result of aggregating\\nindividual preferences is always a weak ordering of the alternatives,\\na binary relation among them that is both transitive and connected.\\nIntuitively, the result has to be a ranking of the\\nalternatives from better to worse, perhaps with ties. There is never\\nto be a cycle of social preferences, like the one derived by pairwise\\nmajority decision in the paradox of voting,\\nin Section 1.\",\n \"Arrow did not state SO as a separate\\ncondition. He built it into the very notion of a social\\nwelfare function, arguing that the result of aggregating\\npreferences will have to be an ordering if it is to “reflect\\nrational choice-making” (Arrow 1951 [1963]: 19). Criticized by\\nBuchanan (1954) for transferring properties of individual\\nchoice to collective choice, Arrow in the second edition of Social\\nChoice and Individual Values gave a different rationale. There he\\nargued that transitivity is important because it ensures that\\ncollective choices are independent of the path taken to them (Arrow\\n1951 [1963]: 120). He did not develop this idea further.\",\n \"Charles Plott (1973) elaborated a suitable notion of path\\nindependence. Suppose we arrive at our choice by what he\\ncalled divide and conquer: first we divide the alternatives\\ninto some smaller sets—say, because these are more\\nmanageable—and we choose from each one. Then we gather together\\nall the alternatives that we have chosen from the smaller sets, and we\\nchoose again from among these. There are many ways of making the\\ninitial division, and a choice procedure is said to be path\\nindependent if the choice we arrive at in the end is independent\\nof which division we start with (Plott 1973: 1080). In Arrow’s\\naccount, social choices are made from some given\\n“environment” \\\\(S\\\\) of feasible alternatives by maximizing a\\nsocial ordering \\\\(R\\\\): the choice \\\\(C(S)\\\\) from among \\\\(S\\\\) is the set of\\nthose \\\\(x\\\\) within \\\\(S\\\\) such that for any \\\\(y\\\\) within \\\\(S, xRy\\\\). It is not\\ndifficult to see how intransitivity of \\\\(R\\\\) can result in path\\ndependence. Consider again the paradox of voting\\nof Section 1. \\\\(A\\\\) is strictly favoured above\\n\\\\(B\\\\), and \\\\(B\\\\) above \\\\(C\\\\); but, contrary to transitivity, \\\\(C\\\\) is strictly\\nfavoured above \\\\(A\\\\). Starting with the division \\\\(\\\\{\\\\{A,B\\\\}, \\\\{B,C\\\\}\\\\}\\\\),\\nour choice from among \\\\(\\\\{A,B,C\\\\}\\\\) will be \\\\(\\\\{A\\\\}\\\\); but starting\\ninstead with \\\\(\\\\{\\\\{A,C\\\\}, \\\\{B,C\\\\}\\\\}\\\\) we will arrive in the end at\\n\\\\(\\\\{B\\\\}\\\\).\",\n \"Plott’s analysis reveals a subtlety. The full strength\\nof SO is not needed to secure path independence of\\nchoice. It is sufficient that social preference is a (complete\\nand) quasi-transitive relation, having a strict component\\nthat is transitive but an indifference component that, perhaps, is\\nnot transitive. Sen (1969: Theorem V) demonstrated the compatibility\\nof this weaker requirement with all of Arrow’s other conditions, but\\nnoted that the aggregation function he came up with would not\\ngenerally be found attractive. Its unattractiveness was no\\naccident. Allan Gibbard showed that the only social welfare functions\\nmade available by allowing intransitivity of social indifference,\\nwhile keeping Arrow’s other requirements in place, are what he\\ncalled liberum veto oligarchies (Gibbard 1969, 2014). There\\nhas in every case to be some group of individuals, the oligarchs,\\nsuch that the society always strictly prefers one alternative to\\nanother if all of the oligarchs strictly prefer it, but never does so\\nif that would go against the strict preference of any\\noligarch.[5] A\\ndictatorship, in Arrow’s sense, is a liberum veto oligarchy of\\none. Relaxing SO by limiting the transitivity requirement to\\nstrict social preferences therefore does not seem a promising way of\\nsecuring, in spite of Arrow’s theorem, the existence of acceptable\\nsocial welfare functions.\\n\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.2 Social Ordering\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Condition WP requires that whenever everybody ranks one\\nalternative strictly above another the social ordering agrees. This\\nhas long been a basic assumption in welfare economics and might seem\\ncompletely uncontroversial. That the community should prefer one\\nsocial state to another whenever each individual does, Arrow argued in\\nconnection with compensation, is “not debatable except perhaps\\non a philosophy of systematically denying people whatever they\\nwant” (Arrow 1951 [1963]: 34).\",\n \"But WP is not as harmless as it might seem, and in\\ncombination with U it tightly constrains the possibilities\\nfor social choice. This is evident from Sen’s (1970) demonstration\\nthat these two conditions conflict with the idea that for each person\\nthere is a personal domain of states of affairs, within which his\\npreferences must prevail in case of conflict with others’. This\\nimportant problem of the “Paretian libertarian” meanwhile\\nhas its own extensive literature. For further discussion, see the\\nentry social choice theory.\",\n \"We may think of WP as a vestige of what Sen called:\",\n \"\\nWelfarism: The judgement of the relative goodness of\\nalternative states of affairs must be based exclusively on, and taken\\nas an increasing function of, the respective collections of\\nindividual utilities in these states (Sen 1979: 468).\\n\",\n \"In Arrow’s ordinal framework, welfarism insists that individual\\npreference orderings are the only basis for deriving social\\npreferences. Non-welfare factors—physical characteristics of\\nsocial states, people’s motives in having the preferences they do,\\nrespect for rights, equality—none of these are to make any\\ndifference except indirectly, through their reflections in individual\\npreferences. WP asserts the demands of welfarism in the\\nspecial case in which everybody’s strict preferences coincide. Sen\\nargued that even these limited demands might be found excessive on\\nmoral grounds (Sen 1979: Section IV). Section 4.5 \\nhas further discussion of welfarism.\\n\\n\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.3 Weak Pareto\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Someone is a dictator, in Arrow’s sense, if whenever he strictly\\nprefers one alternative to another the society always prefers it as\\nwell. The preferences of people other than the dictator can still make\\na difference, and so can non-welfare factors, but only when the\\ndictator is indifferent between two alternatives, having no strict\\npreference one way or the other. Arrow’s non-dictatorship\\ncondition D says that there is to be no dictator. Plainly it\\nrules out many undemocratic arrangements, such as identifying social\\npreferences in every case with the individual preferences of some one\\nperson. This apparently straightforward condition has attracted very\\nlittle attention in the literature. \",\n \"In fact there is more to the non-dictatorship condition than meets\\nthe eye. An Arrovian dictator is just someone whose strict preferences\\ninvariably are a subset of the society’s strict preferences, and that\\nby itself doesn’t mean that his preferences form a basis for social\\npreferences, or that the dictator has any power or control over\\nthese. Aanund Hylland once made a related point while objecting to the\\nunreflective imposition of D in single profile analyses of\\nsocial choice:\",\n \"\\nIn the single-profile model, a dictator is a\\nperson whose individual preferences coincide with the social ones in\\nthe one and only profile under consideration. Nothing is necessarily\\nwrong with that; the decision process can be perfectly democratic, and\\none person simply turns out to be on the winning side on all\\nissues. (Hylland 1986: 51, footnote 10) \",\n \"The non-dictatorship condition for this reason sometimes goes too\\nfar. Even pairwise majority voting, that paradigm of a democratic\\nprocedure, is in Arrow’s sense sometimes a dictatorship. Consider\\nZelig. He has no tastes, values or preferences of his own but\\ntemporarily takes on those of another, whoever is close at hand. He is\\na human chameleon, the ultimate\\nconformist.[6]\\nZelig one day finds himself on a committee of three that will choose\\namong several options using the method of pairwise majority voting\\nand, given his peculiar character, the range of individual orderings\\nthat can arise is somewhat restricted. In each admissible profile, two\\nof the three individual orderings are identical: Zelig’s and that of\\nwhoever is seated closest to him at the committee\\nmeeting.[7] Now\\nsuppose it so happens that Zelig strictly prefers one option \\\\(x\\\\) to\\nanother, \\\\(y\\\\). Then someone else does too; that makes two of the\\nthree and so, when they vote, the result is a strict collective\\npreference for \\\\(x\\\\) above \\\\(y\\\\). The committee’s decision procedure\\nis, in Arrow’s sense, a dictatorship, and Zelig is the dictator. But\\nof course really Zelig is a follower, not a leader, and majority\\nvoting is as democratic as can be. It’s just that this one mad little\\nfellow has a way of always ending up on the winning side.\",\n \"Arrow imposed D in conjunction with the\\nrequirement U that the domain is completely\\nunrestricted. Perhaps this condition expresses something closer to its\\nintended meaning then. With an unrestricted domain, a dictator, unlike\\nZelig, is someone whose preferences conflict with everybody else’s in\\na range of cases, and it is in each instance his preferences that\\nagree with social preferences, not theirs. However this may be, the\\nexample of Zelig shows that whether it is appropriate to\\nimpose D on social welfare functions depends on the details\\nof the choice problem at hand. The name of this condition is\\nmisleading. Sometimes there is nothing undemocratic about having a\\n“dictator”, in Arrow’s technical sense.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.4 Non-Dictatorship\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Arrow’s independence condition requires that whenever all\\nindividual preferences among a pair of alternatives are the same in\\none profile as they are in another, the social preference among these\\nalternatives must also be the same for the two profiles. Speaking\\nfiguratively, what this means is that when the social welfare function\\ngoes about the work of aggregating individual orderings, it has to\\ntake each pair of alternatives separately, paying no attention to\\npreferences for alternatives other than them. Some aggregation\\nprocedures work this way. Pairwise majority decision does: it counts\\n\\\\(x\\\\) as weakly preferred to \\\\(y\\\\), socially, if as many people weakly\\nprefer \\\\(x\\\\) to \\\\(y\\\\) as the other way around, and plainly there is no\\nneed to look beyond \\\\(x\\\\) and \\\\(y\\\\) to find this out.\",\n \"Condition I is not Arrow’s formulation. It is a simpler\\none that has since become the standard in expositions of the\\nimpossibility theorem. Arrow’s formulation concerns choices made from\\nwithin various “environments” \\\\(S\\\\) of feasible options by\\nmaximizing social orderings:\",\n \"\\nIndependence of Irrelevant Alternatives (choice\\nversion): For all environments \\\\(S\\\\) within \\\\(X\\\\), and all profiles\\n\\\\(\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) and \\\\(\\\\langle R^*_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) in the domain of\\n\\\\(f\\\\), if \\\\(\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle|S = \\\\langle R^*_{i}\\\\rangle|S\\\\), then\\n\\\\(C(S)= C^*(S)\\\\).\\n\",\n \"Here \\\\(C(S)\\\\) is the set of those options from \\\\(S\\\\) that are, in\\nthe sense of the social ordering \\\\(f\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\), as good as\\nany other; and \\\\(C^*(S)\\\\) stands for the maxima by \\\\(f\\\\langle\\nR^*_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\). This is Arrow’s Condition 3 (Arrow 1951 [1963]:\\n27).[8] \",\n \"Iain McLean (2003) finds a first statement\\nof Independence, and appreciation of its significance,\\nalready in (Condorcet 1785). Meanwhile much controversy has surrounded\\nthis condition, and not a little confusion. Some of each can be traced\\nto an example with which Arrow sought to\\nmotivate it. When one candidate in an election dies\\nafter polling, he wrote,\",\n \"\\n[…] the choice to be made among the set \\\\(S\\\\) of surviving\\ncandidates should be independent of the preferences of individuals for\\ncandidates not in \\\\(S\\\\). […] Therefore, we may require of our\\nsocial welfare function that the choice made by society from a given\\nenvironment depend only on the orderings of individuals among the\\nalternatives in that environment (Arrow 1951 [1963]: 26).\\n\",\n \"Evidently Arrow took this for his choice version\\nof the independence condition. He continued:\",\n \"\\nAlternatively stated, if we consider two sets of individual\\norderings such that, for each individual, his ordering of those\\nparticular alternatives in a given environment is the same each time,\\nthen we require that the choice made by society from that environment\\nbe the same when individual values are given by the first set of\\norderings as they are when given by the second (Arrow 1951 [1963]:\\n26–27).\\n\",\n \"It is not clear why Arrow thought the case of the dead candidate\\ninvolves different values and preference profiles. As he set the\\nexample up, it is natural to imagine that everybody’s values and\\npreferences stay the same while one candidate becomes unfeasible\\n(“we’d all still prefer \\\\(A\\\\), but sadly he’s not with us any\\nmore”). Apparently, then, Arrow’s example misses its mark. There\\nhas been much discussion of this point in the literature. Hansson\\n(1973) argues that Arrow confused his independence condition for\\nanother; compare Bordes and Tideman (1991) for a contrary view. For\\ndiscussion of several notions of independence whose differences have\\nnot always been appreciated, see Ray (1973).\",\n \"The following condition has also been called Independence\\nof Irrelevant Alternatives:\",\n \"\\n(\\\\(I^*\\\\)) For all \\\\(x\\\\) and \\\\(y\\\\), and all \\\\(\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) and\\n\\\\(\\\\langle R_{i}^*\\\\rangle\\\\) in the domain of \\\\(f\\\\), if for all \\\\(i: xR_{i}y\\\\)\\nif and only if \\\\(xR^*_{i}y\\\\), then \\\\(x f\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle y\\\\) if and\\nonly if \\\\(x f\\\\langle R_{i}^*\\\\rangle y\\\\).\\n\",\n \"If the intention is to express Arrow’s independence condition this\\nis a mistake because \\\\(I^*\\\\), though similar in appearance\\nto I, has a different content. I says that whenever\\neverybody’s preferences concerning a pair of options are the same in\\none profile as they are in another, the social preference must also be\\nthe same at the two profiles, as far as this pair is concerned. This\\nis not what \\\\(I^*\\\\) says because the embedded antecedent ‘for\\nall \\\\(i: xR_{i}y\\\\) if and only if \\\\(xR^*_{i}y\\\\)’ is satisfied\\nnot only when everybody’s preferences among \\\\(x\\\\) and \\\\(y\\\\) are the\\nsame in \\\\(\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) as they are in \\\\(\\\\langle\\nR_{i}^*\\\\rangle\\\\), but in other instances as well. For example,\\nsuppose that in \\\\(\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) everybody is indifferent\\nbetween some social state \\\\(T\\\\) and another state \\\\(S\\\\) (in which case\\nfor all \\\\(i\\\\), both \\\\(T R_{i} S\\\\) and \\\\(S R_{i} T\\\\)), while in\\n\\\\(\\\\langle R_{i}^*\\\\rangle\\\\) everybody strictly prefers \\\\(T\\\\) to \\\\(S\\\\)\\n(for all \\\\(i\\\\), \\\\(T R^*_{i} S\\\\) but not \\\\(S R^*_{i} T\\\\)). Then the\\nantecedent ‘for all \\\\(i: T R_{i} S\\\\) if and only if \\\\(T R^*_{i}\\nS\\\\)’ is satisfied, although individual preferences among \\\\(T\\\\)\\nand \\\\(S\\\\) are not the same in the two profiles. \\\\(I^*\\\\) sometimes\\nconstrains \\\\(f\\\\) though \\\\(I\\\\) does not and it is a more demanding\\ncondition.\",\n \"The additional demands of \\\\(I^*\\\\) are sometimes excessive. Let \\\\(T\\\\) be\\nthe result of reforming some tried and true status quo, \\\\(S\\\\). Now\\nsuppose we favor reform if it is generally thought that change will be\\nfor the better, but not otherwise. Then we will be on the lookout for\\na social welfare function \\\\(f\\\\) that derives a strict social preference\\nfor \\\\(T\\\\) above \\\\(S\\\\) when everybody strictly prefers \\\\(T\\\\) to \\\\(S\\\\), but a\\nstrict preference for \\\\(S\\\\) above \\\\(T\\\\) when everyone is indifferent\\nbetween these states. \\\\(I^*\\\\) rules out\\nevery \\\\(f\\\\) that conforms to this desideratum because it requires a weak\\nsocial preference for \\\\(T\\\\) to \\\\(S\\\\) in both cases or in neither.\",\n \"Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives might be said to\\nrequire that the social comparison among any given pair of\\nalternatives, say social states, depends only on individual\\npreferences among this pair. This is correct but it leaves some room\\nfor misunderstanding. I says that the\\nonly preferences that count are those concerning just these\\ntwo social states. That doesn’t mean that preferences are the only\\nthing that counts, though. And, indeed, as far as I is\\nconcerned, non-welfare features of the two states may also make a\\ndifference. \",\n \"The doctrine that individual preferences are the only\\nbasis for comparing the goodness of social states is welfarism\\n(mentioned already in Section 4.3). An example\\nillustrates how nasty it can be:\",\n \"In the status quo \\\\(S\\\\), Peter is filthy rich and Paul is abjectly\\npoor. Would it be better to take from Peter and give to Paul? Let \\\\(T\\\\)\\nbe the social state resulting from transferring a little of Peter’s\\nvast wealth to Paul. Paul prefers \\\\(T\\\\) to \\\\(S\\\\) (“I need to\\neat”) and Peter prefers \\\\(S\\\\) to \\\\(T\\\\) (“not my\\nproblem”). This is one case. Compare it to another. Social state\\n\\\\(T^*\\\\) arises from a different status quo \\\\(S^*\\\\), also by taking from\\nPeter and giving to Paul. This time, though, their fortunes are\\nreversed. In \\\\(S^*\\\\) it is Peter who is poor and Paul is the rich one,\\nso this is a matter of taking from the poor to give to the rich. Even\\nso, we may assume, the pattern of Peter’s and Paul’s preferences is\\nthe same in the second case as it is in the first, because each of\\nthem prefers to have more for himself than to have less. Paul prefers\\n\\\\(T^*\\\\) to \\\\(S^*\\\\) (“I need another Bugatti”) and Peter\\nprefers \\\\(S^*\\\\) to \\\\(T^*\\\\) (“wish it were my problem”). Since\\neverybody’s preferences are the same in the two cases, welfarism\\nrequires that the relative social goodness is the same as well. In\\nparticular, it allows us to count \\\\(T\\\\) socially better than \\\\(S\\\\) only if\\nwe also count \\\\(T^*\\\\) better than \\\\(S^*\\\\). Whatever we think about taking\\nfrom the rich to give to the poor, though, taking from the poor to\\ngive to the rich is quite another thing. As Samuelson said of a\\nsimilar case, “[o]ne need not be a doctrinaire egalitarian to be\\nspeechless at this requirement” (Samuelson 1977: 83).\",\n \"Condition I does not express welfarism. Applied to this\\nexample, I states that there is to be no change in the social\\ncomparison among the status quo \\\\(S\\\\) and the result \\\\(T\\\\) of\\nredistribution unless Peter’s preferences among these states change,\\nor Paul’s do (assume they are the only people involved). In this\\nsense, the social preference among these states may be said to depend\\n“only” on individual preferences among them. I\\nsays the same about \\\\(S^*\\\\) and \\\\(T^*\\\\) or about any other pair of\\nalternatives. But I is silent about any relationship between\\nthe social comparison among \\\\(S\\\\) and \\\\(T\\\\), on the one hand, and the\\nsocial comparison among \\\\(S^*\\\\) and \\\\(T^*\\\\), on the other. In particular,\\nit leaves a social welfare function free to count \\\\(T\\\\) socially better\\nthan \\\\(S\\\\) (for increasing equality), while also counting \\\\(T^*\\\\)\\nworse than \\\\(S^*\\\\) (for decreasing equality). Intuitively\\nspeaking, I allows a social welfare function to “shift\\ngears” as we go from one pair of social states to the next,\\ndepending on the non-welfare features encountered there. \",\n \"The condition that expresses welfarism is:\",\n \"\\nStrong Neutrality (SN): For all alternatives \\\\(x\\\\),\\n\\\\(y\\\\), \\\\(z\\\\) and \\\\(w\\\\), and all profiles \\\\(\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) and \\\\(\\\\langle\\nR_{i}^*\\\\rangle\\\\): IF for all \\\\(i\\\\): \\\\(xR_{i}y\\\\) if and only if \\\\(zR^*_{i}w\\\\),\\nand \\\\(yR_{i}x\\\\) if and only if \\\\(wR^*_{i}z\\\\), THEN \\\\(x f\\\\langle\\nR_{i}\\\\rangle y\\\\) if and only if \\\\(z f\\\\langle R_{i}^*\\\\rangle w\\\\), and \\\\(y\\nf\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle x\\\\) if and only if \\\\(w f\\\\langle R_{i}^*\\\\rangle\\nz\\\\).\\n\",\n \" SN is more demanding than \\nI.[9]\\n I requires consistency for each\\npair of alternatives separately, as we go from one profile in the\\ndomain to the next. SN also requires this, but in addition it requires consistency as\\nwe go from one pair to the next, whether that is within a\\nsingle profile or among several different ones. This is\\nhow SN keeps non-welfare features from making any difference:\\nby compelling the social welfare function to treat any two pairs of\\nalternatives the same way, if the pattern of individual preference is\\nthe same for both.\",\n \"Since \\\\(I^*\\\\) and SN are logically stronger than I,\\nobviously a version of Arrow’s theorem can be had using either one of\\nthem instead of I. Such a theorem will be less interesting,\\nthough—not only because it is logically weaker but also because,\\nas we have seen, these more demanding conditions often are unreasonable.\",\n \"The meaning of Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives is\\nnot easily grasped, and its ramifications are not immediately obvious.\\nIt is therefore surprising to see just how little has been said, over\\nthe many decades that have passed since Arrow published his famous\\ntheorem, to justify imposing this condition on social welfare\\nfunctions. Let us turn, now, to some arguments for and against.\",\n \"We have discussed Arrow’s attempt to motivate I using the\\nexample of the dead candidate in an election. In the second edition\\nof Social Choice and Individual Values he offered another\\nrationale. Independence, he argued, embodies the principle\\nthat welfare judgments are to be based on observable behavior. Having\\nexpressed approval for Bergson’s use of indifference maps, Arrow\\ncontinued:\",\n \"\\nThe Condition of Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives extends\\nthe requirement of observability one step farther. Given the set of\\nalternatives available for society to choose among, it could be\\nexpected that, ideally, one could observe all preferences among the\\navailable alternatives, but there would be no way to observe\\npreferences among alternatives not feasible for society. (Arrow 1963:\\n110)\\n\",\n \"Arrow seems to be saying that social decisions have to be made on\\nthe basis of preferences for feasible alternatives because these are\\nthe only ones that are observable. Arguably, though, this is\\ninsufficient support. Arrow’s choice version of Independence,\\nas we have seen, concerns all environments \\\\(S\\\\). The\\nobservability argument, though, apparently just concerns some\\n“given” feasible alternatives. See Hansson (1973: 38) on\\nthis point.\",\n \"Gerry Mackie (2003) argues that there has been equivocation on the\\nnotion of irrelevance. It is true that we often take nonfeasible\\nalternatives to be irrelevant. That presumably is why, in elections,\\nwe do not ordinarily put the names of dead people on ballots, along\\nwith those of the live candidates. But I also excludes from\\nconsideration information on preferences for alternatives that, in an\\nordinary sense, are relevant. An example illustrates Mackie’s\\npoint. George W. Bush, Al Gore, and Ralph Nader ran in the United\\nStates presidential election of 2000. Say we want to know whether\\nthere was a social preference for Gore above Bush. I\\nrequires that this question be answerable independently of whether the\\npeople preferred either of them to, say, Abraham Lincoln, or preferred\\nGeorge Washington to Lincoln. This seems right. Neither Lincoln nor\\nWashington ran for President that year. They were, intuitively,\\nirrelevant alternatives. But I also requires that the\\nranking of Gore with respect to Bush should be independent of voters’\\npreferences for Nader, and this does not seem right because\\nhe was on the ballot and, in the ordinary sense, he was a\\nrelevant alternative to them. Certainly Arrow’s observability\\ncriterion does not rule out using information on preferences for\\nNader. They were as observable as any in that election.\",\n \"A different rationale has been suggested for\\nimposing I specifically\\nin the case of voting. Many voting procedures are known to present\\nopportunities for voters to manipulate outcomes by misrepresenting\\ntheir preferences. Section 5.2 discusses the\\nexample of Borda counting, which allows voters to promote their own\\nfavorite candidates by strategically putting others’ favorites at the\\nbottom of their lists. Borda counting, it will be seen,\\nviolates I. Proofs of the Gibbard-Sattherthwaite theorem\\n(Gibbard 1973, Sattherthwaite 1975) associate vulnerability to\\nstrategic voting systematically with violation of I, and Iain\\nMcLean argues on this ground that voting methods ought to satisfy this\\ncondition: “Take out [I] and you have gross\\nmanipulability” (McLean 2003: 16). This matter of strategic\\nvoting did not play a part in Arrow’s presentation of the\\nimpossibility theorem, though, and was not dealt with seriously in\\nthe literature until after its publication. See the entry\\non social choice theory for discussion\\nof this important theme in contemporary theory of social choice.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.5 Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"Arrow’s theorem, it has been said, is about the impossibility of\\ntrying to do too much with too little information. This remark directs\\nattention towards two main avenues leading from Arrow-inspired gloom\\ntoward a sunnier view of the possibilities for collective decision\\nmaking: not trying to do so much, and using more information. One way\\nof not trying to do so much is to relax the requirement, it is a part\\nof SO, that all social preferences are\\ntransitive. Section 4.2 briefly considered this\\nidea but found it unpromising. Another way is to soften the demand\\nof U that there be a social ordering for each\\n“logically possible” preference profile. That is, we can\\nrestrict the domains of social welfare\\nfunctions. Section 5.1 discusses this important\\n“escape route” from Arrow’s theorem in some detail. One\\nway of using more information is to loosen the independence\\nconstraint I. This allows social welfare functions to make\\nuse of more of the information that is carried by individual\\npreference orderings. See Section 5.2. Another\\nway is to extend Arrow’s framework so as to allow individuals to\\ncontribute richer information than is carried by preference\\norderings. This information can come in the form of scores or grades,\\nas discussed in Section 5.3, or in the form of\\ncardinal measurements of individual utilities,\\nin Section 5.4.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Possibilities\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Sometimes, in the nature of the alternatives under consideration\\nand how individual preferences among them are determined, not all\\nindividual preferences can arise. When studying such a case within\\nArrow’s framework there is no need for a social welfare function that\\ncan handle each and every \\\\(n\\\\)-tuple of individual orderings. Some but\\nnot all profiles are admissible, and the domain is said to\\nbe restricted. In fortunate cases, it is then possible to find a\\nsocial welfare function that meets all assumptions and conditions of\\nArrow’s theorem—apart, of course, from U. Such domains\\nare said to be Arrow consistent. This Section considers some\\nimportant examples of Arrow consistent domains.\",\n \"For a simple illustration, consider the following profile: \",\n \"Here, two of the three people have the same strict preference\\nordering. Reckoning the collective preference by pairwise majority\\ndecision, it is easy to see that the result is the ordering of this\\nmajority: ABC. Consider now a domain made up entirely of\\nsuch profiles, in which most of the three voters share the same\\nstrict preferences. On such a domain, pairwise majority decision\\nalways derives an ordering and so it satisfies SO. This\\nsocial welfare function is nondictatorial as well provided the\\ndomain, though restricted, still retains a certain variety. In the\\nabove profile, voter \\\\(3\\\\) strictly prefers \\\\(B\\\\) to \\\\(A\\\\). Both of the\\nothers strictly prefer \\\\(A\\\\) to \\\\(B\\\\), though, and that is the\\nsocial preference: with this profile in the domain, \\\\(3\\\\) is no\\ndictator. Pairwise majority\\ndecision satisfies \\nD if each of the voters disagrees in this way with both of\\nthe others, in some or other profile.[10]\\nIt always satisfies WP\\nand I. On such a domain, we have now seen, this aggregation\\nprocedure satisfies all of Arrow’s non-domain conditions. Such a\\ndomain is Arrow consistent.\",\n \"Full identity of preferences is not needed for Arrow\\nconsistency. It can be enough that everybody’s preferences are\\nsimilar, even if they never entirely agree. An example illustrates the\\ncase of single peaked domains.\",\n \"Suppose three bears get together to decide how hot their common pot\\nof porridge will be. Papa bear likes hot porridge, the hotter the\\nbetter. Mama bear likes cold porridge, the colder the better. Baby\\nbear most likes warm porridge; hot porridge is next best as far as he\\nis concerned (“it will always cool off”), and he doesn’t\\nlike cold porridge at all. These preferences among hot, warm and cold\\nporridge can be represented as a preference profile:\",\n \"Or else they can be pictured like this:\",\n \"This preference profile is single peaked. Each bear has a\\n“bliss point” somewhere along the ordering of the options\\nby their temperature, and each bear likes options less and less as we\\nmove along this common ordering away from the bliss point, on either\\nside. Single peaked preferences arise with respect to the\\nleft-right orientation of political candidates, the cost of\\nalternative public projects, and other salient attributes of\\noptions. Single peaked profiles, in which everybody’s\\npreferences are single peaked with respect to a common ordering, arise\\nnaturally when everybody cares about the same thing in the options\\nunder consideration—temperature, left-right orientation, cost,\\nor what have you—even if, as with the bears, there is no further\\nconsensus about which options are better than which.\",\n \"Duncan Black (1948) showed that if the number of\\nvoters is odd, and their preference profile is single peaked,\\npairwise majority decision always delivers up an\\nordering.[11]\\nFurthermore, he showed, the maximum of this ordering is the bliss\\npoint of the median voter—the voter whose bliss point\\nhas, on the common ordering, as many voters’ bliss points to one side\\nas it has to the other. In the example this is Baby bear, and warm\\nporridge is the collective maximum. This example illustrates the way\\nin which single peakedness can facilitate compromise.\",\n \"Say the number of voters is odd. Now consider a\\nsingle-peaked domain—one that is made up entirely of\\nsingle peaked profiles. Black’s result tells us that pairwise\\nmajority decision on this domain satisfies SO. Provided the\\ndomain is sufficiently inclusive (so that for each \\\\(i\\\\) there is\\nwithin the domain some profile in which \\\\(i\\\\) is not the median voter)\\nit also satisfies D. Pairwise majority decision always\\nsatisfies WP and I, so such a domain is Arrow\\nconsistent.\",\n \"With an even number of voters, single peakedness\\ndoes not ensure satisfaction of SO. For example, suppose\\nthere are just two voters and that their individual orderings are:\",\n \"Pairwise majority decision derives from this profile a weak social\\npreference for \\\\(A\\\\) to \\\\(B\\\\), since there is one who weakly prefers \\\\(A\\\\)\\nto \\\\(B\\\\), and one who weakly prefers \\\\(B\\\\) to \\\\(A\\\\). Similarly, it derives\\na weak social preference for \\\\(B\\\\) to \\\\(C\\\\). Transitivity requires a weak\\nsocial preference for \\\\(A\\\\) to \\\\(C\\\\), but there is none. On the contrary,\\nthere is a strict social preference for \\\\(C\\\\) above \\\\(A\\\\), since that is\\nthe unanimous preference of the voters. Still, this profile is\\nsingle peaked with respect to the common ordering \\\\(BCA\\\\):\",\n \"Majority decision with “phantom” voters can be used to\\nestablish Arrow consistency when the number of people is even. Let\\nthere be \\\\(2n\\\\) people, and let each profile in the domain be single\\npeaked with respect to one and the same ordering of the\\nalternatives. Let \\\\(R_{2n+1}\\\\) be an ordering that also is single peaked\\nwith respect to this common ordering. \\\\(R_{2n+1}\\\\) represents the\\npreferences of a “phantom” voter. Now take each profile\\n\\\\(\\\\langle R_{1},\\\\ldots, R_{2n}\\\\rangle\\\\) in the domain and expand it\\ninto \\\\(\\\\langle R_{1},\\\\ldots, R_{2n}, R_{2n+1}\\\\rangle\\\\), by adding\\n\\\\(R_{2n+1}\\\\). The set of all the expanded profiles is a single peaked\\ndomain and, because the real voters together with the phantom are odd\\nin number, Black’s result applies to it. Let \\\\(g\\\\) be pairwise majority\\ndecision for the expanded domain. We obtain a social welfare function\\n\\\\(f\\\\) for the original domain by assigning to each profile the ordering\\nthat \\\\(g\\\\) assigns to its expansion. That is, we put:\",\n \"This \\\\(f\\\\) satisfies SO because \\\\(g\\\\) does. It\\nsatisfies WP because there are more real voters than\\nphantoms (\\\\(2n\\\\) to \\\\(1\\\\); we could have used any odd number of phantoms\\nsmaller than \\\\(2n\\\\)). \\\\(f\\\\) satisfies I because the phantom\\nordering is the same in all profiles of the expanded domain. If the\\ndomain includes sufficient variety among profiles then \\\\(f\\\\) also\\nsatisfies D and is Arrow consistent. This nice idea of\\nphantom voters was introduced by Moulin (1980), who used it to\\ncharacterize a class of voting schemes that are non-manipulable, in\\nthat they do not provide opportunities for strategic\\nvoting. \",\n \"Domain restrictions have been the focus of much\\nresearch in recent decades. Gaertner (2001) provides a general\\noverview. Le Breton and Weymark (2006) survey work on domain\\nrestrictions that arise naturally when analyzing economic problems in\\nArrow’s framework. Miller (1992) suggests that deliberation can\\nfacilitate rational social choice by transforming initial preferences\\ninto single peaked preferences. List and Dryzek (2003) argue that\\ndeliberation can bring about a “structuration” of\\nindividual preferences that facilitates democratic decision making\\neven without achieving full single-peakedness. List et al. (2013)\\npresent empirical evidence that deliberation sometimes does have this\\neffect.\",\n \"As Samuelson described it, the single profile approach might seem\\nto amount to the most severe of domain restrictions:\",\n \"\\n\\n[O]ne and only one of the […] possible\\npatterns of individuals’ orderings is needed. […]\\nFrom it (not from each of them all) comes a social\\nordering. (Samuelson 1967: 48–49)\\n\",\n \" According to Sen (1977), though, the\\nBergson-Samuelson social welfare function has more than a single\\nprofile in its domain. It has in fact a completely unrestricted\\ndomain, for while according to Samuelson only one profile is needed\\n“it could be any one” (Samuelson 1967: 49). What\\ndistinguishes the single profile approach, on Sen’s way of\\nunderstanding it, is that there is to be no coordinating the behavior\\nof the social welfare function at several different profiles, by\\nimposing on it interprofile conditions such as I\\nand SN (see Section 4.5). Either\\nway, though, and just as Samuelson insisted, Arrow’s theorem does not\\nlimit the single profile approach because one of its conditions is\\ninappropriate in connection with it. Either U is\\ninappropriate (if there is a single profile in the domain) or\\nelse I is inappropriate (if there are no interprofile\\nconstraints).\",\n \"Certain impossibility theorems that are closely related to Arrow’s\\nhave been thought relevant to single-profile choice even so. These\\ntheorems do not use Arrow’s interprofile condition \\\\(I\\\\) but\\nuse instead an intraprofile neutrality condition. This\\ncondition says that whenever within any single profile the\\npattern of individual preferences for one pair \\\\(x\\\\),\\\\(y\\\\) of options is\\nthe same as for another pair \\\\(z,w\\\\), the social ordering derived\\nfrom this profile must also be the same for \\\\(x\\\\), \\\\(y\\\\) as it is for \\\\(z\\\\),\\n\\\\(w\\\\):\",\n \"\\nSingle-Profile Neutrality (SPN): For any \\\\(\\\\langle\\nR_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\), and any alternatives \\\\(x\\\\), \\\\(y\\\\), \\\\(z\\\\) and \\\\(w\\\\): IF for all\\n\\\\(i: xR_{i}y\\\\) if and only if \\\\(zR_{i}w\\\\), and \\\\(yR_{i}x\\\\) if and only if\\n\\\\(wR_{i}z\\\\), THEN \\\\(x f\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle y\\\\) if and only if \\\\(z f\\\\langle\\nR_{i}\\\\rangle w\\\\), and \\\\(y f\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle x\\\\) if and only if \\\\(w\\nf\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle z\\\\).\\n\",\n \"SPN follows from the strong neutrality (SN)\\ncondition of Section 4.5, on identifying\\n\\\\(\\\\langle R_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) with \\\\(\\\\langle R_{i}^*\\\\rangle\\\\). Parks (1976),\\nand independently Kemp and Ng (1976), showed that there are\\n“single profile” versions of Arrow’s theorem\\nusing SPN instead of I. These theorems were\\nsupposed to block the Bergson-Samuelson approach. In fact,\\ncondition SPN is just as easily set aside as SN,\\nand for the same reason: both exclude non-welfare information that is\\nrelevant to the comparison of social states from an ethical\\nstandpoint. Samuelson (1977) ridiculed SPN using an example\\nabout redistributing chocolate. It is similar in structure to the\\nexample of Peter and Paul, in\\n Section 4.5.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.1 Domain Restrictions\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives severely limits\\nwhich information about individual preferences may be used for\\nwhat. It requires a social welfare function, when assembling the\\nsocial preference among a pair of alternatives, to take into account\\nonly those of people’s preferences that concern just this pair. This\\nSection discusses two kinds of information that is implicit in\\npreferences for other alternatives, and illustrates their use in social\\ndecision making: information about the positions of alternatives in\\nindividual orderings, and information about the fairness of social\\nstates. \",\n \"Positional voting methods take into account where the\\ncandidates come in the different individual orderings—whether it\\nis first, or second, … or last. Borda counting is an\\nimportant example. Named after Jean-Charles de Borda, a contemporary\\nof Condorcet, it had already been proposed in the 13th\\nCentury by the pioneering writer and social theorist Ramon\\nLull. Nicholas of Cusa in the 15th Century recommended it\\nfor electing Holy Roman Emperors. Borda counting is used in some\\npolitical elections and on many other occasions for voting, in clubs\\nand other organizations. Consider the profile:\",\n \"Let each candidate receive four points for coming first in some\\nvoter’s ordering, three for coming second, two for a third place and a\\nsingle point for coming last; the alternatives then are ordered by the\\ntotal number of points they receive, from all the voters. The Borda\\ncount of \\\\(A\\\\) is then 10 (or \\\\(4+3+3\\\\)) and that of \\\\(B\\\\) is 11 \\\\((3+4+4)\\\\),\\nso \\\\(B\\\\) outranks \\\\(A\\\\) in the social ordering. This method\\napplies with the obvious adaptation to any election with a finite\\nnumber of candidates.\",\n \"Now suppose voter \\\\(1\\\\) moves \\\\(B\\\\) from second place to last on his\\nown list, and we have the profile:\",\n \"Then \\\\(B\\\\) will receive just 9 points \\\\((1+4+4)\\\\). \\\\(A\\\\) receives\\nthe same 10 as before, though, and now outranks \\\\(B\\\\). This example\\nillustrates two important points. First, Borda counting does not\\nsatisfy Arrow’s condition I, since while each voter’s ranking\\nof \\\\(A\\\\) with respect to \\\\(B\\\\) is the same in the two profiles, the\\nsocial ordering of this pair is different. Second, Borda counting\\nprovides opportunities for voters to manipulate the outcome of an\\nelection by strategic voting. If everybody’s preferences are as in the\\nfirst profile, voter \\\\(1\\\\) might do well to misrepresent his\\npreferences by putting \\\\(B\\\\) at the bottom of his list. In this way,\\nhe can promote his own favorite, \\\\(A\\\\), to the top of the social\\nordering (he will get away with this, of course, only if the other\\nvoters do not see what he is up to and adjust their own rankings\\naccordingly, by putting his favorite \\\\(A\\\\) at the bottom). The\\nsusceptibility of Borda counting to strategic voting has long been\\nknown. When this was raised as an objection, Borda’s indignant\\nresponse is said to have been that his scheme was intended for honest\\npeople. Lull and Nicholas of Cusa recommended, before voting by this\\nmethod, earnest oaths to tell the truth and stripping oneself of all\\nsins.\\n\",\n \"For further discussion of positionalist voting methods, see the\\nentries voting methods\\nand social choice theory; for an\\nanalytical overview, see Pattanaik’s (2002) handbook article. Barberà\\n(2010) reviews what is known about strategic voting. \",\n \"Mark Fleurbaey (2007) has shown that social welfare functions need\\nmore ordinal information than I allows them if they are to\\nrespond appropriately to a certain fairness of social states. He gives\\nthe example of Ann, who has ten apples and two oranges, and Bob, with\\nthree apples and eleven oranges. This allocation is said to be\\n“envy free” if, intuitively, she is at least as happy with\\nher own basket of fruit as she would be with his and, similarly, he is\\nas happy with his own basket as he would be with hers. Let the\\ndistribution of fruit in one social state \\\\(S\\\\) be as described, and\\nconsider the state \\\\(S^*\\\\) in which the allocations are reversed. That\\nis, in \\\\(S^*\\\\) it is Ann that has three apples and eleven oranges,\\nwhile Bob has ten apples and two oranges. More technically, \\\\(S\\\\)\\nis envy free if Ann weakly prefers \\\\(S\\\\) to \\\\(S^*\\\\), and Bob\\ndoes too. We might expect that, other things being equal, the envy\\nfreeness of a social state will promote it in the social ordering\\nabove an alternative state that is not envy free. But I does\\nnot allow this.\",\n \"\\nTo see why not, consider whether it would be socially preferable,\\nstarting from the status quo \\\\(S\\\\), to take one apple and one orange\\nfrom Bob and give both of them to Ann. Let \\\\(T\\\\) be the state arising\\nfrom this transfer. We assume for the sake of the example that Ann\\nalways strictly prefers having more of everything for herself to\\nhaving less, and that Bob’s preferences are similarly self-interested,\\nso that in all admissible profiles Ann strictly prefers \\\\(T\\\\) to\\n\\\\(S\\\\), while Bob strictly prefers \\\\(S\\\\) to \\\\(T\\\\). Their preferences\\namong these states are opposite and do not by themselves entail a\\nsocial preference one way or the other. Now, consider first a profile\\nin which the status quo \\\\(S\\\\) is envy free but \\\\(T\\\\) is not. (Let both\\nAnn and Bob be indifferent between the baskets each one has in \\\\(S\\\\)\\nbut not between those in \\\\(T\\\\), in which both agree that Bob is worse\\noff.) Relative to this profile, a social welfare function promoting\\nenvy freeness comes out against the transfer from Bob to Ann by\\nranking \\\\(S\\\\) strictly above \\\\(T\\\\). But consider another profile, in\\nwhich it is \\\\(T\\\\) that is envy free (now Ann and Bob are indifferent\\nbetween the baskets in \\\\(T\\\\), and agree that in \\\\(S\\\\) Ann is worse off\\nthan Bob). Relative to this second profile, \\\\(T\\\\) outranks \\\\(S\\\\) in\\nthe social ordering. In direct conflict with I, the social\\npreference among \\\\(S\\\\) and \\\\(T\\\\) switches as we go from one profile to\\nthe other, although the individual preferences among \\\\(S\\\\) and \\\\(T\\\\)\\nstay the same. The social ranking of \\\\(S\\\\) and \\\\(T\\\\) turns on\\npreferences among these states and the “irrelevant”\\n\\\\(S^*\\\\) and similarly defined \\\\(T^*\\\\), because the fairness of \\\\(S\\\\)\\nand \\\\(T\\\\) does.\",\n \"Fleurbaey recommends a weaker condition, attributing it to Hansson\\n(1973) and to Pazner (1979):\",\n \"\\nWeak Independence: Social preferences on a pair of options\\nshould only depend on the population’s preferences on these two\\noptions and on what options are indifferent to each of these options\\nfor each individual (Fleurbaey 2007: 23).\\n\",\n \"Fleurbaey (2007) discusses social welfare functions satisfying weak\\nindependence together with Arrow’s conditions apart, of course,\\nfrom I. The approach to social welfare that is sketched there\\nis developed at length in (Fleurbaey and Maniquet 2011).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.2 More Ordinal Information\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAnother way to have social orderings in spite of Arrow’s theorem is to\\nallow people to contribute more ordinal information about their\\npreferences than is admissible within Arrow’s framework. Arrow’s\\npurpose in limiting individual inputs to weak orderings of the\\nalternatives was to exclude cardinal information about utilities. This\\nlimitation, though, is too tight for its purpose. One way for people\\nto communicate their preferences is to grade their\\nalternatives. Now, although in general grades do not carry cardinal\\ninformation, Arrow’s framework has no provision for people to input\\ntheir preferences using them. This might seeem a small oversight on\\nArrow’s part but it is critical, because there are ways of aggregating\\ngraded inputs that are not avaliable for preferance orderings, and\\nwith them comes another “escape” from Arrow’s\\nimpossibility. Showing how it goes requires a slight extension of\\nArrow’s framework.\",\n \"\\nLet a grade language \\\\(L\\\\) be a strictly ordered collection\\nof expressions, the grades. The grades could be adjectival expressions\\nof a natural language, such as excellent, \\ngood, acceptable, poor and terrible,\\nor they could be characters such as the familiar letter grades of\\nacademic evaluation. They could be numerals (then often\\ncalled scores) or the strings of stars commonly used to\\nevaluate hotels and restaurants. They could be any symbols that come\\nin some fixed order (from “top” to\\n“bottom”).\",\n \"\\nA grade function \\\\(G_{i}\\\\) maps the set \\\\(X\\\\) of alternatives\\ninto some given grade language \\\\(L\\\\). Intuitively, \\\\(G_{i}(x)\\\\) is\\n\\\\(i\\\\)’s grade for alternative \\\\(x\\\\). A grade function \\\\(G_{i}\\\\)\\ncontains as much information as some weak ordering \\\\(R_{i}\\\\)\\nof the alternatives. This can be seen by putting \\\\(xR_{i}y\\\\) if\\n\\\\(G_{i}(x) \\\\ge G_{i}(y)\\\\): \\\\(i\\\\) weakly prefers \\\\(x\\\\) to \\\\(y\\\\) if\\n\\\\(i\\\\)’s grade for \\\\(x\\\\) is at least as high as \\\\(i\\\\)’s grade for\\n\\\\(y\\\\). In general \\\\(G_{i}\\\\) contains more information than\\nthe corresponding ordering because we cannot always go in reverse:\\ndifferent grade functions correspond to the same ordering. For\\ninstance, one way to convey that \\\\(A\\\\) is preferable to \\\\(B\\\\) is to\\nsay that whereas \\\\(A\\\\) is good, \\\\(B\\\\) is\\nmerely acceptable; another is to say that whereas \\\\(A\\\\)\\nis good, \\\\(B\\\\) is terrible, but this doesn’t come to\\nthe same thing because acceptable and terrible\\ndon’t. The additional information in grades is in general not cardinal\\ninformation because for instance the expressions \\ngood, acceptable and terrible, ordinary\\nadjectives of English, do not carry cardinal information about how\\ngood \\\\(A\\\\) and \\\\(B\\\\) are.\",\n \"\\nA grade profile is a list \\\\(\\\\langle G_{1}, \\\\ldots,\\nG_{n}\\\\rangle\\\\) of grade functions, one for each of the people \\\\(1,\\n\\\\ldots, n\\\\). Notions of a multiprofile domain and a social welfare\\nfunction \\\\(f\\\\) are defined as in Arrow’s framework, putting grade\\nprofiles instead of Arrow’s profiles of weak orders (the output of a\\nsocial welfare function is not a social grading of the alternatives\\nbut a social ordering of them, just in Arrow’s original\\nframework). The conditions of Arrow’s theorem are reformulated\\naccordingly; for instance, the reformulated domain assumption is: \",\n \"\\nUnrestricted Domain (U): The domain of \\\\(f\\\\)\\nincludes every list \\\\(\\\\langle G_{1}, \\\\ldots, G_{n}\\\\rangle\\\\) of \\\\(n\\\\)\\ngrade functions defined on \\\\(X\\\\). \\n\",\n \" Arrow’s independence condition becomes:\",\n \"\\nIndependence of Irrelevant Alternatives (I): For\\nall alternatives \\\\(x\\\\) and \\\\(y\\\\) in \\\\(X\\\\), and all profiles \\\\(\\\\langle\\nG_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) and \\\\(\\\\langle G^*_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\) in the domain of \\\\(f\\\\), if\\n\\\\(\\\\langle G_{i}\\\\rangle|\\\\{x,y\\\\} = \\\\langle G^*_{i}\\\\rangle|\\\\{x,y\\\\}\\\\), then\\n\\\\(f\\\\langle G_{i}\\\\rangle |\\\\{x,y\\\\} = f\\\\langle G^*_{i}\\\\rangle\\n|\\\\{x,y\\\\}\\\\).\\n\",\n \"\\nIntuitively, the reformulated independence assumption says that\\nwhether one alternative ranks higher than another in the social\\nordering depends only on everybody’s grades for these two\\nalternatives. Other alternatives are in this matter\\n“irrelevant.”\",\n \"\\nThere are social welfare functions that satisfy all conditions of\\nArrow’s theorem, reformulated for graded inputs. With an odd number\\n\\\\(n\\\\) of people, for instance, the social welfare function median\\ngrading fills the bill. Given a profile \\\\(\\\\langle G_{i}\\\\rangle\\\\)\\nof grade functions, the median grade for an alternative \\\\(x\\\\)\\nis the grade that is in the middle, when we list all the grades\\n\\\\(G_{1}(x), \\\\ldots, G_{n}(x)\\\\) for \\\\(x\\\\) in order, from top to\\nbottom. The social ordering associated with this profile goes by the\\nalternatives’ median grades: \\\\(x f\\\\langle G_{i}\\\\rangle y\\\\) means that\\nthe median grade for \\\\(x\\\\) is either the same as the median grade for\\n\\\\(y\\\\), or else it is higher.\",\n \"\\nTo verify that median grading satisfies the reformulated conditions,\\ntake for instance the nondictatorship condition. A person \\\\(d\\\\) is\\na dictator of \\\\(f\\\\) if for any alternatives \\\\(x\\\\) and \\\\(y\\\\),\\nand for any profile \\\\(\\\\langle\\\\ldots, G_{d},\\\\ldots\\\\rangle\\\\) in the\\ndomain of \\\\(f\\\\): if \\\\(xP_{d}y\\\\), then \\\\(xPy\\\\). When \\\\(f\\\\) is median\\ngrading, this means that whenever a dictator expresses a strict\\npreference for one alternative over another, by giving it a higher\\ngrade, this alternative also ranks strictly higher in the social\\nordering, having a higher median grade. Except in the trivial case of\\na language with only a single grade (which makes it impossible to\\nexpress strict preferences, giving everybody vacuous dictatorial\\npowers), and provided there are at least two alternatives and three\\npeople, median grading on an unrestricted domain has no dictator. To\\nsee that it is so, consider any given person \\\\(p\\\\), and any two\\nalternatives \\\\(A\\\\) and \\\\(B\\\\). In an unrestricted domain there is some\\nprofile in which \\\\(p\\\\)’s grade for \\\\(A\\\\) is higher than \\\\(p\\\\)’s grade\\nfor \\\\(B\\\\), but in which everybody else’s grades for these alternatives\\nare just the other way around: everybody other than \\\\(p\\\\) gives to\\n\\\\(B\\\\) the same grade that \\\\(p\\\\) gives to \\\\(A\\\\), and gives to \\\\(A\\\\) the\\nsame grade that \\\\(p\\\\) gives to \\\\(B\\\\). In this profile, the median\\ngrade for \\\\(A\\\\) is \\\\(p\\\\)’s grade for \\\\(B\\\\), and the median grade for\\n\\\\(B\\\\) is \\\\(p\\\\)’s grade for \\\\(A\\\\), which is higher. So although \\\\(p\\\\)\\nstrictly prefers \\\\(A\\\\) to \\\\(B\\\\), \\\\(B\\\\) ranks strictly higher than\\n\\\\(A\\\\) in the social ordering, and \\\\(p\\\\) is not a dictator. Repeating\\nthis demonstration for each person, no one else is a dictator\\neither. Satisfaction of the other reformulated conditions on the\\nunrestricted domain of grade profiles is similarly\\nstraightforward.\",\n \"\\nMichel Balinski and Rida Laraki (2007) showed that scoring and grading\\nenable an “escape” from Arrow’s impossibility while\\nstaying within an ordinal framework. Their theory of majority\\njudgment is a generalization of median grading that makes more\\nuse than it does of the ordinal information in grade profiles\\n(Balinski and Laraki 2010). Balinski and Laraki insist that people\\nmust share what they call a “common language” of grades,\\nwithout giving this notion a precise sense. Indeed it can be shown\\nthat, when different people might have very different thresholds for\\nawarding grades, there is in grade profiles no more information than\\nin the corresponding profiles of weak orderings. Then a close relative\\nof Arrow’s impossibility returns (Morreau 2016).\",\n \"\\nArrow came to realize, late in his life, that scoring and grading\\ncreate possibilities for democracy that his framework unnecessarily\\nrules out of consideration. In a 2012 interview he noted:\",\n \"\\nNow there’s another possible way of thinking about it, which is not\\nincluded in my theorem \\\\(\\\\ldots\\\\) [E]ach voter does not just give a\\nranking. But says, this is good. And this is not good. Or this is very\\ngood. And this is bad. So I have three or four classes \\\\(\\\\ldots\\\\) This\\nchanges the nature of voting.\\n\",\n \"\\nFor a transcript of this interview, see the Other Internet Resources.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.3 Even More Ordinal Information: Scores and Grades\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAmartya Sen (1970) extended Arrow’s framework by representing the\\npreferences of individuals \\\\(i\\\\) as utility functions \\\\(U_{i}\\\\) that\\nmap the alternatives onto real numbers: \\\\(U_{i}(x)\\\\) is the utility\\nthat \\\\(i\\\\) obtains from \\\\(x\\\\). A preference profile in Sen’s\\nframework is a list \\\\(\\\\langle U_{1}, \\\\ldots, U_{n}\\\\rangle\\\\) of utility\\nfunctions, and a domain is a set of these. An aggregation function,\\nnow a social welfare functional, maps each profile in some\\ndomain onto a weak ordering of the alternatives.\",\n \"Sen showed how to study various assumptions concerning the\\nmeasurability and interpersonal comparability of utilities by\\ncoordinating the social orderings derived from profiles that,\\ndepending on these assumptions, carry the same information. For\\ninstance, ordinal measurement with interpersonal\\nnoncomparability—built by Arrow right into his technical\\nframework—amounts, in Sen’s more flexible set up, to a\\nrequirement that the same social ordering is to be derived from any\\nutility profiles that reduce to the same list of orderings. At the\\nother extreme, utilities are measured on a ratio scale with full\\ninterpersonal comparability if those profiles yield the same social\\nordering that can be obtained from each other by rescaling, or\\nmultiplying all utility functions by the same positive real number.\\nSen explored different combinations of such assumptions.\",\n \"One important finding was that having cardinal utilities is not by\\nitself enough to avoid an impossibility result. In addition, utilities\\nhave to be interpersonally comparable. Intuitively speaking, to put\\ninformation about preference strengths to good use it has to be\\npossible to compare the strengths of different individuals’\\npreferences. See Sen (1970: Theorem 8*2). Interpersonal comparability\\nopens up many possibilities for aggregating utilities and preferences.\\nTwo important ones can be read off from classical utilitarianism and\\nRawls’s difference principle. For details, see the entry\\non social choice theory.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.4 Cardinal Information\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe Arrow-Sen framework lends itself to the study of a range of\\naggregation problems other than those for which it was originally\\ndeveloped. This Section briefly discusses some of them. \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"6. Reinterpretations\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nOn an epistemic conception, the value of democratic institutions lies,\\nin part, in their tendency to arrive at the truth in matters relevant\\nto public decisions (see Estlund 2008, but compare Peter 2011). This\\nidea receives some support from Condorcet’s jury theorem. It tells us,\\nsimply put, that if individual people are more likely than not to\\njudge correctly in some matter of fact, independently of one another,\\nthen the collective judgment of a sufficiently large group, arrived at\\nby majority voting, is almost certain to be correct (Condorcet\\n1785). The phenomenon of the “wisdom of crowds”,\\nfacilitated by cognitive diversity among individuals, provides further\\nand arguably better support for the epistemic conception (Page 2007,\\nLandemore 2012). But there are theoretical limits to the possibilities\\nfor collective judgment on matters of fact. Starting with Kornhauser\\nand Sager’s (1986) discussion of group deliberation in legal settings,\\nwork on the theory of judgment aggregation has explored paradoxes and\\nimpossibility theorems closely related to those that Condorcet and\\nArrow discovered in connection with preference aggregation. See List\\n(2012) and the entry social choice\\ntheory for overviews.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.1 Judgment Aggregation\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"In many decision problems there are several criteria by which to\\ncompare alternatives and, putting these criteria in place of people,\\nit is natural to study such problems within the Arrow-Sen framework.\\nArrow’s theorem, if analogues of its various assumptions and\\nconditions are appropriate, then tells us that there is no procedure\\nfor arriving at an “overall” ordering that assimilates\\ndifferent criterial comparisons.\",\n \"The Arrow-Sen framework has been used to study multi-criterial\\nevaluation in industrial decision making (Arrow and Raynaud 1986) and\\nin engineering design (Scott and Antonsson 2000; compare Franssen\\n2005). Anandi Hattiangadi (forthcoming) argues that Arrow’s theorem\\nlimits the possibilities for an interpretationist metasemantics, in\\nwhich the correct interpretation of linguistic expressions is the one\\nthat is, judging by relevant criteria, overall best.\",\n \"Kenneth May (1954) used Arrow’s framework to study the\\ndetermination of individual preferences. It had been found\\nexperimentally that people’s preferences, elicited separately for\\ndifferent pairs of options, often are cyclical. May explained this by\\nanalogy with the paradox of voting as the result of preferring one\\nalternative to another when it is better by more criteria than not.\\nMore generally, he reinterpreted Arrow’s theorem as an argument that\\nintransitivity of individual preferences is to be expected when\\ndifferent criteria “pull in different directions”. Susan\\nHurley (1985, 1989) considered a similar problem in practical\\ndeliberation when the criteria are moral values. She argued that\\nArrow’s theorem does not apply in this case. One strand of her\\nargument is that, unlike a person, a moral criterion can rank any\\ngiven alternatives just one way. It cannot “change its\\nmind” about them (Hurley 1985: 511), and this makes it\\ninappropriate to impose the analogue of the domain\\ncondition U on procedures for weighing moral reasons. \",\n \"There are multicriterial problems in theoretical deliberation as\\nwell. Okasha (2011) uses the Arrow-Sen framework to study the problem\\nof choosing among rival scientific theories by criteria including fit\\nto data, simplicity, and scope. He argues that the impossibility\\ntheorem threatens the rationality of theory choice. See Morreau (2015)\\nfor a reason to think that it does not apply to this problem, and\\nMorreau (2014) for a demonstration that impossibility theorems\\nrelevant to single profile choice (see \\nSections 2.2 and 5.1) \\nmight sometimes apply even so. In related work, Jacob Stegenga (2013)\\nargues that Arrow’s theorem limits the possibilities for combining\\ndifferent kinds of evidence. Eleonora Cresto and Diego Tajer\\n(forthcoming) counter that confirmational holism requires a\\nrestriction on the domains of evidence-aggregation functions that\\nblocks Stegenga’s argument: they cast the Duhem problem in a positive\\nlight as one aspect of a phenomenon that makes evidence aggregation\\npossible.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.2 Multi-Criterial Decision\"\n }\n ]\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Arrow, K.J., 1950, “A Difficulty in the Concept of Social\nWelfare”, Journal of Political Economy, 58:\n328–346.","–––, 1951 [1963], Social Choice and\nIndividual Values, New York: Wiley. 2nd ed.,\n1963.","Arrow, K.J. and H. Raynaud, 1986, Social Choice and\nMulticriterion Decision-Making, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.","Arrow, K.J., A.K. Sen, and K. Suzumura (eds.), 1996, Social\nChoice Re-Examined, vol. 2, London and Basingstoke:\nMacmillan.","––– (eds.), 2002, Handbook of Social Choice\nand Welfare, vol. 1, Amsterdam: North-Holland.","––– (eds.), 2011, Handbook of Social Choice\nand Welfare, vol. 2, Amsterdam: North-Holland.","Balinski, M. and R. Laraki, 2007, “A Theory of Measuring,\nElecting, and Ranking”, Proceedings of the National Academy\nof Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), 104:\n8720–8725.","–––, 2010, Majority Judgment: Measuring,\nRanking, and Electing, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.","Barberà, S., 2010, “Strategy-Proof Social Choice”, in\nArrow, Sen and Suzumura 2010: 731–831.","Bergson, A., 1938, “A Reformulation of Certain Aspects of\nWelfare Economics”, The Quarterly Journal of Economics,\n52: 310–334.","Black, D., 1948, “On the Rationale of Group\nDecision-making”, Journal of Political Economy, 56:\n23–34.","Blackorby, C., W. Bossert, and D. Donaldson, 2006,\n“Anonymous Single-Profile Welfarism”, Social Choice\nand Welfare, 27: 279–287.","Borda, J.C. de, 1781, “Mémoire sur les Élections au\nScrutin”, Histoire de l’Académie Royale de Sciences,\nParis. In translation: Alfred de Grazia 1953, “Mathematical\nDerivation of an Election System”, Isis, 44\n(1–2): 42–51.","Bordes, G. and N. Tideman, 1991, “Independence of\nIrrelevant Alternatives in the Theory of Voting”, Theory and\nDecision, 30: 163–186.","Buchanan, J., 1954, “Social Choice, Democracy, and Free\nMarkets”, Journal of Political Economy, 62:\n114–123.","Campbell, D.E. and J.S. Kelly, 2002, “Impossibility\nTheorems in the Arrovian Framework”, in Arrow, Sen and Suzumura\n2002: 35–94.","Condorcet, Marquis de, 1785, Essai sur l’application de\nl’analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues\nàla pluralité des voix, Paris.","Cresto, E. and D. Tajer, forthcoming, “Confirmational Holism\nand Theory Choice: Arrow meets Duhem”, Mind, first\nonline 30 January 2019. doi:10.1093/mind/fzy062","Dodgson, C.L. (Lewis Carroll), 1884, The Principles of\nParliamentary Representation, London: Harrison and Sons.","Elster, J. and Aa. Hylland (eds.), 1986, Foundations of\nSocial Choice Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.","Estlund D., 1994, “Opinion Leaders, Independence, and\nCondorcet’s Jury Theorem”, Theory and Decision, 36:\n131–162.","–––, 2008, Democratic Authority: a\nPhilosophical Framework, Princeton: Princeton University\nPress.","Fleurbaey, M., 2007, “Social Choice and Just Institutions:\nnew perspectives”, Economics and Philosophy, 23:\n15–43.","Fleurbaey, M. and F. Maniquet, 2011, A Theory of Fairness and\nSocial Welfare, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Fleurbaey, M. and P. Mongin, 2005, “The News of the Death\nof Welfare Economics is Greatly Exaggerated”, Social Choice\nand Welfare, 25: 381–418.","Franssen, M., 2005, “Arrow’s Theorem, Multi-criteria\nDecision Problems and Multi-Attribute Preferences in Engineering\nDesign”, Research in Engineering Design, 16:\n42–56.","Gaertner, W., 2001, Domain Conditions in Social Choice\nTheory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","–––, 2009, A Primer in Social Choice\nTheory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rev. ed.","Geanakoplos, J., 2005, “Three Brief Proofs of Arrow’s\nImpossibility Theorem”, Economic Theory, 26:\n211–215.","Gibbard, A., 1969, “Social Choice and the Arrow\nConditions”, unpublished manuscript. The main result is\navailable in Gibbard 2014.","–––, 1973, “Manipulation of Voting\nSchemes: A General Result”, Econometrica, 41:\n587–601.","–––, 2014, “Intransitive Social\nIndifference and the Arrow Dilemma”, Review of Economic\nDesign, 18: 3–10. ","Hansson, B., 1973, “The Independence Condition in the Theory\nof Social Choice”, Theory and Decision, 4:\n25–49.","Hattiangadi, A., forthcoming, “Radical Interpretation and\nThe Aggregation Problem”, Philosophy and Phenomenological\nResearch, first online 21 February 2019.\ndoi:10.1111/phpr.12578","Hurley, S., 1985, “Supervenience and the Possibility of\nCoherence”, Mind, 94: 501–525.","–––, 1989, Natural Reasons, Oxford:\nOxford University Press.","Hylland, Aa., 1986, “The Purpose and Significance of Social\nChoice Theory: some general remarks and an application to the\n‘Lady Chatterley problem’”, in Elster and Hylland\n1986: 45–73.","Kelly, J.S., 1978, Arrow Impossibility Theorems, New\nYork: Academic Press.","Kemp, M.C. and Y.K. Ng, 1976, “On the Existence of Social\nWelfare Functions, Social Orderings and Social Decision\nFunctions”, Economica, 43: 59–66.","Kolm, Serge-Christophe 1996, “Rational Just Social\nChoice”, in Arrow, Sen and Suzumura 1996: 167–196.","Kornhauser, L. and L Sager 1986, “Unpacking the\nCourt”, The Yale Law Journal, 96: 82–117.","Kroedel, T. and F. Huber, 2013, “Counterfactual Dependence\nand Arrow”, Noûs, 47: 453–466. \n [available online]","Landemore, H. 2012, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective\nIntelligence, and the Rule of the Many, Princeton: Princeton\nUniversity Press.","Le Breton, M. and J.A. Weymark, 2011, “Arrovian Social\nChoice Theory on Economic Domains”, in Arrow, Sen and Suzumura\n2011:\n191–299.","Lewis, D. 1968, “Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal\nLogic”, The Journal of Philosophy, 65:\n113–126.","–––, 1973a, Counterfactuals, Oxford:\nBlackwell Publishers and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,\n1973, Reprinted with revisions, 1986.","–––, 1973b, “Causation”, Journal\nof Philosophy, 70: 556–567","–––, 1979, “Counterfactual Dependence and\nTime’s Arrow”, Noûs, 13: 455–476.","List, C., 2012, “The Theory of Judgment Aggregation: an\nIntroductory Review”, Synthese, 187:\n179–207.","List, C. and J. Dryzek, 2003, “Social Choice Theory and\nDeliberative Democracy: A Reconciliation”, British Journal\nof Political Science, 33: 1–28.","List, C., R. C. Luskin, J. S. Fishkin, and I. McLean, 2013,\n“Deliberation, Single-Peakedness, and the Possibility of\nMeaningful Democracy: Evidence from Deliberative Polls”,\nJournal of Politics, 75: 80–95.","Little, I.M.D., 1952, “Social Choice and Individual\nValues”, Journal of Political Economy, 60:\n422–432.","Mackie, G., 2003, Democracy Defended, Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press.","May, K., 1954, “Intransitivity, Utility, and the Aggregation\nof Preference Patterns”, Econometrica, 22:\n1–13.","McLean, I., 2003, “The Reasonableness of Independence: A\nConversation from Condorcet and Borda to Arrow and Saari”,\nNuffield College Working Paper 2003-W6, University of Oxford,\n[available online].","Miller, D., 1992, “Deliberative Democracy and Social\nChoice”, Political Studies, 40, 54–67.","Morreau, M., 2010, “It Simply Does Not Add Up: Trouble with\nOverall Similarity”, The Journal of Philosophy, 107:\n469–490.","–––, 2014, “Mr. Fit, Mr. Simplicity and\nMr. Scope: From Social Choice to Theory Choice”,\nErkenntnis, 79: 1253–1268.","–––, 2015, “Theory Choice and Social\nChoice: Kuhn Vindicated”, Mind, 124: 239–262.","–––, 2016, “Grading in Groups”,\nEconomics & Philosophy, 32: 323–352.","Moulin, H., 1980, “On Strategy-Proofness and Single\nPeakedness”, Public Choice, 35: 437–455.","Murakami Y., 1968, Logic and Social Choice, London:\nRoutledge and Kegan Paul.","Oddie, G., 2013, “The Content, Consequence and Likeness\nApproaches to Verisimilitude: Compatibility, Trivialization, and\nUnderdetermination”, Synthese, 190:\n1647–1687.","Okasha, S., 2011, “Theory Choice and Social Choice: Kuhn\nversus Arrow”, Mind, 120: 83–115.","Page, S.E., 2007, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity\nCreates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies, Princeton,\nNJ: Princeton University Press.","Parks, R.P., 1976, “An Impossibility Theorem for Fixed\nPreferences: a Dictatorial Bergson-Samuelson Welfare Function”,\nReview of Economic Studies, 43: 447–450.","Pattanaik. P.K., 2002, “Positional Rules of Collective\nDecision Making”, in Arrow, Sen and Suzumura 2002:\n361–394.","Pazner, E., 1979, “Equity, Nonfeasible Alternatives and\nSocial Choice: a Reconsideration of the Concept of Social\nWelfare”, in J.J. Laffont (ed.), Aggregation and Revelation\nof Preferences, Amsterdam: North Holland.","Peter, F., 2011, Democratic Legitimacy, New York, London:\nRoutledge.","Plott, C. R. 1973, “Path Independence, Rationality, and\nSocial Choice”, Econometrica, 41: 1075–1091.","Popper, K. R., 1963, Conjectures and Refutations, London:\nRoutledge.","Ray, P., 1973, “Independence of Irrelevant\nAlternatives”, Econometrica, 44: 987–991.","Riker, W.H., 1982, Liberalism against Populism, San\nFrancisco: W.H. Freeman.","Roberts, K.W.S., 1980, “Social Choice Theory: The Single-\nand Multi-Profile Approaches”, The Review of Economic Studies,\n47: 441–450.","Samuelson, P., 1947, Foundations of Economic Analysis,\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.","–––, 1967, “Arrow’s Mathematical\nPolitics”, in S. Hook (ed.), Human Values and Economic\nPolicy, New York: New York University Press: 41–52.","–––, 1977, “Reaffirming the Existence of\n‘Reasonable’ Bergson-Samuelson Social Welfare\nFunctions”, Economica, 44: 81–88.","Sattherthwaite, M., 1975, “Strategy-Proofness and Arrow’s\nConditions: Existence and Correspondence Theorems for Voting\nProcedures and Social Welfare Functions”, Journal of\nEconomic Theory, 10: 187–217.","Schurz, G. and P. Weingartner, 2010, “Zwart and Franssen’s\nImpossibility Theorem holds for Possible-World-Accounts but not for\nConsequence-Accounts to Versimilitude”, Synthese, 172:\n415–436.","Scott M.J. and E.K. Antonsson, 2000, “Arrow’s Theorem and\nEngineering Design Decision Making”, Research in Engineering\nDesign, 11: 218–228.","Sen, A., 1969, “Quasi-transitivity, Rational Choice and\nCollective Decisions”, Review of Economic Studies, 36:\n381–393.","–––, 1970, Collective Choice and Social\nWelfare, San Francisco: Holden-Day.","–––, 1976, “Liberty, Unanimity and\nRights”, Economica, 43: 217–245.","–––, 1977, “On Weights and Measures:\nInformational Constraints in Social Welfare Analysis”,\nEconometrica, 45: 1539–1572.","–––, 1979, “Utiliarianism and\nWelfarism”, The Journal of Philosophy, 76:\n463–489.","–––, 1986, “Foundations of Social Choice\nTheory: An Epilogue”, in Elster and Hylland 1986:\n213–248.","–––, 1999, “The Possibility of Social\nChoice”, American Economic Review, 89:\n349–378.","–––, 2010, “The Informational Basis of\nSocial Choice”, in Arrow, Sen, and Suzumura 2010:\n29–46.","Stegenga, J. 2013, “An Impossibility Theorem for\nAmalgamating Evidence”, Synthese, 190:\n2391–2411.","Weymark, J. A., 1984, “Arrow’s Theorem with Social\nQuasi-Orderings”, Public Choice, 42: 235–246.","–––, 2014, “An Introduction to Allan\nGibbard’s Oligarchy Theorem Paper”, Review of Economic\nDesign, 18: 1–2.","Zwart, S. D. and M. Franssen 2007, “An Impossibility Theorem\nfor Verisimilitude”, Synthese, 158: 75–92."],"string":"[\n \"Arrow, K.J., 1950, “A Difficulty in the Concept of Social\\nWelfare”, Journal of Political Economy, 58:\\n328–346.\",\n \"–––, 1951 [1963], Social Choice and\\nIndividual Values, New York: Wiley. 2nd ed.,\\n1963.\",\n \"Arrow, K.J. and H. Raynaud, 1986, Social Choice and\\nMulticriterion Decision-Making, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.\",\n \"Arrow, K.J., A.K. Sen, and K. Suzumura (eds.), 1996, Social\\nChoice Re-Examined, vol. 2, London and Basingstoke:\\nMacmillan.\",\n \"––– (eds.), 2002, Handbook of Social Choice\\nand Welfare, vol. 1, Amsterdam: North-Holland.\",\n \"––– (eds.), 2011, Handbook of Social Choice\\nand Welfare, vol. 2, Amsterdam: North-Holland.\",\n \"Balinski, M. and R. Laraki, 2007, “A Theory of Measuring,\\nElecting, and Ranking”, Proceedings of the National Academy\\nof Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), 104:\\n8720–8725.\",\n \"–––, 2010, Majority Judgment: Measuring,\\nRanking, and Electing, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.\",\n \"Barberà, S., 2010, “Strategy-Proof Social Choice”, in\\nArrow, Sen and Suzumura 2010: 731–831.\",\n \"Bergson, A., 1938, “A Reformulation of Certain Aspects of\\nWelfare Economics”, The Quarterly Journal of Economics,\\n52: 310–334.\",\n \"Black, D., 1948, “On the Rationale of Group\\nDecision-making”, Journal of Political Economy, 56:\\n23–34.\",\n \"Blackorby, C., W. Bossert, and D. Donaldson, 2006,\\n“Anonymous Single-Profile Welfarism”, Social Choice\\nand Welfare, 27: 279–287.\",\n \"Borda, J.C. de, 1781, “Mémoire sur les Élections au\\nScrutin”, Histoire de l’Académie Royale de Sciences,\\nParis. In translation: Alfred de Grazia 1953, “Mathematical\\nDerivation of an Election System”, Isis, 44\\n(1–2): 42–51.\",\n \"Bordes, G. and N. Tideman, 1991, “Independence of\\nIrrelevant Alternatives in the Theory of Voting”, Theory and\\nDecision, 30: 163–186.\",\n \"Buchanan, J., 1954, “Social Choice, Democracy, and Free\\nMarkets”, Journal of Political Economy, 62:\\n114–123.\",\n \"Campbell, D.E. and J.S. Kelly, 2002, “Impossibility\\nTheorems in the Arrovian Framework”, in Arrow, Sen and Suzumura\\n2002: 35–94.\",\n \"Condorcet, Marquis de, 1785, Essai sur l’application de\\nl’analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues\\nàla pluralité des voix, Paris.\",\n \"Cresto, E. and D. Tajer, forthcoming, “Confirmational Holism\\nand Theory Choice: Arrow meets Duhem”, Mind, first\\nonline 30 January 2019. doi:10.1093/mind/fzy062\",\n \"Dodgson, C.L. (Lewis Carroll), 1884, The Principles of\\nParliamentary Representation, London: Harrison and Sons.\",\n \"Elster, J. and Aa. Hylland (eds.), 1986, Foundations of\\nSocial Choice Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Estlund D., 1994, “Opinion Leaders, Independence, and\\nCondorcet’s Jury Theorem”, Theory and Decision, 36:\\n131–162.\",\n \"–––, 2008, Democratic Authority: a\\nPhilosophical Framework, Princeton: Princeton University\\nPress.\",\n \"Fleurbaey, M., 2007, “Social Choice and Just Institutions:\\nnew perspectives”, Economics and Philosophy, 23:\\n15–43.\",\n \"Fleurbaey, M. and F. Maniquet, 2011, A Theory of Fairness and\\nSocial Welfare, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Fleurbaey, M. and P. Mongin, 2005, “The News of the Death\\nof Welfare Economics is Greatly Exaggerated”, Social Choice\\nand Welfare, 25: 381–418.\",\n \"Franssen, M., 2005, “Arrow’s Theorem, Multi-criteria\\nDecision Problems and Multi-Attribute Preferences in Engineering\\nDesign”, Research in Engineering Design, 16:\\n42–56.\",\n \"Gaertner, W., 2001, Domain Conditions in Social Choice\\nTheory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2009, A Primer in Social Choice\\nTheory, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rev. ed.\",\n \"Geanakoplos, J., 2005, “Three Brief Proofs of Arrow’s\\nImpossibility Theorem”, Economic Theory, 26:\\n211–215.\",\n \"Gibbard, A., 1969, “Social Choice and the Arrow\\nConditions”, unpublished manuscript. The main result is\\navailable in Gibbard 2014.\",\n \"–––, 1973, “Manipulation of Voting\\nSchemes: A General Result”, Econometrica, 41:\\n587–601.\",\n \"–––, 2014, “Intransitive Social\\nIndifference and the Arrow Dilemma”, Review of Economic\\nDesign, 18: 3–10. \",\n \"Hansson, B., 1973, “The Independence Condition in the Theory\\nof Social Choice”, Theory and Decision, 4:\\n25–49.\",\n \"Hattiangadi, A., forthcoming, “Radical Interpretation and\\nThe Aggregation Problem”, Philosophy and Phenomenological\\nResearch, first online 21 February 2019.\\ndoi:10.1111/phpr.12578\",\n \"Hurley, S., 1985, “Supervenience and the Possibility of\\nCoherence”, Mind, 94: 501–525.\",\n \"–––, 1989, Natural Reasons, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press.\",\n \"Hylland, Aa., 1986, “The Purpose and Significance of Social\\nChoice Theory: some general remarks and an application to the\\n‘Lady Chatterley problem’”, in Elster and Hylland\\n1986: 45–73.\",\n \"Kelly, J.S., 1978, Arrow Impossibility Theorems, New\\nYork: Academic Press.\",\n \"Kemp, M.C. and Y.K. Ng, 1976, “On the Existence of Social\\nWelfare Functions, Social Orderings and Social Decision\\nFunctions”, Economica, 43: 59–66.\",\n \"Kolm, Serge-Christophe 1996, “Rational Just Social\\nChoice”, in Arrow, Sen and Suzumura 1996: 167–196.\",\n \"Kornhauser, L. and L Sager 1986, “Unpacking the\\nCourt”, The Yale Law Journal, 96: 82–117.\",\n \"Kroedel, T. and F. Huber, 2013, “Counterfactual Dependence\\nand Arrow”, Noûs, 47: 453–466. \\n [available online]\",\n \"Landemore, H. 2012, Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective\\nIntelligence, and the Rule of the Many, Princeton: Princeton\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Le Breton, M. and J.A. Weymark, 2011, “Arrovian Social\\nChoice Theory on Economic Domains”, in Arrow, Sen and Suzumura\\n2011:\\n191–299.\",\n \"Lewis, D. 1968, “Counterpart Theory and Quantified Modal\\nLogic”, The Journal of Philosophy, 65:\\n113–126.\",\n \"–––, 1973a, Counterfactuals, Oxford:\\nBlackwell Publishers and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,\\n1973, Reprinted with revisions, 1986.\",\n \"–––, 1973b, “Causation”, Journal\\nof Philosophy, 70: 556–567\",\n \"–––, 1979, “Counterfactual Dependence and\\nTime’s Arrow”, Noûs, 13: 455–476.\",\n \"List, C., 2012, “The Theory of Judgment Aggregation: an\\nIntroductory Review”, Synthese, 187:\\n179–207.\",\n \"List, C. and J. Dryzek, 2003, “Social Choice Theory and\\nDeliberative Democracy: A Reconciliation”, British Journal\\nof Political Science, 33: 1–28.\",\n \"List, C., R. C. Luskin, J. S. Fishkin, and I. McLean, 2013,\\n“Deliberation, Single-Peakedness, and the Possibility of\\nMeaningful Democracy: Evidence from Deliberative Polls”,\\nJournal of Politics, 75: 80–95.\",\n \"Little, I.M.D., 1952, “Social Choice and Individual\\nValues”, Journal of Political Economy, 60:\\n422–432.\",\n \"Mackie, G., 2003, Democracy Defended, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press.\",\n \"May, K., 1954, “Intransitivity, Utility, and the Aggregation\\nof Preference Patterns”, Econometrica, 22:\\n1–13.\",\n \"McLean, I., 2003, “The Reasonableness of Independence: A\\nConversation from Condorcet and Borda to Arrow and Saari”,\\nNuffield College Working Paper 2003-W6, University of Oxford,\\n[available online].\",\n \"Miller, D., 1992, “Deliberative Democracy and Social\\nChoice”, Political Studies, 40, 54–67.\",\n \"Morreau, M., 2010, “It Simply Does Not Add Up: Trouble with\\nOverall Similarity”, The Journal of Philosophy, 107:\\n469–490.\",\n \"–––, 2014, “Mr. Fit, Mr. Simplicity and\\nMr. Scope: From Social Choice to Theory Choice”,\\nErkenntnis, 79: 1253–1268.\",\n \"–––, 2015, “Theory Choice and Social\\nChoice: Kuhn Vindicated”, Mind, 124: 239–262.\",\n \"–––, 2016, “Grading in Groups”,\\nEconomics & Philosophy, 32: 323–352.\",\n \"Moulin, H., 1980, “On Strategy-Proofness and Single\\nPeakedness”, Public Choice, 35: 437–455.\",\n \"Murakami Y., 1968, Logic and Social Choice, London:\\nRoutledge and Kegan Paul.\",\n \"Oddie, G., 2013, “The Content, Consequence and Likeness\\nApproaches to Verisimilitude: Compatibility, Trivialization, and\\nUnderdetermination”, Synthese, 190:\\n1647–1687.\",\n \"Okasha, S., 2011, “Theory Choice and Social Choice: Kuhn\\nversus Arrow”, Mind, 120: 83–115.\",\n \"Page, S.E., 2007, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity\\nCreates Better Groups, Firms, Schools and Societies, Princeton,\\nNJ: Princeton University Press.\",\n \"Parks, R.P., 1976, “An Impossibility Theorem for Fixed\\nPreferences: a Dictatorial Bergson-Samuelson Welfare Function”,\\nReview of Economic Studies, 43: 447–450.\",\n \"Pattanaik. P.K., 2002, “Positional Rules of Collective\\nDecision Making”, in Arrow, Sen and Suzumura 2002:\\n361–394.\",\n \"Pazner, E., 1979, “Equity, Nonfeasible Alternatives and\\nSocial Choice: a Reconsideration of the Concept of Social\\nWelfare”, in J.J. Laffont (ed.), Aggregation and Revelation\\nof Preferences, Amsterdam: North Holland.\",\n \"Peter, F., 2011, Democratic Legitimacy, New York, London:\\nRoutledge.\",\n \"Plott, C. R. 1973, “Path Independence, Rationality, and\\nSocial Choice”, Econometrica, 41: 1075–1091.\",\n \"Popper, K. R., 1963, Conjectures and Refutations, London:\\nRoutledge.\",\n \"Ray, P., 1973, “Independence of Irrelevant\\nAlternatives”, Econometrica, 44: 987–991.\",\n \"Riker, W.H., 1982, Liberalism against Populism, San\\nFrancisco: W.H. Freeman.\",\n \"Roberts, K.W.S., 1980, “Social Choice Theory: The Single-\\nand Multi-Profile Approaches”, The Review of Economic Studies,\\n47: 441–450.\",\n \"Samuelson, P., 1947, Foundations of Economic Analysis,\\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1967, “Arrow’s Mathematical\\nPolitics”, in S. Hook (ed.), Human Values and Economic\\nPolicy, New York: New York University Press: 41–52.\",\n \"–––, 1977, “Reaffirming the Existence of\\n‘Reasonable’ Bergson-Samuelson Social Welfare\\nFunctions”, Economica, 44: 81–88.\",\n \"Sattherthwaite, M., 1975, “Strategy-Proofness and Arrow’s\\nConditions: Existence and Correspondence Theorems for Voting\\nProcedures and Social Welfare Functions”, Journal of\\nEconomic Theory, 10: 187–217.\",\n \"Schurz, G. and P. Weingartner, 2010, “Zwart and Franssen’s\\nImpossibility Theorem holds for Possible-World-Accounts but not for\\nConsequence-Accounts to Versimilitude”, Synthese, 172:\\n415–436.\",\n \"Scott M.J. and E.K. Antonsson, 2000, “Arrow’s Theorem and\\nEngineering Design Decision Making”, Research in Engineering\\nDesign, 11: 218–228.\",\n \"Sen, A., 1969, “Quasi-transitivity, Rational Choice and\\nCollective Decisions”, Review of Economic Studies, 36:\\n381–393.\",\n \"–––, 1970, Collective Choice and Social\\nWelfare, San Francisco: Holden-Day.\",\n \"–––, 1976, “Liberty, Unanimity and\\nRights”, Economica, 43: 217–245.\",\n \"–––, 1977, “On Weights and Measures:\\nInformational Constraints in Social Welfare Analysis”,\\nEconometrica, 45: 1539–1572.\",\n \"–––, 1979, “Utiliarianism and\\nWelfarism”, The Journal of Philosophy, 76:\\n463–489.\",\n \"–––, 1986, “Foundations of Social Choice\\nTheory: An Epilogue”, in Elster and Hylland 1986:\\n213–248.\",\n \"–––, 1999, “The Possibility of Social\\nChoice”, American Economic Review, 89:\\n349–378.\",\n \"–––, 2010, “The Informational Basis of\\nSocial Choice”, in Arrow, Sen, and Suzumura 2010:\\n29–46.\",\n \"Stegenga, J. 2013, “An Impossibility Theorem for\\nAmalgamating Evidence”, Synthese, 190:\\n2391–2411.\",\n \"Weymark, J. A., 1984, “Arrow’s Theorem with Social\\nQuasi-Orderings”, Public Choice, 42: 235–246.\",\n \"–––, 2014, “An Introduction to Allan\\nGibbard’s Oligarchy Theorem Paper”, Review of Economic\\nDesign, 18: 1–2.\",\n \"Zwart, S. D. and M. Franssen 2007, “An Impossibility Theorem\\nfor Verisimilitude”, Synthese, 158: 75–92.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../economics/","text":"economics: philosophy of"},{"href":"../economic-justice/","text":"economics [normative] and economic justice"},{"href":"../collective-intentionality/","text":"intentionality: collective"},{"href":"../preferences/","text":"preferences"},{"href":"../social-choice/","text":"social choice theory"},{"href":"../truthlikeness/","text":"truthlikeness"},{"href":"../voting-methods/","text":"voting: methods"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../economics/\",\n \"text\": \"economics: philosophy of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../economic-justice/\",\n \"text\": \"economics [normative] and economic justice\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../collective-intentionality/\",\n \"text\": \"intentionality: collective\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../preferences/\",\n \"text\": \"preferences\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../social-choice/\",\n \"text\": \"social choice theory\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../truthlikeness/\",\n \"text\": \"truthlikeness\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../voting-methods/\",\n \"text\": \"voting: methods\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":80,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"conceptual-art"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Conceptual Art"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Thu Jun 7, 2007; substantive revision Wed Mar 23, 2022"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nThe philosophy of art addresses a broad spectrum of theoretical issues\narising from a wide variety of objects of attention. These range from\nPaleolithic cave painting to postmodern poetry, and from the problem\nof how music can convey emotion to that of the metaphysical status of\nfictional characters. Until recently, however, philosophical interest\nin conceptual art, or conceptualism, has been notably sparse. Why?\nAfter all, both philosophy and the myriad kinds and styles of art and\nart-making that fall under the conceptual tradition all have one thing\nin common: they are both intended to make you think and ask pressing\nquestions. What are those questions and how do we go about answering\nthem?"],"string":"[\n \"\\nThe philosophy of art addresses a broad spectrum of theoretical issues\\narising from a wide variety of objects of attention. These range from\\nPaleolithic cave painting to postmodern poetry, and from the problem\\nof how music can convey emotion to that of the metaphysical status of\\nfictional characters. Until recently, however, philosophical interest\\nin conceptual art, or conceptualism, has been notably sparse. Why?\\nAfter all, both philosophy and the myriad kinds and styles of art and\\nart-making that fall under the conceptual tradition all have one thing\\nin common: they are both intended to make you think and ask pressing\\nquestions. What are those questions and how do we go about answering\\nthem?\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Conceptual Art – What Is It?","sub_toc":["1.1 Introduction","1.2 The Limits of Art and the Role of Artists","1.3 Artistic Media","1.4 Art as Idea","1.5 Semantic Representation"]},{"content_title":"2. The Philosophy of Conceptual Art – What is it?","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"3. Five Philosophical Themes","sub_toc":["3.1 The Definition of Art","3.2 The Ontology and Media of Art","3.3 The Aesthetic Value of Art","3.4 The Interpretation of Art","3.5 The Cognitive Value of Art"]},{"content_title":"4. Further Questions","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Conceptual Art – What Is It?\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"1.1 Introduction\",\n \"1.2 The Limits of Art and the Role of Artists\",\n \"1.3 Artistic Media\",\n \"1.4 Art as Idea\",\n \"1.5 Semantic Representation\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. The Philosophy of Conceptual Art – What is it?\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Five Philosophical Themes\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"3.1 The Definition of Art\",\n \"3.2 The Ontology and Media of Art\",\n \"3.3 The Aesthetic Value of Art\",\n \"3.4 The Interpretation of Art\",\n \"3.5 The Cognitive Value of Art\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Further Questions\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":[],"section_title":"1. Conceptual Art – What Is It?","subsections":[{"content":["\nFew artistic movements have attracted so much controversy and debate\nas conceptual art. By its nature, conceptual art has a tendency to\nprovoke intense and perhaps even extreme reactions in its audiences.\nWhile some people find conceptual art very refreshing and relevant,\nmany others consider it shocking, distasteful, and conspicuously\nlacking in craftsmanship. Some even simply deny that it is art at all.\nConceptual art, it seems, is something that we either love or\nhate.","\nThis divisive character is, however, far from accidental. Most\nconceptual art actively sets out to be controversial in so far as it\nseeks to challenge and probe us about what we tend to take as given in\nthe domain of art. In fact, this capacity to evoke argument and debate\nlies at the very heart of what conceptual art sets out to do, namely\nto make us question our assumptions not only about what may properly\nqualify as art and what the function of the artist should be, but also\nabout what our role as spectators should involve. It should come as no\nsurprise, then, that conceptual art can cause frustration or vexation\n– to raise difficult and sometimes even annoying questions is\nprecisely what conceptual art in general aspires to do. In reacting\nstrongly to conceptual art we are, in some important sense, playing\nright into its hands.","\nThe first difficulty that a philosophical investigation of conceptual\nart encounters has to do with identifying the object of examination,\nor at least the category of objects under scrutiny. In the words of\nthe art historian Paul Wood,","\n[i]t is not at all clear where the boundaries of ‘conceptual\nart’ are to be drawn, which artists and which works to include.\nLooked at in one way, conceptual art gets to be like Lewis\nCarroll’s Cheshire cat, dissolving away until nothing is left\nbut a grin: a handful of works made over a few short years by a small\nnumber of artists… Then again, regarded under a different\naspect, conceptual art can seem like nothing less than the hinge\naround which the past turned into the present. (Wood 2002, 6)\n","\nOn a strict historical reading, the expression ‘conceptual\nart’ refers to the artistic movement that reached its pinnacle\nbetween 1966 and 1972 (Lippard\n 1973).[1]\n Among its most famous adherents at its early stage we find artists\nsuch as Joseph Kosuth, Robert Morris, Joseph Beuys, Adrian Piper, to\nname but a few. What unites the conceptual art of this period is the\nabsorption of the lessons learnt from other twentieth-century art\nmovements such as Dadaism, Surrealism, Suprematism, Abstract\nExpressionism and the Fluxus group, together with the ambition once\nand for all to ‘free’ art of the Modernist paradigm. Most\nimportantly, perhaps, conceptual art of the 1960s and 70s sought to\novercome a backdrop against which art’s principal aim is to\nproduce something beautiful or aesthetically pleasing. Art, early\nconceptual artists held, is redundant if it does not make us think. In\ntheir belief that most artistic institutions were not conducive to\nreflection but merely promoted a conservative and even consumerist\nconception of art and artists, conceptual artists in the mid-1960s to\nthe early 1970s instead tried to encourage a revisionary understanding\nof art, the artist, and artistic experience.","\nWhile conceptual art in its purest form might arguably be limited to\nworks produced during these five or six years half a century ago, it\nseems overly narrow – certainly from a philosophical perspective\n– to limit our inquiry to works produced during that period\nalone. For although the work created during that time might generally\nbe conceived as more directly anti-establishment and anti-consumerist\nthan later conceptual art, the spirit of early conceptual art seems to\nhave carried on relatively undiluted into the very late twentieth and\ntwenty-first centuries, as witnessed by pieces such as Tracey\nEmin’s Unmade Bed, Damian Hirst’s The\nPhysical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,\nand Ai Weiwei’s Surveillance Camera.","\nThe highly individualised character of the intellectual exploration\nthat conceptual art urges us to engage in has always been such that\nany attempt to pinpoint a specific common denominator other than this\ngeneral vision and approach to art, art-making and society at large\ninvariably fails to catch its very essence. The means of artistic\nexpression, we are told, are infinite and the topics available for\nquestioning and discussion are limitless. It belongs to the very\nnature of conceptual art, then, to be – like Lewis’\nCheshire cat – elusive and slippery. Conceptual artists, be it\nJoseph Beuys or Marina Abramovic, pursue artistic originality and\nrepresentation in every possible way. For that reason, one\nmight find oneself obliged to replace the slightly lofty cliché\naccording to which there are as many definitions of conceptual art as\nthere are conceptual artists, with an even more extreme version of the\nclaim, namely, that there are as many definitions of conceptual art as\nthere are conceptual artworks.","\nNevertheless, in the midst of this deliberately produced uncertainty\nabout the nature of conceptual art, a handful of characteristics and\ngeneral aims do seem to recur, and although they should not be seen as\ncriteria for conceptual art strictly speaking, they may be considered\ntenets fundamental to (most) conceptual art."],"subsection_title":"1.1 Introduction"},{"content":["\nFirst and foremost, conceptual art challenges our intuitions\nconcerning the limits of what may count as art and what it is an\nartist does. It does so, on the one hand, by postulating ever more\ncomplex objects as candidates for the status of ‘artwork’,\nand, on the other hand, by distancing the task of the artist from the\nactual making and manipulating of the artistic material.","\nA characteristic way in which conceptual art explores the boundaries\nof the artwork is by a process of questioning where the realm of the\nartistic ends and that of utility begins. Continuing the tradition of\nMarcel Duchamp’s readymades such as Fountain, or\nBottlerack, it sets out to overthrow our traditional\nconceptions of what an art object should be made of and what it should\nlook like. The artwork is a process rather than a\nmaterial thing, and as such it is no longer something that\ncan be grasped merely by seeing, hearing or touching the end product\nof that process. The notion of agency in art-making is thus\nparticularly emphasised. In many cases, the ‘art-making’\nand the ‘artwork’ come together, because what is sought is\nan identification of the notion of the work of art with the conceptual\nactivity of the artist. Conceptual art, politicised and influenced by\nevents such as the ‘May Days’ in Paris (1968), the\n‘Hot Autumn’ in Italy (1969), the Vietnam War, and the\nrise of feminism, promotes a rapprochement between art-making\nand criticism – both artistic and social – by raising\nquestions about the products of artistic activities and the very\npurpose of art. To use the words of Joseph Kosuth, it ‘annexes\nthe functions of the critic, and makes a middle-man\nunnecessary.’ (Guercio 1999, 39)."],"subsection_title":"1.2 The Limits of Art and the Role of Artists"},{"content":["\nAs a direct result of its examination of what may properly qualify as\nart, and of the markedly broad conception of what may constitute an\nart object resulting from this examination, conceptual art tends to\nreject traditional artistic media such as conventional painting or\nsculpture. Instead, it has found itself drawn to alternative means of\nexpression, including performances, photography, films, videos,\nevents, bodies, new ready-mades and new mixed media. In a nutshell,\nnothing can be ruled out in principle for use as possible artistic\nmedia, as can be seen, for example, in Richard Long’s photograph\nof a line made in the grass by\n walking[2],\n Bruce Nauman’s nine minute film of the artist himself playing\none note on a violin whilst walking around in his\n studio[3],\n Janine Antoni’s use of chocolate and soap, Marina\nAbramovic’s display of an array of everyday objects, including\nknives, torches and feathers, which the audience is invited to apply\ndirectly on to the artist’s body, and Piero Manzoni’s act\nof signing a woman’s\n arm[4]."],"subsection_title":"1.3 Artistic Media"},{"content":["\nThe most fundamentally revisionary feature of conceptual art is the\nway in which it proclaims itself to be an art of the mind rather than\nthe senses: it rejects traditional artistic media because it locates\nthe artwork at the level of ideas rather than that of\nobjects. Because more weight tends to given to creative\nprocess than physical material, and because art should be about\nintellectual inquiry and reflection rather than beauty and aesthetic\npleasure (as traditionally conceived), the identity of the work of art\nis said to lie in the idea at the heart of the piece in question. In\nthe words of Kosuth, ‘[t]he actual works of art are ideas’\n(Lippard 1973, 25). For conceptual art, ‘the idea or concept is\nthe most important aspect of the work’ (LeWitt 1967, 166). Art\nis ‘de-materialised’, and in this sense held to be prior\nto its materialisation in any given object.","\nThe claim that the conceptual artwork is to be identified with an idea\nthat may be seen to underlie it has far-reaching ramifications. It not\nonly affects the ontology of the conceptual artwork but also\nprofoundly alters the role of the artist by casting her in the role of\nthinker rather than object-maker. Moreover, it calls for a thorough\nreview of the way in which we perceive, engage and appreciate\nartworks. Further still, it links art so intimately to ideas and\nconcepts that even a principled distinction between the domain of art\nand the realm of thought seems difficult to preserve."],"subsection_title":"1.4 Art as Idea"},{"content":["\nFor all these reasons, the kind of representation employed in\nconceptual artworks is best described in terms of the transmission of\nideas. In conceptual art, the representation at work can generally be\nseen as semantic rather than illustrative. That is\nto say, it sets out to have and convey a specific meaning rather than\nto depict a scene, person or event. Even in cases where a work makes\nuse of illustrative representation, conceptual art is still putting\nthat representation to a distinctively semantic use, in the sense of\nthere being an intention to represent something one cannot see with\nthe naked eye. Accordingly, the conceptual artist’s task is to\ncontemplate and formulate this meaning – to be a\n‘meaning-maker’."],"subsection_title":"1.5 Semantic Representation"}]},{"main_content":["\nOn the whole, the philosophical concerns raised by conceptual art can\nbe divided into two main categories. First, there are specific\nquestions to do with conceptual art itself, and the claims which\nunderpin the project that drives it. Philosophical investigations\nmight thus be called for not only in relation to the internal\nconsistency and coherence of the project and its set goals, but also\nwith regards to the particular tenets outlined above. For example,\nwhat does it mean to say that every single thing, person or event is a\npossible candidate for an artistic medium and does that suggestion not\nrender the category of art, as we know it, redundant?","\nSecond, conceptual art poses philosophical problems from a wider\nperspective, in so far as one might expect philosophy to provide us\nwith unitary accounts of the nature of art, the role of the artist,\nand artistic experience. In many important respects, conceptual art\nsits very uncomfortably with other, often more traditional artforms\nand artworks, and this tension highlights a pressing issue for anyone\ninterested in the possibility of a universal theory of art. For if\nthere is to be one rule for conceptual art and another for all other\nkinds of art, are there still good grounds for thinking of conceptual\nart as a kind of art? Moreover, could not every particular kind of\nartform or artwork demand a separate theory of art, artist and\nartistic experience?","\nIf we are to sidestep such an intrinsic division between conceptual\nart on the one hand, and other kinds of art on the other, then\ntheories concerned mainly with art that is not conceptual will have to\nmake many significant concessions in order to incorporate the\nproblematic case that conceptual artworks present. At the very least,\na compromise will have to be reached concerning what we mean by the\nterm ‘artwork’.","\nOne of the over-riding concerns that beset the philosophy of\nconceptual art is thus whether and, if so, why one should actively\npursue unified accounts in the philosophy of art. Whether one comes\nout of that investigation embracing a broader – albeit perhaps\nvaguer – set of concepts and tools than one started off with, or\nwhether one considers oneself forced to abandon any hope of anything\nbut very specific theories of art, artist, and artistic experience,\nconceptual art obliges us to think about where we stand on these\nissues.","\nPhilosophizing about conceptual art is, then, not merely\nphilosophizing about one specific artform. It is philosophizing about\nthe most revisionary kind of art, one that sees its own task as being\nprofoundly philosophical in nature. Let us now turn to five more\nspecific philosophical themes that conceptual art urges us to\nconsider."],"section_title":"2. The Philosophy of Conceptual Art – What is it?","subsections":[]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"3. Five Philosophical Themes","subsections":[{"content":["\nThe problem of defining art is by no means a problem for conceptual\nart alone. Two principal difficulties immediately arise in the context\nof any attempt to form a definition. First, the category of art is\nparticularly heterogeneous. Simply put, there seems to be an infinite\nvariety of things, or kinds of thing, that need to fall under its\njurisdiction. Second, there is great variety of opinion on what any\nputative definition of art should actually consist of.","\nOn the standard conception, a definition is something that provides us\nwith necessary and sufficient conditions for some thing x to\nbe F, so that, for example, it is a necessary and sufficient condition\nfor a number to be an even number that it is (i) an integer and (ii)\ndivisible by two. Accordingly, a definition of art must be capable of\noutlining a clear set of conditions that must be satisfied.","\nThere have been no shortages of attempts to define art in this manner.\nMost prominently perhaps, it has been suggested that art ought to be\ndefined in terms of its aesthetic character, so that, roughly,\nx is an artwork if and only if x gives rise to an\naesthetic experience (e.g., Beardsley 1958). Notwithstanding the\ndifficulties that this particular suggestion entails (we shall return\nto this in §3.3), the advent of a kind of art that is as\nprofoundly revisionary and difficult to classify as conceptual art\nrenders the attempt to provide a general definition applicable to\nall art particularly complex. It is no coincidence, then,\nthat a neo-Wittgensteinian approach came to dominate the philosophy of\nart in the late 1950s and 1960s. Drawing support from\nanti-essentialist theories of language, it was suggested that art was\nnumbered among the various concepts that are, by their very nature,\n‘essentially contested’ (Gallie 1948; see also Weitz\n1956). That is to say, some concepts – such as that pertaining\nto sports, for example– simply do not allow for definitions in\nterms of necessary and sufficient conditions, and art is best as\nunderstood as one of them. In the words of Morris Weitz, art may\nbe","\nan open concept. New conditions have constantly arisen and will\nundoubtedly constantly arise; new art forms, new movements will\nemerge, which will demand decisions on the part of those\ninterested… as to whether the concept should be extended or\nnot. (Weitz 1956, 32)\n","\nThe act of proposing a definition of art thus becomes a less stringent\nexercise of conceptual analysis. The alternative method proposed by\nneo-Wittgensteinians such as Weitz in attempting to identify art and\nexplain how we are to distinguish it from non-art is the notion of\nfamily resemblance (see Wittgenstein 1953,\n§66–71). Faced with the question ‘Is X an\nartwork?’, what we should do is try to detect strands of\nresemblance with paradigmatic instances of an artwork. If some\nsignificant resemblance to such a paradigmatic case is observed, we\ncan rightly call the object of our scrutiny a work of art.","\nThe proposal, though interesting, is not without its own difficulties.\nOne problem that immediately arises relates to the idea of resemblance\nitself, and the way it rapidly expands in such a way as to render it\nclose to useless. This is for the simple reason that we can always\nfind some way in which some given thing may be said to resemble any\nother given thing. This kind of openness, it is important to note, is\nnot something that fits in with the programme of conceptual\nart. Whilst conceptual art does hold that any kind of object could be\na work of art, it is not saying that every object is a work\nof art. Far from it. Much conceptual art, in exploring the boundaries\nbetween the realms of the artistic and that of function and utility,\nis perceptually indistinguishable from non-art, such as Andy\nWarhol’s Brillo Boxes. In that sense, conceptual art\npresents a particularly difficult case for the neo-Wittgensteinian\nmethod of identification. After all, the only way in which\nWarhol’s Brillo Boxes does not resemble any other stack\nof Brillo Boxes is the sense in which the former is a work of art and\nthe latter is not. The notion of resemblance is clearly of little use\nhere.","\nPicking up on this concern, Arthur Danto has famously suggested that\nit is in fact a non-manifest relation that makes something an artwork\nrather than an observable property (Danto 1981). That is to say,\nartworks acquire that status in virtue of their relations to the\nhistorical and social setting constituted by the practices and\nconventions of art, our artistic heritage, the intentions of artists,\nand so on — the ‘artworld’ (see also Dickie\n1974). The general idea here is that artworks are generated within a\nsocial and artistic context, and so being an artwork is a function of\ncertain social relations. Conceptual art reinforces the idea that art\nand non-art can be perceptually indistinguishable and so cannot be\nmarked off from each other by ‘exhibited’ properties\n alone.[5]","\nSetting aside the details of such an account, one of the things\nconceptual art has helped philosophers to grasp more fully is that any\nsuccessful general definition, or indeed principled theory of the\nidentification of art, will need to have the non-manifest properties\nof artworks at its centre. It is the meaning that the artist infuses\ninto the work and the meaning that we as audience stand to gain from\nit that contains the key to its status as art (more on this in\n§3.4). To use the example of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes\nagain, the work of the conceptual artist seems primarily to be the\nwork of imbuing objects with a particular kind of meaning.","\nA more promising line of enquiry has been developed by David Davies.\nTaking his cue from the problems posed by conceptual art, Davies\nargues that a unified definition of art can only be found if we think\nof art primarily in terms of the creative process or series of actions\nresulting in a material thing or other ‘focus of\nappreciation’. In that sense, the artwork is primarily\nidentified with the intentional acts through which it comes into being\nrather than with the end-product of that process (Davies 2004). Art,\non this view, is better understood as a kind of performance than as a\nmanifest object. By shifting the focus of our attention in this way,\nwe can overcome many of the difficulties associated with defining art,\nmost notably that of its heterogeneity. It may be, then, that the most\nenduring lesson to be learnt from conceptual art with regards to the\ndefinition of art is not so much that a conceptual analysis of art is\ncompletely unattainable, as that we simply have been looking in the\nwrong place."],"subsection_title":"3.1 The Definition of Art"},{"content":["\nThe claim that conceptual art is to be identified less with a\nperceivable object than with the meaning or idea it aims to convey,\ngives rise to a host of complex ontological questions. The rejection\nof traditional artistic media, together with the de-materialisation of\nthe art object, forces us to reconsider what seemed to be relatively\nuncomplicated aspects of artistic experience. The answers to questions\nsuch as ‘Is there in fact any one thing (or set of things) that\nwe must perceive in artistic appreciation?’, and ‘Is it a\nnecessary condition for the existence of an artwork that it have a\nmedium?’ suddenly become a good deal less obvious.","\nIn the first instance, conceptual art drives us to review the common\nassumption that appropriate appreciation and engagement with an\nartwork must involve a direct first-hand experience of that piece\nitself. The idea here, to use Frank Sibley’s words, is that","\n[p]eople have to see the grace or unity of a work,\nhear the plaintiveness or frenzy in the music,\nnotice the gaudiness of colour scheme, feel the\npower of a novel, its mood, or its uncertainty of tone. They may be\nstruck by these qualities at once, or they may come to perceive them\nonly after repeated viewings, hearings, or readings, and with the help\nof critics. But unless they do perceive them for themselves, aesthetic\nenjoyment, appreciation, and judgement are beyond them… the\ncrucial thing is to see, hear, or feel. (Sibley 1965, 137).\n","\nThe assumption in question is, then, that although we seem to gain\nsomething from looking at, for example, a postcard or poster of\nKatsushika Hokusai's Fine Wine, Clear Morning or\nÉlisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s Self-Portrait in a\nStraw Hat , a genuine judgement about its artistic character\nnecessitates one’s own un-mediated perceptual experience of it.\nBut – and herein lies the crux of the problem for conceptual art\n– what if there is nothing for us to get a first-hand perceptual\nexperience of? In the case of Walter De Maria’s Vertical\nEarth Kilometer\n (1977)[6],\n a kilometre-long metal shaft plunged into the surface of the earth so\nthat only the very top is visible, first-hand perceptual experience is\nsimply not something that can be had. More pertinently, what does it\neven mean to have a perceptual engagement with an artwork that claims,\nbasically, to be an idea?","\nPerhaps the most pressing question, however, has to do with the extent\nto which we are to take conceptual art’s claim of\nde-materialisation seriously. Does the de-materialisation of such art\nnot suggest that there is not only a rejection of traditional artistic\nmedia in conceptual art, but an outright refutation of artistic media\nin general? One possible way of making sense of this idea is with a\ndistinction outlined by Davies, namely that between physical\nmedium and vehicular medium (Davies 2004). Crucially, a\nvehicular medium is said to incorporate not only physical objects\n(such as paintings and sculptures, say) but also actions, events, and\ngenerally more complex entities. In Davies’ words, ‘[t]he\nproduct of an artist’s manipulation of a vehicular medium will\nthen be the vehicle whereby a particular artistic statement\nis articulated… The vehicle may, as in the case of\nPicasso’s Guernica, be a physical object, or, as in the\ncase of Coleridge’s Kubla Kahn, a linguistic\nstructure-type, or, as arguably in the case of Duchamp’s\nFountain, an action of a particular kind.’ (Davies\n2004, 59). Adhering to this vehicular medium in art, may then at least\nequip philosophers with a notion that can deflate the concern of\nwhether conceptual art, by rejecting physical media, denies the need\nfor all artistic media.","\nClearly, conceptual art is not the first kind of art to raise\nontological concerns of this kind. After all, music and literary art,\nbe it traditional or avant-garde, hardly present\nstraightforward cases either. The question of what exactly\nconstitutes, say, a novel or a musical work have been widely discussed\nfor some time (e.g. Davies 2001; Ingarden 1973; Wollheim 1980)\nBuilding on the suggestion that artworks such as musical pieces and\nliterary works are best understood in terms of universals or\n‘types’, one view that has been widely discussed in the\nlast two decades or so is based on the idea that not only musical and\nliterary artworks, but all artworks, are types. More\nspecifically, they are to be conceived of as ‘event- or\naction-types’ (Currie 1988). According to this theory, the\nartwork is thus not the material thing itself but, rather, the way in\nwhich the artist arrived at the underlying structure shared by all\ninstances or performances of that work.","\nWhilst the general approach fostered by both Currie and Davies is\nclearly congenial to some aspects of conceptual art, it might\nnevertheless still be the case that further work needs to be done if\nthe view that artworks are basically event- or action-types is to\naccommodate all art in the conceptual tradition. Further questions\ninclude what role, if any, is played by the (set of) material thing(s)\nthat many conceptual artists undeniably do present us with.\nWhat, in other words, are we to make of the object (be it a human body\nor a video-recording) that is supposed to transmit the idea which, in\nturn, is said to be the genuine artwork? A good philosophical\nexplanation needs to be given as to how the material thing that is\nregularly presented to the audience is, in fact, relevant to the\nartwork itself. Is the vehicular medium constitutive of the artwork,\nand if so, how exactly does that square with the claim of\nde-materialisation?"],"subsection_title":"3.2 The Ontology and Media of Art"},{"content":["\nUnderlying the claim that we need to have a direct experiential\nencounter with an artwork in order to appreciate it appropriately is\nthe fact that some of the properties that bear on the value of a work\ncan only be grasped in this way. The properties in question here are\ngenerally aesthetic properties, and the assumption motivating\nthe experiential requirement is that the appreciation of artworks\nnecessarily involves an aesthetic element (i.e. not necessarily beauty\nper se, but something aesthetically pleasing or\nrewarding).","\nHowever, one of the most distinguishing features of conceptual art,\nsetting out as it does to replace illustrative representation with\nsemantic representation, is that it does not prioritise aesthetic\nexperience in a traditional sense. Conceptual art is intended as an\nart of the mind: it generally appeals to matters of the intellect and\nemphasises art’s cognitive rather than\naesthetic value. In the words of Timothy Binkley, traditional\naesthetics is preoccupied ‘with perceptual entities’ and\nthis ‘leads aesthetics to extol and examine the “work of\nart”, while averting its attention almost entirely from the\nmyriad other aspects of that complex cultural activity we call\n“art” ’ (Binkley 1977, 271).","\nWe can now see that the experiential requirement may well fail to have\nany bite with regards to conceptual artworks because the\nartist’s aim does not necessarily involve conferring to the work\nof art properties that must be experienced directly in order to be\ngrasped and fully appreciated. If there is to be any kind of\nfirst-hand experiential requirement for the appropriate appreciation\nof conceptual artworks, it will perhaps be of a kind that focuses on\nan imaginative engagement with the idea central to the artwork rather\nthan a perceptual experience of its aesthetic properties (see\nSchellekens 2007)","\nThe main philosophical question highlighted by conceptual art in this\ncontext, then, is the following: ‘Does art really need to be\naesthetic, and, if so, in what sense?’. In Binkley’s\nopinion, and in support of conceptual art, one does not necessarily\nhave to think of art in terms of aesthetic value –whilst a lot\nof ‘art has chosen to articulate in the medium of an aesthetic\nspace’, there is ‘no a priori reason why art must confine\nitself to the creation of aesthetic objects. It might opt for\narticulation in a semantic space instead of an aesthetic one so that\nartistic meaning is not embodied in a physical object or event’\n(Binkley 1977, 273).","\nHowever, not everyone has endorsed such a liberal view about the\nseparation between the aesthetic and the\n artistic[7].\n If art does not aim at having aesthetic value, what, one might argue,\nwill set it apart from non-art? Which view one decides to favour on\nthis point may well end up being an issue about definition. If one\nwishes to define art in terms of aesthetic experience, the question\nfinds a clear-cut answer, namely that conceptual art simply cannot be\nconsidered a kind of art. The down-side of that position is, however,\na whole set of difficult concerns to do with things, such as nature or\npersons, that hardly qualify as art even though they invite aesthetic\nexperiences. If one is impressed by these worries and cannot see any\ndecisive philosophical reason to uphold the aesthetic view, there is\nlittle, if anything, to block a conception of art which is not\nnecessarily aesthetic. One may, then, think of aesthetic value as\none kind of artistic value that, alongside with moral,\nreligious, political, historical and financial value, some artworks\nhave and others do\n not.[8]","\nNow, even if it is granted that art need not be aesthetic, it is still\npossible to hold that conceptual art does not qualify as good\nart because it does not (aim to) yield aesthetic experiences. But\nwhile this may be a viable position to hold in relation to the project\nof conceptual art in general, it cannot be used to attack conceptual\nart on its own grounds. Saying, for example, of Michael\nCraig-Martin’s An Oak Tree that one cannot consider it\na great work of art because it fails to give rise to a distinctively\naesthetic kind of pleasure does not actually undermine the project.\nConceptual art, as we now know, is more about conveying meaning\nthrough a vehicular medium than about furnishing its audiences with\nexperiences of, say, beauty. Any attack on this fundamental feature of\nconceptual art targets not so much an individual work of art but\nrather finds fault with the artistic tradition itself."],"subsection_title":"3.3 The Aesthetic Value of Art"},{"content":["\nAt the most basic level of inquiry, two queries arise about\ninterpretation in art: (i) what ‘tools’ do we use to\ninterpret artworks?, and (ii) what is it we do when we interpret\nartworks? In the case of conceptual art, a satisfactory answer to (i)\nwill most probably appeal to elements such as the narrative aids\nprovided by artists or curators (e.g. catalogues, titles, exhibited\nexplanations, labels, etc.); the appropriate mode of perception (i.e.\nlooking or listening); and what we know about the artwork’s and\nartist’s social, historical, political or artistic context.\nDepending on the ontological status of the particular piece (if it is,\nsay, a ready-made or a performance), these elements can be combined in\ndifferent ways to explain our interpretative habits and practices.","\nIn addressing (ii) we will most likely need to refer to the various\nmental abilities we put to use in such interpretative exercises (e.g.\nimagination, empathy); and also to ask precisely what the target of\nour interpretation is. This latter task is not as unproblematic as it\nmay seem, for it is not always clear whether it is the object itself\nthat should be under scrutiny, the object’s perceptual\nproperties (and, if so, which), the idea at the heart of the work, or\nthe artist’s intentions in making the piece. It seems unlikely\nthat the question will find an adequate answer until we find an\nacceptable solution to the problem mentioned above, namely ‘Is\nthe vehicular medium a constitutive part of the conceptual artwork or\nnot, and if so how?’.","\nTwo further philosophical questions about the notion of artistic\ninterpretation take on a particularly complex dimension in relation to\nconceptual art. First, exactly what information is relevant in\nartistic interpretation? And, more importantly, to what extent should\nthe artist’s intention be allowed to determine the\nappropriate interpretation? Views differ widely on this topic. In\ntheir article, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, William Wimsatt\nand Monroe Beardsley famously argue in relation to the literary arts\nthat the only kind of evidence that is relevant to interpretation is\nthat which is internal to the work in question. (Wimsatt &\nBeardsley 1946). An artist’s intention or design is of no\ninterpretative significance. Obviously, this position seems difficult\nto defend in the case of conceptual art: when we are dealing with\npieces such as Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, where the\ninternal evidence is clearly insufficient to discern that it is an\nartwork in the first place, it seems that we need to know that Warhol\nintended the boxes to be viewed qua art, at the very\nleast.","\nNow, even if we do wish to defend the view that the artist’s\nintention needs to be taken into account somehow in the interpretation\nof conceptual art, further questions still require our attention here.\nMost centrally, should the artist’s intention always be\nconsidered the decisive factor in interpretation and\nmust it always be involved? Generally speaking, there are two\nmain strands of intentionalist positions available. On the one hand,\nthere is an approach which holds that the artist’s intention\ndetermines an artwork’s meaning, and thus cannot be overlooked\n– or indeed superseded – in artistic interpretation (e.g.,\nCarroll 1992). On the other hand, there is a view that the interpreter\nought to construct the best hypothesis concerning the artist’s\nactual intention with the help of, say, the text and biographical\nnotes, and that this hypothesis confers meaning on the work in\nquestion (e.g., Levinson 1992).","\nAt least at a first glance, it may seem that conceptual art presents a\nstronger case for the first approach to interpretation, since the\nartist’s intention is all we have to go by, quite literally, in\nworks such as Robert Barry’s simple statement entitled All\nthe Things I Know But of which I am Not at the Moment Thinking\n(1969) (see, e.g., Maes 2010 and Gover 2012). Nevertheless, the\nquestion cannot be settled quite so easily, for many conceptual\nartists make a point of putting all the interpretative onus on the\nspectator. How often are we told, after all, that a specific\nartwork’s meaning rests entirely in our hands; that ‘it\nmeans whatever you want it to mean’?","\nThis leads us to the second question that is especially pertinent for\na kind of art that sets out to convey an idea or meaning, namely\nwhether there can be more than one correct or appropriate\ninterpretation of an artwork. Again, several theories present\nthemselves as eligible candidates in relation to this problem. One\nsuggestion has centred around the idea that there can be a\nmultiplicity of appropriate or correct divergent interpretations of\none and the same artwork which cannot be reduced to one underlying\ninterpretation or ranked in relation to each other (e.g., Margolis\n1991; Goldman 1990). In opposition to this view, however, another\napproach has it that there is in fact always a single best\ninterpretation which is better than any other (e.g., Beardsley 1970).\nThe aim of artistic interpretation is, then, in Matthew Kieran’s\nwords, ‘restricted to discovering the one true meaning of an\nartwork.’ (Kieran 1996, 239). Whilst conceptual art certainly\nseems to rest on something like the interpretative plurality of the\nfirst view, it is not obvious how a kind of art that presents itself\nas an idea can, in reality, accommodate such indeterminacy.","\nThere are good reasons to believe that of all the questions conceptual\nart gives rise to, interpretation is the most problematic from an\ninternal point of view. The conundrum can be put in the following\nterms. If the conceptual work is the idea, it seems reasonable to\nassume that artistic interpretation will consist primarily in coming\nto understand that idea (which is conceded by the artist to the\nartwork considered as such). In other words, if we take conceptual\nart’s de-materialisation claim seriously, we are left with a\nnotion of interpretation which is relatively constrained to the\nartist’s intention and to the claim that that intention\ndetermines the appropriate or correct interpretation for that\nparticular work.","\nAs we have seen, though, we are often encouraged by conceptual artists\nto take the interpretative exercise into our own hands, so to speak,\nand not be shy to use features about ourselves and our own lives as\ninterpretive tools. We are, in other words, asked to combine the idea\nof art as idea with the claim that we can, as spectators, convey an\nentirely new and fresh interpretation onto an artwork that is nothing\nbut an idea which, by definition, needs to be about or concerned with\nsomething. So, if the idea is the art, then how can my idiosyncratic\ninterpretation of that idea be anywhere near valid? It seems, then\nthat in order to be coherent, conceptual art must give up either the\nclaim that the actual artwork is nothing other than the idea, or the\nclaim that the interpretative onus lies on the viewer."],"subsection_title":"3.4 The Interpretation of Art"},{"content":["\nIn seeking to convey a semantic representation through a vehicular\nmedium, conceptual art arguably aims to have cognitive – rather\nthan aesthetic – value. By cognitive value, what is meant is\nsimply the value an artwork may have in virtue of enhancing or\nincreasing our understanding of some topic, notion or event.\nInterestingly, conceptual art seems to assume that the aesthetic\ndetracts from or divests art of its possible cognitive value in such a\nway as to render the two kinds of value close to mutually exclusive\n(Schellekens 2007).","\nThe attempt to separate the aesthetic from the cognitive is far from a\nrecent investigative endeavour in philosophical circles. In the very\nfirst section of Kant’s Critique of the Power of\nJudgement, a clear-cut distinction is outlined between aesthetic\nand cognitive (or ‘logical’) judgements. However, few\nartistic movements have pressed these questions about the division\nbetween aesthetic value on the one hand, and cognitive value on the\nother, as scrupulously and explicitly as conceptual art. In fact,\nconceptual art makes things very difficult for itself by holding that\nthe only kind of artistic value that is entirely legitimate\nis cognitive value.","\nClearly, conceptual art is not the only kind of art that may have\ncognitive value – many other artforms aim to have cognitive\nvalue in addition to aesthetic value – and most of us\nwould agree that part of why we find art rewarding is precisely\nbecause it often yields some kind of understanding. That is to say, we\nread novels, look at paintings and listen to music not only because of\nthe pleasure it may afford, but also because it tends to make us\nricher human beings, better able to make sense of the world around\nus.","\nUncontroversial as this claim may seem, some philosophers have denied\nthat art should either have or seek to have cognitive value. Most\nfamously perhaps, expressivists such as Clive Bell and Roger Fry held\nthat art should only seek to express and arouse emotions (Bell 1914;\nFry 1920). James Young has defended a view whereby\navant-garde art, like conceptual art, cannot yield any\nsignificant knowledge or understanding (Young 2001, 77).","\nYoung’s argument focuses on the notion of exemplification which\nhe locates at the heart of the only kind of semantic representation\nand cognitive value that can be ascribed to artworks such as\nconceptual ones. Exemplification is a form of reference to properties\nby means of a sample (or exemplar). An exemplar ‘stands for some\nproperty by [non-metaphorically, literally] possessing the\nproperty’ (Young 2001, 72). In the case of conceptual art, a\nwork then exemplifies an idea or concept. So, for example, Tom\nMarioni’s The Act of Drinking Beer with One’s Friends\nis the Highest Form of Art\n (1970)[9]\n – a piece involving the artist and his friends drinking beer\ntogether – is an exemplar of the idea at the heart of the work,\nnamely that drinking beer with one’s friends is the highest\nart-form of all. This is the work’s statement. However, as Young\npoints out, it doesn’t follow from the fact that something\nexpresses a statement or has meaning that it has significant cognitive\nvalue. All things considered, the kind of statement that conceptual\nartworks and their like are typically able to make, according to\nYoung, are merely truisms. If conceptual art yields cognitive value,\nthat is to say, it tends to be so trivial that it barely deserves the\nname.","\nThe argument puts a finger on an experience shared by many spectators\nof conceptual art who feel conned or deceived by it. Not only are\nconceptual artworks not beautiful, one might object, they don’t\neven tell us anything over and beyond banal clichés. What,\nthen, is conceptual art really good for?","\nIf there is to be a way out of this difficulty, we will have to take\nthe bull by the horns and discuss exactly what (kind of) understanding\none may gain from it. This answer will have to be cashed out in terms\nof two concerns: one about the content of the knowledge, and\nanother about the kind of knowledge in question. First,\nknowledge yielded by art can be about the artwork – not only the\ntechniques employed, the work’s history and tradition, and so\non, but also the meaning and thoughts that the work conveys. Second,\nart can yield either propositional knowledge or knowledge by\nacquaintance. Whereas the first consists of knowledge given to us in\nterms of propositions and can either be concerned with the artwork\nitself (e.g. knowledge ‘that [Manet's famous painting]\nrepresents the Emperor Maximilan’s execution') or a reality\nbeyond that work (e.g. knowledge ‘that horrible things are often\ndone in the name of political revolutions’), the second kind of\nknowledge has the potential to enable one to imagine what it would be\nlike to be in a certain position or situation, to empathize, to come\nvery close to experiencing what it would be like to have that kind of\nexperience first-hand (e.g. what it is like to witness the execution\nof a dishonoured Emperor).","\nThe notions of knowledge and cognitive value, whilst at the very heart\nof the conceptual project, raise a manifold of important questions\nthat require solid and cogent philosophical answers. Perhaps\nexemplification can still serve an epistemological purpose by inviting\nus to engage with the issues raised by a work of art in a richer and\nmore imaginative way; in a way that makes us think about questions of\nphilosophical interest in particular way – a way that\npropositions alone cannot do? Perhaps the key to conceptual\nart’s value lies in a more challenging intellectual relationship\nwith the work, a genuine engagement with the idea in question.\nExploring this avenue may yet help us see what kind of non-trivial\ncognitive value conceptual art is capable of yielding."],"subsection_title":"3.5 The Cognitive Value of Art"}]},{"main_content":["\nMany more questions centred around these five philosophical themes\nremain to be examined in relation to conceptual art. With regards to\nconcerns about defining art, we need to address the increasing number\nof worries to do with exactly how we are to distinguish art from\nnon-art, and indeed whether there really is a distinction (if only\ntheoretical) to be drawn here. That is to say, if conceptual art is at\ntimes not only perceptually indistinguishable from non-art but it is\nalso the case that everything is alleged to be (part of) a potential\nartwork, perhaps the inevitable outcome is that there simply cannot be\na principled distinction between art and non-art. So, does the\nconceptual project lead to the end of the category of art as such?","\nFrom the ontological perspective, this set of concerns acquires an\neven more aggressive flavour: if art should be all about putting\nforward ideas and making statements, why, one might wonder, do we need\nthe conceptual artwork at all? Can we not merely ask the same\nquestions and make the same statements directly?","\nIn addition to these questions, the host of issues that have been\nraised about interpretation, intention, appreciation and the way they\nare (or should be) related have not yet been silenced. For art that is\nas discourse-dependent as most conceptual art is, it is not always\nclear whether there is anything more to interpreting conceptual art\nthan just being told what the idea in question is. And if so, can we\nstill call this interpretation?","\nFinally, what are we to make of the relation between aesthetic and\ncognitive value in conceptual art – should they be considered as\nin opposition or even as mutually exclusive? If the only kind of value\nthat is of genuine artistic importance is cognitive value, it will be\ndifficult to avoid the definitional and ontological concerns mentioned\nabove. Also, it will call for a deeply revisionary conception of art,\none fundamentally hostile to the very notions we are probably most\nused to associating with art, namely beauty and aesthetic\npleasure.","\nCentral to the philosophy of conceptual art is thus the provocative\nspirit of the project under investigation – conceptual art\nthrows down the gauntlet by challenging us to reconsider every aspect\nof artistic experience, and it may well be up to philosophy to pick it\nup and address some of the questions conceptual art makes its business\nto raise. Conceptual art actively aims to be thought-provoking,\nstimulating and inspiring, and if only for that reason, philosophers\ninterested in art should not pass it by unaffected."],"section_title":"4. Further Questions","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Conceptual Art – What Is It?\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nFew artistic movements have attracted so much controversy and debate\\nas conceptual art. By its nature, conceptual art has a tendency to\\nprovoke intense and perhaps even extreme reactions in its audiences.\\nWhile some people find conceptual art very refreshing and relevant,\\nmany others consider it shocking, distasteful, and conspicuously\\nlacking in craftsmanship. Some even simply deny that it is art at all.\\nConceptual art, it seems, is something that we either love or\\nhate.\",\n \"\\nThis divisive character is, however, far from accidental. Most\\nconceptual art actively sets out to be controversial in so far as it\\nseeks to challenge and probe us about what we tend to take as given in\\nthe domain of art. In fact, this capacity to evoke argument and debate\\nlies at the very heart of what conceptual art sets out to do, namely\\nto make us question our assumptions not only about what may properly\\nqualify as art and what the function of the artist should be, but also\\nabout what our role as spectators should involve. It should come as no\\nsurprise, then, that conceptual art can cause frustration or vexation\\n– to raise difficult and sometimes even annoying questions is\\nprecisely what conceptual art in general aspires to do. In reacting\\nstrongly to conceptual art we are, in some important sense, playing\\nright into its hands.\",\n \"\\nThe first difficulty that a philosophical investigation of conceptual\\nart encounters has to do with identifying the object of examination,\\nor at least the category of objects under scrutiny. In the words of\\nthe art historian Paul Wood,\",\n \"\\n[i]t is not at all clear where the boundaries of ‘conceptual\\nart’ are to be drawn, which artists and which works to include.\\nLooked at in one way, conceptual art gets to be like Lewis\\nCarroll’s Cheshire cat, dissolving away until nothing is left\\nbut a grin: a handful of works made over a few short years by a small\\nnumber of artists… Then again, regarded under a different\\naspect, conceptual art can seem like nothing less than the hinge\\naround which the past turned into the present. (Wood 2002, 6)\\n\",\n \"\\nOn a strict historical reading, the expression ‘conceptual\\nart’ refers to the artistic movement that reached its pinnacle\\nbetween 1966 and 1972 (Lippard\\n 1973).[1]\\n Among its most famous adherents at its early stage we find artists\\nsuch as Joseph Kosuth, Robert Morris, Joseph Beuys, Adrian Piper, to\\nname but a few. What unites the conceptual art of this period is the\\nabsorption of the lessons learnt from other twentieth-century art\\nmovements such as Dadaism, Surrealism, Suprematism, Abstract\\nExpressionism and the Fluxus group, together with the ambition once\\nand for all to ‘free’ art of the Modernist paradigm. Most\\nimportantly, perhaps, conceptual art of the 1960s and 70s sought to\\novercome a backdrop against which art’s principal aim is to\\nproduce something beautiful or aesthetically pleasing. Art, early\\nconceptual artists held, is redundant if it does not make us think. In\\ntheir belief that most artistic institutions were not conducive to\\nreflection but merely promoted a conservative and even consumerist\\nconception of art and artists, conceptual artists in the mid-1960s to\\nthe early 1970s instead tried to encourage a revisionary understanding\\nof art, the artist, and artistic experience.\",\n \"\\nWhile conceptual art in its purest form might arguably be limited to\\nworks produced during these five or six years half a century ago, it\\nseems overly narrow – certainly from a philosophical perspective\\n– to limit our inquiry to works produced during that period\\nalone. For although the work created during that time might generally\\nbe conceived as more directly anti-establishment and anti-consumerist\\nthan later conceptual art, the spirit of early conceptual art seems to\\nhave carried on relatively undiluted into the very late twentieth and\\ntwenty-first centuries, as witnessed by pieces such as Tracey\\nEmin’s Unmade Bed, Damian Hirst’s The\\nPhysical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,\\nand Ai Weiwei’s Surveillance Camera.\",\n \"\\nThe highly individualised character of the intellectual exploration\\nthat conceptual art urges us to engage in has always been such that\\nany attempt to pinpoint a specific common denominator other than this\\ngeneral vision and approach to art, art-making and society at large\\ninvariably fails to catch its very essence. The means of artistic\\nexpression, we are told, are infinite and the topics available for\\nquestioning and discussion are limitless. It belongs to the very\\nnature of conceptual art, then, to be – like Lewis’\\nCheshire cat – elusive and slippery. Conceptual artists, be it\\nJoseph Beuys or Marina Abramovic, pursue artistic originality and\\nrepresentation in every possible way. For that reason, one\\nmight find oneself obliged to replace the slightly lofty cliché\\naccording to which there are as many definitions of conceptual art as\\nthere are conceptual artists, with an even more extreme version of the\\nclaim, namely, that there are as many definitions of conceptual art as\\nthere are conceptual artworks.\",\n \"\\nNevertheless, in the midst of this deliberately produced uncertainty\\nabout the nature of conceptual art, a handful of characteristics and\\ngeneral aims do seem to recur, and although they should not be seen as\\ncriteria for conceptual art strictly speaking, they may be considered\\ntenets fundamental to (most) conceptual art.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.1 Introduction\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nFirst and foremost, conceptual art challenges our intuitions\\nconcerning the limits of what may count as art and what it is an\\nartist does. It does so, on the one hand, by postulating ever more\\ncomplex objects as candidates for the status of ‘artwork’,\\nand, on the other hand, by distancing the task of the artist from the\\nactual making and manipulating of the artistic material.\",\n \"\\nA characteristic way in which conceptual art explores the boundaries\\nof the artwork is by a process of questioning where the realm of the\\nartistic ends and that of utility begins. Continuing the tradition of\\nMarcel Duchamp’s readymades such as Fountain, or\\nBottlerack, it sets out to overthrow our traditional\\nconceptions of what an art object should be made of and what it should\\nlook like. The artwork is a process rather than a\\nmaterial thing, and as such it is no longer something that\\ncan be grasped merely by seeing, hearing or touching the end product\\nof that process. The notion of agency in art-making is thus\\nparticularly emphasised. In many cases, the ‘art-making’\\nand the ‘artwork’ come together, because what is sought is\\nan identification of the notion of the work of art with the conceptual\\nactivity of the artist. Conceptual art, politicised and influenced by\\nevents such as the ‘May Days’ in Paris (1968), the\\n‘Hot Autumn’ in Italy (1969), the Vietnam War, and the\\nrise of feminism, promotes a rapprochement between art-making\\nand criticism – both artistic and social – by raising\\nquestions about the products of artistic activities and the very\\npurpose of art. To use the words of Joseph Kosuth, it ‘annexes\\nthe functions of the critic, and makes a middle-man\\nunnecessary.’ (Guercio 1999, 39).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.2 The Limits of Art and the Role of Artists\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAs a direct result of its examination of what may properly qualify as\\nart, and of the markedly broad conception of what may constitute an\\nart object resulting from this examination, conceptual art tends to\\nreject traditional artistic media such as conventional painting or\\nsculpture. Instead, it has found itself drawn to alternative means of\\nexpression, including performances, photography, films, videos,\\nevents, bodies, new ready-mades and new mixed media. In a nutshell,\\nnothing can be ruled out in principle for use as possible artistic\\nmedia, as can be seen, for example, in Richard Long’s photograph\\nof a line made in the grass by\\n walking[2],\\n Bruce Nauman’s nine minute film of the artist himself playing\\none note on a violin whilst walking around in his\\n studio[3],\\n Janine Antoni’s use of chocolate and soap, Marina\\nAbramovic’s display of an array of everyday objects, including\\nknives, torches and feathers, which the audience is invited to apply\\ndirectly on to the artist’s body, and Piero Manzoni’s act\\nof signing a woman’s\\n arm[4].\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.3 Artistic Media\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe most fundamentally revisionary feature of conceptual art is the\\nway in which it proclaims itself to be an art of the mind rather than\\nthe senses: it rejects traditional artistic media because it locates\\nthe artwork at the level of ideas rather than that of\\nobjects. Because more weight tends to given to creative\\nprocess than physical material, and because art should be about\\nintellectual inquiry and reflection rather than beauty and aesthetic\\npleasure (as traditionally conceived), the identity of the work of art\\nis said to lie in the idea at the heart of the piece in question. In\\nthe words of Kosuth, ‘[t]he actual works of art are ideas’\\n(Lippard 1973, 25). For conceptual art, ‘the idea or concept is\\nthe most important aspect of the work’ (LeWitt 1967, 166). Art\\nis ‘de-materialised’, and in this sense held to be prior\\nto its materialisation in any given object.\",\n \"\\nThe claim that the conceptual artwork is to be identified with an idea\\nthat may be seen to underlie it has far-reaching ramifications. It not\\nonly affects the ontology of the conceptual artwork but also\\nprofoundly alters the role of the artist by casting her in the role of\\nthinker rather than object-maker. Moreover, it calls for a thorough\\nreview of the way in which we perceive, engage and appreciate\\nartworks. Further still, it links art so intimately to ideas and\\nconcepts that even a principled distinction between the domain of art\\nand the realm of thought seems difficult to preserve.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.4 Art as Idea\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nFor all these reasons, the kind of representation employed in\\nconceptual artworks is best described in terms of the transmission of\\nideas. In conceptual art, the representation at work can generally be\\nseen as semantic rather than illustrative. That is\\nto say, it sets out to have and convey a specific meaning rather than\\nto depict a scene, person or event. Even in cases where a work makes\\nuse of illustrative representation, conceptual art is still putting\\nthat representation to a distinctively semantic use, in the sense of\\nthere being an intention to represent something one cannot see with\\nthe naked eye. Accordingly, the conceptual artist’s task is to\\ncontemplate and formulate this meaning – to be a\\n‘meaning-maker’.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.5 Semantic Representation\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nOn the whole, the philosophical concerns raised by conceptual art can\\nbe divided into two main categories. First, there are specific\\nquestions to do with conceptual art itself, and the claims which\\nunderpin the project that drives it. Philosophical investigations\\nmight thus be called for not only in relation to the internal\\nconsistency and coherence of the project and its set goals, but also\\nwith regards to the particular tenets outlined above. For example,\\nwhat does it mean to say that every single thing, person or event is a\\npossible candidate for an artistic medium and does that suggestion not\\nrender the category of art, as we know it, redundant?\",\n \"\\nSecond, conceptual art poses philosophical problems from a wider\\nperspective, in so far as one might expect philosophy to provide us\\nwith unitary accounts of the nature of art, the role of the artist,\\nand artistic experience. In many important respects, conceptual art\\nsits very uncomfortably with other, often more traditional artforms\\nand artworks, and this tension highlights a pressing issue for anyone\\ninterested in the possibility of a universal theory of art. For if\\nthere is to be one rule for conceptual art and another for all other\\nkinds of art, are there still good grounds for thinking of conceptual\\nart as a kind of art? Moreover, could not every particular kind of\\nartform or artwork demand a separate theory of art, artist and\\nartistic experience?\",\n \"\\nIf we are to sidestep such an intrinsic division between conceptual\\nart on the one hand, and other kinds of art on the other, then\\ntheories concerned mainly with art that is not conceptual will have to\\nmake many significant concessions in order to incorporate the\\nproblematic case that conceptual artworks present. At the very least,\\na compromise will have to be reached concerning what we mean by the\\nterm ‘artwork’.\",\n \"\\nOne of the over-riding concerns that beset the philosophy of\\nconceptual art is thus whether and, if so, why one should actively\\npursue unified accounts in the philosophy of art. Whether one comes\\nout of that investigation embracing a broader – albeit perhaps\\nvaguer – set of concepts and tools than one started off with, or\\nwhether one considers oneself forced to abandon any hope of anything\\nbut very specific theories of art, artist, and artistic experience,\\nconceptual art obliges us to think about where we stand on these\\nissues.\",\n \"\\nPhilosophizing about conceptual art is, then, not merely\\nphilosophizing about one specific artform. It is philosophizing about\\nthe most revisionary kind of art, one that sees its own task as being\\nprofoundly philosophical in nature. Let us now turn to five more\\nspecific philosophical themes that conceptual art urges us to\\nconsider.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. The Philosophy of Conceptual Art – What is it?\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Five Philosophical Themes\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe problem of defining art is by no means a problem for conceptual\\nart alone. Two principal difficulties immediately arise in the context\\nof any attempt to form a definition. First, the category of art is\\nparticularly heterogeneous. Simply put, there seems to be an infinite\\nvariety of things, or kinds of thing, that need to fall under its\\njurisdiction. Second, there is great variety of opinion on what any\\nputative definition of art should actually consist of.\",\n \"\\nOn the standard conception, a definition is something that provides us\\nwith necessary and sufficient conditions for some thing x to\\nbe F, so that, for example, it is a necessary and sufficient condition\\nfor a number to be an even number that it is (i) an integer and (ii)\\ndivisible by two. Accordingly, a definition of art must be capable of\\noutlining a clear set of conditions that must be satisfied.\",\n \"\\nThere have been no shortages of attempts to define art in this manner.\\nMost prominently perhaps, it has been suggested that art ought to be\\ndefined in terms of its aesthetic character, so that, roughly,\\nx is an artwork if and only if x gives rise to an\\naesthetic experience (e.g., Beardsley 1958). Notwithstanding the\\ndifficulties that this particular suggestion entails (we shall return\\nto this in §3.3), the advent of a kind of art that is as\\nprofoundly revisionary and difficult to classify as conceptual art\\nrenders the attempt to provide a general definition applicable to\\nall art particularly complex. It is no coincidence, then,\\nthat a neo-Wittgensteinian approach came to dominate the philosophy of\\nart in the late 1950s and 1960s. Drawing support from\\nanti-essentialist theories of language, it was suggested that art was\\nnumbered among the various concepts that are, by their very nature,\\n‘essentially contested’ (Gallie 1948; see also Weitz\\n1956). That is to say, some concepts – such as that pertaining\\nto sports, for example– simply do not allow for definitions in\\nterms of necessary and sufficient conditions, and art is best as\\nunderstood as one of them. In the words of Morris Weitz, art may\\nbe\",\n \"\\nan open concept. New conditions have constantly arisen and will\\nundoubtedly constantly arise; new art forms, new movements will\\nemerge, which will demand decisions on the part of those\\ninterested… as to whether the concept should be extended or\\nnot. (Weitz 1956, 32)\\n\",\n \"\\nThe act of proposing a definition of art thus becomes a less stringent\\nexercise of conceptual analysis. The alternative method proposed by\\nneo-Wittgensteinians such as Weitz in attempting to identify art and\\nexplain how we are to distinguish it from non-art is the notion of\\nfamily resemblance (see Wittgenstein 1953,\\n§66–71). Faced with the question ‘Is X an\\nartwork?’, what we should do is try to detect strands of\\nresemblance with paradigmatic instances of an artwork. If some\\nsignificant resemblance to such a paradigmatic case is observed, we\\ncan rightly call the object of our scrutiny a work of art.\",\n \"\\nThe proposal, though interesting, is not without its own difficulties.\\nOne problem that immediately arises relates to the idea of resemblance\\nitself, and the way it rapidly expands in such a way as to render it\\nclose to useless. This is for the simple reason that we can always\\nfind some way in which some given thing may be said to resemble any\\nother given thing. This kind of openness, it is important to note, is\\nnot something that fits in with the programme of conceptual\\nart. Whilst conceptual art does hold that any kind of object could be\\na work of art, it is not saying that every object is a work\\nof art. Far from it. Much conceptual art, in exploring the boundaries\\nbetween the realms of the artistic and that of function and utility,\\nis perceptually indistinguishable from non-art, such as Andy\\nWarhol’s Brillo Boxes. In that sense, conceptual art\\npresents a particularly difficult case for the neo-Wittgensteinian\\nmethod of identification. After all, the only way in which\\nWarhol’s Brillo Boxes does not resemble any other stack\\nof Brillo Boxes is the sense in which the former is a work of art and\\nthe latter is not. The notion of resemblance is clearly of little use\\nhere.\",\n \"\\nPicking up on this concern, Arthur Danto has famously suggested that\\nit is in fact a non-manifest relation that makes something an artwork\\nrather than an observable property (Danto 1981). That is to say,\\nartworks acquire that status in virtue of their relations to the\\nhistorical and social setting constituted by the practices and\\nconventions of art, our artistic heritage, the intentions of artists,\\nand so on — the ‘artworld’ (see also Dickie\\n1974). The general idea here is that artworks are generated within a\\nsocial and artistic context, and so being an artwork is a function of\\ncertain social relations. Conceptual art reinforces the idea that art\\nand non-art can be perceptually indistinguishable and so cannot be\\nmarked off from each other by ‘exhibited’ properties\\n alone.[5]\",\n \"\\nSetting aside the details of such an account, one of the things\\nconceptual art has helped philosophers to grasp more fully is that any\\nsuccessful general definition, or indeed principled theory of the\\nidentification of art, will need to have the non-manifest properties\\nof artworks at its centre. It is the meaning that the artist infuses\\ninto the work and the meaning that we as audience stand to gain from\\nit that contains the key to its status as art (more on this in\\n§3.4). To use the example of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes\\nagain, the work of the conceptual artist seems primarily to be the\\nwork of imbuing objects with a particular kind of meaning.\",\n \"\\nA more promising line of enquiry has been developed by David Davies.\\nTaking his cue from the problems posed by conceptual art, Davies\\nargues that a unified definition of art can only be found if we think\\nof art primarily in terms of the creative process or series of actions\\nresulting in a material thing or other ‘focus of\\nappreciation’. In that sense, the artwork is primarily\\nidentified with the intentional acts through which it comes into being\\nrather than with the end-product of that process (Davies 2004). Art,\\non this view, is better understood as a kind of performance than as a\\nmanifest object. By shifting the focus of our attention in this way,\\nwe can overcome many of the difficulties associated with defining art,\\nmost notably that of its heterogeneity. It may be, then, that the most\\nenduring lesson to be learnt from conceptual art with regards to the\\ndefinition of art is not so much that a conceptual analysis of art is\\ncompletely unattainable, as that we simply have been looking in the\\nwrong place.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.1 The Definition of Art\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe claim that conceptual art is to be identified less with a\\nperceivable object than with the meaning or idea it aims to convey,\\ngives rise to a host of complex ontological questions. The rejection\\nof traditional artistic media, together with the de-materialisation of\\nthe art object, forces us to reconsider what seemed to be relatively\\nuncomplicated aspects of artistic experience. The answers to questions\\nsuch as ‘Is there in fact any one thing (or set of things) that\\nwe must perceive in artistic appreciation?’, and ‘Is it a\\nnecessary condition for the existence of an artwork that it have a\\nmedium?’ suddenly become a good deal less obvious.\",\n \"\\nIn the first instance, conceptual art drives us to review the common\\nassumption that appropriate appreciation and engagement with an\\nartwork must involve a direct first-hand experience of that piece\\nitself. The idea here, to use Frank Sibley’s words, is that\",\n \"\\n[p]eople have to see the grace or unity of a work,\\nhear the plaintiveness or frenzy in the music,\\nnotice the gaudiness of colour scheme, feel the\\npower of a novel, its mood, or its uncertainty of tone. They may be\\nstruck by these qualities at once, or they may come to perceive them\\nonly after repeated viewings, hearings, or readings, and with the help\\nof critics. But unless they do perceive them for themselves, aesthetic\\nenjoyment, appreciation, and judgement are beyond them… the\\ncrucial thing is to see, hear, or feel. (Sibley 1965, 137).\\n\",\n \"\\nThe assumption in question is, then, that although we seem to gain\\nsomething from looking at, for example, a postcard or poster of\\nKatsushika Hokusai's Fine Wine, Clear Morning or\\nÉlisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s Self-Portrait in a\\nStraw Hat , a genuine judgement about its artistic character\\nnecessitates one’s own un-mediated perceptual experience of it.\\nBut – and herein lies the crux of the problem for conceptual art\\n– what if there is nothing for us to get a first-hand perceptual\\nexperience of? In the case of Walter De Maria’s Vertical\\nEarth Kilometer\\n (1977)[6],\\n a kilometre-long metal shaft plunged into the surface of the earth so\\nthat only the very top is visible, first-hand perceptual experience is\\nsimply not something that can be had. More pertinently, what does it\\neven mean to have a perceptual engagement with an artwork that claims,\\nbasically, to be an idea?\",\n \"\\nPerhaps the most pressing question, however, has to do with the extent\\nto which we are to take conceptual art’s claim of\\nde-materialisation seriously. Does the de-materialisation of such art\\nnot suggest that there is not only a rejection of traditional artistic\\nmedia in conceptual art, but an outright refutation of artistic media\\nin general? One possible way of making sense of this idea is with a\\ndistinction outlined by Davies, namely that between physical\\nmedium and vehicular medium (Davies 2004). Crucially, a\\nvehicular medium is said to incorporate not only physical objects\\n(such as paintings and sculptures, say) but also actions, events, and\\ngenerally more complex entities. In Davies’ words, ‘[t]he\\nproduct of an artist’s manipulation of a vehicular medium will\\nthen be the vehicle whereby a particular artistic statement\\nis articulated… The vehicle may, as in the case of\\nPicasso’s Guernica, be a physical object, or, as in the\\ncase of Coleridge’s Kubla Kahn, a linguistic\\nstructure-type, or, as arguably in the case of Duchamp’s\\nFountain, an action of a particular kind.’ (Davies\\n2004, 59). Adhering to this vehicular medium in art, may then at least\\nequip philosophers with a notion that can deflate the concern of\\nwhether conceptual art, by rejecting physical media, denies the need\\nfor all artistic media.\",\n \"\\nClearly, conceptual art is not the first kind of art to raise\\nontological concerns of this kind. After all, music and literary art,\\nbe it traditional or avant-garde, hardly present\\nstraightforward cases either. The question of what exactly\\nconstitutes, say, a novel or a musical work have been widely discussed\\nfor some time (e.g. Davies 2001; Ingarden 1973; Wollheim 1980)\\nBuilding on the suggestion that artworks such as musical pieces and\\nliterary works are best understood in terms of universals or\\n‘types’, one view that has been widely discussed in the\\nlast two decades or so is based on the idea that not only musical and\\nliterary artworks, but all artworks, are types. More\\nspecifically, they are to be conceived of as ‘event- or\\naction-types’ (Currie 1988). According to this theory, the\\nartwork is thus not the material thing itself but, rather, the way in\\nwhich the artist arrived at the underlying structure shared by all\\ninstances or performances of that work.\",\n \"\\nWhilst the general approach fostered by both Currie and Davies is\\nclearly congenial to some aspects of conceptual art, it might\\nnevertheless still be the case that further work needs to be done if\\nthe view that artworks are basically event- or action-types is to\\naccommodate all art in the conceptual tradition. Further questions\\ninclude what role, if any, is played by the (set of) material thing(s)\\nthat many conceptual artists undeniably do present us with.\\nWhat, in other words, are we to make of the object (be it a human body\\nor a video-recording) that is supposed to transmit the idea which, in\\nturn, is said to be the genuine artwork? A good philosophical\\nexplanation needs to be given as to how the material thing that is\\nregularly presented to the audience is, in fact, relevant to the\\nartwork itself. Is the vehicular medium constitutive of the artwork,\\nand if so, how exactly does that square with the claim of\\nde-materialisation?\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.2 The Ontology and Media of Art\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nUnderlying the claim that we need to have a direct experiential\\nencounter with an artwork in order to appreciate it appropriately is\\nthe fact that some of the properties that bear on the value of a work\\ncan only be grasped in this way. The properties in question here are\\ngenerally aesthetic properties, and the assumption motivating\\nthe experiential requirement is that the appreciation of artworks\\nnecessarily involves an aesthetic element (i.e. not necessarily beauty\\nper se, but something aesthetically pleasing or\\nrewarding).\",\n \"\\nHowever, one of the most distinguishing features of conceptual art,\\nsetting out as it does to replace illustrative representation with\\nsemantic representation, is that it does not prioritise aesthetic\\nexperience in a traditional sense. Conceptual art is intended as an\\nart of the mind: it generally appeals to matters of the intellect and\\nemphasises art’s cognitive rather than\\naesthetic value. In the words of Timothy Binkley, traditional\\naesthetics is preoccupied ‘with perceptual entities’ and\\nthis ‘leads aesthetics to extol and examine the “work of\\nart”, while averting its attention almost entirely from the\\nmyriad other aspects of that complex cultural activity we call\\n“art” ’ (Binkley 1977, 271).\",\n \"\\nWe can now see that the experiential requirement may well fail to have\\nany bite with regards to conceptual artworks because the\\nartist’s aim does not necessarily involve conferring to the work\\nof art properties that must be experienced directly in order to be\\ngrasped and fully appreciated. If there is to be any kind of\\nfirst-hand experiential requirement for the appropriate appreciation\\nof conceptual artworks, it will perhaps be of a kind that focuses on\\nan imaginative engagement with the idea central to the artwork rather\\nthan a perceptual experience of its aesthetic properties (see\\nSchellekens 2007)\",\n \"\\nThe main philosophical question highlighted by conceptual art in this\\ncontext, then, is the following: ‘Does art really need to be\\naesthetic, and, if so, in what sense?’. In Binkley’s\\nopinion, and in support of conceptual art, one does not necessarily\\nhave to think of art in terms of aesthetic value –whilst a lot\\nof ‘art has chosen to articulate in the medium of an aesthetic\\nspace’, there is ‘no a priori reason why art must confine\\nitself to the creation of aesthetic objects. It might opt for\\narticulation in a semantic space instead of an aesthetic one so that\\nartistic meaning is not embodied in a physical object or event’\\n(Binkley 1977, 273).\",\n \"\\nHowever, not everyone has endorsed such a liberal view about the\\nseparation between the aesthetic and the\\n artistic[7].\\n If art does not aim at having aesthetic value, what, one might argue,\\nwill set it apart from non-art? Which view one decides to favour on\\nthis point may well end up being an issue about definition. If one\\nwishes to define art in terms of aesthetic experience, the question\\nfinds a clear-cut answer, namely that conceptual art simply cannot be\\nconsidered a kind of art. The down-side of that position is, however,\\na whole set of difficult concerns to do with things, such as nature or\\npersons, that hardly qualify as art even though they invite aesthetic\\nexperiences. If one is impressed by these worries and cannot see any\\ndecisive philosophical reason to uphold the aesthetic view, there is\\nlittle, if anything, to block a conception of art which is not\\nnecessarily aesthetic. One may, then, think of aesthetic value as\\none kind of artistic value that, alongside with moral,\\nreligious, political, historical and financial value, some artworks\\nhave and others do\\n not.[8]\",\n \"\\nNow, even if it is granted that art need not be aesthetic, it is still\\npossible to hold that conceptual art does not qualify as good\\nart because it does not (aim to) yield aesthetic experiences. But\\nwhile this may be a viable position to hold in relation to the project\\nof conceptual art in general, it cannot be used to attack conceptual\\nart on its own grounds. Saying, for example, of Michael\\nCraig-Martin’s An Oak Tree that one cannot consider it\\na great work of art because it fails to give rise to a distinctively\\naesthetic kind of pleasure does not actually undermine the project.\\nConceptual art, as we now know, is more about conveying meaning\\nthrough a vehicular medium than about furnishing its audiences with\\nexperiences of, say, beauty. Any attack on this fundamental feature of\\nconceptual art targets not so much an individual work of art but\\nrather finds fault with the artistic tradition itself.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.3 The Aesthetic Value of Art\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAt the most basic level of inquiry, two queries arise about\\ninterpretation in art: (i) what ‘tools’ do we use to\\ninterpret artworks?, and (ii) what is it we do when we interpret\\nartworks? In the case of conceptual art, a satisfactory answer to (i)\\nwill most probably appeal to elements such as the narrative aids\\nprovided by artists or curators (e.g. catalogues, titles, exhibited\\nexplanations, labels, etc.); the appropriate mode of perception (i.e.\\nlooking or listening); and what we know about the artwork’s and\\nartist’s social, historical, political or artistic context.\\nDepending on the ontological status of the particular piece (if it is,\\nsay, a ready-made or a performance), these elements can be combined in\\ndifferent ways to explain our interpretative habits and practices.\",\n \"\\nIn addressing (ii) we will most likely need to refer to the various\\nmental abilities we put to use in such interpretative exercises (e.g.\\nimagination, empathy); and also to ask precisely what the target of\\nour interpretation is. This latter task is not as unproblematic as it\\nmay seem, for it is not always clear whether it is the object itself\\nthat should be under scrutiny, the object’s perceptual\\nproperties (and, if so, which), the idea at the heart of the work, or\\nthe artist’s intentions in making the piece. It seems unlikely\\nthat the question will find an adequate answer until we find an\\nacceptable solution to the problem mentioned above, namely ‘Is\\nthe vehicular medium a constitutive part of the conceptual artwork or\\nnot, and if so how?’.\",\n \"\\nTwo further philosophical questions about the notion of artistic\\ninterpretation take on a particularly complex dimension in relation to\\nconceptual art. First, exactly what information is relevant in\\nartistic interpretation? And, more importantly, to what extent should\\nthe artist’s intention be allowed to determine the\\nappropriate interpretation? Views differ widely on this topic. In\\ntheir article, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, William Wimsatt\\nand Monroe Beardsley famously argue in relation to the literary arts\\nthat the only kind of evidence that is relevant to interpretation is\\nthat which is internal to the work in question. (Wimsatt &\\nBeardsley 1946). An artist’s intention or design is of no\\ninterpretative significance. Obviously, this position seems difficult\\nto defend in the case of conceptual art: when we are dealing with\\npieces such as Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, where the\\ninternal evidence is clearly insufficient to discern that it is an\\nartwork in the first place, it seems that we need to know that Warhol\\nintended the boxes to be viewed qua art, at the very\\nleast.\",\n \"\\nNow, even if we do wish to defend the view that the artist’s\\nintention needs to be taken into account somehow in the interpretation\\nof conceptual art, further questions still require our attention here.\\nMost centrally, should the artist’s intention always be\\nconsidered the decisive factor in interpretation and\\nmust it always be involved? Generally speaking, there are two\\nmain strands of intentionalist positions available. On the one hand,\\nthere is an approach which holds that the artist’s intention\\ndetermines an artwork’s meaning, and thus cannot be overlooked\\n– or indeed superseded – in artistic interpretation (e.g.,\\nCarroll 1992). On the other hand, there is a view that the interpreter\\nought to construct the best hypothesis concerning the artist’s\\nactual intention with the help of, say, the text and biographical\\nnotes, and that this hypothesis confers meaning on the work in\\nquestion (e.g., Levinson 1992).\",\n \"\\nAt least at a first glance, it may seem that conceptual art presents a\\nstronger case for the first approach to interpretation, since the\\nartist’s intention is all we have to go by, quite literally, in\\nworks such as Robert Barry’s simple statement entitled All\\nthe Things I Know But of which I am Not at the Moment Thinking\\n(1969) (see, e.g., Maes 2010 and Gover 2012). Nevertheless, the\\nquestion cannot be settled quite so easily, for many conceptual\\nartists make a point of putting all the interpretative onus on the\\nspectator. How often are we told, after all, that a specific\\nartwork’s meaning rests entirely in our hands; that ‘it\\nmeans whatever you want it to mean’?\",\n \"\\nThis leads us to the second question that is especially pertinent for\\na kind of art that sets out to convey an idea or meaning, namely\\nwhether there can be more than one correct or appropriate\\ninterpretation of an artwork. Again, several theories present\\nthemselves as eligible candidates in relation to this problem. One\\nsuggestion has centred around the idea that there can be a\\nmultiplicity of appropriate or correct divergent interpretations of\\none and the same artwork which cannot be reduced to one underlying\\ninterpretation or ranked in relation to each other (e.g., Margolis\\n1991; Goldman 1990). In opposition to this view, however, another\\napproach has it that there is in fact always a single best\\ninterpretation which is better than any other (e.g., Beardsley 1970).\\nThe aim of artistic interpretation is, then, in Matthew Kieran’s\\nwords, ‘restricted to discovering the one true meaning of an\\nartwork.’ (Kieran 1996, 239). Whilst conceptual art certainly\\nseems to rest on something like the interpretative plurality of the\\nfirst view, it is not obvious how a kind of art that presents itself\\nas an idea can, in reality, accommodate such indeterminacy.\",\n \"\\nThere are good reasons to believe that of all the questions conceptual\\nart gives rise to, interpretation is the most problematic from an\\ninternal point of view. The conundrum can be put in the following\\nterms. If the conceptual work is the idea, it seems reasonable to\\nassume that artistic interpretation will consist primarily in coming\\nto understand that idea (which is conceded by the artist to the\\nartwork considered as such). In other words, if we take conceptual\\nart’s de-materialisation claim seriously, we are left with a\\nnotion of interpretation which is relatively constrained to the\\nartist’s intention and to the claim that that intention\\ndetermines the appropriate or correct interpretation for that\\nparticular work.\",\n \"\\nAs we have seen, though, we are often encouraged by conceptual artists\\nto take the interpretative exercise into our own hands, so to speak,\\nand not be shy to use features about ourselves and our own lives as\\ninterpretive tools. We are, in other words, asked to combine the idea\\nof art as idea with the claim that we can, as spectators, convey an\\nentirely new and fresh interpretation onto an artwork that is nothing\\nbut an idea which, by definition, needs to be about or concerned with\\nsomething. So, if the idea is the art, then how can my idiosyncratic\\ninterpretation of that idea be anywhere near valid? It seems, then\\nthat in order to be coherent, conceptual art must give up either the\\nclaim that the actual artwork is nothing other than the idea, or the\\nclaim that the interpretative onus lies on the viewer.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.4 The Interpretation of Art\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIn seeking to convey a semantic representation through a vehicular\\nmedium, conceptual art arguably aims to have cognitive – rather\\nthan aesthetic – value. By cognitive value, what is meant is\\nsimply the value an artwork may have in virtue of enhancing or\\nincreasing our understanding of some topic, notion or event.\\nInterestingly, conceptual art seems to assume that the aesthetic\\ndetracts from or divests art of its possible cognitive value in such a\\nway as to render the two kinds of value close to mutually exclusive\\n(Schellekens 2007).\",\n \"\\nThe attempt to separate the aesthetic from the cognitive is far from a\\nrecent investigative endeavour in philosophical circles. In the very\\nfirst section of Kant’s Critique of the Power of\\nJudgement, a clear-cut distinction is outlined between aesthetic\\nand cognitive (or ‘logical’) judgements. However, few\\nartistic movements have pressed these questions about the division\\nbetween aesthetic value on the one hand, and cognitive value on the\\nother, as scrupulously and explicitly as conceptual art. In fact,\\nconceptual art makes things very difficult for itself by holding that\\nthe only kind of artistic value that is entirely legitimate\\nis cognitive value.\",\n \"\\nClearly, conceptual art is not the only kind of art that may have\\ncognitive value – many other artforms aim to have cognitive\\nvalue in addition to aesthetic value – and most of us\\nwould agree that part of why we find art rewarding is precisely\\nbecause it often yields some kind of understanding. That is to say, we\\nread novels, look at paintings and listen to music not only because of\\nthe pleasure it may afford, but also because it tends to make us\\nricher human beings, better able to make sense of the world around\\nus.\",\n \"\\nUncontroversial as this claim may seem, some philosophers have denied\\nthat art should either have or seek to have cognitive value. Most\\nfamously perhaps, expressivists such as Clive Bell and Roger Fry held\\nthat art should only seek to express and arouse emotions (Bell 1914;\\nFry 1920). James Young has defended a view whereby\\navant-garde art, like conceptual art, cannot yield any\\nsignificant knowledge or understanding (Young 2001, 77).\",\n \"\\nYoung’s argument focuses on the notion of exemplification which\\nhe locates at the heart of the only kind of semantic representation\\nand cognitive value that can be ascribed to artworks such as\\nconceptual ones. Exemplification is a form of reference to properties\\nby means of a sample (or exemplar). An exemplar ‘stands for some\\nproperty by [non-metaphorically, literally] possessing the\\nproperty’ (Young 2001, 72). In the case of conceptual art, a\\nwork then exemplifies an idea or concept. So, for example, Tom\\nMarioni’s The Act of Drinking Beer with One’s Friends\\nis the Highest Form of Art\\n (1970)[9]\\n – a piece involving the artist and his friends drinking beer\\ntogether – is an exemplar of the idea at the heart of the work,\\nnamely that drinking beer with one’s friends is the highest\\nart-form of all. This is the work’s statement. However, as Young\\npoints out, it doesn’t follow from the fact that something\\nexpresses a statement or has meaning that it has significant cognitive\\nvalue. All things considered, the kind of statement that conceptual\\nartworks and their like are typically able to make, according to\\nYoung, are merely truisms. If conceptual art yields cognitive value,\\nthat is to say, it tends to be so trivial that it barely deserves the\\nname.\",\n \"\\nThe argument puts a finger on an experience shared by many spectators\\nof conceptual art who feel conned or deceived by it. Not only are\\nconceptual artworks not beautiful, one might object, they don’t\\neven tell us anything over and beyond banal clichés. What,\\nthen, is conceptual art really good for?\",\n \"\\nIf there is to be a way out of this difficulty, we will have to take\\nthe bull by the horns and discuss exactly what (kind of) understanding\\none may gain from it. This answer will have to be cashed out in terms\\nof two concerns: one about the content of the knowledge, and\\nanother about the kind of knowledge in question. First,\\nknowledge yielded by art can be about the artwork – not only the\\ntechniques employed, the work’s history and tradition, and so\\non, but also the meaning and thoughts that the work conveys. Second,\\nart can yield either propositional knowledge or knowledge by\\nacquaintance. Whereas the first consists of knowledge given to us in\\nterms of propositions and can either be concerned with the artwork\\nitself (e.g. knowledge ‘that [Manet's famous painting]\\nrepresents the Emperor Maximilan’s execution') or a reality\\nbeyond that work (e.g. knowledge ‘that horrible things are often\\ndone in the name of political revolutions’), the second kind of\\nknowledge has the potential to enable one to imagine what it would be\\nlike to be in a certain position or situation, to empathize, to come\\nvery close to experiencing what it would be like to have that kind of\\nexperience first-hand (e.g. what it is like to witness the execution\\nof a dishonoured Emperor).\",\n \"\\nThe notions of knowledge and cognitive value, whilst at the very heart\\nof the conceptual project, raise a manifold of important questions\\nthat require solid and cogent philosophical answers. Perhaps\\nexemplification can still serve an epistemological purpose by inviting\\nus to engage with the issues raised by a work of art in a richer and\\nmore imaginative way; in a way that makes us think about questions of\\nphilosophical interest in particular way – a way that\\npropositions alone cannot do? Perhaps the key to conceptual\\nart’s value lies in a more challenging intellectual relationship\\nwith the work, a genuine engagement with the idea in question.\\nExploring this avenue may yet help us see what kind of non-trivial\\ncognitive value conceptual art is capable of yielding.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.5 The Cognitive Value of Art\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nMany more questions centred around these five philosophical themes\\nremain to be examined in relation to conceptual art. With regards to\\nconcerns about defining art, we need to address the increasing number\\nof worries to do with exactly how we are to distinguish art from\\nnon-art, and indeed whether there really is a distinction (if only\\ntheoretical) to be drawn here. That is to say, if conceptual art is at\\ntimes not only perceptually indistinguishable from non-art but it is\\nalso the case that everything is alleged to be (part of) a potential\\nartwork, perhaps the inevitable outcome is that there simply cannot be\\na principled distinction between art and non-art. So, does the\\nconceptual project lead to the end of the category of art as such?\",\n \"\\nFrom the ontological perspective, this set of concerns acquires an\\neven more aggressive flavour: if art should be all about putting\\nforward ideas and making statements, why, one might wonder, do we need\\nthe conceptual artwork at all? Can we not merely ask the same\\nquestions and make the same statements directly?\",\n \"\\nIn addition to these questions, the host of issues that have been\\nraised about interpretation, intention, appreciation and the way they\\nare (or should be) related have not yet been silenced. For art that is\\nas discourse-dependent as most conceptual art is, it is not always\\nclear whether there is anything more to interpreting conceptual art\\nthan just being told what the idea in question is. And if so, can we\\nstill call this interpretation?\",\n \"\\nFinally, what are we to make of the relation between aesthetic and\\ncognitive value in conceptual art – should they be considered as\\nin opposition or even as mutually exclusive? If the only kind of value\\nthat is of genuine artistic importance is cognitive value, it will be\\ndifficult to avoid the definitional and ontological concerns mentioned\\nabove. Also, it will call for a deeply revisionary conception of art,\\none fundamentally hostile to the very notions we are probably most\\nused to associating with art, namely beauty and aesthetic\\npleasure.\",\n \"\\nCentral to the philosophy of conceptual art is thus the provocative\\nspirit of the project under investigation – conceptual art\\nthrows down the gauntlet by challenging us to reconsider every aspect\\nof artistic experience, and it may well be up to philosophy to pick it\\nup and address some of the questions conceptual art makes its business\\nto raise. Conceptual art actively aims to be thought-provoking,\\nstimulating and inspiring, and if only for that reason, philosophers\\ninterested in art should not pass it by unaffected.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Further Questions\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Alberro, Alexander & Blake, Stimson (eds.), 1999.\nConceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, Cambridge, MA: MIT\nPress.","Alberro, Alexander& Buchmann, Sabeth (eds.), 2006. Art\nafter Conceptual Art, Cambridge, MA & Vienna: MIT\nPress/General Foundation.","Beardsley, Monroe, 1970. The Possibility of Criticism,\nDetroit: Wayne State University Press.","Bell, Clive, 1914. Art, London.","Binkley, Timothy, 1977. ‘Piece: Contra Aesthetics’,\nJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 35:\n265–277.","Budd, Malcolm, 1995. Values of Art: Painting, Poetry, and\nMusic, London: Penguin.","Caldarola, Elisa, 2021. ‘On Tags and Conceptual Street\nArt’, Philosophical Inquiries, IX(2):\n93–114.","–––, 2021. ‘Exemplification,\nKnowledge, and Education of the Emotions through Conceptual\nArt’, Discipline Filosofiche, XXXI(1):\n179–195.","Carroll, Noel, 1992. ‘Art, Intention, and\nConversation’, Intention and Interpretation, G.\nIseminger (ed.), Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp.\n97–131.","Corris, Michael (ed.), 2004. Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and\nPractice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Cray, Wesley, 2014. ‘Conceptual Art, Ideas and\nOntology’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 72:\n265–277.","Currie, Gregory, 1988. An Ontology of Art, New York: St\nMartin’s Press.","Dal Sasso, David & Schellekens, Elisabeth,\n2022. Aesthetics, Philosophy and Conceptual Art. London:\nBloomsbury. ","Danto, Arthur C., 1964. ‘The Artworld’, Journal of\nPhilosophy, 61: 571–584.","–––, 1981. The Transfiguration of the\nCommonplace, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.","Davies, David, 2004. Art as Performance, Oxford:\nBlackwells.","Davies, Stephen, 2001. Musical Works and Performances: A\nPhilosophical Exploration, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","Dickie, George, 1973. ‘The Institutional Conception of\nArt’, in Tilghman, Benjamin (ed.). Language and\nAesthetics, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, pp.\n21–30.","–––, 1974, Art and the Aesthetic: An\nInstitutional Analysis, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University\nPress.","Fry, R., 1920. Vision and Design, London: Chatto &\nWindus.","Godfrey, Tony, 1998. Conceptual Art, London: Phaidon\nPress.","Goldie, Peter & Schellekens, Elisabeth (eds.), 2007.\nPhilosophy and Conceptual Art, Oxford: Oxford University\nPress.","–––, 2009. Who’s Afraid of Conceptual\nArt?, London: Routledge.","Goldman, Alan, 1990. ‘Interpreting Art and\nLiterature’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,\n48: 205–14.","Gover, Karen, 2012. ‘What is Humpty Dumptyism in\nContemporary Art? A Reply to Maes’, British Journal of\nAesthetics, 52: 169–181.","Hanson, Louise. 2015. “Conceptual Art and the Acquaintance\nPrinciple.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art\nCriticism, 73(3): 247–258.","Harrison, Charles, 1991. Essays on Art and Language,\nCambridge, MA: MIT Press.","Ingarden, Roman, 1973. The Literary Work of Art, G.G.\nGrabowicz (trans.), Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University\nPress.","Irvin, Sherri & Dodd, Julian, 2017. ‘In Advance of the\nBroken Theory: Philosophy and Contemporary Art’, Journal of\nAesthetics and Art Criticism, 75(4): 375–386.","Kieran, Matthew, 1996. ‘In Defence of Critical\nPluralism’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 36:\n239–251.","Kosuth, Joseph, 1969. Art After Philosophy and After:\nCollected Writings, 1966–1990, Cambridge, MA: MIT\nPress.","Lewitt, Sol, 1967. ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’,\nArtforum, 5(10): 79–83.","–––, 1969. ‘Sentences on Conceptual\nArt’, Art-Language: The Journal of Conceptual Art, 1\n(May): 11–13. Reprinted in Osborne, 2002.","Levinson, Jerrold, 1979. ‘Defining Art Historically’,\nBritish Journal of Aesthetics, 19: 232–250.","–––, 1992. ‘Intention and Interpretation:\nA Last Look’, Intention and Interpretation, G.\nIseminger (ed.), Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp.\n221–256.","Lippard, Lucy, 1973. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the\nArt Object 1966–1972, New York: Praeger.","Maes, Hans, 2010. ‘Intention, Interpretation, and\nContemporary Visual Art’, British Journal of\nAesthetics, 50: 121–138.","Margolis, Joseph, 1991. The Truth About Relativism,\nOxford: Blackwell.","Meyer, Ursula, 1972. Conceptual Art, New York: Dutton\nPress.","Morgan, Robert C., 1996. Art into Ideas: Essays on Conceptual\nArt, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Newman, M. & Bird, J. (eds.), 1999. Rewriting Conceptual\nArt, London: Reaktion Books.","Osborne, Peter (ed.), 2002. Conceptual Art: Themes and\nMovements, London & New York: Phaidon Press.","Pakes, Anna, 2019. ‘Can There Be Conceptual\nDance?’ Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 44:\n195–212.","Piper, Adrian, 1993. ‘The Logic of Modernism’,\nFlash Art, 26: 56–58.","Sauchelli, Andrea, 2016. ‘The Acquaintance Principle,\nAesthetic Judgments and Conceptual Art’, Journal of\nAesthetic Education, 50: 1–15.","Schellekens, Elisabeth, 2005. ‘“Seeing is\nBelieving” and “Believing is Seeing”‘,\nActa Analytica, 20: 10–23.","–––, 2007. ‘The Aesthetic Value of\nIdeas’, Philosophy and Conceptual Art, Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press, pp. 71–91.","Shelley, James, 2003. ‘The Problem of Non-Perceptual\nArt’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 43:\n363–78.","Sibley, Frank, 1965. ‘Aesthetic and Nonaesthetic’,\nPhilosophical Review, 74: 135–59","Young, James, 2001. Art and Knowledge, London:\nRoutledge.","Walton, Kendall, 1970. ‘Categories of Art’,\nPhilosophical Review, 79: 334–67.","Weitz, Morris, 1956. ‘The Role of Theory in\nAesthetics’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,\n15: 27–35.","Wimsatt, W. K. & Beardsley M. C., 1946. ‘The Intentional\nFallacy’, Sewanee Review, LIV: 468–488.","Wollheim, Richard, 1980. Art and Its Objects, Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press.","Wood, Paul, 2002. Conceptual Art, London: Tate\nPublishing. Series: Movements in Modern Art."],"string":"[\n \"Alberro, Alexander & Blake, Stimson (eds.), 1999.\\nConceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, Cambridge, MA: MIT\\nPress.\",\n \"Alberro, Alexander& Buchmann, Sabeth (eds.), 2006. Art\\nafter Conceptual Art, Cambridge, MA & Vienna: MIT\\nPress/General Foundation.\",\n \"Beardsley, Monroe, 1970. The Possibility of Criticism,\\nDetroit: Wayne State University Press.\",\n \"Bell, Clive, 1914. Art, London.\",\n \"Binkley, Timothy, 1977. ‘Piece: Contra Aesthetics’,\\nJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 35:\\n265–277.\",\n \"Budd, Malcolm, 1995. Values of Art: Painting, Poetry, and\\nMusic, London: Penguin.\",\n \"Caldarola, Elisa, 2021. ‘On Tags and Conceptual Street\\nArt’, Philosophical Inquiries, IX(2):\\n93–114.\",\n \"–––, 2021. ‘Exemplification,\\nKnowledge, and Education of the Emotions through Conceptual\\nArt’, Discipline Filosofiche, XXXI(1):\\n179–195.\",\n \"Carroll, Noel, 1992. ‘Art, Intention, and\\nConversation’, Intention and Interpretation, G.\\nIseminger (ed.), Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp.\\n97–131.\",\n \"Corris, Michael (ed.), 2004. Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth, and\\nPractice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Cray, Wesley, 2014. ‘Conceptual Art, Ideas and\\nOntology’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 72:\\n265–277.\",\n \"Currie, Gregory, 1988. An Ontology of Art, New York: St\\nMartin’s Press.\",\n \"Dal Sasso, David & Schellekens, Elisabeth,\\n2022. Aesthetics, Philosophy and Conceptual Art. London:\\nBloomsbury. \",\n \"Danto, Arthur C., 1964. ‘The Artworld’, Journal of\\nPhilosophy, 61: 571–584.\",\n \"–––, 1981. The Transfiguration of the\\nCommonplace, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Davies, David, 2004. Art as Performance, Oxford:\\nBlackwells.\",\n \"Davies, Stephen, 2001. Musical Works and Performances: A\\nPhilosophical Exploration, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Dickie, George, 1973. ‘The Institutional Conception of\\nArt’, in Tilghman, Benjamin (ed.). Language and\\nAesthetics, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, pp.\\n21–30.\",\n \"–––, 1974, Art and the Aesthetic: An\\nInstitutional Analysis, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University\\nPress.\",\n \"Fry, R., 1920. Vision and Design, London: Chatto &\\nWindus.\",\n \"Godfrey, Tony, 1998. Conceptual Art, London: Phaidon\\nPress.\",\n \"Goldie, Peter & Schellekens, Elisabeth (eds.), 2007.\\nPhilosophy and Conceptual Art, Oxford: Oxford University\\nPress.\",\n \"–––, 2009. Who’s Afraid of Conceptual\\nArt?, London: Routledge.\",\n \"Goldman, Alan, 1990. ‘Interpreting Art and\\nLiterature’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,\\n48: 205–14.\",\n \"Gover, Karen, 2012. ‘What is Humpty Dumptyism in\\nContemporary Art? A Reply to Maes’, British Journal of\\nAesthetics, 52: 169–181.\",\n \"Hanson, Louise. 2015. “Conceptual Art and the Acquaintance\\nPrinciple.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art\\nCriticism, 73(3): 247–258.\",\n \"Harrison, Charles, 1991. Essays on Art and Language,\\nCambridge, MA: MIT Press.\",\n \"Ingarden, Roman, 1973. The Literary Work of Art, G.G.\\nGrabowicz (trans.), Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University\\nPress.\",\n \"Irvin, Sherri & Dodd, Julian, 2017. ‘In Advance of the\\nBroken Theory: Philosophy and Contemporary Art’, Journal of\\nAesthetics and Art Criticism, 75(4): 375–386.\",\n \"Kieran, Matthew, 1996. ‘In Defence of Critical\\nPluralism’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 36:\\n239–251.\",\n \"Kosuth, Joseph, 1969. Art After Philosophy and After:\\nCollected Writings, 1966–1990, Cambridge, MA: MIT\\nPress.\",\n \"Lewitt, Sol, 1967. ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’,\\nArtforum, 5(10): 79–83.\",\n \"–––, 1969. ‘Sentences on Conceptual\\nArt’, Art-Language: The Journal of Conceptual Art, 1\\n(May): 11–13. Reprinted in Osborne, 2002.\",\n \"Levinson, Jerrold, 1979. ‘Defining Art Historically’,\\nBritish Journal of Aesthetics, 19: 232–250.\",\n \"–––, 1992. ‘Intention and Interpretation:\\nA Last Look’, Intention and Interpretation, G.\\nIseminger (ed.), Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp.\\n221–256.\",\n \"Lippard, Lucy, 1973. Six Years: The Dematerialization of the\\nArt Object 1966–1972, New York: Praeger.\",\n \"Maes, Hans, 2010. ‘Intention, Interpretation, and\\nContemporary Visual Art’, British Journal of\\nAesthetics, 50: 121–138.\",\n \"Margolis, Joseph, 1991. The Truth About Relativism,\\nOxford: Blackwell.\",\n \"Meyer, Ursula, 1972. Conceptual Art, New York: Dutton\\nPress.\",\n \"Morgan, Robert C., 1996. Art into Ideas: Essays on Conceptual\\nArt, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Newman, M. & Bird, J. (eds.), 1999. Rewriting Conceptual\\nArt, London: Reaktion Books.\",\n \"Osborne, Peter (ed.), 2002. Conceptual Art: Themes and\\nMovements, London & New York: Phaidon Press.\",\n \"Pakes, Anna, 2019. ‘Can There Be Conceptual\\nDance?’ Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 44:\\n195–212.\",\n \"Piper, Adrian, 1993. ‘The Logic of Modernism’,\\nFlash Art, 26: 56–58.\",\n \"Sauchelli, Andrea, 2016. ‘The Acquaintance Principle,\\nAesthetic Judgments and Conceptual Art’, Journal of\\nAesthetic Education, 50: 1–15.\",\n \"Schellekens, Elisabeth, 2005. ‘“Seeing is\\nBelieving” and “Believing is Seeing”‘,\\nActa Analytica, 20: 10–23.\",\n \"–––, 2007. ‘The Aesthetic Value of\\nIdeas’, Philosophy and Conceptual Art, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press, pp. 71–91.\",\n \"Shelley, James, 2003. ‘The Problem of Non-Perceptual\\nArt’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 43:\\n363–78.\",\n \"Sibley, Frank, 1965. ‘Aesthetic and Nonaesthetic’,\\nPhilosophical Review, 74: 135–59\",\n \"Young, James, 2001. Art and Knowledge, London:\\nRoutledge.\",\n \"Walton, Kendall, 1970. ‘Categories of Art’,\\nPhilosophical Review, 79: 334–67.\",\n \"Weitz, Morris, 1956. ‘The Role of Theory in\\nAesthetics’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,\\n15: 27–35.\",\n \"Wimsatt, W. K. & Beardsley M. C., 1946. ‘The Intentional\\nFallacy’, Sewanee Review, LIV: 468–488.\",\n \"Wollheim, Richard, 1980. Art and Its Objects, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press.\",\n \"Wood, Paul, 2002. Conceptual Art, London: Tate\\nPublishing. Series: Movements in Modern Art.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../aesthetic-concept/","text":"aesthetic, concept of the"},{"href":"../aesthetic-experience/","text":"aesthetic experience"},{"href":"../aesthetic-judgment/","text":"aesthetics: aesthetic judgment"},{"href":"../art-definition/","text":"art, definition of"},{"href":"../beardsley-aesthetics/","text":"Beardsley, Monroe C.: aesthetics"},{"href":"../kant-aesthetics/","text":"Kant, Immanuel: aesthetics and teleology"},{"href":"../wittgenstein-aesthetics/","text":"Wittgenstein, Ludwig: aesthetics"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../aesthetic-concept/\",\n \"text\": \"aesthetic, concept of the\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aesthetic-experience/\",\n \"text\": \"aesthetic experience\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aesthetic-judgment/\",\n \"text\": \"aesthetics: aesthetic judgment\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../art-definition/\",\n \"text\": \"art, definition of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../beardsley-aesthetics/\",\n \"text\": \"Beardsley, Monroe C.: aesthetics\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../kant-aesthetics/\",\n \"text\": \"Kant, Immanuel: aesthetics and teleology\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../wittgenstein-aesthetics/\",\n \"text\": \"Wittgenstein, Ludwig: aesthetics\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":81,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"art-definition"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"The Definition of Art"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Tue Oct 23, 2007; substantive revision Tue Aug 14, 2018"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nThe definition of art is controversial in contemporary philosophy.\nWhether art can be defined has also been a matter of controversy. The\nphilosophical usefulness of a definition of art has also been\ndebated."," Contemporary definitions can be classified with respect to the\ndimensions of art they emphasize. One distinctively modern,\nconventionalist, sort of definition focuses on art’s\ninstitutional features, emphasizing the way art changes over time,\nmodern works that appear to break radically with all traditional art,\nthe relational properties of artworks that depend on works’\nrelations to art history, art genres, etc. – more broadly, on\nthe undeniable heterogeneity of the class of artworks. The more\ntraditional, less conventionalist sort of definition defended in\ncontemporary philosophy makes use of a broader, more traditional\nconcept of aesthetic properties that includes more than art-relational\nones, and puts more emphasis on art’s pan-cultural and\ntrans-historical characteristics – in sum, on commonalities\nacross the class of artworks. Hybrid definitions aim to do justice to\nboth the traditional aesthetic dimension as well as to the\ninstitutional and art-historical dimensions of art, while privileging\nneither."],"string":"[\n \"\\nThe definition of art is controversial in contemporary philosophy.\\nWhether art can be defined has also been a matter of controversy. The\\nphilosophical usefulness of a definition of art has also been\\ndebated.\",\n \" Contemporary definitions can be classified with respect to the\\ndimensions of art they emphasize. One distinctively modern,\\nconventionalist, sort of definition focuses on art’s\\ninstitutional features, emphasizing the way art changes over time,\\nmodern works that appear to break radically with all traditional art,\\nthe relational properties of artworks that depend on works’\\nrelations to art history, art genres, etc. – more broadly, on\\nthe undeniable heterogeneity of the class of artworks. The more\\ntraditional, less conventionalist sort of definition defended in\\ncontemporary philosophy makes use of a broader, more traditional\\nconcept of aesthetic properties that includes more than art-relational\\nones, and puts more emphasis on art’s pan-cultural and\\ntrans-historical characteristics – in sum, on commonalities\\nacross the class of artworks. Hybrid definitions aim to do justice to\\nboth the traditional aesthetic dimension as well as to the\\ninstitutional and art-historical dimensions of art, while privileging\\nneither.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Constraints on Definitions of Art","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. Definitions from the History of Philosophy","sub_toc":["2.1 Some examples"]},{"content_title":"3. Skepticism about Definitions","sub_toc":["3.1 Skepticisms inspired by views of concepts, history, Marxism, feminism","3.2 Some descendants of skepticism"]},{"content_title":"4. Contemporary Definitions","sub_toc":["4.1 Conventionalist Definitions: Institutional and Historical","4.2 Institutional Definitions","4.3 Historical Definitions","4.4 Functional (mainly aesthetic) definitions","4.5 Hybrid (Disjunctive) Definitions"]},{"content_title":"5. Conclusion","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Constraints on Definitions of Art\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Definitions from the History of Philosophy\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"2.1 Some examples\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Skepticism about Definitions\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"3.1 Skepticisms inspired by views of concepts, history, Marxism, feminism\",\n \"3.2 Some descendants of skepticism\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Contemporary Definitions\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"4.1 Conventionalist Definitions: Institutional and Historical\",\n \"4.2 Institutional Definitions\",\n \"4.3 Historical Definitions\",\n \"4.4 Functional (mainly aesthetic) definitions\",\n \"4.5 Hybrid (Disjunctive) Definitions\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Conclusion\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":[" Any definition of art has to square with the following\nuncontroversial facts: (i) entities (artifacts or performances)\nintentionally endowed by their makers with a significant degree of\naesthetic interest, often greatly surpassing that of most everyday\nobjects, first appeared hundreds of thousands of years ago and exist\nin virtually every known human culture (Davies 2012); (ii) such\nentities are partially comprehensible to cultural outsiders –\nthey are neither opaque nor completely transparent; (iii) such\nentities sometimes have non-aesthetic – ceremonial or religious or\npropagandistic – functions, and sometimes do not; (iv) such\nentities might conceivably be produced by non-human species,\nterrestrial or otherwise; and it seems at least in principle possible\nthat they be extraspecifically recognizable as such; (v)\ntraditionally, artworks are intentionally endowed by their makers with\nproperties, often sensory, having a significant degree of aesthetic\ninterest, usually surpassing that of most everyday objects; (vi) art’s\nnormative dimension – the high value placed on making and\nconsuming art – appears to be essential to it, and artworks can\nhave considerable moral and political as well as aesthetic power;\n(vii) the arts are always changing, just as the rest of culture is: as\nartists experiment creatively, new genres, art-forms, and styles\ndevelop; standards of taste and sensibilities evolve; understandings\nof aesthetic properties, aesthetic experience, and the nature of art\nevolve; (viii) there are institutions in some but not all cultures\nwhich involve a focus on artifacts and performances that have a high\ndegree of aesthetic interest but lack any practical, ceremonial, or\nreligious use; (ix) entities seemingly lacking aesthetic interest, and\nentities having a high degree of aesthetic interest, are not\ninfrequently grouped together as artworks by such institutions; (x)\nlots of things besides artworks – for example, natural entities\n(sunsets, landscapes, flowers, shadows), human beings, and abstract\nentities (theories, proofs, mathematical entities) – have\ninteresting aesthetic properties. "," Of these facts, those having to do with art’s contingent\ncultural and historical features are emphasized by some definitions of\nart. Other definitions of art give priority to explaining those facts\nthat reflect art’s universality and continuity with other\naesthetic phenomena. Still other definitions attempt to explain both\nart’s contingent characteristics and its more abiding ones while\ngiving priority to neither. ","\n\nTwo general constraints on definitions are particularly relevant to\ndefinitions of art. First, given that accepting that something is\ninexplicable is generally a philosophical last resort, and granting\nthe importance of extensional adequacy, list-like or enumerative\ndefinitions are if possible to be avoided. Enumerative definitions,\nlacking principles that explain why what is on the list is on the\nlist, don’t, notoriously, apply to definienda that\nevolve, and provide no clue to the next or general case\n(Tarski’s definition of truth, for example, is standardly\ncriticized as unenlightening because it rests on a list-like\ndefinition of primitive denotation; see Field 1972; Devitt 2001;\nDavidson 2005). Corollary: when everything else is equal (and it is\ncontroversial whether and when that condition is satisfied in the case\nof definitions of art), non-disjunctive definitions are preferable to\ndisjunctive ones. Second, given that most classes outside of\nmathematics are vague, and that the existence of borderline cases is\ncharacteristic of vague classes, definitions that take the class of\nartworks to have borderline cases are preferable to definitions that\ndon’t (Davies 1991 and 2006; Stecker 2005).","\n\nWhether any definition of art does account for these facts and satisfy\nthese constraints, or could account for these facts and\nsatisfy these constraints, are key questions for aesthetics and the\nphilosophy of art."],"section_title":"1. Constraints on Definitions of Art","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\nClassical definitions, at least as they are portrayed in\ncontemporary discussions of the definition of art, take artworks to be\ncharacterized by a single type of property. The standard candidates are\nrepresentational properties, expressive properties, and formal\nproperties. So there are representational or mimetic definitions,\nexpressive definitions, and formalist definitions, which hold that\nartworks are characterized by their possession of, respectively,\nrepresentational, expressive, and formal properties. It is not\ndifficult to find fault with these simple definitions. For example,\npossessing representational, expressive, and formal properties cannot\nbe sufficient conditions, since, obviously, instructional manuals are\nrepresentations, but not typically artworks, human faces and gestures\nhave expressive properties without being works of art, and both natural\nobjects and artifacts produced solely for homely utilitarian purposes\nhave formal properties but are not artworks."," The ease of these dismissals, though, serves as a reminder of the\nfact that classical definitions of art are significantly less\nphilosophically self-contained or freestanding than are most\ncontemporary definitions of art. Each classical definition stands in\nclose and complicated relationships to its system’s other\ncomplexly interwoven parts – epistemology, ontology, value theory,\nphilosophy of mind, etc. Relatedly, great philosophers\ncharacteristically analyze the key theoretical components of their\ndefinitions of art in distinctive and subtle ways. For these reasons,\nunderstanding such definitions in isolation from the systems or\ncorpuses of which they are parts is difficult, and brief summaries are\ninvariably somewhat misleading. Nevertheless, some representative\nexamples of historically influential definitions of art offered by\nmajor figures in the history of philosophy should be mentioned."],"section_title":"2. Definitions From the History of Philosophy","subsections":[{"content":["\n\nPlato holds in the Republic and elsewhere that the arts are\nrepresentational, or mimetic (sometimes translated\n“imitative”). Artworks are ontologically dependent on,\nimitations of, and therefore inferior to, ordinary physical\nobjects. Physical objects in turn are ontologically dependent on, and\nimitations of, and hence inferior to, what is most real, the\nnon-physical unchanging Forms. Grasped perceptually, artworks present\nonly an appearance of an appearance of the Forms, which are grasped by\nreason alone. Consequently, artistic experience cannot yield\nknowledge. Nor do the makers of artworks work from knowledge. Because\nartworks engage an unstable, lower part of the soul, art should be\nsubservient to moral realities, which, along with truth, are more\nmetaphysically fundamental and, properly understood, more humanly\nimportant than, beauty. The arts are not, for Plato, the primary\nsphere in which beauty operates. The Platonic conception of beauty is\nextremely wide and metaphysical: there is a Form of Beauty, which can\nonly be known non-perceptually, but it is more closely related to the\nerotic than to the arts. (See Janaway 1998, the entry on\n Plato’s aesthetics, and the entry on\n Plato on Rhetoric and Poetry.)"," Kant has a definition of art, and of fine art; the latter, which\nKant calls the art of genius, is “a kind of representation that\nis purposive in itself and, though without an end, nevertheless\npromotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable\ncommunication” (Kant, Critique of the Power of\nJudgment, Guyer translation, section 44, 46).) When fully\nunpacked, the definition has representational, formalist and\nexpressivist elements, and focuses as much on the creative activity of\nthe artistic genius (who, according to Kant, possesses an “innate\nmental aptitude through which nature gives the rule to art”) as on the\nartworks produced by that activity. Kant’s aesthetic theory is, for\narchitectonic reasons, not focused on art. Art for Kant falls under\nthe broader topic of aesthetic judgment, which covers judgments of the\nbeautiful, judgments of the sublime, and teleological judgments of\nnatural organisms and of nature itself. So Kant’s definition of art is\na relatively small part of his theory of aesthetic judgment. And\nKant’s theory of aesthetic judgment is itself situated in a hugely\nambitious theoretical structure that, famously, aims, to account for,\nand work out the interconnections between, scientific knowledge,\nmorality, and religious faith. (See the entry on\n Kant’s Aesthetics and Teleology \nand the general entry on \n Immanuel Kant.)","\n\nHegel’s account of art incorporates his view of beauty; he\ndefines beauty as the sensuous/perceptual appearance or expression of\nabsolute truth. The best artworks convey, by sensory/perceptual means,\nthe deepest metaphysical truth. The deepest metaphysical truth,\naccording to Hegel, is that the universe is the concrete realization\nof what is conceptual or rational. That is, what is conceptual or\nrational is real, and is the imminent force that animates and propels\nthe self-consciously developing universe. The universe is the concrete\nrealization of what is conceptual or rational, and the rational or\nconceptual is superior to the sensory. So, as the mind and its\nproducts alone are capable of truth, artistic beauty is metaphysically\nsuperior to natural beauty (Hegel, Lectures, [1886, 4]). A\ncentral and defining feature of beautiful works of art is that,\nthrough the medium of sensation, each one presents the most\nfundamental values of its\ncivilization.[1]\nArt, therefore, as a cultural expression, operates in the same sphere\nas religion and philosophy, and expresses the same content as\nthey. But art “reveals to consciousness the deepest interests of\nhumanity” in a different manner than do religion and philosophy,\nbecause art alone, of the three, works by sensuous means. So, given\nthe superiority of the conceptual to the non-conceptual, and the fact\nthat art’s medium for expressing/presenting culture’s\ndeepest values is the sensual or perceptual, art’s medium is\nlimited and inferior in comparison with the medium that religion uses\nto express the same content, viz., mental imagery. Art and religion in\nturn are, in this respect, inferior to philosophy, which employs a\nconceptual medium to present its content. Art initially predominates,\nin each civilization, as the supreme mode of cultural expression,\nfollowed, successively, by religion and philosophy. Similarly, because\nthe broadly “logical” relations between art, religion and\nphilosophy determine the actual structure of art, religion, and\nphilosophy, and because cultural ideas about what is intrinsically\nvaluable develop from sensuous to non-sensuous conceptions, history is\ndivided into periods that reflect the teleological development from\nthe sensuous to the conceptual. Art in general, too, develops in\naccord with the historical growth of non-sensuous or conceptual\nconceptions from sensuous conceptions, and each individual art-form\ndevelops historically in the same way (Hegel, Lectures; Wicks\n1993, see also the entries on\n Hegel and on \n Hegel’s Aesthetics). ","\nFor treatments of other influential definitions\nof art, inseparable from the complex philosophical systems or corpuses in which\nthey occur, see, for example, the entries on\n 18th Century German Aesthetics,\n Arthur Schopenhauer,\n Friedrich Nietzsche,\n and Dewey’s Aesthetics."],"subsection_title":"2.1 Some examples"}]},{"main_content":["\n\nSkeptical doubts about the possibility and value of a definition of\nart have figured importantly in the discussion in aesthetics since the\n1950s, and though their influence has subsided somewhat, uneasiness\nabout the definitional project persists. (See section 4, below, and\nalso Kivy 1997, Brand 2000, and Walton 2007)."],"section_title":"3. Skepticism about Definitions of Art ","subsections":[{"content":["\n\nA common family of arguments, inspired by Wittgenstein’s\nfamous remarks about games (Wittgenstein 1953), has it that the\nphenomena of art are, by their nature, too diverse to admit of the\nunification that a satisfactory definition strives for, or that a\ndefinition of art, were there to be such a thing, would exert a\nstifling influence on artistic creativity. One expression of this\nimpulse is Weitz’s Open Concept Argument: any concept is\nopen if a case can be imagined which would call for some sort of\ndecision on our part to extend the use of the concept to cover it, or\nto close the concept and invent a new one to deal with the new case;\nall open concepts are indefinable; and there are cases calling for a\ndecision about whether to extend or close the concept of art. Hence art\nis indefinable (Weitz 1956). Against this it is claimed that\nchange does not, in general, rule out the preservation of identity over\ntime, that decisions about concept-expansion may be principled rather\nthan capricious, and that nothing bars a definition of art from\nincorporating a novelty requirement.","\n\nA second sort of argument, less common today than in the\nheyday of a certain form of extreme Wittgensteinianism, urges that the\nconcepts that make up the stuff of most definitions of art\n(expressiveness, form) are embedded in general philosophical theories\nwhich incorporate traditional metaphysics and epistemology. But since\ntraditional metaphysics and epistemology are prime instances of\nlanguage gone on conceptually confused holiday, definitions of art\nshare in the conceptual confusions of traditional\nphilosophy (Tilghman 1984).","\n\nA third sort of argument, more historically inflected than the first,\ntakes off from an influential study by the historian of philosophy\nPaul Kristeller, in which he argued that the modern system of the five\nmajor arts [painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and music]\nwhich underlies all modern aesthetics … is of comparatively\nrecent origin and did not assume definite shape before the eighteenth\ncentury, although it had many ingredients which go back to classical,\nmediaeval, and Renaissance thought. (Kristeller, 1951) Since that list of five arts is\nsomewhat arbitrary, and since even those five do not share a single\ncommon nature, but rather are united, at best, only by several\noverlapping features, and since the number of art forms has increased\nsince the eighteenth century, Kristeller’s work may be taken to\nsuggest that our concept of art differs from that of the eighteenth\ncentury. As a matter of historical fact, there simply is no stable\ndefiniendum for a definition of art to capture.","\n\nA fourth sort of argument suggests that a definition of art stating\nindividually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for a thing to\nbe an artwork, is likely to be discoverable only if cognitive science\nmakes it plausible to think that humans categorize things in terms of\nnecessary and sufficient conditions. But, the argument continues,\ncognitive science actually supports the view that the structure of\nconcepts mirrors the way humans categorize things – which is with\nrespect to their similarity to prototypes (or exemplars), and not in\nterms of necessary and sufficient conditions. So the quest for a\ndefinition of art that states individually necessary and jointly\nsufficient conditions is misguided and not likely to succeed (Dean\n2003). Against this it has been urged that psychological theories\nof concepts like the prototype theory and its relatives can provide at\nbest an account of how people in fact classify things, but not\nan account of correct classifications of extra-psychological\nphenomena, and that, even if relevant, prototype theory and other\npsychological theories of concepts are at present too controversial to\ndraw substantive philosophical morals from (Rey 1983; Adajian 2005).","\n\nA fifth argument against defining art, with a normative tinge that is\npsychologistic rather than sociopolitical, takes the fact that there\nis no philosophical consensus about the definition of art as reason to\nhold that no unitary concept of art exists. Concepts of art, like all\nconcepts, after all, should be used for the purpose(s) they best\nserve. But not all concepts of art serve all purposes equally\nwell. So not all art concepts should be used for the same purposes.\nArt should be defined only if there is a unitary concept of art that\nserves all of art’s various purposes – historical,\nconventional, aesthetic, appreciative, communicative, and so on. So,\nsince there is no purpose-independent use of the concept of art, art\nshould not be defined (Mag Uidhir and Magnus 2011; cf. Meskin 2008).\nIn response, it is noted that some account of what makes various\nconcepts of art concepts of art is still required; this\nleaves open the possibility of some degree of unity beneath the\napparent multiplicity. The fact (if it is one) that different concepts\nof art are used for different purposes does not itself imply that they\nare not connected in ordered, to-some-degree systematic ways. The\nrelation between (say) the historical concept of art and the\nappreciative concept of art is not an accidental, unsystematic\nrelation, like that between river banks and savings banks, but is\nsomething like the relation between Socrates’ healthiness and\nthe healthiness of Socrates’ diet. That is, it is not evident\nthat there exist a mere arbitrary heap or disjunction of art concepts,\nconstituting an unsystematic patchwork. Perhaps there is a single\nconcept of art with different facets that interlock in an ordered way,\nor else a multiplicity of concepts that constitute a unity because one\nis at the core, and the others depend asymmetrically on it. (The last\nis an instance of core-dependent homonymy; see the entry on\n Aristotle, section on Essentialism and\nHomonymy.) Multiplicity alone doesn’t entail pluralism.","\nA sixth, broadly Marxian sort of objection rejects the project of\ndefining art as an unwitting (and confused) expression of a harmful\nideology. On this view, the search for a definition of art\npresupposes, wrongly, that the concept of the aesthetic is a\ncreditable one. But since the concept of the aesthetic necessarily\ninvolves the equally bankrupt concept of disinterestedness, its use\nadvances the illusion that what is most real about things can and\nshould be grasped or contemplated without attending to the social and\neconomic conditions of their production. Definitions of art,\nconsequently, spuriously confer ontological dignity and respectability\non social phenomena that probably in fact call more properly for\nrigorous social criticism and change. Their real function is\nideological, not philosophical (Eagleton 1990).","\n\nSeventh, the members of a complex of skeptically-flavored arguments,\nfrom feminist philosophy of art, begin with premises to the effect\nthat art and art-related concepts and practices have been\nsystematically skewed by sex or gender. Such premises are supported\nby a variety of considerations. (a) The artworks the Western artistic\ncanon recognizes as great are dominated by male-centered perspectives\nand stereotypes, and almost all the artists the canon recognizes as\ngreat are men – unsurprisingly, given economic, social, and\ninstitutional impediments that prevented women from making art at all.\nMoreover, the concept of genius developed historically in such a way\nas to exclude women artists (Battersby, 1989, Korsmeyer 2004). (b) The\nfine arts’ focus on purely aesthetic, non-utilitarian value resulted\nin the marginalization as mere “crafts” of items of considerable\naesthetic interest made and used by women for domestic practical\npurposes. Moreover, because all aesthetic judgments are situated and\nparticular, there can be no such thing as disinterested taste. If\nthere is no such thing as disinterested taste, then it is hard to see\nhow there could be universal standards of aesthetic excellence. The\nnon-existence of universal standards of aesthetic excellence\nundermines the idea of an artistic canon (and with it the project of\ndefining art). Art as historically constituted, and art-related\npractices and concepts, then, reflect views and practices that\npresuppose and perpetuate the subordination of women. The data that\ndefinitions of art are supposed to explain are biased, corrupt and\nincomplete. As a consequence, present definitions of art,\nincorporating or presupposing as they do a framework that incorporates\na history of systematically biased, hierarchical, fragmentary, and\nmistaken understandings of art and art-related phenomena and concepts,\nmay be so androcentric as to be untenable. Some theorists have\nsuggested that different genders have systematically unique artistic\nstyles, methods, or modes of appreciating and valuing art. If so,\nthen a separate canon and gynocentric definitions of art are indicated\n(Battersby 1989, Frueh 1991). In any case, in the face of these\nfacts, the project of defining art in anything like the traditional\nway is to be regarded with suspicion (Brand, 2000).","\n\nAn eighth argument sort of skeptical argument concludes that, insofar\nas almost all contemporary definitions foreground the nature of\nartworks, rather than the individual arts to which\n(most? all?) artworks belong, they are philosophically unproductive\n(Lopes, \n2014).[2]\n The grounds for this conclusion concern disagreements among standard\ndefinitions as to the artistic status of entities whose status is for\ntheoretical reasons unclear – e.g., things like ordinary bottleracks\n(Duchamp’s Bottlerack) and silence (John Cage’s 4′33″).\nIf these hard cases are artworks, what makes them so, given their\napparent lack of any of the traditional properties of artworks? Are,\nthey, at best, marginal cases? On the other hand, if they are not\nartworks, then why have generations of experts – art historians,\ncritics, and collectors – classified them as such? And to whom else\nshould one look to determine the true nature of art? (There are, it is\nclaimed, few or no empirical studies of art full stop, though\nempirical studies of the individual arts abound.) Such disputes\ninevitably end in stalemate. Stalemate results because (a) standard\nartwork-focused definitions of art endorse different criteria of\ntheory choice, and (b) on the basis of their preferred criteria,\nappeal to incompatible intuitions about the status of such\ntheoretically-vexed cases. In consequence, disagreements between\nstandard definitions of art that foreground artworks are\nunresolvable. To avoid this stalemate, an alternative definitional\nstrategy that foregrounds the arts rather than individual artworks, is\nindicated. (See section 4.5.)"],"subsection_title":"3.1 Skepticisms inspired by views of concepts, history, Marxism, feminism"},{"content":["\n\nPhilosophers influenced by the moderate Wittgensteinian strictures\ndiscussed above have offered family resemblance accounts of art, which,\nas they purport to be non-definitions, may be usefully considered at\nthis point. Two species of family resemblance views will be considered:\nthe resemblance-to-a-paradigm version, and the cluster\nversion.","\n\nOn the resemblance-to-a-paradigm version, something is, or is\nidentifiable as, an artwork if it resembles, in the right way, certain\nparadigm artworks, which possess most although not necessarily all of\nart’s typical features. (The “is identifiable”\nqualification is intended to make the family resemblance view something\nmore epistemological than a definition, although it is unclear that\nthis really avoids a commitment to constitutive claims about\nart’s nature.) Against this view: since things do not\nresemble each other simpliciter, but only in at least one\nrespect or other, the account is either far too inclusive, since\neverything resembles everything else in some respect or other, or, if\nthe variety of resemblance is specified, tantamount to a definition,\nsince resemblance in that respect will be either a necessary or\nsufficient condition for being an artwork. The family resemblance\nview raises questions, moreover, about the membership and unity of the\nclass of paradigm artworks. If the account lacks an explanation of why\nsome items and not others go on the list of paradigm works, it seems\nexplanatorily deficient. But if it includes a principle that governs\nmembership on the list, or if expertise is required to constitute the\nlist, then the principle, or whatever properties the experts’\njudgments track, seem to be doing the philosophical work.","\n\nThe cluster version of the family resemblance view has been defended\nby a number of philosophers (Bond 1975, Dissanayake 1990, Dutton\n2006, Gaut 2000). The view typically provides a list of properties, no one of\nwhich is a necessary condition for being a work of art, but which are\njointly sufficient for being a work of art, and which is such that at\nleast one proper subset thereof is sufficient for being a work of\nart. Lists offered vary, but overlap considerably. Here is one, due to Gaut: (1)\npossessing positive aesthetic properties; (2) being expressive of\nemotion; (3) being intellectually challenging; (4) being formally\ncomplex and coherent; (5) having the capacity to convey complex\nmeanings; (6) exhibiting an individual point of view; (7) being\noriginal; (8) being an artifact or performance which is the product of\na high degree of skill; (9) belonging to an established artistic form;\n(10) being the product of an intention to make a work of art (Gaut\n2000). The cluster account has been criticized on several grounds.\nFirst, given its logical structure, it is in fact equivalent to a\nlong, complicated, but finite, disjunction, which makes it difficult\nto see why it isn’t a definition (Davies 2006). Second, if the list\nof properties is incomplete, as some cluster theorists hold, then some\njustification or principle would be needed for extending it. Third,\nthe inclusion of the ninth property on the list, belonging to an\nestablished art form, seems to regenerate (or duck), rather than answer, the\ndefinitional question. Finally, it is worth noting that, although\ncluster theorists stress what they take to be the motley heterogeneity of the\nclass of artworks, they tend with surprising regularity to tacitly\ngive the aesthetic a special, perhaps unifying, status among the\nproperties they put forward as merely disjunctive. One cluster\ntheorist, for example, gives a list very similar to the one discussed\nabove (it includes representational properties, expressiveness,\ncreativity, exhibiting a high degree of skill, belonging to an\nestablished artform), but omits aesthetic properties on the grounds\nthat it is the combination of the other items on the list which,\ncombined in the experience of the work of art, are precisely the\naesthetic qualities of the work (Dutton 2006). Gaut, whose list is\ncited above, includes aesthetic properties as a separate item on the\nlist, but construes them very narrowly; the difference between these\nways of formulating the cluster view appears to be mainly nominal. And\nan earlier cluster theorist defines artworks as all and only those\nthings that belong to any instantiation of an artform, offers a list\nof seven properties all of which together are intended to capture the\ncore of what it is to be an artform, though none is either necessary\nor sufficient, and then claims that having aesthetic value (of the\nsame sort as mountains, sunsets, mathematical theorems) is “what\nart is for” (Bond 1975). "],"subsection_title":"3.2 Some descendants of skepticism"}]},{"main_content":[" Definitions of art attempt to make sense of two different sorts of\nfacts: art has important historically contingent cultural features, as\nwell as trans-historical, pan-cultural characteristics that point in\nthe direction of a relatively stable aesthetic core. (Theorists who\nregard art as an invention of eighteenth-century Europe will, of\ncourse, regard this way of putting the matter as tendentious, on the\ngrounds that entities produced outside that culturally distinctive\ninstitution do not fall under the extension of “art” and\nhence are irrelevant to the art-defining project (Shiner\n2001). Whether the concept of art is precise enough to justify this\nmuch confidence about what falls under its extension claim is\nunclear.) Conventionalist definitions take art’s contingent\ncultural features to be explanatorily fundamental, and aim to capture\nthe phenomena – revolutionary modern art, the traditional close\nconnection of art with the aesthetic, the possibility of autonomous\nart traditions, etc. – in social/historical\nterms. Classically-flavored or traditional definitions (also sometimes\ncalled “functionalist”) definitions reverse this\nexplanatory order. Such classically-flavored definitions take\ntraditional concepts like the aesthetic (or allied concepts like the\nformal, or the expressive) as basic, and aim to account for the\nphenomena by making those concepts harder – for example, by\nendorsing a concept of the aesthetic rich enough to include\nnon-perceptual properties, or by attempting an integration of those\nconcepts (e.g., Eldridge, section 4.4 below) ."],"section_title":"4. Contemporary Definitions","subsections":[{"content":["\n\nConventionalist definitions deny that art has essential connection to\naesthetic properties, or to formal properties, or to expressive\nproperties, or to any type of property taken by traditional\ndefinitions to be essential to art. Conventionalist definitions have\nbeen strongly influenced by the emergence, in the twentieth century,\nof artworks that seem to differ radically from all previous\nartworks. Avant-garde works like Marcel Duchamp’s\n“ready-mades” – ordinary unaltered objects like\nsnow-shovels (In Advance of the Broken Arm) and \nbottle-racks – conceptual works like Robert Barry’s All the things I know\nbut of which I am not at the moment thinking – 1:36 PM; June 15,\n1969, and John Cage’s 4′33″, have seemed to\nmany philosophers to lack or even, somehow, repudiate, the traditional\nproperties of art: intended aesthetic interest, artifactuality, even\nperceivability. Conventionalist definitions have also been strongly\ninfluenced by the work of a number of historically-minded\nphilosophers, who have documented the rise and development of modern\nideas of the fine arts, the individual arts, the work of art, and the\naesthetic (Kristeller, Shiner, Carroll, Goehr, Kivy).","\n\nConventionalist definitions come in two varieties, institutional and\nhistorical. Institutionalist conventionalism, or institutionalism, a\nsynchronic view, typically hold that to be a work of art is to be an\nartifact of a kind created, by an artist, to be presented to an\nartworld public (Dickie 1984). Historical conventionalism, a\ndiachronic view, holds that artworks necessarily stand in an\nart-historical relation to some set of earlier artworks."],"subsection_title":"4.1 Conventionalist Definitions: Institutional and Historical"},{"content":["\n\nThe groundwork for institutional definitions was laid by Arthur Danto,\nbetter known to non-philosophers as the long-time influential art\ncritic for the Nation. Danto coined the term\n“artworld”, by which he meant “an atmosphere of art\ntheory.” Danto’s definition has been glossed as follows:\nsomething is a work of art if and only if (i) it has a subject (ii)\nabout which it projects some attitude or point of view (has a style)\n(iii) by means of rhetorical ellipsis (usually metaphorical) which\nellipsis engages audience participation in filling in what is missing,\nand (iv) where the work in question and the interpretations thereof\nrequire an art historical context (Danto, Carroll). Clause (iv) is\nwhat makes the definition institutionalist. The view has been\ncriticized for entailing that art criticism written in a highly\nrhetorical style is art, lacking but requiring an independent account\nof what makes a context art historical, and for not applying\nto music. ","\n\nThe most prominent and influential institutionalism is that of George\nDickie. Dickie’s institutionalism has evolved over\ntime. According to an early version, a work of art is an artifact upon\nwhich some person(s) acting on behalf of the artworld has conferred\nthe status of candidate for appreciation (Dickie 1974). Dickie’s more\nrecent version consists of an interlocking set of five definitions:\n(1) An artist is a person who participates with understanding in the\nmaking of a work of art. (2) A work of art is an artifact of a kind\ncreated to be presented to an artworld public. (3) A public is a set\nof persons the members of which are prepared in some degree to\nunderstand an object which is presented to them. (4) The artworld is\nthe totality of all artworld systems. (5) An artworld system is a\nframework for the presentation of a work of art by an artist to an\nartworld public (Dickie 1984). Both versions have been widely\ncriticized. Philosophers have objected that art created outside any\ninstitution seems possible, although the definition rules it out, and\nthat the artworld, like any institution, seems capable of error. It\nhas also been urged that the definition’s obvious circularity is\nvicious, and that, given the inter-definition of the key concepts\n(artwork, artworld system, artist, artworld public) it lacks any\ninformative way of distinguishing art institutions systems\nfrom other, structurally similar, social institutions (D. Davies 2004,\npp. 248–249, notes that both the artworld and the\n“commerceworld” seem to fall under that definition). Early\non, Dickie claimed that anyone who sees herself as a member of the\nartworld is a member of the artworld: if this is true, then\nunless there are constraints on the kinds of things the artworld can\nput forward as artworks or candidate artworks, any entity can be an\nartwork (though not all are), which appears overly expansive. Finally,\nMatravers has helpfully distinguished strong and\nweak institutionalism. Strong institutionalism holds that\nthere is some reason that is always the reason the art institution has\nfor saying that something is a work of art. Weak institutionalism\nholds that, for every work of art, there is some reason or other that\nthe institution has for saying that it is a work of art (Matravers\n2000). Weak institutionalism, in particular, raises questions about\nart’s unity: if absolutely nothing unifies the reasons that the\nartworld gives for conferring art-hood on things, then the unity of\nthe class of artworks is vanishingly small. Conventionalist views,\nwith their emphasis on art’s heterogeneity, swallow this\nimplication. From the perspective of traditional definitions, doings\nso underplays art’s substantial if incomplete unity, while leaving it\na puzzle why art would be worth caring about. "," Some recent versions of institutionalism depart from Dickie’s by\naccepting the burden, which Dickie rejected, of providing a\nsubstantive, non-circular account of what it is to be an art\ninstitution or an artworld. One, due to David Davies, does so by\nbuilding in Nelson Goodman’s account of aesthetic symbolic\nfunctions. Another, due to Abell, combines Searle’s account of social\ninstitutions with Gaut’s characterization of art-making properties,\nand builds an account of artistic value on that coupling.","\nDavies’ neo-institutionalism holds that making an artwork\nrequires articulating an artistic statement, which requires specifying\nartistic properties, which in turn requires the manipulation of an\nartistic vehicle. Goodman’s “symptoms of the\naesthetic” are utilized to clarify the conditions under which a\npractice of making is a practice of artistic making: on\nGoodman’s view, a symbol functions aesthetically when it is\nsyntactically dense, semantically dense, relatively replete, and\ncharacterized by multiple and complex reference (D. Davies 2004;\nGoodman 1968; see the entry on\n Goodman’s aesthetics).\nManipulating an artistic vehicle is in turn possible only if the\nartist consciously operates with reference to shared understandings\nembodied in the practices of a community of receivers. So art’s\nnature is institutional in the broad sense (or, perhaps better,\nsocio-cultural). By way of criticism, Davies’\nneo-institutionalism may be questioned on the grounds that, since all\npictorial symbols are syntactically dense, semantically dense,\nrelatively replete, and often exemplify the properties they represent,\nit seems to entail that every colored picture, including those in any\ncatalog of industrial products, is an artwork (Abell 2012).","\n\nAbell’s institutional definition adapts Searle’s view of social kinds:\nwhat it is for some social kind, F, to be F is for it to be\ncollectively believed to be F (Abell 2012; Searle 1995, 2010;\nand see the entry on\n social institutions).\nOn Abell’s view, more specifically, an institution’s type is\ndetermined by the valued function(s) that it was collectively believed\nat its inception to promote. The valued functions collective belief in\nwhich make an institution an art institution are those spelled out by\nGaut in his cluster account (see section 3.1, above). That is,\nsomething is an art institution if and only if it is an institution\nwhose existence is due to its being perceived to perform certain\nfunctions, which functions form a significant subset of the following:\npromoting positive aesthetic qualities; promoting the expression of\nemotion; facilitating the posing of intellectual challenges, and the\nrest of Gaut’s list. Plugging in Gaut’s list yields the final\ndefinition: something is an artwork if and only if it is the product\nof an art institution (as just defined) and it directly effects the effectiveness with which that institution performs the perceived functions to which\nits existence is due. One worry is whether Searle’s account of\ninstitutions is up to the task required of it. Some institutional\nsocial kinds have this trait: something can fail to be a token of that\nkind even if there is collective agreement that it counts as a token\nof that kind. Suppose someone gives a big cocktail party, to which\neveryone in Paris invited, and things get so out of hand that the\ncasualty rate is greater than the Battle of Austerlitz. Even if\neveryone thinks the event was a cocktail party, it is possible\n(contrary to Searle) that they are mistaken: it may have been a war or\nbattle. It’s not clear that art isn’t like this. If so, then the fact\nthat an institution is collectively believed to be an art institution\nneedn’t suffice to make it so (Khalidi 2013; see also the entry on\n social \ninstitutions).[3]\nA second worry: if its failure to specify which subsets of the ten\ncluster properties suffice to make something an artwork significantly\nflaws Gaut’s cluster account, then failure to specify which subsets of\nGaut’s ten properties suffice to make something an art institution\nsignificantly flaws Abellian institutionalism."],"subsection_title":"4.2 Institutional Definitions"},{"content":["\n\nHistorical definitions hold that what characterizes artworks is\nstanding in some specified art-historical relation to some specified\nearlier artworks, and disavow any commitment to a trans-historical\nconcept of art, or the “artish.” Historical definitions\ncome in several varieties. All of them are, or resemble, inductive\ndefinitions: they claim that certain entities belong unconditionally\nto the class of artworks, while others do so because they stand in the\nappropriate relations thereto. According to the best known version,\nLevinson’s intentional-historical definition, an artwork is a thing\nthat has been seriously intended for regard in any way preexisting or\nprior artworks are or were correctly regarded (Levinson 1990). A\nsecond version, historical narrativism, comes in several varieties. On\none, a sufficient but not necessary condition for the identification\nof a candidate as a work of art is the construction of a true\nhistorical narrative according to which the candidate was created by\nan artist in an artistic context with a recognized and live artistic\nmotivation, and as a result of being so created, it resembles at least\none acknowledged artwork (Carroll 1993). On another, more ambitious\nand overtly nominalistic version of historical narrativism, something\nis an artwork if and only if (1) there are internal historical\nrelations between it and already established artworks; (2) these\nrelations are correctly identified in a narrative; and (3) that\nnarrative is accepted by the relevant experts. The experts do\nnot detect that certain entities are artworks; rather, the\nfact that the experts assert that certain properties are significant\nin particular cases is constitutive of art (Stock 2003).","\n\nThe similarity of these views to institutionalism is obvious, and\nthe criticisms offered parallel those urged against institutionalism.\nFirst, historical definitions appear to require, but lack, any\ninformative characterization of art traditions (art functions, artistic\ncontexts, etc.) and hence any way of informatively distinguishing them\n(and likewise art functions, or artistic predecessors) from\nnon-art traditions (non-art functions, non-artistic\npredecessors). Correlatively, non-Western art, or alien, autonomous\nart of any kind appears to pose a problem for historical views: any\nautonomous art tradition or artworks – terrestrial,\nextra-terrestrial, or merely possible – causally isolated from\nour art tradition, is either ruled out by the definition, which seems\nto be a reductio, or included, which concedes the existence\nof a supra-historical concept of art. So, too, there could be entities\nthat for adventitious reasons are not correctly identified in\nhistorical narratives, although in actual fact they stand in relations\nto established artworks that make them correctly describable\nin narratives of the appropriate sort. Historical definitions entail\nthat such entities aren’t artworks, but it seems at least as \nplausible to say that they are artworks that are not identified as such. Second,\nhistorical definitions also require, but do not provide a\nsatisfactory, informative account of the basis case – the first\nartworks, or ur-artworks, in the case of the intentional-historical\ndefinitions, or the first or central art-forms, in the case of\nhistorical functionalism. Third, nominalistic historical definitions\nseem to face a version of the Euthyphro dilemma. For either\nsuch definitions include substantive characterizations of what it is\nto be an expert, or they don’t. If, on one hand, they include no\ncharacterization of what it is to be an expert, and hence no\nexplanation as to why the list of experts contains the people it does,\nthen they imply that what makes things artworks is inexplicable. On\nthe other hand, suppose such definitions provide a substantive account\nof what it is to be an expert, so that to be an expert is to possess\nsome ability lacked by non-experts (taste, say) in virtue of the\npossession of which they are able to discern historical connections\nbetween established artworks and candidate artworks. Then the\ndefinition’s claim to be interestingly historical is\nquestionable, because it makes art status a function of whatever\nability it is that permits experts to discern the art-making\nproperties. ","\n\nDefenders of historical definitions have replies. First, as regards\nautonomous art traditions, it can be held that anything we would\nrecognize as an art tradition or an artistic\npractice would display aesthetic concerns, because aesthetic concerns\nhave been central from the start, and persisted centrally for\nthousands of years, in the Western art tradition. Hence it is an\nhistorical, not a conceptual truth that anything we recognize as an\nart practice will centrally involve the aesthetic; it is just that\naesthetic concerns that have always dominated our art tradition\n(Levinson 2002). The idea here is that if the reason that anything\nwe’d take to be a Φ-tradition would have Ψ-concerns is\nthat our Φ-tradition has focused on Ψ-concerns since its\ninception, then it is not essential to Φ-traditions that they have\nΨ-concerns, and Φ is a purely historical concept. But\nthis principle entails, implausibly, that every concept is purely\nhistorical. Suppose that we discovered a new civilization whose\ninhabitants could predict how the physical world works with great\nprecision, on the basis of a substantial body of empirically acquired\nknowledge that they had accumulated over centuries. The reason we\nwould credit them with having a scientific tradition might\nwell be that our own scientific tradition has since its inception\nfocused on explaining things. It does not seem to follow that science\nis a purely historical concept with no essential connection to\nexplanatory aims. (Other theorists hold that it is historically\nnecessary that art begins with the aesthetic, but deny that\nart’s nature is to be defined in terms of its historical\nunfolding (Davies 1997).) Second, as to the first artworks, or the\ncentral art-forms or functions, some theorists hold that an account of\nthem can only take the form of an enumeration. Stecker takes this\napproach: he says that the account of what makes something a central\nart form at a given time is, at its core, institutional, and that the\ncentral artforms can only be listed (Stecker 1997 and 2005). Whether\nrelocating the list at a different, albeit deeper, level in the\ndefinition renders the definition sufficiently informative is an open\nquestion. Third, as to the Euthyphro-style dilemma, it might\nbe held that the categorial distinction between artworks and\n“mere real things” (Danto 1981) explains the distinction\nbetween experts and non-experts. Experts are able, it is said, to\ncreate new categories of art. When created, new categories bring with\nthem new universes of discourse. New universes of discourse in turn\nmake reasons available that otherwise would not be available. Hence,\non this view, it is both the case that the experts’ say-so alone\nsuffices to make mere real things into artworks, and also true that\nexperts’ conferrals of art-status have reasons (McFee\n2011). "],"subsection_title":"4.3 Historical Definitions"},{"content":["\n\nTraditional definitions take some function(s) or intended function(s)\nto be definitive of artworks. Here only aesthetic definitions, which\nconnect art essentially with the aesthetic – aesthetic judgments,\nexperience, or properties – will be considered. Different\naesthetic definitions incorporate different views of aesthetic\nproperties and judgments. See the entry on \n aesthetic judgment.","\n\nAs noted above, some philosophers lean heavily on a distinction\nbetween aesthetic properties and artistic properties, taking the\nformer to be perceptually striking qualities that can be directly\nperceived in works, without knowledge of their origin and purpose, and\nthe latter to be relational properties that works possess in virtue of\ntheir relations to art history, art genres, etc. It is also, of\ncourse, possible to hold a less restrictive view of aesthetic\nproperties, on which aesthetic properties need not be perceptual; on\nthis broader view, it is unnecessary to deny what it seems pointless\nto deny, that abstracta like mathematical entities and scientific laws\npossess aesthetic properties.)","\n\nMonroe Beardsley’s definition holds that an artwork:\n“either an arrangement of conditions intended to be capable of\naffording an experience with marked aesthetic character or\n(incidentally) an arrangement belonging to a class or type of\narrangements that is typically intended to have this capacity”\n(Beardsley 1982, 299). (For more on Beardsley, see the entry on \n Beardsley’s aesthetics.) \nBeardsley’s conception of aesthetic experience is Deweyan:\naesthetic experiences are experiences that are complete, unified,\nintense experiences of the way things appear to us, and are, moreover,\nexperiences which are controlled by the things experienced (see the\nentry on\n Dewey’s aesthetics).\nZangwill’s aesthetic definition of art says that something is a\nwork of art if and only if someone had an insight that certain\naesthetic properties would be determined by certain nonaesthetic\nproperties, and for this reason the thing was intentionally endowed\nwith the aesthetic properties in virtue of the nonaesthetic properties\nas envisaged in the insight (Zangwill 1995a,b). Aesthetic properties\nfor Zangwill are those judgments that are the subject of\n“verdictive aesthetic judgments” (judgements of beauty and\nugliness) and “substantive aesthetic judgements” (e.g., of\ndaintiness, elegance, delicacy, etc.). The latter are ways of being\nbeautiful or ugly; aesthetic in virtue of a special close relation to\nverdictive judgments, which are subjectively universal. Other\naesthetic definitions build in different accounts of the\naesthetic. Eldridge’s aesthetic definition holds that the satisfying appropriateness to one another of a thing’s form and content is the aesthetic quality possession of which is necessary and sufficient for\na thing’s being art (Eldridge 1985). Or one might define aesthetic\nproperties as those having an evaluative component, whose perception\ninvolves the perception of certain formal base properties, such as\nshape and color (De Clercq 2002), and construct an aesthetic\ndefinition incorporating that view.","\n\nViews which combine features of institutional and aesthetic\ndefinitions also exist. Iseminger, for example, builds a definition on\nan account of appreciation, on which to appreciate a thing’s\nbeing F is to find experiencing its being F to be\nvaluable in itself, and an account of aesthetic communication (which it\nis the function of the artworld to promote) (Iseminger 2004).","\n\nAesthetic definitions have been criticized for being both too narrow\nand too broad. They are held to be too narrow because they are unable\nto cover influential modern works like Duchamp’s ready-mades and\nconceptual works like Robert Barry’s All the things I know but of\nwhich I am not at the moment thinking – 1:36 PM; June 15, 1969,\nwhich appear to lack aesthetic properties. (Duchamp famously asserted\nthat his urinal, Fountain, was selected for its lack of\naesthetic features.) Aesthetic definitions are held to be too broad\nbecause beautifully designed automobiles, neatly manicured lawns, and\nproducts of commercial design are often created with the intention of\nbeing objects of aesthetic appreciation, but are not artworks.\nMoreover, aesthetic views have been held to have trouble making sense\nof bad art (see Dickie 2001; Davies 2006, p. 37). Finally, more\nradical doubts about aesthetic definitions center on the\nintelligibility and usefulness of the aesthetic. Beardsley’s view, for\nexample, has been criticized by Dickie, who has also offered\ninfluential criticisms of the idea of an aesthetic attitude (Dickie\n1965, Cohen 1973, Kivy 1975).","\n\nTo these criticisms several responses have been offered. First, the\nless restrictive conception of aesthetic properties mentioned above,\non which they may be based on non-perceptual formal properties, can be\ndeployed. On this view, conceptual works would have aesthetic\nfeatures, much the same way that mathematical entities are often\nclaimed to (Shelley 2003, Carroll 2004). Second, a distinction may be\ndrawn between time-sensitive properties, whose standard observation\nconditions include an essential reference to the temporal location of\nthe observer, and non-time-sensitive properties, which do not.\nHigher-order aesthetic properties like drama, humor, and irony, which\naccount for a significant part of the appeal of Duchamp’s and\nCage’s works, on this view, would derive from time-sensitive\nproperties (Zemach 1997). Third, it might be held that it is the\ncreative act of presenting something that is in the\nrelevant sense unfamiliar, into a new context, the artworld, which has\naesthetic properties. Or, fourth, it might be held that\n(Zangwill’s “second-order” strategy) works like\nready-mades lack aesthetic functions, but are parasitic upon, because\nmeant to be considered in the context of, works that do have aesthetic\nfunctions, and therefore constitute marginal borderline cases of art\nthat do not merit the theoretical primacy they are often\ngiven. Finally, it can be flatly denied that the ready-mades were\nworks of art (Beardsley 1982).","\n\nAs to the over-inclusiveness of aesthetic definitions, a distinction\nmight be drawn between primary and secondary functions. Or it may be\nmaintained that some cars, lawns, and products of industrial design are\non the art/non-art borderline, and so don’t constitute clear\nand decisive counter-examples. Or, if the claim that aesthetic theories\nfail to account for bad art depends on holding that some works have\nabsolutely no aesthetic value whatsoever, as opposed to some\nnon-zero amount, however infinitesimal, it may be wondered what\njustifies that assumption. "],"subsection_title":"4.4 Traditional (mainly aesthetic) definitions"},{"content":["\n\nHybrid definitions characteristically disjoin at least one\ninstitutional component with at least one aesthetic component, aiming\nthereby to accommodate both more traditional art and avant-garde art\nthat appears to lack any significant aesthetic dimension. (Such\ndefinitions could also be classified as institutional, on the grounds\nthat they make provenance sufficient for being a work of art.) Hence\nthey inherit a feature of conventionalist definitions: in appealing to\nart institutions, artworlds, arts, art functions, and so on, they\neither include substantive accounts of what it is to be an\nartinstitution/world/genre/-form/function, or are\nuninformatively circular.","\n\nOne such disjunctive definition, Longworth and Scarantino’s, adapts\nGaut’s list of ten clustering properties, where that list (see 3.5\nabove) includes institutional properties (e.g., belonging to an\nestablished art form) and traditional ones (e.g., possessing positive\naesthetic properties); see also Longworth and Scarantino 2010. The\ncore idea is that art is defined by a disjunction of minimally\nsufficient and disjunctively necessary conditions; to say that a\ndisjunct is a minimally sufficient constitutive condition for\nart-hood, is to say that every proper subset of it is insufficient for\nart-hood. An account of what it is for a concept to have disjunctive\ndefining conditions is also supplied. The definition of art itself is\nas follows: ∃Z∃Y (Art iff (Z ∨\nY)), where (a) Z and Y, formed from properties on\nGaut’s cluster list, are either non-empty conjunctions or non-empty\ndisjunctions of conjunctions or individual properties; (b) there is\nsome indeterminacy over exactly which disjuncts are sufficient; (c)\nZ does not entail Y and Y does not entail\nZ; (d) Z does not entail Art and Y does not\nentail Art. Instantiation of either Z or Y suffices for\nart-hood; something can be art only if at least one of Z,\nY is instantiated; and the third condition is included to\nprevent the definition from collapsing into a classical one. The\naccount of what it is for concept C to have disjunctive\ndefining conditions is as follows: C iff (Z ∨\nY), where (i) Z and Y are non-empty conjunctions\nor non-empty disjunctions of conjunctions or individual properties;\n(ii) Z does not entail Y and Y does not entail\nZ; (iii) Z does not entail C and Y does not\nentail C. A worry concerns condition (iii): as written, it seems to\nrender the account of disjunctive defining conditions\nself-contradictory. For if Z and Y are each minimally\nsufficient for C, it is impossible that Z does not\nentail C and that Y does not entail C. If so,\nthen nothing can satisfy the conditions said to be necessary and\nsufficient for a concept to have disjunctive defining conditions.","\n\nA second disjunctive hybrid definition, with an historical cast,\nRobert Stecker’s historical functionalism, holds that an item is an\nartwork at time t, where t is not earlier than the\ntime at which the item is made, if and only if it is in one of the\ncentral art forms at t and is made with the intention of\nfulfilling a function art has at t or it is an artifact that\nachieves excellence in achieving such a function (Stecker 2005). A\nquestion for Stecker’s view is whether or not it provides an adequate\naccount of what it is for a function to be an art function, and\nwhether, consequently, it can accommodate anti-aesthetic or\nnon-aesthetic art. The grounds given for thinking that it can are\nthat, while art’s original functions were aesthetic, those functions,\nand the intentions with which art is made, can change in unforeseeable\nways. Moreover, aesthetic properties are not always preeminent in\nart’s predecessor concepts (Stecker 2000). A worry is that if the\noperative assumption is that if x belongs to a predecessor\ntradition of T then x belongs to T, the\npossibility is not ruled out that if, for example, the tradition of\nmagic is a predecessor tradition of the scientific tradition, then\nentities that belong to the magic tradition but lacking any of the\nstandard hallmarks of science are scientific entities.","\n\nA third hybrid definition, also disjunctive, is the cladistic\ndefinition defended by Stephen Davies. who holds that something is\nart (a) if it shows excellence of skill and achievement in realizing\nsignificant aesthetic goals, and either doing so is its primary,\nidentifying function or doing so makes a vital contribution to the\nrealization of its primary, identifying function, or (b) if it falls\nunder an art genre or art form established and publicly recognized\nwithin an art tradition, or (c) if it is intended by its\nmaker/presenter to be art and its maker/presenter does what is\nnecessary and appropriate to realizing that intention (Davies, 2015).\n(In biology, a clade is a segment in the tree of life: a group\nof organisms and the common ancestor they share.) Artworlds are to be\ncharacterized in terms of their origins: they begin with prehistoric\nart ancestors, and grow into artworlds. Hence all artworks occupy a\nline of descent from their prehistoric art ancestors; that line of\ndescent comprises an art tradition that grows into an artworld. So\nthe definition is bottom-up and resolutely anthropocentric. A worry:\nthe view seems to entail that art traditions can undergo any changes\nwhatsoever and remain art traditions, since, no matter how distant,\nevery occupant of the right line of descent is part of the art\ntradition. This seems to amount to saying that as long as they remain\ntraditions at all, art traditions cannot die. Whether art is immortal\nin this sense seems open to question. A second worry is that the\nrequirement that every art tradition and artworld stand in some line\nof descent from prehistoric humanoids makes it in principle impossible\nfor any nonhuman species to make art, as long as that species fails to\noccupy the right location in the tree of life. While the\nepistemological challenges that identifying artworks made by nonhumans\nmight pose could be very considerable, this consequence of the\ncladistic definition’s emphasis on lineage rather than traits raises a\nconcern about excessively insularity.","\nA fourth hybrid definition is the “buck-passing” view of Lopes, which\nattempts an escape from the stalemate between artwork-focused\ndefinitions over avant-garde anti-aesthetic cases by adopting a\nstrategy that shifts the focus of the definition of art away from\nartworks. The strategy is to recenter philosophical efforts on\ndifferent problems, which require attention anyway: (a) the problem of\ngiving an account of each individual art, and (b) the problem of\ndefining what it is to be an art, the latter by giving an account of\nthe larger class of normative/appreciative kinds to which the arts\n(and some non-arts) belong. For, given definitions of the individual\narts, and a definition of what it is to be an art, if every artwork\nbelongs to at least one art (if it belongs to no existing art, then it\npioneers a new art), then a definition of artwork falls out: x\nis a work of art if and only if x is a work of K, where K is an\nart (Lopes 2014). When fully spelled out, the definition is\ndisjunctive: x is a work of art if and only if x is a\nwork belonging to art1 or x is a work belonging to\nart2 or x is a work belonging to art3\n…. Most of the explanatory work is done by the theories of the\nindividual arts, since, given the assumption that every artwork\nbelongs to at least one art, possession of theories of the individual\narts would be necessary and sufficient for settling the artistic or\nnon-artistic status of any hard case, once it is determined what art a\ngiven work belongs to. As to what makes a practice an art, Lopes’\npreferred answer seems to be institutionalism of a Dickiean variety:\nan art is an institution in which artists (persons who participate\nwith understanding in the making of artworks) make artworks to be\npresented to an artworld public. (Lopes 2014, Dickie 1984) Thus, on\nthis view, it is arbitrary which activities are artworld systems:\nthere is no deeper answer to the question of what makes music an art\nthan that it has the right institutional\n structure.[4] \nSo it is arbitrary which activities are arts. Two worries. First, the\nkey claim that every work of art belonging to no extant art pioneers a\nnew art may be defended on the grounds that any reason to say that a\nwork belonging to no extant artform is an artwork is a reason to say\nthat it pioneers a new artform. In response, it is noted that the\nquestion of whether or not a thing belongs to an art arises only when,\nand because, there is a prior reason for thinking that the thing is an\nartwork. So it seems that what it is to be an artwork is prior, in\nsome sense, to what it is to be an art. Second, on the buck-passing\ntheory’s institutional theory of the arts, which activities are arts\nis arbitrary. This raises a version of the question that was raised\nabout the cladistic definition’s ability to account for the existence\nof art outside our (Hominin) tradition. Suppose the connection\nbetween a practice’s traits and its status as an art are wholly\ncontingent. Then the fact that a practice in another culture that\nalthough not part of our tradition had most of the traits of one of\nour own arts would be no reason to think that practice was an art, and\nno reason to think that the objects belonging to it were artworks. It\nis not clear that we are really so in the dark when it comes to\ndetermining whether practices in alien cultures or traditions are\narts. "],"subsection_title":"4.5 Hybrid (Disjunctive) Definitions"}]},{"main_content":["\n\nConventionalist definitions account well for modern art, but have\ndifficulty accounting for art’s universality – especially\nthe fact that there can be art disconnected from “our”\n(Western) institutions and traditions, and our species. They also\nstruggle to account for the fact that the same aesthetic terms are\nroutinely applied to artworks, natural objects, humans, and abstracta.\nAesthetic definitions do better accounting for art’s\ntraditional, universal features, but less well, at least according to\ntheir critics, with revolutionary modern art; their further defense\nrequires an account of the aesthetic which can be extended in a\nprincipled way to conceptual and other radical art. (An aesthetic\ndefinition and a conventionalist one could simply be conjoined. But\nthat would merely raise, without answering, the fundamental question\nof the unity or disunity of the class of artworks.) Which defect is\nthe more serious one depends on which explananda are the more\nimportant. Arguments at this level are hard to come by, because\npositions are hard to motivate in ways that do not depend on prior\nconventionalist and functionalist sympathies. If list-like definitions\nare flawed because uninformative, then so are conventionalist\ndefinitions, whether institutional or historical. Of course, if the\nclass of artworks, or of the arts, is a mere chaotic heap, lacking any\ngenuine unity, then enumerative definitions cannot be faulted for\nbeing uninformative: they do all the explaining that it is possible to\ndo, because they capture all the unity that there is to capture. In\nthat case the worry articulated by one prominent aesthetician, who\nwrote earlier of the “bloated, unwieldy” concept of art\nwhich institutional definitions aim to capture, needs to be taken\nseriously, even if it turns out to be ungrounded: “It is not at\nall clear that these words – ‘What is\nart?’ – express anything like a single question, to which\ncompeting answers are given, or whether philosophers proposing answers\nare even engaged in the same debate…. The sheer variety of\nproposed definitions should give us pause. One cannot help wondering\nwhether there is any sense in which they are attempts to …\nclarify the same cultural practices, or address the same issue”\n(Walton 2007). "],"section_title":"5. Conclusion","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \" Any definition of art has to square with the following\\nuncontroversial facts: (i) entities (artifacts or performances)\\nintentionally endowed by their makers with a significant degree of\\naesthetic interest, often greatly surpassing that of most everyday\\nobjects, first appeared hundreds of thousands of years ago and exist\\nin virtually every known human culture (Davies 2012); (ii) such\\nentities are partially comprehensible to cultural outsiders –\\nthey are neither opaque nor completely transparent; (iii) such\\nentities sometimes have non-aesthetic – ceremonial or religious or\\npropagandistic – functions, and sometimes do not; (iv) such\\nentities might conceivably be produced by non-human species,\\nterrestrial or otherwise; and it seems at least in principle possible\\nthat they be extraspecifically recognizable as such; (v)\\ntraditionally, artworks are intentionally endowed by their makers with\\nproperties, often sensory, having a significant degree of aesthetic\\ninterest, usually surpassing that of most everyday objects; (vi) art’s\\nnormative dimension – the high value placed on making and\\nconsuming art – appears to be essential to it, and artworks can\\nhave considerable moral and political as well as aesthetic power;\\n(vii) the arts are always changing, just as the rest of culture is: as\\nartists experiment creatively, new genres, art-forms, and styles\\ndevelop; standards of taste and sensibilities evolve; understandings\\nof aesthetic properties, aesthetic experience, and the nature of art\\nevolve; (viii) there are institutions in some but not all cultures\\nwhich involve a focus on artifacts and performances that have a high\\ndegree of aesthetic interest but lack any practical, ceremonial, or\\nreligious use; (ix) entities seemingly lacking aesthetic interest, and\\nentities having a high degree of aesthetic interest, are not\\ninfrequently grouped together as artworks by such institutions; (x)\\nlots of things besides artworks – for example, natural entities\\n(sunsets, landscapes, flowers, shadows), human beings, and abstract\\nentities (theories, proofs, mathematical entities) – have\\ninteresting aesthetic properties. \",\n \" Of these facts, those having to do with art’s contingent\\ncultural and historical features are emphasized by some definitions of\\nart. Other definitions of art give priority to explaining those facts\\nthat reflect art’s universality and continuity with other\\naesthetic phenomena. Still other definitions attempt to explain both\\nart’s contingent characteristics and its more abiding ones while\\ngiving priority to neither. \",\n \"\\n\\nTwo general constraints on definitions are particularly relevant to\\ndefinitions of art. First, given that accepting that something is\\ninexplicable is generally a philosophical last resort, and granting\\nthe importance of extensional adequacy, list-like or enumerative\\ndefinitions are if possible to be avoided. Enumerative definitions,\\nlacking principles that explain why what is on the list is on the\\nlist, don’t, notoriously, apply to definienda that\\nevolve, and provide no clue to the next or general case\\n(Tarski’s definition of truth, for example, is standardly\\ncriticized as unenlightening because it rests on a list-like\\ndefinition of primitive denotation; see Field 1972; Devitt 2001;\\nDavidson 2005). Corollary: when everything else is equal (and it is\\ncontroversial whether and when that condition is satisfied in the case\\nof definitions of art), non-disjunctive definitions are preferable to\\ndisjunctive ones. Second, given that most classes outside of\\nmathematics are vague, and that the existence of borderline cases is\\ncharacteristic of vague classes, definitions that take the class of\\nartworks to have borderline cases are preferable to definitions that\\ndon’t (Davies 1991 and 2006; Stecker 2005).\",\n \"\\n\\nWhether any definition of art does account for these facts and satisfy\\nthese constraints, or could account for these facts and\\nsatisfy these constraints, are key questions for aesthetics and the\\nphilosophy of art.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Constraints on Definitions of Art\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nClassical definitions, at least as they are portrayed in\\ncontemporary discussions of the definition of art, take artworks to be\\ncharacterized by a single type of property. The standard candidates are\\nrepresentational properties, expressive properties, and formal\\nproperties. So there are representational or mimetic definitions,\\nexpressive definitions, and formalist definitions, which hold that\\nartworks are characterized by their possession of, respectively,\\nrepresentational, expressive, and formal properties. It is not\\ndifficult to find fault with these simple definitions. For example,\\npossessing representational, expressive, and formal properties cannot\\nbe sufficient conditions, since, obviously, instructional manuals are\\nrepresentations, but not typically artworks, human faces and gestures\\nhave expressive properties without being works of art, and both natural\\nobjects and artifacts produced solely for homely utilitarian purposes\\nhave formal properties but are not artworks.\",\n \" The ease of these dismissals, though, serves as a reminder of the\\nfact that classical definitions of art are significantly less\\nphilosophically self-contained or freestanding than are most\\ncontemporary definitions of art. Each classical definition stands in\\nclose and complicated relationships to its system’s other\\ncomplexly interwoven parts – epistemology, ontology, value theory,\\nphilosophy of mind, etc. Relatedly, great philosophers\\ncharacteristically analyze the key theoretical components of their\\ndefinitions of art in distinctive and subtle ways. For these reasons,\\nunderstanding such definitions in isolation from the systems or\\ncorpuses of which they are parts is difficult, and brief summaries are\\ninvariably somewhat misleading. Nevertheless, some representative\\nexamples of historically influential definitions of art offered by\\nmajor figures in the history of philosophy should be mentioned.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Definitions From the History of Philosophy\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nPlato holds in the Republic and elsewhere that the arts are\\nrepresentational, or mimetic (sometimes translated\\n“imitative”). Artworks are ontologically dependent on,\\nimitations of, and therefore inferior to, ordinary physical\\nobjects. Physical objects in turn are ontologically dependent on, and\\nimitations of, and hence inferior to, what is most real, the\\nnon-physical unchanging Forms. Grasped perceptually, artworks present\\nonly an appearance of an appearance of the Forms, which are grasped by\\nreason alone. Consequently, artistic experience cannot yield\\nknowledge. Nor do the makers of artworks work from knowledge. Because\\nartworks engage an unstable, lower part of the soul, art should be\\nsubservient to moral realities, which, along with truth, are more\\nmetaphysically fundamental and, properly understood, more humanly\\nimportant than, beauty. The arts are not, for Plato, the primary\\nsphere in which beauty operates. The Platonic conception of beauty is\\nextremely wide and metaphysical: there is a Form of Beauty, which can\\nonly be known non-perceptually, but it is more closely related to the\\nerotic than to the arts. (See Janaway 1998, the entry on\\n Plato’s aesthetics, and the entry on\\n Plato on Rhetoric and Poetry.)\",\n \" Kant has a definition of art, and of fine art; the latter, which\\nKant calls the art of genius, is “a kind of representation that\\nis purposive in itself and, though without an end, nevertheless\\npromotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable\\ncommunication” (Kant, Critique of the Power of\\nJudgment, Guyer translation, section 44, 46).) When fully\\nunpacked, the definition has representational, formalist and\\nexpressivist elements, and focuses as much on the creative activity of\\nthe artistic genius (who, according to Kant, possesses an “innate\\nmental aptitude through which nature gives the rule to art”) as on the\\nartworks produced by that activity. Kant’s aesthetic theory is, for\\narchitectonic reasons, not focused on art. Art for Kant falls under\\nthe broader topic of aesthetic judgment, which covers judgments of the\\nbeautiful, judgments of the sublime, and teleological judgments of\\nnatural organisms and of nature itself. So Kant’s definition of art is\\na relatively small part of his theory of aesthetic judgment. And\\nKant’s theory of aesthetic judgment is itself situated in a hugely\\nambitious theoretical structure that, famously, aims, to account for,\\nand work out the interconnections between, scientific knowledge,\\nmorality, and religious faith. (See the entry on\\n Kant’s Aesthetics and Teleology \\nand the general entry on \\n Immanuel Kant.)\",\n \"\\n\\nHegel’s account of art incorporates his view of beauty; he\\ndefines beauty as the sensuous/perceptual appearance or expression of\\nabsolute truth. The best artworks convey, by sensory/perceptual means,\\nthe deepest metaphysical truth. The deepest metaphysical truth,\\naccording to Hegel, is that the universe is the concrete realization\\nof what is conceptual or rational. That is, what is conceptual or\\nrational is real, and is the imminent force that animates and propels\\nthe self-consciously developing universe. The universe is the concrete\\nrealization of what is conceptual or rational, and the rational or\\nconceptual is superior to the sensory. So, as the mind and its\\nproducts alone are capable of truth, artistic beauty is metaphysically\\nsuperior to natural beauty (Hegel, Lectures, [1886, 4]). A\\ncentral and defining feature of beautiful works of art is that,\\nthrough the medium of sensation, each one presents the most\\nfundamental values of its\\ncivilization.[1]\\nArt, therefore, as a cultural expression, operates in the same sphere\\nas religion and philosophy, and expresses the same content as\\nthey. But art “reveals to consciousness the deepest interests of\\nhumanity” in a different manner than do religion and philosophy,\\nbecause art alone, of the three, works by sensuous means. So, given\\nthe superiority of the conceptual to the non-conceptual, and the fact\\nthat art’s medium for expressing/presenting culture’s\\ndeepest values is the sensual or perceptual, art’s medium is\\nlimited and inferior in comparison with the medium that religion uses\\nto express the same content, viz., mental imagery. Art and religion in\\nturn are, in this respect, inferior to philosophy, which employs a\\nconceptual medium to present its content. Art initially predominates,\\nin each civilization, as the supreme mode of cultural expression,\\nfollowed, successively, by religion and philosophy. Similarly, because\\nthe broadly “logical” relations between art, religion and\\nphilosophy determine the actual structure of art, religion, and\\nphilosophy, and because cultural ideas about what is intrinsically\\nvaluable develop from sensuous to non-sensuous conceptions, history is\\ndivided into periods that reflect the teleological development from\\nthe sensuous to the conceptual. Art in general, too, develops in\\naccord with the historical growth of non-sensuous or conceptual\\nconceptions from sensuous conceptions, and each individual art-form\\ndevelops historically in the same way (Hegel, Lectures; Wicks\\n1993, see also the entries on\\n Hegel and on \\n Hegel’s Aesthetics). \",\n \"\\nFor treatments of other influential definitions\\nof art, inseparable from the complex philosophical systems or corpuses in which\\nthey occur, see, for example, the entries on\\n 18th Century German Aesthetics,\\n Arthur Schopenhauer,\\n Friedrich Nietzsche,\\n and Dewey’s Aesthetics.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.1 Some examples\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nSkeptical doubts about the possibility and value of a definition of\\nart have figured importantly in the discussion in aesthetics since the\\n1950s, and though their influence has subsided somewhat, uneasiness\\nabout the definitional project persists. (See section 4, below, and\\nalso Kivy 1997, Brand 2000, and Walton 2007).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Skepticism about Definitions of Art \",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nA common family of arguments, inspired by Wittgenstein’s\\nfamous remarks about games (Wittgenstein 1953), has it that the\\nphenomena of art are, by their nature, too diverse to admit of the\\nunification that a satisfactory definition strives for, or that a\\ndefinition of art, were there to be such a thing, would exert a\\nstifling influence on artistic creativity. One expression of this\\nimpulse is Weitz’s Open Concept Argument: any concept is\\nopen if a case can be imagined which would call for some sort of\\ndecision on our part to extend the use of the concept to cover it, or\\nto close the concept and invent a new one to deal with the new case;\\nall open concepts are indefinable; and there are cases calling for a\\ndecision about whether to extend or close the concept of art. Hence art\\nis indefinable (Weitz 1956). Against this it is claimed that\\nchange does not, in general, rule out the preservation of identity over\\ntime, that decisions about concept-expansion may be principled rather\\nthan capricious, and that nothing bars a definition of art from\\nincorporating a novelty requirement.\",\n \"\\n\\nA second sort of argument, less common today than in the\\nheyday of a certain form of extreme Wittgensteinianism, urges that the\\nconcepts that make up the stuff of most definitions of art\\n(expressiveness, form) are embedded in general philosophical theories\\nwhich incorporate traditional metaphysics and epistemology. But since\\ntraditional metaphysics and epistemology are prime instances of\\nlanguage gone on conceptually confused holiday, definitions of art\\nshare in the conceptual confusions of traditional\\nphilosophy (Tilghman 1984).\",\n \"\\n\\nA third sort of argument, more historically inflected than the first,\\ntakes off from an influential study by the historian of philosophy\\nPaul Kristeller, in which he argued that the modern system of the five\\nmajor arts [painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and music]\\nwhich underlies all modern aesthetics … is of comparatively\\nrecent origin and did not assume definite shape before the eighteenth\\ncentury, although it had many ingredients which go back to classical,\\nmediaeval, and Renaissance thought. (Kristeller, 1951) Since that list of five arts is\\nsomewhat arbitrary, and since even those five do not share a single\\ncommon nature, but rather are united, at best, only by several\\noverlapping features, and since the number of art forms has increased\\nsince the eighteenth century, Kristeller’s work may be taken to\\nsuggest that our concept of art differs from that of the eighteenth\\ncentury. As a matter of historical fact, there simply is no stable\\ndefiniendum for a definition of art to capture.\",\n \"\\n\\nA fourth sort of argument suggests that a definition of art stating\\nindividually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for a thing to\\nbe an artwork, is likely to be discoverable only if cognitive science\\nmakes it plausible to think that humans categorize things in terms of\\nnecessary and sufficient conditions. But, the argument continues,\\ncognitive science actually supports the view that the structure of\\nconcepts mirrors the way humans categorize things – which is with\\nrespect to their similarity to prototypes (or exemplars), and not in\\nterms of necessary and sufficient conditions. So the quest for a\\ndefinition of art that states individually necessary and jointly\\nsufficient conditions is misguided and not likely to succeed (Dean\\n2003). Against this it has been urged that psychological theories\\nof concepts like the prototype theory and its relatives can provide at\\nbest an account of how people in fact classify things, but not\\nan account of correct classifications of extra-psychological\\nphenomena, and that, even if relevant, prototype theory and other\\npsychological theories of concepts are at present too controversial to\\ndraw substantive philosophical morals from (Rey 1983; Adajian 2005).\",\n \"\\n\\nA fifth argument against defining art, with a normative tinge that is\\npsychologistic rather than sociopolitical, takes the fact that there\\nis no philosophical consensus about the definition of art as reason to\\nhold that no unitary concept of art exists. Concepts of art, like all\\nconcepts, after all, should be used for the purpose(s) they best\\nserve. But not all concepts of art serve all purposes equally\\nwell. So not all art concepts should be used for the same purposes.\\nArt should be defined only if there is a unitary concept of art that\\nserves all of art’s various purposes – historical,\\nconventional, aesthetic, appreciative, communicative, and so on. So,\\nsince there is no purpose-independent use of the concept of art, art\\nshould not be defined (Mag Uidhir and Magnus 2011; cf. Meskin 2008).\\nIn response, it is noted that some account of what makes various\\nconcepts of art concepts of art is still required; this\\nleaves open the possibility of some degree of unity beneath the\\napparent multiplicity. The fact (if it is one) that different concepts\\nof art are used for different purposes does not itself imply that they\\nare not connected in ordered, to-some-degree systematic ways. The\\nrelation between (say) the historical concept of art and the\\nappreciative concept of art is not an accidental, unsystematic\\nrelation, like that between river banks and savings banks, but is\\nsomething like the relation between Socrates’ healthiness and\\nthe healthiness of Socrates’ diet. That is, it is not evident\\nthat there exist a mere arbitrary heap or disjunction of art concepts,\\nconstituting an unsystematic patchwork. Perhaps there is a single\\nconcept of art with different facets that interlock in an ordered way,\\nor else a multiplicity of concepts that constitute a unity because one\\nis at the core, and the others depend asymmetrically on it. (The last\\nis an instance of core-dependent homonymy; see the entry on\\n Aristotle, section on Essentialism and\\nHomonymy.) Multiplicity alone doesn’t entail pluralism.\",\n \"\\nA sixth, broadly Marxian sort of objection rejects the project of\\ndefining art as an unwitting (and confused) expression of a harmful\\nideology. On this view, the search for a definition of art\\npresupposes, wrongly, that the concept of the aesthetic is a\\ncreditable one. But since the concept of the aesthetic necessarily\\ninvolves the equally bankrupt concept of disinterestedness, its use\\nadvances the illusion that what is most real about things can and\\nshould be grasped or contemplated without attending to the social and\\neconomic conditions of their production. Definitions of art,\\nconsequently, spuriously confer ontological dignity and respectability\\non social phenomena that probably in fact call more properly for\\nrigorous social criticism and change. Their real function is\\nideological, not philosophical (Eagleton 1990).\",\n \"\\n\\nSeventh, the members of a complex of skeptically-flavored arguments,\\nfrom feminist philosophy of art, begin with premises to the effect\\nthat art and art-related concepts and practices have been\\nsystematically skewed by sex or gender. Such premises are supported\\nby a variety of considerations. (a) The artworks the Western artistic\\ncanon recognizes as great are dominated by male-centered perspectives\\nand stereotypes, and almost all the artists the canon recognizes as\\ngreat are men – unsurprisingly, given economic, social, and\\ninstitutional impediments that prevented women from making art at all.\\nMoreover, the concept of genius developed historically in such a way\\nas to exclude women artists (Battersby, 1989, Korsmeyer 2004). (b) The\\nfine arts’ focus on purely aesthetic, non-utilitarian value resulted\\nin the marginalization as mere “crafts” of items of considerable\\naesthetic interest made and used by women for domestic practical\\npurposes. Moreover, because all aesthetic judgments are situated and\\nparticular, there can be no such thing as disinterested taste. If\\nthere is no such thing as disinterested taste, then it is hard to see\\nhow there could be universal standards of aesthetic excellence. The\\nnon-existence of universal standards of aesthetic excellence\\nundermines the idea of an artistic canon (and with it the project of\\ndefining art). Art as historically constituted, and art-related\\npractices and concepts, then, reflect views and practices that\\npresuppose and perpetuate the subordination of women. The data that\\ndefinitions of art are supposed to explain are biased, corrupt and\\nincomplete. As a consequence, present definitions of art,\\nincorporating or presupposing as they do a framework that incorporates\\na history of systematically biased, hierarchical, fragmentary, and\\nmistaken understandings of art and art-related phenomena and concepts,\\nmay be so androcentric as to be untenable. Some theorists have\\nsuggested that different genders have systematically unique artistic\\nstyles, methods, or modes of appreciating and valuing art. If so,\\nthen a separate canon and gynocentric definitions of art are indicated\\n(Battersby 1989, Frueh 1991). In any case, in the face of these\\nfacts, the project of defining art in anything like the traditional\\nway is to be regarded with suspicion (Brand, 2000).\",\n \"\\n\\nAn eighth argument sort of skeptical argument concludes that, insofar\\nas almost all contemporary definitions foreground the nature of\\nartworks, rather than the individual arts to which\\n(most? all?) artworks belong, they are philosophically unproductive\\n(Lopes, \\n2014).[2]\\n The grounds for this conclusion concern disagreements among standard\\ndefinitions as to the artistic status of entities whose status is for\\ntheoretical reasons unclear – e.g., things like ordinary bottleracks\\n(Duchamp’s Bottlerack) and silence (John Cage’s 4′33″).\\nIf these hard cases are artworks, what makes them so, given their\\napparent lack of any of the traditional properties of artworks? Are,\\nthey, at best, marginal cases? On the other hand, if they are not\\nartworks, then why have generations of experts – art historians,\\ncritics, and collectors – classified them as such? And to whom else\\nshould one look to determine the true nature of art? (There are, it is\\nclaimed, few or no empirical studies of art full stop, though\\nempirical studies of the individual arts abound.) Such disputes\\ninevitably end in stalemate. Stalemate results because (a) standard\\nartwork-focused definitions of art endorse different criteria of\\ntheory choice, and (b) on the basis of their preferred criteria,\\nappeal to incompatible intuitions about the status of such\\ntheoretically-vexed cases. In consequence, disagreements between\\nstandard definitions of art that foreground artworks are\\nunresolvable. To avoid this stalemate, an alternative definitional\\nstrategy that foregrounds the arts rather than individual artworks, is\\nindicated. (See section 4.5.)\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.1 Skepticisms inspired by views of concepts, history, Marxism, feminism\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nPhilosophers influenced by the moderate Wittgensteinian strictures\\ndiscussed above have offered family resemblance accounts of art, which,\\nas they purport to be non-definitions, may be usefully considered at\\nthis point. Two species of family resemblance views will be considered:\\nthe resemblance-to-a-paradigm version, and the cluster\\nversion.\",\n \"\\n\\nOn the resemblance-to-a-paradigm version, something is, or is\\nidentifiable as, an artwork if it resembles, in the right way, certain\\nparadigm artworks, which possess most although not necessarily all of\\nart’s typical features. (The “is identifiable”\\nqualification is intended to make the family resemblance view something\\nmore epistemological than a definition, although it is unclear that\\nthis really avoids a commitment to constitutive claims about\\nart’s nature.) Against this view: since things do not\\nresemble each other simpliciter, but only in at least one\\nrespect or other, the account is either far too inclusive, since\\neverything resembles everything else in some respect or other, or, if\\nthe variety of resemblance is specified, tantamount to a definition,\\nsince resemblance in that respect will be either a necessary or\\nsufficient condition for being an artwork. The family resemblance\\nview raises questions, moreover, about the membership and unity of the\\nclass of paradigm artworks. If the account lacks an explanation of why\\nsome items and not others go on the list of paradigm works, it seems\\nexplanatorily deficient. But if it includes a principle that governs\\nmembership on the list, or if expertise is required to constitute the\\nlist, then the principle, or whatever properties the experts’\\njudgments track, seem to be doing the philosophical work.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe cluster version of the family resemblance view has been defended\\nby a number of philosophers (Bond 1975, Dissanayake 1990, Dutton\\n2006, Gaut 2000). The view typically provides a list of properties, no one of\\nwhich is a necessary condition for being a work of art, but which are\\njointly sufficient for being a work of art, and which is such that at\\nleast one proper subset thereof is sufficient for being a work of\\nart. Lists offered vary, but overlap considerably. Here is one, due to Gaut: (1)\\npossessing positive aesthetic properties; (2) being expressive of\\nemotion; (3) being intellectually challenging; (4) being formally\\ncomplex and coherent; (5) having the capacity to convey complex\\nmeanings; (6) exhibiting an individual point of view; (7) being\\noriginal; (8) being an artifact or performance which is the product of\\na high degree of skill; (9) belonging to an established artistic form;\\n(10) being the product of an intention to make a work of art (Gaut\\n2000). The cluster account has been criticized on several grounds.\\nFirst, given its logical structure, it is in fact equivalent to a\\nlong, complicated, but finite, disjunction, which makes it difficult\\nto see why it isn’t a definition (Davies 2006). Second, if the list\\nof properties is incomplete, as some cluster theorists hold, then some\\njustification or principle would be needed for extending it. Third,\\nthe inclusion of the ninth property on the list, belonging to an\\nestablished art form, seems to regenerate (or duck), rather than answer, the\\ndefinitional question. Finally, it is worth noting that, although\\ncluster theorists stress what they take to be the motley heterogeneity of the\\nclass of artworks, they tend with surprising regularity to tacitly\\ngive the aesthetic a special, perhaps unifying, status among the\\nproperties they put forward as merely disjunctive. One cluster\\ntheorist, for example, gives a list very similar to the one discussed\\nabove (it includes representational properties, expressiveness,\\ncreativity, exhibiting a high degree of skill, belonging to an\\nestablished artform), but omits aesthetic properties on the grounds\\nthat it is the combination of the other items on the list which,\\ncombined in the experience of the work of art, are precisely the\\naesthetic qualities of the work (Dutton 2006). Gaut, whose list is\\ncited above, includes aesthetic properties as a separate item on the\\nlist, but construes them very narrowly; the difference between these\\nways of formulating the cluster view appears to be mainly nominal. And\\nan earlier cluster theorist defines artworks as all and only those\\nthings that belong to any instantiation of an artform, offers a list\\nof seven properties all of which together are intended to capture the\\ncore of what it is to be an artform, though none is either necessary\\nor sufficient, and then claims that having aesthetic value (of the\\nsame sort as mountains, sunsets, mathematical theorems) is “what\\nart is for” (Bond 1975). \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.2 Some descendants of skepticism\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \" Definitions of art attempt to make sense of two different sorts of\\nfacts: art has important historically contingent cultural features, as\\nwell as trans-historical, pan-cultural characteristics that point in\\nthe direction of a relatively stable aesthetic core. (Theorists who\\nregard art as an invention of eighteenth-century Europe will, of\\ncourse, regard this way of putting the matter as tendentious, on the\\ngrounds that entities produced outside that culturally distinctive\\ninstitution do not fall under the extension of “art” and\\nhence are irrelevant to the art-defining project (Shiner\\n2001). Whether the concept of art is precise enough to justify this\\nmuch confidence about what falls under its extension claim is\\nunclear.) Conventionalist definitions take art’s contingent\\ncultural features to be explanatorily fundamental, and aim to capture\\nthe phenomena – revolutionary modern art, the traditional close\\nconnection of art with the aesthetic, the possibility of autonomous\\nart traditions, etc. – in social/historical\\nterms. Classically-flavored or traditional definitions (also sometimes\\ncalled “functionalist”) definitions reverse this\\nexplanatory order. Such classically-flavored definitions take\\ntraditional concepts like the aesthetic (or allied concepts like the\\nformal, or the expressive) as basic, and aim to account for the\\nphenomena by making those concepts harder – for example, by\\nendorsing a concept of the aesthetic rich enough to include\\nnon-perceptual properties, or by attempting an integration of those\\nconcepts (e.g., Eldridge, section 4.4 below) .\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Contemporary Definitions\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nConventionalist definitions deny that art has essential connection to\\naesthetic properties, or to formal properties, or to expressive\\nproperties, or to any type of property taken by traditional\\ndefinitions to be essential to art. Conventionalist definitions have\\nbeen strongly influenced by the emergence, in the twentieth century,\\nof artworks that seem to differ radically from all previous\\nartworks. Avant-garde works like Marcel Duchamp’s\\n“ready-mades” – ordinary unaltered objects like\\nsnow-shovels (In Advance of the Broken Arm) and \\nbottle-racks – conceptual works like Robert Barry’s All the things I know\\nbut of which I am not at the moment thinking – 1:36 PM; June 15,\\n1969, and John Cage’s 4′33″, have seemed to\\nmany philosophers to lack or even, somehow, repudiate, the traditional\\nproperties of art: intended aesthetic interest, artifactuality, even\\nperceivability. Conventionalist definitions have also been strongly\\ninfluenced by the work of a number of historically-minded\\nphilosophers, who have documented the rise and development of modern\\nideas of the fine arts, the individual arts, the work of art, and the\\naesthetic (Kristeller, Shiner, Carroll, Goehr, Kivy).\",\n \"\\n\\nConventionalist definitions come in two varieties, institutional and\\nhistorical. Institutionalist conventionalism, or institutionalism, a\\nsynchronic view, typically hold that to be a work of art is to be an\\nartifact of a kind created, by an artist, to be presented to an\\nartworld public (Dickie 1984). Historical conventionalism, a\\ndiachronic view, holds that artworks necessarily stand in an\\nart-historical relation to some set of earlier artworks.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.1 Conventionalist Definitions: Institutional and Historical\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThe groundwork for institutional definitions was laid by Arthur Danto,\\nbetter known to non-philosophers as the long-time influential art\\ncritic for the Nation. Danto coined the term\\n“artworld”, by which he meant “an atmosphere of art\\ntheory.” Danto’s definition has been glossed as follows:\\nsomething is a work of art if and only if (i) it has a subject (ii)\\nabout which it projects some attitude or point of view (has a style)\\n(iii) by means of rhetorical ellipsis (usually metaphorical) which\\nellipsis engages audience participation in filling in what is missing,\\nand (iv) where the work in question and the interpretations thereof\\nrequire an art historical context (Danto, Carroll). Clause (iv) is\\nwhat makes the definition institutionalist. The view has been\\ncriticized for entailing that art criticism written in a highly\\nrhetorical style is art, lacking but requiring an independent account\\nof what makes a context art historical, and for not applying\\nto music. \",\n \"\\n\\nThe most prominent and influential institutionalism is that of George\\nDickie. Dickie’s institutionalism has evolved over\\ntime. According to an early version, a work of art is an artifact upon\\nwhich some person(s) acting on behalf of the artworld has conferred\\nthe status of candidate for appreciation (Dickie 1974). Dickie’s more\\nrecent version consists of an interlocking set of five definitions:\\n(1) An artist is a person who participates with understanding in the\\nmaking of a work of art. (2) A work of art is an artifact of a kind\\ncreated to be presented to an artworld public. (3) A public is a set\\nof persons the members of which are prepared in some degree to\\nunderstand an object which is presented to them. (4) The artworld is\\nthe totality of all artworld systems. (5) An artworld system is a\\nframework for the presentation of a work of art by an artist to an\\nartworld public (Dickie 1984). Both versions have been widely\\ncriticized. Philosophers have objected that art created outside any\\ninstitution seems possible, although the definition rules it out, and\\nthat the artworld, like any institution, seems capable of error. It\\nhas also been urged that the definition’s obvious circularity is\\nvicious, and that, given the inter-definition of the key concepts\\n(artwork, artworld system, artist, artworld public) it lacks any\\ninformative way of distinguishing art institutions systems\\nfrom other, structurally similar, social institutions (D. Davies 2004,\\npp. 248–249, notes that both the artworld and the\\n“commerceworld” seem to fall under that definition). Early\\non, Dickie claimed that anyone who sees herself as a member of the\\nartworld is a member of the artworld: if this is true, then\\nunless there are constraints on the kinds of things the artworld can\\nput forward as artworks or candidate artworks, any entity can be an\\nartwork (though not all are), which appears overly expansive. Finally,\\nMatravers has helpfully distinguished strong and\\nweak institutionalism. Strong institutionalism holds that\\nthere is some reason that is always the reason the art institution has\\nfor saying that something is a work of art. Weak institutionalism\\nholds that, for every work of art, there is some reason or other that\\nthe institution has for saying that it is a work of art (Matravers\\n2000). Weak institutionalism, in particular, raises questions about\\nart’s unity: if absolutely nothing unifies the reasons that the\\nartworld gives for conferring art-hood on things, then the unity of\\nthe class of artworks is vanishingly small. Conventionalist views,\\nwith their emphasis on art’s heterogeneity, swallow this\\nimplication. From the perspective of traditional definitions, doings\\nso underplays art’s substantial if incomplete unity, while leaving it\\na puzzle why art would be worth caring about. \",\n \" Some recent versions of institutionalism depart from Dickie’s by\\naccepting the burden, which Dickie rejected, of providing a\\nsubstantive, non-circular account of what it is to be an art\\ninstitution or an artworld. One, due to David Davies, does so by\\nbuilding in Nelson Goodman’s account of aesthetic symbolic\\nfunctions. Another, due to Abell, combines Searle’s account of social\\ninstitutions with Gaut’s characterization of art-making properties,\\nand builds an account of artistic value on that coupling.\",\n \"\\nDavies’ neo-institutionalism holds that making an artwork\\nrequires articulating an artistic statement, which requires specifying\\nartistic properties, which in turn requires the manipulation of an\\nartistic vehicle. Goodman’s “symptoms of the\\naesthetic” are utilized to clarify the conditions under which a\\npractice of making is a practice of artistic making: on\\nGoodman’s view, a symbol functions aesthetically when it is\\nsyntactically dense, semantically dense, relatively replete, and\\ncharacterized by multiple and complex reference (D. Davies 2004;\\nGoodman 1968; see the entry on\\n Goodman’s aesthetics).\\nManipulating an artistic vehicle is in turn possible only if the\\nartist consciously operates with reference to shared understandings\\nembodied in the practices of a community of receivers. So art’s\\nnature is institutional in the broad sense (or, perhaps better,\\nsocio-cultural). By way of criticism, Davies’\\nneo-institutionalism may be questioned on the grounds that, since all\\npictorial symbols are syntactically dense, semantically dense,\\nrelatively replete, and often exemplify the properties they represent,\\nit seems to entail that every colored picture, including those in any\\ncatalog of industrial products, is an artwork (Abell 2012).\",\n \"\\n\\nAbell’s institutional definition adapts Searle’s view of social kinds:\\nwhat it is for some social kind, F, to be F is for it to be\\ncollectively believed to be F (Abell 2012; Searle 1995, 2010;\\nand see the entry on\\n social institutions).\\nOn Abell’s view, more specifically, an institution’s type is\\ndetermined by the valued function(s) that it was collectively believed\\nat its inception to promote. The valued functions collective belief in\\nwhich make an institution an art institution are those spelled out by\\nGaut in his cluster account (see section 3.1, above). That is,\\nsomething is an art institution if and only if it is an institution\\nwhose existence is due to its being perceived to perform certain\\nfunctions, which functions form a significant subset of the following:\\npromoting positive aesthetic qualities; promoting the expression of\\nemotion; facilitating the posing of intellectual challenges, and the\\nrest of Gaut’s list. Plugging in Gaut’s list yields the final\\ndefinition: something is an artwork if and only if it is the product\\nof an art institution (as just defined) and it directly effects the effectiveness with which that institution performs the perceived functions to which\\nits existence is due. One worry is whether Searle’s account of\\ninstitutions is up to the task required of it. Some institutional\\nsocial kinds have this trait: something can fail to be a token of that\\nkind even if there is collective agreement that it counts as a token\\nof that kind. Suppose someone gives a big cocktail party, to which\\neveryone in Paris invited, and things get so out of hand that the\\ncasualty rate is greater than the Battle of Austerlitz. Even if\\neveryone thinks the event was a cocktail party, it is possible\\n(contrary to Searle) that they are mistaken: it may have been a war or\\nbattle. It’s not clear that art isn’t like this. If so, then the fact\\nthat an institution is collectively believed to be an art institution\\nneedn’t suffice to make it so (Khalidi 2013; see also the entry on\\n social \\ninstitutions).[3]\\nA second worry: if its failure to specify which subsets of the ten\\ncluster properties suffice to make something an artwork significantly\\nflaws Gaut’s cluster account, then failure to specify which subsets of\\nGaut’s ten properties suffice to make something an art institution\\nsignificantly flaws Abellian institutionalism.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.2 Institutional Definitions\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nHistorical definitions hold that what characterizes artworks is\\nstanding in some specified art-historical relation to some specified\\nearlier artworks, and disavow any commitment to a trans-historical\\nconcept of art, or the “artish.” Historical definitions\\ncome in several varieties. All of them are, or resemble, inductive\\ndefinitions: they claim that certain entities belong unconditionally\\nto the class of artworks, while others do so because they stand in the\\nappropriate relations thereto. According to the best known version,\\nLevinson’s intentional-historical definition, an artwork is a thing\\nthat has been seriously intended for regard in any way preexisting or\\nprior artworks are or were correctly regarded (Levinson 1990). A\\nsecond version, historical narrativism, comes in several varieties. On\\none, a sufficient but not necessary condition for the identification\\nof a candidate as a work of art is the construction of a true\\nhistorical narrative according to which the candidate was created by\\nan artist in an artistic context with a recognized and live artistic\\nmotivation, and as a result of being so created, it resembles at least\\none acknowledged artwork (Carroll 1993). On another, more ambitious\\nand overtly nominalistic version of historical narrativism, something\\nis an artwork if and only if (1) there are internal historical\\nrelations between it and already established artworks; (2) these\\nrelations are correctly identified in a narrative; and (3) that\\nnarrative is accepted by the relevant experts. The experts do\\nnot detect that certain entities are artworks; rather, the\\nfact that the experts assert that certain properties are significant\\nin particular cases is constitutive of art (Stock 2003).\",\n \"\\n\\nThe similarity of these views to institutionalism is obvious, and\\nthe criticisms offered parallel those urged against institutionalism.\\nFirst, historical definitions appear to require, but lack, any\\ninformative characterization of art traditions (art functions, artistic\\ncontexts, etc.) and hence any way of informatively distinguishing them\\n(and likewise art functions, or artistic predecessors) from\\nnon-art traditions (non-art functions, non-artistic\\npredecessors). Correlatively, non-Western art, or alien, autonomous\\nart of any kind appears to pose a problem for historical views: any\\nautonomous art tradition or artworks – terrestrial,\\nextra-terrestrial, or merely possible – causally isolated from\\nour art tradition, is either ruled out by the definition, which seems\\nto be a reductio, or included, which concedes the existence\\nof a supra-historical concept of art. So, too, there could be entities\\nthat for adventitious reasons are not correctly identified in\\nhistorical narratives, although in actual fact they stand in relations\\nto established artworks that make them correctly describable\\nin narratives of the appropriate sort. Historical definitions entail\\nthat such entities aren’t artworks, but it seems at least as \\nplausible to say that they are artworks that are not identified as such. Second,\\nhistorical definitions also require, but do not provide a\\nsatisfactory, informative account of the basis case – the first\\nartworks, or ur-artworks, in the case of the intentional-historical\\ndefinitions, or the first or central art-forms, in the case of\\nhistorical functionalism. Third, nominalistic historical definitions\\nseem to face a version of the Euthyphro dilemma. For either\\nsuch definitions include substantive characterizations of what it is\\nto be an expert, or they don’t. If, on one hand, they include no\\ncharacterization of what it is to be an expert, and hence no\\nexplanation as to why the list of experts contains the people it does,\\nthen they imply that what makes things artworks is inexplicable. On\\nthe other hand, suppose such definitions provide a substantive account\\nof what it is to be an expert, so that to be an expert is to possess\\nsome ability lacked by non-experts (taste, say) in virtue of the\\npossession of which they are able to discern historical connections\\nbetween established artworks and candidate artworks. Then the\\ndefinition’s claim to be interestingly historical is\\nquestionable, because it makes art status a function of whatever\\nability it is that permits experts to discern the art-making\\nproperties. \",\n \"\\n\\nDefenders of historical definitions have replies. First, as regards\\nautonomous art traditions, it can be held that anything we would\\nrecognize as an art tradition or an artistic\\npractice would display aesthetic concerns, because aesthetic concerns\\nhave been central from the start, and persisted centrally for\\nthousands of years, in the Western art tradition. Hence it is an\\nhistorical, not a conceptual truth that anything we recognize as an\\nart practice will centrally involve the aesthetic; it is just that\\naesthetic concerns that have always dominated our art tradition\\n(Levinson 2002). The idea here is that if the reason that anything\\nwe’d take to be a Φ-tradition would have Ψ-concerns is\\nthat our Φ-tradition has focused on Ψ-concerns since its\\ninception, then it is not essential to Φ-traditions that they have\\nΨ-concerns, and Φ is a purely historical concept. But\\nthis principle entails, implausibly, that every concept is purely\\nhistorical. Suppose that we discovered a new civilization whose\\ninhabitants could predict how the physical world works with great\\nprecision, on the basis of a substantial body of empirically acquired\\nknowledge that they had accumulated over centuries. The reason we\\nwould credit them with having a scientific tradition might\\nwell be that our own scientific tradition has since its inception\\nfocused on explaining things. It does not seem to follow that science\\nis a purely historical concept with no essential connection to\\nexplanatory aims. (Other theorists hold that it is historically\\nnecessary that art begins with the aesthetic, but deny that\\nart’s nature is to be defined in terms of its historical\\nunfolding (Davies 1997).) Second, as to the first artworks, or the\\ncentral art-forms or functions, some theorists hold that an account of\\nthem can only take the form of an enumeration. Stecker takes this\\napproach: he says that the account of what makes something a central\\nart form at a given time is, at its core, institutional, and that the\\ncentral artforms can only be listed (Stecker 1997 and 2005). Whether\\nrelocating the list at a different, albeit deeper, level in the\\ndefinition renders the definition sufficiently informative is an open\\nquestion. Third, as to the Euthyphro-style dilemma, it might\\nbe held that the categorial distinction between artworks and\\n“mere real things” (Danto 1981) explains the distinction\\nbetween experts and non-experts. Experts are able, it is said, to\\ncreate new categories of art. When created, new categories bring with\\nthem new universes of discourse. New universes of discourse in turn\\nmake reasons available that otherwise would not be available. Hence,\\non this view, it is both the case that the experts’ say-so alone\\nsuffices to make mere real things into artworks, and also true that\\nexperts’ conferrals of art-status have reasons (McFee\\n2011). \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.3 Historical Definitions\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nTraditional definitions take some function(s) or intended function(s)\\nto be definitive of artworks. Here only aesthetic definitions, which\\nconnect art essentially with the aesthetic – aesthetic judgments,\\nexperience, or properties – will be considered. Different\\naesthetic definitions incorporate different views of aesthetic\\nproperties and judgments. See the entry on \\n aesthetic judgment.\",\n \"\\n\\nAs noted above, some philosophers lean heavily on a distinction\\nbetween aesthetic properties and artistic properties, taking the\\nformer to be perceptually striking qualities that can be directly\\nperceived in works, without knowledge of their origin and purpose, and\\nthe latter to be relational properties that works possess in virtue of\\ntheir relations to art history, art genres, etc. It is also, of\\ncourse, possible to hold a less restrictive view of aesthetic\\nproperties, on which aesthetic properties need not be perceptual; on\\nthis broader view, it is unnecessary to deny what it seems pointless\\nto deny, that abstracta like mathematical entities and scientific laws\\npossess aesthetic properties.)\",\n \"\\n\\nMonroe Beardsley’s definition holds that an artwork:\\n“either an arrangement of conditions intended to be capable of\\naffording an experience with marked aesthetic character or\\n(incidentally) an arrangement belonging to a class or type of\\narrangements that is typically intended to have this capacity”\\n(Beardsley 1982, 299). (For more on Beardsley, see the entry on \\n Beardsley’s aesthetics.) \\nBeardsley’s conception of aesthetic experience is Deweyan:\\naesthetic experiences are experiences that are complete, unified,\\nintense experiences of the way things appear to us, and are, moreover,\\nexperiences which are controlled by the things experienced (see the\\nentry on\\n Dewey’s aesthetics).\\nZangwill’s aesthetic definition of art says that something is a\\nwork of art if and only if someone had an insight that certain\\naesthetic properties would be determined by certain nonaesthetic\\nproperties, and for this reason the thing was intentionally endowed\\nwith the aesthetic properties in virtue of the nonaesthetic properties\\nas envisaged in the insight (Zangwill 1995a,b). Aesthetic properties\\nfor Zangwill are those judgments that are the subject of\\n“verdictive aesthetic judgments” (judgements of beauty and\\nugliness) and “substantive aesthetic judgements” (e.g., of\\ndaintiness, elegance, delicacy, etc.). The latter are ways of being\\nbeautiful or ugly; aesthetic in virtue of a special close relation to\\nverdictive judgments, which are subjectively universal. Other\\naesthetic definitions build in different accounts of the\\naesthetic. Eldridge’s aesthetic definition holds that the satisfying appropriateness to one another of a thing’s form and content is the aesthetic quality possession of which is necessary and sufficient for\\na thing’s being art (Eldridge 1985). Or one might define aesthetic\\nproperties as those having an evaluative component, whose perception\\ninvolves the perception of certain formal base properties, such as\\nshape and color (De Clercq 2002), and construct an aesthetic\\ndefinition incorporating that view.\",\n \"\\n\\nViews which combine features of institutional and aesthetic\\ndefinitions also exist. Iseminger, for example, builds a definition on\\nan account of appreciation, on which to appreciate a thing’s\\nbeing F is to find experiencing its being F to be\\nvaluable in itself, and an account of aesthetic communication (which it\\nis the function of the artworld to promote) (Iseminger 2004).\",\n \"\\n\\nAesthetic definitions have been criticized for being both too narrow\\nand too broad. They are held to be too narrow because they are unable\\nto cover influential modern works like Duchamp’s ready-mades and\\nconceptual works like Robert Barry’s All the things I know but of\\nwhich I am not at the moment thinking – 1:36 PM; June 15, 1969,\\nwhich appear to lack aesthetic properties. (Duchamp famously asserted\\nthat his urinal, Fountain, was selected for its lack of\\naesthetic features.) Aesthetic definitions are held to be too broad\\nbecause beautifully designed automobiles, neatly manicured lawns, and\\nproducts of commercial design are often created with the intention of\\nbeing objects of aesthetic appreciation, but are not artworks.\\nMoreover, aesthetic views have been held to have trouble making sense\\nof bad art (see Dickie 2001; Davies 2006, p. 37). Finally, more\\nradical doubts about aesthetic definitions center on the\\nintelligibility and usefulness of the aesthetic. Beardsley’s view, for\\nexample, has been criticized by Dickie, who has also offered\\ninfluential criticisms of the idea of an aesthetic attitude (Dickie\\n1965, Cohen 1973, Kivy 1975).\",\n \"\\n\\nTo these criticisms several responses have been offered. First, the\\nless restrictive conception of aesthetic properties mentioned above,\\non which they may be based on non-perceptual formal properties, can be\\ndeployed. On this view, conceptual works would have aesthetic\\nfeatures, much the same way that mathematical entities are often\\nclaimed to (Shelley 2003, Carroll 2004). Second, a distinction may be\\ndrawn between time-sensitive properties, whose standard observation\\nconditions include an essential reference to the temporal location of\\nthe observer, and non-time-sensitive properties, which do not.\\nHigher-order aesthetic properties like drama, humor, and irony, which\\naccount for a significant part of the appeal of Duchamp’s and\\nCage’s works, on this view, would derive from time-sensitive\\nproperties (Zemach 1997). Third, it might be held that it is the\\ncreative act of presenting something that is in the\\nrelevant sense unfamiliar, into a new context, the artworld, which has\\naesthetic properties. Or, fourth, it might be held that\\n(Zangwill’s “second-order” strategy) works like\\nready-mades lack aesthetic functions, but are parasitic upon, because\\nmeant to be considered in the context of, works that do have aesthetic\\nfunctions, and therefore constitute marginal borderline cases of art\\nthat do not merit the theoretical primacy they are often\\ngiven. Finally, it can be flatly denied that the ready-mades were\\nworks of art (Beardsley 1982).\",\n \"\\n\\nAs to the over-inclusiveness of aesthetic definitions, a distinction\\nmight be drawn between primary and secondary functions. Or it may be\\nmaintained that some cars, lawns, and products of industrial design are\\non the art/non-art borderline, and so don’t constitute clear\\nand decisive counter-examples. Or, if the claim that aesthetic theories\\nfail to account for bad art depends on holding that some works have\\nabsolutely no aesthetic value whatsoever, as opposed to some\\nnon-zero amount, however infinitesimal, it may be wondered what\\njustifies that assumption. \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.4 Traditional (mainly aesthetic) definitions\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nHybrid definitions characteristically disjoin at least one\\ninstitutional component with at least one aesthetic component, aiming\\nthereby to accommodate both more traditional art and avant-garde art\\nthat appears to lack any significant aesthetic dimension. (Such\\ndefinitions could also be classified as institutional, on the grounds\\nthat they make provenance sufficient for being a work of art.) Hence\\nthey inherit a feature of conventionalist definitions: in appealing to\\nart institutions, artworlds, arts, art functions, and so on, they\\neither include substantive accounts of what it is to be an\\nartinstitution/world/genre/-form/function, or are\\nuninformatively circular.\",\n \"\\n\\nOne such disjunctive definition, Longworth and Scarantino’s, adapts\\nGaut’s list of ten clustering properties, where that list (see 3.5\\nabove) includes institutional properties (e.g., belonging to an\\nestablished art form) and traditional ones (e.g., possessing positive\\naesthetic properties); see also Longworth and Scarantino 2010. The\\ncore idea is that art is defined by a disjunction of minimally\\nsufficient and disjunctively necessary conditions; to say that a\\ndisjunct is a minimally sufficient constitutive condition for\\nart-hood, is to say that every proper subset of it is insufficient for\\nart-hood. An account of what it is for a concept to have disjunctive\\ndefining conditions is also supplied. The definition of art itself is\\nas follows: ∃Z∃Y (Art iff (Z ∨\\nY)), where (a) Z and Y, formed from properties on\\nGaut’s cluster list, are either non-empty conjunctions or non-empty\\ndisjunctions of conjunctions or individual properties; (b) there is\\nsome indeterminacy over exactly which disjuncts are sufficient; (c)\\nZ does not entail Y and Y does not entail\\nZ; (d) Z does not entail Art and Y does not\\nentail Art. Instantiation of either Z or Y suffices for\\nart-hood; something can be art only if at least one of Z,\\nY is instantiated; and the third condition is included to\\nprevent the definition from collapsing into a classical one. The\\naccount of what it is for concept C to have disjunctive\\ndefining conditions is as follows: C iff (Z ∨\\nY), where (i) Z and Y are non-empty conjunctions\\nor non-empty disjunctions of conjunctions or individual properties;\\n(ii) Z does not entail Y and Y does not entail\\nZ; (iii) Z does not entail C and Y does not\\nentail C. A worry concerns condition (iii): as written, it seems to\\nrender the account of disjunctive defining conditions\\nself-contradictory. For if Z and Y are each minimally\\nsufficient for C, it is impossible that Z does not\\nentail C and that Y does not entail C. If so,\\nthen nothing can satisfy the conditions said to be necessary and\\nsufficient for a concept to have disjunctive defining conditions.\",\n \"\\n\\nA second disjunctive hybrid definition, with an historical cast,\\nRobert Stecker’s historical functionalism, holds that an item is an\\nartwork at time t, where t is not earlier than the\\ntime at which the item is made, if and only if it is in one of the\\ncentral art forms at t and is made with the intention of\\nfulfilling a function art has at t or it is an artifact that\\nachieves excellence in achieving such a function (Stecker 2005). A\\nquestion for Stecker’s view is whether or not it provides an adequate\\naccount of what it is for a function to be an art function, and\\nwhether, consequently, it can accommodate anti-aesthetic or\\nnon-aesthetic art. The grounds given for thinking that it can are\\nthat, while art’s original functions were aesthetic, those functions,\\nand the intentions with which art is made, can change in unforeseeable\\nways. Moreover, aesthetic properties are not always preeminent in\\nart’s predecessor concepts (Stecker 2000). A worry is that if the\\noperative assumption is that if x belongs to a predecessor\\ntradition of T then x belongs to T, the\\npossibility is not ruled out that if, for example, the tradition of\\nmagic is a predecessor tradition of the scientific tradition, then\\nentities that belong to the magic tradition but lacking any of the\\nstandard hallmarks of science are scientific entities.\",\n \"\\n\\nA third hybrid definition, also disjunctive, is the cladistic\\ndefinition defended by Stephen Davies. who holds that something is\\nart (a) if it shows excellence of skill and achievement in realizing\\nsignificant aesthetic goals, and either doing so is its primary,\\nidentifying function or doing so makes a vital contribution to the\\nrealization of its primary, identifying function, or (b) if it falls\\nunder an art genre or art form established and publicly recognized\\nwithin an art tradition, or (c) if it is intended by its\\nmaker/presenter to be art and its maker/presenter does what is\\nnecessary and appropriate to realizing that intention (Davies, 2015).\\n(In biology, a clade is a segment in the tree of life: a group\\nof organisms and the common ancestor they share.) Artworlds are to be\\ncharacterized in terms of their origins: they begin with prehistoric\\nart ancestors, and grow into artworlds. Hence all artworks occupy a\\nline of descent from their prehistoric art ancestors; that line of\\ndescent comprises an art tradition that grows into an artworld. So\\nthe definition is bottom-up and resolutely anthropocentric. A worry:\\nthe view seems to entail that art traditions can undergo any changes\\nwhatsoever and remain art traditions, since, no matter how distant,\\nevery occupant of the right line of descent is part of the art\\ntradition. This seems to amount to saying that as long as they remain\\ntraditions at all, art traditions cannot die. Whether art is immortal\\nin this sense seems open to question. A second worry is that the\\nrequirement that every art tradition and artworld stand in some line\\nof descent from prehistoric humanoids makes it in principle impossible\\nfor any nonhuman species to make art, as long as that species fails to\\noccupy the right location in the tree of life. While the\\nepistemological challenges that identifying artworks made by nonhumans\\nmight pose could be very considerable, this consequence of the\\ncladistic definition’s emphasis on lineage rather than traits raises a\\nconcern about excessively insularity.\",\n \"\\nA fourth hybrid definition is the “buck-passing” view of Lopes, which\\nattempts an escape from the stalemate between artwork-focused\\ndefinitions over avant-garde anti-aesthetic cases by adopting a\\nstrategy that shifts the focus of the definition of art away from\\nartworks. The strategy is to recenter philosophical efforts on\\ndifferent problems, which require attention anyway: (a) the problem of\\ngiving an account of each individual art, and (b) the problem of\\ndefining what it is to be an art, the latter by giving an account of\\nthe larger class of normative/appreciative kinds to which the arts\\n(and some non-arts) belong. For, given definitions of the individual\\narts, and a definition of what it is to be an art, if every artwork\\nbelongs to at least one art (if it belongs to no existing art, then it\\npioneers a new art), then a definition of artwork falls out: x\\nis a work of art if and only if x is a work of K, where K is an\\nart (Lopes 2014). When fully spelled out, the definition is\\ndisjunctive: x is a work of art if and only if x is a\\nwork belonging to art1 or x is a work belonging to\\nart2 or x is a work belonging to art3\\n…. Most of the explanatory work is done by the theories of the\\nindividual arts, since, given the assumption that every artwork\\nbelongs to at least one art, possession of theories of the individual\\narts would be necessary and sufficient for settling the artistic or\\nnon-artistic status of any hard case, once it is determined what art a\\ngiven work belongs to. As to what makes a practice an art, Lopes’\\npreferred answer seems to be institutionalism of a Dickiean variety:\\nan art is an institution in which artists (persons who participate\\nwith understanding in the making of artworks) make artworks to be\\npresented to an artworld public. (Lopes 2014, Dickie 1984) Thus, on\\nthis view, it is arbitrary which activities are artworld systems:\\nthere is no deeper answer to the question of what makes music an art\\nthan that it has the right institutional\\n structure.[4] \\nSo it is arbitrary which activities are arts. Two worries. First, the\\nkey claim that every work of art belonging to no extant art pioneers a\\nnew art may be defended on the grounds that any reason to say that a\\nwork belonging to no extant artform is an artwork is a reason to say\\nthat it pioneers a new artform. In response, it is noted that the\\nquestion of whether or not a thing belongs to an art arises only when,\\nand because, there is a prior reason for thinking that the thing is an\\nartwork. So it seems that what it is to be an artwork is prior, in\\nsome sense, to what it is to be an art. Second, on the buck-passing\\ntheory’s institutional theory of the arts, which activities are arts\\nis arbitrary. This raises a version of the question that was raised\\nabout the cladistic definition’s ability to account for the existence\\nof art outside our (Hominin) tradition. Suppose the connection\\nbetween a practice’s traits and its status as an art are wholly\\ncontingent. Then the fact that a practice in another culture that\\nalthough not part of our tradition had most of the traits of one of\\nour own arts would be no reason to think that practice was an art, and\\nno reason to think that the objects belonging to it were artworks. It\\nis not clear that we are really so in the dark when it comes to\\ndetermining whether practices in alien cultures or traditions are\\narts. \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.5 Hybrid (Disjunctive) Definitions\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nConventionalist definitions account well for modern art, but have\\ndifficulty accounting for art’s universality – especially\\nthe fact that there can be art disconnected from “our”\\n(Western) institutions and traditions, and our species. They also\\nstruggle to account for the fact that the same aesthetic terms are\\nroutinely applied to artworks, natural objects, humans, and abstracta.\\nAesthetic definitions do better accounting for art’s\\ntraditional, universal features, but less well, at least according to\\ntheir critics, with revolutionary modern art; their further defense\\nrequires an account of the aesthetic which can be extended in a\\nprincipled way to conceptual and other radical art. (An aesthetic\\ndefinition and a conventionalist one could simply be conjoined. But\\nthat would merely raise, without answering, the fundamental question\\nof the unity or disunity of the class of artworks.) Which defect is\\nthe more serious one depends on which explananda are the more\\nimportant. Arguments at this level are hard to come by, because\\npositions are hard to motivate in ways that do not depend on prior\\nconventionalist and functionalist sympathies. If list-like definitions\\nare flawed because uninformative, then so are conventionalist\\ndefinitions, whether institutional or historical. Of course, if the\\nclass of artworks, or of the arts, is a mere chaotic heap, lacking any\\ngenuine unity, then enumerative definitions cannot be faulted for\\nbeing uninformative: they do all the explaining that it is possible to\\ndo, because they capture all the unity that there is to capture. In\\nthat case the worry articulated by one prominent aesthetician, who\\nwrote earlier of the “bloated, unwieldy” concept of art\\nwhich institutional definitions aim to capture, needs to be taken\\nseriously, even if it turns out to be ungrounded: “It is not at\\nall clear that these words – ‘What is\\nart?’ – express anything like a single question, to which\\ncompeting answers are given, or whether philosophers proposing answers\\nare even engaged in the same debate…. The sheer variety of\\nproposed definitions should give us pause. One cannot help wondering\\nwhether there is any sense in which they are attempts to …\\nclarify the same cultural practices, or address the same issue”\\n(Walton 2007). \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Conclusion\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Abell, Catharine, 2012, “Art: What It Is and Why It Matters,”\nPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research, 85: 671–691.","Adajian, Thomas, 2005, “On the Prototype Theory of Concepts\nand the Definition of Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art\nCriticism, 63: 231–236.","–––, 2012, “Defining Art,” in\nA. Ribeiro (ed.) 2012, pp. 39–56.","Battersby, Christine, 1989, Gender and Genius: Towards a\nFeminist Aesthetics, London: The Women’s Press.","Beardsley, Monroe, 1982, The Aesthetic Point of\nView, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.","Bond, E. 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Cooper (ed.),\nIndianapolis: Hackett.","Rey, Georges, 1983, “Concepts and\nStereotypes,” Cognition, 15: 237–262.","Ribeiro, Anna Christina (ed.), 2012, Continuum Companion to\nAesthetics, London: Continuum.","Shelley, James, 2003, “The Problem of Non-Perceptual\nArt.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 43: 363–378.","Sibley, Frank, 1959, “Aesthetic Concepts,”\nPhilosophical Review, 74: 135–159.","Shiner, Larry, 2001, The Invention of Art, Chicago:\nUniversity of Chicago Press.","–––, 2003, “Western and Non-Western\nConcepts of Art: Universality and Authenticity” in S. Davies and\nA. Sukla (eds.) 2003, pp. 143–157.","Stecker, Robert, 1997, Artworks: Definition, Meaning,\nValue, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University\nPress.","Stecker, Robert, 2000, “Is It Reasonable to Attempt to\nDefine Art” in N. Carroll (ed.) 2000, pp. 45–64.","–––, 2005, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of\nArt, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.","Stock, Kathleen, and Thomson-Jones, Katherine, 2008, New Waves\nin Aesthetics, London: Palgrave Macmillan.","Tilghman, Benjamin, 1984, But Is It Art?, Oxford:\nBlackwell.","Walton, Kendall, 1997, “Review of Art and the\nAesthetic,” Philosophical Review, 86: 97–101.","–––, 2007, “Aesthetics – What?, Why?,\nand Wherefore?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art\nCriticism, 65(2): 147–162.","Wicks, R., 1993, “ Hegel’s Aesthetics,” in F. Beiser\n(ed.), Cambridge Companion to Hegel, Cambridge: Cambridge\nUniversity Press, pp. 348–377.","Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1953, Philosophical Investigations,\nG.E.M. Anscombe and R. Rhees (eds.), G.E.M. Anscombe (trans.), Oxford:\nBlackwell.","–––, 1968, Philosophical\nInvestigations, Oxford: Blackwell.","Weitz, Morris, 1956, “The Role of Theory in\nAesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,\n15: 27–35.","Zangwill, Nick, 1995a, “Groundrules in the Philosophy of\nArt,” Philosophy, 70: 533–544.","–––, 1995b, “The Creative Theory of Art,”\nAmerican Philosophical Quarterly, 32: 315–332","–––, 2001, The Metaphysics of Beauty,\nIthaca: Cornell University Press.","Zemach, Eddy, 1997, Real Beauty, University Park, PA:\nPennsylvania State University Press."],"string":"[\n \"Abell, Catharine, 2012, “Art: What It Is and Why It Matters,”\\nPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research, 85: 671–691.\",\n \"Adajian, Thomas, 2005, “On the Prototype Theory of Concepts\\nand the Definition of Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art\\nCriticism, 63: 231–236.\",\n \"–––, 2012, “Defining Art,” in\\nA. Ribeiro (ed.) 2012, pp. 39–56.\",\n \"Battersby, Christine, 1989, Gender and Genius: Towards a\\nFeminist Aesthetics, London: The Women’s Press.\",\n \"Beardsley, Monroe, 1982, The Aesthetic Point of\\nView, Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.\",\n \"Bond, E. J., 1975, “The Essential Nature of\\nArt.” American Philosophical Quarterly, 12:\\n177–183.\",\n \"Brand, Peggy Zeglin, 2000, “Glaring Omissions in Traditional\\nTheories of Art,” in N. Carroll (ed.) 2000,\\npp. 175–198.\",\n \"Carroll, Noel, 1993, “Historical Narratives and the\\nPhilosophy of Art”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art\\nCriticism, 51(3): 313–26.\",\n \"–––, 2001, Beyond Aesthetics, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2004, “Non-Perceptual Aesthetic\\nProperties.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 44:\\n413–423.\",\n \"Carroll, Noel (ed.), 2000, Theories of Art Today, Madison:\\nUniversity of Wisconsin Press.\",\n \"Cohen, Ted, 1973, “Aesthetic/Non-aesthetic and the concept\\nof taste: a critique of Sibley’s position”, Theoria,\\n39(1–3): 113–152.\",\n \"Danto, Arthur, 1981, The Transfiguration of the\\nCommonplace, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Davidson, Donald, 2005, Truth and Predication, Cambridge,\\nMA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Davies, David, 2004, Art as Performance,\\nOxford: Blackwell Publishing.\",\n \"Davies, Stephen, 1991, Definitions of Art, Ithaca:\\nCornell University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1997, “First Art and Art’s\\nDefinition,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, 35:\\n19–34\",\n \"–––, 2000, “Non-Western Art and\\nArt’s Definition,” in N. Carroll (ed.) 2000,\\npp. 199–217 .\",\n \"–––, 2006, The Philosophy of Art, Oxford:\\nBasil Blackwell.\",\n \"–––, 2012, The Artful Species, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2015, “ Defining Art and\\nArtworlds,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism \\n73(4): 375–384.\",\n \"Davies, Stephen, and Sukla, Ananta (eds.), 2003, Art and\\nEssence, Westport, CT: Praeger.\",\n \"Dean, Jeffery, 2003, “The Nature of Concepts and the\\nDefinition of Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art\\nCriticism, 61: 29–35.\",\n \"Devitt, Michael, 2001, “The Metaphysics of Truth,” in\\nMichael Lynch (ed.), The Nature of Truth, Cambridge, MA: MIT\\nPress, pp. 579–611.\",\n \"DeClerq, Rafael, 2002, “The Concept of an Aesthetic\\nProperty,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 60:\\n167–172.\",\n \"Dickie, George, 1965, “Beardsley’s Phantom Aesthetic\\nExperience”, Journal of Philosophy, 62(5):\\n129–136.\",\n \"–––, 1974, Art and the Aesthetic: An\\nInstitutional Analysis, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University\\nPress.\",\n \"–––, 1984, The Art Circle, New York:\\nHaven.\",\n \"–––, 2001, Art and Value, Oxford:\\nBlackwell Publishing.\",\n \"Dissanayake, Ellen, 1990, What is Art For?, Bellingham:\\nUniversity of Washington Press.\",\n \"Dutton, Denis, 2006, “A Naturalist Definition of Art,”\\nJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 64: 367–377.\",\n \"–––, 2008, The Art Instinct, New York:\\nBloomsbury Press. \",\n \"Eagleton, Terry, 1990,The Ideology of the Aesthetic,\\nLondon: Basil Blackwell.\",\n \"Eldridge, Richard, 1985, “Form and Content: An Aesthetic Theory\\nof Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 25(4): 303–316.\",\n \"Field, Hartry, 1972, “Tarski’s Theory of\\nTruth,” The Journal of Philosophy, 69:\\n347–375.\",\n \"Frueh, Joanna, 1991, “Towards a Feminist Theory of Art,” in\\nFeminist Art Criticism: An Anthology, A. Raven, C. Langer and\\nJ. Frueh (eds.), Boulder: Westview Press, pp. 153–165.\",\n \"Gaut, Berys, 2000, “The Cluster Account of Art,” in\\nN. Carroll (ed.) 2000, pp. 25–45.\",\n \"Goehr, Lydia, 1994, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Goldman, Alan, 1995, Aesthetic Value, Boulder, CO:\\nWestview Press.\",\n \"Goodman, Nelson, 1968, Languages of Art: An Approach\\nto a Theory of Symbols, Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill\\nCompany.\",\n \"Hegel, G.W.F., Lectures, translated by\\nBernard Bosanquet in The Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of\\nFine Art, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, & Co., 1886; reprinted\\nas Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, edited and\\nwith an Introduction by Michael Inwood, London: Penguin, 1993. \\n[Page reference is to the 1886 translation.]\",\n \"Iseminger, Gary, 2004, The Aesthetic Function of\\nArt, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.\",\n \"Janaway, Christopher, 1998, Images of Excellence: Plato’s\\nCritique of the Arts, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Kant, Immanuel, 2000, Critique of the Power of Judgment,\\nPaul Guyer and Eric Matthews (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress.\",\n \"Khalidi, Muhammed, 2013, “Three Kinds of Social\\nKinds,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 90(1):\\n96–112.\",\n \"Kivy, Peter, 1975, “What Makes ‘Aesthetic’ Terms\\nAesthetic?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,\\n36(2): 197–211.\",\n \"–––, 1997, Philosophies of the Arts,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Kristeller, Paul, 1951, “The Modern System of the\\nArts,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 12:\\n496–527.\",\n \"Levinson, Jerrold, 1990, Music, Art, and Metaphysics,\\nIthaca: Cornell University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2002, “The Irreducible Historicality\\nof the Concept of Art”, British Journal of Aesthetics,\\n42(4): 367–379.\",\n \"–––, 2005, “What Are Aesthetic\\nProperties?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,\\n79: 191–210.\",\n \"Longworth, F., and A. Scarantino, 2010, “The Disjunctive Theory of\\nArt: The Cluster Account Reformulated,” British Journal of\\nAesthetics, 50(2): 151–167.\",\n \"Lopes, D.M., 2008,“Nobody Needs a Theory of\\nArt” Journal of Philosophy, 105: 109–127.\",\n \"–––, 2014, Beyond Art, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"McFee, Graham, 2011, Artistic Judgment: A Framework for\\nPhilosophical Aesthetics, London: Springer. \",\n \"Mag Uidhir, C. and Magnus, P. D., 2011, “Art Concept\\nPluralism” Metaphilosophy, 42: 183–97.\",\n \"Matravers, Derek, 2000, “The Institutional Theory: A Protean\\nCreature,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 40:\\n242–250.\",\n \"Meskin, Aaron, 2008,“From Defining Art to Defining the\\nIndividual Arts: The Role of Theory in the Philosophies of Arts”\\nin Stock and Thomson-Jones (eds.) 2008, pp. 125–150.\",\n \"Plato, 1997, Complete Works, John M. Cooper (ed.),\\nIndianapolis: Hackett.\",\n \"Rey, Georges, 1983, “Concepts and\\nStereotypes,” Cognition, 15: 237–262.\",\n \"Ribeiro, Anna Christina (ed.), 2012, Continuum Companion to\\nAesthetics, London: Continuum.\",\n \"Shelley, James, 2003, “The Problem of Non-Perceptual\\nArt.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 43: 363–378.\",\n \"Sibley, Frank, 1959, “Aesthetic Concepts,”\\nPhilosophical Review, 74: 135–159.\",\n \"Shiner, Larry, 2001, The Invention of Art, Chicago:\\nUniversity of Chicago Press.\",\n \"–––, 2003, “Western and Non-Western\\nConcepts of Art: Universality and Authenticity” in S. Davies and\\nA. Sukla (eds.) 2003, pp. 143–157.\",\n \"Stecker, Robert, 1997, Artworks: Definition, Meaning,\\nValue, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University\\nPress.\",\n \"Stecker, Robert, 2000, “Is It Reasonable to Attempt to\\nDefine Art” in N. Carroll (ed.) 2000, pp. 45–64.\",\n \"–––, 2005, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of\\nArt, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.\",\n \"Stock, Kathleen, and Thomson-Jones, Katherine, 2008, New Waves\\nin Aesthetics, London: Palgrave Macmillan.\",\n \"Tilghman, Benjamin, 1984, But Is It Art?, Oxford:\\nBlackwell.\",\n \"Walton, Kendall, 1997, “Review of Art and the\\nAesthetic,” Philosophical Review, 86: 97–101.\",\n \"–––, 2007, “Aesthetics – What?, Why?,\\nand Wherefore?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art\\nCriticism, 65(2): 147–162.\",\n \"Wicks, R., 1993, “ Hegel’s Aesthetics,” in F. Beiser\\n(ed.), Cambridge Companion to Hegel, Cambridge: Cambridge\\nUniversity Press, pp. 348–377.\",\n \"Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1953, Philosophical Investigations,\\nG.E.M. Anscombe and R. Rhees (eds.), G.E.M. Anscombe (trans.), Oxford:\\nBlackwell.\",\n \"–––, 1968, Philosophical\\nInvestigations, Oxford: Blackwell.\",\n \"Weitz, Morris, 1956, “The Role of Theory in\\nAesthetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism,\\n15: 27–35.\",\n \"Zangwill, Nick, 1995a, “Groundrules in the Philosophy of\\nArt,” Philosophy, 70: 533–544.\",\n \"–––, 1995b, “The Creative Theory of Art,”\\nAmerican Philosophical Quarterly, 32: 315–332\",\n \"–––, 2001, The Metaphysics of Beauty,\\nIthaca: Cornell University Press.\",\n \"Zemach, Eddy, 1997, Real Beauty, University Park, PA:\\nPennsylvania State University Press.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../aesthetic-judgment/","text":"aesthetics: aesthetic judgment"},{"href":"../aesthetics-18th-german/","text":"aesthetics: German, in the 18th century"},{"href":"../aristotle-aesthetics/","text":"Aristotle, General Topics: aesthetics"},{"href":"../dewey-aesthetics/","text":"Dewey, John: aesthetics"},{"href":"../kant-aesthetics/","text":"Kant, Immanuel: aesthetics and teleology"},{"href":"../nietzsche/","text":"Nietzsche, Friedrich"},{"href":"../plato-rhetoric/","text":"Plato: rhetoric and poetry"},{"href":"../schopenhauer/","text":"Schopenhauer, Arthur"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../aesthetic-judgment/\",\n \"text\": \"aesthetics: aesthetic judgment\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aesthetics-18th-german/\",\n \"text\": \"aesthetics: German, in the 18th century\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotle-aesthetics/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotle, General Topics: aesthetics\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../dewey-aesthetics/\",\n \"text\": \"Dewey, John: aesthetics\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../kant-aesthetics/\",\n \"text\": \"Kant, Immanuel: aesthetics and teleology\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../nietzsche/\",\n \"text\": \"Nietzsche, Friedrich\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../plato-rhetoric/\",\n \"text\": \"Plato: rhetoric and poetry\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../schopenhauer/\",\n \"text\": \"Schopenhauer, Arthur\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":82,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"artifact"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Artifact"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Wed Jul 18, 2018; substantive revision Mon Oct 3, 2022"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nThe contemporary world is pervasively artifactual. Even our most\nmundane, biologically based activities, such as eating, sleeping, and\nsex, depend on engagement with artifacts. Moreover, many of the plants\nand animals we encounter on a daily basis qualify as biological\nartifacts (Sperber 2007). But unlike language—which also\npervades human life from top to bottom—artifacts as such are not\nthe subject matter of any well-defined area of philosophical research.\nThis is as much the case today as it has been throughout the history\nof Western philosophy (Dipert 1993).","\nPhilosophy of technology might have played this role, but historically\nit has not done so. Although its roots reach back to the\n19th century, philosophy of technology became a widely\nrecognized specialization only in the second half of the\n20th century. This early phase was dominated by so-called\n“humanities philosophy of technology” (Mitcham 1994).\nHeavily influenced by Martin Heidegger’s (1954 [1977]) seminal\nessay, “The Question Concerning Technology”, this strain\nof philosophy of technology focuses primarily on the cultural and\nsocial effects of industrial and post-industrial technologies. In the\nlast few decades, a companion strain of philosophy of technology,\nvariously denominated “analytic” (Franssen, Lokhorst,\n& van de Poel 2018) or “engineering” (Mitcham 1994)\nphilosophy of technology has come to prominence. It is focused on\nthe genesis of technologies in the practices of modern science and\nengineering. Thus the net effect has been to focus philosophy of\ntechnology almost exclusively on modern and emerging technologies,\nrather than on artifacts in general.","\nThe aim of this article, then, is to bring together discussions of\nartifacts occurring in sometimes far-flung areas of philosophy, as\nwell as related discussions in other disciplines. Section 1 concerns\nquestions of definition. Section 2 focuses on the metaphysics of\nartifacts. Section 3 turns to epistemological issues. There are also\nimportant normative issues concerning artifacts, but these are covered\nin other articles in this Encyclopedia, listed in the Related Entries\nsection below."],"string":"[\n \"\\nThe contemporary world is pervasively artifactual. Even our most\\nmundane, biologically based activities, such as eating, sleeping, and\\nsex, depend on engagement with artifacts. Moreover, many of the plants\\nand animals we encounter on a daily basis qualify as biological\\nartifacts (Sperber 2007). But unlike language—which also\\npervades human life from top to bottom—artifacts as such are not\\nthe subject matter of any well-defined area of philosophical research.\\nThis is as much the case today as it has been throughout the history\\nof Western philosophy (Dipert 1993).\",\n \"\\nPhilosophy of technology might have played this role, but historically\\nit has not done so. Although its roots reach back to the\\n19th century, philosophy of technology became a widely\\nrecognized specialization only in the second half of the\\n20th century. This early phase was dominated by so-called\\n“humanities philosophy of technology” (Mitcham 1994).\\nHeavily influenced by Martin Heidegger’s (1954 [1977]) seminal\\nessay, “The Question Concerning Technology”, this strain\\nof philosophy of technology focuses primarily on the cultural and\\nsocial effects of industrial and post-industrial technologies. In the\\nlast few decades, a companion strain of philosophy of technology,\\nvariously denominated “analytic” (Franssen, Lokhorst,\\n& van de Poel 2018) or “engineering” (Mitcham 1994)\\nphilosophy of technology has come to prominence. It is focused on\\nthe genesis of technologies in the practices of modern science and\\nengineering. Thus the net effect has been to focus philosophy of\\ntechnology almost exclusively on modern and emerging technologies,\\nrather than on artifacts in general.\",\n \"\\nThe aim of this article, then, is to bring together discussions of\\nartifacts occurring in sometimes far-flung areas of philosophy, as\\nwell as related discussions in other disciplines. Section 1 concerns\\nquestions of definition. Section 2 focuses on the metaphysics of\\nartifacts. Section 3 turns to epistemological issues. There are also\\nimportant normative issues concerning artifacts, but these are covered\\nin other articles in this Encyclopedia, listed in the Related Entries\\nsection below.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Definition","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. Metaphysics","sub_toc":["2.1 Do Artifacts Exist?","2.2 Artifact Kinds","2.3 Artifact Functions"]},{"content_title":"3. Epistemology","sub_toc":["3.1 Methodology","3.2 Knowing Artifacts","3.3 Thinking and Acting With Artifacts"]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Definition\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Metaphysics\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"2.1 Do Artifacts Exist?\",\n \"2.2 Artifact Kinds\",\n \"2.3 Artifact Functions\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Epistemology\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"3.1 Methodology\",\n \"3.2 Knowing Artifacts\",\n \"3.3 Thinking and Acting With Artifacts\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\nA standard philosophical definition of\n“artifact”—often assumed even when not explicitly\nstated—is that artifacts are objects made intentionally, in\norder to accomplish some purpose (Hilpinen 1992; 2011). This\ndefinition is rooted ultimately in Aristotle’s distinction\nbetween things that exist by nature and things that exist by craft\n(Metaphysics 1033a ff., Nicomachean Ethics 1140a\nff., Physics 192b ff.). Those that exist by nature have their\norigin in themselves, whereas those that exist by craft have their\norigin in the craftsperson—specifically, in the form of the\nthing as it exists in the mind of the maker. Both Aristotle and his\ncontemporary descendants are primarily concerned to distinguish\nartifacts from objects that occur naturally, without any human\nintervention.","\nOn this standard definition, artifacts must satisfy three conditions.\nThey must be intentionally produced, thus ruling out unintended\nby-products of intentional actions, such as the shavings that result\nfrom woodcarving, as well as all naturally occurring objects, such as\nsalamanders and stars. They must involve modification of materials,\nthus ruling out naturally occurring objects even when used\nintentionally for a purpose, such as sticks thrown to amuse your dog.\nAnd they must be produced for a purpose. This rules out intentionally\nmodified objects that are nevertheless not intended to accomplish any\nfurther goal, such as the scraps produced when you intentionally, but\nfor no particular reason, tear up a piece of paper before throwing it\naway. Presumably, then, these three conditions are intended to be\nindividually necessary and jointly sufficient to distinguish artifacts\nfrom naturally occurring objects.","\nThree remarks about this definition are in order. First, it does not\nrule out the possibility that at least some things made by non-human\nanimals are artifacts. Spider webs do have a purpose, for instance,\nand are clearly made rather than naturally occurring. But we may\nhesitate to attribute intention to the spiders, given the instinctive\nnature of their web-weaving behavior. Beavers, on the other hand,\nmight be thought to intentionally construct dams in order to create\nponds. This implication of the standard definition fits well with the\nburgeoning evidence for sophisticated cognition among non-human\nanimals in general, and their ability to manufacture and use tools and\nother structures in particular (Shumaker, Walkup, & Beck 2011;\nGould & Gould 2007). This is an important area of research in\nethology and comparative psychology. However, for the purposes of this\narticle we will focus on human artifacts.","\nSecond, many things we would not ordinarily label as artifacts in\nEnglish might nevertheless count under this definition. We usually\nreserve the term “artifact” for tangible, durable objects\nsuch as an archaeologist might unearth. But objects made intentionally\nfor a purpose include many that are ephemeral or abstract. Candidates\ninclude musical performances (Dipert 1993), belief systems\n(Hilpinen 1995), actions and languages (Evnine 2016), software (Irmak\n2012), normativity (Frugé 2022), establishments such as\nrestaurants (Korman 2020), and artifact types (Reicher\n2022). ","\nFinally, this definition is peculiar to philosophers (Hilpinen 2011;\nDipert 2014). In other disciplines the concern is more to investigate\ncognition and behavior involving objects quite generally, without\ncarving out a domain of artifacts having special ontological status.\nPsychologists, for instance, are interested in how children develop\ncategorizations of things, including artifacts as opposed to\nnon-artifacts. But there is some evidence that notions of intention or\nfunction enter into this development only at quite a late stage, and\nthat young children make relevant distinctions more on the basis of\nperceptual features such as shape or movement patterns (Keil, Greif,\n& Kerner 2007). Thus the standard philosophical definition of\n“artifact” might well be more of a hindrance than a help\nin the context of such investigations. Archaeologists and\nanthropologists, on the other hand, are concerned with the roles\nobjects play in cultural processes quite generally. From this point of\nview, a discarded flint chip is just as important as the hide scraper\nfrom which it was struck, because debitage analysis—the study of\nsuch chips and other production debris—is invaluable for\nreconstructing knapping techniques and other aspects of production\nprocesses, including their cognitive underpinnings (Shott 2015; Schick\n& Toth 1993). Similarly, a sharp-edged shell used without\nmodification as a hide scraper is just as important as the\npurpose-made flint scraper for understanding the culture in question.\nIn these disciplines “artifact” tends to be absorbed into\n“material culture”—a much broader category—and\nis usually understood to include anything made and/or used by\nhumans (Preston 2013; Kipfer 2007). As the examples above demonstrate,\nthe making need not be intentional and the use need not involve\nmodification of the object used. And if any objects of cultural\nsignificance are devoid of purpose or function, that condition of the\nphilosophical definition, too, would fall by the wayside.\nConsequently, as the anthropologist Daniel Miller notes:","\n\n\nThere is little point in attempting to distinguish systematically\nbetween a natural world and an artefactual one, except when we are\nconcerned with the ways in which terms such as “natural”\nmay have particular consequences or entailments, as when a commodity\nin the shops is labelled “natural” simply because a single\ningredient, such as a chemical dye, has been deleted, or when\nsomething as apparently natural as radiation is taken to be\nantithetical to true “nature”. (Miller 1994, 398)\n","\nFrom the perspective of other disciplines, then, the philosophical\ninsistence on a strict definition of “artifact” aimed at a\nbright-line distinction between naturally occurring objects and\nartifacts may well appear parochial.","\nThis extra-disciplinary observation points us directly to the central\nproblem for the standard philosophical definition of\n“artifact”. Along all three definitional dimensions we\nencounter a continuum of cases (Koslicki 2018; Grandy 2007;\nSperber 2007). Paths, for example, are often created unintentionally\njust in virtue of people repeatedly traveling along the same straight\nline between points A and B—your kitchen and\nyour vegetable garden, say. But what is the point of saying that such\na path is not an artifact, whereas an identical one that was created\nintentionally by exactly the same process is? Moreover, what would it\ntake to make the erstwhile non-artifactual path into an artifact?\nWould it be enough to notice and approve it? Or would I have to\nintentionally maintain it, by sweeping it clean of leaves, for\ninstance?","\nSimilar difficulties arise with regard to modification, which is\nclearly a matter of degree. If I bring an attractive shell home from a\nwalk on the beach and put it to use as a paperweight, does the\ntransport count as modification? If not, would washing the shell\nbefore using it be enough? Or polishing it to bring out the color of\nits markings? A further complication is that many uses to which\nnaturally occurring objects are put cause modifications. An unmodified\nstone used as a hammer soon acquires a spherical shape (Schick &\nToth 1993, 130 ff.). At what point did it first count as\nmodified, since even the first strike would break off some fragments?\nOr do these use-induced modifications not count for satisfying the\ndefinition at all? If not, why not? The stone is certainly being used\nintentionally for a purpose, so the rest of the definition is\nsatisfied.","\nFinally, Dan Sperber (2007) argues that even function is continuous\nbetween nature and culture. He begins with the observation that what\nhe calls biological artifacts—domesticated plants and animals,\nfor the most part—have both biological and cultural functions.\nBut they carry out their cultural functions in virtue of carrying out\ntheir biological functions, and vice versa. Take seedless\ngrapes. Their seedlessness might seem to make them purely artifactual,\nsince the reproductive function of the fruit appears to be lost along\nwith the seeds. But in fact, Sperber argues, the fruit retains the\nbiological function of attracting us to eat the fruit and then spread\nthe plant—not by dispersing seeds, as with seeded grapes, but by\npropagating the grapevines vegetatively. This coincidence of\nbiological and cultural functions in domesticates shows that far from\nbeing the locus of a divide between nature and culture, the realm of\ndomestication is the locus of their imperceptible merger.","\nSperber concludes that “artifact” as a theoretical term\ncannot be usefully defined, as any attempt to do so will be\nfrustrated by the continua detailed above. We may call this the\ncontinuum problem. This concern is echoed by Kathrin Koslicki (2018),\nwho notes that the common reliance on creators’ intentional activity\nto distinguish artifacts from naturally occurring objects inevitably\nleaves us with objects such as unintended by-products and naturally\noccurring objects pressed into service for human purposes which\ndo not seem to fall readily into either category. She does not\nthink that current approaches in metaphysics have the resources\nto deal with such puzzles about artifacts, and concludes that further\ndevelopment of these approaches is necessary. For\nSperber—whose training is in anthropology—the lesson is\nthat the social sciences simply do not need “artifact” as\na term of art. But philosophers, and some other social scientists,\nhave reacted to the continuum problem by doubling down on their\nclassification efforts. Risto Hilpinen (2011), following the\nanthropologist Wendell Oswalt (1973; 1976), uses the term\n“naturefact” for naturally occurring objects used\nintentionally, but without modification, for some purpose. Naturefacts\nthus lie between naturally occurring objects and artifacts on the\ncontinuum. Hilpinen also suggests that what he calls\n“residue”—modified but unintended by-products of\nproductive activity, such as sawdust—are a conceptually distinct\ncategory of objects also lying somewhere between artifacts and\nnaturally occurring objects. (A terminological note: in archaeology,\n“naturefact” is more usually used to mean an object that\nis in fact the result of purely natural processes, but is difficult to\ndistinguish from an intentionally modified object. This is a problem\nthat bedevils paleoarchaeologists studying stone tools, in particular\n(Schnurrenberger & Bryan 1985). Archaeologists also\nsometimes distinguish artifacts from ecofacts—organic or\ninorganic remains of archaeological significance that have undergone\nno, or minimal, modification by humans, such as animal bones, stored\ngrain, pollen, charcoal, and the like. Naturefacts and residues in\nHilpinen’s sense are usually included in the ecofact\ncategory.)","\nRandall Dipert (1993) proposes a slightly different, triadic\nclassification.","\nThis continuum problem for artifacts is really just a version of a\nwell-known problem besetting classification schemes in the natural and\nsocial sciences. The traditional assumption was that classification is\nan exclusively ontological operation. What we are doing, it is often\nsaid, is carving the world at its joints. On this assumption, a\ncontinuum is a problem because it suggests that there are no joints to\nguide our carving efforts. A continuum is thus incompatible with\nclassification schemes understood as grounded solely in objective\nfeatures of the world, and with essentialist understandings of natural\nkinds. We can, of course, carve the continuum up any way we like, but\nthis must be understood as in part a pragmatic operation, not a\nstrictly ontological one reflecting only the fixed essences of things.\nThis problem has loomed large in discussions of natural kinds in\nphilosophy of science, as bothersome continua are increasingly\nidentified in both natural and social sciences. Muhammad Khalidi\n(2013, Chapter 5) details cases in the chemical, biological,\nphysiological and social sciences where widely accepted kinds are\n“fuzzy”, or have graded membership, for instance. In\nresponse, he advocates an account of natural kinds that incorporates\nthe influence of human interests and epistemic concerns, while still\ninsisting that these interests and concerns are constrained by\nobjective features of the world identifiable by science.\nKhalidi’s account joins a growing list of non-essentialist\naccounts of natural kinds, according to which kinds are real, but\ntheir reality does not require that they be defined in total isolation\nfrom human beings, their activities, interests, epistemic projects,\npragmatic concerns, and so on (Dupré 1993; Boyd 1999; Reydon\n2014; Kendig 2016).","\nUnderstood in this way, classification schemes such as those proposed\nby Hilpinen and Dipert could, in principle, constitute a perfectly\nadequate response to the continuum problem. It would, of course, be\nnice to have a commonly accepted scheme in philosophy—or better\nyet, a scheme shared with the other disciplines that study artifacts\nand material culture. But even failing that, classification schemes\ngrounded in clear methodological considerations would be helpful, even\nif the methodological considerations varied from scheme to scheme.\nUnfortunately, it appears that the main consideration driving the\nschemes proposed so far is merely the desire to shore up the\ntraditional ontological distinction between artifacts and naturally\noccurring objects. This leaves the methodological challenge voiced by\nSperber and Miller unanswered. What do we need this distinction for?\nDoes it help us understand how objects function in human life and\nculture, or does it actually hinder this understanding? If the latter,\nwould other distinctions serve us better? The continuum problem does\nnot, pace Sperber, prove that there are no good\nmethodological considerations in favor of maintaining the ontological\ndivide between artifacts and naturally occurring objects. But in light\nof the “epistemological” (Reydon 2014) or\n“practice” (Kendig 2016) turn in the recent literature on\nnatural kinds, it does show that we cannot assume that\n“artifact” itself is a pure, natural kind, identifiable on\nontological grounds alone. In short, there is no guarantee that the\nstandard definition of “artifact” with which we started\nthis section expresses anything like a traditional essence. We are\nthus left with more questions than answers in the matter of\ndefinition."],"section_title":"1. Definition","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nDiscussions of the metaphysics of artifacts have typically\narisen only in broader investigative contexts in which they are\nnot the primary focus of attention. In particular, the metaphysics of\nordinary objects has generated a significant literature in recent\nyears, and the puzzles about existence around which it revolves do\napply to artifacts, but equally to the vast array of other ordinary\nobjects, like stones, stars, trees, jellyfish and deer. Similarly,\nreflection on artifact kinds has been largely overshadowed by the vast\nliterature on natural kinds, and discussions of artifact function\nexist on the periphery of the much more prominent discussions of\nbiological function. Finally, questions about the existence of\nabstract artifacts have arisen in the context of investigations into\nthe ontology of works of art. We will take up these topics in\nturn."],"section_title":"2. Metaphysics","subsections":[{"content":["\nSkepticism about the existence of artifacts goes back at least to\nAristotle. For him, the primary existents are\nsubstances—independent things on which all other things depend.\nIndividual things, such as horses or houses, are compounds of matter\nand form, but it is not entirely clear whether the substance of the\nthing is the form, the matter, or the compound (Shields 2022). That\nsaid, Aristotle is clearly ambivalent as to whether artifacts have\nwhat it takes. In the Physics (192b8–39), for instance,\nhe says that some things, such as chipmunks or geraniums, exist by\nnature and that each such thing is a substance. He follows this up in\nthe Metaphysics (1043b15–25), saying that perhaps\nonly such things as exist by nature are substances, thus\nimplying that things made by art, such as pots or pincushions, are\nnot. Exactly why Aristotle thinks artifacts are not substances is not\nentirely clear—he suggests different reasons in different places\n(Katayama 1999, 18–19). But it is clear that he doubts that\nthey really exist in the full sense enjoyed by things that exist by\nnature.","\nAristotle’s invidious ontological downgrading of artifacts fed\nstraight into 20th century trends in metaphysics that\ntended to downgrade ordinary objects in general (Thomasson 2009). Even\nafter the baleful anti-metaphysical influence of logical positivism\nwaned, metaphysics took itself to be merely working out the details of\nwhat the dominant scientific theories, particularly in physics and\nbiology, say exists. Since there is no science of artifacts, let alone\nof sticks and stones and rivers, such ordinary objects had to be\neliminated from our ontologies. On the radical left fringe of the\neliminativist spectrum is a startling long list of theorists who deny\nthe existence of ordinary objects tout court, including even\nliving organisms and persons (for the list, see Korman\n2015, 19–23). In the moderate middle are theorists such as\nTrenton Merricks (2001), who denies the existence of artifacts and\nother inanimate macrophysical objects, as well as living organisms,\nwith the exception of humans; Peter van Inwagen (1990), who denies the\nexistence of artifacts and other inanimate macrophysical objects, but\naccepts the existence of living organisms, including humans; and Simon\nEvnine (2016), who denies the existence of inanimate natural objects,\nbut accepts the existence of artifacts and living organisms.","\nThe arguments for these varieties of eliminativism are themselves\nvarious, but they revolve around what Daniel Korman\n(2015, 4–7) calls debunking arguments. Why do we think that\nordinary objects exist? Only because they correspond to our human\nneeds and interests, as embodied in our biology and enshrined in our\ncultural practices. But there is no good reason to think that the\nobjects we pick out in accordance with our needs and interests\ncorrespond to the objects that actually exist in reality. Debunking\narguments go back to the very beginning of Western philosophy.\nParmenides declared that what truly is—Being, or the\nOne—cannot be multiple, changing and transient after the fashion\nof ordinary objects. Plato followed up with the doctrine of the\neternal and unchanging Forms, which truly exist, and of which ordinary\nobjects are at best ontologically deficient copies. Thus the idea that\nwe have no good reason to think that ordinary objects exist is\nentrenched in our metaphysical tradition.","\nOn the other hand, prima facie grounds for rehabilitating\nordinary objects also have ancient roots in atomism, which holds that\nmacrophysical objects are composed of particles which, while multiple,\ndo meet the other criteria for true being laid down by Parmenides. On\nthe assumption that composition follows regular principles, then,\nordinary objects may be said to exist insofar as they are wholes\ncomposed of existing proper parts. This brings us face to face with\nwhat Peter van Inwagen (1990, 21 ff.) calls the Special\nComposition Question—under what conditions do unified\nwholes arise out of parts? Answering this question has turned out to\nbe far from simple, and has latterly given rise to mereology, a\nspecial area of metaphysics devoted to investigating the principles of\ncomposition. Most of the other main arguments against the existence of\nartifacts and other ordinary objects reflect problems arising in the\ncourse of these investigations. For example, there is the material\nconstitution problem. An artifact such as a cookie is made out of\ndough. So everywhere there is a cookie there is a coincident lump of\n(baked) dough, which shares all of its parts with the cookie. But this\ncoincidence violates our intuitions about the identity of ordinary\nobjects. Considerations of this sort have been used by van Inwagen\n(1990, 124 ff.) and others to argue that there are no artifacts.\nCookie makers do not bring anything new into existence; they merely\nmove pre-existing elementary things around. Thus, while debunking\narguments show that we have no good reason to believe ordinary objects\ndo exist, mereological problems show that we have good\nreasons to believe they do not.","\nA growing chorus of voices has been raised against this ontological\ndowngrading of ordinary objects, several of whom have been especially\nconcerned to rehabilitate artifacts. Lynne Rudder Baker’s\nMetaphysics of Everyday Life (2007) foregrounds artifacts as\nparadigmatic examples of existing ordinary objects. Baker subscribes\nto a constitution view, according to which material things are\nnon-reductively made up of other material things.","\n\n\nThe fundamental idea of constitution is this: when a thing of one\nprimary kind is in certain circumstances, a thing of another primary\nkind—a new thing, with new causal powers—comes to exist.\nWhen an octagonal piece of metal is in circumstances of being painted\nred with white marks of the shape S-T-O-P, and is in an environment\nthat has certain conventions and laws, a new thing—a traffic\nsign—comes into existence. (Baker 2007, 32)\n","\nImportantly, for Baker artifacts are intention-dependent (ID)\nobjects—they cannot exist in the absence of beings with relevant\nintentional states. Thus the cosmic ray striking a sheet of scrap\nmetal in the proverbial swamp and turning it red with white lettering\nhas not created any artifact at all, let alone a stop sign. Baker\nbuilds the intentional states into the specification of the required\ncircumstances in terms of a relationship between the construction\nmaterials and the intentions and knowledge of the constructor. For a\nstop sign to exist, for example, it must be constructed from metal and\npaint by someone who understands the function of stop signs, knows how\nto construct one, intends to construct one to fulfill this function,\nand is reasonably successful in executing her intentions\n(2007, 53–55). This view puts Baker at odds with\nAristotle’s view that only things with an internal principle of\nmovement truly exist, as well as with the common view that ID objects\ndo not truly exist. Both of these views are aimed at first\ndistinguishing natural from artificial objects and then downgrading\nthe latter. Baker argues that the distinction itself is suspect, both\nin light of technologies such as genetic engineering and the natural\nstatus of the beings with intentional states who create artifacts\n(2007, 59–66). In short, the whole process of making\nartifacts is internal to nature and cannot be legitimately considered\nseparate from it by those inclined to be judgmental in ontological\nmatters.","\nSimon Evnine (2016) argues for a version of hylomorphism that is very\nsimilar to the constitution view espoused by Baker. Evnine abandons\ntraditional notions of form and focuses instead on the intertwining of\nthe causes that bring a thing into existence and make it the thing it\nis. Artifacts thus take pride of place in his metaphysics, because, he\nclaims, they typically have a specifiable origin in the intentions of\na maker who chooses material and works it up in accordance with an\nenvisioned function and shape. Evnine’s account of organisms as\nexistents rests on an analogy between this paradigmatic intentional\nmaking and organic development. But he does not try to account for\nnon-living natural objects, whose existence he denies. On the other\nhand, Evnine deploys his account of artifacts in an interesting way to\nargue that actions are artifacts—artifactual events rather than\nartifactual objects. Higher-level actions such as turning on a light\nare governed by the agent’s intention and constructed ultimately\nout of the “matter” of basic, bodily actions.","\nAmie Thomasson (2007a; and for a succinct summary, 2009) takes a\ndifferent tack, arguing that the existence of artifacts and other\nordinary objects is established by the connection between our terms on\nthe one hand, and facts about the world on the other. On her view, the\nmeaning of our terms includes a specification of the conditions for\ntheir application. If we then determine empirically that the\napplication conditions of a term are met, the thing to which it refers\nexists. For example, “spoon” refers to a utensil\nintentionally made by humans for the purposes of stirring, serving and\neating food, consisting of a shallow bowl with a long handle. A quick\ncheck of any kitchen will assure you that these conditions are in fact\nsatisfied, and that spoons therefore exist. On the other hand,\n“devil’s tuning fork” refers to an implement\nconsisting of three cylindrical prongs on one end and two rectangular\nprongs on the other, intentionally made by devils for the purpose of\ntuning their instruments, one would suppose. Check the music studios\nand the concert halls as thoroughly as you like, you will not find\nthese conditions satisfied. So devil’s tuning forks do not\nexist. Thomasson’s approach does not privilege artifacts as\nparadigmatic existents the way Baker’s and Evnine’s\naccounts do. But she makes the intention-dependent status of artifacts\nequally comprehensible, since the intentional states of makers figure\nprominently in the application conditions of concepts."],"subsection_title":"2.1 Do Artifacts Exist?"},{"content":["\nIf artifacts do not exist, then the kinds into which we classify\nthem—pillow, book, painting, flowerpot—are not real kinds\non a par with natural kinds, such as oak, owl or anole. But questions\nabout the reality and nature of artifact kinds also arise for those\nwho do take artifacts to exist. As we have seen, these theorists\nresist the objection that the mind-dependence of artifacts compromises\ntheir ontological status. But this objection resurfaces with regard to\nartifact kinds. The mind-dependence of artifacts implies, at a\nminimum, that an account of artifact kinds will be very different from\nan account of natural kinds. This implication is resisted by Crawford\nElder (2004; 2007), who seeks to establish the existence of\nartifacts on the basis of a realist account of kinds. On Elder’s\nview, artifact kinds and many natural kinds are equally copied kinds,\nand equally mind-independent. A copied kind is defined by a set of\nproperties that naturally cluster together—a distinctive shape\nor make-up, a proper function established by a mechanism that copies\nthings of that shape on the basis of successful performance, and a\nhistorically proper placement. For example, cats’ whiskers are\ndistinctively shaped organs that are copied from cat to cat by a\nbiologically based reproductive mechanism because they help cats get\naround in the dark by performing successfully as touch receptors\nstrategically located with respect to the cat’s other bodily\nparts. Similarly, floor lamps are distinctively shaped artifacts that\nare copied from household to household by a socially based\nreproductive mechanism because they help humans get around in the dark\nby performing successfully as light sources strategically located with\nrespect to other household furniture. Human intentional states do, of\ncourse, figure in the copying process for artifacts. However, Elder\nargues:","\n\n\n[C]reation does not begin with the artisan’s intending what he\ndoes. Rather, the essential properties that his product will inherit\nstem from a history of function and of copying that began well before\nthe artisan undertook his work. This history reaches forward through\nthe artisan’s motions—it shapes his shaping. Its existence\nand its efficacy are independent, largely or even entirely, of the\nartisan’s will. (Elder 2004, 142–143)\n","\nAll copied kinds are thus natural, mind-independent kinds whose\nclustered features we discover rather than invent.","\nOne acknowledged problem with Elder’s account is that many\nerstwhile artifact kinds turn out not to be copied kinds. Neckties,\nfor example, do not qualify because they do not appear to have a\nproper function (Elder 2004, 158–159). But his account does\nhave the virtue of drawing out useful analogies between natural kinds\nand artifact kinds. A number of other accounts also focus on analogies\nbetween (at least some) natural kinds and (at least some) artifact\nkinds (Lowe 2014; Franssen & Kroes 2014). The underlying motive\nfor pushing this analogy, clearly, is the fear that artifact kinds are\nnot real if human intentional states and/or classificatory practices\nare constitutive of what kinds there are.","\nAmie Thomasson does not share this fear. In a series of important\npapers (2003; 2007b; 2014), she points out that realists\nabout kinds are not, in fact, forced to choose between showing that\nartifact kinds can be understood on the mind-independent model of\nnatural kinds, or denying that artifact kinds are real. There is a\nthird option—denying that mind-independence is the touchstone of\nreality. Thomasson then builds human intentions and their historical\nconnections into her account of artifact kinds.","\n\n\nNecessarily, for all x and all artifactual kinds K,\nx is a K only if x is the product of a\nlargely successful intention that (Kx), where one intends\n(Kx) only if one has a substantive concept of the nature of\nKs that largely matches that of some group of prior makers of\nKs (if there are any) and intends to realize that concept by\nimposing K-relevant features on the object. (Thomasson\n2003, 600)\n","\nThus for Thomasson, human intentions and concepts are actually\nconstitutive of artifact kinds. Thomasson (2014) also objects to the\ncommon assumption that concepts of artifact kinds revolve exclusively\naround intended function. While it is true that in\nEnglish we often label artifact kinds in accordance with\nfunction—flashlight, bedspread, pincushion, frying pan, and so\non—artifacts actually have an array of features that figure in\ntheir concepts. These include structural or perceptible features, for\nexample, that are also often reflected in our terms—armchair,\ntripod, zebra crossing (definitely not a function designation!), fork,\nand so on. Most importantly for Thomasson, they also include normative\nfeatures concerned with how that kind of artifact is to be treated or\nregarded. Although sponges and paper towels can both be used to wipe\nup spills, it is normal to dispose of the paper towel, but to clean\nthe sponge and reuse it.","\nA distinct approach to artifact kinds is proposed by Thomas Reydon\n(2014). He points out that the nature of natural kinds is currently in\nplay in philosophy of science. Their mind-independence is\ntraditionally predicated on their having essences. But essentialism\nran into trouble when Darwin showed that species—up to that\npoint the very paradigm of natural kinds—are historically fluid\nand have no clear boundaries. Similar problems have now been\nrecognized even in the kinds of chemistry and physics (Khalidi 2013).\nNevertheless, grouping natural objects into kinds does license useful\ninferences and ground successful explanations. This has led to what\nReydon calls an “epistemological turn”.","\n\n\nThe principal criteria for being a natural kind used to be\nmetaphysical: a kind is a natural kind if and only if it really exists\nin the world…independently of human consciousness, human\ninterests, and human practices, and is associated with a particular\nkind essence…. On the alternative approach the principal\ncriteria for being a natural kind no longer are metaphysical but\nepistemological: what counts is being useful in human\nepistemic practices, such as inference and explanation, by\ncorresponding in some way (which is still to be explicated)\nto the state of affairs in nature. (Reydon 2014, 132)\n","\nRather than assimilating artifact kinds to natural kinds by showing\nthat artifacts are actually mind-independent in some way, as Elder and\nothers have tried to do, the epistemological turn suggests that since\nnatural kinds were never mind-independent to begin with, there is in\nprinciple no barrier to a unified account of artifact and natural\nkinds.","\nFinally, we should note that questions have been raised about the\nlegitimacy of the kind—or perhaps more precisely, the\ncategory—“artifact” itself. We have already touched\non this in\n Section 1\n above, in the context of the definitional issues raised by the\ncontinuum problem. This discussion clearly reflects Reydon’s\nepistemological turn in that it foregrounds methodological\nconsiderations and lets the ontological chips fall where they may. We\nwill discuss methodological issues in\n Section 3."],"subsection_title":"2.2 Artifact Kinds"},{"content":["\nFunction is a salient feature of artifacts. Clearly there would be no\ngood reason to keep so many of them around unless they did something\nfor us. Function is also a salient feature of biological traits.\nAccounts of biological function, which now comprise a large\nliterature, have inspired many accounts of artifact function. But\nunlike organisms, artifacts are made to serve human purposes, so human\nintentional states must be considered. Accounts of artifact function\ncan be usefully categorized in terms of the role they give to\nintentions in the establishment of functions (Preston 2009; Houkes\n& Vermaas 2010). At one end of the spectrum are accounts that\nrevolve around human intentions, while at the other end are accounts\nthat focus on non-intentional factors; in between are a variety of\naccounts that mix intentional and non-intentional factors in various\nproportions.","\nKaren Neander (1991) distinguishes artifact function sharply from\nbiological function. Natural selection acting over the long course of\nevolutionary history establishes specific effects of biological traits\nas their functions, in virtue of the reproduction of those traits for\nthose effects. For example, the wings of birds are the result of eons\nof selection for their effect as airfoils. In contrast, intentional\nhuman selection, acting with knowledge and foresight, establishes\nspecific effects of artifacts as their functions immediately, without\nany reference to a history of reproduction for those effects.","\n\n\nIt is enough, in the case of intentional selection, if the designer\nbelieves or hopes that the artifact will have the desired effect and\nselects it for that purpose. (Neander 1991, 462)\n","\nFor example, an individual who designs a hammer, or who uses the heel\nof her shoe to pound in a nail, believing these items to have the\ncapacity to deliver a hard blow and intending to use that effect for\nher purposes, endows them with the relevant function forthwith. John\nSearle (1995) calls such artifact functions “agentive”\nfunctions to distinguish them from the “non-agentive”\nfunctions of biological traits. Searle also distinguishes a special\nsub-category of agentive functions which he terms “status”\nfunctions. These are related in a relatively arbitrary way to the\nphysical structure of the artifact. Money, for example, runs the gamut\nfrom gold ingots to bitcoin. Its functions—medium of exchange,\nmeasure of value, and so on—are imposed on these physical\nbearers by our collective acceptance of them as money. According to\nSearle, the intentional states constituting this collective acceptance\ncreate an “institutional fact” that would not exist\nwithout collective human agency. Status functions thus illustrate not\nonly the creative capacity of human intentionality already\nforegrounded in Neander’s account, but also its typically\ncollective nature in the case of artifact function. Searle supplies an\naccount of collective intentionality to underwrite this feature. Other\nauthors who subscribe to intentionalist theories of artifact function\ninclude Randall Dipert (1993), Peter McLaughlin (2001), Lynne Rudder\nBaker (2007), and Simon Evnine (2016).","\nRuth Millikan (1984) offers a general theory of function that, in the\ncase of artifacts, mixes intentional and non-intentional elements. Her\nmain interest is in proper functions—what a biological trait or\nartifact is supposed to do, and is malfunctioning if it cannot do. On\nMillikan’s view, what she calls direct proper functions, whether\nbiological or artifactual, are established by a history of selection\nand reproduction for the effect constituting the function. So what is\nessential for the establishment of an artifact’s function is\nwhether or not its ancestors—artifacts of that kind—were\nreproduced for that effect. This is what the artifact is supposed to\ndo, even if it is not able to do it because of damage or an\nunfavorable environment. Thus far Millikan’s account is\nnon-intentional, for the role of human intentional states is merely\none factor in the implementation of the reproduction process. However,\nthe other half of Millikan’s account concerns what she calls\nderived proper functions. These are functions that are established by\nsomething that has the direct proper function of producing something\nelse to accomplish a purpose. Millikan’s favored example of\nbiological derived proper function is a novel shade of brown sported\nby a chameleon. It has no history of selection and reproduction for\nthe effect of camouflaging the chameleon, and yet we want to say that\nthat is its proper function. And we can say so, according to Millikan,\nbecause the color-alteration mechanism possessed by chameleons has the\ndirect proper function of changing chameleons’ skin color to\ncamouflage them by matching their surroundings. Thus this novel shade\nof brown does have the derived proper function of\ncamouflaging the chameleon. Derived proper functions in the realm of\nartifacts bring intention back to the fore. On Millikan’s view,\nintentional states have evolutionarily established direct proper\nfunctions. The direct proper function of intentions is to produce\nsomething else to accomplish whatever purpose the intention\nincorporates. Thus, if you intend to produce a can opener, the\nexecution of your intention brings into existence a device having the\nderived proper function of opening cans. Even if this device works in\na completely novel way, and even if it is not capable of performing as\nenvisioned, opening cans is still what it is supposed to do. Usually,\nthe direct and derived proper functions of artifacts coincide—in\nthe case of a standard can opener, for instance, we have both a\nhistory of selection and reproduction and a current intention to\nreproduce yet another can opener. But in the case of novel prototypes,\nespecially, it is intention alone that establishes the (derived)\nproper function.","\nWybo Houkes and Pieter Vermaas (Houkes & Vermaas 2004; 2010;\nVermaas & Houkes 2003) also have a mixed theory, although\nintentionalist factors predominate, in contrast to Millikan’s\nfocus on non-intentionalist history of reproduction. Their approach is\nto derive a theory of artifact function from a theory of artifact use\nand design.","\n\n\nOn our theory, an artifact function is a capacity, supposed or actual,\nwhich has a preferential status in the context of certain actions and\nbeliefs. It is therefore a highly relational property, which\nsupervenes on both the actual physical makeup of an artifact and on\nthe beliefs and actions of human agents, designers as well as users.\n(Houkes & Vermaas 2004, 67)\n","\nHoukes and Vermaas focus on the use plan formulated by designers as\nestablishing the function of the artifact in the first instance. This\nis the predominant intentionalist element in their account. But on\ntheir view, this use plan must be supported by a justification that\nthe plan will realize the function, and this requires knowledge of the\ncausal roles of the physicochemical capacities of the artifact.\nThrough this required justification the actual physical structure of\nthe artifact constrains the intentions articulated in the use plan.\nThis is a non-intentionalist element. In addition, they require a\nhistorical element in the form of the communication of the use plan\nfrom designer to user and subsequently from user to user. They refer\nto this element as “evolutionary”, in an apparent\nreference to cultural evolution, but clearly this element, too, is\nprimarily intentional since the evolution is carried out in a series\nof intentional communications. Houkes and Vermaas refer to their\ntheory as the ICE (Intention, Causal role, Evolution) theory of\nartifact function. Other mixed theories include those of Paul\nGriffiths (1993) and Philip Kitcher (1993).","\nAt the lonelier, non-intentionalist end of the spectrum is Beth\nPreston’s (1998; 2013) account. Her initial concern is to\nadvance a pluralist theory of artifact function according to which\nartifacts have both proper functions and what Preston calls system\nfunctions. For example, the proper function of plates is to hold food\nfor serving or eating. But they function equally well as saucers for\npotted plants, or in a stack to weight down tofu or eggplant slices to\nextract the moisture. For proper function, Preston relies on\nMillikan’s account of direct proper function, but without the\nadded element of derived proper function that brings intention back\nin. For system function, she relies on Robert Cummins’ (1975)\ntheory of biological function, according to which function is\nestablished by the causal role a component plays in a system. Neither\nMillikan’s nor Cummins’ account is intrinsically\nintentionalist, since they are designed to fit both the biological and\nthe artifactual cases. Preston resists reformulating them in\nintentionalist terms, while acknowledging that in the artifact case\nhuman intentions and other intentional states do play a role in\nimplementing the history of selective reproduction and the system\ncontext, respectively. In support of this resolutely\nnon-intentionalist stance, Preston argues that human intentions do not\narise in a vacuum, but are reproduced in and through the process by\nwhich material culture, with its myriad of functional artifacts, is\nreproduced. Intentions to make plates are reproduced in plate cultures\nas surely as the plates themselves; and only in cultures with both\npotted plants and plates can intentions to use plates as pot\nsaucers form.","\n\n\nThe only viable view is one that sees human purposes and the proper\nfunctions of items of material culture indissolubly linked in patterns\nof use and reproduction. Thus, it no longer seems reasonable to ask\nwhich came first, the purpose or the proper function. Both are\nproduced and reproduced through the self-same social process. (Preston\n2013, 206)\n","\nPreston is joined here by Crawford Elder (2004), whose account of\ncopied kinds, as we noted above, similarly characterizes human\nintentions as themselves dependent on the copying process rather than\ninitiating and controlling it.","\nThe theories discussed in this section encounter a number of important\nproblems in accounting for function phenomena in the artifact realm.\nOne such problematic phenomenon is the distinction between proper and\nnon-proper functions. This does occur in the biological\nrealm—pigeon beaks did not evolve to peck buttons for a food\nreward, for example—but it is relatively rare. In material\nculture, it is ubiquitous. Humans are just very good at adopting\nwhatever artifact will accomplish their purposes, regardless of its\nproper function. Stop a random person in the street and ask—she\nwill have a story. Intentionalist approaches have more difficulty\nmaking this distinction, because for these views human intentions are\nthe only mechanism for establishing functions, and this elides the\ndistinction unless some difference can be discerned in the intentions\nthemselves. Authors who have discussed this issue recently include\nWybo Houkes and Pieter Vermaas (2010), Beth Preston (2013) and Simon\nEvnine (2016). Another problem is accounting for malfunction. Just as\nany theory of representation must account for misrepresentation, any\ntheory of function must say something about cases of failure to\nperform, and whether or not that failure is a malfunction or something\nelse. Addressing this issue depends to some extent on the distinction\nbetween proper and non-proper functions, because malfunction only\nseems an appropriate designation in the case of failure to perform a\nproper function—failure to do what the artifact is supposed to\ndo, in other words. This issue is especially important for the\nphilosophy of technology and engineering side of the artifact debates,\nwhere understanding the epistemology of problem solving and innovation\ndepends in part on understanding failure to function and how to learn\nfrom and deal with it. Authors who have covered this issue include\nNeander (1995), Baker (2007), Franssen (2006; 2009), Houkes and\nVermaas (2010) and Kroes (2012).","\nA third problem is how to account for the functions—if\nany—of novel prototypes. Non-intentional accounts have more\ndifficulty in this case, for a truly novel prototype has no history of\nselection and reproduction; and if it does not work, as many\nprototypes in fact do not, then function established in terms of\nsystemic causal role or physicochemical capacities is not possible\neither. This problem is one of the main motivations for\nMillikan’s (1984) introduction of derived proper function, since\ndesigner intention seems to be the only way unsuccessful novel\nprototypes could acquire any kind of function at all. The\nnon-intentionalist then is caught between biting the\nbullet—unsuccessful novel prototypes just do not have\nfunctions—or introducing an ad hoc intentionalist\nelement. This issue has been canvassed by Preston\n(1998; 2003; 2013), Millikan (1999), Vermaas and Houkes\n(2003) and Kroes (2012). A related problem is how to account for\nso-called phantom functions (Preston 2013)—the functions of\nartifacts that are constitutionally incapable of ever fulfilling them.\nTalismans to ensure fertility, for example, are now widely believed in\nWestern culture to have no efficacy, but it is difficult to escape the\nintuition that ensuring fertility is nevertheless their proper\nfunction. Here again, it is the non-intentionalist who is caught\nflatfooted. Although artifacts like fertility talismans are indeed\nreproduced for a purpose, the standard requirement for establishing\nproper function is that the artifact be selected for reproduction on\nthe basis of successful performance. Similarly, function established\nby systemic causal role requires that the artifact actually perform\nthe relevant causal role. Worse yet, the option of just biting the\nbullet and agreeing that such artifacts have no functions is nowhere\nnear as plausible as in the case of unsuccessful novel prototypes\nbecause of the prevalence of talismans, amulets, religious artifacts,\ninefficacious medicines and supplements, and the like. Authors who\nhave addressed this issue include Griffiths (1993), Preston\n(1998; 2013), Thomasson (2009), Parsons (2016) and Holm\n(2017)."],"subsection_title":"2.3 Artifact Functions"},{"content":["\nMany works of art are typical artifacts, ontologically no more or less\nmysterious than hats or hacksaws. Vermeer’s Girl with a\nPearl Earring has extraordinary aesthetic qualities, but\notherwise it is just a concrete, spatiotemporal object, created by\nsomeone and straightforwardly subject to change and destruction. Not\nso with Amy Beach’s Gaelic Symphony, which we hesitate\nto identify with its performances, singly or collectively, and which\ntherefore does not appear to be located in time and space. However, it\ndoes purport to have a creator, and may perhaps be destroyed if all\ntraces of its performances and scores are wiped away. A symphony is a\nso-called repeatable work of art, that is, a work with multiple\ninstances. Performance arts of all kinds fall into this category, but\nso do cast sculptures, limited edition prints, art photographs, films,\nand the like. So understanding the ontology of repeatable works is a\ncentral task for philosophy of art.","\nThe initial difficulty is that such works do not fit neatly into the\nstandard ontological bifurcation between concrete, spatiotemporal\nobjects such as hats and hacksaws and abstract, eternal objects such\nas numbers and sets. Like concrete objects, but unlike abstract\nobjects, repeatable works of art appear to be created and may change\nor be destroyed. Unlike concrete objects, but like abstract objects,\nthey do not appear to be located in space and time. Amie Thomasson\n(1999; 2004; 2006) sought to resolve this difficulty by proposing an\nintermediate ontological category of abstract artifacts—abstract\nin that they are not located in space and time; artifactual in that\nthey are intentionally created and can be destroyed. Thomasson\noriginally proposed this new category as part of her theory of\nfictional characters, but she noted its usefulness to the analysis of\nthe literary works those characters inhabit, repeatable works of art\nin general, and perhaps other social objects as well. (For application\nto repeatable works of art, see the essays in Art and Abstract\nObjects (Mag Uidhir 2012). Applications to other social objects\ninclude software (Irmak 2012), establishments (Korman 2020), and\nnormativity (Frugé 2022).)","\nHowever, further difficulties beset the positing of abstract\nartifacts. It is commonly thought that abstract objects are not just\nnon-spatiotemporal, but non-causal. Our causal commerce is with their\ninstances, not with the abstract objects themselves. But this makes it\nhard to understand how abstract objects could possibly be created.\nErik Satie could certainly create an instance of his\nGymnopédies by playing it on his piano, but it is\nunclear in what sense he could be the author of this musical work as\nan abstract object separate from its instances. According to Jerrold\nLevinson (1980), the last decades of the 20th century saw a\nnear consensus that musical works are abstract objects of a more\nfamiliar sort—structural types that exist eternally and without\nchange, independent of their instances in the causally governed,\nspatiotemporal realm. A leading objection to this consensus is that\ncomposers cannot then bring their works into existence, contrary to\ncommon sense. So the music ontologist faces a dilemma—give up on\nthe idea that musical works are abstract structural types, or explain\nhow the composer can reasonably be said to create musical works even\nthough the abstract structural types that comprise them are already in\nexistence. This difficulty generalizes to other repeatable types of\nartworks that are held to be abstract objects. But most importantly,\ncharacterizing repeatable artworks as abstract artifacts does not\nallow the ontologist to escape this difficulty. Abstract artifacts do\nnot belong to the causal realm of space and time any more than their\neternal and changeless cousins do. So simply saying that they are\nartifacts, and therefore created and destroyed like all other\nartifacts, does not by itself explain how this creation and\ndestruction is possible.","\nResponses run the gamut. Julian Dodd (2000) bites the bullet and\nargues that musical works are discovered, not created. Levinson (1980)\nfamously proposes that composers create musical works by selecting\namong and indicating pre-existing abstract sound structures and\npreferred performance means. In western classical music, for example,\nthese indications are embodied in the written score for the work,\nwhich guides the production of instances. However, abstract artifacts,\nby hypothesis, do not pre-exist the creative acts of authors, so they\ncannot be created by Levinson’s selection-and-indication\nprocess. A popular alternative involves the metaphysical relationship\nof existential dependence. On this view, repeatable works of art have\na dependence base, typically consisting of an author’s mental\nand physical acts which bring an initial instance of the work into\nexistence, subsequent copies of that instance that sustain the work,\nand an audience capable of appreciating and interpreting those\ninstances. The work itself is an abstract artifact, dependent on, but\nexisting separately from, these acts and instances. It begins when\nthey begin and ends when they all cease or are destroyed. Nurbay Irmak\n(2021) argues that existential dependence allows for a non-causal type\nof creation. The artist engages in causal relations with concrete\nobjects and by so doing non-causally creates the dependent abstract\nartifact. Lee Walters (2013), on the other hand, argues that some\nabstract objects can enter into causal relationships, so the process\nof creating an existentially dependent abstract artifact might\nconceivably qualify as ordinary causal creation.","\nThese difficulties have prompted some philosophers to avoid the moves\nthat generate them. An early such attempt is Guy Rohrbaugh’s\n(2003) view that works of art are not abstract objects at all, but\nrather historical individuals—non-physical entities\nontologically dependent on a physical series of historically and\ncausally linked physical objects. For example, a photograph is a\nnon-physical entity dependent on its “embodiments” in a negative\nand subsequent prints. In a more recent proposal, Christy Mag\nUidhir (2013) argues that works of art must have authors, but that\nneither discovery, nor indication of abstract structures, nor\nexistential dependence satisfies the requirements for authorship. He\nconcludes that repeatable works of art cannot be abstract objects of\nany kind, but must rather be ordinary concrete objects. Their apparent\nrepeatability does not mean that they are instances of an abstract\nwork, but only that they bear relevant similarity to one another. In a\nrelated vein, Allan Hazlett (2012) claims that there are no repeatable\nartworks. If there were, he says, they would have to be abstract\nobjects. But abstract objects have all their intrinsic properties\nessentially, whereas artworks typically do not. For example, Alvin\nAiley’s major work, Revelations, premiered as a 10\nsection work lasting an hour, but evolved into a half hour long piece\nin three sections. So, clearly, many of its original properties were\nnot essential to it. Hazlett concludes that apparent repetitions are\nnot instances of an abstract object. They are either separate, similar\nartworks, or copies of an original.","\nThe discussion of abstract artifacts has been largely confined to the\nontology of art. But as some of the participants have noted (e.g.,\nLevinson 1980, 21–22), repeatable works are not confined to\nworks of art. This is particularly clear for named artifacts such as\nChanel No. 5, the Ford F-150, Campbell’s tomato soup, Earl Grey\ntea, the Hepplewhite chair, or the Washington quarter. It is possible\nto see each bottle of Chanel No. 5 or each quarter not as a\ndistinctive artifact in its own right, but as an instance of an\nabstract artifact—Chanel No. 5 tout court, or the\nWashington quarter. Apart from marketing and branding concerns, what\ndoes the naming of such ordinary artifacts accomplish? It highlights\ntheir standardization, and often designates the entity responsible for\nmaintaining it—Ford, in the case of the F-150, for instance. But\nstandardization is a virtually universal feature of human artifacts,\nfrom the Acheulean handaxe to the Apple MacBook Air. There are\nvanishingly few artifacts that are unique in the way non-repeatable\nartworks like paintings are supposed to be. Failed prototypes that\nwere never reproduced might be an example. This means that we are\npotentially swimming in abstract artifacts, with all the philosophical\ndifficulties that would entail. This, in turn, highlights views\nopposed to the positing of abstract artifacts, which are more\nplausible in the case of everyday artifacts. We resist thinking of\nperformances of Beach’s Gaelic Symphony as separate,\nrelevantly similar artifacts because we are used to thinking of\nsymphonies as unique, individual works. But the Washington\nquarter does not seem like a work in the same sense, and there is thus\nless reason to resist the idea that individual quarters are just\nrelevantly similar artifacts produced by a copying process managed by\nthe United States Mint. In this regard, we might consider that the\nnotion of the work, functioning as a regulatory concept for the arts,\nis arguably neither universal nor of ancient lineage, even in the\nwestern tradition (Goehr 1993). In short, the time may be ripe\nfor the discussion of abstract artifacts to be expanded to cover\nartifacts in general, perhaps with different outcomes than in its\nnative context."],"subsection_title":"2.4 Abstract Artifacts"}]},{"main_content":["\nThe metaphysics of artifacts is a fairly well delineated set of\ndiscussions, carried out by a fairly cohesive group of philosophers.\nIn contrast, the epistemology of artifacts is more interdisciplinary\nin nature, ranging over anthropology, archaeology, cognitive science,\nand psychology, in addition to philosophy. Within philosophy it runs\nthe gamut from environmental philosophy to philosophy of mind.\n Section 3.1\n returns in more detail to the methodological considerations already\nbroached in\n Section 2.2.\n Section 3.2 takes up issues concerning artifacts as objects of\nknowledge. Finally,\n Section 3.3\n covers issues arising in studies of cognition in which artifacts are\npresented as playing significant and sometimes controversial roles in\ncognitive processes themselves."],"section_title":"3. Epistemology","subsections":[{"content":["\nReydon’s identification of an epistemological turn in our\nunderstanding of kinds and categories leads to a new question about\nthe category “artifact”. Rather than only asking whether\nit carves the world at a joint, we can also ask: Is it serving our\nepistemic purposes well? A number of authors have argued that\n“artifact” is methodologically counterproductive. Dan\nSperber (2007, 136–137) claims that it is not a useful\ncategory for the purposes of a naturalistic social science.","\n\n\nI have tried to cast doubt on the idea that a theoretically useful\nnotion of artifact can be built around its usual prototypes:\nbracelets, jars, hammers, and other inert objects, or that it can be\ndefined in a more systematic way…. There is no good reason why\na naturalistic social science should treat separately, or even give\npride of place to, cultural productions that are both more clearly\nintended for a purpose and more thoroughly designed by humans, that\nis, to prototypical artifacts. (Sperber 2007, 137)\n","\nSperber’s main argument for this conclusion, as we noted in\n Section 1,\n is based on the continuum problem. But Sperber also suggests that in\nfocusing on paradigmatic artifacts as the basis for our\ncategorization, we are allowing ourselves to be epistemologically\ndisadvantaged by “a doubly obsolete industrial-age revival of a\nPaleolithic categorization” (2007, 136). In the\nPaleolithic, before there were any domesticates other than dogs, the\n(few) technologies people used in their daily lives were\nparadigmatic artifacts—stone tools, baskets, beads, and so on.\nSo, Sperber speculates, we evolved a psychological disposition to\nclassify things in accordance with the predominance of such artifacts.\nWe then retained this disposition right through the Neolithic\ntransition to agriculture 12,000 years ago, which made biological\nartifacts (as Sperber calls domesticates) proportionally the most\ncommon type of artifact in human experience until the Industrial\ntransition of only a couple of centuries ago. This is the first sense\nin which our “artifact” category is obsolete. Second,\nSperber argues, information technology has increasingly contributed to\nour environment artifacts that would have astonished Aristotle with\ntheir ability to act on their own, beyond any intention their creators\nmay have. Simultaneously, biotechnology has made impressing our\nintentions on our biological artifacts increasingly effective. These\ncountervailing trends further reduce the dominance of erstwhile\nparadigmatic artifacts in our lives. This is the second sense in which\nour “artifact” category is obsolete. In short, Sperber\nseems to suggest, if we cannot shake the Paleolithic urge to center\nthe “artifact” category on the paradigmatic bracelets and\njars, we should jettison the category altogether, for the sake of an\nepistemologically adequate social science.","\nBeth Preston (2013, 4–7) declines to use the term\n“artifact”, opting instead for the more open-ended\n“material culture”. The initial problem she identifies is\nthat phenomena of interest from the point of view of human interaction\nwith the environment do not divide naturally into interactions with\nartifacts and interactions with other sorts of things. We noted an\nexample of this in\n Section 1—intentionally\n made paths, which do qualify as artifacts, are used in the same way\nas unintentionally made paths. It thus seems methodologically\nwrongheaded to rule the unintentionally made path out of consideration\non a definitional technicality. Similarly, residues such as sawdust,\nwhey, or fingerprints often enter into human practices in important\nways, but a focus on artifacts as traditionally defined may leave\nthese phenomena out of account as well. Preston also argues that it is\nprecisely the central concepts in a field of investigation that should\nbe left open-ended, on pain of epistemic distortion of the results.\nFor example, defining “mind” very strictly might have\nruled the extended mind debate out in advance.","\nSteven Vogel (2003; 2015) argues that no good sense can be made\nof the artifact-nature distinction, making it unfit for the purposes\nof environmental philosophy. His argument unrolls against the backdrop\nof a longstanding controversy in environmental philosophy about the\nvalue of ecological restoration—the practice of restoring areas\ndamaged by mining, industrial waste and the like to something as close\nas possible to the condition they were in before the damage was done.\nThe ontological status of such sites has been challenged on the\ngrounds that such restoration does not actually restore nature but\nrather creates an artifact (Katz 1997). Worse yet, this artifact is\npassed off as nature, so it is a fake (Elliot 1997). This casts doubt\non the ethical and political value of ecological restoration as an\nenvironmental practice. Vogel responds by questioning the unspoken\nassumption that environmental philosophy is about nature, and\nenvironmental activism about protecting nature from human activity. He\nargues that nature conceived as pristine and independent in this way\ndoes not exist—certainly not now that human activity is global\nin its effects, as Bill McKibben (1989) noted long ago, but in\nprinciple, since humans, like all other living things, change their\nenvironment simply by living in it. On Vogel’s view,\nenvironmental philosophy is about just that—the environment,\nboth built and not-so-built, and what we should do to ensure that it\nis the environment we want and need, not only for ourselves but for\nother beings as well.","\nThe important point for our purposes, though, is that Vogel’s\npost-nature environmental philosophy rests on a full-throated\nrejection of the nature-artifact categorization. He begins with the\nclaim that our concepts of nature—already multiple, and not\nalways carefully distinguished—are riddled with\nantinomy-generating ambiguities. The epistemological backwash leaves\nus mired in nostalgia, unable to see and address environmental\nproblems as they actually exist. In particular, we are unable to see\nthat ecological restoration does not produce artifacts by the\ntraditional definition, since restored areas are designed precisely to\nescape our designs and outrun our intentions. They are thus\n“wild” in a perfectly straightforward sense. Furthermore,\nVogel argues, all human productions, including artifacts, are wild in\nthis sense. Rather than focusing on unintentional creations, as\nPreston and Sperber tend to do, Vogel emphasizes the ways in which\nartifacts outrun all our creative intentions.","\n\n\nBuilding an artifact requires black boxes all the way down: to\ndesign and build anything requires presupposing a whole set of\nprocesses that one does not design, and whose operation beyond\none’s understanding and intention is necessary for building to\ntake place. There is a gap, in the construction of every\nartifact, between the intention with which the builder acts and the\nconsequences of her acts, a gap that is ineliminable and indeed\nconstitutive of what it is to construct something, and in this gap\nresides something like what I earlier called wildness. (Vogel\n2015, 113)\n","\nThus the traditional definition of\n“artifact”—something intentionally made for a\npurpose—while true as far as it goes, merely skates over the\nsurface, leaving us at an epistemological disadvantage with regard to\nthe full range and depth of the phenomena."],"subsection_title":"3.1 Methodology"},{"content":["\nVogel’s position on environmental ethics resonates in an\ninteresting way with a much earlier dispute about\nreference—specifically, about whether our capacity to refer to\ndifferent kinds of artifacts is grounded in a definite description of\nwhat being a member of that kind requires, or rather in a historical\nconnection to a “baptismal” event in which someone slapped\na label on something and declared that label henceforth applicable to\nthings of that sort. Hilary Putnam (1975) famously favors the\nbaptismal account for both natural kinds and artifact kinds. Steven\nSchwartz (1978) challenges Putnam’s account in the case of\nartifacts. He agrees with Putnam that the “baptismal”\naccount is correct for natural kinds, because they have hidden natures\nto which we are not necessarily privy. Thus if we are to refer to\nnatural objects reliably at all, it cannot be by way of definite\ndescription. But artifacts, Schwartz says, have publicly accessible\nnatures based on form and function, so reference to them is grounded\nin description rather than a baptismal event. Amie Thomasson\n(2003; 2007b) carves out a nuanced position based on her view\nthat the intentions and concepts of human makers are constitutive of\nartifact kinds\n (Section 2.2\n above). If so, then some makers are in an epistemically privileged\nposition with regard to given artifacts, and so do refer to them in\nvirtue of having a substantive concept of what being an artifact of\nthat kind involves. Thomasson acknowledges that most speakers are not\nin this epistemically privileged position. Users are not, and even\nmany who qualify as makers in the causal sense—workers on a\nproduction line, for instance—may not be. So Thomasson’s\nview, unlike Schwartz’s, is not a return to a purely descriptive\ntheory of reference for artifact terms, but rather a hybrid theory.\nHilary Kornblith (2007) argues against Thomasson that she has still\nnot demonstrated any essential connection between makers’\nsubstantive concepts of artifacts and reference. On the one hand, in\ncases where a type of artifact is no longer used for the purpose the\nmaker intended, the users’ concept would seem decisive. On the\nother hand, having the concept is arguably the result of familiarity\nwith the artifact rather than any special semantic capacity enjoyed by\nmakers. Similarly, Kornblith (1980) argues against Schwartz that the\nfunction of artifacts is not necessarily accessible—a problem\nfaced frequently by archaeologists, for instance—and thus that\neven in cases of objects where the form and function are familiar, it\nis not this familiarity that grounds the ability to refer. The\nbaptismal account of reference therefore must apply to both artifacts\nand natural objects, just as Putnam said. Such semantic parity between\nartifacts and natural objects, which rejects any privilege for\nmakers’ intentions, echoes Vogel’s view that artifacts and\nnatural objects are equally “wild”, because artifacts\noutrun their makers’ intentions in practice, just as surely as\nnatural objects outrun human intentions in principle.","\nMuch of the epistemology of artifacts is, in the first instance, the\nprovince of cognitive psychology, not philosophy. Artifact kinds, for\ninstance, can be approached from the side of psychology rather than\nmetaphysics, yielding theories about the psychological mechanisms by\nmeans of which we group artifacts together, apart from any question of\nwhether these groupings represent reality (Malt & Sloman 2007a).\nIn an influential article, Paul Bloom (1996) argues that we cannot\ncategorize artifacts based on form, use, or function. Form and use are\nboth too variable to be reliable. Beanbag chairs do not look much like\nother chairs, and even if every flatiron in existence were currently\nbeing used as a doorstop, we would not want to categorize them as\ndoorstops. Experiments show that even intended function is neither\nnecessary nor sufficient for categorization (Malt & Johnson 1992).\nVary the form of something sufficiently, and people will decline to\ncategorize it as a chair even if it is made to be sat on. On the other\nhand, present them with something that looks like a chair but is made\nto be a plant stand, and they will still categorize it as a chair. In\nresponse, Bloom proposes an intentional-historical theory, according\nto which categorization of artifacts depends on our being able to\ninfer that an artifact was successfully made with the intention that\nit belong to a particular category. Form and use are good grounds for\nsuch inferences, and this explains our intuition that these factors\nhave something to do with how we categorize artifacts. So if something\nlooks like a chair and we regularly observe people sitting on it, we\nreasonably infer it was made with the intention that it be a chair,\nand we categorize it accordingly. (Bloom’s view is clearly\nancestral to Amie Thomasson’s account of artifact kinds\n (Section 2.2),\n but he is concerned only to explain how we group artifacts, and does\nnot claim, as Thomasson does, that makers’ intentions and\nconcepts are ontologically constitutive of artifact kinds.) Barbara\nMalt and Eric Johnson (1998) criticize Bloom for failing to make clear\neither why we would need to resort to creator’s intention to\ncategorize artifacts, or exactly how we might assess that intention.\nMore recently, Malt and Steven Sloman (2007a; 2007b) have argued\nthat the kind of essentialist approach represented by Bloom’s\ntheory is misguided, and have proposed an alternative, pragmatic\napproach. In a series of experiments, they show that artifact\ncategorization is sensitive to communicative goals in specific\nsituations. Creators’ intentions are important with regard to\nsome goals and situations; unimportant with regard to others. If this\napproach is on the right track, artifact kinds are not psychologically\nstable or clearly demarcated groupings. Moreover, this raises the\npossibility that “categorization” itself is not a\npsychological natural kind. It may be that this label is used for what\nis actually a heterogeneous collection of processes.","\nDevelopmental issues with regard to our concepts of\n“artifact” and specific kinds of artifacts also loom large\nin cognitive psychology. As philosophers might anticipate, the\nunderlying general issue is between empiricist and nativist approaches\nto concept acquisition. But the now vast experimental literature on\nchild development means that theories in this area are both numerous\nand highly sophisticated. An empiricist-oriented theory that stands\nout is Jean Mandler’s (2004; 2007) comprehensive perceptual\nmeaning analysis view, according to which children construct abstract\nimage schemas on the basis of their perceptual experience, especially\ntheir experience of motion. Since artifacts and animals move in\ncharacteristically different ways, the first level of differentiation\nthese image schemas provide is vague, global concepts of these two\ntypes of objects. Mandler holds that there is no good reason to think\nthese concepts are innate, nor is there any good reason to think that\nthe perceptual meaning analysis mechanisms that produce them are\ndomain specific. All that is innate, on her view, is a domain-general\nmechanism that enables the child to analyze her perceptual input.\nMandler’s work also indicates that artifacts may be first\ndifferentiated into indoor and outdoor, and only then into more\nspecific kinds such as furniture and kitchen utensils, on the one\nhand, and vehicles and buildings, on the other. The nativist\nalternative to Mandler’s theory is best represented by Susan\nCarey’s equally comprehensive “core cognition”\ntheory. Carey (2009, 194–196) has a characteristically\nnativist critique of Mandler. On the face of it, Mandler’s image\nschemas represent features of motion and the paths motions describe\nthrough space. However, Carey argues, there is no explanation of how\nthe child gets from these representations to a representation of\nagency, for example. No matter how distinctive the motions of animals,\nthey do not by themselves yield concepts of intention, attention, or\ngoal-directedness. On Carey’s view, these concepts must be\ninnate in the form of “core knowledge” (Spelke 2000), or\n“core cognition”, as Carey prefers to call it in her more\nrecent work. Core cognition is characterized by innate,\ndomain-specific mechanisms for the analysis of perceptual input,\ndesigned by natural selection to construct domain-specific\nrepresentations of the world, such as intention in the agent domain,\nor causality in the object domain. Both of these domains of core\ncognition are essential for the development of artifact concepts,\nbecause on Carey’s view (Kelemen & Carey 2007) we\nconceptualize artifacts as objects that have been intentionally\ndesigned to carry out a specific function. The developmental issue,\nthen, boils down to the question of whether we can construct artifact\nconcepts with only a single, domain-general mechanism for analyzing\nperceptual input, or whether we need at least two domain-specific\nmechanisms with quite different output."],"subsection_title":"3.2 Knowing Artifacts"}]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nA standard philosophical definition of\\n“artifact”—often assumed even when not explicitly\\nstated—is that artifacts are objects made intentionally, in\\norder to accomplish some purpose (Hilpinen 1992; 2011). This\\ndefinition is rooted ultimately in Aristotle’s distinction\\nbetween things that exist by nature and things that exist by craft\\n(Metaphysics 1033a ff., Nicomachean Ethics 1140a\\nff., Physics 192b ff.). Those that exist by nature have their\\norigin in themselves, whereas those that exist by craft have their\\norigin in the craftsperson—specifically, in the form of the\\nthing as it exists in the mind of the maker. Both Aristotle and his\\ncontemporary descendants are primarily concerned to distinguish\\nartifacts from objects that occur naturally, without any human\\nintervention.\",\n \"\\nOn this standard definition, artifacts must satisfy three conditions.\\nThey must be intentionally produced, thus ruling out unintended\\nby-products of intentional actions, such as the shavings that result\\nfrom woodcarving, as well as all naturally occurring objects, such as\\nsalamanders and stars. They must involve modification of materials,\\nthus ruling out naturally occurring objects even when used\\nintentionally for a purpose, such as sticks thrown to amuse your dog.\\nAnd they must be produced for a purpose. This rules out intentionally\\nmodified objects that are nevertheless not intended to accomplish any\\nfurther goal, such as the scraps produced when you intentionally, but\\nfor no particular reason, tear up a piece of paper before throwing it\\naway. Presumably, then, these three conditions are intended to be\\nindividually necessary and jointly sufficient to distinguish artifacts\\nfrom naturally occurring objects.\",\n \"\\nThree remarks about this definition are in order. First, it does not\\nrule out the possibility that at least some things made by non-human\\nanimals are artifacts. Spider webs do have a purpose, for instance,\\nand are clearly made rather than naturally occurring. But we may\\nhesitate to attribute intention to the spiders, given the instinctive\\nnature of their web-weaving behavior. Beavers, on the other hand,\\nmight be thought to intentionally construct dams in order to create\\nponds. This implication of the standard definition fits well with the\\nburgeoning evidence for sophisticated cognition among non-human\\nanimals in general, and their ability to manufacture and use tools and\\nother structures in particular (Shumaker, Walkup, & Beck 2011;\\nGould & Gould 2007). This is an important area of research in\\nethology and comparative psychology. However, for the purposes of this\\narticle we will focus on human artifacts.\",\n \"\\nSecond, many things we would not ordinarily label as artifacts in\\nEnglish might nevertheless count under this definition. We usually\\nreserve the term “artifact” for tangible, durable objects\\nsuch as an archaeologist might unearth. But objects made intentionally\\nfor a purpose include many that are ephemeral or abstract. Candidates\\ninclude musical performances (Dipert 1993), belief systems\\n(Hilpinen 1995), actions and languages (Evnine 2016), software (Irmak\\n2012), normativity (Frugé 2022), establishments such as\\nrestaurants (Korman 2020), and artifact types (Reicher\\n2022). \",\n \"\\nFinally, this definition is peculiar to philosophers (Hilpinen 2011;\\nDipert 2014). In other disciplines the concern is more to investigate\\ncognition and behavior involving objects quite generally, without\\ncarving out a domain of artifacts having special ontological status.\\nPsychologists, for instance, are interested in how children develop\\ncategorizations of things, including artifacts as opposed to\\nnon-artifacts. But there is some evidence that notions of intention or\\nfunction enter into this development only at quite a late stage, and\\nthat young children make relevant distinctions more on the basis of\\nperceptual features such as shape or movement patterns (Keil, Greif,\\n& Kerner 2007). Thus the standard philosophical definition of\\n“artifact” might well be more of a hindrance than a help\\nin the context of such investigations. Archaeologists and\\nanthropologists, on the other hand, are concerned with the roles\\nobjects play in cultural processes quite generally. From this point of\\nview, a discarded flint chip is just as important as the hide scraper\\nfrom which it was struck, because debitage analysis—the study of\\nsuch chips and other production debris—is invaluable for\\nreconstructing knapping techniques and other aspects of production\\nprocesses, including their cognitive underpinnings (Shott 2015; Schick\\n& Toth 1993). Similarly, a sharp-edged shell used without\\nmodification as a hide scraper is just as important as the\\npurpose-made flint scraper for understanding the culture in question.\\nIn these disciplines “artifact” tends to be absorbed into\\n“material culture”—a much broader category—and\\nis usually understood to include anything made and/or used by\\nhumans (Preston 2013; Kipfer 2007). As the examples above demonstrate,\\nthe making need not be intentional and the use need not involve\\nmodification of the object used. And if any objects of cultural\\nsignificance are devoid of purpose or function, that condition of the\\nphilosophical definition, too, would fall by the wayside.\\nConsequently, as the anthropologist Daniel Miller notes:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nThere is little point in attempting to distinguish systematically\\nbetween a natural world and an artefactual one, except when we are\\nconcerned with the ways in which terms such as “natural”\\nmay have particular consequences or entailments, as when a commodity\\nin the shops is labelled “natural” simply because a single\\ningredient, such as a chemical dye, has been deleted, or when\\nsomething as apparently natural as radiation is taken to be\\nantithetical to true “nature”. (Miller 1994, 398)\\n\",\n \"\\nFrom the perspective of other disciplines, then, the philosophical\\ninsistence on a strict definition of “artifact” aimed at a\\nbright-line distinction between naturally occurring objects and\\nartifacts may well appear parochial.\",\n \"\\nThis extra-disciplinary observation points us directly to the central\\nproblem for the standard philosophical definition of\\n“artifact”. Along all three definitional dimensions we\\nencounter a continuum of cases (Koslicki 2018; Grandy 2007;\\nSperber 2007). Paths, for example, are often created unintentionally\\njust in virtue of people repeatedly traveling along the same straight\\nline between points A and B—your kitchen and\\nyour vegetable garden, say. But what is the point of saying that such\\na path is not an artifact, whereas an identical one that was created\\nintentionally by exactly the same process is? Moreover, what would it\\ntake to make the erstwhile non-artifactual path into an artifact?\\nWould it be enough to notice and approve it? Or would I have to\\nintentionally maintain it, by sweeping it clean of leaves, for\\ninstance?\",\n \"\\nSimilar difficulties arise with regard to modification, which is\\nclearly a matter of degree. If I bring an attractive shell home from a\\nwalk on the beach and put it to use as a paperweight, does the\\ntransport count as modification? If not, would washing the shell\\nbefore using it be enough? Or polishing it to bring out the color of\\nits markings? A further complication is that many uses to which\\nnaturally occurring objects are put cause modifications. An unmodified\\nstone used as a hammer soon acquires a spherical shape (Schick &\\nToth 1993, 130 ff.). At what point did it first count as\\nmodified, since even the first strike would break off some fragments?\\nOr do these use-induced modifications not count for satisfying the\\ndefinition at all? If not, why not? The stone is certainly being used\\nintentionally for a purpose, so the rest of the definition is\\nsatisfied.\",\n \"\\nFinally, Dan Sperber (2007) argues that even function is continuous\\nbetween nature and culture. He begins with the observation that what\\nhe calls biological artifacts—domesticated plants and animals,\\nfor the most part—have both biological and cultural functions.\\nBut they carry out their cultural functions in virtue of carrying out\\ntheir biological functions, and vice versa. Take seedless\\ngrapes. Their seedlessness might seem to make them purely artifactual,\\nsince the reproductive function of the fruit appears to be lost along\\nwith the seeds. But in fact, Sperber argues, the fruit retains the\\nbiological function of attracting us to eat the fruit and then spread\\nthe plant—not by dispersing seeds, as with seeded grapes, but by\\npropagating the grapevines vegetatively. This coincidence of\\nbiological and cultural functions in domesticates shows that far from\\nbeing the locus of a divide between nature and culture, the realm of\\ndomestication is the locus of their imperceptible merger.\",\n \"\\nSperber concludes that “artifact” as a theoretical term\\ncannot be usefully defined, as any attempt to do so will be\\nfrustrated by the continua detailed above. We may call this the\\ncontinuum problem. This concern is echoed by Kathrin Koslicki (2018),\\nwho notes that the common reliance on creators’ intentional activity\\nto distinguish artifacts from naturally occurring objects inevitably\\nleaves us with objects such as unintended by-products and naturally\\noccurring objects pressed into service for human purposes which\\ndo not seem to fall readily into either category. She does not\\nthink that current approaches in metaphysics have the resources\\nto deal with such puzzles about artifacts, and concludes that further\\ndevelopment of these approaches is necessary. For\\nSperber—whose training is in anthropology—the lesson is\\nthat the social sciences simply do not need “artifact” as\\na term of art. But philosophers, and some other social scientists,\\nhave reacted to the continuum problem by doubling down on their\\nclassification efforts. Risto Hilpinen (2011), following the\\nanthropologist Wendell Oswalt (1973; 1976), uses the term\\n“naturefact” for naturally occurring objects used\\nintentionally, but without modification, for some purpose. Naturefacts\\nthus lie between naturally occurring objects and artifacts on the\\ncontinuum. Hilpinen also suggests that what he calls\\n“residue”—modified but unintended by-products of\\nproductive activity, such as sawdust—are a conceptually distinct\\ncategory of objects also lying somewhere between artifacts and\\nnaturally occurring objects. (A terminological note: in archaeology,\\n“naturefact” is more usually used to mean an object that\\nis in fact the result of purely natural processes, but is difficult to\\ndistinguish from an intentionally modified object. This is a problem\\nthat bedevils paleoarchaeologists studying stone tools, in particular\\n(Schnurrenberger & Bryan 1985). Archaeologists also\\nsometimes distinguish artifacts from ecofacts—organic or\\ninorganic remains of archaeological significance that have undergone\\nno, or minimal, modification by humans, such as animal bones, stored\\ngrain, pollen, charcoal, and the like. Naturefacts and residues in\\nHilpinen’s sense are usually included in the ecofact\\ncategory.)\",\n \"\\nRandall Dipert (1993) proposes a slightly different, triadic\\nclassification.\",\n \"\\nThis continuum problem for artifacts is really just a version of a\\nwell-known problem besetting classification schemes in the natural and\\nsocial sciences. The traditional assumption was that classification is\\nan exclusively ontological operation. What we are doing, it is often\\nsaid, is carving the world at its joints. On this assumption, a\\ncontinuum is a problem because it suggests that there are no joints to\\nguide our carving efforts. A continuum is thus incompatible with\\nclassification schemes understood as grounded solely in objective\\nfeatures of the world, and with essentialist understandings of natural\\nkinds. We can, of course, carve the continuum up any way we like, but\\nthis must be understood as in part a pragmatic operation, not a\\nstrictly ontological one reflecting only the fixed essences of things.\\nThis problem has loomed large in discussions of natural kinds in\\nphilosophy of science, as bothersome continua are increasingly\\nidentified in both natural and social sciences. Muhammad Khalidi\\n(2013, Chapter 5) details cases in the chemical, biological,\\nphysiological and social sciences where widely accepted kinds are\\n“fuzzy”, or have graded membership, for instance. In\\nresponse, he advocates an account of natural kinds that incorporates\\nthe influence of human interests and epistemic concerns, while still\\ninsisting that these interests and concerns are constrained by\\nobjective features of the world identifiable by science.\\nKhalidi’s account joins a growing list of non-essentialist\\naccounts of natural kinds, according to which kinds are real, but\\ntheir reality does not require that they be defined in total isolation\\nfrom human beings, their activities, interests, epistemic projects,\\npragmatic concerns, and so on (Dupré 1993; Boyd 1999; Reydon\\n2014; Kendig 2016).\",\n \"\\nUnderstood in this way, classification schemes such as those proposed\\nby Hilpinen and Dipert could, in principle, constitute a perfectly\\nadequate response to the continuum problem. It would, of course, be\\nnice to have a commonly accepted scheme in philosophy—or better\\nyet, a scheme shared with the other disciplines that study artifacts\\nand material culture. But even failing that, classification schemes\\ngrounded in clear methodological considerations would be helpful, even\\nif the methodological considerations varied from scheme to scheme.\\nUnfortunately, it appears that the main consideration driving the\\nschemes proposed so far is merely the desire to shore up the\\ntraditional ontological distinction between artifacts and naturally\\noccurring objects. This leaves the methodological challenge voiced by\\nSperber and Miller unanswered. What do we need this distinction for?\\nDoes it help us understand how objects function in human life and\\nculture, or does it actually hinder this understanding? If the latter,\\nwould other distinctions serve us better? The continuum problem does\\nnot, pace Sperber, prove that there are no good\\nmethodological considerations in favor of maintaining the ontological\\ndivide between artifacts and naturally occurring objects. But in light\\nof the “epistemological” (Reydon 2014) or\\n“practice” (Kendig 2016) turn in the recent literature on\\nnatural kinds, it does show that we cannot assume that\\n“artifact” itself is a pure, natural kind, identifiable on\\nontological grounds alone. In short, there is no guarantee that the\\nstandard definition of “artifact” with which we started\\nthis section expresses anything like a traditional essence. We are\\nthus left with more questions than answers in the matter of\\ndefinition.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Definition\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nDiscussions of the metaphysics of artifacts have typically\\narisen only in broader investigative contexts in which they are\\nnot the primary focus of attention. In particular, the metaphysics of\\nordinary objects has generated a significant literature in recent\\nyears, and the puzzles about existence around which it revolves do\\napply to artifacts, but equally to the vast array of other ordinary\\nobjects, like stones, stars, trees, jellyfish and deer. Similarly,\\nreflection on artifact kinds has been largely overshadowed by the vast\\nliterature on natural kinds, and discussions of artifact function\\nexist on the periphery of the much more prominent discussions of\\nbiological function. Finally, questions about the existence of\\nabstract artifacts have arisen in the context of investigations into\\nthe ontology of works of art. We will take up these topics in\\nturn.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Metaphysics\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nSkepticism about the existence of artifacts goes back at least to\\nAristotle. For him, the primary existents are\\nsubstances—independent things on which all other things depend.\\nIndividual things, such as horses or houses, are compounds of matter\\nand form, but it is not entirely clear whether the substance of the\\nthing is the form, the matter, or the compound (Shields 2022). That\\nsaid, Aristotle is clearly ambivalent as to whether artifacts have\\nwhat it takes. In the Physics (192b8–39), for instance,\\nhe says that some things, such as chipmunks or geraniums, exist by\\nnature and that each such thing is a substance. He follows this up in\\nthe Metaphysics (1043b15–25), saying that perhaps\\nonly such things as exist by nature are substances, thus\\nimplying that things made by art, such as pots or pincushions, are\\nnot. Exactly why Aristotle thinks artifacts are not substances is not\\nentirely clear—he suggests different reasons in different places\\n(Katayama 1999, 18–19). But it is clear that he doubts that\\nthey really exist in the full sense enjoyed by things that exist by\\nnature.\",\n \"\\nAristotle’s invidious ontological downgrading of artifacts fed\\nstraight into 20th century trends in metaphysics that\\ntended to downgrade ordinary objects in general (Thomasson 2009). Even\\nafter the baleful anti-metaphysical influence of logical positivism\\nwaned, metaphysics took itself to be merely working out the details of\\nwhat the dominant scientific theories, particularly in physics and\\nbiology, say exists. Since there is no science of artifacts, let alone\\nof sticks and stones and rivers, such ordinary objects had to be\\neliminated from our ontologies. On the radical left fringe of the\\neliminativist spectrum is a startling long list of theorists who deny\\nthe existence of ordinary objects tout court, including even\\nliving organisms and persons (for the list, see Korman\\n2015, 19–23). In the moderate middle are theorists such as\\nTrenton Merricks (2001), who denies the existence of artifacts and\\nother inanimate macrophysical objects, as well as living organisms,\\nwith the exception of humans; Peter van Inwagen (1990), who denies the\\nexistence of artifacts and other inanimate macrophysical objects, but\\naccepts the existence of living organisms, including humans; and Simon\\nEvnine (2016), who denies the existence of inanimate natural objects,\\nbut accepts the existence of artifacts and living organisms.\",\n \"\\nThe arguments for these varieties of eliminativism are themselves\\nvarious, but they revolve around what Daniel Korman\\n(2015, 4–7) calls debunking arguments. Why do we think that\\nordinary objects exist? Only because they correspond to our human\\nneeds and interests, as embodied in our biology and enshrined in our\\ncultural practices. But there is no good reason to think that the\\nobjects we pick out in accordance with our needs and interests\\ncorrespond to the objects that actually exist in reality. Debunking\\narguments go back to the very beginning of Western philosophy.\\nParmenides declared that what truly is—Being, or the\\nOne—cannot be multiple, changing and transient after the fashion\\nof ordinary objects. Plato followed up with the doctrine of the\\neternal and unchanging Forms, which truly exist, and of which ordinary\\nobjects are at best ontologically deficient copies. Thus the idea that\\nwe have no good reason to think that ordinary objects exist is\\nentrenched in our metaphysical tradition.\",\n \"\\nOn the other hand, prima facie grounds for rehabilitating\\nordinary objects also have ancient roots in atomism, which holds that\\nmacrophysical objects are composed of particles which, while multiple,\\ndo meet the other criteria for true being laid down by Parmenides. On\\nthe assumption that composition follows regular principles, then,\\nordinary objects may be said to exist insofar as they are wholes\\ncomposed of existing proper parts. This brings us face to face with\\nwhat Peter van Inwagen (1990, 21 ff.) calls the Special\\nComposition Question—under what conditions do unified\\nwholes arise out of parts? Answering this question has turned out to\\nbe far from simple, and has latterly given rise to mereology, a\\nspecial area of metaphysics devoted to investigating the principles of\\ncomposition. Most of the other main arguments against the existence of\\nartifacts and other ordinary objects reflect problems arising in the\\ncourse of these investigations. For example, there is the material\\nconstitution problem. An artifact such as a cookie is made out of\\ndough. So everywhere there is a cookie there is a coincident lump of\\n(baked) dough, which shares all of its parts with the cookie. But this\\ncoincidence violates our intuitions about the identity of ordinary\\nobjects. Considerations of this sort have been used by van Inwagen\\n(1990, 124 ff.) and others to argue that there are no artifacts.\\nCookie makers do not bring anything new into existence; they merely\\nmove pre-existing elementary things around. Thus, while debunking\\narguments show that we have no good reason to believe ordinary objects\\ndo exist, mereological problems show that we have good\\nreasons to believe they do not.\",\n \"\\nA growing chorus of voices has been raised against this ontological\\ndowngrading of ordinary objects, several of whom have been especially\\nconcerned to rehabilitate artifacts. Lynne Rudder Baker’s\\nMetaphysics of Everyday Life (2007) foregrounds artifacts as\\nparadigmatic examples of existing ordinary objects. Baker subscribes\\nto a constitution view, according to which material things are\\nnon-reductively made up of other material things.\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nThe fundamental idea of constitution is this: when a thing of one\\nprimary kind is in certain circumstances, a thing of another primary\\nkind—a new thing, with new causal powers—comes to exist.\\nWhen an octagonal piece of metal is in circumstances of being painted\\nred with white marks of the shape S-T-O-P, and is in an environment\\nthat has certain conventions and laws, a new thing—a traffic\\nsign—comes into existence. (Baker 2007, 32)\\n\",\n \"\\nImportantly, for Baker artifacts are intention-dependent (ID)\\nobjects—they cannot exist in the absence of beings with relevant\\nintentional states. Thus the cosmic ray striking a sheet of scrap\\nmetal in the proverbial swamp and turning it red with white lettering\\nhas not created any artifact at all, let alone a stop sign. Baker\\nbuilds the intentional states into the specification of the required\\ncircumstances in terms of a relationship between the construction\\nmaterials and the intentions and knowledge of the constructor. For a\\nstop sign to exist, for example, it must be constructed from metal and\\npaint by someone who understands the function of stop signs, knows how\\nto construct one, intends to construct one to fulfill this function,\\nand is reasonably successful in executing her intentions\\n(2007, 53–55). This view puts Baker at odds with\\nAristotle’s view that only things with an internal principle of\\nmovement truly exist, as well as with the common view that ID objects\\ndo not truly exist. Both of these views are aimed at first\\ndistinguishing natural from artificial objects and then downgrading\\nthe latter. Baker argues that the distinction itself is suspect, both\\nin light of technologies such as genetic engineering and the natural\\nstatus of the beings with intentional states who create artifacts\\n(2007, 59–66). In short, the whole process of making\\nartifacts is internal to nature and cannot be legitimately considered\\nseparate from it by those inclined to be judgmental in ontological\\nmatters.\",\n \"\\nSimon Evnine (2016) argues for a version of hylomorphism that is very\\nsimilar to the constitution view espoused by Baker. Evnine abandons\\ntraditional notions of form and focuses instead on the intertwining of\\nthe causes that bring a thing into existence and make it the thing it\\nis. Artifacts thus take pride of place in his metaphysics, because, he\\nclaims, they typically have a specifiable origin in the intentions of\\na maker who chooses material and works it up in accordance with an\\nenvisioned function and shape. Evnine’s account of organisms as\\nexistents rests on an analogy between this paradigmatic intentional\\nmaking and organic development. But he does not try to account for\\nnon-living natural objects, whose existence he denies. On the other\\nhand, Evnine deploys his account of artifacts in an interesting way to\\nargue that actions are artifacts—artifactual events rather than\\nartifactual objects. Higher-level actions such as turning on a light\\nare governed by the agent’s intention and constructed ultimately\\nout of the “matter” of basic, bodily actions.\",\n \"\\nAmie Thomasson (2007a; and for a succinct summary, 2009) takes a\\ndifferent tack, arguing that the existence of artifacts and other\\nordinary objects is established by the connection between our terms on\\nthe one hand, and facts about the world on the other. On her view, the\\nmeaning of our terms includes a specification of the conditions for\\ntheir application. If we then determine empirically that the\\napplication conditions of a term are met, the thing to which it refers\\nexists. For example, “spoon” refers to a utensil\\nintentionally made by humans for the purposes of stirring, serving and\\neating food, consisting of a shallow bowl with a long handle. A quick\\ncheck of any kitchen will assure you that these conditions are in fact\\nsatisfied, and that spoons therefore exist. On the other hand,\\n“devil’s tuning fork” refers to an implement\\nconsisting of three cylindrical prongs on one end and two rectangular\\nprongs on the other, intentionally made by devils for the purpose of\\ntuning their instruments, one would suppose. Check the music studios\\nand the concert halls as thoroughly as you like, you will not find\\nthese conditions satisfied. So devil’s tuning forks do not\\nexist. Thomasson’s approach does not privilege artifacts as\\nparadigmatic existents the way Baker’s and Evnine’s\\naccounts do. But she makes the intention-dependent status of artifacts\\nequally comprehensible, since the intentional states of makers figure\\nprominently in the application conditions of concepts.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.1 Do Artifacts Exist?\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIf artifacts do not exist, then the kinds into which we classify\\nthem—pillow, book, painting, flowerpot—are not real kinds\\non a par with natural kinds, such as oak, owl or anole. But questions\\nabout the reality and nature of artifact kinds also arise for those\\nwho do take artifacts to exist. As we have seen, these theorists\\nresist the objection that the mind-dependence of artifacts compromises\\ntheir ontological status. But this objection resurfaces with regard to\\nartifact kinds. The mind-dependence of artifacts implies, at a\\nminimum, that an account of artifact kinds will be very different from\\nan account of natural kinds. This implication is resisted by Crawford\\nElder (2004; 2007), who seeks to establish the existence of\\nartifacts on the basis of a realist account of kinds. On Elder’s\\nview, artifact kinds and many natural kinds are equally copied kinds,\\nand equally mind-independent. A copied kind is defined by a set of\\nproperties that naturally cluster together—a distinctive shape\\nor make-up, a proper function established by a mechanism that copies\\nthings of that shape on the basis of successful performance, and a\\nhistorically proper placement. For example, cats’ whiskers are\\ndistinctively shaped organs that are copied from cat to cat by a\\nbiologically based reproductive mechanism because they help cats get\\naround in the dark by performing successfully as touch receptors\\nstrategically located with respect to the cat’s other bodily\\nparts. Similarly, floor lamps are distinctively shaped artifacts that\\nare copied from household to household by a socially based\\nreproductive mechanism because they help humans get around in the dark\\nby performing successfully as light sources strategically located with\\nrespect to other household furniture. Human intentional states do, of\\ncourse, figure in the copying process for artifacts. However, Elder\\nargues:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n[C]reation does not begin with the artisan’s intending what he\\ndoes. Rather, the essential properties that his product will inherit\\nstem from a history of function and of copying that began well before\\nthe artisan undertook his work. This history reaches forward through\\nthe artisan’s motions—it shapes his shaping. Its existence\\nand its efficacy are independent, largely or even entirely, of the\\nartisan’s will. (Elder 2004, 142–143)\\n\",\n \"\\nAll copied kinds are thus natural, mind-independent kinds whose\\nclustered features we discover rather than invent.\",\n \"\\nOne acknowledged problem with Elder’s account is that many\\nerstwhile artifact kinds turn out not to be copied kinds. Neckties,\\nfor example, do not qualify because they do not appear to have a\\nproper function (Elder 2004, 158–159). But his account does\\nhave the virtue of drawing out useful analogies between natural kinds\\nand artifact kinds. A number of other accounts also focus on analogies\\nbetween (at least some) natural kinds and (at least some) artifact\\nkinds (Lowe 2014; Franssen & Kroes 2014). The underlying motive\\nfor pushing this analogy, clearly, is the fear that artifact kinds are\\nnot real if human intentional states and/or classificatory practices\\nare constitutive of what kinds there are.\",\n \"\\nAmie Thomasson does not share this fear. In a series of important\\npapers (2003; 2007b; 2014), she points out that realists\\nabout kinds are not, in fact, forced to choose between showing that\\nartifact kinds can be understood on the mind-independent model of\\nnatural kinds, or denying that artifact kinds are real. There is a\\nthird option—denying that mind-independence is the touchstone of\\nreality. Thomasson then builds human intentions and their historical\\nconnections into her account of artifact kinds.\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nNecessarily, for all x and all artifactual kinds K,\\nx is a K only if x is the product of a\\nlargely successful intention that (Kx), where one intends\\n(Kx) only if one has a substantive concept of the nature of\\nKs that largely matches that of some group of prior makers of\\nKs (if there are any) and intends to realize that concept by\\nimposing K-relevant features on the object. (Thomasson\\n2003, 600)\\n\",\n \"\\nThus for Thomasson, human intentions and concepts are actually\\nconstitutive of artifact kinds. Thomasson (2014) also objects to the\\ncommon assumption that concepts of artifact kinds revolve exclusively\\naround intended function. While it is true that in\\nEnglish we often label artifact kinds in accordance with\\nfunction—flashlight, bedspread, pincushion, frying pan, and so\\non—artifacts actually have an array of features that figure in\\ntheir concepts. These include structural or perceptible features, for\\nexample, that are also often reflected in our terms—armchair,\\ntripod, zebra crossing (definitely not a function designation!), fork,\\nand so on. Most importantly for Thomasson, they also include normative\\nfeatures concerned with how that kind of artifact is to be treated or\\nregarded. Although sponges and paper towels can both be used to wipe\\nup spills, it is normal to dispose of the paper towel, but to clean\\nthe sponge and reuse it.\",\n \"\\nA distinct approach to artifact kinds is proposed by Thomas Reydon\\n(2014). He points out that the nature of natural kinds is currently in\\nplay in philosophy of science. Their mind-independence is\\ntraditionally predicated on their having essences. But essentialism\\nran into trouble when Darwin showed that species—up to that\\npoint the very paradigm of natural kinds—are historically fluid\\nand have no clear boundaries. Similar problems have now been\\nrecognized even in the kinds of chemistry and physics (Khalidi 2013).\\nNevertheless, grouping natural objects into kinds does license useful\\ninferences and ground successful explanations. This has led to what\\nReydon calls an “epistemological turn”.\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nThe principal criteria for being a natural kind used to be\\nmetaphysical: a kind is a natural kind if and only if it really exists\\nin the world…independently of human consciousness, human\\ninterests, and human practices, and is associated with a particular\\nkind essence…. On the alternative approach the principal\\ncriteria for being a natural kind no longer are metaphysical but\\nepistemological: what counts is being useful in human\\nepistemic practices, such as inference and explanation, by\\ncorresponding in some way (which is still to be explicated)\\nto the state of affairs in nature. (Reydon 2014, 132)\\n\",\n \"\\nRather than assimilating artifact kinds to natural kinds by showing\\nthat artifacts are actually mind-independent in some way, as Elder and\\nothers have tried to do, the epistemological turn suggests that since\\nnatural kinds were never mind-independent to begin with, there is in\\nprinciple no barrier to a unified account of artifact and natural\\nkinds.\",\n \"\\nFinally, we should note that questions have been raised about the\\nlegitimacy of the kind—or perhaps more precisely, the\\ncategory—“artifact” itself. We have already touched\\non this in\\n Section 1\\n above, in the context of the definitional issues raised by the\\ncontinuum problem. This discussion clearly reflects Reydon’s\\nepistemological turn in that it foregrounds methodological\\nconsiderations and lets the ontological chips fall where they may. We\\nwill discuss methodological issues in\\n Section 3.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.2 Artifact Kinds\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nFunction is a salient feature of artifacts. Clearly there would be no\\ngood reason to keep so many of them around unless they did something\\nfor us. Function is also a salient feature of biological traits.\\nAccounts of biological function, which now comprise a large\\nliterature, have inspired many accounts of artifact function. But\\nunlike organisms, artifacts are made to serve human purposes, so human\\nintentional states must be considered. Accounts of artifact function\\ncan be usefully categorized in terms of the role they give to\\nintentions in the establishment of functions (Preston 2009; Houkes\\n& Vermaas 2010). At one end of the spectrum are accounts that\\nrevolve around human intentions, while at the other end are accounts\\nthat focus on non-intentional factors; in between are a variety of\\naccounts that mix intentional and non-intentional factors in various\\nproportions.\",\n \"\\nKaren Neander (1991) distinguishes artifact function sharply from\\nbiological function. Natural selection acting over the long course of\\nevolutionary history establishes specific effects of biological traits\\nas their functions, in virtue of the reproduction of those traits for\\nthose effects. For example, the wings of birds are the result of eons\\nof selection for their effect as airfoils. In contrast, intentional\\nhuman selection, acting with knowledge and foresight, establishes\\nspecific effects of artifacts as their functions immediately, without\\nany reference to a history of reproduction for those effects.\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nIt is enough, in the case of intentional selection, if the designer\\nbelieves or hopes that the artifact will have the desired effect and\\nselects it for that purpose. (Neander 1991, 462)\\n\",\n \"\\nFor example, an individual who designs a hammer, or who uses the heel\\nof her shoe to pound in a nail, believing these items to have the\\ncapacity to deliver a hard blow and intending to use that effect for\\nher purposes, endows them with the relevant function forthwith. John\\nSearle (1995) calls such artifact functions “agentive”\\nfunctions to distinguish them from the “non-agentive”\\nfunctions of biological traits. Searle also distinguishes a special\\nsub-category of agentive functions which he terms “status”\\nfunctions. These are related in a relatively arbitrary way to the\\nphysical structure of the artifact. Money, for example, runs the gamut\\nfrom gold ingots to bitcoin. Its functions—medium of exchange,\\nmeasure of value, and so on—are imposed on these physical\\nbearers by our collective acceptance of them as money. According to\\nSearle, the intentional states constituting this collective acceptance\\ncreate an “institutional fact” that would not exist\\nwithout collective human agency. Status functions thus illustrate not\\nonly the creative capacity of human intentionality already\\nforegrounded in Neander’s account, but also its typically\\ncollective nature in the case of artifact function. Searle supplies an\\naccount of collective intentionality to underwrite this feature. Other\\nauthors who subscribe to intentionalist theories of artifact function\\ninclude Randall Dipert (1993), Peter McLaughlin (2001), Lynne Rudder\\nBaker (2007), and Simon Evnine (2016).\",\n \"\\nRuth Millikan (1984) offers a general theory of function that, in the\\ncase of artifacts, mixes intentional and non-intentional elements. Her\\nmain interest is in proper functions—what a biological trait or\\nartifact is supposed to do, and is malfunctioning if it cannot do. On\\nMillikan’s view, what she calls direct proper functions, whether\\nbiological or artifactual, are established by a history of selection\\nand reproduction for the effect constituting the function. So what is\\nessential for the establishment of an artifact’s function is\\nwhether or not its ancestors—artifacts of that kind—were\\nreproduced for that effect. This is what the artifact is supposed to\\ndo, even if it is not able to do it because of damage or an\\nunfavorable environment. Thus far Millikan’s account is\\nnon-intentional, for the role of human intentional states is merely\\none factor in the implementation of the reproduction process. However,\\nthe other half of Millikan’s account concerns what she calls\\nderived proper functions. These are functions that are established by\\nsomething that has the direct proper function of producing something\\nelse to accomplish a purpose. Millikan’s favored example of\\nbiological derived proper function is a novel shade of brown sported\\nby a chameleon. It has no history of selection and reproduction for\\nthe effect of camouflaging the chameleon, and yet we want to say that\\nthat is its proper function. And we can say so, according to Millikan,\\nbecause the color-alteration mechanism possessed by chameleons has the\\ndirect proper function of changing chameleons’ skin color to\\ncamouflage them by matching their surroundings. Thus this novel shade\\nof brown does have the derived proper function of\\ncamouflaging the chameleon. Derived proper functions in the realm of\\nartifacts bring intention back to the fore. On Millikan’s view,\\nintentional states have evolutionarily established direct proper\\nfunctions. The direct proper function of intentions is to produce\\nsomething else to accomplish whatever purpose the intention\\nincorporates. Thus, if you intend to produce a can opener, the\\nexecution of your intention brings into existence a device having the\\nderived proper function of opening cans. Even if this device works in\\na completely novel way, and even if it is not capable of performing as\\nenvisioned, opening cans is still what it is supposed to do. Usually,\\nthe direct and derived proper functions of artifacts coincide—in\\nthe case of a standard can opener, for instance, we have both a\\nhistory of selection and reproduction and a current intention to\\nreproduce yet another can opener. But in the case of novel prototypes,\\nespecially, it is intention alone that establishes the (derived)\\nproper function.\",\n \"\\nWybo Houkes and Pieter Vermaas (Houkes & Vermaas 2004; 2010;\\nVermaas & Houkes 2003) also have a mixed theory, although\\nintentionalist factors predominate, in contrast to Millikan’s\\nfocus on non-intentionalist history of reproduction. Their approach is\\nto derive a theory of artifact function from a theory of artifact use\\nand design.\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nOn our theory, an artifact function is a capacity, supposed or actual,\\nwhich has a preferential status in the context of certain actions and\\nbeliefs. It is therefore a highly relational property, which\\nsupervenes on both the actual physical makeup of an artifact and on\\nthe beliefs and actions of human agents, designers as well as users.\\n(Houkes & Vermaas 2004, 67)\\n\",\n \"\\nHoukes and Vermaas focus on the use plan formulated by designers as\\nestablishing the function of the artifact in the first instance. This\\nis the predominant intentionalist element in their account. But on\\ntheir view, this use plan must be supported by a justification that\\nthe plan will realize the function, and this requires knowledge of the\\ncausal roles of the physicochemical capacities of the artifact.\\nThrough this required justification the actual physical structure of\\nthe artifact constrains the intentions articulated in the use plan.\\nThis is a non-intentionalist element. In addition, they require a\\nhistorical element in the form of the communication of the use plan\\nfrom designer to user and subsequently from user to user. They refer\\nto this element as “evolutionary”, in an apparent\\nreference to cultural evolution, but clearly this element, too, is\\nprimarily intentional since the evolution is carried out in a series\\nof intentional communications. Houkes and Vermaas refer to their\\ntheory as the ICE (Intention, Causal role, Evolution) theory of\\nartifact function. Other mixed theories include those of Paul\\nGriffiths (1993) and Philip Kitcher (1993).\",\n \"\\nAt the lonelier, non-intentionalist end of the spectrum is Beth\\nPreston’s (1998; 2013) account. Her initial concern is to\\nadvance a pluralist theory of artifact function according to which\\nartifacts have both proper functions and what Preston calls system\\nfunctions. For example, the proper function of plates is to hold food\\nfor serving or eating. But they function equally well as saucers for\\npotted plants, or in a stack to weight down tofu or eggplant slices to\\nextract the moisture. For proper function, Preston relies on\\nMillikan’s account of direct proper function, but without the\\nadded element of derived proper function that brings intention back\\nin. For system function, she relies on Robert Cummins’ (1975)\\ntheory of biological function, according to which function is\\nestablished by the causal role a component plays in a system. Neither\\nMillikan’s nor Cummins’ account is intrinsically\\nintentionalist, since they are designed to fit both the biological and\\nthe artifactual cases. Preston resists reformulating them in\\nintentionalist terms, while acknowledging that in the artifact case\\nhuman intentions and other intentional states do play a role in\\nimplementing the history of selective reproduction and the system\\ncontext, respectively. In support of this resolutely\\nnon-intentionalist stance, Preston argues that human intentions do not\\narise in a vacuum, but are reproduced in and through the process by\\nwhich material culture, with its myriad of functional artifacts, is\\nreproduced. Intentions to make plates are reproduced in plate cultures\\nas surely as the plates themselves; and only in cultures with both\\npotted plants and plates can intentions to use plates as pot\\nsaucers form.\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nThe only viable view is one that sees human purposes and the proper\\nfunctions of items of material culture indissolubly linked in patterns\\nof use and reproduction. Thus, it no longer seems reasonable to ask\\nwhich came first, the purpose or the proper function. Both are\\nproduced and reproduced through the self-same social process. (Preston\\n2013, 206)\\n\",\n \"\\nPreston is joined here by Crawford Elder (2004), whose account of\\ncopied kinds, as we noted above, similarly characterizes human\\nintentions as themselves dependent on the copying process rather than\\ninitiating and controlling it.\",\n \"\\nThe theories discussed in this section encounter a number of important\\nproblems in accounting for function phenomena in the artifact realm.\\nOne such problematic phenomenon is the distinction between proper and\\nnon-proper functions. This does occur in the biological\\nrealm—pigeon beaks did not evolve to peck buttons for a food\\nreward, for example—but it is relatively rare. In material\\nculture, it is ubiquitous. Humans are just very good at adopting\\nwhatever artifact will accomplish their purposes, regardless of its\\nproper function. Stop a random person in the street and ask—she\\nwill have a story. Intentionalist approaches have more difficulty\\nmaking this distinction, because for these views human intentions are\\nthe only mechanism for establishing functions, and this elides the\\ndistinction unless some difference can be discerned in the intentions\\nthemselves. Authors who have discussed this issue recently include\\nWybo Houkes and Pieter Vermaas (2010), Beth Preston (2013) and Simon\\nEvnine (2016). Another problem is accounting for malfunction. Just as\\nany theory of representation must account for misrepresentation, any\\ntheory of function must say something about cases of failure to\\nperform, and whether or not that failure is a malfunction or something\\nelse. Addressing this issue depends to some extent on the distinction\\nbetween proper and non-proper functions, because malfunction only\\nseems an appropriate designation in the case of failure to perform a\\nproper function—failure to do what the artifact is supposed to\\ndo, in other words. This issue is especially important for the\\nphilosophy of technology and engineering side of the artifact debates,\\nwhere understanding the epistemology of problem solving and innovation\\ndepends in part on understanding failure to function and how to learn\\nfrom and deal with it. Authors who have covered this issue include\\nNeander (1995), Baker (2007), Franssen (2006; 2009), Houkes and\\nVermaas (2010) and Kroes (2012).\",\n \"\\nA third problem is how to account for the functions—if\\nany—of novel prototypes. Non-intentional accounts have more\\ndifficulty in this case, for a truly novel prototype has no history of\\nselection and reproduction; and if it does not work, as many\\nprototypes in fact do not, then function established in terms of\\nsystemic causal role or physicochemical capacities is not possible\\neither. This problem is one of the main motivations for\\nMillikan’s (1984) introduction of derived proper function, since\\ndesigner intention seems to be the only way unsuccessful novel\\nprototypes could acquire any kind of function at all. The\\nnon-intentionalist then is caught between biting the\\nbullet—unsuccessful novel prototypes just do not have\\nfunctions—or introducing an ad hoc intentionalist\\nelement. This issue has been canvassed by Preston\\n(1998; 2003; 2013), Millikan (1999), Vermaas and Houkes\\n(2003) and Kroes (2012). A related problem is how to account for\\nso-called phantom functions (Preston 2013)—the functions of\\nartifacts that are constitutionally incapable of ever fulfilling them.\\nTalismans to ensure fertility, for example, are now widely believed in\\nWestern culture to have no efficacy, but it is difficult to escape the\\nintuition that ensuring fertility is nevertheless their proper\\nfunction. Here again, it is the non-intentionalist who is caught\\nflatfooted. Although artifacts like fertility talismans are indeed\\nreproduced for a purpose, the standard requirement for establishing\\nproper function is that the artifact be selected for reproduction on\\nthe basis of successful performance. Similarly, function established\\nby systemic causal role requires that the artifact actually perform\\nthe relevant causal role. Worse yet, the option of just biting the\\nbullet and agreeing that such artifacts have no functions is nowhere\\nnear as plausible as in the case of unsuccessful novel prototypes\\nbecause of the prevalence of talismans, amulets, religious artifacts,\\ninefficacious medicines and supplements, and the like. Authors who\\nhave addressed this issue include Griffiths (1993), Preston\\n(1998; 2013), Thomasson (2009), Parsons (2016) and Holm\\n(2017).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.3 Artifact Functions\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nMany works of art are typical artifacts, ontologically no more or less\\nmysterious than hats or hacksaws. Vermeer’s Girl with a\\nPearl Earring has extraordinary aesthetic qualities, but\\notherwise it is just a concrete, spatiotemporal object, created by\\nsomeone and straightforwardly subject to change and destruction. Not\\nso with Amy Beach’s Gaelic Symphony, which we hesitate\\nto identify with its performances, singly or collectively, and which\\ntherefore does not appear to be located in time and space. However, it\\ndoes purport to have a creator, and may perhaps be destroyed if all\\ntraces of its performances and scores are wiped away. A symphony is a\\nso-called repeatable work of art, that is, a work with multiple\\ninstances. Performance arts of all kinds fall into this category, but\\nso do cast sculptures, limited edition prints, art photographs, films,\\nand the like. So understanding the ontology of repeatable works is a\\ncentral task for philosophy of art.\",\n \"\\nThe initial difficulty is that such works do not fit neatly into the\\nstandard ontological bifurcation between concrete, spatiotemporal\\nobjects such as hats and hacksaws and abstract, eternal objects such\\nas numbers and sets. Like concrete objects, but unlike abstract\\nobjects, repeatable works of art appear to be created and may change\\nor be destroyed. Unlike concrete objects, but like abstract objects,\\nthey do not appear to be located in space and time. Amie Thomasson\\n(1999; 2004; 2006) sought to resolve this difficulty by proposing an\\nintermediate ontological category of abstract artifacts—abstract\\nin that they are not located in space and time; artifactual in that\\nthey are intentionally created and can be destroyed. Thomasson\\noriginally proposed this new category as part of her theory of\\nfictional characters, but she noted its usefulness to the analysis of\\nthe literary works those characters inhabit, repeatable works of art\\nin general, and perhaps other social objects as well. (For application\\nto repeatable works of art, see the essays in Art and Abstract\\nObjects (Mag Uidhir 2012). Applications to other social objects\\ninclude software (Irmak 2012), establishments (Korman 2020), and\\nnormativity (Frugé 2022).)\",\n \"\\nHowever, further difficulties beset the positing of abstract\\nartifacts. It is commonly thought that abstract objects are not just\\nnon-spatiotemporal, but non-causal. Our causal commerce is with their\\ninstances, not with the abstract objects themselves. But this makes it\\nhard to understand how abstract objects could possibly be created.\\nErik Satie could certainly create an instance of his\\nGymnopédies by playing it on his piano, but it is\\nunclear in what sense he could be the author of this musical work as\\nan abstract object separate from its instances. According to Jerrold\\nLevinson (1980), the last decades of the 20th century saw a\\nnear consensus that musical works are abstract objects of a more\\nfamiliar sort—structural types that exist eternally and without\\nchange, independent of their instances in the causally governed,\\nspatiotemporal realm. A leading objection to this consensus is that\\ncomposers cannot then bring their works into existence, contrary to\\ncommon sense. So the music ontologist faces a dilemma—give up on\\nthe idea that musical works are abstract structural types, or explain\\nhow the composer can reasonably be said to create musical works even\\nthough the abstract structural types that comprise them are already in\\nexistence. This difficulty generalizes to other repeatable types of\\nartworks that are held to be abstract objects. But most importantly,\\ncharacterizing repeatable artworks as abstract artifacts does not\\nallow the ontologist to escape this difficulty. Abstract artifacts do\\nnot belong to the causal realm of space and time any more than their\\neternal and changeless cousins do. So simply saying that they are\\nartifacts, and therefore created and destroyed like all other\\nartifacts, does not by itself explain how this creation and\\ndestruction is possible.\",\n \"\\nResponses run the gamut. Julian Dodd (2000) bites the bullet and\\nargues that musical works are discovered, not created. Levinson (1980)\\nfamously proposes that composers create musical works by selecting\\namong and indicating pre-existing abstract sound structures and\\npreferred performance means. In western classical music, for example,\\nthese indications are embodied in the written score for the work,\\nwhich guides the production of instances. However, abstract artifacts,\\nby hypothesis, do not pre-exist the creative acts of authors, so they\\ncannot be created by Levinson’s selection-and-indication\\nprocess. A popular alternative involves the metaphysical relationship\\nof existential dependence. On this view, repeatable works of art have\\na dependence base, typically consisting of an author’s mental\\nand physical acts which bring an initial instance of the work into\\nexistence, subsequent copies of that instance that sustain the work,\\nand an audience capable of appreciating and interpreting those\\ninstances. The work itself is an abstract artifact, dependent on, but\\nexisting separately from, these acts and instances. It begins when\\nthey begin and ends when they all cease or are destroyed. Nurbay Irmak\\n(2021) argues that existential dependence allows for a non-causal type\\nof creation. The artist engages in causal relations with concrete\\nobjects and by so doing non-causally creates the dependent abstract\\nartifact. Lee Walters (2013), on the other hand, argues that some\\nabstract objects can enter into causal relationships, so the process\\nof creating an existentially dependent abstract artifact might\\nconceivably qualify as ordinary causal creation.\",\n \"\\nThese difficulties have prompted some philosophers to avoid the moves\\nthat generate them. An early such attempt is Guy Rohrbaugh’s\\n(2003) view that works of art are not abstract objects at all, but\\nrather historical individuals—non-physical entities\\nontologically dependent on a physical series of historically and\\ncausally linked physical objects. For example, a photograph is a\\nnon-physical entity dependent on its “embodiments” in a negative\\nand subsequent prints. In a more recent proposal, Christy Mag\\nUidhir (2013) argues that works of art must have authors, but that\\nneither discovery, nor indication of abstract structures, nor\\nexistential dependence satisfies the requirements for authorship. He\\nconcludes that repeatable works of art cannot be abstract objects of\\nany kind, but must rather be ordinary concrete objects. Their apparent\\nrepeatability does not mean that they are instances of an abstract\\nwork, but only that they bear relevant similarity to one another. In a\\nrelated vein, Allan Hazlett (2012) claims that there are no repeatable\\nartworks. If there were, he says, they would have to be abstract\\nobjects. But abstract objects have all their intrinsic properties\\nessentially, whereas artworks typically do not. For example, Alvin\\nAiley’s major work, Revelations, premiered as a 10\\nsection work lasting an hour, but evolved into a half hour long piece\\nin three sections. So, clearly, many of its original properties were\\nnot essential to it. Hazlett concludes that apparent repetitions are\\nnot instances of an abstract object. They are either separate, similar\\nartworks, or copies of an original.\",\n \"\\nThe discussion of abstract artifacts has been largely confined to the\\nontology of art. But as some of the participants have noted (e.g.,\\nLevinson 1980, 21–22), repeatable works are not confined to\\nworks of art. This is particularly clear for named artifacts such as\\nChanel No. 5, the Ford F-150, Campbell’s tomato soup, Earl Grey\\ntea, the Hepplewhite chair, or the Washington quarter. It is possible\\nto see each bottle of Chanel No. 5 or each quarter not as a\\ndistinctive artifact in its own right, but as an instance of an\\nabstract artifact—Chanel No. 5 tout court, or the\\nWashington quarter. Apart from marketing and branding concerns, what\\ndoes the naming of such ordinary artifacts accomplish? It highlights\\ntheir standardization, and often designates the entity responsible for\\nmaintaining it—Ford, in the case of the F-150, for instance. But\\nstandardization is a virtually universal feature of human artifacts,\\nfrom the Acheulean handaxe to the Apple MacBook Air. There are\\nvanishingly few artifacts that are unique in the way non-repeatable\\nartworks like paintings are supposed to be. Failed prototypes that\\nwere never reproduced might be an example. This means that we are\\npotentially swimming in abstract artifacts, with all the philosophical\\ndifficulties that would entail. This, in turn, highlights views\\nopposed to the positing of abstract artifacts, which are more\\nplausible in the case of everyday artifacts. We resist thinking of\\nperformances of Beach’s Gaelic Symphony as separate,\\nrelevantly similar artifacts because we are used to thinking of\\nsymphonies as unique, individual works. But the Washington\\nquarter does not seem like a work in the same sense, and there is thus\\nless reason to resist the idea that individual quarters are just\\nrelevantly similar artifacts produced by a copying process managed by\\nthe United States Mint. In this regard, we might consider that the\\nnotion of the work, functioning as a regulatory concept for the arts,\\nis arguably neither universal nor of ancient lineage, even in the\\nwestern tradition (Goehr 1993). In short, the time may be ripe\\nfor the discussion of abstract artifacts to be expanded to cover\\nartifacts in general, perhaps with different outcomes than in its\\nnative context.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.4 Abstract Artifacts\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe metaphysics of artifacts is a fairly well delineated set of\\ndiscussions, carried out by a fairly cohesive group of philosophers.\\nIn contrast, the epistemology of artifacts is more interdisciplinary\\nin nature, ranging over anthropology, archaeology, cognitive science,\\nand psychology, in addition to philosophy. Within philosophy it runs\\nthe gamut from environmental philosophy to philosophy of mind.\\n Section 3.1\\n returns in more detail to the methodological considerations already\\nbroached in\\n Section 2.2.\\n Section 3.2 takes up issues concerning artifacts as objects of\\nknowledge. Finally,\\n Section 3.3\\n covers issues arising in studies of cognition in which artifacts are\\npresented as playing significant and sometimes controversial roles in\\ncognitive processes themselves.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Epistemology\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nReydon’s identification of an epistemological turn in our\\nunderstanding of kinds and categories leads to a new question about\\nthe category “artifact”. Rather than only asking whether\\nit carves the world at a joint, we can also ask: Is it serving our\\nepistemic purposes well? A number of authors have argued that\\n“artifact” is methodologically counterproductive. Dan\\nSperber (2007, 136–137) claims that it is not a useful\\ncategory for the purposes of a naturalistic social science.\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nI have tried to cast doubt on the idea that a theoretically useful\\nnotion of artifact can be built around its usual prototypes:\\nbracelets, jars, hammers, and other inert objects, or that it can be\\ndefined in a more systematic way…. There is no good reason why\\na naturalistic social science should treat separately, or even give\\npride of place to, cultural productions that are both more clearly\\nintended for a purpose and more thoroughly designed by humans, that\\nis, to prototypical artifacts. (Sperber 2007, 137)\\n\",\n \"\\nSperber’s main argument for this conclusion, as we noted in\\n Section 1,\\n is based on the continuum problem. But Sperber also suggests that in\\nfocusing on paradigmatic artifacts as the basis for our\\ncategorization, we are allowing ourselves to be epistemologically\\ndisadvantaged by “a doubly obsolete industrial-age revival of a\\nPaleolithic categorization” (2007, 136). In the\\nPaleolithic, before there were any domesticates other than dogs, the\\n(few) technologies people used in their daily lives were\\nparadigmatic artifacts—stone tools, baskets, beads, and so on.\\nSo, Sperber speculates, we evolved a psychological disposition to\\nclassify things in accordance with the predominance of such artifacts.\\nWe then retained this disposition right through the Neolithic\\ntransition to agriculture 12,000 years ago, which made biological\\nartifacts (as Sperber calls domesticates) proportionally the most\\ncommon type of artifact in human experience until the Industrial\\ntransition of only a couple of centuries ago. This is the first sense\\nin which our “artifact” category is obsolete. Second,\\nSperber argues, information technology has increasingly contributed to\\nour environment artifacts that would have astonished Aristotle with\\ntheir ability to act on their own, beyond any intention their creators\\nmay have. Simultaneously, biotechnology has made impressing our\\nintentions on our biological artifacts increasingly effective. These\\ncountervailing trends further reduce the dominance of erstwhile\\nparadigmatic artifacts in our lives. This is the second sense in which\\nour “artifact” category is obsolete. In short, Sperber\\nseems to suggest, if we cannot shake the Paleolithic urge to center\\nthe “artifact” category on the paradigmatic bracelets and\\njars, we should jettison the category altogether, for the sake of an\\nepistemologically adequate social science.\",\n \"\\nBeth Preston (2013, 4–7) declines to use the term\\n“artifact”, opting instead for the more open-ended\\n“material culture”. The initial problem she identifies is\\nthat phenomena of interest from the point of view of human interaction\\nwith the environment do not divide naturally into interactions with\\nartifacts and interactions with other sorts of things. We noted an\\nexample of this in\\n Section 1—intentionally\\n made paths, which do qualify as artifacts, are used in the same way\\nas unintentionally made paths. It thus seems methodologically\\nwrongheaded to rule the unintentionally made path out of consideration\\non a definitional technicality. Similarly, residues such as sawdust,\\nwhey, or fingerprints often enter into human practices in important\\nways, but a focus on artifacts as traditionally defined may leave\\nthese phenomena out of account as well. Preston also argues that it is\\nprecisely the central concepts in a field of investigation that should\\nbe left open-ended, on pain of epistemic distortion of the results.\\nFor example, defining “mind” very strictly might have\\nruled the extended mind debate out in advance.\",\n \"\\nSteven Vogel (2003; 2015) argues that no good sense can be made\\nof the artifact-nature distinction, making it unfit for the purposes\\nof environmental philosophy. His argument unrolls against the backdrop\\nof a longstanding controversy in environmental philosophy about the\\nvalue of ecological restoration—the practice of restoring areas\\ndamaged by mining, industrial waste and the like to something as close\\nas possible to the condition they were in before the damage was done.\\nThe ontological status of such sites has been challenged on the\\ngrounds that such restoration does not actually restore nature but\\nrather creates an artifact (Katz 1997). Worse yet, this artifact is\\npassed off as nature, so it is a fake (Elliot 1997). This casts doubt\\non the ethical and political value of ecological restoration as an\\nenvironmental practice. Vogel responds by questioning the unspoken\\nassumption that environmental philosophy is about nature, and\\nenvironmental activism about protecting nature from human activity. He\\nargues that nature conceived as pristine and independent in this way\\ndoes not exist—certainly not now that human activity is global\\nin its effects, as Bill McKibben (1989) noted long ago, but in\\nprinciple, since humans, like all other living things, change their\\nenvironment simply by living in it. On Vogel’s view,\\nenvironmental philosophy is about just that—the environment,\\nboth built and not-so-built, and what we should do to ensure that it\\nis the environment we want and need, not only for ourselves but for\\nother beings as well.\",\n \"\\nThe important point for our purposes, though, is that Vogel’s\\npost-nature environmental philosophy rests on a full-throated\\nrejection of the nature-artifact categorization. He begins with the\\nclaim that our concepts of nature—already multiple, and not\\nalways carefully distinguished—are riddled with\\nantinomy-generating ambiguities. The epistemological backwash leaves\\nus mired in nostalgia, unable to see and address environmental\\nproblems as they actually exist. In particular, we are unable to see\\nthat ecological restoration does not produce artifacts by the\\ntraditional definition, since restored areas are designed precisely to\\nescape our designs and outrun our intentions. They are thus\\n“wild” in a perfectly straightforward sense. Furthermore,\\nVogel argues, all human productions, including artifacts, are wild in\\nthis sense. Rather than focusing on unintentional creations, as\\nPreston and Sperber tend to do, Vogel emphasizes the ways in which\\nartifacts outrun all our creative intentions.\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nBuilding an artifact requires black boxes all the way down: to\\ndesign and build anything requires presupposing a whole set of\\nprocesses that one does not design, and whose operation beyond\\none’s understanding and intention is necessary for building to\\ntake place. There is a gap, in the construction of every\\nartifact, between the intention with which the builder acts and the\\nconsequences of her acts, a gap that is ineliminable and indeed\\nconstitutive of what it is to construct something, and in this gap\\nresides something like what I earlier called wildness. (Vogel\\n2015, 113)\\n\",\n \"\\nThus the traditional definition of\\n“artifact”—something intentionally made for a\\npurpose—while true as far as it goes, merely skates over the\\nsurface, leaving us at an epistemological disadvantage with regard to\\nthe full range and depth of the phenomena.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.1 Methodology\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nVogel’s position on environmental ethics resonates in an\\ninteresting way with a much earlier dispute about\\nreference—specifically, about whether our capacity to refer to\\ndifferent kinds of artifacts is grounded in a definite description of\\nwhat being a member of that kind requires, or rather in a historical\\nconnection to a “baptismal” event in which someone slapped\\na label on something and declared that label henceforth applicable to\\nthings of that sort. Hilary Putnam (1975) famously favors the\\nbaptismal account for both natural kinds and artifact kinds. Steven\\nSchwartz (1978) challenges Putnam’s account in the case of\\nartifacts. He agrees with Putnam that the “baptismal”\\naccount is correct for natural kinds, because they have hidden natures\\nto which we are not necessarily privy. Thus if we are to refer to\\nnatural objects reliably at all, it cannot be by way of definite\\ndescription. But artifacts, Schwartz says, have publicly accessible\\nnatures based on form and function, so reference to them is grounded\\nin description rather than a baptismal event. Amie Thomasson\\n(2003; 2007b) carves out a nuanced position based on her view\\nthat the intentions and concepts of human makers are constitutive of\\nartifact kinds\\n (Section 2.2\\n above). If so, then some makers are in an epistemically privileged\\nposition with regard to given artifacts, and so do refer to them in\\nvirtue of having a substantive concept of what being an artifact of\\nthat kind involves. Thomasson acknowledges that most speakers are not\\nin this epistemically privileged position. Users are not, and even\\nmany who qualify as makers in the causal sense—workers on a\\nproduction line, for instance—may not be. So Thomasson’s\\nview, unlike Schwartz’s, is not a return to a purely descriptive\\ntheory of reference for artifact terms, but rather a hybrid theory.\\nHilary Kornblith (2007) argues against Thomasson that she has still\\nnot demonstrated any essential connection between makers’\\nsubstantive concepts of artifacts and reference. On the one hand, in\\ncases where a type of artifact is no longer used for the purpose the\\nmaker intended, the users’ concept would seem decisive. On the\\nother hand, having the concept is arguably the result of familiarity\\nwith the artifact rather than any special semantic capacity enjoyed by\\nmakers. Similarly, Kornblith (1980) argues against Schwartz that the\\nfunction of artifacts is not necessarily accessible—a problem\\nfaced frequently by archaeologists, for instance—and thus that\\neven in cases of objects where the form and function are familiar, it\\nis not this familiarity that grounds the ability to refer. The\\nbaptismal account of reference therefore must apply to both artifacts\\nand natural objects, just as Putnam said. Such semantic parity between\\nartifacts and natural objects, which rejects any privilege for\\nmakers’ intentions, echoes Vogel’s view that artifacts and\\nnatural objects are equally “wild”, because artifacts\\noutrun their makers’ intentions in practice, just as surely as\\nnatural objects outrun human intentions in principle.\",\n \"\\nMuch of the epistemology of artifacts is, in the first instance, the\\nprovince of cognitive psychology, not philosophy. Artifact kinds, for\\ninstance, can be approached from the side of psychology rather than\\nmetaphysics, yielding theories about the psychological mechanisms by\\nmeans of which we group artifacts together, apart from any question of\\nwhether these groupings represent reality (Malt & Sloman 2007a).\\nIn an influential article, Paul Bloom (1996) argues that we cannot\\ncategorize artifacts based on form, use, or function. Form and use are\\nboth too variable to be reliable. Beanbag chairs do not look much like\\nother chairs, and even if every flatiron in existence were currently\\nbeing used as a doorstop, we would not want to categorize them as\\ndoorstops. Experiments show that even intended function is neither\\nnecessary nor sufficient for categorization (Malt & Johnson 1992).\\nVary the form of something sufficiently, and people will decline to\\ncategorize it as a chair even if it is made to be sat on. On the other\\nhand, present them with something that looks like a chair but is made\\nto be a plant stand, and they will still categorize it as a chair. In\\nresponse, Bloom proposes an intentional-historical theory, according\\nto which categorization of artifacts depends on our being able to\\ninfer that an artifact was successfully made with the intention that\\nit belong to a particular category. Form and use are good grounds for\\nsuch inferences, and this explains our intuition that these factors\\nhave something to do with how we categorize artifacts. So if something\\nlooks like a chair and we regularly observe people sitting on it, we\\nreasonably infer it was made with the intention that it be a chair,\\nand we categorize it accordingly. (Bloom’s view is clearly\\nancestral to Amie Thomasson’s account of artifact kinds\\n (Section 2.2),\\n but he is concerned only to explain how we group artifacts, and does\\nnot claim, as Thomasson does, that makers’ intentions and\\nconcepts are ontologically constitutive of artifact kinds.) Barbara\\nMalt and Eric Johnson (1998) criticize Bloom for failing to make clear\\neither why we would need to resort to creator’s intention to\\ncategorize artifacts, or exactly how we might assess that intention.\\nMore recently, Malt and Steven Sloman (2007a; 2007b) have argued\\nthat the kind of essentialist approach represented by Bloom’s\\ntheory is misguided, and have proposed an alternative, pragmatic\\napproach. In a series of experiments, they show that artifact\\ncategorization is sensitive to communicative goals in specific\\nsituations. Creators’ intentions are important with regard to\\nsome goals and situations; unimportant with regard to others. If this\\napproach is on the right track, artifact kinds are not psychologically\\nstable or clearly demarcated groupings. Moreover, this raises the\\npossibility that “categorization” itself is not a\\npsychological natural kind. It may be that this label is used for what\\nis actually a heterogeneous collection of processes.\",\n \"\\nDevelopmental issues with regard to our concepts of\\n“artifact” and specific kinds of artifacts also loom large\\nin cognitive psychology. As philosophers might anticipate, the\\nunderlying general issue is between empiricist and nativist approaches\\nto concept acquisition. But the now vast experimental literature on\\nchild development means that theories in this area are both numerous\\nand highly sophisticated. An empiricist-oriented theory that stands\\nout is Jean Mandler’s (2004; 2007) comprehensive perceptual\\nmeaning analysis view, according to which children construct abstract\\nimage schemas on the basis of their perceptual experience, especially\\ntheir experience of motion. Since artifacts and animals move in\\ncharacteristically different ways, the first level of differentiation\\nthese image schemas provide is vague, global concepts of these two\\ntypes of objects. Mandler holds that there is no good reason to think\\nthese concepts are innate, nor is there any good reason to think that\\nthe perceptual meaning analysis mechanisms that produce them are\\ndomain specific. All that is innate, on her view, is a domain-general\\nmechanism that enables the child to analyze her perceptual input.\\nMandler’s work also indicates that artifacts may be first\\ndifferentiated into indoor and outdoor, and only then into more\\nspecific kinds such as furniture and kitchen utensils, on the one\\nhand, and vehicles and buildings, on the other. The nativist\\nalternative to Mandler’s theory is best represented by Susan\\nCarey’s equally comprehensive “core cognition”\\ntheory. Carey (2009, 194–196) has a characteristically\\nnativist critique of Mandler. On the face of it, Mandler’s image\\nschemas represent features of motion and the paths motions describe\\nthrough space. However, Carey argues, there is no explanation of how\\nthe child gets from these representations to a representation of\\nagency, for example. No matter how distinctive the motions of animals,\\nthey do not by themselves yield concepts of intention, attention, or\\ngoal-directedness. On Carey’s view, these concepts must be\\ninnate in the form of “core knowledge” (Spelke 2000), or\\n“core cognition”, as Carey prefers to call it in her more\\nrecent work. Core cognition is characterized by innate,\\ndomain-specific mechanisms for the analysis of perceptual input,\\ndesigned by natural selection to construct domain-specific\\nrepresentations of the world, such as intention in the agent domain,\\nor causality in the object domain. Both of these domains of core\\ncognition are essential for the development of artifact concepts,\\nbecause on Carey’s view (Kelemen & Carey 2007) we\\nconceptualize artifacts as objects that have been intentionally\\ndesigned to carry out a specific function. The developmental issue,\\nthen, boils down to the question of whether we can construct artifact\\nconcepts with only a single, domain-general mechanism for analyzing\\nperceptual input, or whether we need at least two domain-specific\\nmechanisms with quite different output.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.2 Knowing Artifacts\"\n }\n ]\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Metaphysics, Physics, in\nJonathan Barnes (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle,\nVolumes I and II, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.","Baker, Lynne Rudder, 2007, The Metaphysics of Everyday Life:\nAn Essay in Practical Realism, Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511487545","Bloom, Paul, 1996, “Intention, History, and Artifact\nConcepts”, Cognition, 60(1): 1–29.\ndoi:10.1016/0010-0277(95)00699-0","Boyd, Richard, 1999, “Homeostasis, Species, and Higher\nTaxa”, in Robert A. Wilson (ed.), Species: New\nInterdisciplinary Essays, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.\n141–185.","Carey, Susan, 2009, The Origin of Concepts, Oxford:\nOxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195367638.001.0001","Clark, Andy, 1997, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World\nTogether Again, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.","Clark, Andy and David J. Chalmers, 1998, “The Extended\nMind”, Analysis, 58(1): 7–19.\ndoi:10.1093/analys/58.1.7","Cummins, Robert C., 1975, “Functional Analysis”,\nThe Journal of Philosophy, 72(20): 741–765.\ndoi:10.2307/2024640","Dipert, Randall R., 1993, Artifacts, Art Works, and\nAgency, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.","–––, 2014, “Artifact”, in Michael\nKelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, New York: Oxford\nUniversity Press, second edition.","Dodd, Julian, 2000, “Musical Works as Eternal\nTypes”, British Journal of Aesthetics, 40(4):\n 424–440. doi:10.1093/bjaesthetics/40.4.424","Donald, Merlin, 1991, Origins of the Modern Mind,\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.","Dupré, John, 1993, The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical\nFoundations of the Disunity of Science, Cambridge, MA: Harvard\nUniversity Press.","Elder, Crawford L., 2004, Real Natures and Familiar\nObjects, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.","–––, 2007, “The Place of Artifacts in\nOntology”, in Margolis and Laurence 2007: 33–51.","Elliot, Robert, 1997, Faking Nature: The Ethics of\nEnvironmental Restoration, London: Routledge.","Evnine, Simon J., 2016, Making Objects and Events: A\nHylomorphic Theory of Artifacts, Actions, and Organisms, Oxford:\nOxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198779674.001.0001","Foucault, Michel, 1975 [1977], Discipline and Punish: The\nBirth of the Prison (Surveiller et\npunir : Naissance de la prison), Alan Sheridan\n(trans.), New York: Pantheon Books.","Franssen, Maarten, 2006, “The Normativity of\nArtefacts”, Studies in History and Philosophy of\nScience, 37(1): 42–57. doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2005.12.006","–––, 2009, “Artefacts and\nNormativity”, in Meijers 2009: 923–952.\ndoi:10.1016/B978-0-444-51667-1.50038-0","Franssen, Maarten and Peter Kroes, 2014, “Artefact Kinds,\nOntological Criteria, and Forms of Mind-Dependence”, in\nFranssen, Kroes, Reydon, and Vermaas 2014: 63–84.\ndoi:10.1007/978-3-319-00801-1_5","Franssen, Maarten, Peter Kroes, Thomas A.C. 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Beck,\n2011, Animal Tool Behavior: The Use And Manufacture Of Tools By\nAnimals, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.","Spelke, Elizabeth, 2000, “Core Knowledge”,\nAmerican Psychologist, 55(11): 1233–1243.\ndoi:10.1037/0003-066X.55.11.1233","Sperber, Dan, 2007, “Seedless Grapes: Nature and\nCulture”, in Margolis and Laurence 2007: 124–137.","Sutton, John, 2006, “Distributed Cognition: Domains and\nDimensions”, Pragmatics & Cognition, 14(2):\n235–247. doi:10.1075/pc.14.2.05sut","–––, 2010, “Exograms and\nInterdisciplinarity: History, the Extended Mind, and the Civilizing\nProcess”, in Menary 2010: 189–225.","Thomasson, Amie L., 1999, Fiction and Metaphysics,\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.","–––, 2003, “Realism and Human\nKinds”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,\n67(3): 580–609. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2003.tb00309.x","–––, 2004, “The Ontology of\nArt”, in Peter Kivy (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to\nAesthetics, Malden: Blackwell, pp. 78–92.\ndoi:10.1002/9780470756645","–––, 2006, “Debate About the Ontology\nof Art: What are We Doing Here?”, Philosophy Compass 1(3): 245–255. doi:10.1111/j.1747-9991.2006.00021.x","–––, 2007a, Ordinary Objects, Oxford:\nOxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195319910.001.0001","–––, 2007b, “Artifacts and Human\nConcepts”, in Margolis and Laurence 2007: 52–73.","–––, 2009, “Artefacts in\nMetaphysics”, in Meijers 2009: 191–212.\ndoi:10.1016/B978-0-444-51667-1.50012-4","–––, 2014, “Public Artifacts, Intentions,\nand Norms”, in Franssen, Kroes, Reydon, and Vermaas 2014:\n45–62. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-00801-1_4","van Inwagen, Peter, 1990, Material Beings, Ithaca, NY:\nCornell University Press.","Vermaas, Pieter E. and Wybo Houkes, 2003, “Ascribing\nFunctions to Technical Artefacts: A Challenge to Etiological Accounts\nof Functions”, British Journal for the Philosophy of\nScience, 54(2): 261–289. doi:10.1093/bjps/54.2.261","Vogel, Steven, 2003, “The Nature of Artifacts”,\nEnvironmental Ethics, 25(2): 149–168.\ndoi:10.5840/enviroethics200325230","–––, 2015, Thinking Like a Mall:\nEnvironmental Philosophy After the End of Nature, Cambridge: MIT\nPress.","Walters, Lee, 2013, “Repeatable Artworks as Created\nTypes”, British Journal of Aesthetics, 53(4):\n461–477. doi:10.1093/aesthj/ayt026","Wilson, Robert A. and Andy Clark, 2009, “How to Situate\nCognition: Letting Nature Take Its Course”, in Philip Robbins\nand Murat Aydede (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated\nCognition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.\n55–77. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511816826.004"],"string":"[\n \"Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Metaphysics, Physics, in\\nJonathan Barnes (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle,\\nVolumes I and II, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.\",\n \"Baker, Lynne Rudder, 2007, The Metaphysics of Everyday Life:\\nAn Essay in Practical Realism, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511487545\",\n \"Bloom, Paul, 1996, “Intention, History, and Artifact\\nConcepts”, Cognition, 60(1): 1–29.\\ndoi:10.1016/0010-0277(95)00699-0\",\n \"Boyd, Richard, 1999, “Homeostasis, Species, and Higher\\nTaxa”, in Robert A. Wilson (ed.), Species: New\\nInterdisciplinary Essays, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.\\n141–185.\",\n \"Carey, Susan, 2009, The Origin of Concepts, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195367638.001.0001\",\n \"Clark, Andy, 1997, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World\\nTogether Again, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.\",\n \"Clark, Andy and David J. Chalmers, 1998, “The Extended\\nMind”, Analysis, 58(1): 7–19.\\ndoi:10.1093/analys/58.1.7\",\n \"Cummins, Robert C., 1975, “Functional Analysis”,\\nThe Journal of Philosophy, 72(20): 741–765.\\ndoi:10.2307/2024640\",\n \"Dipert, Randall R., 1993, Artifacts, Art Works, and\\nAgency, Philadelphia: Temple University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2014, “Artifact”, in Michael\\nKelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, New York: Oxford\\nUniversity Press, second edition.\",\n \"Dodd, Julian, 2000, “Musical Works as Eternal\\nTypes”, British Journal of Aesthetics, 40(4):\\n 424–440. doi:10.1093/bjaesthetics/40.4.424\",\n \"Donald, Merlin, 1991, Origins of the Modern Mind,\\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Dupré, John, 1993, The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical\\nFoundations of the Disunity of Science, Cambridge, MA: Harvard\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Elder, Crawford L., 2004, Real Natures and Familiar\\nObjects, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.\",\n \"–––, 2007, “The Place of Artifacts in\\nOntology”, in Margolis and Laurence 2007: 33–51.\",\n \"Elliot, Robert, 1997, Faking Nature: The Ethics of\\nEnvironmental Restoration, London: Routledge.\",\n \"Evnine, Simon J., 2016, Making Objects and Events: A\\nHylomorphic Theory of Artifacts, Actions, and Organisms, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198779674.001.0001\",\n \"Foucault, Michel, 1975 [1977], Discipline and Punish: The\\nBirth of the Prison (Surveiller et\\npunir : Naissance de la prison), Alan Sheridan\\n(trans.), New York: Pantheon Books.\",\n \"Franssen, Maarten, 2006, “The Normativity of\\nArtefacts”, Studies in History and Philosophy of\\nScience, 37(1): 42–57. doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2005.12.006\",\n \"–––, 2009, “Artefacts and\\nNormativity”, in Meijers 2009: 923–952.\\ndoi:10.1016/B978-0-444-51667-1.50038-0\",\n \"Franssen, Maarten and Peter Kroes, 2014, “Artefact Kinds,\\nOntological Criteria, and Forms of Mind-Dependence”, in\\nFranssen, Kroes, Reydon, and Vermaas 2014: 63–84.\\ndoi:10.1007/978-3-319-00801-1_5\",\n \"Franssen, Maarten, Peter Kroes, Thomas A.C. Reydon, and Pieter E.\\nVermaas (eds.), 2014, Artefact Kinds: Ontology and the Human-Made\\nWorld, Cham: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-00801-1\",\n \"Franssen, Maarten, Gert-Jan Lokhorst, and Ibo van de Poel, 2018,\\n“Philosophy of Technology”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of\\nPhilosophy (Fall 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),\\nURL =\\n<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/technology/>.\",\n \" \",\n \"Frugé, Christopher, 2022, “Artifactual\\nNormativity”, Synthese 200: 126\\ndoi:10.1007/s11229-022-03621-1\",\n \"Gallagher, Shaun, 2005, How the Body Shapes the Mind,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0199271941.001.0001\",\n \"Goehr, Lydia, 1992, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An\\nEssay in the Philosophy of Music, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"Gould, James L. and Carol Grant Gould, 2007, Animal\\nArchitects: Building and the Evolution of Intelligence, New York:\\nBasic Books.\",\n \"Grandy, Richard E., 2007, “Artifacts: Parts and\\nPrinciples”, in Margolis and Laurence 2007: 18–32.\",\n \"Griffiths, Paul E., 1993, “Functional Analysis and Proper\\nFunctions”, British Journal for the Philosophy of\\nScience, 44(3): 409–422. doi:10.1093/bjps/44.3.409\",\n \"Hazlett, Allan, 2012, “Against Repeatable Artworks”, in\\nMag Uidhir 2012: 161–178.\",\n \"Heidegger, Martin, 1954 [1977], “The Question Concerning\\nTechnology” (Die Frage nach der Technik), in The\\nQuestion Concerning Technology, And Other Essays, William Lovitt\\n(trans.), New York: Harper & Row.\",\n \"Hilpinen, Risto, 1992, “Artifacts and Works of Art”,\\nTheoria, 58(1): 58–82.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1755-2567.1992.tb01155.x\",\n \"–––, 1995, “Belief Systems as\\nArtifacts”, The Monist, 78(2): 136–155.\\ndoi:10.5840/monist19957828\",\n \"–––, 2011, “Artifact”, The\\nStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 Edition), Edward\\nN. Zalta (ed.), URL =\\n < target=“other”>https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2011/entries/artifact/>.\",\n \"Holm, Sune, 2017, “The Problem of Phantom Functions”,\\nErkenntnis, 82(1): 233–241.\\ndoi:10.1007/s10670-016-9814-x\",\n \"Houkes, Wybo and Pieter E. Vermaas, 2004, “Actions Versus\\nFunctions: A Plea for an Alternative Metaphysics of Artifacts”,\\nThe Monist, 87(1): 52–71.\\ndoi:10.5840/monist20048712\",\n \"–––, 2010, Technical Functions: On the Use\\nand Design of Artefacts, Dordrecht: Springer.\\ndoi:10.1007/978-90-481-3900-2\",\n \"Hutchins, Edwin, 1995, Cognition in the Wild, Cambridge, MA:\\nMIT Press.\",\n \"Ingold, Tim, 2013, Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and\\nArchitecture, New York: Routledge.\",\n \"Irmak, Nurbay, 2012, “Software is an Abstract\\nArtifact”, Grazer Philosophische Studien, 86(1):\\n55–72.\",\n \"—,2021, “The Problem of Creation and Abstract\\nArtifacts”, Synthese, 198 (10): 9695–9708.\\ndoi:10.1007/s11229-020-02672-6\",\n \"Katayama, Errol G., 1999, Aristotle on Artifacts: A\\nMetaphysical Puzzle, Albany, NY: State University of New York\\nPress.\",\n \"Katz, Eric, 1997, Nature as Subject: Human Obligation and\\nNatural Community, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.\",\n \"Keil, Frank C., Marissa L. Greif, and Rebekkah S. Kerner, 2007,\\n“A World Apart: How Concepts of the Constructed World Are\\nDifferent in Representation and in Development”, in Margolis and\\nLaurence 2007: 231–245.\",\n \"Kelemen, Deborah, and Susan Carey, 2007, “The Essence of\\nArtifacts: Developing the Design Stance”, in Margolis and\\nLaurence 2007: 212–230.\",\n \"Kendig, Catherine (ed.), 2016, Natural Kinds and\\nClassification in Scientific Practice, London: Routledge.\",\n \"Khalidi, Muhammad Ali, 2013, Natural Categories and Human\\nKinds: Classification in The Natural and Social Sciences,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511998553\",\n \"Kipfer, Barbara Ann, 2007, Dictionary of Artifacts,\\nMalden: Blackwell Publishing.\",\n \"Kirsh, David, 1995, “The Intelligent Use of Space”,\\nArtificial Intelligence, 73(1–2): 31–68.\\ndoi:10.1016/0004-3702(94)00017-U\",\n \"–––, 2009, “Problem Solving and Situated\\nCognition”, in Philip Robbins and Murat Aydede (eds.), The\\nCambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, Cambridge: Cambridge\\nUniversity Press, pp. 264–306.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511816826.015\",\n \"Kitcher, Philip S., 1993, “Function and Design”,\\nMidwest Studies in Philosophy, 18(1): 379–397.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1475-4975.1993.tb00274.x\",\n \"Korman, Daniel Z., 2015, Objects: Nothing Out of the\\nOrdinary, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198732532.001.0001\",\n \"—, 2020, “The Metaphysics of\\nEstablishments”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 98(3): 434–448. doi:10.1080/00048402.2019.1622140\",\n \"Kornblith, Hilary, 1980, “Referring to Artifacts”,\\nThe Philosophical Review, 89(1): 109–114.\\ndoi:10.2307/2184866\",\n \"–––, 2007, “How to Refer to\\nArtifacts”, in Margolis and Laurence 2007: 138–149.\",\n \"Koslicki, Kathrin, 2018, Form, Matter, Substance, Oxford:\\nOxford University\\nPress. DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198823803.001.0001\",\n \"Kroes, Peter, 2012, Technical Artefacts: Creations of Mind and\\nMatter: A Philosophy of Engineering Design, (Philosophy of\\nEngineering and Technology, Volume 6), Dordrecht: Springer.\",\n \"Latour, Bruno, 1994, “On Technical Mediation: Philosophy,\\nSociology, Genealogy”, Common Knowledge, 3(2):\\n29–64.\",\n \"–––, 1999, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on\\nthe Reality of Science Studies, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University\\nPress.\",\n \"Lave, Jean, 1988, Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics and\\nCulture in Everyday Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511609268\",\n \"Levinson, Jerrold, 1980, “What a Musical Work\\nIs”, The Journal of Philosophy, 77(1): 5–28.\\ndoi:10.2307/2025596\",\n \"Lowe, E.J., 2014, “How Real Are Artefacts and Artefact\\nKinds?” in Franssen, Kroes, Reydon, and Vermaas 2014:\\n17–26. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-00801-1_2\",\n \"Mag Uidhir, Christy (ed.), 2012, Art and Abstract\\nObjects, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199691494.001.0001\",\n \"—2013, Art and Art Attempts, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199665778.001.0001\",\n \"Malafouris, Lambros, 2013, How Things Shape the Mind,\\nCambridge, MA: MIT Press.\",\n \"Malt, Barbara C. and Eric C. Johnson, 1992, “Do Artifact\\nConcepts Have Cores?” Journal of Memory and Language,\\n31(2): 195–217. doi:10.1016/0749-596X(92)90011-L\",\n \"–––, 1998, “Discussion: Artifact Category\\nMembership and the Intentional-Historical Theory”,\\nCognition, 66(1): 79–85.\\ndoi:10.1016/S0010-0277(98)00004-3\",\n \"Malt, Barbara C., and Steven A. Sloman, 2007a, “Artifact\\nCategorization: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”, in Margolis\\nand Laurence 2007: 85–123.\",\n \"–––, 2007b, “Category Essence or\\nEssentially Pragmatic? Creator’s Intention in Naming and\\nWhat’s Really What”, Cognition, 105(3):\\n615–648. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2006.10.001\",\n \"Mandler, Jean, 2004, Foundations of Mind: Origins of\\nConceptual Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195311839.001.0001\",\n \"–––, 2007, “The Conceptual Foundations of\\nAnimals and Artifacts”, in Margolis and Laurence 2007:\\n191–211.\",\n \"Margolis, Eric and Stephen Laurence (eds.), 2007, Creations of\\nthe Mind: Theories of Artifacts and Their Representation, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press.\",\n \"McKibben, Bill, 1989, The End of Nature, New York: Anchor\\nBooks.\",\n \"McLaughlin, Peter E., 2001, What Functions Explain: Functional\\nExplanation and Self-Reproducing Systems, Cambridge: Cambridge\\nUniversity Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511498510\",\n \"Meijers, Anthonie (ed.), 2009, Philosophy of Technology and\\nEngineering Sciences (Handbook of the Philosophy of\\nScience, Volume 9), Amsterdam: Elsevier.\",\n \"Menary, Richard (ed.), 2010, The Extended Mind,\\nCambridge, MA: MIT Press.\",\n \"Merricks, Trenton, 2001, Objects and Persons, New York:\\nOxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0199245363.001.0001\",\n \"Michaelian, Kourken and John Sutton, 2013, “Distributed\\nCognition and Memory Research: History and Current Directions”,\\nReview of Philosophy and Psychology, 4(1): 1–24.\\ndoi:10.1007/s13164-013-0131-x\",\n \"Miller, Daniel, 1994, “Artefacts and the Meaning of\\nThings”, in Tim Ingold (ed.), Companion Encyclopedia of\\nAnthropology, London: Routledge, second edition, pp.\\n396–419.\",\n \"Millikan, Ruth Garrett, 1984, Language, Thought, and Other\\nBiological Categories: New Foundations for Realism, Cambridge:\\nMIT Press.\",\n \"–––, 1999, “Wings, Spoons, Pills and\\nQuills: A Pluralist Theory of Function”, The Journal of\\nPhilosophy, 96(4): 191–206. doi:10.5840/jphil199996428\",\n \"Mitcham, Carl, 1994, Thinking Through Technology: The Path\\nBetween Engineering And Philosophy, Chicago: University of\\nChicago Press.\",\n \"Neander, Karen, 1991, “The Teleological Notion of\\n‘Function’”, Australasian Journal of\\nPhilosophy, 69(4): 454–468.\\ndoi:10.1080/00048409112344881\",\n \"–––, 1995, “Misrepresenting and\\nMalfunctioning”, Philosophical Studies, 79(2):\\n109–141. doi:10.1007/BF00989706\",\n \"Oswalt, Wendell H., 1973, Habitat and Technology: The\\nEvolution of Hunting, New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.\",\n \"–––, 1976, An Anthropological Analysis of\\nFood-Getting Technology, New York: John Wiley & Sons.\",\n \"Parsons, Glenn, 2016, The Philosophy of Design,\\nCambridge: Polity Press.\",\n \"Preston, Beth, 1998, “Why Is a Wing Like a Spoon? A\\nPluralist Theory of Function”, The Journal of\\nPhilosophy, 95(5): 215–254. doi:10.2307/2564689\",\n \"–––, 2009, “Philosophical Theories of\\nArtifact Function”, in Meijers 2009: 213–233.\\ndoi:10.1016/B978-0-444-51667-1.50013-6\",\n \"–––, 2013, A Philosophy of Material Culture:\\nAction, Function, and Mind, New York: Routledge.\",\n \"Putnam, Hilary, 1975, “The Meaning of\\n‘Meaning’”,\\n Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science,\\n 7: 131–193.\",\n \"Reicher, Maria Elisabeth, 2022, “The Primacy of Abstract\\nArtifacts”, in Paul McNamara, Andrew J. I. Jones, and Mark A.\\nBrown (eds.), Agency, Norms, Inquiry, and Artifacts: Essays in\\nHonor of Risto Hilpinen, Synthese Library 454, Cham: Springer,\\npp. 235–246.\",\n \"Reydon, Thomas A.C., 2014, “Metaphysical and Epistemological\\nApproaches to Developing a Theory of Artifact Kinds”, in\\nFranssen, Kroes, Reydon, and Vermaas 2014: 125–144.\\ndoi:10.1007/978-3-319-00801-1_8\",\n \"\\nRohrbaugh, Guy, 2003, “Artworks as Historical\\nIndividuals”, European Journal of Philosophy, 11(2):\\n177–205. \",\n \"Schick, Kathy D. and Nicholas Toth, 1993, Making Silent Stones\\nSpeak: Human Evolution and the Dawn of Technology, New York:\\nSimon & Schuster.\",\n \"Schnurrenberger, Douglas and Alan L. Bryan, 1985, “A\\nContribution to the Study of the Naturefact-Artifact\\nControversy”, in Mark G. Plew, James C. Woods, and Max G.\\nPavesic (eds.), Stone Tool Analysis: Essays in Honor of Don E.\\nCrabtree, Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, pp.\\n133–159.\",\n \"Schwartz, Stephen, 1978, “Putnam on Artifacts”,\\nThe Philosophical Review, 87(4): 566–574.\\ndoi:10.2307/2184460\",\n \"Searle, John R., 1995, The Construction of Social\\nReality, New York: The Free Press.\",\n \"Shields, Christopher, 2022, “Aristotle”, The Stanford\\nEncyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 Edition), Edward N.\\nZalta (ed.), URL =\\n<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2022/entries/aristotle/>.\",\n \"Shott, Michael J. (ed.), 2015, Works in Stone: Contemporary\\nPerspectives in Lithic Analysis, Salt Lake City, UT: University\\nof Utah Press.\",\n \"Shumaker, Robert W., Kristina R. Walkup, and Benjamin B. Beck,\\n2011, Animal Tool Behavior: The Use And Manufacture Of Tools By\\nAnimals, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.\",\n \"Spelke, Elizabeth, 2000, “Core Knowledge”,\\nAmerican Psychologist, 55(11): 1233–1243.\\ndoi:10.1037/0003-066X.55.11.1233\",\n \"Sperber, Dan, 2007, “Seedless Grapes: Nature and\\nCulture”, in Margolis and Laurence 2007: 124–137.\",\n \"Sutton, John, 2006, “Distributed Cognition: Domains and\\nDimensions”, Pragmatics & Cognition, 14(2):\\n235–247. doi:10.1075/pc.14.2.05sut\",\n \"–––, 2010, “Exograms and\\nInterdisciplinarity: History, the Extended Mind, and the Civilizing\\nProcess”, in Menary 2010: 189–225.\",\n \"Thomasson, Amie L., 1999, Fiction and Metaphysics,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2003, “Realism and Human\\nKinds”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,\\n67(3): 580–609. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2003.tb00309.x\",\n \"–––, 2004, “The Ontology of\\nArt”, in Peter Kivy (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to\\nAesthetics, Malden: Blackwell, pp. 78–92.\\ndoi:10.1002/9780470756645\",\n \"–––, 2006, “Debate About the Ontology\\nof Art: What are We Doing Here?”, Philosophy Compass 1(3): 245–255. doi:10.1111/j.1747-9991.2006.00021.x\",\n \"–––, 2007a, Ordinary Objects, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195319910.001.0001\",\n \"–––, 2007b, “Artifacts and Human\\nConcepts”, in Margolis and Laurence 2007: 52–73.\",\n \"–––, 2009, “Artefacts in\\nMetaphysics”, in Meijers 2009: 191–212.\\ndoi:10.1016/B978-0-444-51667-1.50012-4\",\n \"–––, 2014, “Public Artifacts, Intentions,\\nand Norms”, in Franssen, Kroes, Reydon, and Vermaas 2014:\\n45–62. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-00801-1_4\",\n \"van Inwagen, Peter, 1990, Material Beings, Ithaca, NY:\\nCornell University Press.\",\n \"Vermaas, Pieter E. and Wybo Houkes, 2003, “Ascribing\\nFunctions to Technical Artefacts: A Challenge to Etiological Accounts\\nof Functions”, British Journal for the Philosophy of\\nScience, 54(2): 261–289. doi:10.1093/bjps/54.2.261\",\n \"Vogel, Steven, 2003, “The Nature of Artifacts”,\\nEnvironmental Ethics, 25(2): 149–168.\\ndoi:10.5840/enviroethics200325230\",\n \"–––, 2015, Thinking Like a Mall:\\nEnvironmental Philosophy After the End of Nature, Cambridge: MIT\\nPress.\",\n \"Walters, Lee, 2013, “Repeatable Artworks as Created\\nTypes”, British Journal of Aesthetics, 53(4):\\n461–477. doi:10.1093/aesthj/ayt026\",\n \"Wilson, Robert A. and Andy Clark, 2009, “How to Situate\\nCognition: Letting Nature Take Its Course”, in Philip Robbins\\nand Murat Aydede (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated\\nCognition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.\\n55–77. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511816826.004\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../abstract-objects/","text":"abstract objects"},{"href":"../environmental-aesthetics/","text":"aesthetics: environmental"},{"href":"../aesthetics-of-everyday/","text":"aesthetics of the everyday"},{"href":"../ethics-environmental/","text":"ethics: environmental"},{"href":"../enhancement/","text":"human enhancement"},{"href":"../ethics-it-phenomenology/","text":"information technology: phenomenological approaches to ethics and"},{"href":"../ordinary-objects/","text":"ordinary objects"},{"href":"../ethics-social-networking/","text":"social networking and ethics"},{"href":"../technology/","text":"technology, philosophy of"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../abstract-objects/\",\n \"text\": \"abstract objects\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../environmental-aesthetics/\",\n \"text\": \"aesthetics: environmental\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aesthetics-of-everyday/\",\n \"text\": \"aesthetics of the everyday\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../ethics-environmental/\",\n \"text\": \"ethics: environmental\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../enhancement/\",\n \"text\": \"human enhancement\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../ethics-it-phenomenology/\",\n \"text\": \"information technology: phenomenological approaches to ethics and\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../ordinary-objects/\",\n \"text\": \"ordinary objects\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../ethics-social-networking/\",\n \"text\": \"social networking and ethics\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../technology/\",\n \"text\": \"technology, philosophy of\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":83,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"artificial-intelligence"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Artificial Intelligence"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Thu Jul 12, 2018"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nArtificial intelligence (AI) is the field devoted to building\nartificial animals (or at least artificial creatures that – in\nsuitable contexts – appear to be animals) and, for\nmany, artificial persons (or at least artificial creatures that\n– in suitable contexts – appear to be\n persons).[1]\n Such goals immediately ensure that AI is a discipline of considerable\ninterest to many philosophers, and this has been confirmed (e.g.) by\nthe energetic attempt, on the part of numerous philosophers, to show\nthat these goals are in fact un/attainable. On the constructive side,\nmany of the core formalisms and techniques used in AI come out of, and\nare indeed still much used and refined in, philosophy: first-order\nlogic and its extensions; intensional logics suitable for the modeling\nof doxastic attitudes and deontic reasoning; inductive logic,\nprobability theory, and probabilistic reasoning; practical reasoning\nand planning, and so on. In light of this, some philosophers conduct\nAI research and development as philosophy. ","\nIn the present entry, the history of AI is briefly recounted, proposed\ndefinitions of the field are discussed, and an overview of the field\nis provided. In addition, both philosophical AI (AI pursued as and out\nof philosophy) and philosophy of AI are discussed, via\nexamples of both. The entry ends with some de rigueur\nspeculative commentary regarding the future of AI. "],"string":"[\n \"\\nArtificial intelligence (AI) is the field devoted to building\\nartificial animals (or at least artificial creatures that – in\\nsuitable contexts – appear to be animals) and, for\\nmany, artificial persons (or at least artificial creatures that\\n– in suitable contexts – appear to be\\n persons).[1]\\n Such goals immediately ensure that AI is a discipline of considerable\\ninterest to many philosophers, and this has been confirmed (e.g.) by\\nthe energetic attempt, on the part of numerous philosophers, to show\\nthat these goals are in fact un/attainable. On the constructive side,\\nmany of the core formalisms and techniques used in AI come out of, and\\nare indeed still much used and refined in, philosophy: first-order\\nlogic and its extensions; intensional logics suitable for the modeling\\nof doxastic attitudes and deontic reasoning; inductive logic,\\nprobability theory, and probabilistic reasoning; practical reasoning\\nand planning, and so on. In light of this, some philosophers conduct\\nAI research and development as philosophy. \",\n \"\\nIn the present entry, the history of AI is briefly recounted, proposed\\ndefinitions of the field are discussed, and an overview of the field\\nis provided. In addition, both philosophical AI (AI pursued as and out\\nof philosophy) and philosophy of AI are discussed, via\\nexamples of both. The entry ends with some de rigueur\\nspeculative commentary regarding the future of AI. \"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. The History of AI","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. What Exactly ","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"3. Approaches to AI","sub_toc":["3.1 The Intelligent Agent Continuum","3.2 Logic-Based AI: Some Surgical Points","3.3 Non-Logicist AI: A Summary","3.4 AI Beyond the Clash of Paradigms "]},{"content_title":"4. The Explosive Growth of AI","sub_toc":["4.1 Bloom in Machine Learning ","4.2 The Resurgence of Neurocomputational Techniques","4.3 The Resurgence of Probabilistic Techniques"]},{"content_title":"5. AI in the Wild","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"6. Moral AI","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"7. Philosophical AI","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"8. Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence","sub_toc":["8.1 “Strong” versus “Weak” AI","8.2 The Chinese Room Argument Against “Strong AI”","8.3 The Gödelian Argument Against “Strong AI”","8.4 Additional Topics and Readings in Philosophy of AI"]},{"content_title":"9. The Future","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[" Online Courses on AI "]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. The History of AI\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. What Exactly \",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Approaches to AI\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"3.1 The Intelligent Agent Continuum\",\n \"3.2 Logic-Based AI: Some Surgical Points\",\n \"3.3 Non-Logicist AI: A Summary\",\n \"3.4 AI Beyond the Clash of Paradigms \"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. The Explosive Growth of AI\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"4.1 Bloom in Machine Learning \",\n \"4.2 The Resurgence of Neurocomputational Techniques\",\n \"4.3 The Resurgence of Probabilistic Techniques\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. AI in the Wild\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. Moral AI\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"7. Philosophical AI\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"8. Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"8.1 “Strong” versus “Weak” AI\",\n \"8.2 The Chinese Room Argument Against “Strong AI”\",\n \"8.3 The Gödelian Argument Against “Strong AI”\",\n \"8.4 Additional Topics and Readings in Philosophy of AI\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"9. The Future\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \" Online Courses on AI \"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\nThe field of artificial intelligence (AI) officially started in 1956,\nlaunched by a small but now-famous\n DARPA-sponsored\n summer conference at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire.\n(The 50-year celebration of this conference,\n AI@50,\n was held in July 2006 at Dartmouth, with five of the original\nparticipants making it\n back.[2]\n What happened at this historic conference figures in the final\nsection of this entry.) Ten thinkers attended, including John McCarthy\n(who was working at Dartmouth in 1956), Claude Shannon, Marvin Minsky,\nArthur Samuel, Trenchard Moore (apparently the lone note-taker at the\noriginal conference), Ray Solomonoff, Oliver Selfridge, Allen Newell,\nand Herbert Simon. From where we stand now, into the start of the new\nmillennium, the Dartmouth conference is memorable for many reasons,\nincluding this pair: one, the term ‘artificial\nintelligence’ was coined there (and has long been firmly\nentrenched, despite being disliked by some of the attendees, e.g.,\nMoore); two, Newell and Simon revealed a program – Logic\nTheorist (LT) – agreed by the attendees (and, indeed, by nearly\nall those who learned of and about it soon after the conference) to be\na remarkable achievement. LT was capable of proving elementary\ntheorems in the propositional\n calculus.[3][4]","\nThough the term ‘artificial intelligence’ made\nits advent at the 1956 conference, certainly the field of AI,\noperationally defined (defined, i.e., as a field constituted by\npractitioners who think and act in certain ways), was in operation\nbefore 1956. For example, in a famous Mind paper of 1950,\nAlan Turing argues that the question “Can a machine\nthink?” (and here Turing is talking about standard computing\nmachines: machines capable of computing functions from the natural\nnumbers (or pairs, triples, … thereof) to the natural numbers\nthat a Turing machine or equivalent can handle) should be replaced\nwith the question “Can a machine be linguistically\nindistinguishable from a human?.” Specifically, he proposes a\ntest, the\n “Turing Test”\n (TT) as it’s now known. In the TT, a woman and a computer are\nsequestered in sealed rooms, and a human judge, in the dark as to\nwhich of the two rooms contains which contestant, asks questions by\nemail (actually, by teletype, to use the original term) of the\ntwo. If, on the strength of returned answers, the judge can do no\nbetter than 50/50 when delivering a verdict as to which room houses\nwhich player, we say that the computer in question has passed\nthe TT. Passing in this sense operationalizes linguistic\nindistinguishability. Later, we shall discuss the role that TT has\nplayed, and indeed continues to play, in attempts to define AI. At the\nmoment, though, the point is that in his paper, Turing explicitly lays\ndown the call for building machines that would provide an existence\nproof of an affirmative answer to his question. The call even includes\na suggestion for how such construction should proceed. (He suggests\nthat “child machines” be built, and that these machines\ncould then gradually grow up on their own to learn to communicate in\nnatural language at the level of adult humans. This suggestion has\narguably been followed by Rodney Brooks and the philosopher Daniel\nDennett (1994) in the Cog Project. In addition, the Spielberg/Kubrick\nmovie A.I. is at least in part a cinematic exploration of\nTuring’s\n suggestion.[5])\n The TT continues to be at the heart of AI and discussions of its\nfoundations, as confirmed by the appearance of (Moor 2003). In fact,\nthe TT continues to be used to define the field, as in\nNilsson’s (1998) position, expressed in his textbook for the\nfield, that AI simply is the field devoted to building an artifact\nable to negotiate this test. Energy supplied by the dream of\nengineering a computer that can pass TT, or by controversy surrounding\nclaims that it has already been passed, is if anything\nstronger than ever, and the reader has only to do an internet search\nvia the string ","\nturing test passed ","\nto find up-to-the-minute attempts at reaching this dream, and attempts\n(sometimes made by philosophers) to debunk claims that some such\nattempt has succeeded.","\nReturning to the issue of the historical record, even if one bolsters\nthe claim that AI started at the 1956 conference by adding the proviso\nthat ‘artificial intelligence’ refers to a nuts-and-bolts\nengineering pursuit (in which case Turing’s\nphilosophical discussion, despite calls for a child machine,\nwouldn’t exactly count as AI per se), one must confront the fact\nthat Turing, and indeed many predecessors, did attempt to build\nintelligent artifacts. In Turing’s case, such building was\nsurprisingly well-understood before the advent of programmable\ncomputers: Turing wrote a program for playing chess before there were\ncomputers to run such programs on, by slavishly following the code\nhimself. He did this well before 1950, and long before Newell (1973)\ngave thought in print to the possibility of a sustained, serious\nattempt at building a good chess-playing\n computer.[6]","\nFrom the perspective of philosophy, which views the systematic\ninvestigation of mechanical intelligence as meaningful and productive\nseparate from the specific logicist formalisms (e.g., first-order\nlogic) and problems (e.g., the Entscheidungsproblem) that gave\nbirth to computer science, neither the 1956 conference, nor\nTuring’s Mind paper, come close to marking the start of\nAI. This is easy enough to see. For example, Descartes proposed TT\n(not the TT by name, of course) long before Turing was\n born.[7]\n Here’s the relevant passage: ","\nIf there were machines which bore a resemblance to our body and\nimitated our actions as far as it was morally possible to do so, we\nshould always have two very certain tests by which to recognise that,\nfor all that, they were not real men. The first is, that they could\nnever use speech or other signs as we do when placing our thoughts on\nrecord for the benefit of others. For we can easily understand a\nmachine’s being constituted so that it can utter words, and even\nemit some responses to action on it of a corporeal kind, which brings\nabout a change in its organs; for instance, if it is touched in a\nparticular part it may ask what we wish to say to it; if in another\npart it may exclaim that it is being hurt, and so on. But it never\nhappens that it arranges its speech in various ways, in order to reply\nappropriately to everything that may be said in its presence, as even\nthe lowest type of man can do. And the second difference is, that\nalthough machines can perform certain things as well as or perhaps\nbetter than any of us can do, they infallibly fall short in others, by\nwhich means we may discover that they did not act from knowledge, but\nonly for the disposition of their organs. For while reason is a\nuniversal instrument which can serve for all contingencies, these\norgans have need of some special adaptation for every particular\naction. From this it follows that it is morally impossible that there\nshould be sufficient diversity in any machine to allow it to act in\nall the events of life in the same way as our reason causes us to act.\n(Descartes 1637, p. 116)\n","\nAt the moment, Descartes is certainly carrying the\n day.[8]\n Turing predicted that his test would be passed by 2000, but the\nfireworks across the globe at the start of the new millennium have\nlong since died down, and the most articulate of computers still\ncan’t meaningfully debate a sharp toddler. Moreover, while in\ncertain focussed areas machines out-perform minds (IBM’s famous\nDeep Blue prevailed in chess over Gary Kasparov, e.g.; and more\nrecently, AI systems have prevailed in other games, e.g.\nJeopardy! and Go, about which more will momentarily be said),\nminds have a (Cartesian) capacity for cultivating their expertise in\nvirtually any sphere. (If it were announced to Deep Blue, or\nany current successor, that chess was no longer to be the game of\nchoice, but rather a heretofore unplayed variant of chess, the machine\nwould be trounced by human children of average intelligence having no\nchess expertise.) AI simply hasn’t managed to create\ngeneral intelligence; it hasn’t even managed to produce\nan artifact indicating that eventually it will create such a\nthing. ","\nBut what about IBM Watson’s famous nail-biting victory in the\nJeopardy! game-show\n contest?[9]\n That certainly seems to be a machine triumph over humans on their\n“home field,” since Jeopardy! delivers a\nhuman-level linguistic challenge ranging across many domains. Indeed,\namong many AI cognoscenti, Watson’s success is considered to be\nmuch more impressive than Deep Blue’s, for numerous reasons. One\nreason is that while chess is generally considered to be\nwell-understood from the formal-computational perspective (after all,\nit’s well-known that there exists a perfect strategy for playing\nchess), in open-domain question-answering (QA), as in any\nsignificant natural-language processing task, there is no consensus as\nto what problem, formally speaking, one is trying to solve. Briefly,\nquestion-answering (QA) is what the reader would think it is: one asks\na question of a machine, and gets an answer, where the answer has to\nbe produced via some “significant” computational process.\n(See Strzalkowski & Harabagiu (2006) for an overview of what QA,\nhistorically, has been as a field.) A bit more precisely, there is no\nagreement as to what underlying function, formally speaking,\nquestion-answering capability computes. This lack of agreement stems\nquite naturally from the fact that there is of course no consensus as\nto what natural languages are, formally\n speaking.[10]\n Despite this murkiness, and in the face of an almost universal belief\nthat open-domain question-answering would remain unsolved for a decade\nor more, Watson decisively beat the two top human Jeopardy!\nchampions on the planet. During the contest, Watson had to answer\nquestions that required not only command of simple factoids\n(Question1), but also of some amount of rudimentary\nreasoning (in the form of temporal reasoning) and commonsense\n(Question2):","\nQuestion1: The only two consecutive U.S. presidents\nwith the same first name. ","\nQuestion2: In May 1898, Portugal celebrated the\n400th anniversary of this explorer’s arrival in India. ","\nWhile Watson is demonstrably better than humans in\nJeopardy!-style quizzing (a new human Jeopardy! master\ncould arrive on the scene, but as for chess, AI now assumes that a\nsecond round of IBM-level investment would vanquish the new human\nopponent), this approach does not work for the kind of NLP challenge\nthat Descartes described; that is, Watson can’t converse on the\nfly. After all, some questions don’t hinge on sophisticated\ninformation retrieval and machine learning over pre-existing data, but\nrather on intricate reasoning right on the spot. Such questions may\nfor instance involve anaphora resolution, which require even deeper\ndegrees of commonsensical understanding of time, space, history, folk\npsychology, and so on. Levesque (2013) has catalogued some alarmingly\nsimple questions which fall in this category. (Marcus, 2013, gives an\naccount of Levesque’s challenges that is accessible to a wider\naudience.) The other class of question-answering tasks on which Watson\nfails can be characterized as dynamic question-answering. These\nare questions for which answers may not be recorded in textual form\nanywhere at the time of questioning, or for which answers are\ndependent on factors that change with time. Two questions that fall in\nthis category are given below (Govindarajulu et al. 2013):","\nQuestion3: If I have 4 foos and 5 bars, and if foos\nare not the same as bars, how many foos will I have if I get 3 bazes\nwhich just happen to be foos?","\nQuestion4: What was IBM’s Sharpe ratio in the\nlast 60 days of trading? ","\nClosely following Watson’s victory, in March 2016,\n Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo\n defeated one of Go’s top-ranked players, Lee Seedol, in four\nout of five matches. This was considered a landmark achievement within\nAI, as it was widely believed in the AI community that computer\nvictory in Go was at least a few decades away, partly due to the\nenormous number of valid sequences of moves in Go compared to that in\n Chess.[11]\n While this is a remarkable achievement, it should be noted that,\ndespite breathless coverage in the popular\n press,[12]\n AlphaGo, while indisputably a great Go player, is just that. For\nexample, neither AlphaGo nor Watson can understand the rules of Go\nwritten in plain-and-simple English and produce a computer program\nthat can play the game. It’s interesting that there is one\nendeavor in AI that tackles a narrow version of this very problem: In\ngeneral game playing, a machine is given a description of a\nbrand new game just before it has to play the game (Genesereth et al.\n2005). However, the description in question is expressed in a formal\nlanguage, and the machine has to manage to play the game from this\ndescription. Note that this is still far from understanding even a\nsimple description of a game in English well enough to play it. ","\nBut what if we consider the history of AI not from the perspective of\nphilosophy, but rather from the perspective of the field with which,\ntoday, it is most closely connected? The reference here is to computer\nscience. From this perspective, does AI run back to well before\nTuring? Interestingly enough, the results are the same: we find that\nAI runs deep into the past, and has always had philosophy in its\nveins. This is true for the simple reason that computer science grew\nout of logic and probability\n theory,[13]\n which in turn grew out of (and is still intertwined with) philosophy.\nComputer science, today, is shot through and through with logic; the\ntwo fields cannot be separated. This phenomenon has become an object\nof study unto itself (Halpern et al. 2001). The situation is no\ndifferent when we are talking not about traditional logic, but rather\nabout probabilistic formalisms, also a significant component of\nmodern-day AI: These formalisms also grew out of philosophy, as nicely\nchronicled, in part, by Glymour (1992). For example, in the one mind\nof Pascal was born a method of rigorously calculating probabilities,\nconditional probability (which plays a particularly large role in AI,\ncurrently), and such fertile philosophico-probabilistic arguments as\n Pascal’s wager,\n according to which it is irrational not to become a Christian. ","\nThat modern-day AI has its roots in philosophy, and in fact that these\nhistorical roots are temporally deeper than even Descartes’\ndistant day, can be seen by looking to the clever, revealing cover of\nthe second edition (the third edition is the current one) of the\ncomprehensive textbook\n Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach\n (known in the AI community as simply AIMA2e for Russell &\nNorvig, 2002).","\nWhat you see there is an eclectic collection of memorabilia that might\nbe on and around the desk of some imaginary AI researcher. For\nexample, if you look carefully, you will specifically see: a picture\nof Turing, a view of Big Ben through a window (perhaps R&N are\naware of the fact that Turing famously held at one point that a\nphysical machine with the power of a universal Turing machine is\nphysically impossible: he quipped that it would have to be the size of\nBig Ben), a planning algorithm described in Aristotle’s De\nMotu Animalium,\n Frege’s fascinating notation for first-order logic,\n a glimpse of Lewis Carroll’s (1958) pictorial representation of\nsyllogistic reasoning, Ramon Lull’s concept-generating wheel\nfrom his 13th-century Ars Magna, and a number of\nother pregnant items (including, in a clever, recursive, and\nbordering-on-self-congratulatory touch, a copy of AIMA itself).\nThough there is insufficient space here to make all the historical\nconnections, we can safely infer from the appearance of these items\n(and here we of course refer to the ancient ones: Aristotle conceived\nof planning as information-processing over two-and-a-half millennia\nback; and in addition, as Glymour (1992) notes, Artistotle can also be\ncredited with devising the first knowledge-bases and ontologies, two\ntypes of representation schemes that have long been central to AI)\nthat AI is indeed very, very old. Even those who insist that AI is at\nleast in part an artifact-building enterprise must concede that, in\nlight of these objects, AI is ancient, for it isn’t just\ntheorizing from the perspective that intelligence is at bottom\ncomputational that runs back into the remote past of human history:\nLull’s wheel, for example, marks an attempt to capture\nintelligence not only in computation, but in a physical artifact that\nembodies that\n computation.[14]\n ","\nAIMA has now reached its the third edition, and those interested in\nthe history of AI, and for that matter the history of philosophy of\nmind, will not be disappointed by examination of the cover of the\nthird installment (the cover of the second edition is almost exactly\nlike the first edition). (All the elements of the cover, separately\nlisted and annotated, can be found\n online.)\n One significant addition to the cover of the third edition is a\ndrawing of Thomas Bayes; his appearance reflects the recent rise in\nthe popularity of probabilistic techniques in AI, which we discuss\nlater.","\nOne final point about the history of AI seems worth making. ","\nIt is generally assumed that the birth of modern-day AI in the 1950s\ncame in large part because of and through the advent of the modern\nhigh-speed digital computer. This assumption accords with\ncommon-sense. After all, AI (and, for that matter, to some degree its\ncousin, cognitive science, particularly computational cognitive\nmodeling, the sub-field of cognitive science devoted to producing\ncomputational simulations of human cognition) is aimed at implementing\nintelligence in a computer, and it stands to reason that such a goal\nwould be inseparably linked with the advent of such devices. However,\nthis is only part of the story: the part that reaches back but to\nTuring and others (e.g., von Neuman) responsible for the first\nelectronic computers. The other part is that, as already mentioned, AI\nhas a particularly strong tie, historically speaking, to reasoning\n(logic-based and, in the need to deal with uncertainty,\ninductive/probabilistic reasoning). In this story, nicely told by\nGlymour (1992), a search for an answer to the question “What is\na proof?” eventually led to an answer based on Frege’s\nversion of first-order logic (FOL): a (finitary) mathematical proof\nconsists in a series of step-by-step inferences from one formula of\nfirst-order logic to the next. The obvious extension of this answer\n(and it isn’t a complete answer, given that lots of classical\nmathematics, despite conventional wisdom, clearly can’t be\nexpressed in FOL; even the Peano Axioms, to be expressed as a finite\nset of formulae, require SOL) is to say that not only\nmathematical thinking, but thinking, period, can be expressed in FOL.\n(This extension was entertained by many logicians long before the\nstart of information-processing psychology and cognitive science\n– a fact some cognitive psychologists and cognitive scientists\noften seem to forget.) Today, logic-based AI is only part of\nAI, but the point is that this part still lives (with help from logics\nmuch more powerful, but much more complicated, than FOL), and it can\nbe traced all the way back to Aristotle’s theory of the\n syllogism.[15]\n In the case of uncertain reasoning, the question isn’t\n“What is a proof?”, but rather questions such as\n“What is it rational to believe, in light of certain\nobservations and probabilities?” This is a question posed and\ntackled long before the arrival of digital computers. "],"section_title":"1. The History of AI","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nSo far we have been proceeding as if we have a firm and precise grasp\nof the nature of AI. But what exactly is AI? Philosophers\narguably know better than anyone that precisely defining a particular\ndiscipline to the satisfaction of all relevant parties (including\nthose working in the discipline itself) can be acutely challenging.\nPhilosophers of science certainly have proposed credible accounts of\nwhat constitutes at least the general shape and texture of a given\nfield of science and/or engineering, but what exactly is the\nagreed-upon definition of physics? What about biology? What, for that\nmatter, is philosophy, exactly? These are remarkably difficult, maybe\neven eternally unanswerable, questions, especially if the target is a\nconsensus definition. Perhaps the most prudent course we can\nmanage here under obvious space constraints is to present in\nencapsulated form some proposed definitions of AI. We do\ninclude a glimpse of recent attempts to define AI in detailed,\nrigorous fashion (and we suspect that such attempts will be of\ninterest to philosophers of science, and those interested in this\nsub-area of philosophy). ","\nRussell and Norvig (1995, 2002, 2009), in their aforementioned\nAIMA text, provide a set of possible answers to the “What\nis AI?” question that has considerable currency in the field\nitself. These answers all assume that AI should be defined in terms of\nits goals: a candidate definition thus has the form “AI is the\nfield that aims at building …” The answers all fall under\na quartet of types placed along two dimensions. One dimension is\nwhether the goal is to match human performance, or, instead, ideal\nrationality. The other dimension is whether the goal is to build\nsystems that reason/think, or rather systems that act. The situation\nis summed up in this table:","\nPlease note that this quartet of possibilities does reflect (at least\na significant portion of) the relevant literature. For example,\nphilosopher John Haugeland (1985) falls into the Human/Reasoning\nquadrant when he says that AI is “The exciting new effort to\nmake computers think … machines with minds, in the\nfull and literal sense.” (By far, this is the quadrant that most\npopular narratives affirm and explore. The recent\n Westworld\n TV series is a powerful case in point.) Luger and Stubblefield (1993)\nseem to fall into the Ideal/Act quadrant when they write: “The\nbranch of computer science that is concerned with the automation of\nintelligent behavior.” The Human/Act position is occupied most\nprominently by Turing, whose test is passed only by those systems able\nto act sufficiently like a human. The “thinking\nrationally” position is defended (e.g.) by Winston (1992). While\nit might not be entirely uncontroversial to assert that the four bins\ngiven here are exhaustive, such an assertion appears to be quite\nplausible, even when the literature up to the present moment is\ncanvassed. ","\nIt’s important to know that the contrast between the focus on\nsystems that think/reason versus systems that act, while found, as we\nhave seen, at the heart of the AIMA texts, and at the heart of\nAI itself, should not be interpreted as implying that AI researchers\nview their work as falling all and only within one of these two\ncompartments. Researchers who focus more or less exclusively on\nknowledge representation and reasoning, are also quite prepared to\nacknowledge that they are working on (what they take to be) a central\ncomponent or capability within any one of a family of larger systems\nspanning the reason/act distinction. The clearest case may come from\nthe work on planning – an AI area traditionally making central\nuse of representation and reasoning. For good or ill, much of this\nresearch is done in abstraction (in vitro, as opposed to in vivo), but\nthe researchers involved certainly intend or at least hope that the\nresults of their work can be embedded into systems that actually do\nthings, such as, for example, execute the plans. ","\nWhat about Russell and Norvig themselves? What is their answer to the\nWhat is AI? question? They are firmly in the the “acting\nrationally” camp. In fact, it’s safe to say both that they\nare the chief proponents of this answer, and that they have been\nremarkably successful evangelists. Their extremely influential\nAIMA series can be viewed as a book-length defense and\nspecification of the Ideal/Act category. We will look a bit later at\nhow Russell and Norvig lay out all of AI in terms of intelligent\nagents, which are systems that act in accordance with various\nideal standards for rationality. But first let’s look a bit\ncloser at the view of intelligence underlying the AIMA text. We\ncan do so by turning to Russell (1997). Here Russell recasts the\n“What is AI?” question as the question “What is\nintelligence?” (presumably under the assumption that we have a\ngood grasp of what an artifact is), and then he identifies\nintelligence with rationality. More specifically, Russell sees\nAI as the field devoted to building intelligent agents, which\nare functions taking as input tuples of percepts from the external\nenvironment, and producing behavior (actions) on the basis of these\npercepts. Russell’s overall picture is this one:","\nLet’s unpack this diagram a bit, and take a look, first, at the\naccount of perfect rationality that can be derived from it. The\nbehavior of the agent in the environment \\(E\\) (from a class \\(\\bE\\)\nof environments) produces a sequence of states or snapshots of that\nenvironment. A performance measure \\(U\\) evaluates this sequence;\nnotice the box labeled “Performance Measure” in the above\nfigure. We let \\(V(f,\\bE,U)\\) denote the expected utility\naccording to \\(U\\) of the agent function \\(f\\) operating on\n \\(\\bE\\).[16]\n Now we identify a perfectly rational agent with the agent function:\n","\nAccording to the above equation, a perfectly rational agent can be\ntaken to be the function \\(f_{opt}\\) which produces the maximum\nexpected utility in the environment under consideration. Of course, as\nRussell points out, it’s usually not possible to actually build\nperfectly rational agents. For example, though it’s easy enough\nto specify an algorithm for playing invincible chess, it’s not\nfeasible to implement this algorithm. What traditionally happens in AI\nis that programs that are – to use Russell’s apt\nterminology – calculatively rational are constructed\ninstead: these are programs that, if executed infinitely fast,\nwould result in perfectly rational behavior. In the case of chess,\nthis would mean that we strive to write a program that runs an\nalgorithm capable, in principle, of finding a flawless move, but we\nadd features that truncate the search for this move in order to play\nwithin intervals of digestible duration. ","\nRussell himself champions a new brand of intelligence/rationality for\nAI; he calls this brand bounded optimality. To understand\nRussell’s view, first we follow him in introducing a\ndistinction: We say that agents have two components: a program, and a\nmachine upon which the program runs. We write \\(Agent(P, M)\\) to\ndenote the agent function implemented by program \\(P\\) running on\nmachine \\(M\\). Now, let \\(\\mathcal{P}(M)\\) denote the set of all\nprograms \\(P\\) that can run on machine \\(M\\). The bounded\noptimal program \\(P_{\\opt,M}\\) then is:","\nYou can understand this equation in terms of any of the mathematical\nidealizations for standard computation. For example, machines can be\nidentified with Turing machines minus instructions (i.e., TMs are here\nviewed architecturally only: as having tapes divided into squares upon\nwhich symbols can be written, read/write heads capable of moving up\nand down the tape to write and erase, and control units which are in\none of a finite number of states at any time), and programs can be\nidentified with instructions in the Turing-machine model (telling the\nmachine to write and erase symbols, depending upon what state the\nmachine is in). So, if you are told that you must\n“program” within the constraints of a 22-state Turing\nmachine, you could search for the “best” program given\nthose constraints. In other words, you could strive to find the\noptimal program within the bounds of the 22-state architecture.\nRussell’s (1997) view is thus that AI is the field devoted to\ncreating optimal programs for intelligent agents, under time and space\nconstraints on the machines implementing these\n programs.[17]\n ","\nThe reader must have noticed that in the equation for \\(P_{\\opt,M}\\)\nwe have not elaborated on \\(\\bE\\) and \\(U\\) and how equation\n\\eqref{eq1} might be used to construct an agent if the class of\nenvironments \\(\\bE\\) is quite general, or if the true environment\n\\(E\\) is simply unknown. Depending on the task for which one is\nconstructing an artificial agent, \\(E\\) and \\(U\\) would vary. The\nmathematical form of the environment \\(E\\) and the utility function\n\\(U\\) would vary wildly from, say, chess to Jeopardy!. Of\ncourse, if we were to design a globally intelligent agent, and not\njust a chess-playing agent, we could get away with having just one\npair of \\(E\\) and \\(U\\). What would \\(E\\) look like if we were\nbuilding a generally intelligent agent and not just an agent that is\ngood at a single task? \\(E\\) would be a model of not just a single\ngame or a task, but the entire physical-social-virtual universe\nconsisting of many games, tasks, situations, problems, etc. This\nproject is (at least currently) hopelessly difficult as, obviously, we\nare nowhere near to having such a comprehensive theory-of-everything\nmodel. For further discussion of a theoretical architecture put\nforward for this problem, see the\n Supplement on the AIXI architecture.\n ","\nIt should be mentioned that there is a different, much more\nstraightforward answer to the “What is AI?” question. This\nanswer, which goes back to the days of the original Dartmouth\nconference, was expressed by, among others, Newell (1973), one of the\ngrandfathers of modern-day AI (recall that he attended the 1956\nconference); it is: ","\nAI is the field devoted to building artifacts that are intelligent,\nwhere ‘intelligent’ is operationalized through\nintelligence tests (such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale),\nand other tests of mental ability (including, e.g., tests of\nmechanical ability, creativity, and so on).\n","\nThe above definition can be seen as fully specifying a concrete\nversion of Russell and Norvig’s four possible goals. Though few\nare aware of this now, this answer was taken quite seriously for a\nwhile, and in fact underlied one of the most famous programs in the\nhistory of AI: the ANALOGY program of Evans (1968), which solved\ngeometric analogy problems of a type seen in many intelligence tests.\nAn attempt to rigorously define this forgotten form of AI (as what\nthey dub Psychometric AI), and to resurrect it from the days of\nNewell and Evans, is provided by Bringsjord and Schimanski (2003) [see\nalso e.g. (Bringsjord 2011)]. A sizable private investment has been\nmade in the ongoing attempt, now known as\n Project Aristo,\n to build a “digital Aristotle”, in the form of a machine\nable to excel on standardized tests such at the AP exams tackled by US\nhigh school students (Friedland et al. 2004). (Vibrant work in this\ndirection continues today at the\n Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.)[18]\n In addition, researchers at Northwestern have forged a connection\nbetween AI and tests of mechanical ability (Klenk et al. 2005). ","\nIn the end, as is the case with any discipline, to really know\nprecisely what that discipline is requires you to, at least to some\ndegree, dive in and do, or at least dive in and read. Two decades ago\nsuch a dive was quite manageable. Today, because the content that has\ncome to constitute AI has mushroomed, the dive (or at least the swim\nafter it) is a bit more demanding."],"section_title":"2. What Exactly is AI?","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nThere are a number of ways of “carving up” AI. By far the\nmost prudent and productive way to summarize the field is to turn yet\nagain to the AIMA text given its comprehensive overview of the\nfield. "],"section_title":"3. Approaches to AI","subsections":[{"content":["\nAs Russell and Norvig (2009) tell us in the Preface of AIMA:\n","\nThe main unifying theme is the idea of an intelligent agent. We define\nAI as the study of agents that receive percepts from the environment\nand perform actions. Each such agent implements a function that maps\npercept sequences to actions, and we cover different ways to represent\nthese functions… (Russell & Norvig 2009, vii)\n","\nThe basic picture is thus summed up in this figure:","\nThe content of AIMA derives, essentially, from fleshing out\nthis picture; that is, the above figure corresponds to the different\nways of representing the overall function that intelligent agents\nimplement. And there is a progression from the least powerful agents\nup to the more powerful ones. The following figure gives a high-level\nview of a simple kind of agent discussed early in the book. (Though\nsimple, this sort of agent corresponds to the architecture of\nrepresentation-free agents designed and implemented by Rodney Brooks,\n1991.)","\nAs the book progresses, agents get increasingly sophisticated, and the\nimplementation of the function they represent thus draws from more and\nmore of what AI can currently muster. The following figure gives an\noverview of an agent that is a bit smarter than the simple reflex\nagent. This smarter agent has the ability to internally model the\noutside world, and is therefore not simply at the mercy of what can at\nthe moment be directly sensed.","\nThere are seven parts to AIMA. As the reader passes through\nthese parts, she is introduced to agents that take on the powers\ndiscussed in each part. Part I is an introduction to the agent-based\nview. Part II is concerned with giving an intelligent agent the\ncapacity to think ahead a few steps in clearly defined environments.\nExamples here include agents able to successfully play games of\nperfect information, such as chess. Part III deals with agents that\nhave declarative knowledge and can reason in ways that will be quite\nfamiliar to most philosophers and logicians (e.g., knowledge-based\nagents deduce what actions should be taken to secure their goals).\nPart IV of the book outfits agents with the power to handle\nuncertainty by reasoning in probabilistic\n fashion.[19]\n In Part V, agents are given a capacity to learn. The following figure\nshows the overall structure of a learning agent.","\nThe final set of powers agents are given allow them to communicate.\nThese powers are covered in Part VI. ","\nPhilosophers who patiently travel the entire progression of\nincreasingly smart agents will no doubt ask, when reaching the end of\nPart VII, if anything is missing. Are we given enough, in general, to\nbuild an artificial person, or is there enough only to build a mere\nanimal? This question is implicit in the following from Charniak and\nMcDermott (1985): ","\nThe ultimate goal of AI (which we are very far from achieving) is to\nbuild a person, or, more humbly, an animal. (Charniak & McDermott\n1985, 7)\n","\nTo their credit, Russell & Norvig, in AIMA’s Chapter\n27, “AI: Present and Future,” consider this question, at\nleast to some\n degree.[]\n They do so by considering some challenges to AI that have hitherto\nnot been met. One of these challenges is described by R&N as\nfollows: ","\n[M]achine learning has made very little progress on the important\nproblem of constructing new representations at levels of abstraction\nhigher than the input vocabulary. In computer vision, for example,\nlearning complex concepts such as Classroom and Cafeteria would be\nmade unnecessarily difficult if the agent were forced to work from\npixels as the input representation; instead, the agent needs to be\nable to form intermediate concepts first, such as Desk and Tray,\nwithout explicit human supervision. Similar concepts apply to learning\nbehavior: HavingACupOfTea is a very important high-level step\nin many plans, but how does it get into an action library that\ninitially contains much simpler actions such as RaiseArm and Swallow?\nPerhaps this will incorporate deep belief networks –\nBayesian networks that have multiple layers of hidden variables, as in\nthe work of Hinton et al. (2006), Hawkins and Blakeslee (2004),\nand Bengio and LeCun (2007). … Unless we understand such\nissues, we are faced with the daunting task of constructing large\ncommonsense knowledge bases by hand, and approach that has not fared\nwell to date. (Russell & Norvig 2009, Ch. 27.1)\n","\nWhile there has seen some advances in addressing this challenge (in\nthe form of deep learning or representation learning),\nthis specific challenge is actually merely a foothill before a range\nof dizzyingly high mountains that AI must eventually somehow manage to\nclimb. One of those mountains, put simply, is\n reading.[21]\n Despite the fact that, as noted, Part V of AIMA is devoted to\nmachine learning, AI, as it stands, offers next to nothing in the way\nof a mechanization of learning by reading. Yet when you think about\nit, reading is probably the dominant way you learn at this stage in\nyour life. Consider what you’re doing at this very moment.\nIt’s a good bet that you are reading this sentence because,\nearlier, you set yourself the goal of learning about the field of AI.\n Yet\n the formal models of learning provided in AIMA’s Part IV\n(which are all and only the models at play in AI) cannot be applied to\nlearning by\n reading.[22]\n These models all start with a function-based view of learning.\nAccording to this view, to learn is almost invariably to produce an\nunderlying function \\(\\ff\\) on the basis of a restricted set of\npairs","\nFor example, consider receiving inputs consisting of 1, 2, 3, 4, and\n5, and corresponding range values of 1, 4, 9, 16, and 25; the goal is\nto “learn” the underlying mapping from natural numbers to\nnatural numbers. In this case, assume that the underlying function is\n\\(n^2\\), and that you do “learn” it. While this narrow\nmodel of learning can be productively applied to a number of\nprocesses, the process of reading isn’t one of them. Learning by\nreading cannot (at least for the foreseeable future) be modeled as\ndivining a function that produces argument-value pairs. Instead, your\nreading about AI can pay dividends only if your knowledge has\nincreased in the right way, and if that knowledge leaves you\npoised to be able to produce behavior taken to confirm sufficient\nmastery of the subject area in question. This behavior can range from\ncorrectly answering and justifying test questions regarding AI, to\nproducing a robust, compelling presentation or paper that signals your\nachievement. ","\nTwo points deserve to be made about machine reading. First, it may not\nbe clear to all readers that reading is an ability that is central to\nintelligence. The centrality derives from the fact that intelligence\nrequires vast knowledge. We have no other means of getting systematic\nknowledge into a system than to get it in from text, whether text on\nthe web, text in libraries, newspapers, and so on. You might even say\nthat the big problem with AI has been that machines really don’t\nknow much compared to humans. That can only be because of the fact\nthat humans read (or hear: illiterate people can listen to text being\nuttered and learn that way). Either machines gain knowledge by humans\nmanually encoding and inserting knowledge, or by reading and\nlistening. These are brute facts. (We leave aside supernatural\ntechniques, of course. Oddly enough, Turing didn’t: he seemed to\nthink ESP should be discussed in connection with the powers of minds\nand machines. See Turing,\n 1950.)[23]","\nNow for the second point. Humans able to read have invariably also\nlearned a language, and learning languages has been modeled in\nconformity to the function-based approach adumbrated just above\n(Osherson et al. 1986). However, this doesn’t entail that an\nartificial agent able to read, at least to a significant degree, must\nhave really and truly learned a natural language. AI is first and\nforemost concerned with engineering computational artifacts that\nmeasure up to some test (where, yes, sometimes that test is from the\nhuman sphere), not with whether these artifacts process information in\nways that match those present in the human case. It may or may not be\nnecessary, when engineering a machine that can read, to imbue that\nmachine with human-level linguistic competence. The issue is\nempirical, and as time unfolds, and the engineering is pursued, we\nshall no doubt see the issue settled. ","\nTwo additional high mountains facing AI are subjective consciousness\nand creativity, yet it would seem that these great challenges are ones\nthe field apparently hasn’t even come to grips with. Mental\nphenomena of paramount importance to many philosophers of mind and\nneuroscience are simply missing from AIMA. For example,\nconsciousness is only mentioned in passing in AIMA, but\nsubjective consciousness is the most important thing in our lives\n– indeed we only desire to go on living because we wish to go on\nenjoying subjective states of certain types. Moreover, if human minds\nare the product of evolution, then presumably phenomenal consciousness\nhas great survival value, and would be of tremendous help to a robot\nintended to have at least the behavioral repertoire of the first\ncreatures with brains that match our own (hunter-gatherers; see Pinker\n1997). Of course, subjective consciousness is largely missing from the\nsister fields of cognitive psychology and computational cognitive\nmodeling as well. We discuss some of these challenges in the\n Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence\n section below. For a list of similar challenges to cognitive science,\nsee the relevant\n section of the entry on cognitive science.[24]\n ","\nTo some readers, it might seem in the very least tendentious to point\nto subjective consciousness as a major challenge to AI that it has yet\nto address. These readers might be of the view that pointing to this\nproblem is to look at AI through a distinctively philosophical prism,\nand indeed a controversial philosophical standpoint. ","\nBut as its literature makes clear, AI measures itself by looking to\nanimals and humans and picking out in them remarkable mental powers,\nand by then seeing if these powers can be mechanized. Arguably the\npower most important to humans (the capacity to experience) is nowhere\nto be found on the target list of most AI researchers. There may be a\ngood reason for this (no formalism is at hand, perhaps), but there is\nno denying the state of affairs in question obtains, and that, in\nlight of how AI measures itself, that it’s worrisome. ","\nAs to creativity, it’s quite remarkable that the power we most\npraise in human minds is nowhere to be found in AIMA. Just as\nin (Charniak & McDermott 1985) one cannot find\n‘neural’ in the index, ‘creativity’\ncan’t be found in the index of AIMA. This is particularly\nodd because many AI researchers have in fact worked on creativity\n(especially those coming out of philosophy; e.g., Boden 1994,\nBringsjord & Ferrucci 2000). ","\nAlthough the focus has been on AIMA, any of its counterparts\ncould have been used. As an example, consider Artificial\nIntelligence: A New Synthesis, by Nils Nilsson. As in the case of\nAIMA, everything here revolves around a gradual progression\nfrom the simplest of agents (in Nilsson’s case, reactive\nagents), to ones having more and more of those powers that\ndistinguish persons. Energetic readers can verify that there is a\nstriking parallel between the main sections of Nilsson’s book\nand AIMA. In addition, Nilsson, like Russell and Norvig,\nignores phenomenal consciousness, reading, and creativity. None of the\nthree are even mentioned. Likewise, a recent comprehensive AI textbook\nby Luger (2008) follows the same pattern. ","\nA final point to wrap up this section. It seems quite plausible to\nhold that there is a certain inevitability to the structure of an AI\ntextbook, and the apparent reason is perhaps rather interesting. In\npersonal conversation, Jim Hendler, a well-known AI researcher who is\none of the main innovators behind Semantic Web (Berners-Lee, Hendler,\nLassila 2001), an under-development “AI-ready” version of\nthe World Wide Web, has said that this inevitability can be rather\neasily displayed when teaching Introduction to AI; here’s how.\nBegin by asking students what they think AI is. Invariably, many\nstudents will volunteer that AI is the field devoted to building\nartificial creatures that are intelligent. Next, ask for examples of\nintelligent creatures. Students always respond by giving examples\nacross a continuum: simple multi-cellular organisms, insects, rodents,\nlower mammals, higher mammals (culminating in the great apes), and\nfinally human persons. When students are asked to describe the\ndifferences between the creatures they have cited, they end up\nessentially describing the progression from simple agents to ones\nhaving our (e.g.) communicative powers. This progression gives the\nskeleton of every comprehensive AI textbook. Why does this happen? The\nanswer seems clear: it happens because we can’t resist\nconceiving of AI in terms of the powers of extant creatures with which\nwe are familiar. At least at present, persons, and the creatures who\nenjoy only bits and pieces of personhood, are – to repeat\n– the measure of\n AI.[25]\n "],"subsection_title":"3.1 The Intelligent Agent Continuum"},{"content":["\nReasoning based on classical deductive logic is monotonic; that is, if\n\\(\\Phi\\vdash\\phi\\), then for all \\(\\psi\\), \\(\\Phi\\cup\n\\{\\psi\\}\\vdash\\phi\\). Commonsense reasoning is not monotonic. While\nyou may currently believe on the basis of reasoning that your house is\nstill standing, if while at work you see on your computer screen that\na vast tornado is moving through the location of your house, you will\ndrop this belief. The addition of new information causes previous\ninferences to fail. In the simpler example that has become an AI\nstaple, if I tell you that Tweety is a bird, you will infer that\nTweety can fly, but if I then inform you that Tweety is a penguin, the\ninference evaporates, as well it should. Nonmonotonic (or defeasible)\nlogic includes formalisms designed to capture the mechanisms\nunderlying these kinds of examples. See the separate entry on\n logic and artificial intelligence,\n which is focused on nonmonotonic reasoning, and reasoning about time\nand change. It also provides a history of the early days of\nlogic-based AI, making clear the contributions of those who founded\nthe tradition (e.g., John McCarthy and Pat Hayes; see their seminal\n1969 paper). ","\nThe formalisms and techniques of logic-based AI have reached a level\nof impressive maturity – so much so that in various academic and\ncorporate laboratories, implementations of these formalisms and\ntechniques can be used to engineer robust, real-world software. It is\nstrongly recommend that readers who have an interest to learn where AI\nstands in these areas consult (Mueller 2006), which provides, in one\nvolume, integrated coverage of nonmonotonic reasoning (in the form,\nspecifically, of circumscription), and reasoning about time and change\nin the situation and event calculi. (The former calculus is also\nintroduced by Thomason. In the second, timepoints are included, among\nother things.) The other nice thing about (Mueller 2006) is that the\nlogic used is multi-sorted first-order logic (MSL), which has\nunificatory power that will be known to and appreciated by many\ntechnical philosophers and logicians (Manzano 1996). ","\nWe now turn to three further topics of importance in AI. They are:","\nThis trio is covered in order, beginning with the first.","\nDetailed accounts of logicist AI that fall under the agent-based\nscheme can be found in (Lenat 1983, Lenat & Guha 1990, Nilsson\n1991, Bringsjord & Ferrucci\n 1998).[26].\n The core idea is that an intelligent agent receives percepts from the\nexternal world in the form of formulae in some logical system (e.g.,\nfirst-order logic), and infers, on the basis of these percepts and its\nknowledge base, what actions should be performed to secure the\nagent’s goals. (This is of course a barbaric simplification.\nInformation from the external world is encoded in formulae,\nand transducers to accomplish this feat may be components of the\nagent.) ","\nTo clarify things a bit, we consider, briefly, the logicist view in\nconnection with arbitrary logical systems\n \\(\\mathcal{L}_{X}\\).[27]\n We obtain a particular logical system by setting \\(X\\) in the\nappropriate way. Some examples: If \\(X=I\\), then we have a system at\nthe level of FOL [following the standard notation from model theory;\nsee e.g. (Ebbinghaus et al. 1984)]. \\(\\mathcal{L}_{II}\\) is\nsecond-order logic, and \\(\\mathcal{L}_{\\omega_I\\omega}\\) is a\n“small system” of infinitary logic (countably infinite\nconjunctions and disjunctions are permitted). These logical systems\nare all extensional, but there are intensional ones as\nwell. For example, we can have logical systems corresponding to those\nseen in standard propositional modal logic (Chellas 1980). One\npossibility, familiar to many philosophers, would be propositional\nKT45, or\n \\(\\mathcal{L}_{KT45}\\).[28]\n In each case, the system in question includes a relevant alphabet\nfrom which well-formed formulae are constructed by way of a formal\ngrammar, a reasoning (or proof) theory, a formal semantics, and at\nleast some meta-theoretical results (soundness, completeness, etc.).\nTaking off from standard notation, we can thus say that a set of\nformulas in some particular logical system \\(\\mathcal{L}_X\\),\n\\(\\Phi_{\\mathcal{L}_X}\\), can be used, in conjunction with some\nreasoning theory, to infer some particular formula\n\\(\\phi_{\\mathcal{L}_X}\\). (The reasoning may be deductive, inductive,\nabductive, and so on. Logicist AI isn’t in the least restricted\nto any particular mode of reasoning.) To say that such a situation\nholds, we write \n\n \\[\n \\Phi_{\\mathcal{L}_X} \\vdash_{\\mathcal{L}_X} \\phi_{\\mathcal{L}_X}\n \\]\n\n ","\nWhen the logical system referred to is clear from context, or when we\ndon’t care about which logical system is involved, we can simply\nwrite \n\n \\[\n \\Phi \\vdash \\phi\n \\]\n\n ","\nEach logical system, in its formal semantics, will include objects\ndesigned to represent ways the world pointed to by formulae in this\nsystem can be. Let these ways be denoted by \\(W^i_{{\\mathcal{L}_X}}\\).\nWhen we aren’t concerned with which logical system is involved,\nwe can simply write \\(W^i\\). To say that such a way models a formula\n\\(\\phi\\) we write \n\n \\[\n W_i \\models \\phi\n \\]\n\n ","\nWe extend this to a set of formulas in the natural way:\n\\(W^i\\models\\Phi\\) means that all the elements of \\(\\Phi\\) are true on\n\\(W^i\\). Now, using the simple machinery we’ve established, we\ncan describe, in broad strokes, the life of an intelligent agent that\nconforms to the logicist point of view. This life conforms to the\nbasic cycle that undergirds intelligent agents in the AIMA\nsense. ","\nTo begin, we assume that the human designer, after studying the world,\nuses the language of a particular logical system to give to our agent\nan initial set of beliefs \\(\\Delta_0\\) about what this world is like.\nIn doing so, the designer works with a formal model of this world,\n\\(W\\), and ensures that \\(W\\models\\Delta_0\\). Following tradition, we\nrefer to \\(\\Delta_0\\) as the agent’s (starting) knowledge\nbase. (This terminology, given that we are talking about the\nagent’s beliefs, is known to be peculiar, but it\npersists.) Next, the agent ADJUSTS its knowlege base to produce\na new one, \\(\\Delta_1\\). We say that adjustment is carried out by way\nof an operation \\(\\mathcal{A}\\); so\n\\(\\mathcal{A}[\\Delta_0]=\\Delta_1\\). How does the adjustment process,\n\\(\\mathcal{A}\\), work? There are many possibilities. Unfortunately,\nmany believe that the simplest possibility (viz.,\n\\(\\mathcal{A}[\\Delta_i]\\) equals the set of all formulas that can be\ndeduced in some elementary manner from \\(\\Delta_i\\)) exhausts\nall the possibilities. The reality is that adjustment, as\nindicated above, can come by way of any mode of reasoning\n– induction, abduction, and yes, various forms of deduction\ncorresponding to the logical system in play. For present purposes,\nit’s not important that we carefully enumerate all the options.\n","\nThe cycle continues when the agent ACTS on the environment, in\nan attempt to secure its goals. Acting, of course, can cause changes\nto the environment. At this point, the agent SENSES the\nenvironment, and this new information \\(\\Gamma_1\\) factors into the\nprocess of adjustment, so that\n\\(\\mathcal{A}[\\Delta_1\\cup\\Gamma_1]=\\Delta_2\\). The cycle of SENSES\n\\(\\Rightarrow\\) ADJUSTS \\(\\Rightarrow\\) ACTS continues to produce\nthe life \\(\\Delta_0,\\Delta_1,\\Delta_2,\\Delta_3,\\ldots,\\) … of\nour agent. ","\nIt may strike you as preposterous that logicist AI be touted as an\napproach taken to replicate all of cognition. Reasoning over\nformulae in some logical system might be appropriate for\ncomputationally capturing high-level tasks like trying to solve a math\nproblem (or devising an outline for an entry in the Stanford\nEncyclopedia of Philosophy), but how could such reasoning apply to\ntasks like those a hawk tackles when swooping down to capture\nscurrying prey? In the human sphere, the task successfully negotiated\nby athletes would seem to be in the same category. Surely, some will\ndeclare, an outfielder chasing down a fly ball doesn’t prove\ntheorems to figure out how to pull off a diving catch to save the\ngame! Two brutally reductionistic arguments can be given in support of\nthis “logicist theory of everything” approach towards\ncognition. The first stems from the fact that a complete proof\ncalculus for just first-order logic can simulate all of Turing-level\ncomputation (Chapter 11, Boolos et al. 2007). The second justification\ncomes from the role logic plays in foundational theories of\nmathematics and mathematical reasoning. Not only are foundational\ntheories of mathematics cast in logic (Potter 2004), but there have\nbeen successful projects resulting in machine verification of ordinary\nnon-trivial theorems, e.g., in the\n Mizar project\n alone around 50,000 theorems have been verified (Naumowicz and\nKornilowicz 2009). The argument goes that if any approach to AI can be\ncast mathematically, then it can be cast in a logicist form. ","\nNeedless to say, such a declaration has been carefully considered by\nlogicists beyond the reductionistic argument given above. For example,\nRosenschein and Kaelbling (1986) describe a method in which logic is\nused to specify finite state machines. These machines are used at\n“run time” for rapid, reactive processing. In this\napproach, though the finite state machines contain no logic in the\ntraditional sense, they are produced by logic and inference. Real\nrobot control via first-order theorem proving has been demonstrated by\nAmir and Maynard-Reid (1999, 2000, 2001). In fact, you can\n download\n version 2.0 of the software that makes this approach real for a Nomad\n200 mobile robot in an office environment. Of course, negotiating an\noffice environment is a far cry from the rapid adjustments an\noutfielder for the Yankees routinely puts on display, but certainly\nit’s an open question as to whether future machines will be able\nto mimic such feats through rapid reasoning. The question is open if\nfor no other reason than that all must concede that the constant\nincrease in reasoning speed of first-order theorem provers is\nbreathtaking. (For up-to-date news on this increase, visit and monitor\nthe\n TPTP site.)\n There is no known reason why the software engineering in question\ncannot continue to produce speed gains that would eventually allow an\nartificial creature to catch a fly ball by processing information in\npurely logicist fashion. ","\nNow we come to the second topic related to logicist AI that warrants\nmention herein: common logic and the intensifying quest for\ninteroperability between logic-based systems using different logics.\nOnly a few brief comments are\n offered.[29]\n Readers wanting more can explore the links provided in the course of\nthe summary. ","\nOne standardization is through what is known as\n Common Logic\n (CL), and variants thereof. (CL is published as an\n ISO standard\n – ISO is the International Standards Organization.)\nPhilosophers interested in logic, and of course logicians, will find\nCL to be quite fascinating. From an historical perspective, the advent\nof CL is interesting in no small part because the person spearheading\nit is none other than Pat Hayes, the same Hayes who, as we have seen,\nworked with McCarthy to establish logicist AI in the 1960s. Though\nHayes was not at the original 1956 Dartmouth conference, he certainly\nmust be regarded as one of the founders of contemporary AI.) One of\nthe interesting things about CL, at least as we see it, is that it\nsignifies a trend toward the marriage of logics, and programming\nlanguages and environments. Another system that is a logic/programming\nhybrid is\n Athena,\n which can be used as a programming language, and is at the same time\na form of MSL. Athena is based on formal systems known as\ndenotational proof languages (Arkoudas 2000). ","\nHow is interoperability between two systems to be enabled by CL?\nSuppose one of these systems is based on logic \\(L\\), and the other on\n\\(L'\\). (To ease exposition, assume that both logics are first-order.)\nThe idea is that a theory \\(\\Phi_L\\), that is, a set of formulae in\n\\(L\\), can be translated into CL, producing \\(\\Phi_{CL}\\), and then\nthis theory can be translated into \\(\\Phi_L'\\). CL thus becomes an\ninter lingua. Note that what counts as a well-formed formula in\n\\(L\\) can be different than what counts as one in \\(L'\\). The two\nlogics might also have different proof theories. For example,\ninference in \\(L\\) might be based on resolution, while inference in\n\\(L'\\) is of the natural deduction variety. Finally, the symbol sets\nwill be different. Despite these differences, courtesy of the\ntranslations, desired behavior can be produced across the translation.\nThat, at any rate, is the hope. The technical challenges here are\nimmense, but federal monies are increasingly available for attacks on\nthe problem of interoperability.","\nNow for the third topic in this section: what can be called\nencoding down. The technique is easy to understand. Suppose\nthat we have on hand a set \\(\\Phi\\) of first-order axioms. As is\nwell-known, the problem of deciding, for arbitrary formula \\(\\phi\\),\nwhether or not it’s deducible from \\(\\Phi\\) is\nTuring-undecidable: there is no Turing machine or equivalent that can\ncorrectly return “Yes” or “No” in the general\ncase. However, if the domain in question is finite, we can encode this\nproblem down to the propositional calculus. An assertion that all\nthings have \\(F\\) is of course equivalent to the assertion that\n\\(Fa\\), \\(Fb\\), \\(Fc\\), as long as the domain contains only these\nthree objects. So here a first-order quantified formula becomes a\nconjunction in the propositional calculus. Determining whether such\nconjunctions are provable from axioms themselves expressed in the\npropositional calculus is Turing-decidable, and in addition, in\ncertain clusters of cases, the check can be done very quickly in the\npropositional case; very quickly. Readers interested in\nencoding down to the propositional calculus should consult recent\n DARPA-sponsored work by Bart Selman.\n Please note that the target of encoding down doesn’t need to be\nthe propositional calculus. Because it’s generally harder for\nmachines to find proofs in an intensional logic than in straight\nfirst-order logic, it is often expedient to encode down the former to\nthe latter. For example, propositional modal logic can be encoded in\nmulti-sorted logic (a variant of FOL); see (Arkoudas & Bringsjord\n2005). Prominent usage of such an encoding down can be found in a set\nof systems known as Description Logics, which are a set of\nlogics less expressive than first-order logic but more expressive than\npropositional logic (Baader et al. 2003). Description logics are used\nto reason about ontologies in a given domain and have been\nsuccessfully used, for example, in the biomedical domain (Smith et al.\n2007). "],"subsection_title":"3.2 Logic-Based AI: Some Surgical Points"},{"content":["\nIt’s tempting to define non-logicist AI by negation: an approach\nto building intelligent agents that rejects the distinguishing\nfeatures of logicist AI. Such a shortcut would imply that the agents\nengineered by non-logicist AI researchers and developers, whatever the\nvirtues of such agents might be, cannot be said to know that \\(\\phi\\);\n– for the simple reason that, by negation, the non-logicist\nparadigm would have not even a single declarative proposition that is\na candidate for \\(\\phi\\);. However, this isn’t a particularly\nenlightening way to define non-symbolic AI. A more productive approach\nis to say that non-symbolic AI is AI carried out on the basis of\nparticular formalisms other than logical systems, and to then\nenumerate those formalisms. It will turn out, of course, that these\nformalisms fail to include knowledge in the normal sense. (In\nphilosophy, as is well-known, the normal sense is one according to\nwhich if \\(p\\) is known, \\(p\\) is a declarative statement.) ","\nFrom the standpoint of formalisms other than logical systems,\nnon-logicist AI can be partitioned into symbolic but non-logicist\napproaches, and connectionist/neurocomputational approaches. (AI\ncarried out on the basis of symbolic, declarative structures that, for\nreadability and ease of use, are not treated directly by researchers\nas elements of formal logics, does not count. In this category fall\ntraditional semantic networks, Schank’s (1972) conceptual\ndependency scheme, frame-based schemes, and other such schemes.) The\nformer approaches, today, are probabilistic, and are based on the\nformalisms (Bayesian networks) covered\n below.\n The latter approaches are based, as we have noted, on formalisms that\ncan be broadly termed “neurocomputational.” Given our\nspace constraints, only one of the formalisms in this category is\ndescribed here (and briefly at that): the aforementioned artificial\nneural\n networks.[30].\n Though artificial neural networks, with an appropriate architecture,\ncould be used for arbitrary computation, they are almost exclusively\nused for building learning systems. ","\nNeural nets are composed of units or nodes designed to\nrepresent neurons, which are connected by links designed to\nrepresent dendrites, each of which has a numeric weight.","\nIt is usually assumed that some of the units work in symbiosis with\nthe external environment; these units form the sets of input\nand output units. Each unit has a current activation\nlevel, which is its output, and can compute, based on its inputs\nand weights on those inputs, its activation level at the next moment\nin time. This computation is entirely local: a unit takes account of\nbut its neighbors in the net. This local computation is calculated in\ntwo stages. First, the input function, \\(in_i\\), gives the\nweighted sum of the unit’s input values, that is, the sum of the\ninput activations multiplied by their weights: ","\nIn the second stage, the activation function, \\(g\\), takes the\ninput from the first stage as argument and generates the output, or\nactivation level, \\(a_i\\): ","\nOne common (and confessedly elementary) choice for the activation\nfunction (which usually governs all units in a given net) is the step\nfunction, which usually has a threshold \\(t\\) that sees to it that a 1\nis output when the input is greater than \\(t\\), and that 0 is output\notherwise. This is supposed to be “brain-like” to some\ndegree, given that 1 represents the firing of a pulse from a neuron\nthrough an axon, and 0 represents no firing. A simple three-layer\nneural net is shown in the following picture.","\nAs you might imagine, there are many different kinds of neural\nnetworks. The main distinction is between feed-forward and\nrecurrent networks. In feed-forward networks like the one\npictured immediately above, as their name suggests, links move\ninformation in one direction, and there are no cycles; recurrent\nnetworks allow for cycling back, and can become rather complicated.\nFor a more detailed presentation, see the","\n\n Supplement on Neural Nets.\n ","\nNeural networks were fundamentally plagued by the fact that while they\nare simple and have theoretically efficient learning algorithms, when\nthey are multi-layered and thus sufficiently expressive to represent\nnon-linear functions, they were very hard to train in practice. This\nchanged in the mid 2000s with the advent of methods that exploit\nstate-of-the-art hardware better (Rajat et al. 2009). The\nbackpropagation method for training multi-layered neural networks can\nbe translated into a sequence of repeated simple arithmetic operations\non a large set of numbers. The general trend in computing hardware has\nfavored algorithms that are able to do a large of number of simple\noperations that are not that dependent on each other, versus a small\nof number of complex and intricate operations.","\nAnother key recent observation is that deep neural networks can be\npre-trained first in an unsupervised phase where they are just fed\ndata without any labels for the data. Each hidden layer is forced to\nrepresent the outputs of the layer below. The outcome of this training\nis a series of layers which represent the input domain with increasing\nlevels of abstraction. For example, if we pre-train the network with\nimages of faces, we would get a first layer which is good at detecting\nedges in images, a second layer which can combine edges to form facial\nfeatures such as eyes, noses etc., a third layer which responds to\ngroups of features, and so on (LeCun et al. 2015).","\nPerhaps the best technique for teaching students about neural networks\nin the context of other statistical learning formalisms and methods is\nto focus on a specific problem, preferably one that seems unnatural to\ntackle using logicist techniques. The task is then to seek to engineer\na solution to the problem, using any and all techniques\navailable. One nice problem is handwriting recognition (which\nalso happens to have a rich philosophical dimension; see e.g.\nHofstadter & McGraw 1995). For example, consider the problem of\nassigning, given as input a handwritten digit \\(d\\), the correct\ndigit, 0 through 9. Because there is a database of 60,000 labeled\ndigits available to researchers (from the National Institute of\nScience and Technology), this problem has evolved into a benchmark\nproblem for comparing learning algorithms. It turns out that neural\nnetworks currently reign as the best approach to the problem according\nto a recent ranking by Benenson (2016).","\nReaders interested in AI (and computational cognitive science) pursued\nfrom an overtly brain-based orientation are encouraged to explore the\nwork of Rick Granger (2004a, 2004b) and researchers in his\n Brain Engineering Laboratory\n and\n W. H. Neukom Institute for Computational Sciences.\n The contrast between the “dry”, logicist AI started at\nthe original 1956 conference, and the approach taken here by Granger\nand associates (in which brain circuitry is directly modeled) is\nremarkable. For those interested in computational properties of neural\nnetworks, Hornik et al. (1989) address the general representation\ncapability of neural networks independent of learning. "],"subsection_title":"3.3 Non-Logicist AI: A Summary"},{"content":["\nAt this point the reader has been exposed to the chief formalisms in\nAI, and may wonder about heterogeneous approaches that bridge them. Is\nthere such research and development in AI? Yes. From an\nengineering standpoint, such work makes irresistibly good\nsense. There is now an understanding that, in order to build\napplications that get the job done, one should choose from a toolbox\nthat includes logicist, probabilistic/Bayesian, and neurocomputational\ntechniques. Given that the original top-down logicist paradigm is\nalive and thriving (e.g., see Brachman & Levesque 2004, Mueller\n2006), and that, as noted, a resurgence of Bayesian and\nneurocomputational approaches has placed these two paradigms on solid,\nfertile footing as well, AI now moves forward, armed with this\nfundamental triad, and it is a virtual certainty that applications\n(e.g., robots) will be engineered by drawing from elements of all\nthree. Watson’s DeepQA architecture is one recent example of an\nengineering system that leverages multiple paradigms. For a detailed\ndiscussion, see the","\n\n Supplement on Watson’s DeepQA Architecture.\n ","\nGoogle DeepMind’s AlphaGo is another example of a multi-paradigm\nsystem, although in a much narrower form than Watson. The central\nalgorithmic problem in games such as Go or Chess is to search through\na vast sequence of valid moves. For most non-trivial games, this is\nnot feasible to do so exhaustively. The Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS)\nalgorithm gets around this obstacle by searching through an enormous\nspace of valid moves in a statistical fashion (Browne et al. 2012).\nWhile MCTS is the central algorithm in AlpaGo, there are two neural\nnetworks which help evaluate states in the game and help model how\nexpert opponents play (Silver et al. 2016). It should be noted that\nMCTS is behind almost all the winning submissions in general game\nplaying (Finnsson 2012).","\nWhat, though, about deep, theoretical integration of the main\nparadigms in AI? Such integration is at present only a possibility for\nthe future, but readers are directed to the research of some striving\nfor such integration. For example: Sun (1994, 2002) has been working\nto demonstrate that human cognition that is on its face symbolic in\nnature (e.g., professional philosophizing in the analytic tradition,\nwhich deals explicitly with arguments and definitions carefully\nsymbolized) can arise from cognition that is neurocomputational in\nnature. Koller (1997) has investigated the marriage between\nprobability theory and logic. And, in general, the very recent arrival\nof so-called human-level AI is being led by theorists seeking\nto genuinely integrate the three paradigms set out above (e.g.,\nCassimatis 2006).","\nFinally, we note that cognitive architectures such as Soar\n(Laird 2012) and PolyScheme (Cassimatis 2006) are another area where\nintegration of different fields of AI can be found. For example, one\nsuch endeavor striving to build human-level AI is the Companions\nproject (Forbus and Hinrichs 2006). Companions are long-lived systems\nthat strive to be human-level AI systems that function as\ncollaborators with humans. The Companions architecture tries to solve\nmultiple AI problems such as reasoning and learning, interactivity,\nand longevity in one unifying system."],"subsection_title":"3.4 AI Beyond the Clash of Paradigms"}]},{"main_content":["\nAs we noted above, work on AI has mushroomed over the past couple of\ndecades. Now that we have looked a bit at the content that composes\nAI, we take a quick look at the explosive growth of AI.","\nFirst, a point of clarification. The growth of which we speak is not a\nshallow sort correlated with amount of funding provided for a given\nsub-field of AI. That kind of thing happens all the time in all\nfields, and can be triggered by entirely political and financial\nchanges designed to grow certain areas, and diminish others. Along the\nsame line, the growth of which we speak is not correlated with the\namount of industrial activity revolving around AI (or a sub-field\nthereof); for this sort of growth too can be driven by forces quite\noutside an expansion in the scientific breadth of\n AI.[31]\n Rather, we are speaking of an explosion of deep content: new\nmaterial which someone intending to be conversant with the field needs\nto know. Relative to other fields, the size of the explosion may or\nmay not be unprecedented. (Though it should perhaps be noted that an\nanalogous increase in philosophy would be marked by the development of\nentirely new formalisms for reasoning, reflected in the fact that,\nsay, longstanding philosophy textbooks like Copi’s (2004)\nIntroduction to Logic are dramatically rewritten and enlarged\nto include these formalisms, rather than remaining anchored to\nessentially immutable core formalisms, with incremental refinement\naround the edges through the years.) But it certainly appears to be\nquite remarkable, and is worth taking note of here, if for no other\nreason than that AI’s near-future will revolve in significant\npart around whether or not the new content in question forms a\nfoundation for new long-lived research and development that would not\notherwise\n obtain.[32]","\nAI has also witnessed an explosion in its usage in various artifacts\nand applications. While we are nowhere near building a machine with\ncapabilities of a human or one that acts rationally in all scenarios\naccording to the Russell/Hutter definition above, algorithms that have\ntheir origins in AI research are now widely deployed for many tasks in\na variety of domains. "],"section_title":"4. The Explosive Growth of AI","subsections":[{"content":["\nA huge part of AI’s growth in applications has been made\npossible through invention of new algorithms in the subfield of\nmachine learning. Machine learning is concerned with building\nsystems that improve their performance on a task when given examples\nof ideal performance on the task, or improve their performance with\nrepeated experience on the task. Algorithms from machine learning have\nbeen used in speech recognition systems, spam filters, online\nfraud-detection systems, product-recommendation systems, etc. The\ncurrent state-of-the-art in machine learning can be divided into three\nareas (Murphy 2013, Alpaydin 2014):","\nIn addition to being used in domains that are traditionally the ken of\nAI, machine-learning algorithms have also been used in all stages of\nthe scientific process. For example, machine-learning techniques are\nnow routinely applied to analyze large volumes of data generated from\nparticle accelerators. CERN, for instance, generates a petabyte\n(\\(10^{15}\\) bytes) per second, and statistical algorithms that have\ntheir origins in AI are used to filter and analyze this data. Particle\naccelerators are used in fundamental experimental research in physics\nto probe the structure of our physical universe. They work by\ncolliding larger particles together to create much finer particles.\nNot all such events are fruitful. Machine-learning methods have been\nused to select events which are then analyzed further (Whiteson &\nWhiteson 2009 and Baldi et al. 2014). More recently, researchers at\nCERN launched a machine learning\n competition\n to aid in the analysis of the Higgs Boson. The goal of this challenge\nwas to develop algorithms that separate meaningful events from\nbackground noise given data from the Large Hadron Collider, a particle\naccelerator at CERN.","\nIn the past few decades, there has been an explosion in data that does\nnot have any explicit semantics attached to it. This data is generated\nby both humans and machines. Most of this data is not easily\nmachine-processable; for example, images, text, video (as opposed to\ncarefully curated data in a knowledge- or data-base). This has given\nrise to a huge industry that applies AI techniques to get usable\ninformation from such enormous data. This field of applying techniques\nderived from AI to large volumes of data goes by names such as\n“data mining,” “big data,”\n“analytics,” etc. This field is too vast to even\nmoderately cover in the present article, but we note that there is no\nfull agreement on what constitutes such a “big-data”\nproblem. One definition, from Madden (2012), is that big data differs\nfrom traditional machine-processable data in that it is too big (for\nmost of the existing state-of-the-art hardware), too quick (generated\nat a fast rate, e.g. online email transactions), or too hard. It is in\nthe too-hard part that AI techniques work quite well. While this\nuniverse is quite varied, we use the Watson’s system later in\nthis article as an AI-relevant exemplar. As we will see later, while\nmost of this new explosion is powered by learning, it isn’t\nentirely limited to just learning. This bloom in learning algorithms\nhas been supported by both a resurgence in neurocomputational\ntechniques and probabilistic techniques."],"subsection_title":"4.1 Bloom in Machine Learning"},{"content":["\nOne of the remarkable aspects of (Charniak & McDermott 1985) is\nthis: The authors say the central dogma of AI is that “What the\nbrain does may be thought of at some level as a kind of\ncomputation” (p. 6). And yet nowhere in the book is brain-like\ncomputation discussed. In fact, you will search the index in vain for\nthe term ‘neural’ and its variants. Please note that the\nauthors are not to blame for this. A large part of AI’s growth\nhas come from formalisms, tools, and techniques that are, in some\nsense, brain-based, not logic-based. A paper that conveys the\nimportance and maturity of neurocomputation is (Litt et al. 2006).\n(Growth has also come from a return of probabilistic techniques that\nhad withered by the mid-70s and 80s. More about that momentarily, in\nthe next “resurgence”\n section.)\n ","\nOne very prominent class of non-logicist formalism does make an\nexplicit nod in the direction of the brain: viz., artificial neural\nnetworks (or as they are often simply called, neural\nnetworks, or even just neural nets). (The structure of\nneural networks and more recent developments are discussed\n above).\n Because Minsky and Pappert’s (1969) Perceptrons led many\n(including, specifically, many sponsors of AI research and\ndevelopment) to conclude that neural networks didn’t have\nsufficient information-processing power to model human cognition, the\nformalism was pretty much universally dropped from AI. However, Minsky\nand Pappert had only considered very limited neural networks.\nConnectionism, the view that intelligence consists not in\nsymbolic processing, but rather non-symbolic processing at\nleast somewhat like what we find in the brain (at least at the\ncellular level), approximated specifically by artificial neural\nnetworks, came roaring back in the early 1980s on the strength of more\nsophisticated forms of such networks, and soon the situation was (to\nuse a metaphor introduced by John McCarthy) that of two horses in a\nrace toward building truly intelligent agents.","\nIf one had to pick a year at which connectionism was resurrected, it\nwould certainly be 1986, the year Parallel Distributed\nProcessing (Rumelhart & McClelland 1986) appeared in print.\nThe rebirth of connectionism was specifically fueled by the\nback-propagation (backpropagation) algorithm over neural networks,\nnicely covered in Chapter 20 of AIMA. The\nsymbolicist/connectionist race led to a spate of lively debate in the\nliterature (e.g., Smolensky 1988, Bringsjord 1991), and some AI\nengineers have explicitly championed a methodology marked by a\nrejection of knowledge representation and reasoning. For example,\nRodney Brooks was such an engineer; he wrote the well-known\n“Intelligence Without Representation” (1991), and his Cog\nProject, to which we referred above, is arguably an incarnation of the\npremeditatedly non-logicist approach. Increasingly, however, those in\nthe business of building sophisticated systems find that both\nlogicist and more neurocomputational techniques are required (Wermter\n& Sun\n 2001).[33]\n In addition, the neurocomputational paradigm today includes\nconnectionism only as a proper part, in light of the fact that some of\nthose working on building intelligent systems strive to do so by\nengineering brain-based computation outside the neural network-based\napproach (e.g., Granger 2004a, 2004b). ","\nAnother recent resurgence in neurocomputational techniques has\noccurred in machine learning. The modus operandi in machine learning\nis that given a problem, say recognizing handwritten digits\n\\(\\{0,1,\\ldots,9\\}\\) or faces, from a 2D matrix representing an image\nof the digits or faces, a machine learning or a domain expert would\nconstruct a feature vector representation function for the\ntask. This function is a transformation of the input into a format\nthat tries to throw away irrelevant information in the input and keep\nonly information useful for the task. Inputs transformed by \\(\\rr\\)\nare termed features. For recognizing faces, irrelevant\ninformation could be the amount of lighting in the scene and relevant\ninformation could be information about facial features. The machine is\nthen fed a sequence of inputs represented by the features and the\nideal or ground truth output values for those inputs. This converts\nthe learning challenge from that of having to learn the function\n\\(\\ff\\) from the examples: \\(\\left\\{\\left\\langle x_1,\n\\ff(x_1)\\right\\rangle,\\left\\langle x_2, \\ff(x_2)\\right\\rangle, \\ldots,\n\\left\\langle x_n, \\ff(x_n)\\right\\rangle \\right\\}\\) to having to learn\nfrom possibly easier data: \\(\\left\\{\\left\\langle \\rr(x_1),\n\\ff(x_1)\\right\\rangle,\\left\\langle \\rr(x_2), \\ff(x_2)\\right\\rangle,\n\\ldots, \\left\\langle \\rr(x_n), \\ff(x_n)\\right\\rangle \\right\\}\\). Here\nthe function \\(\\rr\\) is the function that computes the feature vector\nrepresentation of the input. Formally, \\(\\ff\\) is assumed to be a\ncomposition of the functions \\(\\gg\\) and \\(\\rr\\). That is, for any\ninput \\(x\\), \\(f(x) = \\gg\\left(\\rr\\left(x\\right)\\right)\\). This is\ndenoted by \\(\\ff=\\gg\\circ \\rr\\). For any input, the features are first\ncomputed, and then the function \\(\\gg\\) is applied. If the feature\nrepresentation \\(\\rr\\) is provided by the domain expert, the learning\nproblem becomes simpler to the extent the feature representation takes\non the difficulty of the task. At one extreme, the feature vector\ncould hide an easily extractable form of the answer in the input and\nin the other extreme the feature representation could be just the\nplain input.","\nFor non-trivial problems, choosing the right representation is vital.\nFor instance, one of the drastic changes in the AI landscape was due\nto Minsky and Papert’s (1969) demonstration that the perceptron\ncannot learn even the binary XOR function, but this function\ncan be learnt by the perceptron if we have the right representation.\nFeature engineering has grown to be one of the most labor intensive\ntasks of machine learning, so much so that it is considered to be one\nof the “black arts” of machine learning. The other\nsignificant black art of learning methods is choosing the right\nparameters. These black arts require significant human expertise and\nexperience, which can be quite difficult to obtain without significant\napprenticeship (Domingos 2012). Another bigger issue is that the task\nof feature engineering is just knowledge representation in a new skin.\n","\nGiven this state of affairs, there has been a recent resurgence in\nmethods for automatically learning a feature representation function\n\\(\\rr\\); such methods potentially bypass a large part of human labor\nthat is traditionally required. Such methods are based mostly on what\nare now termed deep neural networks. Such networks are simply\nneural networks with two or more hidden layers. These networks allow\nus to learn a feature function \\(\\rr\\) by using one or more of the\nhidden layers to learn \\(\\rr\\). The general form of learning in which\none learns from the raw sensory data without much hand-based feature\nengineering has now its own term: deep learning. A general and\nyet concise definition (Bengio et al. 2015) is: ","\nDeep learning can safely be regarded as the study of models that\neither involve a greater amount of composition of learned functions or\nlearned concepts than traditional machine learning does. (Bengio et\nal. 2015, Chapter 1)\n","\nThough the idea has been around for decades, recent innovations\nleading to more efficient learning techniques have made the approach\nmore feasible (Bengio et al. 2013). Deep-learning methods have\nrecently produced state-of-the-art results in image recognition (given\nan image containing various objects, label the objects from a given\nset of labels), speech recognition (from audio input, generate a\ntextual representation), and the analysis of data from particle\naccelerators (LeCun et al. 2015). Despite impressive results in tasks\nsuch as these, minor and major issues remain unresolved. A minor issue\nis that significant human expertise is still needed to choose an\narchitecture and set up the right parameters for the architecture; a\nmajor issue is the existence of so-called adversarial inputs,\nwhich are indistinguishable from normal inputs to humans but are\ncomputed in a special manner that makes a neural network regard them\nas different than similar inputs in the training data. The existence\nof such adversarial inputs, which remain stable across training data,\nhas raised doubts about how well performance on benchmarks can\ntranslate into performance in real-world systems with sensory noise\n(Szegedy et al. 2014)."],"subsection_title":"4.2 The Resurgence of Neurocomputational Techniques"},{"content":["\nThere is a second dimension to the explosive growth of AI: the\nexplosion in popularity of probabilistic methods that aren’t\nneurocomputational in nature, in order to formalize and mechanize a\nform of non-logicist reasoning in the face of uncertainty.\nInterestingly enough, it is Eugene Charniak himself who can be safely\nconsidered one of the leading proponents of an explicit, premeditated\nturn away from logic to statistical techniques. His area of\nspecialization is natural language processing, and whereas his\nintroductory textbook of 1985 gave an accurate sense of his approach\nto parsing at the time (as we have seen, write computer programs that,\ngiven English text as input, ultimately infer meaning expressed in\nFOL), this approach was abandoned in favor of purely statistical\napproaches (Charniak 1993). At the\n AI@50\n conference, Charniak boldly proclaimed, in a talk tellingly entitled\n“Why Natural Language Processing is Now Statistical Natural\nLanguage Processing,” that logicist AI is moribund, and that the\nstatistical approach is the only promising game in town – for\nthe next 50\n years.[34]","\nThe chief source of energy and debate at the conference flowed from\nthe clash between Charniak’s probabilistic orientation, and the\noriginal logicist orientation, upheld at the conference in question by\nJohn McCarthy and others.","\nAI’s use of probability theory grows out of the standard form of\nthis theory, which grew directly out of technical philosophy and\nlogic. This form will be familiar to many philosophers, but\nlet’s review it quickly now, in order to set a firm stage for\nmaking points about the new probabilistic techniques that have\nenergized AI. ","\nJust as in the case of FOL, in probability theory we are concerned\nwith declarative statements, or propositions, to which degrees\nof belief are applied; we can thus say that both logicist and\nprobabilistic approaches are symbolic in nature. Both approaches also\nagree that statements can either be true or false in the world. In\nbuilding agents, a simplistic logic-based approach requires agents to\nknow the truth-value of all possible statements. This is not\nrealistic, as an agent may not know the truth-value of some\nproposition \\(p\\) due to either ignorance, non-determinism in the\nphysical world, or just plain vagueness in the meaning of the\nstatement. More specifically, the fundamental proposition in\nprobability theory is a random variable, which can be conceived\nof as an aspect of the world whose status is initially unknown to the\nagent. We usually capitalize the names of random variables, though we\nreserve \\(p,q,r, \\ldots\\) as such names as well. For example, in a\nparticular murder investigation centered on whether or not Mr. Barolo\ncommitted the crime, the random variable \\(Guilty\\) might be of\nconcern. The detective may be interested as well in whether or not the\nmurder weapon – a particular knife, let us assume –\nbelongs to Barolo. In light of this, we might say that \\(\\Weapon =\n\\true\\) if it does, and \\(\\Weapon = \\false\\) if it doesn’t. As a\nnotational convenience, we can write \\(weapon\\) and \\(\\lnot weapon\\)\nand for these two cases, respectively; and we can use this convention\nfor other variables of this type. ","\nThe kind of variables we have described so far are\n\\(\\mathbf{Boolean}\\), because their \\(\\mathbf{domain}\\) is simply\n\\(\\{true,false\\}.\\) But we can generalize and allow\n\\(\\mathbf{discrete}\\) random variables, whose values are from any\ncountable domain. For example, \\(\\PriceTChina\\) might be a variable\nfor the price of (a particular, presumably) tea in China, and its\ndomain might be \\(\\{1,2,3,4,5\\}\\), where each number here is in US\ndollars. A third type of variable is \\(\\mathbf{continous}\\); its\ndomain is either the reals, or some subset thereof. ","\nWe say that an atomic event is an assignment of particular\nvalues from the appropriate domains to all the variables composing the\n(idealized) world. For example, in the simple murder investigation\nworld introduced just above, we have two Boolean variables,\n\\(\\Guilty\\) and \\(\\Weapon\\), and there are just four atomic events.\nNote that atomic events have some obvious properties. For example,\nthey are mutually exclusive, exhaustive, and logically entail the\ntruth or falsity of every proposition. Usually not obvious to\nbeginning students is a fourth property, namely, any proposition is\nlogically equivalent to the disjunction of all atomic events that\nentail that proposition. ","\nPrior probabilities correspond to a degree of belief accorded to a\nproposition in the complete absence of any other information. For\nexample, if the prior probability of Barolo’s guilt is \\(0.2\\),\nwe write \n\n \\[\n P\\left(\\Guilty=true\\right)=0.2\n \\]\n\n ","\nor simply \\(\\P(guilty)=0.2\\). It is often convenient to have a\nnotation allowing one to refer economically to the probabilities of\nall the possible values for a random variable. For example,\nwe can write \n\n \\[\n \\P\\left(\\PriceTChina\\right)\n \\]\n\n ","\nas an abbreviation for the five equations listing all the possible\nprices for tea in China. We can also write \n\n \\[\n \\P\\left(\\PriceTChina\\right)=\\langle 1,2,3,4,5\\rangle\n \\]\n\n ","\nIn addition, as further convenient notation, we can write \\(\n\\mathbf{P}\\left(\\Guilty, \\Weapon\\right)\\) to denote the probabilities\nof all combinations of values of the relevant set of random variables.\nThis is referred to as the joint probability distribution of\n\\(\\Guilty\\) and \\(\\Weapon\\). The full joint probability\ndistribution covers the distribution for all the random variables used\nto describe a world. Given our simple murder world, we have 20 atomic\nevents summed up in the equation \n\n \\[\n \\mathbf{P}\\left(\\Guilty, \\Weapon, \\PriceTChina\\right)\n \\]\n\n ","\nThe final piece of the basic language of probability theory\ncorresponds to conditional probabilities. Where \\(p\\) and \\(q\\)\nare any propositions, the relevant expression is \\(P\\!\\left(p\\given\nq\\right)\\), which can be interpreted as “the probability of\n\\(p\\), given that all we know is \\(q\\).” For example,\n\n \\[\n P\\left(guilty\\ggiven weapon\\right)=0.7\n \\]\n\n ","\nsays that if the murder weapon belongs to Barolo, and no other\ninformation is available, the probability that Barolo is guilty is\n\\(0.7.\\) ","\nAndrei Kolmogorov showed how to construct probability theory from\nthree axioms that make use of the machinery now introduced, viz., ","\nThese axioms are clearly at bottom logicist. The remainder of\nprobability theory can be erected from this foundation (conditional\nprobabilities are easily defined in terms of prior probabilities). We\ncan thus say that logic is in some fundamental sense still being used\nto characterize the set of beliefs that a rational agent can have. But\nwhere does probabilistic inference enter the picture on this\naccount, since traditional deduction is not used for inference in\nprobability theory?","\nProbabilistic inference consists in computing, from observed evidence\nexpressed in terms of probability theory, posterior probabilities of\npropositions of interest. For a good long while, there have been\nalgorithms for carrying out such computation. These algorithms precede\nthe resurgence of probabilistic techniques in the 1990s. (Chapter 13\nof AIMA presents a number of them.) For example, given the\nKolmogorov axioms, here is a straightforward way of computing the\nprobability of any proposition, using the full joint distribution\ngiving the probabilities of all atomic events: Where \\(p\\) is some\nproposition, let \\(\\alpha(p)\\) be the disjunction of all atomic events\nin which \\(p\\) holds. Since the probability of a proposition (i.e.,\n\\(P(p)\\)) is equal to the sum of the probabilities of the atomic\nevents in which it holds, we have an equation that provides a method\nfor computing the probability of any proposition \\(p\\), viz., ","\nUnfortunately, there were two serious problems infecting this original\nprobabilistic approach: One, the processing in question needed to take\nplace over paralyzingly large amounts of information (enumeration over\nthe entire distribution is required). And two, the expressivity of the\napproach was merely propositional. (It was by the way the philosopher\nHilary Putnam (1963) who pointed out that there was a price to pay in\nmoving to the first-order level. The issue is not discussed herein.)\nEverything changed with the advent of a new formalism that marks the\nmarriage of probabilism and graph theory: Bayesian networks\n(also called belief nets). The pivotal text was (Pearl 1988).\nFor a more detailed discussion, see the","\n\n Supplement on Bayesian Networks.\n ","\nBefore concluding this section, it is probably worth noting that, from\nthe standpoint of philosophy, a situation such as the murder\ninvestigation we have exploited above would often be analyzed into\narguments, and strength factors, not into numbers to be\ncrunched by purely arithmetical procedures. For example, in the\nepistemology of Roderick Chisholm, as presented his Theory of\nKnowledge (1966, 1977), Detective Holmes might classify a\nproposition like Barolo committed the murder. as\ncounterbalanced if he was unable to find a compelling argument\neither way, or perhaps probable if the murder weapon turned out\nto belong to Barolo. Such categories cannot be found on a continuum\nfrom 0 to 1, and they are used in articulating arguments for or\nagainst Barolo’s guilt. Argument-based approaches to uncertain\nand defeasible reasoning are virtually non-existent in AI. One\nexception is Pollock’s approach, covered below. This approach is\nChisholmian in nature. ","\nIt should also be noted that there have been well-established\nformalisms for dealing with probabilistic reasoning as an instance of\nlogic-based reasoning. E.g., the activity a researcher in\nprobabilistic reasoning undertakes when she proves a theorem \\(\\phi\\)\nabout their domain (e.g. any theorem in (Pearl 1988)) is purely within\nthe realm of traditional logic. Readers interested in logic-flavored\napproaches to probabilistic reasoning can consult (Adams 1996,\nHailperin 1996 & 2010, Halpern 1998). Formalisms marrying\nprobability theory, induction and deductive reasoning, placing them on\nan equal footing, have been on the rise, with Markov logic (Richardson\nand Domingos 2006) being salient among these approaches. ","\nProbabilistic Machine Learning","\nMachine learning, in the sense given\n above,\n has been associated with probabilistic techniques. Probabilistic\ntechniques have been associated with both the learning of functions\n(e.g. Naive Bayes classification) and the modeling of theoretical\nproperties of learning algorithms. For example, a standard\nreformulation of supervised learning casts it as a Bayesian\nproblem. Assume that we are looking at recognizing digits\n\\([0{-}9]\\) from a given image. One way to cast this problem is to ask\nwhat the probability that the hypothesis \\(H_x\\): “the digit\nis \\(x\\)” is true given the image \\(d\\) from a sensor. Bayes\ntheorem gives us: ","\n\\(P(d\\given H_x)\\) and \\(P(H_x)\\) can be estimated from the given\ntraining dataset. Then the hypothesis with the highest posterior\nprobability is then given as the answer and is given by:\n\\(\\argmax_{x}P\\left(d\\ggiven H_x\\right)*P\\left(H_x\\right) \\) In\naddition to probabilistic methods being used to build algorithms,\nprobability theory has also been used to analyze algorithms which\nmight not have an overt probabilistic or logical formulation. For\nexample, one of the central classes of meta-theorems in learning,\nprobably approximately correct (PAC) theorems, are cast in\nterms of lower bounds of the probability that the mismatch between the\ninduced/learnt fL function and the true function\nfT being less than a certain amount, given that the\nlearnt function fL works well for a certain number\nof cases (see Chapter 18, AIMA). "],"subsection_title":"4.3 The Resurgence of Probabilistic Techniques"}]},{"main_content":["\nFrom at least its modern inception, AI has always been connected to\ngadgets, often ones produced by corporations, and it would be remiss\nof us not to say a few words about this phenomenon. While there have\nbeen a large number of commercial in-the-wild success stories for AI\nand its sister fields, such as optimization and decision-making, some\napplications are more visible and have been thoroughly battle-tested\nin the wild. In 2014, one of the most visible such domains (one in\nwhich AI has been strikingly successful) is information retrieval,\nincarnated as web search. Another recent success story is pattern\nrecognition. The state-of-the-art in applied pattern recognition\n(e.g., fingerprint/face verification, speech recognition, and\nhandwriting recognition) is robust enough to allow\n“high-stakes” deployment outside the laboratory. As of mid\n2018, several corporations and research laboratories have begun\ntesting autonomous vehicles on public roads, with even a handful of\njurisdictions making self-driving cars legal to operate. For example,\nGoogle’s autonomous cars have navigated hundreds of thousands of\nmiles in California with minimal human help under non-trivial\nconditions (Guizzo 2011). ","\nComputer games provide a robust test bed for AI techniques as they can\ncapture important parts that might be necessary to test an AI\ntechnique while abstracting or removing details that might beyond the\nscope of core AI research, for example, designing better hardware or\ndealing with legal issues (Laird and VanLent 2001). One subclass of\ngames that has seen quite fruitful for commercial deployment of AI is\nreal-time strategy games. Real-time strategy games are games in which\nplayers manage an army given limited resources. One objective is to\nconstantly battle other players and reduce an opponent’s forces.\nReal-time strategy games differ from strategy games in that players\nplan their actions simultaneously in real-time and do not have to take\nturns playing. Such games have a number of challenges that are\ntantalizing within the grasp of the state-of-the-art. This makes such\ngames an attractive venue in which to deploy simple AI agents. An\noverview of AI used in real-time strategy games can be found in\n(Robertson and Watson 2015). ","\nSome other ventures in AI, despite significant success, have been only\nchugging slowly and humbly along, quietly. For instance, AI-related\nmethods have achieved triumphs in solving open problems in mathematics\nthat have resisted any solution for decades. The most noteworthy\ninstance of such a problem is perhaps a proof of the statement that\n“All Robbins algebras are Boolean algebras.” This\nwas conjectured in the 1930s, and the proof was finally discovered by\nthe Otter automatic theorem-prover in 1996 after just a few months of\neffort (Kolata 1996, Wos 2013). Sister fields like formal verification\nhave also bloomed to the extent that it is now not too difficult to\nsemi-automatically verify vital hardware/software components (Kaufmann\net al. 2000 and Chajed et al. 2017).","\nOther related areas, such as (natural) language translation, still\nhave a long way to go, but are good enough to let us use them under\nrestricted conditions. The jury is out on tasks such as machine\ntranslation, which seems to require both statistical methods (Lopez\n2008) and symbolic methods (España-Bonet 2011). Both\nmethods now have comparable but limited success in the wild. A\ndeployed translation system at Ford that was initially developed for\ntranslating manufacturing process instructions from English to other\nlanguages initially started out as rule-based system with Ford and\ndomain-specific vocabulary and language. This system then evolved to\nincorporate statistical techniques along with rule-based techniques as\nit gained new uses beyond translating manuals, for example, lay users\nwithin Ford translating their own documents (Rychtyckyj and Plesco\n2012). ","\nAI’s great achievements mentioned above so far have all been in\nlimited, narrow domains. This lack of any success in the unrestricted\ngeneral case has caused a small set of researchers to break away into\nwhat is now called\n artificial general intelligence\n (Goertzel and Pennachin 2007). The stated goals of this movement\ninclude shifting the focus again to building artifacts that are\ngenerally intelligent and not just capable in one narrow domain. "],"section_title":"5. AI in the Wild","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nComputer Ethics has been around for a long time. In this\nsub-field, typically one would consider how one ought to act in a\ncertain class of situations involving computer technology, where the\n“one” here refers to a human being (Moor 1985). So-called\n“robot ethics” is different. In this sub-field (which goes\nby names such as “moral AI,” “ethical AI,”\n“machine ethics,” “moral robots,” etc.) one is\nconfronted with such prospects as robots being able to make autonomous\nand weighty decisions – decisions that might or might not be\nmorally permissible (Wallach & Allen 2010). If one were to attempt\nto engineer a robot with a capacity for sophisticated ethical\nreasoning and decision-making, one would also be doing Philosophical\nAI, as that concept is characterized\n elsewhere\n in the present entry. There can be many different flavors of\napproaches toward Moral AI. Wallach and Allen (2010) provide a\nhigh-level overview of the different approaches. Moral reasoning is\nobviously needed in robots that have the capability for lethal action.\nArkin (2009) provides an introduction to how we can control and\nregulate machines that have the capacity for lethal behavior. Moral AI\ngoes beyond obviously lethal situations, and we can have a spectrum of\nmoral machines. Moor (2006) provides one such spectrum of possible\nmoral agents. An example of a non-lethal but ethically-charged machine\nwould be a lying machine. Clark (2010) uses a computational theory\nof the mind, the ability to represent and reason about other\nagents, to build a lying machine that successfully persuades people\ninto believing falsehoods. Bello & Bringsjord (2013) give a\ngeneral overview of what might be required to build a moral machine,\none of the ingredients being a theory of mind. ","\nThe most general framework for building machines that can reason\nethically consists in endowing the machines with a moral code.\nThis requires that the formal framework used for reasoning by the\nmachine be expressive enough to receive such codes. The field of Moral\nAI, for now, is not concerned with the source or provenance of such\ncodes. The source could be humans, and the machine could receive the\ncode directly (via explicit encoding) or indirectly (reading). Another\npossibility is that the code is inferred by the machine from a more\nbasic set of laws. We assume that the robot has access to some such\ncode, and we then try to engineer the robot to follow that code under\nall circumstances while making sure that the moral code and its\nrepresentation do not lead to unintended consequences. Deontic\nlogics are a class of formal logics that have been studied the\nmost for this purpose. Abstractly, such logics are concerned mainly\nwith what follows from a given moral code. Engineering then studies\nthe match of a given deontic logic to a moral code (i.e., is the logic\nexpressive enough) which has to be balanced with the ease of\nautomation. Bringsjord et al. (2006) provide a blueprint for using\ndeontic logics to build systems that can perform actions in accordance\nwith a moral code. The role deontic logics play in the framework\noffered by Bringsjord et al (which can be considered to be\nrepresentative of the field of deontic logic for moral AI) can be best\nunderstood as striving towards Leibniz’s dream of a universal\nmoral calculus: ","\nWhen controversies arise, there will be no more need for a disputation\nbetween two philosophers than there would be between two accountants\n[computistas]. It would be enough for them to pick up their pens and\nsit at their abacuses, and say to each other (perhaps having summoned\na mutual friend): ‘Let us calculate.’\n","\nDeontic logic-based frameworks can also be used in a fashion that is\nanalogous to moral self-reflection. In this mode, logic-based\nverification of the robot’s internal modules can done before the\nrobot ventures out into the real world. Govindarajulu and Bringsjord\n(2015) present an approach, drawing from formal-program\nverification, in which a deontic-logic based system could be used\nto verify that a robot acts in a certain ethically-sanctioned manner\nunder certain conditions. Since formal-verification approaches can be\nused to assert statements about an infinite number of situations and\nconditions, such approaches might be preferred to having the robot\nroam around in an ethically-charged test environment and make a finite\nset of decisions that are then judged for their ethical correctness.\nMore recently, Govindarajulu and Bringsjord (2017) use a deontic logic\nto present a computational model of the\n Doctrine of Double Effect,\n an ethical principle for moral dilemmas that has been studied\nempirically and analyzed extensively by\n philosophers.[35]\n The principle is usually presented and motivated via dilemmas using\ntrolleys and was first presented in this fashion by Foot (1967). ","\nWhile there has been substantial theoretical and philosophical work,\nthe field of machine ethics is still in its infancy. There has been\nsome embryonic work in building ethical machines. One recent such\nexample would be Pereira and Saptawijaya (2016) who use logic\nprogramming and base their work in machine ethics on the ethical\ntheory known as contractualism, set out by Scanlon (1982). And\nwhat about the future? Since artificial agents are bound to get\nsmarter and smarter, and to have more and more autonomy and\nresponsibility, robot ethics is almost certainly going to grow in\nimportance. This endeavor might not be a straightforward application\nof classical ethics. For example, experimental results suggest that\nhumans hold robots to different ethical standards than they expect\nfrom humans under similar conditions (Malle et al.\n 2015).[36]\n "],"section_title":"6. Moral AI","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nNotice that the heading for this section isn’t Philosophy\nof AI. We’ll get to that category momentarily. (For now\nit can be identified with the attempt to answer such questions as\nwhether artificial agents created in AI can ever reach the full\nheights of human intelligence.) Philosophical AI is AI, not\nphilosophy; but it’s AI rooted in and flowing from, philosophy.\nFor example, one could engage, using the tools and techniques of\nphilosophy, a paradox, work out a proposed solution, and then proceed\nto a step that is surely optional for philosophers: expressing the\nsolution in terms that can be translated into a computer program that,\nwhen executed, allows an artificial agent to surmount concrete\ninstances of the original\n paradox.[37]\n Before we ostensively characterize Philosophical AI of this sort\ncourtesy of a particular research program, let us consider first the\nview that AI is in fact simply philosophy, or a part thereof. ","\nDaniel Dennett (1979) has famously claimed not just that there are\nparts of AI intimately bound up with philosophy, but that AI\nis philosophy (and psychology, at least of the cognitive\nsort). (He has made a parallel claim about Artificial Life (Dennett\n1998)). This view will turn out to be incorrect, but the reasons why\nit’s wrong will prove illuminating, and our discussion will pave\nthe way for a discussion of Philosophical AI. ","\nWhat does Dennett say, exactly? This: ","\nI want to claim that AI is better viewed as sharing with traditional\nepistemology the status of being a most general, most abstract asking\nof the top-down question: how is knowledge possible? (Dennett 1979,\n60)\n","\nElsewhere he says his view is that AI should be viewed “as a\nmost abstract inquiry into the possibility of intelligence or\nknowledge” (Dennett 1979, 64). ","\nIn short, Dennett holds that AI is the attempt to explain\nintelligence, not by studying the brain in the hopes of identifying\ncomponents to which cognition can be reduced, and not by engineering\nsmall information-processing units from which one can build in\nbottom-up fashion to high-level cognitive processes, but rather by\n– and this is why he says the approach is top-down\n– designing and implementing abstract algorithms that capture\ncognition. Leaving aside the fact that, at least starting in the early\n1980s, AI includes an approach that is in some sense bottom-up (see\nthe neurocomputational paradigm discussed above, in\n Non-Logicist AI: A Summary;\n and see, specifically, Granger’s (2004a, 2004b) work,\nhyperlinked in text immediately above, a specific counterexample), a\nfatal flaw infects Dennett’s view. Dennett sees the potential\nflaw, as reflected in: ","\nIt has seemed to some philosophers that AI cannot plausibly be so\nconstrued because it takes on an additional burden: it restricts\nitself to mechanistic solutions, and hence its domain is not\nthe Kantian domain of all possible modes of intelligence, but just all\npossible mechanistically realizable modes of intelligence. This, it is\nclaimed, would beg the question against vitalists, dualists, and other\nanti-mechanists. (Dennett 1979, 61)\n","\nDennett has a ready answer to this objection. He writes: ","\nBut … the mechanism requirement of AI is not an additional\nconstraint of any moment, for if psychology is possible at all, and if\nChurch’s thesis is true, the constraint of mechanism is no more\nsevere than the constraint against begging the question in psychology,\nand who would wish to evade that? (Dennett 1979, 61)\n","\nUnfortunately, this is acutely problematic; and examination of the\nproblems throws light on the nature of AI. ","\nFirst, insofar as philosophy and psychology are concerned with the\nnature of mind, they aren’t in the least trammeled by the\npresupposition that mentation consists in computation. AI, at least of\nthe “Strong” variety (we’ll discuss\n“Strong” versus “Weak” AI\n below)\n is indeed an attempt to substantiate, through engineering certain\nimpressive artifacts, the thesis that intelligence is at bottom\ncomputational (at the level of Turing machines and their equivalents,\ne.g., Register machines). So there is a philosophical claim, for sure.\nBut this doesn’t make AI philosophy, any more than some of the\ndeeper, more aggressive claims of some physicists (e.g., that the\n universe is ultimately digital in nature)\n make their field philosophy. Philosophy of physics certainly\nentertains the proposition that the physical universe can be\nperfectly modeled in digital terms (in a series of cellular automata,\ne.g.), but of course philosophy of physics can’t be\nidentified with this doctrine. ","\nSecond, we now know well (and those familiar with the relevant formal\nterrain knew at the time of Dennett’s writing) that information\nprocessing can exceed standard computation, that is, can exceed\ncomputation at and below the level of what a Turing machine can muster\n(Turing-computation, we shall say). (Such information\nprocessing is known as hypercomputation, a term coined by\nphilosopher Jack Copeland, who has himself defined such machines\n(e.g., Copeland 1998). The first machines capable of hypercomputation\nwere trial-and-error machines, introduced in the same famous\nissue of the Journal of Symbolic Logic (Gold 1965; Putnam\n1965). A new hypercomputer is the infinite time Turing machine\n(Hamkins & Lewis 2000).) Dennett’s appeal to Church’s\nthesis thus flies in the face of the mathematical facts: some\nvarieties of information processing exceed standard computation (or\nTuring-computation). Church’s thesis, or more precisely, the\nChurch-Turing thesis, is the view that a function \\(f\\) is effectively\ncomputable if and only if \\(f\\) is Turing-computable (i.e., some\nTuring machine can compute \\(f\\)). Thus, this thesis has nothing to\nsay about information processing that is more demanding than what a\nTuring machine can achieve. (Put another way, there is no\ncounter-example to CTT to be automatically found in an\ninformation-processing device capable of feats beyond the reach of\nTMs.) For all philosophy and psychology know, intelligence, even if\ntied to information processing, exceeds what is Turing-computational\nor\n Turing-mechanical.[38]\n This is especially true because philosophy and psychology, unlike AI,\nare in no way fundamentally charged with engineering artifacts, which\nmakes the physical realizability of hypercomputation irrelevant from\ntheir perspectives. Therefore, contra Dennett, to consider AI\nas psychology or philosophy is to commit a serious error, precisely\nbecause so doing would box these fields into only a speck of the\nentire space of functions from the natural numbers (including tuples\ntherefrom) to the natural numbers. (Only a tiny portion of the\nfunctions in this space are Turing-computable.) AI is without question\nmuch, much narrower than this pair of fields. Of course, it’s\npossible that AI could be replaced by a field devoted not to building\ncomputational artifacts by writing computer programs and running them\non embodied Turing machines. But this new field, by definition, would\nnot be AI. Our exploration of AIMA and other textbooks provide\ndirect empirical confirmation of this. ","\nThird, most AI researchers and developers, in point of fact, are\nsimply concerned with building useful, profitable artifacts, and\ndon’t spend much time reflecting upon the kinds of abstract\ndefinitions of intelligence explored in this entry (e.g.,\n What Exactly is AI?).\n ","\nThough AI isn’t philosophy, there are certainly ways of doing\nreal implementation-focussed AI of the highest caliber that are\nintimately bound up with philosophy. The best way to demonstrate this\nis to simply present such research and development, or at least a\nrepresentative example thereof. While there have been many examples of\nsuch work, the most prominent example in AI is John Pollock’s\nOSCAR project, which stretched over a considerable portion of his\nlifetime. For a detailed presentation and further discussion, see\nthe","\n\n Supplement on the OSCAR Project.\n ","\nIt’s important to note at this juncture that the OSCAR project,\nand the information processing that underlies it, are without question\nat once philosophy and technical AI. Given that the work in\nquestion has appeared in the pages of Artificial Intelligence,\na first-rank journal devoted to that field, and not to philosophy,\nthis is undeniable (see, e.g., Pollock 2001, 1992). This point is\nimportant because while it’s certainly appropriate, in the\npresent venue, to emphasize connections between AI and philosophy,\nsome readers may suspect that this emphasis is contrived: they may\nsuspect that the truth of the matter is that page after page of AI\njournals are filled with narrow, technical content far from\nphilosophy. Many such papers do exist. But we must distinguish between\nwritings designed to present the nature of AI, and its core methods\nand goals, versus writings designed to present progress on specific\ntechnical issues. ","\nWritings in the latter category are more often than not quite narrow,\nbut, as the example of Pollock shows, sometimes these specific issues\nare inextricably linked to philosophy. And of course Pollock’s\nwork is a representative example (albeit the most substantive one).\nOne could just as easily have selected work by folks who don’t\nhappen to also produce straight philosophy. For example, for an entire\nbook written within the confines of AI and computer science, but which\nis epistemic logic in action in many ways, suitable for use in\nseminars on that topic, see (Fagin et al. 2004). (It is hard to find\ntechnical work that isn’t bound up with philosophy in some\ndirect way. E.g., AI research on learning is all intimately bound up\nwith philosophical treatments of induction, of how genuinely new\nconcepts not simply defined in terms of prior ones can be learned. One\npossible partial answer offered by AI is inductive logic\nprogramming, discussed in Chapter 19 of AIMA.) ","\nWhat of writings in the former category? Writings in this category,\nwhile by definition in AI venues, not philosophy ones, are nonetheless\nphilosophical. Most textbooks include plenty of material that falls\ninto this latter category, and hence they include discussion of the\nphilosophical nature of AI (e.g., that AI is aimed at building\nartificial intelligences, and that’s why, after all, it’s\ncalled ‘AI’). "],"section_title":"7. Philosophical AI","subsections":[]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"8. Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence","subsections":[{"content":["\nRecall that we earlier discussed proposed definitions of AI, and\nrecall specifically that these proposals were couched in terms of the\ngoals of the field. We can follow this pattern here: We can\ndistinguish between “Strong” and “Weak” AI by\ntaking note of the different goals that these two versions of AI\nstrive to reach. “Strong” AI seeks to create artificial\npersons: machines that have all the mental powers we have, including\nphenomenal consciousness. “Weak” AI, on the other hand,\nseeks to build information-processing machines that appear to\nhave the full mental repertoire of human persons (Searle 1997).\n“Weak” AI can also be defined as the form of AI that aims\nat a system able to pass not just the Turing Test (again, abbreviated\nas TT), but the Total Turing Test (Harnad 1991). In TTT, a\nmachine must muster more than linguistic indistinguishability: it must\npass for a human in all behaviors – throwing a baseball, eating,\nteaching a class, etc. ","\nIt would certainly seem to be exceedingly difficult for philosophers\nto overthrow “Weak” AI (Bringsjord and Xiao 2000). After\nall, what philosophical reason stands in the way of AI\nproducing artifacts that appear to be animals or even humans?\nHowever, some philosophers have aimed to do in “Strong”\nAI, and we turn now to the most prominent case in point. "],"subsection_title":"8.1 “Strong” versus “Weak” AI"},{"content":["\nWithout question, the most famous argument in the philosophy of AI is\nJohn Searle’s (1980) Chinese Room Argument (CRA), designed to\noverthrow “Strong” AI. We present a quick summary here and\na “report from the trenches” as to how AI practitioners\nregard the argument. Readers wanting to further study CRA will find an\nexcellent next step in the entry on\n the Chinese Room Argument\n and (Bishop & Preston 2002). ","\nCRA is based on a thought-experiment in which Searle himself stars. He\nis inside a room; outside the room are native Chinese speakers who\ndon’t know that Searle is inside it. Searle-in-the-box, like\nSearle-in-real-life, doesn’t know any Chinese, but is fluent in\nEnglish. The Chinese speakers send cards into the room through a slot;\non these cards are written questions in Chinese. The box, courtesy of\nSearle’s secret work therein, returns cards to the native\nChinese speakers as output. Searle’s output is produced by\nconsulting a rulebook: this book is a lookup table that tells him what\nChinese to produce based on what is sent in. To Searle, the Chinese is\nall just a bunch of – to use Searle’s language –\nsquiggle-squoggles. The following schematic picture sums up the\nsituation. The labels should be obvious. \\(O\\) denotes the outside\nobservers, in this case the Chinese speakers. Input is denoted by\n\\(i\\) and output by \\(o\\). As you can see, there is an icon for the\nrulebook, and Searle himself is denoted by \\(P\\).","\nNow, what is the argument based on this thought-experiment? Even if\nyou’ve never heard of CRA before, you doubtless can see the\nbasic idea: that Searle (in the box) is supposed to be everything a\ncomputer can be, and because he doesn’t understand Chinese, no\ncomputer could have such understanding. Searle is mindlessly moving\nsquiggle-squoggles around, and (according to the argument)\nthat’s all computers do,\n fundamentally.[39]","\nWhere does CRA stand today? As we’ve already indicated, the\nargument would still seem to be alive and well; witness (Bishop &\nPreston 2002). However, there is little doubt that at least among AI\npractitioners, CRA is generally rejected. (This is of course\nthoroughly unsurprising.) Among these practitioners, the philosopher\nwho has offered the most formidable response out of AI itself is\nRapaport (1988), who argues that while AI systems are indeed\nsyntactic, the right syntax can constitute semantics. It should be\nsaid that a common attitude among proponents of “Strong”\nAI is that CRA is not only unsound, but silly, based as it is on a\nfanciful story (CR) far removed from the practice of AI\n– practice which is year by year moving ineluctably toward\nsophisticated robots that will once and for all silence CRA and its\nproponents. For example, John Pollock (as we’ve noted,\nphilosopher and practitioner of AI) writes: ","\nOnce [my intelligent system] OSCAR is fully functional, the argument\nfrom analogy will lead us inexorably to attribute thoughts and\nfeelings to OSCAR with precisely the same credentials with which we\nattribute them to human beings. Philosophical arguments to the\ncontrary will be passé. (Pollock 1995, p. 6)\n","\nTo wrap up discussion of CRA, we make two quick points, to wit: ","\nReaders may wonder if there are philosophical debates that AI\nresearchers engage in, in the course of working in their field (as\nopposed to when they might attend a philosophy conference). Surely, AI\nresearchers have philosophical discussions amongst themselves, right?\n","\nGenerally, one finds that AI researchers do discuss among themselves\ntopics in philosophy of AI, and these topics are usually the very same\nones that occupy philosophers of AI. However, the attitude reflected\nin the quote from Pollock immediately above is by far the dominant\none. That is, in general, the attitude of AI researchers is that\nphilosophizing is sometimes fun, but the upward march of AI\nengineering cannot be stopped, will not fail, and will eventually\nrender such philosophizing otiose. ","\nWe will return to the issue of the future of AI in the\n final section\n of this entry. "],"subsection_title":"8.2 The Chinese Room Argument Against “Strong AI”"},{"content":["\nFour decades ago, J.R. Lucas (1964) argued that Gödel’s\nfirst incompleteness theorem entails that no machine can ever reach\nhuman-level intelligence. His argument has not proved to be\ncompelling, but Lucas initiated a debate that has produced more\nformidable arguments. One of Lucas’ indefatigable defenders is\nthe physicist Roger Penrose, whose first attempt to vindicate Lucas\nwas a Gödelian attack on “Strong” AI articulated in\nhis The Emperor’s New Mind (1989). This first attempt\nfell short, and Penrose published a more elaborate and more fastidious\nGödelian case, expressed in Chapters 2 and 3 of his Shadows of\nthe Mind (1994). ","\nIn light of the fact that readers can turn to the\n entry on the Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems,\n a full review here is not needed. Instead, readers will be given a\ndecent sense of the argument by turning to an online paper in which\nPenrose, writing in response to critics (e.g., the philosopher David\nChalmers, the logician Solomon Feferman, and the computer scientist\nDrew McDermott) of his Shadows of the Mind, distills the\nargument to a couple of\n paragraphs.[40]\n Indeed, in this paper Penrose gives what he takes to be the perfected\nversion of the core Gödelian case given in SOTM. Here is\nthis version, verbatim: ","\nWe try to suppose that the totality of methods of (unassailable)\nmathematical reasoning that are in principle humanly accessible can be\nencapsulated in some (not necessarily computational) sound formal\nsystem \\(F\\). A human mathematician, if presented with \\(F\\), could\nargue as follows (bearing in mind that the phrase “I am\n\\(F\\)” is merely a shorthand for “\\(F\\) encapsulates all\nthe humanly accessible methods of mathematical proof”):\n\n\n(A) “Though I don’t know that I necessarily am \\(F\\), I\nconclude that if I were, then the system \\(F\\) would have to be sound\nand, more to the point, \\(F'\\) would have to be sound, where \\(F'\\) is\n\\(F\\) supplemented by the further assertion “I am \\(F\\).”\nI perceive that it follows from the assumption that I am \\(F\\) that\nthe Gödel statement \\(G(F')\\) would have to be true and,\nfurthermore, that it would not be a consequence of \\(F'\\). But I have\njust perceived that “If I happened to be \\(F\\), then \\(G(F')\\)\nwould have to be true,” and perceptions of this nature would be\nprecisely what \\(F'\\) is supposed to achieve. Since I am therefore\ncapable of perceiving something beyond the powers of \\(F'\\), I deduce\nthat I cannot be \\(F\\) after all. Moreover, this applies to any other\n(Gödelizable) system, in place of \\(F\\).” (Penrose 1996,\n3.2)\n\n","\nDoes this argument succeed? A firm answer to this question is not\nappropriate to seek in the present entry. Interested readers are\nencouraged to consult four full-scale treatments of the argument\n(LaForte et. al 1998; Bringsjord and Xiao 2000; Shapiro 2003; Bowie\n1982)."],"subsection_title":"8.3 The Gödelian Argument Against “Strong AI”"},{"content":["\nIn addition to the Gödelian and Searlean arguments covered\nbriefly above, a third attack on “Strong” AI (of the\nsymbolic variety) has been widely discussed (though with the rise of\nstatistical machine learning has come a corresponding decrease in the\nattention paid to it), namely, one given by the philosopher Hubert\nDreyfus (1972, 1992), some incarnations of which have been\nco-articulated with his brother, Stuart Dreyfus (1987), a computer\nscientist. Put crudely, the core idea in this attack is that human\nexpertise is not based on the explicit, disembodied, mechanical\nmanipulation of symbolic information (such as formulae in some logic,\nor probabilities in some Bayesian network), and that AI’s\nefforts to build machines with such expertise are doomed if based on\nthe symbolic paradigm. The genesis of the Dreyfusian attack was a\nbelief that the critique of (if you will) symbol-based philosophy\n(e.g., philosophy in the logic-based, rationalist tradition, as\nopposed to what is called the Continental tradition) from such\nthinkers as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty could be made against the\nrationalist tradition in AI. After further reading and study of\nDreyfus’ writings, readers may judge whether this critique is\ncompelling, in an information-driven world increasingly managed by\nintelligent agents that carry out symbolic reasoning (albeit not even\nclose to the human level). ","\nFor readers interested in exploring philosophy of AI beyond what Jim\nMoor (in a recent address – “The Next Fifty Years of AI:\nFuture Scientific Research vs. Past Philosophical Criticisms”\n– as the 2006 Barwise Award winner at the annual eastern\nAmerican Philosophical Association meeting) has called the “the\nbig three” criticisms of AI, there is no shortage of additional\nmaterial, much of it available on the Web. The last chapter of\nAIMA provides a compressed overview of some additional\narguments against “Strong” AI, and is in general not a bad\nnext step. Needless to say, Philosophy of AI today involves much more\nthan the three well-known arguments discussed above, and, inevitably,\nPhilosophy of AI tomorrow will include new debates and problems we\ncan’t see now. Because machines, inevitably, will get smarter\nand smarter (regardless of just how smart they get),\nPhilosophy of AI, pure and simple, is a growth industry. With every\nhuman activity that machines match, the “big” questions\nwill only attract more attention. "],"subsection_title":"8.4 Additional Topics and Readings in Philosophy of AI"}]},{"main_content":["\nIf past predictions are any indication, the only thing we know today\nabout tomorrow’s science and technology is that it will be\nradically different than whatever we predict it will be like.\nArguably, in the case of AI, we may also specifically know today that\nprogress will be much slower than what most expect. After all, at the\n1956 kickoff conference (discussed at the start of this entry), Herb\nSimon predicted that thinking machines able to match the human mind\nwere “just around the corner” (for the relevant quotes and\ninformative discussion, see the first chapter of AIMA). As it\nturned out, the new century would arrive without a single machine able\nto converse at even the toddler level. (Recall that when it comes to\nthe building of machines capable of displaying human-level\nintelligence, Descartes, not Turing, seems today to be the better\nprophet.) Nonetheless, astonishing though it may be, serious thinkers\nin the late 20th century have continued to issue incredibly optimistic\npredictions regarding the progress of AI. For example, Hans Moravec\n(1999), in his Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind,\ninforms us that because the speed of computer hardware doubles every\n18 months (in accordance with Moore’s Law, which has\napparently held in the past), “fourth generation”\nrobots will soon enough exceed humans in all respects, from running\ncompanies to writing novels. These robots, so the story goes, will\nevolve to such lofty cognitive heights that we will stand to them as\nsingle-cell organisms stand to us\n today.[41]\n ","\nMoravec is by no means singularly Pollyannaish: Many others in AI\npredict the same sensational future unfolding on about the same rapid\nschedule. In fact, at the aforementioned AI@50 conference, Jim Moor\nposed the question “Will human-level AI be achieved within the\nnext 50 years?” to five thinkers who attended the original 1956\nconference: John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Oliver Selfridge, Ray\nSolomonoff, and Trenchard Moore. McCarthy and Minsky gave firm,\nunhesitating affirmatives, and Solomonoff seemed to suggest that AI\nprovided the one ray of hope in the face of fact that our species\nseems bent on destroying itself. (Selfridge’s reply was a bit\ncryptic. Moore returned a firm, unambiguous negative, and declared\nthat once his computer is smart enough to interact with him\nconversationally about mathematical problems, he might take this whole\nenterprise more seriously.) It is left to the reader to judge the\naccuracy of such risky predictions as have been given by Moravec,\nMcCarthy, and\n Minsky.[42]\n ","\nThe judgment of the reader in this regard ought to factor in the\nstunning resurgence, very recently, of serious reflection on what is\nknown as “The Singularity,” (denoted by us simply as\nS) the future point at which artificial intelligence exceeds\nhuman intelligence, whereupon immediately thereafter (as the story\ngoes) the machines make themselves rapidly smarter and smarter and\nsmarter, reaching a superhuman level of intelligence that, stuck as we\nare in the mud of our limited mentation, we can’t fathom. For\nextensive, balanced analysis of S, see Eden et al. (2013).","\nReaders unfamiliar with the literature on S may be quite\nsurprised to learn the degree to which, among learned folks, this\nhypothetical event is not only taken seriously, but has in fact become\na target for extensive and frequent philosophizing [for a mordant tour\nof the recent thought in question, see Floridi (2015)]. What\narguments support the belief that S is in our future?\nThere are two main arguments at this point: the familiar\nhardware-based one [championed by Moravec, as noted above, and again\nmore recently by Kurzweil (2006)]; and the – as far as we know\n– original argument given by mathematician I. J. Good (1965). In\naddition, there is a recent and related doomsayer argument advanced by\nBostrom (2014), which seems to presuppose that S will occur.\nGood’s argument, nicely amplified and adjusted by Chalmers\n(2010), who affirms the tidied-up version of the argument, runs as\nfollows:","\nIn this argument, ‘AI’ is artificial intelligence at the\nlevel of, and created by, human persons, ‘AI\\(^+\\)’\nartificial intelligence above the level of human persons, and\n‘AI\\(^{++}\\)’ super-intelligence constitutive of S.\nThe key process is presumably the creation of one class of\nmachine by another. We have added for convenience ‘HI’ for\nhuman intelligence; the central idea is then: HI will create AI, the\nlatter at the same level of intelligence as the former; AI will create\nAI\\(^+\\); AI\\(^+\\) will create AI\\(^{++}\\); with the ascension\nproceeding perhaps forever, but at any rate proceeding long enough for\nus to be as ants outstripped by gods. ","\nThe argument certainly appears to be formally valid. Are its three\npremises true? Taking up such a question would fling us far beyond the\nscope of this entry. We point out only that the concept of one class\nof machines creating another, more powerful class of machines is not a\ntransparent one, and neither Good nor Chalmers provides a rigorous\naccount of the concept, which is ripe for philosophical analysis. (As\nto mathematical analysis, some exists, of course. It is for example\nwell-known that a computing machine at level \\(L\\) cannot possibly\ncreate another machine at a higher level \\(L'\\). For instance, a\nlinear-bounded automaton can’t create a Turing machine.)","\nThe Good-Chalmers argument has a rather clinical air about it; the\nargument doesn’t say anything regarding whether machines in\nthe AI\\(^{++}\\) category will be benign, malicious, or munificent.\nMany others gladly fill this gap with dark, dark pessimism. The\nlocus classicus here is without question a widely read paper by\nBill Joy (2000): “Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us.”\nJoy believes that the human race is doomed, in no small part because\nit’s busy building smart machines. He writes: ","\n\n\nThe 21st-century technologies – genetics, nanotechnology, and\nrobotics (GNR) – are so powerful that they can spawn whole new\nclasses of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time,\nthese accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals\nor small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare raw\nmaterials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them.\n\n\nThus we have the possibility not just of weapons of mass destruction\nbut of knowledge-enabled mass destruction (KMD), this destructiveness\nhugely amplified by the power of self-replication. \n\n\nI think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further\nperfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well\nbeyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the\nnation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme\n individuals.[43]\n \n","\nPhilosophers would be most interested in arguments for this\nview. What are Joy’s? Well, no small reason for the attention\nlavished on his paper is that, like Raymond Kurzweil (2000), Joy\nrelies heavily on an argument given by none other than the Unabomber\n(Theodore Kaczynski). The idea is that, assuming we succeed in\nbuilding intelligent machines, we will have them do most (if not all)\nwork for us. If we further allow the machines to make decisions for us\n– even if we retain oversight over the machines –, we will\neventually depend on them to the point where we must simply accept\ntheir decisions. But even if we don’t allow the machines to make\ndecisions, the control of such machines is likely to be held by a\nsmall elite who will view the rest of humanity as unnecessary –\nsince the machines can do any needed work (Joy 2000).","\nThis isn’t the place to assess this argument. (Having said that,\nthe pattern pushed by the Unabomber and his supporters certainly\nappears to be flatly\n invalid.[44])\n In fact, many readers will doubtless feel that no such place exists\nor will exist, because the reasoning here is amateurish. So then, what\nabout the reasoning of professional philosophers on the matter? ","\nBostrom has recently painted an exceedingly dark picture of a possible\nfuture. He points out that the “first superintelligence”\ncould have the capability","\nto shape the future of Earth-originating life, could easily have\nnon-anthropomorphic final goals, and would likely have instrumental\nreasons to pursue open-ended resource acquisition. If we now reflect\nthat human beings consist of useful resources (such as conveniently\nlocated atoms) and that we depend on many more local resources, we can\nsee that the outcome could easily be one in which humanity quickly\nbecomes extinct. (Bostrom 2014, p. 416)\n","\n Clearly, the most vulnerable premise in this sort of argument\nis that the “first superintelligence” will arrive indeed\narrive. Here perhaps the Good-Chalmers argument provides a basis.\n","\nSearle (2014) thinks Bostrom’s book is misguided and\nfundamentally mistaken, and that we needn’t worry. His rationale\nis dirt-simple: Machines aren’t conscious; Bostrom is alarmed at\nthe prospect of malicious machines who do us in; a malicious machine\nis by definition a conscious machine; ergo, Bostrom’s argument\ndoesn’t work. Searle writes: ","\nIf the computer can fly airplanes, drive cars, and win at chess, who\ncares if it is totally nonconscious? But if we are worried about a\nmaliciously motivated superintelligence destroying us, then it is\nimportant that the malicious motivation should be real. Without\nconsciousness, there is no possibiity of its being real.\n","\nThe positively remarkable thing here, it seems to us, is that Searle\nappears to be unaware of the brute fact that most AI engineers are\nperfectly content to build machines on the basis of the AIMA\nview of AI we presented and explained above: the view according to\nwhich machines simply map percepts to actions. On this view, it\ndoesn’t matter whether the machine really has desires;\nwhat matters is whether it acts suitably on the basis of how AI\nscientists engineer formal correlates to desire. An\nautonomous machine with overwhelming destructive power that\nnon-consciously “decides” to kill doesn’t become\njust a nuisance because genuine, human-level, subjective desire is\nabsent from the machine. If an AI can play the game of chess, and the\ngame of Jeopardy!, it can certainly play the game of war. Just\nas it does little good for a human loser to point out that the\nvictorious machine in a game of chess isn’t conscious, it will\ndo little good for humans being killed by machines to point out that\nthese machines aren’t conscious. (It is interesting to note that\nthe genesis of Joy’s paper was an informal conversation with\nJohn Searle and Raymond Kurzweil. According to Joy, Searle\ndidn’t think there was much to worry about, since he was (and\nis) quite confident that tomorrow’s robots can’t be\n conscious.[45])\n ","\nThere are some things we can safely say about tomorrow.\nCertainly, barring some cataclysmic events (nuclear or biological\nwarfare, global economic depression, a meteorite smashing into Earth,\netc.), we now know that AI will succeed in producing artificial\nanimals. Since even some natural animals (mules, e.g.) can be\neasily trained to work for humans, it stands to reason that artificial\nanimals, designed from scratch with our purposes in mind, will be\ndeployed to work for us. In fact, many jobs currently done by humans\nwill certainly be done by appropriately programmed artificial animals.\nTo pick an arbitrary example, it is difficult to believe that\ncommercial drivers won’t be artificial in the future. (Indeed,\nDaimler is already running commercials in which they tout the ability\nof their automobiles to drive “autonomously,” allowing\nhuman occupants of these vehicles to ignore the road and read.) Other\nexamples would include: cleaners, mail carriers, clerical workers,\nmilitary scouts, surgeons, and pilots. (As to cleaners, probably a\nsignificant number of readers, at this very moment, have robots from\niRobot cleaning the carpets in their homes.) It is hard to see how\nsuch jobs are inseparably bound up with the attributes often taken to\nbe at the core of personhood – attributes that would be the most\ndifficult for AI to\n replicate.[46]\n ","\nAndy Clark (2003) has another prediction: Humans will gradually\nbecome, at least to an appreciable degree, cyborgs, courtesy of\nartificial limbs and sense organs, and implants. The main driver of\nthis trend will be that while standalone AIs are often desirable, they\nare hard to engineer when the desired level of intelligence is high.\nBut to let humans “pilot” less intelligent machines is a\ngood deal easier, and still very attractive for concrete reasons.\nAnother related prediction is that AI would play the role of a\ncognitive prosthesis for humans (Ford et al. 1997; Hoffman et al.\n2001). The prosthesis view sees AI as a “great equalizer”\nthat would lead to less stratification in society, perhaps similar to\nhow the Hindu-Arabic numeral system made arithmetic available to the\nmasses, and to how the Guttenberg press contributed to literacy\nbecoming more universal. ","\nEven if the argument is formally invalid, it leaves us with a question\n– the cornerstone question about AI and the future: Will AI\nproduce artificial creatures that replicate and exceed human cognition\n(as Kurzweil and Joy believe)? Or is this merely an interesting\nsupposition? ","\nThis is a question not just for scientists and engineers; it is also a\nquestion for philosophers. This is so for two reasons. One, research\nand development designed to validate an affirmative answer must\ninclude philosophy – for reasons rooted in earlier parts of the\npresent entry. (E.g., philosophy is the place to turn to for robust\nformalisms to model human propositional attitudes in machine terms.)\nTwo, philosophers might well be able to provide arguments that answer\nthe cornerstone question now, definitively. If a version of either of\nthe three arguments against “Strong” AI alluded to above\n(Searle’s CRA; the Gödelian attack; the Dreyfus argument)\nare sound, then of course AI will not manage to produce machines\nhaving the mental powers of persons. No doubt the future holds not\nonly ever-smarter machines, but new arguments pro and con on the\nquestion of whether this progress can reach the human level that\nDescartes declared to be unreachable. "],"section_title":"9. The Future","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe field of artificial intelligence (AI) officially started in 1956,\\nlaunched by a small but now-famous\\n DARPA-sponsored\\n summer conference at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire.\\n(The 50-year celebration of this conference,\\n AI@50,\\n was held in July 2006 at Dartmouth, with five of the original\\nparticipants making it\\n back.[2]\\n What happened at this historic conference figures in the final\\nsection of this entry.) Ten thinkers attended, including John McCarthy\\n(who was working at Dartmouth in 1956), Claude Shannon, Marvin Minsky,\\nArthur Samuel, Trenchard Moore (apparently the lone note-taker at the\\noriginal conference), Ray Solomonoff, Oliver Selfridge, Allen Newell,\\nand Herbert Simon. From where we stand now, into the start of the new\\nmillennium, the Dartmouth conference is memorable for many reasons,\\nincluding this pair: one, the term ‘artificial\\nintelligence’ was coined there (and has long been firmly\\nentrenched, despite being disliked by some of the attendees, e.g.,\\nMoore); two, Newell and Simon revealed a program – Logic\\nTheorist (LT) – agreed by the attendees (and, indeed, by nearly\\nall those who learned of and about it soon after the conference) to be\\na remarkable achievement. LT was capable of proving elementary\\ntheorems in the propositional\\n calculus.[3][4]\",\n \"\\nThough the term ‘artificial intelligence’ made\\nits advent at the 1956 conference, certainly the field of AI,\\noperationally defined (defined, i.e., as a field constituted by\\npractitioners who think and act in certain ways), was in operation\\nbefore 1956. For example, in a famous Mind paper of 1950,\\nAlan Turing argues that the question “Can a machine\\nthink?” (and here Turing is talking about standard computing\\nmachines: machines capable of computing functions from the natural\\nnumbers (or pairs, triples, … thereof) to the natural numbers\\nthat a Turing machine or equivalent can handle) should be replaced\\nwith the question “Can a machine be linguistically\\nindistinguishable from a human?.” Specifically, he proposes a\\ntest, the\\n “Turing Test”\\n (TT) as it’s now known. In the TT, a woman and a computer are\\nsequestered in sealed rooms, and a human judge, in the dark as to\\nwhich of the two rooms contains which contestant, asks questions by\\nemail (actually, by teletype, to use the original term) of the\\ntwo. If, on the strength of returned answers, the judge can do no\\nbetter than 50/50 when delivering a verdict as to which room houses\\nwhich player, we say that the computer in question has passed\\nthe TT. Passing in this sense operationalizes linguistic\\nindistinguishability. Later, we shall discuss the role that TT has\\nplayed, and indeed continues to play, in attempts to define AI. At the\\nmoment, though, the point is that in his paper, Turing explicitly lays\\ndown the call for building machines that would provide an existence\\nproof of an affirmative answer to his question. The call even includes\\na suggestion for how such construction should proceed. (He suggests\\nthat “child machines” be built, and that these machines\\ncould then gradually grow up on their own to learn to communicate in\\nnatural language at the level of adult humans. This suggestion has\\narguably been followed by Rodney Brooks and the philosopher Daniel\\nDennett (1994) in the Cog Project. In addition, the Spielberg/Kubrick\\nmovie A.I. is at least in part a cinematic exploration of\\nTuring’s\\n suggestion.[5])\\n The TT continues to be at the heart of AI and discussions of its\\nfoundations, as confirmed by the appearance of (Moor 2003). In fact,\\nthe TT continues to be used to define the field, as in\\nNilsson’s (1998) position, expressed in his textbook for the\\nfield, that AI simply is the field devoted to building an artifact\\nable to negotiate this test. Energy supplied by the dream of\\nengineering a computer that can pass TT, or by controversy surrounding\\nclaims that it has already been passed, is if anything\\nstronger than ever, and the reader has only to do an internet search\\nvia the string \",\n \"\\nturing test passed \",\n \"\\nto find up-to-the-minute attempts at reaching this dream, and attempts\\n(sometimes made by philosophers) to debunk claims that some such\\nattempt has succeeded.\",\n \"\\nReturning to the issue of the historical record, even if one bolsters\\nthe claim that AI started at the 1956 conference by adding the proviso\\nthat ‘artificial intelligence’ refers to a nuts-and-bolts\\nengineering pursuit (in which case Turing’s\\nphilosophical discussion, despite calls for a child machine,\\nwouldn’t exactly count as AI per se), one must confront the fact\\nthat Turing, and indeed many predecessors, did attempt to build\\nintelligent artifacts. In Turing’s case, such building was\\nsurprisingly well-understood before the advent of programmable\\ncomputers: Turing wrote a program for playing chess before there were\\ncomputers to run such programs on, by slavishly following the code\\nhimself. He did this well before 1950, and long before Newell (1973)\\ngave thought in print to the possibility of a sustained, serious\\nattempt at building a good chess-playing\\n computer.[6]\",\n \"\\nFrom the perspective of philosophy, which views the systematic\\ninvestigation of mechanical intelligence as meaningful and productive\\nseparate from the specific logicist formalisms (e.g., first-order\\nlogic) and problems (e.g., the Entscheidungsproblem) that gave\\nbirth to computer science, neither the 1956 conference, nor\\nTuring’s Mind paper, come close to marking the start of\\nAI. This is easy enough to see. For example, Descartes proposed TT\\n(not the TT by name, of course) long before Turing was\\n born.[7]\\n Here’s the relevant passage: \",\n \"\\nIf there were machines which bore a resemblance to our body and\\nimitated our actions as far as it was morally possible to do so, we\\nshould always have two very certain tests by which to recognise that,\\nfor all that, they were not real men. The first is, that they could\\nnever use speech or other signs as we do when placing our thoughts on\\nrecord for the benefit of others. For we can easily understand a\\nmachine’s being constituted so that it can utter words, and even\\nemit some responses to action on it of a corporeal kind, which brings\\nabout a change in its organs; for instance, if it is touched in a\\nparticular part it may ask what we wish to say to it; if in another\\npart it may exclaim that it is being hurt, and so on. But it never\\nhappens that it arranges its speech in various ways, in order to reply\\nappropriately to everything that may be said in its presence, as even\\nthe lowest type of man can do. And the second difference is, that\\nalthough machines can perform certain things as well as or perhaps\\nbetter than any of us can do, they infallibly fall short in others, by\\nwhich means we may discover that they did not act from knowledge, but\\nonly for the disposition of their organs. For while reason is a\\nuniversal instrument which can serve for all contingencies, these\\norgans have need of some special adaptation for every particular\\naction. From this it follows that it is morally impossible that there\\nshould be sufficient diversity in any machine to allow it to act in\\nall the events of life in the same way as our reason causes us to act.\\n(Descartes 1637, p. 116)\\n\",\n \"\\nAt the moment, Descartes is certainly carrying the\\n day.[8]\\n Turing predicted that his test would be passed by 2000, but the\\nfireworks across the globe at the start of the new millennium have\\nlong since died down, and the most articulate of computers still\\ncan’t meaningfully debate a sharp toddler. Moreover, while in\\ncertain focussed areas machines out-perform minds (IBM’s famous\\nDeep Blue prevailed in chess over Gary Kasparov, e.g.; and more\\nrecently, AI systems have prevailed in other games, e.g.\\nJeopardy! and Go, about which more will momentarily be said),\\nminds have a (Cartesian) capacity for cultivating their expertise in\\nvirtually any sphere. (If it were announced to Deep Blue, or\\nany current successor, that chess was no longer to be the game of\\nchoice, but rather a heretofore unplayed variant of chess, the machine\\nwould be trounced by human children of average intelligence having no\\nchess expertise.) AI simply hasn’t managed to create\\ngeneral intelligence; it hasn’t even managed to produce\\nan artifact indicating that eventually it will create such a\\nthing. \",\n \"\\nBut what about IBM Watson’s famous nail-biting victory in the\\nJeopardy! game-show\\n contest?[9]\\n That certainly seems to be a machine triumph over humans on their\\n“home field,” since Jeopardy! delivers a\\nhuman-level linguistic challenge ranging across many domains. Indeed,\\namong many AI cognoscenti, Watson’s success is considered to be\\nmuch more impressive than Deep Blue’s, for numerous reasons. One\\nreason is that while chess is generally considered to be\\nwell-understood from the formal-computational perspective (after all,\\nit’s well-known that there exists a perfect strategy for playing\\nchess), in open-domain question-answering (QA), as in any\\nsignificant natural-language processing task, there is no consensus as\\nto what problem, formally speaking, one is trying to solve. Briefly,\\nquestion-answering (QA) is what the reader would think it is: one asks\\na question of a machine, and gets an answer, where the answer has to\\nbe produced via some “significant” computational process.\\n(See Strzalkowski & Harabagiu (2006) for an overview of what QA,\\nhistorically, has been as a field.) A bit more precisely, there is no\\nagreement as to what underlying function, formally speaking,\\nquestion-answering capability computes. This lack of agreement stems\\nquite naturally from the fact that there is of course no consensus as\\nto what natural languages are, formally\\n speaking.[10]\\n Despite this murkiness, and in the face of an almost universal belief\\nthat open-domain question-answering would remain unsolved for a decade\\nor more, Watson decisively beat the two top human Jeopardy!\\nchampions on the planet. During the contest, Watson had to answer\\nquestions that required not only command of simple factoids\\n(Question1), but also of some amount of rudimentary\\nreasoning (in the form of temporal reasoning) and commonsense\\n(Question2):\",\n \"\\nQuestion1: The only two consecutive U.S. presidents\\nwith the same first name. \",\n \"\\nQuestion2: In May 1898, Portugal celebrated the\\n400th anniversary of this explorer’s arrival in India. \",\n \"\\nWhile Watson is demonstrably better than humans in\\nJeopardy!-style quizzing (a new human Jeopardy! master\\ncould arrive on the scene, but as for chess, AI now assumes that a\\nsecond round of IBM-level investment would vanquish the new human\\nopponent), this approach does not work for the kind of NLP challenge\\nthat Descartes described; that is, Watson can’t converse on the\\nfly. After all, some questions don’t hinge on sophisticated\\ninformation retrieval and machine learning over pre-existing data, but\\nrather on intricate reasoning right on the spot. Such questions may\\nfor instance involve anaphora resolution, which require even deeper\\ndegrees of commonsensical understanding of time, space, history, folk\\npsychology, and so on. Levesque (2013) has catalogued some alarmingly\\nsimple questions which fall in this category. (Marcus, 2013, gives an\\naccount of Levesque’s challenges that is accessible to a wider\\naudience.) The other class of question-answering tasks on which Watson\\nfails can be characterized as dynamic question-answering. These\\nare questions for which answers may not be recorded in textual form\\nanywhere at the time of questioning, or for which answers are\\ndependent on factors that change with time. Two questions that fall in\\nthis category are given below (Govindarajulu et al. 2013):\",\n \"\\nQuestion3: If I have 4 foos and 5 bars, and if foos\\nare not the same as bars, how many foos will I have if I get 3 bazes\\nwhich just happen to be foos?\",\n \"\\nQuestion4: What was IBM’s Sharpe ratio in the\\nlast 60 days of trading? \",\n \"\\nClosely following Watson’s victory, in March 2016,\\n Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo\\n defeated one of Go’s top-ranked players, Lee Seedol, in four\\nout of five matches. This was considered a landmark achievement within\\nAI, as it was widely believed in the AI community that computer\\nvictory in Go was at least a few decades away, partly due to the\\nenormous number of valid sequences of moves in Go compared to that in\\n Chess.[11]\\n While this is a remarkable achievement, it should be noted that,\\ndespite breathless coverage in the popular\\n press,[12]\\n AlphaGo, while indisputably a great Go player, is just that. For\\nexample, neither AlphaGo nor Watson can understand the rules of Go\\nwritten in plain-and-simple English and produce a computer program\\nthat can play the game. It’s interesting that there is one\\nendeavor in AI that tackles a narrow version of this very problem: In\\ngeneral game playing, a machine is given a description of a\\nbrand new game just before it has to play the game (Genesereth et al.\\n2005). However, the description in question is expressed in a formal\\nlanguage, and the machine has to manage to play the game from this\\ndescription. Note that this is still far from understanding even a\\nsimple description of a game in English well enough to play it. \",\n \"\\nBut what if we consider the history of AI not from the perspective of\\nphilosophy, but rather from the perspective of the field with which,\\ntoday, it is most closely connected? The reference here is to computer\\nscience. From this perspective, does AI run back to well before\\nTuring? Interestingly enough, the results are the same: we find that\\nAI runs deep into the past, and has always had philosophy in its\\nveins. This is true for the simple reason that computer science grew\\nout of logic and probability\\n theory,[13]\\n which in turn grew out of (and is still intertwined with) philosophy.\\nComputer science, today, is shot through and through with logic; the\\ntwo fields cannot be separated. This phenomenon has become an object\\nof study unto itself (Halpern et al. 2001). The situation is no\\ndifferent when we are talking not about traditional logic, but rather\\nabout probabilistic formalisms, also a significant component of\\nmodern-day AI: These formalisms also grew out of philosophy, as nicely\\nchronicled, in part, by Glymour (1992). For example, in the one mind\\nof Pascal was born a method of rigorously calculating probabilities,\\nconditional probability (which plays a particularly large role in AI,\\ncurrently), and such fertile philosophico-probabilistic arguments as\\n Pascal’s wager,\\n according to which it is irrational not to become a Christian. \",\n \"\\nThat modern-day AI has its roots in philosophy, and in fact that these\\nhistorical roots are temporally deeper than even Descartes’\\ndistant day, can be seen by looking to the clever, revealing cover of\\nthe second edition (the third edition is the current one) of the\\ncomprehensive textbook\\n Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach\\n (known in the AI community as simply AIMA2e for Russell &\\nNorvig, 2002).\",\n \"\\nWhat you see there is an eclectic collection of memorabilia that might\\nbe on and around the desk of some imaginary AI researcher. For\\nexample, if you look carefully, you will specifically see: a picture\\nof Turing, a view of Big Ben through a window (perhaps R&N are\\naware of the fact that Turing famously held at one point that a\\nphysical machine with the power of a universal Turing machine is\\nphysically impossible: he quipped that it would have to be the size of\\nBig Ben), a planning algorithm described in Aristotle’s De\\nMotu Animalium,\\n Frege’s fascinating notation for first-order logic,\\n a glimpse of Lewis Carroll’s (1958) pictorial representation of\\nsyllogistic reasoning, Ramon Lull’s concept-generating wheel\\nfrom his 13th-century Ars Magna, and a number of\\nother pregnant items (including, in a clever, recursive, and\\nbordering-on-self-congratulatory touch, a copy of AIMA itself).\\nThough there is insufficient space here to make all the historical\\nconnections, we can safely infer from the appearance of these items\\n(and here we of course refer to the ancient ones: Aristotle conceived\\nof planning as information-processing over two-and-a-half millennia\\nback; and in addition, as Glymour (1992) notes, Artistotle can also be\\ncredited with devising the first knowledge-bases and ontologies, two\\ntypes of representation schemes that have long been central to AI)\\nthat AI is indeed very, very old. Even those who insist that AI is at\\nleast in part an artifact-building enterprise must concede that, in\\nlight of these objects, AI is ancient, for it isn’t just\\ntheorizing from the perspective that intelligence is at bottom\\ncomputational that runs back into the remote past of human history:\\nLull’s wheel, for example, marks an attempt to capture\\nintelligence not only in computation, but in a physical artifact that\\nembodies that\\n computation.[14]\\n \",\n \"\\nAIMA has now reached its the third edition, and those interested in\\nthe history of AI, and for that matter the history of philosophy of\\nmind, will not be disappointed by examination of the cover of the\\nthird installment (the cover of the second edition is almost exactly\\nlike the first edition). (All the elements of the cover, separately\\nlisted and annotated, can be found\\n online.)\\n One significant addition to the cover of the third edition is a\\ndrawing of Thomas Bayes; his appearance reflects the recent rise in\\nthe popularity of probabilistic techniques in AI, which we discuss\\nlater.\",\n \"\\nOne final point about the history of AI seems worth making. \",\n \"\\nIt is generally assumed that the birth of modern-day AI in the 1950s\\ncame in large part because of and through the advent of the modern\\nhigh-speed digital computer. This assumption accords with\\ncommon-sense. After all, AI (and, for that matter, to some degree its\\ncousin, cognitive science, particularly computational cognitive\\nmodeling, the sub-field of cognitive science devoted to producing\\ncomputational simulations of human cognition) is aimed at implementing\\nintelligence in a computer, and it stands to reason that such a goal\\nwould be inseparably linked with the advent of such devices. However,\\nthis is only part of the story: the part that reaches back but to\\nTuring and others (e.g., von Neuman) responsible for the first\\nelectronic computers. The other part is that, as already mentioned, AI\\nhas a particularly strong tie, historically speaking, to reasoning\\n(logic-based and, in the need to deal with uncertainty,\\ninductive/probabilistic reasoning). In this story, nicely told by\\nGlymour (1992), a search for an answer to the question “What is\\na proof?” eventually led to an answer based on Frege’s\\nversion of first-order logic (FOL): a (finitary) mathematical proof\\nconsists in a series of step-by-step inferences from one formula of\\nfirst-order logic to the next. The obvious extension of this answer\\n(and it isn’t a complete answer, given that lots of classical\\nmathematics, despite conventional wisdom, clearly can’t be\\nexpressed in FOL; even the Peano Axioms, to be expressed as a finite\\nset of formulae, require SOL) is to say that not only\\nmathematical thinking, but thinking, period, can be expressed in FOL.\\n(This extension was entertained by many logicians long before the\\nstart of information-processing psychology and cognitive science\\n– a fact some cognitive psychologists and cognitive scientists\\noften seem to forget.) Today, logic-based AI is only part of\\nAI, but the point is that this part still lives (with help from logics\\nmuch more powerful, but much more complicated, than FOL), and it can\\nbe traced all the way back to Aristotle’s theory of the\\n syllogism.[15]\\n In the case of uncertain reasoning, the question isn’t\\n“What is a proof?”, but rather questions such as\\n“What is it rational to believe, in light of certain\\nobservations and probabilities?” This is a question posed and\\ntackled long before the arrival of digital computers. \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. The History of AI\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nSo far we have been proceeding as if we have a firm and precise grasp\\nof the nature of AI. But what exactly is AI? Philosophers\\narguably know better than anyone that precisely defining a particular\\ndiscipline to the satisfaction of all relevant parties (including\\nthose working in the discipline itself) can be acutely challenging.\\nPhilosophers of science certainly have proposed credible accounts of\\nwhat constitutes at least the general shape and texture of a given\\nfield of science and/or engineering, but what exactly is the\\nagreed-upon definition of physics? What about biology? What, for that\\nmatter, is philosophy, exactly? These are remarkably difficult, maybe\\neven eternally unanswerable, questions, especially if the target is a\\nconsensus definition. Perhaps the most prudent course we can\\nmanage here under obvious space constraints is to present in\\nencapsulated form some proposed definitions of AI. We do\\ninclude a glimpse of recent attempts to define AI in detailed,\\nrigorous fashion (and we suspect that such attempts will be of\\ninterest to philosophers of science, and those interested in this\\nsub-area of philosophy). \",\n \"\\nRussell and Norvig (1995, 2002, 2009), in their aforementioned\\nAIMA text, provide a set of possible answers to the “What\\nis AI?” question that has considerable currency in the field\\nitself. These answers all assume that AI should be defined in terms of\\nits goals: a candidate definition thus has the form “AI is the\\nfield that aims at building …” The answers all fall under\\na quartet of types placed along two dimensions. One dimension is\\nwhether the goal is to match human performance, or, instead, ideal\\nrationality. The other dimension is whether the goal is to build\\nsystems that reason/think, or rather systems that act. The situation\\nis summed up in this table:\",\n \"\\nPlease note that this quartet of possibilities does reflect (at least\\na significant portion of) the relevant literature. For example,\\nphilosopher John Haugeland (1985) falls into the Human/Reasoning\\nquadrant when he says that AI is “The exciting new effort to\\nmake computers think … machines with minds, in the\\nfull and literal sense.” (By far, this is the quadrant that most\\npopular narratives affirm and explore. The recent\\n Westworld\\n TV series is a powerful case in point.) Luger and Stubblefield (1993)\\nseem to fall into the Ideal/Act quadrant when they write: “The\\nbranch of computer science that is concerned with the automation of\\nintelligent behavior.” The Human/Act position is occupied most\\nprominently by Turing, whose test is passed only by those systems able\\nto act sufficiently like a human. The “thinking\\nrationally” position is defended (e.g.) by Winston (1992). While\\nit might not be entirely uncontroversial to assert that the four bins\\ngiven here are exhaustive, such an assertion appears to be quite\\nplausible, even when the literature up to the present moment is\\ncanvassed. \",\n \"\\nIt’s important to know that the contrast between the focus on\\nsystems that think/reason versus systems that act, while found, as we\\nhave seen, at the heart of the AIMA texts, and at the heart of\\nAI itself, should not be interpreted as implying that AI researchers\\nview their work as falling all and only within one of these two\\ncompartments. Researchers who focus more or less exclusively on\\nknowledge representation and reasoning, are also quite prepared to\\nacknowledge that they are working on (what they take to be) a central\\ncomponent or capability within any one of a family of larger systems\\nspanning the reason/act distinction. The clearest case may come from\\nthe work on planning – an AI area traditionally making central\\nuse of representation and reasoning. For good or ill, much of this\\nresearch is done in abstraction (in vitro, as opposed to in vivo), but\\nthe researchers involved certainly intend or at least hope that the\\nresults of their work can be embedded into systems that actually do\\nthings, such as, for example, execute the plans. \",\n \"\\nWhat about Russell and Norvig themselves? What is their answer to the\\nWhat is AI? question? They are firmly in the the “acting\\nrationally” camp. In fact, it’s safe to say both that they\\nare the chief proponents of this answer, and that they have been\\nremarkably successful evangelists. Their extremely influential\\nAIMA series can be viewed as a book-length defense and\\nspecification of the Ideal/Act category. We will look a bit later at\\nhow Russell and Norvig lay out all of AI in terms of intelligent\\nagents, which are systems that act in accordance with various\\nideal standards for rationality. But first let’s look a bit\\ncloser at the view of intelligence underlying the AIMA text. We\\ncan do so by turning to Russell (1997). Here Russell recasts the\\n“What is AI?” question as the question “What is\\nintelligence?” (presumably under the assumption that we have a\\ngood grasp of what an artifact is), and then he identifies\\nintelligence with rationality. More specifically, Russell sees\\nAI as the field devoted to building intelligent agents, which\\nare functions taking as input tuples of percepts from the external\\nenvironment, and producing behavior (actions) on the basis of these\\npercepts. Russell’s overall picture is this one:\",\n \"\\nLet’s unpack this diagram a bit, and take a look, first, at the\\naccount of perfect rationality that can be derived from it. The\\nbehavior of the agent in the environment \\\\(E\\\\) (from a class \\\\(\\\\bE\\\\)\\nof environments) produces a sequence of states or snapshots of that\\nenvironment. A performance measure \\\\(U\\\\) evaluates this sequence;\\nnotice the box labeled “Performance Measure” in the above\\nfigure. We let \\\\(V(f,\\\\bE,U)\\\\) denote the expected utility\\naccording to \\\\(U\\\\) of the agent function \\\\(f\\\\) operating on\\n \\\\(\\\\bE\\\\).[16]\\n Now we identify a perfectly rational agent with the agent function:\\n\",\n \"\\nAccording to the above equation, a perfectly rational agent can be\\ntaken to be the function \\\\(f_{opt}\\\\) which produces the maximum\\nexpected utility in the environment under consideration. Of course, as\\nRussell points out, it’s usually not possible to actually build\\nperfectly rational agents. For example, though it’s easy enough\\nto specify an algorithm for playing invincible chess, it’s not\\nfeasible to implement this algorithm. What traditionally happens in AI\\nis that programs that are – to use Russell’s apt\\nterminology – calculatively rational are constructed\\ninstead: these are programs that, if executed infinitely fast,\\nwould result in perfectly rational behavior. In the case of chess,\\nthis would mean that we strive to write a program that runs an\\nalgorithm capable, in principle, of finding a flawless move, but we\\nadd features that truncate the search for this move in order to play\\nwithin intervals of digestible duration. \",\n \"\\nRussell himself champions a new brand of intelligence/rationality for\\nAI; he calls this brand bounded optimality. To understand\\nRussell’s view, first we follow him in introducing a\\ndistinction: We say that agents have two components: a program, and a\\nmachine upon which the program runs. We write \\\\(Agent(P, M)\\\\) to\\ndenote the agent function implemented by program \\\\(P\\\\) running on\\nmachine \\\\(M\\\\). Now, let \\\\(\\\\mathcal{P}(M)\\\\) denote the set of all\\nprograms \\\\(P\\\\) that can run on machine \\\\(M\\\\). The bounded\\noptimal program \\\\(P_{\\\\opt,M}\\\\) then is:\",\n \"\\nYou can understand this equation in terms of any of the mathematical\\nidealizations for standard computation. For example, machines can be\\nidentified with Turing machines minus instructions (i.e., TMs are here\\nviewed architecturally only: as having tapes divided into squares upon\\nwhich symbols can be written, read/write heads capable of moving up\\nand down the tape to write and erase, and control units which are in\\none of a finite number of states at any time), and programs can be\\nidentified with instructions in the Turing-machine model (telling the\\nmachine to write and erase symbols, depending upon what state the\\nmachine is in). So, if you are told that you must\\n“program” within the constraints of a 22-state Turing\\nmachine, you could search for the “best” program given\\nthose constraints. In other words, you could strive to find the\\noptimal program within the bounds of the 22-state architecture.\\nRussell’s (1997) view is thus that AI is the field devoted to\\ncreating optimal programs for intelligent agents, under time and space\\nconstraints on the machines implementing these\\n programs.[17]\\n \",\n \"\\nThe reader must have noticed that in the equation for \\\\(P_{\\\\opt,M}\\\\)\\nwe have not elaborated on \\\\(\\\\bE\\\\) and \\\\(U\\\\) and how equation\\n\\\\eqref{eq1} might be used to construct an agent if the class of\\nenvironments \\\\(\\\\bE\\\\) is quite general, or if the true environment\\n\\\\(E\\\\) is simply unknown. Depending on the task for which one is\\nconstructing an artificial agent, \\\\(E\\\\) and \\\\(U\\\\) would vary. The\\nmathematical form of the environment \\\\(E\\\\) and the utility function\\n\\\\(U\\\\) would vary wildly from, say, chess to Jeopardy!. Of\\ncourse, if we were to design a globally intelligent agent, and not\\njust a chess-playing agent, we could get away with having just one\\npair of \\\\(E\\\\) and \\\\(U\\\\). What would \\\\(E\\\\) look like if we were\\nbuilding a generally intelligent agent and not just an agent that is\\ngood at a single task? \\\\(E\\\\) would be a model of not just a single\\ngame or a task, but the entire physical-social-virtual universe\\nconsisting of many games, tasks, situations, problems, etc. This\\nproject is (at least currently) hopelessly difficult as, obviously, we\\nare nowhere near to having such a comprehensive theory-of-everything\\nmodel. For further discussion of a theoretical architecture put\\nforward for this problem, see the\\n Supplement on the AIXI architecture.\\n \",\n \"\\nIt should be mentioned that there is a different, much more\\nstraightforward answer to the “What is AI?” question. This\\nanswer, which goes back to the days of the original Dartmouth\\nconference, was expressed by, among others, Newell (1973), one of the\\ngrandfathers of modern-day AI (recall that he attended the 1956\\nconference); it is: \",\n \"\\nAI is the field devoted to building artifacts that are intelligent,\\nwhere ‘intelligent’ is operationalized through\\nintelligence tests (such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale),\\nand other tests of mental ability (including, e.g., tests of\\nmechanical ability, creativity, and so on).\\n\",\n \"\\nThe above definition can be seen as fully specifying a concrete\\nversion of Russell and Norvig’s four possible goals. Though few\\nare aware of this now, this answer was taken quite seriously for a\\nwhile, and in fact underlied one of the most famous programs in the\\nhistory of AI: the ANALOGY program of Evans (1968), which solved\\ngeometric analogy problems of a type seen in many intelligence tests.\\nAn attempt to rigorously define this forgotten form of AI (as what\\nthey dub Psychometric AI), and to resurrect it from the days of\\nNewell and Evans, is provided by Bringsjord and Schimanski (2003) [see\\nalso e.g. (Bringsjord 2011)]. A sizable private investment has been\\nmade in the ongoing attempt, now known as\\n Project Aristo,\\n to build a “digital Aristotle”, in the form of a machine\\nable to excel on standardized tests such at the AP exams tackled by US\\nhigh school students (Friedland et al. 2004). (Vibrant work in this\\ndirection continues today at the\\n Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.)[18]\\n In addition, researchers at Northwestern have forged a connection\\nbetween AI and tests of mechanical ability (Klenk et al. 2005). \",\n \"\\nIn the end, as is the case with any discipline, to really know\\nprecisely what that discipline is requires you to, at least to some\\ndegree, dive in and do, or at least dive in and read. Two decades ago\\nsuch a dive was quite manageable. Today, because the content that has\\ncome to constitute AI has mushroomed, the dive (or at least the swim\\nafter it) is a bit more demanding.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. What Exactly is AI?\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThere are a number of ways of “carving up” AI. By far the\\nmost prudent and productive way to summarize the field is to turn yet\\nagain to the AIMA text given its comprehensive overview of the\\nfield. \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Approaches to AI\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAs Russell and Norvig (2009) tell us in the Preface of AIMA:\\n\",\n \"\\nThe main unifying theme is the idea of an intelligent agent. We define\\nAI as the study of agents that receive percepts from the environment\\nand perform actions. Each such agent implements a function that maps\\npercept sequences to actions, and we cover different ways to represent\\nthese functions… (Russell & Norvig 2009, vii)\\n\",\n \"\\nThe basic picture is thus summed up in this figure:\",\n \"\\nThe content of AIMA derives, essentially, from fleshing out\\nthis picture; that is, the above figure corresponds to the different\\nways of representing the overall function that intelligent agents\\nimplement. And there is a progression from the least powerful agents\\nup to the more powerful ones. The following figure gives a high-level\\nview of a simple kind of agent discussed early in the book. (Though\\nsimple, this sort of agent corresponds to the architecture of\\nrepresentation-free agents designed and implemented by Rodney Brooks,\\n1991.)\",\n \"\\nAs the book progresses, agents get increasingly sophisticated, and the\\nimplementation of the function they represent thus draws from more and\\nmore of what AI can currently muster. The following figure gives an\\noverview of an agent that is a bit smarter than the simple reflex\\nagent. This smarter agent has the ability to internally model the\\noutside world, and is therefore not simply at the mercy of what can at\\nthe moment be directly sensed.\",\n \"\\nThere are seven parts to AIMA. As the reader passes through\\nthese parts, she is introduced to agents that take on the powers\\ndiscussed in each part. Part I is an introduction to the agent-based\\nview. Part II is concerned with giving an intelligent agent the\\ncapacity to think ahead a few steps in clearly defined environments.\\nExamples here include agents able to successfully play games of\\nperfect information, such as chess. Part III deals with agents that\\nhave declarative knowledge and can reason in ways that will be quite\\nfamiliar to most philosophers and logicians (e.g., knowledge-based\\nagents deduce what actions should be taken to secure their goals).\\nPart IV of the book outfits agents with the power to handle\\nuncertainty by reasoning in probabilistic\\n fashion.[19]\\n In Part V, agents are given a capacity to learn. The following figure\\nshows the overall structure of a learning agent.\",\n \"\\nThe final set of powers agents are given allow them to communicate.\\nThese powers are covered in Part VI. \",\n \"\\nPhilosophers who patiently travel the entire progression of\\nincreasingly smart agents will no doubt ask, when reaching the end of\\nPart VII, if anything is missing. Are we given enough, in general, to\\nbuild an artificial person, or is there enough only to build a mere\\nanimal? This question is implicit in the following from Charniak and\\nMcDermott (1985): \",\n \"\\nThe ultimate goal of AI (which we are very far from achieving) is to\\nbuild a person, or, more humbly, an animal. (Charniak & McDermott\\n1985, 7)\\n\",\n \"\\nTo their credit, Russell & Norvig, in AIMA’s Chapter\\n27, “AI: Present and Future,” consider this question, at\\nleast to some\\n degree.[]\\n They do so by considering some challenges to AI that have hitherto\\nnot been met. One of these challenges is described by R&N as\\nfollows: \",\n \"\\n[M]achine learning has made very little progress on the important\\nproblem of constructing new representations at levels of abstraction\\nhigher than the input vocabulary. In computer vision, for example,\\nlearning complex concepts such as Classroom and Cafeteria would be\\nmade unnecessarily difficult if the agent were forced to work from\\npixels as the input representation; instead, the agent needs to be\\nable to form intermediate concepts first, such as Desk and Tray,\\nwithout explicit human supervision. Similar concepts apply to learning\\nbehavior: HavingACupOfTea is a very important high-level step\\nin many plans, but how does it get into an action library that\\ninitially contains much simpler actions such as RaiseArm and Swallow?\\nPerhaps this will incorporate deep belief networks –\\nBayesian networks that have multiple layers of hidden variables, as in\\nthe work of Hinton et al. (2006), Hawkins and Blakeslee (2004),\\nand Bengio and LeCun (2007). … Unless we understand such\\nissues, we are faced with the daunting task of constructing large\\ncommonsense knowledge bases by hand, and approach that has not fared\\nwell to date. (Russell & Norvig 2009, Ch. 27.1)\\n\",\n \"\\nWhile there has seen some advances in addressing this challenge (in\\nthe form of deep learning or representation learning),\\nthis specific challenge is actually merely a foothill before a range\\nof dizzyingly high mountains that AI must eventually somehow manage to\\nclimb. One of those mountains, put simply, is\\n reading.[21]\\n Despite the fact that, as noted, Part V of AIMA is devoted to\\nmachine learning, AI, as it stands, offers next to nothing in the way\\nof a mechanization of learning by reading. Yet when you think about\\nit, reading is probably the dominant way you learn at this stage in\\nyour life. Consider what you’re doing at this very moment.\\nIt’s a good bet that you are reading this sentence because,\\nearlier, you set yourself the goal of learning about the field of AI.\\n Yet\\n the formal models of learning provided in AIMA’s Part IV\\n(which are all and only the models at play in AI) cannot be applied to\\nlearning by\\n reading.[22]\\n These models all start with a function-based view of learning.\\nAccording to this view, to learn is almost invariably to produce an\\nunderlying function \\\\(\\\\ff\\\\) on the basis of a restricted set of\\npairs\",\n \"\\nFor example, consider receiving inputs consisting of 1, 2, 3, 4, and\\n5, and corresponding range values of 1, 4, 9, 16, and 25; the goal is\\nto “learn” the underlying mapping from natural numbers to\\nnatural numbers. In this case, assume that the underlying function is\\n\\\\(n^2\\\\), and that you do “learn” it. While this narrow\\nmodel of learning can be productively applied to a number of\\nprocesses, the process of reading isn’t one of them. Learning by\\nreading cannot (at least for the foreseeable future) be modeled as\\ndivining a function that produces argument-value pairs. Instead, your\\nreading about AI can pay dividends only if your knowledge has\\nincreased in the right way, and if that knowledge leaves you\\npoised to be able to produce behavior taken to confirm sufficient\\nmastery of the subject area in question. This behavior can range from\\ncorrectly answering and justifying test questions regarding AI, to\\nproducing a robust, compelling presentation or paper that signals your\\nachievement. \",\n \"\\nTwo points deserve to be made about machine reading. First, it may not\\nbe clear to all readers that reading is an ability that is central to\\nintelligence. The centrality derives from the fact that intelligence\\nrequires vast knowledge. We have no other means of getting systematic\\nknowledge into a system than to get it in from text, whether text on\\nthe web, text in libraries, newspapers, and so on. You might even say\\nthat the big problem with AI has been that machines really don’t\\nknow much compared to humans. That can only be because of the fact\\nthat humans read (or hear: illiterate people can listen to text being\\nuttered and learn that way). Either machines gain knowledge by humans\\nmanually encoding and inserting knowledge, or by reading and\\nlistening. These are brute facts. (We leave aside supernatural\\ntechniques, of course. Oddly enough, Turing didn’t: he seemed to\\nthink ESP should be discussed in connection with the powers of minds\\nand machines. See Turing,\\n 1950.)[23]\",\n \"\\nNow for the second point. Humans able to read have invariably also\\nlearned a language, and learning languages has been modeled in\\nconformity to the function-based approach adumbrated just above\\n(Osherson et al. 1986). However, this doesn’t entail that an\\nartificial agent able to read, at least to a significant degree, must\\nhave really and truly learned a natural language. AI is first and\\nforemost concerned with engineering computational artifacts that\\nmeasure up to some test (where, yes, sometimes that test is from the\\nhuman sphere), not with whether these artifacts process information in\\nways that match those present in the human case. It may or may not be\\nnecessary, when engineering a machine that can read, to imbue that\\nmachine with human-level linguistic competence. The issue is\\nempirical, and as time unfolds, and the engineering is pursued, we\\nshall no doubt see the issue settled. \",\n \"\\nTwo additional high mountains facing AI are subjective consciousness\\nand creativity, yet it would seem that these great challenges are ones\\nthe field apparently hasn’t even come to grips with. Mental\\nphenomena of paramount importance to many philosophers of mind and\\nneuroscience are simply missing from AIMA. For example,\\nconsciousness is only mentioned in passing in AIMA, but\\nsubjective consciousness is the most important thing in our lives\\n– indeed we only desire to go on living because we wish to go on\\nenjoying subjective states of certain types. Moreover, if human minds\\nare the product of evolution, then presumably phenomenal consciousness\\nhas great survival value, and would be of tremendous help to a robot\\nintended to have at least the behavioral repertoire of the first\\ncreatures with brains that match our own (hunter-gatherers; see Pinker\\n1997). Of course, subjective consciousness is largely missing from the\\nsister fields of cognitive psychology and computational cognitive\\nmodeling as well. We discuss some of these challenges in the\\n Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence\\n section below. For a list of similar challenges to cognitive science,\\nsee the relevant\\n section of the entry on cognitive science.[24]\\n \",\n \"\\nTo some readers, it might seem in the very least tendentious to point\\nto subjective consciousness as a major challenge to AI that it has yet\\nto address. These readers might be of the view that pointing to this\\nproblem is to look at AI through a distinctively philosophical prism,\\nand indeed a controversial philosophical standpoint. \",\n \"\\nBut as its literature makes clear, AI measures itself by looking to\\nanimals and humans and picking out in them remarkable mental powers,\\nand by then seeing if these powers can be mechanized. Arguably the\\npower most important to humans (the capacity to experience) is nowhere\\nto be found on the target list of most AI researchers. There may be a\\ngood reason for this (no formalism is at hand, perhaps), but there is\\nno denying the state of affairs in question obtains, and that, in\\nlight of how AI measures itself, that it’s worrisome. \",\n \"\\nAs to creativity, it’s quite remarkable that the power we most\\npraise in human minds is nowhere to be found in AIMA. Just as\\nin (Charniak & McDermott 1985) one cannot find\\n‘neural’ in the index, ‘creativity’\\ncan’t be found in the index of AIMA. This is particularly\\nodd because many AI researchers have in fact worked on creativity\\n(especially those coming out of philosophy; e.g., Boden 1994,\\nBringsjord & Ferrucci 2000). \",\n \"\\nAlthough the focus has been on AIMA, any of its counterparts\\ncould have been used. As an example, consider Artificial\\nIntelligence: A New Synthesis, by Nils Nilsson. As in the case of\\nAIMA, everything here revolves around a gradual progression\\nfrom the simplest of agents (in Nilsson’s case, reactive\\nagents), to ones having more and more of those powers that\\ndistinguish persons. Energetic readers can verify that there is a\\nstriking parallel between the main sections of Nilsson’s book\\nand AIMA. In addition, Nilsson, like Russell and Norvig,\\nignores phenomenal consciousness, reading, and creativity. None of the\\nthree are even mentioned. Likewise, a recent comprehensive AI textbook\\nby Luger (2008) follows the same pattern. \",\n \"\\nA final point to wrap up this section. It seems quite plausible to\\nhold that there is a certain inevitability to the structure of an AI\\ntextbook, and the apparent reason is perhaps rather interesting. In\\npersonal conversation, Jim Hendler, a well-known AI researcher who is\\none of the main innovators behind Semantic Web (Berners-Lee, Hendler,\\nLassila 2001), an under-development “AI-ready” version of\\nthe World Wide Web, has said that this inevitability can be rather\\neasily displayed when teaching Introduction to AI; here’s how.\\nBegin by asking students what they think AI is. Invariably, many\\nstudents will volunteer that AI is the field devoted to building\\nartificial creatures that are intelligent. Next, ask for examples of\\nintelligent creatures. Students always respond by giving examples\\nacross a continuum: simple multi-cellular organisms, insects, rodents,\\nlower mammals, higher mammals (culminating in the great apes), and\\nfinally human persons. When students are asked to describe the\\ndifferences between the creatures they have cited, they end up\\nessentially describing the progression from simple agents to ones\\nhaving our (e.g.) communicative powers. This progression gives the\\nskeleton of every comprehensive AI textbook. Why does this happen? The\\nanswer seems clear: it happens because we can’t resist\\nconceiving of AI in terms of the powers of extant creatures with which\\nwe are familiar. At least at present, persons, and the creatures who\\nenjoy only bits and pieces of personhood, are – to repeat\\n– the measure of\\n AI.[25]\\n \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.1 The Intelligent Agent Continuum\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nReasoning based on classical deductive logic is monotonic; that is, if\\n\\\\(\\\\Phi\\\\vdash\\\\phi\\\\), then for all \\\\(\\\\psi\\\\), \\\\(\\\\Phi\\\\cup\\n\\\\{\\\\psi\\\\}\\\\vdash\\\\phi\\\\). Commonsense reasoning is not monotonic. While\\nyou may currently believe on the basis of reasoning that your house is\\nstill standing, if while at work you see on your computer screen that\\na vast tornado is moving through the location of your house, you will\\ndrop this belief. The addition of new information causes previous\\ninferences to fail. In the simpler example that has become an AI\\nstaple, if I tell you that Tweety is a bird, you will infer that\\nTweety can fly, but if I then inform you that Tweety is a penguin, the\\ninference evaporates, as well it should. Nonmonotonic (or defeasible)\\nlogic includes formalisms designed to capture the mechanisms\\nunderlying these kinds of examples. See the separate entry on\\n logic and artificial intelligence,\\n which is focused on nonmonotonic reasoning, and reasoning about time\\nand change. It also provides a history of the early days of\\nlogic-based AI, making clear the contributions of those who founded\\nthe tradition (e.g., John McCarthy and Pat Hayes; see their seminal\\n1969 paper). \",\n \"\\nThe formalisms and techniques of logic-based AI have reached a level\\nof impressive maturity – so much so that in various academic and\\ncorporate laboratories, implementations of these formalisms and\\ntechniques can be used to engineer robust, real-world software. It is\\nstrongly recommend that readers who have an interest to learn where AI\\nstands in these areas consult (Mueller 2006), which provides, in one\\nvolume, integrated coverage of nonmonotonic reasoning (in the form,\\nspecifically, of circumscription), and reasoning about time and change\\nin the situation and event calculi. (The former calculus is also\\nintroduced by Thomason. In the second, timepoints are included, among\\nother things.) The other nice thing about (Mueller 2006) is that the\\nlogic used is multi-sorted first-order logic (MSL), which has\\nunificatory power that will be known to and appreciated by many\\ntechnical philosophers and logicians (Manzano 1996). \",\n \"\\nWe now turn to three further topics of importance in AI. They are:\",\n \"\\nThis trio is covered in order, beginning with the first.\",\n \"\\nDetailed accounts of logicist AI that fall under the agent-based\\nscheme can be found in (Lenat 1983, Lenat & Guha 1990, Nilsson\\n1991, Bringsjord & Ferrucci\\n 1998).[26].\\n The core idea is that an intelligent agent receives percepts from the\\nexternal world in the form of formulae in some logical system (e.g.,\\nfirst-order logic), and infers, on the basis of these percepts and its\\nknowledge base, what actions should be performed to secure the\\nagent’s goals. (This is of course a barbaric simplification.\\nInformation from the external world is encoded in formulae,\\nand transducers to accomplish this feat may be components of the\\nagent.) \",\n \"\\nTo clarify things a bit, we consider, briefly, the logicist view in\\nconnection with arbitrary logical systems\\n \\\\(\\\\mathcal{L}_{X}\\\\).[27]\\n We obtain a particular logical system by setting \\\\(X\\\\) in the\\nappropriate way. Some examples: If \\\\(X=I\\\\), then we have a system at\\nthe level of FOL [following the standard notation from model theory;\\nsee e.g. (Ebbinghaus et al. 1984)]. \\\\(\\\\mathcal{L}_{II}\\\\) is\\nsecond-order logic, and \\\\(\\\\mathcal{L}_{\\\\omega_I\\\\omega}\\\\) is a\\n“small system” of infinitary logic (countably infinite\\nconjunctions and disjunctions are permitted). These logical systems\\nare all extensional, but there are intensional ones as\\nwell. For example, we can have logical systems corresponding to those\\nseen in standard propositional modal logic (Chellas 1980). One\\npossibility, familiar to many philosophers, would be propositional\\nKT45, or\\n \\\\(\\\\mathcal{L}_{KT45}\\\\).[28]\\n In each case, the system in question includes a relevant alphabet\\nfrom which well-formed formulae are constructed by way of a formal\\ngrammar, a reasoning (or proof) theory, a formal semantics, and at\\nleast some meta-theoretical results (soundness, completeness, etc.).\\nTaking off from standard notation, we can thus say that a set of\\nformulas in some particular logical system \\\\(\\\\mathcal{L}_X\\\\),\\n\\\\(\\\\Phi_{\\\\mathcal{L}_X}\\\\), can be used, in conjunction with some\\nreasoning theory, to infer some particular formula\\n\\\\(\\\\phi_{\\\\mathcal{L}_X}\\\\). (The reasoning may be deductive, inductive,\\nabductive, and so on. Logicist AI isn’t in the least restricted\\nto any particular mode of reasoning.) To say that such a situation\\nholds, we write \\n\\n \\\\[\\n \\\\Phi_{\\\\mathcal{L}_X} \\\\vdash_{\\\\mathcal{L}_X} \\\\phi_{\\\\mathcal{L}_X}\\n \\\\]\\n\\n \",\n \"\\nWhen the logical system referred to is clear from context, or when we\\ndon’t care about which logical system is involved, we can simply\\nwrite \\n\\n \\\\[\\n \\\\Phi \\\\vdash \\\\phi\\n \\\\]\\n\\n \",\n \"\\nEach logical system, in its formal semantics, will include objects\\ndesigned to represent ways the world pointed to by formulae in this\\nsystem can be. Let these ways be denoted by \\\\(W^i_{{\\\\mathcal{L}_X}}\\\\).\\nWhen we aren’t concerned with which logical system is involved,\\nwe can simply write \\\\(W^i\\\\). To say that such a way models a formula\\n\\\\(\\\\phi\\\\) we write \\n\\n \\\\[\\n W_i \\\\models \\\\phi\\n \\\\]\\n\\n \",\n \"\\nWe extend this to a set of formulas in the natural way:\\n\\\\(W^i\\\\models\\\\Phi\\\\) means that all the elements of \\\\(\\\\Phi\\\\) are true on\\n\\\\(W^i\\\\). Now, using the simple machinery we’ve established, we\\ncan describe, in broad strokes, the life of an intelligent agent that\\nconforms to the logicist point of view. This life conforms to the\\nbasic cycle that undergirds intelligent agents in the AIMA\\nsense. \",\n \"\\nTo begin, we assume that the human designer, after studying the world,\\nuses the language of a particular logical system to give to our agent\\nan initial set of beliefs \\\\(\\\\Delta_0\\\\) about what this world is like.\\nIn doing so, the designer works with a formal model of this world,\\n\\\\(W\\\\), and ensures that \\\\(W\\\\models\\\\Delta_0\\\\). Following tradition, we\\nrefer to \\\\(\\\\Delta_0\\\\) as the agent’s (starting) knowledge\\nbase. (This terminology, given that we are talking about the\\nagent’s beliefs, is known to be peculiar, but it\\npersists.) Next, the agent ADJUSTS its knowlege base to produce\\na new one, \\\\(\\\\Delta_1\\\\). We say that adjustment is carried out by way\\nof an operation \\\\(\\\\mathcal{A}\\\\); so\\n\\\\(\\\\mathcal{A}[\\\\Delta_0]=\\\\Delta_1\\\\). How does the adjustment process,\\n\\\\(\\\\mathcal{A}\\\\), work? There are many possibilities. Unfortunately,\\nmany believe that the simplest possibility (viz.,\\n\\\\(\\\\mathcal{A}[\\\\Delta_i]\\\\) equals the set of all formulas that can be\\ndeduced in some elementary manner from \\\\(\\\\Delta_i\\\\)) exhausts\\nall the possibilities. The reality is that adjustment, as\\nindicated above, can come by way of any mode of reasoning\\n– induction, abduction, and yes, various forms of deduction\\ncorresponding to the logical system in play. For present purposes,\\nit’s not important that we carefully enumerate all the options.\\n\",\n \"\\nThe cycle continues when the agent ACTS on the environment, in\\nan attempt to secure its goals. Acting, of course, can cause changes\\nto the environment. At this point, the agent SENSES the\\nenvironment, and this new information \\\\(\\\\Gamma_1\\\\) factors into the\\nprocess of adjustment, so that\\n\\\\(\\\\mathcal{A}[\\\\Delta_1\\\\cup\\\\Gamma_1]=\\\\Delta_2\\\\). The cycle of SENSES\\n\\\\(\\\\Rightarrow\\\\) ADJUSTS \\\\(\\\\Rightarrow\\\\) ACTS continues to produce\\nthe life \\\\(\\\\Delta_0,\\\\Delta_1,\\\\Delta_2,\\\\Delta_3,\\\\ldots,\\\\) … of\\nour agent. \",\n \"\\nIt may strike you as preposterous that logicist AI be touted as an\\napproach taken to replicate all of cognition. Reasoning over\\nformulae in some logical system might be appropriate for\\ncomputationally capturing high-level tasks like trying to solve a math\\nproblem (or devising an outline for an entry in the Stanford\\nEncyclopedia of Philosophy), but how could such reasoning apply to\\ntasks like those a hawk tackles when swooping down to capture\\nscurrying prey? In the human sphere, the task successfully negotiated\\nby athletes would seem to be in the same category. Surely, some will\\ndeclare, an outfielder chasing down a fly ball doesn’t prove\\ntheorems to figure out how to pull off a diving catch to save the\\ngame! Two brutally reductionistic arguments can be given in support of\\nthis “logicist theory of everything” approach towards\\ncognition. The first stems from the fact that a complete proof\\ncalculus for just first-order logic can simulate all of Turing-level\\ncomputation (Chapter 11, Boolos et al. 2007). The second justification\\ncomes from the role logic plays in foundational theories of\\nmathematics and mathematical reasoning. Not only are foundational\\ntheories of mathematics cast in logic (Potter 2004), but there have\\nbeen successful projects resulting in machine verification of ordinary\\nnon-trivial theorems, e.g., in the\\n Mizar project\\n alone around 50,000 theorems have been verified (Naumowicz and\\nKornilowicz 2009). The argument goes that if any approach to AI can be\\ncast mathematically, then it can be cast in a logicist form. \",\n \"\\nNeedless to say, such a declaration has been carefully considered by\\nlogicists beyond the reductionistic argument given above. For example,\\nRosenschein and Kaelbling (1986) describe a method in which logic is\\nused to specify finite state machines. These machines are used at\\n“run time” for rapid, reactive processing. In this\\napproach, though the finite state machines contain no logic in the\\ntraditional sense, they are produced by logic and inference. Real\\nrobot control via first-order theorem proving has been demonstrated by\\nAmir and Maynard-Reid (1999, 2000, 2001). In fact, you can\\n download\\n version 2.0 of the software that makes this approach real for a Nomad\\n200 mobile robot in an office environment. Of course, negotiating an\\noffice environment is a far cry from the rapid adjustments an\\noutfielder for the Yankees routinely puts on display, but certainly\\nit’s an open question as to whether future machines will be able\\nto mimic such feats through rapid reasoning. The question is open if\\nfor no other reason than that all must concede that the constant\\nincrease in reasoning speed of first-order theorem provers is\\nbreathtaking. (For up-to-date news on this increase, visit and monitor\\nthe\\n TPTP site.)\\n There is no known reason why the software engineering in question\\ncannot continue to produce speed gains that would eventually allow an\\nartificial creature to catch a fly ball by processing information in\\npurely logicist fashion. \",\n \"\\nNow we come to the second topic related to logicist AI that warrants\\nmention herein: common logic and the intensifying quest for\\ninteroperability between logic-based systems using different logics.\\nOnly a few brief comments are\\n offered.[29]\\n Readers wanting more can explore the links provided in the course of\\nthe summary. \",\n \"\\nOne standardization is through what is known as\\n Common Logic\\n (CL), and variants thereof. (CL is published as an\\n ISO standard\\n – ISO is the International Standards Organization.)\\nPhilosophers interested in logic, and of course logicians, will find\\nCL to be quite fascinating. From an historical perspective, the advent\\nof CL is interesting in no small part because the person spearheading\\nit is none other than Pat Hayes, the same Hayes who, as we have seen,\\nworked with McCarthy to establish logicist AI in the 1960s. Though\\nHayes was not at the original 1956 Dartmouth conference, he certainly\\nmust be regarded as one of the founders of contemporary AI.) One of\\nthe interesting things about CL, at least as we see it, is that it\\nsignifies a trend toward the marriage of logics, and programming\\nlanguages and environments. Another system that is a logic/programming\\nhybrid is\\n Athena,\\n which can be used as a programming language, and is at the same time\\na form of MSL. Athena is based on formal systems known as\\ndenotational proof languages (Arkoudas 2000). \",\n \"\\nHow is interoperability between two systems to be enabled by CL?\\nSuppose one of these systems is based on logic \\\\(L\\\\), and the other on\\n\\\\(L'\\\\). (To ease exposition, assume that both logics are first-order.)\\nThe idea is that a theory \\\\(\\\\Phi_L\\\\), that is, a set of formulae in\\n\\\\(L\\\\), can be translated into CL, producing \\\\(\\\\Phi_{CL}\\\\), and then\\nthis theory can be translated into \\\\(\\\\Phi_L'\\\\). CL thus becomes an\\ninter lingua. Note that what counts as a well-formed formula in\\n\\\\(L\\\\) can be different than what counts as one in \\\\(L'\\\\). The two\\nlogics might also have different proof theories. For example,\\ninference in \\\\(L\\\\) might be based on resolution, while inference in\\n\\\\(L'\\\\) is of the natural deduction variety. Finally, the symbol sets\\nwill be different. Despite these differences, courtesy of the\\ntranslations, desired behavior can be produced across the translation.\\nThat, at any rate, is the hope. The technical challenges here are\\nimmense, but federal monies are increasingly available for attacks on\\nthe problem of interoperability.\",\n \"\\nNow for the third topic in this section: what can be called\\nencoding down. The technique is easy to understand. Suppose\\nthat we have on hand a set \\\\(\\\\Phi\\\\) of first-order axioms. As is\\nwell-known, the problem of deciding, for arbitrary formula \\\\(\\\\phi\\\\),\\nwhether or not it’s deducible from \\\\(\\\\Phi\\\\) is\\nTuring-undecidable: there is no Turing machine or equivalent that can\\ncorrectly return “Yes” or “No” in the general\\ncase. However, if the domain in question is finite, we can encode this\\nproblem down to the propositional calculus. An assertion that all\\nthings have \\\\(F\\\\) is of course equivalent to the assertion that\\n\\\\(Fa\\\\), \\\\(Fb\\\\), \\\\(Fc\\\\), as long as the domain contains only these\\nthree objects. So here a first-order quantified formula becomes a\\nconjunction in the propositional calculus. Determining whether such\\nconjunctions are provable from axioms themselves expressed in the\\npropositional calculus is Turing-decidable, and in addition, in\\ncertain clusters of cases, the check can be done very quickly in the\\npropositional case; very quickly. Readers interested in\\nencoding down to the propositional calculus should consult recent\\n DARPA-sponsored work by Bart Selman.\\n Please note that the target of encoding down doesn’t need to be\\nthe propositional calculus. Because it’s generally harder for\\nmachines to find proofs in an intensional logic than in straight\\nfirst-order logic, it is often expedient to encode down the former to\\nthe latter. For example, propositional modal logic can be encoded in\\nmulti-sorted logic (a variant of FOL); see (Arkoudas & Bringsjord\\n2005). Prominent usage of such an encoding down can be found in a set\\nof systems known as Description Logics, which are a set of\\nlogics less expressive than first-order logic but more expressive than\\npropositional logic (Baader et al. 2003). Description logics are used\\nto reason about ontologies in a given domain and have been\\nsuccessfully used, for example, in the biomedical domain (Smith et al.\\n2007). \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.2 Logic-Based AI: Some Surgical Points\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIt’s tempting to define non-logicist AI by negation: an approach\\nto building intelligent agents that rejects the distinguishing\\nfeatures of logicist AI. Such a shortcut would imply that the agents\\nengineered by non-logicist AI researchers and developers, whatever the\\nvirtues of such agents might be, cannot be said to know that \\\\(\\\\phi\\\\);\\n– for the simple reason that, by negation, the non-logicist\\nparadigm would have not even a single declarative proposition that is\\na candidate for \\\\(\\\\phi\\\\);. However, this isn’t a particularly\\nenlightening way to define non-symbolic AI. A more productive approach\\nis to say that non-symbolic AI is AI carried out on the basis of\\nparticular formalisms other than logical systems, and to then\\nenumerate those formalisms. It will turn out, of course, that these\\nformalisms fail to include knowledge in the normal sense. (In\\nphilosophy, as is well-known, the normal sense is one according to\\nwhich if \\\\(p\\\\) is known, \\\\(p\\\\) is a declarative statement.) \",\n \"\\nFrom the standpoint of formalisms other than logical systems,\\nnon-logicist AI can be partitioned into symbolic but non-logicist\\napproaches, and connectionist/neurocomputational approaches. (AI\\ncarried out on the basis of symbolic, declarative structures that, for\\nreadability and ease of use, are not treated directly by researchers\\nas elements of formal logics, does not count. In this category fall\\ntraditional semantic networks, Schank’s (1972) conceptual\\ndependency scheme, frame-based schemes, and other such schemes.) The\\nformer approaches, today, are probabilistic, and are based on the\\nformalisms (Bayesian networks) covered\\n below.\\n The latter approaches are based, as we have noted, on formalisms that\\ncan be broadly termed “neurocomputational.” Given our\\nspace constraints, only one of the formalisms in this category is\\ndescribed here (and briefly at that): the aforementioned artificial\\nneural\\n networks.[30].\\n Though artificial neural networks, with an appropriate architecture,\\ncould be used for arbitrary computation, they are almost exclusively\\nused for building learning systems. \",\n \"\\nNeural nets are composed of units or nodes designed to\\nrepresent neurons, which are connected by links designed to\\nrepresent dendrites, each of which has a numeric weight.\",\n \"\\nIt is usually assumed that some of the units work in symbiosis with\\nthe external environment; these units form the sets of input\\nand output units. Each unit has a current activation\\nlevel, which is its output, and can compute, based on its inputs\\nand weights on those inputs, its activation level at the next moment\\nin time. This computation is entirely local: a unit takes account of\\nbut its neighbors in the net. This local computation is calculated in\\ntwo stages. First, the input function, \\\\(in_i\\\\), gives the\\nweighted sum of the unit’s input values, that is, the sum of the\\ninput activations multiplied by their weights: \",\n \"\\nIn the second stage, the activation function, \\\\(g\\\\), takes the\\ninput from the first stage as argument and generates the output, or\\nactivation level, \\\\(a_i\\\\): \",\n \"\\nOne common (and confessedly elementary) choice for the activation\\nfunction (which usually governs all units in a given net) is the step\\nfunction, which usually has a threshold \\\\(t\\\\) that sees to it that a 1\\nis output when the input is greater than \\\\(t\\\\), and that 0 is output\\notherwise. This is supposed to be “brain-like” to some\\ndegree, given that 1 represents the firing of a pulse from a neuron\\nthrough an axon, and 0 represents no firing. A simple three-layer\\nneural net is shown in the following picture.\",\n \"\\nAs you might imagine, there are many different kinds of neural\\nnetworks. The main distinction is between feed-forward and\\nrecurrent networks. In feed-forward networks like the one\\npictured immediately above, as their name suggests, links move\\ninformation in one direction, and there are no cycles; recurrent\\nnetworks allow for cycling back, and can become rather complicated.\\nFor a more detailed presentation, see the\",\n \"\\n\\n Supplement on Neural Nets.\\n \",\n \"\\nNeural networks were fundamentally plagued by the fact that while they\\nare simple and have theoretically efficient learning algorithms, when\\nthey are multi-layered and thus sufficiently expressive to represent\\nnon-linear functions, they were very hard to train in practice. This\\nchanged in the mid 2000s with the advent of methods that exploit\\nstate-of-the-art hardware better (Rajat et al. 2009). The\\nbackpropagation method for training multi-layered neural networks can\\nbe translated into a sequence of repeated simple arithmetic operations\\non a large set of numbers. The general trend in computing hardware has\\nfavored algorithms that are able to do a large of number of simple\\noperations that are not that dependent on each other, versus a small\\nof number of complex and intricate operations.\",\n \"\\nAnother key recent observation is that deep neural networks can be\\npre-trained first in an unsupervised phase where they are just fed\\ndata without any labels for the data. Each hidden layer is forced to\\nrepresent the outputs of the layer below. The outcome of this training\\nis a series of layers which represent the input domain with increasing\\nlevels of abstraction. For example, if we pre-train the network with\\nimages of faces, we would get a first layer which is good at detecting\\nedges in images, a second layer which can combine edges to form facial\\nfeatures such as eyes, noses etc., a third layer which responds to\\ngroups of features, and so on (LeCun et al. 2015).\",\n \"\\nPerhaps the best technique for teaching students about neural networks\\nin the context of other statistical learning formalisms and methods is\\nto focus on a specific problem, preferably one that seems unnatural to\\ntackle using logicist techniques. The task is then to seek to engineer\\na solution to the problem, using any and all techniques\\navailable. One nice problem is handwriting recognition (which\\nalso happens to have a rich philosophical dimension; see e.g.\\nHofstadter & McGraw 1995). For example, consider the problem of\\nassigning, given as input a handwritten digit \\\\(d\\\\), the correct\\ndigit, 0 through 9. Because there is a database of 60,000 labeled\\ndigits available to researchers (from the National Institute of\\nScience and Technology), this problem has evolved into a benchmark\\nproblem for comparing learning algorithms. It turns out that neural\\nnetworks currently reign as the best approach to the problem according\\nto a recent ranking by Benenson (2016).\",\n \"\\nReaders interested in AI (and computational cognitive science) pursued\\nfrom an overtly brain-based orientation are encouraged to explore the\\nwork of Rick Granger (2004a, 2004b) and researchers in his\\n Brain Engineering Laboratory\\n and\\n W. H. Neukom Institute for Computational Sciences.\\n The contrast between the “dry”, logicist AI started at\\nthe original 1956 conference, and the approach taken here by Granger\\nand associates (in which brain circuitry is directly modeled) is\\nremarkable. For those interested in computational properties of neural\\nnetworks, Hornik et al. (1989) address the general representation\\ncapability of neural networks independent of learning. \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.3 Non-Logicist AI: A Summary\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAt this point the reader has been exposed to the chief formalisms in\\nAI, and may wonder about heterogeneous approaches that bridge them. Is\\nthere such research and development in AI? Yes. From an\\nengineering standpoint, such work makes irresistibly good\\nsense. There is now an understanding that, in order to build\\napplications that get the job done, one should choose from a toolbox\\nthat includes logicist, probabilistic/Bayesian, and neurocomputational\\ntechniques. Given that the original top-down logicist paradigm is\\nalive and thriving (e.g., see Brachman & Levesque 2004, Mueller\\n2006), and that, as noted, a resurgence of Bayesian and\\nneurocomputational approaches has placed these two paradigms on solid,\\nfertile footing as well, AI now moves forward, armed with this\\nfundamental triad, and it is a virtual certainty that applications\\n(e.g., robots) will be engineered by drawing from elements of all\\nthree. Watson’s DeepQA architecture is one recent example of an\\nengineering system that leverages multiple paradigms. For a detailed\\ndiscussion, see the\",\n \"\\n\\n Supplement on Watson’s DeepQA Architecture.\\n \",\n \"\\nGoogle DeepMind’s AlphaGo is another example of a multi-paradigm\\nsystem, although in a much narrower form than Watson. The central\\nalgorithmic problem in games such as Go or Chess is to search through\\na vast sequence of valid moves. For most non-trivial games, this is\\nnot feasible to do so exhaustively. The Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS)\\nalgorithm gets around this obstacle by searching through an enormous\\nspace of valid moves in a statistical fashion (Browne et al. 2012).\\nWhile MCTS is the central algorithm in AlpaGo, there are two neural\\nnetworks which help evaluate states in the game and help model how\\nexpert opponents play (Silver et al. 2016). It should be noted that\\nMCTS is behind almost all the winning submissions in general game\\nplaying (Finnsson 2012).\",\n \"\\nWhat, though, about deep, theoretical integration of the main\\nparadigms in AI? Such integration is at present only a possibility for\\nthe future, but readers are directed to the research of some striving\\nfor such integration. For example: Sun (1994, 2002) has been working\\nto demonstrate that human cognition that is on its face symbolic in\\nnature (e.g., professional philosophizing in the analytic tradition,\\nwhich deals explicitly with arguments and definitions carefully\\nsymbolized) can arise from cognition that is neurocomputational in\\nnature. Koller (1997) has investigated the marriage between\\nprobability theory and logic. And, in general, the very recent arrival\\nof so-called human-level AI is being led by theorists seeking\\nto genuinely integrate the three paradigms set out above (e.g.,\\nCassimatis 2006).\",\n \"\\nFinally, we note that cognitive architectures such as Soar\\n(Laird 2012) and PolyScheme (Cassimatis 2006) are another area where\\nintegration of different fields of AI can be found. For example, one\\nsuch endeavor striving to build human-level AI is the Companions\\nproject (Forbus and Hinrichs 2006). Companions are long-lived systems\\nthat strive to be human-level AI systems that function as\\ncollaborators with humans. The Companions architecture tries to solve\\nmultiple AI problems such as reasoning and learning, interactivity,\\nand longevity in one unifying system.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.4 AI Beyond the Clash of Paradigms\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nAs we noted above, work on AI has mushroomed over the past couple of\\ndecades. Now that we have looked a bit at the content that composes\\nAI, we take a quick look at the explosive growth of AI.\",\n \"\\nFirst, a point of clarification. The growth of which we speak is not a\\nshallow sort correlated with amount of funding provided for a given\\nsub-field of AI. That kind of thing happens all the time in all\\nfields, and can be triggered by entirely political and financial\\nchanges designed to grow certain areas, and diminish others. Along the\\nsame line, the growth of which we speak is not correlated with the\\namount of industrial activity revolving around AI (or a sub-field\\nthereof); for this sort of growth too can be driven by forces quite\\noutside an expansion in the scientific breadth of\\n AI.[31]\\n Rather, we are speaking of an explosion of deep content: new\\nmaterial which someone intending to be conversant with the field needs\\nto know. Relative to other fields, the size of the explosion may or\\nmay not be unprecedented. (Though it should perhaps be noted that an\\nanalogous increase in philosophy would be marked by the development of\\nentirely new formalisms for reasoning, reflected in the fact that,\\nsay, longstanding philosophy textbooks like Copi’s (2004)\\nIntroduction to Logic are dramatically rewritten and enlarged\\nto include these formalisms, rather than remaining anchored to\\nessentially immutable core formalisms, with incremental refinement\\naround the edges through the years.) But it certainly appears to be\\nquite remarkable, and is worth taking note of here, if for no other\\nreason than that AI’s near-future will revolve in significant\\npart around whether or not the new content in question forms a\\nfoundation for new long-lived research and development that would not\\notherwise\\n obtain.[32]\",\n \"\\nAI has also witnessed an explosion in its usage in various artifacts\\nand applications. While we are nowhere near building a machine with\\ncapabilities of a human or one that acts rationally in all scenarios\\naccording to the Russell/Hutter definition above, algorithms that have\\ntheir origins in AI research are now widely deployed for many tasks in\\na variety of domains. \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. The Explosive Growth of AI\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nA huge part of AI’s growth in applications has been made\\npossible through invention of new algorithms in the subfield of\\nmachine learning. Machine learning is concerned with building\\nsystems that improve their performance on a task when given examples\\nof ideal performance on the task, or improve their performance with\\nrepeated experience on the task. Algorithms from machine learning have\\nbeen used in speech recognition systems, spam filters, online\\nfraud-detection systems, product-recommendation systems, etc. The\\ncurrent state-of-the-art in machine learning can be divided into three\\nareas (Murphy 2013, Alpaydin 2014):\",\n \"\\nIn addition to being used in domains that are traditionally the ken of\\nAI, machine-learning algorithms have also been used in all stages of\\nthe scientific process. For example, machine-learning techniques are\\nnow routinely applied to analyze large volumes of data generated from\\nparticle accelerators. CERN, for instance, generates a petabyte\\n(\\\\(10^{15}\\\\) bytes) per second, and statistical algorithms that have\\ntheir origins in AI are used to filter and analyze this data. Particle\\naccelerators are used in fundamental experimental research in physics\\nto probe the structure of our physical universe. They work by\\ncolliding larger particles together to create much finer particles.\\nNot all such events are fruitful. Machine-learning methods have been\\nused to select events which are then analyzed further (Whiteson &\\nWhiteson 2009 and Baldi et al. 2014). More recently, researchers at\\nCERN launched a machine learning\\n competition\\n to aid in the analysis of the Higgs Boson. The goal of this challenge\\nwas to develop algorithms that separate meaningful events from\\nbackground noise given data from the Large Hadron Collider, a particle\\naccelerator at CERN.\",\n \"\\nIn the past few decades, there has been an explosion in data that does\\nnot have any explicit semantics attached to it. This data is generated\\nby both humans and machines. Most of this data is not easily\\nmachine-processable; for example, images, text, video (as opposed to\\ncarefully curated data in a knowledge- or data-base). This has given\\nrise to a huge industry that applies AI techniques to get usable\\ninformation from such enormous data. This field of applying techniques\\nderived from AI to large volumes of data goes by names such as\\n“data mining,” “big data,”\\n“analytics,” etc. This field is too vast to even\\nmoderately cover in the present article, but we note that there is no\\nfull agreement on what constitutes such a “big-data”\\nproblem. One definition, from Madden (2012), is that big data differs\\nfrom traditional machine-processable data in that it is too big (for\\nmost of the existing state-of-the-art hardware), too quick (generated\\nat a fast rate, e.g. online email transactions), or too hard. It is in\\nthe too-hard part that AI techniques work quite well. While this\\nuniverse is quite varied, we use the Watson’s system later in\\nthis article as an AI-relevant exemplar. As we will see later, while\\nmost of this new explosion is powered by learning, it isn’t\\nentirely limited to just learning. This bloom in learning algorithms\\nhas been supported by both a resurgence in neurocomputational\\ntechniques and probabilistic techniques.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.1 Bloom in Machine Learning\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nOne of the remarkable aspects of (Charniak & McDermott 1985) is\\nthis: The authors say the central dogma of AI is that “What the\\nbrain does may be thought of at some level as a kind of\\ncomputation” (p. 6). And yet nowhere in the book is brain-like\\ncomputation discussed. In fact, you will search the index in vain for\\nthe term ‘neural’ and its variants. Please note that the\\nauthors are not to blame for this. A large part of AI’s growth\\nhas come from formalisms, tools, and techniques that are, in some\\nsense, brain-based, not logic-based. A paper that conveys the\\nimportance and maturity of neurocomputation is (Litt et al. 2006).\\n(Growth has also come from a return of probabilistic techniques that\\nhad withered by the mid-70s and 80s. More about that momentarily, in\\nthe next “resurgence”\\n section.)\\n \",\n \"\\nOne very prominent class of non-logicist formalism does make an\\nexplicit nod in the direction of the brain: viz., artificial neural\\nnetworks (or as they are often simply called, neural\\nnetworks, or even just neural nets). (The structure of\\nneural networks and more recent developments are discussed\\n above).\\n Because Minsky and Pappert’s (1969) Perceptrons led many\\n(including, specifically, many sponsors of AI research and\\ndevelopment) to conclude that neural networks didn’t have\\nsufficient information-processing power to model human cognition, the\\nformalism was pretty much universally dropped from AI. However, Minsky\\nand Pappert had only considered very limited neural networks.\\nConnectionism, the view that intelligence consists not in\\nsymbolic processing, but rather non-symbolic processing at\\nleast somewhat like what we find in the brain (at least at the\\ncellular level), approximated specifically by artificial neural\\nnetworks, came roaring back in the early 1980s on the strength of more\\nsophisticated forms of such networks, and soon the situation was (to\\nuse a metaphor introduced by John McCarthy) that of two horses in a\\nrace toward building truly intelligent agents.\",\n \"\\nIf one had to pick a year at which connectionism was resurrected, it\\nwould certainly be 1986, the year Parallel Distributed\\nProcessing (Rumelhart & McClelland 1986) appeared in print.\\nThe rebirth of connectionism was specifically fueled by the\\nback-propagation (backpropagation) algorithm over neural networks,\\nnicely covered in Chapter 20 of AIMA. The\\nsymbolicist/connectionist race led to a spate of lively debate in the\\nliterature (e.g., Smolensky 1988, Bringsjord 1991), and some AI\\nengineers have explicitly championed a methodology marked by a\\nrejection of knowledge representation and reasoning. For example,\\nRodney Brooks was such an engineer; he wrote the well-known\\n“Intelligence Without Representation” (1991), and his Cog\\nProject, to which we referred above, is arguably an incarnation of the\\npremeditatedly non-logicist approach. Increasingly, however, those in\\nthe business of building sophisticated systems find that both\\nlogicist and more neurocomputational techniques are required (Wermter\\n& Sun\\n 2001).[33]\\n In addition, the neurocomputational paradigm today includes\\nconnectionism only as a proper part, in light of the fact that some of\\nthose working on building intelligent systems strive to do so by\\nengineering brain-based computation outside the neural network-based\\napproach (e.g., Granger 2004a, 2004b). \",\n \"\\nAnother recent resurgence in neurocomputational techniques has\\noccurred in machine learning. The modus operandi in machine learning\\nis that given a problem, say recognizing handwritten digits\\n\\\\(\\\\{0,1,\\\\ldots,9\\\\}\\\\) or faces, from a 2D matrix representing an image\\nof the digits or faces, a machine learning or a domain expert would\\nconstruct a feature vector representation function for the\\ntask. This function is a transformation of the input into a format\\nthat tries to throw away irrelevant information in the input and keep\\nonly information useful for the task. Inputs transformed by \\\\(\\\\rr\\\\)\\nare termed features. For recognizing faces, irrelevant\\ninformation could be the amount of lighting in the scene and relevant\\ninformation could be information about facial features. The machine is\\nthen fed a sequence of inputs represented by the features and the\\nideal or ground truth output values for those inputs. This converts\\nthe learning challenge from that of having to learn the function\\n\\\\(\\\\ff\\\\) from the examples: \\\\(\\\\left\\\\{\\\\left\\\\langle x_1,\\n\\\\ff(x_1)\\\\right\\\\rangle,\\\\left\\\\langle x_2, \\\\ff(x_2)\\\\right\\\\rangle, \\\\ldots,\\n\\\\left\\\\langle x_n, \\\\ff(x_n)\\\\right\\\\rangle \\\\right\\\\}\\\\) to having to learn\\nfrom possibly easier data: \\\\(\\\\left\\\\{\\\\left\\\\langle \\\\rr(x_1),\\n\\\\ff(x_1)\\\\right\\\\rangle,\\\\left\\\\langle \\\\rr(x_2), \\\\ff(x_2)\\\\right\\\\rangle,\\n\\\\ldots, \\\\left\\\\langle \\\\rr(x_n), \\\\ff(x_n)\\\\right\\\\rangle \\\\right\\\\}\\\\). Here\\nthe function \\\\(\\\\rr\\\\) is the function that computes the feature vector\\nrepresentation of the input. Formally, \\\\(\\\\ff\\\\) is assumed to be a\\ncomposition of the functions \\\\(\\\\gg\\\\) and \\\\(\\\\rr\\\\). That is, for any\\ninput \\\\(x\\\\), \\\\(f(x) = \\\\gg\\\\left(\\\\rr\\\\left(x\\\\right)\\\\right)\\\\). This is\\ndenoted by \\\\(\\\\ff=\\\\gg\\\\circ \\\\rr\\\\). For any input, the features are first\\ncomputed, and then the function \\\\(\\\\gg\\\\) is applied. If the feature\\nrepresentation \\\\(\\\\rr\\\\) is provided by the domain expert, the learning\\nproblem becomes simpler to the extent the feature representation takes\\non the difficulty of the task. At one extreme, the feature vector\\ncould hide an easily extractable form of the answer in the input and\\nin the other extreme the feature representation could be just the\\nplain input.\",\n \"\\nFor non-trivial problems, choosing the right representation is vital.\\nFor instance, one of the drastic changes in the AI landscape was due\\nto Minsky and Papert’s (1969) demonstration that the perceptron\\ncannot learn even the binary XOR function, but this function\\ncan be learnt by the perceptron if we have the right representation.\\nFeature engineering has grown to be one of the most labor intensive\\ntasks of machine learning, so much so that it is considered to be one\\nof the “black arts” of machine learning. The other\\nsignificant black art of learning methods is choosing the right\\nparameters. These black arts require significant human expertise and\\nexperience, which can be quite difficult to obtain without significant\\napprenticeship (Domingos 2012). Another bigger issue is that the task\\nof feature engineering is just knowledge representation in a new skin.\\n\",\n \"\\nGiven this state of affairs, there has been a recent resurgence in\\nmethods for automatically learning a feature representation function\\n\\\\(\\\\rr\\\\); such methods potentially bypass a large part of human labor\\nthat is traditionally required. Such methods are based mostly on what\\nare now termed deep neural networks. Such networks are simply\\nneural networks with two or more hidden layers. These networks allow\\nus to learn a feature function \\\\(\\\\rr\\\\) by using one or more of the\\nhidden layers to learn \\\\(\\\\rr\\\\). The general form of learning in which\\none learns from the raw sensory data without much hand-based feature\\nengineering has now its own term: deep learning. A general and\\nyet concise definition (Bengio et al. 2015) is: \",\n \"\\nDeep learning can safely be regarded as the study of models that\\neither involve a greater amount of composition of learned functions or\\nlearned concepts than traditional machine learning does. (Bengio et\\nal. 2015, Chapter 1)\\n\",\n \"\\nThough the idea has been around for decades, recent innovations\\nleading to more efficient learning techniques have made the approach\\nmore feasible (Bengio et al. 2013). Deep-learning methods have\\nrecently produced state-of-the-art results in image recognition (given\\nan image containing various objects, label the objects from a given\\nset of labels), speech recognition (from audio input, generate a\\ntextual representation), and the analysis of data from particle\\naccelerators (LeCun et al. 2015). Despite impressive results in tasks\\nsuch as these, minor and major issues remain unresolved. A minor issue\\nis that significant human expertise is still needed to choose an\\narchitecture and set up the right parameters for the architecture; a\\nmajor issue is the existence of so-called adversarial inputs,\\nwhich are indistinguishable from normal inputs to humans but are\\ncomputed in a special manner that makes a neural network regard them\\nas different than similar inputs in the training data. The existence\\nof such adversarial inputs, which remain stable across training data,\\nhas raised doubts about how well performance on benchmarks can\\ntranslate into performance in real-world systems with sensory noise\\n(Szegedy et al. 2014).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.2 The Resurgence of Neurocomputational Techniques\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThere is a second dimension to the explosive growth of AI: the\\nexplosion in popularity of probabilistic methods that aren’t\\nneurocomputational in nature, in order to formalize and mechanize a\\nform of non-logicist reasoning in the face of uncertainty.\\nInterestingly enough, it is Eugene Charniak himself who can be safely\\nconsidered one of the leading proponents of an explicit, premeditated\\nturn away from logic to statistical techniques. His area of\\nspecialization is natural language processing, and whereas his\\nintroductory textbook of 1985 gave an accurate sense of his approach\\nto parsing at the time (as we have seen, write computer programs that,\\ngiven English text as input, ultimately infer meaning expressed in\\nFOL), this approach was abandoned in favor of purely statistical\\napproaches (Charniak 1993). At the\\n AI@50\\n conference, Charniak boldly proclaimed, in a talk tellingly entitled\\n“Why Natural Language Processing is Now Statistical Natural\\nLanguage Processing,” that logicist AI is moribund, and that the\\nstatistical approach is the only promising game in town – for\\nthe next 50\\n years.[34]\",\n \"\\nThe chief source of energy and debate at the conference flowed from\\nthe clash between Charniak’s probabilistic orientation, and the\\noriginal logicist orientation, upheld at the conference in question by\\nJohn McCarthy and others.\",\n \"\\nAI’s use of probability theory grows out of the standard form of\\nthis theory, which grew directly out of technical philosophy and\\nlogic. This form will be familiar to many philosophers, but\\nlet’s review it quickly now, in order to set a firm stage for\\nmaking points about the new probabilistic techniques that have\\nenergized AI. \",\n \"\\nJust as in the case of FOL, in probability theory we are concerned\\nwith declarative statements, or propositions, to which degrees\\nof belief are applied; we can thus say that both logicist and\\nprobabilistic approaches are symbolic in nature. Both approaches also\\nagree that statements can either be true or false in the world. In\\nbuilding agents, a simplistic logic-based approach requires agents to\\nknow the truth-value of all possible statements. This is not\\nrealistic, as an agent may not know the truth-value of some\\nproposition \\\\(p\\\\) due to either ignorance, non-determinism in the\\nphysical world, or just plain vagueness in the meaning of the\\nstatement. More specifically, the fundamental proposition in\\nprobability theory is a random variable, which can be conceived\\nof as an aspect of the world whose status is initially unknown to the\\nagent. We usually capitalize the names of random variables, though we\\nreserve \\\\(p,q,r, \\\\ldots\\\\) as such names as well. For example, in a\\nparticular murder investigation centered on whether or not Mr. Barolo\\ncommitted the crime, the random variable \\\\(Guilty\\\\) might be of\\nconcern. The detective may be interested as well in whether or not the\\nmurder weapon – a particular knife, let us assume –\\nbelongs to Barolo. In light of this, we might say that \\\\(\\\\Weapon =\\n\\\\true\\\\) if it does, and \\\\(\\\\Weapon = \\\\false\\\\) if it doesn’t. As a\\nnotational convenience, we can write \\\\(weapon\\\\) and \\\\(\\\\lnot weapon\\\\)\\nand for these two cases, respectively; and we can use this convention\\nfor other variables of this type. \",\n \"\\nThe kind of variables we have described so far are\\n\\\\(\\\\mathbf{Boolean}\\\\), because their \\\\(\\\\mathbf{domain}\\\\) is simply\\n\\\\(\\\\{true,false\\\\}.\\\\) But we can generalize and allow\\n\\\\(\\\\mathbf{discrete}\\\\) random variables, whose values are from any\\ncountable domain. For example, \\\\(\\\\PriceTChina\\\\) might be a variable\\nfor the price of (a particular, presumably) tea in China, and its\\ndomain might be \\\\(\\\\{1,2,3,4,5\\\\}\\\\), where each number here is in US\\ndollars. A third type of variable is \\\\(\\\\mathbf{continous}\\\\); its\\ndomain is either the reals, or some subset thereof. \",\n \"\\nWe say that an atomic event is an assignment of particular\\nvalues from the appropriate domains to all the variables composing the\\n(idealized) world. For example, in the simple murder investigation\\nworld introduced just above, we have two Boolean variables,\\n\\\\(\\\\Guilty\\\\) and \\\\(\\\\Weapon\\\\), and there are just four atomic events.\\nNote that atomic events have some obvious properties. For example,\\nthey are mutually exclusive, exhaustive, and logically entail the\\ntruth or falsity of every proposition. Usually not obvious to\\nbeginning students is a fourth property, namely, any proposition is\\nlogically equivalent to the disjunction of all atomic events that\\nentail that proposition. \",\n \"\\nPrior probabilities correspond to a degree of belief accorded to a\\nproposition in the complete absence of any other information. For\\nexample, if the prior probability of Barolo’s guilt is \\\\(0.2\\\\),\\nwe write \\n\\n \\\\[\\n P\\\\left(\\\\Guilty=true\\\\right)=0.2\\n \\\\]\\n\\n \",\n \"\\nor simply \\\\(\\\\P(guilty)=0.2\\\\). It is often convenient to have a\\nnotation allowing one to refer economically to the probabilities of\\nall the possible values for a random variable. For example,\\nwe can write \\n\\n \\\\[\\n \\\\P\\\\left(\\\\PriceTChina\\\\right)\\n \\\\]\\n\\n \",\n \"\\nas an abbreviation for the five equations listing all the possible\\nprices for tea in China. We can also write \\n\\n \\\\[\\n \\\\P\\\\left(\\\\PriceTChina\\\\right)=\\\\langle 1,2,3,4,5\\\\rangle\\n \\\\]\\n\\n \",\n \"\\nIn addition, as further convenient notation, we can write \\\\(\\n\\\\mathbf{P}\\\\left(\\\\Guilty, \\\\Weapon\\\\right)\\\\) to denote the probabilities\\nof all combinations of values of the relevant set of random variables.\\nThis is referred to as the joint probability distribution of\\n\\\\(\\\\Guilty\\\\) and \\\\(\\\\Weapon\\\\). The full joint probability\\ndistribution covers the distribution for all the random variables used\\nto describe a world. Given our simple murder world, we have 20 atomic\\nevents summed up in the equation \\n\\n \\\\[\\n \\\\mathbf{P}\\\\left(\\\\Guilty, \\\\Weapon, \\\\PriceTChina\\\\right)\\n \\\\]\\n\\n \",\n \"\\nThe final piece of the basic language of probability theory\\ncorresponds to conditional probabilities. Where \\\\(p\\\\) and \\\\(q\\\\)\\nare any propositions, the relevant expression is \\\\(P\\\\!\\\\left(p\\\\given\\nq\\\\right)\\\\), which can be interpreted as “the probability of\\n\\\\(p\\\\), given that all we know is \\\\(q\\\\).” For example,\\n\\n \\\\[\\n P\\\\left(guilty\\\\ggiven weapon\\\\right)=0.7\\n \\\\]\\n\\n \",\n \"\\nsays that if the murder weapon belongs to Barolo, and no other\\ninformation is available, the probability that Barolo is guilty is\\n\\\\(0.7.\\\\) \",\n \"\\nAndrei Kolmogorov showed how to construct probability theory from\\nthree axioms that make use of the machinery now introduced, viz., \",\n \"\\nThese axioms are clearly at bottom logicist. The remainder of\\nprobability theory can be erected from this foundation (conditional\\nprobabilities are easily defined in terms of prior probabilities). We\\ncan thus say that logic is in some fundamental sense still being used\\nto characterize the set of beliefs that a rational agent can have. But\\nwhere does probabilistic inference enter the picture on this\\naccount, since traditional deduction is not used for inference in\\nprobability theory?\",\n \"\\nProbabilistic inference consists in computing, from observed evidence\\nexpressed in terms of probability theory, posterior probabilities of\\npropositions of interest. For a good long while, there have been\\nalgorithms for carrying out such computation. These algorithms precede\\nthe resurgence of probabilistic techniques in the 1990s. (Chapter 13\\nof AIMA presents a number of them.) For example, given the\\nKolmogorov axioms, here is a straightforward way of computing the\\nprobability of any proposition, using the full joint distribution\\ngiving the probabilities of all atomic events: Where \\\\(p\\\\) is some\\nproposition, let \\\\(\\\\alpha(p)\\\\) be the disjunction of all atomic events\\nin which \\\\(p\\\\) holds. Since the probability of a proposition (i.e.,\\n\\\\(P(p)\\\\)) is equal to the sum of the probabilities of the atomic\\nevents in which it holds, we have an equation that provides a method\\nfor computing the probability of any proposition \\\\(p\\\\), viz., \",\n \"\\nUnfortunately, there were two serious problems infecting this original\\nprobabilistic approach: One, the processing in question needed to take\\nplace over paralyzingly large amounts of information (enumeration over\\nthe entire distribution is required). And two, the expressivity of the\\napproach was merely propositional. (It was by the way the philosopher\\nHilary Putnam (1963) who pointed out that there was a price to pay in\\nmoving to the first-order level. The issue is not discussed herein.)\\nEverything changed with the advent of a new formalism that marks the\\nmarriage of probabilism and graph theory: Bayesian networks\\n(also called belief nets). The pivotal text was (Pearl 1988).\\nFor a more detailed discussion, see the\",\n \"\\n\\n Supplement on Bayesian Networks.\\n \",\n \"\\nBefore concluding this section, it is probably worth noting that, from\\nthe standpoint of philosophy, a situation such as the murder\\ninvestigation we have exploited above would often be analyzed into\\narguments, and strength factors, not into numbers to be\\ncrunched by purely arithmetical procedures. For example, in the\\nepistemology of Roderick Chisholm, as presented his Theory of\\nKnowledge (1966, 1977), Detective Holmes might classify a\\nproposition like Barolo committed the murder. as\\ncounterbalanced if he was unable to find a compelling argument\\neither way, or perhaps probable if the murder weapon turned out\\nto belong to Barolo. Such categories cannot be found on a continuum\\nfrom 0 to 1, and they are used in articulating arguments for or\\nagainst Barolo’s guilt. Argument-based approaches to uncertain\\nand defeasible reasoning are virtually non-existent in AI. One\\nexception is Pollock’s approach, covered below. This approach is\\nChisholmian in nature. \",\n \"\\nIt should also be noted that there have been well-established\\nformalisms for dealing with probabilistic reasoning as an instance of\\nlogic-based reasoning. E.g., the activity a researcher in\\nprobabilistic reasoning undertakes when she proves a theorem \\\\(\\\\phi\\\\)\\nabout their domain (e.g. any theorem in (Pearl 1988)) is purely within\\nthe realm of traditional logic. Readers interested in logic-flavored\\napproaches to probabilistic reasoning can consult (Adams 1996,\\nHailperin 1996 & 2010, Halpern 1998). Formalisms marrying\\nprobability theory, induction and deductive reasoning, placing them on\\nan equal footing, have been on the rise, with Markov logic (Richardson\\nand Domingos 2006) being salient among these approaches. \",\n \"\\nProbabilistic Machine Learning\",\n \"\\nMachine learning, in the sense given\\n above,\\n has been associated with probabilistic techniques. Probabilistic\\ntechniques have been associated with both the learning of functions\\n(e.g. Naive Bayes classification) and the modeling of theoretical\\nproperties of learning algorithms. For example, a standard\\nreformulation of supervised learning casts it as a Bayesian\\nproblem. Assume that we are looking at recognizing digits\\n\\\\([0{-}9]\\\\) from a given image. One way to cast this problem is to ask\\nwhat the probability that the hypothesis \\\\(H_x\\\\): “the digit\\nis \\\\(x\\\\)” is true given the image \\\\(d\\\\) from a sensor. Bayes\\ntheorem gives us: \",\n \"\\n\\\\(P(d\\\\given H_x)\\\\) and \\\\(P(H_x)\\\\) can be estimated from the given\\ntraining dataset. Then the hypothesis with the highest posterior\\nprobability is then given as the answer and is given by:\\n\\\\(\\\\argmax_{x}P\\\\left(d\\\\ggiven H_x\\\\right)*P\\\\left(H_x\\\\right) \\\\) In\\naddition to probabilistic methods being used to build algorithms,\\nprobability theory has also been used to analyze algorithms which\\nmight not have an overt probabilistic or logical formulation. For\\nexample, one of the central classes of meta-theorems in learning,\\nprobably approximately correct (PAC) theorems, are cast in\\nterms of lower bounds of the probability that the mismatch between the\\ninduced/learnt fL function and the true function\\nfT being less than a certain amount, given that the\\nlearnt function fL works well for a certain number\\nof cases (see Chapter 18, AIMA). \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.3 The Resurgence of Probabilistic Techniques\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nFrom at least its modern inception, AI has always been connected to\\ngadgets, often ones produced by corporations, and it would be remiss\\nof us not to say a few words about this phenomenon. While there have\\nbeen a large number of commercial in-the-wild success stories for AI\\nand its sister fields, such as optimization and decision-making, some\\napplications are more visible and have been thoroughly battle-tested\\nin the wild. In 2014, one of the most visible such domains (one in\\nwhich AI has been strikingly successful) is information retrieval,\\nincarnated as web search. Another recent success story is pattern\\nrecognition. The state-of-the-art in applied pattern recognition\\n(e.g., fingerprint/face verification, speech recognition, and\\nhandwriting recognition) is robust enough to allow\\n“high-stakes” deployment outside the laboratory. As of mid\\n2018, several corporations and research laboratories have begun\\ntesting autonomous vehicles on public roads, with even a handful of\\njurisdictions making self-driving cars legal to operate. For example,\\nGoogle’s autonomous cars have navigated hundreds of thousands of\\nmiles in California with minimal human help under non-trivial\\nconditions (Guizzo 2011). \",\n \"\\nComputer games provide a robust test bed for AI techniques as they can\\ncapture important parts that might be necessary to test an AI\\ntechnique while abstracting or removing details that might beyond the\\nscope of core AI research, for example, designing better hardware or\\ndealing with legal issues (Laird and VanLent 2001). One subclass of\\ngames that has seen quite fruitful for commercial deployment of AI is\\nreal-time strategy games. Real-time strategy games are games in which\\nplayers manage an army given limited resources. One objective is to\\nconstantly battle other players and reduce an opponent’s forces.\\nReal-time strategy games differ from strategy games in that players\\nplan their actions simultaneously in real-time and do not have to take\\nturns playing. Such games have a number of challenges that are\\ntantalizing within the grasp of the state-of-the-art. This makes such\\ngames an attractive venue in which to deploy simple AI agents. An\\noverview of AI used in real-time strategy games can be found in\\n(Robertson and Watson 2015). \",\n \"\\nSome other ventures in AI, despite significant success, have been only\\nchugging slowly and humbly along, quietly. For instance, AI-related\\nmethods have achieved triumphs in solving open problems in mathematics\\nthat have resisted any solution for decades. The most noteworthy\\ninstance of such a problem is perhaps a proof of the statement that\\n“All Robbins algebras are Boolean algebras.” This\\nwas conjectured in the 1930s, and the proof was finally discovered by\\nthe Otter automatic theorem-prover in 1996 after just a few months of\\neffort (Kolata 1996, Wos 2013). Sister fields like formal verification\\nhave also bloomed to the extent that it is now not too difficult to\\nsemi-automatically verify vital hardware/software components (Kaufmann\\net al. 2000 and Chajed et al. 2017).\",\n \"\\nOther related areas, such as (natural) language translation, still\\nhave a long way to go, but are good enough to let us use them under\\nrestricted conditions. The jury is out on tasks such as machine\\ntranslation, which seems to require both statistical methods (Lopez\\n2008) and symbolic methods (España-Bonet 2011). Both\\nmethods now have comparable but limited success in the wild. A\\ndeployed translation system at Ford that was initially developed for\\ntranslating manufacturing process instructions from English to other\\nlanguages initially started out as rule-based system with Ford and\\ndomain-specific vocabulary and language. This system then evolved to\\nincorporate statistical techniques along with rule-based techniques as\\nit gained new uses beyond translating manuals, for example, lay users\\nwithin Ford translating their own documents (Rychtyckyj and Plesco\\n2012). \",\n \"\\nAI’s great achievements mentioned above so far have all been in\\nlimited, narrow domains. This lack of any success in the unrestricted\\ngeneral case has caused a small set of researchers to break away into\\nwhat is now called\\n artificial general intelligence\\n (Goertzel and Pennachin 2007). The stated goals of this movement\\ninclude shifting the focus again to building artifacts that are\\ngenerally intelligent and not just capable in one narrow domain. \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. AI in the Wild\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nComputer Ethics has been around for a long time. In this\\nsub-field, typically one would consider how one ought to act in a\\ncertain class of situations involving computer technology, where the\\n“one” here refers to a human being (Moor 1985). So-called\\n“robot ethics” is different. In this sub-field (which goes\\nby names such as “moral AI,” “ethical AI,”\\n“machine ethics,” “moral robots,” etc.) one is\\nconfronted with such prospects as robots being able to make autonomous\\nand weighty decisions – decisions that might or might not be\\nmorally permissible (Wallach & Allen 2010). If one were to attempt\\nto engineer a robot with a capacity for sophisticated ethical\\nreasoning and decision-making, one would also be doing Philosophical\\nAI, as that concept is characterized\\n elsewhere\\n in the present entry. There can be many different flavors of\\napproaches toward Moral AI. Wallach and Allen (2010) provide a\\nhigh-level overview of the different approaches. Moral reasoning is\\nobviously needed in robots that have the capability for lethal action.\\nArkin (2009) provides an introduction to how we can control and\\nregulate machines that have the capacity for lethal behavior. Moral AI\\ngoes beyond obviously lethal situations, and we can have a spectrum of\\nmoral machines. Moor (2006) provides one such spectrum of possible\\nmoral agents. An example of a non-lethal but ethically-charged machine\\nwould be a lying machine. Clark (2010) uses a computational theory\\nof the mind, the ability to represent and reason about other\\nagents, to build a lying machine that successfully persuades people\\ninto believing falsehoods. Bello & Bringsjord (2013) give a\\ngeneral overview of what might be required to build a moral machine,\\none of the ingredients being a theory of mind. \",\n \"\\nThe most general framework for building machines that can reason\\nethically consists in endowing the machines with a moral code.\\nThis requires that the formal framework used for reasoning by the\\nmachine be expressive enough to receive such codes. The field of Moral\\nAI, for now, is not concerned with the source or provenance of such\\ncodes. The source could be humans, and the machine could receive the\\ncode directly (via explicit encoding) or indirectly (reading). Another\\npossibility is that the code is inferred by the machine from a more\\nbasic set of laws. We assume that the robot has access to some such\\ncode, and we then try to engineer the robot to follow that code under\\nall circumstances while making sure that the moral code and its\\nrepresentation do not lead to unintended consequences. Deontic\\nlogics are a class of formal logics that have been studied the\\nmost for this purpose. Abstractly, such logics are concerned mainly\\nwith what follows from a given moral code. Engineering then studies\\nthe match of a given deontic logic to a moral code (i.e., is the logic\\nexpressive enough) which has to be balanced with the ease of\\nautomation. Bringsjord et al. (2006) provide a blueprint for using\\ndeontic logics to build systems that can perform actions in accordance\\nwith a moral code. The role deontic logics play in the framework\\noffered by Bringsjord et al (which can be considered to be\\nrepresentative of the field of deontic logic for moral AI) can be best\\nunderstood as striving towards Leibniz’s dream of a universal\\nmoral calculus: \",\n \"\\nWhen controversies arise, there will be no more need for a disputation\\nbetween two philosophers than there would be between two accountants\\n[computistas]. It would be enough for them to pick up their pens and\\nsit at their abacuses, and say to each other (perhaps having summoned\\na mutual friend): ‘Let us calculate.’\\n\",\n \"\\nDeontic logic-based frameworks can also be used in a fashion that is\\nanalogous to moral self-reflection. In this mode, logic-based\\nverification of the robot’s internal modules can done before the\\nrobot ventures out into the real world. Govindarajulu and Bringsjord\\n(2015) present an approach, drawing from formal-program\\nverification, in which a deontic-logic based system could be used\\nto verify that a robot acts in a certain ethically-sanctioned manner\\nunder certain conditions. Since formal-verification approaches can be\\nused to assert statements about an infinite number of situations and\\nconditions, such approaches might be preferred to having the robot\\nroam around in an ethically-charged test environment and make a finite\\nset of decisions that are then judged for their ethical correctness.\\nMore recently, Govindarajulu and Bringsjord (2017) use a deontic logic\\nto present a computational model of the\\n Doctrine of Double Effect,\\n an ethical principle for moral dilemmas that has been studied\\nempirically and analyzed extensively by\\n philosophers.[35]\\n The principle is usually presented and motivated via dilemmas using\\ntrolleys and was first presented in this fashion by Foot (1967). \",\n \"\\nWhile there has been substantial theoretical and philosophical work,\\nthe field of machine ethics is still in its infancy. There has been\\nsome embryonic work in building ethical machines. One recent such\\nexample would be Pereira and Saptawijaya (2016) who use logic\\nprogramming and base their work in machine ethics on the ethical\\ntheory known as contractualism, set out by Scanlon (1982). And\\nwhat about the future? Since artificial agents are bound to get\\nsmarter and smarter, and to have more and more autonomy and\\nresponsibility, robot ethics is almost certainly going to grow in\\nimportance. This endeavor might not be a straightforward application\\nof classical ethics. For example, experimental results suggest that\\nhumans hold robots to different ethical standards than they expect\\nfrom humans under similar conditions (Malle et al.\\n 2015).[36]\\n \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"6. Moral AI\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nNotice that the heading for this section isn’t Philosophy\\nof AI. We’ll get to that category momentarily. (For now\\nit can be identified with the attempt to answer such questions as\\nwhether artificial agents created in AI can ever reach the full\\nheights of human intelligence.) Philosophical AI is AI, not\\nphilosophy; but it’s AI rooted in and flowing from, philosophy.\\nFor example, one could engage, using the tools and techniques of\\nphilosophy, a paradox, work out a proposed solution, and then proceed\\nto a step that is surely optional for philosophers: expressing the\\nsolution in terms that can be translated into a computer program that,\\nwhen executed, allows an artificial agent to surmount concrete\\ninstances of the original\\n paradox.[37]\\n Before we ostensively characterize Philosophical AI of this sort\\ncourtesy of a particular research program, let us consider first the\\nview that AI is in fact simply philosophy, or a part thereof. \",\n \"\\nDaniel Dennett (1979) has famously claimed not just that there are\\nparts of AI intimately bound up with philosophy, but that AI\\nis philosophy (and psychology, at least of the cognitive\\nsort). (He has made a parallel claim about Artificial Life (Dennett\\n1998)). This view will turn out to be incorrect, but the reasons why\\nit’s wrong will prove illuminating, and our discussion will pave\\nthe way for a discussion of Philosophical AI. \",\n \"\\nWhat does Dennett say, exactly? This: \",\n \"\\nI want to claim that AI is better viewed as sharing with traditional\\nepistemology the status of being a most general, most abstract asking\\nof the top-down question: how is knowledge possible? (Dennett 1979,\\n60)\\n\",\n \"\\nElsewhere he says his view is that AI should be viewed “as a\\nmost abstract inquiry into the possibility of intelligence or\\nknowledge” (Dennett 1979, 64). \",\n \"\\nIn short, Dennett holds that AI is the attempt to explain\\nintelligence, not by studying the brain in the hopes of identifying\\ncomponents to which cognition can be reduced, and not by engineering\\nsmall information-processing units from which one can build in\\nbottom-up fashion to high-level cognitive processes, but rather by\\n– and this is why he says the approach is top-down\\n– designing and implementing abstract algorithms that capture\\ncognition. Leaving aside the fact that, at least starting in the early\\n1980s, AI includes an approach that is in some sense bottom-up (see\\nthe neurocomputational paradigm discussed above, in\\n Non-Logicist AI: A Summary;\\n and see, specifically, Granger’s (2004a, 2004b) work,\\nhyperlinked in text immediately above, a specific counterexample), a\\nfatal flaw infects Dennett’s view. Dennett sees the potential\\nflaw, as reflected in: \",\n \"\\nIt has seemed to some philosophers that AI cannot plausibly be so\\nconstrued because it takes on an additional burden: it restricts\\nitself to mechanistic solutions, and hence its domain is not\\nthe Kantian domain of all possible modes of intelligence, but just all\\npossible mechanistically realizable modes of intelligence. This, it is\\nclaimed, would beg the question against vitalists, dualists, and other\\nanti-mechanists. (Dennett 1979, 61)\\n\",\n \"\\nDennett has a ready answer to this objection. He writes: \",\n \"\\nBut … the mechanism requirement of AI is not an additional\\nconstraint of any moment, for if psychology is possible at all, and if\\nChurch’s thesis is true, the constraint of mechanism is no more\\nsevere than the constraint against begging the question in psychology,\\nand who would wish to evade that? (Dennett 1979, 61)\\n\",\n \"\\nUnfortunately, this is acutely problematic; and examination of the\\nproblems throws light on the nature of AI. \",\n \"\\nFirst, insofar as philosophy and psychology are concerned with the\\nnature of mind, they aren’t in the least trammeled by the\\npresupposition that mentation consists in computation. AI, at least of\\nthe “Strong” variety (we’ll discuss\\n“Strong” versus “Weak” AI\\n below)\\n is indeed an attempt to substantiate, through engineering certain\\nimpressive artifacts, the thesis that intelligence is at bottom\\ncomputational (at the level of Turing machines and their equivalents,\\ne.g., Register machines). So there is a philosophical claim, for sure.\\nBut this doesn’t make AI philosophy, any more than some of the\\ndeeper, more aggressive claims of some physicists (e.g., that the\\n universe is ultimately digital in nature)\\n make their field philosophy. Philosophy of physics certainly\\nentertains the proposition that the physical universe can be\\nperfectly modeled in digital terms (in a series of cellular automata,\\ne.g.), but of course philosophy of physics can’t be\\nidentified with this doctrine. \",\n \"\\nSecond, we now know well (and those familiar with the relevant formal\\nterrain knew at the time of Dennett’s writing) that information\\nprocessing can exceed standard computation, that is, can exceed\\ncomputation at and below the level of what a Turing machine can muster\\n(Turing-computation, we shall say). (Such information\\nprocessing is known as hypercomputation, a term coined by\\nphilosopher Jack Copeland, who has himself defined such machines\\n(e.g., Copeland 1998). The first machines capable of hypercomputation\\nwere trial-and-error machines, introduced in the same famous\\nissue of the Journal of Symbolic Logic (Gold 1965; Putnam\\n1965). A new hypercomputer is the infinite time Turing machine\\n(Hamkins & Lewis 2000).) Dennett’s appeal to Church’s\\nthesis thus flies in the face of the mathematical facts: some\\nvarieties of information processing exceed standard computation (or\\nTuring-computation). Church’s thesis, or more precisely, the\\nChurch-Turing thesis, is the view that a function \\\\(f\\\\) is effectively\\ncomputable if and only if \\\\(f\\\\) is Turing-computable (i.e., some\\nTuring machine can compute \\\\(f\\\\)). Thus, this thesis has nothing to\\nsay about information processing that is more demanding than what a\\nTuring machine can achieve. (Put another way, there is no\\ncounter-example to CTT to be automatically found in an\\ninformation-processing device capable of feats beyond the reach of\\nTMs.) For all philosophy and psychology know, intelligence, even if\\ntied to information processing, exceeds what is Turing-computational\\nor\\n Turing-mechanical.[38]\\n This is especially true because philosophy and psychology, unlike AI,\\nare in no way fundamentally charged with engineering artifacts, which\\nmakes the physical realizability of hypercomputation irrelevant from\\ntheir perspectives. Therefore, contra Dennett, to consider AI\\nas psychology or philosophy is to commit a serious error, precisely\\nbecause so doing would box these fields into only a speck of the\\nentire space of functions from the natural numbers (including tuples\\ntherefrom) to the natural numbers. (Only a tiny portion of the\\nfunctions in this space are Turing-computable.) AI is without question\\nmuch, much narrower than this pair of fields. Of course, it’s\\npossible that AI could be replaced by a field devoted not to building\\ncomputational artifacts by writing computer programs and running them\\non embodied Turing machines. But this new field, by definition, would\\nnot be AI. Our exploration of AIMA and other textbooks provide\\ndirect empirical confirmation of this. \",\n \"\\nThird, most AI researchers and developers, in point of fact, are\\nsimply concerned with building useful, profitable artifacts, and\\ndon’t spend much time reflecting upon the kinds of abstract\\ndefinitions of intelligence explored in this entry (e.g.,\\n What Exactly is AI?).\\n \",\n \"\\nThough AI isn’t philosophy, there are certainly ways of doing\\nreal implementation-focussed AI of the highest caliber that are\\nintimately bound up with philosophy. The best way to demonstrate this\\nis to simply present such research and development, or at least a\\nrepresentative example thereof. While there have been many examples of\\nsuch work, the most prominent example in AI is John Pollock’s\\nOSCAR project, which stretched over a considerable portion of his\\nlifetime. For a detailed presentation and further discussion, see\\nthe\",\n \"\\n\\n Supplement on the OSCAR Project.\\n \",\n \"\\nIt’s important to note at this juncture that the OSCAR project,\\nand the information processing that underlies it, are without question\\nat once philosophy and technical AI. Given that the work in\\nquestion has appeared in the pages of Artificial Intelligence,\\na first-rank journal devoted to that field, and not to philosophy,\\nthis is undeniable (see, e.g., Pollock 2001, 1992). This point is\\nimportant because while it’s certainly appropriate, in the\\npresent venue, to emphasize connections between AI and philosophy,\\nsome readers may suspect that this emphasis is contrived: they may\\nsuspect that the truth of the matter is that page after page of AI\\njournals are filled with narrow, technical content far from\\nphilosophy. Many such papers do exist. But we must distinguish between\\nwritings designed to present the nature of AI, and its core methods\\nand goals, versus writings designed to present progress on specific\\ntechnical issues. \",\n \"\\nWritings in the latter category are more often than not quite narrow,\\nbut, as the example of Pollock shows, sometimes these specific issues\\nare inextricably linked to philosophy. And of course Pollock’s\\nwork is a representative example (albeit the most substantive one).\\nOne could just as easily have selected work by folks who don’t\\nhappen to also produce straight philosophy. For example, for an entire\\nbook written within the confines of AI and computer science, but which\\nis epistemic logic in action in many ways, suitable for use in\\nseminars on that topic, see (Fagin et al. 2004). (It is hard to find\\ntechnical work that isn’t bound up with philosophy in some\\ndirect way. E.g., AI research on learning is all intimately bound up\\nwith philosophical treatments of induction, of how genuinely new\\nconcepts not simply defined in terms of prior ones can be learned. One\\npossible partial answer offered by AI is inductive logic\\nprogramming, discussed in Chapter 19 of AIMA.) \",\n \"\\nWhat of writings in the former category? Writings in this category,\\nwhile by definition in AI venues, not philosophy ones, are nonetheless\\nphilosophical. Most textbooks include plenty of material that falls\\ninto this latter category, and hence they include discussion of the\\nphilosophical nature of AI (e.g., that AI is aimed at building\\nartificial intelligences, and that’s why, after all, it’s\\ncalled ‘AI’). \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"7. Philosophical AI\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"8. Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nRecall that we earlier discussed proposed definitions of AI, and\\nrecall specifically that these proposals were couched in terms of the\\ngoals of the field. We can follow this pattern here: We can\\ndistinguish between “Strong” and “Weak” AI by\\ntaking note of the different goals that these two versions of AI\\nstrive to reach. “Strong” AI seeks to create artificial\\npersons: machines that have all the mental powers we have, including\\nphenomenal consciousness. “Weak” AI, on the other hand,\\nseeks to build information-processing machines that appear to\\nhave the full mental repertoire of human persons (Searle 1997).\\n“Weak” AI can also be defined as the form of AI that aims\\nat a system able to pass not just the Turing Test (again, abbreviated\\nas TT), but the Total Turing Test (Harnad 1991). In TTT, a\\nmachine must muster more than linguistic indistinguishability: it must\\npass for a human in all behaviors – throwing a baseball, eating,\\nteaching a class, etc. \",\n \"\\nIt would certainly seem to be exceedingly difficult for philosophers\\nto overthrow “Weak” AI (Bringsjord and Xiao 2000). After\\nall, what philosophical reason stands in the way of AI\\nproducing artifacts that appear to be animals or even humans?\\nHowever, some philosophers have aimed to do in “Strong”\\nAI, and we turn now to the most prominent case in point. \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"8.1 “Strong” versus “Weak” AI\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nWithout question, the most famous argument in the philosophy of AI is\\nJohn Searle’s (1980) Chinese Room Argument (CRA), designed to\\noverthrow “Strong” AI. We present a quick summary here and\\na “report from the trenches” as to how AI practitioners\\nregard the argument. Readers wanting to further study CRA will find an\\nexcellent next step in the entry on\\n the Chinese Room Argument\\n and (Bishop & Preston 2002). \",\n \"\\nCRA is based on a thought-experiment in which Searle himself stars. He\\nis inside a room; outside the room are native Chinese speakers who\\ndon’t know that Searle is inside it. Searle-in-the-box, like\\nSearle-in-real-life, doesn’t know any Chinese, but is fluent in\\nEnglish. The Chinese speakers send cards into the room through a slot;\\non these cards are written questions in Chinese. The box, courtesy of\\nSearle’s secret work therein, returns cards to the native\\nChinese speakers as output. Searle’s output is produced by\\nconsulting a rulebook: this book is a lookup table that tells him what\\nChinese to produce based on what is sent in. To Searle, the Chinese is\\nall just a bunch of – to use Searle’s language –\\nsquiggle-squoggles. The following schematic picture sums up the\\nsituation. The labels should be obvious. \\\\(O\\\\) denotes the outside\\nobservers, in this case the Chinese speakers. Input is denoted by\\n\\\\(i\\\\) and output by \\\\(o\\\\). As you can see, there is an icon for the\\nrulebook, and Searle himself is denoted by \\\\(P\\\\).\",\n \"\\nNow, what is the argument based on this thought-experiment? Even if\\nyou’ve never heard of CRA before, you doubtless can see the\\nbasic idea: that Searle (in the box) is supposed to be everything a\\ncomputer can be, and because he doesn’t understand Chinese, no\\ncomputer could have such understanding. Searle is mindlessly moving\\nsquiggle-squoggles around, and (according to the argument)\\nthat’s all computers do,\\n fundamentally.[39]\",\n \"\\nWhere does CRA stand today? As we’ve already indicated, the\\nargument would still seem to be alive and well; witness (Bishop &\\nPreston 2002). However, there is little doubt that at least among AI\\npractitioners, CRA is generally rejected. (This is of course\\nthoroughly unsurprising.) Among these practitioners, the philosopher\\nwho has offered the most formidable response out of AI itself is\\nRapaport (1988), who argues that while AI systems are indeed\\nsyntactic, the right syntax can constitute semantics. It should be\\nsaid that a common attitude among proponents of “Strong”\\nAI is that CRA is not only unsound, but silly, based as it is on a\\nfanciful story (CR) far removed from the practice of AI\\n– practice which is year by year moving ineluctably toward\\nsophisticated robots that will once and for all silence CRA and its\\nproponents. For example, John Pollock (as we’ve noted,\\nphilosopher and practitioner of AI) writes: \",\n \"\\nOnce [my intelligent system] OSCAR is fully functional, the argument\\nfrom analogy will lead us inexorably to attribute thoughts and\\nfeelings to OSCAR with precisely the same credentials with which we\\nattribute them to human beings. Philosophical arguments to the\\ncontrary will be passé. (Pollock 1995, p. 6)\\n\",\n \"\\nTo wrap up discussion of CRA, we make two quick points, to wit: \",\n \"\\nReaders may wonder if there are philosophical debates that AI\\nresearchers engage in, in the course of working in their field (as\\nopposed to when they might attend a philosophy conference). Surely, AI\\nresearchers have philosophical discussions amongst themselves, right?\\n\",\n \"\\nGenerally, one finds that AI researchers do discuss among themselves\\ntopics in philosophy of AI, and these topics are usually the very same\\nones that occupy philosophers of AI. However, the attitude reflected\\nin the quote from Pollock immediately above is by far the dominant\\none. That is, in general, the attitude of AI researchers is that\\nphilosophizing is sometimes fun, but the upward march of AI\\nengineering cannot be stopped, will not fail, and will eventually\\nrender such philosophizing otiose. \",\n \"\\nWe will return to the issue of the future of AI in the\\n final section\\n of this entry. \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"8.2 The Chinese Room Argument Against “Strong AI”\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nFour decades ago, J.R. Lucas (1964) argued that Gödel’s\\nfirst incompleteness theorem entails that no machine can ever reach\\nhuman-level intelligence. His argument has not proved to be\\ncompelling, but Lucas initiated a debate that has produced more\\nformidable arguments. One of Lucas’ indefatigable defenders is\\nthe physicist Roger Penrose, whose first attempt to vindicate Lucas\\nwas a Gödelian attack on “Strong” AI articulated in\\nhis The Emperor’s New Mind (1989). This first attempt\\nfell short, and Penrose published a more elaborate and more fastidious\\nGödelian case, expressed in Chapters 2 and 3 of his Shadows of\\nthe Mind (1994). \",\n \"\\nIn light of the fact that readers can turn to the\\n entry on the Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems,\\n a full review here is not needed. Instead, readers will be given a\\ndecent sense of the argument by turning to an online paper in which\\nPenrose, writing in response to critics (e.g., the philosopher David\\nChalmers, the logician Solomon Feferman, and the computer scientist\\nDrew McDermott) of his Shadows of the Mind, distills the\\nargument to a couple of\\n paragraphs.[40]\\n Indeed, in this paper Penrose gives what he takes to be the perfected\\nversion of the core Gödelian case given in SOTM. Here is\\nthis version, verbatim: \",\n \"\\nWe try to suppose that the totality of methods of (unassailable)\\nmathematical reasoning that are in principle humanly accessible can be\\nencapsulated in some (not necessarily computational) sound formal\\nsystem \\\\(F\\\\). A human mathematician, if presented with \\\\(F\\\\), could\\nargue as follows (bearing in mind that the phrase “I am\\n\\\\(F\\\\)” is merely a shorthand for “\\\\(F\\\\) encapsulates all\\nthe humanly accessible methods of mathematical proof”):\\n\\n\\n(A) “Though I don’t know that I necessarily am \\\\(F\\\\), I\\nconclude that if I were, then the system \\\\(F\\\\) would have to be sound\\nand, more to the point, \\\\(F'\\\\) would have to be sound, where \\\\(F'\\\\) is\\n\\\\(F\\\\) supplemented by the further assertion “I am \\\\(F\\\\).”\\nI perceive that it follows from the assumption that I am \\\\(F\\\\) that\\nthe Gödel statement \\\\(G(F')\\\\) would have to be true and,\\nfurthermore, that it would not be a consequence of \\\\(F'\\\\). But I have\\njust perceived that “If I happened to be \\\\(F\\\\), then \\\\(G(F')\\\\)\\nwould have to be true,” and perceptions of this nature would be\\nprecisely what \\\\(F'\\\\) is supposed to achieve. Since I am therefore\\ncapable of perceiving something beyond the powers of \\\\(F'\\\\), I deduce\\nthat I cannot be \\\\(F\\\\) after all. Moreover, this applies to any other\\n(Gödelizable) system, in place of \\\\(F\\\\).” (Penrose 1996,\\n3.2)\\n\\n\",\n \"\\nDoes this argument succeed? A firm answer to this question is not\\nappropriate to seek in the present entry. Interested readers are\\nencouraged to consult four full-scale treatments of the argument\\n(LaForte et. al 1998; Bringsjord and Xiao 2000; Shapiro 2003; Bowie\\n1982).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"8.3 The Gödelian Argument Against “Strong AI”\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIn addition to the Gödelian and Searlean arguments covered\\nbriefly above, a third attack on “Strong” AI (of the\\nsymbolic variety) has been widely discussed (though with the rise of\\nstatistical machine learning has come a corresponding decrease in the\\nattention paid to it), namely, one given by the philosopher Hubert\\nDreyfus (1972, 1992), some incarnations of which have been\\nco-articulated with his brother, Stuart Dreyfus (1987), a computer\\nscientist. Put crudely, the core idea in this attack is that human\\nexpertise is not based on the explicit, disembodied, mechanical\\nmanipulation of symbolic information (such as formulae in some logic,\\nor probabilities in some Bayesian network), and that AI’s\\nefforts to build machines with such expertise are doomed if based on\\nthe symbolic paradigm. The genesis of the Dreyfusian attack was a\\nbelief that the critique of (if you will) symbol-based philosophy\\n(e.g., philosophy in the logic-based, rationalist tradition, as\\nopposed to what is called the Continental tradition) from such\\nthinkers as Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty could be made against the\\nrationalist tradition in AI. After further reading and study of\\nDreyfus’ writings, readers may judge whether this critique is\\ncompelling, in an information-driven world increasingly managed by\\nintelligent agents that carry out symbolic reasoning (albeit not even\\nclose to the human level). \",\n \"\\nFor readers interested in exploring philosophy of AI beyond what Jim\\nMoor (in a recent address – “The Next Fifty Years of AI:\\nFuture Scientific Research vs. Past Philosophical Criticisms”\\n– as the 2006 Barwise Award winner at the annual eastern\\nAmerican Philosophical Association meeting) has called the “the\\nbig three” criticisms of AI, there is no shortage of additional\\nmaterial, much of it available on the Web. The last chapter of\\nAIMA provides a compressed overview of some additional\\narguments against “Strong” AI, and is in general not a bad\\nnext step. Needless to say, Philosophy of AI today involves much more\\nthan the three well-known arguments discussed above, and, inevitably,\\nPhilosophy of AI tomorrow will include new debates and problems we\\ncan’t see now. Because machines, inevitably, will get smarter\\nand smarter (regardless of just how smart they get),\\nPhilosophy of AI, pure and simple, is a growth industry. With every\\nhuman activity that machines match, the “big” questions\\nwill only attract more attention. \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"8.4 Additional Topics and Readings in Philosophy of AI\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nIf past predictions are any indication, the only thing we know today\\nabout tomorrow’s science and technology is that it will be\\nradically different than whatever we predict it will be like.\\nArguably, in the case of AI, we may also specifically know today that\\nprogress will be much slower than what most expect. After all, at the\\n1956 kickoff conference (discussed at the start of this entry), Herb\\nSimon predicted that thinking machines able to match the human mind\\nwere “just around the corner” (for the relevant quotes and\\ninformative discussion, see the first chapter of AIMA). As it\\nturned out, the new century would arrive without a single machine able\\nto converse at even the toddler level. (Recall that when it comes to\\nthe building of machines capable of displaying human-level\\nintelligence, Descartes, not Turing, seems today to be the better\\nprophet.) Nonetheless, astonishing though it may be, serious thinkers\\nin the late 20th century have continued to issue incredibly optimistic\\npredictions regarding the progress of AI. For example, Hans Moravec\\n(1999), in his Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind,\\ninforms us that because the speed of computer hardware doubles every\\n18 months (in accordance with Moore’s Law, which has\\napparently held in the past), “fourth generation”\\nrobots will soon enough exceed humans in all respects, from running\\ncompanies to writing novels. These robots, so the story goes, will\\nevolve to such lofty cognitive heights that we will stand to them as\\nsingle-cell organisms stand to us\\n today.[41]\\n \",\n \"\\nMoravec is by no means singularly Pollyannaish: Many others in AI\\npredict the same sensational future unfolding on about the same rapid\\nschedule. In fact, at the aforementioned AI@50 conference, Jim Moor\\nposed the question “Will human-level AI be achieved within the\\nnext 50 years?” to five thinkers who attended the original 1956\\nconference: John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Oliver Selfridge, Ray\\nSolomonoff, and Trenchard Moore. McCarthy and Minsky gave firm,\\nunhesitating affirmatives, and Solomonoff seemed to suggest that AI\\nprovided the one ray of hope in the face of fact that our species\\nseems bent on destroying itself. (Selfridge’s reply was a bit\\ncryptic. Moore returned a firm, unambiguous negative, and declared\\nthat once his computer is smart enough to interact with him\\nconversationally about mathematical problems, he might take this whole\\nenterprise more seriously.) It is left to the reader to judge the\\naccuracy of such risky predictions as have been given by Moravec,\\nMcCarthy, and\\n Minsky.[42]\\n \",\n \"\\nThe judgment of the reader in this regard ought to factor in the\\nstunning resurgence, very recently, of serious reflection on what is\\nknown as “The Singularity,” (denoted by us simply as\\nS) the future point at which artificial intelligence exceeds\\nhuman intelligence, whereupon immediately thereafter (as the story\\ngoes) the machines make themselves rapidly smarter and smarter and\\nsmarter, reaching a superhuman level of intelligence that, stuck as we\\nare in the mud of our limited mentation, we can’t fathom. For\\nextensive, balanced analysis of S, see Eden et al. (2013).\",\n \"\\nReaders unfamiliar with the literature on S may be quite\\nsurprised to learn the degree to which, among learned folks, this\\nhypothetical event is not only taken seriously, but has in fact become\\na target for extensive and frequent philosophizing [for a mordant tour\\nof the recent thought in question, see Floridi (2015)]. What\\narguments support the belief that S is in our future?\\nThere are two main arguments at this point: the familiar\\nhardware-based one [championed by Moravec, as noted above, and again\\nmore recently by Kurzweil (2006)]; and the – as far as we know\\n– original argument given by mathematician I. J. Good (1965). In\\naddition, there is a recent and related doomsayer argument advanced by\\nBostrom (2014), which seems to presuppose that S will occur.\\nGood’s argument, nicely amplified and adjusted by Chalmers\\n(2010), who affirms the tidied-up version of the argument, runs as\\nfollows:\",\n \"\\nIn this argument, ‘AI’ is artificial intelligence at the\\nlevel of, and created by, human persons, ‘AI\\\\(^+\\\\)’\\nartificial intelligence above the level of human persons, and\\n‘AI\\\\(^{++}\\\\)’ super-intelligence constitutive of S.\\nThe key process is presumably the creation of one class of\\nmachine by another. We have added for convenience ‘HI’ for\\nhuman intelligence; the central idea is then: HI will create AI, the\\nlatter at the same level of intelligence as the former; AI will create\\nAI\\\\(^+\\\\); AI\\\\(^+\\\\) will create AI\\\\(^{++}\\\\); with the ascension\\nproceeding perhaps forever, but at any rate proceeding long enough for\\nus to be as ants outstripped by gods. \",\n \"\\nThe argument certainly appears to be formally valid. Are its three\\npremises true? Taking up such a question would fling us far beyond the\\nscope of this entry. We point out only that the concept of one class\\nof machines creating another, more powerful class of machines is not a\\ntransparent one, and neither Good nor Chalmers provides a rigorous\\naccount of the concept, which is ripe for philosophical analysis. (As\\nto mathematical analysis, some exists, of course. It is for example\\nwell-known that a computing machine at level \\\\(L\\\\) cannot possibly\\ncreate another machine at a higher level \\\\(L'\\\\). For instance, a\\nlinear-bounded automaton can’t create a Turing machine.)\",\n \"\\nThe Good-Chalmers argument has a rather clinical air about it; the\\nargument doesn’t say anything regarding whether machines in\\nthe AI\\\\(^{++}\\\\) category will be benign, malicious, or munificent.\\nMany others gladly fill this gap with dark, dark pessimism. The\\nlocus classicus here is without question a widely read paper by\\nBill Joy (2000): “Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us.”\\nJoy believes that the human race is doomed, in no small part because\\nit’s busy building smart machines. He writes: \",\n \"\\n\\n\\nThe 21st-century technologies – genetics, nanotechnology, and\\nrobotics (GNR) – are so powerful that they can spawn whole new\\nclasses of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time,\\nthese accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals\\nor small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare raw\\nmaterials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them.\\n\\n\\nThus we have the possibility not just of weapons of mass destruction\\nbut of knowledge-enabled mass destruction (KMD), this destructiveness\\nhugely amplified by the power of self-replication. \\n\\n\\nI think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further\\nperfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well\\nbeyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the\\nnation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme\\n individuals.[43]\\n \\n\",\n \"\\nPhilosophers would be most interested in arguments for this\\nview. What are Joy’s? Well, no small reason for the attention\\nlavished on his paper is that, like Raymond Kurzweil (2000), Joy\\nrelies heavily on an argument given by none other than the Unabomber\\n(Theodore Kaczynski). The idea is that, assuming we succeed in\\nbuilding intelligent machines, we will have them do most (if not all)\\nwork for us. If we further allow the machines to make decisions for us\\n– even if we retain oversight over the machines –, we will\\neventually depend on them to the point where we must simply accept\\ntheir decisions. But even if we don’t allow the machines to make\\ndecisions, the control of such machines is likely to be held by a\\nsmall elite who will view the rest of humanity as unnecessary –\\nsince the machines can do any needed work (Joy 2000).\",\n \"\\nThis isn’t the place to assess this argument. (Having said that,\\nthe pattern pushed by the Unabomber and his supporters certainly\\nappears to be flatly\\n invalid.[44])\\n In fact, many readers will doubtless feel that no such place exists\\nor will exist, because the reasoning here is amateurish. So then, what\\nabout the reasoning of professional philosophers on the matter? \",\n \"\\nBostrom has recently painted an exceedingly dark picture of a possible\\nfuture. He points out that the “first superintelligence”\\ncould have the capability\",\n \"\\nto shape the future of Earth-originating life, could easily have\\nnon-anthropomorphic final goals, and would likely have instrumental\\nreasons to pursue open-ended resource acquisition. If we now reflect\\nthat human beings consist of useful resources (such as conveniently\\nlocated atoms) and that we depend on many more local resources, we can\\nsee that the outcome could easily be one in which humanity quickly\\nbecomes extinct. (Bostrom 2014, p. 416)\\n\",\n \"\\n Clearly, the most vulnerable premise in this sort of argument\\nis that the “first superintelligence” will arrive indeed\\narrive. Here perhaps the Good-Chalmers argument provides a basis.\\n\",\n \"\\nSearle (2014) thinks Bostrom’s book is misguided and\\nfundamentally mistaken, and that we needn’t worry. His rationale\\nis dirt-simple: Machines aren’t conscious; Bostrom is alarmed at\\nthe prospect of malicious machines who do us in; a malicious machine\\nis by definition a conscious machine; ergo, Bostrom’s argument\\ndoesn’t work. Searle writes: \",\n \"\\nIf the computer can fly airplanes, drive cars, and win at chess, who\\ncares if it is totally nonconscious? But if we are worried about a\\nmaliciously motivated superintelligence destroying us, then it is\\nimportant that the malicious motivation should be real. Without\\nconsciousness, there is no possibiity of its being real.\\n\",\n \"\\nThe positively remarkable thing here, it seems to us, is that Searle\\nappears to be unaware of the brute fact that most AI engineers are\\nperfectly content to build machines on the basis of the AIMA\\nview of AI we presented and explained above: the view according to\\nwhich machines simply map percepts to actions. On this view, it\\ndoesn’t matter whether the machine really has desires;\\nwhat matters is whether it acts suitably on the basis of how AI\\nscientists engineer formal correlates to desire. An\\nautonomous machine with overwhelming destructive power that\\nnon-consciously “decides” to kill doesn’t become\\njust a nuisance because genuine, human-level, subjective desire is\\nabsent from the machine. If an AI can play the game of chess, and the\\ngame of Jeopardy!, it can certainly play the game of war. Just\\nas it does little good for a human loser to point out that the\\nvictorious machine in a game of chess isn’t conscious, it will\\ndo little good for humans being killed by machines to point out that\\nthese machines aren’t conscious. (It is interesting to note that\\nthe genesis of Joy’s paper was an informal conversation with\\nJohn Searle and Raymond Kurzweil. According to Joy, Searle\\ndidn’t think there was much to worry about, since he was (and\\nis) quite confident that tomorrow’s robots can’t be\\n conscious.[45])\\n \",\n \"\\nThere are some things we can safely say about tomorrow.\\nCertainly, barring some cataclysmic events (nuclear or biological\\nwarfare, global economic depression, a meteorite smashing into Earth,\\netc.), we now know that AI will succeed in producing artificial\\nanimals. Since even some natural animals (mules, e.g.) can be\\neasily trained to work for humans, it stands to reason that artificial\\nanimals, designed from scratch with our purposes in mind, will be\\ndeployed to work for us. In fact, many jobs currently done by humans\\nwill certainly be done by appropriately programmed artificial animals.\\nTo pick an arbitrary example, it is difficult to believe that\\ncommercial drivers won’t be artificial in the future. (Indeed,\\nDaimler is already running commercials in which they tout the ability\\nof their automobiles to drive “autonomously,” allowing\\nhuman occupants of these vehicles to ignore the road and read.) Other\\nexamples would include: cleaners, mail carriers, clerical workers,\\nmilitary scouts, surgeons, and pilots. (As to cleaners, probably a\\nsignificant number of readers, at this very moment, have robots from\\niRobot cleaning the carpets in their homes.) It is hard to see how\\nsuch jobs are inseparably bound up with the attributes often taken to\\nbe at the core of personhood – attributes that would be the most\\ndifficult for AI to\\n replicate.[46]\\n \",\n \"\\nAndy Clark (2003) has another prediction: Humans will gradually\\nbecome, at least to an appreciable degree, cyborgs, courtesy of\\nartificial limbs and sense organs, and implants. The main driver of\\nthis trend will be that while standalone AIs are often desirable, they\\nare hard to engineer when the desired level of intelligence is high.\\nBut to let humans “pilot” less intelligent machines is a\\ngood deal easier, and still very attractive for concrete reasons.\\nAnother related prediction is that AI would play the role of a\\ncognitive prosthesis for humans (Ford et al. 1997; Hoffman et al.\\n2001). The prosthesis view sees AI as a “great equalizer”\\nthat would lead to less stratification in society, perhaps similar to\\nhow the Hindu-Arabic numeral system made arithmetic available to the\\nmasses, and to how the Guttenberg press contributed to literacy\\nbecoming more universal. \",\n \"\\nEven if the argument is formally invalid, it leaves us with a question\\n– the cornerstone question about AI and the future: Will AI\\nproduce artificial creatures that replicate and exceed human cognition\\n(as Kurzweil and Joy believe)? Or is this merely an interesting\\nsupposition? \",\n \"\\nThis is a question not just for scientists and engineers; it is also a\\nquestion for philosophers. This is so for two reasons. One, research\\nand development designed to validate an affirmative answer must\\ninclude philosophy – for reasons rooted in earlier parts of the\\npresent entry. (E.g., philosophy is the place to turn to for robust\\nformalisms to model human propositional attitudes in machine terms.)\\nTwo, philosophers might well be able to provide arguments that answer\\nthe cornerstone question now, definitively. If a version of either of\\nthe three arguments against “Strong” AI alluded to above\\n(Searle’s CRA; the Gödelian attack; the Dreyfus argument)\\nare sound, then of course AI will not manage to produce machines\\nhaving the mental powers of persons. No doubt the future holds not\\nonly ever-smarter machines, but new arguments pro and con on the\\nquestion of whether this progress can reach the human level that\\nDescartes declared to be unreachable. \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"9. The Future\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":[" Adams, E. W., 1996, A Primer of Probability Logic,\nStanford, CA: CSLI. 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E., Hinton G. E., & Williams R. J., 1986\\n“Learning Representations by Back-propagating Errors,”\\nNature, 323.10: 533–536. \",\n \" Winston, P., 1992, Artificial Intelligence, Reading, MA:\\nAddison-Wesley. \",\n \" Wos, L., Overbeek, R., Lusk R. & Boyle, J., 1992,\\nAutomated Reasoning: Introduction and Applications (2nd\\nedition), New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. \",\n \" Wos, L., 2013, “The Legacy of a Great Researcher,” in\\nAutomated Reasoning and Mathematics: Essays in Memory of William\\nMcCune, Bonacina, M.P. & Stickel, M.E., eds., 1–14.\\nBerlin: Springer. \",\n \" Zalta, E., 1988, Intensional Logic and the Metaphysics of\\nIntentionality, Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books. \"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../logic-ai/","text":"artificial intelligence: logic and"},{"href":"../causation-probabilistic/","text":"causation: probabilistic"},{"href":"../chinese-room/","text":"Chinese room argument"},{"href":"../cognitive-science/","text":"cognitive science"},{"href":"../computability/","text":"computability and complexity"},{"href":"../computing-history/","text":"computing: modern history of"},{"href":"../connectionism/","text":"connectionism"},{"href":"../epistemology-bayesian/","text":"epistemology: Bayesian"},{"href":"../frame-problem/","text":"frame problem"},{"href":"../it-moral-values/","text":"information technology: and moral values"},{"href":"../language-thought/","text":"language of thought hypothesis"},{"href":"../learning-formal/","text":"learning theory, formal"},{"href":"../computational-linguistics/","text":"linguistics: computational"},{"href":"../computational-mind/","text":"mind: computational theory of"},{"href":"../reasoning-automated/","text":"reasoning: automated"},{"href":"../reasoning-defeasible/","text":"reasoning: defeasible"},{"href":"../statistics/","text":"statistics, philosophy of"},{"href":"../turing-test/","text":"Turing test"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../logic-ai/\",\n \"text\": \"artificial intelligence: logic and\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../causation-probabilistic/\",\n \"text\": \"causation: probabilistic\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../chinese-room/\",\n \"text\": \"Chinese room argument\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../cognitive-science/\",\n \"text\": \"cognitive science\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../computability/\",\n \"text\": \"computability and complexity\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../computing-history/\",\n \"text\": \"computing: modern history of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../connectionism/\",\n \"text\": \"connectionism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../epistemology-bayesian/\",\n \"text\": \"epistemology: Bayesian\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../frame-problem/\",\n \"text\": \"frame problem\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../it-moral-values/\",\n \"text\": \"information technology: and moral values\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../language-thought/\",\n \"text\": \"language of thought hypothesis\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../learning-formal/\",\n \"text\": \"learning theory, formal\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../computational-linguistics/\",\n \"text\": \"linguistics: computational\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../computational-mind/\",\n \"text\": \"mind: computational theory of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../reasoning-automated/\",\n \"text\": \"reasoning: automated\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../reasoning-defeasible/\",\n \"text\": \"reasoning: defeasible\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../statistics/\",\n \"text\": \"statistics, philosophy of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../turing-test/\",\n \"text\": \"Turing test\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":84,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"tense-aspect"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Tense and Aspect"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Tue Jan 7, 2014; substantive revision Mon Sep 17, 2018"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nMany languages have grammatical means to indicate the time when an\naction or event occurs, or when a state or process holds. This\nphenomenon is called tense. In English, for example, adding\nthe morpheme -ed to the verb walk, to form\nwalked, indicates that the event denoted by the verb occurred\nbefore the present time. What is called aspect, on the other\nhand, deals with the internal constituency of actions, events, states,\nprocesses or situations. For instance, it may indicate that an action\nis completed or still ongoing. English typically uses the\n-ing form of verbs to indicate ongoing processes, as in\nHe is building a house. ","\nAfter a short introduction to basic notions of tense and aspect we\nbriefly discuss temporal logic, and then Reichenbach’s famous\ndistinction between speech time, event time and reference\ntime. Event-based semantic theories treat events as ontological\nprimitives, so in the following section we show how time can be\nconstructed from event structures, as exemplified by the Russell-Kamp\nconstruction. These sections are followed by a discussion of the most\nimportant observations concerning lexical and grammatical aspect,\nincluding the famous imperfective paradox. Next we introduce two\nwidely discussed theories of temporality and show how they cope with\nthe imperfective paradox. This section is followed by one that shows\nhow temporal information is expressed in Artificial Intelligence\n(AI). We use the event calculus from AI to present a solution of the\nimperfective paradox, by viewing it as an instance of the frame\nproblem. The last section is devoted to gathering psycholinguistic\nevidence showing that at least some of the philosophical and semantic\nconcepts discussed in this article may be cognitively real. "],"string":"[\n \"\\nMany languages have grammatical means to indicate the time when an\\naction or event occurs, or when a state or process holds. This\\nphenomenon is called tense. In English, for example, adding\\nthe morpheme -ed to the verb walk, to form\\nwalked, indicates that the event denoted by the verb occurred\\nbefore the present time. What is called aspect, on the other\\nhand, deals with the internal constituency of actions, events, states,\\nprocesses or situations. For instance, it may indicate that an action\\nis completed or still ongoing. English typically uses the\\n-ing form of verbs to indicate ongoing processes, as in\\nHe is building a house. \",\n \"\\nAfter a short introduction to basic notions of tense and aspect we\\nbriefly discuss temporal logic, and then Reichenbach’s famous\\ndistinction between speech time, event time and reference\\ntime. Event-based semantic theories treat events as ontological\\nprimitives, so in the following section we show how time can be\\nconstructed from event structures, as exemplified by the Russell-Kamp\\nconstruction. These sections are followed by a discussion of the most\\nimportant observations concerning lexical and grammatical aspect,\\nincluding the famous imperfective paradox. Next we introduce two\\nwidely discussed theories of temporality and show how they cope with\\nthe imperfective paradox. This section is followed by one that shows\\nhow temporal information is expressed in Artificial Intelligence\\n(AI). We use the event calculus from AI to present a solution of the\\nimperfective paradox, by viewing it as an instance of the frame\\nproblem. The last section is devoted to gathering psycholinguistic\\nevidence showing that at least some of the philosophical and semantic\\nconcepts discussed in this article may be cognitively real. \"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Introduction","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. Temporal Logic","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"3. Speech Time, Event Time and Reference Time","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"4. From Events to Time","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"5. Lexical and Grammatical Aspect","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"6. Intensionality versus Events","sub_toc":["6.1 Nominal Reference and Temporal Constitution"]},{"content_title":"7. Event Calculus","sub_toc":["7.1 The Yale Shooting Scenario","7.2 The completion of a program","7.3 Introducing tense information","7.4 The imperfective paradox reconsidered"]},{"content_title":"8. Cognitive aspects","sub_toc":["8.1 Lexical Aspect","8.2 Grammatical Aspect"]},{"content_title":"9. Conclusion","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Introduction\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Temporal Logic\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Speech Time, Event Time and Reference Time\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. From Events to Time\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Lexical and Grammatical Aspect\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. Intensionality versus Events\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"6.1 Nominal Reference and Temporal Constitution\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"7. Event Calculus\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"7.1 The Yale Shooting Scenario\",\n \"7.2 The completion of a program\",\n \"7.3 Introducing tense information\",\n \"7.4 The imperfective paradox reconsidered\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"8. Cognitive aspects\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"8.1 Lexical Aspect\",\n \"8.2 Grammatical Aspect\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"9. Conclusion\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\nTense roughly means reference to the time at which events\ntake place, or at which processes or states hold. English, for\nexample, clearly distinguishes between past and non-past tense as in\n(1a) and (1b) and (1c). ","\nIn English, verb forms are typically used to signal the time\nwhen an action or event occurs or a state holds. Thus in (1a), John’s\npromise was given before the present time, in (1b) the promising is\nsimultaneous with the present time and (1c) says that the student’s\nwork on his thesis will occur at some time after the present. It\nshould be noted that the verb forms used to express temporal\ninformation may also be used to signal information that is not purely\ntemporal. For instance, the present tense form in John walks\n\n\ncharacterizes a certain habit of John. And in the statement The\ntrain departs at five o’clock tomorrow, the present verb form\nclearly has a futurate meaning. So English distinguishes between past\nand non-past but not between future and non-future. Moreover, many\nlinguists exclude future as a pure tense, because the auxiliary\nwill may be used to express volition as in He will go\nswimming in dangerous\n water.[1]","\nApart from absolute tense—exemplified by\n(1a)–(1c)—where the reference point from which the\nlocation in time is evaluated is the present, there is also\n\nrelative tense where the reference point is not necessarily\nthe present but may be given by context. Thus in a sentence like\nThe student had worked on his thesis the student’s work took\nplace at a time before a reference point in the past, in contrast to\n(1c) where the reference point is the present. Other instances of\nrelative tense in English are the present perfect and the future\nperfect in (2a) respectively (2b). ","\nThe notion of aspect according to Comrie refers to\n“[the] different ways of viewing the internal temporal\nconstituency of a situation” (1976: 3). It is customary to\ndistinguish between lexical and grammatical aspect.\nThe following are examples concerning lexical aspect. Since Vendler\n(1967) linguists distinguish at least four aspectual classes. These\nare states like know, activities like run,\naccomplishments like cross the street and achievements\nexemplified by a verb like recognize. Accomplishments\ndescribe the internal temporal constituency of a situation in a more\ndetailed way than (say) activities. Crossing the street, for\nexample, includes the starting of a crossing activity which goes on\nfor some time and involves a result state that is characterized by\nbeing on the other side of the street. No such elaborate descriptions\nare necessary for activities or achievements. There are grammatical\nmeans of distinguishing between these aspectual classes. For example,\nstates and achievements cannot occur with the progressive while\nactivities and accomplishments can; more about this below in\n Section 5.\n\n\n These differences are customarily considered to be lexical\ndifferences and this area is therefore dubbed lexical aspect.\n","\nA further crucial aspectual difference is that between perfective and\nimperfective aspect. Comrie characterizes these notions as follows.\n","\n\n…perfectivity indicates the view of the situation as a single\nwhole, without distinction of the various separate phases that make up\nthat situation, while the imperfective pays essential attention to the\ninternal structure of the situation. (Comrie 1976: 16) \n","\nIn English this difference is often expressed by grammatical\nmeans, for instance by past tense versus past progressive. This is an\ninstance of grammatical aspect. Slavic language often have an\nelaborate grammatical system to signal the difference between\nimperfectivity (ipv) and perfectivity (pv). Here is an example from Russian. ","\nSentence (3b) presents the writing of a letter as a single whole and\nit is clear that this activity was finished when the letter was brought to the\npost office. By contrast, (3a) focuses on an ongoing activity of\nletter writing in the past which is not completed because of the\ninterruption. In fact it is consistent with the truth of (3a) that the\nletter was never completely written. ","\nThe natural language categories tense and aspect\n\n\nembody the linguistic encoding of time. From a typological point of\nview these categories are typical verbal\n categories.[2]\n This means that if these categories are morphologically realized in a\nlanguage then these morphemes attach to the verb. Verbs usually\nexpress events, processes, actions or\n states[3]\n and the temporal morphemes locate these eventualities in time. Of\ncourse this does not mean that languages that lack such morphemes are\nnot able to express temporal relations. They just have to choose other\nmeans for this purpose. One famous example of a language not\ncontaining temporal morphology is Mandarin Chinese. Often tense and\naspect cannot be clearly separated. For example the Quiché\nprefix \\(x-\\) denotes a completed (aspect) action in the past\n (tense).[4]\n\n\n ","\nTypologists also observed an asymmetry between past and future. Most\nlanguages that possess temporal morphology use these means to\ndifferentiate between past and non-past. There are, however, a few\nlanguages which use temporal morphology to distinguish between future\nand non-future. ","\nWe will not go into further details concerning the linguistic\nrealization of tense and aspect, but present a brief and necessarily\nincomplete review of major philosophical and semantic theories of\nthese notions. "],"section_title":"1. Introduction","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nTemporal logic was introduced by Arthur Prior (see for instance Prior\n1967). Here we will sketch only propositional temporal logic (for a\nmore thorough introduction the reader is advised to consult Gamut\n1991: chapters 2 and 3) and the entry on\n temporal logic.\n\n\n Temporal logic introduces operators \\(\\bG\\), \\(\\bH\\), \\(\\bF\\) and\n\\(\\bP\\), which are similar to the modal operators \\(\\Box\\) and \\(\\Diamond\\).\nWe summarize the intuitive meaning of these operators in Table 1. ","\nBy adding the above operators to propositional logic we extend\npropositional logic to propositional temporal logic. Let \\(q\\)\nabbreviate the sentence Sam is working, then we are able to\nexpress the following verb tenses in temporal logic: ","\nA model \\(\\sM\\) for propositional temporal logic consists of a\nnonempty set \\(T\\) of moments of time, an earlier than relation\n\\(\\prec\\) and a valuation function \\(I\\) which for each moment of\ntime and each proposition letter \\(q\\) assigns a truth value\n\\(I_{\\sM ,t}(q)\\). The following\ndefinition characterizes \\(I_{\\sM ,t}(\\phi)\\)\nfor the temporal operators. ","\nThese clauses are analogous to the clauses which define the modal\noperators \\(\\Box\\) and \\(\\Diamond\\)—with \\(\\bG\\) and \\(\\bH\\)\ncorresponding to \\(\\Box\\), and \\(\\bF\\) and \\(\\bP\\) to \\(\\Diamond\\)—but\ninstead of possible worlds the valuation function takes moments of\ntime as arguments. Therefore principle (5) is valid in any model,\nsince the modal analogue is valid for \\(\\Box\\) independently of the\naccessibility relation. ","\nHowever, principle (6), which is often considered as valid for\n\\(\\Box\\), is presumably not valid for \\(\\bG\\). ","\nFormula (6) is equivalent to \\(\\phi \\rightarrow \\bF\\phi\\). The latter\nformula says that if \\(\\phi\\) is the case then \\(\\phi\\) will be the case,\nwhich is intuitively incorrect. Suppose that \\(\\prec\\) is irreflexive;\nthis assumption makes sense since it means that no time point is\nearlier than itself. But under this assumption, Principle (6) is\nobviously wrong. For extensions of temporal logic and more examples\nconcerning the correspondence between properties of models and the\nvalidity or invalidity of formulas see Gamut 1991: chapter 2.","\nThis concludes our brief remarks about temporal logic. We now turn to\nan alternative approach due to the philosopher Hans Reichenbach. "],"section_title":"2. Temporal Logic","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nThe notions speech time, event time, and\n\nreference time were introduced by Reichenbach (1947) in order\nto distinguish simple past and present perfect or, more generally,\nabsolute and relative tense. According to Comrie (1985), who refined\nReichenbach’s system (in Chapter 6 of his book on tense) speech time\nand event time are sufficient for the analysis of absolute\ntime; i.e., present, (simple) past and future. But for\nrelative tense—of which the present perfect is but one\nexample—reference time is required. Let us explain these notions\nby applying them to distinguish between past and present perfect. ","\nConsider the following examples from Steedman (1997). ","\nIt has often been observed that the present perfect in English has\npresent relevance. For instance the continuation of (7a) with but\nI have found it again is infelicitous in English; the German\ntranslation of this sequence is acceptable, showing that the German\nperfect is more like a past tense (but see Kamp et al. 2015 for an\nextensive discussion, in Other Internet Resources). The same\ncontinuation is fine for sentence (7b). In this sense the perfect is a\nrelative tense and the past an absolute tense in English. Let \\(E\\)\nbe short for event time and let \\(S, R\\) stand for speech\ntime and reference time respectively. ","\nFor the simple past, both event time and reference time are situated\non the time line before speech time. In case of the perfect, R and S\nare simultaneous and E is earlier than both R and S. Intuitively,\nreference time represents the perspective from which an eventuality is\nperceived on the time line. This is not a purely semantic theory of\ntense like temporal logic, rather it is a pragmatic theory of tense.\nIn particular, reference time (in contrast to event time) has to be\nmutually known by communication partners. When using the present\nperfect, reference time is known since it coincides with speech time.\nHowever, reference time is not necessarily known when the past tense\nis used, since it is just required to be earlier than speech time and\nto coincide with event time. This may explain why sentences in the\npast sound strange when uttered out of the blue. Steedman (1997)\npresents the following examples: ","\nThe past-tensed sentence (8a) uttered out of the blue is infelicitous,\nwhile sentence (8b) is fine, since in this case the\nwhen-clause introduces the reference time.","\nThis is by no means the complete story of the perfect. For example,\nComrie (1976) distinguishes four typical uses of the perfect: the\nperfect of result, the experiential perfect, the perfect of persistent\nsituation and the perfect of recent past. For an extensive recent\ndiscussion the reader is advised to consult Kamp et al. 2015 (in Other\nInternet Resources). ","\n\n\nThe following table summarizes the positions of event time, reference\ntime and speech time for other tenses: ","\nComrie (1985) and Gamut (1991) point out that this cannot be a\ncomplete account for temporal constructions that occur in natural\nlanguages. For instance the temporal profile of the sentence Sam\nwould have worked cannot be analyzed by using a single reference\ntime. This is one reason for the extended requirements for a formal\ntheory of tense proposed by Comrie (1985: chapter 6). Furthermore, \nBlackburn and Jørgensen (2016) combine the key insights of Prior \nand Reichenbach in the framework of hybrid tense logic suggesting that \nthe two approaches are fully compatible with each other."],"section_title":"3. Speech Time, Event Time and Reference Time","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["In event semantics following Davidson (1967) events are commonly\ntaken as ontological primitives. This raises the philosophical\nquestion how events and times relate to each other. A construction,\ndue to Russell, Wiener and Kamp, shows that the time line can be\nconstructed from events. We will briefly sketch this construction\nbefore we move on to lexical and grammatical aspect.","Russell remarked:","\n\n\n\nEven if there be a physical world such as the mathematical theory of\nmotion presupposes, impressions on our sense-organs produce sensations\nwhich are not merely and strictly instantaneous, and therefore the\nobjects of sense of which we are immediately conscious are not\nstrictly instantaneous. Instants, therefore, are not among the data of\nexperience and must be either inferred or constructed. It is difficult\nto see how they can be validly inferred; thus we are left with the\nalternative that they must be constructed. (Russell 1914: lecture\nIV)\n","Kamp (1979)\ntook up Russell’s ideas and slightly modified them. The construction\ntakes event structures as primitives from which the structure of time,\ni.e., a total order, can be derived. ","\nAn event structure \\(\\langle E, P, O\\rangle\\) simply\nconsists of a set of events \\(E\\) and the relations \\(P\\)\n(precedes) and \\(O\\) (overlaps) and is\ncharacterized by axioms A1–7. ","\nGiven an event structure satisfying these axioms, the set of instants\nand their strict linear ordering can be constructed according to\ndefinition 2. The idea is to identify an instant with the maximal set\nof pairwise overlapping events. Instants are thus conceived of as\nabstractions over events that happen (or go on) simultaneously. Events\nlinked by the precedence relation will give rise to distinct instants.\n","\n\nWe will first illustrate the Russell-Kamp construction by way of an\nexample and then show that \\(\\langle I,\\lt \\rangle\\) has the\nproperties specified in Theorem 1: it is a strict linear ordering\nwhich gives rise to an interval structure. ","\nExample 1. Let \\(E = \\{a, b, c, d, e\\}\\) and \\(P\\) be the\nset of ordered pairs \\(\\{(a, c), (a, d), (a, e), (b, e), (c,\ne)\\}\\). Given A7, the relation \\(O\\) consists of the set of pairs\n\\(\\{(a, b), (b, c), (b, d), (c, d), (d, e)\\}\\). \\(E\\) contains three\nmaximal subsets of pairwise overlapping events, that is, instants\n\\(i_1 = \\{a, b\\}\\), \\(i_2 = \\{b, c, d\\}\\) and \\(i_3 = \\{d,\ne\\}\\). Furthermore, \\(i_1\\), \\(i_2\\) and \\(i_3\\) are linearly ordered\nas \\(i_1 \\lt i_2 \\lt i_3\\) because \\(a \\in i_1\\), \\(c \\in i_2\\) and\n\\(P(a, c)\\) hence \\(i_1 \\lt i_2\\), and \\(c \\in i_2\\), \\(e \\in i_3\\)\nand \\(P(c, e)\\) hence \\(i_2 \\lt i_3\\), and similarly for \\(i_1 \\lt\ni_3.\\) \n","\nA proof of the following theorem can be found in (Kamp 1979: 379).\n","\nOnce having constructed the set \\(I\\) it is possible to define time\nintervals and these, in turn, can be used to measure the temporal\nextent of an event. In Example 1, for example, \\(a\\) goes\non in the interval [\\(i_1], b\\) in\n[\\(i_1, i_2], c\\) in\n[\\(i_2], d\\) in [\\(i_2,\ni_3\\)] and \\(e\\) in [\\(i_3\\)].\nCorollary 1 guarantees that these intervals can be constructed (Kamp\n1979: 379). ","\nProof: If \\(i_1, i_2 \\in e'\\) and \\(i_1 \\lt i \\lt i_2\\), it has to be\nshown that \\(e \\in i\\), too. Suppose it is not. Then there is \\(d \\in\ni\\) such that \\(\\neg O(d, e)\\), hence \\(P(d, e)\\) or \\(P(e, d)\\). In\nthe first case \\(i \\lt i_1\\) and in the second case \\(i_2 \\lt\ni\\). Both yield a contradiction.\\(\\Box\\) ","\nWe cannot give further details here, but refer the interested reader\nto Thomason (1986) who discusses how to construct time as a\ncontinuum—isomorphic to the real numbers—and uses a\ndifferent construction originally proposed by Walker (1947). Empirical\nevidence for events being ontological primitives will be presented in\n section 8\nwhere we review psychological studies on event perception. We will now\nmove to lexical and grammatical aspect, that is the expression of event\ntypes and how a given event is conceptualized, which form basic\nconcepts in linguistic theory."],"section_title":"4. From Events to Time","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nLinguists distinguish four or five lexical aspectual classes or\nAktionsarten. The following four were introduced by the\nphilosopher Zeno Vendler (1967: chapter four) on the basis of earlier\nwork by philosophers such as Kenny, Ryle and Aristotle (see also the\n entry on events). For a formal\ndefinition of Aktionsart the reader is referred to van\nLambalgen and Hamm (2005: 85 ff). ","\nIn addition, linguists often assume that verbs like flash,\nspot and blink form an extra class—the class\nof semelfactives or points (see Smith 1991). ","\nA useful notion for distinguishing Aktionarten is the\nevent nucleus introduced by Moens and Steedman (1988). The\nevent nucleus is constructed from a preparatory phase, a culminating\nevent and a consequent phase. Activities only refer to the preparatory\nphase, states only to the consequent phase, achievements to the\nculminating event and to the consequent phase and finally\naccomplishments to all three parts of the event nucleus. ","\n\nVendler proposed several linguistic tests for distinguishing these\nverb classes. We will present only the most important ones here; for a\nmuch more comprehensive list the reader is referred to Dowty (1979: 60).\nThe first test separates non-statives from statives. Only non-statives\noccur in the progressive. ","\nAccomplishment verbs prefer \\(in\\)-adverbials as temporal\nmodifiers, whereas activity verbs allow only\nfor-adverbials.","\nAchievement verbs are usually infelicitous with\n\nfor-adverbials but allow the combination with\n\\(in\\)-adverbials. ","\nThe last test we mention here concerns the different entailment\npatterns of activities and accomplishments in the progressive.\nActivities in the past progressive entail their past reading but\naccomplishments in the past progressive don’t. ","\nThis is an instance of the famous imperfective paradox. Of course,\ntaken literally this is not a paradox. Nevertheless the entailment\npatterns (12) and (13) pose a significant problem for any formal\ntheory of tense and aspect. For instance, the first formal proposal\nfor truth conditions of sentences in the past progressive stated that\na sentence S in the past progressive is true if and only if there\nexists an open interval before the speech time at which the sentence\nwithout the progressive is true. According to definition 1.4 this\nimmediately validates pattern (12) but without qualifications this\ntruth definition does not account for pattern (13). Sections\n 6\n and\n 7\ncontain extensive discussion of the imperfective paradox. ","\nVendler thought of the Aktionarten as lexical properties of\nverbs. That this position is dubious was pointed out by many\nlinguists, in particular by Dowty (1979) and Verkuyl (1993). For a\nsimple case, consider the verb drink. If we assume that being\nan activity is a lexical property of this verb, then surely by\ncombining it with the noun wine this property is preserved\nfor the complex phrase drink wine. However, if we combine the\nverb drink with the noun phrase a bottle of wine we\nturn an activity into an accomplishment. The converse problem arises\nif we assume that being an accomplishment is a lexical property of\n\ndrink. This phenomenon of aspectual reinterpretation was\ndubbed coercion in Moens and Steedman (1988). In\n Section 6.1 \nwe will sketch a systematic solution for these types of coercion\n in mereological semantics (Krifka 1989, 1992). ","\nAktionsart is not even definitely fixed at the VP-level. The\nverb arrive in ","\nis an achievement, as demonstrated by the ungrammaticality of (14-b).\nBut if we choose a bare plural as subject it is turned into an\nactivity and sentence (15) is grammatical. ","\nTherefore a final decision about aspectual class cannot be reached\nbelow the sentence level. Steedman’s famous sentence (16) ","\nshows that coercion can be iterated and that aspectual class can\nswitch back and forth in this iteration process. We close this section\nwith two further examples of aspectual coercion. In the first one a\nstative verb is transformed into an activity.","\nThe verb resemble is a stative verb and therefore (17a) is\nunacceptable but (17b) is fine. ","\nHowever, if we add more and more every day to (17a) thus\nforming ","\n\nwe get an acceptable result. This is due to the phrase more and\nmore every day which coerces a state into an activity. Our last\nexample is about temporal modification with for-adverbials.\nAs pointed out above accomplishments are usually rather bad with\nfor-adverbials. They require \\(in\\)-adverbials. But\nconsider sentence (19) from van Lambalgen and Hamm (2005). ","\nThis sentence seems to be fine. However it is not interpreted as an\naccomplishment any more but is reinterpreted as an iterated activity.\nTo get this reading, a lot of non-linguistic knowledge is required.\nFirst, one has to guess that Opus 111 refers to Beethoven’s last piano\nsonata and moreover one has to be aware that this piece lasts about 25\nminutes. Under these assumptions, sentence (19) says that Pollini\nplayed Opus 111 repeatedly within a time span of two weeks. Formal\naccounts of coercion phenomena are contained in Egg (2005), van\nLambalgen and Hamm (2005) and Steedman (1997) among others. The reader\nis also advised to consult Steedman’s updated manuscript, The\nProductions of Time (see the Other Internet Resources).\nProcessing studies of coercion are reviewed in Bott (2010); see also\n Section 8.\n\n "],"section_title":"5. Lexical and Grammatical Aspect","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\nThe most influential approach to solving the imperfective paradox is\ndue to Dowty (1979). The basic idea is to treat the progressive as a\nmodal operator \\((\\Box)\\) but restrict its domain to inertia worlds.\nThe notion of an inertia world is characterized informally.\nAn inertia world is exactly like the real world up to the time of\nevaluation; after this it may differ from the real world but is\nassumed to be as similar to the real world as possible. Given this\nnotion, the following definition introduces truth conditions for\nsentences in the progressive. ","\nDefinition 3 does not yet account for the different entailment\npatterns of activities and accomplishments. Two additional assumptions\nare required. The first concerns activities; the second,\naccomplishments. ","\nAccomplishments like Mary draw a circle are split up into two\nparts, an activity part Mary draw that satisfies principle\n(20) and a result part which is characterized by the existence of a\ncircle. Both parts are connected by a causality relation\n\nCAUSE. ","\nThus an accomplishment has a richer internal structure than an\nactivity. ","\nWith these additional requirements, the inference patterns for\nactivities and accomplishments follow. Let us first show that Mary\nwas pushing a cart implies Mary pushed a cart. Assume\nthat the first sentence is true in \\(w\\) with respect to speech time\n\\(S\\). Then Mary be pushing a cart is true in \\(w\\) with\nrespect to an interval \\(I\\) before \\(S\\). According to Definition 3,\nMary push a cart is then true in every inertia world \\(w' \\in\nIE(w)\\) with respect to an interval \\(I' \\supseteq I\\). Because of\npostulate (20), Mary push a cart is true in every \\(w' \\in\nIE(w)\\) with respect to interval \\(I \\ (I\\) is a subinterval of\n\\(I')\\). Now, the definition of inertia worlds implies that\n\nMary push a cart is true in \\(w\\) with respect to interval\n\\(I\\). This means that Mary pushed a cart is true in\n\\(w\\) with respect to speech time \\(S\\). ","\nA completely analogous argument shows that Mary was drawing a\ncircle implies Mary drew. But postulate (20) only holds\nfor the first part of accomplishments; the result part is only\nrequired to hold in every inertia world \\(w'\\) with respect\nto a larger interval \\(I'\\), normally one after speech time.\nSince the inertia worlds after \\(S\\) may differ from \\(w\\) and\nsince the subinterval property (20) is not required to hold for the\nresult parts of accomplishments, the stronger conclusion that Mary\ndrew a circle does not follow. ","\nMany researchers assume that inertia worlds introduce a notion of\nnormality for the semantic analysis of the progressive. The\nthunderbolt in example (22) from Landman (1992) seems to break the\nnormal development of the real world. Dowty’s analysis seems to be\ntailored for cases like this one. ","\n\nHowever, objections have been raised to the normality interpretation\nof inertia. The first one is attributed to Frank Vlach in Ogihara\n(1990). Consider sentence (23) ","\nand a situation in which the truck is only a few centimeters away from\nJohn. Moreover the truck’s speed is such that it is impossible for it\nto stop before hitting John. In this situation, the normal course of\nevents is such that John will never reach the other side of the\nstreet. Therefore, given definition 3, sentence (23) should be false\nunder these circumstances. This is intuitively incorrect. A similar\nobjection was raised by Bonomi (1997).","\nOn the other hand, the normality interpretation seems to be at least\nquestionable. Consider the following example from Naumann and\nPiñón (1997). ","\nThis does presumably not mean that when you are running across a\nminefield, you normally will eventually get to the other side.","\nNote that these objections all make use of a particular informal\ninterpretation of the notion inertia. Judging the validity of\nthese objections to Dowty’s theory in a precise way therefore requires\nan explicit theory of this notion with exact empirical predictions.\n","\nDowty analyzes the progressive as an intensional construction. Does\nthe progressive satisfy the standard philosophical tests for\nintensional constructions, that is, the invalidity of substitution of\nco-designative proper names and the impossibility of pulling the\nexistential quantifier out of the context created by the intensional\nconstruction (see Bealer and Mönnich (1989) for a more detailed\ndiscussion)? Let us consider accomplishments, for example sentence\n(25). ","\nGiven that Ruth Rendel and Barbara Vine are co-designative proper\nnames, sentence (25) implies that Jackson Pollock was painting\nBarbara Vine. Therefore the first test fails. Co-designative\nproper names are substitutable salva veritate in progressive\nconstructions. The second one, however, applies, since ","\ndoes not imply that there is a house that Carlos was building. These\ntests therefore don’t provide a clear answer to the question whether\nthe progressive is an intensional construction. Even if the answer is\nyes, the progressive is certainly a different type of intensional\nconstruction than, for example, propositional attitudes like\nbelieve or doubt. ","\nAn extensional alternative was developed by Parsons (1989, 1990).\nParsons, like Davidson (1967), assumes that first-order quantification\nover events is possible. But unlike Davidson, Parsons assumes\nquantification over eventualities in the sense of Bach (1986), which\nincludes events proper but also states, processes and so on. Like\nDowty, Parsons supposes that eventualities are split up into a\ndevelopment phase and a culmination phase. In order to represent this\ndifference in first-order logic two new predicates are introduced,\nCul\\((e, t)\\) and Hold\\((e,\nt)\\). The intuitive meaning of the first is that eventuality\n\\(e\\) culminates at time \\(t\\). The second one says that\n\\(e\\) is either an eventuality in its development phase or that\n\\(e\\) is a state. Given these assumptions a sentence like Mary\ndrew a circle is translated into first-order formula (27),\n\\(S\\) is again short for speech time. ","\nThe semantic effect of the progressive consists in transforming events\ninto states. ","\nIf ‘\\(A\\)’ is an event verb, then ‘be\n\\(A\\)-ing’ is to be treated semantically as a state verb;\notherwise, ‘be \\(A\\)-ing’ is to be treated the same as\n‘\\(A\\)’. (Parsons 1989: 222) ","\nWith this assumption the logical representation of Mary was\ndrawing a circle is (28). ","\nObviously (27) does not follow from (28). But (28) does imply that\nthere is a circle Mary was drawing. Of course this circle may not be\ncomplete. This means that Parson’s ontology is bound to include\nincomplete objects. For a discussion of incomplete objects see for\ninstance Baggio and van Lambalgen (2007).","\nAccording to the quotation above, the progressive doesn’t change\nanything in the case of activities. Therefore Mary pushed a\ncart and Mary was pushing a cart are predicted to be\nequivalent. ","\nParsons’ theory rests on the difference between the predicates\n\nCul and Hold. This difference is left to intuition.\nNo axiomatisation of these predicates is given. This is one of the\nobjections made in Zucchi (1999). Zucchi also notes that under certain\ncircumstances it is possible to derive a specific version of the\nimperfective paradox in Parsons’ theory. A careful discussion of\nDowty’ and Parsons’ approaches and a combination of the two systems is\ncontained in Landman (1992).","Another approach to the imperfective paradox and - more generally -\nnon-culminating accomplishments was proposed by Copley and Harley\n(2015). They abandon event semantics and propose instead a framework\nusing situations and forces as primitives. Forces lead to transitions\nbetween situations. Their theory is motivated by the observation that\nacross languages, non-culminating accomplishments are\ncrosslinguistically in fact a very common phenomenon. Interestingly,\nthese non-culminating readings are per default conveyed by less complex\nexpressions than complete events. Often, it is the perfective and not\nthe imperfective that is marked linguistically. Prima facie, this is a\nproblem for analyses such as Dowty's which assume that the imperfective\nparadox in accomplishments hinges on an additional operator such as\nPROG. This is where Copley and Harley's causal analysis comes into\nplay. Their force-theoretic account does not run into this problem\nbecause causally efficacious forces always take effects ceteris\nparibus, for instance, an effect may not occur do to the occurrence of a\ncounter force preventing the effect. They develop a compositional\nsemantic framework linking forces to the argument structure of the\nsentence. At the present stage of the theory, however, some of the\nbasic concepts also call for axiomatisation. For instance, it is\ncrucial to gain a proper understanding of what it means for a situation\nto be a ceteribus paribus successor situation for some initial\nsituation. For this purpose, their semantic framework must be connected\nto a theory of causality connecting linguistic meaning to cognition and\ncausal reasoning via a conceptual level integrating the two.","We will come back to the imperfective\nparadox in\n Section 7\n where we combine linguistic theory with event theories from artificial\n intelligence. This will give us a formalization of\n ceteris paribus from which a\n new solution to the imperfective paradox will follow."],"section_title":"6. Intensionality versus Events","subsections":[{"content":["Let us now show that events are also useful for a systematic\naccount of certain types of coercion that were mentioned\nabove in Section 5.","Intuitively\nthere is a close link between the nominal predicates wine and a bottle\nof wine and their verbal counterparts (29-a), (29-b)."," \nWhenever there are two entities to which wine applies, this\npredicate applies to their collection as well. The predicate a\nbottle of wine does not have this property. Whenever there are\ntwo different entities to which a bottle of wine applies,\nthis predicate does not apply to their collection. The first predicate\nis cumulative (see Definition 4) the second is\nquantized (see Definition 5). A similar argumentation applies\nto the difference between the activity drink wine and the\naccomplishment drink a bottle of wine. It was observed by\nmany linguists that the combination of a verb like drink with\na cumulative predicate like wine yields an atelic predicate\nlike (29-a), whereas its combination with a quantized predicate yields\na telic predicate like in (29-b).","\nIn order to account for these intuitions in a precise way Krifka assumes\nthat the parts of the structure \\(\\mathcal{M} = (\\mathfrak{O},\n\\mathfrak{E}, \\mathfrak{T})\\) consisting of objects \\(\\mathfrak{O}\\),\nevents \\(\\mathfrak{E}\\) and times \\(\\mathfrak{T}\\) are each structured\nas complete join semi-lattices without a bottom element (see Grätzer,\n1978). This means that we have a two place relation \\(\\sqcup\\) (join)\nand relations \\(\\sqsubseteq\\), \\(\\sqsubset\\), and \\(\\bigcirc\\) (part,\nproper part and overlap) that impose part-whole relations (mereologies,\nsee the entry mereology)\non the sets of objects, events and times. We cannot list all the\nproperties that must hold for these structures to serve as admissible\ninterpretations of natural language but we illustrate these properties\nby giving two examples.","\nDefinitions 4 and 5 now allow for a formal descripion of the\nreferential difference between wine and a bottle of\nwine.","For verbal predicates Krifka assumes that they are event denoting\nand moreover that thematic relations\nlike agent, theme, etc are represented as in\n(31-b). Thematic roles of verbs are crucial since they determine which\nverbs give raise to the drink wine versus drink a bottle\nof wine\n distinction.[5]","It\nis now straightforward to fix the reference of the verbal predicates in\na way that exhibits their simlarity to the respective nominal\npredicates.","\nCumulativity of nominal predicates corresponds to atelicity in the\nverbal domain and a quantized nominal predicate corresponds to a telic\nverbal predicate.","\nThere is still something missing. How can the impact of the reference\nof the nominal predicates on the aspectual class be derived formally?\nWe will present only the basic idea of Krifka's construction here. Let\n\\(w\\) be the predicate corresponding to wine and let \\(e\\) be the event predicate representing drink wine. The basic idea is that an object is changed by the influence of such an event in a gradual\nmanner. Since we know that \\(w\\) is cumulative this predicate also\napplies to proper parts of \\(w\\), say \\(w'\\). Then given that drink wine\ncan be applied to \\(e\\) it should also be possible to apply it to a\nproper part of \\(e\\), say \\(e'\\). Quantized predicates show a different\nbehaviour. Since a bottle of wine is quantized no proper part of it is a bottle of wine and therefore no proper part of \\(e\\) can be described as drink a bottle of wine.\nTo account for this intuitive explanation in formal terms it is\nnecessary to specify certain preservation properties for thematic roles\nsince these roles relate the algebraic structure of events and the\nalgebraic structure of objects. This means that notions like summativity, uniqueness of objects etc. have to be defined for relations between events and objects; i.e. thematic roles.","\nHere we will illustrate these concepts with only one example, summativity (SUM).","\nSummativity says that the sum-operation \\(\\sqcup\\) on\nevents and objects is preserved under summative relations on events and\nobjects. For instance if we have two distinct events of drinking a bottle of wine we get an event of drinking two bottles of wine.","\nWith this formal background it is now possible to state exactly when a\npredicate of events corresponding to a verb-phrase is cumulative, telic\netc.. Again we will just state one result. Let \\(\\phi = \\{ e|\\exists\nx(\\alpha(e) \\wedge \\delta(x) \\wedge \\theta(e, x))\\}\\) be such a\npredicate where \\(\\alpha\\) represents a verb - say draw - \\(\\delta\\) the nominal predicate - pictures - and \\(\\theta\\) a thematic relation - say theme.\nIt then follows that one set of conditions for \\(\\phi\\) being\ncumulative is that \\(\\delta\\) is cumulative and \\(\\theta\\) is\nsummative. An example is the verb phrase draw pictures. Similar results characterize, iterative, telic, atelic etc. readings.","\nThis concludes our glimpse of events in linguistic semantics; Readers interested in a more comprehensive treatment of this issue may find Champollion (2014, see Other Internet Resources) a useful contemporary source. We now come back to the imperfective paradox and turn to an\nevent calculus that was developed in artificial intelligence."],"subsection_title":"6.1 Nominal Reference and Temporal Constitution"}]},{"main_content":["\nIn the following section we will show that the imperfective paradox is\nan instance of the frame problem prominent in Artificial Intelligence\n(AI). To this end we will explain the event calculus, which is an\nextension of McCarthy’s situation calculus (McCarthy 1977) developed\nby Kowalski and Sergot (1986). Then we will indicate how the event\ncalculus leads to a formalization of natural language tense and aspect\nby analysing the imperfective paradox. ","\nConsider narrative (33). ","\nAssuming that shooting at somebody with a loaded gun will lead to the\ndeath of that person, we will interpret the discourse in a way that\nFred eventually gets killed. Arriving at this inference is, however,\nnot a trivial task. In (33) the frame problem is exemplified in the\nform of the Yale Shooting Scenario (Hanks and McDermott 1986). To\ndemonstrate this, we will start with a very simple calculus—a\nvariant of the Simple Event Calculus by Shanahan (1997) which\nonly incorporates a very basic notion of instantaneous change. Later\nwe will add axioms in order to deal with continuous change and then\nreturn to the imperfective paradox. In short, we will argue that the\nparadox can be viewed as an instance of the frame problem. "],"section_title":"7. Event Calculus","subsections":[{"content":["\nSuppose we have three kinds of actions/events—Load,\nSmoke and Shoot—and three time dependent\nproperties, the fluents Alive, Loaded and\n Dead.[6]\n Besides actions and fluents we will also need instants of time in our\nbasic ontology. The predicates listed in Table 4 are used to express\nactions and their effects and to locate them in time. ","\nThe predicates are related to each other by a set of four simple\naxioms (34)–(37). In these axioms, all variables are assumed to be universally\nquantified with maximal scope. We will come to the semantics of the\nimplication when we have introduced the complete scenario. ","\n The first three axioms state the conditions\nunder which a fluent can hold at a time \\(t\\): either it holds\nright from the start or it is initiated at a time \\(t_1\\)\nbefore \\(t\\) without a terminating action occurring in between the\ntwo. The fourth axiom defines the predicate Clipped\\((t_1,\nf,\nt_2)\\) saying that a fluent \\(f\\) is clipped\nbetween times \\(t_1\\) and \\(t_2\\) if it is\nterminated by some action \\(a\\) happening between\n\\(t_1\\) and \\(t_2\\). Simplifying a whole\nlot, the axioms (30)–(33) formalize the notion of instantaneous\nchange, such as two balls colliding or somebody dying. Moreover, they\nembody a notion of inertia: fluents continue to hold unless\nterminated.\n\n","\n\nNext, we have to translate the discourse (33) into the Simple Event\nCalculus. The first set of formulas (38)–(40) states what the\nmentioned actions do. These formulas provide a crude sketch of the\nlexical meaning of load, smoke and shoot.\nThe effect of a Load action is to make the fluent\nLoaded hold, a Shoot action makes Dead hold\n(and Alive not hold) with Loaded being a\nprecondition. Finally, Smoke is assumed to have no effects\n(thus, there are no rules involving Smoke). ","\n(33) comprises a Load action followed by a Smoke\naction followed by a Shoot action. Using four arbitrarily\nchosen time points \\(T_1\\)–\\(T_4\\) the\ndiscourse can be represented as follows: ","\n\nFrom this little theory we want to derive\nHoldsAt(Dead, \\(T_4)\\). Unfortunately,\nthis sequent is not valid in the classical sense of being true in all\nmodels which satisfy the theory. Think for example of a situation in\nwhich the gun obscurely becomes unloaded while Vincent is smoking. In\nsuch a model, the precondition of the shooting action is clearly not\nmet and thus the action will lack any effects. Note that nothing rules\nout such a model since it is entirely consistent with our theory. We\nthus have to further constrain the models under consideration.\nCrucially, we have to find a way to deal with the non-effects of\nactions; this is the famous frame problem. ","\nHow to proceed? From the fact that no terminating action was\nmentioned, we want to conclude that no terminating event occurred. To\ndo so, we have to strengthen the assumptions of the theory in a way\nthat only those events are assumed to occur which have been explicitly\nstated in the discourse. The discourse model should be minimal,\nlinking discourse understanding intimately to closed world\nreasoning. It is important to note that this strategy forces\nreasoning to be non-monotonic: adding further premises to a theory can\nmake inferences invalid that were valid before (see the entry on \nnon-monotonic logic). "],"subsection_title":"7.1 The Yale Shooting Scenario"},{"content":["\nThere are different techniques for formalizing this line of reasoning;\none is circumscription (e.g., Shanahan 1997). Here, we will use the\ncompletion of a logic program technique, adopting the\n\nEvent Calculus of van Lambalgen and Hamm (2005). Taking a\ncloser look at the formulas of the theory\n\\(((34) \\wedge \\ldots \\wedge (45))\\), an important feature to notice is that\nformulas come in two variants: they are either facts\nconsisting of a simple predicate expression or they express\nrules with a conjunction of potentially negated formulas to\nthe left of the implication sign and a single positive atomic\nexpression to its right (in logic programming the former is called the\n\nbody and the latter is called the head of a clause).\nWe will now illustrate how the completion of a simple logic program is\ncomputed. Consider the description of a situation where the gun gets\nloaded at time 1 and a shooting event happens at time 10. This\nsituation is stated in the following program: ","\nThe uncompleted program does not yet rule out intervening events. It\nis, for example, consistent with an Unload event occurring at\ntime instant 9. The completion of the program should tell us that (46)\nand (47) were the only events. The completion is computed according to\nthe following\n procedure.[7]\n We start with the facts in (46) and (47). Both of these are\nHappens formulae. The completion of the program intuitively\ncorresponds to an assertion that, given this program,\nHappens\\((e, t)\\) can only mean Load\noccurring at 1 or Shoot occurring at 10. We therefore first\nsubstitute variables for the constants and write the following\ndisjunction: ","\nThen, we universally quantify over the variables \\(e\\) and \\(t\\)\nand strengthen the implication to a bi-implication: ","\nFrom (49) it follows that there were no intervening events.\nStrengthening the implications to bi-implications makes it impossible\nthat a head can be true without the enabling conditions being\n met.[8]\n The uniquely determined model of (49) is the minimal model of the\nlogic program consisting of (46) and (47). ","\nWe can now come back to the Yale Shooting Problem in discourse (33).\nFrom the completion of the logic program\n((34))\\(\\wedge \\ldots \\wedge\\)((45)) it follows (non-monotonically) that\nHoldsAt(Dead, \\(T_4)\\). Enriching the\nprogram with further information and computing the new completion,\nhowever, could clearly lead to cancellation of this inference. "],"subsection_title":"7.2 The completion of a program"},{"content":["\nIf we want to use these ideas to model natural language discourse, we\nneed to incorporate tense. In van Lambalgen and Hamm (2005) this is\ndone by adopting the classic tripartition into reference\ntime, event time and speech time due to\nReichenbach (see\n section 3).\n ","\nRecall that above, when we translated discourse (33) into Shanahan’s\nEvent Calculus, we arbitrarily chose instants of time\n\\(T_1 ,\\ldots ,T_4\\) to locate actions\nin time. This is not how it is done in natural language discourse. The\nfirst sentence (Yesterday morning Vincent loaded the gun)\nstates that within some time interval \\((=\\) reference time) before now \\((=\\)\nspeech time) there was a time \\(t'\\) at which a loading event\nhappened \\((=\\) event time). The second sentence (Then he smoked a\ncigarette) is linked to this event by the connective\nthen, stating that at some later time \\(t''\\) a\nsmoking event happened with \\(t''\\) also being temporally\nlocated before now. Analogously for the third sentence: there\nis an event time \\(t'''\\) at which Shoot happens and\n\\(t'' \\lt t''' \\lt\\)\nnow. Note that when locating events in time it is\nalways done by existential statements of the form there is a\ntime. So far, however, we have only been dealing with universally\nquantified variables. Clearly, a formula like \\(\\forall t\\).Happens(Load,\n\\(t)\n\\wedge t \\lt\\) now cannot be used to represent\ntense since it would state that Load happens at all times in\nthe past. We have to find a way to introduce existentially quantified\ninformation. ","\nIntuitively, it suffices to introduce new entities into the domain of\ndiscourse. This approach lies at the heart of dynamic semantic\ntheories such as Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp and Reyle 1993,\nand see also the entry on\n Discourse Representation Theory)\n or File Change Semantics (Heim 1982). We will need an update\nprocedure that introduces new actions/events into the discourse model\nbut is compatible with the non-monotonic semantics introduced so far.\nFollowing van Lambalgen and Hamm (2005) we will use integrity\nconstraints—a device from database theory (for a more\ncomplete and formal treatment the reader is referred to Kowalski 1995\nand van Lambalgen and Hamm 2005: ch. 8)—to implement the notion\nof a minimal update of a discourse model. Consider discourse (50).\n","\nIn interpreting the first sentence, we want to update the situation\nmodel in a way that makes the sentence true. The tense information\nwill be interpreted as a goal to minimally update the situation model\nwith a fluent Loaded that holds now. In our framework\nsemantic interpretation is thus closely linked to planning, in that\nfinding an interpretation for a sentences requires coming up with a\nsequence of actions that makes the goal succeed. ","\n\nTo resolve this integrity constraint we will use the axioms of the\nSimple Event Calculus plus the world knowledge about the consequences\nof a load action stated in (52). ","\n\nIn logic programming, the sort of reasoning required to resolve (51)\nis carried out by a derivation procedure called resolution.\nWe will use resolution here in a non-standard way, i.e. logic\nprogramming combined with integrity constraints (for details see van\nLambalgen and Hamm 2005). It starts with the formula that has to be\nmade true in the discourse model. Resolution proceeds by identifying\nrules which have the query as their consequent and substituting the\nconsequent with the antecedent conditions of the rule, making the\nantecedent formulas new queries themselves. The resolution stops when\nthe query cannot be further resolved, that is, when a plan has been\ncomputed whose preconditions are all fulfilled given an appropriate\nupdate of the discourse model. To get an impression of how this works\nwe will illustrate the resolution of (51). First, we have to compute\nthe completion of the program and whenever possible substitute the\nvariables with constants, in our case Loaded and\n\nnow. In logic programming this substitution is done\nautomatically via unification. Here is the completion of the\nHoldsAt predicate which forms the head of two\naxioms—(35) and (36). ","\n\nSince the theory doesn’t contain the statement\nInitially(Loaded), closed world reasoning yields\nthat at time 0 the gun is not loaded\n\\((\\neg\\)Initially(Loaded)). No matter how we update\nthe discourse representation the first disjunct can never succeed. We\nthus have to move on to the second disjunct. In this case, the\ndatabase is searched for an action \\(a\\) and a time \\(s\\) such\nthat Initiates\\((a, f, s)\\),\n\nHappens\\((a, s)\\) and\n\\(\\neg\\)Clipped\\((s\\), Loaded, \\(t)\\). On the\nsole basis of the information provided in the discourse the subquery\n?Happens\\((a, s)\\) will fail, because in discourse\n(50) there is no information about a load action. However, since\nintegrity constraints are intended to be made true, the database will\nbe updated with a clause Happens(Load,\n\\(s) \\wedge s \\lt\\)\n\nnow which makes the second disjunct true and the query\nsucceed. "],"subsection_title":"7.3 Introducing tense information"},{"content":["\nIn the following, we will analyze the imperfective paradox as an\ninstance of the frame problem (cf. Stenning and van Lambalgen 2005;\nvan Lambalgen and Hamm 2005; Stenning and van Lambalgen 2008; Baggio\nand van Lambalgen 2007; Baggio et al. 2008). Both activities and\naccomplishments involve continuous change and we therefore have to add\nadditional predicates and axioms to properly deal with gradually\nchanging objects which are under the influence of an external force.\nTable 5 introduces two new predicates; axioms A1–A5 provide a\ngeneral theory of instantaneous and continuous change (from van\nLambalgen and Hamm 2005: 40). As can be easily seen, the axiom system\nextends that of Shanahan (1997). ","\nAxioms 4 and 5 define continuous change. Axiom 4 defines the\nTrajectory predicate. To see what it says, let’s consider a\nsituation of running a mile where \\(f_1\\) is\ninstantiated by running and \\(f_2\\) by\ndistance\\((x)\\). Should running be true during\nthe whole interval from \\(t\\) until \\(t'\\) then distance\\((a + 1)\\) will be true\nat \\(t'\\). The value of \\(x\\), that is, the actual\ndistance actually run at each time instant will be determined by the\nlaw of the process under consideration (here, running speed). Axiom 5\ndefines the predicate Clipped\\((t,\nf, t')\\)\nwhich is true if \\(f\\) is terminated or released by an event\n\\(e\\) which happens in the time interval between \\(t\\) and\n\\(t'\\). Thus Clipped covers both instantaneous and\ncontinuous change. The axioms provide a general theory of what can\nchange and what stays constant.","\nFor concrete situations, we also need the specific temporal and causal\nrelationships. This kind of information is specified in so called\nscenarios representing lexical meaning. The lexical meaning\nof the accomplishment run a mile corresponds to scenario\n(54). Like the axioms, the scenario takes the form of a logic program.\nAll variables are universally quantified. ","\nScenarios formalize the event nucleus of Moens and Steedman (1988).\nEvery accomplishment takes the same form of scenario, the only\ndifferences being that the individual scenarios involve different\npreparatory processes (run, build, etc.), incremental\nthemes (distance\\((x)\\), house\\((x)\\), etc.)\nand resultant states. Furthermore, it is obvious that the preparatory\nprocess run, an activity, is a proper part of scenario (54).\nThe simpler activity scenario can be easily arrived at if we remove\nclauses (d)–(f) from (54). We are now in the position to solve\nthe imperfective paradox avoiding the problems discussed in\n section 6.\n Both a past progressive activity sentence as in (55a) and a past\nprogressive accomplishment sentence (55b) will trigger a discourse\nupdate as stated in integrity constraint (55c). ","\nThe discourse update of the completed program (54) yields that at some\npoint after \\(t\\) John will achieve the culmination and will have\nrun one mile (see van Lambalgen and Hamm 2005: 61ff. for a proof).\nObviously, the same integrity constraint in combination with the\nactivity in (55a) only licenses the inferences that there was some\npast running activity. In the case of an accomplishment the course of\nevents dramatically changes if we add information to the\nrepresentation as in (56b). Now, both (56a) and (56b) only allow the\ninference that there was a running event but, arguably, John didn’t\nreach his goal in (56b). Without going into further details it should\nbe clear how this non-monotonic inference works. The derivation works\nanalogously to the simpler instances of the frame problem discussed\nabove. ","\nThe solution to the imperfective paradox just outlined makes reference\nto the intentions of the agent involved in the event; therefore the\nnotion of a goal or intention is built into the system right from the\nstart. Note, however, it does not involve possible worlds, or\nprimitive notions like inertia worlds; instead it is based upon\nminimal models and non-monotonic reasoning. This yields additional\nbenefits. Firstly, the Event Calculus will compute a minimal model in\ncases where an integrity constraint can be satisfied. Moreover, the\nnumber of construction steps required for this yields a precise\ncomplexity measure which (for example) allows us to derive predictions\nfor cognitive processing. Secondly, the non-monotonic nature of the\nEvent Calculus can be used to model the incremental construction of a\ntemporal model with inferences which hold locally at a discourse\nsegment \\(s_n\\) but which can be undone at some\nlater discourse unit \\(s_{n+1}\\). This is a\nnecessary prerequisite if we think of interpreting sentences like\n(56b) from left to right assuming incremental interpretation (see\ne.g., Baggio and van Lambalgen 2007 and Bott 2010 for implementations\nof the Event Calculus as a processing model). In the next section we\nwill review psychological and psycholinguistic work on the\ninterpretation of aspect which will provide empirical motivation for\nthe outlined analysis. "],"subsection_title":"7.4 The imperfective paradox reconsidered"}]},{"main_content":["\nDue to limitations of space, we will not discuss psychological and\npsycholinguistic studies of tense but will focus solely on processing\nstudies of aspect. Moreover, within this topic we limit ourselves to\nstudies of the adult system. The interested reader is referred to\nDickey (2001) and the references therein for psycholinguistic work on\ntense as well as to the entry on\n the experience and perception of time\n\n and the contributions in Grondin (2008) for psychology of time in\ngeneral. ","\nPsychologists have recently begun studying event perception and its\nneural basis (e.g., Zacks and Tversky 2001; Zacks, Tversky, and Iyer\n2001; Zacks et al. 2006). The underlying question behind this line of\nresearch is whether events play a role in how we cognitively structure\nand remember changing states of affairs and how they are represented.\nZacks, Tversky, and Iyer (2001) use an analogy from the domain of\nobjects to the domain of events to define an event as a “segment\nin time at a given location that is conceived by an observer to have a\nbeginning and an end” (p.30). They claim that “the ability\nto identify the parts of events and their relationships constitutes a\ndistinct perceptual process” (p.30) which they call event\nstructure perception. Just as an object is an ontological\nprimitive in the spatial domain, so an event is an ontological\nprimitive in the spatio-temporal\n domain.[9]\n Objects are recognized by shape, color etc. and have boundaries in\nspace. Analogously, events have boundaries in time, but are also\nbounded in space. An event of buttering toast, for instance, happens\nat a particular time, but also in a particular location in space and\nis therefore spatially bounded. Continuing the analogy, both objects\nand events can be identified and categorized using hierarchical\nrelations. ","\n\nIn Zacks, Tversky, and Iyer’s experiments, participants segmented an\nongoing activity (like washing dishes) while watching it on\nfilm by pressing a key to mark “natural and meaningful”\nunit boundaries. The grain at which participants segmented the\nactivity was manipulated between subjects: one group was asked to mark\nthe largest meaningful units (coarse grain size), the other group the\nsmallest units (fine grain size) which still could be considered to be\ncomplete events. The placement of perceived event boundaries provides\ninformation about the psychological status of events and their\npartonomic hierarchy. If the stream of action is perceived as\nconsisting of discrete events, participants should place event\nboundaries consistently and this is what Zacks, Tversky, and Iyer\n(2001) found. Further, if participants make use of partonomic\nhierarchies, coarse event boundaries should be aligned with fine\nboundaries, since the end of each superordinate event is also the end\nof its last subevent. Again, this hypothesis was corroborated by a\nstrong hierarchical bias effect. Events thus seem to be\npsychologically real and to be hierarchically structured. "],"section_title":"8. Cognitive aspects","subsections":[{"content":["\nDuring the last decade psycholinguists have started to investigate the\ncognitive reality of lexical aspect and how it is processed. The\nexisting studies can be sub-classified into studies concerning\nAktionsart simpliciter and those concerned with shifts from\none aspectual class to an other, i.e., aspectual coercion. In\nthe following, we will provide a brief overview of both areas of\nresearch. ","\nMcKoon and Macfarland (2002) were among the first to study processing\nconsequences of decompositional analyses along the lines of Dowty\n(1979). They provided evidence from reading times and lexical decision\ntimes that accomplishments \\((\\alpha\\) CAUSE \\(x\\) BECOME IN-STATE)\nare inherently more complex than achievements \\((x\\) BECOME\nIN-STATE). Similarly, Gennari and Poeppel (2003) compared eventive\npredicates (which included accomplishments, achievements and\nactivities) to statives and found that the former were more complex to\nprocess than the latter. Brennan and Pylkkänen (2010) extended\nthis line of research to psychological verbs and compared\naccomplishments (e.g., scare) with statives (e.g.,\n\ncherish) using reading time methods and\nmagnetoencephalography (MEG). They also included a comparison of the\nsimple psychological statives with modified sentences that required\ncoercion (e.g., within half an hour, the child cherished the\nprecious kitten). Reading times and MEG data indicated that\naccomplishments were more complex to comprehend than statives and,\nmoreover, that the enhanced semantic complexity led to different MEG\ncomponents than aspectual coercion. Finally, Coll-Florit and Gennari\n(2011) compared durative states and punctual event predicates (mostly\nachievements) and observed longer reading times of statives than of\nevent predicates. They attributed this effect—which runs counter\nto what would be expected under a decomposition analysis—to the\nfact that durative situations occur in semantically more diverse\ncontexts and elicit more diverse associations than event predicates\nwhich may modulate the required processing effort. Taken together, the\nexisting studies provide evidence for complexity differences between\nthe aspectual classes, lending support to decompositional analyses.\nHowever, not all issues are entirely solved yet and further research\nis required. ","\nThe second line of research concerns aspectual coercion. Here, the\nmain research question has been whether aspectual coercion is a costly\noperation. Existing research has almost exclusively focused on one\ncoercion type, i.e., coercion of point action verbs into an iterative\ninterpretation (but see Brennan and Pylkkänen 2010 and Bott 2010\nfor exceptions). Again, the findings are mixed. Early studies have\nprovided evidence for coercion costs employing secondary tasks such as\ncross-modal lexical decision or stop making sense\njudgments (Piñango, Zurif, and Jackendoff 1999; Todorova\net al. 2000). Pickering et al. (2006) used the same materials as in\nthe experiments mentioned above, but tested a coerced meaning during\nordinary reading without an additional task. In two self-paced reading\nand two eyetracking experiments, they found aspectual coercion to be\nno more difficult than their aspectual control conditions. This lack\nof effect let them propose the aspectual underspecification\nhypothesis, stating that the aspectual representation stays\nunderspecified during normal reading. Brennan and Pylkkänen\n(2008) challenged this view and reported a coercion effect of coercion\nsentences like (57a) as compared to aspectual controls (57b) both in\nself-paced reading and in MEG; on the basis of a rating study they had\ncarefully selected clear instances of point action verbs. Their MEG\nstudy revealed activation in the anterior midline field, a MEG\ncomponent that has been observed for other non-aspectual cases of\ncoercion, too. ","\nComplicating matters, Bott (2008, 2010) applied the same norming\nprocedures, but did not find evidence of coercion cost in iterative\npoint action verbs in German. With other types of aspectual coercion,\nhowever, there were clear indications of processing difficulty\nindicating that the underlying processes differ between coercion\ntypes. Furthermore, the study provided evidence that at least in some\ncases (achievement ⇝ accomplishment) coercion operations are not\ntriggered by an aspectual mismatch, but can proceed smoothly by\nenriching the aspectual representation with additional eventualities.\nThis was shown in an event-related potentials (ERP) study in which a\ndouble dissociation of ERP components was elicited by sentences with\naspectual coercion as compared to sentences that contained an\naspectual mismatch."],"subsection_title":"8.1 Lexical Aspect"},{"content":["\nGrammatical aspect has recently received increased interest in\npsycholinguistics (for a comprehensive review see Madden and Ferretti\n2009). One line of studies has investigated (e.g., Ferretti\net al. 2007) the accessibility of event participants in English\nprogressive and simple sentences. They provide evidence that, in line\nwith the linguistic description provided above, the progressive\npresents an event from the inside, making participants, instruments\nand places fully accessible, whereas the simple forms present events\nas complete units and the event participants are less accessible.\nUsing picture selection/verification, Madden and Zwaan (2003) found\nthat participants were faster and more likely to choose a picture\nshowing a complete event, rather than a picture depicting an ongoing\nevent, after they had read a sentence with an accomplishment verb in\nthe simple past. This indicates that English speakers encode\naccomplishments in the simple past as complete events. This finding\nwas supported by a study by Anderson et al. (2008). They compared\naccomplishments describing a path such as Tom jogged/was jogging\nto the woods and then stretched when he got there. Participants\nlistened to these sentences while using a computer mouse to drag and\ndrop a human character in a visual scene. When hearing a sentence in\nthe past progressive, many drops took place at the beginning and the\ncenter of the path, whereas in the simple past most drops were at the\nend of the path. Interestingly, the differences were by no means\ncategorical. Even in the simple past condition, the character was in\nsome trials positioned well before the end of the path. This indicates\nthat accomplishments in the simple past are consistent with incomplete\nevents. ","\nAnother study relevant for the discussion in the previous sections is\nan ERP study on the imperfective paradox by Baggio et al. (2008). They\ninvestigated the processing of Dutch imperfective sentences such as\nhet meisje was een brief aan het schrijven (the girl was\nwriting a letter) which were either followed by a\n\nwhen-clause that made the culmination unlikely (when her\nfriend spilled coffee on the paper) or by a sentence which was\ncompatible with the attainment of the goal (when her friend spilled\ncoffee on the tablecloth). The first kind of sentences elicited larger\nsustained anterior negativities compared to sentences that were\ncompatible with the culmination. Moreover, the amplitude of the\nnegativity was correlated with the frequency with which participants\nresponded that the culmination was not reached. These findings\nindicate that a progressive sentence triggers a default inference to a\ncomplete event which can be canceled again, if the context so\nrequires. ","\nGrammatical aspect is subject to clear crosslinguistic differences.\nThis raises the question of whether the grammatical system has an\ninfluence on how we process language. In von Stutterheim et al. (2009)\nthe authors reported findings of a production study comparing event\ndescriptions of English, German and Dutch speakers that were elicited\nwhile they were watching and describing a silent video clip. Their\nstudy revealed clear differences between productions from the three\nlanguages. English speakers used the progressive to start event\ndescriptions well before the endpoint was visible (e.g., A car is\ngoing down a lane … to a farmhouse). Germans showed a\ndifferent behavior, relating their descriptions to the endpoint of a\nmotion event. It thus seems as if production is constrained by the\nlanguage in which it is realized. Recently, von Stutterheim et al.\n(2012) extended this line of research to a sample of seven languages\nand showed that the aspectual properties of a language influence how\nspeakers conceptualize events. It’s not only that speakers of\ndifferent languages talked differently about motion events (e.g.,\nmention of endpoints), their language also had a clear influence on\ntheir viewing behavior while watching the movies and influenced their\nmemory capacity for those parts of the scene corresponding to\nendpoints. ","As for comprehension, Bott and Hamm (2014)\ninvestigated how the aspectual system of a language influences\nprocessing difficulty. They compared coercion of German and English\naccomplishments which were modified by for \\(x\\) time\nadverbials. (58) is a sample item. ","\nIn the German experiments, condition (58a) was read as fast as a\nnon-coercing control condition with an in x time adverbial.\nThis was different in English where the authors found coercion to\ncause a substantial slowdown of reading speed. They interpret this\ncrosslinguistic difference as follows: languages which have the\ngrammatical means to express an aspectual difference via alternative\nforms—the progressive vs. simple forms in English—enforce\nimmediate aspectual commitment, whereas languages that lack this\ngrammatical feature have to leave it underspecified. In other words,\nGerman readers will leave it to the context whether an accomplishment\nexpresses a complete or incomplete event, whereas English readers\nimmediately strengthen an accomplishment in the simple form into a\ncomplete event interpretation. They take this strengthening to be a\npragmatic process that is due to competition between alternative\ngrammatical forms.","In an eyetracking during reading study, Bott and Gattnar (2015)\nfollowed up on the observed cross-linguistic variation in the\nprocessing of grammatical aspect comparing an aspect language, Russian,\nwith the non-aspect language German. They investigated whether the\ndifferences in the aspectual systems of the two languages affected the\ntime course of mismatch detection in the case of lexical aspectual\nmismatch.All test sentences contained clear instances of (in Russian always perfective) transitive achievement verbs such as win, find, reach, notice, etc. which were modified by a semantically mismatching for-adverbial (e.g., for three hours) or a semantically fitting ago-adverbial (e.g., three hours ago)\nin aspectual control conditions. Crucially, both Russian and German\nhave relatively free word order making it possible to test for effects\nof mismatching vs. matchingadverbials in the word order subject verb object adverbial but also in the order adverbial verb subject object. The results show that Russian readers immediately detect the aspectual mismatch\nirrespective of whether they have seen the subject or the object\nargument yet. This is different in German where aspectual mismatch\ndetection only started after the verb plus all its obligary arguments\nhad been encountered. This result was modeled by Bott and Sternefeld\n(2017) in an incremental event semantics drawing on insights from\nmereological semantics as proposed by Krifka (1989, 1992); see\n also\n section 6.1 (and the entry\n mereology).\nThe incremental semantic derivations show that in a non-aspect language\nlike German, lexical aspect really is a property of whole sentences and\nstrongly depends on the compositional interpretation of the verb, its\narguments, and their thematic roles. In an aspect language like\nRussian, on the other hand, the grammatical aspect imposes itself\nstrong constraints on lexical aspectual interpretation. These\npsycholinguistic results thus nicely fit semantic proposals for\ngrammatical aspect that have been proposed in the framework of\nmereological semantics (see, e.g., Filip 2008, a.o.).","\nTo summarize, the existing studies lend empirical support to the\naspectual distinctions made in the semantic and philosophic\nliterature. Moreover, the grammatical system of a language influences\nthe way language is processed and may even influence the way we\nexperience the world. "],"subsection_title":"8.2 Grammatical Aspect"}]},{"main_content":["\nWe introduced and discussed several important semantic, philosophical\nand technical concepts and theories of temporality and at least\nindicated how these concepts and theories are related to cognition.\nHowever, we did this exclusively from a sentence internal perspective.\nTense and aspect are important means for organizing discourse as\n well.[10]\n To conclude our overview, we present French examples due to Kamp and\nRohrer (see van Lambalgen and Hamm 2005, ch. 9) and indicate the role\ntense and aspect play in discourse organization. Consider sentence\n(59) in which the passé simple (PS) occurs four times.\n\n","\nFirst the PS in (59) provides temporal information; all events are\nlocated in the past. But the PS conveys aspectual information too. It\nsays that the internal constitution of the events is not important and\nthis means that PS expresses perfectivity. PS imposes a view of the\nevents “from the outside”. This is then taken to explain\nwhy multiple uses of the PS imply a succession of the events described\nas witnessed in example (59). This means that Pierre getting up\nprecedes his going up to his room and this event precedes closing the\ndoor which finally precedes turning the radio on. Thus, the PS\nstructures the above little discourse in a particular way. Early\ndiscourse representation theory explains this effect by assuming that\nthe PS introduces a new reference point after a previously introduced\none.","\nThe discourse function of the French imparfait is different. Example\n(60a) shows that, like the past in English, the\n imparfait[11]\n is not felicitous when uttered out of the blue. ","\nKamp explains these facts in the following way. The imparfait does not\nintroduce its own reference time and in (60a) there is no previous\nreference point given. Therefore (60a) is out. In (60b) the sentence\nin the passé simple Jean ôta sa veste introduces\na reference time that can be used to anchor If faisait chaud.\nThe imperfective aspect of the imparfait is then explained by the fact\nthat the PS event happens while the sentence in the imparfait holds.\nThus passé simple and imparfait not only provide temporal\ninformation but they also serve as means to structure discourse in\ndifferent ways.","\nOf course these brief remarks about the discourse function of tense\nand aspect barely touch the tip of the iceberg. For more information\non the discourse semantics of French tense and discourse organization\nin general, the reader is advised to consult de Swart and Corblin\n(2002), Asher and Lascarides (2003) and van Lambalgen and Hamm (2005,\nespecially chapter 9). This short note on discourse structure\ncompletes our article on tense and aspect. "],"section_title":"9. Conclusion","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nTense roughly means reference to the time at which events\\ntake place, or at which processes or states hold. English, for\\nexample, clearly distinguishes between past and non-past tense as in\\n(1a) and (1b) and (1c). \",\n \"\\nIn English, verb forms are typically used to signal the time\\nwhen an action or event occurs or a state holds. Thus in (1a), John’s\\npromise was given before the present time, in (1b) the promising is\\nsimultaneous with the present time and (1c) says that the student’s\\nwork on his thesis will occur at some time after the present. It\\nshould be noted that the verb forms used to express temporal\\ninformation may also be used to signal information that is not purely\\ntemporal. For instance, the present tense form in John walks\\n\\n\\ncharacterizes a certain habit of John. And in the statement The\\ntrain departs at five o’clock tomorrow, the present verb form\\nclearly has a futurate meaning. So English distinguishes between past\\nand non-past but not between future and non-future. Moreover, many\\nlinguists exclude future as a pure tense, because the auxiliary\\nwill may be used to express volition as in He will go\\nswimming in dangerous\\n water.[1]\",\n \"\\nApart from absolute tense—exemplified by\\n(1a)–(1c)—where the reference point from which the\\nlocation in time is evaluated is the present, there is also\\n\\nrelative tense where the reference point is not necessarily\\nthe present but may be given by context. Thus in a sentence like\\nThe student had worked on his thesis the student’s work took\\nplace at a time before a reference point in the past, in contrast to\\n(1c) where the reference point is the present. Other instances of\\nrelative tense in English are the present perfect and the future\\nperfect in (2a) respectively (2b). \",\n \"\\nThe notion of aspect according to Comrie refers to\\n“[the] different ways of viewing the internal temporal\\nconstituency of a situation” (1976: 3). It is customary to\\ndistinguish between lexical and grammatical aspect.\\nThe following are examples concerning lexical aspect. Since Vendler\\n(1967) linguists distinguish at least four aspectual classes. These\\nare states like know, activities like run,\\naccomplishments like cross the street and achievements\\nexemplified by a verb like recognize. Accomplishments\\ndescribe the internal temporal constituency of a situation in a more\\ndetailed way than (say) activities. Crossing the street, for\\nexample, includes the starting of a crossing activity which goes on\\nfor some time and involves a result state that is characterized by\\nbeing on the other side of the street. No such elaborate descriptions\\nare necessary for activities or achievements. There are grammatical\\nmeans of distinguishing between these aspectual classes. For example,\\nstates and achievements cannot occur with the progressive while\\nactivities and accomplishments can; more about this below in\\n Section 5.\\n\\n\\n These differences are customarily considered to be lexical\\ndifferences and this area is therefore dubbed lexical aspect.\\n\",\n \"\\nA further crucial aspectual difference is that between perfective and\\nimperfective aspect. Comrie characterizes these notions as follows.\\n\",\n \"\\n\\n…perfectivity indicates the view of the situation as a single\\nwhole, without distinction of the various separate phases that make up\\nthat situation, while the imperfective pays essential attention to the\\ninternal structure of the situation. (Comrie 1976: 16) \\n\",\n \"\\nIn English this difference is often expressed by grammatical\\nmeans, for instance by past tense versus past progressive. This is an\\ninstance of grammatical aspect. Slavic language often have an\\nelaborate grammatical system to signal the difference between\\nimperfectivity (ipv) and perfectivity (pv). Here is an example from Russian. \",\n \"\\nSentence (3b) presents the writing of a letter as a single whole and\\nit is clear that this activity was finished when the letter was brought to the\\npost office. By contrast, (3a) focuses on an ongoing activity of\\nletter writing in the past which is not completed because of the\\ninterruption. In fact it is consistent with the truth of (3a) that the\\nletter was never completely written. \",\n \"\\nThe natural language categories tense and aspect\\n\\n\\nembody the linguistic encoding of time. From a typological point of\\nview these categories are typical verbal\\n categories.[2]\\n This means that if these categories are morphologically realized in a\\nlanguage then these morphemes attach to the verb. Verbs usually\\nexpress events, processes, actions or\\n states[3]\\n and the temporal morphemes locate these eventualities in time. Of\\ncourse this does not mean that languages that lack such morphemes are\\nnot able to express temporal relations. They just have to choose other\\nmeans for this purpose. One famous example of a language not\\ncontaining temporal morphology is Mandarin Chinese. Often tense and\\naspect cannot be clearly separated. For example the Quiché\\nprefix \\\\(x-\\\\) denotes a completed (aspect) action in the past\\n (tense).[4]\\n\\n\\n \",\n \"\\nTypologists also observed an asymmetry between past and future. Most\\nlanguages that possess temporal morphology use these means to\\ndifferentiate between past and non-past. There are, however, a few\\nlanguages which use temporal morphology to distinguish between future\\nand non-future. \",\n \"\\nWe will not go into further details concerning the linguistic\\nrealization of tense and aspect, but present a brief and necessarily\\nincomplete review of major philosophical and semantic theories of\\nthese notions. \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Introduction\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nTemporal logic was introduced by Arthur Prior (see for instance Prior\\n1967). Here we will sketch only propositional temporal logic (for a\\nmore thorough introduction the reader is advised to consult Gamut\\n1991: chapters 2 and 3) and the entry on\\n temporal logic.\\n\\n\\n Temporal logic introduces operators \\\\(\\\\bG\\\\), \\\\(\\\\bH\\\\), \\\\(\\\\bF\\\\) and\\n\\\\(\\\\bP\\\\), which are similar to the modal operators \\\\(\\\\Box\\\\) and \\\\(\\\\Diamond\\\\).\\nWe summarize the intuitive meaning of these operators in Table 1. \",\n \"\\nBy adding the above operators to propositional logic we extend\\npropositional logic to propositional temporal logic. Let \\\\(q\\\\)\\nabbreviate the sentence Sam is working, then we are able to\\nexpress the following verb tenses in temporal logic: \",\n \"\\nA model \\\\(\\\\sM\\\\) for propositional temporal logic consists of a\\nnonempty set \\\\(T\\\\) of moments of time, an earlier than relation\\n\\\\(\\\\prec\\\\) and a valuation function \\\\(I\\\\) which for each moment of\\ntime and each proposition letter \\\\(q\\\\) assigns a truth value\\n\\\\(I_{\\\\sM ,t}(q)\\\\). The following\\ndefinition characterizes \\\\(I_{\\\\sM ,t}(\\\\phi)\\\\)\\nfor the temporal operators. \",\n \"\\nThese clauses are analogous to the clauses which define the modal\\noperators \\\\(\\\\Box\\\\) and \\\\(\\\\Diamond\\\\)—with \\\\(\\\\bG\\\\) and \\\\(\\\\bH\\\\)\\ncorresponding to \\\\(\\\\Box\\\\), and \\\\(\\\\bF\\\\) and \\\\(\\\\bP\\\\) to \\\\(\\\\Diamond\\\\)—but\\ninstead of possible worlds the valuation function takes moments of\\ntime as arguments. Therefore principle (5) is valid in any model,\\nsince the modal analogue is valid for \\\\(\\\\Box\\\\) independently of the\\naccessibility relation. \",\n \"\\nHowever, principle (6), which is often considered as valid for\\n\\\\(\\\\Box\\\\), is presumably not valid for \\\\(\\\\bG\\\\). \",\n \"\\nFormula (6) is equivalent to \\\\(\\\\phi \\\\rightarrow \\\\bF\\\\phi\\\\). The latter\\nformula says that if \\\\(\\\\phi\\\\) is the case then \\\\(\\\\phi\\\\) will be the case,\\nwhich is intuitively incorrect. Suppose that \\\\(\\\\prec\\\\) is irreflexive;\\nthis assumption makes sense since it means that no time point is\\nearlier than itself. But under this assumption, Principle (6) is\\nobviously wrong. For extensions of temporal logic and more examples\\nconcerning the correspondence between properties of models and the\\nvalidity or invalidity of formulas see Gamut 1991: chapter 2.\",\n \"\\nThis concludes our brief remarks about temporal logic. We now turn to\\nan alternative approach due to the philosopher Hans Reichenbach. \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Temporal Logic\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe notions speech time, event time, and\\n\\nreference time were introduced by Reichenbach (1947) in order\\nto distinguish simple past and present perfect or, more generally,\\nabsolute and relative tense. According to Comrie (1985), who refined\\nReichenbach’s system (in Chapter 6 of his book on tense) speech time\\nand event time are sufficient for the analysis of absolute\\ntime; i.e., present, (simple) past and future. But for\\nrelative tense—of which the present perfect is but one\\nexample—reference time is required. Let us explain these notions\\nby applying them to distinguish between past and present perfect. \",\n \"\\nConsider the following examples from Steedman (1997). \",\n \"\\nIt has often been observed that the present perfect in English has\\npresent relevance. For instance the continuation of (7a) with but\\nI have found it again is infelicitous in English; the German\\ntranslation of this sequence is acceptable, showing that the German\\nperfect is more like a past tense (but see Kamp et al. 2015 for an\\nextensive discussion, in Other Internet Resources). The same\\ncontinuation is fine for sentence (7b). In this sense the perfect is a\\nrelative tense and the past an absolute tense in English. Let \\\\(E\\\\)\\nbe short for event time and let \\\\(S, R\\\\) stand for speech\\ntime and reference time respectively. \",\n \"\\nFor the simple past, both event time and reference time are situated\\non the time line before speech time. In case of the perfect, R and S\\nare simultaneous and E is earlier than both R and S. Intuitively,\\nreference time represents the perspective from which an eventuality is\\nperceived on the time line. This is not a purely semantic theory of\\ntense like temporal logic, rather it is a pragmatic theory of tense.\\nIn particular, reference time (in contrast to event time) has to be\\nmutually known by communication partners. When using the present\\nperfect, reference time is known since it coincides with speech time.\\nHowever, reference time is not necessarily known when the past tense\\nis used, since it is just required to be earlier than speech time and\\nto coincide with event time. This may explain why sentences in the\\npast sound strange when uttered out of the blue. Steedman (1997)\\npresents the following examples: \",\n \"\\nThe past-tensed sentence (8a) uttered out of the blue is infelicitous,\\nwhile sentence (8b) is fine, since in this case the\\nwhen-clause introduces the reference time.\",\n \"\\nThis is by no means the complete story of the perfect. For example,\\nComrie (1976) distinguishes four typical uses of the perfect: the\\nperfect of result, the experiential perfect, the perfect of persistent\\nsituation and the perfect of recent past. For an extensive recent\\ndiscussion the reader is advised to consult Kamp et al. 2015 (in Other\\nInternet Resources). \",\n \"\\n\\n\\nThe following table summarizes the positions of event time, reference\\ntime and speech time for other tenses: \",\n \"\\nComrie (1985) and Gamut (1991) point out that this cannot be a\\ncomplete account for temporal constructions that occur in natural\\nlanguages. For instance the temporal profile of the sentence Sam\\nwould have worked cannot be analyzed by using a single reference\\ntime. This is one reason for the extended requirements for a formal\\ntheory of tense proposed by Comrie (1985: chapter 6). Furthermore, \\nBlackburn and Jørgensen (2016) combine the key insights of Prior \\nand Reichenbach in the framework of hybrid tense logic suggesting that \\nthe two approaches are fully compatible with each other.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Speech Time, Event Time and Reference Time\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"In event semantics following Davidson (1967) events are commonly\\ntaken as ontological primitives. This raises the philosophical\\nquestion how events and times relate to each other. A construction,\\ndue to Russell, Wiener and Kamp, shows that the time line can be\\nconstructed from events. We will briefly sketch this construction\\nbefore we move on to lexical and grammatical aspect.\",\n \"Russell remarked:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n\\nEven if there be a physical world such as the mathematical theory of\\nmotion presupposes, impressions on our sense-organs produce sensations\\nwhich are not merely and strictly instantaneous, and therefore the\\nobjects of sense of which we are immediately conscious are not\\nstrictly instantaneous. Instants, therefore, are not among the data of\\nexperience and must be either inferred or constructed. It is difficult\\nto see how they can be validly inferred; thus we are left with the\\nalternative that they must be constructed. (Russell 1914: lecture\\nIV)\\n\",\n \"Kamp (1979)\\ntook up Russell’s ideas and slightly modified them. The construction\\ntakes event structures as primitives from which the structure of time,\\ni.e., a total order, can be derived. \",\n \"\\nAn event structure \\\\(\\\\langle E, P, O\\\\rangle\\\\) simply\\nconsists of a set of events \\\\(E\\\\) and the relations \\\\(P\\\\)\\n(precedes) and \\\\(O\\\\) (overlaps) and is\\ncharacterized by axioms A1–7. \",\n \"\\nGiven an event structure satisfying these axioms, the set of instants\\nand their strict linear ordering can be constructed according to\\ndefinition 2. The idea is to identify an instant with the maximal set\\nof pairwise overlapping events. Instants are thus conceived of as\\nabstractions over events that happen (or go on) simultaneously. Events\\nlinked by the precedence relation will give rise to distinct instants.\\n\",\n \"\\n\\nWe will first illustrate the Russell-Kamp construction by way of an\\nexample and then show that \\\\(\\\\langle I,\\\\lt \\\\rangle\\\\) has the\\nproperties specified in Theorem 1: it is a strict linear ordering\\nwhich gives rise to an interval structure. \",\n \"\\nExample 1. Let \\\\(E = \\\\{a, b, c, d, e\\\\}\\\\) and \\\\(P\\\\) be the\\nset of ordered pairs \\\\(\\\\{(a, c), (a, d), (a, e), (b, e), (c,\\ne)\\\\}\\\\). Given A7, the relation \\\\(O\\\\) consists of the set of pairs\\n\\\\(\\\\{(a, b), (b, c), (b, d), (c, d), (d, e)\\\\}\\\\). \\\\(E\\\\) contains three\\nmaximal subsets of pairwise overlapping events, that is, instants\\n\\\\(i_1 = \\\\{a, b\\\\}\\\\), \\\\(i_2 = \\\\{b, c, d\\\\}\\\\) and \\\\(i_3 = \\\\{d,\\ne\\\\}\\\\). Furthermore, \\\\(i_1\\\\), \\\\(i_2\\\\) and \\\\(i_3\\\\) are linearly ordered\\nas \\\\(i_1 \\\\lt i_2 \\\\lt i_3\\\\) because \\\\(a \\\\in i_1\\\\), \\\\(c \\\\in i_2\\\\) and\\n\\\\(P(a, c)\\\\) hence \\\\(i_1 \\\\lt i_2\\\\), and \\\\(c \\\\in i_2\\\\), \\\\(e \\\\in i_3\\\\)\\nand \\\\(P(c, e)\\\\) hence \\\\(i_2 \\\\lt i_3\\\\), and similarly for \\\\(i_1 \\\\lt\\ni_3.\\\\) \\n\",\n \"\\nA proof of the following theorem can be found in (Kamp 1979: 379).\\n\",\n \"\\nOnce having constructed the set \\\\(I\\\\) it is possible to define time\\nintervals and these, in turn, can be used to measure the temporal\\nextent of an event. In Example 1, for example, \\\\(a\\\\) goes\\non in the interval [\\\\(i_1], b\\\\) in\\n[\\\\(i_1, i_2], c\\\\) in\\n[\\\\(i_2], d\\\\) in [\\\\(i_2,\\ni_3\\\\)] and \\\\(e\\\\) in [\\\\(i_3\\\\)].\\nCorollary 1 guarantees that these intervals can be constructed (Kamp\\n1979: 379). \",\n \"\\nProof: If \\\\(i_1, i_2 \\\\in e'\\\\) and \\\\(i_1 \\\\lt i \\\\lt i_2\\\\), it has to be\\nshown that \\\\(e \\\\in i\\\\), too. Suppose it is not. Then there is \\\\(d \\\\in\\ni\\\\) such that \\\\(\\\\neg O(d, e)\\\\), hence \\\\(P(d, e)\\\\) or \\\\(P(e, d)\\\\). In\\nthe first case \\\\(i \\\\lt i_1\\\\) and in the second case \\\\(i_2 \\\\lt\\ni\\\\). Both yield a contradiction.\\\\(\\\\Box\\\\) \",\n \"\\nWe cannot give further details here, but refer the interested reader\\nto Thomason (1986) who discusses how to construct time as a\\ncontinuum—isomorphic to the real numbers—and uses a\\ndifferent construction originally proposed by Walker (1947). Empirical\\nevidence for events being ontological primitives will be presented in\\n section 8\\nwhere we review psychological studies on event perception. We will now\\nmove to lexical and grammatical aspect, that is the expression of event\\ntypes and how a given event is conceptualized, which form basic\\nconcepts in linguistic theory.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. From Events to Time\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nLinguists distinguish four or five lexical aspectual classes or\\nAktionsarten. The following four were introduced by the\\nphilosopher Zeno Vendler (1967: chapter four) on the basis of earlier\\nwork by philosophers such as Kenny, Ryle and Aristotle (see also the\\n entry on events). For a formal\\ndefinition of Aktionsart the reader is referred to van\\nLambalgen and Hamm (2005: 85 ff). \",\n \"\\nIn addition, linguists often assume that verbs like flash,\\nspot and blink form an extra class—the class\\nof semelfactives or points (see Smith 1991). \",\n \"\\nA useful notion for distinguishing Aktionarten is the\\nevent nucleus introduced by Moens and Steedman (1988). The\\nevent nucleus is constructed from a preparatory phase, a culminating\\nevent and a consequent phase. Activities only refer to the preparatory\\nphase, states only to the consequent phase, achievements to the\\nculminating event and to the consequent phase and finally\\naccomplishments to all three parts of the event nucleus. \",\n \"\\n\\nVendler proposed several linguistic tests for distinguishing these\\nverb classes. We will present only the most important ones here; for a\\nmuch more comprehensive list the reader is referred to Dowty (1979: 60).\\nThe first test separates non-statives from statives. Only non-statives\\noccur in the progressive. \",\n \"\\nAccomplishment verbs prefer \\\\(in\\\\)-adverbials as temporal\\nmodifiers, whereas activity verbs allow only\\nfor-adverbials.\",\n \"\\nAchievement verbs are usually infelicitous with\\n\\nfor-adverbials but allow the combination with\\n\\\\(in\\\\)-adverbials. \",\n \"\\nThe last test we mention here concerns the different entailment\\npatterns of activities and accomplishments in the progressive.\\nActivities in the past progressive entail their past reading but\\naccomplishments in the past progressive don’t. \",\n \"\\nThis is an instance of the famous imperfective paradox. Of course,\\ntaken literally this is not a paradox. Nevertheless the entailment\\npatterns (12) and (13) pose a significant problem for any formal\\ntheory of tense and aspect. For instance, the first formal proposal\\nfor truth conditions of sentences in the past progressive stated that\\na sentence S in the past progressive is true if and only if there\\nexists an open interval before the speech time at which the sentence\\nwithout the progressive is true. According to definition 1.4 this\\nimmediately validates pattern (12) but without qualifications this\\ntruth definition does not account for pattern (13). Sections\\n 6\\n and\\n 7\\ncontain extensive discussion of the imperfective paradox. \",\n \"\\nVendler thought of the Aktionarten as lexical properties of\\nverbs. That this position is dubious was pointed out by many\\nlinguists, in particular by Dowty (1979) and Verkuyl (1993). For a\\nsimple case, consider the verb drink. If we assume that being\\nan activity is a lexical property of this verb, then surely by\\ncombining it with the noun wine this property is preserved\\nfor the complex phrase drink wine. However, if we combine the\\nverb drink with the noun phrase a bottle of wine we\\nturn an activity into an accomplishment. The converse problem arises\\nif we assume that being an accomplishment is a lexical property of\\n\\ndrink. This phenomenon of aspectual reinterpretation was\\ndubbed coercion in Moens and Steedman (1988). In\\n Section 6.1 \\nwe will sketch a systematic solution for these types of coercion\\n in mereological semantics (Krifka 1989, 1992). \",\n \"\\nAktionsart is not even definitely fixed at the VP-level. The\\nverb arrive in \",\n \"\\nis an achievement, as demonstrated by the ungrammaticality of (14-b).\\nBut if we choose a bare plural as subject it is turned into an\\nactivity and sentence (15) is grammatical. \",\n \"\\nTherefore a final decision about aspectual class cannot be reached\\nbelow the sentence level. Steedman’s famous sentence (16) \",\n \"\\nshows that coercion can be iterated and that aspectual class can\\nswitch back and forth in this iteration process. We close this section\\nwith two further examples of aspectual coercion. In the first one a\\nstative verb is transformed into an activity.\",\n \"\\nThe verb resemble is a stative verb and therefore (17a) is\\nunacceptable but (17b) is fine. \",\n \"\\nHowever, if we add more and more every day to (17a) thus\\nforming \",\n \"\\n\\nwe get an acceptable result. This is due to the phrase more and\\nmore every day which coerces a state into an activity. Our last\\nexample is about temporal modification with for-adverbials.\\nAs pointed out above accomplishments are usually rather bad with\\nfor-adverbials. They require \\\\(in\\\\)-adverbials. But\\nconsider sentence (19) from van Lambalgen and Hamm (2005). \",\n \"\\nThis sentence seems to be fine. However it is not interpreted as an\\naccomplishment any more but is reinterpreted as an iterated activity.\\nTo get this reading, a lot of non-linguistic knowledge is required.\\nFirst, one has to guess that Opus 111 refers to Beethoven’s last piano\\nsonata and moreover one has to be aware that this piece lasts about 25\\nminutes. Under these assumptions, sentence (19) says that Pollini\\nplayed Opus 111 repeatedly within a time span of two weeks. Formal\\naccounts of coercion phenomena are contained in Egg (2005), van\\nLambalgen and Hamm (2005) and Steedman (1997) among others. The reader\\nis also advised to consult Steedman’s updated manuscript, The\\nProductions of Time (see the Other Internet Resources).\\nProcessing studies of coercion are reviewed in Bott (2010); see also\\n Section 8.\\n\\n \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Lexical and Grammatical Aspect\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThe most influential approach to solving the imperfective paradox is\\ndue to Dowty (1979). The basic idea is to treat the progressive as a\\nmodal operator \\\\((\\\\Box)\\\\) but restrict its domain to inertia worlds.\\nThe notion of an inertia world is characterized informally.\\nAn inertia world is exactly like the real world up to the time of\\nevaluation; after this it may differ from the real world but is\\nassumed to be as similar to the real world as possible. Given this\\nnotion, the following definition introduces truth conditions for\\nsentences in the progressive. \",\n \"\\nDefinition 3 does not yet account for the different entailment\\npatterns of activities and accomplishments. Two additional assumptions\\nare required. The first concerns activities; the second,\\naccomplishments. \",\n \"\\nAccomplishments like Mary draw a circle are split up into two\\nparts, an activity part Mary draw that satisfies principle\\n(20) and a result part which is characterized by the existence of a\\ncircle. Both parts are connected by a causality relation\\n\\nCAUSE. \",\n \"\\nThus an accomplishment has a richer internal structure than an\\nactivity. \",\n \"\\nWith these additional requirements, the inference patterns for\\nactivities and accomplishments follow. Let us first show that Mary\\nwas pushing a cart implies Mary pushed a cart. Assume\\nthat the first sentence is true in \\\\(w\\\\) with respect to speech time\\n\\\\(S\\\\). Then Mary be pushing a cart is true in \\\\(w\\\\) with\\nrespect to an interval \\\\(I\\\\) before \\\\(S\\\\). According to Definition 3,\\nMary push a cart is then true in every inertia world \\\\(w' \\\\in\\nIE(w)\\\\) with respect to an interval \\\\(I' \\\\supseteq I\\\\). Because of\\npostulate (20), Mary push a cart is true in every \\\\(w' \\\\in\\nIE(w)\\\\) with respect to interval \\\\(I \\\\ (I\\\\) is a subinterval of\\n\\\\(I')\\\\). Now, the definition of inertia worlds implies that\\n\\nMary push a cart is true in \\\\(w\\\\) with respect to interval\\n\\\\(I\\\\). This means that Mary pushed a cart is true in\\n\\\\(w\\\\) with respect to speech time \\\\(S\\\\). \",\n \"\\nA completely analogous argument shows that Mary was drawing a\\ncircle implies Mary drew. But postulate (20) only holds\\nfor the first part of accomplishments; the result part is only\\nrequired to hold in every inertia world \\\\(w'\\\\) with respect\\nto a larger interval \\\\(I'\\\\), normally one after speech time.\\nSince the inertia worlds after \\\\(S\\\\) may differ from \\\\(w\\\\) and\\nsince the subinterval property (20) is not required to hold for the\\nresult parts of accomplishments, the stronger conclusion that Mary\\ndrew a circle does not follow. \",\n \"\\nMany researchers assume that inertia worlds introduce a notion of\\nnormality for the semantic analysis of the progressive. The\\nthunderbolt in example (22) from Landman (1992) seems to break the\\nnormal development of the real world. Dowty’s analysis seems to be\\ntailored for cases like this one. \",\n \"\\n\\nHowever, objections have been raised to the normality interpretation\\nof inertia. The first one is attributed to Frank Vlach in Ogihara\\n(1990). Consider sentence (23) \",\n \"\\nand a situation in which the truck is only a few centimeters away from\\nJohn. Moreover the truck’s speed is such that it is impossible for it\\nto stop before hitting John. In this situation, the normal course of\\nevents is such that John will never reach the other side of the\\nstreet. Therefore, given definition 3, sentence (23) should be false\\nunder these circumstances. This is intuitively incorrect. A similar\\nobjection was raised by Bonomi (1997).\",\n \"\\nOn the other hand, the normality interpretation seems to be at least\\nquestionable. Consider the following example from Naumann and\\nPiñón (1997). \",\n \"\\nThis does presumably not mean that when you are running across a\\nminefield, you normally will eventually get to the other side.\",\n \"\\nNote that these objections all make use of a particular informal\\ninterpretation of the notion inertia. Judging the validity of\\nthese objections to Dowty’s theory in a precise way therefore requires\\nan explicit theory of this notion with exact empirical predictions.\\n\",\n \"\\nDowty analyzes the progressive as an intensional construction. Does\\nthe progressive satisfy the standard philosophical tests for\\nintensional constructions, that is, the invalidity of substitution of\\nco-designative proper names and the impossibility of pulling the\\nexistential quantifier out of the context created by the intensional\\nconstruction (see Bealer and Mönnich (1989) for a more detailed\\ndiscussion)? Let us consider accomplishments, for example sentence\\n(25). \",\n \"\\nGiven that Ruth Rendel and Barbara Vine are co-designative proper\\nnames, sentence (25) implies that Jackson Pollock was painting\\nBarbara Vine. Therefore the first test fails. Co-designative\\nproper names are substitutable salva veritate in progressive\\nconstructions. The second one, however, applies, since \",\n \"\\ndoes not imply that there is a house that Carlos was building. These\\ntests therefore don’t provide a clear answer to the question whether\\nthe progressive is an intensional construction. Even if the answer is\\nyes, the progressive is certainly a different type of intensional\\nconstruction than, for example, propositional attitudes like\\nbelieve or doubt. \",\n \"\\nAn extensional alternative was developed by Parsons (1989, 1990).\\nParsons, like Davidson (1967), assumes that first-order quantification\\nover events is possible. But unlike Davidson, Parsons assumes\\nquantification over eventualities in the sense of Bach (1986), which\\nincludes events proper but also states, processes and so on. Like\\nDowty, Parsons supposes that eventualities are split up into a\\ndevelopment phase and a culmination phase. In order to represent this\\ndifference in first-order logic two new predicates are introduced,\\nCul\\\\((e, t)\\\\) and Hold\\\\((e,\\nt)\\\\). The intuitive meaning of the first is that eventuality\\n\\\\(e\\\\) culminates at time \\\\(t\\\\). The second one says that\\n\\\\(e\\\\) is either an eventuality in its development phase or that\\n\\\\(e\\\\) is a state. Given these assumptions a sentence like Mary\\ndrew a circle is translated into first-order formula (27),\\n\\\\(S\\\\) is again short for speech time. \",\n \"\\nThe semantic effect of the progressive consists in transforming events\\ninto states. \",\n \"\\nIf ‘\\\\(A\\\\)’ is an event verb, then ‘be\\n\\\\(A\\\\)-ing’ is to be treated semantically as a state verb;\\notherwise, ‘be \\\\(A\\\\)-ing’ is to be treated the same as\\n‘\\\\(A\\\\)’. (Parsons 1989: 222) \",\n \"\\nWith this assumption the logical representation of Mary was\\ndrawing a circle is (28). \",\n \"\\nObviously (27) does not follow from (28). But (28) does imply that\\nthere is a circle Mary was drawing. Of course this circle may not be\\ncomplete. This means that Parson’s ontology is bound to include\\nincomplete objects. For a discussion of incomplete objects see for\\ninstance Baggio and van Lambalgen (2007).\",\n \"\\nAccording to the quotation above, the progressive doesn’t change\\nanything in the case of activities. Therefore Mary pushed a\\ncart and Mary was pushing a cart are predicted to be\\nequivalent. \",\n \"\\nParsons’ theory rests on the difference between the predicates\\n\\nCul and Hold. This difference is left to intuition.\\nNo axiomatisation of these predicates is given. This is one of the\\nobjections made in Zucchi (1999). Zucchi also notes that under certain\\ncircumstances it is possible to derive a specific version of the\\nimperfective paradox in Parsons’ theory. A careful discussion of\\nDowty’ and Parsons’ approaches and a combination of the two systems is\\ncontained in Landman (1992).\",\n \"Another approach to the imperfective paradox and - more generally -\\nnon-culminating accomplishments was proposed by Copley and Harley\\n(2015). They abandon event semantics and propose instead a framework\\nusing situations and forces as primitives. Forces lead to transitions\\nbetween situations. Their theory is motivated by the observation that\\nacross languages, non-culminating accomplishments are\\ncrosslinguistically in fact a very common phenomenon. Interestingly,\\nthese non-culminating readings are per default conveyed by less complex\\nexpressions than complete events. Often, it is the perfective and not\\nthe imperfective that is marked linguistically. Prima facie, this is a\\nproblem for analyses such as Dowty's which assume that the imperfective\\nparadox in accomplishments hinges on an additional operator such as\\nPROG. This is where Copley and Harley's causal analysis comes into\\nplay. Their force-theoretic account does not run into this problem\\nbecause causally efficacious forces always take effects ceteris\\nparibus, for instance, an effect may not occur do to the occurrence of a\\ncounter force preventing the effect. They develop a compositional\\nsemantic framework linking forces to the argument structure of the\\nsentence. At the present stage of the theory, however, some of the\\nbasic concepts also call for axiomatisation. For instance, it is\\ncrucial to gain a proper understanding of what it means for a situation\\nto be a ceteribus paribus successor situation for some initial\\nsituation. For this purpose, their semantic framework must be connected\\nto a theory of causality connecting linguistic meaning to cognition and\\ncausal reasoning via a conceptual level integrating the two.\",\n \"We will come back to the imperfective\\nparadox in\\n Section 7\\n where we combine linguistic theory with event theories from artificial\\n intelligence. This will give us a formalization of\\n ceteris paribus from which a\\n new solution to the imperfective paradox will follow.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"6. Intensionality versus Events\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Let us now show that events are also useful for a systematic\\naccount of certain types of coercion that were mentioned\\nabove in Section 5.\",\n \"Intuitively\\nthere is a close link between the nominal predicates wine and a bottle\\nof wine and their verbal counterparts (29-a), (29-b).\",\n \" \\nWhenever there are two entities to which wine applies, this\\npredicate applies to their collection as well. The predicate a\\nbottle of wine does not have this property. Whenever there are\\ntwo different entities to which a bottle of wine applies,\\nthis predicate does not apply to their collection. The first predicate\\nis cumulative (see Definition 4) the second is\\nquantized (see Definition 5). A similar argumentation applies\\nto the difference between the activity drink wine and the\\naccomplishment drink a bottle of wine. It was observed by\\nmany linguists that the combination of a verb like drink with\\na cumulative predicate like wine yields an atelic predicate\\nlike (29-a), whereas its combination with a quantized predicate yields\\na telic predicate like in (29-b).\",\n \"\\nIn order to account for these intuitions in a precise way Krifka assumes\\nthat the parts of the structure \\\\(\\\\mathcal{M} = (\\\\mathfrak{O},\\n\\\\mathfrak{E}, \\\\mathfrak{T})\\\\) consisting of objects \\\\(\\\\mathfrak{O}\\\\),\\nevents \\\\(\\\\mathfrak{E}\\\\) and times \\\\(\\\\mathfrak{T}\\\\) are each structured\\nas complete join semi-lattices without a bottom element (see Grätzer,\\n1978). This means that we have a two place relation \\\\(\\\\sqcup\\\\) (join)\\nand relations \\\\(\\\\sqsubseteq\\\\), \\\\(\\\\sqsubset\\\\), and \\\\(\\\\bigcirc\\\\) (part,\\nproper part and overlap) that impose part-whole relations (mereologies,\\nsee the entry mereology)\\non the sets of objects, events and times. We cannot list all the\\nproperties that must hold for these structures to serve as admissible\\ninterpretations of natural language but we illustrate these properties\\nby giving two examples.\",\n \"\\nDefinitions 4 and 5 now allow for a formal descripion of the\\nreferential difference between wine and a bottle of\\nwine.\",\n \"For verbal predicates Krifka assumes that they are event denoting\\nand moreover that thematic relations\\nlike agent, theme, etc are represented as in\\n(31-b). Thematic roles of verbs are crucial since they determine which\\nverbs give raise to the drink wine versus drink a bottle\\nof wine\\n distinction.[5]\",\n \"It\\nis now straightforward to fix the reference of the verbal predicates in\\na way that exhibits their simlarity to the respective nominal\\npredicates.\",\n \"\\nCumulativity of nominal predicates corresponds to atelicity in the\\nverbal domain and a quantized nominal predicate corresponds to a telic\\nverbal predicate.\",\n \"\\nThere is still something missing. How can the impact of the reference\\nof the nominal predicates on the aspectual class be derived formally?\\nWe will present only the basic idea of Krifka's construction here. Let\\n\\\\(w\\\\) be the predicate corresponding to wine and let \\\\(e\\\\) be the event predicate representing drink wine. The basic idea is that an object is changed by the influence of such an event in a gradual\\nmanner. Since we know that \\\\(w\\\\) is cumulative this predicate also\\napplies to proper parts of \\\\(w\\\\), say \\\\(w'\\\\). Then given that drink wine\\ncan be applied to \\\\(e\\\\) it should also be possible to apply it to a\\nproper part of \\\\(e\\\\), say \\\\(e'\\\\). Quantized predicates show a different\\nbehaviour. Since a bottle of wine is quantized no proper part of it is a bottle of wine and therefore no proper part of \\\\(e\\\\) can be described as drink a bottle of wine.\\nTo account for this intuitive explanation in formal terms it is\\nnecessary to specify certain preservation properties for thematic roles\\nsince these roles relate the algebraic structure of events and the\\nalgebraic structure of objects. This means that notions like summativity, uniqueness of objects etc. have to be defined for relations between events and objects; i.e. thematic roles.\",\n \"\\nHere we will illustrate these concepts with only one example, summativity (SUM).\",\n \"\\nSummativity says that the sum-operation \\\\(\\\\sqcup\\\\) on\\nevents and objects is preserved under summative relations on events and\\nobjects. For instance if we have two distinct events of drinking a bottle of wine we get an event of drinking two bottles of wine.\",\n \"\\nWith this formal background it is now possible to state exactly when a\\npredicate of events corresponding to a verb-phrase is cumulative, telic\\netc.. Again we will just state one result. Let \\\\(\\\\phi = \\\\{ e|\\\\exists\\nx(\\\\alpha(e) \\\\wedge \\\\delta(x) \\\\wedge \\\\theta(e, x))\\\\}\\\\) be such a\\npredicate where \\\\(\\\\alpha\\\\) represents a verb - say draw - \\\\(\\\\delta\\\\) the nominal predicate - pictures - and \\\\(\\\\theta\\\\) a thematic relation - say theme.\\nIt then follows that one set of conditions for \\\\(\\\\phi\\\\) being\\ncumulative is that \\\\(\\\\delta\\\\) is cumulative and \\\\(\\\\theta\\\\) is\\nsummative. An example is the verb phrase draw pictures. Similar results characterize, iterative, telic, atelic etc. readings.\",\n \"\\nThis concludes our glimpse of events in linguistic semantics; Readers interested in a more comprehensive treatment of this issue may find Champollion (2014, see Other Internet Resources) a useful contemporary source. We now come back to the imperfective paradox and turn to an\\nevent calculus that was developed in artificial intelligence.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.1 Nominal Reference and Temporal Constitution\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nIn the following section we will show that the imperfective paradox is\\nan instance of the frame problem prominent in Artificial Intelligence\\n(AI). To this end we will explain the event calculus, which is an\\nextension of McCarthy’s situation calculus (McCarthy 1977) developed\\nby Kowalski and Sergot (1986). Then we will indicate how the event\\ncalculus leads to a formalization of natural language tense and aspect\\nby analysing the imperfective paradox. \",\n \"\\nConsider narrative (33). \",\n \"\\nAssuming that shooting at somebody with a loaded gun will lead to the\\ndeath of that person, we will interpret the discourse in a way that\\nFred eventually gets killed. Arriving at this inference is, however,\\nnot a trivial task. In (33) the frame problem is exemplified in the\\nform of the Yale Shooting Scenario (Hanks and McDermott 1986). To\\ndemonstrate this, we will start with a very simple calculus—a\\nvariant of the Simple Event Calculus by Shanahan (1997) which\\nonly incorporates a very basic notion of instantaneous change. Later\\nwe will add axioms in order to deal with continuous change and then\\nreturn to the imperfective paradox. In short, we will argue that the\\nparadox can be viewed as an instance of the frame problem. \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"7. Event Calculus\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nSuppose we have three kinds of actions/events—Load,\\nSmoke and Shoot—and three time dependent\\nproperties, the fluents Alive, Loaded and\\n Dead.[6]\\n Besides actions and fluents we will also need instants of time in our\\nbasic ontology. The predicates listed in Table 4 are used to express\\nactions and their effects and to locate them in time. \",\n \"\\nThe predicates are related to each other by a set of four simple\\naxioms (34)–(37). In these axioms, all variables are assumed to be universally\\nquantified with maximal scope. We will come to the semantics of the\\nimplication when we have introduced the complete scenario. \",\n \"\\n The first three axioms state the conditions\\nunder which a fluent can hold at a time \\\\(t\\\\): either it holds\\nright from the start or it is initiated at a time \\\\(t_1\\\\)\\nbefore \\\\(t\\\\) without a terminating action occurring in between the\\ntwo. The fourth axiom defines the predicate Clipped\\\\((t_1,\\nf,\\nt_2)\\\\) saying that a fluent \\\\(f\\\\) is clipped\\nbetween times \\\\(t_1\\\\) and \\\\(t_2\\\\) if it is\\nterminated by some action \\\\(a\\\\) happening between\\n\\\\(t_1\\\\) and \\\\(t_2\\\\). Simplifying a whole\\nlot, the axioms (30)–(33) formalize the notion of instantaneous\\nchange, such as two balls colliding or somebody dying. Moreover, they\\nembody a notion of inertia: fluents continue to hold unless\\nterminated.\\n\\n\",\n \"\\n\\nNext, we have to translate the discourse (33) into the Simple Event\\nCalculus. The first set of formulas (38)–(40) states what the\\nmentioned actions do. These formulas provide a crude sketch of the\\nlexical meaning of load, smoke and shoot.\\nThe effect of a Load action is to make the fluent\\nLoaded hold, a Shoot action makes Dead hold\\n(and Alive not hold) with Loaded being a\\nprecondition. Finally, Smoke is assumed to have no effects\\n(thus, there are no rules involving Smoke). \",\n \"\\n(33) comprises a Load action followed by a Smoke\\naction followed by a Shoot action. Using four arbitrarily\\nchosen time points \\\\(T_1\\\\)–\\\\(T_4\\\\) the\\ndiscourse can be represented as follows: \",\n \"\\n\\nFrom this little theory we want to derive\\nHoldsAt(Dead, \\\\(T_4)\\\\). Unfortunately,\\nthis sequent is not valid in the classical sense of being true in all\\nmodels which satisfy the theory. Think for example of a situation in\\nwhich the gun obscurely becomes unloaded while Vincent is smoking. In\\nsuch a model, the precondition of the shooting action is clearly not\\nmet and thus the action will lack any effects. Note that nothing rules\\nout such a model since it is entirely consistent with our theory. We\\nthus have to further constrain the models under consideration.\\nCrucially, we have to find a way to deal with the non-effects of\\nactions; this is the famous frame problem. \",\n \"\\nHow to proceed? From the fact that no terminating action was\\nmentioned, we want to conclude that no terminating event occurred. To\\ndo so, we have to strengthen the assumptions of the theory in a way\\nthat only those events are assumed to occur which have been explicitly\\nstated in the discourse. The discourse model should be minimal,\\nlinking discourse understanding intimately to closed world\\nreasoning. It is important to note that this strategy forces\\nreasoning to be non-monotonic: adding further premises to a theory can\\nmake inferences invalid that were valid before (see the entry on \\nnon-monotonic logic). \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"7.1 The Yale Shooting Scenario\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThere are different techniques for formalizing this line of reasoning;\\none is circumscription (e.g., Shanahan 1997). Here, we will use the\\ncompletion of a logic program technique, adopting the\\n\\nEvent Calculus of van Lambalgen and Hamm (2005). Taking a\\ncloser look at the formulas of the theory\\n\\\\(((34) \\\\wedge \\\\ldots \\\\wedge (45))\\\\), an important feature to notice is that\\nformulas come in two variants: they are either facts\\nconsisting of a simple predicate expression or they express\\nrules with a conjunction of potentially negated formulas to\\nthe left of the implication sign and a single positive atomic\\nexpression to its right (in logic programming the former is called the\\n\\nbody and the latter is called the head of a clause).\\nWe will now illustrate how the completion of a simple logic program is\\ncomputed. Consider the description of a situation where the gun gets\\nloaded at time 1 and a shooting event happens at time 10. This\\nsituation is stated in the following program: \",\n \"\\nThe uncompleted program does not yet rule out intervening events. It\\nis, for example, consistent with an Unload event occurring at\\ntime instant 9. The completion of the program should tell us that (46)\\nand (47) were the only events. The completion is computed according to\\nthe following\\n procedure.[7]\\n We start with the facts in (46) and (47). Both of these are\\nHappens formulae. The completion of the program intuitively\\ncorresponds to an assertion that, given this program,\\nHappens\\\\((e, t)\\\\) can only mean Load\\noccurring at 1 or Shoot occurring at 10. We therefore first\\nsubstitute variables for the constants and write the following\\ndisjunction: \",\n \"\\nThen, we universally quantify over the variables \\\\(e\\\\) and \\\\(t\\\\)\\nand strengthen the implication to a bi-implication: \",\n \"\\nFrom (49) it follows that there were no intervening events.\\nStrengthening the implications to bi-implications makes it impossible\\nthat a head can be true without the enabling conditions being\\n met.[8]\\n The uniquely determined model of (49) is the minimal model of the\\nlogic program consisting of (46) and (47). \",\n \"\\nWe can now come back to the Yale Shooting Problem in discourse (33).\\nFrom the completion of the logic program\\n((34))\\\\(\\\\wedge \\\\ldots \\\\wedge\\\\)((45)) it follows (non-monotonically) that\\nHoldsAt(Dead, \\\\(T_4)\\\\). Enriching the\\nprogram with further information and computing the new completion,\\nhowever, could clearly lead to cancellation of this inference. \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"7.2 The completion of a program\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIf we want to use these ideas to model natural language discourse, we\\nneed to incorporate tense. In van Lambalgen and Hamm (2005) this is\\ndone by adopting the classic tripartition into reference\\ntime, event time and speech time due to\\nReichenbach (see\\n section 3).\\n \",\n \"\\nRecall that above, when we translated discourse (33) into Shanahan’s\\nEvent Calculus, we arbitrarily chose instants of time\\n\\\\(T_1 ,\\\\ldots ,T_4\\\\) to locate actions\\nin time. This is not how it is done in natural language discourse. The\\nfirst sentence (Yesterday morning Vincent loaded the gun)\\nstates that within some time interval \\\\((=\\\\) reference time) before now \\\\((=\\\\)\\nspeech time) there was a time \\\\(t'\\\\) at which a loading event\\nhappened \\\\((=\\\\) event time). The second sentence (Then he smoked a\\ncigarette) is linked to this event by the connective\\nthen, stating that at some later time \\\\(t''\\\\) a\\nsmoking event happened with \\\\(t''\\\\) also being temporally\\nlocated before now. Analogously for the third sentence: there\\nis an event time \\\\(t'''\\\\) at which Shoot happens and\\n\\\\(t'' \\\\lt t''' \\\\lt\\\\)\\nnow. Note that when locating events in time it is\\nalways done by existential statements of the form there is a\\ntime. So far, however, we have only been dealing with universally\\nquantified variables. Clearly, a formula like \\\\(\\\\forall t\\\\).Happens(Load,\\n\\\\(t)\\n\\\\wedge t \\\\lt\\\\) now cannot be used to represent\\ntense since it would state that Load happens at all times in\\nthe past. We have to find a way to introduce existentially quantified\\ninformation. \",\n \"\\nIntuitively, it suffices to introduce new entities into the domain of\\ndiscourse. This approach lies at the heart of dynamic semantic\\ntheories such as Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp and Reyle 1993,\\nand see also the entry on\\n Discourse Representation Theory)\\n or File Change Semantics (Heim 1982). We will need an update\\nprocedure that introduces new actions/events into the discourse model\\nbut is compatible with the non-monotonic semantics introduced so far.\\nFollowing van Lambalgen and Hamm (2005) we will use integrity\\nconstraints—a device from database theory (for a more\\ncomplete and formal treatment the reader is referred to Kowalski 1995\\nand van Lambalgen and Hamm 2005: ch. 8)—to implement the notion\\nof a minimal update of a discourse model. Consider discourse (50).\\n\",\n \"\\nIn interpreting the first sentence, we want to update the situation\\nmodel in a way that makes the sentence true. The tense information\\nwill be interpreted as a goal to minimally update the situation model\\nwith a fluent Loaded that holds now. In our framework\\nsemantic interpretation is thus closely linked to planning, in that\\nfinding an interpretation for a sentences requires coming up with a\\nsequence of actions that makes the goal succeed. \",\n \"\\n\\nTo resolve this integrity constraint we will use the axioms of the\\nSimple Event Calculus plus the world knowledge about the consequences\\nof a load action stated in (52). \",\n \"\\n\\nIn logic programming, the sort of reasoning required to resolve (51)\\nis carried out by a derivation procedure called resolution.\\nWe will use resolution here in a non-standard way, i.e. logic\\nprogramming combined with integrity constraints (for details see van\\nLambalgen and Hamm 2005). It starts with the formula that has to be\\nmade true in the discourse model. Resolution proceeds by identifying\\nrules which have the query as their consequent and substituting the\\nconsequent with the antecedent conditions of the rule, making the\\nantecedent formulas new queries themselves. The resolution stops when\\nthe query cannot be further resolved, that is, when a plan has been\\ncomputed whose preconditions are all fulfilled given an appropriate\\nupdate of the discourse model. To get an impression of how this works\\nwe will illustrate the resolution of (51). First, we have to compute\\nthe completion of the program and whenever possible substitute the\\nvariables with constants, in our case Loaded and\\n\\nnow. In logic programming this substitution is done\\nautomatically via unification. Here is the completion of the\\nHoldsAt predicate which forms the head of two\\naxioms—(35) and (36). \",\n \"\\n\\nSince the theory doesn’t contain the statement\\nInitially(Loaded), closed world reasoning yields\\nthat at time 0 the gun is not loaded\\n\\\\((\\\\neg\\\\)Initially(Loaded)). No matter how we update\\nthe discourse representation the first disjunct can never succeed. We\\nthus have to move on to the second disjunct. In this case, the\\ndatabase is searched for an action \\\\(a\\\\) and a time \\\\(s\\\\) such\\nthat Initiates\\\\((a, f, s)\\\\),\\n\\nHappens\\\\((a, s)\\\\) and\\n\\\\(\\\\neg\\\\)Clipped\\\\((s\\\\), Loaded, \\\\(t)\\\\). On the\\nsole basis of the information provided in the discourse the subquery\\n?Happens\\\\((a, s)\\\\) will fail, because in discourse\\n(50) there is no information about a load action. However, since\\nintegrity constraints are intended to be made true, the database will\\nbe updated with a clause Happens(Load,\\n\\\\(s) \\\\wedge s \\\\lt\\\\)\\n\\nnow which makes the second disjunct true and the query\\nsucceed. \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"7.3 Introducing tense information\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIn the following, we will analyze the imperfective paradox as an\\ninstance of the frame problem (cf. Stenning and van Lambalgen 2005;\\nvan Lambalgen and Hamm 2005; Stenning and van Lambalgen 2008; Baggio\\nand van Lambalgen 2007; Baggio et al. 2008). Both activities and\\naccomplishments involve continuous change and we therefore have to add\\nadditional predicates and axioms to properly deal with gradually\\nchanging objects which are under the influence of an external force.\\nTable 5 introduces two new predicates; axioms A1–A5 provide a\\ngeneral theory of instantaneous and continuous change (from van\\nLambalgen and Hamm 2005: 40). As can be easily seen, the axiom system\\nextends that of Shanahan (1997). \",\n \"\\nAxioms 4 and 5 define continuous change. Axiom 4 defines the\\nTrajectory predicate. To see what it says, let’s consider a\\nsituation of running a mile where \\\\(f_1\\\\) is\\ninstantiated by running and \\\\(f_2\\\\) by\\ndistance\\\\((x)\\\\). Should running be true during\\nthe whole interval from \\\\(t\\\\) until \\\\(t'\\\\) then distance\\\\((a + 1)\\\\) will be true\\nat \\\\(t'\\\\). The value of \\\\(x\\\\), that is, the actual\\ndistance actually run at each time instant will be determined by the\\nlaw of the process under consideration (here, running speed). Axiom 5\\ndefines the predicate Clipped\\\\((t,\\nf, t')\\\\)\\nwhich is true if \\\\(f\\\\) is terminated or released by an event\\n\\\\(e\\\\) which happens in the time interval between \\\\(t\\\\) and\\n\\\\(t'\\\\). Thus Clipped covers both instantaneous and\\ncontinuous change. The axioms provide a general theory of what can\\nchange and what stays constant.\",\n \"\\nFor concrete situations, we also need the specific temporal and causal\\nrelationships. This kind of information is specified in so called\\nscenarios representing lexical meaning. The lexical meaning\\nof the accomplishment run a mile corresponds to scenario\\n(54). Like the axioms, the scenario takes the form of a logic program.\\nAll variables are universally quantified. \",\n \"\\nScenarios formalize the event nucleus of Moens and Steedman (1988).\\nEvery accomplishment takes the same form of scenario, the only\\ndifferences being that the individual scenarios involve different\\npreparatory processes (run, build, etc.), incremental\\nthemes (distance\\\\((x)\\\\), house\\\\((x)\\\\), etc.)\\nand resultant states. Furthermore, it is obvious that the preparatory\\nprocess run, an activity, is a proper part of scenario (54).\\nThe simpler activity scenario can be easily arrived at if we remove\\nclauses (d)–(f) from (54). We are now in the position to solve\\nthe imperfective paradox avoiding the problems discussed in\\n section 6.\\n Both a past progressive activity sentence as in (55a) and a past\\nprogressive accomplishment sentence (55b) will trigger a discourse\\nupdate as stated in integrity constraint (55c). \",\n \"\\nThe discourse update of the completed program (54) yields that at some\\npoint after \\\\(t\\\\) John will achieve the culmination and will have\\nrun one mile (see van Lambalgen and Hamm 2005: 61ff. for a proof).\\nObviously, the same integrity constraint in combination with the\\nactivity in (55a) only licenses the inferences that there was some\\npast running activity. In the case of an accomplishment the course of\\nevents dramatically changes if we add information to the\\nrepresentation as in (56b). Now, both (56a) and (56b) only allow the\\ninference that there was a running event but, arguably, John didn’t\\nreach his goal in (56b). Without going into further details it should\\nbe clear how this non-monotonic inference works. The derivation works\\nanalogously to the simpler instances of the frame problem discussed\\nabove. \",\n \"\\nThe solution to the imperfective paradox just outlined makes reference\\nto the intentions of the agent involved in the event; therefore the\\nnotion of a goal or intention is built into the system right from the\\nstart. Note, however, it does not involve possible worlds, or\\nprimitive notions like inertia worlds; instead it is based upon\\nminimal models and non-monotonic reasoning. This yields additional\\nbenefits. Firstly, the Event Calculus will compute a minimal model in\\ncases where an integrity constraint can be satisfied. Moreover, the\\nnumber of construction steps required for this yields a precise\\ncomplexity measure which (for example) allows us to derive predictions\\nfor cognitive processing. Secondly, the non-monotonic nature of the\\nEvent Calculus can be used to model the incremental construction of a\\ntemporal model with inferences which hold locally at a discourse\\nsegment \\\\(s_n\\\\) but which can be undone at some\\nlater discourse unit \\\\(s_{n+1}\\\\). This is a\\nnecessary prerequisite if we think of interpreting sentences like\\n(56b) from left to right assuming incremental interpretation (see\\ne.g., Baggio and van Lambalgen 2007 and Bott 2010 for implementations\\nof the Event Calculus as a processing model). In the next section we\\nwill review psychological and psycholinguistic work on the\\ninterpretation of aspect which will provide empirical motivation for\\nthe outlined analysis. \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"7.4 The imperfective paradox reconsidered\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nDue to limitations of space, we will not discuss psychological and\\npsycholinguistic studies of tense but will focus solely on processing\\nstudies of aspect. Moreover, within this topic we limit ourselves to\\nstudies of the adult system. The interested reader is referred to\\nDickey (2001) and the references therein for psycholinguistic work on\\ntense as well as to the entry on\\n the experience and perception of time\\n\\n and the contributions in Grondin (2008) for psychology of time in\\ngeneral. \",\n \"\\nPsychologists have recently begun studying event perception and its\\nneural basis (e.g., Zacks and Tversky 2001; Zacks, Tversky, and Iyer\\n2001; Zacks et al. 2006). The underlying question behind this line of\\nresearch is whether events play a role in how we cognitively structure\\nand remember changing states of affairs and how they are represented.\\nZacks, Tversky, and Iyer (2001) use an analogy from the domain of\\nobjects to the domain of events to define an event as a “segment\\nin time at a given location that is conceived by an observer to have a\\nbeginning and an end” (p.30). They claim that “the ability\\nto identify the parts of events and their relationships constitutes a\\ndistinct perceptual process” (p.30) which they call event\\nstructure perception. Just as an object is an ontological\\nprimitive in the spatial domain, so an event is an ontological\\nprimitive in the spatio-temporal\\n domain.[9]\\n Objects are recognized by shape, color etc. and have boundaries in\\nspace. Analogously, events have boundaries in time, but are also\\nbounded in space. An event of buttering toast, for instance, happens\\nat a particular time, but also in a particular location in space and\\nis therefore spatially bounded. Continuing the analogy, both objects\\nand events can be identified and categorized using hierarchical\\nrelations. \",\n \"\\n\\nIn Zacks, Tversky, and Iyer’s experiments, participants segmented an\\nongoing activity (like washing dishes) while watching it on\\nfilm by pressing a key to mark “natural and meaningful”\\nunit boundaries. The grain at which participants segmented the\\nactivity was manipulated between subjects: one group was asked to mark\\nthe largest meaningful units (coarse grain size), the other group the\\nsmallest units (fine grain size) which still could be considered to be\\ncomplete events. The placement of perceived event boundaries provides\\ninformation about the psychological status of events and their\\npartonomic hierarchy. If the stream of action is perceived as\\nconsisting of discrete events, participants should place event\\nboundaries consistently and this is what Zacks, Tversky, and Iyer\\n(2001) found. Further, if participants make use of partonomic\\nhierarchies, coarse event boundaries should be aligned with fine\\nboundaries, since the end of each superordinate event is also the end\\nof its last subevent. Again, this hypothesis was corroborated by a\\nstrong hierarchical bias effect. Events thus seem to be\\npsychologically real and to be hierarchically structured. \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"8. Cognitive aspects\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nDuring the last decade psycholinguists have started to investigate the\\ncognitive reality of lexical aspect and how it is processed. The\\nexisting studies can be sub-classified into studies concerning\\nAktionsart simpliciter and those concerned with shifts from\\none aspectual class to an other, i.e., aspectual coercion. In\\nthe following, we will provide a brief overview of both areas of\\nresearch. \",\n \"\\nMcKoon and Macfarland (2002) were among the first to study processing\\nconsequences of decompositional analyses along the lines of Dowty\\n(1979). They provided evidence from reading times and lexical decision\\ntimes that accomplishments \\\\((\\\\alpha\\\\) CAUSE \\\\(x\\\\) BECOME IN-STATE)\\nare inherently more complex than achievements \\\\((x\\\\) BECOME\\nIN-STATE). Similarly, Gennari and Poeppel (2003) compared eventive\\npredicates (which included accomplishments, achievements and\\nactivities) to statives and found that the former were more complex to\\nprocess than the latter. Brennan and Pylkkänen (2010) extended\\nthis line of research to psychological verbs and compared\\naccomplishments (e.g., scare) with statives (e.g.,\\n\\ncherish) using reading time methods and\\nmagnetoencephalography (MEG). They also included a comparison of the\\nsimple psychological statives with modified sentences that required\\ncoercion (e.g., within half an hour, the child cherished the\\nprecious kitten). Reading times and MEG data indicated that\\naccomplishments were more complex to comprehend than statives and,\\nmoreover, that the enhanced semantic complexity led to different MEG\\ncomponents than aspectual coercion. Finally, Coll-Florit and Gennari\\n(2011) compared durative states and punctual event predicates (mostly\\nachievements) and observed longer reading times of statives than of\\nevent predicates. They attributed this effect—which runs counter\\nto what would be expected under a decomposition analysis—to the\\nfact that durative situations occur in semantically more diverse\\ncontexts and elicit more diverse associations than event predicates\\nwhich may modulate the required processing effort. Taken together, the\\nexisting studies provide evidence for complexity differences between\\nthe aspectual classes, lending support to decompositional analyses.\\nHowever, not all issues are entirely solved yet and further research\\nis required. \",\n \"\\nThe second line of research concerns aspectual coercion. Here, the\\nmain research question has been whether aspectual coercion is a costly\\noperation. Existing research has almost exclusively focused on one\\ncoercion type, i.e., coercion of point action verbs into an iterative\\ninterpretation (but see Brennan and Pylkkänen 2010 and Bott 2010\\nfor exceptions). Again, the findings are mixed. Early studies have\\nprovided evidence for coercion costs employing secondary tasks such as\\ncross-modal lexical decision or stop making sense\\njudgments (Piñango, Zurif, and Jackendoff 1999; Todorova\\net al. 2000). Pickering et al. (2006) used the same materials as in\\nthe experiments mentioned above, but tested a coerced meaning during\\nordinary reading without an additional task. In two self-paced reading\\nand two eyetracking experiments, they found aspectual coercion to be\\nno more difficult than their aspectual control conditions. This lack\\nof effect let them propose the aspectual underspecification\\nhypothesis, stating that the aspectual representation stays\\nunderspecified during normal reading. Brennan and Pylkkänen\\n(2008) challenged this view and reported a coercion effect of coercion\\nsentences like (57a) as compared to aspectual controls (57b) both in\\nself-paced reading and in MEG; on the basis of a rating study they had\\ncarefully selected clear instances of point action verbs. Their MEG\\nstudy revealed activation in the anterior midline field, a MEG\\ncomponent that has been observed for other non-aspectual cases of\\ncoercion, too. \",\n \"\\nComplicating matters, Bott (2008, 2010) applied the same norming\\nprocedures, but did not find evidence of coercion cost in iterative\\npoint action verbs in German. With other types of aspectual coercion,\\nhowever, there were clear indications of processing difficulty\\nindicating that the underlying processes differ between coercion\\ntypes. Furthermore, the study provided evidence that at least in some\\ncases (achievement ⇝ accomplishment) coercion operations are not\\ntriggered by an aspectual mismatch, but can proceed smoothly by\\nenriching the aspectual representation with additional eventualities.\\nThis was shown in an event-related potentials (ERP) study in which a\\ndouble dissociation of ERP components was elicited by sentences with\\naspectual coercion as compared to sentences that contained an\\naspectual mismatch.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"8.1 Lexical Aspect\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nGrammatical aspect has recently received increased interest in\\npsycholinguistics (for a comprehensive review see Madden and Ferretti\\n2009). One line of studies has investigated (e.g., Ferretti\\net al. 2007) the accessibility of event participants in English\\nprogressive and simple sentences. They provide evidence that, in line\\nwith the linguistic description provided above, the progressive\\npresents an event from the inside, making participants, instruments\\nand places fully accessible, whereas the simple forms present events\\nas complete units and the event participants are less accessible.\\nUsing picture selection/verification, Madden and Zwaan (2003) found\\nthat participants were faster and more likely to choose a picture\\nshowing a complete event, rather than a picture depicting an ongoing\\nevent, after they had read a sentence with an accomplishment verb in\\nthe simple past. This indicates that English speakers encode\\naccomplishments in the simple past as complete events. This finding\\nwas supported by a study by Anderson et al. (2008). They compared\\naccomplishments describing a path such as Tom jogged/was jogging\\nto the woods and then stretched when he got there. Participants\\nlistened to these sentences while using a computer mouse to drag and\\ndrop a human character in a visual scene. When hearing a sentence in\\nthe past progressive, many drops took place at the beginning and the\\ncenter of the path, whereas in the simple past most drops were at the\\nend of the path. Interestingly, the differences were by no means\\ncategorical. Even in the simple past condition, the character was in\\nsome trials positioned well before the end of the path. This indicates\\nthat accomplishments in the simple past are consistent with incomplete\\nevents. \",\n \"\\nAnother study relevant for the discussion in the previous sections is\\nan ERP study on the imperfective paradox by Baggio et al. (2008). They\\ninvestigated the processing of Dutch imperfective sentences such as\\nhet meisje was een brief aan het schrijven (the girl was\\nwriting a letter) which were either followed by a\\n\\nwhen-clause that made the culmination unlikely (when her\\nfriend spilled coffee on the paper) or by a sentence which was\\ncompatible with the attainment of the goal (when her friend spilled\\ncoffee on the tablecloth). The first kind of sentences elicited larger\\nsustained anterior negativities compared to sentences that were\\ncompatible with the culmination. Moreover, the amplitude of the\\nnegativity was correlated with the frequency with which participants\\nresponded that the culmination was not reached. These findings\\nindicate that a progressive sentence triggers a default inference to a\\ncomplete event which can be canceled again, if the context so\\nrequires. \",\n \"\\nGrammatical aspect is subject to clear crosslinguistic differences.\\nThis raises the question of whether the grammatical system has an\\ninfluence on how we process language. In von Stutterheim et al. (2009)\\nthe authors reported findings of a production study comparing event\\ndescriptions of English, German and Dutch speakers that were elicited\\nwhile they were watching and describing a silent video clip. Their\\nstudy revealed clear differences between productions from the three\\nlanguages. English speakers used the progressive to start event\\ndescriptions well before the endpoint was visible (e.g., A car is\\ngoing down a lane … to a farmhouse). Germans showed a\\ndifferent behavior, relating their descriptions to the endpoint of a\\nmotion event. It thus seems as if production is constrained by the\\nlanguage in which it is realized. Recently, von Stutterheim et al.\\n(2012) extended this line of research to a sample of seven languages\\nand showed that the aspectual properties of a language influence how\\nspeakers conceptualize events. It’s not only that speakers of\\ndifferent languages talked differently about motion events (e.g.,\\nmention of endpoints), their language also had a clear influence on\\ntheir viewing behavior while watching the movies and influenced their\\nmemory capacity for those parts of the scene corresponding to\\nendpoints. \",\n \"As for comprehension, Bott and Hamm (2014)\\ninvestigated how the aspectual system of a language influences\\nprocessing difficulty. They compared coercion of German and English\\naccomplishments which were modified by for \\\\(x\\\\) time\\nadverbials. (58) is a sample item. \",\n \"\\nIn the German experiments, condition (58a) was read as fast as a\\nnon-coercing control condition with an in x time adverbial.\\nThis was different in English where the authors found coercion to\\ncause a substantial slowdown of reading speed. They interpret this\\ncrosslinguistic difference as follows: languages which have the\\ngrammatical means to express an aspectual difference via alternative\\nforms—the progressive vs. simple forms in English—enforce\\nimmediate aspectual commitment, whereas languages that lack this\\ngrammatical feature have to leave it underspecified. In other words,\\nGerman readers will leave it to the context whether an accomplishment\\nexpresses a complete or incomplete event, whereas English readers\\nimmediately strengthen an accomplishment in the simple form into a\\ncomplete event interpretation. They take this strengthening to be a\\npragmatic process that is due to competition between alternative\\ngrammatical forms.\",\n \"In an eyetracking during reading study, Bott and Gattnar (2015)\\nfollowed up on the observed cross-linguistic variation in the\\nprocessing of grammatical aspect comparing an aspect language, Russian,\\nwith the non-aspect language German. They investigated whether the\\ndifferences in the aspectual systems of the two languages affected the\\ntime course of mismatch detection in the case of lexical aspectual\\nmismatch.All test sentences contained clear instances of (in Russian always perfective) transitive achievement verbs such as win, find, reach, notice, etc. which were modified by a semantically mismatching for-adverbial (e.g., for three hours) or a semantically fitting ago-adverbial (e.g., three hours ago)\\nin aspectual control conditions. Crucially, both Russian and German\\nhave relatively free word order making it possible to test for effects\\nof mismatching vs. matchingadverbials in the word order subject verb object adverbial but also in the order adverbial verb subject object. The results show that Russian readers immediately detect the aspectual mismatch\\nirrespective of whether they have seen the subject or the object\\nargument yet. This is different in German where aspectual mismatch\\ndetection only started after the verb plus all its obligary arguments\\nhad been encountered. This result was modeled by Bott and Sternefeld\\n(2017) in an incremental event semantics drawing on insights from\\nmereological semantics as proposed by Krifka (1989, 1992); see\\n also\\n section 6.1 (and the entry\\n mereology).\\nThe incremental semantic derivations show that in a non-aspect language\\nlike German, lexical aspect really is a property of whole sentences and\\nstrongly depends on the compositional interpretation of the verb, its\\narguments, and their thematic roles. In an aspect language like\\nRussian, on the other hand, the grammatical aspect imposes itself\\nstrong constraints on lexical aspectual interpretation. These\\npsycholinguistic results thus nicely fit semantic proposals for\\ngrammatical aspect that have been proposed in the framework of\\nmereological semantics (see, e.g., Filip 2008, a.o.).\",\n \"\\nTo summarize, the existing studies lend empirical support to the\\naspectual distinctions made in the semantic and philosophic\\nliterature. Moreover, the grammatical system of a language influences\\nthe way language is processed and may even influence the way we\\nexperience the world. \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"8.2 Grammatical Aspect\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nWe introduced and discussed several important semantic, philosophical\\nand technical concepts and theories of temporality and at least\\nindicated how these concepts and theories are related to cognition.\\nHowever, we did this exclusively from a sentence internal perspective.\\nTense and aspect are important means for organizing discourse as\\n well.[10]\\n To conclude our overview, we present French examples due to Kamp and\\nRohrer (see van Lambalgen and Hamm 2005, ch. 9) and indicate the role\\ntense and aspect play in discourse organization. Consider sentence\\n(59) in which the passé simple (PS) occurs four times.\\n\\n\",\n \"\\nFirst the PS in (59) provides temporal information; all events are\\nlocated in the past. But the PS conveys aspectual information too. It\\nsays that the internal constitution of the events is not important and\\nthis means that PS expresses perfectivity. PS imposes a view of the\\nevents “from the outside”. This is then taken to explain\\nwhy multiple uses of the PS imply a succession of the events described\\nas witnessed in example (59). This means that Pierre getting up\\nprecedes his going up to his room and this event precedes closing the\\ndoor which finally precedes turning the radio on. Thus, the PS\\nstructures the above little discourse in a particular way. Early\\ndiscourse representation theory explains this effect by assuming that\\nthe PS introduces a new reference point after a previously introduced\\none.\",\n \"\\nThe discourse function of the French imparfait is different. Example\\n(60a) shows that, like the past in English, the\\n imparfait[11]\\n is not felicitous when uttered out of the blue. \",\n \"\\nKamp explains these facts in the following way. The imparfait does not\\nintroduce its own reference time and in (60a) there is no previous\\nreference point given. Therefore (60a) is out. In (60b) the sentence\\nin the passé simple Jean ôta sa veste introduces\\na reference time that can be used to anchor If faisait chaud.\\nThe imperfective aspect of the imparfait is then explained by the fact\\nthat the PS event happens while the sentence in the imparfait holds.\\nThus passé simple and imparfait not only provide temporal\\ninformation but they also serve as means to structure discourse in\\ndifferent ways.\",\n \"\\nOf course these brief remarks about the discourse function of tense\\nand aspect barely touch the tip of the iceberg. For more information\\non the discourse semantics of French tense and discourse organization\\nin general, the reader is advised to consult de Swart and Corblin\\n(2002), Asher and Lascarides (2003) and van Lambalgen and Hamm (2005,\\nespecially chapter 9). This short note on discourse structure\\ncompletes our article on tense and aspect. \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"9. Conclusion\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Anderson, S., T. Matlock, C. Fausey, and M. Spivey, 2008,\n“On the path to understanding the on-line processing of\ngrammatical aspect”, in Proceedings of the 30th CogSci\nconference, 2253–2258. ","Asher, N. and A. Lascarides, 2003, Logics of Conversation.\nStudies in Natural Language Processing, Cambridge: Cambridge\nUniversity Press. ","Bach, E., 1986, “The algebra of events”,\nLinguistics and Philosophy, 9(1): 5–16. ","Baggio, G., M. van Lambalgen, and P. Hagoort, 2008,\n“Computing and recomputing discourse models: an ERP\nstudy”, Journal of Memory and Language, 59(1):\n36–53. ","Baggio, G. and M. van Lambalgen, 2007, “The processing\nconsequences of the imperfective paradox”, Journal of\nSemantics, 24(4): 307–330. ","Bealer, G. and U. Mönnich, 1989, “Property\ntheories”, in Handbook of Philosophical Logic (Volume\nIV), D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner (eds.), Dordrecht: Reidel. ","Blackburn, P. and K.F. Jørgensen, 2016, “Reichenbach,\nPrior and hybrid tense logic”, Synthese, 193(11):\n3677–3689.","Bonomi, A., 1997, “The progressive and the structure of\nevents”, Journal of Semantics, 14(2): 173–205.\n","Bott, O., 2008, “Doing it again and again may be\ndifficult—but it depends on what you are doing”, in\nProceedings of the 27th WCCFL conference, N. Abner and J.\nBishop (eds.), Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press, 63–71. ","–––, 2010, The processing of events,\nvol. 162 of Linguistics Today, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.\n","Bott, O. and F. 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McRae, 2007, “Verb aspect and\nthe activation of event knowledge”, Journal of Experimental\nPsychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33(1):\n182–196.","Filip, H., 2008, “Events and Maximalization”, in\nCrosslinguistic Appraches to the Semantics of Aspect,\nS. Rothstein (ed.), Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 217–256.","Gamut, L.T.F., 1991, Logic, Language and Meaning: Volume\nII, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ","Gennari, S. and D. Poeppel, 2003, “Processing correlates of\nlexical semantic complexity”, Cognition, 89(1):\nB27–B41.","Grätzer, G. (1978). General Lattice Theory,\nBasel/Boston/Berlin: Birkhäuser.","Grondin, S. (ed.), 2008, Psychology of Time, Bingley, UK:\nEmerald Group. ","Hanks, S. and D. McDermott, 1986, “Default reasoning,\nnonmonotonic logic, and the frame problem”, Proceedings\nAAAI, 86: 328–333. ","Heim, I., 1982, The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun\nPhrases, Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.\n","Kamp, H., 1979, “Events, instants and temporal\nreference”, in Semantics from Different Points of View,\nR. Bäuerle, U. Egli, and A. von Stechow (eds.), Berlin: Springer.\n","–––, 1991, “The perfect and other tenses\nin French and English”, in Tense and Aspect in English and\nFrench, Dyana Deliverable R2. 3B, 41–64. ","Kamp, H. and U. Reyle, 1993, From Discourse to Logic,\nDordrecht: Reidel. ","Kowalski, R., 1995, “How to reconcile reactive and rational\nagents”, in Meta-Logic and Logic Programming, Apt and\nTurini (eds.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ","Kowalski, R. A. and M. Sergot, 1986, “A logic-based calculus\nof events”, New Generation Computing, 4(1):\n67–95.","Krifka, M., 1989, Nominalreferenz und Zeitkonstitution,\nMunich: Fink. ","–––, 1992, “Thematic roles as links\nbetween nominal reference and temporal constitution”,\nin Lexical Matters, I. Sag and A. Szabolcsi (eds.), Stanford,\nCA: CSLI Publications, 29–53.","Landman, F., 1992, “The progressive”, Natural\nLanguage Semantics, 1: 1–32. ","Lecarme, J., 2008, “Tense and modality in nominals”,\nin Time and Modality, J. Guéron and J. Lecarme (eds.),\nSpringer, Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. ","Madden, C. and T. Ferretti, 2009, “Verb aspect and the\nmental representation of situations”, in The expression of\ntime, W. Klein and P. Li (eds.), Berlin/New York: Mouton de\nGruyter, 217–240. ","Madden, C. and R. Zwaan, 2003, “How does verb aspect\nconstrain event representations?”, Memory &\nCognition, 31(5): 663–672. ","McCarthy, J., 1977, “Epistemological problems of artificial\nintelligence”, in Proceedings of IJACAI-77. ","McKoon, G. and T. Macfarland, 2002, “Event templates in the\nlexical representations of verbs”, Cognitive\nPsychology, 45(1): 1–44. ","Moens, M. and M. Steedman, 1988, “Temporal ontology and\ntemporal reference”, Computational Linguistics, 14:\n15–28. ","Naumann, R. and Ch. Piñón, 1997, “Decomposing\nthe progressive”, in Proceedings of the 11th\nAmsterdam Colloquium, P. Dekker, M. Stokhof, and Y. Venema (eds.),\nAmsterdam: University of Amsterdam. ","Nienhuys-Cheng, S-H. and R. de Wolf, 1997, Foundations of\nInductive Logic Programming, New York, Berlin: Springer. ","Oettinger, A., 1966, “The Uses of Computers in\nScience”, Scientific American, 215: 166–169.","Ogihara, T., 1990, “Semantics of the progressive and the\nperfect in English”, in Dyana–Report R.2.5.A, H.\nKamp (ed.), ESPRIT Basic Research Project 6852. ","Parsons, T., 1989, “The progressive in English: Events,\nstates and processes”, Linguistics and Philosophy,\n12(2): 213–241. ","–––, 1990, Events in the Semantics of\nEnglish, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. ","Pickering, M.J., B. McElree, S. Frisson, L. Chen, and M.J.\nTraxler, 2006, “Underspecification and coercion”,\nDiscourse Processes, 42(2): 131–155. ","Piñango, M.M., E. Zurif, and R. Jackendoff, 1999,\n“Real-time processing implications of enriched composition at\nthe syntax-semantics interface”, Journal of Psycholinguistic\nResearch, 28(4): 395–414. ","Prior, A., 1967, Past, Present, and Future, Oxford:\nOxford University Press. ","Reichenbach, H., 1947, Elements of Symbolic Logic, New\nYork: Dover Publications, Inc. ","Russell, B., 1914, Our Knowledge of the External World,\nLondon: Allen and Unwin. ","Shanahan, M., 1997, Solving the Frame Problem: A Mathematical\nInvestigation of the Common Sense Law of Inertia, Cambridge, MA:\nMIT Press. ","Smith, C. S., 1991, The Parameter of Aspect, Dordrecht:\nKluwer. ","Spencer, A., 1991, Morphological Theory, Oxford:\nBlackwell. ","Steedman, M., 1997, “Temporality”, in Handbook of\nLogic and Language, J. van Benthem and A. ter Meulen (eds.),\nAmsterdam: Elsevier. ","Stenning, K. and M. van Lambalgen, 2005, “Semantic\ninterpretation as computation in nonmonotonic logic: The real meaning\nof the suppression task”, Cognitive Science, 29(6):\n919–960. ","–––, 2008, Human Reasoning and Cognitive\nScience, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ","Thomason, S., 1986, “On constructing instants from\nevents”, Journal of Philosophical Logic, 13(1):\n85–96. ","Todorova, M., K. Straub, W. Badecker, and R. Frank, 2000,\n“Aspectual coercion and the online computation of sentential\naspect”, Proceedings of the CogSci 2000 Conference.\n","van Lambalgen, M. and F. Hamm, 2005, The Proper Treatment of\nEvents, Malden: Blackwell. ","Vendler, Z., 1967, Linguistics in Philosophy, Ithaca, New\nYork: Cornell University Press. ","Verkuyl, H., 1993, A Theory of Aspectability. The Interaction\nbetween Temporal and Atemporal Structure, Cambridge: Cambridge\nUniversity Press. ","von Stutterheim, C., M. Andermann, M. Carroll, M. Flecken, and B.\nSchmiedtová, 2012, “How grammaticized concepts shape\nevent conceptualization in language production: Insights from\nlinguistic analysis, eye tracking data, and memory performance”,\nLinguistics, 50(4): 833–867. ","von Stutterheim, C., M. Carroll, and W. Klein, 2009, “New\nperspectives in analyzing aspectual distinctions across\nlanguages”, in The expression of time, W. Klein and P.\nLi (eds.), Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 195–216. ","Walker, A. G., 1947, “Durées et instants”,\nRevue Scientifique, 85: 131–134. ","Zacks, J., K.M. Swallow, J.M. Vettel, and M.P. McAvoy, 2006,\n“Visual motion and the neural correlates of event\nperception”, Brain Research, 1076: 150–162. ","Zacks, J. and B. Tversky, 2001, “Event structure in\nperception and conception”, Psychological Bulletin,\n127: 3–21. ","Zacks, J., B. Tversky, and G. Iyer, 2001, “Perceiving,\nremembering and communicating structure in events”, Journal\nof Experimental Psychology: General, 130: 29–58. ","Zucchi, S., 1999, “Incomplete events, intensionality and\nimperfective aspect”, Natural Language Semantics, 7(2):\n179–215. "],"string":"[\n \"Anderson, S., T. Matlock, C. Fausey, and M. Spivey, 2008,\\n“On the path to understanding the on-line processing of\\ngrammatical aspect”, in Proceedings of the 30th CogSci\\nconference, 2253–2258. \",\n \"Asher, N. and A. Lascarides, 2003, Logics of Conversation.\\nStudies in Natural Language Processing, Cambridge: Cambridge\\nUniversity Press. \",\n \"Bach, E., 1986, “The algebra of events”,\\nLinguistics and Philosophy, 9(1): 5–16. \",\n \"Baggio, G., M. van Lambalgen, and P. Hagoort, 2008,\\n“Computing and recomputing discourse models: an ERP\\nstudy”, Journal of Memory and Language, 59(1):\\n36–53. \",\n \"Baggio, G. and M. van Lambalgen, 2007, “The processing\\nconsequences of the imperfective paradox”, Journal of\\nSemantics, 24(4): 307–330. \",\n \"Bealer, G. and U. Mönnich, 1989, “Property\\ntheories”, in Handbook of Philosophical Logic (Volume\\nIV), D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner (eds.), Dordrecht: Reidel. \",\n \"Blackburn, P. and K.F. Jørgensen, 2016, “Reichenbach,\\nPrior and hybrid tense logic”, Synthese, 193(11):\\n3677–3689.\",\n \"Bonomi, A., 1997, “The progressive and the structure of\\nevents”, Journal of Semantics, 14(2): 173–205.\\n\",\n \"Bott, O., 2008, “Doing it again and again may be\\ndifficult—but it depends on what you are doing”, in\\nProceedings of the 27th WCCFL conference, N. Abner and J.\\nBishop (eds.), Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press, 63–71. \",\n \"–––, 2010, The processing of events,\\nvol. 162 of Linguistics Today, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.\\n\",\n \"Bott, O. and F. Hamm, 2014, “Crosslinguistic variation in\\nthe processing of aspect”, in Meaning and Understanding\\nacross Languages (Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics),\\nB. Hemforth, B. Mertins, and C. Fabricius-Hansen (eds.), Cham:\\nSpringer International Publishing.\",\n \"Bott, O. and Gattnar, A., 2015, “The cross-linguistic\\nprocessing of aspect: An eyetracking study on the time course of\\naspectual interpretation in German and Russian”, Language,\\nCognition and Neuroscience, 30(7): 877–898.\",\n \"Brennan, J. and L. Pylkkänen, 2008, “Processing events:\\nBehavioral and neuromagnetic correlates of aspectual coercion”,\\nBrain & Language, 106(2): 132–143. \",\n \"–––, 2010, “Processing psych verbs:\\nBehavioural and MEG measures of two different types of semantic\\ncomplexity”, Language and cognitive processes, 25(6):\\n777–807. \",\n \"Coll-Florit, M. and S. P. Gennari, 2011, “Time in language:\\nEvent duration in language comprehension”, Cognitive\\nPsychology, 62(1): 41–79. \",\n \"Comrie, B., 1976, Aspect, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress. \",\n \"–––, 1985, Tense, Cambridge: Cambridge\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Copley, B., and Harley, H., 2015, “A force-theoretic\\nframework for event structure”, Linguistics and\\nPhilosophy, 38(2): 103–158.\",\n \"Davidson, D., 1967, “The logical form of action\\nsentences”, in The Logic of Decision and Action, N.\\nRescher (ed.), Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. \",\n \"de Swart, H. and F. Corblin, (eds.), 2002, Handbook of French\\nSemantics, Stanford: CSLI Publications. \",\n \"Dickey, M., 2001, The Processing of Tense: Psycholinguistic\\nStudies on the Interpretation of Tense and Temporal Relations,\\nDordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. \",\n \"Doets, K., 1994, From Logic to Logic Programming,\\nCambridge, MA: MIT Press. \",\n \"Dowty, D., 1979, Word Meaning and Montague Grammar,\\nDordrecht: Reidel. \",\n \"Egg, M., 2005, Flexible Semantics for Reinterpretation\\nphenomena, Stanford: CSLI Publications. \",\n \"Ferretti, T., M. Kutas, and K. McRae, 2007, “Verb aspect and\\nthe activation of event knowledge”, Journal of Experimental\\nPsychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33(1):\\n182–196.\",\n \"Filip, H., 2008, “Events and Maximalization”, in\\nCrosslinguistic Appraches to the Semantics of Aspect,\\nS. Rothstein (ed.), Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 217–256.\",\n \"Gamut, L.T.F., 1991, Logic, Language and Meaning: Volume\\nII, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. \",\n \"Gennari, S. and D. Poeppel, 2003, “Processing correlates of\\nlexical semantic complexity”, Cognition, 89(1):\\nB27–B41.\",\n \"Grätzer, G. (1978). General Lattice Theory,\\nBasel/Boston/Berlin: Birkhäuser.\",\n \"Grondin, S. (ed.), 2008, Psychology of Time, Bingley, UK:\\nEmerald Group. \",\n \"Hanks, S. and D. McDermott, 1986, “Default reasoning,\\nnonmonotonic logic, and the frame problem”, Proceedings\\nAAAI, 86: 328–333. \",\n \"Heim, I., 1982, The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun\\nPhrases, Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.\\n\",\n \"Kamp, H., 1979, “Events, instants and temporal\\nreference”, in Semantics from Different Points of View,\\nR. Bäuerle, U. Egli, and A. von Stechow (eds.), Berlin: Springer.\\n\",\n \"–––, 1991, “The perfect and other tenses\\nin French and English”, in Tense and Aspect in English and\\nFrench, Dyana Deliverable R2. 3B, 41–64. \",\n \"Kamp, H. and U. Reyle, 1993, From Discourse to Logic,\\nDordrecht: Reidel. \",\n \"Kowalski, R., 1995, “How to reconcile reactive and rational\\nagents”, in Meta-Logic and Logic Programming, Apt and\\nTurini (eds.), Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. \",\n \"Kowalski, R. A. and M. Sergot, 1986, “A logic-based calculus\\nof events”, New Generation Computing, 4(1):\\n67–95.\",\n \"Krifka, M., 1989, Nominalreferenz und Zeitkonstitution,\\nMunich: Fink. \",\n \"–––, 1992, “Thematic roles as links\\nbetween nominal reference and temporal constitution”,\\nin Lexical Matters, I. Sag and A. Szabolcsi (eds.), Stanford,\\nCA: CSLI Publications, 29–53.\",\n \"Landman, F., 1992, “The progressive”, Natural\\nLanguage Semantics, 1: 1–32. \",\n \"Lecarme, J., 2008, “Tense and modality in nominals”,\\nin Time and Modality, J. Guéron and J. Lecarme (eds.),\\nSpringer, Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. \",\n \"Madden, C. and T. Ferretti, 2009, “Verb aspect and the\\nmental representation of situations”, in The expression of\\ntime, W. Klein and P. Li (eds.), Berlin/New York: Mouton de\\nGruyter, 217–240. \",\n \"Madden, C. and R. Zwaan, 2003, “How does verb aspect\\nconstrain event representations?”, Memory &\\nCognition, 31(5): 663–672. \",\n \"McCarthy, J., 1977, “Epistemological problems of artificial\\nintelligence”, in Proceedings of IJACAI-77. \",\n \"McKoon, G. and T. Macfarland, 2002, “Event templates in the\\nlexical representations of verbs”, Cognitive\\nPsychology, 45(1): 1–44. \",\n \"Moens, M. and M. Steedman, 1988, “Temporal ontology and\\ntemporal reference”, Computational Linguistics, 14:\\n15–28. \",\n \"Naumann, R. and Ch. Piñón, 1997, “Decomposing\\nthe progressive”, in Proceedings of the 11th\\nAmsterdam Colloquium, P. Dekker, M. Stokhof, and Y. Venema (eds.),\\nAmsterdam: University of Amsterdam. \",\n \"Nienhuys-Cheng, S-H. and R. de Wolf, 1997, Foundations of\\nInductive Logic Programming, New York, Berlin: Springer. \",\n \"Oettinger, A., 1966, “The Uses of Computers in\\nScience”, Scientific American, 215: 166–169.\",\n \"Ogihara, T., 1990, “Semantics of the progressive and the\\nperfect in English”, in Dyana–Report R.2.5.A, H.\\nKamp (ed.), ESPRIT Basic Research Project 6852. \",\n \"Parsons, T., 1989, “The progressive in English: Events,\\nstates and processes”, Linguistics and Philosophy,\\n12(2): 213–241. \",\n \"–––, 1990, Events in the Semantics of\\nEnglish, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. \",\n \"Pickering, M.J., B. McElree, S. Frisson, L. Chen, and M.J.\\nTraxler, 2006, “Underspecification and coercion”,\\nDiscourse Processes, 42(2): 131–155. \",\n \"Piñango, M.M., E. Zurif, and R. Jackendoff, 1999,\\n“Real-time processing implications of enriched composition at\\nthe syntax-semantics interface”, Journal of Psycholinguistic\\nResearch, 28(4): 395–414. \",\n \"Prior, A., 1967, Past, Present, and Future, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press. \",\n \"Reichenbach, H., 1947, Elements of Symbolic Logic, New\\nYork: Dover Publications, Inc. \",\n \"Russell, B., 1914, Our Knowledge of the External World,\\nLondon: Allen and Unwin. \",\n \"Shanahan, M., 1997, Solving the Frame Problem: A Mathematical\\nInvestigation of the Common Sense Law of Inertia, Cambridge, MA:\\nMIT Press. \",\n \"Smith, C. S., 1991, The Parameter of Aspect, Dordrecht:\\nKluwer. \",\n \"Spencer, A., 1991, Morphological Theory, Oxford:\\nBlackwell. \",\n \"Steedman, M., 1997, “Temporality”, in Handbook of\\nLogic and Language, J. van Benthem and A. ter Meulen (eds.),\\nAmsterdam: Elsevier. \",\n \"Stenning, K. and M. van Lambalgen, 2005, “Semantic\\ninterpretation as computation in nonmonotonic logic: The real meaning\\nof the suppression task”, Cognitive Science, 29(6):\\n919–960. \",\n \"–––, 2008, Human Reasoning and Cognitive\\nScience, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. \",\n \"Thomason, S., 1986, “On constructing instants from\\nevents”, Journal of Philosophical Logic, 13(1):\\n85–96. \",\n \"Todorova, M., K. Straub, W. Badecker, and R. Frank, 2000,\\n“Aspectual coercion and the online computation of sentential\\naspect”, Proceedings of the CogSci 2000 Conference.\\n\",\n \"van Lambalgen, M. and F. Hamm, 2005, The Proper Treatment of\\nEvents, Malden: Blackwell. \",\n \"Vendler, Z., 1967, Linguistics in Philosophy, Ithaca, New\\nYork: Cornell University Press. \",\n \"Verkuyl, H., 1993, A Theory of Aspectability. The Interaction\\nbetween Temporal and Atemporal Structure, Cambridge: Cambridge\\nUniversity Press. \",\n \"von Stutterheim, C., M. Andermann, M. Carroll, M. Flecken, and B.\\nSchmiedtová, 2012, “How grammaticized concepts shape\\nevent conceptualization in language production: Insights from\\nlinguistic analysis, eye tracking data, and memory performance”,\\nLinguistics, 50(4): 833–867. \",\n \"von Stutterheim, C., M. Carroll, and W. Klein, 2009, “New\\nperspectives in analyzing aspectual distinctions across\\nlanguages”, in The expression of time, W. Klein and P.\\nLi (eds.), Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 195–216. \",\n \"Walker, A. G., 1947, “Durées et instants”,\\nRevue Scientifique, 85: 131–134. \",\n \"Zacks, J., K.M. Swallow, J.M. Vettel, and M.P. McAvoy, 2006,\\n“Visual motion and the neural correlates of event\\nperception”, Brain Research, 1076: 150–162. \",\n \"Zacks, J. and B. Tversky, 2001, “Event structure in\\nperception and conception”, Psychological Bulletin,\\n127: 3–21. \",\n \"Zacks, J., B. Tversky, and G. Iyer, 2001, “Perceiving,\\nremembering and communicating structure in events”, Journal\\nof Experimental Psychology: General, 130: 29–58. \",\n \"Zucchi, S., 1999, “Incomplete events, intensionality and\\nimperfective aspect”, Natural Language Semantics, 7(2):\\n179–215. \"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../discourse-representation-theory/","text":"discourse representation theory"},{"href":"../events/","text":"events"},{"href":"../logic-nonmonotonic/","text":"logic: non-monotonic"},{"href":"../logic-temporal/","text":"logic: temporal"},{"href":"../mereology/","text":"mereology"},{"href":"../time-experience/","text":"time: the experience and perception of"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../discourse-representation-theory/\",\n \"text\": \"discourse representation theory\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../events/\",\n \"text\": \"events\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../logic-nonmonotonic/\",\n \"text\": \"logic: non-monotonic\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../logic-temporal/\",\n \"text\": \"logic: temporal\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../mereology/\",\n \"text\": \"mereology\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../time-experience/\",\n \"text\": \"time: the experience and perception of\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":85,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"assertion"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Assertion"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Mon Jan 22, 2007; substantive revision Wed Nov 17, 2021"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nAsserting is the act of claiming that something is the case—for\ninstance, that oranges are citruses, or that there is a\ntraffic congestion on Brooklyn Bridge (at some time). We make\nassertions to share information, coordinate our actions, defend\narguments, and communicate our beliefs and desires. Because of its\ncentral role in communication, assertion has been investigated in\nseveral disciplines. Linguists, philosophers of language, and\nlogicians rely heavily on the notion of assertion in theorizing about\nmeaning, truth and inference.","\nThe nature of assertion and its relation to other speech acts and\nlinguistic phenomena (implicatures, presuppositions, etc.) have been\nsubject to much controversy. This entry will situate assertion within\nspeech act theory and pragmatics more generally, and then go on to\npresent the current main accounts of\n assertion.[1]","\nBy an account of assertion is here meant a theory of what\na speaker does (e.g., expresses a belief) in making an\nassertion. According to such accounts, there are deep properties of\nassertion: specifying those properties is specifying what asserting\nconsists in. There must also be surface properties, which are\nthe properties by which a competent speaker can tell whether an\nutterance is an assertion, for instance that it is made by means of\nuttering a sentence in the indicative mood.","\nWe shall classify accounts according two parameters. Firstly, we\ndistinguish between normative and descriptive\naccounts. Normative accounts rely on the existence of norms or\nnormative relations that are essential to assertoric practice.\nDescriptive accounts don’t. Secondly, we distinguish between\ncontent-directed and hearer-directed accounts.\nContent-directed accounts focus on the relation between the speaker\nand the content of the proposition asserted, while hearer-directed\naccounts focus on the relations between speaker and hearer. Some\ntheories have both normative and descriptive components. The entry is\nstructured as follows"],"string":"[\n \"\\nAsserting is the act of claiming that something is the case—for\\ninstance, that oranges are citruses, or that there is a\\ntraffic congestion on Brooklyn Bridge (at some time). We make\\nassertions to share information, coordinate our actions, defend\\narguments, and communicate our beliefs and desires. Because of its\\ncentral role in communication, assertion has been investigated in\\nseveral disciplines. Linguists, philosophers of language, and\\nlogicians rely heavily on the notion of assertion in theorizing about\\nmeaning, truth and inference.\",\n \"\\nThe nature of assertion and its relation to other speech acts and\\nlinguistic phenomena (implicatures, presuppositions, etc.) have been\\nsubject to much controversy. This entry will situate assertion within\\nspeech act theory and pragmatics more generally, and then go on to\\npresent the current main accounts of\\n assertion.[1]\",\n \"\\nBy an account of assertion is here meant a theory of what\\na speaker does (e.g., expresses a belief) in making an\\nassertion. According to such accounts, there are deep properties of\\nassertion: specifying those properties is specifying what asserting\\nconsists in. There must also be surface properties, which are\\nthe properties by which a competent speaker can tell whether an\\nutterance is an assertion, for instance that it is made by means of\\nuttering a sentence in the indicative mood.\",\n \"\\nWe shall classify accounts according two parameters. Firstly, we\\ndistinguish between normative and descriptive\\naccounts. Normative accounts rely on the existence of norms or\\nnormative relations that are essential to assertoric practice.\\nDescriptive accounts don’t. Secondly, we distinguish between\\ncontent-directed and hearer-directed accounts.\\nContent-directed accounts focus on the relation between the speaker\\nand the content of the proposition asserted, while hearer-directed\\naccounts focus on the relations between speaker and hearer. Some\\ntheories have both normative and descriptive components. The entry is\\nstructured as follows\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Speech Acts","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. Pragmatics","sub_toc":["2.1 Presupposition","2.2 Implicature","2.3 Indirect assertions","2.4 Explicitness"]},{"content_title":"3. Descriptive Accounts, Content-Directed","sub_toc":["3.1 Relation to truth","3.2 Cognitive models of communication"]},{"content_title":"4. Descriptive Accounts, Hearer-Directed","sub_toc":["4.1 Self-representation","4.2 Communicative intentions"]},{"content_title":"5. Normative Accounts, Content-Directed","sub_toc":["5.1 Norms of assertion","5.2 Conventions"]},{"content_title":"6. Normative Accounts, Hearer-Directed","sub_toc":["6.1 Commitment"]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Speech Acts\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Pragmatics\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"2.1 Presupposition\",\n \"2.2 Implicature\",\n \"2.3 Indirect assertions\",\n \"2.4 Explicitness\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Descriptive Accounts, Content-Directed\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"3.1 Relation to truth\",\n \"3.2 Cognitive models of communication\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Descriptive Accounts, Hearer-Directed\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"4.1 Self-representation\",\n \"4.2 Communicative intentions\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Normative Accounts, Content-Directed\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"5.1 Norms of assertion\",\n \"5.2 Conventions\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. Normative Accounts, Hearer-Directed\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"6.1 Commitment\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\nConsider typical utterances made by means of the following\nsentences","\nSentence (1a) would typically be used to make an assertion. The\nspeaker would tell or inform a hearer that there is\na beer in the fridge. Such an utterance of is called\nassertoric, or assertive. By contrast, (1b) would be\nused to ask a question (and the utterance would then be\ninterrogative), (1c) to express a wish (optative),\nand (1d) to make a command, or a request (imperative). This\nentry is about utterances of the first kind, and about the speech acts\nperformed by means of them.","\nGottlob Frege emphasized the distinction between judging a thought\ncontent (what Frege called a Thought) to be true, and merely\nthinking/entertaining that content. Both are distinct from the content\nitself. Analogously, he distinguished between utterances with\nassertoric quality, or force (see below), and utterances\nwithout assertoric force. For instance, an assertoric\nutterance of","\nas a whole, by which the conditional proposition is asserted, contains\nas a proper part an utterance or the antecedent ‘it is\nraining’. But the utterance of “it is raining” is\nnot itself assertoric. The conditional can be true whether the\nantecedent is true or false, and hence the speaker’s belief\nabout rain is left open by the assertion","\nLike Frege, C.S. Peirce stressed the importance of distinguishing\n“between a proposition and what one does with it”. He also\nadopted, albeit implicitly, a distinction between force and\ncontent:","\n\n\none and the same proposition may be affirmed, denied, judged, doubted,\ninwardly inquired into, put as a question, wished, asked for,\neffectively commanded, taught, or merely expressed, and does not\nthereby become a different proposition (Peirce [NEM]:\n 248).[2]\n ","\nFrege characterized the assertoric quality of an utterance as an\nassertoric force (“behauptende Kraft”;\nFrege 1918a [TFR: 330]) of the utterance. This idea was later taken\nover by J. L. Austin (1962 [1975: 99–100]), the founding father\nof the general theory of speech acts. Austin distinguished between\nseveral levels of speech act, including these: the locutionary act,\nthe illocutionary act and the perlocutionary act. The locutionary act\nis the act of “ ‘saying something’ in the full\nnormal sense” (1962 [1975: 94]), which is the utterance of\ncertain words with certain meanings in a certain grammatical\nconstruction, such as uttering ‘I like ice’ as a sentence\nof English.","\nThe notion of an illocutionary act was introduced by Austin by means\nof examples (1962 [1975: 98–102]), and that is the normal\nprocedure. Illocutionary acts are such acts as asserting, asking a\nquestion, warning, threatening, announcing a verdict or intention,\nmaking an appointment, giving an order, expressing a wish, making a\nrequest. An utterance of a sentence, i.e., a locutionary act, by means\nof which a question is asked is thus an utterance with\ninterrogative force, an if an assertion is made, it has\nassertoric force.","\nThe perlocutionary act is made by means of an illocutionary act, and\ndepends entirely on the hearer’s reaction. For instance, by\nmeans of arguing the speaker may convince the hearer, and by\nmeans of warning the speaker may frighten the hearer. In\nthese examples, convincing and frightening are perlocutionary\nacts.","\nThe illocutionary act does not depend on the hearer’s reaction\nto the utterance. Still, according to Austin (1962 [1975:\n116–7]) it does depend on the hearer’s being aware of the\nutterance and understanding it in a certain way: I haven’t\nwarned someone unless he heard what I said. In this sense, the\nperformance of an illocutionary act depends on the “securing of\nuptake” (Austin 1962 [1975: 117]). However, although\nAustin’s view is intuitively plausible for speech acts verbs\nwith speaker-hearer argument structure (like x congratulates\ny) or speaker-hearer-content argument structure (x\ntells y that p), it is less plausible when the\nstructure is speaker-content (“Bill asserted that\np”). It may be said that Bill failed to tell\nLisa that the station was closed, since she had already left\nthe room when he said so, but that Bill still asserted that\nit was closed, since Bill believed she was still\n there.[3]","\nAustin had earlier (1956) initiated the development of speech act\ntaxonomy by means of the distinction between constative and\nperformative utterances. Roughly, whereas in a constative\nutterance you report an already obtaining state of affairs—you\nsay something—in a performative utterance you create\nsomething new: you do something (Austin 1956 [1979: 235]).\nAssertion is the paradigm of a constative utterance. Paradigm examples\nof performatives are utterances by means of which actions such as\nbaptizing, congratulating and greeting are performed. However, when\ndeveloping his general theory of speech acts, Austin abandoned the\nconstative/performative distinction, the reason being that it is not\nso clear in what sense something is done for instance by\nmeans of an optative utterance, whereas nothing is done by means of an\nassertoric one.","\nAustin noted, e.g., that assertions are subject both to infelicities\nand to various kinds of appraisal, just like performatives (Austin\n1962 [1975: 13–66]). For instance, an assertion is\ninsincere in case of lying as a promise is insincere when the\nappropriate intention is lacking (Austin 1962 [1975: 40]). This is an\ninfelicity of the abuse kind. Also, an assertion is,\naccording to Austin, void in case of a failed referential\npresupposition, such as in Russell’s","\n(Austin 1962 [1975: 20]). This is then an infelicity of the same\nkind—flaw-type misexecutions—as the use of the\nwrong formula in a legal procedure (Austin 1962 [1975: 36]), or of the\nsame kind—misinvocations—as when the requirements\nof a naming procedure aren’t met (Austin 1962 [1975: 51]).","\nFurther, Austin noted that when it comes to appraisals, there is not a\nsharp difference between acts that are simply true and false, and acts\nthat are assessed in other respects (Austin 1962 [1975: 140–7]).\nOn the one hand, a warning can be objectively proper or improper,\ndepending on the facts. On the other hand, assertions (statements) can\nbe assessed as suitable in some contexts and not in others, and are\nnot simply true or\n false.[4]","\nAs an alternative to the constative/performative distinction, Austin\nsuggested five classes of illocutionary types (or illocutionary\nverbs): verdictives, exercitives,\ncommissives, behabitives and expositives\n(Austin 1962 [1975: 151–64]). You exemplify a verdictive, e.g.,\nwhen as a judge you pronounce a verdict; an exercitive by appointing,\nvoting or advising; a commissive by promising, undertaking or\ndeclaring that you will do something; a behabitive by apologizing,\ncriticizing, cursing or congratulating; an expositive by acts\nappropriately prefixed by phrases like ‘I reply’, ‘I\nargue’, ‘I concede’ etc., of a general expository\nnature.","\nIn this classification, assertion would best be placed under\nexpositives, since the prefix “I assert” is or may be of\nan expository nature. Austin explicitly includes the verbs\n“affirm”, “deny”, and “state”, in\nhis first group of expositives (1962 [1975: 162]). Marina Sbisà\n(2020) argues that assertion belongs to both expositives and to\nverdictives, insofar as assertion expresses a judgment/verdict.","\nOther taxonomies have been proposed, for instance by Stephen Schiffer\n(1972), John Searle (1975b), Kent Bach and Robert M. Harnish (1979),\nFrancois Recanati (1987), and William P. Alston\n (2000).[5]"],"section_title":"1. Speech Acts","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nAssertion is generally thought of being open, explicit and direct, as\nopposed for instance to implying something without explicitly saying\nit. In this respect, assertion is contrasted with\npresupposition and implicature. The contrast is,\nhowever, not altogether sharp, partly because of the idea of indirect\nspeech acts, including indirect assertions."],"section_title":"2. Pragmatics","subsections":[{"content":["\nA sentence such as","\nis not true unless the singular term ‘Kepler’ has\nreference. Still, Frege argued that a speaker asserting that Kepler\ndied in misery, by means of (4) does not also assert that\n‘Kepler’ has reference (Frege 1892 [TPW: 69]). That Kepler\nhas reference is not part of the sense of the sentence. Frege’s\nreason was that if it had been, the sense of its negation","\nwould have been that Kepler did not die in misery or\n‘Kepler’ does not have reference, which is absurd.\nAccording to Frege, that ‘Kepler’ has reference is rather\npresupposed, both in an assertion of\n (4)\n and in an assertion of its negation.","\nThe modern treatment of presupposition has followed Frege in treating\nsurvival under negation as the most important test for presupposition.\nThat is, if it is implied that p, both in an assertion of a\nsentence s and in an assertion of the negation of s,\nthen it is presupposed that p in those assertions (unless\nthat p is entailed by all sentences). Other typical examples\nof presupposition (Levinson 1983: 178–181) include","\nimplying that John tried to stop in time, and","\nimplying that Martha drank John’s home brew.","\nIn the case of\n (4),\n the presupposition is clearly of a semantic nature, since the\nsentence “Someone is identical with Kepler”, which is true\njust if ‘Kepler’ has reference, is a logical consequence\nof\n (4)\n and (under a standard interpretation) of (5). By contrast, in the\nnegated forms of\n (6)\n and\n (7),\n the presupposition can be canceled by context, e.g., as in","\nThis indicates that in this case the presupposition is rather a\npragmatic phenomenon; it is the speaker or speech act rather than the\nsentence or the proposition expressed that presupposes something.","\nHowever, the issue of separating semantic from pragmatic aspects of\npresupposition is complex, and regarded differently in different\napproaches to presupposition (for an overview, see Simons\n 2006).[6]"],"subsection_title":"2.1 Presupposition"},{"content":["\nFrege noted (1879: [TPW:10]) that there is no difference in truth\nconditional content between sentences such as","\n“and” and “but” contribute the same way to\ntruth and falsity. However, when using\n (9b),\n but not when using\n (9a),\n the speaker indicates that there is a contrast of some kind between\nworking with real estate and liking fishing. The speaker is not\nasserting that there is a contrast. We can test this, for\ninstance, by forming a conditional with\n (9b).\n The antecedent of (10) preserves the contrast rather than make it\nhypothetical, showing that the contrast is not asserted, forming a\nconditional with\n (9b)\n in the antecedent preserves the contrast rather than make it\nhypothetical:","\nIt is usually said that the speaker in cases like\n (9b)\n and\n (10)\n implicates that there is a contrast. These are examples of\nimplicature. H. Paul Grice (1975, 1989) developed a general\ntheory of implicature. Grice called implicatures of the kind\nexemplified conventional, since it is a standing feature of\nthe word “but” to give rise to them.","\nMost of Grice’s theory is concerned with the complementing kind,\nthe conversational implicatures. These are subdivided into\nthe particularized ones, which depend on features of the\nconversational context, and the generalized ones, which\ndon’t (Grice 1975: 37–8). The particularized\nconversational implicature rely on general conversational maxims, not\non features of expressions. These maxims are thought to be in force in\nordinary conversation. For instance, the maxim Be orderly!\nrequires of the speaker to recount events in the order they took\nplace. This is meant to account for the intuitive difference in\ncontent between","\nAccording to Grice’s account, the speaker doesn’t assert,\nonly implicates that the events took place in the order recounted.\nWhat is asserted is just that both events did take place.","\nReal or apparent violations of the maxims generate implicatures, on\nthe assumption that the participants obey the over-arching\nCooperative Principle. For instance, in the conversation","\nB implicates that he doesn’t know where in Canada John\nspends the summer. The reasoning is as follows: B violates\nthe Maxim of Quantity to be as informative as required. Since\nB is assumed to be cooperative, we can infer that he cannot\nsatisfy the Maxim of Quantity without violating some other maxim. The\nbest candidate is the sub-maxim of the Maxim of Quality, which\nrequires you not to say anything for which you lack sufficient\nevidence. Hence, one can infer that B doesn’t know.\nAgain, B has not asserted that he doesn’t know, but\nstill managed to convey it in an indirect\n manner.[7]"],"subsection_title":"2.2 Implicature"},{"content":["\nThe distinction between assertion and implicature is to some extent\nundermined by acknowledging indirect assertion as a kind of\nassertion proper. A standard example of an indirect speech act is\ngiven by","\nBy means of uttering an interrogative sentence the speaker requests\nthe addressee to pass the salt. The request is indirect. The question,\nliterally concerning the addressee’s ability to pass the salt,\nis direct. As defined by John Searle (1975b: 59–60), and also by\nBach and Harnish (1979: 70), an indirect illocutionary act is\nsubordinate to another, more primary act and depends on the success of\nthe first. An alternative definition, given by Sadock (1974: 73), is\nthat an act is indirect just if it has a different illocutionary force\nfrom the one standardly correlated with the sentence-type used.","\nExamples of indirect assertions by means of questions and\ncommands/requests are given by","\n(Levinson 1983: 266). Rhetorical questions also have the force of\nassertions:","\nAnother candidate type is irony:","\nassuming the speaker does mean the negation of what is literally said.\nHowever, although in a sense the act is indirect, since the speaker\nasserts something different from what she would do on a normal, direct\nuse of the sentence, and relies on the hearer to realize this, it is\nnot an indirect assertion by either definition. It isn’t on the\nfirst, since the primary act (the literal assertion) isn’t even\nmade, and it isn’t on the second, since there is no discrepancy\nbetween force and sentence\n type.[8]","\nThe very idea of indirect speech acts is, however, controversial. It\nis not universally agreed that an ordinary utterance of\n (13)\n is indirect, since it has been denied, e.g., by Levinson (1983:\n273–6) that a question has really been asked, over and above the\nrequest. Similarly, Levinson have questioned the idea of a standard\ncorrelation between force and sentence form, by which a request would\ncount as indirect on Sadock’s criterion.","\nCommon to all conceptions of indirect assertions is that they are not\nexplicit: what is expressed, or literally said, is not the same as\nwhat is asserted. One question is whether an utterance is an assertion\nproper that p if that content is not exactly what is\nexpressed, or whether it is an act of a related kind, perhaps an\n implicature.[9]"],"subsection_title":"2.3 Indirect assertions"},{"content":["\nA related question is how far an utterance may deviate from\nexplicitness and yet be counted as an assertion, proper or indirect.\nAccording to one intuition, as soon as it is not fully determinate to\nthe hearer what the intended content of an utterance is, or what force\nit is made with, the utterance fails to be assertoric.\nUnderdetermination is the crucial issue. This has been argued by\nElizabeth Fricker (2012). But the issue is controversial, and\nobjections of several kinds have been made, for instance by John\nHawthorne (2012), Andrew Peet (2015, forthcoming) and Manuel\nGarcía-Carpintero (2016,\n 2019b).[10]"],"subsection_title":"2.4 Explicitness"}]},{"main_content":["\nDescriptive accounts characterize assertion in terms of its\npsychological, social, and linguistic features, without appeal to\nnormative notions. The content-directed accounts focus on the\nrelations between the speaker and content and between hearer and\ncontent."],"section_title":"3. Descriptive Accounts, Content-Directed","subsections":[{"content":["\nFrege (1918a [TFR: 329]) held that an assertion is an outward sign of\na judgment (Urteil). A judgment in turn, in\nFrege’s view, is a step from entertaining a Thought to\nacknowledging its truth (Frege 1892 [TPW:\n 64]).[11]\n The subject first merely thinks the Thought that p, and\nthen, at the judgment stage, moves on to acknowledge it as true. Since\nfor Frege, the truth value is the reference (Bedeutung) of a\nsentence, a judgment is an advance from the sense of a sentence to its\nreference. In case the subject makes a mistake, it is not the actual\nreference, but the reference the subject takes it to\nhave.","\nFor Frege, truth is not relative. There is exactly one point of\nevaluation of a Thought, the world itself. If instead we accept more\nthan one point of evaluation, such as different possible worlds, truth\nsimpliciter is equated with truth at the actual world. We can\nthen adapt Frege’s view to say that judging that p is\nadvancing to reference at the actual world, or again,\nevaluating as true in the actual world.","\nOn this picture, what holds for judgment carries over to assertion. It\nis in the force of an utterance that the step is taken from the\ncontent to the actual point of evaluation. This view has been stated\nby Recanati with respect to the actual world:","\n\n\n[…] a content is not enough; we need to connect that content\nwith the actual world, via the assertive force of the utterance, in\nvirtue of which the content is presented as characterizing that world.\n(Recanati 2007: 37)\n","\nIn Pagin (2016a: 276–278), this idea is generalized. If contents\nare possible-worlds propositions, the points of evaluation are\npossible worlds. All actual judgments are then applications of\npropositions to the actual world. If contents are\ntemporal propositions, true or false with respect to\nworld-time pairs, then all actual judgments are applications to the\nordered pair of the actual world and a relevant time, usually the time\nat which the judgment is made. This is the point with respect to which\na sentence, used in a context of utterance, has its truth value (cf.\nKaplan 1989: 522). Again, the relation is general: if the content of a\njudgment is a function from indices of some type to truth\nvalues, then a judgment is the very step of taking the content to be\ntrue at the actual/current index, or again applying the\ncontent to that index. The force of an assertion, on this\nview, connects the content of the assertion with the relevant index.\nThe assertion indicates that the content is true at the\nindex.","\nOn the more social side, it is often said that in asserting a\nproposition the speaker “presents the proposition as true”\n(cf. Wright 1992: 34). Prima facie, this characterizes\nassertion well. However, there are problems with the idea. One is that\nit should generalize to other speech act types, but does not seem to\ndo so. For instance, does a question present a proposition as one the\nspeaker would like to know the truth value of? If so, it does\nnot seem that this way of presenting the proposition distinguishes\nbetween the interrogative force in\n (17a),\n the optative force in\n (17b),\n and the imperative force in\n (17c).","\nIf other speech act types could be characterized in ways analogous to\nassertion, that would strengthen the proposal. If not, it appears to\nbe a weakness.","\nAnother problem is that it remains unclear what\n“presenting” amounts to. It must be a sense of the word\ndifferent from that in which the proposition is presented as true in\nthe sentence","\neven if the sentence is not uttered assertorically. That is,\n“present as true” must not refer to a feature simply of\ncontent. Since there is a sense of “present as\nsuch-and-such” that does refer to representational\ncontent, there is a need to specify, in a non-question-begging way,\nthe other sense of “present” that is relevant.","\nIn addition, there is a question of distinguishing the assertoric way\nof presenting something as true from weaker illocutionary\nalternatives, such as guesses and conjectures, which also in some\nsense present their contents as being true.","\nThere are therefore weaker senses of “present as true”,\nwhich do not require that the presentation itself is made with\nassertoric force (like an obsolete label on a bottle), and these\nsenses are too weak. There is clearly also a stronger sense that\ndoes require assertoric force (for cases when the label is\ntaken to apply), but that is just what we want to have\n(non-circularly) explained. Simply using the phrase “present as\ntrue” does not by itself help.","\nAnother idea for characterizing assertion in terms of truth-related\nattitudes is that assertion aims at truth. This is stated for\ninstance both by Bernard Williams (1966), by Michael Dummett (1973\n[1981]), and more recently by Marsili (2018). The notion of\n“aiming at truth” can be understood in rather different\nways (for some ways of understanding what it could be for\nbelief to aim at truth, see Engel 2004 and Glüer &\nWikforss\n 2013).[12]","\nWilliams (1966) characterizes assertion’s aim in different\nterms. For him, the property of aiming at truth is what characterizes\nfact-stating discourse, as opposed to, e.g., evaluative or\ndirective discourse. It is natural to think of","\nas stating a fact, and of","\nas expressing an evaluation, not corresponding to any fact of the\nmatter. On Williams’s view, to regard a sincere utterance of","\nas a moral assertion, is to take a realistic\nattitude to moral discourse: there are moral facts, making moral\nstatements objectively true or false. This view again comes in two\nversions. On the first alternative, the existence of moral facts\nrenders the discourse fact-stating, whether the speaker thinks so or\nnot, and the non-existence renders it evaluative, again whether the\nspeaker thinks so or not. On the second alternative, an utterance of\n (21)\n is an assertion if the speaker has a realistic attitude towards moral\ndiscourse and otherwise not.","\nOn these views, it is assumed that truth is a substantial property\n(Williams 1966: 202), not a concept that can be characterized in some\ndeflationary way. As a consequence, the sentence","\nis to be regarded as false, since\n (22)\n is objectively neither true nor false; there is no fact of the\n matter.[13]"],"subsection_title":"3.1 Relation to truth"},{"content":["\nPerhaps the best way of capturing the cognitive nature of assertion is\nto give a theory of the cognitive features of normal communication by\nmeans of assertion. A classic theory is Stalnaker’s (1974,\n1978). Stalnaker provides a model of a conversation in which assertion\nand presupposition dynamically interact. On Stalnaker’s model,\npropositions are presupposed in a conversation if they are on record\nas belonging to the common ground between the speakers. When an\nassertion is made and accepted in the conversation, its content is\nadded to the common ground, and the truth of the proposition in\nquestion will be presupposed in later stages. What is presupposed at a\ngiven stage has an effect on the interpretation of new utterances made\nat that stage. For Stalnaker, the common ground is a set of\npropositions. He models this with the set of worlds in which all\ncommon ground propositions are true, the context set.","\nIn this framework Stalnaker (1978: 88–89) proposes three rules\nfor assertion:","\nStalnaker comments on the first rule:","\n\n\nTo assert something incompatible with what is presupposed is\nself-defeating […] And to assert something which already\npresupposed is to attempt to do something that is already done.\n","\nOn such an approach, the satisfaction of a presupposition is an\nadmittance condition of an assertion (cf. Karttunen 1974;\nHeim 1988). This idea connects with Austin’s more general idea\nof felicity conditions of speech\n acts.[14]\n Does Stalnaker offer an account of assertion itself? The answer is\nno, for the role of assertion is shared by other speech acts such as\nassuming and conjecturing (Stalnaker 1978: 153).\nWhat is added to the common ground is only for the purpose of\nconversation, and need not be actually believed by the\nparticipants. It is only required that it be accepted (cf.\nStalnaker 2002: 716).","\nStalnaker has not (as far as we are aware) attempted to add a\ndistinguishing feature of assertion to the model. This has, however,\nbeen attempted by Schaffer (2008), Kölbel (2011: 68–70),\nand Stokke\n (2013).[15]","\nAnother cognitive account is offered by Pagin (2011, 2020). The\naccount is summarized by the phrase: “an assertion is an\nutterance that is prima facie informative”. For an utterance to\nbe informative is for it to be made in part “because it is\ntrue”. What this amounts to is different, but complementary, for\nspeaker and hearer. For the speaker, part of the reason for\nusing a particular sentence is that it is true (in context); that is,\nthe speaker believes, with a sufficient strength, that the sentence\nexpresses a true proposition, and utters it partly because of that.\nFor the hearer, taking the utterance as informative, means, by\ndefault, to update their credence in the proposition as a response to\nthe utterance, both in the upwards direction and to a level above\n0.5.","\nThe prima facie element of the account means that the typical\nproperties on the speaker and hearer side are only default\nproperties associated with surface features of the utterance: the\ndeclarative sentence type, a typical intonation pattern, etc. There\nare many possible reasons why a speaker may utter such a sentence\nwithout believing the proposition, and why a hearer may not adjust\ntheir credence in the typical manner. For example, the speaker may be\nlying, the hearer may distrust the speaker, or may already have given\nthe proposition a very high credence before the utterance. On\nPagin’s picture, it is the cognitive patterns associated with\nsurface features, on the production and comprehension sides, that\ncharacterize assertion. This way of dividing the account between\nspeaker and hearer is somewhat controversial.","\nYet another cognitive account is elaborated in Jary (2010).\nJary’s account is situated within Relevance Theory, a\nmore general account of cognition and communication. As a typical\ningredient of this general framework, when an assertion is made, the\nproposition expressed by the utterance is presented as “relevant\nto the hearer” (2010: 163), where ‘relevant’ is a\ntechnical term (Sperber & Wilson 1986 [1995: 265]).","\nWhat distinguishes assertion from other speech act types is something\ndifferent:","\n\n\nAssertion cannot be defined thus, though. In order for an utterance to\nhave assertoric force, it must also be subject to the cognitive and\nsocial safeguards that distinguish assertion. […] It is the\napplicability of these safeguards that distinguishes assertion both\nfrom other illocutionary acts and from other forms of information\ntransfer. (Jary 2010: 163–164)\n","\nSocial safeguards consist in sanctions against misleading assertions,\nwhile cognitive safeguards consist in the ability of the hearer to not\nsimply accept what is said but meta-represent the speaker as\nexpressing certain beliefs and intentions (2010: 160). It is part of a\nfull account of assertion, according to Jary, that assertions are\nsubject to these safeguards. This also distinguishes assertions from\npromises and commands, where the proposition is not presented as\nsubject to the hearer’s safeguards; “rejection is not\npresented as an option for the hearer” (2010: 73)."],"subsection_title":"3.2 Cognitive models of communication"}]},{"main_content":["\nHearer-directed accounts of assertion are primarily concerned with the\nspeaker’s thoughts and intentions about their audience."],"section_title":"4. Descriptive Accounts, Hearer-Directed","subsections":[{"content":["\nAccording to Frege (1918a [TFR: 329]), as noted, an assertion is an\noutward sign of a judgment (Urteil). The term\n“judgment” has been used in several ways. If it is used to\nmean either belief, or act by which a belief is formed or\nreinforced, then Frege’s view is pretty close to the view\nthat assertion is the expression of belief.","\nThis idea, that assertion is the expression of belief, has a longer\nhistory, going back to at least Kant. How should one understand the\nidea of expressing here? It is natural to think of a belief state,\nthat is, a mental state of the speaker, as causally co-responsible for\nthe making of the assertion. The speaker has a belief and wants to\ncommunicate it, which motivates an assertoric utterance. But what\nabout the cases when the speaker does not believe what he asserts? Can\nwe still say, even of insincere assertions, that they express belief?\nIf so, in what sense?","\nWithin the communicative intentions tradition, Bach and Harnish have\nemphasized that an assertion gives the hearer evidence for\nthe corresponding belief, and that what is common to the sincere and\ninsincere case is the intention of providing such evidence:","\n\n\nFor S to express an attitude is for S to\nR-intend the hearer to take S’s utterance as\nreason to think S has that attitude. (Bach & Harnish\n1979: 15, italics in the original)\n","\n(‘R-intend’ is, as above, short for “reflexively\nintend”). On this view, expressing is wholly a matter of\nhearer-directed intentions.","\nThis proposal has the advantage of covering both the sincere and the\ninsincere case, but has the drawback of requiring a high level of\nsophistication. By contrast, Bernard Williams (2002: 74) has claimed\nthat a sincere assertion is simply the direct expression of\nbelief, in a more primitive and unsophisticated way. Insincere\nassertions are different. According to Williams (2002: 74), in an\nassertion, the speaker either gives a direct expression of\nbelief, or he intends the addressee to “take it”\nthat he has the belief (cf. Owens 2006).","\nPresumably, the intention mentioned is an intention about what the\nhearer is to believe about the speaker. In this case the objection\nthat too much sophistication is required is less pressing, since it\nonly concerns insincere assertions. However, Williams’s idea (as\nin Grice 1969) has the opposite defect of not taking more\nsophistication into account. The idea, that the alternative to\nsincerity is the intention to make the hearer believe that the speaker\nbelieves what he asserts, is not general enough. For instance, there\nis double bluffing, where the speaker asserts what is true in order to\ndeceive the hearer, whom the speaker believes will expect the speaker\nto lie. Again, an insincere speaker S who asserts that\np may know that the hearer A knows that\nS does not believe that p, but may still intend to\nmake A believe that S does not know about\nA’s knowledge, precisely by making the assertion that\np. There is no definitive upper limit to the sophistication\nof the deceiving speaker’s calculations. In addition, the\nspeaker may simply be stonewalling, reiterating an assertion without\nany hope of convincing the addressee of anything.","\nA more neutral way of trying to capture the relation between assertion\nand believing was suggested both by Max Black (1952) and by Davidson\n(1984: 268): in asserting that p the speaker\nrepresents herself as believing that p. This\nsuggestion appears to avoid the difficulties with the appeal to\nhearer-directed intentions.","\nA somewhat related approach is taken by Mitchell S. Green (2007), who\nappeals to “expressive conventions”. Grammatical moods can\nhave such conventions (2007: 150). According to Green (2007: 160), an\nassertion that p invokes a set of conventions according to\nwhich the speaker “can be represented as bearing the\nbelief-relation to p”.","\nAs one can represent oneself as believing, one can also represent\noneself as knowing. Inspired by Davidson’s proposal, Peter Unger\n(1975: 253–270) and Michael Slote (1979: 185) made the stronger\nclaim that in asserting that p the speaker represents\nherself as knowing that p. To a small extent this idea had been\nanticipated by G. E. Moore when claiming that the speaker\nimplies that she knows that p (1912 [1966: 63]).","\nHowever, it is not so clear what representing oneself amounts to. It\nmust be a sense different from that in which one represents the\nworld as having certain features. The speaker who asserts","\ndoes not also claim that she believes that there are black\nswans. It must apparently be some weaker sense of\n“represent”, since it is not just a matter of\nbeing, as opposed to not being, fully explicit. If I am asked what I\nbelieve and I answer by uttering\n (23),\n I do represent myself as believing that there are black swans, just\nas I would have done by explicitly saying that I believe that\nthere are black swans. I do represent myself as believing that there\nare black swans, equivalently with asserting that I do. What I assert\nthen is false if I don’t have the belief, despite the existence\nof black swans.","\nOn the other hand, it must also be stronger than the sense of\n“represent” by which an actor can be said to represent\nhimself as believing something on stage. The actor says","\nthereby representing himself as asserting that he is in the biology\ndepartment, since he represents himself as being a man who honestly\nasserts that he is in the biology department. By means of that, he in\none sense represents himself as believing that he is in the biology\ndepartment. But the audience not invited to believe that the\nspeaker, that is, the actor, has that belief.","\nApparently, the relevant sense of “represent” is not easy\nto specify. That it nevertheless tracks a real phenomenon is often\nclaimed to be shown by Moore’s Paradox. This is the paradox that\nassertoric utterances of sentences such as","\n(the omissive type of Moorean sentences) are distinctly odd, and even\nprima facie self-defeating, despite the fact that they may\nwell be true. Among the different types of account of Moore’s\nParadox, Moore’s own emphasizes the connection between asserting\nand believing. Moore’s idea (1944: 175–176; 1912 [1966:\n63]) was that the speaker in some sense implies that she\nbelieves what she asserts. So by asserting\n (25)\n the speaker induces a contradiction between what she asserts and what\nshe implies. This contradiction is then supposed to explain the\n oddity.[16]"],"subsection_title":"4.1 Self-representation"},{"content":["\nTypically, the speaker who makes an assertion has hearer-directed\nintentions in performing a speech act. The speaker may intend\nthe hearer to come to believe something or other about the speaker, or\nabout something else, or intend the hearer to come to desire or intend\nto do something. Such intentions can concern institutional changes,\nbut need not. Intentions that are immediately concerned with\ncommunication itself, as opposed to ulterior goals, are called\ncommunicative intentions.","\nThe idea of communicative intentions derives from Grice’s (1957)\narticle ‘Meaning’, where Grice defined what it is for a\nspeaker to non-naturally mean something. Although Grice did\nnot explicitly attempt to define assertion, his ideas can be\nstraightforwardly transposed to provide a definition:","\nIn the early to mid 1960s Austin’s speech act theory and\nGrice’s account of communicative intentions began to merge. The\nconnection is discussed in Strawson 1964. Strawson inquired whether\nillocutionary force could be made overt by means of communicative\nintentions. He concluded that when it comes to highly conventionalized\nutterances, communicative intentions are largely irrelevant, but that\non the other hand, convention does not play much role for ordinary\nillocutionary types. Strawson also pointed out a difficulty with\nGrice’s analysis: it may be the case that all three conditions\n(i-iii) are fulfilled, but that the speaker intends the hearer to\nbelieve that they aren’t (for instance, if the speaker\nwants the hearer to believe that p for reasons altogether\nindependent from his making the statement).","\nSuch intentions to mislead came to be called sneaky\nintentions (Grice 1969), and they constituted a problem for\nspeech act analyses based on communicative intentions. The idea was\nthat genuine communication is essentially open: the speaker’s\ncommunicative intentions are meant to be fully accessible to the\nhearer. Sneaky intentions violate this requirement of openness, and\ntherefore apparently they must be ruled out one way or another.\nStrawson’s own solution was to add a fourth clause about the\nspeaker’s intention that the hearer recognize the third\nintention. However, that solution only invited a sneaky intention one\nlevel up (cf. Schiffer 1972: 17–42; Vlach 1981; Davis 1999).","\nAnother solution was to make the intention reflexive. This\nwas proposed by Searle (1969), in the first full-blown analysis of\nillocutionary types made by appeal to communicative intentions. Searle\ncombined this with an appeal to social institutions as created by\nrules. We return to these in\n section 5.1.","\nSearle criticized Grice for requiring the speaker to intend\nperlocutionary effects, such as what the speaker shall come\nto do or believe, pointing out that such intentions aren’t\nessential (1969: 46–7). Instead, according to Searle, the\nspeaker intends to be understood, and also intends to achieve\nthis by means of the hearer’s recognition of this very intention\nitself. Moreover, if the intention is recognized, it is also\nfulfilled: “we achieve what we try to do by getting our audience\nto recognize what we try to do” (Searle 1969: 47). This\nreflexive intention is formally spelled out as follows:","\nThe illocutionary effect IE is the effect of generating the state\nspecified in the constitutive rule. In the case of assertion, the\nspeaker intends that her utterance counts as an undertaking\nthat p represents an actual state of affairs, depending on\nthe constitutive rule (cf.\n section 5.1).","\nBach and Harnish follow Searle in appealing to reflexive communicative\nintentions. On their analysis (1979: 42), assuming a speaker\nS and a hearer H,","\nAccording to Bach and Harnish’s understanding, a speaker\nS expresses an attitude just in case S\nR-intends (reflexively intends) the hearer to take\nS’s utterance as reason to think S has that\nattitude. They understand the reflexive nature of the intention pretty\nmuch like Searle. They say (1979: 15) that the intended effect of an\nact of communication is not just any effect produced by means of\nrecognition of the intention to produce a certain effect, it is\nthe recognition of that intention.","\nThese appeals to reflexive intentions were later criticized, in\nparticular by Sperber and Wilson (1986 [1995:256–257]). Their\npoint is that if an intention I has as sub-intentions both\nthe intention J and the intention that the hearer recognize\nI, this will yield an infinitely long sequence: the intention\nthat: J and the hearer recognize the intention that:\nJ and the hearer recognize the intention that: J and\n…). If this is an intention content at all, it is not humanly\n graspable.[17]","\nApart from the communicative intentions accounts of assertion, there\nare more general questions about what intentions are required of a\nspeaker in order for his utterance to qualify as an assertion. For\ninstance, must he intend it to be an assertion? Must it be\nmade voluntarily?"],"subsection_title":"4.2 Communicative intentions"}]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"5. Normative Accounts, Content-Directed","subsections":[{"content":["\nMost of the discussion on assertion during the past twenty years has\nconcerned norms of assertability. Simply put, philosophers aim to\ndetermine under which conditions it is epistemically permissible (or\nproper, warranted, correct, appropriate) to make an assertion.","\nPhilosophers have long been interested in analyzing what we mean when\nwe characterize an assertion as “correct”,\n“justified”, “proper”,\n“warranted”, “assertible”, or\n“warrantedly assertible”. The latter notion was taken on\nboard in pragmatism, and in later forms of anti-realism. Dewey (1938)\nseems to have been the first to characterize truth in terms of\nassertoric correctness, with his notion of warranted\nassertibility, even though this idea had a clear affinity with\nthe verifiability principle of Moritz Schlick (1936). Dewey, following\nPeirce, regarded truth as the ideal limit of scientific inquiry (1938:\n345), and a proposition warrantedly asserted only when known\nin virtue of such an inquiry. Warranted assertibility is the property\nof a proposition for which such knowledge potentially exists\n(1938: 9). Dewey was later followed by, notably, Dummett (1976) and\nPutnam (1981). Common to them is the position that there cannot be\nanything more to truth than being supported by the best available\nevidence. In these early discussions, the strategy was that of getting\na handle on truth by means of an appeal to the notion of the\ncorrectness of an assertion, which was taken as more fundamental. On\nDummett’s view, we do get a notion of truth distinct\nfrom the notion of a correct assertion only because of the\nsemantics of compound sentences (1976: 50–52). The\nquestion of what the correctness of an assertion consists in was not\nitself much discussed in earlier work, but became subject of\ndiscussion already in the 1980s, with the work of Boghossian and\nothers.","\nThe contemporary wave of discussion about assertoric normativity is\nalmost exclusively content-directed; the norms concern the epistemic\nrelation between the speaker and the content of their\n assertion.[18]\n Williamson (1996, 2000) initiated this debate by proposing that\nassertion is governed by a single norm, of the format:","\nAccording to this hypothesis, you are entitled to assert a proposition\nonly if that proposition has a certain unspecified property\nC. The (N)-schema formalizes the key philosophical question\nabout assertability: which epistemic property C that makes a\nproposition assertable?","\nWilliamson’s answer is that property C must be\nknowledge, i.e., being known by the speaker. If this is\nright, you can properly assert only what you know: assertion is\ngoverned by the knowledge-norm\n (KNA):","\n(Williamson 2000: 243). (KNA) is proposed as part of an account of\nassertion. Other norms have been proposed: the most prominent\nalternatives are the truth norm (TNA), the justification norm (JNA)\nand the belief norm (BNA):","\nDetermining which of these norms governs assertion depends (at least\nin part) on what we mean by hypothesizing that assertion is governed\nby a simple norm by N. In the next section\n (5.1.3),\n we clarify what philosophers typically mean when they say that\nN governs assertions. In the subsequent section\n (5.1.4),\n we review the various accounts of which specific norm governs\nassertion (i.e., the different views as to which property\nC makes a proposition assertable).","\nWilliamson’s initial framing of the debate on the norm of\nassertion takes for granted a number of assumptions: for instance,\nthat there is a single norm, that it is constitutive of assertion,\nthat all and only assertions are subject to it. In subsequent work,\nsome of these assumptions have been questioned. Here we limit\nourselves to list each assumption (ignoring the numerous objections\nthat affect them). The interested reader will find a discussion of the\ncase for and against each assumption in the supplementary document\n Which Kind of Norm?.","\nBy Specificity, N is a norm that regulates only one\nspecies of action: asserting. In this sense, it is specific to\nassertion. It governs the making of assertions in general, and nothing\nelse. Directness is closely connected to\nSpecificity. It clarifies that assertions are subject to\nN only in virtue of the fact that they are assertions.","\nThe “uniqueness assumption” holds that assertion is\nsubject to a single norm. Indirectness specifies that\nUniqueness is compatible with recognizing that there are\nother norms that apply to assertion, albeit only indirectly\n(Williamson 1996: 489). For instance, an assertion can follow\nN (e.g., satisfy the Justification Norm JNA) and violate\nstandard of politeness, morality, legality, etc. Unlike N,\nthese other normative standards are not specific to assertion, since\nthey apply also to other actions (questions, orders, as well as\nnon-linguistic actions).","\nAn important corollary of Indirectness is that whether an\nassertion is all-things-considered permissible or not may depend on\nfactors that are independent of N. When you say something\noffensive, or reveal a secret that you agreed to keep, you may follow\nN and yet make an (all-things-considered) impermissible\nassertion. And when you lie to save a life, you may violate N\nand make an assertion that is (all-things-considered) permissible.","\nAccording to the Individuation assumption, the norm of\nassertion is individuating: assertion can be defined as the unique\nspeech act who is subject to this unique norm (Williamson 2000: 241;\nGoldberg 2015: 25; Montminy 2013a). It should be emphasized here that\nit is being subject to the norm that characterizes assertion,\nnot conforming to the norm. An assertion that violates the\nnorm is still an assertion. A definition of assertion in terms of its\nnorm would read as:","\nIf\n (A3)\n holds, an important motivation for identifying N is that it\nwill provide us with a definition of assertion. Once we determine what\nN is (say, JNA), we can disambiguate the content of this\ndefinition (say, “the only speech act who is only subject to\nJNA”).","\nThe Essentiality assumption goes beyond\nIndividuation: Individuation allows that assertion\nis only actually individuated by N, and that it could have\nbeen governed by some other norm. By contrast,\n (A4)\n holds that assertions could not exist and be governed by a different\nnorm: if assertion were subject to a different norm, it would be a\ndifferent speech act. Nothing but an assertion could violate the norm,\nif the\n (A3)\n and\n (A4)\n properties hold.","\nBy\n (A5),\n an assertion is permissible (appropriate, epistemically proper,\nwarranted, correct—depending on one’s favorite\nterminology) only if it meets condition C, and impermissible\nif it does not meet C. Permission is related to the negative\nevaluation of assertions: assertions who violate N are\nprima facie faulty, and criticizable (qua violations of\nN). Permissibility only establishes what is\nnecessary for permissible assertion, not what is\n sufficient.[19]","\nMost theorists take for granted that N is the\n“constitutive” norm of assertion, and some explicitly\nadvocate\n (A6).[20]","\nHowever, there is substantial (and often unacknowledged) disagreement\nabout what constitutivity amounts to (for more the debate surrounding\neach of these assumptions, see the supplementary document\n Which Kind of Norm?).","\nFor the most part, the literature on norms of assertion has concerned\nthe question of which specific norm governs assertion, and\nwhat are the reasons for favoring one candidate norm over another.\nBelow, we briefly go through the main candidates from the\nliterature.","\nOver and above Williamson,\n (KNA)\n has been favored by DeRose (2002), Reynolds (2002), Adler (2002:\n275), Hawthorne (2004), Stanley (2005), Engel (2008), Schaffer (2008),\nand Turri (2010), among others.","\nIn addition to direct intuitions about the appropriateness of specific\nsentences, proponents of the knowledge norm have adduced indirect\nevidence in the form of intuitions about conversational patterns,\nclaiming that these patterns are best explained by the acceptance of\nthe knowledge norm. Williamson himself appeals to such patterns, such\nas those arising from Moorean Assertions\n (26),\n Lottery Assertions\n (27),\n and Challenges\n (28):","\nConcerning the first, Williamson (2000: 253) claims that an utterance\nof\n (26)\n is just as odd as any ordinary Moorean sentence involving belief,\nsuch as\n (25)\n above. The oddity of\n (26)\n can be explained by appeal to the knowledge norm, and this is taken\nby supporters of\n (KNA)\n to be a datum in its favor. By\n (KNA),\n (26) is proper only if the speaker knows that the proposition\nexpressed by\n (26)\n is true. Since knowledge distributes over conjunction, this means\nthat the speaker should know that it is raining and also that she does\nnot know that it is raining. Since knowledge is factive, this\ngenerates a contradiction: it follows that an assertion of\n (26)\n cannot be proper, and this explains its oddity.","\nSimilarly,\n (KNA)\n seems well positioned to explain the oddity of asserting\n (27)\n merely on probabilistic grounds. Suppose that a (fair) lottery with a\nlarge number of tickets has been held; only one ticket has won.\nB has a ticket, but neither A nor B knows\nthe result. A asserts\n (27)\n on merely probabilistic grounds. Although the probability that the\nticket has won is very low (and one can get it arbitrarily low, short\nof zero, by increasing the number of tickets in the lottery), it is\nintuitively incorrect for A to tell\n (27)\n to B (Williamson 2000: 246–249). No probability short\nof 1 seems to authorize A’s utterance of\n (27).\n Since A does not know that\n (27)\n is true,\n (KNA)\n explains the unacceptability of A’s utterance.","\nFinally, in standard contexts, it is perfectly appropriate to\nchallenge an assertion with questions like\n (28),\n but\n (28)\n presupposes that the speaker knows that what she says is true.\n (KNA)\n is well positioned to explain why this presupposition is appropriate:\nif speakers are only entitled to assert what they know, then it is\nwithin the hearer’s conversational rights to assume (and\npresuppose) that the speaker knows that what they say is true. Further\nconversational patterns supporting\n (KNA)\n have been proposed, e.g., by Benton (2011).","\nThe claim that\n (KNA)\n is supported by these conversational patterns has been extensively\ncriticized. The most common line is that the available data can be\nexplained equally well (if not better) by competing accounts. For\ninstance, several authors argue that the oddity of Moorean Assertions\nand Lottery Assertions can be explained by appeal to a justification\n norm.[21]\n Others have noted that these conversational patterns may be explained\nby appealing to more general principles, rather than assertoric norms\nspecifically. For instance, it has been argued that Lottery Assertions\nand Moorean Assertions are improper because they violate more general\n(Gricean) conversational\n principles.[22]","\nA different criticism comes from Sosa (2009), who notes that\n (KNA)’s\n explanation of Moorean assertions fails to generalize as it should,\nbecause\n (KNA)\n is unable to explain “dubious assertions”: cases in which\nthe speaker asserts p while admitting that he doesn’t\nknow whether he knows that p (but see Benton 2013, Montminy\n2013a). Finally, several authors have questioned the assumption that\nit is always improper to assert that one’s ticket is a loser on\npurely probabilistic\n grounds.[23]","\nThe argument from challenges like\n (28)\n is surely the least compelling. First, to meet the challenge raised\nby\n (28),\n it would be sufficient for the speaker to show that she has good\nreasons to believe that what she said is true (Lackey 2007:\n610; Kvanvig 2009: 143; McKinnon & Turri 2013). It does not seem,\nby contrast, that the speaker has to prove that she knows (rather than\nmerely believe) that what she said is true. Second, taking the\nargument seriously proves too much. Consider\n (29):","\nSince\n (29)\n and\n (30)\n are also natural ways to challenge an assertion, by the same logic,\nwe should conclude that assertion is also governed by a certainty\nrule. We could extend this to other challenges (Is that true?). So the\nchallenge argument doesn’t seem to show a primacy of knowledge\nover alternative rules.","\nA general problem with the appeal to conversational patterns is that\nthey don’t seem to favor specifically normative views over\ncorresponding non-normative views. For instance, it appears that any\nlinguistic phenomenon that can be explained by appeal to a knowledge\nnorm can be equally well explained by appeal to the view that\nasserters represent themselves as knowing what they say, although\nthere is no norm (cf. Pagin 2016b; D. Black 2018). Combine this with\nextraneous, non-assertion-specific norms. That A’s lottery\nassertion\n (27)\n is bad can then be explained by appeal to self-representation of\nknowledge, together with the general moral norm that it is wrong to\nmislead hearers.","\nMany objections against\n (KNA)\n are based on the idea that its requirements are too strong. First,\nGettiered assertions. Suppose that you have a justified true\nbelief that falls short of knowledge. For instance, you walk into a\ncafé, look at the clock, and conclude that it’s 4.35; but\nyour belief is only accidentally true because (unbeknownst to you) the\nclock has been stuck at 4.35 for several days. If someone asks you the\ntime, it seems perfectly appropriate for you to respond “4.35\npm”. However, by making such an assertion, you would be\nviolating\n (KNA),\n which intuitively speaks against it (Lackey 2007: 596; Kvanvig 2009:\n146–7; Coffman 2014: 36).","\nSimilar objections arise in relation to the intuitive permissibility\nof unlucky assertions: assertions that you have excellent\nreasons to believe to be true, but that happen to be false. Since the\nproblem with unlucky assertions is that\n (KNA)\n entails\n (TNA)\n (it only allows true assertions), we will discuss it below, as we\nconsider objections to\n (TNA).","\nLackey objects that\n (KNA)\n fails to accommodate selfless assertions. She presents\nseveral examples: one involves a teacher, Stella, who firmly believes\nin creationism, but is aware that the scientific consensus is that\nhumans evolved from apes. Stella recognizes that Darwinism is\nsupported by stronger empirical evidence, but this is not enough to\nshake her firm belief in creationism. Suppose that she tells her\nstudents:","\nIntuitively, it would be appropriate for Stella, as a teacher, to\nassert\n (31).\n However,\n (KNA)\n predicts that\n (31)\n is incorrect, because Stella does not believe, and therefore does not\nknow, that\n (31)\n is true. Selfless assertion have generated a lively debate, mostly\ninvolving attempts to explain their propriety within a\n (KNA)-framework\n (see Montminy 2013a, Turri 2015, Milić 2017).","\nFurther objections concern so-called unsafe assertions, where\nthe speaker does know what is asserted, but would easily have made the\nassertion in a similar situation without\n knowledge.[24]","\nA few authors who sympathize with\n (KNA)\n have emphasized the role of the hearer. Their proposals are similar\nto\n (KNA),\n but set the condition in relation to the transmission of knowledge to\nthe hearer. An example is García-Carpintero (2004:\n156):","\nSimilar norms have also been proposed by Pelling (2013a) and by\nHinchman (2013). García-Carpintero suggests that his version is\npreferable to Williamson’s because it brings out the social,\ncommunicative function of language (but see Willard-Kyle forthcoming\nfor objections to KNA-T).\n [25]","\nMost alternatives to the knowledge norm that are weaker than\n (KNA):\n they require less than knowledge for proper assertion. Weiner (2005)\nand Whiting (2013, 2015) propose a truth norm (cf. also Alston\n2000):","\nJust like the knowledge norm, the truth norm is factive: both entail\nthat you can assert a proposition only if it is true. This generates a\nproblem concerning the intuitive appropriateness of unlucky\nassertions. To illustrate, imagine that you have had a cat for\nseveral years. During a conversation, a friend asks you if you have\nany pets at home, and you reply:","\nUnbeknownst to you, however, some thieves broke into your house and\nstole everything you have, including your cat. Since you could not\npossibly have foreseen the eventuality of such an absurd theft, it\nseems that your assertion is appropriate: in response to your\nfriend’s question,\n (32)\n is simply the right thing to say. However,\n (KNA)\n and\n (TNA)\n give a different verdict: they predict that\n (32)\n is an inappropriate response. What’s more,\n (TNA)\n (but not\n (KNA))\n predicts that the appropriate reply would have been to assert the\nnegation of\n (32),\n namely that you don’t have a cat at home. But again, such a\n“lucky assertion” would be intuitively inappropriate:\nsince you have no reason to believe that your cat was stolen, in\nsaying that you don’t have a pet you would be\n lying.[26]","\nProponents of\n (KNA)\n and\n (TNA)\n tend to concede that unlucky assertions (and Gettiered\nassertions) are intuitively appropriate, and that lucky assertions are\nintuitively inappropriate. Their standard defense strategy is to\ninvoke some distinctions that explain away their incorrect\npredictions. Williamson (2000: 256–257) suggests that making\nunlucky and Gettiered assertions is reasonable, and this is why\nassertions like\n (32)\n usually don’t warrant criticism. However, here the prediction\nthat uttering\n (32)\n is reasonable is made by general observations about rationality, and\nnot by\n (KNA)\n itself. If\n (KNA)’s\n job is to tell us which assertions are appropriate and which are not,\nit is not clear how these observations really help its case, since\nthere are other norms (such as\n (JNA))\n that are able to make this prediction without appeal to independent\nepistemic standards.","\nA parallel solution has been delineated by DeRose, who draws a\ndistinction between primary and secondary propriety. Primary\npropriety is just what a rule says: when a rule prescribes to\nf only if C, it is primarily proper to f if\nC, and primarily improper to f if not C.\nSecondary propriety is dictated by whether you have reasons to think\nyou are following the rule. If you f because you reasonably\nbelieve that C, but C is accidentally false, your\naction is primarily improper but secondarily proper, and doesn’t\ndeserve blame. If you f although you reasonably believe that\nC is false, but C is accidentally true, your\nassertion is primarily proper but secondarily improper, and\ndoesn’t deserve praise. This strategy helps defend\n (TNA)\n and\n (KNA)\n against the devised counterexamples. Unlucky and Gettiered assertions\nare primarily improper but secondarily proper, and that’s why\nthey don’t deserve blame. Lucky assertions are primarily proper\nbut secondarily improper, and that’s why they don’t\ndeserve praise.","\nSeveral authors reject this distinction between primary and secondary\n propriety.[27]\n Most of them think that this distinction is spurious. If the job of\nan epistemic norm is to identify the one epistemic standard C\nfrom which it is appropriate to assert, then it is not clear that\nappealing to secondary propriety, epistemic excuses or reasonableness\nis a legitimate move, given that more economic alternatives are\navailable. Reasonably thinking that you are in C (secondarily\nfollowing the rule) is itself an epistemic state; if being in such a\nstate epistemically entitles you to assert, such permissibility should\nbe built into the\n norm.[28]","\nAccepting the distinction between primary and secondary propriety\ninduces a problem for the intuitive support for the various theories.\nA large part of the intuitions that serve to support one or the other\nnorm theory relies on raw intuitions about what one should or\nshouldn’t assert in some situation, or what is proper or\nimproper to assert there. If there are several ways an assertion can\nbe proper or improper, then it is not easy to see which concept of\npropriety is being tracked by these intuitions. The idea is that a\nparticular intuition that seems to disconfirm a particular normative\ntheory can be explained away by saying that it does not in fact track\nthe primary propriety, but instead only some secondary propriety.\nSince intuitions don’t come labeled as “primary” and\n“secondary”, there is a risk of a substantial\nunderdetermination of theory by data (stressed by Pagin 2016b): two\ntheorists need not agree about whether or not an intuition about a\nparticular case supports a certain theory.","\nA problem persists even if we reject the primary/secondary\ndistinction. As noted, everyone agrees that assertions are governed by\nvarious norms: moral, prudential, conversational, rules of etiquette.\nWhen does an intuition track the intended notion of a proper\nassertion, and when something else altogether? Kvanvig (2011: 235) and\nEngel (2008: 52–54) have drawn attention to this. According to\nKvanvig, intuitions typically concern whether assertions are\nall-things-considered appropriate. But an assertion may be\n“all-things-considered appropriate” without being\n“epistemic appropriate” (or the other way around). Since\nwe do not have a reliable method for telling apart intuitions about\n“overall appropriateness” from intuitions about\n“epistemic appropriateness”, it is often unclear to which\nextent a given set of intuitions supports or undermines a given theory\n(cf. Hawthorne & Stanley 2008: 585–6). To address this\nproblem, Greenberg (forthcoming) proposes to reframe the debate in\nterms of epistemic norms constraining action, rather than\nassertion.","\nComplex refinements of\n (TNA)\n have been proposed, too. MacFarlane (2014: 103) adopts a truth norm,\nbut requires it to be qualified as being reflective. This\nmeans, in the context of MacFarlane’s relativism, that\nthe proposition should be true in the context of utterance, as\nassessed from the same context of\n utterance.[29]\n According to MacFarlane, the truth norm needs to be complemented by a\nretraction rule that enjoins the speaker to retract the\nassertion if it turns out not be true (cf. Dummett 1991: 165), in a\ncontext of assessment:","\nThis rule is also stated in the context of MacFarlane’s\nrelativism, with respect to a context of use and a context of\nassessment. According to the resulting view, assertion is governed\njointly by the (reflective) truth norm and the retraction rule.\nRescorla (2009a), who defends a commitment account of assertion (see\n section 6.1),\n argues there is no norm at all for proper making of\nassertions. There are only norms that govern later reactions. He\nproposes three alternatives to\n (RNA),\n which share the idea that when a speaker is challenged with respect\nto an assertion he has made, he must either defend the assertion or\nelse retract it (Rescorla 2009a: 103–105; cf. Rescorla\n2009b).","\nSeveral authors have argued that assertability requires justification,\nrather than belief or knowledge. A standard formulation would be:","\nWhat “justification” is taken to refer to varies between\nauthors. Douven (2006, 2009) and Lackey (2007, 2008) argue for a norm\nof rational belief. Note that\n (JNA)\n does not require that you believe what you say: all that it\nrequires is that it is (or would be) rational for you to\nbelieve it. As such,\n (JNA)\n classifies selfless assertions (which are disbelieved, but\nrational to believe) as appropriate, a prediction that Lackey (2007)\ntakes to be a crucial advantage of\n (JNA).","\nDifferent conversational contexts may require different degrees of\njustification. For instance, suppose that you are serving your friend\na curry that you just defrosted. You remember that you prepared it for\na vegan dinner over a month ago, but you’re not absolutely sure.\nIf your friend has a mild dislike for cheese,\n (33)\n may be an appropriate thing to say; not so much if your friend has a\ndeadly allergy to lactose:","\nTo accommodate this sort of intuitions, some authors have proposed\ncontext-sensitive versions of\n (JNA).\n Gerken (2012, 2014, 2017) says that an assertion must be based\n“on a degree of discursive justification for believing that\np that is adequate” relative to the conversational\ncontext. He also argues that the notion of justification is best\nunderstood in internalist terms: a speaker asserting p is\njustified only if they would be able to consciously articulate their\nreasons in support of p. McKinnon (2013, 2015) also defends a\nversion of\n (JNA)\n that is context-sensitive. She argues that one may assert that\np only if (i) the speaker has supportive reasons for\np, and (ii) the relevant conventional and pragmatic elements\nof the context of assertion are present. On this view, the pragmatic\nfeatures of the context have an effect on which epistemic support is\nneeded. Pragmatic features can regard the stakes involved\n(how much depends practically on the truth of what is asserted) or\npedagogical requirements (in case the speaker is a teacher\nwho is required to teach what is rational to believe; McKinnon 2015:\nSection 4.4).","\nIf justification comes in degrees, perhaps some propositions are more\nassertable than others. According to an influential view (Jackson\n1974, 565, cf. Lewis 1976, 297), the degree to which a proposition is\nassertable is a function of its probability. But Sam Carter\n(forthcoming) shows that this view makes systematically incorrect\npredictions. He suggests that assertability is a matter of\nnormality instead: “asserting p is more\nappropriate than asserting q, for a speaker in evidential\nstate E, iff amongst the worlds compatible with E, p is more\nnormal than q” (in turn, normality has to do with what\nis compatible with our evidence-based expectations; cf. Carter\nforthcoming: §5 for a formal definition).","\n\n (JNA)\n does not explicitly forbid insincere assertions (assertions that are\nbelieved to be false). Some find this feature unattractive, and prefer\nto amend\n (JNA)\n so as to introduce a belief-requirement, as in\n (JBNA):","\nSince\n (JBNA)\n requires both justification and belief, it entails that both\n (JNA)\n and\n (BNA)\n are true. But how should we characterize justification for\nthe purpose of this more demanding norm? For Kvanvig (2009, 2011), the\nrelevant notion is knowledge-level justification: “the kind [of\njustification] that is sufficient for knowledge in the presence of\nungettiered true belief” (2009: 156); a stronger version of this\nrequirement (would-be-knowledge) is defended by Coffman (2014).","\nA datum that justification rules may have trouble explaining is the\nwrongness of false assertions. There seems to be something inherently\ndefective about false assertions, and there is clearly a sense in\nwhich true, justified assertions are more valuable than false, equally\njustified ones. But\n (JNA)\n and\n (JBNA)\n have no resources to explain what is defective about falsity. In\nresponse, Marsili (2018) notes that proponents of non-factive accounts\ncan avail themselves of the notion of an assertion’s aim: when\nwe make an assertion, we purport to describe the world as it is; our\nassertion’s purported goal is met only if the assertion is true.\nOn this view, false assertions are not impermissible, but are still\ndefective, because they fail to meet their purported aim.","\nThere are views that come very close to justification rules. Maitra\nand Weatherson (2010: 112) propose what they call The Evidence\nResponsiveness Rule: that one assert that p only if\none’s attitude towards p is properly responsive to the\nevidence (they also propose to complement it with an action\nrule, that it is proper to assert that p only if acting\nas if p is “the thing for you to do”). Smithies\n(2012) defends the view that p is assertable only if you have\na justification to believe that you are in a position to know that\np (cf. Koethe 2009, Rosenkranz forthcoming). This version of\n (JNA)\n restores a guiding normative role for knowledge, while accommodating\nmany of the intuitions that motivate a preference for\n (JNA)\n or\n (KNA)\n (for a critique, see M. Smith 2012).","\nBelief norms are the weakest norms on the market:","\nThe belief norm is explicitly stated by Hindriks (2007) and Bach\n(2008: 77). If one substitutes ‘say’ for\n‘assert’, this is close to a reformulations of\nGrice’s second submaxim of Quality (“Do not say what you\nbelieve to be false” (Grice 1989: 27).","\nIntuitively,\n (BNA)\n is too permissive: it allows us to assert whatever we believe, even\nif we have no evidence but a hunch to support our claim. To explain\naway this prediction, advocates of\n (BNA)\n typically add that while\n (BNA)\n is the only norm that is specific to assertion (and regulates\nassertion directly, cf.\n (A1)\n and\n (A2)),\n it is not the only norm that regulates it. Since assertions\nnecessarily express a belief, and appropriate belief (and/or\npractical action) is allegedly governed by a knowledge-norm,\n (KNA)\n ultimately determines which assertions all-things-considered\nappropriate (Hindriks 2007; Bach 2008; Montminy 2013a).","\nAll the alternatives to the knowledge norm considered so far require\nless than knowledge for proper assertion. A stronger\nrequirement has been suggested by Stanley (2008):","\nHere one is epistemically certain of a proposition p","\n\n\nif and only if one knows that p (or is in a position to know\nthat p) on the basis of evidence that gives one the highest\ndegree of justification for one’s belief that p. (2008:\n35)\n","\nAccording to Stanley, since the certainty norm requires more than just\nknowledge, everything that can be explained by appeal to the knowledge\nnorm can also be explained by appeal to the certainty\n norm.[30]","\nGoldberg (2015) argues that the norm of assertion hypothesis can\nexplain why we have a (pro tanto) epistemic entitlement believe what\nwe are told. He identifies some requirements that are needed to meet\nthis desideratum. One is that the norm of assertion is robustly\nepistemic, and strong enough to warrant testimonial belief (2015: 96).\nAnother is that it must be common knowledge between speaker\nand hearer that the speaker’s assertion is subject to this norm.\nA further requirement (2015: 8) is that the speaker\nauthorizes the hearer to defer back to the speaker the\nresponsibility of meeting challenges to the assertion. Together, these\nassumptions should be able to explain why beliefs based on testimony\nare pro tanto justified.","\nMost authors who write about the norm of assertion appeal to their own\nintuitions. However, this is an area where experimental data is highly\nrelevant. If the aim is to describe a real-word communicative act,\nrather than a purely idealized philosopher’s construct, it\nfollows a good theory of assertion should make predictions that are\nconsistent with our actual practice: it should deem appropriate the\nassertions that ordinary speakers deem appropriate, and inappropriate\nthe ones that they criticize as inappropriate. If this is right,\ncompeting accounts can be tested empirically against the intuitions of\ncompetent speakers of the language.","\nEmpirical research on the norm of assertion was initiated by Turri.\nHis (2013) study aims to determine whether people’s\nassertability judgments are better predicted by a factive norm, like\n (KNA)\n or\n (TNA),\n or a non-factive one, like\n (JNA)\n or\n (BNA).\n Turri reports the results of six experiments, primarily investigating\njudgments about unlucky assertions (false assertions that the speaker\nreasonably believes to be true). In the first experiment, Maria\nincorrectly thinks that she has a 1990 Rolex in her watch collection,\nbecause this is what her inventory says. When a friend asks Maria if\nshe has that particular Rolex, participants are asked: “Should\nMaria tell her guest that she has a 1990 Rolex in her\ncollection?” [Yes/No]. Participants overwhelmingly selected the\nnegative option (No), even when different factors were manipulated\n(the control questions, what is at stake, the response options, etc.),\napparently providing robust evidential support for factive accounts.\nTurri has since conducted several more studies, accumulating an\nimpressive body of evidence supporting factive accounts of assertion\nin general and the knowledge-norm in particular (for a review, see\nTurri 2017), including studies on other potential counterexamples to\n (KNA),\n like selfless assertions (2015a), and Gettiered\nassertions (2016).","\nIt seemed that the debate was settled in favor of the knowledge rule,\nuntil new studies came out that pointed in the opposite direction.\nReuter and Brössel (2019) argue that two factors likely skewed\nthe results in favor of factive accounts in Turri’s (2013)\nseminal study. First, the protagonist (Maria) has a defeater against\nher belief: she is aware that her inventory is occasionally\nmistaken. Second, participants were asked what Maria should\nsay, but it would seem more appropriate to ask whether her assertion\nwas permissible. Manipulating these factors reverted the\nresults: a majority of participants gave responses aligning with\nnon-factive accounts. The authors then conducted new experiments\ninvolving both lucky assertions (true, but not justified) and\nunlucky assertions (false, but justified), finding that\n (JNA)\n was reliably a better predictor of assertability than any of its\nfactive rivals\n (TNA,\n KNA).","\nKneer (2017) also found solid evidence that\n (JNA)\n is a better predictor of assertability judgments than\n (KNA),\n TNA, and\n (BNA).\n In a first experiment, he tested Gettiered assertions and\nunlucky assertions, measuring assertability with different\nprompts: he asked whether the protagonist “should say\np”, whether she “is permitted to say\np”, and if saying p is\n“appropriate”. In both the Gettiered condition\nand the unlucky condition, the overwhelming majority of\nparticipants considered p assertable, but not known. Kneer\nconcludes that “knowledge quite clearly doesn’t constitute\nthe norm of assertion”. The other experiments were therefore\ndesigned to verify whether\n (JNA) makes\n more reliable predictions. Experiments 2 and 3 found robust evidence\nthat\n (JNA) is\n a better predictor of assertability judgments than\n (KNA),\n both in Gettier assertions and unlucky assertions,\neven when different factors (like the response options or the kind of\nepistemic support) are manipulated. Experiment 4 shows that\n (JNA) is\n a better predictor of assertability judgments than\n (BNA):\n people judge that “having a hunch” that p is\ntrue is not good enough ground to assert p. Like Reuter and\nBrössel, Kneer concludes that\n (JNA),\n rather than\n (KNA),\n is better supported by the empirical evidence. In a subsequent study,\nKneer (2021) found that these results are stable across different\ncultures.","\nThese results are at odds with the initial findings by Turri and\ncolleagues. Given the contrasting data available, how can we determine\nwhich account is best supported by empirical evidence? To answer this\nquestion, Marsili and Wiegmann (2021) note that, in all their\ndifferences, Turri’s studies share a central methodological\naspect: they explore laypeople intuitions by asking a sample of\nsubjects to judge what a particular agent should do in a\ngiven scenario, before the protagonist makes the assertion;\nKneer, Reuter and Brössel adopt instead different prompts and\ntense structures. Marsili and Wiegmann argue that the divergent\nresults are the predictable bi-product of a flaw in the questioning\nmethod employed in the former set of studies. They note that\n“should” can be interpreted in two ways:\nteleologically (or instrumentally), when it indicates what\nyou should do to achieve your aims, and deontologically, when\nit indicates what you should do to live up to some norms or\nobligations. The authors found experimental evidence that participants\nin Turri’s studies interpreted the test questions\nteleologically, which undermines a factive interpretation of the\nresults. Furthermore, they identify measures that can be introduced to\nprompt the intended (deontological) reading of the test question,\nfinding that when these measures are implemented into Turri’s\nvignettes, participants’ judgments overwhelmingly align with\nnon-factive views like\n (JNA).","\nIt would therefore seem that the latest studies have tipped the scale\nin favor of non-factive views like\n (JNA).\n However, further research will be needed to settle the disagreement\non empirical grounds."],"subsection_title":"5.1 Norms of assertion"},{"content":["\nAustin held that illocutionary acts as opposed to perlocutionary acts\nare conventional, in the sense that they can be made explicit\nby the so-called performative formula (Austin 1962: 103). According to\nAustin, one can say “I argue that” or “I warn you\nthat” but not “I convince you that” or “I\nalarm you that”. Presumably, the idea was that a speech act type\nis conventional just if there exists a convention by which an\nutterance of a sentence of a certain kind ensures (if uptake is\nsecured) that a speech act of that type is performed. Austin probably\nthought that in virtue of the performative formulas this condition is\nmet by illocutionary but not by perlocutionary act types.","\nThe more general claim that illocutionary force is correlated by\nconvention with sentence type has been advocated by Dummett (1973\n[1981: 302, 311]). On this view, it is a convention that declarative\nsentences are used for assertion, interrogative for questions and\nimperative for commands and requests. Similar views have been put\nforward by Searle (1969) and Kot’átko (1998), and the\nidea has been more recently defended by Kölbel (2010). According\nto Searle (1969: 38, 40), illocutionary acts are conventional, and the\nconventions in question govern the use of so-called force-indicating\ndevices (Searle 1969: 64) specific to each\n language.[31]","\nHowever, the view that illocutionary acts types are conventional in\nthis sense has met with much opposition. Strawson (1964:\n153–154) objected early on that ordinary illocutionary acts can\nbe performed without relying on any convention to identify the force,\nfor instance when using a declarative sentence like “The ice\nover there is very thin” for a warning. This kind of criticism,\ndirected against Dummett, has later been reinforced by Robert J.\nStainton (1996, 2006), stressing that in appropriate contexts,\nsub-sentential phrases like “John’s father”\n(pointing at a man) or “very fast” (looking at a car) can\nbe used to make assertions, and gives linguistic arguments why not all\nsuch uses can be treated as cases of ellipsis (that is, as cases of\nleaving out parts of a well-formed sentence that speaker and hearer\ntacitly aware of). If Strawson and Stainton are right, convention\nisn’t necessary for making assertions.","\nMoreover, Davidson (1979, 1984) stressed that no conventional sign\ncould work as a force indicator in this sense, since any conventional\nsign could be used (and would be used) in insincere utterances, where\nthe corresponding force was missing, including cases of deception,\njokes, impersonation and other theatrical performances. Basically the\nsame point is made by Bach and Harnish (1979: 122–127). If\nDavidson, and Bach and Harnish are right, then conventions are also\nnot sufficient (but see Kölbel 2010 for an argument against this\nview).","\nWilliamson (1996, 239) has argued that that speech acts defined by\nconstitutive rules (like assertion, in his own view) cannot be\nconventional. However, García-Carpintero (2019) has shown that\nthis position is controversial. The situation is complicated by the\nfact that the general question of when a convention, or rule of any\nkind, is in force for a speaker, is substantial and complex\n(for more on the relation of assertion to convention, Green\n2020a)."],"subsection_title":"5.2 Conventions"}]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"6. Normative Accounts, Hearer-Directed","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nConsider typical utterances made by means of the following\\nsentences\",\n \"\\nSentence (1a) would typically be used to make an assertion. The\\nspeaker would tell or inform a hearer that there is\\na beer in the fridge. Such an utterance of is called\\nassertoric, or assertive. By contrast, (1b) would be\\nused to ask a question (and the utterance would then be\\ninterrogative), (1c) to express a wish (optative),\\nand (1d) to make a command, or a request (imperative). This\\nentry is about utterances of the first kind, and about the speech acts\\nperformed by means of them.\",\n \"\\nGottlob Frege emphasized the distinction between judging a thought\\ncontent (what Frege called a Thought) to be true, and merely\\nthinking/entertaining that content. Both are distinct from the content\\nitself. Analogously, he distinguished between utterances with\\nassertoric quality, or force (see below), and utterances\\nwithout assertoric force. For instance, an assertoric\\nutterance of\",\n \"\\nas a whole, by which the conditional proposition is asserted, contains\\nas a proper part an utterance or the antecedent ‘it is\\nraining’. But the utterance of “it is raining” is\\nnot itself assertoric. The conditional can be true whether the\\nantecedent is true or false, and hence the speaker’s belief\\nabout rain is left open by the assertion\",\n \"\\nLike Frege, C.S. Peirce stressed the importance of distinguishing\\n“between a proposition and what one does with it”. He also\\nadopted, albeit implicitly, a distinction between force and\\ncontent:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\none and the same proposition may be affirmed, denied, judged, doubted,\\ninwardly inquired into, put as a question, wished, asked for,\\neffectively commanded, taught, or merely expressed, and does not\\nthereby become a different proposition (Peirce [NEM]:\\n 248).[2]\\n \",\n \"\\nFrege characterized the assertoric quality of an utterance as an\\nassertoric force (“behauptende Kraft”;\\nFrege 1918a [TFR: 330]) of the utterance. This idea was later taken\\nover by J. L. Austin (1962 [1975: 99–100]), the founding father\\nof the general theory of speech acts. Austin distinguished between\\nseveral levels of speech act, including these: the locutionary act,\\nthe illocutionary act and the perlocutionary act. The locutionary act\\nis the act of “ ‘saying something’ in the full\\nnormal sense” (1962 [1975: 94]), which is the utterance of\\ncertain words with certain meanings in a certain grammatical\\nconstruction, such as uttering ‘I like ice’ as a sentence\\nof English.\",\n \"\\nThe notion of an illocutionary act was introduced by Austin by means\\nof examples (1962 [1975: 98–102]), and that is the normal\\nprocedure. Illocutionary acts are such acts as asserting, asking a\\nquestion, warning, threatening, announcing a verdict or intention,\\nmaking an appointment, giving an order, expressing a wish, making a\\nrequest. An utterance of a sentence, i.e., a locutionary act, by means\\nof which a question is asked is thus an utterance with\\ninterrogative force, an if an assertion is made, it has\\nassertoric force.\",\n \"\\nThe perlocutionary act is made by means of an illocutionary act, and\\ndepends entirely on the hearer’s reaction. For instance, by\\nmeans of arguing the speaker may convince the hearer, and by\\nmeans of warning the speaker may frighten the hearer. In\\nthese examples, convincing and frightening are perlocutionary\\nacts.\",\n \"\\nThe illocutionary act does not depend on the hearer’s reaction\\nto the utterance. Still, according to Austin (1962 [1975:\\n116–7]) it does depend on the hearer’s being aware of the\\nutterance and understanding it in a certain way: I haven’t\\nwarned someone unless he heard what I said. In this sense, the\\nperformance of an illocutionary act depends on the “securing of\\nuptake” (Austin 1962 [1975: 117]). However, although\\nAustin’s view is intuitively plausible for speech acts verbs\\nwith speaker-hearer argument structure (like x congratulates\\ny) or speaker-hearer-content argument structure (x\\ntells y that p), it is less plausible when the\\nstructure is speaker-content (“Bill asserted that\\np”). It may be said that Bill failed to tell\\nLisa that the station was closed, since she had already left\\nthe room when he said so, but that Bill still asserted that\\nit was closed, since Bill believed she was still\\n there.[3]\",\n \"\\nAustin had earlier (1956) initiated the development of speech act\\ntaxonomy by means of the distinction between constative and\\nperformative utterances. Roughly, whereas in a constative\\nutterance you report an already obtaining state of affairs—you\\nsay something—in a performative utterance you create\\nsomething new: you do something (Austin 1956 [1979: 235]).\\nAssertion is the paradigm of a constative utterance. Paradigm examples\\nof performatives are utterances by means of which actions such as\\nbaptizing, congratulating and greeting are performed. However, when\\ndeveloping his general theory of speech acts, Austin abandoned the\\nconstative/performative distinction, the reason being that it is not\\nso clear in what sense something is done for instance by\\nmeans of an optative utterance, whereas nothing is done by means of an\\nassertoric one.\",\n \"\\nAustin noted, e.g., that assertions are subject both to infelicities\\nand to various kinds of appraisal, just like performatives (Austin\\n1962 [1975: 13–66]). For instance, an assertion is\\ninsincere in case of lying as a promise is insincere when the\\nappropriate intention is lacking (Austin 1962 [1975: 40]). This is an\\ninfelicity of the abuse kind. Also, an assertion is,\\naccording to Austin, void in case of a failed referential\\npresupposition, such as in Russell’s\",\n \"\\n(Austin 1962 [1975: 20]). This is then an infelicity of the same\\nkind—flaw-type misexecutions—as the use of the\\nwrong formula in a legal procedure (Austin 1962 [1975: 36]), or of the\\nsame kind—misinvocations—as when the requirements\\nof a naming procedure aren’t met (Austin 1962 [1975: 51]).\",\n \"\\nFurther, Austin noted that when it comes to appraisals, there is not a\\nsharp difference between acts that are simply true and false, and acts\\nthat are assessed in other respects (Austin 1962 [1975: 140–7]).\\nOn the one hand, a warning can be objectively proper or improper,\\ndepending on the facts. On the other hand, assertions (statements) can\\nbe assessed as suitable in some contexts and not in others, and are\\nnot simply true or\\n false.[4]\",\n \"\\nAs an alternative to the constative/performative distinction, Austin\\nsuggested five classes of illocutionary types (or illocutionary\\nverbs): verdictives, exercitives,\\ncommissives, behabitives and expositives\\n(Austin 1962 [1975: 151–64]). You exemplify a verdictive, e.g.,\\nwhen as a judge you pronounce a verdict; an exercitive by appointing,\\nvoting or advising; a commissive by promising, undertaking or\\ndeclaring that you will do something; a behabitive by apologizing,\\ncriticizing, cursing or congratulating; an expositive by acts\\nappropriately prefixed by phrases like ‘I reply’, ‘I\\nargue’, ‘I concede’ etc., of a general expository\\nnature.\",\n \"\\nIn this classification, assertion would best be placed under\\nexpositives, since the prefix “I assert” is or may be of\\nan expository nature. Austin explicitly includes the verbs\\n“affirm”, “deny”, and “state”, in\\nhis first group of expositives (1962 [1975: 162]). Marina Sbisà\\n(2020) argues that assertion belongs to both expositives and to\\nverdictives, insofar as assertion expresses a judgment/verdict.\",\n \"\\nOther taxonomies have been proposed, for instance by Stephen Schiffer\\n(1972), John Searle (1975b), Kent Bach and Robert M. Harnish (1979),\\nFrancois Recanati (1987), and William P. Alston\\n (2000).[5]\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Speech Acts\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nAssertion is generally thought of being open, explicit and direct, as\\nopposed for instance to implying something without explicitly saying\\nit. In this respect, assertion is contrasted with\\npresupposition and implicature. The contrast is,\\nhowever, not altogether sharp, partly because of the idea of indirect\\nspeech acts, including indirect assertions.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Pragmatics\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nA sentence such as\",\n \"\\nis not true unless the singular term ‘Kepler’ has\\nreference. Still, Frege argued that a speaker asserting that Kepler\\ndied in misery, by means of (4) does not also assert that\\n‘Kepler’ has reference (Frege 1892 [TPW: 69]). That Kepler\\nhas reference is not part of the sense of the sentence. Frege’s\\nreason was that if it had been, the sense of its negation\",\n \"\\nwould have been that Kepler did not die in misery or\\n‘Kepler’ does not have reference, which is absurd.\\nAccording to Frege, that ‘Kepler’ has reference is rather\\npresupposed, both in an assertion of\\n (4)\\n and in an assertion of its negation.\",\n \"\\nThe modern treatment of presupposition has followed Frege in treating\\nsurvival under negation as the most important test for presupposition.\\nThat is, if it is implied that p, both in an assertion of a\\nsentence s and in an assertion of the negation of s,\\nthen it is presupposed that p in those assertions (unless\\nthat p is entailed by all sentences). Other typical examples\\nof presupposition (Levinson 1983: 178–181) include\",\n \"\\nimplying that John tried to stop in time, and\",\n \"\\nimplying that Martha drank John’s home brew.\",\n \"\\nIn the case of\\n (4),\\n the presupposition is clearly of a semantic nature, since the\\nsentence “Someone is identical with Kepler”, which is true\\njust if ‘Kepler’ has reference, is a logical consequence\\nof\\n (4)\\n and (under a standard interpretation) of (5). By contrast, in the\\nnegated forms of\\n (6)\\n and\\n (7),\\n the presupposition can be canceled by context, e.g., as in\",\n \"\\nThis indicates that in this case the presupposition is rather a\\npragmatic phenomenon; it is the speaker or speech act rather than the\\nsentence or the proposition expressed that presupposes something.\",\n \"\\nHowever, the issue of separating semantic from pragmatic aspects of\\npresupposition is complex, and regarded differently in different\\napproaches to presupposition (for an overview, see Simons\\n 2006).[6]\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.1 Presupposition\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nFrege noted (1879: [TPW:10]) that there is no difference in truth\\nconditional content between sentences such as\",\n \"\\n“and” and “but” contribute the same way to\\ntruth and falsity. However, when using\\n (9b),\\n but not when using\\n (9a),\\n the speaker indicates that there is a contrast of some kind between\\nworking with real estate and liking fishing. The speaker is not\\nasserting that there is a contrast. We can test this, for\\ninstance, by forming a conditional with\\n (9b).\\n The antecedent of (10) preserves the contrast rather than make it\\nhypothetical, showing that the contrast is not asserted, forming a\\nconditional with\\n (9b)\\n in the antecedent preserves the contrast rather than make it\\nhypothetical:\",\n \"\\nIt is usually said that the speaker in cases like\\n (9b)\\n and\\n (10)\\n implicates that there is a contrast. These are examples of\\nimplicature. H. Paul Grice (1975, 1989) developed a general\\ntheory of implicature. Grice called implicatures of the kind\\nexemplified conventional, since it is a standing feature of\\nthe word “but” to give rise to them.\",\n \"\\nMost of Grice’s theory is concerned with the complementing kind,\\nthe conversational implicatures. These are subdivided into\\nthe particularized ones, which depend on features of the\\nconversational context, and the generalized ones, which\\ndon’t (Grice 1975: 37–8). The particularized\\nconversational implicature rely on general conversational maxims, not\\non features of expressions. These maxims are thought to be in force in\\nordinary conversation. For instance, the maxim Be orderly!\\nrequires of the speaker to recount events in the order they took\\nplace. This is meant to account for the intuitive difference in\\ncontent between\",\n \"\\nAccording to Grice’s account, the speaker doesn’t assert,\\nonly implicates that the events took place in the order recounted.\\nWhat is asserted is just that both events did take place.\",\n \"\\nReal or apparent violations of the maxims generate implicatures, on\\nthe assumption that the participants obey the over-arching\\nCooperative Principle. For instance, in the conversation\",\n \"\\nB implicates that he doesn’t know where in Canada John\\nspends the summer. The reasoning is as follows: B violates\\nthe Maxim of Quantity to be as informative as required. Since\\nB is assumed to be cooperative, we can infer that he cannot\\nsatisfy the Maxim of Quantity without violating some other maxim. The\\nbest candidate is the sub-maxim of the Maxim of Quality, which\\nrequires you not to say anything for which you lack sufficient\\nevidence. Hence, one can infer that B doesn’t know.\\nAgain, B has not asserted that he doesn’t know, but\\nstill managed to convey it in an indirect\\n manner.[7]\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.2 Implicature\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe distinction between assertion and implicature is to some extent\\nundermined by acknowledging indirect assertion as a kind of\\nassertion proper. A standard example of an indirect speech act is\\ngiven by\",\n \"\\nBy means of uttering an interrogative sentence the speaker requests\\nthe addressee to pass the salt. The request is indirect. The question,\\nliterally concerning the addressee’s ability to pass the salt,\\nis direct. As defined by John Searle (1975b: 59–60), and also by\\nBach and Harnish (1979: 70), an indirect illocutionary act is\\nsubordinate to another, more primary act and depends on the success of\\nthe first. An alternative definition, given by Sadock (1974: 73), is\\nthat an act is indirect just if it has a different illocutionary force\\nfrom the one standardly correlated with the sentence-type used.\",\n \"\\nExamples of indirect assertions by means of questions and\\ncommands/requests are given by\",\n \"\\n(Levinson 1983: 266). Rhetorical questions also have the force of\\nassertions:\",\n \"\\nAnother candidate type is irony:\",\n \"\\nassuming the speaker does mean the negation of what is literally said.\\nHowever, although in a sense the act is indirect, since the speaker\\nasserts something different from what she would do on a normal, direct\\nuse of the sentence, and relies on the hearer to realize this, it is\\nnot an indirect assertion by either definition. It isn’t on the\\nfirst, since the primary act (the literal assertion) isn’t even\\nmade, and it isn’t on the second, since there is no discrepancy\\nbetween force and sentence\\n type.[8]\",\n \"\\nThe very idea of indirect speech acts is, however, controversial. It\\nis not universally agreed that an ordinary utterance of\\n (13)\\n is indirect, since it has been denied, e.g., by Levinson (1983:\\n273–6) that a question has really been asked, over and above the\\nrequest. Similarly, Levinson have questioned the idea of a standard\\ncorrelation between force and sentence form, by which a request would\\ncount as indirect on Sadock’s criterion.\",\n \"\\nCommon to all conceptions of indirect assertions is that they are not\\nexplicit: what is expressed, or literally said, is not the same as\\nwhat is asserted. One question is whether an utterance is an assertion\\nproper that p if that content is not exactly what is\\nexpressed, or whether it is an act of a related kind, perhaps an\\n implicature.[9]\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.3 Indirect assertions\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nA related question is how far an utterance may deviate from\\nexplicitness and yet be counted as an assertion, proper or indirect.\\nAccording to one intuition, as soon as it is not fully determinate to\\nthe hearer what the intended content of an utterance is, or what force\\nit is made with, the utterance fails to be assertoric.\\nUnderdetermination is the crucial issue. This has been argued by\\nElizabeth Fricker (2012). But the issue is controversial, and\\nobjections of several kinds have been made, for instance by John\\nHawthorne (2012), Andrew Peet (2015, forthcoming) and Manuel\\nGarcía-Carpintero (2016,\\n 2019b).[10]\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.4 Explicitness\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nDescriptive accounts characterize assertion in terms of its\\npsychological, social, and linguistic features, without appeal to\\nnormative notions. The content-directed accounts focus on the\\nrelations between the speaker and content and between hearer and\\ncontent.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Descriptive Accounts, Content-Directed\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nFrege (1918a [TFR: 329]) held that an assertion is an outward sign of\\na judgment (Urteil). A judgment in turn, in\\nFrege’s view, is a step from entertaining a Thought to\\nacknowledging its truth (Frege 1892 [TPW:\\n 64]).[11]\\n The subject first merely thinks the Thought that p, and\\nthen, at the judgment stage, moves on to acknowledge it as true. Since\\nfor Frege, the truth value is the reference (Bedeutung) of a\\nsentence, a judgment is an advance from the sense of a sentence to its\\nreference. In case the subject makes a mistake, it is not the actual\\nreference, but the reference the subject takes it to\\nhave.\",\n \"\\nFor Frege, truth is not relative. There is exactly one point of\\nevaluation of a Thought, the world itself. If instead we accept more\\nthan one point of evaluation, such as different possible worlds, truth\\nsimpliciter is equated with truth at the actual world. We can\\nthen adapt Frege’s view to say that judging that p is\\nadvancing to reference at the actual world, or again,\\nevaluating as true in the actual world.\",\n \"\\nOn this picture, what holds for judgment carries over to assertion. It\\nis in the force of an utterance that the step is taken from the\\ncontent to the actual point of evaluation. This view has been stated\\nby Recanati with respect to the actual world:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n[…] a content is not enough; we need to connect that content\\nwith the actual world, via the assertive force of the utterance, in\\nvirtue of which the content is presented as characterizing that world.\\n(Recanati 2007: 37)\\n\",\n \"\\nIn Pagin (2016a: 276–278), this idea is generalized. If contents\\nare possible-worlds propositions, the points of evaluation are\\npossible worlds. All actual judgments are then applications of\\npropositions to the actual world. If contents are\\ntemporal propositions, true or false with respect to\\nworld-time pairs, then all actual judgments are applications to the\\nordered pair of the actual world and a relevant time, usually the time\\nat which the judgment is made. This is the point with respect to which\\na sentence, used in a context of utterance, has its truth value (cf.\\nKaplan 1989: 522). Again, the relation is general: if the content of a\\njudgment is a function from indices of some type to truth\\nvalues, then a judgment is the very step of taking the content to be\\ntrue at the actual/current index, or again applying the\\ncontent to that index. The force of an assertion, on this\\nview, connects the content of the assertion with the relevant index.\\nThe assertion indicates that the content is true at the\\nindex.\",\n \"\\nOn the more social side, it is often said that in asserting a\\nproposition the speaker “presents the proposition as true”\\n(cf. Wright 1992: 34). Prima facie, this characterizes\\nassertion well. However, there are problems with the idea. One is that\\nit should generalize to other speech act types, but does not seem to\\ndo so. For instance, does a question present a proposition as one the\\nspeaker would like to know the truth value of? If so, it does\\nnot seem that this way of presenting the proposition distinguishes\\nbetween the interrogative force in\\n (17a),\\n the optative force in\\n (17b),\\n and the imperative force in\\n (17c).\",\n \"\\nIf other speech act types could be characterized in ways analogous to\\nassertion, that would strengthen the proposal. If not, it appears to\\nbe a weakness.\",\n \"\\nAnother problem is that it remains unclear what\\n“presenting” amounts to. It must be a sense of the word\\ndifferent from that in which the proposition is presented as true in\\nthe sentence\",\n \"\\neven if the sentence is not uttered assertorically. That is,\\n“present as true” must not refer to a feature simply of\\ncontent. Since there is a sense of “present as\\nsuch-and-such” that does refer to representational\\ncontent, there is a need to specify, in a non-question-begging way,\\nthe other sense of “present” that is relevant.\",\n \"\\nIn addition, there is a question of distinguishing the assertoric way\\nof presenting something as true from weaker illocutionary\\nalternatives, such as guesses and conjectures, which also in some\\nsense present their contents as being true.\",\n \"\\nThere are therefore weaker senses of “present as true”,\\nwhich do not require that the presentation itself is made with\\nassertoric force (like an obsolete label on a bottle), and these\\nsenses are too weak. There is clearly also a stronger sense that\\ndoes require assertoric force (for cases when the label is\\ntaken to apply), but that is just what we want to have\\n(non-circularly) explained. Simply using the phrase “present as\\ntrue” does not by itself help.\",\n \"\\nAnother idea for characterizing assertion in terms of truth-related\\nattitudes is that assertion aims at truth. This is stated for\\ninstance both by Bernard Williams (1966), by Michael Dummett (1973\\n[1981]), and more recently by Marsili (2018). The notion of\\n“aiming at truth” can be understood in rather different\\nways (for some ways of understanding what it could be for\\nbelief to aim at truth, see Engel 2004 and Glüer &\\nWikforss\\n 2013).[12]\",\n \"\\nWilliams (1966) characterizes assertion’s aim in different\\nterms. For him, the property of aiming at truth is what characterizes\\nfact-stating discourse, as opposed to, e.g., evaluative or\\ndirective discourse. It is natural to think of\",\n \"\\nas stating a fact, and of\",\n \"\\nas expressing an evaluation, not corresponding to any fact of the\\nmatter. On Williams’s view, to regard a sincere utterance of\",\n \"\\nas a moral assertion, is to take a realistic\\nattitude to moral discourse: there are moral facts, making moral\\nstatements objectively true or false. This view again comes in two\\nversions. On the first alternative, the existence of moral facts\\nrenders the discourse fact-stating, whether the speaker thinks so or\\nnot, and the non-existence renders it evaluative, again whether the\\nspeaker thinks so or not. On the second alternative, an utterance of\\n (21)\\n is an assertion if the speaker has a realistic attitude towards moral\\ndiscourse and otherwise not.\",\n \"\\nOn these views, it is assumed that truth is a substantial property\\n(Williams 1966: 202), not a concept that can be characterized in some\\ndeflationary way. As a consequence, the sentence\",\n \"\\nis to be regarded as false, since\\n (22)\\n is objectively neither true nor false; there is no fact of the\\n matter.[13]\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.1 Relation to truth\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nPerhaps the best way of capturing the cognitive nature of assertion is\\nto give a theory of the cognitive features of normal communication by\\nmeans of assertion. A classic theory is Stalnaker’s (1974,\\n1978). Stalnaker provides a model of a conversation in which assertion\\nand presupposition dynamically interact. On Stalnaker’s model,\\npropositions are presupposed in a conversation if they are on record\\nas belonging to the common ground between the speakers. When an\\nassertion is made and accepted in the conversation, its content is\\nadded to the common ground, and the truth of the proposition in\\nquestion will be presupposed in later stages. What is presupposed at a\\ngiven stage has an effect on the interpretation of new utterances made\\nat that stage. For Stalnaker, the common ground is a set of\\npropositions. He models this with the set of worlds in which all\\ncommon ground propositions are true, the context set.\",\n \"\\nIn this framework Stalnaker (1978: 88–89) proposes three rules\\nfor assertion:\",\n \"\\nStalnaker comments on the first rule:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nTo assert something incompatible with what is presupposed is\\nself-defeating […] And to assert something which already\\npresupposed is to attempt to do something that is already done.\\n\",\n \"\\nOn such an approach, the satisfaction of a presupposition is an\\nadmittance condition of an assertion (cf. Karttunen 1974;\\nHeim 1988). This idea connects with Austin’s more general idea\\nof felicity conditions of speech\\n acts.[14]\\n Does Stalnaker offer an account of assertion itself? The answer is\\nno, for the role of assertion is shared by other speech acts such as\\nassuming and conjecturing (Stalnaker 1978: 153).\\nWhat is added to the common ground is only for the purpose of\\nconversation, and need not be actually believed by the\\nparticipants. It is only required that it be accepted (cf.\\nStalnaker 2002: 716).\",\n \"\\nStalnaker has not (as far as we are aware) attempted to add a\\ndistinguishing feature of assertion to the model. This has, however,\\nbeen attempted by Schaffer (2008), Kölbel (2011: 68–70),\\nand Stokke\\n (2013).[15]\",\n \"\\nAnother cognitive account is offered by Pagin (2011, 2020). The\\naccount is summarized by the phrase: “an assertion is an\\nutterance that is prima facie informative”. For an utterance to\\nbe informative is for it to be made in part “because it is\\ntrue”. What this amounts to is different, but complementary, for\\nspeaker and hearer. For the speaker, part of the reason for\\nusing a particular sentence is that it is true (in context); that is,\\nthe speaker believes, with a sufficient strength, that the sentence\\nexpresses a true proposition, and utters it partly because of that.\\nFor the hearer, taking the utterance as informative, means, by\\ndefault, to update their credence in the proposition as a response to\\nthe utterance, both in the upwards direction and to a level above\\n0.5.\",\n \"\\nThe prima facie element of the account means that the typical\\nproperties on the speaker and hearer side are only default\\nproperties associated with surface features of the utterance: the\\ndeclarative sentence type, a typical intonation pattern, etc. There\\nare many possible reasons why a speaker may utter such a sentence\\nwithout believing the proposition, and why a hearer may not adjust\\ntheir credence in the typical manner. For example, the speaker may be\\nlying, the hearer may distrust the speaker, or may already have given\\nthe proposition a very high credence before the utterance. On\\nPagin’s picture, it is the cognitive patterns associated with\\nsurface features, on the production and comprehension sides, that\\ncharacterize assertion. This way of dividing the account between\\nspeaker and hearer is somewhat controversial.\",\n \"\\nYet another cognitive account is elaborated in Jary (2010).\\nJary’s account is situated within Relevance Theory, a\\nmore general account of cognition and communication. As a typical\\ningredient of this general framework, when an assertion is made, the\\nproposition expressed by the utterance is presented as “relevant\\nto the hearer” (2010: 163), where ‘relevant’ is a\\ntechnical term (Sperber & Wilson 1986 [1995: 265]).\",\n \"\\nWhat distinguishes assertion from other speech act types is something\\ndifferent:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nAssertion cannot be defined thus, though. In order for an utterance to\\nhave assertoric force, it must also be subject to the cognitive and\\nsocial safeguards that distinguish assertion. […] It is the\\napplicability of these safeguards that distinguishes assertion both\\nfrom other illocutionary acts and from other forms of information\\ntransfer. (Jary 2010: 163–164)\\n\",\n \"\\nSocial safeguards consist in sanctions against misleading assertions,\\nwhile cognitive safeguards consist in the ability of the hearer to not\\nsimply accept what is said but meta-represent the speaker as\\nexpressing certain beliefs and intentions (2010: 160). It is part of a\\nfull account of assertion, according to Jary, that assertions are\\nsubject to these safeguards. This also distinguishes assertions from\\npromises and commands, where the proposition is not presented as\\nsubject to the hearer’s safeguards; “rejection is not\\npresented as an option for the hearer” (2010: 73).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.2 Cognitive models of communication\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nHearer-directed accounts of assertion are primarily concerned with the\\nspeaker’s thoughts and intentions about their audience.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Descriptive Accounts, Hearer-Directed\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAccording to Frege (1918a [TFR: 329]), as noted, an assertion is an\\noutward sign of a judgment (Urteil). The term\\n“judgment” has been used in several ways. If it is used to\\nmean either belief, or act by which a belief is formed or\\nreinforced, then Frege’s view is pretty close to the view\\nthat assertion is the expression of belief.\",\n \"\\nThis idea, that assertion is the expression of belief, has a longer\\nhistory, going back to at least Kant. How should one understand the\\nidea of expressing here? It is natural to think of a belief state,\\nthat is, a mental state of the speaker, as causally co-responsible for\\nthe making of the assertion. The speaker has a belief and wants to\\ncommunicate it, which motivates an assertoric utterance. But what\\nabout the cases when the speaker does not believe what he asserts? Can\\nwe still say, even of insincere assertions, that they express belief?\\nIf so, in what sense?\",\n \"\\nWithin the communicative intentions tradition, Bach and Harnish have\\nemphasized that an assertion gives the hearer evidence for\\nthe corresponding belief, and that what is common to the sincere and\\ninsincere case is the intention of providing such evidence:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nFor S to express an attitude is for S to\\nR-intend the hearer to take S’s utterance as\\nreason to think S has that attitude. (Bach & Harnish\\n1979: 15, italics in the original)\\n\",\n \"\\n(‘R-intend’ is, as above, short for “reflexively\\nintend”). On this view, expressing is wholly a matter of\\nhearer-directed intentions.\",\n \"\\nThis proposal has the advantage of covering both the sincere and the\\ninsincere case, but has the drawback of requiring a high level of\\nsophistication. By contrast, Bernard Williams (2002: 74) has claimed\\nthat a sincere assertion is simply the direct expression of\\nbelief, in a more primitive and unsophisticated way. Insincere\\nassertions are different. According to Williams (2002: 74), in an\\nassertion, the speaker either gives a direct expression of\\nbelief, or he intends the addressee to “take it”\\nthat he has the belief (cf. Owens 2006).\",\n \"\\nPresumably, the intention mentioned is an intention about what the\\nhearer is to believe about the speaker. In this case the objection\\nthat too much sophistication is required is less pressing, since it\\nonly concerns insincere assertions. However, Williams’s idea (as\\nin Grice 1969) has the opposite defect of not taking more\\nsophistication into account. The idea, that the alternative to\\nsincerity is the intention to make the hearer believe that the speaker\\nbelieves what he asserts, is not general enough. For instance, there\\nis double bluffing, where the speaker asserts what is true in order to\\ndeceive the hearer, whom the speaker believes will expect the speaker\\nto lie. Again, an insincere speaker S who asserts that\\np may know that the hearer A knows that\\nS does not believe that p, but may still intend to\\nmake A believe that S does not know about\\nA’s knowledge, precisely by making the assertion that\\np. There is no definitive upper limit to the sophistication\\nof the deceiving speaker’s calculations. In addition, the\\nspeaker may simply be stonewalling, reiterating an assertion without\\nany hope of convincing the addressee of anything.\",\n \"\\nA more neutral way of trying to capture the relation between assertion\\nand believing was suggested both by Max Black (1952) and by Davidson\\n(1984: 268): in asserting that p the speaker\\nrepresents herself as believing that p. This\\nsuggestion appears to avoid the difficulties with the appeal to\\nhearer-directed intentions.\",\n \"\\nA somewhat related approach is taken by Mitchell S. Green (2007), who\\nappeals to “expressive conventions”. Grammatical moods can\\nhave such conventions (2007: 150). According to Green (2007: 160), an\\nassertion that p invokes a set of conventions according to\\nwhich the speaker “can be represented as bearing the\\nbelief-relation to p”.\",\n \"\\nAs one can represent oneself as believing, one can also represent\\noneself as knowing. Inspired by Davidson’s proposal, Peter Unger\\n(1975: 253–270) and Michael Slote (1979: 185) made the stronger\\nclaim that in asserting that p the speaker represents\\nherself as knowing that p. To a small extent this idea had been\\nanticipated by G. E. Moore when claiming that the speaker\\nimplies that she knows that p (1912 [1966: 63]).\",\n \"\\nHowever, it is not so clear what representing oneself amounts to. It\\nmust be a sense different from that in which one represents the\\nworld as having certain features. The speaker who asserts\",\n \"\\ndoes not also claim that she believes that there are black\\nswans. It must apparently be some weaker sense of\\n“represent”, since it is not just a matter of\\nbeing, as opposed to not being, fully explicit. If I am asked what I\\nbelieve and I answer by uttering\\n (23),\\n I do represent myself as believing that there are black swans, just\\nas I would have done by explicitly saying that I believe that\\nthere are black swans. I do represent myself as believing that there\\nare black swans, equivalently with asserting that I do. What I assert\\nthen is false if I don’t have the belief, despite the existence\\nof black swans.\",\n \"\\nOn the other hand, it must also be stronger than the sense of\\n“represent” by which an actor can be said to represent\\nhimself as believing something on stage. The actor says\",\n \"\\nthereby representing himself as asserting that he is in the biology\\ndepartment, since he represents himself as being a man who honestly\\nasserts that he is in the biology department. By means of that, he in\\none sense represents himself as believing that he is in the biology\\ndepartment. But the audience not invited to believe that the\\nspeaker, that is, the actor, has that belief.\",\n \"\\nApparently, the relevant sense of “represent” is not easy\\nto specify. That it nevertheless tracks a real phenomenon is often\\nclaimed to be shown by Moore’s Paradox. This is the paradox that\\nassertoric utterances of sentences such as\",\n \"\\n(the omissive type of Moorean sentences) are distinctly odd, and even\\nprima facie self-defeating, despite the fact that they may\\nwell be true. Among the different types of account of Moore’s\\nParadox, Moore’s own emphasizes the connection between asserting\\nand believing. Moore’s idea (1944: 175–176; 1912 [1966:\\n63]) was that the speaker in some sense implies that she\\nbelieves what she asserts. So by asserting\\n (25)\\n the speaker induces a contradiction between what she asserts and what\\nshe implies. This contradiction is then supposed to explain the\\n oddity.[16]\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.1 Self-representation\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nTypically, the speaker who makes an assertion has hearer-directed\\nintentions in performing a speech act. The speaker may intend\\nthe hearer to come to believe something or other about the speaker, or\\nabout something else, or intend the hearer to come to desire or intend\\nto do something. Such intentions can concern institutional changes,\\nbut need not. Intentions that are immediately concerned with\\ncommunication itself, as opposed to ulterior goals, are called\\ncommunicative intentions.\",\n \"\\nThe idea of communicative intentions derives from Grice’s (1957)\\narticle ‘Meaning’, where Grice defined what it is for a\\nspeaker to non-naturally mean something. Although Grice did\\nnot explicitly attempt to define assertion, his ideas can be\\nstraightforwardly transposed to provide a definition:\",\n \"\\nIn the early to mid 1960s Austin’s speech act theory and\\nGrice’s account of communicative intentions began to merge. The\\nconnection is discussed in Strawson 1964. Strawson inquired whether\\nillocutionary force could be made overt by means of communicative\\nintentions. He concluded that when it comes to highly conventionalized\\nutterances, communicative intentions are largely irrelevant, but that\\non the other hand, convention does not play much role for ordinary\\nillocutionary types. Strawson also pointed out a difficulty with\\nGrice’s analysis: it may be the case that all three conditions\\n(i-iii) are fulfilled, but that the speaker intends the hearer to\\nbelieve that they aren’t (for instance, if the speaker\\nwants the hearer to believe that p for reasons altogether\\nindependent from his making the statement).\",\n \"\\nSuch intentions to mislead came to be called sneaky\\nintentions (Grice 1969), and they constituted a problem for\\nspeech act analyses based on communicative intentions. The idea was\\nthat genuine communication is essentially open: the speaker’s\\ncommunicative intentions are meant to be fully accessible to the\\nhearer. Sneaky intentions violate this requirement of openness, and\\ntherefore apparently they must be ruled out one way or another.\\nStrawson’s own solution was to add a fourth clause about the\\nspeaker’s intention that the hearer recognize the third\\nintention. However, that solution only invited a sneaky intention one\\nlevel up (cf. Schiffer 1972: 17–42; Vlach 1981; Davis 1999).\",\n \"\\nAnother solution was to make the intention reflexive. This\\nwas proposed by Searle (1969), in the first full-blown analysis of\\nillocutionary types made by appeal to communicative intentions. Searle\\ncombined this with an appeal to social institutions as created by\\nrules. We return to these in\\n section 5.1.\",\n \"\\nSearle criticized Grice for requiring the speaker to intend\\nperlocutionary effects, such as what the speaker shall come\\nto do or believe, pointing out that such intentions aren’t\\nessential (1969: 46–7). Instead, according to Searle, the\\nspeaker intends to be understood, and also intends to achieve\\nthis by means of the hearer’s recognition of this very intention\\nitself. Moreover, if the intention is recognized, it is also\\nfulfilled: “we achieve what we try to do by getting our audience\\nto recognize what we try to do” (Searle 1969: 47). This\\nreflexive intention is formally spelled out as follows:\",\n \"\\nThe illocutionary effect IE is the effect of generating the state\\nspecified in the constitutive rule. In the case of assertion, the\\nspeaker intends that her utterance counts as an undertaking\\nthat p represents an actual state of affairs, depending on\\nthe constitutive rule (cf.\\n section 5.1).\",\n \"\\nBach and Harnish follow Searle in appealing to reflexive communicative\\nintentions. On their analysis (1979: 42), assuming a speaker\\nS and a hearer H,\",\n \"\\nAccording to Bach and Harnish’s understanding, a speaker\\nS expresses an attitude just in case S\\nR-intends (reflexively intends) the hearer to take\\nS’s utterance as reason to think S has that\\nattitude. They understand the reflexive nature of the intention pretty\\nmuch like Searle. They say (1979: 15) that the intended effect of an\\nact of communication is not just any effect produced by means of\\nrecognition of the intention to produce a certain effect, it is\\nthe recognition of that intention.\",\n \"\\nThese appeals to reflexive intentions were later criticized, in\\nparticular by Sperber and Wilson (1986 [1995:256–257]). Their\\npoint is that if an intention I has as sub-intentions both\\nthe intention J and the intention that the hearer recognize\\nI, this will yield an infinitely long sequence: the intention\\nthat: J and the hearer recognize the intention that:\\nJ and the hearer recognize the intention that: J and\\n…). If this is an intention content at all, it is not humanly\\n graspable.[17]\",\n \"\\nApart from the communicative intentions accounts of assertion, there\\nare more general questions about what intentions are required of a\\nspeaker in order for his utterance to qualify as an assertion. For\\ninstance, must he intend it to be an assertion? Must it be\\nmade voluntarily?\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.2 Communicative intentions\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Normative Accounts, Content-Directed\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nMost of the discussion on assertion during the past twenty years has\\nconcerned norms of assertability. Simply put, philosophers aim to\\ndetermine under which conditions it is epistemically permissible (or\\nproper, warranted, correct, appropriate) to make an assertion.\",\n \"\\nPhilosophers have long been interested in analyzing what we mean when\\nwe characterize an assertion as “correct”,\\n“justified”, “proper”,\\n“warranted”, “assertible”, or\\n“warrantedly assertible”. The latter notion was taken on\\nboard in pragmatism, and in later forms of anti-realism. Dewey (1938)\\nseems to have been the first to characterize truth in terms of\\nassertoric correctness, with his notion of warranted\\nassertibility, even though this idea had a clear affinity with\\nthe verifiability principle of Moritz Schlick (1936). Dewey, following\\nPeirce, regarded truth as the ideal limit of scientific inquiry (1938:\\n345), and a proposition warrantedly asserted only when known\\nin virtue of such an inquiry. Warranted assertibility is the property\\nof a proposition for which such knowledge potentially exists\\n(1938: 9). Dewey was later followed by, notably, Dummett (1976) and\\nPutnam (1981). Common to them is the position that there cannot be\\nanything more to truth than being supported by the best available\\nevidence. In these early discussions, the strategy was that of getting\\na handle on truth by means of an appeal to the notion of the\\ncorrectness of an assertion, which was taken as more fundamental. On\\nDummett’s view, we do get a notion of truth distinct\\nfrom the notion of a correct assertion only because of the\\nsemantics of compound sentences (1976: 50–52). The\\nquestion of what the correctness of an assertion consists in was not\\nitself much discussed in earlier work, but became subject of\\ndiscussion already in the 1980s, with the work of Boghossian and\\nothers.\",\n \"\\nThe contemporary wave of discussion about assertoric normativity is\\nalmost exclusively content-directed; the norms concern the epistemic\\nrelation between the speaker and the content of their\\n assertion.[18]\\n Williamson (1996, 2000) initiated this debate by proposing that\\nassertion is governed by a single norm, of the format:\",\n \"\\nAccording to this hypothesis, you are entitled to assert a proposition\\nonly if that proposition has a certain unspecified property\\nC. The (N)-schema formalizes the key philosophical question\\nabout assertability: which epistemic property C that makes a\\nproposition assertable?\",\n \"\\nWilliamson’s answer is that property C must be\\nknowledge, i.e., being known by the speaker. If this is\\nright, you can properly assert only what you know: assertion is\\ngoverned by the knowledge-norm\\n (KNA):\",\n \"\\n(Williamson 2000: 243). (KNA) is proposed as part of an account of\\nassertion. Other norms have been proposed: the most prominent\\nalternatives are the truth norm (TNA), the justification norm (JNA)\\nand the belief norm (BNA):\",\n \"\\nDetermining which of these norms governs assertion depends (at least\\nin part) on what we mean by hypothesizing that assertion is governed\\nby a simple norm by N. In the next section\\n (5.1.3),\\n we clarify what philosophers typically mean when they say that\\nN governs assertions. In the subsequent section\\n (5.1.4),\\n we review the various accounts of which specific norm governs\\nassertion (i.e., the different views as to which property\\nC makes a proposition assertable).\",\n \"\\nWilliamson’s initial framing of the debate on the norm of\\nassertion takes for granted a number of assumptions: for instance,\\nthat there is a single norm, that it is constitutive of assertion,\\nthat all and only assertions are subject to it. In subsequent work,\\nsome of these assumptions have been questioned. Here we limit\\nourselves to list each assumption (ignoring the numerous objections\\nthat affect them). The interested reader will find a discussion of the\\ncase for and against each assumption in the supplementary document\\n Which Kind of Norm?.\",\n \"\\nBy Specificity, N is a norm that regulates only one\\nspecies of action: asserting. In this sense, it is specific to\\nassertion. It governs the making of assertions in general, and nothing\\nelse. Directness is closely connected to\\nSpecificity. It clarifies that assertions are subject to\\nN only in virtue of the fact that they are assertions.\",\n \"\\nThe “uniqueness assumption” holds that assertion is\\nsubject to a single norm. Indirectness specifies that\\nUniqueness is compatible with recognizing that there are\\nother norms that apply to assertion, albeit only indirectly\\n(Williamson 1996: 489). For instance, an assertion can follow\\nN (e.g., satisfy the Justification Norm JNA) and violate\\nstandard of politeness, morality, legality, etc. Unlike N,\\nthese other normative standards are not specific to assertion, since\\nthey apply also to other actions (questions, orders, as well as\\nnon-linguistic actions).\",\n \"\\nAn important corollary of Indirectness is that whether an\\nassertion is all-things-considered permissible or not may depend on\\nfactors that are independent of N. When you say something\\noffensive, or reveal a secret that you agreed to keep, you may follow\\nN and yet make an (all-things-considered) impermissible\\nassertion. And when you lie to save a life, you may violate N\\nand make an assertion that is (all-things-considered) permissible.\",\n \"\\nAccording to the Individuation assumption, the norm of\\nassertion is individuating: assertion can be defined as the unique\\nspeech act who is subject to this unique norm (Williamson 2000: 241;\\nGoldberg 2015: 25; Montminy 2013a). It should be emphasized here that\\nit is being subject to the norm that characterizes assertion,\\nnot conforming to the norm. An assertion that violates the\\nnorm is still an assertion. A definition of assertion in terms of its\\nnorm would read as:\",\n \"\\nIf\\n (A3)\\n holds, an important motivation for identifying N is that it\\nwill provide us with a definition of assertion. Once we determine what\\nN is (say, JNA), we can disambiguate the content of this\\ndefinition (say, “the only speech act who is only subject to\\nJNA”).\",\n \"\\nThe Essentiality assumption goes beyond\\nIndividuation: Individuation allows that assertion\\nis only actually individuated by N, and that it could have\\nbeen governed by some other norm. By contrast,\\n (A4)\\n holds that assertions could not exist and be governed by a different\\nnorm: if assertion were subject to a different norm, it would be a\\ndifferent speech act. Nothing but an assertion could violate the norm,\\nif the\\n (A3)\\n and\\n (A4)\\n properties hold.\",\n \"\\nBy\\n (A5),\\n an assertion is permissible (appropriate, epistemically proper,\\nwarranted, correct—depending on one’s favorite\\nterminology) only if it meets condition C, and impermissible\\nif it does not meet C. Permission is related to the negative\\nevaluation of assertions: assertions who violate N are\\nprima facie faulty, and criticizable (qua violations of\\nN). Permissibility only establishes what is\\nnecessary for permissible assertion, not what is\\n sufficient.[19]\",\n \"\\nMost theorists take for granted that N is the\\n“constitutive” norm of assertion, and some explicitly\\nadvocate\\n (A6).[20]\",\n \"\\nHowever, there is substantial (and often unacknowledged) disagreement\\nabout what constitutivity amounts to (for more the debate surrounding\\neach of these assumptions, see the supplementary document\\n Which Kind of Norm?).\",\n \"\\nFor the most part, the literature on norms of assertion has concerned\\nthe question of which specific norm governs assertion, and\\nwhat are the reasons for favoring one candidate norm over another.\\nBelow, we briefly go through the main candidates from the\\nliterature.\",\n \"\\nOver and above Williamson,\\n (KNA)\\n has been favored by DeRose (2002), Reynolds (2002), Adler (2002:\\n275), Hawthorne (2004), Stanley (2005), Engel (2008), Schaffer (2008),\\nand Turri (2010), among others.\",\n \"\\nIn addition to direct intuitions about the appropriateness of specific\\nsentences, proponents of the knowledge norm have adduced indirect\\nevidence in the form of intuitions about conversational patterns,\\nclaiming that these patterns are best explained by the acceptance of\\nthe knowledge norm. Williamson himself appeals to such patterns, such\\nas those arising from Moorean Assertions\\n (26),\\n Lottery Assertions\\n (27),\\n and Challenges\\n (28):\",\n \"\\nConcerning the first, Williamson (2000: 253) claims that an utterance\\nof\\n (26)\\n is just as odd as any ordinary Moorean sentence involving belief,\\nsuch as\\n (25)\\n above. The oddity of\\n (26)\\n can be explained by appeal to the knowledge norm, and this is taken\\nby supporters of\\n (KNA)\\n to be a datum in its favor. By\\n (KNA),\\n (26) is proper only if the speaker knows that the proposition\\nexpressed by\\n (26)\\n is true. Since knowledge distributes over conjunction, this means\\nthat the speaker should know that it is raining and also that she does\\nnot know that it is raining. Since knowledge is factive, this\\ngenerates a contradiction: it follows that an assertion of\\n (26)\\n cannot be proper, and this explains its oddity.\",\n \"\\nSimilarly,\\n (KNA)\\n seems well positioned to explain the oddity of asserting\\n (27)\\n merely on probabilistic grounds. Suppose that a (fair) lottery with a\\nlarge number of tickets has been held; only one ticket has won.\\nB has a ticket, but neither A nor B knows\\nthe result. A asserts\\n (27)\\n on merely probabilistic grounds. Although the probability that the\\nticket has won is very low (and one can get it arbitrarily low, short\\nof zero, by increasing the number of tickets in the lottery), it is\\nintuitively incorrect for A to tell\\n (27)\\n to B (Williamson 2000: 246–249). No probability short\\nof 1 seems to authorize A’s utterance of\\n (27).\\n Since A does not know that\\n (27)\\n is true,\\n (KNA)\\n explains the unacceptability of A’s utterance.\",\n \"\\nFinally, in standard contexts, it is perfectly appropriate to\\nchallenge an assertion with questions like\\n (28),\\n but\\n (28)\\n presupposes that the speaker knows that what she says is true.\\n (KNA)\\n is well positioned to explain why this presupposition is appropriate:\\nif speakers are only entitled to assert what they know, then it is\\nwithin the hearer’s conversational rights to assume (and\\npresuppose) that the speaker knows that what they say is true. Further\\nconversational patterns supporting\\n (KNA)\\n have been proposed, e.g., by Benton (2011).\",\n \"\\nThe claim that\\n (KNA)\\n is supported by these conversational patterns has been extensively\\ncriticized. The most common line is that the available data can be\\nexplained equally well (if not better) by competing accounts. For\\ninstance, several authors argue that the oddity of Moorean Assertions\\nand Lottery Assertions can be explained by appeal to a justification\\n norm.[21]\\n Others have noted that these conversational patterns may be explained\\nby appealing to more general principles, rather than assertoric norms\\nspecifically. For instance, it has been argued that Lottery Assertions\\nand Moorean Assertions are improper because they violate more general\\n(Gricean) conversational\\n principles.[22]\",\n \"\\nA different criticism comes from Sosa (2009), who notes that\\n (KNA)’s\\n explanation of Moorean assertions fails to generalize as it should,\\nbecause\\n (KNA)\\n is unable to explain “dubious assertions”: cases in which\\nthe speaker asserts p while admitting that he doesn’t\\nknow whether he knows that p (but see Benton 2013, Montminy\\n2013a). Finally, several authors have questioned the assumption that\\nit is always improper to assert that one’s ticket is a loser on\\npurely probabilistic\\n grounds.[23]\",\n \"\\nThe argument from challenges like\\n (28)\\n is surely the least compelling. First, to meet the challenge raised\\nby\\n (28),\\n it would be sufficient for the speaker to show that she has good\\nreasons to believe that what she said is true (Lackey 2007:\\n610; Kvanvig 2009: 143; McKinnon & Turri 2013). It does not seem,\\nby contrast, that the speaker has to prove that she knows (rather than\\nmerely believe) that what she said is true. Second, taking the\\nargument seriously proves too much. Consider\\n (29):\",\n \"\\nSince\\n (29)\\n and\\n (30)\\n are also natural ways to challenge an assertion, by the same logic,\\nwe should conclude that assertion is also governed by a certainty\\nrule. We could extend this to other challenges (Is that true?). So the\\nchallenge argument doesn’t seem to show a primacy of knowledge\\nover alternative rules.\",\n \"\\nA general problem with the appeal to conversational patterns is that\\nthey don’t seem to favor specifically normative views over\\ncorresponding non-normative views. For instance, it appears that any\\nlinguistic phenomenon that can be explained by appeal to a knowledge\\nnorm can be equally well explained by appeal to the view that\\nasserters represent themselves as knowing what they say, although\\nthere is no norm (cf. Pagin 2016b; D. Black 2018). Combine this with\\nextraneous, non-assertion-specific norms. That A’s lottery\\nassertion\\n (27)\\n is bad can then be explained by appeal to self-representation of\\nknowledge, together with the general moral norm that it is wrong to\\nmislead hearers.\",\n \"\\nMany objections against\\n (KNA)\\n are based on the idea that its requirements are too strong. First,\\nGettiered assertions. Suppose that you have a justified true\\nbelief that falls short of knowledge. For instance, you walk into a\\ncafé, look at the clock, and conclude that it’s 4.35; but\\nyour belief is only accidentally true because (unbeknownst to you) the\\nclock has been stuck at 4.35 for several days. If someone asks you the\\ntime, it seems perfectly appropriate for you to respond “4.35\\npm”. However, by making such an assertion, you would be\\nviolating\\n (KNA),\\n which intuitively speaks against it (Lackey 2007: 596; Kvanvig 2009:\\n146–7; Coffman 2014: 36).\",\n \"\\nSimilar objections arise in relation to the intuitive permissibility\\nof unlucky assertions: assertions that you have excellent\\nreasons to believe to be true, but that happen to be false. Since the\\nproblem with unlucky assertions is that\\n (KNA)\\n entails\\n (TNA)\\n (it only allows true assertions), we will discuss it below, as we\\nconsider objections to\\n (TNA).\",\n \"\\nLackey objects that\\n (KNA)\\n fails to accommodate selfless assertions. She presents\\nseveral examples: one involves a teacher, Stella, who firmly believes\\nin creationism, but is aware that the scientific consensus is that\\nhumans evolved from apes. Stella recognizes that Darwinism is\\nsupported by stronger empirical evidence, but this is not enough to\\nshake her firm belief in creationism. Suppose that she tells her\\nstudents:\",\n \"\\nIntuitively, it would be appropriate for Stella, as a teacher, to\\nassert\\n (31).\\n However,\\n (KNA)\\n predicts that\\n (31)\\n is incorrect, because Stella does not believe, and therefore does not\\nknow, that\\n (31)\\n is true. Selfless assertion have generated a lively debate, mostly\\ninvolving attempts to explain their propriety within a\\n (KNA)-framework\\n (see Montminy 2013a, Turri 2015, Milić 2017).\",\n \"\\nFurther objections concern so-called unsafe assertions, where\\nthe speaker does know what is asserted, but would easily have made the\\nassertion in a similar situation without\\n knowledge.[24]\",\n \"\\nA few authors who sympathize with\\n (KNA)\\n have emphasized the role of the hearer. Their proposals are similar\\nto\\n (KNA),\\n but set the condition in relation to the transmission of knowledge to\\nthe hearer. An example is García-Carpintero (2004:\\n156):\",\n \"\\nSimilar norms have also been proposed by Pelling (2013a) and by\\nHinchman (2013). García-Carpintero suggests that his version is\\npreferable to Williamson’s because it brings out the social,\\ncommunicative function of language (but see Willard-Kyle forthcoming\\nfor objections to KNA-T).\\n [25]\",\n \"\\nMost alternatives to the knowledge norm that are weaker than\\n (KNA):\\n they require less than knowledge for proper assertion. Weiner (2005)\\nand Whiting (2013, 2015) propose a truth norm (cf. also Alston\\n2000):\",\n \"\\nJust like the knowledge norm, the truth norm is factive: both entail\\nthat you can assert a proposition only if it is true. This generates a\\nproblem concerning the intuitive appropriateness of unlucky\\nassertions. To illustrate, imagine that you have had a cat for\\nseveral years. During a conversation, a friend asks you if you have\\nany pets at home, and you reply:\",\n \"\\nUnbeknownst to you, however, some thieves broke into your house and\\nstole everything you have, including your cat. Since you could not\\npossibly have foreseen the eventuality of such an absurd theft, it\\nseems that your assertion is appropriate: in response to your\\nfriend’s question,\\n (32)\\n is simply the right thing to say. However,\\n (KNA)\\n and\\n (TNA)\\n give a different verdict: they predict that\\n (32)\\n is an inappropriate response. What’s more,\\n (TNA)\\n (but not\\n (KNA))\\n predicts that the appropriate reply would have been to assert the\\nnegation of\\n (32),\\n namely that you don’t have a cat at home. But again, such a\\n“lucky assertion” would be intuitively inappropriate:\\nsince you have no reason to believe that your cat was stolen, in\\nsaying that you don’t have a pet you would be\\n lying.[26]\",\n \"\\nProponents of\\n (KNA)\\n and\\n (TNA)\\n tend to concede that unlucky assertions (and Gettiered\\nassertions) are intuitively appropriate, and that lucky assertions are\\nintuitively inappropriate. Their standard defense strategy is to\\ninvoke some distinctions that explain away their incorrect\\npredictions. Williamson (2000: 256–257) suggests that making\\nunlucky and Gettiered assertions is reasonable, and this is why\\nassertions like\\n (32)\\n usually don’t warrant criticism. However, here the prediction\\nthat uttering\\n (32)\\n is reasonable is made by general observations about rationality, and\\nnot by\\n (KNA)\\n itself. If\\n (KNA)’s\\n job is to tell us which assertions are appropriate and which are not,\\nit is not clear how these observations really help its case, since\\nthere are other norms (such as\\n (JNA))\\n that are able to make this prediction without appeal to independent\\nepistemic standards.\",\n \"\\nA parallel solution has been delineated by DeRose, who draws a\\ndistinction between primary and secondary propriety. Primary\\npropriety is just what a rule says: when a rule prescribes to\\nf only if C, it is primarily proper to f if\\nC, and primarily improper to f if not C.\\nSecondary propriety is dictated by whether you have reasons to think\\nyou are following the rule. If you f because you reasonably\\nbelieve that C, but C is accidentally false, your\\naction is primarily improper but secondarily proper, and doesn’t\\ndeserve blame. If you f although you reasonably believe that\\nC is false, but C is accidentally true, your\\nassertion is primarily proper but secondarily improper, and\\ndoesn’t deserve praise. This strategy helps defend\\n (TNA)\\n and\\n (KNA)\\n against the devised counterexamples. Unlucky and Gettiered assertions\\nare primarily improper but secondarily proper, and that’s why\\nthey don’t deserve blame. Lucky assertions are primarily proper\\nbut secondarily improper, and that’s why they don’t\\ndeserve praise.\",\n \"\\nSeveral authors reject this distinction between primary and secondary\\n propriety.[27]\\n Most of them think that this distinction is spurious. If the job of\\nan epistemic norm is to identify the one epistemic standard C\\nfrom which it is appropriate to assert, then it is not clear that\\nappealing to secondary propriety, epistemic excuses or reasonableness\\nis a legitimate move, given that more economic alternatives are\\navailable. Reasonably thinking that you are in C (secondarily\\nfollowing the rule) is itself an epistemic state; if being in such a\\nstate epistemically entitles you to assert, such permissibility should\\nbe built into the\\n norm.[28]\",\n \"\\nAccepting the distinction between primary and secondary propriety\\ninduces a problem for the intuitive support for the various theories.\\nA large part of the intuitions that serve to support one or the other\\nnorm theory relies on raw intuitions about what one should or\\nshouldn’t assert in some situation, or what is proper or\\nimproper to assert there. If there are several ways an assertion can\\nbe proper or improper, then it is not easy to see which concept of\\npropriety is being tracked by these intuitions. The idea is that a\\nparticular intuition that seems to disconfirm a particular normative\\ntheory can be explained away by saying that it does not in fact track\\nthe primary propriety, but instead only some secondary propriety.\\nSince intuitions don’t come labeled as “primary” and\\n“secondary”, there is a risk of a substantial\\nunderdetermination of theory by data (stressed by Pagin 2016b): two\\ntheorists need not agree about whether or not an intuition about a\\nparticular case supports a certain theory.\",\n \"\\nA problem persists even if we reject the primary/secondary\\ndistinction. As noted, everyone agrees that assertions are governed by\\nvarious norms: moral, prudential, conversational, rules of etiquette.\\nWhen does an intuition track the intended notion of a proper\\nassertion, and when something else altogether? Kvanvig (2011: 235) and\\nEngel (2008: 52–54) have drawn attention to this. According to\\nKvanvig, intuitions typically concern whether assertions are\\nall-things-considered appropriate. But an assertion may be\\n“all-things-considered appropriate” without being\\n“epistemic appropriate” (or the other way around). Since\\nwe do not have a reliable method for telling apart intuitions about\\n“overall appropriateness” from intuitions about\\n“epistemic appropriateness”, it is often unclear to which\\nextent a given set of intuitions supports or undermines a given theory\\n(cf. Hawthorne & Stanley 2008: 585–6). To address this\\nproblem, Greenberg (forthcoming) proposes to reframe the debate in\\nterms of epistemic norms constraining action, rather than\\nassertion.\",\n \"\\nComplex refinements of\\n (TNA)\\n have been proposed, too. MacFarlane (2014: 103) adopts a truth norm,\\nbut requires it to be qualified as being reflective. This\\nmeans, in the context of MacFarlane’s relativism, that\\nthe proposition should be true in the context of utterance, as\\nassessed from the same context of\\n utterance.[29]\\n According to MacFarlane, the truth norm needs to be complemented by a\\nretraction rule that enjoins the speaker to retract the\\nassertion if it turns out not be true (cf. Dummett 1991: 165), in a\\ncontext of assessment:\",\n \"\\nThis rule is also stated in the context of MacFarlane’s\\nrelativism, with respect to a context of use and a context of\\nassessment. According to the resulting view, assertion is governed\\njointly by the (reflective) truth norm and the retraction rule.\\nRescorla (2009a), who defends a commitment account of assertion (see\\n section 6.1),\\n argues there is no norm at all for proper making of\\nassertions. There are only norms that govern later reactions. He\\nproposes three alternatives to\\n (RNA),\\n which share the idea that when a speaker is challenged with respect\\nto an assertion he has made, he must either defend the assertion or\\nelse retract it (Rescorla 2009a: 103–105; cf. Rescorla\\n2009b).\",\n \"\\nSeveral authors have argued that assertability requires justification,\\nrather than belief or knowledge. A standard formulation would be:\",\n \"\\nWhat “justification” is taken to refer to varies between\\nauthors. Douven (2006, 2009) and Lackey (2007, 2008) argue for a norm\\nof rational belief. Note that\\n (JNA)\\n does not require that you believe what you say: all that it\\nrequires is that it is (or would be) rational for you to\\nbelieve it. As such,\\n (JNA)\\n classifies selfless assertions (which are disbelieved, but\\nrational to believe) as appropriate, a prediction that Lackey (2007)\\ntakes to be a crucial advantage of\\n (JNA).\",\n \"\\nDifferent conversational contexts may require different degrees of\\njustification. For instance, suppose that you are serving your friend\\na curry that you just defrosted. You remember that you prepared it for\\na vegan dinner over a month ago, but you’re not absolutely sure.\\nIf your friend has a mild dislike for cheese,\\n (33)\\n may be an appropriate thing to say; not so much if your friend has a\\ndeadly allergy to lactose:\",\n \"\\nTo accommodate this sort of intuitions, some authors have proposed\\ncontext-sensitive versions of\\n (JNA).\\n Gerken (2012, 2014, 2017) says that an assertion must be based\\n“on a degree of discursive justification for believing that\\np that is adequate” relative to the conversational\\ncontext. He also argues that the notion of justification is best\\nunderstood in internalist terms: a speaker asserting p is\\njustified only if they would be able to consciously articulate their\\nreasons in support of p. McKinnon (2013, 2015) also defends a\\nversion of\\n (JNA)\\n that is context-sensitive. She argues that one may assert that\\np only if (i) the speaker has supportive reasons for\\np, and (ii) the relevant conventional and pragmatic elements\\nof the context of assertion are present. On this view, the pragmatic\\nfeatures of the context have an effect on which epistemic support is\\nneeded. Pragmatic features can regard the stakes involved\\n(how much depends practically on the truth of what is asserted) or\\npedagogical requirements (in case the speaker is a teacher\\nwho is required to teach what is rational to believe; McKinnon 2015:\\nSection 4.4).\",\n \"\\nIf justification comes in degrees, perhaps some propositions are more\\nassertable than others. According to an influential view (Jackson\\n1974, 565, cf. Lewis 1976, 297), the degree to which a proposition is\\nassertable is a function of its probability. But Sam Carter\\n(forthcoming) shows that this view makes systematically incorrect\\npredictions. He suggests that assertability is a matter of\\nnormality instead: “asserting p is more\\nappropriate than asserting q, for a speaker in evidential\\nstate E, iff amongst the worlds compatible with E, p is more\\nnormal than q” (in turn, normality has to do with what\\nis compatible with our evidence-based expectations; cf. Carter\\nforthcoming: §5 for a formal definition).\",\n \"\\n\\n (JNA)\\n does not explicitly forbid insincere assertions (assertions that are\\nbelieved to be false). Some find this feature unattractive, and prefer\\nto amend\\n (JNA)\\n so as to introduce a belief-requirement, as in\\n (JBNA):\",\n \"\\nSince\\n (JBNA)\\n requires both justification and belief, it entails that both\\n (JNA)\\n and\\n (BNA)\\n are true. But how should we characterize justification for\\nthe purpose of this more demanding norm? For Kvanvig (2009, 2011), the\\nrelevant notion is knowledge-level justification: “the kind [of\\njustification] that is sufficient for knowledge in the presence of\\nungettiered true belief” (2009: 156); a stronger version of this\\nrequirement (would-be-knowledge) is defended by Coffman (2014).\",\n \"\\nA datum that justification rules may have trouble explaining is the\\nwrongness of false assertions. There seems to be something inherently\\ndefective about false assertions, and there is clearly a sense in\\nwhich true, justified assertions are more valuable than false, equally\\njustified ones. But\\n (JNA)\\n and\\n (JBNA)\\n have no resources to explain what is defective about falsity. In\\nresponse, Marsili (2018) notes that proponents of non-factive accounts\\ncan avail themselves of the notion of an assertion’s aim: when\\nwe make an assertion, we purport to describe the world as it is; our\\nassertion’s purported goal is met only if the assertion is true.\\nOn this view, false assertions are not impermissible, but are still\\ndefective, because they fail to meet their purported aim.\",\n \"\\nThere are views that come very close to justification rules. Maitra\\nand Weatherson (2010: 112) propose what they call The Evidence\\nResponsiveness Rule: that one assert that p only if\\none’s attitude towards p is properly responsive to the\\nevidence (they also propose to complement it with an action\\nrule, that it is proper to assert that p only if acting\\nas if p is “the thing for you to do”). Smithies\\n(2012) defends the view that p is assertable only if you have\\na justification to believe that you are in a position to know that\\np (cf. Koethe 2009, Rosenkranz forthcoming). This version of\\n (JNA)\\n restores a guiding normative role for knowledge, while accommodating\\nmany of the intuitions that motivate a preference for\\n (JNA)\\n or\\n (KNA)\\n (for a critique, see M. Smith 2012).\",\n \"\\nBelief norms are the weakest norms on the market:\",\n \"\\nThe belief norm is explicitly stated by Hindriks (2007) and Bach\\n(2008: 77). If one substitutes ‘say’ for\\n‘assert’, this is close to a reformulations of\\nGrice’s second submaxim of Quality (“Do not say what you\\nbelieve to be false” (Grice 1989: 27).\",\n \"\\nIntuitively,\\n (BNA)\\n is too permissive: it allows us to assert whatever we believe, even\\nif we have no evidence but a hunch to support our claim. To explain\\naway this prediction, advocates of\\n (BNA)\\n typically add that while\\n (BNA)\\n is the only norm that is specific to assertion (and regulates\\nassertion directly, cf.\\n (A1)\\n and\\n (A2)),\\n it is not the only norm that regulates it. Since assertions\\nnecessarily express a belief, and appropriate belief (and/or\\npractical action) is allegedly governed by a knowledge-norm,\\n (KNA)\\n ultimately determines which assertions all-things-considered\\nappropriate (Hindriks 2007; Bach 2008; Montminy 2013a).\",\n \"\\nAll the alternatives to the knowledge norm considered so far require\\nless than knowledge for proper assertion. A stronger\\nrequirement has been suggested by Stanley (2008):\",\n \"\\nHere one is epistemically certain of a proposition p\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nif and only if one knows that p (or is in a position to know\\nthat p) on the basis of evidence that gives one the highest\\ndegree of justification for one’s belief that p. (2008:\\n35)\\n\",\n \"\\nAccording to Stanley, since the certainty norm requires more than just\\nknowledge, everything that can be explained by appeal to the knowledge\\nnorm can also be explained by appeal to the certainty\\n norm.[30]\",\n \"\\nGoldberg (2015) argues that the norm of assertion hypothesis can\\nexplain why we have a (pro tanto) epistemic entitlement believe what\\nwe are told. He identifies some requirements that are needed to meet\\nthis desideratum. One is that the norm of assertion is robustly\\nepistemic, and strong enough to warrant testimonial belief (2015: 96).\\nAnother is that it must be common knowledge between speaker\\nand hearer that the speaker’s assertion is subject to this norm.\\nA further requirement (2015: 8) is that the speaker\\nauthorizes the hearer to defer back to the speaker the\\nresponsibility of meeting challenges to the assertion. Together, these\\nassumptions should be able to explain why beliefs based on testimony\\nare pro tanto justified.\",\n \"\\nMost authors who write about the norm of assertion appeal to their own\\nintuitions. However, this is an area where experimental data is highly\\nrelevant. If the aim is to describe a real-word communicative act,\\nrather than a purely idealized philosopher’s construct, it\\nfollows a good theory of assertion should make predictions that are\\nconsistent with our actual practice: it should deem appropriate the\\nassertions that ordinary speakers deem appropriate, and inappropriate\\nthe ones that they criticize as inappropriate. If this is right,\\ncompeting accounts can be tested empirically against the intuitions of\\ncompetent speakers of the language.\",\n \"\\nEmpirical research on the norm of assertion was initiated by Turri.\\nHis (2013) study aims to determine whether people’s\\nassertability judgments are better predicted by a factive norm, like\\n (KNA)\\n or\\n (TNA),\\n or a non-factive one, like\\n (JNA)\\n or\\n (BNA).\\n Turri reports the results of six experiments, primarily investigating\\njudgments about unlucky assertions (false assertions that the speaker\\nreasonably believes to be true). In the first experiment, Maria\\nincorrectly thinks that she has a 1990 Rolex in her watch collection,\\nbecause this is what her inventory says. When a friend asks Maria if\\nshe has that particular Rolex, participants are asked: “Should\\nMaria tell her guest that she has a 1990 Rolex in her\\ncollection?” [Yes/No]. Participants overwhelmingly selected the\\nnegative option (No), even when different factors were manipulated\\n(the control questions, what is at stake, the response options, etc.),\\napparently providing robust evidential support for factive accounts.\\nTurri has since conducted several more studies, accumulating an\\nimpressive body of evidence supporting factive accounts of assertion\\nin general and the knowledge-norm in particular (for a review, see\\nTurri 2017), including studies on other potential counterexamples to\\n (KNA),\\n like selfless assertions (2015a), and Gettiered\\nassertions (2016).\",\n \"\\nIt seemed that the debate was settled in favor of the knowledge rule,\\nuntil new studies came out that pointed in the opposite direction.\\nReuter and Brössel (2019) argue that two factors likely skewed\\nthe results in favor of factive accounts in Turri’s (2013)\\nseminal study. First, the protagonist (Maria) has a defeater against\\nher belief: she is aware that her inventory is occasionally\\nmistaken. Second, participants were asked what Maria should\\nsay, but it would seem more appropriate to ask whether her assertion\\nwas permissible. Manipulating these factors reverted the\\nresults: a majority of participants gave responses aligning with\\nnon-factive accounts. The authors then conducted new experiments\\ninvolving both lucky assertions (true, but not justified) and\\nunlucky assertions (false, but justified), finding that\\n (JNA)\\n was reliably a better predictor of assertability than any of its\\nfactive rivals\\n (TNA,\\n KNA).\",\n \"\\nKneer (2017) also found solid evidence that\\n (JNA)\\n is a better predictor of assertability judgments than\\n (KNA),\\n TNA, and\\n (BNA).\\n In a first experiment, he tested Gettiered assertions and\\nunlucky assertions, measuring assertability with different\\nprompts: he asked whether the protagonist “should say\\np”, whether she “is permitted to say\\np”, and if saying p is\\n“appropriate”. In both the Gettiered condition\\nand the unlucky condition, the overwhelming majority of\\nparticipants considered p assertable, but not known. Kneer\\nconcludes that “knowledge quite clearly doesn’t constitute\\nthe norm of assertion”. The other experiments were therefore\\ndesigned to verify whether\\n (JNA) makes\\n more reliable predictions. Experiments 2 and 3 found robust evidence\\nthat\\n (JNA) is\\n a better predictor of assertability judgments than\\n (KNA),\\n both in Gettier assertions and unlucky assertions,\\neven when different factors (like the response options or the kind of\\nepistemic support) are manipulated. Experiment 4 shows that\\n (JNA) is\\n a better predictor of assertability judgments than\\n (BNA):\\n people judge that “having a hunch” that p is\\ntrue is not good enough ground to assert p. Like Reuter and\\nBrössel, Kneer concludes that\\n (JNA),\\n rather than\\n (KNA),\\n is better supported by the empirical evidence. In a subsequent study,\\nKneer (2021) found that these results are stable across different\\ncultures.\",\n \"\\nThese results are at odds with the initial findings by Turri and\\ncolleagues. Given the contrasting data available, how can we determine\\nwhich account is best supported by empirical evidence? To answer this\\nquestion, Marsili and Wiegmann (2021) note that, in all their\\ndifferences, Turri’s studies share a central methodological\\naspect: they explore laypeople intuitions by asking a sample of\\nsubjects to judge what a particular agent should do in a\\ngiven scenario, before the protagonist makes the assertion;\\nKneer, Reuter and Brössel adopt instead different prompts and\\ntense structures. Marsili and Wiegmann argue that the divergent\\nresults are the predictable bi-product of a flaw in the questioning\\nmethod employed in the former set of studies. They note that\\n“should” can be interpreted in two ways:\\nteleologically (or instrumentally), when it indicates what\\nyou should do to achieve your aims, and deontologically, when\\nit indicates what you should do to live up to some norms or\\nobligations. The authors found experimental evidence that participants\\nin Turri’s studies interpreted the test questions\\nteleologically, which undermines a factive interpretation of the\\nresults. Furthermore, they identify measures that can be introduced to\\nprompt the intended (deontological) reading of the test question,\\nfinding that when these measures are implemented into Turri’s\\nvignettes, participants’ judgments overwhelmingly align with\\nnon-factive views like\\n (JNA).\",\n \"\\nIt would therefore seem that the latest studies have tipped the scale\\nin favor of non-factive views like\\n (JNA).\\n However, further research will be needed to settle the disagreement\\non empirical grounds.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.1 Norms of assertion\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAustin held that illocutionary acts as opposed to perlocutionary acts\\nare conventional, in the sense that they can be made explicit\\nby the so-called performative formula (Austin 1962: 103). According to\\nAustin, one can say “I argue that” or “I warn you\\nthat” but not “I convince you that” or “I\\nalarm you that”. Presumably, the idea was that a speech act type\\nis conventional just if there exists a convention by which an\\nutterance of a sentence of a certain kind ensures (if uptake is\\nsecured) that a speech act of that type is performed. Austin probably\\nthought that in virtue of the performative formulas this condition is\\nmet by illocutionary but not by perlocutionary act types.\",\n \"\\nThe more general claim that illocutionary force is correlated by\\nconvention with sentence type has been advocated by Dummett (1973\\n[1981: 302, 311]). On this view, it is a convention that declarative\\nsentences are used for assertion, interrogative for questions and\\nimperative for commands and requests. Similar views have been put\\nforward by Searle (1969) and Kot’átko (1998), and the\\nidea has been more recently defended by Kölbel (2010). According\\nto Searle (1969: 38, 40), illocutionary acts are conventional, and the\\nconventions in question govern the use of so-called force-indicating\\ndevices (Searle 1969: 64) specific to each\\n language.[31]\",\n \"\\nHowever, the view that illocutionary acts types are conventional in\\nthis sense has met with much opposition. Strawson (1964:\\n153–154) objected early on that ordinary illocutionary acts can\\nbe performed without relying on any convention to identify the force,\\nfor instance when using a declarative sentence like “The ice\\nover there is very thin” for a warning. This kind of criticism,\\ndirected against Dummett, has later been reinforced by Robert J.\\nStainton (1996, 2006), stressing that in appropriate contexts,\\nsub-sentential phrases like “John’s father”\\n(pointing at a man) or “very fast” (looking at a car) can\\nbe used to make assertions, and gives linguistic arguments why not all\\nsuch uses can be treated as cases of ellipsis (that is, as cases of\\nleaving out parts of a well-formed sentence that speaker and hearer\\ntacitly aware of). If Strawson and Stainton are right, convention\\nisn’t necessary for making assertions.\",\n \"\\nMoreover, Davidson (1979, 1984) stressed that no conventional sign\\ncould work as a force indicator in this sense, since any conventional\\nsign could be used (and would be used) in insincere utterances, where\\nthe corresponding force was missing, including cases of deception,\\njokes, impersonation and other theatrical performances. Basically the\\nsame point is made by Bach and Harnish (1979: 122–127). If\\nDavidson, and Bach and Harnish are right, then conventions are also\\nnot sufficient (but see Kölbel 2010 for an argument against this\\nview).\",\n \"\\nWilliamson (1996, 239) has argued that that speech acts defined by\\nconstitutive rules (like assertion, in his own view) cannot be\\nconventional. However, García-Carpintero (2019) has shown that\\nthis position is controversial. The situation is complicated by the\\nfact that the general question of when a convention, or rule of any\\nkind, is in force for a speaker, is substantial and complex\\n(for more on the relation of assertion to convention, Green\\n2020a).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.2 Conventions\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"6. Normative Accounts, Hearer-Directed\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Adler, Jonathan E., 2002, Belief’s Own\nEthics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.","Alston, William P., 2000, Illocutionary\nActs and Sentence Meaning, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University\nPress.","Antonsen, Paal, 2018,\n“Scorekeeping”, Analysis, 78(4): 589–595.\ndoi:10.1093/analys/anx145","Austin, John Langshaw, 1956 [1979],\n“Performative Utterances”, corrected transcript of an\nunscripted radio talk delivered in the Third Programme of the BBC.\nReprint in his Philosophical Papers, Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press, 1961, 220–239. Third edition, 1979,\n233–252. doi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0010","–––, 1962 [1975], How to\nDo Things with Words, James O. Urmson (ed.), Cambridge, MA:\nHarvard University Press; based on his 1955 William James Lectures at\nHarvard; second edition, James O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà\n(eds.), 1975.","Bach, Kent, 1994, “Conversational\nImpliciture”, Mind & Language, 9(2): 124–162.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1468-0017.1994.tb00220.x","–––, 2008, “Applying\nPragmatics to Epistemology”, Philosophical Issues, 18:\n68–88. doi:10.1111/j.1533-6077.2008.00138.x","Bach, Kent and R. M. Harnish, 1979,\nLinguistic Communication and Speech Acts, Cambridge, MA: MIT\nPress.","Baghramian, Maria and J. Adam Carter,\n2020, “Relativism”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of\nPhilosophy (Fall 2020), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =\n <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/relativism/>","Begby, Endre, 2020, “The Knowledge Norm\nof Assertion in Dialectical Context”, Ratio, 33(4):\n295–306. doi:10.1111/rati.12261","Bellucci, Francesco, 2019, “Peirce on Assertion and Other\nSpeech Acts”, Semiotica, 2019(228): 29-54.\nhttps://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2018-0081","Benton, Matthew A., 2011, “Two More for\nthe Knowledge Account of Assertion”, Analysis, 71(4):\n684–687. doi:10.1093/analys/anr085","–––, 2013, “Dubious\nObjections from Iterated Conjunctions”, Philosophical\nStudies, 162(2): 355–358.\ndoi:10.1007/s11098-011-9769-3","–––, 2016, “Gricean\nQuality”, Noûs, 50(4): 689–703.\ndoi:10.1111/nous.12065","Blaauw, Martijn and Jeroen de Ridder, 2012,\n“Unsafe Assertions”, Australasian Journal of\nPhilosophy, 90(4): 797–801.\ndoi:10.1080/00048402.2011.641573","Black, Dylan, 2019, “A Non-Normative\nAccount of Assertion”, Ratio, 32(1): 53–62.\ndoi:10.1111/rati.12210","Black, Max, 1952, “The Identity of\nIndiscernibles”, Mind, 61(242): 153–164.\ndoi:10.1093/mind/LXI.242.153","Bonalumi, Francesca, Thom Scott-Phillips,\nJulius Tacha, and Christophe Heintz, 2020, “Commitment and\nCommunication: Are We Committed to What We Mean, or What We\nSay?”, Language and Cognition, 12(2): 360–384.\ndoi:10.1017/langcog.2020.2","Borg, Emma, 2012, Pursuing Meaning,\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199588374.001.0001","–––, 2019, “Explanatory\nRoles for Minimal Content”, Noûs, 53(3):\n513–539. doi:10.1111/nous.12217","Brandom, Robert, 1983, “Asserting”,\nNoûs, 17(4): 637-50.","Brandom, Robert, 1994, Making it\nExplicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment,\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.","Brock, Jarrett E, 1981,“An Introduction to Peirce’s\nTheory of Speech Acts”. Transactions of the Charles S.\nPeirce Society. A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy 17(4):\n319-26","Brogaard, Berit, 2014, “Intellectual\nFlourishing as the Fundamental Epistemic Norm”. In C. Littlejohn\n& J. Turri (2014), pp. 11-31.","Brogaard, Berit and Dimitria Electra Gatzia, 2017,\n“Introduction: Epistemic Modals”, Topoi, 36(1):\n127–130. doi:10.1007/s11245-016-9374-3","Brown, Jessica, 2008, “The Knowledge Norm\nfor Assertion”, Philosophical Issues, 18: 89–103.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1533-6077.2008.00139.x","–––, 2010, “Knowledge\nand Assertion”, Philosophy and Phenomenological\nResearch, 81(3): 549–566.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2010.00369.x","–––, 2011, “Fallibilism\nand the Knowledge Norm for Assertion and Practical Reasoning”,\nin Brown and Cappelen 2011: 153–174.","–––, 2012, “Assertion\nand Practical Reasoning: Common or Divergent Epistemic\nStandards?”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,\n84(1): 123–157. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2010.00432.x","Brown, Jessica and Herman Cappelen (eds.), 2011, Assertion:\nNew Philosophical Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199573004.001.0001","Caffi, Claudia, 1999, “On\nMitigation”, Journal of Pragmatics, 31(7):\n881–909. doi:10.1016/S0378-2166(98)00098-8","Cappelen, Herman, 2011, “Against\nAssertion”, in Brown and Cappelen 2011: 21–47.","–––, 2020,\n“Assertion: A Defective Theoretical Category”, in Goldberg\n2020: 137–155. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190675233.013.6","Carson, Thomas L., 2006, “The\nDefinition of Lying”, Noûs, 40(2): 284–306.\ndoi:10.1111/j.0029-4624.2006.00610.x","Carter, J. Adam, 2017, “Assertion,\nUniqueness and Epistemic Hypocrisy”, Synthese, 194(5):\n1463–1476. doi:10.1007/s11229-015-0766-5","Carter, J. Adam and Emma C. Gordon, 2011,\n“Norms of Assertion: The Quantity and Quality of Epistemic\nSupport”, Philosophia, 39(4): 615–635.\ndoi:10.1007/s11406-011-9317-6","Carter, Sam. forthcoming. Degrees of Assertability. Philosophy\nand Phenomenological Research. doi:10.1111/phpr.12725","Caso, Ramiro, 2014, “Assertion and Relative\nTruth”, Synthese, 191(6): 1309–1325.\ndoi:10.1007/s11229-013-0329-6","Coates, Jennifer, 1987, “Epistemic\nModality and Spoken Discourse”, Transactions of the\nPhilological Society, 85(1): 110–131.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1467-968X.1987.tb00714.x","Coffman, E. J., 2014, “Lenient\nAccounts of Warranted Assertability”, in Littlejohn and Turri\n2014: ch. 2, pp. 33–58.","Cole, Peter and Jerry L. Morgan (eds.), 1975 Syntax and\nSemantics 3: Speech Acts, New York: Academic Press.","Conte, Amedeo G., 1991, “L’enjeu des\nrègles”, Droit et société, 17(1):\n125–146.","Cull, Matthew J., 2019, “When Alston met Brandom: Defining\nAssertion”, Rivista Italiana Di Filosofia Del\nLinguaggio, 13(1): 36–50.\n [Cull 2019 available online]","Davidson, Donald, 1979, “Moods and\nPerformances”, in Meaning and Use, Avishai Margalit\n(ed.), Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 9–22.\ndoi:10.1007/978-1-4020-4104-4_2","–––, 1984,\n“Communication and Convention”, Synthese, 59(1):\n3–17. doi:10.1007/BF00873278","Davis, Wayne A., 1999, “Communicating,\nTelling, and Informing”:, Philosophical Inquiry, 21(1):\n21–43. doi:10.5840/philinquiry19992112","DeRose, Keith, 2002, “Assertion,\nKnowledge, and Context”, The Philosophical Review,\n111(2): 167–203. doi:10.1215/00318108-111-2-167","Dewey, John, 1938, Logic. The Theory of\nInquiry, New York: Henry Holt Company.","Douven, Igor, 2006, “Assertion,\nKnowledge, and Rational Credibility”, The Philosophical\nReview, 115(4): 449–485. doi:10.1215/00318108-2006-010","–––, 2009, “Assertion,\nMoore, and Bayes”, Philosophical Studies, 144(3):\n361–375. doi:10.1007/s11098-008-9214-4","Dummett, Michael, 1976, “What Is a Theory\nof Meaning? (II)”, in Truth and Meaning, Gareth Evans\n& John McDowell (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.\n63-137.","–––, 1973 [1981], Frege:\nPhilosophy of Language, London: Duckworth. Second edition,\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.","–––, 1991, The Logical\nBasis of Metaphysics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University\nPress.","Egan, Andy, 2012, “Relativist Dispositional\nTheories of Value: Relativist Dispositional Theories of Value”,\nThe Southern Journal of Philosophy, 50(4): 557–582.\ndoi:10.1111/j.2041-6962.2012.00136.x","Engel, Pascal, 2004, “Truth and the Aim of\nBelief”, in Laws and Models in Science, Donald Gillies\n(ed.), London: King’s College Publications, pp. 77-97.","–––, 2008, “In What\nSense Is Knowledge the Norm of Assertion?” Grazer\nPhilosophische Studien, 77: 45–59.\ndoi:10.1163/18756735-90000843","Evans, Gareth, 1985, “Does Tense Logic\nRest on a Mistake?” in his Collected Papers, Antonia\nPhillips (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 341–363. \n","Fallis, Don, 2013, “Davidson Was Almost\nRight about Lying”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy,\n91(2): 337–353. doi:10.1080/00048402.2012.688980","Fantl, Jeremy and Matthew McGrath, 2009,\nKnowledge in an Uncertain World, Oxford: Oxford University\nPress. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199550623.001.0001","Frege, Gottlob, 1879, Begriffsschrift, Eine\nDer Aritmetischen Nachgebildete Formelsprache Des Reinen Denkens,\nHalle: Louis Nebert; partial translation in Frege [TPW], pp.\n1–21. Full translation in J van Heijenoort (ed.), Frege and\nGödel. Two Fundamental Texts in Mathematical Logic,\nCambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1970.","–––, 1892, “Über\nSinn Und Bedeutung”, Zeitschrift Für Philosophie Und\nPhilosophische Kritik, 100: 22–50; translated by Max Black\nas “On Sense and Meaning”, in Frege [TPW]:\n56–78.","–––, 1918a, “Der\nGedanke: Eine logische Untersuchung”, Beiträge Zur\nPhilosophie Des Deutschen Idealismus, 100: 58–77; English\ntranslation by P. T. Geach and R. H. Stoothoff as “Thoughts: A\nLogical Enquiry”, republished in Frege [TFR], 325–45.","–––, 1918b, “Die\nVerneinung. Eine logische Untersuchung”, Beiträge zur\nPhilosophie des deutschen Idealismus, I (1918–1919), pp.\n143–157; translated by Peter T. Geach as “Negation”,\nin Frege [TPW]: 117–135.","–––, [TFR], The Frege Reader, Mike\nBeaney (ed.), Oxford: Blackwell Publishing 1997.","–––, [TPW], Translations\nfrom the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, Peter T. Geach\nand Max Black (eds.), Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952.","Fricker, Elizabeth, 2012, “Stating and\nInsinuating”, Aristotelian Society Supplementary\nVolume, 86: 61–94.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1467-8349.2012.00208.x","García-Carpintero, Manuel, 2004,\n“Assertion and the Semantics of Force-Markers”, in The\nSemantics/Pragmatics Distinction, Claudia Bianchi (ed.),\nStanford, CA: CSLI Publications, pp. 133–166.","–––, 2008,\n“Relativism, Vagueness and What Is Said”, in Relative\nTruth, Manuel García-Carpintero and Max Kölbel\n(eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 129–154.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199234950.003.0006","–––, 2013, “Explicit performatives\nrevisited”, Journal of Pragmatics, 49, 1-17.","–––, 2016, “Indirect Assertion”,\nPolish Journal of Philosophy, 10(1): 13–49.\ndoi:10.5840/pjphil20161012","–––, 2019a,\n“Conventions and Constitutive Norms”, Journal of\nSocial Ontology, 5(1): 35–52.\ndoi:10.1515/jso-2019-0013","–––, 2019b, “Sneaky Assertions”,\nPhilosophical Perspectives 32(1): 188-218.\nhttps://doi.org/10.1111/phpe.12116.","–––, forthcoming, “How to Understand\nRule-Constituted Kinds”, Review of Philosophy and\nPsychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-021-00576-z","Gerken, Mikkel, 2012, “Discursive Justification and\nSkepticism”, Synthese, 189(2): 373–394.\ndoi:10.1007/s11229-012-0076-0","–––, 2014, “Same, Same\nbut Different: The Epistemic Norms of Assertion, Action and Practical\nReasoning”, Philosophical Studies, 168(3):\n725–744. doi:10.1007/s11098-013-0156-0","–––, 2017, On Folk\nEpistemology: How We Think and Talk about Knowledge, Oxford:\nOxford University Press. doi:10.1093/oso/9780198803454.001.0001","Gerken, Mikkel and Esben Nedenskov Petersen,\n2020, “Epistemic Norms of Assertion and Action”, in\nGoldberg 2020: 681–706.\ndoi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190675233.013.49","Geurts, Bart, 2019, “Communication as\nCommitment Sharing: Speech Acts, Implicatures, Common Ground”,\nTheoretical Linguistics, 45(1–2): 1–30.\ndoi:10.1515/tl-2019-0001","Glüer, Kathrin and Peter Pagin, 1998,\n“Rules of Meaning and Practical Reasoning”,\nSynthese, 117(2): 207–227.\ndoi:10.1023/A:1005162503125","–––, 2003,\n“Meaning Theory and Autistic Speakers”, Mind &\nLanguage, 18(1): 23–51. doi:10.1111/1468-0017.00213","Glüer, Kathrin and Åsa\nWikforss, 2013, “Aiming at Truth: On the Role of Belief”,\nTheorema, 32(3): 137–160.","Goldberg, Sanford C., 2015, Assertion: On\nthe Philosophical Significance of Assertoric Speech, Oxford:\nOxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198732488.001.0001","––– (ed.), 2020, The Oxford Handbook of\nAssertion, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190675233.001.0001","Graham, Peter J., 2020, “Assertions, Handicaps, and Social\nNorms”. 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The Theory of\\nInquiry, New York: Henry Holt Company.\",\n \"Douven, Igor, 2006, “Assertion,\\nKnowledge, and Rational Credibility”, The Philosophical\\nReview, 115(4): 449–485. doi:10.1215/00318108-2006-010\",\n \"–––, 2009, “Assertion,\\nMoore, and Bayes”, Philosophical Studies, 144(3):\\n361–375. doi:10.1007/s11098-008-9214-4\",\n \"Dummett, Michael, 1976, “What Is a Theory\\nof Meaning? (II)”, in Truth and Meaning, Gareth Evans\\n& John McDowell (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.\\n63-137.\",\n \"–––, 1973 [1981], Frege:\\nPhilosophy of Language, London: Duckworth. Second edition,\\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.\",\n \"–––, 1991, The Logical\\nBasis of Metaphysics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University\\nPress.\",\n \"Egan, Andy, 2012, “Relativist Dispositional\\nTheories of Value: Relativist Dispositional Theories of Value”,\\nThe Southern Journal of Philosophy, 50(4): 557–582.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.2041-6962.2012.00136.x\",\n \"Engel, Pascal, 2004, “Truth and the Aim of\\nBelief”, in Laws and Models in Science, Donald Gillies\\n(ed.), London: King’s College Publications, pp. 77-97.\",\n \"–––, 2008, “In What\\nSense Is Knowledge the Norm of Assertion?” Grazer\\nPhilosophische Studien, 77: 45–59.\\ndoi:10.1163/18756735-90000843\",\n \"Evans, Gareth, 1985, “Does Tense Logic\\nRest on a Mistake?” in his Collected Papers, Antonia\\nPhillips (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 341–363. \\n\",\n \"Fallis, Don, 2013, “Davidson Was Almost\\nRight about Lying”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy,\\n91(2): 337–353. doi:10.1080/00048402.2012.688980\",\n \"Fantl, Jeremy and Matthew McGrath, 2009,\\nKnowledge in an Uncertain World, Oxford: Oxford University\\nPress. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199550623.001.0001\",\n \"Frege, Gottlob, 1879, Begriffsschrift, Eine\\nDer Aritmetischen Nachgebildete Formelsprache Des Reinen Denkens,\\nHalle: Louis Nebert; partial translation in Frege [TPW], pp.\\n1–21. Full translation in J van Heijenoort (ed.), Frege and\\nGödel. Two Fundamental Texts in Mathematical Logic,\\nCambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1970.\",\n \"–––, 1892, “Über\\nSinn Und Bedeutung”, Zeitschrift Für Philosophie Und\\nPhilosophische Kritik, 100: 22–50; translated by Max Black\\nas “On Sense and Meaning”, in Frege [TPW]:\\n56–78.\",\n \"–––, 1918a, “Der\\nGedanke: Eine logische Untersuchung”, Beiträge Zur\\nPhilosophie Des Deutschen Idealismus, 100: 58–77; English\\ntranslation by P. T. Geach and R. H. Stoothoff as “Thoughts: A\\nLogical Enquiry”, republished in Frege [TFR], 325–45.\",\n \"–––, 1918b, “Die\\nVerneinung. Eine logische Untersuchung”, Beiträge zur\\nPhilosophie des deutschen Idealismus, I (1918–1919), pp.\\n143–157; translated by Peter T. 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(2016).\\nAssertion: know\",\n \"Searle, John R., 1969, Speech Acts: An Essay\\nin the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139173438\",\n \"–––, 1975a, “A Taxonomy\\nof Illocutionary Acts”, in Language, Mind and\\nKnowledge, Keith Gunderson (ed.), (Minnesota studies in the\\nphilosophy of science, 7), 344–369.\\n [Searle 1975 available online]\",\n \"–––, 1975b, “Indirect\\nSpeech Acts”, in Cole and Morgan 1975: 59–82.\",\n \"–––, 1979, Expression\\nand Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511609213\",\n \"–––, 2010, Making the Social\\nWorld: The Structure of Human Civilization, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780195396171.001.0001\",\n \"Searle John, and Daniel Vanderveken,\\n1985, Foundations of Illocutionary Logic, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press.\",\n \"Shapiro, Lionel, 2020, “Commitment Accounts of\\nAssertion”, in Goldberg 2020: 73-97.\\ndoi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190675233.013.4\",\n \"Siebel, Mark, 2020, “The Belief View of\\nAssertion”, in Goldberg 2020: 97–118.\\ndoi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190675233.013.4\",\n \"Simion, Mona, 2016, “Assertion:\\nKnowledge Is Enough”, Synthese, 193(10):\\n3041–3056. doi:10.1007/s11229-015-0914-y\",\n \"Simion, Mona and Christoph Kelp, 2020,\\n“Assertion: The Constitutive Norms View”, in Goldberg\\n2020: 57–73. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190675233.013.2\",\n \"Simons, Mandy, 2006, “Foundational Issues\\nin Presupposition”, Philosophy Compass, 1(4):\\n357–372. doi:10.1111/j.1747-9991.2006.00028.x\",\n \"Slote, Michael A., 1979, “Assertion and\\nBelief”, in Papers on Language and Logic, Jonathan\\nDancy (ed.), Keele: Keele University Library, 177–190,.\",\n \"Smith, Barry, 1990, “Towards a History of\\nSpeech Act Theory”, in Speech Acts, Meanings and Intentions.\\nCritical Approaches to the Philosophy of John R. Searle, Armin\\nBrukhardt (ed.), Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 29–61.\\ndoi:10.1515/9783110859485.29\",\n \"Smith, Martin, 2012, “Some Thoughts on\\nthe JK-Rule 1”, Noûs, 46(4): 791–802.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1468-0068.2012.00866.x\",\n \"Smithies, Declan, 2012, “The Normative\\nRole of Knowledge”, Noûs, 46(2): 265–288.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1468-0068.2010.00787.x\",\n \"Sosa, David, 2009, “Dubious\\nAssertions”, Philosophical Studies, 146(2):\\n269–272. doi:10.1007/s11098-008-9255-8\",\n \"Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson, 1986,\\nRelevance: Communication and Cognition, Oxford:\\nBlackwell.\",\n \"–––, 1995, Relevance: Communication and\\nCognition, second edition, Oxford: Blackwell.\",\n \"Stainton, Robert J., 1996, “What\\nAssertion Is Not”, Philosophical Studies, 85(1):\\n57–73. doi:10.1023/A:1017922124403\",\n \"–––, 2006, Words and\\nThoughts: Subsentences, Ellipsis, and the Philosophy of Language,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199250387.001.0001\",\n \"Stalnaker, Robert, 1974, “Pragmatic\\nPresuppositions”, in Semantics and Philosophy, Milton\\nK. Munitz and Peter Unger (eds.), New York: New York University Press,\\npp. 197–213.\",\n \"–––, 1978,\\n“Assertion”, in Syntax and Semantics 9:\\nPragmatics, Peter Cole (ed.), New York: New York Academic Press,\\n315–332.\",\n \"–––, 2002, “Common\\nGround”, Linguistics and Philosophy, 25(5/6):\\n701–721. doi:10.1023/A:1020867916902\",\n \"Stanley, Jason, 2005, Knowledge and\\nPractical Interests, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/0199288038.001.0001\",\n \"–––, 2008, “Knowledge\\nand Certainty”, Philosophical Issues, 18: 35–57.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1533-6077.2008.00136.x\",\n \"Stokke, Andreas, 2013, “Lying and\\nAsserting”:, Journal of Philosophy, 110(1):\\n33–60. doi:10.5840/jphil2013110144\",\n \"Stone, Jim, 2007, “Contextualism and\\nWarranted Assertion”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly,\\n88(1): 92–113. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0114.2007.00282.x\",\n \"Strawson, Peter F., 1964, “Intention and\\nConvention in Speech Acts”, The Philosophical Review,\\n73(4): 439–460. doi:10.2307/2183301\",\n \"Tanesini, Alessandra, 2020, “Silencing\\nand Assertion”, in Goldberg 2020: 748–769.\\ndoi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190675233.013.31\",\n \"Toulmin, Stephen E., 1958, The Uses of\\nArgument, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Turri, John, 2010, “Epistemic Invariantism\\nand Speech Act Contextualism”, The Philosophical\\nReview, 119(1): 77–95. doi:10.1215/00318108-2009-026\",\n \"–––, 2011, “The\\nExpress Knowledge Account of Assertion”, Australasian\\nJournal of Philosophy, 89(1): 37–45.\\ndoi:10.1080/00048401003660333\",\n \"–––, 2013, “The Test of\\nTruth: An Experimental Investigation of the Norm of Assertion”,\\nCognition, 129(2): 279–291.\\ndoi:10.1016/j.cognition.2013.06.012\",\n \"–––, 2014, “Knowledge\\nand Suberogatory Assertion”, Philosophical Studies,\\n167(3): 557–567. doi:10.1007/s11098-013-0112-z\",\n \"–––, 2015, “Selfless\\nAssertions: Some Empirical Evidence”, Synthese, 192(4):\\n1221–1233. doi:10.1007/s11229-014-0621-0\",\n \"–––, 2016, “Knowledge\\nand Assertion in ‘Gettier’ Cases”, Philosophical\\nPsychology, 29(5): 759–775.\\ndoi:10.1080/09515089.2016.1154140\",\n \"–––, 2017, “Experimental work on the norms\\nof assertion”. Philosophy Compass, 12(e12425).\\nhttps://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.12425\",\n \"Tuzet, Giovanni, 2006, «Responsible for Truth? Peirce on\\nJudgment and Assertion», in Cognitio, 7: 317-336.\",\n \"Unger, Peter, 1975, Ignorance: A Case for\\nScepticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/0198244177.001.0001\",\n \"van Riel, Raphael van, 2019, “Lying\\nbeyond a Conversational Purpose: A Critique of Stokke’s\\nAssertion-Based Account of Lying”, The Journal of\\nPhilosophy, 116(2): 106–118.\\ndoi:10.5840/jphil201911626\",\n \"Vlach, Frank, 1981, “Speaker’s\\nMeaning”, Linguistics and Philosophy, 4(3):\\n359–391. doi:10.1007/BF00304401\",\n \"Watson, Gary, 2004, “Asserting and\\nPromising”, Philosophical Studies, 117(1/2):\\n57–77. doi:10.1023/B:PHIL.0000014525.93335.9e\",\n \"Weiner, Matthew, 2005, “Must We Know What\\nWe Say?”, The Philosophical Review, 114(2):\\n227–251. doi:10.1215/00318108-114-2-227\",\n \"Whiting, Daniel, 2013, “Stick to the\\nFacts: On the Norms of Assertion”, Erkenntnis, 78(4):\\n847–867. doi:10.1007/s10670-012-9383-6\",\n \"–––, 2015, “Truth Is\\n(Still) the Norm for Assertion: A Reply to Littlejohn”,\\nErkenntnis, 80(6): 1245–1253.\\ndoi:10.1007/s10670-015-9722-5\",\n \"Williams, Bernard A. O., 1966,\\n“Consistency and Realism”, Aristotelian Society\\nSupplementary Volume, 40: 1–22.\\ndoi:10.1093/aristoteliansupp/40.1.1\",\n \"–––, 2002, Truth and\\nTruthfulness. An Essay in Genealogy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Williamson, Timothy, 1996, “Knowing\\nand Asserting”, The Philosophical Review, 105(4):\\n489–523. doi:10.2307/2998423\",\n \"–––, 2000, Knowledge\\nand Its Limits, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/019925656X.001.0001\",\n \"Willard-Kyle, Christopher, forthcoming, “P, but you\\nDon’t Know That P”. Synthese.\",\n \"Wright, Crispin, 1992, Truth and\\nObjectivity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Znamierowski, Czesław, 1924, Podstawowe Pojęcia\\nTeorii Prawa, cz. I. Układ Prawny i Norma\\nPrawna (The Basic Concepts of the Theory of Law, Part I: Legal\\nSystem and Legal Norm), Fiszer i Majewski, Poznań.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../austin-jl/","text":"Austin, John Langshaw"},{"href":"../belief/","text":"belief"},{"href":"../convention/","text":"convention"},{"href":"../definitions/","text":"definitions"},{"href":"../evidence/","text":"evidence"},{"href":"../frege/","text":"Frege, Gottlob"},{"href":"../grice/","text":"Grice, Paul"},{"href":"../implicature/","text":"implicature"},{"href":"../information/","text":"information"},{"href":"../meaning-normativity/","text":"meaning: normativity of"},{"href":"../peirce/","text":"Peirce, Charles Sanders"},{"href":"../presupposition/","text":"presupposition"},{"href":"../speech-acts/","text":"speech acts"},{"href":"../testimony-episprob/","text":"testimony: epistemological problems of"},{"href":"../truth/","text":"truth"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../austin-jl/\",\n \"text\": \"Austin, John Langshaw\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../belief/\",\n \"text\": \"belief\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../convention/\",\n \"text\": \"convention\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../definitions/\",\n \"text\": \"definitions\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../evidence/\",\n \"text\": \"evidence\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../frege/\",\n \"text\": \"Frege, Gottlob\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../grice/\",\n \"text\": \"Grice, Paul\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../implicature/\",\n \"text\": \"implicature\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../information/\",\n \"text\": \"information\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../meaning-normativity/\",\n \"text\": \"meaning: normativity of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../peirce/\",\n \"text\": \"Peirce, Charles Sanders\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../presupposition/\",\n \"text\": \"presupposition\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../speech-acts/\",\n \"text\": \"speech acts\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../testimony-episprob/\",\n \"text\": \"testimony: epistemological problems of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../truth/\",\n \"text\": \"truth\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":86,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"associationist-thought"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Associationist Theories of Thought"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Tue Mar 17, 2015; substantive revision Wed Jun 24, 2020"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["Associationism is one of the oldest, and, in some form or another,\nmost widely held theories of thought. Associationism has been the\nengine behind empiricism for centuries, from the British Empiricists\nthrough the Behaviorists and modern day Connectionists. Nevertheless,\n“associationism” does not refer to one particular theory\nof cognition per se, but rather a constellation of related\nthough separable theses. What ties these theses together is a\ncommitment to a certain arationality of thought: a creature’s\nmental states are associated because of some facts about its causal\nhistory, and having these mental states associated entails that\nbringing one of a pair of associates to mind will, ceteris\nparibus, ensure that the other also becomes activated."],"string":"[\n \"Associationism is one of the oldest, and, in some form or another,\\nmost widely held theories of thought. Associationism has been the\\nengine behind empiricism for centuries, from the British Empiricists\\nthrough the Behaviorists and modern day Connectionists. Nevertheless,\\n“associationism” does not refer to one particular theory\\nof cognition per se, but rather a constellation of related\\nthough separable theses. What ties these theses together is a\\ncommitment to a certain arationality of thought: a creature’s\\nmental states are associated because of some facts about its causal\\nhistory, and having these mental states associated entails that\\nbringing one of a pair of associates to mind will, ceteris\\nparibus, ensure that the other also becomes activated.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. What is Associationism?","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. Associationism as a Theory of Mental Processes: The Empiricist Connection","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"3. Associationism as a Theory of Learning","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"4. Associationism as a Theory of Mental Structure","sub_toc":["4.1 Associative Symmetry","4.2 Activation Maps of Associative Structure ","4.3 Relation Between Associative Learning and Associative Structures","4.4 Extinction and Counterconditioning"]},{"content_title":"5. Associative Transitions","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"6. Associative Instantiation","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"7. Relation between the Varieties of Association and Related Positions","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"8. Associationism in Social Psychology","sub_toc":["8.1 Implicit Attitudes","8.2 Dual Process Theories"]},{"content_title":"9. Criticisms of Associationism","sub_toc":["9.1 Learning Curves","9.2 The Problem of Predication","9.3 Word Learning","9.4 Against the Contiguity Analysis of Associationism","9.5 Coextensionality"]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. What is Associationism?\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Associationism as a Theory of Mental Processes: The Empiricist Connection\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Associationism as a Theory of Learning\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Associationism as a Theory of Mental Structure\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"4.1 Associative Symmetry\",\n \"4.2 Activation Maps of Associative Structure \",\n \"4.3 Relation Between Associative Learning and Associative Structures\",\n \"4.4 Extinction and Counterconditioning\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Associative Transitions\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. Associative Instantiation\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"7. Relation between the Varieties of Association and Related Positions\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"8. Associationism in Social Psychology\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"8.1 Implicit Attitudes\",\n \"8.2 Dual Process Theories\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"9. Criticisms of Associationism\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"9.1 Learning Curves\",\n \"9.2 The Problem of Predication\",\n \"9.3 Word Learning\",\n \"9.4 Against the Contiguity Analysis of Associationism\",\n \"9.5 Coextensionality\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["Associationism is a theory that connects learning to thought based\non principles of the organism’s causal history. Since its early\nroots, associationists have sought to use the history of an\norganism’s experience as the main sculptor of cognitive\narchitecture. In its most basic form, associationism has claimed that\npairs of thoughts become associated based on the organism’s past\nexperience. So, for example, a basic form of associationism (such as\nHume’s) might claim that the frequency with which an organism\nhas come into contact with Xs and Ys in one’s\nenvironment determines the frequency with which thoughts\nabout Xs and thoughts about Ys will arise together\nin the organism’s future.","Associationism’s popularity is in part due to how many\ndifferent masters it can serve. In particular, associationism can be\nused as a theory of learning (e.g., as in behaviorist theorizing), a\ntheory of thinking (as in Jamesian “streams of thought”),\na theory of mental structures (e.g., as in concept pairs), and a theory\nof the implementation of thought (e.g., as in connectionism). All these\ntheories are separable, but share a related, empiricist-friendly\ncore. As used here, a “pure associationist” will refer to\none who holds associationist theories of learning, thinking, mental\nstructure, and implementation. The “pure associationist”\nis a somewhat idealized position, one that no particular theorist may\nhave ever held, but many have approximated to differing degrees (e.g.,\nLocke 1690/1975; Hume 1738/1975; Thorndike 1911; Skinner 1953; Hull\n1943; Churchland 1986, 1989; Churchland and Sejnowski 1990; Smolensky\n1988; Elman 1991; Elman et al. 1996; McClelland et al. 2010; Rydell\nand McConnell 2006; Fazio 2007).","Outside of these core uses of associationism the movement has also\nbeen closely aligned with a number of different doctrines over the\nyears: empiricism, behaviorism, anti-representationalism (i.e.,\nskepticism about the necessity of representational realism in\npsychological explanation), gradual learning, and domain-general\nlearning. All of these theses are dissociable from core associationist\n thought (see section 7). While one\ncan be an associationist without holding those theses, some of those\ntheses imply associationism to differing degrees. These extra\ntheses’ historical and sociological ties to associationism are\nstrong, and so will be intermittently discussed below."],"section_title":"1. What is Associationism?","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["Empiricism is a general theoretical outlook, which tends to offer a\ntheory of learning to explain as much of our mental life as possible.\nFrom the British empiricists through Skinner and the behaviorists\n (see the entry on behaviorism) the main focus\nhas been arguing for the acquisition of concepts (for the\nempiricists’ “Ideas”, for the behaviorists\n“responses”) through learning. However, the mental\nprocesses that underwrite such learning are almost never themselves\n posited to be learned.[1]\nSo winnowing down the amount of mental\nprocesses one has to posit limits the amount of innate machinery with which the\ntheorist is saddled. Associationism, in its original form as in\nHume (1738/1975), was put forward as a theory of mental processes.\nAssociationists’ attempt to answer the question of how many\nmental processes there are by positing only a single mental\n process: the ability to associate \nideas.[2]","Of course, thinkers execute many different types of cognitive acts,\nso if there is only one mental process, the ability to associate, that\nprocess must be flexible enough to accomplish a wide range of\ncognitive work. In particular, it must be able to account for learning\nand thinking. Accordingly, associationism has been utilized on both\nfronts. We will first discuss the theory of learning and then, after\nanalyzing that theory and seeing what is putatively learned, we will\nreturn to the associationist theory of thinking."],"section_title":"2. Associationism as a Theory of Mental Processes: The Empiricist Connection","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["In one of its senses, “associationism” refers to a\ntheory of how organisms acquire concepts, associative structures,\nresponse biases, and even propositional knowledge. It is commonly\nacknowledged that associationism took hold after the publishing of\nJohn Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding\n (1690/1975).[3]\nHowever, Locke’s comments on associationism were terse (though\nfertile), and did not address learning to any great degree. The first\nserious attempt to detail associationism as a theory of learning was\ngiven by Hume in the Treatise of Human Nature\n (1738/1975).[4]\nHume’s associationism was, first and foremost, a theory\nconnecting how perceptions (“Impressions”) determined\ntrains of thought (successions of “Ideas”). Hume’s\nempiricism, as enshrined in the Copy\n Principle,[5]\ndemanded that there were no Ideas in the mind that were not first\ngiven in experience. For Hume, the principles of association\nconstrained the functional role of Ideas once they were copied from\nImpressions: if Impressions IM1 and IM2 were associated in\nperception, then their corresponding Ideas, ID1 and ID2 would also\nbecome associated. In other words, the ordering of Ideas was\ndetermined by the ordering of the Impressions that caused the Ideas\nto arise.","Hume’s theory then needs to analyze what types of associative\nrelations between Impressions mattered for determining the ordering\nof Ideas. Hume’s analysis consisted of three types of\nassociative relations: cause and effect, contiguity, and\nresemblance. If two Impressions instantiated one of these associative\nrelations, then their corresponding Ideas would mimic the same\n instantiation.[6]\nFor instance, if Impression IM1 was cotemporaneous with Impression\nIM2, then (ceteris paribus) their corresponding Ideas, ID1\nand ID2, would become associated.","As stated, Hume’s associationism was mostly a way of\ndetermining the functional profile of Ideas. But we have not yet said\nwhat it is for two Ideas to be associated (for that\n see section 4). Instead, one can see\nHume’s contribution as introducing a very influential type of\nlearning—associative learning—for Hume’s theory\npurports to explain how we learn to associate certain Ideas. We\ncan abstract away from Hume’s framework of ideas and his\naccount of the specific relations that underlie associative learning,\nand state the theory of associative learning more generally: if two\ncontents of experiences, X and Y, instantiate some\nassociative relation, R, then those contents will become\nassociated, so that future activations of X will tend to\nbring about activations of Y. The associationist then has\nto explain what relation R amounts to. The Humean form of\nassociative learning (where R is equated with cause and\neffect, contiguity, or resemblance) has been hugely influential,\ninforming the accounts of those such as Jeremy Bentham, J.S. Mill,\n and Alexander Bain (see, e.g., the entries on\n John Stuart Mill and\n 19th Century Scottish Philosophy).[7]","Associative learning didn’t hit its stride until the work of\nIvan Pavlov, which spurred the subsequent rise of the behaviorist\nmovement in psychology. Pavlov introduced the concept of classical\nconditioning as a modernized version of associative learning. For\nPavlov, classical conditioning was in part an experimental paradigm\nfor teaching animals to learn new associations between stimuli. The\ngeneral method of learning was to pair an unconditioned stimulus (US)\nwith a novel stimulus. An unconditioned stimulus is just a stimulus\nthat instinctively, without training, provokes a response in an\norganism. Since this response is not itself learned, the response is\nreferred to as an “unconditioned response” (UR). In\nPavlov’s canonical experiment, the US was a meat powder, as the\nsmell of meat automatically brought about salivation (UR) in his\ncanine subjects. The US is then paired with a neutral stimulus, such\nas a bell. Over time, the contiguity between the US and the neutral\nstimulus causes the neutral stimulus to provoke the same response as\nthe US. Once the bell starts to provoke salivation, the bell has\nbecome a “conditioned stimulus” (CS) and the salivating,\nwhen prompted by the bell alone, a “conditioned response”\n(CR). The associative learning here is learning to form new\nstimulus-response pairs between the bell and the\n salivation.[8]","Classical conditioning is a fairly circumscribed process. It is a\n“stimulus substitution” paradigm where one stimulus can\nbe swapped for another to provoke a\n response.[9]\nHowever, the responses that are provoked are supposed to remain unchanged; all that\nchanges is the stimulus that gets associated with the response. Thus,\nclassical conditioning seemed to some to be too restrictive to\nexplain the panoply of novel behavior organisms appear to\n execute.[10]","Edward Thorndike’s research with cats in puzzle boxes\nbroadened the theory of associative learning by introducing the notion\nof consequences to associative learning. Thorndike expanded the notion\nof associative learning beyond instinctual behaviors and sensory\nsubstitution to genuinely novel behaviors. Thorndike’s\nexperiments initially probed, e.g., how cats learned to lift a lever\nto escape the “puzzle boxes” (the forbearer to\n“Skinner boxes”) that they were trapped in. The\ncats’ behaviors, such as attempting to lift a lever, were not\nthemselves instinctual behaviors like the URs of Pavlov’s\nexperiments. Additionally, the cats’ behaviors were shaped by\nthe consequences that they brought on. For Thorndike it was because\nlifting the lever caused the door to open that the cats learned the\nconnection between the lever and the door. This new view of learning,\noperant conditioning (for the organism is “operating” on\nits environment), was not merely the passive learning of Pavlov, but a\nspecies-nonspecific, general, active theory of learning.","This research culminated in Thorndike’s famous “Law of\nEffect” (1911), the first canonical psychological law of\nassociationist learning. It asserted that responses that are\naccompanied by the organism feeling satisfied will, ceteris\nparibus, be more likely to be associated with the situation in\nwhich the behavior was executed, whereas responses that are\naccompanied with a feeling of discomfort to the animal\nwill, ceteris paribus, make the response less likely to\noccur when the organism encounters the same\n situation.[11]\nThe greater the positive or negative feelings produced, the greater\nthe likelihood that the behavior will be evinced. To this Thorndike\nadded the “Law of Exercise”, that responses to situations\nwill, ceteris paribus, be more connected to those situations\nin proportion to the frequency of past pairings between situation and\nresponse. Thorndike’s paradigm was popularized and extended by\nB.F. Skinner (see, e.g., Skinner 1953) who stressed the notion not\njust of consequences but of reinforcement as the basis of\nforming associations. For Skinner, a behavior would get associated\nwith a situation according to the frequency and strength of\nreinforcement that would arise as a consequence of the behavior.","Since the days of Skinner, associative learning has come in many\ndifferent variations. But what all varieties should share with their\nhistorical predecessors is that associative learning is supposed to\nmirror the contingencies in the world without adding additional\nstructure to them (see section 9 for some examples of when supposedly associative theories smuggle in extra structure). The question of what contingencies associative\nlearning detects (that is, one’s preferred analysis of what the\nassociative relation R is), is up for debate and changes\nbetween theorists.","The final widely shared, though less central, property of\nassociative learning concerns the domain generality of associative\nlearning. Domain generality’s prevalence among associationists\nis due in large part to their traditional empiricist allegiances:\nexcising domain-specific learning mechanisms constrains the amount of\ninnate mental processes one has to posit. Thus it is no surprise to\nfind that both Hume and Pavlov assumed that associative learning could\nbe used to acquire associations between any contents, regardless of\nthe types of contents they were. For example, Pavlov writes,","Any natural phenomenon chosen at will may be converted\ninto a conditioned stimulus. Any ocular stimulus, any desired sound,\nany odor, and the stimulation of any portion of the skin, whether by\nmechanical means or by the application of heat or cold never failed to\nstimulate the salivary glands. (Pavlov 1906: 615)","For Pavlov the content of the CS\ndoesn’t matter. Any content will do, as long as it bears the\nright functional relationship in the organism’s learning\nhistory. In that sense, the learning is domain general—it\nmatters not what the content is, just the role it plays (for more on\nthis topic, see\n section 9.4).[12]"],"section_title":"3. Associationism as a Theory of Learning","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["Associative learning amounts to a constellation of related views\nthat interprets learning as associating stimuli with responses (in\noperant conditioning), or stimuli with other stimuli (in classical\nconditioning), or stimuli with valences (in evaluative\nconditioning).[13] Associative learning accounts raise the question: when\none learns to associate contents X and Y because,\ne.g., previous experiences with Xs and Ys\ninstantiated R, how does one store the information\nthat X and Y are associated?[14] A highly contrived\nsample answer to this question would be that a thinker learns an\nexplicitly represented unconscious conditional rule that states\n“when a token of x is activated, then also activate a\ntoken of y”. Instead of such a highly intellectualized\nresponse, associationists have found a natural (though by no means\n necessary, see section 4.2) complementary\nview that the information is stored in an associative\nstructure.","An associative structure describes the type of bond that connects\n two distinct mental states.[15]\n An example of such a structure is the\n associative pair \nsalt/pepper.[16]\n The associative structure is defined, in\nthe first instance, functionally: if X and Y form\nan associative structure, then, ceteris paribus, activations\nof mental state X bring about mental state Y\nand vice versa without the mediation of any other\npsychological states (such as an explicitly represented rule telling\nthe system to activate a concept because its associate has been\n activated).[17]\nIn other words, saying that two concepts are associated amounts to\nsaying that there is a reliable, psychologically basic causal\nrelation that holds between them—the activation of one of\nthe concepts causes the activation of the other. So, saying that\nsomeone harbors the structure\n salt/pepper amounts to saying that\nactivations of salt will cause activations of\n pepper (and vice\nversa) without the aid of any other cognitive states.","Associative structures are most naturally contrasted with\npropositional structures. A pure associationist is opposed to\npropositional structures—strings of mental representations that\nexpress a proposition—because propositionally structured mental\nrepresentations have structure over and above the mere associative\nbond between two concepts. Take, for example, the associative\nstructure\n green/toucan. This structure does not predicate green onto\ntoucan. If we know that a mind has an associative bond between\n green\nand\n toucan, then we know that activating one of those concepts leads\nto the activation of the other. A pure associative theory rules out\npredication, for propositional structures aren’t just strings of\nassociations. “Association” (in associative structures)\njust denotes a causal relation among mental representations, whereas\npredication (roughly) expresses a relation between things in the world\n(or intentional contents that specify external relations). Saying that\nsomeone has an associative thought\n green/toucan tells you something\nabout the causal and temporal sequences of the activation of concepts\nin one’s mind; saying that someone has the thought\n\n there is a green toucan\n tells you that a person is predicating greenness of a\nparticular toucan (see Fodor 2003: 91–94, for an expansion of\nthis point).","Associative structures needn’t just hold between simple\nconcepts. One might have reason to posit associative structures\n between propositional elements (see section 5)\n or between concepts and valences (see section 8). \nBut none of the proceeding is meant to imply that all\nstructures are associative or propositional—there are other\nrepresentational formats that the mind might harbor (e.g., analog\nmagnitudes or iconic structures; see Camp 2007; Quilty-Dunn forthcoming). For instance, not all semantically\nrelated concepts are harbored in associative structures. Semantically\nrelated concepts may in fact also be directly associated (as in\ndoctor/nurse) or they may not\n (as in\n horse/zebra; see Perea and Rosa\n2002). The\ndifference in structure is not just a theoretical possibility, as these\ndifferent structures have different functional profiles: for example,\nconditioned associations appear to last longer than semantic\nassociations do in subjects with dementia (Glosser and Friedman\n1991)."],"section_title":"4. Associationism as a Theory of Mental Structure","subsections":[{"content":["The analysis of associative structures implies that, ceteris\nparibus, associations are symmetric in their causal effects: if a\nthinker has a bond between\n salt/pepper,\n then\n salt should bring about\npepper just as well as\n\n pepper brings about\n salt (for extensive discussion of the symmetry point see Quilty-Dunn and Mandelbaum 2019). But all else is\nrarely equal. For example, behaviorists such as Thorndike, Hull, and\nSkinner knew that the order of learning affected the causal sequence\nof recall: if one is always hearing “salt and pepper” then\nsalt will be more poised to\n activate\n pepper than\n pepper to activate\nsalt. So, included in the ceteris paribus clause in the\nanalysis of associative structures is the idealization that the\nlearning of the associative elements was equally well randomized in\norder.","Similarly, associative symmetry is violated when there are\ndiffering amounts of associative connections between the individual\nassociated elements. For example, in the\n green/toucan case, most\nthinkers will have many more associations stemming from\n green than\nstemming from\n toucan. Suppose we have a thinker that only associates\ntoucan with\n green,\n but associates\n green with a large host of other\nconcepts (e.g.,\n grass,\n\n vegetables,\n tea,\n\n kermit,\n seasickness,\n\n moss,\nmold,\n lantern,\n\n ireland, etc). In this case one can expect that\n\n toucan\nwill more quickly activate\n green than\n\n green will activate\n toucan, for\nthe former bond will have its activation strength less weakened\namongst other associates than the latter will."],"subsection_title":"4.1 Associative Symmetry"},{"content":["An associative activation map (sometimes called a “spreading\nactivation” map, Collins and Luftus 1975) is a mapping for a\nsingle thinker of all the associative connections between\n concepts.[18]\nThere are many ways of operationalizing associative connections. In\nthe abstract, a psychologist will attempt to probe which concepts (or\nother mental elements) activate which other concepts (or\nelements). Imagine a subject who is asked to say whether a string of\nletters constitutes a word or not, which is the typical goal given to\nsubjects in a “lexical decision task”. If a subject has\njust seen the word “mouse”, we assume that the concept mouse was activated. If the subject is then quicker to say that, e.g.,\n“cursor” is a word than the subject is to say that\n“toaster” is, then we can infer that\n cursor was primed,\nand is thus associatively related to \n mouse, in this thinker. Likewise,\nif we find that “rodent” is also responded to\nquicker, then we know that\n rodent is associatively related to\nmouse. Using this procedure, one can generate an\nassociative mapping of a thinker’s mind. Such a mapping would\nconstitute a mapping of the associative structures one harbors.\nHowever, to be a true activation map—a true mapping of what\nconcepts facilitate what—the mapping would also need to include\ninformation about the violations of symmetry between concepts."],"subsection_title":"4.2 Activation Maps of Associative Structure"},{"content":["The British Empiricists desired to have a thoroughgoing pure\nassociationist theory, for it allowed them to lessen the load of\ninnate machinery they needed to posit. Likewise, the behaviorists also\ntended to want a pure associationist theory (sometimes out of a\nsimilar empiricist tendency, other times because they were radical\nbehaviorists like Skinner, who banned all discussion of mental\nrepresentations). Pure associationists tend to be partial to a\nconnection that Fodor (2003) refers to as “Bare-Boned\nAssociation”. The idea is that the current strength of an\nassociation connection between X and Y is\ndetermined, ceteris paribus, by the frequency of the past\nassociations of X and Y. As stated, Bare-Boned\nAssociation assumes that associative structures encode, at least\nimplicitly, the frequency of past associations of X\nand Y, and the strength of that associative bond is\ndetermined by the organism’s previous history of\nexperiencing Xs and\n Ys.[19]\n In other words, the learning history of\npast associations determines the current functional profile of the\n corresponding associative \nstructures.[20]","Although the picture sketched\nabove, where associative learning eventuates in associative\nstructure, is appealing for many, it is not forced upon\none, as there is no a priori reason to bar any type of\nstructure to arise from a particular type of learning. One may, for\nexample, gain propositional structures from associative learning (see\nMitchell et al. 2009 and Mandelbaum 2016 for arguments that\nthis is more than a mere logical possibility). This can happen in two\nways. In the first, one may gain an associative structure that has a\nproposition as one of its associates. Assume that every time\none’s father came home he immediately made dinner. In such a\ncase one might associate the proposition\n daddy is home with the\nconcept\n dinner (that is one might acquire: \ndaddy is home/dinner). However,\n one might also just have a propositional\nstructure result from associative learning. If every time one’s\nfather came home he made dinner, then one might just end up learning\nif daddy is home then dinner will come soon, which is a propositional\nstructure."],"subsection_title":"4.3 Relation Between Associative Learning and Associative Structures"},{"content":["There is a different, tighter relationship between associative\nlearning and associative structures concerning how to modulate an\nassociation. Associative theorists, especially from Pavlov onward,\nhave been clear on the functional characteristics necessary to\nmodulate an already created association. There have been two generally\nagreed upon routes: extinction\nand counterconditioning. Suppose that, through associative\nlearning, you have learned to associate a CS with a US. How do we\nbreak that association? Associationists have posited that one breaks\nan associative structure via two different types of\nassociative learning (/unlearning). Extinction is the name\nfor one such process. During extinction one decouples the external\npresentation of the CS and the US by presenting the CS without the US\n(and sometimes the US without the CS). Over time, the organism will\nlearn to disconnect the CS and US.","Counterconditioning names a similar process to extinction,\nthough one which proceeds via a slightly different method.\nCounterconditioning can only occur when an organism has an\nassociation between a mental representation and a valence, as\nacquired in an evaluative conditioning paradigm. Suppose that one\nassociates\n ducks with a positive valence. To break this association\nvia counterconditioning one introduces ducks not with a lack of\npositive valence (as would happen in extinction) but with the\nopposite valence, a negative valence. Over multiple\nexposures, the initial representation/valence association weakens,\n and is perhaps completely \nbroken.[21]","How successful extinction and counterconditioning are, and how they\nwork, is the source of some controversy, and some reason to see both methods as highly ineffectual (Bouton 2004). Although the traditional\nview is that extinction breaks associative bonds, it is an open\nempirical question whether extinction proceeds by breaking the\npreviously created associative bonds, or whether it proceeds by\nleaving that bond alone but creating new, more salient (and perhaps\ncontext-specific) associations between the CS and other mental states (Bouton 2002, Bendana and Mandelbaum forthcoming). Additionally, reinstatement, the spontaneous\nreappearance of an associative bond after seemingly successful\nextinction, has been observed in many contexts (see, e.g., Dirikx et\nal. 2004 for\n reinstatement of fear in \nhumans).[22]","One fixed point in this debate is that one reverses associative\nstructures via these two types of associative learning/unlearning, and\nonly via these two pathways. What one does not do is try to\nbreak an associative structure by using practical or theoretical\nreasoning. If you associate\n salt with\n pepper, then telling you that\nsalt has nothing to do with pepper or giving you very good reasons\nnot to associate the two (say, someone will give you $50,000 for not\nassociating them) won’t affect the association. This much has at\nleast been clear since Locke. In the Essay concerning Human\nUnderstanding, in his chapter “On the Association of\nIdeas” (chapter XXIII) he writes,","\nWhen this combination is settled, and while it lasts, it is not in\nthe power of reason to help us, and relieve us from the effects of it.\nIdeas in our minds, when they are there, will operate according to\ntheir natures and circumstances. And here we see the cause why time\ncures certain affections, which reason, though in the right, and\nallowed to be so, has not power over, nor is able against them to\nprevail with those who are apt to hearken to it in other\ncases. (2.23.13)\n","Likewise, say one has just eaten lutefisk and then vomited. The\nsmell and taste of lutefisk will then be associated with feeling\nnauseated, and no amount of telling one that they shouldn’t be\nnauseated will be very effective. Say the lutefisk that made one\nvomit was covered in poison, so that we know that the lutefisk\nwasn’t the root cause of the\n sickness.[23]\nHaving this knowledge won’t dislodge the association. In\nessence, associative structures are functionally defined as being\nfungible based on counterconditioning, extinction, and nothing\nelse. Thus, assuming one sees counterconditioning and extinction as\ntypes of associative learning, we can say that associative learning\ndoes not necessarily eventuate in associative structures, but\nassociative structures can only be modified by associative\nlearning."],"subsection_title":"4.4 Extinction and Counterconditioning"}]},{"main_content":["So far we’ve discussed learning and mental structures, but\nhave yet to discuss thinking. The pure associationist will\nwant a theory that covers not just acquisition and cognitive\nstructure, but also the transition between thoughts. Associative\ntransitions are a particular type of thinking, akin to what William\nJames called “The Stream of Thought” (James\n1890). Associative transitions are movements between thoughts that are\nnot predicated on a prior logical relationship between the elements of\nthe thoughts that one connects. In this sense, associative transitions\nare contrasted with computational transitions as analyzed by the\nComputational Theory of Mind (Fodor 2001; Quilty-Dunn and Mandelbaum 2018,2019; see\n the entry on Computational Theory of Mind). \nCTM understands inferences as truth preserving\nmovements in thought that are underwritten by the formal/syntactic\nproperties of thoughts. For example inferring the conclusion\nin modus ponens from the premises is possible just based on\nthe form of the major and minor premise, and not on the content of the\npremises. Associative transitions are transitions in thought that are\nnot based on the logico-syntactic properties of thoughts. Rather, they\nare transitions in thought that occur based on the associative\nrelations among the separate thoughts.","Imagine an impure associationist model of the mind, one that\ncontains both propositional and associative structures. A\ncomputational inference might be one such as inferring \nyou are a g from the thoughts \nif you are an f, then you are a g, and \nyou are an f. However, an associative\ntransition is just a stream of ideas that needn’t have any\nformal, or even rational, relation between them, such as the\ntransition from \nthis coffee shop is cold to russia should annex idaho, \nwithout there being any intervening thoughts. This transition\ncould be subserved merely by one’s association of\n idaho and\ncold, or it could happen because the two thoughts have tended to\nco-occur in the past, and their close temporal proximity caused an\nassociation between the two thoughts to arise (or for many other\nreasons). Regardless of the etiology, the transition doesn’t\noccur on the basis of the formal properties of the\n thoughts.[24]","According to this taxonomy, talk of an “associative\ninference” (e.g., Anderson et al. 1994; Armstrong et al. 2012)\nis a borderline oxymoron. The easiest way to give sense to the idea of\nan associative inference is for it to involve transitions in thought\nthat began because they were purely inferential (as understood by the\ncomputational theory of mind) but then became associated over\ntime. For example, at first one might make the modus ponens\ninference because a particular series of thoughts instantiates\nthe modus ponens form. Over time the premises and conclusion of that\nparticular token of a modus ponens argument become associated\nwith each other through their continued use in that inference and now\nthe thinker merely associates the premises with the conclusion. That\nis, the constant contiguity between the premises and the conclusion\noccurred because the inference was made so frequently, but the\ninference was originally made so frequently not because of the\nassociative relations between the premises and conclusion, but because\nthe form of the thoughts (and the particular motivations of the\nthinker). This constant contiguity then formed the basis for an\nassociative linkage between the premises and the conclusion. [25]","As was the case for associative structures, associative transitions\nin thought are not just a logical possibility. There are particular\nempirical differences associated with associative transitions versus\ninferential transitions. Associative transitions tend to move across\ndifferent content domains, whereas inferential transitions tend to\nstay on a more focused set of contents. These differences have been\nseen to result in measurable differences in mood: associative thinking\nacross topics bolsters mood when compared to logical thinking on a\nsingle topic (Mason and Bar 2012)."],"section_title":"5. Associative Transitions","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["The associationist position so far has been neutral on how\nassociations are to be implemented. Implementation can be seen at a\nrepresentational (that is psychological) level of explanation, or at\nthe neural level. A pure associationist picture would posit an\nassociative implementation base at one, or both, of these\n levels.[26]","The most well-known associative instantiation base is a class of\nnetworks called Connectionist networks (see\n the entry on connectionism). \nConnectionist networks are sometimes pitched at the\npsychological level (see, e.g., Elman 1991; Elman et al. 1996;\nSmolensky 1988). This amounts to the claim that models of algorithms\nembedded in the networks capture the essence of certain mental\nprocesses, such as associative learning. Other times connectionist\nnetworks are said to be models of neural activity (“neural\nnetworks”). Connectionist networks consist in sets of nodes,\ngenerally input nodes, hidden nodes, and output nodes. Input nodes\nare taken to be analogs of sensory neurons (or sub-symbolic sensory\nrepresentations), output nodes the analog of motor neurons (or\nsub-symbolic behavioral representations), and hidden nodes are\n stand-ins for all other\n neurons.[27]\n The network consists in these nodes\nbeing connected to each other with varying strengths. The topology of\nthe connections gives one an associative mapping of the system, with\nthe associative weights understood as the differing strengths of\nconnections. On the psychological reading, these associations are\nfunctionally defined; on the neurological reading, they are generally\nunderstood to be representing synaptic conductance (and are the\nanalogs of dendrites).[28] Prima facie, these networks are\npurely associative and do not contain propositional elements, and the\nnodes themselves are not to be equated with single representational\nstates (such as concepts; see, e.g., Gallistel and King 2009).","However, a connectionist network can implement a classical Turing\nmachine architecture (see, e.g., Fodor and McLaughlin\n1990; Chalmers 1993). Many, if not most, of the\nadherents of classical computation, for example proponents of CTM,\nthink that the brain is an associative network, one which implements a\nclassical computational program. Some adherents of CTM do deny that\nthe brain runs an associative network (see, e.g., Gallistel and King\n2009, who appear to deny that there is any scientific level of\nexplanation that association is intimately involved in), but they do\nso on separate empirical grounds and not because of any logical\ninconsistency with an associative brain implementing a classical\nmind.","When discussing an associative implementation base it is important\nto distinguish questions of associationist structure from questions of\nrepresentational reality. Connectionists have often been followers of\nthe Skinnerian anti-representationalist tradition (Skinner 1938).\nBecause of the distributed nature of the nodes in connectionist\nnetworks, the networks have tended to be analyzed as associative\nstimulus/response chains of subsymbolic elements. However, the\nquestion of whether connectionist networks have representations which\nare distributed in patterns of activity throughout different nodes of\nthe network, or whether connectionist networks are best understood as\ncontaining no representational structures at all, is orthogonal to\nboth the question of whether the networks are purely associative or\ncomputational, and whether the networks can implement classical\narchitectures."],"section_title":"6. Associative Instantiation","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["These four types of associationism share a certain empiricist\nspiritual similarity, but are logically, and empirically, separable.\nThe pure associationist who wants to posit the smallest number of\ndomain-general mental processes will theorize that the mind consists\nof associative structures acquired by associative learning which enter\ninto associative transitions and are implemented in an associative\ninstantiation base. However, many hybrid views are available and\nfrequently different associationist positions become mixed and\nmatched, especially once issues of empiricism, domain-specificity, and\ngradual learning arise. Below is a partial taxonomy of where some\nwell-known theorists lie in terms of associationism and these other,\noften related doctrines.","Prinz (2002) and Karmiloff-Smith\n(1995) are examples of\nempiricist non-associationists. It is rare to find an associationist\nwho is a nativist, but plenty of nativists have aspects of\nassociationism in their own work. For example, even the arch-nativist\nJerry Fodor maintains that intramodular lexicons contain associative\nstructures (Fodor 1983). Similarly, there are many non-behaviorist\n(at least non-radical, analytic, or methodological behaviorist)\nassociationists, such as Elman (1991), Smolensky (1988), Baeyens (De\nHouwer and Baeyens 2001), and modern day dual process theorists such as\nEvans and Stanovich (2013). It is quite difficult to find a\nnon-associationist behaviorist, though Tolman approximates one\n(Tolman 1948). Elman and Smolensky also qualify as\nrepresentationalist associationists, and Van Gelder (1995) as an\nanti-representationalist non-associationist. Karmiloff-Smith\n(1995) can be\ninterpreted as, for some areas of learning, a proponent of gradual\nlearning without being associationist (some might also read\ncontemporary Bayesian theorists, e.g., Tenenbaum et al. 2011 and\nChater et al. 2006 as holding a similar position for some areas of\nlearning). Rescorla (1988) and Heyes (2012) claim to be\nassociationists who are pro step-wise, one shot learning (though\nRescorla sees his project as a continuation of the classical\nconditioning program, others see his data as grist for the\nanti-associationist, pro-computationalist mill, see Gallistel and\nKing 2009; Quilty-Dunn and Mandelbaum 2019). Lastly, Tenenbaum and his contemporary Bayesians\ncolleagues sometimes qualify as holding a domain-general learning\nposition without it being\n associationist.[29]"],"section_title":"7. Relation between the Varieties of Association and Related Positions","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["Since the cognitive revolution, associationism’s influence\nhas mostly died out in cognitive psychology and\npsycholinguistics. This is not to say that all aspects of associative\ntheorizing are dead in these areas; rather, they have just taken on\nmuch smaller, more peripheral roles (for example, it has often been suggested that\nmental lexicons are structured, in part, associatively, which is why\nlexical decision tasks are taken to be facilitation maps of\none’s lexicon). In other areas of cognitive psychology (for\nexample, the study of causal cognition), associationism is no longer\nthe dominant theoretical paradigm, but vestiges of associationism still persist (see Shanks 2010 for an overview of associationism\nin causal cognition). Associationism is also still alive in the\nconnectionist literature, as well as in the animal cognition\ntradition.","But the biggest contemporary stronghold of associationist\ntheorizing resides in social psychology, an area which has\ntraditionally been hostile to associationism (see, e.g., Asch 1962,\n1969). The ascendance of associationism in social psychology has been\na fairly modern development, and has caused a revival of\nassociationist theories in philosophy (e.g., Madva and Brownstein 2019). The two\nareas of social psychology that have seen the greatest renaissance of\nassociationism are the implicit attitude and dual-process theory\nliterature. However, in the late 2010s social psychology has begun to take a critical look at associationist theories (e.g., Mann et al. 2019)."],"section_title":"8. Associationism in Social Psychology","subsections":[{"content":["Implicit attitudes are generally operationally defined as the attitudes tested on implicit tests such as the Implicit Association Test\n(Greenwald et al. 1998), the Affect Misattribution Procedure (Payne et\nal. 2005), the Sorted Paired Feature Task (Bar-Annan et al. 2009) and\nthe Go/No-Go Association Task (Nosek and Banaji 2001). Implicit attitudes are contrasted with explicit attitudes, attitudes operationalized as the one’s being probed when one gives an explicit response like a marking on a Likert scale, feeling thermometer, or in free report. Such operationalizations leave open the question of whether there are any natural kinds to which explicit and implicit attitudes refer. In general implicit attitudes are characterized as being mental\nrepresentations that are unavailable for explicit report and inaccessible to consciousness (cf. Hahn et al. 2014; Berger 2020).","\nThe default position among social psychologists is to treat implicit attitudes as\nif they are associations among mental representations (Fazio 2007), or\namong pairs of mental representations and valences. In particular,\nthey treat implicit attitudes as associative structures which enter\ninto associative transitions. Recently this issue has come under much\ndebate. In an ever expanding series of studies De Houwer and his collaborators have taken to show that associative learning is, at base, relational, propositional contingency learning; i.e., that all putatively associative learning is in fact a nonautomatic learning process that generates and evaluates propositional hypotheses (Mitchell et al. 2009; De Houwer 2009, 2011, 2014 2019; Hughes et al. 2019). Other researchers have approached the question also using learning as the entrance point to the debate, demonstrating effects that non-associative acquisition creates stronger attitudes than associative acquisition (Hughes et al. 2019). For example, one might demonstrate that learning through merely reading an evaluative statement creates a stronger implicit attitude than repeated associative exposures (Kurdi and Banaji 2017, 2019; Mann et al. 2019). Other researchers have championed propositional models not based on learning, but instead based on how implicit attitudes change regardless of how they are acquired. For instance, Mandelbaum (2016) argued that logical/evidential interventions modulate implicit attitudes in predictable ways (e.g., using double negation to cancel each other out), while others have used diagnosticity to show that implicit attitudes update in a non-associationistic, propositional way (e.g., after reading a story about a man who broke into a building and appeared to ransack it you learn that we jumped into save people from a fire and immediately change your opinion of the man from negative to positive; Mann and Ferguson 2015; Mann et al. 2017; Van Dessel et al. 2019). (For more on implicit attitudes see the entry\non\n implicit bias)."],"subsection_title":"8.1 Implicit Attitudes"},{"content":["Associative structures and transitions are widely implicated in a\nparticular type of influential dual-process theory. Though there are\nmany dual-process theories in social psychology (see, e.g., the papers\nin Chaiken and Trope 1999, or the discussion in Evans and Stanovich\n2013), the one most germane to associationism is also the most\npopular. It originates from work in the psychology of reasoning and\nis often also invoked in the heuristics and biases tradition (see,\ne.g., Kahneman 2011). It has been developed by many different\npsychological theorists (Sloman 1996; Smith and Decoster 2000; Wilson\net al. 2000;\nEvans and Stanovich 2013) and, in parts, taken up by\nphilosophers too (see, e.g., Gendler 2008; Frankish 2009; see also\nsome of the essays in Evans and Frankish 2009).","The dual-process strain most relevant to the current discussion\nposits two systems, one evolutionarily ancient intuitive system\nunderlying unconscious, automatic, fast, parallel and associative\nprocessing, the other an evolutionarily recent reflective system\ncharacterized by conscious, controlled, slow,\n“rule-governed” serial processes (see, e.g., Evans and\nStanovich 2013). The\nancient system, sometimes called “System 1”, is often\nunderstood to include a collection of autonomous, distinct\nsubsystems, each of which is recruited to deal with distinct types of\nproblems (see Stanovich 2011 for a discussion of\n“TASS—the autonomous set of systems”). Although\ntheories differ on how System 1 interacts with System\n 2,[30] the\ntheoretical core of System 1 is arguing that its processing is\nessentially associative. As in the implicit attitude debate, dual\nsystems models have recently come under fire (see Kruglanski 2013;\nOsman 2013; Mandelbaum 2016; De Houwer 2019), though they remain very\npopular."],"subsection_title":"8.2 Dual Process Theories"}]},{"main_content":["Associationism has been a dominant theme in mental theorizing for\ncenturies. As such, it has garnered an appreciable amount of\ncriticism."],"section_title":"9. Criticisms of Associationism","subsections":[{"content":["The basic associative learning theories imply, either explicitly or\nimplicitly, slow, gradual learning of associations (Baeyens et al.\n1995). The learning process can be summarized in a learning curve\nwhich plots the frequency (or magnitude) of the conditioned response\nas a function of the number of reinforcements (Gallistel et al. 2004:\n13124). Mappings between CRs and USs are gradually built up over\nnumerous trials (in the lab) or experiences (in the world). Gradual,\nslow learning has come under fire from a variety of areas (see sections 9.3 and 9.4.1). However, here we just\nfocus on the behavioral data. In a series of works re-analyzing animal\nbehavior, Gallistel (Gallistel et al. 2004; Gallistel and King 2009)\nhas argued that although group-level learning curves do\ndisplay the properties of being negatively accelerated and gradually\ndeveloping, these curves are misleading because\nno individual’s learning curve has these\nproperties. Gallistel has argued that learning for individuals is\ngenerally step-like, rapid, and abrupt. An individual’s learning\nfrom a low-level of responding to asymptotic responding is very quick.\nSometimes, the learning is so quick that it is literally one-shot\nlearning. For example, after analyzing multiple experiments of animal\nlearning of spatial location Gallistel writes","The learning of a spatial location generally\nrequires but a single experience. Several trials may, however, be\nrequired to convince the subject that the location is predictable from\ntrial to trial. (Gallistel et al. 2004: 13130)","Gallistel argues that the reason the group learning curves look to\nbe smooth and gradual is that there are large individual differences\nbetween subjects in terms of when the onset latency of the step-wise\ncurves begin (Gallistel et al. 2004: 13125); in other words, different\nanimals take different amounts of time for the learning to\ncommence. The differences between individual subject’s learning\ncurves are predicated on when the steps begin and not by the speed of\nthe individual animal’s learning process. All individuals appear\nto show rapid rises in learning, but since each begins their learning\nat a different time, when we average over the group, the rapid step-wise\nlearning appears to look like slow, gradual learning (Gallistel et\nal. 2004: 13124)."],"subsection_title":"9.1 Learning Curves"},{"content":["The problem of predication is, at its core, a problem of how an\nassociative mechanism can result in the acquisition of\nsubject/predicate structures, structures which many theorists believe\nappear in language, thought, and judgment. The first major discussion\nof the problem appears in Kant (1781/1787), but variants of the basic\nKantian criticism can be seen across the contemporary literature (see,\ne.g., Chomsky 1959; Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988; Fodor 2003; Mandelbaum\n2013a; for the details of the Kantian argument see the entry\n on Kant’s Transcendental Argument).","For a pure associationist, association is “semantically\ntransparent” (see Fodor 2003), in that it purports to add no\nadditional structure to thoughts. When a simple concept, X\nand a simple concept Y, become associated one acquires the\nassociative structure X/Y. But X/Y\nhas no additional structure on top of their contents. Knowing\nthat X and Y are associated amounts to knowing a\ncausal fact: that activating Xs will bring about the\nactivation of Ys and vice versa. However, so the\nargument goes, some of our thoughts appear to have more structure than\nthis: the thought\n birds fly predicates the property of flying onto\nbirds. The task for the associationist is to explain how associative\nstructures can distinguish a thinker who has a single (complex)\nthought\n birds fly from a thinker who conjoins two simple thoughts in\nan associative structure where one thought,\n birds, is immediately\nfollowed by another,\n fly. As long as the two simple thoughts are\nreliably causally correlated so that, for a thinker, activations of\nbirds regularly brings about\n fly, then that thinker has the\nassociative structure\n birds/fly. Yet it appears that thinker\nhasn’t yet had the thought\n birds fly. The problem of predication\nis explaining how a purely associative mechanism could eventuate in\ncomplex thoughts. In Fodor’s terms the problem boils down to how\nassociation, a causal relation among mental representations, can\naffect predication, a relation among intentional contents (Fodor\n2003).","A family of related objections to associationism can be interpreted\nas variations on this theme. For example, problems of productivity,\ncompositionality, and systematicity for associationist theorizing\nappear to be variants of the problem of predication (for more on these\n specific issues see the entries on the\n Language of Thought Hypothesis and\n on compositionality). If\nassociation doesn’t add any additional structure to the mental\nrepresentations that get associated, then it is hard to see how it can\nexplain the compositionality of thought, which relies on structures\nthat specify relations among intentional contents. Compositionality\nrequires that the meaning of a complex thought is determined by the\nmeanings of its simple constituents along with their syntactic\narrangements. The challenge to associationism is to explain how an\nassociative mechanism can give rise to the syntactic structures\nnecessary to distinguish a complex thought like\n\n birds fly from the\ntemporal succession of two simple thoughts\n\n birds and\n fly. Since the\ncompositionality of thought is posited to undergird the productivity\nof thought (thinkers’ abilities to think novel sentences of\narbitrary lengths, e.g.,\n green birds fly,\n giant green birds fly,\ncuddly giant green birds fly, etc.), associationism has problems\nexplaining productivity.","Systematicity is the thesis that there are predictable patterns\namong which thoughts a thinker is capable of entertaining. Thinkers\nthat can entertain thoughts of certain structures can always entertain\ndistinct thoughts that have related structure. For instance, any\nthinker who can think a complex thought of the form “X\ntransitive verb Y” can think “Y\ntransitive verb X”.[31] Systematicity entails that we\nwon’t find any thinker that can only think one of those\ntwo thoughts, in which case we could not find a person who could think\naudrey wronged max, but not\n\n max wronged audrey. Of course, these two\nthoughts have very different effects in one’s cognitive\neconomy. The challenge for the associationist is to explain how the\nassociative structure\n audrey/wronged/max can be distinguished from the\nstructure\n max/wronged/audrey, while capturing the differences in those\nthoughts’ effects.","Associationists have had different responses to the problem. Some\nhave denied that human thought is actually compositional, productive,\nand systematic, and other non-associationists have agreed with this\ncritique. For example, Prinz and Clark claim “concepts do not\ncompose most of the time” (2002: 62), and Johnson (2004) argues\nthat the systematicity criterion is wrongheaded (see Aydede 1997 for\nextended discussion of these issues). Rumelhart et al. offer a\nconnectionist interpretation of “schemata”, one which is\nintended to cover some of the phenomenon mentioned in this section\n(Rumelhart et al. 1986). Others have worked to show that classical\nconditioning can indeed give rise to complex associative structures\n(Rescorla 1988). In defense of the associationist construal of complex\nassociations Rescorla writes,","Clearly, the animals had not simply coded the RH\n[complex] compound in terms of parallel associations with its\nelements. Rather they had engaged in some more hierarchical\nstructuring of the situation, forming a representation of the compound\nand using it as an associate. (Rescorla 1988: 156)","\n\nWhether or not associationism has the theoretical\ntools to explain such complex compounds by itself is still debated\n(see, e.g., Fodor 2003; Mitchell 2009; Gallistel and King 2009; Quilty-Dunn and Mandelbaum 2019)."],"subsection_title":"9.2 The Problem of Predication"},{"content":["Multiple issues in the acquisition of the lexicon appear to cause\nproblems for associationism. Some of the most well known examples are\nreviewed below (for further discussion of word learning and\nassociationism see Bloom 2000).","Children learn words at an incredible rate, acquiring around 6,000\nwords by age 6 (Carey 2010: 184). If gradual learning is the rule,\nthen words too should be learned gradually across this time. However,\nthis does not appear to be the case. Susan Carey\ndiscovered the phenomenon of “fast mapping”, which is\none-shot learning of a word (Carey 1978a, 1978b; Carey and Bartlett\n1978). Her most influential example investigated children’s\nacquisition of “chromium” (a color word referring to olive\ngreen). Children were shown one of two otherwise identical objects,\nwhich only differed in color and asked, “Can you get me the\nchromium tray, not the red one, the chromium one” (recited in\nCarey 2010: 2). All of the children handed over the correct tray at\nthat time. When the children were later tested in differing contexts,\nmore than half remembered the referent of\n“chromium”. These findings have been extended—for\nexample, Markson and Bloom (1997) showed that they are not specific to\nthe remembering of novel words, but also hold for novel facts.","Fast mapping poses two problems for associationism. The first is\nthat the learning of a new word did not develop slowly, as would be\npredicted by proponents of gradual learning. The second is that in\norder for the word learning to proceed, the mind must have been aided\nby additional principles not given by the environment. Some of these\nprinciples such as Markman’s (1989) taxonomic, whole object, and\nmutual exclusivity constraints, and Gleitman’s syntactic\nbootstrapping (Gleitman et al. 2005), imply that the mind does add structure to what is\nlearned. Consequently, the associationist claim that learning is just\nmapping external contingencies without adding structure is\nimperiled.","“Motherese”, the name of the type of language that\ninfants generally hear, consists of simple sentences such as\n“Nora want a bottle?” and “Are you tired?”.\nThese sentences almost always contain a noun and a verb. Yet, the\ninfant’s vocabulary massively over-represents nouns in the first\n100 words or so, while massively under-representing the verbs (never\nmind adjectives or adverbs, which almost never appear in the first 100\nwords infants produce; see, e.g., Goldin-Meadow, Seligman, and Gelman\n1976). Even more surprising is that the over-representation of\nnouns to verbs holds even though","the incidence of each word (that is, the token\nfrequency) is higher for the verbs than for the nouns in the common\nset used by mothers. (Snedeker and Gleitman 2004: 259, citing data\nfrom Sandhoffer, Smith, and Luo 2000)\n","Moreover, children hear a preponderance of\ndeterminers (“the” and “a”) but don’t\nproduce them (Bloom 2000). These facts are not specific to English,\nbut hold cross-culturally (see, e.g., Caselli et al. 1995). The\ndisparity between the variation of the syntactic categories infants\nreceive as input and produce as output is troublesome to\nassociationism, insofar as associationism is committed to the learned\nstructures (and the behaviors that follow from them) merely\npatterning what is given in experience."],"subsection_title":"9.3 Word Learning"},{"content":["Contiguity has been a central part of associationist analyses since\nthe British Empiricists. In the experimental literature, the problem\nof figuring out the parameters needed for acquiring an association due to the contiguity of its relata has sometimes\nbeen termed the problem of the “Window of Association”\n(e.g., Gallistel and King 2009). Every associationist theory has to specify what temporal window two properties must instantiate in order for those properties to be associated.[32]\nA related problem for contiguity theorists is that if the domain\ngenerality of associative learning is desired, then the window needs\nto be homogenous across content domains. The late 1960s saw\npersuasive attacks on domain generality, as well as the necessity and\nsufficiency of the contiguity criterion in general.","Research on “taste aversions” and\n“bait-shyness” provided a variety of problems with\ncontiguity in the associative learning tradition of classical\nconditioning. Garcia observed that a gustatory stimulus (e.g.,\ndrinking water or eating a hot dog) but not an audiovisual stimulus (a\nlight and a sound) would naturally become associated with feeling\nnauseated. For instance, Garcia and Koelling (1966) paired an\naudiovisual stimulus (a light and a sound) with a gustatory stimulus\n(flavored water). The two stimuli were then paired with the rats\nreceiving radiation, which made the rats feel nauseated. The rats\nassociated the feeling of nausea with the water and not with the\nsound, even though the sound was contiguous with the water. Moreover,\nthe delay between ingesting the gustatory stimulus and feeling\nnauseated could be quite long, with the feeling not coming on until 12\nhours later (Roll and Smith 1972), and the organism needn’t even\nbe conscious when the negative feeling arises. (For a review, see\nSeligman 1970; Garcia et al. 1974). The temporal delay shows that the\nCS (the flavored water) needn’t be contiguous with the US (the\nfeeling of nausea) in order for learning to occur, thus showing that\ncontiguity isn’t necessary for associative learning.","Garcia’s work also laid bare the problems with the domain\ngeneral aspect of associationism. In the above study the rat was\nprepared to associate the nausea with the gustatory stimulus, but\nwould not associate it with the audiovisual stimulus. However, if one\nchanges the US from feeling nauseated to receiving shocks in perfect\ncontiguity with the audiovisual and gustatory stimuli, then the rats\nwill associate the shocks with the audiovisual stimulus but not with\nthe gustatory stimulus. That is, rats are prepared to associate\naudiovisual stimuli with the shock but are contraprepared to associate\nthe shocks with the gustatory stimulus. Thus, learning does not seem\nto be entirely domain general (for similar content specificity\neffects in humans, see Baeyens et al.\n 1990).[33]","Lastly, “The Garcia effect” has also been used to show\n problems in the learning curve (see section 9.1). \n“Taste aversions” are the phenomena whereby an\norganism gets sick from ingesting the stimulus and the taste (or odor,\nGarcia et al. 1974) of that stimulus gets associated with the feeling\nof sickness. As anyone who has had food poisoning can attest, this\nlearning can proceed in a one-shot fashion, and needn’t have a\ngradual rise over many trials (taste aversions have also been observed\nin humans, see, e.g., Bernstein and Webster 1980; Bernsetin 1985;\nLogue et al. 1981; Rozin 1986).","Kamin’s famous blocking experiments (1969) showed that not\nall contiguous structures lead to classical conditioning. A rat that\nhas already learned that CS1 predicts a US, will not learn that a\nsubsequent CS2 predicts the US, if the CS2 is always paired with the\nCS1. Suppose that a rat has learned that a light predicts a shock\nbecause of the constant contiguity of the light and shock. After\nlearning this, the rat has a sound introduced which only arises in\nconjunction with the light and the shock. As long as the rat had\npreviously learned that the light predicts the shock, it will not\nlearn that the sound does (as can be seen on later trials that have\nthe sound alone). In sum, having learned that the CS1 predicts the US\nblocks the organism from learning that the CS2 predicts the\n US.[34] So even\nthough CS2 is perfectly contiguous with the US, the association\nbetween CS2 and the US remains unlearned, thus serving as a\ncounterexample to sufficiency of\n contiguity.[35]","Similarly Rescorla (1968) demonstrated that a CS can appear only\nwhen the US appears and yet still have the association between them be\nunlearnable. If a tone is arranged to bellow only when there are\nshocks, but there are still shocks when there are no tones (that is,\nthe CS only appears with the US, but the US sometimes appears without\nthe CS), no associative learning between the CS and the US will occur.\nInstead, subjects (in Rescorla 1968, rats) will only learn a\nconnection between the shock and the experimental\nsituation—e.g., the room in which the experiment is carried\nout.","In large part because of the problems discussed in 9.4, many\nclassical conditioning theorists gave up the traditional\nprogram. Some, like Garcia, appeared to give up the classical\ntheoretical framework altogether (Garcia et al. 1974), others, such\nas Rescorla and Wagner, tried to usher the framework into the modern\nera (see, Rescorla and Wagner 1972; Rescorla 1988), where\nconditioning is seen as sensitive to base rates and driven by\ninformational \npick-up.[36] \nWhether this movement is interpreted as\na substantive revision of classical conditioning (Rescorla 1988;\nHeyes 2012) or a wholesale abandoning of it (Gallistel and King 2009)\nis debatable."],"subsection_title":"9.4 Against the Contiguity Analysis of Associationism"}]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"Associationism is a theory that connects learning to thought based\\non principles of the organism’s causal history. Since its early\\nroots, associationists have sought to use the history of an\\norganism’s experience as the main sculptor of cognitive\\narchitecture. In its most basic form, associationism has claimed that\\npairs of thoughts become associated based on the organism’s past\\nexperience. So, for example, a basic form of associationism (such as\\nHume’s) might claim that the frequency with which an organism\\nhas come into contact with Xs and Ys in one’s\\nenvironment determines the frequency with which thoughts\\nabout Xs and thoughts about Ys will arise together\\nin the organism’s future.\",\n \"Associationism’s popularity is in part due to how many\\ndifferent masters it can serve. In particular, associationism can be\\nused as a theory of learning (e.g., as in behaviorist theorizing), a\\ntheory of thinking (as in Jamesian “streams of thought”),\\na theory of mental structures (e.g., as in concept pairs), and a theory\\nof the implementation of thought (e.g., as in connectionism). All these\\ntheories are separable, but share a related, empiricist-friendly\\ncore. As used here, a “pure associationist” will refer to\\none who holds associationist theories of learning, thinking, mental\\nstructure, and implementation. The “pure associationist”\\nis a somewhat idealized position, one that no particular theorist may\\nhave ever held, but many have approximated to differing degrees (e.g.,\\nLocke 1690/1975; Hume 1738/1975; Thorndike 1911; Skinner 1953; Hull\\n1943; Churchland 1986, 1989; Churchland and Sejnowski 1990; Smolensky\\n1988; Elman 1991; Elman et al. 1996; McClelland et al. 2010; Rydell\\nand McConnell 2006; Fazio 2007).\",\n \"Outside of these core uses of associationism the movement has also\\nbeen closely aligned with a number of different doctrines over the\\nyears: empiricism, behaviorism, anti-representationalism (i.e.,\\nskepticism about the necessity of representational realism in\\npsychological explanation), gradual learning, and domain-general\\nlearning. All of these theses are dissociable from core associationist\\n thought (see section 7). While one\\ncan be an associationist without holding those theses, some of those\\ntheses imply associationism to differing degrees. These extra\\ntheses’ historical and sociological ties to associationism are\\nstrong, and so will be intermittently discussed below.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. What is Associationism?\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"Empiricism is a general theoretical outlook, which tends to offer a\\ntheory of learning to explain as much of our mental life as possible.\\nFrom the British empiricists through Skinner and the behaviorists\\n (see the entry on behaviorism) the main focus\\nhas been arguing for the acquisition of concepts (for the\\nempiricists’ “Ideas”, for the behaviorists\\n“responses”) through learning. However, the mental\\nprocesses that underwrite such learning are almost never themselves\\n posited to be learned.[1]\\nSo winnowing down the amount of mental\\nprocesses one has to posit limits the amount of innate machinery with which the\\ntheorist is saddled. Associationism, in its original form as in\\nHume (1738/1975), was put forward as a theory of mental processes.\\nAssociationists’ attempt to answer the question of how many\\nmental processes there are by positing only a single mental\\n process: the ability to associate \\nideas.[2]\",\n \"Of course, thinkers execute many different types of cognitive acts,\\nso if there is only one mental process, the ability to associate, that\\nprocess must be flexible enough to accomplish a wide range of\\ncognitive work. In particular, it must be able to account for learning\\nand thinking. Accordingly, associationism has been utilized on both\\nfronts. We will first discuss the theory of learning and then, after\\nanalyzing that theory and seeing what is putatively learned, we will\\nreturn to the associationist theory of thinking.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Associationism as a Theory of Mental Processes: The Empiricist Connection\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"In one of its senses, “associationism” refers to a\\ntheory of how organisms acquire concepts, associative structures,\\nresponse biases, and even propositional knowledge. It is commonly\\nacknowledged that associationism took hold after the publishing of\\nJohn Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding\\n (1690/1975).[3]\\nHowever, Locke’s comments on associationism were terse (though\\nfertile), and did not address learning to any great degree. The first\\nserious attempt to detail associationism as a theory of learning was\\ngiven by Hume in the Treatise of Human Nature\\n (1738/1975).[4]\\nHume’s associationism was, first and foremost, a theory\\nconnecting how perceptions (“Impressions”) determined\\ntrains of thought (successions of “Ideas”). Hume’s\\nempiricism, as enshrined in the Copy\\n Principle,[5]\\ndemanded that there were no Ideas in the mind that were not first\\ngiven in experience. For Hume, the principles of association\\nconstrained the functional role of Ideas once they were copied from\\nImpressions: if Impressions IM1 and IM2 were associated in\\nperception, then their corresponding Ideas, ID1 and ID2 would also\\nbecome associated. In other words, the ordering of Ideas was\\ndetermined by the ordering of the Impressions that caused the Ideas\\nto arise.\",\n \"Hume’s theory then needs to analyze what types of associative\\nrelations between Impressions mattered for determining the ordering\\nof Ideas. Hume’s analysis consisted of three types of\\nassociative relations: cause and effect, contiguity, and\\nresemblance. If two Impressions instantiated one of these associative\\nrelations, then their corresponding Ideas would mimic the same\\n instantiation.[6]\\nFor instance, if Impression IM1 was cotemporaneous with Impression\\nIM2, then (ceteris paribus) their corresponding Ideas, ID1\\nand ID2, would become associated.\",\n \"As stated, Hume’s associationism was mostly a way of\\ndetermining the functional profile of Ideas. But we have not yet said\\nwhat it is for two Ideas to be associated (for that\\n see section 4). Instead, one can see\\nHume’s contribution as introducing a very influential type of\\nlearning—associative learning—for Hume’s theory\\npurports to explain how we learn to associate certain Ideas. We\\ncan abstract away from Hume’s framework of ideas and his\\naccount of the specific relations that underlie associative learning,\\nand state the theory of associative learning more generally: if two\\ncontents of experiences, X and Y, instantiate some\\nassociative relation, R, then those contents will become\\nassociated, so that future activations of X will tend to\\nbring about activations of Y. The associationist then has\\nto explain what relation R amounts to. The Humean form of\\nassociative learning (where R is equated with cause and\\neffect, contiguity, or resemblance) has been hugely influential,\\ninforming the accounts of those such as Jeremy Bentham, J.S. Mill,\\n and Alexander Bain (see, e.g., the entries on\\n John Stuart Mill and\\n 19th Century Scottish Philosophy).[7]\",\n \"Associative learning didn’t hit its stride until the work of\\nIvan Pavlov, which spurred the subsequent rise of the behaviorist\\nmovement in psychology. Pavlov introduced the concept of classical\\nconditioning as a modernized version of associative learning. For\\nPavlov, classical conditioning was in part an experimental paradigm\\nfor teaching animals to learn new associations between stimuli. The\\ngeneral method of learning was to pair an unconditioned stimulus (US)\\nwith a novel stimulus. An unconditioned stimulus is just a stimulus\\nthat instinctively, without training, provokes a response in an\\norganism. Since this response is not itself learned, the response is\\nreferred to as an “unconditioned response” (UR). In\\nPavlov’s canonical experiment, the US was a meat powder, as the\\nsmell of meat automatically brought about salivation (UR) in his\\ncanine subjects. The US is then paired with a neutral stimulus, such\\nas a bell. Over time, the contiguity between the US and the neutral\\nstimulus causes the neutral stimulus to provoke the same response as\\nthe US. Once the bell starts to provoke salivation, the bell has\\nbecome a “conditioned stimulus” (CS) and the salivating,\\nwhen prompted by the bell alone, a “conditioned response”\\n(CR). The associative learning here is learning to form new\\nstimulus-response pairs between the bell and the\\n salivation.[8]\",\n \"Classical conditioning is a fairly circumscribed process. It is a\\n“stimulus substitution” paradigm where one stimulus can\\nbe swapped for another to provoke a\\n response.[9]\\nHowever, the responses that are provoked are supposed to remain unchanged; all that\\nchanges is the stimulus that gets associated with the response. Thus,\\nclassical conditioning seemed to some to be too restrictive to\\nexplain the panoply of novel behavior organisms appear to\\n execute.[10]\",\n \"Edward Thorndike’s research with cats in puzzle boxes\\nbroadened the theory of associative learning by introducing the notion\\nof consequences to associative learning. Thorndike expanded the notion\\nof associative learning beyond instinctual behaviors and sensory\\nsubstitution to genuinely novel behaviors. Thorndike’s\\nexperiments initially probed, e.g., how cats learned to lift a lever\\nto escape the “puzzle boxes” (the forbearer to\\n“Skinner boxes”) that they were trapped in. The\\ncats’ behaviors, such as attempting to lift a lever, were not\\nthemselves instinctual behaviors like the URs of Pavlov’s\\nexperiments. Additionally, the cats’ behaviors were shaped by\\nthe consequences that they brought on. For Thorndike it was because\\nlifting the lever caused the door to open that the cats learned the\\nconnection between the lever and the door. This new view of learning,\\noperant conditioning (for the organism is “operating” on\\nits environment), was not merely the passive learning of Pavlov, but a\\nspecies-nonspecific, general, active theory of learning.\",\n \"This research culminated in Thorndike’s famous “Law of\\nEffect” (1911), the first canonical psychological law of\\nassociationist learning. It asserted that responses that are\\naccompanied by the organism feeling satisfied will, ceteris\\nparibus, be more likely to be associated with the situation in\\nwhich the behavior was executed, whereas responses that are\\naccompanied with a feeling of discomfort to the animal\\nwill, ceteris paribus, make the response less likely to\\noccur when the organism encounters the same\\n situation.[11]\\nThe greater the positive or negative feelings produced, the greater\\nthe likelihood that the behavior will be evinced. To this Thorndike\\nadded the “Law of Exercise”, that responses to situations\\nwill, ceteris paribus, be more connected to those situations\\nin proportion to the frequency of past pairings between situation and\\nresponse. Thorndike’s paradigm was popularized and extended by\\nB.F. Skinner (see, e.g., Skinner 1953) who stressed the notion not\\njust of consequences but of reinforcement as the basis of\\nforming associations. For Skinner, a behavior would get associated\\nwith a situation according to the frequency and strength of\\nreinforcement that would arise as a consequence of the behavior.\",\n \"Since the days of Skinner, associative learning has come in many\\ndifferent variations. But what all varieties should share with their\\nhistorical predecessors is that associative learning is supposed to\\nmirror the contingencies in the world without adding additional\\nstructure to them (see section 9 for some examples of when supposedly associative theories smuggle in extra structure). The question of what contingencies associative\\nlearning detects (that is, one’s preferred analysis of what the\\nassociative relation R is), is up for debate and changes\\nbetween theorists.\",\n \"The final widely shared, though less central, property of\\nassociative learning concerns the domain generality of associative\\nlearning. Domain generality’s prevalence among associationists\\nis due in large part to their traditional empiricist allegiances:\\nexcising domain-specific learning mechanisms constrains the amount of\\ninnate mental processes one has to posit. Thus it is no surprise to\\nfind that both Hume and Pavlov assumed that associative learning could\\nbe used to acquire associations between any contents, regardless of\\nthe types of contents they were. For example, Pavlov writes,\",\n \"Any natural phenomenon chosen at will may be converted\\ninto a conditioned stimulus. Any ocular stimulus, any desired sound,\\nany odor, and the stimulation of any portion of the skin, whether by\\nmechanical means or by the application of heat or cold never failed to\\nstimulate the salivary glands. (Pavlov 1906: 615)\",\n \"For Pavlov the content of the CS\\ndoesn’t matter. Any content will do, as long as it bears the\\nright functional relationship in the organism’s learning\\nhistory. In that sense, the learning is domain general—it\\nmatters not what the content is, just the role it plays (for more on\\nthis topic, see\\n section 9.4).[12]\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Associationism as a Theory of Learning\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"Associative learning amounts to a constellation of related views\\nthat interprets learning as associating stimuli with responses (in\\noperant conditioning), or stimuli with other stimuli (in classical\\nconditioning), or stimuli with valences (in evaluative\\nconditioning).[13] Associative learning accounts raise the question: when\\none learns to associate contents X and Y because,\\ne.g., previous experiences with Xs and Ys\\ninstantiated R, how does one store the information\\nthat X and Y are associated?[14] A highly contrived\\nsample answer to this question would be that a thinker learns an\\nexplicitly represented unconscious conditional rule that states\\n“when a token of x is activated, then also activate a\\ntoken of y”. Instead of such a highly intellectualized\\nresponse, associationists have found a natural (though by no means\\n necessary, see section 4.2) complementary\\nview that the information is stored in an associative\\nstructure.\",\n \"An associative structure describes the type of bond that connects\\n two distinct mental states.[15]\\n An example of such a structure is the\\n associative pair \\nsalt/pepper.[16]\\n The associative structure is defined, in\\nthe first instance, functionally: if X and Y form\\nan associative structure, then, ceteris paribus, activations\\nof mental state X bring about mental state Y\\nand vice versa without the mediation of any other\\npsychological states (such as an explicitly represented rule telling\\nthe system to activate a concept because its associate has been\\n activated).[17]\\nIn other words, saying that two concepts are associated amounts to\\nsaying that there is a reliable, psychologically basic causal\\nrelation that holds between them—the activation of one of\\nthe concepts causes the activation of the other. So, saying that\\nsomeone harbors the structure\\n salt/pepper amounts to saying that\\nactivations of salt will cause activations of\\n pepper (and vice\\nversa) without the aid of any other cognitive states.\",\n \"Associative structures are most naturally contrasted with\\npropositional structures. A pure associationist is opposed to\\npropositional structures—strings of mental representations that\\nexpress a proposition—because propositionally structured mental\\nrepresentations have structure over and above the mere associative\\nbond between two concepts. Take, for example, the associative\\nstructure\\n green/toucan. This structure does not predicate green onto\\ntoucan. If we know that a mind has an associative bond between\\n green\\nand\\n toucan, then we know that activating one of those concepts leads\\nto the activation of the other. A pure associative theory rules out\\npredication, for propositional structures aren’t just strings of\\nassociations. “Association” (in associative structures)\\njust denotes a causal relation among mental representations, whereas\\npredication (roughly) expresses a relation between things in the world\\n(or intentional contents that specify external relations). Saying that\\nsomeone has an associative thought\\n green/toucan tells you something\\nabout the causal and temporal sequences of the activation of concepts\\nin one’s mind; saying that someone has the thought\\n\\n there is a green toucan\\n tells you that a person is predicating greenness of a\\nparticular toucan (see Fodor 2003: 91–94, for an expansion of\\nthis point).\",\n \"Associative structures needn’t just hold between simple\\nconcepts. One might have reason to posit associative structures\\n between propositional elements (see section 5)\\n or between concepts and valences (see section 8). \\nBut none of the proceeding is meant to imply that all\\nstructures are associative or propositional—there are other\\nrepresentational formats that the mind might harbor (e.g., analog\\nmagnitudes or iconic structures; see Camp 2007; Quilty-Dunn forthcoming). For instance, not all semantically\\nrelated concepts are harbored in associative structures. Semantically\\nrelated concepts may in fact also be directly associated (as in\\ndoctor/nurse) or they may not\\n (as in\\n horse/zebra; see Perea and Rosa\\n2002). The\\ndifference in structure is not just a theoretical possibility, as these\\ndifferent structures have different functional profiles: for example,\\nconditioned associations appear to last longer than semantic\\nassociations do in subjects with dementia (Glosser and Friedman\\n1991).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Associationism as a Theory of Mental Structure\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"The analysis of associative structures implies that, ceteris\\nparibus, associations are symmetric in their causal effects: if a\\nthinker has a bond between\\n salt/pepper,\\n then\\n salt should bring about\\npepper just as well as\\n\\n pepper brings about\\n salt (for extensive discussion of the symmetry point see Quilty-Dunn and Mandelbaum 2019). But all else is\\nrarely equal. For example, behaviorists such as Thorndike, Hull, and\\nSkinner knew that the order of learning affected the causal sequence\\nof recall: if one is always hearing “salt and pepper” then\\nsalt will be more poised to\\n activate\\n pepper than\\n pepper to activate\\nsalt. So, included in the ceteris paribus clause in the\\nanalysis of associative structures is the idealization that the\\nlearning of the associative elements was equally well randomized in\\norder.\",\n \"Similarly, associative symmetry is violated when there are\\ndiffering amounts of associative connections between the individual\\nassociated elements. For example, in the\\n green/toucan case, most\\nthinkers will have many more associations stemming from\\n green than\\nstemming from\\n toucan. Suppose we have a thinker that only associates\\ntoucan with\\n green,\\n but associates\\n green with a large host of other\\nconcepts (e.g.,\\n grass,\\n\\n vegetables,\\n tea,\\n\\n kermit,\\n seasickness,\\n\\n moss,\\nmold,\\n lantern,\\n\\n ireland, etc). In this case one can expect that\\n\\n toucan\\nwill more quickly activate\\n green than\\n\\n green will activate\\n toucan, for\\nthe former bond will have its activation strength less weakened\\namongst other associates than the latter will.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.1 Associative Symmetry\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"An associative activation map (sometimes called a “spreading\\nactivation” map, Collins and Luftus 1975) is a mapping for a\\nsingle thinker of all the associative connections between\\n concepts.[18]\\nThere are many ways of operationalizing associative connections. In\\nthe abstract, a psychologist will attempt to probe which concepts (or\\nother mental elements) activate which other concepts (or\\nelements). Imagine a subject who is asked to say whether a string of\\nletters constitutes a word or not, which is the typical goal given to\\nsubjects in a “lexical decision task”. If a subject has\\njust seen the word “mouse”, we assume that the concept mouse was activated. If the subject is then quicker to say that, e.g.,\\n“cursor” is a word than the subject is to say that\\n“toaster” is, then we can infer that\\n cursor was primed,\\nand is thus associatively related to \\n mouse, in this thinker. Likewise,\\nif we find that “rodent” is also responded to\\nquicker, then we know that\\n rodent is associatively related to\\nmouse. Using this procedure, one can generate an\\nassociative mapping of a thinker’s mind. Such a mapping would\\nconstitute a mapping of the associative structures one harbors.\\nHowever, to be a true activation map—a true mapping of what\\nconcepts facilitate what—the mapping would also need to include\\ninformation about the violations of symmetry between concepts.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.2 Activation Maps of Associative Structure\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"The British Empiricists desired to have a thoroughgoing pure\\nassociationist theory, for it allowed them to lessen the load of\\ninnate machinery they needed to posit. Likewise, the behaviorists also\\ntended to want a pure associationist theory (sometimes out of a\\nsimilar empiricist tendency, other times because they were radical\\nbehaviorists like Skinner, who banned all discussion of mental\\nrepresentations). Pure associationists tend to be partial to a\\nconnection that Fodor (2003) refers to as “Bare-Boned\\nAssociation”. The idea is that the current strength of an\\nassociation connection between X and Y is\\ndetermined, ceteris paribus, by the frequency of the past\\nassociations of X and Y. As stated, Bare-Boned\\nAssociation assumes that associative structures encode, at least\\nimplicitly, the frequency of past associations of X\\nand Y, and the strength of that associative bond is\\ndetermined by the organism’s previous history of\\nexperiencing Xs and\\n Ys.[19]\\n In other words, the learning history of\\npast associations determines the current functional profile of the\\n corresponding associative \\nstructures.[20]\",\n \"Although the picture sketched\\nabove, where associative learning eventuates in associative\\nstructure, is appealing for many, it is not forced upon\\none, as there is no a priori reason to bar any type of\\nstructure to arise from a particular type of learning. One may, for\\nexample, gain propositional structures from associative learning (see\\nMitchell et al. 2009 and Mandelbaum 2016 for arguments that\\nthis is more than a mere logical possibility). This can happen in two\\nways. In the first, one may gain an associative structure that has a\\nproposition as one of its associates. Assume that every time\\none’s father came home he immediately made dinner. In such a\\ncase one might associate the proposition\\n daddy is home with the\\nconcept\\n dinner (that is one might acquire: \\ndaddy is home/dinner). However,\\n one might also just have a propositional\\nstructure result from associative learning. If every time one’s\\nfather came home he made dinner, then one might just end up learning\\nif daddy is home then dinner will come soon, which is a propositional\\nstructure.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.3 Relation Between Associative Learning and Associative Structures\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"There is a different, tighter relationship between associative\\nlearning and associative structures concerning how to modulate an\\nassociation. Associative theorists, especially from Pavlov onward,\\nhave been clear on the functional characteristics necessary to\\nmodulate an already created association. There have been two generally\\nagreed upon routes: extinction\\nand counterconditioning. Suppose that, through associative\\nlearning, you have learned to associate a CS with a US. How do we\\nbreak that association? Associationists have posited that one breaks\\nan associative structure via two different types of\\nassociative learning (/unlearning). Extinction is the name\\nfor one such process. During extinction one decouples the external\\npresentation of the CS and the US by presenting the CS without the US\\n(and sometimes the US without the CS). Over time, the organism will\\nlearn to disconnect the CS and US.\",\n \"Counterconditioning names a similar process to extinction,\\nthough one which proceeds via a slightly different method.\\nCounterconditioning can only occur when an organism has an\\nassociation between a mental representation and a valence, as\\nacquired in an evaluative conditioning paradigm. Suppose that one\\nassociates\\n ducks with a positive valence. To break this association\\nvia counterconditioning one introduces ducks not with a lack of\\npositive valence (as would happen in extinction) but with the\\nopposite valence, a negative valence. Over multiple\\nexposures, the initial representation/valence association weakens,\\n and is perhaps completely \\nbroken.[21]\",\n \"How successful extinction and counterconditioning are, and how they\\nwork, is the source of some controversy, and some reason to see both methods as highly ineffectual (Bouton 2004). Although the traditional\\nview is that extinction breaks associative bonds, it is an open\\nempirical question whether extinction proceeds by breaking the\\npreviously created associative bonds, or whether it proceeds by\\nleaving that bond alone but creating new, more salient (and perhaps\\ncontext-specific) associations between the CS and other mental states (Bouton 2002, Bendana and Mandelbaum forthcoming). Additionally, reinstatement, the spontaneous\\nreappearance of an associative bond after seemingly successful\\nextinction, has been observed in many contexts (see, e.g., Dirikx et\\nal. 2004 for\\n reinstatement of fear in \\nhumans).[22]\",\n \"One fixed point in this debate is that one reverses associative\\nstructures via these two types of associative learning/unlearning, and\\nonly via these two pathways. What one does not do is try to\\nbreak an associative structure by using practical or theoretical\\nreasoning. If you associate\\n salt with\\n pepper, then telling you that\\nsalt has nothing to do with pepper or giving you very good reasons\\nnot to associate the two (say, someone will give you $50,000 for not\\nassociating them) won’t affect the association. This much has at\\nleast been clear since Locke. In the Essay concerning Human\\nUnderstanding, in his chapter “On the Association of\\nIdeas” (chapter XXIII) he writes,\",\n \"\\nWhen this combination is settled, and while it lasts, it is not in\\nthe power of reason to help us, and relieve us from the effects of it.\\nIdeas in our minds, when they are there, will operate according to\\ntheir natures and circumstances. And here we see the cause why time\\ncures certain affections, which reason, though in the right, and\\nallowed to be so, has not power over, nor is able against them to\\nprevail with those who are apt to hearken to it in other\\ncases. (2.23.13)\\n\",\n \"Likewise, say one has just eaten lutefisk and then vomited. The\\nsmell and taste of lutefisk will then be associated with feeling\\nnauseated, and no amount of telling one that they shouldn’t be\\nnauseated will be very effective. Say the lutefisk that made one\\nvomit was covered in poison, so that we know that the lutefisk\\nwasn’t the root cause of the\\n sickness.[23]\\nHaving this knowledge won’t dislodge the association. In\\nessence, associative structures are functionally defined as being\\nfungible based on counterconditioning, extinction, and nothing\\nelse. Thus, assuming one sees counterconditioning and extinction as\\ntypes of associative learning, we can say that associative learning\\ndoes not necessarily eventuate in associative structures, but\\nassociative structures can only be modified by associative\\nlearning.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.4 Extinction and Counterconditioning\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"So far we’ve discussed learning and mental structures, but\\nhave yet to discuss thinking. The pure associationist will\\nwant a theory that covers not just acquisition and cognitive\\nstructure, but also the transition between thoughts. Associative\\ntransitions are a particular type of thinking, akin to what William\\nJames called “The Stream of Thought” (James\\n1890). Associative transitions are movements between thoughts that are\\nnot predicated on a prior logical relationship between the elements of\\nthe thoughts that one connects. In this sense, associative transitions\\nare contrasted with computational transitions as analyzed by the\\nComputational Theory of Mind (Fodor 2001; Quilty-Dunn and Mandelbaum 2018,2019; see\\n the entry on Computational Theory of Mind). \\nCTM understands inferences as truth preserving\\nmovements in thought that are underwritten by the formal/syntactic\\nproperties of thoughts. For example inferring the conclusion\\nin modus ponens from the premises is possible just based on\\nthe form of the major and minor premise, and not on the content of the\\npremises. Associative transitions are transitions in thought that are\\nnot based on the logico-syntactic properties of thoughts. Rather, they\\nare transitions in thought that occur based on the associative\\nrelations among the separate thoughts.\",\n \"Imagine an impure associationist model of the mind, one that\\ncontains both propositional and associative structures. A\\ncomputational inference might be one such as inferring \\nyou are a g from the thoughts \\nif you are an f, then you are a g, and \\nyou are an f. However, an associative\\ntransition is just a stream of ideas that needn’t have any\\nformal, or even rational, relation between them, such as the\\ntransition from \\nthis coffee shop is cold to russia should annex idaho, \\nwithout there being any intervening thoughts. This transition\\ncould be subserved merely by one’s association of\\n idaho and\\ncold, or it could happen because the two thoughts have tended to\\nco-occur in the past, and their close temporal proximity caused an\\nassociation between the two thoughts to arise (or for many other\\nreasons). Regardless of the etiology, the transition doesn’t\\noccur on the basis of the formal properties of the\\n thoughts.[24]\",\n \"According to this taxonomy, talk of an “associative\\ninference” (e.g., Anderson et al. 1994; Armstrong et al. 2012)\\nis a borderline oxymoron. The easiest way to give sense to the idea of\\nan associative inference is for it to involve transitions in thought\\nthat began because they were purely inferential (as understood by the\\ncomputational theory of mind) but then became associated over\\ntime. For example, at first one might make the modus ponens\\ninference because a particular series of thoughts instantiates\\nthe modus ponens form. Over time the premises and conclusion of that\\nparticular token of a modus ponens argument become associated\\nwith each other through their continued use in that inference and now\\nthe thinker merely associates the premises with the conclusion. That\\nis, the constant contiguity between the premises and the conclusion\\noccurred because the inference was made so frequently, but the\\ninference was originally made so frequently not because of the\\nassociative relations between the premises and conclusion, but because\\nthe form of the thoughts (and the particular motivations of the\\nthinker). This constant contiguity then formed the basis for an\\nassociative linkage between the premises and the conclusion. [25]\",\n \"As was the case for associative structures, associative transitions\\nin thought are not just a logical possibility. There are particular\\nempirical differences associated with associative transitions versus\\ninferential transitions. Associative transitions tend to move across\\ndifferent content domains, whereas inferential transitions tend to\\nstay on a more focused set of contents. These differences have been\\nseen to result in measurable differences in mood: associative thinking\\nacross topics bolsters mood when compared to logical thinking on a\\nsingle topic (Mason and Bar 2012).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Associative Transitions\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"The associationist position so far has been neutral on how\\nassociations are to be implemented. Implementation can be seen at a\\nrepresentational (that is psychological) level of explanation, or at\\nthe neural level. A pure associationist picture would posit an\\nassociative implementation base at one, or both, of these\\n levels.[26]\",\n \"The most well-known associative instantiation base is a class of\\nnetworks called Connectionist networks (see\\n the entry on connectionism). \\nConnectionist networks are sometimes pitched at the\\npsychological level (see, e.g., Elman 1991; Elman et al. 1996;\\nSmolensky 1988). This amounts to the claim that models of algorithms\\nembedded in the networks capture the essence of certain mental\\nprocesses, such as associative learning. Other times connectionist\\nnetworks are said to be models of neural activity (“neural\\nnetworks”). Connectionist networks consist in sets of nodes,\\ngenerally input nodes, hidden nodes, and output nodes. Input nodes\\nare taken to be analogs of sensory neurons (or sub-symbolic sensory\\nrepresentations), output nodes the analog of motor neurons (or\\nsub-symbolic behavioral representations), and hidden nodes are\\n stand-ins for all other\\n neurons.[27]\\n The network consists in these nodes\\nbeing connected to each other with varying strengths. The topology of\\nthe connections gives one an associative mapping of the system, with\\nthe associative weights understood as the differing strengths of\\nconnections. On the psychological reading, these associations are\\nfunctionally defined; on the neurological reading, they are generally\\nunderstood to be representing synaptic conductance (and are the\\nanalogs of dendrites).[28] Prima facie, these networks are\\npurely associative and do not contain propositional elements, and the\\nnodes themselves are not to be equated with single representational\\nstates (such as concepts; see, e.g., Gallistel and King 2009).\",\n \"However, a connectionist network can implement a classical Turing\\nmachine architecture (see, e.g., Fodor and McLaughlin\\n1990; Chalmers 1993). Many, if not most, of the\\nadherents of classical computation, for example proponents of CTM,\\nthink that the brain is an associative network, one which implements a\\nclassical computational program. Some adherents of CTM do deny that\\nthe brain runs an associative network (see, e.g., Gallistel and King\\n2009, who appear to deny that there is any scientific level of\\nexplanation that association is intimately involved in), but they do\\nso on separate empirical grounds and not because of any logical\\ninconsistency with an associative brain implementing a classical\\nmind.\",\n \"When discussing an associative implementation base it is important\\nto distinguish questions of associationist structure from questions of\\nrepresentational reality. Connectionists have often been followers of\\nthe Skinnerian anti-representationalist tradition (Skinner 1938).\\nBecause of the distributed nature of the nodes in connectionist\\nnetworks, the networks have tended to be analyzed as associative\\nstimulus/response chains of subsymbolic elements. However, the\\nquestion of whether connectionist networks have representations which\\nare distributed in patterns of activity throughout different nodes of\\nthe network, or whether connectionist networks are best understood as\\ncontaining no representational structures at all, is orthogonal to\\nboth the question of whether the networks are purely associative or\\ncomputational, and whether the networks can implement classical\\narchitectures.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"6. Associative Instantiation\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"These four types of associationism share a certain empiricist\\nspiritual similarity, but are logically, and empirically, separable.\\nThe pure associationist who wants to posit the smallest number of\\ndomain-general mental processes will theorize that the mind consists\\nof associative structures acquired by associative learning which enter\\ninto associative transitions and are implemented in an associative\\ninstantiation base. However, many hybrid views are available and\\nfrequently different associationist positions become mixed and\\nmatched, especially once issues of empiricism, domain-specificity, and\\ngradual learning arise. Below is a partial taxonomy of where some\\nwell-known theorists lie in terms of associationism and these other,\\noften related doctrines.\",\n \"Prinz (2002) and Karmiloff-Smith\\n(1995) are examples of\\nempiricist non-associationists. It is rare to find an associationist\\nwho is a nativist, but plenty of nativists have aspects of\\nassociationism in their own work. For example, even the arch-nativist\\nJerry Fodor maintains that intramodular lexicons contain associative\\nstructures (Fodor 1983). Similarly, there are many non-behaviorist\\n(at least non-radical, analytic, or methodological behaviorist)\\nassociationists, such as Elman (1991), Smolensky (1988), Baeyens (De\\nHouwer and Baeyens 2001), and modern day dual process theorists such as\\nEvans and Stanovich (2013). It is quite difficult to find a\\nnon-associationist behaviorist, though Tolman approximates one\\n(Tolman 1948). Elman and Smolensky also qualify as\\nrepresentationalist associationists, and Van Gelder (1995) as an\\nanti-representationalist non-associationist. Karmiloff-Smith\\n(1995) can be\\ninterpreted as, for some areas of learning, a proponent of gradual\\nlearning without being associationist (some might also read\\ncontemporary Bayesian theorists, e.g., Tenenbaum et al. 2011 and\\nChater et al. 2006 as holding a similar position for some areas of\\nlearning). Rescorla (1988) and Heyes (2012) claim to be\\nassociationists who are pro step-wise, one shot learning (though\\nRescorla sees his project as a continuation of the classical\\nconditioning program, others see his data as grist for the\\nanti-associationist, pro-computationalist mill, see Gallistel and\\nKing 2009; Quilty-Dunn and Mandelbaum 2019). Lastly, Tenenbaum and his contemporary Bayesians\\ncolleagues sometimes qualify as holding a domain-general learning\\nposition without it being\\n associationist.[29]\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"7. Relation between the Varieties of Association and Related Positions\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"Since the cognitive revolution, associationism’s influence\\nhas mostly died out in cognitive psychology and\\npsycholinguistics. This is not to say that all aspects of associative\\ntheorizing are dead in these areas; rather, they have just taken on\\nmuch smaller, more peripheral roles (for example, it has often been suggested that\\nmental lexicons are structured, in part, associatively, which is why\\nlexical decision tasks are taken to be facilitation maps of\\none’s lexicon). In other areas of cognitive psychology (for\\nexample, the study of causal cognition), associationism is no longer\\nthe dominant theoretical paradigm, but vestiges of associationism still persist (see Shanks 2010 for an overview of associationism\\nin causal cognition). Associationism is also still alive in the\\nconnectionist literature, as well as in the animal cognition\\ntradition.\",\n \"But the biggest contemporary stronghold of associationist\\ntheorizing resides in social psychology, an area which has\\ntraditionally been hostile to associationism (see, e.g., Asch 1962,\\n1969). The ascendance of associationism in social psychology has been\\na fairly modern development, and has caused a revival of\\nassociationist theories in philosophy (e.g., Madva and Brownstein 2019). The two\\nareas of social psychology that have seen the greatest renaissance of\\nassociationism are the implicit attitude and dual-process theory\\nliterature. However, in the late 2010s social psychology has begun to take a critical look at associationist theories (e.g., Mann et al. 2019).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"8. Associationism in Social Psychology\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Implicit attitudes are generally operationally defined as the attitudes tested on implicit tests such as the Implicit Association Test\\n(Greenwald et al. 1998), the Affect Misattribution Procedure (Payne et\\nal. 2005), the Sorted Paired Feature Task (Bar-Annan et al. 2009) and\\nthe Go/No-Go Association Task (Nosek and Banaji 2001). Implicit attitudes are contrasted with explicit attitudes, attitudes operationalized as the one’s being probed when one gives an explicit response like a marking on a Likert scale, feeling thermometer, or in free report. Such operationalizations leave open the question of whether there are any natural kinds to which explicit and implicit attitudes refer. In general implicit attitudes are characterized as being mental\\nrepresentations that are unavailable for explicit report and inaccessible to consciousness (cf. Hahn et al. 2014; Berger 2020).\",\n \"\\nThe default position among social psychologists is to treat implicit attitudes as\\nif they are associations among mental representations (Fazio 2007), or\\namong pairs of mental representations and valences. In particular,\\nthey treat implicit attitudes as associative structures which enter\\ninto associative transitions. Recently this issue has come under much\\ndebate. In an ever expanding series of studies De Houwer and his collaborators have taken to show that associative learning is, at base, relational, propositional contingency learning; i.e., that all putatively associative learning is in fact a nonautomatic learning process that generates and evaluates propositional hypotheses (Mitchell et al. 2009; De Houwer 2009, 2011, 2014 2019; Hughes et al. 2019). Other researchers have approached the question also using learning as the entrance point to the debate, demonstrating effects that non-associative acquisition creates stronger attitudes than associative acquisition (Hughes et al. 2019). For example, one might demonstrate that learning through merely reading an evaluative statement creates a stronger implicit attitude than repeated associative exposures (Kurdi and Banaji 2017, 2019; Mann et al. 2019). Other researchers have championed propositional models not based on learning, but instead based on how implicit attitudes change regardless of how they are acquired. For instance, Mandelbaum (2016) argued that logical/evidential interventions modulate implicit attitudes in predictable ways (e.g., using double negation to cancel each other out), while others have used diagnosticity to show that implicit attitudes update in a non-associationistic, propositional way (e.g., after reading a story about a man who broke into a building and appeared to ransack it you learn that we jumped into save people from a fire and immediately change your opinion of the man from negative to positive; Mann and Ferguson 2015; Mann et al. 2017; Van Dessel et al. 2019). (For more on implicit attitudes see the entry\\non\\n implicit bias).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"8.1 Implicit Attitudes\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Associative structures and transitions are widely implicated in a\\nparticular type of influential dual-process theory. Though there are\\nmany dual-process theories in social psychology (see, e.g., the papers\\nin Chaiken and Trope 1999, or the discussion in Evans and Stanovich\\n2013), the one most germane to associationism is also the most\\npopular. It originates from work in the psychology of reasoning and\\nis often also invoked in the heuristics and biases tradition (see,\\ne.g., Kahneman 2011). It has been developed by many different\\npsychological theorists (Sloman 1996; Smith and Decoster 2000; Wilson\\net al. 2000;\\nEvans and Stanovich 2013) and, in parts, taken up by\\nphilosophers too (see, e.g., Gendler 2008; Frankish 2009; see also\\nsome of the essays in Evans and Frankish 2009).\",\n \"The dual-process strain most relevant to the current discussion\\nposits two systems, one evolutionarily ancient intuitive system\\nunderlying unconscious, automatic, fast, parallel and associative\\nprocessing, the other an evolutionarily recent reflective system\\ncharacterized by conscious, controlled, slow,\\n“rule-governed” serial processes (see, e.g., Evans and\\nStanovich 2013). The\\nancient system, sometimes called “System 1”, is often\\nunderstood to include a collection of autonomous, distinct\\nsubsystems, each of which is recruited to deal with distinct types of\\nproblems (see Stanovich 2011 for a discussion of\\n“TASS—the autonomous set of systems”). Although\\ntheories differ on how System 1 interacts with System\\n 2,[30] the\\ntheoretical core of System 1 is arguing that its processing is\\nessentially associative. As in the implicit attitude debate, dual\\nsystems models have recently come under fire (see Kruglanski 2013;\\nOsman 2013; Mandelbaum 2016; De Houwer 2019), though they remain very\\npopular.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"8.2 Dual Process Theories\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"Associationism has been a dominant theme in mental theorizing for\\ncenturies. As such, it has garnered an appreciable amount of\\ncriticism.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"9. Criticisms of Associationism\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"The basic associative learning theories imply, either explicitly or\\nimplicitly, slow, gradual learning of associations (Baeyens et al.\\n1995). The learning process can be summarized in a learning curve\\nwhich plots the frequency (or magnitude) of the conditioned response\\nas a function of the number of reinforcements (Gallistel et al. 2004:\\n13124). Mappings between CRs and USs are gradually built up over\\nnumerous trials (in the lab) or experiences (in the world). Gradual,\\nslow learning has come under fire from a variety of areas (see sections 9.3 and 9.4.1). However, here we just\\nfocus on the behavioral data. In a series of works re-analyzing animal\\nbehavior, Gallistel (Gallistel et al. 2004; Gallistel and King 2009)\\nhas argued that although group-level learning curves do\\ndisplay the properties of being negatively accelerated and gradually\\ndeveloping, these curves are misleading because\\nno individual’s learning curve has these\\nproperties. Gallistel has argued that learning for individuals is\\ngenerally step-like, rapid, and abrupt. An individual’s learning\\nfrom a low-level of responding to asymptotic responding is very quick.\\nSometimes, the learning is so quick that it is literally one-shot\\nlearning. For example, after analyzing multiple experiments of animal\\nlearning of spatial location Gallistel writes\",\n \"The learning of a spatial location generally\\nrequires but a single experience. Several trials may, however, be\\nrequired to convince the subject that the location is predictable from\\ntrial to trial. (Gallistel et al. 2004: 13130)\",\n \"Gallistel argues that the reason the group learning curves look to\\nbe smooth and gradual is that there are large individual differences\\nbetween subjects in terms of when the onset latency of the step-wise\\ncurves begin (Gallistel et al. 2004: 13125); in other words, different\\nanimals take different amounts of time for the learning to\\ncommence. The differences between individual subject’s learning\\ncurves are predicated on when the steps begin and not by the speed of\\nthe individual animal’s learning process. All individuals appear\\nto show rapid rises in learning, but since each begins their learning\\nat a different time, when we average over the group, the rapid step-wise\\nlearning appears to look like slow, gradual learning (Gallistel et\\nal. 2004: 13124).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"9.1 Learning Curves\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"The problem of predication is, at its core, a problem of how an\\nassociative mechanism can result in the acquisition of\\nsubject/predicate structures, structures which many theorists believe\\nappear in language, thought, and judgment. The first major discussion\\nof the problem appears in Kant (1781/1787), but variants of the basic\\nKantian criticism can be seen across the contemporary literature (see,\\ne.g., Chomsky 1959; Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988; Fodor 2003; Mandelbaum\\n2013a; for the details of the Kantian argument see the entry\\n on Kant’s Transcendental Argument).\",\n \"For a pure associationist, association is “semantically\\ntransparent” (see Fodor 2003), in that it purports to add no\\nadditional structure to thoughts. When a simple concept, X\\nand a simple concept Y, become associated one acquires the\\nassociative structure X/Y. But X/Y\\nhas no additional structure on top of their contents. Knowing\\nthat X and Y are associated amounts to knowing a\\ncausal fact: that activating Xs will bring about the\\nactivation of Ys and vice versa. However, so the\\nargument goes, some of our thoughts appear to have more structure than\\nthis: the thought\\n birds fly predicates the property of flying onto\\nbirds. The task for the associationist is to explain how associative\\nstructures can distinguish a thinker who has a single (complex)\\nthought\\n birds fly from a thinker who conjoins two simple thoughts in\\nan associative structure where one thought,\\n birds, is immediately\\nfollowed by another,\\n fly. As long as the two simple thoughts are\\nreliably causally correlated so that, for a thinker, activations of\\nbirds regularly brings about\\n fly, then that thinker has the\\nassociative structure\\n birds/fly. Yet it appears that thinker\\nhasn’t yet had the thought\\n birds fly. The problem of predication\\nis explaining how a purely associative mechanism could eventuate in\\ncomplex thoughts. In Fodor’s terms the problem boils down to how\\nassociation, a causal relation among mental representations, can\\naffect predication, a relation among intentional contents (Fodor\\n2003).\",\n \"A family of related objections to associationism can be interpreted\\nas variations on this theme. For example, problems of productivity,\\ncompositionality, and systematicity for associationist theorizing\\nappear to be variants of the problem of predication (for more on these\\n specific issues see the entries on the\\n Language of Thought Hypothesis and\\n on compositionality). If\\nassociation doesn’t add any additional structure to the mental\\nrepresentations that get associated, then it is hard to see how it can\\nexplain the compositionality of thought, which relies on structures\\nthat specify relations among intentional contents. Compositionality\\nrequires that the meaning of a complex thought is determined by the\\nmeanings of its simple constituents along with their syntactic\\narrangements. The challenge to associationism is to explain how an\\nassociative mechanism can give rise to the syntactic structures\\nnecessary to distinguish a complex thought like\\n\\n birds fly from the\\ntemporal succession of two simple thoughts\\n\\n birds and\\n fly. Since the\\ncompositionality of thought is posited to undergird the productivity\\nof thought (thinkers’ abilities to think novel sentences of\\narbitrary lengths, e.g.,\\n green birds fly,\\n giant green birds fly,\\ncuddly giant green birds fly, etc.), associationism has problems\\nexplaining productivity.\",\n \"Systematicity is the thesis that there are predictable patterns\\namong which thoughts a thinker is capable of entertaining. Thinkers\\nthat can entertain thoughts of certain structures can always entertain\\ndistinct thoughts that have related structure. For instance, any\\nthinker who can think a complex thought of the form “X\\ntransitive verb Y” can think “Y\\ntransitive verb X”.[31] Systematicity entails that we\\nwon’t find any thinker that can only think one of those\\ntwo thoughts, in which case we could not find a person who could think\\naudrey wronged max, but not\\n\\n max wronged audrey. Of course, these two\\nthoughts have very different effects in one’s cognitive\\neconomy. The challenge for the associationist is to explain how the\\nassociative structure\\n audrey/wronged/max can be distinguished from the\\nstructure\\n max/wronged/audrey, while capturing the differences in those\\nthoughts’ effects.\",\n \"Associationists have had different responses to the problem. Some\\nhave denied that human thought is actually compositional, productive,\\nand systematic, and other non-associationists have agreed with this\\ncritique. For example, Prinz and Clark claim “concepts do not\\ncompose most of the time” (2002: 62), and Johnson (2004) argues\\nthat the systematicity criterion is wrongheaded (see Aydede 1997 for\\nextended discussion of these issues). Rumelhart et al. offer a\\nconnectionist interpretation of “schemata”, one which is\\nintended to cover some of the phenomenon mentioned in this section\\n(Rumelhart et al. 1986). Others have worked to show that classical\\nconditioning can indeed give rise to complex associative structures\\n(Rescorla 1988). In defense of the associationist construal of complex\\nassociations Rescorla writes,\",\n \"Clearly, the animals had not simply coded the RH\\n[complex] compound in terms of parallel associations with its\\nelements. Rather they had engaged in some more hierarchical\\nstructuring of the situation, forming a representation of the compound\\nand using it as an associate. (Rescorla 1988: 156)\",\n \"\\n\\nWhether or not associationism has the theoretical\\ntools to explain such complex compounds by itself is still debated\\n(see, e.g., Fodor 2003; Mitchell 2009; Gallistel and King 2009; Quilty-Dunn and Mandelbaum 2019).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"9.2 The Problem of Predication\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Multiple issues in the acquisition of the lexicon appear to cause\\nproblems for associationism. Some of the most well known examples are\\nreviewed below (for further discussion of word learning and\\nassociationism see Bloom 2000).\",\n \"Children learn words at an incredible rate, acquiring around 6,000\\nwords by age 6 (Carey 2010: 184). If gradual learning is the rule,\\nthen words too should be learned gradually across this time. However,\\nthis does not appear to be the case. Susan Carey\\ndiscovered the phenomenon of “fast mapping”, which is\\none-shot learning of a word (Carey 1978a, 1978b; Carey and Bartlett\\n1978). Her most influential example investigated children’s\\nacquisition of “chromium” (a color word referring to olive\\ngreen). Children were shown one of two otherwise identical objects,\\nwhich only differed in color and asked, “Can you get me the\\nchromium tray, not the red one, the chromium one” (recited in\\nCarey 2010: 2). All of the children handed over the correct tray at\\nthat time. When the children were later tested in differing contexts,\\nmore than half remembered the referent of\\n“chromium”. These findings have been extended—for\\nexample, Markson and Bloom (1997) showed that they are not specific to\\nthe remembering of novel words, but also hold for novel facts.\",\n \"Fast mapping poses two problems for associationism. The first is\\nthat the learning of a new word did not develop slowly, as would be\\npredicted by proponents of gradual learning. The second is that in\\norder for the word learning to proceed, the mind must have been aided\\nby additional principles not given by the environment. Some of these\\nprinciples such as Markman’s (1989) taxonomic, whole object, and\\nmutual exclusivity constraints, and Gleitman’s syntactic\\nbootstrapping (Gleitman et al. 2005), imply that the mind does add structure to what is\\nlearned. Consequently, the associationist claim that learning is just\\nmapping external contingencies without adding structure is\\nimperiled.\",\n \"“Motherese”, the name of the type of language that\\ninfants generally hear, consists of simple sentences such as\\n“Nora want a bottle?” and “Are you tired?”.\\nThese sentences almost always contain a noun and a verb. Yet, the\\ninfant’s vocabulary massively over-represents nouns in the first\\n100 words or so, while massively under-representing the verbs (never\\nmind adjectives or adverbs, which almost never appear in the first 100\\nwords infants produce; see, e.g., Goldin-Meadow, Seligman, and Gelman\\n1976). Even more surprising is that the over-representation of\\nnouns to verbs holds even though\",\n \"the incidence of each word (that is, the token\\nfrequency) is higher for the verbs than for the nouns in the common\\nset used by mothers. (Snedeker and Gleitman 2004: 259, citing data\\nfrom Sandhoffer, Smith, and Luo 2000)\\n\",\n \"Moreover, children hear a preponderance of\\ndeterminers (“the” and “a”) but don’t\\nproduce them (Bloom 2000). These facts are not specific to English,\\nbut hold cross-culturally (see, e.g., Caselli et al. 1995). The\\ndisparity between the variation of the syntactic categories infants\\nreceive as input and produce as output is troublesome to\\nassociationism, insofar as associationism is committed to the learned\\nstructures (and the behaviors that follow from them) merely\\npatterning what is given in experience.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"9.3 Word Learning\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Contiguity has been a central part of associationist analyses since\\nthe British Empiricists. In the experimental literature, the problem\\nof figuring out the parameters needed for acquiring an association due to the contiguity of its relata has sometimes\\nbeen termed the problem of the “Window of Association”\\n(e.g., Gallistel and King 2009). Every associationist theory has to specify what temporal window two properties must instantiate in order for those properties to be associated.[32]\\nA related problem for contiguity theorists is that if the domain\\ngenerality of associative learning is desired, then the window needs\\nto be homogenous across content domains. The late 1960s saw\\npersuasive attacks on domain generality, as well as the necessity and\\nsufficiency of the contiguity criterion in general.\",\n \"Research on “taste aversions” and\\n“bait-shyness” provided a variety of problems with\\ncontiguity in the associative learning tradition of classical\\nconditioning. Garcia observed that a gustatory stimulus (e.g.,\\ndrinking water or eating a hot dog) but not an audiovisual stimulus (a\\nlight and a sound) would naturally become associated with feeling\\nnauseated. For instance, Garcia and Koelling (1966) paired an\\naudiovisual stimulus (a light and a sound) with a gustatory stimulus\\n(flavored water). The two stimuli were then paired with the rats\\nreceiving radiation, which made the rats feel nauseated. The rats\\nassociated the feeling of nausea with the water and not with the\\nsound, even though the sound was contiguous with the water. Moreover,\\nthe delay between ingesting the gustatory stimulus and feeling\\nnauseated could be quite long, with the feeling not coming on until 12\\nhours later (Roll and Smith 1972), and the organism needn’t even\\nbe conscious when the negative feeling arises. (For a review, see\\nSeligman 1970; Garcia et al. 1974). The temporal delay shows that the\\nCS (the flavored water) needn’t be contiguous with the US (the\\nfeeling of nausea) in order for learning to occur, thus showing that\\ncontiguity isn’t necessary for associative learning.\",\n \"Garcia’s work also laid bare the problems with the domain\\ngeneral aspect of associationism. In the above study the rat was\\nprepared to associate the nausea with the gustatory stimulus, but\\nwould not associate it with the audiovisual stimulus. However, if one\\nchanges the US from feeling nauseated to receiving shocks in perfect\\ncontiguity with the audiovisual and gustatory stimuli, then the rats\\nwill associate the shocks with the audiovisual stimulus but not with\\nthe gustatory stimulus. That is, rats are prepared to associate\\naudiovisual stimuli with the shock but are contraprepared to associate\\nthe shocks with the gustatory stimulus. Thus, learning does not seem\\nto be entirely domain general (for similar content specificity\\neffects in humans, see Baeyens et al.\\n 1990).[33]\",\n \"Lastly, “The Garcia effect” has also been used to show\\n problems in the learning curve (see section 9.1). \\n“Taste aversions” are the phenomena whereby an\\norganism gets sick from ingesting the stimulus and the taste (or odor,\\nGarcia et al. 1974) of that stimulus gets associated with the feeling\\nof sickness. As anyone who has had food poisoning can attest, this\\nlearning can proceed in a one-shot fashion, and needn’t have a\\ngradual rise over many trials (taste aversions have also been observed\\nin humans, see, e.g., Bernstein and Webster 1980; Bernsetin 1985;\\nLogue et al. 1981; Rozin 1986).\",\n \"Kamin’s famous blocking experiments (1969) showed that not\\nall contiguous structures lead to classical conditioning. A rat that\\nhas already learned that CS1 predicts a US, will not learn that a\\nsubsequent CS2 predicts the US, if the CS2 is always paired with the\\nCS1. Suppose that a rat has learned that a light predicts a shock\\nbecause of the constant contiguity of the light and shock. After\\nlearning this, the rat has a sound introduced which only arises in\\nconjunction with the light and the shock. As long as the rat had\\npreviously learned that the light predicts the shock, it will not\\nlearn that the sound does (as can be seen on later trials that have\\nthe sound alone). In sum, having learned that the CS1 predicts the US\\nblocks the organism from learning that the CS2 predicts the\\n US.[34] So even\\nthough CS2 is perfectly contiguous with the US, the association\\nbetween CS2 and the US remains unlearned, thus serving as a\\ncounterexample to sufficiency of\\n contiguity.[35]\",\n \"Similarly Rescorla (1968) demonstrated that a CS can appear only\\nwhen the US appears and yet still have the association between them be\\nunlearnable. If a tone is arranged to bellow only when there are\\nshocks, but there are still shocks when there are no tones (that is,\\nthe CS only appears with the US, but the US sometimes appears without\\nthe CS), no associative learning between the CS and the US will occur.\\nInstead, subjects (in Rescorla 1968, rats) will only learn a\\nconnection between the shock and the experimental\\nsituation—e.g., the room in which the experiment is carried\\nout.\",\n \"In large part because of the problems discussed in 9.4, many\\nclassical conditioning theorists gave up the traditional\\nprogram. Some, like Garcia, appeared to give up the classical\\ntheoretical framework altogether (Garcia et al. 1974), others, such\\nas Rescorla and Wagner, tried to usher the framework into the modern\\nera (see, Rescorla and Wagner 1972; Rescorla 1988), where\\nconditioning is seen as sensitive to base rates and driven by\\ninformational \\npick-up.[36] \\nWhether this movement is interpreted as\\na substantive revision of classical conditioning (Rescorla 1988;\\nHeyes 2012) or a wholesale abandoning of it (Gallistel and King 2009)\\nis debatable.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"9.4 Against the Contiguity Analysis of Associationism\"\n }\n ]\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Anderson, J., K. Spoehr, and D. Bennett, 1994, “A Study in\nNumerical Perversity: Teaching Arithmetic to a Neural Network”,\nin Neural Networks for Knowledge Representation and\nInference, D. Levine and M. 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The Default Interventionist\\nPerspective as a Unimodel—Commentary on Evans &\\nStanovich”, Perspectives on Psychological\\nScience, 8(3): 242–247.\",\n \"Kurdi, B., and M. Banaji, 2017, “Repeated evaluative pairings and evaluative statements: How effectively do they shift implicit attitudes?”, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146(2): 194–213.\",\n \"–––, 2019, “Attitude change via repeated evaluative pairings versus evaluative statements: Shared and unique features”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 116(5): 681–703.\",\n \"Locke, J., 1690, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,\\nin Peter H. Nidditch (ed.), An Essay Concerning Human\\nUnderstanding, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975,\",\n \"Logue, A., I. Ophir, and K. Strauss, 1981, “The Acquisition\\nof Taste Aversion in Humans”, Behavioral Research and\\nTherapy, 19(4): 319–33.\",\n \"Luka, B., and L. 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Brownstein, 2018, “Stereotypes, Prejudice, and the Taxonomy of the Implicit Social Mind”, Nous, 52(3): 611–644.\",\n \"Mandelbaum, E., 2013a, “Against\\nAlief”, Philosophical Studies, 165(1):\\n197–211.\",\n \"–––, 2013b, “Numerical Architecture”, Topics in Cognitive Science, 5(2): 367–386.\",\n \"–––, 2016, “Attitude, Inference,\\nAssociation: On the Propositional Structure of Implicit\\nAttitudes”, Nous, 50(3): 629–658.\",\n \"–––, 2017, “Seeing and Conceptualizing: Modularity and the Shallow Contents of Vision”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 97(2): 267–283.\",\n \"–––, 2019, “Troubles with Bayesianism: An Introduction to the Psychological Immune System”, Mind & Language, 34(2): 141–157.\",\n \"Mann, T., and M. Ferguson, 2015, “Can we undo our first impressions? The role of reinterpretation in reversing implicit evaluations”, Journal of Social and Personality Psychology, 108(6): 823–849.\",\n \"–––, 2017, “Reversing implicit first impressions through reinterpretation after a two-day delay.”, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 68: 122–127.\",\n \"Mann, T., B. Kurdi, and M. Banaji, 2019, “ How effectively can implicit evaluations be updated? Using evaluative statements after aversive repeated evaluative pairings”, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, doi: 10.1037/xge0000701.\",\n \"Markman, E., 1989, Categorization and Naming in Children:\\nProblems of Induction, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.\",\n \"Markson, L. and P. Bloom, 1997, “Evidence Against a\\nDedicated System for Word Learning in\\nChildren”, Nature, 385(6619): 813–815.\",\n \"Marr, D., 1982, Vision: A Computational Investigation into the\\nHuman Representation and Processing of Visual Information, NY:\\nW.H. Freeman and Co.\",\n \"Mason, M. and M. Bar, 2012, “The Effect of Mental\\nProgression on Mood”, Journal of Experimental Psychology:\\nGeneral, 141(2): 217–221. doi:10.1037/a0025035\",\n \"McClelland, J., M. Botvinick, D. Noelle, D. Plaut, T. Rogers,\\nM. Seidenberg, and L. Smith, 2010, “Letting Structure Emerge:\\nConnectionist and Dynamic Systems Approaches to\\nCognition”, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(8):\\n348–356.\",\n \"Minsky, M., 1963, “Steps toward Artificial\\nIntelligence”, in E. Feigenbaum and J. Feldman\\n(eds.), Computers And Thought, New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, pp.\\n406–450.\",\n \"Mitchell, C., J. De Houwer, and P. Lovibond, 2009, “The\\nPropositional Nature of Human Associative\\nLearning”, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32(2):\\n183–246.\",\n \"Nosek, B. and M. Banaji, 2001, “The Go/No-Go Association\\nTask”, Social Cognition, 19(6): 625–66.\",\n \"Osman, M., 2013, “A Case Study Dual-Process Theories of\\nHigher Cognition—Commentary on Evans &\\nStanovich”, Perspectives on Psychological\\nScience, 8(3): 248–252.\",\n \"Pavlov, I., 1906, “The Scientific Investigation of the\\nPsychical Faculties or Processes in the Higher\\nAnimals”, Science, 24(620): 613–619.\",\n \"–––, 1927, Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Payne, B., Cheng, C., Govorun, O., and Stewart, B., 2005, “An\\nInkblot for Attitudes: Affect Misattribution as Implicit\\nMeasurement”, Journal of Personality and Social\\nPsychology, 89(3): 277–293.\",\n \"Perea, M. and E. Rosa, 2002, “The Effects of Associative and\\nSemantic Priming in the Lexical Decision\\nTask”, Psychological Research, 66(3):\\n180–194.\",\n \"Prinz, J., 2002, Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and their\\nPerceptual Basis, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.\",\n \"––– and A. Clark, 2004, “Putting Concepts to Work:\\nSome Thoughts for the 21st Century”, Mind &\\nLanguage, 19(1): 57–69.\",\n \"Quilty-Dunn, J. forthcoming, “Perceptual Pluralism”, Nous, 1–41.\",\n \"Quilty-Dunn, J. and E. Mandelbaum, 2018, “Inferential Transitions”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 96(3): 532–547.\",\n \"–––, 2019, “Non-Inferential Transitions: Imagery and Association”, in T. Chan and A. Nes (eds.),Inference and Consciousness, New York: Routledge, pp. 151–171.\",\n \"Rescorla, R., 1968, “Probability of Shock in the Presence\\nand Absence of CS in Fear Conditioning”, Journal of\\nComparative and Physiological Psychology, 66(1): 1–5.\",\n \"–––, 1988, “Pavlovian Conditioning:\\nIt’s Not What You Think It Is”, American\\nPsychologist, 43(3): 151–160.\",\n \"Rescorla, E., and A. Wagner, 1972, “A Theory of Pavlovian\\nConditioning: Variations in the Effectiveness of Reinforcement and\\nNonreinforcement”, in Black and Prokasy 1972, pp. 64–99.\",\n \"Roll, D. and J. Smith, 1972, “Conditioned Taste Aversion in\\nAnesthetized Rats”, in M. Hager and J. Seligman\\n(eds.), Biological Boundaries of Learning. New York:\\nAppleton-Century-Crofts, pp. 98–102.\",\n \"Rozin, P., 1986, “One-Trial Acquired Likes and Dislikes in\\nHumans: Disgust as a US, Food Predominance, and Negative Learning\\nPredominance”, Learning and Motivation, 17(2):\\n180–189.\",\n \"Rumelhart, D., P. Smolensky, J. McClelland, and G. Hinton, 1986,\\n“Sequential Thought Processes in PDP Models”, in\\nJ.McClelland and D. Rumelhart (eds.), Parallel Distributed\\nProcessing Vol. 2: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition:\\nPsychological and Biological Models, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.\\n7–57.\",\n \"Rusiniak, K., W. Hankins, J. Garcia, and L. Brett, 1979,\\n“Flavor-illness Aversions: Potentiation of Odor by Taste in\\nRats”, Behavioral and Neural Biology, 25(1):\\n1–17.\",\n \"Rydell, R. and A. McConnell, 2006, “Understanding Implicit\\nand Explicit Attitude Change: A Systems of Reasoning\\nAnalysis”, Journal of Personality and Social\\nPsychology, 91(6): 995–1008.\",\n \"Sandhoffer, C., L. Smith, and J. Luo, 2000, “Counting Nouns\\nand Verbs in the Input: Differential Frequencies, Different Kinds of\\nLearning?”, Journal of Child Language, 27(3):\\n561–585.\",\n \"Seligman, M., 1970, “On the Generality of the Laws of\\nLearning”, Psychological Review, 77(5):\\n406–418.\",\n \"Shanks, D., 2010, “Learning: From Association to\\nCognition”, Annual Review of Psychology, 1,\\n273–301.\",\n \"Skinner, B., 1938, The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimental\\nAnalysis, Oxford: Appleton-Century.\",\n \"–––, 1953, Science and Human\\nBehavior, New York: Simon and Schuster.\",\n \"Sloman, S., 1996, “The Empirical Case for Two Systems of\\nReasoning”, Psychological Bulletin, 119(1):\\n3–22.\",\n \"Smith, E. R. and J. DeCoster, 2000, “Dual-Process Models in\\nSocial and Cognitive Psychology: Conceptual Integration and Links to\\nUnderlying Memory Systems”, Personality and Social\\nPsychology Review, 4(2): 108–131.\",\n \"Smith, J. and D. Roll, 1967, “Trace Conditioning with X-rays\\nas an Aversive Stimulus”, Psychonomic Science, 9(1):\\n11–12.\",\n \"Smolensky, P., 1988, “On the Proper Treatment of\\nConnectionism”, Behavioral and Bruin Sciences, 11(1):\\nl–23.\",\n \"Snedeker, J. and L. Gleitman, 2004, “Why it is Hard to Label\\nOur Concepts”, in D. Hall and S. Waxman (eds.), Weaving a\\nLexicon, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 257–294.\",\n \"Stanovich, K., 2011, Rationality and the Reflective Mind,\\nNew York: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Tenenbaum, J., C. Kemp, T. Griffiths, and N. Goodman, 2011,\\n“How to Grow a Mind: Statistics, Structure, and\\nAbstraction”, Science, 331(6022): 1279–1285.\",\n \"Thorndike, E., 1911, Animal intelligence: Experimental\\nstudies, New York: Macmillan.\",\n \"Todrank, J., D. Byrnes, A. Wrzesniewski, and P. Rozin, 1995,\\n“Odors can Change Preferences for People in Photographs: A\\nCross-Modal Evaluative Conditioning Study with Olfactory USs and\\nVisual CSs”, Learning and Motivation, 26(2):\\n116–140.\",\n \"Tolman, E., 1948, “Cognitive Maps in Rats and\\nMen”, Psychological Review, 55(4): 189–208.\",\n \"Van Dessel, P., Y. Ye, and J. De Houwer 2019, “Chaning\\ndeep-rooted implicit evaluation in the blink of an eye: engative\\nverbal information shifts automatic liking of Gandhi”,\\nSocial Psychological and Personality Science, 10(2):\\n266–273.\",\n \"Van Gelder, T., 1995, “What Might Cognition Be, If not\\nComputation?”, The Journal of Philosophy, 91(7):\\n345–381.\",\n \"Vansteenwegen, D., G. Francken, B. Vervliet, A. De Clercq, and\\nP. Eelen, 2006, “Resistance to Extinction in Evaluative\\nConditioning”, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal\\nBehavior Processes, 32(1): 71–79.\",\n \"Wilson, T., S. Lindsey, and T. Schooler, 2000, “A Model of\\nDual Attitudes”, Psychological Review, 107(1):\\n 101–26.\\n [Wilson, Lindsey, and Schooler 2000 available online]\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../behaviorism/","text":"behaviorism"},{"href":"../compositionality/","text":"compositionality"},{"href":"../connectionism/","text":"connectionism"},{"href":"../hume/","text":"Hume, David"},{"href":"../kant-transcendental/","text":"Kant, Immanuel: transcendental arguments"},{"href":"../logical-form/","text":"logical form"},{"href":"../mill/","text":"Mill, John Stuart"},{"href":"../computational-mind/","text":"mind: computational theory of"},{"href":"../scottish-19th/","text":"Scottish Philosophy: in the 19th century"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../behaviorism/\",\n \"text\": \"behaviorism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../compositionality/\",\n \"text\": \"compositionality\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../connectionism/\",\n \"text\": \"connectionism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../hume/\",\n \"text\": \"Hume, David\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../kant-transcendental/\",\n \"text\": \"Kant, Immanuel: transcendental arguments\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../logical-form/\",\n \"text\": \"logical form\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../mill/\",\n \"text\": \"Mill, John Stuart\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../computational-mind/\",\n \"text\": \"mind: computational theory of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../scottish-19th/\",\n \"text\": \"Scottish Philosophy: in the 19th century\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":87,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"astell"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Mary Astell"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Fri Jul 1, 2005; substantive revision Wed Dec 9, 2015"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nMary Astell (1666–1731) was an English philosopher. She was born\nin Newcastle, and lived her adult life in London. Her patrons were\nLady Ann Coventry, Lady Elizabeth Hastings, and Catherine Jones, and\namong those in her intellectual circle were Lady Mary Chudleigh,\nJudith Drake, Elizabeth Elstob, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and John\nNorris. In addition to a number of pamphlets, she wrote the following\nbooks: ","\n Today she is best known for her theories on the education of women\nand her critiques of Norris and John Locke."],"string":"[\n \"\\nMary Astell (1666–1731) was an English philosopher. She was born\\nin Newcastle, and lived her adult life in London. Her patrons were\\nLady Ann Coventry, Lady Elizabeth Hastings, and Catherine Jones, and\\namong those in her intellectual circle were Lady Mary Chudleigh,\\nJudith Drake, Elizabeth Elstob, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and John\\nNorris. In addition to a number of pamphlets, she wrote the following\\nbooks: \",\n \"\\n Today she is best known for her theories on the education of women\\nand her critiques of Norris and John Locke.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Metaphysics","sub_toc":["1.1 God","1.2 Individuation among Beings","1.3 The Relation between God and His Creatures"]},{"content_title":"2. Epistemology","sub_toc":["2.1 Mind and Ideas","2.2 Knowledge and Belief","2.3 Method"]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":["Primary Sources","Secondary Sources"]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Metaphysics\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"1.1 God\",\n \"1.2 Individuation among Beings\",\n \"1.3 The Relation between God and His Creatures\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Epistemology\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"2.1 Mind and Ideas\",\n \"2.2 Knowledge and Belief\",\n \"2.3 Method\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"Primary Sources\",\n \"Secondary Sources\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\nMary Astell designed her metaphysics around an account of God and his\ncreation. She was a dualist, maintaining that the two kinds of\nbeings—minds and bodies—come in various degrees of\nfinitude and corruptibility: God is the infinite and incorruptible\nmind; human minds and corporeal particles are finite, naturally\nincorruptible beings; and human bodies and physical objects are\nfinite, naturally corruptible beings."],"section_title":"1. Metaphysics","subsections":[{"content":["\nAccording to Astell, God is the “First Intelligence,” the\nbeing whose nature is to be infinite in all perfections. Among his\nperfections, Astell often lists wisdom, goodness, justice, holiness,\nintelligence, presence, power, and self-existence. In keeping with\nrationalist views of the period, Astell maintains that the correct\nunderstanding of metaphysics turns on the correct understanding of\nGod. For this reason, much of her work is dedicated to demonstrating\nnot only what God is, but also how a correct understanding of him can\nbe attained.","\nHer earliest such account is in A Serious Proposal to the\nLadies, where she demonstrates the existence, perfection, and\nnecessary creative power of God. She begins by giving an example of\nthe correct method for attaining knowledge, one similar to those\ndeveloped by Descartes in Discourse on the Method and Arnauld\nand Nicole in Logic or the Art of Thinking (see section 2.3\nof this entry). Her proof of God’s existence includes an account of\nsimple and composed ideas; clear and distinct perceptions, and obscure\nand confused perceptions; adequate and inadequate ideas; proofs by\nintuition and proofs by comparison of ideas; God’s perfections and our\nideas of God’s perfections; and the relation between ideas and terms\n(Astell 2002, 176–182). In Christian Religion, she\nframes other arguments for God’s existence in terms of what we can and\ncannot doubt; God’s perfections and our ideas of God’s perfections;\ncausality; and the beauty of the created universe (Astell 1705,\n7–10 [sections 7–10]).","\nAt times, Astell privileges some of God’s perfections over others. In\nChristian Religion, when stating her ontological argument for\nGod’s existence, she notes that “I find that the notion I have\nof GOD, contains those and all other perfections. Among which\nSelf-existence is most remarkable, as being the original and basis of\nall the rest” (Astell 1705, 8 [section 7]). This claim is about\nthe order of ideas: her idea of God’s self-existence allows her\nto understand his other perfections. A few lines later, she makes the\nanalogous claim about the order of reality: “And Self-existence\nis such a Perfection as necessarily includes all other\nperfections” (Astell 1705, 8 [section 8]).","\nBroad (2002a, 103) reveals evidence that Astell privileges God’s\nwisdom and goodness over his omnipotence. There are two ways that\nphilosophers of the period thought about God’s attributes of wisdom,\npower, and goodness. Some held “intellectualist” theories,\naccording to which God exercises his will in accordance with the true\nnature of things; others held “voluntarist”\ntheories, according to which God exercises his will to create both\nthings and the truth of things. In showing that Astell maintains an\nintellectualist theology, Broad refers to a number of passages, one of\nwhich is the following:","\n This is then the sum of the matter; GOD who is Infinite in all\n Perfections, in Justice and Holiness, as well as in Goodness and\n Mercy, always does what is best and most becoming His Perfections,\n and cannot act but according to the Essential Nature and Reason of\n things; nor is it possible that our Wishes or Actions shou’d make\n any alteration in the immutable Rectitude of His Conduct. (Astell\n 1705, 95 [section 105]; see also Astell 2002, 205; Astell 1705, 416\n [section 407])\n"],"subsection_title":"1.1 God"},{"content":["\nThroughout her texts, Astell is concerned with giving an account of\nhow created beings are individuated from each other. Ultimately, she\nmaintains that there are four kinds of created beings: minds, bodies,\nmind–body unions, and the particles that compose bodies.","\nAbout finite minds considered on their own, Astell differs quite\nradically from Descartes. In Discourse on the Method,\nDescartes remarks that all minds have the same ability to reason (AT\n2; CSM 111). According to Astell, on the other hand, God creates minds\nwith intrinsic differences. She gives a number of reasons for this\nview. One has to do with the relationships that God wants minds to\nhave with each other: humans form community only if their minds have\ndifferent intellectual capacities. Another concerns the relationship\nbetween created minds and God: minds were made to contemplate and\nenjoy God, and God needs their adoration and love. But each mind is\nlimited and, thus, can only love God by adoring a limited amount of\nhis works. So God creates many minds, each with an ability to\nunderstand a certain collection of truths, and in this way all of his\ncreation is attended to (Astell 2002, 144–146,\n154–155).","\nThough Astell discusses minds as if they are sometimes isolated from\nbodies, she maintains that human beings are mind–body\nunions. She notes that we cannot comprehend the connection between the\nmind and body: “We know and feel the Union between our Soul and\nBody, but who amongst us sees so clearly, as to find out with\nCertitude and Exactness, the secret ties which unite two such\ndifferent Substances, or how they are able to act upon each\nother?” (Astell 2002, 148) The union between the mind and body\nis mysterious; though we “know and feel” it, we\ndon’t have perfect knowledge of it or of how the mind and body\ninteract causally. In Christian Religion, Astell presents\nthis same position by way of a parallel between, on the one hand, our\nlack of knowledge of the mind–body union, and, on the other\nhand, our lack of knowledge about the relation between God and humans:\n“Again, tho’ I do not understand the Philosophy of the\nUnion between the Divine and Human Nature; (neither do I comprehend\nthe Vital Union between my Soul and Body, nor how and in what manner\nthey are joyn’d, tho’ I am sure that so it is)\n…” (Astell 1705, 51 [section 62]).","\nAbout how mind–body unions differ from each other with respect\nto their abilities to reason, Astell sometimes implies that\nexperience, construed in a Lockean framework, may be the cause:","\n For as the Diligent-hand maketh Rich, whil’st the Slothful and\n Prodigal come to nothing, so the Use of our Powers improves and\n Encreases them, and the most Observing and Considerate is the Wisest\n Person: For she lays up in her Mind as in a Store-house, ready to\n produce on all Occasions, a Clear and Simple Idea of every Object\n that has at any time presented itself. And perhaps the difference\n between one Womans Reason and anothers may consist only in this,\n that the one has amass’d a greater number of such Ideas than the\n other, and dispos’d them more Orderly in her Understanding so that\n they are at hand, ready to be apply’d to those Complex Ideas whose\n Agreement or Disagreement cannot be found out by the means of some\n of ‘em. (Astell 2002, 175–176)\n","\nHer more common view, however, is a rationalist one, according to\nwhich bodies impede minds from having perfect ideas: “For did we\nconsider what we Are, that Humane Nature consists in the Union of a\nRational Soul with a Mortal Body, that the Body very often Clogs the\nMind in its noblest Operations, especially when indulg’d”\n(Astell 2002, 210). She also presents this view in the following\npassage:","\n The Primary Cause of this is that Limitation which all Created Minds\n are Subject to, which Limitation appears more visible in some than\n in others, either because some Minds are endow’d by their Creator\n with a larger Capacity than the rest, or if you are not inclin’d to\n think so, then by reason of the Indisposition of the Bodily Organs,\n which cramps and contracts the Operations of the Mind. (Astell 2002,\n 159)\n","\nHere Astell, like other rationalists, valorizes the mind over the\nbody. The following passage illustrates another way Astell emphasizes\nthis point:","\n For I question not but that we shoul’d be convinc’d that the Body is\n the Instrument of the Mind and no more, that it is of such a much\n Inferiour Nature, and therefore ought to be kept in such a Case as\n to be ready on all occasions to serve the Mind. That the true and\n proper Pleasure of Human Nature consists in the exercise of that\n Dominion which the Soul has over the Body, in governing every\n Passion and Motion according to Right Reason, by which we most truly\n pursue the real good of both, it being a mistake as well of our Duty\n as our Happiness to consider either part of us singly, so as to\n neglect what is due to the other. For if we disregard the Body\n wholly, we pretend to live like Angels whilst we are but Mortals;\n and if we prefer or equal it to the Mind we degenerate into\n Brutes. (Astell 2002, 210–211)\n","\nWhereas the body has merely an “instrumental” role with\nrespect to the mind, the mind has “dominion” over the\nbody, and a governing role over the passions. Humans should correctly\nemploy their minds and bodies so that they do not degenerate into\nbrutes, or conduct their lives as if they were angels.","\nAstell’s account of the mind–body union allows her to argue\nagainst the popular view of the period about women, according to which\nwomen do not demonstrate the same kinds of intellectual abilities as\ndo men because women are inherently more closely united to their\nbodies than are men (Broad 2002a, 109). Equip with the rationalist\naccount of the mind–body union, Astell can show that the\nuniformity of women’s inabilities is rooted not in their natures, but\narises because of social practices. Thus the difference between the\nabilities of women and men should be explained not metaphysically, but\nepistemologically. For this reason, I will leave a discussion of this\nissue to section 2.3 of this entry.","\nIn addition to developing an account of the mind–body union,\nAstell also maintains that the mind and body are “really\ndistinct.” As she had a social reason for developing her account\nof the mind–body union—namely, to argue against the popular\naccount of women’s nature—she also had a social reason for\nconstructing arguments about the real distinction between the mind and\nbody: by showing that the mind, unlike the body, is immortal, she can\nillustrate to people, especially those who believe in the existence of\nGod, how God’s existence is important to them (Astell 1705, CR\n246–247 [section 256]).","\nIn presenting this account of the real distinction between the mind\nand body in Christian Religion, Astell demonstrates first that\nthe mind is immaterial and then that it is immortal. She maintains\nthat the mind is immaterial in that it has no parts, and so is\nindivisible. Given that it is indivisible, it is incorruptible, and so\nimmortal (Astell 1705, 247 [section 257]). Having ruled out the natural\nannihilation of minds, Astell turns to the question of whether God\nwould supernaturally annihilate them. She argues that he would not, for\nGod does nothing in vain, thus he would not create something only to\nannihilate it (Astell 1705, 248–249 [section 257–258]).","\nWithin her discussion about the immortality of minds, Astell\ncontrasts minds with bodies, and different kinds of bodies with each\nother. Unlike minds, human bodies and other physical objects have\nparts, and so are corruptible. Such bodies differ from the particles\nthat make them up, which do not corrupt:","\n Because, tho’ this System of Bones, Flesh, and Skin, &. which I\n call my body, shall within Threescore Years; and this Wood which is\n now upon the Fire, shall in an Hour or two; and all other Material\n Beings shall in their proper Seasons be no more; yet not the least\n Particle doth totally perish. (Astell 1705, 247–248 [section\n 257])\n","\nHere Astell embraces a view according to which physical objects and\nhuman bodies are not ‘beings’ in the same sense that particles of\nbodies are. In the next passage, she also reveals her view about the\nindividuality of physical objects: their ‘being’ is based on\nappearances, not anything intrinsic within the objects themselves:","\n So that a Being is Mortal and Corruptible, or ceases to Be, when\n those parts of which it consists, and whose particular Composition and\n Figure is that which denominates it this or that\n Being, and which distinguishes it from all other Beings, are no longer\n thus or United, but ceasing to appear under their first Texture and\n Figure, are therefore very properly said to Be no more. (Astell 1705,\n 248 [section 257])\n","\nIn the next passages, Astell presents a proof of the real\ndistinction between the mind and body. Her argument is similar to\nDescartes’s insofar as she maintains that the nature of the mind\nis thought and the nature of the body is extension (Astell 1705,\n249–252 [sections 259–261]). (See Atherton, 1993, for a\ndiscussion of Astell’s account of thought as the nature of the\nmind.) In the sections that follow these, she uses her account of the\nreal distinction between the mind and body to formulate a critique of\nLocke’s view about the possibility of thinking matter. Bryson\n(1988), Squadrito (1987; 1991), Taylor (2001), O’Neill (1998a,\n528–529), and Broad (2002a, 151–153) discuss these\narguments in detail."],"subsection_title":"1.2 Individuation among Beings"},{"content":["\nIn Letters Concerning the Love of God, Astell and John\nNorris debate occasionalist and Cambridge Platonist accounts of the\nrelation between God and his creation. (See Wilson, 2004, for a\ndetailed discussion of this text.) The central issue at stake is the\nclaim made by Norris in Practical Discourses upon Several Divine\nSubjects (1693) that we should love God because he alone is the\nsource of our sensation, and so the source of our pleasure, and so the\nsource of our good. Astell objects: our reason for loving God should\nnot depend on the occasionalist tenet about God’s direct causal\nrole in the universe. The issues in their discussion are the extent of\nGod’s causal role in creation, the causal powers of physical\nobjects, the workings of human sense perception, the mind–body\nunion, and the ways humans can and should love God and his\ncreation.","\nAstell and Norris agree on an account of human love, holding that\nas bodies have motion so minds have love. A remnant of this parallel\nis still with us in the twenty-first century, for we say metaphorically\nthat we are “moved” when we experience a shift in our\nemotions toward a kind of tenderness. Broad notes that Astell and\nNorris also agree that there are two basic kinds of love and that they are\ndifferentiated in part with respect to the objects on which the love is\nfocused. On the one hand, creatures deserve “benevolence,”\nwhich is marked by its disinterestedness and motivated by altruism and\ncharity; created things, after all, lack the causal power to ultimately\nsatisfy the desires of other created beings. On the other hand, God\nmerits “desire,” which is a love of something as our good.\nUltimately, he is the only one who has the causal power to ultimately\nsatisfy our desires. God does not need our benevolence, for he cannot\nlack anything that we could give him (Broad 2002a, 119–120).","\nAstell and Norris’s shared views on love relate to their views on\ncausality. Occasionalists and Cambridge Platonists developed accounts\nof causality in order to remedy a purported problem with Descartes’s\nontology. According to Descartes, God created two different kinds of\nsubstances—mental and corporeal—that, on the one hand, are\n“really distinct” from each other in virtue of their\nessences, and, on the other hand, are sometimes united to form\nmind–body unions. When so united, minds and bodies interact with\neach other, for instance during sensation. The purported problem is\nthis: how can two substances that have completely different\nessences—essences that render them “really distinct”\nsubstances—interact with each other?","\nWith an eye toward resolving this problem, Cambridge Platonists\nretained an account of the interaction between the mind and body, and\npresented a quite different interpretation of the number and nature of\nsubstances that exist. Henry More, for example, maintained that, in\naddition to the souls of God and living creatures, there is the\n“Spirit of Nature,” which is the causal agent that allows\nhuman minds and bodies to interact.","\nThe occasionalist philosophers resolved the problem another way:\nthey agreed with Descartes that the mind and body are really distinct\nbecause of their quite different natures, but they denied that there is\nany interaction between them. Instead, they maintained that God\norchestrates a harmonious correlation between events of the mind and\nevents of the body, and he is the efficient (and so direct) cause of\nhuman sensations.","\nThroughout Letters, Norris defends his occasionalism against\nAstell’s critiques, which were based on Cambridge Platonist views\nabout the nature of the mind–body union. In the\nappendix—written after Norris convinced Astell to allow him to\npublish the letters as a volume—Astell presents two final\ncriticisms of Norris’s account. First, occasionalism makes much of\nGod’s creation vain: if God is the efficient cause of all of our sense\nperceptions, then his creation of material objects is superfluous, for\nthey play no direct role in our sense perceptions (Astell, Norris\n1695, 278–80). Second, occasionalism offends God’s majesty, for\naccording to it he repeatedly interferes in creation in order to move\nbodies and create mental events. (Astell, Norris 1695, 278). See\nO’Neill (2007) for a history of these arguments in St. Thomas’\ncritiques of medieval Islamic occasionalists.","\nAstell’s own view about the causation of sensation involves an account\nof a “sensible congruity” between features of external\nbodies and powers of the soul that are employed in sensations. For\ndiscussions of her account, as well as arguments about whether its\nroots are in Descartes, Malebranche, or Norris, see Acworth (1979,\n174, 178), Taylor (2001, 511–2), Broad (2002a, 109), and O’Neill\n(2007)."],"subsection_title":"1.3 The Relation between God and His Creatures"}]},{"main_content":["\nAstell develops three themes common to rationalism: an emphasis of the\nmind over the body; a theory of innate ideas as the origin of\nknowledge; and a methodology that leads the novice from confusion to\nclarity. In the section above on metaphysics, I addressed\nAstell’s emphasis of the mind over body. In this section I will\nreconstruct her accounts of mind, ideas, knowledge, belief, and\nmethod."],"section_title":"2. Epistemology","subsections":[{"content":["\nAstell holds that the mind has two faculties: the understanding and\nthe will. The understanding is the capacity to receive and compare\nideas, and the will is the power of preferring and directing thoughts\nand motions (Astell 2002, 205). Each faculty has a proper object: the\nproper object of the understanding is truth, which has “being\nfrom Eternity in the Divine Ideas” (Astell 2002, 137); the\nproper object of the will is the good, which is God’s will\n(Astell 2002, 206). When the understanding is healthy, it has\nknowledge (Astell 2002, 130); when the will is healthy, it is\nregular—that is, it is guided by the understanding (Astell\n2002,205, 209). The task of the understanding is to govern the will\n(Astell 2002, 130). ","\nAstell holds a nativism according to which there are not merely innate\nideas, but also innate inclinations. She explains that the innate\nideas are “rudiments of knowledge” (Astell 2002, 128) that\nare “inseparable” from the understanding and are the\nsources of our other ideas (Astell 2002, 205). In addition, she states\nthat we are born with inclinations that are “inseparable”\nfrom the will (Astell 2002, 205). She explains that our innate ideas\nmake us rational creatures. Irrational creatures, on the other hand,\nact according to the will of God and by mechanism. But equipped with\nreason, humans are voluntary agents: we choose our actions according\nto principles in the understanding, and we determine our wills (Astell\n2002, 128). (For a further discussion of these passages, see Atherton\n1993, 29–35, and Sowaal 2007, 228–31.)","\nAstell provides two accounts of ideas, one\ngeneral and one strict. In doing so, she presents her views on\nknowledge and clear and distinct perceptions. Here is the general\naccount of idea:","\n By Ideas we sometimes understand in general all that which is the\n immediate Object of the Mind, whatever it Perceives; and in this large\n Sense it may take in all Thought, all that we are any ways capable of\n Discerning: So when we have no Idea of a thing, ’tis as much as\n to say we know nothing of the matter. (Astell 2002, 168)\n","\nIn the general sense ideas—the immediate objects of the\nmind—are required for knowledge. Here is the strict account of\nidea:","\n Again, it is more strictly taken for that which represents to the\n Mind some object distinct from it, whether Clearly or Confusedly;\n when this is its import, our Knowledge is said to be as Clear as our\n Ideas are. For that Idea which represents a thing so Clearly, that\n by an Attent and Simple View we may discern its Properties and\n Modifications, at least so far as they can be Known, is never false;\n for our Certainty and Evidence depends on it, if we Know not Truly\n what is thus represented to our Minds we know nothing. (Astell 2002,\n 168)\n","\nIdeas in the strict sense represent what is distinct from the idea.\nAs such, ideas must be clear in order for them to afford knowledge. In\nthe following passage, Astell employs Descartes’s account of clear and\ndistinct perceptions from Principles of Philosophy, Part I,\nsection 45 (AT VIIIA 21–2; CSM I 207):","\n That (to use the words of a Celebrated Author) may be said to be\n “Clear which is Present and Manifest to an attentive\n Mind;” so as we say we see Objects Clearly, when being present\n to our Eyes they sufficiently Act on ’em, and our Eyes are\n dispos’d to regard ’em. And that Distinct, which is so\n Clear, Particular, and Different from all other things, that it\n contains not any thing in it self which appears not manifestly to\n him who considers it as he ought. (Astell 2002, 172)\n","\nAstell differs from Descartes, however, in maintaining that we have\nclear but not distinct (or perfect) ideas of God and souls. She holds\nthat though we can know some of the attributes of these substances, we\ncannot know their true natures (Astell 2002, 173).","\nFor Astell, though ideas can be confused, they are not the sources of\nerror. Rather, Astell locates falsity and error in judgments, and\noften in language (Astell 2002, 169, 171). She holds that judgment\ninvolves the comparison of two ideas and that sometimes we lack an\n“intermediate idea” (a “middle term”) in order\nto make a judgment (Astell 2002, 146–7, 172–3).","\nOn this view, we can avoid error in judgment when we are careful in\nseparating and uniting ideas; we can avoid equivocation in language\nwhen we only use words that have distinct ideas attached to them. To\ndo this kind of work, we need to first examine ideas about morality\nand religion, separating what we find through metaphysical reflection\nfrom what we have adopted by custom. Ultimately all reasonings and\ndeductions should begin from ideas that are clear and are “as\ndistinct as the nature of the subject will permit” (Astell 2002,\n169–72)."],"subsection_title":"2.1 Mind and Ideas"},{"content":["\nAstell does not hold a “traditional” account of knowledge\nas true, justified belief. Rather, on her view knowledge and belief\nare ideas that are distinguished by origin, clarity, distinctness, and\nthe means by which they are affirmed. What follows is a reconstruction\nof her discussion of these issues in Serious Proposal\n(Astell 2002, 146–153).","\nGiven the finitude of the human mind, it is limited with respect to\nits reach, and it is diverse in its modes of thinking. Astell states the\nfollowing about the reach of the mind:","\n Truth in general is the Object of the Understanding, but all Truths\n are not equally Evident, because of the Limitation of the Humane Mind,\n which tho’ it can gradually take in many Truths, yet cannot any\n more than our sight attend to many things at once…. (Astell\n 2002, 146)\n","\nAbout the modes of thinking, she writes:","\n Tho the Human Intellect has a large extent, yet being limited as we\n have already said, this Limitation is the Cause of those different\n Modes of Thinking, which for distinction sake we call Faith, Science\n and Opinion. (Astell 2002, 149)\n","\nIn addition to faith, science, and opinion, Astell also discusses\nmoral certainty and sensation. She notes that sensation is not so much\na mode of knowledge as it is a kind of being conscious (Astell 2002,\n152).","\nAstell’s account of the modes of thinking is related to her view\nabout how we come to hold truths, of which there are two ways. The\nfirst is marked by passivity: some truths are delivered to us. They\ncan be delivered to us by our own understandings, that is, by\nintuition; or they can be delivered to us by authority. When truths\nare delivered by intuition, we have ideas that are clear and distinct,\nself-evident, indubitable, compel the will, and serve as first\nprinciples. When they are delivered by authority they are dubitable,\nconfused, and lack self-evidence. The second way we come to hold\ntruths is marked by activity: such truths are drawn by demonstration\nfrom other truths.","\nScience is our mode of thinking when we intuit a truth and when we\nhold that truth because we have derived it (by reasoning and\ndeduction) from an intuition. In the latter case, we hold\n“objects of science.” In both cases, we have\n“knowledge.”","\nFaith is our mode of thinking when we hold a truth given to us by\nauthority and when we derive additional truths from such truths. In\nboth cases we hold “objects of faith” and we have\n“belief.”","\n“Moral certainty” is our mode of thinking when we draw\nideas by demonstration from premises that are a mix of knowledge and\nbelief; “opinion” is our mode of thinking when we hold\nideas drawn either by bad argument or by an argument in which confused\nideas serve as premises.","\nIdeas attained through intuition are the highest form of knowledge.\nThese ideas are clear and distinct, self-evident, and indubitable;\nfurther, these ideas compel the will. The “objects of\nscience” that are derived by demonstration from intuitions have\na very high epistemic status and command a firm assent. Though Astell\nmaintains that all beliefs are dubitable, as they lack self-evidence\nas well as clarity and distinctness, she holds that objects of faith\ncan share the elevated epistemic status maintained by intuitions and\nobjects of science:","\n The Objects of Faith are as Certain and as truly Intelligible in\n themselves as those of Science, as has been said already, only we\n become persuaded of the Truth of them by another Method, we do not\n See them so clearly and distinctly as to be unable to\n disbelieve them. Faith has a mixture of the Will that it may be\n rewardable, for who will thank us for giving our Assent where it was\n impossible to withhold it? Faith then may be said to be the sort of\n Knowledge capable of Reward, and Men are Infidels not for want of\n Conviction, but thro an unwillingness to Believe. (Astell\n 2002, 151)\n","\nFor Astell, the will, which is involved whenever we hold a truth, is\nmoved in different ways depending on the situation and the kind of\ntruth involved. When we hold a self-evident truth, our wills are\ncompelled by the clarity and distinctness of the idea: we\n“see” the truth so clearly and distinctly that we cannot\ndoubt it; that is, we cannot but assent to it. On the other hand, when\na truth is delivered to us from an authority, and we do not have a\nclear and distinct perception of the truth, then our wills are not\ncompelled by the idea. In such cases, if we are to affirm the idea, we\nmust move our wills ourselves. What is striking about Astell’s view is\nthat she maintains that we are as certain when we move our wills to\naffirm objects of faith as when our wills are compelled to affirm\nintuitions and objects of science.","\nHowever, this is not to say that we should intentionally move our\nwills to affirm truths about which we can have clear and\ndistinct ideas when we do not currently have such clear and distinct\nideas. That is, those truths that are candidates for knowledge\n(intuitions or objects of science) should known and not merely\nbelieved. This is especially true with respect to what she calls\n“the ideas of the philosophers”:","\n [H]ow many of us daily make that a matter of Faith which indeed\n belongs to Science, by adhering blindly to the Dictates of some famous\n Philosopher in Physical Truths, the Principles of which we have as much\n right to examine, and to make deductions from ’em as he had?\n (Astell 2002, 152)\n","\nThis connects to Astell’s view on wisdom: “to Know what is to be\nKnown, and to Believe what is to be Believ’d is the property of\na Wise person” (Astell 2002, 152). It also provides one of the\ntheoretical bases for Astell’s views on education."],"subsection_title":"2.2 Knowledge and Belief"}]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nMary Astell designed her metaphysics around an account of God and his\\ncreation. She was a dualist, maintaining that the two kinds of\\nbeings—minds and bodies—come in various degrees of\\nfinitude and corruptibility: God is the infinite and incorruptible\\nmind; human minds and corporeal particles are finite, naturally\\nincorruptible beings; and human bodies and physical objects are\\nfinite, naturally corruptible beings.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Metaphysics\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAccording to Astell, God is the “First Intelligence,” the\\nbeing whose nature is to be infinite in all perfections. Among his\\nperfections, Astell often lists wisdom, goodness, justice, holiness,\\nintelligence, presence, power, and self-existence. In keeping with\\nrationalist views of the period, Astell maintains that the correct\\nunderstanding of metaphysics turns on the correct understanding of\\nGod. For this reason, much of her work is dedicated to demonstrating\\nnot only what God is, but also how a correct understanding of him can\\nbe attained.\",\n \"\\nHer earliest such account is in A Serious Proposal to the\\nLadies, where she demonstrates the existence, perfection, and\\nnecessary creative power of God. She begins by giving an example of\\nthe correct method for attaining knowledge, one similar to those\\ndeveloped by Descartes in Discourse on the Method and Arnauld\\nand Nicole in Logic or the Art of Thinking (see section 2.3\\nof this entry). Her proof of God’s existence includes an account of\\nsimple and composed ideas; clear and distinct perceptions, and obscure\\nand confused perceptions; adequate and inadequate ideas; proofs by\\nintuition and proofs by comparison of ideas; God’s perfections and our\\nideas of God’s perfections; and the relation between ideas and terms\\n(Astell 2002, 176–182). In Christian Religion, she\\nframes other arguments for God’s existence in terms of what we can and\\ncannot doubt; God’s perfections and our ideas of God’s perfections;\\ncausality; and the beauty of the created universe (Astell 1705,\\n7–10 [sections 7–10]).\",\n \"\\nAt times, Astell privileges some of God’s perfections over others. In\\nChristian Religion, when stating her ontological argument for\\nGod’s existence, she notes that “I find that the notion I have\\nof GOD, contains those and all other perfections. Among which\\nSelf-existence is most remarkable, as being the original and basis of\\nall the rest” (Astell 1705, 8 [section 7]). This claim is about\\nthe order of ideas: her idea of God’s self-existence allows her\\nto understand his other perfections. A few lines later, she makes the\\nanalogous claim about the order of reality: “And Self-existence\\nis such a Perfection as necessarily includes all other\\nperfections” (Astell 1705, 8 [section 8]).\",\n \"\\nBroad (2002a, 103) reveals evidence that Astell privileges God’s\\nwisdom and goodness over his omnipotence. There are two ways that\\nphilosophers of the period thought about God’s attributes of wisdom,\\npower, and goodness. Some held “intellectualist” theories,\\naccording to which God exercises his will in accordance with the true\\nnature of things; others held “voluntarist”\\ntheories, according to which God exercises his will to create both\\nthings and the truth of things. In showing that Astell maintains an\\nintellectualist theology, Broad refers to a number of passages, one of\\nwhich is the following:\",\n \"\\n This is then the sum of the matter; GOD who is Infinite in all\\n Perfections, in Justice and Holiness, as well as in Goodness and\\n Mercy, always does what is best and most becoming His Perfections,\\n and cannot act but according to the Essential Nature and Reason of\\n things; nor is it possible that our Wishes or Actions shou’d make\\n any alteration in the immutable Rectitude of His Conduct. (Astell\\n 1705, 95 [section 105]; see also Astell 2002, 205; Astell 1705, 416\\n [section 407])\\n\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.1 God\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThroughout her texts, Astell is concerned with giving an account of\\nhow created beings are individuated from each other. Ultimately, she\\nmaintains that there are four kinds of created beings: minds, bodies,\\nmind–body unions, and the particles that compose bodies.\",\n \"\\nAbout finite minds considered on their own, Astell differs quite\\nradically from Descartes. In Discourse on the Method,\\nDescartes remarks that all minds have the same ability to reason (AT\\n2; CSM 111). According to Astell, on the other hand, God creates minds\\nwith intrinsic differences. She gives a number of reasons for this\\nview. One has to do with the relationships that God wants minds to\\nhave with each other: humans form community only if their minds have\\ndifferent intellectual capacities. Another concerns the relationship\\nbetween created minds and God: minds were made to contemplate and\\nenjoy God, and God needs their adoration and love. But each mind is\\nlimited and, thus, can only love God by adoring a limited amount of\\nhis works. So God creates many minds, each with an ability to\\nunderstand a certain collection of truths, and in this way all of his\\ncreation is attended to (Astell 2002, 144–146,\\n154–155).\",\n \"\\nThough Astell discusses minds as if they are sometimes isolated from\\nbodies, she maintains that human beings are mind–body\\nunions. She notes that we cannot comprehend the connection between the\\nmind and body: “We know and feel the Union between our Soul and\\nBody, but who amongst us sees so clearly, as to find out with\\nCertitude and Exactness, the secret ties which unite two such\\ndifferent Substances, or how they are able to act upon each\\nother?” (Astell 2002, 148) The union between the mind and body\\nis mysterious; though we “know and feel” it, we\\ndon’t have perfect knowledge of it or of how the mind and body\\ninteract causally. In Christian Religion, Astell presents\\nthis same position by way of a parallel between, on the one hand, our\\nlack of knowledge of the mind–body union, and, on the other\\nhand, our lack of knowledge about the relation between God and humans:\\n“Again, tho’ I do not understand the Philosophy of the\\nUnion between the Divine and Human Nature; (neither do I comprehend\\nthe Vital Union between my Soul and Body, nor how and in what manner\\nthey are joyn’d, tho’ I am sure that so it is)\\n…” (Astell 1705, 51 [section 62]).\",\n \"\\nAbout how mind–body unions differ from each other with respect\\nto their abilities to reason, Astell sometimes implies that\\nexperience, construed in a Lockean framework, may be the cause:\",\n \"\\n For as the Diligent-hand maketh Rich, whil’st the Slothful and\\n Prodigal come to nothing, so the Use of our Powers improves and\\n Encreases them, and the most Observing and Considerate is the Wisest\\n Person: For she lays up in her Mind as in a Store-house, ready to\\n produce on all Occasions, a Clear and Simple Idea of every Object\\n that has at any time presented itself. And perhaps the difference\\n between one Womans Reason and anothers may consist only in this,\\n that the one has amass’d a greater number of such Ideas than the\\n other, and dispos’d them more Orderly in her Understanding so that\\n they are at hand, ready to be apply’d to those Complex Ideas whose\\n Agreement or Disagreement cannot be found out by the means of some\\n of ‘em. (Astell 2002, 175–176)\\n\",\n \"\\nHer more common view, however, is a rationalist one, according to\\nwhich bodies impede minds from having perfect ideas: “For did we\\nconsider what we Are, that Humane Nature consists in the Union of a\\nRational Soul with a Mortal Body, that the Body very often Clogs the\\nMind in its noblest Operations, especially when indulg’d”\\n(Astell 2002, 210). She also presents this view in the following\\npassage:\",\n \"\\n The Primary Cause of this is that Limitation which all Created Minds\\n are Subject to, which Limitation appears more visible in some than\\n in others, either because some Minds are endow’d by their Creator\\n with a larger Capacity than the rest, or if you are not inclin’d to\\n think so, then by reason of the Indisposition of the Bodily Organs,\\n which cramps and contracts the Operations of the Mind. (Astell 2002,\\n 159)\\n\",\n \"\\nHere Astell, like other rationalists, valorizes the mind over the\\nbody. The following passage illustrates another way Astell emphasizes\\nthis point:\",\n \"\\n For I question not but that we shoul’d be convinc’d that the Body is\\n the Instrument of the Mind and no more, that it is of such a much\\n Inferiour Nature, and therefore ought to be kept in such a Case as\\n to be ready on all occasions to serve the Mind. That the true and\\n proper Pleasure of Human Nature consists in the exercise of that\\n Dominion which the Soul has over the Body, in governing every\\n Passion and Motion according to Right Reason, by which we most truly\\n pursue the real good of both, it being a mistake as well of our Duty\\n as our Happiness to consider either part of us singly, so as to\\n neglect what is due to the other. For if we disregard the Body\\n wholly, we pretend to live like Angels whilst we are but Mortals;\\n and if we prefer or equal it to the Mind we degenerate into\\n Brutes. (Astell 2002, 210–211)\\n\",\n \"\\nWhereas the body has merely an “instrumental” role with\\nrespect to the mind, the mind has “dominion” over the\\nbody, and a governing role over the passions. Humans should correctly\\nemploy their minds and bodies so that they do not degenerate into\\nbrutes, or conduct their lives as if they were angels.\",\n \"\\nAstell’s account of the mind–body union allows her to argue\\nagainst the popular view of the period about women, according to which\\nwomen do not demonstrate the same kinds of intellectual abilities as\\ndo men because women are inherently more closely united to their\\nbodies than are men (Broad 2002a, 109). Equip with the rationalist\\naccount of the mind–body union, Astell can show that the\\nuniformity of women’s inabilities is rooted not in their natures, but\\narises because of social practices. Thus the difference between the\\nabilities of women and men should be explained not metaphysically, but\\nepistemologically. For this reason, I will leave a discussion of this\\nissue to section 2.3 of this entry.\",\n \"\\nIn addition to developing an account of the mind–body union,\\nAstell also maintains that the mind and body are “really\\ndistinct.” As she had a social reason for developing her account\\nof the mind–body union—namely, to argue against the popular\\naccount of women’s nature—she also had a social reason for\\nconstructing arguments about the real distinction between the mind and\\nbody: by showing that the mind, unlike the body, is immortal, she can\\nillustrate to people, especially those who believe in the existence of\\nGod, how God’s existence is important to them (Astell 1705, CR\\n246–247 [section 256]).\",\n \"\\nIn presenting this account of the real distinction between the mind\\nand body in Christian Religion, Astell demonstrates first that\\nthe mind is immaterial and then that it is immortal. She maintains\\nthat the mind is immaterial in that it has no parts, and so is\\nindivisible. Given that it is indivisible, it is incorruptible, and so\\nimmortal (Astell 1705, 247 [section 257]). Having ruled out the natural\\nannihilation of minds, Astell turns to the question of whether God\\nwould supernaturally annihilate them. She argues that he would not, for\\nGod does nothing in vain, thus he would not create something only to\\nannihilate it (Astell 1705, 248–249 [section 257–258]).\",\n \"\\nWithin her discussion about the immortality of minds, Astell\\ncontrasts minds with bodies, and different kinds of bodies with each\\nother. Unlike minds, human bodies and other physical objects have\\nparts, and so are corruptible. Such bodies differ from the particles\\nthat make them up, which do not corrupt:\",\n \"\\n Because, tho’ this System of Bones, Flesh, and Skin, &. which I\\n call my body, shall within Threescore Years; and this Wood which is\\n now upon the Fire, shall in an Hour or two; and all other Material\\n Beings shall in their proper Seasons be no more; yet not the least\\n Particle doth totally perish. (Astell 1705, 247–248 [section\\n 257])\\n\",\n \"\\nHere Astell embraces a view according to which physical objects and\\nhuman bodies are not ‘beings’ in the same sense that particles of\\nbodies are. In the next passage, she also reveals her view about the\\nindividuality of physical objects: their ‘being’ is based on\\nappearances, not anything intrinsic within the objects themselves:\",\n \"\\n So that a Being is Mortal and Corruptible, or ceases to Be, when\\n those parts of which it consists, and whose particular Composition and\\n Figure is that which denominates it this or that\\n Being, and which distinguishes it from all other Beings, are no longer\\n thus or United, but ceasing to appear under their first Texture and\\n Figure, are therefore very properly said to Be no more. (Astell 1705,\\n 248 [section 257])\\n\",\n \"\\nIn the next passages, Astell presents a proof of the real\\ndistinction between the mind and body. Her argument is similar to\\nDescartes’s insofar as she maintains that the nature of the mind\\nis thought and the nature of the body is extension (Astell 1705,\\n249–252 [sections 259–261]). (See Atherton, 1993, for a\\ndiscussion of Astell’s account of thought as the nature of the\\nmind.) In the sections that follow these, she uses her account of the\\nreal distinction between the mind and body to formulate a critique of\\nLocke’s view about the possibility of thinking matter. Bryson\\n(1988), Squadrito (1987; 1991), Taylor (2001), O’Neill (1998a,\\n528–529), and Broad (2002a, 151–153) discuss these\\narguments in detail.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.2 Individuation among Beings\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIn Letters Concerning the Love of God, Astell and John\\nNorris debate occasionalist and Cambridge Platonist accounts of the\\nrelation between God and his creation. (See Wilson, 2004, for a\\ndetailed discussion of this text.) The central issue at stake is the\\nclaim made by Norris in Practical Discourses upon Several Divine\\nSubjects (1693) that we should love God because he alone is the\\nsource of our sensation, and so the source of our pleasure, and so the\\nsource of our good. Astell objects: our reason for loving God should\\nnot depend on the occasionalist tenet about God’s direct causal\\nrole in the universe. The issues in their discussion are the extent of\\nGod’s causal role in creation, the causal powers of physical\\nobjects, the workings of human sense perception, the mind–body\\nunion, and the ways humans can and should love God and his\\ncreation.\",\n \"\\nAstell and Norris agree on an account of human love, holding that\\nas bodies have motion so minds have love. A remnant of this parallel\\nis still with us in the twenty-first century, for we say metaphorically\\nthat we are “moved” when we experience a shift in our\\nemotions toward a kind of tenderness. Broad notes that Astell and\\nNorris also agree that there are two basic kinds of love and that they are\\ndifferentiated in part with respect to the objects on which the love is\\nfocused. On the one hand, creatures deserve “benevolence,”\\nwhich is marked by its disinterestedness and motivated by altruism and\\ncharity; created things, after all, lack the causal power to ultimately\\nsatisfy the desires of other created beings. On the other hand, God\\nmerits “desire,” which is a love of something as our good.\\nUltimately, he is the only one who has the causal power to ultimately\\nsatisfy our desires. God does not need our benevolence, for he cannot\\nlack anything that we could give him (Broad 2002a, 119–120).\",\n \"\\nAstell and Norris’s shared views on love relate to their views on\\ncausality. Occasionalists and Cambridge Platonists developed accounts\\nof causality in order to remedy a purported problem with Descartes’s\\nontology. According to Descartes, God created two different kinds of\\nsubstances—mental and corporeal—that, on the one hand, are\\n“really distinct” from each other in virtue of their\\nessences, and, on the other hand, are sometimes united to form\\nmind–body unions. When so united, minds and bodies interact with\\neach other, for instance during sensation. The purported problem is\\nthis: how can two substances that have completely different\\nessences—essences that render them “really distinct”\\nsubstances—interact with each other?\",\n \"\\nWith an eye toward resolving this problem, Cambridge Platonists\\nretained an account of the interaction between the mind and body, and\\npresented a quite different interpretation of the number and nature of\\nsubstances that exist. Henry More, for example, maintained that, in\\naddition to the souls of God and living creatures, there is the\\n“Spirit of Nature,” which is the causal agent that allows\\nhuman minds and bodies to interact.\",\n \"\\nThe occasionalist philosophers resolved the problem another way:\\nthey agreed with Descartes that the mind and body are really distinct\\nbecause of their quite different natures, but they denied that there is\\nany interaction between them. Instead, they maintained that God\\norchestrates a harmonious correlation between events of the mind and\\nevents of the body, and he is the efficient (and so direct) cause of\\nhuman sensations.\",\n \"\\nThroughout Letters, Norris defends his occasionalism against\\nAstell’s critiques, which were based on Cambridge Platonist views\\nabout the nature of the mind–body union. In the\\nappendix—written after Norris convinced Astell to allow him to\\npublish the letters as a volume—Astell presents two final\\ncriticisms of Norris’s account. First, occasionalism makes much of\\nGod’s creation vain: if God is the efficient cause of all of our sense\\nperceptions, then his creation of material objects is superfluous, for\\nthey play no direct role in our sense perceptions (Astell, Norris\\n1695, 278–80). Second, occasionalism offends God’s majesty, for\\naccording to it he repeatedly interferes in creation in order to move\\nbodies and create mental events. (Astell, Norris 1695, 278). See\\nO’Neill (2007) for a history of these arguments in St. Thomas’\\ncritiques of medieval Islamic occasionalists.\",\n \"\\nAstell’s own view about the causation of sensation involves an account\\nof a “sensible congruity” between features of external\\nbodies and powers of the soul that are employed in sensations. For\\ndiscussions of her account, as well as arguments about whether its\\nroots are in Descartes, Malebranche, or Norris, see Acworth (1979,\\n174, 178), Taylor (2001, 511–2), Broad (2002a, 109), and O’Neill\\n(2007).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.3 The Relation between God and His Creatures\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nAstell develops three themes common to rationalism: an emphasis of the\\nmind over the body; a theory of innate ideas as the origin of\\nknowledge; and a methodology that leads the novice from confusion to\\nclarity. In the section above on metaphysics, I addressed\\nAstell’s emphasis of the mind over body. In this section I will\\nreconstruct her accounts of mind, ideas, knowledge, belief, and\\nmethod.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Epistemology\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAstell holds that the mind has two faculties: the understanding and\\nthe will. The understanding is the capacity to receive and compare\\nideas, and the will is the power of preferring and directing thoughts\\nand motions (Astell 2002, 205). Each faculty has a proper object: the\\nproper object of the understanding is truth, which has “being\\nfrom Eternity in the Divine Ideas” (Astell 2002, 137); the\\nproper object of the will is the good, which is God’s will\\n(Astell 2002, 206). When the understanding is healthy, it has\\nknowledge (Astell 2002, 130); when the will is healthy, it is\\nregular—that is, it is guided by the understanding (Astell\\n2002,205, 209). The task of the understanding is to govern the will\\n(Astell 2002, 130). \",\n \"\\nAstell holds a nativism according to which there are not merely innate\\nideas, but also innate inclinations. She explains that the innate\\nideas are “rudiments of knowledge” (Astell 2002, 128) that\\nare “inseparable” from the understanding and are the\\nsources of our other ideas (Astell 2002, 205). In addition, she states\\nthat we are born with inclinations that are “inseparable”\\nfrom the will (Astell 2002, 205). She explains that our innate ideas\\nmake us rational creatures. Irrational creatures, on the other hand,\\nact according to the will of God and by mechanism. But equipped with\\nreason, humans are voluntary agents: we choose our actions according\\nto principles in the understanding, and we determine our wills (Astell\\n2002, 128). (For a further discussion of these passages, see Atherton\\n1993, 29–35, and Sowaal 2007, 228–31.)\",\n \"\\nAstell provides two accounts of ideas, one\\ngeneral and one strict. In doing so, she presents her views on\\nknowledge and clear and distinct perceptions. Here is the general\\naccount of idea:\",\n \"\\n By Ideas we sometimes understand in general all that which is the\\n immediate Object of the Mind, whatever it Perceives; and in this large\\n Sense it may take in all Thought, all that we are any ways capable of\\n Discerning: So when we have no Idea of a thing, ’tis as much as\\n to say we know nothing of the matter. (Astell 2002, 168)\\n\",\n \"\\nIn the general sense ideas—the immediate objects of the\\nmind—are required for knowledge. Here is the strict account of\\nidea:\",\n \"\\n Again, it is more strictly taken for that which represents to the\\n Mind some object distinct from it, whether Clearly or Confusedly;\\n when this is its import, our Knowledge is said to be as Clear as our\\n Ideas are. For that Idea which represents a thing so Clearly, that\\n by an Attent and Simple View we may discern its Properties and\\n Modifications, at least so far as they can be Known, is never false;\\n for our Certainty and Evidence depends on it, if we Know not Truly\\n what is thus represented to our Minds we know nothing. (Astell 2002,\\n 168)\\n\",\n \"\\nIdeas in the strict sense represent what is distinct from the idea.\\nAs such, ideas must be clear in order for them to afford knowledge. In\\nthe following passage, Astell employs Descartes’s account of clear and\\ndistinct perceptions from Principles of Philosophy, Part I,\\nsection 45 (AT VIIIA 21–2; CSM I 207):\",\n \"\\n That (to use the words of a Celebrated Author) may be said to be\\n “Clear which is Present and Manifest to an attentive\\n Mind;” so as we say we see Objects Clearly, when being present\\n to our Eyes they sufficiently Act on ’em, and our Eyes are\\n dispos’d to regard ’em. And that Distinct, which is so\\n Clear, Particular, and Different from all other things, that it\\n contains not any thing in it self which appears not manifestly to\\n him who considers it as he ought. (Astell 2002, 172)\\n\",\n \"\\nAstell differs from Descartes, however, in maintaining that we have\\nclear but not distinct (or perfect) ideas of God and souls. She holds\\nthat though we can know some of the attributes of these substances, we\\ncannot know their true natures (Astell 2002, 173).\",\n \"\\nFor Astell, though ideas can be confused, they are not the sources of\\nerror. Rather, Astell locates falsity and error in judgments, and\\noften in language (Astell 2002, 169, 171). She holds that judgment\\ninvolves the comparison of two ideas and that sometimes we lack an\\n“intermediate idea” (a “middle term”) in order\\nto make a judgment (Astell 2002, 146–7, 172–3).\",\n \"\\nOn this view, we can avoid error in judgment when we are careful in\\nseparating and uniting ideas; we can avoid equivocation in language\\nwhen we only use words that have distinct ideas attached to them. To\\ndo this kind of work, we need to first examine ideas about morality\\nand religion, separating what we find through metaphysical reflection\\nfrom what we have adopted by custom. Ultimately all reasonings and\\ndeductions should begin from ideas that are clear and are “as\\ndistinct as the nature of the subject will permit” (Astell 2002,\\n169–72).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.1 Mind and Ideas\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAstell does not hold a “traditional” account of knowledge\\nas true, justified belief. Rather, on her view knowledge and belief\\nare ideas that are distinguished by origin, clarity, distinctness, and\\nthe means by which they are affirmed. What follows is a reconstruction\\nof her discussion of these issues in Serious Proposal\\n(Astell 2002, 146–153).\",\n \"\\nGiven the finitude of the human mind, it is limited with respect to\\nits reach, and it is diverse in its modes of thinking. Astell states the\\nfollowing about the reach of the mind:\",\n \"\\n Truth in general is the Object of the Understanding, but all Truths\\n are not equally Evident, because of the Limitation of the Humane Mind,\\n which tho’ it can gradually take in many Truths, yet cannot any\\n more than our sight attend to many things at once…. (Astell\\n 2002, 146)\\n\",\n \"\\nAbout the modes of thinking, she writes:\",\n \"\\n Tho the Human Intellect has a large extent, yet being limited as we\\n have already said, this Limitation is the Cause of those different\\n Modes of Thinking, which for distinction sake we call Faith, Science\\n and Opinion. (Astell 2002, 149)\\n\",\n \"\\nIn addition to faith, science, and opinion, Astell also discusses\\nmoral certainty and sensation. She notes that sensation is not so much\\na mode of knowledge as it is a kind of being conscious (Astell 2002,\\n152).\",\n \"\\nAstell’s account of the modes of thinking is related to her view\\nabout how we come to hold truths, of which there are two ways. The\\nfirst is marked by passivity: some truths are delivered to us. They\\ncan be delivered to us by our own understandings, that is, by\\nintuition; or they can be delivered to us by authority. When truths\\nare delivered by intuition, we have ideas that are clear and distinct,\\nself-evident, indubitable, compel the will, and serve as first\\nprinciples. When they are delivered by authority they are dubitable,\\nconfused, and lack self-evidence. The second way we come to hold\\ntruths is marked by activity: such truths are drawn by demonstration\\nfrom other truths.\",\n \"\\nScience is our mode of thinking when we intuit a truth and when we\\nhold that truth because we have derived it (by reasoning and\\ndeduction) from an intuition. In the latter case, we hold\\n“objects of science.” In both cases, we have\\n“knowledge.”\",\n \"\\nFaith is our mode of thinking when we hold a truth given to us by\\nauthority and when we derive additional truths from such truths. In\\nboth cases we hold “objects of faith” and we have\\n“belief.”\",\n \"\\n“Moral certainty” is our mode of thinking when we draw\\nideas by demonstration from premises that are a mix of knowledge and\\nbelief; “opinion” is our mode of thinking when we hold\\nideas drawn either by bad argument or by an argument in which confused\\nideas serve as premises.\",\n \"\\nIdeas attained through intuition are the highest form of knowledge.\\nThese ideas are clear and distinct, self-evident, and indubitable;\\nfurther, these ideas compel the will. The “objects of\\nscience” that are derived by demonstration from intuitions have\\na very high epistemic status and command a firm assent. Though Astell\\nmaintains that all beliefs are dubitable, as they lack self-evidence\\nas well as clarity and distinctness, she holds that objects of faith\\ncan share the elevated epistemic status maintained by intuitions and\\nobjects of science:\",\n \"\\n The Objects of Faith are as Certain and as truly Intelligible in\\n themselves as those of Science, as has been said already, only we\\n become persuaded of the Truth of them by another Method, we do not\\n See them so clearly and distinctly as to be unable to\\n disbelieve them. Faith has a mixture of the Will that it may be\\n rewardable, for who will thank us for giving our Assent where it was\\n impossible to withhold it? Faith then may be said to be the sort of\\n Knowledge capable of Reward, and Men are Infidels not for want of\\n Conviction, but thro an unwillingness to Believe. (Astell\\n 2002, 151)\\n\",\n \"\\nFor Astell, the will, which is involved whenever we hold a truth, is\\nmoved in different ways depending on the situation and the kind of\\ntruth involved. When we hold a self-evident truth, our wills are\\ncompelled by the clarity and distinctness of the idea: we\\n“see” the truth so clearly and distinctly that we cannot\\ndoubt it; that is, we cannot but assent to it. On the other hand, when\\na truth is delivered to us from an authority, and we do not have a\\nclear and distinct perception of the truth, then our wills are not\\ncompelled by the idea. In such cases, if we are to affirm the idea, we\\nmust move our wills ourselves. What is striking about Astell’s view is\\nthat she maintains that we are as certain when we move our wills to\\naffirm objects of faith as when our wills are compelled to affirm\\nintuitions and objects of science.\",\n \"\\nHowever, this is not to say that we should intentionally move our\\nwills to affirm truths about which we can have clear and\\ndistinct ideas when we do not currently have such clear and distinct\\nideas. That is, those truths that are candidates for knowledge\\n(intuitions or objects of science) should known and not merely\\nbelieved. This is especially true with respect to what she calls\\n“the ideas of the philosophers”:\",\n \"\\n [H]ow many of us daily make that a matter of Faith which indeed\\n belongs to Science, by adhering blindly to the Dictates of some famous\\n Philosopher in Physical Truths, the Principles of which we have as much\\n right to examine, and to make deductions from ’em as he had?\\n (Astell 2002, 152)\\n\",\n \"\\nThis connects to Astell’s view on wisdom: “to Know what is to be\\nKnown, and to Believe what is to be Believ’d is the property of\\na Wise person” (Astell 2002, 152). It also provides one of the\\ntheoretical bases for Astell’s views on education.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.2 Knowledge and Belief\"\n }\n ]\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Arnauld, A. and Nicole, P., Logic or the Art of Thinking:\nContaining, besides rules, several new observations appropriate for\nforming judgment, J. V. 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M., 1993, Writing Women’s Literary History,\nBaltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.","Goldie, M., 2007, “Mary Astell and John Locke”,\nin Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, W. Kolbrener and\nM. Michelson, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, pp. 17–30.","Harris, J., 2012, “Philosophy and sexual politics in Mary\nAstell and Samuel Richardson”, Intellectual History\nReview, 22(3): 445–63.","Hartmann, Van. C., 1998, “Tory Feminism in Mary Astell’s\nBart’lemy Fair”, Journal of Narrative\nTechnique, 28(3): 243–65.","Herberg, E., 1999, “Mary Astell’s Rhetorical Theory: A\nWoman’s Viewpoint”, in The Changing Tradition: Women in the\nHistory of Rhetoric, C. M. Sutherland and R. 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[Reprint of the introduction is\navailable online.]","Lister, A., 2004, “Marriage and Misogyny: The Place of Mary\nAstell in the History of Political Thought”, History of\nPolitical Thought, 25(1): 44–72.","McCrystal, J., 1992, “A Lady’s Calling: Mary Astell’s Notion\nof Women”, Political Theory Newsletter, 4:\n156–70.","–––, 1993, “Revolting Women The Use of\nRevolutionary Discourse in Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft\nCompared”, History of Political Thought, 14(2):\n189–203.","Miller, S., 2008, Engendering the Fall: John Milton and\nSeventeenth-Century Women Writers, Philadelphia: University of\nPennsylvania Press.","Myers, J. E., 2012, “Enthusiastic Improvement: Mary Astell\nand Damaris Masham on Sociability”, Hypatia, 28(3):\n533–550.","Nadelhaft, J., 1982, “The Englishwoman’s Sexual Civil War:\nFeminist Attitudes Towards Men, Women, and Marriage”,\nJournal of the History of Ideas, 43(4): 555–579.","Nelson, A., 2005, “The Rationalist Impulse”, in A\nCompanion to Rationalism, A. 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L., 2013, “Reproducing Custom: Mechanical\nHabits and Female Machines in Augustan Women’s\nEducation”, Feminist Formations, 25(1):\n111–137.","Shapiro, L., 2013, “The Outward and Inward Beauty of Early\nModern Women”, Review Philosophique de la France et de\nl’Étranger, T.: Penser au Féminin Au XVIIe Siécle, 203(3):\n327–346.","Sharrock, C., 1992, “De-ciphering Women and De-scribing\nAuthority: The Writings of Mary Astell”, in Women, Writing,\nHistory 1640-1740, I. Grundy and S. Wiseman (eds.), Athens:\nUniversity of Georgia Press, pp. 109–124.","Smith, F., 1916, Mary Astell, Columbia: Columbia University\nPress.","Smith, H. L., 1982, Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth-Century\nEnglish Feminists, Urbana: University of Illinois\nPress.","–––, 2007, “‘Cry up liberty’:\nThe Political Context for Mary Astell’s Feminism”, in Mary\nAstell: Reason, Gender, Faith, W. Kolbrener and M. Michelson\n(eds.), Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 193–204.","Sowaal, A., 2007, “Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal: Mind,\nMethod, and Custom”, Philosophy Compass, 2(2):\n227–43.","Spender, D., 1982, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to\nThem: From Aphra Behn to Adrienne Rich, London: Routledge and Kegan\nPaul.","Springborg, P., 1995, “Mary Astell (1666-1731), Critic of\nLocke”, American Political Science\nReview, 89(3): 621-633.","–––, 1996,\n“Introduction”, Astell: Political Writings,\nP. Springborg (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,\npp. xi–xlviii.","–––, 2002, “Introduction”, A Serious\nProposal to the Ladies, Parts I and II, Ontario: Broadview Literary\nTexts.","–––, 2005, Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom\nfrom Domination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Squadrito, K.M., 1987, “Mary Astell’s Critique of Locke’s\nView of Thinking Matter”, Journal of History of\nPhilosophy, 25: 433–439.","–––, 1991, “Mary Astell”, A\nHistory of Women Philosophers. Vol. III: 1600–1800,\nM.E. Waithe (ed.), Dordrecht, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.","Stanton, K. S., 2007, “‘Affliction, The Sincerest\nFriend’”, Prose Studies: History, Theory,\nCriticism, 29(1): 104–114.","Staves, S., 2002, “Church of England Clergy and Women\nWriters”, Huntington Library Quarterly: Reconsidering the\nBluestockings, 65(1/2): 81–103.","Sutherland, C. M., 1991, “Outside the Rhetorical Tradition:\nMary Astell’s Advice to Women in Seventeenth-Century\nEngland”, Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of\nRhetoric, 9(2): 147–63.","–––, 1995, “Mary Astell: Reclaiming\nRhetorica in the Seventeenth Century”, in Reclaiming\nRhetoria: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition, A. Lunsford (ed.),\nPittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 93–116.","–––, 2005, The Eloquence of Mary Astell,\nCalgary: University of Calgary Press.","–––, 2009, Reason and Religion in\nClarissa: Samuel Richardson and “The Famous Mr. Norris, of\nBemerton”, Farnham: Ashgate.","Sutherland, C. M. and R. Sutcliffe, 1999, The Changing\nTradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric, Calgary: University\nof Calgary Press.","Taylor, E. D., 2001, “Mary Astell’s Ironic Assault on John\nLocke’s Theory of Thinking Matter”, Journal of the History\nof Ideas, 62(3): 505–522.","––, 2005a, “Introduction Mary Astell and John\nNorris: A Correspondence”, in Mary Astell And John Norris:\nLetters Concerning The Love Of God, E. D. Taylor and M. New\n(eds.), Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 1–41. [Reprint available\nonline.]","–––, 2005b–6, “Mary Astell’s Work\ntoward a New Edition of ‘A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part\nII’”, Studies in Bibliography, 57:\n197–232.","Thickstun, M. O., 1991, “‘This was a Woman that\ntaught’: Feminist Scriptural Exegesis in the Seventeenth\nCentury”, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 21:\n149–58.","Waters, K., 2002, “Sources of Political Authority: John\nLocke and Mary Astell”, in Introduction, Women and Men Political\nTheorists: Enlightened Conversations, Malden, Massachusetts:\nBlackwell, pp. 5–19.","Weiss, P., 2004, “Mary Astell: Including Women’s Voices in\nPolitical Theory”, Hypatia, 19(3): 63–84.","–––, 1996, “Wollstonecraft and Rousseau:\nThe Gendered Fate of Political Theorists”, in Feminist\nInterpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft (Series: Re-Reading the\nCanon), M. J. Falco (ed.), University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania\nState University Press, pp. 15–32.","–––, 2009, Canon Fodder: Historical Women\nPolitical Thinkers, University Park: Penn State University\nPress.","Wilson, C., 2004, “Love of God and Love of Creatures”,\nHistory of Philosophy Quarterly, 21(3):\n281–298.","Zook, M., 2007, “Religious Nonconformity and the Problem of\nDissent in the Works of Aphra Behn and Mary Astell”, in Mary\nAstell: Reason, Gender, Faith, W. Kolbrener and M. Michelson\n(eds.), Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, pp. 99–113."],"string":"[\n \"Arnauld, A. and Nicole, P., Logic or the Art of Thinking:\\nContaining, besides rules, several new observations appropriate for\\nforming judgment, J. V. Buroker (tr. and ed.), Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press, 1996.\",\n \"Astell, M., The Christian Religion, As Profess’d by a\\nDaughter of the Church of England. In a Letter to the Right Honourable,\\nT.L. C.I., London: R. Wilkin, 1705.\",\n \"–––, Astell: Political Writings,\\nP. Springborg (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.\",\n \"–––, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies.\\nParts I and II, P. Springborg (ed.), Ontario: Broadview Literary\\nTexts, 2002.\",\n \"–––, The Christian Religion, As\\nProfessed by a Daughter of the Church of England, J. Broad (ed.),\\nToronto, ON: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies and Iter\\nPublishing, 2013.\",\n \"Astell, M. and Norris, J., Letters Concerning the Love of\\nGod, Between the Author of the Proposal to the Ladies and Mr. John\\nNorris: Wherein his late Discourse, shewing That it ought to be intire\\nand exclusive of all other Loves, is further cleared and\\njustified, London: J. Norris, 1695.\",\n \"–––, Letters Concerning the Love of\\nGod, E. D. Taylor and M. New (ed.), Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005.\",\n \"Descartes, R., The Philosophical Writings of Descartes,\\nJ. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch (eds. and trs.),\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, Vol. I (abbreviated as\\n‘CSM’ and cited by page number).\",\n \"–––, Oeuvres de Descartes, C. Adam and\\nP. Tannery (eds.), Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1996,\\nVol. VI (abbreviated as ‘AT’ and cited by page\\nnumber).\",\n \"Locke, J., An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,\\nP. H. Nidditch (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.\",\n \"Norris, J., Practical Discourses Upon several Divine\\nSubjects, London: S. Manship, 1693.\",\n \"Achinstein, S., 2007, “Mary Astell. Religion and Feminism:\\nTexts in Motion”, in Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith,\\nW. Kolbrener & M. Michelson, Burlington, VT: Ashgate,\\npp. 17–30.\",\n \"Acworth, R., 1979, The Philosophy of John Norris of Bemerton\\n(1657–1712), Hildesheim/New York: Georg Olms Verlag.\",\n \"Alvarez, D. P., 2011, “Reason and Religious Tolerance: Mary\\nAstell’s Critique of Shaftesbury”, Eighteenth Century\\nStudies, 44(4): 475–494.\",\n \"Apetrei, S., 2008a, “‘Call no man master upon earth’:\\nMary Astell’s Tory Feminism and an Unknown\\nCorrespondence”, Eighteenth-Century\\nStudies, 41(4): 507–23.\",\n \"–––, 2008b, Women, Feminism and Religion in\\nEarly Enlightenment England, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress.\",\n \"Atherton, M., 1993, “Cartesian Reason and Gendered\\nReason”, in A Mind of One’s Own: Feminist Essays on Reason\\nand Objectivity, L.M. Antony and C. Witt (eds.), Boulder and\\nOxford: Westview Press, pp. 19–34.\",\n \"Broad, J., 2002a, Women Philosophers of the\\n Seventeenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Broad, J., 2002b, “Mary Astell (1666–1731)”,\\nin British Philosophers 1500–1899, P.B. Dematteis and\\nP.S. Fosl (eds.), Dictionary of Literary Biography 252, pp.\\n3–10.\",\n \"–––, 2003, “Adversaries or Allies?\\nOccasional Thoughts on the Masham-Astell\\nExchange”, Eighteenth-Century Thought, 1:\\n123–49.\",\n \"–––, 2007, “Astell, Cartesian Ethics, and\\nthe Critique of Custom”, in Mary Astell: Reason, Gender,\\nFaith, W. Kolbrener and M. Michelson (eds.), Aldershot: Ashgate,\\npp. 165–179.\",\n \"–––, 2009, “Mary Astell on Virtuous\\nFriendship”, Parergon: Journal of the Australian and New\\nZealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern\\nStudies, 26(2): 65–86.\",\n \"–––, 2014, “Mary Astell on Marriage and\\nLockean Slavery”, History of Political Thought, 35(4):\\n717–738.\",\n \"Broad, J. and K. Green, 2009, A History of Women’s Political\\nThought in Europe, 1400–1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress.\",\n \"Bryson, C.B., 1988, “Mary Astell: Defended of the\\n‘Disembodied Mind’”, Hypatia, 13(4):\\n40–62.\",\n \"Carroll, B. A., 1990, “The Politics of\\n‘Originality’: Women and the Class System of the\\nIntellect,”, Journal of Women’s\\nHistory, 2(2): 136–63.\",\n \"Duran, J., 2000, “Mary Astell: A Pre-Humean Christian\\nEmpiricist and Feminist”, in Presenting Women Philosophers, C.\\nTougas and S. Ebenreck (eds.), Philadelphia: Temple University Press,\\npp. 147–154.\",\n \"–––, 2006, Eight Women Philosophers: Theory,\\nPolitics, and Feminism, Urbana: University of Illinois Press.\",\n \"–––, 2014, “Christianity and Women’s\\nEducation: Anna Maria van Schurman and Mary\\nAstell,” Philosophy & Theology, 26(1):\\n3–18.\",\n \"Dussinger, J. A., 2013, “Mary Astell’s Revisions of Some\\nReflections upon Marriage (1730)”, The Papers of the\\nBibliographical Society of America, 107(1): 49–79.\",\n \"Ellenzwig, S., 2003, “The Love of God and the Radical\\nEnlightenment: Mary Astell’s Brush with\\nSpinoza”, Journal of the History of\\nIdeas, 63(3): 379–87.\",\n \"Ezell, M. J. M., 1993, Writing Women’s Literary History,\\nBaltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.\",\n \"Goldie, M., 2007, “Mary Astell and John Locke”,\\nin Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, W. Kolbrener and\\nM. Michelson, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, pp. 17–30.\",\n \"Harris, J., 2012, “Philosophy and sexual politics in Mary\\nAstell and Samuel Richardson”, Intellectual History\\nReview, 22(3): 445–63.\",\n \"Hartmann, Van. C., 1998, “Tory Feminism in Mary Astell’s\\nBart’lemy Fair”, Journal of Narrative\\nTechnique, 28(3): 243–65.\",\n \"Herberg, E., 1999, “Mary Astell’s Rhetorical Theory: A\\nWoman’s Viewpoint”, in The Changing Tradition: Women in the\\nHistory of Rhetoric, C. M. Sutherland and R. Sutcliffe (eds.),\\nCalgary: University of Calgary Press, pp. 147–157.\",\n \"Hill, B., 1986, The First English Feminist: “Reflections upon\\nMarriage” and Other Writings by Mary Astell, Aldershot, Hants:\\nGrower Publishing.\",\n \"–––, 1987, “A Refuge from Men: The Idea of\\na Protestant Nunnery”, Past & Present, 117:\\n107–130.\",\n \"James, R., 1976, “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, Or, Mary\\nAstell and Mary Wollstonecraft Compared”, Studies in\\nEighteenth Century Culture, Ronald C. Rosbottom (ed.), 5:\\n121–139.\",\n \"Johns, A., 1996, “Mary Astell’s ‘Excited\\nneedles’: Theorizing Feminist Utopia in Seventeenth-Century\\nEngland”, Utopian Studies, 7(1):\\n60–74.\",\n \"Kinnaird, J. K., 1979, “Mary Astell and the Conservative\\nContribution to English Feminism”, Journal of British\\nStudies, 19(1): 53–75.\",\n \"Kolbrener, W., 2003, “Gendering the Modern, Mary Astell’s\\nFeminist Historiography”, The Eighteenth\\nCentury, 44(1): 1–24.\",\n \"–––, 2007, “Astell’s ‘Design of\\nFriendship’ in Letters and A Serious Proposal, Part I”, In\\nMary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith, W. Kolbrener and M. Michelson\\n(eds.), Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 49–64.\",\n \"–––, 2014, “Slander, Conversation and the\\nMaking of the Christian Public Sphere in Mary Astell’s A Serious\\nProposal to the Ladies and The Christian Religion as Profess’d\\nby a Daughter of the Church of England”, in Religion and\\nWomen in Britain, c. 1660-1760, S. Apetrei and H. Smith (eds.),\\nFarnham Surrey, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate,\\npp. 131–144.\",\n \"Kolbrener W. and M. Michelson, 2007, Mary Astell: Reason,\\nGender, Faith, Aldershot: Ashgate. [Reprint of the introduction is\\navailable online.]\",\n \"Lister, A., 2004, “Marriage and Misogyny: The Place of Mary\\nAstell in the History of Political Thought”, History of\\nPolitical Thought, 25(1): 44–72.\",\n \"McCrystal, J., 1992, “A Lady’s Calling: Mary Astell’s Notion\\nof Women”, Political Theory Newsletter, 4:\\n156–70.\",\n \"–––, 1993, “Revolting Women The Use of\\nRevolutionary Discourse in Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft\\nCompared”, History of Political Thought, 14(2):\\n189–203.\",\n \"Miller, S., 2008, Engendering the Fall: John Milton and\\nSeventeenth-Century Women Writers, Philadelphia: University of\\nPennsylvania Press.\",\n \"Myers, J. E., 2012, “Enthusiastic Improvement: Mary Astell\\nand Damaris Masham on Sociability”, Hypatia, 28(3):\\n533–550.\",\n \"Nadelhaft, J., 1982, “The Englishwoman’s Sexual Civil War:\\nFeminist Attitudes Towards Men, Women, and Marriage”,\\nJournal of the History of Ideas, 43(4): 555–579.\",\n \"Nelson, A., 2005, “The Rationalist Impulse”, in A\\nCompanion to Rationalism, A. Nelson (ed.), Malden, MA: Blackwell,\\npp. 3–11.\",\n \"O’Donnell, S., 1978, “Mr. Locke and the Ladies: The\\nIndelible Words on the Tabula Rasa”, Studies in\\nEighteenth Century Culture, 8: 151–64.\",\n \"O’Neill, E., 1998, “Astell, Mary (1666–1731)”,\\nin Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 1, E. Craig (ed.),\\nNew York: Routledge, pp. 527–30.\",\n \"––&ndahs;, 1998b, “Disappearing Ink: Early\\nModern Women Philosophers and their Fate in History,”\\nin Philosophy in a Feminist Voice: Critiques and\\nReconstructions, J. A. Kournay (ed.), Princeton: Princeton\\nUniversity Press, pp. 17–62.\",\n \"–––, 1999, “Women Cartesians,\\n‘Feminine Philosophy’, and Historical\\nExclusion”, in Feminist Interpretations of René\\nDescartes, S. Bordo (ed.), University Park, Pennsylvania:\\nPennsylvania State University Press, pp. 232–57.\",\n \"–––, 2005, “Early Modern Women\\nPhilosophers and the History of Philosophy,”\\nHypatia, 20(3): 185–97.\",\n \"–––, 2007, “Mary Astell on the Causation\\nof Sensation”, in Mary Astell: Reason, Gender, Faith,\\nW. Kolbrener and M. Michelson (eds.), Aldershot: Ashgate,\\npp. 145–64.\",\n \"Perry, R., 1981, “Two Forgotten Wits”, The Antioch\\nReview, 39(4): 431–438.\",\n \"–––, 1982, “Mary Astell’s\\nPoetry”, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 1(2):\\n201–202.\",\n \"–––, 1984, “Mary Astell’s Response to the\\nEnlightenment”, in Women and the Enlightenment,\\nM. Hunt, M. Jacob, P. Mack, and R. Perry (eds.), New York: The Haworth\\nPress, Inc., pp. 13–40.\",\n \"–––, 1985, “Radical Doubt and the\\nLiberation of Women”, Eighteenth-Century\\nStudies, 18(4): 472–93.\",\n \"–––, 1986, The Celebrated Mary Astell: An\\nEarly English Feminist, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress.\",\n \"–––, 1990, “Mary Astell and the Feminist\\nCritique of Possessive\\nIndividualism”, Eighteenth-Century\\nStudies, 23(4): 444–57.\",\n \"Pickard, C. “Great in Humilitie’: A Consideration of\\nMary Astell’s Poetry”, in Mary Astell: Reason, Gender,\\nFaith, W. Kolbrener and M. Michelson (eds.), Aldershot, England:\\nAshgate, 115–126.\",\n \"Ruether, R. R., 1990, “Prophets and Humanists: Types of\\nReligious Feminism in Stuart England”, The Journal of\\nReligion, 70(1): 1–18.\",\n \"Schillace, B. L., 2013, “Reproducing Custom: Mechanical\\nHabits and Female Machines in Augustan Women’s\\nEducation”, Feminist Formations, 25(1):\\n111–137.\",\n \"Shapiro, L., 2013, “The Outward and Inward Beauty of Early\\nModern Women”, Review Philosophique de la France et de\\nl’Étranger, T.: Penser au Féminin Au XVIIe Siécle, 203(3):\\n327–346.\",\n \"Sharrock, C., 1992, “De-ciphering Women and De-scribing\\nAuthority: The Writings of Mary Astell”, in Women, Writing,\\nHistory 1640-1740, I. Grundy and S. Wiseman (eds.), Athens:\\nUniversity of Georgia Press, pp. 109–124.\",\n \"Smith, F., 1916, Mary Astell, Columbia: Columbia University\\nPress.\",\n \"Smith, H. L., 1982, Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth-Century\\nEnglish Feminists, Urbana: University of Illinois\\nPress.\",\n \"–––, 2007, “‘Cry up liberty’:\\nThe Political Context for Mary Astell’s Feminism”, in Mary\\nAstell: Reason, Gender, Faith, W. Kolbrener and M. Michelson\\n(eds.), Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 193–204.\",\n \"Sowaal, A., 2007, “Mary Astell’s Serious Proposal: Mind,\\nMethod, and Custom”, Philosophy Compass, 2(2):\\n227–43.\",\n \"Spender, D., 1982, Women of Ideas and What Men Have Done to\\nThem: From Aphra Behn to Adrienne Rich, London: Routledge and Kegan\\nPaul.\",\n \"Springborg, P., 1995, “Mary Astell (1666-1731), Critic of\\nLocke”, American Political Science\\nReview, 89(3): 621-633.\",\n \"–––, 1996,\\n“Introduction”, Astell: Political Writings,\\nP. Springborg (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,\\npp. xi–xlviii.\",\n \"–––, 2002, “Introduction”, A Serious\\nProposal to the Ladies, Parts I and II, Ontario: Broadview Literary\\nTexts.\",\n \"–––, 2005, Mary Astell: Theorist of Freedom\\nfrom Domination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Squadrito, K.M., 1987, “Mary Astell’s Critique of Locke’s\\nView of Thinking Matter”, Journal of History of\\nPhilosophy, 25: 433–439.\",\n \"–––, 1991, “Mary Astell”, A\\nHistory of Women Philosophers. Vol. III: 1600–1800,\\nM.E. Waithe (ed.), Dordrecht, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.\",\n \"Stanton, K. S., 2007, “‘Affliction, The Sincerest\\nFriend’”, Prose Studies: History, Theory,\\nCriticism, 29(1): 104–114.\",\n \"Staves, S., 2002, “Church of England Clergy and Women\\nWriters”, Huntington Library Quarterly: Reconsidering the\\nBluestockings, 65(1/2): 81–103.\",\n \"Sutherland, C. M., 1991, “Outside the Rhetorical Tradition:\\nMary Astell’s Advice to Women in Seventeenth-Century\\nEngland”, Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of\\nRhetoric, 9(2): 147–63.\",\n \"–––, 1995, “Mary Astell: Reclaiming\\nRhetorica in the Seventeenth Century”, in Reclaiming\\nRhetoria: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition, A. Lunsford (ed.),\\nPittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 93–116.\",\n \"–––, 2005, The Eloquence of Mary Astell,\\nCalgary: University of Calgary Press.\",\n \"–––, 2009, Reason and Religion in\\nClarissa: Samuel Richardson and “The Famous Mr. Norris, of\\nBemerton”, Farnham: Ashgate.\",\n \"Sutherland, C. M. and R. Sutcliffe, 1999, The Changing\\nTradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric, Calgary: University\\nof Calgary Press.\",\n \"Taylor, E. D., 2001, “Mary Astell’s Ironic Assault on John\\nLocke’s Theory of Thinking Matter”, Journal of the History\\nof Ideas, 62(3): 505–522.\",\n \"––, 2005a, “Introduction Mary Astell and John\\nNorris: A Correspondence”, in Mary Astell And John Norris:\\nLetters Concerning The Love Of God, E. D. Taylor and M. New\\n(eds.), Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 1–41. [Reprint available\\nonline.]\",\n \"–––, 2005b–6, “Mary Astell’s Work\\ntoward a New Edition of ‘A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Part\\nII’”, Studies in Bibliography, 57:\\n197–232.\",\n \"Thickstun, M. O., 1991, “‘This was a Woman that\\ntaught’: Feminist Scriptural Exegesis in the Seventeenth\\nCentury”, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 21:\\n149–58.\",\n \"Waters, K., 2002, “Sources of Political Authority: John\\nLocke and Mary Astell”, in Introduction, Women and Men Political\\nTheorists: Enlightened Conversations, Malden, Massachusetts:\\nBlackwell, pp. 5–19.\",\n \"Weiss, P., 2004, “Mary Astell: Including Women’s Voices in\\nPolitical Theory”, Hypatia, 19(3): 63–84.\",\n \"–––, 1996, “Wollstonecraft and Rousseau:\\nThe Gendered Fate of Political Theorists”, in Feminist\\nInterpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft (Series: Re-Reading the\\nCanon), M. J. Falco (ed.), University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania\\nState University Press, pp. 15–32.\",\n \"–––, 2009, Canon Fodder: Historical Women\\nPolitical Thinkers, University Park: Penn State University\\nPress.\",\n \"Wilson, C., 2004, “Love of God and Love of Creatures”,\\nHistory of Philosophy Quarterly, 21(3):\\n281–298.\",\n \"Zook, M., 2007, “Religious Nonconformity and the Problem of\\nDissent in the Works of Aphra Behn and Mary Astell”, in Mary\\nAstell: Reason, Gender, Faith, W. Kolbrener and M. Michelson\\n(eds.), Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, pp. 99–113.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../cambridge-platonists/","text":"Cambridge Platonists"},{"href":"../descartes/","text":"Descartes, René"},{"href":"../locke/","text":"Locke, John"},{"href":"../john-norris/","text":"Norris, John"},{"href":"../occasionalism/","text":"occasionalism"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../cambridge-platonists/\",\n \"text\": \"Cambridge Platonists\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../descartes/\",\n \"text\": \"Descartes, René\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../locke/\",\n \"text\": \"Locke, John\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../john-norris/\",\n \"text\": \"Norris, John\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../occasionalism/\",\n \"text\": \"occasionalism\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":88,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"attention"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Attention"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Tue Sep 8, 2009; substantive revision Tue Oct 26, 2021"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nAttention is involved in the selective directedness of our mental\nlives. The nature of this selectivity is one of the principal points\nof disagreement between the extant theories of attention. Some of the\nmost influential theories treat the selectivity of attention as\nresulting from limitations in the brain’s capacity to process\nthe complex properties of multiple perceivable stimuli. Other theories\ntake the selectivity of attention to be the result of limitations in\nthe thinking subject’s capacity to consciously entertain\nmultiple trains of thought. A third group attempt to account for\nattention’s selectivity in ways that need not make any reference\nto limitations in capacity. These latter theories relate the\nselectivity of attention to the selectivity required to maintain a\nsingle coherent course of action, to the weighting of sensory\ninformation in accordance with its expected precision, or to\ncompetition between mutually inhibitory streams of processing.","\nThe instances of attention differ along several dimensions of\nvariation. In some of its instances attention is a perceptual\nphenomenon. In other instances it is a phenomenon related to\naction. In some instances the selectivity of attention is\nvoluntary. In other instances it is driven, quite\nindependently of the subject’s volition, by the high salience of\nattention-grabbing items in the perceptual field. The difficulty of\ngiving a unified theory of attention that applies to attention’s\nvoluntary and involuntary instances, and to its perceptual and\nenactive instances, makes attention a topic of philosophical interest\nin its own right.","\nAttention is also a topic of philosophical interest because of its\napparent relations to a number of other philosophically puzzling\nphenomena. There are empirical and theoretical considerations\nsuggesting that attention is closely related to\nconsciousness, and there are controversies over whether this\nrelationship is one of necessity, or sufficiency (or both or neither).\nThere are also controversies – thought to be important to the\nviability of representationism about consciousness – over the\nways in which the phenomenal character of a conscious experience can\nbe modulated by attention. Different considerations link attention to\ndemonstrative reference, to the development of an\nunderstanding of other minds, and to the exercise of the\nwill. Some work in the tradition of virtue ethics takes\nattention to be morally important, since there are at least\nsome virtues that require one to attend appropriately. Attention has\nalso been given a prominent role in some theories about the epistemic\nsignificance of emotion, and in some discussions of the\nepistemic peculiarities of self-attributed mental states.","\nThe controversies concerning attention’s relation to these other\nphenomena often include debates about the philosophical significance\nof theories that have been developed through the empirical study of\nattention at the neuropsychological and cognitive levels.\nAttention’s cultural and economic aspects have also become a\npoint of philosophical interest, with some theorists suggesting that\nthe social significance of new media is primarily a consequence of the\nnovel ways in which those media engage and compete for our\nattention."],"string":"[\n \"\\nAttention is involved in the selective directedness of our mental\\nlives. The nature of this selectivity is one of the principal points\\nof disagreement between the extant theories of attention. Some of the\\nmost influential theories treat the selectivity of attention as\\nresulting from limitations in the brain’s capacity to process\\nthe complex properties of multiple perceivable stimuli. Other theories\\ntake the selectivity of attention to be the result of limitations in\\nthe thinking subject’s capacity to consciously entertain\\nmultiple trains of thought. A third group attempt to account for\\nattention’s selectivity in ways that need not make any reference\\nto limitations in capacity. These latter theories relate the\\nselectivity of attention to the selectivity required to maintain a\\nsingle coherent course of action, to the weighting of sensory\\ninformation in accordance with its expected precision, or to\\ncompetition between mutually inhibitory streams of processing.\",\n \"\\nThe instances of attention differ along several dimensions of\\nvariation. In some of its instances attention is a perceptual\\nphenomenon. In other instances it is a phenomenon related to\\naction. In some instances the selectivity of attention is\\nvoluntary. In other instances it is driven, quite\\nindependently of the subject’s volition, by the high salience of\\nattention-grabbing items in the perceptual field. The difficulty of\\ngiving a unified theory of attention that applies to attention’s\\nvoluntary and involuntary instances, and to its perceptual and\\nenactive instances, makes attention a topic of philosophical interest\\nin its own right.\",\n \"\\nAttention is also a topic of philosophical interest because of its\\napparent relations to a number of other philosophically puzzling\\nphenomena. There are empirical and theoretical considerations\\nsuggesting that attention is closely related to\\nconsciousness, and there are controversies over whether this\\nrelationship is one of necessity, or sufficiency (or both or neither).\\nThere are also controversies – thought to be important to the\\nviability of representationism about consciousness – over the\\nways in which the phenomenal character of a conscious experience can\\nbe modulated by attention. Different considerations link attention to\\ndemonstrative reference, to the development of an\\nunderstanding of other minds, and to the exercise of the\\nwill. Some work in the tradition of virtue ethics takes\\nattention to be morally important, since there are at least\\nsome virtues that require one to attend appropriately. Attention has\\nalso been given a prominent role in some theories about the epistemic\\nsignificance of emotion, and in some discussions of the\\nepistemic peculiarities of self-attributed mental states.\",\n \"\\nThe controversies concerning attention’s relation to these other\\nphenomena often include debates about the philosophical significance\\nof theories that have been developed through the empirical study of\\nattention at the neuropsychological and cognitive levels.\\nAttention’s cultural and economic aspects have also become a\\npoint of philosophical interest, with some theorists suggesting that\\nthe social significance of new media is primarily a consequence of the\\nnovel ways in which those media engage and compete for our\\nattention.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Historical Overview","sub_toc":["1.1 Descartes: Attention and Epistemology","1.2 Berkeley: Attention and Abstraction","1.3 Locke: Attention as a Mode of Thought","1.4 The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Attention in Perception, in Action, and in Reflective Thought","1.5 William James and His Contemporaries: Deflationary Theories","1.6 The Twentieth Century: Locating Attention at a Bottleneck in Information Processing"]},{"content_title":"2. Theories of Attention","sub_toc":["2.1 Capacity-Limitation Theories","2.2 Feature Integration Theory ","2.3 Coherence Theories","2.4 General-Purpose Prioritization","2.5 Precision Optimization Theories and Prediction Error Coding","2.6 Competition Theories and Cognitive Unison","2.7 Spotlight Theories","2.8 Motor Theories"]},{"content_title":"3. Explanatory Roles for Attention","sub_toc":["3.1 Attention and Consciousness","3.2 Attention and Demonstrative Reference","3.3 Attention and Other Minds","3.4 Attention and Knowledge","3.5 Attention and Voluntary Action"]},{"content_title":"4 Attention and Value","sub_toc":["4.1 Attention in Aesthetics","4.2 Attention in Ethics","4.3 Attention in Social and Political Theory "]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Historical Overview\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"1.1 Descartes: Attention and Epistemology\",\n \"1.2 Berkeley: Attention and Abstraction\",\n \"1.3 Locke: Attention as a Mode of Thought\",\n \"1.4 The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Attention in Perception, in Action, and in Reflective Thought\",\n \"1.5 William James and His Contemporaries: Deflationary Theories\",\n \"1.6 The Twentieth Century: Locating Attention at a Bottleneck in Information Processing\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Theories of Attention\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"2.1 Capacity-Limitation Theories\",\n \"2.2 Feature Integration Theory \",\n \"2.3 Coherence Theories\",\n \"2.4 General-Purpose Prioritization\",\n \"2.5 Precision Optimization Theories and Prediction Error Coding\",\n \"2.6 Competition Theories and Cognitive Unison\",\n \"2.7 Spotlight Theories\",\n \"2.8 Motor Theories\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Explanatory Roles for Attention\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"3.1 Attention and Consciousness\",\n \"3.2 Attention and Demonstrative Reference\",\n \"3.3 Attention and Other Minds\",\n \"3.4 Attention and Knowledge\",\n \"3.5 Attention and Voluntary Action\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4 Attention and Value\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"4.1 Attention in Aesthetics\",\n \"4.2 Attention in Ethics\",\n \"4.3 Attention in Social and Political Theory \"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":[],"section_title":"1. Historical Overview","subsections":[{"content":["\nIn the early modern period a variety of explanatory roles were\nassigned to attention by a number of different writers.\nDescartes’ Meditations provides one prominent example.\nThe result of Descartes’ First Meditation—that everything\ncan be doubted—is in apparent tension with his Third\nMeditation’s claim that clear and distinct ideas are beyond\ndoubt. Descartes introduces a claim about attention to resolve this\napparent conflict. He says, in reply to the seventh set of objections,\nthat it is only when we pay attention to them that clear and distinct\nideas provide a place where doubt does not take hold:","\nSo long as we attend to a truth which we perceive very clearly, we\ncannot doubt it. But when, as often happens, we are not attending to\nany truth in this way, then even though we remember that we have\npreviously perceived many things clearly, nevertheless there will be\nnothing which we may not justly doubt so long as we do not know that\nwhatever we clearly perceive is true. (‘Replies to\nObjections’, 309)\n","\nThis passage is usually cited for the point that it makes about\nmemory, but the picture that Descartes is here outlining is also one\nin which attention has an important epistemic role to play: clarity\nand distinctness realize their epistemic potential only when attention\nis being paid to the ideas that have them. Those ideas can be doubted,\nas, in accordance with the policy of the First Meditation they must\nbe, but that doubt cannot be maintained by a properly attentive\nthinker. The crucial first move in Descartes’\nepistemology—the move from radical doubt to certainty about the\ntruth of particular clear and distinct ideas—is, therefore, a\ntransition that is mediated by attention."],"subsection_title":"1.1 Descartes: Attention and Epistemology"},{"content":["\nA quite different explanatory role is assigned to attention in Bishop\nBerkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge, although here\nagain we find that it is in order to remove an epistemological glitch\nthat the notion of attention is brought in. In the Introduction to\nPrinciples of Human Knowledge Berkeley rejects Locke’s\nclaim that there exist such things as Abstract Ideas. But Berkeley\nretains Locke’s commitment to the core empiricist claim that the\nthinking of thoughts is always a matter of handling ideas received\nfrom experience. This would seem to lead to the conclusion that it is\nnot possible to think about abstractia, but Berkeley realizes that\nthat conclusion is unacceptable. It is, as he says, perfectly possible\nto think about the properties of triangles in general.","\nIn the second edition of the Principles Berkeley added a\ncouple of sentences to the Introduction that make it clear that it is\nattention and, in particular, the withholding of attention, that is\nsupposed to explain the possibility of thinking about abstractia\nwithout the need to postulate Abstract Ideas. These added sentences\ntell us that:","\n[It] must be acknowledged that a man may consider a figure merely\nas triangular, without attending to the particular qualities of the\nangles or relations of the sides. So far he may abstract, but\nthis will never prove that he can frame an abstract general,\ninconsistent idea of a triangle. (1710, Introduction to 2nd edn.\n§16. emphasis added)\n","\nIn these sentences Berkeley is not attempting to elaborate a theory of\nattention. He says nothing more about the idea that attention might\nenable thought about abstractia. It is nonetheless clear that he\nrequires attention to play an important role in his picture of the\nmind.","\nBerkeley’s idea that attention and abstraction are linked was\ntaken up in the second half of the nineteenth century by William\nHamilton. Hamilton did not, however, think that the link between\nattention and abstraction provided the starting point for an\nexplanation of attention, nor of abstraction. That is because he took\nit that the relationship between the two phenomena was too intimate to\nbe explanatory. He writes that:","\nAttention and Abstraction are only the same process viewed in\ndifferent relations. They are, as it were, the positive and negative\npoles of the same act. (1876, 88)\n"],"subsection_title":"1.2 Berkeley: Attention and Abstraction"},{"content":["\nDescartes and Berkeley treat attention very briefly, but each assigns\nattention to a particular explanatory role. Locke’s treatment of\nattention is also brief, but he has his own theory of the explanatory\nrole that attention plays, and goes further than either Descartes or\nBerkeley in giving us a positive account of what attention is. His\naccount is given as part of the catalogue of ‘Modes of\nThinking’, which Locke sets out towards the beginning of Chapter\nNineteen of Book Two of the Essay Concerning Human\nUnderstanding:","\n[W]hen ideas float in our mind without any reflection or regard of the\nunderstanding, it is that which the French call reverie; our language\nhas scarce a name for it: when the ideas that offer themselves\n(for, as I have observed in another place, whilst we are awake, there\nwill always be a train of ideas succeeding one another in our minds)\nare taken notice of, and, as it were, registered in the memory, it is\nattention: when the mind with great earnestness, and of choice,\nfixes its view on any idea, considers it on all sides, and will not be\ncalled off by the ordinary solicitation of other ideas, it is that we\ncall “intention,” or “study.” (1689, II, 19\n§1 emphasis added)\n","\nIn addition to providing these quick theories of\n‘reverie’, ‘attention’ and ‘intention or\nstudy’, the very same sentence of Locke’s Essay\nprovides theories of ‘remembrance’,\n‘recollection’, ‘contemplation’,\n‘sleep’, ‘dreaming’, and\n‘ecstasy’. It is significant that Locke’s account of\nattention is given so briefly, and that it goes by as part of a crowd\nof theories of these various other mental phenomena. Locke is not here\nengaging in an uncharacteristically slapdash piece of rapid-fire\ntheorizing. His intention in going through this catalogue is to\nestablish that these are topics for which no new substantive theory is\nneeded. These are, in Locke’s theory, simply ‘modes of\nthinking’: ‘reverie’, ‘study’ etc. are\nnot names for independent phenomena, existing in their own right.\nInstead they are the various names that thinking is given when it\ntakes place in various ways.","\nOne consequence of Locke’s treatment of attention as a mode of\nthinking is that, once we have a theory of thinking before us, we need\nno further theory to account for the possibility of attention,\ncontemplation, study, etc. (Just as, to use the classic example of\n‘modes’, we need no substantive independent theory, once\nwe have a theory of walking, to explain the possibility of limping,\npacing or ambling.) We need to say something in giving an\nanalysis of the nature of modes, but—once the\nthing-to-be-modified has been accounted for—our analysis can\nsimply say something brief, along the lines indicated by Locke. We do\nnot need to give a theory that postulates any substances or processes\nspecific to the explanation of attention.","\nLocke’s modal view of attention has the consequence that no very\nsubstantive theory of attention is needed once our theory of thinking\nis in place. It also entails, and for the same reason, that attention\ncannot figure in the explanation of how thinking itself is possible\n(for any explanation in which it did figure would be analogous to an\nexplanation of walking that takes strolling to already be possible; it\nwould get its explanatory priorities backwards)."],"subsection_title":"1.3 Locke: Attention as a Mode of Thought"},{"content":["\nLocke viewed attention as an explanatorily slight phenomenon—a\nmode of thought that is not in need of much explanation, nor capable\nof providing much. Theories of attention moved away from that view\nover the course of the eighteenth century. Attention was increasingly\ntreated as a phenomenon with explanatory work to do, and so as a\nphenomenon for which a substantive independent theory needed to be\ngiven. The attempt to provide such a theory got properly underway in\n1738, when Christian Wolff’s textbook on psychology was the\nfirst to devote a whole chapter to the topic of attention (see\nHatfield, 1995, for an excellent discussion).","\nDuring this period the explanatory remit for theories of attention\nbroadened in two directions. The first move was away from the idea\nthat attention acts on already-received ideas and towards the idea\nthat attention is involved in the initial reception of those ideas.\nLocke had characterized attention as the registration of\nalready-received ideas into memory. But by 1769, when Henry Home Kames\nadded the appendix of ‘Terms Defined or Explained’ to his\nElements of Criticism, attention’s role as a regulator\nof cognitive input was regarded as definitive of it:","\nAttention is that state of mind which prepares one to receive\nimpressions. According to the degree of attention objects make a\nstrong or weak impression. Attention is requisite even to the simple\nact of seeing. (1769, 18)\n","\nAs well as beginning to assign to attention a role in the explanation\nof the reception of ideas, eighteenth century theories also moved\ntowards including a role for attention in the production of\nbehaviour. This is particularly clear in Dugald\nStewart’s 1792 Elements of the Philosophy of the Human\nMind. Stewart retains Locke’s view that attention has an\nessential role to play in determining which things get stored in\nmemory. He adds to that view the claim that attention has a role in\ndetermining which particular memories get recalled, writing that\n“Some attention [is] necessary for any act of memory\nwhatever.” (1792, 53). Stewart also claims that attention has a\nrole in the explanation of the development and deployment of at least\nsome skilled behaviours. The example that Stewart gives here is that\nof “the dexterity of jugglers” which, he says,\n“merits a greater degree of attention from philosophers than it\nhas yet attracted” (62).","\nIn the century between Locke’s Essay and\nStewart’s Elements, then, attention ceases to be seen\nmerely as a certain mode of idea-handling, and comes to be seen as a\nphenomenon in need of its own explanation, and with a role to play in\nthe explanation of perception, in the explanation of skilled action,\nand in the explanation of memory (both in its storage and in its\nrecall).","\nIn the century after Stewart’s Elements the diversity\namong the phenomena that attention was expected to explain continued\nto grow, and it continued to include phenomena from across the\npsychological spectrum from perception, to thought, to action. By the\nend of the nineteenth century, in what was a crucial period in the\ndevelopment of scientific psychology, there were some psychologists,\nsuch as E.B. Titchener, who took the role of attention in perception\nand in ‘sensory clearness’ to be its most essential\nfeature (see Titchener, 1908, 1910); others, such as Alexander Bain,\nwho thought that the essential feature of attention was its role in\naction, (Bain, 1888); and a third group, of whom G.F. Stout was the\nmost prominent example, who argued that the primary job for a theory\nof attention was to explain attention’s role in reflective\nthought (see Stout, 1891).","\nAs a result of this diversity in their conceptions of\nattention’s explanatory remit (and as a result of the lack of\nany established methodology for empirical psychology) the debates\nbetween exponents of these various psychological theories of attention\ngot themselves into what was acknowledged to be a ‘chaotic\nstate’ (Pillsbury, 1906)."],"subsection_title":"1.4 The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Attention in Perception, in Action and in Reflective Thought"},{"content":["\nThe diversity of explanatory roles assigned to attention in the\neighteenth and nineteenth centuries meant that theorizing about\nattention at the end of the nineteenth century was in a chaotic state.\nThe ambition for theorists of attention writing at the end of the\nnineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries was to get\nthis chaos into order. The theories of attention proposed in this\nperiod therefore tended to take the form of attempts to reveal\nattention as something less mysterious and less complex than earlier\nwriters had supposed. This ambition to give a ‘nothing\nbut…’ reduction of attention can be seen in the most\ninfluential work from this period: William James’ The\nPrinciples of Psychology (1890).","\nOne aspect of James’ approach is to play down the more complex\nperceptual aspects of attention. His chapter on attention includes a\ndiscussion of experiments into what we now call\n‘subitizing’—that is, into the ability to perceive\nthe cardinality of small stimulus sets without needing to count their\nmembers—but James writes of these experiments that it “is\nobvious that such observations decide nothing at all about our\nattention, properly so called” (407).","\nAlthough James plays down attention’s role in complex perceptual\nphenomena, he does assign attention to an important explanatory role\nin the production of behaviour. He claims, for example, that\n‘Volition is nothing but attention’ (424). But when James\nmakes such claims it is as part of a general project that seeks always\nto be deflationary where possible. When James associates attention\nwith volition it is as a way of suggesting how volition could be given\na deflationary treatment, not as a way of inflating attention’s\nexplanatory role.","\nThis deflationary approach to attention’s explanatory remit\nmeans that, when it comes to giving an account of the ‘intimate\nnature of the attention process’, James can identify two fairly\nsimple processes which, he claims, ‘probably coexist in all our\nconcrete attentive acts’. and which ‘possibly form in\ncombination a complete reply’ to the question of\nattention’s ‘intimate nature’ (1890, 411). The\nprocesses that James identifies are:","\nThe first of these processes is reasonably familiar. By ‘the\naccommodation or adjustment of the sensory organs’ James means\nsuch processes as pointing one’s ears in the right direction,\nbringing one’s eyes into focus, taking a sniff, and so on.","\nJames’s talk of ‘anticipatory preparation’ of\n‘ideation centres’ is a little less clear, but the point\nis again a quite straightforward one. What James has in mind here is\nsimply imagination. His claim is that when attention does not\ninvolve adjusting one’s sense organs it consists in imagining\nthe things or actions that one is attending to, or looking for.","\nJames illustrates his claim about attention’s link to\nimagination with an example from Hermann von Helmholtz. This example\nis an important one for James, and it illustrates some important\nfeatures of attention that subsequent theorists have tended to\nneglect. The example involves the variety of attention that needs to\nbe paid when trying to discern the overtones in a note played on the\npiano. Helmholtz asks us to sit at the piano and to play a G, then,\nimagining the sound that we have just heard, to play a low C. Doing\nthis, it is claimed, enables one to hear that G is discernibly there\n(as the third overtone) within the sound produced when C is played.\nHelmholtz’s claim, which James endorses, is that the kind of\nattention that is paid when listening for an overtone is constituted\nby the imagining of what that overtone would sound like. James goes\nonto claim that there is a wide range of cases in which paying\nattention to what one is doing consists in this same sort of\npreparatory imaginative engagement.","\nHere, as in his more frequently discussed treatment of emotion, it is\ndistinctive of James’s approach that he tries to account for a\nlarge-scale personal-level psychological phenomenon in a realist but\nsomewhat revisionary way, so as to be able to give his account using\nrelatively simple and unmysterious explanatory resources. An\nalternative deflationary approach—one which James explicitly\ncontrasted with his own—is the approach taken in 1886 by F.H.\nBradley.","\nBradley advocated a view according to which attention is not the sort\nof phenomenon for which an independent and substantive theory can or\nneeds to be given. Bradley does not develop this point in much detail,\nand it is a point on which he would later change his mind, but in his\n1886 article, ‘Is there a special activity of attention?’,\nBradley was concerned with arguing that a project such as\nJames’s one of identifying particular processes as the\nattention-constituting ones was wrongheaded. He claims that no\nparticular attention-processes can be identified since:","\nAny function whatever of the body or the mind will be active attention\nif it is prompted by an interest and brings about the result of our\nengrossment with its product. There is no primary act of attention,\nthere is no specific act of attention, there is no one kind of act of\nattention at all. (1886, 316)\n","\nAlthough Bradley does not use the Lockean vocabulary (and although\nJames himself does not seem to have taken Bradley in this way),\nBradley’s position here has much in common with Locke’s\nclaim that attention is a mode. Bradley’s position,\nlike Locke’s, is that what is essential to an instance of\nattention is not the matter of which processes are taking\nplace, but the facts about how the things that happen happen.\nHe therefore takes the ennumeration of processes to be the wrong form\nfor a theory of attention to take.","\nOther writers who were contemporary with Bradley and James took\ndifferent approaches to the project of giving a deflationary\nexplanation of attention. In Théodule Ribot’s 1888 book\nLa Psychologie De L’Attention the attempt to explain\nattention took an approach that we would now classify as behaviourist.\nIn 1888 behaviourism had not yet been established as a general\napproach in philosophical or psychological theories of the mind, but\nRibot’s suggestion that attention’s behavioural\nmanifestations are essential to it is nonetheless recognizable as an\nearly articulation of behaviourism in a strong form:","\nAre the movements of the face, the body, and the limbs and the\nrespiratory modifications that accompany attention, simple effects,\noutward marks, as is usually supposed? Or are they, on the contrary,\nthe necessary conditions, the constituent elements, the\nindispensable factors of attention? Without hesitation we accept\nthe second thesis. (1888, 19)\n","\nA somewhat more moderate version of this behaviour-centred approach\nwas taken by Alexander Bain, who identified attention, not with its\nbehavioural manifestations themselves, but with truncated versions of\nthe motor-control processes that typically bring about those\nbehavioural manifestations: processes ‘stopping short of the\nactual movement performed by the organ’ (Bain, 1888, 371). Much\nas Ribot’s view can be seen as an early version of behaviourism,\nBain’s view can be seen as an early version of the motor-based\napproaches to attention that can be found in the literature of the\npresent century (see\n Section 2.8\n below)."],"subsection_title":"1.5 William James and His Contemporaries: Deflationary Theories"},{"content":["\nThe variety among the deflationary explanatory approaches that\ncharacterized the theories of attention offered in the nineteenth\ncentury gave way in the early twentieth century to a period in which\none such explanatory tactic was dominant: the tactic of behaviourism.\nBehaviourists tended to neglect attention, but did not ignore it\nentirely. John Dashiell’s 1928 Fundamentals of Objective\nPsychology, for example, is a behaviourist work that attempts to\naccount for attention “as a form of posturing” (Ch. 10,\n§3). The project of identifying a behaviour with which to explain\nattention was, nonetheless, an understandably unpopular one. As\nGilbert Ryle notes, it is not only attention, but also ‘heed\nconcepts’ more generally, that resist simple behaviourist\nanalysis:","\n[W]hen a man is described as driving carefully, whistling with\nconcentration or eating absent-mindedly the special character of his\nactivity seem to elude the observer, the camera and the Dictaphone.\nPerhaps knitted brows, taciturnity and fixed gaze may be evidence of\nintentness; but these can be simulated, or they can be purely\nhabitual. (1949, 133)\n","\nIn the middle of the twentieth century behaviourism’s dominance\nwaned, cognitive psychology established itself, and a new theoretical\napproach to the explanation of attention was developed. These three\ndevelopments were intimately related to one another. Instrumental to\nall three was the publication in 1958 of Donald Broadbent’s\nPerception and Communication.","\nThe year prior to Perception and Communication’s\npublication had seen B.F. Skinner’s attempt, in Verbal\nBehaviour (1957), to apply a behaviourist explanatory approach to\ndistinctively human aspects of cognition. Skinner’s project in\nthat book failed, and Noam Chomsky’s famous 1959 review of the\nbook made its failure conspicuous. Chomsky’s own work in\nSyntactic Structures (1957) went some way towards\nestablishing the new cognitive paradigm for psychology by showing how\ninternal processing could be theorized by describing transformations\non representations in abstraction from the question of how those\nrepresentations were realized. Donald Broadbent’s distinctive\ncontribution to the overthrow of behaviourism was to show how the move\nfrom behavioural data to the postulation of a particular cognitive\narchitecture could be disciplined by the then-new strategy of\nimporting into psychology the intellectual resources used in thinking\nabout information technology. The year in which Broadbent’s book\nwas published was an important year for the development of such\ntechnologies, being the year in which (inter alia) the integrated\ncircuit chip was invented (see Mole, 2012). It was also the year in\nwhich Subscriber Trunk Dialling was introduced to UK telephone\nexchanges. The technology of the telephone exchange was what most\nnaturally suggested itself as a metaphor for attention at the time\nwhen Broadbent was writing.","\nTowards the end of Perception and Communication Broadbent\nexplicitly sets out the claim that the theoretical resources developed\nin thinking about the transmission of information through telephone\nexchanges provide the basis for an alternative to behaviourism. He\nalso attacks the positivistic methodological principles that had given\nmany behaviourists their motivation. But the central lesson from\nBroadbent’s work, so far as the theory of attention goes, is a\nlesson that he takes to be independent of this attack on behaviourism\nand its positivist foundations. At an early stage in Perception\nand Communication he remarks that:","\nPerhaps the point of permanent value which will remain in psychology\nif the fashion for communication theory wanes, will be the emphasis on\nproblems of capacity. […] The fact that any given channel has a\nlimit is a matter of central importance to communication engineers,\nand it is correspondingly forced on the attention of psychologists who\nuse their terms. (1958, 5)\n","\nThis introduction of the notion of capacity limitations into\ndiscussions of perception and attention was, as Broadbent here\npredicted, hugely and permanently influential.","\nBroadbent claimed not only that the human brain is subject to capacity\nlimitations of the sort that communications engineers had learnt to\ntheorize, he claimed also that these limitations are clustered so that\nthere is a single bottleneck in capacity that is especially critical\nto the brain’s handling of perceptual information. This\nbottleneck was said to occur at the junction of two systems operating\nin series, with the first system having a large capacity for\ninformation processing, and operating automatically on all of the\nstimuli with which the perceiving subject is presented, while the\nsecond has a much smaller capacity, and therefore needs to be deployed\nselectively.","\nThose who followed Broadbent took it that the bottleneck that results\nfrom the connection of these two systems corresponds to attention in\nthe sense that, when a representation of a stimulus passes through\nthat bottleneck, the stimulus ipso facto counts as one to\nwhich attention has been paid.","\nBroadbent himself was cautious about presenting his claims about\ncapacity-bottlenecks as a theory of attention. The word\n‘attention’ occurs rarely in Perception and\nCommunication. Broadbent’s later book, Decision and\nStress (1971), does describe his earlier experiments as\n‘studies of attention’, but here too Broadbent prefers to\ntalk about ‘selective perception’ (chapter V) or\n‘vigilance’ (chapters II and III). In an article from\n1982, entitled, ‘Task Combination and Selective Intake of\nInformation’, he admits that: “The topic of this paper is\none that is often termed ‘attention’, and it may seem\nunduly artificial to have given it a more cumbrous title.” But\nhe goes on to reassert his qualms:","\n‘Attention’ is a word in ordinary language, that can\nreasonably be used as a label for experiments in a particular area.\nYet it has also been used as a theoretical concept, a mysterious asset\nor energy which is sometimes attached to human functions and sometimes\nnot. This use of attention […] is not very helpful, and\navoiding the word in the title is a step towards clarity. (1982, 253)\n","\nWhen Broadbent does use the word ‘attention’ it is mostly\nin discussions of attention shifting. His view, at least in\nhis early work, seems to have been that where there is a bottleneck in\nour information processing capacity there need to be additional\nmechanisms that control how our limited capacity resources will be\ndeployed. These additional mechanisms of bottleneck-control\nseem to have been what Broadbent thought of as the attention\nmechanisms. He never took himself to have given a theory of them, only\nto have given a theory of where they would be needed. Nor were these\nmechanisms the topic that was at issue in the debates about attention\nthat Broadbent prompted. Those debates were concerned with questions\nabout the nature and location of the bottleneck itself, not about the\nfactors that determine what, on any particular occasion, gets to pass\nthrough it.","\nIn the decades following Broadbent a great many psychologists devoted\nthemselves to the task of locating the attentional bottleneck that he\nhad postulated. Almost all psychologists writing at this time were\nguided to some degree by Broadbent’s\ntwo-serial-systems-and-a-bottleneck picture of perceptual processing.\nThe question of whether a given task is attention demanding was\ntherefore understood to depend on the question of whether the\nperformance of that task requires the engagement of the small-capacity\nsystem that comes after the bottleneck of attention. Research\ninto the attention-related demands of particular tasks therefore\nbecame another route by which to approach the issue of where the\nattentional bottleneck is located. Broadbent’s\ntwo-systems-and-a-bottleneck model was frequently questioned, but for\nmost research into attention in the second half of the twentieth\ncentury it was very much the orthodox view. This has now changed. In\npsychology’s current paradigm, only a few aspects of\nBroadbent’s picture remain orthodox."],"subsection_title":"1.6 The Twentieth Century: Locating Attention at a Bottleneck in Information Processing"}]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"2. Theories of Attention","subsections":[{"content":["\nPsychologists attempting to produce a theory of attention in the\nnineteen sixties and seventies were highly influenced by Donald\nBroadbent’s picture of attention as corresponding to a\nbottleneck in information processing capacity resulting from the\nconnection of two separate perceptual processing systems. The first\npiece of business for these psychologists was to locate this\nattentional bottleneck, by determining which sorts of processing are\ndone by the large capacity, pre-bottleneck system, and which by the\nsmall capacity, post-bottleneck system. Debates between these\npsychologists gave rise to various theories in which the selectivity\nof attention was characterized with a claim about the location of this\nbottleneck.","\nBroadbent’s own account of the distribution of processing\nbetween the pre-attentional system and the post-attentional system\ndefines the ‘early selection’ theory of attention. He\nclaimed that only very simple properties are detected by the large\ncapacity system, and that any semantic properties, or any properties\nrelating to the particular identity of a stimulus, are\ndetected only after representations of the stimulus have passed\nthrough the attentional-bottleneck and into the smaller capacity\nsystem.","\nThe personal-level consequences of this early selection theory are\nthat we can recognize what things are and what they mean only if we\nare paying attention to them, but can detect the simple physical\nproperties of things even when paying no attention to them. The theory\ncan be thought of as a communication-theoretic rendering of two\nintuitive ideas, which Broadbent’s own research had put on an\nempirically sound footing. The first is that one has no immediate\ncontrol over one’s awareness of simple features of one’s\nenvironment, such as the fact that there are people talking in the\nnext room. Whatever one is paying attention to, one will continue to\nhear some chatter to be going on, if any is. The second idea is that\nthe details of things—such as the semantic content of that\nchatter—can be detected only for the one or two things to which\none is paying attention: If one wants to know what the chatter is\nabout, one has to listen, and this involves disengaging one’s\nattention from other things that might be happening.","\nThe early selection theory also entails, more problematically, that\nthe semantic properties of an unattended item must remain\nunrepresented in the nervous system, and so entails that those\nproperties can have no psychological effects. According to this view\nthe semantic features of unattended items cannot explain why those\nitems attract attention to themselves, on the occasions when they do.\nIt was to this aspect of the theory that its opponents most frequently\nobjected.","\nThe chief rivals of Broadbent’s early selection theory were the\n‘late selectionists’, who claimed that all (or almost all)\nperceivable properties are detected automatically, by a large capacity\nsystem that operates on all of the stimuli with which the perceiving\nsubject is presented. According to this late selection theory of\nattention the consequences of passing through the bottleneck of\nattention into the post-attentive small capacity system are only (1)\nthat the subject comes to be conscious of the contents that the large\ncapacity system has already succeeded in encoding and (2) that those\ncontents come to be stored in working memory (Deutsch and Deutsch,\n1963).","\nAlthough it was originally proposed against the background of\nBroadbent’s now superseded theoretical framework, it would be\ntoo quick to dismiss the late selection theory as an obsolete one. The\ntheory has much in common with some plausible and empirically\nwell-supported views found in the more recent literature. Jesse Prinz,\nfor example, shares the late selectionists’ view that\nattention’s primary role is not in managing limited perceptual\nprocessing resources, but in projecting already-processed\nrepresentations to working memory. Prinz’s view, varying a theme\nfrom the work of Stanislas Dehaene, is that this projection to working\nmemory is what makes it the case that the content represented comes to\nconscious awareness. (Prinz, 2005, 2012, Dehaene et al.,\n2006).","\nIt should be noted that Prinz’s main philosophical business is\nwith the explanation of consciousness. Objections have been\nraised as to whether the process of projection to working\nmemory—which Prinz refers to as\n‘attention’—can adequately account for the various\nthings that attention does (Wu, 2014, §6.3.2). If it cannot then\nPrinz is willing to allow that this process is not the sole referent\nof the English word ‘attention’, writing that ‘other\nresearchers may choose to define attention differently’, and\nthat ‘those who disagree with my analysis of attention could\nsimply drop the term “attention”’ (Prinz, 2012, p.\n95).","\nThe central component of the late-selection theory, as it was\noriginally understood, was that the effect of withdrawing attention\nfrom a stimulus is to make it the case that that stimulus is processed\nwithout the subject’s awareness, rather than not being processed\nat all. This component of the view has, to some extent, been\nvindicated. The claim that unattended stimuli are subjected to some\nprocessing of which the subject lacks awareness, including some\nprocessing of those stimuli’s semantic properties, is now\nuncontroversial. Since we know that the semantic properties of\nunattended stimuli can, for example, produce negative priming effects\n(Tipper and Driver, 1988), we know that unattended stimuli are\nprocessed in a way that allows at least some of their semantic\nproperties to be encoded. The semantic properties of unattended items\nhave such effects despite the fact that experimental participants are\ntypically unaware of what those properties are.","\nThe traditional late selection theory is right in taking it that\ninattention can lead to properties being encoded without our\nawareness, rather than not being encoded at all, but that theory is\nalso committed to the claim that attention’s only\neffects are in determining what gets remembered and experienced, so\nthat the direction of attention has no effects on the initial\nperceptual processing to which stimuli are subjected. These latter\nclaims we now know to be false. An important experiment by\nO’Connor et al. used fMRI to compare neural activity in\nparticipants who, in various task conditions, were presented with high\nand low contrast checkerboard patterns in one or other half of their\nvisual field (O’Connor et al. 2002). In some conditions\nthese participants had to perform a task involving these checkerboard\npatterns. In other conditions the patterns were irrelevant to the task\nthat the participants were performing (and in a third condition no\npattern was presented, but the participants were attending to the\nscreen in anticipation of a pattern that was about to be presented).\nThe results of these comparisons reveal that even in the first parts\nof the neural circuitry through which information from the retina\npasses, on its way to the visual cortex—even, that is, in the\nLateral Geniculate Nuclei—there is a difference in the baserate\nof neural activity, and a difference in the response that stimuli\nelicit, depending on what the participant is attending to. These\nfindings indicate that attention’s effects are not limited to\ncortical loci that are upstream from a late process of attentional\nselection. They therefore refute any version of the late-selection\ntheory according to which the selectivity of attention is entirely a\n‘late process’, occurring only after initial perceptual\nencoding is complete.","\nThe findings of O’Connor et al. create fewer problems\nfor some recent theories in which elements of the late selection view\nare retained. Nilli Lavie and her collaborators have proposed one such\ntheory, which attempts to combine some aspects of the late selection\ntheory with some aspects of its early selectionist rival. According to\nLavie’s ‘load theory’, attention does\ncorrespond to a capacity bottleneck—much as Broadbent\nthought—but the differing demands of the task that is at hand\nlead to differences as to where that bottleneck restricts the\nprocessing of a stimulus: in conditions where the processing demands\nof perception are high the available resources will soon be exhausted,\nand the bottleneck will operate at an early stage, with the result\nthat unattended stimuli will be processed rather little; in conditions\nwhere the processing load of perception is lower the bottleneck will\noperate at a later stage, with the result that unattended stimuli will\nbe processed rather more (Lavie & Tsal, 1994, Lavie et\nal. 2004). This load theory predicts that peripheral stimuli will\nelicit less neural activation, and will be less distracting, when the\nsubject’s task is a perceptually demanding one. These\npredictions have been borne out by behavioural and neurological\nobservations (Lavie, 2005). The theory’s theoretical apparatus\nhas also provided a useful framework for the philosophical treatment\nof attention’s relationship to consciousness (Hine, 2010). Many\npsychologists nonetheless continue to be wary of Lavie’s\nrehabilitation of elements from the Broadbentian framework.","\nOther theories have been proposed that also retain the Broadbentian\nidea that attentional selectivity is the result of capacity\nlimitations, while retreating further than Lavie from the picture of\nattention that Broadbent introduced. These theories reject the terms\nof the debate between early and late selectionists because they reject\nthe idea that the capacity limitations responsible for attention are\nclustered into a single bottleneck. In some cases this is because the\nselectivity of attention is taken to be the result of\nmultiple bottlenecks in processing capacity (see, e.g.,\nJohnston and McCann, 2006). In other cases it is because these\ntheorists see capacity limitations as occurring throughout the\nprocessing stream, and not as clustered into bottlenecks at all (see\nDriver, 2001, for a suggestion along these lines, and Allport, Antonis\n& Reynolds, 1972, for an earlier indication of it).","\nThe early and late selection theories dominated discussions of\nattention in the decades following Broadbent’s seminal work, but\nby the beginning of the nineteen nineties it had become clear that the\ndebate between advocates of the early selection theory and advocates\nof the late selection theory had become fruitless. Those debates were\ntherefore thought to have been predicated on some sort of mistaken\nassumption. Several different diagnoses have been proposed as to what\nthat mistaken assumption might have been. Little consensus has been\nreached as to which of these diagnoses is correct, with the result\nthat some theorists—such as those discussed at the end of the\npreceding section—retain ideas from the early and late selection\ntheories, while others regard this as a wrong-headedly retrograde\nstep.","\nOne diagnosis is that the early/late debate was fruitless because the\nterms ‘early’ and ‘late’ are themselves\nproblematic. If perceptual processing occurs in a parallel processing\narchitecture without any prevailing direction of information flow then\nthere can be no sense in labeling one part of that architecture as\nearlier or later than any other. If the attentional bottleneck is\nlocated in a system that has such an architecture then it may be this\nthat explains why there was no satisfactory answer to the question of\nwhether attentional selection is early or late. It seems to have been\nwith this thought in mind that some writers have suggested that the\nfailure of the debate between early and late selection theories was\nowing to the fact that that debate requires us to make an assumption\nabout the linearity of the processing stream in which\nselection occurs (see, e.g., Prinz and Hommel, 2002, 3). This is a\nthought that needs to be treated with care.","\nThe claim that it was a problematic assumption about linearity that\nled the early/late selection debate into fruitlessness received its\nmost influential treatment in an important paper by Alan Allport\n(Allport, 1992). Allport identifies several problematic assumptions\nthat the early/late selection debate requires. His characterization of\nwhat he takes to be the problematic assumption about linearity is as\nthe claim that:","\n[T]he processing of nonsemantic attributes (i.e. the processing of\nattributes other than symbolic or categorical identity) occurs earlier\nin a logical/causal sequence of operations than does any semantic or\ncategorical processing. (1992, 187)\n","\nDespite Allport’s qualms, this assumption about linearity does not\nseem, on the face of it, to be a problematic one. There is nothing to\nbe objected to in the claim that the situations in which we encounter\na written word and come to be in a position to know what that word\nmeans are typically situations in which our sensory transducers\nrespond firstly to simple nonsemantic properties of the word. In order\nfor creatures like us to detect the semantic properties of written\nwords, it is necessary for our information processing systems\nto first encode some information about the simple spatial properties\nof the lines on the page. This information does then get passed on to\nsubsequent processing stages in which more complex properties,\nconcerned with semantics and stimulus identity, get processed. If this\nsort of linearity is what Allport was taking issue with then it seems\nhe must have been mistaken, since there is nothing problematic about\nthe idea that there is this much linearity in the processing to which\nstimuli are subjected.","\nNor is there anything unscientific about that idea. It continues to be\nentirely normal for neuroscientists to refer to the processing that\ntakes place in occipital brain areas as ‘early’ and the\nprocessing in frontal areas as ‘late’. Such thinking can\nbe seen in a much-cited review of neuroimaging work on attention, in\nwhich Sabine Kastner and Leslie Ungerleider speak of:","\n… an increase in the complexity of processing as activity\nproceeds anteriorly through the ventral stream into the temporal lobe.\nWhereas posterior regions in cortex are preferentially activated\nduring the processing of object attributes, such as colors or\nscrambled objects and faces, more anterior regions are activated\nselectively during the processing of intact objects and faces. (2000,\n319)\n","\nThe orthodox view, expressed here by Kastner and Ungerleider, is\nsubject to differing interpretations. Those who believe that\nperception and cognition are best thought of as arising from a\nhierarchical Bayesian process might reject the idea that information\nprogresses through the nervous system in a bottom-up fashion, with the\ndetection of simple properties happening at an early stage, and the\ndetection of more complex properties happening at a later one. Current\nadvocates of such hierarchical Bayesian theories place great emphasis\non the idea that the prior hypotheses required by a Bayesian inference\ncan be generated in a top-down fashion, and can then be tested against\nincoming signals which contain information only about the ways in\nwhich the predictions generated by those hypotheses are in error\n(Hohwy, 2013). Such theories break from the tradition of thinking\nabout the information flow in the brain as being largely one-way, but\nthey retain the idea that information is organized into a structure\nwith earlier and later stages, with these stages now being understood\nas corresponding to the more or less abstract layers in an\nhierarchically organized Bayesian inference. They therefore retain the\nidea that there are earlier and later stages in the processing of any\ngiven stimulus, while rejecting the idea that there is one predominant\ndirection of information flow in the brain. Since this much linearity\nremains in our current thinking about the architecture of perceptual\nprocessing, we cannot coherently blame an assumption about this much\nlinearity for the troubles that led to the fruitlessness of the debate\nbetween early and late selectionists.","\nThat is not to say that the early/late selection debate was entirely\nfree of problematic assumptions relating to linearity—only that\npsychology has not yet settled upon a satisfactory account of the way\nin which assumptions about linearity led the early/late debate into\ntrouble.","\nA reason why assumptions about linearity may have been problematic is\nthat when, following Broadbent, we think about hierarchical perceptual\nprocessing while bearing in mind the communications\nengineer’s concerns about capacity limitations, it then\nbecomes natural to make some additional assumptions about the way in\nwhich this hierarchically organized architecture supports\npersonal-level cognition. The early/late debate’s problems are\nmore plausibly blamed on these additional assumptions, rather than on\nany assumptions about linear or hierarchical organization per\nse. Given that some physical properties of a thing must first be\nrepresented in order for a person to become aware of that thing’s\nsemantic properties, it is natural for the communications engineer to\nsuppose that no further representation of these physical properties\nneeds to be generated in order for that person to also be aware of\nthose properties, so that a person who is experiencing the semantic\nproperties of a stimulus must have been through a process that already\ngives them an experience of that stimulus’s simple spatial\nproperties. This additional supposition would be a mistake, since the\nbrain represents the physical properties of stimuli in multiple,\nparallel, somewhat overlapping systems, only some of which put the\nsubject in a position to think about the properties that they\nrepresent. In order to get to a representation of the meaning of the\nword on a page, the subject’s brain must represent that\nword’s physical properties, but it turns out that the\nbrain’s representation of these physical properties need not put\nthis perceiver in a position to form thoughts about them. Their access\nto these properties might require that the properties be represented\nall over again, in some parallel system. From the point of view\nintroduced by Broadbent – that of a communications engineer who\nis concerned with the management of limited capacity channels –\nthis seems strangely profligate. At least some of the problems with\nthe early/late debate can be attributed to this: not an assumption\nabout linearity per se, but an assumption about the linearity\nof the processes that support personal level thinking.","\nOnce the problematic assumption about linearity has been made precise,\nhowever, we see that it cannot be satisfactory to credit the entire\ncollapse of the early/late debate to this assumption. The falsity of\nthe assumption about the linearity of the processes supporting\npersonal-level awareness does not undermine the very idea that the\nearly/late debate is a meaningful one. The problems that it creates\nare largely methodological. The falsity of that assumption means that\none cannot make an inference from a lack of personal-level awareness\nof some content to the absence of representations encoding that\ncontent. It also means that Broadbent was wrong to suppose that the\npsychological effects of unattended stimuli can only depend on those\nproperties of which the inattentive perceiver can be aware. But these\nare methodological problems. They do not, by themselves, imply that\nthe debate between the early selection theory and the late selection\ntheory must have been misconceived.","\nThe situation that we find ourselves in is, then, a somewhat unhappy\none. Everybody agrees that there was something misconceived about the\ndebate between the two theories of attention that dominated the\ndecades following Broadbent’s reintroduction of attention to the\npsychological agenda. The ongoing influence of Broadbent’s\nselection theory, and of the early/late debate, has often been noted,\nand sometimes lamented (Driver, 2001, 56). But nobody is clear about\nwhether the elements of those theories that are retained in current\ntheorizing are problematic ones."],"subsection_title":"2.1 Capacity-Limitation Theories"},{"content":["\nIn the early nineteen eighties, Anne Treisman and her collaborators\nidentified the existence of ‘the binding problem’, and\ndescribed a process that could solve that problem. Treisman proposed\nthat attention be identified with this process. This proposal is known\nas the Feature Integration Theory of attention. It has been hugely\ninfluential, not only as a theory of attention, but also as the\nframework that introduced and regimented research into the\nindependently interesting question of the binding problem (for more on\nwhich, see\n ‘The Unity of Consciousness’\n esp.\n §2.2).","\nTreisman describes the way in which the binding problem arises like\nthis:","\nSensory information arrives in parallel as a variety of heterogeneous\nhints, (shapes, colors, motions, smells and sounds) encoded in partly\nmodular systems. Typically many objects are present at once. The\nresult is an urgent case of what has been labelled the binding\nproblem. We must collect the hints, bind them into the right spatial\nand temporal bundles, and then interpret them to specify their real\nworld origins. (2003, 97)\n","\nWe can illustrate this problem with an example. Suppose we have a\nsubject who is presented, at one time, with a red tomato and a green\napple. This visual input is, Treisman says, initially broken up for\nspecialized distributed processing—so that, for example, one\npart of the brain is responsible for detecting the shapes of things, a\ndifferent part is responsible for detecting their colours. The\nshape-detecting centres represent the fact that a tomato-shaped thing\nis present, and they represent the fact that an apple-shaped thing is\npresent. The colour-detecting centres represent the fact that a red\nthing is present, and the fact that a green thing is present. But the\nsubject, if he is a normal human, knows more than is implied by these\nfour facts: He knows that the red thing is the tomato-shaped thing and\nthe green thing the apple-shaped thing. To know this he must have a\nway of ‘binding’ the representation of red in the colour\ncentre with the representation of the tomato shape in the shape\ncentre. The binding problem is the problem of knowing how to put\ntogether the properties that have been detected in separate\nspecialized detection centres.","\nTreisman’s proposed solution exploits the fact that\nspatial representations are ubiquitous, and the idea that\nthere is only one thing to be seen in any one place at any one time.\nIf the centre for detecting colours detects red at place one\nand green at place two, and if the centre for detecting shape\ndetects a tomato shape at place one and an apple shape at\nplace two, then, given the principle that there is a maximum of\none visible object per place per time, the binding problem can be\nsolved. Treisman therefore proposes that we achieve a correctly bound\nrepresentation by moving a variously sized ‘window’ from\none location in the perceptual scene to another. This window blocks\nout the information from all but a single location, and all the\nfeatures found at that location can then be ‘bound’ as\nbeing features of the same object. The area covered by the window\nwithin which features are bound is taken to correspond to the region\nto which attention is being paid.","\nThere is more than one way to understand the explanatory import of\nTreisman’s claim that the window of attention corresponds to the\nwindow within which features are bound. Treisman’s early work\npresents that claim as an attempt to identify the processes of\nattention (by telling us that they are the processes of feature\nintegration). In her later work the explanation being offered is no\nlonger simply one in which it is attention that occupies the role of\nexplanandum and binding processes that occupy the role of explanans.\nHer later claim is that solving the binding problem is one role for\nthe kind of selectivity that attention enables.","\nThere is some work in which the Feature Integration Theory has been\npressed into the service of more ambitious explanatory goals. That\ntheory plays an important role in John Campbell’s 2002 attempt,\nin Reference and Consciousness, to use attention to explain\nhow the reference of demonstrative expressions gets fixed by their\nproducers, and understood by their consumers (see section\n 3.2).\n Treisman herself suggests, albeit tentatively, that descendants of\nthe Feature Integration Theory may provide part of the explanation for\n“the bound, unitary, interpreted, personal view of the world of\nsubjective experience” (Treisman, 2003, 111). She goes on to\nsuggest, again tentatively, that the sort of explanation that such a\ntheory provides “should give us all the information there is\nabout the conditions that create consciousness” (op\ncit).","\nOpposed to those who think that a theory of feature binding will be a\nlarge component in our theory of attention, of the unity of\nconsciousness, or of anything else, are a number of philosophers (and\na smaller number of psychologists) who deny that feature binding\ncreates a problem that needs any serious cognitive apparatus for its\nsolution. Such claims have been made for a variety of reasons. They\nare generally made as part of large-scale revisionary proposals for\nthe conceptual framework of cognitive neuroscience. Kevin\nO’Regan and Alva Noë’s rejection of the binding\nproblem ‘as, in essence, a pseudo-problem’ (O’Regan\nand Noë, 2001, 967) comes as part of their general attack on the\nidea that perception requires the representation of the thing\nperceived. Vincent Di Lollo has suggested that the assumptions about\nneural coding that generate the binding problem have been superseded,\nwith the result that the binding problem is an ill-defined one (Di\nLollo, 2012). And M.R. Bennett and P.M.S. Hacker, in their book-length\ncritique of the philosophical foundations of neuroscience, claim that\nthe notions of representation and information that enjoy currency in\nneuroscience are subject to various confusions, and that these\nconfusions lead to it being ‘widespread’ for\nneuroscientists to make “confused statements of the so-called\nbinding problem” (Bennett and Hacker, 2003, 14). These debates\nabout the status of the binding problem (reviewed by Plate, 2007) turn\non foundational issues for the cognitive sciences generally. They have\nceased to be specifically concerned with the explanation of\nattention.","\nEven if these philosophical critics of the binding problem are right\nto suggest that a perceiver can typically experience several\nproperties as belonging to a single object without the need for any\nspecial binding process to integrate the representations of those\nproperties, it may nonetheless be true that, in some particular cases,\nattention does play a role in determining the way in which different\nstreams of sensory information come to be combined. Even in these\ncircumscribed cases, the question of how this binding-like role for\nattention should be characterized may raise its own philosophical\ndifficulties. Several psychologists studying the integration of\ninformation from across different sensory modalities have found\nthemselves running into such difficulties, claiming that the role of\nattention in integrated multisensory perception is\n‘curious’, and ‘a paradox’, especially in\ncases that involve the perception of speech (Tiippana, Andersen and\nSams, 2004; Macaluso et al., 2016). Philosophers who have\ninterrogated the assumptions leading to the idea there is a general\nbinding problem have not yet extended their critique to these more\nspecific cases. A preliminary philosophical examination suggests that\nthese may be cases in which the appearance of paradox derives from\ncertain questionable assumptions about the predominantly bottom-up\nnature of perceptual processing, or from assumptions of a more\nmetaphysical sort, concerning the localizable way in which\nattention’s causal influence is exerted (Mole, 2020)."],"subsection_title":"2.2 Feature Integration Theory"},{"content":["\nThe view that the function of attention is the management of\nlimitations in the brain’s information processing capacity has\nbeen an orthodox one among psychologists since Donald Broadbent\nintroduced it in the nineteen fifties, but it has sometimes been\ncalled into question. The theories of attention proposed by\nphilosophers have tended not to endorse any straightforward version of\nthe capacity-limitation view, and there are empirical reasons to think\nthat the simplest versions of such a view are mistaken. In the\nnineteen seventies Ulric Neisser and his collaborators carried out a\nseries of experiments showing that, when appropriately trained, a\nsubject can perform two attention-involving tasks concurrently,\nwithout much interference between them (Hirst et al., 1980,\nNeisser, 1976). Neisser interpreted these experiments as suggesting\nthat, insofar as there is a bottleneck that attention is needed to\nmanage, it must often be a bottleneck in behavioural coordination,\nrather than in information processing capacity. Simple bodily\nlimitations are what prevent us from looking in two directions at one\ntime, or from throwing a ball and writing with the same hand.\nNeisser’s suggestion was that in many cases cognitive processing\nwas selective, not as a result of limitations in processing capacity,\nbut only in so far as such bodily limitations required it to be.","\nIn two papers from 1987, authored individually but published in the\nsame volume, Odmar Neumann and Alan Allport developed a similar idea.\nWhereas Neisser emphasized the constraints that are imposed on\ncognition by the need to manage a single body, Neumann and Allport\nboth emphasized the constraints that are placed on cognition by the\nneed to maintain a coherent course of goal-directed action. They\ndescribe their position as a ‘selection-for-action’\ntheory.","\nIf we think of ‘action’ as here referring to bodily\nbehaviour then the selection-for-action theory is very similar to\nNeisser’s view. But Neumann and Allport’s point retains\nits force if we extend the notion of action to include deliberate\nmental activities, such as puzzle-solving, for which no bodily\nlimitations are in play. There is here an “analogy between\npractical and theoretical and activity”, which was noted in an\n1891 paper by G. F. Stout:","\nThinking is action directed towards intellectual ends. Intellectual\nends are attained by an appropriate combination of movements of\nattention just as practical ends are attained by an appropriate\ncombination of movements of the body. If, therefore, we desire to\nexplain the process of Thinking, we must clearly determine the nature\nof active Attention. (Stout, 1891, p. 23)\n","\nAs Stout and the later generations of action-oriented theorists\nindicate, the need to select among several possible sources of\ninformation, and to select among several possible things that might be\ndone with the information that has then been selected, is a\ncharacteristic of almost all deliberately executed thoughts and\nactions, whether those actions are bodily or intellectual. This\nubiquitous need for selectivity has been emphasized in a series of\nworks by Wayne Wu, where it is referred to as the “many many\nproblem”(Wu, 2011a, 2014, 2019).","\nIn Wu’s handling of it, the idea that Neumann and Allport\nemphasized becomes part of a larger attempt to understand the\nessential connections between attention and agency (Wu, 2011b). For\nWu, attention’s role in action is more fundamental than its role\nin perception. Stout is not the only precedent for this idea. The same\nconnection was noted by William James when he claimed that\n“Volition is nothing but attention”, (see Section\n 1.5,\n above). As with these earlier authors, Wu’s point is not just\nthat, by treating attention as a purely perceptual phenomenon, we\nignore many of its other instances. Instead Wu wants to suggest that\nany division we might attempt to draw between perceptual attention and\nthe attentional selectivity required by agency would be an artificial\none. Even the involuntary capture of attention by perceptually salient\nstimuli should, Wu thinks, be understood as involving a kind of\nreadiness to act on the things to which we involuntarily attend\n(op cit, §3). Wu’s selection-for-action theory of\nattention is therefore intended as a step towards a unification of our\nphilosophical account of ourselves as agents and our philosophical\naccount of ourselves as perceivers.","\nAccording to selection-for-action type views, the function of\nattention is not the management of capacity limitations. It is,\ninstead, the management of capacity excess. It is because we\ncan process multiple stimuli that we can be distracted by them, and\nbecause we can be distracted by them, not because we cannot process\nthem, that we need mechanisms of attention to provide selectivity and\nfocus. Attention, on this view, serves to lend coherence to, and to\nprevent interference between, the activity of several components in a\nsystem that has the capacity to handle far more stimuli than those\npertaining to the subject’s current task. Such a view contrasts\nsharply with Broadbent’s conception of attentional selectivity\nas capacity-bottleneck management."],"subsection_title":"2.3 Coherence Theories"},{"content":["\nIn the tradition perpetuated by Wu, the selectivity of attention is\nunderstood as providing a solution to one particular problem, created\nby the fact that there are multiple courses of action that might be\ntaken at any time, with the taking of any one requiring the others to\nbe suppressed. The solving of this particular problem is not the only\ncognitive need that could be served by an operation of selectivity,\neven in a mind without bottlenecks of processing capacity. The\nselection-for-action theory is therefore not the only alternative to\nBroadbent’s bottleneck theory. Other functions for attentional\nselectivity might also be proposed. Alternatively—rather than\nelecting any one of these functions of cognitive selectivity as being\nthe function that is essentially served by attention—we might\ninstead characterize attention as a quite general process of\nselectivity, recruitable on any of the various occasions when one\nthing needs to prioritized over another, whether this prioritization\nis required by the presence of a processing bottleneck, required in\norder for a coherent action-plan to be executed, or required for some\nquite different reason. The work of Sebastian Watzl develops the idea\nthat attention might be such a non-specific process of prioritization\n(Watzl, 2017).","\nIn Watzl’s treatment of it, this idea places particular emphasis\non the fact that, just as a binary ‘is greater than’\nrelation can introduce a partial ordering on a set, so a number of\nthese binary prioritizations can be considered in sum, as introducing\na prioritization structure on the several items that together\nconstitute one’s mental life. For Watzl, attention is the\nprocess by which one’s life comes to have such a structure.","\nWatzl also claims that any mind which lacked such a structure would\ntherefore be lacking a particular perspective on the world, and so\nwould not be the mind of a creature with the subjective point of view\nthat is characteristic of conscious experiences. From this he derives\nthe claim that every conscious creature is attentive. Carolyn Jennings\nhas suggested that certain kinds of highly engaged expert performance\nmay be a counterexample to this (Jennings, 2015)."],"subsection_title":"2.4 General-Purpose Prioritization"},{"content":["\nThe idea that there might be reasons for attentional selection that\nhave nothing to do with processing bottlenecks has also been a theme\nin the work of psychologists hoping to understand perception as a\nprocess of Bayesian inference (Friston et al. 2006,\nSummerfield & Egner, 2013), and in the work of those philosophers\nwho have been influenced by them (Hohwy, 2013; Clark, 2013, 2017).","\nIn what has come to be the most philosophically developed version of\nthis Bayesian approach to the mind (Hohwy, 2013, Clark, 2013),\ncognition as a whole is understood to be a process of Bayesian\nupdating, in which a hierarchically-organized series of hypotheses is\nconstantly being tested, with each hypothesis being updated in the\nlight of evidence coming from the level below. Advocates of this\ntheory attempt to find room within this hierarchical framework for all\naspects of cognition, including perception, thought, and action. A\ncentral claim of their theory is that the information that gets passed\nup through this hierarchy is encoded in the form of signals\nrepresenting the errors in the predictions that have been\nmade by hypotheses at the hierarchy’s next level up, with the\ncontent of one’s experience at any time being given by whichever\nhypothesis makes the least erroneous predictions. (Different versions\nof the theory use different techniques to calculate the relative size\nof these prediction errors.) Given their commitment to\nprediction-error coding, a central claim of these theories is that the\nrole of our sensory encounter with the world is to provide information\nabout the way in which our prior hypotheses get things wrong: instead\nof providing us with the information that it has started to rain, our\nsenses provide only the information that it is more rainy than we had\nexpected.","\nAdvocates of this theory claim that it “allows us to see\nattention in a new light and to provide alternative conceptualizations\nof its functional role in our overall mental economy” (Hohwy,\n2014, p. 191). According to these ‘alternative\nconceptions’, attention adjusts the weighting of incoming\nprediction error signals, in accordance with their expected\nprecision (Hohwy, 2012). ‘Precision’ is to be\nunderstood here in the sense that contrasts precision with accuracy.\n‘Accuracy’, in the intended sense, is a measure of the\ndifference between the value indicated by a signal and the actual\nvalue, whereas ‘precision’ is a measure of the random\nfluctuation in that signal, even when the actual input is held\nconstant. A miscalibrated instrument might, in this sense, be highly\nprecise, without being especially accurate.","\nVarious empirical results make it plausible that the brain takes\naccount of expected precisions when it is processing perceptual\nsignals. In the ventriloquist illusion, for example, it is plausible\nthat expectations of precision have a role to play: It is because\nvision is expected to give a more precise indication of location than\naudition that sounds are heard to come from the location where their\nsource is apparently seen. Other considerations make it equally\nplausible that attention plays a role in accommodating the variations\nin these expected precisions, as we move from one context to another.\nIf we expect that the signal from vision is likely to be a noisy\none—perhaps because a thick fog has started to\ndescend—then we may place more weight than usual on the\ninformation that is present in the signal coming from audition. It\nseems likely that there is a role for attention in bringing about this\nchange of weighting. It is more controversial to claim, as the\nadvocates of this theory do, that “attention is nothing but\nprecision optimization in hierarchical inference.” (Hohwy, 1014,\np.244, citing Feldman & Friston, 2010). Ransom et al.\nhave suggested that, by taking attention always to be\nprecision optimization, this theory struggles to account for certain\nforms of voluntary attention (Ransom et al. 2017). Clark has\nsuggested that this challenge can be met if the sources of voluntary\nattention are identified with beliefs, rather than desires (Clark,\n2017)."],"subsection_title":"2.5 Precision Optimization Theories and Prediction Error Coding"},{"content":["\nLike the precision-optimization theories that have been advocated by\nHohwy and Clark, from within the framework of the prediction-error\ncoding theory, the Coherence theories advocated by Neisser, Neumann,\nAllport, and Wu have also suggested functions for attention other than\nthe management of limitations in processing capacity. Despite the\navailability of these non-Broadbentian conceptions of\nattention’s function, the Broadbentian idea that\nattention’s selectivity serves to manage limitations in\nprocessing capacity continues to be regarded by many psychologists as\nincontrovertible. The claim that “Because the visual system does\nnot have the capacity to process all inputs simultaneously, there must\nexist attentional processes that help the visual system select some\ninputs” continues to be treated as a platitude of the sort that\ncan be used as an uncontroversial opening sentence when introducing\none’s research. (The example just given comes from the beginning\nof Vecera (2000), but many more examples of the same claim can easily\nbe found.)","\nFor those who reject this platitude, and think that the\nfunction of attention is something other than the management\nof limitations in processing capacity, it is natural to think that the\nmechanisms of attentional selection may be something other\nthan capacity bottlenecks.","\nThe clearest non-bottleneck mechanisms for achieving selectivity are\ncompetitions. Since well-organized competitions can always\nselect one winner, however good and however numerous the competitors,\nthe selectivity of a competitive mechanism need not have anything to\ndo with bottlenecks, or with any other limitations of processing\ncapacity.","\nCompetition-based mechanisms for achieving selectivity come in at\nleast two varieties: In a simple race mechanism each of the\ncompetitors independently completes a process that is comparable,\nalong some dimension of variation, with the processes that are\ncompleted by each of the other competitors. The competitor that\nachieves the highest value on the relevant dimension of variation is\nselected as the winner. In a struggle the competitors do not\njust get on with their own processing in the hope that they will do it\nbetter than each of the other competitors. Instead the active\nsuppression of other competitors is a part of the process that each\ncompetitor carries out. Simple race models of attention have been\nproposed (Shibuya and Bundesen, 1988, Bundesen, 1987), but our best\ncurrent theories supplement the simple race mechanism with some\ncomponents of mutual struggle, or with additional processes of\ntop-down control (see, for example, Bundesen and Habekost, 2008).","\nOne suggestion for a supplemented-competition mechanism for\nattentional selectivity is the biased-competition model, elaborated in\nseveral works by Robert Desimone, John Duncan and John Reynolds. The\nbiased-competition model accounts for various attention-involving\neffects, at the personal and at the sub-personal level, as being\neffects that arise from numerous struggles between the different\nstimuli that fall within the variously sized receptive fields of\nneurons throughout the perceptual processing hierarchy. It is\nhypothesized that each one of these struggles is biased, although not\nsettled outright, by a top-down attention-specific signal (Desimone\nand Duncan, 1995, Reynolds and Desimone, 2001).","\nWe have said that competitions are selective in ways that do not\ninvolve limitations in capacity, and that competition-based theories\nof attention’s underlying mechanisms are therefore natural\naccompaniments to selection-for-action type views of attention’s\nfunction (Section\n 2.3),\n and perhaps to other views that involve a break from the Broadbentian\nview according to which attention’s function is the management of\ncapacity limitations. Competition views of attention’s\nmechanisms do not, however, require us to take a non-Broadbentian view\nof attention’s function. Although the biased competition view\nsits naturally with a non-Broadbentian view of that function, Reynolds\nand Desimone continue to introduce the biased competition theory as an\nattempt to understand attention in recognizably Broadbentian terms,\nwriting that:","\nThe visual system is limited in its capacity to process information.\nHowever, it is equipped to overcome this constraint because it can\ndirect this limited capacity channel to locations or objects of\ninterest. (2001, 233)\n","\nSome advocates of the biased competition view emphasize the particular\nimportance of the top-down biasing signals that the theory postulates\n(e.g., Beck and Kastner, 2009, p. 1156), taking the source of\nthese signals to be the true locus of attentional selection. Others\nsuggest that the biased competition theory is better understood as a\ntheory that refuses to identify any such locus, and that it should\ninstead be read (as suggested in Duncan’s original presentation\nof the theory, (Duncan 1996)) as attributing the selectivity of\nattention to the totality of an integrated competition, involving\nprocesses of various sorts at various levels, any part of which can\nbias any other (Mole, 2011, §6.7, 2015).","\nWhen it is understood in this second way the biased-competition theory\naccords with the proposal that attention should be taken to have a\nmetaphysical status analogous to that of unison in an orchestra.\nAccording to this view it is always a mistake to identify any one\nprocess as the attention process (or any set of processes as the\nattention processes); attention requires the unified activity of\nwhichever processes happen to be relevant to a person’s current\ntask, but, since these vary from one task to the next, it does not\nrequire any particular processes to be taking place. Such a\nview has been developed in work by Christopher Mole, who dubs it the\n‘Cognitive Unison Theory’. Metaphysically speaking, such a\ntheory can be understood as a revival of John Locke and F.H.\nBradley’s view that attention is a mode of thinking (see\n Section 1.3\n above). Phenomenologically the view has a precedent in Ribot’s\nsuggestion that attention be identified with ‘monoideism’\n(Ribot, 1889, p. 10). It also draws on some ideas about the\n‘polymorphousness’ of attention, which were advocated in a\n1964 monograph by Alan White, on the basis of considerations drawn\nfrom the examination of various ‘heed concepts’ in natural\nlanguage.","\nBecause operating in unison requires an absence of task-irrelevant\nprocessing, the most straightforward version of the unison theory\nentails that full attention is a rare achievement, with most cases of\nattentiveness involving what is, strictly speaking, only partial or\ndivided attention. Mole (like Ribot) accepts this implication. Yair\nLevy has suggested that doing so prevents him from giving an adequate\naccount of phenomena such a listening, or observing, which always\nrequire some attention to be paid, but which can nonetheless be done\nmore or less attentively (Levy, 2019). Work by Philipp Koralus has\nsuggested that a more satisfactory treatment of divided attention can\nbe given if the attentive pursuit of a task is understood to share\ncertain formal properties with the answering of a question (Koralus,\n2014). This characterization of attention as “the means by which\nwe answer questions about the environment” has been argued for\non phenomenological and epistemological grounds by Naomi Eilan (Eilan,\n1998). (Eilan credits the thought to Rowland Stout, whose treatment of\nit can be found in Chapter 9 §5 of Stout 2006.) Koralus draws on\nHamblin’s 1958 semantics of questions to provide a formal model\nof such questioning (Hamblin, 1958).","\nThere are philosophical issues, independent of the cognitive unison\ntheory, about the way in which partial or divided attention relates to\nfull attention, and about whether a distinction should be drawn\nbetween the attention that is given to things by which we are merely\ndistracted and the attention that is given to things on which we\nremain concertedly focused. Aaron Henry considers these questions as\npart of a more general enquiry into attention and control, using the\nnotion of constitutive norms to provide an account in which\ndistraction always does involve a certain sort of shortcoming, while\nnonetheless qualifying as a case of genuine attention, rather than\nmerely being a defective approximation of it (Henry, 2019). Zachary\nIrving has suggested that the wandering of a distracted mind presents\nphilosophical puzzles of its own, and has worked towards giving an\nempirically-informed account of mind-wandering that avoids these\npuzzles. His account takes such wandering to be attentive but unguided\n(Irving, 2016). Theories such as the Cognitive Unison Theory, in which\nattention essentially depends on the performance of an\nunderstanding-guided task, will need to find some alternative account\nof the phenomena that Irving identifies."],"subsection_title":"2.6 Competition Theories and Cognitive Unison"},{"content":["\nWhereas bottleneck metaphors have traditionally guided the\ntheories that attempt to locate the cognitive resources that operate\nonly on attended stimuli, it has been spotlight metaphors\nthat have guided the theories that attempt to say which features of a\nstimulus determine whether attention is being paid to that stimulus at\nany given moment (e.g., Watchel, 1967; Woodman and Luck, 1999; see\nFernandez-Duque and Johnson, 2002, for discussion). The idea suggested\nby the spotlight metaphor is that a stimulus’s location\nultimately determines whether or not that stimulus receives attention:\nthe point here is not to deny that one can pay attention to something\non account of it being brightly coloured, or on account of it being\ninteresting. The point is, instead, that one pays attention to\nbrightly coloured or interesting things only by directing one’s\nattention to the location of those things.","\nOne can easily see why the spotlight metaphor has been appealing. If\nwe are presented with an array of differently coloured shapes,\nappearing and disappearing in various places, then there will be any\nnumber of attention-demanding tasks that we might perform regarding\nthat array. Some tasks might require us to attend to whatever is going\non at the top of the screen, others might require us to attend to all\nthe red shapes, or to all the triangles, or to something else. Some of\nthese ways of attending seem to be more basic than others. It seems,\nfor example, that attending to things in the top part of the screen\nmight be a primitive task, whereas attending to the triangles could\nnot be primitive in the same way: we cannot simply attend to\nthe triangles. If we want to attend to the triangles, we need first to\nwork out where the triangles are. If, on the other hand, we\nwant to attend to the things in the top part of the screen we do not\nneed to work out whether they are triangles. It is therefore plausible\nthat when we attend to the triangles we do so by attending to\ntheir locations. In this sense attending on the basis of location\nseems to be more basic than attending on the basis of shape.","\nThe idea that attending to a location is more basic than attending to\na shape might tempt one to think that attending on the basis of\nlocation is absolutely basic, so that attention is always and only\nallocated on the basis of location. If that were right then a theory\nof the spatial allocation of attention—a theory about the moving\nand focusing of an ‘attentional spotlight’—would be\na large and central component in an account of how attention works.\nThis would be good news for those who want to give a single unified\ntheory of attention, and it would be good news for the scientific\nproject of explaining attention more generally, since\nattention’s spotlight-like behaviours are some of its best\nunderstood aspects (see Logan, 1996).","\nThere are reasons to think that location does play a special role in\nthe allocation of attention, as the spotlight metaphor suggests. But\nthe role of location in the allocation of attention is probably not as\nstraightforward as would be required by the most parsimonious of\nspotlight-based theories. Location does have a special role to play\nhere, but (1) location is not the only property to have such a role,\nand (2) the role of location is more complicated than a simple\nspotlight metaphor suggests.","\nEmpirical debates about the direction of the spotlight of attention\nhave focussed mostly on the second of these points. An important\nsource of data here is case studies contrasting the different patterns\nof attention failure that are shown by different unilateral neglect\npatients. Such studies suggest that various frames of reference are\ninvolved in the spatial allocation of attention (Behrmann and Tipper,\n1999). This indicates that there is no single map of\nlocations determining which items get attention: attention is\nsometimes allocated on the basis of location in egocentric space,\nsometimes on the basis of location in more complex frames of reference\n(a point that was among those raised by Allport, in his influential\ncritique of the Broadbentian debates (see Allport, 1992, p. 197)).","\nThere are also some well-known experimental effects suggesting that\nattention is allocated, not on the basis of straightforward spatial\ncoordinates, but in ways that are constrained by the distribution of\nobjects in space. The classic work in this area is John\nDuncan’s demonstration that attention shifts more readily\nbetween two locations that fall within the bounds of a single object\nthan between equidistant locations that are separated by an object\nboundary (Duncan, 1984). Equally important here are findings from\nexperiments using three-dimensional stimuli, and using virtual\nthree-dimensional displays. These studies suggest that experimental\nparticipants are unable to differentially attend to depths in an empty\nspace, but that these participants start to be able to shift their\nattention forwards and backward (to a place in front of or behind the\npoint that their eyes are fixating) when the relevant locations are\nones in which there are objects (see Yantis, 1998).","\nThese converging sources of data indicate that the spotlight of\nattention is not allocated simply on the basis of coordinates in any\nsingle spatial frame of reference. That is an important finding for\nthose attempting to localize mechanisms for the allocation of\nattention within the brain (since different brain areas differ in\ntheir mapping of space, and in their representation of spatial\ninformation about the objects within it). It has been influential in\nleading psychologists to turn away from simple spotlight metaphors. It\nshould be noted, however, that these findings do not threaten the core\nof the idea that was suggested by the spotlight metaphor: the facts\nabout what a person is attending to might still supervene on the facts\nabout where that person is attending, even if quite numerous\nand sometimes complex factors are responsible for determining which\nlocation that is.","\nOther effects are somewhat more damaging for a pure spotlight view,\nalthough they also stop short of refuting it entirely. The\nmore-than-merely-spatial complexity of the way in which attention is\nallocated has been nicely demonstrated in a series of experiments by\nDwight Kravitz and Marlene Behrmann (Kravitz and Behrmann, 2011). The\nparticipants in these experiments have their attention cued by a brief\nstimulus that is presented at one end of a shape that is shown on a\ncomputer screen. This shape might be a simple rectangle, a rectangle\nwith bulbous ends, or a more complex ‘H’ or\n‘h’ shape. It is presented alongside another shape, which\nin some cases has the same shape and colour, and in other cases is\ndifferent. The resulting allocation of attention is then probed by\nmeasuring the reaction times to stimuli that are presented on and near\nthese objects. Kravitz and Behrmann find that all the different\nproperties of their stimuli interact to determine the way in\nwhich attention is allocated to the screen on which those stimuli\nappear. Most strikingly of all, they find a difference in the\nallocation of attention between trials in which the shapes on the\nscreen are an upper and a lower case ‘H’, and trials in\nwhich the shapes are an upper case H and number 4, even though this\nnumber 4 shape is exactly the same as the lower case h, but presented\nupside down. Such findings suggest that attention, even when triggered\nby a simple spatial cue, is not allocated merely on the basis of\nlocation, but also on the basis of shape, colour, and arbitrary\nlearned meaning.","\nThe discovery that attention can preferentially modulate the\nprocessing of stimuli on account of their colours, shapes, and\nmeanings does not prevent us from maintaining that the location of a\nstimulus has a special role to play in the process by which attention\nis allocated to it. More than one line of research in psychology has\nsought to identify some one representation in the brain in which items\nare encoded in a way that determines the extent to which attention\nwill be allocated to them. In the longest established of these lines\nof research—beginning with the work of Koch and Ullman\n(1985)—this representation has been taken to be a map,\nin some quite literal sense of ‘map’: the representation\nis taken to be one in which every location in some region is\nrepresented, and the representation of these locations is taken to be\nin some format that immediately encodes the spatial relations between\nthem. Every object that is represented is taken to be represented as\nbeing at some location, and the properties assigned to these located\nobjects are taken to determine the likelihood that attention will be\npaid to the location that the objects occupy. According to the theory\nthat postulates these ‘salience maps’, location does play\na unique role in determining the way in which attention is allocated,\ndespite the fact that other properties also contribute to that\nallocation.","\nIn more recent treatments of this idea (Pessoa, 2013) such maps are\ntaken to include representations, not merely of the objective\nproperties that give an item salience, but also of subjective\nproperties, such as emotional-valence and\ncurrent-motivational-relevance. The more we think of these maps as\nbeing augmented with additional, non-spatial information, the less\nspotlight-like the allocation of attention represented in them will\nseem to be, but, provided the representation in question is still\nunderstood to be map-like, location can still be understood to have an\nimportant role, and perhaps even a uniquely important one.","\nDebates about the role of such maps, and about the variety of\nsubjective and objective properties that are represented within them,\nmay have some wide-ranging philosophical consequences, concerning more\nthan just the aptness of the spotlight metaphor. Aaron Henry has\nsuggested that the viability of some recent philosophical theories\ndepends on the outcome of these debates. Since the recent\nphilosophical theories of attention have tended to emphasize the role\nof agency in attention, they face potential counterexamples from\ninstances of involuntary attention. Henry suggests that the threat of\nsuch counterexamples can be defused if the mechanisms of involuntary\nattention capture are understood to involve attention being allocated\non the basis of a map in which the agent’s own priorities for\naction are represented (Henry, 2017).","\nAlthough the psychological debates about salience maps are ongoing, an\nargument against pure spotlight views can also be made on more\ntraditional, phenomenological grounds. A pure spotlight theory,\naccording to which attention is always allocated on the basis of\nlocation, seems unable to account for the sort of case that Hermann\nvon Helmholtz and William James were concerned with (see section\n 1.5).\n There is, as their example suggests, a difference between attending\nto the pitch of a note and attending to its timbre, or to its\novertones. This difference in attention does not seem to correspond to\nany difference in the location attended. Nor does any purely\nlocation-based theory of attention allocation seem able to account for\nthe sort attention that one must pay in order to perform a time-based\ntask, such as finding out which of a group of shapes appears on screen\nfor longest. Such temporal aspects of attention have been a relatively\nlate addition to the psychological research agenda (see the papers\ncollected in Nobre and Coull, 2010). The research concerning them is\nbeginning to reveal a diverse range of effects, with a range of\nsimilarly diverse neural underpinnings (Nobre and van Ede, 2018). Some\nphilosophical work has been devoted to the exploration of these\ntemporal aspects of attention (see Phillips, 2011), but it is work\nthat has tended to address questions that further our understanding of\nthe experience and perception of time, without attempting to\ncontribute directly to our philosophical understanding of attention\nitself (see the entry on\n The Experience and Perception of Time).","\nSince some shifts of attention are not shifts in the location\nattended, a theory of the factors that determine which locations a\nsubject is attending to cannot tell us the whole story about the\nallocation of attention. It might nonetheless be a central component\nin a theory of some of attention’s forms (see Wright and Ward,\n2008)."],"subsection_title":"2.7 Spotlight Theories"},{"content":["\nWork in which electrodes are used in vivo to stimulate areas\nof the macaque brain known to be associated with eye-movement\ncoordination has provided strong evidence for the existence of an\nanatomical overlap between brain areas involved in eye-movement\ncontrol and those involved in determining which stimuli elicit the\nstrongest responses in visual cortex. There is also evidence that this\nanatomical fact has some functional significance. One suggestive\nfinding is that the links between frontal eye-movement-control areas\nand attention-like effects in occipital visual areas are spatially\nspecific: an electrode that is placed so that it elicits an eye\nmovement to a particular part of the visual field when activated at\none level will, if activated at a lower level, elicit changes in\nneural responsiveness that are exactly similar to the changes that are\nseen when attention is shifted to that same location (Moore and\nArmstrong, 2003, Armstrong and Moore, 2007).","\nThese facts have been taken to be suggestive of a ‘motor\ntheory’ of attention, according to which the processes\nunderpinning attention are, in at least some cases, truncated versions\nof the processes underpinning the coordination of movements of sensory\norientation.","\nThe central idea of such a theory is that “the program for\norienting attention either overtly or covertly is the same, but in the\nlatter case the eyes are blocked at a certain peripheral stage”\n(Rizzolatti et al, 1987, 37). Advocates of motor theories\n(such as Moore, Armstrong and Fallah, 2003) have characterised their\nwork as a revival of the picture that Alexander Bain proposed at the\nend of the nineteenth century. Bain (as we saw in Section\n 1.5,\n above) identified attention with truncated versions of the\nmotor-control processes that typically bring about attention’s\nbehavioural manifestations — processes “stopping short of\nthe actual movement performed by the organ” (Bain, 1888,\n371).","\nThese versions of the motor theory should be distinguished from\ntheories that regard attention and motor control as intimately linked,\nbut that place no emphasis on the fact that the motor control\nprocesses that have been implicated in attention are processes that\ncontrol the movement of sensory organs. In these theories\n(which are natural but not obligatory concomitants of the\n‘selection-for-action’ views discussed in\n section 2.5)\n attention stands in an intimate relation to motor control more\ngenerally. One line of experimental evidence in support of such a\ngeneral connection comes from work by Heiner Deubel and his\ncollaborators, in which various changes to the way in which an object\nfigures in action are shown to have an attention-indicating influence\non the perceptual discrimination of stimuli that are presented on or\nnear that object. In one striking example of this, Deubel and\nSchneider found that the way in which attention is allocated to the\nspace around a 6.5cm wooden X shape depended on whether the subject\nwas reaching with her left hand to grasp the shape by the top-left and\nbottom right arms, or reaching with her right hand to grasp the shape\nby the arms at its top-right and bottom left (Deubel & Schneider,\n2004). In each case attention was allocated not only to the shape, but\nto the to-be-gripped parts of it. (For other evidence of interactions\nbetween attention and action-targeting, see Tipper, Howard, and\nHoughton, 1998.)","\nMotor theories and other action-based theories give a plausible\naccount of some of attention’s instances, but they have\nlimitations that prevent them from applying with full generality:\nSince movement of the eyes, or of the limbs, is always movement to\na location motor theories will struggle to account for the\nallocation of attention on the basis of anything other than location.\nThey therefore face the limitations that we saw when considering pure\nspotlight theories, of being unable to account for shifts in attention\nthat do not correspond to differences in the location attended. Nor is\nit clear how motor theories should be applied to spatial attention in\nthose sensory modalities where the orientation of the sense organs is\nless straightforward than it is in the visual case. The motor theory\ndoes, nonetheless, provide a plausible and well-supported account of\nthe location-based variety of visual attention that is displayed in\ntypical attention-lab experiments.","\nThe success of motor theories in accounting for the sorts of attention\nthat are found in some typical attention-lab experiments can be given\neither an optimistic or a pessimistic interpretation. The optimistic\ninterpretation sees the motor theory as providing a successful account\nof the processing underpinning some of attention’s simpler and\nmore central varieties. The pessimistic interpretation sees the motor\ntheory as revealing a problem with our usual experimental\nparadigms. The participants in typical laboratory tasks direct\ntheir attention to different parts of their visual field, while\nkeeping their eyes fixated on a central spot. The behavioural\nsignatures of attention in such tasks are usually reductions in\nreaction time to the attended stimuli. The neural correlates of these\nbehavioural signatures are certain biases as to which stimuli most\nstrongly drive the neural circuitry that processes them. The central\nfinding of the motor-theorists is that these neural and behavioural\neffects can result from attenuated versions of the activity\nresponsible for directing eye movements. The pessimistic\ninterpretation of this finding is as revealing that signs that have\ntraditionally been taken to indicate the direction of attention are\nactually no more than consequences of the truncated eye-movements that\nour experimental paradigms induce, by imposing the restriction that\nexperimental participants fixate their gaze on a single location. If\nthat is right then the phenomenon studied in attention labs may not be\nthe psychologically important one that it has been taken for.","\nMotor theorists are not the only ones who might be accused of\nelevating a theory of some circumscribed subset of attention-related\nphenomena into a spuriously general theory of attention in its\nentirety. Henry Taylor has shown that, although the ambition to give a\ngeneral theory of attention is widespread among the philosophers who\nhave recently written on this subject, it is seldom found in the\nrecent psychological literature, where it has proven fruitful to\nfollow the influential example of Michael Posner by giving somewhat\nseparate treatments of attention’s roles in vigilance, in\nperceptual orientation, and in the focalized deployment of processing\nresources (Taylor, 2015, 2018; Posner and Boies, 1971). Taylor\nsuggests that the psychologists’ tolerance for pluralism here\nshould be reflected in our philosophical theories."],"subsection_title":"2.8 Motor Theories"}]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"3. Explanatory Roles for Attention","subsections":[{"content":["\nThe question of whether attention is necessary for consciousness has\nbeen answered in various ways. One answer is given by those who think\nthat lots of unattended items appear in consciousness. A different\nanswer is given by those who think that only some unattended items\nfigure in consciousness. A third answer is given if we think that\nunattended items figure in consciousness only in special\ncircumstances. There is some evidence that, independently of any\nphilosophical commitments, people differ as to which of these views\nthey find plausible (Schwitzgebel, 2007). There are also some theories\n(e.g., Watzl, 2017) in which attention is necessary for\n‘creature consciousness’ in the sense that every conscious\ncreature must be an attentive one. Such views need not entail that\nattention to an object is necessary for the conscious perception of\nthat object.","\nAt one extreme end of this spectrum is the view according to which\nattention to a thing is strictly necessary for consciousness of it, so\nthat the things to which we are not paying attention do not figure in\nour consciousness at all. A number of psychologists endorse this view\n(e.g., Cohen et al. 2012), as do some philosophers (e.g.,\nPrinz, 2012, Carruthers, 2015, Montemayor & Haladjian, 2015). It\nhas historical precedent in James’s remark, at the beginning of\nhis chapter on attention, that “my experience is what I agree to\nattend to”(James, 1890, ch. 11), and in Kames’ remark that\n“Attention is requisite even to the simple act of seeing”\n(Kames, 1769, see Sect\n 1.4,\n above).","\nThe evidence that is proffered in support of the view that attention\nis strictly necessary for consciousness comes from a range of\nexperiments showing the surprising extent to which experimental\nparticipants are ignorant of the items to which they have paid no\nattention. In Arien Mack and Irvin Rock’s ‘inattentional\nblindness’ paradigm, for example, participants who are given an\nattention-demanding task pertaining to a stimulus in one part of their\nvisual field frequently fail to notice shapes or words that are\nflashed up elsewhere (Mack & Rock, 1998). In Rensink et\nal.’s ‘change blindness’ paradigm the\nparticipants need to see an alternating pair of pictures between ten\nand twenty times before they can identify a large but narratively\ninconsequential difference between them (Rensink et al.,\n1997, Rensink, 2002). In the most memorable of these experiments a\nlarge number of participants fail to notice the central appearance of\na man in a gorilla suit when their attention is taken up with the\nbusiness of counting the number of passes made by one of two teams in\na concurrent basketball-type game (Simons & Chabdris, 1999).","\nNo single one of these experiments can establish the claim that\nattention is always necessary for consciousness. That claim is a\nuniversally quantified one, and is not entailed by any one of its\ninstances. Nor is it clear that what we see in these experiments\nreally are instances in which unattended objects drop out of\nconsciousness altogether. The participants’ ignorance of the\ngorilla’s appearance, for example, is compatible with it being\nthe case that the presence of the gorilla does make a\nphenomenal difference to their inattentive experience. To explain\nthose participants’ ignorance we need only say that any\nphenomenal difference that the unattended gorilla makes is a\ndifference that the participants are unable to use in answering the\nexperimenter’s question about whether anything strange happened\nin the scene. It may be a phenomenal difference that is epistemically\nunusable because it is immediately forgotten (see Wolfe, 1998) or it\nmay, alternatively, be a difference that is unusable because it is too\nunstructured and inchoate to be epistemically mobilizable. In that\ncase the effect of inattention would be inattentional\nagnosia, rather than inattentional blindness (see\nSimons, 2000).","\nAbsolute amnesia for unattended items, or thoroughgoing agnosia for\nthem, may be indistinguishable from inattentional blindness, both\nbehaviourally and from the point of view of retrospective\nintrospection. For that reason it is not a straightforward matter for\nthe advocates of any of these interpretations of the inattentional\nblindness and change blindness effects to rule out the alternative\ninterpretations. Subpersonal sources of data (such as experiments\nusing neuroimaging) may be the only sources of data that we have to go\non. (See Rees, et al. 1999, for an example in which fMRI data\nis used to argue against the amnesia interpretation of inattentional\nblindness effects involving written words).","\nIt is only narratively insignificant differences that go unnoticed in\nthe change-blindness paradigm. Change blindness effects might\ntherefore be taken as showing, not that there is no consciousness in\nthe absence of attention, but that there is consciousness in\nthe absence of attention, the contents of which are restricted to the\nscene’s overall gist. There are difficulties in adjudicating\nbetween these two interpretations experimentally. When features of\ngist do seem to be perceived, in the apparent absence of attention,\nthe defender of the claim that attention is necessary for\nconsciousness may reply by claiming that attention has been paid to\nthese items, either in a dispersed, non-focal way (Prettyman, 2013),\nor because these features are briefly and involuntarily\nattention-catching (Prinz, 2012, p. 119). Without an experimental\noperationalization of complete inattention, these rival\ninterpretations cannot be ruled out, with the result that empirical\ndebates about the extent of consciousness beyond attention are\ncurrently in something of deadlock, with experimenters being able to\nclaim only to have demonstrated perception in the ‘near\nabsence’ of attention (Li et al., 2002, Reddy et\nal., 2004, Reddy et al., 2006), and so providing only\ninconclusive support to the hypothesis that attention and\nconsciousness are dissociable (Koch & Tsuchiya, 2007).","\nThe methodological puzzle that we face when trying to settle the\ndispute between different interpretations of the inattentional and\nchange blindness effects raises the question of whether our\ncommonsense beliefs about the conscious status of unattended items are\nwell founded. Such beliefs seem to vary from person to person\n(Schwitzgebel, 2007), and to vary with certain features of the context\nin which they are probed (De Brigard, 2010). To the extent that we\nfind it natural to suppose that unattended items do figure in\nconsciousness, this may simply be owing to a version of the\n‘refrigerator-light illusion’: If our reason for believing\nthat we are conscious of the things to which we pay no attention is a\nreason that depends on our finding that we are conscious of those\nthings whenever we check on them then that belief is on shaky ground.\nA checking procedure cannot provide us with good evidence about the\nstatus of unattended items since the act of checking is itself an act\nthat involves a shift in attention to the things checked\n(O’Regan & Noë, 2001).","\nSince a direct checking procedure is ruled out we need a more\ntheory-driven way of assessing the dispute between those who claim\nthat the consequence of not attending to an item is that the item\ndrops out of conscious experience and those who claim that inattention\nsimply puts the subject in a poor epistemic position vis-à-vis\nthese unattended items. The current state of our theories is such that\nit would be premature to try to settle this dispute by an inference to\nthe best explanation, since neither side of the dispute has a theory\nof the attention/consciousness relation that has been worked out to a\ndegree that would allow the different explanations to be compared. We\ncan, however, see some of the considerations that the two sides in\nthis debate might invoke. Those who endorse the idea that attention is\nnecessary for consciousness can point to the fact that this view\naccords well with theories in which attention features prominently in\nthe explanation of consciousness (e.g., Prinz, 2005, 2012). They may\nalso be able to develop arguments based on theories of the way in\nwhich consciousness and attention evolved (Montemayor & Haladjian,\n2015). Those who prefer the epistemic-deficit interpretation of the\ninattentional blindness effects (Mole, 2011, §7.3.7) can point to\nthe fact that that interpretation flows naturally from the view\naccording to which attention to an item provides the sort of\nacquaintance that is needed for the use of a demonstrative concept\nthat refers to that item (a view advocated by Campbell, 2002, and\ndiscussed in section\n 3.2\n below): If attention to the gorilla is necessary for the forming of a\ndemonstrative-involving thought (such as ‘That’s a\ngorilla’) then there is an immediate explanation, consistent\nwith the idea that unattended items nonetheless feature in\nconsciousness, for the fact that inattentive people are unable to\nanswer questions such as ‘Was there a gorilla?’.","\nThe difficulty in the case of the unnoticed gorilla is to discern\nwhether unattended items are present to consciousness but present only\nas unindividuated items to which no demonstrative reference has yet\nbeen directed, or whether those unattended items are instead absent\nfrom consciousness altogether. Part of this difficulty originates in\nthe fact that, although most people give no attention to the gorilla,\nthey could attend to him, and would have done so if anything\nhad prompted them to do so. More data may be available, both to\nintrospection and to laboratory measurement, in cases where our\nfailure to attend has some more systemic explanation. Ned Block has\nsuggested that one such case is found in our perception of peripheral\nstimuli, when these are subject to the phenomenon of ‘identity\ncrowding’ (Block, 2013a). An individual ‘T’ or\n‘F’ can be seen reasonably clearly, even when presented in\na peripheral part of the visual field. But if additional characters\nare presented alongside this individual character, then the properties\nof those characters become prone to perceptual confusion. Attention\nseems to bind together properties from all of the characters in the\nvicinity of the one individual that we are trying to pick out. It\ntherefore seems that, in the perceptual periphery, attention cannot be\ndirected onto a region that fits an individual character tightly. Due\nto this ‘crowding’ effect, individual letters or shapes\nbecome impossible to individuate from the others with which they are\nclustered, when they fall into parts of the visual field that are\noutside of the high-definition centre. The properties of objects that\nare crowded in this way can nonetheless be seen, and the fact that\nseveral items are present can be reliably reported. On the basis of\nempirical and introspective considerations, Block claims that, even in\ncases where the crowded characters share all of their features with\nthe others by which they are crowded, these crowded characters are\nconsciously discriminated from their surroundings. He claims that\nthese characters figure as objects in consciousness. Since attention\ncannot be allocated to anything more fine-grained than the crowd of\nwhich these characters are a part, the characters are not themselves\nobjects to which attention is paid. Block therefore takes\n‘identity crowding’ to give counterexamples to the claim\nthat we are conscious of objects only when paying attention to\nthem.","\nBlock’s claim that the crowded characters figure in\nconsciousness as individuated objects, rather than as parts of some\nfeature-rich texture, has been contested (Taylor, 2013, Richards,\n2013). In response, Block has suggested that an inference the best\nexplanation of several related phenomena favours his interpretation of\nthe effect (Block, 2013b).","\nInference to the best explanation is always a hazardous business,\nespecially in the vicinity of an explanatory gap. In the\ninterpretation of identity crowding, as in the interpretation of\ninattentional blindness, the inescapability of abductive\nconsiderations suggests that our answer to the question of whether\nattention is necessary for consciousness may have to wait until we\nhave a better understanding of the relation of attention to\ndemonstrative reference (of the sort that is involved in thinking\n‘That’s a gorilla’), and perhaps until we have a\nbetter understanding of attention’s role in epistemology more\ngenerally. (See\n sections 3.3 & 3.4 ,\n below.)","\nIn addition to disputes about whether we are conscious of\nonly those things to which we attend, there are also disputes\nabout whether we are conscious of everything to which we\nattend. If we were then a complete theory of attention might be given\nby giving an account of the way in which attention modulates\nconsciousness.","\nDeclan Smithies has argued in favour of a position according to which\neverything that is attended to is consciously attended to. He claims\nthat all instances of attention must be consciousness-involving, on\nthe grounds that (1) all such instances must have a connection with\ntheir subject’s ‘rational-access’ to the contents of\nher experience, and (2) there is no connection to rationality in the\ncase of processing that is wholly unconscious. Smithies’ view\nis, therefore, that attention is essentially involved in the\n‘rational-access’ of consciously experienced contents\n(Smithies, 2011). The nature of any such connection between attention\nto an experience and the justificatory force of that experience is\nitself a source of ongoing controversy: Johannes Roesller has argued\nthat John McDowell’s theory of perceptual experience’s\nreason-giving force cannot account for the role played by attention in\nexperience (Roessler, 2011); Susanna Siegel and Nicholas Silins have\nclaimed that the doxastic influence of an experience can be an\ninstance of rational access even when that experience receives no\nattention (Siegel & Silins, 2014); Terry Horgan and Matjaž\nPotrč have argued that the justification of beliefs by experience\nmust outrun both the contents of attention and the contents of\nconsciousness (Horgan and Potrč 2011). Here, as above,\none’s understanding of attention and one’s understanding\nof epistemology constrain one another, and may provide a theory-driven\nroute by which to settle questions about the possibility of\nunconscious attentiveness.","\nThe claim that all attention is conscious attention sits uneasily with\ncertain empirical results indicating that consciousness is not\nrequired for the operation of those psychological processes that are\nresponsible for certain effects that are usually taken to be\nsignatures of attention. In an experiment by Yi Jiang et al.,\n(2006), for example, participants are presented with\nattention-attracting stimuli in such a way that, thanks to an\narrangement of mirrors, these stimuli are given to just one eye.\nBecause a more vivid stimulus is presented to the other eye, and\nbecause this more vivid stimulus wins the competition for\nconsciousness that occurs in such cases of binocular rivalry, these\nexperimental participants do not consciously experience the less vivid\nstimulus. Those unconsciously processed stimuli include erotic\nphotographs. And those photographs do seem to elicit shifts of\nattention, despite being unseen, as is evidenced by the fact that\nconsciously experienced stimuli that are presented in the same\nlocation as these unseen attention-grabbers are more accurately\nresponded to in an attention demanding task (involving detecting the\norientation of gabor-patches). One striking finding from Jiang et\nal.’s experiments is that the way in which these unseen\nphotographs attract and repel attention depends on the sexual\norientation of the experimental participants.","\nA natural interpretation of these experiments is as showing that the\nerotic pictures capture the participants’ attention, despite the\nfact that those participants have no conscious experience of them.\nThis suggests—although it does not conclusively\ndemonstrate—that one may be attending to a thing without being\nconscious of it. The same conclusion is suggested by a quite different\nset of experiments involving a patient with blindsight. These\nexperiments show that, even though the blindsighted patient has no\nexperience of cues presented in his scotoma, those cues can elicit the\nfacilitation of processing and reduction of reaction times that are\nusually taken to be the signatures of attention (Kentridge &\nHeywood, 2001, Kentridge et al., 2004).","\nOne complaint against both these lines of evidence is that they do not\nenable us to distinguish between attention to a thing and attention\nthat is directed to a part of space (in which that thing happens to\nbe), with the result that they cannot demonstrate attention to a\nthing in the absence of consciousness of that same thing (Mole,\n2008a). Research by Liam Norman, Charles Heywood and Robert Kentridge\ngoes some way towards addressing this complaint. Norman, Heywood and\nKentridge present normal participants with a screen showing an array\nof small, rapidly flickering Gabor patches. Objects the boundaries of\nwhich are defined by changes in the orientations of these patches are\nnot consciously experienced: Participants merely see the whole screen\nas a flickering array of patches. Cues that direct the attention of\nthose participants do nonetheless seem to draw attention to these\nunseen objects, as indicated by differences in the response times to\nitems that are subsequently presented in and outside of their\nboundaries (Norman, Heywood & Kentridge, 2013).","\nSuch experiments show that there is an influence operating between\nunconscious processing and the direction of attention, and perhaps\nindicate that attention can be paid to objects that make no showing in\nconscious experience (Mole, 2014a). They therefore place a limit on\nthe closeness of the relationship that can be claimed to exist between\nattention and consciousness.","\nThe disputes about whether attention is sufficient for consciousness,\nnecessary for consciousness, or both, are related to questions about\nattention’s metaphysics. The claim that attention is not\nsufficient for consciousness is typically made as part of a defence of\nthe idea that attention and consciousness are underpinned by two\ndistinct brain processes, which can occur independently (see, e.g.,\nKoch and Tsuchiya, 2007). The claim that the things to which we attend\nare a proper subset of the things that appear in our consciousness is\nrequired by those who, like Locke (see Section\n 1.3),\n think that there is a process of conscious thinking, and that this\nconstitutes attention when it happens in a certain way. \nAnd the claim that attention is both necessary and sufficient for\nconsciousness is required by those who think that the process by which\nthings come to consciousness is identical to the process by which\nattention is allocated (Prinz, 2005, 2011). Some scientific theories\nof consciousness also carry strong commitments concerning its\nrelationship to attention: Taylor Webb and Michael Graziano emphasize\nthese commitments in making the empirical case for their\n‘Attention-Schema’ theory, according to which\nconsciousness emerges from processes in which the control of attention\nrequires a schematic representation of the way in which attention is\nbeing allocated (Graziano and Webb, 2014; Webb and Graziano,\n2015).","\nWhether or not one thinks that attention is always responsible for\nbringing things into our consciousness, there are good reasons to\nthink that changes in the direction of our attention can make some\ndifference to the character of conscious experience. Phenomenologists\nand Gestalt psychologists have characterized this difference in\nvarious ways, with Maurice Merleau-Ponty emphasizing the way in which\nattention can configure the figure/ground structure of perceived space\n(Merleau-Ponty, 1962, Chp.3–4), and Aron Gurwitsch (Gurwitsch,\n1964) elaborating a theory in which the configuration given by\nattention has a more complex, three-part structure (explained in\nArvidson, 2006). In the second half of his 2017 book, Sebastian Watzl\ndevelops a similar suggestion, on the basis of his claim that the role\nof attention is to impose a priority structure on our mental lives\n(see above\n §2.4),\n (Watzl, 2011, 2017).","\nThere is currently some dispute about whether the differences made by\nshifts of attention can be adequately characterized as differences in\nthe content of the attended experience. If, as Watzl\ncontends, they cannot, then phenomena of attention create a serious\ndifficulty for any fully general attempts to explain the character of\nconscious experience by reference to the contents represented in it\n(Chalmers, 2004). Such explanations might still be viable in\ncircumscribed domains (Speaks, 2010).","\nA series of studies by Marisa Carrasco and her collaborators have\nexamined the influence of attention on the character of conscious\nexperience. These have revealed that the phenomenal differences\nproduced by shifts of attention include differences of perceived\nbrightness, contrast, and saturation of colours, but do not include\ndifferences of hue (Carrasco, Ling & Read, 2004, Fuller &\nCarrasco, 2006). Ned Block has suggested that these perceived\ndifferences should not be thought of as differences in the\ncontent of experience, since to characterize them in that way\nwould be to take it that attending to an item creates an illusion as\nto its brightness, contrast, etc.; a result which he takes to be\nimplausible. Block therefore interprets Carrasco’s findings as\nindicating an aspect of experience that cannot be accounted for with a\ntheory in which the phenomenal character of an experience is a\nfunction of that experience’s content (Block 2010).","\nThere have been similar disputes, transacted on the basis of more\nintrospective considerations, concerning the effects of attention on\nthe perception of ambiguous figures (such as the Necker Cube). In\nresponse to some considerations that were first raised by Fiona\nMacpherson (Macpherson, 2006), Bence Nanay has suggested that the\neffects of attention on the perception of such figures can be\nexplained by those who maintain that every difference in consciousness\nis a difference of content (Nanay, 2010, 2011). His contention is that\nthe effects of attention on the character of conscious experience\nshould be understood as including a modulation of the specificity of\nan experience’s content, in which the representations of\ndeterminable properties are made more or less determinate. The issues\nhere are similar to those concerning the way in which blurriness\nshould be thought to enter into visual experience (see Section 4.4 of\nthe entry on\n representational theories of consciousness).","\nMattia Riccardi casts attention in a rather different phenomenological\nrole, suggesting (in opposition to the proposal of Matthen, 2010) that\nattention explains the presentness that differentiates\none’s perceptual experiences of real objects in one’s\nimmediate environment from one’s experiences of objects that are seen\nin photographs, or that are pictured by the mind’s eye during\nepisodes of vivid imagination (Riccardi, 2019)."],"subsection_title":"3.1 Attention and Consciousness"},{"content":["\nConsciousness is only one of the philosophically puzzling mental\nphenomena that have been thought to be related to attention in ways\nthat may prove to be explanatorily revealing. Demonstrative\nreference is another. One advocate of the idea that attention\ncontributes to the explanation of demonstrative reference is John\nCampbell, who writes that:","\n… the notion of conscious attention to an object has an\nexplanatory role to play: it has to explain how it is that we have\nknowledge of the reference of a demonstrative. (2002, 45)\n","\nA similar idea was explored in the manuscript on Theory of Knowledge\nthat Bertrand Russell abandoned (under the influence of Wittgenstein)\nin the summer in 1913. In that work Russell gives the following\nstatement of the idea that reference to particulars requires attention\nto them:","\nAt any moment of my conscious life, there is one object (or at most\nsome very small number of objects) to which I am attending. All\nknowledge of particulars radiates out from this object. (1913, 40)\n","\nIn support of the Russellian claim that there is an explanatory\nrelation between attention and demonstrative reference, Campbell\ndevelops two lines of thought.","\nHis first line of thought comes from reflection on examples concerning\nthe requirements that have to be met in order to understand\ndemonstrative expressions in conversational contexts where one of the\nparticipants in the conversation uses expressions such as ‘that\nwoman’, but where various women are present, all of whom are\npossible referents for this demonstrative. Knowing which women is\nmeant, according to Campbell, requires attending to the woman in\nquestion and knowing that it is to her that the speaker was attending.\nThis is intended to show more than just that the direction of the\nspeaker’s attention is a possible source of evidence for what\nthat speaker means. It is intended as showing that attention and\nreference stand in a particularly intimate relationship—a\nrelationship that Campbell characterizes by saying that\n‘knowledge of the reference of a demonstrative is provided by\nconscious attention to the object’ (p. 22).","\nThe second line of thought that Campbell develops in support of the\nview that attention explains demonstrative reference is one pertaining\nto deductive arguments in which the premises refer to items that are\npicked out by demonstratives: Arguments such as ‘(1) That is F.\n(2) That is G. Therefore (3) That is F and G’. Campbell’s\nthought here is that such arguments depend for their validity on there\nbeing no possibility of equivocating on the meaning of\n‘that’, as it occurs in the two separate premises. Such\narguments can only figure in rationally-entitling reasoning so long as\nthere is a single fixing of the referent of ‘that’ in both\npremises. This reference fixing, Campbell thinks, is achieved if and\nonly if there is no redirection of attention between the premises.\nAgain this is intended to show more than just that there is some\ncausal or evidential relation between attending and referring. It is\nintended to show that the role played by attention in fixing the\nreference of a demonstrative is analogous to the role played by a\nFregean Sense in fixing the reference of a proper name (Campbell,\n2002, Chapter 5).","\nThe explanatory approach that Campbell advocates, and that Russell\nconsidered, has traditionally been thought to suffer from a problem of\ncircularity. This problem was urged by Peter Geach in Mental\nActs (1957). Geach considers the suggestion that we can use\nattention to explain our ability to make reference to the things that\nwe perceive, but thinks that no such suggestion can provide a genuine\nexplanation of reference because:","\n… it is quite useless to say the relevant sense-perceptions\nmust be attended to, either this does not give a sufficient condition,\nor else “attended to” is a mere word for the very relation\nof judgment to sense perception that requires analysis. (1957, 64)\n","\nGeach’s threat of circularity can be avoided if an independently\ngiven theory of how attention is constituted can be shown to\nilluminate the way in which reference is fixed by it. Imogen Dickie\nhas attempted to show just this. In a 2011 paper Dickie shows that\ncognitive psychology provides us with a theory of the role played by\nattention in tracking objects over time. She suggests that such a\ntheory can be used to account for the way in which attending to an\nobject removes any knowledge-defeating component of luck from our\ninferences involving it, thereby establishing the attended object as a\npossible topic of demonstrative thoughts (Dickie, 2011, 2015). This\ntreatment of attention exemplifies some of the central themes in\nDickie’s more general attempt to explain how thoughts come to be\nabout ordinary objects (and so how singular terms come to refer to\nthose objects). The explanation that she offers is one in which a\nthought comes to be about a thing when the justificatory practices in\nwhich that thought figures are anchored to the object in question (in\na sense of ‘anchoring’ that Dickie spells out in detail\n(Dickie, 2015)).","\nWhether or not a theory of attention can be turned into a non-circular\nexplanation of demonstrative reference, the idea that attention and\nreference are related does seem to cast light on what goes on when we\nunderstand referring expressions. Campbell’s examples succeed in\nsuggesting that what we attend to and what we refer to are often the\nsame. There is also some empirical evidence, coming from developmental\npsychology, indicating that attention-related abilities play a crucial\nrole in the infant’s development of an understanding of its\ncaregiver’s demonstrative use (see\n Section 3.3).\n Lessons have been drawn from this that are not only about the\ncomprehension of linguistic expressions. This developmental work has\nalso been taken to imply something about our grasp on directly\nreferring thoughts. The idea here – as in the work of\nDickie and Campbell – is not only that attention contributes to\nour production and comprehension of linguistic expressions that have\nparticular referents, but that it also contributes to the\nestablishment of those referents as the contents of our thoughts. In\naddition to these developmental considerations, Michael Barkasi has\nsuggested that the nature of attention’s contribution to fixing\nthe reference of thoughts can be illuminated by considering the\npattern of neural projections to the frontal eye fields. Whereas\nCampbell characterizes attention in epistemic terms, Barkasi\nfavours a sub-doxastic characterization, in which attention\n‘sets targets’ and thereby regulates the flow of visual\ninformation (Barkasi, 2019)."],"subsection_title":"3.2 Attention and Demonstrative Reference"},{"content":["\nThere are empirical results, coming from developmental psychology,\nwhich are suggestive of an intimate link between the development of\nvarious abilities related to attention and the development of various\ncapacities that are involved in understanding the mental states that\nare expressed in interactions between the infant and its\ncaregiver.","\nAn ability to appreciate what others are attending to appears to be a\ncrucial stage in a normal infant’s development towards\nunderstanding the fact that its caregivers’ utterances have\nreferential intentions behind them. More generally, capacities for\nattention develop at important milestones on the route to the\nacquisition of some distinctively human cognitive capacities (Moore\nand Dunham, 1995). There is a distinctive developmental pathway in\nwhich normal human infants develop an ability and a willingness to\nattend to their mother, an ability and willingness to attend to the\nthing that she is attending to, and then, most importantly, an ability\nand willingness to enter into episodes in which there is a third\nobject that mother and child are attending to jointly, with\nmutual understanding of the fact that their attention is shared\n(Reddy, 2010, Trevarthen, 2011). In these episodes infants and\ncaregivers employ complex cues, involving speech, gaze-following, and\npointing.","\nThere is good evidence that the child’s progression along this\npathway is related to its development of abilities to respond\nappropriately to the mental states of others, and to the development\nof its ability to acquire new vocabulary on the basis of an\nunderstanding of what the words used by its mother refer to. A\nlongitudinal study suggests that the earlier stages in this pathway\nare predictive of the age at which infants reach the later ones\n– thereby providing some evidence for the hypothesis that this\nsequence is a causal one – with the mastery at twelve months of\npointing as a means to direct the attention of others being predictive\nof false belief understanding at the age of fifty months, even when\nfactors relating to temperament and language are factored out (Sodian\n& Kristen-Antonow, 2015). Another source of evidence comes from\nthe fact that the arrested development of these attention-involving\nabilities is a revealing marker of the impairments suffered by\nautistic children (Kanner, 1943, Hobson and Hobson, 2011). \nFurther evidence may also come from the fact that a lack of such\nabilities is related to limitations in the mental-state attribution\nabilities of non-human primates, although this last claim is more\ncontroversial (Call & Tomasello, 2005).","\nSome progress has been made towards extracting philosophical lessons\nfrom the empirical work indicating that joint attention has a role to\nplay here, in the explanation of distinctively human aspects of\ncognitive and social development, and also – once that\ndevelopment is complete – in the explanation of the way in which\nsome elementary social phenomena are transacted. (For several\ndevelopmental examples, see the papers collected in Eilan, et\nal. 2005, and Seemann 2011; for a discussion of joint attention\nin adult cases of shared intention, see Fiebich and Gallagher, 2012,\nwho argue that jointly attending has a basic, elementary status, as\nthe most minimal instance of a joint action.)","\nOne of the points at which philosophical difficulties arise is in\ncharacterizing the sharedness of the attention that is\nimplicated in this developmental trajectory. Christopher Peacocke has\nargued that the way in which joint attention episodes are shared\ninvolves a kind of reciprocal recognition of the other’s\nrecognition of one’s own attention, and that it therefore\ninvolves a kind of mutual openness that is analogous to the openness\nof ‘common knowledge’, as that notion figures in\nphilosophical analyses of communication and convention (see the entry\non\n convention).\n Since joint attention is achieved by young children, its achievement\ncannot plausibly be thought to make any sophisticated intellectual\ndemands. Peacocke therefore argues that awareness of reciprocated\nopenness must be more fundamental than the intellectual achievement of\ncommon knowledge. He suggests that it should instead be\nunderstood as a variety of perceptual awareness that makes\nsuch common knowledge possible (Peacocke, 2005). John Campbell shares\nPeacocke’s view of joint attention as being a perceptual\nphenomenon, as opposed to a phenomenon that is achieved when\none’s perception is reflected on in a certain way, but Campbell\ndiffers from Peacocke in taking the person with whom attention is\nshared to be fellow subject of the joint experience, not an\nobject who figures in the content of the experience that each\njoint-attender individually has (Campbell, 2002, Ch. 8).\nCampbell’s attempt to shift the explanation of sharedness from\nthe cognitive to the perceptual domain is rejected by Lucas Battich\nand Bart Geurts (Battich and Guerts, 2020), who suggest that\nCampbell’s view suffers from problems that originate in his\nrelational conception of perception. They therefore claim that the\nissues here cast light on the long-running debates between\nrepresentation-based and relation-based theories of perception (see\nthe entry on\n the problem of perception)."],"subsection_title":"3.3 Attention and Other Minds"},{"content":["\nThe apparent links between attention and demonstrative reference (see\nsection\n 3.2)\n and attention and knowledge of other minds (see section\n 3.3)\n might be special instances of a more general connection between\nattention and the making of epistemic moves. A general connection of\nthat sort may have been what Descartes had in mind when he suggested\nthat attention to clear and distinct ideas is a necessary condition\nfor those ideas to realize their special epistemic potential (see\nSection\n 1.1).\n It might also be what Stewart had in mind when he suggested that\n“Some attention [is] necessary for any act of memory\nwhatever” (see Section\n 1.4).\n Kant’s anthropological writings also cast attention in a\ncrucial epistemic role, as explaining the control that one can exert\nover representations in thought and in imagination, where this perhaps\nincludes the kind of imagination that Kant takes to be involved in\nmaking one’s experiences into experiences of an objective\nspatiotemporal world (Merritt & Valaris, 2017).","\nAlthough each of these philosophers have tended to frame it in a way\nthat reflects their other theoretical commitments, some version of the\nidea that attention is always involved in the making of epistemic\nmoves can be made pre-theoretically plausible. The inattentional\nblindness experiments, in which participants are visually presented\nwith large changes while attending to something else, show that\ninattentive people can fail to notice all sorts of perceivable things\nthat attentive people would find obvious. Something exactly similar\nseems to be true in the case of a priori reasoning: just as no item is\nso large, so central, and so well-lit that no conscious and sighted\nobserver could miss it, so there is no step in reasoning that is so\nsimple, so compelling, and so obvious, that every thinker, whether\nattentive or inattentive, can be expected to recognise it. Just as the\ninattentional blindness effects might seem to show that there are\nattentional demands that a thinker has to meet before his perceptual\nencounter with things can provide him with knowledge of them, so it is\nplausible that there are similar attentional demands that have to be\nmet before the thinker’s grasp of a thought gives her a\njustified belief in that thought’s consequences. This\ninterpretation of the inattentional blindness effects is, however,\ncontroversial. Nicholas Silins and Susanna Siegel have suggested that\n– even if inattention does sometimes explain a perceiving\nperson’s failure to form a belief about the things happening in\ntheir visual field – unattended aspects of experience are\nnonetheless capable of providing justification for such beliefs\n(Silins and Sigel, 2019). Émile Thalbard argues to the contrary\n(Thalabard, 2020).","\nIn both the a priori case and the perceptual case, the acquisition of\nknowledge seems to require attention on at least some occasions, and\nin both of these cases that requirement seems to be a\npractical one. It may be that knowledge of some propositions\nis required if one’s experience with a gorilla is to provide one\nwith knowledge of the gorilla’s presence (with the propositions\nhere being of a sort that could serve as a major premise in an\ninference by which one’s perceptual experience was interpreted),\nbut the requirement on gaining knowledge from experience cannot be\nthat one must be bearing such propositions in mind. The same is true\nin the a priori domain. What is required before an a priori\nentitlement can be recognized cannot be that one has to entertain some\nprior knowledge of a proposition from which that entitlement can be\ndeduced. To suppose that occurrent propositional knowledge is what is\nnecessary for such moves would be to embark on the regress set by\nLewis Carroll’s tortoise to Achilles (Carroll, 1895). What\nepistemic move-making requires is not occurrent knowledge of a\nproposition. The thing that it requires is the right sort of active\nattention.","\nThe attentional requirements that have to be met before one can\nacquire knowledge from experience or recognize an a priori entitlement\nare not requirements merely for alertness. They are not captured\nmerely by saying that, in order to gain knowledge, the thinker has to\npay some attention to the relevant ideas. A thinker may be attending\nto a syllogism, but, if he is attending to its rhythm, he may still be\nunable to see that the conclusion follows. A non-question begging\ncharacterisation of the attentional requirements of knowledge\nacquisition in general would be an important contribution to\nepistemology. Current work on attention, focussing as it does on\nattention as a perceptual phenomenon, may give us only part of the\ngeneral theory that we need. Work on the purely intellectual forms of\nattention continues to be scarce. This shortcoming has been emphasized\nby Mark Fortney, who argues that the neglect of intellectual attention\nhas led philosophers to misinterpret some of the claims made in the\nempirical literature on attention and consciousness (Fortney, 2019).\nFortney also claims that considerations pertaining to intellectual\nattention should have a central role in debates about the transparency\nof phenomenology, and about the consequences of this transparency for\nthe epistemology of self-attributed thoughts (debates that are\nexemplified, in Fortney’s discussion, by Byrne, 2018). Fortney\nsuggests that, when attention is given this role, certain results from\ncognitive psychology cast light on these debates. He thinks, when seen\nin this light, some of the claims that have been made about the\ntransparency of occurrent thought start to seem dubious (Fortney,\n2020)."],"subsection_title":"3.4 Attention and Knowledge"},{"content":["\nAttention’s involvement in voluntary action is a lot\nharder to study in a controlled experiment than its involvement in\nperception. The theories of attention emerging from experimental\npsychology have, as a result, focused almost exclusively on\nattention’s perceptual instances. In this respect they contrast\nwith theories that were developed in the period before psychology and\nphilosophy split, in which the action-involving aspects of attention\nwere much more prominent. William James, for example, suggests in the\nPrinciples of Psychology that ‘volition is nothing but\nattention’ (James, 1890 p. 424), and at one time (in what might\nbe read as an anticipation of the competition-based theories discussed\nabove, in\n §2.6)\n he proposed that “Attention, belief, affirmation, and motor\nvolition, are […] four names for an identical process,\nincidental to the conflict of ideas alone, the survival of one in\nspite of the opposition of the others.” (1880).","\nThe issues surrounding attention’s relationship to the\nvoluntariness of action are parallel to some of the issues surrounding\nattention’s relationship to the consciousness of perception. It\nseems natural to think that attention is necessary for the voluntary\nperformance of finely tuned behaviours, much as it seems necessary for\nthe conscious perception of fine detail. But it does not seem natural\nto think that we must be paying attention to the execution of every\nact that we voluntarily perform, any more than it seem natural to\nsuppose that we must pay attention in order to be consciously\nperceiving anything at all. A case could therefore be made, on\ncommonsense grounds, for claiming that attention figures in the\nproduction of some but not all voluntary behaviours. One can imagine\nthis view being challenged by a theorist who claimed that attention is\nnecessary for any action to be voluntary, arguing that there is an\nillusion (analogous to the refrigerator light illusion) that gives us\nthe mistaken impression that our inattentive acts are voluntary too.\nAs in the case of attention and consciousness, there is a\nmethodological puzzle (with epistemologically deep roots) about the\nsort of evidence that could settle this issue. This may be a topic for\nfuture research. While resisting the idea that attention is either\nnecessary or sufficient for an act to be voluntary, Denis Buehler has\nargued that there is a central role for attention in the explanation\nof flexible goal-directed behaviour (Buehler, 2019). In cases where\nthat behaviour involves the exercise of a skill, Alex Dayer and\nCarolyn Jennings have argued against the idea that any simple account\nof attention’s role in it can be given, claiming that a theory\nof attention’s role in skilled performance must instead be\n‘pluralist’ (Dayer & Jennings, 2021).","\nThe separation of attention’s role in action from\nattention’s role in perception is somewhat artificial,\nespecially when the perception in question is perception of\none’s own moving body. Psychological research into that\nparticular form of perception has been largely independent of research\ninto the role of attention in vision and audition. A 2016 paper by\nGregor Hochstetter reviews the research into this bodily case, and\nargues, following Marcel Kinsbourne (1995, 2002) that internal\nrepresentation of a ‘body image’ must play some role in\nguiding attention during normal bodily awareness (Hochstetter,\n2016)."],"subsection_title":"3.5 Attention and Voluntary Action"}]},{"main_content":["\nAttention’s contribution to our understanding of values has been\nrelatively underexplored in the recent literature. The range of\nvalue-theoretic contexts in which attention makes an explanatorily\nsignificant appearance is nonetheless broad."],"section_title":"4 Attention and Value","subsections":[{"content":["\nThe subject matter of aesthetics can be demarcated in various ways,\neach of which is somewhat controversial (see Lopes, 2014). A natural\nthought here is that aesthetics might be identified as the branch of\nphilosophy that is concerned with one particular sort of experience.\nIf this proposal is to be informative then it obviously needs to be\nsupplemented with some specification of which sort of experience that\nis. It is clear that this specification cannot be given via an\nextensional specification of the objects that are experienced: the\nsame wine might be experienced by the connoisseur and the thirsty man,\nwith only one of their experiences being aesthetic; the same painting\nmight be seen aesthetically by the art lover, and from a purely\nfinancial point of view by its dealer.","\nOne response to this would be individuate experiences more finely than\ntheir objects, by instead identifying some particular set of\nproperties that are experienced as belonging to those objects\nin the aesthetic case (see the section on aesthetic objects in the\nentry on\n the concept of the aesthetic).\n An alternative response would be to consider not only the contents\nthat are experienced, but also the way in which the subject\nexperiences them, perhaps by identifying some particular\nattitude that characterises the subject in the aesthetic\ncase, or perhaps by identifying some mode of attention that that\nsubject instantiates (see the section on the aesthetic attitude in the\nentry on\n the concept of the aesthetic).","\nAttempts to identify such an aesthetic mode of attention are\nwell-represented in the philosophical tradition. Kant’s famous\nclaims about judgements of beauty having a first moment of\ndisinterested pleasure are usually read as a paradigm of the\nattitude-identifying approach (see the entry on\n Kant’s aesthetics and teleology),\n but Jessica Williams has argued that Kant must also be operating with\na notion of aesthetic attention, as being a mode of attention\ninvolving a distinctive combination of imagination and understanding\n(Williams, 2021).","\nSome such notion of attention also plays a central role in R.G.\nCollingwood’s account of the way in which art (and, in\nparticular, literature) contributes positively to a society’s\nculture. Collingwood describes attention as “the assertion of\nourselves as the owners of our feelings”, and takes this\nself-assertion to be crucial in enabling us to exercise volition over\nthose feelings, so that “Their brute power over us is thus\nreplaced by our power over them” (Collingwood, 1938, p. 222).\nCollingwood therefore takes the diminution of a society’s\nartistic culture to make it vulnerable to emotive influences (while\nhimself suggesting that this might best read, not as a broad\nphilosophical claim, but as a point about Europe in the nineteen\nthirties).","\nAttempts to demarcate the aesthetic via the identification of an\naesthetic attitude, or of an aesthetic mode of attention, have been\nattacked — for their details, and for their more general\norientation (most famously by George Dickie, in his 1964 paper). Those\nlines of attack have led to a widespread acceptance of the idea that\nthere is something wrongheaded about specifying necessary and\nsufficient conditions for qualifying as aesthetic via the\nidentification of some particular aesthetic attitude. Many\nphilosophers nonetheless retain the idea that there are informative\nthings that can be said, in the service of less strictly defined\ntheoretical ends, about the sorts of attitudes that are often found to\nbe exemplified in aesthetic cases. It is in this spirit that some\nideas about distinctive forms of aesthetic attention have recently\nbeen revived.","\nServaas van der Berg suggests that a distinctive mode of attention can\nbe seen in cases of aesthetic appreciation (van der Berg, 2019). He\nclaims that this mode of attention is distinguished by its\nmotivational structure, which has a form that is similar to the\nmotivational structure of game playing, as theorised by Bernard Suits\n(Suits, 1978) and Thi Nguyen (Nguyen, 2020). This structure is one\nthat inverts the normal order of priorities between means and ends: in\nnormal actions one’s means are typically taken in order to bring\nabout one’s ends, but the game-playing golfer (for example)\ninstead adopts the end of getting his ball into a hole in order that\nhe can take the means to reaching that end. Van der Berg argues that a\nsimilar inversion is seen in aesthetic appreciation, where the\ncognitive means that are required in order to reach understanding\nprovide the reasons for adopting the end of understanding an item that\nis being appreciated aesthetically.","\nBence Nanay has set out a position with similar aims — not\naspiring to give necessary or sufficient conditions for the aesthetic,\nbut aiming to cast some light on the way in which certain central\ncases of aesthetic experience operate. He does this by giving a theory\nof the distinctive way in which our attention is engaged in the course\nof these experiences. Nanay emphasizes the psychological distinction\nbetween focused and distributed attention, and uses examples from a\nrange of arts to suggest that aesthetic experiences often require\nattention of both sorts. He also suggests this contributes to\nthe value that we place on such experiences (Nanay, 2015, 2016)."],"subsection_title":"4.1 Attention in Aesthetics"},{"content":["\nSimone Weil suggests that attention has an absolutely central role in\nethics, and in value theory more broadly, writing that:","\nThe authentic and pure values – truth, beauty and goodness\n– in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the\nsame act, a certain application of the full attention to the object.\n(Weil, 1986, p. 214)\n","\nThis apotheosizing of attention provides the basis for Weil’s\nclaims about priorities for education. On these points, her position\nis shared by a number of other figures whose work sits at the\ninterface of philosophy and literature (see Mole, 2017). Christopher\nThomas has suggested that the role played by attention in Weil’s\n‘ethics of affliction’ can be interpreted as an attempt to\nput some central notions from Kant’s aesthetic theory to ethical\nwork (Thomas, 2020).","\nThe influence of Kant was in the foreground, together with the\ninteractions between ethics and aesthetics, when Weil’s claims\nabout attention’s import were developed in the work of Iris\nMurdoch. Murdoch suggests that there are certain forms of attention\nthat play an essential role in the exercise of the virtues (Murdoch,\n1970, see Bagnoli, 2003, Mole, 2006). She implies that a capacity for\nthese forms of attention can be cultivated through experiences of\nbeauty. These themes have been taken up by Dorothea Debus, who places\nparticular emphasis on Weil’s claim that it is full\nattention to which cardinal value is attributed (Debus, 2015). Antony\nFredriksson and Silvia Panizza suggest that the aspects of attention\nthat Murdoch takes to be important are seen with particular clarity if\none adopts the perspective of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of\nattention, in which the openness of the attentive mind is\nemphasized (Fredriksson & Panizza, 2020). Nicolas Bommarito has\ndeveloped an account of modesty along broadly Murdochian lines, as\nbeing a ‘virtue of attention’. He argues that this avoids\nepistemic difficulties that other accounts of modesty face, if they\ninstead characterize modesty as requiring false beliefs about the\nextent of one’s strengths (Bommarito, 2013).","\nSimilar issues are approached from a somewhat different direction by\nPeter Goldie (Goldie, 2004), and Michael Brady (Brady, 2010), both of\nwho relate attention and virtue to the epistemic significance of a\nperson’s emotional life. Both Goldie and Brady suggest that the\nattention-modulating profile of an emotion is essential to it, and\nboth claim that this modulation of attention by emotion plays an\nineliminable role in our having a full appreciation of the evaluative\nproperties that we encounter in the world around us. Goldie and Brady\ndisagree as to how this epistemic role should be characterized, with\nGoldie taking the experience of one’s own emotion to itself be a\nreason-giving experience, with an epistemic authority analogous to\none’s experiences of the things in one’s visual field,\nwhereas Brady takes the emotional subject’s experience of items\nin the world to have an epistemic authority that is not shared by the\nsubject’s experience of their own emotional state, so that that\nstate’s epistemic significance must instead be exhausted by its\ninfluence on our outwardly-directed attention (Brady, 2013)."],"subsection_title":"4.2 Attention in Ethics"}]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Historical Overview\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIn the early modern period a variety of explanatory roles were\\nassigned to attention by a number of different writers.\\nDescartes’ Meditations provides one prominent example.\\nThe result of Descartes’ First Meditation—that everything\\ncan be doubted—is in apparent tension with his Third\\nMeditation’s claim that clear and distinct ideas are beyond\\ndoubt. Descartes introduces a claim about attention to resolve this\\napparent conflict. He says, in reply to the seventh set of objections,\\nthat it is only when we pay attention to them that clear and distinct\\nideas provide a place where doubt does not take hold:\",\n \"\\nSo long as we attend to a truth which we perceive very clearly, we\\ncannot doubt it. But when, as often happens, we are not attending to\\nany truth in this way, then even though we remember that we have\\npreviously perceived many things clearly, nevertheless there will be\\nnothing which we may not justly doubt so long as we do not know that\\nwhatever we clearly perceive is true. (‘Replies to\\nObjections’, 309)\\n\",\n \"\\nThis passage is usually cited for the point that it makes about\\nmemory, but the picture that Descartes is here outlining is also one\\nin which attention has an important epistemic role to play: clarity\\nand distinctness realize their epistemic potential only when attention\\nis being paid to the ideas that have them. Those ideas can be doubted,\\nas, in accordance with the policy of the First Meditation they must\\nbe, but that doubt cannot be maintained by a properly attentive\\nthinker. The crucial first move in Descartes’\\nepistemology—the move from radical doubt to certainty about the\\ntruth of particular clear and distinct ideas—is, therefore, a\\ntransition that is mediated by attention.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.1 Descartes: Attention and Epistemology\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nA quite different explanatory role is assigned to attention in Bishop\\nBerkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge, although here\\nagain we find that it is in order to remove an epistemological glitch\\nthat the notion of attention is brought in. In the Introduction to\\nPrinciples of Human Knowledge Berkeley rejects Locke’s\\nclaim that there exist such things as Abstract Ideas. But Berkeley\\nretains Locke’s commitment to the core empiricist claim that the\\nthinking of thoughts is always a matter of handling ideas received\\nfrom experience. This would seem to lead to the conclusion that it is\\nnot possible to think about abstractia, but Berkeley realizes that\\nthat conclusion is unacceptable. It is, as he says, perfectly possible\\nto think about the properties of triangles in general.\",\n \"\\nIn the second edition of the Principles Berkeley added a\\ncouple of sentences to the Introduction that make it clear that it is\\nattention and, in particular, the withholding of attention, that is\\nsupposed to explain the possibility of thinking about abstractia\\nwithout the need to postulate Abstract Ideas. These added sentences\\ntell us that:\",\n \"\\n[It] must be acknowledged that a man may consider a figure merely\\nas triangular, without attending to the particular qualities of the\\nangles or relations of the sides. So far he may abstract, but\\nthis will never prove that he can frame an abstract general,\\ninconsistent idea of a triangle. (1710, Introduction to 2nd edn.\\n§16. emphasis added)\\n\",\n \"\\nIn these sentences Berkeley is not attempting to elaborate a theory of\\nattention. He says nothing more about the idea that attention might\\nenable thought about abstractia. It is nonetheless clear that he\\nrequires attention to play an important role in his picture of the\\nmind.\",\n \"\\nBerkeley’s idea that attention and abstraction are linked was\\ntaken up in the second half of the nineteenth century by William\\nHamilton. Hamilton did not, however, think that the link between\\nattention and abstraction provided the starting point for an\\nexplanation of attention, nor of abstraction. That is because he took\\nit that the relationship between the two phenomena was too intimate to\\nbe explanatory. He writes that:\",\n \"\\nAttention and Abstraction are only the same process viewed in\\ndifferent relations. They are, as it were, the positive and negative\\npoles of the same act. (1876, 88)\\n\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.2 Berkeley: Attention and Abstraction\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nDescartes and Berkeley treat attention very briefly, but each assigns\\nattention to a particular explanatory role. Locke’s treatment of\\nattention is also brief, but he has his own theory of the explanatory\\nrole that attention plays, and goes further than either Descartes or\\nBerkeley in giving us a positive account of what attention is. His\\naccount is given as part of the catalogue of ‘Modes of\\nThinking’, which Locke sets out towards the beginning of Chapter\\nNineteen of Book Two of the Essay Concerning Human\\nUnderstanding:\",\n \"\\n[W]hen ideas float in our mind without any reflection or regard of the\\nunderstanding, it is that which the French call reverie; our language\\nhas scarce a name for it: when the ideas that offer themselves\\n(for, as I have observed in another place, whilst we are awake, there\\nwill always be a train of ideas succeeding one another in our minds)\\nare taken notice of, and, as it were, registered in the memory, it is\\nattention: when the mind with great earnestness, and of choice,\\nfixes its view on any idea, considers it on all sides, and will not be\\ncalled off by the ordinary solicitation of other ideas, it is that we\\ncall “intention,” or “study.” (1689, II, 19\\n§1 emphasis added)\\n\",\n \"\\nIn addition to providing these quick theories of\\n‘reverie’, ‘attention’ and ‘intention or\\nstudy’, the very same sentence of Locke’s Essay\\nprovides theories of ‘remembrance’,\\n‘recollection’, ‘contemplation’,\\n‘sleep’, ‘dreaming’, and\\n‘ecstasy’. It is significant that Locke’s account of\\nattention is given so briefly, and that it goes by as part of a crowd\\nof theories of these various other mental phenomena. Locke is not here\\nengaging in an uncharacteristically slapdash piece of rapid-fire\\ntheorizing. His intention in going through this catalogue is to\\nestablish that these are topics for which no new substantive theory is\\nneeded. These are, in Locke’s theory, simply ‘modes of\\nthinking’: ‘reverie’, ‘study’ etc. are\\nnot names for independent phenomena, existing in their own right.\\nInstead they are the various names that thinking is given when it\\ntakes place in various ways.\",\n \"\\nOne consequence of Locke’s treatment of attention as a mode of\\nthinking is that, once we have a theory of thinking before us, we need\\nno further theory to account for the possibility of attention,\\ncontemplation, study, etc. (Just as, to use the classic example of\\n‘modes’, we need no substantive independent theory, once\\nwe have a theory of walking, to explain the possibility of limping,\\npacing or ambling.) We need to say something in giving an\\nanalysis of the nature of modes, but—once the\\nthing-to-be-modified has been accounted for—our analysis can\\nsimply say something brief, along the lines indicated by Locke. We do\\nnot need to give a theory that postulates any substances or processes\\nspecific to the explanation of attention.\",\n \"\\nLocke’s modal view of attention has the consequence that no very\\nsubstantive theory of attention is needed once our theory of thinking\\nis in place. It also entails, and for the same reason, that attention\\ncannot figure in the explanation of how thinking itself is possible\\n(for any explanation in which it did figure would be analogous to an\\nexplanation of walking that takes strolling to already be possible; it\\nwould get its explanatory priorities backwards).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.3 Locke: Attention as a Mode of Thought\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nLocke viewed attention as an explanatorily slight phenomenon—a\\nmode of thought that is not in need of much explanation, nor capable\\nof providing much. Theories of attention moved away from that view\\nover the course of the eighteenth century. Attention was increasingly\\ntreated as a phenomenon with explanatory work to do, and so as a\\nphenomenon for which a substantive independent theory needed to be\\ngiven. The attempt to provide such a theory got properly underway in\\n1738, when Christian Wolff’s textbook on psychology was the\\nfirst to devote a whole chapter to the topic of attention (see\\nHatfield, 1995, for an excellent discussion).\",\n \"\\nDuring this period the explanatory remit for theories of attention\\nbroadened in two directions. The first move was away from the idea\\nthat attention acts on already-received ideas and towards the idea\\nthat attention is involved in the initial reception of those ideas.\\nLocke had characterized attention as the registration of\\nalready-received ideas into memory. But by 1769, when Henry Home Kames\\nadded the appendix of ‘Terms Defined or Explained’ to his\\nElements of Criticism, attention’s role as a regulator\\nof cognitive input was regarded as definitive of it:\",\n \"\\nAttention is that state of mind which prepares one to receive\\nimpressions. According to the degree of attention objects make a\\nstrong or weak impression. Attention is requisite even to the simple\\nact of seeing. (1769, 18)\\n\",\n \"\\nAs well as beginning to assign to attention a role in the explanation\\nof the reception of ideas, eighteenth century theories also moved\\ntowards including a role for attention in the production of\\nbehaviour. This is particularly clear in Dugald\\nStewart’s 1792 Elements of the Philosophy of the Human\\nMind. Stewart retains Locke’s view that attention has an\\nessential role to play in determining which things get stored in\\nmemory. He adds to that view the claim that attention has a role in\\ndetermining which particular memories get recalled, writing that\\n“Some attention [is] necessary for any act of memory\\nwhatever.” (1792, 53). Stewart also claims that attention has a\\nrole in the explanation of the development and deployment of at least\\nsome skilled behaviours. The example that Stewart gives here is that\\nof “the dexterity of jugglers” which, he says,\\n“merits a greater degree of attention from philosophers than it\\nhas yet attracted” (62).\",\n \"\\nIn the century between Locke’s Essay and\\nStewart’s Elements, then, attention ceases to be seen\\nmerely as a certain mode of idea-handling, and comes to be seen as a\\nphenomenon in need of its own explanation, and with a role to play in\\nthe explanation of perception, in the explanation of skilled action,\\nand in the explanation of memory (both in its storage and in its\\nrecall).\",\n \"\\nIn the century after Stewart’s Elements the diversity\\namong the phenomena that attention was expected to explain continued\\nto grow, and it continued to include phenomena from across the\\npsychological spectrum from perception, to thought, to action. By the\\nend of the nineteenth century, in what was a crucial period in the\\ndevelopment of scientific psychology, there were some psychologists,\\nsuch as E.B. Titchener, who took the role of attention in perception\\nand in ‘sensory clearness’ to be its most essential\\nfeature (see Titchener, 1908, 1910); others, such as Alexander Bain,\\nwho thought that the essential feature of attention was its role in\\naction, (Bain, 1888); and a third group, of whom G.F. Stout was the\\nmost prominent example, who argued that the primary job for a theory\\nof attention was to explain attention’s role in reflective\\nthought (see Stout, 1891).\",\n \"\\nAs a result of this diversity in their conceptions of\\nattention’s explanatory remit (and as a result of the lack of\\nany established methodology for empirical psychology) the debates\\nbetween exponents of these various psychological theories of attention\\ngot themselves into what was acknowledged to be a ‘chaotic\\nstate’ (Pillsbury, 1906).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.4 The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Attention in Perception, in Action and in Reflective Thought\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe diversity of explanatory roles assigned to attention in the\\neighteenth and nineteenth centuries meant that theorizing about\\nattention at the end of the nineteenth century was in a chaotic state.\\nThe ambition for theorists of attention writing at the end of the\\nnineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries was to get\\nthis chaos into order. The theories of attention proposed in this\\nperiod therefore tended to take the form of attempts to reveal\\nattention as something less mysterious and less complex than earlier\\nwriters had supposed. This ambition to give a ‘nothing\\nbut…’ reduction of attention can be seen in the most\\ninfluential work from this period: William James’ The\\nPrinciples of Psychology (1890).\",\n \"\\nOne aspect of James’ approach is to play down the more complex\\nperceptual aspects of attention. His chapter on attention includes a\\ndiscussion of experiments into what we now call\\n‘subitizing’—that is, into the ability to perceive\\nthe cardinality of small stimulus sets without needing to count their\\nmembers—but James writes of these experiments that it “is\\nobvious that such observations decide nothing at all about our\\nattention, properly so called” (407).\",\n \"\\nAlthough James plays down attention’s role in complex perceptual\\nphenomena, he does assign attention to an important explanatory role\\nin the production of behaviour. He claims, for example, that\\n‘Volition is nothing but attention’ (424). But when James\\nmakes such claims it is as part of a general project that seeks always\\nto be deflationary where possible. When James associates attention\\nwith volition it is as a way of suggesting how volition could be given\\na deflationary treatment, not as a way of inflating attention’s\\nexplanatory role.\",\n \"\\nThis deflationary approach to attention’s explanatory remit\\nmeans that, when it comes to giving an account of the ‘intimate\\nnature of the attention process’, James can identify two fairly\\nsimple processes which, he claims, ‘probably coexist in all our\\nconcrete attentive acts’. and which ‘possibly form in\\ncombination a complete reply’ to the question of\\nattention’s ‘intimate nature’ (1890, 411). The\\nprocesses that James identifies are:\",\n \"\\nThe first of these processes is reasonably familiar. By ‘the\\naccommodation or adjustment of the sensory organs’ James means\\nsuch processes as pointing one’s ears in the right direction,\\nbringing one’s eyes into focus, taking a sniff, and so on.\",\n \"\\nJames’s talk of ‘anticipatory preparation’ of\\n‘ideation centres’ is a little less clear, but the point\\nis again a quite straightforward one. What James has in mind here is\\nsimply imagination. His claim is that when attention does not\\ninvolve adjusting one’s sense organs it consists in imagining\\nthe things or actions that one is attending to, or looking for.\",\n \"\\nJames illustrates his claim about attention’s link to\\nimagination with an example from Hermann von Helmholtz. This example\\nis an important one for James, and it illustrates some important\\nfeatures of attention that subsequent theorists have tended to\\nneglect. The example involves the variety of attention that needs to\\nbe paid when trying to discern the overtones in a note played on the\\npiano. Helmholtz asks us to sit at the piano and to play a G, then,\\nimagining the sound that we have just heard, to play a low C. Doing\\nthis, it is claimed, enables one to hear that G is discernibly there\\n(as the third overtone) within the sound produced when C is played.\\nHelmholtz’s claim, which James endorses, is that the kind of\\nattention that is paid when listening for an overtone is constituted\\nby the imagining of what that overtone would sound like. James goes\\nonto claim that there is a wide range of cases in which paying\\nattention to what one is doing consists in this same sort of\\npreparatory imaginative engagement.\",\n \"\\nHere, as in his more frequently discussed treatment of emotion, it is\\ndistinctive of James’s approach that he tries to account for a\\nlarge-scale personal-level psychological phenomenon in a realist but\\nsomewhat revisionary way, so as to be able to give his account using\\nrelatively simple and unmysterious explanatory resources. An\\nalternative deflationary approach—one which James explicitly\\ncontrasted with his own—is the approach taken in 1886 by F.H.\\nBradley.\",\n \"\\nBradley advocated a view according to which attention is not the sort\\nof phenomenon for which an independent and substantive theory can or\\nneeds to be given. Bradley does not develop this point in much detail,\\nand it is a point on which he would later change his mind, but in his\\n1886 article, ‘Is there a special activity of attention?’,\\nBradley was concerned with arguing that a project such as\\nJames’s one of identifying particular processes as the\\nattention-constituting ones was wrongheaded. He claims that no\\nparticular attention-processes can be identified since:\",\n \"\\nAny function whatever of the body or the mind will be active attention\\nif it is prompted by an interest and brings about the result of our\\nengrossment with its product. There is no primary act of attention,\\nthere is no specific act of attention, there is no one kind of act of\\nattention at all. (1886, 316)\\n\",\n \"\\nAlthough Bradley does not use the Lockean vocabulary (and although\\nJames himself does not seem to have taken Bradley in this way),\\nBradley’s position here has much in common with Locke’s\\nclaim that attention is a mode. Bradley’s position,\\nlike Locke’s, is that what is essential to an instance of\\nattention is not the matter of which processes are taking\\nplace, but the facts about how the things that happen happen.\\nHe therefore takes the ennumeration of processes to be the wrong form\\nfor a theory of attention to take.\",\n \"\\nOther writers who were contemporary with Bradley and James took\\ndifferent approaches to the project of giving a deflationary\\nexplanation of attention. In Théodule Ribot’s 1888 book\\nLa Psychologie De L’Attention the attempt to explain\\nattention took an approach that we would now classify as behaviourist.\\nIn 1888 behaviourism had not yet been established as a general\\napproach in philosophical or psychological theories of the mind, but\\nRibot’s suggestion that attention’s behavioural\\nmanifestations are essential to it is nonetheless recognizable as an\\nearly articulation of behaviourism in a strong form:\",\n \"\\nAre the movements of the face, the body, and the limbs and the\\nrespiratory modifications that accompany attention, simple effects,\\noutward marks, as is usually supposed? Or are they, on the contrary,\\nthe necessary conditions, the constituent elements, the\\nindispensable factors of attention? Without hesitation we accept\\nthe second thesis. (1888, 19)\\n\",\n \"\\nA somewhat more moderate version of this behaviour-centred approach\\nwas taken by Alexander Bain, who identified attention, not with its\\nbehavioural manifestations themselves, but with truncated versions of\\nthe motor-control processes that typically bring about those\\nbehavioural manifestations: processes ‘stopping short of the\\nactual movement performed by the organ’ (Bain, 1888, 371). Much\\nas Ribot’s view can be seen as an early version of behaviourism,\\nBain’s view can be seen as an early version of the motor-based\\napproaches to attention that can be found in the literature of the\\npresent century (see\\n Section 2.8\\n below).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.5 William James and His Contemporaries: Deflationary Theories\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe variety among the deflationary explanatory approaches that\\ncharacterized the theories of attention offered in the nineteenth\\ncentury gave way in the early twentieth century to a period in which\\none such explanatory tactic was dominant: the tactic of behaviourism.\\nBehaviourists tended to neglect attention, but did not ignore it\\nentirely. John Dashiell’s 1928 Fundamentals of Objective\\nPsychology, for example, is a behaviourist work that attempts to\\naccount for attention “as a form of posturing” (Ch. 10,\\n§3). The project of identifying a behaviour with which to explain\\nattention was, nonetheless, an understandably unpopular one. As\\nGilbert Ryle notes, it is not only attention, but also ‘heed\\nconcepts’ more generally, that resist simple behaviourist\\nanalysis:\",\n \"\\n[W]hen a man is described as driving carefully, whistling with\\nconcentration or eating absent-mindedly the special character of his\\nactivity seem to elude the observer, the camera and the Dictaphone.\\nPerhaps knitted brows, taciturnity and fixed gaze may be evidence of\\nintentness; but these can be simulated, or they can be purely\\nhabitual. (1949, 133)\\n\",\n \"\\nIn the middle of the twentieth century behaviourism’s dominance\\nwaned, cognitive psychology established itself, and a new theoretical\\napproach to the explanation of attention was developed. These three\\ndevelopments were intimately related to one another. Instrumental to\\nall three was the publication in 1958 of Donald Broadbent’s\\nPerception and Communication.\",\n \"\\nThe year prior to Perception and Communication’s\\npublication had seen B.F. Skinner’s attempt, in Verbal\\nBehaviour (1957), to apply a behaviourist explanatory approach to\\ndistinctively human aspects of cognition. Skinner’s project in\\nthat book failed, and Noam Chomsky’s famous 1959 review of the\\nbook made its failure conspicuous. Chomsky’s own work in\\nSyntactic Structures (1957) went some way towards\\nestablishing the new cognitive paradigm for psychology by showing how\\ninternal processing could be theorized by describing transformations\\non representations in abstraction from the question of how those\\nrepresentations were realized. Donald Broadbent’s distinctive\\ncontribution to the overthrow of behaviourism was to show how the move\\nfrom behavioural data to the postulation of a particular cognitive\\narchitecture could be disciplined by the then-new strategy of\\nimporting into psychology the intellectual resources used in thinking\\nabout information technology. The year in which Broadbent’s book\\nwas published was an important year for the development of such\\ntechnologies, being the year in which (inter alia) the integrated\\ncircuit chip was invented (see Mole, 2012). It was also the year in\\nwhich Subscriber Trunk Dialling was introduced to UK telephone\\nexchanges. The technology of the telephone exchange was what most\\nnaturally suggested itself as a metaphor for attention at the time\\nwhen Broadbent was writing.\",\n \"\\nTowards the end of Perception and Communication Broadbent\\nexplicitly sets out the claim that the theoretical resources developed\\nin thinking about the transmission of information through telephone\\nexchanges provide the basis for an alternative to behaviourism. He\\nalso attacks the positivistic methodological principles that had given\\nmany behaviourists their motivation. But the central lesson from\\nBroadbent’s work, so far as the theory of attention goes, is a\\nlesson that he takes to be independent of this attack on behaviourism\\nand its positivist foundations. At an early stage in Perception\\nand Communication he remarks that:\",\n \"\\nPerhaps the point of permanent value which will remain in psychology\\nif the fashion for communication theory wanes, will be the emphasis on\\nproblems of capacity. […] The fact that any given channel has a\\nlimit is a matter of central importance to communication engineers,\\nand it is correspondingly forced on the attention of psychologists who\\nuse their terms. (1958, 5)\\n\",\n \"\\nThis introduction of the notion of capacity limitations into\\ndiscussions of perception and attention was, as Broadbent here\\npredicted, hugely and permanently influential.\",\n \"\\nBroadbent claimed not only that the human brain is subject to capacity\\nlimitations of the sort that communications engineers had learnt to\\ntheorize, he claimed also that these limitations are clustered so that\\nthere is a single bottleneck in capacity that is especially critical\\nto the brain’s handling of perceptual information. This\\nbottleneck was said to occur at the junction of two systems operating\\nin series, with the first system having a large capacity for\\ninformation processing, and operating automatically on all of the\\nstimuli with which the perceiving subject is presented, while the\\nsecond has a much smaller capacity, and therefore needs to be deployed\\nselectively.\",\n \"\\nThose who followed Broadbent took it that the bottleneck that results\\nfrom the connection of these two systems corresponds to attention in\\nthe sense that, when a representation of a stimulus passes through\\nthat bottleneck, the stimulus ipso facto counts as one to\\nwhich attention has been paid.\",\n \"\\nBroadbent himself was cautious about presenting his claims about\\ncapacity-bottlenecks as a theory of attention. The word\\n‘attention’ occurs rarely in Perception and\\nCommunication. Broadbent’s later book, Decision and\\nStress (1971), does describe his earlier experiments as\\n‘studies of attention’, but here too Broadbent prefers to\\ntalk about ‘selective perception’ (chapter V) or\\n‘vigilance’ (chapters II and III). In an article from\\n1982, entitled, ‘Task Combination and Selective Intake of\\nInformation’, he admits that: “The topic of this paper is\\none that is often termed ‘attention’, and it may seem\\nunduly artificial to have given it a more cumbrous title.” But\\nhe goes on to reassert his qualms:\",\n \"\\n‘Attention’ is a word in ordinary language, that can\\nreasonably be used as a label for experiments in a particular area.\\nYet it has also been used as a theoretical concept, a mysterious asset\\nor energy which is sometimes attached to human functions and sometimes\\nnot. This use of attention […] is not very helpful, and\\navoiding the word in the title is a step towards clarity. (1982, 253)\\n\",\n \"\\nWhen Broadbent does use the word ‘attention’ it is mostly\\nin discussions of attention shifting. His view, at least in\\nhis early work, seems to have been that where there is a bottleneck in\\nour information processing capacity there need to be additional\\nmechanisms that control how our limited capacity resources will be\\ndeployed. These additional mechanisms of bottleneck-control\\nseem to have been what Broadbent thought of as the attention\\nmechanisms. He never took himself to have given a theory of them, only\\nto have given a theory of where they would be needed. Nor were these\\nmechanisms the topic that was at issue in the debates about attention\\nthat Broadbent prompted. Those debates were concerned with questions\\nabout the nature and location of the bottleneck itself, not about the\\nfactors that determine what, on any particular occasion, gets to pass\\nthrough it.\",\n \"\\nIn the decades following Broadbent a great many psychologists devoted\\nthemselves to the task of locating the attentional bottleneck that he\\nhad postulated. Almost all psychologists writing at this time were\\nguided to some degree by Broadbent’s\\ntwo-serial-systems-and-a-bottleneck picture of perceptual processing.\\nThe question of whether a given task is attention demanding was\\ntherefore understood to depend on the question of whether the\\nperformance of that task requires the engagement of the small-capacity\\nsystem that comes after the bottleneck of attention. Research\\ninto the attention-related demands of particular tasks therefore\\nbecame another route by which to approach the issue of where the\\nattentional bottleneck is located. Broadbent’s\\ntwo-systems-and-a-bottleneck model was frequently questioned, but for\\nmost research into attention in the second half of the twentieth\\ncentury it was very much the orthodox view. This has now changed. In\\npsychology’s current paradigm, only a few aspects of\\nBroadbent’s picture remain orthodox.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.6 The Twentieth Century: Locating Attention at a Bottleneck in Information Processing\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Theories of Attention\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nPsychologists attempting to produce a theory of attention in the\\nnineteen sixties and seventies were highly influenced by Donald\\nBroadbent’s picture of attention as corresponding to a\\nbottleneck in information processing capacity resulting from the\\nconnection of two separate perceptual processing systems. The first\\npiece of business for these psychologists was to locate this\\nattentional bottleneck, by determining which sorts of processing are\\ndone by the large capacity, pre-bottleneck system, and which by the\\nsmall capacity, post-bottleneck system. Debates between these\\npsychologists gave rise to various theories in which the selectivity\\nof attention was characterized with a claim about the location of this\\nbottleneck.\",\n \"\\nBroadbent’s own account of the distribution of processing\\nbetween the pre-attentional system and the post-attentional system\\ndefines the ‘early selection’ theory of attention. He\\nclaimed that only very simple properties are detected by the large\\ncapacity system, and that any semantic properties, or any properties\\nrelating to the particular identity of a stimulus, are\\ndetected only after representations of the stimulus have passed\\nthrough the attentional-bottleneck and into the smaller capacity\\nsystem.\",\n \"\\nThe personal-level consequences of this early selection theory are\\nthat we can recognize what things are and what they mean only if we\\nare paying attention to them, but can detect the simple physical\\nproperties of things even when paying no attention to them. The theory\\ncan be thought of as a communication-theoretic rendering of two\\nintuitive ideas, which Broadbent’s own research had put on an\\nempirically sound footing. The first is that one has no immediate\\ncontrol over one’s awareness of simple features of one’s\\nenvironment, such as the fact that there are people talking in the\\nnext room. Whatever one is paying attention to, one will continue to\\nhear some chatter to be going on, if any is. The second idea is that\\nthe details of things—such as the semantic content of that\\nchatter—can be detected only for the one or two things to which\\none is paying attention: If one wants to know what the chatter is\\nabout, one has to listen, and this involves disengaging one’s\\nattention from other things that might be happening.\",\n \"\\nThe early selection theory also entails, more problematically, that\\nthe semantic properties of an unattended item must remain\\nunrepresented in the nervous system, and so entails that those\\nproperties can have no psychological effects. According to this view\\nthe semantic features of unattended items cannot explain why those\\nitems attract attention to themselves, on the occasions when they do.\\nIt was to this aspect of the theory that its opponents most frequently\\nobjected.\",\n \"\\nThe chief rivals of Broadbent’s early selection theory were the\\n‘late selectionists’, who claimed that all (or almost all)\\nperceivable properties are detected automatically, by a large capacity\\nsystem that operates on all of the stimuli with which the perceiving\\nsubject is presented. According to this late selection theory of\\nattention the consequences of passing through the bottleneck of\\nattention into the post-attentive small capacity system are only (1)\\nthat the subject comes to be conscious of the contents that the large\\ncapacity system has already succeeded in encoding and (2) that those\\ncontents come to be stored in working memory (Deutsch and Deutsch,\\n1963).\",\n \"\\nAlthough it was originally proposed against the background of\\nBroadbent’s now superseded theoretical framework, it would be\\ntoo quick to dismiss the late selection theory as an obsolete one. The\\ntheory has much in common with some plausible and empirically\\nwell-supported views found in the more recent literature. Jesse Prinz,\\nfor example, shares the late selectionists’ view that\\nattention’s primary role is not in managing limited perceptual\\nprocessing resources, but in projecting already-processed\\nrepresentations to working memory. Prinz’s view, varying a theme\\nfrom the work of Stanislas Dehaene, is that this projection to working\\nmemory is what makes it the case that the content represented comes to\\nconscious awareness. (Prinz, 2005, 2012, Dehaene et al.,\\n2006).\",\n \"\\nIt should be noted that Prinz’s main philosophical business is\\nwith the explanation of consciousness. Objections have been\\nraised as to whether the process of projection to working\\nmemory—which Prinz refers to as\\n‘attention’—can adequately account for the various\\nthings that attention does (Wu, 2014, §6.3.2). If it cannot then\\nPrinz is willing to allow that this process is not the sole referent\\nof the English word ‘attention’, writing that ‘other\\nresearchers may choose to define attention differently’, and\\nthat ‘those who disagree with my analysis of attention could\\nsimply drop the term “attention”’ (Prinz, 2012, p.\\n95).\",\n \"\\nThe central component of the late-selection theory, as it was\\noriginally understood, was that the effect of withdrawing attention\\nfrom a stimulus is to make it the case that that stimulus is processed\\nwithout the subject’s awareness, rather than not being processed\\nat all. This component of the view has, to some extent, been\\nvindicated. The claim that unattended stimuli are subjected to some\\nprocessing of which the subject lacks awareness, including some\\nprocessing of those stimuli’s semantic properties, is now\\nuncontroversial. Since we know that the semantic properties of\\nunattended stimuli can, for example, produce negative priming effects\\n(Tipper and Driver, 1988), we know that unattended stimuli are\\nprocessed in a way that allows at least some of their semantic\\nproperties to be encoded. The semantic properties of unattended items\\nhave such effects despite the fact that experimental participants are\\ntypically unaware of what those properties are.\",\n \"\\nThe traditional late selection theory is right in taking it that\\ninattention can lead to properties being encoded without our\\nawareness, rather than not being encoded at all, but that theory is\\nalso committed to the claim that attention’s only\\neffects are in determining what gets remembered and experienced, so\\nthat the direction of attention has no effects on the initial\\nperceptual processing to which stimuli are subjected. These latter\\nclaims we now know to be false. An important experiment by\\nO’Connor et al. used fMRI to compare neural activity in\\nparticipants who, in various task conditions, were presented with high\\nand low contrast checkerboard patterns in one or other half of their\\nvisual field (O’Connor et al. 2002). In some conditions\\nthese participants had to perform a task involving these checkerboard\\npatterns. In other conditions the patterns were irrelevant to the task\\nthat the participants were performing (and in a third condition no\\npattern was presented, but the participants were attending to the\\nscreen in anticipation of a pattern that was about to be presented).\\nThe results of these comparisons reveal that even in the first parts\\nof the neural circuitry through which information from the retina\\npasses, on its way to the visual cortex—even, that is, in the\\nLateral Geniculate Nuclei—there is a difference in the baserate\\nof neural activity, and a difference in the response that stimuli\\nelicit, depending on what the participant is attending to. These\\nfindings indicate that attention’s effects are not limited to\\ncortical loci that are upstream from a late process of attentional\\nselection. They therefore refute any version of the late-selection\\ntheory according to which the selectivity of attention is entirely a\\n‘late process’, occurring only after initial perceptual\\nencoding is complete.\",\n \"\\nThe findings of O’Connor et al. create fewer problems\\nfor some recent theories in which elements of the late selection view\\nare retained. Nilli Lavie and her collaborators have proposed one such\\ntheory, which attempts to combine some aspects of the late selection\\ntheory with some aspects of its early selectionist rival. According to\\nLavie’s ‘load theory’, attention does\\ncorrespond to a capacity bottleneck—much as Broadbent\\nthought—but the differing demands of the task that is at hand\\nlead to differences as to where that bottleneck restricts the\\nprocessing of a stimulus: in conditions where the processing demands\\nof perception are high the available resources will soon be exhausted,\\nand the bottleneck will operate at an early stage, with the result\\nthat unattended stimuli will be processed rather little; in conditions\\nwhere the processing load of perception is lower the bottleneck will\\noperate at a later stage, with the result that unattended stimuli will\\nbe processed rather more (Lavie & Tsal, 1994, Lavie et\\nal. 2004). This load theory predicts that peripheral stimuli will\\nelicit less neural activation, and will be less distracting, when the\\nsubject’s task is a perceptually demanding one. These\\npredictions have been borne out by behavioural and neurological\\nobservations (Lavie, 2005). The theory’s theoretical apparatus\\nhas also provided a useful framework for the philosophical treatment\\nof attention’s relationship to consciousness (Hine, 2010). Many\\npsychologists nonetheless continue to be wary of Lavie’s\\nrehabilitation of elements from the Broadbentian framework.\",\n \"\\nOther theories have been proposed that also retain the Broadbentian\\nidea that attentional selectivity is the result of capacity\\nlimitations, while retreating further than Lavie from the picture of\\nattention that Broadbent introduced. These theories reject the terms\\nof the debate between early and late selectionists because they reject\\nthe idea that the capacity limitations responsible for attention are\\nclustered into a single bottleneck. In some cases this is because the\\nselectivity of attention is taken to be the result of\\nmultiple bottlenecks in processing capacity (see, e.g.,\\nJohnston and McCann, 2006). In other cases it is because these\\ntheorists see capacity limitations as occurring throughout the\\nprocessing stream, and not as clustered into bottlenecks at all (see\\nDriver, 2001, for a suggestion along these lines, and Allport, Antonis\\n& Reynolds, 1972, for an earlier indication of it).\",\n \"\\nThe early and late selection theories dominated discussions of\\nattention in the decades following Broadbent’s seminal work, but\\nby the beginning of the nineteen nineties it had become clear that the\\ndebate between advocates of the early selection theory and advocates\\nof the late selection theory had become fruitless. Those debates were\\ntherefore thought to have been predicated on some sort of mistaken\\nassumption. Several different diagnoses have been proposed as to what\\nthat mistaken assumption might have been. Little consensus has been\\nreached as to which of these diagnoses is correct, with the result\\nthat some theorists—such as those discussed at the end of the\\npreceding section—retain ideas from the early and late selection\\ntheories, while others regard this as a wrong-headedly retrograde\\nstep.\",\n \"\\nOne diagnosis is that the early/late debate was fruitless because the\\nterms ‘early’ and ‘late’ are themselves\\nproblematic. If perceptual processing occurs in a parallel processing\\narchitecture without any prevailing direction of information flow then\\nthere can be no sense in labeling one part of that architecture as\\nearlier or later than any other. If the attentional bottleneck is\\nlocated in a system that has such an architecture then it may be this\\nthat explains why there was no satisfactory answer to the question of\\nwhether attentional selection is early or late. It seems to have been\\nwith this thought in mind that some writers have suggested that the\\nfailure of the debate between early and late selection theories was\\nowing to the fact that that debate requires us to make an assumption\\nabout the linearity of the processing stream in which\\nselection occurs (see, e.g., Prinz and Hommel, 2002, 3). This is a\\nthought that needs to be treated with care.\",\n \"\\nThe claim that it was a problematic assumption about linearity that\\nled the early/late selection debate into fruitlessness received its\\nmost influential treatment in an important paper by Alan Allport\\n(Allport, 1992). Allport identifies several problematic assumptions\\nthat the early/late selection debate requires. His characterization of\\nwhat he takes to be the problematic assumption about linearity is as\\nthe claim that:\",\n \"\\n[T]he processing of nonsemantic attributes (i.e. the processing of\\nattributes other than symbolic or categorical identity) occurs earlier\\nin a logical/causal sequence of operations than does any semantic or\\ncategorical processing. (1992, 187)\\n\",\n \"\\nDespite Allport’s qualms, this assumption about linearity does not\\nseem, on the face of it, to be a problematic one. There is nothing to\\nbe objected to in the claim that the situations in which we encounter\\na written word and come to be in a position to know what that word\\nmeans are typically situations in which our sensory transducers\\nrespond firstly to simple nonsemantic properties of the word. In order\\nfor creatures like us to detect the semantic properties of written\\nwords, it is necessary for our information processing systems\\nto first encode some information about the simple spatial properties\\nof the lines on the page. This information does then get passed on to\\nsubsequent processing stages in which more complex properties,\\nconcerned with semantics and stimulus identity, get processed. If this\\nsort of linearity is what Allport was taking issue with then it seems\\nhe must have been mistaken, since there is nothing problematic about\\nthe idea that there is this much linearity in the processing to which\\nstimuli are subjected.\",\n \"\\nNor is there anything unscientific about that idea. It continues to be\\nentirely normal for neuroscientists to refer to the processing that\\ntakes place in occipital brain areas as ‘early’ and the\\nprocessing in frontal areas as ‘late’. Such thinking can\\nbe seen in a much-cited review of neuroimaging work on attention, in\\nwhich Sabine Kastner and Leslie Ungerleider speak of:\",\n \"\\n… an increase in the complexity of processing as activity\\nproceeds anteriorly through the ventral stream into the temporal lobe.\\nWhereas posterior regions in cortex are preferentially activated\\nduring the processing of object attributes, such as colors or\\nscrambled objects and faces, more anterior regions are activated\\nselectively during the processing of intact objects and faces. (2000,\\n319)\\n\",\n \"\\nThe orthodox view, expressed here by Kastner and Ungerleider, is\\nsubject to differing interpretations. Those who believe that\\nperception and cognition are best thought of as arising from a\\nhierarchical Bayesian process might reject the idea that information\\nprogresses through the nervous system in a bottom-up fashion, with the\\ndetection of simple properties happening at an early stage, and the\\ndetection of more complex properties happening at a later one. Current\\nadvocates of such hierarchical Bayesian theories place great emphasis\\non the idea that the prior hypotheses required by a Bayesian inference\\ncan be generated in a top-down fashion, and can then be tested against\\nincoming signals which contain information only about the ways in\\nwhich the predictions generated by those hypotheses are in error\\n(Hohwy, 2013). Such theories break from the tradition of thinking\\nabout the information flow in the brain as being largely one-way, but\\nthey retain the idea that information is organized into a structure\\nwith earlier and later stages, with these stages now being understood\\nas corresponding to the more or less abstract layers in an\\nhierarchically organized Bayesian inference. They therefore retain the\\nidea that there are earlier and later stages in the processing of any\\ngiven stimulus, while rejecting the idea that there is one predominant\\ndirection of information flow in the brain. Since this much linearity\\nremains in our current thinking about the architecture of perceptual\\nprocessing, we cannot coherently blame an assumption about this much\\nlinearity for the troubles that led to the fruitlessness of the debate\\nbetween early and late selectionists.\",\n \"\\nThat is not to say that the early/late selection debate was entirely\\nfree of problematic assumptions relating to linearity—only that\\npsychology has not yet settled upon a satisfactory account of the way\\nin which assumptions about linearity led the early/late debate into\\ntrouble.\",\n \"\\nA reason why assumptions about linearity may have been problematic is\\nthat when, following Broadbent, we think about hierarchical perceptual\\nprocessing while bearing in mind the communications\\nengineer’s concerns about capacity limitations, it then\\nbecomes natural to make some additional assumptions about the way in\\nwhich this hierarchically organized architecture supports\\npersonal-level cognition. The early/late debate’s problems are\\nmore plausibly blamed on these additional assumptions, rather than on\\nany assumptions about linear or hierarchical organization per\\nse. Given that some physical properties of a thing must first be\\nrepresented in order for a person to become aware of that thing’s\\nsemantic properties, it is natural for the communications engineer to\\nsuppose that no further representation of these physical properties\\nneeds to be generated in order for that person to also be aware of\\nthose properties, so that a person who is experiencing the semantic\\nproperties of a stimulus must have been through a process that already\\ngives them an experience of that stimulus’s simple spatial\\nproperties. This additional supposition would be a mistake, since the\\nbrain represents the physical properties of stimuli in multiple,\\nparallel, somewhat overlapping systems, only some of which put the\\nsubject in a position to think about the properties that they\\nrepresent. In order to get to a representation of the meaning of the\\nword on a page, the subject’s brain must represent that\\nword’s physical properties, but it turns out that the\\nbrain’s representation of these physical properties need not put\\nthis perceiver in a position to form thoughts about them. Their access\\nto these properties might require that the properties be represented\\nall over again, in some parallel system. From the point of view\\nintroduced by Broadbent – that of a communications engineer who\\nis concerned with the management of limited capacity channels –\\nthis seems strangely profligate. At least some of the problems with\\nthe early/late debate can be attributed to this: not an assumption\\nabout linearity per se, but an assumption about the linearity\\nof the processes that support personal level thinking.\",\n \"\\nOnce the problematic assumption about linearity has been made precise,\\nhowever, we see that it cannot be satisfactory to credit the entire\\ncollapse of the early/late debate to this assumption. The falsity of\\nthe assumption about the linearity of the processes supporting\\npersonal-level awareness does not undermine the very idea that the\\nearly/late debate is a meaningful one. The problems that it creates\\nare largely methodological. The falsity of that assumption means that\\none cannot make an inference from a lack of personal-level awareness\\nof some content to the absence of representations encoding that\\ncontent. It also means that Broadbent was wrong to suppose that the\\npsychological effects of unattended stimuli can only depend on those\\nproperties of which the inattentive perceiver can be aware. But these\\nare methodological problems. They do not, by themselves, imply that\\nthe debate between the early selection theory and the late selection\\ntheory must have been misconceived.\",\n \"\\nThe situation that we find ourselves in is, then, a somewhat unhappy\\none. Everybody agrees that there was something misconceived about the\\ndebate between the two theories of attention that dominated the\\ndecades following Broadbent’s reintroduction of attention to the\\npsychological agenda. The ongoing influence of Broadbent’s\\nselection theory, and of the early/late debate, has often been noted,\\nand sometimes lamented (Driver, 2001, 56). But nobody is clear about\\nwhether the elements of those theories that are retained in current\\ntheorizing are problematic ones.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.1 Capacity-Limitation Theories\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIn the early nineteen eighties, Anne Treisman and her collaborators\\nidentified the existence of ‘the binding problem’, and\\ndescribed a process that could solve that problem. Treisman proposed\\nthat attention be identified with this process. This proposal is known\\nas the Feature Integration Theory of attention. It has been hugely\\ninfluential, not only as a theory of attention, but also as the\\nframework that introduced and regimented research into the\\nindependently interesting question of the binding problem (for more on\\nwhich, see\\n ‘The Unity of Consciousness’\\n esp.\\n §2.2).\",\n \"\\nTreisman describes the way in which the binding problem arises like\\nthis:\",\n \"\\nSensory information arrives in parallel as a variety of heterogeneous\\nhints, (shapes, colors, motions, smells and sounds) encoded in partly\\nmodular systems. Typically many objects are present at once. The\\nresult is an urgent case of what has been labelled the binding\\nproblem. We must collect the hints, bind them into the right spatial\\nand temporal bundles, and then interpret them to specify their real\\nworld origins. (2003, 97)\\n\",\n \"\\nWe can illustrate this problem with an example. Suppose we have a\\nsubject who is presented, at one time, with a red tomato and a green\\napple. This visual input is, Treisman says, initially broken up for\\nspecialized distributed processing—so that, for example, one\\npart of the brain is responsible for detecting the shapes of things, a\\ndifferent part is responsible for detecting their colours. The\\nshape-detecting centres represent the fact that a tomato-shaped thing\\nis present, and they represent the fact that an apple-shaped thing is\\npresent. The colour-detecting centres represent the fact that a red\\nthing is present, and the fact that a green thing is present. But the\\nsubject, if he is a normal human, knows more than is implied by these\\nfour facts: He knows that the red thing is the tomato-shaped thing and\\nthe green thing the apple-shaped thing. To know this he must have a\\nway of ‘binding’ the representation of red in the colour\\ncentre with the representation of the tomato shape in the shape\\ncentre. The binding problem is the problem of knowing how to put\\ntogether the properties that have been detected in separate\\nspecialized detection centres.\",\n \"\\nTreisman’s proposed solution exploits the fact that\\nspatial representations are ubiquitous, and the idea that\\nthere is only one thing to be seen in any one place at any one time.\\nIf the centre for detecting colours detects red at place one\\nand green at place two, and if the centre for detecting shape\\ndetects a tomato shape at place one and an apple shape at\\nplace two, then, given the principle that there is a maximum of\\none visible object per place per time, the binding problem can be\\nsolved. Treisman therefore proposes that we achieve a correctly bound\\nrepresentation by moving a variously sized ‘window’ from\\none location in the perceptual scene to another. This window blocks\\nout the information from all but a single location, and all the\\nfeatures found at that location can then be ‘bound’ as\\nbeing features of the same object. The area covered by the window\\nwithin which features are bound is taken to correspond to the region\\nto which attention is being paid.\",\n \"\\nThere is more than one way to understand the explanatory import of\\nTreisman’s claim that the window of attention corresponds to the\\nwindow within which features are bound. Treisman’s early work\\npresents that claim as an attempt to identify the processes of\\nattention (by telling us that they are the processes of feature\\nintegration). In her later work the explanation being offered is no\\nlonger simply one in which it is attention that occupies the role of\\nexplanandum and binding processes that occupy the role of explanans.\\nHer later claim is that solving the binding problem is one role for\\nthe kind of selectivity that attention enables.\",\n \"\\nThere is some work in which the Feature Integration Theory has been\\npressed into the service of more ambitious explanatory goals. That\\ntheory plays an important role in John Campbell’s 2002 attempt,\\nin Reference and Consciousness, to use attention to explain\\nhow the reference of demonstrative expressions gets fixed by their\\nproducers, and understood by their consumers (see section\\n 3.2).\\n Treisman herself suggests, albeit tentatively, that descendants of\\nthe Feature Integration Theory may provide part of the explanation for\\n“the bound, unitary, interpreted, personal view of the world of\\nsubjective experience” (Treisman, 2003, 111). She goes on to\\nsuggest, again tentatively, that the sort of explanation that such a\\ntheory provides “should give us all the information there is\\nabout the conditions that create consciousness” (op\\ncit).\",\n \"\\nOpposed to those who think that a theory of feature binding will be a\\nlarge component in our theory of attention, of the unity of\\nconsciousness, or of anything else, are a number of philosophers (and\\na smaller number of psychologists) who deny that feature binding\\ncreates a problem that needs any serious cognitive apparatus for its\\nsolution. Such claims have been made for a variety of reasons. They\\nare generally made as part of large-scale revisionary proposals for\\nthe conceptual framework of cognitive neuroscience. Kevin\\nO’Regan and Alva Noë’s rejection of the binding\\nproblem ‘as, in essence, a pseudo-problem’ (O’Regan\\nand Noë, 2001, 967) comes as part of their general attack on the\\nidea that perception requires the representation of the thing\\nperceived. Vincent Di Lollo has suggested that the assumptions about\\nneural coding that generate the binding problem have been superseded,\\nwith the result that the binding problem is an ill-defined one (Di\\nLollo, 2012). And M.R. Bennett and P.M.S. Hacker, in their book-length\\ncritique of the philosophical foundations of neuroscience, claim that\\nthe notions of representation and information that enjoy currency in\\nneuroscience are subject to various confusions, and that these\\nconfusions lead to it being ‘widespread’ for\\nneuroscientists to make “confused statements of the so-called\\nbinding problem” (Bennett and Hacker, 2003, 14). These debates\\nabout the status of the binding problem (reviewed by Plate, 2007) turn\\non foundational issues for the cognitive sciences generally. They have\\nceased to be specifically concerned with the explanation of\\nattention.\",\n \"\\nEven if these philosophical critics of the binding problem are right\\nto suggest that a perceiver can typically experience several\\nproperties as belonging to a single object without the need for any\\nspecial binding process to integrate the representations of those\\nproperties, it may nonetheless be true that, in some particular cases,\\nattention does play a role in determining the way in which different\\nstreams of sensory information come to be combined. Even in these\\ncircumscribed cases, the question of how this binding-like role for\\nattention should be characterized may raise its own philosophical\\ndifficulties. Several psychologists studying the integration of\\ninformation from across different sensory modalities have found\\nthemselves running into such difficulties, claiming that the role of\\nattention in integrated multisensory perception is\\n‘curious’, and ‘a paradox’, especially in\\ncases that involve the perception of speech (Tiippana, Andersen and\\nSams, 2004; Macaluso et al., 2016). Philosophers who have\\ninterrogated the assumptions leading to the idea there is a general\\nbinding problem have not yet extended their critique to these more\\nspecific cases. A preliminary philosophical examination suggests that\\nthese may be cases in which the appearance of paradox derives from\\ncertain questionable assumptions about the predominantly bottom-up\\nnature of perceptual processing, or from assumptions of a more\\nmetaphysical sort, concerning the localizable way in which\\nattention’s causal influence is exerted (Mole, 2020).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.2 Feature Integration Theory\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe view that the function of attention is the management of\\nlimitations in the brain’s information processing capacity has\\nbeen an orthodox one among psychologists since Donald Broadbent\\nintroduced it in the nineteen fifties, but it has sometimes been\\ncalled into question. The theories of attention proposed by\\nphilosophers have tended not to endorse any straightforward version of\\nthe capacity-limitation view, and there are empirical reasons to think\\nthat the simplest versions of such a view are mistaken. In the\\nnineteen seventies Ulric Neisser and his collaborators carried out a\\nseries of experiments showing that, when appropriately trained, a\\nsubject can perform two attention-involving tasks concurrently,\\nwithout much interference between them (Hirst et al., 1980,\\nNeisser, 1976). Neisser interpreted these experiments as suggesting\\nthat, insofar as there is a bottleneck that attention is needed to\\nmanage, it must often be a bottleneck in behavioural coordination,\\nrather than in information processing capacity. Simple bodily\\nlimitations are what prevent us from looking in two directions at one\\ntime, or from throwing a ball and writing with the same hand.\\nNeisser’s suggestion was that in many cases cognitive processing\\nwas selective, not as a result of limitations in processing capacity,\\nbut only in so far as such bodily limitations required it to be.\",\n \"\\nIn two papers from 1987, authored individually but published in the\\nsame volume, Odmar Neumann and Alan Allport developed a similar idea.\\nWhereas Neisser emphasized the constraints that are imposed on\\ncognition by the need to manage a single body, Neumann and Allport\\nboth emphasized the constraints that are placed on cognition by the\\nneed to maintain a coherent course of goal-directed action. They\\ndescribe their position as a ‘selection-for-action’\\ntheory.\",\n \"\\nIf we think of ‘action’ as here referring to bodily\\nbehaviour then the selection-for-action theory is very similar to\\nNeisser’s view. But Neumann and Allport’s point retains\\nits force if we extend the notion of action to include deliberate\\nmental activities, such as puzzle-solving, for which no bodily\\nlimitations are in play. There is here an “analogy between\\npractical and theoretical and activity”, which was noted in an\\n1891 paper by G. F. Stout:\",\n \"\\nThinking is action directed towards intellectual ends. Intellectual\\nends are attained by an appropriate combination of movements of\\nattention just as practical ends are attained by an appropriate\\ncombination of movements of the body. If, therefore, we desire to\\nexplain the process of Thinking, we must clearly determine the nature\\nof active Attention. (Stout, 1891, p. 23)\\n\",\n \"\\nAs Stout and the later generations of action-oriented theorists\\nindicate, the need to select among several possible sources of\\ninformation, and to select among several possible things that might be\\ndone with the information that has then been selected, is a\\ncharacteristic of almost all deliberately executed thoughts and\\nactions, whether those actions are bodily or intellectual. This\\nubiquitous need for selectivity has been emphasized in a series of\\nworks by Wayne Wu, where it is referred to as the “many many\\nproblem”(Wu, 2011a, 2014, 2019).\",\n \"\\nIn Wu’s handling of it, the idea that Neumann and Allport\\nemphasized becomes part of a larger attempt to understand the\\nessential connections between attention and agency (Wu, 2011b). For\\nWu, attention’s role in action is more fundamental than its role\\nin perception. Stout is not the only precedent for this idea. The same\\nconnection was noted by William James when he claimed that\\n“Volition is nothing but attention”, (see Section\\n 1.5,\\n above). As with these earlier authors, Wu’s point is not just\\nthat, by treating attention as a purely perceptual phenomenon, we\\nignore many of its other instances. Instead Wu wants to suggest that\\nany division we might attempt to draw between perceptual attention and\\nthe attentional selectivity required by agency would be an artificial\\none. Even the involuntary capture of attention by perceptually salient\\nstimuli should, Wu thinks, be understood as involving a kind of\\nreadiness to act on the things to which we involuntarily attend\\n(op cit, §3). Wu’s selection-for-action theory of\\nattention is therefore intended as a step towards a unification of our\\nphilosophical account of ourselves as agents and our philosophical\\naccount of ourselves as perceivers.\",\n \"\\nAccording to selection-for-action type views, the function of\\nattention is not the management of capacity limitations. It is,\\ninstead, the management of capacity excess. It is because we\\ncan process multiple stimuli that we can be distracted by them, and\\nbecause we can be distracted by them, not because we cannot process\\nthem, that we need mechanisms of attention to provide selectivity and\\nfocus. Attention, on this view, serves to lend coherence to, and to\\nprevent interference between, the activity of several components in a\\nsystem that has the capacity to handle far more stimuli than those\\npertaining to the subject’s current task. Such a view contrasts\\nsharply with Broadbent’s conception of attentional selectivity\\nas capacity-bottleneck management.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.3 Coherence Theories\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIn the tradition perpetuated by Wu, the selectivity of attention is\\nunderstood as providing a solution to one particular problem, created\\nby the fact that there are multiple courses of action that might be\\ntaken at any time, with the taking of any one requiring the others to\\nbe suppressed. The solving of this particular problem is not the only\\ncognitive need that could be served by an operation of selectivity,\\neven in a mind without bottlenecks of processing capacity. The\\nselection-for-action theory is therefore not the only alternative to\\nBroadbent’s bottleneck theory. Other functions for attentional\\nselectivity might also be proposed. Alternatively—rather than\\nelecting any one of these functions of cognitive selectivity as being\\nthe function that is essentially served by attention—we might\\ninstead characterize attention as a quite general process of\\nselectivity, recruitable on any of the various occasions when one\\nthing needs to prioritized over another, whether this prioritization\\nis required by the presence of a processing bottleneck, required in\\norder for a coherent action-plan to be executed, or required for some\\nquite different reason. The work of Sebastian Watzl develops the idea\\nthat attention might be such a non-specific process of prioritization\\n(Watzl, 2017).\",\n \"\\nIn Watzl’s treatment of it, this idea places particular emphasis\\non the fact that, just as a binary ‘is greater than’\\nrelation can introduce a partial ordering on a set, so a number of\\nthese binary prioritizations can be considered in sum, as introducing\\na prioritization structure on the several items that together\\nconstitute one’s mental life. For Watzl, attention is the\\nprocess by which one’s life comes to have such a structure.\",\n \"\\nWatzl also claims that any mind which lacked such a structure would\\ntherefore be lacking a particular perspective on the world, and so\\nwould not be the mind of a creature with the subjective point of view\\nthat is characteristic of conscious experiences. From this he derives\\nthe claim that every conscious creature is attentive. Carolyn Jennings\\nhas suggested that certain kinds of highly engaged expert performance\\nmay be a counterexample to this (Jennings, 2015).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.4 General-Purpose Prioritization\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe idea that there might be reasons for attentional selection that\\nhave nothing to do with processing bottlenecks has also been a theme\\nin the work of psychologists hoping to understand perception as a\\nprocess of Bayesian inference (Friston et al. 2006,\\nSummerfield & Egner, 2013), and in the work of those philosophers\\nwho have been influenced by them (Hohwy, 2013; Clark, 2013, 2017).\",\n \"\\nIn what has come to be the most philosophically developed version of\\nthis Bayesian approach to the mind (Hohwy, 2013, Clark, 2013),\\ncognition as a whole is understood to be a process of Bayesian\\nupdating, in which a hierarchically-organized series of hypotheses is\\nconstantly being tested, with each hypothesis being updated in the\\nlight of evidence coming from the level below. Advocates of this\\ntheory attempt to find room within this hierarchical framework for all\\naspects of cognition, including perception, thought, and action. A\\ncentral claim of their theory is that the information that gets passed\\nup through this hierarchy is encoded in the form of signals\\nrepresenting the errors in the predictions that have been\\nmade by hypotheses at the hierarchy’s next level up, with the\\ncontent of one’s experience at any time being given by whichever\\nhypothesis makes the least erroneous predictions. (Different versions\\nof the theory use different techniques to calculate the relative size\\nof these prediction errors.) Given their commitment to\\nprediction-error coding, a central claim of these theories is that the\\nrole of our sensory encounter with the world is to provide information\\nabout the way in which our prior hypotheses get things wrong: instead\\nof providing us with the information that it has started to rain, our\\nsenses provide only the information that it is more rainy than we had\\nexpected.\",\n \"\\nAdvocates of this theory claim that it “allows us to see\\nattention in a new light and to provide alternative conceptualizations\\nof its functional role in our overall mental economy” (Hohwy,\\n2014, p. 191). According to these ‘alternative\\nconceptions’, attention adjusts the weighting of incoming\\nprediction error signals, in accordance with their expected\\nprecision (Hohwy, 2012). ‘Precision’ is to be\\nunderstood here in the sense that contrasts precision with accuracy.\\n‘Accuracy’, in the intended sense, is a measure of the\\ndifference between the value indicated by a signal and the actual\\nvalue, whereas ‘precision’ is a measure of the random\\nfluctuation in that signal, even when the actual input is held\\nconstant. A miscalibrated instrument might, in this sense, be highly\\nprecise, without being especially accurate.\",\n \"\\nVarious empirical results make it plausible that the brain takes\\naccount of expected precisions when it is processing perceptual\\nsignals. In the ventriloquist illusion, for example, it is plausible\\nthat expectations of precision have a role to play: It is because\\nvision is expected to give a more precise indication of location than\\naudition that sounds are heard to come from the location where their\\nsource is apparently seen. Other considerations make it equally\\nplausible that attention plays a role in accommodating the variations\\nin these expected precisions, as we move from one context to another.\\nIf we expect that the signal from vision is likely to be a noisy\\none—perhaps because a thick fog has started to\\ndescend—then we may place more weight than usual on the\\ninformation that is present in the signal coming from audition. It\\nseems likely that there is a role for attention in bringing about this\\nchange of weighting. It is more controversial to claim, as the\\nadvocates of this theory do, that “attention is nothing but\\nprecision optimization in hierarchical inference.” (Hohwy, 1014,\\np.244, citing Feldman & Friston, 2010). Ransom et al.\\nhave suggested that, by taking attention always to be\\nprecision optimization, this theory struggles to account for certain\\nforms of voluntary attention (Ransom et al. 2017). Clark has\\nsuggested that this challenge can be met if the sources of voluntary\\nattention are identified with beliefs, rather than desires (Clark,\\n2017).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.5 Precision Optimization Theories and Prediction Error Coding\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nLike the precision-optimization theories that have been advocated by\\nHohwy and Clark, from within the framework of the prediction-error\\ncoding theory, the Coherence theories advocated by Neisser, Neumann,\\nAllport, and Wu have also suggested functions for attention other than\\nthe management of limitations in processing capacity. Despite the\\navailability of these non-Broadbentian conceptions of\\nattention’s function, the Broadbentian idea that\\nattention’s selectivity serves to manage limitations in\\nprocessing capacity continues to be regarded by many psychologists as\\nincontrovertible. The claim that “Because the visual system does\\nnot have the capacity to process all inputs simultaneously, there must\\nexist attentional processes that help the visual system select some\\ninputs” continues to be treated as a platitude of the sort that\\ncan be used as an uncontroversial opening sentence when introducing\\none’s research. (The example just given comes from the beginning\\nof Vecera (2000), but many more examples of the same claim can easily\\nbe found.)\",\n \"\\nFor those who reject this platitude, and think that the\\nfunction of attention is something other than the management\\nof limitations in processing capacity, it is natural to think that the\\nmechanisms of attentional selection may be something other\\nthan capacity bottlenecks.\",\n \"\\nThe clearest non-bottleneck mechanisms for achieving selectivity are\\ncompetitions. Since well-organized competitions can always\\nselect one winner, however good and however numerous the competitors,\\nthe selectivity of a competitive mechanism need not have anything to\\ndo with bottlenecks, or with any other limitations of processing\\ncapacity.\",\n \"\\nCompetition-based mechanisms for achieving selectivity come in at\\nleast two varieties: In a simple race mechanism each of the\\ncompetitors independently completes a process that is comparable,\\nalong some dimension of variation, with the processes that are\\ncompleted by each of the other competitors. The competitor that\\nachieves the highest value on the relevant dimension of variation is\\nselected as the winner. In a struggle the competitors do not\\njust get on with their own processing in the hope that they will do it\\nbetter than each of the other competitors. Instead the active\\nsuppression of other competitors is a part of the process that each\\ncompetitor carries out. Simple race models of attention have been\\nproposed (Shibuya and Bundesen, 1988, Bundesen, 1987), but our best\\ncurrent theories supplement the simple race mechanism with some\\ncomponents of mutual struggle, or with additional processes of\\ntop-down control (see, for example, Bundesen and Habekost, 2008).\",\n \"\\nOne suggestion for a supplemented-competition mechanism for\\nattentional selectivity is the biased-competition model, elaborated in\\nseveral works by Robert Desimone, John Duncan and John Reynolds. The\\nbiased-competition model accounts for various attention-involving\\neffects, at the personal and at the sub-personal level, as being\\neffects that arise from numerous struggles between the different\\nstimuli that fall within the variously sized receptive fields of\\nneurons throughout the perceptual processing hierarchy. It is\\nhypothesized that each one of these struggles is biased, although not\\nsettled outright, by a top-down attention-specific signal (Desimone\\nand Duncan, 1995, Reynolds and Desimone, 2001).\",\n \"\\nWe have said that competitions are selective in ways that do not\\ninvolve limitations in capacity, and that competition-based theories\\nof attention’s underlying mechanisms are therefore natural\\naccompaniments to selection-for-action type views of attention’s\\nfunction (Section\\n 2.3),\\n and perhaps to other views that involve a break from the Broadbentian\\nview according to which attention’s function is the management of\\ncapacity limitations. Competition views of attention’s\\nmechanisms do not, however, require us to take a non-Broadbentian view\\nof attention’s function. Although the biased competition view\\nsits naturally with a non-Broadbentian view of that function, Reynolds\\nand Desimone continue to introduce the biased competition theory as an\\nattempt to understand attention in recognizably Broadbentian terms,\\nwriting that:\",\n \"\\nThe visual system is limited in its capacity to process information.\\nHowever, it is equipped to overcome this constraint because it can\\ndirect this limited capacity channel to locations or objects of\\ninterest. (2001, 233)\\n\",\n \"\\nSome advocates of the biased competition view emphasize the particular\\nimportance of the top-down biasing signals that the theory postulates\\n(e.g., Beck and Kastner, 2009, p. 1156), taking the source of\\nthese signals to be the true locus of attentional selection. Others\\nsuggest that the biased competition theory is better understood as a\\ntheory that refuses to identify any such locus, and that it should\\ninstead be read (as suggested in Duncan’s original presentation\\nof the theory, (Duncan 1996)) as attributing the selectivity of\\nattention to the totality of an integrated competition, involving\\nprocesses of various sorts at various levels, any part of which can\\nbias any other (Mole, 2011, §6.7, 2015).\",\n \"\\nWhen it is understood in this second way the biased-competition theory\\naccords with the proposal that attention should be taken to have a\\nmetaphysical status analogous to that of unison in an orchestra.\\nAccording to this view it is always a mistake to identify any one\\nprocess as the attention process (or any set of processes as the\\nattention processes); attention requires the unified activity of\\nwhichever processes happen to be relevant to a person’s current\\ntask, but, since these vary from one task to the next, it does not\\nrequire any particular processes to be taking place. Such a\\nview has been developed in work by Christopher Mole, who dubs it the\\n‘Cognitive Unison Theory’. Metaphysically speaking, such a\\ntheory can be understood as a revival of John Locke and F.H.\\nBradley’s view that attention is a mode of thinking (see\\n Section 1.3\\n above). Phenomenologically the view has a precedent in Ribot’s\\nsuggestion that attention be identified with ‘monoideism’\\n(Ribot, 1889, p. 10). It also draws on some ideas about the\\n‘polymorphousness’ of attention, which were advocated in a\\n1964 monograph by Alan White, on the basis of considerations drawn\\nfrom the examination of various ‘heed concepts’ in natural\\nlanguage.\",\n \"\\nBecause operating in unison requires an absence of task-irrelevant\\nprocessing, the most straightforward version of the unison theory\\nentails that full attention is a rare achievement, with most cases of\\nattentiveness involving what is, strictly speaking, only partial or\\ndivided attention. Mole (like Ribot) accepts this implication. Yair\\nLevy has suggested that doing so prevents him from giving an adequate\\naccount of phenomena such a listening, or observing, which always\\nrequire some attention to be paid, but which can nonetheless be done\\nmore or less attentively (Levy, 2019). Work by Philipp Koralus has\\nsuggested that a more satisfactory treatment of divided attention can\\nbe given if the attentive pursuit of a task is understood to share\\ncertain formal properties with the answering of a question (Koralus,\\n2014). This characterization of attention as “the means by which\\nwe answer questions about the environment” has been argued for\\non phenomenological and epistemological grounds by Naomi Eilan (Eilan,\\n1998). (Eilan credits the thought to Rowland Stout, whose treatment of\\nit can be found in Chapter 9 §5 of Stout 2006.) Koralus draws on\\nHamblin’s 1958 semantics of questions to provide a formal model\\nof such questioning (Hamblin, 1958).\",\n \"\\nThere are philosophical issues, independent of the cognitive unison\\ntheory, about the way in which partial or divided attention relates to\\nfull attention, and about whether a distinction should be drawn\\nbetween the attention that is given to things by which we are merely\\ndistracted and the attention that is given to things on which we\\nremain concertedly focused. Aaron Henry considers these questions as\\npart of a more general enquiry into attention and control, using the\\nnotion of constitutive norms to provide an account in which\\ndistraction always does involve a certain sort of shortcoming, while\\nnonetheless qualifying as a case of genuine attention, rather than\\nmerely being a defective approximation of it (Henry, 2019). Zachary\\nIrving has suggested that the wandering of a distracted mind presents\\nphilosophical puzzles of its own, and has worked towards giving an\\nempirically-informed account of mind-wandering that avoids these\\npuzzles. His account takes such wandering to be attentive but unguided\\n(Irving, 2016). Theories such as the Cognitive Unison Theory, in which\\nattention essentially depends on the performance of an\\nunderstanding-guided task, will need to find some alternative account\\nof the phenomena that Irving identifies.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.6 Competition Theories and Cognitive Unison\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nWhereas bottleneck metaphors have traditionally guided the\\ntheories that attempt to locate the cognitive resources that operate\\nonly on attended stimuli, it has been spotlight metaphors\\nthat have guided the theories that attempt to say which features of a\\nstimulus determine whether attention is being paid to that stimulus at\\nany given moment (e.g., Watchel, 1967; Woodman and Luck, 1999; see\\nFernandez-Duque and Johnson, 2002, for discussion). The idea suggested\\nby the spotlight metaphor is that a stimulus’s location\\nultimately determines whether or not that stimulus receives attention:\\nthe point here is not to deny that one can pay attention to something\\non account of it being brightly coloured, or on account of it being\\ninteresting. The point is, instead, that one pays attention to\\nbrightly coloured or interesting things only by directing one’s\\nattention to the location of those things.\",\n \"\\nOne can easily see why the spotlight metaphor has been appealing. If\\nwe are presented with an array of differently coloured shapes,\\nappearing and disappearing in various places, then there will be any\\nnumber of attention-demanding tasks that we might perform regarding\\nthat array. Some tasks might require us to attend to whatever is going\\non at the top of the screen, others might require us to attend to all\\nthe red shapes, or to all the triangles, or to something else. Some of\\nthese ways of attending seem to be more basic than others. It seems,\\nfor example, that attending to things in the top part of the screen\\nmight be a primitive task, whereas attending to the triangles could\\nnot be primitive in the same way: we cannot simply attend to\\nthe triangles. If we want to attend to the triangles, we need first to\\nwork out where the triangles are. If, on the other hand, we\\nwant to attend to the things in the top part of the screen we do not\\nneed to work out whether they are triangles. It is therefore plausible\\nthat when we attend to the triangles we do so by attending to\\ntheir locations. In this sense attending on the basis of location\\nseems to be more basic than attending on the basis of shape.\",\n \"\\nThe idea that attending to a location is more basic than attending to\\na shape might tempt one to think that attending on the basis of\\nlocation is absolutely basic, so that attention is always and only\\nallocated on the basis of location. If that were right then a theory\\nof the spatial allocation of attention—a theory about the moving\\nand focusing of an ‘attentional spotlight’—would be\\na large and central component in an account of how attention works.\\nThis would be good news for those who want to give a single unified\\ntheory of attention, and it would be good news for the scientific\\nproject of explaining attention more generally, since\\nattention’s spotlight-like behaviours are some of its best\\nunderstood aspects (see Logan, 1996).\",\n \"\\nThere are reasons to think that location does play a special role in\\nthe allocation of attention, as the spotlight metaphor suggests. But\\nthe role of location in the allocation of attention is probably not as\\nstraightforward as would be required by the most parsimonious of\\nspotlight-based theories. Location does have a special role to play\\nhere, but (1) location is not the only property to have such a role,\\nand (2) the role of location is more complicated than a simple\\nspotlight metaphor suggests.\",\n \"\\nEmpirical debates about the direction of the spotlight of attention\\nhave focussed mostly on the second of these points. An important\\nsource of data here is case studies contrasting the different patterns\\nof attention failure that are shown by different unilateral neglect\\npatients. Such studies suggest that various frames of reference are\\ninvolved in the spatial allocation of attention (Behrmann and Tipper,\\n1999). This indicates that there is no single map of\\nlocations determining which items get attention: attention is\\nsometimes allocated on the basis of location in egocentric space,\\nsometimes on the basis of location in more complex frames of reference\\n(a point that was among those raised by Allport, in his influential\\ncritique of the Broadbentian debates (see Allport, 1992, p. 197)).\",\n \"\\nThere are also some well-known experimental effects suggesting that\\nattention is allocated, not on the basis of straightforward spatial\\ncoordinates, but in ways that are constrained by the distribution of\\nobjects in space. The classic work in this area is John\\nDuncan’s demonstration that attention shifts more readily\\nbetween two locations that fall within the bounds of a single object\\nthan between equidistant locations that are separated by an object\\nboundary (Duncan, 1984). Equally important here are findings from\\nexperiments using three-dimensional stimuli, and using virtual\\nthree-dimensional displays. These studies suggest that experimental\\nparticipants are unable to differentially attend to depths in an empty\\nspace, but that these participants start to be able to shift their\\nattention forwards and backward (to a place in front of or behind the\\npoint that their eyes are fixating) when the relevant locations are\\nones in which there are objects (see Yantis, 1998).\",\n \"\\nThese converging sources of data indicate that the spotlight of\\nattention is not allocated simply on the basis of coordinates in any\\nsingle spatial frame of reference. That is an important finding for\\nthose attempting to localize mechanisms for the allocation of\\nattention within the brain (since different brain areas differ in\\ntheir mapping of space, and in their representation of spatial\\ninformation about the objects within it). It has been influential in\\nleading psychologists to turn away from simple spotlight metaphors. It\\nshould be noted, however, that these findings do not threaten the core\\nof the idea that was suggested by the spotlight metaphor: the facts\\nabout what a person is attending to might still supervene on the facts\\nabout where that person is attending, even if quite numerous\\nand sometimes complex factors are responsible for determining which\\nlocation that is.\",\n \"\\nOther effects are somewhat more damaging for a pure spotlight view,\\nalthough they also stop short of refuting it entirely. The\\nmore-than-merely-spatial complexity of the way in which attention is\\nallocated has been nicely demonstrated in a series of experiments by\\nDwight Kravitz and Marlene Behrmann (Kravitz and Behrmann, 2011). The\\nparticipants in these experiments have their attention cued by a brief\\nstimulus that is presented at one end of a shape that is shown on a\\ncomputer screen. This shape might be a simple rectangle, a rectangle\\nwith bulbous ends, or a more complex ‘H’ or\\n‘h’ shape. It is presented alongside another shape, which\\nin some cases has the same shape and colour, and in other cases is\\ndifferent. The resulting allocation of attention is then probed by\\nmeasuring the reaction times to stimuli that are presented on and near\\nthese objects. Kravitz and Behrmann find that all the different\\nproperties of their stimuli interact to determine the way in\\nwhich attention is allocated to the screen on which those stimuli\\nappear. Most strikingly of all, they find a difference in the\\nallocation of attention between trials in which the shapes on the\\nscreen are an upper and a lower case ‘H’, and trials in\\nwhich the shapes are an upper case H and number 4, even though this\\nnumber 4 shape is exactly the same as the lower case h, but presented\\nupside down. Such findings suggest that attention, even when triggered\\nby a simple spatial cue, is not allocated merely on the basis of\\nlocation, but also on the basis of shape, colour, and arbitrary\\nlearned meaning.\",\n \"\\nThe discovery that attention can preferentially modulate the\\nprocessing of stimuli on account of their colours, shapes, and\\nmeanings does not prevent us from maintaining that the location of a\\nstimulus has a special role to play in the process by which attention\\nis allocated to it. More than one line of research in psychology has\\nsought to identify some one representation in the brain in which items\\nare encoded in a way that determines the extent to which attention\\nwill be allocated to them. In the longest established of these lines\\nof research—beginning with the work of Koch and Ullman\\n(1985)—this representation has been taken to be a map,\\nin some quite literal sense of ‘map’: the representation\\nis taken to be one in which every location in some region is\\nrepresented, and the representation of these locations is taken to be\\nin some format that immediately encodes the spatial relations between\\nthem. Every object that is represented is taken to be represented as\\nbeing at some location, and the properties assigned to these located\\nobjects are taken to determine the likelihood that attention will be\\npaid to the location that the objects occupy. According to the theory\\nthat postulates these ‘salience maps’, location does play\\na unique role in determining the way in which attention is allocated,\\ndespite the fact that other properties also contribute to that\\nallocation.\",\n \"\\nIn more recent treatments of this idea (Pessoa, 2013) such maps are\\ntaken to include representations, not merely of the objective\\nproperties that give an item salience, but also of subjective\\nproperties, such as emotional-valence and\\ncurrent-motivational-relevance. The more we think of these maps as\\nbeing augmented with additional, non-spatial information, the less\\nspotlight-like the allocation of attention represented in them will\\nseem to be, but, provided the representation in question is still\\nunderstood to be map-like, location can still be understood to have an\\nimportant role, and perhaps even a uniquely important one.\",\n \"\\nDebates about the role of such maps, and about the variety of\\nsubjective and objective properties that are represented within them,\\nmay have some wide-ranging philosophical consequences, concerning more\\nthan just the aptness of the spotlight metaphor. Aaron Henry has\\nsuggested that the viability of some recent philosophical theories\\ndepends on the outcome of these debates. Since the recent\\nphilosophical theories of attention have tended to emphasize the role\\nof agency in attention, they face potential counterexamples from\\ninstances of involuntary attention. Henry suggests that the threat of\\nsuch counterexamples can be defused if the mechanisms of involuntary\\nattention capture are understood to involve attention being allocated\\non the basis of a map in which the agent’s own priorities for\\naction are represented (Henry, 2017).\",\n \"\\nAlthough the psychological debates about salience maps are ongoing, an\\nargument against pure spotlight views can also be made on more\\ntraditional, phenomenological grounds. A pure spotlight theory,\\naccording to which attention is always allocated on the basis of\\nlocation, seems unable to account for the sort of case that Hermann\\nvon Helmholtz and William James were concerned with (see section\\n 1.5).\\n There is, as their example suggests, a difference between attending\\nto the pitch of a note and attending to its timbre, or to its\\novertones. This difference in attention does not seem to correspond to\\nany difference in the location attended. Nor does any purely\\nlocation-based theory of attention allocation seem able to account for\\nthe sort attention that one must pay in order to perform a time-based\\ntask, such as finding out which of a group of shapes appears on screen\\nfor longest. Such temporal aspects of attention have been a relatively\\nlate addition to the psychological research agenda (see the papers\\ncollected in Nobre and Coull, 2010). The research concerning them is\\nbeginning to reveal a diverse range of effects, with a range of\\nsimilarly diverse neural underpinnings (Nobre and van Ede, 2018). Some\\nphilosophical work has been devoted to the exploration of these\\ntemporal aspects of attention (see Phillips, 2011), but it is work\\nthat has tended to address questions that further our understanding of\\nthe experience and perception of time, without attempting to\\ncontribute directly to our philosophical understanding of attention\\nitself (see the entry on\\n The Experience and Perception of Time).\",\n \"\\nSince some shifts of attention are not shifts in the location\\nattended, a theory of the factors that determine which locations a\\nsubject is attending to cannot tell us the whole story about the\\nallocation of attention. It might nonetheless be a central component\\nin a theory of some of attention’s forms (see Wright and Ward,\\n2008).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.7 Spotlight Theories\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nWork in which electrodes are used in vivo to stimulate areas\\nof the macaque brain known to be associated with eye-movement\\ncoordination has provided strong evidence for the existence of an\\nanatomical overlap between brain areas involved in eye-movement\\ncontrol and those involved in determining which stimuli elicit the\\nstrongest responses in visual cortex. There is also evidence that this\\nanatomical fact has some functional significance. One suggestive\\nfinding is that the links between frontal eye-movement-control areas\\nand attention-like effects in occipital visual areas are spatially\\nspecific: an electrode that is placed so that it elicits an eye\\nmovement to a particular part of the visual field when activated at\\none level will, if activated at a lower level, elicit changes in\\nneural responsiveness that are exactly similar to the changes that are\\nseen when attention is shifted to that same location (Moore and\\nArmstrong, 2003, Armstrong and Moore, 2007).\",\n \"\\nThese facts have been taken to be suggestive of a ‘motor\\ntheory’ of attention, according to which the processes\\nunderpinning attention are, in at least some cases, truncated versions\\nof the processes underpinning the coordination of movements of sensory\\norientation.\",\n \"\\nThe central idea of such a theory is that “the program for\\norienting attention either overtly or covertly is the same, but in the\\nlatter case the eyes are blocked at a certain peripheral stage”\\n(Rizzolatti et al, 1987, 37). Advocates of motor theories\\n(such as Moore, Armstrong and Fallah, 2003) have characterised their\\nwork as a revival of the picture that Alexander Bain proposed at the\\nend of the nineteenth century. Bain (as we saw in Section\\n 1.5,\\n above) identified attention with truncated versions of the\\nmotor-control processes that typically bring about attention’s\\nbehavioural manifestations — processes “stopping short of\\nthe actual movement performed by the organ” (Bain, 1888,\\n371).\",\n \"\\nThese versions of the motor theory should be distinguished from\\ntheories that regard attention and motor control as intimately linked,\\nbut that place no emphasis on the fact that the motor control\\nprocesses that have been implicated in attention are processes that\\ncontrol the movement of sensory organs. In these theories\\n(which are natural but not obligatory concomitants of the\\n‘selection-for-action’ views discussed in\\n section 2.5)\\n attention stands in an intimate relation to motor control more\\ngenerally. One line of experimental evidence in support of such a\\ngeneral connection comes from work by Heiner Deubel and his\\ncollaborators, in which various changes to the way in which an object\\nfigures in action are shown to have an attention-indicating influence\\non the perceptual discrimination of stimuli that are presented on or\\nnear that object. In one striking example of this, Deubel and\\nSchneider found that the way in which attention is allocated to the\\nspace around a 6.5cm wooden X shape depended on whether the subject\\nwas reaching with her left hand to grasp the shape by the top-left and\\nbottom right arms, or reaching with her right hand to grasp the shape\\nby the arms at its top-right and bottom left (Deubel & Schneider,\\n2004). In each case attention was allocated not only to the shape, but\\nto the to-be-gripped parts of it. (For other evidence of interactions\\nbetween attention and action-targeting, see Tipper, Howard, and\\nHoughton, 1998.)\",\n \"\\nMotor theories and other action-based theories give a plausible\\naccount of some of attention’s instances, but they have\\nlimitations that prevent them from applying with full generality:\\nSince movement of the eyes, or of the limbs, is always movement to\\na location motor theories will struggle to account for the\\nallocation of attention on the basis of anything other than location.\\nThey therefore face the limitations that we saw when considering pure\\nspotlight theories, of being unable to account for shifts in attention\\nthat do not correspond to differences in the location attended. Nor is\\nit clear how motor theories should be applied to spatial attention in\\nthose sensory modalities where the orientation of the sense organs is\\nless straightforward than it is in the visual case. The motor theory\\ndoes, nonetheless, provide a plausible and well-supported account of\\nthe location-based variety of visual attention that is displayed in\\ntypical attention-lab experiments.\",\n \"\\nThe success of motor theories in accounting for the sorts of attention\\nthat are found in some typical attention-lab experiments can be given\\neither an optimistic or a pessimistic interpretation. The optimistic\\ninterpretation sees the motor theory as providing a successful account\\nof the processing underpinning some of attention’s simpler and\\nmore central varieties. The pessimistic interpretation sees the motor\\ntheory as revealing a problem with our usual experimental\\nparadigms. The participants in typical laboratory tasks direct\\ntheir attention to different parts of their visual field, while\\nkeeping their eyes fixated on a central spot. The behavioural\\nsignatures of attention in such tasks are usually reductions in\\nreaction time to the attended stimuli. The neural correlates of these\\nbehavioural signatures are certain biases as to which stimuli most\\nstrongly drive the neural circuitry that processes them. The central\\nfinding of the motor-theorists is that these neural and behavioural\\neffects can result from attenuated versions of the activity\\nresponsible for directing eye movements. The pessimistic\\ninterpretation of this finding is as revealing that signs that have\\ntraditionally been taken to indicate the direction of attention are\\nactually no more than consequences of the truncated eye-movements that\\nour experimental paradigms induce, by imposing the restriction that\\nexperimental participants fixate their gaze on a single location. If\\nthat is right then the phenomenon studied in attention labs may not be\\nthe psychologically important one that it has been taken for.\",\n \"\\nMotor theorists are not the only ones who might be accused of\\nelevating a theory of some circumscribed subset of attention-related\\nphenomena into a spuriously general theory of attention in its\\nentirety. Henry Taylor has shown that, although the ambition to give a\\ngeneral theory of attention is widespread among the philosophers who\\nhave recently written on this subject, it is seldom found in the\\nrecent psychological literature, where it has proven fruitful to\\nfollow the influential example of Michael Posner by giving somewhat\\nseparate treatments of attention’s roles in vigilance, in\\nperceptual orientation, and in the focalized deployment of processing\\nresources (Taylor, 2015, 2018; Posner and Boies, 1971). Taylor\\nsuggests that the psychologists’ tolerance for pluralism here\\nshould be reflected in our philosophical theories.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.8 Motor Theories\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Explanatory Roles for Attention\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe question of whether attention is necessary for consciousness has\\nbeen answered in various ways. One answer is given by those who think\\nthat lots of unattended items appear in consciousness. A different\\nanswer is given by those who think that only some unattended items\\nfigure in consciousness. A third answer is given if we think that\\nunattended items figure in consciousness only in special\\ncircumstances. There is some evidence that, independently of any\\nphilosophical commitments, people differ as to which of these views\\nthey find plausible (Schwitzgebel, 2007). There are also some theories\\n(e.g., Watzl, 2017) in which attention is necessary for\\n‘creature consciousness’ in the sense that every conscious\\ncreature must be an attentive one. Such views need not entail that\\nattention to an object is necessary for the conscious perception of\\nthat object.\",\n \"\\nAt one extreme end of this spectrum is the view according to which\\nattention to a thing is strictly necessary for consciousness of it, so\\nthat the things to which we are not paying attention do not figure in\\nour consciousness at all. A number of psychologists endorse this view\\n(e.g., Cohen et al. 2012), as do some philosophers (e.g.,\\nPrinz, 2012, Carruthers, 2015, Montemayor & Haladjian, 2015). It\\nhas historical precedent in James’s remark, at the beginning of\\nhis chapter on attention, that “my experience is what I agree to\\nattend to”(James, 1890, ch. 11), and in Kames’ remark that\\n“Attention is requisite even to the simple act of seeing”\\n(Kames, 1769, see Sect\\n 1.4,\\n above).\",\n \"\\nThe evidence that is proffered in support of the view that attention\\nis strictly necessary for consciousness comes from a range of\\nexperiments showing the surprising extent to which experimental\\nparticipants are ignorant of the items to which they have paid no\\nattention. In Arien Mack and Irvin Rock’s ‘inattentional\\nblindness’ paradigm, for example, participants who are given an\\nattention-demanding task pertaining to a stimulus in one part of their\\nvisual field frequently fail to notice shapes or words that are\\nflashed up elsewhere (Mack & Rock, 1998). In Rensink et\\nal.’s ‘change blindness’ paradigm the\\nparticipants need to see an alternating pair of pictures between ten\\nand twenty times before they can identify a large but narratively\\ninconsequential difference between them (Rensink et al.,\\n1997, Rensink, 2002). In the most memorable of these experiments a\\nlarge number of participants fail to notice the central appearance of\\na man in a gorilla suit when their attention is taken up with the\\nbusiness of counting the number of passes made by one of two teams in\\na concurrent basketball-type game (Simons & Chabdris, 1999).\",\n \"\\nNo single one of these experiments can establish the claim that\\nattention is always necessary for consciousness. That claim is a\\nuniversally quantified one, and is not entailed by any one of its\\ninstances. Nor is it clear that what we see in these experiments\\nreally are instances in which unattended objects drop out of\\nconsciousness altogether. The participants’ ignorance of the\\ngorilla’s appearance, for example, is compatible with it being\\nthe case that the presence of the gorilla does make a\\nphenomenal difference to their inattentive experience. To explain\\nthose participants’ ignorance we need only say that any\\nphenomenal difference that the unattended gorilla makes is a\\ndifference that the participants are unable to use in answering the\\nexperimenter’s question about whether anything strange happened\\nin the scene. It may be a phenomenal difference that is epistemically\\nunusable because it is immediately forgotten (see Wolfe, 1998) or it\\nmay, alternatively, be a difference that is unusable because it is too\\nunstructured and inchoate to be epistemically mobilizable. In that\\ncase the effect of inattention would be inattentional\\nagnosia, rather than inattentional blindness (see\\nSimons, 2000).\",\n \"\\nAbsolute amnesia for unattended items, or thoroughgoing agnosia for\\nthem, may be indistinguishable from inattentional blindness, both\\nbehaviourally and from the point of view of retrospective\\nintrospection. For that reason it is not a straightforward matter for\\nthe advocates of any of these interpretations of the inattentional\\nblindness and change blindness effects to rule out the alternative\\ninterpretations. Subpersonal sources of data (such as experiments\\nusing neuroimaging) may be the only sources of data that we have to go\\non. (See Rees, et al. 1999, for an example in which fMRI data\\nis used to argue against the amnesia interpretation of inattentional\\nblindness effects involving written words).\",\n \"\\nIt is only narratively insignificant differences that go unnoticed in\\nthe change-blindness paradigm. Change blindness effects might\\ntherefore be taken as showing, not that there is no consciousness in\\nthe absence of attention, but that there is consciousness in\\nthe absence of attention, the contents of which are restricted to the\\nscene’s overall gist. There are difficulties in adjudicating\\nbetween these two interpretations experimentally. When features of\\ngist do seem to be perceived, in the apparent absence of attention,\\nthe defender of the claim that attention is necessary for\\nconsciousness may reply by claiming that attention has been paid to\\nthese items, either in a dispersed, non-focal way (Prettyman, 2013),\\nor because these features are briefly and involuntarily\\nattention-catching (Prinz, 2012, p. 119). Without an experimental\\noperationalization of complete inattention, these rival\\ninterpretations cannot be ruled out, with the result that empirical\\ndebates about the extent of consciousness beyond attention are\\ncurrently in something of deadlock, with experimenters being able to\\nclaim only to have demonstrated perception in the ‘near\\nabsence’ of attention (Li et al., 2002, Reddy et\\nal., 2004, Reddy et al., 2006), and so providing only\\ninconclusive support to the hypothesis that attention and\\nconsciousness are dissociable (Koch & Tsuchiya, 2007).\",\n \"\\nThe methodological puzzle that we face when trying to settle the\\ndispute between different interpretations of the inattentional and\\nchange blindness effects raises the question of whether our\\ncommonsense beliefs about the conscious status of unattended items are\\nwell founded. Such beliefs seem to vary from person to person\\n(Schwitzgebel, 2007), and to vary with certain features of the context\\nin which they are probed (De Brigard, 2010). To the extent that we\\nfind it natural to suppose that unattended items do figure in\\nconsciousness, this may simply be owing to a version of the\\n‘refrigerator-light illusion’: If our reason for believing\\nthat we are conscious of the things to which we pay no attention is a\\nreason that depends on our finding that we are conscious of those\\nthings whenever we check on them then that belief is on shaky ground.\\nA checking procedure cannot provide us with good evidence about the\\nstatus of unattended items since the act of checking is itself an act\\nthat involves a shift in attention to the things checked\\n(O’Regan & Noë, 2001).\",\n \"\\nSince a direct checking procedure is ruled out we need a more\\ntheory-driven way of assessing the dispute between those who claim\\nthat the consequence of not attending to an item is that the item\\ndrops out of conscious experience and those who claim that inattention\\nsimply puts the subject in a poor epistemic position vis-à-vis\\nthese unattended items. The current state of our theories is such that\\nit would be premature to try to settle this dispute by an inference to\\nthe best explanation, since neither side of the dispute has a theory\\nof the attention/consciousness relation that has been worked out to a\\ndegree that would allow the different explanations to be compared. We\\ncan, however, see some of the considerations that the two sides in\\nthis debate might invoke. Those who endorse the idea that attention is\\nnecessary for consciousness can point to the fact that this view\\naccords well with theories in which attention features prominently in\\nthe explanation of consciousness (e.g., Prinz, 2005, 2012). They may\\nalso be able to develop arguments based on theories of the way in\\nwhich consciousness and attention evolved (Montemayor & Haladjian,\\n2015). Those who prefer the epistemic-deficit interpretation of the\\ninattentional blindness effects (Mole, 2011, §7.3.7) can point to\\nthe fact that that interpretation flows naturally from the view\\naccording to which attention to an item provides the sort of\\nacquaintance that is needed for the use of a demonstrative concept\\nthat refers to that item (a view advocated by Campbell, 2002, and\\ndiscussed in section\\n 3.2\\n below): If attention to the gorilla is necessary for the forming of a\\ndemonstrative-involving thought (such as ‘That’s a\\ngorilla’) then there is an immediate explanation, consistent\\nwith the idea that unattended items nonetheless feature in\\nconsciousness, for the fact that inattentive people are unable to\\nanswer questions such as ‘Was there a gorilla?’.\",\n \"\\nThe difficulty in the case of the unnoticed gorilla is to discern\\nwhether unattended items are present to consciousness but present only\\nas unindividuated items to which no demonstrative reference has yet\\nbeen directed, or whether those unattended items are instead absent\\nfrom consciousness altogether. Part of this difficulty originates in\\nthe fact that, although most people give no attention to the gorilla,\\nthey could attend to him, and would have done so if anything\\nhad prompted them to do so. More data may be available, both to\\nintrospection and to laboratory measurement, in cases where our\\nfailure to attend has some more systemic explanation. Ned Block has\\nsuggested that one such case is found in our perception of peripheral\\nstimuli, when these are subject to the phenomenon of ‘identity\\ncrowding’ (Block, 2013a). An individual ‘T’ or\\n‘F’ can be seen reasonably clearly, even when presented in\\na peripheral part of the visual field. But if additional characters\\nare presented alongside this individual character, then the properties\\nof those characters become prone to perceptual confusion. Attention\\nseems to bind together properties from all of the characters in the\\nvicinity of the one individual that we are trying to pick out. It\\ntherefore seems that, in the perceptual periphery, attention cannot be\\ndirected onto a region that fits an individual character tightly. Due\\nto this ‘crowding’ effect, individual letters or shapes\\nbecome impossible to individuate from the others with which they are\\nclustered, when they fall into parts of the visual field that are\\noutside of the high-definition centre. The properties of objects that\\nare crowded in this way can nonetheless be seen, and the fact that\\nseveral items are present can be reliably reported. On the basis of\\nempirical and introspective considerations, Block claims that, even in\\ncases where the crowded characters share all of their features with\\nthe others by which they are crowded, these crowded characters are\\nconsciously discriminated from their surroundings. He claims that\\nthese characters figure as objects in consciousness. Since attention\\ncannot be allocated to anything more fine-grained than the crowd of\\nwhich these characters are a part, the characters are not themselves\\nobjects to which attention is paid. Block therefore takes\\n‘identity crowding’ to give counterexamples to the claim\\nthat we are conscious of objects only when paying attention to\\nthem.\",\n \"\\nBlock’s claim that the crowded characters figure in\\nconsciousness as individuated objects, rather than as parts of some\\nfeature-rich texture, has been contested (Taylor, 2013, Richards,\\n2013). In response, Block has suggested that an inference the best\\nexplanation of several related phenomena favours his interpretation of\\nthe effect (Block, 2013b).\",\n \"\\nInference to the best explanation is always a hazardous business,\\nespecially in the vicinity of an explanatory gap. In the\\ninterpretation of identity crowding, as in the interpretation of\\ninattentional blindness, the inescapability of abductive\\nconsiderations suggests that our answer to the question of whether\\nattention is necessary for consciousness may have to wait until we\\nhave a better understanding of the relation of attention to\\ndemonstrative reference (of the sort that is involved in thinking\\n‘That’s a gorilla’), and perhaps until we have a\\nbetter understanding of attention’s role in epistemology more\\ngenerally. (See\\n sections 3.3 & 3.4 ,\\n below.)\",\n \"\\nIn addition to disputes about whether we are conscious of\\nonly those things to which we attend, there are also disputes\\nabout whether we are conscious of everything to which we\\nattend. If we were then a complete theory of attention might be given\\nby giving an account of the way in which attention modulates\\nconsciousness.\",\n \"\\nDeclan Smithies has argued in favour of a position according to which\\neverything that is attended to is consciously attended to. He claims\\nthat all instances of attention must be consciousness-involving, on\\nthe grounds that (1) all such instances must have a connection with\\ntheir subject’s ‘rational-access’ to the contents of\\nher experience, and (2) there is no connection to rationality in the\\ncase of processing that is wholly unconscious. Smithies’ view\\nis, therefore, that attention is essentially involved in the\\n‘rational-access’ of consciously experienced contents\\n(Smithies, 2011). The nature of any such connection between attention\\nto an experience and the justificatory force of that experience is\\nitself a source of ongoing controversy: Johannes Roesller has argued\\nthat John McDowell’s theory of perceptual experience’s\\nreason-giving force cannot account for the role played by attention in\\nexperience (Roessler, 2011); Susanna Siegel and Nicholas Silins have\\nclaimed that the doxastic influence of an experience can be an\\ninstance of rational access even when that experience receives no\\nattention (Siegel & Silins, 2014); Terry Horgan and Matjaž\\nPotrč have argued that the justification of beliefs by experience\\nmust outrun both the contents of attention and the contents of\\nconsciousness (Horgan and Potrč 2011). Here, as above,\\none’s understanding of attention and one’s understanding\\nof epistemology constrain one another, and may provide a theory-driven\\nroute by which to settle questions about the possibility of\\nunconscious attentiveness.\",\n \"\\nThe claim that all attention is conscious attention sits uneasily with\\ncertain empirical results indicating that consciousness is not\\nrequired for the operation of those psychological processes that are\\nresponsible for certain effects that are usually taken to be\\nsignatures of attention. In an experiment by Yi Jiang et al.,\\n(2006), for example, participants are presented with\\nattention-attracting stimuli in such a way that, thanks to an\\narrangement of mirrors, these stimuli are given to just one eye.\\nBecause a more vivid stimulus is presented to the other eye, and\\nbecause this more vivid stimulus wins the competition for\\nconsciousness that occurs in such cases of binocular rivalry, these\\nexperimental participants do not consciously experience the less vivid\\nstimulus. Those unconsciously processed stimuli include erotic\\nphotographs. And those photographs do seem to elicit shifts of\\nattention, despite being unseen, as is evidenced by the fact that\\nconsciously experienced stimuli that are presented in the same\\nlocation as these unseen attention-grabbers are more accurately\\nresponded to in an attention demanding task (involving detecting the\\norientation of gabor-patches). One striking finding from Jiang et\\nal.’s experiments is that the way in which these unseen\\nphotographs attract and repel attention depends on the sexual\\norientation of the experimental participants.\",\n \"\\nA natural interpretation of these experiments is as showing that the\\nerotic pictures capture the participants’ attention, despite the\\nfact that those participants have no conscious experience of them.\\nThis suggests—although it does not conclusively\\ndemonstrate—that one may be attending to a thing without being\\nconscious of it. The same conclusion is suggested by a quite different\\nset of experiments involving a patient with blindsight. These\\nexperiments show that, even though the blindsighted patient has no\\nexperience of cues presented in his scotoma, those cues can elicit the\\nfacilitation of processing and reduction of reaction times that are\\nusually taken to be the signatures of attention (Kentridge &\\nHeywood, 2001, Kentridge et al., 2004).\",\n \"\\nOne complaint against both these lines of evidence is that they do not\\nenable us to distinguish between attention to a thing and attention\\nthat is directed to a part of space (in which that thing happens to\\nbe), with the result that they cannot demonstrate attention to a\\nthing in the absence of consciousness of that same thing (Mole,\\n2008a). Research by Liam Norman, Charles Heywood and Robert Kentridge\\ngoes some way towards addressing this complaint. Norman, Heywood and\\nKentridge present normal participants with a screen showing an array\\nof small, rapidly flickering Gabor patches. Objects the boundaries of\\nwhich are defined by changes in the orientations of these patches are\\nnot consciously experienced: Participants merely see the whole screen\\nas a flickering array of patches. Cues that direct the attention of\\nthose participants do nonetheless seem to draw attention to these\\nunseen objects, as indicated by differences in the response times to\\nitems that are subsequently presented in and outside of their\\nboundaries (Norman, Heywood & Kentridge, 2013).\",\n \"\\nSuch experiments show that there is an influence operating between\\nunconscious processing and the direction of attention, and perhaps\\nindicate that attention can be paid to objects that make no showing in\\nconscious experience (Mole, 2014a). They therefore place a limit on\\nthe closeness of the relationship that can be claimed to exist between\\nattention and consciousness.\",\n \"\\nThe disputes about whether attention is sufficient for consciousness,\\nnecessary for consciousness, or both, are related to questions about\\nattention’s metaphysics. The claim that attention is not\\nsufficient for consciousness is typically made as part of a defence of\\nthe idea that attention and consciousness are underpinned by two\\ndistinct brain processes, which can occur independently (see, e.g.,\\nKoch and Tsuchiya, 2007). The claim that the things to which we attend\\nare a proper subset of the things that appear in our consciousness is\\nrequired by those who, like Locke (see Section\\n 1.3),\\n think that there is a process of conscious thinking, and that this\\nconstitutes attention when it happens in a certain way. \\nAnd the claim that attention is both necessary and sufficient for\\nconsciousness is required by those who think that the process by which\\nthings come to consciousness is identical to the process by which\\nattention is allocated (Prinz, 2005, 2011). Some scientific theories\\nof consciousness also carry strong commitments concerning its\\nrelationship to attention: Taylor Webb and Michael Graziano emphasize\\nthese commitments in making the empirical case for their\\n‘Attention-Schema’ theory, according to which\\nconsciousness emerges from processes in which the control of attention\\nrequires a schematic representation of the way in which attention is\\nbeing allocated (Graziano and Webb, 2014; Webb and Graziano,\\n2015).\",\n \"\\nWhether or not one thinks that attention is always responsible for\\nbringing things into our consciousness, there are good reasons to\\nthink that changes in the direction of our attention can make some\\ndifference to the character of conscious experience. Phenomenologists\\nand Gestalt psychologists have characterized this difference in\\nvarious ways, with Maurice Merleau-Ponty emphasizing the way in which\\nattention can configure the figure/ground structure of perceived space\\n(Merleau-Ponty, 1962, Chp.3–4), and Aron Gurwitsch (Gurwitsch,\\n1964) elaborating a theory in which the configuration given by\\nattention has a more complex, three-part structure (explained in\\nArvidson, 2006). In the second half of his 2017 book, Sebastian Watzl\\ndevelops a similar suggestion, on the basis of his claim that the role\\nof attention is to impose a priority structure on our mental lives\\n(see above\\n §2.4),\\n (Watzl, 2011, 2017).\",\n \"\\nThere is currently some dispute about whether the differences made by\\nshifts of attention can be adequately characterized as differences in\\nthe content of the attended experience. If, as Watzl\\ncontends, they cannot, then phenomena of attention create a serious\\ndifficulty for any fully general attempts to explain the character of\\nconscious experience by reference to the contents represented in it\\n(Chalmers, 2004). Such explanations might still be viable in\\ncircumscribed domains (Speaks, 2010).\",\n \"\\nA series of studies by Marisa Carrasco and her collaborators have\\nexamined the influence of attention on the character of conscious\\nexperience. These have revealed that the phenomenal differences\\nproduced by shifts of attention include differences of perceived\\nbrightness, contrast, and saturation of colours, but do not include\\ndifferences of hue (Carrasco, Ling & Read, 2004, Fuller &\\nCarrasco, 2006). Ned Block has suggested that these perceived\\ndifferences should not be thought of as differences in the\\ncontent of experience, since to characterize them in that way\\nwould be to take it that attending to an item creates an illusion as\\nto its brightness, contrast, etc.; a result which he takes to be\\nimplausible. Block therefore interprets Carrasco’s findings as\\nindicating an aspect of experience that cannot be accounted for with a\\ntheory in which the phenomenal character of an experience is a\\nfunction of that experience’s content (Block 2010).\",\n \"\\nThere have been similar disputes, transacted on the basis of more\\nintrospective considerations, concerning the effects of attention on\\nthe perception of ambiguous figures (such as the Necker Cube). In\\nresponse to some considerations that were first raised by Fiona\\nMacpherson (Macpherson, 2006), Bence Nanay has suggested that the\\neffects of attention on the perception of such figures can be\\nexplained by those who maintain that every difference in consciousness\\nis a difference of content (Nanay, 2010, 2011). His contention is that\\nthe effects of attention on the character of conscious experience\\nshould be understood as including a modulation of the specificity of\\nan experience’s content, in which the representations of\\ndeterminable properties are made more or less determinate. The issues\\nhere are similar to those concerning the way in which blurriness\\nshould be thought to enter into visual experience (see Section 4.4 of\\nthe entry on\\n representational theories of consciousness).\",\n \"\\nMattia Riccardi casts attention in a rather different phenomenological\\nrole, suggesting (in opposition to the proposal of Matthen, 2010) that\\nattention explains the presentness that differentiates\\none’s perceptual experiences of real objects in one’s\\nimmediate environment from one’s experiences of objects that are seen\\nin photographs, or that are pictured by the mind’s eye during\\nepisodes of vivid imagination (Riccardi, 2019).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.1 Attention and Consciousness\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nConsciousness is only one of the philosophically puzzling mental\\nphenomena that have been thought to be related to attention in ways\\nthat may prove to be explanatorily revealing. Demonstrative\\nreference is another. One advocate of the idea that attention\\ncontributes to the explanation of demonstrative reference is John\\nCampbell, who writes that:\",\n \"\\n… the notion of conscious attention to an object has an\\nexplanatory role to play: it has to explain how it is that we have\\nknowledge of the reference of a demonstrative. (2002, 45)\\n\",\n \"\\nA similar idea was explored in the manuscript on Theory of Knowledge\\nthat Bertrand Russell abandoned (under the influence of Wittgenstein)\\nin the summer in 1913. In that work Russell gives the following\\nstatement of the idea that reference to particulars requires attention\\nto them:\",\n \"\\nAt any moment of my conscious life, there is one object (or at most\\nsome very small number of objects) to which I am attending. All\\nknowledge of particulars radiates out from this object. (1913, 40)\\n\",\n \"\\nIn support of the Russellian claim that there is an explanatory\\nrelation between attention and demonstrative reference, Campbell\\ndevelops two lines of thought.\",\n \"\\nHis first line of thought comes from reflection on examples concerning\\nthe requirements that have to be met in order to understand\\ndemonstrative expressions in conversational contexts where one of the\\nparticipants in the conversation uses expressions such as ‘that\\nwoman’, but where various women are present, all of whom are\\npossible referents for this demonstrative. Knowing which women is\\nmeant, according to Campbell, requires attending to the woman in\\nquestion and knowing that it is to her that the speaker was attending.\\nThis is intended to show more than just that the direction of the\\nspeaker’s attention is a possible source of evidence for what\\nthat speaker means. It is intended as showing that attention and\\nreference stand in a particularly intimate relationship—a\\nrelationship that Campbell characterizes by saying that\\n‘knowledge of the reference of a demonstrative is provided by\\nconscious attention to the object’ (p. 22).\",\n \"\\nThe second line of thought that Campbell develops in support of the\\nview that attention explains demonstrative reference is one pertaining\\nto deductive arguments in which the premises refer to items that are\\npicked out by demonstratives: Arguments such as ‘(1) That is F.\\n(2) That is G. Therefore (3) That is F and G’. Campbell’s\\nthought here is that such arguments depend for their validity on there\\nbeing no possibility of equivocating on the meaning of\\n‘that’, as it occurs in the two separate premises. Such\\narguments can only figure in rationally-entitling reasoning so long as\\nthere is a single fixing of the referent of ‘that’ in both\\npremises. This reference fixing, Campbell thinks, is achieved if and\\nonly if there is no redirection of attention between the premises.\\nAgain this is intended to show more than just that there is some\\ncausal or evidential relation between attending and referring. It is\\nintended to show that the role played by attention in fixing the\\nreference of a demonstrative is analogous to the role played by a\\nFregean Sense in fixing the reference of a proper name (Campbell,\\n2002, Chapter 5).\",\n \"\\nThe explanatory approach that Campbell advocates, and that Russell\\nconsidered, has traditionally been thought to suffer from a problem of\\ncircularity. This problem was urged by Peter Geach in Mental\\nActs (1957). Geach considers the suggestion that we can use\\nattention to explain our ability to make reference to the things that\\nwe perceive, but thinks that no such suggestion can provide a genuine\\nexplanation of reference because:\",\n \"\\n… it is quite useless to say the relevant sense-perceptions\\nmust be attended to, either this does not give a sufficient condition,\\nor else “attended to” is a mere word for the very relation\\nof judgment to sense perception that requires analysis. (1957, 64)\\n\",\n \"\\nGeach’s threat of circularity can be avoided if an independently\\ngiven theory of how attention is constituted can be shown to\\nilluminate the way in which reference is fixed by it. Imogen Dickie\\nhas attempted to show just this. In a 2011 paper Dickie shows that\\ncognitive psychology provides us with a theory of the role played by\\nattention in tracking objects over time. She suggests that such a\\ntheory can be used to account for the way in which attending to an\\nobject removes any knowledge-defeating component of luck from our\\ninferences involving it, thereby establishing the attended object as a\\npossible topic of demonstrative thoughts (Dickie, 2011, 2015). This\\ntreatment of attention exemplifies some of the central themes in\\nDickie’s more general attempt to explain how thoughts come to be\\nabout ordinary objects (and so how singular terms come to refer to\\nthose objects). The explanation that she offers is one in which a\\nthought comes to be about a thing when the justificatory practices in\\nwhich that thought figures are anchored to the object in question (in\\na sense of ‘anchoring’ that Dickie spells out in detail\\n(Dickie, 2015)).\",\n \"\\nWhether or not a theory of attention can be turned into a non-circular\\nexplanation of demonstrative reference, the idea that attention and\\nreference are related does seem to cast light on what goes on when we\\nunderstand referring expressions. Campbell’s examples succeed in\\nsuggesting that what we attend to and what we refer to are often the\\nsame. There is also some empirical evidence, coming from developmental\\npsychology, indicating that attention-related abilities play a crucial\\nrole in the infant’s development of an understanding of its\\ncaregiver’s demonstrative use (see\\n Section 3.3).\\n Lessons have been drawn from this that are not only about the\\ncomprehension of linguistic expressions. This developmental work has\\nalso been taken to imply something about our grasp on directly\\nreferring thoughts. The idea here – as in the work of\\nDickie and Campbell – is not only that attention contributes to\\nour production and comprehension of linguistic expressions that have\\nparticular referents, but that it also contributes to the\\nestablishment of those referents as the contents of our thoughts. In\\naddition to these developmental considerations, Michael Barkasi has\\nsuggested that the nature of attention’s contribution to fixing\\nthe reference of thoughts can be illuminated by considering the\\npattern of neural projections to the frontal eye fields. Whereas\\nCampbell characterizes attention in epistemic terms, Barkasi\\nfavours a sub-doxastic characterization, in which attention\\n‘sets targets’ and thereby regulates the flow of visual\\ninformation (Barkasi, 2019).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.2 Attention and Demonstrative Reference\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThere are empirical results, coming from developmental psychology,\\nwhich are suggestive of an intimate link between the development of\\nvarious abilities related to attention and the development of various\\ncapacities that are involved in understanding the mental states that\\nare expressed in interactions between the infant and its\\ncaregiver.\",\n \"\\nAn ability to appreciate what others are attending to appears to be a\\ncrucial stage in a normal infant’s development towards\\nunderstanding the fact that its caregivers’ utterances have\\nreferential intentions behind them. More generally, capacities for\\nattention develop at important milestones on the route to the\\nacquisition of some distinctively human cognitive capacities (Moore\\nand Dunham, 1995). There is a distinctive developmental pathway in\\nwhich normal human infants develop an ability and a willingness to\\nattend to their mother, an ability and willingness to attend to the\\nthing that she is attending to, and then, most importantly, an ability\\nand willingness to enter into episodes in which there is a third\\nobject that mother and child are attending to jointly, with\\nmutual understanding of the fact that their attention is shared\\n(Reddy, 2010, Trevarthen, 2011). In these episodes infants and\\ncaregivers employ complex cues, involving speech, gaze-following, and\\npointing.\",\n \"\\nThere is good evidence that the child’s progression along this\\npathway is related to its development of abilities to respond\\nappropriately to the mental states of others, and to the development\\nof its ability to acquire new vocabulary on the basis of an\\nunderstanding of what the words used by its mother refer to. A\\nlongitudinal study suggests that the earlier stages in this pathway\\nare predictive of the age at which infants reach the later ones\\n– thereby providing some evidence for the hypothesis that this\\nsequence is a causal one – with the mastery at twelve months of\\npointing as a means to direct the attention of others being predictive\\nof false belief understanding at the age of fifty months, even when\\nfactors relating to temperament and language are factored out (Sodian\\n& Kristen-Antonow, 2015). Another source of evidence comes from\\nthe fact that the arrested development of these attention-involving\\nabilities is a revealing marker of the impairments suffered by\\nautistic children (Kanner, 1943, Hobson and Hobson, 2011). \\nFurther evidence may also come from the fact that a lack of such\\nabilities is related to limitations in the mental-state attribution\\nabilities of non-human primates, although this last claim is more\\ncontroversial (Call & Tomasello, 2005).\",\n \"\\nSome progress has been made towards extracting philosophical lessons\\nfrom the empirical work indicating that joint attention has a role to\\nplay here, in the explanation of distinctively human aspects of\\ncognitive and social development, and also – once that\\ndevelopment is complete – in the explanation of the way in which\\nsome elementary social phenomena are transacted. (For several\\ndevelopmental examples, see the papers collected in Eilan, et\\nal. 2005, and Seemann 2011; for a discussion of joint attention\\nin adult cases of shared intention, see Fiebich and Gallagher, 2012,\\nwho argue that jointly attending has a basic, elementary status, as\\nthe most minimal instance of a joint action.)\",\n \"\\nOne of the points at which philosophical difficulties arise is in\\ncharacterizing the sharedness of the attention that is\\nimplicated in this developmental trajectory. Christopher Peacocke has\\nargued that the way in which joint attention episodes are shared\\ninvolves a kind of reciprocal recognition of the other’s\\nrecognition of one’s own attention, and that it therefore\\ninvolves a kind of mutual openness that is analogous to the openness\\nof ‘common knowledge’, as that notion figures in\\nphilosophical analyses of communication and convention (see the entry\\non\\n convention).\\n Since joint attention is achieved by young children, its achievement\\ncannot plausibly be thought to make any sophisticated intellectual\\ndemands. Peacocke therefore argues that awareness of reciprocated\\nopenness must be more fundamental than the intellectual achievement of\\ncommon knowledge. He suggests that it should instead be\\nunderstood as a variety of perceptual awareness that makes\\nsuch common knowledge possible (Peacocke, 2005). John Campbell shares\\nPeacocke’s view of joint attention as being a perceptual\\nphenomenon, as opposed to a phenomenon that is achieved when\\none’s perception is reflected on in a certain way, but Campbell\\ndiffers from Peacocke in taking the person with whom attention is\\nshared to be fellow subject of the joint experience, not an\\nobject who figures in the content of the experience that each\\njoint-attender individually has (Campbell, 2002, Ch. 8).\\nCampbell’s attempt to shift the explanation of sharedness from\\nthe cognitive to the perceptual domain is rejected by Lucas Battich\\nand Bart Geurts (Battich and Guerts, 2020), who suggest that\\nCampbell’s view suffers from problems that originate in his\\nrelational conception of perception. They therefore claim that the\\nissues here cast light on the long-running debates between\\nrepresentation-based and relation-based theories of perception (see\\nthe entry on\\n the problem of perception).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.3 Attention and Other Minds\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe apparent links between attention and demonstrative reference (see\\nsection\\n 3.2)\\n and attention and knowledge of other minds (see section\\n 3.3)\\n might be special instances of a more general connection between\\nattention and the making of epistemic moves. A general connection of\\nthat sort may have been what Descartes had in mind when he suggested\\nthat attention to clear and distinct ideas is a necessary condition\\nfor those ideas to realize their special epistemic potential (see\\nSection\\n 1.1).\\n It might also be what Stewart had in mind when he suggested that\\n“Some attention [is] necessary for any act of memory\\nwhatever” (see Section\\n 1.4).\\n Kant’s anthropological writings also cast attention in a\\ncrucial epistemic role, as explaining the control that one can exert\\nover representations in thought and in imagination, where this perhaps\\nincludes the kind of imagination that Kant takes to be involved in\\nmaking one’s experiences into experiences of an objective\\nspatiotemporal world (Merritt & Valaris, 2017).\",\n \"\\nAlthough each of these philosophers have tended to frame it in a way\\nthat reflects their other theoretical commitments, some version of the\\nidea that attention is always involved in the making of epistemic\\nmoves can be made pre-theoretically plausible. The inattentional\\nblindness experiments, in which participants are visually presented\\nwith large changes while attending to something else, show that\\ninattentive people can fail to notice all sorts of perceivable things\\nthat attentive people would find obvious. Something exactly similar\\nseems to be true in the case of a priori reasoning: just as no item is\\nso large, so central, and so well-lit that no conscious and sighted\\nobserver could miss it, so there is no step in reasoning that is so\\nsimple, so compelling, and so obvious, that every thinker, whether\\nattentive or inattentive, can be expected to recognise it. Just as the\\ninattentional blindness effects might seem to show that there are\\nattentional demands that a thinker has to meet before his perceptual\\nencounter with things can provide him with knowledge of them, so it is\\nplausible that there are similar attentional demands that have to be\\nmet before the thinker’s grasp of a thought gives her a\\njustified belief in that thought’s consequences. This\\ninterpretation of the inattentional blindness effects is, however,\\ncontroversial. Nicholas Silins and Susanna Siegel have suggested that\\n– even if inattention does sometimes explain a perceiving\\nperson’s failure to form a belief about the things happening in\\ntheir visual field – unattended aspects of experience are\\nnonetheless capable of providing justification for such beliefs\\n(Silins and Sigel, 2019). Émile Thalbard argues to the contrary\\n(Thalabard, 2020).\",\n \"\\nIn both the a priori case and the perceptual case, the acquisition of\\nknowledge seems to require attention on at least some occasions, and\\nin both of these cases that requirement seems to be a\\npractical one. It may be that knowledge of some propositions\\nis required if one’s experience with a gorilla is to provide one\\nwith knowledge of the gorilla’s presence (with the propositions\\nhere being of a sort that could serve as a major premise in an\\ninference by which one’s perceptual experience was interpreted),\\nbut the requirement on gaining knowledge from experience cannot be\\nthat one must be bearing such propositions in mind. The same is true\\nin the a priori domain. What is required before an a priori\\nentitlement can be recognized cannot be that one has to entertain some\\nprior knowledge of a proposition from which that entitlement can be\\ndeduced. To suppose that occurrent propositional knowledge is what is\\nnecessary for such moves would be to embark on the regress set by\\nLewis Carroll’s tortoise to Achilles (Carroll, 1895). What\\nepistemic move-making requires is not occurrent knowledge of a\\nproposition. The thing that it requires is the right sort of active\\nattention.\",\n \"\\nThe attentional requirements that have to be met before one can\\nacquire knowledge from experience or recognize an a priori entitlement\\nare not requirements merely for alertness. They are not captured\\nmerely by saying that, in order to gain knowledge, the thinker has to\\npay some attention to the relevant ideas. A thinker may be attending\\nto a syllogism, but, if he is attending to its rhythm, he may still be\\nunable to see that the conclusion follows. A non-question begging\\ncharacterisation of the attentional requirements of knowledge\\nacquisition in general would be an important contribution to\\nepistemology. Current work on attention, focussing as it does on\\nattention as a perceptual phenomenon, may give us only part of the\\ngeneral theory that we need. Work on the purely intellectual forms of\\nattention continues to be scarce. This shortcoming has been emphasized\\nby Mark Fortney, who argues that the neglect of intellectual attention\\nhas led philosophers to misinterpret some of the claims made in the\\nempirical literature on attention and consciousness (Fortney, 2019).\\nFortney also claims that considerations pertaining to intellectual\\nattention should have a central role in debates about the transparency\\nof phenomenology, and about the consequences of this transparency for\\nthe epistemology of self-attributed thoughts (debates that are\\nexemplified, in Fortney’s discussion, by Byrne, 2018). Fortney\\nsuggests that, when attention is given this role, certain results from\\ncognitive psychology cast light on these debates. He thinks, when seen\\nin this light, some of the claims that have been made about the\\ntransparency of occurrent thought start to seem dubious (Fortney,\\n2020).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.4 Attention and Knowledge\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAttention’s involvement in voluntary action is a lot\\nharder to study in a controlled experiment than its involvement in\\nperception. The theories of attention emerging from experimental\\npsychology have, as a result, focused almost exclusively on\\nattention’s perceptual instances. In this respect they contrast\\nwith theories that were developed in the period before psychology and\\nphilosophy split, in which the action-involving aspects of attention\\nwere much more prominent. William James, for example, suggests in the\\nPrinciples of Psychology that ‘volition is nothing but\\nattention’ (James, 1890 p. 424), and at one time (in what might\\nbe read as an anticipation of the competition-based theories discussed\\nabove, in\\n §2.6)\\n he proposed that “Attention, belief, affirmation, and motor\\nvolition, are […] four names for an identical process,\\nincidental to the conflict of ideas alone, the survival of one in\\nspite of the opposition of the others.” (1880).\",\n \"\\nThe issues surrounding attention’s relationship to the\\nvoluntariness of action are parallel to some of the issues surrounding\\nattention’s relationship to the consciousness of perception. It\\nseems natural to think that attention is necessary for the voluntary\\nperformance of finely tuned behaviours, much as it seems necessary for\\nthe conscious perception of fine detail. But it does not seem natural\\nto think that we must be paying attention to the execution of every\\nact that we voluntarily perform, any more than it seem natural to\\nsuppose that we must pay attention in order to be consciously\\nperceiving anything at all. A case could therefore be made, on\\ncommonsense grounds, for claiming that attention figures in the\\nproduction of some but not all voluntary behaviours. One can imagine\\nthis view being challenged by a theorist who claimed that attention is\\nnecessary for any action to be voluntary, arguing that there is an\\nillusion (analogous to the refrigerator light illusion) that gives us\\nthe mistaken impression that our inattentive acts are voluntary too.\\nAs in the case of attention and consciousness, there is a\\nmethodological puzzle (with epistemologically deep roots) about the\\nsort of evidence that could settle this issue. This may be a topic for\\nfuture research. While resisting the idea that attention is either\\nnecessary or sufficient for an act to be voluntary, Denis Buehler has\\nargued that there is a central role for attention in the explanation\\nof flexible goal-directed behaviour (Buehler, 2019). In cases where\\nthat behaviour involves the exercise of a skill, Alex Dayer and\\nCarolyn Jennings have argued against the idea that any simple account\\nof attention’s role in it can be given, claiming that a theory\\nof attention’s role in skilled performance must instead be\\n‘pluralist’ (Dayer & Jennings, 2021).\",\n \"\\nThe separation of attention’s role in action from\\nattention’s role in perception is somewhat artificial,\\nespecially when the perception in question is perception of\\none’s own moving body. Psychological research into that\\nparticular form of perception has been largely independent of research\\ninto the role of attention in vision and audition. A 2016 paper by\\nGregor Hochstetter reviews the research into this bodily case, and\\nargues, following Marcel Kinsbourne (1995, 2002) that internal\\nrepresentation of a ‘body image’ must play some role in\\nguiding attention during normal bodily awareness (Hochstetter,\\n2016).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.5 Attention and Voluntary Action\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nAttention’s contribution to our understanding of values has been\\nrelatively underexplored in the recent literature. The range of\\nvalue-theoretic contexts in which attention makes an explanatorily\\nsignificant appearance is nonetheless broad.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4 Attention and Value\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe subject matter of aesthetics can be demarcated in various ways,\\neach of which is somewhat controversial (see Lopes, 2014). A natural\\nthought here is that aesthetics might be identified as the branch of\\nphilosophy that is concerned with one particular sort of experience.\\nIf this proposal is to be informative then it obviously needs to be\\nsupplemented with some specification of which sort of experience that\\nis. It is clear that this specification cannot be given via an\\nextensional specification of the objects that are experienced: the\\nsame wine might be experienced by the connoisseur and the thirsty man,\\nwith only one of their experiences being aesthetic; the same painting\\nmight be seen aesthetically by the art lover, and from a purely\\nfinancial point of view by its dealer.\",\n \"\\nOne response to this would be individuate experiences more finely than\\ntheir objects, by instead identifying some particular set of\\nproperties that are experienced as belonging to those objects\\nin the aesthetic case (see the section on aesthetic objects in the\\nentry on\\n the concept of the aesthetic).\\n An alternative response would be to consider not only the contents\\nthat are experienced, but also the way in which the subject\\nexperiences them, perhaps by identifying some particular\\nattitude that characterises the subject in the aesthetic\\ncase, or perhaps by identifying some mode of attention that that\\nsubject instantiates (see the section on the aesthetic attitude in the\\nentry on\\n the concept of the aesthetic).\",\n \"\\nAttempts to identify such an aesthetic mode of attention are\\nwell-represented in the philosophical tradition. Kant’s famous\\nclaims about judgements of beauty having a first moment of\\ndisinterested pleasure are usually read as a paradigm of the\\nattitude-identifying approach (see the entry on\\n Kant’s aesthetics and teleology),\\n but Jessica Williams has argued that Kant must also be operating with\\na notion of aesthetic attention, as being a mode of attention\\ninvolving a distinctive combination of imagination and understanding\\n(Williams, 2021).\",\n \"\\nSome such notion of attention also plays a central role in R.G.\\nCollingwood’s account of the way in which art (and, in\\nparticular, literature) contributes positively to a society’s\\nculture. Collingwood describes attention as “the assertion of\\nourselves as the owners of our feelings”, and takes this\\nself-assertion to be crucial in enabling us to exercise volition over\\nthose feelings, so that “Their brute power over us is thus\\nreplaced by our power over them” (Collingwood, 1938, p. 222).\\nCollingwood therefore takes the diminution of a society’s\\nartistic culture to make it vulnerable to emotive influences (while\\nhimself suggesting that this might best read, not as a broad\\nphilosophical claim, but as a point about Europe in the nineteen\\nthirties).\",\n \"\\nAttempts to demarcate the aesthetic via the identification of an\\naesthetic attitude, or of an aesthetic mode of attention, have been\\nattacked — for their details, and for their more general\\norientation (most famously by George Dickie, in his 1964 paper). Those\\nlines of attack have led to a widespread acceptance of the idea that\\nthere is something wrongheaded about specifying necessary and\\nsufficient conditions for qualifying as aesthetic via the\\nidentification of some particular aesthetic attitude. Many\\nphilosophers nonetheless retain the idea that there are informative\\nthings that can be said, in the service of less strictly defined\\ntheoretical ends, about the sorts of attitudes that are often found to\\nbe exemplified in aesthetic cases. It is in this spirit that some\\nideas about distinctive forms of aesthetic attention have recently\\nbeen revived.\",\n \"\\nServaas van der Berg suggests that a distinctive mode of attention can\\nbe seen in cases of aesthetic appreciation (van der Berg, 2019). He\\nclaims that this mode of attention is distinguished by its\\nmotivational structure, which has a form that is similar to the\\nmotivational structure of game playing, as theorised by Bernard Suits\\n(Suits, 1978) and Thi Nguyen (Nguyen, 2020). This structure is one\\nthat inverts the normal order of priorities between means and ends: in\\nnormal actions one’s means are typically taken in order to bring\\nabout one’s ends, but the game-playing golfer (for example)\\ninstead adopts the end of getting his ball into a hole in order that\\nhe can take the means to reaching that end. Van der Berg argues that a\\nsimilar inversion is seen in aesthetic appreciation, where the\\ncognitive means that are required in order to reach understanding\\nprovide the reasons for adopting the end of understanding an item that\\nis being appreciated aesthetically.\",\n \"\\nBence Nanay has set out a position with similar aims — not\\naspiring to give necessary or sufficient conditions for the aesthetic,\\nbut aiming to cast some light on the way in which certain central\\ncases of aesthetic experience operate. He does this by giving a theory\\nof the distinctive way in which our attention is engaged in the course\\nof these experiences. Nanay emphasizes the psychological distinction\\nbetween focused and distributed attention, and uses examples from a\\nrange of arts to suggest that aesthetic experiences often require\\nattention of both sorts. He also suggests this contributes to\\nthe value that we place on such experiences (Nanay, 2015, 2016).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.1 Attention in Aesthetics\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nSimone Weil suggests that attention has an absolutely central role in\\nethics, and in value theory more broadly, writing that:\",\n \"\\nThe authentic and pure values – truth, beauty and goodness\\n– in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the\\nsame act, a certain application of the full attention to the object.\\n(Weil, 1986, p. 214)\\n\",\n \"\\nThis apotheosizing of attention provides the basis for Weil’s\\nclaims about priorities for education. On these points, her position\\nis shared by a number of other figures whose work sits at the\\ninterface of philosophy and literature (see Mole, 2017). Christopher\\nThomas has suggested that the role played by attention in Weil’s\\n‘ethics of affliction’ can be interpreted as an attempt to\\nput some central notions from Kant’s aesthetic theory to ethical\\nwork (Thomas, 2020).\",\n \"\\nThe influence of Kant was in the foreground, together with the\\ninteractions between ethics and aesthetics, when Weil’s claims\\nabout attention’s import were developed in the work of Iris\\nMurdoch. Murdoch suggests that there are certain forms of attention\\nthat play an essential role in the exercise of the virtues (Murdoch,\\n1970, see Bagnoli, 2003, Mole, 2006). She implies that a capacity for\\nthese forms of attention can be cultivated through experiences of\\nbeauty. These themes have been taken up by Dorothea Debus, who places\\nparticular emphasis on Weil’s claim that it is full\\nattention to which cardinal value is attributed (Debus, 2015). Antony\\nFredriksson and Silvia Panizza suggest that the aspects of attention\\nthat Murdoch takes to be important are seen with particular clarity if\\none adopts the perspective of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of\\nattention, in which the openness of the attentive mind is\\nemphasized (Fredriksson & Panizza, 2020). Nicolas Bommarito has\\ndeveloped an account of modesty along broadly Murdochian lines, as\\nbeing a ‘virtue of attention’. He argues that this avoids\\nepistemic difficulties that other accounts of modesty face, if they\\ninstead characterize modesty as requiring false beliefs about the\\nextent of one’s strengths (Bommarito, 2013).\",\n \"\\nSimilar issues are approached from a somewhat different direction by\\nPeter Goldie (Goldie, 2004), and Michael Brady (Brady, 2010), both of\\nwho relate attention and virtue to the epistemic significance of a\\nperson’s emotional life. Both Goldie and Brady suggest that the\\nattention-modulating profile of an emotion is essential to it, and\\nboth claim that this modulation of attention by emotion plays an\\nineliminable role in our having a full appreciation of the evaluative\\nproperties that we encounter in the world around us. Goldie and Brady\\ndisagree as to how this epistemic role should be characterized, with\\nGoldie taking the experience of one’s own emotion to itself be a\\nreason-giving experience, with an epistemic authority analogous to\\none’s experiences of the things in one’s visual field,\\nwhereas Brady takes the emotional subject’s experience of items\\nin the world to have an epistemic authority that is not shared by the\\nsubject’s experience of their own emotional state, so that that\\nstate’s epistemic significance must instead be exhausted by its\\ninfluence on our outwardly-directed attention (Brady, 2013).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.2 Attention in Ethics\"\n }\n ]\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Allport, A., 1987, “Selection for action: Some behavioural\nand neurophysiological considerations of attention and action”,\nin Perspectives on perception and action, A. 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Miles (ed.)\\nNew York: Grove Press.\",\n \"White, A., 1964, Attention, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.\",\n \"Williams, J., 2018, Stand out of our Light: Freedom and\\nResistance in the Attention Economy, Cambridge: Cambridge\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Williams, J.J., 2021, “Kant on Aesthetic Attention”\\nThe British Journal of Aesthetics, online 12 May 2021,\\ndoi:10.1093/aesthj/ayaa057\",\n \"Wolff, C., 1732, Empirical Psychology, Treated According to\\nthe Scientific Method, Frankfurt and Leipzig: Officina Libraria\\nRengeriana.\",\n \"Wolff, J. M., 1999, “Inattentional Amnesia” in\\nFleeting Memories: Cognition of Brief Visual Stimuli, V.\\nColtheart (ed.), Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 71–94.\",\n \"Wright, R. D., & Ward, L. M., 2008, Orienting of\\nAttention, New York: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Wu, W., 2011a, “Confronting many-many problems: Attention\\nand agentive control”, Noûs, 45(1):\\n51–60.\",\n \"–––, 2011b, “Attention as Selection for\\nAction”, in Christopher Mole, Declan Smithies, and Wayne Wu\\n(eds.), Attention: Philosophical and Psychological Essays,\\nNew York: Oxford University Press, pp. 97–116.\",\n \"–––, 2014, Attention, London:\\nRoutledge.\",\n \"–––, 2019. “Action always involves\\nattention”. Analysis, 79(4): 693–703.\",\n \"Yantis, S., 1998, “Control of Visual Attention”, in H.\\nPashler (ed.), Attention, New York: Psychology Press\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../behaviorism/","text":"behaviorism"},{"href":"../bradley/","text":"Bradley, Francis Herbert"},{"href":"../cognitive-science/","text":"cognitive science"},{"href":"../collingwood-aesthetics/","text":"Collingwood, Robin George: aesthetics"},{"href":"../common-knowledge/","text":"common knowledge"},{"href":"../consciousness/","text":"consciousness"},{"href":"../consciousness-intentionality/","text":"consciousness: and intentionality"},{"href":"../freewill/","text":"free will"},{"href":"../hermann-helmholtz/","text":"Helmholtz, Hermann von"},{"href":"../james/","text":"James, William"},{"href":"../locke/","text":"Locke, John"},{"href":"../computational-mind/","text":"mind: computational theory of"},{"href":"../ryle/","text":"Ryle, Gilbert"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../behaviorism/\",\n \"text\": \"behaviorism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../bradley/\",\n \"text\": \"Bradley, Francis Herbert\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../cognitive-science/\",\n \"text\": \"cognitive science\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../collingwood-aesthetics/\",\n \"text\": \"Collingwood, Robin George: aesthetics\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../common-knowledge/\",\n \"text\": \"common knowledge\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../consciousness/\",\n \"text\": \"consciousness\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../consciousness-intentionality/\",\n \"text\": \"consciousness: and intentionality\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../freewill/\",\n \"text\": \"free will\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../hermann-helmholtz/\",\n \"text\": \"Helmholtz, Hermann von\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../james/\",\n \"text\": \"James, William\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../locke/\",\n \"text\": \"Locke, John\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../computational-mind/\",\n \"text\": \"mind: computational theory of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../ryle/\",\n \"text\": \"Ryle, Gilbert\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":89,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"properties"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Properties"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Thu Sep 23, 1999; substantive revision Wed Nov 25, 2020"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nProperties are those entities that can be predicated of\nthings or, in other words, attributed to them. Thus,\nproperties are often called predicables. Other terms for them\nare “attributes”, “qualities”,\n“features”, “characteristics”,\n“types”. Properties are also ways things are, entities\nthat things exemplify or instantiate. For example,\nif we say that this is a leaf and is green, we are attributing the\nproperties leaf and green to it, and, if the\npredication is veridical, the thing in question exemplifies these\nproperties. Hence, properties can also be characterized as\nexemplifiables, with the controversial exception of those\nthat cannot be instantiated, e.g., some would say, round and\nsquare. It is typically assumed that no other entities can be\npredicated and exemplified (Aristotle, Categories, 2a). For\nexample, ordinary objects like apples and chairs cannot be predicated\nof, and are not exemplified by, anything.","\nThe nature and existence of properties have always been central and\ncontroversial issues in philosophy since its origin, and interest in\nthem keeps flourishing, as Allen’s (2016) recent introductory\ntext well testifies (see also surveys or anthologies such as Loux\n1972; Oliver 1996; Mellor and Oliver 1997; Koons and Pickavance 2017;\nMarmodoro and Mayr 2019). At least since Plato, who called them\n“ideas” or “forms”, properties are viewed as\nuniversals, i.e., as capable, (in typical cases) of being\ninstantiated by different objects, “shared” by them, as it\nwere; consequently, in contrast with particulars, or\nindividuals, of being somehow at once in different\n places.[1]\n For example, if there are two potatoes each of which weighs 300\ngrams, the property weighing 300 grams is instantiated by two\nparticulars and is therefore multi-located. According to a different\nconception, however, properties are themselves particulars, though\nabstract ones. As so conceived, properties are nowadays\ncommonly called\n tropes,\n and are the subject of another entry. Here we shall focus on\nproperties as universals. Relations, e.g., loving and\nbetween, can also be considered properties: they are\npredicable, exemplifiable, and viewable as universals. Accordingly, we\nuse “property” as a generic term that also covers them,\nunless the context suggests otherwise. However, we shall consider\ntheir peculiarity only to a minimum extent, since they are discussed\nin detail in the entry on\n relations.","\nIn §1 we consider some most fundamental themes, including the\nmain motivations and arguments for including properties in one’s\nontology. In §2 we deal with the central topic of what it is for\nproperties to be exemplified. In §3 we tackle the intertwined\nissues of the existence and identity conditions for properties. In\n§4 we consider different senses in which properties may be\nstructurally complex. In §5 we survey the frequent appeal to\nproperties in current metaphysics of science. In §6 we conclude\nwith a review of formal accounts of properties and their applications\nin natural language semantics and the foundations of mathematics,\nwhich provide additional motivations for an ontological commitment to\nproperties."],"string":"[\n \"\\nProperties are those entities that can be predicated of\\nthings or, in other words, attributed to them. Thus,\\nproperties are often called predicables. Other terms for them\\nare “attributes”, “qualities”,\\n“features”, “characteristics”,\\n“types”. Properties are also ways things are, entities\\nthat things exemplify or instantiate. For example,\\nif we say that this is a leaf and is green, we are attributing the\\nproperties leaf and green to it, and, if the\\npredication is veridical, the thing in question exemplifies these\\nproperties. Hence, properties can also be characterized as\\nexemplifiables, with the controversial exception of those\\nthat cannot be instantiated, e.g., some would say, round and\\nsquare. It is typically assumed that no other entities can be\\npredicated and exemplified (Aristotle, Categories, 2a). For\\nexample, ordinary objects like apples and chairs cannot be predicated\\nof, and are not exemplified by, anything.\",\n \"\\nThe nature and existence of properties have always been central and\\ncontroversial issues in philosophy since its origin, and interest in\\nthem keeps flourishing, as Allen’s (2016) recent introductory\\ntext well testifies (see also surveys or anthologies such as Loux\\n1972; Oliver 1996; Mellor and Oliver 1997; Koons and Pickavance 2017;\\nMarmodoro and Mayr 2019). At least since Plato, who called them\\n“ideas” or “forms”, properties are viewed as\\nuniversals, i.e., as capable, (in typical cases) of being\\ninstantiated by different objects, “shared” by them, as it\\nwere; consequently, in contrast with particulars, or\\nindividuals, of being somehow at once in different\\n places.[1]\\n For example, if there are two potatoes each of which weighs 300\\ngrams, the property weighing 300 grams is instantiated by two\\nparticulars and is therefore multi-located. According to a different\\nconception, however, properties are themselves particulars, though\\nabstract ones. As so conceived, properties are nowadays\\ncommonly called\\n tropes,\\n and are the subject of another entry. Here we shall focus on\\nproperties as universals. Relations, e.g., loving and\\nbetween, can also be considered properties: they are\\npredicable, exemplifiable, and viewable as universals. Accordingly, we\\nuse “property” as a generic term that also covers them,\\nunless the context suggests otherwise. However, we shall consider\\ntheir peculiarity only to a minimum extent, since they are discussed\\nin detail in the entry on\\n relations.\",\n \"\\nIn §1 we consider some most fundamental themes, including the\\nmain motivations and arguments for including properties in one’s\\nontology. In §2 we deal with the central topic of what it is for\\nproperties to be exemplified. In §3 we tackle the intertwined\\nissues of the existence and identity conditions for properties. In\\n§4 we consider different senses in which properties may be\\nstructurally complex. In §5 we survey the frequent appeal to\\nproperties in current metaphysics of science. In §6 we conclude\\nwith a review of formal accounts of properties and their applications\\nin natural language semantics and the foundations of mathematics,\\nwhich provide additional motivations for an ontological commitment to\\nproperties.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Properties: Basic Ideas","sub_toc":["1.1 How We Speak of Properties","1.2 Arguments for Properties","1.3 Traditional Views about the Existence of Universals","1.4 Properties in Propositions and States of Affairs","1.5 Relations","1.6 Universals versus Tropes","1.7 Kinds of Properties"]},{"content_title":"2. Exemplification","sub_toc":["2.1 Monist vs. Pluralist Accounts","2.2 Compresence and Partial Identity","2.3 Bradley’s Regress","2.4 Self-exemplification"]},{"content_title":"3. Existence and Identity Conditions for Properties","sub_toc":["3.1 From Extensionality to Hyperintensionality","3.2 The Sparse and the Abundant Conceptions"]},{"content_title":"4. Complex Properties","sub_toc":["4.1 Logically Compound Properties","4.2 Structural Properties"]},{"content_title":"5. Properties in the Metaphysics of Science","sub_toc":["5.1 Miscellaneous Topics","5.2. Essentially Categorical vs. Essentially Dispositional Properties"]},{"content_title":"6. Formal Property Theories and their applications","sub_toc":["6.1 Logical Systems for Properties","6.2 Semantics and Logical Form","6.3 Foundations of Mathematics"]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Properties: Basic Ideas\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"1.1 How We Speak of Properties\",\n \"1.2 Arguments for Properties\",\n \"1.3 Traditional Views about the Existence of Universals\",\n \"1.4 Properties in Propositions and States of Affairs\",\n \"1.5 Relations\",\n \"1.6 Universals versus Tropes\",\n \"1.7 Kinds of Properties\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Exemplification\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"2.1 Monist vs. Pluralist Accounts\",\n \"2.2 Compresence and Partial Identity\",\n \"2.3 Bradley’s Regress\",\n \"2.4 Self-exemplification\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Existence and Identity Conditions for Properties\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"3.1 From Extensionality to Hyperintensionality\",\n \"3.2 The Sparse and the Abundant Conceptions\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Complex Properties\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"4.1 Logically Compound Properties\",\n \"4.2 Structural Properties\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Properties in the Metaphysics of Science\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"5.1 Miscellaneous Topics\",\n \"5.2. Essentially Categorical vs. Essentially Dispositional Properties\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. Formal Property Theories and their applications\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"6.1 Logical Systems for Properties\",\n \"6.2 Semantics and Logical Form\",\n \"6.3 Foundations of Mathematics\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\nThere are some crucial terminological and conceptual distinctions that\nare typically made in talking of properties. There are also various\nsorts of reasons that have been adduced for the existence of\nproperties and different traditional views about whether and in what\nsense properties should be acknowledged. We shall focus on such\nmatters in the following subsections."],"section_title":"1. Properties: Basic Ideas","subsections":[{"content":["\nProperties are expressed, as meanings, by\npredicates. In the past “predicate” was often\nused as synonym of “property”, but nowadays predicates are\nlinguistic entities, typically contrasted with singular\nterms, i.e., simple or complex noun phrases such as\n“Daniel”, “this horse” or “the President\nof France”, which can occupy subject positions in sentences and\npurport to denote, or refer to, a single thing.\nFollowing Frege, predicates are verbal phrases such as\n“is French” or “drinks”. Alternatively,\npredicates are general terms such as “French”,\nwith the copula “is” (or verbal inflection) taken to\nconvey an exemplification link (P. Strawson 1959; Bergmann 1960). We\nshall conveniently use “predicate” in both ways.\nPredicates are predicated of singular terms, thereby\ngenerating sentences such as “Daniel is French”. In the\nfamiliar formal language of first-order logic, this would be rendered,\nsay, as “\\(F(d)\\)”, thus representing the predicate with a\ncapital letter. The set or class of objects to which a predicate\nveridically applies is often called the extension of the\npredicate, or of the corresponding property. This property, in\ncontrast, is called the intension of the predicate, i.e., its\nmeaning. This terminology traces back to the Middle Age and in the\nlast century has led to the habit of calling sets and properties\nextensional and intensional entities, respectively.\nExtensions and intensions can hardly be identified; this is\nimmediately suggested by paradigmatic examples of co-extensional\npredicates that appear to differ in meaning, such as “has a\nheart”, and “has kidneys” (see\n §3.1).","\nProperties can also be referred to by singular terms, or so it seems.\nFirst of all, there are singular terms, e.g., “being\nhonest” or “honesty”, that result from the\nnominalization of predicates, such as “is honest”\nor “honest” (some think that “being \\(F\\)” and\n“\\(F\\)-ness” stand for different kinds of property\n(Levinson 1991). Further, there are definite descriptions, such as\n“Mary’s favorite property”. Finally, though more\ncontroversially, there are demonstratives, such as “that shade\nof red”, deployed while pointing to a red object (Heal\n1997).","\nFrege (1892) and Russell (1903) had different opinions regarding the\nontological import of nominalization. According to the former,\nnominalized predicates stand for a “correlate” of the\n“unsaturated” entity that the predicate stands for (in\nFrege’s terminology they are a “concept correlate”\nand a “concept”, respectively). According to the latter,\nwho speaks of “inextricable difficulties” in Frege’s\nview (Russell 1903: §49), they stand for exactly the same entity.\nMutatis mutandis, they similarly disagreed about other\nsingular terms that seemingly refer to properties. The ontological\ndistinction put forward by Frege is mainly motivated by the fact that\ngrammar indeed forbids the use of predicates in subject position. But\nthis hardly suffices for the distinction and it is dubious that other\nmotivations can be marshalled (Parsons 1986). We shall thus take for\ngranted Russell’s line here, although many philosophers support\nFrege’s view or at least take it very seriously\n(Castañeda 1976; Cocchiarella 1986a; Landini 2008)."],"subsection_title":"1.1 How We Speak of Properties"},{"content":["\nProperties are typically invoked to explain phenomena of philosophical\ninterest. The most traditional task for which properties have been\nappealed to is to provide a solution to the so-called “one over\nmany problem” via a corresponding “one over many\nargument”. This traces back at least to Socrates and Plato\n(e.g., Phaedo, 100 c-d) and keeps being rehearsed (Russell\n1912: ch. 9; Butchvarov 1966; Armstrong 1978a: ch. 7; Loux 1998:\nch.1). The problem is that certain things are many, they are\nnumerically different, and yet they are somehow one: they appear to be\nsimilar, in a way that suggests a uniform classification, their being\ngrouped together into a single class. For example, some objects have\nthe same shape, certain others have the same color, and still others\nthe same weight. Hence, the argument goes, something is needed to\nexplain this phenomenon and properties fill the bill: the objects in\nthe first group, say, all have the property spherical, those\nin the second red, and those in the third weighing 200\ngrams.","\nRelatedly, properties have been called for to explain our use of\ngeneral terms. How is it, e.g., that we apply “spherical”\nto those balls over there and refuse to do it for the nearby bench? It\ndoes not seem to be due to an arbitrary decision concerning where, or\nwhere not, to stick a certain label. It seems rather the case that the\nrecognition of a certain property in some objects but not in others\nelicits the need for a label, “spherical”, which is then\nused for objects having that property and not for others. Properties\nare thus invoked as meanings of general terms and\npredicates (Plato, Phaedo, 78e; Russell 1912: ch.\n9). In contrast with this, Quine (1948; 1953 [1980: 11, 21, 131] )\ninfluentially argued that the use of general terms and predicates in\nitself does not involve an ontological commitment to entities\ncorresponding to them, since it is by deploying singular terms that we\npurport to refer to something (see also Sellars 1960). However, as\nnoted, predicates can be nominalized and thus occur as singular terms.\nHence, even if one agrees with Quine, nominalized predicates still\nsuggest the existence of properties as their referents, at least to\nthe extent that the use of nominalized predicates cannot be\nparaphrased away (Loux 2006: 25–34; entry on\n platonism in metaphysics, §4).","\nAfter Quine (1948), quantificational idiom is the landmark of\nontological commitment. We can thus press the point even more by\nnoting that we make claims and construct arguments that appear to\ninvolve quantification over properties, with quantifiers reaching (i)\nover predicate positions, or even (ii) over both subject and predicate\npositions (Castañeda\n 1976).[2]\n As regards (i), consider: this apple is red; this tomato is red;\nhence, there is something that this apple is and this tomato also is.\nAs for (ii), consider: wisdom is more important than beauty; Mary is\nwise and Elisabeth is beautiful; hence, there is something that Mary\nis which is more important than something that Elisabeth is.","\nQuantification over properties seems ubiquitous not just in ordinary\ndiscourse but in science as well. For example, the inverse square law\nfor dynamics and the reduction of temperature to mean molecular energy\ncan be taken to involve quantification over properties such as masses,\ndistances and temperatures: the former tells us that the attraction\nforce between any two bodies depends on such bodies’ having\ncertain masses and being at a certain distance, and the latter informs\nus that the fact that a sample of gas has a given temperature depends\non its having such and such mean kinetic energy.","\nSwoyer (1999: §3.2) considers these points within a long list of\narguments that have been, or can be, put forward to motivate an\nontological commitment to properties. He touches on topics such as\na priori knowledge, change, causation, measurement, laws of\nnature, intensional logic, natural language semantics, numbers (we\nshall cover some of this territory in\n §5\n and\n §6).","\nDespite all this, whether, and in what sense, properties should be\nadmitted in one’s ontology appears to be a perennial issue,\ntraditionally shaped as a controversy about the existence of\nuniversals."],"subsection_title":"1.2 Arguments for Properties"},{"content":["\nDo universals really exist? There are three long-standing answers to\nthis question: realism, nominalism, and\nconceptualism.","\nAccording to realists, universals exist as mind-independent entities.\nIn transcendent realism, put forward by Plato, they exist\neven if uninstantiated and are thus “transcendent” or\n“ante res” (“before the things”). In\nimmanent realism, defended by Aristotle in opposition to his\nmaster, they are “immanent” or “in\nrebus” (“in things”), as they exist only if\ninstantiated by objects. Contemporary notable supporters are Russell\n(1912) for the former and Armstrong (1978a) for the latter (for recent\ntakes on this old dispute see the essays by Loux, Van Inwagen, Lowe\nand Galluzzo in Galluzzo & Loux 2015). Transcendentism is of\ncourse a less economical position and elicits epistemological worries\nregarding our capacity to grasp ante res universals.\nNevertheless, such worries may be countered in various ways (cf. entry\non\n platonism in metaphysics, §5;\n Bealer 1982: 19–20; 1998: §2; Linsky & Zalta 1995),\nand uninstantiated properties may well have work to do, particularly\nin capturing the intuitive idea that there are unrealized\npossibilities and in dealing with cognitive content (see\n §3).\n A good summary of pro-transcendentist arguments and immanentist\nrejoinders is offered by Allen (2016: §2.3). See also Costa\nforthcoming for a new criticism of immanentism, based on the\nnotion of grounding.","\nNominalists eschew mind-independent universals. They may either resort\nto tropes in their stead, or accept predicate nominalism,\nwhich tries to make it without mind-independent properties at all, by\ntaking the predicates themselves to do the classifying job that\nproperties are supposed to do. This is especially indigestible to a\nrealist, since it seems to put the cart before the horse by making\nlanguage and mind responsible for the similarities we find in the rich\nvarieties of things surrounding us. Some even say that this involves\nan idealist rejection of a mind-independent world (Hochberg 2013).\nConceptualists also deny that there are mind-independent universals,\nand because of this they are often assimilated to nominalists. Still,\nthey can be distinguished insofar as they replace such universals with\nconcepts, understood as non-linguistic mind-dependent entities,\ntypically functioning as meanings of predicates. The mind-dependence\nof concepts however makes conceptualism liable to the same kind of\ncart/horse worry just voiced above in relation to predicate\n nominalism.[3]","\nThe arguments considered in\n §1.2\n constitute the typical motivation for realism, which is the stance\nthat we take for granted here. They may be configured as an abductive\ninference to the best explanation (Swoyer 1999). Thus, of course, they\nare not foolproof, and in fact nominalism is still a popular view,\nwhich is discussed in detail in the entry on\n nominalism in metaphysics,\n as well as in the entry on\n tropes.\n Conceptualism appears to be less common nowadays, although it still\nhas supporters (cf. Cocchiarella 1986a: ch. 3; 2007), and it is worth\nnoting that empirical research on concepts is flourishing."],"subsection_title":"1.3 Traditional Views about the Existence of Universals"},{"content":["\nWe have talked above in a way that might give the impression that\npredication is an activity that we perform, e.g., when we say\nor think that a certain apple is red. Although some philosophers might\nthink of it in this way, predication, or attribution, may\nalso be viewed as a special link that connects a property to a thing\nin a way that gives rise to a\n proposition,\n understood as a complex\nfeaturing the property and the thing (or concepts of them) as\nconstituents with different roles: the latter occurs in the\nproposition as logical subject or argument, as is\noften said, and the former as attributed to such an argument.\nIf the proposition is true (the predication is veridical), the\nargument exemplifies the property, viz. the former is an instance of\nthe latter. The idea that properties yield propositions when\nappropriately connected to an argument motivates Russell’s\n(1903) introduction of the term\n“propositional\nfunction” to speak of properties. We\ntake for granted here that predication is univocal. However, according\nto some neo-Meinongian philosophers, there are two modes of\npredication, sometimes characterized as “external” and\n“internal” (Castañeda 1972; Rapaport 1978; Zalta\n1983; see entry on\n nonexistent objects).\n Zalta (1983) traces back the distinction to Mally and uses\n“exemplification” to characterize the former and\n“encoding” to characterize the latter. Roughly, the idea\nis that non-existent objects may encode properties that existent\nobjects exemplify. For instance, winged is exemplified by\nthat bird over there and is encoded by the winged horse.","\nIt is often assumed nowadays that, when an object exemplifies a\nproperty, there is a further, complex, entity, a fact or state of\naffairs (Bergmann 1960; Armstrong 1997, entries on\n facts\n and\n states of affairs),\n having the property (qua attributed) and the object\n(qua argument) as constituents (this compositional conception\nis not always accepted; see, e.g., Bynoe 2011 for a dissenting voice).\nFacts are typically taken to fulfill the theoretical roles of\ntruthmakers (the entities that make true propositions true, see entry\non\n truthmakers)\n and causal relata (the entities connected by causal\nrelations; see entry on\n the metaphysics of causation, §1).\n Not all philosophers, however, distinguish between propositions and\nstates of affairs; Russell (1903) acknowledges only propositions and,\nfor a more recent example, so does Gaskin (2008).","\nIt appears that properties can have a double role that no other\nentities can have: they can occur in propositions and facts both as\narguments and as attributed (Russell 1903: §48). For example, in\ntruly saying that this apple is red and that red is a color, we\nexpress a proposition wherein red occurs as attributed, and\nanother proposition wherein red occurs as argument.\nCorrespondingly, there are two facts with red in both roles,\nrespectively. This duplicity grounds the common distinction between\ndifferent orders or types of properties:\nfirst-order ones are properties of things that are not\nthemselves predicables; second-order ones are properties of\nfirst-order properties; and so on. Even though the formal and\nontological issues behind this terminology are controversial, it is\nwidely used and is often connected to the subdivision between\nfirst-order and higher-order logics (see, e.g., Thomason 1974; Oliver\n1996; Williamson 2013; entry on\n type theory).\n It originates from Frege’s and Russell’s logical\ntheories, especially Russell’s type theory, wherein distinctions\nof types and orders are rigidly regimented in order to circumvent the\nlogical paradoxes (see\n §6)."],"subsection_title":"1.4 Properties in Propositions and States of Affairs"},{"content":["\nA relation is typically attributed to a plurality of objects. These\njointly instantiate the relation in question, if the\nattribution is veridical. In this case, the relata (as\narguments) and the relation (as attributed) are constituents of a\nstate of affairs. Depending on the number of objects that it can\nrelate, a relation is usually taken to have a number of\n“places” or a “degree” (“adicity”,\n“arity”), and is thus called “dyadic”\n(“two-place”), “triadic”\n(“three-place”), etc. For example, before and\nbetween are dyadic (of degree 2) and triadic (of degree 3),\nrespectively. In line with this, properties and propositions are\n“monadic” and “zero-adic” predicables, as they\nare predicated of one, and of no, object, respectively, and may then\nbe seen as limiting cases of relations (Bealer 1982, where properties,\nrelations and propositions are suggestively grouped under the acronym\n“PRP;” Dixon 2018; Menzel 1986; 1993; Swoyer 1998; Orilia\n1999; Van Inwagen 2004; 2015; Zalta 1983). This terminology is also\napplied to predicates and sentences; for example, the predicate\n“between” is triadic, and the sentence “Peter is\nbetween Tom and May” is zero-adic. Accordingly, standard\nfirst-order logic employs predicates with a fixed degree, typically\nindicated by a superscript, e.g., \\(P^1\\), \\(Q^2\\), \\(R^3\\), etc.","\nIn natural language, however, many predicates appear to be\nmultigrade or variably polyadic; i.e., they can be\nused with different numbers of arguments, as they can be true of\nvarious numbers of things. For example, we say “John is lifting\na table”, with “lifting” used as dyadic, as well as\n“John and Mary are lifting a table”, with\n“lifting” used as triadic. Moreover, there is a kind of\ninference, called “argument deletion”, which also suggests\nthat many predicates that prima facie could be assigned a\ncertain fixed degree are in fact multigrade. For example, “John\nis eating a cake” suggests that “is eating” is\ndyadic, but since, by argument deletion, it entails “John is\neating”, one could conclude that it is also monadic and thus\nmultigrade. Often one can resist the conclusion that there are\nmultigrade predicates. For example, it could be said that “John\nis eating” is simply short for “John is eating\nsomething”. But it seems hard to find a systematic and\nconvincing strategy that allows us to maintain that natural language\npredicates have a fixed degree. This has motivated the construction of\nlogical languages that feature multigrade predicates in order to\nprovide a more appropriate formal account of natural language (Grandy\n1976; Graves 1993; Orilia 2000a). Since natural language predicates\nappear to be multigrade, one may be tempted to take the properties and\nrelations that they express to also be multigrade, and the metaphysics\nof science may lend support to this conclusion (Mundy 1989).","\nSeemingly, relations are not jointly instantiated\nsimpliciter; how the instantiation occurs also plays\na role. This comes to the fore in particular with non-symmetric\nrelations such as loving. For example, if John loves Mary,\nthen loving is jointly instantiated by John and Mary in a\ncertain way, whereas if it is Mary who loves John, then\nloving is instantiated by John and Mary in another way.\nAccordingly, relations pose a special problem: explicating the\ndifference between facts, such as Abelard loves Eloise and\nEloise loves Abelard, that at least prima facie\ninvolve exactly the same constituents, namely a non-symmetric relation\nand two other items (loving, Abelard, Eloise). Such facts are\noften said to differ in “relational order” or in the\n“differential application” of the non-symmetric relation\nin question, and the problem then is that of characterizing what this\nrelational order or differential application amounts to.","\nRussell (1903: §218) attributed an enormous importance to this\nissue and attacked it repeatedly. Despite this, it has been pretty\nmuch neglected until the end of last century, with only few others\nconfronting it systematically (e.g., Bergmann 1992; Hochberg 1987).\nHowever, Fine (2000) has forcefully brought it again on the\nontological agenda and proposed a novel approach that has received\nsome attention. Fine identifies standard and\npositionalist views (analogous to two approaches defended by\nRussell at different times (1903; 1984); cf. Orilia 2008). According\nto the former, relations are intrinsically endowed with a\n“direction”, which allows us to distinguish, e.g.,\nloving and being loved: Abelard loves\nEloise and Eloise loves Abelard differ, because they\ninvolve two relations that differ in direction (e.g., the former\ninvolves loving and the latter being loved).\nAccording to the latter, relations have different\n“positions” that can somehow host relata:\nAbelard loves Eloise and Eloise loves Abelard\ndiffer, because the two positions of the very same loving\nrelation are differently occupied (by Abelard and Eloise in one case\nand by Eloise and Abelard in the other case). Fine goes on to propose\nand endorse an alternative, “anti-positionalist”\nstandpoint, according to which relations have neither direction nor\npositions. The literature on this topic keeps growing and there are\nnow various proposals on the market, including new versions of\npositionalism (Orilia 2014; Donnelly 2016; Dixon 2018), and\nprimitivism, according to which differential application\ncannot be analyzed (MacBride 2014).","\nRussell (1903: ch. 26) also had a key role in leading philosophers to\nacknowledge that at least some relations, in particular\nspatio-temporal ones, are external, i.e., cannot be reduced\nto monadic properties, or the mere existence, of the relata,\nin contrast to internal relations that can be so reduced. This was a\nbreakthrough after a long tradition tracing back at least to Aristotle\nand the Scholastics wherein there seems to be hardly any place for\nexternal relations (see entry on\n medieval theories of relations).[4]"],"subsection_title":"1.5 Relations"},{"content":["\nAccording to some philosophers, universals and tropes may coexist in\none ontological framework (see, e.g., Lowe 2006 for a well-known\ngeneral system of this kind, and Orilia 2006a, for a proposal based on\nempirical data from quantum mechanics). However, nowadays they are\ntypically seen as alternatives, with the typical supporter of\nuniversals (“universalist”) trying to do without tropes\n(e.g., Armstrong 1997) and the typical supporter of tropes\n(“tropist”) trying to dispense with universals (e.g.,\nMaurin\n 2002).[5]\n In order to clarify how differently they see matters, we may take\nadvantage of states of affairs. Both parties may agree, say, that\nthere are two red apples, \\(a\\) and \\(b\\). They will immediately\ndisagree, however, for the universalist will add that","\nThe tropist will reject these states of affairs with universals as\nconstituents and rather urge that there are two distinct tropes, the\nredness of \\(a\\) and the redness of \\(b\\), which play a theoretical\nrole analogous to the one that the universalist would invoke for such\nstates of affairs. Hence, tropists claim that tropes can be causal\nrelata (D. Williams 1953) and truthmakers (Mulligan, Simons, &\nSmith 1984).","\nTropes are typically taken to be simple, i.e., without any\nsubconstituent (see Section 2.2 of the entry on\n tropes).\n Their playing the role of states of affairs with universals as\nconstituents depends on this: universals combine two functions, only\none of which is fulfilled by tropes. On the one hand, universals are\ncharacterizers, inasmuch as they characterize concrete\nobjects. On the other hand, they are also unifiers, to the\nextent that different concrete objects may be characterized by the\nvery same universal, which is thus somehow shared by all of them; when\nthis is the case, there is, according to the universalist, an\nobjective similarity among the different objects (see\n §1.2).\n In contrast, tropes are only characterizers, for, at least as\ntypically understood, they cannot be shared by distinct concrete\nobjects. Given its dependency on one specific object, say, the apple\n\\(a\\), a trope can do the work of a state of affairs with \\(a\\) as\nconstituent. But for tropes to play this role, the tropist will have\nto pay a price and introduce additional theoretical machinery to\naccount for objective similarities among concrete objects. To this\nend, she will typically resort to the idea that there are objective\nresemblances among tropes, which can then be grouped together in\nresemblance classes. These resemblance classes play the role of\nunifiers for the tropist. Hence, from the tropist’s point of\nview “property” is ambiguous, since it may stand for the\ncharacterizers (tropes) or for the unifiers (resemblance classes) (cf.\nentry on\n mental causation, §6.5).\n Similarly, “exemplification” and related words may be\nregarded as ambiguous insofar as they can be used either to indicate\nthat an object exemplifies a certain trope or to indicate that the\nobject relates to a certain resemblance class by virtue of\nexemplifying a trope in that\n class.[6]"],"subsection_title":"1.6 Universals versus Tropes"},{"content":["\nMany important and often controversial distinctions among different\nkinds of properties have been made throughout the whole history of\nphilosophy until now, often playing key roles in all sorts of disputes\nand arguments, especially in metaphysics. Here we shall briefly review\nsome of these distinctions and others will surface in the following\nsections. More details can be found in other more specialized entries,\nto which we shall refer.","\nLocke influentially distinguished between primary and\nsecondary qualities; the former are objective features of\nthings, such as shapes, sizes and weights, whereas the latter are\nmind-dependent, e.g., colors, tastes,\nsounds, and smells. This contrast was already\nemphasized by the Greek atomists and was revived in modern times by\nGalileo, Descartes, and Boyle.","\nAt least since Aristotle, the essential properties of an\nobject have been contrasted with its accidental properties;\nthe object could not exist without the former, whereas it could fail\nto have the latter (see entry on\n essential vs. accidental properties).\n Among essential properties, some acknowledge individual\nessences (also called “haecceities” or\n“thisnesses”), which univocally characterize a certain\nindividual. Adams (1979) conceives of such properties as involving,\nvia the identity relation, the very individual in question, e.g.,\nSocrates: being identical to Socrates, which cannot exist if\nSocrates does not exist. In contrast, Plantinga (1974) views them as\ncapable of existing without the individuals of which they are\nessences, e.g., Socratizing, which could have existed even if\nSocrates had not existed. See\n §5.2\n on the issue of the essences of properties themselves.","\n Sortal properties are typically\nexpressed by count nouns like “desk” and “cat”\nand are taken to encode principles of individuation and persistence\nthat allow us to objectively count objects. For example, there is a\nfact of the matter regarding how many things in this room instantiate\nbeing a desk and being a cat. On the other hand,\nnon-sortal properties such as red or water do not\nallow us to count in a similarly obvious way. This distinction is\noften appealed to in contemporary metaphysics (P. Strawson 1959: ch.\n5, §2; Armstrong 1978a: ch. 11, §4), where, in contrast, the\ntraditional one between genus and\n species\n plays a relatively small role. The latter figured conspicuously in\nAristotle and in much subsequent philosophy inspired by him. We can\nview a genus as a property more general than a corresponding species\nproperty, in a hierarchically relative manner. For example, being\na mammal is a genus relative to the species being a\nhuman, but it is a species relative to the genus being an\nanimal. The possession of a property called differentia\nis appealed to in order to distinguish between different species\nfalling under a common genus; e.g., as the tradition has it, the\ndifferentia for being human is being rational (Aristotle,\nCategories, 3a). Similar hierarchies of properties, however\nwithout anything like differentiae, come with the distinction of\n determinables and determinates,\n which appears to be\nmore prominent in current metaphysics. Color properties provide\ntypical examples of such hierarchies, e.g., with red and\nscarlet as determinable and determinate, respectively."],"subsection_title":"1.7 Kinds of Properties"}]},{"main_content":["\nWe saw right at the outset that objects exemplify, or instantiate,\nproperties. More generally, items of all sorts, including properties\nthemselves, exemplify properties, or, in different terminology,\nbear, have or possess properties. Reversing\norder, we can also say that properties characterize, or\ninhere in, the items that exemplify them. There is then a\nvery general phenomenon of exemplification to investigate, which has\nbeen labeled in various ways, as the variety of terms of art just\ndisplayed testifies. All such terms have often been given special\ntechnical senses in the rich array of different explorations of this\nterritory since Ancient and Medieval times up to the present age (see,\ne.g., Lowe 2006: 77). These explorations can hardly be disentangled\nfrom the task of providing a general ontological picture with its own\ncategorial distinctions. In line with what most philosophers do\nnowadays, we choose “exemplification”, or, equivalently,\n“instantiation” (and their cognates), to discuss this\nphenomenon in general and to approach some different accounts that\nhave been given of it in recent times. This sweeping use of these\nterms is to be kept distinct from the more specialized uses of them\nthat will surface below (and to some extent have already surfaced\nabove) in describing specific approaches by different philosophers\nwith their own terminologies."],"section_title":"2. Exemplification","subsections":[{"content":["\nWe have taken for granted that there is just one kind of\nexemplification, applying indifferently to different categories of\nentities. This monist option may indeed be considered the\ndefault one. A typical recent case of a philosopher who endorses it is\nArmstrong (1997). He distinguishes three basic\ncategories, particulars, properties or relations, and states of\naffairs, and takes exemplification as cutting across them: properties\nand relations are exemplified not only by particulars, but by\nproperties or relations and states of affairs as well. But some\nphilosophers are pluralist: they distinguish different kinds\nof exemplification, in relation to categorial distinctions in their\nontology.","\nOne may perhaps attribute different kinds of exemplification to the\nabove-considered Meinongians in view of the different sorts of\npredication that they admit (see, e.g., Monaghan’s (2011)\ndiscussion of Zalta’s theory). A more typical example of the\npluralist alternative is however provided by Lowe (2006), who\ndistinguishes “instantiation”,\n“characterization” and “exemplification” in\nhis account of four fundamental categories: objects, and three\ndifferent sorts of properties, namely kinds (substantial universals),\nattributes and modes\n (tropes).[7]\n To illustrate, Fido is a dog insofar as it instantiates the\nkind dog, \\(D\\), which in turn is characterized by\nthe attribute of barking, \\(B\\). Hence, when Fido is barking, it\nexemplifies \\(B\\) occurrently by virtue of being\ncharacterized by a barking mode, \\(b\\), that instantiates \\(B\\); and,\nwhen Fido is silent, it exemplifies \\(B\\) dispositionally,\nsince \\(D\\), which Fido instantiates, is characterized by\n\\(B\\) (see Gorman 2014 for a critical discussion of this sort of\nview)."],"subsection_title":"2.1 Monist vs. Pluralist Accounts"},{"content":["\nMost philosophers, whether tacitly or overtly, appear to take\nexemplification as primitive and unanalyzable. However, on certain\nviews of particulars, it might seem that exemplification is reduced to\nsomething more fundamental.","\nA well-known such approach is the bundle theory, which takes\nparticulars to be nothing more than “bundles” of\nuniversals connected by a special relation, commonly called\ncompresence, after Russell (1948: Pt. IV, ch.\n 8)[8].\n Despite well-known problems (Van Cleve 1985), this view, or\napproaches in its vicinity, keep having supporters (Casullo 1988;\nCurtis 2014; Dasgupta 2009; Paul 2002; Shiver 2014; J. Russell 2018;\nsee Sider 2020, ch. 3, for a recent critical analysis). From this\nperspective, that a particular exemplifies a property amounts to the\nproperty’s being compresent with the properties that constitute\nthe bundle with which the particular in question is identified. It\nthus looks as if exemplification is reduced to compresence.\nNevertheless, compresence itself is presumably jointly exemplified by\nthe properties that constitute a given bundle, and thus at most there\nis a reduction, to compresence, of exemplification by a\nparticular (understood as a bundle), and not an elimination of\nexemplification in general.","\nAnother, more recent, approach is based on partial identity.\nBaxter (2001) and, inspired by him, Armstrong (2004), have proposed\nrelated assays of exemplification, which seem to analyze it in terms\nof such partial identity. These views have captured some interest and\ntriggered discussions (see, e.g., Mumford 2007; Baxter’s (2013)\nreply to critics and Baxter’s (2018) rejoinder to Brown\n2017).","\nBaxter (2001) relies on the notion of aspect and on the\nrelativization of numerical identity to counts. In his view,\nboth particulars and properties have aspects, which can be\nsimilar to distinct aspects of other particulars or properties. The\nnumerical identity of aspects is relative to standards for counting,\ncounts, which group items in count collections: aspects of\nparticulars in the particular collection, and aspects of\nuniversals, in the universal collection. There can then be a\ncross-count identity, which holds between an aspect in the\nparticular collection, and an aspect in the universal collection,\ne.g., the aspects Hume as human and humanity as had by\nHume. In this case, the universal and the particular in question\n(humanity and Hume, in our example) are partially identical.\nInstantiation, e.g., that Hume instantiates humanity, then amounts to\nthis partial identity of a universal and a particular. One may have\nthe feeling, as Baxter himself worries (2001: 449), that in this\napproach instantiation has been traded for something definitely more\nobscure, such as aspects and an idiosyncratic view of identity. It can\nalso be suspected that particulars’ and properties’\nhaving aspects is presupposed in this analysis, where this\nhaving is a relation rather close to exemplification\nitself.","\nArmstrong (2004) tries to do without aspects. At first glance it seems\nas if he analyzes exemplification, for he takes the exemplification of\na property (a universal) by a particular to be a partial identity of\nthe property and the particular; as he puts it (2004: 47), “[i]t\nis not a mere mereological overlap, as when two streets intersect, but\nit is a partial identity”. However, when we see more closely\nwhat this partial identity amounts to, the suspicion arises that it\npresupposes exemplification. For Armstrong appears to identify a\nparticular via the properties that it instantiates and\nsimilarly a property via the particulars that instantiate it.\nSo that we may identify a particular, \\(x\\), via a collection of\nproperties qua instantiated by \\(x\\), say \\(\\{F_x,\\) \\(G_x,\\)\n\\(H_x,\\) …, \\(P_x,\\) \\(Q_x,\\) \\(\\ldots\\};\\) and a property,\n\\(P\\), via a collection of particulars qua instantiating\n\\(P\\), say \\(\\{P_a, P_b , \\ldots ,P_x, P_y , \\ldots \\}\\). By putting\nthings in this way, we can then say that a particular is partially\nidentical to a property when the collection that identifies the\nparticular has an element in common with the collection that\nidentifies the property. To illustrate, the \\(x\\) and the \\(P\\) of our\nexample are partially identical because they have the element \\(P_x\\)\nin common. Now, the elements of these collections are neither\nproperties tout court nor particulars tout court,\nwhich led us to talk of properties qua instantiated and\nparticulars qua\n instantiating.[9]\n But this of course presupposes instantiation. Moreover, there is the\nunwelcome consequence that the world becomes dramatically less\ncontingent than we would have thought at first sight, for neither a\nconcrete particular nor a property can exist without it being the case\nthat the former has the properties it happens to have, and that the\nlatter is instantiated by the same particulars that actually\ninstantiate it; we get, as Mumford puts it (2007: 185), “a major\nnew kind of necessity in the world”."],"subsection_title":"2.2 Compresence and Partial Identity"},{"content":["\nOne important motivation, possibly the main one, behind attempts at\nanalysis such as the ones we have just seen is the worry to avoid the\nso-called Bradley’s regress\nregarding\nexemplification (Baxter 2001: 449; Mumford 2007: 185), which goes as\nfollows. Suppose that the individual \\(a\\) has the property \\(F\\). For\n\\(a\\) to instantiate \\(F\\) it must be linked to \\(F\\) by a\n(dyadic) relation of instantiation, \\(I_1\\). But this requires a\nfurther (triadic) relation of instantiation, \\(I_2\\), that connects\n\\(I_1, F\\) and \\(a\\), and so on without end. At each stage a further\nconnecting relation is required, and thus it seems that nothing\never gets connected to anything else (it is not clear to what\nextent Bradley had this version in mind; for references to analogous\nregresses prior to Bradley’s, see Gaskin 2008: ch. 5,\n§70).","\nThis regress has traditionally been regarded as vicious (see, e.g.,\nBergmann 1960), although philosophers such as Russell (1903: §55)\nand Armstrong (1997: 18–19) have argued that it is not. In doing\nso, however, they seem to take for granted the fact that \\(a\\) has the\nproperty \\(F\\) (pretty much as in the brute fact approach;\nsee below) and go on to see \\(a\\)’s and \\(F\\)’s\ninstantiating \\(I_1\\) as a further fact that is merely\nentailed by the former, which in turn entails \\(a\\)’s,\n\\(F\\)’s and \\(I_1\\)’s instantiating \\(I_2\\), and so on.\nThis way of looking at the matter tends to be regarded as a standard\nresponse to the regress. But those who see the regress as vicious\nassume that the various exemplification relations are introduced in an\neffort to explain the very existence of the fact that \\(a\\)\nhas the property \\(F\\). Hence, from their explanatory standpoint,\ntaking the fact in question as an unquestioned ground for a chain of\nentailments is beside the point (cf. Loux 1998: 31–36;\nVallicella 2002).","\nIt should be noted, however, that this perspective suggests a\ndistinction between an “internalist” and an\n“externalist” version of the regress (in the terminology\nof Orilia 2006a). In the former, at each stage we postulate a new\nconstituent of the fact, or state of affairs, \\(s\\), that exists\ninsofar as \\(a\\) has the property \\(F\\), and there is viciousness\nbecause \\(s\\) can never be appropriately\n characterized.[10]\n In the latter, at each stage we postulate a new, distinct, state of\naffairs, whose existence is required by the existence of the state of\naffairs of the previous stage. This amounts to admitting infinite\nexplanatory and metaphysical dependence chains. However, according to\nOrilia (2006b: §7), since no decisive arguments against such\nchains exist, the externalist regress should not be viewed as vicious\n(for criticisms, see Maurin 2015 and Allen 2016: §2.4.1; for a\nsimilar view about predication, see Gaskin 2008).","\nA typical line for those convinced that the regress is vicious has\nconsisted in proposing that instantiation is not a relation, or at\nleast not a normal one. Some philosophers hold that it is a sui\ngeneris linkage that hooks things up without intermediaries.\nPeter Strawson (1959) calls it a non-relational tie and\nBergmann (1960) calls it a nexus. Broad (1933: 85) likened\ninstantiation to glue, which just sticks two sheets of paper\ntogether, without needing anything additional; similarly,\ninstantiation just relates. An alternative line has been to\nreject instantiation altogether. According to Frege, it is not needed,\nbecause properties have “gaps” that can be filled, and\naccording to a reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,\nbecause objects and properties can be connected like links in a chain.\nHowever, both strategies are problematic, as argued by Vallicella\n(2002). His basic point is that, if \\(a\\) has property \\(F\\), we need\nan ontological explanation of why \\(F\\) and \\(a\\) happen to be\nconnected in such a way that \\(a\\) has \\(F\\) as one of its properties\n(unless \\(F\\) is a property that \\(a\\) has necessarily). But none of\nthese strategies can provide this explanation. For example, the appeal\nto gaps is pointless: \\(F\\) has a gap whether or not it is filled by\n\\(a\\) (for example, it could be filled in by another object), and thus\nthe gap cannot explain the fact that \\(a\\) has \\(F\\) as one of its\nproperties.","\nBefore turning to exemplification as partial identity, Armstrong\n(1997: 118) has claimed that Bradley’s regress can be avoided by\ntaking a state of affairs, say \\(x\\)’s being \\(P\\), as capable\nby itself of holding together its constituents, i.e., the object \\(x\\)\nand the property \\(P\\) (see also Perovic 2016). Thus, there is no need\nto invoke a relation of exemplification linking \\(x\\) and \\(P\\) in\norder to explain how \\(x\\) and \\(P\\) succeed in giving rise to a\nunitary item, namely the state of affairs in question. There seems to\nbe a circularity here for it appears that we want to explain how an\nobject and a property come to be united in a state of affairs by\nappealing to the result of this unification, namely the state of\naffairs itself. But perhaps this view can be interpreted as simply the\nidea that states of affairs should be taken for granted in a\nprimitivist fashion without seeking an explanation of their unity by\nappealing to exemplification or otherwise; this is the brute fact\napproach, as we may call it (for supporters, see Van Inwagen\n(1993: 37) and Oliver (1996: 33); for criticisms and a possible\ndefense, see Vallicella 2002, and Orilia 2016, respectively).","\nLowe (2006) has tried to tackle Bradley’s regress within his\npluralist approach to exemplification. In his view, characterization,\ninstantiation and exemplification are “formal” and thus\nquite different from garden-variety relations such giving or\nloving. This guarantees that these three relations escape\nBradley’s regress (Lowe 2006: 30, 80,\n 90).[11]\n Let us illustrate how, by turning back to the Fido example of\n §2.1.\n What a mode instantiates and what it characterizes belong to its\nessence. In other words, a mode cannot exist without instantiating the\nattribute it instantiates and characterizing the object it\ncharacterizes. Hence, mode \\(b\\), by simply existing, instantiates\nattribute \\(B\\) and characterizes Fido. Moreover, since\nexemplification (the occurrent one, in this case) results from\n“composing” characterization and instantiation,\n\\(b\\)’s existence also guarantees that Fido exemplifies \\(B\\).\nAccording to Lowe, we thus have some truths, that \\(b\\) characterizes\nFido, that \\(b\\) instantiates \\(B\\), and that Fido exemplifies \\(B\\)\n(i.e., is barking), all of which are made true by \\(b\\). Hence, there\nis no need to postulate as truthmakers states of affairs with\nconstituents, Fido and \\(b\\), related by characterization, or \\(b\\)\nand \\(B\\), related by exemplification, or Fido and \\(B\\), related by\nexemplification. This, in Lowe’s opinion, eschews\nBradley’s regress, since this arises precisely because we appeal\nto states of affairs with constituents in need of a glue that\ncontingently keep them together. Nevertheless, there is no loss of\ncontingency in Lowe’s world picture, for an object need not be\ncharacterized by the modes that happen to characterize it. Thus, for\nexample, mode \\(b\\) might have failed to exist and there could have\nbeen a Fido silence mode in its stead, in which case the proposition\nthat Fido is barking would have been false and the proposition that\nFido is silent would have been true. One may wonder however what makes\nit the case that a certain mode is a mode of just a certain object and\nnot of another one, say another barking dog. Even granting that it is\nessential for \\(b\\) to be a mode of Fido, rather than of another dog,\nit remains true that it is of Fido, rather than of the other\ndog, and one may still think that this being of is also glue\nof some sort, perhaps with a contingency inherited from the\ncontingency of \\(b\\) (which might have failed to exist). The suspicion\nthen is that the problem of accounting for the relation between a mode\nand an object has replaced the Armstrongian one of what makes it the\ncase that a universal \\(P\\) and an object \\(x\\) make up the state of\naffairs \\(x\\)’s being \\(P\\). But the former problem,\none may urge, is no less thorny than the latter, and some\nuniversalists like Armstrong may consider uneconomical Lowe’s\nacceptance of tropes in addition to universals (for accounts of\nBradley’s regress analogous to Lowe’s, but within a\nthoroughly tropist ontology, see Section 3.2 of the entry on\n tropes.)","\nAs it should be clear from this far from exhaustive survey,\nBradley’s regress deeply worries ontologists and the attempts to\ntame it keep\n flowing.[12]"],"subsection_title":"2.3 Bradley’s Regress"},{"content":["\nPresumably, properties exemplify properties. For example, if\nproperties are abstract objects, as is usually thought, then seemingly\nevery property exemplifies abstractness. But then we should also grant\nthat there is self-exemplification, i.e., a property exemplifying\nitself. For example, abstractness is itself abstract and thus\nexemplifies itself. Self-exemplification however has raised severe\nperplexities at least since Plato.","\nPlato appears to hold that all properties exemplify\nthemselves, when he claims that forms participate in themselves. This\nclaim is crucially involved in his so-called third man\nargument, which led him to worry that his theory of forms is\nincoherent (Parmenides, 132 ff.). As we see matters now, it\nis not clear why we should hold that all properties exemplify\nthemselves (Armstrong 1978a: 71); for instance, people are honest, but\nhonesty itself is not honest (see, however, the entry on\n Plato’s Parmenides,\n and Marmodoro forthcoming).","\nNowadays, a more serious worry related to self-exemplification is\nRussell’s famous paradox, constructed as regarding the property\nof non-self-exemplification, which appears to exemplify itself iff it\ndoes not, thus defying the laws of logic, at least classical logic.\nThe discovery of his paradox (and then the awareness of related\npuzzles) led Russell to introduce a theory of types, which institutes\na total ban on self-predication by a rigid segregation of properties\ninto a hierarchy of types (more on this in\n §6.1).\n The account became more complex and rigid, as Russell moved from\nsimple to ramified type theory, which involves a\ndistinction of orders within types (see entries on\n type theory\n and\n Russell’s paradox,\n and, for a detailed reconstruction of how Russell reacted to the\nparadox, Landini 1998).","\nIn type theory all properties are, we may say, typed. This\napproach has never gained unanimous consensus and its many problematic\naspects are well-known (see, e.g., Fitch 1952: Appendix C; Bealer\n1989). Just to mention a few, the type-theoretical hierarchy imposed\non properties appears to be highly artificial and multiplies\nproperties ad infinitum (e.g., since presumably properties\nare abstract, for any property \\(P\\) of type \\(n\\), there is an\nabstractness of type \\(n+1\\) that \\(P\\) exemplifies). Moreover, many\ncases of self-exemplification are innocuous and common. For example,\nthe property of being a property is itself a property, so it\nexemplifies itself. Accordingly, many recent proposals are type-free\n(see\n §6.1)\n and thus view properties as untyped, capable of being\nself-predicated, sometimes veridically. An additional motivation to\nmove in this direction is a new paradox proposed by Orilia and Landini\n(2019), which affects simple type theory. It is\n“contingent” in that it is derived from a contingent\nassumption, namely that someone, say John, is thinking just about the\nproperty of being a property \\(P\\) such that John is thinking of\nsomething that is not exemplified by \\(P\\)."],"subsection_title":"2.4 Self-exemplification"}]},{"main_content":["\nQuine (1957 [1969: 23]) famously claimed that there should be no\nentity without identity. His paradigmatic case concerns sets: two of\nthem are identical iff they have exactly the same members. Since then\nit has been customary in ontology to search for identity conditions\nfor given categories of entities and to rule out categories for want\nof identity conditions (against this, see Lowe 1989). Quine started\nthis trend precisely by arguing against properties and this has\nstrictly intertwined the issues of which properties there are and of\ntheir identity\n conditions.[13]"],"section_title":"3. Existence and Identity Conditions for Properties","subsections":[{"content":["\nIn an effort to provide identity conditions for properties, one could\nmimic those for sets, or equate the former with the latter (as in\nclass nominalism; see note 3), and provide the following\nextensionalist identity conditions: two properties are\nidentical iff they are co-extensional. This criterion can hardly work,\nhowever, since there are seemingly distinct properties with the same\nextension, such as having a heart and having\nkidneys, and even wildly different properties such as\nspherical and weighing 2 kilos could by accident be\nco-extensive.","\nOne could then try the following intensional identity\nconditions: two properties are identical iff they are\nco-intensional, i.e., necessarily co-extensional, where the\nnecessity in question is logical necessity. This guarantees that\nspherical and weighing 2 kilos are different even if\nthey happen to be co-extensional. Following this line, one may take\nproperties to be intensions, understood as, roughly,\nfunctions that assign extensions (sets of objects) to predicates at\nlogically possible worlds. Thus, for instance, the predicates\n“has a heart” and “has kidneys” stand for\ndifferent intensions, for even if they have the same extension in the\nactual world they have different extensions at worlds where there are\ncreatures with heart and no kidneys or vice versa. This approach is\nfollowed by Montague (1974) in his pioneering work in natural language\nsemantics, and in a similar way by Lewis (1986b), who reduces\nproperties to sets of possible objects in his modal realism,\nexplicitly committed to possible worlds and mere possibilia\ninhabiting them. Most philosophers find this commitment unappealing.\nMoreover, one may wonder how properties can do their causal work if\nthey are conceived of in this way (for further criticisms see Bealer\n1982: 13–19, and 1998: §4; Egan 2004). However, the\ncriterion of co-intensionality may be accepted without also buying the\nreduction of properties to sets of possibilia (Bealer views\nthis as the identity condition for his conception 1 properties; see\nbelow). Still, co-intensionality must face two challenges coming from\nopposite fronts.","\nOn the one hand, from the perspective of empirical science,\nco-intensionality may appear too strong as a criterion of identity.\nFor the identity statements of scientific reductions, such as that of\ntemperature to mean kinetic energy, could suggest that some properties\nare identical even if not co-intensional. For example, one may accept\nthat having absolute temperature of 300K is having mean\nmolecular kinetic energy of \\(6.21 \\times 10^{-21}\\) (Achinstein\n1974: 259; Putnam (1970: §1) and Causey (1972) speak of\n“synthetic identity” and “contingent\nidentity”, respectively). Rather than logical necessity, it is\nnomological necessity, necessity on the basis of the causal\nlaws of nature, that becomes central in this line of thought.\nFollowing it, some have focused on the causal and\nnomological roles of properties, i.e., roughly, the causes\nand effects of their being instantiated, and their involvement in laws\nof nature, respectively. They have thus advanced causal or\nnomic criteria. According to them, two properties are identical\niff they have the same causal (Achinstein 1974: §XI; Shoemaker\n1980) or nomological role (Swoyer 1982; Kistler 2002). This line has\nbeen influential, as it connects to the “pure\ndispositionalism” discussed in\n §5.2.\n There is however a suspicion of circularity here, since causal and\nnomological roles may be viewed as higher-order properties (see entry\non\n dispositions, §3).","\nOn the other hand, once matters of meaning and mental content are\ntaken into account, co-intensionality might seem too weak, for it\nmakes a property \\(P\\) identical to any logically equivalent property,\ne.g., assuming classical logic, \\(P\\) and (\\(Q\\) or not\n\\(Q\\)). And with a sufficiently broad notion of logical\nnecessity, even, for example, being triangular and being\ntrilateral are identical. However, one could insist that\n“trilateral” and “triangular” appear to have\ndifferent meanings, which somehow involve the different geometrical\nproperties having a side, and having an angle,\nrespectively. And if being triangular were really identical\nto being trilateral, from the fact that John believes that a\ncertain object has the former property, one should be able to infer\nthat John also believes that such an object has the latter property.\nYet, John’s ignorance may make this conclusion unwarranted. In\nthe light of this, borrowing a term from Cresswell (1975), one may\nmove from intensional to hyperintensional identity\nconditions, according to which two properties, such as trilaterality\nand triangularity, may be different even if they are co-intensional.\nIn order to implement this idea, Bealer (1982) take two properties to\nbe identical iff they have the same analysis, i.e., roughly, they\nresult from the same ultimate primitive properties and the same\nlogical operations applied to them (see also Menzel 1986; 1993). Zalta\n(1983; 1988) has developed an alternative available to those who admit\ntwo modes of predication (see\n §1.4):\n two properties are identical iff they are (necessarily) encoded by\nthe same objects.","\nHyperintensional conditions make of course for finer distinctions\namong entities than the other criteria we considered. Accordingly, the\nformer are often called “fine-grained” and the latter\n“coarse-grained”, and the same denominations are\ncorrespondingly reserved for the entities that obey the conditions in\nquestion. Coarse- or fine-grainedness is a relative matter. The\nextensional criterion is more coarse-grained than the intensional or\ncausal/nomological ones. And hyperintensional conditions themselves\nmay be more or less fine-grained: properties could be individuated\nalmost as finely as the predicates expressing them, to the point that,\ne.g., even being \\(P\\) and \\(Q\\) and being \\(Q\\) and\n\\(P\\) are kept distinct, but one may also envisage less stringent\nconditions that make for the identification of properties of that sort\n(Bealer 1982: 54). It is conceivable, however, that one could be\nlogically obtuse to the point of believing that something has a\ncertain property without believing that it has a trivially equivalent\nproperty. Thus, to properly account for mental content,\nmaximal hyperintensionality appears to be required, and it is\nin fact preferred by Bealer. Even so, the paradox of analysis\nraises a serious issue.\nOne could say, for example, that being a circle is being\na locus of points equidistant from a point, since the latter\nprovides the analysis of the former. In reply, Bealer distinguishes\nbetween “being a circle” as designating a simple\n“undefined” property, which is an analysandum\ndistinct from the analysans, being a locus of points\nequidistant from a point, and “being a circle” as\ndesignating a complex “defined” property, which is indeed\nidentical to that analysans. Orilia (1999: §5.5)\nsimilarly distinguishes between the simple analysans and the\ncomplex analysandum, without admitting that expressions for\nproperties such as “being a circle” could be ambiguous in\nthe way Bealer suggests. Orilia rather argues that the\n“is” of analysis does not express identity but a weaker\nrelation, which is asymmetrical in that analysans and\nanalysandum play different roles in it. The matter keeps\nbeing discussed. Rosen (2015) appeals to grounding to characterize the\ndifferent role played by the analysans. Dorr (2016) provides\na formal account of the “is” used in identity statements\ninvolving properties, according to which it stands for a symmetric\n“identification” relation."],"subsection_title":"3.1 From Extensionality to Hyperintensionality"},{"content":["\nBealer (1982) distinguishes between conception 1 properties,\nor qualities, and conception 2 properties, or\nconcepts (understood as mind-independent). With a different\nand now widespread terminology, Lewis (1983, 1986b) followed suit,\nspeaking of a sparse and an abundant conception of\nproperties. According to the former, there are relatively few\nproperties, namely just those responsible for the objective\nresemblances and causal powers of things; they cut nature at its\njoints, and science is supposed to individuate them a\nposteriori. According to the latter, there are immensely many\nproperties, corresponding to all meaningful predicates we could\npossibly imagine and to all sets of objects, and they can be assumed\na priori. (It should be clear that “few” and\n“many” are used in a comparative sense, for the number of\nsparse properties may be very high, possibly infinite). To illustrate,\nthe sparse conception admits properties currently accepted by\nempirical science such as having negative charge or\nhaving spin up and rejects those that are no longer supported\nsuch as having a certain amount of caloric, which featured in\neighteenth century chemistry; in contrast, the abundant conception may\nacknowledge the latter property and all sorts of other properties,\nstrange as they may be, e.g., negatively charged or disliked by\nSocrates, round and square or Goodman’s (1983)\nnotorious grue and bleen. Lewis (1986b: 60) tries to\nfurther characterize the distinction by taking the sparse properties\nto be intrinsic, rather than extrinsic (e.g.,\nbeing 6 feet tall, rather than being taller than\nTom), and natural, where naturalness is something that\nadmits of degrees (for example, he says, masses and charges are\nperfectly natural, colors are less natural and grue and\nbleen are paradigms of unnaturalness). Much work on such\nissues has been done since then (see entries on\n intrinsic vs. extrinsic properties\n and\n natural properties).","\nDepending on how sparse or abundant properties are, we can have two\nextreme positions and other more moderate views in between.","\nAt one end of the spectrum, there is the most extreme version of the\nsparse conception, minimalism, which accepts all of these\nprinciples:","\nThis approach is typically motivated by physicalism and\nepistemological qualms regarding transcendent universals. The\nbest-known contemporary supporter of minimalism is Armstrong (1978a,b,\n1984). Another minimalist is Swoyer (1996).","\nBy dropping or mitigating some of the above principles, we get less\nminimalist versions of the sparse conception. For example, some have\nurged uninstantiated properties to account for features of measurement\n(Mundy 1987), vectors (Bigelow & Pargetter 1991: 77), or natural\nlaws (Tooley 1987), and some even that there are all the properties\nthat can be possibly exemplified, where the possibility in question is\ncausal or nomic (Cocchiarella 2007: ch. 12). In line with\npositions traditionally found in emergentism (see\n §5.1),\n Schaffer (2004) proposes that there are sparse properties as\nfundamental, and in addition, as grounded on them, the properties that\nneed be postulated at all levels of scientific explanations, e.g.,\nchemical, biological and psychological ones. Even Armstrong goes\nbeyond minimalist strictures, when in his later work (1997)\ndistinguishes between “first-class properties”\n(universals), identified from a minimalist perspective, and\n“second-class properties” (supervening on universals). All\nthese positions appear to be primarily concerned with issues in the\nmetaphysics of science (see\n §5)\n and typically display too short a supply of properties to deal with\nmeaning and mental content, and thus with natural language semantics\nand the foundations of mathematics (see\n §6).\n However, minimalists might want to resort to concepts, understood as\nmind-dependent entities, in dealing with such issues (e.g., along the\nlines proposed in Cocchiarella 2007).","\nMatters of meaning and mental content are instead what typically\nmotivate the views at the opposite end of the spectrum. To begin with,\nmaximalism, i.e., the abundant conception in all its glory\n(Bealer 1982; 1993; Carmichael 2010; Castañeda 1976; Jubien\n1989; Lewis 1986b; Orilia 1999; Zalta 1988; Van Inwagen 2004):\nproperties are fine-grained necessary entities that exist even if\nuninstantiated, or even impossible to be instantiated. In its most\nextreme version, maximalism adopts identity conditions that\ndifferentiate properties as much as possible, but more moderate\nversions can be obtained by slightly relaxing such conditions. Views\nof this sort are hardly concerned with physicalist constraints or the\nlike and rather focus on the explanatory advantages of\nhyperintensionality. These may well go beyond the typical motivations\nconsidered above: Nolan (2014) argues that hyperintensionality is\nincreasingly important in metaphysics in dealing with issues such as\ncounter-possible conditionals, explanation, essences, grounding,\ncausation, confirmation and chance.","\nRather than choosing between the sparse and abundant conceptions, the\nvery promoters of this distinction have opted in different ways for a\ndualism of properties, according to which there are\nproperties of both kinds. Lewis endorses abundant properties as\nreduced to sets of possibilia, and sparse properties either\nviewed as universals, and corresponding to some of the abundant\nproperties (1983), or as themselves sets of possibilia (1986b: 60).\nBealer (1982) proposes a systematic account wherein qualities are the\ncoarse-grained properties that “provide the world with its\ncausal and phenomenal order” (1982: 183) and concepts are the\nfine-grained properties that can function as meanings and as\nconstituents of mental contents. He admits a stock of simple\nproperties, which are both qualities and concepts (1982: 186),\nwherefrom complex qualities and complex concepts are differently\nconstructed: on the one hand, by thought-building operations,\nwhich give rise to fine-grained qualities; on the other hand, by\ncondition-building operations, which give rise to\ncoarse-grained qualities. Orilia (1999) has followed Bealer’s\nlead in also endorsing both coarse-grained qualities and fine-grained\nconcepts, without however identifying simple concepts and simple\nqualities. In Orilia’s account concepts are never identical to\nqualities, but may correspond to them; in particular, the identity\nstatements of intertheoretic reductions should be taken to express the\nfact that two different concepts correspond to the same quality.\nDespite its advantages in dealing with a disparate range of phenomena,\ndualism has not gained any explicit consensus. Its implicit presence\nmay however be widespread. For example, Putnam’s (1970: §1)\ndistinction between predicates and physical\nproperties, and Armstrong’s above-mentioned recognition of\nsecond-class properties may be seen as forms of dualism."],"subsection_title":"3.2 The Sparse and the Abundant Conceptions"}]},{"main_content":["\nIt is customary to distinguish between simple and\ncomplex properties, even though some philosophers take all\nproperties to be simple (Grossmann 1983: §§58–61). The\nformer are not characterizable in terms of other properties, are\nprimitive and unanalyzable and thus have no internal structure,\nwhereas the latter somehow have a structure, wherein other properties,\nor more generally entities, are parts or constituents. It is not\nobvious that there are simple properties, since one may imagine that\nall properties are analyzable into constituents ad infinitum\n(Armstrong 1978b: 67). Even setting this aside, to provide examples is\nnot easy. Traditionally, determinate colors are cited, but nowadays\nmany would rather appeal to fundamental physical properties such as\nhaving a certain electric charge. It is easier to provide\nputative examples of complex properties, once some other properties\nare taken for granted, e.g., blue and spherical or blue\nor non-spherical. These logically compound properties,\nwhich involve logical operations, will be considered in\n §4.1.\n Next, in\n §4.2\n we shall discuss other kinds of complex properties, called\nstructural (after Armstrong 1978b), which are eliciting a\ngrowing interest, as a recent survey testifies (Fisher 2018). Their\ncomplexity has to do with the subdivisions of their instances into\nsubcomponents. Typical examples come from chemistry, e.g.,\nH2O and methane understood as properties\nof molecules.","\nIt should be noted that it is not generally taken for granted that\ncomplex properties literally have parts or constituents. Some\nphilosophers take this line (Armstrong 1978a: 36–39, 67ff.;\nBigelow & Pargetter 1989; Orilia 1999), whereas others demur, and\nrather think that talk in terms of structures with constituents is\nmetaphorical and dependent on our reliance on structured terms such as\n“blue and spherical” (Bealer 1982; Cocchiarella 1986a;\nSwoyer 1998: §1.2)."],"section_title":"4. Complex Properties","subsections":[{"content":["\nAt least prima facie, our use of complex predicates suggests\nthat there are corresponding complex properties involving all sorts of\nlogical operations. Thus, one can envisage conjunctive\nproperties such as blue and spherical, negative properties\nsuch as non-spherical, disjunctive properties such\nas blue or non-spherical, existentially or\nuniversally quantified properties such as loving\nsomeone or loved by everyone, reflexive\nproperties such as loving oneself, etc. Moreover, one could\nadd to the list properties with individuals as constituents, which are\nthen denied the status of a purely qualitative property,\ne.g., taller than Obama.","\nIt is easy to construct complex predicates. But whether there really\nare corresponding properties of this kind is a much more difficult and\ncontroversial issue, tightly bound to the sparse/abundant distinction.\nIn the sparse conception the tendency is to dispense with them. This\nis understandable since in this camp one typically postulates\nproperties in rebus for empirical explanatory reasons. But\nthen, if we explain some phenomena by attributing properties \\(F\\) and\n\\(G\\) to an object, while denying that it does not exemplify \\(H\\), it\nseems of no value to add that it also has, say, F and G,\nF or H, and non-H. Nevertheless, Armstrong, the\nleading supporter of sparseness, has defended over the years a mixed\nstance without disjunctive and negative properties, but with\nconjunctive ones. Armstrong’s line has of course its opponents\n(see, e.g., Paolini Paoletti 2014; 2017a; 2020a; Zangwill 2011 argues\nthat there are negative properties, but they are less real than\npositive ones). On the other hand, in the abundant conception, all\nsorts of logically compound properties are acknowledged. Since the\nfocus now is on meaning and mental content, it appears natural to\npostulate such properties to account for our understanding of complex\npredicates and of how they differ from simple ones. Even here,\nhowever, there are disagreements, when it comes to problematic\npredicates such the “does not exemplify itself” of\nRussell’s paradox. Some suggest that in this case one should\ndeny there is a corresponding property, in order to avoid the paradox\n(Van Inwagen 2006). However, we understand this predicate and thus it\nseems ad hoc that the general strategy of postulating a\nproperty fails. It seems better to confront the paradox with other\nmeans (see\n §6)."],"subsection_title":"4.1 Logically Compound Properties"},{"content":["\nFollowing Armstrong (1978b: 68–71; see also Fisher 2018:\n§2), a structural property \\(F\\) is typically viewed as a\nuniversal, and can be characterized thus:","\nFor instance, a molecule \\(w\\) exemplifying H2O\nhas as parts two atoms \\(h_1\\) and \\(h_2\\) and an atom \\(o\\) that do\nnot exemplify H2O; this property involves\nhydrogen and oxygen, which are not exemplified by\n\\(w\\); \\(h_1\\) and \\(h_2\\) exemplify hydrogen, and \\(o\\)\nexemplifies oxygen. For relational structural\nproperties, there is the further condition that","\nH2O is a case in point: the relevant (chemical)\nrelation is bonding, which links the three atoms in question.\nAnother, often considered, example is methane as a structural\nproperty of methane-molecules (CH4), which\ninvolves a bonding relation between atoms and the joint\ninstantiation of hydrogen (by four atoms) and carbon\n(by one atom). Non-relational structural properties do not\nrequire condition (iv). For instance, mass 1 kg involves many\nrelevant properties of the kind mass n kg, for \\(n \\lt 1\\),\nwhich are instantiated by relevant proper parts of any object that is\n1 kg in mass, and these proper parts are not linked by any relevant\nrelation (Armstrong 1978b: 70).","\nIn most approaches, including Armstrong’s, the relevant\nproperties and the relevant relation, if any, are conceived of as\nparts, or constituents, of the structural property in question, and\nthus their being involved in the latter is a parthood relation. For\ninstance, hydrogen, oxygen and bonding are\nconstituents of H2O. Moreover, the composition of\nstructural properties is isomorphic to that of the complexes\nexemplifying them. These two theses characterize what Lewis (1986a)\ncalls the “pictorial conception”. It is worth noting that\nstructural properties differ from conjunctive properties such as\nhuman and musician, in that the constituents of the latter\n(i.e., human and musician) are instantiated by\nwhatever entity exemplifies the conjunctive property (i.e., a human\nbeing who is also a musician), whereas the constituents of a\nstructural property (e.g., hydrogen, oxygen and\nbonding) are not instantiated by the entities that\ninstantiate it (e.g., H2O molecules).","\nStructural properties have been invoked for many reasons. Armstrong\n(1978b: ch. 22) appeals to them to explain the resemblance of\nuniversals belonging to a common class, e.g., lengths and colors.\nArmstrong (1988; 1989) also treats physical quantities and numbers\nthrough structural properties. The former involve, as in the above\nmass 1 kg example, smaller quantities such as mass 0.1\nkg and mass 0.2 kg (this view is criticized by Eddon\n2007). The latter are internal proportion relations between structural\nproperties (e.g., being a nineteen-electrons aggregate) and\nunit-properties (e.g., being an electron). Moreover,\nstructural properties have been appealed to in treatments of laws of\nnature (Armstrong 1989; Lewis 1986a), some natural kinds (Armstrong\n1978b, 1997; Hawley & Bird 2011), possible worlds (Forrest 1986),\nersatz times (Parsons 2005), emergent properties\n(O’Connor & Wong 2005), linguistic types (Davis 2014), ontic\nstructural realism (Psillos 2012). However, structural universals have\nalso been questioned on various grounds, as we shall now see.","\nLewis (1986a) raises two problems for the pictorial conception. First,\nit is not clear how one and the same universal (e.g.,\nhydrogen) can recur more than once in a structural universal.\nLet us dub this “multiple recurrence problem”. Secondly,\nstructural universals violate the Principle of Uniqueness of\nComposition of classical\n mereology.\n According to this principle, given a certain collection of parts,\nthere is only one whole that they compose. Consider isomers, namely,\nmolecules that have the same number and types of atoms but different\nstructures, e.g., butane and isobutane\n(C4H10). Here, butane and\nisobutane are different structural universals. Yet, they\narise from the same universals recurring the same number of times. Let\nus dub this “isomer problem.”","\nTwo further problems may be pointed out. First, even molecules with\nthe same number and types of atoms and the same structures may vary in\nvirtue of their spatial orientation (Kalhat 2008). This phenomenon is\nknown as chirality. How can structural properties account for\nit? Secondly, the composition of structural properties is restricted:\nnot every collection of properties gives rise to a structural\nproperty. This violates another principle of classical mereology: the\nPrinciple of Unrestricted Composition.","\nLewis dismisses alternatives to the pictorial conception, such as the\n“linguistic conception” (in which structural universals\nare set-theoretic constructions out of simple universals) and the\n“magic conception” (in which structural universals\nare not complex and are primitively connected to the relevant\nproperties). Moreover, he also rejects the possibility of there being\namphibians, i.e., particularized universals lying between\nparticulars and full-fledged universals. Amphibians would solve the\nmultiple recurrence problem, as they would be identical with multiple\nrecurrences of single universals. For example, in methane,\nthere would be four amphibians of hydrogen.","\nTo reply to Lewis’ challenges, two main strategies have been\nadopted on behalf of the pictorial conception: a non-mereological\ncomposition strategy, according to which structural properties do not\nobey the principles of classical mereology, and a mereology-friendly\nstrategy. Let us start with the former.","\nArmstrong (1986) admits that the composition of structural universals\nis non-mereological. In his 1997, he emphasizes that states of affairs\ndo not have a mereological kind of composition, and views universals,\nincluding structural ones, as states of affairs-types which,\nas such, are not mereological in their composition. Structural\nuniversals themselves turn out to be state of affairs-types of a\nconjunctive sort (1997: 34 ff.). To illustrate, let us go back to the\nabove example with H2O exemplified by the water\nmolecule \\(w\\). It involves the conjunction of these states of\naffairs:","\nThis conjunction of states of affairs provides an example of a\nstate of affairs-type identifiable with the structural universal\nH2O.","\nIn pursuit of the non-mereological composition strategy, Forrest\n(1986; 2006; 2016) relies on logically compound properties, in\nparticular (in his 2016) conjunctive, existentially quantified and\nreflexive ones. Bennett (2013) argues that entities are part of\nfurther entities by occupying specific slots within the latter.\nParthood slots are distinct from each other. Therefore, which entity\noccupies which slot matters to the composition of the resultant\ncomplex entity. Hawley (2010) defends the possibility of there being\nmultiple composition relations. In a more general way, McDaniel (2009)\npoints out that the relation of structure-making does not obey some of\nthe principles of classical mereology. Mormann (2010) argues that\ndistinct categories (to be understood as in\n category theory)\n come together with distinct parthood and composition relations.","\nAs regards the mereology-friendly strategy, it has been suggested that\nstructural properties actually include extra components accounting for\nstructures, so that the Principle of Uniqueness of Composition is\nsafe. Considering methane, Pagès (2002) claims that\nsuch a structural property is composed of the properties\ncarbon and hydrogen, a bonding relation and\na peculiar first-order, formal relation between the atoms. According\nto Kalhat (2008), the extra component is a second-order arrangement\nrelation between the first-order properties. Ordering formal\nrelations—together with causally individuated\nproperties—are also invoked by McFarland (2018).","\nAt the intersection of these strategies, Bigelow and Pargetter (1989,\n1991) claim that structural universals are internally relational\nproperties that supervene on first-order properties and relations and\non second-order proportion relations. Second-order proportion\nrelations are relations such as having four times as. They\nrelate first-order properties and relations. For example, in\nmethane, the relation having four times as relates\ntwo conjunctive properties: (i) hydrogen and being part of this\nmolecule; (ii) carbon and being part of this\nmolecule.","\nCampbell (1990) solves the multiple recurrence problem and the isomer\nproblem by appealing to tropes. In methane, there are\nmultiple hydrogen tropes. In butane and isobutane,\ndistinct tropes entertain distinct structural relations.","\nDespite Lewis’ dismissal, a number of theories appeal to\namphibians (i.e., particularized universals lying between particulars\nand full-fledged universals) or, more precisely, to entities similar\nto amphibians. Fine (2017) suggests that structural properties should\nbe treated by invoking arbitrary objects (Fine 1985). Davis’\n(2014) account of linguistic types as structural properties confronts\nthe problem of the multiple occurrence of one type, e.g.,\n“dog”, in another (e.g., “every dog likes another\ndog”) (Wetzel 2009). In general, the idea that types are\nproperties of tokens is a natural one, although there are also\nalternative views on the matter (see entry on\n types and tokens).\n Be this as it may, Davis proposes that types cannot occur within\nfurther types as tokens: they can only occur as subtypes.\nTherefore, subtypes lie, like amphibians, between types and tokens.\nSubtypes are individuated by their positions in asymmetric wholes,\nwhereas they are primitively and non-qualitatively distinct in\nsymmetric ones. The approach could be extended to properties such as\nmethane, which would be taken to have four distinct\nhydrogen subtypes."],"subsection_title":"4.2 Structural Properties"}]},{"main_content":["\nWhen it comes to the metaphysical underpinnings of scientific\ntheories, properties play a prominent role: it appears that science\ncan hardly be done without appealing to them. This adds up to the case\nfor realism about properties and to our understanding of them. We\nshall illustrate this here first by dwelling on some miscellaneous\ntopics and then by focusing on a debate regarding the very nature of\nthe properties invoked in science, namely whether or not they are\nessentially dispositional. Roughly, an object exemplifies a\ndispositional property, such as soluble or\nfragile, by having a power or disposition to act or being\nacted upon in a certain way in certain conditions. For example, a\nglass’ disposition of being fragile consists in its\npossibly shattering in certain conditions (e.g., if struck with a\ncertain force). In contrast, something exemplifies a\ncategorical property, e.g., made of salt or\nspherical, by merely being in a certain way (see entry on\n dispositions)."],"section_title":"5. Properties in the Metaphysics of Science","subsections":[{"content":["\nMany predicates in scientific theories (e.g., “being a\ngene” and “being a belief”) are functionally\ndefined. Namely, their meaning is fixed by appealing to some function\nor set of functions (e.g., encoding and transmitting genetic\ninformation). To make sense of functions, properties are needed.\nFirst, functions can be thought of as webs of causal relationships\nbetween properties or property-instances. Secondly, predicates such as\n“being a gene” may be taken to refer to\nhigher-level properties, or at least to something that has\nsuch properties. In this case, the property of being a gene\nwould be the higher-level property of possessing some further\nproperties (e.g., biochemical ones) that play the relevant\nfunctions (i.e., encoding and transmitting genetic information).\nAlternatively, being a gene would be a property that\nsatisfies the former higher-level property. Thirdly, the ensuing\nrealization relationships between higher-level and function-playing\nproperties can only be defined by appealing to properties (see entry\non\n functionalism).","\nMore generally, many ontological\ndependence and reduction\nrelationships primarily concern properties: type-identity (Place 1956;\nSmart 1959; Lewis 1966) and token-identity (Davidson 1980) (see entry\non\n the mind/brain identity theory),\n supervenience (Horgan 1982; Kim 1993; entry on\n supervenience);\n realization (Putnam 1975; Wilson 1999; Shoemaker 2007), \nscientific reduction\n(Nagel 1961). Moreover,\na non-reductive relation such as ontological emergence (Bedau 1997;\nPaolini Paoletti 2017b) is typically characterized as a relation\nbetween emergent properties\nand more fundamental\nproperties. Even mechanistic explanations often appeal to properties\nand relations in characterizing the organization, the components, the\npowers and the phenomena displayed by mechanisms (Glennan & Illari\n2018; entry on\n mechanisms in science).","\nEntities in nature are typified by\n natural kinds.\n These are mostly thought of as properties or property-like entities\nthat carve nature at its joints (Campbell, O'Rourke, & Slater\n2011) at distinct layers of the universe: microphysical (e.g.,\nbeing a neutron), chemical (e.g., being gold),\nbiological (e.g., being a horse).","\nPhysical quantities such as mass or length are typically treated as\nproperties, specifiable in terms of a magnitude, a certain number, and\na unit measure, e.g., kg or meter, which can itself be specified in\nterms of properties (Mundy 1987; Swoyer 1987). Following Eddon’s\n(2013) overview, it is possible to distinguish two main strands here:\nrelational and monadic properties theories (see also\nDasgupta 2013). In relational theories (Bigelow & Pargetter 1988;\n1991), quantities arise from proportion relations, which may in turn\nbe related by higher-order proportion relations. Consider a certain\nquantity, e.g., mass 3 kg. Here the thrice as massive\nas proportion relation is relevant, which holds of certain pairs\nof objects \\(a\\) and \\(b\\) such that \\(a\\) is thrice as massive as\n\\(b\\). By virtue of such relational facts, the first members of such\npairs have a mass of 3 kg. Another relational approach is by Mundy\n(1988), who claims that mass 3 kg is a relation between\n(ordered pairs of) objects and numbers. For example, mass 3\nkg is a relation holding between the ordered pair \\(\\langle a,\nb\\rangle\\) (assuming that \\(a\\) is thrice as massive as \\(b\\), and not\nthe other way round) and the number 3; or—if relations have\nbuilt-in relational order—between \\(a, b\\) and 3. Knowles (2015)\nholds a similar view, wherein physical quantities are relations that\nobjects bear to numbers. According to the monadic properties approach,\nquantities are intrinsic properties of objects (Swoyer 1987; Armstrong\n1988; 1989). As we saw, Armstrong develops such a view by taking\nquantities to be structural properties. Related metaphysical inquiries\nconcern the dimensions of quantities (Skow 2017) and the status of\nforces (Massin 2009).","\nLastly, properties play a prominent role in two well-known accounts of\nthe\n laws of nature:\n the nomological necessitation account and law\ndispositionalism. The former has been expounded by Tooley (1977;\n1987), Dretske (1977) and Armstrong (1983). Roughly, following\nArmstrong, a law of nature consists in a second-order and external\nnomological necessitation relation \\(\\rN\\), contingently holding\nbetween first-order universals \\(P\\) and \\(Q\\): \\(\\rN(P, Q)\\). Such a\nhigher-order fact necessitates certain lower-order regularities, i.e.,\nall the objects that have \\(P\\) also have \\(Q\\) (by nomological\nnecessity, in virtue of \\(\\rN(P, Q))\\). Law dispositionalism\ninterprets laws of nature by appealing to dispositional properties.\nAccording to it, laws of nature “flow” from the essence of\nsuch properties. This implies that laws of nature hold with\nmetaphysical necessity: whenever the dispositions are in place, the\nrelevant laws must be in place too (Cartwright 1983; Ellis 2001; Bird\n2007; Chakravartty 2007; Fischer 2018; see also Schrenk 2017 and\nDumsday 2019). (For criticisms, see, e.g., van Fraassen 1989 as\nregards the former approach, and McKitrick 2018 and Paolini Paoletti\n2020b, as regards the latter)."],"subsection_title":"5.1 Miscellaneous Topics"},{"content":["\nThere is a domestic dispute among supporters of properties in the\nmetaphysics of science, regarding the very nature of such properties\n(or at least the fundamental ones). We may distinguish two extreme\nviews, pure dispositionalism and pure\ncategoricalism. According to the former, all properties are\nessentially dispositional (“dispositional”, for\nbrevity’s sake, from now on), since they are nothing more than\ncausal powers; their causative roles, i.e., which effects\ntheir instantiations can cause, exhaust their essences. According to\npure categoricalism, all properties are essentially categorical (in\nbrief, “categorical”, in the following), because their\ncausative roles are not essential to them. If anything is essential to\na property, it is rather a non-dispositional and intrinsic aspect\ncalled “quiddity” (after Armstrong 1989), which need not\nbe seen as an additional entity over and above the property itself\n(Locke 2012, in response to Hawthorne 2001). Between such views there\nlie a number of intermediate positions.","\nPure dispositionalism has been widely supported in the last few\ndecades (Mellor 1974; 2000; Shoemaker 1984: ch. 10 and 11 [in terms of\ncausal roles]; Mumford 1998; 2004; Bird 2005; 2007; Chakravartty 2007;\nWhittle 2008; see Tugby 2013 for an attempt to argue from this sort of\nview to a Platonist conception of properties). There are three main\narguments in favor of it. First, pure dispositionalism easily accounts\nfor the natural necessity of the laws of nature, insofar as such a\nnecessity just “flows” from the essence of the\ndispositional properties involved. Secondly, dispositional properties\ncan be easily known as they really are, because it is part of their\nessence that they affect us in certain ways. Thirdly, at the\n(presumably fundamental) micro-physical level, properties are only\ndescribed dispositionally, which is best explained by their being\ndispositional (Ellis & Lierse 1994; N. Williams 2011).","\nNevertheless, pure dispositionalism is affected by several problems.\nFirst, some authors believe that it is not easy to provide a clear-cut\ndistinction between dispositional and would-be non-dispositional\nproperties (Cross 2005). Secondly, it seems that the essence of\ncertain properties does not include, or is not exhausted by, their\ncausative roles: qualia, inert and epiphenomenal\n properties,[14]\n structural and geometrical properties, spatio-temporal properties\n(Prior 1982; Armstrong 1999; for some responses, see Mellor 1974 and\nBird 2007; 2009). Thirdly, there can be symmetrical causative\nroles. Consider three distinct properties \\(A\\), \\(B\\) and \\(C\\) such\nthat \\(A\\) can cause \\(B\\), \\(B\\) can cause \\(A\\), \\(A\\) and \\(B\\) can\ntogether cause \\(C\\) and nothing else characterizes \\(A\\) and \\(B\\).\n\\(A\\) and \\(B\\) have the same causative role. Therefore, in pure\ndispositionalism, they turn out to be identical, against the\nhypothesis (Hawthorne 2001; see also Contessa 2019). Fourthly,\naccording to some, pure dispositionalism falls prey to (at least)\nthree distinct regresses (for a fourth regress, see Psillos 2006).\nSuch regresses arise from the fact that the essential causative role\nof a dispositional property \\(P\\) “points towards” further\nproperties \\(S\\), \\(T\\), etc. qua possible effects. The\nessential causative roles of the latter “point towards”\nstill other properties, and so on. The first regress concerns the\nidentity of \\(P\\), which is never fixed, as it depends on the identity\nof further properties, which depend for their identity on still other\nproperties, and so on (Lowe 2006; Barker 2009; 2013). The second\nregress concerns the knowability of \\(P\\) (Swinburne 1980). \\(P\\) is\nonly knowable through its possible effects (i.e., the instantiation of\n\\(S\\), \\(T\\), etc.), included in its causative role. Yet, such\npossible effects are only knowable through their possible effects, and\nso on. The third regress concerns the actuality of \\(P\\) (Armstrong\n1997). \\(P\\)’s actuality is never reached, since \\(P\\) is\nnothing but the power to give rise to \\(S\\), \\(T\\), etc., which are\nnothing but the powers to give rise to further properties, and so on.\nFor responses to these regresses, see Molnar 2003; Marmodoro 2009;\nBauer 2012; McKitrick 2013; see also Ingthorsson 2013.","\nPure categoricalism seems to imply that causative roles are only\ncontingently associated to a property. Therefore, on pure\ncategoricalism, a property can possibly have distinct causative roles,\nwhich allows it to explain—among other things—the apparent\ncontingency of causative roles and the possibility of recombining a\nproperty with distinct causative roles. Its supporters include Lewis\n(1986b, 2009), Armstrong (1999), Schaffer (2005), and more recently\nLivanios (2017), who provides further arguments based on the\nmetaphysics of science. Kelly (2009) and Smith (2016) may be added to\nthe list, although they take roles to be non-essential and necessary\n(for further options, see also Kimpton-Nye 2018, Yates 2018a, Coates\nforthcoming and Tugby forthcoming).","\nHowever, pure categoricalism falls prey to two sorts of difficulties.\nFirst, the contingency of causative roles has some unpalatable\nconsequences: unbeknownst to us, two distinct properties can swap\ntheir roles; they can play the same role at the same time; the same\nrole can be played by one property at one time and by another property\nat a later time; an “alien” property can replace a\nfamiliar one by playing its role (Black 2000). Secondly, and more\ngenerally, we are never able to know which properties play which\nroles, nor are we able to know the intrinsic nature of such\nproperties. This consequence should be accepted with “Ramseyan\nhumility” (Lewis 2009; see also Langton 1998 for a related,\nKantian, sort of humility) or it should be countered in the same way\nas we decide to counter any broader version of skepticism (Schaffer\n2005). On this issue, see also Whittle (2006); Locke (2009); Kelly\n(2013); Yates (2018b).","\nLet us now turn to some intermediate positions.","\nAccording to dualism (Ellis 2001; Molnar 2003), there are\nboth dispositional and categorical properties. Dualism is meant to\ncombine the virtues of pure dispositionalism and pure categoricalism.\nIt then faces the charge of adopting a less parsimonious ontology,\nsince it accepts two classes of properties rather than one, i.e.,\ndispositional and categorical ones.","\nAccording to the identity theory (Heil 2003; 2012; Jaworski\n2016; Martin 2008; G. Strawson 2008; see also N. Williams 2019), every\nproperty is both dispositional and categorical (or qualitative). The\nmain problem here is how to characterize the distinction and relation\nof these two “sides”. Martin and Heil suggest that they\nare two distinct ways of partially considering one and the same\nproperty, whereas Mumford (1998) explores the possibility of seeing\nthem as two distinct ways of conceptualizing the property in question.\nHeil claims that the qualitative and the dispositional sides need to\nbe identified with one another and with the whole property. Jacobs\n(2011) holds that the qualitative side consists in the possession of\nsome qualitative nature by the property, whereas the dispositional\nside consists in that property being (part of) a sufficient truthmaker\nfor certain counterfactuals. Dispositional and qualitative sides may\nalso be seen as essential, higher-order properties of properties, as\nsupervenient and ontologically innocent aspects of properties\n(Giannotti 2019), or as constituents of the essence of properties\n(Taylor 2018). In general, the identity theory is between Scylla and\nCharybdis. If it reifies the dispositional and qualitative sides, it\nruns the risk of implying some sort of dualism. If it insists on the\nidentity between them, it runs the opposite risk of turning into a\npure dispositionalist theory (Taylor 2018)."],"subsection_title":"5.2. Essentially Categorical vs. Essentially Dispositional Properties"}]},{"main_content":["\nFormal property theories are logical systems that aim at formulating\n“general noncontingent laws that deal with properties”\n(Bealer & Mönnich 1989: 133). In the next subsection we shall\noutline how they work. In the two subsequent subsections we shall\nbriefly consider their deployment in natural language semantics and\nthe foundations of mathematics, which can be taken to provide further\nreasons for the acknowledgment of properties in one’s ontology,\nor at least of certain kinds of properties."],"section_title":"6. Formal Property Theories and their applications","subsections":[{"content":["\nThese systems allow for terms corresponding to properties, in\nparticular variables that are meant to range over properties and that\ncan be quantified over. This can be achieved in two ways. Either\n(option 1; Cocchiarella 1986a) the terms standing for properties are\npredicates or (option 2; Bealer 1982) such terms are subject terms\nthat can be linked to other subject terms by a special predicate that\nis meant to express a predication relation (let us use\n“pred”) pretty much as in standard set theory a special\npredicate, “\\(\\in\\)”, is used to express the membership\nrelation. To illustrate, given the former option, an assertion such as\n“there is a property that both John and Mary have” can be\nrendered as","\\[\\notag \\exists P(P(j) \\amp P(m)).\\]","\nGiven the second option, it can be rendered as","\\[\\notag \\exists x(\\textrm{pred}(x, j) \\amp \\textrm{pred}(x, m)).\\]","\n(The two options can be combined as in Menzel 1986; see Menzel 1993\nfor further discussion).","\nWhatever option one follows, in spelling out such theories one\ntypically postulates a rich realm of properties. Traditionally, this\nis done by a so-called comprehension principle which, intuitively,\nasserts that, for any well-formed formula (“wff”) \\(A\\),\nwith \\(n\\) free variables, \\(x_1 , \\ldots ,x_n\\), there is a\ncorresponding \\(n\\)-adic property. Following option 1, it goes as\nfollows:","\\[\\tag{CP} \\exists R^n \\forall x_1 \\ldots \\forall x_n(R^n(x_1 ,\n\\ldots ,x_n) \\leftrightarrow A). \\]","\nAlternatively, one can use a variable-binding operator, \\(\\lambda\\),\nthat, given an open wff, generates a term (called a “lambda\nabstract”) that is meant to stand for a property. This way to\nproceed is more flexible and is followed in the most recent versions\nof property theory. We shall thus stick to it in the following. To\nillustrate, we can apply “\\(\\lambda\\)” to the open\nformula, “\\((R(x) \\amp S(x))\\)” to form the one-place\ncomplex predicate “[\\(\\lambda x (R(x) \\amp S(x))\\)]”; if\n“\\(R\\)” denotes being red and “\\(S\\)”\ndenotes being square, then this complex predicate denotes the\ncompound, conjunctive property being red and square.\nSimilarly, we can apply the operator to the open formula\n“\\(\\exists y(L(x, y))\\)” to form the one-place predicate\n“[\\(\\lambda x \\exists y(L(x, y))\\)]”; if\n“\\(L\\)” stands for loves, this complex predicate\ndenotes the compound property loving someone (whereas\n“[\\(\\lambda y \\exists x(L(x, y))\\)]” would denote\nbeing loved by someone). To ensure that lambda abstracts\ndesignate the intended property, one should assume a “principle\nof lambda conversion”. Given option 1, it can be stated\nthus:","\\[\\tag{\\(\\lambda\\)-conv} [\\lambda x_1\\ldots x_n A](t_1 , \\ldots\n,t_n) \\leftrightarrow A(x_1 /t_1 , \\ldots ,x_n /t_n).\\]","\n\\(A(x_1 /t_1 , \\ldots ,x_n /t_n)\\) is the wff resulting from\nsimultaneously replacing each \\(x_i\\) in \\(A\\) with \\(t_i\\) (for \\(1\n\\le i \\le n)\\), provided \\(t_i\\) is free for \\(x_i\\) in \\(A\\)). For\nexample, given this principle, [\\(\\lambda x (R(x) \\amp S(x))](j)\\) is\nthe case iff \\((R(j) \\amp S(j))\\) is also the case.","\nStandard second-order logic allows for predicate variables bound by\nquantifiers. Hence, to the extent that these variables are taken to\nrange over properties, this system could be seen as a formal theory of\nproperties. Its expressive power is however limited, since it does not\nallow for subject terms that stand for properties. Thus, for example,\none cannot even say of a property \\(F\\) that \\(F = F\\). This is a\nserious limitation if one wants a formal tool for a realm of\nproperties whose laws one is trying to explore. Standard higher order\nlogics beyond the second order obviate this limitation by allowing for\npredicates in subject position, provided that the predicates that are\npredicated of them belong to a higher type. This presupposes a grammar\nin which predicates are assigned types of increasing levels, which can\nbe taken to mean that the properties themselves, for which the\npredicates stand for, are arranged into a hierarchy of types. Thus,\nsuch logics appropriate one version or another of the type theory\nconcocted by Russell to tame his own paradox and related conundrums.\nIf a predicate can be predicated of another predicate only if the\nformer is of a type higher than the latter, then self-predication is\nbanished and Russell’s paradox cannot even be formulated.\nFollowing this line, we can construct a type-theoretical formal\nproperty theory. The simple theory of types, as presented, e.g., in\nCopi (1971), can be seen as a prototypical version of such a property\ntheory (if we neglect the principle of extensionality assumed by\nCopi). The type-theoretical approach keeps having supporters. For\nexample, it is followed in the property theories embedded in\nZalta’s (1983) theory of abstract objects and more recently in\nthe metaphysical systems proposed by Williamson (2013) and Hale\n(2013).","\nHowever, for reasons sketched in\n §2.4,\n type theory is hardly satisfactory. Accordingly, many type-free\nversions of property theory have been developed over the years and no\nconsensus on what the right strategy is appears to be in sight. Of\ncourse, without type-theoretical constraints, given \\((\\lambda\\)-conv)\nand classical logic (CL), paradoxes such as Russell’s\nimmediately follow (to see this, consider this instance of\n\\((\\lambda\\textrm{-conv}): [\\lambda x {\\sim}x(x)]([\\lambda x\n{\\sim}x(x)]) \\leftrightarrow{\\sim}[\\lambda x {\\sim}x(x)]([\\lambda x\n{\\sim}x(x)])\\)). In formal systems where abstract singular terms or\npredicates may (but need not) denote properties (Swoyer 1998), formal\ncounterparts of (complex) predicates like “being a property that\ndoes not exemplify itself” (formally, “[\\(\\lambda x\n{\\sim}x(x)\\)]”) could exist in the object language without\ndenoting properties; from this perspective, Russell’s paradox\nmerely shows that such predicates do not stand for properties\n(similarly, according to Schnieder 2017, it shows that it is not\npossible that a certain property exists). But we would like to have\ngeneral criteria to decide when a predicate stands for a property and\nwhen it does not. Moreover, one may wonder what gives these predicates\nany significance at all if they do not stand for properties. There are\nthen motivations for building type-free property theories in which all\npredicates stand for properties. We can distinguish two main strands\nof them: those that weaken CL and those that circumscribe\n\\((\\lambda\\)-conv) (some of the proposals to be mentioned below are\nformulated in relation to set theory, but can be easily translated\ninto proposals for property theory).","\nAn early example of the former approach was offered in a 1938 paper by\nthe Russian logician D. A. Bochvar (Bochvar 1938 [1981]), where the\nprinciple of excluded middle is sacrificed as a consequence of the\nadoption of what is now known as Kleene’s weak three-valued\nscheme. An interesting recent attempt based on giving up excluded\nmiddle is Field 2004. A rather radical alternative proposal is to\nembrace a paraconsistent logic and give up the principle of\nnon-contradiction (Priest 1987). A different way of giving up CL is by\nquestioning its structural rules and turn to a substructural logic, as\nin Mares and Paoli (2014). The problem with all these approaches is\nwhether their underlying logic is strong enough for all the intended\napplications of property theory, in particular to natural language\nsemantics and the foundations of mathematics.","\nAs for the second strand (based on circumscribing \\((\\lambda\\)-conv)),\nit has been proposed to read the axioms of a standard set theory such\nas ZFC, minus extensionality, as if they were about properties rather\nthan sets (Schock 1969; Bealer 1982; Jubien 1989). The problem with\nthis is that these axioms, understood as talking about sets, can be\nmotivated by the iterative conception of sets, but they seem rather\nad hoc when understood as talking about properties\n(Cocchiarella 1985). An alternative can be found in Cocchiarella\n1986a, where \\((\\lambda\\)-conv) is circumscribed by adapting to\nproperties the notion of stratification used by Quine for sets. This\napproach is however subject to a version of Russell’s paradox\nderivable from contingent but intuitively possible facts (Orilia 1996)\nand to a paradox of hyperintensionality (Bozon 2004) (see Landini 2009\nand Cocchiarella 2009 for a discussion of both). Orilia (2000; Orilia\n& Landini 2019) has proposed another strategy for circumscribing\n\\((\\lambda\\)-conv), based on applying to exemplification Gupta’s\nand Belnap’s theory of circular definitions.","\nIndependently of the paradoxes (Bealer & Mönnich 1989: 198\nff.), there is the issue of providing identity conditions for\nproperties, specifying when it is the case that two properties are\nidentical. If one thinks of properties as meanings of natural language\npredicates and tries to account for intensional contexts, one will be\ninclined to assume rather fine-grained identity conditions, possibly\neven allowing that [\\(\\lambda x(R(x) \\amp S(x))\\)] and [\\(\\lambda\nx(S(x) \\amp R(x))\\)] are distinct (see Fox & Lappin 2015 for an\napproach based on operational distinctions among computable\nfunctions). On the other hand, if one thinks of properties as causally\noperative entities in the physical world, one will want to provide\nrather coarse-grained identity conditions. For instance, one might\nrequire that [\\(\\lambda x A\\)] and [\\(\\lambda x B\\)] are the same\nproperty iff it is physically necessary that \\(\\forall x(A\n\\leftrightarrow B)\\). Bealer (1982) tries to combine the two\napproaches (see also Bealer & Mönnich\n 1989)[15]."],"subsection_title":"6.1 Logical Systems for Properties"},{"content":["\nThe formal study of natural language semantics started with Montague\nand gave rise to a flourishing field of inquiry (see entry on\n Montague semantics).\n The basic idea in this field is to associate to natural language\nsentences wffs of a formal language, in order to represent sentence\nmeanings in a logically perspicuous manner. The association reflects\nthe compositionality of meanings: different syntactic subcomponents of\nsentences correspond systematically to syntactic subcomponents of the\nwffs; subcomponents of wffs thus represent the meanings of the\nsubcomponents of the sentences. The formal language eschews\nambiguities and has its own formal semantics, which grants that\nformulas have logical properties and relations, such as logical truth\nand entailments, so that in particular certain sequences of formulas\ncount as logically valid arguments. The ambiguities we normally find\nin natural language sentences and the entailment relations that link\nthem are captured by associating ambiguous sentences to different\nunambiguous wffs, in such a way that when a natural language argument\nis felt to be valid there is a corresponding sequence of wffs that\ncount as a logically valid argument. In order to achieve all this,\nMontague appealed to a higher-order logic. To see why this was\nnecessary, one may focus on this valid argument:","\ntherefore,","\nTo grant compositionality in a way that respects the syntactic\nsimilarity of the three sentences (they all have the same\nsubject-predicate form), and the validity of the argument, Montague\nassociates (1)–(3) to formulas such as these:","\\[ \\tag{1a} [\\lambda F \\forall x(\\mathrm{G}(x) \\rightarrow\nF(x)](\\mathrm{M}); \\] \\[ \\tag{2a} [\\lambda F \\exists x(\\forall y(P(x)\n\\rightarrow x = y) \\amp F(x))](G); \\] \\[ \\tag{3a} [\\lambda F \\exists\nx(\\forall y(P(x) \\rightarrow x = y) \\amp F(x))](\\mathrm{M}). \\]","\nThe three lambda abstracts in (1a)–(3a) represent, respectively,\nthe meanings of the three noun phrases in (1)–(3). These\nlambda-abstracts occur in predicate position, as predicates of\npredicates, so that (1a)–(3a) can be read, respectively, as:\nevery Greek is instantiated by being mortal; the\npresident of Greece is instantiated by being Greek;\nthe president of Greece is instantiated by being\nmortal. Given lambda-conversion plus quantifier and propositional\nlogic, the argument is valid, as desired. It should be noted that\nlambda abstracts such as these can be taken to stand for peculiar\nproperties of properties, classifiable as denoting concepts\n(after Russell 1903; see Cocchiarella 1989). One may then say then\nthis approach to semantics makes a case for the postulation of\ndenoting concepts, in addition to the more obvious and general fact\nthat it grants properties as meanings of natural language predicates\n(represented by symbols of the formal language).","\nThis in itself says nothing about the nature of such properties. As we\nsaw in\n §3.1,\n Montague took them to be intensions as set-theoretically\ncharacterized in terms of possible worlds. Moreover, he took them to\nbe typed, since, to avoid logical paradoxes, he relied on type theory.\nAfter Montague, these two assumptions have been typically taken for\ngranted in natural language semantics, though with attempts to recover\nhyperintensionality somehow (Cresswell 1985) in order to capture the\nsemantics of propositional attitudes verbs such as\n“believe”, affected by the phenomena regarding mental\ncontent hinted at in\n §3.1.\n However, the development of type-free property theories has suggested\nthe radically different road of relying on them to provide logical\nforms for natural language semantics (Chierchia 1985; Chierchia &\nTurner 1988; Orilia 2000b; Orilia & Landini 2019). This allows one\nto capture straightforwardly natural language inferences that appear\nto presuppose type-freedom, as they feature quantifiers that bind\nsimultaneously subject and predicate positions (recall the example of\n §1.2).\n Moreover, by endowing the selected type-free property theory with\nfine-grained identity conditions, one also accounts for propositional\nattitude verbs (Bealer 1989). Thus, we may say that this line makes a\ncase for properties understood as untyped and highly fine-grained."],"subsection_title":"6.2 Semantics and Logical Form"}]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThere are some crucial terminological and conceptual distinctions that\\nare typically made in talking of properties. There are also various\\nsorts of reasons that have been adduced for the existence of\\nproperties and different traditional views about whether and in what\\nsense properties should be acknowledged. We shall focus on such\\nmatters in the following subsections.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Properties: Basic Ideas\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nProperties are expressed, as meanings, by\\npredicates. In the past “predicate” was often\\nused as synonym of “property”, but nowadays predicates are\\nlinguistic entities, typically contrasted with singular\\nterms, i.e., simple or complex noun phrases such as\\n“Daniel”, “this horse” or “the President\\nof France”, which can occupy subject positions in sentences and\\npurport to denote, or refer to, a single thing.\\nFollowing Frege, predicates are verbal phrases such as\\n“is French” or “drinks”. Alternatively,\\npredicates are general terms such as “French”,\\nwith the copula “is” (or verbal inflection) taken to\\nconvey an exemplification link (P. Strawson 1959; Bergmann 1960). We\\nshall conveniently use “predicate” in both ways.\\nPredicates are predicated of singular terms, thereby\\ngenerating sentences such as “Daniel is French”. In the\\nfamiliar formal language of first-order logic, this would be rendered,\\nsay, as “\\\\(F(d)\\\\)”, thus representing the predicate with a\\ncapital letter. The set or class of objects to which a predicate\\nveridically applies is often called the extension of the\\npredicate, or of the corresponding property. This property, in\\ncontrast, is called the intension of the predicate, i.e., its\\nmeaning. This terminology traces back to the Middle Age and in the\\nlast century has led to the habit of calling sets and properties\\nextensional and intensional entities, respectively.\\nExtensions and intensions can hardly be identified; this is\\nimmediately suggested by paradigmatic examples of co-extensional\\npredicates that appear to differ in meaning, such as “has a\\nheart”, and “has kidneys” (see\\n §3.1).\",\n \"\\nProperties can also be referred to by singular terms, or so it seems.\\nFirst of all, there are singular terms, e.g., “being\\nhonest” or “honesty”, that result from the\\nnominalization of predicates, such as “is honest”\\nor “honest” (some think that “being \\\\(F\\\\)” and\\n“\\\\(F\\\\)-ness” stand for different kinds of property\\n(Levinson 1991). Further, there are definite descriptions, such as\\n“Mary’s favorite property”. Finally, though more\\ncontroversially, there are demonstratives, such as “that shade\\nof red”, deployed while pointing to a red object (Heal\\n1997).\",\n \"\\nFrege (1892) and Russell (1903) had different opinions regarding the\\nontological import of nominalization. According to the former,\\nnominalized predicates stand for a “correlate” of the\\n“unsaturated” entity that the predicate stands for (in\\nFrege’s terminology they are a “concept correlate”\\nand a “concept”, respectively). According to the latter,\\nwho speaks of “inextricable difficulties” in Frege’s\\nview (Russell 1903: §49), they stand for exactly the same entity.\\nMutatis mutandis, they similarly disagreed about other\\nsingular terms that seemingly refer to properties. The ontological\\ndistinction put forward by Frege is mainly motivated by the fact that\\ngrammar indeed forbids the use of predicates in subject position. But\\nthis hardly suffices for the distinction and it is dubious that other\\nmotivations can be marshalled (Parsons 1986). We shall thus take for\\ngranted Russell’s line here, although many philosophers support\\nFrege’s view or at least take it very seriously\\n(Castañeda 1976; Cocchiarella 1986a; Landini 2008).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.1 How We Speak of Properties\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nProperties are typically invoked to explain phenomena of philosophical\\ninterest. The most traditional task for which properties have been\\nappealed to is to provide a solution to the so-called “one over\\nmany problem” via a corresponding “one over many\\nargument”. This traces back at least to Socrates and Plato\\n(e.g., Phaedo, 100 c-d) and keeps being rehearsed (Russell\\n1912: ch. 9; Butchvarov 1966; Armstrong 1978a: ch. 7; Loux 1998:\\nch.1). The problem is that certain things are many, they are\\nnumerically different, and yet they are somehow one: they appear to be\\nsimilar, in a way that suggests a uniform classification, their being\\ngrouped together into a single class. For example, some objects have\\nthe same shape, certain others have the same color, and still others\\nthe same weight. Hence, the argument goes, something is needed to\\nexplain this phenomenon and properties fill the bill: the objects in\\nthe first group, say, all have the property spherical, those\\nin the second red, and those in the third weighing 200\\ngrams.\",\n \"\\nRelatedly, properties have been called for to explain our use of\\ngeneral terms. How is it, e.g., that we apply “spherical”\\nto those balls over there and refuse to do it for the nearby bench? It\\ndoes not seem to be due to an arbitrary decision concerning where, or\\nwhere not, to stick a certain label. It seems rather the case that the\\nrecognition of a certain property in some objects but not in others\\nelicits the need for a label, “spherical”, which is then\\nused for objects having that property and not for others. Properties\\nare thus invoked as meanings of general terms and\\npredicates (Plato, Phaedo, 78e; Russell 1912: ch.\\n9). In contrast with this, Quine (1948; 1953 [1980: 11, 21, 131] )\\ninfluentially argued that the use of general terms and predicates in\\nitself does not involve an ontological commitment to entities\\ncorresponding to them, since it is by deploying singular terms that we\\npurport to refer to something (see also Sellars 1960). However, as\\nnoted, predicates can be nominalized and thus occur as singular terms.\\nHence, even if one agrees with Quine, nominalized predicates still\\nsuggest the existence of properties as their referents, at least to\\nthe extent that the use of nominalized predicates cannot be\\nparaphrased away (Loux 2006: 25–34; entry on\\n platonism in metaphysics, §4).\",\n \"\\nAfter Quine (1948), quantificational idiom is the landmark of\\nontological commitment. We can thus press the point even more by\\nnoting that we make claims and construct arguments that appear to\\ninvolve quantification over properties, with quantifiers reaching (i)\\nover predicate positions, or even (ii) over both subject and predicate\\npositions (Castañeda\\n 1976).[2]\\n As regards (i), consider: this apple is red; this tomato is red;\\nhence, there is something that this apple is and this tomato also is.\\nAs for (ii), consider: wisdom is more important than beauty; Mary is\\nwise and Elisabeth is beautiful; hence, there is something that Mary\\nis which is more important than something that Elisabeth is.\",\n \"\\nQuantification over properties seems ubiquitous not just in ordinary\\ndiscourse but in science as well. For example, the inverse square law\\nfor dynamics and the reduction of temperature to mean molecular energy\\ncan be taken to involve quantification over properties such as masses,\\ndistances and temperatures: the former tells us that the attraction\\nforce between any two bodies depends on such bodies’ having\\ncertain masses and being at a certain distance, and the latter informs\\nus that the fact that a sample of gas has a given temperature depends\\non its having such and such mean kinetic energy.\",\n \"\\nSwoyer (1999: §3.2) considers these points within a long list of\\narguments that have been, or can be, put forward to motivate an\\nontological commitment to properties. He touches on topics such as\\na priori knowledge, change, causation, measurement, laws of\\nnature, intensional logic, natural language semantics, numbers (we\\nshall cover some of this territory in\\n §5\\n and\\n §6).\",\n \"\\nDespite all this, whether, and in what sense, properties should be\\nadmitted in one’s ontology appears to be a perennial issue,\\ntraditionally shaped as a controversy about the existence of\\nuniversals.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.2 Arguments for Properties\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nDo universals really exist? There are three long-standing answers to\\nthis question: realism, nominalism, and\\nconceptualism.\",\n \"\\nAccording to realists, universals exist as mind-independent entities.\\nIn transcendent realism, put forward by Plato, they exist\\neven if uninstantiated and are thus “transcendent” or\\n“ante res” (“before the things”). In\\nimmanent realism, defended by Aristotle in opposition to his\\nmaster, they are “immanent” or “in\\nrebus” (“in things”), as they exist only if\\ninstantiated by objects. Contemporary notable supporters are Russell\\n(1912) for the former and Armstrong (1978a) for the latter (for recent\\ntakes on this old dispute see the essays by Loux, Van Inwagen, Lowe\\nand Galluzzo in Galluzzo & Loux 2015). Transcendentism is of\\ncourse a less economical position and elicits epistemological worries\\nregarding our capacity to grasp ante res universals.\\nNevertheless, such worries may be countered in various ways (cf. entry\\non\\n platonism in metaphysics, §5;\\n Bealer 1982: 19–20; 1998: §2; Linsky & Zalta 1995),\\nand uninstantiated properties may well have work to do, particularly\\nin capturing the intuitive idea that there are unrealized\\npossibilities and in dealing with cognitive content (see\\n §3).\\n A good summary of pro-transcendentist arguments and immanentist\\nrejoinders is offered by Allen (2016: §2.3). See also Costa\\nforthcoming for a new criticism of immanentism, based on the\\nnotion of grounding.\",\n \"\\nNominalists eschew mind-independent universals. They may either resort\\nto tropes in their stead, or accept predicate nominalism,\\nwhich tries to make it without mind-independent properties at all, by\\ntaking the predicates themselves to do the classifying job that\\nproperties are supposed to do. This is especially indigestible to a\\nrealist, since it seems to put the cart before the horse by making\\nlanguage and mind responsible for the similarities we find in the rich\\nvarieties of things surrounding us. Some even say that this involves\\nan idealist rejection of a mind-independent world (Hochberg 2013).\\nConceptualists also deny that there are mind-independent universals,\\nand because of this they are often assimilated to nominalists. Still,\\nthey can be distinguished insofar as they replace such universals with\\nconcepts, understood as non-linguistic mind-dependent entities,\\ntypically functioning as meanings of predicates. The mind-dependence\\nof concepts however makes conceptualism liable to the same kind of\\ncart/horse worry just voiced above in relation to predicate\\n nominalism.[3]\",\n \"\\nThe arguments considered in\\n §1.2\\n constitute the typical motivation for realism, which is the stance\\nthat we take for granted here. They may be configured as an abductive\\ninference to the best explanation (Swoyer 1999). Thus, of course, they\\nare not foolproof, and in fact nominalism is still a popular view,\\nwhich is discussed in detail in the entry on\\n nominalism in metaphysics,\\n as well as in the entry on\\n tropes.\\n Conceptualism appears to be less common nowadays, although it still\\nhas supporters (cf. Cocchiarella 1986a: ch. 3; 2007), and it is worth\\nnoting that empirical research on concepts is flourishing.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.3 Traditional Views about the Existence of Universals\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nWe have talked above in a way that might give the impression that\\npredication is an activity that we perform, e.g., when we say\\nor think that a certain apple is red. Although some philosophers might\\nthink of it in this way, predication, or attribution, may\\nalso be viewed as a special link that connects a property to a thing\\nin a way that gives rise to a\\n proposition,\\n understood as a complex\\nfeaturing the property and the thing (or concepts of them) as\\nconstituents with different roles: the latter occurs in the\\nproposition as logical subject or argument, as is\\noften said, and the former as attributed to such an argument.\\nIf the proposition is true (the predication is veridical), the\\nargument exemplifies the property, viz. the former is an instance of\\nthe latter. The idea that properties yield propositions when\\nappropriately connected to an argument motivates Russell’s\\n(1903) introduction of the term\\n“propositional\\nfunction” to speak of properties. We\\ntake for granted here that predication is univocal. However, according\\nto some neo-Meinongian philosophers, there are two modes of\\npredication, sometimes characterized as “external” and\\n“internal” (Castañeda 1972; Rapaport 1978; Zalta\\n1983; see entry on\\n nonexistent objects).\\n Zalta (1983) traces back the distinction to Mally and uses\\n“exemplification” to characterize the former and\\n“encoding” to characterize the latter. Roughly, the idea\\nis that non-existent objects may encode properties that existent\\nobjects exemplify. For instance, winged is exemplified by\\nthat bird over there and is encoded by the winged horse.\",\n \"\\nIt is often assumed nowadays that, when an object exemplifies a\\nproperty, there is a further, complex, entity, a fact or state of\\naffairs (Bergmann 1960; Armstrong 1997, entries on\\n facts\\n and\\n states of affairs),\\n having the property (qua attributed) and the object\\n(qua argument) as constituents (this compositional conception\\nis not always accepted; see, e.g., Bynoe 2011 for a dissenting voice).\\nFacts are typically taken to fulfill the theoretical roles of\\ntruthmakers (the entities that make true propositions true, see entry\\non\\n truthmakers)\\n and causal relata (the entities connected by causal\\nrelations; see entry on\\n the metaphysics of causation, §1).\\n Not all philosophers, however, distinguish between propositions and\\nstates of affairs; Russell (1903) acknowledges only propositions and,\\nfor a more recent example, so does Gaskin (2008).\",\n \"\\nIt appears that properties can have a double role that no other\\nentities can have: they can occur in propositions and facts both as\\narguments and as attributed (Russell 1903: §48). For example, in\\ntruly saying that this apple is red and that red is a color, we\\nexpress a proposition wherein red occurs as attributed, and\\nanother proposition wherein red occurs as argument.\\nCorrespondingly, there are two facts with red in both roles,\\nrespectively. This duplicity grounds the common distinction between\\ndifferent orders or types of properties:\\nfirst-order ones are properties of things that are not\\nthemselves predicables; second-order ones are properties of\\nfirst-order properties; and so on. Even though the formal and\\nontological issues behind this terminology are controversial, it is\\nwidely used and is often connected to the subdivision between\\nfirst-order and higher-order logics (see, e.g., Thomason 1974; Oliver\\n1996; Williamson 2013; entry on\\n type theory).\\n It originates from Frege’s and Russell’s logical\\ntheories, especially Russell’s type theory, wherein distinctions\\nof types and orders are rigidly regimented in order to circumvent the\\nlogical paradoxes (see\\n §6).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.4 Properties in Propositions and States of Affairs\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nA relation is typically attributed to a plurality of objects. These\\njointly instantiate the relation in question, if the\\nattribution is veridical. In this case, the relata (as\\narguments) and the relation (as attributed) are constituents of a\\nstate of affairs. Depending on the number of objects that it can\\nrelate, a relation is usually taken to have a number of\\n“places” or a “degree” (“adicity”,\\n“arity”), and is thus called “dyadic”\\n(“two-place”), “triadic”\\n(“three-place”), etc. For example, before and\\nbetween are dyadic (of degree 2) and triadic (of degree 3),\\nrespectively. In line with this, properties and propositions are\\n“monadic” and “zero-adic” predicables, as they\\nare predicated of one, and of no, object, respectively, and may then\\nbe seen as limiting cases of relations (Bealer 1982, where properties,\\nrelations and propositions are suggestively grouped under the acronym\\n“PRP;” Dixon 2018; Menzel 1986; 1993; Swoyer 1998; Orilia\\n1999; Van Inwagen 2004; 2015; Zalta 1983). This terminology is also\\napplied to predicates and sentences; for example, the predicate\\n“between” is triadic, and the sentence “Peter is\\nbetween Tom and May” is zero-adic. Accordingly, standard\\nfirst-order logic employs predicates with a fixed degree, typically\\nindicated by a superscript, e.g., \\\\(P^1\\\\), \\\\(Q^2\\\\), \\\\(R^3\\\\), etc.\",\n \"\\nIn natural language, however, many predicates appear to be\\nmultigrade or variably polyadic; i.e., they can be\\nused with different numbers of arguments, as they can be true of\\nvarious numbers of things. For example, we say “John is lifting\\na table”, with “lifting” used as dyadic, as well as\\n“John and Mary are lifting a table”, with\\n“lifting” used as triadic. Moreover, there is a kind of\\ninference, called “argument deletion”, which also suggests\\nthat many predicates that prima facie could be assigned a\\ncertain fixed degree are in fact multigrade. For example, “John\\nis eating a cake” suggests that “is eating” is\\ndyadic, but since, by argument deletion, it entails “John is\\neating”, one could conclude that it is also monadic and thus\\nmultigrade. Often one can resist the conclusion that there are\\nmultigrade predicates. For example, it could be said that “John\\nis eating” is simply short for “John is eating\\nsomething”. But it seems hard to find a systematic and\\nconvincing strategy that allows us to maintain that natural language\\npredicates have a fixed degree. This has motivated the construction of\\nlogical languages that feature multigrade predicates in order to\\nprovide a more appropriate formal account of natural language (Grandy\\n1976; Graves 1993; Orilia 2000a). Since natural language predicates\\nappear to be multigrade, one may be tempted to take the properties and\\nrelations that they express to also be multigrade, and the metaphysics\\nof science may lend support to this conclusion (Mundy 1989).\",\n \"\\nSeemingly, relations are not jointly instantiated\\nsimpliciter; how the instantiation occurs also plays\\na role. This comes to the fore in particular with non-symmetric\\nrelations such as loving. For example, if John loves Mary,\\nthen loving is jointly instantiated by John and Mary in a\\ncertain way, whereas if it is Mary who loves John, then\\nloving is instantiated by John and Mary in another way.\\nAccordingly, relations pose a special problem: explicating the\\ndifference between facts, such as Abelard loves Eloise and\\nEloise loves Abelard, that at least prima facie\\ninvolve exactly the same constituents, namely a non-symmetric relation\\nand two other items (loving, Abelard, Eloise). Such facts are\\noften said to differ in “relational order” or in the\\n“differential application” of the non-symmetric relation\\nin question, and the problem then is that of characterizing what this\\nrelational order or differential application amounts to.\",\n \"\\nRussell (1903: §218) attributed an enormous importance to this\\nissue and attacked it repeatedly. Despite this, it has been pretty\\nmuch neglected until the end of last century, with only few others\\nconfronting it systematically (e.g., Bergmann 1992; Hochberg 1987).\\nHowever, Fine (2000) has forcefully brought it again on the\\nontological agenda and proposed a novel approach that has received\\nsome attention. Fine identifies standard and\\npositionalist views (analogous to two approaches defended by\\nRussell at different times (1903; 1984); cf. Orilia 2008). According\\nto the former, relations are intrinsically endowed with a\\n“direction”, which allows us to distinguish, e.g.,\\nloving and being loved: Abelard loves\\nEloise and Eloise loves Abelard differ, because they\\ninvolve two relations that differ in direction (e.g., the former\\ninvolves loving and the latter being loved).\\nAccording to the latter, relations have different\\n“positions” that can somehow host relata:\\nAbelard loves Eloise and Eloise loves Abelard\\ndiffer, because the two positions of the very same loving\\nrelation are differently occupied (by Abelard and Eloise in one case\\nand by Eloise and Abelard in the other case). Fine goes on to propose\\nand endorse an alternative, “anti-positionalist”\\nstandpoint, according to which relations have neither direction nor\\npositions. The literature on this topic keeps growing and there are\\nnow various proposals on the market, including new versions of\\npositionalism (Orilia 2014; Donnelly 2016; Dixon 2018), and\\nprimitivism, according to which differential application\\ncannot be analyzed (MacBride 2014).\",\n \"\\nRussell (1903: ch. 26) also had a key role in leading philosophers to\\nacknowledge that at least some relations, in particular\\nspatio-temporal ones, are external, i.e., cannot be reduced\\nto monadic properties, or the mere existence, of the relata,\\nin contrast to internal relations that can be so reduced. This was a\\nbreakthrough after a long tradition tracing back at least to Aristotle\\nand the Scholastics wherein there seems to be hardly any place for\\nexternal relations (see entry on\\n medieval theories of relations).[4]\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.5 Relations\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAccording to some philosophers, universals and tropes may coexist in\\none ontological framework (see, e.g., Lowe 2006 for a well-known\\ngeneral system of this kind, and Orilia 2006a, for a proposal based on\\nempirical data from quantum mechanics). However, nowadays they are\\ntypically seen as alternatives, with the typical supporter of\\nuniversals (“universalist”) trying to do without tropes\\n(e.g., Armstrong 1997) and the typical supporter of tropes\\n(“tropist”) trying to dispense with universals (e.g.,\\nMaurin\\n 2002).[5]\\n In order to clarify how differently they see matters, we may take\\nadvantage of states of affairs. Both parties may agree, say, that\\nthere are two red apples, \\\\(a\\\\) and \\\\(b\\\\). They will immediately\\ndisagree, however, for the universalist will add that\",\n \"\\nThe tropist will reject these states of affairs with universals as\\nconstituents and rather urge that there are two distinct tropes, the\\nredness of \\\\(a\\\\) and the redness of \\\\(b\\\\), which play a theoretical\\nrole analogous to the one that the universalist would invoke for such\\nstates of affairs. Hence, tropists claim that tropes can be causal\\nrelata (D. Williams 1953) and truthmakers (Mulligan, Simons, &\\nSmith 1984).\",\n \"\\nTropes are typically taken to be simple, i.e., without any\\nsubconstituent (see Section 2.2 of the entry on\\n tropes).\\n Their playing the role of states of affairs with universals as\\nconstituents depends on this: universals combine two functions, only\\none of which is fulfilled by tropes. On the one hand, universals are\\ncharacterizers, inasmuch as they characterize concrete\\nobjects. On the other hand, they are also unifiers, to the\\nextent that different concrete objects may be characterized by the\\nvery same universal, which is thus somehow shared by all of them; when\\nthis is the case, there is, according to the universalist, an\\nobjective similarity among the different objects (see\\n §1.2).\\n In contrast, tropes are only characterizers, for, at least as\\ntypically understood, they cannot be shared by distinct concrete\\nobjects. Given its dependency on one specific object, say, the apple\\n\\\\(a\\\\), a trope can do the work of a state of affairs with \\\\(a\\\\) as\\nconstituent. But for tropes to play this role, the tropist will have\\nto pay a price and introduce additional theoretical machinery to\\naccount for objective similarities among concrete objects. To this\\nend, she will typically resort to the idea that there are objective\\nresemblances among tropes, which can then be grouped together in\\nresemblance classes. These resemblance classes play the role of\\nunifiers for the tropist. Hence, from the tropist’s point of\\nview “property” is ambiguous, since it may stand for the\\ncharacterizers (tropes) or for the unifiers (resemblance classes) (cf.\\nentry on\\n mental causation, §6.5).\\n Similarly, “exemplification” and related words may be\\nregarded as ambiguous insofar as they can be used either to indicate\\nthat an object exemplifies a certain trope or to indicate that the\\nobject relates to a certain resemblance class by virtue of\\nexemplifying a trope in that\\n class.[6]\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.6 Universals versus Tropes\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nMany important and often controversial distinctions among different\\nkinds of properties have been made throughout the whole history of\\nphilosophy until now, often playing key roles in all sorts of disputes\\nand arguments, especially in metaphysics. Here we shall briefly review\\nsome of these distinctions and others will surface in the following\\nsections. More details can be found in other more specialized entries,\\nto which we shall refer.\",\n \"\\nLocke influentially distinguished between primary and\\nsecondary qualities; the former are objective features of\\nthings, such as shapes, sizes and weights, whereas the latter are\\nmind-dependent, e.g., colors, tastes,\\nsounds, and smells. This contrast was already\\nemphasized by the Greek atomists and was revived in modern times by\\nGalileo, Descartes, and Boyle.\",\n \"\\nAt least since Aristotle, the essential properties of an\\nobject have been contrasted with its accidental properties;\\nthe object could not exist without the former, whereas it could fail\\nto have the latter (see entry on\\n essential vs. accidental properties).\\n Among essential properties, some acknowledge individual\\nessences (also called “haecceities” or\\n“thisnesses”), which univocally characterize a certain\\nindividual. Adams (1979) conceives of such properties as involving,\\nvia the identity relation, the very individual in question, e.g.,\\nSocrates: being identical to Socrates, which cannot exist if\\nSocrates does not exist. In contrast, Plantinga (1974) views them as\\ncapable of existing without the individuals of which they are\\nessences, e.g., Socratizing, which could have existed even if\\nSocrates had not existed. See\\n §5.2\\n on the issue of the essences of properties themselves.\",\n \"\\n Sortal properties are typically\\nexpressed by count nouns like “desk” and “cat”\\nand are taken to encode principles of individuation and persistence\\nthat allow us to objectively count objects. For example, there is a\\nfact of the matter regarding how many things in this room instantiate\\nbeing a desk and being a cat. On the other hand,\\nnon-sortal properties such as red or water do not\\nallow us to count in a similarly obvious way. This distinction is\\noften appealed to in contemporary metaphysics (P. Strawson 1959: ch.\\n5, §2; Armstrong 1978a: ch. 11, §4), where, in contrast, the\\ntraditional one between genus and\\n species\\n plays a relatively small role. The latter figured conspicuously in\\nAristotle and in much subsequent philosophy inspired by him. We can\\nview a genus as a property more general than a corresponding species\\nproperty, in a hierarchically relative manner. For example, being\\na mammal is a genus relative to the species being a\\nhuman, but it is a species relative to the genus being an\\nanimal. The possession of a property called differentia\\nis appealed to in order to distinguish between different species\\nfalling under a common genus; e.g., as the tradition has it, the\\ndifferentia for being human is being rational (Aristotle,\\nCategories, 3a). Similar hierarchies of properties, however\\nwithout anything like differentiae, come with the distinction of\\n determinables and determinates,\\n which appears to be\\nmore prominent in current metaphysics. Color properties provide\\ntypical examples of such hierarchies, e.g., with red and\\nscarlet as determinable and determinate, respectively.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.7 Kinds of Properties\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nWe saw right at the outset that objects exemplify, or instantiate,\\nproperties. More generally, items of all sorts, including properties\\nthemselves, exemplify properties, or, in different terminology,\\nbear, have or possess properties. Reversing\\norder, we can also say that properties characterize, or\\ninhere in, the items that exemplify them. There is then a\\nvery general phenomenon of exemplification to investigate, which has\\nbeen labeled in various ways, as the variety of terms of art just\\ndisplayed testifies. All such terms have often been given special\\ntechnical senses in the rich array of different explorations of this\\nterritory since Ancient and Medieval times up to the present age (see,\\ne.g., Lowe 2006: 77). These explorations can hardly be disentangled\\nfrom the task of providing a general ontological picture with its own\\ncategorial distinctions. In line with what most philosophers do\\nnowadays, we choose “exemplification”, or, equivalently,\\n“instantiation” (and their cognates), to discuss this\\nphenomenon in general and to approach some different accounts that\\nhave been given of it in recent times. This sweeping use of these\\nterms is to be kept distinct from the more specialized uses of them\\nthat will surface below (and to some extent have already surfaced\\nabove) in describing specific approaches by different philosophers\\nwith their own terminologies.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Exemplification\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nWe have taken for granted that there is just one kind of\\nexemplification, applying indifferently to different categories of\\nentities. This monist option may indeed be considered the\\ndefault one. A typical recent case of a philosopher who endorses it is\\nArmstrong (1997). He distinguishes three basic\\ncategories, particulars, properties or relations, and states of\\naffairs, and takes exemplification as cutting across them: properties\\nand relations are exemplified not only by particulars, but by\\nproperties or relations and states of affairs as well. But some\\nphilosophers are pluralist: they distinguish different kinds\\nof exemplification, in relation to categorial distinctions in their\\nontology.\",\n \"\\nOne may perhaps attribute different kinds of exemplification to the\\nabove-considered Meinongians in view of the different sorts of\\npredication that they admit (see, e.g., Monaghan’s (2011)\\ndiscussion of Zalta’s theory). A more typical example of the\\npluralist alternative is however provided by Lowe (2006), who\\ndistinguishes “instantiation”,\\n“characterization” and “exemplification” in\\nhis account of four fundamental categories: objects, and three\\ndifferent sorts of properties, namely kinds (substantial universals),\\nattributes and modes\\n (tropes).[7]\\n To illustrate, Fido is a dog insofar as it instantiates the\\nkind dog, \\\\(D\\\\), which in turn is characterized by\\nthe attribute of barking, \\\\(B\\\\). Hence, when Fido is barking, it\\nexemplifies \\\\(B\\\\) occurrently by virtue of being\\ncharacterized by a barking mode, \\\\(b\\\\), that instantiates \\\\(B\\\\); and,\\nwhen Fido is silent, it exemplifies \\\\(B\\\\) dispositionally,\\nsince \\\\(D\\\\), which Fido instantiates, is characterized by\\n\\\\(B\\\\) (see Gorman 2014 for a critical discussion of this sort of\\nview).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.1 Monist vs. Pluralist Accounts\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nMost philosophers, whether tacitly or overtly, appear to take\\nexemplification as primitive and unanalyzable. However, on certain\\nviews of particulars, it might seem that exemplification is reduced to\\nsomething more fundamental.\",\n \"\\nA well-known such approach is the bundle theory, which takes\\nparticulars to be nothing more than “bundles” of\\nuniversals connected by a special relation, commonly called\\ncompresence, after Russell (1948: Pt. IV, ch.\\n 8)[8].\\n Despite well-known problems (Van Cleve 1985), this view, or\\napproaches in its vicinity, keep having supporters (Casullo 1988;\\nCurtis 2014; Dasgupta 2009; Paul 2002; Shiver 2014; J. Russell 2018;\\nsee Sider 2020, ch. 3, for a recent critical analysis). From this\\nperspective, that a particular exemplifies a property amounts to the\\nproperty’s being compresent with the properties that constitute\\nthe bundle with which the particular in question is identified. It\\nthus looks as if exemplification is reduced to compresence.\\nNevertheless, compresence itself is presumably jointly exemplified by\\nthe properties that constitute a given bundle, and thus at most there\\nis a reduction, to compresence, of exemplification by a\\nparticular (understood as a bundle), and not an elimination of\\nexemplification in general.\",\n \"\\nAnother, more recent, approach is based on partial identity.\\nBaxter (2001) and, inspired by him, Armstrong (2004), have proposed\\nrelated assays of exemplification, which seem to analyze it in terms\\nof such partial identity. These views have captured some interest and\\ntriggered discussions (see, e.g., Mumford 2007; Baxter’s (2013)\\nreply to critics and Baxter’s (2018) rejoinder to Brown\\n2017).\",\n \"\\nBaxter (2001) relies on the notion of aspect and on the\\nrelativization of numerical identity to counts. In his view,\\nboth particulars and properties have aspects, which can be\\nsimilar to distinct aspects of other particulars or properties. The\\nnumerical identity of aspects is relative to standards for counting,\\ncounts, which group items in count collections: aspects of\\nparticulars in the particular collection, and aspects of\\nuniversals, in the universal collection. There can then be a\\ncross-count identity, which holds between an aspect in the\\nparticular collection, and an aspect in the universal collection,\\ne.g., the aspects Hume as human and humanity as had by\\nHume. In this case, the universal and the particular in question\\n(humanity and Hume, in our example) are partially identical.\\nInstantiation, e.g., that Hume instantiates humanity, then amounts to\\nthis partial identity of a universal and a particular. One may have\\nthe feeling, as Baxter himself worries (2001: 449), that in this\\napproach instantiation has been traded for something definitely more\\nobscure, such as aspects and an idiosyncratic view of identity. It can\\nalso be suspected that particulars’ and properties’\\nhaving aspects is presupposed in this analysis, where this\\nhaving is a relation rather close to exemplification\\nitself.\",\n \"\\nArmstrong (2004) tries to do without aspects. At first glance it seems\\nas if he analyzes exemplification, for he takes the exemplification of\\na property (a universal) by a particular to be a partial identity of\\nthe property and the particular; as he puts it (2004: 47), “[i]t\\nis not a mere mereological overlap, as when two streets intersect, but\\nit is a partial identity”. However, when we see more closely\\nwhat this partial identity amounts to, the suspicion arises that it\\npresupposes exemplification. For Armstrong appears to identify a\\nparticular via the properties that it instantiates and\\nsimilarly a property via the particulars that instantiate it.\\nSo that we may identify a particular, \\\\(x\\\\), via a collection of\\nproperties qua instantiated by \\\\(x\\\\), say \\\\(\\\\{F_x,\\\\) \\\\(G_x,\\\\)\\n\\\\(H_x,\\\\) …, \\\\(P_x,\\\\) \\\\(Q_x,\\\\) \\\\(\\\\ldots\\\\};\\\\) and a property,\\n\\\\(P\\\\), via a collection of particulars qua instantiating\\n\\\\(P\\\\), say \\\\(\\\\{P_a, P_b , \\\\ldots ,P_x, P_y , \\\\ldots \\\\}\\\\). By putting\\nthings in this way, we can then say that a particular is partially\\nidentical to a property when the collection that identifies the\\nparticular has an element in common with the collection that\\nidentifies the property. To illustrate, the \\\\(x\\\\) and the \\\\(P\\\\) of our\\nexample are partially identical because they have the element \\\\(P_x\\\\)\\nin common. Now, the elements of these collections are neither\\nproperties tout court nor particulars tout court,\\nwhich led us to talk of properties qua instantiated and\\nparticulars qua\\n instantiating.[9]\\n But this of course presupposes instantiation. Moreover, there is the\\nunwelcome consequence that the world becomes dramatically less\\ncontingent than we would have thought at first sight, for neither a\\nconcrete particular nor a property can exist without it being the case\\nthat the former has the properties it happens to have, and that the\\nlatter is instantiated by the same particulars that actually\\ninstantiate it; we get, as Mumford puts it (2007: 185), “a major\\nnew kind of necessity in the world”.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.2 Compresence and Partial Identity\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nOne important motivation, possibly the main one, behind attempts at\\nanalysis such as the ones we have just seen is the worry to avoid the\\nso-called Bradley’s regress\\nregarding\\nexemplification (Baxter 2001: 449; Mumford 2007: 185), which goes as\\nfollows. Suppose that the individual \\\\(a\\\\) has the property \\\\(F\\\\). For\\n\\\\(a\\\\) to instantiate \\\\(F\\\\) it must be linked to \\\\(F\\\\) by a\\n(dyadic) relation of instantiation, \\\\(I_1\\\\). But this requires a\\nfurther (triadic) relation of instantiation, \\\\(I_2\\\\), that connects\\n\\\\(I_1, F\\\\) and \\\\(a\\\\), and so on without end. At each stage a further\\nconnecting relation is required, and thus it seems that nothing\\never gets connected to anything else (it is not clear to what\\nextent Bradley had this version in mind; for references to analogous\\nregresses prior to Bradley’s, see Gaskin 2008: ch. 5,\\n§70).\",\n \"\\nThis regress has traditionally been regarded as vicious (see, e.g.,\\nBergmann 1960), although philosophers such as Russell (1903: §55)\\nand Armstrong (1997: 18–19) have argued that it is not. In doing\\nso, however, they seem to take for granted the fact that \\\\(a\\\\) has the\\nproperty \\\\(F\\\\) (pretty much as in the brute fact approach;\\nsee below) and go on to see \\\\(a\\\\)’s and \\\\(F\\\\)’s\\ninstantiating \\\\(I_1\\\\) as a further fact that is merely\\nentailed by the former, which in turn entails \\\\(a\\\\)’s,\\n\\\\(F\\\\)’s and \\\\(I_1\\\\)’s instantiating \\\\(I_2\\\\), and so on.\\nThis way of looking at the matter tends to be regarded as a standard\\nresponse to the regress. But those who see the regress as vicious\\nassume that the various exemplification relations are introduced in an\\neffort to explain the very existence of the fact that \\\\(a\\\\)\\nhas the property \\\\(F\\\\). Hence, from their explanatory standpoint,\\ntaking the fact in question as an unquestioned ground for a chain of\\nentailments is beside the point (cf. Loux 1998: 31–36;\\nVallicella 2002).\",\n \"\\nIt should be noted, however, that this perspective suggests a\\ndistinction between an “internalist” and an\\n“externalist” version of the regress (in the terminology\\nof Orilia 2006a). In the former, at each stage we postulate a new\\nconstituent of the fact, or state of affairs, \\\\(s\\\\), that exists\\ninsofar as \\\\(a\\\\) has the property \\\\(F\\\\), and there is viciousness\\nbecause \\\\(s\\\\) can never be appropriately\\n characterized.[10]\\n In the latter, at each stage we postulate a new, distinct, state of\\naffairs, whose existence is required by the existence of the state of\\naffairs of the previous stage. This amounts to admitting infinite\\nexplanatory and metaphysical dependence chains. However, according to\\nOrilia (2006b: §7), since no decisive arguments against such\\nchains exist, the externalist regress should not be viewed as vicious\\n(for criticisms, see Maurin 2015 and Allen 2016: §2.4.1; for a\\nsimilar view about predication, see Gaskin 2008).\",\n \"\\nA typical line for those convinced that the regress is vicious has\\nconsisted in proposing that instantiation is not a relation, or at\\nleast not a normal one. Some philosophers hold that it is a sui\\ngeneris linkage that hooks things up without intermediaries.\\nPeter Strawson (1959) calls it a non-relational tie and\\nBergmann (1960) calls it a nexus. Broad (1933: 85) likened\\ninstantiation to glue, which just sticks two sheets of paper\\ntogether, without needing anything additional; similarly,\\ninstantiation just relates. An alternative line has been to\\nreject instantiation altogether. According to Frege, it is not needed,\\nbecause properties have “gaps” that can be filled, and\\naccording to a reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,\\nbecause objects and properties can be connected like links in a chain.\\nHowever, both strategies are problematic, as argued by Vallicella\\n(2002). His basic point is that, if \\\\(a\\\\) has property \\\\(F\\\\), we need\\nan ontological explanation of why \\\\(F\\\\) and \\\\(a\\\\) happen to be\\nconnected in such a way that \\\\(a\\\\) has \\\\(F\\\\) as one of its properties\\n(unless \\\\(F\\\\) is a property that \\\\(a\\\\) has necessarily). But none of\\nthese strategies can provide this explanation. For example, the appeal\\nto gaps is pointless: \\\\(F\\\\) has a gap whether or not it is filled by\\n\\\\(a\\\\) (for example, it could be filled in by another object), and thus\\nthe gap cannot explain the fact that \\\\(a\\\\) has \\\\(F\\\\) as one of its\\nproperties.\",\n \"\\nBefore turning to exemplification as partial identity, Armstrong\\n(1997: 118) has claimed that Bradley’s regress can be avoided by\\ntaking a state of affairs, say \\\\(x\\\\)’s being \\\\(P\\\\), as capable\\nby itself of holding together its constituents, i.e., the object \\\\(x\\\\)\\nand the property \\\\(P\\\\) (see also Perovic 2016). Thus, there is no need\\nto invoke a relation of exemplification linking \\\\(x\\\\) and \\\\(P\\\\) in\\norder to explain how \\\\(x\\\\) and \\\\(P\\\\) succeed in giving rise to a\\nunitary item, namely the state of affairs in question. There seems to\\nbe a circularity here for it appears that we want to explain how an\\nobject and a property come to be united in a state of affairs by\\nappealing to the result of this unification, namely the state of\\naffairs itself. But perhaps this view can be interpreted as simply the\\nidea that states of affairs should be taken for granted in a\\nprimitivist fashion without seeking an explanation of their unity by\\nappealing to exemplification or otherwise; this is the brute fact\\napproach, as we may call it (for supporters, see Van Inwagen\\n(1993: 37) and Oliver (1996: 33); for criticisms and a possible\\ndefense, see Vallicella 2002, and Orilia 2016, respectively).\",\n \"\\nLowe (2006) has tried to tackle Bradley’s regress within his\\npluralist approach to exemplification. In his view, characterization,\\ninstantiation and exemplification are “formal” and thus\\nquite different from garden-variety relations such giving or\\nloving. This guarantees that these three relations escape\\nBradley’s regress (Lowe 2006: 30, 80,\\n 90).[11]\\n Let us illustrate how, by turning back to the Fido example of\\n §2.1.\\n What a mode instantiates and what it characterizes belong to its\\nessence. In other words, a mode cannot exist without instantiating the\\nattribute it instantiates and characterizing the object it\\ncharacterizes. Hence, mode \\\\(b\\\\), by simply existing, instantiates\\nattribute \\\\(B\\\\) and characterizes Fido. Moreover, since\\nexemplification (the occurrent one, in this case) results from\\n“composing” characterization and instantiation,\\n\\\\(b\\\\)’s existence also guarantees that Fido exemplifies \\\\(B\\\\).\\nAccording to Lowe, we thus have some truths, that \\\\(b\\\\) characterizes\\nFido, that \\\\(b\\\\) instantiates \\\\(B\\\\), and that Fido exemplifies \\\\(B\\\\)\\n(i.e., is barking), all of which are made true by \\\\(b\\\\). Hence, there\\nis no need to postulate as truthmakers states of affairs with\\nconstituents, Fido and \\\\(b\\\\), related by characterization, or \\\\(b\\\\)\\nand \\\\(B\\\\), related by exemplification, or Fido and \\\\(B\\\\), related by\\nexemplification. This, in Lowe’s opinion, eschews\\nBradley’s regress, since this arises precisely because we appeal\\nto states of affairs with constituents in need of a glue that\\ncontingently keep them together. Nevertheless, there is no loss of\\ncontingency in Lowe’s world picture, for an object need not be\\ncharacterized by the modes that happen to characterize it. Thus, for\\nexample, mode \\\\(b\\\\) might have failed to exist and there could have\\nbeen a Fido silence mode in its stead, in which case the proposition\\nthat Fido is barking would have been false and the proposition that\\nFido is silent would have been true. One may wonder however what makes\\nit the case that a certain mode is a mode of just a certain object and\\nnot of another one, say another barking dog. Even granting that it is\\nessential for \\\\(b\\\\) to be a mode of Fido, rather than of another dog,\\nit remains true that it is of Fido, rather than of the other\\ndog, and one may still think that this being of is also glue\\nof some sort, perhaps with a contingency inherited from the\\ncontingency of \\\\(b\\\\) (which might have failed to exist). The suspicion\\nthen is that the problem of accounting for the relation between a mode\\nand an object has replaced the Armstrongian one of what makes it the\\ncase that a universal \\\\(P\\\\) and an object \\\\(x\\\\) make up the state of\\naffairs \\\\(x\\\\)’s being \\\\(P\\\\). But the former problem,\\none may urge, is no less thorny than the latter, and some\\nuniversalists like Armstrong may consider uneconomical Lowe’s\\nacceptance of tropes in addition to universals (for accounts of\\nBradley’s regress analogous to Lowe’s, but within a\\nthoroughly tropist ontology, see Section 3.2 of the entry on\\n tropes.)\",\n \"\\nAs it should be clear from this far from exhaustive survey,\\nBradley’s regress deeply worries ontologists and the attempts to\\ntame it keep\\n flowing.[12]\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.3 Bradley’s Regress\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nPresumably, properties exemplify properties. For example, if\\nproperties are abstract objects, as is usually thought, then seemingly\\nevery property exemplifies abstractness. But then we should also grant\\nthat there is self-exemplification, i.e., a property exemplifying\\nitself. For example, abstractness is itself abstract and thus\\nexemplifies itself. Self-exemplification however has raised severe\\nperplexities at least since Plato.\",\n \"\\nPlato appears to hold that all properties exemplify\\nthemselves, when he claims that forms participate in themselves. This\\nclaim is crucially involved in his so-called third man\\nargument, which led him to worry that his theory of forms is\\nincoherent (Parmenides, 132 ff.). As we see matters now, it\\nis not clear why we should hold that all properties exemplify\\nthemselves (Armstrong 1978a: 71); for instance, people are honest, but\\nhonesty itself is not honest (see, however, the entry on\\n Plato’s Parmenides,\\n and Marmodoro forthcoming).\",\n \"\\nNowadays, a more serious worry related to self-exemplification is\\nRussell’s famous paradox, constructed as regarding the property\\nof non-self-exemplification, which appears to exemplify itself iff it\\ndoes not, thus defying the laws of logic, at least classical logic.\\nThe discovery of his paradox (and then the awareness of related\\npuzzles) led Russell to introduce a theory of types, which institutes\\na total ban on self-predication by a rigid segregation of properties\\ninto a hierarchy of types (more on this in\\n §6.1).\\n The account became more complex and rigid, as Russell moved from\\nsimple to ramified type theory, which involves a\\ndistinction of orders within types (see entries on\\n type theory\\n and\\n Russell’s paradox,\\n and, for a detailed reconstruction of how Russell reacted to the\\nparadox, Landini 1998).\",\n \"\\nIn type theory all properties are, we may say, typed. This\\napproach has never gained unanimous consensus and its many problematic\\naspects are well-known (see, e.g., Fitch 1952: Appendix C; Bealer\\n1989). Just to mention a few, the type-theoretical hierarchy imposed\\non properties appears to be highly artificial and multiplies\\nproperties ad infinitum (e.g., since presumably properties\\nare abstract, for any property \\\\(P\\\\) of type \\\\(n\\\\), there is an\\nabstractness of type \\\\(n+1\\\\) that \\\\(P\\\\) exemplifies). Moreover, many\\ncases of self-exemplification are innocuous and common. For example,\\nthe property of being a property is itself a property, so it\\nexemplifies itself. Accordingly, many recent proposals are type-free\\n(see\\n §6.1)\\n and thus view properties as untyped, capable of being\\nself-predicated, sometimes veridically. An additional motivation to\\nmove in this direction is a new paradox proposed by Orilia and Landini\\n(2019), which affects simple type theory. It is\\n“contingent” in that it is derived from a contingent\\nassumption, namely that someone, say John, is thinking just about the\\nproperty of being a property \\\\(P\\\\) such that John is thinking of\\nsomething that is not exemplified by \\\\(P\\\\).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.4 Self-exemplification\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nQuine (1957 [1969: 23]) famously claimed that there should be no\\nentity without identity. His paradigmatic case concerns sets: two of\\nthem are identical iff they have exactly the same members. Since then\\nit has been customary in ontology to search for identity conditions\\nfor given categories of entities and to rule out categories for want\\nof identity conditions (against this, see Lowe 1989). Quine started\\nthis trend precisely by arguing against properties and this has\\nstrictly intertwined the issues of which properties there are and of\\ntheir identity\\n conditions.[13]\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Existence and Identity Conditions for Properties\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIn an effort to provide identity conditions for properties, one could\\nmimic those for sets, or equate the former with the latter (as in\\nclass nominalism; see note 3), and provide the following\\nextensionalist identity conditions: two properties are\\nidentical iff they are co-extensional. This criterion can hardly work,\\nhowever, since there are seemingly distinct properties with the same\\nextension, such as having a heart and having\\nkidneys, and even wildly different properties such as\\nspherical and weighing 2 kilos could by accident be\\nco-extensive.\",\n \"\\nOne could then try the following intensional identity\\nconditions: two properties are identical iff they are\\nco-intensional, i.e., necessarily co-extensional, where the\\nnecessity in question is logical necessity. This guarantees that\\nspherical and weighing 2 kilos are different even if\\nthey happen to be co-extensional. Following this line, one may take\\nproperties to be intensions, understood as, roughly,\\nfunctions that assign extensions (sets of objects) to predicates at\\nlogically possible worlds. Thus, for instance, the predicates\\n“has a heart” and “has kidneys” stand for\\ndifferent intensions, for even if they have the same extension in the\\nactual world they have different extensions at worlds where there are\\ncreatures with heart and no kidneys or vice versa. This approach is\\nfollowed by Montague (1974) in his pioneering work in natural language\\nsemantics, and in a similar way by Lewis (1986b), who reduces\\nproperties to sets of possible objects in his modal realism,\\nexplicitly committed to possible worlds and mere possibilia\\ninhabiting them. Most philosophers find this commitment unappealing.\\nMoreover, one may wonder how properties can do their causal work if\\nthey are conceived of in this way (for further criticisms see Bealer\\n1982: 13–19, and 1998: §4; Egan 2004). However, the\\ncriterion of co-intensionality may be accepted without also buying the\\nreduction of properties to sets of possibilia (Bealer views\\nthis as the identity condition for his conception 1 properties; see\\nbelow). Still, co-intensionality must face two challenges coming from\\nopposite fronts.\",\n \"\\nOn the one hand, from the perspective of empirical science,\\nco-intensionality may appear too strong as a criterion of identity.\\nFor the identity statements of scientific reductions, such as that of\\ntemperature to mean kinetic energy, could suggest that some properties\\nare identical even if not co-intensional. For example, one may accept\\nthat having absolute temperature of 300K is having mean\\nmolecular kinetic energy of \\\\(6.21 \\\\times 10^{-21}\\\\) (Achinstein\\n1974: 259; Putnam (1970: §1) and Causey (1972) speak of\\n“synthetic identity” and “contingent\\nidentity”, respectively). Rather than logical necessity, it is\\nnomological necessity, necessity on the basis of the causal\\nlaws of nature, that becomes central in this line of thought.\\nFollowing it, some have focused on the causal and\\nnomological roles of properties, i.e., roughly, the causes\\nand effects of their being instantiated, and their involvement in laws\\nof nature, respectively. They have thus advanced causal or\\nnomic criteria. According to them, two properties are identical\\niff they have the same causal (Achinstein 1974: §XI; Shoemaker\\n1980) or nomological role (Swoyer 1982; Kistler 2002). This line has\\nbeen influential, as it connects to the “pure\\ndispositionalism” discussed in\\n §5.2.\\n There is however a suspicion of circularity here, since causal and\\nnomological roles may be viewed as higher-order properties (see entry\\non\\n dispositions, §3).\",\n \"\\nOn the other hand, once matters of meaning and mental content are\\ntaken into account, co-intensionality might seem too weak, for it\\nmakes a property \\\\(P\\\\) identical to any logically equivalent property,\\ne.g., assuming classical logic, \\\\(P\\\\) and (\\\\(Q\\\\) or not\\n\\\\(Q\\\\)). And with a sufficiently broad notion of logical\\nnecessity, even, for example, being triangular and being\\ntrilateral are identical. However, one could insist that\\n“trilateral” and “triangular” appear to have\\ndifferent meanings, which somehow involve the different geometrical\\nproperties having a side, and having an angle,\\nrespectively. And if being triangular were really identical\\nto being trilateral, from the fact that John believes that a\\ncertain object has the former property, one should be able to infer\\nthat John also believes that such an object has the latter property.\\nYet, John’s ignorance may make this conclusion unwarranted. In\\nthe light of this, borrowing a term from Cresswell (1975), one may\\nmove from intensional to hyperintensional identity\\nconditions, according to which two properties, such as trilaterality\\nand triangularity, may be different even if they are co-intensional.\\nIn order to implement this idea, Bealer (1982) take two properties to\\nbe identical iff they have the same analysis, i.e., roughly, they\\nresult from the same ultimate primitive properties and the same\\nlogical operations applied to them (see also Menzel 1986; 1993). Zalta\\n(1983; 1988) has developed an alternative available to those who admit\\ntwo modes of predication (see\\n §1.4):\\n two properties are identical iff they are (necessarily) encoded by\\nthe same objects.\",\n \"\\nHyperintensional conditions make of course for finer distinctions\\namong entities than the other criteria we considered. Accordingly, the\\nformer are often called “fine-grained” and the latter\\n“coarse-grained”, and the same denominations are\\ncorrespondingly reserved for the entities that obey the conditions in\\nquestion. Coarse- or fine-grainedness is a relative matter. The\\nextensional criterion is more coarse-grained than the intensional or\\ncausal/nomological ones. And hyperintensional conditions themselves\\nmay be more or less fine-grained: properties could be individuated\\nalmost as finely as the predicates expressing them, to the point that,\\ne.g., even being \\\\(P\\\\) and \\\\(Q\\\\) and being \\\\(Q\\\\) and\\n\\\\(P\\\\) are kept distinct, but one may also envisage less stringent\\nconditions that make for the identification of properties of that sort\\n(Bealer 1982: 54). It is conceivable, however, that one could be\\nlogically obtuse to the point of believing that something has a\\ncertain property without believing that it has a trivially equivalent\\nproperty. Thus, to properly account for mental content,\\nmaximal hyperintensionality appears to be required, and it is\\nin fact preferred by Bealer. Even so, the paradox of analysis\\nraises a serious issue.\\nOne could say, for example, that being a circle is being\\na locus of points equidistant from a point, since the latter\\nprovides the analysis of the former. In reply, Bealer distinguishes\\nbetween “being a circle” as designating a simple\\n“undefined” property, which is an analysandum\\ndistinct from the analysans, being a locus of points\\nequidistant from a point, and “being a circle” as\\ndesignating a complex “defined” property, which is indeed\\nidentical to that analysans. Orilia (1999: §5.5)\\nsimilarly distinguishes between the simple analysans and the\\ncomplex analysandum, without admitting that expressions for\\nproperties such as “being a circle” could be ambiguous in\\nthe way Bealer suggests. Orilia rather argues that the\\n“is” of analysis does not express identity but a weaker\\nrelation, which is asymmetrical in that analysans and\\nanalysandum play different roles in it. The matter keeps\\nbeing discussed. Rosen (2015) appeals to grounding to characterize the\\ndifferent role played by the analysans. Dorr (2016) provides\\na formal account of the “is” used in identity statements\\ninvolving properties, according to which it stands for a symmetric\\n“identification” relation.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.1 From Extensionality to Hyperintensionality\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nBealer (1982) distinguishes between conception 1 properties,\\nor qualities, and conception 2 properties, or\\nconcepts (understood as mind-independent). With a different\\nand now widespread terminology, Lewis (1983, 1986b) followed suit,\\nspeaking of a sparse and an abundant conception of\\nproperties. According to the former, there are relatively few\\nproperties, namely just those responsible for the objective\\nresemblances and causal powers of things; they cut nature at its\\njoints, and science is supposed to individuate them a\\nposteriori. According to the latter, there are immensely many\\nproperties, corresponding to all meaningful predicates we could\\npossibly imagine and to all sets of objects, and they can be assumed\\na priori. (It should be clear that “few” and\\n“many” are used in a comparative sense, for the number of\\nsparse properties may be very high, possibly infinite). To illustrate,\\nthe sparse conception admits properties currently accepted by\\nempirical science such as having negative charge or\\nhaving spin up and rejects those that are no longer supported\\nsuch as having a certain amount of caloric, which featured in\\neighteenth century chemistry; in contrast, the abundant conception may\\nacknowledge the latter property and all sorts of other properties,\\nstrange as they may be, e.g., negatively charged or disliked by\\nSocrates, round and square or Goodman’s (1983)\\nnotorious grue and bleen. Lewis (1986b: 60) tries to\\nfurther characterize the distinction by taking the sparse properties\\nto be intrinsic, rather than extrinsic (e.g.,\\nbeing 6 feet tall, rather than being taller than\\nTom), and natural, where naturalness is something that\\nadmits of degrees (for example, he says, masses and charges are\\nperfectly natural, colors are less natural and grue and\\nbleen are paradigms of unnaturalness). Much work on such\\nissues has been done since then (see entries on\\n intrinsic vs. extrinsic properties\\n and\\n natural properties).\",\n \"\\nDepending on how sparse or abundant properties are, we can have two\\nextreme positions and other more moderate views in between.\",\n \"\\nAt one end of the spectrum, there is the most extreme version of the\\nsparse conception, minimalism, which accepts all of these\\nprinciples:\",\n \"\\nThis approach is typically motivated by physicalism and\\nepistemological qualms regarding transcendent universals. The\\nbest-known contemporary supporter of minimalism is Armstrong (1978a,b,\\n1984). Another minimalist is Swoyer (1996).\",\n \"\\nBy dropping or mitigating some of the above principles, we get less\\nminimalist versions of the sparse conception. For example, some have\\nurged uninstantiated properties to account for features of measurement\\n(Mundy 1987), vectors (Bigelow & Pargetter 1991: 77), or natural\\nlaws (Tooley 1987), and some even that there are all the properties\\nthat can be possibly exemplified, where the possibility in question is\\ncausal or nomic (Cocchiarella 2007: ch. 12). In line with\\npositions traditionally found in emergentism (see\\n §5.1),\\n Schaffer (2004) proposes that there are sparse properties as\\nfundamental, and in addition, as grounded on them, the properties that\\nneed be postulated at all levels of scientific explanations, e.g.,\\nchemical, biological and psychological ones. Even Armstrong goes\\nbeyond minimalist strictures, when in his later work (1997)\\ndistinguishes between “first-class properties”\\n(universals), identified from a minimalist perspective, and\\n“second-class properties” (supervening on universals). All\\nthese positions appear to be primarily concerned with issues in the\\nmetaphysics of science (see\\n §5)\\n and typically display too short a supply of properties to deal with\\nmeaning and mental content, and thus with natural language semantics\\nand the foundations of mathematics (see\\n §6).\\n However, minimalists might want to resort to concepts, understood as\\nmind-dependent entities, in dealing with such issues (e.g., along the\\nlines proposed in Cocchiarella 2007).\",\n \"\\nMatters of meaning and mental content are instead what typically\\nmotivate the views at the opposite end of the spectrum. To begin with,\\nmaximalism, i.e., the abundant conception in all its glory\\n(Bealer 1982; 1993; Carmichael 2010; Castañeda 1976; Jubien\\n1989; Lewis 1986b; Orilia 1999; Zalta 1988; Van Inwagen 2004):\\nproperties are fine-grained necessary entities that exist even if\\nuninstantiated, or even impossible to be instantiated. In its most\\nextreme version, maximalism adopts identity conditions that\\ndifferentiate properties as much as possible, but more moderate\\nversions can be obtained by slightly relaxing such conditions. Views\\nof this sort are hardly concerned with physicalist constraints or the\\nlike and rather focus on the explanatory advantages of\\nhyperintensionality. These may well go beyond the typical motivations\\nconsidered above: Nolan (2014) argues that hyperintensionality is\\nincreasingly important in metaphysics in dealing with issues such as\\ncounter-possible conditionals, explanation, essences, grounding,\\ncausation, confirmation and chance.\",\n \"\\nRather than choosing between the sparse and abundant conceptions, the\\nvery promoters of this distinction have opted in different ways for a\\ndualism of properties, according to which there are\\nproperties of both kinds. Lewis endorses abundant properties as\\nreduced to sets of possibilia, and sparse properties either\\nviewed as universals, and corresponding to some of the abundant\\nproperties (1983), or as themselves sets of possibilia (1986b: 60).\\nBealer (1982) proposes a systematic account wherein qualities are the\\ncoarse-grained properties that “provide the world with its\\ncausal and phenomenal order” (1982: 183) and concepts are the\\nfine-grained properties that can function as meanings and as\\nconstituents of mental contents. He admits a stock of simple\\nproperties, which are both qualities and concepts (1982: 186),\\nwherefrom complex qualities and complex concepts are differently\\nconstructed: on the one hand, by thought-building operations,\\nwhich give rise to fine-grained qualities; on the other hand, by\\ncondition-building operations, which give rise to\\ncoarse-grained qualities. Orilia (1999) has followed Bealer’s\\nlead in also endorsing both coarse-grained qualities and fine-grained\\nconcepts, without however identifying simple concepts and simple\\nqualities. In Orilia’s account concepts are never identical to\\nqualities, but may correspond to them; in particular, the identity\\nstatements of intertheoretic reductions should be taken to express the\\nfact that two different concepts correspond to the same quality.\\nDespite its advantages in dealing with a disparate range of phenomena,\\ndualism has not gained any explicit consensus. Its implicit presence\\nmay however be widespread. For example, Putnam’s (1970: §1)\\ndistinction between predicates and physical\\nproperties, and Armstrong’s above-mentioned recognition of\\nsecond-class properties may be seen as forms of dualism.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.2 The Sparse and the Abundant Conceptions\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nIt is customary to distinguish between simple and\\ncomplex properties, even though some philosophers take all\\nproperties to be simple (Grossmann 1983: §§58–61). The\\nformer are not characterizable in terms of other properties, are\\nprimitive and unanalyzable and thus have no internal structure,\\nwhereas the latter somehow have a structure, wherein other properties,\\nor more generally entities, are parts or constituents. It is not\\nobvious that there are simple properties, since one may imagine that\\nall properties are analyzable into constituents ad infinitum\\n(Armstrong 1978b: 67). Even setting this aside, to provide examples is\\nnot easy. Traditionally, determinate colors are cited, but nowadays\\nmany would rather appeal to fundamental physical properties such as\\nhaving a certain electric charge. It is easier to provide\\nputative examples of complex properties, once some other properties\\nare taken for granted, e.g., blue and spherical or blue\\nor non-spherical. These logically compound properties,\\nwhich involve logical operations, will be considered in\\n §4.1.\\n Next, in\\n §4.2\\n we shall discuss other kinds of complex properties, called\\nstructural (after Armstrong 1978b), which are eliciting a\\ngrowing interest, as a recent survey testifies (Fisher 2018). Their\\ncomplexity has to do with the subdivisions of their instances into\\nsubcomponents. Typical examples come from chemistry, e.g.,\\nH2O and methane understood as properties\\nof molecules.\",\n \"\\nIt should be noted that it is not generally taken for granted that\\ncomplex properties literally have parts or constituents. Some\\nphilosophers take this line (Armstrong 1978a: 36–39, 67ff.;\\nBigelow & Pargetter 1989; Orilia 1999), whereas others demur, and\\nrather think that talk in terms of structures with constituents is\\nmetaphorical and dependent on our reliance on structured terms such as\\n“blue and spherical” (Bealer 1982; Cocchiarella 1986a;\\nSwoyer 1998: §1.2).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Complex Properties\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAt least prima facie, our use of complex predicates suggests\\nthat there are corresponding complex properties involving all sorts of\\nlogical operations. Thus, one can envisage conjunctive\\nproperties such as blue and spherical, negative properties\\nsuch as non-spherical, disjunctive properties such\\nas blue or non-spherical, existentially or\\nuniversally quantified properties such as loving\\nsomeone or loved by everyone, reflexive\\nproperties such as loving oneself, etc. Moreover, one could\\nadd to the list properties with individuals as constituents, which are\\nthen denied the status of a purely qualitative property,\\ne.g., taller than Obama.\",\n \"\\nIt is easy to construct complex predicates. But whether there really\\nare corresponding properties of this kind is a much more difficult and\\ncontroversial issue, tightly bound to the sparse/abundant distinction.\\nIn the sparse conception the tendency is to dispense with them. This\\nis understandable since in this camp one typically postulates\\nproperties in rebus for empirical explanatory reasons. But\\nthen, if we explain some phenomena by attributing properties \\\\(F\\\\) and\\n\\\\(G\\\\) to an object, while denying that it does not exemplify \\\\(H\\\\), it\\nseems of no value to add that it also has, say, F and G,\\nF or H, and non-H. Nevertheless, Armstrong, the\\nleading supporter of sparseness, has defended over the years a mixed\\nstance without disjunctive and negative properties, but with\\nconjunctive ones. Armstrong’s line has of course its opponents\\n(see, e.g., Paolini Paoletti 2014; 2017a; 2020a; Zangwill 2011 argues\\nthat there are negative properties, but they are less real than\\npositive ones). On the other hand, in the abundant conception, all\\nsorts of logically compound properties are acknowledged. Since the\\nfocus now is on meaning and mental content, it appears natural to\\npostulate such properties to account for our understanding of complex\\npredicates and of how they differ from simple ones. Even here,\\nhowever, there are disagreements, when it comes to problematic\\npredicates such the “does not exemplify itself” of\\nRussell’s paradox. Some suggest that in this case one should\\ndeny there is a corresponding property, in order to avoid the paradox\\n(Van Inwagen 2006). However, we understand this predicate and thus it\\nseems ad hoc that the general strategy of postulating a\\nproperty fails. It seems better to confront the paradox with other\\nmeans (see\\n §6).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.1 Logically Compound Properties\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nFollowing Armstrong (1978b: 68–71; see also Fisher 2018:\\n§2), a structural property \\\\(F\\\\) is typically viewed as a\\nuniversal, and can be characterized thus:\",\n \"\\nFor instance, a molecule \\\\(w\\\\) exemplifying H2O\\nhas as parts two atoms \\\\(h_1\\\\) and \\\\(h_2\\\\) and an atom \\\\(o\\\\) that do\\nnot exemplify H2O; this property involves\\nhydrogen and oxygen, which are not exemplified by\\n\\\\(w\\\\); \\\\(h_1\\\\) and \\\\(h_2\\\\) exemplify hydrogen, and \\\\(o\\\\)\\nexemplifies oxygen. For relational structural\\nproperties, there is the further condition that\",\n \"\\nH2O is a case in point: the relevant (chemical)\\nrelation is bonding, which links the three atoms in question.\\nAnother, often considered, example is methane as a structural\\nproperty of methane-molecules (CH4), which\\ninvolves a bonding relation between atoms and the joint\\ninstantiation of hydrogen (by four atoms) and carbon\\n(by one atom). Non-relational structural properties do not\\nrequire condition (iv). For instance, mass 1 kg involves many\\nrelevant properties of the kind mass n kg, for \\\\(n \\\\lt 1\\\\),\\nwhich are instantiated by relevant proper parts of any object that is\\n1 kg in mass, and these proper parts are not linked by any relevant\\nrelation (Armstrong 1978b: 70).\",\n \"\\nIn most approaches, including Armstrong’s, the relevant\\nproperties and the relevant relation, if any, are conceived of as\\nparts, or constituents, of the structural property in question, and\\nthus their being involved in the latter is a parthood relation. For\\ninstance, hydrogen, oxygen and bonding are\\nconstituents of H2O. Moreover, the composition of\\nstructural properties is isomorphic to that of the complexes\\nexemplifying them. These two theses characterize what Lewis (1986a)\\ncalls the “pictorial conception”. It is worth noting that\\nstructural properties differ from conjunctive properties such as\\nhuman and musician, in that the constituents of the latter\\n(i.e., human and musician) are instantiated by\\nwhatever entity exemplifies the conjunctive property (i.e., a human\\nbeing who is also a musician), whereas the constituents of a\\nstructural property (e.g., hydrogen, oxygen and\\nbonding) are not instantiated by the entities that\\ninstantiate it (e.g., H2O molecules).\",\n \"\\nStructural properties have been invoked for many reasons. Armstrong\\n(1978b: ch. 22) appeals to them to explain the resemblance of\\nuniversals belonging to a common class, e.g., lengths and colors.\\nArmstrong (1988; 1989) also treats physical quantities and numbers\\nthrough structural properties. The former involve, as in the above\\nmass 1 kg example, smaller quantities such as mass 0.1\\nkg and mass 0.2 kg (this view is criticized by Eddon\\n2007). The latter are internal proportion relations between structural\\nproperties (e.g., being a nineteen-electrons aggregate) and\\nunit-properties (e.g., being an electron). Moreover,\\nstructural properties have been appealed to in treatments of laws of\\nnature (Armstrong 1989; Lewis 1986a), some natural kinds (Armstrong\\n1978b, 1997; Hawley & Bird 2011), possible worlds (Forrest 1986),\\nersatz times (Parsons 2005), emergent properties\\n(O’Connor & Wong 2005), linguistic types (Davis 2014), ontic\\nstructural realism (Psillos 2012). However, structural universals have\\nalso been questioned on various grounds, as we shall now see.\",\n \"\\nLewis (1986a) raises two problems for the pictorial conception. First,\\nit is not clear how one and the same universal (e.g.,\\nhydrogen) can recur more than once in a structural universal.\\nLet us dub this “multiple recurrence problem”. Secondly,\\nstructural universals violate the Principle of Uniqueness of\\nComposition of classical\\n mereology.\\n According to this principle, given a certain collection of parts,\\nthere is only one whole that they compose. Consider isomers, namely,\\nmolecules that have the same number and types of atoms but different\\nstructures, e.g., butane and isobutane\\n(C4H10). Here, butane and\\nisobutane are different structural universals. Yet, they\\narise from the same universals recurring the same number of times. Let\\nus dub this “isomer problem.”\",\n \"\\nTwo further problems may be pointed out. First, even molecules with\\nthe same number and types of atoms and the same structures may vary in\\nvirtue of their spatial orientation (Kalhat 2008). This phenomenon is\\nknown as chirality. How can structural properties account for\\nit? Secondly, the composition of structural properties is restricted:\\nnot every collection of properties gives rise to a structural\\nproperty. This violates another principle of classical mereology: the\\nPrinciple of Unrestricted Composition.\",\n \"\\nLewis dismisses alternatives to the pictorial conception, such as the\\n“linguistic conception” (in which structural universals\\nare set-theoretic constructions out of simple universals) and the\\n“magic conception” (in which structural universals\\nare not complex and are primitively connected to the relevant\\nproperties). Moreover, he also rejects the possibility of there being\\namphibians, i.e., particularized universals lying between\\nparticulars and full-fledged universals. Amphibians would solve the\\nmultiple recurrence problem, as they would be identical with multiple\\nrecurrences of single universals. For example, in methane,\\nthere would be four amphibians of hydrogen.\",\n \"\\nTo reply to Lewis’ challenges, two main strategies have been\\nadopted on behalf of the pictorial conception: a non-mereological\\ncomposition strategy, according to which structural properties do not\\nobey the principles of classical mereology, and a mereology-friendly\\nstrategy. Let us start with the former.\",\n \"\\nArmstrong (1986) admits that the composition of structural universals\\nis non-mereological. In his 1997, he emphasizes that states of affairs\\ndo not have a mereological kind of composition, and views universals,\\nincluding structural ones, as states of affairs-types which,\\nas such, are not mereological in their composition. Structural\\nuniversals themselves turn out to be state of affairs-types of a\\nconjunctive sort (1997: 34 ff.). To illustrate, let us go back to the\\nabove example with H2O exemplified by the water\\nmolecule \\\\(w\\\\). It involves the conjunction of these states of\\naffairs:\",\n \"\\nThis conjunction of states of affairs provides an example of a\\nstate of affairs-type identifiable with the structural universal\\nH2O.\",\n \"\\nIn pursuit of the non-mereological composition strategy, Forrest\\n(1986; 2006; 2016) relies on logically compound properties, in\\nparticular (in his 2016) conjunctive, existentially quantified and\\nreflexive ones. Bennett (2013) argues that entities are part of\\nfurther entities by occupying specific slots within the latter.\\nParthood slots are distinct from each other. Therefore, which entity\\noccupies which slot matters to the composition of the resultant\\ncomplex entity. Hawley (2010) defends the possibility of there being\\nmultiple composition relations. In a more general way, McDaniel (2009)\\npoints out that the relation of structure-making does not obey some of\\nthe principles of classical mereology. Mormann (2010) argues that\\ndistinct categories (to be understood as in\\n category theory)\\n come together with distinct parthood and composition relations.\",\n \"\\nAs regards the mereology-friendly strategy, it has been suggested that\\nstructural properties actually include extra components accounting for\\nstructures, so that the Principle of Uniqueness of Composition is\\nsafe. Considering methane, Pagès (2002) claims that\\nsuch a structural property is composed of the properties\\ncarbon and hydrogen, a bonding relation and\\na peculiar first-order, formal relation between the atoms. According\\nto Kalhat (2008), the extra component is a second-order arrangement\\nrelation between the first-order properties. Ordering formal\\nrelations—together with causally individuated\\nproperties—are also invoked by McFarland (2018).\",\n \"\\nAt the intersection of these strategies, Bigelow and Pargetter (1989,\\n1991) claim that structural universals are internally relational\\nproperties that supervene on first-order properties and relations and\\non second-order proportion relations. Second-order proportion\\nrelations are relations such as having four times as. They\\nrelate first-order properties and relations. For example, in\\nmethane, the relation having four times as relates\\ntwo conjunctive properties: (i) hydrogen and being part of this\\nmolecule; (ii) carbon and being part of this\\nmolecule.\",\n \"\\nCampbell (1990) solves the multiple recurrence problem and the isomer\\nproblem by appealing to tropes. In methane, there are\\nmultiple hydrogen tropes. In butane and isobutane,\\ndistinct tropes entertain distinct structural relations.\",\n \"\\nDespite Lewis’ dismissal, a number of theories appeal to\\namphibians (i.e., particularized universals lying between particulars\\nand full-fledged universals) or, more precisely, to entities similar\\nto amphibians. Fine (2017) suggests that structural properties should\\nbe treated by invoking arbitrary objects (Fine 1985). Davis’\\n(2014) account of linguistic types as structural properties confronts\\nthe problem of the multiple occurrence of one type, e.g.,\\n“dog”, in another (e.g., “every dog likes another\\ndog”) (Wetzel 2009). In general, the idea that types are\\nproperties of tokens is a natural one, although there are also\\nalternative views on the matter (see entry on\\n types and tokens).\\n Be this as it may, Davis proposes that types cannot occur within\\nfurther types as tokens: they can only occur as subtypes.\\nTherefore, subtypes lie, like amphibians, between types and tokens.\\nSubtypes are individuated by their positions in asymmetric wholes,\\nwhereas they are primitively and non-qualitatively distinct in\\nsymmetric ones. The approach could be extended to properties such as\\nmethane, which would be taken to have four distinct\\nhydrogen subtypes.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.2 Structural Properties\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nWhen it comes to the metaphysical underpinnings of scientific\\ntheories, properties play a prominent role: it appears that science\\ncan hardly be done without appealing to them. This adds up to the case\\nfor realism about properties and to our understanding of them. We\\nshall illustrate this here first by dwelling on some miscellaneous\\ntopics and then by focusing on a debate regarding the very nature of\\nthe properties invoked in science, namely whether or not they are\\nessentially dispositional. Roughly, an object exemplifies a\\ndispositional property, such as soluble or\\nfragile, by having a power or disposition to act or being\\nacted upon in a certain way in certain conditions. For example, a\\nglass’ disposition of being fragile consists in its\\npossibly shattering in certain conditions (e.g., if struck with a\\ncertain force). In contrast, something exemplifies a\\ncategorical property, e.g., made of salt or\\nspherical, by merely being in a certain way (see entry on\\n dispositions).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Properties in the Metaphysics of Science\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nMany predicates in scientific theories (e.g., “being a\\ngene” and “being a belief”) are functionally\\ndefined. Namely, their meaning is fixed by appealing to some function\\nor set of functions (e.g., encoding and transmitting genetic\\ninformation). To make sense of functions, properties are needed.\\nFirst, functions can be thought of as webs of causal relationships\\nbetween properties or property-instances. Secondly, predicates such as\\n“being a gene” may be taken to refer to\\nhigher-level properties, or at least to something that has\\nsuch properties. In this case, the property of being a gene\\nwould be the higher-level property of possessing some further\\nproperties (e.g., biochemical ones) that play the relevant\\nfunctions (i.e., encoding and transmitting genetic information).\\nAlternatively, being a gene would be a property that\\nsatisfies the former higher-level property. Thirdly, the ensuing\\nrealization relationships between higher-level and function-playing\\nproperties can only be defined by appealing to properties (see entry\\non\\n functionalism).\",\n \"\\nMore generally, many ontological\\ndependence and reduction\\nrelationships primarily concern properties: type-identity (Place 1956;\\nSmart 1959; Lewis 1966) and token-identity (Davidson 1980) (see entry\\non\\n the mind/brain identity theory),\\n supervenience (Horgan 1982; Kim 1993; entry on\\n supervenience);\\n realization (Putnam 1975; Wilson 1999; Shoemaker 2007), \\nscientific reduction\\n(Nagel 1961). Moreover,\\na non-reductive relation such as ontological emergence (Bedau 1997;\\nPaolini Paoletti 2017b) is typically characterized as a relation\\nbetween emergent properties\\nand more fundamental\\nproperties. Even mechanistic explanations often appeal to properties\\nand relations in characterizing the organization, the components, the\\npowers and the phenomena displayed by mechanisms (Glennan & Illari\\n2018; entry on\\n mechanisms in science).\",\n \"\\nEntities in nature are typified by\\n natural kinds.\\n These are mostly thought of as properties or property-like entities\\nthat carve nature at its joints (Campbell, O'Rourke, & Slater\\n2011) at distinct layers of the universe: microphysical (e.g.,\\nbeing a neutron), chemical (e.g., being gold),\\nbiological (e.g., being a horse).\",\n \"\\nPhysical quantities such as mass or length are typically treated as\\nproperties, specifiable in terms of a magnitude, a certain number, and\\na unit measure, e.g., kg or meter, which can itself be specified in\\nterms of properties (Mundy 1987; Swoyer 1987). Following Eddon’s\\n(2013) overview, it is possible to distinguish two main strands here:\\nrelational and monadic properties theories (see also\\nDasgupta 2013). In relational theories (Bigelow & Pargetter 1988;\\n1991), quantities arise from proportion relations, which may in turn\\nbe related by higher-order proportion relations. Consider a certain\\nquantity, e.g., mass 3 kg. Here the thrice as massive\\nas proportion relation is relevant, which holds of certain pairs\\nof objects \\\\(a\\\\) and \\\\(b\\\\) such that \\\\(a\\\\) is thrice as massive as\\n\\\\(b\\\\). By virtue of such relational facts, the first members of such\\npairs have a mass of 3 kg. Another relational approach is by Mundy\\n(1988), who claims that mass 3 kg is a relation between\\n(ordered pairs of) objects and numbers. For example, mass 3\\nkg is a relation holding between the ordered pair \\\\(\\\\langle a,\\nb\\\\rangle\\\\) (assuming that \\\\(a\\\\) is thrice as massive as \\\\(b\\\\), and not\\nthe other way round) and the number 3; or—if relations have\\nbuilt-in relational order—between \\\\(a, b\\\\) and 3. Knowles (2015)\\nholds a similar view, wherein physical quantities are relations that\\nobjects bear to numbers. According to the monadic properties approach,\\nquantities are intrinsic properties of objects (Swoyer 1987; Armstrong\\n1988; 1989). As we saw, Armstrong develops such a view by taking\\nquantities to be structural properties. Related metaphysical inquiries\\nconcern the dimensions of quantities (Skow 2017) and the status of\\nforces (Massin 2009).\",\n \"\\nLastly, properties play a prominent role in two well-known accounts of\\nthe\\n laws of nature:\\n the nomological necessitation account and law\\ndispositionalism. The former has been expounded by Tooley (1977;\\n1987), Dretske (1977) and Armstrong (1983). Roughly, following\\nArmstrong, a law of nature consists in a second-order and external\\nnomological necessitation relation \\\\(\\\\rN\\\\), contingently holding\\nbetween first-order universals \\\\(P\\\\) and \\\\(Q\\\\): \\\\(\\\\rN(P, Q)\\\\). Such a\\nhigher-order fact necessitates certain lower-order regularities, i.e.,\\nall the objects that have \\\\(P\\\\) also have \\\\(Q\\\\) (by nomological\\nnecessity, in virtue of \\\\(\\\\rN(P, Q))\\\\). Law dispositionalism\\ninterprets laws of nature by appealing to dispositional properties.\\nAccording to it, laws of nature “flow” from the essence of\\nsuch properties. This implies that laws of nature hold with\\nmetaphysical necessity: whenever the dispositions are in place, the\\nrelevant laws must be in place too (Cartwright 1983; Ellis 2001; Bird\\n2007; Chakravartty 2007; Fischer 2018; see also Schrenk 2017 and\\nDumsday 2019). (For criticisms, see, e.g., van Fraassen 1989 as\\nregards the former approach, and McKitrick 2018 and Paolini Paoletti\\n2020b, as regards the latter).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.1 Miscellaneous Topics\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThere is a domestic dispute among supporters of properties in the\\nmetaphysics of science, regarding the very nature of such properties\\n(or at least the fundamental ones). We may distinguish two extreme\\nviews, pure dispositionalism and pure\\ncategoricalism. According to the former, all properties are\\nessentially dispositional (“dispositional”, for\\nbrevity’s sake, from now on), since they are nothing more than\\ncausal powers; their causative roles, i.e., which effects\\ntheir instantiations can cause, exhaust their essences. According to\\npure categoricalism, all properties are essentially categorical (in\\nbrief, “categorical”, in the following), because their\\ncausative roles are not essential to them. If anything is essential to\\na property, it is rather a non-dispositional and intrinsic aspect\\ncalled “quiddity” (after Armstrong 1989), which need not\\nbe seen as an additional entity over and above the property itself\\n(Locke 2012, in response to Hawthorne 2001). Between such views there\\nlie a number of intermediate positions.\",\n \"\\nPure dispositionalism has been widely supported in the last few\\ndecades (Mellor 1974; 2000; Shoemaker 1984: ch. 10 and 11 [in terms of\\ncausal roles]; Mumford 1998; 2004; Bird 2005; 2007; Chakravartty 2007;\\nWhittle 2008; see Tugby 2013 for an attempt to argue from this sort of\\nview to a Platonist conception of properties). There are three main\\narguments in favor of it. First, pure dispositionalism easily accounts\\nfor the natural necessity of the laws of nature, insofar as such a\\nnecessity just “flows” from the essence of the\\ndispositional properties involved. Secondly, dispositional properties\\ncan be easily known as they really are, because it is part of their\\nessence that they affect us in certain ways. Thirdly, at the\\n(presumably fundamental) micro-physical level, properties are only\\ndescribed dispositionally, which is best explained by their being\\ndispositional (Ellis & Lierse 1994; N. Williams 2011).\",\n \"\\nNevertheless, pure dispositionalism is affected by several problems.\\nFirst, some authors believe that it is not easy to provide a clear-cut\\ndistinction between dispositional and would-be non-dispositional\\nproperties (Cross 2005). Secondly, it seems that the essence of\\ncertain properties does not include, or is not exhausted by, their\\ncausative roles: qualia, inert and epiphenomenal\\n properties,[14]\\n structural and geometrical properties, spatio-temporal properties\\n(Prior 1982; Armstrong 1999; for some responses, see Mellor 1974 and\\nBird 2007; 2009). Thirdly, there can be symmetrical causative\\nroles. Consider three distinct properties \\\\(A\\\\), \\\\(B\\\\) and \\\\(C\\\\) such\\nthat \\\\(A\\\\) can cause \\\\(B\\\\), \\\\(B\\\\) can cause \\\\(A\\\\), \\\\(A\\\\) and \\\\(B\\\\) can\\ntogether cause \\\\(C\\\\) and nothing else characterizes \\\\(A\\\\) and \\\\(B\\\\).\\n\\\\(A\\\\) and \\\\(B\\\\) have the same causative role. Therefore, in pure\\ndispositionalism, they turn out to be identical, against the\\nhypothesis (Hawthorne 2001; see also Contessa 2019). Fourthly,\\naccording to some, pure dispositionalism falls prey to (at least)\\nthree distinct regresses (for a fourth regress, see Psillos 2006).\\nSuch regresses arise from the fact that the essential causative role\\nof a dispositional property \\\\(P\\\\) “points towards” further\\nproperties \\\\(S\\\\), \\\\(T\\\\), etc. qua possible effects. The\\nessential causative roles of the latter “point towards”\\nstill other properties, and so on. The first regress concerns the\\nidentity of \\\\(P\\\\), which is never fixed, as it depends on the identity\\nof further properties, which depend for their identity on still other\\nproperties, and so on (Lowe 2006; Barker 2009; 2013). The second\\nregress concerns the knowability of \\\\(P\\\\) (Swinburne 1980). \\\\(P\\\\) is\\nonly knowable through its possible effects (i.e., the instantiation of\\n\\\\(S\\\\), \\\\(T\\\\), etc.), included in its causative role. Yet, such\\npossible effects are only knowable through their possible effects, and\\nso on. The third regress concerns the actuality of \\\\(P\\\\) (Armstrong\\n1997). \\\\(P\\\\)’s actuality is never reached, since \\\\(P\\\\) is\\nnothing but the power to give rise to \\\\(S\\\\), \\\\(T\\\\), etc., which are\\nnothing but the powers to give rise to further properties, and so on.\\nFor responses to these regresses, see Molnar 2003; Marmodoro 2009;\\nBauer 2012; McKitrick 2013; see also Ingthorsson 2013.\",\n \"\\nPure categoricalism seems to imply that causative roles are only\\ncontingently associated to a property. Therefore, on pure\\ncategoricalism, a property can possibly have distinct causative roles,\\nwhich allows it to explain—among other things—the apparent\\ncontingency of causative roles and the possibility of recombining a\\nproperty with distinct causative roles. Its supporters include Lewis\\n(1986b, 2009), Armstrong (1999), Schaffer (2005), and more recently\\nLivanios (2017), who provides further arguments based on the\\nmetaphysics of science. Kelly (2009) and Smith (2016) may be added to\\nthe list, although they take roles to be non-essential and necessary\\n(for further options, see also Kimpton-Nye 2018, Yates 2018a, Coates\\nforthcoming and Tugby forthcoming).\",\n \"\\nHowever, pure categoricalism falls prey to two sorts of difficulties.\\nFirst, the contingency of causative roles has some unpalatable\\nconsequences: unbeknownst to us, two distinct properties can swap\\ntheir roles; they can play the same role at the same time; the same\\nrole can be played by one property at one time and by another property\\nat a later time; an “alien” property can replace a\\nfamiliar one by playing its role (Black 2000). Secondly, and more\\ngenerally, we are never able to know which properties play which\\nroles, nor are we able to know the intrinsic nature of such\\nproperties. This consequence should be accepted with “Ramseyan\\nhumility” (Lewis 2009; see also Langton 1998 for a related,\\nKantian, sort of humility) or it should be countered in the same way\\nas we decide to counter any broader version of skepticism (Schaffer\\n2005). On this issue, see also Whittle (2006); Locke (2009); Kelly\\n(2013); Yates (2018b).\",\n \"\\nLet us now turn to some intermediate positions.\",\n \"\\nAccording to dualism (Ellis 2001; Molnar 2003), there are\\nboth dispositional and categorical properties. Dualism is meant to\\ncombine the virtues of pure dispositionalism and pure categoricalism.\\nIt then faces the charge of adopting a less parsimonious ontology,\\nsince it accepts two classes of properties rather than one, i.e.,\\ndispositional and categorical ones.\",\n \"\\nAccording to the identity theory (Heil 2003; 2012; Jaworski\\n2016; Martin 2008; G. Strawson 2008; see also N. Williams 2019), every\\nproperty is both dispositional and categorical (or qualitative). The\\nmain problem here is how to characterize the distinction and relation\\nof these two “sides”. Martin and Heil suggest that they\\nare two distinct ways of partially considering one and the same\\nproperty, whereas Mumford (1998) explores the possibility of seeing\\nthem as two distinct ways of conceptualizing the property in question.\\nHeil claims that the qualitative and the dispositional sides need to\\nbe identified with one another and with the whole property. Jacobs\\n(2011) holds that the qualitative side consists in the possession of\\nsome qualitative nature by the property, whereas the dispositional\\nside consists in that property being (part of) a sufficient truthmaker\\nfor certain counterfactuals. Dispositional and qualitative sides may\\nalso be seen as essential, higher-order properties of properties, as\\nsupervenient and ontologically innocent aspects of properties\\n(Giannotti 2019), or as constituents of the essence of properties\\n(Taylor 2018). In general, the identity theory is between Scylla and\\nCharybdis. If it reifies the dispositional and qualitative sides, it\\nruns the risk of implying some sort of dualism. If it insists on the\\nidentity between them, it runs the opposite risk of turning into a\\npure dispositionalist theory (Taylor 2018).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.2. Essentially Categorical vs. Essentially Dispositional Properties\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nFormal property theories are logical systems that aim at formulating\\n“general noncontingent laws that deal with properties”\\n(Bealer & Mönnich 1989: 133). In the next subsection we shall\\noutline how they work. In the two subsequent subsections we shall\\nbriefly consider their deployment in natural language semantics and\\nthe foundations of mathematics, which can be taken to provide further\\nreasons for the acknowledgment of properties in one’s ontology,\\nor at least of certain kinds of properties.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"6. Formal Property Theories and their applications\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThese systems allow for terms corresponding to properties, in\\nparticular variables that are meant to range over properties and that\\ncan be quantified over. This can be achieved in two ways. Either\\n(option 1; Cocchiarella 1986a) the terms standing for properties are\\npredicates or (option 2; Bealer 1982) such terms are subject terms\\nthat can be linked to other subject terms by a special predicate that\\nis meant to express a predication relation (let us use\\n“pred”) pretty much as in standard set theory a special\\npredicate, “\\\\(\\\\in\\\\)”, is used to express the membership\\nrelation. To illustrate, given the former option, an assertion such as\\n“there is a property that both John and Mary have” can be\\nrendered as\",\n \"\\\\[\\\\notag \\\\exists P(P(j) \\\\amp P(m)).\\\\]\",\n \"\\nGiven the second option, it can be rendered as\",\n \"\\\\[\\\\notag \\\\exists x(\\\\textrm{pred}(x, j) \\\\amp \\\\textrm{pred}(x, m)).\\\\]\",\n \"\\n(The two options can be combined as in Menzel 1986; see Menzel 1993\\nfor further discussion).\",\n \"\\nWhatever option one follows, in spelling out such theories one\\ntypically postulates a rich realm of properties. Traditionally, this\\nis done by a so-called comprehension principle which, intuitively,\\nasserts that, for any well-formed formula (“wff”) \\\\(A\\\\),\\nwith \\\\(n\\\\) free variables, \\\\(x_1 , \\\\ldots ,x_n\\\\), there is a\\ncorresponding \\\\(n\\\\)-adic property. Following option 1, it goes as\\nfollows:\",\n \"\\\\[\\\\tag{CP} \\\\exists R^n \\\\forall x_1 \\\\ldots \\\\forall x_n(R^n(x_1 ,\\n\\\\ldots ,x_n) \\\\leftrightarrow A). \\\\]\",\n \"\\nAlternatively, one can use a variable-binding operator, \\\\(\\\\lambda\\\\),\\nthat, given an open wff, generates a term (called a “lambda\\nabstract”) that is meant to stand for a property. This way to\\nproceed is more flexible and is followed in the most recent versions\\nof property theory. We shall thus stick to it in the following. To\\nillustrate, we can apply “\\\\(\\\\lambda\\\\)” to the open\\nformula, “\\\\((R(x) \\\\amp S(x))\\\\)” to form the one-place\\ncomplex predicate “[\\\\(\\\\lambda x (R(x) \\\\amp S(x))\\\\)]”; if\\n“\\\\(R\\\\)” denotes being red and “\\\\(S\\\\)”\\ndenotes being square, then this complex predicate denotes the\\ncompound, conjunctive property being red and square.\\nSimilarly, we can apply the operator to the open formula\\n“\\\\(\\\\exists y(L(x, y))\\\\)” to form the one-place predicate\\n“[\\\\(\\\\lambda x \\\\exists y(L(x, y))\\\\)]”; if\\n“\\\\(L\\\\)” stands for loves, this complex predicate\\ndenotes the compound property loving someone (whereas\\n“[\\\\(\\\\lambda y \\\\exists x(L(x, y))\\\\)]” would denote\\nbeing loved by someone). To ensure that lambda abstracts\\ndesignate the intended property, one should assume a “principle\\nof lambda conversion”. Given option 1, it can be stated\\nthus:\",\n \"\\\\[\\\\tag{\\\\(\\\\lambda\\\\)-conv} [\\\\lambda x_1\\\\ldots x_n A](t_1 , \\\\ldots\\n,t_n) \\\\leftrightarrow A(x_1 /t_1 , \\\\ldots ,x_n /t_n).\\\\]\",\n \"\\n\\\\(A(x_1 /t_1 , \\\\ldots ,x_n /t_n)\\\\) is the wff resulting from\\nsimultaneously replacing each \\\\(x_i\\\\) in \\\\(A\\\\) with \\\\(t_i\\\\) (for \\\\(1\\n\\\\le i \\\\le n)\\\\), provided \\\\(t_i\\\\) is free for \\\\(x_i\\\\) in \\\\(A\\\\)). For\\nexample, given this principle, [\\\\(\\\\lambda x (R(x) \\\\amp S(x))](j)\\\\) is\\nthe case iff \\\\((R(j) \\\\amp S(j))\\\\) is also the case.\",\n \"\\nStandard second-order logic allows for predicate variables bound by\\nquantifiers. Hence, to the extent that these variables are taken to\\nrange over properties, this system could be seen as a formal theory of\\nproperties. Its expressive power is however limited, since it does not\\nallow for subject terms that stand for properties. Thus, for example,\\none cannot even say of a property \\\\(F\\\\) that \\\\(F = F\\\\). This is a\\nserious limitation if one wants a formal tool for a realm of\\nproperties whose laws one is trying to explore. Standard higher order\\nlogics beyond the second order obviate this limitation by allowing for\\npredicates in subject position, provided that the predicates that are\\npredicated of them belong to a higher type. This presupposes a grammar\\nin which predicates are assigned types of increasing levels, which can\\nbe taken to mean that the properties themselves, for which the\\npredicates stand for, are arranged into a hierarchy of types. Thus,\\nsuch logics appropriate one version or another of the type theory\\nconcocted by Russell to tame his own paradox and related conundrums.\\nIf a predicate can be predicated of another predicate only if the\\nformer is of a type higher than the latter, then self-predication is\\nbanished and Russell’s paradox cannot even be formulated.\\nFollowing this line, we can construct a type-theoretical formal\\nproperty theory. The simple theory of types, as presented, e.g., in\\nCopi (1971), can be seen as a prototypical version of such a property\\ntheory (if we neglect the principle of extensionality assumed by\\nCopi). The type-theoretical approach keeps having supporters. For\\nexample, it is followed in the property theories embedded in\\nZalta’s (1983) theory of abstract objects and more recently in\\nthe metaphysical systems proposed by Williamson (2013) and Hale\\n(2013).\",\n \"\\nHowever, for reasons sketched in\\n §2.4,\\n type theory is hardly satisfactory. Accordingly, many type-free\\nversions of property theory have been developed over the years and no\\nconsensus on what the right strategy is appears to be in sight. Of\\ncourse, without type-theoretical constraints, given \\\\((\\\\lambda\\\\)-conv)\\nand classical logic (CL), paradoxes such as Russell’s\\nimmediately follow (to see this, consider this instance of\\n\\\\((\\\\lambda\\\\textrm{-conv}): [\\\\lambda x {\\\\sim}x(x)]([\\\\lambda x\\n{\\\\sim}x(x)]) \\\\leftrightarrow{\\\\sim}[\\\\lambda x {\\\\sim}x(x)]([\\\\lambda x\\n{\\\\sim}x(x)])\\\\)). In formal systems where abstract singular terms or\\npredicates may (but need not) denote properties (Swoyer 1998), formal\\ncounterparts of (complex) predicates like “being a property that\\ndoes not exemplify itself” (formally, “[\\\\(\\\\lambda x\\n{\\\\sim}x(x)\\\\)]”) could exist in the object language without\\ndenoting properties; from this perspective, Russell’s paradox\\nmerely shows that such predicates do not stand for properties\\n(similarly, according to Schnieder 2017, it shows that it is not\\npossible that a certain property exists). But we would like to have\\ngeneral criteria to decide when a predicate stands for a property and\\nwhen it does not. Moreover, one may wonder what gives these predicates\\nany significance at all if they do not stand for properties. There are\\nthen motivations for building type-free property theories in which all\\npredicates stand for properties. We can distinguish two main strands\\nof them: those that weaken CL and those that circumscribe\\n\\\\((\\\\lambda\\\\)-conv) (some of the proposals to be mentioned below are\\nformulated in relation to set theory, but can be easily translated\\ninto proposals for property theory).\",\n \"\\nAn early example of the former approach was offered in a 1938 paper by\\nthe Russian logician D. A. Bochvar (Bochvar 1938 [1981]), where the\\nprinciple of excluded middle is sacrificed as a consequence of the\\nadoption of what is now known as Kleene’s weak three-valued\\nscheme. An interesting recent attempt based on giving up excluded\\nmiddle is Field 2004. A rather radical alternative proposal is to\\nembrace a paraconsistent logic and give up the principle of\\nnon-contradiction (Priest 1987). A different way of giving up CL is by\\nquestioning its structural rules and turn to a substructural logic, as\\nin Mares and Paoli (2014). The problem with all these approaches is\\nwhether their underlying logic is strong enough for all the intended\\napplications of property theory, in particular to natural language\\nsemantics and the foundations of mathematics.\",\n \"\\nAs for the second strand (based on circumscribing \\\\((\\\\lambda\\\\)-conv)),\\nit has been proposed to read the axioms of a standard set theory such\\nas ZFC, minus extensionality, as if they were about properties rather\\nthan sets (Schock 1969; Bealer 1982; Jubien 1989). The problem with\\nthis is that these axioms, understood as talking about sets, can be\\nmotivated by the iterative conception of sets, but they seem rather\\nad hoc when understood as talking about properties\\n(Cocchiarella 1985). An alternative can be found in Cocchiarella\\n1986a, where \\\\((\\\\lambda\\\\)-conv) is circumscribed by adapting to\\nproperties the notion of stratification used by Quine for sets. This\\napproach is however subject to a version of Russell’s paradox\\nderivable from contingent but intuitively possible facts (Orilia 1996)\\nand to a paradox of hyperintensionality (Bozon 2004) (see Landini 2009\\nand Cocchiarella 2009 for a discussion of both). Orilia (2000; Orilia\\n& Landini 2019) has proposed another strategy for circumscribing\\n\\\\((\\\\lambda\\\\)-conv), based on applying to exemplification Gupta’s\\nand Belnap’s theory of circular definitions.\",\n \"\\nIndependently of the paradoxes (Bealer & Mönnich 1989: 198\\nff.), there is the issue of providing identity conditions for\\nproperties, specifying when it is the case that two properties are\\nidentical. If one thinks of properties as meanings of natural language\\npredicates and tries to account for intensional contexts, one will be\\ninclined to assume rather fine-grained identity conditions, possibly\\neven allowing that [\\\\(\\\\lambda x(R(x) \\\\amp S(x))\\\\)] and [\\\\(\\\\lambda\\nx(S(x) \\\\amp R(x))\\\\)] are distinct (see Fox & Lappin 2015 for an\\napproach based on operational distinctions among computable\\nfunctions). On the other hand, if one thinks of properties as causally\\noperative entities in the physical world, one will want to provide\\nrather coarse-grained identity conditions. For instance, one might\\nrequire that [\\\\(\\\\lambda x A\\\\)] and [\\\\(\\\\lambda x B\\\\)] are the same\\nproperty iff it is physically necessary that \\\\(\\\\forall x(A\\n\\\\leftrightarrow B)\\\\). Bealer (1982) tries to combine the two\\napproaches (see also Bealer & Mönnich\\n 1989)[15].\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.1 Logical Systems for Properties\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe formal study of natural language semantics started with Montague\\nand gave rise to a flourishing field of inquiry (see entry on\\n Montague semantics).\\n The basic idea in this field is to associate to natural language\\nsentences wffs of a formal language, in order to represent sentence\\nmeanings in a logically perspicuous manner. The association reflects\\nthe compositionality of meanings: different syntactic subcomponents of\\nsentences correspond systematically to syntactic subcomponents of the\\nwffs; subcomponents of wffs thus represent the meanings of the\\nsubcomponents of the sentences. The formal language eschews\\nambiguities and has its own formal semantics, which grants that\\nformulas have logical properties and relations, such as logical truth\\nand entailments, so that in particular certain sequences of formulas\\ncount as logically valid arguments. The ambiguities we normally find\\nin natural language sentences and the entailment relations that link\\nthem are captured by associating ambiguous sentences to different\\nunambiguous wffs, in such a way that when a natural language argument\\nis felt to be valid there is a corresponding sequence of wffs that\\ncount as a logically valid argument. In order to achieve all this,\\nMontague appealed to a higher-order logic. To see why this was\\nnecessary, one may focus on this valid argument:\",\n \"\\ntherefore,\",\n \"\\nTo grant compositionality in a way that respects the syntactic\\nsimilarity of the three sentences (they all have the same\\nsubject-predicate form), and the validity of the argument, Montague\\nassociates (1)–(3) to formulas such as these:\",\n \"\\\\[ \\\\tag{1a} [\\\\lambda F \\\\forall x(\\\\mathrm{G}(x) \\\\rightarrow\\nF(x)](\\\\mathrm{M}); \\\\] \\\\[ \\\\tag{2a} [\\\\lambda F \\\\exists x(\\\\forall y(P(x)\\n\\\\rightarrow x = y) \\\\amp F(x))](G); \\\\] \\\\[ \\\\tag{3a} [\\\\lambda F \\\\exists\\nx(\\\\forall y(P(x) \\\\rightarrow x = y) \\\\amp F(x))](\\\\mathrm{M}). \\\\]\",\n \"\\nThe three lambda abstracts in (1a)–(3a) represent, respectively,\\nthe meanings of the three noun phrases in (1)–(3). These\\nlambda-abstracts occur in predicate position, as predicates of\\npredicates, so that (1a)–(3a) can be read, respectively, as:\\nevery Greek is instantiated by being mortal; the\\npresident of Greece is instantiated by being Greek;\\nthe president of Greece is instantiated by being\\nmortal. Given lambda-conversion plus quantifier and propositional\\nlogic, the argument is valid, as desired. It should be noted that\\nlambda abstracts such as these can be taken to stand for peculiar\\nproperties of properties, classifiable as denoting concepts\\n(after Russell 1903; see Cocchiarella 1989). One may then say then\\nthis approach to semantics makes a case for the postulation of\\ndenoting concepts, in addition to the more obvious and general fact\\nthat it grants properties as meanings of natural language predicates\\n(represented by symbols of the formal language).\",\n \"\\nThis in itself says nothing about the nature of such properties. As we\\nsaw in\\n §3.1,\\n Montague took them to be intensions as set-theoretically\\ncharacterized in terms of possible worlds. Moreover, he took them to\\nbe typed, since, to avoid logical paradoxes, he relied on type theory.\\nAfter Montague, these two assumptions have been typically taken for\\ngranted in natural language semantics, though with attempts to recover\\nhyperintensionality somehow (Cresswell 1985) in order to capture the\\nsemantics of propositional attitudes verbs such as\\n“believe”, affected by the phenomena regarding mental\\ncontent hinted at in\\n §3.1.\\n However, the development of type-free property theories has suggested\\nthe radically different road of relying on them to provide logical\\nforms for natural language semantics (Chierchia 1985; Chierchia &\\nTurner 1988; Orilia 2000b; Orilia & Landini 2019). This allows one\\nto capture straightforwardly natural language inferences that appear\\nto presuppose type-freedom, as they feature quantifiers that bind\\nsimultaneously subject and predicate positions (recall the example of\\n §1.2).\\n Moreover, by endowing the selected type-free property theory with\\nfine-grained identity conditions, one also accounts for propositional\\nattitude verbs (Bealer 1989). Thus, we may say that this line makes a\\ncase for properties understood as untyped and highly fine-grained.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.2 Semantics and Logical Form\"\n }\n ]\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Achinstein, Peter, 1974, “The Identity of Properties”,\nAmerican Philosophical Quarterly, 11(4): 257–275.","Adams, Robert Merrihew, 1979, “Primitive Thisness and\nPrimitive Identity”, The Journal of Philosophy, 76(1):\n5–26. doi:10.2307/2025812","Ainsworth, Peter Mark, 2010, “What Is Ontic Structural\nRealism?”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part\nB: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 41(1):\n50–57. doi:10.1016/j.shpsb.2009.11.001","Allen, Sophie R., 2016, A Critical Introduction to\nProperties, London: Bloomsbury. doi:10.5040/9781474276979","Aristotle, Categories, in The Complete Works of\nAristotle, Jonathan Barnes (ed.), Oxford: Oxford University\nPress, 1998.","Armstrong, David M., 1978, Universals and Scientific\nRealism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press\n\n\n\n1978a, Volume I, Nominalism and Realism\n\n1978b, Volume II, A Theory of Universals\n ","1978a, Volume I, Nominalism and Realism","1978b, Volume II, A Theory of Universals","–––, 1980, “Against ‘Ostrich’\nNominalism: A Reply to Michael Devitt”, Pacific\nPhilosophical Quarterly, 61(4): 440–449.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1468-0114.1980.tb00032.x","–––, 1983, What Is a Law of Nature?,\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9781316499030","–––, 1984, “Replies”, in D.M.\nArmstrong: Profiles, Radu J. 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Slater\n(eds), 2011, Carving Nature at Its Joints: Natural Kinds in\nMetaphysics and Science, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.","Carmichael, Chad, 2010, “Universals”,\nPhilosophical Studies, 150(3): 373–389.\ndoi:10.1007/s11098-009-9417-3","Cartwright, Nancy, 1983, How the Laws of Physics Lie,\nOxford: Clarendon Press.","Castañeda, Hector-Neri, 1972, “Thinking and the\nStructure of the World: Discours d'Ontologie”, Critica,\n6(18): 43–86. doi:10.1007/BF02381514","–––, 1976, “Ontology and Grammar: I.\nRussell’s Paradox and the General Theory of Properties in\nNatural Language”, Theoria, 42(1–3): 44–92.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1755-2567.1976.tb00678.x","Casullo, Albert, 1988, “A Fourth Version of the Bundle\nTheory”, Philosophical Studies, 54(1): 125–139.\ndoi:10.1007/BF00354181","Causey, Robert L., 1972, “Attribute-Identities in\nMicroreductions”, Journal of Philosophy, 69(14):\n407–422. doi:10.2307/2024853","Chakravartty, Anjan, 2007, A Metaphysics for Scientific\nRealism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511487354","Chierchia, Gennaro, 1985, “Formal Semantics and the Grammar\nof Predication”, Linguistic Inquiry, 16(3):\n417–443.","Chierchia, Gennaro, Barbara Partee, and Raymond Turner (eds),\n1989, Properties, Types and Meanings (Volume I: Foundational\nIssues). Dordrecht: Kluwer.","Chierchia, Gennaro and Raymond Turner, 1988, “Semantics and\nProperty Theory”, Linguistics and Philosophy, 11(3):\n261–302. doi:10.1007/BF00632905","Coates, Ashley, forthcoming, “Making sense of powerful\nqualities”, Synthese, early online:\n18 February 2020. doi:10.1007/s11229-020-02576-5","Cocchiarella, Nino B., 1985, “Review of G. Bealer’s\nQuality and Concept”, Journal of Symbolic\nLogic, 50(2): 554–56. doi:10.2307/2274249","–––, 1986a, Logical Investigations of\nPredication Theory and the Problem of Universals, Napoli:\nBibliopolis.","–––, 1986b, “Frege, Russell and Logicism:\nA Logical Reconstruction”, in Frege Synthesized: Essays on\nthe Philosophical and Foundational Work of Gottlob Frege, Leila\nHaaparanta and Jaakko Hintikka (eds.), Dordrecht: Springer\nNetherlands, pp. 197–252. doi:10.1007/978-94-009-4552-4_9","–––, 1989, “Conceptualism, Realism, and\nIntensional Logic”, Topoi, 8(1): 15–34.\ndoi:10.1007/BF00138676","–––, 2007, Formal Ontology and Conceptual\nRealism, Dordrecht: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-1-4020-6204-9","–––, 2009, “Reply to Gregory\nLandini’s Review of Formal Ontology and Conceptual\nRealism”, Axiomathes, 19(2): 143–153.\ndoi:10.1007/s10516-009-9060-9","Contessa, Gabriele, 2019, “Powerful Qualities or Pure\nPowers?”, Metaphysica, 20(1): 5–33.\ndoi:10.1515/mp-2019-2003","Copi, Irving, 1971, The Theory of Logical Types, London:\nRoutledge and Kegan Paul.","Costa, Damiano, forthcoming, “An Argument against\nAristotelian Universals”, Synthese, early online: 8\nAugust 2019. doi:10.1007/s11229-019-02345-z","Cresswell, Max J., 1975, “Hyperintensional Logic”,\nStudia Logica, 34(1): 25–38.\ndoi:10.1007/BF02314421","–––, 1985, Structured Meanings. The\nSemantics of Propositional Attitudes, Boston, MA: MIT Press.","Cross, Troy, 2005, “What Is a Disposition?”,\nSynthese, 144(3): 321–341.\ndoi:10.1007/s11229-005-5857-2","Curtis, Benjamin L., 2014, “The Rumble in the Bundle”,\nNoûs, 48(2): 298–313.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1468-0068.2012.00872.x","Dasgupta, Shamik, 2009, “Individuals: An Essay in\nRevisionary Metaphysics”, Philosophical Studies,\n145(1): 35–67. doi:10.1007/s11098-009-9390-x","–––, 2013, “Absolutism vs Comparativism\nabout Quantity”, in Oxford Studies in Metaphysics. Vol.\n8, Karen Bennett and Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press, pp. 105–148.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199682904.003.0003","Davidson, Donald, 1980, Essays on Actions and Events,\nOxford: Clarendon.","Davis, Wayne A., 2014, “On Occurrences of Types in\nTypes”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 92(2):\n349–363. doi:10.1080/00048402.2013.831927","Devitt, Michael, 1980, “‘Ostrich Nominalism’ or\n‘Mirage Realism’?”, Pacific Philosophical\nQuarterly, 61(4): 433–439.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1468-0114.1980.tb00031.x","Dipert, Randall R., 1997, “The Mathematical Structure of the\nWorld: The World as Graph”, Journal of Philosophy,\n94(7): 329–358. doi:10.5840/jphil199794738","Dixon, T. Scott, 2018, “Plural Slot Theory”, in\nOxford Studies in Metaphysics. Vol. 11, Karen Bennett and\nDean W. 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J., 2018, “Structural Universals”,\nPhilosophy Compass, 13(10): e12518.\ndoi:10.1111/phc3.12518","Fisk, Milton, 1972, “Relatedness Without Relations”,\nNoûs, 6(2): 139–151. doi:10.2307/2216145","Fitch, Frederic B., 1952, Elements of Symbolic Logic, New\nYork: The Ronald Press Company.","Forrest, Peter, 1986, “Ways Worlds Could Be”,\nAustralasian Journal of Philosophy, 64(1): 15–24.\ndoi:10.1080/00048408612342201","–––, 2006, “The Operator Theory of\nInstantiation”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy,\n84(2): 213–228. doi:10.1080/00048400600759001","–––, 2016, “The Mereology of Structural\nUniversals”, Logic and Logical Philosophy, 25(3):\n259–283. doi:10.12775/LLP.2015.012","Fox, Chris and Shalom Lappin, 2015, “Type-Theoretic Logic\nwith an Operational Account of Intensionality”,\nSynthese, 192(3): 563–584.\ndoi:10.1007/s11229-013-0390-1","Frege, Gottlob, 1892, “Über Begriff und\nGegenstand”, Vierteljahresschrift für wissenschaftliche\nPhilosophie, 16: 192–205. Translated as “Concept and\nObject” by Peter Geach in Translations from the\nPhilosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, P. Geach and Max Black\n(eds. and trans.), Oxford: Blackwell, third edition, 1980.","French, Steven and James Ladyman, 2003, “Remodelling\nStructural Realism: Quantum Physics and the Metaphysics of\nStructure”, Synthese, 136(1): 31–56.\ndoi:10.1023/A:1024156116636","Galluzzo, Gabriele and Michael J. Loux (eds), 2015, The\nProblem of Universals in Contemporary Philosophy, Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316181539","Gaskin, Richard, 2008, The Unity of the Proposition,\nOxford: Oxford University Press.","Giannotti, Joaquim, forthcoming, “The Identity Theory of\nPowers Revisited”, Erkenntnis, early online: 20 April\n2019. doi:10.1007/s10670-019-00122-5","Glennan, Stuart and Phyllis Illari (eds.), 2018, The Routledge\nHandbook of Mechanisms and Mechanical Philosophy, London-New\nYork: Routledge.","Goodman, Nelson, 1955, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast,\nCambridge (MA): Harvard University Press. Fourth edition\n1983.","Gorman, Michael, 2014, “Two Types of Features: An\nAristotelian Approach”, Ratio, 27(2): 140–154.\ndoi:10.1111/rati.12031","Gozzano, Simone and Francesco Orilia (eds), 2008, Tropes,\nUniversals and the Philosophy of Mind, Frankfurt: Ontos\nVerlag.","Grandy, Richard E., 1976, “Anadic Logic and English”,\nSynthese, 32(3–4): 395–402.\ndoi:10.1007/BF00484785","Graves, P. R., 1993, “Argument Deletion without\nEvents”, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 34(4):\n607–620. doi:10.1305/ndjfl/1093633910","Grossmann, Reinhardt, 1983, The Categorial Structure of the\nWorld, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.","Hale, Bob, 2013, Necessary Beings: An Essay on Ontology,\nModality, and the Relations Between Them, Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press.","Harte, Verity, 2008, “Plato’s Metaphysics”, in\nThe Oxford Handbook of Plato, Gail Fine (ed.), Oxford\nUniversity Press: Oxford, pp. 191–216.","Hawley, Katherine, 2010, “Mereology, Modality and\nMagic”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 88(1):\n117–133. doi:10.1080/00048400802587341","Hawley, Katherine and Alexander Bird, 2011, “What are\nNatural Kinds?”, Philosophical Perspectives, 25:\n205–221. doi:10.1111/j.1520-8583.2011.00212.x","Hawthorne, John, 2001, “Causal Structuralism”,\nPhilosophical Perspectives, 15: 361–378. Reprinted as\nCh. 10 of his Metaphysical Essays, Oxford: Oxford University\nPress, 2006. doi:10.1111/0029-4624.35.s15.16","Heal, Jane, 1997, “Indexical Predicates and Their\nUses”, Mind, 106(424): 619–640.\ndoi:10.1093/mind/106.424.619","Heil, John, 2003, From an Ontological Point of View,\nOxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/0199259747.001.0001","–––, 2012, The Universe As We Find It,\nOxford: Oxford University Press.","Hochberg, Herbert, 1987, “Russell’s Early Analysis of\nRelational Predication and the Asymmetry of the Predication\nRelation”, Philosophia, 17(4): 439–459.\ndoi:10.1007/BF02381064","–––, 2013, “Nominalism and\nIdealism”, Axiomathes, 23(2): 213–234.\ndoi:10.1007/s10516-011-9150-3","Horgan, Terence, 1982, “Supervenience and\nMicrophysics”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 63(1):\n29–43. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0114.1982.tb00084.x","Ingthorsson, Roegnvaldur D., 2013, “Properties: Qualities,\nPowers, or Both?”, dialectica, 67(1): 55–80.\ndoi:10.1111/1746-8361.12011","Jacobs, Jonathan, 2011, “Powerful Qualities, Not Pure\nPowers”, The Monist, 94(1): 81–102.\ndoi:10.5840/monist20119415","Jaworski, William, 2016, Structure and the Metaphysics of\nMind. 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A Comprehensive Guide to Metaphysics, Maiden, MA: Wiley\nBlackwell.","Landini, Gregory, 1998, Russell’s Hidden Substitutional\nTheory, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","–––, 2008, “Russell’s Definite\nDescriptions De Re”, in Russell vs. Meinong: The\nLegacy of “On Denoting”, Nicholas Griffin and Dale\nJacquette (eds), New York: Routledge, pp. 265–296.","–––, 2009, “Review of Cocchiarella’s\nFormal Ontology and the Paradoxes of\nHyperintensionality”, Axiomathes, 19(2):\n115–142. doi:10.1007/s10516-009-9062-7","–––, 2011, Russell, London-New York:\nRoutledge.","Langton, Rae, 1998, Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things\nin Themselves, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/0199243174.001.0001","Leeds, Stephen, 1978, “Quine on Properties and\nMeanings”, Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, 9(2):\n97–108.","Levinson, Jerrold, 1991, “Attributes”, in Handbook\nof Metaphysics and Ontology, Vol. I, Hans Burkhardt and Barry\nSmith (eds), Munich: Philosophia, pp. 65–70.","Lewis, David K., 1966, “An Argument for the Identity\nTheory”, Journal of Philosophy, 63(1): 17–25.\ndoi:10.2307/2024524","–––, 1983, “New Work for a Theory of\nUniversals”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 61(4):\n343–377. doi:10.1080/00048408312341131","–––, 1986a, “Against Structural\nUniversals”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 64(1):\n25–46. doi:10.1080/00048408612342211","–––, 1986b, On the Plurality of Worlds,\nOxford: Blackwell.","–––, 2009, “Ramseyan Humility”, in\nBraddon-Mitchell and Nola 2009: 203–222.","Linsky, Bernard and Edward N. 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From Pandispositionalism to Aristotle”, History of\nPhilosophy Quarterly, 26(4): 337–352.","–––, forthcoming, Forms and Structure in\nPlato’s Metaphysics, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","Marmodoro, Anna and Erasmus Mayr, 2019, Metaphysics: An\nIntroduction to Contemporary Debates and Their History, Oxford:\nOxford University Press.","Marmodoro, Anna and David Yates (eds.), 2016, The Metaphysics\nof Relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198735878.001.0001","Martin, Charles B., 2008, The Mind in Nature, Oxford:\nOxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199234103.001.0001","Massin, Olivier, 2009, “The Metaphysics of Forces”,\ndialectica, 63(4): 555–589.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1746-8361.2009.01213.x","Maurin, Anna-Sofia, 2002, If Tropes, Dordrecht: Kluwer.\ndoi:10.1007/978-94-017-0079-5","–––, 2015, “States of Affairs and the\nRelation Regress”, in Galluzzo and Loux 2015: 195–214.\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9781316181539.010","McDaniel, Kris, 2009, “Structure-Making”,\nAustralasian Journal of Philosophy, 87(2): 251–274.\ndoi:10.1080/00048400802587374","McFarland, Andrew, 2018, “Causal Powers and Isomeric\nChemical Kinds”, Synthese, 195(4): 1441–1457.\ndoi:10.1007/s11229-016-1044-x","McKitrick, Jennifer, 2013, “How to Activate a Power”,\nin Metaphysics and Science, Stephen D. 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A Study in Metaphysics,\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199204175.001.0001","Monaghan, Patrick X., 2011, Property Possession as Identity:\nAn Essay in Metaphysics, Frankfurt: Ontos.","Montague, Richard, 1974, Formal Philosophy: Selected Papers of\nRichard Montague Richmond Thomasson (ed.), New Haven, CT: Yale\nUniversity Press.","Mormann, Thomas, 2010, “Structural Universals as Structural\nParts: Toward a General Theory of Parthood and Composition”,\nAxiomathes, 20(2–3): 209–227.\ndoi:10.1007/s10516-010-9105-0","Mugnai, Massimo, 1992, Leibniz’s Theory of\nRelations, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag (Studia\nLeibnitiana Supplementa, Vol. 28).","Mulligan, Kevin, Peter Simons, and Barry Smith, 1984,\n“Truth-Makers”, Philosophy and Phenomenological\nResearch, 44(3): 287–321. doi:10.2307/2107686","Mumford, Stephen D., 1998, Dispositions, Oxford:\nClarendon.","–––, 2004, Laws in Nature, London-New\nYork: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203458426","–––, 2007, David Armstrong,\nStocksfield: Acumen.","Mundy, Brent, 1987, “The Metaphysics of Quantity”,\nPhilosophical Studies, 51(1): 29–54.\ndoi:10.1007/BF00353961","–––, 1988, “Extensive Measurement and\nRatio Functions”, Synthese, 75(1): 1–23.\ndoi:10.1007/BF00873272","–––, 1989, “Elementary Categorial Logic,\nPredicates of Variable Degree, and Theory of Quantity”,\nJournal of Philosophical Logic, 18(2): 115–140.\ndoi:10.1007/BF00293444","Nagel, Ernest, 1961, The Structure of Science. 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Bradley\nvs. Meinong”, in Meinongian Issues in Contemporary Italian\nPhilosophy, Venanzio Raspa (ed.), Frankfurt: Ontos, pp.\n213–238.","–––, 2008, “The Problem of Order in\nRelational States of Affairs: A Leibnizian View”, in\nFostering the Ontological Turn: Essays on Gustav Bergmann,\nGuido Bonino and Rosaria Egidi (eds), Frankfurt: Ontos, pp.\n161–186.","–––, 2014, “Positions, Ordering Relations\nand O-Roles”, dialectica, 68(2): 283–303.\ndoi:10.1111/1746-8361.12058","–––, 2016, “Armstrong’s\nSupervenience and Ontological Dependence”, in Metaphysics\nand Scientific Realism: Essays in Honour of David Malet\nArmstrong, Francesco F. 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Issues\\nin the Metaphysics of Realism, Alexander Bird, Brian Ellis and\\nHoward Sankey (eds.), London-New York: Routledge, pp.\\n139–162.\",\n \"Baxter, Donald L. 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Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.\",\n \"Bigelow, John and Robert Pargetter, 1988,\\n“Quantities”, Philosophical Studies, 54(3):\\n287–304. doi:10.1007/BF00646273\",\n \"–––, 1989, “A Theory of Structural\\nUniversals”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 67(1):\\n1–11. doi:10.1080/00048408912343641\",\n \"–––, 1991, Science and Necessity,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511551611\",\n \"Bird, Alexander, 2005, “Laws and Essences”,\\nRatio, 18(4): 437–461.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1467-9329.2005.00304.x\",\n \"–––, 2007, Nature’s Metaphysics: Laws\\nand Properties, New York: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199227013.001.0001\",\n \"–––, 2009, “Structural Properties\\nRevisited”, in Dispositions and Causes, Toby Handfield\\n(ed.), Oxford: Clarendon, pp. 215–241.\",\n \"Black, Robert, 2000, “Against Quidditism”,\\nAustralasian Journal of Philosophy, 78(1): 87–104.\\ndoi:10.1080/00048400012349371\",\n \"Bochvar, D.A., 1938 [1981], “Об\\nодном\\nтрехзначном\\nисчислении\\nи его\\nприменении\\nк ана лизу\\nпарадоксов\\nклассического\\nрасширенного\\nфункцио\\nнального\\nисчисления”,\\nMatematicheskii Sbornik, 4(46)/2: 287–308. Reprinted as\\n“On a Three-Valued Logical Calculus and Its Application to the\\nAnalysis of the Paradoxes of the Classical Extended Functional\\nCalculus”, Merrie Bergmann (trans.), History and Philosophy\\nof Logic, 2(1–2): 87–112.\\ndoi:10.1080/01445348108837023\",\n \"Bozon, Serge, 2004, “Why λHST* and\\nHST*λ Do Not Solve the Russell-Myhill\\nParadox After All”, in Proceedings of the 9th Student ESSLLI\\nSession, Laura Alonso i Alemany and Paul Égré\\n(eds.), Nancy, France, pp. 48–60.\",\n \"Braddon-Mitchell, David and Robert Nola (eds.), 2009,\\nConceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism, Cambridge,\\nMA: MIT Press.\",\n \"Broad, C. D., 1933, Examination of McTaggart’s\\nPhilosophy: Volume I, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Brown, Scott, 2017, “Against Instantiation as\\nIdentity”, Philosophical Studies, 174(4):\\n887–900. doi:10.1007/s11098-016-0712-5\",\n \"Butchvarov, Panayot, 1966, Resemblance and Identity,\\nBloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press.\",\n \"Bynoe, William, 2011, “Against the Compositional View of\\nFacts”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 89(1):\\n91–100. doi:10.1080/00048400903521025\",\n \"Campbell, Keith, 1990, Abstract Particulars, Oxford:\\nBlackwell.\",\n \"Campbell, Joseph K., Michael O’Rourke, and Matthew H. 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Dordrecht: Kluwer.\",\n \"Chierchia, Gennaro and Raymond Turner, 1988, “Semantics and\\nProperty Theory”, Linguistics and Philosophy, 11(3):\\n261–302. doi:10.1007/BF00632905\",\n \"Coates, Ashley, forthcoming, “Making sense of powerful\\nqualities”, Synthese, early online:\\n18 February 2020. doi:10.1007/s11229-020-02576-5\",\n \"Cocchiarella, Nino B., 1985, “Review of G. 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Problems in the\\nLogic of Explanation, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World,\\nInc.\",\n \"Nolan, Daniel, 2014, “Hyperintensional Metaphysics”,\\nPhilosophical Studies, 171(1): 149–160.\\ndoi:10.1007/s11098-013-0251-2\",\n \"O’Connor, Timothy and Hong Yu Wong, 2005, “The\\nMetaphysics of Emergence”, Noûs, 39(4):\\n658–678. doi:10.1111/j.0029-4624.2005.00543.x\",\n \"Oliver, Alex, 1996, “The Metaphysics of Properties”,\\nMind, 105(417): 1–80. doi:10.1093/mind/105.417.1\",\n \"Orilia, Francesco, 1996, “A Contingent Russell’s\\nParadox”, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 37(1):\\n105–111. doi:10.1305/ndjfl/1040067319\",\n \"–––, 1999, Predication, Analysis and\\nReference, Bologna: CLUEB.\",\n \"–––, 2000a, “Argument Deletion, Thematic\\nRoles, and Leibniz’s Logico-Grammatical Analysis of\\nRelations”, History and Philosophy of Logic, 21(2):\\n147–162. doi:10.1080/01445340050064040\",\n \"–––, 2000b, “Property Theory and the\\nRevision Theory of Definitions”, Journal of Symbolic\\nLogic, 65(1): 212–246. doi:10.2307/2586533\",\n \"–––, 2006a, “Quantum-Mechanical Statistics\\nand the Inclusivist Approach to the Nature of Particulars”,\\nSynthese, 148(1): 57–77.\\ndoi:10.1007/s11229-004-6216-4\",\n \"–––, 2006b, “States of affairs. Bradley\\nvs. Meinong”, in Meinongian Issues in Contemporary Italian\\nPhilosophy, Venanzio Raspa (ed.), Frankfurt: Ontos, pp.\\n213–238.\",\n \"–––, 2008, “The Problem of Order in\\nRelational States of Affairs: A Leibnizian View”, in\\nFostering the Ontological Turn: Essays on Gustav Bergmann,\\nGuido Bonino and Rosaria Egidi (eds), Frankfurt: Ontos, pp.\\n161–186.\",\n \"–––, 2014, “Positions, Ordering Relations\\nand O-Roles”, dialectica, 68(2): 283–303.\\ndoi:10.1111/1746-8361.12058\",\n \"–––, 2016, “Armstrong’s\\nSupervenience and Ontological Dependence”, in Metaphysics\\nand Scientific Realism: Essays in Honour of David Malet\\nArmstrong, Francesco F. Calemi (ed.), Boston/Berlin: De Gruyter,\\npp. 233–251.\",\n \"Orilia, Francesco and Gregory Landini, 2019, “Truth,\\nPredication and a Family of Contingent Paradoxes”, Journal\\nof Philosophical Logic, 48(1): 113–136.\\ndoi:10.1007/s10992-018-9480-3\",\n \"Pagés, Joan, 2002, “Structural Universals and Formal\\nRelations”, Synthese, 131(2): 215–221.\\ndoi:10.1023/A:1015765414172\",\n \"Paolini Paoletti, Michele, 2014, “Falsemakers: Something\\nNegative About Facts”, Grazer Philosophische Studien,\\n90: 169–182. doi:10.1163/9789004298767_011\",\n \"–––, 2017a, “From Falsemakers to Negative\\nProperties”, Theoria, 83(1): 53–77.\\ndoi:10.1111/theo.12113\",\n \"–––, 2017b, The Quest for Emergence,\\nMunich: Philosophia.\",\n \"–––, 2020a, “Against Conjunctive\\nProperties”, Acta Analytica, 35(3): 421–437.\\ndoi:10.1007/s12136-019-00413-0\",\n \"–––, 2020b, “Five Sources of Contingency\\nfor Dispositionalism”, Metaphysica, 21(1): 9–30.\\ndoi:10.1515/mp-2019-0004\",\n \"Parsons, Josh, 2005, “Truthmakers, the Past, and the\\nFuture”, in Truthmakers: The Contemporary Debate, Helen\\nBeebee and Julian Dodd (eds.), Oxford: Clarendon, pp.\\n161–174.\",\n \"Parsons, Terence, 1986, “Why Frege Should not have Said\\n‘The Concept Horse is not a Concept’”,\\nHistory of Philosophy Quarterly, 3(4): 449–465.\",\n \"Paul, Laurie A., 2002, “Logical Parts”,\\nNoûs, 36(4): 578–596.\\ndoi:10.1111/1468-0068.00402\",\n \"Peacock, Howard, 2012, “Bradley’s Regress, Truthmaking\\nand Constitution”, Grazer Philosophische Studien, 86:\\n1–21. doi:10.1163/9789401209182_002\",\n \"Perovic, Katarina, 2016, “A Neo-Armstrongian Defense of\\nStates of Affairs: A Reply to Vallicella”, Metaphysica,\\n17(2): 143–161. doi:10.1515/mp-2016-0010\",\n \"Place, Ullin T., 1956, “Is Consciousness a Brain\\nProcess?”, British Journal of Psychology, 47(1):\\n44–50. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.1956.tb00560.x\",\n \"Plantinga, Alvin, 1974, The Nature of Necessity, Oxford:\\nClarendon Press.\",\n \"Plato, Phaedo, in Plato: Complete Works, J. M.\\nCooper and D. S. Hutchinson (eds.), Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.\",\n \"–––, Parmenides, in Plato: Complete\\nWorks, J. M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (eds.), Indianapolis:\\nHackett, 1997.\",\n \"Priest, Graham, 1987, In Contradiction, First edition, M.\\nNijhoff: Boston/Dordrecht. Second edition, Oxford: Oxford University\\nPress, 2006.\",\n \"Prior, Elizabeth W., 1982, “The Dispositional/Categorical\\nDistinction”, Analysis, 42(2): 93–96.\\ndoi:10.1093/analys/42.2.93\",\n \"Psillos, Stathis, 2006, “What Do Powers Do When They Are Not\\nManifested?”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,\\n72(1): 137–156. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2006.tb00494.x\",\n \"–––, 2012, “Adding Modality to Ontic\\nStructuralism: An Exploration and Critique”, in Structural\\nRealism: Structure, Object, and Causality, Elaine Landry and Dean\\nRickles (eds.), (The Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science\\n77), Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, pp. 169–185.\\ndoi:10.1007/978-94-007-2579-9_9\",\n \"Putnam, Hilary, 1970, “On Properties”, in Essays\\nin Honor of Carl G. Hempel. A Tribute on the Occasion of his\\nSixty-Fifth Birthday, Nicholas Rescher (ed.), Dordrecht: Reidel,\\npp. 235–254.\",\n \"–––, 1975, Mind, Language and Reality,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511625251\",\n \"Quine, Willard V. O., 1948, “On What There Is”,\\nReview of Metaphysics, 2(5): 21–38. Reprinted in Quine\\n1953 [1980: 1–19].\",\n \"–––, 1957 [1969], “Speaking of\\nObjects”, Proceedings and Addresses of the American\\nPhilosophical Association, 31: 5–22. Reprinted in his\\nOntological Relativity and Other Essays, New York: Columbia\\nUniversity Press, 1–25, 1969. doi:10.2307/3129242\",\n \"–––, 1956 [1976], “Quantifiers and\\nPropositional Attitudes”, The Journal of Philosophy,\\n53(5): 177–187. 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Zimmerman (eds.), Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press, pp. 171–199.\",\n \"Smart, John Jamieson C., 1959, “Sensations and Brain\\nProcesses”, The Philosophical Review, 68(2):\\n141–156. doi:10.2307/2182164\",\n \"Smith, Deborah C., 2016, “Quid Quidditism Est?”,\\nErkenntnis, 81(2): 237–257.\\ndoi:10.1007/s10670-015-9737-y\",\n \"Strawson, Galen, 2008, “The Identity of the Categorical and\\nthe Dispositional”, Analysis, 68(4): 271–282.\\ndoi:10.1093/analys/68.4.271\",\n \"Strawson, Peter F., 1959, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive\\nMetaphysics, Garden City, NY: Doubleday.\",\n \"Swinburne, Richard, 1980, “Properties, Causation, and\\nProjectibility: Reply to Shoemaker”, in Applications of\\nInductive Logic, L. Jonathan Cohen and Mary Hesse (eds.), Oxford:\\nOxford University Press, pp. 313–320.\",\n \"Swoyer, Chris, 1982, “The Nature of Natural Laws”,\\nAustralasian Journal of Philosophy, 60(3): 203–223.\\ndoi:10.1080/00048408212340641\",\n \"–––, 1987, “The Metaphysics of\\nMeasurement”, in Measurement, Realism and Objectivity,\\nJohn Forge (ed.), Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 235–290.\",\n \"–––, 1996, “Theories of Properties: From\\nPlenitude to Paucity”, Philosophical Perspectives, 10:\\n243–264. doi:10.2307/2216246\",\n \"–––, 1998, “Complex Predicates and Logics\\nfor Properties and Relations”, Journal of Philosophical\\nLogic, 27(3): 295–325. doi:10.1023/A:1004234204990\",\n \"–––, 1999, “How Ontology Might be\\nPossible: Explanation and Inference in Metaphysics”, in Peter A.\\nFrench and Howard K. Wettstein (eds.), Midwest Studies in\\nPhilosophy, 23: 100–131.\",\n \"Szabó, Zoltan Gendler, 2003, “Nominalism”, in\\nThe Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics, Michael J. Loux and Dean\\nW. Zimmerman (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.\\n11–45.\",\n \"Taylor, Henry, 2018, “Powerful Qualities and Pure\\nPowers”, Philosophical Studies, 175(6):\\n1423–1440. doi:10.1007/s11098-017-0918-1\",\n \"Tegtmeier, Erwin, 2013, “Exemplification and Universal\\nRealism”, Axiomathes, 23(2): 261–267.\\ndoi:10.1007/s10516-012-9191-2\",\n \"Thomason, Richmond H., 1974, “Introduction”, in\\nMontague 1974: 1–69.\",\n \"Tooley, Michael, 1977, “The Nature of Laws”,\\nCanadian Journal of Philosophy, 7(4): 667–698.\\ndoi:10.1080/00455091.1977.10716190\",\n \"–––, 1987, Causation, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Tugby, Matthew, 2013, “Platonic Dispositionalism”,\\nMind, 122(486): 451–480. doi:10.1093/mind/fzt071\",\n \"–––, forthcoming, “Grounding theories\\nof powers”, Synthese, early online: 22 July 2020.\\ndoi:10.1007/s11229-020-02781-2\",\n \"Vallicella, William F., 2002, “Relations, Monism, and the\\nVindication of Bradley’s Regress”, dialectica,\\n56(1): 3–35. doi:10.1111/j.1746-8361.2002.tb00227.x\",\n \"Van Cleve, James, 1985, “Three Versions of the Bundle\\nTheory”, Philosophical Studies, 47(1): 95–107.\\ndoi:10.1007/BF00355089\",\n \"Van Fraassen, Bas, 1989, Laws and Symmetry, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press.\",\n \"Van Inwagen, Peter, 1993, Metaphysics, Boulder, CO:\\nWestview Press.\",\n \"–––, 2004, “A Theory of Properties”,\\nin Oxford Studies in Metaphysics. Vol. 1, Dean W. Zimmerman\\n(ed.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 107–138.\",\n \"–––, 2006, “Names for Relations”,\\nPhilosophical Perspectives, 20: 453–477.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1520-8583.2006.00115.x\",\n \"–––, 2015, “Against Ontological\\nStructure”, in Galluzzo and Loux 2015: 46–64.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9781316181539.003\",\n \"Wetzel, Linda, 2009, Types and Tokens. On Abstract\\nObjects, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.\",\n \"Whittle, Ann, 2006, “On an Argument for Humility”,\\nPhilosophical Studies, 130(3): 461–497.\\ndoi:10.1007/s11098-004-5751-7\",\n \"–––, 2008, “A Functionalist Theory of\\nProperties”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,\\n77(1): 59–82. doi:10.1111/j.1933-1592.2008.00176.x\",\n \"Williams, Donald, C., 1953, “The Elements of Being”,\\nReview of Metaphysics, part I, 7(1): 3–18; part II\\n7(2): 171–192.\",\n \"Williams, Neil E., 2011, “Dispositions and the Argument from\\nScience”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 89(1):\\n71–90. doi:10.1080/00048400903527766\",\n \"–––, 2019, The Powers Metaphysic,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Williamson, Timothy, 2013, Modal Logic as Metaphysics,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199552078.001.0001\",\n \"Wilson, Jessica, 1999, “How Superduper Does a Physicalist\\nSupervenience Need to Be?”, The Philosophical\\nQuarterly, 49(194): 33–52. doi:10.1111/1467-9213.00127\",\n \"Yates, David, 2018a, “Inverse functionalism and the\\nindividuation of Powers”, Synthese, 195(10): 4525-4550.\\ndoi:10.1007/s11229-017-1417-9\",\n \"–––, 2018b, “Three Arguments for\\nHumility”, Philosophical Studies, 175(2):\\n461–481. doi:10.1007/s11098-017-0877-6\",\n \"Zalta, Edward N., 1983, Abstract Objects: An Introduction to\\nAxiomatic Metaphysics, Dordrecht: D. Reidel.\\ndoi:10.1007/978-94-009-6980-3\",\n \"–––, 1988, Intensional Logic and the\\nMetaphysics of Intentionality, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.\",\n \"Zangwill, Nick, 2011, “Negative Properties”,\\nNoûs, 45(3): 528–556.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1468-0068.2010.00776.x\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/","text":"species"},{"href":"../analysis/","text":"analysis"},{"href":"../bradley-regress/","text":"Bradley, Francis Herbert: Regress"},{"href":"../category-theory/","text":"category theory"},{"href":"../causation-metaphysics/","text":"causation: the metaphysics of"},{"href":"../color/","text":"color"},{"href":"../concepts/","text":"concepts"},{"href":"../definitions/","text":"definitions"},{"href":"../dependence-ontological/","text":"dependence, ontological"},{"href":"../determinate-determinables/","text":"determinates vs. 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theory"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/\",\n \"text\": \"species\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../analysis/\",\n \"text\": \"analysis\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../bradley-regress/\",\n \"text\": \"Bradley, Francis Herbert: Regress\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../category-theory/\",\n \"text\": \"category theory\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../causation-metaphysics/\",\n \"text\": \"causation: the metaphysics of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../color/\",\n \"text\": \"color\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../concepts/\",\n \"text\": \"concepts\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../definitions/\",\n \"text\": \"definitions\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../dependence-ontological/\",\n \"text\": \"dependence, ontological\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../determinate-determinables/\",\n \"text\": \"determinates vs. determinables\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../dispositions/\",\n \"text\": \"dispositions\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../properties-emergent/\",\n \"text\": \"emergent properties\"\n },\n 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What do we hear? What are the objects of auditory\nawareness? What is the content of audition? Is hearing spatial? How\ndoes audition differ from vision and other sense modalities? How does\nthe perception of sounds differ from that of colors and ordinary\nobjects? This entry presents the main debates in this developing area\nand discusses promising avenues for future inquiry. It discusses the\nmotivation for exploring non-visual modalities, how audition bears on\ntheorizing about perception, and questions concerning the objects,\ncontents, phenomenology, varieties, and bounds of auditory\nperception."],"string":"[\n \"\\nAuditory perception raises a variety of challenging philosophical\\nquestions. What do we hear? What are the objects of auditory\\nawareness? What is the content of audition? Is hearing spatial? How\\ndoes audition differ from vision and other sense modalities? How does\\nthe perception of sounds differ from that of colors and ordinary\\nobjects? This entry presents the main debates in this developing area\\nand discusses promising avenues for future inquiry. It discusses the\\nmotivation for exploring non-visual modalities, how audition bears on\\ntheorizing about perception, and questions concerning the objects,\\ncontents, phenomenology, varieties, and bounds of auditory\\nperception.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Other Modalities and the Philosophy of Perception","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. The Objects of Auditory Perception","sub_toc":["2.1 Sounds","2.2 Auditory Objects","2.3 Sound Sources"]},{"content_title":"3. The Contents of Auditory Perception","sub_toc":["3.1 Spatial Hearing","3.2 Audible Qualities"]},{"content_title":"4. Varieties of Auditory Perception","sub_toc":["4.1 Musical Listening","4.2 Speech Perception","4.3 Crossmodal Influences"]},{"content_title":"5. Conclusion and Future Directions","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Other Modalities and the Philosophy of Perception\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. The Objects of Auditory Perception\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"2.1 Sounds\",\n \"2.2 Auditory Objects\",\n \"2.3 Sound Sources\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. The Contents of Auditory Perception\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"3.1 Spatial Hearing\",\n \"3.2 Audible Qualities\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Varieties of Auditory Perception\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"4.1 Musical Listening\",\n \"4.2 Speech Perception\",\n \"4.3 Crossmodal Influences\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Conclusion and Future Directions\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\nThe philosophy of sounds and auditory perception is one area of the\nphilosophy of perception that reaches beyond vision for insights about\nthe nature, objects, contents, and varieties of perception. This entry\ncharacterizes central issues in the philosophy of auditory perception,\nmany of which bear upon theorizing about perception more generally,\nand it mentions outstanding questions and promising future areas for\ninquiry in this developing literature. Before beginning the\nsubstantive discussion of audition itself, it is worthwhile to discuss\nthe motivation and rationale for this kind of work.","\nPhilosophical thinking about perception has focused predominantly on\nvision. The philosophical puzzle of perception and its proposed\nsolutions have been shaped by a concern for visual experience and\nvisual illusions. Questions and proposals about the nature of\nperceptual content have been framed and evaluated in visual terms, and\ndetailed accounts of what we perceive frequently address just the\nvisual case. Vision informs our understanding of perception’s\nepistemological role and of its role in guiding action. It is not a\ngreat exaggeration to say that much of the philosophy of perception\ntranslates roughly as philosophy of visual perception.","\nRecently, however, other perceptual modalities have attracted\nattention (see, e.g., Stokes et al. 2015, Matthen 2015). In addition\nto auditory perception and the experience of sound, touch and tactile\nawareness have generated philosophical interest concerning, for\ninstance, the tactile and proprioceptive experience of space, the\nobjects of touch, whether contact is required for touch, and whether\ndistinct modalities detect pressure, heat, and pain (see, e.g.,\nO’Shaughnessy 1989, Martin 1993, Scott 2001, Fulkerson 2013,\n2016). The unique phenomenology of olfaction and smells has been used\nto argue that vision is atypical in supporting the transparency of\nperceptual experience (Lycan 2000, 282; cf. Batty 2010) and that\nperceptual objectivity does not require spatiality (Smith 2002, ch 5).\nLycan (2000) even suggests that the philosophy of perception would\nhave taken a different course had it focused upon olfaction instead of\nvision (see also Batty 2011). Some authors have appealed to taste and\nflavor to challenge traditional ways of dividing and counting senses\n(Smith 2015; cf. Richardson 2013).","\nThis kind of work is philosophically interesting in its own right. But\nit is also worthwhile because theorizing about perception commonly\naims to address general questions about perception, rather than\nconcerns specific to vision. Hope for a comprehensive and general\nunderstanding of perception rests upon extending and testing claims,\narguments, and theories beyond vision. One might view work on\nnon-visual modalities as filling out the particulars required for a\nthoroughly detailed account of perceiving that applies not just to\nvision but across the modalities. At least three approaches might be\nadopted, with potential for increasingly revisionist outcomes.","\nFirst, one might take work on non-visual modalities as\ntranslating what we have learned from the visual case into\nterms that apply to other modalities. This approach is relatively\nconservative. It assumes that vision is representative or paradigmatic\nand that we have a good understanding of perception that is derived\nfrom the case of vision. One example of this kind of approach would be\nto develop an account of the representational content of auditory\nexperience.","\nSecond, considering other modalities might extend our\nvision-based understanding of perception. Non-visual cases might draw\nattention to new kinds of phenomena that are missing from or not\nsalient in vision. If so, a vision-based account of perception is\nsatisfactory as far as it goes, but it leaves out critical pieces. For\nexample, speech perception, multimodal perception, and flavor\nperception might involve novel kinds of perceptual phenomena absent\nfrom the visual case.","\nThird, considering other modalities might challenge\nvision-based claims about perception. If falsifying evidence is\ndiscovered in non-visual cases, then theorizing beyond vision may\nforce revision of general claims about perception that are supported\nby vision. For example, if olfactory experience is not diaphanous, but\nolfactory experience is perceptual, the transparency thesis for\nperceptual experience fails.","\nFinally, we might attempt to determine whether any unified\naccount exists that applies generally to all of the perceptual\nmodalities. We can ask this question either at the level of quite\nspecific claims, such as those concerning the objects of perception or\nthe nature and structure of content. We can ask it about the\nrelationships among perceiving, believing, and acting. Or we can ask\nit about the general theory of necessary and sufficient conditions for\nperceiving. Some philosophers, impressed by findings concerning\nnon-visual modalities, express skepticism whether a unified theory\nexists (e.g., Martin 1992).","\nWhatever the approach, extending our knowledge about perception beyond\nthe visual requires systematic attention to individual modalities as\nwell as careful accounting in order to determine how the results bear\non general questions about perception. Whatever the outcome, audition\nis a rich subject matter in its own right, and investigating this\nsubject matter is crucial to our overall understanding of\nperception."],"section_title":"1. Other Modalities and the Philosophy of Perception","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nWhat do we hear? One way to address this question concerns the\nobjects of auditory perception."],"section_title":"2. The Objects of Auditory Perception","subsections":[{"content":["\nIn the first instance, typical human perceivers hear sounds. It\nis plausible that sounds are objects of auditory perception.","\nWhat are sounds? Sounds traditionally have been counted with colors,\nsmells, and tastes as secondary, sensible, or\nsensory qualities (see, e.g., Locke 1689/1975, Pasnau\n1999, 2000, Leddington 2019). However, recently it has been proposed\nthat sounds are individuals to which sensible features are\nattributed. In particular, several philosophers have proposed that\nsounds are public, distally-located, event-like individuals (Casati\nand Dokic 1994, 2005, O’Callaghan 2007, Matthen 2010).","\nFour questions about audition’s objects define the debate and\nconstrain theories of sound (see also the entry on\n sounds,\n for extensive discussion).","\nAre sounds private or public? Maclachlan (1989) argues that the sounds\nwe hear are sensations (rather than, for instance, the pressure\nwaves that cause auditory experiences). Such sensations are internal\nand private, and we experience them directly, or without apparent\nmediation. On Maclachlan’s account, we hear the ordinary things\nand happenings that are the sources of sounds only\nindirectly, by means of inference from auditory data.","\nMaclachlan’s story is noteworthy partly because he uses hearing\nand sounds to motivate a general claim about perception. He claims\nthat what seems perfectly intuitive and obvious in the case of sounds\nand hearing—that something other than material objects are the\ndirect objects of hearing; that the direct objects of audition are\ninternal; and that we indirectly hear things in the world by hearing\ntheir sounds—helps us to discover what is true of all\nperception. According to Maclachlan, for instance, seeing involves\ndirect awareness of sensations of patterns of light, while surfaces\nand ordinary objects figure only indirectly and thanks to inference\namong the intentional objects of sight. The case of sounds and\naudition is important because it reveals that perceiving involves\nawareness of sensations in the first instance, and of the external\nworld only indirectly.","\nMaclachlan’s description of sounds and auditory experience has\nsome attractions. First, sounds are among the things we hear. And\nsounds are among the direct or immediate objects of audition in the\nrelatively innocuous sense that hearing a sound does not seem to\nrequire hearing as of something else. Hearing a collision, on the\nother hand, may seem to require awareness as of a sound. Furthermore,\nsounds are unlike the ordinary material objects (e.g., bottles and\nstaplers) we see. You cannot reach out and grab a sound, or determine\nits temperature. Instead, sounds may strike us as byproducts or\neffects of such ordinary things and their transactions. Sounds result\nfrom activities or interactions of material bodies and thus are\nexperienced as distinct or independent from them (cf. Nudds 2001).\nNevertheless, audition does afford some variety of awareness of the\nsources of sounds, or at least provides information about them.","\nHowever, the claim that sounds are sensations is unattractive. Good\nreasons suggest that sounds are public rather than private, even if\nsounds are not identical with ordinary objects and events such as\nclothespins and collisions. Suppose I am near the stage in a hall\nlistening to some music, and that I have a headache. It is a confusion\nto think you could feel my headache, but I assume you hear the sounds\nI hear. Suppose I move to the back of the hall, and the headache then\ngets better. My experience of the sounds of the music differs once I\nam at the back of the room, and my experience of the headache differs.\nThe sound of the music itself need not differ (the musicians could\nmake the same sounds), but the headache itself changes. The sounds can\ncontinue once I leave the room, but if I stop experiencing the\nheadache, it is gone. Moreover, the notion of an unfelt headache is\npuzzling, but it makes good sense to say that a tree makes a sound\nwhen it falls in the woods without being heard. Finally, tinnitus, or\nringing of the ears, is an illusory or hallucinatory experience as of\na sound, but received wisdom maintains that there are no illusory\nheadaches.","\nThis suggests that audition does not provide special reasons to\nbelieve that the objects of perception are private sensations. Sounds,\nconstrued as objects of auditory perception, plausibly inhabit the\npublic world. (See the section\n 3.1 Spatial Hearing\n for further discussion.)","\nAre sounds proximal or distal? The customary science-based view holds\nthat sounds are pressure waves that travel through a medium (see also\nSorensen 2008). On this account, sounds are caused by objects and\nevents such as collisions, and sounds cause auditory experiences.\nHowever, sounds are not auditorily experienced to travel through the\nsurrounding medium as waves do. Thus, if sounds are waves, then the\nsounds we hear may be proximal, located at the ear of the hearer.","\nAlternatively, some have argued that audition presents sounds as being\nlocated in some direction at a distance (Pasnau 1999,\nO’Callaghan 2007, ch. 3, 2010). On such an account, sounds\ncommonly appear auditorily to be in the neighborhood of their sources\nand thereby furnish useful information about the locations of those\nsources. The sound of the drumming across the street seems to come\nfrom across the street but does not seem audibly to travel. When\nsounds do appear to fill a room, sound seems located all around.\nSounds that seem to “bounce” around a room appear\nintermittently at different locations rather than as traveling\ncontinuously from place to place. Experiencing a missile-like sound\nspeeding towards your ears illustrates the contrast with ordinary\nhearing (O’Callaghan 2007, 35). Sounds, according to this\nconception, ordinarily appear to have distal locations and to remain\nstationary relative to their sources.","\nIf sounds are not usually experienced to travel, then unless auditory\nexperience is illusory with respect to the apparent locations of\nsounds, sounds themselves do not travel. Sounds thus are not identical\nwith and do not supervene locally upon the waves, since waves travel\n(Pasnau 1999). Several philosophers have argued on these and related\ngrounds that sounds are located distally, near their sources (Pasnau\n1999, Casati and Dokic 2005, O’Callaghan 2007). On this view,\npressure waves bear information about sounds and are the proximal\ncauses of auditory experiences, but are not identical with sounds.","\nOne might object by resisting the phenomenological claim that we\nexperience sounds as distally located, for instance by suggesting that\naudition is aspatial, or that audition is spatial but sound\nsources rather than sounds are auditorily localized (see\nsection\n 3.1 Spatial Hearing\n for further discussion). Or, one might accept some measure of\nillusion. Another possibility is that we experience only a small\nsubset of the locations sounds occupy during their lifetimes (for\ninstance, while at their sources), and simply fail to experience where\nthey are at other times. This avoids ascribing illusion. Finally,\nFowler (2013) argues indirectly on the basis of echoes against distal\ntheories of sound.","\nAre sounds properties or individuals? Among both proximal and distal\ntheories, disagreement exists concerning the ontological category to\nwhich sounds belong. Philosophers traditionally have understood sounds\nas properties—either as sensible or secondary qualities, or as\nthe categorical or physical properties that ground powers to affect\nsubjects. Commonly, sounds are attributed to the medium that\nintervenes between sources and perceivers. More recently, however,\nsome distal theorists have argued that sounds are properties of what\nwe ordinarily understand as sound sources—bells and whistles\nhave or possess rather than make or\nproduce sounds. Pasnau (1999), for instance, claims that sounds\nare transient properties that are identical with or supervene upon\nvibrations of objects. Kulvicki (2008) argues against transience in an\nattempt to subsume sounds to the model of colors, and claims that\nsounds are persistent, stable dispositional properties of objects to\nvibrate in response to being “thwacked”. He distinguishes\n“having” a stable sound from “making” a sound\non some occasion (manifesting the stable disposition). This account\nimplies that sounds sometimes make sounds they do not have, and that\nthey have sounds when silent. One also might ask whether events such\nas collisions and strummings, rather than objects, bear sounds.\nLeddington (2019) recently has defended such an account.","\nA revisionist challenge comes from those who argue that sounds are\nindividuals rather than properties. Several arguments support\nthis understanding. First, empirical work on auditory scene\nanalysis suggests that one primary task of audition is to carve up\nthe acoustic scene into distinct sounds, each of which may possess its\nown pitch, timbre, and loudness (Bregman 1990). Multiple distinct\nsounds with different audible attributes can be heard simultaneously.\nAn analog of Jackson’s (1977, see also Clark 2000) many\nproperties problem thus arises for audition since feature\nawareness alone cannot explain the bundling or grouping of audible\nattributes into distinct sounds. Such bundling or grouping of audible\nfeatures suggests that sounds are perceptible individuals to which\nthese features are attributed.","\nFurthermore, the temporal characteristics of experienced sounds\nsuggest that sounds are not simple qualities. Sounds audibly seem to\npersist through time and to survive change. A particular sound, such\nas that of an emergency siren, might begin high-pitched and loud and\nend low-pitched and soft. This suggests that sounds are individuals\nthat bear different features at different times, rather than sensible\nqualities.","\nSeveral responses to these arguments are available (see Cohen 2009 for\nthe most developed reply). One might argue that sounds are complex\nproperties, such as pitch-timbre-loudness complexes, instantiated at a\ntime. To account for feature binding, one might hold that such complex\nproperties are ascribed to ordinary objects such as bells and\nwhistles. Or, one might hold that they are particularized properties,\nsuch as tropes. To accommodate sounds that survive change through\ntime, a property account could hold that sounds are yet more complex\nproperties that have patterns of change built into their identity\nconditions. However, any such view differs a great deal from the\nfamiliar secondary or sensible quality view pioneered by Locke. Pitch,\ntimbre, and loudness are better candidates for simple sensible\nfeatures in audition (see section\n 3.2 Audible Qualities).\n ","\nIf sounds are individuals, are they object-like or event-like\nindividuals? Intuitively, the material objects we see are capable of\nexisting wholly at any given moment, and all that is required to\nperceptually recognize such individuals is present at a moment. On the\nother hand, event-like individuals occupy time and need not exist\nwholly at any given moment. Their individuation and recognition\nfrequently appeal to patterns of features over time. Event-like\nindividuals intuitively comprise temporal parts, while object-like\nindividuals intuitively do not. The issue here is not the truth of\nendurantism or perdurantism as an account of the persistence of\nobjects or events. Instead, the issue concerns a difference in how we\nperceptually individuate, experience, and recognize individuals.","\nNo contemporary philosopher has yet claimed that sounds are objects\nin the ordinary sense. Those who argue that sounds are\nindividuals commonly point out that sounds not only persist and\nsurvive change (as do ordinary material objects), but also\nrequire time to occur or unfold. It is difficult to imagine an\ninstantaneous sound, or one that lacks duration. Sounds are not\ncommonly treated as existing wholly at a given moment during their\nduration. Indeed, the identities of many common sounds are tied to\npatterns of change in qualities through time. The sound of an\nambulance siren differs from that of a police siren precisely because\nthe two differ in patterns of qualitative change through time. The\nsound of the spoken word ‘team’ differs from that of\n‘meat’ because each instantiates a common set of audible\nqualities in a different temporal pattern. These considerations\nsupport the view that sounds are event-like individuals (see Casati\nand Dokic 1994, 2005, Scruton 1997, O’Callaghan 2007, Matthen\n2010).","\nThis may bear on debates about persistence in the following way.\nDifferences in the intuitive plausibility of endurantism and\nperdurantism may be grounded in facts about perception. In particular,\nvision may treat objects as persisting by enduring or being wholly\npresent at each time at which they exist, while audition may treat its\nobjects as persisting by perduring or having temporal parts. This may\nstem from differences in perceptual organization. For instance,\nexhibiting a visible property profile at a time may suffice for being\na visual object of a given sort, while being an audible object of a\ngiven sort may require exhibiting an audible property profile over\ntime."],"subsection_title":"2.1 Sounds"},{"content":["\nThough most philosophers construe sounds either as properties or as\nevent-like individuals (see section\n 2.1 Sounds),\n psychologists commonly have discussed auditory objects (see,\ne.g., Kubovy and Van Valkenburg 2001, Griffiths and Warren 2004, Heald\net al. 2017). The target of such discussion is not simply\naudition’s intentional objects or proper (specific\nto audition) objects. The intended analogy is with visual\nobjects. Talk of auditory objects gestures at the visual processes\ninvolved in perceptually discriminating, attentively tracking,\nrecognizing and categorizing ordinary material objects. What justifies\ntalk of object perception in audition?","\nFirst of all, humans typically do not auditorily perceive\nthree-dimensional, bounded material objects as such, though it\nis plausible to think we visually perceive them. Hearing does not\nresolve the edges, boundaries, and filled volumes in space that I see,\nand I do not hear audible items to complete spatially behind occluders\nas do visible surfaces of objects. If perceiving a three-dimensional\nobject requires awareness of its edges, boundaries, and extension,\nperhaps in order to discriminate it from its surroundings, humans\ntypically do not auditorily perceive such objects.","\nNevertheless, striking and illuminating parallels do exist between the\nperceptual processes and experiences that take place in vision and\naudition. Such parallels may warrant talk of object perception in a\nmore general sense that is common to both vision and audition\n(O’Callaghan 2008a).","\nPerceiving objects requires parsing a perceptual scene into distinct\nunits that one can attend to and distinguish from each other\nand from a background. In vision, bounded, cohesive collections of\nsurfaces that are extended in space and that persist through time play\nthis role (see, e.g., Spelke 1990, Nakayama et al. 1995, Leslie et al.\n1998, Scholl 2001, Matthen 2005). In audition, as in vision, multiple\ndistinct perceptible individuals might exist simultaneously, and each\nmight persist and survive change (see the discussion of auditory scene\nanalysis in section\n 2.1 Sounds).\n A critical difference, however, is that while vision’s objects\nare extended in space, and are individuated and recognized primarily\nin virtue of spatial characteristics, audible individuals are extended\nin time, and are perceptually individuated and recognized primarily in\nvirtue of pitch and temporal characteristics (see, e.g., Bregman 1990,\nKubovy and Van Valkenburg 2001). For instance, audible individuals\nhave temporal edges and boundaries, and boundary elements can belong\nonly to a single audible individual. They also are susceptible to\nfigure-ground effects over time. One can, for instance, shift\nattention among continuous audible individuals that differ in pitch.\nFurthermore, they are susceptible to completion effects over time in\nmuch the same way that visible objects are perceptually completed in\nspace. Seeing a single visible region to continue behind a barrier is\nanalogous to hearing a sound stream to continue through masking noise,\nwhich may take place even when there is no corresponding signal\n(Bregman 1990, 28). Finally, multiple distinct, discrete audible\nindividuals, such as the temporally bounded notes in a tune, can form\naudible streams that comprise a single perceptible unit. Such\nstreams are subject to figure-ground shifts, and, like collections of\nsurfaces, they can be attentively tracked through changes to their\nfeatures and to one’s perspective. Though such complex audible\nindividuals include sounds, they comprise temporally unified\ncollections of sounds and silence that are analogous to spatially\ncomplex visible objects, such as tractors.","\nSuch audible individuals are temporally extended and bounded, serve as\nthe locus for auditory attention, prompt completion effects, and are\nsubject to figure-ground distinctions in pitch space. For these\nreasons, the auditory processes involved in their perception parallel\nthose involved in the visual perception of ordinary three-dimensional\nobjects. The parallels suggest a shared sense in which vision and\naudition involve a more general form of object perception (see, e.g.,\nKubovy and Van Valkenburg 2001, Scholl 2001, Griffiths and Warren\n2004, O’Callaghan 2008a, Matthen 2010).","\nWhat is the shared sense in which both visible and audible individuals\ndeserve to be called ‘objects’? Kubovy and Van Valkenburg\n(2001, 2003) define objecthood in terms of figure-ground segregation,\nwhich requires perceptual grouping. They propose the theory of\nindispensable attributes as an account of the necessary conditions\non perceptual grouping (see also Kubovy 1981). Indispensable\nattributes for a modality are those without which perceptual\nnumerosity is impossible. They claim that while space and time are\nindispensable attributes for vision (and color is not), pitch and time\nare indispensable attributes for auditory objects. Though they are\nmore skeptical about whether audition parallels vision, Griffiths and\nWarren (2004) sympathize with a figure-ground characterization but\nsuggest a working notion of an auditory object defined in terms of\n“an acoustic experience that produces a two-dimensional image\nwith frequency and time dimensions” (Griffiths and Warren 2004,\n891).","\nO’Callaghan (2008a) proposes that both visible and audible\nobjects are mereologically complex individuals, though their mereology\ndiffers in noteworthy respects. While vision’s objects possess a\nspatial mereology and are individuated and tracked in terms of spatial\nfeatures, audition’s objects have a temporal mereology and are\nindividuated and tracked in terms of both pitch and temporal\ncharacteristics. Discussion of auditory objects thus draws attention\nto two roles that space plays in vision. First, there is the role of\nspace in determining the structure internal to visible objects, which\nfacilitates identifying and recognizing visible objects. Second, space\nserves as the external structure among visible objects, and is\ncritical in distinguishing objects from each other. In audition, time\nplays a role similar to space in vision in determining the structure\ninternal to auditory objects. Pitch, on the other hand, serves as an\nexternal structural framework, along with space, that helps to\ndistinguish among audible individuals.","\nWhy is it useful to perceive such individuals in audition? One\npromising account is that they provide useful information about the\nhappenings that produce sounds. Carving the acoustic world into\nmereologically complex individuals informs us about what is going on\nin the extra-acoustic environment. It provides ecologically\nsignificant information about what the furniture is doing, rather than\njust how it is arranged. It is one thing to perceive a tree; it is\nanother to hear that it is falling behind you.","\nDiscussion of auditory objects and accounts of their nature and\nperception is relatively new among philosophers (see, e.g.,\nO’Callaghan 2008a, and essays in Bullot and Egré 2010,\nincluding Matthen 2010, Nudds 2010). Such work has led to the\ndevelopment of general accounts of perceptual objects designed to\navoid visuocentrism (see, e.g., O’Callaghan 2016, Green 2019).\nThis area is ripe for philosophical contributions."],"subsection_title":"2.2 Auditory Objects"},{"content":["\nSounds are among the objects of audition. Plausibly, so are complex,\ntemporally extended individuals composed of sounds. Do we hear\nanything else? Reflection suggests we hear things beyond sounds\nand sound complexes. In hearing sounds, one may seem to experience the\nbackfiring of the car or the banging of the drum. One might hold that\na primary part of audition’s function is to reveal sound\nsources, the things and happenings that make sounds.","\nIf sounds were internal sensations or sense-data, then, as Maclachlan\n(1989) observes, we would hear sound sources only indirectly, in an\nepistemological sense, perhaps thanks to something akin to inference.\nAcquiring beliefs about the environment would require mediation by\npropositions connecting experienced internal sounds with environmental\ncauses.","\nIf, however, sounds are properties attributed either to ordinary\nobjects, as Pasnau (1999) and Kulvicki (2008) hold, or to events, as\nLeddington (2019) holds, then hearing a tuba or the playing of a tuba\nmight only require hearing its sounds. Perceptually ascribing such\naudible attributes to their sources might ground epistemically\nunmediated awareness of tubas or their playings.","\nHowever, the individuals to which audible attributes are perceptually\nattributed need not be identical with ordinary objects or events.\nInstead, audible attributes may belong in the first instance to\nsounds. Sounds plausibly are distinct from ordinary or extra-acoustic\nindividuals (O’Callaghan 2007, 2011). Suppose then that one\ncould not hear an ordinary object or event without there existing an\naudible sound, as well as that sounds can mislead about their sources\n(it might sound like drumming but be hammering).","\nGiven this, forming beliefs about ordinary things and happenings\nconnected with sounds might seem to require inference, association, or\nsome otherwise cognitive process, and so awareness of a sound source\nmight appear to always involve more than perceptual awareness.\nAccording to such an account, awareness of environmental things and\nhappenings thanks to audition is epistemically mediated by awareness\nas of sounds and auditory objects, but does not itself constitute\nauditory perceptual awareness as of those things and happenings. You\nare inclined to think you hear the source because your representing or\nbeing aware of it co-occurs with, but is no more than a downstream\nconsequence triggered by, your auditory experience.","\nSuch an account is not wholly satisfactory. First, the phenomenology\nof audition suggests something stronger than indirect, epistemically\nmediated awareness of things such as collisions or guitar strummings\nor lions roaring. Reflection suggests auditory awareness as of\ncollisions, strummings, and lions. Second, the capacity to refer\ndemonstratively to such things and events on auditory grounds also\nsuggests genuine perceptual awareness of them. Third, we commonly\nperceptually individuate sounds in terms of their apparent sources,\nand our taxonomy reflects this. “What did you hear?”\n“I heard paper ripping,” or, “The sound of a\ndripping faucet.” We distinguish two quite similar rattles once\nwe hear one as of a muffler clamp and the other as of a loose fender.\nFurthermore, characterizing certain audible features and explaining\nperceptual constancy effects involving such features requires appeal\nto sound sources. Handel says of timbre: “At this point, no\nknown acoustic invariants can be said to underlie timbre... The cues\nthat determine timbre quality are interdependent because all are\ndetermined by the method of sound production and the physical\nconstruction of the instrument” (Handel 1995, 441). Explaining\nloudness constancy—why moving to the back of the room does not\nchange how loudly the lecturer seems to speak—appeals to facts\nabout the sources of sounds (Zahorik and Wightman 2001). Auditory\nprocessing proceeds in accordance with natural constraints concerning\ncharacteristics of sound sources, and information concerning sources\nshapes how auditory experiences are organized. This is to say that\nprocesses responsible for auditory experience proceed as if acoustic\ninformation is information about sound sources. Finally,\naudition-guided action supports the claim that we hear such things and\nevents. Turning to look toward the source of a sound or ducking out of\nthe way of something we hear to be approaching—behaviors guided\nby auditory experience—would make little sense if we heard only\nsounds. In the first place, these reasons ground a case for thinking\nthat auditory perceptual experience does not strictly end with sounds\nand auditory objects. In particular, awareness as of a source, even if\ndependent upon awareness as of a sound, may be constitutive of\none’s auditory perceptual experience.","\nThe main barrier to an alternative is that the relation between sounds\nand ordinary things or happenings is commonly understood as\ncausal (see, e.g., Nudds 2001). Awareness as of an effect does\nnot itself typically furnish epistemically unmediated awareness of its\ncause. Seeing smoke is not seeing fire. The right sort of dependence\nbetween characteristics of the experience and the cause is not\napparent, and awareness as of an effect does not by itself ground\nperceptual demonstratives that concern the cause. The metaphysical\nindirectness of the causal relation appears to block epistemic\ndirectness (see O’Callaghan 2011a for further discussion).","\nIs there another explanatory route? Suppose that instead of a causal\nrelation, we understand the relationship between sounds and sources\nmereologically, or as one of part to whole (see\nO’Callaghan 2011a). Parthood frequently does ground perceptual\nawareness. For instance, seeing distinct parts of a surface\ninterrupted by an occluder leads to perceptual experience as of a\nsingle surface (imagine seeing a dog behind a picket fence). Seeing\nthe facing surfaces of a cube affords awareness as of a cube, and we\ncan attentively track that same cube as it rotates and reveals\ndifferent surfaces. Suppose, then, that a sound is an event-like\nindividual (recall, property accounts escape the worry). This event is\npart of a more encompassing event, such as a collision or the playing\nof a trumpet, that occurs in the environment and that includes the\nsound. So, the typical horse race includes the sounds, and you might\nauditorily perceive the racing in hearing some of its proper parts:\nthe sounds. More specifically, you may hear the galloping thanks to\nhearing the sounds it includes. You may fail to hear certain parts of\nthe racing event, such as the jockey’s glance back after\ncrossing the wire, but you also fail to see parts of the race, such as\nthe misstep of the horse in second place. If the sounds are akin to\nthe audible “profile” of the event, analogous to the\nvisible surfaces of objects and visible parts of events, you might\nthen enjoy auditory awareness as of the galloping of the horses in\nvirtue of your awareness as of the sounds of the hooves. The sound is\nnot identical with the galloping, and it is not just a property or a\ncausal byproduct of the galloping. It is a part of a particular event\nof galloping. The metaphysical relation of part to whole, in contrast\nto that between effect and cause, might ground the sort of\nepistemically unmediated awareness of interest (cf. Nakayama et al.\n1995, Bermúdez 2000, Noë 2004). Auditory perceptual\nawareness as of the whole may occur thanks to experiencing the\npart.","\nOne objection is that this mereological account of the relation\nbetween sounds and sources cannot account for hearing ordinary\nobjects by hearing their sounds. You could not strictly hear a\ntuba by hearing its sound because a tuba is not an event of which a\nsound is a part. However, the sound is part of the event of playing\nthe tuba, and the tuba is a participant in that playing. So, though\nyou are not aware as of a tuba, you are aware as of an event that\ninvolves a tuba. That perhaps is enough to explain talk of hearing\ntubas and to assuage the worry (for further discussion, see Young\n2018).","\nAnother more serious objection contends that the events we seem to\nhear are ones that do not constitutively involve sounds or that might\nhave taken place without sounds. For instance, we hear the collision,\nbut the collision is something that could have occurred in a vacuum\nand not made a sound. (Note that this differs from the claim discussed\nbelow according to which sounds are identical with source events and\nso inaudibly exist in vacuums.) If so, the collision and the sound\ndiffer and the collision does not strictly include a sound. The\ncollision therefore must have made the sound as a causal byproduct.\nThis suggests that, strictly speaking, you could not hear that very\ncollision event (since it causes the sound). The best response is to\nbite the bullet and accept that events that do occur or that could\noccur in vacuums cannot be heard since they include no sounds. This is\nnot so bad, since you could hear a different, more encompassing event\nthat includes a sound along with a collision. Alternatively, one might\nsay the very same event that occurs in a vacuum also could occur in\nair, but that it would have involved a sound had it occurred in air.\nIn that case, one can only hear such events when they occur in air and\ninclude a sound. The choice depends upon one’s metaphysics of\nevents. In either case, it seems reasonable that token events that do\nnot include sounds are inaudible.","\nCasati et al. (2013) sidestep some of these concerns by rejecting the\ndistinction between sounds and events that are typically understood as\nsound sources. They propose to “Ockhamize” the\n“event sources” of sounds by identifying sounds with\nevents such as collisions and vibrations. The sound just is the\ncollision or the vibrating, whether or not it occurs in air. This\naccount implies that sounds could exist in vacuums.","\nWhat hinges on the debate about hearing sources? The first upshot is\nepistemological and concerns the nature of the justification for\nempirical beliefs grounded in perceptual experience. The evidential\nstatus of beliefs about what one perceptually experiences differs from\nthat of beliefs about what is causally responsible for what one\nperceptually experiences. So, whether or not we hear sound sources\nimpacts the epistemology of audition. The second upshot concerns the\nrelation between audition and certain actions. If we hear only sounds\nand auditory objects, what appears to be effortless, auditorily guided\naction to avoid or orient toward sound sources requires another\nexplanation (because sounds are invisible and usually do no harm).\nFinally, it affects how we understand the adaptive significance of\naudition. Did audition evolve so as to furnish awareness of sounds\nalone, while leaving their environmental significance to\nextra-perceptual cognition, or did it evolve so as to furnish\nperceptual responsiveness to the sources of sounds?"],"subsection_title":"2.3 Sound Sources"}]},{"main_content":["\nAnother way to address the question, “What do we hear?”\nconcerns the contents of auditory perception. Two topics are\nespecially noteworthy in the context of related debates about vision\nand its contents. The first concerns the whether audition has spatial\ncontent. The second concerns the perception of audible qualities.\nParallel questions can be raised without relying on the perceptual\ncontent framework, though important complications arise."],"section_title":"3. The Contents of Auditory Perception","subsections":[{"content":["\nOne topic where the contrast between vision and audition has been\nthought to be particularly philosophically significant concerns space.\nVision is a robustly spatial perceptual modality. Vision furnishes\nawareness of space and spatial features. Some claim vision has an\ninherently spatial structure, or, further, that vision’s spatial\nstructure is a necessary condition on being visually aware of things\nas independent from oneself.","\nHearing also provides information about space—humans learn about\nspace on the basis of hearing. If audition represents space or spatial\nfeatures, there is a natural account of being so informed. We might\nform beliefs about spatial features of environments on the basis of\nauditory perceptual experiences simply by accepting or endorsing what\nis apparent in having those experiences.","\nBut learning about spatial features on the basis of audition and\naudition’s bearing information about space both are consistent\nwith entirely aspatial auditory phenomenology. For instance, volume\nmight bear information about distance, and differences in volume at\nthe two ears might bear information about direction. In that case,\naudition bears information about space, and learning about space on\nthe basis of audition is possible, but it does not follow that\nauditory experience is spatial or that audition represents space.","\nNotably, a tradition of skepticism about audition’s spatiality\nexists in philosophy. Certainly, our capacity to glean information\nabout space is less acute in audition than in vision. Vision reveals\nfine-grained spatial details that audition cannot convey, such as\npatterns and textures. But philosophers who are skeptical about\nspatial audition are not just concerned about a difference in spatial\nacuity between audition and vision. Malpas says of the\nexpression, ‘the location of sound’:","\nI do not mean by ‘location’ ‘locality’, but\n‘the act of locating’, and by ‘the act of\nlocating’ I do not mean ‘the act of establishing in a\nplace’, but ‘the act of discovering the place of’.\nEven so ‘location’ is misleading, because it implies that\nthere is such a thing as discovering the place of sounds. Since sounds\ndo not have places there is no such act. (Malpas 1965, 131)\n","\nO’Shaughnessy states, “…We absolutely never\nimmediately perceive sounds to be at any place. (Inference from\nauditory data being another thing)” (O’Shaughnessy 2002,\n446). The claim is that, in contrast to visible objects, audible\nsounds are not experienced as having locations. Rather, we determine\nthe places of sounds and sources from acoustic features, such as\nloudness and interaural differences, that bear information about\ndistance and direction. We do not auditorily experience spatial\nfeatures.","\nThis debate, and the purported contrast between vision and audition,\nhas consequences for perceptual theorizing. One route to the\nconclusion that hearing sounds involves auditory awareness of\nsensations involves denying that audition satisfies spatial\nprerequisites on experiencing sounds as objective or public. For\ninstance, Maclachlan (1989) claims that audition’s\nphenomenology—in particular, its aspatial\nphenomenology—provides reasons to think sounds are sensations.\nComparing sounds with pains, which we readily recognize as sensations,\nhe says, “[A]lthough the sounds we hear are just as much effects\nproduced in us as are the pains produced by pins and mosquitoes,\nthere is no variety in the location of these effects [the\nsounds]. Because of the lack of contrast, we are not even aware that\nthe sounds we hear are bodily sensations” (Maclachlan 1989, 31,\nmy emphasis). Maclachlan means that, in contrast even to the case of\npains, which are felt at different bodily locations, sounds are not\nexperienced to be at differing locations, and so we are not even\ninclined to recognize that they are bodily sensations. Maclachlan then\nsuggests that we associate sounds with things and happenings\noutside the body rather than appreciate that they are effects in us.\nGiven the lack of spatial variation among experienced sounds,\nwe projectively associate sounds with distal sources. This explanation\nassumes that experienced sounds exhibit no audibly apparent spatial\nvariation: sounds seem located at the ears or lack apparent location\naltogether. Denying that auditory experiences present sounds at\nvarying locations beyond the ears invites difficulty in finding a\nplace for sounds in the world. If audition is wholly aspatial, this\nmay encourage a retreat to the view that sounds lack locations outside\nthe mind.","\nThis kind of strategy has companions and precursors. Lycan’s\nsuggestion that olfactory experiences are apparent as modifications of\none’s own consciousness depends heavily on the aspatial\nphenomenology of olfactory experience (Lycan 2000, 278–82). Each\nrecalls the Kantian claim that objectivity requires space, or that\ngrasping something as independent from oneself requires the experience\nof space, a version of which is deployed by Strawson (1959, ch 2) in\nhis famous discussion of sounds.","\nTwo lines of response are open. The first appeals to the thriving\nempirical research program in “spatial hearing”\n(see, e.g., Blauert 1997). Scientists aim to discover the cues and\nperceptual mechanisms that ground spatial audition, such as interaural\ntime and level differences, secondary and reverberant signals, and\nhead-related transfer functions. Audition clearly cannot match\nvision’s singular acuity—vision’s resolution limit\nis nearly two orders of magnitude better than audition’s\n(Blauert 1997, 38–9). Nevertheless, this research strongly\nsupports the claim that human subjects auditorily perceive such\nspatial characteristics as direction and distance.","\nSecond, a number of philosophers have objected on\nphenomenological grounds. Audition, they argue, involves\nexperiencing or perceptually representing such spatial characteristics\nas direction and distance (Pasnau 1999, Casati and Dokic 2005, Matthen\n2005, O’Callaghan 2007, 2010). Introspection and performance\nsupport the claim that sounds or sound sources are in many ordinary\ncases perceptually experienced as located in the environment at a\ndistance in some direction. We hear the sound of the knocking over\nnear the door; we hear footsteps approaching from behind and to the\nleft; hearing sound to “fill” a room is itself a form of\nspatial hearing. Though hearing is more error prone than vision, we\nfrequently do not need to work out the locations of sounds or\nsources—we simply hear them.","\nA subtler form of skepticism about spatial audition aims just to block\nthe requirements on objectivity. Strawson (1959) famously argues in\nChapter 2 of Individuals that because auditory experience is\nnot intrinsically spatial—spatial concepts have no\nintrinsic auditory significance—a purely auditory experience\nwould be non-spatial. Thus, it would not satisfy the requirements on\nnon-solipsistic consciousness. Others have endorsed versions of\nStrawson’s claim. “[T]he truth of a proposition to the\neffect that there is a sound at such-and-such a position must consist\nin this: if someone was to go to that position, he would have certain\nauditory experiences,” states Evans (1980, 274).","\nThe claim that audition is not intrinsically spatial admits at least\ntwo readings. First, since Strawson suggests that audition might\ninherit spatial content from other sense modalities, such as vision or\ntouch, it could mean that audition depends for its spatial\ncontent upon that of other modalities. If, unlike vision and touch,\naudition’s spatial capacities are parasitic upon those of other\nmodalities, audition is spatial only thanks to its relations to other\nintrinsically spatial modalities. Second, it might be understood as a\nclaim about the objects of audition. Strawson indicates that\nsounds themselves are not intrinsically spatial. He says that although\nsounds have pitch, timbre, and loudness, they lack “intrinsic\nspatial characteristics” (1959, 65). Since these interpretations\nare not clearly distinguished by Strawson, it is helpful to consider\nhis master argument.","\nStrawson claims that a purely auditory experience would be\nnon-spatial. By “purely auditory experience” Strawson\nmeans an exclusively auditory experience, or an auditory experience in\nabsence of experience associated with any other modality. However, if\nany modality in isolation ever could ground spatial experience,\naudition could. On one hand, given the mechanisms of spatial hearing,\nit is empirically implausible that a normal acoustic environment with\nrich spatial cues would fail to produce even a minimally spatial\npurely auditory experience. Even listening only to stereo headphones\ncould produce a directional auditory experience. On the other hand, it\ndoes seem possible that there could be a non-spatial but\nimpoverished exclusively auditory experience if no binaural or\nother spatial cues were present. But similarly impoverished,\nnon-spatial experiences seem possible for other modalities. Consider\nvisually experiencing a uniform gray ganzfeld, or floating\nweightlessly in a uniformly warm bath. Neither provides the materials\nfor spatial concepts, so neither differs from audition in this\nrespect. One might contend that we therefore lack a good reason to\nthink that, in contrast to a purely visual or tactile\nexperience, a purely auditory experience would be an entirely\nnon-spatial experience (see O’Callaghan 2010).","\nNudds (2001) suggests another way to understand the claim, and\ninterprets Strawson as making an observation about the internal\nstructure of audition:","\nWhen we see (or seem to see) something, we see it as occupying or as\nlocated within a region of space; when we hear (or appear to hear) a\nsound we simply hear the sound, and we don’t experience it as\nstanding in any relation to the space it may in fact occupy. (Nudds\n2001, 213–14)\n","\nAudition, unlike vision, lacks a spatial structure or field, claims\nNudds. A purely auditory experience thus would not comprise a spatial\nfield into which individuals independent from oneself might figure.\nFollowing an example from Martin (1992), Nudds argues that while\nvision involves awareness of unoccupied locations, audition does not\ninvolve awareness of regions of space as empty or unoccupied.\nMartin’s example is seeing the space in the center of a ring\nas empty. In audition, Nudds claims, one never experiences a\nspace as empty or unoccupied.","\nIn response, one might simply deny a difference between vision and\naudition in this respect. If one can attend to a location near the\ncenter of the visible ring as empty, one can attend to the location\nbetween the sounding alarm clock and the slamming door as a place\nwhere there is no audible sound—as acoustically empty space. Of\ncourse, auditory space generally is less replete than visual space,\nbut this is contingent. Consider seeing just a few stars flickering on\nand off against a dark sky. Since such an experience may have spatial\nstructure, and since it is analogous to audition, one might on these\ngrounds defend the claim that audition has spatial structure (see also\nYoung 2017).","\nWhat about the second way mentioned above to understand\nStrawson’s claim? Though audition’s status as\nintrinsically spatial may not differ from that of vision or touch,\nperhaps sounds are not intrinsically spatial. But without further\nargument, or a commitment to a theory of sounds, it is difficult to\nstate confidently the intrinsic features of sounds and thus whether\nthey include spatial features. If, for instance, wavelength is among a\nsound’s intrinsic features, sounds are intrinsically\nspatial.","\nNonetheless, the claim might be that, as they are perceptually\nexperienced to be, sounds lack apparent intrinsic or non-relational\nspatial features. Roughly, independent from spatial relations to other\nsounds, experienced sounds seem to lack internal spatial\nstructure. That is why you cannot auditorily experience the empty\nspace at the center of a sound or hear its edges. Interpreted as\nsuch—that sounds are not experienced or perceptually represented\nto have inherent spatial features—the claim is plausible (though\nconsider diffuse or spread out sounds in contrast to focused or\npinpoint sounds). It certainly marks an important difference from\nvision, whose objects frequently not only seem to have rich internal\nspatial structure, but also are individuated in terms of inherent\nspatial features.","\nThis difference, however, does not ground an argument that any purely\nauditory experience is non-spatial or that sounds fail to satisfy the\nrequirement on objectivity, since sounds’ being experienced to\nhave internal, intrinsic, or inherent spatial characteristics is\nnecessary neither for spatial auditory experience nor to experience\nsounds as objective. Since sounds phenomenologically seem to be\nlocated in space and to bear extrinsic spatial relations to each\nother, auditory experience satisfies the requirements for objectivity,\nwhich need only secure the materials for a conception of a place for\nsounds to exist when not experienced.","\nSo, vision and audition differ with respect to space in two ways.\nFirst, vision’s spatial acuity surpasses that of\naudition. Second, vision’s objects are perceptually experienced\nto have rich internal spatial structure, and audition’s\nare not. However, given the spatial characteristics evident in\naudition, such as direction and distance, the spatial status of\naudition presents no barrier to understanding its objects as\nperceiver-independent. The spatial aspects of auditory phenomenology\nthus may fail to ground an argument to the conclusion that sounds are\nmodifications of one’s consciousness. If that is the case, then\naudition provides no special intuitive support for accounts on which\nprivate entities are the direct objects of perception."],"subsection_title":"3.1 Spatial Hearing"},{"content":["\nAccording to theories in which sounds are individuals, sounds are not\nsecondary or sensible qualities. But, humans hear audible qualities,\nsuch as pitch, loudness, and timbre, that are analogous to colors,\ntastes, and scents. Thus, familiar accounts of colors and other\nsensible attributes or secondary qualities might apply to the audible\nqualities. For instance, pitches might be either dispositions to cause\ncertain kinds of experiences in suitable subjects, the physical or\ncategorical bases of such dispositions, sensations or projected\nfeatures of auditory experiences, or simple primitive properties of\n(actual or edenic) sounds.","\nTradition suggests that the form of a philosophical account of visible\nqualities, such as color, and their perception applies to other\nsensible qualities, such as pitch, flavor, and smell, and their\nperception. Thus, according to tradition, if dispositionalism,\nphysicalism, projectivism, or primitivism about sensible qualities is\ntrue for features associated with one modality, it is true for\nfeatures associated with others. Despite tradition, we should be wary\nto accept that a theory of sensible qualities translates plausibly\nacross the senses.","\nDebates about sensible qualities and their perception begin with\nconcerns about whether sensible features can be identified with or\nreduced to any objective physical features. What follows has two aims.\nThe first is to give a sense of how such debates might go in the case\nof audible qualities. The focus is on pitch, since pitch is often\ncompared to color, and the case of color is well known (for discussion\nof similar questions concerning timbre, see Isaac 2017). The second is\nto point out the most salient differences and similarities between the\ncases of color and pitch that impact the plausibility of arguments\ntranslated from one case to the other.","\nFirst, I consider two noteworthy arguments that are founded on aspects\nof color perception. Each aims to establish that the colors we\nperceive cannot be identified with objective physical features.\nNeither argument transposes neatly to the case of pitch. Thus, we\nshould not assume arguments that are effective in the case of color\nhave equal force when applied to other sensible qualities. Color\nperhaps is a uniquely difficult case.","\nSecond, however, I discuss two respects in which pitch experience is\nsimilar to color experience. It is instructive that these aspects of\npitch experience do raise difficulties for an objective physical\naccount of pitch that are familiar from the case of color.","\nWhat are pitch, timbre, and loudness? Pitch is a dimension along which\ntones can be ordered according to apparent “height”. The\npitch of fingernails scratching a blackboard generally is higher than\nthat of thumping a washtub. Loudness can be glossed as the volume,\nintensity, or quantity of sound. A jet plane makes louder sounds than\na model plane. Timbre is more difficult to describe. Timbre is a\nquality in which sounds that share pitch and loudness might differ.\nSo, a violin, a cello, and a piano all playing the same note differ in\ntimbre. Sometimes timbre is called “tone color”.","\nPhysics and psychoacoustics show that properties including frequency,\namplitude, and wave shape determine the audible qualities sounds\n(auditorily) appear to have. To simplify, take the case of pitch,\nsince pitch often is compared to color. Not all sounds appear to have\npitch. Some sounds appear to have pitch thanks to a simple,\nsinusoidal pattern of vibration at some frequency in an object\nor in the air. Some sounds appear pitched thanks to a complex pattern\nof vibration that can be decomposed into sinusoidal constituents at\nmultiple frequencies, since any pattern of vibration can be analyzed\nas some combination of simple sinusoids. Sounds appear pitched,\nhowever, just when they have sinusoidal constituents, or\npartials, that all are integer multiples of a common\nfundamental frequency. Sounds with pitch thus correspond to\nregular or periodic patterns of vibration that differ in\nfundamental frequency and complexity. Simple sinusoids and complex\nwaveforms match in pitch (though they typically differ in timbre) when\nthey share fundamental frequency. This is true even when the complex\ntone lacks a sinusoidal constituent at the fundamental frequency,\nwhich is referred to as the phenomenon of the missing\nfundamental.","\nA straightforward account identifies pitch with periodicity (perhaps\nwithin some range). Having pitch is being periodic (see\nO’Callaghan 2007, ch. 6). Periodicity can be expressed in terms\nof fundamental frequency, so individual pitches are fundamental\nfrequencies. This has advantages as an account of pitch. It captures\nthe linear ordering of pitches. It also explains the musical\nintervals, such as the octave, fifth, and fourth, for example, which\nare pitch relations that hold among periodic tones. Musical intervals\ncorrespond to whole-number ratios between fundamental frequencies.\nSounds that differ by an octave have fundamental frequencies that\nstand in 1:2 ratios. Fifths involve a 2:3 relationship, fourths are\n3:4, and so on. This also allows us to revise the linear pitch\nordering to accommodate the auditory sense in which tones that differ\nby an octave nonetheless are the same pitch. If the pitch ordering is\nrepresented as a helix, upon which successive octave-related tones\nfall at a common angular position, each full rotation represents\ndoubling frequency.","\nIs the periodicity theory of pitch plausible as an account of the\naudible features we perceive when hearing sounds? If so, then\nobjective physicalism about at least some sensible qualities might\nsucceed.","\nThe periodicity theory of pitch fares better on two counts than\ntheories that identify colors with objective physical properties.","\nFirst, consider the phenomenological distinction between unique\nand binary hues. Some colors appear to incorporate other\ncolors, and some do not. Purple, for instance, appears both reddish\nand bluish; red just looks red. Some philosophers contend that the\nleading physical theories of color cannot explain the unique-binary\ndistinction without essentially invoking the color experiences of\nsubjects. How, for instance, do reflectance classes identified with\nunique hues differ from those associated with binary hues?","\nConsider a related issue concerning pitch. Some tones with pitch sound\nsimple, while other pitched tones, such as sounds of musical\ninstruments, auditorily appear to be complex and to have\ndiscernible components. However, the difference between audibly simple\nand audibly complex pitched tones is captured by the simplicity\nor complexity of a sound’s partials. Simple tones are sinusoids,\nand complex tones have multiple overtones. So, one response is to hold\nthat the unique-binary color distinction and the simple-complex pitch\ndistinction are disanalogous. Unlike the case of color, one might\ncontend, no pitch that is essentially a mixture of other pitches\nsolely occupies a distinctive place in pitch space.","\nSecond, consider metamerism. Some surfaces with very different\nreflectance characteristics match in color. Metameric pairs share no\nobvious objective physical property. Some philosophers argue that\nunless color experience fails to distinguish distinct colors, metamers\npreclude identifying colors with natural physical properties of\nsurfaces (see the entry on\n color).","\nNow consider the case of pitch. Are there pitch metamers? Some sounds\nwith very different spectral frequency profiles match in pitch. A\nsimple sinusoidal tone at a given frequency matches the pitch of each\ncomplex tone with that fundamental frequency (even those that lack a\nconstituent at the fundamental). But, again, the case of pitch differs\nfrom the case of color. For each matching pitch, a single natural\nproperty does unify the class. The tones all share a fundamental\nfrequency.","\nTwo kinds of argument familiar from the case of color are equally\npressing when applied to the case of pitch.","\nFirst, arguments from intersubjective variation transpose.\nActual variations in frequency sensitivity exist among perceivers; for\ninstance, subjects differ in which frequency they identify as middle\nC. If there is no principled way to legislate whose experience is\nveridical, pitch might be subjective or perceiver-relative. One\nresponse is that, in contrast to the case of unique red, there is an\nobjective standard for middle C: fundamental frequency. But, whose\npitch experience has the normative significance to settle the\nfrequency of middle C?","\nSome might wonder whether there is a pitch analog of the trouble posed\nby the kind of variation associated with spectrum inversion in\nthe case of color (see the entry on\n inverted qualia).\n Spectral shift in pitch, sometimes dramatic, commonly occurs after\ncochlear implant surgery. This is not spectral inversion for pitch;\nbut, a dramatic shift makes most of the same trouble as inversion. Not\nquite all the trouble, since cochlear implants preserve the pitch\nordering and its direction. But, there could be a cochlear implant\nthat switched the placement of electrodes sensitive to 100 hertz and\n1000 hertz, respectively; and there could be one that reversed the\nentire electrode ordering. This goes some distance to grounding the\nconceivability of a pitch inversion that reverses the height ordering\nof tones.","\nSecond, consider an argument that frequencies cannot capture the\nrelational structure among the pitches. This is loosely\nanalogous to the argument that physicalism about color fails to\ncapture the relational structure of the hues—for instance, that\nred is more similar to orange than either is to green. In the case of\npitch, psychoacoustics experiments show that perceived pitch does not\nmap straightforwardly onto frequency. Though each unique pitch\ncorresponds to a unique frequency (or small frequency range), the\nrelations among apparent pitches do not match those among\nfrequencies. In particular, equivalent pitch intervals do not\ncorrespond to equal frequency intervals. For example, the effect upon\nperceived pitch of a 100 hertz change in frequency varies dramatically\nacross the frequency range. It is dramatic at low frequency and barely\ndetectable at high frequency. Similarly, doubling frequency does not\nmake for equivalent pitch intervals. A 1000 hertz tone must be tripled\nin frequency to produce the same increase in pitch as that produced by\nquadrupling the frequency of a 2000 hertz tone. Apparent pitch is a\ncomplex function of frequency; it is neither linear nor logarithmic\n(see, e.g., Hartmann 1997, ch 12, Gelfand 2004, ch 12, Zwicker and\nFastl 2006, ch 5). Pitch scales that capture the psychoacoustic data\nassign equal magnitudes, commonly measured in units called\nmels, to equal pitch intervals. The mel scale of pitch\nthus is an extensive or numerical pitch scale, in contrast to the\nintensive frequency scale for pitch. The former, but not the latter,\npreserves ratios among pitches.","\nS. S. Stevens famously argued on the basis of results drawn from\npsychoacoustic experiments that pitch is not frequency (see, e.g.,\nStevens et al. 1937, Stevens and Volkmann 1940). In light of similar\nresults, contemporary psychoacoustics researchers commonly reject the\nidentification of pitch with frequency or periodicity. The received\nscientific view thus holds that pitch is a subjective or psychological\nquality that is no more than correlated with objective frequency (see,\ne.g., Gelfand 2004, Houtsma 1995). Pitch, on this understanding,\nbelongs only to experiences. The received view of pitch therefore\nimplies an error theory according to which pitch experience involves a\nwidespread projective illusion.","\nWhat is the argument against the periodicity theory of pitch? Compare\nan argument against reflectance physicalism about color. Reflectance\nphysicalism identifies each hue with a class of reflectances.\nPeriodicity physicalism identifies each pitch with a fundamental\nfrequency. In both cases, each determinate sensible feature is\nidentified with a determinate physical property. In the color case, it\nis objected that reflectance classes do not bear the relations to each\nother that the colors bear. In the pitch case, the frequencies do not\nbear the relations to each other that the pitches bear. Thus, if the\nrelational features among a class of sensible qualities are essential\nto them, an account that does not accurately capture those relations\nfails. Frequencies, according to this line of argument, do not stand\nin the relations essential to pitch.","\nThis, of course, is a quite general phenomenon among sensible\nqualities. Brightness and loudness vary logarithmically with simple\nphysical quantities. Even if we identified candidate molecules for\nsmells, nothing suggests physical similarities would mirror their\nolfactory similarities.","\nIn the case of pitch and other sensible features that can be put in a\nlinear ordering, one might respond that the relational order is\nessential while the magnitudes are not. In that case, if pitch is\nfrequency, pitch experience has the right structure, but distorts\nmagnitudes of difference in pitch. This retains the periodicity theory\nand explains away the results in terms of pitch experiences.","\nNonetheless, Pautz (2014, 3.5) has replied that this partial error\naccount cannot be reconciled with certain types of possible\nintersubjective difference. So, suppose instead we accept that the mel\nscale is well-founded and that it accurately captures essential\nrelationships among pitches. This does not by itself imply a\nprojective or subjective theory of pitch. Pitches might be\ndispositions to produce certain kinds of experiences, or they might be\nsimple or primitive properties. It also is open to seek a more\nadequate physical candidate for pitch. For instance, pitches might be\nfar more complex physical properties than frequencies. Such physical\nproperties may be of no interest in developing the simplest, most\ncomplete natural physical theory, but they may be anthropocentrically\ninteresting.","\nIt is an important question whether a physical theory of sensible\nfeatures should just provide a physical candidate for each determinate\nsensible feature, or whether the physical relationships among those\nphysical candidates should capture the structural relations among\nsensible qualities (and, if so, which structural relations it should\ncapture). This is an example of how considering in detail the nature\nand the experience of sensible qualities other than color promises\ninsights into traditional debates concerning the sensible qualities.\nPautz (2014) offers an empirically-grounded argument concerning a\nvariety of sensible qualities, including audible qualities, that\nadvances such discussion."],"subsection_title":"3.2 Audible Qualities"}]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"4. Varieties of Auditory Perception","subsections":[{"content":["\nMusical listening is a topic that bears on questions about the\nrelationship between hearing sounds and hearing sources. While the\nphilosophy of music has its own vast literature (see the entry on\n the philosophy of music),\n musical experience has not been used as extensively to explore\ngeneral philosophical questions about auditory perception. This\nsection discusses links that are relevant to advancing philosophical\nwork on auditory perception.","\nAn account of listening to pure or non-vocal music should capture the\naesthetic significance of musical listening. Appreciating music\nis appreciating sounds and sequences, arrangements, or structures of\nsounds. Thus, the temporal aspects of auditory experiences are\ncritical to appreciatively listening to music.","\nOne might go further and hold that sounds are all that matters in\nmusic. In particular, some have argued that appreciatively listening\nto music demands listening in a way that abstracts from the\nenvironmental significance, and thus from the specific sources, of the\nsounds it includes (Scruton 1997, 2–3). Such acousmatic\nlistening involves experiencing sounds in a way that is\n“detached from the circumstances of their production,”\nrather than “as having a certain worldly cause” (Hamilton\n2007, 58; see also Hamilton 2009). Listening to music and being\nreceptive to its aesthetically relevant features requires not\nlistening to violins, horns, or brushes on snare drums. It requires\nhearing sounds and grasping them in a way removed from their common\nsources. Hearing a high fidelity recording thus furnishes an\naesthetically identical musical experience despite having a speaker\ncone rather than a violin as source. “The acousmatic experience\nof sound is precisely what is exploited by the art of music”\n(Scruton 1997, 3).","\nThis suggests an intuitive difference between music and visual arts\nsuch as painting and sculpture. As Kivy (1991) explains, it is\ndifficult even with the most abstract paintings and sculptures to see\nthem in a way that takes them to be entirely formal or abstract. That\nis, it is difficult to avoid seeing pictures and sculptures as\nrepresentational. In contrast, it seems easier to listen attentively\nto the formal acoustical features of musical sounds, without being\ncompelled to think of what makes them.","\nMusical listening thus may be thought to provide a prima facie\nargument against the claim that in hearing sounds one typically hears\nsound sources such as the strumming of guitars and bowing of violins.\nIf such “interested” audition were the rule, musical\nlistening would be far more challenging.","\nAcousmatic experience, however, may be a matter of attention.\nNothing prevents focusing one’s attention on the sounds and\naudible qualities without attending to the instruments, acts, and\nevents that are their sources, even if each is auditorily available.\nThat musical listening requires effort and training supports the idea\nthat one can direct attention differently in auditory experience,\ndepending on one’s interests. Caring for an infant and safely\ncrossing the street require attending to sound sources, while\nlistening with aesthetic appreciation to a symphony may require\nabstracting from the circumstances of its production, such as the\nfinger movements of the oboist. This response holds that musical\nlistening is a matter of auditorily attending in a certain way. It is\nattending to features of sounds themselves, but does not imply failing\nto hear sound sources.","\nThe acousmatic thesis is a limited view about which aspects of the\nthings one can auditory experience are aesthetically significant.\nThese include audible aspects of sounds themselves, but exclude, for\nexample, other contents of auditory experience. However, room exists\nfor debate over the aesthetically significant aspects of what you hear\n(see Hamilton 2007, 2009). For example, one might argue that live\nperformances have aesthetic advantages over recordings because one\nhears the performance of the sounds and songs, rather than\ntheir reproduction by loudspeakers (cf. Mag Uidhir 2007).\nCircumstances of sound production, such as that skillful gestures\ngenerate a certain passage, or that a particularly rare wood accounts\nfor a violin’s sounds, might be aesthetically relevant in a way\nthat outstrips the sounds, and some such features may be audible in\naddition to sounds. For instance, hearing the spatial characteristics\nof a performance may hold aesthetic significance beyond the tones and\nstructures admitted by traditional accounts of musical listening.\nComposers may even intend “spatial gestures” among aspects\nessential for the appreciation of a piece (see, e.g., Solomon 2007).\nTo imagine auditorily experiencing the spatial characteristics of\nmusic in a way entirely divorced from the environmental significance\nof the sounds is difficult. Appreciating the relationship between\nexperiences of sounds and of sources makes room for a view of the\naesthetic value of musical listening that is more liberal than\nacousmatic experience allows."],"subsection_title":"4.1 Musical Listening"},{"content":["\nSpeech perception presents uniquely difficult twists, and few\nphilosophers have confronted it directly (Appelbaum 1999, Trout 2001a,\nMatthen 2005, ch 9, and Remez and Trout 2009 are recent exceptions).\nSomething striking and qualitatively distinctive—perhaps\nuniquely human—seems to set the perception of speech apart from\nordinary hearing. The main philosophical issues about speech\nperception concern versions of the question, Is speech special? (See\nO’Callaghan 2015 for a comprehensive review and discussion.)","\nHow does perceiving speech differ from perceiving ordinary\nnon-linguistic sounds? Listening to music and listening to speech each\ndiffer from listening to other environmental sounds in the following\nrespect. In each case, one’s interest in listening is to some\ndegree distanced from the specific environmental happenings involved\nin the production of sounds.","\nBut this is true of listening to music and of listening to speech for\ndifferent reasons. In music, it is plausible that one’s interest\nis in the sounds themselves, rather than in the sources of their\nproduction. However, speech is a vehicle for conventional linguistic\nmeaning. In listening to speech, one’s main interest is in the\nmeanings, rather than in the sources of sound. Ultimately, the\ninformation conveyed is what matters.","\nNevertheless, according to the most common philosophical\nunderstanding, perceiving spoken utterances is just a matter of\nhearing sounds. The sounds of speech are complex audible sound\nstructures. Listening to speech in a language you know typically\ninvolves grasping meanings, but grasping meanings requires\nfirst hearing the sounds of speech. According to this account,\ngrasping meanings itself is a matter of extra-perceptual\ncognition.","\nThe commonplace view—that perceiving speech is a variety of\nordinary auditory perception that just involves hearing the sounds of\nspeech—has been challenged in a number of ways. The challenges\ndiffer in respect of how speech perception is held to differ from\nnon-linguistic audition.","\nFirst, consider the objects of speech perception. What are the\nobjects of speech perception, and do they differ from those of\nordinary or non-linguistic auditory perception? According to the\ncommonplace understanding, hearing speech involves hearing sounds.\nThus, hearing spoken language shares perceptual objects with ordinary\naudition. Alternatively, one might hold that the objects of speech\nperception are not ordinary sounds at all. Perhaps they are\nlanguage-specific entities, such as phonemes or words.\nPerhaps, as some have argued, perceiving speech involves perceiving\narticulatory gestures or movements of the mouth and vocal\norgans (see the supplement on\n Speech Perception: Empirical and Theoretical Considerations).\n Note that if audition’s objects typically include distal\nevents, speech in this respect is not special, since its objects do\nnot belong to an entirely different kind from ordinary sounds. ","\nSecond, consider the contents of speech perception. Does the\ncontent of speech perception differ from that of ordinary audition? If\nit does, how does the experience of perceiving speech differ from that\nof hearing ordinary sounds? Perceiving speech might involve hearing\nordinary sounds but auditorily ascribing distinctive features\nto them. These features might simply be, or comprise, finer grained\nqualitative and temporal acoustical details than non-linguistic sounds\naudibly possess. But perceiving speech also might involve perceiving\nsounds as belonging to language-specific types, such as\nphonemes, words, or other syntactic categories.","\nFurthermore, speech perception’s contents might differ in a more\ndramatic way from those of non-linguistic audition. Listening with\nunderstanding to speech involves grasping meanings. The\ncommonplace view is conservative. It holds that grasping meanings is\nan act of the understanding rather than of audition. Thus, the\ndifference between the experience of listening to speech in a language\nyou know and the experience of listening to speech in a language you\ndo not know is entirely cognitive.","\nBut one might think that there also is a perceptual difference.\nA liberal account of this perceptual difference holds that perceiving\nspeech in a language you know may involve hearing sounds as\nmeaningful or auditorily representing them as having semantic\nproperties (see, e.g., Siegel 2006, Bayne 2009, Azzouni 2013, Brogaard\n2018; cf. O’Callaghan 2011b, Reiland 2015). Alternatively, a\nmoderately liberal account holds that the perceptual experience of\nspeech in a language you know involves perceptually experiencing\nlanguage-specific but nevertheless non-semantic features. For\ninstance, O’Callaghan (2011b) argues that listening to speech in\na familiar language typical involves perceiving its phonological\nfeatures.","\nThird, consider the processes responsible for speech\nperception. To what extent does perceiving speech implicate processes\nthat are continuous with those of ordinary or general audition, and to\nwhat extent does perceiving speech involve separate, distinctive, or\nmodular processes? While some defend general auditory accounts\nof speech perception (see, e.g, Holt and Lotto 2008), some argue that\nperceiving speech involves dedicated perceptual resources, or even an\nencapsulated perceptual system distinct from ordinary non-linguistic\naudition (see, e.g., Fodor 1983, Pinker 1994, Liberman 1996, Trout\n2001b). These arguments typically are grounded in several types of\nphenomena, including the multimodality of speech\nperception—visual cues about the movements of the mouth and\ntongue impact the experience of speech, as demonstrated by the McGurk\neffect (see the section\n 4.3 Crossmodal Influences);\n duplex perception—a particular stimulus sometimes\ncontributes simultaneously both to the experience of an ordinary sound\nand to that of a speech sound (Rand 1974); and the top-down\ninfluence of linguistic knowledge upon the experience of speech. A\nreasonable challenge is that each of these\ncharacteristics—multimodality, duplex perception, and top-down\ninfluence—also is displayed in general audition. ","\nSee the supplement on\n Speech Perception: Empirical and Theoretical Considerations.\n "],"subsection_title":"4.2 Speech Perception"},{"content":["\nAuditory perception of speech is influenced by cues from vision and\ntouch (see Gick et al. 2008). The McGurk effect in speech perception\nleads to an illusory auditory experience caused by a visual stimulus\n(McGurk and Macdonald 1976). Do such multimodal effects occur in\nordinary audition? Visual and tactile cues commonly do shape auditory\nexperience. The ventriloquist illusion is an illusory auditory\nexperience of location that is produced by an apparent visible sound\nsource (see, e.g., Bertelson 1999). Audition even impacts experience\nin other modalities. The sound-induced flash effect involves a visual\nillusion as of seeing two consecutive flashes that is produced when a\nsingle flash is accompanied by two consecutive beeps (Shams et al.\n2000, 2002). Such crossmodal illusions demonstrate that auditory\nexperience is impacted by other modalities and that audition\ninfluences other modalities. In general, experiences associated with\none perceptual modality are influenced by stimulation to other sensory\nsystems.","\nAn important question is whether the impact is merely causal, or\nwhether perception in one modality is somehow constitutively tied to\nother modalities. If, for instance, vision merely causally impacts\nyour auditory experience of a given sound, then processes associated\nwith audition might be proprietary and characterizable in terms that\ndo not appeal to other modalities. Relying on information from vision\nor touch could simply improve the existing capacity to perceive space,\ntime, or spoken language auditorily. On the other hand, coordination\nbetween audition and other senses could enable a new perceptual\ncapacity. In that case, audition might rely constitutively on another\nsense.","\nA first step in resolving this question is recognizing that crossmodal\nillusions are not mere accidents. Instead, they are intelligible as\nthe results of adaptive perceptual strategies. In ordinary\ncircumstances, crossmodal processes serve to reduce or resolve\napparent conflicts in information drawn from several senses. In doing\nso, they tend to make perception more reliable overall. Thus,\ncrossmodal illusions differ from synaesthesia. Synaesthesia is\njust a kind of accident. It results from mere quirks of processing,\nand it always involves illusion (or else is accidentally veridical).\nCrossmodal recalibrations, in contrast, are best understood as\nattempts “to maintain a perceptual experience consonant with a\nunitary event” (Welch and Warren 1980, 638).","\nIn the first place, the principled reconciliation of information drawn\nfrom different sensory sources suggests that audition is governed by\nextra-auditory perceptual constraints. Moreover, since conflict\nrequires a common subject matter, such constraints must concern common\nsources of stimulation to multiple senses. If so, audition and vision\nshare a perceptual concern for a common subject matter. And that\nconcern is reflected in the organization of auditory experience. But\nthis by itself does not establish constitutive dependence of audition\non another sense.","\nHowever, the perceptual concern for a common subject matter could be\nreflected as such in certain forms of auditory experience. For\ninstance, the commonality may be experientially evident in jointly\nperceiving shared spatio-temporal features, or in the perceptual\nexperience of audio-visual intermodal feature binding. If so, some\nforms of auditory perceptual experience may share with vision a common\nmultimodal or amodal content or character (see O’Callaghan\n2008b, Clark 2011). More to the point, if coordination with another\nsense enables a new auditory capacity, then vision or touch could have\na constitutive rather than merely causal impact upon corresponding\nauditory experiences.","\nWhat hangs on this? First, it bears on questions about\naudition’s content. If we cannot exhaustively characterize\nauditory experience in terms that are modality-specific or distinctive\nto audition, then we might hear as of things we can see or\nexperience with other senses. This is related to one puzzling question\nabout hearing sound sources: How could you hear as of something you\ncould see? Rather than just a claim about audition’s content\nthat requires further explanation, we now have a story about why\nthings like sound sources figure in the content of auditory\nexperience. Second, all of this may bear on how to delineate what\ncounts as auditory perception, as opposed to visual or even amodal\nperception. If hearing is systematically impacted by visual processes,\nand if it shares content and phenomenology with other sense\nexperiences, what are the boundaries of auditory perception?\nMultimodal perception may bear on the question of whether there are\nclear and significant distinctions among the sense modalities (cf.\nNudds 2003). Finally, multimodal perceptual experiences, illusions,\nand explanatory strategies may illuminate the phenomenological\nunity of experiences in different modalities, or the sense in\nwhich, for instance, an auditory experience and a visual experience of\nsome happening comprise a single encompassing experience (see the\nentry on\n the unity of consciousness).\n ","\nWe can ask questions about the relationships among modalities in\ndifferent areas of explanatory concern. Worthwhile areas for attention\ninclude the objects, contents, and phenomenology of perception, as\nwell as perceptual processes and their architecture. Crossmodal and\nmultimodal considerations might shed doubt on whether vision-based\ntheorizing alone can deliver a complete understanding of perception\nand its contents. This approach constitutes an important\nmethodological advance in the philosophical study of perception (for\nfurther discussion, see O’Callaghan 2012, 2019, Matthen 2015,\nStokes et al. 2015)."],"subsection_title":"4.3 Crossmodal Influences"}]},{"main_content":["\nConsidering modalities other than vision enhances our understanding of\nperception. It is necessary to developing and vetting an adequate\ncomprehensive and general account of perception and its roles.\nAuditory perception is a rich territory for philosophical exploration\nin its own right, but it also provides a useful contrast case in which\nto evaluate claims about perception proposed in the context of vision.\nOne of the most promising directions for future work concerns the\nnature of the relationships among perceptual modalities, how these\nrelationships shape experience across modalities, and how they may\nprove essential to understanding perception itself. Philosophical work\non auditory perception thus is part of the advance beyond considering\nmodalities in isolation from each other."],"section_title":"5. Conclusion and Future Directions","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe philosophy of sounds and auditory perception is one area of the\\nphilosophy of perception that reaches beyond vision for insights about\\nthe nature, objects, contents, and varieties of perception. This entry\\ncharacterizes central issues in the philosophy of auditory perception,\\nmany of which bear upon theorizing about perception more generally,\\nand it mentions outstanding questions and promising future areas for\\ninquiry in this developing literature. Before beginning the\\nsubstantive discussion of audition itself, it is worthwhile to discuss\\nthe motivation and rationale for this kind of work.\",\n \"\\nPhilosophical thinking about perception has focused predominantly on\\nvision. The philosophical puzzle of perception and its proposed\\nsolutions have been shaped by a concern for visual experience and\\nvisual illusions. Questions and proposals about the nature of\\nperceptual content have been framed and evaluated in visual terms, and\\ndetailed accounts of what we perceive frequently address just the\\nvisual case. Vision informs our understanding of perception’s\\nepistemological role and of its role in guiding action. It is not a\\ngreat exaggeration to say that much of the philosophy of perception\\ntranslates roughly as philosophy of visual perception.\",\n \"\\nRecently, however, other perceptual modalities have attracted\\nattention (see, e.g., Stokes et al. 2015, Matthen 2015). In addition\\nto auditory perception and the experience of sound, touch and tactile\\nawareness have generated philosophical interest concerning, for\\ninstance, the tactile and proprioceptive experience of space, the\\nobjects of touch, whether contact is required for touch, and whether\\ndistinct modalities detect pressure, heat, and pain (see, e.g.,\\nO’Shaughnessy 1989, Martin 1993, Scott 2001, Fulkerson 2013,\\n2016). The unique phenomenology of olfaction and smells has been used\\nto argue that vision is atypical in supporting the transparency of\\nperceptual experience (Lycan 2000, 282; cf. Batty 2010) and that\\nperceptual objectivity does not require spatiality (Smith 2002, ch 5).\\nLycan (2000) even suggests that the philosophy of perception would\\nhave taken a different course had it focused upon olfaction instead of\\nvision (see also Batty 2011). Some authors have appealed to taste and\\nflavor to challenge traditional ways of dividing and counting senses\\n(Smith 2015; cf. Richardson 2013).\",\n \"\\nThis kind of work is philosophically interesting in its own right. But\\nit is also worthwhile because theorizing about perception commonly\\naims to address general questions about perception, rather than\\nconcerns specific to vision. Hope for a comprehensive and general\\nunderstanding of perception rests upon extending and testing claims,\\narguments, and theories beyond vision. One might view work on\\nnon-visual modalities as filling out the particulars required for a\\nthoroughly detailed account of perceiving that applies not just to\\nvision but across the modalities. At least three approaches might be\\nadopted, with potential for increasingly revisionist outcomes.\",\n \"\\nFirst, one might take work on non-visual modalities as\\ntranslating what we have learned from the visual case into\\nterms that apply to other modalities. This approach is relatively\\nconservative. It assumes that vision is representative or paradigmatic\\nand that we have a good understanding of perception that is derived\\nfrom the case of vision. One example of this kind of approach would be\\nto develop an account of the representational content of auditory\\nexperience.\",\n \"\\nSecond, considering other modalities might extend our\\nvision-based understanding of perception. Non-visual cases might draw\\nattention to new kinds of phenomena that are missing from or not\\nsalient in vision. If so, a vision-based account of perception is\\nsatisfactory as far as it goes, but it leaves out critical pieces. For\\nexample, speech perception, multimodal perception, and flavor\\nperception might involve novel kinds of perceptual phenomena absent\\nfrom the visual case.\",\n \"\\nThird, considering other modalities might challenge\\nvision-based claims about perception. If falsifying evidence is\\ndiscovered in non-visual cases, then theorizing beyond vision may\\nforce revision of general claims about perception that are supported\\nby vision. For example, if olfactory experience is not diaphanous, but\\nolfactory experience is perceptual, the transparency thesis for\\nperceptual experience fails.\",\n \"\\nFinally, we might attempt to determine whether any unified\\naccount exists that applies generally to all of the perceptual\\nmodalities. We can ask this question either at the level of quite\\nspecific claims, such as those concerning the objects of perception or\\nthe nature and structure of content. We can ask it about the\\nrelationships among perceiving, believing, and acting. Or we can ask\\nit about the general theory of necessary and sufficient conditions for\\nperceiving. Some philosophers, impressed by findings concerning\\nnon-visual modalities, express skepticism whether a unified theory\\nexists (e.g., Martin 1992).\",\n \"\\nWhatever the approach, extending our knowledge about perception beyond\\nthe visual requires systematic attention to individual modalities as\\nwell as careful accounting in order to determine how the results bear\\non general questions about perception. Whatever the outcome, audition\\nis a rich subject matter in its own right, and investigating this\\nsubject matter is crucial to our overall understanding of\\nperception.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Other Modalities and the Philosophy of Perception\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nWhat do we hear? One way to address this question concerns the\\nobjects of auditory perception.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. The Objects of Auditory Perception\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIn the first instance, typical human perceivers hear sounds. It\\nis plausible that sounds are objects of auditory perception.\",\n \"\\nWhat are sounds? Sounds traditionally have been counted with colors,\\nsmells, and tastes as secondary, sensible, or\\nsensory qualities (see, e.g., Locke 1689/1975, Pasnau\\n1999, 2000, Leddington 2019). However, recently it has been proposed\\nthat sounds are individuals to which sensible features are\\nattributed. In particular, several philosophers have proposed that\\nsounds are public, distally-located, event-like individuals (Casati\\nand Dokic 1994, 2005, O’Callaghan 2007, Matthen 2010).\",\n \"\\nFour questions about audition’s objects define the debate and\\nconstrain theories of sound (see also the entry on\\n sounds,\\n for extensive discussion).\",\n \"\\nAre sounds private or public? Maclachlan (1989) argues that the sounds\\nwe hear are sensations (rather than, for instance, the pressure\\nwaves that cause auditory experiences). Such sensations are internal\\nand private, and we experience them directly, or without apparent\\nmediation. On Maclachlan’s account, we hear the ordinary things\\nand happenings that are the sources of sounds only\\nindirectly, by means of inference from auditory data.\",\n \"\\nMaclachlan’s story is noteworthy partly because he uses hearing\\nand sounds to motivate a general claim about perception. He claims\\nthat what seems perfectly intuitive and obvious in the case of sounds\\nand hearing—that something other than material objects are the\\ndirect objects of hearing; that the direct objects of audition are\\ninternal; and that we indirectly hear things in the world by hearing\\ntheir sounds—helps us to discover what is true of all\\nperception. According to Maclachlan, for instance, seeing involves\\ndirect awareness of sensations of patterns of light, while surfaces\\nand ordinary objects figure only indirectly and thanks to inference\\namong the intentional objects of sight. The case of sounds and\\naudition is important because it reveals that perceiving involves\\nawareness of sensations in the first instance, and of the external\\nworld only indirectly.\",\n \"\\nMaclachlan’s description of sounds and auditory experience has\\nsome attractions. First, sounds are among the things we hear. And\\nsounds are among the direct or immediate objects of audition in the\\nrelatively innocuous sense that hearing a sound does not seem to\\nrequire hearing as of something else. Hearing a collision, on the\\nother hand, may seem to require awareness as of a sound. Furthermore,\\nsounds are unlike the ordinary material objects (e.g., bottles and\\nstaplers) we see. You cannot reach out and grab a sound, or determine\\nits temperature. Instead, sounds may strike us as byproducts or\\neffects of such ordinary things and their transactions. Sounds result\\nfrom activities or interactions of material bodies and thus are\\nexperienced as distinct or independent from them (cf. Nudds 2001).\\nNevertheless, audition does afford some variety of awareness of the\\nsources of sounds, or at least provides information about them.\",\n \"\\nHowever, the claim that sounds are sensations is unattractive. Good\\nreasons suggest that sounds are public rather than private, even if\\nsounds are not identical with ordinary objects and events such as\\nclothespins and collisions. Suppose I am near the stage in a hall\\nlistening to some music, and that I have a headache. It is a confusion\\nto think you could feel my headache, but I assume you hear the sounds\\nI hear. Suppose I move to the back of the hall, and the headache then\\ngets better. My experience of the sounds of the music differs once I\\nam at the back of the room, and my experience of the headache differs.\\nThe sound of the music itself need not differ (the musicians could\\nmake the same sounds), but the headache itself changes. The sounds can\\ncontinue once I leave the room, but if I stop experiencing the\\nheadache, it is gone. Moreover, the notion of an unfelt headache is\\npuzzling, but it makes good sense to say that a tree makes a sound\\nwhen it falls in the woods without being heard. Finally, tinnitus, or\\nringing of the ears, is an illusory or hallucinatory experience as of\\na sound, but received wisdom maintains that there are no illusory\\nheadaches.\",\n \"\\nThis suggests that audition does not provide special reasons to\\nbelieve that the objects of perception are private sensations. Sounds,\\nconstrued as objects of auditory perception, plausibly inhabit the\\npublic world. (See the section\\n 3.1 Spatial Hearing\\n for further discussion.)\",\n \"\\nAre sounds proximal or distal? The customary science-based view holds\\nthat sounds are pressure waves that travel through a medium (see also\\nSorensen 2008). On this account, sounds are caused by objects and\\nevents such as collisions, and sounds cause auditory experiences.\\nHowever, sounds are not auditorily experienced to travel through the\\nsurrounding medium as waves do. Thus, if sounds are waves, then the\\nsounds we hear may be proximal, located at the ear of the hearer.\",\n \"\\nAlternatively, some have argued that audition presents sounds as being\\nlocated in some direction at a distance (Pasnau 1999,\\nO’Callaghan 2007, ch. 3, 2010). On such an account, sounds\\ncommonly appear auditorily to be in the neighborhood of their sources\\nand thereby furnish useful information about the locations of those\\nsources. The sound of the drumming across the street seems to come\\nfrom across the street but does not seem audibly to travel. When\\nsounds do appear to fill a room, sound seems located all around.\\nSounds that seem to “bounce” around a room appear\\nintermittently at different locations rather than as traveling\\ncontinuously from place to place. Experiencing a missile-like sound\\nspeeding towards your ears illustrates the contrast with ordinary\\nhearing (O’Callaghan 2007, 35). Sounds, according to this\\nconception, ordinarily appear to have distal locations and to remain\\nstationary relative to their sources.\",\n \"\\nIf sounds are not usually experienced to travel, then unless auditory\\nexperience is illusory with respect to the apparent locations of\\nsounds, sounds themselves do not travel. Sounds thus are not identical\\nwith and do not supervene locally upon the waves, since waves travel\\n(Pasnau 1999). Several philosophers have argued on these and related\\ngrounds that sounds are located distally, near their sources (Pasnau\\n1999, Casati and Dokic 2005, O’Callaghan 2007). On this view,\\npressure waves bear information about sounds and are the proximal\\ncauses of auditory experiences, but are not identical with sounds.\",\n \"\\nOne might object by resisting the phenomenological claim that we\\nexperience sounds as distally located, for instance by suggesting that\\naudition is aspatial, or that audition is spatial but sound\\nsources rather than sounds are auditorily localized (see\\nsection\\n 3.1 Spatial Hearing\\n for further discussion). Or, one might accept some measure of\\nillusion. Another possibility is that we experience only a small\\nsubset of the locations sounds occupy during their lifetimes (for\\ninstance, while at their sources), and simply fail to experience where\\nthey are at other times. This avoids ascribing illusion. Finally,\\nFowler (2013) argues indirectly on the basis of echoes against distal\\ntheories of sound.\",\n \"\\nAre sounds properties or individuals? Among both proximal and distal\\ntheories, disagreement exists concerning the ontological category to\\nwhich sounds belong. Philosophers traditionally have understood sounds\\nas properties—either as sensible or secondary qualities, or as\\nthe categorical or physical properties that ground powers to affect\\nsubjects. Commonly, sounds are attributed to the medium that\\nintervenes between sources and perceivers. More recently, however,\\nsome distal theorists have argued that sounds are properties of what\\nwe ordinarily understand as sound sources—bells and whistles\\nhave or possess rather than make or\\nproduce sounds. Pasnau (1999), for instance, claims that sounds\\nare transient properties that are identical with or supervene upon\\nvibrations of objects. Kulvicki (2008) argues against transience in an\\nattempt to subsume sounds to the model of colors, and claims that\\nsounds are persistent, stable dispositional properties of objects to\\nvibrate in response to being “thwacked”. He distinguishes\\n“having” a stable sound from “making” a sound\\non some occasion (manifesting the stable disposition). This account\\nimplies that sounds sometimes make sounds they do not have, and that\\nthey have sounds when silent. One also might ask whether events such\\nas collisions and strummings, rather than objects, bear sounds.\\nLeddington (2019) recently has defended such an account.\",\n \"\\nA revisionist challenge comes from those who argue that sounds are\\nindividuals rather than properties. Several arguments support\\nthis understanding. First, empirical work on auditory scene\\nanalysis suggests that one primary task of audition is to carve up\\nthe acoustic scene into distinct sounds, each of which may possess its\\nown pitch, timbre, and loudness (Bregman 1990). Multiple distinct\\nsounds with different audible attributes can be heard simultaneously.\\nAn analog of Jackson’s (1977, see also Clark 2000) many\\nproperties problem thus arises for audition since feature\\nawareness alone cannot explain the bundling or grouping of audible\\nattributes into distinct sounds. Such bundling or grouping of audible\\nfeatures suggests that sounds are perceptible individuals to which\\nthese features are attributed.\",\n \"\\nFurthermore, the temporal characteristics of experienced sounds\\nsuggest that sounds are not simple qualities. Sounds audibly seem to\\npersist through time and to survive change. A particular sound, such\\nas that of an emergency siren, might begin high-pitched and loud and\\nend low-pitched and soft. This suggests that sounds are individuals\\nthat bear different features at different times, rather than sensible\\nqualities.\",\n \"\\nSeveral responses to these arguments are available (see Cohen 2009 for\\nthe most developed reply). One might argue that sounds are complex\\nproperties, such as pitch-timbre-loudness complexes, instantiated at a\\ntime. To account for feature binding, one might hold that such complex\\nproperties are ascribed to ordinary objects such as bells and\\nwhistles. Or, one might hold that they are particularized properties,\\nsuch as tropes. To accommodate sounds that survive change through\\ntime, a property account could hold that sounds are yet more complex\\nproperties that have patterns of change built into their identity\\nconditions. However, any such view differs a great deal from the\\nfamiliar secondary or sensible quality view pioneered by Locke. Pitch,\\ntimbre, and loudness are better candidates for simple sensible\\nfeatures in audition (see section\\n 3.2 Audible Qualities).\\n \",\n \"\\nIf sounds are individuals, are they object-like or event-like\\nindividuals? Intuitively, the material objects we see are capable of\\nexisting wholly at any given moment, and all that is required to\\nperceptually recognize such individuals is present at a moment. On the\\nother hand, event-like individuals occupy time and need not exist\\nwholly at any given moment. Their individuation and recognition\\nfrequently appeal to patterns of features over time. Event-like\\nindividuals intuitively comprise temporal parts, while object-like\\nindividuals intuitively do not. The issue here is not the truth of\\nendurantism or perdurantism as an account of the persistence of\\nobjects or events. Instead, the issue concerns a difference in how we\\nperceptually individuate, experience, and recognize individuals.\",\n \"\\nNo contemporary philosopher has yet claimed that sounds are objects\\nin the ordinary sense. Those who argue that sounds are\\nindividuals commonly point out that sounds not only persist and\\nsurvive change (as do ordinary material objects), but also\\nrequire time to occur or unfold. It is difficult to imagine an\\ninstantaneous sound, or one that lacks duration. Sounds are not\\ncommonly treated as existing wholly at a given moment during their\\nduration. Indeed, the identities of many common sounds are tied to\\npatterns of change in qualities through time. The sound of an\\nambulance siren differs from that of a police siren precisely because\\nthe two differ in patterns of qualitative change through time. The\\nsound of the spoken word ‘team’ differs from that of\\n‘meat’ because each instantiates a common set of audible\\nqualities in a different temporal pattern. These considerations\\nsupport the view that sounds are event-like individuals (see Casati\\nand Dokic 1994, 2005, Scruton 1997, O’Callaghan 2007, Matthen\\n2010).\",\n \"\\nThis may bear on debates about persistence in the following way.\\nDifferences in the intuitive plausibility of endurantism and\\nperdurantism may be grounded in facts about perception. In particular,\\nvision may treat objects as persisting by enduring or being wholly\\npresent at each time at which they exist, while audition may treat its\\nobjects as persisting by perduring or having temporal parts. This may\\nstem from differences in perceptual organization. For instance,\\nexhibiting a visible property profile at a time may suffice for being\\na visual object of a given sort, while being an audible object of a\\ngiven sort may require exhibiting an audible property profile over\\ntime.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.1 Sounds\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThough most philosophers construe sounds either as properties or as\\nevent-like individuals (see section\\n 2.1 Sounds),\\n psychologists commonly have discussed auditory objects (see,\\ne.g., Kubovy and Van Valkenburg 2001, Griffiths and Warren 2004, Heald\\net al. 2017). The target of such discussion is not simply\\naudition’s intentional objects or proper (specific\\nto audition) objects. The intended analogy is with visual\\nobjects. Talk of auditory objects gestures at the visual processes\\ninvolved in perceptually discriminating, attentively tracking,\\nrecognizing and categorizing ordinary material objects. What justifies\\ntalk of object perception in audition?\",\n \"\\nFirst of all, humans typically do not auditorily perceive\\nthree-dimensional, bounded material objects as such, though it\\nis plausible to think we visually perceive them. Hearing does not\\nresolve the edges, boundaries, and filled volumes in space that I see,\\nand I do not hear audible items to complete spatially behind occluders\\nas do visible surfaces of objects. If perceiving a three-dimensional\\nobject requires awareness of its edges, boundaries, and extension,\\nperhaps in order to discriminate it from its surroundings, humans\\ntypically do not auditorily perceive such objects.\",\n \"\\nNevertheless, striking and illuminating parallels do exist between the\\nperceptual processes and experiences that take place in vision and\\naudition. Such parallels may warrant talk of object perception in a\\nmore general sense that is common to both vision and audition\\n(O’Callaghan 2008a).\",\n \"\\nPerceiving objects requires parsing a perceptual scene into distinct\\nunits that one can attend to and distinguish from each other\\nand from a background. In vision, bounded, cohesive collections of\\nsurfaces that are extended in space and that persist through time play\\nthis role (see, e.g., Spelke 1990, Nakayama et al. 1995, Leslie et al.\\n1998, Scholl 2001, Matthen 2005). In audition, as in vision, multiple\\ndistinct perceptible individuals might exist simultaneously, and each\\nmight persist and survive change (see the discussion of auditory scene\\nanalysis in section\\n 2.1 Sounds).\\n A critical difference, however, is that while vision’s objects\\nare extended in space, and are individuated and recognized primarily\\nin virtue of spatial characteristics, audible individuals are extended\\nin time, and are perceptually individuated and recognized primarily in\\nvirtue of pitch and temporal characteristics (see, e.g., Bregman 1990,\\nKubovy and Van Valkenburg 2001). For instance, audible individuals\\nhave temporal edges and boundaries, and boundary elements can belong\\nonly to a single audible individual. They also are susceptible to\\nfigure-ground effects over time. One can, for instance, shift\\nattention among continuous audible individuals that differ in pitch.\\nFurthermore, they are susceptible to completion effects over time in\\nmuch the same way that visible objects are perceptually completed in\\nspace. Seeing a single visible region to continue behind a barrier is\\nanalogous to hearing a sound stream to continue through masking noise,\\nwhich may take place even when there is no corresponding signal\\n(Bregman 1990, 28). Finally, multiple distinct, discrete audible\\nindividuals, such as the temporally bounded notes in a tune, can form\\naudible streams that comprise a single perceptible unit. Such\\nstreams are subject to figure-ground shifts, and, like collections of\\nsurfaces, they can be attentively tracked through changes to their\\nfeatures and to one’s perspective. Though such complex audible\\nindividuals include sounds, they comprise temporally unified\\ncollections of sounds and silence that are analogous to spatially\\ncomplex visible objects, such as tractors.\",\n \"\\nSuch audible individuals are temporally extended and bounded, serve as\\nthe locus for auditory attention, prompt completion effects, and are\\nsubject to figure-ground distinctions in pitch space. For these\\nreasons, the auditory processes involved in their perception parallel\\nthose involved in the visual perception of ordinary three-dimensional\\nobjects. The parallels suggest a shared sense in which vision and\\naudition involve a more general form of object perception (see, e.g.,\\nKubovy and Van Valkenburg 2001, Scholl 2001, Griffiths and Warren\\n2004, O’Callaghan 2008a, Matthen 2010).\",\n \"\\nWhat is the shared sense in which both visible and audible individuals\\ndeserve to be called ‘objects’? Kubovy and Van Valkenburg\\n(2001, 2003) define objecthood in terms of figure-ground segregation,\\nwhich requires perceptual grouping. They propose the theory of\\nindispensable attributes as an account of the necessary conditions\\non perceptual grouping (see also Kubovy 1981). Indispensable\\nattributes for a modality are those without which perceptual\\nnumerosity is impossible. They claim that while space and time are\\nindispensable attributes for vision (and color is not), pitch and time\\nare indispensable attributes for auditory objects. Though they are\\nmore skeptical about whether audition parallels vision, Griffiths and\\nWarren (2004) sympathize with a figure-ground characterization but\\nsuggest a working notion of an auditory object defined in terms of\\n“an acoustic experience that produces a two-dimensional image\\nwith frequency and time dimensions” (Griffiths and Warren 2004,\\n891).\",\n \"\\nO’Callaghan (2008a) proposes that both visible and audible\\nobjects are mereologically complex individuals, though their mereology\\ndiffers in noteworthy respects. While vision’s objects possess a\\nspatial mereology and are individuated and tracked in terms of spatial\\nfeatures, audition’s objects have a temporal mereology and are\\nindividuated and tracked in terms of both pitch and temporal\\ncharacteristics. Discussion of auditory objects thus draws attention\\nto two roles that space plays in vision. First, there is the role of\\nspace in determining the structure internal to visible objects, which\\nfacilitates identifying and recognizing visible objects. Second, space\\nserves as the external structure among visible objects, and is\\ncritical in distinguishing objects from each other. In audition, time\\nplays a role similar to space in vision in determining the structure\\ninternal to auditory objects. Pitch, on the other hand, serves as an\\nexternal structural framework, along with space, that helps to\\ndistinguish among audible individuals.\",\n \"\\nWhy is it useful to perceive such individuals in audition? One\\npromising account is that they provide useful information about the\\nhappenings that produce sounds. Carving the acoustic world into\\nmereologically complex individuals informs us about what is going on\\nin the extra-acoustic environment. It provides ecologically\\nsignificant information about what the furniture is doing, rather than\\njust how it is arranged. It is one thing to perceive a tree; it is\\nanother to hear that it is falling behind you.\",\n \"\\nDiscussion of auditory objects and accounts of their nature and\\nperception is relatively new among philosophers (see, e.g.,\\nO’Callaghan 2008a, and essays in Bullot and Egré 2010,\\nincluding Matthen 2010, Nudds 2010). Such work has led to the\\ndevelopment of general accounts of perceptual objects designed to\\navoid visuocentrism (see, e.g., O’Callaghan 2016, Green 2019).\\nThis area is ripe for philosophical contributions.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.2 Auditory Objects\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nSounds are among the objects of audition. Plausibly, so are complex,\\ntemporally extended individuals composed of sounds. Do we hear\\nanything else? Reflection suggests we hear things beyond sounds\\nand sound complexes. In hearing sounds, one may seem to experience the\\nbackfiring of the car or the banging of the drum. One might hold that\\na primary part of audition’s function is to reveal sound\\nsources, the things and happenings that make sounds.\",\n \"\\nIf sounds were internal sensations or sense-data, then, as Maclachlan\\n(1989) observes, we would hear sound sources only indirectly, in an\\nepistemological sense, perhaps thanks to something akin to inference.\\nAcquiring beliefs about the environment would require mediation by\\npropositions connecting experienced internal sounds with environmental\\ncauses.\",\n \"\\nIf, however, sounds are properties attributed either to ordinary\\nobjects, as Pasnau (1999) and Kulvicki (2008) hold, or to events, as\\nLeddington (2019) holds, then hearing a tuba or the playing of a tuba\\nmight only require hearing its sounds. Perceptually ascribing such\\naudible attributes to their sources might ground epistemically\\nunmediated awareness of tubas or their playings.\",\n \"\\nHowever, the individuals to which audible attributes are perceptually\\nattributed need not be identical with ordinary objects or events.\\nInstead, audible attributes may belong in the first instance to\\nsounds. Sounds plausibly are distinct from ordinary or extra-acoustic\\nindividuals (O’Callaghan 2007, 2011). Suppose then that one\\ncould not hear an ordinary object or event without there existing an\\naudible sound, as well as that sounds can mislead about their sources\\n(it might sound like drumming but be hammering).\",\n \"\\nGiven this, forming beliefs about ordinary things and happenings\\nconnected with sounds might seem to require inference, association, or\\nsome otherwise cognitive process, and so awareness of a sound source\\nmight appear to always involve more than perceptual awareness.\\nAccording to such an account, awareness of environmental things and\\nhappenings thanks to audition is epistemically mediated by awareness\\nas of sounds and auditory objects, but does not itself constitute\\nauditory perceptual awareness as of those things and happenings. You\\nare inclined to think you hear the source because your representing or\\nbeing aware of it co-occurs with, but is no more than a downstream\\nconsequence triggered by, your auditory experience.\",\n \"\\nSuch an account is not wholly satisfactory. First, the phenomenology\\nof audition suggests something stronger than indirect, epistemically\\nmediated awareness of things such as collisions or guitar strummings\\nor lions roaring. Reflection suggests auditory awareness as of\\ncollisions, strummings, and lions. Second, the capacity to refer\\ndemonstratively to such things and events on auditory grounds also\\nsuggests genuine perceptual awareness of them. Third, we commonly\\nperceptually individuate sounds in terms of their apparent sources,\\nand our taxonomy reflects this. “What did you hear?”\\n“I heard paper ripping,” or, “The sound of a\\ndripping faucet.” We distinguish two quite similar rattles once\\nwe hear one as of a muffler clamp and the other as of a loose fender.\\nFurthermore, characterizing certain audible features and explaining\\nperceptual constancy effects involving such features requires appeal\\nto sound sources. Handel says of timbre: “At this point, no\\nknown acoustic invariants can be said to underlie timbre... The cues\\nthat determine timbre quality are interdependent because all are\\ndetermined by the method of sound production and the physical\\nconstruction of the instrument” (Handel 1995, 441). Explaining\\nloudness constancy—why moving to the back of the room does not\\nchange how loudly the lecturer seems to speak—appeals to facts\\nabout the sources of sounds (Zahorik and Wightman 2001). Auditory\\nprocessing proceeds in accordance with natural constraints concerning\\ncharacteristics of sound sources, and information concerning sources\\nshapes how auditory experiences are organized. This is to say that\\nprocesses responsible for auditory experience proceed as if acoustic\\ninformation is information about sound sources. Finally,\\naudition-guided action supports the claim that we hear such things and\\nevents. Turning to look toward the source of a sound or ducking out of\\nthe way of something we hear to be approaching—behaviors guided\\nby auditory experience—would make little sense if we heard only\\nsounds. In the first place, these reasons ground a case for thinking\\nthat auditory perceptual experience does not strictly end with sounds\\nand auditory objects. In particular, awareness as of a source, even if\\ndependent upon awareness as of a sound, may be constitutive of\\none’s auditory perceptual experience.\",\n \"\\nThe main barrier to an alternative is that the relation between sounds\\nand ordinary things or happenings is commonly understood as\\ncausal (see, e.g., Nudds 2001). Awareness as of an effect does\\nnot itself typically furnish epistemically unmediated awareness of its\\ncause. Seeing smoke is not seeing fire. The right sort of dependence\\nbetween characteristics of the experience and the cause is not\\napparent, and awareness as of an effect does not by itself ground\\nperceptual demonstratives that concern the cause. The metaphysical\\nindirectness of the causal relation appears to block epistemic\\ndirectness (see O’Callaghan 2011a for further discussion).\",\n \"\\nIs there another explanatory route? Suppose that instead of a causal\\nrelation, we understand the relationship between sounds and sources\\nmereologically, or as one of part to whole (see\\nO’Callaghan 2011a). Parthood frequently does ground perceptual\\nawareness. For instance, seeing distinct parts of a surface\\ninterrupted by an occluder leads to perceptual experience as of a\\nsingle surface (imagine seeing a dog behind a picket fence). Seeing\\nthe facing surfaces of a cube affords awareness as of a cube, and we\\ncan attentively track that same cube as it rotates and reveals\\ndifferent surfaces. Suppose, then, that a sound is an event-like\\nindividual (recall, property accounts escape the worry). This event is\\npart of a more encompassing event, such as a collision or the playing\\nof a trumpet, that occurs in the environment and that includes the\\nsound. So, the typical horse race includes the sounds, and you might\\nauditorily perceive the racing in hearing some of its proper parts:\\nthe sounds. More specifically, you may hear the galloping thanks to\\nhearing the sounds it includes. You may fail to hear certain parts of\\nthe racing event, such as the jockey’s glance back after\\ncrossing the wire, but you also fail to see parts of the race, such as\\nthe misstep of the horse in second place. If the sounds are akin to\\nthe audible “profile” of the event, analogous to the\\nvisible surfaces of objects and visible parts of events, you might\\nthen enjoy auditory awareness as of the galloping of the horses in\\nvirtue of your awareness as of the sounds of the hooves. The sound is\\nnot identical with the galloping, and it is not just a property or a\\ncausal byproduct of the galloping. It is a part of a particular event\\nof galloping. The metaphysical relation of part to whole, in contrast\\nto that between effect and cause, might ground the sort of\\nepistemically unmediated awareness of interest (cf. Nakayama et al.\\n1995, Bermúdez 2000, Noë 2004). Auditory perceptual\\nawareness as of the whole may occur thanks to experiencing the\\npart.\",\n \"\\nOne objection is that this mereological account of the relation\\nbetween sounds and sources cannot account for hearing ordinary\\nobjects by hearing their sounds. You could not strictly hear a\\ntuba by hearing its sound because a tuba is not an event of which a\\nsound is a part. However, the sound is part of the event of playing\\nthe tuba, and the tuba is a participant in that playing. So, though\\nyou are not aware as of a tuba, you are aware as of an event that\\ninvolves a tuba. That perhaps is enough to explain talk of hearing\\ntubas and to assuage the worry (for further discussion, see Young\\n2018).\",\n \"\\nAnother more serious objection contends that the events we seem to\\nhear are ones that do not constitutively involve sounds or that might\\nhave taken place without sounds. For instance, we hear the collision,\\nbut the collision is something that could have occurred in a vacuum\\nand not made a sound. (Note that this differs from the claim discussed\\nbelow according to which sounds are identical with source events and\\nso inaudibly exist in vacuums.) If so, the collision and the sound\\ndiffer and the collision does not strictly include a sound. The\\ncollision therefore must have made the sound as a causal byproduct.\\nThis suggests that, strictly speaking, you could not hear that very\\ncollision event (since it causes the sound). The best response is to\\nbite the bullet and accept that events that do occur or that could\\noccur in vacuums cannot be heard since they include no sounds. This is\\nnot so bad, since you could hear a different, more encompassing event\\nthat includes a sound along with a collision. Alternatively, one might\\nsay the very same event that occurs in a vacuum also could occur in\\nair, but that it would have involved a sound had it occurred in air.\\nIn that case, one can only hear such events when they occur in air and\\ninclude a sound. The choice depends upon one’s metaphysics of\\nevents. In either case, it seems reasonable that token events that do\\nnot include sounds are inaudible.\",\n \"\\nCasati et al. (2013) sidestep some of these concerns by rejecting the\\ndistinction between sounds and events that are typically understood as\\nsound sources. They propose to “Ockhamize” the\\n“event sources” of sounds by identifying sounds with\\nevents such as collisions and vibrations. The sound just is the\\ncollision or the vibrating, whether or not it occurs in air. This\\naccount implies that sounds could exist in vacuums.\",\n \"\\nWhat hinges on the debate about hearing sources? The first upshot is\\nepistemological and concerns the nature of the justification for\\nempirical beliefs grounded in perceptual experience. The evidential\\nstatus of beliefs about what one perceptually experiences differs from\\nthat of beliefs about what is causally responsible for what one\\nperceptually experiences. So, whether or not we hear sound sources\\nimpacts the epistemology of audition. The second upshot concerns the\\nrelation between audition and certain actions. If we hear only sounds\\nand auditory objects, what appears to be effortless, auditorily guided\\naction to avoid or orient toward sound sources requires another\\nexplanation (because sounds are invisible and usually do no harm).\\nFinally, it affects how we understand the adaptive significance of\\naudition. Did audition evolve so as to furnish awareness of sounds\\nalone, while leaving their environmental significance to\\nextra-perceptual cognition, or did it evolve so as to furnish\\nperceptual responsiveness to the sources of sounds?\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.3 Sound Sources\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nAnother way to address the question, “What do we hear?”\\nconcerns the contents of auditory perception. Two topics are\\nespecially noteworthy in the context of related debates about vision\\nand its contents. The first concerns the whether audition has spatial\\ncontent. The second concerns the perception of audible qualities.\\nParallel questions can be raised without relying on the perceptual\\ncontent framework, though important complications arise.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. The Contents of Auditory Perception\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nOne topic where the contrast between vision and audition has been\\nthought to be particularly philosophically significant concerns space.\\nVision is a robustly spatial perceptual modality. Vision furnishes\\nawareness of space and spatial features. Some claim vision has an\\ninherently spatial structure, or, further, that vision’s spatial\\nstructure is a necessary condition on being visually aware of things\\nas independent from oneself.\",\n \"\\nHearing also provides information about space—humans learn about\\nspace on the basis of hearing. If audition represents space or spatial\\nfeatures, there is a natural account of being so informed. We might\\nform beliefs about spatial features of environments on the basis of\\nauditory perceptual experiences simply by accepting or endorsing what\\nis apparent in having those experiences.\",\n \"\\nBut learning about spatial features on the basis of audition and\\naudition’s bearing information about space both are consistent\\nwith entirely aspatial auditory phenomenology. For instance, volume\\nmight bear information about distance, and differences in volume at\\nthe two ears might bear information about direction. In that case,\\naudition bears information about space, and learning about space on\\nthe basis of audition is possible, but it does not follow that\\nauditory experience is spatial or that audition represents space.\",\n \"\\nNotably, a tradition of skepticism about audition’s spatiality\\nexists in philosophy. Certainly, our capacity to glean information\\nabout space is less acute in audition than in vision. Vision reveals\\nfine-grained spatial details that audition cannot convey, such as\\npatterns and textures. But philosophers who are skeptical about\\nspatial audition are not just concerned about a difference in spatial\\nacuity between audition and vision. Malpas says of the\\nexpression, ‘the location of sound’:\",\n \"\\nI do not mean by ‘location’ ‘locality’, but\\n‘the act of locating’, and by ‘the act of\\nlocating’ I do not mean ‘the act of establishing in a\\nplace’, but ‘the act of discovering the place of’.\\nEven so ‘location’ is misleading, because it implies that\\nthere is such a thing as discovering the place of sounds. Since sounds\\ndo not have places there is no such act. (Malpas 1965, 131)\\n\",\n \"\\nO’Shaughnessy states, “…We absolutely never\\nimmediately perceive sounds to be at any place. (Inference from\\nauditory data being another thing)” (O’Shaughnessy 2002,\\n446). The claim is that, in contrast to visible objects, audible\\nsounds are not experienced as having locations. Rather, we determine\\nthe places of sounds and sources from acoustic features, such as\\nloudness and interaural differences, that bear information about\\ndistance and direction. We do not auditorily experience spatial\\nfeatures.\",\n \"\\nThis debate, and the purported contrast between vision and audition,\\nhas consequences for perceptual theorizing. One route to the\\nconclusion that hearing sounds involves auditory awareness of\\nsensations involves denying that audition satisfies spatial\\nprerequisites on experiencing sounds as objective or public. For\\ninstance, Maclachlan (1989) claims that audition’s\\nphenomenology—in particular, its aspatial\\nphenomenology—provides reasons to think sounds are sensations.\\nComparing sounds with pains, which we readily recognize as sensations,\\nhe says, “[A]lthough the sounds we hear are just as much effects\\nproduced in us as are the pains produced by pins and mosquitoes,\\nthere is no variety in the location of these effects [the\\nsounds]. Because of the lack of contrast, we are not even aware that\\nthe sounds we hear are bodily sensations” (Maclachlan 1989, 31,\\nmy emphasis). Maclachlan means that, in contrast even to the case of\\npains, which are felt at different bodily locations, sounds are not\\nexperienced to be at differing locations, and so we are not even\\ninclined to recognize that they are bodily sensations. Maclachlan then\\nsuggests that we associate sounds with things and happenings\\noutside the body rather than appreciate that they are effects in us.\\nGiven the lack of spatial variation among experienced sounds,\\nwe projectively associate sounds with distal sources. This explanation\\nassumes that experienced sounds exhibit no audibly apparent spatial\\nvariation: sounds seem located at the ears or lack apparent location\\naltogether. Denying that auditory experiences present sounds at\\nvarying locations beyond the ears invites difficulty in finding a\\nplace for sounds in the world. If audition is wholly aspatial, this\\nmay encourage a retreat to the view that sounds lack locations outside\\nthe mind.\",\n \"\\nThis kind of strategy has companions and precursors. Lycan’s\\nsuggestion that olfactory experiences are apparent as modifications of\\none’s own consciousness depends heavily on the aspatial\\nphenomenology of olfactory experience (Lycan 2000, 278–82). Each\\nrecalls the Kantian claim that objectivity requires space, or that\\ngrasping something as independent from oneself requires the experience\\nof space, a version of which is deployed by Strawson (1959, ch 2) in\\nhis famous discussion of sounds.\",\n \"\\nTwo lines of response are open. The first appeals to the thriving\\nempirical research program in “spatial hearing”\\n(see, e.g., Blauert 1997). Scientists aim to discover the cues and\\nperceptual mechanisms that ground spatial audition, such as interaural\\ntime and level differences, secondary and reverberant signals, and\\nhead-related transfer functions. Audition clearly cannot match\\nvision’s singular acuity—vision’s resolution limit\\nis nearly two orders of magnitude better than audition’s\\n(Blauert 1997, 38–9). Nevertheless, this research strongly\\nsupports the claim that human subjects auditorily perceive such\\nspatial characteristics as direction and distance.\",\n \"\\nSecond, a number of philosophers have objected on\\nphenomenological grounds. Audition, they argue, involves\\nexperiencing or perceptually representing such spatial characteristics\\nas direction and distance (Pasnau 1999, Casati and Dokic 2005, Matthen\\n2005, O’Callaghan 2007, 2010). Introspection and performance\\nsupport the claim that sounds or sound sources are in many ordinary\\ncases perceptually experienced as located in the environment at a\\ndistance in some direction. We hear the sound of the knocking over\\nnear the door; we hear footsteps approaching from behind and to the\\nleft; hearing sound to “fill” a room is itself a form of\\nspatial hearing. Though hearing is more error prone than vision, we\\nfrequently do not need to work out the locations of sounds or\\nsources—we simply hear them.\",\n \"\\nA subtler form of skepticism about spatial audition aims just to block\\nthe requirements on objectivity. Strawson (1959) famously argues in\\nChapter 2 of Individuals that because auditory experience is\\nnot intrinsically spatial—spatial concepts have no\\nintrinsic auditory significance—a purely auditory experience\\nwould be non-spatial. Thus, it would not satisfy the requirements on\\nnon-solipsistic consciousness. Others have endorsed versions of\\nStrawson’s claim. “[T]he truth of a proposition to the\\neffect that there is a sound at such-and-such a position must consist\\nin this: if someone was to go to that position, he would have certain\\nauditory experiences,” states Evans (1980, 274).\",\n \"\\nThe claim that audition is not intrinsically spatial admits at least\\ntwo readings. First, since Strawson suggests that audition might\\ninherit spatial content from other sense modalities, such as vision or\\ntouch, it could mean that audition depends for its spatial\\ncontent upon that of other modalities. If, unlike vision and touch,\\naudition’s spatial capacities are parasitic upon those of other\\nmodalities, audition is spatial only thanks to its relations to other\\nintrinsically spatial modalities. Second, it might be understood as a\\nclaim about the objects of audition. Strawson indicates that\\nsounds themselves are not intrinsically spatial. He says that although\\nsounds have pitch, timbre, and loudness, they lack “intrinsic\\nspatial characteristics” (1959, 65). Since these interpretations\\nare not clearly distinguished by Strawson, it is helpful to consider\\nhis master argument.\",\n \"\\nStrawson claims that a purely auditory experience would be\\nnon-spatial. By “purely auditory experience” Strawson\\nmeans an exclusively auditory experience, or an auditory experience in\\nabsence of experience associated with any other modality. However, if\\nany modality in isolation ever could ground spatial experience,\\naudition could. On one hand, given the mechanisms of spatial hearing,\\nit is empirically implausible that a normal acoustic environment with\\nrich spatial cues would fail to produce even a minimally spatial\\npurely auditory experience. Even listening only to stereo headphones\\ncould produce a directional auditory experience. On the other hand, it\\ndoes seem possible that there could be a non-spatial but\\nimpoverished exclusively auditory experience if no binaural or\\nother spatial cues were present. But similarly impoverished,\\nnon-spatial experiences seem possible for other modalities. Consider\\nvisually experiencing a uniform gray ganzfeld, or floating\\nweightlessly in a uniformly warm bath. Neither provides the materials\\nfor spatial concepts, so neither differs from audition in this\\nrespect. One might contend that we therefore lack a good reason to\\nthink that, in contrast to a purely visual or tactile\\nexperience, a purely auditory experience would be an entirely\\nnon-spatial experience (see O’Callaghan 2010).\",\n \"\\nNudds (2001) suggests another way to understand the claim, and\\ninterprets Strawson as making an observation about the internal\\nstructure of audition:\",\n \"\\nWhen we see (or seem to see) something, we see it as occupying or as\\nlocated within a region of space; when we hear (or appear to hear) a\\nsound we simply hear the sound, and we don’t experience it as\\nstanding in any relation to the space it may in fact occupy. (Nudds\\n2001, 213–14)\\n\",\n \"\\nAudition, unlike vision, lacks a spatial structure or field, claims\\nNudds. A purely auditory experience thus would not comprise a spatial\\nfield into which individuals independent from oneself might figure.\\nFollowing an example from Martin (1992), Nudds argues that while\\nvision involves awareness of unoccupied locations, audition does not\\ninvolve awareness of regions of space as empty or unoccupied.\\nMartin’s example is seeing the space in the center of a ring\\nas empty. In audition, Nudds claims, one never experiences a\\nspace as empty or unoccupied.\",\n \"\\nIn response, one might simply deny a difference between vision and\\naudition in this respect. If one can attend to a location near the\\ncenter of the visible ring as empty, one can attend to the location\\nbetween the sounding alarm clock and the slamming door as a place\\nwhere there is no audible sound—as acoustically empty space. Of\\ncourse, auditory space generally is less replete than visual space,\\nbut this is contingent. Consider seeing just a few stars flickering on\\nand off against a dark sky. Since such an experience may have spatial\\nstructure, and since it is analogous to audition, one might on these\\ngrounds defend the claim that audition has spatial structure (see also\\nYoung 2017).\",\n \"\\nWhat about the second way mentioned above to understand\\nStrawson’s claim? Though audition’s status as\\nintrinsically spatial may not differ from that of vision or touch,\\nperhaps sounds are not intrinsically spatial. But without further\\nargument, or a commitment to a theory of sounds, it is difficult to\\nstate confidently the intrinsic features of sounds and thus whether\\nthey include spatial features. If, for instance, wavelength is among a\\nsound’s intrinsic features, sounds are intrinsically\\nspatial.\",\n \"\\nNonetheless, the claim might be that, as they are perceptually\\nexperienced to be, sounds lack apparent intrinsic or non-relational\\nspatial features. Roughly, independent from spatial relations to other\\nsounds, experienced sounds seem to lack internal spatial\\nstructure. That is why you cannot auditorily experience the empty\\nspace at the center of a sound or hear its edges. Interpreted as\\nsuch—that sounds are not experienced or perceptually represented\\nto have inherent spatial features—the claim is plausible (though\\nconsider diffuse or spread out sounds in contrast to focused or\\npinpoint sounds). It certainly marks an important difference from\\nvision, whose objects frequently not only seem to have rich internal\\nspatial structure, but also are individuated in terms of inherent\\nspatial features.\",\n \"\\nThis difference, however, does not ground an argument that any purely\\nauditory experience is non-spatial or that sounds fail to satisfy the\\nrequirement on objectivity, since sounds’ being experienced to\\nhave internal, intrinsic, or inherent spatial characteristics is\\nnecessary neither for spatial auditory experience nor to experience\\nsounds as objective. Since sounds phenomenologically seem to be\\nlocated in space and to bear extrinsic spatial relations to each\\nother, auditory experience satisfies the requirements for objectivity,\\nwhich need only secure the materials for a conception of a place for\\nsounds to exist when not experienced.\",\n \"\\nSo, vision and audition differ with respect to space in two ways.\\nFirst, vision’s spatial acuity surpasses that of\\naudition. Second, vision’s objects are perceptually experienced\\nto have rich internal spatial structure, and audition’s\\nare not. However, given the spatial characteristics evident in\\naudition, such as direction and distance, the spatial status of\\naudition presents no barrier to understanding its objects as\\nperceiver-independent. The spatial aspects of auditory phenomenology\\nthus may fail to ground an argument to the conclusion that sounds are\\nmodifications of one’s consciousness. If that is the case, then\\naudition provides no special intuitive support for accounts on which\\nprivate entities are the direct objects of perception.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.1 Spatial Hearing\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAccording to theories in which sounds are individuals, sounds are not\\nsecondary or sensible qualities. But, humans hear audible qualities,\\nsuch as pitch, loudness, and timbre, that are analogous to colors,\\ntastes, and scents. Thus, familiar accounts of colors and other\\nsensible attributes or secondary qualities might apply to the audible\\nqualities. For instance, pitches might be either dispositions to cause\\ncertain kinds of experiences in suitable subjects, the physical or\\ncategorical bases of such dispositions, sensations or projected\\nfeatures of auditory experiences, or simple primitive properties of\\n(actual or edenic) sounds.\",\n \"\\nTradition suggests that the form of a philosophical account of visible\\nqualities, such as color, and their perception applies to other\\nsensible qualities, such as pitch, flavor, and smell, and their\\nperception. Thus, according to tradition, if dispositionalism,\\nphysicalism, projectivism, or primitivism about sensible qualities is\\ntrue for features associated with one modality, it is true for\\nfeatures associated with others. Despite tradition, we should be wary\\nto accept that a theory of sensible qualities translates plausibly\\nacross the senses.\",\n \"\\nDebates about sensible qualities and their perception begin with\\nconcerns about whether sensible features can be identified with or\\nreduced to any objective physical features. What follows has two aims.\\nThe first is to give a sense of how such debates might go in the case\\nof audible qualities. The focus is on pitch, since pitch is often\\ncompared to color, and the case of color is well known (for discussion\\nof similar questions concerning timbre, see Isaac 2017). The second is\\nto point out the most salient differences and similarities between the\\ncases of color and pitch that impact the plausibility of arguments\\ntranslated from one case to the other.\",\n \"\\nFirst, I consider two noteworthy arguments that are founded on aspects\\nof color perception. Each aims to establish that the colors we\\nperceive cannot be identified with objective physical features.\\nNeither argument transposes neatly to the case of pitch. Thus, we\\nshould not assume arguments that are effective in the case of color\\nhave equal force when applied to other sensible qualities. Color\\nperhaps is a uniquely difficult case.\",\n \"\\nSecond, however, I discuss two respects in which pitch experience is\\nsimilar to color experience. It is instructive that these aspects of\\npitch experience do raise difficulties for an objective physical\\naccount of pitch that are familiar from the case of color.\",\n \"\\nWhat are pitch, timbre, and loudness? Pitch is a dimension along which\\ntones can be ordered according to apparent “height”. The\\npitch of fingernails scratching a blackboard generally is higher than\\nthat of thumping a washtub. Loudness can be glossed as the volume,\\nintensity, or quantity of sound. A jet plane makes louder sounds than\\na model plane. Timbre is more difficult to describe. Timbre is a\\nquality in which sounds that share pitch and loudness might differ.\\nSo, a violin, a cello, and a piano all playing the same note differ in\\ntimbre. Sometimes timbre is called “tone color”.\",\n \"\\nPhysics and psychoacoustics show that properties including frequency,\\namplitude, and wave shape determine the audible qualities sounds\\n(auditorily) appear to have. To simplify, take the case of pitch,\\nsince pitch often is compared to color. Not all sounds appear to have\\npitch. Some sounds appear to have pitch thanks to a simple,\\nsinusoidal pattern of vibration at some frequency in an object\\nor in the air. Some sounds appear pitched thanks to a complex pattern\\nof vibration that can be decomposed into sinusoidal constituents at\\nmultiple frequencies, since any pattern of vibration can be analyzed\\nas some combination of simple sinusoids. Sounds appear pitched,\\nhowever, just when they have sinusoidal constituents, or\\npartials, that all are integer multiples of a common\\nfundamental frequency. Sounds with pitch thus correspond to\\nregular or periodic patterns of vibration that differ in\\nfundamental frequency and complexity. Simple sinusoids and complex\\nwaveforms match in pitch (though they typically differ in timbre) when\\nthey share fundamental frequency. This is true even when the complex\\ntone lacks a sinusoidal constituent at the fundamental frequency,\\nwhich is referred to as the phenomenon of the missing\\nfundamental.\",\n \"\\nA straightforward account identifies pitch with periodicity (perhaps\\nwithin some range). Having pitch is being periodic (see\\nO’Callaghan 2007, ch. 6). Periodicity can be expressed in terms\\nof fundamental frequency, so individual pitches are fundamental\\nfrequencies. This has advantages as an account of pitch. It captures\\nthe linear ordering of pitches. It also explains the musical\\nintervals, such as the octave, fifth, and fourth, for example, which\\nare pitch relations that hold among periodic tones. Musical intervals\\ncorrespond to whole-number ratios between fundamental frequencies.\\nSounds that differ by an octave have fundamental frequencies that\\nstand in 1:2 ratios. Fifths involve a 2:3 relationship, fourths are\\n3:4, and so on. This also allows us to revise the linear pitch\\nordering to accommodate the auditory sense in which tones that differ\\nby an octave nonetheless are the same pitch. If the pitch ordering is\\nrepresented as a helix, upon which successive octave-related tones\\nfall at a common angular position, each full rotation represents\\ndoubling frequency.\",\n \"\\nIs the periodicity theory of pitch plausible as an account of the\\naudible features we perceive when hearing sounds? If so, then\\nobjective physicalism about at least some sensible qualities might\\nsucceed.\",\n \"\\nThe periodicity theory of pitch fares better on two counts than\\ntheories that identify colors with objective physical properties.\",\n \"\\nFirst, consider the phenomenological distinction between unique\\nand binary hues. Some colors appear to incorporate other\\ncolors, and some do not. Purple, for instance, appears both reddish\\nand bluish; red just looks red. Some philosophers contend that the\\nleading physical theories of color cannot explain the unique-binary\\ndistinction without essentially invoking the color experiences of\\nsubjects. How, for instance, do reflectance classes identified with\\nunique hues differ from those associated with binary hues?\",\n \"\\nConsider a related issue concerning pitch. Some tones with pitch sound\\nsimple, while other pitched tones, such as sounds of musical\\ninstruments, auditorily appear to be complex and to have\\ndiscernible components. However, the difference between audibly simple\\nand audibly complex pitched tones is captured by the simplicity\\nor complexity of a sound’s partials. Simple tones are sinusoids,\\nand complex tones have multiple overtones. So, one response is to hold\\nthat the unique-binary color distinction and the simple-complex pitch\\ndistinction are disanalogous. Unlike the case of color, one might\\ncontend, no pitch that is essentially a mixture of other pitches\\nsolely occupies a distinctive place in pitch space.\",\n \"\\nSecond, consider metamerism. Some surfaces with very different\\nreflectance characteristics match in color. Metameric pairs share no\\nobvious objective physical property. Some philosophers argue that\\nunless color experience fails to distinguish distinct colors, metamers\\npreclude identifying colors with natural physical properties of\\nsurfaces (see the entry on\\n color).\",\n \"\\nNow consider the case of pitch. Are there pitch metamers? Some sounds\\nwith very different spectral frequency profiles match in pitch. A\\nsimple sinusoidal tone at a given frequency matches the pitch of each\\ncomplex tone with that fundamental frequency (even those that lack a\\nconstituent at the fundamental). But, again, the case of pitch differs\\nfrom the case of color. For each matching pitch, a single natural\\nproperty does unify the class. The tones all share a fundamental\\nfrequency.\",\n \"\\nTwo kinds of argument familiar from the case of color are equally\\npressing when applied to the case of pitch.\",\n \"\\nFirst, arguments from intersubjective variation transpose.\\nActual variations in frequency sensitivity exist among perceivers; for\\ninstance, subjects differ in which frequency they identify as middle\\nC. If there is no principled way to legislate whose experience is\\nveridical, pitch might be subjective or perceiver-relative. One\\nresponse is that, in contrast to the case of unique red, there is an\\nobjective standard for middle C: fundamental frequency. But, whose\\npitch experience has the normative significance to settle the\\nfrequency of middle C?\",\n \"\\nSome might wonder whether there is a pitch analog of the trouble posed\\nby the kind of variation associated with spectrum inversion in\\nthe case of color (see the entry on\\n inverted qualia).\\n Spectral shift in pitch, sometimes dramatic, commonly occurs after\\ncochlear implant surgery. This is not spectral inversion for pitch;\\nbut, a dramatic shift makes most of the same trouble as inversion. Not\\nquite all the trouble, since cochlear implants preserve the pitch\\nordering and its direction. But, there could be a cochlear implant\\nthat switched the placement of electrodes sensitive to 100 hertz and\\n1000 hertz, respectively; and there could be one that reversed the\\nentire electrode ordering. This goes some distance to grounding the\\nconceivability of a pitch inversion that reverses the height ordering\\nof tones.\",\n \"\\nSecond, consider an argument that frequencies cannot capture the\\nrelational structure among the pitches. This is loosely\\nanalogous to the argument that physicalism about color fails to\\ncapture the relational structure of the hues—for instance, that\\nred is more similar to orange than either is to green. In the case of\\npitch, psychoacoustics experiments show that perceived pitch does not\\nmap straightforwardly onto frequency. Though each unique pitch\\ncorresponds to a unique frequency (or small frequency range), the\\nrelations among apparent pitches do not match those among\\nfrequencies. In particular, equivalent pitch intervals do not\\ncorrespond to equal frequency intervals. For example, the effect upon\\nperceived pitch of a 100 hertz change in frequency varies dramatically\\nacross the frequency range. It is dramatic at low frequency and barely\\ndetectable at high frequency. Similarly, doubling frequency does not\\nmake for equivalent pitch intervals. A 1000 hertz tone must be tripled\\nin frequency to produce the same increase in pitch as that produced by\\nquadrupling the frequency of a 2000 hertz tone. Apparent pitch is a\\ncomplex function of frequency; it is neither linear nor logarithmic\\n(see, e.g., Hartmann 1997, ch 12, Gelfand 2004, ch 12, Zwicker and\\nFastl 2006, ch 5). Pitch scales that capture the psychoacoustic data\\nassign equal magnitudes, commonly measured in units called\\nmels, to equal pitch intervals. The mel scale of pitch\\nthus is an extensive or numerical pitch scale, in contrast to the\\nintensive frequency scale for pitch. The former, but not the latter,\\npreserves ratios among pitches.\",\n \"\\nS. S. Stevens famously argued on the basis of results drawn from\\npsychoacoustic experiments that pitch is not frequency (see, e.g.,\\nStevens et al. 1937, Stevens and Volkmann 1940). In light of similar\\nresults, contemporary psychoacoustics researchers commonly reject the\\nidentification of pitch with frequency or periodicity. The received\\nscientific view thus holds that pitch is a subjective or psychological\\nquality that is no more than correlated with objective frequency (see,\\ne.g., Gelfand 2004, Houtsma 1995). Pitch, on this understanding,\\nbelongs only to experiences. The received view of pitch therefore\\nimplies an error theory according to which pitch experience involves a\\nwidespread projective illusion.\",\n \"\\nWhat is the argument against the periodicity theory of pitch? Compare\\nan argument against reflectance physicalism about color. Reflectance\\nphysicalism identifies each hue with a class of reflectances.\\nPeriodicity physicalism identifies each pitch with a fundamental\\nfrequency. In both cases, each determinate sensible feature is\\nidentified with a determinate physical property. In the color case, it\\nis objected that reflectance classes do not bear the relations to each\\nother that the colors bear. In the pitch case, the frequencies do not\\nbear the relations to each other that the pitches bear. Thus, if the\\nrelational features among a class of sensible qualities are essential\\nto them, an account that does not accurately capture those relations\\nfails. Frequencies, according to this line of argument, do not stand\\nin the relations essential to pitch.\",\n \"\\nThis, of course, is a quite general phenomenon among sensible\\nqualities. Brightness and loudness vary logarithmically with simple\\nphysical quantities. Even if we identified candidate molecules for\\nsmells, nothing suggests physical similarities would mirror their\\nolfactory similarities.\",\n \"\\nIn the case of pitch and other sensible features that can be put in a\\nlinear ordering, one might respond that the relational order is\\nessential while the magnitudes are not. In that case, if pitch is\\nfrequency, pitch experience has the right structure, but distorts\\nmagnitudes of difference in pitch. This retains the periodicity theory\\nand explains away the results in terms of pitch experiences.\",\n \"\\nNonetheless, Pautz (2014, 3.5) has replied that this partial error\\naccount cannot be reconciled with certain types of possible\\nintersubjective difference. So, suppose instead we accept that the mel\\nscale is well-founded and that it accurately captures essential\\nrelationships among pitches. This does not by itself imply a\\nprojective or subjective theory of pitch. Pitches might be\\ndispositions to produce certain kinds of experiences, or they might be\\nsimple or primitive properties. It also is open to seek a more\\nadequate physical candidate for pitch. For instance, pitches might be\\nfar more complex physical properties than frequencies. Such physical\\nproperties may be of no interest in developing the simplest, most\\ncomplete natural physical theory, but they may be anthropocentrically\\ninteresting.\",\n \"\\nIt is an important question whether a physical theory of sensible\\nfeatures should just provide a physical candidate for each determinate\\nsensible feature, or whether the physical relationships among those\\nphysical candidates should capture the structural relations among\\nsensible qualities (and, if so, which structural relations it should\\ncapture). This is an example of how considering in detail the nature\\nand the experience of sensible qualities other than color promises\\ninsights into traditional debates concerning the sensible qualities.\\nPautz (2014) offers an empirically-grounded argument concerning a\\nvariety of sensible qualities, including audible qualities, that\\nadvances such discussion.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.2 Audible Qualities\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Varieties of Auditory Perception\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nMusical listening is a topic that bears on questions about the\\nrelationship between hearing sounds and hearing sources. While the\\nphilosophy of music has its own vast literature (see the entry on\\n the philosophy of music),\\n musical experience has not been used as extensively to explore\\ngeneral philosophical questions about auditory perception. This\\nsection discusses links that are relevant to advancing philosophical\\nwork on auditory perception.\",\n \"\\nAn account of listening to pure or non-vocal music should capture the\\naesthetic significance of musical listening. Appreciating music\\nis appreciating sounds and sequences, arrangements, or structures of\\nsounds. Thus, the temporal aspects of auditory experiences are\\ncritical to appreciatively listening to music.\",\n \"\\nOne might go further and hold that sounds are all that matters in\\nmusic. In particular, some have argued that appreciatively listening\\nto music demands listening in a way that abstracts from the\\nenvironmental significance, and thus from the specific sources, of the\\nsounds it includes (Scruton 1997, 2–3). Such acousmatic\\nlistening involves experiencing sounds in a way that is\\n“detached from the circumstances of their production,”\\nrather than “as having a certain worldly cause” (Hamilton\\n2007, 58; see also Hamilton 2009). Listening to music and being\\nreceptive to its aesthetically relevant features requires not\\nlistening to violins, horns, or brushes on snare drums. It requires\\nhearing sounds and grasping them in a way removed from their common\\nsources. Hearing a high fidelity recording thus furnishes an\\naesthetically identical musical experience despite having a speaker\\ncone rather than a violin as source. “The acousmatic experience\\nof sound is precisely what is exploited by the art of music”\\n(Scruton 1997, 3).\",\n \"\\nThis suggests an intuitive difference between music and visual arts\\nsuch as painting and sculpture. As Kivy (1991) explains, it is\\ndifficult even with the most abstract paintings and sculptures to see\\nthem in a way that takes them to be entirely formal or abstract. That\\nis, it is difficult to avoid seeing pictures and sculptures as\\nrepresentational. In contrast, it seems easier to listen attentively\\nto the formal acoustical features of musical sounds, without being\\ncompelled to think of what makes them.\",\n \"\\nMusical listening thus may be thought to provide a prima facie\\nargument against the claim that in hearing sounds one typically hears\\nsound sources such as the strumming of guitars and bowing of violins.\\nIf such “interested” audition were the rule, musical\\nlistening would be far more challenging.\",\n \"\\nAcousmatic experience, however, may be a matter of attention.\\nNothing prevents focusing one’s attention on the sounds and\\naudible qualities without attending to the instruments, acts, and\\nevents that are their sources, even if each is auditorily available.\\nThat musical listening requires effort and training supports the idea\\nthat one can direct attention differently in auditory experience,\\ndepending on one’s interests. Caring for an infant and safely\\ncrossing the street require attending to sound sources, while\\nlistening with aesthetic appreciation to a symphony may require\\nabstracting from the circumstances of its production, such as the\\nfinger movements of the oboist. This response holds that musical\\nlistening is a matter of auditorily attending in a certain way. It is\\nattending to features of sounds themselves, but does not imply failing\\nto hear sound sources.\",\n \"\\nThe acousmatic thesis is a limited view about which aspects of the\\nthings one can auditory experience are aesthetically significant.\\nThese include audible aspects of sounds themselves, but exclude, for\\nexample, other contents of auditory experience. However, room exists\\nfor debate over the aesthetically significant aspects of what you hear\\n(see Hamilton 2007, 2009). For example, one might argue that live\\nperformances have aesthetic advantages over recordings because one\\nhears the performance of the sounds and songs, rather than\\ntheir reproduction by loudspeakers (cf. Mag Uidhir 2007).\\nCircumstances of sound production, such as that skillful gestures\\ngenerate a certain passage, or that a particularly rare wood accounts\\nfor a violin’s sounds, might be aesthetically relevant in a way\\nthat outstrips the sounds, and some such features may be audible in\\naddition to sounds. For instance, hearing the spatial characteristics\\nof a performance may hold aesthetic significance beyond the tones and\\nstructures admitted by traditional accounts of musical listening.\\nComposers may even intend “spatial gestures” among aspects\\nessential for the appreciation of a piece (see, e.g., Solomon 2007).\\nTo imagine auditorily experiencing the spatial characteristics of\\nmusic in a way entirely divorced from the environmental significance\\nof the sounds is difficult. Appreciating the relationship between\\nexperiences of sounds and of sources makes room for a view of the\\naesthetic value of musical listening that is more liberal than\\nacousmatic experience allows.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.1 Musical Listening\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nSpeech perception presents uniquely difficult twists, and few\\nphilosophers have confronted it directly (Appelbaum 1999, Trout 2001a,\\nMatthen 2005, ch 9, and Remez and Trout 2009 are recent exceptions).\\nSomething striking and qualitatively distinctive—perhaps\\nuniquely human—seems to set the perception of speech apart from\\nordinary hearing. The main philosophical issues about speech\\nperception concern versions of the question, Is speech special? (See\\nO’Callaghan 2015 for a comprehensive review and discussion.)\",\n \"\\nHow does perceiving speech differ from perceiving ordinary\\nnon-linguistic sounds? Listening to music and listening to speech each\\ndiffer from listening to other environmental sounds in the following\\nrespect. In each case, one’s interest in listening is to some\\ndegree distanced from the specific environmental happenings involved\\nin the production of sounds.\",\n \"\\nBut this is true of listening to music and of listening to speech for\\ndifferent reasons. In music, it is plausible that one’s interest\\nis in the sounds themselves, rather than in the sources of their\\nproduction. However, speech is a vehicle for conventional linguistic\\nmeaning. In listening to speech, one’s main interest is in the\\nmeanings, rather than in the sources of sound. Ultimately, the\\ninformation conveyed is what matters.\",\n \"\\nNevertheless, according to the most common philosophical\\nunderstanding, perceiving spoken utterances is just a matter of\\nhearing sounds. The sounds of speech are complex audible sound\\nstructures. Listening to speech in a language you know typically\\ninvolves grasping meanings, but grasping meanings requires\\nfirst hearing the sounds of speech. According to this account,\\ngrasping meanings itself is a matter of extra-perceptual\\ncognition.\",\n \"\\nThe commonplace view—that perceiving speech is a variety of\\nordinary auditory perception that just involves hearing the sounds of\\nspeech—has been challenged in a number of ways. The challenges\\ndiffer in respect of how speech perception is held to differ from\\nnon-linguistic audition.\",\n \"\\nFirst, consider the objects of speech perception. What are the\\nobjects of speech perception, and do they differ from those of\\nordinary or non-linguistic auditory perception? According to the\\ncommonplace understanding, hearing speech involves hearing sounds.\\nThus, hearing spoken language shares perceptual objects with ordinary\\naudition. Alternatively, one might hold that the objects of speech\\nperception are not ordinary sounds at all. Perhaps they are\\nlanguage-specific entities, such as phonemes or words.\\nPerhaps, as some have argued, perceiving speech involves perceiving\\narticulatory gestures or movements of the mouth and vocal\\norgans (see the supplement on\\n Speech Perception: Empirical and Theoretical Considerations).\\n Note that if audition’s objects typically include distal\\nevents, speech in this respect is not special, since its objects do\\nnot belong to an entirely different kind from ordinary sounds. \",\n \"\\nSecond, consider the contents of speech perception. Does the\\ncontent of speech perception differ from that of ordinary audition? If\\nit does, how does the experience of perceiving speech differ from that\\nof hearing ordinary sounds? Perceiving speech might involve hearing\\nordinary sounds but auditorily ascribing distinctive features\\nto them. These features might simply be, or comprise, finer grained\\nqualitative and temporal acoustical details than non-linguistic sounds\\naudibly possess. But perceiving speech also might involve perceiving\\nsounds as belonging to language-specific types, such as\\nphonemes, words, or other syntactic categories.\",\n \"\\nFurthermore, speech perception’s contents might differ in a more\\ndramatic way from those of non-linguistic audition. Listening with\\nunderstanding to speech involves grasping meanings. The\\ncommonplace view is conservative. It holds that grasping meanings is\\nan act of the understanding rather than of audition. Thus, the\\ndifference between the experience of listening to speech in a language\\nyou know and the experience of listening to speech in a language you\\ndo not know is entirely cognitive.\",\n \"\\nBut one might think that there also is a perceptual difference.\\nA liberal account of this perceptual difference holds that perceiving\\nspeech in a language you know may involve hearing sounds as\\nmeaningful or auditorily representing them as having semantic\\nproperties (see, e.g., Siegel 2006, Bayne 2009, Azzouni 2013, Brogaard\\n2018; cf. O’Callaghan 2011b, Reiland 2015). Alternatively, a\\nmoderately liberal account holds that the perceptual experience of\\nspeech in a language you know involves perceptually experiencing\\nlanguage-specific but nevertheless non-semantic features. For\\ninstance, O’Callaghan (2011b) argues that listening to speech in\\na familiar language typical involves perceiving its phonological\\nfeatures.\",\n \"\\nThird, consider the processes responsible for speech\\nperception. To what extent does perceiving speech implicate processes\\nthat are continuous with those of ordinary or general audition, and to\\nwhat extent does perceiving speech involve separate, distinctive, or\\nmodular processes? While some defend general auditory accounts\\nof speech perception (see, e.g, Holt and Lotto 2008), some argue that\\nperceiving speech involves dedicated perceptual resources, or even an\\nencapsulated perceptual system distinct from ordinary non-linguistic\\naudition (see, e.g., Fodor 1983, Pinker 1994, Liberman 1996, Trout\\n2001b). These arguments typically are grounded in several types of\\nphenomena, including the multimodality of speech\\nperception—visual cues about the movements of the mouth and\\ntongue impact the experience of speech, as demonstrated by the McGurk\\neffect (see the section\\n 4.3 Crossmodal Influences);\\n duplex perception—a particular stimulus sometimes\\ncontributes simultaneously both to the experience of an ordinary sound\\nand to that of a speech sound (Rand 1974); and the top-down\\ninfluence of linguistic knowledge upon the experience of speech. A\\nreasonable challenge is that each of these\\ncharacteristics—multimodality, duplex perception, and top-down\\ninfluence—also is displayed in general audition. \",\n \"\\nSee the supplement on\\n Speech Perception: Empirical and Theoretical Considerations.\\n \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.2 Speech Perception\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAuditory perception of speech is influenced by cues from vision and\\ntouch (see Gick et al. 2008). The McGurk effect in speech perception\\nleads to an illusory auditory experience caused by a visual stimulus\\n(McGurk and Macdonald 1976). Do such multimodal effects occur in\\nordinary audition? Visual and tactile cues commonly do shape auditory\\nexperience. The ventriloquist illusion is an illusory auditory\\nexperience of location that is produced by an apparent visible sound\\nsource (see, e.g., Bertelson 1999). Audition even impacts experience\\nin other modalities. The sound-induced flash effect involves a visual\\nillusion as of seeing two consecutive flashes that is produced when a\\nsingle flash is accompanied by two consecutive beeps (Shams et al.\\n2000, 2002). Such crossmodal illusions demonstrate that auditory\\nexperience is impacted by other modalities and that audition\\ninfluences other modalities. In general, experiences associated with\\none perceptual modality are influenced by stimulation to other sensory\\nsystems.\",\n \"\\nAn important question is whether the impact is merely causal, or\\nwhether perception in one modality is somehow constitutively tied to\\nother modalities. If, for instance, vision merely causally impacts\\nyour auditory experience of a given sound, then processes associated\\nwith audition might be proprietary and characterizable in terms that\\ndo not appeal to other modalities. Relying on information from vision\\nor touch could simply improve the existing capacity to perceive space,\\ntime, or spoken language auditorily. On the other hand, coordination\\nbetween audition and other senses could enable a new perceptual\\ncapacity. In that case, audition might rely constitutively on another\\nsense.\",\n \"\\nA first step in resolving this question is recognizing that crossmodal\\nillusions are not mere accidents. Instead, they are intelligible as\\nthe results of adaptive perceptual strategies. In ordinary\\ncircumstances, crossmodal processes serve to reduce or resolve\\napparent conflicts in information drawn from several senses. In doing\\nso, they tend to make perception more reliable overall. Thus,\\ncrossmodal illusions differ from synaesthesia. Synaesthesia is\\njust a kind of accident. It results from mere quirks of processing,\\nand it always involves illusion (or else is accidentally veridical).\\nCrossmodal recalibrations, in contrast, are best understood as\\nattempts “to maintain a perceptual experience consonant with a\\nunitary event” (Welch and Warren 1980, 638).\",\n \"\\nIn the first place, the principled reconciliation of information drawn\\nfrom different sensory sources suggests that audition is governed by\\nextra-auditory perceptual constraints. Moreover, since conflict\\nrequires a common subject matter, such constraints must concern common\\nsources of stimulation to multiple senses. If so, audition and vision\\nshare a perceptual concern for a common subject matter. And that\\nconcern is reflected in the organization of auditory experience. But\\nthis by itself does not establish constitutive dependence of audition\\non another sense.\",\n \"\\nHowever, the perceptual concern for a common subject matter could be\\nreflected as such in certain forms of auditory experience. For\\ninstance, the commonality may be experientially evident in jointly\\nperceiving shared spatio-temporal features, or in the perceptual\\nexperience of audio-visual intermodal feature binding. If so, some\\nforms of auditory perceptual experience may share with vision a common\\nmultimodal or amodal content or character (see O’Callaghan\\n2008b, Clark 2011). More to the point, if coordination with another\\nsense enables a new auditory capacity, then vision or touch could have\\na constitutive rather than merely causal impact upon corresponding\\nauditory experiences.\",\n \"\\nWhat hangs on this? First, it bears on questions about\\naudition’s content. If we cannot exhaustively characterize\\nauditory experience in terms that are modality-specific or distinctive\\nto audition, then we might hear as of things we can see or\\nexperience with other senses. This is related to one puzzling question\\nabout hearing sound sources: How could you hear as of something you\\ncould see? Rather than just a claim about audition’s content\\nthat requires further explanation, we now have a story about why\\nthings like sound sources figure in the content of auditory\\nexperience. Second, all of this may bear on how to delineate what\\ncounts as auditory perception, as opposed to visual or even amodal\\nperception. If hearing is systematically impacted by visual processes,\\nand if it shares content and phenomenology with other sense\\nexperiences, what are the boundaries of auditory perception?\\nMultimodal perception may bear on the question of whether there are\\nclear and significant distinctions among the sense modalities (cf.\\nNudds 2003). Finally, multimodal perceptual experiences, illusions,\\nand explanatory strategies may illuminate the phenomenological\\nunity of experiences in different modalities, or the sense in\\nwhich, for instance, an auditory experience and a visual experience of\\nsome happening comprise a single encompassing experience (see the\\nentry on\\n the unity of consciousness).\\n \",\n \"\\nWe can ask questions about the relationships among modalities in\\ndifferent areas of explanatory concern. Worthwhile areas for attention\\ninclude the objects, contents, and phenomenology of perception, as\\nwell as perceptual processes and their architecture. Crossmodal and\\nmultimodal considerations might shed doubt on whether vision-based\\ntheorizing alone can deliver a complete understanding of perception\\nand its contents. This approach constitutes an important\\nmethodological advance in the philosophical study of perception (for\\nfurther discussion, see O’Callaghan 2012, 2019, Matthen 2015,\\nStokes et al. 2015).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.3 Crossmodal Influences\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nConsidering modalities other than vision enhances our understanding of\\nperception. It is necessary to developing and vetting an adequate\\ncomprehensive and general account of perception and its roles.\\nAuditory perception is a rich territory for philosophical exploration\\nin its own right, but it also provides a useful contrast case in which\\nto evaluate claims about perception proposed in the context of vision.\\nOne of the most promising directions for future work concerns the\\nnature of the relationships among perceptual modalities, how these\\nrelationships shape experience across modalities, and how they may\\nprove essential to understanding perception itself. Philosophical work\\non auditory perception thus is part of the advance beyond considering\\nmodalities in isolation from each other.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Conclusion and Future Directions\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Appelbaum, I., 1996, “The lack of invariance problem and the\ngoal of speech perception,” ICSLP-1996, 3(435):\n1541–1544.","–––, 1999, “The dogma of isomorphism: A\ncase study from speech perception,” Philosophy of\nScience, 66 (Supplement. Proceedings of the 1998 Biennial Meetings\nof the Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers):\nS250–S259.","Azzouni, J., 2013, Semantic Perception: How the Illusion of a\nCommon Language Arises and Persists, Oxford: Oxford University\nPress.","Batty, C., 2010, “Scents and sensibilia,” American\nPhilosophical Quarterly, 47: 103–118.","–––, 2011, “Smelling lessons,”\nPhilosophical Studies, 153: 161–174.","Bayne, T., 2009, “Perception and the reach of phenomenal\ncontent,” Philosophical Quarterly, 59:\n385–404.","Bermúdez, J. L., 2000, “Naturalized sense\ndata,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 61(2):\n353–374.","Bertelson, P., 1999, “Ventriloquism: A case of cross-modal\nperceptual grouping,” in G. Aschersleben, T. Bachmann, and J.\nMússeler (eds.), Cognitive Contributions to the Perception\nof Spatial and Temporal Events, Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp.\n347–317.","Blauert, J., 1997, Spatial Hearing: The Psychophysics of Human\nSound Localization, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.","Bloomfield, L., 1933, Language, New York: Holt.","Blumstein, S. E. and K. N. Stevens, 1981, “Phonetic features\nand acoustic invariance in speech,” Cognition, 10:\n25–32.","Bosch, L. and N. Sebastián-Gallés, 1997,\n“Native-language recognition abilities in 4-month-old infants\nfrom monolingual and bilingual environments,” Cognition,\n65(1): 33–69.","Bregman, A. S., 1990, Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual\nOrganization of Sound, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.","Brogaard, B., 2018, “In defense of hearing meanings,”\nSynthese, 195: 2967–2983.","Bullot, N. and P. Egré (eds.), 2010, Objects and Sound\nPerception, Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1.","Casati, R. and J. Dokic, 1994, La Philosopie du Son,\nNîmes: Chambon.","–––, 2005, “Sounds,” in The\nStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2009 Edition), Edward\nN. Zalta (ed.), URL =\n <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/sounds/>.","Casati, R., E. Di Bona, and J. 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Fastl, 2006, Psychoacoustics: Facts and\nModels, 3rd edition, New York: Springer."],"string":"[\n \"Appelbaum, I., 1996, “The lack of invariance problem and the\\ngoal of speech perception,” ICSLP-1996, 3(435):\\n1541–1544.\",\n \"–––, 1999, “The dogma of isomorphism: A\\ncase study from speech perception,” Philosophy of\\nScience, 66 (Supplement. Proceedings of the 1998 Biennial Meetings\\nof the Philosophy of Science Association. Part I: Contributed Papers):\\nS250–S259.\",\n \"Azzouni, J., 2013, Semantic Perception: How the Illusion of a\\nCommon Language Arises and Persists, Oxford: Oxford University\\nPress.\",\n \"Batty, C., 2010, “Scents and sensibilia,” American\\nPhilosophical Quarterly, 47: 103–118.\",\n \"–––, 2011, “Smelling lessons,”\\nPhilosophical Studies, 153: 161–174.\",\n \"Bayne, T., 2009, “Perception and the reach of phenomenal\\ncontent,” Philosophical Quarterly, 59:\\n385–404.\",\n \"Bermúdez, J. L., 2000, “Naturalized sense\\ndata,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 61(2):\\n353–374.\",\n \"Bertelson, P., 1999, “Ventriloquism: A case of cross-modal\\nperceptual grouping,” in G. Aschersleben, T. Bachmann, and J.\\nMússeler (eds.), Cognitive Contributions to the Perception\\nof Spatial and Temporal Events, Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp.\\n347–317.\",\n \"Blauert, J., 1997, Spatial Hearing: The Psychophysics of Human\\nSound Localization, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.\",\n \"Bloomfield, L., 1933, Language, New York: Holt.\",\n \"Blumstein, S. E. and K. N. Stevens, 1981, “Phonetic features\\nand acoustic invariance in speech,” Cognition, 10:\\n25–32.\",\n \"Bosch, L. and N. Sebastián-Gallés, 1997,\\n“Native-language recognition abilities in 4-month-old infants\\nfrom monolingual and bilingual environments,” Cognition,\\n65(1): 33–69.\",\n \"Bregman, A. S., 1990, Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual\\nOrganization of Sound, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.\",\n \"Brogaard, B., 2018, “In defense of hearing meanings,”\\nSynthese, 195: 2967–2983.\",\n \"Bullot, N. and P. Egré (eds.), 2010, Objects and Sound\\nPerception, Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1.\",\n \"Casati, R. and J. Dokic, 1994, La Philosopie du Son,\\nNîmes: Chambon.\",\n \"–––, 2005, “Sounds,” in The\\nStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2009 Edition), Edward\\nN. Zalta (ed.), URL =\\n <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2009/entries/sounds/>.\",\n \"Casati, R., E. Di Bona, and J. Dokic, 2013, “The\\nOckhamization of the event sources of sound,” Analysis,\\n73(3): 462–466.\",\n \"Clark, A., 2000, A Theory of Sentience, New York: Oxford\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"–––, 2011, “Cross-modal cuing and\\nselective attention,” in F. MacPherson (ed.), The Senses.\\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Cohen, J., 2009, “Sounds and temporality,” Oxford\\nStudies in Metaphysics, 5: 303–320.\",\n \"Cooper, F. S., P. C. Delattre, A. M. Liberman, J. M. Borst, and L.\\nJ. Gerstman, 1952, “Some experiments on the perception of\\nsynthetic speech sounds,” Journal of the Acoustical Society\\nof America, 24: 597–606.\",\n \"Diehl, R. L., A. J. Lotto, and L. L. Holt, 2004, “Speech\\nperception,” Annual Review of Psychology, 55:\\n149–179.\",\n \"Evans, G., 1980, “Things without the mind—a commentary\\nupon Chapter Two of Strawson’s Individuals,” in Z.\\nvan Straaten (ed.), Philosophical Subjects: Essays Presented to P.\\nF. Strawson, Oxford: Clarendon Press; reprinted in G. Evans, 1985,\\nCollected Papers, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"Fodor, J. A., 1983, The Modularity of Mind, Cambridge, MA:\\nMIT Press.\",\n \"Fulkerson, M., 2013, The First Sense: A Philosophical Study of\\nHuman Touch, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.\",\n \"–––, 2016, “Touch,” in The\\nStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2016 Edition), Edward\\nN. Zalta (ed.), URL =\\n <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/touch/>.\",\n \"Fowler, C. A., 1986, “An event approach to the study of\\nspeech perception from a direct-realist perspective,” Journal\\nof Phonetics, 14: 3–28.\",\n \"Fowler, G., 2013, “Against the primary sound account of\\nechoes,” Analysis, 73: 466–473.\",\n \"Gelfand, S. A., 2004, Hearing: An Introduction to Psychological\\nand Physiological Acoustics, 4th edition, New York: Marcel\\nDekker.\",\n \"Gick, B., K. M. Jóhannsdóttir, D. Gibraiel, and J.\\nMühlbauer, 2008, “Tactile enhancement of auditory and\\nvisual speech perception in untrained perceivers,” Journal of\\nthe Acoustical Society of America, 123(4): EL72–76.\",\n \"Green, E. J., 2019, “A theory of perceptual objects,”\\nPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research, 99(3):\\n663–693.\",\n \"Griffiths, T. D. and J. D. Warren, 2004, “What is an\\nauditory object?” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 5:\\n887–892.\",\n \"Hamilton, A., 2007, Aesthetics and Music. London:\\nContinuum.\",\n \"–––, 2009, “The sound of music,”, in\\nNudds and O’Callaghan 2009, pp. 146–182.\",\n \"Handel, S., 1995, “Timbre perception and auditory object\\nidentification,” in B. C. Moore (ed.), Hearing, San\\nDiego, CA: Academic Press, pp. 425–461.\",\n \"Hartmann, W. M., 1997, Signals, Sound, and Sensation, New\\nYork: Springer.\",\n \"Heald, S. L. M., S. C. Van Hedger, and H. C. Nusbaum, 2017,\\n“Perceptual plasticity for auditory object recognition,”\\nFrontiers in Psychology, 8: 781.\",\n \"Holt, L. L. and A. J. Lotto, 2008, “Speech perception within\\nan auditory cognitive science framework,” Current Directions\\nin Psychological Science, 17(1): 42–46.\",\n \"Houtsma, A., 1995, “Pitch perception,” in B. C. J.\\nMoore (ed.), Hearing, New York: Academic Press, pp.\\n267–291.\",\n \"Isaac, A. M. C., 2018, “Prospects for timbre\\nphysicalism,” Philosophical Studies, 175(2):\\n503–529.\",\n \"Jackson, F., 1977, Perception: A Representative Theory,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press. \",\n \"Kivy, P., 1991, Music Alone, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University\\nPress. \",\n \"Kubovy, M., 1981, “Concurrent pitch-segregation and the\\ntheory of indispensable attributes,” in M. Kubovy and J. R.\\nPomerantz (eds.), Perceptual Organization, Hillsdale, NJ:\\nErlbaum, pp. 55–98. \",\n \"Kubovy, M. and D. Van Valkenburg, 2001, “Auditory and visual\\nobjects,” Cognition, 80: 97–126.\",\n \"Kuhl, P. K., 2000, “A new view of language\\nacquisition,” Proceedings of the National Academy of\\nScience, 97(22): 11850–11857.\",\n \"Kulvicki, J., 2008, “The nature of noise,”\\nPhilosophers’ Imprint, 8(11): 1–16.\",\n \"Leddington, J. P., 2019, “Sounds fully simplified,”\\nAnalysis, 79(4): 621–629.\",\n \"Leslie, A. M., F. Xu, P. D. Tremoulet, and B. J. Scholl, 1998,\\n“Indexing and the object concept: developing ‘what’\\nand ‘where’ systems,” Trends in Cognitive\\nSciences, 2(1): 10–18.\",\n \"Liberman, A. M., 1970, “The grammars of speech and\\nlanguage,” Cognitive Psychology, 1(4):\\n301–323.\",\n \"–––, 1996, Speech: A Special Code,\\nCambridge, MA: MIT Press.\",\n \"Liberman, A. M., F. S. Cooper, D. P. Shankweiler, and M.\\nStuddert-Kennedy, 1967, “Perception of the speech code,”\\nPsychological Review, 74(6): 431–461.\",\n \"Liberman, A. M. and I. G. Mattingly, 1985, “The motor theory\\nof speech perception revised,” Cognition, 21:\\n1–36.\",\n \"–––, 1989, “A specialization for speech\\nperception,” Science, 243(4890): 489–494.\",\n \"Locke, J., 1689/1975, An Essay Concerning Human\\nUnderstanding, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"Lotto, A. J., K. R. Kluender, and L. L. Holt, 1997, “Animal\\nmodels of speech perception phenomena,” in K. Singer, R. Eggert,\\nand G. Anderson (eds.), Chicago Linguistic Society, 33,\\nChicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, pp. 357–367. \",\n \"Lycan, W., 2000, “The slighting of smell,” in N.\\nBhushan and S. Rosenfeld (eds.), Of Minds and Molecules: New\\nPhilosophical Perspectives on Chemistry, Oxford: Oxford University\\nPress, pp. 273–89.\",\n \"Maclachlan, D. L. C., 1989, Philosophy of Perception,\\nEnglewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. \",\n \"Mag Uidhir, C., 2007, “Recordings as performances,”\\nBritish Journal of Aesthetics, 47(3): 298–314.\",\n \"Malpas, R. M. P., 1965, “The location of sound,” in R.\\nJ. Butler (ed.), Analytical Philosophy, Second Series, Oxford:\\nBasil Blackwell, pp. 131–144.\",\n \"Martin, M. G. F., 1992, “Sight and touch,” in T. Crane\\n(ed.), The Contents of Experience, Cambridge: Cambridge\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"–––, 1993, “Sense modalities and spatial\\nproperties,” in N. Eilan, R. McCarthy, and B. Brewer (eds.),\\nSpatial Representation: Problems in Philosophy and Psychology,\\nOxford: Blackwell.\",\n \"Matthen, M., 2005, Seeing, Doing, and Knowing: A Philosophical\\nTheory of Sense Perception, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2010, “On the diversity of auditory\\nobjects,” Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1:\\n63–89.\",\n \"––– (ed.), 2015, Oxford Handbook of\\nPhilosophy of Perception, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"McGurk, H. and J. MacDonald, 1976, “Hearing lips and seeing\\nvoices,” Nature, 264: 746–748.\",\n \"Mehler, J., P. Jusczyk, G. Lambertz, N. Halsted, J. Bertoncini,\\nand C. Amiel-Tison, 1988, “A precursor of language acquisition\\nin young infants,” Cognition, 29: 143–178.\",\n \"Mole, C., 2009, “The Motor Theory of speech\\nperception,” in M. Nudds and C. O’Callaghan (eds.),\\nSounds and Perception: New Philosophical Essays, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Nakayama, K., Z. J. He, and S. Shimojo, 1995, “Visual\\nsurface representation,” in S. M. Kosslyn and D. N. Osherson\\n(eds.), Visual Cognition, Volume 2 of An Invitation to\\nCognitive Science, second edition, Cambridge, MA: MIT, pp.\\n1–70.\",\n \"Noë, A., 2004, Action in Perception, Cambridge, MA:\\nMIT Press.\",\n \"Nudds, M., 2001, “Experiencing the production of\\nsounds,” European Journal of Philosophy, 9:\\n210–229.\",\n \"–––, 2003, “The significance of the\\nsenses,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 104(1):\\n31–51.\",\n \"–––, 2010, “What are auditory\\nobjects?” Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1:\\n105–122.\",\n \"Nudds, M. and C. O’Callaghan, 2009, Sounds and\\nPerception: New Philosophical Essays, Oxford: Oxford University\\nPress.\",\n \"O’Callaghan, C., 2007, Sounds: A Philosophical\\nTheory, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2008a, “Object perception: Vision and\\naudition,” Philosophy Compass, 3: 803–829.\",\n \"–––, 2008b, “Seeing what you hear:\\nCross-modal illusions and perception,” Philosophical\\nIssues, 18: 316–338.\",\n \"–––, 2010, “Perceiving the locations of\\nsounds,” Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1:\\n123–140.\",\n \"–––, 2011a, “Hearing properties, effects\\nor parts?” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 111:\\n375–405.\",\n \"–––, 2011b, “Against hearing\\nmeanings,” Philosophical Quarterly, 61:\\n783–807.\",\n \"–––, 2012, “Perception and\\nmultimodality,” in E. Margolis, R. Samuels, and S. Stich (eds.),\\nOxford Handbook of Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press, pp. 92–117.\",\n \"–––, 2015, “Speech perception,” in\\nM. Matthen (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Perception,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 475–494.\",\n \"–––, 2016, “Objects for multisensory\\nperception,” Philosophical Studies, 173(5):\\n1269–1289.\",\n \"–––, 2019, A Multisensory Philosophy of\\nPerception, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"O’Shaughnessy, B., 1989, “The sense of touch,”\\nAustralasian Journal of Philosophy, 69: 37–58.\",\n \"–––, 2002, Consciousness and the World,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Pasnau, R., 1999, “What is sound?” Philosophical\\nQuarterly, 49: 309–324.\",\n \"–––, 2000, “Sensible qualities: The case\\nof sound,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 38:\\n27–40.\",\n \"Pautz, A., 2014, “The real trouble for phenomenal\\nexternalists,” in R. Brown (ed.), Consciousness Inside and\\nOut: Phenomenology, Neuroscience, and the Nature of Experience,\\nNew York: Springer, pp. 237–298.\",\n \"–––, 2017, “Experiences are\\nrepresentations: An empirical argument,” in B. Nanay (ed.),\\nCurrent Controversies in Philosophy of Perception, New York:\\nRoutledge, pp. 23–43.\",\n \"Pinker, S., 1994, The Language Instinct, New York: William\\nMorrow.\",\n \"Rand, T. C., 1974, “Dichotic release from masking for\\nspeech,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America,\\n55: 678–680.\",\n \"Remez, R. E. and J. D. Trout, 2009, “Philosophical messages\\nin the medium of spoken language,” in M. Nudds and C.\\nO’Callaghan (eds.), Sounds and Perception: New Philosophical\\nEssays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 234–263.\",\n \"Rey, G., 2012, “Externalism and inexistence in early\\ncontent,” in R. Schantz (ed.), Prospects for Meaning, New\\nYork: de Gruyter, pp. 503–530.\",\n \"Richardson, L., 2013, “Flavour, taste and smell,”\\nMind and Language, 28(3): 322–341.\",\n \"Rosenblum, L. D., 2004, “Perceiving articulatory events:\\nLessons for an ecological psychoacoustics,” in J. G. Neuhoff\\n(ed.), Ecological Psychoacoustics, Chapter 8, San Diego, CA:\\nElsevier, pp. 220–248.\",\n \"Scholl, B. J., 2001, “Objects and attention: the state of\\nthe art,” Cognition, 80: 1–46.\",\n \"Scott, M., 2001, “Tactual perception,” Australasian\\nJournal of Philosophy, 79(2): 149–160.\",\n \"Scruton, R., 1997, The Aesthetics of Music, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Shams, L., Y. Kamitani, and S. Shimojo, 2000, “What you see\\nis what you hear,” Nature, 408: 788.\",\n \"–––, 2002, “Visual illusion induced by\\nsound,” Cognitive Brain Research, 14: 147–152.\",\n \"Siegel, S., 2006, “Which properties are represented in\\nperception?” in T. Gendler and J. Hawthorne (eds.),\\nPerceptual Experience, New York: Oxford University Press, pp.\\n481–503.\",\n \"Smith, A. D., 2002, The Problem of Perception, Cambridge,\\nMA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Smith, B. C., 2015, “The chemical senses,” in M.\\nMatthen (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Perception,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 314–352.\",\n \"Solomon, J., 2007, Spatialization in Music: The Analysis and\\nInterpretation of Spatial Gestures, Ph.D. thesis, Department of\\nMusic, University of Georgia, Athens, GA.\\n [available online (in PDF)]\",\n \"Sorensen, R., 2008, Seeing Dark Things, New York: Oxford\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Soto-Faraco, S., J. Navarra, W. M. Weikum, A. Vouloumanos, N.\\nSebastián-Gallés, and J. F. Werker, 2007,\\n“Discriminating languages by speech-reading,”\\nPerception and Psychophysics, 69(2): 218.\",\n \"Spelke, E. S., 1990, “Principles of object\\nperception,” Cognitive Science, 14: 29–56.\",\n \"Stevens, S. and J. Volkmann, 1940, “The relation of pitch to\\nfrequency: A revised scale,” American Journal of\\nPsychology, 53: 329–353.\",\n \"Stevens, S., J. Volkmann, and E. Newman, 1937, “A scale for\\nthe measurement of the psychological magnitude pitch,”\\nJournal of the Acoustical Society of America, 8(3):\\n185–190.\",\n \"Stokes, D., M. Matthen, and S. Biggs (eds.), 2015, Perception\\nand Its Modalities, New York: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Strawson, P. F., 1959, Individuals, New York: Routledge.\\n\",\n \"Trout, J. D., 2001a, “Metaphysics, method, and the mouth:\\nPhilosophical lessons of speech perception,” Philosophical\\nPsychology, 14(3): 261–291.\",\n \"–––, 2001b, “The biological basis of\\nspeech: What to infer from talking to the animals,”\\nPsychological Review, 108(3): 523–549.\",\n \"Van Valkenburg, D. and M. Kubovy, 2003, “In defense of the\\ntheory of indispensable attributes,” Cognition, 87:\\n225–233.\",\n \"Vouloumanos, A. and J. F. Werker, 2007, “Listening to\\nlanguage at birth: evidence for a bias for speech in neonates,”\\nDevelopmental Science, 10(2): 159–164.\",\n \"Weikum, W. M., A. Vouloumanos, J. Navarra, S. Soto-Faraco, N.\\nSebastián-Gallés, and J. F. Werker, 2007, “Visual\\nlanguage discrimination in infancy,” Science, 316(5828):\\n1159.\",\n \"Welch, R. B. and D. H. Warren, 1980, “Immediate perceptual\\nresponse to intersensory discrepancy,” Psychological\\nBulletin, 88(3): 638–667.\",\n \"Werker, J., 1995, “Exploring developmental changes in\\ncross-language speech perception,” in L. Gleitman and M.\\nLiberman (eds.), Language: An Invitation to Cognitive Science,\\nVolume 1, 2nd edition, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.\\n87–106.\",\n \"Young, N., 2017, “Hearing spaces,” Australasian\\nJournal of Philosophy, 95(2): 242–255.\",\n \"–––, 2018, “Hearing objects and\\nevents,” Philosophical Studies, 175(11):\\n2931–2950.\",\n \"Zahorik, P. and F. Wightman, 2001, “Loudness constancy with\\nvarying sound source distance,” Nature Neuroscience, 4:\\n78–83.\",\n \"Zwicker, E. and H. Fastl, 2006, Psychoacoustics: Facts and\\nModels, 3rd edition, New York: Springer.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../color/","text":"color"},{"href":"../consciousness-unity/","text":"consciousness: unity of"},{"href":"../music/","text":"music, philosophy of"},{"href":"../perception-contents/","text":"perception: the contents of"},{"href":"../perception-problem/","text":"perception: the problem of"},{"href":"../qualia-inverted/","text":"qualia: inverted"},{"href":"../sounds/","text":"sounds"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../color/\",\n \"text\": \"color\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../consciousness-unity/\",\n \"text\": \"consciousness: unity of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../music/\",\n \"text\": \"music, philosophy of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../perception-contents/\",\n \"text\": \"perception: the contents of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../perception-problem/\",\n \"text\": \"perception: the problem of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../qualia-inverted/\",\n \"text\": \"qualia: inverted\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../sounds/\",\n \"text\": \"sounds\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":91,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"augustine"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Saint Augustine"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Wed Sep 25, 2019"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nAugustine was perhaps the greatest Christian philosopher of Antiquity\nand certainly the one who exerted the deepest and most lasting\ninfluence. He is a saint of the Catholic Church, and his authority in\ntheological matters was universally accepted in the Latin Middle Ages\nand remained, in the Western Christian tradition, virtually\nuncontested till the nineteenth century. The impact of his views on\nsin, grace, freedom and sexuality on Western culture can hardly be\noverrated. These views, deeply at variance with the ancient\nphilosophical and cultural tradition, provoked however fierce\ncriticism in Augustine’s lifetime and have, again, been\nvigorously opposed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from\nvarious (e.g., humanist, liberal, feminist) standpoints. Philosophers\nkeep however being fascinated by his often innovative ideas on\nlanguage, on skepticism and knowledge, on will and the emotions, on\nfreedom and determinism and on the structure of the human mind and,\nlast but not least, by his way of doing philosophy, which\nis—though of course committed to the truth of biblical\nrevelation—surprisingly undogmatic and marked by a spirit of\nrelentless inquiry. His most famous work, the Confessiones,\nis unique in the ancient literary tradition but greatly influenced the\nmodern tradition of autobiography; it is an intriguing piece of\nphilosophy from a first-person perspective. Because of his importance\nfor the philosophical tradition of the Middle Ages he is often listed\nas the first medieval philosopher. But even though he was born several\ndecades after the emperor Constantine I had terminated the\nanti-Christian persecutions and, in his mature years, saw the\nanti-pagan and anti-heretic legislation of Theodosius I and his sons,\nwhich virtually made Catholic (i.e., Nicene) Christianity the official\nreligion of the Roman Empire, Augustine did not live in a\n“medieval” Christian world. Pagan religious, cultural and\nsocial traditions were much alive in his congregation, as he often\ndeplores in his sermons, and his own cultural outlook was, like that\nof most of his learned upper-class contemporaries, shaped by the\nclassical Latin authors, poets and philosophers whom he studied in the\nschools of grammar and rhetoric long before he encountered the Bible\nand Christian writers. Throughout his work he engages with pre- and\nnon-Christian philosophy, much of which he knew from firsthand.\nPlatonism in particular remained a decisive ingredient of his thought.\nHe is therefore best read as a Christian philosopher of late antiquity\nshaped by and in constant dialogue with the classical tradition.","Translations from Greek or Latin texts in this entry are by the\nauthor, unless otherwise stated. Biblical quotations are translated\nfrom Augustine’s Latin version; these may differ from the Greek\nor Hebrew original and/or from the Latin Vulgate."],"string":"[\n \"\\nAugustine was perhaps the greatest Christian philosopher of Antiquity\\nand certainly the one who exerted the deepest and most lasting\\ninfluence. He is a saint of the Catholic Church, and his authority in\\ntheological matters was universally accepted in the Latin Middle Ages\\nand remained, in the Western Christian tradition, virtually\\nuncontested till the nineteenth century. The impact of his views on\\nsin, grace, freedom and sexuality on Western culture can hardly be\\noverrated. These views, deeply at variance with the ancient\\nphilosophical and cultural tradition, provoked however fierce\\ncriticism in Augustine’s lifetime and have, again, been\\nvigorously opposed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from\\nvarious (e.g., humanist, liberal, feminist) standpoints. Philosophers\\nkeep however being fascinated by his often innovative ideas on\\nlanguage, on skepticism and knowledge, on will and the emotions, on\\nfreedom and determinism and on the structure of the human mind and,\\nlast but not least, by his way of doing philosophy, which\\nis—though of course committed to the truth of biblical\\nrevelation—surprisingly undogmatic and marked by a spirit of\\nrelentless inquiry. His most famous work, the Confessiones,\\nis unique in the ancient literary tradition but greatly influenced the\\nmodern tradition of autobiography; it is an intriguing piece of\\nphilosophy from a first-person perspective. Because of his importance\\nfor the philosophical tradition of the Middle Ages he is often listed\\nas the first medieval philosopher. But even though he was born several\\ndecades after the emperor Constantine I had terminated the\\nanti-Christian persecutions and, in his mature years, saw the\\nanti-pagan and anti-heretic legislation of Theodosius I and his sons,\\nwhich virtually made Catholic (i.e., Nicene) Christianity the official\\nreligion of the Roman Empire, Augustine did not live in a\\n“medieval” Christian world. Pagan religious, cultural and\\nsocial traditions were much alive in his congregation, as he often\\ndeplores in his sermons, and his own cultural outlook was, like that\\nof most of his learned upper-class contemporaries, shaped by the\\nclassical Latin authors, poets and philosophers whom he studied in the\\nschools of grammar and rhetoric long before he encountered the Bible\\nand Christian writers. Throughout his work he engages with pre- and\\nnon-Christian philosophy, much of which he knew from firsthand.\\nPlatonism in particular remained a decisive ingredient of his thought.\\nHe is therefore best read as a Christian philosopher of late antiquity\\nshaped by and in constant dialogue with the classical tradition.\",\n \"Translations from Greek or Latin texts in this entry are by the\\nauthor, unless otherwise stated. Biblical quotations are translated\\nfrom Augustine’s Latin version; these may differ from the Greek\\nor Hebrew original and/or from the Latin Vulgate.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Life","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. Work","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"3. Augustine and Philosophy","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"4. The Philosophical Tradition; Augustine’s Platonism","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"5. Theory of Knowledge","sub_toc":["5.1 Skepticism and Certainty","5.2 Illumination","5.3 Faith and Reason","5.4 Language and Signs"]},{"content_title":"6. Anthropology: God and the Soul; Soul and Body","sub_toc":["6.1 Soul as a Created Being","6.2 The Human Mind as an Image of God"]},{"content_title":"7. Ethics","sub_toc":["7.1 Happiness","7.2 Virtue","7.3 Love","7.4 Will and Freedom","7.5 Will and Evil","7.6 Grace, Predestination and Original Sin"]},{"content_title":"8. History and Political Philosophy","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"9. Gender, Women, and Sexuality","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"10. Creation and Time","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"11. Legacy","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":["Editions","Translations","Commentaries","Reference Works","Introductory and General","Greek and Latin Authors Cited","Selected Secondary Literature"]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Life\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Work\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Augustine and Philosophy\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. The Philosophical Tradition; Augustine’s Platonism\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Theory of Knowledge\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"5.1 Skepticism and Certainty\",\n \"5.2 Illumination\",\n \"5.3 Faith and Reason\",\n \"5.4 Language and Signs\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. Anthropology: God and the Soul; Soul and Body\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"6.1 Soul as a Created Being\",\n \"6.2 The Human Mind as an Image of God\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"7. Ethics\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"7.1 Happiness\",\n \"7.2 Virtue\",\n \"7.3 Love\",\n \"7.4 Will and Freedom\",\n \"7.5 Will and Evil\",\n \"7.6 Grace, Predestination and Original Sin\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"8. History and Political Philosophy\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"9. Gender, Women, and Sexuality\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"10. Creation and Time\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"11. Legacy\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"Editions\",\n \"Translations\",\n \"Commentaries\",\n \"Reference Works\",\n \"Introductory and General\",\n \"Greek and Latin Authors Cited\",\n \"Selected Secondary Literature\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\nAugustine (Aurelius Augustinus) lived from 13 November 354 to 28\nAugust 430. He was born in Thagaste in Roman Africa (modern Souk Ahras\nin Algeria). His mother Monnica (d. 388), a devout Christian, seems to\nhave exerted a deep but not wholly unambiguous influence on his\nreligious development. His father Patricius (d. 372) was baptized on\nhis deathbed. Augustine himself was made a catechumen early in his\nlife. His studies of grammar and rhetoric in the provincial centers of\nMadauros and Carthage, which strained the financial resources of his\nmiddle-class parents, were hoped to pave his way for a future career\nin the higher imperial administration. In Carthage at the age of ca.\n18, he found a mistress with whom he lived in a monogamous union for\nca. 14 years and who bore him a son, Adeodatus, who was baptized\ntogether with his father in Milan and died a little later (ca. 390)\naged 18. Ca. 373 Augustine became a “hearer”\n(auditor) of Manicheism, a dualistic religion with Persian\norigins that, in Northern Africa, had developed into a variety of\nChristianity (and was persecuted by the state as a heresy). His\nadherence to Manicheism lasted for nine years and was strongly opposed\nby Monnica. Though probably active as a Manichean apologist and\nmissionary, he never became one of the sect’s\n“elect” (electi), who were committed to\nasceticism and sexual abstinence. In 383 he moved to Milan, then the\ncapital of the western half of the Empire, to become a publicly paid\nprofessor of rhetoric of the city and an official panegyrist at the\nImperial court. Here he sent away his mistress to free the way for an\nadvantageous marriage (a behavior presumably common for young\ncareerists at that epoch). At Milan he underwent the influence of\nBishop Ambrose (339–397), who taught him the allegorical method\nof Scriptural exegesis, and of some Neoplatonically inclined\nChristians who acquainted him with an understanding of Christianity\nthat was philosophically informed and, to Augustine, intellectually\nmore satisfactory than Manicheism, from which he had already begun to\ndistance himself. The ensuing period of uncertainty and\ndoubt—depicted in the Confessiones as a crisis in the\nmedical sense—ended in summer 386, when Augustine converted to\nascetic Christianity and gave up both his chair of rhetoric and his\nfurther career prospects. After a winter of philosophical leisure at\nthe rural estate of Cassiciacum near Milan, Augustine was baptized by\nAmbrose at Easter 387 and returned to Africa, accompanied by his son,\nsome friends and his mother, who died on the journey (Ostia, 388). In\n391 he was, apparently against his will, ordained a priest in the\ndiocese of the maritime city of Hippo Regius (modern Annaba/Bône\nin Algeria). About five years later (ca. 396) he succeeded the local\nbishop. This ecclesiastical function involved new pastoral, political,\nadministrative and juridical duties, and his responsibility for and\nexperiences with an ordinary Christian congregation may have\ncontributed to modify his views on grace and original sin (Brown 2000:\nch. 15). But his rhetorical skills equipped him well for his daily\npreaching and for religious disputes. Throughout his life as a bishop\nhe was involved in religious controversies with Manicheans, Donatists,\nPelagians and, to a lesser extent, pagans. Most of the numerous books\nand letters he wrote in that period were part of these controversies\nor at least inspired by them, and even those that were not (e.g.,\nDe Genesi ad litteram, De trinitate) combine\nphilosophical or theological teaching with rhetorical persuasion\n(Tornau 2006a). Polemics against his former co-religionists, the\nManicheans, looms large in his work until about 400; the debate with\nthem helped to shape his ideas on the non-substantiality of evil and\non human responsibility. The Donatist schism had its roots in the last\ngreat persecution at the beginning of the fourth century. The\nDonatists saw themselves as the legitimate successors of those who had\nremained steadfast during the persecution and claimed to represent the\nAfrican tradition of a Christian “church of the pure”.\nSince 405 the Donatists were subsumed under the imperial laws against\nheresy and forced to re-enter the Catholic church by legal means;\nthese measures were intensified after a conference at Carthage (411)\nhad marked the official end of Donatism in Africa (Lancel &\nAlexander 1996–2002). By way of his assiduous writing against\nthe Donatists, Augustine sharpened his ecclesiological ideas and\ndeveloped a theory of religious coercion based on an intentionalist\nunderstanding of Christian love. Pelagianism (named after the British\nascetic Pelagius) was a movement Augustine became aware of around 412.\nHe and his African fellow-bishops managed to get it condemned as a\nheresy in 418. While not denying the importance of divine grace,\nPelagius and his followers insisted that the human being was by nature\nfree and able not to sin (possibilitas). Against this view,\nAugustine vigorously defended his doctrine of the human being’s\nradical dependence on grace, a conviction already voiced in the\nConfessiones but refined and hardened during the controversy.\nThe last decade of Augustine’s life is marked by a vitriolic\ndebate with the Pelagianist ex-bishop Julian of Aeclanum who accused\nAugustine of crypto-Manicheism and of denying free will while\nAugustine blamed him and the Pelagianists for evacuating\nChrist’s sacrifice by denying original sin (Drecoll\n2012–2018). Controversy with pagan traditionalists seems to have\nreached a peak after 400, when Augustine refuted a series of\nobjections against Christianity apparently extracted from\nPorphyry’s treatise Against the Christians\n(Letter 102; Bochet 2011), and after 410, when the city of\nRome had been sacked by Alaric and his Goths. The City of\nGod, Augustine’s great apology, was prompted by this\nsymbolic event, though it is by no means just a response to pagan\npolemics.\n Augustine’s life ended when the Vandals besieged Hippo; he is\nsaid to have died with a word of Plotinus on his lips (Possidius,\nVita Augustini 28.11, after Plotinus, Enneads I\n4.7.23–24)."],"section_title":"1. Life","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nAugustine’s literary output surpasses the preserved work of\nalmost all other ancient writers in quantity. In the\nRetractationes (“Revisions”, a critical survey of\nhis writings in chronological order down to 428 CE) he suggests a\nthreefold division of his work into books, letters and sermons\n(Retractationes 1, prologue 1); about 100 books, 300 letters,\nand 500 sermons have survived. Augustine’s literary career after\nhis conversion began with philosophical dialogues. The first of these,\nwritten in Cassiciacum in 386/7, deal with traditional topics such as\nskepticism (Contra Academicos), happiness (De beata\nvita), evil (De ordine) and the immortality of the soul\n(Soliloquia, De immortalitate animae). Augustine continued to\npursue these issues in dialogues on the immateriality of the soul\n(De quantitate animae, 388), language and learning (De\nmagistro, 388–391), freedom of choice and human\nresponsibility (De libero arbitrio, begun in 388 and\ncompleted perhaps as late as 395) and the numeric structure of reality\n(De musica, 388–390). The treatise De vera\nreligione (389–391) is a kind of summa of Augustine’s\nearly Christian philosophy. After the start of his ecclesiastical\ncareer he abandoned the dialogue form, perhaps because he realized its\nelitist and potentially misleading character (G. Clark 2009; Catapano\n2013). Of the works from his priesthood and episcopate, many are\ncontroversial writings against the Manicheans (e.g., Contra\nFaustum Manichaeum, around 400), the Donatists (e.g., Contra\nlitteras Petiliani, 401–405; De baptismo, 404) and\nthe Pelagians (e.g., De spiritu et littera, 412; Contra\nIulianum, 422; De gratia et libero arbitrio,\n424–427; and his last and unfinished work Contra Iulianum\nopus imperfectum, which preserves a substantial portion of the\notherwise lost treatise Ad Florum by his Pelagian adversary\nJulian of Aeclanum). Among the philosophically most interesting of\nthese works are De utilitate credendi (391–392, a\ndefense of faith/belief against Manichean rationalism), De natura\nboni (399, a concise anti-Manichean argument for the doctrine\nthat evil is a privation of goodness rather than an independent\nsubstance), De natura et gratia (413–417, a reply to\nPelagius’ treatise De natura) and De correptione et\ngratia (426/427, refuting a Christian version of the Stoic\n‘Lazy Argument’ that had been put forward against Augustine’s\ndoctrine of grace). Augustine is however most famous for the five long\ntreatises with a wider scope he composed between 396 and 426. The\nConfessiones (ca. 396–400), probably his most original\nwork, is “philosophy in autobiography” (Mann 2014) rather\nthan an autobiography in a modern sense. It shows how an individual\nlife—Augustine’s own—is made sense of by God’s\nprovidence and grace as well as by his creation and economy of\nsalvation. De doctrina christiana (begun in 396/7 but\ncompleted only in 426/7) is a handbook of biblical hermeneutics and\nChristian rhetoric; it delineates the semiotic dichotomy of\n“things” (res) and—especially\nlinguistic—“signs” (signa) and critically\nassesses the importance of the classical disciplines for the biblical\nexegete. De trinitate (begun in 399 and completed in 419 or\nperhaps as late as 426) has impressed modern philosophical readers by\nits probing analyses of the human mind as an “image” of\nthe Divine Trinity. De Genesi ad litteram (401/2–416)\nis an attempt at winning a philosophically justifiable cosmology from\nthe opening chapters of Genesis. Here as in most of Augustine’s\nworks philosophy is inseparable from biblical exegesis. The monumental\napologetic treatise De civitate dei (begun in 412, two years\nafter the sack of Rome, and completed in 426) argues that happiness\ncan be found neither in the Roman nor the philosophical tradition but\nonly through membership in the city of God whose founder is Christ.\nAmong many other things, it has interesting reflections on the secular\nstate and on the Christian’s life in a secular society. The\nsermons document Augustine’s ability to adapt complex ideas to a\nlarge and not overly learned audience. Two long series on the Psalms\n(Enarrationes in Psalmos, ca. 392–422) and the Gospel\nof John (In Iohannis evangelium tractatus, ca. 406–420)\nstand out; a series of sermons on the First Letter of John (In\nepistulam Iohannis ad Parthos tractatus decem, 407) is\nAugustine’s most sustained discussion of Christian love. The\nletters are not personal or intimate documents but public writings\nthat are part of Augustine’s teaching and of his ecclesiastical\npolitics. Some of them reach the length of full treatises and offer\nexcellent philosophical discussions (Letter 155 on virtue;\nLetter 120 on faith and reason; Letter 147 on the\n“seeing” of God)."],"section_title":"2. Work","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nFrom ancient thought Augustine inherited the notion that philosophy is\n“love of wisdom” (Confessiones 3.8; De\ncivitate dei 8.1), i.e., an attempt to pursue happiness—or,\nas late-antique thinkers, both pagan and Christian, liked to put it,\nsalvation—by seeking insight into the true nature of things and\nliving accordingly. This kind of philosophy he emphatically endorses,\nespecially in his early work (cf., e.g., Contra Academicos\n1.1). He is convinced that the true philosopher is a lover of God\nbecause true wisdom is, in the last resort, identical with God, a\npoint on which he feels in agreement with both Paul (1 Corinthians\n1:24) and Plato (cf. De civitate dei 8.8). This is why he\nthinks that Christianity is “the true philosophy”\n(Contra Iulianum 4.72; the view is common among ancient,\nespecially Greek, Christian thinkers) and that true philosophy and\ntrue (cultic) religion are identical (De vera religione 8).\nIn case of doubt, practice takes precedence over theory: in the\nCassiciacum dialogues Monnica, who represents the saintly but\nuneducated, is credited with a philosophy of her own (De\nordine 1,31–32; 2.45). At the same time, Augustine sharply\ncriticizes the “philosophy of this world” censured in the\nNew Testament that distracts from Christ (Colossians 2:8). In his\nearly work he usually limits this verdict to the Hellenistic\nmaterialist systems (Contra Academicos 3.42; De\nordine 1.32); later he extends it even to Platonism because the\nlatter denies the possibility of a history of salvation (De\ncivitate dei 12.14). The main error he faults the philosophers\nwith is arrogance or pride (superbia), a reproach that does\nnot weigh lightly given that arrogance is, in Augustine’s view,\nthe root of all sins. Out of arrogance the philosophers presume to be\nable to reach happiness through their own virtue (De civitate\ndei 19.4, a criticism primarily directed against the Stoics), and\neven those among them who have gained insight into the true nature of\nGod and his Word (i.e., the Platonists) are incapable of\n“returning” to their divine “homeland” because\nthey proudly reject the mediation of Christ incarnate and resort to\nproud and malevolent demons instead, i.e., to the traditional pagan\ncults and to theurgy (Confessiones 7.27; In evangelium\nIohannis tractatus 2.2–4; De civitate dei\n10.24–29; Madec 1989). In his first works Augustine epitomizes\nhis own philosophical program with the phrase “to know God and\nthe soul” (Soliloquia 1.7; De ordine 2.47) and\npromises to pursue it with the means provided by Platonic philosophy\nas long as these are not in conflict with the authority of biblical\nrevelation (Contra Academicos 3.43). He thereby restates the\nold philosophical questions about the true nature of the human being\nand about the first principle of reality, and he adumbrates the key\nNeoplatonic idea that knowledge of our true self entails knowledge of\nour divine origin and will enable us to return to it (cf. Plotinus,\nEnneads VI.9.7.33–34). While these remain the basic\ncharacteristics of Augustine’s philosophy throughout his career,\nthey are considerably differentiated and modified as his engagement\nwith biblical thought intensifies and the notions of creation, sin and\ngrace acquire greater significance. Augustine is entirely unaware of\nthe medieval and modern distinction of “philosophy” and\n“theology”; both are inextricably intertwined in his\nthought, and it is unadvisable to try to disentangle them by focusing\nexclusively on elements that are deemed “philosophical”\nfrom a modern point of view."],"section_title":"3. Augustine and Philosophy","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nAugustine tells us that at the age of eighteen Cicero’s (now\nlost) protreptic dialogue Hortensius enflamed him for\nphilosophy (Confessiones 3.7), that as a young man he read\nAristotle’s Categories (ib. 4.28) and that his\nconversion was greatly furthered by his Neoplatonic readings (ib.\n7.13) as well as by the letters of Paul (ib. 7.27; Contra\nAcademicos 2.5). He is more reticent about Manichean texts, of\nwhich he must have known a great deal (van Oort 2012). From the 390s\nonwards the Bible becomes decisive for his thought, in particular\nGenesis, the Psalms and the Pauline and Johannine writings (even\nthough his exegesis remains philosophically impregnated), and his\nmature doctrine of grace seems to have grown from a fresh reading of\nPaul ca. 395 (see\n 7.6 Grace, Predestination and Original Sin).","\nThe most lasting philosophical influence on Augustine is Neoplatonism.\nHe does not specify the authors and the exact subjects of the\n“books of the Platonists” (Confessiones 7.13)\ntranslated into Latin by the fourth century Christian Neoplatonist\nMarius Victorinus (ib. 8.3) he read in 386. In the twentieth century\nthere was an ongoing and sometimes heated debate on whether to\nprivilege Plotinus (who is mentioned in De beata vita 4) or\nPorphyry (who is named first in De consensus evangelistarum\n1.23 ca. 400) as the main Neoplatonic influence on Augustine (for\nsummaries of the debate see O’Donnell 1992: II 421–424;\nKany 2007: 50–61). Today most scholars accept the compromise\nthat the “books of the Platonists” comprised some\ntreatises of Plotinus (e.g., Enneads I.6, I.2, V.1,\nVI.4–5) and a selection from Porphyry (Sententiae and,\nperhaps, Symmikta Zetemata). In any event, the importance of\nthis problem should not be overrated because Augustine seems to have\ncontinued his Neoplatonic readings after 386. Around 400 he had\nPorphyry’s Philosophy from the Oracles at his disposal;\nin De civitate dei 10 (ca. 417) he quotes from his Letter\nto Anebo and from an otherwise unattested anagogic treatise\ntitled, in the translation used by Augustine, De regressu\nanimae, the influence of which some have suspected already in\nAugustine’s earliest works. For the philosophy of mind in the\nsecond half of De trinitate he may have turned to Neoplatonic\ntexts on psychology. While the exact sources of Augustine’s\nNeoplatonism elude us, source criticism has been able to determine\nsome pervasive features of his thought that are doubtlessly\nNeoplatonic in origin: the transcendence and immateriality of God; the\nsuperiority of the unchangeable over the changeable (cf. Plato,\nTimaeus 28d); the ontological hierarchy of God, soul and body\n(Letter 18.2); the incorporeality and immortality of the\nsoul; the dichotomy of the intelligible and the sensible realms\n(attributed to Plato in Contra Academicos 3.37); the\nnon-spatial omnipresence of the intelligible in the sensible\n(Confessiones 1.2–4; Letter 137.4) and the\ncausal presence of God in his creation (De immortalitate\nanimae 14–15; De Genesi ad litteram 4.12.22); the\nexistence of intelligible (Platonic) Forms that are located in the\nmind of God and work as paradigms of the sensible things (De\ndiversis quaestionibus 46); the inwardness of the intelligible\nand the idea that we find God and Truth by turning inwards (De\nvera religione 72); the doctrine of evil as lack or privation of\ngoodness; the understanding of the soul’s love of God as a\nquasi-erotic desire for true beauty (Confessiones 10.38; cf.\nRist 1994: 155). A distinctly Platonic element is the notion of\nintellectual or spiritual ascent. Augustine thinks that by turning\ninwards and upwards from bodies to soul (i.e., from knowledge of\nobjects to self-knowledge) and from the sensible to the intelligible\nwe will finally be able to transcend ourselves and get in touch with\nthe supreme being that is none other than God and Truth and that is\nmore internal to us than our innermost self (Confessiones\n3.11; MacDonald 2014: 22–26; Augustine’s biblical proof\ntext is Romans 1:20, quoted, e.g., ib. 7.16). Ascents of this kind are\nubiquitous in Augustine’s work (e.g., De libero\narbitrio 2.7–39; Confessiones 10.8–38;\nDe trinitate 8–15). Whether the condensed versions in\nthe Confessiones (7.16; 7.23; 9.24–26) should be read\nas reports of mystical experiences is difficult to determine (Cassin\n2017). An early version of the Augustinian ascent is the\nproject—outlined in De ordine (2.24–52) but soon\nabandoned and virtually retracted in De doctrina\nchristiana—of turning the mind to the intelligible and to\nGod by means of a cursus in the liberal (especially mathematical)\ndisciplines (Pollmann & Vessey 2005). It is remotely inspired by\nPlato’s Republic and may have had a Neoplatonic precedent\n(Hadot 2005), though use of Varro’s work on the disciplines\ncannot be excluded (Shanzer 2005). As late as De civitate dei\n8 (ca. 417) he grants, in a brief doxography organized according to\nthe traditional fields of physics, ethics and epistemology, that\nPlatonism and Christianity share some basic philosophical insights,\nviz. that God is the first principle, that he is the supreme good and\nthat he is the criterion of knowledge (De civitate dei\n8.5–8; cf. already De vera religione 3–7). In\nspite of these important insights, Platonism cannot however lead to\nsalvation because it is unable or unwilling to accept the mediation of\nChrist. It is, therefore, also philosophically defective (De\ncivitate dei 10.32).","\nCicero is Augustine’s main source for the Hellenistic\nphilosophies, notably Academic skepticism and Stoicism. As a part of\nhis cultural heritage, Augustine quotes him and the other Latin\nclassics as it suits his argumentative purposes (Hagendahl 1967). His\nearly ideal of the sage who is independent of all goods that one can\nlose against one’s will is inherited from Stoic ethics (De\nbeata vita 11; De moribus 1.5; Wetzel 1992:\n42–55). Though the implication that the sage’s virtue\nguarantees his happiness already in this life is later rejected as\nillusory (De trinitate 13.10; De civitate dei 19.4;\nRetractationes 1.2; Wolterstorff 2012), the Christian martyr\ncan be styled in the manner of the Stoic sage whose happiness is\nimmune to torture (Letter 155.16; Tornau 2015: 278).\nAugustine’s Manichean past was constantly on his mind, as his\nincessant polemics shows; its precise impact on his thought is however\ndifficult to assess (van Oort (ed.) 2012; Fuhrer 2013; BeDuhn 2010 and\n2013). The claim of Julian of Aeclanum that with his doctrine of\npredestination and grace Augustine had fallen back into Manichean\ndualism has appealed to some modern critics, but Julian must ignore\nessential features of Augustine’s thought (e.g., the notion of\nevil as privatio boni) to make his claim plausible\n(Lamberigts 2001)."],"section_title":"4. The Philosophical Tradition; Augustine’s Platonism","subsections":[]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"5. Theory of Knowledge","subsections":[{"content":["\nAugustine’s earliest surviving work is a dialogue on Academic\nskepticism (Contra Academicos or De Academicis, 386;\nFuhrer 1997). He wrote it at the beginning of his career as a\nChristian philosopher in order to save himself and his readers from\nthe “despair” that would have resulted if it could not be\nproven that, against the skeptic challenge, truth is attainable and\nknowledge and wisdom possible (cf. Retractationes 1.1.1). The\nsense of despair must have been very real to him when, after having\nbroken with Manicheism but still being unable to see the truth of\nCatholic Christianity, he decided to “withhold assent until some\ncertainty lighted up” (Confessiones 5.25). His\ninformation about skepticism does not come from a contemporary skeptic\n“school”, which hardly existed, but from Cicero’s\nAcademica and Hortensius. Much of the discussion in\nContra Academicos is thus devoted to the debate between\nHellenistic Stoics and skeptics about the so-called\n“grasping” or kataleptic appearance, i.e., the problem\nwhether there are appearances about the truth of which one cannot be\nmistaken because they are evident by themselves (Bermon 2001:\n105–191). Unlike the original Stoics and Academics, Augustine\nlimits the discussion to sense impressions because he wants to present\nPlatonism as a solution to the skeptic problem and to point out a\nsource of true knowledge unavailable to the Hellenistic\nmaterialists.","\nUnlike modern anti-skeptical lines of argumentation, Augustine’s\nrefutation of skepticism does not aim at justifying our ordinary\npractices and beliefs. To refute the Academic claim that, since the\nwise person can never be sure whether she has grasped the truth, she\nwill consistently withhold assent in order not to succumb to empty\nopinion, he thinks it sufficient to demonstrate the existence of some\nkind of knowledge that is immune to skeptical doubt. His strategy\ntherefore consists in pointing out 1) the certainty of\nself-referential knowledge (the wise person “knows\nwisdom”, Contra Academicos 3.6; the Academic skeptic\n“knows” the Stoic criterion of truth, ib. 3.18–21);\n2) the certainty of private or subjective knowledge (I am certain that\nsomething appears white to me even if I am ignorant\nwhether it is really white, ib. 3.26); 3) the certainty of formal,\nlogical or mathematical, structures (ib. 3.24–29), knowledge of\nwhich is possible independently of the mental state of the knower,\nwhereas the reliability of sense impressions differs according as we\nare awake or dreaming, sane or insane. Modern critics have not been\nvery impressed by these arguments (e.g., Kirwan 1989: 15–34),\nand an ancient skeptic would rightly have objected that being limited\nto subjective or formal knowledge, they could not justify the\ndogmatists’ claim to objective knowledge of reality (cf. Sextus\nEmpiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.13). Yet this is not\nAugustine’s point. To him it matters to have shown that even if\nmaximal concessions are made to skepticism concerning the\nunknowability of the external world attainable by the senses, there\nremains an internal area of cognition that allows for and even\nguarantees certainty. This is why Contra Academicos ends with\na sketch of Platonic epistemology and ontology and with an\nidiosyncratic if not wholly unparalleled reconstruction of the history\nof the Academy according to which the Academics were in fact\ncrypto-Platonists who hid their insight into transcendent reality and\nrestricted themselves to skeptical arguments to combat the materialist\nand sensualist schools dominant in Hellenistic times until authentic\nPlatonism emerged again with Plotinus (Contra Academicos\n3.37–43; the story is still told in Letter 118 of 410,\nwhere the renaissance of Platonism is however connected with the rise\nof Christianity). The only realities that meet the Hellenistic\ncriterion of truth and guarantee absolute certainty by being\nself-evident are the Platonic Forms (Contra Academicos 3.39;\ncf. De diversis quaestionibus 9; Cary 2008a: 55–60).\nThe “objects” of knowledge that appear in\nAugustine’s anti-skeptical arguments thus either are the\nPlatonic Forms themselves or at least point out the way of accessing\nthem. This squares with the early Augustine’s tendency to\ninterpret the Forms, or at any rate the most basic among them, as\n“numbers”, i.e., as the formal and normative structures\nand standards that govern all reality and enable us to understand and\nevaluate it (De ordine 2.14; 16; De musica\n6.57–58; O’Daly 1987: 101–102; see also\n 5.2 Illumination).\n Strictly speaking, Augustine’s anti-skeptical arguments do not\njustify the claim that knowledge can be derived from the senses;\nhaving sensible and mutable objects, they cannot but yield opinion or,\nat best, true belief. The later Augustine, in a more generous way of\nspeaking, widens the term “knowledge” (scientia,\nto be distinguished from “wisdom”, sapientia) so\nas to include what we learn through sense perception and from reliable\nwitnesses (De trinitate 15.21; cf. De civitate dei\n8.7; Retractationes 1.14.3; Siebert 2018; see\n 5.3 Faith and Reason).","\nAugustine’s most famous anti-skeptical argument is what is\ncommonly called his “cogito-like” argument because it is\nsimilar to (and probably inspired) the Cogito of Descartes (Matthews\n1992; Menn 1998; Fuchs 2010). Like Descartes’, Augustine’s\ncogito establishes an area immune to skeptical doubt by inferring from\nmy awareness of my own existence the truth of the proposition “I\nexist”. Even if I were in error in uttering this proposition, it\nwould still be true that I, who am in error, exist (De civitate\ndei 11.26: si enim fallor, sum; for the exact\nreconstruction of this argument cf. Horn 1995: 81–87; Matthews\n2005: 34–42). The argument does not yet appear in Contra\nAcademicos but is easily recognized as a development of the\nargument from subjective knowledge (Contra Academicos 3.26);\nAugustine considers it a valid refutation of skepticism from his\nearliest (De beata vita 7) to his latest works (De\ntrinitate 15.21; for further attestations see Soliloquia\n2.1; De duabus animabus 13; De libero arbitrio 2.7;\nDe vera religione 73; Confessiones 7.5; 13.12). The\nscope of the argument in Augustine is both wider and narrower than in\nDescartes. The Augustinian cogito lacks the systematic importance of\nits Cartesian counterpart; there is no attempt to found a coherent and\ncomprehensive philosophy on it. On some occasions, however, it works\nas a starting point for the Augustinian ascent to God (De libero\narbitrio 2.7, where the ascent leads to an understanding of God\nas immutable truth and wisdom; for a condensed version, cf. De\nvera religione 72–73, where Augustine even makes\nsupra-rational Truth the source and criterion of the truth of the\ncogito itself). The most impressive example is the second half of De\ntrinitate. Here the attempt to reach a rational understanding of\nthe mystery of the Trinity by means of an inquiry into the structure\nof the human mind starts with an analysis of the mind’s\ninalienable self-love and self-awareness (see\n 6.2 The Human Mind as an Image of God;\n Augustine does not, however, claim that the mind’s certainty\nabout itself entails a similar certainty about the nature of God).\nAugustine’s cogito argument is not limited to epistemology but\ncan also be employed in an ethical context because it proves not only\nmy existence and my thinking (and, by implication, my being alive) but\nalso my loving and willing. I am as certain that I will as I am\ncertain that I exist and live, and my will is as undeniably mine as is\nmy existence and my life. Therefore, my volitions are imputable to me,\nand it is I who am responsible for my choices (and not some evil\nsubstance present in my soul but foreign to my own self, as, on\nAugustine’s interpretation, Manichean dualism would have it; cf.\nDe duabus animabus 13; Confessiones 7.5; De\ncivitate dei 5.10)."],"subsection_title":"5.1 Skepticism and Certainty"},{"content":["\nAugustine’s theory of knowledge—his so-called doctrine of\nillumination—is a distinctly non-empiricist epistemology based\non a probably Neoplatonic reading of Plato’s doctrine of\nrecollection (Burnyeat 1987; MacDonald 2012b; King 2014a:\n147–152; Karfíková 2017). Like Plato and his\nfollowers, Augustine thinks that true knowledge requires first-hand\nacquaintance; second-hand information, e.g., from reliable testimony,\nmay yield true and even justifiable belief, but not knowledge in the\nstrict sense.\n In the case of sensible objects—which, strictly speaking, do\nnot admit of knowledge at all but only opinion—such\n first-hand acquaintance is possible through sense perception.\nCognition of intelligible objects, however, can be neither reached\nempirically by means of abstraction nor transmitted to us\nlinguistically by a human teacher (see\n 5.4 Language and Signs);\n rather, such cognition requires personal intellectual activity that\nresults in an intellectual insight, which we judge by a criterion we\nfind nowhere but in ourselves. The paradigm of this kind of cognition\nare mathematical and logical truths and fundamental moral intuitions,\nwhich we understand not because we believe a teacher or a book but\nbecause we see them for ourselves (De magistro 40, cf. De\nlibero arbitrio 2.34). The condition of possibility and the\ncriterion of truth of this intellectual insight is none other than God\n(a view attributed, with explicit approval, to the Platonists in\nDe civitate dei 8.7), who, in the manner of a Neoplatonic\nimmaterial principle, is both immanent and transcendent in relation to\nour soul. Augustine mostly explains this Platonizing theory of a\npriori knowledge by means of two striking images: the inner teacher\nand illumination. The former is introduced in the dialogue De\nmagistro (ca. 390) and remains frequent especially in the sermons\n(e.g., In epistulam Iohannis ad Parthos tractatus decem 3.13;\nFuhrer 2018b); according to it, Christ is present in our souls and by\n“presiding over” them like a teacher guarantees the\ntruthfulness of our understanding (De magistro 38–39,\ncf. Ephesians 3:17 for the image and, for the idea that truth\n“lives in the inner man”, De vera religione 72).\nThe latter appears first in the Soliloquia (1.12–15)\nand is ubiquitous in Augustine’s writings (cf. esp. De\ntrinitate 12.24). It is ultimately derived from the Analogy of\nthe Sun in Plato’s Republic (508a-509b; cf. Rist 1994:\n78–79). In the Soliloquia Augustine says, in a manner\nstrongly reminiscent of Plato, that just as the sun is both visible\nitself and illumines the objects of sight so as to enable the eye to\nsee them, God is intelligible himself and illumines the intelligible\nobjects (which are here identified with the objects of the liberal\ndisciplines and subordinated to God) so as to enable reason (the\n“eye” of the soul) to activate its capacity for\nintellection. The later version in De trinitate explicitly\npresents divine illumination as an alternative to Platonic\nrecollection and situates it in the framework of a theory of creation.\nHere Augustine says that the human mind has been created by God in\nsuch a way as to be “connected” to intelligible reality\n“from below” (subiuncta) and with a capacity\n(capacitas) that enables it to “see” the\nintelligibles in the light of intelligible truth, just as the eye is\nby nature able to see colors in the light of the sun. Obviously,\n“capacity” in this case does not mean pure potentiality\n(as in the tabula rasa theory endorsed by Augustine’s\ninterlocutor Euodius in De quantitate animae 34) but\ncomprises at least implicit or latent knowledge of moral and\nepistemological standards. Both images, if properly read, should\npreclude the misunderstanding that Augustine’s gnoseology makes\nhuman knowledge entirely dependent on divine agency, with the human\nbeing becoming merely a passive recipient of revelation (cf. Gilson\n1943: ch. 4 and Lagouanère 2012: 158–180 for the debates\nabout Augustinian illumination in medieval and modern philosophy).\nCognition does not simply result from the presence of Christ in our\nsoul but from our “consulting” the inner teacher, i.e.,\nour testing propositions that claim to convey a truth about\nintelligible reality (or even a general truth about sensible objects,\ncf. Letter 13.3–4) against the inner standards we\npossess thanks to the presence of Christ (De magistro\n37–38; this way of “consulting” the inner truth is\nrepeatedly dramatized in the Confessiones, e.g., 11.10;\n11.31; Cary 2008b: 100). And while every human being is\n“illumined” by the divine light at least from behind so as\nto be able to pass true judgments about right and wrong or good and\nevil, in order to develop these natural intuitions to full knowledge\nor wisdom and to be able actually to lead a virtuous life, we need to\nconvert to God, the “source” of the light (De\ntrinitate 14.21). Thus, while all human beings are by nature\ncapable of accessing intelligible truth, only those succeed in doing\nso who have a sufficiently good will (De magistro\n38)—presumably those who endorse Christian religion and live\naccordingly. This strong voluntary element intimately connects\nAugustine’s epistemology with his ethics and, ultimately, with\nhis doctrine of grace (on the parallel structure of cognition and grace in Augustine\nsee Lorenz 1964). Like all human agency, striving for wisdom takes place\nunder the conditions of a fallen world and meets the difficulties and\nhindrances humanity is subject to because of original sin.","\nIn order to illustrate what he means by “seeing things by\nourselves” “in the light of truth”, Augustine often\ncites the example of the Socratic maieutic dialogue (De\nmagistro 40; cf. De immortalitate animae 6; De\ntrinitate 12.24), and in some passages of his early work he seems\nto subscribe to the Platonic doctrine of recollection (familiar to him\nfrom Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.57) in such a way as to\nimply the preexistence of the soul (Soliloquia 2.35,\nretracted in Retractationes 1.4.4; De immortalitate\nanimae 6; De quantitate animae 34, retracted in\nRetractationes 1.8.2). It is difficult to tell whether the\nearly Augustine literally believed in recollection and preexistence\n(Karfíková 2017; O’Daly 1987: 70–75;\n199–207), not least because he was aware that some Neoplatonists\ninterpreted Platonic recollection as an actualization of our\never-present but latent knowledge of the intelligible rather than as a\nremembrance of our past acquaintance with it (Letter 7.2, cf.\nPlotinus, Enneads IV.3.25.31–33; O’Daly 1976).\nIf, as in De immortalitate animae 6, recollection is taken to\nprove the immortality of the soul (as it did in the Phaedo),\nit is hard to see how preexistence should not be implied. In any\nevent, it is imprecise to say, as it is sometimes done, that Augustine\ngave up the theory of recollection because he realized that\npreexistence was at variance with Christian faith. In De civitate\ndei (12.14 etc.) Augustine emphatically rejects\nPlatonic-Pythagorean metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls as\nincompatible with eternal happiness and the economy of salvation, and\nin De trinitate (12.24) the Meno version of the\nrecollection theory, which implies transmigration, is rejected in\nfavor of illumination. Yet it is a fallacy to claim that recollection\nentails transmigration. The early Augustine may have believed in\npreexistence (perhaps simply as a corollary of the immortality of the\nsoul), but there is no evidence that he believed in the transmigration\nof souls; conversely, his rejection of transmigration did not prevent\neven the late Augustine from considering preexistence—at least\ntheoretically—an option for the origin of the soul\n(Letter 143.6 from 412; cf.\n 6.1 Soul as a Created Being)."],"subsection_title":"5.2 Illumination"},{"content":["\nWhereas modern discussion tends to regard faith and reason as\nalternative or even mutually exclusive ways to (religious) truth, in\nAugustine’s epistemological and exegetical program the two are\ninseparable. He rejects the rationalism of the philosophers and,\nespecially, the Manicheans as an unwarranted over-confidence into the\nabilities of human reason resulting from sinful pride and as an\narrogant neglect of the revelation of Christ in Scripture (De\nlibero arbitrio 3.56; 60; Confessiones 3.10–12).\nAgainst the fideism he encountered in some Christian circles (cf.\nLetter 119 from Consentius to Augustine) he insisted that it\nwas good and natural to employ the rational capacity we have been\ncreated with to search for an understanding of the truths we accept\nfrom the authority of the biblical revelation, even though a true\nunderstanding of God will only be possible after this life when we see\nhim “face to face” (Letter 120.3–4). In\nthis epistemological and exegetical program, which since Anselm of\nCanterbury has aptly been labeled as “faith seeking\nunderstanding” (cf. De trinitate 15.2: fides\nquaerit, intellectus invenit) or “understanding of\nfaith” (intellectus fidei), faith is prior to\nunderstanding in time but posterior to it in importance and value\n(De ordine 2.26; De vera religione 45;\nLetter 120.3; van Fleteren 2010). The first step toward\nperfection is to believe the words of Scripture; the second is to\nrealize that the words are outward signs of an internal and\nintelligible reality and that they admonish us to turn to and to\n“consult” inner truth so as to reach true understanding\nand, accordingly, the good life (cf.\n 5.2 Illumination;\n 5.4 Language and Signs). \nPhilosophical argument may be of help in this process;\nyet as Augustine notes as early as in Contra Academicos\n(3.43), it needs to be tied to the authority of Scripture and the\nCreed to prevent the frailty of human reason from going astray (cf.\nConfessiones 7.13). The Augustine of the earliest dialogues\nseems to have entertained the elitist idea that those educated in the\nliberal arts and capable of the Neoplatonic intellectual ascent may\nactually outgrow authority and achieve a full understanding of the\ndivine already in this life (De ordine 2.26, but contrast ib.\n2.45 on Monnica). In his later work, he abandons this hope and\nemphasizes that during this life, inevitably characterized by sin and\nweakness, every human being remains in need of the guidance of the\nrevealed authority of Christ (Cary 2008b: 109–120). Faith is\nthus not just an epistemological but also an ethical category; it is\nessential for the moral purification we need to undergo before we can\nhope for even a glimpse of true understanding (Soliloquia\n1.12; De diversis quaestionibus 48; De trinitate\n4.24; Rist 2001). To a great extent, Augustine’s defense of\nfaith as a valid epistemic category rests on a rehabilitation of true\nbelief against the philosophical (Platonic and Hellenistic) tradition.\nAugustine neatly distinguishes “belief” (fides,\nthe word he also uses for religious faith), which entails the\nbeliever’s awareness that he does not know, from\n“opinion” (opinio), defined by the philosophers\nas the illusion of knowing what one in fact does not know (De\nutilitate credendi 25; Letter 120.3). Without belief in\nthe former sense, we would have to admit that we are ignorant of our\nown lineage (Confessiones 6.7) and of the objects of the\nhistorical and empirical sciences, of which, as Augustine asserts in a\ncritique of Platonism, first-hand knowledge is rarely possible (De\ntrinitate 4.21). The belief that a person we have not seen was or\nis just may trigger our fraternal love for him (De trinitate\n8.7; Bouton-Touboulic 2012: 182–187; conversely, Augustine asks\nthose who are united with him in fraternal love to believe what he\ntells them about his life, Confessiones 10.3). And obviously,\nthe crucial events of the history of salvation, Jesus’ death on\nthe cross and his resurrection, cannot be known but only believed qua\nhistorical events, even though qua signs they may lead to\nunderstanding by prompting us to an intelligible truth (De\ntrinitate 13.2). Thus, while no doubt faith in revelation\nprecedes rational insight into its true meaning, the decision about\nwhose authority to believe and whom to accept as a reliable witness is\nitself reasonable (De vera religione 45; Letter\n120.3). Even so, belief may of course be deceived (De\ntrinitate 8.6). In ordinary life, this is inevitable and mostly\nunproblematic. A more serious problem is the justification of belief\nin Scripture, which, for Augustine, is the tradition and authority\n(auctoritas, not potestas) of the Church (Contra\nepistulam fundamenti 5.6; Rist 1994: 245)."],"subsection_title":"5.3 Faith and Reason"},{"content":["\nAugustine’s philosophy of language is both indebted to the\nStoic-influenced Hellenistic and Roman theories of grammar and highly\ninnovative (Rist 1994: 23–40; King 2014b). He follows the Stoics\nin distinguishing between the sound of a word, its meaning and the\nthing it signifies (De dialectica 5; De quantitate animae 66; cf. Sextus Empiricus, Adversus\nmathematicos 8.11–12 = 33B Long-Sedley), but he seems to\nhave been the first to interpret language as such as a system of signs\nand to integrate it into a general semiotics (Fuhrer 2018a: 1696; Cary\n2008b; Mayer 1969 and 1974). In his handbook of biblical exegesis and\nChristian rhetoric, De doctrina christiana (1.2;\n2.1–4), Augustine divides the world into “things”\nand “signs” (i.e., things that, apart from being what they\nare, signify other things) and furthermore distinguishes between\n“natural” or involuntary signs (e.g., smoke signifying\nfire) and voluntary or “given” signs (a distinction akin,\nbut not equivalent, to the older discussion about nature or convention\nas the origin of language). Language is defined as a system of given\nsigns by means of which the speaker signifies either things or her\nthoughts and emotions (Enchiridion 22). In the exegetical\nframework of De doctrina christiana, the “thing”\nsignified by the verbal signs of Scripture is God, the Supreme Being.\nAugustine therefore begins with a sketch of his theology and ethics\ncentered around the notions of love of God and neighbor before he sets out his biblical hermeneutics which,\nagain, posits love as the criterion of exegetical adequacy (Pollmann\n1996; Williams 2001). The words of the Bible are external signs\ndesigned to prompt us to the more inward phenomenon of love and,\nultimately, to God who is beyond all language and thought. This may be\ngeneralized to the principle that external—verbal and\nnon-verbal—signs operate on a lower ontological level than the\ninward and intelligible truth they attempt to signify and that they\nare superseded in true knowledge which is knowledge not of signs but\nof things. This holds not only for words, even the words of Scripture,\nbut also for the sacraments and for the Incarnation of Christ\n(Contra epistulam fundamenti 36.41). Augustine’s most\nsustained discussion of language, the early dialogue De\nmagistro, asks how we learn things from words and relates\nlinguistic signification to the epistemology of illumination (Nawar\n2015). After a long discussion of how verbal signs signify things or\nstates of mind and how they relate to other signs, it turns out,\nrather surprisingly, that we do not learn things from signs at all\nbecause in order to understand the meaning of a sign we already have\nto be acquainted with the thing signified. This is ultimately a\nversion of Meno’s paradox, and Augustine solves it by\nintroducing the metaphors of the inner teacher and of illumination,\ni.e., by means of an internalist theory of learning recognizable as a\nNeoplatonic interpretation of Platonic anamnesis (De magistro\n38–40).\n This does not mean that words are useless. They inform us about\nthings that are inaccessible to direct acquaintance and thus generate\ntrue belief; most importantly, they admonish us to\n“consult” the inner teacher and to understand things by\nourselves (this, according to Augustine, is the whole point of the\nSocratic dialogue). This goes even for the acquisition of language\nitself: We understand the sign “bird-catching”, not simply\nby being shown a person engaged in that activity and being told that\nhe is signified by that name, but by observing him and figuring out\nfor ourselves what “bird-catching” means (ib. 32; on this\nand Wittgenstein’s criticism of what he took to be\nAugustine’s view of language acquisition, see Matthews 2005:\n23–33). In the later books of De trinitate and in the\nsermons on the Trinity, Augustine frequently refers to a phenomenon\ncalled “inner word”, which he uses to explain the relation\nof the inner-Trinitarian Word or Logos from the Prologue of John (John\n1:1) to Christ incarnate. Just as the spoken word signifies a concept\nthat we have formed within our mind and communicates it to others, so\nChrist incarnate signifies the divine Logos and admonishes and assists\nus to turn to it (cf. De trinitate 15.20; De doctrina\nchristiana 1.12; Sermon 119.7; 187.3). In De\ntrinitate Augustine expands this to a theory about how the inner\nword or concept is formed (14.10; 15.25; cf. 15.43). The inner word is\ngenerated when we actualize some latent or implicit knowledge that is\nstored in our memory. It is not a sign, nor of linguistic nature\n(Augustine insists that it is neither Latin nor Greek nor Hebrew), but\nrather seems to be a kind of a-temporal intellectual insight that\ntranscends language (cf. De catechizandis rudibus 3).\nProperly speaking, then, the theory of the inner word is not a\nlinguistic theory at all."],"subsection_title":"5.4 Language and Signs"}]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"6. Anthropology: God and the Soul; Soul and Body","subsections":[{"content":["\nLike most ancient philosophers, Augustine thinks that the human being\nis a compound of body and soul and that, within this compound, the\nsoul—conceived as both the life-giving element and the center of\nconsciousness, perception and thought—is, or ought to be, the\nruling part. The rational soul should control the sensual desires and\npassions; it can become wise if it turns to God, who is at the same\ntime the Supreme Being and the Supreme Good.\n In his Manichean phase, he conceived of both God and the soul as\nmaterial entities, the soul being in fact a portion of God that had\nfallen into the corporeal world where it remained a foreigner, even to\nits own body (De duabus animabus 1; Confessiones\n8.22). After his Platonist readings in Milan had provided him with the\nadequate philosophical means to think about immaterial, non-spatial\nreality (Confessiones 7.1–2; 7.16), he replaced this\nview, which he later represents as a rather crude dualism, with an\nontological hierarchy in which the soul, which is mutable in time but\nimmutable in space, occupies a middle position between God, who is\ntotally unchangeable immaterial being (cf. MacDonald 2014), and\nbodies, which are subject to temporal and spatial change\n(Letter 18.2). The soul is of divine origin and even god-like\n(De quantitate animae 2–3); it is not divine itself but\ncreated by God (the talk about divinity of the soul in the Cassiciacum\ndialogues seems to be a traditional Ciceronian element, cf. Cary 2000:\n77–89; for a Plotinian interpretation see O’Connell 1968:\n112–131). In De quantitate animae, Augustine broadly\nargues that the “greatness” of the soul does not refer to\nspatial extension but to its vivifying, perceptive, rational and\ncontemplative powers that enable it to move close to God and are\ncompatible with and even presuppose immateriality (esp. ib.\n70–76; Brittain 2003). An early definition of soul as “a\nrational substance fitted for rule over a body” (ib. 22) echoes\nPlatonic views (cf. the definition of the human being as “a\nrational soul with a body” in In Iohannis evangelium\ntractatus 19.15; O’Daly 1987: 54–60). Later on, when\nthe resurrection of the body becomes more important to him, Augustine\nemphasizes—against Porphyry’s alleged claim that in order\nto be happy, the soul must free itself from anything\ncorporeal—that it is natural and even desirable for a soul to\ngovern a body (De Genesi ad litteram 12.35.68), but he\nnevertheless remains convinced that soul is an incorporeal and\nimmortal substance that can, in principle, exist independently of a\nbody. In the Soliloquia (2.24), following the tradition of\nPlato and of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, he\nproposes a proof for the immortality of the soul which he expressly\nintroduces as an alternative to the final proof of the Phaedo\n(Soliloquia 2.23, cf. Phaedo 102d-103c). The proof\nis constructed from elements from Porphyry’s Isagoge\nand his Commentary on Aristotle’s Categories (rather\nelementary texts that Augustine would have encountered long before his\nPlatonic readings at Milan) and seems to be original with him (Tornau\n2017). It says that since truth is both eternal and in the soul as its\nsubject, it follows that soul, the subject of truth, is eternal too.\nThis is fallacious, because if truth is eternal independently of the\nsoul it cannot be in the soul as in its subject (i.e., as a property),\nand if it is a property of the soul, it cannot ensure its eternity. In\nthe incomplete draft of a third book of the Soliloquia\npreserved under the title De immortalitate animae, Augustine\ntherefore modifies the proof and argues that soul is immortal because\nof the inalienable causal presence of God (= Truth) in it. It turns\nout however that even if this version of the proof is successful, it\nonly demonstrates the soul’s eternal existence as a (rational)\nsoul but not its eternal wisdom (De immortalitate animae 19;\nZum Brunn 1969: 17–41 [1988: 9–34]), in the hope of which the\ninterlocutors had set out to prove the immortality of the soul in the\nfirst place (Soliloquia 2.1). After De immortalitate\nanimae, Augustine never returned to his proof. But neither did he\ndisown it; as late as De trinitate (13.12), he endorses the\nPlatonic axiom that soul is by nature immortal and that its\nimmortality can, in principle, be proven by philosophical means. He\nalso sticks to his conviction that immortality is a necessary\ncondition of happiness but insists that it is not a sufficient\ncondition, given that immortality and misery are compatible (cf.\nDe civitate dei 9.15 on the misery of the wicked demons).\nTrue happiness will only be realized in the afterlife as a gift of\nGod’s grace, when, thanks to the resurrection of the body, not\njust the soul but the human being as a whole will live forever.\nResurrection, however, is not susceptible of rational proof; it is a\npromise of God that must be believed on Scriptural authority (De\ntrinitate ib.).","\nTogether with an essentially Platonic notion of the soul, Augustine\ninherits the classical problems of Platonic soul-body dualism. How can\nsoul fulfil its task of “governing” the body (cf. De quantitate\nanimae 22) if it is incorporeal itself? And how are\ncorporeal and psychic aspects related to each other in phenomena that\ninvolve both body and soul, especially if, like passions and desires,\nthese are morally relevant? These problems are further complicated by\nthe Platonic axiom that incorporeal entities, being ontologically\nprior to corporeal ones, cannot be causally affected by them.\nAugustine’s solution is indebted to Plotinus’ strategy of\nmaking the relation of the soul to the bodily affections an\nessentially cognitive one (O’Daly 1987, 84–87;\nHölscher 1986, ch. 2.2.1; Nash 1969, 39–59; Bermon 2001:\n239–281). With Plotinus, he insists that sense perception is not\nan affection which the soul passively undergoes (as Stoic materialism\nwould have it, where sensory perception was interpreted as a kind of\nimprint in the soul) but its active awareness of affections undergone\nby the body (De quantitate animae 41; 48; De Genesi ad\nlitteram 7.14.20; Plotinus, Enneads I.4.2.3–4;\nBrittain 2002: 274–282). In De quantitate animae, the\nframework of this theory is the general argument that the relation of\nsoul to body must be conceived of not in terms of space but of\n“power” (see above). In De musica (6.11), this is\ndeveloped into the idea that sense perception is the soul’s\nawareness of modifications of its own formative and vivifying\nactivities that result from its reacting to the external impulses\nundergone by the body. In addition to the usual five senses, Augustine\nidentifies a sensory faculty that relates the data of the senses to\neach other and judges them aesthetically (but not morally; De musica 6.5; 19);\nin De libero arbitrio (2.8–13) he calls this the\n“inner sense” (on the Aristotelian background cf.\nO’Daly 1987: 102–105).","\nIn Neoplatonism it was disputed how soul, being immortal, immaterial\nand ontologically superior to body, came to be incorporated\nnevertheless. The basic options, present already in Plato’s\ndialogues, were either that the disembodied soul had\n“fallen” into the corporeal world because of some error\n(as in the Phaedrus myth) or that it had been sent into the\ncosmos by God to impart life and order to it (as in the\nTimaeus; for harmonizing Neoplatonic exegeses, see Plotinus,\nEnneads IV.8, and Macrobius, Commentary on Cicero’s\nSomnium Scipionis 1.10–14). Augustine addresses the issue\nin the horizon of his doctrine of creation and, in the period of the\nPelagian Controversy, of the debate about the transmission of original\nsin (see\n 9. Gender, Women and Sexuality).\n In De libero arbitrio (3.56–59), he distinguishes the\nthree options of creationism (God creates a new soul for every newborn\nbody), traducianism (the soul is transmitted from the parents to the\nchild like corporeal properties), and preexistence, which is\nsubdivided into the Platonic options of voluntary or god-sent descent.\nAfter 412 all these options come to the fore again (Letters\n143.5–11; 166; 190; and the treatise De anima et eius\norigine). Augustine discards none of them officially except for\nthe notion, wrongly associated with Origenism, which was considered a\nheresy at the time, that incorporation was a punishment for a sin\ncommitted by the pre-existent soul (De civitate dei 11.23).\nIn practice, he narrows the debate down to the alternative between\ncreationism and traducianism, which appear to have been the only\noptions taken seriously by his Christian contemporaries. Augustine\nrefused to take a stand till the end of his life, probably because\nneither option really suited his purposes (Rist 1994: 317–320;\nO’Connell 1987; Mendelson 1998): Creationism made original sin\nvery difficult to explain; traducianism was functional in this\nrespect, but it was a materialist and even biologist theory that ran\ncounter to Augustine’s Platonism and was further compromised\nbecause it had been brought up by his African predecessor Tertullian\n(d. c. 220 CE), a Stoicizing corporealist who had ended his life as a\nheretic (Rist 1994: 123)."],"subsection_title":"6.1 Soul as a Created Being"},{"content":["\nAugustine deploys what we may call his philosophy of the mind most\nfully in his great work on Nicene Trinitarian theology, De\ntrinitate. Having removed apparent Scriptural obstacles to the\nequality and consubstantiality of the three divine persons (bks.\n1–4) and having set out the grammar, as it were, of adequate\nspeaking about the Trinity by distinguishing absolute and relative\npropositions about God and the three Persons (bks. 5–7; King\n2012), he turns to an analysis of the human mind as an image of God\n(bks. 8–15; Brachtendorf 2000; Ayres 2010; Bermon &\nO’Daly (eds.) 2012). The basis for this move is, of course,\nGenesis 1:26–27. Augustine follows a long-standing Jewish and\nPatristic tradition, familiar to him from Ambrose, according to which\nthe biblical qualification of the human being as an image of God\nreferred not to the living body (a literalist reading vulnerable to\nthe Manichean charge of anthropomorphism, cf. Confessiones\n6.4) but to what is specifically human, i.e., the “inner\nman” (2 Corinthians 4:16, quoted, e.g., in De trinitate\n11.1) or the mind (mens). Assuming, in a Platonist manner,\nthat “image” in this case does not merely mean an analogy\nbut a causal effect of the original that reflects the essential\nfeatures of the latter on a lower ontological level,\nhe scrutinizes the human mind for triadic structures that meet the\nNicene requirements of equality and consubstantiality and may thus\ngive a—however faint—understanding of the Triune God. The\ngeneral pattern of his argument is the Augustinian ascent from the\nexternal to the internal and from the senses to God; but since human\nreason is, whether by nature or due to its fallen state, hardly\ncapable of knowing God, Augustine this time is obliged to interrupt\nand re-start the ascent several times. The final book shows that the\nexercise of analyzing the human mind does have preparatory value for\nour thinking about the Trinity but does not yield insight into the\ndivine by being simply transferred to it (De trinitate\n15.10–11). The three elements Augustine discerns in all our\ncognitive acts from sense perception to theoretical reason or\ncontemplation are: [1] an object that is either external to the mind\n(as in sense perception) or internal to it, in which case it is an\nimage or a concept stored in our memory; [2] a cognitive faculty that\nmust be activated or “formed” by the object if cognition\nis to come about; [3] a voluntary or intentional element that makes\nthe cognitive faculty turn to its object so as to be actually formed\nby it. The last element ensures the active character of perception and\nintellection\n but also gives weight to the idea that we do not cognize an object\nunless we consciously direct our attention to it (MacDonald 2012b).\nThough this triadic pattern is operative on all levels of human\ncognition, Augustine contends that only the mind’s intellectual\nself-knowledge on the level of contemplative reason (its “memory\nof itself, knowledge of itself and love of itself”) qualifies as\nan image of God because only here are the three elements as closely\nrelated to each other as in the Nicene dogma and because they are as\ninalienable as the mind’s immediate presence to itself (De\ntrinitate 14.19). This idea is carefully prepared in Book 10,\nwhich contains one of Augustine’s most remarkable arguments for\nthe substantiality of the mind and its independence of the body\n(Stróżyński 2013; Brittain 2012a; Matthews 2005:\n43–52; Bermon 2001, 357–404). Augustine begins by arguing\n(in a manner reminiscent of his cogito-like argument; see\n 5.1 Skepticism and Certainty)\n that the mind always already knows itself because it is always\npresent to and hence aware of itself. This pre-reflexive\nself-awareness is presupposed by every act of conscious cognition. If\nso, however, the Delphic command “Know thyself” cannot\nmean that the mind is to become acquainted with itself as if it had\nbeen unknown to itself before, but rather that it must become\nconscious of what it knew about itself all along and distinguish it\nfrom what it does not know about itself. As the mind in its fallen\nstate is deeply immersed in sensible reality, it tends to forget what\nit really is and what it knows it is and confounds itself with the\nthings it attaches the greatest importance to, i.e., sensible objects\nthat give it pleasure. The result are materialist theories about the\nsoul, which thus derive from flawed morality (De trinitate\n10.11–12). If it follows the Delphic command, however, the mind\nwill realize that it knows with certainty that it exists, thinks,\nwills etc., whereas it can at best merely believe that it is air, fire\nor brain (ib. 10.13).\n And as the substance or essence of the mind cannot be anything other\nthan what it knows with certainty about itself, it follows that\nnothing material is essential to the mind and that its essence must be\nsought in its mental acts (ib. 10.16). Full self-knowledge is reached,\nthen, when the mind’s inalienable self-awareness (se\nnosse, “to be acquainted with oneself”) is actualized\nto conscious “self-thinking” (se cogitare). How\nthis relates to the mind’s pre-reflexive presence to itself is\nnot entirely clear (for problems of interpretation, see, e.g., Horn\n2012; Brittain 2012b), but Augustine seems to think that not only the\nmind’s intellectual self-thinking but already its immediate\nself-awareness is triadically structured and an image of the Triune\nGod (De trinitate 14.7–14). Again, the ethical side of\nthe theory should not be overlooked. As a strong voluntary element is\npresent in and necessary for an act of cognition, what objects\n(imaginations, thoughts) we cognize is morally relevant and indicative\nof our loves and desires. And while the triadic structure of the mind\nis its very essence and hence inalienable, Augustine insists that the\nmind is created in the image of God, not because it is capable of\nself-knowledge, but because it has the potential to become wise, i.e.,\nto remember, know and love God, its creator (ib. 14.21–22)."],"subsection_title":"6.2 The Human Mind as an Image of God"}]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"7. Ethics","subsections":[{"content":["\nThe basic structure of Augustine’s ethics is that of ancient\neudaimonism (Holte 1962), but he defers happiness to the afterlife and\nblames the ancient ethicists for their arrogant\nconviction—resulting from their ignorance of the fallen\ncondition of humankind—that they could reach happiness in this\nlife by philosophical endeavor (De civitate dei 19.4;\nWolterstorff 2012; for a more optimistic view, cf. the early De\nordine 2.26). He takes it as axiomatic that happiness is the\nultimate goal pursued by all human beings (e.g., De beata\nvita 10; De civitate dei 10.1; De trinitate\n13.7, quoting Cicero’s Hortensius; for an interesting\ndiscussion of how the desire for happiness relates to our equally\nnatural desires for pleasure and for truth cf. Confessiones\n10.29–34; Matthews 2005: 134–145; Menn 2014: 80–95).\nHappiness or the good life is brought about by the possession of the\ngreatest good in nature that humans can attain and that one cannot\nlose against one’s will (e.g., lib. arb. 1.10–12;\nespecially in his early work Augustine shares the Stoics’\nconcern about the self-sufficiency and independence of the wise and\nhappy person, cf. Wetzel 1992, 42–55). This structure Augustine\ninscribes into his Neoplatonically inspired three-tiered ontological\nhierarchy (Letter 18.2)\n and concludes that the only thing able to fulfil the requirements for\nthe supreme good set by eudaimonism is the immutable God himself. The\nSupreme Being is also the greatest good; the desire of created being\nfor happiness can only be satisfied by the creator. As Augustine puts\nin concisely in De beata vita (11): “Happy is he who\nhas God”. Alternative formulations are “enjoyment of\nGod” (De civitate dei 8.8; De trinitate\n13.10), “contemplation of God” or “enjoyment of\ntruth” (De libero arbitrio 2.35). To “have”\nGod means in fact to know and, especially, to love God; Augustine\ntherefore interprets Psalm 72:28 (“For me it is good to cling to\nGod”) as a biblical telos formula or definition of the\nsupreme and beatifying good (De civitate dei 10.18; Tornau\n2015: 265–266). We are, in other words, happy, wise and virtuous\nif we turn to or “convert” to God. If we turn away from\nhim and direct our attention and love to the bodies—which are\nnot per se bad, as in Manicheism, but an infinitely lesser good than\nGod—or to ourselves, who are a great good but still subordinate\nto God, we become miserable, foolish and wicked (Letter 18.2;\nDe libero arbitrio 2.52–54; In Iohannis evangelium\ntractatus 20.11). Virtue is “love that knows its\npriorities” (ordo amoris, De civitate dei 15.22)\nwhereas vice or sin perverts the natural order. Just as after the Fall\nall human beings are inevitably tainted by sin, we need to be purified\nthrough faith in order to live well and to restore our ability to know\nand love God (De diversis quaestionibus 68.3; Cary 2008a:\n12–13). Augustine does not discard the intellectual element\ninherited from the ancient (Socratic) ethical tradition, and his\nnotion of conversion is certainly inspired by Neoplatonist\n“return” (epistrophe), but Augustine enhances the\nethical relevance of conversion and aversion by emphasizing their\nvoluntary character (cf. already De immortalitate animae\n11–12).\n The element of will or love is also crucial to the distinction between\n“enjoyment” (frui) and “use”\n(uti) that is first fully developed in De doctrina\nchristiana, bk. 1 (c. 396) and remains basic for his ethical\nthought. Following the ancient insight that we pursue some goods for\ntheir own sake and others for the sake of other and greater goods,\nAugustine states that to “enjoy” a thing means to cling to\nit with love for its own sake whereas to “use” it means to\nlove it for the sake of another thing which we want to enjoy. We love\nabsolutely only what we enjoy, whereas our love for things we use is\nrelative and even instrumental (De doctrina christiana 1.4).\nThe only proper object of enjoyment is God (cf. De civitate\ndei 8.8 where the same view is attributed to the Platonists).\nWickedness and confusion of the moral order results from a reversal of\nuse and enjoyment, when we want to enjoy what we ought to use (all\ncreated things, e.g., wealth, bodies or ourselves) and to use what we\nought to enjoy (this probably refers to the “carnal”\nunderstanding of religion of which Augustine often accuses the Jews).\nAn obvious problem of this system is the categorization of the\nbiblically prescribed love of the neighbor. Are we to enjoy our\nneighbor or to use her? Whereas natural moral intuition suggests the\nformer, Augustine’s systematic seems to require the latter. The\nproblem is inherited from ancient eudaimonism, where it takes some\nphilosophical effort to reconcile the intuition that concern for\nothers is morally relevant with the assumption that ethics is\nprimarily about the virtue and happiness of the individual. Augustine\nis aware of the problem and gives a differentiated answer. In De\ndoctrina christiana (1.20–21) he somewhat tentatively\nsuggests that to love our neighbor means to use him, not because he is\nmerely instrumental to our happiness but because we are enjoined to\nlove him as ourselves and because we love ourselves rightly only if we\nrefer our self-love to our desire to enjoy God. Love of the neighbor\nthus means to desire his true happiness in the same way as we desire\nour own. In substance, this remains Augustine’s view also in his\nlater work (cf., e.g., In epistulam Iohannis ad Parthos tractatus\ndecem 1.9), but he then prefers to avoid the counter-intuitive\nand potentially misleading talk about “using” fellow\nhumans and replaces it by a description of fraternal love as\n“mutual enjoyment in God” (e.g., De trinitate\n9.13; cf. already De doctrina christiana 1.35; 3.16; Rist\n1994: 159–168; O’Donovan 1980: 32–36;\n112–136). “In God” is presumably added to prevent\nthe misunderstanding that we are to enjoy the neighbor “in\nherself” or “in ourselves” without reference to God.\nThis would mean that we expect our true happiness from her, which no\nhuman can give; the result of this misdirection would be extreme\nmisery in the case of the neighbor’s loss (cf.\nConfessiones 4.9–11 on Augustine’s excessive\ngrief after the death of his friend; Nawar 2014)."],"subsection_title":"7.1 Happiness"},{"content":["\nIn principle Augustine follows the view of the ancient eudaimonists\nthat virtue is sufficient or at least relevant for happiness. There\nare however several important modifications. (1) The entire structure\nis made dependent on God’s prevenient grace. True virtue\nguarantees true happiness, but there is no true virtue that is not a\ngift of grace.\n (2) Augustine accepts Cicero’s definition of virtue as the art\nof “living well” but emphatically rejects his equation of\nliving well and living happily, i.e., the Stoicizing claim that a\nvirtuous disposition is equivalent to happiness (De libero\narbitrio 2.50; De civitate dei 4.21; De moribus\n1.10; contrast Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 5.53). Our\npostlapsarian life on earth is inevitably the locus of sin and\npunishment, and even the saints are unable to overcome the permanent\ninner conflict between “the spirit” and “the\nflesh”, i.e., between good and evil volitions or rational and\nirrational desires in this life (De civitate dei 19.4,\nquoting Galatians 5:17). The perfect inner tranquility virtue strives\nfor will only be achieved in the afterlife. (3) Augustine replaces the\nancient definition of virtue as “right reason” (as in\nStoicism) or “activity in accordance with reason” (as in\nthe Aristotelian tradition) with a definition of virtue as love of God\nor, in later texts, as love of God and neighbor. Virtue is an inner\ndisposition or motivational habit that enables us to perform every\naction we perform out of right love.\n There are several catalogues of the traditional four cardinal virtues\nprudence, justice, courage and temperance that redefine these as\nvarieties of the love of God either in this life or in the eschaton\n(De moribus 1.25; Letter 155.12; cf. Letter\n155.16 for the cardinal virtues as varieties of love of the neighbor;\nDe libero arbitrio 1.27 for descriptions of the virtues in\nterms of good will). His briefest definition of virtue is\n“ordered love” (De civitate dei 15.22). This does\nnot mean that virtue becomes non-rational (for Augustine love and will\nare essential features of the rational mind; see\n 6.2 The Human Mind as an Image of God),\n but it does mean that it becomes essentially intentional. The\ncriterion of true virtue is that it is oriented toward God. Even if\nAugustine occasionally talks as if the four cardinal virtues could be\nadded to the Pauline or theological virtues of love, faith and hope to\nmake a sum of seven (Letter 171A.2), they are best taken as a\nsubdivision of love, the only one of the Pauline virtues that persists\nin the eschaton (Soliloquia 1.14).","\nThese modifications have several interesting consequences. Even though\nAugustine postpones the happiness that is the reward of virtue to the\nafterlife, he does not make virtue a means to an end in the sense that\nvirtue becomes superfluous when happiness is reached. To the contrary,\nhe insists that virtue will persist in the eschaton where it will be\ntransformed into eternal unimpeded fruition of God and of the neighbor\nin God. Then it will indeed be its own reward and identical with\nhappiness (Letter 155.2; 12). Both eschatological virtue and\nvirtue in this life are thus love of God; they only differ in that the\nlatter is subject to hindrances and temptation. For this reason, those\nwho have true love of God—e.g., Christian martyrs—are\nhappy already in this life, at least in hope (e.g.,\nConfessiones 10.29; Tornau 2015). Augustine’s\ndescription of eschatological and non-eschatological virtues\n(Letter 155) is partly modelled on the Neoplatonic doctrine\nof the scale of virtues with its ascending hierarchy of social or\ncivic, purificatory and contemplative virtues (Tornau 2013; Dodaro\n2004a: 206–212; Dodaro 2004b). When analyzing virtue in this\nlife, Augustine takes up the Stoic distinction, familiar to him from\nCicero (De officiis 1.7–8), between a virtue’s\nfinal end (finis) and its appropriate action\n(officium; cf., e.g., Contra Iulianum 4.21; De\ncivitate dei 10.18). The appropriate action that characterizes\nvirtue in this life but is no longer needed in eternal bliss is to\nsubdue the lower parts of soul to reason and to resist the temptations\nthat emerge from the permanent conflict between good and bad volitions\n(as it were, a permanent “akratic” state; see\n 7.4 Will and Freedom)\n that results from our fallen condition (De civitate dei\n19.4). As the examples of the best philosophers and the heroes of\nRome’s glorious past teach, whom Augustine regularly accuses of\nlove of glory, these actions may easily spring from other motivations\nthan the true love of God. Augustine therefore distinguishes between\ntrue (i.e., Christian) virtue that is motivated by love of God and\n“virtue as such” (virtus ipsa: De civitate dei\n5.19) that performs the same appropriate actions but is, in the last\nresort, guided by self-love or pride (ib. 5.12; 19.25). Among other\nthings, this distinction underpins his solution of the so-called\nproblem of pagan virtue (Harding 2008; Tornau 2006b; Dodaro 2004a: 27–71; Rist 1994:\n168–173) because it permits ascribing virtue in a meaningful\nsense to pagan and pre-Christian paradigms of virtue like Socrates\nwithout having to admit that they were eligible for salvation. If a\n“teleological” perspective on virtue is adopted that\nexclusively focuses on ends, the virtues of the pagan must be judged\nvices rather than virtues and will be punished accordingly (De\ncivitate dei 19.25, the passage from which the non-Augustinian\nphrase that pagan virtues are “splendid vices” seems to be\nderived; see Irwin 1999). An “operative” perspective\nhowever reveals that as far as appropriate actions are concerned,\nvirtuous non-Christians differ from the foolish and wicked but are\nindistinguishable from virtuous Christians. From this point of view,\nSocrates is closer to Paul than to Nero, even though his virtue will\nnot bring him happiness, i.e., eternal bliss. That he envisages a\nperspective on virtue that abstracts from the causal nexus of virtue\nand happiness is perhaps Augustine’s most significant departure\nfrom ancient eudaimonism."],"subsection_title":"7.2 Virtue"},{"content":["\nLove is a crucial and overarching notion in Augustine’s ethics.\nIt is closely related to virtue\n and often used synonymously with will (e.g., De trinitate\n15.38; in the cogito-like arguments, love and will are\ninterchangeable, cf. De civitate dei 11.27 with\nConfessiones 13.12) or intention (intentio).\nAugustine’s basic text is, of course, the biblical command to\nlove God and neighbor (Matthew 22.37; 39), which he is however\nprepared, throughout his life, to interpret in terms of Platonic\nerotic love (Rist 1994: 148–202). As in the Symposium\nand in Plotinus (Enneads I.6), love is a force in our souls\nthat attracts us to the true beauty we find nowhere else but in and\nabove ourselves; it drives us to ascend from the sensible to the\nintelligible world and to the cognition and contemplation of God\n(Confessiones 10.8–38, esp. 38). Even Christian\nfraternal love can be described, in a manner reminiscent of the\nPhaedrus, as a kind of seduction through another’s real\nor assumed righteousness (De trinitate 9.11). In a more\ngeneral way, love means the overall direction of our will (positively)\ntoward God or (negatively) toward ourselves or corporeal creature\n(De civitate dei 14.7; Byers 2013: 88–99;\n217–231). The former is called love in a good sense\n(caritas), the latter cupidity or concupiscence\n(cupiditas), i.e., misdirected and sinful love (De\ndoctrina christiana 3.16). The root of sin is excessive self-love\nthat wants to put the self in the position of God and is equivalent\nwith pride (De civitate dei 14.28). It must be distinguished\nfrom the legitimate self-love that is part of the biblical commandment\nand strives for true happiness by subordinating the self to God\n(O’Donovan 1980). In his earlier work, Augustine has some\ndifficulties incorporating love of neighbor into the Platonic and\neudaimonist framework of his thinking (De doctrina christiana\n1.20–21, see\n 7.1 Happiness).\n After 400, in the context of his reflections on the Trinity and his\nexegesis of the First Epistle of John (esp. 1 John 4:8; 16, “God\nis love”), he finds the solution that love is by its very nature\nself-reflexive. In loving our neighbors, we of necessity love that\nlove which enables us to do so itself, which is none other than God;\nlove of God and love of neighbor are, accordingly, co-extensive and,\nultimately, identical (De trinitate 8.12; In epistulam\nIohannis ad Parthos tractatus decem 9.10). Right and perverse\nlove or intention—charity or concupiscence—thus becomes\nthe predominant and even the single criterion of moral evaluation;\nAugustine’s ethics may in this sense be labeled intentionalist\n(cf. Mann 1999 on Augustine’s “inner-life ethics”).\nHe keenly insists that each and every action, even if it is externally\ngood and impressive, can be motivated either by a good or an evil\nintention, by right or perverse love, by charity or pride. This goes\nfor the actions prescribed by the Sermon of the Mount and even for\nmartyrdom (In epistulam Iohannis tractatus decem 8.9, partly\nrelying on 1 Corinthians 13:3). It is therefore impossible to give\ncasuistic rules for external moral behavior. The only thing possible\nis the general recommendation to “Love and do what you\nwill” (ib. 7.8), i.e., to take care that the inner disposition\nor intention behind one’s actions is love of God and neighbor\nand not self-love or pride. It is important not to misunderstand this\nas moral subjectivism, which Augustine’s ontological and ethical\nassumptions exclude. He never excuses evil deeds done “with the\nbest intentions” or with a subjectively pure conscience, and he\ndoes allow for actions that are always condemnable because they cannot\npossibly result from love, such as heresy. In a sense, his ideal agent\nis a successor of the Stoic and Neoplatonic sage, who always acts out\nof inner virtue or perfect rationality (the latter Augustine replaces\nwith true love) but adapts his outward actions to the external\ncircumstances (cf. Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos\n11.200–201 = 59 G Long-Sedley; Diogenes Laertius 7.121;\nPorphyry, Sententiae 32). Augustine’s intentionalism\nhas, however, the ambivalent implication that, since love and will\ninevitably belong to the privacy of the mind, the inner motives for a\nperson’s external agency are unknowable to anyone except the\nagent herself and God. On the one hand, this limits the authority of\nother people—including those endowed with worldly power or an\necclesiastical office—to pass moral judgments. Augustine\nrepeatedly recommends withholding judgment so as to preserve humility\n(De civitate dei 1.26; Sermon 30.3–4). On the\nother hand, Augustine makes our inner motivational and moral life\nopaque even to ourselves and fully transparent only to God\n(Confessiones 10.7; In Iohannis evangelium tractatus\n32.5). We can never be fully sure about the purity of our intentions,\nand even if we were, we could not be sure that we will persist in\nthem. All human beings are therefore called to constantly scrutinize\nthe moral status of their inner selves in a prayerful dialogue with\nGod (as it is dramatized in the Confessiones). Such\nself-scrutiny may well be self-tormenting; the obsession of Western\nChristianity with inner latent guilt here has its Augustinian roots.\nThe public staging of Augustine’s confession before God in the\nConfessiones may, among many other things, represent an\nattempt to remedy the loneliness of Christian self-scrutiny (cf.\nConfessiones 10.1–7).","\nAugustine’s intentionalism also provides him with arguments in\nfavor of religious coercion. As the objective of right fraternal love\nis not the neighbor’s temporal well-being but his eternal\nhappiness or salvation, we must not passively tolerate our\nfellow-humans’ sins but should actively correct them if we can;\notherwise, our motivation would be inertia rather than love (In\nepistulam Iohannis ad Parthos tractatus decem 7.11; cf.\nLetter 151.11; Ad Simplicianum 1.2.18). Catholic\nbishops are therefore obliged to compel heretics and schismatics to\nre-enter the Catholic church even forcibly, just as a father beats his\nchildren when he sees them playing with snakes or as we bind a madman\nwho otherwise would fling himself down a precipice (Letter\n93.8; 185.7; and Letter 93.1–10 in general). Obviously,\nthis is a paternalistic argument that presupposes superior insight in\nthose who legitimately wield coercive power. While this may be\nacceptable in the case of the Church, which according to\nAugustine’s ecclesiology is the body of Christ and the\nembodiment of fraternal love, it turns out to be problematic when it\nis transferred to secular rulers (Augustine rarely does this, but cf.\nLetter 138.14–15). And as even the Church in this world\nis a mixed body of sinners and saints (see\n 8. History and Political Philosophy),\n it may be asked how individual bishops can be sure of their good\nintentions when they use religious force (Rist 1994: 242–245).\nAugustine does not address this problem, presumably because most of\nhis relevant texts are propagandistic defenses of coercion against the\nDonatists."],"subsection_title":"7.3 Love"},{"content":["\nThough other Latin philosophers, especially Seneca, had made use of\nthe concept of will (voluntas) before Augustine, it has a\nmuch wider application in his ethics and moral psychology than in any\npredecessor and covers a broader range of phenomena than either\nAristotelian boulesis (roughly, rational choice) or Stoic\nprohairesis (roughly, the fundamental decision to lead a good\nlife). Augustine comes closer than any earlier philosopher to positing\nwill as a faculty of choice that is reducible neither to reason nor to\nnon-rational desire. It has therefore been claimed that Augustine\n“discovered” the will (Dihle 1982: ch. 6; Kahn 1988;\ncontrast Frede 2011: 153–174 who, mainly on the basis of De\nlibero arbitrio, emphasizes Augustine’s indebtedness to\nStoicism). Augustine admits both first-order and second-order\nvolitions, the latter being acts of the liberum voluntatis\narbitrium, the ability to choose between conflicting first-order\nvolitions (Stump 2001; Horn 1996; den Bok 1994). Like desires,\nfirst-order volitions are intentional or object-directed and operate\non all levels of the soul. Like memory and thought, will is a\nconstitutive element of the mind (see\n 6.2 The Human Mind as an Image of God).\n It is closely related to love and, accordingly, the locus of moral\nevaluation. We act well or badly if and only if our actions spring\nfrom a good or evil will, which is equivalent to saying that they are\nmotivated by right (i.e., God-directed) or perverse (i.e.,\nself-directed) love (De civitate dei 14.7).\n With this basic idea in view, Augustine defends the passions or\nemotions against their Stoic condemnation as malfunctions of rational\njudgment by redefining them more neutrally as volitions\n(voluntates) that may be good or bad depending on their\nintentional objects (De civitate dei 9.4–5; 14.9;\nWetzel 1992: 98–111; Byers 2012b). The mechanics of the will in\nAugustine’s moral psychology is strongly indebted to the Stoic\ntheory of assent, which it however modifies in at least one respect.\nAs in Stoicism, the will to act is triggered by an impression\ngenerated by an external object (visum). To\nthis the mind responds with an appetitive motion that urges us to\npursue or to avoid the object (e.g., delight or fear). But only when\nwe give our inner consent to this impulse or withhold it, does a will\nemerge that, circumstances permitting, results in a corresponding\naction. The will is the proper locus of our moral responsibility\nbecause it is neither in our power whether an object presents itself\nto our senses or intellect nor whether we take delight in it (De\nlibero arbitrio 3.74; Ad Simplicianum 1.2.21), and our\nattempts to act externally may succeed or fail for reasons beyond our\ncontrol. The only element that is in our power is our will or inner\nconsent, for which we are therefore fully responsible. Thus, a person\nwho has consented to adultery is guilty even if his attempt actually\nto commit it is unsuccessful, and a victim of rape who does not\nconsent to the deed keeps her will free of sin even if she feels\nphysical pleasure (De civitate dei 1.16–28). Augustine\ntherefore defines sin as “the will to keep or pursue something\nunjustly” (De duabus animabus 15). The second stage in\nthe above structure, the involuntary appetitive motion of the soul, is\nreminiscent of the Stoic “first motions”, but it also\ncorresponds to the “impulse”, which in Stoicism does not\nprecede consent but follows it and immediately results in action.\nTemptations of this kind are, in Augustine, not personal sins but due to\noriginal sin, and they haunt even the saints. Our will must be freed\nby divine grace to resist them (Contra Iulianum 6.70; see, on\nthis theory and its Stoic and Platonic background, Byers 2013:\n100–150; J. Müller 2009: 157–161; Sorabji 2000:\n372–384; Rist 1994: 176–177).","\nAugustine’s thinking about free will (liberum arbitrium\nor liberum voluntatis arbitrium) undergoes some development\nduring his career. In the 390s, opposing the dualistic fatalism of the\nManicheans, he uses the cogito-like argument (see\n 5.1 Skepticism and Certainty)\n to demonstrate that we are responsible for our volitions because we\nare as certain that we will as we are certain that we exist and think\n(De duabus animabus 13; De libero arbitrio 3.3;\nConfessiones 7.5; S. Harrison 1999). A contemporaneous\ndefinition of will as a movement of soul toward some object of desire\nemphasizes the absence of external constraint, and the ensuing\ndefinition of sin as an unjust volition (see above) seems to endorse\nthe principle of alternative possibilities (De duabus\nanimabus 14–15). In De libero arbitrio, free will\nappears as the condition of possibility of moral goodness and hence as\na great good itself; but as it is not an absolute good (which is God\nalone) but only an intermediate one, it is liable to misuse and,\nhence, also the source of moral evil (De libero arbitrio\n2.47–53). In his early exegesis of Paul’s chapter on\ndivine election (Romans 9), Augustine is keen to establish that Paul\ndid not abolish free will (Expositio quarundam propositionum ex\nepistula apostoli ad Romanos 13–18). With all this,\nAugustine is basically in harmony with the traditional view of early\nChristian theology and exegesis, which is still adopted in the 420s by\nJulian of Aeclanum when he blames Augustine for having fallen back\ninto Manichean fatalism and quotes his early definitions against him\n(Julian, Ad Florum, in Contra Iulianum opus\nimperfectum 1.44–47). Things change with Ad\nSimplicianum 1.2 and the Confessiones. By c. 400 CE,\nAugustine had come to the conclusion that our ability to make choices\nwas seriously impaired by the fallen condition of humankind and that\nit made little sense to talk about free will without reference to\ngrace. The optimistic-sounding claim in the first book of De\nlibero arbitrio (1.25–26; 29) that it is in our power to be\ngood as soon as we choose to be good because “nothing is as\ncompletely in our will as will itself” was probably never the\nwhole story; already in book 3 of the same work Augustine says that\nthe cognitive and motivational deficiencies caused by Adam’s sin\n(“ignorance and difficulty”, ib. 3.52; S. Harrison 2006:\n112–130) seriously compromise our natural ability to choose the\ngood, and in his later, especially anti-Pelagian work he radicalizes\nthis to the idea that original sin makes us unable to completely\nsubdue our sinful volitions as long as we live, so that we live in a\npermanent state of “akrasia” or weakness of will (De\nnatura et gratia 61–67; De civitate dei 19.4;\nDe nuptiis et concupiscentia 1.35). But he never questions\nthe principle that we have been created with the natural ability to\nfreely and voluntarily choose the good, nor does he ever deny the\napplicability of the cogito argument to the will (cf. De civitate\ndei 5.10) or doubt that our volitions are imputable to us. What\ngrace does is to restore our natural freedom; it does not compel us to\nact against our will. What this means is best illustrated by the\nnarrative of Confessiones 8 (for particularly lucid\ninterpretations, see Wetzel 1992: 126–138; J. Müller 2009:\n323–335). Immediately before his conversion Augustine suffers\nfrom a “divided will”, feeling torn apart between the will\nto lead an ascetic Christian life and the will to continue his\nprevious, sexually active life. Though he identifies with the former,\nbetter will rather than with the latter that actually torments him, he\nis unable to opt for it because of his bad habits, which he once\nacquired voluntarily but which have by now transformed into a kind of\naddictive necessity (ib. 8.10–12). Earlier philosophical\ntraditions would have interpreted this “akratic” state as\na conflict of reason and desire, and Manichean dualism would have\nattributed Augustine’s bad will to an evil substance present in\nbut foreign to the soul, but Augustine insists that both wills were\nindeed his own. Using medical metaphors reminiscent of Hellenistic\nmoral philosophy, he argues that his will lacked the power of free\nchoice because the disease of being divided between conflicting\nvolitions had weakened it (ib. 8.19; 21). His ability to choose is\nonly restored when, in the garden scene at the end of the book, his\nwill is reintegrated and healed by God’s call, which immediately\nfrees him to opt for the ascetic life (ib. 8.29–30). Before,\nwhen he had just continued his habitual way of life, this had been a\nnon-choice rather than a choice, even though, as Augustine insists, he\nhad done so voluntarily. In substance, this remained his line of\ndefense when, in the Pelagian controversy, he was confronted with the\ncharge that his doctrine of grace abolished free will (De spiritu\net littera 52–60; cf. De correptione et gratia 6).\nWhile the Pelagians thought that the principle of alternative\npossibilities was indispensable for human responsibility and divine\njustice, Augustine accepts that principle only for the first humans in\nparadise (Contra Iulianum opus imperfectum 1.47; 5.28;\n5.40–42 etc.). In a way, by choosing wrongly Adam and Eve have\nabandoned free will both for themselves and for all humankind.\nOriginal sin transformed our initial ability not to sin into an\ninability not to sin; grace can restore ability not to sin in this\nlife and will transform it into inability to sin in the next (De\ncivitate dei 22.30; De correptione et gratia 33)."],"subsection_title":"7.4 Will and Freedom"},{"content":["\nAugustine’s notion of will is closely related to his thinking on\nevil. The problem of the origin of evil (unde malum), he\nclaims, had haunted him from his youth (Confessiones 7.7). At\nfirst, he accepted the dualist solution of the Manicheans, which freed\nGod from the responsibility for evil but compromised his omnipotence\n(ib. 3.12; 7.3). After having encountered the books of the Platonists,\nAugustine rejected the existence of an evil substance and endorsed the\nNeoplatonic view (argued e.g., in Plotinus, Enneads I.8) that\nevil is in fact unsubstantial and a privation or corruption of\ngoodness. In his mature view, which was largely developed during his\nanti-Manichean polemics, everything that has being is good insofar as\nit has been created by God. There are of course different degrees of\ngoodness as well as of being (Letter 18.2),\n but everything that is real is good “in its degree”, and\nthe hierarchical order of reality is itself a good creation of God\n(Bouton-Touboulic 2004). Augustine therefore rejects Plotinus’\nview that prime matter is equivalent to prime evil, because the\nformlessness of matter is not pure negativity but a positive, and\nhence divinely created, capacity to receive forms\n(Confessiones 12.6; see\n 10. Creation and Time).\n A created being can be said to be evil if and only if it falls short\nof its natural goodness by being corrupted or vitiated; strictly\nspeaking, only corruption itself is evil, whereas the nature or\nsubstance or essence (for the equivalence of the terms see De\nmoribus 2.2) of the thing itself remains good\n(Confessiones 7.18; Contra epistulam fundamenti\n35.39 etc.; for a systematic account, De natura boni\n1–23; Schäfer 2002: 219–239). While this theory can\nexplain physical evil relatively easily either as a necessary feature\nof hierarchically ordered (corporeal) reality (De ordine\n2.51), as a just punishment of sin, or as part of God’s pedagogy\nof salvation (Letter 138.14), it leaves open the question of\nmoral evil or sin itself. Augustine answers by equating moral evil\nwith evil will\n and claims that the seemingly natural question of what causes evil\nwill is unanswerable. His most sustained argument to this effect is\nfound in his explanation of the fall of the devil and the evil angels,\na case that, being the very first occurrence of evil in the created\nworld, allows him to analyze the problem in its most abstract terms\n(De civitate dei 12.1–9; cf. already De libero\narbitrio 3.37–49; Schäfer 2002: 242–300;\nMacDonald 1999). The cause can neither be a substance (which, qua\nsubstance, is good and unable to cause anything evil) nor a will\n(which would in turn have to be an evil will in need of explanation).\nTherefore, an evil will has no “efficient” but only a\n“deficient” cause, which is none other than the\nwill’s spontaneous defection from God. The fact that evil agents\nare created from nothing and hence are not, unlike God, intrinsically\nunable to sin is a necessary condition of evil but not a sufficient\none (after all the good angels successfully kept their good will). In\nthis context Augustine, in an interesting thought experiment, imagines\ntwo persons of equal intellectual and emotional disposition of whom\none gives in to a temptation while the other resists it; from this he\nconcludes that the difference must be due to a free, spontaneous and\nirreducible choice of the will (De civitate dei 12.6). Here\nat least Augustine virtually posits the will as an independent mental\nfaculty."],"subsection_title":"7.5 Will and Evil"},{"content":["\nFrom the Middle Ages onwards, Augustine’s theology of grace has\nbeen regarded as the heart of his Christian teaching, and with good\nreason. As he points out himself, his conviction that human beings in\ntheir present condition are unable to do or even to will the good by\ntheir own efforts is his most fundamental disagreement with ancient,\nespecially Stoic, virtue ethics (De civitate dei 19.4;\nWolterstorff 2012). After and because of the disobedience of Adam and\nEve, we have lost our natural ability of self-determination, which can\nonly be repaired and restored by the divine grace that has manifested\nitself in the incarnation and sacrifice of Christ and works inwardly\nto free our will from its enslavement to sin.\n Confession of sins and humility are, therefore, basic Christian\nvirtues and attitudes; the philosophers’ confidence in their own\nvirtue that prevents them from accepting the grace of Christ is an\nexample of the sinful pride that puts the self in the place of God and\nwas at the core of the evil angels’ primal sin (De civitate\ndei 10.29).","\nThe main inspiration for Augustine’s doctrine of grace is, of\ncourse, Paul (even though remarks on human weakness and divine help\nare not absent from the ancient philosophical tradition and especially\nfrom Platonism which had had a strong religious side from the\nbeginning; Augustine claims that with such utterances the Platonists\ninadvertently “confess” grace, cf. De civitate\ndei 10.29; 22.22). The radical view that the gifts of grace\ninclude not only external good works and the internal volitional\ndisposition that allows us to perform them but even the very first\nbeginnings of faith—in later technical terminology: that grace\nis not “cooperative” but radically\n“prevenient”—is however his own, and it took several\nyears to take shape in his thought. There is some debate on the stages\nof this development (for diverging reconstructions, see\nKarfíková 2012; Cary 2008a; Drecoll 2004–2010;\nDrecoll 1999; emphasis on the shifts in Augustine’s thinking:\nLettieri 2001; Flasch 1995; emphasis on continuity: C. Harrison 2006),\nbut it is generally agreed that Augustine’s doctrine of grace\nreached its mature form c. 395–397 with Ad Simplicianum\n1.2, after several years of intense reading and exegesis of Paul, and\ngained higher profile during the Pelagian controversy after 412.\nAugustine emphasizes the necessity of grace for both intellectual\nunderstanding and moral purification already in his earliest works\n(cf. esp. Soliloquia 1.2–6), but seems to have been\nconcerned to leave room for human initiative at least with respect to\nfaith and will (which would be in line with his concern, prominent\nthroughout the 390s, to safeguard human responsibility against\nManichean fatalism). In his early exegesis of Paul, he explains\nGod’s apparently gratuitous election of Jacob and rejection of\nEsau (Romans 9:10–13) with God’s foreknowledge of\nJacob’s faith and Esau’s infidelity (De diversis\nquaestionibus 68.5; Expositio quarundam propositionum ex\nepistula apostoli ad Romanos 60), a “synergistic”\nreading that relies on the assumption that salvation results from the\ncooperation of divine grace and human initiative and that had been\nstandard in early Christianity since Origen. This explanation is\nexplicitly rejected in Ad Simplicianum (1.2.5–6; 8;\n11). In this pivotal text, Augustine, true to his program of\n“faith seeking understanding”,\n attempts an exegesis of Romans 9:9–29 that satisfies the\nphilosophical requirements of God’s justice and benevolence\nwhile taking seriously the Pauline point that God’s election is\nentirely gratuitous and not occasioned by any human merit. The guiding\nintention of Romans 9, Augustine now says, is to preclude vainglory\nand pride (ib. 1.2.2) rather than to safeguard human responsibility\n(as had been his view in Expositio quarundam propositionum ex\nepistula apostoli ad Romanos 13–18). Augustine rehearses\nall possible reasons for God’s election of Jacob—his good\nworks, his good will, his faith and God’s foreknowledge of\neach—and discounts them all as amounting to an election from\nmerit rather than from grace. Starting from the primordial willingness\nto heed God’s call to faith, then, everything that is good in\nJacob must be considered a gift of divine grace. Free will has nothing\nto do with the reception of that gift because nobody can will to\nreceive a divine call to faith nor to respond positively to it so as\nto act accordingly and perform good works out of love (Ad\nSimplicianum 1.2.21; for the Stoically-inspired theory of agency\nbehind this see\n 7.4 Will and Freedom).\n While gratuitous election is, apart from being consoling,\ncomparatively easily squared with the axioms of divine benevolence,\njustice and omnipotence, its corollary, the equally gratuitous\nreprobation and damnation of Esau, is a serious philosophical problem\n(ib. 1.2.8). If it is not to violate the principle of God’s\njustice, it obliges us to assume some kind of evil in Esau, which is\nhowever excluded by Paul’s explicit statement to the contrary\n(Romans 9:11). Augustine’s solution is his doctrine of original\nsin. Both Jacob and Esau have inherited Adam’s guilt that his\nsin has spread over all humankind—a debt that God remits for\nJacob but exacts from Esau for reasons that, Augustine admits,\nnecessarily elude human understanding but are certainly just. Since\nthe Fall, humankind is nothing but a “lump of sin” that\nGod might justly have damned as a whole but from which he has chosen\nto save some individuals and to transform them into “vessels of\nmercy” (ib. 1.2.16, cf. Romans 9:23). The notion of original sin\nwas not invented by Augustine but had a tradition in African\nChristianity, especially in Tertullian.\n The view that original sin is a personally imputable guilt that\njustifies eternal damnation is, however, new with Ad\nSimplicianum and follows with logical necessity from the\nexegetical and philosophical claims made there about divine grace and\nelection (Flasch 1995; contrast De libero arbitrio\n3.52–55). The theory of Ad Simplicianum is illustrated,\nwith great philosophical acumen and psychological plausibility, in the\nConfessiones (especially bk. 8) and remains in place during\nthe Pelagian controversy till the end of Augustine’s life.\nCuriously, however, there are passages even in his anti-Pelagian work\nthat seem aimed at safeguarding freedom of choice and, accordingly,\nadmit of a “synergistic” reading (De spiritu et\nlittera 60; Cary 2008a: 82–86 and, for a different\ninterpretation, Drecoll 2004–2010: 207–208). After 412,\npressed by his Pelagian opponents, Augustine paid increasing attention\nto the mechanics of the transmission of original sin. The result was a\nquasi-biological theory that associated original sin closely with\nsexual concupiscence (see\n 9. Gender, Women and Sexuality).","\nAn obvious implication of Augustine’s theory of grace and\nelection is predestination, a subject prominent in his last treatises\nagainst the Pelagians (e.g., De praedestinatione sanctorum,\nwritten after 426) but already implied in Ad Simplicianum.\nGod decides “before the constitution of the world”\n(Ephesians 1:4), i.e., (in Neoplatonic terms) in the non-temporal way\nthat matches his transcendent, eternal being (De civitate dei\n11.21; see also\n 10. Creation and Time),\n who will be exempted from the damnation that awaits fallen humankind\nand who will not (“double predestination”). This knowledge\nis however hidden to human beings, to whom it will only be revealed at\nthe end of times (De correptione et gratia 49).\n Until then, nobody, not even a baptized Christian, can be sure\nwhether grace has given her true faith and a good will and, if so,\nwhether she will persevere in it till the end of her life so as to be\nactually saved (De correptione et gratia 10–25; cf.\n 7.3 Love).\n Like the Stoic determinists before him, Augustine was confronted with\nthe objection that his doctrine of predestination made all human\nactivity pointless (“Lazy Argument”). While in Hellenism\nthis had largely been a theoretical issue, it acquired practical\nrelevance under the circumstances of monastic life: some North African\nmonks objected to being rebuked for their misbehavior with the\nargument that they were not responsible for not (yet) enjoying the\ngift of divine grace (De correptione et gratia 6). Taking up\nideas from De magistro\n and from Ad Simplicianum, Augustine replies that rebuke may\nwork as an external admonition, even as a divine calling, that helps\npeople turn to God inwardly and hence must not be withheld (De\ncorreptione et gratia 7–9). To the query that\npredestination undermines free will, Augustine gives his usual answer\nthat our freedom of choice has been damaged by original sin and must\nbe liberated by grace if we are to develop the good will necessary for\nvirtue and happiness. The medieval and modern debate on whether grace is\n“irresistible” is, therefore, to some extent\nun-Augustinian (cf. Wetzel 1992: 197–206); some, especially\nlater, texts do however present prevenient grace as converting the\nwill with coercive force (Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum\n1.36–37; cf. already Ad Simplicianum 1.2.22; Cary\n2008a: 105–110). A problem related to predestination but not\nequivalent to it is divine foreknowledge (Matthews 2005: 96–104;\nWetzel 2001; for general discussion, Zagzebski 1991). Augustine\ninherits it from the Hellenistic discussion on future contingents and\nlogical determinism that is best documented in Cicero’s De\nfato. His solution is that while external actions may be\ndetermined, inner volitions are not. These are certainly foreknown by\nGod but exactly as what they are, i.e., as ours and as volitions and\nnot as external compulsions (De civitate dei 5.9–10;\ncf. De libero arbitrio 3.4–11). This argument is\nindependent of the doctrine of grace and original sin; it applies not\njust to fallen humankind but also to Adam and Eve and even to the\ndevil, whose transgression God had, of course, foreseen (De\ncivitate dei 11.17; 14.11)."],"subsection_title":"7.6 Grace, Predestination and Original Sin"}]},{"main_content":["\nAugustine’s City of God is not a treatise of political\nor social philosophy. It is an extended plea designed to persuade\npeople “to enter the city of God or to persist in it”\n(Letter 2*.3). The criterion of membership in the city of God\n(a metaphor Augustine takes from the Psalms, cf. Psalm 86:3 quoted,\ne.g., in De civitate dei 11.1) and its antagonist, the\nearthly city, is right or wrong love.\n A person belongs to the city of God if and only if he directs his\nlove towards God even at the expense of self-love, and he belongs to\nthe earthly city or city of the devil if and only if he postpones love\nof God for self-love, proudly making himself his greatest good (De\ncivitate dei 14.28). The main argument of the work is that true\nhappiness, which is sought by every human being (ib. 10.1),\n cannot be found outside the city of God founded by Christ (cf. ib. 1,\nprologue). The first ten books deconstruct, in a manner reminiscent of\ntraditional Christian apologetics, the alternative conceptions of\nhappiness in the Roman political tradition (which equates happiness\nwith the prosperity of the Empire, thus falling prey to evil demons\nwho posed as the defenders of Rome but in fact ruined it morally and\npolitically) and in Greek, especially Platonic, philosophy (which,\ndespite its insight into the true nature of God, failed to accept the\nmediation of Christ incarnate out of pride and turned to false\nmediators, i.e., deceptive demons; bks. 8–10 have an interesting\ndisquisition on Platonic demonology). Augustine’s approach in\nthe second, positive half is Scriptural, creationist and\neschatological; this fact accounts for the specific character of its\nhistorical dimension. The history of the two cities begins with the\ncreation of the world and the defection of the devil and the sin of\nAdam and Eve (bks. 11–14); it continues with the\nprovidentially-governed vicissitudes of the People of Israel (the\nfirst earthly representative of the city of God) and, after the coming\nof Christ, of the Church (bks. 15–17, supplemented by a survey\nof the concurrent secular history from the earliest Eastern empires to\ncontemporary Rome in bk. 18); and it ends with the final destination\n(finis, to be understood both ethically as “ultimate\ngoal” and eschatologically as “end of times”) of the\ntwo cities in eternal damnation and eternal bliss (bks. 19–22;\nfor the structure and basic ideas of the City of God see\nO’Daly 1999). To a great extent, Augustine’s approach is\nexegetical; for him, the history of the city of God is, in substance,\nsacred history as laid down in Scripture (Markus 1970: 1–21).\nObviously, however, the heavenly and earthly cities must not be\nconfounded with the worldly institutions of the church and the state.\nIn history, each of these, and the Church in particular, is a mixed\nbody in which members of the city of God and the earthly city coexist,\ntheir distinction being clear only to God, who will separate the two\ncities at the end of times (ib. 1.35; 10.32 etc.). While the city of\nGod is a stranger or, at best, a resident alien (peregrinus:\nib. 15.1; 15.15) in this world and yearns for its celestial homeland,\nthe earthly city is not a unified body at all but lies in continuous\nstrife with itself because it is dominated by lust for power, the most\nwidespread form of the archetypal sin of pride in political and social\nlife (ib. 18.2). All this is in agreement with Augustine’s ideas\non predestination and grace;\n the history of the two cities is essentially the history of fallen\nhumanity. This dualistic account is however qualified when, in the\npart of the work that moves closest to social philosophy, Augustine\nanalyzes the attitude a Christian ought to adopt to the earthly\nsociety she inevitably lives in during her existence in this world.\nStarting, again, from the axiom that all human beings naturally desire\nwhat is good for them, he innovatively determines the goal that every\nindividual and every community in fact pursues as “peace”\n(pax), which, in his view, is largely equivalent with natural order and subordination. There are higher and lesser degrees of both individual\nand collective peace, e.g., the control of the emotions through\nreason, the subordination of body to soul, the subordination of\nchildren to parents in the family or a functioning hierarchical order\nin the state; at the top is “peace with God” or the\nsubordination of the human mind to God (ib. 19.13; Weissenberg 2005).\nThe lower forms of peace are relative goods and, as such, legitimately\npursued as long as they are not mistaken for the absolute good.\nPolitical peace and order is sought by members of the city of God and\nthe earthly city alike, but whereas the latter “enjoy” it\nbecause it is the greatest good they can attain and conceive of, the\nformer “use” it for the sake of their peace with God,\ni.e., in order that they and others may enjoy an unhindered Christian\nreligious life (ib. 19.17; 19.26; for “enjoyment” and\n“use” see\n 7.1 Happiness).\n Political peace is thus morally neutral insofar as it is a goal\ncommon to Christians and non-Christians. Augustine criticizes Cicero\nbecause he included justice in his definition of the state (Cicero,\nDe re publica 1.39) and thereby gave the earthly state an\ninherent moral quality that in reality is the privilege of the city of\nGod (De civitate dei 19.21). He himself prefers a more\npragmatic definition that makes the consensus about a common object of\n“love” (i.e., a common good agreed on by all members of\nthe community) the criterion of a state; the moral evaluation is not a\nmatter of the definition but depends on the evaluation of the goal it\npursues (cf.\n 7.3 Love).\n The early Roman Empire, which strove for glory, was more tolerable\nthan the Oriental empires that were driven by naked lust for power;\nthe best imaginable goal pursued by an earthly society would be\nperfect earthly peace (ib. 19.24; Weithman 2001: 243–4).\nChristians are allowed and even called to work for the well-being of\nthe societies they live in as long as they promote earthly peace for\nthe sake of their citizens’ and their own true happiness; in\npractice, this will usually mean furthering Christian religion (ib.\n5.25–6, on the Christian emperors Constantine and Theodosius;\nLetter 155.12; 16; Dodaro 2004b; Tornau 2013). But the doctrine\nof the two cities deliberately precludes any promotion of\nthe emperor or the empire to a providential and quasi-sacred rank. Not\neven Christians in power will be able to overcome the inherent\nwretchedness of fallen humanity (De civitate dei 19.6). Like\nthe vast majority of ancient Christian theologians, Augustine has\nlittle or no interest in social reform. Slavery, meaning unnatural\ndomination of humans over humans, is a characteristic stain of\npostlapsarian human life and, at the same time, an evil that is put to\ngood effects when it secures social order (ib. 19.15; Rist 1994:\n236–239). War results from sin and is the privileged means of\nsatisfying lust for power (ib. 18.2; 19.7). Nevertheless, Augustine\nwrote a letter to refute the claim that Christianity advocated a\npolitically impracticable pacifism (Letter 138). His\nChristian reinterpretation of the traditional Roman Just War Theory\nshould be read in the framework of his general theory of virtue and\npeace (Holmes 1999). To be truly just according to Augustinian\nstandards, a war would have to be waged for the benefit of the\nadversary and without any vindictiveness, in short, out of love of\nneighbor, which, in a fallen world, seems utopian (Letter\n138.14). Wars may however be relatively just if they are defensive and\nproperly declared (cf. Cicero, De officiis 1.36–37) or\ncommanded by a just authority even short of the special case of the\nwars of the People of Israel that were commanded by God himself\n(Contra Faustum 22.74–78)."],"section_title":"8. History and Political Philosophy","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nOutright misogyny is rare in Augustine, but he lived in a society and\nworked from a tradition—both Greco-Roman and\nJudeo-Christian—that took the natural and social subordination\nof women to men largely for granted (cf. Børresen 2013: 135\nand, for a sketch of the social and familial realities of late-antique\nRoman Africa, Rist 1994: 210–213; 246–247). Augustine\ninterprets the Genesis tale of the creation of woman (Genesis\n2:18–22) to mean that, Eve having been created as a helper to\nAdam and for the sake of reproduction, she was subordinate to him\nalready in paradise (De Genesi ad litteram 6.5.7; 9.5.9).\nThis situation is exacerbated by the Fall; under the conditions of\nfallen humankind, marriage is, for the wives, a kind of slavery that\nthey should accept with obedience and humility (as Monnica did; cf.\nConfessiones 9.19–20 and, on marriage in Augustine in\ngeneral, E. Clark 1996). In his early anti-Manichean exegesis of\nGenesis, he allegorizes man as the rational and woman as the\nnon-rational, appetitive parts of the soul (De Genesi contra\nManichaeos 2.15, cf. De vera religione 78; De Genesi\nad litteram 8.23.44; the pattern is well attested in the\nphilosophical tradition). On the other hand, he insists—as until\nthen few Christian theologians had done—that the meaning of the\nGenesis tale was not purely allegorical but that sexual\ndifferentiation had begun to exist in paradise and would persist in\nthe resurrected bodies of the blessed because it was a natural part of\nGod’s creation (De civitate dei 22.17). Following the\nGreek philosophical (in particular, Platonic) conviction that the soul\nand especially its highest, intellectual part is not gendered as well\nas the Pauline eschatological promise that in Christ “there is\nneither male nor female” (Galatians 3:28), Augustine argues that\nthe words of Genesis 1:26–27 on the human being having been\ncreated in the image of God imply that woman is human like man because\nshe has an intellectual soul and because it is not the gendered body\nbut the intellectual soul that makes the human being an image of God\n(De Genesi ad litteram 3.22.34; Børresen 2013:\n136–137; cf. also\n 6.2 The Human Mind as an Image of God;\n the view that woman is made in the image of God is far from\nuncontroversial in ancient Christianity). The inner tension of the\nview that woman is intellectually equal and, at the same time, by\nnature socially inferior to man makes itself felt in Augustine’s\nexegesis of Paul’s saying that women, but not men, should veil\nthemselves because man is made in the image of God (1 Corinthians\n11:7). Augustine compares man with theoretical and woman (the\n“helper” of Genesis 2:18) with practical reason and claims\nthat while theoretical and practical reason together or reason in its\nentirety is an image of God just as the human being as such is, in virtue\nof its reason, an image of God, practical reason alone, being directed toward corporeal\nthings and but a “helper” of theoretical reason, is not. (By implication, woman is an image of God qua human being, but not qua woman.) The\npractice enjoined by Paul is meant to signify this difference (De\ntrinitate 12.10–13). This exegesis safeguards the\ngodlikeness of woman against a widespread patristic consensus and, it\nappears, against Paul himself, but at the same time defends social\ninequality and even endows it with metaphysical and religious\nsignificance (Stark 2007a).","\nTwo women figure prominently in Augustine’s literary output\n(Power 1995; G. Clark 2015): his mother, Monnica (her name appears\nonly in Confessiones 9.37), and his partner for fourteen years,\nthe mother of Adeodatus. In the dialogues of Cassiciacum, Monnica\nrepresents a philosophical way of life based on the natural intuitions\nof reason and on an unshakable Christian faith together with a life\naccording to the precepts of Christian morality (De beata\nvita 10; De ordine 1.31–32). She, and the\nuneducated but faithful in general, may not be able to reach happiness\nin this life by means of an ascent to the divine with the help of the\nliberal arts, but they will certainly see God “from face to\nface” in eternal bliss (De ordine 2.45–46).\nBehind this idealization may be the male Christian philosopher’s\nnostalgic desire for a “natural” holiness untainted by\nsecular occupation and learning (Brown 1988: ch. 13, on the Greek\ntheologians and bishops of the fourth century). Monnica’s\nprominence and idealization in the Confessiones has provoked\nmuch, and mostly fruitless, psychological speculation. Augustine\nrepresents her influence on his religious life as pervasive from his\nearliest years onwards and even compares her to the Mother Church\n(Confessiones 1.17). She embodies ideal Christian love of the\nneighbor (see\n 7.3 Love)\n in that she furthers Augustine’s Catholic faith with all her\nmeans (mostly, tears and prayer) and never indulges his Manicheism\ndespite her motherly affection (e.g., Confessiones 3.19).\nWith this she however combines, especially in the earlier books, more\nmundane motives, e.g., when she arranges a marriage for Augustine in\nthe hope of both fencing his sexual concupiscence and assisting his\nworldly career (ib. 6.23). Like the other human influences on\nAugustine reported in the Confessiones, she is used by God as\nan instrument of his grace in a way she neither foresees nor wills.\nOnly after Augustine’s conversion does she rise to saintly\nperfection, especially in the “vision of Ostia” when,\nshortly before her death, mother and son, after a long\nphilosophico-theological conversation, reach a sudden insight into\nwhat contemplation of the transcendent God in eternal bliss must be\nlike (ib. 9.24–25). The chapter on the dismissal of\nAdeodatus’ mother for the sake of an advantageous marriage (ib.\n6.25; Shanzer 2002; Miles 2007) has been unpalatable for many modern\nreaders. Yet what is unusual about it is not Augustine’s\nbehavior but the fact that he mentions it at all and, from hindsight,\nreflects on the pain it caused him. True to the deliberately\ncounter-intuitive and often provocative procedure of the\nConfessiones, he singles out an emotion that, then as now,\nmost people would have easily understood but which he nevertheless\ninterprets as a mark of his sinful state because it resulted from the\nloss of a female body he had, in a kind of mutual sexual exploitation,\nenjoyed for the sake of pleasure (Confessiones 4.2; for the\nunderlying defective view, common in antiquity, of erotic\nrelationships cf. Rist 1994: 249) instead of “enjoying”\nhis female neighbor “in God” and relating their mutual\nlove to him (cf.\n 7.1 Happiness;\n compare Augustine’s excessive grief about the friend of his\nyouth in Confessiones 4.9–11 and contrast his\npost-conversion mourning of Monnica, ib. 9.30–33).","\nAugustine’s views on sexuality are most prominent in his\nanti-Pelagian treatises, where he develops a theory about the\ntransmission of original sin from the first couple in paradise to\nevery human being born since, making sexual concupiscence the prime\nfactor in the process (cf. E. Clark 1996 and 2000, who also takes into\naccount Augustine’s Manichean past). In Augustine’s\nethics, concupiscence (concupiscentia) does not have a\nspecifically sexual meaning but is an umbrella term that covers all\nvolitions or intentions opposed to right love (see\n\n Nisula 2012). The transgression of Adam and Eve did not consist\nin sexual concupiscence but in their disobedience, which, like the\nevil angels’ primal sin, was rooted in pride (see\n 7.5 Will and Evil).\n For this disobedience they, and all humankind with them, were\npunished with the disobedience of their own selves, i.e., the\nimpossibility of fully controlling their own appetites and volitions\nand the permanent akratic state (the “coveting of the flesh\nagainst the spirit”, in the words of Galatians 5:17) that marks\nfallen humanity. The inability of human beings to control their sexual\ndesires and even their sexual organs (witness the shameful experiences\nof involuntary male erection or of impotence: De civitate dei\n14.15–16) is just an especially obvious example. Unlike most\nearlier Christian writers, Augustine thought that there was sexual\nintercourse in paradise and that there would have been procreation\neven without the fall; he did not share the encratic ideas of some\nascetic circles who hoped to make good for the first sin through\nsexual abstinence, and he had comparatively moderate views on\nvirginity and sexual continence (De sancta virginitate;\nBørresen 2013: 138; Brown 1988: ch. 19). But he thought that\nAdam and Eve had been able to control their sexual organs voluntarily\nso as to limit their use to the natural purpose of procreation; in\nparadise, there had been sexuality but no concupiscence (De\ncivitate dei 14.21–23). Original sin had destroyed this\nideal state, and since then sexual concupiscence is an inevitable\nconcomitant of procreation—an evil that may be put to good use\nin legitimate marriage, where the purpose of sexual intercourse is the\nprocreation of children rather than bodily pleasure (De nuptiis et\nconcupiscentia 1.16; Contra Iulianum 3.15–16), but\nthat nevertheless subjects every newborn human being to the domination\nof the devil from which they need to be freed through baptism (De\nnuptiis et concupiscentia 1.25–26; for energetic criticism\nof Augustine’s views on concupiscence, inter alia\nbecause of their impact on the sex morals of modern Christianity, see\nPagels 1989, for moderate defense Lamberigts 2000)."],"section_title":"9. Gender, Women, and Sexuality","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nJust as the late-antique Platonists developed their cosmological\nthinking by commenting on Plato’s Timaeus,\nAugustine’s natural philosophy is largely a theory of creation\nbased on an exegesis of the opening chapters of Genesis, on which he\nwrote five extended, and occasionally diverging, commentaries (De\nGenesi contra Manichaeos; De Genesi ad litteram liber\nimperfectus; Confessiones 11–13; De Genesi ad\nlitteram; De civitate dei 11–14). The longest and\nmost important of them is the Literal Commentary on Genesis\n(De Genesi ad litteram). “Literal” does not mean\n“literalist” but denotes the hermeneutic assumption that\nthe text is really about the creation of the world (as opposed to a\nmoralist or prophetic allegorical reading of the kind proposed in\nAugustine’s early De Genesi contra Manichaeos; the two\napproaches are compatible because Augustine, like Origen and the\nJewish exegete Philo before him, believes in the existence of multiple\nlayers of meaning in Scripture; see De Genesi ad litteram\n1.1.1 and, in general, De doctrina christiana, bk. 3). In\nline with his epistemology of illumination and his theory of verbal\nsigns,\n Augustine takes the biblical creation tale as an\n“admonition” that prompts him to devise, with the help of\nthe “inner teacher”, a rational theistic cosmology based\non Trinitarian theology (for rejection of explanations that contradict\nthe findings of the natural philosophers or the laws of nature cf.,\ne.g., De Genesi ad litteram 2.9.21). In De Genesi ad\nlitteram, in the Confessiones and, to a lesser extent,\nin De civitate dei Augustine presents his exegesis in a\nquestioning manner and keeps the results open to revision. The reason\nis that, according to the hermeneutics developed especially in bk. 12\nof the Confessiones, the authorial intention of the\nScriptural text, or indeed of any text, cannot be recovered, so\nthat—given that the truthfulness of Scripture can be taken for\ngranted—different and even incompatible readings must be\nconsidered as adequate if they agree with what the text says and if\nthey are sanctioned by the truth which we access inwardly through\nreason and which is, ultimately, God himself (see esp.\nConfessiones 12.27; 43; De doctrina christiana 3.38\nwhere Augustine claims that the Holy Spirit providentially allowed for\na plenitude of Scriptural meanings in order to prompt different people\nto different aspects of the truth; Williams 2001; van Riel 2007; Dutton 2014: 175–179;\nand, on the epistemological foundations of this hermeneutics, Cary\n2008b: 135–138). The basic and recurrent features of\nAugustine’s cosmological thought are these (cf. Knuuttila 2001:\n103–109; Mayer 1996–2002, each with references): God does\nnot create in time but creates time together with changeable being\nwhile resting in timeless eternity himself (Confessiones\n11.16; De Genesi ad litteram 5.5.12; the distinction of\neternity and time is Platonic, cf. Timaeus 37c-38b; Plotinus,\nEnneads III.7.1). Creation occurs instantaneously; the seven\ndays of creation are not to be taken literally but are a didactic\nmeans to make plain the intrinsic order of reality\n(Confessiones 12.40; De Genesi ad litteram 1.15.29).\nLike the demiurge in the Timaeus, God creates out of\ngoodness, i.e., out of his good will and his gratuitous love for his\ncreation (De civitate dei 11.24). In creation, all three\npersons of the Trinity are active, with, roughly, the Father\naccounting for the existence, the Son (to whom, in Augustine’s\nreading, the opening words of Genesis, in principio, refer)\nfor the form or essence and the Holy Spirit for the goodness and\norderliness of every created being (Confessiones 11.11;\nDe civitate dei 11.24). As the causality of the Trinity makes\nitself felt everywhere in creation, Augustine likes to describe\ncreated beings in their relation to the divine cause in a triadic\nmanner, using, e.g., the categories “measure”,\n“form” and “peace/order” (e.g., De vera\nreligione 13; De natura boni 3; De civitate dei\n12.5; cf. Schäfer 2000 and, for a very thorough discussion, du\nRoy 1966). These “traces” of the Trinity in creation must\nnot be confused with the Trinitarian structure of the human intellect,\nwhich, alone among all created beings, is an image of God.\n Changeable being is not generated from God (which, according to the\nNicene Creed, is true only of the Son) but created out of nothing, a\nfact that partly accounts for its susceptibility for evil.\n More precisely, God “first” creates formless matter out\nof nothing (which is why matter in Augustine, unlike in the\nNeoplatonists, has a minimal ontological status; cf.\nConfessiones 12.6; Tornau 2014: 189–194) and\n“then” forms it by conveying to it the rational principles\n(rationes) that eternally exist in his mind (De diversis\nquaestionibus 46.2) or, as Augustine prefers to put it, in his\nWord, i.e., the Second Person of the Trinity. This formative process\nis Augustine’s exegesis of the biblical “word” of\nGod (Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1). Incorporeal and purely intellectual\nbeings, i.e., the angels, are created from intelligible matter which\nis created out of nothing and converted to the creator so as to be\nformed through the “hearing” of God’s word, i.e., by\ntheir contemplation of the Forms contained in God (De Genesi ad\nlitteram 1.4.9–1.5.11, an idea inspired by the Neoplatonic\npattern of abiding, procession and return). Corporeal being is created\nwhen the Forms or rational principles contained in God and\ncontemplated by the angels are even further externalized so as to\ninform not only intelligible but also physical matter (De Genesi\nad litteram 2.8.16; 4.22.39).","\nAll this is the framework of Augustine’s famous meditation about\ntime in the Confessiones (11.17–41), whose context is\nan exegesis of Genesis and which constantly presupposes the\ndistinction of time and eternity (much has been written on this text,\nbut particularly illuminating treatments are Flasch 1993; Mesch 1998:\n295–343; Matthews 2005: 76–85; Helm 2014; Hoffmann 2017).\nAugustine opens the section with the question, “What is\ntime?” (Confessiones 11.17) but in fact has no\nintention of giving a definition of time. Whereas his accounts outside\nthe Confessiones center on cosmic or physical time, he here\nfocuses on how we experience time from a first-person perspective and\nwhat it means for us and our relationship to ourselves and to God to\nexist temporally. In this sense, the purpose of the book is ethical\nrather than cosmological. Augustine begins by observing that though of\nthe three familiar “parts” of time, past, present and\nfuture, none really exists (the past having ceased to exist, the\nfuture not existing yet, and the present being without extension),\ntime doubtless has reality for us. This is so because time is present\nto us in the form of our present memory of the past, our present\nattention to the present and our present expectation of the future\n(ib. 11.26). The phenomenal proof of this claim is the experience of\nmeasuring time by comparing remembered or expected portions of time to\neach other or of repeating a poem we know by heart, when, as we\nproceed, the words traverse our attention (the present), passing from\nexpectation (the future) to memory (the past; ib. 11.38). We would\nthus be unable to relate past, present and future events, to remember\nthe history of our own lives and even to be aware of our personal\nidentity if our being in time was not divided into memory, attention\nand expectation and, at the same time, unified by the connectedness\nand the simultaneous presence of these. This ambivalent state\nAugustine calls “a distention of the soul” (ib. 11.33;\n38–39, perhaps echoing Plotinus, Enneads III.7.11.41);\nthis is the closest Confessiones 11 comes to a definition of\ntime. The stability of this precarious unity is however dependent on\nthe higher unity of the eternal God—as the whole narrative of\nthe Confessiones teaches, we cannot make sense of the memory\nof our life unless we perceive the ceaseless presence of God’s\nprovidence and grace in it. Toward the end of the book, Augustine\nintroduces the Pauline “straining forward to what lies\nahead” (Philippians 3:12–14)—as he reads it, the\norientation or “intention” of the soul toward God—as\na counterpoint to the soul’s distention in time and concludes\nwith an exhortation to turn from the dispersion of temporal existence\nto the timeless eternity of God which alone guarantees truth and\nstability (ib. 11.39–41)."],"section_title":"10. Creation and Time","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nAugustine’s impact on later philosophy is as enormous as it is\nambivalent (for an overview, see Fuhrer 2018a: 1742–1750; for\nall questions of detail, Pollmann (ed.) 2013; for De\ntrinitate, Kany 2007). Although he was soon accepted as a\ntheological authority and consensus with him was regarded as a\nstandard of orthodoxy throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, his\nviews—or more precisely, the right way of interpreting\nthem—continued to trigger controversies. In the ninth century\nthe monk Gottschalk took Augustine’s doctrine of grace to imply\ndouble predestination (a term coined by him); he was opposed by John\nScotus Eriugena. The philosophical discourse of early scholasticism\n(11th–12th centuries) largely centered on\nAugustinian themes. Anselm’s proof of the existence of God\ndevelops the argument of De libero arbitrio, bk. 2; the\nethicists’ debates on will and conscience rest on the\nassumptions of Augustine’s moral intentionalism, and\nAbelard’s view that ethics is universal and applicable to both\nhuman and divine agency may be read as a response to the problems in\nAugustine’s theory of divine election. With the growing\ninfluence of Aristotle from the thirteenth century onwards, Augustine\ncame to be interpreted in Aristotelian terms that had largely been\nunknown to himself. Thomas Aquinas and others had little interest in\nAugustine’s Platonism, and there was a certain tension between\nthe medieval tendency to look for a teachable philosophical and\ntheological system in his texts and his own way of philosophical\ninquiry that was shaped by the ancient tradition and left room for\ntentative argument and was open to revision. Medieval political\nAugustinianism projected the conflict of the Two Cities onto the\nChurch and the State. Martin Luther (1483–1546) agrees with\nAugustine on the absolute gratuitousness of grace but does not follow\nthe Augustinian (and scholastic) ideal of intellectus fidei\nand makes faith in the Gospel the decisive condition of salvation. In\nhis debate with Erasmus on free will, he voices a quite Augustinian\npessimism about human freedom. The variety of Protestantism that was\ninaugurated by Jean Calvin (1509–1564) accepts double\npredestination. In the seventeenth century Descartes’ cogito was\nsoon recognized as an Augustinian idea and triggered a refreshed\ninterest in Augustine’s epistemology. In the same epoch, the\nJansenist movement put forward a radical interpretation of\nAugustine’s theology of grace and justification that was\nfiercely combated by the Catholic Church. In the eighteenth and\nnineteenth centuries, the leading philosophers of Enlightenment,\nGerman Idealism and Romanticism showed little interest in Augustine,\nand even, in the case of Nietzsche, outright contempt. He remained,\nhowever, an important figure in Neoscholasticism or Neothomism, a\nphilosophical reaction of Catholic philosophers against Enlightenment\nand Idealism which continued to inform Catholic theological\nscholarship on Augustine till the 1950s and beyond. In the twentieth\ncentury, Augustine’s philosophy of time (Confessiones\n11) received enormous and unprecedented philosophical attention from\nthinkers like Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), Martin Heidegger\n(1889–1976) and Paul Ricœur (1913–2005), some of\nwhom credited Augustine with their own subjectivist understanding of\ntime. Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) wrote her doctoral dissertation\non Augustine’s philosophy of love and blamed him, not uncommonly\nfor her epoch, for degrading love of neighbor to an instrument of\npersonal happiness. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) takes issue\nwith what he considers Augustine’s view of language and language\nacquisition throughout his analysis of language in the\nPhilosophical Investigations. Postmodernist thinkers\n(Jean-Luc Marion, John Milbank) have set Augustine’s notion of\nself, in which love is perceived as an integral part, against the\npurported egoism and isolation of the Cartesian subject, which is\nconsidered the hallmark and, as it were, the birth defect of\nmodernity. Like their medieval predecessors, modern and postmodern\nappropriations of Augustine are selective and inevitably conditioned\nby contemporary concerns, sometimes resulting in secularized readings.\nContemporary Western culture has little sympathy for Augustine’s\nyearning for an inner divine light or for his less than optimistic\nviews about human autonomy and the secular. Nevertheless, the richness\nof his thought continues to fascinate readers. "],"section_title":"11. Legacy","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nAugustine (Aurelius Augustinus) lived from 13 November 354 to 28\\nAugust 430. He was born in Thagaste in Roman Africa (modern Souk Ahras\\nin Algeria). His mother Monnica (d. 388), a devout Christian, seems to\\nhave exerted a deep but not wholly unambiguous influence on his\\nreligious development. His father Patricius (d. 372) was baptized on\\nhis deathbed. Augustine himself was made a catechumen early in his\\nlife. His studies of grammar and rhetoric in the provincial centers of\\nMadauros and Carthage, which strained the financial resources of his\\nmiddle-class parents, were hoped to pave his way for a future career\\nin the higher imperial administration. In Carthage at the age of ca.\\n18, he found a mistress with whom he lived in a monogamous union for\\nca. 14 years and who bore him a son, Adeodatus, who was baptized\\ntogether with his father in Milan and died a little later (ca. 390)\\naged 18. Ca. 373 Augustine became a “hearer”\\n(auditor) of Manicheism, a dualistic religion with Persian\\norigins that, in Northern Africa, had developed into a variety of\\nChristianity (and was persecuted by the state as a heresy). His\\nadherence to Manicheism lasted for nine years and was strongly opposed\\nby Monnica. Though probably active as a Manichean apologist and\\nmissionary, he never became one of the sect’s\\n“elect” (electi), who were committed to\\nasceticism and sexual abstinence. In 383 he moved to Milan, then the\\ncapital of the western half of the Empire, to become a publicly paid\\nprofessor of rhetoric of the city and an official panegyrist at the\\nImperial court. Here he sent away his mistress to free the way for an\\nadvantageous marriage (a behavior presumably common for young\\ncareerists at that epoch). At Milan he underwent the influence of\\nBishop Ambrose (339–397), who taught him the allegorical method\\nof Scriptural exegesis, and of some Neoplatonically inclined\\nChristians who acquainted him with an understanding of Christianity\\nthat was philosophically informed and, to Augustine, intellectually\\nmore satisfactory than Manicheism, from which he had already begun to\\ndistance himself. The ensuing period of uncertainty and\\ndoubt—depicted in the Confessiones as a crisis in the\\nmedical sense—ended in summer 386, when Augustine converted to\\nascetic Christianity and gave up both his chair of rhetoric and his\\nfurther career prospects. After a winter of philosophical leisure at\\nthe rural estate of Cassiciacum near Milan, Augustine was baptized by\\nAmbrose at Easter 387 and returned to Africa, accompanied by his son,\\nsome friends and his mother, who died on the journey (Ostia, 388). In\\n391 he was, apparently against his will, ordained a priest in the\\ndiocese of the maritime city of Hippo Regius (modern Annaba/Bône\\nin Algeria). About five years later (ca. 396) he succeeded the local\\nbishop. This ecclesiastical function involved new pastoral, political,\\nadministrative and juridical duties, and his responsibility for and\\nexperiences with an ordinary Christian congregation may have\\ncontributed to modify his views on grace and original sin (Brown 2000:\\nch. 15). But his rhetorical skills equipped him well for his daily\\npreaching and for religious disputes. Throughout his life as a bishop\\nhe was involved in religious controversies with Manicheans, Donatists,\\nPelagians and, to a lesser extent, pagans. Most of the numerous books\\nand letters he wrote in that period were part of these controversies\\nor at least inspired by them, and even those that were not (e.g.,\\nDe Genesi ad litteram, De trinitate) combine\\nphilosophical or theological teaching with rhetorical persuasion\\n(Tornau 2006a). Polemics against his former co-religionists, the\\nManicheans, looms large in his work until about 400; the debate with\\nthem helped to shape his ideas on the non-substantiality of evil and\\non human responsibility. The Donatist schism had its roots in the last\\ngreat persecution at the beginning of the fourth century. The\\nDonatists saw themselves as the legitimate successors of those who had\\nremained steadfast during the persecution and claimed to represent the\\nAfrican tradition of a Christian “church of the pure”.\\nSince 405 the Donatists were subsumed under the imperial laws against\\nheresy and forced to re-enter the Catholic church by legal means;\\nthese measures were intensified after a conference at Carthage (411)\\nhad marked the official end of Donatism in Africa (Lancel &\\nAlexander 1996–2002). By way of his assiduous writing against\\nthe Donatists, Augustine sharpened his ecclesiological ideas and\\ndeveloped a theory of religious coercion based on an intentionalist\\nunderstanding of Christian love. Pelagianism (named after the British\\nascetic Pelagius) was a movement Augustine became aware of around 412.\\nHe and his African fellow-bishops managed to get it condemned as a\\nheresy in 418. While not denying the importance of divine grace,\\nPelagius and his followers insisted that the human being was by nature\\nfree and able not to sin (possibilitas). Against this view,\\nAugustine vigorously defended his doctrine of the human being’s\\nradical dependence on grace, a conviction already voiced in the\\nConfessiones but refined and hardened during the controversy.\\nThe last decade of Augustine’s life is marked by a vitriolic\\ndebate with the Pelagianist ex-bishop Julian of Aeclanum who accused\\nAugustine of crypto-Manicheism and of denying free will while\\nAugustine blamed him and the Pelagianists for evacuating\\nChrist’s sacrifice by denying original sin (Drecoll\\n2012–2018). Controversy with pagan traditionalists seems to have\\nreached a peak after 400, when Augustine refuted a series of\\nobjections against Christianity apparently extracted from\\nPorphyry’s treatise Against the Christians\\n(Letter 102; Bochet 2011), and after 410, when the city of\\nRome had been sacked by Alaric and his Goths. The City of\\nGod, Augustine’s great apology, was prompted by this\\nsymbolic event, though it is by no means just a response to pagan\\npolemics.\\n Augustine’s life ended when the Vandals besieged Hippo; he is\\nsaid to have died with a word of Plotinus on his lips (Possidius,\\nVita Augustini 28.11, after Plotinus, Enneads I\\n4.7.23–24).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Life\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nAugustine’s literary output surpasses the preserved work of\\nalmost all other ancient writers in quantity. In the\\nRetractationes (“Revisions”, a critical survey of\\nhis writings in chronological order down to 428 CE) he suggests a\\nthreefold division of his work into books, letters and sermons\\n(Retractationes 1, prologue 1); about 100 books, 300 letters,\\nand 500 sermons have survived. Augustine’s literary career after\\nhis conversion began with philosophical dialogues. The first of these,\\nwritten in Cassiciacum in 386/7, deal with traditional topics such as\\nskepticism (Contra Academicos), happiness (De beata\\nvita), evil (De ordine) and the immortality of the soul\\n(Soliloquia, De immortalitate animae). Augustine continued to\\npursue these issues in dialogues on the immateriality of the soul\\n(De quantitate animae, 388), language and learning (De\\nmagistro, 388–391), freedom of choice and human\\nresponsibility (De libero arbitrio, begun in 388 and\\ncompleted perhaps as late as 395) and the numeric structure of reality\\n(De musica, 388–390). The treatise De vera\\nreligione (389–391) is a kind of summa of Augustine’s\\nearly Christian philosophy. After the start of his ecclesiastical\\ncareer he abandoned the dialogue form, perhaps because he realized its\\nelitist and potentially misleading character (G. Clark 2009; Catapano\\n2013). Of the works from his priesthood and episcopate, many are\\ncontroversial writings against the Manicheans (e.g., Contra\\nFaustum Manichaeum, around 400), the Donatists (e.g., Contra\\nlitteras Petiliani, 401–405; De baptismo, 404) and\\nthe Pelagians (e.g., De spiritu et littera, 412; Contra\\nIulianum, 422; De gratia et libero arbitrio,\\n424–427; and his last and unfinished work Contra Iulianum\\nopus imperfectum, which preserves a substantial portion of the\\notherwise lost treatise Ad Florum by his Pelagian adversary\\nJulian of Aeclanum). Among the philosophically most interesting of\\nthese works are De utilitate credendi (391–392, a\\ndefense of faith/belief against Manichean rationalism), De natura\\nboni (399, a concise anti-Manichean argument for the doctrine\\nthat evil is a privation of goodness rather than an independent\\nsubstance), De natura et gratia (413–417, a reply to\\nPelagius’ treatise De natura) and De correptione et\\ngratia (426/427, refuting a Christian version of the Stoic\\n‘Lazy Argument’ that had been put forward against Augustine’s\\ndoctrine of grace). Augustine is however most famous for the five long\\ntreatises with a wider scope he composed between 396 and 426. The\\nConfessiones (ca. 396–400), probably his most original\\nwork, is “philosophy in autobiography” (Mann 2014) rather\\nthan an autobiography in a modern sense. It shows how an individual\\nlife—Augustine’s own—is made sense of by God’s\\nprovidence and grace as well as by his creation and economy of\\nsalvation. De doctrina christiana (begun in 396/7 but\\ncompleted only in 426/7) is a handbook of biblical hermeneutics and\\nChristian rhetoric; it delineates the semiotic dichotomy of\\n“things” (res) and—especially\\nlinguistic—“signs” (signa) and critically\\nassesses the importance of the classical disciplines for the biblical\\nexegete. De trinitate (begun in 399 and completed in 419 or\\nperhaps as late as 426) has impressed modern philosophical readers by\\nits probing analyses of the human mind as an “image” of\\nthe Divine Trinity. De Genesi ad litteram (401/2–416)\\nis an attempt at winning a philosophically justifiable cosmology from\\nthe opening chapters of Genesis. Here as in most of Augustine’s\\nworks philosophy is inseparable from biblical exegesis. The monumental\\napologetic treatise De civitate dei (begun in 412, two years\\nafter the sack of Rome, and completed in 426) argues that happiness\\ncan be found neither in the Roman nor the philosophical tradition but\\nonly through membership in the city of God whose founder is Christ.\\nAmong many other things, it has interesting reflections on the secular\\nstate and on the Christian’s life in a secular society. The\\nsermons document Augustine’s ability to adapt complex ideas to a\\nlarge and not overly learned audience. Two long series on the Psalms\\n(Enarrationes in Psalmos, ca. 392–422) and the Gospel\\nof John (In Iohannis evangelium tractatus, ca. 406–420)\\nstand out; a series of sermons on the First Letter of John (In\\nepistulam Iohannis ad Parthos tractatus decem, 407) is\\nAugustine’s most sustained discussion of Christian love. The\\nletters are not personal or intimate documents but public writings\\nthat are part of Augustine’s teaching and of his ecclesiastical\\npolitics. Some of them reach the length of full treatises and offer\\nexcellent philosophical discussions (Letter 155 on virtue;\\nLetter 120 on faith and reason; Letter 147 on the\\n“seeing” of God).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Work\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nFrom ancient thought Augustine inherited the notion that philosophy is\\n“love of wisdom” (Confessiones 3.8; De\\ncivitate dei 8.1), i.e., an attempt to pursue happiness—or,\\nas late-antique thinkers, both pagan and Christian, liked to put it,\\nsalvation—by seeking insight into the true nature of things and\\nliving accordingly. This kind of philosophy he emphatically endorses,\\nespecially in his early work (cf., e.g., Contra Academicos\\n1.1). He is convinced that the true philosopher is a lover of God\\nbecause true wisdom is, in the last resort, identical with God, a\\npoint on which he feels in agreement with both Paul (1 Corinthians\\n1:24) and Plato (cf. De civitate dei 8.8). This is why he\\nthinks that Christianity is “the true philosophy”\\n(Contra Iulianum 4.72; the view is common among ancient,\\nespecially Greek, Christian thinkers) and that true philosophy and\\ntrue (cultic) religion are identical (De vera religione 8).\\nIn case of doubt, practice takes precedence over theory: in the\\nCassiciacum dialogues Monnica, who represents the saintly but\\nuneducated, is credited with a philosophy of her own (De\\nordine 1,31–32; 2.45). At the same time, Augustine sharply\\ncriticizes the “philosophy of this world” censured in the\\nNew Testament that distracts from Christ (Colossians 2:8). In his\\nearly work he usually limits this verdict to the Hellenistic\\nmaterialist systems (Contra Academicos 3.42; De\\nordine 1.32); later he extends it even to Platonism because the\\nlatter denies the possibility of a history of salvation (De\\ncivitate dei 12.14). The main error he faults the philosophers\\nwith is arrogance or pride (superbia), a reproach that does\\nnot weigh lightly given that arrogance is, in Augustine’s view,\\nthe root of all sins. Out of arrogance the philosophers presume to be\\nable to reach happiness through their own virtue (De civitate\\ndei 19.4, a criticism primarily directed against the Stoics), and\\neven those among them who have gained insight into the true nature of\\nGod and his Word (i.e., the Platonists) are incapable of\\n“returning” to their divine “homeland” because\\nthey proudly reject the mediation of Christ incarnate and resort to\\nproud and malevolent demons instead, i.e., to the traditional pagan\\ncults and to theurgy (Confessiones 7.27; In evangelium\\nIohannis tractatus 2.2–4; De civitate dei\\n10.24–29; Madec 1989). In his first works Augustine epitomizes\\nhis own philosophical program with the phrase “to know God and\\nthe soul” (Soliloquia 1.7; De ordine 2.47) and\\npromises to pursue it with the means provided by Platonic philosophy\\nas long as these are not in conflict with the authority of biblical\\nrevelation (Contra Academicos 3.43). He thereby restates the\\nold philosophical questions about the true nature of the human being\\nand about the first principle of reality, and he adumbrates the key\\nNeoplatonic idea that knowledge of our true self entails knowledge of\\nour divine origin and will enable us to return to it (cf. Plotinus,\\nEnneads VI.9.7.33–34). While these remain the basic\\ncharacteristics of Augustine’s philosophy throughout his career,\\nthey are considerably differentiated and modified as his engagement\\nwith biblical thought intensifies and the notions of creation, sin and\\ngrace acquire greater significance. Augustine is entirely unaware of\\nthe medieval and modern distinction of “philosophy” and\\n“theology”; both are inextricably intertwined in his\\nthought, and it is unadvisable to try to disentangle them by focusing\\nexclusively on elements that are deemed “philosophical”\\nfrom a modern point of view.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Augustine and Philosophy\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nAugustine tells us that at the age of eighteen Cicero’s (now\\nlost) protreptic dialogue Hortensius enflamed him for\\nphilosophy (Confessiones 3.7), that as a young man he read\\nAristotle’s Categories (ib. 4.28) and that his\\nconversion was greatly furthered by his Neoplatonic readings (ib.\\n7.13) as well as by the letters of Paul (ib. 7.27; Contra\\nAcademicos 2.5). He is more reticent about Manichean texts, of\\nwhich he must have known a great deal (van Oort 2012). From the 390s\\nonwards the Bible becomes decisive for his thought, in particular\\nGenesis, the Psalms and the Pauline and Johannine writings (even\\nthough his exegesis remains philosophically impregnated), and his\\nmature doctrine of grace seems to have grown from a fresh reading of\\nPaul ca. 395 (see\\n 7.6 Grace, Predestination and Original Sin).\",\n \"\\nThe most lasting philosophical influence on Augustine is Neoplatonism.\\nHe does not specify the authors and the exact subjects of the\\n“books of the Platonists” (Confessiones 7.13)\\ntranslated into Latin by the fourth century Christian Neoplatonist\\nMarius Victorinus (ib. 8.3) he read in 386. In the twentieth century\\nthere was an ongoing and sometimes heated debate on whether to\\nprivilege Plotinus (who is mentioned in De beata vita 4) or\\nPorphyry (who is named first in De consensus evangelistarum\\n1.23 ca. 400) as the main Neoplatonic influence on Augustine (for\\nsummaries of the debate see O’Donnell 1992: II 421–424;\\nKany 2007: 50–61). Today most scholars accept the compromise\\nthat the “books of the Platonists” comprised some\\ntreatises of Plotinus (e.g., Enneads I.6, I.2, V.1,\\nVI.4–5) and a selection from Porphyry (Sententiae and,\\nperhaps, Symmikta Zetemata). In any event, the importance of\\nthis problem should not be overrated because Augustine seems to have\\ncontinued his Neoplatonic readings after 386. Around 400 he had\\nPorphyry’s Philosophy from the Oracles at his disposal;\\nin De civitate dei 10 (ca. 417) he quotes from his Letter\\nto Anebo and from an otherwise unattested anagogic treatise\\ntitled, in the translation used by Augustine, De regressu\\nanimae, the influence of which some have suspected already in\\nAugustine’s earliest works. For the philosophy of mind in the\\nsecond half of De trinitate he may have turned to Neoplatonic\\ntexts on psychology. While the exact sources of Augustine’s\\nNeoplatonism elude us, source criticism has been able to determine\\nsome pervasive features of his thought that are doubtlessly\\nNeoplatonic in origin: the transcendence and immateriality of God; the\\nsuperiority of the unchangeable over the changeable (cf. Plato,\\nTimaeus 28d); the ontological hierarchy of God, soul and body\\n(Letter 18.2); the incorporeality and immortality of the\\nsoul; the dichotomy of the intelligible and the sensible realms\\n(attributed to Plato in Contra Academicos 3.37); the\\nnon-spatial omnipresence of the intelligible in the sensible\\n(Confessiones 1.2–4; Letter 137.4) and the\\ncausal presence of God in his creation (De immortalitate\\nanimae 14–15; De Genesi ad litteram 4.12.22); the\\nexistence of intelligible (Platonic) Forms that are located in the\\nmind of God and work as paradigms of the sensible things (De\\ndiversis quaestionibus 46); the inwardness of the intelligible\\nand the idea that we find God and Truth by turning inwards (De\\nvera religione 72); the doctrine of evil as lack or privation of\\ngoodness; the understanding of the soul’s love of God as a\\nquasi-erotic desire for true beauty (Confessiones 10.38; cf.\\nRist 1994: 155). A distinctly Platonic element is the notion of\\nintellectual or spiritual ascent. Augustine thinks that by turning\\ninwards and upwards from bodies to soul (i.e., from knowledge of\\nobjects to self-knowledge) and from the sensible to the intelligible\\nwe will finally be able to transcend ourselves and get in touch with\\nthe supreme being that is none other than God and Truth and that is\\nmore internal to us than our innermost self (Confessiones\\n3.11; MacDonald 2014: 22–26; Augustine’s biblical proof\\ntext is Romans 1:20, quoted, e.g., ib. 7.16). Ascents of this kind are\\nubiquitous in Augustine’s work (e.g., De libero\\narbitrio 2.7–39; Confessiones 10.8–38;\\nDe trinitate 8–15). Whether the condensed versions in\\nthe Confessiones (7.16; 7.23; 9.24–26) should be read\\nas reports of mystical experiences is difficult to determine (Cassin\\n2017). An early version of the Augustinian ascent is the\\nproject—outlined in De ordine (2.24–52) but soon\\nabandoned and virtually retracted in De doctrina\\nchristiana—of turning the mind to the intelligible and to\\nGod by means of a cursus in the liberal (especially mathematical)\\ndisciplines (Pollmann & Vessey 2005). It is remotely inspired by\\nPlato’s Republic and may have had a Neoplatonic precedent\\n(Hadot 2005), though use of Varro’s work on the disciplines\\ncannot be excluded (Shanzer 2005). As late as De civitate dei\\n8 (ca. 417) he grants, in a brief doxography organized according to\\nthe traditional fields of physics, ethics and epistemology, that\\nPlatonism and Christianity share some basic philosophical insights,\\nviz. that God is the first principle, that he is the supreme good and\\nthat he is the criterion of knowledge (De civitate dei\\n8.5–8; cf. already De vera religione 3–7). In\\nspite of these important insights, Platonism cannot however lead to\\nsalvation because it is unable or unwilling to accept the mediation of\\nChrist. It is, therefore, also philosophically defective (De\\ncivitate dei 10.32).\",\n \"\\nCicero is Augustine’s main source for the Hellenistic\\nphilosophies, notably Academic skepticism and Stoicism. As a part of\\nhis cultural heritage, Augustine quotes him and the other Latin\\nclassics as it suits his argumentative purposes (Hagendahl 1967). His\\nearly ideal of the sage who is independent of all goods that one can\\nlose against one’s will is inherited from Stoic ethics (De\\nbeata vita 11; De moribus 1.5; Wetzel 1992:\\n42–55). Though the implication that the sage’s virtue\\nguarantees his happiness already in this life is later rejected as\\nillusory (De trinitate 13.10; De civitate dei 19.4;\\nRetractationes 1.2; Wolterstorff 2012), the Christian martyr\\ncan be styled in the manner of the Stoic sage whose happiness is\\nimmune to torture (Letter 155.16; Tornau 2015: 278).\\nAugustine’s Manichean past was constantly on his mind, as his\\nincessant polemics shows; its precise impact on his thought is however\\ndifficult to assess (van Oort (ed.) 2012; Fuhrer 2013; BeDuhn 2010 and\\n2013). The claim of Julian of Aeclanum that with his doctrine of\\npredestination and grace Augustine had fallen back into Manichean\\ndualism has appealed to some modern critics, but Julian must ignore\\nessential features of Augustine’s thought (e.g., the notion of\\nevil as privatio boni) to make his claim plausible\\n(Lamberigts 2001).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. The Philosophical Tradition; Augustine’s Platonism\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Theory of Knowledge\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAugustine’s earliest surviving work is a dialogue on Academic\\nskepticism (Contra Academicos or De Academicis, 386;\\nFuhrer 1997). He wrote it at the beginning of his career as a\\nChristian philosopher in order to save himself and his readers from\\nthe “despair” that would have resulted if it could not be\\nproven that, against the skeptic challenge, truth is attainable and\\nknowledge and wisdom possible (cf. Retractationes 1.1.1). The\\nsense of despair must have been very real to him when, after having\\nbroken with Manicheism but still being unable to see the truth of\\nCatholic Christianity, he decided to “withhold assent until some\\ncertainty lighted up” (Confessiones 5.25). His\\ninformation about skepticism does not come from a contemporary skeptic\\n“school”, which hardly existed, but from Cicero’s\\nAcademica and Hortensius. Much of the discussion in\\nContra Academicos is thus devoted to the debate between\\nHellenistic Stoics and skeptics about the so-called\\n“grasping” or kataleptic appearance, i.e., the problem\\nwhether there are appearances about the truth of which one cannot be\\nmistaken because they are evident by themselves (Bermon 2001:\\n105–191). Unlike the original Stoics and Academics, Augustine\\nlimits the discussion to sense impressions because he wants to present\\nPlatonism as a solution to the skeptic problem and to point out a\\nsource of true knowledge unavailable to the Hellenistic\\nmaterialists.\",\n \"\\nUnlike modern anti-skeptical lines of argumentation, Augustine’s\\nrefutation of skepticism does not aim at justifying our ordinary\\npractices and beliefs. To refute the Academic claim that, since the\\nwise person can never be sure whether she has grasped the truth, she\\nwill consistently withhold assent in order not to succumb to empty\\nopinion, he thinks it sufficient to demonstrate the existence of some\\nkind of knowledge that is immune to skeptical doubt. His strategy\\ntherefore consists in pointing out 1) the certainty of\\nself-referential knowledge (the wise person “knows\\nwisdom”, Contra Academicos 3.6; the Academic skeptic\\n“knows” the Stoic criterion of truth, ib. 3.18–21);\\n2) the certainty of private or subjective knowledge (I am certain that\\nsomething appears white to me even if I am ignorant\\nwhether it is really white, ib. 3.26); 3) the certainty of formal,\\nlogical or mathematical, structures (ib. 3.24–29), knowledge of\\nwhich is possible independently of the mental state of the knower,\\nwhereas the reliability of sense impressions differs according as we\\nare awake or dreaming, sane or insane. Modern critics have not been\\nvery impressed by these arguments (e.g., Kirwan 1989: 15–34),\\nand an ancient skeptic would rightly have objected that being limited\\nto subjective or formal knowledge, they could not justify the\\ndogmatists’ claim to objective knowledge of reality (cf. Sextus\\nEmpiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.13). Yet this is not\\nAugustine’s point. To him it matters to have shown that even if\\nmaximal concessions are made to skepticism concerning the\\nunknowability of the external world attainable by the senses, there\\nremains an internal area of cognition that allows for and even\\nguarantees certainty. This is why Contra Academicos ends with\\na sketch of Platonic epistemology and ontology and with an\\nidiosyncratic if not wholly unparalleled reconstruction of the history\\nof the Academy according to which the Academics were in fact\\ncrypto-Platonists who hid their insight into transcendent reality and\\nrestricted themselves to skeptical arguments to combat the materialist\\nand sensualist schools dominant in Hellenistic times until authentic\\nPlatonism emerged again with Plotinus (Contra Academicos\\n3.37–43; the story is still told in Letter 118 of 410,\\nwhere the renaissance of Platonism is however connected with the rise\\nof Christianity). The only realities that meet the Hellenistic\\ncriterion of truth and guarantee absolute certainty by being\\nself-evident are the Platonic Forms (Contra Academicos 3.39;\\ncf. De diversis quaestionibus 9; Cary 2008a: 55–60).\\nThe “objects” of knowledge that appear in\\nAugustine’s anti-skeptical arguments thus either are the\\nPlatonic Forms themselves or at least point out the way of accessing\\nthem. This squares with the early Augustine’s tendency to\\ninterpret the Forms, or at any rate the most basic among them, as\\n“numbers”, i.e., as the formal and normative structures\\nand standards that govern all reality and enable us to understand and\\nevaluate it (De ordine 2.14; 16; De musica\\n6.57–58; O’Daly 1987: 101–102; see also\\n 5.2 Illumination).\\n Strictly speaking, Augustine’s anti-skeptical arguments do not\\njustify the claim that knowledge can be derived from the senses;\\nhaving sensible and mutable objects, they cannot but yield opinion or,\\nat best, true belief. The later Augustine, in a more generous way of\\nspeaking, widens the term “knowledge” (scientia,\\nto be distinguished from “wisdom”, sapientia) so\\nas to include what we learn through sense perception and from reliable\\nwitnesses (De trinitate 15.21; cf. De civitate dei\\n8.7; Retractationes 1.14.3; Siebert 2018; see\\n 5.3 Faith and Reason).\",\n \"\\nAugustine’s most famous anti-skeptical argument is what is\\ncommonly called his “cogito-like” argument because it is\\nsimilar to (and probably inspired) the Cogito of Descartes (Matthews\\n1992; Menn 1998; Fuchs 2010). Like Descartes’, Augustine’s\\ncogito establishes an area immune to skeptical doubt by inferring from\\nmy awareness of my own existence the truth of the proposition “I\\nexist”. Even if I were in error in uttering this proposition, it\\nwould still be true that I, who am in error, exist (De civitate\\ndei 11.26: si enim fallor, sum; for the exact\\nreconstruction of this argument cf. Horn 1995: 81–87; Matthews\\n2005: 34–42). The argument does not yet appear in Contra\\nAcademicos but is easily recognized as a development of the\\nargument from subjective knowledge (Contra Academicos 3.26);\\nAugustine considers it a valid refutation of skepticism from his\\nearliest (De beata vita 7) to his latest works (De\\ntrinitate 15.21; for further attestations see Soliloquia\\n2.1; De duabus animabus 13; De libero arbitrio 2.7;\\nDe vera religione 73; Confessiones 7.5; 13.12). The\\nscope of the argument in Augustine is both wider and narrower than in\\nDescartes. The Augustinian cogito lacks the systematic importance of\\nits Cartesian counterpart; there is no attempt to found a coherent and\\ncomprehensive philosophy on it. On some occasions, however, it works\\nas a starting point for the Augustinian ascent to God (De libero\\narbitrio 2.7, where the ascent leads to an understanding of God\\nas immutable truth and wisdom; for a condensed version, cf. De\\nvera religione 72–73, where Augustine even makes\\nsupra-rational Truth the source and criterion of the truth of the\\ncogito itself). The most impressive example is the second half of De\\ntrinitate. Here the attempt to reach a rational understanding of\\nthe mystery of the Trinity by means of an inquiry into the structure\\nof the human mind starts with an analysis of the mind’s\\ninalienable self-love and self-awareness (see\\n 6.2 The Human Mind as an Image of God;\\n Augustine does not, however, claim that the mind’s certainty\\nabout itself entails a similar certainty about the nature of God).\\nAugustine’s cogito argument is not limited to epistemology but\\ncan also be employed in an ethical context because it proves not only\\nmy existence and my thinking (and, by implication, my being alive) but\\nalso my loving and willing. I am as certain that I will as I am\\ncertain that I exist and live, and my will is as undeniably mine as is\\nmy existence and my life. Therefore, my volitions are imputable to me,\\nand it is I who am responsible for my choices (and not some evil\\nsubstance present in my soul but foreign to my own self, as, on\\nAugustine’s interpretation, Manichean dualism would have it; cf.\\nDe duabus animabus 13; Confessiones 7.5; De\\ncivitate dei 5.10).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.1 Skepticism and Certainty\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAugustine’s theory of knowledge—his so-called doctrine of\\nillumination—is a distinctly non-empiricist epistemology based\\non a probably Neoplatonic reading of Plato’s doctrine of\\nrecollection (Burnyeat 1987; MacDonald 2012b; King 2014a:\\n147–152; Karfíková 2017). Like Plato and his\\nfollowers, Augustine thinks that true knowledge requires first-hand\\nacquaintance; second-hand information, e.g., from reliable testimony,\\nmay yield true and even justifiable belief, but not knowledge in the\\nstrict sense.\\n In the case of sensible objects—which, strictly speaking, do\\nnot admit of knowledge at all but only opinion—such\\n first-hand acquaintance is possible through sense perception.\\nCognition of intelligible objects, however, can be neither reached\\nempirically by means of abstraction nor transmitted to us\\nlinguistically by a human teacher (see\\n 5.4 Language and Signs);\\n rather, such cognition requires personal intellectual activity that\\nresults in an intellectual insight, which we judge by a criterion we\\nfind nowhere but in ourselves. The paradigm of this kind of cognition\\nare mathematical and logical truths and fundamental moral intuitions,\\nwhich we understand not because we believe a teacher or a book but\\nbecause we see them for ourselves (De magistro 40, cf. De\\nlibero arbitrio 2.34). The condition of possibility and the\\ncriterion of truth of this intellectual insight is none other than God\\n(a view attributed, with explicit approval, to the Platonists in\\nDe civitate dei 8.7), who, in the manner of a Neoplatonic\\nimmaterial principle, is both immanent and transcendent in relation to\\nour soul. Augustine mostly explains this Platonizing theory of a\\npriori knowledge by means of two striking images: the inner teacher\\nand illumination. The former is introduced in the dialogue De\\nmagistro (ca. 390) and remains frequent especially in the sermons\\n(e.g., In epistulam Iohannis ad Parthos tractatus decem 3.13;\\nFuhrer 2018b); according to it, Christ is present in our souls and by\\n“presiding over” them like a teacher guarantees the\\ntruthfulness of our understanding (De magistro 38–39,\\ncf. Ephesians 3:17 for the image and, for the idea that truth\\n“lives in the inner man”, De vera religione 72).\\nThe latter appears first in the Soliloquia (1.12–15)\\nand is ubiquitous in Augustine’s writings (cf. esp. De\\ntrinitate 12.24). It is ultimately derived from the Analogy of\\nthe Sun in Plato’s Republic (508a-509b; cf. Rist 1994:\\n78–79). In the Soliloquia Augustine says, in a manner\\nstrongly reminiscent of Plato, that just as the sun is both visible\\nitself and illumines the objects of sight so as to enable the eye to\\nsee them, God is intelligible himself and illumines the intelligible\\nobjects (which are here identified with the objects of the liberal\\ndisciplines and subordinated to God) so as to enable reason (the\\n“eye” of the soul) to activate its capacity for\\nintellection. The later version in De trinitate explicitly\\npresents divine illumination as an alternative to Platonic\\nrecollection and situates it in the framework of a theory of creation.\\nHere Augustine says that the human mind has been created by God in\\nsuch a way as to be “connected” to intelligible reality\\n“from below” (subiuncta) and with a capacity\\n(capacitas) that enables it to “see” the\\nintelligibles in the light of intelligible truth, just as the eye is\\nby nature able to see colors in the light of the sun. Obviously,\\n“capacity” in this case does not mean pure potentiality\\n(as in the tabula rasa theory endorsed by Augustine’s\\ninterlocutor Euodius in De quantitate animae 34) but\\ncomprises at least implicit or latent knowledge of moral and\\nepistemological standards. Both images, if properly read, should\\npreclude the misunderstanding that Augustine’s gnoseology makes\\nhuman knowledge entirely dependent on divine agency, with the human\\nbeing becoming merely a passive recipient of revelation (cf. Gilson\\n1943: ch. 4 and Lagouanère 2012: 158–180 for the debates\\nabout Augustinian illumination in medieval and modern philosophy).\\nCognition does not simply result from the presence of Christ in our\\nsoul but from our “consulting” the inner teacher, i.e.,\\nour testing propositions that claim to convey a truth about\\nintelligible reality (or even a general truth about sensible objects,\\ncf. Letter 13.3–4) against the inner standards we\\npossess thanks to the presence of Christ (De magistro\\n37–38; this way of “consulting” the inner truth is\\nrepeatedly dramatized in the Confessiones, e.g., 11.10;\\n11.31; Cary 2008b: 100). And while every human being is\\n“illumined” by the divine light at least from behind so as\\nto be able to pass true judgments about right and wrong or good and\\nevil, in order to develop these natural intuitions to full knowledge\\nor wisdom and to be able actually to lead a virtuous life, we need to\\nconvert to God, the “source” of the light (De\\ntrinitate 14.21). Thus, while all human beings are by nature\\ncapable of accessing intelligible truth, only those succeed in doing\\nso who have a sufficiently good will (De magistro\\n38)—presumably those who endorse Christian religion and live\\naccordingly. This strong voluntary element intimately connects\\nAugustine’s epistemology with his ethics and, ultimately, with\\nhis doctrine of grace (on the parallel structure of cognition and grace in Augustine\\nsee Lorenz 1964). Like all human agency, striving for wisdom takes place\\nunder the conditions of a fallen world and meets the difficulties and\\nhindrances humanity is subject to because of original sin.\",\n \"\\nIn order to illustrate what he means by “seeing things by\\nourselves” “in the light of truth”, Augustine often\\ncites the example of the Socratic maieutic dialogue (De\\nmagistro 40; cf. De immortalitate animae 6; De\\ntrinitate 12.24), and in some passages of his early work he seems\\nto subscribe to the Platonic doctrine of recollection (familiar to him\\nfrom Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.57) in such a way as to\\nimply the preexistence of the soul (Soliloquia 2.35,\\nretracted in Retractationes 1.4.4; De immortalitate\\nanimae 6; De quantitate animae 34, retracted in\\nRetractationes 1.8.2). It is difficult to tell whether the\\nearly Augustine literally believed in recollection and preexistence\\n(Karfíková 2017; O’Daly 1987: 70–75;\\n199–207), not least because he was aware that some Neoplatonists\\ninterpreted Platonic recollection as an actualization of our\\never-present but latent knowledge of the intelligible rather than as a\\nremembrance of our past acquaintance with it (Letter 7.2, cf.\\nPlotinus, Enneads IV.3.25.31–33; O’Daly 1976).\\nIf, as in De immortalitate animae 6, recollection is taken to\\nprove the immortality of the soul (as it did in the Phaedo),\\nit is hard to see how preexistence should not be implied. In any\\nevent, it is imprecise to say, as it is sometimes done, that Augustine\\ngave up the theory of recollection because he realized that\\npreexistence was at variance with Christian faith. In De civitate\\ndei (12.14 etc.) Augustine emphatically rejects\\nPlatonic-Pythagorean metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls as\\nincompatible with eternal happiness and the economy of salvation, and\\nin De trinitate (12.24) the Meno version of the\\nrecollection theory, which implies transmigration, is rejected in\\nfavor of illumination. Yet it is a fallacy to claim that recollection\\nentails transmigration. The early Augustine may have believed in\\npreexistence (perhaps simply as a corollary of the immortality of the\\nsoul), but there is no evidence that he believed in the transmigration\\nof souls; conversely, his rejection of transmigration did not prevent\\neven the late Augustine from considering preexistence—at least\\ntheoretically—an option for the origin of the soul\\n(Letter 143.6 from 412; cf.\\n 6.1 Soul as a Created Being).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.2 Illumination\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nWhereas modern discussion tends to regard faith and reason as\\nalternative or even mutually exclusive ways to (religious) truth, in\\nAugustine’s epistemological and exegetical program the two are\\ninseparable. He rejects the rationalism of the philosophers and,\\nespecially, the Manicheans as an unwarranted over-confidence into the\\nabilities of human reason resulting from sinful pride and as an\\narrogant neglect of the revelation of Christ in Scripture (De\\nlibero arbitrio 3.56; 60; Confessiones 3.10–12).\\nAgainst the fideism he encountered in some Christian circles (cf.\\nLetter 119 from Consentius to Augustine) he insisted that it\\nwas good and natural to employ the rational capacity we have been\\ncreated with to search for an understanding of the truths we accept\\nfrom the authority of the biblical revelation, even though a true\\nunderstanding of God will only be possible after this life when we see\\nhim “face to face” (Letter 120.3–4). In\\nthis epistemological and exegetical program, which since Anselm of\\nCanterbury has aptly been labeled as “faith seeking\\nunderstanding” (cf. De trinitate 15.2: fides\\nquaerit, intellectus invenit) or “understanding of\\nfaith” (intellectus fidei), faith is prior to\\nunderstanding in time but posterior to it in importance and value\\n(De ordine 2.26; De vera religione 45;\\nLetter 120.3; van Fleteren 2010). The first step toward\\nperfection is to believe the words of Scripture; the second is to\\nrealize that the words are outward signs of an internal and\\nintelligible reality and that they admonish us to turn to and to\\n“consult” inner truth so as to reach true understanding\\nand, accordingly, the good life (cf.\\n 5.2 Illumination;\\n 5.4 Language and Signs). \\nPhilosophical argument may be of help in this process;\\nyet as Augustine notes as early as in Contra Academicos\\n(3.43), it needs to be tied to the authority of Scripture and the\\nCreed to prevent the frailty of human reason from going astray (cf.\\nConfessiones 7.13). The Augustine of the earliest dialogues\\nseems to have entertained the elitist idea that those educated in the\\nliberal arts and capable of the Neoplatonic intellectual ascent may\\nactually outgrow authority and achieve a full understanding of the\\ndivine already in this life (De ordine 2.26, but contrast ib.\\n2.45 on Monnica). In his later work, he abandons this hope and\\nemphasizes that during this life, inevitably characterized by sin and\\nweakness, every human being remains in need of the guidance of the\\nrevealed authority of Christ (Cary 2008b: 109–120). Faith is\\nthus not just an epistemological but also an ethical category; it is\\nessential for the moral purification we need to undergo before we can\\nhope for even a glimpse of true understanding (Soliloquia\\n1.12; De diversis quaestionibus 48; De trinitate\\n4.24; Rist 2001). To a great extent, Augustine’s defense of\\nfaith as a valid epistemic category rests on a rehabilitation of true\\nbelief against the philosophical (Platonic and Hellenistic) tradition.\\nAugustine neatly distinguishes “belief” (fides,\\nthe word he also uses for religious faith), which entails the\\nbeliever’s awareness that he does not know, from\\n“opinion” (opinio), defined by the philosophers\\nas the illusion of knowing what one in fact does not know (De\\nutilitate credendi 25; Letter 120.3). Without belief in\\nthe former sense, we would have to admit that we are ignorant of our\\nown lineage (Confessiones 6.7) and of the objects of the\\nhistorical and empirical sciences, of which, as Augustine asserts in a\\ncritique of Platonism, first-hand knowledge is rarely possible (De\\ntrinitate 4.21). The belief that a person we have not seen was or\\nis just may trigger our fraternal love for him (De trinitate\\n8.7; Bouton-Touboulic 2012: 182–187; conversely, Augustine asks\\nthose who are united with him in fraternal love to believe what he\\ntells them about his life, Confessiones 10.3). And obviously,\\nthe crucial events of the history of salvation, Jesus’ death on\\nthe cross and his resurrection, cannot be known but only believed qua\\nhistorical events, even though qua signs they may lead to\\nunderstanding by prompting us to an intelligible truth (De\\ntrinitate 13.2). Thus, while no doubt faith in revelation\\nprecedes rational insight into its true meaning, the decision about\\nwhose authority to believe and whom to accept as a reliable witness is\\nitself reasonable (De vera religione 45; Letter\\n120.3). Even so, belief may of course be deceived (De\\ntrinitate 8.6). In ordinary life, this is inevitable and mostly\\nunproblematic. A more serious problem is the justification of belief\\nin Scripture, which, for Augustine, is the tradition and authority\\n(auctoritas, not potestas) of the Church (Contra\\nepistulam fundamenti 5.6; Rist 1994: 245).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.3 Faith and Reason\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAugustine’s philosophy of language is both indebted to the\\nStoic-influenced Hellenistic and Roman theories of grammar and highly\\ninnovative (Rist 1994: 23–40; King 2014b). He follows the Stoics\\nin distinguishing between the sound of a word, its meaning and the\\nthing it signifies (De dialectica 5; De quantitate animae 66; cf. Sextus Empiricus, Adversus\\nmathematicos 8.11–12 = 33B Long-Sedley), but he seems to\\nhave been the first to interpret language as such as a system of signs\\nand to integrate it into a general semiotics (Fuhrer 2018a: 1696; Cary\\n2008b; Mayer 1969 and 1974). In his handbook of biblical exegesis and\\nChristian rhetoric, De doctrina christiana (1.2;\\n2.1–4), Augustine divides the world into “things”\\nand “signs” (i.e., things that, apart from being what they\\nare, signify other things) and furthermore distinguishes between\\n“natural” or involuntary signs (e.g., smoke signifying\\nfire) and voluntary or “given” signs (a distinction akin,\\nbut not equivalent, to the older discussion about nature or convention\\nas the origin of language). Language is defined as a system of given\\nsigns by means of which the speaker signifies either things or her\\nthoughts and emotions (Enchiridion 22). In the exegetical\\nframework of De doctrina christiana, the “thing”\\nsignified by the verbal signs of Scripture is God, the Supreme Being.\\nAugustine therefore begins with a sketch of his theology and ethics\\ncentered around the notions of love of God and neighbor before he sets out his biblical hermeneutics which,\\nagain, posits love as the criterion of exegetical adequacy (Pollmann\\n1996; Williams 2001). The words of the Bible are external signs\\ndesigned to prompt us to the more inward phenomenon of love and,\\nultimately, to God who is beyond all language and thought. This may be\\ngeneralized to the principle that external—verbal and\\nnon-verbal—signs operate on a lower ontological level than the\\ninward and intelligible truth they attempt to signify and that they\\nare superseded in true knowledge which is knowledge not of signs but\\nof things. This holds not only for words, even the words of Scripture,\\nbut also for the sacraments and for the Incarnation of Christ\\n(Contra epistulam fundamenti 36.41). Augustine’s most\\nsustained discussion of language, the early dialogue De\\nmagistro, asks how we learn things from words and relates\\nlinguistic signification to the epistemology of illumination (Nawar\\n2015). After a long discussion of how verbal signs signify things or\\nstates of mind and how they relate to other signs, it turns out,\\nrather surprisingly, that we do not learn things from signs at all\\nbecause in order to understand the meaning of a sign we already have\\nto be acquainted with the thing signified. This is ultimately a\\nversion of Meno’s paradox, and Augustine solves it by\\nintroducing the metaphors of the inner teacher and of illumination,\\ni.e., by means of an internalist theory of learning recognizable as a\\nNeoplatonic interpretation of Platonic anamnesis (De magistro\\n38–40).\\n This does not mean that words are useless. They inform us about\\nthings that are inaccessible to direct acquaintance and thus generate\\ntrue belief; most importantly, they admonish us to\\n“consult” the inner teacher and to understand things by\\nourselves (this, according to Augustine, is the whole point of the\\nSocratic dialogue). This goes even for the acquisition of language\\nitself: We understand the sign “bird-catching”, not simply\\nby being shown a person engaged in that activity and being told that\\nhe is signified by that name, but by observing him and figuring out\\nfor ourselves what “bird-catching” means (ib. 32; on this\\nand Wittgenstein’s criticism of what he took to be\\nAugustine’s view of language acquisition, see Matthews 2005:\\n23–33). In the later books of De trinitate and in the\\nsermons on the Trinity, Augustine frequently refers to a phenomenon\\ncalled “inner word”, which he uses to explain the relation\\nof the inner-Trinitarian Word or Logos from the Prologue of John (John\\n1:1) to Christ incarnate. Just as the spoken word signifies a concept\\nthat we have formed within our mind and communicates it to others, so\\nChrist incarnate signifies the divine Logos and admonishes and assists\\nus to turn to it (cf. De trinitate 15.20; De doctrina\\nchristiana 1.12; Sermon 119.7; 187.3). In De\\ntrinitate Augustine expands this to a theory about how the inner\\nword or concept is formed (14.10; 15.25; cf. 15.43). The inner word is\\ngenerated when we actualize some latent or implicit knowledge that is\\nstored in our memory. It is not a sign, nor of linguistic nature\\n(Augustine insists that it is neither Latin nor Greek nor Hebrew), but\\nrather seems to be a kind of a-temporal intellectual insight that\\ntranscends language (cf. De catechizandis rudibus 3).\\nProperly speaking, then, the theory of the inner word is not a\\nlinguistic theory at all.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.4 Language and Signs\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"6. Anthropology: God and the Soul; Soul and Body\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nLike most ancient philosophers, Augustine thinks that the human being\\nis a compound of body and soul and that, within this compound, the\\nsoul—conceived as both the life-giving element and the center of\\nconsciousness, perception and thought—is, or ought to be, the\\nruling part. The rational soul should control the sensual desires and\\npassions; it can become wise if it turns to God, who is at the same\\ntime the Supreme Being and the Supreme Good.\\n In his Manichean phase, he conceived of both God and the soul as\\nmaterial entities, the soul being in fact a portion of God that had\\nfallen into the corporeal world where it remained a foreigner, even to\\nits own body (De duabus animabus 1; Confessiones\\n8.22). After his Platonist readings in Milan had provided him with the\\nadequate philosophical means to think about immaterial, non-spatial\\nreality (Confessiones 7.1–2; 7.16), he replaced this\\nview, which he later represents as a rather crude dualism, with an\\nontological hierarchy in which the soul, which is mutable in time but\\nimmutable in space, occupies a middle position between God, who is\\ntotally unchangeable immaterial being (cf. MacDonald 2014), and\\nbodies, which are subject to temporal and spatial change\\n(Letter 18.2). The soul is of divine origin and even god-like\\n(De quantitate animae 2–3); it is not divine itself but\\ncreated by God (the talk about divinity of the soul in the Cassiciacum\\ndialogues seems to be a traditional Ciceronian element, cf. Cary 2000:\\n77–89; for a Plotinian interpretation see O’Connell 1968:\\n112–131). In De quantitate animae, Augustine broadly\\nargues that the “greatness” of the soul does not refer to\\nspatial extension but to its vivifying, perceptive, rational and\\ncontemplative powers that enable it to move close to God and are\\ncompatible with and even presuppose immateriality (esp. ib.\\n70–76; Brittain 2003). An early definition of soul as “a\\nrational substance fitted for rule over a body” (ib. 22) echoes\\nPlatonic views (cf. the definition of the human being as “a\\nrational soul with a body” in In Iohannis evangelium\\ntractatus 19.15; O’Daly 1987: 54–60). Later on, when\\nthe resurrection of the body becomes more important to him, Augustine\\nemphasizes—against Porphyry’s alleged claim that in order\\nto be happy, the soul must free itself from anything\\ncorporeal—that it is natural and even desirable for a soul to\\ngovern a body (De Genesi ad litteram 12.35.68), but he\\nnevertheless remains convinced that soul is an incorporeal and\\nimmortal substance that can, in principle, exist independently of a\\nbody. In the Soliloquia (2.24), following the tradition of\\nPlato and of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, he\\nproposes a proof for the immortality of the soul which he expressly\\nintroduces as an alternative to the final proof of the Phaedo\\n(Soliloquia 2.23, cf. Phaedo 102d-103c). The proof\\nis constructed from elements from Porphyry’s Isagoge\\nand his Commentary on Aristotle’s Categories (rather\\nelementary texts that Augustine would have encountered long before his\\nPlatonic readings at Milan) and seems to be original with him (Tornau\\n2017). It says that since truth is both eternal and in the soul as its\\nsubject, it follows that soul, the subject of truth, is eternal too.\\nThis is fallacious, because if truth is eternal independently of the\\nsoul it cannot be in the soul as in its subject (i.e., as a property),\\nand if it is a property of the soul, it cannot ensure its eternity. In\\nthe incomplete draft of a third book of the Soliloquia\\npreserved under the title De immortalitate animae, Augustine\\ntherefore modifies the proof and argues that soul is immortal because\\nof the inalienable causal presence of God (= Truth) in it. It turns\\nout however that even if this version of the proof is successful, it\\nonly demonstrates the soul’s eternal existence as a (rational)\\nsoul but not its eternal wisdom (De immortalitate animae 19;\\nZum Brunn 1969: 17–41 [1988: 9–34]), in the hope of which the\\ninterlocutors had set out to prove the immortality of the soul in the\\nfirst place (Soliloquia 2.1). After De immortalitate\\nanimae, Augustine never returned to his proof. But neither did he\\ndisown it; as late as De trinitate (13.12), he endorses the\\nPlatonic axiom that soul is by nature immortal and that its\\nimmortality can, in principle, be proven by philosophical means. He\\nalso sticks to his conviction that immortality is a necessary\\ncondition of happiness but insists that it is not a sufficient\\ncondition, given that immortality and misery are compatible (cf.\\nDe civitate dei 9.15 on the misery of the wicked demons).\\nTrue happiness will only be realized in the afterlife as a gift of\\nGod’s grace, when, thanks to the resurrection of the body, not\\njust the soul but the human being as a whole will live forever.\\nResurrection, however, is not susceptible of rational proof; it is a\\npromise of God that must be believed on Scriptural authority (De\\ntrinitate ib.).\",\n \"\\nTogether with an essentially Platonic notion of the soul, Augustine\\ninherits the classical problems of Platonic soul-body dualism. How can\\nsoul fulfil its task of “governing” the body (cf. De quantitate\\nanimae 22) if it is incorporeal itself? And how are\\ncorporeal and psychic aspects related to each other in phenomena that\\ninvolve both body and soul, especially if, like passions and desires,\\nthese are morally relevant? These problems are further complicated by\\nthe Platonic axiom that incorporeal entities, being ontologically\\nprior to corporeal ones, cannot be causally affected by them.\\nAugustine’s solution is indebted to Plotinus’ strategy of\\nmaking the relation of the soul to the bodily affections an\\nessentially cognitive one (O’Daly 1987, 84–87;\\nHölscher 1986, ch. 2.2.1; Nash 1969, 39–59; Bermon 2001:\\n239–281). With Plotinus, he insists that sense perception is not\\nan affection which the soul passively undergoes (as Stoic materialism\\nwould have it, where sensory perception was interpreted as a kind of\\nimprint in the soul) but its active awareness of affections undergone\\nby the body (De quantitate animae 41; 48; De Genesi ad\\nlitteram 7.14.20; Plotinus, Enneads I.4.2.3–4;\\nBrittain 2002: 274–282). In De quantitate animae, the\\nframework of this theory is the general argument that the relation of\\nsoul to body must be conceived of not in terms of space but of\\n“power” (see above). In De musica (6.11), this is\\ndeveloped into the idea that sense perception is the soul’s\\nawareness of modifications of its own formative and vivifying\\nactivities that result from its reacting to the external impulses\\nundergone by the body. In addition to the usual five senses, Augustine\\nidentifies a sensory faculty that relates the data of the senses to\\neach other and judges them aesthetically (but not morally; De musica 6.5; 19);\\nin De libero arbitrio (2.8–13) he calls this the\\n“inner sense” (on the Aristotelian background cf.\\nO’Daly 1987: 102–105).\",\n \"\\nIn Neoplatonism it was disputed how soul, being immortal, immaterial\\nand ontologically superior to body, came to be incorporated\\nnevertheless. The basic options, present already in Plato’s\\ndialogues, were either that the disembodied soul had\\n“fallen” into the corporeal world because of some error\\n(as in the Phaedrus myth) or that it had been sent into the\\ncosmos by God to impart life and order to it (as in the\\nTimaeus; for harmonizing Neoplatonic exegeses, see Plotinus,\\nEnneads IV.8, and Macrobius, Commentary on Cicero’s\\nSomnium Scipionis 1.10–14). Augustine addresses the issue\\nin the horizon of his doctrine of creation and, in the period of the\\nPelagian Controversy, of the debate about the transmission of original\\nsin (see\\n 9. Gender, Women and Sexuality).\\n In De libero arbitrio (3.56–59), he distinguishes the\\nthree options of creationism (God creates a new soul for every newborn\\nbody), traducianism (the soul is transmitted from the parents to the\\nchild like corporeal properties), and preexistence, which is\\nsubdivided into the Platonic options of voluntary or god-sent descent.\\nAfter 412 all these options come to the fore again (Letters\\n143.5–11; 166; 190; and the treatise De anima et eius\\norigine). Augustine discards none of them officially except for\\nthe notion, wrongly associated with Origenism, which was considered a\\nheresy at the time, that incorporation was a punishment for a sin\\ncommitted by the pre-existent soul (De civitate dei 11.23).\\nIn practice, he narrows the debate down to the alternative between\\ncreationism and traducianism, which appear to have been the only\\noptions taken seriously by his Christian contemporaries. Augustine\\nrefused to take a stand till the end of his life, probably because\\nneither option really suited his purposes (Rist 1994: 317–320;\\nO’Connell 1987; Mendelson 1998): Creationism made original sin\\nvery difficult to explain; traducianism was functional in this\\nrespect, but it was a materialist and even biologist theory that ran\\ncounter to Augustine’s Platonism and was further compromised\\nbecause it had been brought up by his African predecessor Tertullian\\n(d. c. 220 CE), a Stoicizing corporealist who had ended his life as a\\nheretic (Rist 1994: 123).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.1 Soul as a Created Being\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAugustine deploys what we may call his philosophy of the mind most\\nfully in his great work on Nicene Trinitarian theology, De\\ntrinitate. Having removed apparent Scriptural obstacles to the\\nequality and consubstantiality of the three divine persons (bks.\\n1–4) and having set out the grammar, as it were, of adequate\\nspeaking about the Trinity by distinguishing absolute and relative\\npropositions about God and the three Persons (bks. 5–7; King\\n2012), he turns to an analysis of the human mind as an image of God\\n(bks. 8–15; Brachtendorf 2000; Ayres 2010; Bermon &\\nO’Daly (eds.) 2012). The basis for this move is, of course,\\nGenesis 1:26–27. Augustine follows a long-standing Jewish and\\nPatristic tradition, familiar to him from Ambrose, according to which\\nthe biblical qualification of the human being as an image of God\\nreferred not to the living body (a literalist reading vulnerable to\\nthe Manichean charge of anthropomorphism, cf. Confessiones\\n6.4) but to what is specifically human, i.e., the “inner\\nman” (2 Corinthians 4:16, quoted, e.g., in De trinitate\\n11.1) or the mind (mens). Assuming, in a Platonist manner,\\nthat “image” in this case does not merely mean an analogy\\nbut a causal effect of the original that reflects the essential\\nfeatures of the latter on a lower ontological level,\\nhe scrutinizes the human mind for triadic structures that meet the\\nNicene requirements of equality and consubstantiality and may thus\\ngive a—however faint—understanding of the Triune God. The\\ngeneral pattern of his argument is the Augustinian ascent from the\\nexternal to the internal and from the senses to God; but since human\\nreason is, whether by nature or due to its fallen state, hardly\\ncapable of knowing God, Augustine this time is obliged to interrupt\\nand re-start the ascent several times. The final book shows that the\\nexercise of analyzing the human mind does have preparatory value for\\nour thinking about the Trinity but does not yield insight into the\\ndivine by being simply transferred to it (De trinitate\\n15.10–11). The three elements Augustine discerns in all our\\ncognitive acts from sense perception to theoretical reason or\\ncontemplation are: [1] an object that is either external to the mind\\n(as in sense perception) or internal to it, in which case it is an\\nimage or a concept stored in our memory; [2] a cognitive faculty that\\nmust be activated or “formed” by the object if cognition\\nis to come about; [3] a voluntary or intentional element that makes\\nthe cognitive faculty turn to its object so as to be actually formed\\nby it. The last element ensures the active character of perception and\\nintellection\\n but also gives weight to the idea that we do not cognize an object\\nunless we consciously direct our attention to it (MacDonald 2012b).\\nThough this triadic pattern is operative on all levels of human\\ncognition, Augustine contends that only the mind’s intellectual\\nself-knowledge on the level of contemplative reason (its “memory\\nof itself, knowledge of itself and love of itself”) qualifies as\\nan image of God because only here are the three elements as closely\\nrelated to each other as in the Nicene dogma and because they are as\\ninalienable as the mind’s immediate presence to itself (De\\ntrinitate 14.19). This idea is carefully prepared in Book 10,\\nwhich contains one of Augustine’s most remarkable arguments for\\nthe substantiality of the mind and its independence of the body\\n(Stróżyński 2013; Brittain 2012a; Matthews 2005:\\n43–52; Bermon 2001, 357–404). Augustine begins by arguing\\n(in a manner reminiscent of his cogito-like argument; see\\n 5.1 Skepticism and Certainty)\\n that the mind always already knows itself because it is always\\npresent to and hence aware of itself. This pre-reflexive\\nself-awareness is presupposed by every act of conscious cognition. If\\nso, however, the Delphic command “Know thyself” cannot\\nmean that the mind is to become acquainted with itself as if it had\\nbeen unknown to itself before, but rather that it must become\\nconscious of what it knew about itself all along and distinguish it\\nfrom what it does not know about itself. As the mind in its fallen\\nstate is deeply immersed in sensible reality, it tends to forget what\\nit really is and what it knows it is and confounds itself with the\\nthings it attaches the greatest importance to, i.e., sensible objects\\nthat give it pleasure. The result are materialist theories about the\\nsoul, which thus derive from flawed morality (De trinitate\\n10.11–12). If it follows the Delphic command, however, the mind\\nwill realize that it knows with certainty that it exists, thinks,\\nwills etc., whereas it can at best merely believe that it is air, fire\\nor brain (ib. 10.13).\\n And as the substance or essence of the mind cannot be anything other\\nthan what it knows with certainty about itself, it follows that\\nnothing material is essential to the mind and that its essence must be\\nsought in its mental acts (ib. 10.16). Full self-knowledge is reached,\\nthen, when the mind’s inalienable self-awareness (se\\nnosse, “to be acquainted with oneself”) is actualized\\nto conscious “self-thinking” (se cogitare). How\\nthis relates to the mind’s pre-reflexive presence to itself is\\nnot entirely clear (for problems of interpretation, see, e.g., Horn\\n2012; Brittain 2012b), but Augustine seems to think that not only the\\nmind’s intellectual self-thinking but already its immediate\\nself-awareness is triadically structured and an image of the Triune\\nGod (De trinitate 14.7–14). Again, the ethical side of\\nthe theory should not be overlooked. As a strong voluntary element is\\npresent in and necessary for an act of cognition, what objects\\n(imaginations, thoughts) we cognize is morally relevant and indicative\\nof our loves and desires. And while the triadic structure of the mind\\nis its very essence and hence inalienable, Augustine insists that the\\nmind is created in the image of God, not because it is capable of\\nself-knowledge, but because it has the potential to become wise, i.e.,\\nto remember, know and love God, its creator (ib. 14.21–22).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.2 The Human Mind as an Image of God\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"7. Ethics\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe basic structure of Augustine’s ethics is that of ancient\\neudaimonism (Holte 1962), but he defers happiness to the afterlife and\\nblames the ancient ethicists for their arrogant\\nconviction—resulting from their ignorance of the fallen\\ncondition of humankind—that they could reach happiness in this\\nlife by philosophical endeavor (De civitate dei 19.4;\\nWolterstorff 2012; for a more optimistic view, cf. the early De\\nordine 2.26). He takes it as axiomatic that happiness is the\\nultimate goal pursued by all human beings (e.g., De beata\\nvita 10; De civitate dei 10.1; De trinitate\\n13.7, quoting Cicero’s Hortensius; for an interesting\\ndiscussion of how the desire for happiness relates to our equally\\nnatural desires for pleasure and for truth cf. Confessiones\\n10.29–34; Matthews 2005: 134–145; Menn 2014: 80–95).\\nHappiness or the good life is brought about by the possession of the\\ngreatest good in nature that humans can attain and that one cannot\\nlose against one’s will (e.g., lib. arb. 1.10–12;\\nespecially in his early work Augustine shares the Stoics’\\nconcern about the self-sufficiency and independence of the wise and\\nhappy person, cf. Wetzel 1992, 42–55). This structure Augustine\\ninscribes into his Neoplatonically inspired three-tiered ontological\\nhierarchy (Letter 18.2)\\n and concludes that the only thing able to fulfil the requirements for\\nthe supreme good set by eudaimonism is the immutable God himself. The\\nSupreme Being is also the greatest good; the desire of created being\\nfor happiness can only be satisfied by the creator. As Augustine puts\\nin concisely in De beata vita (11): “Happy is he who\\nhas God”. Alternative formulations are “enjoyment of\\nGod” (De civitate dei 8.8; De trinitate\\n13.10), “contemplation of God” or “enjoyment of\\ntruth” (De libero arbitrio 2.35). To “have”\\nGod means in fact to know and, especially, to love God; Augustine\\ntherefore interprets Psalm 72:28 (“For me it is good to cling to\\nGod”) as a biblical telos formula or definition of the\\nsupreme and beatifying good (De civitate dei 10.18; Tornau\\n2015: 265–266). We are, in other words, happy, wise and virtuous\\nif we turn to or “convert” to God. If we turn away from\\nhim and direct our attention and love to the bodies—which are\\nnot per se bad, as in Manicheism, but an infinitely lesser good than\\nGod—or to ourselves, who are a great good but still subordinate\\nto God, we become miserable, foolish and wicked (Letter 18.2;\\nDe libero arbitrio 2.52–54; In Iohannis evangelium\\ntractatus 20.11). Virtue is “love that knows its\\npriorities” (ordo amoris, De civitate dei 15.22)\\nwhereas vice or sin perverts the natural order. Just as after the Fall\\nall human beings are inevitably tainted by sin, we need to be purified\\nthrough faith in order to live well and to restore our ability to know\\nand love God (De diversis quaestionibus 68.3; Cary 2008a:\\n12–13). Augustine does not discard the intellectual element\\ninherited from the ancient (Socratic) ethical tradition, and his\\nnotion of conversion is certainly inspired by Neoplatonist\\n“return” (epistrophe), but Augustine enhances the\\nethical relevance of conversion and aversion by emphasizing their\\nvoluntary character (cf. already De immortalitate animae\\n11–12).\\n The element of will or love is also crucial to the distinction between\\n“enjoyment” (frui) and “use”\\n(uti) that is first fully developed in De doctrina\\nchristiana, bk. 1 (c. 396) and remains basic for his ethical\\nthought. Following the ancient insight that we pursue some goods for\\ntheir own sake and others for the sake of other and greater goods,\\nAugustine states that to “enjoy” a thing means to cling to\\nit with love for its own sake whereas to “use” it means to\\nlove it for the sake of another thing which we want to enjoy. We love\\nabsolutely only what we enjoy, whereas our love for things we use is\\nrelative and even instrumental (De doctrina christiana 1.4).\\nThe only proper object of enjoyment is God (cf. De civitate\\ndei 8.8 where the same view is attributed to the Platonists).\\nWickedness and confusion of the moral order results from a reversal of\\nuse and enjoyment, when we want to enjoy what we ought to use (all\\ncreated things, e.g., wealth, bodies or ourselves) and to use what we\\nought to enjoy (this probably refers to the “carnal”\\nunderstanding of religion of which Augustine often accuses the Jews).\\nAn obvious problem of this system is the categorization of the\\nbiblically prescribed love of the neighbor. Are we to enjoy our\\nneighbor or to use her? Whereas natural moral intuition suggests the\\nformer, Augustine’s systematic seems to require the latter. The\\nproblem is inherited from ancient eudaimonism, where it takes some\\nphilosophical effort to reconcile the intuition that concern for\\nothers is morally relevant with the assumption that ethics is\\nprimarily about the virtue and happiness of the individual. Augustine\\nis aware of the problem and gives a differentiated answer. In De\\ndoctrina christiana (1.20–21) he somewhat tentatively\\nsuggests that to love our neighbor means to use him, not because he is\\nmerely instrumental to our happiness but because we are enjoined to\\nlove him as ourselves and because we love ourselves rightly only if we\\nrefer our self-love to our desire to enjoy God. Love of the neighbor\\nthus means to desire his true happiness in the same way as we desire\\nour own. In substance, this remains Augustine’s view also in his\\nlater work (cf., e.g., In epistulam Iohannis ad Parthos tractatus\\ndecem 1.9), but he then prefers to avoid the counter-intuitive\\nand potentially misleading talk about “using” fellow\\nhumans and replaces it by a description of fraternal love as\\n“mutual enjoyment in God” (e.g., De trinitate\\n9.13; cf. already De doctrina christiana 1.35; 3.16; Rist\\n1994: 159–168; O’Donovan 1980: 32–36;\\n112–136). “In God” is presumably added to prevent\\nthe misunderstanding that we are to enjoy the neighbor “in\\nherself” or “in ourselves” without reference to God.\\nThis would mean that we expect our true happiness from her, which no\\nhuman can give; the result of this misdirection would be extreme\\nmisery in the case of the neighbor’s loss (cf.\\nConfessiones 4.9–11 on Augustine’s excessive\\ngrief after the death of his friend; Nawar 2014).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"7.1 Happiness\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIn principle Augustine follows the view of the ancient eudaimonists\\nthat virtue is sufficient or at least relevant for happiness. There\\nare however several important modifications. (1) The entire structure\\nis made dependent on God’s prevenient grace. True virtue\\nguarantees true happiness, but there is no true virtue that is not a\\ngift of grace.\\n (2) Augustine accepts Cicero’s definition of virtue as the art\\nof “living well” but emphatically rejects his equation of\\nliving well and living happily, i.e., the Stoicizing claim that a\\nvirtuous disposition is equivalent to happiness (De libero\\narbitrio 2.50; De civitate dei 4.21; De moribus\\n1.10; contrast Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 5.53). Our\\npostlapsarian life on earth is inevitably the locus of sin and\\npunishment, and even the saints are unable to overcome the permanent\\ninner conflict between “the spirit” and “the\\nflesh”, i.e., between good and evil volitions or rational and\\nirrational desires in this life (De civitate dei 19.4,\\nquoting Galatians 5:17). The perfect inner tranquility virtue strives\\nfor will only be achieved in the afterlife. (3) Augustine replaces the\\nancient definition of virtue as “right reason” (as in\\nStoicism) or “activity in accordance with reason” (as in\\nthe Aristotelian tradition) with a definition of virtue as love of God\\nor, in later texts, as love of God and neighbor. Virtue is an inner\\ndisposition or motivational habit that enables us to perform every\\naction we perform out of right love.\\n There are several catalogues of the traditional four cardinal virtues\\nprudence, justice, courage and temperance that redefine these as\\nvarieties of the love of God either in this life or in the eschaton\\n(De moribus 1.25; Letter 155.12; cf. Letter\\n155.16 for the cardinal virtues as varieties of love of the neighbor;\\nDe libero arbitrio 1.27 for descriptions of the virtues in\\nterms of good will). His briefest definition of virtue is\\n“ordered love” (De civitate dei 15.22). This does\\nnot mean that virtue becomes non-rational (for Augustine love and will\\nare essential features of the rational mind; see\\n 6.2 The Human Mind as an Image of God),\\n but it does mean that it becomes essentially intentional. The\\ncriterion of true virtue is that it is oriented toward God. Even if\\nAugustine occasionally talks as if the four cardinal virtues could be\\nadded to the Pauline or theological virtues of love, faith and hope to\\nmake a sum of seven (Letter 171A.2), they are best taken as a\\nsubdivision of love, the only one of the Pauline virtues that persists\\nin the eschaton (Soliloquia 1.14).\",\n \"\\nThese modifications have several interesting consequences. Even though\\nAugustine postpones the happiness that is the reward of virtue to the\\nafterlife, he does not make virtue a means to an end in the sense that\\nvirtue becomes superfluous when happiness is reached. To the contrary,\\nhe insists that virtue will persist in the eschaton where it will be\\ntransformed into eternal unimpeded fruition of God and of the neighbor\\nin God. Then it will indeed be its own reward and identical with\\nhappiness (Letter 155.2; 12). Both eschatological virtue and\\nvirtue in this life are thus love of God; they only differ in that the\\nlatter is subject to hindrances and temptation. For this reason, those\\nwho have true love of God—e.g., Christian martyrs—are\\nhappy already in this life, at least in hope (e.g.,\\nConfessiones 10.29; Tornau 2015). Augustine’s\\ndescription of eschatological and non-eschatological virtues\\n(Letter 155) is partly modelled on the Neoplatonic doctrine\\nof the scale of virtues with its ascending hierarchy of social or\\ncivic, purificatory and contemplative virtues (Tornau 2013; Dodaro\\n2004a: 206–212; Dodaro 2004b). When analyzing virtue in this\\nlife, Augustine takes up the Stoic distinction, familiar to him from\\nCicero (De officiis 1.7–8), between a virtue’s\\nfinal end (finis) and its appropriate action\\n(officium; cf., e.g., Contra Iulianum 4.21; De\\ncivitate dei 10.18). The appropriate action that characterizes\\nvirtue in this life but is no longer needed in eternal bliss is to\\nsubdue the lower parts of soul to reason and to resist the temptations\\nthat emerge from the permanent conflict between good and bad volitions\\n(as it were, a permanent “akratic” state; see\\n 7.4 Will and Freedom)\\n that results from our fallen condition (De civitate dei\\n19.4). As the examples of the best philosophers and the heroes of\\nRome’s glorious past teach, whom Augustine regularly accuses of\\nlove of glory, these actions may easily spring from other motivations\\nthan the true love of God. Augustine therefore distinguishes between\\ntrue (i.e., Christian) virtue that is motivated by love of God and\\n“virtue as such” (virtus ipsa: De civitate dei\\n5.19) that performs the same appropriate actions but is, in the last\\nresort, guided by self-love or pride (ib. 5.12; 19.25). Among other\\nthings, this distinction underpins his solution of the so-called\\nproblem of pagan virtue (Harding 2008; Tornau 2006b; Dodaro 2004a: 27–71; Rist 1994:\\n168–173) because it permits ascribing virtue in a meaningful\\nsense to pagan and pre-Christian paradigms of virtue like Socrates\\nwithout having to admit that they were eligible for salvation. If a\\n“teleological” perspective on virtue is adopted that\\nexclusively focuses on ends, the virtues of the pagan must be judged\\nvices rather than virtues and will be punished accordingly (De\\ncivitate dei 19.25, the passage from which the non-Augustinian\\nphrase that pagan virtues are “splendid vices” seems to be\\nderived; see Irwin 1999). An “operative” perspective\\nhowever reveals that as far as appropriate actions are concerned,\\nvirtuous non-Christians differ from the foolish and wicked but are\\nindistinguishable from virtuous Christians. From this point of view,\\nSocrates is closer to Paul than to Nero, even though his virtue will\\nnot bring him happiness, i.e., eternal bliss. That he envisages a\\nperspective on virtue that abstracts from the causal nexus of virtue\\nand happiness is perhaps Augustine’s most significant departure\\nfrom ancient eudaimonism.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"7.2 Virtue\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nLove is a crucial and overarching notion in Augustine’s ethics.\\nIt is closely related to virtue\\n and often used synonymously with will (e.g., De trinitate\\n15.38; in the cogito-like arguments, love and will are\\ninterchangeable, cf. De civitate dei 11.27 with\\nConfessiones 13.12) or intention (intentio).\\nAugustine’s basic text is, of course, the biblical command to\\nlove God and neighbor (Matthew 22.37; 39), which he is however\\nprepared, throughout his life, to interpret in terms of Platonic\\nerotic love (Rist 1994: 148–202). As in the Symposium\\nand in Plotinus (Enneads I.6), love is a force in our souls\\nthat attracts us to the true beauty we find nowhere else but in and\\nabove ourselves; it drives us to ascend from the sensible to the\\nintelligible world and to the cognition and contemplation of God\\n(Confessiones 10.8–38, esp. 38). Even Christian\\nfraternal love can be described, in a manner reminiscent of the\\nPhaedrus, as a kind of seduction through another’s real\\nor assumed righteousness (De trinitate 9.11). In a more\\ngeneral way, love means the overall direction of our will (positively)\\ntoward God or (negatively) toward ourselves or corporeal creature\\n(De civitate dei 14.7; Byers 2013: 88–99;\\n217–231). The former is called love in a good sense\\n(caritas), the latter cupidity or concupiscence\\n(cupiditas), i.e., misdirected and sinful love (De\\ndoctrina christiana 3.16). The root of sin is excessive self-love\\nthat wants to put the self in the position of God and is equivalent\\nwith pride (De civitate dei 14.28). It must be distinguished\\nfrom the legitimate self-love that is part of the biblical commandment\\nand strives for true happiness by subordinating the self to God\\n(O’Donovan 1980). In his earlier work, Augustine has some\\ndifficulties incorporating love of neighbor into the Platonic and\\neudaimonist framework of his thinking (De doctrina christiana\\n1.20–21, see\\n 7.1 Happiness).\\n After 400, in the context of his reflections on the Trinity and his\\nexegesis of the First Epistle of John (esp. 1 John 4:8; 16, “God\\nis love”), he finds the solution that love is by its very nature\\nself-reflexive. In loving our neighbors, we of necessity love that\\nlove which enables us to do so itself, which is none other than God;\\nlove of God and love of neighbor are, accordingly, co-extensive and,\\nultimately, identical (De trinitate 8.12; In epistulam\\nIohannis ad Parthos tractatus decem 9.10). Right and perverse\\nlove or intention—charity or concupiscence—thus becomes\\nthe predominant and even the single criterion of moral evaluation;\\nAugustine’s ethics may in this sense be labeled intentionalist\\n(cf. Mann 1999 on Augustine’s “inner-life ethics”).\\nHe keenly insists that each and every action, even if it is externally\\ngood and impressive, can be motivated either by a good or an evil\\nintention, by right or perverse love, by charity or pride. This goes\\nfor the actions prescribed by the Sermon of the Mount and even for\\nmartyrdom (In epistulam Iohannis tractatus decem 8.9, partly\\nrelying on 1 Corinthians 13:3). It is therefore impossible to give\\ncasuistic rules for external moral behavior. The only thing possible\\nis the general recommendation to “Love and do what you\\nwill” (ib. 7.8), i.e., to take care that the inner disposition\\nor intention behind one’s actions is love of God and neighbor\\nand not self-love or pride. It is important not to misunderstand this\\nas moral subjectivism, which Augustine’s ontological and ethical\\nassumptions exclude. He never excuses evil deeds done “with the\\nbest intentions” or with a subjectively pure conscience, and he\\ndoes allow for actions that are always condemnable because they cannot\\npossibly result from love, such as heresy. In a sense, his ideal agent\\nis a successor of the Stoic and Neoplatonic sage, who always acts out\\nof inner virtue or perfect rationality (the latter Augustine replaces\\nwith true love) but adapts his outward actions to the external\\ncircumstances (cf. Sextus Empiricus, Adversus Mathematicos\\n11.200–201 = 59 G Long-Sedley; Diogenes Laertius 7.121;\\nPorphyry, Sententiae 32). Augustine’s intentionalism\\nhas, however, the ambivalent implication that, since love and will\\ninevitably belong to the privacy of the mind, the inner motives for a\\nperson’s external agency are unknowable to anyone except the\\nagent herself and God. On the one hand, this limits the authority of\\nother people—including those endowed with worldly power or an\\necclesiastical office—to pass moral judgments. Augustine\\nrepeatedly recommends withholding judgment so as to preserve humility\\n(De civitate dei 1.26; Sermon 30.3–4). On the\\nother hand, Augustine makes our inner motivational and moral life\\nopaque even to ourselves and fully transparent only to God\\n(Confessiones 10.7; In Iohannis evangelium tractatus\\n32.5). We can never be fully sure about the purity of our intentions,\\nand even if we were, we could not be sure that we will persist in\\nthem. All human beings are therefore called to constantly scrutinize\\nthe moral status of their inner selves in a prayerful dialogue with\\nGod (as it is dramatized in the Confessiones). Such\\nself-scrutiny may well be self-tormenting; the obsession of Western\\nChristianity with inner latent guilt here has its Augustinian roots.\\nThe public staging of Augustine’s confession before God in the\\nConfessiones may, among many other things, represent an\\nattempt to remedy the loneliness of Christian self-scrutiny (cf.\\nConfessiones 10.1–7).\",\n \"\\nAugustine’s intentionalism also provides him with arguments in\\nfavor of religious coercion. As the objective of right fraternal love\\nis not the neighbor’s temporal well-being but his eternal\\nhappiness or salvation, we must not passively tolerate our\\nfellow-humans’ sins but should actively correct them if we can;\\notherwise, our motivation would be inertia rather than love (In\\nepistulam Iohannis ad Parthos tractatus decem 7.11; cf.\\nLetter 151.11; Ad Simplicianum 1.2.18). Catholic\\nbishops are therefore obliged to compel heretics and schismatics to\\nre-enter the Catholic church even forcibly, just as a father beats his\\nchildren when he sees them playing with snakes or as we bind a madman\\nwho otherwise would fling himself down a precipice (Letter\\n93.8; 185.7; and Letter 93.1–10 in general). Obviously,\\nthis is a paternalistic argument that presupposes superior insight in\\nthose who legitimately wield coercive power. While this may be\\nacceptable in the case of the Church, which according to\\nAugustine’s ecclesiology is the body of Christ and the\\nembodiment of fraternal love, it turns out to be problematic when it\\nis transferred to secular rulers (Augustine rarely does this, but cf.\\nLetter 138.14–15). And as even the Church in this world\\nis a mixed body of sinners and saints (see\\n 8. History and Political Philosophy),\\n it may be asked how individual bishops can be sure of their good\\nintentions when they use religious force (Rist 1994: 242–245).\\nAugustine does not address this problem, presumably because most of\\nhis relevant texts are propagandistic defenses of coercion against the\\nDonatists.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"7.3 Love\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThough other Latin philosophers, especially Seneca, had made use of\\nthe concept of will (voluntas) before Augustine, it has a\\nmuch wider application in his ethics and moral psychology than in any\\npredecessor and covers a broader range of phenomena than either\\nAristotelian boulesis (roughly, rational choice) or Stoic\\nprohairesis (roughly, the fundamental decision to lead a good\\nlife). Augustine comes closer than any earlier philosopher to positing\\nwill as a faculty of choice that is reducible neither to reason nor to\\nnon-rational desire. It has therefore been claimed that Augustine\\n“discovered” the will (Dihle 1982: ch. 6; Kahn 1988;\\ncontrast Frede 2011: 153–174 who, mainly on the basis of De\\nlibero arbitrio, emphasizes Augustine’s indebtedness to\\nStoicism). Augustine admits both first-order and second-order\\nvolitions, the latter being acts of the liberum voluntatis\\narbitrium, the ability to choose between conflicting first-order\\nvolitions (Stump 2001; Horn 1996; den Bok 1994). Like desires,\\nfirst-order volitions are intentional or object-directed and operate\\non all levels of the soul. Like memory and thought, will is a\\nconstitutive element of the mind (see\\n 6.2 The Human Mind as an Image of God).\\n It is closely related to love and, accordingly, the locus of moral\\nevaluation. We act well or badly if and only if our actions spring\\nfrom a good or evil will, which is equivalent to saying that they are\\nmotivated by right (i.e., God-directed) or perverse (i.e.,\\nself-directed) love (De civitate dei 14.7).\\n With this basic idea in view, Augustine defends the passions or\\nemotions against their Stoic condemnation as malfunctions of rational\\njudgment by redefining them more neutrally as volitions\\n(voluntates) that may be good or bad depending on their\\nintentional objects (De civitate dei 9.4–5; 14.9;\\nWetzel 1992: 98–111; Byers 2012b). The mechanics of the will in\\nAugustine’s moral psychology is strongly indebted to the Stoic\\ntheory of assent, which it however modifies in at least one respect.\\nAs in Stoicism, the will to act is triggered by an impression\\ngenerated by an external object (visum). To\\nthis the mind responds with an appetitive motion that urges us to\\npursue or to avoid the object (e.g., delight or fear). But only when\\nwe give our inner consent to this impulse or withhold it, does a will\\nemerge that, circumstances permitting, results in a corresponding\\naction. The will is the proper locus of our moral responsibility\\nbecause it is neither in our power whether an object presents itself\\nto our senses or intellect nor whether we take delight in it (De\\nlibero arbitrio 3.74; Ad Simplicianum 1.2.21), and our\\nattempts to act externally may succeed or fail for reasons beyond our\\ncontrol. The only element that is in our power is our will or inner\\nconsent, for which we are therefore fully responsible. Thus, a person\\nwho has consented to adultery is guilty even if his attempt actually\\nto commit it is unsuccessful, and a victim of rape who does not\\nconsent to the deed keeps her will free of sin even if she feels\\nphysical pleasure (De civitate dei 1.16–28). Augustine\\ntherefore defines sin as “the will to keep or pursue something\\nunjustly” (De duabus animabus 15). The second stage in\\nthe above structure, the involuntary appetitive motion of the soul, is\\nreminiscent of the Stoic “first motions”, but it also\\ncorresponds to the “impulse”, which in Stoicism does not\\nprecede consent but follows it and immediately results in action.\\nTemptations of this kind are, in Augustine, not personal sins but due to\\noriginal sin, and they haunt even the saints. Our will must be freed\\nby divine grace to resist them (Contra Iulianum 6.70; see, on\\nthis theory and its Stoic and Platonic background, Byers 2013:\\n100–150; J. Müller 2009: 157–161; Sorabji 2000:\\n372–384; Rist 1994: 176–177).\",\n \"\\nAugustine’s thinking about free will (liberum arbitrium\\nor liberum voluntatis arbitrium) undergoes some development\\nduring his career. In the 390s, opposing the dualistic fatalism of the\\nManicheans, he uses the cogito-like argument (see\\n 5.1 Skepticism and Certainty)\\n to demonstrate that we are responsible for our volitions because we\\nare as certain that we will as we are certain that we exist and think\\n(De duabus animabus 13; De libero arbitrio 3.3;\\nConfessiones 7.5; S. Harrison 1999). A contemporaneous\\ndefinition of will as a movement of soul toward some object of desire\\nemphasizes the absence of external constraint, and the ensuing\\ndefinition of sin as an unjust volition (see above) seems to endorse\\nthe principle of alternative possibilities (De duabus\\nanimabus 14–15). In De libero arbitrio, free will\\nappears as the condition of possibility of moral goodness and hence as\\na great good itself; but as it is not an absolute good (which is God\\nalone) but only an intermediate one, it is liable to misuse and,\\nhence, also the source of moral evil (De libero arbitrio\\n2.47–53). In his early exegesis of Paul’s chapter on\\ndivine election (Romans 9), Augustine is keen to establish that Paul\\ndid not abolish free will (Expositio quarundam propositionum ex\\nepistula apostoli ad Romanos 13–18). With all this,\\nAugustine is basically in harmony with the traditional view of early\\nChristian theology and exegesis, which is still adopted in the 420s by\\nJulian of Aeclanum when he blames Augustine for having fallen back\\ninto Manichean fatalism and quotes his early definitions against him\\n(Julian, Ad Florum, in Contra Iulianum opus\\nimperfectum 1.44–47). Things change with Ad\\nSimplicianum 1.2 and the Confessiones. By c. 400 CE,\\nAugustine had come to the conclusion that our ability to make choices\\nwas seriously impaired by the fallen condition of humankind and that\\nit made little sense to talk about free will without reference to\\ngrace. The optimistic-sounding claim in the first book of De\\nlibero arbitrio (1.25–26; 29) that it is in our power to be\\ngood as soon as we choose to be good because “nothing is as\\ncompletely in our will as will itself” was probably never the\\nwhole story; already in book 3 of the same work Augustine says that\\nthe cognitive and motivational deficiencies caused by Adam’s sin\\n(“ignorance and difficulty”, ib. 3.52; S. Harrison 2006:\\n112–130) seriously compromise our natural ability to choose the\\ngood, and in his later, especially anti-Pelagian work he radicalizes\\nthis to the idea that original sin makes us unable to completely\\nsubdue our sinful volitions as long as we live, so that we live in a\\npermanent state of “akrasia” or weakness of will (De\\nnatura et gratia 61–67; De civitate dei 19.4;\\nDe nuptiis et concupiscentia 1.35). But he never questions\\nthe principle that we have been created with the natural ability to\\nfreely and voluntarily choose the good, nor does he ever deny the\\napplicability of the cogito argument to the will (cf. De civitate\\ndei 5.10) or doubt that our volitions are imputable to us. What\\ngrace does is to restore our natural freedom; it does not compel us to\\nact against our will. What this means is best illustrated by the\\nnarrative of Confessiones 8 (for particularly lucid\\ninterpretations, see Wetzel 1992: 126–138; J. Müller 2009:\\n323–335). Immediately before his conversion Augustine suffers\\nfrom a “divided will”, feeling torn apart between the will\\nto lead an ascetic Christian life and the will to continue his\\nprevious, sexually active life. Though he identifies with the former,\\nbetter will rather than with the latter that actually torments him, he\\nis unable to opt for it because of his bad habits, which he once\\nacquired voluntarily but which have by now transformed into a kind of\\naddictive necessity (ib. 8.10–12). Earlier philosophical\\ntraditions would have interpreted this “akratic” state as\\na conflict of reason and desire, and Manichean dualism would have\\nattributed Augustine’s bad will to an evil substance present in\\nbut foreign to the soul, but Augustine insists that both wills were\\nindeed his own. Using medical metaphors reminiscent of Hellenistic\\nmoral philosophy, he argues that his will lacked the power of free\\nchoice because the disease of being divided between conflicting\\nvolitions had weakened it (ib. 8.19; 21). His ability to choose is\\nonly restored when, in the garden scene at the end of the book, his\\nwill is reintegrated and healed by God’s call, which immediately\\nfrees him to opt for the ascetic life (ib. 8.29–30). Before,\\nwhen he had just continued his habitual way of life, this had been a\\nnon-choice rather than a choice, even though, as Augustine insists, he\\nhad done so voluntarily. In substance, this remained his line of\\ndefense when, in the Pelagian controversy, he was confronted with the\\ncharge that his doctrine of grace abolished free will (De spiritu\\net littera 52–60; cf. De correptione et gratia 6).\\nWhile the Pelagians thought that the principle of alternative\\npossibilities was indispensable for human responsibility and divine\\njustice, Augustine accepts that principle only for the first humans in\\nparadise (Contra Iulianum opus imperfectum 1.47; 5.28;\\n5.40–42 etc.). In a way, by choosing wrongly Adam and Eve have\\nabandoned free will both for themselves and for all humankind.\\nOriginal sin transformed our initial ability not to sin into an\\ninability not to sin; grace can restore ability not to sin in this\\nlife and will transform it into inability to sin in the next (De\\ncivitate dei 22.30; De correptione et gratia 33).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"7.4 Will and Freedom\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAugustine’s notion of will is closely related to his thinking on\\nevil. The problem of the origin of evil (unde malum), he\\nclaims, had haunted him from his youth (Confessiones 7.7). At\\nfirst, he accepted the dualist solution of the Manicheans, which freed\\nGod from the responsibility for evil but compromised his omnipotence\\n(ib. 3.12; 7.3). After having encountered the books of the Platonists,\\nAugustine rejected the existence of an evil substance and endorsed the\\nNeoplatonic view (argued e.g., in Plotinus, Enneads I.8) that\\nevil is in fact unsubstantial and a privation or corruption of\\ngoodness. In his mature view, which was largely developed during his\\nanti-Manichean polemics, everything that has being is good insofar as\\nit has been created by God. There are of course different degrees of\\ngoodness as well as of being (Letter 18.2),\\n but everything that is real is good “in its degree”, and\\nthe hierarchical order of reality is itself a good creation of God\\n(Bouton-Touboulic 2004). Augustine therefore rejects Plotinus’\\nview that prime matter is equivalent to prime evil, because the\\nformlessness of matter is not pure negativity but a positive, and\\nhence divinely created, capacity to receive forms\\n(Confessiones 12.6; see\\n 10. Creation and Time).\\n A created being can be said to be evil if and only if it falls short\\nof its natural goodness by being corrupted or vitiated; strictly\\nspeaking, only corruption itself is evil, whereas the nature or\\nsubstance or essence (for the equivalence of the terms see De\\nmoribus 2.2) of the thing itself remains good\\n(Confessiones 7.18; Contra epistulam fundamenti\\n35.39 etc.; for a systematic account, De natura boni\\n1–23; Schäfer 2002: 219–239). While this theory can\\nexplain physical evil relatively easily either as a necessary feature\\nof hierarchically ordered (corporeal) reality (De ordine\\n2.51), as a just punishment of sin, or as part of God’s pedagogy\\nof salvation (Letter 138.14), it leaves open the question of\\nmoral evil or sin itself. Augustine answers by equating moral evil\\nwith evil will\\n and claims that the seemingly natural question of what causes evil\\nwill is unanswerable. His most sustained argument to this effect is\\nfound in his explanation of the fall of the devil and the evil angels,\\na case that, being the very first occurrence of evil in the created\\nworld, allows him to analyze the problem in its most abstract terms\\n(De civitate dei 12.1–9; cf. already De libero\\narbitrio 3.37–49; Schäfer 2002: 242–300;\\nMacDonald 1999). The cause can neither be a substance (which, qua\\nsubstance, is good and unable to cause anything evil) nor a will\\n(which would in turn have to be an evil will in need of explanation).\\nTherefore, an evil will has no “efficient” but only a\\n“deficient” cause, which is none other than the\\nwill’s spontaneous defection from God. The fact that evil agents\\nare created from nothing and hence are not, unlike God, intrinsically\\nunable to sin is a necessary condition of evil but not a sufficient\\none (after all the good angels successfully kept their good will). In\\nthis context Augustine, in an interesting thought experiment, imagines\\ntwo persons of equal intellectual and emotional disposition of whom\\none gives in to a temptation while the other resists it; from this he\\nconcludes that the difference must be due to a free, spontaneous and\\nirreducible choice of the will (De civitate dei 12.6). Here\\nat least Augustine virtually posits the will as an independent mental\\nfaculty.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"7.5 Will and Evil\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nFrom the Middle Ages onwards, Augustine’s theology of grace has\\nbeen regarded as the heart of his Christian teaching, and with good\\nreason. As he points out himself, his conviction that human beings in\\ntheir present condition are unable to do or even to will the good by\\ntheir own efforts is his most fundamental disagreement with ancient,\\nespecially Stoic, virtue ethics (De civitate dei 19.4;\\nWolterstorff 2012). After and because of the disobedience of Adam and\\nEve, we have lost our natural ability of self-determination, which can\\nonly be repaired and restored by the divine grace that has manifested\\nitself in the incarnation and sacrifice of Christ and works inwardly\\nto free our will from its enslavement to sin.\\n Confession of sins and humility are, therefore, basic Christian\\nvirtues and attitudes; the philosophers’ confidence in their own\\nvirtue that prevents them from accepting the grace of Christ is an\\nexample of the sinful pride that puts the self in the place of God and\\nwas at the core of the evil angels’ primal sin (De civitate\\ndei 10.29).\",\n \"\\nThe main inspiration for Augustine’s doctrine of grace is, of\\ncourse, Paul (even though remarks on human weakness and divine help\\nare not absent from the ancient philosophical tradition and especially\\nfrom Platonism which had had a strong religious side from the\\nbeginning; Augustine claims that with such utterances the Platonists\\ninadvertently “confess” grace, cf. De civitate\\ndei 10.29; 22.22). The radical view that the gifts of grace\\ninclude not only external good works and the internal volitional\\ndisposition that allows us to perform them but even the very first\\nbeginnings of faith—in later technical terminology: that grace\\nis not “cooperative” but radically\\n“prevenient”—is however his own, and it took several\\nyears to take shape in his thought. There is some debate on the stages\\nof this development (for diverging reconstructions, see\\nKarfíková 2012; Cary 2008a; Drecoll 2004–2010;\\nDrecoll 1999; emphasis on the shifts in Augustine’s thinking:\\nLettieri 2001; Flasch 1995; emphasis on continuity: C. Harrison 2006),\\nbut it is generally agreed that Augustine’s doctrine of grace\\nreached its mature form c. 395–397 with Ad Simplicianum\\n1.2, after several years of intense reading and exegesis of Paul, and\\ngained higher profile during the Pelagian controversy after 412.\\nAugustine emphasizes the necessity of grace for both intellectual\\nunderstanding and moral purification already in his earliest works\\n(cf. esp. Soliloquia 1.2–6), but seems to have been\\nconcerned to leave room for human initiative at least with respect to\\nfaith and will (which would be in line with his concern, prominent\\nthroughout the 390s, to safeguard human responsibility against\\nManichean fatalism). In his early exegesis of Paul, he explains\\nGod’s apparently gratuitous election of Jacob and rejection of\\nEsau (Romans 9:10–13) with God’s foreknowledge of\\nJacob’s faith and Esau’s infidelity (De diversis\\nquaestionibus 68.5; Expositio quarundam propositionum ex\\nepistula apostoli ad Romanos 60), a “synergistic”\\nreading that relies on the assumption that salvation results from the\\ncooperation of divine grace and human initiative and that had been\\nstandard in early Christianity since Origen. This explanation is\\nexplicitly rejected in Ad Simplicianum (1.2.5–6; 8;\\n11). In this pivotal text, Augustine, true to his program of\\n“faith seeking understanding”,\\n attempts an exegesis of Romans 9:9–29 that satisfies the\\nphilosophical requirements of God’s justice and benevolence\\nwhile taking seriously the Pauline point that God’s election is\\nentirely gratuitous and not occasioned by any human merit. The guiding\\nintention of Romans 9, Augustine now says, is to preclude vainglory\\nand pride (ib. 1.2.2) rather than to safeguard human responsibility\\n(as had been his view in Expositio quarundam propositionum ex\\nepistula apostoli ad Romanos 13–18). Augustine rehearses\\nall possible reasons for God’s election of Jacob—his good\\nworks, his good will, his faith and God’s foreknowledge of\\neach—and discounts them all as amounting to an election from\\nmerit rather than from grace. Starting from the primordial willingness\\nto heed God’s call to faith, then, everything that is good in\\nJacob must be considered a gift of divine grace. Free will has nothing\\nto do with the reception of that gift because nobody can will to\\nreceive a divine call to faith nor to respond positively to it so as\\nto act accordingly and perform good works out of love (Ad\\nSimplicianum 1.2.21; for the Stoically-inspired theory of agency\\nbehind this see\\n 7.4 Will and Freedom).\\n While gratuitous election is, apart from being consoling,\\ncomparatively easily squared with the axioms of divine benevolence,\\njustice and omnipotence, its corollary, the equally gratuitous\\nreprobation and damnation of Esau, is a serious philosophical problem\\n(ib. 1.2.8). If it is not to violate the principle of God’s\\njustice, it obliges us to assume some kind of evil in Esau, which is\\nhowever excluded by Paul’s explicit statement to the contrary\\n(Romans 9:11). Augustine’s solution is his doctrine of original\\nsin. Both Jacob and Esau have inherited Adam’s guilt that his\\nsin has spread over all humankind—a debt that God remits for\\nJacob but exacts from Esau for reasons that, Augustine admits,\\nnecessarily elude human understanding but are certainly just. Since\\nthe Fall, humankind is nothing but a “lump of sin” that\\nGod might justly have damned as a whole but from which he has chosen\\nto save some individuals and to transform them into “vessels of\\nmercy” (ib. 1.2.16, cf. Romans 9:23). The notion of original sin\\nwas not invented by Augustine but had a tradition in African\\nChristianity, especially in Tertullian.\\n The view that original sin is a personally imputable guilt that\\njustifies eternal damnation is, however, new with Ad\\nSimplicianum and follows with logical necessity from the\\nexegetical and philosophical claims made there about divine grace and\\nelection (Flasch 1995; contrast De libero arbitrio\\n3.52–55). The theory of Ad Simplicianum is illustrated,\\nwith great philosophical acumen and psychological plausibility, in the\\nConfessiones (especially bk. 8) and remains in place during\\nthe Pelagian controversy till the end of Augustine’s life.\\nCuriously, however, there are passages even in his anti-Pelagian work\\nthat seem aimed at safeguarding freedom of choice and, accordingly,\\nadmit of a “synergistic” reading (De spiritu et\\nlittera 60; Cary 2008a: 82–86 and, for a different\\ninterpretation, Drecoll 2004–2010: 207–208). After 412,\\npressed by his Pelagian opponents, Augustine paid increasing attention\\nto the mechanics of the transmission of original sin. The result was a\\nquasi-biological theory that associated original sin closely with\\nsexual concupiscence (see\\n 9. Gender, Women and Sexuality).\",\n \"\\nAn obvious implication of Augustine’s theory of grace and\\nelection is predestination, a subject prominent in his last treatises\\nagainst the Pelagians (e.g., De praedestinatione sanctorum,\\nwritten after 426) but already implied in Ad Simplicianum.\\nGod decides “before the constitution of the world”\\n(Ephesians 1:4), i.e., (in Neoplatonic terms) in the non-temporal way\\nthat matches his transcendent, eternal being (De civitate dei\\n11.21; see also\\n 10. Creation and Time),\\n who will be exempted from the damnation that awaits fallen humankind\\nand who will not (“double predestination”). This knowledge\\nis however hidden to human beings, to whom it will only be revealed at\\nthe end of times (De correptione et gratia 49).\\n Until then, nobody, not even a baptized Christian, can be sure\\nwhether grace has given her true faith and a good will and, if so,\\nwhether she will persevere in it till the end of her life so as to be\\nactually saved (De correptione et gratia 10–25; cf.\\n 7.3 Love).\\n Like the Stoic determinists before him, Augustine was confronted with\\nthe objection that his doctrine of predestination made all human\\nactivity pointless (“Lazy Argument”). While in Hellenism\\nthis had largely been a theoretical issue, it acquired practical\\nrelevance under the circumstances of monastic life: some North African\\nmonks objected to being rebuked for their misbehavior with the\\nargument that they were not responsible for not (yet) enjoying the\\ngift of divine grace (De correptione et gratia 6). Taking up\\nideas from De magistro\\n and from Ad Simplicianum, Augustine replies that rebuke may\\nwork as an external admonition, even as a divine calling, that helps\\npeople turn to God inwardly and hence must not be withheld (De\\ncorreptione et gratia 7–9). To the query that\\npredestination undermines free will, Augustine gives his usual answer\\nthat our freedom of choice has been damaged by original sin and must\\nbe liberated by grace if we are to develop the good will necessary for\\nvirtue and happiness. The medieval and modern debate on whether grace is\\n“irresistible” is, therefore, to some extent\\nun-Augustinian (cf. Wetzel 1992: 197–206); some, especially\\nlater, texts do however present prevenient grace as converting the\\nwill with coercive force (Contra duas epistulas Pelagianorum\\n1.36–37; cf. already Ad Simplicianum 1.2.22; Cary\\n2008a: 105–110). A problem related to predestination but not\\nequivalent to it is divine foreknowledge (Matthews 2005: 96–104;\\nWetzel 2001; for general discussion, Zagzebski 1991). Augustine\\ninherits it from the Hellenistic discussion on future contingents and\\nlogical determinism that is best documented in Cicero’s De\\nfato. His solution is that while external actions may be\\ndetermined, inner volitions are not. These are certainly foreknown by\\nGod but exactly as what they are, i.e., as ours and as volitions and\\nnot as external compulsions (De civitate dei 5.9–10;\\ncf. De libero arbitrio 3.4–11). This argument is\\nindependent of the doctrine of grace and original sin; it applies not\\njust to fallen humankind but also to Adam and Eve and even to the\\ndevil, whose transgression God had, of course, foreseen (De\\ncivitate dei 11.17; 14.11).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"7.6 Grace, Predestination and Original Sin\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nAugustine’s City of God is not a treatise of political\\nor social philosophy. It is an extended plea designed to persuade\\npeople “to enter the city of God or to persist in it”\\n(Letter 2*.3). The criterion of membership in the city of God\\n(a metaphor Augustine takes from the Psalms, cf. Psalm 86:3 quoted,\\ne.g., in De civitate dei 11.1) and its antagonist, the\\nearthly city, is right or wrong love.\\n A person belongs to the city of God if and only if he directs his\\nlove towards God even at the expense of self-love, and he belongs to\\nthe earthly city or city of the devil if and only if he postpones love\\nof God for self-love, proudly making himself his greatest good (De\\ncivitate dei 14.28). The main argument of the work is that true\\nhappiness, which is sought by every human being (ib. 10.1),\\n cannot be found outside the city of God founded by Christ (cf. ib. 1,\\nprologue). The first ten books deconstruct, in a manner reminiscent of\\ntraditional Christian apologetics, the alternative conceptions of\\nhappiness in the Roman political tradition (which equates happiness\\nwith the prosperity of the Empire, thus falling prey to evil demons\\nwho posed as the defenders of Rome but in fact ruined it morally and\\npolitically) and in Greek, especially Platonic, philosophy (which,\\ndespite its insight into the true nature of God, failed to accept the\\nmediation of Christ incarnate out of pride and turned to false\\nmediators, i.e., deceptive demons; bks. 8–10 have an interesting\\ndisquisition on Platonic demonology). Augustine’s approach in\\nthe second, positive half is Scriptural, creationist and\\neschatological; this fact accounts for the specific character of its\\nhistorical dimension. The history of the two cities begins with the\\ncreation of the world and the defection of the devil and the sin of\\nAdam and Eve (bks. 11–14); it continues with the\\nprovidentially-governed vicissitudes of the People of Israel (the\\nfirst earthly representative of the city of God) and, after the coming\\nof Christ, of the Church (bks. 15–17, supplemented by a survey\\nof the concurrent secular history from the earliest Eastern empires to\\ncontemporary Rome in bk. 18); and it ends with the final destination\\n(finis, to be understood both ethically as “ultimate\\ngoal” and eschatologically as “end of times”) of the\\ntwo cities in eternal damnation and eternal bliss (bks. 19–22;\\nfor the structure and basic ideas of the City of God see\\nO’Daly 1999). To a great extent, Augustine’s approach is\\nexegetical; for him, the history of the city of God is, in substance,\\nsacred history as laid down in Scripture (Markus 1970: 1–21).\\nObviously, however, the heavenly and earthly cities must not be\\nconfounded with the worldly institutions of the church and the state.\\nIn history, each of these, and the Church in particular, is a mixed\\nbody in which members of the city of God and the earthly city coexist,\\ntheir distinction being clear only to God, who will separate the two\\ncities at the end of times (ib. 1.35; 10.32 etc.). While the city of\\nGod is a stranger or, at best, a resident alien (peregrinus:\\nib. 15.1; 15.15) in this world and yearns for its celestial homeland,\\nthe earthly city is not a unified body at all but lies in continuous\\nstrife with itself because it is dominated by lust for power, the most\\nwidespread form of the archetypal sin of pride in political and social\\nlife (ib. 18.2). All this is in agreement with Augustine’s ideas\\non predestination and grace;\\n the history of the two cities is essentially the history of fallen\\nhumanity. This dualistic account is however qualified when, in the\\npart of the work that moves closest to social philosophy, Augustine\\nanalyzes the attitude a Christian ought to adopt to the earthly\\nsociety she inevitably lives in during her existence in this world.\\nStarting, again, from the axiom that all human beings naturally desire\\nwhat is good for them, he innovatively determines the goal that every\\nindividual and every community in fact pursues as “peace”\\n(pax), which, in his view, is largely equivalent with natural order and subordination. There are higher and lesser degrees of both individual\\nand collective peace, e.g., the control of the emotions through\\nreason, the subordination of body to soul, the subordination of\\nchildren to parents in the family or a functioning hierarchical order\\nin the state; at the top is “peace with God” or the\\nsubordination of the human mind to God (ib. 19.13; Weissenberg 2005).\\nThe lower forms of peace are relative goods and, as such, legitimately\\npursued as long as they are not mistaken for the absolute good.\\nPolitical peace and order is sought by members of the city of God and\\nthe earthly city alike, but whereas the latter “enjoy” it\\nbecause it is the greatest good they can attain and conceive of, the\\nformer “use” it for the sake of their peace with God,\\ni.e., in order that they and others may enjoy an unhindered Christian\\nreligious life (ib. 19.17; 19.26; for “enjoyment” and\\n“use” see\\n 7.1 Happiness).\\n Political peace is thus morally neutral insofar as it is a goal\\ncommon to Christians and non-Christians. Augustine criticizes Cicero\\nbecause he included justice in his definition of the state (Cicero,\\nDe re publica 1.39) and thereby gave the earthly state an\\ninherent moral quality that in reality is the privilege of the city of\\nGod (De civitate dei 19.21). He himself prefers a more\\npragmatic definition that makes the consensus about a common object of\\n“love” (i.e., a common good agreed on by all members of\\nthe community) the criterion of a state; the moral evaluation is not a\\nmatter of the definition but depends on the evaluation of the goal it\\npursues (cf.\\n 7.3 Love).\\n The early Roman Empire, which strove for glory, was more tolerable\\nthan the Oriental empires that were driven by naked lust for power;\\nthe best imaginable goal pursued by an earthly society would be\\nperfect earthly peace (ib. 19.24; Weithman 2001: 243–4).\\nChristians are allowed and even called to work for the well-being of\\nthe societies they live in as long as they promote earthly peace for\\nthe sake of their citizens’ and their own true happiness; in\\npractice, this will usually mean furthering Christian religion (ib.\\n5.25–6, on the Christian emperors Constantine and Theodosius;\\nLetter 155.12; 16; Dodaro 2004b; Tornau 2013). But the doctrine\\nof the two cities deliberately precludes any promotion of\\nthe emperor or the empire to a providential and quasi-sacred rank. Not\\neven Christians in power will be able to overcome the inherent\\nwretchedness of fallen humanity (De civitate dei 19.6). Like\\nthe vast majority of ancient Christian theologians, Augustine has\\nlittle or no interest in social reform. Slavery, meaning unnatural\\ndomination of humans over humans, is a characteristic stain of\\npostlapsarian human life and, at the same time, an evil that is put to\\ngood effects when it secures social order (ib. 19.15; Rist 1994:\\n236–239). War results from sin and is the privileged means of\\nsatisfying lust for power (ib. 18.2; 19.7). Nevertheless, Augustine\\nwrote a letter to refute the claim that Christianity advocated a\\npolitically impracticable pacifism (Letter 138). His\\nChristian reinterpretation of the traditional Roman Just War Theory\\nshould be read in the framework of his general theory of virtue and\\npeace (Holmes 1999). To be truly just according to Augustinian\\nstandards, a war would have to be waged for the benefit of the\\nadversary and without any vindictiveness, in short, out of love of\\nneighbor, which, in a fallen world, seems utopian (Letter\\n138.14). Wars may however be relatively just if they are defensive and\\nproperly declared (cf. Cicero, De officiis 1.36–37) or\\ncommanded by a just authority even short of the special case of the\\nwars of the People of Israel that were commanded by God himself\\n(Contra Faustum 22.74–78).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"8. History and Political Philosophy\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nOutright misogyny is rare in Augustine, but he lived in a society and\\nworked from a tradition—both Greco-Roman and\\nJudeo-Christian—that took the natural and social subordination\\nof women to men largely for granted (cf. Børresen 2013: 135\\nand, for a sketch of the social and familial realities of late-antique\\nRoman Africa, Rist 1994: 210–213; 246–247). Augustine\\ninterprets the Genesis tale of the creation of woman (Genesis\\n2:18–22) to mean that, Eve having been created as a helper to\\nAdam and for the sake of reproduction, she was subordinate to him\\nalready in paradise (De Genesi ad litteram 6.5.7; 9.5.9).\\nThis situation is exacerbated by the Fall; under the conditions of\\nfallen humankind, marriage is, for the wives, a kind of slavery that\\nthey should accept with obedience and humility (as Monnica did; cf.\\nConfessiones 9.19–20 and, on marriage in Augustine in\\ngeneral, E. Clark 1996). In his early anti-Manichean exegesis of\\nGenesis, he allegorizes man as the rational and woman as the\\nnon-rational, appetitive parts of the soul (De Genesi contra\\nManichaeos 2.15, cf. De vera religione 78; De Genesi\\nad litteram 8.23.44; the pattern is well attested in the\\nphilosophical tradition). On the other hand, he insists—as until\\nthen few Christian theologians had done—that the meaning of the\\nGenesis tale was not purely allegorical but that sexual\\ndifferentiation had begun to exist in paradise and would persist in\\nthe resurrected bodies of the blessed because it was a natural part of\\nGod’s creation (De civitate dei 22.17). Following the\\nGreek philosophical (in particular, Platonic) conviction that the soul\\nand especially its highest, intellectual part is not gendered as well\\nas the Pauline eschatological promise that in Christ “there is\\nneither male nor female” (Galatians 3:28), Augustine argues that\\nthe words of Genesis 1:26–27 on the human being having been\\ncreated in the image of God imply that woman is human like man because\\nshe has an intellectual soul and because it is not the gendered body\\nbut the intellectual soul that makes the human being an image of God\\n(De Genesi ad litteram 3.22.34; Børresen 2013:\\n136–137; cf. also\\n 6.2 The Human Mind as an Image of God;\\n the view that woman is made in the image of God is far from\\nuncontroversial in ancient Christianity). The inner tension of the\\nview that woman is intellectually equal and, at the same time, by\\nnature socially inferior to man makes itself felt in Augustine’s\\nexegesis of Paul’s saying that women, but not men, should veil\\nthemselves because man is made in the image of God (1 Corinthians\\n11:7). Augustine compares man with theoretical and woman (the\\n“helper” of Genesis 2:18) with practical reason and claims\\nthat while theoretical and practical reason together or reason in its\\nentirety is an image of God just as the human being as such is, in virtue\\nof its reason, an image of God, practical reason alone, being directed toward corporeal\\nthings and but a “helper” of theoretical reason, is not. (By implication, woman is an image of God qua human being, but not qua woman.) The\\npractice enjoined by Paul is meant to signify this difference (De\\ntrinitate 12.10–13). This exegesis safeguards the\\ngodlikeness of woman against a widespread patristic consensus and, it\\nappears, against Paul himself, but at the same time defends social\\ninequality and even endows it with metaphysical and religious\\nsignificance (Stark 2007a).\",\n \"\\nTwo women figure prominently in Augustine’s literary output\\n(Power 1995; G. Clark 2015): his mother, Monnica (her name appears\\nonly in Confessiones 9.37), and his partner for fourteen years,\\nthe mother of Adeodatus. In the dialogues of Cassiciacum, Monnica\\nrepresents a philosophical way of life based on the natural intuitions\\nof reason and on an unshakable Christian faith together with a life\\naccording to the precepts of Christian morality (De beata\\nvita 10; De ordine 1.31–32). She, and the\\nuneducated but faithful in general, may not be able to reach happiness\\nin this life by means of an ascent to the divine with the help of the\\nliberal arts, but they will certainly see God “from face to\\nface” in eternal bliss (De ordine 2.45–46).\\nBehind this idealization may be the male Christian philosopher’s\\nnostalgic desire for a “natural” holiness untainted by\\nsecular occupation and learning (Brown 1988: ch. 13, on the Greek\\ntheologians and bishops of the fourth century). Monnica’s\\nprominence and idealization in the Confessiones has provoked\\nmuch, and mostly fruitless, psychological speculation. Augustine\\nrepresents her influence on his religious life as pervasive from his\\nearliest years onwards and even compares her to the Mother Church\\n(Confessiones 1.17). She embodies ideal Christian love of the\\nneighbor (see\\n 7.3 Love)\\n in that she furthers Augustine’s Catholic faith with all her\\nmeans (mostly, tears and prayer) and never indulges his Manicheism\\ndespite her motherly affection (e.g., Confessiones 3.19).\\nWith this she however combines, especially in the earlier books, more\\nmundane motives, e.g., when she arranges a marriage for Augustine in\\nthe hope of both fencing his sexual concupiscence and assisting his\\nworldly career (ib. 6.23). Like the other human influences on\\nAugustine reported in the Confessiones, she is used by God as\\nan instrument of his grace in a way she neither foresees nor wills.\\nOnly after Augustine’s conversion does she rise to saintly\\nperfection, especially in the “vision of Ostia” when,\\nshortly before her death, mother and son, after a long\\nphilosophico-theological conversation, reach a sudden insight into\\nwhat contemplation of the transcendent God in eternal bliss must be\\nlike (ib. 9.24–25). The chapter on the dismissal of\\nAdeodatus’ mother for the sake of an advantageous marriage (ib.\\n6.25; Shanzer 2002; Miles 2007) has been unpalatable for many modern\\nreaders. Yet what is unusual about it is not Augustine’s\\nbehavior but the fact that he mentions it at all and, from hindsight,\\nreflects on the pain it caused him. True to the deliberately\\ncounter-intuitive and often provocative procedure of the\\nConfessiones, he singles out an emotion that, then as now,\\nmost people would have easily understood but which he nevertheless\\ninterprets as a mark of his sinful state because it resulted from the\\nloss of a female body he had, in a kind of mutual sexual exploitation,\\nenjoyed for the sake of pleasure (Confessiones 4.2; for the\\nunderlying defective view, common in antiquity, of erotic\\nrelationships cf. Rist 1994: 249) instead of “enjoying”\\nhis female neighbor “in God” and relating their mutual\\nlove to him (cf.\\n 7.1 Happiness;\\n compare Augustine’s excessive grief about the friend of his\\nyouth in Confessiones 4.9–11 and contrast his\\npost-conversion mourning of Monnica, ib. 9.30–33).\",\n \"\\nAugustine’s views on sexuality are most prominent in his\\nanti-Pelagian treatises, where he develops a theory about the\\ntransmission of original sin from the first couple in paradise to\\nevery human being born since, making sexual concupiscence the prime\\nfactor in the process (cf. E. Clark 1996 and 2000, who also takes into\\naccount Augustine’s Manichean past). In Augustine’s\\nethics, concupiscence (concupiscentia) does not have a\\nspecifically sexual meaning but is an umbrella term that covers all\\nvolitions or intentions opposed to right love (see\\n\\n Nisula 2012). The transgression of Adam and Eve did not consist\\nin sexual concupiscence but in their disobedience, which, like the\\nevil angels’ primal sin, was rooted in pride (see\\n 7.5 Will and Evil).\\n For this disobedience they, and all humankind with them, were\\npunished with the disobedience of their own selves, i.e., the\\nimpossibility of fully controlling their own appetites and volitions\\nand the permanent akratic state (the “coveting of the flesh\\nagainst the spirit”, in the words of Galatians 5:17) that marks\\nfallen humanity. The inability of human beings to control their sexual\\ndesires and even their sexual organs (witness the shameful experiences\\nof involuntary male erection or of impotence: De civitate dei\\n14.15–16) is just an especially obvious example. Unlike most\\nearlier Christian writers, Augustine thought that there was sexual\\nintercourse in paradise and that there would have been procreation\\neven without the fall; he did not share the encratic ideas of some\\nascetic circles who hoped to make good for the first sin through\\nsexual abstinence, and he had comparatively moderate views on\\nvirginity and sexual continence (De sancta virginitate;\\nBørresen 2013: 138; Brown 1988: ch. 19). But he thought that\\nAdam and Eve had been able to control their sexual organs voluntarily\\nso as to limit their use to the natural purpose of procreation; in\\nparadise, there had been sexuality but no concupiscence (De\\ncivitate dei 14.21–23). Original sin had destroyed this\\nideal state, and since then sexual concupiscence is an inevitable\\nconcomitant of procreation—an evil that may be put to good use\\nin legitimate marriage, where the purpose of sexual intercourse is the\\nprocreation of children rather than bodily pleasure (De nuptiis et\\nconcupiscentia 1.16; Contra Iulianum 3.15–16), but\\nthat nevertheless subjects every newborn human being to the domination\\nof the devil from which they need to be freed through baptism (De\\nnuptiis et concupiscentia 1.25–26; for energetic criticism\\nof Augustine’s views on concupiscence, inter alia\\nbecause of their impact on the sex morals of modern Christianity, see\\nPagels 1989, for moderate defense Lamberigts 2000).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"9. Gender, Women, and Sexuality\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nJust as the late-antique Platonists developed their cosmological\\nthinking by commenting on Plato’s Timaeus,\\nAugustine’s natural philosophy is largely a theory of creation\\nbased on an exegesis of the opening chapters of Genesis, on which he\\nwrote five extended, and occasionally diverging, commentaries (De\\nGenesi contra Manichaeos; De Genesi ad litteram liber\\nimperfectus; Confessiones 11–13; De Genesi ad\\nlitteram; De civitate dei 11–14). The longest and\\nmost important of them is the Literal Commentary on Genesis\\n(De Genesi ad litteram). “Literal” does not mean\\n“literalist” but denotes the hermeneutic assumption that\\nthe text is really about the creation of the world (as opposed to a\\nmoralist or prophetic allegorical reading of the kind proposed in\\nAugustine’s early De Genesi contra Manichaeos; the two\\napproaches are compatible because Augustine, like Origen and the\\nJewish exegete Philo before him, believes in the existence of multiple\\nlayers of meaning in Scripture; see De Genesi ad litteram\\n1.1.1 and, in general, De doctrina christiana, bk. 3). In\\nline with his epistemology of illumination and his theory of verbal\\nsigns,\\n Augustine takes the biblical creation tale as an\\n“admonition” that prompts him to devise, with the help of\\nthe “inner teacher”, a rational theistic cosmology based\\non Trinitarian theology (for rejection of explanations that contradict\\nthe findings of the natural philosophers or the laws of nature cf.,\\ne.g., De Genesi ad litteram 2.9.21). In De Genesi ad\\nlitteram, in the Confessiones and, to a lesser extent,\\nin De civitate dei Augustine presents his exegesis in a\\nquestioning manner and keeps the results open to revision. The reason\\nis that, according to the hermeneutics developed especially in bk. 12\\nof the Confessiones, the authorial intention of the\\nScriptural text, or indeed of any text, cannot be recovered, so\\nthat—given that the truthfulness of Scripture can be taken for\\ngranted—different and even incompatible readings must be\\nconsidered as adequate if they agree with what the text says and if\\nthey are sanctioned by the truth which we access inwardly through\\nreason and which is, ultimately, God himself (see esp.\\nConfessiones 12.27; 43; De doctrina christiana 3.38\\nwhere Augustine claims that the Holy Spirit providentially allowed for\\na plenitude of Scriptural meanings in order to prompt different people\\nto different aspects of the truth; Williams 2001; van Riel 2007; Dutton 2014: 175–179;\\nand, on the epistemological foundations of this hermeneutics, Cary\\n2008b: 135–138). The basic and recurrent features of\\nAugustine’s cosmological thought are these (cf. Knuuttila 2001:\\n103–109; Mayer 1996–2002, each with references): God does\\nnot create in time but creates time together with changeable being\\nwhile resting in timeless eternity himself (Confessiones\\n11.16; De Genesi ad litteram 5.5.12; the distinction of\\neternity and time is Platonic, cf. Timaeus 37c-38b; Plotinus,\\nEnneads III.7.1). Creation occurs instantaneously; the seven\\ndays of creation are not to be taken literally but are a didactic\\nmeans to make plain the intrinsic order of reality\\n(Confessiones 12.40; De Genesi ad litteram 1.15.29).\\nLike the demiurge in the Timaeus, God creates out of\\ngoodness, i.e., out of his good will and his gratuitous love for his\\ncreation (De civitate dei 11.24). In creation, all three\\npersons of the Trinity are active, with, roughly, the Father\\naccounting for the existence, the Son (to whom, in Augustine’s\\nreading, the opening words of Genesis, in principio, refer)\\nfor the form or essence and the Holy Spirit for the goodness and\\norderliness of every created being (Confessiones 11.11;\\nDe civitate dei 11.24). As the causality of the Trinity makes\\nitself felt everywhere in creation, Augustine likes to describe\\ncreated beings in their relation to the divine cause in a triadic\\nmanner, using, e.g., the categories “measure”,\\n“form” and “peace/order” (e.g., De vera\\nreligione 13; De natura boni 3; De civitate dei\\n12.5; cf. Schäfer 2000 and, for a very thorough discussion, du\\nRoy 1966). These “traces” of the Trinity in creation must\\nnot be confused with the Trinitarian structure of the human intellect,\\nwhich, alone among all created beings, is an image of God.\\n Changeable being is not generated from God (which, according to the\\nNicene Creed, is true only of the Son) but created out of nothing, a\\nfact that partly accounts for its susceptibility for evil.\\n More precisely, God “first” creates formless matter out\\nof nothing (which is why matter in Augustine, unlike in the\\nNeoplatonists, has a minimal ontological status; cf.\\nConfessiones 12.6; Tornau 2014: 189–194) and\\n“then” forms it by conveying to it the rational principles\\n(rationes) that eternally exist in his mind (De diversis\\nquaestionibus 46.2) or, as Augustine prefers to put it, in his\\nWord, i.e., the Second Person of the Trinity. This formative process\\nis Augustine’s exegesis of the biblical “word” of\\nGod (Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1). Incorporeal and purely intellectual\\nbeings, i.e., the angels, are created from intelligible matter which\\nis created out of nothing and converted to the creator so as to be\\nformed through the “hearing” of God’s word, i.e., by\\ntheir contemplation of the Forms contained in God (De Genesi ad\\nlitteram 1.4.9–1.5.11, an idea inspired by the Neoplatonic\\npattern of abiding, procession and return). Corporeal being is created\\nwhen the Forms or rational principles contained in God and\\ncontemplated by the angels are even further externalized so as to\\ninform not only intelligible but also physical matter (De Genesi\\nad litteram 2.8.16; 4.22.39).\",\n \"\\nAll this is the framework of Augustine’s famous meditation about\\ntime in the Confessiones (11.17–41), whose context is\\nan exegesis of Genesis and which constantly presupposes the\\ndistinction of time and eternity (much has been written on this text,\\nbut particularly illuminating treatments are Flasch 1993; Mesch 1998:\\n295–343; Matthews 2005: 76–85; Helm 2014; Hoffmann 2017).\\nAugustine opens the section with the question, “What is\\ntime?” (Confessiones 11.17) but in fact has no\\nintention of giving a definition of time. Whereas his accounts outside\\nthe Confessiones center on cosmic or physical time, he here\\nfocuses on how we experience time from a first-person perspective and\\nwhat it means for us and our relationship to ourselves and to God to\\nexist temporally. In this sense, the purpose of the book is ethical\\nrather than cosmological. Augustine begins by observing that though of\\nthe three familiar “parts” of time, past, present and\\nfuture, none really exists (the past having ceased to exist, the\\nfuture not existing yet, and the present being without extension),\\ntime doubtless has reality for us. This is so because time is present\\nto us in the form of our present memory of the past, our present\\nattention to the present and our present expectation of the future\\n(ib. 11.26). The phenomenal proof of this claim is the experience of\\nmeasuring time by comparing remembered or expected portions of time to\\neach other or of repeating a poem we know by heart, when, as we\\nproceed, the words traverse our attention (the present), passing from\\nexpectation (the future) to memory (the past; ib. 11.38). We would\\nthus be unable to relate past, present and future events, to remember\\nthe history of our own lives and even to be aware of our personal\\nidentity if our being in time was not divided into memory, attention\\nand expectation and, at the same time, unified by the connectedness\\nand the simultaneous presence of these. This ambivalent state\\nAugustine calls “a distention of the soul” (ib. 11.33;\\n38–39, perhaps echoing Plotinus, Enneads III.7.11.41);\\nthis is the closest Confessiones 11 comes to a definition of\\ntime. The stability of this precarious unity is however dependent on\\nthe higher unity of the eternal God—as the whole narrative of\\nthe Confessiones teaches, we cannot make sense of the memory\\nof our life unless we perceive the ceaseless presence of God’s\\nprovidence and grace in it. Toward the end of the book, Augustine\\nintroduces the Pauline “straining forward to what lies\\nahead” (Philippians 3:12–14)—as he reads it, the\\norientation or “intention” of the soul toward God—as\\na counterpoint to the soul’s distention in time and concludes\\nwith an exhortation to turn from the dispersion of temporal existence\\nto the timeless eternity of God which alone guarantees truth and\\nstability (ib. 11.39–41).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"10. Creation and Time\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nAugustine’s impact on later philosophy is as enormous as it is\\nambivalent (for an overview, see Fuhrer 2018a: 1742–1750; for\\nall questions of detail, Pollmann (ed.) 2013; for De\\ntrinitate, Kany 2007). Although he was soon accepted as a\\ntheological authority and consensus with him was regarded as a\\nstandard of orthodoxy throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, his\\nviews—or more precisely, the right way of interpreting\\nthem—continued to trigger controversies. In the ninth century\\nthe monk Gottschalk took Augustine’s doctrine of grace to imply\\ndouble predestination (a term coined by him); he was opposed by John\\nScotus Eriugena. The philosophical discourse of early scholasticism\\n(11th–12th centuries) largely centered on\\nAugustinian themes. Anselm’s proof of the existence of God\\ndevelops the argument of De libero arbitrio, bk. 2; the\\nethicists’ debates on will and conscience rest on the\\nassumptions of Augustine’s moral intentionalism, and\\nAbelard’s view that ethics is universal and applicable to both\\nhuman and divine agency may be read as a response to the problems in\\nAugustine’s theory of divine election. With the growing\\ninfluence of Aristotle from the thirteenth century onwards, Augustine\\ncame to be interpreted in Aristotelian terms that had largely been\\nunknown to himself. Thomas Aquinas and others had little interest in\\nAugustine’s Platonism, and there was a certain tension between\\nthe medieval tendency to look for a teachable philosophical and\\ntheological system in his texts and his own way of philosophical\\ninquiry that was shaped by the ancient tradition and left room for\\ntentative argument and was open to revision. Medieval political\\nAugustinianism projected the conflict of the Two Cities onto the\\nChurch and the State. Martin Luther (1483–1546) agrees with\\nAugustine on the absolute gratuitousness of grace but does not follow\\nthe Augustinian (and scholastic) ideal of intellectus fidei\\nand makes faith in the Gospel the decisive condition of salvation. In\\nhis debate with Erasmus on free will, he voices a quite Augustinian\\npessimism about human freedom. The variety of Protestantism that was\\ninaugurated by Jean Calvin (1509–1564) accepts double\\npredestination. In the seventeenth century Descartes’ cogito was\\nsoon recognized as an Augustinian idea and triggered a refreshed\\ninterest in Augustine’s epistemology. In the same epoch, the\\nJansenist movement put forward a radical interpretation of\\nAugustine’s theology of grace and justification that was\\nfiercely combated by the Catholic Church. In the eighteenth and\\nnineteenth centuries, the leading philosophers of Enlightenment,\\nGerman Idealism and Romanticism showed little interest in Augustine,\\nand even, in the case of Nietzsche, outright contempt. He remained,\\nhowever, an important figure in Neoscholasticism or Neothomism, a\\nphilosophical reaction of Catholic philosophers against Enlightenment\\nand Idealism which continued to inform Catholic theological\\nscholarship on Augustine till the 1950s and beyond. In the twentieth\\ncentury, Augustine’s philosophy of time (Confessiones\\n11) received enormous and unprecedented philosophical attention from\\nthinkers like Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), Martin Heidegger\\n(1889–1976) and Paul Ricœur (1913–2005), some of\\nwhom credited Augustine with their own subjectivist understanding of\\ntime. Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) wrote her doctoral dissertation\\non Augustine’s philosophy of love and blamed him, not uncommonly\\nfor her epoch, for degrading love of neighbor to an instrument of\\npersonal happiness. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) takes issue\\nwith what he considers Augustine’s view of language and language\\nacquisition throughout his analysis of language in the\\nPhilosophical Investigations. Postmodernist thinkers\\n(Jean-Luc Marion, John Milbank) have set Augustine’s notion of\\nself, in which love is perceived as an integral part, against the\\npurported egoism and isolation of the Cartesian subject, which is\\nconsidered the hallmark and, as it were, the birth defect of\\nmodernity. Like their medieval predecessors, modern and postmodern\\nappropriations of Augustine are selective and inevitably conditioned\\nby contemporary concerns, sometimes resulting in secularized readings.\\nContemporary Western culture has little sympathy for Augustine’s\\nyearning for an inner divine light or for his less than optimistic\\nviews about human autonomy and the secular. Nevertheless, the richness\\nof his thought continues to fascinate readers. \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"11. Legacy\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["[CSEL] Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum\nLatinorum (Wien: Holder, Pichler, Tempsky, latest volumes Berlin:\nDe Gruyter) and","[CCL] Corpus Christianorum Series Latina\n(Turnhout: Brepols). New critical editions are continually being\nprepared and older ones replaced.","Augustinus-Lexikon 4 (2012–2018), pp.\nXI–XXXIV (available online);\n Fitzgerald (ed.) 1999, xxxv–il.","[WSA] The Works of Saint Augustine. A Translation for\nthe 21st Century, 46 vols., John E. Rotelle et al. (eds.), New\nYork: New City Press, 1991–2019. Reliable and modern, but almost\nwithout annotation.","[FC] The Fathers of the Church, Ludwig Schopp et\nal. (eds.), New York: Cima Publishing, 1947ff.","[ACW] Ancient Christian Writers. The Works of the\nFathers in Translation, Johannes Quasten et al. (eds.), New York:\nNewman Press 1946ff.","[BA] Bibliothèque Augustinienne. Œuvres\nde saint Augustin, Paris: Études Augustiniennes 1936ff.\nBilingual editions with rich annotation that often comes close to a\ncommentary. Especially important are the volumes on\n\n\n\nConfessiones (BA 13–14, edited by\nAimé Solignac et al., 1962), \n\nDe civitate dei (BA 33–37, edited by\nGuillaume Bardy and Guillaume Combès, 1959–1960), \n\nDe Genesi ad litteram (BA 48–49, edited by\nPaul Agaësse and Aimé Solignac, 1972) and \n\nLetters 1–30 (BA 40/A, edited by Serge\nLancel, Emmanuel Bermon et al., 2011). \n ","Confessiones (BA 13–14, edited by\nAimé Solignac et al., 1962), ","De civitate dei (BA 33–37, edited by\nGuillaume Bardy and Guillaume Combès, 1959–1960), ","De Genesi ad litteram (BA 48–49, edited by\nPaul Agaësse and Aimé Solignac, 1972) and ","Letters 1–30 (BA 40/A, edited by Serge\nLancel, Emmanuel Bermon et al., 2011). ","[AOW] Augustinus: Opera—Werke, Wilhelm\nGeerlings, Johannes Brachtendorf, and Volker Henning Drecoll (eds.),\nPaderborn: Schöningh, 2002ff. 82 volumes planned, 13\ncompleted.","Kopp, Sebastian, Thomas Gerhard Ring, and Adolar Zumkeller (eds.),\n1955–1997, Sankt Augustinus—Der Lehrer der Gnade.\nGesamtausgabe seiner antipelagianischen Schriften, 8 vols. (6\ncompleted), Würzburg: Augustinus-Verlag."," [NBA] Nuova Biblioteca Agostiniana. Opere di\nSant’Agostino. Edizione latino-italiana, 44 vols., Agostino\nTrapé et al. (eds.), Roma: Città Nuova Editrice,\n1965–2010. Complete.","O’Donnell; James J., 1992, Augustine: Confessions,\n3 vols., Oxford: Oxford University Press. Introduction, text and\ncommentary.\n [O’Donnell 1992 available online]","Simonetti, Manlio et al. (eds.), 1992–1997,\nSant’Agostino. Confessioni. 5 vols., Milano: Mondadori.\nCritically revised text, translation and commentary.","Flasch, Kurt, 1993, Was ist Zeit? Augustinus von Hippo. Das\nXI. Buch der Confessiones, Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann\n(2nd edition 2004).","Fuhrer, Therese, 1997, Augustin, Contra Academicos (vel De\nAcademicis), Bücher 2 und 3, Einleitung und Kommentar,\nBerlin/New York: De Gruyter.","Watson, Gerard, 1990, Saint Augustine. Soliloquies and\nImmortality of the Soul, with an Introduction, translation and\nCommentary, Warminster: Aris & Phillips.","Bermon, Emmanuel, 2007, La signification et\nl’enseignement. Texte latin, traduction française et\ncommentaire du ‘De magistro’ de Saint Augustin,\nParis: Vrin.","Augustinus-Lexikon, edited by Cornelius Mayer et al.,\nBasel: Schwabe, 1986ff. Four volumes out of five completed (down to\n“Sacrificium”). Articles in English, French and German,\nlemmata in Latin. Also available online (license required).","Corpus Augustinianum Gissense, a Cornelio Mayer editum\n3.0 (CAG-online), Basel: Schwabe. Searchable database of\nAugustine’s complete works in Latin, based on the most recent\neditions (including quotation search), and bibliographical database\nwith over 50,000 titles. License required. Free access to the\nbibliographical database at the “Literatur-Portal” of\nZentrum für Augustinusforschung, Würzburg\n(available online).","Drecoll, Volker Henning (ed.), 2007, Augustin Handbuch,\nTübingen: Mohr Siebeck.","Fitzgerald, Allan D. (ed.), 1999, Augustine through the Ages.\nAn Encyclopedia, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans 1999. Encyclopedia in\none volume, translated into\n\n\n\nFrench: Saint Augustin. La Méditerranée et\nl’Europe, IVe–XXIe siècle, Paris:\nÉdition du Cerf, 2005\n\nItalian: Agostino. Dizionario enciclopedico, Roma:\nCittà Nuova Editrice, 2007.\n","French: Saint Augustin. La Méditerranée et\nl’Europe, IVe–XXIe siècle, Paris:\nÉdition du Cerf, 2005","Italian: Agostino. Dizionario enciclopedico, Roma:\nCittà Nuova Editrice, 2007.","Fuhrer, Therese, 2018a, “§ 144. Augustinus von\nHippo”, in Christoph Riedweg, Christoph Horn, and Dietmar Wyrwa (eds.),\nDie Philosophie der Antike 5.2: Philosophie der\nKaiserzeit und der Spätantike, Basel: Schwabe, pp.\n1672–1750. With full bibliography down to 2018 (ib. pp.\n1828–1853).","Pollmann, Karla (ed.), 2013, The Oxford Guide to the\nHistorical Reception of Augustine, 3 vols., Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press.","Brown, Peter, 2000, Augustine of Hippo. A Biography. A New\nEdition with an Epilogue, second edition, London: Faber &\nFaber (first edition 1967). Translated into\n\n\n\nGerman: Augustinus von Hippo. Eine Biographie, Frankfurt:\nSocietäts-Verlag, 1973, second edition 2000. \n\nFrench: La vie de saint Augustin, Paris: Éditions\ndu Seuil, 1971.\n","German: Augustinus von Hippo. Eine Biographie, Frankfurt:\nSocietäts-Verlag, 1973, second edition 2000. ","French: La vie de saint Augustin, Paris: Éditions\ndu Seuil, 1971.","Catapano, Giovanni, 2010a, Agostino, Roma: Carocci.","Gilson, Étienne, 1943, Introduction à\nl’étude de saint Augustin, second edition, Paris:\nVrin. English translation: The Christian Philosophy of Saint\nAugustine, L.E.M. Lynch (trans.), New York: Random House,\n1960.","Horn, Christoph, 1995, Augustinus, München:\nBeck.","Kirwan, Christopher, 1989, Augustine, New York:\nRoutledge.","Matthews, Gareth B., 2005, Augustine, Malden:\nBlackwell.","Meconi, David Vincent and Eleonore Stump (eds.), 2014, The\nCambridge Companion to Augustine, second edition, Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press 2014. Revised and enlarged edition of Stump\nand Kretzmann (eds.) 2001. doi:10.1017/CCO9781139178044","O’Donnell, James J., 2005, Augustine. A New\nBiography, New York: HarperCollins.","Rist, John M., 1994, Augustine. Ancient Thought Baptized,\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Stump, Eleonore and Norman Kretzmann (eds.), 2001, The\nCambridge Companion to Augustine, Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521650186","Vessey, Mark (ed.), 2012, A Companion to Augustine,\nChichester: Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781118255483","Wetzel, James, 2010, Augustine. A Guide for the\nPerplexed, London/New York: Bloomsbury.","Cicero, De officiis, Michael Winterbottom (ed.), Oxford:\nOxford University Press, 1994.","–––, Tusculanae disputationes, Max\nPohlenz (ed.), Leipzig: Teubner, 1918.","Diogenes Laertius, Lives of eminent philosophers, Tiziano\nDorandi (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.","Macrobius, Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis –\nCommentaire au songe de Scipion, Mireille Armisen-Marchetti (ed.\ntrans.), 2 vols., Paris, 2003.","Plato, Opera, Elizabeth A. Duke, et al. (eds.), Oxford:\nOxford University Press, 1995 (vol. 1); John Burnet (ed.), Oxford:\nOxford University Press 1901–1907 (vols. 2–5).","Plotinus, Opera, Paul Henry and Hans-Rudolf Schwyzer\n(eds.), 3 vols., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964–1982.","Porphyry, Sententiae ad intelligibilia ducentes, Erich\nLamberz (ed.), Leipzig: Teubner, 1975.","Possidius, Sancti Augustini vita, Herbert T. Weiskotten\n(ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1919.","Sextus Empiricus, Opera, Hermann Mutschmann et al. (eds.),\n4 vols., Leipzig: Teubner, 1914–1962.","Long, Anthony A. and David N. Sedley (eds.), 1987, The\nHellenistic Philosophers, Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress.","Ayres, Lewis, 2010, Augustine and the Trinity, Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511780301","BeDuhn, Jason D., 2010, Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma 1:\nConversion and Apostasy, 373–388 C.E., Philadelphia:\nUniversity of Pennsylvania Press.","–––, 2013, Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma 2.\nMaking a “Catholic” Self, 388–401 C.E.,\nPhiladelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.","Bermon, Emmanuel, 2001, Le cogito dans la pensée de\nsaint Augustin, Paris: Vrin.","Bermon, Emmanuel and Gerard O’Daly (eds.), 2012, Le De\nTrinitate de saint Augustin. Exégèse, logique et\nnoétique. Actes du colloque international de Bordeaux,\n16–19 juin 2010, Paris: Études Augustiniennes.","Bittner, Rüdiger, 1999, “Augustine’s Philosophy\nof History”, in Matthews 1999: 345–360.","Bochet, Isabelle, 2011, “Les quaestiones\nattribuées à Porphyre dans la Lettre 102\nd’Augustin”, in Sébastien Morlet (ed.), Le\ntraité de Porphyre Contre les chrétiens. Un\nsiècle de recherches, nouvelles questions. Actes du colloque\ninternational organisé les 8 et 9 septembre 2009 à\nl’Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne, Paris: Études\nAugustiniennes, pp. 371–394.","Børresen, Kari E., 2013, “Challenging Augustine in\nFeminist Theology and Gender Studies”, in Pollmann 2013:\n135–141.","Bouton-Touboulic, Anne-Isabelle, 2004, L’ordre\ncaché. La notion d’ordre chez saint Augustin, Paris:\nÉtudes Augustiniennes.","–––, 2012, “Qu’il n’y a pas\nd’amour sans connaissance: étude d’un argument du\nDe Trinitate, livres VIII–XV”, in Bermon and\nO’Daly 2012: 181–203.","Brachtendorf, Johannes, 2000, Die Struktur des menschlichen\nGeistes nach Augustinus. Selbstreflexion und Erkenntnis Gottes in De\ntrinitate, Hamburg: Meiner.","–––, 2005, Augustins\n‘Confessiones’, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche\nBuchgesellschaft.","–––, 2012, “Time, Memory, and Selfhood in\nDe Trinitate”, in Bermon and O’Daly 2012:\n221–233.","Brittain, Charles, 2002, “Non-Rational Perception in the\nStoics and Augustine”, Oxford Studies in Ancient\nPhilosophy, 22: 253–308.","–––, 2003, “Colloquium 7: Attention\nDeficit in Plotinus and Augustine: Psychological Problems in Christian\nand Platonist Theories of the Grades of Virtue”, Proceedings\nof the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, 18:\n223–275. doi:10.1163/22134417-90000043","–––, 2012a, “Self-Knowledge in Cicero and\nAugustine (De trinitate, X, 5, 7–10, 16)”, in\nCatapano and Cillerai 2012: 107–135.","–––, 2012b, “Intellectual Self-Knowledge\nin Augustine (De Trinitate 14.7–14)”, in Bermon\nand O’Daly 2012: 313–330.","Brown, Peter, 1988, The Body and Society. Men, Women and\nSexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, New York: Columbia\nUniversity Press. Translated into\n\n\n\nGerman: Die Keuschheit der Engel. Sexuelle Entsagung, Askese\nund Körperlichkeit im frühen Christentum, München:\nHanser, 1991.\n\nFrench: Le Renoncement à la chair. Virginité,\ncélibat et continence dans le christianisme primitif,\nParis: Gallimard, 1995.\n","German: Die Keuschheit der Engel. Sexuelle Entsagung, Askese\nund Körperlichkeit im frühen Christentum, München:\nHanser, 1991.","French: Le Renoncement à la chair. Virginité,\ncélibat et continence dans le christianisme primitif,\nParis: Gallimard, 1995.","Bubacz, Bruce, 1981, St. Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge. A\nContemporary Analysis, New York: Edwin Mellen Press.","Burnell, Peter J., 1992, “The Status of Politics in St.\nAugustine’s ‘City of God’”, History of Political\nThought, 13(1): 13–29.","–––, 1995, “Concupiscence and Moral\nFreedom in Augustine and before Augustine”:, Augustinian\nStudies, 26(1): 49–63. doi:10.5840/augstudies19952612","Burnyeat, Myles F., 1987, “Wittgenstein and Augustine De\nMagistro”, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume,\n61: 1–24. Reprinted in Matthews 1999: 286–303.\ndoi:10.1093/aristoteliansupp/61.1.1","Byers, Sarah, 2012a, “Augustine and the Philosophers”,\nin Vessey 2012: 175–187. doi:10.1002/9781118255483.ch14","–––, 2012b, “The Psychology of Compassion:\nStoicism in City of God 9.5”, in Wetzel 2012:\n130–148. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139014144.008","–––, 2013, Perception, Sensibility, and\nMoral Motivation in Augustine: A Stoic-Platonic Synthesis,\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9781139086110","Cary, Phillip, 2000, Augustine’s Invention of the Inner\nSelf. The Legacy of a Christian Platonist, Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press.","–––, 2008a, Inner Grace: Augustine in the\nTraditions of Plato and Paul, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195336481.001.0001","–––, 2008b, Outward Signs: The Powerlessness\nof External Things in Augustine’s Thought, Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195336498.001.0001","Cary, Phillip, John Doody, and Kim Paffenroth (eds.), 2010,\nAugustine and Philosophy, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.","Cassin, Mireille, 2017, Augustin est-il mystique?, Paris:\nLes éditions du Cerf.","Castagnoli, Luca, 2010, Ancient Self-Refutation: The Logic and\nHistory of the Self-Refutation Argument from Democritus to\nAugustine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Catapano, Giovanni, 2010, “Augustine”, in The\nCambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, Lloyd Gerson\n(ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1:552–581.\ndoi:10.1017/CHOL9780521764407.038","–––, 2013, “The Epistemological Background\nof Augustine’s Dialogues”, in Sabine Föllinger and Gernot\nM. Müller (eds.), Der Dialog in der Antike. Formen und\nFunktionen einer literarischen Gattung zwischen Philosophie,\nWissensvermittlung und dramatischer Inszenierung, Berlin/Boston:\nDe Gruyter, pp. 107–122.","–––, 2012–2018a,\n“Philosophia”, Augustinus-Lexikon, 4:\n719–742.","–––, 2012–2018b, “Ratio”,\nAugustinus-Lexikon, 4: 1069–1084.","–––, forthcoming,\n“Signum—res”, Augustinus-Lexikon, 5.","Catapano, Giovanni and Beatrice Cillerai (eds.), 2012, Il De\ntrinitate di Agostino e la sua fortuna nella filosofia\nmedievale/Augustine’s De trinitate and Its Fortune in Medieval\nPhilosophy (= Medioevo. Rivista di storia della filosofia\nmedievale 27), Padova: Il Poligrafo.","Chappell, Timothy D.J., 1995, Aristotle and Augustine on\nFreedom. Two Theories of Freedom, Voluntary Action and Akrasia,\nNew York: St. Martin’s Press.","Cillerai, Beatrice, 2008, La memoria come ‘capacitas\nDei’ secondo Agostino. Unità e complessità,\nPisa: Edizioni ETS.","–––, 2012, “La mens-imago et la «\nmémoire métaphysique » dans la réflexion\ntrinitaire de saint Augustin”, in Bermon and O’Daly 2012:\n291–312.","Clark, Elizabeth A., 1996, St. Augustine on Marriage and\nSexuality, Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America\nPress.","–––, 2000, “Vitiated Seeds and Holy\nVessels. Augustine’s Manichean Past”, in Karen L. King\n(ed.), Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism, Harrisburg, PA:\nTrinity Press International, pp. 367–401.","Clark, Gillian, 2009, “Can We Talk? Augustine and the\nPossibility of Dialogue”, in The End of Dialogue in\nAntiquity, Simon Goldhill (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress, 117–134. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511575464.007","–––, 2015, Monica. An Ordinary Saint,\nOxford: Oxford University Press.","Colish, Marcia L., 1980, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to\nthe Early Middle Ages II: Stoicism in Latin Christian Thought through\nthe Sixth Century, Leiden: Brill.","den Bok, Nico W., 1994, “Freedom of the Will: A Systematic\nand Biographical Sounding of Augustine’s Thoughts on Human\nWilling”, Augustiniana, 44(3/4): 237–270.","Dihle, Albrecht, 1982, The Theory of Will in Classical\nAntiquity, Berkeley: University of California Press 1982. German\ntranslation: Die Vorstellung vom Willen in der Antike,\nGöttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985.","Dobell, Brian, 2009, Augustine’s Intellectual\nConversion: The Journey from Platonism to Christianity,\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511691744","Dodaro, Robert, 2004a, Christ and the Just Society in the\nThought of Augustine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511487668","–––, 2004b, “Political and Theological\nVirtues in Augustine, Letter 155 to Macedonius”,\nAugustiniana, 54(1/4): 431–474.","–––, 2009, “Ecclesia and Res\npublica. How Augustinian are Neo-Augustinian Politics?”,\nin: Lieven Boeve, Mathijs Lamberigts, and Maarten Wisse (eds.),\nAugustine and Postmodern Thought. A New Alliance against\nModernity? Leuven: Peeters, pp. 237–271.","–––, 2012, “Augustine on the Statesman and\nthe Two Cities”, in Vessey 2012: 386–397.\ndoi:10.1002/9781118255483.ch30","Doody, John, Kevin L. Hughes, and Kim Paffenroth (eds.), 2005,\nAugustine and Politics, Lanham: Lexington Books.","Drecoll, Volker Henning, 1999, Die Entstehung der Gnadenlehre\nAugustins, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.","–––, 2004–2010, “Gratia”,\nAugustinus-Lexikon, 3. 182–242.","–––, 2012–2018, “Pelagius,\nPelagiani”, Augustinus-Lexikon, 4: 624–666.","du Roy, Olivier, 1966, L’intelligence de la foi en la\nTrinité selon saint Augustin. Genèse de sa\nthéologie trinitaire jusqu’en 391, Paris:\nÉtudes Augustiniennes.","Dutton, Blake D., 2014, “The Privacy of the Mind and the\nFully Approvable Reading of Scripture”, in Mann 2014: 155–180.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199577552.003.0008","Dyson, Robert W., 2001, The Pilgrim City. Social and Political\nIdeas in the Writings of St. Augustine of Hippo, Woodbridge:\nBoydell.","Flasch, Kurt, 1995, Logik des Schreckens. Aurelius Augustinus,\nDe diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum I 2, Deutsche\nErstübersetzung von Walter Schäfer. Herausgegeben und\nerklärt von Kurt Flasch, second edition, Mainz: Dieterich (first\nedition 1990).","Frede, Michael, 2011, A Free Will. Origins of the Notion in\nAncient Thought, Anthony A. Long (ed.), Berkeley: University of\nCalifornia Press.","Fuchs, Marko J., 2010, Sum und cogito. Grundfiguren endlichen\nSelbstseins bei Augustinus und Descartes, Paderborn:\nSchöningh.","Fuhrer, Therese, 1999, “Zum erkenntnistheoretischen\nHintergrund von Augustins Glaubensbegriff”, in Fuhrer and Erler\n1999: 191–211.","–––, 2013, “Augustine’s Moulding of the\nManichaean Idea of God in the Confessions”,\nVigiliae Christianae, 67(5): 531–547.\ndoi:10.1163/15700720-12341155","–––, 2018b, “Ille intus magister.\nOn Augustine’s didactic concept of interiority”, in Peter\nGemeinhardt et al. (eds.), Teachers in late antique\nChristianity, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp.\n129–146.","Fuhrer, Therese and Michael Erler (eds.), 1999, Zur Rezeption\nder hellenistischen Philosophie in der Spätantike,\nStuttgart: Teubner.","Gioia, Luigi, 2007, The Theological Epistemology of\nAugustine’s De Trinitate, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199553464.001.0001","Hadot, Ilsetraut, 2005, Arts libéraux et philosophie\ndans la pensée antique, second edition, Paris: Vrin (first\nedition 1984).","Hagendahl, Harald, 1967, Augustine and the Latin\nClassics, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.","Harding, Brian, 2008, Augustine and Roman Virtue,\nLondon/New York: Bloomsbury.","Harrison, Carol, 2006, Rethinking Augustine’s Early\nTheology: An Argument for Continuity, Oxford: Oxford University\nPress. doi:10.1093/0199281661.001.0001","Harrison, Simon, 1999, “Do We Have a Will? Augustine’s\nWay in to the Will”, in Matthews 1999: 195–205.","–––, 2006, Augustine’s Way into the Will:\nThe Theological and Philosophical Significance of De Libero\nArbitrio, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269847.001.0001","Helm, Paul, 2014, “Thinking Eternally*”, in Mann 2014:\n135–154. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199577552.003.0007","Hoffmann, Philippe, 2017, “Temps et éternité\ndans le livre XI des Confessions : Augustin, Plotin, Porphyre et\nSaint Paul”, Revue d’Etudes Augustiniennes et\nPatristiques, 63(1): 31–79. doi:10.1484/J.REA.4.2017072","Holmes, Robert L., 1999, “St. Augustine and the Just War\nTheory”, in Matthews 1999: 323–344.","Hölscher, Ludger, 1986, The Reality of Mind.\nAugustine’s Philosophical Arguments for the Human Soul as a\nSpiritual Substance, London/New York: Routledge. German\ntranslation: Die Realität des Geistes. Eine Darstellung und\nphänomenologische Neubegründung der Argumente Augustins\nfür die geistige Substantialität der Seele, Heidelberg:\nWinter 1999.","Holte, Ragnar, 1962, Béatitude et sagesse. Saint\nAugustin et le problème de la fin de l’homme dans la\nphilosophie ancienne, Paris: Études Augustiniennes.","Horn, Christoph, 1996, “Augustinus und die Entstehung des\nphilosophischen Willensbegriffs”, Zeitschrift für\nphilosophische Forschung 50(1/2): 113–132.","––– (ed.), 1997, Augustinus. De civitate\ndei, (Klassiker Auslegen, 11), Berlin: Akademie\nVerlag.","–––, 1999, “Augustinus über Tugend,\nMoralität und das höchste Gut”, in Fuhrer and Erler\n1999: 173–190.","–––, 2012, “Augustine’s Theory of\nMind and Self-Knowledge: Some Fundamental Problems”, in Bermon\nand O’Daly 2012: 205–219.","Irwin, Terence H., 1999, “Splendid Vices? Augustine For and\nAgainst Pagan Virtues”, Medieval Philosophy and\nTheology, 8(2): 105–127. doi:10.1017/S1057060899082018","Kahn, Charles H., 1988, “Discovering the Will. From\nAristotle to Augustine”, in John M. Dillon and Anthony A. Long\n(eds.), The Question of ‘Eclecticism’. Studies in\nLater Greek Philosophy, Berkeley, CA: The University of\nCalifornia Press, pp. 234–259.","Kany, Roland, 2007, Augustins Trinitätsdenken. Bilanz,\nKritik und Weiterführung der modernen Forschung zu ‘De\ntrinitate’, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.","Karfíková, Lenka, 2012, Grace and the Will\n\nAccording to Augustine, Markéta Janebová (trans.),\n\nLeiden/Boston: Brill. doi:10.1163/9789004229211","–––, 2017, “Augustine on Recollection\n\nbetween Plato and Plotinus”, in Markus Vinzent (ed.), Studia\nPatristica 75. Papers presented at the Seventeenth International\nConference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford 2015, Leuven:\n\nPeeters, pp. 81–102.","King, Peter, 2012, “The Semantics of Augustine’s\nTrinitarian Analysis in De Trinitate 5–7”, in\nBermon and O’Daly 201: 123–135.","–––, 2014a, “Augustine on\nKnowledge”, in Meconi and Stump 2014: 142–165.\ndoi:10.1017/CCO9781139178044.013","–––, 2014b, “Augustine on Language”,\nin Meconi and Stump 2014: 292–310.\n\ndoi:10.1017/CCO9781139178044.023","Kirwan, Christopher, 2001, “Augustine’s Philosophy of\nLanguage”, in Stump and Kretzmann 2001: 186–204.\ndoi:10.1017/CCOL0521650186.015","Knuuttila, Simo, 2001, “Time and Creation in\nAugustine”, in Stump and Kretzmann 2001: 103–115. Reprinted in\nMeconi and Stump 2014: 81–97. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521650186.009\ndoi:10.1017/CCO9781139178044.008","Lagouanère, Jérôme, 2012,\nIntériorité et réflexivité dans la\npensée de saint Augustin. Formes et genèse d’une\n\nconceptualization, Paris: Études Augustiniennes.","Lamberigts, Mathijs, 2000, “A Critical Evaluation of\nCritiques of Augustine’s View of Sexuality”, in Robert\nDodaro and George Lawless (eds.), Augustine and his Critics.\nEssays in Honour of Gerald Bonner, London/New York: Routledge,\npp. 176–197.","–––, 2001, “Was Augustine a Manichaean?\nThe Assessment of Julian of Aeclanum”, in Johannes van Oort et\nal. (eds.), Augustine and Manicheism in the Latin West,\nLeiden: Brill, pp. 113–136.","–––, 2004, “Augustine on Predestination.\nSome Quaestiones Disputatae Revisited”,\nAugustiniana, 54(1/4): 279–305.","Lancel, Serge and James S. Alexander, 1996–2002,\n“Donatistae”, Augustinus-Lexikon, 2: \n606–638.","Lettieri, Gaetano, 2001, L’altro Agostino. Ermeneutica e\nretorica della grazia dalla crisi alla metamorfosi del De doctrina\nchristiana, Brescia: Morcelliana.","Lössl, Josef, 2002, “Augustine on Predestination:\nConsequences for the Reception”, Augustiniana, 52(2/4):\n241–272.","Lorenz, Rudolf, 1964, “Gnade und Erkenntnis bei\nAugustinus”, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte,\n75: 21–78. Reprinted in Carl Andresen (ed.), Zum\nAugustin-Gespräch der Gegenwart II, Darmstadt:\nWissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1981, pp. 43–125.","MacDonald, Scott, 1999, “Primal Sin”, in Matthews\n1999: 110–139.","–––, 2012a, “Revisiting the Intelligibles:\nThe Theory of Illumination in De trinitate, XII”, in\nCatapano and Cillerai 2012: 137–160.","–––, 2012b, “Augustine’s Cognitive\nVoluntarism in De trinitate 11”, in Bermon and\nO’Daly 2012: 235–250.","–––, 2014, “The Divine Nature: Being and\nGoodness”, in Meconi and Stump 2014: 17–36.\ndoi:10.1017/CCO9781139178044.004","Madec, Goulven, 1989, La patrie et la voie. Le Christ dans la\nvie et la pensée de saint Augustin, Paris:\nDesclée.","–––, 1996, Saint Augustin et la philosophie.\nNotes critiques, second edition, Paris: Études\nAugustiniennes.","Mann, William E., 1999, “Inner-Life Ethics”, in\nMatthews 1999: 140–165.","––– (ed.), 2006, Augustine’s\nConfessions. Critical Essays, Lanham: Rowman &\nLittlefield.","–––, 2014, “Augustine on Evil and Original\nSin”, in Meconi and Stump 2014: 98–107.\ndoi:10.1017/CCO9781139178044.009","––– (ed.), 2014, Augustine’s Confessions:\nPhilosophy in Autobiography, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199577552.001.0001","Markus, Robert A., 1970, Saeculum. History and Society in the\nTheology of St Augustine, Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress.","––– (ed.), 1972, Augustine. A Collection of\nCritical Essays, New York: Anchor Books. Anthology of older\nessays.","–––, 2006, Christianity and the\nSecular, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.","Matthews, Gareth B., 1992, Thought’s Ego in Augustine\nand Descartes, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.","––– (ed.), 1999, The Augustinian\nTradition, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.","–––, 2010, “Augustine’s First-Person\nPerspective”, in Cary, Doody, and Paffenroth 2010:\n41–60.","Mayer, Cornelius Petrus, 1969, Die Zeichen in der geistigen\nEntwicklung und in der Theologie des jungen Augustinus,\nWürzburg: Augustinus-Verlag.","–––, 1974, Die Zeichen in der geistigen\nEntwicklung und in der Theologie Augustins. II. Teil: Die\nantimanichäische Epoche, Würzburg:\nAugustinus-Verlag.","–––, 1996–2002, “Creatio, creator,\ncreatura”, Augustinus-Lexikon, 2: 56–116.","Mendelson, Michael, 1998, “‘The Business of Those\nAbsent’: The Origin of the Soul in Augustine’s De Genesi Ad\nLitteram 10.6-26”, Augustinian Studies, 29(1):\n25–81. doi:10.5840/augstudies19982918","Menn, Stephen, 1998, Descartes and Augustine, Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511608995","–––, 2014, “The Desire for God and the\nAporetic Method in Augustine’s Confessions”, in Mann 2014:\n71–107. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199577552.003.0005","Mesch, Walter, 1998, Reflektierte Gegenwart. Eine Studie\nüber Zeit und Ewigkeit bei Platon, Aristoteles, Plotin und\nAugustinus, Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann.","Miles, Margaret R., 2007, “Not Nameless but Unnamed. The\nWoman torn from Augustine’s Side”, in Stark 2007b:\n167–188.","–––, 2012, “From Rape to Resurrection:\nSin, Sexual Difference, and Politics”, in Wetzel 2012: 75–92.\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9781139014144.005","Müller, Christof, 1996–2002, “Femina”,\nAugustinus-Lexikon, 2: 1266–1281.","Müller, Jörn, 2009, Willensschwäche in Antike\nund Mittelalter. Eine Problemgeschichte von Sokrates bis Johannes Duns\nScotus, Leuven: Peeters.","Nash, Ronald H., 1969, The Light of the Mind. St.\nAugustine’s Theory of Knowledge, Lexington: University\nPress of Kentucky.","Nawar, Tamer, 2014, “Adiutrix Virtutum? Augustine\non Friendship and Virtue”, in Suzanne Stern-Gillet and Gary M.\nGurtler (eds.), Ancient and Medieval Concepts of Friendship,\nAlbany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 197–226.","–––, 2015, “Augustine on the Varieties of\nUnderstanding and Why There is No Learning from Words”,\nOxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy, 3: 1–31.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198743798.003.0001","Nisula, Timo, 2012, Augustine and the Functions of\nConcupiscence, Leiden/Boston: Brill.","O’Connell, Robert J., 1968, St. Augustine’s Early\nTheory of Man, A.D. 386–391, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap\nPress.","–––, 1987, The Origin of the Soul in St.\nAugustine’s Later Works, New York: Fordham University\nPress.","O’Daly, Gerard, 1976, “Memory in Plotinus and two\nearly texts of St. Augustine”, Studia Patristica 14. Papers\npresented to the Sixth International Conference on Patristic Studies\nheld in Oxford 1971, Berlin: Akademie Verlag 1976, pp.\n461–469. Reprinted in O’Daly 2001: no. III.","–––, 1987 Augustine’s Philosophy of\nMind, London: Duckworth.","–––, 1986–1994, “Anima,\nanimus”, Augustinus-Lexikon, 1: 315–340.","–––, 1999, Augustine’s City of God. A\nReader’s Guide, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","–––, 2001, Platonism Pagan and Christian.\nStudies in Plotinus and Augustine, Aldershot: Variorum.","O’Donovan, O., 1980, The Problem of Self-Love in St.\nAugustine, New Haven: Yale University Press.","Paffenroth, Kim and Robert P. Kennedy (eds.), 2003, A\nReader’s Companion to Augustine’s Confessions,\nLouisville: Westminster John Knox Press.","Pagels, Elaine, 1989, Adam, Eve and the Serpent, New\nYork: Vintage Books. German translation: Adam, Eva und die\nSchlange, Hamburg: Rowohlt 1991.","Pépin, Jean, 1977, Ex Platonicorum persona.\nÉtudes sur les lectures philosophiques de saint Augustin,\nAmsterdam: Hakkert. Reprint of earlier studies.","Pollmann, Karla, 1996, Doctrina christiana. 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Die Frau und ihre Gottebenbildlichkeit bei\nAugustin, Würzburg: Augustinus-Verlag.","Shanzer, Danuta, 2002, “Avulsa a latere meo.\nAugustine’s Spare Rib—Confessiones\n6.15.25”, The Journal of Roman Studies, 92:\n157–176. doi:10.2307/3184864","–––, 2005, “Augustine’s Disciplines:\nSilent diutius Musae Varronis?”, in Pollmann and Vessey\n2005: 69–112.","Siebert, Matthew Kent, 2018, “Augustine’s Development on\nTestimonial Knowledge”, Journal of the History of\nPhilosophy, 56(2): 215–237. doi:10.1353/hph.2018.0021","Sorabji, Richard, 2000, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic\nAgitation to Christian Temptation, Oxford: Oxford University\nPress. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199256600.001.0001","Stark, Judith Chelius, 2007a, “Augustine on Women. In\nGod’s Image but Less So”, in Stark 2007b:\n215–241.","––– (ed.), 2007b, Feminist Interpretations\nof Augustine, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University\nPress.","Stróżyński, Mateusz, 2013, “There Is No\nSearching for the Self: Self-Knowledge in Book Ten of Augustine’s\nDe Trinitate”, Phronesis, 58(3): 280–300.\ndoi:10.1163/15685284-12341250","Stump, Eleonore, 2001, “Augustine on Free Will”, in\nStump and Kretzmann 2001: 124–147. Shortened version in Meconi and\nStump 2014: 166–186. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521650186.011\ndoi:10.1017/CCO9781139178044.014","Teske, Roland J., 2009, Augustine of Hippo: Philosopher,\nExegete, and Theologian. A Second Collection of Essays,\nMilwaukee: Marquette University Press.","Tornau, Christian, 2006a, Zwischen Rhetorik und Philosophie.\nAugustins Argumentationstechnik in De civitate dei und ihr\nbildungsgeschichtlicher Hintergrund, Berlin: De Gruyter.","–––, 2006b, “Does Augustine Accept Pagan\nVirtue? The Place of Book 5 in the Argument of the City of\nGod”, in Frances Young, Mark Edwards, and Paul Parvis\n(eds.), Studia Patristica 43. Papers presented at the XIVth\nInternational Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford\n2003, Leuven: Peeters, pp. 263–275.","–––, 2013, “Augustinus und die\nneuplatonischen Tugendgrade. Versuch einer Interpretation von\nAugustins Brief 155 an Macedonius”, in Filip Karfík and\nEuree Song (eds.), Plato Revived. Essays on Ancient Platonism in\nHonour of Dominic O’Meara, Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, pp.\n215–240.","–––, 2014, “Intelligible Matter and the\nGenesis of Intellect: The Metamorphosis of a Plotinian Theme in\nConfessions 12–13”, in Mann 2014: 181–218.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199577552.003.0009","–––, 2015, “Happiness in This Life?\nAugustine on the Principle That Virtue Is Self-Sufficient for\nHappiness”, in The Quest for the Good Life: Ancient\nPhilosophers on Happiness, Øyvind Rabbås,\nEyjólfur K. Emilsson, Hallvard Fossheim, and Miira Tuominen\n(eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 265–280.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198746980.003.0015","–––, 2017, “Ratio in Subiecto?\nThe Sources of Augustine’s Proof for the Immortality of the Soul in\nthe Soliloquia and Its Defense in De Immortalitate\nAnimae”, Phronesis, 62(3): 319–354.\ndoi:10.1163/15685284-12341330","van Dusen, David, 2014, The Space of Time. A Sensualist\nInterpretation of Time in Augustine, Confessions X to XII,\nLeiden/Boston: Brill.","van Fleteren, Frederick, 2010, “Augustine and Philosophy:\nIntellectus Fidei”, in Cary, Doody, and Paffenroth\n2010: 23–40.","van Oort, Johannes, 2012, “Augustine and the Books of the\nManicheans”, in Vessey 2012: 188–199.\ndoi:10.1002/9781118255483.ch15","––– (ed.), 2013, Augustine and Manichaean\nChristianity. Selected Papers from the First South African Conference\non Augustine of Hippo. University of Pretoria, 24–26 April\n2012, Leiden/Boston: Brill.","–––, 2016, “Once Again: Augustine’s\nManichaean Dilemma”, Augustiniana, 66(1/4):\n233–245.","–––, forthcoming, Augustine and Mani,\nLeiden/Boston: Brill. Collected papers on Augustine and\nManicheism.","van Riel, Gerd, 2007, “Augustine’s Exegesis of ‘Heaven and Earth’ in Conf. XII: Finding Truth amidst Philosophers, Heretics and Exegetes”, Quaestio, 7: 191–228.\ndoi: 10.1484/J.QUAESTIO.1.100154","Vessey, Mark, Karla Pollmann, and Allan D. Fitzgerald (eds.),\n1999, History, Apocalypse, and the Secular Imagination. New Essays\non Augustine’s City of God, Bowling Green: Philosophy\nDocumentation Center.","von Heyking, John, 2001, Augustine and Politics as Longing in\nthe World, Columbia: University of Missouri Press.","Weissenberg, Timo J., 2005, Die Friedenslehre des Augustinus.\nTheologische Grundlagen und ethische Entfaltung, Stuttgart:\nKohlhammer.","Weithman, Paul J., 1999, “Toward an Augustinian\nLiberalism”, in Matthews 1999: 304–322.","–––, 2001, “Augustine’s Political\nPhilosophy”, in Stump and Kretzmann 2001: 234–252. Revised\nversion in Meconi and Stump 2014: 231–250.\ndoi:10.1017/CCOL0521650186.017 doi:10.1017/CCO9781139178044.019","Wetzel, James, 1992, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue,\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511983627","–––, 2001, “Predestination, Pelagianism,\nand Foreknowledge”, in Stump and Kretzmann 2001: 49–58.\ndoi:10.1017/CCOL0521650186.005","––– (ed.), 2012, Augustine’s ‘City\nof God’: A Critical Guide, Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139014144","Williams, Thomas, 2001, “Biblical Interpretation”, in\nStump and Kretzmann 2001: 59–70. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521650186.006\nRevised version under the title “Hermeneutics and Reading\nScripture”, in Meconi and Stump 2014: 311–328.\ndoi:10.1017/CCO9781139178044.024","Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 2012, “Augustine’s Rejection of\nEudaimonism”, in Wetzel 2012: 149–166.\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9781139014144.009","Zagzebski, Linda Trinkaus, 1991, The Dilemma of Freedom and\nForeknowledge, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195107630.001.0001","zum Brunn, Émilie, 1969 [1988], “Le dilemme de\nl’être et du néant chez saint Augustin. Des\npremiers dialogues aux Confessions”, Recherches\naugustiniennes, 6: 3–102. Translated as St. Augustine.\nBeing and Nothingness, New York: Paragon House Publishers 1988.\n"],"string":"[\n \"[CSEL] Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum\\nLatinorum (Wien: Holder, Pichler, Tempsky, latest volumes Berlin:\\nDe Gruyter) and\",\n \"[CCL] Corpus Christianorum Series Latina\\n(Turnhout: Brepols). New critical editions are continually being\\nprepared and older ones replaced.\",\n \"Augustinus-Lexikon 4 (2012–2018), pp.\\nXI–XXXIV (available online);\\n Fitzgerald (ed.) 1999, xxxv–il.\",\n \"[WSA] The Works of Saint Augustine. A Translation for\\nthe 21st Century, 46 vols., John E. Rotelle et al. (eds.), New\\nYork: New City Press, 1991–2019. Reliable and modern, but almost\\nwithout annotation.\",\n \"[FC] The Fathers of the Church, Ludwig Schopp et\\nal. (eds.), New York: Cima Publishing, 1947ff.\",\n \"[ACW] Ancient Christian Writers. The Works of the\\nFathers in Translation, Johannes Quasten et al. (eds.), New York:\\nNewman Press 1946ff.\",\n \"[BA] Bibliothèque Augustinienne. Œuvres\\nde saint Augustin, Paris: Études Augustiniennes 1936ff.\\nBilingual editions with rich annotation that often comes close to a\\ncommentary. Especially important are the volumes on\\n\\n\\n\\nConfessiones (BA 13–14, edited by\\nAimé Solignac et al., 1962), \\n\\nDe civitate dei (BA 33–37, edited by\\nGuillaume Bardy and Guillaume Combès, 1959–1960), \\n\\nDe Genesi ad litteram (BA 48–49, edited by\\nPaul Agaësse and Aimé Solignac, 1972) and \\n\\nLetters 1–30 (BA 40/A, edited by Serge\\nLancel, Emmanuel Bermon et al., 2011). \\n \",\n \"Confessiones (BA 13–14, edited by\\nAimé Solignac et al., 1962), \",\n \"De civitate dei (BA 33–37, edited by\\nGuillaume Bardy and Guillaume Combès, 1959–1960), \",\n \"De Genesi ad litteram (BA 48–49, edited by\\nPaul Agaësse and Aimé Solignac, 1972) and \",\n \"Letters 1–30 (BA 40/A, edited by Serge\\nLancel, Emmanuel Bermon et al., 2011). \",\n \"[AOW] Augustinus: Opera—Werke, Wilhelm\\nGeerlings, Johannes Brachtendorf, and Volker Henning Drecoll (eds.),\\nPaderborn: Schöningh, 2002ff. 82 volumes planned, 13\\ncompleted.\",\n \"Kopp, Sebastian, Thomas Gerhard Ring, and Adolar Zumkeller (eds.),\\n1955–1997, Sankt Augustinus—Der Lehrer der Gnade.\\nGesamtausgabe seiner antipelagianischen Schriften, 8 vols. (6\\ncompleted), Würzburg: Augustinus-Verlag.\",\n \" [NBA] Nuova Biblioteca Agostiniana. Opere di\\nSant’Agostino. Edizione latino-italiana, 44 vols., Agostino\\nTrapé et al. (eds.), Roma: Città Nuova Editrice,\\n1965–2010. Complete.\",\n \"O’Donnell; James J., 1992, Augustine: Confessions,\\n3 vols., Oxford: Oxford University Press. Introduction, text and\\ncommentary.\\n [O’Donnell 1992 available online]\",\n \"Simonetti, Manlio et al. (eds.), 1992–1997,\\nSant’Agostino. Confessioni. 5 vols., Milano: Mondadori.\\nCritically revised text, translation and commentary.\",\n \"Flasch, Kurt, 1993, Was ist Zeit? Augustinus von Hippo. Das\\nXI. Buch der Confessiones, Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann\\n(2nd edition 2004).\",\n \"Fuhrer, Therese, 1997, Augustin, Contra Academicos (vel De\\nAcademicis), Bücher 2 und 3, Einleitung und Kommentar,\\nBerlin/New York: De Gruyter.\",\n \"Watson, Gerard, 1990, Saint Augustine. Soliloquies and\\nImmortality of the Soul, with an Introduction, translation and\\nCommentary, Warminster: Aris & Phillips.\",\n \"Bermon, Emmanuel, 2007, La signification et\\nl’enseignement. Texte latin, traduction française et\\ncommentaire du ‘De magistro’ de Saint Augustin,\\nParis: Vrin.\",\n \"Augustinus-Lexikon, edited by Cornelius Mayer et al.,\\nBasel: Schwabe, 1986ff. Four volumes out of five completed (down to\\n“Sacrificium”). Articles in English, French and German,\\nlemmata in Latin. Also available online (license required).\",\n \"Corpus Augustinianum Gissense, a Cornelio Mayer editum\\n3.0 (CAG-online), Basel: Schwabe. Searchable database of\\nAugustine’s complete works in Latin, based on the most recent\\neditions (including quotation search), and bibliographical database\\nwith over 50,000 titles. License required. Free access to the\\nbibliographical database at the “Literatur-Portal” of\\nZentrum für Augustinusforschung, Würzburg\\n(available online).\",\n \"Drecoll, Volker Henning (ed.), 2007, Augustin Handbuch,\\nTübingen: Mohr Siebeck.\",\n \"Fitzgerald, Allan D. (ed.), 1999, Augustine through the Ages.\\nAn Encyclopedia, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans 1999. Encyclopedia in\\none volume, translated into\\n\\n\\n\\nFrench: Saint Augustin. La Méditerranée et\\nl’Europe, IVe–XXIe siècle, Paris:\\nÉdition du Cerf, 2005\\n\\nItalian: Agostino. Dizionario enciclopedico, Roma:\\nCittà Nuova Editrice, 2007.\\n\",\n \"French: Saint Augustin. La Méditerranée et\\nl’Europe, IVe–XXIe siècle, Paris:\\nÉdition du Cerf, 2005\",\n \"Italian: Agostino. Dizionario enciclopedico, Roma:\\nCittà Nuova Editrice, 2007.\",\n \"Fuhrer, Therese, 2018a, “§ 144. Augustinus von\\nHippo”, in Christoph Riedweg, Christoph Horn, and Dietmar Wyrwa (eds.),\\nDie Philosophie der Antike 5.2: Philosophie der\\nKaiserzeit und der Spätantike, Basel: Schwabe, pp.\\n1672–1750. With full bibliography down to 2018 (ib. pp.\\n1828–1853).\",\n \"Pollmann, Karla (ed.), 2013, The Oxford Guide to the\\nHistorical Reception of Augustine, 3 vols., Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Brown, Peter, 2000, Augustine of Hippo. A Biography. A New\\nEdition with an Epilogue, second edition, London: Faber &\\nFaber (first edition 1967). Translated into\\n\\n\\n\\nGerman: Augustinus von Hippo. Eine Biographie, Frankfurt:\\nSocietäts-Verlag, 1973, second edition 2000. \\n\\nFrench: La vie de saint Augustin, Paris: Éditions\\ndu Seuil, 1971.\\n\",\n \"German: Augustinus von Hippo. Eine Biographie, Frankfurt:\\nSocietäts-Verlag, 1973, second edition 2000. \",\n \"French: La vie de saint Augustin, Paris: Éditions\\ndu Seuil, 1971.\",\n \"Catapano, Giovanni, 2010a, Agostino, Roma: Carocci.\",\n \"Gilson, Étienne, 1943, Introduction à\\nl’étude de saint Augustin, second edition, Paris:\\nVrin. English translation: The Christian Philosophy of Saint\\nAugustine, L.E.M. Lynch (trans.), New York: Random House,\\n1960.\",\n \"Horn, Christoph, 1995, Augustinus, München:\\nBeck.\",\n \"Kirwan, Christopher, 1989, Augustine, New York:\\nRoutledge.\",\n \"Matthews, Gareth B., 2005, Augustine, Malden:\\nBlackwell.\",\n \"Meconi, David Vincent and Eleonore Stump (eds.), 2014, The\\nCambridge Companion to Augustine, second edition, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press 2014. Revised and enlarged edition of Stump\\nand Kretzmann (eds.) 2001. doi:10.1017/CCO9781139178044\",\n \"O’Donnell, James J., 2005, Augustine. A New\\nBiography, New York: HarperCollins.\",\n \"Rist, John M., 1994, Augustine. Ancient Thought Baptized,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Stump, Eleonore and Norman Kretzmann (eds.), 2001, The\\nCambridge Companion to Augustine, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521650186\",\n \"Vessey, Mark (ed.), 2012, A Companion to Augustine,\\nChichester: Blackwell. doi:10.1002/9781118255483\",\n \"Wetzel, James, 2010, Augustine. A Guide for the\\nPerplexed, London/New York: Bloomsbury.\",\n \"Cicero, De officiis, Michael Winterbottom (ed.), Oxford:\\nOxford University Press, 1994.\",\n \"–––, Tusculanae disputationes, Max\\nPohlenz (ed.), Leipzig: Teubner, 1918.\",\n \"Diogenes Laertius, Lives of eminent philosophers, Tiziano\\nDorandi (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.\",\n \"Macrobius, Commentarii in Somnium Scipionis –\\nCommentaire au songe de Scipion, Mireille Armisen-Marchetti (ed.\\ntrans.), 2 vols., Paris, 2003.\",\n \"Plato, Opera, Elizabeth A. Duke, et al. (eds.), Oxford:\\nOxford University Press, 1995 (vol. 1); John Burnet (ed.), Oxford:\\nOxford University Press 1901–1907 (vols. 2–5).\",\n \"Plotinus, Opera, Paul Henry and Hans-Rudolf Schwyzer\\n(eds.), 3 vols., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964–1982.\",\n \"Porphyry, Sententiae ad intelligibilia ducentes, Erich\\nLamberz (ed.), Leipzig: Teubner, 1975.\",\n \"Possidius, Sancti Augustini vita, Herbert T. Weiskotten\\n(ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1919.\",\n \"Sextus Empiricus, Opera, Hermann Mutschmann et al. (eds.),\\n4 vols., Leipzig: Teubner, 1914–1962.\",\n \"Long, Anthony A. and David N. Sedley (eds.), 1987, The\\nHellenistic Philosophers, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress.\",\n \"Ayres, Lewis, 2010, Augustine and the Trinity, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511780301\",\n \"BeDuhn, Jason D., 2010, Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma 1:\\nConversion and Apostasy, 373–388 C.E., Philadelphia:\\nUniversity of Pennsylvania Press.\",\n \"–––, 2013, Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma 2.\\nMaking a “Catholic” Self, 388–401 C.E.,\\nPhiladelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.\",\n \"Bermon, Emmanuel, 2001, Le cogito dans la pensée de\\nsaint Augustin, Paris: Vrin.\",\n \"Bermon, Emmanuel and Gerard O’Daly (eds.), 2012, Le De\\nTrinitate de saint Augustin. Exégèse, logique et\\nnoétique. Actes du colloque international de Bordeaux,\\n16–19 juin 2010, Paris: Études Augustiniennes.\",\n \"Bittner, Rüdiger, 1999, “Augustine’s Philosophy\\nof History”, in Matthews 1999: 345–360.\",\n \"Bochet, Isabelle, 2011, “Les quaestiones\\nattribuées à Porphyre dans la Lettre 102\\nd’Augustin”, in Sébastien Morlet (ed.), Le\\ntraité de Porphyre Contre les chrétiens. Un\\nsiècle de recherches, nouvelles questions. Actes du colloque\\ninternational organisé les 8 et 9 septembre 2009 à\\nl’Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne, Paris: Études\\nAugustiniennes, pp. 371–394.\",\n \"Børresen, Kari E., 2013, “Challenging Augustine in\\nFeminist Theology and Gender Studies”, in Pollmann 2013:\\n135–141.\",\n \"Bouton-Touboulic, Anne-Isabelle, 2004, L’ordre\\ncaché. La notion d’ordre chez saint Augustin, Paris:\\nÉtudes Augustiniennes.\",\n \"–––, 2012, “Qu’il n’y a pas\\nd’amour sans connaissance: étude d’un argument du\\nDe Trinitate, livres VIII–XV”, in Bermon and\\nO’Daly 2012: 181–203.\",\n \"Brachtendorf, Johannes, 2000, Die Struktur des menschlichen\\nGeistes nach Augustinus. Selbstreflexion und Erkenntnis Gottes in De\\ntrinitate, Hamburg: Meiner.\",\n \"–––, 2005, Augustins\\n‘Confessiones’, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche\\nBuchgesellschaft.\",\n \"–––, 2012, “Time, Memory, and Selfhood in\\nDe Trinitate”, in Bermon and O’Daly 2012:\\n221–233.\",\n \"Brittain, Charles, 2002, “Non-Rational Perception in the\\nStoics and Augustine”, Oxford Studies in Ancient\\nPhilosophy, 22: 253–308.\",\n \"–––, 2003, “Colloquium 7: Attention\\nDeficit in Plotinus and Augustine: Psychological Problems in Christian\\nand Platonist Theories of the Grades of Virtue”, Proceedings\\nof the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy, 18:\\n223–275. doi:10.1163/22134417-90000043\",\n \"–––, 2012a, “Self-Knowledge in Cicero and\\nAugustine (De trinitate, X, 5, 7–10, 16)”, in\\nCatapano and Cillerai 2012: 107–135.\",\n \"–––, 2012b, “Intellectual Self-Knowledge\\nin Augustine (De Trinitate 14.7–14)”, in Bermon\\nand O’Daly 2012: 313–330.\",\n \"Brown, Peter, 1988, The Body and Society. Men, Women and\\nSexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, New York: Columbia\\nUniversity Press. Translated into\\n\\n\\n\\nGerman: Die Keuschheit der Engel. Sexuelle Entsagung, Askese\\nund Körperlichkeit im frühen Christentum, München:\\nHanser, 1991.\\n\\nFrench: Le Renoncement à la chair. Virginité,\\ncélibat et continence dans le christianisme primitif,\\nParis: Gallimard, 1995.\\n\",\n \"German: Die Keuschheit der Engel. Sexuelle Entsagung, Askese\\nund Körperlichkeit im frühen Christentum, München:\\nHanser, 1991.\",\n \"French: Le Renoncement à la chair. Virginité,\\ncélibat et continence dans le christianisme primitif,\\nParis: Gallimard, 1995.\",\n \"Bubacz, Bruce, 1981, St. Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge. A\\nContemporary Analysis, New York: Edwin Mellen Press.\",\n \"Burnell, Peter J., 1992, “The Status of Politics in St.\\nAugustine’s ‘City of God’”, History of Political\\nThought, 13(1): 13–29.\",\n \"–––, 1995, “Concupiscence and Moral\\nFreedom in Augustine and before Augustine”:, Augustinian\\nStudies, 26(1): 49–63. doi:10.5840/augstudies19952612\",\n \"Burnyeat, Myles F., 1987, “Wittgenstein and Augustine De\\nMagistro”, Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume,\\n61: 1–24. Reprinted in Matthews 1999: 286–303.\\ndoi:10.1093/aristoteliansupp/61.1.1\",\n \"Byers, Sarah, 2012a, “Augustine and the Philosophers”,\\nin Vessey 2012: 175–187. doi:10.1002/9781118255483.ch14\",\n \"–––, 2012b, “The Psychology of Compassion:\\nStoicism in City of God 9.5”, in Wetzel 2012:\\n130–148. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139014144.008\",\n \"–––, 2013, Perception, Sensibility, and\\nMoral Motivation in Augustine: A Stoic-Platonic Synthesis,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9781139086110\",\n \"Cary, Phillip, 2000, Augustine’s Invention of the Inner\\nSelf. The Legacy of a Christian Platonist, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"–––, 2008a, Inner Grace: Augustine in the\\nTraditions of Plato and Paul, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195336481.001.0001\",\n \"–––, 2008b, Outward Signs: The Powerlessness\\nof External Things in Augustine’s Thought, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195336498.001.0001\",\n \"Cary, Phillip, John Doody, and Kim Paffenroth (eds.), 2010,\\nAugustine and Philosophy, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.\",\n \"Cassin, Mireille, 2017, Augustin est-il mystique?, Paris:\\nLes éditions du Cerf.\",\n \"Castagnoli, Luca, 2010, Ancient Self-Refutation: The Logic and\\nHistory of the Self-Refutation Argument from Democritus to\\nAugustine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Catapano, Giovanni, 2010, “Augustine”, in The\\nCambridge History of Philosophy in Late Antiquity, Lloyd Gerson\\n(ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1:552–581.\\ndoi:10.1017/CHOL9780521764407.038\",\n \"–––, 2013, “The Epistemological Background\\nof Augustine’s Dialogues”, in Sabine Föllinger and Gernot\\nM. Müller (eds.), Der Dialog in der Antike. Formen und\\nFunktionen einer literarischen Gattung zwischen Philosophie,\\nWissensvermittlung und dramatischer Inszenierung, Berlin/Boston:\\nDe Gruyter, pp. 107–122.\",\n \"–––, 2012–2018a,\\n“Philosophia”, Augustinus-Lexikon, 4:\\n719–742.\",\n \"–––, 2012–2018b, “Ratio”,\\nAugustinus-Lexikon, 4: 1069–1084.\",\n \"–––, forthcoming,\\n“Signum—res”, Augustinus-Lexikon, 5.\",\n \"Catapano, Giovanni and Beatrice Cillerai (eds.), 2012, Il De\\ntrinitate di Agostino e la sua fortuna nella filosofia\\nmedievale/Augustine’s De trinitate and Its Fortune in Medieval\\nPhilosophy (= Medioevo. Rivista di storia della filosofia\\nmedievale 27), Padova: Il Poligrafo.\",\n \"Chappell, Timothy D.J., 1995, Aristotle and Augustine on\\nFreedom. Two Theories of Freedom, Voluntary Action and Akrasia,\\nNew York: St. Martin’s Press.\",\n \"Cillerai, Beatrice, 2008, La memoria come ‘capacitas\\nDei’ secondo Agostino. Unità e complessità,\\nPisa: Edizioni ETS.\",\n \"–––, 2012, “La mens-imago et la «\\nmémoire métaphysique » dans la réflexion\\ntrinitaire de saint Augustin”, in Bermon and O’Daly 2012:\\n291–312.\",\n \"Clark, Elizabeth A., 1996, St. Augustine on Marriage and\\nSexuality, Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America\\nPress.\",\n \"–––, 2000, “Vitiated Seeds and Holy\\nVessels. Augustine’s Manichean Past”, in Karen L. King\\n(ed.), Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism, Harrisburg, PA:\\nTrinity Press International, pp. 367–401.\",\n \"Clark, Gillian, 2009, “Can We Talk? Augustine and the\\nPossibility of Dialogue”, in The End of Dialogue in\\nAntiquity, Simon Goldhill (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress, 117–134. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511575464.007\",\n \"–––, 2015, Monica. An Ordinary Saint,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Colish, Marcia L., 1980, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to\\nthe Early Middle Ages II: Stoicism in Latin Christian Thought through\\nthe Sixth Century, Leiden: Brill.\",\n \"den Bok, Nico W., 1994, “Freedom of the Will: A Systematic\\nand Biographical Sounding of Augustine’s Thoughts on Human\\nWilling”, Augustiniana, 44(3/4): 237–270.\",\n \"Dihle, Albrecht, 1982, The Theory of Will in Classical\\nAntiquity, Berkeley: University of California Press 1982. German\\ntranslation: Die Vorstellung vom Willen in der Antike,\\nGöttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985.\",\n \"Dobell, Brian, 2009, Augustine’s Intellectual\\nConversion: The Journey from Platonism to Christianity,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511691744\",\n \"Dodaro, Robert, 2004a, Christ and the Just Society in the\\nThought of Augustine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511487668\",\n \"–––, 2004b, “Political and Theological\\nVirtues in Augustine, Letter 155 to Macedonius”,\\nAugustiniana, 54(1/4): 431–474.\",\n \"–––, 2009, “Ecclesia and Res\\npublica. How Augustinian are Neo-Augustinian Politics?”,\\nin: Lieven Boeve, Mathijs Lamberigts, and Maarten Wisse (eds.),\\nAugustine and Postmodern Thought. A New Alliance against\\nModernity? Leuven: Peeters, pp. 237–271.\",\n \"–––, 2012, “Augustine on the Statesman and\\nthe Two Cities”, in Vessey 2012: 386–397.\\ndoi:10.1002/9781118255483.ch30\",\n \"Doody, John, Kevin L. Hughes, and Kim Paffenroth (eds.), 2005,\\nAugustine and Politics, Lanham: Lexington Books.\",\n \"Drecoll, Volker Henning, 1999, Die Entstehung der Gnadenlehre\\nAugustins, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.\",\n \"–––, 2004–2010, “Gratia”,\\nAugustinus-Lexikon, 3. 182–242.\",\n \"–––, 2012–2018, “Pelagius,\\nPelagiani”, Augustinus-Lexikon, 4: 624–666.\",\n \"du Roy, Olivier, 1966, L’intelligence de la foi en la\\nTrinité selon saint Augustin. Genèse de sa\\nthéologie trinitaire jusqu’en 391, Paris:\\nÉtudes Augustiniennes.\",\n \"Dutton, Blake D., 2014, “The Privacy of the Mind and the\\nFully Approvable Reading of Scripture”, in Mann 2014: 155–180.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199577552.003.0008\",\n \"Dyson, Robert W., 2001, The Pilgrim City. Social and Political\\nIdeas in the Writings of St. Augustine of Hippo, Woodbridge:\\nBoydell.\",\n \"Flasch, Kurt, 1995, Logik des Schreckens. Aurelius Augustinus,\\nDe diversis quaestionibus ad Simplicianum I 2, Deutsche\\nErstübersetzung von Walter Schäfer. Herausgegeben und\\nerklärt von Kurt Flasch, second edition, Mainz: Dieterich (first\\nedition 1990).\",\n \"Frede, Michael, 2011, A Free Will. Origins of the Notion in\\nAncient Thought, Anthony A. Long (ed.), Berkeley: University of\\nCalifornia Press.\",\n \"Fuchs, Marko J., 2010, Sum und cogito. Grundfiguren endlichen\\nSelbstseins bei Augustinus und Descartes, Paderborn:\\nSchöningh.\",\n \"Fuhrer, Therese, 1999, “Zum erkenntnistheoretischen\\nHintergrund von Augustins Glaubensbegriff”, in Fuhrer and Erler\\n1999: 191–211.\",\n \"–––, 2013, “Augustine’s Moulding of the\\nManichaean Idea of God in the Confessions”,\\nVigiliae Christianae, 67(5): 531–547.\\ndoi:10.1163/15700720-12341155\",\n \"–––, 2018b, “Ille intus magister.\\nOn Augustine’s didactic concept of interiority”, in Peter\\nGemeinhardt et al. (eds.), Teachers in late antique\\nChristianity, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp.\\n129–146.\",\n \"Fuhrer, Therese and Michael Erler (eds.), 1999, Zur Rezeption\\nder hellenistischen Philosophie in der Spätantike,\\nStuttgart: Teubner.\",\n \"Gioia, Luigi, 2007, The Theological Epistemology of\\nAugustine’s De Trinitate, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199553464.001.0001\",\n \"Hadot, Ilsetraut, 2005, Arts libéraux et philosophie\\ndans la pensée antique, second edition, Paris: Vrin (first\\nedition 1984).\",\n \"Hagendahl, Harald, 1967, Augustine and the Latin\\nClassics, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.\",\n \"Harding, Brian, 2008, Augustine and Roman Virtue,\\nLondon/New York: Bloomsbury.\",\n \"Harrison, Carol, 2006, Rethinking Augustine’s Early\\nTheology: An Argument for Continuity, Oxford: Oxford University\\nPress. doi:10.1093/0199281661.001.0001\",\n \"Harrison, Simon, 1999, “Do We Have a Will? Augustine’s\\nWay in to the Will”, in Matthews 1999: 195–205.\",\n \"–––, 2006, Augustine’s Way into the Will:\\nThe Theological and Philosophical Significance of De Libero\\nArbitrio, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198269847.001.0001\",\n \"Helm, Paul, 2014, “Thinking Eternally*”, in Mann 2014:\\n135–154. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199577552.003.0007\",\n \"Hoffmann, Philippe, 2017, “Temps et éternité\\ndans le livre XI des Confessions : Augustin, Plotin, Porphyre et\\nSaint Paul”, Revue d’Etudes Augustiniennes et\\nPatristiques, 63(1): 31–79. doi:10.1484/J.REA.4.2017072\",\n \"Holmes, Robert L., 1999, “St. Augustine and the Just War\\nTheory”, in Matthews 1999: 323–344.\",\n \"Hölscher, Ludger, 1986, The Reality of Mind.\\nAugustine’s Philosophical Arguments for the Human Soul as a\\nSpiritual Substance, London/New York: Routledge. German\\ntranslation: Die Realität des Geistes. Eine Darstellung und\\nphänomenologische Neubegründung der Argumente Augustins\\nfür die geistige Substantialität der Seele, Heidelberg:\\nWinter 1999.\",\n \"Holte, Ragnar, 1962, Béatitude et sagesse. Saint\\nAugustin et le problème de la fin de l’homme dans la\\nphilosophie ancienne, Paris: Études Augustiniennes.\",\n \"Horn, Christoph, 1996, “Augustinus und die Entstehung des\\nphilosophischen Willensbegriffs”, Zeitschrift für\\nphilosophische Forschung 50(1/2): 113–132.\",\n \"––– (ed.), 1997, Augustinus. De civitate\\ndei, (Klassiker Auslegen, 11), Berlin: Akademie\\nVerlag.\",\n \"–––, 1999, “Augustinus über Tugend,\\nMoralität und das höchste Gut”, in Fuhrer and Erler\\n1999: 173–190.\",\n \"–––, 2012, “Augustine’s Theory of\\nMind and Self-Knowledge: Some Fundamental Problems”, in Bermon\\nand O’Daly 2012: 205–219.\",\n \"Irwin, Terence H., 1999, “Splendid Vices? Augustine For and\\nAgainst Pagan Virtues”, Medieval Philosophy and\\nTheology, 8(2): 105–127. doi:10.1017/S1057060899082018\",\n \"Kahn, Charles H., 1988, “Discovering the Will. From\\nAristotle to Augustine”, in John M. Dillon and Anthony A. Long\\n(eds.), The Question of ‘Eclecticism’. Studies in\\nLater Greek Philosophy, Berkeley, CA: The University of\\nCalifornia Press, pp. 234–259.\",\n \"Kany, Roland, 2007, Augustins Trinitätsdenken. Bilanz,\\nKritik und Weiterführung der modernen Forschung zu ‘De\\ntrinitate’, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.\",\n \"Karfíková, Lenka, 2012, Grace and the Will\\n\\nAccording to Augustine, Markéta Janebová (trans.),\\n\\nLeiden/Boston: Brill. doi:10.1163/9789004229211\",\n \"–––, 2017, “Augustine on Recollection\\n\\nbetween Plato and Plotinus”, in Markus Vinzent (ed.), Studia\\nPatristica 75. Papers presented at the Seventeenth International\\nConference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford 2015, Leuven:\\n\\nPeeters, pp. 81–102.\",\n \"King, Peter, 2012, “The Semantics of Augustine’s\\nTrinitarian Analysis in De Trinitate 5–7”, in\\nBermon and O’Daly 201: 123–135.\",\n \"–––, 2014a, “Augustine on\\nKnowledge”, in Meconi and Stump 2014: 142–165.\\ndoi:10.1017/CCO9781139178044.013\",\n \"–––, 2014b, “Augustine on Language”,\\nin Meconi and Stump 2014: 292–310.\\n\\ndoi:10.1017/CCO9781139178044.023\",\n \"Kirwan, Christopher, 2001, “Augustine’s Philosophy of\\nLanguage”, in Stump and Kretzmann 2001: 186–204.\\ndoi:10.1017/CCOL0521650186.015\",\n \"Knuuttila, Simo, 2001, “Time and Creation in\\nAugustine”, in Stump and Kretzmann 2001: 103–115. Reprinted in\\nMeconi and Stump 2014: 81–97. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521650186.009\\ndoi:10.1017/CCO9781139178044.008\",\n \"Lagouanère, Jérôme, 2012,\\nIntériorité et réflexivité dans la\\npensée de saint Augustin. Formes et genèse d’une\\n\\nconceptualization, Paris: Études Augustiniennes.\",\n \"Lamberigts, Mathijs, 2000, “A Critical Evaluation of\\nCritiques of Augustine’s View of Sexuality”, in Robert\\nDodaro and George Lawless (eds.), Augustine and his Critics.\\nEssays in Honour of Gerald Bonner, London/New York: Routledge,\\npp. 176–197.\",\n \"–––, 2001, “Was Augustine a Manichaean?\\nThe Assessment of Julian of Aeclanum”, in Johannes van Oort et\\nal. (eds.), Augustine and Manicheism in the Latin West,\\nLeiden: Brill, pp. 113–136.\",\n \"–––, 2004, “Augustine on Predestination.\\nSome Quaestiones Disputatae Revisited”,\\nAugustiniana, 54(1/4): 279–305.\",\n \"Lancel, Serge and James S. Alexander, 1996–2002,\\n“Donatistae”, Augustinus-Lexikon, 2: \\n606–638.\",\n \"Lettieri, Gaetano, 2001, L’altro Agostino. Ermeneutica e\\nretorica della grazia dalla crisi alla metamorfosi del De doctrina\\nchristiana, Brescia: Morcelliana.\",\n \"Lössl, Josef, 2002, “Augustine on Predestination:\\nConsequences for the Reception”, Augustiniana, 52(2/4):\\n241–272.\",\n \"Lorenz, Rudolf, 1964, “Gnade und Erkenntnis bei\\nAugustinus”, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte,\\n75: 21–78. Reprinted in Carl Andresen (ed.), Zum\\nAugustin-Gespräch der Gegenwart II, Darmstadt:\\nWissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1981, pp. 43–125.\",\n \"MacDonald, Scott, 1999, “Primal Sin”, in Matthews\\n1999: 110–139.\",\n \"–––, 2012a, “Revisiting the Intelligibles:\\nThe Theory of Illumination in De trinitate, XII”, in\\nCatapano and Cillerai 2012: 137–160.\",\n \"–––, 2012b, “Augustine’s Cognitive\\nVoluntarism in De trinitate 11”, in Bermon and\\nO’Daly 2012: 235–250.\",\n \"–––, 2014, “The Divine Nature: Being and\\nGoodness”, in Meconi and Stump 2014: 17–36.\\ndoi:10.1017/CCO9781139178044.004\",\n \"Madec, Goulven, 1989, La patrie et la voie. Le Christ dans la\\nvie et la pensée de saint Augustin, Paris:\\nDesclée.\",\n \"–––, 1996, Saint Augustin et la philosophie.\\nNotes critiques, second edition, Paris: Études\\nAugustiniennes.\",\n \"Mann, William E., 1999, “Inner-Life Ethics”, in\\nMatthews 1999: 140–165.\",\n \"––– (ed.), 2006, Augustine’s\\nConfessions. Critical Essays, Lanham: Rowman &\\nLittlefield.\",\n \"–––, 2014, “Augustine on Evil and Original\\nSin”, in Meconi and Stump 2014: 98–107.\\ndoi:10.1017/CCO9781139178044.009\",\n \"––– (ed.), 2014, Augustine’s Confessions:\\nPhilosophy in Autobiography, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199577552.001.0001\",\n \"Markus, Robert A., 1970, Saeculum. History and Society in the\\nTheology of St Augustine, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress.\",\n \"––– (ed.), 1972, Augustine. A Collection of\\nCritical Essays, New York: Anchor Books. Anthology of older\\nessays.\",\n \"–––, 2006, Christianity and the\\nSecular, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.\",\n \"Matthews, Gareth B., 1992, Thought’s Ego in Augustine\\nand Descartes, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.\",\n \"––– (ed.), 1999, The Augustinian\\nTradition, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.\",\n \"–––, 2010, “Augustine’s First-Person\\nPerspective”, in Cary, Doody, and Paffenroth 2010:\\n41–60.\",\n \"Mayer, Cornelius Petrus, 1969, Die Zeichen in der geistigen\\nEntwicklung und in der Theologie des jungen Augustinus,\\nWürzburg: Augustinus-Verlag.\",\n \"–––, 1974, Die Zeichen in der geistigen\\nEntwicklung und in der Theologie Augustins. II. Teil: Die\\nantimanichäische Epoche, Würzburg:\\nAugustinus-Verlag.\",\n \"–––, 1996–2002, “Creatio, creator,\\ncreatura”, Augustinus-Lexikon, 2: 56–116.\",\n \"Mendelson, Michael, 1998, “‘The Business of Those\\nAbsent’: The Origin of the Soul in Augustine’s De Genesi Ad\\nLitteram 10.6-26”, Augustinian Studies, 29(1):\\n25–81. doi:10.5840/augstudies19982918\",\n \"Menn, Stephen, 1998, Descartes and Augustine, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511608995\",\n \"–––, 2014, “The Desire for God and the\\nAporetic Method in Augustine’s Confessions”, in Mann 2014:\\n71–107. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199577552.003.0005\",\n \"Mesch, Walter, 1998, Reflektierte Gegenwart. Eine Studie\\nüber Zeit und Ewigkeit bei Platon, Aristoteles, Plotin und\\nAugustinus, Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann.\",\n \"Miles, Margaret R., 2007, “Not Nameless but Unnamed. The\\nWoman torn from Augustine’s Side”, in Stark 2007b:\\n167–188.\",\n \"–––, 2012, “From Rape to Resurrection:\\nSin, Sexual Difference, and Politics”, in Wetzel 2012: 75–92.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9781139014144.005\",\n \"Müller, Christof, 1996–2002, “Femina”,\\nAugustinus-Lexikon, 2: 1266–1281.\",\n \"Müller, Jörn, 2009, Willensschwäche in Antike\\nund Mittelalter. Eine Problemgeschichte von Sokrates bis Johannes Duns\\nScotus, Leuven: Peeters.\",\n \"Nash, Ronald H., 1969, The Light of the Mind. St.\\nAugustine’s Theory of Knowledge, Lexington: University\\nPress of Kentucky.\",\n \"Nawar, Tamer, 2014, “Adiutrix Virtutum? Augustine\\non Friendship and Virtue”, in Suzanne Stern-Gillet and Gary M.\\nGurtler (eds.), Ancient and Medieval Concepts of Friendship,\\nAlbany, NY: SUNY Press, pp. 197–226.\",\n \"–––, 2015, “Augustine on the Varieties of\\nUnderstanding and Why There is No Learning from Words”,\\nOxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy, 3: 1–31.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198743798.003.0001\",\n \"Nisula, Timo, 2012, Augustine and the Functions of\\nConcupiscence, Leiden/Boston: Brill.\",\n \"O’Connell, Robert J., 1968, St. Augustine’s Early\\nTheory of Man, A.D. 386–391, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap\\nPress.\",\n \"–––, 1987, The Origin of the Soul in St.\\nAugustine’s Later Works, New York: Fordham University\\nPress.\",\n \"O’Daly, Gerard, 1976, “Memory in Plotinus and two\\nearly texts of St. Augustine”, Studia Patristica 14. Papers\\npresented to the Sixth International Conference on Patristic Studies\\nheld in Oxford 1971, Berlin: Akademie Verlag 1976, pp.\\n461–469. Reprinted in O’Daly 2001: no. III.\",\n \"–––, 1987 Augustine’s Philosophy of\\nMind, London: Duckworth.\",\n \"–––, 1986–1994, “Anima,\\nanimus”, Augustinus-Lexikon, 1: 315–340.\",\n \"–––, 1999, Augustine’s City of God. A\\nReader’s Guide, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2001, Platonism Pagan and Christian.\\nStudies in Plotinus and Augustine, Aldershot: Variorum.\",\n \"O’Donovan, O., 1980, The Problem of Self-Love in St.\\nAugustine, New Haven: Yale University Press.\",\n \"Paffenroth, Kim and Robert P. Kennedy (eds.), 2003, A\\nReader’s Companion to Augustine’s Confessions,\\nLouisville: Westminster John Knox Press.\",\n \"Pagels, Elaine, 1989, Adam, Eve and the Serpent, New\\nYork: Vintage Books. German translation: Adam, Eva und die\\nSchlange, Hamburg: Rowohlt 1991.\",\n \"Pépin, Jean, 1977, Ex Platonicorum persona.\\nÉtudes sur les lectures philosophiques de saint Augustin,\\nAmsterdam: Hakkert. Reprint of earlier studies.\",\n \"Pollmann, Karla, 1996, Doctrina christiana. Untersuchungen zu\\nden Anfängen der christlichen Hermeneutik unter besonderer\\nBerücksichtigung von Augustinus, De doctrina christiana,\\nFreiburg/Schweiz: Unversitäts-Verlag.\",\n \"Pollmann, Karla and Mark Vessey (eds.), 2005, Augustine and\\nthe Disciplines. From Cassiciacum to Confessions, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230044.001.0001\",\n \"Power, Kim, 1996, Veiled Desire. Augustine on Women, New\\nYork: Continuum Books.\",\n \"Rist, John, 2001, “Faith and Reason”, in Stump and\\nKretzmann 2001: 26–39. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521650186.003\",\n \"Schäfer, Christian, 2000, “Augustine on Mode, Form, and\\nNatural Order”:, Augustinian Studies, 31(1): 59–77.\\ndoi:10.5840/augstudies20003111\",\n \"–––, 2002, Unde malum. Die Frage nach dem\\nWoher des Bösen bei Plotin, Augustinus und Dionysius,\\nWürzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.\",\n \"Seelbach, Larissa Carina, 2002, Das weibliche Geschlecht ist\\nja kein Gebrechen. Die Frau und ihre Gottebenbildlichkeit bei\\nAugustin, Würzburg: Augustinus-Verlag.\",\n \"Shanzer, Danuta, 2002, “Avulsa a latere meo.\\nAugustine’s Spare Rib—Confessiones\\n6.15.25”, The Journal of Roman Studies, 92:\\n157–176. doi:10.2307/3184864\",\n \"–––, 2005, “Augustine’s Disciplines:\\nSilent diutius Musae Varronis?”, in Pollmann and Vessey\\n2005: 69–112.\",\n \"Siebert, Matthew Kent, 2018, “Augustine’s Development on\\nTestimonial Knowledge”, Journal of the History of\\nPhilosophy, 56(2): 215–237. doi:10.1353/hph.2018.0021\",\n \"Sorabji, Richard, 2000, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic\\nAgitation to Christian Temptation, Oxford: Oxford University\\nPress. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199256600.001.0001\",\n \"Stark, Judith Chelius, 2007a, “Augustine on Women. In\\nGod’s Image but Less So”, in Stark 2007b:\\n215–241.\",\n \"––– (ed.), 2007b, Feminist Interpretations\\nof Augustine, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University\\nPress.\",\n \"Stróżyński, Mateusz, 2013, “There Is No\\nSearching for the Self: Self-Knowledge in Book Ten of Augustine’s\\nDe Trinitate”, Phronesis, 58(3): 280–300.\\ndoi:10.1163/15685284-12341250\",\n \"Stump, Eleonore, 2001, “Augustine on Free Will”, in\\nStump and Kretzmann 2001: 124–147. Shortened version in Meconi and\\nStump 2014: 166–186. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521650186.011\\ndoi:10.1017/CCO9781139178044.014\",\n \"Teske, Roland J., 2009, Augustine of Hippo: Philosopher,\\nExegete, and Theologian. A Second Collection of Essays,\\nMilwaukee: Marquette University Press.\",\n \"Tornau, Christian, 2006a, Zwischen Rhetorik und Philosophie.\\nAugustins Argumentationstechnik in De civitate dei und ihr\\nbildungsgeschichtlicher Hintergrund, Berlin: De Gruyter.\",\n \"–––, 2006b, “Does Augustine Accept Pagan\\nVirtue? The Place of Book 5 in the Argument of the City of\\nGod”, in Frances Young, Mark Edwards, and Paul Parvis\\n(eds.), Studia Patristica 43. Papers presented at the XIVth\\nInternational Conference on Patristic Studies held in Oxford\\n2003, Leuven: Peeters, pp. 263–275.\",\n \"–––, 2013, “Augustinus und die\\nneuplatonischen Tugendgrade. Versuch einer Interpretation von\\nAugustins Brief 155 an Macedonius”, in Filip Karfík and\\nEuree Song (eds.), Plato Revived. Essays on Ancient Platonism in\\nHonour of Dominic O’Meara, Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, pp.\\n215–240.\",\n \"–––, 2014, “Intelligible Matter and the\\nGenesis of Intellect: The Metamorphosis of a Plotinian Theme in\\nConfessions 12–13”, in Mann 2014: 181–218.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199577552.003.0009\",\n \"–––, 2015, “Happiness in This Life?\\nAugustine on the Principle That Virtue Is Self-Sufficient for\\nHappiness”, in The Quest for the Good Life: Ancient\\nPhilosophers on Happiness, Øyvind Rabbås,\\nEyjólfur K. Emilsson, Hallvard Fossheim, and Miira Tuominen\\n(eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 265–280.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198746980.003.0015\",\n \"–––, 2017, “Ratio in Subiecto?\\nThe Sources of Augustine’s Proof for the Immortality of the Soul in\\nthe Soliloquia and Its Defense in De Immortalitate\\nAnimae”, Phronesis, 62(3): 319–354.\\ndoi:10.1163/15685284-12341330\",\n \"van Dusen, David, 2014, The Space of Time. A Sensualist\\nInterpretation of Time in Augustine, Confessions X to XII,\\nLeiden/Boston: Brill.\",\n \"van Fleteren, Frederick, 2010, “Augustine and Philosophy:\\nIntellectus Fidei”, in Cary, Doody, and Paffenroth\\n2010: 23–40.\",\n \"van Oort, Johannes, 2012, “Augustine and the Books of the\\nManicheans”, in Vessey 2012: 188–199.\\ndoi:10.1002/9781118255483.ch15\",\n \"––– (ed.), 2013, Augustine and Manichaean\\nChristianity. Selected Papers from the First South African Conference\\non Augustine of Hippo. University of Pretoria, 24–26 April\\n2012, Leiden/Boston: Brill.\",\n \"–––, 2016, “Once Again: Augustine’s\\nManichaean Dilemma”, Augustiniana, 66(1/4):\\n233–245.\",\n \"–––, forthcoming, Augustine and Mani,\\nLeiden/Boston: Brill. Collected papers on Augustine and\\nManicheism.\",\n \"van Riel, Gerd, 2007, “Augustine’s Exegesis of ‘Heaven and Earth’ in Conf. XII: Finding Truth amidst Philosophers, Heretics and Exegetes”, Quaestio, 7: 191–228.\\ndoi: 10.1484/J.QUAESTIO.1.100154\",\n \"Vessey, Mark, Karla Pollmann, and Allan D. Fitzgerald (eds.),\\n1999, History, Apocalypse, and the Secular Imagination. New Essays\\non Augustine’s City of God, Bowling Green: Philosophy\\nDocumentation Center.\",\n \"von Heyking, John, 2001, Augustine and Politics as Longing in\\nthe World, Columbia: University of Missouri Press.\",\n \"Weissenberg, Timo J., 2005, Die Friedenslehre des Augustinus.\\nTheologische Grundlagen und ethische Entfaltung, Stuttgart:\\nKohlhammer.\",\n \"Weithman, Paul J., 1999, “Toward an Augustinian\\nLiberalism”, in Matthews 1999: 304–322.\",\n \"–––, 2001, “Augustine’s Political\\nPhilosophy”, in Stump and Kretzmann 2001: 234–252. Revised\\nversion in Meconi and Stump 2014: 231–250.\\ndoi:10.1017/CCOL0521650186.017 doi:10.1017/CCO9781139178044.019\",\n \"Wetzel, James, 1992, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9780511983627\",\n \"–––, 2001, “Predestination, Pelagianism,\\nand Foreknowledge”, in Stump and Kretzmann 2001: 49–58.\\ndoi:10.1017/CCOL0521650186.005\",\n \"––– (ed.), 2012, Augustine’s ‘City\\nof God’: A Critical Guide, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139014144\",\n \"Williams, Thomas, 2001, “Biblical Interpretation”, in\\nStump and Kretzmann 2001: 59–70. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521650186.006\\nRevised version under the title “Hermeneutics and Reading\\nScripture”, in Meconi and Stump 2014: 311–328.\\ndoi:10.1017/CCO9781139178044.024\",\n \"Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 2012, “Augustine’s Rejection of\\nEudaimonism”, in Wetzel 2012: 149–166.\\ndoi:10.1017/CBO9781139014144.009\",\n \"Zagzebski, Linda Trinkaus, 1991, The Dilemma of Freedom and\\nForeknowledge, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195107630.001.0001\",\n \"zum Brunn, Émilie, 1969 [1988], “Le dilemme de\\nl’être et du néant chez saint Augustin. Des\\npremiers dialogues aux Confessions”, Recherches\\naugustiniennes, 6: 3–102. Translated as St. Augustine.\\nBeing and Nothingness, New York: Paragon House Publishers 1988.\\n\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../christiantheology-philosophy/","text":"Christian theology, philosophy and"},{"href":"../illumination/","text":"divine: illumination"},{"href":"../emotion-Christian-tradition/","text":"emotion: in the Christian tradition"},{"href":"../ethics-virtue/","text":"ethics: virtue"},{"href":"../freewill/","text":"free will"},{"href":"../free-will-foreknowledge/","text":"free will: divine foreknowledge and"},{"href":"../medieval-philosophy/","text":"medieval philosophy"},{"href":"../moral-responsibility/","text":"moral responsibility"},{"href":"../neoplatonism/","text":"Neoplatonism"},{"href":"../plotinus/","text":"Plotinus"},{"href":"../ancient-political/","text":"political philosophy: ancient"},{"href":"../porphyry/","text":"Porphyry"},{"href":"../skepticism-ancient/","text":"skepticism: ancient"},{"href":"../stoicism/","text":"Stoicism"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../christiantheology-philosophy/\",\n \"text\": \"Christian theology, philosophy and\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../illumination/\",\n \"text\": \"divine: illumination\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../emotion-Christian-tradition/\",\n \"text\": \"emotion: in the Christian tradition\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../ethics-virtue/\",\n \"text\": \"ethics: virtue\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../freewill/\",\n \"text\": \"free will\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../free-will-foreknowledge/\",\n \"text\": \"free will: divine foreknowledge and\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../medieval-philosophy/\",\n \"text\": \"medieval philosophy\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../moral-responsibility/\",\n \"text\": \"moral responsibility\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../neoplatonism/\",\n \"text\": \"Neoplatonism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../plotinus/\",\n \"text\": \"Plotinus\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../ancient-political/\",\n \"text\": \"political philosophy: ancient\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../porphyry/\",\n \"text\": \"Porphyry\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../skepticism-ancient/\",\n \"text\": \"skepticism: ancient\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../stoicism/\",\n \"text\": \"Stoicism\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":92,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"auriol"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Peter Auriol"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Wed Nov 6, 2002; substantive revision Tue Sep 8, 2015"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nWhile the French Franciscan Peter Auriol (ca. 1280–1322) has not\nattracted as much attention as has his slightly younger contemporary\nWilliam Ockham, nevertheless on many topics Auriol was probably just\nas influential among fourteenth century thinkers as was the Venerable\nInceptor. Often explicitly rejecting the ideas of Thomas Aquinas,\nHenry of Ghent, and most importantly John Duns Scotus, Auriol created\ninteresting, innovative, and frequently controversial positions over a\nwhole range of philosophical and theological issues — not least\nin his theory of cognition — and many of his positions set the\nterms of debate for later thinkers like Gregory of Rimini and John\nCapreolus."],"string":"[\n \"\\nWhile the French Franciscan Peter Auriol (ca. 1280–1322) has not\\nattracted as much attention as has his slightly younger contemporary\\nWilliam Ockham, nevertheless on many topics Auriol was probably just\\nas influential among fourteenth century thinkers as was the Venerable\\nInceptor. Often explicitly rejecting the ideas of Thomas Aquinas,\\nHenry of Ghent, and most importantly John Duns Scotus, Auriol created\\ninteresting, innovative, and frequently controversial positions over a\\nwhole range of philosophical and theological issues — not least\\nin his theory of cognition — and many of his positions set the\\nterms of debate for later thinkers like Gregory of Rimini and John\\nCapreolus.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Life and Works","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. The Character of Auriol’s Thought and Some Noteworthy Positions","sub_toc":["2.1 The Categories","2.2 The Concept of Being","2.3 Future Contingents and Divine Foreknowledge","2.4 Predestination and Free Will"]},{"content_title":"3. Cognition and Reality: Conceptualism and the ","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"4. Intuitive and Abstractive Cognition and the Limits of Human Cognitive Abilities","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":["Primary Literature","Secondary Literature"]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Life and Works\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. The Character of Auriol’s Thought and Some Noteworthy Positions\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"2.1 The Categories\",\n \"2.2 The Concept of Being\",\n \"2.3 Future Contingents and Divine Foreknowledge\",\n \"2.4 Predestination and Free Will\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Cognition and Reality: Conceptualism and the \",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Intuitive and Abstractive Cognition and the Limits of Human Cognitive Abilities\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"Primary Literature\",\n \"Secondary Literature\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\nAs with many of his contemporaries, we know very few dates with\ncertainty in the life of Peter Auriol (a.k.a. Peter Auriole, Peter\nAureol, Petrus Aureoli, the Doctor Facundus). On the basis of\nhis later career it seems reasonable to suppose that Auriol was born\naround 1280, and we have evidence that he originated in the region\nnear the city of Cahors in France. We know that Auriol joined the\nFranciscan order in the order’s province of Aquitania, and we\nsurmise that this took place sometime before 1300. From the structure\nof the contemporary Franciscan educational system we can deduce that\nhe studied in Paris sometime in the first decade of the fourteenth\ncentury, but evidence that some scholars have presented that Auriol\nheard Scotus in Paris or was definitely in Paris in 1304 is\ninconclusive. Auriol’s first written work, dealing with the\nissue of Franciscan poverty (Tractatus de paupertate et usu\npaupere), seems to have been composed in 1311 or at latest early\n1312. In the latter year we know that Auriol was teaching in Bologna,\npresumably at the Franciscan convent in that city. It was here that he\nauthored his Tractatus de principiis naturae (Treatise on\nthe principles of nature), his only non-theological work. By the\nend of 1314, Auriol was in Toulouse, again apparently teaching at the\nFranciscan convent, and it seems that the two treatises that he\nauthored in support of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary\n(and in opposition to Dominican critics of that view) stem from this\ntime (Tractatus de conceptione Beatae Mariae Virginis and\nRepercussorium). In one or both of these cities, Auriol must\nhave also been lecturing on the standard medieval theological\ntextbook, the Sentences of Peter Lombard, and his massive\ncommentary on the first book of the Sentences, his\nScriptum super primum Sententiarum — more than 1100\nfolio pages in its early modern printing (Rome 1596) — was\nalmost certainly substantially finished by the autumn of 1316 when\nAuriol arrived in Paris, sent by the Franciscan order to earn his\ndoctorate. We used to think that Auriol read the Sentences at\nParis 1316–18, but new research has shown that he did this there\nover the sole academic year 1317-18 (Duba and Schabel 2017, esp. pp.\n159-165). No less a figure than Pope John XXII, Auriol’s mentor,\nwrote to the Chancellor of Paris in a letter dated July 14, 1318,\nasking that Auriol be granted the doctorate. The letter served its\npurpose, and by late 1318 he was the Franciscan regent master in\ntheology there. Auriol served as regent master in Paris until 1320 or\n1321, lecturing on the Bible (from which resulted several extant\nbiblical commentaries), and holding at least one series of quodlibetal\ndisputations. In 1321, he was elevated by John XXII to the position of\nArchbishop of Aix-en-Provence, but Auriol died soon after taking\noffice, probably on January 22, 1322. (See, for more details, Teetaert\n1935, and esp. Buytaert 1952).","\nAs should be clear from the above, Auriol’s extant works are\npredominantly theological in nature, having been composed in\nconnection with his duties as a theological student and teacher.\nNevertheless, especially his commentary on Peter Lombard’s\nSentences is a treasure trove of philosophical thought\nspanning a vast range of issues in metaphysics, epistemology and\nphilosophy of mind, natural philosophy, and ethics; it is in addition\nhis most important and influential work. We possess several versions\nof Auriol’s Sentences commentary. Besides the\nScriptum, which, as mentioned above, was mostly composed\nbefore Auriol arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1316, we have\nreportationes (student transcripts) of lectures that Auriol\nheld on all four books of the Sentences, some of which have\nobviously been reworked to one degree or another by Auriol himself and\nsome of which are still found only in medieval manuscripts. A version\nof his commentary on books II-IV was published in Rome in 1605 (along\nwith Auriol’s single Quodlibet of sixteen questions).\nIn part because the project to critically edit all of Auriol’s\nworks has been initiated only recently, the complex relationship\nbetween these published texts and other versions, found only in\nmanuscripts, as well as the relationship between the published\nScriptum and the extant reportationes on book I of\nthe Sentences, is not entirely clear. (See however, Nielsen\n2002; Schabel 2000a, pp. 67–76; Schabel 2000b; Duba 2000; for\nmore information on Auriol’s works, see the bibliography on the\nPeter Auriol Homepage (Other Internet Resources).)"],"section_title":"1. Life and Works","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nAuriol’s thought is relentlessly systematic; one finds certain\nbasic ideas or devices that crop up time and again in extremely varied\nphilosophical and theological contexts. Given this, it seems clear\nthat at an early stage in his career Auriol settled on these basic\nideas and devices as those best representing his fundamental\nconvictions, and then applied them rigorously, so that his philosophy\nand theology emerge from them like spokes from a hub. As a\nconsequence, Auriol’s thought has the appearance of being\nextremely unified.","\nAuriol also exhibits throughout his works a pronounced historical\nbent. That is to say, when dealing with nearly every philosophical or\ntheological issue, he takes as his point of departure a detailed\nanalysis of earlier and contemporary ideas on the matter at hand,\noffering for the most part accurate summaries of other positions and\ngenerally perceptive critiques. On the basis of this analysis of\nearlier positions, Auriol’s own thought often takes shape as he\nproposes positions that have the goal of avoiding the pitfalls he sees\nin his predecessors’ ideas. A recent study of Auriol’s\ncitation practice in his Scriptum (Schabel 2009) has shown\nthat the top five university authors explicitly cited are, in reverse\norder: Durand of St. Pourcain, Hervaeus Natalis, Henry of Ghent,\nThomas Aquinas, and John Duns Scotus. While these were the authors who\nclearly had the greatest impact on Auriol’s thought, he\nresponded throughout his works to many other theologians, including\nWilliam of Ware, Godfrey of Fontaines, Bonaventure, Richard of\nMediavilla (Middleton), Thomas Wylton, and Giles of Rome. Moreover,\nAuriol is clearly extremely well-versed in ancient and Arabic thought.\n(See e.g., Duba 2001.)","\nFinally, Auriol is well known for proposing unusual and sometimes\nradical solutions to traditional problems. This was one of the reasons\nwhy Auriol’s thought was so provocative to his contemporaries\nand to readers right into the seventeenth century. Recent research has\npointed to several areas of Auriol’s thought as particularly\ninnovative. Among these areas can be mentioned the following."],"section_title":"2. The Character of Auriol’s Thought and Some Noteworthy Positions","subsections":[{"content":["\nAuriol maintained that only five of the ten Aristotelian categories\nactually exist in the extra-mental world (substance, quality,\nquantity, action, and passion), the other five (relation, place, time,\nposition, and state/habit) being merely conceptual or mind-dependent,\ni.e. resulting from an intellect conceiving one of the actual\ncategories to be other than it is in extra-mental reality. Thus, the\nconceptual categories exist only potentially, but not actually, in\nextra-mental reality; it is possible for the intellect, upon\nacquaintance with one of the actual categories in extra-mental\nreality, to form the concept of the corresponding conceptual category\n(on Auriol’s ideas on the category most broadly, see Amerini\n2014). This theory has been studied most thoroughly with regard to\nAuriol’s ideas concerning the category of relation (cf. e.g.,\nHenninger 1989, pp. 150–73; Brower 2018, sections 3.1 and 3.2;\nFriedman 2013, pp. 550–56). In this context, Auriol maintains\nthat real relations are conceptual in nature, not existing in\nextra-mental reality, and hence dependent upon the activity of the\nmind; the three types of real relation originate from the\nintellect’s acquaintance with respectively quantity (e.g., a\nrelation of equality), quality (e.g., a relation of similarity), and\naction and passion (e.g., a relation of causality). Moreover, Auriol,\nin stark contrast to the medieval tradition before him, thinks of\nrelations as being between two terms, and not in a subject\ntowards a term. While the impact of Auriol’s ideas on the\ncategories has not been studied in any depth, nevertheless it is\ninteresting that Gregory of Rimini devotes a great deal of his\ndiscussion of the category of relation to a thorough attack on\nAuriol’s view (Henninger 1989, p. 173; for Auriol’s more\ngeneral views on the ontology of accidents as well as some reaction to\nthose views, see Pasnau 2008, Pasnau 2011, pp. 213-220)."],"subsection_title":"2.1 The Categories"},{"content":["\nAuriol modified Scotus’ view on the univocity of the concept of\nbeing. While accepting Scotus’ view that ‘being’ is\nunivocal both between God and creatures and between substance and\naccidents, Auriol nevertheless heavily criticized Scotus for\nmaintaining that being was contracted to the most general genera\nthrough various “qualitative differences” that themselves\nwere not included under the concept of being; on Scotus’ view,\nbeing itself became like a genus that was contracted through an\noutside difference. Auriol rejected this view on the grounds that this\n“outside difference” was an illusion; according to Auriol,\nnothing escapes the concept of being. Instead Auriol maintains that\nthe concept of being is an indeterminate concept that grasps\nall beings at once and equally. This concept of being itself has no\ndeterminate content; instead it contains within itself implicitly all\nother concepts that the intellect could possibly form. Being, then,\nfor Auriol is not contracted to its inferiors through any added\ndifference, but merely through explicating what is already contained\nimplicitly and indeterminately in the concept of being (Brown 1964;\nBrown 1965; Goris 2002; Pickavé 2004; Aertsen 2012, pp.\n433–56). As with many other topics, the history of the reception\nof Auriol’s view on the univocity of the concept of being\nremains to be written, but the important fifteenth century Thomist,\nJohn Capreolus, copied half of his eleven page treatment of this issue\nverbatim from Auriol’s Scriptum only to reject\nAuriol’s view in favor of a more Thomistic one. (See Brown 1964,\np. 6, esp. n. 10.)"],"subsection_title":"2.2 The Concept of Being"},{"content":["\nAuriol developed influential theories on future contingents and divine\nforeknowledge. These take their starting point in two convictions that\nAuriol firmly holds. First, he maintains that immutability and\nnecessity are mutually implicative, and thus, since God is immutable,\nif he were to know the future, the future would be necessary. (This\nsame conviction led Auriol to reject, at least in some contexts, the\nuse of the popular later-medieval distinction between God’s\nabsolute and ordained powers. For Auriol, there is no genuine\npossibility in God to will other than he does.) Second, Auriol took as\na fundamental principle the existence of human free will (on\nAuriol’s theory of free will, see Hoffmann 2015; Alliney 2015).\nThese two principles lead Auriol to theorize that God does know the\nfuture, but not as future; rather God knows the future\nindistantly, as abstracted from all time; it is therefore\nthis special way of knowing the future that preserves human freedom\nand avoids divine necessitarianism. In accordance with this view,\nAuriol develops a three-valued logic, in which future-tensed\npropositions are neutral, admitting of neither truth nor falsity,\nthereby discarding the principle of bivalence (the principle claiming\nthat any proposition can have only one of two truth values).\nAuriol’s position on future contingents and divine foreknowledge\nhad a great deal of impact in the later Middle Ages, since it often\ninspired refutations that nevertheless took into account the\ncriticisms that Auriol had made of, e.g., Thomas Aquinas, Henry of\nGhent, and John Duns Scotus (Schabel 2000a). When Auriol’s view\nactually found an adherent in Peter de Rivo at the University of\nLouvain (Leuven) in the period 1465–74, it occasioned a major\ndebate involving in the end Pope Sixtus IV, who in 1474 officially\ncondemned aspects of Auriol’s view. Despite this condemnation,\nhowever, it appears that Auriol’s critique of earlier scholastic\nviews and some elements of his own theory on the topic influenced the\nhumanist Pietro Pomponazzi around 1520, and perhaps as well the\nreformer Martin Luther (Schabel 2003)."],"subsection_title":"2.3 Future Contingents and Divine Foreknowledge"},{"content":["\nIn the related area of predestination, human free will is again a\nmotive force behind Auriol’s ideas. Believing that earlier\nexplanations of the way God elected some to salvation and damned\nothers to eternal punishment left all too little room for human free\nwill, Auriol proposed a theory on which God offers his grace freely to\nall human beings. Salvation comes to those who passively accept this\nfree offer of grace. Those whom God knows offer an obstacle to grace,\ni.e. those who actively reject it, God damns to eternal punishment.\nThus, for Auriol, the central issue in predestination is how human\nbeings choose to react to God’s free offer of grace: they are\njudged on their reaction. Auriol believes that he has avoided any hint\nof Pelagianism — where human beings can merit salvation on their\nown account — because individuals do not do anything\nactively in order to earn their salvation on his theory; they are only\nrequired to passively accept grace by not offering an obstacle to it,\nand this passive acceptance is, according to Auriol, a negative cause\nof the person’s salvation. Auriol’s theory when first\nproposed was an extremely innovative way of explaining the mechanics\nof salvation, and it came in for scathing criticism from, among\nothers, Gregory of Rimini; but, whether through direct influence or\nnot, elements of Auriol’s theory appear in the works of such\nthinkers as William Ockham, Robert Holcot, and, on the eve of the\nReformation, Gabriel Biel (Halverson 1998).","\nIn the rest of this entry, we’ll look at two areas in which\nAuriol provoked a significant response in part on account of his\nradical solutions, two areas that also illustrate the systematic and\nhistorical nature of his thought: his ideas on the relation between\ncognition and reality (including his conceptualism) and his ideas on\nintuitive and abstractive cognition."],"subsection_title":"2.4 Predestination and Free Will"}]},{"main_content":["\nIf there is one thing that is known about Peter Auriol, it is that he\nwas a “conceptualist.” Indeed, Auriol has often been\nviewed as a forerunner of William Ockham precisely on account of his\nconceptualism. What is probably the very first monograph ever devoted\nto Auriol (Dreiling 1913) deals with his conceptualism. Thus,\nunderstanding Auriol’s conceptualism is a good place to start\nwhen dealing with Auriol’s thought.","\nIn fact, Auriol is a conceptualist. By this it is merely\nmeant that, for Auriol, only singulars (i.e. individuals) have real,\nextra-mental existence. As Auriol writes: “every thing, insofar\nas it exists, exists as a singular” (omnis res, eo quod est,\nsingulariter est). Moreover, Auriol states explicitly that there\nis no principle of individuation — individuals just are\nindividuals and their individuality needs no further explanation. This\nis one of the most basic of Auriol’s metaphysical principles,\nand it necessarily entails that universality and universals are mental\nphenomena, fabricated in some way by the intellect. Thus, for Auriol,\nthe individuality of singular things does not need explaining, but the\nformation of universal concepts on the basis of these individuals does\nneed explaining. What is important for understanding Auriol’s\nconceptualism, then, is explicating his theory of intellectual\ncognition: determining the process by which the intellect fabricates\nthese universal concepts, determining what these universal concepts\nare, and what relation they have to really existing singulars in the\nworld.","\nWhile only individuals have real, extra-mental existence, every\nindividual by its very nature has several different ontological or\nquidditative aspects. Auriol calls these quidditative aspects\nrationes (a term that will remain untranslated in the rest of\nthis entry). Thus, Auriol claims that, e.g., Socrates has the\nrationes substance, corporeality, sensitivity, rationality.\nMoreover, rationes of the same kind found in different\nindividuals are “maximally similar” (simillimae).\ne.g., Socrates’ corporeality is totally like Plato’s\ncorporeality, which is totally like the donkey Brunellus’\ncorporeality. It should be noted that these rationes are\nnon-universal characteristics, i.e. a ratio belongs to one\nand only one individual. This is why Auriol emphasizes the maximal\nsimilarity of rationes of the same kind: they are not the\nsame and they are not shared, they are merely as alike as they can be.\nWhat is most important about these rationes in the present\ncontext is that they are the basic unit of intellectual acquaintance:\nevery ratio of its very nature is able to serve as the basis\nfor a concept, although the concept that results from the intellection\nof a ratio can be modified by the way that we conceive it\n(our modus concipiendi), a purely psychological difference\nwith no immediate grounds in extra-mental reality. We might say that a\nratio directs our intellect to form one certain concept, this\ncore concept undergoing modification according to the way we conceive\nit. Our universal concepts, then, have in these rationes a\ndirect basis in extra-mental individuals. (See, for more on this,\nFriedman 1999, Wöller 2015, pp. 36–79; for the term\n‘maximally similar’ [as it is used in Ockham], see\nPanaccio 1992, pp. 258–67.) What universal concept we actually\nform, according to Auriol, depends on how closely our will makes the\nintellect focus on the information we receive from the object of\ncognition, and hence how strong an impression the object makes on the\nintellect: the more closely focused, the stronger the impression, the\nmore specific the universal concept that is formed.","\nTo understand further what universal concepts are, we need to know\nwhat Auriol thinks concepts in general are. Central to this is\nAuriol’s theory of apparent existence or esse apparens,\nthat, at all levels, our cognitive faculties, in the very process of\ncognizing, put the object of cognition into a special type of\nexistence, termed by Auriol “apparent existence” (esse\napparens). For Auriol, in line with the general medieval view,\nour cognitive apparatus is divided into a sensory part (including the\nfive external senses, the common sense, which puts the sense data from\nthe five external senses together, and the imagination, which stores,\nretrieves, and sometimes manipulates the sense data, as well as sends\nthem on to the intellect) and an intellectual part (including the\nagent and the possible intellect). According to Auriol, in any\ncognitive act — whether sensory or intellectual — the\ncognitive power puts the object of cognition into this special type of\nexistence, and the object of cognition in this special type of\nexistence is the object as perceived. Thus concepts as well\nas sensations are simply cognized things themselves in a type of\nexistence different from that which they have in extra-mental reality.\nAuriol employs at least two different approaches to argue for this\nview: one based on intellectual cognition, the other based on sensory\ncognition. (Auriol’s trinitarian theology provides further\narguments for this view; see Friedman 2013, esp. Ch. 9, section 4.)\nWe’ll look at each of these in turn, in the process sketching\nwhat it was about the theory of esse apparens that made it\nquite radical and disturbing to Auriol’s medieval readers. (For\nthe sake of precision, esse apparens will go untranslated\nhereafter.)","\nIntellectual cognition (see Friedman 1999;\nAdriaenssen 2014, esp. pp. 85–95; Friedman 2015; Adriaenssen\n2017a, pp. 82–99): Auriol’s solution to the question of\nwhat a concept is takes its point of departure in the necessity of\nexplaining three things at once: essential predication; intellectual\nacquaintance with extra-mental objects; and necessary, scientific\nknowledge. Auriol holds that the first of these explanatory\nrequirements would not be fulfilled by any theory of concepts\naccording to which the concept is a type of representation or token of\nthe thing, if this representation has real — albeit mental\n— being. Examples that he gives of solutions of this sort are\nthat a concept might be the intellectual act or an intelligible\nspecies or any type of accident terminating an act of the\nunderstanding. All of these representations have some real being of\ntheir own. According to Auriol, these types of representational\ntheories of concepts would make explaining essential predication\nimpossible, since, assuming any of them, when I predicated, e.g.,\nanimal of human being, I would make a false predication, inasmuch as\nthe concept human being would not be the concept animal. The\nultimate problem with theories of universals of this sort, according\nto Auriol, is that if they were correct, then universals would not be\nuniversals at all, but would be particulars with their own real being.\nMoreover, not only these same types of representational views of\nconcepts, but also any theory that holds concepts to be Platonic\nIdeas, would hinder us in having intellectual acquaintance with\nextra-mental objects, Auriol’s second explanatory requirement.\nOn both these types of theories, our knowledge would extend only to\nthese really existing entities. We would, according to Auriol, be\nintellectually blind to extra-mental reality. On the other hand, we\ncould certainly have intellectual acquaintance with extra-mental\nobjects, if our concepts were particular things in the extra-mental\nworld as they exist extra-mentally — a final position Auriol\ncriticizes — but we would be unable to have necessary,\nscientific knowledge, Auriol’s third explanatory requirement. In\nfact, we would be unable to make universal judgments of any kind,\nsince there would be nothing universal about our knowledge; instead of\nknowing that all mules are sterile, we would know only that this mule\nis sterile and that that mule is sterile.","\nHaving considered all these views and found them wanting, Auriol\noffers his own alternative: the only way to explain at once essential\npredication, intellectual acquaintance with extra-mental objects, and\nnecessary, scientific knowledge is to maintain that concepts\nare extra-mental particulars, but having a different type of\nexistence (modus essendi) from the real existence they have\nextra-mentally. This special type of existence Auriol terms esse\napparens, apparent being, but he uses many synonyms for it,\nincluding “intentional” or “objective”\nexistence. (For other synonyms, see Tachau 1988, p. 90.) What\ncharacterizes this type of existence is that it is a particular\nextra-mental object, e.g., Socrates, but indistinguishably mixed\ntogether (indistinguibiliter immiscetur) with\npassive conception, i.e. the formation of a concept of Socrates. A\nconcept of Socrates is Socrates as conceived.","\nFor Auriol, Socrates and a concept grasping Socrates, then, are the\nsame thing with differing types of existence. That they are “the\nsame thing” Auriol means quite literally. He says that “a\nthing and its intention do not differ numerically with respect to\nanything absolute”; they are the same thing strictly speaking.\nWhat thing and intention differ by is a respect or a relation. And\nthis is no ordinary respect “fixed to or superimposed upon that\nthing, as are other relations, rather it is utterly intrinsic and\nindistinguishably joined to it.” This intrinsic relation, Auriol\ntells us, is the appearance of the thing as an object of perception\n(apparere) to a perceiver (hence the term esse\napparens). For Auriol, then, it is intrinsic to each and every\nthing to have two different types of being: real or extra-mental being\non the one hand, and intentional or objective being on the other.\nUnlike real being, the thing’s intentional being needs a\nperceiver in order to actualize it. This is only to say that it is\nthrough the act of conceiving that a thing is put into intentional\nbeing.","\nIn fact — and here we return to conceptualism — on the\nbasis of what Auriol has said, we can deduce that every particular\nthing, e.g. Socrates, has several potential intentional existences:\none for each of Socrates’ rationes, those basic units\nof intellectual acquaintance that direct the mind to form certain\nconcepts of him. And, according to Auriol, all of these different\nconcepts of Socrates are Socrates. On Auriol’s account,\nthis makes good sense: rationes are quidditative or essential\naspects without which a particular thing would not be the particular\nthing that it in fact is. Thus, Socrates is not Socrates without being\na rational animal, i.e. without having the rationes\nsensitivity and rationality. Socrates is every bit as much a human\nbeing as he is Socrates, and on Auriol’s theory the concept\n‘human being’ is every bit as much Socrates as is the\nconcept ‘Socrates’. Thus upon intellectual acquaintance,\nSocrates (and in particular his ratio of rationality) directs\nus to form the concept ‘human being’, and that concept\nis Socrates, one of Socrates’ several potential\nintentional existences.","\nIn this way Auriol attempts to deal with the problems he saw in other\ntheories of concepts. On the one hand, he attempts to get our\nknowledge grounded as firmly as possible on extra-mental things: a\nconcept simply is the intellected extra-mental particular in\na different type of being from that which it has extra-mentally, a\ntype of being that is nevertheless intrinsic to the extra-mental\nparticular; the concept offers no barrier whatsoever between\nconceiving mind and conceived object. At the same time, however,\nAuriol wants to preserve the universality of universal concepts and\ntheir use in essential predications and necessary, scientific\nknowledge, and he thinks that his theory of concepts does just that.\nBecause rationes of the same kind found in different\nindividuals are “maximally similar,” they all direct the\nmind to form the same concept. Thus the concept ‘human\nbeing’ arising from Socrates is the same as the concept\n‘human being’ arising from Plato, since they are both\nbased on the maximally similar ratio of rationality. Auriol\nis clear that a universal concept is all of its particulars,\nrose is all particular roses, animal is all\nparticular animals. That is to say, animal is the concept and every\nreally existing animal at the same time.","\nSensory Cognition (Wood 1982, pp. 214–17,\n220–23; Tachau 1988, pp. 89–100; Denery 1998, pp.\n28–39; Lička 2016; Pickavé 2017; Bolyard 2021,\nsection 4.2.2): The intellect is not the only cognitive faculty that\nfunctions by putting the cognized thing into esse apparens:\nthe sensitive faculties also work in this way according to Auriol. In\nfact, Auriol uses sensory cognition, and his claim that the senses\nform esse apparens, as further proof that the intellect does\nso as well. In a famous passage in Auriol’s works\n(Scriptum, d. 3, q. 3, a.1, ed. Buytaert, vol. 2, pp.\n696–99), one that was known to and criticized by William Ockham,\nAuriol creates an account of sensory cognition that takes its point of\ndeparture in a group of “experiences” that Auriol thinks\nprove that the senses cognize by actively placing the object sensed in\nesse apparens. Thus, if someone were on a ship moving down a\nriver, it would appear to that person that the trees on the shore were\nmoving; when a baton is twirled extremely rapidly, it appears to the\nviewer that a colored circle hovers in the air; a stick placed halfway\ninto a bucket of water appears to be broken; if I press on my eye\nwhile looking at a candle, it will appear that I see two candles; upon\nlooking directly at the sun, an afterimage appears. Auriol gives eight\nexperiences like these, but for him all of them lead to the same\nconclusion: that in each of these cases, what appears to us\n(i.e. our erroneous perception) does not correspond directly to\nreality but is a result of the senses’ putting the object into\nesse apparens. Take the case of the twirling baton: what is\nthe circle that appears in the air? It can’t be anything real\nexisting in the baton itself, since the baton is straight. Nor,\nclearly, is the circle something real hovering in the air. Finally,\nthe circle is not something in vision or in the eye, since we are\nseeing the circle and not our vision of it, and also since the circle\nappears to be in the air. For Auriol, the only possible explanation\nfor the circle is that it appears to us because our sense of sight has\nactively put the baton into esse apparens. More generally,\nwhat we see in these cases is “only the appearance of the thing\nor the thing in esse apparens.” Sensory error, for\nAuriol, is explained by appealing to the fundamental activity of the\nsenses. And Auriol insists that the senses are just as active in cases\nwhere they function correctly; this is because, since activity is a\nnoble trait to have, if in erroneous visions our sense of sight\nactively places the thing seen in esse apparens, it will\ncertainly do so in veridical visions. The difference between a\nveridical sensory experience and an erroneous one is that in a\nveridical one the way the object of cognition appears and the\nway it is in extra-mental reality coincide. So in veridical\nsensory experience we have no way to tell that the senses are placing\nthe thing into esse apparens. Thus, these experiences of\nsensory error are of immense importance, since it is only through them\nthat we can discern the necessary role that esse apparens and\nthe activity of the senses play in all sensory cognition.","\nFor Auriol, then, the senses necessarily put the cognized object into\nesse apparens or intentional being; this is a condition of\nour perceiving. Moreover, Auriol makes clear in this context that this\nesse apparens is not a representation of the thing with its\nown real being; rather it is the thing itself merely placed\nin another type of existence. The esse apparens of a sensed\nobject is merely that object as sensed. (See on this particularly\nDenery 1998, pp. 34–39.) Obviously, this corresponds to the\ntheory we have already seen Auriol holds concerning esse\napparens in intellectual cognition, and Auriol makes the\ncorrespondence explicit. To go from sensory perception to intellectual\ncognition, Auriol uses a common scholastic principle called by\nPhilotheus Boehner “The Principle of Hierarchy” (Boehner\n1949, p. 298): given two faculties, one lower and one higher (like\nsense and intellect), if the lower faculty can do something noble,\nthen the higher faculty can certainly do the same. The activity of the\nsenses, then, i.e. the fact that the senses put the object into\nesse apparens, since it is noble, shows that the intellect\nalso puts its object into esse apparens. (Auriol’s\ntheory of sensory perception is complicated by the fact that Auriol\nseems to claim that some of the illusory sensory experiences he\nmentions exist outside the mind, e.g., that the colored circle is\n“in” the air and not “in” the mind. For\napproaches to this complication, see Pasnau 1997, pp. 69–76;\nDenery 1998, pp. 36–37; Lička 2016).","\nThree general claims can be made on the basis of this examination of\nAuriol’s ideas on cognition and reality. First, Auriol is a\nconceptualist, holding that universals are nothing more than concepts\nformed by the mind, although these universal concepts do have a direct\nbasis in the particular thing cognized (the rationes).\nSecond, a principle underlying Auriol’s theory of cognition is\nthat cognitive faculties are fundamentally active. All cognition takes\nplace because a cognitive faculty places the object of\ncognition into esse apparens, which is merely the object of\ncognition in a different type of being than it has extra-mentally, the\nbeing of being perceived. Thus, Auriol is part of one pronounced\nstrain of medieval thought (deriving from Augustine and ultimately\nfrom Plato) that rejects that the soul and its powers are passively\naffected by extra-mental objects. (See on this Tachau 1988, Friedman\n2000.) Cognitive powers are, for Auriol, active. A third point, and\none that has been noted in a great deal of the secondary literature\n(e.g., Tachau 1988; Denery 1998; Bolyard 2000; Friedman 2000) is that\nby appealing to erroneous visions to show that both sense and\nintellect produce esse apparens or make things appear, Auriol\nhas given error a central place in his account of cognition. To put\nthis in another way, Auriol does not have a real problem explaining\nhow we can have erroneous perception and intellection (in contrast to\nmany theories of knowledge); rather he needs to explain how we can\nhave veridical ones and just as importantly how we can know when we\nare having veridical ones. This is roughly one of the functions that\nthe distinction between intuitive and abstractive cognition served for\nsome medieval authors (in e.g., John Duns Scotus and William Ockham),\nalthough as we will see, Auriol does not use it in this way. Indeed it\nseems best to describe Auriol as a “reliabilist,” holding\nas a type of axiomatic principle that under normal circumstances our\nGod-given cognitive faculties represent the world in an adequate\nmanner. (See Bolyard 2000, p. 175; that Auriol is not the only\nmedieval thinker with this reliabilist attitude, see e.g., Stump 1998,\npp. 306–07.) No matter what Auriol thought, however, the\nskeptical implications of Auriol’s theory of esse\napparens did worry many of his medieval readers, and the theory\nelicited a critical response because some thought that it posed too\nsharp a break between cognition and reality. (For examples, see Wood\n1982, Tachau 1988, Adriaenssen 2017b)"],"section_title":"3. Cognition and Reality: Conceptualism and the esse apparens","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nJohn Duns Scotus, who introduced the distinction between intuitive and\nabstractive cognition, took the view that intuitive and abstractive\ncognition were distinct because they had different objects. Thus, for\nScotus, we have an abstractive cognition of an object when it is not\ndirectly present to us, on account of there being some intervening\nrepresentation; an intuitive cognition can only come about when the\nobject of cognition is existing and directly present to us. For\nScotus, then, intuitive cognition carries along with it the guarantee\nthat the object of cognition exists; not so for abstractive cognition.\n(See Tachau 1988, esp. pp. 68–81; Dumont 1989; Pini 2014.) It is\nwell known that William Ockham took exception to this view, holding\nthat we can, in certain extraordinary (i.e. supernatural) cases, have\nintuitive cognition of non-existent objects. Auriol too objects to\nScotus’ view.","\nFor Auriol, in contrast to Scotus, intuitive cognition is possible\nwhether the object of cognition is present or absent. Likewise, an\nabstractive cognition of an object that is actually present is\npossible. The distinction between intuitive and abstractive cognition\ndoes not depend on the object at all; the very same object can be\ncognized in both an intuitive and an abstractive way. According to\nAuriol, whether we are having the one type of cognition or the other\ndepends exclusively on the characteristics of the cognition that we\nare having, how the object appears to us. Auriol says explicitly that\nintuitive and abstractive cognition are in fact simply two\nfundamentally different ways that the esse apparens created\nby the cognitive faculties can appear to us: “abstractive and\nintuitive cognition differ … for there are two modes of formal\nappearance … by which things appear objectively” (trans.\nPasnau 2002, p. 201, n. 111). In order to illustrate this, Auriol\nclaims that ocular cognition, i.e. the sense of sight, is fully\nintuitive, while imaginary cognition, i.e. cognizing something through\nthe internal sense of the imagination, is fully abstractive. This is\nthe governing metaphor in Auriol’s attempt to distinguish the\ntwo types of cognition: sight is intuitive, imagination is\nabstractive. Thus, describing sensory cognition, Auriol gives four\ntraits that together enable us to determine whether any particular\ncognition is intuitive or abstractive. First, an intuitive cognition\nis characterized by being immediate or direct, as\nwhen we see an object before us. Not so abstractive or imaginary\ncognition; it is mediate, requiring some type of discursive process.\nAuriol gives the following example: an astronomer sitting in his room\ncan predict an eclipse through calculation, and he can even imagine it\non that basis, but this is something entirely different from seeing\nthe eclipse directly. A second characteristic of ocular or intuitive\ncognition is the presentness of the object. The object of an\nintuitive cognition seems to be present (whether it actually is or\nnot), whereas the object of an abstractive cognition does not have\nthis appearance of presence. Take the astronomer again. He can imagine\nthe eclipse, but in the very act of doing so he knows that the eclipse\nis not present before him. The third and fourth characteristics that\nAuriol mentions are roughly equivalent: an intuitive cognition carries\nwith it the actualization and existence of its\nobject; not so an imaginary, abstractive cognition. The astronomer can\nimagine an eclipse, and even imagine an eclipse taking place right\nnow, but again, the very fact that he is imagining the eclipse bears\nwith it the recognition that it is not in fact actualized and\nexisting. Auriol sums up:","\nTherefore, it is rightly said that an intuitive cognition is a direct\ncognition as opposed to a discursive one, that it is present as\nopposed to the absent mode in which the imagination reaches even\ntoward things that are present, and that it actualizes the object and\nposits its existence, since it makes the object’s real existence\nand actual position appear, even if the object does not exist. And in\ncontrast it is clear that an imaginary cognition lacks and abstracts\nfrom these four conditions. It extends to its object neither directly\nnor presently, nor by actualizing or positing existence, even if one\nimagines the object to exist and be actual and even if it is present.\n(trans. Pasnau 2002, pp. 206–07, n. 109).\n","\n(The most complete discussion of Auriol on intuitive and abstractive\ncognition is Boehner 1949; for the background and reception of\nAuriol’s view, see particularly Tachau 1988; for a translation\ninto English of Auriol’s major text on intuitive and abstractive\ncognition, his Scriptum, Prologue (aka Prooemium), q. 2, see\nPasnau 2002, pp. 178–218.)","\nThus, what is central to Auriol’s distinction between intuitive\nand abstractive cognition is the character of the cognition as it\nappears to us. The distinction between them is phenomenologically\ndetermined. As mentioned above, in this way Auriol rejected\nScotus’ view that intuitive cognitions are only of objects\npresent and existing. Auriol’s rejection of Scotus’\ndistinction between intuitive and abstractive cognition takes as one\nof its starting points several “experiences” that recall\nthe experiences he employed to show that the senses put the object of\nsensitive cognition into esse apparens. For example, upon\nlooking directly at the sun or any other luminous object, an\nafterimage appears; thus a vision of the sun remains in the eye even\nwhen the object itself is absent. In dreams, we can experience sights,\nsounds, and tactile sensations, in the real absence of the objects of\nsensation. Persons who are deceived by illusions often see things that\nare not really there. In all of these sensations the object appears to\nbe actually present and existing, when it is not. Auriol concludes\nthat we can have an intuitive sensory cognition of non-existent\nobjects.","\nThat was the characterization of intuitive sensory cognition\nas opposed to abstractive cognition. What about intellectual\ncognition? Auriol makes clear that the human intellect can have\nintuitive cognition. To show this he first appeals to the Principle of\nHierarchy mentioned above: because the lower faculties, the senses,\ncan have intuitive cognition, therefore it is certain that the higher\nfaculty, intellect, can have intuitive cognition, since it is more\nnoble than the abstractive cognition that we know the intellect does\nhave. Moreover, on the basis of a famous passage from St. Paul’s\nI Corinthians (13:12 “For now we see in a mirror dimly,\nbut then face to face”), Auriol maintains that we are assured\nthat the beatific vision of God is an intuitive intellectual\ncognition.","\nAlthough intuitive cognition is possible for an intellect,\nAuriol, in contrast to William Ockham, nevertheless denies that we\nexperience intuitive cognition in this life. Because the\nintellect of the wayfarer (viator — the person in this\nlife) is dependent upon the senses and their cognition of particulars,\nAuriol denies that we can have (or at least that we can know that we\nhave) intellectual cognition with the direct and present, ocular-like\ncognition that is characteristic of intuitive cognition. Auriol says:\n“Thus each of these cognitions should be posited within\nintellect, although we do not experience intuitive cognition in this\nlife because of its conjunction with sensory intuition” (trans.\nPasnau 2002, pp. 210–11, n. 121.) Intuitive intellectual\ncognition is reserved for the angels and for the blessed in heaven,\nunencumbered by bodily senses. All of our intellectual cognition in\nthis life is characterized by the discursivity and mediacy that is the\nmark of an abstractive cognition.","\nAbove, it was mentioned that Auriol seems ultimately to be best\ndescribed as a reliabilist; he does not question that, given normal\nconditions, our God-given cognitive faculties work as they should and\nthat they are self-correcting. He does not seem to have been concerned\nabout possible skeptical ramifications of his theory of esse\napparens. But with this said, by denying that human beings in\nthis life have intuitive intellectual cognition, he set the stage for\nsomewhat strictly limiting human intellectual abilities in his\nphilosophy.","\nThis last point explains some interesting features of Auriol’s\nattitude towards human knowledge. In particular, despite the fact that\nAuriol maintains that God could give a person in this life an\nabstractive cognition of the divine essence, and that this abstractive\ncognition would be able to serve as the basis for demonstrative\nknowledge of all articles of the Christian faith (Scriptum,\nPrologue, q. 2, ed. Buytaert, vol. 1, pp. 211–14; trans. Pasnau\n2002, p. 213, n. 130 and p. 214, n. 133), nevertheless Auriol often\nexhibits a noticeable pessimism when it comes to human cognitive\nabilities. Thus, Auriol argues at length that in this life we are\nunable to decide such issues as whether the universe is eternal or\ncreated in time. (We know, of course, through Scripture that the world\nis not eternal, but we could never decisively prove this by means of\nunaided human reason.) Auriol argues that this is the case because we\ndo not have direct intellectual cognition of, e.g., temporal instants;\nsuch cognition would allow us to resolve this problem. (See esp.\nNielsen 1996, esp. pp. 223–26, 232–35, 239–41; see\nalso Nielsen 1999.) Here we see that Auriol’s rejection of\nintuitive intellectual cognition in this life lies at the heart of a\nsomewhat pessimistic view of the reach of human reason: we do not have\ndirect intuitive knowledge of the world (much less of God), only\nindirect abstractive knowledge, and this places fairly strict\nlimitations on just what our intellect can achieve unaided. The\ndisembodied soul of the blessed, having direct intuitive intellectual\ncognition, will fare much better.","\nAuriol’s theory of human intellectual cognition of singulars\nalso shows the influence of his rejection of intuitive intellectual\ncognition in this life. Auriol is explicit that universal concepts\n(formed through the Aristotelian process of abstraction) always appear\nto us as abstractive cognitions, since what is universal abstracts\nfrom any presentness and directness of the object of cognition (see\ne.g. Scriptum, Prologue, q. 2, ed. Buytaert, p. 206, n. 111,\nl. 87, Pasnau 2002, p. 207; cf. Friedman 1997, pp. 310–14).\nThere were, however, a number of members of the Franciscan order,\nincluding John Duns Scotus, who was sometimes understood by\ncontemporaries to have claimed that singulars could be cognized as\nsingular by the intellect. (On this aspect of Scotus thought see,\ne.g., Boler 1982, esp. Pini 2008.) Auriol rejects this Franciscan\ntradition; because true intuitive intellectual cognition is barred to\nus in this lifetime, we can have no direct intellectual cognition of\nsingulars at all. Auriol maintains in his theory of intellectual\ncognition of singulars that we only form concepts of singulars through\nthe mediation of the senses and by means of a discursive process. (By\nrecognizing that the senses are now sensing a singular, the intellect\ncan reason that a singular must now exist and be present, but we have\nno direct intellectual knowledge or concept of any singular.) Auriol\nexplicitly claims, however, that angels and the blessed, lacking\nbodies and bodily senses, would have direct intellectual cognition of\nsingulars, just as God does by seeing his own essence. (On\nAuriol’s theory, see Friedman 2000.) A mild pessimism about\nhuman cognitive abilities is thus systemic in Auriol’s thought,\nand has its most clear expression in his claim that we do not\nexperience intuitive intellectual cognition in this life."],"section_title":"4. Intuitive and Abstractive Cognition and the Limits of Human Cognitive Abilities","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nAs with many of his contemporaries, we know very few dates with\\ncertainty in the life of Peter Auriol (a.k.a. Peter Auriole, Peter\\nAureol, Petrus Aureoli, the Doctor Facundus). On the basis of\\nhis later career it seems reasonable to suppose that Auriol was born\\naround 1280, and we have evidence that he originated in the region\\nnear the city of Cahors in France. We know that Auriol joined the\\nFranciscan order in the order’s province of Aquitania, and we\\nsurmise that this took place sometime before 1300. From the structure\\nof the contemporary Franciscan educational system we can deduce that\\nhe studied in Paris sometime in the first decade of the fourteenth\\ncentury, but evidence that some scholars have presented that Auriol\\nheard Scotus in Paris or was definitely in Paris in 1304 is\\ninconclusive. Auriol’s first written work, dealing with the\\nissue of Franciscan poverty (Tractatus de paupertate et usu\\npaupere), seems to have been composed in 1311 or at latest early\\n1312. In the latter year we know that Auriol was teaching in Bologna,\\npresumably at the Franciscan convent in that city. It was here that he\\nauthored his Tractatus de principiis naturae (Treatise on\\nthe principles of nature), his only non-theological work. By the\\nend of 1314, Auriol was in Toulouse, again apparently teaching at the\\nFranciscan convent, and it seems that the two treatises that he\\nauthored in support of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary\\n(and in opposition to Dominican critics of that view) stem from this\\ntime (Tractatus de conceptione Beatae Mariae Virginis and\\nRepercussorium). In one or both of these cities, Auriol must\\nhave also been lecturing on the standard medieval theological\\ntextbook, the Sentences of Peter Lombard, and his massive\\ncommentary on the first book of the Sentences, his\\nScriptum super primum Sententiarum — more than 1100\\nfolio pages in its early modern printing (Rome 1596) — was\\nalmost certainly substantially finished by the autumn of 1316 when\\nAuriol arrived in Paris, sent by the Franciscan order to earn his\\ndoctorate. We used to think that Auriol read the Sentences at\\nParis 1316–18, but new research has shown that he did this there\\nover the sole academic year 1317-18 (Duba and Schabel 2017, esp. pp.\\n159-165). No less a figure than Pope John XXII, Auriol’s mentor,\\nwrote to the Chancellor of Paris in a letter dated July 14, 1318,\\nasking that Auriol be granted the doctorate. The letter served its\\npurpose, and by late 1318 he was the Franciscan regent master in\\ntheology there. Auriol served as regent master in Paris until 1320 or\\n1321, lecturing on the Bible (from which resulted several extant\\nbiblical commentaries), and holding at least one series of quodlibetal\\ndisputations. In 1321, he was elevated by John XXII to the position of\\nArchbishop of Aix-en-Provence, but Auriol died soon after taking\\noffice, probably on January 22, 1322. (See, for more details, Teetaert\\n1935, and esp. Buytaert 1952).\",\n \"\\nAs should be clear from the above, Auriol’s extant works are\\npredominantly theological in nature, having been composed in\\nconnection with his duties as a theological student and teacher.\\nNevertheless, especially his commentary on Peter Lombard’s\\nSentences is a treasure trove of philosophical thought\\nspanning a vast range of issues in metaphysics, epistemology and\\nphilosophy of mind, natural philosophy, and ethics; it is in addition\\nhis most important and influential work. We possess several versions\\nof Auriol’s Sentences commentary. Besides the\\nScriptum, which, as mentioned above, was mostly composed\\nbefore Auriol arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1316, we have\\nreportationes (student transcripts) of lectures that Auriol\\nheld on all four books of the Sentences, some of which have\\nobviously been reworked to one degree or another by Auriol himself and\\nsome of which are still found only in medieval manuscripts. A version\\nof his commentary on books II-IV was published in Rome in 1605 (along\\nwith Auriol’s single Quodlibet of sixteen questions).\\nIn part because the project to critically edit all of Auriol’s\\nworks has been initiated only recently, the complex relationship\\nbetween these published texts and other versions, found only in\\nmanuscripts, as well as the relationship between the published\\nScriptum and the extant reportationes on book I of\\nthe Sentences, is not entirely clear. (See however, Nielsen\\n2002; Schabel 2000a, pp. 67–76; Schabel 2000b; Duba 2000; for\\nmore information on Auriol’s works, see the bibliography on the\\nPeter Auriol Homepage (Other Internet Resources).)\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Life and Works\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nAuriol’s thought is relentlessly systematic; one finds certain\\nbasic ideas or devices that crop up time and again in extremely varied\\nphilosophical and theological contexts. Given this, it seems clear\\nthat at an early stage in his career Auriol settled on these basic\\nideas and devices as those best representing his fundamental\\nconvictions, and then applied them rigorously, so that his philosophy\\nand theology emerge from them like spokes from a hub. As a\\nconsequence, Auriol’s thought has the appearance of being\\nextremely unified.\",\n \"\\nAuriol also exhibits throughout his works a pronounced historical\\nbent. That is to say, when dealing with nearly every philosophical or\\ntheological issue, he takes as his point of departure a detailed\\nanalysis of earlier and contemporary ideas on the matter at hand,\\noffering for the most part accurate summaries of other positions and\\ngenerally perceptive critiques. On the basis of this analysis of\\nearlier positions, Auriol’s own thought often takes shape as he\\nproposes positions that have the goal of avoiding the pitfalls he sees\\nin his predecessors’ ideas. A recent study of Auriol’s\\ncitation practice in his Scriptum (Schabel 2009) has shown\\nthat the top five university authors explicitly cited are, in reverse\\norder: Durand of St. Pourcain, Hervaeus Natalis, Henry of Ghent,\\nThomas Aquinas, and John Duns Scotus. While these were the authors who\\nclearly had the greatest impact on Auriol’s thought, he\\nresponded throughout his works to many other theologians, including\\nWilliam of Ware, Godfrey of Fontaines, Bonaventure, Richard of\\nMediavilla (Middleton), Thomas Wylton, and Giles of Rome. Moreover,\\nAuriol is clearly extremely well-versed in ancient and Arabic thought.\\n(See e.g., Duba 2001.)\",\n \"\\nFinally, Auriol is well known for proposing unusual and sometimes\\nradical solutions to traditional problems. This was one of the reasons\\nwhy Auriol’s thought was so provocative to his contemporaries\\nand to readers right into the seventeenth century. Recent research has\\npointed to several areas of Auriol’s thought as particularly\\ninnovative. Among these areas can be mentioned the following.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. The Character of Auriol’s Thought and Some Noteworthy Positions\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAuriol maintained that only five of the ten Aristotelian categories\\nactually exist in the extra-mental world (substance, quality,\\nquantity, action, and passion), the other five (relation, place, time,\\nposition, and state/habit) being merely conceptual or mind-dependent,\\ni.e. resulting from an intellect conceiving one of the actual\\ncategories to be other than it is in extra-mental reality. Thus, the\\nconceptual categories exist only potentially, but not actually, in\\nextra-mental reality; it is possible for the intellect, upon\\nacquaintance with one of the actual categories in extra-mental\\nreality, to form the concept of the corresponding conceptual category\\n(on Auriol’s ideas on the category most broadly, see Amerini\\n2014). This theory has been studied most thoroughly with regard to\\nAuriol’s ideas concerning the category of relation (cf. e.g.,\\nHenninger 1989, pp. 150–73; Brower 2018, sections 3.1 and 3.2;\\nFriedman 2013, pp. 550–56). In this context, Auriol maintains\\nthat real relations are conceptual in nature, not existing in\\nextra-mental reality, and hence dependent upon the activity of the\\nmind; the three types of real relation originate from the\\nintellect’s acquaintance with respectively quantity (e.g., a\\nrelation of equality), quality (e.g., a relation of similarity), and\\naction and passion (e.g., a relation of causality). Moreover, Auriol,\\nin stark contrast to the medieval tradition before him, thinks of\\nrelations as being between two terms, and not in a subject\\ntowards a term. While the impact of Auriol’s ideas on the\\ncategories has not been studied in any depth, nevertheless it is\\ninteresting that Gregory of Rimini devotes a great deal of his\\ndiscussion of the category of relation to a thorough attack on\\nAuriol’s view (Henninger 1989, p. 173; for Auriol’s more\\ngeneral views on the ontology of accidents as well as some reaction to\\nthose views, see Pasnau 2008, Pasnau 2011, pp. 213-220).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.1 The Categories\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAuriol modified Scotus’ view on the univocity of the concept of\\nbeing. While accepting Scotus’ view that ‘being’ is\\nunivocal both between God and creatures and between substance and\\naccidents, Auriol nevertheless heavily criticized Scotus for\\nmaintaining that being was contracted to the most general genera\\nthrough various “qualitative differences” that themselves\\nwere not included under the concept of being; on Scotus’ view,\\nbeing itself became like a genus that was contracted through an\\noutside difference. Auriol rejected this view on the grounds that this\\n“outside difference” was an illusion; according to Auriol,\\nnothing escapes the concept of being. Instead Auriol maintains that\\nthe concept of being is an indeterminate concept that grasps\\nall beings at once and equally. This concept of being itself has no\\ndeterminate content; instead it contains within itself implicitly all\\nother concepts that the intellect could possibly form. Being, then,\\nfor Auriol is not contracted to its inferiors through any added\\ndifference, but merely through explicating what is already contained\\nimplicitly and indeterminately in the concept of being (Brown 1964;\\nBrown 1965; Goris 2002; Pickavé 2004; Aertsen 2012, pp.\\n433–56). As with many other topics, the history of the reception\\nof Auriol’s view on the univocity of the concept of being\\nremains to be written, but the important fifteenth century Thomist,\\nJohn Capreolus, copied half of his eleven page treatment of this issue\\nverbatim from Auriol’s Scriptum only to reject\\nAuriol’s view in favor of a more Thomistic one. (See Brown 1964,\\np. 6, esp. n. 10.)\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.2 The Concept of Being\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAuriol developed influential theories on future contingents and divine\\nforeknowledge. These take their starting point in two convictions that\\nAuriol firmly holds. First, he maintains that immutability and\\nnecessity are mutually implicative, and thus, since God is immutable,\\nif he were to know the future, the future would be necessary. (This\\nsame conviction led Auriol to reject, at least in some contexts, the\\nuse of the popular later-medieval distinction between God’s\\nabsolute and ordained powers. For Auriol, there is no genuine\\npossibility in God to will other than he does.) Second, Auriol took as\\na fundamental principle the existence of human free will (on\\nAuriol’s theory of free will, see Hoffmann 2015; Alliney 2015).\\nThese two principles lead Auriol to theorize that God does know the\\nfuture, but not as future; rather God knows the future\\nindistantly, as abstracted from all time; it is therefore\\nthis special way of knowing the future that preserves human freedom\\nand avoids divine necessitarianism. In accordance with this view,\\nAuriol develops a three-valued logic, in which future-tensed\\npropositions are neutral, admitting of neither truth nor falsity,\\nthereby discarding the principle of bivalence (the principle claiming\\nthat any proposition can have only one of two truth values).\\nAuriol’s position on future contingents and divine foreknowledge\\nhad a great deal of impact in the later Middle Ages, since it often\\ninspired refutations that nevertheless took into account the\\ncriticisms that Auriol had made of, e.g., Thomas Aquinas, Henry of\\nGhent, and John Duns Scotus (Schabel 2000a). When Auriol’s view\\nactually found an adherent in Peter de Rivo at the University of\\nLouvain (Leuven) in the period 1465–74, it occasioned a major\\ndebate involving in the end Pope Sixtus IV, who in 1474 officially\\ncondemned aspects of Auriol’s view. Despite this condemnation,\\nhowever, it appears that Auriol’s critique of earlier scholastic\\nviews and some elements of his own theory on the topic influenced the\\nhumanist Pietro Pomponazzi around 1520, and perhaps as well the\\nreformer Martin Luther (Schabel 2003).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.3 Future Contingents and Divine Foreknowledge\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIn the related area of predestination, human free will is again a\\nmotive force behind Auriol’s ideas. Believing that earlier\\nexplanations of the way God elected some to salvation and damned\\nothers to eternal punishment left all too little room for human free\\nwill, Auriol proposed a theory on which God offers his grace freely to\\nall human beings. Salvation comes to those who passively accept this\\nfree offer of grace. Those whom God knows offer an obstacle to grace,\\ni.e. those who actively reject it, God damns to eternal punishment.\\nThus, for Auriol, the central issue in predestination is how human\\nbeings choose to react to God’s free offer of grace: they are\\njudged on their reaction. Auriol believes that he has avoided any hint\\nof Pelagianism — where human beings can merit salvation on their\\nown account — because individuals do not do anything\\nactively in order to earn their salvation on his theory; they are only\\nrequired to passively accept grace by not offering an obstacle to it,\\nand this passive acceptance is, according to Auriol, a negative cause\\nof the person’s salvation. Auriol’s theory when first\\nproposed was an extremely innovative way of explaining the mechanics\\nof salvation, and it came in for scathing criticism from, among\\nothers, Gregory of Rimini; but, whether through direct influence or\\nnot, elements of Auriol’s theory appear in the works of such\\nthinkers as William Ockham, Robert Holcot, and, on the eve of the\\nReformation, Gabriel Biel (Halverson 1998).\",\n \"\\nIn the rest of this entry, we’ll look at two areas in which\\nAuriol provoked a significant response in part on account of his\\nradical solutions, two areas that also illustrate the systematic and\\nhistorical nature of his thought: his ideas on the relation between\\ncognition and reality (including his conceptualism) and his ideas on\\nintuitive and abstractive cognition.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.4 Predestination and Free Will\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nIf there is one thing that is known about Peter Auriol, it is that he\\nwas a “conceptualist.” Indeed, Auriol has often been\\nviewed as a forerunner of William Ockham precisely on account of his\\nconceptualism. What is probably the very first monograph ever devoted\\nto Auriol (Dreiling 1913) deals with his conceptualism. Thus,\\nunderstanding Auriol’s conceptualism is a good place to start\\nwhen dealing with Auriol’s thought.\",\n \"\\nIn fact, Auriol is a conceptualist. By this it is merely\\nmeant that, for Auriol, only singulars (i.e. individuals) have real,\\nextra-mental existence. As Auriol writes: “every thing, insofar\\nas it exists, exists as a singular” (omnis res, eo quod est,\\nsingulariter est). Moreover, Auriol states explicitly that there\\nis no principle of individuation — individuals just are\\nindividuals and their individuality needs no further explanation. This\\nis one of the most basic of Auriol’s metaphysical principles,\\nand it necessarily entails that universality and universals are mental\\nphenomena, fabricated in some way by the intellect. Thus, for Auriol,\\nthe individuality of singular things does not need explaining, but the\\nformation of universal concepts on the basis of these individuals does\\nneed explaining. What is important for understanding Auriol’s\\nconceptualism, then, is explicating his theory of intellectual\\ncognition: determining the process by which the intellect fabricates\\nthese universal concepts, determining what these universal concepts\\nare, and what relation they have to really existing singulars in the\\nworld.\",\n \"\\nWhile only individuals have real, extra-mental existence, every\\nindividual by its very nature has several different ontological or\\nquidditative aspects. Auriol calls these quidditative aspects\\nrationes (a term that will remain untranslated in the rest of\\nthis entry). Thus, Auriol claims that, e.g., Socrates has the\\nrationes substance, corporeality, sensitivity, rationality.\\nMoreover, rationes of the same kind found in different\\nindividuals are “maximally similar” (simillimae).\\ne.g., Socrates’ corporeality is totally like Plato’s\\ncorporeality, which is totally like the donkey Brunellus’\\ncorporeality. It should be noted that these rationes are\\nnon-universal characteristics, i.e. a ratio belongs to one\\nand only one individual. This is why Auriol emphasizes the maximal\\nsimilarity of rationes of the same kind: they are not the\\nsame and they are not shared, they are merely as alike as they can be.\\nWhat is most important about these rationes in the present\\ncontext is that they are the basic unit of intellectual acquaintance:\\nevery ratio of its very nature is able to serve as the basis\\nfor a concept, although the concept that results from the intellection\\nof a ratio can be modified by the way that we conceive it\\n(our modus concipiendi), a purely psychological difference\\nwith no immediate grounds in extra-mental reality. We might say that a\\nratio directs our intellect to form one certain concept, this\\ncore concept undergoing modification according to the way we conceive\\nit. Our universal concepts, then, have in these rationes a\\ndirect basis in extra-mental individuals. (See, for more on this,\\nFriedman 1999, Wöller 2015, pp. 36–79; for the term\\n‘maximally similar’ [as it is used in Ockham], see\\nPanaccio 1992, pp. 258–67.) What universal concept we actually\\nform, according to Auriol, depends on how closely our will makes the\\nintellect focus on the information we receive from the object of\\ncognition, and hence how strong an impression the object makes on the\\nintellect: the more closely focused, the stronger the impression, the\\nmore specific the universal concept that is formed.\",\n \"\\nTo understand further what universal concepts are, we need to know\\nwhat Auriol thinks concepts in general are. Central to this is\\nAuriol’s theory of apparent existence or esse apparens,\\nthat, at all levels, our cognitive faculties, in the very process of\\ncognizing, put the object of cognition into a special type of\\nexistence, termed by Auriol “apparent existence” (esse\\napparens). For Auriol, in line with the general medieval view,\\nour cognitive apparatus is divided into a sensory part (including the\\nfive external senses, the common sense, which puts the sense data from\\nthe five external senses together, and the imagination, which stores,\\nretrieves, and sometimes manipulates the sense data, as well as sends\\nthem on to the intellect) and an intellectual part (including the\\nagent and the possible intellect). According to Auriol, in any\\ncognitive act — whether sensory or intellectual — the\\ncognitive power puts the object of cognition into this special type of\\nexistence, and the object of cognition in this special type of\\nexistence is the object as perceived. Thus concepts as well\\nas sensations are simply cognized things themselves in a type of\\nexistence different from that which they have in extra-mental reality.\\nAuriol employs at least two different approaches to argue for this\\nview: one based on intellectual cognition, the other based on sensory\\ncognition. (Auriol’s trinitarian theology provides further\\narguments for this view; see Friedman 2013, esp. Ch. 9, section 4.)\\nWe’ll look at each of these in turn, in the process sketching\\nwhat it was about the theory of esse apparens that made it\\nquite radical and disturbing to Auriol’s medieval readers. (For\\nthe sake of precision, esse apparens will go untranslated\\nhereafter.)\",\n \"\\nIntellectual cognition (see Friedman 1999;\\nAdriaenssen 2014, esp. pp. 85–95; Friedman 2015; Adriaenssen\\n2017a, pp. 82–99): Auriol’s solution to the question of\\nwhat a concept is takes its point of departure in the necessity of\\nexplaining three things at once: essential predication; intellectual\\nacquaintance with extra-mental objects; and necessary, scientific\\nknowledge. Auriol holds that the first of these explanatory\\nrequirements would not be fulfilled by any theory of concepts\\naccording to which the concept is a type of representation or token of\\nthe thing, if this representation has real — albeit mental\\n— being. Examples that he gives of solutions of this sort are\\nthat a concept might be the intellectual act or an intelligible\\nspecies or any type of accident terminating an act of the\\nunderstanding. All of these representations have some real being of\\ntheir own. According to Auriol, these types of representational\\ntheories of concepts would make explaining essential predication\\nimpossible, since, assuming any of them, when I predicated, e.g.,\\nanimal of human being, I would make a false predication, inasmuch as\\nthe concept human being would not be the concept animal. The\\nultimate problem with theories of universals of this sort, according\\nto Auriol, is that if they were correct, then universals would not be\\nuniversals at all, but would be particulars with their own real being.\\nMoreover, not only these same types of representational views of\\nconcepts, but also any theory that holds concepts to be Platonic\\nIdeas, would hinder us in having intellectual acquaintance with\\nextra-mental objects, Auriol’s second explanatory requirement.\\nOn both these types of theories, our knowledge would extend only to\\nthese really existing entities. We would, according to Auriol, be\\nintellectually blind to extra-mental reality. On the other hand, we\\ncould certainly have intellectual acquaintance with extra-mental\\nobjects, if our concepts were particular things in the extra-mental\\nworld as they exist extra-mentally — a final position Auriol\\ncriticizes — but we would be unable to have necessary,\\nscientific knowledge, Auriol’s third explanatory requirement. In\\nfact, we would be unable to make universal judgments of any kind,\\nsince there would be nothing universal about our knowledge; instead of\\nknowing that all mules are sterile, we would know only that this mule\\nis sterile and that that mule is sterile.\",\n \"\\nHaving considered all these views and found them wanting, Auriol\\noffers his own alternative: the only way to explain at once essential\\npredication, intellectual acquaintance with extra-mental objects, and\\nnecessary, scientific knowledge is to maintain that concepts\\nare extra-mental particulars, but having a different type of\\nexistence (modus essendi) from the real existence they have\\nextra-mentally. This special type of existence Auriol terms esse\\napparens, apparent being, but he uses many synonyms for it,\\nincluding “intentional” or “objective”\\nexistence. (For other synonyms, see Tachau 1988, p. 90.) What\\ncharacterizes this type of existence is that it is a particular\\nextra-mental object, e.g., Socrates, but indistinguishably mixed\\ntogether (indistinguibiliter immiscetur) with\\npassive conception, i.e. the formation of a concept of Socrates. A\\nconcept of Socrates is Socrates as conceived.\",\n \"\\nFor Auriol, Socrates and a concept grasping Socrates, then, are the\\nsame thing with differing types of existence. That they are “the\\nsame thing” Auriol means quite literally. He says that “a\\nthing and its intention do not differ numerically with respect to\\nanything absolute”; they are the same thing strictly speaking.\\nWhat thing and intention differ by is a respect or a relation. And\\nthis is no ordinary respect “fixed to or superimposed upon that\\nthing, as are other relations, rather it is utterly intrinsic and\\nindistinguishably joined to it.” This intrinsic relation, Auriol\\ntells us, is the appearance of the thing as an object of perception\\n(apparere) to a perceiver (hence the term esse\\napparens). For Auriol, then, it is intrinsic to each and every\\nthing to have two different types of being: real or extra-mental being\\non the one hand, and intentional or objective being on the other.\\nUnlike real being, the thing’s intentional being needs a\\nperceiver in order to actualize it. This is only to say that it is\\nthrough the act of conceiving that a thing is put into intentional\\nbeing.\",\n \"\\nIn fact — and here we return to conceptualism — on the\\nbasis of what Auriol has said, we can deduce that every particular\\nthing, e.g. Socrates, has several potential intentional existences:\\none for each of Socrates’ rationes, those basic units\\nof intellectual acquaintance that direct the mind to form certain\\nconcepts of him. And, according to Auriol, all of these different\\nconcepts of Socrates are Socrates. On Auriol’s account,\\nthis makes good sense: rationes are quidditative or essential\\naspects without which a particular thing would not be the particular\\nthing that it in fact is. Thus, Socrates is not Socrates without being\\na rational animal, i.e. without having the rationes\\nsensitivity and rationality. Socrates is every bit as much a human\\nbeing as he is Socrates, and on Auriol’s theory the concept\\n‘human being’ is every bit as much Socrates as is the\\nconcept ‘Socrates’. Thus upon intellectual acquaintance,\\nSocrates (and in particular his ratio of rationality) directs\\nus to form the concept ‘human being’, and that concept\\nis Socrates, one of Socrates’ several potential\\nintentional existences.\",\n \"\\nIn this way Auriol attempts to deal with the problems he saw in other\\ntheories of concepts. On the one hand, he attempts to get our\\nknowledge grounded as firmly as possible on extra-mental things: a\\nconcept simply is the intellected extra-mental particular in\\na different type of being from that which it has extra-mentally, a\\ntype of being that is nevertheless intrinsic to the extra-mental\\nparticular; the concept offers no barrier whatsoever between\\nconceiving mind and conceived object. At the same time, however,\\nAuriol wants to preserve the universality of universal concepts and\\ntheir use in essential predications and necessary, scientific\\nknowledge, and he thinks that his theory of concepts does just that.\\nBecause rationes of the same kind found in different\\nindividuals are “maximally similar,” they all direct the\\nmind to form the same concept. Thus the concept ‘human\\nbeing’ arising from Socrates is the same as the concept\\n‘human being’ arising from Plato, since they are both\\nbased on the maximally similar ratio of rationality. Auriol\\nis clear that a universal concept is all of its particulars,\\nrose is all particular roses, animal is all\\nparticular animals. That is to say, animal is the concept and every\\nreally existing animal at the same time.\",\n \"\\nSensory Cognition (Wood 1982, pp. 214–17,\\n220–23; Tachau 1988, pp. 89–100; Denery 1998, pp.\\n28–39; Lička 2016; Pickavé 2017; Bolyard 2021,\\nsection 4.2.2): The intellect is not the only cognitive faculty that\\nfunctions by putting the cognized thing into esse apparens:\\nthe sensitive faculties also work in this way according to Auriol. In\\nfact, Auriol uses sensory cognition, and his claim that the senses\\nform esse apparens, as further proof that the intellect does\\nso as well. In a famous passage in Auriol’s works\\n(Scriptum, d. 3, q. 3, a.1, ed. Buytaert, vol. 2, pp.\\n696–99), one that was known to and criticized by William Ockham,\\nAuriol creates an account of sensory cognition that takes its point of\\ndeparture in a group of “experiences” that Auriol thinks\\nprove that the senses cognize by actively placing the object sensed in\\nesse apparens. Thus, if someone were on a ship moving down a\\nriver, it would appear to that person that the trees on the shore were\\nmoving; when a baton is twirled extremely rapidly, it appears to the\\nviewer that a colored circle hovers in the air; a stick placed halfway\\ninto a bucket of water appears to be broken; if I press on my eye\\nwhile looking at a candle, it will appear that I see two candles; upon\\nlooking directly at the sun, an afterimage appears. Auriol gives eight\\nexperiences like these, but for him all of them lead to the same\\nconclusion: that in each of these cases, what appears to us\\n(i.e. our erroneous perception) does not correspond directly to\\nreality but is a result of the senses’ putting the object into\\nesse apparens. Take the case of the twirling baton: what is\\nthe circle that appears in the air? It can’t be anything real\\nexisting in the baton itself, since the baton is straight. Nor,\\nclearly, is the circle something real hovering in the air. Finally,\\nthe circle is not something in vision or in the eye, since we are\\nseeing the circle and not our vision of it, and also since the circle\\nappears to be in the air. For Auriol, the only possible explanation\\nfor the circle is that it appears to us because our sense of sight has\\nactively put the baton into esse apparens. More generally,\\nwhat we see in these cases is “only the appearance of the thing\\nor the thing in esse apparens.” Sensory error, for\\nAuriol, is explained by appealing to the fundamental activity of the\\nsenses. And Auriol insists that the senses are just as active in cases\\nwhere they function correctly; this is because, since activity is a\\nnoble trait to have, if in erroneous visions our sense of sight\\nactively places the thing seen in esse apparens, it will\\ncertainly do so in veridical visions. The difference between a\\nveridical sensory experience and an erroneous one is that in a\\nveridical one the way the object of cognition appears and the\\nway it is in extra-mental reality coincide. So in veridical\\nsensory experience we have no way to tell that the senses are placing\\nthe thing into esse apparens. Thus, these experiences of\\nsensory error are of immense importance, since it is only through them\\nthat we can discern the necessary role that esse apparens and\\nthe activity of the senses play in all sensory cognition.\",\n \"\\nFor Auriol, then, the senses necessarily put the cognized object into\\nesse apparens or intentional being; this is a condition of\\nour perceiving. Moreover, Auriol makes clear in this context that this\\nesse apparens is not a representation of the thing with its\\nown real being; rather it is the thing itself merely placed\\nin another type of existence. The esse apparens of a sensed\\nobject is merely that object as sensed. (See on this particularly\\nDenery 1998, pp. 34–39.) Obviously, this corresponds to the\\ntheory we have already seen Auriol holds concerning esse\\napparens in intellectual cognition, and Auriol makes the\\ncorrespondence explicit. To go from sensory perception to intellectual\\ncognition, Auriol uses a common scholastic principle called by\\nPhilotheus Boehner “The Principle of Hierarchy” (Boehner\\n1949, p. 298): given two faculties, one lower and one higher (like\\nsense and intellect), if the lower faculty can do something noble,\\nthen the higher faculty can certainly do the same. The activity of the\\nsenses, then, i.e. the fact that the senses put the object into\\nesse apparens, since it is noble, shows that the intellect\\nalso puts its object into esse apparens. (Auriol’s\\ntheory of sensory perception is complicated by the fact that Auriol\\nseems to claim that some of the illusory sensory experiences he\\nmentions exist outside the mind, e.g., that the colored circle is\\n“in” the air and not “in” the mind. For\\napproaches to this complication, see Pasnau 1997, pp. 69–76;\\nDenery 1998, pp. 36–37; Lička 2016).\",\n \"\\nThree general claims can be made on the basis of this examination of\\nAuriol’s ideas on cognition and reality. First, Auriol is a\\nconceptualist, holding that universals are nothing more than concepts\\nformed by the mind, although these universal concepts do have a direct\\nbasis in the particular thing cognized (the rationes).\\nSecond, a principle underlying Auriol’s theory of cognition is\\nthat cognitive faculties are fundamentally active. All cognition takes\\nplace because a cognitive faculty places the object of\\ncognition into esse apparens, which is merely the object of\\ncognition in a different type of being than it has extra-mentally, the\\nbeing of being perceived. Thus, Auriol is part of one pronounced\\nstrain of medieval thought (deriving from Augustine and ultimately\\nfrom Plato) that rejects that the soul and its powers are passively\\naffected by extra-mental objects. (See on this Tachau 1988, Friedman\\n2000.) Cognitive powers are, for Auriol, active. A third point, and\\none that has been noted in a great deal of the secondary literature\\n(e.g., Tachau 1988; Denery 1998; Bolyard 2000; Friedman 2000) is that\\nby appealing to erroneous visions to show that both sense and\\nintellect produce esse apparens or make things appear, Auriol\\nhas given error a central place in his account of cognition. To put\\nthis in another way, Auriol does not have a real problem explaining\\nhow we can have erroneous perception and intellection (in contrast to\\nmany theories of knowledge); rather he needs to explain how we can\\nhave veridical ones and just as importantly how we can know when we\\nare having veridical ones. This is roughly one of the functions that\\nthe distinction between intuitive and abstractive cognition served for\\nsome medieval authors (in e.g., John Duns Scotus and William Ockham),\\nalthough as we will see, Auriol does not use it in this way. Indeed it\\nseems best to describe Auriol as a “reliabilist,” holding\\nas a type of axiomatic principle that under normal circumstances our\\nGod-given cognitive faculties represent the world in an adequate\\nmanner. (See Bolyard 2000, p. 175; that Auriol is not the only\\nmedieval thinker with this reliabilist attitude, see e.g., Stump 1998,\\npp. 306–07.) No matter what Auriol thought, however, the\\nskeptical implications of Auriol’s theory of esse\\napparens did worry many of his medieval readers, and the theory\\nelicited a critical response because some thought that it posed too\\nsharp a break between cognition and reality. (For examples, see Wood\\n1982, Tachau 1988, Adriaenssen 2017b)\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Cognition and Reality: Conceptualism and the esse apparens\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nJohn Duns Scotus, who introduced the distinction between intuitive and\\nabstractive cognition, took the view that intuitive and abstractive\\ncognition were distinct because they had different objects. Thus, for\\nScotus, we have an abstractive cognition of an object when it is not\\ndirectly present to us, on account of there being some intervening\\nrepresentation; an intuitive cognition can only come about when the\\nobject of cognition is existing and directly present to us. For\\nScotus, then, intuitive cognition carries along with it the guarantee\\nthat the object of cognition exists; not so for abstractive cognition.\\n(See Tachau 1988, esp. pp. 68–81; Dumont 1989; Pini 2014.) It is\\nwell known that William Ockham took exception to this view, holding\\nthat we can, in certain extraordinary (i.e. supernatural) cases, have\\nintuitive cognition of non-existent objects. Auriol too objects to\\nScotus’ view.\",\n \"\\nFor Auriol, in contrast to Scotus, intuitive cognition is possible\\nwhether the object of cognition is present or absent. Likewise, an\\nabstractive cognition of an object that is actually present is\\npossible. The distinction between intuitive and abstractive cognition\\ndoes not depend on the object at all; the very same object can be\\ncognized in both an intuitive and an abstractive way. According to\\nAuriol, whether we are having the one type of cognition or the other\\ndepends exclusively on the characteristics of the cognition that we\\nare having, how the object appears to us. Auriol says explicitly that\\nintuitive and abstractive cognition are in fact simply two\\nfundamentally different ways that the esse apparens created\\nby the cognitive faculties can appear to us: “abstractive and\\nintuitive cognition differ … for there are two modes of formal\\nappearance … by which things appear objectively” (trans.\\nPasnau 2002, p. 201, n. 111). In order to illustrate this, Auriol\\nclaims that ocular cognition, i.e. the sense of sight, is fully\\nintuitive, while imaginary cognition, i.e. cognizing something through\\nthe internal sense of the imagination, is fully abstractive. This is\\nthe governing metaphor in Auriol’s attempt to distinguish the\\ntwo types of cognition: sight is intuitive, imagination is\\nabstractive. Thus, describing sensory cognition, Auriol gives four\\ntraits that together enable us to determine whether any particular\\ncognition is intuitive or abstractive. First, an intuitive cognition\\nis characterized by being immediate or direct, as\\nwhen we see an object before us. Not so abstractive or imaginary\\ncognition; it is mediate, requiring some type of discursive process.\\nAuriol gives the following example: an astronomer sitting in his room\\ncan predict an eclipse through calculation, and he can even imagine it\\non that basis, but this is something entirely different from seeing\\nthe eclipse directly. A second characteristic of ocular or intuitive\\ncognition is the presentness of the object. The object of an\\nintuitive cognition seems to be present (whether it actually is or\\nnot), whereas the object of an abstractive cognition does not have\\nthis appearance of presence. Take the astronomer again. He can imagine\\nthe eclipse, but in the very act of doing so he knows that the eclipse\\nis not present before him. The third and fourth characteristics that\\nAuriol mentions are roughly equivalent: an intuitive cognition carries\\nwith it the actualization and existence of its\\nobject; not so an imaginary, abstractive cognition. The astronomer can\\nimagine an eclipse, and even imagine an eclipse taking place right\\nnow, but again, the very fact that he is imagining the eclipse bears\\nwith it the recognition that it is not in fact actualized and\\nexisting. Auriol sums up:\",\n \"\\nTherefore, it is rightly said that an intuitive cognition is a direct\\ncognition as opposed to a discursive one, that it is present as\\nopposed to the absent mode in which the imagination reaches even\\ntoward things that are present, and that it actualizes the object and\\nposits its existence, since it makes the object’s real existence\\nand actual position appear, even if the object does not exist. And in\\ncontrast it is clear that an imaginary cognition lacks and abstracts\\nfrom these four conditions. It extends to its object neither directly\\nnor presently, nor by actualizing or positing existence, even if one\\nimagines the object to exist and be actual and even if it is present.\\n(trans. Pasnau 2002, pp. 206–07, n. 109).\\n\",\n \"\\n(The most complete discussion of Auriol on intuitive and abstractive\\ncognition is Boehner 1949; for the background and reception of\\nAuriol’s view, see particularly Tachau 1988; for a translation\\ninto English of Auriol’s major text on intuitive and abstractive\\ncognition, his Scriptum, Prologue (aka Prooemium), q. 2, see\\nPasnau 2002, pp. 178–218.)\",\n \"\\nThus, what is central to Auriol’s distinction between intuitive\\nand abstractive cognition is the character of the cognition as it\\nappears to us. The distinction between them is phenomenologically\\ndetermined. As mentioned above, in this way Auriol rejected\\nScotus’ view that intuitive cognitions are only of objects\\npresent and existing. Auriol’s rejection of Scotus’\\ndistinction between intuitive and abstractive cognition takes as one\\nof its starting points several “experiences” that recall\\nthe experiences he employed to show that the senses put the object of\\nsensitive cognition into esse apparens. For example, upon\\nlooking directly at the sun or any other luminous object, an\\nafterimage appears; thus a vision of the sun remains in the eye even\\nwhen the object itself is absent. In dreams, we can experience sights,\\nsounds, and tactile sensations, in the real absence of the objects of\\nsensation. Persons who are deceived by illusions often see things that\\nare not really there. In all of these sensations the object appears to\\nbe actually present and existing, when it is not. Auriol concludes\\nthat we can have an intuitive sensory cognition of non-existent\\nobjects.\",\n \"\\nThat was the characterization of intuitive sensory cognition\\nas opposed to abstractive cognition. What about intellectual\\ncognition? Auriol makes clear that the human intellect can have\\nintuitive cognition. To show this he first appeals to the Principle of\\nHierarchy mentioned above: because the lower faculties, the senses,\\ncan have intuitive cognition, therefore it is certain that the higher\\nfaculty, intellect, can have intuitive cognition, since it is more\\nnoble than the abstractive cognition that we know the intellect does\\nhave. Moreover, on the basis of a famous passage from St. Paul’s\\nI Corinthians (13:12 “For now we see in a mirror dimly,\\nbut then face to face”), Auriol maintains that we are assured\\nthat the beatific vision of God is an intuitive intellectual\\ncognition.\",\n \"\\nAlthough intuitive cognition is possible for an intellect,\\nAuriol, in contrast to William Ockham, nevertheless denies that we\\nexperience intuitive cognition in this life. Because the\\nintellect of the wayfarer (viator — the person in this\\nlife) is dependent upon the senses and their cognition of particulars,\\nAuriol denies that we can have (or at least that we can know that we\\nhave) intellectual cognition with the direct and present, ocular-like\\ncognition that is characteristic of intuitive cognition. Auriol says:\\n“Thus each of these cognitions should be posited within\\nintellect, although we do not experience intuitive cognition in this\\nlife because of its conjunction with sensory intuition” (trans.\\nPasnau 2002, pp. 210–11, n. 121.) Intuitive intellectual\\ncognition is reserved for the angels and for the blessed in heaven,\\nunencumbered by bodily senses. All of our intellectual cognition in\\nthis life is characterized by the discursivity and mediacy that is the\\nmark of an abstractive cognition.\",\n \"\\nAbove, it was mentioned that Auriol seems ultimately to be best\\ndescribed as a reliabilist; he does not question that, given normal\\nconditions, our God-given cognitive faculties work as they should and\\nthat they are self-correcting. He does not seem to have been concerned\\nabout possible skeptical ramifications of his theory of esse\\napparens. But with this said, by denying that human beings in\\nthis life have intuitive intellectual cognition, he set the stage for\\nsomewhat strictly limiting human intellectual abilities in his\\nphilosophy.\",\n \"\\nThis last point explains some interesting features of Auriol’s\\nattitude towards human knowledge. In particular, despite the fact that\\nAuriol maintains that God could give a person in this life an\\nabstractive cognition of the divine essence, and that this abstractive\\ncognition would be able to serve as the basis for demonstrative\\nknowledge of all articles of the Christian faith (Scriptum,\\nPrologue, q. 2, ed. Buytaert, vol. 1, pp. 211–14; trans. Pasnau\\n2002, p. 213, n. 130 and p. 214, n. 133), nevertheless Auriol often\\nexhibits a noticeable pessimism when it comes to human cognitive\\nabilities. Thus, Auriol argues at length that in this life we are\\nunable to decide such issues as whether the universe is eternal or\\ncreated in time. (We know, of course, through Scripture that the world\\nis not eternal, but we could never decisively prove this by means of\\nunaided human reason.) Auriol argues that this is the case because we\\ndo not have direct intellectual cognition of, e.g., temporal instants;\\nsuch cognition would allow us to resolve this problem. (See esp.\\nNielsen 1996, esp. pp. 223–26, 232–35, 239–41; see\\nalso Nielsen 1999.) Here we see that Auriol’s rejection of\\nintuitive intellectual cognition in this life lies at the heart of a\\nsomewhat pessimistic view of the reach of human reason: we do not have\\ndirect intuitive knowledge of the world (much less of God), only\\nindirect abstractive knowledge, and this places fairly strict\\nlimitations on just what our intellect can achieve unaided. The\\ndisembodied soul of the blessed, having direct intuitive intellectual\\ncognition, will fare much better.\",\n \"\\nAuriol’s theory of human intellectual cognition of singulars\\nalso shows the influence of his rejection of intuitive intellectual\\ncognition in this life. Auriol is explicit that universal concepts\\n(formed through the Aristotelian process of abstraction) always appear\\nto us as abstractive cognitions, since what is universal abstracts\\nfrom any presentness and directness of the object of cognition (see\\ne.g. Scriptum, Prologue, q. 2, ed. Buytaert, p. 206, n. 111,\\nl. 87, Pasnau 2002, p. 207; cf. Friedman 1997, pp. 310–14).\\nThere were, however, a number of members of the Franciscan order,\\nincluding John Duns Scotus, who was sometimes understood by\\ncontemporaries to have claimed that singulars could be cognized as\\nsingular by the intellect. (On this aspect of Scotus thought see,\\ne.g., Boler 1982, esp. Pini 2008.) Auriol rejects this Franciscan\\ntradition; because true intuitive intellectual cognition is barred to\\nus in this lifetime, we can have no direct intellectual cognition of\\nsingulars at all. Auriol maintains in his theory of intellectual\\ncognition of singulars that we only form concepts of singulars through\\nthe mediation of the senses and by means of a discursive process. (By\\nrecognizing that the senses are now sensing a singular, the intellect\\ncan reason that a singular must now exist and be present, but we have\\nno direct intellectual knowledge or concept of any singular.) Auriol\\nexplicitly claims, however, that angels and the blessed, lacking\\nbodies and bodily senses, would have direct intellectual cognition of\\nsingulars, just as God does by seeing his own essence. (On\\nAuriol’s theory, see Friedman 2000.) A mild pessimism about\\nhuman cognitive abilities is thus systemic in Auriol’s thought,\\nand has its most clear expression in his claim that we do not\\nexperience intuitive intellectual cognition in this life.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Intuitive and Abstractive Cognition and the Limits of Human Cognitive Abilities\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Peter Auriol, Commentariorum in primum librum Sententiarum\nPars Prima, Rome: Ex typographia Vaticana, 1596.","Peter Auriol, Scriptum super primum sententiarum, E.M.\nBuytaert (ed.), 2 volumes, St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute,\n1952–56.","Adriaenssen, H.T., 2014, ‘Peter John Olivi and Peter Auriol\non Conceptual Thought’, Oxford Studies in Medieval\nPhilosophy, 2: 67–97.","–––, 2017a, Representation and Scepticism\nfrom Aquinas to Descartes, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge\nUniversity Press.","–––, 2017b, ‘Peter Auriol on the Intuitive\nCognition of Nonexistents. Revisiting the Charge of Skepticism in\nWalter Chatton and Adam Wodeham’, Oxford Studies in Medieval\nPhilosophy, 5: 151–176.","Aertsen, J., 2012, Medieval Philosophy as Transcendental\nThought. From Philip the Chancellor (ca. 1225) to Francisco\nSuárez, Leiden: Brill.","Alliney, G., 2015, ‘Landolfo Caracciolo, Peter Auriol, and\nJohn Duns Scotus on Freedom and Contingency’, Recherches de\nthéologie et philosophie médiévales, 82(2):\n271–300.","Amerini, F., 2014, ‘Peter Auriol on Categories’,\nDocumenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale, 25:\n493–535.","Boehner, P., 1949, ‘Notitia Intuitiva of Non Existents\nAccording to Peter Aureoli, O.F.M. (1322)’, Rivista di\nfilosofia neo-scolastica, 41: 289–307; also published in\nFranciscan Studies, 8 (1948): 388–416.","Boler, J., 1982, ‘Intuitive and Abstractive\nCognition’, in Norman Kretzmann, et al. (eds.), The\nCambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press, 460–78.","Bolyard, C., 2000, ‘Knowing naturaliter:\nAuriol’s propositional foundations’, Vivarium,\n38(1): 162–76.","–––, 2021, ‘Medieval Skepticism’, in\nThe Stanford Encyclopedia Philosophy, Spring 2021 Edition,\nEdward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =\n <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/skepticism-medieval/>","Brower, J. E., 2018, ‘Medieval Theories of Relations’,\nin The Stanford Encyclopedia Philosophy, Winter 2018 Edition,\nEdward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =\n <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/relations-medieval/>","Brown, S. F., 1964, ‘The Unity of the Concept of Being in\nPeter Aureoli’s Scriptum and Commentarium’, Ph.D.\ndissertation, Université Catholique de Louvain.","–––, 1965, ‘Avicenna and the Unity of the\nConcept of Being: The Interpretation of Henry of Ghent, Duns Scotus,\nGerard of Bologna and Peter Aureoli’, Franciscan\nStudies, 25: 117–50.","Denery, D. G., 1998, ‘The Appearance of Reality: Peter\nAureol and the Experience of Perceptual Error’, Franciscan\nStudies, 55: 27–52.","Dreiling, R., 1913, Der Konzeptualismus in der\nUniversalienlehre des Petrus Aureoli, Münster i. W:\nAschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung.","Duba, W., 2000, ‘The Immaculate Conception in the Works of\nPeter Auriol’, Vivarium, 38(1): 5–34.","–––, 2001, ‘Aristotle’s\nMetaphysics in Peter Auriol’s Commentary on the\nSentences’, Documenti e studi sulla tradizione\nfilosofica medievale, 12: 549–72.","Duba, W. and C. Schabel 2017, ‘Remigio, Auriol, Scotus, and\nthe Myth of the Two-Year Sentences Lecture at Paris’,\nRecherches de Théologie et Philosophie\nmédiévales, 84(1): 143–179.","Dumont, S. D., 1989, ‘Theology as a Science and Duns\nScotus’s Distinction between Intuitive and Abstractive\nCognition’, Speculum, 64: 579–99.","Friedman, R. L., 1997, ‘Conceiving and Modifying Reality:\nSome Modist Roots of Peter Auriol’s Theory of Concept\nFormation’, in C. Marmo (ed.), Vestigia, Imagines,\nVerba, Turnhout: Brepols, 305–21.","–––, 1999, ‘Peter Auriol on Intentions and\nEssential Predication’, in S. Ebbesen and R. L. Friedman (eds.),\nMedieval Analyses in Language and Cognition, Copenhagen: C.A.\nRietzel (commissioned by Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and\nLetters), 415–430.","–––, 2000, ‘Peter Auriol on Intellectual\nCognition of Singulars’, Vivarium, 38(1):\n177–193.","–––, 2013, Intellectual Traditions in the\nMedieval University: The Use of Philosophical Psychology in\nTrinitarian Theology among the Franciscans and Dominicans,\n1250–1350, Leiden: Brill.","–––, 2015, ‘Act, Species, and Appearance:\nPeter Auriol on Intellectual Cognition and Consciousness’, in G.\nKlima (ed.), Intentionality, Cognition, and Mental Representation\nin Medieval Philosophy, New York: Fordham University Press,\n141–165.","Goris, W., 2002, ‘Implicit Knowledge – Being as First\nKnown in Peter of Oriel’, Recherches de théologie et\nphilosophie médiévales, 69(1): 33–65.","Halverson, J. L., 1998, Peter Aureol on Predestination. A\nChallenge to Late Medieval Thought, Leiden: Brill.","Henninger, M., 1989, Relations: Medieval Theories\n1250–1325, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","Hoffmann, T., 2015, ‘Peter Auriol on Free Choice and Free\nJudgment’, Vivarium, 53(1): 65–89.","Lička, L., 2016, ‘Perception and Objective Being: Peter\nAuriol on Perceptual Acts and their Objects’, American\nCatholic Philosophical Quarterly, 90(2): 49–76.","Nielsen, L. O., 1996, ‘Dictates of Faith versus Dictates of\nReason: Peter Auriole on Divine Power, Creation, and Human\nRationality’, Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica\nmedievale, 7: 213–41.","–––, 1999, ‘The Intelligibility of Faith\nand the Nature of Theology: Peter Auriole’s Theological\nProgramme’, Studia Theologica, 53(1): 26–39.","–––, 2002, ‘Peter Auriol’s Way with\nWords: The Genesis of Peter Auriol’s Commentaries on Peter\nLombard’s First and Fourth Books of the Sentences’, in G.\nEvans (ed.) Mediaeval Commentaries on the Sentences of\nPeter Lombard, Leiden: Brill, 149–219.","Panaccio, C., 1992, Les mots, les concepts, et les\nchoses, Paris-Montreal: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin. ","Pasnau, R., 1997, Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle\nAges, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","–––, 2002, The Cambridge Translations of\nMedieval Philosophical Texts, (Volume 3: Mind and\nKnowledge), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","–––, 2008, ‘Id Quo Cognoscimus’, in\nS. Knuuttila and P. Kärkkäin (eds.), Theories of\nPerception in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, Dordrecht:\nSpringer Science.","–––, 2011, Metaphysical Themes\n1274–1671, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","Pickavé, M., 2004, ‘Metaphysics as First Science: the\nCase of Peter Auriol’, Documenti e studi sulla tradizione\nfilosofica medievale, 15: 487–516.","–––, 2017, ‘Peter Auriol and William of\nOckham on a Medieval Version of the Argument from Illusion’, in\nJ. Pelletier and M. Roques (eds.), The Language of Thought in Late\nMedieval Philosophy. Essays in Honor of Claude Panaccio, Cham:\nSpringer, 183–99.","Pini, G., 2008, ‘Scotus on the Objects of Cognitive\nActs’, Franciscan Studies, 66: 281–315.","–––, 2014, ‘Scotus on Intuitive and\nAbstractive Cognition’, in J. Hause (ed.), Debates in\nMedieval Philosophy. Essential Readings and Contemporary\nResponses, London: Routledge, 348–65.","Schabel, C., 2000a, Theology at Paris, 1316–1345. Peter\nAuriol and the Problem of Divine Foreknowledge and Future\nContingents, Aldershot: Ashgate.","–––, 2000b, ‘Place, Space, and the Physics\nof Grace in Auriol’s Sentences Commentary’,\nVivarium, 38(1): 117–61.","–––, 2003, ‘Divine Foreknowledge and Human\nFreedom: Auriol, Pomponazzi, and Luther on “Scholastic\nSubtleties”’, in R. L. Friedman and L. O. Nielsen (eds.),\nThe Medieval Heritage in Early Modern Metaphysics and Modal Logic,\n1400–1800, Dordrecht: Springer, 165–89.","–––, 2009, ‘Auriol’s Rubrics:\nCitations of University Theologians in Peter Auriol’s\nScriptum in Primum Librum Sententiarum’, in S. F.\nBrown, T. Dewender, and T. Kobusch (eds.), Philosophical Debates\nat Paris in the Early Fourteenth Century, Leiden: Brill,\n3–38.","Stump, E., 1998, ‘Aquinas’s Account of the Mechanisms\nof Intellective Cognition’, Revue Internationale de\nPhilosophie, 204: 287–307.","Tachau, K. H., 1988, Vision and Certitude in the Age of\nOckham: Optics, Epistemology and the Foundation of Semantics,\n1250–1345, Leiden: Brill.","Teetaert, A., 1935, ‘Pierre Auriol ou Oriol’, in\nDictionnaire de théologie catholique, XII/2,\nParis: Librairie Letouzey et Ané, cols. 1810–81.","Wöller, F., 2015, Theologie und Wissenschaft bei Petrus\nAureoli. Ein scholastischer Entwurf aus dem frühen 14.\nJahrhundert, Leiden: Brill.","Wood, R., 1982, ‘Adam Wodeham on Sensory Illusions’,\nTraditio, 38: 213–52."],"string":"[\n \"Peter Auriol, Commentariorum in primum librum Sententiarum\\nPars Prima, Rome: Ex typographia Vaticana, 1596.\",\n \"Peter Auriol, Scriptum super primum sententiarum, E.M.\\nBuytaert (ed.), 2 volumes, St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute,\\n1952–56.\",\n \"Adriaenssen, H.T., 2014, ‘Peter John Olivi and Peter Auriol\\non Conceptual Thought’, Oxford Studies in Medieval\\nPhilosophy, 2: 67–97.\",\n \"–––, 2017a, Representation and Scepticism\\nfrom Aquinas to Descartes, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"–––, 2017b, ‘Peter Auriol on the Intuitive\\nCognition of Nonexistents. Revisiting the Charge of Skepticism in\\nWalter Chatton and Adam Wodeham’, Oxford Studies in Medieval\\nPhilosophy, 5: 151–176.\",\n \"Aertsen, J., 2012, Medieval Philosophy as Transcendental\\nThought. From Philip the Chancellor (ca. 1225) to Francisco\\nSuárez, Leiden: Brill.\",\n \"Alliney, G., 2015, ‘Landolfo Caracciolo, Peter Auriol, and\\nJohn Duns Scotus on Freedom and Contingency’, Recherches de\\nthéologie et philosophie médiévales, 82(2):\\n271–300.\",\n \"Amerini, F., 2014, ‘Peter Auriol on Categories’,\\nDocumenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale, 25:\\n493–535.\",\n \"Boehner, P., 1949, ‘Notitia Intuitiva of Non Existents\\nAccording to Peter Aureoli, O.F.M. (1322)’, Rivista di\\nfilosofia neo-scolastica, 41: 289–307; also published in\\nFranciscan Studies, 8 (1948): 388–416.\",\n \"Boler, J., 1982, ‘Intuitive and Abstractive\\nCognition’, in Norman Kretzmann, et al. (eds.), The\\nCambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press, 460–78.\",\n \"Bolyard, C., 2000, ‘Knowing naturaliter:\\nAuriol’s propositional foundations’, Vivarium,\\n38(1): 162–76.\",\n \"–––, 2021, ‘Medieval Skepticism’, in\\nThe Stanford Encyclopedia Philosophy, Spring 2021 Edition,\\nEdward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =\\n <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2021/entries/skepticism-medieval/>\",\n \"Brower, J. E., 2018, ‘Medieval Theories of Relations’,\\nin The Stanford Encyclopedia Philosophy, Winter 2018 Edition,\\nEdward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =\\n <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/relations-medieval/>\",\n \"Brown, S. F., 1964, ‘The Unity of the Concept of Being in\\nPeter Aureoli’s Scriptum and Commentarium’, Ph.D.\\ndissertation, Université Catholique de Louvain.\",\n \"–––, 1965, ‘Avicenna and the Unity of the\\nConcept of Being: The Interpretation of Henry of Ghent, Duns Scotus,\\nGerard of Bologna and Peter Aureoli’, Franciscan\\nStudies, 25: 117–50.\",\n \"Denery, D. G., 1998, ‘The Appearance of Reality: Peter\\nAureol and the Experience of Perceptual Error’, Franciscan\\nStudies, 55: 27–52.\",\n \"Dreiling, R., 1913, Der Konzeptualismus in der\\nUniversalienlehre des Petrus Aureoli, Münster i. W:\\nAschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung.\",\n \"Duba, W., 2000, ‘The Immaculate Conception in the Works of\\nPeter Auriol’, Vivarium, 38(1): 5–34.\",\n \"–––, 2001, ‘Aristotle’s\\nMetaphysics in Peter Auriol’s Commentary on the\\nSentences’, Documenti e studi sulla tradizione\\nfilosofica medievale, 12: 549–72.\",\n \"Duba, W. and C. Schabel 2017, ‘Remigio, Auriol, Scotus, and\\nthe Myth of the Two-Year Sentences Lecture at Paris’,\\nRecherches de Théologie et Philosophie\\nmédiévales, 84(1): 143–179.\",\n \"Dumont, S. D., 1989, ‘Theology as a Science and Duns\\nScotus’s Distinction between Intuitive and Abstractive\\nCognition’, Speculum, 64: 579–99.\",\n \"Friedman, R. L., 1997, ‘Conceiving and Modifying Reality:\\nSome Modist Roots of Peter Auriol’s Theory of Concept\\nFormation’, in C. Marmo (ed.), Vestigia, Imagines,\\nVerba, Turnhout: Brepols, 305–21.\",\n \"–––, 1999, ‘Peter Auriol on Intentions and\\nEssential Predication’, in S. Ebbesen and R. L. Friedman (eds.),\\nMedieval Analyses in Language and Cognition, Copenhagen: C.A.\\nRietzel (commissioned by Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and\\nLetters), 415–430.\",\n \"–––, 2000, ‘Peter Auriol on Intellectual\\nCognition of Singulars’, Vivarium, 38(1):\\n177–193.\",\n \"–––, 2013, Intellectual Traditions in the\\nMedieval University: The Use of Philosophical Psychology in\\nTrinitarian Theology among the Franciscans and Dominicans,\\n1250–1350, Leiden: Brill.\",\n \"–––, 2015, ‘Act, Species, and Appearance:\\nPeter Auriol on Intellectual Cognition and Consciousness’, in G.\\nKlima (ed.), Intentionality, Cognition, and Mental Representation\\nin Medieval Philosophy, New York: Fordham University Press,\\n141–165.\",\n \"Goris, W., 2002, ‘Implicit Knowledge – Being as First\\nKnown in Peter of Oriel’, Recherches de théologie et\\nphilosophie médiévales, 69(1): 33–65.\",\n \"Halverson, J. L., 1998, Peter Aureol on Predestination. A\\nChallenge to Late Medieval Thought, Leiden: Brill.\",\n \"Henninger, M., 1989, Relations: Medieval Theories\\n1250–1325, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Hoffmann, T., 2015, ‘Peter Auriol on Free Choice and Free\\nJudgment’, Vivarium, 53(1): 65–89.\",\n \"Lička, L., 2016, ‘Perception and Objective Being: Peter\\nAuriol on Perceptual Acts and their Objects’, American\\nCatholic Philosophical Quarterly, 90(2): 49–76.\",\n \"Nielsen, L. O., 1996, ‘Dictates of Faith versus Dictates of\\nReason: Peter Auriole on Divine Power, Creation, and Human\\nRationality’, Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica\\nmedievale, 7: 213–41.\",\n \"–––, 1999, ‘The Intelligibility of Faith\\nand the Nature of Theology: Peter Auriole’s Theological\\nProgramme’, Studia Theologica, 53(1): 26–39.\",\n \"–––, 2002, ‘Peter Auriol’s Way with\\nWords: The Genesis of Peter Auriol’s Commentaries on Peter\\nLombard’s First and Fourth Books of the Sentences’, in G.\\nEvans (ed.) Mediaeval Commentaries on the Sentences of\\nPeter Lombard, Leiden: Brill, 149–219.\",\n \"Panaccio, C., 1992, Les mots, les concepts, et les\\nchoses, Paris-Montreal: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin. \",\n \"Pasnau, R., 1997, Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle\\nAges, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2002, The Cambridge Translations of\\nMedieval Philosophical Texts, (Volume 3: Mind and\\nKnowledge), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2008, ‘Id Quo Cognoscimus’, in\\nS. Knuuttila and P. Kärkkäin (eds.), Theories of\\nPerception in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, Dordrecht:\\nSpringer Science.\",\n \"–––, 2011, Metaphysical Themes\\n1274–1671, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Pickavé, M., 2004, ‘Metaphysics as First Science: the\\nCase of Peter Auriol’, Documenti e studi sulla tradizione\\nfilosofica medievale, 15: 487–516.\",\n \"–––, 2017, ‘Peter Auriol and William of\\nOckham on a Medieval Version of the Argument from Illusion’, in\\nJ. Pelletier and M. Roques (eds.), The Language of Thought in Late\\nMedieval Philosophy. Essays in Honor of Claude Panaccio, Cham:\\nSpringer, 183–99.\",\n \"Pini, G., 2008, ‘Scotus on the Objects of Cognitive\\nActs’, Franciscan Studies, 66: 281–315.\",\n \"–––, 2014, ‘Scotus on Intuitive and\\nAbstractive Cognition’, in J. Hause (ed.), Debates in\\nMedieval Philosophy. Essential Readings and Contemporary\\nResponses, London: Routledge, 348–65.\",\n \"Schabel, C., 2000a, Theology at Paris, 1316–1345. Peter\\nAuriol and the Problem of Divine Foreknowledge and Future\\nContingents, Aldershot: Ashgate.\",\n \"–––, 2000b, ‘Place, Space, and the Physics\\nof Grace in Auriol’s Sentences Commentary’,\\nVivarium, 38(1): 117–61.\",\n \"–––, 2003, ‘Divine Foreknowledge and Human\\nFreedom: Auriol, Pomponazzi, and Luther on “Scholastic\\nSubtleties”’, in R. L. Friedman and L. O. Nielsen (eds.),\\nThe Medieval Heritage in Early Modern Metaphysics and Modal Logic,\\n1400–1800, Dordrecht: Springer, 165–89.\",\n \"–––, 2009, ‘Auriol’s Rubrics:\\nCitations of University Theologians in Peter Auriol’s\\nScriptum in Primum Librum Sententiarum’, in S. F.\\nBrown, T. Dewender, and T. Kobusch (eds.), Philosophical Debates\\nat Paris in the Early Fourteenth Century, Leiden: Brill,\\n3–38.\",\n \"Stump, E., 1998, ‘Aquinas’s Account of the Mechanisms\\nof Intellective Cognition’, Revue Internationale de\\nPhilosophie, 204: 287–307.\",\n \"Tachau, K. H., 1988, Vision and Certitude in the Age of\\nOckham: Optics, Epistemology and the Foundation of Semantics,\\n1250–1345, Leiden: Brill.\",\n \"Teetaert, A., 1935, ‘Pierre Auriol ou Oriol’, in\\nDictionnaire de théologie catholique, XII/2,\\nParis: Librairie Letouzey et Ané, cols. 1810–81.\",\n \"Wöller, F., 2015, Theologie und Wissenschaft bei Petrus\\nAureoli. Ein scholastischer Entwurf aus dem frühen 14.\\nJahrhundert, Leiden: Brill.\",\n \"Wood, R., 1982, ‘Adam Wodeham on Sensory Illusions’,\\nTraditio, 38: 213–52.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../duns-scotus/","text":"Duns Scotus, John"},{"href":"../gregory-rimini/","text":"Gregory of Rimini"},{"href":"../ockham/","text":"Ockham [Occam], William"},{"href":"../relations-medieval/","text":"relations: medieval theories of"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../duns-scotus/\",\n \"text\": \"Duns Scotus, John\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../gregory-rimini/\",\n \"text\": \"Gregory of Rimini\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../ockham/\",\n \"text\": \"Ockham [Occam], William\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../relations-medieval/\",\n \"text\": \"relations: medieval theories of\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":93,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"austin-john"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"John Austin"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Sat Feb 24, 2001; substantive revision Fri Jan 14, 2022"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nJohn Austin is considered by many to be the creator of the school of\nanalytical jurisprudence, as well as, more specifically, the approach\nto law known as “legal positivism.” Austin’s\nparticular command theory of law has been subject to pervasive\ncriticism, but its simplicity gives it an evocative power that\ncontinues to attract adherents."],"string":"[\n \"\\nJohn Austin is considered by many to be the creator of the school of\\nanalytical jurisprudence, as well as, more specifically, the approach\\nto law known as “legal positivism.” Austin’s\\nparticular command theory of law has been subject to pervasive\\ncriticism, but its simplicity gives it an evocative power that\\ncontinues to attract adherents.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Life","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. Analytical Jurisprudence and Legal Positivism","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"3. Austin’s Views","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"4. Criticisms","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"5. A Revisionist View?","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":["Primary Sources","Secondary Sources"]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Life\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Analytical Jurisprudence and Legal Positivism\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Austin’s Views\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Criticisms\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. A Revisionist View?\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"Primary Sources\",\n \"Secondary Sources\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\nJohn Austin’s life (1790–1859) was filled with\ndisappointment and unfulfilled expectations. His influential friends\n(who included Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, John Stuart Mill and Thomas\nCarlyle) were impressed by his intellect and his conversation, and\npredicted he would go far. However, in public dealings, Austin’s\nnervous disposition, shaky health, tendency towards melancholy, and\nperfectionism combined to end quickly careers at the Bar, in academia,\nand in government service (Hamburger 1985, 1992).","\nAustin was born to a Suffolk merchant family, and served briefly in\nthe military before beginning his legal training. He was called to the\nBar in 1818, but he took on few cases, and quit the practice of law in\n1825. Austin shortly thereafter obtained an appointment to the first\nChair of Jurisprudence at the recently established University of\nLondon. He prepared for his lectures by study in Bonn, and evidence of\nthe influence of continental legal and political ideas can be found\nscattered throughout Austin’s writings. Commentators have found\nevidence in Austin’s writings of the German Pandectist treatment\nof Roman Law, in particular, its approach to law as something that is,\nor should be, systematic and coherent (Schwarz 1934; Stein 1988: pp.\n223–229, 238–244; Lobban 1991: pp. 223–256, Lobban\n2013).","\nLectures from the course he gave were eventually published in 1832 as\n“Province of Jurisprudence Determined” (Austin 1832).\nHowever, attendance at his courses was small and getting smaller, and\nhe gave his last lecture in 1833. A short-lived effort to give a\nsimilar course of lectures at the Inner Temple met the same result.\nAustin resigned his University of London Chair in 1835. He later\nbriefly served on the Criminal Law Commission, and as a Royal\nCommissioner to Malta, but he never found either success or\ncontentment. He did some occasional writing on political themes, but\nhis plans for longer works never came to anything during his lifetime,\ndue apparently to some combination of perfectionism, melancholy, and\nwriter’s block. His changing views on moral, political, and\nlegal matters also apparently hindered both the publication of a\nrevised edition of “Province of Jurisprudence Determined,”\nand the completion of a longer project started when his views had been\ndifferent.","\n(Some scholars have argued that Austin may have moved away from\nanalytical jurisprudence (see below) towards something more\napproximating the historical jurisprudence school; cf. Hamburger 1985:\npp. 178–91, arguing for Austin’s views having changed\nsignificantly, with Rumble 2013, arguing against that view.)","\nMuch of whatever success Austin found during his life, and after, must\nbe attributed to his wife Sarah, for her tireless support, both moral\nand economic (during the later years of their marriage, they lived\nprimarily off her efforts as a translator and reviewer), and her work\nto publicize his writings after his death (including the publication\nof a more complete set of his Lectures on Jurisprudence) (Austin\n1879). Credit should also be given to Austin’s influential\nfriends, who not only helped him to secure many of the positions he\nheld during his lifetime, but also gave important support for his\nwritings after his death (Hamburger 1985: pp. 33, 197; Morison 1982:\np. 17; Mill 1863).","\nAustin’s work was influential in the decades after his passing\naway (Rumble 2005); this influence was in part due to the restatement\nof is ideas by other thinkers, like T. E. Holland (Postema 2011: p.\n4). E. C. Clark wrote in the late 19th century that Austin’s\nwork “is undoubtedly forming a school of English jurists,\npossibly of English legislators also. It is the staple of\njurisprudence in all our systems of legal education” (Clark\n1883: pp. 4–5). A similar assessment is made by H.L.A. Hart,\nlooking back nearly a century later: “within a few years of his\ndeath it was clear that his work had established the study of\njurisprudence in England” (Hart 1955: p. xvi). As will be\ndiscussed, Austin’s influence can be seen at a number of levels,\nincluding the general level of how legal theory, and law generally,\nwere taught (Stein 1988: pp. 238–244), and the use of an\nanalytical approach in legal theory. At such levels, Austin’s\nimpact is felt to this day. Hart could write that\n“Austin’s influence on the development of England of\n[Jurisprudence] has been greater than that of any other writer,”\n(Hart 1955: p. xvi) even while Austin’s particular command\ntheory of law became almost friendless, and is today probably best\nknown from Hart’s use of it (1958: 602–606, 2012:\n18–25) as a foil for the elaboration of Hart’s own, more\nnuanced approach to legal theory. In recent decades, some theorists\nhave revisited Austin’s command theory (and other works),\noffering new characterizations and defenses of his ideas (e.g.,\nMorison 1982, Rumble 1985, see generally Freeman & Mindus\n2013)."],"section_title":"1. Life","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nEarly in his career, Austin came under the influence of Jeremy\nBentham, and Bentham’s utilitarianism is evident (though with\nsome differences) in the work for which Austin is best known today. On\nAustin’s reading of utilitarianism, Divine will is equated with\nUtilitarian principles: “The commands which God has revealed we\nmust gather from the terms wherein they are promulg[ate]d. The command\nwhich he has not revealed, we must construe by the principle of\nutility” (Austin 1873: Lecture IV, p. 160; see also Austin 1832:\nLecture II, p. 41). This particular reading of utilitarianism,\nhowever, has had little long-term influence, though it seems to have\nbeen the part of his work that received the most attention in his own\nday (Rumble 1995: p. xx). Some have also seen Austin as being one of\nthe early advocates of “rule utilitarianism” (e.g.,\nAustin 1832: Lecture II, p. 42, where Austin urges that we analyze not\nthe utility of particular acts, but that of “class[es] of\naction”). Additionally, Austin early on shared many of the ideas\nof the Benthamite philosophical radicals; he was “a strong\nproponent of modern political economy, a believer in Hartleian\nmetaphysics, and a most enthusiastic Malthusian” (Rumble 1985:\npp. 16–17). Austin was to lose most of his “radical”\ninclinations as he grew older.","\nAustin’s importance to legal theory lies elsewhere—his\ntheorizing about law was novel at four different levels of generality.\nFirst, he was arguably the first writer to approach the theory of law\nanalytically (as contrasted with approaches to law more grounded in\nhistory or sociology, or arguments about law that were secondary to\nmore general moral and political theories). Analytical jurisprudence\nemphasizes the analysis of key concepts, including “law,”\n“(legal) right,” “(legal) duty,” and\n“legal validity.” Though analytical jurisprudence has been\nchallenged by some in recent years (e.g., Leiter 2007, Leiter and\nEtchemendy 2021, Postema 2021 [Other Internet Resources]), it remains\nthe dominant approach to discussing the nature of law. Analytical\njurisprudence, an approach to theorizing about law, has sometimes been\nconfused with what the American legal realists (an influential group\nof theorists prominent in the early decades of the 20th century)\ncalled “legal formalism”—a narrow approach to how\njudges should decide cases. The American legal realists saw Austin in\nparticular, and analytical jurisprudence in general, as their\nopponents in their critical and reform-minded efforts (e.g., Sebok\n1998: pp. 65–69). In this, the realists were simply mistaken;\nunfortunately, it is a mistake that can still be found in some\ncontemporary legal commentators (see Bix 1999, 903–919, for\ndocumentation).","\nSecond, Austin’s work should be seen against a background where\nmost English judges and commentators saw common-law reasoning (the\nincremental creation or modification of law through judicial\nresolution of particular disputes) as supreme, as declaring existing\nlaw, as discovering the requirements of “Reason,” as the\nimmemorial wisdom of popular “custom.” Such\n(Anglo-American) theories about common law reasoning fit with a larger\ntradition of theorizing about law (which had strong roots in\ncontinental European thought—e.g., the historical jurisprudence\nof theorists like Karl Friedrich von Savigny (1975)): the idea that\ngenerally law did or should reflect community mores,\n“spirit,” or custom. In general, one might look at many of\nthe theorists prior to Austin as exemplifying an approach that was\nmore “community-oriented”—law as arising from\nsocietal values or needs, or expressive of societal customs or\nmorality. By contrast, Austin’s is one of the first, and one of\nthe most distinctive, theories that views law as being “imperium\noriented”—viewing law as mostly the rules imposed from\nabove from certain authorized (pedigreed) sources. More\n“top-down” theories of law, like that of Austin, better\nfit the more centralized governments (and the modern political\ntheories about government) of modern times (Cotterrell 2003: pp.\n21–77).","\nThird, within analytical jurisprudence, Austin was the first\nsystematic exponent of a view of law known as “legal\npositivism.” Most of the important theoretical work on law prior\nto Austin had treated jurisprudence as though it were merely a branch\nof moral theory or political theory: asking how should the state\ngovern? (and when were governments legitimate?), and under what\ncircumstances did citizens have an obligation to obey the law? Austin\nspecifically, and legal positivism generally, offered a quite\ndifferent approach to law: as an object of “scientific”\nstudy (Austin 1879: pp. 1107–1108), dominated neither by\nprescription nor by moral evaluation. Subtle jurisprudential questions\naside, Austin’s efforts to treat law systematically gained\npopularity in the late 19th century among English lawyers who wanted\nto approach their profession, and their professional training, in a\nmore serious and rigorous manner (Hart 1955: pp. xvi–xviii;\nCotterrell 2003: pp. 74–77; Stein 1988: pp. 231–244).","\nLegal positivism asserts (or assumes) that it is both possible and\nvaluable to have a morally neutral descriptive (or\n“conceptual”—though this is not a term Austin used)\ntheory of law. (The main competitor to legal positivism, in\nAustin’s day as in our own, has been natural law theory.) Legal\npositivism does not deny that moral and political criticism of legal\nsystems is important, but insists that a descriptive or conceptual\napproach to law is valuable, both on its own terms and as a necessary\nprelude to criticism.","\n(The term “legal positivism” is sometimes used more\nbroadly to include the position that we should construct or modify our\nconcept of law to remove moral criteria of legal validity; or to\ninclude a prescription that moral values should not be used in\njudicial decision-making (Schauer 2010—see the Other Internet\nResources). I do not think anything turns on whether the term is used\nmore broadly or more narrowly, as long as it is clear which sense is\nbeing used. Additionally, while Schauer claims (2010) that Austin\ncould be seen as supporting some of the views associated with the\nbroader understanding of “legal positivism”, there is need\nfor more evidence and argument before the point should be\ngranted.)","\nThere were theorists prior to Austin who arguably offered views\nsimilar to legal positivism or who at least foreshadowed legal\npositivism in some way. Among these would be Thomas Hobbes, with his\namoral view of laws as the product of Leviathan (Hobbes 1996); David\nHume, with his argument for separating “is” and\n“ought” (which has been taken by some as a sharp criticism\nfor some forms of natural law theory, those views that purported to\nderive moral truths from statements about human nature, Hume 1739,\nSection 3.1.1, but see Chilovi and Wodak 2021, raising questions about\nthe relevance of Hume’s views here for either natural law theory\nor legal positivism); and Jeremy Bentham, with his attacks on judicial\nlawmaking and on those commentators, like Sir William Blackstone, who\njustified such lawmaking with natural-law-like justifications (Bentham\n1789).","\nAustin’s famous formulation of what could be called the\n“dogma” of legal positivism is as follows:","\nThe existence of law is one thing; its merit or demerit is another.\nWhether it be or be not is one enquiry; whether it be or be not\nconformable to an assumed standard, is a different enquiry. A law,\nwhich actually exists, is a law, though we happen to dislike it, or\nthough it vary from the text, by which we regulate our approbation and\ndisapprobation. (Austin 1832: Lecture V, p. 157)\n","\n(While Austin saw himself as criticizing natural law theory, a view\nshared by most of the legal positivists who followed him, the extent\nto which the two schools disagree, and the location of their\ndisagreement, remains a matter sharply contested (e.g., Finnis 2000a,\n2000b.))","\nAndrew Halpin has argued (Halpin 2013) that Austin shaped the nature\nof modern analytical jurisprudence and legal positivism by his choice\nto exclude legal reasoning from his discussion of\n“jurisprudence.” A greater focus on legal reasoning,\nHalpin argues, would have made it harder to claim a clear separation\nof law “as it is” and law “as it ought to be.”\nHalpin points out that prominent later legal positivists have followed\nAustin, either in speaking little about legal reasoning (Hans Kelsen,\nand, to some extent, H. L. A. Hart), or speaking about the topic at\nlength, but treating the issue as sharply separate from their theories\nof (the nature of) law.","\nFourth, Austin’s version of legal positivism, a “command\ntheory of law” (which will be detailed in the next section), was\nalso, for a time, quite influential. Austin’s theory had\nsimilarities with views developed by Jeremy Bentham, whose theory\ncould also be characterized as a “command theory.”\nBentham, in a posthumously published work, defined law as an:","\nassemblage of signs declarative of a volition conceived or adopted by\nthe sovereign in a state, concerning the conduct to be\nobserved in a certain case by a certain person or class of\npersons, who in the case in question are or are supposed to be subject\nto his power: such volition trusting for its accomplishment to the\nexpectation of certain events which it is intended such declaration\nshould upon occasion be a means of bringing to pass, and the prospect\nof which it is intended should act as a motive upon those whose\nconduct is in question (Bentham 1970: p. 1).\n","\nHowever, Austin’s command theory was more influential than\nBentham’s, because the latter’s jurisprudential writings\ndid not appear in an even-roughly systematic form until well after\nAustin’s work had already been published, with Bentham’s\nmost systematic discussion only appearing posthumously, late in the\n20th century (Bentham 1970, 1996; Cotterrell 2003: p. 50)."],"section_title":"2. Analytical Jurisprudence and Legal Positivism","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nAustin’s basic approach was to ascertain what can be said\ngenerally, but still with interest, about all laws. Austin’s\nanalysis can be seen as either a paradigm of, or a caricature of,\nanalytical philosophy, in that his discussions are dryly full of\ndistinctions, but are thin in argument. The modern reader is forced to\nfill in much of the meta-theoretical, justificatory work, as it cannot\nbe found in the text. Where Austin does articulate his methodology and\nobjective, it is a fairly traditional one: he “endeavored to\nresolve a law (taken with the largest signification which can\nbe given to that term properly) into the necessary and\nessential elements of which it is composed” (Austin 1832:\nLecture V, p. 117).","\nAs to what is the core nature of law, Austin’s answer is that\nlaws (“properly so called”) are commands of a sovereign.\nHe clarifies the concept of positive law (that is, man-made law) by\nanalyzing the constituent concepts of his definition, and by\ndistinguishing law from other concepts that are similar:","\nAustin also included within “the province of\njurisprudence” certain “exceptions,” items which did\nnot fit his criteria but which should nonetheless be studied with\nother “laws properly so called”: repealing laws,\ndeclarative laws, and “imperfect laws”—laws\nprescribing action but without sanctions (a concept Austin ascribes to\n“Roman [law] jurists”) (Austin 1832: Lecture I, p.\n36).","\nIn the criteria set out above, Austin succeeded in delimiting law and\nlegal rules from religion, morality, convention, and custom. However,\nalso excluded from “the province of jurisprudence” were\ncustomary law (except to the extent that the sovereign had, directly\nor indirectly, adopted such customs as law), public international law,\nand parts of constitutional law. (These exclusions alone would make\nAustin’s theory problematic for most modern readers.)","\nWithin Austin’s approach, whether something is or is not\n“law” depends on which people have done what: the question\nturns on an empirical investigation, and it is a matter mostly of\npower, not of morality. Of course, Austin is not arguing that law\nshould not be moral, nor is he implying that it rarely is. Austin is\nnot playing the nihilist or the skeptic. He is merely pointing out\nthat there is much that is law that is not moral, and what makes\nsomething law does nothing to guarantee its moral value. “The\nmost pernicious laws, and therefore those which are most opposed to\nthe will of God, have been and are continually enforced as laws by\njudicial tribunals” (Austin 1832: Lecture V, p. 158).","\nIn contrast to his mentor Bentham, Austin, in his early lectures,\naccepted judicial lawmaking as “highly beneficial and even\nabsolutely necessary” (Austin, 1832: Lecture V, p. 163). Nor did\nAustin find any difficulty incorporating judicial lawmaking into his\ncommand theory: he characterized that form of lawmaking, along with\nthe occasional legal/judicial recognition of customs by judges, as the\n“tacit commands” of the sovereign, the sovereign’s\naffirming the “orders” by its acquiescence (Austin 1832:\nLecture 1, pp. 35–36). It should be noted, however, that one of\nAustin’s later lectures listed the many problems that can come\nwith judicial legislation, and recommended codification of the law\ninstead (Austin 1879: vol. 2, Lecture XXXIX, pp. 669–704)."],"section_title":"3. Austin’s Views","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nAs many readers come to Austin’s theory mostly through its\ncriticism by other writers (prominently, that of H.L.A. Hart; see also\nKelsen 1941: 54–66), the weaknesses of the theory are almost\nbetter known than the theory itself:","\nFirst, in many societies, it is hard to identify a\n“sovereign” in Austin’s sense of the word (a\ndifficulty Austin himself experienced, when he was forced to describe\nthe British “sovereign” awkwardly as the combination of\nthe King, the House of Lords, and all the electors of the House of\nCommons). Additionally, a focus on a “sovereign” makes it\ndifficult to explain the continuity of legal systems: a new ruler will\nnot come in with the kind of “habit of obedience” that\nAustin sets as a criterion for a system’s rule-maker.","\nA few responses are available to those who would defend Austin. First,\nsome commentators have argued that Austin is here misunderstood, in\nthat he always meant “by the sovereign the office or\ninstitution which embodies supreme authority; never the\nindividuals who happen to hold that office or embody that institution\nat any given time” (Cotterrell 2003: p. 63, footnote omitted);\nthere are certainly parts of Austin’s lectures that support this\nreading (e.g., Austin 1832: Lecture V, pp. 128–29; Lecture VI,\np. 218).","\nSecondly, one could argue (see Harris 1977) that the sovereign is best\nunderstood as a constructive metaphor: that law should be viewed as if\nit reflected the view of a single will (a similar view, that law\nshould be interpreted as if it derived from a single will, can be\nfound in Ronald Dworkin’s work (1986: pp. 176–190)).","\nThirdly, one could argue that Austin’s reference to a sovereign\nwhom others are in the habit of obeying but who is not in the habit of\nobeying anyone else, captures what a “realist” or\n“cynic” would call a basic fact of political life. There\nis, the claim goes, entities or factions in society that are not\neffectively constrained, or could act in an unconstrained way if they\nso chose. For one type of example, one could point out that if there\nwas a sufficiently large and persistent majority among the United\nStates electorate, nothing could contain them: they could elect\nPresidents and legislators who would amend the Constitution and,\nthrough those same officials, appoint judges who would interpret the\n(revised or original) Constitution in a way amenable to their\ninterests. A different sort of example (and some would say that there\nare recent real-life examples of this type) would be a President who\nignored the constraints of statutory law, constitutional law, and\ninternational treaty commitments, while the public and other officials\nlacked the will or the means to hold that President to the legal norms\nthat purported to constrain his or her actions.","\nAs regards Austin’s “command” model, it seems to fit\nsome aspects of law poorly (e.g., rules which grant powers to\nofficials and to private citizens—of the latter, the rules for\nmaking wills, trusts, and contracts are examples), while excluding\nother matters (e.g., international law) which we are not inclined to\nexclude from the category “law.”","\nMore generally, it seems more distorting than enlightening to reduce\nall legal rules to one type. For example, rules that empower people to\nmake wills and contracts perhaps can be re-characterized as\npart of a long chain of reasoning for eventually imposing a sanction\n(Austin spoke in this context of the sanction of “nullity”\n(Austin 1879: 522, 523, 923)) on those who fail to comply with the\nrelevant provisions. However, such a re-characterization misses the\nbasic purpose of those sorts of laws—they are arguably about\ngranting power and autonomy, not punishing wrongdoing.","\nA different criticism of Austin’s command theory is that a\ntheory which portrays law solely in terms of power fails to\ndistinguish rules of terror from forms of governance sufficiently just\nthat they are accepted as legitimate (or at least as reasons for\naction) by their own citizens.","\nFinally, one might note that the constitutive rules that determine who\nthe legal officials are and what procedures must be followed in\ncreating new legal rules, “are not commands habitually obeyed,\nnor can they be expressed as habits of obedience to persons”\n(Hart 1958: p. 603).","\nAustin was aware of some of these lines of attack, and had responses\nready; it is another matter whether his responses were adequate. It\nshould also be noted that Austin’s work shows a silence on\nquestions of methodology, though this may be forgivable, given the\nearly stage of jurisprudence. As discussed in an earlier section, in\nmany ways, Austin was blazing a new path. On matters of methodology,\nlater commentators on Austin’s work have had difficulty\ndetermining whether he is best understood as making empirical claims\nabout the law or conceptual claims; elements of each sort of approach\ncan be found in his writings (Lobban 1991: pp. 224–225;\nCotterrell 2003: pp. 81–83).","\nWhen H.L.A. Hart revived legal positivism in the middle of the\n20th century (Hart 1958, 2012), he did it by criticizing\nand building on Austin’s theory: for example, Hart’s\ntheory did not try to reduce all legal rules to one kind of rule, but\nemphasized the varying types and functions of legal rules; and\nHart’s theory, grounded partly on the distinction between\n“obligation” and “being obliged,” was built\naround the fact that some participants within legal systems\n“accepted” the legal rules as reasons for action, above\nand beyond the fear of sanctions. Hart’s\n“hermeneutic” approach, building on the “internal\npoint of view” of participants who accepted the legal system,\ndiverged sharply from Austin’s approach to law."],"section_title":"4. Criticisms","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nSome modern commentators appreciate in Austin elements that were\nprobably not foremost in his mind (or that of his contemporary\nreaders). For example, one occasionally sees Austin portrayed as the\nfirst “realist”: in contrast both to the theorists that\ncame before Austin and to some modern writers on law, Austin is seen\nas having a keener sense of the connection of law and power, and the\nimportance of keeping that connection at the forefront of analysis\n(cf. Cotterrell 2003: pp. 49–77). One commentator wrote:","\nAustin’s theory is not a theory of the Rule of Law: of\ngovernment subject to law. It is a theory of the ‘rule of\nmen’: of government using law as an instrument of power. Such a\nview may be considered realistic or merely cynical. But it is, in its\nbroad outlines, essentially coherent. (Cotterrell 2003: p. 70)\n","\nWhen circumstances seem to warrant a more critical, skeptical or\ncynical approach to law and government, Austin’s equation of law\nand force will be attractive—however distant such a reading may\nbe from Austin’s own liberal-utilitarian views at the time of\nhis writing, or his more conservative political views later in his\nlife (Hamburger, 1985)."],"section_title":"5. A Revisionist View?","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nJohn Austin’s life (1790–1859) was filled with\\ndisappointment and unfulfilled expectations. His influential friends\\n(who included Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, John Stuart Mill and Thomas\\nCarlyle) were impressed by his intellect and his conversation, and\\npredicted he would go far. However, in public dealings, Austin’s\\nnervous disposition, shaky health, tendency towards melancholy, and\\nperfectionism combined to end quickly careers at the Bar, in academia,\\nand in government service (Hamburger 1985, 1992).\",\n \"\\nAustin was born to a Suffolk merchant family, and served briefly in\\nthe military before beginning his legal training. He was called to the\\nBar in 1818, but he took on few cases, and quit the practice of law in\\n1825. Austin shortly thereafter obtained an appointment to the first\\nChair of Jurisprudence at the recently established University of\\nLondon. He prepared for his lectures by study in Bonn, and evidence of\\nthe influence of continental legal and political ideas can be found\\nscattered throughout Austin’s writings. Commentators have found\\nevidence in Austin’s writings of the German Pandectist treatment\\nof Roman Law, in particular, its approach to law as something that is,\\nor should be, systematic and coherent (Schwarz 1934; Stein 1988: pp.\\n223–229, 238–244; Lobban 1991: pp. 223–256, Lobban\\n2013).\",\n \"\\nLectures from the course he gave were eventually published in 1832 as\\n“Province of Jurisprudence Determined” (Austin 1832).\\nHowever, attendance at his courses was small and getting smaller, and\\nhe gave his last lecture in 1833. A short-lived effort to give a\\nsimilar course of lectures at the Inner Temple met the same result.\\nAustin resigned his University of London Chair in 1835. He later\\nbriefly served on the Criminal Law Commission, and as a Royal\\nCommissioner to Malta, but he never found either success or\\ncontentment. He did some occasional writing on political themes, but\\nhis plans for longer works never came to anything during his lifetime,\\ndue apparently to some combination of perfectionism, melancholy, and\\nwriter’s block. His changing views on moral, political, and\\nlegal matters also apparently hindered both the publication of a\\nrevised edition of “Province of Jurisprudence Determined,”\\nand the completion of a longer project started when his views had been\\ndifferent.\",\n \"\\n(Some scholars have argued that Austin may have moved away from\\nanalytical jurisprudence (see below) towards something more\\napproximating the historical jurisprudence school; cf. Hamburger 1985:\\npp. 178–91, arguing for Austin’s views having changed\\nsignificantly, with Rumble 2013, arguing against that view.)\",\n \"\\nMuch of whatever success Austin found during his life, and after, must\\nbe attributed to his wife Sarah, for her tireless support, both moral\\nand economic (during the later years of their marriage, they lived\\nprimarily off her efforts as a translator and reviewer), and her work\\nto publicize his writings after his death (including the publication\\nof a more complete set of his Lectures on Jurisprudence) (Austin\\n1879). Credit should also be given to Austin’s influential\\nfriends, who not only helped him to secure many of the positions he\\nheld during his lifetime, but also gave important support for his\\nwritings after his death (Hamburger 1985: pp. 33, 197; Morison 1982:\\np. 17; Mill 1863).\",\n \"\\nAustin’s work was influential in the decades after his passing\\naway (Rumble 2005); this influence was in part due to the restatement\\nof is ideas by other thinkers, like T. E. Holland (Postema 2011: p.\\n4). E. C. Clark wrote in the late 19th century that Austin’s\\nwork “is undoubtedly forming a school of English jurists,\\npossibly of English legislators also. It is the staple of\\njurisprudence in all our systems of legal education” (Clark\\n1883: pp. 4–5). A similar assessment is made by H.L.A. Hart,\\nlooking back nearly a century later: “within a few years of his\\ndeath it was clear that his work had established the study of\\njurisprudence in England” (Hart 1955: p. xvi). As will be\\ndiscussed, Austin’s influence can be seen at a number of levels,\\nincluding the general level of how legal theory, and law generally,\\nwere taught (Stein 1988: pp. 238–244), and the use of an\\nanalytical approach in legal theory. At such levels, Austin’s\\nimpact is felt to this day. Hart could write that\\n“Austin’s influence on the development of England of\\n[Jurisprudence] has been greater than that of any other writer,”\\n(Hart 1955: p. xvi) even while Austin’s particular command\\ntheory of law became almost friendless, and is today probably best\\nknown from Hart’s use of it (1958: 602–606, 2012:\\n18–25) as a foil for the elaboration of Hart’s own, more\\nnuanced approach to legal theory. In recent decades, some theorists\\nhave revisited Austin’s command theory (and other works),\\noffering new characterizations and defenses of his ideas (e.g.,\\nMorison 1982, Rumble 1985, see generally Freeman & Mindus\\n2013).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Life\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nEarly in his career, Austin came under the influence of Jeremy\\nBentham, and Bentham’s utilitarianism is evident (though with\\nsome differences) in the work for which Austin is best known today. On\\nAustin’s reading of utilitarianism, Divine will is equated with\\nUtilitarian principles: “The commands which God has revealed we\\nmust gather from the terms wherein they are promulg[ate]d. The command\\nwhich he has not revealed, we must construe by the principle of\\nutility” (Austin 1873: Lecture IV, p. 160; see also Austin 1832:\\nLecture II, p. 41). This particular reading of utilitarianism,\\nhowever, has had little long-term influence, though it seems to have\\nbeen the part of his work that received the most attention in his own\\nday (Rumble 1995: p. xx). Some have also seen Austin as being one of\\nthe early advocates of “rule utilitarianism” (e.g.,\\nAustin 1832: Lecture II, p. 42, where Austin urges that we analyze not\\nthe utility of particular acts, but that of “class[es] of\\naction”). Additionally, Austin early on shared many of the ideas\\nof the Benthamite philosophical radicals; he was “a strong\\nproponent of modern political economy, a believer in Hartleian\\nmetaphysics, and a most enthusiastic Malthusian” (Rumble 1985:\\npp. 16–17). Austin was to lose most of his “radical”\\ninclinations as he grew older.\",\n \"\\nAustin’s importance to legal theory lies elsewhere—his\\ntheorizing about law was novel at four different levels of generality.\\nFirst, he was arguably the first writer to approach the theory of law\\nanalytically (as contrasted with approaches to law more grounded in\\nhistory or sociology, or arguments about law that were secondary to\\nmore general moral and political theories). Analytical jurisprudence\\nemphasizes the analysis of key concepts, including “law,”\\n“(legal) right,” “(legal) duty,” and\\n“legal validity.” Though analytical jurisprudence has been\\nchallenged by some in recent years (e.g., Leiter 2007, Leiter and\\nEtchemendy 2021, Postema 2021 [Other Internet Resources]), it remains\\nthe dominant approach to discussing the nature of law. Analytical\\njurisprudence, an approach to theorizing about law, has sometimes been\\nconfused with what the American legal realists (an influential group\\nof theorists prominent in the early decades of the 20th century)\\ncalled “legal formalism”—a narrow approach to how\\njudges should decide cases. The American legal realists saw Austin in\\nparticular, and analytical jurisprudence in general, as their\\nopponents in their critical and reform-minded efforts (e.g., Sebok\\n1998: pp. 65–69). In this, the realists were simply mistaken;\\nunfortunately, it is a mistake that can still be found in some\\ncontemporary legal commentators (see Bix 1999, 903–919, for\\ndocumentation).\",\n \"\\nSecond, Austin’s work should be seen against a background where\\nmost English judges and commentators saw common-law reasoning (the\\nincremental creation or modification of law through judicial\\nresolution of particular disputes) as supreme, as declaring existing\\nlaw, as discovering the requirements of “Reason,” as the\\nimmemorial wisdom of popular “custom.” Such\\n(Anglo-American) theories about common law reasoning fit with a larger\\ntradition of theorizing about law (which had strong roots in\\ncontinental European thought—e.g., the historical jurisprudence\\nof theorists like Karl Friedrich von Savigny (1975)): the idea that\\ngenerally law did or should reflect community mores,\\n“spirit,” or custom. In general, one might look at many of\\nthe theorists prior to Austin as exemplifying an approach that was\\nmore “community-oriented”—law as arising from\\nsocietal values or needs, or expressive of societal customs or\\nmorality. By contrast, Austin’s is one of the first, and one of\\nthe most distinctive, theories that views law as being “imperium\\noriented”—viewing law as mostly the rules imposed from\\nabove from certain authorized (pedigreed) sources. More\\n“top-down” theories of law, like that of Austin, better\\nfit the more centralized governments (and the modern political\\ntheories about government) of modern times (Cotterrell 2003: pp.\\n21–77).\",\n \"\\nThird, within analytical jurisprudence, Austin was the first\\nsystematic exponent of a view of law known as “legal\\npositivism.” Most of the important theoretical work on law prior\\nto Austin had treated jurisprudence as though it were merely a branch\\nof moral theory or political theory: asking how should the state\\ngovern? (and when were governments legitimate?), and under what\\ncircumstances did citizens have an obligation to obey the law? Austin\\nspecifically, and legal positivism generally, offered a quite\\ndifferent approach to law: as an object of “scientific”\\nstudy (Austin 1879: pp. 1107–1108), dominated neither by\\nprescription nor by moral evaluation. Subtle jurisprudential questions\\naside, Austin’s efforts to treat law systematically gained\\npopularity in the late 19th century among English lawyers who wanted\\nto approach their profession, and their professional training, in a\\nmore serious and rigorous manner (Hart 1955: pp. xvi–xviii;\\nCotterrell 2003: pp. 74–77; Stein 1988: pp. 231–244).\",\n \"\\nLegal positivism asserts (or assumes) that it is both possible and\\nvaluable to have a morally neutral descriptive (or\\n“conceptual”—though this is not a term Austin used)\\ntheory of law. (The main competitor to legal positivism, in\\nAustin’s day as in our own, has been natural law theory.) Legal\\npositivism does not deny that moral and political criticism of legal\\nsystems is important, but insists that a descriptive or conceptual\\napproach to law is valuable, both on its own terms and as a necessary\\nprelude to criticism.\",\n \"\\n(The term “legal positivism” is sometimes used more\\nbroadly to include the position that we should construct or modify our\\nconcept of law to remove moral criteria of legal validity; or to\\ninclude a prescription that moral values should not be used in\\njudicial decision-making (Schauer 2010—see the Other Internet\\nResources). I do not think anything turns on whether the term is used\\nmore broadly or more narrowly, as long as it is clear which sense is\\nbeing used. Additionally, while Schauer claims (2010) that Austin\\ncould be seen as supporting some of the views associated with the\\nbroader understanding of “legal positivism”, there is need\\nfor more evidence and argument before the point should be\\ngranted.)\",\n \"\\nThere were theorists prior to Austin who arguably offered views\\nsimilar to legal positivism or who at least foreshadowed legal\\npositivism in some way. Among these would be Thomas Hobbes, with his\\namoral view of laws as the product of Leviathan (Hobbes 1996); David\\nHume, with his argument for separating “is” and\\n“ought” (which has been taken by some as a sharp criticism\\nfor some forms of natural law theory, those views that purported to\\nderive moral truths from statements about human nature, Hume 1739,\\nSection 3.1.1, but see Chilovi and Wodak 2021, raising questions about\\nthe relevance of Hume’s views here for either natural law theory\\nor legal positivism); and Jeremy Bentham, with his attacks on judicial\\nlawmaking and on those commentators, like Sir William Blackstone, who\\njustified such lawmaking with natural-law-like justifications (Bentham\\n1789).\",\n \"\\nAustin’s famous formulation of what could be called the\\n“dogma” of legal positivism is as follows:\",\n \"\\nThe existence of law is one thing; its merit or demerit is another.\\nWhether it be or be not is one enquiry; whether it be or be not\\nconformable to an assumed standard, is a different enquiry. A law,\\nwhich actually exists, is a law, though we happen to dislike it, or\\nthough it vary from the text, by which we regulate our approbation and\\ndisapprobation. (Austin 1832: Lecture V, p. 157)\\n\",\n \"\\n(While Austin saw himself as criticizing natural law theory, a view\\nshared by most of the legal positivists who followed him, the extent\\nto which the two schools disagree, and the location of their\\ndisagreement, remains a matter sharply contested (e.g., Finnis 2000a,\\n2000b.))\",\n \"\\nAndrew Halpin has argued (Halpin 2013) that Austin shaped the nature\\nof modern analytical jurisprudence and legal positivism by his choice\\nto exclude legal reasoning from his discussion of\\n“jurisprudence.” A greater focus on legal reasoning,\\nHalpin argues, would have made it harder to claim a clear separation\\nof law “as it is” and law “as it ought to be.”\\nHalpin points out that prominent later legal positivists have followed\\nAustin, either in speaking little about legal reasoning (Hans Kelsen,\\nand, to some extent, H. L. A. Hart), or speaking about the topic at\\nlength, but treating the issue as sharply separate from their theories\\nof (the nature of) law.\",\n \"\\nFourth, Austin’s version of legal positivism, a “command\\ntheory of law” (which will be detailed in the next section), was\\nalso, for a time, quite influential. Austin’s theory had\\nsimilarities with views developed by Jeremy Bentham, whose theory\\ncould also be characterized as a “command theory.”\\nBentham, in a posthumously published work, defined law as an:\",\n \"\\nassemblage of signs declarative of a volition conceived or adopted by\\nthe sovereign in a state, concerning the conduct to be\\nobserved in a certain case by a certain person or class of\\npersons, who in the case in question are or are supposed to be subject\\nto his power: such volition trusting for its accomplishment to the\\nexpectation of certain events which it is intended such declaration\\nshould upon occasion be a means of bringing to pass, and the prospect\\nof which it is intended should act as a motive upon those whose\\nconduct is in question (Bentham 1970: p. 1).\\n\",\n \"\\nHowever, Austin’s command theory was more influential than\\nBentham’s, because the latter’s jurisprudential writings\\ndid not appear in an even-roughly systematic form until well after\\nAustin’s work had already been published, with Bentham’s\\nmost systematic discussion only appearing posthumously, late in the\\n20th century (Bentham 1970, 1996; Cotterrell 2003: p. 50).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Analytical Jurisprudence and Legal Positivism\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nAustin’s basic approach was to ascertain what can be said\\ngenerally, but still with interest, about all laws. Austin’s\\nanalysis can be seen as either a paradigm of, or a caricature of,\\nanalytical philosophy, in that his discussions are dryly full of\\ndistinctions, but are thin in argument. The modern reader is forced to\\nfill in much of the meta-theoretical, justificatory work, as it cannot\\nbe found in the text. Where Austin does articulate his methodology and\\nobjective, it is a fairly traditional one: he “endeavored to\\nresolve a law (taken with the largest signification which can\\nbe given to that term properly) into the necessary and\\nessential elements of which it is composed” (Austin 1832:\\nLecture V, p. 117).\",\n \"\\nAs to what is the core nature of law, Austin’s answer is that\\nlaws (“properly so called”) are commands of a sovereign.\\nHe clarifies the concept of positive law (that is, man-made law) by\\nanalyzing the constituent concepts of his definition, and by\\ndistinguishing law from other concepts that are similar:\",\n \"\\nAustin also included within “the province of\\njurisprudence” certain “exceptions,” items which did\\nnot fit his criteria but which should nonetheless be studied with\\nother “laws properly so called”: repealing laws,\\ndeclarative laws, and “imperfect laws”—laws\\nprescribing action but without sanctions (a concept Austin ascribes to\\n“Roman [law] jurists”) (Austin 1832: Lecture I, p.\\n36).\",\n \"\\nIn the criteria set out above, Austin succeeded in delimiting law and\\nlegal rules from religion, morality, convention, and custom. However,\\nalso excluded from “the province of jurisprudence” were\\ncustomary law (except to the extent that the sovereign had, directly\\nor indirectly, adopted such customs as law), public international law,\\nand parts of constitutional law. (These exclusions alone would make\\nAustin’s theory problematic for most modern readers.)\",\n \"\\nWithin Austin’s approach, whether something is or is not\\n“law” depends on which people have done what: the question\\nturns on an empirical investigation, and it is a matter mostly of\\npower, not of morality. Of course, Austin is not arguing that law\\nshould not be moral, nor is he implying that it rarely is. Austin is\\nnot playing the nihilist or the skeptic. He is merely pointing out\\nthat there is much that is law that is not moral, and what makes\\nsomething law does nothing to guarantee its moral value. “The\\nmost pernicious laws, and therefore those which are most opposed to\\nthe will of God, have been and are continually enforced as laws by\\njudicial tribunals” (Austin 1832: Lecture V, p. 158).\",\n \"\\nIn contrast to his mentor Bentham, Austin, in his early lectures,\\naccepted judicial lawmaking as “highly beneficial and even\\nabsolutely necessary” (Austin, 1832: Lecture V, p. 163). Nor did\\nAustin find any difficulty incorporating judicial lawmaking into his\\ncommand theory: he characterized that form of lawmaking, along with\\nthe occasional legal/judicial recognition of customs by judges, as the\\n“tacit commands” of the sovereign, the sovereign’s\\naffirming the “orders” by its acquiescence (Austin 1832:\\nLecture 1, pp. 35–36). It should be noted, however, that one of\\nAustin’s later lectures listed the many problems that can come\\nwith judicial legislation, and recommended codification of the law\\ninstead (Austin 1879: vol. 2, Lecture XXXIX, pp. 669–704).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Austin’s Views\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nAs many readers come to Austin’s theory mostly through its\\ncriticism by other writers (prominently, that of H.L.A. Hart; see also\\nKelsen 1941: 54–66), the weaknesses of the theory are almost\\nbetter known than the theory itself:\",\n \"\\nFirst, in many societies, it is hard to identify a\\n“sovereign” in Austin’s sense of the word (a\\ndifficulty Austin himself experienced, when he was forced to describe\\nthe British “sovereign” awkwardly as the combination of\\nthe King, the House of Lords, and all the electors of the House of\\nCommons). Additionally, a focus on a “sovereign” makes it\\ndifficult to explain the continuity of legal systems: a new ruler will\\nnot come in with the kind of “habit of obedience” that\\nAustin sets as a criterion for a system’s rule-maker.\",\n \"\\nA few responses are available to those who would defend Austin. First,\\nsome commentators have argued that Austin is here misunderstood, in\\nthat he always meant “by the sovereign the office or\\ninstitution which embodies supreme authority; never the\\nindividuals who happen to hold that office or embody that institution\\nat any given time” (Cotterrell 2003: p. 63, footnote omitted);\\nthere are certainly parts of Austin’s lectures that support this\\nreading (e.g., Austin 1832: Lecture V, pp. 128–29; Lecture VI,\\np. 218).\",\n \"\\nSecondly, one could argue (see Harris 1977) that the sovereign is best\\nunderstood as a constructive metaphor: that law should be viewed as if\\nit reflected the view of a single will (a similar view, that law\\nshould be interpreted as if it derived from a single will, can be\\nfound in Ronald Dworkin’s work (1986: pp. 176–190)).\",\n \"\\nThirdly, one could argue that Austin’s reference to a sovereign\\nwhom others are in the habit of obeying but who is not in the habit of\\nobeying anyone else, captures what a “realist” or\\n“cynic” would call a basic fact of political life. There\\nis, the claim goes, entities or factions in society that are not\\neffectively constrained, or could act in an unconstrained way if they\\nso chose. For one type of example, one could point out that if there\\nwas a sufficiently large and persistent majority among the United\\nStates electorate, nothing could contain them: they could elect\\nPresidents and legislators who would amend the Constitution and,\\nthrough those same officials, appoint judges who would interpret the\\n(revised or original) Constitution in a way amenable to their\\ninterests. A different sort of example (and some would say that there\\nare recent real-life examples of this type) would be a President who\\nignored the constraints of statutory law, constitutional law, and\\ninternational treaty commitments, while the public and other officials\\nlacked the will or the means to hold that President to the legal norms\\nthat purported to constrain his or her actions.\",\n \"\\nAs regards Austin’s “command” model, it seems to fit\\nsome aspects of law poorly (e.g., rules which grant powers to\\nofficials and to private citizens—of the latter, the rules for\\nmaking wills, trusts, and contracts are examples), while excluding\\nother matters (e.g., international law) which we are not inclined to\\nexclude from the category “law.”\",\n \"\\nMore generally, it seems more distorting than enlightening to reduce\\nall legal rules to one type. For example, rules that empower people to\\nmake wills and contracts perhaps can be re-characterized as\\npart of a long chain of reasoning for eventually imposing a sanction\\n(Austin spoke in this context of the sanction of “nullity”\\n(Austin 1879: 522, 523, 923)) on those who fail to comply with the\\nrelevant provisions. However, such a re-characterization misses the\\nbasic purpose of those sorts of laws—they are arguably about\\ngranting power and autonomy, not punishing wrongdoing.\",\n \"\\nA different criticism of Austin’s command theory is that a\\ntheory which portrays law solely in terms of power fails to\\ndistinguish rules of terror from forms of governance sufficiently just\\nthat they are accepted as legitimate (or at least as reasons for\\naction) by their own citizens.\",\n \"\\nFinally, one might note that the constitutive rules that determine who\\nthe legal officials are and what procedures must be followed in\\ncreating new legal rules, “are not commands habitually obeyed,\\nnor can they be expressed as habits of obedience to persons”\\n(Hart 1958: p. 603).\",\n \"\\nAustin was aware of some of these lines of attack, and had responses\\nready; it is another matter whether his responses were adequate. It\\nshould also be noted that Austin’s work shows a silence on\\nquestions of methodology, though this may be forgivable, given the\\nearly stage of jurisprudence. As discussed in an earlier section, in\\nmany ways, Austin was blazing a new path. On matters of methodology,\\nlater commentators on Austin’s work have had difficulty\\ndetermining whether he is best understood as making empirical claims\\nabout the law or conceptual claims; elements of each sort of approach\\ncan be found in his writings (Lobban 1991: pp. 224–225;\\nCotterrell 2003: pp. 81–83).\",\n \"\\nWhen H.L.A. Hart revived legal positivism in the middle of the\\n20th century (Hart 1958, 2012), he did it by criticizing\\nand building on Austin’s theory: for example, Hart’s\\ntheory did not try to reduce all legal rules to one kind of rule, but\\nemphasized the varying types and functions of legal rules; and\\nHart’s theory, grounded partly on the distinction between\\n“obligation” and “being obliged,” was built\\naround the fact that some participants within legal systems\\n“accepted” the legal rules as reasons for action, above\\nand beyond the fear of sanctions. Hart’s\\n“hermeneutic” approach, building on the “internal\\npoint of view” of participants who accepted the legal system,\\ndiverged sharply from Austin’s approach to law.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Criticisms\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nSome modern commentators appreciate in Austin elements that were\\nprobably not foremost in his mind (or that of his contemporary\\nreaders). For example, one occasionally sees Austin portrayed as the\\nfirst “realist”: in contrast both to the theorists that\\ncame before Austin and to some modern writers on law, Austin is seen\\nas having a keener sense of the connection of law and power, and the\\nimportance of keeping that connection at the forefront of analysis\\n(cf. Cotterrell 2003: pp. 49–77). One commentator wrote:\",\n \"\\nAustin’s theory is not a theory of the Rule of Law: of\\ngovernment subject to law. It is a theory of the ‘rule of\\nmen’: of government using law as an instrument of power. Such a\\nview may be considered realistic or merely cynical. But it is, in its\\nbroad outlines, essentially coherent. (Cotterrell 2003: p. 70)\\n\",\n \"\\nWhen circumstances seem to warrant a more critical, skeptical or\\ncynical approach to law and government, Austin’s equation of law\\nand force will be attractive—however distant such a reading may\\nbe from Austin’s own liberal-utilitarian views at the time of\\nhis writing, or his more conservative political views later in his\\nlife (Hamburger, 1985).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. A Revisionist View?\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Austin, John, 1832, The Province of Jurisprudence\nDetermined, W. Rumble (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress, 1995.","–––, 1879, Lectures on Jurisprudence,\nor The Philosophy of Positive Law, 2 volumes, R. Campbell\n(ed.), 4th edition, revised, London: John Murray; reprinted, Bristol:\nThoemmes Press, 2002.","Bentham, Jeremy, 1789, An Introduction to the Principles of\nMorals and Legislation, J. H. Burns & H.L.A. Hart (eds.),\nOxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.","–––, 1970, Of Laws in General, H.L.A.\nHart (ed.), London: Athlone Press.","Bix, Brian H., 1999, “Positively Positivism,”\nVirginia Law Review, 75: 1613–1624.","Chilovi, Samuele and Wodak, Daniel, 2021, “On the\n(In)significance of Hume’s Law,” Philosophical\nStudies, first online 29 June 2021.\ndoi:10.1007/s11098-021-01674-5","Clark, E. C., 1883, Practical Jurisprudence: A Comment on\nAustin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Cliffe Leslie, T. E., 1864, “Modern Phases of Jurisprudence\nin England,” Westminster Review, 26: 261–76 [U.S.\nedition, 162: 125–132].","Cosgrove, Richard A., 1996, Scholars of the Law: English\nJurisprudence from Blackstone to Hart, New York: New York\nUniversity Press.","Cotterrell, Roger, 2003, The Politics of Jurisprudence: A\nCritical Introduction to Legal Philosophy, 2nd edition, London:\nLexisNexis.","Dewey, James, 1894, “Austin’s Theory of\nSovereignty,” Political Science Quarterly, 9:\n31–52.","Duxbury, Neil, 2005, “English Jurisprudence Between Austin\nand Hart,” Virginia Law Review, 91: 1–91.","Dworkin, Ronald, 1986, Law’s Empire, Cambridge, MA:\nHarvard University Press.","Finnis, John, 2000a, “On the Incoherence of Legal\nPositivism,” Notre Dame Law Review, 75:\n1597–1611.","–––, 2000b, “The Truth in Legal\nPositivism,” in The Autonomy of Law, Robert P. George\n(ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 195–214.","Freeman, Michael & Mindus, Patricia (eds.) 2013, The\nLegacy of John Austin’s Jurisprudence, Dordrecht:\nSpringer.","Halpin, Andrew, 2013, “Austin’s Methodology? His\nBequest to Jurisprudence,” in Michael Freeman & Patricia\nMindus (eds.) 2013, The Legacy of John Austin’s\nJurisprudence, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 15–40.","Hamburger, Lotte & Joseph, 1985, Troubled Lives: John and\nSarah Austin, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.","–––, 1992, Contemplating Adultery: The\nSecret Life of a Victorian Woman, London: Macmillan.","Harris, J.W., 1977, “The Concept of Sovereign Will,”\nActa Juridica (Essays in Honour of Ben Beinart, Volume II),\nCape Town: Juta & Co., 1979, pp. 1–15.","Hart, H.L.A., 1954, “Introduction” to John Austin,\nThe Province of Jurisprudence Determined, H.L.A. Hart (ed.),\nLondon: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, pp. vii–xxi.","–––, 1958, “Positivism and the Separation\nof Law and Morals,”Harvard Law Review, 71:\n593–629.","–––, 2012, The Concept of Law, 3rd\nedition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","Hobbes, Thomas, 1651, Leviathan, Richard Tuck (ed.),\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.","Hume, David, 1739, A Treatise of Human Nature, David Fate\nNorton & Mary J. Norton (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press,\n2000.","Kelsen, Hans, 1941, “The Pure Theory of Law and Analytical\nJurisprudence,” Harvard Law Review, 55:\n44–70.","Leiter, Brian, 2007, Naturalizing Jurisprudence, Oxford:\nOxford University Press.","Leiter, Brian and Etchemendy, Matthew X., “Naturalism in\nLegal Philosophy,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of\nPhilosophy (Fall 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =\n <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/lawphil-naturalism/>.","Lobban, Michael, 1991, The Common Law and English\nJurisprudence 1760–1850, Oxford: Clarendon Press.","–––, 2013, “Austin and the Germans,”\nin Michael Freeman & Patricia Mindus (eds.), The Legacy of\nJohn Austin’s Jurisprudence, Dordrecht: Springer, pp.\n255–270.","Mill, John Stuart, 1863, “Austin on Jurisprudence,”\nEdinburgh Review, 118 (October): 439–82 [U.S. edition,\n118: 222–244].","Moles, Robert N., 1987, Definition and Rule in Legal Theory: A\nReassessment of H.L.A. Hart and the Positivist Tradition, Oxford:\nBasil Blackwell.","Morison, W. L., 1982, John Austin, Stanford: Stanford\nUniversity Press.","Postema, Gerald J., 2011, Legal Philosophy in the Twentieth\nCentury: The Common Law World, Dordrecht: Springer.","Rumble, W. E., 1985, The Thought of John Austin:\nJurisprudence, Colonial Reform, and the British Constitution,\nLondon: Athlone Press.","–––, 1995, “Introduction,” in W.\nRumble (ed.), Austin: The Province of Jurisprudence\nDetermined, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.\nvii–xxiv.","–––, 2005, Doing Austin Justice: The\nReception of John Austin’s Philosophy of Law in\nNineteenth-Century England, London: Continuum.","–––, 2013, “Did Austin Remain an\nAustinian?,” in Michael Freeman & Patricia Mindus (eds.)\n2013, The Legacy of John Austin’s Jurisprudence,\nDordrecht: Springer, pp. 131–153.","Savigny, Friedrich Karl von, 1975, On the Vocation of Our Age\nfor Legislation and Jurisprudence, Abraham Hayward (trans.), New\nYork: Arno Press.","Schauer, Frederick, 2010, “Was Austin Right After\nAll?,” Ratio Juris, 23: 1–21.","Schwarz, Andreas B., 1934, “John Austin and the German\nJurisprudence of His Time,” Politica, 1:\n178–199.","Sebok, Anthony J., 1998, Legal Positivism in American\nJurisprudence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Stein, Peter, 1988, The Character and Influence of the Roman\nCivil Law: Historical Essays, London: The Hambledon Press.","Tapper, Colin, 1965, “Austin on Sanctions,”\nCambridge Law Journal, 23(2): 271–287."],"string":"[\n \"Austin, John, 1832, The Province of Jurisprudence\\nDetermined, W. Rumble (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress, 1995.\",\n \"–––, 1879, Lectures on Jurisprudence,\\nor The Philosophy of Positive Law, 2 volumes, R. Campbell\\n(ed.), 4th edition, revised, London: John Murray; reprinted, Bristol:\\nThoemmes Press, 2002.\",\n \"Bentham, Jeremy, 1789, An Introduction to the Principles of\\nMorals and Legislation, J. H. Burns & H.L.A. Hart (eds.),\\nOxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.\",\n \"–––, 1970, Of Laws in General, H.L.A.\\nHart (ed.), London: Athlone Press.\",\n \"Bix, Brian H., 1999, “Positively Positivism,”\\nVirginia Law Review, 75: 1613–1624.\",\n \"Chilovi, Samuele and Wodak, Daniel, 2021, “On the\\n(In)significance of Hume’s Law,” Philosophical\\nStudies, first online 29 June 2021.\\ndoi:10.1007/s11098-021-01674-5\",\n \"Clark, E. C., 1883, Practical Jurisprudence: A Comment on\\nAustin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Cliffe Leslie, T. E., 1864, “Modern Phases of Jurisprudence\\nin England,” Westminster Review, 26: 261–76 [U.S.\\nedition, 162: 125–132].\",\n \"Cosgrove, Richard A., 1996, Scholars of the Law: English\\nJurisprudence from Blackstone to Hart, New York: New York\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Cotterrell, Roger, 2003, The Politics of Jurisprudence: A\\nCritical Introduction to Legal Philosophy, 2nd edition, London:\\nLexisNexis.\",\n \"Dewey, James, 1894, “Austin’s Theory of\\nSovereignty,” Political Science Quarterly, 9:\\n31–52.\",\n \"Duxbury, Neil, 2005, “English Jurisprudence Between Austin\\nand Hart,” Virginia Law Review, 91: 1–91.\",\n \"Dworkin, Ronald, 1986, Law’s Empire, Cambridge, MA:\\nHarvard University Press.\",\n \"Finnis, John, 2000a, “On the Incoherence of Legal\\nPositivism,” Notre Dame Law Review, 75:\\n1597–1611.\",\n \"–––, 2000b, “The Truth in Legal\\nPositivism,” in The Autonomy of Law, Robert P. George\\n(ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 195–214.\",\n \"Freeman, Michael & Mindus, Patricia (eds.) 2013, The\\nLegacy of John Austin’s Jurisprudence, Dordrecht:\\nSpringer.\",\n \"Halpin, Andrew, 2013, “Austin’s Methodology? His\\nBequest to Jurisprudence,” in Michael Freeman & Patricia\\nMindus (eds.) 2013, The Legacy of John Austin’s\\nJurisprudence, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 15–40.\",\n \"Hamburger, Lotte & Joseph, 1985, Troubled Lives: John and\\nSarah Austin, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.\",\n \"–––, 1992, Contemplating Adultery: The\\nSecret Life of a Victorian Woman, London: Macmillan.\",\n \"Harris, J.W., 1977, “The Concept of Sovereign Will,”\\nActa Juridica (Essays in Honour of Ben Beinart, Volume II),\\nCape Town: Juta & Co., 1979, pp. 1–15.\",\n \"Hart, H.L.A., 1954, “Introduction” to John Austin,\\nThe Province of Jurisprudence Determined, H.L.A. Hart (ed.),\\nLondon: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, pp. vii–xxi.\",\n \"–––, 1958, “Positivism and the Separation\\nof Law and Morals,”Harvard Law Review, 71:\\n593–629.\",\n \"–––, 2012, The Concept of Law, 3rd\\nedition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Hobbes, Thomas, 1651, Leviathan, Richard Tuck (ed.),\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.\",\n \"Hume, David, 1739, A Treatise of Human Nature, David Fate\\nNorton & Mary J. Norton (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press,\\n2000.\",\n \"Kelsen, Hans, 1941, “The Pure Theory of Law and Analytical\\nJurisprudence,” Harvard Law Review, 55:\\n44–70.\",\n \"Leiter, Brian, 2007, Naturalizing Jurisprudence, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press.\",\n \"Leiter, Brian and Etchemendy, Matthew X., “Naturalism in\\nLegal Philosophy,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of\\nPhilosophy (Fall 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =\\n <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/lawphil-naturalism/>.\",\n \"Lobban, Michael, 1991, The Common Law and English\\nJurisprudence 1760–1850, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"–––, 2013, “Austin and the Germans,”\\nin Michael Freeman & Patricia Mindus (eds.), The Legacy of\\nJohn Austin’s Jurisprudence, Dordrecht: Springer, pp.\\n255–270.\",\n \"Mill, John Stuart, 1863, “Austin on Jurisprudence,”\\nEdinburgh Review, 118 (October): 439–82 [U.S. edition,\\n118: 222–244].\",\n \"Moles, Robert N., 1987, Definition and Rule in Legal Theory: A\\nReassessment of H.L.A. Hart and the Positivist Tradition, Oxford:\\nBasil Blackwell.\",\n \"Morison, W. L., 1982, John Austin, Stanford: Stanford\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Postema, Gerald J., 2011, Legal Philosophy in the Twentieth\\nCentury: The Common Law World, Dordrecht: Springer.\",\n \"Rumble, W. E., 1985, The Thought of John Austin:\\nJurisprudence, Colonial Reform, and the British Constitution,\\nLondon: Athlone Press.\",\n \"–––, 1995, “Introduction,” in W.\\nRumble (ed.), Austin: The Province of Jurisprudence\\nDetermined, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.\\nvii–xxiv.\",\n \"–––, 2005, Doing Austin Justice: The\\nReception of John Austin’s Philosophy of Law in\\nNineteenth-Century England, London: Continuum.\",\n \"–––, 2013, “Did Austin Remain an\\nAustinian?,” in Michael Freeman & Patricia Mindus (eds.)\\n2013, The Legacy of John Austin’s Jurisprudence,\\nDordrecht: Springer, pp. 131–153.\",\n \"Savigny, Friedrich Karl von, 1975, On the Vocation of Our Age\\nfor Legislation and Jurisprudence, Abraham Hayward (trans.), New\\nYork: Arno Press.\",\n \"Schauer, Frederick, 2010, “Was Austin Right After\\nAll?,” Ratio Juris, 23: 1–21.\",\n \"Schwarz, Andreas B., 1934, “John Austin and the German\\nJurisprudence of His Time,” Politica, 1:\\n178–199.\",\n \"Sebok, Anthony J., 1998, Legal Positivism in American\\nJurisprudence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Stein, Peter, 1988, The Character and Influence of the Roman\\nCivil Law: Historical Essays, London: The Hambledon Press.\",\n \"Tapper, Colin, 1965, “Austin on Sanctions,”\\nCambridge Law Journal, 23(2): 271–287.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../bentham/","text":"Bentham, Jeremy"},{"href":"../law-language/","text":"law: and language"},{"href":"../legal-obligation/","text":"legal obligation and authority"},{"href":"../lawphil-naturalism/","text":"naturalism: in legal philosophy"},{"href":"../lawphil-nature/","text":"nature of law"},{"href":"../legal-positivism/","text":"nature of law: legal positivism"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../bentham/\",\n \"text\": \"Bentham, Jeremy\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../law-language/\",\n \"text\": \"law: and language\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../legal-obligation/\",\n \"text\": \"legal obligation and authority\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../lawphil-naturalism/\",\n \"text\": \"naturalism: in legal philosophy\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../lawphil-nature/\",\n \"text\": \"nature of law\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../legal-positivism/\",\n \"text\": \"nature of law: legal positivism\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":94,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"austin-jl"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"John Langshaw Austin"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Tue Dec 11, 2012; substantive revision Wed Jun 30, 2021"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nJohn Langshaw Austin (1911–1960) was White’s Professor of\nMoral Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He made a number of\ncontributions in various areas of philosophy, including important work\non knowledge, perception, action, freedom, truth, language, and the\nuse of language in speech acts. Distinctions that Austin draws in his\nwork on speech acts—in particular his distinction between\nlocutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts—have assumed\nsomething like canonical status in more recent work. His work on\nknowledge and perception places him in a broad tradition of\n“Oxford Realism”, running from Cook Wilson and Harold\nArthur Prichard through to J.M. Hinton, M.G.F. Martin, John McDowell,\nPaul Snowdon, Charles Travis, and Timothy Williamson. His work on\ntruth has played an important role in recent discussions of the extent\nto which sentence meaning can be accounted for in terms of\ntruth-conditions."],"string":"[\n \"\\nJohn Langshaw Austin (1911–1960) was White’s Professor of\\nMoral Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He made a number of\\ncontributions in various areas of philosophy, including important work\\non knowledge, perception, action, freedom, truth, language, and the\\nuse of language in speech acts. Distinctions that Austin draws in his\\nwork on speech acts—in particular his distinction between\\nlocutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts—have assumed\\nsomething like canonical status in more recent work. His work on\\nknowledge and perception places him in a broad tradition of\\n“Oxford Realism”, running from Cook Wilson and Harold\\nArthur Prichard through to J.M. Hinton, M.G.F. Martin, John McDowell,\\nPaul Snowdon, Charles Travis, and Timothy Williamson. His work on\\ntruth has played an important role in recent discussions of the extent\\nto which sentence meaning can be accounted for in terms of\\ntruth-conditions.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Life and Work","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. Language and Truth","sub_toc":["2.1 Language and Philosophy","2.2 Language and Truth","2.3 Speech Acts and Truth"]},{"content_title":"3. Knowledge and Perception","sub_toc":["3.1 Knowledge","3.2 Sensory perception"]},{"content_title":"4. Action and Freedom","sub_toc":["4.1 Actions and Excuses","4.2 Freedom and Ability"]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":["Primary Literature","Secondary Literature"]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Life and Work\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Language and Truth\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"2.1 Language and Philosophy\",\n \"2.2 Language and Truth\",\n \"2.3 Speech Acts and Truth\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Knowledge and Perception\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"3.1 Knowledge\",\n \"3.2 Sensory perception\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Action and Freedom\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"4.1 Actions and Excuses\",\n \"4.2 Freedom and Ability\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"Primary Literature\",\n \"Secondary Literature\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\nAustin was born in Lancaster, England 26 March 1911 to Geoffrey\nLangshaw Austin and his wife Mary Austin (née Bowes-Wilson).\nThe family moved to Scotland in 1922, where Austin’s father\nwas Secretary of St. Leonard’s School, St. Andrews.","\nAustin took up a scholarship in Classics at Shrewsbury School in 1924,\nand, in 1929, went on to study Classics at Balliol College, Oxford. In\n1933, he received a First in Literae Humaniores (Classics and\nPhilosophy) in 1933 and was elected to a Fellowship at All Souls\nCollege, Oxford. He undertook his first teaching position in 1935, as\nfellow and tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford.","\nAustin’s early interests included Aristotle, Kant, Leibniz, and\nPlato (especially Theaetetus). His more contemporary\ninfluences included especially G.E. Moore, John Cook Wilson, and H.A.\nPrichard. (Austin attended Prichard’s undergraduate lectures\nwith such vigour that Prichard is reported to have made an\nunsuccessful attempt to exclude him.) It’s plausible that some\naspects of Austin’s distinctive approach to philosophical\nquestions derived from his engagement with the last three. All three\nphilosophers shaped their views about general philosophical questions\non the basis of careful attention to the more specific judgments we\nmake. And they took our specific judgments (for instance, in\nMoore’s case, “I know that I have hands”) to be, in\ngeneral, more secure than more general judgments (for instance, again\nin Moore’s case, “I know things about external\nreality”). Moreover, there are some continuities of doctrine,\nespecially with Cook Wilson and Prichard, which align Austin with an\n“Oxford Realist” school of philosophy. The core components\nof the latter view are, first, that perception and knowledge are\nprimitive forms of apprehension and, second, that what we apprehend\nare ordinary elements of our environments that are independent of our\napprehending them. (All three thinkers were at one or another time\ncommitted to versions of both components of the position but for\ncomplex reasons sometimes wavered about the second. See e.g., Travis\nand Kalderon 2013.)","\nDuring the Second World War, Austin served in the British Intelligence\nCorps. It has been said of him that, “he more than anybody was\nresponsible for the life-saving accuracy of the D-Day\nintelligence” (reported in Warnock 1963: 9). Austin left the\narmy in September 1945 with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was\nhonoured for his intelligence work with an Order of the British\nEmpire, the French Croix de Guerre, and the U.S. Officer of the Legion\nof Merit. ","\nAustin married Jean Coutts in 1941. They had four children, two girls\nand two boys.","\nAfter the War, Austin returned to Oxford. He became White’s\nProfessor of Moral Philosophy in 1952. In the same year, he took on\nthe role of delegate to Oxford University Press, becoming Chairman of\nthe Finance Committee in 1957. His other administrative work for the\nUniversity included the role of Junior Proctor (1949–50), and\nChairman of the Sub-Faculty of Philosophy (1953–55). He was\npresident of the Aristotelian Society 1956–57. He gave the\nWilliam James Lectures in Harvard in 1955 (a version of the lectures\nwas published as How to Do Things With Words – see\n1962b in the Bibliography). He invented the card game CASE in 1951.","\nDuring this period, Austin edited H.W.B. Joseph Lectures on the\nPhilosophy of Leibniz (1949) and produced a translation of\nGottlob Frege’s Grundlagen der Arithmetik, so that it\ncould be set as an exam (1950). Austin wrote little and published\nless. Much of his influence was through teaching and other forms of\nsmall-scale engagement with philosophers. He also instituted a series\nof “Saturday Morning” discussion sessions, which involved\ndetailed discussions of a number of philosophical topics and works,\nincluding Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics,\nFrege’s Grundlagen, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s\nPhilosophical Investigations, Merleau-Ponty’s\nPhenomenology of Perception, and Noam Chomsky’s\nSyntactic Structures.","\nAustin died in Oxford on 8 February 1960.","\n(For more detail about Austin’s life, work, and influences see\nAyer 1978; Baldwin 2010; Berlin 1973b; Dancy 2010; Garvey 2014;\nGustaffson 2011; Hacker 2004; Hampshire 1960; Travis and Kalderon\n2013; Marion 2000a,b, 2009; Passmore 1957; Pears 1962; Pitcher 1973;\nSearle 2014; Urmson and Warnock 1961; Urmson 1967; Warnock 1963,\n1973a; Warnock 1989: 1–10.)"],"section_title":"1. Life and Work","subsections":[]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"2. Language and Truth","subsections":[{"content":["\nIn this section, we’ll look at Austin’s views about the\nrole of the study of language in philosophy more generally. It is\ncommon to count Austin as an “Ordinary Language\nPhilosopher”, along with, for example, Gilbert Ryle, P.F.\nStrawson, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. However, although each of these\nthinkers was sometimes concerned, in one or another way, with our use\nof ordinary language, it is far from clear what in addition to that\nthe label is supposed to entail. And it is equally unclear that the\nvarious thinkers so-labelled deserve to be grouped together.","\nAustin cared about language for two main reasons. First, language use\nis a central part of human activity, so it’s an important topic\nin its own right. Second, the study of language is an\naide—indeed, for some topics, an important preliminary—to\nthe pursuit of philosophical topics. Many of Austin’s most\ndistinctive reflections on the use of language arise in the course of\ndiscussion of other topics (see especially his “A Plea for\nExcuses” 1957).","\nOne route to understanding Austin’s general approach to\nphilosophy is provided by reflection on the following comment by\nStuart Hampshire:","\n\n\n[Austin] was constitutionally unable to refrain from applying the same\nstandards of truth and accuracy to a philosophical argument, sentence\nby sentence, as he would have applied to any other serious\nsubject-matter. He could not have adopted a special tone of voice, or\nattitude of mind, for philosophical questions. (Hampshire 1960:\n34)\n","\nIn short, it mattered to Austin that, in attempting to make out\npositions and arguments, philosophers should meet ordinary standards\nof truth, accuracy, and so forth. On the one hand, this presented a\ngeneral challenge to philosophers, a challenge that they might easily\nfail to meet. The challenge is either to make use of an ordinary\nvocabulary, or ordinary concepts, in order to make claims or judgments\nthat are, according to ordinary standards, at least true (or accurate,\netc.); or to do the serious work required to set up an appropriate\ntechnical vocabulary and then use it to say things that are by\nappropriate standards true (accurate, etc.). On the other hand, it\nprovided Austin with what he took to be a reasonably secure approach\nto general philosophical questions: first, find a connection between\nthose general philosophical questions and the more specific claims or\njudgments that we ordinarily make and take ourselves to be secure in\nmaking; second, make sufficiently many of the relevant claims or\njudgments, in a sufficient variety of circumstances, in order to\naddress the general philosophical questions.","\nAustin held that, in their hurry to address general philosophical\nquestions, philosophers have a tendency to ignore the nuances involved\nin making and assessing ordinary claims and judgments. Among the risks\nassociated with insensitivity to the nuances, two stand out. First,\nphilosophers are liable to miss distinctions that are made in our\nordinary use of language and that are relevant to our concerns and\nclaims. Second, failure to exploit fully the resources of ordinary\nlanguage can make philosophers susceptible to seemingly forced choices\nbetween unacceptable alternatives. Here Austin warns:","\n\n\nIt is worth bearing in mind…the general rule that we must not\nexpect to find simple labels for complicated cases…however\nwell-equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all\npossible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer\nthan diction. (1957: 195)\n","\nOn Austin’s view, language is likely to be well designed for the\nends to which it is ordinarily put. But special, or especially\ncomplicated, cases may require special treatment. This is apt to be an\nespecial liability when it comes to the question whether a sentence\ncan be used in a particular circumstance to state something true or\nfalse:","\n\n\nWe say, for example, that a certain statement is exaggerated or vague\nor bold, a description somewhat rough or misleading or not very good,\nan account rather general or too concise. In cases like these it is\npointless to insist on deciding in simple terms whether the statement\nis “true or false”. Is it true or false that Belfast is\nnorth of London? That the galaxy is the shape of a fried egg? That\nBeethoven was a drunkard? That Wellington won the battle of Waterloo?\nThere are various degrees and dimensions of success in making\nstatements: the statements fit the facts always more or less loosely,\nin different ways on different occasions for different intents and\npurposes. (1950a: 129–130)\n","\nAustin makes two points here. First, when faced with a putative choice\nof this sort, we should not insist on deciding in simple\nterms whether a statement is true or false (or whether an\nexpression applies or fails to apply to something). Some cases are\ncomplicated, and, in some of those cases, we are capable of meeting\nsome of the complications by saying more: “Well, it is true that\nBelfast is north of London if you understand that claim in the\nfollowing way….” Second, the complications can take\ndifferent forms, and can matter in different ways, on different\noccasions. Given the prior course of our conversation, and our\nspecific intents and purposes in discussing the issue, it might be\nmanifest that, on that particular occasion, we will\nunderstand the complications, without a need for their\narticulation, so that the following is fine as it stands: “Yes,\nit is true that Belfast is north of London.”","\nAustin’s summarised his view of the role of attention to\nordinary language in philosophy thus:","\n\n\nFirst, words are our tools, and, as a minimum, we should use clean\ntools: we should know what we mean and what we do not, and we must\nforearm ourselves against the traps that language sets us. Secondly,\nwords are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we\nneed therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from\nand against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and\narbitrariness, and can re-look at the world without blinkers. Thirdly,\nand more hopefully, our common stock of words embodies all the\ndistinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they\nhave found worth making, in the lifetimes of many generations: these\nsurely are likely to be more sound, since they have stood up to the\nlong test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in\nall ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I\nare likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon—the\nmost favoured alternative method. (1957:\n 181–182)[1]\n ","\nAustin holds, then, that an important preliminary to philosophising on\nat least some topics—for instance, where the topic is\n“ordinary and reasonably practical”—would be the\ndetailed study of the language we use to speak on that topic, and of\nthe way that we use it.","\nAustin didn’t think that the investigation of language was more\nthan a preliminary to theorising, either in philosophy or science. He\nwasn’t averse to theory construction, even if its outcome were\npotentially revisionary (see e.g., 1957: 189). His concern was only\nthat such theorising should be properly grounded, and that it should\nnot be driven, for example, by an initial failure to keep track of\ndistinctions that we mark in our ordinary use of language. Further,\nAustin draws an important distinction between “words and facts\nor things,” and he seems to suggest that we have ways of\ninvestigating the world—that is, facts and things—which\ncan bypass the “blinkers” sometimes imposed on us by our\nwords. We’ll return to Austin’s distinction between the world,\nincluding facts—which Austin thinks of as particular or\nconcrete—and words, including the statements we make in using\nwords, in \n section 2.2. \n And we’ll return to Austin’s idea that we can\nhave unblinkered awareness of the world—unblinkered, that is, by\nthe linguistic or judgmental capacities that we bring to bear on what\nwe experience—in \n section 3.1.","\nIt’s fair to say that Austin’s work has been caught up in\nthe stampede away from broadly ordinary language-based approaches to\nphilosophical questions. The work of Paul Grice, collected in his\nStudies in the Way of Words (1989), has played an important\nrole in the negative assessment of such approaches, including aspects\nof Austin’s work. One central idea in Grice’s work is that\nthe ways in which we use language—crudely, the pairings of\nsituations and sentences that we find appropriate or inappropriate, or\nwhat we would or wouldn’t say in those situations—is not a\nsimple function of the nature of the respective situations and the\ncorrectness conditions with which the sentences are associated.\nRather, judgments about appropriateness are driven also by, for\nexample, our sensitivities to the demands of rational co-operation\nwith our conversational partners. And it has been thought that, in one\nor another way, ordinary language philosophers, including Austin, have\nbeen insensitive to the additional parameters to which judgments of\nappropriateness are beholden (for early attacks of this sort, see Ayer\n1967 and Searle 1966). It is beyond the scope of this entry to attempt\nto assess either the extent to which Austin should really be seen as a\ntarget of such objections or, if he should, whether they demonstrate\nweaknesses in his work. However, in pursuing any such assessment, it\nis important to note that Austin’s exploitation of ordinary\nlanguage is never driven by simple appeal to whether, in a situation\nconsidered as a whole, we would take it to be simply appropriate or\ninappropriate to use some sentence or other. Rather, Austin\nis—as we are—sensitive to more fine-grained appraisals of\nuses of bits of language and, when he judges that an utterance on an\noccasion would be false or nonsensical, he intends that judgment to\ncontrast with less damaging negative appraisals—for example,\nabout what it would be merely inappropriate or impolite to say.\nMoreover, Austin is sensitive to the specific features of situations\nupon which we base one or another more fine-grained appraisal of uses\nof sentences. As he stresses, “It takes two to make a\ntruth” (1950a: 124 fn.1). And Austin is sensitive to the details\nof both participants in that and other forms of transaction between\nword and\n world.[2]","\n(For discussion of Austin’s approach to philosophical questions,\nwith reference to his classification as an ordinary language\nphilosopher, see Berlin 1973b; Cavell 1965; Garvey 2014; Grice 1989:\n3–21; Gustafsson 2011; Hampshire 1960, 1965; Kaplan 2018: 1–39; Longworth 2018a; Marion 2009; Martin\nms (Other Internet Resources); Pears 1962; Pitcher 1973; Putnam 1994;\nQuine 1965; Reimer 2018; Searle 1966; Soames 2003: 171–219; Travis 1991;\nUrmson 1965, 1967; Urmson and Warnock 1961; Warnock 1973a, 1989:\n2–10; White 1967.)"],"subsection_title":"2.1 Language and Philosophy"},{"content":["\nThe topic of this section is Austin’s views about truth.\nAustin’s views about truth are scattered throughout his work,\nbut his most explicit discussion of the topic is in the paper\n“Truth” (1950a) (see also 1953, 1954ms, 1956b, 1962b,\n1962c). Amongst the distinctive claims Austin makes about truth are\nthe following:","\nLet’s start with (1)–(3). Austin 1950a is ostensibly\nresponding to a proposal in Strawson 1949 according to which the\nfunction of the predicate “is true” is to facilitate the\nperformance of acts of affirmation or agreement, and not to describe\nthings—e.g., statements—as possessing the property of\ntruth. For short, Strawson claimed that “is true” has a\nperformative rather than a descriptive function. And\nhe accused his opponents of committing the descriptive\nfallacy: the alleged fallacy of treating expressions, or aspects\nof the use of expressions, that really serve performative purposes as\nhaving (only) a descriptive\n purpose.[4]\n One of Austin’s aims was to defend the view that the predicate\n“is true” has a descriptive function (perhaps in addition\nto its having one or more performative functions). In pursuing that\naim, Austin also made a number of distinctive proposals about the\ndescriptive function of the truth\n predicate.[5]","\nLet’s turn, then, to the core of Austin’s account of\ntruth. Austin presents his account of truth as an account of truth for\nstatements. However, “statement” is at least two\nways ambiguous, covering both historical episodes in which something\nis stated—what I’ll refer to as\nstatings—and also the things or propositions that are\nstated therein—which I’ll refer to as what is\nstated. Austin isn’t especially careful about the\ndistinction, but it’s possible to reconstruct much of what he\nsays in a way that respects it (for discussion of the distinction see\ne.g., Cartwright 1962).","\nAustin’s primary interest appears to be the truth of\nstatings. He writes of “statement” that it has\n“the merit of clearly referring to the historic use of a\nsentence by an utterer” (1950a: 121). However, statings are not\nordinarily said to be true or false, except derivatively insofar as\nwhat is stated in them is true or false. Rather, statings are assessed\nas, for example, correct or incorrect, appropriate or inappropriate,\nand so forth. However, it is plausible that stating correctly is\nclosely associated with making a statement that is true. And\nAustin’s account can be understood as an account of the\nconditions in which statings are such that what is stated in them is\n true.[6]","\nAustin presents the core of his account of truth in the following\nway:","\n\n\nWhen is a statement true? The temptation is to answer (at least if we\nconfine ourselves to “straightforward” statements):\n“When it corresponds to the facts”. And as a piece of\nstandard English this can hardly be wrong. Indeed, I must confess I do\nnot really think it is wrong at all: the theory of truth is a series\nof truisms. Still, it can at least be misleading. (1950a: 121)\n","\nThe two obvious sources of potential misdirection in the formula that\nAustin endorses here are its appeal to correspondence and its\nappeal to\n facts.[7]\n Austin attempts to prevent our being misled by explaining how those\ntwo appeals ought to be understood. Austin’s focus in his\n“Truth” (1950a) is mainly on the nature of correspondence.\nHe deals more fully with facts in his “Unfair to Facts”\n(1954ms).","\nIn giving an account of correspondence, Austin makes appeal to two\ntypes of (what he calls) conventions\n (as per (3) above):[8]","\nThe descriptive conventions associate sentences with (types\nof) ways for things to be: ways for situations, things, events, etc.\nto be. For instance, the sentence “The cat is on the mat”\nis associated with a type of way for things to be in which the cat is\non the mat. A variety of different historic situations might be of\nthat type. For instance, one historic situation of that type might\ninvolve Logos (Derrida’s cat), while a different historic\nsituation of the same type might involve Nothing (Sartre’s cat).\nSimilarly, cat-mat pairings that took place at different times would\nbe different historic situations or events and yet might be of the\nsame type.","\nThe demonstrative conventions, by contrast, associate\nparticular statings—themselves historic events—with some\namongst the accessible historic situations, things, events, etc.\nConsider, for example, the following simplified case. There are two\naccessible situations, one of which is of the cat-on-mat type and one\nof which is of the dog-on-linoleum type. The descriptive conventions\ngoverning the English sentence “The cat is on the mat” do\nnot, and cannot, determine which of the two accessible situations a\nspeaker aims to talk about on a particular occasion. In order to\nachieve that, the speaker must find a way of making manifest that\ntheir goal is to select, say, the dog-on-linoleum situation. They\nmight achieve this by, for example, their use on a particular occasion\nof the present tense, or by pointing, etc. (1950a:\n 121–126).[10]","\nWith this machinery in place, Austin continues:","\n\n\nA statement is said to be true when the historic state of affairs [or\ne.g., situation, thing, event] to which it is correlated by the\ndemonstrative conventions (the one to which it “refers”)\nis of a type [footnote omitted] with which the sentence used in making\nit is correlated by the descriptive conventions. (1950a: 122)\n","\nWhat does “is of a type with which” mean? Austin expands\non his account in the omitted footnote:","\n\n\n“Is of a type with which” means “is sufficiently\nlike those standard states of affairs with which”. Thus, for a\nstatement to be true one state of affairs must be like\ncertain others, which is a natural relation, but also\nsufficiently like to merit the same\n“description”, which is no longer a purely natural\nrelation. To say “This is red” is not the same as to say\n“This is like those”, nor even as to say “This is\nlike those which were called red”. That things are\nsimilar, or even “exactly” similar, I may\nliterally see, but that they are the same I cannot literally\nsee—in calling them the same colour a convention is involved\nadditional to the conventional choice of the name to be given to the\ncolour which they are said to be. (1950a: 122 fn.2)\n","\nThe English sentence “This is red” is correlated by the\ndescriptive conventions with a type of way for things to be: a type\ninstanced by all and only those historic situations or states of\naffairs in which a selected thing is red. According to Austin, a\nstating by use of that sentence would be correct if the thing selected\nin the stating via the demonstrative conventions were sufficiently\nlike standard situations or states of affairs in which a selected\nthing is red. So, we rely on the existence of a range of standard\ninstances that are assumed to be of the required type. We can see that\nthe thing selected in this stating, via the demonstrative conventions,\nis now in various ways similar and dissimilar from those standard\ninstances. The question we need to answer is this: Is this thing of\nthe same type as the standard instances with respect to its\ncolour? That is, is it the same colour as they are? According to\nAustin, we cannot answer that question simply by looking. In an at\nleast attenuated sense we must make a decision as to whether the\npresent instance is, in relevant respects, sufficiently\nsimilar to the standard instances as to mandate treating it as of the\nvery same\n type.[11]","\nNotice that, on Austin’s view, states of affairs (etc.) do not\nper se mandate that they belong to one or another type. To\nthat extent, they do not alone determine which propositional\nstatements are true of them. The things to which true statings\ncorrespond, then, are (in at least that sense) particulars\n (see (2) above).\n The things to which statings correspond, then, appear to be quite\ndifferent from facts as the latter are commonly understood by\nphilosophers. For facts are often thought of as\nproposition-like—as exhaustively captured by instances of the\nform “The fact that p”. And it seems that\nelements of that type would mandate the correctness of one or another\nclassification. Austin’s views about facts are developed a bit\nmore fully in his “Unfair to Facts” (1954ms). There Austin\nmakes clear, first, that he uses “facts”, with\netymological precedent, to speak of particulars. Second, Austin\nsketches a view of propositional fact talk on which it is used as a\nway of indirectly denoting particulars as the elements that make the\nspecified propositions true. However, Austin’s basic account of\ntruth can for the most part be detached from his views about facts and\n fact-talk.[12]","\nThe role for human judgment or decision in mediating the\nclassification of particulars leaves open that their correct\nclassification as to type might vary depending on specific features of\nthe occasion for so classifying them\n (see (4) above).\n It may be, for example, that for certain purposes an historic state\nof affairs involving a rose is sufficiently like standard situations\ninvolving red things as to warrant sameness of classification, while\nfor different purposes its likeness is outweighed by its\ndissimilarities from the standard cases. Moreover, what are counted as\nstandard cases may vary with the purposes operative in attempting to\nclassify, and may shift as new cases come to be counted as of a\nspecific\n type.[13]","\nThe precise ways in which our statings depend for their correctness or\nincorrectness on the facts can vary with variation in specific\nfeatures of the occasion, in particular with variation in the intents\nand purposes of conversational participants. As Austin puts it,","\n\n\nIt seems to be fairly generally realized nowadays that, if you just\ntake a bunch of sentences…impeccably formulated in some\nlanguage or other, there can be no question of sorting them out into\nthose that are true and those that are false; for (leaving out of\naccount so-called “analytic” sentences) the question of\ntruth and falsehood does not turn only on what a sentence is,\nnor yet on what it means, but on, speaking very broadly, the\n\ncircumstances in which it is uttered. Sentences as such are\nnot either true or false. (1962a: 110–111. See also 40–41,\n65)\n","\nAnd the circumstances can matter in a variety of ways, not simply by\nsupplying, or failing to supply, an appropriate array of facts:","\n\n\n…in the case of stating truly or falsely, just as in the case\nof advising well or badly, the intents and purposes of the utterance\nand its context are important; what is judged true in a school book\nmay not be so judged in a work of historical research. Consider\n… “Lord Raglan won the battle of Alma”, remembering\nthat Alma was a soldier’s battle if ever there was one and that\nLord Raglan’s orders were never transmitted to some of his\nsubordinates. Did Lord Raglan then win the battle of Alma or did he\nnot? Of course in some contexts, perhaps in a school book, it is\nperfectly justifiable to say so—it is something of an\nexaggeration, maybe, and there would be no question of giving Raglan a\nmedal for it…“Lord Raglan won the battle of Alma”\nis exaggerated and suitable to some contexts and not to others; it\nwould be pointless to insist on its [i.e., the\nsentence’s] truth or falsehood. (1962b: 143–144,\ninterpolation added)\n","\nIt’s important here to separate two questions. First, is the\nsentence “Lord Raglan won the battle of Alma”\ntrue? Second, is what is stated in using that sentence on a\nparticular occasion, true? In order for the first question to get an\naffirmative answer, every use of the sentence would have to\nbe—or issue in a statement that\n is—true.[14]\n But although the sentence can be used in a schoolbook to make a\nstatement that is true, it might also be used in a work of historical\nresearch, or in support of Raglan’s decoration, in making a\nfalse statement. Hence, the sentence doesn’t take the same\ntruth-value on every occasion: the sentence per se\nis neither true nor false. By contrast, there is no reason to deny\nthat the things that are stated in using the sentence on occasions are\ntrue: in particular, there is no reason to deny that what is stated by\nthe schoolbook occurrence of the sentence is true. So, the second\nquestion can be given an affirmative answer, as long as we are willing\nto allow that a sentence can be used to make different statements on\ndifferent occasions (see also Austin’s discussion of\n“real” in Sense and Sensibilia (1962a:\n62–77) for an array of relevant examples).","\nWe should avoid a possible misunderstanding of Austin here. His\nargument shows, at most, that whatever combines with the facts to\ndetermine a particular truth-value varies from occasion to occasion.\nThat does nothing to dislodge the natural view that a sentence can\ncarry its meaning with it from occasion to occasion, and thus\npossess a literal meaning. However, if we wish to retain that idea, we\nmust give up on the idea that sentence meaning simply combines with\nthe facts that are being spoken about to determine truth-value: we\nmust reject the idea that sentence meanings determine\ntruth-conditions. Plausibly, we should also give up the idea that\nmeaning alone determines what is stated (at least insofar as the\nlatter determines truth-conditions). In taking this line, we would\nreject views of meaning according to which it is given by appeal to\n truth-conditions.[15]","\nAustin’s account gives rise to the possibility of utterances in\nwhich no truth-evaluable statement is produced:","\n\n\nSuppose that we confront “France is hexagonal” with the\nfacts, in this case, I suppose, with France, is it true or false?\nWell, if you like, up to a point; of course I can see what you mean by\nsaying that it is true for certain intents and purposes. It is good\nenough for a top-ranking general, perhaps, but not for a\ngeographer… How can one answer this question, whether it is\ntrue or false that France is hexagonal? It is just rough, and that is\nthe right and final answer to the question of the relation of\n“France is hexagonal” to France. It is a rough\ndescription; it is not a true or a false one. (1962a: 143)\n","\nWhat Austin characterises in his final denial is the sentence\n“France is hexagonal”, in relation to France. He\nneedn’t, and doesn’t, deny that on occasion, for\nparticular intents and purposes, one might use the sentence to\nstate a truth. However, he suggests that, in some cases, the\ncircumstances of utterance may be such that no truth-evaluable\nstatement is made by the use of a sentence.","\nSuppose, for example, that someone uttered “France is\nhexagonal” out of the blue, without making manifest any intents\nand purposes. In that case, there would be nothing to go on, in\nseeking to establish whether the utterance was true or false, other\nthan the words used, given their meanings. But those words might have\nbeen used to make a variety of statements, statements whose truth or\nfalsehood depends on the facts in a variety of ways. Hence, unless we\nare willing to allow that the utterance is both true and false, we\nshould withhold that mode of assessment: although such an utterance\nwould involve a perfectly meaningful sentence, it would fail\nto be either true or false. Austin thought that our uses of words are\nalways liable to that sort of failure, especially when we are doing\nphilosophy. When used in cases that are out of the ordinary, or in the\nabsence of the background required to sustain the statement of truths\nor falsehoods, words might—in that sense—fail us.","\nAustin makes no claims to generality for the account of truth that he\nsketches. However, it’s natural to wonder to what extent the\naccount can naturally be extended in order to take in types of\nstatement that he doesn’t explicitly attempt to bring within its\npurview. Potential pressure points here include statements whose\nexpression involves negation (see 1950a: 128–129, 129 fn.1),\nquantification (see 1962b: 144), or conditionals, and statements of\nnecessary truths. The three main options open to the defender of\nAustin here are the following. First, an attempt might be made to\nbring some cases within the purview of a natural generalization of\nAustin’s account (see, for example, Warnock 1989: 56–61).\nSecond, it might be allowed that some such cases require distinctive\ntreatment, but argued that they can still be connected with the\naccount Austin offers as further species of the truth-genus. Third, an\nattempt might be made to argue that some such cases are so distinctive\nthat the forms of positive appraisal that are appropriate to them are\nnot really forms of appraisal as to\n truth.[16]","\nLet’s turn to\n (5),\n the question of the extent to which Austin endorses a deflationary\naccount of truth. The promiscuity of the classifier\n“deflationist” has a tendency to render the question\ndifficult to discuss in a useful way. However, we can at least\nconsider some ways in which Austin might be thought to give an\nexplanatory role to truth, or to deny it such a role. It’s clear\nthat Austin wishes to reject Strawson’s very strong form of\ndeflationism, according to which the function of truth is exhaustively\nperformative: saying that a statement is true amounts, precisely, to\nendorsing that statement oneself. Moreover, there is no sign that\nAustin thinks an account can be given of the expression of statements\nby statings that isn’t bound up with consideration of the\nconditions in which their stating would be subject to one or another\nform of positive appraisal—at the most general level,\nconsideration of their correctness-conditions. However, Austin often\ncharacterizes truth and falsity themselves as, in effect, mere labels\nfor positive and negative poles, respectively, in a variety of more\nspecific forms of appraisal.","\n\n\nWe become obsessed with “truth” when discussing\nstatements, just as we become obsessed with “freedom” when\ndiscussing conduct. So long as we think that what has always and alone\nto be decided is whether a certain action was done freely or was not,\nwe get nowhere: but so soon as we turn instead to the numerous other\nadverbs used in the same connexion (“accidentally”,\n“unwillingly”, “inadvertently”, &c.),\nthings become easier, and we come to see that no concluding inference\nof the form “Ergo, it was done freely (or not freely)” is\nrequired. Like freedom, truth is a bare minimum or an illusory ideal\n(the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about, say, the\nbattle of Waterloo or the Primavera). (1950a: 130; see also\n1956b: 250–251, 1957: 180)\n","\nAustin’s idea here seems to be the following. There are numerous\nspecific forms of positive appraisal that we employ with respect to\nstatings: they might be fair, reasonable, accurate, precise, adequate,\nsatisfactory and so forth. (Recall that Austin would have taken each\nform of assessment to be occasion-bound: a matter, for example, of\nwhat would be fair and reasonable to judge on this particular\noccasion.) In saying that what is stated in a stating is\ntrue, we are in effect saying that the stating meets the\n“bare minimum” condition of being susceptible to one or\nanother of those specific forms of positive appraisal. It’s\nconsistent with this type of view that our conception of the natures\nof what we state, and of how our statings come to be expressions of\nthose things, is bound up with our conception of the conditions in\nwhich our statings, and what we thereby state, are susceptible to one\nor another form of positive appraisal. To that extent, it differs from\nsome stronger forms of deflationism on which no truth-related mode of\npositive appraisal plays a non-derivative explanatory role. Moreover,\nthe view can take more or less radical forms. Its most radical form\ntreats truth as a mere disjunction of the more specific modes of\npositive appraisal, with no uniform underlying commonality amongst\nthose specific modes. That view would be a distinctive form of\ndeflationism about truth, since it would reject the idea that truth\nper se plays an essential role in explanation. Its less\nradical form allows that truth might impose a uniform necessary\ncondition on the specific modes of positive appraisal, and thereby\nplay an essential role, through its government of the specific modes,\nin the explanation of what is stated in statings. The latter form of\nview wouldn’t count as an interesting form of\ndeflationism, although it might well be an interesting\nposition in its own right.","\nAustin discusses an important range of ways in which assessment as to\ntruth can cover a variety of more fine-grained modes of appraisal in\nhis “How to Talk” (1953). See also the discussions of this\npaper in Chisholm 1964 and Warnock 1989: 47–56.","\n(For discussion of Austin’s account of truth, see Barwise and\nEtchemendy 1987; Bennett 1966; Crary 2002; Davidson 1969; Grice 1989:\n3–40; Hansen 2014; Kirkham 1995: 124–140; Mates 1974;\nNarboux 2011; Putnam 1994; Recanati 1994: 1–5, 121–130,\n141–153; Searle 1966; Strawson 1950, 1965; Travis 1991, 2005,\n2008: 1–18, 2011; Warnock 1973c, 1989: 45–64,\n135–145, 163–4 fn.74; White 1967; C.J.F. Williams\n1973.)"],"subsection_title":"2.2 Language and Truth"},{"content":["\nIn this section, we’ll consider some aspects of Austin’s\ntreatment of speech acts—things done with words (the main\nsources here are: 1962b, 1956b, and 1963; see also 1946: 97–103,\n1950a: 130–133, 1953). The topics we’ll consider are the\nfollowing.","\nA topic that has figured in some recent discussions, but that we\nwon’t discuss here, is this:","\nAustin presents the second reason for why sentences do not conspire\nwith the facts to determine truth-values in considering whether there\nis a useful distinction to be drawn between (indicative) sentences\nthat are used to make statements—which Austin labels\nconstatives—and sentences that are useable in the\nperformance of some act—which Austin labels\nperformatives (or sometimes performatory)\n (topic (2) above).[17]\n Austin’s opening list of examples of putative performatives\nincludes: “I take … to be my lawfully wedded\n…”—as uttered in the course of the marriage\nceremony; “I name this ship the Queen\nElizabeth”—as uttered when smashing a bottle against\nthe stern; “I give and bequeath my watch to my\nbrother”—as occurring in a will; “I bet you sixpence\nit will rain tomorrow” (1962b: 5). About these examples, Austin\nwrites:","\n\n\nIn these examples it seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of\ncourse, the appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my\ndoing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing…[fn.\nStill less anything that I have already done or have yet to\ndo.]…or to state that I am doing it. None of the utterances\ncited is either true or false: I assert this as obvious and do not\nargue it. (1962b: 6)\n","\nAustin is sometimes read as seeking to defend this view of\nperformatives. However, four features of his presentation suggest that\nhis view is not so straightforward. First, Austin presents the issue\nas concerning the classification by use of utterances of types of\nsentence, and we have already seen that he is in general\nsceptical about alleged associations between sentences and their\noccasional uses. Second, Austin fails here, and elsewhere, to offer\nserious arguments for his assertion that none of the cited utterances\nis either true or false. Third, Austin’s assertion is made using\nthe apparently performative form, “I assert …\n”—a form that appears, moreover, to falsify the\ngeneralisation that performatives lack truth-values. Finally, Austin\nissues the following warning in a footnote, two pages earlier:\n“Everything said in these sections is provisional, and subject\nto revision in the light of later sections” (1962b: 4 fn.1).","\nAustin goes on to discuss two apparently quite different modes of\nassessment for utterances of the two apparently different types.\nConstatives, as already noted, are assessed along the dimension of\ntruth and falsehood. By contrast, performatives are assessed along\ndimensions of happiness and unhappiness, or\nfelicity and infelicity. Taking the example of an\nutterance of “I take … to be my lawfully wedded …\n”, and simplifying Austin’s discussion, there are two main\nsorts of unhappiness, or infelicity, to which this performative is\nliable. First, there are misfires:","\n\n\n…if we…utter the formula incorrectly, or if…we\nare not in a position to do the act because we are…married\nalready, or it is the purser and not the captain who is conducting the\nceremony, then the act in question, …marrying, is not\nsuccessfully performed at all, …[it] is not achieved. (1962b:\n15–16)\n","\nSecond, there are abuses: in these cases, the act is\nperformed, but insincerely, perhaps for example in instituting a\nmarriage of convenience.","\nIt’s important to see that, even if it were true, in general,\nthat some things done using performatives—e.g., marrying,\nnaming, bequeathing, and betting—are neither true nor false, but\nrather are subject to assessment as happy or unhappy, it would not\nfollow that truth is out of the picture. That would depend, not only\non the basic claim that actions of those types per se are not\ntrue or false, but also on the claim that particular actions of those\ntypes are not also of other types that are assessable as true\nor false. And Austin recognised that actions can be of more than one\ntype (or, perhaps, that distinct actions might be performed\nsimultaneously):","\n\n\nTo say that I believe you ‘is’ on occasion to accept your\nstatement; but it is also to make an assertion, which is not made by\nthe strictly performatory utterance “I accept your\nstatement”. (1950a: 133)\n","\nIn the examples that Austin cites, things are done that are not\nassessable as true or false—marrying, naming, betting, etc. But\nas Austin points out, those examples might also involve other things\nbeing done—e.g., the making of statements—that are, or\ninvolve things that are, assessable as true or false. However, even\nthough this undermines Austin’s provisional characterisation of\nperformatives, the possibility that we might sometimes do more than\none thing in using a performative puts pressure on the idea that there\nis a simple connection between sentences and the various things we do\nin using them.","\nI’ve suggested that Austin’s view of the putative\ndistinction between performatives and constatives is less\nstraightforward than it might at first seem. And the structure of\nAustin (1962b) bears out that assessment. Although much of the book\nseems to be devoted to pursuit of a distinction between performatives\nand constatives, none of the attempts succeeds. It is possible, but\nimplausible, that in the course of the lectures Austin found that he\nwas unable to draw a distinction that he thought should be drawn. A\nmore plausible interpretation is that Austin’s purpose is not to\ndraw such a distinction. Rather it is to argue—through the\nfailures of various attempts to draw the distinction—that there\nis no such simple distinction—no sorting of sentences into those\napt for performative, and those apt for constative, use.","\nAustin argues against the distinction by appeal to the fact that the\nsame forms of assessment are applicable to utterances apparently of\nboth sorts:","\n\n\n…unhappiness…seems to characterize both kinds of\nutterance, not merely the performative; and…the requirement of\nconforming or bearing some relation to the facts, different in\ndifferent cases, seems to characterize performatives… (1962b:\n91)\n","\nAttempts to make a statement are liable both to misfires and abuses.\nFor example, an attempt to make a statement using “France is\nhexagonal” might misfire if there were no such country as\nFrance, or (as discussed above) if no suitable intents and purposes\nwere manifest (1962b: 47–52). And an attempt might be an abuse\nif the speaker failed to believe that France was hexagonal. Attempts\nat performative utterance are liable to assessment either in terms of\ntruth or falsehood, or in terms similarly dependent on conformity with\nthe facts: my utterance of “I warn you that the bull is about to\ncharge” may be liable to criticism as mistaken rather\nthan unhappy if the bull is not about to charge (1962b: 55). More\ngenerally, it is often impossible to decide, just from the words a\nspeaker uses, whether their utterance is susceptible to one or another\nform of assessment. And there are cases like “I state that\n…” which seem to satisfy all formal and lexical\nrequirements for being performative, and yet are used in utterances\n“…which surely are the making of statements, and surely\nare essentially true or false” (1962b: 91). (Austin’s\nideas here also bear on\n topic (4) above.)","\n(For discussion of Austin’s views about performative utterances,\nsee Bach 1975; G. Bird 1981; Black 1963; Cohen 1964, 1974; Forguson\n1966; Heal 1974; Hornsby 1988, 2006; Jack 1981; Lemmon 1962; Lewis\n1972; Schiffer 1972; Sinnott-Armstrong 1994; Tsohatzidis 2018; Urmson 1977; Warnock\n1973b, 1989: 105–151.)","\nFrom the wreckage of the initial distinction, Austin assembles a new\nmodel\n (topic (3) above).\n The new model is founded on distinctions among various kinds of thing\nspeakers do—various acts they perform—when they\nproduce an utterance.","\nAustin’s interest in the types of act so distinguished was\n“…essentially to fasten on the second, illocutionary act\nand contrast it with the other two…” (1962b: 103). What\ndid Austin think was important about the illocutionary act? And what\ndid he think were the dangers inherent in failing to mark it off from\nthe other types?","\nAustin appears to have thought that the various modes of assessment\nthat he discusses—e.g., true/false, happy/unhappy—apply\nmost fundamentally to the illocutionary act, rather than the\nlocutionary or the perlocutionary\n act.[18]\n One point is that Austin thought that philosophers have had a\ntendency to view some assessments as to happiness (or felicity) as\nreally applying to perlocutionary acts, so as not bearing on the\nspecifically linguistic things that speakers are up to. Another\npoint—and perhaps the point of primary importance—is that\nAustin thought that philosophers have had a tendency to view\nassessments as to truth as applying most fundamentally to locutionary\nacts. Moreover, he thought that philosophers had conceived locutionary\nacts, not as abstractions from illocutionary acts, but rather as\nthings that might be done without any illocutionary purpose, just by\nvirtue of the linguistic expressions employed or their meanings. By\ncontrast, Austin held that locutionary acts are abstracted from\ninstances of illocutionary acts, and that assessment as to truth is\ndirected most fundamentally to the illocutionary act. (We’ll\nconsider below a stronger and a weaker reading of the idea that\nassessment as to truth applies most fundamentally to the illocutionary\nact.)","\nFor Austin, then, assessment as to truth is of a piece with various\nforms of assessment as to happiness, etc., and like those forms it is\nthe assessment of an act with respect to its goodness or badness. Thus\nAustin’s discussion of illocutionary acts is bound up with his\nother discussions of the ways in which assessment of utterances as to\ntruth is dependent upon specific features of the circumstances of\nutterance. He writes:","\n\n\nThe truth or falsity of statements is affected by what they leave out\nor put in and by their being misleading, and so on. Thus, for example,\ndescriptions, which are said to be true or false or, if you like, are\n“statements”, are surely liable to these criticisms, since\nthey are selective and uttered for a purpose. It is essential to\nrealize that “true” and false’, like\n“free” and “unfree”, do not stand for anything\nsimple at all; but only for a general dimension of being a right and\nproper thing to say as opposed to a wrong thing, in these\ncircumstances, to this audience, for these purposes and with these\nintentions. (1962b: 144–145)\n","\nAccording to Austin, there is more involved in any such assessment\nthan a simple comparison of requirements imposed by linguistic meaning\nwith the facts. Reflection on the assessment of actions in which we\nspeak and the speech acts that classify them indicates two things:\nfirst, the distinction between assessment as to happiness and\nassessment as to truth is ultimately unprincipled; and, second, some\nmixture of various types of assessment applies to all, or nearly all,\nutterances. These ideas appear to be the basis for a cryptic claim of\nAustin’s\n (mentioned above as topic (4)).\n Exploiting the various modes of appraisal to distinguish five very\ngeneral classes of speech act verbs, Austin writes that","\n\n\nThey are…quite enough to play Old Harry with two fetishes which\nI admit to an inclination to play Old Harry with, viz. (1) the\ntrue/false fetish, (2) the value/fact fetish. (1962b: 151)\n","\nAustin’s cryptic suggestion appears to be to the effect that, in\none or another way, classifications of utterances along the true-false\ndimension, or according to whether they are expressions of fact or\nexpressions of value, is—for at least some purposes—too\ncrude. The suggestion is susceptible of a weaker and a stronger\nreading. On the weaker reading, the suggestion is to the effect that,\nwhen the assessment of an utterance is at issue, it is\nessential to consider the force or forces that attach to the\nillocutionary act or acts thereby performed. Since various such acts\nmay have been performed, and since assessment of each act involves\nconsideration of a mix of facts and values, there is no clean way of\nsorting utterances on the basis either of whether or not their primary\nmode of assessment is on the true-false dimension, or of whether their\nprimary function is the expression of fact, rather than the expression\nof value. That leaves open that, with respect to at least some speech\nacts, a locutionary core—a proposition, or propositions, or\npropositional-like element—may be assessed in a way that makes\nno reference to force, for example, along the true-false dimension. On\nthe stronger reading, the claim would be that it is not possible to\ndetach a locutionary core from the force with which it is expressed in\nsuch a way that that core can be assessed without reference to force.\nOn its stronger reading, Austin’s suggestion would have to\ncontend with an aspect of what is known as the Frege-Geach\nproblem: the challenge of explaining logical connections amongst\nspeech acts with different forces where those connections appear to\ndepend upon their sharing (elements of) a locutionary core (see Geach\n1965).","\n(For discussion of Austin’s distinction amongst locutionary,\nillocutionary, and perlocutionary acts see Bach 1975; Bach and Harnish\n1979; G. Bird 1981; Black 1963; Cerf 1966; Chisholm 1964; Cohen 1964,\n1974; Fiengo 2018; Forguson 1966, 1973; Furberg 1969; Garvey 2014; Geach 1965;\nHornsby 1988, 1994, 2006; Katz 1986; Moltmann 2018; Schiffer 1972; Searle 1968, 1969;\nStrawson 1964a, 1973; Urmson 1977; Vendler 1972; Warnock 1973b, 1989:\n105–151. For discussion specifically of the interaction of\nAustin’s views about the natures of speech acts with his views\nabout truth, see Crary 2002; Quine 1965; Travis 2011; Warnock 1989:\n140–150, 163–164 fn. 74.)"],"subsection_title":"2.3 Speech Acts and Truth"}]},{"main_content":["\nAustin’s main discussions of knowledge and perception take place\nin “Other Minds” (1946) and Sense and Sensibilia\n(1962a; see also “Unfair to Facts” [1954ms], which\noverlaps with parts of the lecture series on which Sense and\nSensibilia was based that are excised from the book, and\n“Ifs and Cans” [1956a:\n 230]).[19]\n Stated more baldly than would have been acceptable to Austin, and\nreconstructing slightly, his distinctive views in this area include\nthe following.","\nA consequence of (3) and (4) is that foundationalism is\nundercut: there are no foundational claims that are especially\ninfallible; and there are no non-foundational claims that are\ndistinctively fallible. It is possible for our judgmental capacities\nto misfire with respect to any subject matter, including e.g., our own\nfeelings or experiences. And it’s possible for their exercise to\nbe sufficiently reliable to give rise to knowledge about ordinary\nmatters, e.g., that there is a pig before one.","\nThree further side claims that have assumed some importance in recent\nwork are the following."],"section_title":"3. Knowledge and Perception","subsections":[{"content":["\nLet’s begin with some of what Austin says in support of\n (1).\n In his “Other Minds” (1946), Austin sketches a\ndistinction between knowing and believing through appeal to the\ndifferent kinds of challenges that are appropriate to claims to know\nversus claims to believe. First, Austin points out that one who claims\nto know may be challenged to explain how they know, while\nsomeone who claims to believe may be challenged to explain\nwhy they believe. The consequences of failing adequately to\nmeet those challenges are also different: in the first case, the\nconsequences might include that the subject does not know; in\nthe second, the consequence might include, not the subject\ndoesn’t believe, but that they oughtn’t\nto believe. Later, Austin indicates a further basis for the\ndistinction between knowing and believing:","\n\n…saying “I know”…is not saying\n“I have performed a specially striking feat of cognition,\nsuperior, in the same scale as believing and being sure, even to being\nquite sure”: for there is nothing in that scale\nsuperior to being quite sure. (1946: 99)\n","\nImportantly, and moving on to claim\n (2),\n Austin holds that knowledge is the upshot of the successful exercise\nof judgmental capacities—which he thinks of as essentially\nlanguage involving—in appropriate circumstances: the successful\nexercise of (judgmental) acumen given (perception- or\ntestimony-based) opportunity. The following two passages are\ncentral to understanding Austin’s views in this area:","\n\n\nAny description of a taste or sound or smell (or colour) or of a\nfeeling, involves (is) saying that it is like one or some that we have\nexperienced before: any descriptive word is classificatory, involves\nrecognition and in that sense memory, and only when we use such words\n(or names or descriptions, which come down to the same) are we knowing\nanything, or believing anything. But memory and recognition are often\nuncertain and unreliable. (1946: 92).\n\n\n…sensa [the things we sense or perceive] are dumb, and only\nprevious experience enables us to identify them. If we choose\nto say that they “identify themselves” (and certainly\n“recognizing” is not a highly voluntary act of ours), then\nit must be admitted that they share the birthright of all speakers,\nthat of speaking unclearly and untruly. (1946: 97)\n","\nWe perceive various things, features, events, and states of affairs.\nThe things we perceive are not presented to us as already classified\ninto types. Yet propositional knowledge essentially involves\nclassification: for example, we know that that thing is a\npig. In order to know, we must exercise judgmental capacities,\ntaking stands with respect to the ways the things, features, events,\nand states of affairs are. We must classify the elements into types\nbased on their similarities with elements that we have already\nclassified into types. (Notice that Austin’s view that these\nelements are particulars, articulated in his “Truth”\n(1950a) and “Unfair to Facts” (1954ms), figures\nessentially here.)","\nReturning to\n (1),\n let’s consider what Austin says about the conditions in which a\nsubject would fail to know. Austin’s discussion is\nhaunted by the following condition: “If I know, I\ncan’t be wrong”. He never quite endorses the\ncondition. He admits at one point that its third person counterpart\nmakes sense, but characterizes the sense it makes by appeal\nto a prohibition on saying “I know it is so, but I may\nbe wrong” (1946: 98).","\nIt’s clear that Austin would reject the claim that it is a\nnecessary condition on knowing that it be impossible for one\nto have been wrong—impossible, that is, for one to have\nexercised the same capacities in the same circumstances and to have\njudged incorrectly. For given that he holds that judgmental capacities\nare inherently fallible\n ((3) above),\n it would follow that we can never know anything.","\n\n\nThe human intellect and senses are, indeed, inherently\nfallible and delusive, but not inveterately so. Machines are\ninherently liable to break down, but good machines don’t\n(often). It is futile to embark on a “theory of knowledge”\nwhich denies this liability: such theories constantly end up by\nadmitting the liability after all, and denying the existence of\n“knowledge”. (1946: 98)\n","\nWhat Austin says here is consistent with the operation of the\ncapacities being reliable in some circumstances, and with their\nreliable operation being such as to give rise to knowledge. So it is\nopen to Austin to hold a view on which knowledge requires that the\nparticular exercises of the capacity to judge on which they\nare based couldn’t have occurred and yet the output judgment be\nmistaken. And it is open to him to hold that if the exercise of\njudgmental capacities is to give rise to knowledge, those capacities\nmust be reliable in the circumstances in which they are\nexercised and given the way they are exercised on that occasion (e.g.,\ncarefully). However, Austin doesn’t make fully explicit that his\nview about knowledge includes either component. And some of what he\nsays—especially in discussion of his performative proposal about\nthe use of “I know”—is in tension with the first\nclaim, on which knowing is incompatible with being\n mistaken.[20]\n (It’s possible that Austin viewed his “Ifs and\nCans” (1956a) discussion of abilities as providing further\nillumination concerning the proper understanding of the formula\n“If one knows, one can’t be wrong”.)","\nOne potential consequence of Austin’s account concerns\nfoundationalism. Foundationalism typically involves the following\nthree claims. First, many of the ordinary judgments that we\nmake—for example, judgments to the effect that there is a pig\nhere—are inherently risky in the following sense. It’s\npossible for us to make such judgments mistakenly, even in cases in\nwhich we operate as carefully as possible. Second, some of the\njudgments we make, or could make, are not inherently risky: for\nexample, where we are careful only to judge about how things presently\nappear to us, the judgments we make carry no risk of error. Third,\nthen, if our aim is to achieve absolute security, we should avoid\njudgments of the first sort except insofar as they are securely based\nupon judgments of the second sort. (On one view of this type, the\nsecond sort of judgment would be taken to provide evidence on\nwhich judgments of the first sort are based.) Austin’s account\nundermines the first two components of this view. The first component\nis undermined because, although it is always possible to\njudge incorrectly, there are ordinary cases in which our judgments\nabout our environment are, in fact, absolutely secure\n ((4) above):","\n\n\n…if I watch or some time an animal a few feet in front of me,\nin a good light, if I prod it perhaps, and sniff, and take note of the\nnoises it makes, I may say, “That”s a pig’; and this\ntoo will be “incorrigible”, nothing could be produced that\nwould show that I had made a mistake…if the animal then emerges\nand stands there plainly in view, there is no longer any question of\ncollecting evidence; its coming into view doesn’t provide me\nwith more evidence that it’s a pig, I can now just see\nthat it is, the question is settled. (1962a: 114–115)\n","\nThe second component is undermined because there is no type\nof judgment, and no type of subject matter, with respect to\nwhich error is impossible\n ((3) above).\n In order to have propositional knowledge even about what I am\nexperiencing right now, I must classify it together with other things\nof the same type. And that requires the exercise of capacities that\nare inherently fallible: I may not have had enough experiences of\nthings of the same sort to classify this one securely; I may not have\nattended to what I am experiencing with sufficient care; I may fail\nadequately to remember similar things that I experienced earlier; and\nso forth (1946: 90–97; 1962a: 104–131).","\nOrdinary challenges to judgments or claims, including claims to know,\nare sometimes invitations to detail our credentials—our\npossession of appropriate acumen in making judgments of the type in\nquestion. Sometimes, however, they are invitations to detail our\nfacts—the features of the circumstance that figure in\nour judging in the way that we do. For example, we might claim to know\nthat that presented thing is a goldfinch “by the shape of its\nhead”. If we were to detail our facts in that sort of way, then\nwe might be open to further challenge: someone might claim that\nthat’s not enough of a basis on which to judge that the\npresented thing is a goldfinch. In addition to emphasizing the role of\nspecial acumen in this type of case—not just anyone can tell a\ngoldfinch by the shape of its head—Austin makes two important\nclaims about such potential challenges to our facts. First, Austin\nclaims that, in order for such a challenge to be appropriate, the\nchallenger must have in mind some more or less definite lack, for\nexample by pointing out that birds other than goldfinches have heads\nof that shape. Second, Austin writes:","\n\n\nEnough is enough: it doesn’t mean everything. Enough means\nenough to show that (within reason, and for present intents and\npurposes) it “can’t” be anything else, there is no\nroom for an alternative, competing description of it. It does not\nmean, for example, enough to show it isn’t a stuffed\ngoldfinch. (1946: 84.)\n","\nThere are at least three, non-exclusive ways of reading Austin’s\nclaim here. The first is as the claim that what suffices for this\nhere to be a goldfinch may not be enough with respect to anything\nin any circumstance. There may be other birds, or other things, with\nheads of the same shape. However, we might still know full well that\nthere are no such birds, and no such things, here; or we may know\nenough about this thing to know it isn’t a bird of that sort, or\none of those other things, even though we haven’t specified how\nwe know in answer to the initial challenge. That is, we may know that\nthis isn’t a stuffed goldfinch—given the rest of\nwhat we know, and the circumstances in which we judge—even\nthough what we explicitly point to in answer to challenges\ndoesn’t alone rule out the possibility. The second way of\nreading Austin here is as allowing that we can know that this is a\ngoldfinch, even though we know that if it’s a stuffed goldfinch,\nthen it is not a goldfinch, and we don’t know that it\nisn’t a stuffed goldfinch. We are entitled—either in\ngeneral, or in circumstances of this sort—to assume or rely upon\nits not being a stuffed goldfinch, even though that is something we\ncan’t rule out and don’t know (see Kaplan 2011 for\ndevelopment of the second way of reading Austin’s views in this\narea). The third way of reading the passage is as claiming that the\nrange of possibilities can vary from occasion to occasion for\njudging or claiming that one knows that this is a goldfinch. On the\nthird reading, it might be impossible, on this occasion, for\nthe presented thing to be a stuffed goldfinch, even though there are\nother occasions on which it would be a possibility. Hence, our facts\ndo not need to foreclose on that possibility on this occasion,\nalthough there might be other occasions on which our facts would need\nto do so. (Travis 2005 develops the third approach. See Millar 2005\nfor objections.)","\nLet’s turn, then, to\n (7)–(9),\n focusing attention on\n (9),\n the view that utterances of the form “I know that\nsuch-and-such” serve a performative and not a descriptive\nfunction. This is puzzling for at least two reasons: first, the claim\nthat “I know” lacks a descriptive function is apt to seem\nobviously false; and second, it is unclear what, if any, function the\nclaim has in Austin’s account as a whole.","\nThe main focus of objection to Austin here isn’t the claim that\n“I know that such-and-such” can, on occasion, serve\ndistinctive performative functions. Rather, the concern with\nAustin’s proposal is focused on two more specific claims. First,\nit is focused on the claim that “I know that\nsuch-and-such” always and only serves a distinctive performative\nfunction and so is never at the service of self-description. Second,\nit is focused on the claim that, in cases in which “I know that\nsuch-and-such” is used to serve a performative function, neither\nthe felicity conditions of using the sentence in that way, nor the\ntruth of what, if anything, one thereby states, depend in turn on\nwhether the speaker knows that such-and-such.","\nAustin is misled here, I think, due to three factors. First, he is\nmisled by similarities between saying “I know that\nsuch-and-such” and saying “I promise that\nsuch-and-such” or “I swear that such-and-such”. But\nthe cases are importantly different. For example, unlike the case of\npromising, in which saying “I promise…” in\nappropriate circumstances makes it so that one has promised…,\nsaying “I know that such-and-such” does not make it so\nthat one knows. Now, as Austin later saw, it is possible to develop an\naccount on which saying “I know that such-and-such” can\nserve more than one purpose and so can function well with respect to\none such purpose while functioning poorly with respect to others (see\ne.g., 1950a: 133 and 1962b). Accordingly, it would be possible to\ndevelop a view on which, for example, saying “I know that\nsuch-and-such” in cases in which one does not know\nwould be improper qua statement (since saying it\ndoesn’t remove the deficit by making it so that one knows),\nwhile properly serving the purpose of giving an audience one’s\nassurance. However, and this is the second reason for which Austin is\nmisled, he had not in “Other Minds” (1946) yet attained\nthe later perspective on which that is a clear possibility. Since he\nnonetheless believes that “I know that such-and-such”\nserves purposes other than statement making, he is forced to efface\nits statement-making function. Finally, and more speculatively, it\nseems that Austin is misled due to his attempting to build into his\naccount a response to a doctrine, common to his Oxford Realist\npredecessors Cook Wilson and Prichard, according to which whether one\nknows or merely believes something is transparent to one. (For\ndiscussion of that feature of Cook Wilson’s and Prichard’s\nviews, see Longworth 2018b, Travis and Kalderon 2013 and Travis 2005.) Although Austin\nrejects the letter of the doctrine, he retains its spirit in\nattempting to provide an account on which avowals of the form “I\nknow that such-and-such” can never be false. (For further\ndiscussion of Austin’s performative proposal, see Warnock 1989:\n24–33, Lawlor 2013.)","\n(For critical engagement with Austin’s work on knowledge, see\nAyer 1967; Baz 2011; Chisholm 1964; Hetherington 2018; Kaplan 2011, 2018; Lawlor 2013, 2018; Leite 2011; Longworth 2018b, Marion 2000a,b; Martin ms (Other\nInternet Resources); Millar 2005; Putnam 1994; Soames 2003:\n171–193; Stroud 1984: 39–82; Travis 2005; Travis and Kalderon 2013; Warnock 1989:\n32–44; M. Williams 1996: 135–171.)"],"subsection_title":"3.1 Knowledge"},{"content":["\nLet’s turn now to Austin’s views specifically about\nperception\n ((5) and (6) above).\n Once we have detailed the facts on which a perception-based judgment\nof ours relies, a more general challenge arises concerning our access\nto those facts. In order to exploit the bird’s head shape as the\nbasis for our judgment that it is a goldfinch, it is arguable that we\nmust be able to see (or perhaps feel) the bird and its shape. On some\nviews of perception, however, birds and their shapes are not amongst\nthe things that one can perceive. Austin’s main aim in Sense\n& Sensibilia is to undermine considerations that have been\noffered in favour of the general doctrine that, as he puts it,","\n\n\n…we never see or otherwise perceive (or “sense”),\nor anyhow we never directly perceive or sense, material\nobjects (or material things), but only sense-data (or our own ideas,\nimpressions, sense, sense-perceptions, percepts, &c.). (1962a:\n2)\n","\nCentral to those considerations are those organized by versions of\nwhat is known as the argument from illusion\n ((6) above).[21]\n The version of the argument that Austin criticizes can be\nreconstructed as follows. (i) There are cases of illusion in which we\nhave a sensory experience as of seeing something of some sort with\nspecific features but in which nothing has those specific features.\nThis might be because, although we experience something of the sort in\nquestion, the thing we experience lacks the features in question; or\nit might be because we don’t experience a thing of the sort in\nquestion at all. (ii) In those cases, there must be something we\nexperience that has the features in question. Call the things we\nexperience in such cases sense-data. (iii) Since the cases in\nwhich we experience sense-data include cases in which no material\nthings of the sort in question, or with the features in question, are\nexperienced, it follows that sense-data are not (in general) material\nthings, or elements in the environment independent of the individual\nexperiencer. It follows that, in the cases in question, we experience\nthings (or directly experience things) that are distinct from\nmaterial things and we do not thereby experience (or directly\nexperience) material things. (iv) Now it is a general principle about\nexperiences that if we cannot discriminate the objects of two\nexperiences on the basis of introspection, then those experiences must\nhave objects of the same sort. Hence, if one experience has only\nsense-data as its objects, and not material things, and a second\nexperience has as its objects something that we cannot discriminate on\nthe basis of introspection from the objects of the first experience,\nthen the second experience also has sense-data rather than material\nthings as its objects. (v) Since every experience stands in the\nrequired relation to an experience with only sense-data as its\nobjects, every experience has sense-data rather than material things\nas its objects. Hence, we never experience—or never\ndirectly experience—material things","\nAustin objects to every step in the argument just reconstructed.\nAmongst other complaints, he argues that key terms in the argument\nhave not been properly defined or explained—for instance,\n“material thing” and “sense-data” (1962a: 4,\n7–14, 55), and “directly” (1962a: 14–19). And\nhe objects to the general principle, to which appeal was made in (iv),\npointing out that there are no grounds for thinking that we cannot\nhave experiences with different kinds of object that we nonetheless\ncan’t discriminate on the basis of introspection. For instance,\nwe might experience a bar of soap that looks just like a lemon, and be\nin a position where we couldn’t discriminate the soap from the\nlemon on the basis of introspection. Nonetheless, we would hold that\nthe two experiences have different kinds of objects (1962a:\n 50–52).[22]\n However, what are perhaps his most important complaints target (i)\nand (ii) by exploiting the distinction, initially articulated in\n“Other Minds” (1946), between two elements in perceptually\nbased judgment: the opportunity afforded by sensory perception and\njudgmental acumen.","\nThe distinction between sensory perception and judgmental acumen\nenables Austin to distinguish between central cases of\nillusion and central cases of delusion, and also to\nsketch explanations of what is going on in those cases that do not\nmake appeal to sense-data. Austin takes the defender of (i) and (ii)\nto argue as follows. First, consider an illusion, for example a stick\nthat looks bent but really isn’t. Such an illusion has two key\nfeatures. First, it clearly involves a distinctive sensory experience.\nSecond, the distinctive sensory experience that it involves is apt to\ngive rise to an erroneous perceptual judgment, to the effect that the\nstick is bent. Now one way of explaining the erroneous perceptual\njudgment is to view it as dictated by the sensory\nexperience—that is, to view it as accurately representing\nfeatures presented in the experience: the bent-ness of that which is\nexperienced. Since the stick is not in fact bent, and that\nwhich is experienced is bent, we have reason to claim that\nthat which is experienced is not identical with the stick. What we\nexperience is sense-data rather than a stick. Moreover, we\nmight also consider more extreme cases in which we make erroneous\nperceptual judgments: cases of delusion or hallucination. For example,\nthere is the case in which an alcoholic person judges that pink rats\nare visible, when in fact there are none. Now, given the proposed\naccount of the case of illusion, that case cannot be distinguished\nfrom the case of delusion by appeal to the fact that, in the former,\nan environmental feature is experienced while, in the latter, there is\nno suitable environmental feature to be experienced. It therefore\nseems natural to treat the two cases as of the same basic type, and to\noffer the same type of explanation for both. Thus, one might be\ntempted to view the rat-delusion as having the following three\nfeatures. First, it involves a distinctive sensory experience. Second,\nthe distinctive sensory experience that it involves dictates\nan erroneous perceptual judgment to the effect that pink rats are\nvisible. Third, that judgment is dictated because it accurately\nrepresents features present in the experience.","\nAustin responds as follows. First, he exploits the role of judgmental\nacumen in perceptual judgment in order to provide an alternative\nexplanation of cases of illusion (or more generally of things looking\nways that they are not). He allows that some things really do\nlook the way they are sometimes taken to be—the stick\nlooks bent, even though it is not in fact bent. But he holds that\nthose looks are not private features of individual’s\nexperiences. For example, they are available to other perceivers and\nmight be recorded in a photograph. (Austin discusses talk about how\nthings look, and distinguishes it from talk about how things\nseem—which he associates with judgment rather than with\nexperience, in Sense and Sensibilia (1962a: 33–43). See\nalso Jackson 1977: 30–49; Martin 2010; Travis 2004.) However,\nthe way the stick looks, just as much as features like the\nstick’s straightness, can be the basis for perceptual judgments.\nWe can explain why someone is prone to judge that the stick is bent by\nappeal to the stick’s looking bent, rather to\nanything’s being bent, together with the ways in which exercises\nof judgmental acumen can respond erroneously to looks. More generally,\nthere needn’t be anything in particular—any specific\nfeature of what is experienced or any specific look—that figures\nin explaining why individuals are prone to make a specific type of\njudgment on the basis of the experience. For the explanation for each\nindividual’s judgment will depend, not only on what they\nexperience, but also on the types of judgmental capacities that they\nhave. In support of this form of explanation, Austin notes that not\neveryone would be inclined to judge that the stick is bent. For\nexample, noting the presence of water, those whose judgmental\ncapacities are sufficiently well trained might withhold judgment about\nthe stick’s shape (Hinton 1973: 114ff includes a useful\ndiscussion of some of Austin’s claims about illusions).","\nStandard cases of illusion or misleading appearance of the sort\nwe’ve just considered involve sensory experiences of ordinary\nthings and their features, including their looks, feels, and so forth.\nHowever, because the connection between what is experienced and what\none judges on its basis is not straightforward—because\njudgmental acumen is involved in moving from one to the\nother—there is no general way to read back from the judgments\nsomeone is prone to make to specific features of their sensory\nexperiences. Because such cases of illusion involve experience of\nordinary things, while standard cases of delusion do not, we thus have\na ground on which to distinguish the two sorts of case. For example,\nwe have grounds to distinguish the case in which someone erroneously\njudges that a submerged stick is bent from the case of the alcoholic\nperson who judges that pink rats are visible. But having distinguished\nthe cases in that way, we are liable to become open to two new\nquestions. First, should we allow that the judgment in the delusory\ncase is based on sensory experience? Perhaps, for example, some cases\nof delusion involve dysfunction in the systems responsible for\nperceptual judgment of a sort that give rise to perceptual judgments\nin the absence of any sense-experiential basis for those judgments.\nSecond, even if we allow that a particular delusory judgment is based\nupon sensory experience, should we allow that it involves sensory\nexperience of anything other than elements that are present in the\ndeluded subject’s environment? Perhaps some cases of delusion\ninvolve dysfunctional judgmental responses to what is seen or heard.\nFor example, an alcoholic subject judgment that a pink rat is visible\nmight be a disordered response to an experience of a shadow. Unless we\nare forced to answer both questions affirmatively, we lack the basis\nfor an argument that the deluded subject experiences anything distinct\nfrom the ordinary things and features that they can see, hear,\netc.","\nAustin doesn’t suggest that there could be no grounds for giving\naffirmative answers to either of those questions. Moreover, it is very\nplausible that such grounds can be provided. It is plausible,\nfor example, that there are distinctive sensory experiences involved\nin what we call seeing double, or seeing afterimages, that cannot be\nexplained simply by appeal to what is present in subjects’\nenvironments. And it is plausible that genuine sensory hallucinations\nare possible—indeed, it is plausible that such hallucinations\nmight figure in explaining the alcoholic person’s judgment.\nHowever, although the style of response just considered is indecisive\nagainst such additional developments of the argument, the resources\nthat it deploys will surely figure in serious engagement with those\ndevelopments. Austin sketches an approach to issues raised by such\nexperiences by attempting to give an account of the reports we are\ninclined to make in such cases—“I see two pieces of\npaper”, “I see pink rats”. Austin’s sketch\naims to explain how such reports can be non-committal about the nature\nof the experiences so-reported, and in particular about whether such\nexperiences have objects at all (1962a: 84–103). It is here in\nparticular that Austin comes close to endorsing a form of\ndisjunctivism about perception (see Soteriou 2009).","\n(For critical engagement with Austin’s work on perception, see\nAyer 1967, 1969; Burnyeat 1979; Firth 1964; Forguson 1969b; Garvey\n2014; Hinton 1973: 114ff; Hirst 1963; Jackson 1977; Travis and\nKalderon 2013; Leite 2011; Longworth 2019, Marion 2000a,b; Martin ms (Other Internet\nResources), 2000, 2010; Pears 1979; Putnam 1994; Schwartz 2004, 2018;\nSnowdon 2014; Soames 2003: 171–193; Thau 2004; Travis 2004; van\nHulst and Cresswell 2016; Warnock 1989: 11–31.)"],"subsection_title":"3.2 Sensory perception"}]},{"main_content":["\nThe core of Austin’s work on freedom and action is contained in\n“A Plea for Excuses” (1957) and developed in “Ifs\nand Cans” (1956a), “Three Ways of Spilling Ink”\n(1966), and “Pretending” (1958a). The three most\ndistinctive features of his views in this area are the following."],"section_title":"4. Action and Freedom","subsections":[{"content":["\nLet’s begin with\n (1).\n Austin holds that we can make progress on questions about freedom and\naction by descending from reflection at the general level—i.e.,\nreflection on freedom and action, per se—to reflection\non the more specific ways in which we characterize and appraise\nactions. Austin’s view about the general notions of acting, and\nof acting freely or responsibly, is structurally similar to his view\nabout the general notion of truth: he thinks of such general notions\nas dimension words, grouping a range of more specific\ncharacterizations. The basic range here consists in the various\nspecific ways in which we can characterize happenings as\nactions—for example, as someone running to the shop, or as their\nreading a book. In addition to that basic range are what Austin calls\naggravations: the various specific ways in which we\ncharacterize someone as distinctively responsible for\nsomething that happens—for example, when we characterize someone\nas having done something on purpose, intentionally, or deliberately.\nThe latter three aggravations are the topic of his “Three Ways\nof Spilling Ink” (1966).","\nIn his “A Plea for Excuses” (1957), Austin argues that the\nminimal requirement for an agent to be responsible for an action of\ntheirs is that it be incorrect to characterize the action in\none or another way as something for which they were not fully\nresponsible—as something for which they have an excuse.\nWe might, for example, characterize a happening as an accident, a\nmistake, involuntary, unintentional, inadvertent, or as due (in part)\nto clumsiness, lack of appreciation of circumstances, or incompetence.\nWhere an act is performed, and where no excuse is available, the\naction is one for which the actor counts as fully responsible. Where\none or another type of excuse is available, the specific type\nof excuses that are available mitigate in one or another specific way\nthe subject’s responsibility for the occurrence of an action or\nits consequences, and so the extent to which the action is to be\ncounted as free. An excuse may do this by mitigating in various ways\nthe subject’s responsibility either for an action considered as\na whole, or for proper sub-components of the action, or for\nconsequences of the action, or by indicating ways in which a happening\nis not (a paradigmatic case of) an action. The varieties of\npretending that Austin discusses in his\n“Pretending” (1958a) are of importance to him, at least in\npart, because they provide for some distinctive forms of excuse. For\ninstance, one might seek to excuse what appeared to be an action of\ntype A by claiming that the agent was only pretending to\nA, pretending to be A-ing, or pretending that they\nwere A-ing. (One of Austin’s aims in the paper is to\ndistinguish those ways of pretending.)","\nOne of Austin’s central aims in considering the variety of\nexcuses and aggravations is to shed light on the inner composition of\nresponsible action: the division between an action and its\nconsequences; the decomposition of an action into its various\nsub-components or phases; and what Austin calls the machinery of\naction:","\n\n\n…the detail of the complicated internal machinery we use in\n“acting”—the receipt of intelligence, the\nappreciation of the situation, the invocation of principles, the\nplanning, the control of execution and the rest. (1957: 179)\n","\nTurning now to\n (2),\n Austin thinks that there is a range of normal or standard cases of\nattributions of action with respect to which modification, by appeal\neither to aggravations or excuses, is impermissible. With respect to\nsuch normal or standard cases, it suffices, in order to characterize\nthe agent’s role within them, simply to say what the agent did.\nTo add that the agent did the thing, for example, either voluntarily\nor involuntarily would be inappropriate, incorrect, or even\nsenseless. Austin summarizes this idea in the slogan, “No\nmodification without aberration”. Amongst the supporting\nexamples he gives are the following:","\n\n\nI sit in my chair, in the usual way—I am not in a daze or\ninfluenced by threats or the like: here, it will not do to say either\nthat I sit in it intentionally or that I did not sit in it\nintentionally, nor yet that I sat in it automatically or from habit or\nwhat you will. It is bedtime, I am alone, I yawn: but I do not yawn\ninvoluntarily (or voluntarily!), nor yet deliberately. To yawn in any\nsuch peculiar way is just not to just yawn. (1957:\n 190)[23]\n ","\nAustin holds that modifiers like “voluntarily” and\n“involuntarily” are used to assert the respective presence\nand absence of specific elements in the general machinery of action.\n(He suggests that such apparent pairs do not invariably target the\nvery same specific elements. See 1957: 189–193.) Austin thinks\nthat philosophers have tended to assume that, given that someone has\ndone a specific thing, it will always be a further question whether\nthose pieces of machinery are present or absent. Moreover,\nphilosophers have aligned that question with the question whether the\nactor was responsible for what they did or acted freely. Those\nphilosophers have in effect been making the following pair of\nassumptions. They’ve assumed, first, that there is a single type\nof piece of machinery such that for any action, the action\nwill be free and responsible just in case it involves that machinery.\nSecond, they’ve assumed that the various aggravations serve\nindiscriminately to mark the presence of the required type of\nmachinery, while the various excuses serve to mark its absence.","\nCharacteristically, Austin suggests that the situation is more\ncomplicated. In particular, although he thinks that, in normal or\nstandard cases, actors are responsible for what they do and act\nfreely, he holds that what makes that so can vary from case to case:\ndifferent types of machinery can account for freedom and\nresponsibility with respect to different types of action. He holds\nmoreover that different aggravating and excusing modifiers target\ndifferent pieces of machinery. And, finally, he holds that the\nappropriate use of a modifier doesn’t depend only upon the\npresence or absence of instances of the type of action-machinery that\nit targets. In addition, it depends upon whether the targeted\nmachinery figures in normal cases of actions of the type in\n question.[24]","\n(For discussion of Austin’s views about actions and excuses see\nForguson 1969a; Heintz 1981; Holdcroft 1969; Laugier 2018; Narboux 2011; New 1966;\nPetrie 1971; Searle 1966; Zimmerman 2004; Warnock 1989: 65–79;\nWhite 1967.)"],"subsection_title":"4.1 Actions and Excuses"}]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nAustin was born in Lancaster, England 26 March 1911 to Geoffrey\\nLangshaw Austin and his wife Mary Austin (née Bowes-Wilson).\\nThe family moved to Scotland in 1922, where Austin’s father\\nwas Secretary of St. Leonard’s School, St. Andrews.\",\n \"\\nAustin took up a scholarship in Classics at Shrewsbury School in 1924,\\nand, in 1929, went on to study Classics at Balliol College, Oxford. In\\n1933, he received a First in Literae Humaniores (Classics and\\nPhilosophy) in 1933 and was elected to a Fellowship at All Souls\\nCollege, Oxford. He undertook his first teaching position in 1935, as\\nfellow and tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford.\",\n \"\\nAustin’s early interests included Aristotle, Kant, Leibniz, and\\nPlato (especially Theaetetus). His more contemporary\\ninfluences included especially G.E. Moore, John Cook Wilson, and H.A.\\nPrichard. (Austin attended Prichard’s undergraduate lectures\\nwith such vigour that Prichard is reported to have made an\\nunsuccessful attempt to exclude him.) It’s plausible that some\\naspects of Austin’s distinctive approach to philosophical\\nquestions derived from his engagement with the last three. All three\\nphilosophers shaped their views about general philosophical questions\\non the basis of careful attention to the more specific judgments we\\nmake. And they took our specific judgments (for instance, in\\nMoore’s case, “I know that I have hands”) to be, in\\ngeneral, more secure than more general judgments (for instance, again\\nin Moore’s case, “I know things about external\\nreality”). Moreover, there are some continuities of doctrine,\\nespecially with Cook Wilson and Prichard, which align Austin with an\\n“Oxford Realist” school of philosophy. The core components\\nof the latter view are, first, that perception and knowledge are\\nprimitive forms of apprehension and, second, that what we apprehend\\nare ordinary elements of our environments that are independent of our\\napprehending them. (All three thinkers were at one or another time\\ncommitted to versions of both components of the position but for\\ncomplex reasons sometimes wavered about the second. See e.g., Travis\\nand Kalderon 2013.)\",\n \"\\nDuring the Second World War, Austin served in the British Intelligence\\nCorps. It has been said of him that, “he more than anybody was\\nresponsible for the life-saving accuracy of the D-Day\\nintelligence” (reported in Warnock 1963: 9). Austin left the\\narmy in September 1945 with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was\\nhonoured for his intelligence work with an Order of the British\\nEmpire, the French Croix de Guerre, and the U.S. Officer of the Legion\\nof Merit. \",\n \"\\nAustin married Jean Coutts in 1941. They had four children, two girls\\nand two boys.\",\n \"\\nAfter the War, Austin returned to Oxford. He became White’s\\nProfessor of Moral Philosophy in 1952. In the same year, he took on\\nthe role of delegate to Oxford University Press, becoming Chairman of\\nthe Finance Committee in 1957. His other administrative work for the\\nUniversity included the role of Junior Proctor (1949–50), and\\nChairman of the Sub-Faculty of Philosophy (1953–55). He was\\npresident of the Aristotelian Society 1956–57. He gave the\\nWilliam James Lectures in Harvard in 1955 (a version of the lectures\\nwas published as How to Do Things With Words – see\\n1962b in the Bibliography). He invented the card game CASE in 1951.\",\n \"\\nDuring this period, Austin edited H.W.B. Joseph Lectures on the\\nPhilosophy of Leibniz (1949) and produced a translation of\\nGottlob Frege’s Grundlagen der Arithmetik, so that it\\ncould be set as an exam (1950). Austin wrote little and published\\nless. Much of his influence was through teaching and other forms of\\nsmall-scale engagement with philosophers. He also instituted a series\\nof “Saturday Morning” discussion sessions, which involved\\ndetailed discussions of a number of philosophical topics and works,\\nincluding Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics,\\nFrege’s Grundlagen, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s\\nPhilosophical Investigations, Merleau-Ponty’s\\nPhenomenology of Perception, and Noam Chomsky’s\\nSyntactic Structures.\",\n \"\\nAustin died in Oxford on 8 February 1960.\",\n \"\\n(For more detail about Austin’s life, work, and influences see\\nAyer 1978; Baldwin 2010; Berlin 1973b; Dancy 2010; Garvey 2014;\\nGustaffson 2011; Hacker 2004; Hampshire 1960; Travis and Kalderon\\n2013; Marion 2000a,b, 2009; Passmore 1957; Pears 1962; Pitcher 1973;\\nSearle 2014; Urmson and Warnock 1961; Urmson 1967; Warnock 1963,\\n1973a; Warnock 1989: 1–10.)\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Life and Work\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Language and Truth\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIn this section, we’ll look at Austin’s views about the\\nrole of the study of language in philosophy more generally. It is\\ncommon to count Austin as an “Ordinary Language\\nPhilosopher”, along with, for example, Gilbert Ryle, P.F.\\nStrawson, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. However, although each of these\\nthinkers was sometimes concerned, in one or another way, with our use\\nof ordinary language, it is far from clear what in addition to that\\nthe label is supposed to entail. And it is equally unclear that the\\nvarious thinkers so-labelled deserve to be grouped together.\",\n \"\\nAustin cared about language for two main reasons. First, language use\\nis a central part of human activity, so it’s an important topic\\nin its own right. Second, the study of language is an\\naide—indeed, for some topics, an important preliminary—to\\nthe pursuit of philosophical topics. Many of Austin’s most\\ndistinctive reflections on the use of language arise in the course of\\ndiscussion of other topics (see especially his “A Plea for\\nExcuses” 1957).\",\n \"\\nOne route to understanding Austin’s general approach to\\nphilosophy is provided by reflection on the following comment by\\nStuart Hampshire:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n[Austin] was constitutionally unable to refrain from applying the same\\nstandards of truth and accuracy to a philosophical argument, sentence\\nby sentence, as he would have applied to any other serious\\nsubject-matter. He could not have adopted a special tone of voice, or\\nattitude of mind, for philosophical questions. (Hampshire 1960:\\n34)\\n\",\n \"\\nIn short, it mattered to Austin that, in attempting to make out\\npositions and arguments, philosophers should meet ordinary standards\\nof truth, accuracy, and so forth. On the one hand, this presented a\\ngeneral challenge to philosophers, a challenge that they might easily\\nfail to meet. The challenge is either to make use of an ordinary\\nvocabulary, or ordinary concepts, in order to make claims or judgments\\nthat are, according to ordinary standards, at least true (or accurate,\\netc.); or to do the serious work required to set up an appropriate\\ntechnical vocabulary and then use it to say things that are by\\nappropriate standards true (accurate, etc.). On the other hand, it\\nprovided Austin with what he took to be a reasonably secure approach\\nto general philosophical questions: first, find a connection between\\nthose general philosophical questions and the more specific claims or\\njudgments that we ordinarily make and take ourselves to be secure in\\nmaking; second, make sufficiently many of the relevant claims or\\njudgments, in a sufficient variety of circumstances, in order to\\naddress the general philosophical questions.\",\n \"\\nAustin held that, in their hurry to address general philosophical\\nquestions, philosophers have a tendency to ignore the nuances involved\\nin making and assessing ordinary claims and judgments. Among the risks\\nassociated with insensitivity to the nuances, two stand out. First,\\nphilosophers are liable to miss distinctions that are made in our\\nordinary use of language and that are relevant to our concerns and\\nclaims. Second, failure to exploit fully the resources of ordinary\\nlanguage can make philosophers susceptible to seemingly forced choices\\nbetween unacceptable alternatives. Here Austin warns:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nIt is worth bearing in mind…the general rule that we must not\\nexpect to find simple labels for complicated cases…however\\nwell-equipped our language, it can never be forearmed against all\\npossible cases that may arise and call for description: fact is richer\\nthan diction. (1957: 195)\\n\",\n \"\\nOn Austin’s view, language is likely to be well designed for the\\nends to which it is ordinarily put. But special, or especially\\ncomplicated, cases may require special treatment. This is apt to be an\\nespecial liability when it comes to the question whether a sentence\\ncan be used in a particular circumstance to state something true or\\nfalse:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nWe say, for example, that a certain statement is exaggerated or vague\\nor bold, a description somewhat rough or misleading or not very good,\\nan account rather general or too concise. In cases like these it is\\npointless to insist on deciding in simple terms whether the statement\\nis “true or false”. Is it true or false that Belfast is\\nnorth of London? That the galaxy is the shape of a fried egg? That\\nBeethoven was a drunkard? That Wellington won the battle of Waterloo?\\nThere are various degrees and dimensions of success in making\\nstatements: the statements fit the facts always more or less loosely,\\nin different ways on different occasions for different intents and\\npurposes. (1950a: 129–130)\\n\",\n \"\\nAustin makes two points here. First, when faced with a putative choice\\nof this sort, we should not insist on deciding in simple\\nterms whether a statement is true or false (or whether an\\nexpression applies or fails to apply to something). Some cases are\\ncomplicated, and, in some of those cases, we are capable of meeting\\nsome of the complications by saying more: “Well, it is true that\\nBelfast is north of London if you understand that claim in the\\nfollowing way….” Second, the complications can take\\ndifferent forms, and can matter in different ways, on different\\noccasions. Given the prior course of our conversation, and our\\nspecific intents and purposes in discussing the issue, it might be\\nmanifest that, on that particular occasion, we will\\nunderstand the complications, without a need for their\\narticulation, so that the following is fine as it stands: “Yes,\\nit is true that Belfast is north of London.”\",\n \"\\nAustin’s summarised his view of the role of attention to\\nordinary language in philosophy thus:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nFirst, words are our tools, and, as a minimum, we should use clean\\ntools: we should know what we mean and what we do not, and we must\\nforearm ourselves against the traps that language sets us. Secondly,\\nwords are not (except in their own little corner) facts or things: we\\nneed therefore to prise them off the world, to hold them apart from\\nand against it, so that we can realize their inadequacies and\\narbitrariness, and can re-look at the world without blinkers. Thirdly,\\nand more hopefully, our common stock of words embodies all the\\ndistinctions men have found worth drawing, and the connexions they\\nhave found worth making, in the lifetimes of many generations: these\\nsurely are likely to be more sound, since they have stood up to the\\nlong test of the survival of the fittest, and more subtle, at least in\\nall ordinary and reasonably practical matters, than any that you or I\\nare likely to think up in our arm-chairs of an afternoon—the\\nmost favoured alternative method. (1957:\\n 181–182)[1]\\n \",\n \"\\nAustin holds, then, that an important preliminary to philosophising on\\nat least some topics—for instance, where the topic is\\n“ordinary and reasonably practical”—would be the\\ndetailed study of the language we use to speak on that topic, and of\\nthe way that we use it.\",\n \"\\nAustin didn’t think that the investigation of language was more\\nthan a preliminary to theorising, either in philosophy or science. He\\nwasn’t averse to theory construction, even if its outcome were\\npotentially revisionary (see e.g., 1957: 189). His concern was only\\nthat such theorising should be properly grounded, and that it should\\nnot be driven, for example, by an initial failure to keep track of\\ndistinctions that we mark in our ordinary use of language. Further,\\nAustin draws an important distinction between “words and facts\\nor things,” and he seems to suggest that we have ways of\\ninvestigating the world—that is, facts and things—which\\ncan bypass the “blinkers” sometimes imposed on us by our\\nwords. We’ll return to Austin’s distinction between the world,\\nincluding facts—which Austin thinks of as particular or\\nconcrete—and words, including the statements we make in using\\nwords, in \\n section 2.2. \\n And we’ll return to Austin’s idea that we can\\nhave unblinkered awareness of the world—unblinkered, that is, by\\nthe linguistic or judgmental capacities that we bring to bear on what\\nwe experience—in \\n section 3.1.\",\n \"\\nIt’s fair to say that Austin’s work has been caught up in\\nthe stampede away from broadly ordinary language-based approaches to\\nphilosophical questions. The work of Paul Grice, collected in his\\nStudies in the Way of Words (1989), has played an important\\nrole in the negative assessment of such approaches, including aspects\\nof Austin’s work. One central idea in Grice’s work is that\\nthe ways in which we use language—crudely, the pairings of\\nsituations and sentences that we find appropriate or inappropriate, or\\nwhat we would or wouldn’t say in those situations—is not a\\nsimple function of the nature of the respective situations and the\\ncorrectness conditions with which the sentences are associated.\\nRather, judgments about appropriateness are driven also by, for\\nexample, our sensitivities to the demands of rational co-operation\\nwith our conversational partners. And it has been thought that, in one\\nor another way, ordinary language philosophers, including Austin, have\\nbeen insensitive to the additional parameters to which judgments of\\nappropriateness are beholden (for early attacks of this sort, see Ayer\\n1967 and Searle 1966). It is beyond the scope of this entry to attempt\\nto assess either the extent to which Austin should really be seen as a\\ntarget of such objections or, if he should, whether they demonstrate\\nweaknesses in his work. However, in pursuing any such assessment, it\\nis important to note that Austin’s exploitation of ordinary\\nlanguage is never driven by simple appeal to whether, in a situation\\nconsidered as a whole, we would take it to be simply appropriate or\\ninappropriate to use some sentence or other. Rather, Austin\\nis—as we are—sensitive to more fine-grained appraisals of\\nuses of bits of language and, when he judges that an utterance on an\\noccasion would be false or nonsensical, he intends that judgment to\\ncontrast with less damaging negative appraisals—for example,\\nabout what it would be merely inappropriate or impolite to say.\\nMoreover, Austin is sensitive to the specific features of situations\\nupon which we base one or another more fine-grained appraisal of uses\\nof sentences. As he stresses, “It takes two to make a\\ntruth” (1950a: 124 fn.1). And Austin is sensitive to the details\\nof both participants in that and other forms of transaction between\\nword and\\n world.[2]\",\n \"\\n(For discussion of Austin’s approach to philosophical questions,\\nwith reference to his classification as an ordinary language\\nphilosopher, see Berlin 1973b; Cavell 1965; Garvey 2014; Grice 1989:\\n3–21; Gustafsson 2011; Hampshire 1960, 1965; Kaplan 2018: 1–39; Longworth 2018a; Marion 2009; Martin\\nms (Other Internet Resources); Pears 1962; Pitcher 1973; Putnam 1994;\\nQuine 1965; Reimer 2018; Searle 1966; Soames 2003: 171–219; Travis 1991;\\nUrmson 1965, 1967; Urmson and Warnock 1961; Warnock 1973a, 1989:\\n2–10; White 1967.)\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.1 Language and Philosophy\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe topic of this section is Austin’s views about truth.\\nAustin’s views about truth are scattered throughout his work,\\nbut his most explicit discussion of the topic is in the paper\\n“Truth” (1950a) (see also 1953, 1954ms, 1956b, 1962b,\\n1962c). Amongst the distinctive claims Austin makes about truth are\\nthe following:\",\n \"\\nLet’s start with (1)–(3). Austin 1950a is ostensibly\\nresponding to a proposal in Strawson 1949 according to which the\\nfunction of the predicate “is true” is to facilitate the\\nperformance of acts of affirmation or agreement, and not to describe\\nthings—e.g., statements—as possessing the property of\\ntruth. For short, Strawson claimed that “is true” has a\\nperformative rather than a descriptive function. And\\nhe accused his opponents of committing the descriptive\\nfallacy: the alleged fallacy of treating expressions, or aspects\\nof the use of expressions, that really serve performative purposes as\\nhaving (only) a descriptive\\n purpose.[4]\\n One of Austin’s aims was to defend the view that the predicate\\n“is true” has a descriptive function (perhaps in addition\\nto its having one or more performative functions). In pursuing that\\naim, Austin also made a number of distinctive proposals about the\\ndescriptive function of the truth\\n predicate.[5]\",\n \"\\nLet’s turn, then, to the core of Austin’s account of\\ntruth. Austin presents his account of truth as an account of truth for\\nstatements. However, “statement” is at least two\\nways ambiguous, covering both historical episodes in which something\\nis stated—what I’ll refer to as\\nstatings—and also the things or propositions that are\\nstated therein—which I’ll refer to as what is\\nstated. Austin isn’t especially careful about the\\ndistinction, but it’s possible to reconstruct much of what he\\nsays in a way that respects it (for discussion of the distinction see\\ne.g., Cartwright 1962).\",\n \"\\nAustin’s primary interest appears to be the truth of\\nstatings. He writes of “statement” that it has\\n“the merit of clearly referring to the historic use of a\\nsentence by an utterer” (1950a: 121). However, statings are not\\nordinarily said to be true or false, except derivatively insofar as\\nwhat is stated in them is true or false. Rather, statings are assessed\\nas, for example, correct or incorrect, appropriate or inappropriate,\\nand so forth. However, it is plausible that stating correctly is\\nclosely associated with making a statement that is true. And\\nAustin’s account can be understood as an account of the\\nconditions in which statings are such that what is stated in them is\\n true.[6]\",\n \"\\nAustin presents the core of his account of truth in the following\\nway:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nWhen is a statement true? The temptation is to answer (at least if we\\nconfine ourselves to “straightforward” statements):\\n“When it corresponds to the facts”. And as a piece of\\nstandard English this can hardly be wrong. Indeed, I must confess I do\\nnot really think it is wrong at all: the theory of truth is a series\\nof truisms. Still, it can at least be misleading. (1950a: 121)\\n\",\n \"\\nThe two obvious sources of potential misdirection in the formula that\\nAustin endorses here are its appeal to correspondence and its\\nappeal to\\n facts.[7]\\n Austin attempts to prevent our being misled by explaining how those\\ntwo appeals ought to be understood. Austin’s focus in his\\n“Truth” (1950a) is mainly on the nature of correspondence.\\nHe deals more fully with facts in his “Unfair to Facts”\\n(1954ms).\",\n \"\\nIn giving an account of correspondence, Austin makes appeal to two\\ntypes of (what he calls) conventions\\n (as per (3) above):[8]\",\n \"\\nThe descriptive conventions associate sentences with (types\\nof) ways for things to be: ways for situations, things, events, etc.\\nto be. For instance, the sentence “The cat is on the mat”\\nis associated with a type of way for things to be in which the cat is\\non the mat. A variety of different historic situations might be of\\nthat type. For instance, one historic situation of that type might\\ninvolve Logos (Derrida’s cat), while a different historic\\nsituation of the same type might involve Nothing (Sartre’s cat).\\nSimilarly, cat-mat pairings that took place at different times would\\nbe different historic situations or events and yet might be of the\\nsame type.\",\n \"\\nThe demonstrative conventions, by contrast, associate\\nparticular statings—themselves historic events—with some\\namongst the accessible historic situations, things, events, etc.\\nConsider, for example, the following simplified case. There are two\\naccessible situations, one of which is of the cat-on-mat type and one\\nof which is of the dog-on-linoleum type. The descriptive conventions\\ngoverning the English sentence “The cat is on the mat” do\\nnot, and cannot, determine which of the two accessible situations a\\nspeaker aims to talk about on a particular occasion. In order to\\nachieve that, the speaker must find a way of making manifest that\\ntheir goal is to select, say, the dog-on-linoleum situation. They\\nmight achieve this by, for example, their use on a particular occasion\\nof the present tense, or by pointing, etc. (1950a:\\n 121–126).[10]\",\n \"\\nWith this machinery in place, Austin continues:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nA statement is said to be true when the historic state of affairs [or\\ne.g., situation, thing, event] to which it is correlated by the\\ndemonstrative conventions (the one to which it “refers”)\\nis of a type [footnote omitted] with which the sentence used in making\\nit is correlated by the descriptive conventions. (1950a: 122)\\n\",\n \"\\nWhat does “is of a type with which” mean? Austin expands\\non his account in the omitted footnote:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n“Is of a type with which” means “is sufficiently\\nlike those standard states of affairs with which”. Thus, for a\\nstatement to be true one state of affairs must be like\\ncertain others, which is a natural relation, but also\\nsufficiently like to merit the same\\n“description”, which is no longer a purely natural\\nrelation. To say “This is red” is not the same as to say\\n“This is like those”, nor even as to say “This is\\nlike those which were called red”. That things are\\nsimilar, or even “exactly” similar, I may\\nliterally see, but that they are the same I cannot literally\\nsee—in calling them the same colour a convention is involved\\nadditional to the conventional choice of the name to be given to the\\ncolour which they are said to be. (1950a: 122 fn.2)\\n\",\n \"\\nThe English sentence “This is red” is correlated by the\\ndescriptive conventions with a type of way for things to be: a type\\ninstanced by all and only those historic situations or states of\\naffairs in which a selected thing is red. According to Austin, a\\nstating by use of that sentence would be correct if the thing selected\\nin the stating via the demonstrative conventions were sufficiently\\nlike standard situations or states of affairs in which a selected\\nthing is red. So, we rely on the existence of a range of standard\\ninstances that are assumed to be of the required type. We can see that\\nthe thing selected in this stating, via the demonstrative conventions,\\nis now in various ways similar and dissimilar from those standard\\ninstances. The question we need to answer is this: Is this thing of\\nthe same type as the standard instances with respect to its\\ncolour? That is, is it the same colour as they are? According to\\nAustin, we cannot answer that question simply by looking. In an at\\nleast attenuated sense we must make a decision as to whether the\\npresent instance is, in relevant respects, sufficiently\\nsimilar to the standard instances as to mandate treating it as of the\\nvery same\\n type.[11]\",\n \"\\nNotice that, on Austin’s view, states of affairs (etc.) do not\\nper se mandate that they belong to one or another type. To\\nthat extent, they do not alone determine which propositional\\nstatements are true of them. The things to which true statings\\ncorrespond, then, are (in at least that sense) particulars\\n (see (2) above).\\n The things to which statings correspond, then, appear to be quite\\ndifferent from facts as the latter are commonly understood by\\nphilosophers. For facts are often thought of as\\nproposition-like—as exhaustively captured by instances of the\\nform “The fact that p”. And it seems that\\nelements of that type would mandate the correctness of one or another\\nclassification. Austin’s views about facts are developed a bit\\nmore fully in his “Unfair to Facts” (1954ms). There Austin\\nmakes clear, first, that he uses “facts”, with\\netymological precedent, to speak of particulars. Second, Austin\\nsketches a view of propositional fact talk on which it is used as a\\nway of indirectly denoting particulars as the elements that make the\\nspecified propositions true. However, Austin’s basic account of\\ntruth can for the most part be detached from his views about facts and\\n fact-talk.[12]\",\n \"\\nThe role for human judgment or decision in mediating the\\nclassification of particulars leaves open that their correct\\nclassification as to type might vary depending on specific features of\\nthe occasion for so classifying them\\n (see (4) above).\\n It may be, for example, that for certain purposes an historic state\\nof affairs involving a rose is sufficiently like standard situations\\ninvolving red things as to warrant sameness of classification, while\\nfor different purposes its likeness is outweighed by its\\ndissimilarities from the standard cases. Moreover, what are counted as\\nstandard cases may vary with the purposes operative in attempting to\\nclassify, and may shift as new cases come to be counted as of a\\nspecific\\n type.[13]\",\n \"\\nThe precise ways in which our statings depend for their correctness or\\nincorrectness on the facts can vary with variation in specific\\nfeatures of the occasion, in particular with variation in the intents\\nand purposes of conversational participants. As Austin puts it,\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nIt seems to be fairly generally realized nowadays that, if you just\\ntake a bunch of sentences…impeccably formulated in some\\nlanguage or other, there can be no question of sorting them out into\\nthose that are true and those that are false; for (leaving out of\\naccount so-called “analytic” sentences) the question of\\ntruth and falsehood does not turn only on what a sentence is,\\nnor yet on what it means, but on, speaking very broadly, the\\n\\ncircumstances in which it is uttered. Sentences as such are\\nnot either true or false. (1962a: 110–111. See also 40–41,\\n65)\\n\",\n \"\\nAnd the circumstances can matter in a variety of ways, not simply by\\nsupplying, or failing to supply, an appropriate array of facts:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n…in the case of stating truly or falsely, just as in the case\\nof advising well or badly, the intents and purposes of the utterance\\nand its context are important; what is judged true in a school book\\nmay not be so judged in a work of historical research. Consider\\n… “Lord Raglan won the battle of Alma”, remembering\\nthat Alma was a soldier’s battle if ever there was one and that\\nLord Raglan’s orders were never transmitted to some of his\\nsubordinates. Did Lord Raglan then win the battle of Alma or did he\\nnot? Of course in some contexts, perhaps in a school book, it is\\nperfectly justifiable to say so—it is something of an\\nexaggeration, maybe, and there would be no question of giving Raglan a\\nmedal for it…“Lord Raglan won the battle of Alma”\\nis exaggerated and suitable to some contexts and not to others; it\\nwould be pointless to insist on its [i.e., the\\nsentence’s] truth or falsehood. (1962b: 143–144,\\ninterpolation added)\\n\",\n \"\\nIt’s important here to separate two questions. First, is the\\nsentence “Lord Raglan won the battle of Alma”\\ntrue? Second, is what is stated in using that sentence on a\\nparticular occasion, true? In order for the first question to get an\\naffirmative answer, every use of the sentence would have to\\nbe—or issue in a statement that\\n is—true.[14]\\n But although the sentence can be used in a schoolbook to make a\\nstatement that is true, it might also be used in a work of historical\\nresearch, or in support of Raglan’s decoration, in making a\\nfalse statement. Hence, the sentence doesn’t take the same\\ntruth-value on every occasion: the sentence per se\\nis neither true nor false. By contrast, there is no reason to deny\\nthat the things that are stated in using the sentence on occasions are\\ntrue: in particular, there is no reason to deny that what is stated by\\nthe schoolbook occurrence of the sentence is true. So, the second\\nquestion can be given an affirmative answer, as long as we are willing\\nto allow that a sentence can be used to make different statements on\\ndifferent occasions (see also Austin’s discussion of\\n“real” in Sense and Sensibilia (1962a:\\n62–77) for an array of relevant examples).\",\n \"\\nWe should avoid a possible misunderstanding of Austin here. His\\nargument shows, at most, that whatever combines with the facts to\\ndetermine a particular truth-value varies from occasion to occasion.\\nThat does nothing to dislodge the natural view that a sentence can\\ncarry its meaning with it from occasion to occasion, and thus\\npossess a literal meaning. However, if we wish to retain that idea, we\\nmust give up on the idea that sentence meaning simply combines with\\nthe facts that are being spoken about to determine truth-value: we\\nmust reject the idea that sentence meanings determine\\ntruth-conditions. Plausibly, we should also give up the idea that\\nmeaning alone determines what is stated (at least insofar as the\\nlatter determines truth-conditions). In taking this line, we would\\nreject views of meaning according to which it is given by appeal to\\n truth-conditions.[15]\",\n \"\\nAustin’s account gives rise to the possibility of utterances in\\nwhich no truth-evaluable statement is produced:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nSuppose that we confront “France is hexagonal” with the\\nfacts, in this case, I suppose, with France, is it true or false?\\nWell, if you like, up to a point; of course I can see what you mean by\\nsaying that it is true for certain intents and purposes. It is good\\nenough for a top-ranking general, perhaps, but not for a\\ngeographer… How can one answer this question, whether it is\\ntrue or false that France is hexagonal? It is just rough, and that is\\nthe right and final answer to the question of the relation of\\n“France is hexagonal” to France. It is a rough\\ndescription; it is not a true or a false one. (1962a: 143)\\n\",\n \"\\nWhat Austin characterises in his final denial is the sentence\\n“France is hexagonal”, in relation to France. He\\nneedn’t, and doesn’t, deny that on occasion, for\\nparticular intents and purposes, one might use the sentence to\\nstate a truth. However, he suggests that, in some cases, the\\ncircumstances of utterance may be such that no truth-evaluable\\nstatement is made by the use of a sentence.\",\n \"\\nSuppose, for example, that someone uttered “France is\\nhexagonal” out of the blue, without making manifest any intents\\nand purposes. In that case, there would be nothing to go on, in\\nseeking to establish whether the utterance was true or false, other\\nthan the words used, given their meanings. But those words might have\\nbeen used to make a variety of statements, statements whose truth or\\nfalsehood depends on the facts in a variety of ways. Hence, unless we\\nare willing to allow that the utterance is both true and false, we\\nshould withhold that mode of assessment: although such an utterance\\nwould involve a perfectly meaningful sentence, it would fail\\nto be either true or false. Austin thought that our uses of words are\\nalways liable to that sort of failure, especially when we are doing\\nphilosophy. When used in cases that are out of the ordinary, or in the\\nabsence of the background required to sustain the statement of truths\\nor falsehoods, words might—in that sense—fail us.\",\n \"\\nAustin makes no claims to generality for the account of truth that he\\nsketches. However, it’s natural to wonder to what extent the\\naccount can naturally be extended in order to take in types of\\nstatement that he doesn’t explicitly attempt to bring within its\\npurview. Potential pressure points here include statements whose\\nexpression involves negation (see 1950a: 128–129, 129 fn.1),\\nquantification (see 1962b: 144), or conditionals, and statements of\\nnecessary truths. The three main options open to the defender of\\nAustin here are the following. First, an attempt might be made to\\nbring some cases within the purview of a natural generalization of\\nAustin’s account (see, for example, Warnock 1989: 56–61).\\nSecond, it might be allowed that some such cases require distinctive\\ntreatment, but argued that they can still be connected with the\\naccount Austin offers as further species of the truth-genus. Third, an\\nattempt might be made to argue that some such cases are so distinctive\\nthat the forms of positive appraisal that are appropriate to them are\\nnot really forms of appraisal as to\\n truth.[16]\",\n \"\\nLet’s turn to\\n (5),\\n the question of the extent to which Austin endorses a deflationary\\naccount of truth. The promiscuity of the classifier\\n“deflationist” has a tendency to render the question\\ndifficult to discuss in a useful way. However, we can at least\\nconsider some ways in which Austin might be thought to give an\\nexplanatory role to truth, or to deny it such a role. It’s clear\\nthat Austin wishes to reject Strawson’s very strong form of\\ndeflationism, according to which the function of truth is exhaustively\\nperformative: saying that a statement is true amounts, precisely, to\\nendorsing that statement oneself. Moreover, there is no sign that\\nAustin thinks an account can be given of the expression of statements\\nby statings that isn’t bound up with consideration of the\\nconditions in which their stating would be subject to one or another\\nform of positive appraisal—at the most general level,\\nconsideration of their correctness-conditions. However, Austin often\\ncharacterizes truth and falsity themselves as, in effect, mere labels\\nfor positive and negative poles, respectively, in a variety of more\\nspecific forms of appraisal.\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nWe become obsessed with “truth” when discussing\\nstatements, just as we become obsessed with “freedom” when\\ndiscussing conduct. So long as we think that what has always and alone\\nto be decided is whether a certain action was done freely or was not,\\nwe get nowhere: but so soon as we turn instead to the numerous other\\nadverbs used in the same connexion (“accidentally”,\\n“unwillingly”, “inadvertently”, &c.),\\nthings become easier, and we come to see that no concluding inference\\nof the form “Ergo, it was done freely (or not freely)” is\\nrequired. Like freedom, truth is a bare minimum or an illusory ideal\\n(the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about, say, the\\nbattle of Waterloo or the Primavera). (1950a: 130; see also\\n1956b: 250–251, 1957: 180)\\n\",\n \"\\nAustin’s idea here seems to be the following. There are numerous\\nspecific forms of positive appraisal that we employ with respect to\\nstatings: they might be fair, reasonable, accurate, precise, adequate,\\nsatisfactory and so forth. (Recall that Austin would have taken each\\nform of assessment to be occasion-bound: a matter, for example, of\\nwhat would be fair and reasonable to judge on this particular\\noccasion.) In saying that what is stated in a stating is\\ntrue, we are in effect saying that the stating meets the\\n“bare minimum” condition of being susceptible to one or\\nanother of those specific forms of positive appraisal. It’s\\nconsistent with this type of view that our conception of the natures\\nof what we state, and of how our statings come to be expressions of\\nthose things, is bound up with our conception of the conditions in\\nwhich our statings, and what we thereby state, are susceptible to one\\nor another form of positive appraisal. To that extent, it differs from\\nsome stronger forms of deflationism on which no truth-related mode of\\npositive appraisal plays a non-derivative explanatory role. Moreover,\\nthe view can take more or less radical forms. Its most radical form\\ntreats truth as a mere disjunction of the more specific modes of\\npositive appraisal, with no uniform underlying commonality amongst\\nthose specific modes. That view would be a distinctive form of\\ndeflationism about truth, since it would reject the idea that truth\\nper se plays an essential role in explanation. Its less\\nradical form allows that truth might impose a uniform necessary\\ncondition on the specific modes of positive appraisal, and thereby\\nplay an essential role, through its government of the specific modes,\\nin the explanation of what is stated in statings. The latter form of\\nview wouldn’t count as an interesting form of\\ndeflationism, although it might well be an interesting\\nposition in its own right.\",\n \"\\nAustin discusses an important range of ways in which assessment as to\\ntruth can cover a variety of more fine-grained modes of appraisal in\\nhis “How to Talk” (1953). See also the discussions of this\\npaper in Chisholm 1964 and Warnock 1989: 47–56.\",\n \"\\n(For discussion of Austin’s account of truth, see Barwise and\\nEtchemendy 1987; Bennett 1966; Crary 2002; Davidson 1969; Grice 1989:\\n3–40; Hansen 2014; Kirkham 1995: 124–140; Mates 1974;\\nNarboux 2011; Putnam 1994; Recanati 1994: 1–5, 121–130,\\n141–153; Searle 1966; Strawson 1950, 1965; Travis 1991, 2005,\\n2008: 1–18, 2011; Warnock 1973c, 1989: 45–64,\\n135–145, 163–4 fn.74; White 1967; C.J.F. Williams\\n1973.)\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.2 Language and Truth\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIn this section, we’ll consider some aspects of Austin’s\\ntreatment of speech acts—things done with words (the main\\nsources here are: 1962b, 1956b, and 1963; see also 1946: 97–103,\\n1950a: 130–133, 1953). The topics we’ll consider are the\\nfollowing.\",\n \"\\nA topic that has figured in some recent discussions, but that we\\nwon’t discuss here, is this:\",\n \"\\nAustin presents the second reason for why sentences do not conspire\\nwith the facts to determine truth-values in considering whether there\\nis a useful distinction to be drawn between (indicative) sentences\\nthat are used to make statements—which Austin labels\\nconstatives—and sentences that are useable in the\\nperformance of some act—which Austin labels\\nperformatives (or sometimes performatory)\\n (topic (2) above).[17]\\n Austin’s opening list of examples of putative performatives\\nincludes: “I take … to be my lawfully wedded\\n…”—as uttered in the course of the marriage\\nceremony; “I name this ship the Queen\\nElizabeth”—as uttered when smashing a bottle against\\nthe stern; “I give and bequeath my watch to my\\nbrother”—as occurring in a will; “I bet you sixpence\\nit will rain tomorrow” (1962b: 5). About these examples, Austin\\nwrites:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nIn these examples it seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of\\ncourse, the appropriate circumstances) is not to describe my\\ndoing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing…[fn.\\nStill less anything that I have already done or have yet to\\ndo.]…or to state that I am doing it. None of the utterances\\ncited is either true or false: I assert this as obvious and do not\\nargue it. (1962b: 6)\\n\",\n \"\\nAustin is sometimes read as seeking to defend this view of\\nperformatives. However, four features of his presentation suggest that\\nhis view is not so straightforward. First, Austin presents the issue\\nas concerning the classification by use of utterances of types of\\nsentence, and we have already seen that he is in general\\nsceptical about alleged associations between sentences and their\\noccasional uses. Second, Austin fails here, and elsewhere, to offer\\nserious arguments for his assertion that none of the cited utterances\\nis either true or false. Third, Austin’s assertion is made using\\nthe apparently performative form, “I assert …\\n”—a form that appears, moreover, to falsify the\\ngeneralisation that performatives lack truth-values. Finally, Austin\\nissues the following warning in a footnote, two pages earlier:\\n“Everything said in these sections is provisional, and subject\\nto revision in the light of later sections” (1962b: 4 fn.1).\",\n \"\\nAustin goes on to discuss two apparently quite different modes of\\nassessment for utterances of the two apparently different types.\\nConstatives, as already noted, are assessed along the dimension of\\ntruth and falsehood. By contrast, performatives are assessed along\\ndimensions of happiness and unhappiness, or\\nfelicity and infelicity. Taking the example of an\\nutterance of “I take … to be my lawfully wedded …\\n”, and simplifying Austin’s discussion, there are two main\\nsorts of unhappiness, or infelicity, to which this performative is\\nliable. First, there are misfires:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n…if we…utter the formula incorrectly, or if…we\\nare not in a position to do the act because we are…married\\nalready, or it is the purser and not the captain who is conducting the\\nceremony, then the act in question, …marrying, is not\\nsuccessfully performed at all, …[it] is not achieved. (1962b:\\n15–16)\\n\",\n \"\\nSecond, there are abuses: in these cases, the act is\\nperformed, but insincerely, perhaps for example in instituting a\\nmarriage of convenience.\",\n \"\\nIt’s important to see that, even if it were true, in general,\\nthat some things done using performatives—e.g., marrying,\\nnaming, bequeathing, and betting—are neither true nor false, but\\nrather are subject to assessment as happy or unhappy, it would not\\nfollow that truth is out of the picture. That would depend, not only\\non the basic claim that actions of those types per se are not\\ntrue or false, but also on the claim that particular actions of those\\ntypes are not also of other types that are assessable as true\\nor false. And Austin recognised that actions can be of more than one\\ntype (or, perhaps, that distinct actions might be performed\\nsimultaneously):\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nTo say that I believe you ‘is’ on occasion to accept your\\nstatement; but it is also to make an assertion, which is not made by\\nthe strictly performatory utterance “I accept your\\nstatement”. (1950a: 133)\\n\",\n \"\\nIn the examples that Austin cites, things are done that are not\\nassessable as true or false—marrying, naming, betting, etc. But\\nas Austin points out, those examples might also involve other things\\nbeing done—e.g., the making of statements—that are, or\\ninvolve things that are, assessable as true or false. However, even\\nthough this undermines Austin’s provisional characterisation of\\nperformatives, the possibility that we might sometimes do more than\\none thing in using a performative puts pressure on the idea that there\\nis a simple connection between sentences and the various things we do\\nin using them.\",\n \"\\nI’ve suggested that Austin’s view of the putative\\ndistinction between performatives and constatives is less\\nstraightforward than it might at first seem. And the structure of\\nAustin (1962b) bears out that assessment. Although much of the book\\nseems to be devoted to pursuit of a distinction between performatives\\nand constatives, none of the attempts succeeds. It is possible, but\\nimplausible, that in the course of the lectures Austin found that he\\nwas unable to draw a distinction that he thought should be drawn. A\\nmore plausible interpretation is that Austin’s purpose is not to\\ndraw such a distinction. Rather it is to argue—through the\\nfailures of various attempts to draw the distinction—that there\\nis no such simple distinction—no sorting of sentences into those\\napt for performative, and those apt for constative, use.\",\n \"\\nAustin argues against the distinction by appeal to the fact that the\\nsame forms of assessment are applicable to utterances apparently of\\nboth sorts:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n…unhappiness…seems to characterize both kinds of\\nutterance, not merely the performative; and…the requirement of\\nconforming or bearing some relation to the facts, different in\\ndifferent cases, seems to characterize performatives… (1962b:\\n91)\\n\",\n \"\\nAttempts to make a statement are liable both to misfires and abuses.\\nFor example, an attempt to make a statement using “France is\\nhexagonal” might misfire if there were no such country as\\nFrance, or (as discussed above) if no suitable intents and purposes\\nwere manifest (1962b: 47–52). And an attempt might be an abuse\\nif the speaker failed to believe that France was hexagonal. Attempts\\nat performative utterance are liable to assessment either in terms of\\ntruth or falsehood, or in terms similarly dependent on conformity with\\nthe facts: my utterance of “I warn you that the bull is about to\\ncharge” may be liable to criticism as mistaken rather\\nthan unhappy if the bull is not about to charge (1962b: 55). More\\ngenerally, it is often impossible to decide, just from the words a\\nspeaker uses, whether their utterance is susceptible to one or another\\nform of assessment. And there are cases like “I state that\\n…” which seem to satisfy all formal and lexical\\nrequirements for being performative, and yet are used in utterances\\n“…which surely are the making of statements, and surely\\nare essentially true or false” (1962b: 91). (Austin’s\\nideas here also bear on\\n topic (4) above.)\",\n \"\\n(For discussion of Austin’s views about performative utterances,\\nsee Bach 1975; G. Bird 1981; Black 1963; Cohen 1964, 1974; Forguson\\n1966; Heal 1974; Hornsby 1988, 2006; Jack 1981; Lemmon 1962; Lewis\\n1972; Schiffer 1972; Sinnott-Armstrong 1994; Tsohatzidis 2018; Urmson 1977; Warnock\\n1973b, 1989: 105–151.)\",\n \"\\nFrom the wreckage of the initial distinction, Austin assembles a new\\nmodel\\n (topic (3) above).\\n The new model is founded on distinctions among various kinds of thing\\nspeakers do—various acts they perform—when they\\nproduce an utterance.\",\n \"\\nAustin’s interest in the types of act so distinguished was\\n“…essentially to fasten on the second, illocutionary act\\nand contrast it with the other two…” (1962b: 103). What\\ndid Austin think was important about the illocutionary act? And what\\ndid he think were the dangers inherent in failing to mark it off from\\nthe other types?\",\n \"\\nAustin appears to have thought that the various modes of assessment\\nthat he discusses—e.g., true/false, happy/unhappy—apply\\nmost fundamentally to the illocutionary act, rather than the\\nlocutionary or the perlocutionary\\n act.[18]\\n One point is that Austin thought that philosophers have had a\\ntendency to view some assessments as to happiness (or felicity) as\\nreally applying to perlocutionary acts, so as not bearing on the\\nspecifically linguistic things that speakers are up to. Another\\npoint—and perhaps the point of primary importance—is that\\nAustin thought that philosophers have had a tendency to view\\nassessments as to truth as applying most fundamentally to locutionary\\nacts. Moreover, he thought that philosophers had conceived locutionary\\nacts, not as abstractions from illocutionary acts, but rather as\\nthings that might be done without any illocutionary purpose, just by\\nvirtue of the linguistic expressions employed or their meanings. By\\ncontrast, Austin held that locutionary acts are abstracted from\\ninstances of illocutionary acts, and that assessment as to truth is\\ndirected most fundamentally to the illocutionary act. (We’ll\\nconsider below a stronger and a weaker reading of the idea that\\nassessment as to truth applies most fundamentally to the illocutionary\\nact.)\",\n \"\\nFor Austin, then, assessment as to truth is of a piece with various\\nforms of assessment as to happiness, etc., and like those forms it is\\nthe assessment of an act with respect to its goodness or badness. Thus\\nAustin’s discussion of illocutionary acts is bound up with his\\nother discussions of the ways in which assessment of utterances as to\\ntruth is dependent upon specific features of the circumstances of\\nutterance. He writes:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nThe truth or falsity of statements is affected by what they leave out\\nor put in and by their being misleading, and so on. Thus, for example,\\ndescriptions, which are said to be true or false or, if you like, are\\n“statements”, are surely liable to these criticisms, since\\nthey are selective and uttered for a purpose. It is essential to\\nrealize that “true” and false’, like\\n“free” and “unfree”, do not stand for anything\\nsimple at all; but only for a general dimension of being a right and\\nproper thing to say as opposed to a wrong thing, in these\\ncircumstances, to this audience, for these purposes and with these\\nintentions. (1962b: 144–145)\\n\",\n \"\\nAccording to Austin, there is more involved in any such assessment\\nthan a simple comparison of requirements imposed by linguistic meaning\\nwith the facts. Reflection on the assessment of actions in which we\\nspeak and the speech acts that classify them indicates two things:\\nfirst, the distinction between assessment as to happiness and\\nassessment as to truth is ultimately unprincipled; and, second, some\\nmixture of various types of assessment applies to all, or nearly all,\\nutterances. These ideas appear to be the basis for a cryptic claim of\\nAustin’s\\n (mentioned above as topic (4)).\\n Exploiting the various modes of appraisal to distinguish five very\\ngeneral classes of speech act verbs, Austin writes that\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nThey are…quite enough to play Old Harry with two fetishes which\\nI admit to an inclination to play Old Harry with, viz. (1) the\\ntrue/false fetish, (2) the value/fact fetish. (1962b: 151)\\n\",\n \"\\nAustin’s cryptic suggestion appears to be to the effect that, in\\none or another way, classifications of utterances along the true-false\\ndimension, or according to whether they are expressions of fact or\\nexpressions of value, is—for at least some purposes—too\\ncrude. The suggestion is susceptible of a weaker and a stronger\\nreading. On the weaker reading, the suggestion is to the effect that,\\nwhen the assessment of an utterance is at issue, it is\\nessential to consider the force or forces that attach to the\\nillocutionary act or acts thereby performed. Since various such acts\\nmay have been performed, and since assessment of each act involves\\nconsideration of a mix of facts and values, there is no clean way of\\nsorting utterances on the basis either of whether or not their primary\\nmode of assessment is on the true-false dimension, or of whether their\\nprimary function is the expression of fact, rather than the expression\\nof value. That leaves open that, with respect to at least some speech\\nacts, a locutionary core—a proposition, or propositions, or\\npropositional-like element—may be assessed in a way that makes\\nno reference to force, for example, along the true-false dimension. On\\nthe stronger reading, the claim would be that it is not possible to\\ndetach a locutionary core from the force with which it is expressed in\\nsuch a way that that core can be assessed without reference to force.\\nOn its stronger reading, Austin’s suggestion would have to\\ncontend with an aspect of what is known as the Frege-Geach\\nproblem: the challenge of explaining logical connections amongst\\nspeech acts with different forces where those connections appear to\\ndepend upon their sharing (elements of) a locutionary core (see Geach\\n1965).\",\n \"\\n(For discussion of Austin’s distinction amongst locutionary,\\nillocutionary, and perlocutionary acts see Bach 1975; Bach and Harnish\\n1979; G. Bird 1981; Black 1963; Cerf 1966; Chisholm 1964; Cohen 1964,\\n1974; Fiengo 2018; Forguson 1966, 1973; Furberg 1969; Garvey 2014; Geach 1965;\\nHornsby 1988, 1994, 2006; Katz 1986; Moltmann 2018; Schiffer 1972; Searle 1968, 1969;\\nStrawson 1964a, 1973; Urmson 1977; Vendler 1972; Warnock 1973b, 1989:\\n105–151. For discussion specifically of the interaction of\\nAustin’s views about the natures of speech acts with his views\\nabout truth, see Crary 2002; Quine 1965; Travis 2011; Warnock 1989:\\n140–150, 163–164 fn. 74.)\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.3 Speech Acts and Truth\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nAustin’s main discussions of knowledge and perception take place\\nin “Other Minds” (1946) and Sense and Sensibilia\\n(1962a; see also “Unfair to Facts” [1954ms], which\\noverlaps with parts of the lecture series on which Sense and\\nSensibilia was based that are excised from the book, and\\n“Ifs and Cans” [1956a:\\n 230]).[19]\\n Stated more baldly than would have been acceptable to Austin, and\\nreconstructing slightly, his distinctive views in this area include\\nthe following.\",\n \"\\nA consequence of (3) and (4) is that foundationalism is\\nundercut: there are no foundational claims that are especially\\ninfallible; and there are no non-foundational claims that are\\ndistinctively fallible. It is possible for our judgmental capacities\\nto misfire with respect to any subject matter, including e.g., our own\\nfeelings or experiences. And it’s possible for their exercise to\\nbe sufficiently reliable to give rise to knowledge about ordinary\\nmatters, e.g., that there is a pig before one.\",\n \"\\nThree further side claims that have assumed some importance in recent\\nwork are the following.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Knowledge and Perception\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nLet’s begin with some of what Austin says in support of\\n (1).\\n In his “Other Minds” (1946), Austin sketches a\\ndistinction between knowing and believing through appeal to the\\ndifferent kinds of challenges that are appropriate to claims to know\\nversus claims to believe. First, Austin points out that one who claims\\nto know may be challenged to explain how they know, while\\nsomeone who claims to believe may be challenged to explain\\nwhy they believe. The consequences of failing adequately to\\nmeet those challenges are also different: in the first case, the\\nconsequences might include that the subject does not know; in\\nthe second, the consequence might include, not the subject\\ndoesn’t believe, but that they oughtn’t\\nto believe. Later, Austin indicates a further basis for the\\ndistinction between knowing and believing:\",\n \"\\n\\n…saying “I know”…is not saying\\n“I have performed a specially striking feat of cognition,\\nsuperior, in the same scale as believing and being sure, even to being\\nquite sure”: for there is nothing in that scale\\nsuperior to being quite sure. (1946: 99)\\n\",\n \"\\nImportantly, and moving on to claim\\n (2),\\n Austin holds that knowledge is the upshot of the successful exercise\\nof judgmental capacities—which he thinks of as essentially\\nlanguage involving—in appropriate circumstances: the successful\\nexercise of (judgmental) acumen given (perception- or\\ntestimony-based) opportunity. The following two passages are\\ncentral to understanding Austin’s views in this area:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nAny description of a taste or sound or smell (or colour) or of a\\nfeeling, involves (is) saying that it is like one or some that we have\\nexperienced before: any descriptive word is classificatory, involves\\nrecognition and in that sense memory, and only when we use such words\\n(or names or descriptions, which come down to the same) are we knowing\\nanything, or believing anything. But memory and recognition are often\\nuncertain and unreliable. (1946: 92).\\n\\n\\n…sensa [the things we sense or perceive] are dumb, and only\\nprevious experience enables us to identify them. If we choose\\nto say that they “identify themselves” (and certainly\\n“recognizing” is not a highly voluntary act of ours), then\\nit must be admitted that they share the birthright of all speakers,\\nthat of speaking unclearly and untruly. (1946: 97)\\n\",\n \"\\nWe perceive various things, features, events, and states of affairs.\\nThe things we perceive are not presented to us as already classified\\ninto types. Yet propositional knowledge essentially involves\\nclassification: for example, we know that that thing is a\\npig. In order to know, we must exercise judgmental capacities,\\ntaking stands with respect to the ways the things, features, events,\\nand states of affairs are. We must classify the elements into types\\nbased on their similarities with elements that we have already\\nclassified into types. (Notice that Austin’s view that these\\nelements are particulars, articulated in his “Truth”\\n(1950a) and “Unfair to Facts” (1954ms), figures\\nessentially here.)\",\n \"\\nReturning to\\n (1),\\n let’s consider what Austin says about the conditions in which a\\nsubject would fail to know. Austin’s discussion is\\nhaunted by the following condition: “If I know, I\\ncan’t be wrong”. He never quite endorses the\\ncondition. He admits at one point that its third person counterpart\\nmakes sense, but characterizes the sense it makes by appeal\\nto a prohibition on saying “I know it is so, but I may\\nbe wrong” (1946: 98).\",\n \"\\nIt’s clear that Austin would reject the claim that it is a\\nnecessary condition on knowing that it be impossible for one\\nto have been wrong—impossible, that is, for one to have\\nexercised the same capacities in the same circumstances and to have\\njudged incorrectly. For given that he holds that judgmental capacities\\nare inherently fallible\\n ((3) above),\\n it would follow that we can never know anything.\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nThe human intellect and senses are, indeed, inherently\\nfallible and delusive, but not inveterately so. Machines are\\ninherently liable to break down, but good machines don’t\\n(often). It is futile to embark on a “theory of knowledge”\\nwhich denies this liability: such theories constantly end up by\\nadmitting the liability after all, and denying the existence of\\n“knowledge”. (1946: 98)\\n\",\n \"\\nWhat Austin says here is consistent with the operation of the\\ncapacities being reliable in some circumstances, and with their\\nreliable operation being such as to give rise to knowledge. So it is\\nopen to Austin to hold a view on which knowledge requires that the\\nparticular exercises of the capacity to judge on which they\\nare based couldn’t have occurred and yet the output judgment be\\nmistaken. And it is open to him to hold that if the exercise of\\njudgmental capacities is to give rise to knowledge, those capacities\\nmust be reliable in the circumstances in which they are\\nexercised and given the way they are exercised on that occasion (e.g.,\\ncarefully). However, Austin doesn’t make fully explicit that his\\nview about knowledge includes either component. And some of what he\\nsays—especially in discussion of his performative proposal about\\nthe use of “I know”—is in tension with the first\\nclaim, on which knowing is incompatible with being\\n mistaken.[20]\\n (It’s possible that Austin viewed his “Ifs and\\nCans” (1956a) discussion of abilities as providing further\\nillumination concerning the proper understanding of the formula\\n“If one knows, one can’t be wrong”.)\",\n \"\\nOne potential consequence of Austin’s account concerns\\nfoundationalism. Foundationalism typically involves the following\\nthree claims. First, many of the ordinary judgments that we\\nmake—for example, judgments to the effect that there is a pig\\nhere—are inherently risky in the following sense. It’s\\npossible for us to make such judgments mistakenly, even in cases in\\nwhich we operate as carefully as possible. Second, some of the\\njudgments we make, or could make, are not inherently risky: for\\nexample, where we are careful only to judge about how things presently\\nappear to us, the judgments we make carry no risk of error. Third,\\nthen, if our aim is to achieve absolute security, we should avoid\\njudgments of the first sort except insofar as they are securely based\\nupon judgments of the second sort. (On one view of this type, the\\nsecond sort of judgment would be taken to provide evidence on\\nwhich judgments of the first sort are based.) Austin’s account\\nundermines the first two components of this view. The first component\\nis undermined because, although it is always possible to\\njudge incorrectly, there are ordinary cases in which our judgments\\nabout our environment are, in fact, absolutely secure\\n ((4) above):\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n…if I watch or some time an animal a few feet in front of me,\\nin a good light, if I prod it perhaps, and sniff, and take note of the\\nnoises it makes, I may say, “That”s a pig’; and this\\ntoo will be “incorrigible”, nothing could be produced that\\nwould show that I had made a mistake…if the animal then emerges\\nand stands there plainly in view, there is no longer any question of\\ncollecting evidence; its coming into view doesn’t provide me\\nwith more evidence that it’s a pig, I can now just see\\nthat it is, the question is settled. (1962a: 114–115)\\n\",\n \"\\nThe second component is undermined because there is no type\\nof judgment, and no type of subject matter, with respect to\\nwhich error is impossible\\n ((3) above).\\n In order to have propositional knowledge even about what I am\\nexperiencing right now, I must classify it together with other things\\nof the same type. And that requires the exercise of capacities that\\nare inherently fallible: I may not have had enough experiences of\\nthings of the same sort to classify this one securely; I may not have\\nattended to what I am experiencing with sufficient care; I may fail\\nadequately to remember similar things that I experienced earlier; and\\nso forth (1946: 90–97; 1962a: 104–131).\",\n \"\\nOrdinary challenges to judgments or claims, including claims to know,\\nare sometimes invitations to detail our credentials—our\\npossession of appropriate acumen in making judgments of the type in\\nquestion. Sometimes, however, they are invitations to detail our\\nfacts—the features of the circumstance that figure in\\nour judging in the way that we do. For example, we might claim to know\\nthat that presented thing is a goldfinch “by the shape of its\\nhead”. If we were to detail our facts in that sort of way, then\\nwe might be open to further challenge: someone might claim that\\nthat’s not enough of a basis on which to judge that the\\npresented thing is a goldfinch. In addition to emphasizing the role of\\nspecial acumen in this type of case—not just anyone can tell a\\ngoldfinch by the shape of its head—Austin makes two important\\nclaims about such potential challenges to our facts. First, Austin\\nclaims that, in order for such a challenge to be appropriate, the\\nchallenger must have in mind some more or less definite lack, for\\nexample by pointing out that birds other than goldfinches have heads\\nof that shape. Second, Austin writes:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nEnough is enough: it doesn’t mean everything. Enough means\\nenough to show that (within reason, and for present intents and\\npurposes) it “can’t” be anything else, there is no\\nroom for an alternative, competing description of it. It does not\\nmean, for example, enough to show it isn’t a stuffed\\ngoldfinch. (1946: 84.)\\n\",\n \"\\nThere are at least three, non-exclusive ways of reading Austin’s\\nclaim here. The first is as the claim that what suffices for this\\nhere to be a goldfinch may not be enough with respect to anything\\nin any circumstance. There may be other birds, or other things, with\\nheads of the same shape. However, we might still know full well that\\nthere are no such birds, and no such things, here; or we may know\\nenough about this thing to know it isn’t a bird of that sort, or\\none of those other things, even though we haven’t specified how\\nwe know in answer to the initial challenge. That is, we may know that\\nthis isn’t a stuffed goldfinch—given the rest of\\nwhat we know, and the circumstances in which we judge—even\\nthough what we explicitly point to in answer to challenges\\ndoesn’t alone rule out the possibility. The second way of\\nreading Austin here is as allowing that we can know that this is a\\ngoldfinch, even though we know that if it’s a stuffed goldfinch,\\nthen it is not a goldfinch, and we don’t know that it\\nisn’t a stuffed goldfinch. We are entitled—either in\\ngeneral, or in circumstances of this sort—to assume or rely upon\\nits not being a stuffed goldfinch, even though that is something we\\ncan’t rule out and don’t know (see Kaplan 2011 for\\ndevelopment of the second way of reading Austin’s views in this\\narea). The third way of reading the passage is as claiming that the\\nrange of possibilities can vary from occasion to occasion for\\njudging or claiming that one knows that this is a goldfinch. On the\\nthird reading, it might be impossible, on this occasion, for\\nthe presented thing to be a stuffed goldfinch, even though there are\\nother occasions on which it would be a possibility. Hence, our facts\\ndo not need to foreclose on that possibility on this occasion,\\nalthough there might be other occasions on which our facts would need\\nto do so. (Travis 2005 develops the third approach. See Millar 2005\\nfor objections.)\",\n \"\\nLet’s turn, then, to\\n (7)–(9),\\n focusing attention on\\n (9),\\n the view that utterances of the form “I know that\\nsuch-and-such” serve a performative and not a descriptive\\nfunction. This is puzzling for at least two reasons: first, the claim\\nthat “I know” lacks a descriptive function is apt to seem\\nobviously false; and second, it is unclear what, if any, function the\\nclaim has in Austin’s account as a whole.\",\n \"\\nThe main focus of objection to Austin here isn’t the claim that\\n“I know that such-and-such” can, on occasion, serve\\ndistinctive performative functions. Rather, the concern with\\nAustin’s proposal is focused on two more specific claims. First,\\nit is focused on the claim that “I know that\\nsuch-and-such” always and only serves a distinctive performative\\nfunction and so is never at the service of self-description. Second,\\nit is focused on the claim that, in cases in which “I know that\\nsuch-and-such” is used to serve a performative function, neither\\nthe felicity conditions of using the sentence in that way, nor the\\ntruth of what, if anything, one thereby states, depend in turn on\\nwhether the speaker knows that such-and-such.\",\n \"\\nAustin is misled here, I think, due to three factors. First, he is\\nmisled by similarities between saying “I know that\\nsuch-and-such” and saying “I promise that\\nsuch-and-such” or “I swear that such-and-such”. But\\nthe cases are importantly different. For example, unlike the case of\\npromising, in which saying “I promise…” in\\nappropriate circumstances makes it so that one has promised…,\\nsaying “I know that such-and-such” does not make it so\\nthat one knows. Now, as Austin later saw, it is possible to develop an\\naccount on which saying “I know that such-and-such” can\\nserve more than one purpose and so can function well with respect to\\none such purpose while functioning poorly with respect to others (see\\ne.g., 1950a: 133 and 1962b). Accordingly, it would be possible to\\ndevelop a view on which, for example, saying “I know that\\nsuch-and-such” in cases in which one does not know\\nwould be improper qua statement (since saying it\\ndoesn’t remove the deficit by making it so that one knows),\\nwhile properly serving the purpose of giving an audience one’s\\nassurance. However, and this is the second reason for which Austin is\\nmisled, he had not in “Other Minds” (1946) yet attained\\nthe later perspective on which that is a clear possibility. Since he\\nnonetheless believes that “I know that such-and-such”\\nserves purposes other than statement making, he is forced to efface\\nits statement-making function. Finally, and more speculatively, it\\nseems that Austin is misled due to his attempting to build into his\\naccount a response to a doctrine, common to his Oxford Realist\\npredecessors Cook Wilson and Prichard, according to which whether one\\nknows or merely believes something is transparent to one. (For\\ndiscussion of that feature of Cook Wilson’s and Prichard’s\\nviews, see Longworth 2018b, Travis and Kalderon 2013 and Travis 2005.) Although Austin\\nrejects the letter of the doctrine, he retains its spirit in\\nattempting to provide an account on which avowals of the form “I\\nknow that such-and-such” can never be false. (For further\\ndiscussion of Austin’s performative proposal, see Warnock 1989:\\n24–33, Lawlor 2013.)\",\n \"\\n(For critical engagement with Austin’s work on knowledge, see\\nAyer 1967; Baz 2011; Chisholm 1964; Hetherington 2018; Kaplan 2011, 2018; Lawlor 2013, 2018; Leite 2011; Longworth 2018b, Marion 2000a,b; Martin ms (Other\\nInternet Resources); Millar 2005; Putnam 1994; Soames 2003:\\n171–193; Stroud 1984: 39–82; Travis 2005; Travis and Kalderon 2013; Warnock 1989:\\n32–44; M. Williams 1996: 135–171.)\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.1 Knowledge\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nLet’s turn now to Austin’s views specifically about\\nperception\\n ((5) and (6) above).\\n Once we have detailed the facts on which a perception-based judgment\\nof ours relies, a more general challenge arises concerning our access\\nto those facts. In order to exploit the bird’s head shape as the\\nbasis for our judgment that it is a goldfinch, it is arguable that we\\nmust be able to see (or perhaps feel) the bird and its shape. On some\\nviews of perception, however, birds and their shapes are not amongst\\nthe things that one can perceive. Austin’s main aim in Sense\\n& Sensibilia is to undermine considerations that have been\\noffered in favour of the general doctrine that, as he puts it,\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n…we never see or otherwise perceive (or “sense”),\\nor anyhow we never directly perceive or sense, material\\nobjects (or material things), but only sense-data (or our own ideas,\\nimpressions, sense, sense-perceptions, percepts, &c.). (1962a:\\n2)\\n\",\n \"\\nCentral to those considerations are those organized by versions of\\nwhat is known as the argument from illusion\\n ((6) above).[21]\\n The version of the argument that Austin criticizes can be\\nreconstructed as follows. (i) There are cases of illusion in which we\\nhave a sensory experience as of seeing something of some sort with\\nspecific features but in which nothing has those specific features.\\nThis might be because, although we experience something of the sort in\\nquestion, the thing we experience lacks the features in question; or\\nit might be because we don’t experience a thing of the sort in\\nquestion at all. (ii) In those cases, there must be something we\\nexperience that has the features in question. Call the things we\\nexperience in such cases sense-data. (iii) Since the cases in\\nwhich we experience sense-data include cases in which no material\\nthings of the sort in question, or with the features in question, are\\nexperienced, it follows that sense-data are not (in general) material\\nthings, or elements in the environment independent of the individual\\nexperiencer. It follows that, in the cases in question, we experience\\nthings (or directly experience things) that are distinct from\\nmaterial things and we do not thereby experience (or directly\\nexperience) material things. (iv) Now it is a general principle about\\nexperiences that if we cannot discriminate the objects of two\\nexperiences on the basis of introspection, then those experiences must\\nhave objects of the same sort. Hence, if one experience has only\\nsense-data as its objects, and not material things, and a second\\nexperience has as its objects something that we cannot discriminate on\\nthe basis of introspection from the objects of the first experience,\\nthen the second experience also has sense-data rather than material\\nthings as its objects. (v) Since every experience stands in the\\nrequired relation to an experience with only sense-data as its\\nobjects, every experience has sense-data rather than material things\\nas its objects. Hence, we never experience—or never\\ndirectly experience—material things\",\n \"\\nAustin objects to every step in the argument just reconstructed.\\nAmongst other complaints, he argues that key terms in the argument\\nhave not been properly defined or explained—for instance,\\n“material thing” and “sense-data” (1962a: 4,\\n7–14, 55), and “directly” (1962a: 14–19). And\\nhe objects to the general principle, to which appeal was made in (iv),\\npointing out that there are no grounds for thinking that we cannot\\nhave experiences with different kinds of object that we nonetheless\\ncan’t discriminate on the basis of introspection. For instance,\\nwe might experience a bar of soap that looks just like a lemon, and be\\nin a position where we couldn’t discriminate the soap from the\\nlemon on the basis of introspection. Nonetheless, we would hold that\\nthe two experiences have different kinds of objects (1962a:\\n 50–52).[22]\\n However, what are perhaps his most important complaints target (i)\\nand (ii) by exploiting the distinction, initially articulated in\\n“Other Minds” (1946), between two elements in perceptually\\nbased judgment: the opportunity afforded by sensory perception and\\njudgmental acumen.\",\n \"\\nThe distinction between sensory perception and judgmental acumen\\nenables Austin to distinguish between central cases of\\nillusion and central cases of delusion, and also to\\nsketch explanations of what is going on in those cases that do not\\nmake appeal to sense-data. Austin takes the defender of (i) and (ii)\\nto argue as follows. First, consider an illusion, for example a stick\\nthat looks bent but really isn’t. Such an illusion has two key\\nfeatures. First, it clearly involves a distinctive sensory experience.\\nSecond, the distinctive sensory experience that it involves is apt to\\ngive rise to an erroneous perceptual judgment, to the effect that the\\nstick is bent. Now one way of explaining the erroneous perceptual\\njudgment is to view it as dictated by the sensory\\nexperience—that is, to view it as accurately representing\\nfeatures presented in the experience: the bent-ness of that which is\\nexperienced. Since the stick is not in fact bent, and that\\nwhich is experienced is bent, we have reason to claim that\\nthat which is experienced is not identical with the stick. What we\\nexperience is sense-data rather than a stick. Moreover, we\\nmight also consider more extreme cases in which we make erroneous\\nperceptual judgments: cases of delusion or hallucination. For example,\\nthere is the case in which an alcoholic person judges that pink rats\\nare visible, when in fact there are none. Now, given the proposed\\naccount of the case of illusion, that case cannot be distinguished\\nfrom the case of delusion by appeal to the fact that, in the former,\\nan environmental feature is experienced while, in the latter, there is\\nno suitable environmental feature to be experienced. It therefore\\nseems natural to treat the two cases as of the same basic type, and to\\noffer the same type of explanation for both. Thus, one might be\\ntempted to view the rat-delusion as having the following three\\nfeatures. First, it involves a distinctive sensory experience. Second,\\nthe distinctive sensory experience that it involves dictates\\nan erroneous perceptual judgment to the effect that pink rats are\\nvisible. Third, that judgment is dictated because it accurately\\nrepresents features present in the experience.\",\n \"\\nAustin responds as follows. First, he exploits the role of judgmental\\nacumen in perceptual judgment in order to provide an alternative\\nexplanation of cases of illusion (or more generally of things looking\\nways that they are not). He allows that some things really do\\nlook the way they are sometimes taken to be—the stick\\nlooks bent, even though it is not in fact bent. But he holds that\\nthose looks are not private features of individual’s\\nexperiences. For example, they are available to other perceivers and\\nmight be recorded in a photograph. (Austin discusses talk about how\\nthings look, and distinguishes it from talk about how things\\nseem—which he associates with judgment rather than with\\nexperience, in Sense and Sensibilia (1962a: 33–43). See\\nalso Jackson 1977: 30–49; Martin 2010; Travis 2004.) However,\\nthe way the stick looks, just as much as features like the\\nstick’s straightness, can be the basis for perceptual judgments.\\nWe can explain why someone is prone to judge that the stick is bent by\\nappeal to the stick’s looking bent, rather to\\nanything’s being bent, together with the ways in which exercises\\nof judgmental acumen can respond erroneously to looks. More generally,\\nthere needn’t be anything in particular—any specific\\nfeature of what is experienced or any specific look—that figures\\nin explaining why individuals are prone to make a specific type of\\njudgment on the basis of the experience. For the explanation for each\\nindividual’s judgment will depend, not only on what they\\nexperience, but also on the types of judgmental capacities that they\\nhave. In support of this form of explanation, Austin notes that not\\neveryone would be inclined to judge that the stick is bent. For\\nexample, noting the presence of water, those whose judgmental\\ncapacities are sufficiently well trained might withhold judgment about\\nthe stick’s shape (Hinton 1973: 114ff includes a useful\\ndiscussion of some of Austin’s claims about illusions).\",\n \"\\nStandard cases of illusion or misleading appearance of the sort\\nwe’ve just considered involve sensory experiences of ordinary\\nthings and their features, including their looks, feels, and so forth.\\nHowever, because the connection between what is experienced and what\\none judges on its basis is not straightforward—because\\njudgmental acumen is involved in moving from one to the\\nother—there is no general way to read back from the judgments\\nsomeone is prone to make to specific features of their sensory\\nexperiences. Because such cases of illusion involve experience of\\nordinary things, while standard cases of delusion do not, we thus have\\na ground on which to distinguish the two sorts of case. For example,\\nwe have grounds to distinguish the case in which someone erroneously\\njudges that a submerged stick is bent from the case of the alcoholic\\nperson who judges that pink rats are visible. But having distinguished\\nthe cases in that way, we are liable to become open to two new\\nquestions. First, should we allow that the judgment in the delusory\\ncase is based on sensory experience? Perhaps, for example, some cases\\nof delusion involve dysfunction in the systems responsible for\\nperceptual judgment of a sort that give rise to perceptual judgments\\nin the absence of any sense-experiential basis for those judgments.\\nSecond, even if we allow that a particular delusory judgment is based\\nupon sensory experience, should we allow that it involves sensory\\nexperience of anything other than elements that are present in the\\ndeluded subject’s environment? Perhaps some cases of delusion\\ninvolve dysfunctional judgmental responses to what is seen or heard.\\nFor example, an alcoholic subject judgment that a pink rat is visible\\nmight be a disordered response to an experience of a shadow. Unless we\\nare forced to answer both questions affirmatively, we lack the basis\\nfor an argument that the deluded subject experiences anything distinct\\nfrom the ordinary things and features that they can see, hear,\\netc.\",\n \"\\nAustin doesn’t suggest that there could be no grounds for giving\\naffirmative answers to either of those questions. Moreover, it is very\\nplausible that such grounds can be provided. It is plausible,\\nfor example, that there are distinctive sensory experiences involved\\nin what we call seeing double, or seeing afterimages, that cannot be\\nexplained simply by appeal to what is present in subjects’\\nenvironments. And it is plausible that genuine sensory hallucinations\\nare possible—indeed, it is plausible that such hallucinations\\nmight figure in explaining the alcoholic person’s judgment.\\nHowever, although the style of response just considered is indecisive\\nagainst such additional developments of the argument, the resources\\nthat it deploys will surely figure in serious engagement with those\\ndevelopments. Austin sketches an approach to issues raised by such\\nexperiences by attempting to give an account of the reports we are\\ninclined to make in such cases—“I see two pieces of\\npaper”, “I see pink rats”. Austin’s sketch\\naims to explain how such reports can be non-committal about the nature\\nof the experiences so-reported, and in particular about whether such\\nexperiences have objects at all (1962a: 84–103). It is here in\\nparticular that Austin comes close to endorsing a form of\\ndisjunctivism about perception (see Soteriou 2009).\",\n \"\\n(For critical engagement with Austin’s work on perception, see\\nAyer 1967, 1969; Burnyeat 1979; Firth 1964; Forguson 1969b; Garvey\\n2014; Hinton 1973: 114ff; Hirst 1963; Jackson 1977; Travis and\\nKalderon 2013; Leite 2011; Longworth 2019, Marion 2000a,b; Martin ms (Other Internet\\nResources), 2000, 2010; Pears 1979; Putnam 1994; Schwartz 2004, 2018;\\nSnowdon 2014; Soames 2003: 171–193; Thau 2004; Travis 2004; van\\nHulst and Cresswell 2016; Warnock 1989: 11–31.)\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.2 Sensory perception\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe core of Austin’s work on freedom and action is contained in\\n“A Plea for Excuses” (1957) and developed in “Ifs\\nand Cans” (1956a), “Three Ways of Spilling Ink”\\n(1966), and “Pretending” (1958a). The three most\\ndistinctive features of his views in this area are the following.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Action and Freedom\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nLet’s begin with\\n (1).\\n Austin holds that we can make progress on questions about freedom and\\naction by descending from reflection at the general level—i.e.,\\nreflection on freedom and action, per se—to reflection\\non the more specific ways in which we characterize and appraise\\nactions. Austin’s view about the general notions of acting, and\\nof acting freely or responsibly, is structurally similar to his view\\nabout the general notion of truth: he thinks of such general notions\\nas dimension words, grouping a range of more specific\\ncharacterizations. The basic range here consists in the various\\nspecific ways in which we can characterize happenings as\\nactions—for example, as someone running to the shop, or as their\\nreading a book. In addition to that basic range are what Austin calls\\naggravations: the various specific ways in which we\\ncharacterize someone as distinctively responsible for\\nsomething that happens—for example, when we characterize someone\\nas having done something on purpose, intentionally, or deliberately.\\nThe latter three aggravations are the topic of his “Three Ways\\nof Spilling Ink” (1966).\",\n \"\\nIn his “A Plea for Excuses” (1957), Austin argues that the\\nminimal requirement for an agent to be responsible for an action of\\ntheirs is that it be incorrect to characterize the action in\\none or another way as something for which they were not fully\\nresponsible—as something for which they have an excuse.\\nWe might, for example, characterize a happening as an accident, a\\nmistake, involuntary, unintentional, inadvertent, or as due (in part)\\nto clumsiness, lack of appreciation of circumstances, or incompetence.\\nWhere an act is performed, and where no excuse is available, the\\naction is one for which the actor counts as fully responsible. Where\\none or another type of excuse is available, the specific type\\nof excuses that are available mitigate in one or another specific way\\nthe subject’s responsibility for the occurrence of an action or\\nits consequences, and so the extent to which the action is to be\\ncounted as free. An excuse may do this by mitigating in various ways\\nthe subject’s responsibility either for an action considered as\\na whole, or for proper sub-components of the action, or for\\nconsequences of the action, or by indicating ways in which a happening\\nis not (a paradigmatic case of) an action. The varieties of\\npretending that Austin discusses in his\\n“Pretending” (1958a) are of importance to him, at least in\\npart, because they provide for some distinctive forms of excuse. For\\ninstance, one might seek to excuse what appeared to be an action of\\ntype A by claiming that the agent was only pretending to\\nA, pretending to be A-ing, or pretending that they\\nwere A-ing. (One of Austin’s aims in the paper is to\\ndistinguish those ways of pretending.)\",\n \"\\nOne of Austin’s central aims in considering the variety of\\nexcuses and aggravations is to shed light on the inner composition of\\nresponsible action: the division between an action and its\\nconsequences; the decomposition of an action into its various\\nsub-components or phases; and what Austin calls the machinery of\\naction:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n…the detail of the complicated internal machinery we use in\\n“acting”—the receipt of intelligence, the\\nappreciation of the situation, the invocation of principles, the\\nplanning, the control of execution and the rest. (1957: 179)\\n\",\n \"\\nTurning now to\\n (2),\\n Austin thinks that there is a range of normal or standard cases of\\nattributions of action with respect to which modification, by appeal\\neither to aggravations or excuses, is impermissible. With respect to\\nsuch normal or standard cases, it suffices, in order to characterize\\nthe agent’s role within them, simply to say what the agent did.\\nTo add that the agent did the thing, for example, either voluntarily\\nor involuntarily would be inappropriate, incorrect, or even\\nsenseless. Austin summarizes this idea in the slogan, “No\\nmodification without aberration”. Amongst the supporting\\nexamples he gives are the following:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\nI sit in my chair, in the usual way—I am not in a daze or\\ninfluenced by threats or the like: here, it will not do to say either\\nthat I sit in it intentionally or that I did not sit in it\\nintentionally, nor yet that I sat in it automatically or from habit or\\nwhat you will. It is bedtime, I am alone, I yawn: but I do not yawn\\ninvoluntarily (or voluntarily!), nor yet deliberately. To yawn in any\\nsuch peculiar way is just not to just yawn. (1957:\\n 190)[23]\\n \",\n \"\\nAustin holds that modifiers like “voluntarily” and\\n“involuntarily” are used to assert the respective presence\\nand absence of specific elements in the general machinery of action.\\n(He suggests that such apparent pairs do not invariably target the\\nvery same specific elements. See 1957: 189–193.) Austin thinks\\nthat philosophers have tended to assume that, given that someone has\\ndone a specific thing, it will always be a further question whether\\nthose pieces of machinery are present or absent. Moreover,\\nphilosophers have aligned that question with the question whether the\\nactor was responsible for what they did or acted freely. Those\\nphilosophers have in effect been making the following pair of\\nassumptions. They’ve assumed, first, that there is a single type\\nof piece of machinery such that for any action, the action\\nwill be free and responsible just in case it involves that machinery.\\nSecond, they’ve assumed that the various aggravations serve\\nindiscriminately to mark the presence of the required type of\\nmachinery, while the various excuses serve to mark its absence.\",\n \"\\nCharacteristically, Austin suggests that the situation is more\\ncomplicated. In particular, although he thinks that, in normal or\\nstandard cases, actors are responsible for what they do and act\\nfreely, he holds that what makes that so can vary from case to case:\\ndifferent types of machinery can account for freedom and\\nresponsibility with respect to different types of action. He holds\\nmoreover that different aggravating and excusing modifiers target\\ndifferent pieces of machinery. And, finally, he holds that the\\nappropriate use of a modifier doesn’t depend only upon the\\npresence or absence of instances of the type of action-machinery that\\nit targets. In addition, it depends upon whether the targeted\\nmachinery figures in normal cases of actions of the type in\\n question.[24]\",\n \"\\n(For discussion of Austin’s views about actions and excuses see\\nForguson 1969a; Heintz 1981; Holdcroft 1969; Laugier 2018; Narboux 2011; New 1966;\\nPetrie 1971; Searle 1966; Zimmerman 2004; Warnock 1989: 65–79;\\nWhite 1967.)\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.1 Actions and Excuses\"\n }\n ]\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Austin, J.L., 1930s–1940s, “The Line and the Cave in\nPlato’s Republic”, reconstructed from notes by\nJ.O. Urmson, in Austin 1979: 288–304.\ndoi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0013","–––, 1939ms/1967, “Agathon and Eudaimonia\nin the Ethics of Aristotle”, in J.M.E. Moravcsik (ed.)\nAristotle, New York: Doubleday: 261–296; reprinted in\nAustin 1979: 1–31. doi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0001","–––, 1939, “Are There A Priori\nConcepts”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,\nSupplementary Volume 18: 83–105; reprinted in Austin 1979:\n32–54. doi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0002","–––, 1940ms, “The Meaning of a\nWord”, in Austin 1979: 55–75.\ndoi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0003","–––, 1946, “Symposium: Other Minds\nII”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,\nSupplementary Volume 20: 148–187; reprinted as “Other\nMinds 1” in Austin 1979: 76–116.\ndoi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0004","–––, 1950a, “Truth”, Proceedings\nof the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 24:\n111–128; reprinted in Austin 1979: 117–133.\ndoi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0005","–––, 1950b, “Intelligent Behaviour: A\nCritical Review of The Concept of Mind”, Times\nLiterary Supplement, Supplementary Volume 24: 111–128;\nreprinted in Oscar P. Wood and George Pitcher (eds.), 1970, Ryle:\nA Collection of Critical Essays, New York: Doubleday, pp.\n48–51.","–––, 1952a, “Critical Notice:\nAristotle’s Syllogistic by Jan Łukasiewicz”,\nMind, 61(243): 395–404.\ndoi:10.1093/mind/LXI.243.395","–––, 1952b, “Report on Analysis\n‘Problem’ no. 1: ‘What sort of ‘if’ is\nthe ‘if’ in ‘I can if I choose’?’”\nAnalysis, 12(6): 125–126.\ndoi:10.1093/analys/12.6.125a","–––, 1953, “How to Talk—some simple\nways”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 53:\n227–246; reprinted in Austin 1979: 134–153.\ndoi:10.1093/aristotelian/53.1.227 and\ndoi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0006","–––, 1954ms, “Unfair to Facts”, in\nAustin 1979: 154–174. doi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0007","–––, 1956a, “Ifs and Cans”,\nProceedings of the British Academy 42: 109–132;\nreprinted in Austin 1979: 205–232.\ndoi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0009","–––, 1956b, “Performative\nUtterances”, corrected transcript of an unscripted radio talk\ndelivered in the Third Programme of the BBC, in Austin 1979:\n233–252. doi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0010","–––, 1957, “A Plea for Excuses: The\nPresidential Address”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian\nSociety, 57: 1–30; reprinted in Austin 1979: 175–204.\ndoi:10.1093/aristotelian/57.1.1 and\ndoi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0008","–––, 1958a, “Pretending”,\nProceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume\n32: 261–278; reprinted in Austin 1979: 253–271.\ndoi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0011","–––, 1958b, “Report on Analysis\n‘Problem’ no. 12: ‘All swans are white or\nblack.’ Does this refer to possible swans on canals on\nMars?’” Analysis, 18(5): 97–98.\ndoi:10.1093/analys/18.5.97","–––, 1962a, Sense and Sensibilia,\nreconstructed from the manuscript notes by G.J. Warnock, Oxford:\nOxford University Press.","–––, 1962b, How to Do Things with\nWords, 2nd edn., M. Sbisà and J.O. Urmson\n(eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.","–––, 1962c, “Performatif-Constatif”,\nin Cahiers de Royaumont, Philosophie No. IV, La Philosophie\nAnalytique, Les Editions de Minuit: 271–304.","–––, 1963, “Performative-Constative”\n(a translation of Austin 1962c by G.J. Warnock) in Charles E. Caton\n(ed.), Philosophy and Ordinary Language, University of\nIllinois Press: 22–54.","–––, 1966, “Three Ways of Spilling\nInk”, L.W. Forguson (ed.), Philosophical Review, 75(4):\n427–440; reprinted in Austin 1979: 272–287.\ndoi:10.2307/2183222 and doi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0012","–––, 1979, Philosophical Papers,\n3rd edn., J.O. Urmson and G.J. Warnock (eds.), Oxford:\nOxford University Press. doi:10.1093/019283021X.001.0001","Frege, Gottlob, 1884/1950, Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik,\ntranslated by J.L. Austin as The Foundations of Arithmetic: A\nLogico-mathematical Enquiry into the Concept of Number, Oxford:\nBlackwell.","Joseph, H.W.B., 1949, Lectures on the Philosophy of\nLeibniz, J.L. Austin (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press.","Ayer, A.J., 1940, The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge,\nLondon: Macmillan.","–––, 1967, “Has Austin Refuted the\nSense-Datum Theory?” Synthese, 17(2): 117–140;\nreprinted in Fann 1969: 284–308. doi:10.1007/BF00485023","–––, 1969, “Rejoinder to Professor\nForguson”, in Fann 1969: 342–348.","–––, 1978, Part of My Life, Oxford:\nOxford University Press.","Ayers, M.R., 1966, “Austin on ‘Could’ and\n‘Could Have’”, Philosophical Quarterly,\n16(63): 113–120. doi:10.2307/2218447","Bach, Kent, 1975, “Performatives are Statements too”,\nPhilosophical Studies, 28(4): 229–36; reprinted in Bach\nand Harnish 1979. doi:10.1007/BF00353970","Bach, Kent and Robert M. Harnish, 1979, Linguistic\nCommunication and Speech Acts, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.","Baldwin, Tom, 2010, “George Edward Moore”, The\nStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), Edward\nN. Zalta (ed.), URL =\n <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/moore/>","Barwise, Jon and John Etchemendy, 1987, The Liar: An Essay on\nTruth and Circularity, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","Baz, Avner, 2011, “Knowing Knowing (that Such and\nSuch)”, in Gustafsson and Sørli 2011: 146–174.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199219759.003.0006","Bennett, Jonathan, 1966, “‘Real’”,\nMind, 75(300): 501–515; reprinted in Fann 1969:\n267–283. doi:10.1093/mind/LXXV.300.501","Berlin, Isaiah, and others, 1973a, Essays on J.L. Austin,\nOxford: Clarendon Press.","–––, 1973b, “Austin and the Early\nBeginnings of Oxford Philosophy”, in Berlin and others 1973a:\n1–16.","Bird, Alexander, 1998, “Dispositions and Antidotes”,\nPhilosophical Quarterly, 48(191): 227–34.\ndoi:10.1111/1467-9213.00098","Bird, Graham, 1981, “Austin’s Theory of Illocutionary\nForce”, in P.A. French, T.E. Uehling Jr., and H.K. Wettstein\n(eds.), Midwest Studies in Philosophy (Volume VI),\nMinneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 345–370.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1475-4975.1981.tb00445.x","Black, Max, 1963, “Austin on Performatives”,\nPhilosophy, 38(145): 217–226; reprinted in Fann 1969:\n401–411. doi:10.1017/S003181910006174X","Burnyeat, Myles, 1979, “Conflicting Appearances”,\nProceedings of the British Academy, 65: 69–111.","Cartwright, Richard L., 1962, “Propositions”, in R.J.\nButler (ed.) Analytical Philosophy, Oxford: Basil Blackwell:\n179–203; reprinted in Cartwright 1987 Philosophical\nEssays, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.","Cavell, Stanley, 1965, “Austin at Criticism”,\nPhilosophical Review, 74(2): 204–219; reprinted in Fann\n1969: 59–75. doi:10.2307/2183265 ","Cerf, Walter, 1966, “Critical Review of How to Do Things\nwith Words”, Mind, 75(298): 262–285;\nreprinted in Fann 1969: 351–379.\ndoi:10.1093/mind/LXXV.298.262","Chisholm, Roderick M., 1964, “Austin’s\nPhilosophical Papers”, Mind, 73(289):\n1–26; reprinted in Fann 1969: 101–126.\ndoi:10.1093/mind/LXXIII.289.1","Clarke, Randolph, 2009, “Dispositions, Abilities to Acts,\nand Free Will: The New Dispositionalism”, Mind,\n118(470): 323–351. doi:10.1093/mind/fzp034","Cohen, L. Jonathan, 1964, “Do Illocutionary Forces\nExist?” Philosophical Quarterly, 14(55): 118–137;\nreprinted in Fann 1969: 420–444. doi:10.2307/2955549","–––, 1974, “Speech Acts”, T. Sebcok\n(ed.) Current Trends in Linguistics XII, The Hague: Mouten de\nGruyter.","Crary, Alice, 2002, “The Happy Truth: J.L. Austin’s\nHow to Do Things with Words”, Inquiry, 45(1):\n59–80. doi:10.1080/002017402753556616","Dancy, J., 2010, “Harold Arthur Prichard”, The\nStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition), Edward\nN. Zalta (ed.), URL =\n <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries/prichard/>.","Davidson, Donald, 1969, “True to the Facts”,\nJournal of Philosophy, 66(21): 748–764.\ndoi:10.2307/2023778 ","de Gaynesford, Maximilian, 2009, “Incense and Insensibility: Austin\non the ‘Non-Seriousness’ of Poetry”, Ratio,\n22(4): 463–485. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9329.2009.00445.x","–––, 2018, “Uptake in Action”,\nin Savas L. Tsohatzidis ed. Interpreting J. L. Austin: Critical\nEssays, pp. 79–95, Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress. doi:10.1017/9781316421840.005","Derrida, Jacques, 1977, “Signature, Event, Context”,\nGlyph 1, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press: 172–197;\nreproduced in Alan Bass (trans.) 1982 Margins of Philosophy,\nBrighton: Harvester Press: 307–330. References to\nreproduction.","Fann, K.T. (ed.), 1969, Symposium on J.L. Austin, London:\nRoutledge & Kegan Paul.","Fara, Michael, 2008, “Masked Abilities and\nCompatibilism”, Mind, 117(468): 843–865.\ndoi:10.1093/mind/fzn078","Fiengo, Robert, 2018, “On the Representation of Form and\nFunction: Imperative Sentences”, in Savas L. Tsohatzidis\ned. Interpreting J. L. Austin: Critical Essays,\npp. 60–78, Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress. doi:10.1017/9781316421840.004","Firth, Roderick, 1964, “Austin and the Argument from\nIllusion”, Philosophical Review, 73(3): 372–382;\nreprinted in Fann 1969: 254–266. doi:10.2307/2183663 ","Forguson, L.W., 1966, “In Pursuit of Performatives”,\nPhilosophy, 41(158): 341–347; reprinted in Fann 1969:\n412–419. doi:10.1017/S0031819100058885","–––, 1969a, “Austin’s Philosophy of\nAction”, in Fann 1969: 127–147.","–––, 1969b, “Has Ayer Vindicated the\nSense-Datum Theory?” in Fann 1969: 309–341.","–––, 1973, “Locutionary and Illocutionary\nActs”, in Berlin 1973a: 160–185.","Furberg, M., 1969, “Meaning and Illocutionary Force”,\nin Fann 1969: 445–468.","Garvey, B. (ed.), 2014, J.L. Austin on Language,\nBasingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.","Geach, P.T., 1965, “Assertion”, Philosophical\nReview, 74(4): 449–465. doi:10.2307/2183123 ","Glendinning, Simon, 2011, “Unmasking the Tradition”,\nin Gustafsson and Sørli 2011: 32–50.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199219759.003.0002","Graham, K., 1977, J.L. Austin: A Critique of Ordinary Language\nPhilosophy, Michigan: Harvester Press.","Grice, H.P., 1989, Studies in the Way of Words,\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.","Grice, H.P. and P.F. Strawson, 1956, “In Defense of a\nDogma”, Philosophical Review, 65(2): 141–158.\ndoi:10.2307/2182828 ","Gustafsson, Martin and Richard Sørli (eds.), 2011, The\nPhilosophy of J.L. Austin, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199219759.001.0001","Gustafsson, Martin, 2011, “Introduction: Inheriting\nAustin”, in Gustafsson and Sørli 2011: 1–31.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199219759.003.0001","Hacker, P.M.S., 2004, “Austin, John Langshaw\n(1911–1960)”, Oxford Dictionary of National\nBiography, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/ref:odnb/30505 ","Hampshire, Stuart, 1960, “J.L. Austin,\n1911–1960”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian\nSociety, 60: 1–14; reprinted in Fann 1969: 33–48.\ndoi:10.1093/aristotelian/60.1.ib","–––, 1965, “A Symposium on Austin’s\nMethods: J.L. Austin and Philosophy”, Journal of\nPhilosophy, 62(19): 511–513 (abstract only). Printed in\nfull for the first time as part of “A Symposium on Austin’s\nMethod” in Fann 1969: 76–98. doi:10.2307/2023744 ","Hansen, Nat, 2014, “J.L. Austin and Literal Meaning”,\nEuropean Journal of Philosophy, 22(4): 617–632.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1468-0378.2011.00510.x","Heal, Jane, 1974, “Explicit Performative Utterances and\nStatements”, Philosophical Quarterly, 24(95):\n106–121. doi:10.2307/2217715","Heintz, Lawrence L., 1981, “The Logic of Defenses”,\nAmerican Philosophical Quarterly, 18(3): 243–248.","Hetherington, Stephen, 2018, “Knowledge and\nKnowledge-Claims: Austin and Beyond”, in Savas L. Tsohatzidis\ned. Interpreting J. L. Austin: Critical Essays,\npp. 206–222, Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress. 10.1017/9781316421840.011","Hinton, J.M., 1973, Experiences: An Inquiry into Some\nAmbiguities, Oxford: Clarendon Press.","Hirst, R.J., 1963, “A Critical Study of Sense and\nSensibilia”, Philosophical Quarterly, 13(51):\n162–170; reprinted in Fann 1969: 243–253.\ndoi:10.2307/2217192","Holdcroft, David, 1969, “A Plea for Excuses?”\nPhilosophy, 44(170): 314–330.\ndoi:10.1017/S003181910000944X","Hornsby, Jennifer, 1988, “Things Done with Words”, in\nJ. Dancy, J.M.E. Moravcsik, and C.C.W. Taylor (eds.), Human\nAgency: Language, Duty, and Value, Stanford, CA: Stanford\nUniversity Press: 27–46.","–––, 1994, “Illocution and Its\nSignificance”, in Savas L. Tsohatzdis (ed.) Foundations of\nSpeech Act Theory, London: Routledge: 187–207.","–––, 2006, “Speech Acts and\nPerformatives”, in Ernest Lepore and Barry .C. Smith (eds.),\nThe Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press: 893–909.\ndoi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199552238.003.0035","Jack, Julie, 1981, “Stating and Otherwise\nSubscribing”, Philosophia, 10(3): 283–313.\ndoi:10.1007/BF02380770","Jackson, Frank, 1977, Perception: A Representative\nTheory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","James, William, 1907/1975, Pragmatism, Cambridge, MA:\nHarvard University Press.","Johnston, Mark, 1992, “How to Speak of the Colors”,\nPhilosophical Studies, 68(3): 221–263.\ndoi:10.1007/BF00694847","Kaplan, Mark, 2011, “Tales of the Unknown: Austin and the\nArgument from Ignorance”, in Gustafsson and Sørli 2011:\n51–77. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199219759.003.0003","Kaplan, Mark, 2018, Austin’s Way with Skepticism: an essay on philosophical method, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","Katz, Jerrold J., 1986, Propositional Structure and\nIllocutionary Force, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University\nPress.","Kaufman, Arnold S., 1963, “Ability”, Journal of\nPhilosophy, 60(19): 537–551. doi:10.2307/2022867 ","Kirkham, Richard L., 1995, Theories of Truth: A Critical\nIntroduction, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.","Laugier, Sandra 2018, “The Vulnerability of Reality: Austin,\nNormativity, and Excuses”, in Savas L. 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Harman (eds.), Semantics for Natural\nLanguage, Dordrecht: Reidel: 169–218; reprinted with\npostscripts in Lewis, 1983, Philosophical Papers (Volume 1),\nOxford: Oxford University Press.","Locke, Don, 1962, “Ifs and Cans Revisited”,\nPhilosophy, 37(141): 245–256.\ndoi:10.1017/S0031819100061982","Longworth, Guy, 2018a, “The Ordinary and the Experimental: Cook Wilson and Austin on Method in Philosophy”,\nBritish Journal of the History of Philosophy, 26(5): 939–960.\ndoi:10.1080/09608788.2017.1413539","–––, 2018b, “Enough is Enough: Austin on\nKnowing”, in Savas L. Tsohatzidis ed. Interpreting\nJ. L. Austin: Critical Essays, pp. 186–205, Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316421840.010","–––, 2019, “Settling a Question: Austin and Disjunctivism”, in Casey Doyle, Joe Milburn, and Duncan Pritchard eds. New Issues in Epistemological Disjunctivism. London: Routledge.","Marion, Mathieu, 2000a, “Oxford Realism: Knowledge and\nPerception I”, British Journal for the History of\nPhilosophy, 8(2): 299–338.\ndoi:10.1080/09608780050043235","–––, 2000b, “Oxford Realism: Knowledge and\nPerception II”, British Journal for the History of\nPhilosophy, 8(3): 485–519. doi:10.1080/096087800442156","–––, 2009, “John Cook Wilson”,\nThe Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010\nEdition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =\n <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries/wilson/>.","Martin, M.G.F., 1997, “The Reality of Appearances”, in\n\nThought and Ontology, M. Sainsbury (ed.), Milan: Franco\n\nAngeli, pp. 77–96.","–––, 2000, “Beyond Dispute: sense-data,\n\nintentionality and the mind-body problem”, in Tim Crane and\nSarah Patterson (eds.), The History of the Mind-Body Problem,\nLondon: Routledge: 195–231.","–––, 2010, “What’s in a Look?”\n\nin Bence Nanay (ed.), Perceiving the World, Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press: 160–225.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195386196.003.0008","Mates, Benson, 1974, “Austin, Strawson, Tarski, and\nTruth”, in Leon Henkin (ed.), Tarski Symposium,\nAmerican Mathematical Society: 385–396.","McDowell, John, 1982, “Criteria, Defeasibility and\nKnowledge”, Proceedings of the British Academy, 68:\n455–79.","McMyler, Benjamin, 2011, “Believing what the Man Says about\nhis own Feelings”, in Gustafsson and Sørli 2011:\n114–174. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199219759.003.0005","Millar, Alan, 2005, “Travis’ Sense of Occasion”,\nPhilosophical Quarterly, 55(219): 337–342.\ndoi:10.1111/j.0031-8094.2005.00403.x","Moltmann, Friederike, 2018, “Levels of Linguistic Acts and\nthe Semantics of Saying and Quoting”, in Savas L. Tsohatzidis\ned. Interpreting J. L. Austin: Critical Essays,\npp. 34–59, Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress. doi:10.1017/9781316421840.003","Moore, A.W., 2000, “Arguing with Derrida”,\nRatio, 13(4): 355–80. doi:10.1111/1467-9329.00134","Moore, G.E., 1912, Ethics, Oxford: Oxford: University\nPress.","Narboux, J.-P., 2011, “‘There’s Many a Slip\nbetween Cup and Lip’: Dimension and Negation in Austin”,\nin Gustafsson and Sørli 2011: 204–240.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199219759.003.0008","New, C.G., 1966, “A Plea for Linguistics”,\nMind, 75(299): 368–384; reprinted in Fann 1969:\n148–165. doi:10.1093/mind/LXXV.299.368","Nowell-Smith, Patrick H., 1954, Ethics, Harmondsworth:\nPelican Books.","–––, 1960, “Ifs and Cans”,\nTheoria, 26(2): 85–101; reprinted in Fann 1969:\n166–181. doi:10.1111/j.1755-2567.1960.tb00557.x","Passmore, John, 1957, A Hundred Years of Philosophy,\nLondon: Duckworth.","Pears, David, 1962, “An Original Philosopher”,\nTimes Literary Supplement, Febrary 9(3128): 81–83;\nreprinted in Fann 1969: 49–58.","–––, 1973, “Ifs and Cans”, in Berlin\n1973a: 90–140.","–––, 1979, “A Comparison between\nAyer’s Views about the Privilege of Sense-Datum Statements and\nthe Views of Russell and Austin”, in Graham F. Macdonald (ed.),\nPerception and Identity, London: Macmillan: 61–83.","Petrie, Hugh G., 1971, “Austin’s Usage of\n‘Intentional’”, Mind, 80(319):\n441–444. doi:10.1093/mind/LXXX.319.441","Pitcher, George (ed.), 1964, Truth, Englewood Cliffs, NJ:\nPrentice Hall.","–––, 1973, “Austin: a personal\nmemoir”, in Berlin 1973a: 17–30.","Price, H.H., 1932, Perception, London: Methuen.","Prichard, H.A., 1979, Moral Obligation, Oxford: Clarendon\nPress.","Putnam, Hilary, 1962, “The Analytic and the\nSynthetic”, in H. Feigl and G. Maxwell (eds.), Minnesota\nStudies in the Philosophy of Science 3, Minneapolis: University\nof Minnesota Press: 358–397.","–––, 1994, “Sense, Nonsense, and the\nSenses: An Inquiry Into the Power of the Human Mind”,\nJournal of Philosophy, 91(9): 445–517.\ndoi:10.2307/2940978 ","Quine, W.V.O., 1965, “J.L. Austin: Comment”,\nJournal of Philosophy, 62(19): 509–510 (abstract only).\nPrinted in full for the first time as part of “A Symposium on\nAustin’s Method” in Fann 1969: 76–98. doi:10.2307/2023743\n","Recanati, François, 1994, Literal Meaning,\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Reimer, Marga, 2018, “Exploring Austin’s Galaxy: Searching\nfor Truth through the Lens of Ordinary Language”, in Savas\nL. Tsohatzidis ed. Interpreting J. L. Austin: Critical\nEssays, pp. 15–33, Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress. doi:10.1017/9781316421840.002","Richmond, Sarah, 1996, “Derrida and Analytical Philosophy:\nSpeech Acts and their Force”, European Journal of\nPhilosophy, 4(1): 38–62.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1468-0378.1996.tb00064.x","Ricks, Christopher, 1992, “Austin’s Swink”, University of Toronto Quarterly, 61(3): 297–315.","Schiffer, Stephen R., 1972, Meaning, Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press.","Schwartz, Robert, 2004, “To Austin or Not to Austin,\nThat’s the Disjunction”, Philosophical Studies,\n120(1): 255–263. doi:10.1023/B:PHIL.0000033756.70177.3d","Schwartz, Robert, 2018, “Berkeley and Austin on the Argument\nfrom Illusion”, in Savas L. Tsohatzidis ed. Interpreting\nJ. L. Austin: Critical Essays, pp. 143–164, Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316421840.008","Searle, John R., 1966, “Assertions and Aberrations”,\nin Bernard Williams and Alan Montefiore (eds.), British Analytical\nPhilosophy, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul: 41–54;\nreprinted in Fann 1969: 205–218.","–––, 1968, “Austin on Locutionary and\nIllocutionary Acts”, Philosophical Review, 77(4):\n405–424; reprinted in Berlin 1973a: 141–159.\ndoi:10.2307/2183008 ","–––, 1969, Speech Acts, Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press.","–––, 1977, “Reiterating the Differences: A\nReply to Derrida”, Glyph 2, Baltimore, MD: Johns\nHopkins Press: 198–208.","–––, 2005, “J.L. Austin\n(1911–1960)”, in A.P. Martinich and David Sosa (eds.),\nA Companion to Analytic Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell:\n218–230.","–––, 2014, “Oxford Philosophy in the\n1950s”, Philosophy, 90(2): 173–193.\ndoi:10.1017/S0031819114000485","Sinnot-Armstrong, Walter, 1994, “The Truth of\nPerformatives”, International Journal of Philosophical\nStudies, 2(1): 99–107. doi:10.1080/09672559408570785","Snowdon, Paul F., 1981, “Perception, Vision and\nCausation”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,\n81: 175–92. doi:10.1093/aristotelian/81.1.175","–––, 2014, “Austin on the Philosophy of\nPerception”, in Brian Garvey (ed.), J.L. Austin on\nLanguage, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 161–176.\ndoi:10.1057/9781137329998_10","Soames, Scott, 2003, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth\nCentury, Volume 2: The Age of Meaning, Princeton, NJ: Princeton\nUniversity Press.","Soteriou, Matthew, 2009, “The Disjunctive Theory of\nPerception”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter\n2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =\n <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/perception-disjunctive/>.","Strawson, P.F., 1949, “Truth”, Analysis,\n9(6): 83–97. doi:10.1093/analys/9.6.83","–––, 1950, “Truth”, Proceedings\nof the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 24:\n129–156.","–––, 1964a, “Intention and Convention in\nSpeech Acts”, Philosophical Review, 73(4):\n439–460; reprinted in Fann 1969: 380–400.\ndoi:10.2307/2183301 ","–––, 1964b, “A Problem about Truth—A\nReply to Mr. Warnock”, in Pitcher 1964: 68–84.","–––, 1965, “Truth: A Reconsideration of\nAustin’s Views”, Philosophical Quarterly, 15(61):\n289–301. doi:10.2307/2218255","–––, 1973, “Austin and ‘Locutionary\nMeaning’”, in Berlin 1973a: 46–68.","Stroud, Barry, 1984, The Philosophical Significance of\nScepticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","Thalberg, Irving, 1969, “Austin on Abilities”, in Fann\n1969: 182–204.","Thau, Mike, 2004, “What is Disjunctivism?”\nPhilosophical Studies, 120(1): 193–253.\ndoi:10.1023/B:PHIL.0000033755.32540.76","Tsohatzidis, Savas L., 2018, “Performativity and the\n“True/False Fetish””, in Savas L. Tsohatzidis\ned. Interpreting J. L. Austin: Critical Essays,\npp. 96–118, Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress. doi:10.1017/9781316421840.006","Travis, Charles, 1991, “Annals of Analysis, Critical Notice\nof H.P. Grice Studies in the Way of Words”,\nMind, 100(398): 237–264. reprinted in Travis 2008:\n290–315. doi:10.1093/mind/C.398.237 and\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230334.003.0014","–––, 2004, “The Silence of the\nSenses”, Mind, 113(449): 57–94.\ndoi:10.1093/mind/113.449.57","–––, 2005, “A Sense of Occasion”,\nPhilosophical Quarterly, 55(219): 286–314.\ndoi:10.1111/j.0031-8094.2005.00399.x","–––, 2008, Occasion-Sensitivity: Selected\nEssays, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230334.001.0001","–––, 2011, “Truth and Merit”, in\nGustafsson and Sørli 2011: 175–203.\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199219759.003.0007","Travis, Charles and Mark E. Kalderon, 2013, “Oxford\nRealism”, in Michael Beaney (ed.), Oxford Handbook of the\nHistory of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.\ndoi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199238842.013.0018","Urmson, J.O., 1965, “J.L. Austin”, Journal of\nPhilosophy, 62(19): 499–508. Printed in full for the first\ntime as part of “A Symposium on Austin’s Method” in Fann\n1969: 76–98. doi:10.2307/2023741 ","–––, 1967, “Austin, John Langshaw”,\nin P. Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, New\nYork: Random House, Inc.: 211–215; reprinted as “Austin’s\nPhilosophy”, in Fann 1969: 22–32.","–––, 1977, “Performative\nUtterances”, in P.A. French, T.E. Uehling Jr., and H.K.\nWettstein (eds.), Midwest Studies in Philosophy (Volume II),\nMinneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 120–127.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1475-4975.1977.tb00033.x","Urmson, J.O. and G.J. Warnock, 1961, “J.L. Austin”,\nMind, 70(278): 256–257; reprinted as\n‘Comments’ on Hampshire (1960) in Fann 1969: 22–32.\ndoi:10.1093/mind/LXX.278.256","van Hulst, Chrissy and Max Cresswell (eds.), 2016, “A.N.\nPrior on Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia: A\nreconstruction from Prior’s manuscripts”, Journal for the\nHistory of Analytical Philosophy, 4(4): 1–12.\ndoi:10.15173/jhap.v4i4.2809 ","Vendler, Zeno, 1972, Res Cogitans: An Essay in Rational\nPsychology, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.","Warnock, G.J., 1953, Berkeley, Harmondsworth:\nPenguin.","–––, 1962, “Truth and\nCorrespondence”, in Calvin Dwight Rollins (ed.), Knowledge\nand Experience, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press:\n11–20.","–––, 1963, “John Langshaw Austin: A\nBiographical Sketch”, Proceedings of the British\nAcademy; reprinted in Fann 1969: 3–21.","–––, 1964, “A Problem about Truth”,\nin Pitcher 1964: 54–67.","–––, 1973a, “Saturday Mornings”, in\nBerlin 1973a: 31–45.","–––, 1973b, “Some Types of Performative\nUtterance”, in Berlin 1973a: 69–89.","–––, 1973c, “Truth: or Bristol Revisited\nII”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,\nSupplementary Volume 47: 135–145.","–––, 1989, J.L. Austin, London:\nRoutledge.","Wheatley, Jon, 1969, “Austin on Truth”, in Fann 1969:\n226–240.","White, Alan R., 1967, “Mentioning the Unmentionable”,\nAnalysis, 27(4): 113–118; reprinted in Fann 1969:\n219–225. doi:10.2307/3327002 ","Williams, C.J.F., 1973, “Truth: or Bristol Revisited\nI”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,\nSupplementary Volume 47: 121–134.","Williams, Michael, 1996, Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological\nRealism and the Basis of Skepticism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton\nUniversity Press.","Williamson, Timothy, 2000, Knowledge and its Limits,\nOxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/019925656X.001.0001","Wisdom, J., 1946, “Symposium: Other Minds I”,\nProceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume\n20: 122–147.","Zimmerman, Michael J., 2004, “Another Plea for\nExcuses”, American Philosophy Quarterly, 41(3):\n259–266."],"string":"[\n \"Austin, J.L., 1930s–1940s, “The Line and the Cave in\\nPlato’s Republic”, reconstructed from notes by\\nJ.O. Urmson, in Austin 1979: 288–304.\\ndoi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0013\",\n \"–––, 1939ms/1967, “Agathon and Eudaimonia\\nin the Ethics of Aristotle”, in J.M.E. Moravcsik (ed.)\\nAristotle, New York: Doubleday: 261–296; reprinted in\\nAustin 1979: 1–31. doi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0001\",\n \"–––, 1939, “Are There A Priori\\nConcepts”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,\\nSupplementary Volume 18: 83–105; reprinted in Austin 1979:\\n32–54. doi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0002\",\n \"–––, 1940ms, “The Meaning of a\\nWord”, in Austin 1979: 55–75.\\ndoi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0003\",\n \"–––, 1946, “Symposium: Other Minds\\nII”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,\\nSupplementary Volume 20: 148–187; reprinted as “Other\\nMinds 1” in Austin 1979: 76–116.\\ndoi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0004\",\n \"–––, 1950a, “Truth”, Proceedings\\nof the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 24:\\n111–128; reprinted in Austin 1979: 117–133.\\ndoi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0005\",\n \"–––, 1950b, “Intelligent Behaviour: A\\nCritical Review of The Concept of Mind”, Times\\nLiterary Supplement, Supplementary Volume 24: 111–128;\\nreprinted in Oscar P. Wood and George Pitcher (eds.), 1970, Ryle:\\nA Collection of Critical Essays, New York: Doubleday, pp.\\n48–51.\",\n \"–––, 1952a, “Critical Notice:\\nAristotle’s Syllogistic by Jan Łukasiewicz”,\\nMind, 61(243): 395–404.\\ndoi:10.1093/mind/LXI.243.395\",\n \"–––, 1952b, “Report on Analysis\\n‘Problem’ no. 1: ‘What sort of ‘if’ is\\nthe ‘if’ in ‘I can if I choose’?’”\\nAnalysis, 12(6): 125–126.\\ndoi:10.1093/analys/12.6.125a\",\n \"–––, 1953, “How to Talk—some simple\\nways”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 53:\\n227–246; reprinted in Austin 1979: 134–153.\\ndoi:10.1093/aristotelian/53.1.227 and\\ndoi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0006\",\n \"–––, 1954ms, “Unfair to Facts”, in\\nAustin 1979: 154–174. doi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0007\",\n \"–––, 1956a, “Ifs and Cans”,\\nProceedings of the British Academy 42: 109–132;\\nreprinted in Austin 1979: 205–232.\\ndoi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0009\",\n \"–––, 1956b, “Performative\\nUtterances”, corrected transcript of an unscripted radio talk\\ndelivered in the Third Programme of the BBC, in Austin 1979:\\n233–252. doi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0010\",\n \"–––, 1957, “A Plea for Excuses: The\\nPresidential Address”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian\\nSociety, 57: 1–30; reprinted in Austin 1979: 175–204.\\ndoi:10.1093/aristotelian/57.1.1 and\\ndoi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0008\",\n \"–––, 1958a, “Pretending”,\\nProceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume\\n32: 261–278; reprinted in Austin 1979: 253–271.\\ndoi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0011\",\n \"–––, 1958b, “Report on Analysis\\n‘Problem’ no. 12: ‘All swans are white or\\nblack.’ Does this refer to possible swans on canals on\\nMars?’” Analysis, 18(5): 97–98.\\ndoi:10.1093/analys/18.5.97\",\n \"–––, 1962a, Sense and Sensibilia,\\nreconstructed from the manuscript notes by G.J. Warnock, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1962b, How to Do Things with\\nWords, 2nd edn., M. Sbisà and J.O. Urmson\\n(eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.\",\n \"–––, 1962c, “Performatif-Constatif”,\\nin Cahiers de Royaumont, Philosophie No. IV, La Philosophie\\nAnalytique, Les Editions de Minuit: 271–304.\",\n \"–––, 1963, “Performative-Constative”\\n(a translation of Austin 1962c by G.J. Warnock) in Charles E. Caton\\n(ed.), Philosophy and Ordinary Language, University of\\nIllinois Press: 22–54.\",\n \"–––, 1966, “Three Ways of Spilling\\nInk”, L.W. Forguson (ed.), Philosophical Review, 75(4):\\n427–440; reprinted in Austin 1979: 272–287.\\ndoi:10.2307/2183222 and doi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0012\",\n \"–––, 1979, Philosophical Papers,\\n3rd edn., J.O. Urmson and G.J. Warnock (eds.), Oxford:\\nOxford University Press. doi:10.1093/019283021X.001.0001\",\n \"Frege, Gottlob, 1884/1950, Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik,\\ntranslated by J.L. Austin as The Foundations of Arithmetic: A\\nLogico-mathematical Enquiry into the Concept of Number, Oxford:\\nBlackwell.\",\n \"Joseph, H.W.B., 1949, Lectures on the Philosophy of\\nLeibniz, J.L. Austin (ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"Ayer, A.J., 1940, The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge,\\nLondon: Macmillan.\",\n \"–––, 1967, “Has Austin Refuted the\\nSense-Datum Theory?” Synthese, 17(2): 117–140;\\nreprinted in Fann 1969: 284–308. doi:10.1007/BF00485023\",\n \"–––, 1969, “Rejoinder to Professor\\nForguson”, in Fann 1969: 342–348.\",\n \"–––, 1978, Part of My Life, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press.\",\n \"Ayers, M.R., 1966, “Austin on ‘Could’ and\\n‘Could Have’”, Philosophical Quarterly,\\n16(63): 113–120. doi:10.2307/2218447\",\n \"Bach, Kent, 1975, “Performatives are Statements too”,\\nPhilosophical Studies, 28(4): 229–36; reprinted in Bach\\nand Harnish 1979. doi:10.1007/BF00353970\",\n \"Bach, Kent and Robert M. Harnish, 1979, Linguistic\\nCommunication and Speech Acts, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.\",\n \"Baldwin, Tom, 2010, “George Edward Moore”, The\\nStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), Edward\\nN. Zalta (ed.), URL =\\n <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/moore/>\",\n \"Barwise, Jon and John Etchemendy, 1987, The Liar: An Essay on\\nTruth and Circularity, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Baz, Avner, 2011, “Knowing Knowing (that Such and\\nSuch)”, in Gustafsson and Sørli 2011: 146–174.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199219759.003.0006\",\n \"Bennett, Jonathan, 1966, “‘Real’”,\\nMind, 75(300): 501–515; reprinted in Fann 1969:\\n267–283. doi:10.1093/mind/LXXV.300.501\",\n \"Berlin, Isaiah, and others, 1973a, Essays on J.L. Austin,\\nOxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"–––, 1973b, “Austin and the Early\\nBeginnings of Oxford Philosophy”, in Berlin and others 1973a:\\n1–16.\",\n \"Bird, Alexander, 1998, “Dispositions and Antidotes”,\\nPhilosophical Quarterly, 48(191): 227–34.\\ndoi:10.1111/1467-9213.00098\",\n \"Bird, Graham, 1981, “Austin’s Theory of Illocutionary\\nForce”, in P.A. French, T.E. Uehling Jr., and H.K. Wettstein\\n(eds.), Midwest Studies in Philosophy (Volume VI),\\nMinneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 345–370.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1475-4975.1981.tb00445.x\",\n \"Black, Max, 1963, “Austin on Performatives”,\\nPhilosophy, 38(145): 217–226; reprinted in Fann 1969:\\n401–411. doi:10.1017/S003181910006174X\",\n \"Burnyeat, Myles, 1979, “Conflicting Appearances”,\\nProceedings of the British Academy, 65: 69–111.\",\n \"Cartwright, Richard L., 1962, “Propositions”, in R.J.\\nButler (ed.) Analytical Philosophy, Oxford: Basil Blackwell:\\n179–203; reprinted in Cartwright 1987 Philosophical\\nEssays, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.\",\n \"Cavell, Stanley, 1965, “Austin at Criticism”,\\nPhilosophical Review, 74(2): 204–219; reprinted in Fann\\n1969: 59–75. doi:10.2307/2183265 \",\n \"Cerf, Walter, 1966, “Critical Review of How to Do Things\\nwith Words”, Mind, 75(298): 262–285;\\nreprinted in Fann 1969: 351–379.\\ndoi:10.1093/mind/LXXV.298.262\",\n \"Chisholm, Roderick M., 1964, “Austin’s\\nPhilosophical Papers”, Mind, 73(289):\\n1–26; reprinted in Fann 1969: 101–126.\\ndoi:10.1093/mind/LXXIII.289.1\",\n \"Clarke, Randolph, 2009, “Dispositions, Abilities to Acts,\\nand Free Will: The New Dispositionalism”, Mind,\\n118(470): 323–351. doi:10.1093/mind/fzp034\",\n \"Cohen, L. Jonathan, 1964, “Do Illocutionary Forces\\nExist?” Philosophical Quarterly, 14(55): 118–137;\\nreprinted in Fann 1969: 420–444. doi:10.2307/2955549\",\n \"–––, 1974, “Speech Acts”, T. Sebcok\\n(ed.) Current Trends in Linguistics XII, The Hague: Mouten de\\nGruyter.\",\n \"Crary, Alice, 2002, “The Happy Truth: J.L. Austin’s\\nHow to Do Things with Words”, Inquiry, 45(1):\\n59–80. doi:10.1080/002017402753556616\",\n \"Dancy, J., 2010, “Harold Arthur Prichard”, The\\nStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition), Edward\\nN. Zalta (ed.), URL =\\n <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries/prichard/>.\",\n \"Davidson, Donald, 1969, “True to the Facts”,\\nJournal of Philosophy, 66(21): 748–764.\\ndoi:10.2307/2023778 \",\n \"de Gaynesford, Maximilian, 2009, “Incense and Insensibility: Austin\\non the ‘Non-Seriousness’ of Poetry”, Ratio,\\n22(4): 463–485. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9329.2009.00445.x\",\n \"–––, 2018, “Uptake in Action”,\\nin Savas L. Tsohatzidis ed. Interpreting J. L. Austin: Critical\\nEssays, pp. 79–95, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress. doi:10.1017/9781316421840.005\",\n \"Derrida, Jacques, 1977, “Signature, Event, Context”,\\nGlyph 1, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press: 172–197;\\nreproduced in Alan Bass (trans.) 1982 Margins of Philosophy,\\nBrighton: Harvester Press: 307–330. References to\\nreproduction.\",\n \"Fann, K.T. (ed.), 1969, Symposium on J.L. Austin, London:\\nRoutledge & Kegan Paul.\",\n \"Fara, Michael, 2008, “Masked Abilities and\\nCompatibilism”, Mind, 117(468): 843–865.\\ndoi:10.1093/mind/fzn078\",\n \"Fiengo, Robert, 2018, “On the Representation of Form and\\nFunction: Imperative Sentences”, in Savas L. Tsohatzidis\\ned. Interpreting J. L. Austin: Critical Essays,\\npp. 60–78, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress. doi:10.1017/9781316421840.004\",\n \"Firth, Roderick, 1964, “Austin and the Argument from\\nIllusion”, Philosophical Review, 73(3): 372–382;\\nreprinted in Fann 1969: 254–266. doi:10.2307/2183663 \",\n \"Forguson, L.W., 1966, “In Pursuit of Performatives”,\\nPhilosophy, 41(158): 341–347; reprinted in Fann 1969:\\n412–419. doi:10.1017/S0031819100058885\",\n \"–––, 1969a, “Austin’s Philosophy of\\nAction”, in Fann 1969: 127–147.\",\n \"–––, 1969b, “Has Ayer Vindicated the\\nSense-Datum Theory?” in Fann 1969: 309–341.\",\n \"–––, 1973, “Locutionary and Illocutionary\\nActs”, in Berlin 1973a: 160–185.\",\n \"Furberg, M., 1969, “Meaning and Illocutionary Force”,\\nin Fann 1969: 445–468.\",\n \"Garvey, B. (ed.), 2014, J.L. Austin on Language,\\nBasingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.\",\n \"Geach, P.T., 1965, “Assertion”, Philosophical\\nReview, 74(4): 449–465. doi:10.2307/2183123 \",\n \"Glendinning, Simon, 2011, “Unmasking the Tradition”,\\nin Gustafsson and Sørli 2011: 32–50.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199219759.003.0002\",\n \"Graham, K., 1977, J.L. Austin: A Critique of Ordinary Language\\nPhilosophy, Michigan: Harvester Press.\",\n \"Grice, H.P., 1989, Studies in the Way of Words,\\nCambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Grice, H.P. and P.F. Strawson, 1956, “In Defense of a\\nDogma”, Philosophical Review, 65(2): 141–158.\\ndoi:10.2307/2182828 \",\n \"Gustafsson, Martin and Richard Sørli (eds.), 2011, The\\nPhilosophy of J.L. Austin, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199219759.001.0001\",\n \"Gustafsson, Martin, 2011, “Introduction: Inheriting\\nAustin”, in Gustafsson and Sørli 2011: 1–31.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199219759.003.0001\",\n \"Hacker, P.M.S., 2004, “Austin, John Langshaw\\n(1911–1960)”, Oxford Dictionary of National\\nBiography, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/ref:odnb/30505 \",\n \"Hampshire, Stuart, 1960, “J.L. Austin,\\n1911–1960”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian\\nSociety, 60: 1–14; reprinted in Fann 1969: 33–48.\\ndoi:10.1093/aristotelian/60.1.ib\",\n \"–––, 1965, “A Symposium on Austin’s\\nMethods: J.L. Austin and Philosophy”, Journal of\\nPhilosophy, 62(19): 511–513 (abstract only). Printed in\\nfull for the first time as part of “A Symposium on Austin’s\\nMethod” in Fann 1969: 76–98. doi:10.2307/2023744 \",\n \"Hansen, Nat, 2014, “J.L. Austin and Literal Meaning”,\\nEuropean Journal of Philosophy, 22(4): 617–632.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1468-0378.2011.00510.x\",\n \"Heal, Jane, 1974, “Explicit Performative Utterances and\\nStatements”, Philosophical Quarterly, 24(95):\\n106–121. doi:10.2307/2217715\",\n \"Heintz, Lawrence L., 1981, “The Logic of Defenses”,\\nAmerican Philosophical Quarterly, 18(3): 243–248.\",\n \"Hetherington, Stephen, 2018, “Knowledge and\\nKnowledge-Claims: Austin and Beyond”, in Savas L. Tsohatzidis\\ned. Interpreting J. L. Austin: Critical Essays,\\npp. 206–222, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress. 10.1017/9781316421840.011\",\n \"Hinton, J.M., 1973, Experiences: An Inquiry into Some\\nAmbiguities, Oxford: Clarendon Press.\",\n \"Hirst, R.J., 1963, “A Critical Study of Sense and\\nSensibilia”, Philosophical Quarterly, 13(51):\\n162–170; reprinted in Fann 1969: 243–253.\\ndoi:10.2307/2217192\",\n \"Holdcroft, David, 1969, “A Plea for Excuses?”\\nPhilosophy, 44(170): 314–330.\\ndoi:10.1017/S003181910000944X\",\n \"Hornsby, Jennifer, 1988, “Things Done with Words”, in\\nJ. Dancy, J.M.E. Moravcsik, and C.C.W. Taylor (eds.), Human\\nAgency: Language, Duty, and Value, Stanford, CA: Stanford\\nUniversity Press: 27–46.\",\n \"–––, 1994, “Illocution and Its\\nSignificance”, in Savas L. Tsohatzdis (ed.) Foundations of\\nSpeech Act Theory, London: Routledge: 187–207.\",\n \"–––, 2006, “Speech Acts and\\nPerformatives”, in Ernest Lepore and Barry .C. Smith (eds.),\\nThe Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press: 893–909.\\ndoi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199552238.003.0035\",\n \"Jack, Julie, 1981, “Stating and Otherwise\\nSubscribing”, Philosophia, 10(3): 283–313.\\ndoi:10.1007/BF02380770\",\n \"Jackson, Frank, 1977, Perception: A Representative\\nTheory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"James, William, 1907/1975, Pragmatism, Cambridge, MA:\\nHarvard University Press.\",\n \"Johnston, Mark, 1992, “How to Speak of the Colors”,\\nPhilosophical Studies, 68(3): 221–263.\\ndoi:10.1007/BF00694847\",\n \"Kaplan, Mark, 2011, “Tales of the Unknown: Austin and the\\nArgument from Ignorance”, in Gustafsson and Sørli 2011:\\n51–77. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199219759.003.0003\",\n \"Kaplan, Mark, 2018, Austin’s Way with Skepticism: an essay on philosophical method, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Katz, Jerrold J., 1986, Propositional Structure and\\nIllocutionary Force, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University\\nPress.\",\n \"Kaufman, Arnold S., 1963, “Ability”, Journal of\\nPhilosophy, 60(19): 537–551. doi:10.2307/2022867 \",\n \"Kirkham, Richard L., 1995, Theories of Truth: A Critical\\nIntroduction, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.\",\n \"Laugier, Sandra 2018, “The Vulnerability of Reality: Austin,\\nNormativity, and Excuses”, in Savas L. Tsohatzidis\\ned. Interpreting J. L. Austin: Critical Essays,\\npp. 119–142, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress. doi:10.1017/9781316421840.007\",\n \"Lawlor, Krista, 2013, Assurance: An Austinian View of\\nKnowledge and Knowledge Claims, Oxford: Oxford University\\nPress.\",\n \"Lawlor, Krista, 2018, “Austin on Perception, Knowledge, and\\nMeaning”, in Savas L. Tsohatzidis ed. Interpreting\\nJ. L. Austin: Critical Essays, pp. 165–185, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316421840.009\",\n \"Leite, Adam, 2011, “Austin, Dreams, and Scepticism”,\\nin Gustafsson and Sørli 2011: 78–113.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199219759.003.0004\",\n \"Lemmon, E.J., 1962, “On Sentences Verifiable by their\\nUse”, Analysis, 22(4): 86–9. doi:10.2307/3327029\\n\",\n \"Lewis, David K., 1972, “General Semantics”, in D.\\nDavidson and G. Harman (eds.), Semantics for Natural\\nLanguage, Dordrecht: Reidel: 169–218; reprinted with\\npostscripts in Lewis, 1983, Philosophical Papers (Volume 1),\\nOxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Locke, Don, 1962, “Ifs and Cans Revisited”,\\nPhilosophy, 37(141): 245–256.\\ndoi:10.1017/S0031819100061982\",\n \"Longworth, Guy, 2018a, “The Ordinary and the Experimental: Cook Wilson and Austin on Method in Philosophy”,\\nBritish Journal of the History of Philosophy, 26(5): 939–960.\\ndoi:10.1080/09608788.2017.1413539\",\n \"–––, 2018b, “Enough is Enough: Austin on\\nKnowing”, in Savas L. Tsohatzidis ed. Interpreting\\nJ. L. Austin: Critical Essays, pp. 186–205, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316421840.010\",\n \"–––, 2019, “Settling a Question: Austin and Disjunctivism”, in Casey Doyle, Joe Milburn, and Duncan Pritchard eds. New Issues in Epistemological Disjunctivism. London: Routledge.\",\n \"Marion, Mathieu, 2000a, “Oxford Realism: Knowledge and\\nPerception I”, British Journal for the History of\\nPhilosophy, 8(2): 299–338.\\ndoi:10.1080/09608780050043235\",\n \"–––, 2000b, “Oxford Realism: Knowledge and\\nPerception II”, British Journal for the History of\\nPhilosophy, 8(3): 485–519. doi:10.1080/096087800442156\",\n \"–––, 2009, “John Cook Wilson”,\\nThe Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010\\nEdition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =\\n <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries/wilson/>.\",\n \"Martin, M.G.F., 1997, “The Reality of Appearances”, in\\n\\nThought and Ontology, M. Sainsbury (ed.), Milan: Franco\\n\\nAngeli, pp. 77–96.\",\n \"–––, 2000, “Beyond Dispute: sense-data,\\n\\nintentionality and the mind-body problem”, in Tim Crane and\\nSarah Patterson (eds.), The History of the Mind-Body Problem,\\nLondon: Routledge: 195–231.\",\n \"–––, 2010, “What’s in a Look?”\\n\\nin Bence Nanay (ed.), Perceiving the World, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press: 160–225.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195386196.003.0008\",\n \"Mates, Benson, 1974, “Austin, Strawson, Tarski, and\\nTruth”, in Leon Henkin (ed.), Tarski Symposium,\\nAmerican Mathematical Society: 385–396.\",\n \"McDowell, John, 1982, “Criteria, Defeasibility and\\nKnowledge”, Proceedings of the British Academy, 68:\\n455–79.\",\n \"McMyler, Benjamin, 2011, “Believing what the Man Says about\\nhis own Feelings”, in Gustafsson and Sørli 2011:\\n114–174. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199219759.003.0005\",\n \"Millar, Alan, 2005, “Travis’ Sense of Occasion”,\\nPhilosophical Quarterly, 55(219): 337–342.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.0031-8094.2005.00403.x\",\n \"Moltmann, Friederike, 2018, “Levels of Linguistic Acts and\\nthe Semantics of Saying and Quoting”, in Savas L. Tsohatzidis\\ned. Interpreting J. L. Austin: Critical Essays,\\npp. 34–59, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress. doi:10.1017/9781316421840.003\",\n \"Moore, A.W., 2000, “Arguing with Derrida”,\\nRatio, 13(4): 355–80. doi:10.1111/1467-9329.00134\",\n \"Moore, G.E., 1912, Ethics, Oxford: Oxford: University\\nPress.\",\n \"Narboux, J.-P., 2011, “‘There’s Many a Slip\\nbetween Cup and Lip’: Dimension and Negation in Austin”,\\nin Gustafsson and Sørli 2011: 204–240.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199219759.003.0008\",\n \"New, C.G., 1966, “A Plea for Linguistics”,\\nMind, 75(299): 368–384; reprinted in Fann 1969:\\n148–165. doi:10.1093/mind/LXXV.299.368\",\n \"Nowell-Smith, Patrick H., 1954, Ethics, Harmondsworth:\\nPelican Books.\",\n \"–––, 1960, “Ifs and Cans”,\\nTheoria, 26(2): 85–101; reprinted in Fann 1969:\\n166–181. doi:10.1111/j.1755-2567.1960.tb00557.x\",\n \"Passmore, John, 1957, A Hundred Years of Philosophy,\\nLondon: Duckworth.\",\n \"Pears, David, 1962, “An Original Philosopher”,\\nTimes Literary Supplement, Febrary 9(3128): 81–83;\\nreprinted in Fann 1969: 49–58.\",\n \"–––, 1973, “Ifs and Cans”, in Berlin\\n1973a: 90–140.\",\n \"–––, 1979, “A Comparison between\\nAyer’s Views about the Privilege of Sense-Datum Statements and\\nthe Views of Russell and Austin”, in Graham F. Macdonald (ed.),\\nPerception and Identity, London: Macmillan: 61–83.\",\n \"Petrie, Hugh G., 1971, “Austin’s Usage of\\n‘Intentional’”, Mind, 80(319):\\n441–444. doi:10.1093/mind/LXXX.319.441\",\n \"Pitcher, George (ed.), 1964, Truth, Englewood Cliffs, NJ:\\nPrentice Hall.\",\n \"–––, 1973, “Austin: a personal\\nmemoir”, in Berlin 1973a: 17–30.\",\n \"Price, H.H., 1932, Perception, London: Methuen.\",\n \"Prichard, H.A., 1979, Moral Obligation, Oxford: Clarendon\\nPress.\",\n \"Putnam, Hilary, 1962, “The Analytic and the\\nSynthetic”, in H. Feigl and G. Maxwell (eds.), Minnesota\\nStudies in the Philosophy of Science 3, Minneapolis: University\\nof Minnesota Press: 358–397.\",\n \"–––, 1994, “Sense, Nonsense, and the\\nSenses: An Inquiry Into the Power of the Human Mind”,\\nJournal of Philosophy, 91(9): 445–517.\\ndoi:10.2307/2940978 \",\n \"Quine, W.V.O., 1965, “J.L. Austin: Comment”,\\nJournal of Philosophy, 62(19): 509–510 (abstract only).\\nPrinted in full for the first time as part of “A Symposium on\\nAustin’s Method” in Fann 1969: 76–98. doi:10.2307/2023743\\n\",\n \"Recanati, François, 1994, Literal Meaning,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Reimer, Marga, 2018, “Exploring Austin’s Galaxy: Searching\\nfor Truth through the Lens of Ordinary Language”, in Savas\\nL. Tsohatzidis ed. Interpreting J. L. Austin: Critical\\nEssays, pp. 15–33, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress. doi:10.1017/9781316421840.002\",\n \"Richmond, Sarah, 1996, “Derrida and Analytical Philosophy:\\nSpeech Acts and their Force”, European Journal of\\nPhilosophy, 4(1): 38–62.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1468-0378.1996.tb00064.x\",\n \"Ricks, Christopher, 1992, “Austin’s Swink”, University of Toronto Quarterly, 61(3): 297–315.\",\n \"Schiffer, Stephen R., 1972, Meaning, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Schwartz, Robert, 2004, “To Austin or Not to Austin,\\nThat’s the Disjunction”, Philosophical Studies,\\n120(1): 255–263. doi:10.1023/B:PHIL.0000033756.70177.3d\",\n \"Schwartz, Robert, 2018, “Berkeley and Austin on the Argument\\nfrom Illusion”, in Savas L. Tsohatzidis ed. Interpreting\\nJ. L. Austin: Critical Essays, pp. 143–164, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781316421840.008\",\n \"Searle, John R., 1966, “Assertions and Aberrations”,\\nin Bernard Williams and Alan Montefiore (eds.), British Analytical\\nPhilosophy, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul: 41–54;\\nreprinted in Fann 1969: 205–218.\",\n \"–––, 1968, “Austin on Locutionary and\\nIllocutionary Acts”, Philosophical Review, 77(4):\\n405–424; reprinted in Berlin 1973a: 141–159.\\ndoi:10.2307/2183008 \",\n \"–––, 1969, Speech Acts, Cambridge:\\nCambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1977, “Reiterating the Differences: A\\nReply to Derrida”, Glyph 2, Baltimore, MD: Johns\\nHopkins Press: 198–208.\",\n \"–––, 2005, “J.L. Austin\\n(1911–1960)”, in A.P. Martinich and David Sosa (eds.),\\nA Companion to Analytic Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell:\\n218–230.\",\n \"–––, 2014, “Oxford Philosophy in the\\n1950s”, Philosophy, 90(2): 173–193.\\ndoi:10.1017/S0031819114000485\",\n \"Sinnot-Armstrong, Walter, 1994, “The Truth of\\nPerformatives”, International Journal of Philosophical\\nStudies, 2(1): 99–107. doi:10.1080/09672559408570785\",\n \"Snowdon, Paul F., 1981, “Perception, Vision and\\nCausation”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,\\n81: 175–92. doi:10.1093/aristotelian/81.1.175\",\n \"–––, 2014, “Austin on the Philosophy of\\nPerception”, in Brian Garvey (ed.), J.L. Austin on\\nLanguage, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 161–176.\\ndoi:10.1057/9781137329998_10\",\n \"Soames, Scott, 2003, Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth\\nCentury, Volume 2: The Age of Meaning, Princeton, NJ: Princeton\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Soteriou, Matthew, 2009, “The Disjunctive Theory of\\nPerception”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter\\n2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =\\n <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/perception-disjunctive/>.\",\n \"Strawson, P.F., 1949, “Truth”, Analysis,\\n9(6): 83–97. doi:10.1093/analys/9.6.83\",\n \"–––, 1950, “Truth”, Proceedings\\nof the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 24:\\n129–156.\",\n \"–––, 1964a, “Intention and Convention in\\nSpeech Acts”, Philosophical Review, 73(4):\\n439–460; reprinted in Fann 1969: 380–400.\\ndoi:10.2307/2183301 \",\n \"–––, 1964b, “A Problem about Truth—A\\nReply to Mr. Warnock”, in Pitcher 1964: 68–84.\",\n \"–––, 1965, “Truth: A Reconsideration of\\nAustin’s Views”, Philosophical Quarterly, 15(61):\\n289–301. doi:10.2307/2218255\",\n \"–––, 1973, “Austin and ‘Locutionary\\nMeaning’”, in Berlin 1973a: 46–68.\",\n \"Stroud, Barry, 1984, The Philosophical Significance of\\nScepticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Thalberg, Irving, 1969, “Austin on Abilities”, in Fann\\n1969: 182–204.\",\n \"Thau, Mike, 2004, “What is Disjunctivism?”\\nPhilosophical Studies, 120(1): 193–253.\\ndoi:10.1023/B:PHIL.0000033755.32540.76\",\n \"Tsohatzidis, Savas L., 2018, “Performativity and the\\n“True/False Fetish””, in Savas L. Tsohatzidis\\ned. Interpreting J. L. Austin: Critical Essays,\\npp. 96–118, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress. doi:10.1017/9781316421840.006\",\n \"Travis, Charles, 1991, “Annals of Analysis, Critical Notice\\nof H.P. Grice Studies in the Way of Words”,\\nMind, 100(398): 237–264. reprinted in Travis 2008:\\n290–315. doi:10.1093/mind/C.398.237 and\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230334.003.0014\",\n \"–––, 2004, “The Silence of the\\nSenses”, Mind, 113(449): 57–94.\\ndoi:10.1093/mind/113.449.57\",\n \"–––, 2005, “A Sense of Occasion”,\\nPhilosophical Quarterly, 55(219): 286–314.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.0031-8094.2005.00399.x\",\n \"–––, 2008, Occasion-Sensitivity: Selected\\nEssays, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230334.001.0001\",\n \"–––, 2011, “Truth and Merit”, in\\nGustafsson and Sørli 2011: 175–203.\\ndoi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199219759.003.0007\",\n \"Travis, Charles and Mark E. Kalderon, 2013, “Oxford\\nRealism”, in Michael Beaney (ed.), Oxford Handbook of the\\nHistory of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.\\ndoi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199238842.013.0018\",\n \"Urmson, J.O., 1965, “J.L. Austin”, Journal of\\nPhilosophy, 62(19): 499–508. Printed in full for the first\\ntime as part of “A Symposium on Austin’s Method” in Fann\\n1969: 76–98. doi:10.2307/2023741 \",\n \"–––, 1967, “Austin, John Langshaw”,\\nin P. Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, New\\nYork: Random House, Inc.: 211–215; reprinted as “Austin’s\\nPhilosophy”, in Fann 1969: 22–32.\",\n \"–––, 1977, “Performative\\nUtterances”, in P.A. French, T.E. Uehling Jr., and H.K.\\nWettstein (eds.), Midwest Studies in Philosophy (Volume II),\\nMinneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 120–127.\\ndoi:10.1111/j.1475-4975.1977.tb00033.x\",\n \"Urmson, J.O. and G.J. Warnock, 1961, “J.L. Austin”,\\nMind, 70(278): 256–257; reprinted as\\n‘Comments’ on Hampshire (1960) in Fann 1969: 22–32.\\ndoi:10.1093/mind/LXX.278.256\",\n \"van Hulst, Chrissy and Max Cresswell (eds.), 2016, “A.N.\\nPrior on Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia: A\\nreconstruction from Prior’s manuscripts”, Journal for the\\nHistory of Analytical Philosophy, 4(4): 1–12.\\ndoi:10.15173/jhap.v4i4.2809 \",\n \"Vendler, Zeno, 1972, Res Cogitans: An Essay in Rational\\nPsychology, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.\",\n \"Warnock, G.J., 1953, Berkeley, Harmondsworth:\\nPenguin.\",\n \"–––, 1962, “Truth and\\nCorrespondence”, in Calvin Dwight Rollins (ed.), Knowledge\\nand Experience, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press:\\n11–20.\",\n \"–––, 1963, “John Langshaw Austin: A\\nBiographical Sketch”, Proceedings of the British\\nAcademy; reprinted in Fann 1969: 3–21.\",\n \"–––, 1964, “A Problem about Truth”,\\nin Pitcher 1964: 54–67.\",\n \"–––, 1973a, “Saturday Mornings”, in\\nBerlin 1973a: 31–45.\",\n \"–––, 1973b, “Some Types of Performative\\nUtterance”, in Berlin 1973a: 69–89.\",\n \"–––, 1973c, “Truth: or Bristol Revisited\\nII”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,\\nSupplementary Volume 47: 135–145.\",\n \"–––, 1989, J.L. Austin, London:\\nRoutledge.\",\n \"Wheatley, Jon, 1969, “Austin on Truth”, in Fann 1969:\\n226–240.\",\n \"White, Alan R., 1967, “Mentioning the Unmentionable”,\\nAnalysis, 27(4): 113–118; reprinted in Fann 1969:\\n219–225. doi:10.2307/3327002 \",\n \"Williams, C.J.F., 1973, “Truth: or Bristol Revisited\\nI”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,\\nSupplementary Volume 47: 121–134.\",\n \"Williams, Michael, 1996, Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological\\nRealism and the Basis of Skepticism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Williamson, Timothy, 2000, Knowledge and its Limits,\\nOxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/019925656X.001.0001\",\n \"Wisdom, J., 1946, “Symposium: Other Minds I”,\\nProceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume\\n20: 122–147.\",\n \"Zimmerman, Michael J., 2004, “Another Plea for\\nExcuses”, American Philosophy Quarterly, 41(3):\\n259–266.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../abilities/","text":"abilities"},{"href":"../action/","text":"action"},{"href":"../ayer/","text":"Ayer, Alfred Jules"},{"href":"../compatibilism/","text":"compatibilism"},{"href":"../contextualism-epistemology/","text":"contextualism, epistemic"},{"href":"../closure-epistemic/","text":"epistemic closure"},{"href":"../freewill/","text":"free will"},{"href":"../grice/","text":"Grice, Paul"},{"href":"../incompatibilism-arguments/","text":"incompatibilism: arguments for"},{"href":"../knowledge-analysis/","text":"knowledge: analysis of"},{"href":"../moore/","text":"Moore, George Edward"},{"href":"../moral-responsibility/","text":"moral responsibility"},{"href":"../perception-disjunctive/","text":"perception: the disjunctive theory of"},{"href":"../perception-problem/","text":"perception: the problem of"},{"href":"../pragmatics/","text":"pragmatics"},{"href":"../prichard/","text":"Prichard, Harold Arthur"},{"href":"../sense-data/","text":"sense data"},{"href":"../speech-acts/","text":"speech acts"},{"href":"../states-of-affairs/","text":"states of affairs"},{"href":"../strawson/","text":"Strawson, Peter Frederick"},{"href":"../tropes/","text":"tropes"},{"href":"../truth/","text":"truth"},{"href":"../truth-deflationary/","text":"truth: deflationation about"},{"href":"../wilson/","text":"Wilson, John Cook"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../abilities/\",\n \"text\": \"abilities\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../action/\",\n \"text\": \"action\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../ayer/\",\n \"text\": \"Ayer, Alfred Jules\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../compatibilism/\",\n \"text\": \"compatibilism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../contextualism-epistemology/\",\n \"text\": \"contextualism, epistemic\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../closure-epistemic/\",\n \"text\": \"epistemic closure\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../freewill/\",\n \"text\": \"free will\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../grice/\",\n \"text\": \"Grice, Paul\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../incompatibilism-arguments/\",\n \"text\": \"incompatibilism: arguments for\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../knowledge-analysis/\",\n \"text\": \"knowledge: analysis of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../moore/\",\n \"text\": \"Moore, George Edward\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../moral-responsibility/\",\n \"text\": \"moral responsibility\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../perception-disjunctive/\",\n \"text\": \"perception: the disjunctive theory of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../perception-problem/\",\n \"text\": \"perception: the problem of\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../pragmatics/\",\n \"text\": \"pragmatics\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../prichard/\",\n \"text\": \"Prichard, Harold Arthur\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../sense-data/\",\n \"text\": \"sense data\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../speech-acts/\",\n \"text\": \"speech acts\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../states-of-affairs/\",\n \"text\": \"states of affairs\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../strawson/\",\n \"text\": \"Strawson, Peter Frederick\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../tropes/\",\n \"text\": \"tropes\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../truth/\",\n \"text\": \"truth\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../truth-deflationary/\",\n \"text\": \"truth: deflationation about\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../wilson/\",\n \"text\": \"Wilson, John Cook\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":95,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"authenticity"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Authenticity"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Thu Sep 11, 2014; substantive revision Thu Feb 20, 2020"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":[" The term ‘authentic’ is used either in the strong sense\nof being “of undisputed origin or authorship”, or in a\nweaker sense of being “faithful to an original” or a\n“reliable, accurate representation”. To say that something\nis authentic is to say that it is what it professes to be, or what it\nis reputed to be, in origin or authorship. But the distinction between\nauthentic and derivative is more complicated when discussing\nauthenticity as a characteristic attributed to human beings. For in\nthis case, the question arises: What is it to be oneself, at one with\noneself, or truly representing one’s self? The multiplicity of puzzles\nthat arise in conjunction with the conception of authenticity connects\nwith metaphysical, epistemological, and moral issues (for recent discussion, see Newman and Smith 2016; Heldke and Thomsen 2014). On the one hand,\nbeing oneself is inescapable, since whenever one makes a choice or\nacts, it is oneself who is doing these things. But on the other hand,\nwe are sometimes inclined to say that some of the thoughts, decisions\nand actions that we undertake are not really one’s own and\nare therefore not genuinely expressive of who one is. Here, the issue\nis no longer of metaphysical nature, but rather about\nmoral-psychology, identity and responsibility.","When used in this latter sense, the characterization describes a\nperson who acts in accordance with desires, motives, ideals or beliefs\nthat are not only hers (as opposed to someone else’s), but that also\nexpress who she really is. Bernard Williams captures this when he\nspecifies authenticity as “the idea that some things are in some\nsense really you, or express what you are, and others aren’t”\n(quoted in Guignon 2004: viii).","Besides being a topic in philosophical debates, authenticity is\nalso a pervasive ideal that impacts social and political\nthinking. In fact, one distinctive feature of recent Western\nintellectual developments has been a shift to what is called the\n“age of authenticity” (Taylor 2007; Ferrarra 1998).\nTherefore, understanding the concept also involves investigating its\nhistorical and philosophical sources and on the way it impacts the\nsocio-political outlook of contemporary societies."],"string":"[\n \" The term ‘authentic’ is used either in the strong sense\\nof being “of undisputed origin or authorship”, or in a\\nweaker sense of being “faithful to an original” or a\\n“reliable, accurate representation”. To say that something\\nis authentic is to say that it is what it professes to be, or what it\\nis reputed to be, in origin or authorship. But the distinction between\\nauthentic and derivative is more complicated when discussing\\nauthenticity as a characteristic attributed to human beings. For in\\nthis case, the question arises: What is it to be oneself, at one with\\noneself, or truly representing one’s self? The multiplicity of puzzles\\nthat arise in conjunction with the conception of authenticity connects\\nwith metaphysical, epistemological, and moral issues (for recent discussion, see Newman and Smith 2016; Heldke and Thomsen 2014). On the one hand,\\nbeing oneself is inescapable, since whenever one makes a choice or\\nacts, it is oneself who is doing these things. But on the other hand,\\nwe are sometimes inclined to say that some of the thoughts, decisions\\nand actions that we undertake are not really one’s own and\\nare therefore not genuinely expressive of who one is. Here, the issue\\nis no longer of metaphysical nature, but rather about\\nmoral-psychology, identity and responsibility.\",\n \"When used in this latter sense, the characterization describes a\\nperson who acts in accordance with desires, motives, ideals or beliefs\\nthat are not only hers (as opposed to someone else’s), but that also\\nexpress who she really is. Bernard Williams captures this when he\\nspecifies authenticity as “the idea that some things are in some\\nsense really you, or express what you are, and others aren’t”\\n(quoted in Guignon 2004: viii).\",\n \"Besides being a topic in philosophical debates, authenticity is\\nalso a pervasive ideal that impacts social and political\\nthinking. In fact, one distinctive feature of recent Western\\nintellectual developments has been a shift to what is called the\\n“age of authenticity” (Taylor 2007; Ferrarra 1998).\\nTherefore, understanding the concept also involves investigating its\\nhistorical and philosophical sources and on the way it impacts the\\nsocio-political outlook of contemporary societies.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Origins and Meaning of the Concept of Authenticity","sub_toc":["1.1 Sincerity and Authenticity","1.2 Autonomy and Authenticity","1.3 Authenticity and the self"]},{"content_title":"2. Critique of Authenticity","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"3. Conceptions of Authenticity","sub_toc":["3.1 Kierkegaard and Heidegger","3.2 Sartre and de Beauvoir"]},{"content_title":"4. Recent Accounts of Authenticity","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Origins and Meaning of the Concept of Authenticity\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"1.1 Sincerity and Authenticity\",\n \"1.2 Autonomy and Authenticity\",\n \"1.3 Authenticity and the self\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Critique of Authenticity\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Conceptions of Authenticity\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"3.1 Kierkegaard and Heidegger\",\n \"3.2 Sartre and de Beauvoir\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Recent Accounts of Authenticity\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":[],"section_title":"1. Origins and Meaning of the Concept of Authenticity","subsections":[{"content":["A number of significant cultural changes in the seventeenth and\neighteenth centuries led to the emergence of a new ideal in the\nWestern world (Trilling 1972). During this period, human beings came to be\nthought of more as individuals than as placeholders in systems of\nsocial relations. This emphasis on the importance of the individual is\nseen in the prevalence of autobiographies and self-portraits, where\nthe individual becomes the centre of attention not because of\nextraordinary feats or access to special knowledge, but because he or\nshe is an individual.","In the same period, society comes to be seen not as an organic\nwhole of interacting components, but as an aggregate of individual\nhuman beings, a social system with a life of its own, which presents\nitself to the individual as not itself quite human but rather as\nartificial, the result of a “social contract”. Being human\nis understood as being best achieved through being unique and\ndistinctive, even when these collide with certain social norms. At the\nsame time, there is an increasing awareness of what Charles Taylor\n(1989) calls “inwardness” or “internal\nspace”. The result is a distinction between one’s private and\nunique individuality, and one’s public self (Taylor 1991; Trilling\n1972).","With these social changes there is a sharp shift in the conceptions\nof approbation and disapproval that are commonly used in judging\nothers and oneself. For instance, concepts like sincerity and honor\nbecome obsolescent (Berger 1970). In earlier times, a sincere person\nwas seen as someone who honestly attempts to neither violate the\nexpectations that follow from the position he holds in society, nor to\nstrive to appear otherwise than he ought to. However, by the time of\nHegel, the ideal of sincerity had lost its normative appeal. Hegel\npolemically refers to sincerity as “the heroism of dumb\nservice” (Hegel 2002 [1807]: 515) and launches an attack on the\nbourgeois “honest man,” who passively internalizes a\nparticular conventional social ethos. In the condition of sincerity,\nthe individual is uncritically obedient to the power of\nsociety—a conformity that for Hegel leads to subjugation and a\ndeterioration of the individual (Hegel 2002 [1807]; Golomb 1995: 9;\nTrilling 1972). For Hegel, in the progress of “spirit”,\nthe individual consciousness will eventually move from this condition\nof sincerity to a condition of baseness, in which the individual\nbecomes antagonistic to external societal powers and achieves a\nmeasure of autonomy. Hegel shows this clearly in a comment on\nDiderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, a story in which the narrator\n(supposedly Diderot himself) is portrayed as the reasonable, sincere\nman who respects the prevailing order and who has achieved bourgeois\nrespectability. In contrast, the nephew is full of contempt for the\nsociety in which he figures as a worthless person. However, he is in\nopposition to himself, because he still aspires to a better standing\nin a society, which he believes has nothing but emptiness to offer\n(Despland 1975: 360; Golomb 1995: 13–15). For Hegel, the\nnarrator is an example of the sincere, honest soul, while the nephew\nfigures as the “disintegrated,” alienated\nconsciousness. The nephew is clearly alienated, but for Hegel this\nalienation is a step in the progression towards autonomous existence\n(Williams 2002: 190).","In the midst of this conceptual change, the term\n‘authenticity’ becomes applicable in demarcating a\nsomewhat new set of virtues. The older concept of sincerity, referring\nto being truthful in order to be honest in one’s dealings with others,\ncomes to be replaced by a relatively new concept of authenticity,\nunderstood as being true to oneself for one’s own benefit. Earlier,\nthe moral advice to be authentic recommended that one should be true\nto oneself in order thereby to be true to others. Thus,\nbeing true to oneself is seen as a means to the end of\nsuccessful social relations. In contrast, in our contemporary\nthinking, authenticity as a virtue term is seen as referring to a way\nof acting that is choiceworthy in itself (Ferrara 1993; Varga\n2011a; Varga 2011b)."],"subsection_title":"1.1 Sincerity and Authenticity"},{"content":["The growing appeal of the idea of authenticity has led to the\nemergence of a highly influential modern “ethic of\nauthenticity” (Ferrara 1993; Ferrara 2017). This ethic acknowledges the value\nof the dominant “ethic of autonomy” that shapes modern\nmoral thought (Schneewind 1998; Dworkin 1988). The idea of autonomy\nemphasizes the individual’s self-governing abilities, the independence\nof one’s deliberation from manipulation and the capacity to decide for\noneself. It is connected to the view that moral principles and the\nlegitimacy of political authority should be grounded in the\nself-governing individual who is free from diverse cultural and social\npressures. According to the ethic of autonomy, each individual should\nfollow those norms he or she can will on the basis of rational\nreflective endorsement. To some extent, authenticity and autonomy\nagree in supposing that one should strive to lead one’s life according\nto one’s own reasons and motives, relying on one’s capacity to\nfollow self-imposed guidelines. In both cases, it is crucial\nthat one has the ability to put one’s own behavior under reflexive\nscrutiny and make it dependent on self-determined goals (Honneth\n1994).","One crucial difference is that the ethic of authenticity introduces\nthe idea that there are motives, desires and commitments that\nsometimes should outweigh the restrictions of rational\nreflection. This is because those motives are so fundamental to the\ncohesion of one’s own identity that overriding them would mean\ndisintegrating the very self which is necessary to be a moral\nagent. The point is that there are types of moral philosophical\nreasoning that can be repressive if they arise from “an\nautonomous moral conscience not complemented by sensitivity to the\nequilibrium of identity and by authenticity” (Ferrara 1993:\n102). Besides leading an autonomous life, guided by one’s own,\nnon-constrained reasons and motives, authenticity requires that these\nmotives and reasons should be expressive of one’s\nself-identity. Authenticity guides the moral agent to follow only\nthose “moral sources outside the subject [that speak in\na language] which resonate[s] within him or her”, in\nother words, moral sources that accord with “an order which is\ninseparably indexed to a personal vision” (Taylor 1989:\n510). Hence, authenticity entails an aspect that lies beyond the scope\nof autonomy, namely, a “language of personal resonance”\n(Taylor 1991: 90). This points to the gap between (Kantian) autonomy\nand authenticity: one can lead an autonomous life, even if this way of\nliving fails to express a person’s self-understanding."," In recent years, more attention has been devoted to highlighting how autonomy and authenticity can come apart (e.g. Oshana 2007; Roessler 2012; MacKay forthcoming). Some argue that authenticity demands more than is necessary for autonomy: a person does not have to reflectively endorse key aspects of her identity in order to qualify as autonomous (Oshana 2007). If she acknowledges that aspects of her identity contradict her self-conception, she might still be autonomous, even if this acknowledgement injects ambivalence into her life."," In all, the ideal of authenticity does not object to the importance\nof the self-given law, but disagrees that full freedom consists in\nmaking and following such a law (Menke 2005: 308). It is not just\nabout being involved in the authorship of such a law, but about how\nthis law fits with the wholeness of a person’s life, and how or\nwhether it expresses who the person is. In this sense, the idea of\nautonomy already represents a counterposition to an ethic that is\nsolely concerned with strict adherence to social norms."],"subsection_title":"1.2 Autonomy and Authenticity"},{"content":["Another decisive factor in the development of the ideal of\nauthenticity was that it emerged together with a distinctively modern\nconception of the self. This is visible in the work of Rousseau, who\nargues that the orientation toward life that should guide the conduct\none chooses should come from a source within. This led to questions\nabout inwardness, self-reflection and introspection, many of them\naddressed in his Confessions (1770). When the space of\ninteriority becomes a guiding authority, the individual must detect\nand distinguish central impulses, feelings and wishes from ones that\nare less central or conflict with one’s central motives. In other\nwords, interiority must be divided into what is at the core and what\nis peripheral. In this picture, the measure of one’s actions is\nwhether they spring from and express essential aspects of one’s\nidentity or whether they come from a peripheral place.","Such a conception of the self exhibits decisive parallels to the\ntradition of “religious individualism” that centers\nreligious life on the individual and stresses the importance of\ninwardness and the introspective examination of one’s inner motives,\nintentions and conscience. Investigating the characteristics of the\nmodern subject of inwardness, Foucault (1980: 58–60) suggests\nthat “it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret\nnature, ‘demands’ only to surface.” For Foucault,\nconfession—the look inward to monitor one’s interior life and to\ntell certain “truths” about oneself—has become a\npart of a cultural life, reaching from religious contexts to\npsychological therapy. The radicalization of the distinction between\ntrue and false interiority has led to new possibilities; inner states,\nmotivations and feelings are now increasingly thought of as\nobjectifiable and malleable in different contexts."," Rousseau also adds that acting on motives that spring from the\nperiphery of the self, while ignoring or denying essential aspects of\none’s self, simply amounts to self-betrayal and annihilation of the\nself. Rousseau’s The New Heloise (1997 [1761]) emphasizes\nthis aspect by showing how the novel accentuates the significant costs\nand the potential self-alienation involved in suppressing one’s\ndeepest motivations. But, in addition, in the Discourse on the\nOrigin of Inequality, Rousseau argues that, with the emergence of\na competitive public sphere, the ability to turn inward is\nincreasingly compromised, because competitive relations require\nintense role-playing, which Rousseau calls an “excessive\nlabor” (Rousseau 1992 [1754]: 22). The ongoing instrumental\nrole-playing not only causes alienation, but ultimately inequality and\ninjustice, since it destroys the immanent moral understanding with\nwhich, according to Rousseau, humans are hard-wired. Social life requires identification with social roles, but because role identity is determined by other people’s normative expectations, role-playing leads to a tension that might be understood as a matter of politics more than anything else (Schmid 2017). \n"],"subsection_title":"1.3 Authenticity and the self"}]},{"main_content":["The idea of autonomy—the view that each individual must\ndecide how to act based on his or her own rational deliberations about\nthe best course of action—has in many ways paved the way for the\nidea of authenticity. However, authenticity goes beyond autonomy by\nholding that an individual’s feelings and deepest desires can outweigh\nboth the outcome of rational deliberation in making decisions, and our\nwillingness to immerse ourselves into the reigning norms and values of\nsociety. Whereas sincerity generally seems to accept a given social\norder, authenticity becomes an implicitly critical concept, often\ncalling into question the reigning social order and public opinion. In\nRousseau’s optic, one of our most important projects is to avert from\nthe social sphere and to unearth what is truly us underneath\nthe ‘masks’ that society forces on us. But when\nauthenticity comes to be regarded as something like sincerity for its\nown sake (Ferrara 1993: 86), it becomes increasingly hard to see what\nthe moral good is that it is supposed to bring into being.","A frequently mentioned worry with the ideal of authenticity is that\nthe focus on one’s own inner feelings and attitudes may breed a\nself-centered preoccupation with oneself that is anti-social and\ndestructive of altruism and compassion toward others. Christopher\nLasch (1979)\npoints out similarities between the clinical disorder referred to as\nNarcissistic Personality Disorder and authenticity. According to\nLasch, narcissism and authenticity are both characterized by deficient\nempathic skills, self-indulgence and self-absorbed\nbehavior. Similarly, Allan Bloom (1987: 61) maintains that the culture\nof authenticity has made the minds of the youth “narrower and\nflatter,” leading to self-centeredness and the collapse of the\npublic self. While Lasch and Bloom worry about the threat that the\nself-centeredness and narcissism of the “culture of\nauthenticity” poses to morality and political coherence, Daniel\nBell voices worries about its economic viability. What Bell fears is\nthat the “megalomania of self-infinitization” that comes\nwith the culture of authenticity will erode the foundations of market\nmechanisms that are “based on a moral system of reward rooted in\nthe Protestant sanctification of work” (Bell 1976: 84).\nMore recently, critics have argued that when properly analyzed, authenticity demands positing the existence of a “true self.” It requires positing an essentialist structure leading to metaphysical problems that current accounts of authenticity fail to solve (Bialystok 2014). Correspondingly, Feldman (2014) argues in favor of abandoning the ideal of authenticity because it builds on confused assumptions about the self, the value of one’s “gut feelings” in revealing one’s values, and the supposedly corrupting influence of the “external” social realm (for a critique of this position, see Bauer 2017; Ferrara 2009)\n","However, one might argue that this only becomes a problem if one\nthinks of authenticity as entirely a personal virtue. In other words,\nthere is only a clash between morality and social life and being\nauthentic if the “true” self is regarded as fundamentally\nprone to anti-social behaviour. But many thinkers at this time\nunderstood human nature as fundamentally disposed toward beneficence,\nso that evil was seen as arising from socialization and upbringing\nrather than from deep drives within the human being. For instance,\nRousseau holds that certain immoral characteristics are immanent in\nman but were produced by the dynamics of modern society, which is\ncharacterized by a competitive way of relating to others and striving\nfor acknowledgement in the public sphere. Rousseau thus externalizes\nthe origins of societal evil and alienation from the original nature\nof man. The undistorted self-relation of natural man inspires sympathy\nand considerate relations with others, sensitive to “seeing any\nsentient being, especially our fellow-man, perish or suffer,\nprincipally those like ourselves” (Rousseau 1992 [1754]: 14). In\nsomewhat the same way, economic theorists of the time supposed that\nunregulated markets are self-correcting, as human beings are naturally\ninclined to engage in mutually advantageous commercial activities\n(Taylor 2007: 221–269). On this view, authenticity does not\namount to egoism or self-absorption. On the contrary, the prevailing\nview seems to have been that, by turning inward and accessing the\n“true” self, one is simultaneously led towards a deeper\nengagement with the social world. This is why Taylor (1989:\n419–455) describes the trajectory of the project of authenticity\nis “inward and upward”.","It might however be objected that supposing that the\n“inner” is a morally worthy guide is deeply misguided and\nbuilds upon an overly optimistic idea of human nature. It may be\nargued that once the idea of rational deliberation is set aside, the\npowerful impact of the non-rational becomes apparent. Thinkers such as\nNietzsche and Freud have put in question the conception of human\nnature, and especially of our “inner” nature, as\nfundamentally good. Following their “hermeneutics of\nsuspicion” (Ricoeur 1970), human nature comes to be seen as\nincluding forces of violence, disorder and unreason as well as\ntendencies toward beneficence and altruism. In that case, any idea of\nan ethic based primarily on the ideal of authenticity is simply\nuntenable.","Others have expressed serious concerns not about the optimistic\nview of human nature, but about the conception of the self that\nunderlies the idea of authenticity. Some argued that the dichotomies\nthat the concept authenticity was built on, like conformity\nvs. independence, individual vs. society, or inner-directedness\nvs. other-directedness, were entirely misguided. The underlying\nassumption that considers the individual separate from the environment\nis an absurd assumption that erodes that bond between the individual\nand community, which ultimately is the source of the authentic self\n(Slater 1970: 15; Sisk 1973). In agreement with Slater (1970) and Yankelovich\n(1981), Bellah et al. (1985) and Fairlie (1978) contend\nthat such a pursuit of authenticity is self-defeating, for with the\nloss of the bond with community, the sense of self is also\ndiminished.","Additionally, in The Jargon of Authenticity, Adorno\ncontended that the “liturgy of inwardness” is founded on\nthe flawed idea of a self-transparent individual who is capable of\nchoosing herself (Adorno 1973: 70). The doubtful picture of the\nself-centered individual covers up the constitutive alterity and\nmimetic nature of the self. In the concluding part of The Order of\nThings, Foucault maintained that present society was witnessing a\ncrisis, not only of authenticity but also of the whole idea of the\nsubject in its temporary historically contingent constitution,\nforeseeing that “man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand\nat the edge of the sea” (Foucault 1994: 387). Foucault clearly\nopposed the idea of a hidden authentic self, which he critically\nreferred to as the “Californian cult of the self” (1983:\n266). The recognition that the subject is not given to itself in\nadvance leads him to the practical consequence that it must create\nitself as a work of art (Foucault 1983: 392). Rather than searching for a hidden true\nself, one should attempt to shape one’s life as a work of art,\nproceeding without recourse to any fixed rules or permanent truths in\na process of unending becoming (Foucault 1988: 49). In a similar vein,\nRichard Rorty has argued that the idea of coming to “know a\ntruth which was out there (or in here) all the time” (Rorty\n1989: 27) is simply a myth. Postmodern thought raises questions about\nthe existence of an underlying subject with essential properties\naccessible through introspection. The whole idea of the authentic as\nthat which is “original”, “essential”,\n“proper”, and so forth now seems doubtful. If we are\nself-constituting beings who make ourselves up from one moment to the\nnext, it appears that the term “authenticity” can refer\nonly to whatever feels right at some particular moment.","Yet others have based their criticism of authenticity especially on\nthe emergence of a pervasive “culture of\nauthenticity”. Cultural critics have argued that the ostensible\n“decline” of modern society might not primarily be a\nresult of economical or structural transformations, but as the outcome\nof an increasingly ubiquitous ideal of authenticity. Before we turn to\nthese critiques, it is helpful to understand how the ideal of\nauthenticity became so widespread. First, we should mention that\nRousseau’s work, made a significant contribution to the popularization\nof authenticity. Indeed, some argue that authenticity can be seen as a “keystone” in Rousseau’s work, giving unity to his reflections on sociality, political order, and education (Ferrara 2017: 2). Particularly The New Heloise (1997 [1761])\nwas enormously influential, with at least 70 editions in print before\n1800 (Darnton 1984: 242). This dispersion of the ideal of authenticity\ninto popular culture was further strengthened by several factors. For\ninstance, a wide array of intellectuals of the nineteenth and the\nearly twentieth century had embraced the idea of authenticity, and\neven radicalized it by resisting established codes and publicly\ndefending alternative, “artistic” or\n“bohemian” modes of life."," The reception of the work of Sartre and Heidegger has surely\ncontributed to the popularization of the idea of authenticity, and the\ndecisive impact of this idea first began to manifest itself after the\nSecond World War (Taylor 2007: 475). Rossinow contends that the\npolitics of the 1960s were centered on questions of authenticity.\nFollowing his account, the main driving force towards political and\nsocial changes of the New Left movement in the 1960s was “a\nsearch for authenticity in industrial American life” (Rossinow\n1998: 345). Both J. Farrell (1997) and Rossinow argue that the New\nLeft emerged partly as a reaction to traditional American liberalism\nand Christian existentialism, replacing the negative concept of\n“sin” with “alienation” and the positive goal\nof “salvation” with that of\n“authenticity”. Confronted with what they understood as\nalienation that “isn’t restricted to the poor” (Rossinow\n1998: 194), New Left activism reached beyond civil rights to moral\nrights and attempted to bring about a recovery of a sense of personal\nwholeness and authenticity by curing the institutions of American\nsociety.","The emerging youth culture was characterized by a severe\ndissatisfaction with the “morass of conformity” of the\nparental generation (Gray 1965: 57). The critique of the growing\nconformity of life got more persistent during the 1950s, and a number\nof social scientists in widely read books criticized what they saw as\nwidespread conformity and inauthenticity. Among these, The Lonely\nCrowd (1950) by Riesman and The Organization Man (1956)\nby Whyte received the most attention. Riesman points out that the\nefficacious functioning of modern organizations requires\nother-directed individuals who smoothly adjust to their\nenvironment. However, he also notes that such people compromised\nthemselves, and a society consisting mostly of other-directed\nindividuals faces substantial deficiencies in leadership and human\npotential.","On the background of this development, it seems that at a time when\nrelativism appears difficult to surmount, authenticity has become a\nlast measure of value and a common currency in contemporary cultural\nlife (Jay 2004). So, under the impact of existentialism on Western\nculture, the ubiquitous desire for authenticity has emerged in modern\nsociety as “one of the most politically explosive of human\nimpulses,” as Marshall Berman argues (1970: xix). "],"section_title":"2. Critique of Authenticity","subsections":[]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"3. Conceptions of Authenticity","subsections":[{"content":["Kierkegaard’s work on authenticity and his suggestion that\neach of us is to “become what one is” (1992 [1846]: 130),\nis best seen as linked to his critical stance towards a certain social\nreality and a certain essentialist trend in philosophical and\nscientific thought. On the one hand, he (1962 [1846]) condemned\naspects of his contemporary social world, claiming that many people\nhave come to function as merely place-holders in a society that\nconstantly levels down possibilities to the lowest common\ndenominator. In more contemporary terms, we can say that Kierkegaard\nprovides a criticism of modern society as causing\n“inauthenticity”. Living in a society characterized by\nsuch “massification” lead to what he refers to as\nwidespread “despair” that comes to the fore as\nspiritlessness, denial, and defiance. On the other hand, he rejected\nthe view that a human being should be regarded as an object,\nas a substance with certain essential attributes. Rather than\nbeing an item among others, Kierkegaard proposes to understand the\nself in relational terms: “The self is a relation that relates\nitself to itself…” (Kierkegaard 1980 [1849]:13). This\nrelation consists in the unfolding project of taking what we find\nourselves with as beings in the world and imparting some meaning or\nconcrete identity to our own life course. Thus, the self is defined by\nconcrete expressions through which one manifests oneself in\nthe world and thereby constitutes one’s identity over time. In\nKierkegaard’s view, “becoming what one is” and evading\ndespair and hollowness is not a matter of solitary introspection, but\nrather a matter of passionate commitment to a relation to something\noutside oneself that bestows one’s life with meaning. For Kierkegaard,\nas a religious thinker, this ultimate commitment was his defining\nrelation to God. The idea is that passionate care about something\noutside ourselves gives diachronic coherence in our lives and provides\nthe basis for the narrative unity of the self (Davenport 2012).","Heidegger’s conception of human existence (or, as calls it,\nDasein, ‘being-there’) echoes Kierkegaard’s\nconception of the “self”. Rather than being an object\namong others, Dasein is a “relation of being”\n(Seinsverhältnis; Heidegger 1962 [1927]: 12)—a\nrelation that obtains between what one is at any moment and what one\ncan and will be as the temporally extended unfolding of life into a\nrealm of possibilities. To conceive Dasein as relational means that in\nliving out our lives, we always already care: for each of us,\nour being is always at issue and this is made concrete in the\nspecific actions we undertake and the roles we enact. Over the course\nof our lives, our identities are always in question: we are always\nprojections into the future, incessantly taking a stand on who we\nare.","The most familiar conception of “authenticity” comes to\nus mainly from Heidegger’s Being and Time of 1927. The word\nwe translate as ‘authenticity’ is actually a neologism\ninvented by Heidegger, the word Eigentlichkeit, which comes\nfrom an ordinary term, eigentlich, meaning\n‘really’ or ‘truly’, but is built on the\nstem eigen, meaning ‘own’ or\n‘proper’. So the word might be more literally translated\nas ‘ownedness’, or ‘being owned’, or even\n‘being one’s own’, implying the idea of owning up to and\nowning what one is and does (for a stimulating recent interpretation, see McManus 2019). Nevertheless, the word\n‘authenticity’ has become closely associated with\nHeidegger as a result of early translations of Being and Time\ninto English, and was adopted by Sartre and Beauvoir as well as by\nexistentialist therapists and cultural theorists who followed\nthem.[1]","Heidegger’s conception of ownedness as the most fully realized\nhuman form of life emerges from his view of what it is to be a human\nbeing. This conception of human Dasein echoes Kierkegaard’s\ndescription of a “self”. On Heidegger’s account, Dasein is\nnot a type of object among others in the totality of what is on hand\nin the universe. Instead, human being is a “relation of\nbeing”, a relation\nthat obtains between what one is at any moment (the immediacy of the\nconcrete present as it has evolved) and what one can and will be as\nthe temporally extended unfolding or happening of life into\nan open realm of possibilities. To say that human being is a relation\nis to say that, in living out our lives, we always care about\nwho and what we are. Heidegger expresses this by saying that, for each\nof us, our being (what our lives will amount to overall) is\nalways at issue. This “being at stake” or\n“being in question for oneself” is made concrete in the\nspecific stands we take—that is, in the roles we\nenact—over the course of our lives. It is because our being (our\nidentity) is in question for us that we are always taking a stand on\nwho we are. Since the German word for\n‘understanding’, Verstehen, is etymologically\nderived from the idea of ‘taking a stand’, Heidegger can\ncall the projection into the future by which we shape our identity\n‘understanding’. And because any stand one takes is\ninescapably “being-in-the-world”, understanding carries\nwith it some degree of competence in coping with the world around us.\nAn understanding of being in general is therefore built into human\nagency.","To the extent that all our actions contribute to realizing an\noverarching project or set of projects, our active lives can be seen\nas embodying a life-project of some sort. On Heidegger’s view, we\nexist for the sake of ourselves: enacting roles and\nexpressing character traits contribute to realizing some image of what\nit is to be human in our own cases. Existence has a directedness or\npurposiveness that imparts a degree of connection to our life\nstories. For the most part, having such a life-plan requires very\nlittle conscious formulation of goals or deliberation about means. It\nresults from our competence in being members of a historical culture\nthat we have mastered to a great extent in growing up into a shared\nworld. This tacit “pre-understanding” makes possible our\nfamiliar dwelling with things and others in the familiar, everyday\nworld.","Heidegger holds that all possibilities of concrete understanding\nand action are made possible by a background of shared practices\nopened up by the social context in which we find ourselves, by what he\ncalls the ‘They’ (das Man). Far from it being the\ncase that social existence is something alien to and opposed to our\nhumanity, Heidegger holds that we are always essentially and\ninescapably social beings. As he says,","They itself prescribes that way of interpreting\nthe world that lies closest. Dasein is for the sake of the They in an\neveryday manner… In terms of the They, and as the They, I am\n‘given’ proximally to ‘myself’…. (1962\n[1927]: 167, translation modified)","To be a teacher, for instance, I must adopt (and\nperhaps blend) some set of the ready-made styles of classroom\npresentation and of dealing with students laid out in advance by\nexisting norms and conventions of professional conduct."," To say that we are always the They is not to say we are automata,\nhowever. Heidegger suggests that even in the bland conformism of\n“average everydayness” we are constantly making choices\nthat reflect our understanding of who we are. Nevertheless, in average\neverydayness, we are as a rule adrift, acting as one of the\n“herd” or “crowd”—a form of life\nHeidegger calls “falling” (Verfallen). Heidegger\n(1962 [1927]: 220) emphasizes that calling this way of living\n“falling” does not imply that it is “a bad or\ndeplorable ontical property of which, perhaps, more advanced stages of\nhuman culture might be able to rid themselves” (1962 [1927]:\n220). On the contrary, since there is no exit from the social\nworld—since it is the “only game in town”—it\nplays a positive role in creating the background of shared\nintelligibility that lets us be fully human in the first\nplace. Nevertheless, Heidegger is aware that there is something deeply\nproblematic about this falling mode of existence. In “doing what\none does”, he suggests, we fail to own up to who we are. We do\nnot take over our own choices as our own and, as a result, we are not\nreally the authors of our own lives. To the extent that our lives are\nunowned or disowned, existence is inauthentic (uneigentlich),\nnot our own (eigen).","Our condition as They-selves is one of dispersal, distraction and\nforgetfulness. But this “downward plunge” captures only\none aspect of Dasein, Heidegger says. In order to be able to realize\nthe capacity for authenticity, one must undergo a personal\ntransformation, one that tears us away from falling. This is possible\nonly given certain fundamental insights arising in a life. The first\nmajor shift can occur when one experiences an intense bout of\nanxiety. In anxiety, the familiar world that seemed to assure one’s\nsecurity suddenly breaks down, and in this world-collapse one finds\nthat the significance of things is “completely lacking”\n(1962 [1927]: 186). One finds oneself alone, with no worldly supports\nfor one’s existence. In anxiety, Dasein encounters itself as\nan individual, ultimately alone. In Heidegger’s words,\n“Anxiety individualizes Dasein and thus discloses it as\n‘solus ipse’” (1962 [1927]: 188). The\nsecond transformative event is the encounter with one’s\n“ownmost” possibility, the possibility of death as the\npossible loss of all possibilities. In facing our own finitude, we\nfind that we are always future-directed happenings or projects, where\nwhat is crucial to that ongoing forward movement is not its\nactualization of possibilities, but the “How” with which\none undertakes one’s life. Heidegger tries to envision a way of life\nhe calls anticipatory running-forward (Vorlaufen) as\na life that clear-sightedly and intensely carries out its projects, no\nmatter what they may be. The third transformative event is hearing the\ncall of conscience. What conscience calls out to us is the fact that\nwe are “guilty” in the German sense of that word, which\nmeans that we have a debt (Schuld) and are\nresponsible for ourselves. Conscience tells us that we are falling\nshort of what we can be, and that we are obliged to take up the task\nof living with resoluteness and full engagement. Such resoluteness is\nseen clearly in the case of vocational commitments, where one has\nheard a calling and feels pulled toward pursuing that\ncalling.[2]","The three “existentialia” that structure Dasein’s\nBeing-in-the-world make up the “formal existential totality of\nDasein’s structural whole”, what Heidegger\ncalls care. To be Dasein, an entity must have some sense of\nwhat it is “coming toward” (Zu-kunft, the German\nfor “future”), what has “come before” (what is\n“passed”, Vorbei), and what one is dealing with\nin one’s current situation (“making present”). The\ndefining characteristics of Dasein’s potentiality-for-Being are\ndisplayed in the transformative events that lead to the possibility of\nbeing authentic (eigentlich, as we saw, from the stem meaning\n“proper” or “own”). When Dasein confronts and\ngrasps its authentic possibility of being, it becomes possible to see\nthe whole of Dasein, including both its being as a They-self\nand as authentic being-one’s-self. “Dasein is authentically\nitself in [its] primordial individualization”, where the\n“constancy [Ständigkeit] of the Self\n… gets clarified” (1962 [1927]: 322). What defines the\nwholeness and unity of Dasein is determined not by an underlying\nsubstance (e.g., the sub-ject, that which underlies), but by the\n“steadiness and steadfastness” (beständigen\nStandfestigkeit, ibid) of authenticity.","The key to understanding authenticity lies, as we have seen, in the\ncharacterization of Dasein’s being as a relation between two\naspects or dimensions making up human existence. On the one hand, we\nfind ourselves thrown into a world and a situation not of our\nown making, already disposed by moods and particular commitments, with\na past behind us that constrains our choices. With respect to this\ndimension of human life, we are generally absorbed in practical\naffairs, taking care of business, striving to get things done as they\ncrop up from time to time. This “being-in-a-situation”\nnaturally inclines us to everyday falling as Heidegger describes\nit.","At the same time, however, to be human is to be underway toward\nachieving ends that are understood as integral to one’s overarching\nlife-project. My actions at any moment, though typically aimed at\naccomplishing tasks laid out by the demands of circumstances, are also\ncumulatively creating me as a person of a particular sort. In this\nsense, my futural projection as “understanding” has the\nstructure of being a projection onto one’s ownmost possibility of\nbeing. So, for example, when I attend a boring parent/teacher\nconference, I do so as part of handling my current duties. But this\nact is also part of being a parent insofar as it contributes\nto determining “that for the sake of which” I understand\nmyself as existing. Given this distinction between current means/ends\nstrategic actions and long-range life-defining undertakings, it is\npossible to see that there are two senses of freedom in play in\nHeidegger’s account of human existence. There is freedom in the\nhumdrum sense of doing what I choose to do under ordinary conditions,\na freedom Heidegger presumably interprets in an agent-libertarian way.\nBut there is also freedom in an ethically more robust sense. In\naddition to choosing courses of action among options, Dasein is\ncapable of “choosing to choose a kind of being-one’s-self”\n(1962 [1927]: 314) through its ongoing constitution of that identity\nfor the sake of which it exists. Thus, I attend the parent/teacher\nconference and behave in a particular way because I care about being a\nparent and a citizen of a particular sort. I understand this stance as\nhaving repercussions for my life as a whole, and I grasp the need\nfor resoluteness in holding steady to undertakings of this\nsort if I am to shape my identity in the way I can care about. For\nHeidegger, the resolute commitment that is made concrete and defined\nin one’s day-to-day actions is what imparts steadiness\nand steadfastness to a life. It is also the condition for\nbeing responsible for one’s own existence: “Only so can\n[one] be responsible [verantwortlich]”,\nHeidegger says (1962 [1927]: 334, translation modified). Authenticity,\ndefined as standing up for and standing behind what one\ndoes—as owning and owning up to one’s deeds as\nan agent in the world—becomes possible in this sort of resolute\ncommitment to the “for the sake of which” of one’s\nexistence.","It should be obvious that this conception of authenticity has very\nlittle to do with the older idea of being true to one’s own pregiven\nfeelings and desires. But there is still a clear respect in which the\nidea of “being true to oneself” has a role to play\nhere. What distinguishes this conception from the conceptions of pop\npsychology and romantic views of authenticity is the fact that the\n“true self” to which we are to be true is not some\npre-given set of substantive feelings, opinions and desires to be\nconsulted through inward-turning or introspection. On the contrary,\nthe “true self” alluded to here is an on-going narrative\nconstruction: the composition of one’s own autobiography through one’s\nconcrete ways of acting over the course of a life as a whole. Feelings\nand desires are, of course, profoundly important, as are the features\nof one’s situation and one’s concrete connections to others. Heidegger\nwants to recover a firm sense of the wholeness of the existing\nindividual. But this wholeness is found in the connectedness of what\nHeidegger calls the “happening” or “movement”\nof a life—that is, in the unfolding and constantly\n“in-progress” storyizing that continues until death. What\nis at stake in the ideal of authenticity is not being true to some\nantecedently given nature, then, but being a person of a\nparticular sort. Heidegger emphasizes that being authentic presupposes\nthat one instantiate such virtues as perseverance, integrity,\nclear-sightedness, flexibility, openness, and so forth. It should be\nobvious that such a life is not necessarily opposed to an ethical and\nsocially engaged existence. On the contrary, authenticity seems to be\nregarded as a “executive virtue” that provides the condition\nfor the possibility of being a moral agent in any meaningful sense\nwhatsoever.","Others argue that Heidegger uses authenticity in both\nevaluative-normative and purely descriptive senses. In the descriptive\nuse of the term, inauthenticity is simply the default condition of\neveryday life, in which our self-relations are mediated by others. In\nthis sense, authenticity involves no judgment about which mode of\nbeing is superior for Dasein. But sometimes Heidegger’s language turns\nnormative (Carman 2003), and the seemingly neutral inauthentic form of\nrelating transforms into something negative. Inauthentic Dasein is now\n“not itself”, loses itself (Selbstverlorenheit), and\nbecomes self-alienated. At this point, it is argued that when\nintroducing the normative-evaluative sense, Heidegger presents three\nmodes of life: authentic—average(ness)—inauthentic, where\nthe authentic and inauthentic modes are existential modifications of\naverage everydayness (Blattner 2006: 130; Dreyfus\n1991). In this\npicture, an authentic way of life is owned, an inauthentic disowned,\nand the middle one—which is how we live much of the\ntime—is simply one that is unowned. Dasein and authenticity\nemerge in contrast to this background and out of this background, so\nthat the primordially indifferent mode is the condition of possibility\nfor authenticity or inauthenticity. In addition, Carman (2003: 295)\nargues that Heidegger’s notion of conscience can help us further\nillustrate his account of authenticity and shows how the “call\nof conscience” may be interpreted as expressive responsiveness\nto one’s own particularity."],"subsection_title":"3.1 Kierkegaard and Heidegger"},{"content":["Published in 1943, Sartre’s opus magnum, Being and\nNothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, had a\nsignificant influence on philosophical thought and intellectual life\nin the second half of the twentieth century. His principal goal in\nthis book is to “repudiate the spirit of\nseriousness” of traditional philosophy as well as of\nbourgeois culture (Sartre 1992a [1943]: 796). The spirit of\nseriousness assumes (1) that there are transcendent values that exist\nantecedently to humans, and (2) that the value of a thing is part of\nthe actual being of the valued thing. Sartre’s view, in contrast, is\nthat all values are generated by human interactions in situations, so\nthat value is a human construct with no extra-human existence in\nthings.","To address the question of human existence, Sartre scrutinizes our\neveryday lives, focusing on two particular aspects. He notes that\nhuman beings, like other entities in the world, have certain concrete\ncharacteristics that make up what he calls their\n“facticity” or what they are “in themselves”\n(en soi). Facticity makes up the element of\n“givenness” we must work with: I find myself with a past,\na body and a social situation that constrains me in what I can\ndo. This “just being there” is above all contingent: there\nis no prior justification or reason for the existence of my being. On\nSartre’s view, the “in itself” does not even have any\ndeterminate characteristics, since every determination (every\n“this, not that”) is first introduced into the\ntotality of being by our specific interpretations of things.","While human beings share their “facticity” with other\nentities in the world, they are unique among the totality of entities\ninsofar as they are capable of distancing themselves from what is\n“in itself” through reflection and self-awareness. Rather\nthan being an item in the world with relatively fixed attributes, what\nis distinctive about me as a human being is that I am capable of putting\nmy own being in question by asking myself, for example, whether I want\nto be a person of a particular sort. This capacity for gaining\ndistance inserts a “not” or a “nonbeing” into\nthe totality of what is, which allows me to organize what surrounds me\ninto a meaningfully differentiated whole. In addition, human\nconsciousness is the source of the “not” because it is\nitself a “nothingness”. In other words, a human being is\nnot just an “in itself” but also a “for itself\n(pour soi), thus characterized by what Sartre calls\n“transcendence”. As transcendence, I am always more than I\nam as facticity because, as surpassing my brute being, I stand before\nan open range of possibilities for self-definition in the future.","Sartre’s notion of transcendence is closely linked with the idea of\nfreedom. Humans are free in the sense that they have the\nability to choose how they are going to interpret things, and in these\ninterpretations they are deciding how things are to count or\nmatter. We constitute the world through our freedom to the extent that\nour ways of taking things determine how reality will be sorted out and\nmatter to us. At the same time, we constitute ourselves\nthrough our own choices: though the facticity of my situation creates\nsome constraints on my possible self-interpretations, it is always up\nto me to decide the meaning of those constraints, and this means that\nwhat I take to be limitations are in fact produced by my own\ninterpretations or meaning-giving activities. Such limitations are\ngrasped in light of antecedent commitments, on the background of which\nsituations becomes intelligible, as affording certain actions and/or\nmodes of evaluation. It is our antecedent commitments that shape our\nworld, making situations and objects intelligible as threatening or\nfavorable, easy or full of obstacles, or more generally, as affording\ncertain actions (Sartre 1992a [1943]: 489). Our engagements provide a\nhermeneutic structure within which our situations and motives become\ncomprehensible and reveal themselves in the way situations appear to\nus—as significant, requiring our attention, etc. (1992a [1943]:\n485).","It is important to note that Sartre’s notion of freedom is\nradical. Freedom is absolute to the extent that each person decides\nthe significance of the constraints in his or her facticity: “I\nfind an absolute responsibility for the fact that my facticity\n… is directly inapprehensible”, because supposed\n“facts” about me are never brute facts, “but always\nappear across a projective reconstruction of my for-itself”\n(Sartre 1992a [1943]: 710). For Sartre, only our choices and their\nprojected ends define our situations as meaningful, as threatening or\nfavorable, as affording certain actions etc. The resistances and\nobstacles that one encounters in a situation acquire meaning only in\nand through the free choice. Thus, individuals are responsible not\nonly for their identities, but for the way the world presents itself\nin their experiences. Even others are just\n“opportunities and chances” for my free\ncreative activity. According to this early formulation, it is up to us\nto interpret how other people are to matter to us relative to\nsituations in which we find ourselves engaged (Sartre 1992a [1943]:\n711).","But human beings are not merely characterized by facticity and\ntranscendence; they are also seen as embodying a deep and\nirreconcilable tension between facticity and transcendence. This\ntension comes to the fore in Sartre’s account of “bad\nfaith”. Bad faith, a kind of self-deception, involves believing\nor taking oneself to be an X while all along one is (and knows\noneself to be) actually a Y. The most familiar form of bad\nfaith is acting as if one were a mere thing—solely\nfacticity—and thereby denying one’s own freedom to make oneself\ninto something very different. Thus, the person who thinks she is a\ncoward “just as a matter of fact” is excluding from view\nthe ability to transform her existence through changed ways of\nbehaving. Such bad faith is a denial of transcendence or freedom.","At first, it might seem that one could escape bad faith by making a\nsincere, deep commitment to something and abiding by that\ncommitment—for example, a total, resolute engagement of the self\ncomparable to Kierkegaard’s notion of an “infinite\npassion”. In this regard, Sartre considers a person who tries to\nwholeheartedly believe that his friend really likes\nhim. “I believe it”, he says, “I decide to\nbelieve in it and maintain myself in this decision…”\n(Sartre 1992a [1943]: 114). My belief will be steady and solid, like\nsomething “in itself” that informs my being and cuts\nthrough all the tenuousness and unsteadiness of my subjective\nlife. I know I believe it, I will say. If I could\nmake myself believe something in this way, then to achieve this might\nbe what we could call “good faith:” to\nactually be something, without the questionability of the\n“not” creeping in. However, Sartre doubts that such an\nabsolute, being-determining commitment is possible. In fact, Sartre\nclaims that any such sort of “good faith” would actually\namount to little more than another form of self-deception. For if my\ndecision to believe is in fact a decision, it must always be something\nthat to some extent distances me from what is decided. That is why we\nuse the word ‘believe’ to imply some degree of\nuncertainty, as when we say, “Is he my friend? Well,\nI believe he is”. Lucid self-awareness shows us that in\nmaking a choice, we can never attain the condition of the “in\nitself”, because what we are is always in question for us. This\nis what Sartre means when he says human being is always\n“previously corrupted” and that “bad faith [always]\nreapprehends good faith” (Sartre 1992a [1943]: 116). Thus, the\nproject of being in good faith seems impossible, as we are always\nnecessarily in bad faith.","The inescapable nature of bad faith seems to leave no room for the\npossibility of authenticity. This might be why the word translated as\n“authentic” only appears twice in this vast tome. On one\noccasion, Sartre attacks Heidegger for introducing the idea of\nauthenticity as a way of providing something foundational in an\notherwise totally contingent world. The concept of authenticity\n“shows all too clearly [Heidegger’s] anxiety to establish an\nontological foundation for an Ethics…” (Sartre 1992a\n[1943]: 128). A second and more obscure appearance of the word comes\nat the end of the discussion of bad faith early in the book. Here\nSartre acknowledges that his account of bad faith seems to have the\nconsequence that there can be no such thing as good faith, so that\n“it is indifferent whether one is in good faith or in bad\nfaith”, and that in turn seems to imply that “we can never\nradically escape bad faith”. Nevertheless, he goes on, there may\nbe a “self-recovery of being which has been previously\ncorrupted”, a recovery “we shall call authenticity, the\ndescription of which has no place here” (Sartre 1992a [1943]:\n116n).","One might thus conclude that there is no way to be true to what one\nis, because there is nothing that one is. However, such a negative\nconclusion would be reached only by someone who embraced from the\noutset the “spirit of seriousness” Sartre sets out to\nattack. Seriousness would lead us to think that there is simply a fact\nof the matter about a person: the person is either a believer or he is\nnot. But, as Linda A. Bell (1989: 45) has noted, there is another\npossibility. If one rejects the spirit of seriousness, one might\nlucidly acknowledge that, as transcendence, one’s belief is\nalways in question and so not really a secure belief. Yet, at the same\ntime, one might also recognize that, as facticity, one\ngenuinely holds a belief, and that the belief is central to one’s\nbeing as an engaged agent in this situation. In Sartre’s convoluted\nstyle of formulation, “he would be right if he recognized\nhimself as a being that is what it is not and is not what it is”\n(Bell 1989: 45). On this account, I believe, but I also acknowledge my\nability to retract the belief, since nothing is ever fixed in\nstone.","What is suggested here is that a correlate of authenticity can be\nfound in the idea of being true to the inescapable tension at the core\nof the human self. This would be attained if one clear-sightedly\nacknowledged the fundamental ambiguity of the human\ncondition. Authenticity would then be what Sartre calls a\n“self-recovery of being which was previously corrupted”\n(1992a [1943]: 116). In a sense, humans can never really be\nanything in the way brute objects can be things with determinate\nattributes. In Bell’s words, authenticity would be “the\nawareness and acceptance of—this basic ambiguity” (1989:\n46). This conclusion is supported by Sartre’s later\nwork, Anti-Semite and Jew where he writes,","Authenticity, it is almost needless to say,\nconsists in having a true and lucid consciousness of the situation, in\nassuming the responsibilities and risks it involves, in accepting it\n… sometimes in horror and hate. (1948: 90)","Lucid recognition of the ambiguity of the human condition is the\nleading idea behind Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity.\nBeauvoir takes over Sartre’s characterization of the human condition\nand expands on ideas only hinted at in Sartre’s famous lecture,\n“The Humanism of Existentialism” (1946), in developing a\nconception of authenticity. According to Beauvoir, Sartre’s conception\nof the human being as “engaged freedom” implies not just\nthat each individual finds his or her “reason for being”\nin concrete realizations of freedom, but that willing one’s own\nfreedom necessarily involves willing the freedom of all humans. In\nachieving one’s own freedom, she writes, freedom must also will\n“an open future, by seeking to extend itself by means of the\nfreedom of others” (1948: 60). The point here is that a\ndedication to freedom, when clearly grasped in its full implications,\nwill be seen to call for a future in which an unrestricted range of\npossibilities is open to all.","Beauvoir also builds on Sartre’s notion of engagement to\nextend the idea of authenticity. Following Sartre, we are always\nalready engaged in the affairs of the world, whether we realize it or\nnot. To be human is to be already caught up in the midst of social and\nconcrete situations that call for commitments of certain sorts on our\npart. Sartre takes this ground-level fact of engagement as the basis\nfor exhorting us to be engaged in a deeper sense, where this implies\nthat we decisively and wholeheartedly involve ourselves in what the\ncurrent situation demands. Of course, once we have abandoned the\nspirit of seriousness, we will recognize that there are no\nantecedently given principles or values that dictate the proper course\nfor our existential engagement, so that any commitment will be tenuous\nand groundless. But the authentic individual will be the one who takes\nup the terrifying freedom of being the ultimate source of values,\nembraces it, and acts with a clarity and firmness suitable to his or\nher best understanding of what is right in this context. In this way,\nthe conception of authenticity is continuous with the ideal of being\ntrue to ourselves: we are called upon to become, in our concrete\nlives, what we already are in the ontological structure of our\nbeing.","This is in agreement with the manner in which Sartre describes the\nconsequences of acting against one’s deepest commitments.","There is no doubt that I could have done\notherwise, but that is not the problem. It ought to be formulated like\nthis: could I have done otherwise without perceptibly modifying the\norganic totality of the projects that make up who I am?","Sartre goes on to say that the character of the\nact may be such that","instead of remaining a purely local and accidental\nmodification of my behavior, it could be effected only by means of a\nradical transformation of my being-in-the-world… In other\nwords: I could have acted otherwise. Agreed. But at what price?\n(Sartre 1992a [1943]: 454)","Thus, acting otherwise or, more precisely,\nfailing to act on one’s fundamental commitments, comes at the price of\ntransforming who one is. This change effectively precludes one from\ncarrying on with an unchanged self-conception."],"subsection_title":"3.2 Sartre and de Beauvoir"}]},{"main_content":["In the last three decades, authors like Taylor (1989, 1991, 1995,\n2007), Ferrara (1993; 1998), Jacob Golomb (1995), Guignon (2004, 2008) and\nVarga (2011a) have attempted to reconstruct authenticity by\nmaintaining that the justified criticism of self-indulgent forms of\nthe idea does not justify the total condemnation of the idea itself\n(see Taylor 1991: 56). Instead of abandoning the notion of\nauthenticity, they attempt to reconstruct it in a manner that leads\nneither to aestheticism nor to atomistic self-indulgence."," In The Ethics of Authenticity, and the more fully\narticulated Sources of the Self, Taylor makes a case for\nretaining the concept of authenticity (and the practices associated\nwith it) on the grounds that the original and undistorted idea of\nauthenticity contains an important element of self-transcendence\n(Taylor 1991: 15; Anderson 1995). Unsatisfied with the widespread\ncriticism of authenticity as an adequate ethical orientation, Taylor\nsets out to prove that authenticity does not necessarily lead to\naestheticism or self-indulgence: the justified criticism of\nself-indulgent forms of the ideal does not justify the complete\ncondemnation of the ideal itself (Taylor 1991: 56). This would mean\nextricating aestheticism, subjectivism, individualism, and\nself-indulgent interpretations of this ideal from what Taylor (Ibid.:\n15) holds to be an original understanding of that concept as achieving\nself-transcendence (Anderson 1995). Restoring an undistorted version,\nTaylor says, could guard against meaninglessness, which is one of the\n“malaises of modernity” that Taylor regards as tied to\ntrivialized forms of the culture of authenticity. Self-transcendence,\nwhich once was a crucial element in the ideal of authenticity, is\npractically lost from the contemporary version, giving rise to\ncultures of self-absorption, which ultimately deteriorate into the\nmalaise of absurdity.","Already in Sources of the Self, Taylor draws attention to\nhow modernism gives birth to a new kind of inward turn that not only\nattempts to overcome the mechanistic conception of the self linked to\ndisengaged reason but also the Romantic ideal of a faultless alignment\nof inner nature and reason. Instead, for the modernists, a turn inward\ndid not mean a turn towards a self that needs articulation.","On the contrary, the turn inward may take us\nbeyond the self as usually understood, to a fragmentation of\nexperience which calls our ordinary notions of identity into\nquestion. (Taylor 1989: 462)","While in modernism, the turn inward still contained a\nself-transcending moment, the critical point where the ideal of\nauthenticity becomes flattened is when it becomes\n‘contaminated’ by a certain form of\n‘self-determining freedom’ that also contains elements of\ninwardness and unconventionality (Taylor 1991: 38). Self-determining\nfreedom","\nis the idea that I am free when I decide for myself what concerns\nme, rather than being shaped by external influences. It is a standard\nof freedom that obviously goes beyond what has been called negative\nliberty (being free to do what I want without interference by others)\nbecause that is compatible with one’s being shaped and influenced by\nsociety and its laws of conformity. Instead, self-determining freedom\ndemands that one break free of all such external impositions and\ndecide for oneself alone. (Taylor 1991: 27)","Not only is self-determining freedom not a necessary part of\nauthenticity, it is also counterproductive because its\nself-centeredness flattens the meanings of lives and fragments\nidentities. For Taylor, the process of articulating an identity\ninvolves adopting a relationship to the good or to what is important,\nwhich is connected to one’s membership in a language community (Taylor\n1989: 34–35). As he clearly states, “authenticity is not\nthe enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it presupposes\nsuch demands” (Taylor 1991: 41). It cannot be up to me to decide\nwhat is important, since this would be self-defeating. Instead,\nwhatever is important for me must connect to an inter-subjective\nnotion of the good, wherefrom a good part of its normative force\nlastly emanates. In this sense, authenticity simply requires\nmaintaining bonds to collective questions of worth that point beyond\none’s own preferences. Taylor wants to show that modes of contemporary\nculture that opt for self-fulfillment without regard","(a) to the demands of our ties with others, or (b)\nto demands of any kind emanating from something more or other than\nhuman desires or aspirations are self-defeating, that they destroy the\nconditions for realizing authenticity itself. (Taylor 1991:\n35)","Thus, not only do we need the recognition of concrete others in\norder to form our identities, but we must also (critically) engage\nwith a common vocabulary of shared value orientations. In other words,\nTaylor points out that authenticity needs the appropriation of values\nthat make up our collective horizons.","In his Reflective Authenticity, Alessandro Ferrara also\nsets out to defend authenticity as an ideal, but in contrast to Taylor\nhe is interested in the social and philosophical issues of the\nrelation between authenticity and validity. According to Ferrara’s\ndiagnosis, we are currently witnessing a profound transition that,\nbesides affecting cultures, values and norms, also touch on the\n“foundations of validity,” thereby affecting the\n“bedrock of the symbolic network through which we relate to\nreality and reproduce our life-forms” (Ferrara 1998: 1). At the\ncore of this transformation is the reformulation of\n“well-being” (eudaimonia) as the normative ideal\nof authenticity, which can be of help in reconstructing a contemporary\nunderstanding of normativity. For Ferrara, it can ground a new ideal\nof universal validity “ultimately linked with the model of\nexemplary uniqueness or enlightening singularity thus far associated\nwith ‘aesthetics’” (Ferrara 1998: 10). Authenticity\nis then characterized by the “self-congruency” of an\nindividual, collective or symbolic identity (Ferrara 1998: 70), and is\nthought of as providing a new universal validity that does not build\non the generalizable but rather on the exemplary. Ferrara views\nSimmel’s idea of an individual law as an instructive example of such\nan anti-generalizing universalism, and it is exactly this\ncharacteristic that makes it better suited to the pluralist contexts\nfaced by modern Western societies. More recently, Ferrara (2019) has argued that authenticity currently faces a “dual paradox” and is misconstrued by many critics advocating its deconstructionist dismissal.","Golomb (1995) provides an informative historical overview of the\ngenesis and development of the concept of authenticity, paying\nattention to both literary and philosophical sources. While\ncontinuously reminding us of the inherently social dimension of\nauthenticity, one of the achievements here is the focus on boundary\nsituations where authenticity “is best forged and\nrevealed” (Ibid.: 201). Golomb takes a neutral position on the\nethical value of authenticity, maintaining that “there is no\nreason to suppose that it is any better or any more valuable to be\nauthentic than to act inauthentically” (Ibid.: 202).","Guignon (2004) explores both the philosophical roots of\nauthenticity and its contemporary manifestations in popular\nculture. He thoughtfully criticizes pop-psychological literature that\ndeals with the authentic life by making recourse to the subdued\n‘inner child’. Since Rousseau, the dichotomy between\nauthentic and inauthentic has often been interpreted akin to the\ndistinction between child and adult (Guignon 2004: 43). Like the inner\nchild, the authentic self is depicted as not yet corrupted by the\npressures, competitiveness, and conformity of modern public\nlife. Guignon draws on the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Jung\nto remind us of less romanticized visions of the inner\nchild. Additionally, Guignon (2004: 151) aims to identify the manner\nin which authenticity can be understood as being at the same time a\npersonal and a “fundamentally and irreducibly” social\nvirtue. Authenticity then involves reflectively discerning what is\nreally worth pursuing in the social context in which the agent is\nsituated (Ibid.: 155). If the ideal of authenticity is possible only\nin a free society with a solid foundation of established social\nvirtues, it would seem that trying to be authentic, if it is to be\ncoherent, must involve a commitment to sustaining and nurturing the\ntype of society in which such an ideal is possible. A reflection on\nthe social embodiment of virtues therefore suggests that authenticity,\nlike many other character ideals, carries with it an obligation to\ncontribute to the maintenance and well-being of a particular type of\nsocial organization and way of life (Guignon 2008: 288; 2004: 161). On\nthe other hand, Guignon (2004, 2008) argues that in a democratic\nsociety, in which the authority of government—in setting the\npolitical course—stems from the consent of the governed, there\nis good reason to promote virtues like authenticity that sustain such\nan organization of government. To be authentic is to be clear about\none’s own most basic feelings, desires and convictions, and to openly\nexpress one’s stance in the public arena. But that capacity is\nprecisely the character trait that is needed in order to be an\neffective member of a democratic society (Guignon 2008: 288)."," Varga (2011a) shares the fundamental assumption that authenticity\nhas a certain potential (and therefore deserves to be reformulated),\nbut he also thinks that it could be used for a critical inquiry into\nthe practices of the self in contemporary life. By way of an analysis\nof self-help and self-management literature, Varga detects a\n“paradoxical transformation:” the ideal of authenticity\nthat once provided an antidote to hierarchical institutions and\nrequirements of capitalism, now seems to function both as an\ninstitutionalized demand towards subjects to match the systemic\ndemands of contemporary capitalism and as a factor in the economic\nutilization of subjective capacities. Varga argues that it is in\n“existential” choices that we express who we are, and that\nthese have a complex phenomenology characterized by a sense of\nnecessity. In such choices, described as “alternativeless\nchoices”, we articulate who we are, bringing into reality some\ntacit intuitions that often only take on a gestalt-like formation. In\nthese cases, we both discover who we are “on the inside”,\nand actively constitute ourselves. Varga’s examination of the\nstructure of our commitments culminates in the claim that the internal\nstructure of our commitments commits us to more than what we happen to\ncare about. In many cases it may actually commit us to publicly\nintelligible values that we take our commitments to embody—an\naspect that may constrain the manner of our practical deliberation and\nthe way in which we can pursue our commitments (Varga 2011a,b).","Along similar lines, Bauer (2017) defends authenticity as an ethical ideal, arguing that the ideal should understood as the combination of the ideal of expressing one’s individual personality and the ideal of being an autonomous and morally responsible person. Others have argued that authenticity might require more than living in accord with commitments that one wholeheartedly endorses. For example, Rings (2017) highlights an epistemic criterion. The point is that the commitments in question have to be chosen in light of an acknowledgment of facts concerning one’s personal history and present context. Thus, self-knowledge might matter more than hitherto recognized, even if the self-relation most pertinent to authenticity is not primarily of an epistemic nature. \n"],"section_title":"4. Recent Accounts of Authenticity","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Origins and Meaning of the Concept of Authenticity\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"A number of significant cultural changes in the seventeenth and\\neighteenth centuries led to the emergence of a new ideal in the\\nWestern world (Trilling 1972). During this period, human beings came to be\\nthought of more as individuals than as placeholders in systems of\\nsocial relations. This emphasis on the importance of the individual is\\nseen in the prevalence of autobiographies and self-portraits, where\\nthe individual becomes the centre of attention not because of\\nextraordinary feats or access to special knowledge, but because he or\\nshe is an individual.\",\n \"In the same period, society comes to be seen not as an organic\\nwhole of interacting components, but as an aggregate of individual\\nhuman beings, a social system with a life of its own, which presents\\nitself to the individual as not itself quite human but rather as\\nartificial, the result of a “social contract”. Being human\\nis understood as being best achieved through being unique and\\ndistinctive, even when these collide with certain social norms. At the\\nsame time, there is an increasing awareness of what Charles Taylor\\n(1989) calls “inwardness” or “internal\\nspace”. The result is a distinction between one’s private and\\nunique individuality, and one’s public self (Taylor 1991; Trilling\\n1972).\",\n \"With these social changes there is a sharp shift in the conceptions\\nof approbation and disapproval that are commonly used in judging\\nothers and oneself. For instance, concepts like sincerity and honor\\nbecome obsolescent (Berger 1970). In earlier times, a sincere person\\nwas seen as someone who honestly attempts to neither violate the\\nexpectations that follow from the position he holds in society, nor to\\nstrive to appear otherwise than he ought to. However, by the time of\\nHegel, the ideal of sincerity had lost its normative appeal. Hegel\\npolemically refers to sincerity as “the heroism of dumb\\nservice” (Hegel 2002 [1807]: 515) and launches an attack on the\\nbourgeois “honest man,” who passively internalizes a\\nparticular conventional social ethos. In the condition of sincerity,\\nthe individual is uncritically obedient to the power of\\nsociety—a conformity that for Hegel leads to subjugation and a\\ndeterioration of the individual (Hegel 2002 [1807]; Golomb 1995: 9;\\nTrilling 1972). For Hegel, in the progress of “spirit”,\\nthe individual consciousness will eventually move from this condition\\nof sincerity to a condition of baseness, in which the individual\\nbecomes antagonistic to external societal powers and achieves a\\nmeasure of autonomy. Hegel shows this clearly in a comment on\\nDiderot’s Rameau’s Nephew, a story in which the narrator\\n(supposedly Diderot himself) is portrayed as the reasonable, sincere\\nman who respects the prevailing order and who has achieved bourgeois\\nrespectability. In contrast, the nephew is full of contempt for the\\nsociety in which he figures as a worthless person. However, he is in\\nopposition to himself, because he still aspires to a better standing\\nin a society, which he believes has nothing but emptiness to offer\\n(Despland 1975: 360; Golomb 1995: 13–15). For Hegel, the\\nnarrator is an example of the sincere, honest soul, while the nephew\\nfigures as the “disintegrated,” alienated\\nconsciousness. The nephew is clearly alienated, but for Hegel this\\nalienation is a step in the progression towards autonomous existence\\n(Williams 2002: 190).\",\n \"In the midst of this conceptual change, the term\\n‘authenticity’ becomes applicable in demarcating a\\nsomewhat new set of virtues. The older concept of sincerity, referring\\nto being truthful in order to be honest in one’s dealings with others,\\ncomes to be replaced by a relatively new concept of authenticity,\\nunderstood as being true to oneself for one’s own benefit. Earlier,\\nthe moral advice to be authentic recommended that one should be true\\nto oneself in order thereby to be true to others. Thus,\\nbeing true to oneself is seen as a means to the end of\\nsuccessful social relations. In contrast, in our contemporary\\nthinking, authenticity as a virtue term is seen as referring to a way\\nof acting that is choiceworthy in itself (Ferrara 1993; Varga\\n2011a; Varga 2011b).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.1 Sincerity and Authenticity\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"The growing appeal of the idea of authenticity has led to the\\nemergence of a highly influential modern “ethic of\\nauthenticity” (Ferrara 1993; Ferrara 2017). This ethic acknowledges the value\\nof the dominant “ethic of autonomy” that shapes modern\\nmoral thought (Schneewind 1998; Dworkin 1988). The idea of autonomy\\nemphasizes the individual’s self-governing abilities, the independence\\nof one’s deliberation from manipulation and the capacity to decide for\\noneself. It is connected to the view that moral principles and the\\nlegitimacy of political authority should be grounded in the\\nself-governing individual who is free from diverse cultural and social\\npressures. According to the ethic of autonomy, each individual should\\nfollow those norms he or she can will on the basis of rational\\nreflective endorsement. To some extent, authenticity and autonomy\\nagree in supposing that one should strive to lead one’s life according\\nto one’s own reasons and motives, relying on one’s capacity to\\nfollow self-imposed guidelines. In both cases, it is crucial\\nthat one has the ability to put one’s own behavior under reflexive\\nscrutiny and make it dependent on self-determined goals (Honneth\\n1994).\",\n \"One crucial difference is that the ethic of authenticity introduces\\nthe idea that there are motives, desires and commitments that\\nsometimes should outweigh the restrictions of rational\\nreflection. This is because those motives are so fundamental to the\\ncohesion of one’s own identity that overriding them would mean\\ndisintegrating the very self which is necessary to be a moral\\nagent. The point is that there are types of moral philosophical\\nreasoning that can be repressive if they arise from “an\\nautonomous moral conscience not complemented by sensitivity to the\\nequilibrium of identity and by authenticity” (Ferrara 1993:\\n102). Besides leading an autonomous life, guided by one’s own,\\nnon-constrained reasons and motives, authenticity requires that these\\nmotives and reasons should be expressive of one’s\\nself-identity. Authenticity guides the moral agent to follow only\\nthose “moral sources outside the subject [that speak in\\na language] which resonate[s] within him or her”, in\\nother words, moral sources that accord with “an order which is\\ninseparably indexed to a personal vision” (Taylor 1989:\\n510). Hence, authenticity entails an aspect that lies beyond the scope\\nof autonomy, namely, a “language of personal resonance”\\n(Taylor 1991: 90). This points to the gap between (Kantian) autonomy\\nand authenticity: one can lead an autonomous life, even if this way of\\nliving fails to express a person’s self-understanding.\",\n \" In recent years, more attention has been devoted to highlighting how autonomy and authenticity can come apart (e.g. Oshana 2007; Roessler 2012; MacKay forthcoming). Some argue that authenticity demands more than is necessary for autonomy: a person does not have to reflectively endorse key aspects of her identity in order to qualify as autonomous (Oshana 2007). If she acknowledges that aspects of her identity contradict her self-conception, she might still be autonomous, even if this acknowledgement injects ambivalence into her life.\",\n \" In all, the ideal of authenticity does not object to the importance\\nof the self-given law, but disagrees that full freedom consists in\\nmaking and following such a law (Menke 2005: 308). It is not just\\nabout being involved in the authorship of such a law, but about how\\nthis law fits with the wholeness of a person’s life, and how or\\nwhether it expresses who the person is. In this sense, the idea of\\nautonomy already represents a counterposition to an ethic that is\\nsolely concerned with strict adherence to social norms.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.2 Autonomy and Authenticity\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Another decisive factor in the development of the ideal of\\nauthenticity was that it emerged together with a distinctively modern\\nconception of the self. This is visible in the work of Rousseau, who\\nargues that the orientation toward life that should guide the conduct\\none chooses should come from a source within. This led to questions\\nabout inwardness, self-reflection and introspection, many of them\\naddressed in his Confessions (1770). When the space of\\ninteriority becomes a guiding authority, the individual must detect\\nand distinguish central impulses, feelings and wishes from ones that\\nare less central or conflict with one’s central motives. In other\\nwords, interiority must be divided into what is at the core and what\\nis peripheral. In this picture, the measure of one’s actions is\\nwhether they spring from and express essential aspects of one’s\\nidentity or whether they come from a peripheral place.\",\n \"Such a conception of the self exhibits decisive parallels to the\\ntradition of “religious individualism” that centers\\nreligious life on the individual and stresses the importance of\\ninwardness and the introspective examination of one’s inner motives,\\nintentions and conscience. Investigating the characteristics of the\\nmodern subject of inwardness, Foucault (1980: 58–60) suggests\\nthat “it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret\\nnature, ‘demands’ only to surface.” For Foucault,\\nconfession—the look inward to monitor one’s interior life and to\\ntell certain “truths” about oneself—has become a\\npart of a cultural life, reaching from religious contexts to\\npsychological therapy. The radicalization of the distinction between\\ntrue and false interiority has led to new possibilities; inner states,\\nmotivations and feelings are now increasingly thought of as\\nobjectifiable and malleable in different contexts.\",\n \" Rousseau also adds that acting on motives that spring from the\\nperiphery of the self, while ignoring or denying essential aspects of\\none’s self, simply amounts to self-betrayal and annihilation of the\\nself. Rousseau’s The New Heloise (1997 [1761]) emphasizes\\nthis aspect by showing how the novel accentuates the significant costs\\nand the potential self-alienation involved in suppressing one’s\\ndeepest motivations. But, in addition, in the Discourse on the\\nOrigin of Inequality, Rousseau argues that, with the emergence of\\na competitive public sphere, the ability to turn inward is\\nincreasingly compromised, because competitive relations require\\nintense role-playing, which Rousseau calls an “excessive\\nlabor” (Rousseau 1992 [1754]: 22). The ongoing instrumental\\nrole-playing not only causes alienation, but ultimately inequality and\\ninjustice, since it destroys the immanent moral understanding with\\nwhich, according to Rousseau, humans are hard-wired. Social life requires identification with social roles, but because role identity is determined by other people’s normative expectations, role-playing leads to a tension that might be understood as a matter of politics more than anything else (Schmid 2017). \\n\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.3 Authenticity and the self\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"The idea of autonomy—the view that each individual must\\ndecide how to act based on his or her own rational deliberations about\\nthe best course of action—has in many ways paved the way for the\\nidea of authenticity. However, authenticity goes beyond autonomy by\\nholding that an individual’s feelings and deepest desires can outweigh\\nboth the outcome of rational deliberation in making decisions, and our\\nwillingness to immerse ourselves into the reigning norms and values of\\nsociety. Whereas sincerity generally seems to accept a given social\\norder, authenticity becomes an implicitly critical concept, often\\ncalling into question the reigning social order and public opinion. In\\nRousseau’s optic, one of our most important projects is to avert from\\nthe social sphere and to unearth what is truly us underneath\\nthe ‘masks’ that society forces on us. But when\\nauthenticity comes to be regarded as something like sincerity for its\\nown sake (Ferrara 1993: 86), it becomes increasingly hard to see what\\nthe moral good is that it is supposed to bring into being.\",\n \"A frequently mentioned worry with the ideal of authenticity is that\\nthe focus on one’s own inner feelings and attitudes may breed a\\nself-centered preoccupation with oneself that is anti-social and\\ndestructive of altruism and compassion toward others. Christopher\\nLasch (1979)\\npoints out similarities between the clinical disorder referred to as\\nNarcissistic Personality Disorder and authenticity. According to\\nLasch, narcissism and authenticity are both characterized by deficient\\nempathic skills, self-indulgence and self-absorbed\\nbehavior. Similarly, Allan Bloom (1987: 61) maintains that the culture\\nof authenticity has made the minds of the youth “narrower and\\nflatter,” leading to self-centeredness and the collapse of the\\npublic self. While Lasch and Bloom worry about the threat that the\\nself-centeredness and narcissism of the “culture of\\nauthenticity” poses to morality and political coherence, Daniel\\nBell voices worries about its economic viability. What Bell fears is\\nthat the “megalomania of self-infinitization” that comes\\nwith the culture of authenticity will erode the foundations of market\\nmechanisms that are “based on a moral system of reward rooted in\\nthe Protestant sanctification of work” (Bell 1976: 84).\\nMore recently, critics have argued that when properly analyzed, authenticity demands positing the existence of a “true self.” It requires positing an essentialist structure leading to metaphysical problems that current accounts of authenticity fail to solve (Bialystok 2014). Correspondingly, Feldman (2014) argues in favor of abandoning the ideal of authenticity because it builds on confused assumptions about the self, the value of one’s “gut feelings” in revealing one’s values, and the supposedly corrupting influence of the “external” social realm (for a critique of this position, see Bauer 2017; Ferrara 2009)\\n\",\n \"However, one might argue that this only becomes a problem if one\\nthinks of authenticity as entirely a personal virtue. In other words,\\nthere is only a clash between morality and social life and being\\nauthentic if the “true” self is regarded as fundamentally\\nprone to anti-social behaviour. But many thinkers at this time\\nunderstood human nature as fundamentally disposed toward beneficence,\\nso that evil was seen as arising from socialization and upbringing\\nrather than from deep drives within the human being. For instance,\\nRousseau holds that certain immoral characteristics are immanent in\\nman but were produced by the dynamics of modern society, which is\\ncharacterized by a competitive way of relating to others and striving\\nfor acknowledgement in the public sphere. Rousseau thus externalizes\\nthe origins of societal evil and alienation from the original nature\\nof man. The undistorted self-relation of natural man inspires sympathy\\nand considerate relations with others, sensitive to “seeing any\\nsentient being, especially our fellow-man, perish or suffer,\\nprincipally those like ourselves” (Rousseau 1992 [1754]: 14). In\\nsomewhat the same way, economic theorists of the time supposed that\\nunregulated markets are self-correcting, as human beings are naturally\\ninclined to engage in mutually advantageous commercial activities\\n(Taylor 2007: 221–269). On this view, authenticity does not\\namount to egoism or self-absorption. On the contrary, the prevailing\\nview seems to have been that, by turning inward and accessing the\\n“true” self, one is simultaneously led towards a deeper\\nengagement with the social world. This is why Taylor (1989:\\n419–455) describes the trajectory of the project of authenticity\\nis “inward and upward”.\",\n \"It might however be objected that supposing that the\\n“inner” is a morally worthy guide is deeply misguided and\\nbuilds upon an overly optimistic idea of human nature. It may be\\nargued that once the idea of rational deliberation is set aside, the\\npowerful impact of the non-rational becomes apparent. Thinkers such as\\nNietzsche and Freud have put in question the conception of human\\nnature, and especially of our “inner” nature, as\\nfundamentally good. Following their “hermeneutics of\\nsuspicion” (Ricoeur 1970), human nature comes to be seen as\\nincluding forces of violence, disorder and unreason as well as\\ntendencies toward beneficence and altruism. In that case, any idea of\\nan ethic based primarily on the ideal of authenticity is simply\\nuntenable.\",\n \"Others have expressed serious concerns not about the optimistic\\nview of human nature, but about the conception of the self that\\nunderlies the idea of authenticity. Some argued that the dichotomies\\nthat the concept authenticity was built on, like conformity\\nvs. independence, individual vs. society, or inner-directedness\\nvs. other-directedness, were entirely misguided. The underlying\\nassumption that considers the individual separate from the environment\\nis an absurd assumption that erodes that bond between the individual\\nand community, which ultimately is the source of the authentic self\\n(Slater 1970: 15; Sisk 1973). In agreement with Slater (1970) and Yankelovich\\n(1981), Bellah et al. (1985) and Fairlie (1978) contend\\nthat such a pursuit of authenticity is self-defeating, for with the\\nloss of the bond with community, the sense of self is also\\ndiminished.\",\n \"Additionally, in The Jargon of Authenticity, Adorno\\ncontended that the “liturgy of inwardness” is founded on\\nthe flawed idea of a self-transparent individual who is capable of\\nchoosing herself (Adorno 1973: 70). The doubtful picture of the\\nself-centered individual covers up the constitutive alterity and\\nmimetic nature of the self. In the concluding part of The Order of\\nThings, Foucault maintained that present society was witnessing a\\ncrisis, not only of authenticity but also of the whole idea of the\\nsubject in its temporary historically contingent constitution,\\nforeseeing that “man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand\\nat the edge of the sea” (Foucault 1994: 387). Foucault clearly\\nopposed the idea of a hidden authentic self, which he critically\\nreferred to as the “Californian cult of the self” (1983:\\n266). The recognition that the subject is not given to itself in\\nadvance leads him to the practical consequence that it must create\\nitself as a work of art (Foucault 1983: 392). Rather than searching for a hidden true\\nself, one should attempt to shape one’s life as a work of art,\\nproceeding without recourse to any fixed rules or permanent truths in\\na process of unending becoming (Foucault 1988: 49). In a similar vein,\\nRichard Rorty has argued that the idea of coming to “know a\\ntruth which was out there (or in here) all the time” (Rorty\\n1989: 27) is simply a myth. Postmodern thought raises questions about\\nthe existence of an underlying subject with essential properties\\naccessible through introspection. The whole idea of the authentic as\\nthat which is “original”, “essential”,\\n“proper”, and so forth now seems doubtful. If we are\\nself-constituting beings who make ourselves up from one moment to the\\nnext, it appears that the term “authenticity” can refer\\nonly to whatever feels right at some particular moment.\",\n \"Yet others have based their criticism of authenticity especially on\\nthe emergence of a pervasive “culture of\\nauthenticity”. Cultural critics have argued that the ostensible\\n“decline” of modern society might not primarily be a\\nresult of economical or structural transformations, but as the outcome\\nof an increasingly ubiquitous ideal of authenticity. Before we turn to\\nthese critiques, it is helpful to understand how the ideal of\\nauthenticity became so widespread. First, we should mention that\\nRousseau’s work, made a significant contribution to the popularization\\nof authenticity. Indeed, some argue that authenticity can be seen as a “keystone” in Rousseau’s work, giving unity to his reflections on sociality, political order, and education (Ferrara 2017: 2). Particularly The New Heloise (1997 [1761])\\nwas enormously influential, with at least 70 editions in print before\\n1800 (Darnton 1984: 242). This dispersion of the ideal of authenticity\\ninto popular culture was further strengthened by several factors. For\\ninstance, a wide array of intellectuals of the nineteenth and the\\nearly twentieth century had embraced the idea of authenticity, and\\neven radicalized it by resisting established codes and publicly\\ndefending alternative, “artistic” or\\n“bohemian” modes of life.\",\n \" The reception of the work of Sartre and Heidegger has surely\\ncontributed to the popularization of the idea of authenticity, and the\\ndecisive impact of this idea first began to manifest itself after the\\nSecond World War (Taylor 2007: 475). Rossinow contends that the\\npolitics of the 1960s were centered on questions of authenticity.\\nFollowing his account, the main driving force towards political and\\nsocial changes of the New Left movement in the 1960s was “a\\nsearch for authenticity in industrial American life” (Rossinow\\n1998: 345). Both J. Farrell (1997) and Rossinow argue that the New\\nLeft emerged partly as a reaction to traditional American liberalism\\nand Christian existentialism, replacing the negative concept of\\n“sin” with “alienation” and the positive goal\\nof “salvation” with that of\\n“authenticity”. Confronted with what they understood as\\nalienation that “isn’t restricted to the poor” (Rossinow\\n1998: 194), New Left activism reached beyond civil rights to moral\\nrights and attempted to bring about a recovery of a sense of personal\\nwholeness and authenticity by curing the institutions of American\\nsociety.\",\n \"The emerging youth culture was characterized by a severe\\ndissatisfaction with the “morass of conformity” of the\\nparental generation (Gray 1965: 57). The critique of the growing\\nconformity of life got more persistent during the 1950s, and a number\\nof social scientists in widely read books criticized what they saw as\\nwidespread conformity and inauthenticity. Among these, The Lonely\\nCrowd (1950) by Riesman and The Organization Man (1956)\\nby Whyte received the most attention. Riesman points out that the\\nefficacious functioning of modern organizations requires\\nother-directed individuals who smoothly adjust to their\\nenvironment. However, he also notes that such people compromised\\nthemselves, and a society consisting mostly of other-directed\\nindividuals faces substantial deficiencies in leadership and human\\npotential.\",\n \"On the background of this development, it seems that at a time when\\nrelativism appears difficult to surmount, authenticity has become a\\nlast measure of value and a common currency in contemporary cultural\\nlife (Jay 2004). So, under the impact of existentialism on Western\\nculture, the ubiquitous desire for authenticity has emerged in modern\\nsociety as “one of the most politically explosive of human\\nimpulses,” as Marshall Berman argues (1970: xix). \"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Critique of Authenticity\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Conceptions of Authenticity\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Kierkegaard’s work on authenticity and his suggestion that\\neach of us is to “become what one is” (1992 [1846]: 130),\\nis best seen as linked to his critical stance towards a certain social\\nreality and a certain essentialist trend in philosophical and\\nscientific thought. On the one hand, he (1962 [1846]) condemned\\naspects of his contemporary social world, claiming that many people\\nhave come to function as merely place-holders in a society that\\nconstantly levels down possibilities to the lowest common\\ndenominator. In more contemporary terms, we can say that Kierkegaard\\nprovides a criticism of modern society as causing\\n“inauthenticity”. Living in a society characterized by\\nsuch “massification” lead to what he refers to as\\nwidespread “despair” that comes to the fore as\\nspiritlessness, denial, and defiance. On the other hand, he rejected\\nthe view that a human being should be regarded as an object,\\nas a substance with certain essential attributes. Rather than\\nbeing an item among others, Kierkegaard proposes to understand the\\nself in relational terms: “The self is a relation that relates\\nitself to itself…” (Kierkegaard 1980 [1849]:13). This\\nrelation consists in the unfolding project of taking what we find\\nourselves with as beings in the world and imparting some meaning or\\nconcrete identity to our own life course. Thus, the self is defined by\\nconcrete expressions through which one manifests oneself in\\nthe world and thereby constitutes one’s identity over time. In\\nKierkegaard’s view, “becoming what one is” and evading\\ndespair and hollowness is not a matter of solitary introspection, but\\nrather a matter of passionate commitment to a relation to something\\noutside oneself that bestows one’s life with meaning. For Kierkegaard,\\nas a religious thinker, this ultimate commitment was his defining\\nrelation to God. The idea is that passionate care about something\\noutside ourselves gives diachronic coherence in our lives and provides\\nthe basis for the narrative unity of the self (Davenport 2012).\",\n \"Heidegger’s conception of human existence (or, as calls it,\\nDasein, ‘being-there’) echoes Kierkegaard’s\\nconception of the “self”. Rather than being an object\\namong others, Dasein is a “relation of being”\\n(Seinsverhältnis; Heidegger 1962 [1927]: 12)—a\\nrelation that obtains between what one is at any moment and what one\\ncan and will be as the temporally extended unfolding of life into a\\nrealm of possibilities. To conceive Dasein as relational means that in\\nliving out our lives, we always already care: for each of us,\\nour being is always at issue and this is made concrete in the\\nspecific actions we undertake and the roles we enact. Over the course\\nof our lives, our identities are always in question: we are always\\nprojections into the future, incessantly taking a stand on who we\\nare.\",\n \"The most familiar conception of “authenticity” comes to\\nus mainly from Heidegger’s Being and Time of 1927. The word\\nwe translate as ‘authenticity’ is actually a neologism\\ninvented by Heidegger, the word Eigentlichkeit, which comes\\nfrom an ordinary term, eigentlich, meaning\\n‘really’ or ‘truly’, but is built on the\\nstem eigen, meaning ‘own’ or\\n‘proper’. So the word might be more literally translated\\nas ‘ownedness’, or ‘being owned’, or even\\n‘being one’s own’, implying the idea of owning up to and\\nowning what one is and does (for a stimulating recent interpretation, see McManus 2019). Nevertheless, the word\\n‘authenticity’ has become closely associated with\\nHeidegger as a result of early translations of Being and Time\\ninto English, and was adopted by Sartre and Beauvoir as well as by\\nexistentialist therapists and cultural theorists who followed\\nthem.[1]\",\n \"Heidegger’s conception of ownedness as the most fully realized\\nhuman form of life emerges from his view of what it is to be a human\\nbeing. This conception of human Dasein echoes Kierkegaard’s\\ndescription of a “self”. On Heidegger’s account, Dasein is\\nnot a type of object among others in the totality of what is on hand\\nin the universe. Instead, human being is a “relation of\\nbeing”, a relation\\nthat obtains between what one is at any moment (the immediacy of the\\nconcrete present as it has evolved) and what one can and will be as\\nthe temporally extended unfolding or happening of life into\\nan open realm of possibilities. To say that human being is a relation\\nis to say that, in living out our lives, we always care about\\nwho and what we are. Heidegger expresses this by saying that, for each\\nof us, our being (what our lives will amount to overall) is\\nalways at issue. This “being at stake” or\\n“being in question for oneself” is made concrete in the\\nspecific stands we take—that is, in the roles we\\nenact—over the course of our lives. It is because our being (our\\nidentity) is in question for us that we are always taking a stand on\\nwho we are. Since the German word for\\n‘understanding’, Verstehen, is etymologically\\nderived from the idea of ‘taking a stand’, Heidegger can\\ncall the projection into the future by which we shape our identity\\n‘understanding’. And because any stand one takes is\\ninescapably “being-in-the-world”, understanding carries\\nwith it some degree of competence in coping with the world around us.\\nAn understanding of being in general is therefore built into human\\nagency.\",\n \"To the extent that all our actions contribute to realizing an\\noverarching project or set of projects, our active lives can be seen\\nas embodying a life-project of some sort. On Heidegger’s view, we\\nexist for the sake of ourselves: enacting roles and\\nexpressing character traits contribute to realizing some image of what\\nit is to be human in our own cases. Existence has a directedness or\\npurposiveness that imparts a degree of connection to our life\\nstories. For the most part, having such a life-plan requires very\\nlittle conscious formulation of goals or deliberation about means. It\\nresults from our competence in being members of a historical culture\\nthat we have mastered to a great extent in growing up into a shared\\nworld. This tacit “pre-understanding” makes possible our\\nfamiliar dwelling with things and others in the familiar, everyday\\nworld.\",\n \"Heidegger holds that all possibilities of concrete understanding\\nand action are made possible by a background of shared practices\\nopened up by the social context in which we find ourselves, by what he\\ncalls the ‘They’ (das Man). Far from it being the\\ncase that social existence is something alien to and opposed to our\\nhumanity, Heidegger holds that we are always essentially and\\ninescapably social beings. As he says,\",\n \"They itself prescribes that way of interpreting\\nthe world that lies closest. Dasein is for the sake of the They in an\\neveryday manner… In terms of the They, and as the They, I am\\n‘given’ proximally to ‘myself’…. (1962\\n[1927]: 167, translation modified)\",\n \"To be a teacher, for instance, I must adopt (and\\nperhaps blend) some set of the ready-made styles of classroom\\npresentation and of dealing with students laid out in advance by\\nexisting norms and conventions of professional conduct.\",\n \" To say that we are always the They is not to say we are automata,\\nhowever. Heidegger suggests that even in the bland conformism of\\n“average everydayness” we are constantly making choices\\nthat reflect our understanding of who we are. Nevertheless, in average\\neverydayness, we are as a rule adrift, acting as one of the\\n“herd” or “crowd”—a form of life\\nHeidegger calls “falling” (Verfallen). Heidegger\\n(1962 [1927]: 220) emphasizes that calling this way of living\\n“falling” does not imply that it is “a bad or\\ndeplorable ontical property of which, perhaps, more advanced stages of\\nhuman culture might be able to rid themselves” (1962 [1927]:\\n220). On the contrary, since there is no exit from the social\\nworld—since it is the “only game in town”—it\\nplays a positive role in creating the background of shared\\nintelligibility that lets us be fully human in the first\\nplace. Nevertheless, Heidegger is aware that there is something deeply\\nproblematic about this falling mode of existence. In “doing what\\none does”, he suggests, we fail to own up to who we are. We do\\nnot take over our own choices as our own and, as a result, we are not\\nreally the authors of our own lives. To the extent that our lives are\\nunowned or disowned, existence is inauthentic (uneigentlich),\\nnot our own (eigen).\",\n \"Our condition as They-selves is one of dispersal, distraction and\\nforgetfulness. But this “downward plunge” captures only\\none aspect of Dasein, Heidegger says. In order to be able to realize\\nthe capacity for authenticity, one must undergo a personal\\ntransformation, one that tears us away from falling. This is possible\\nonly given certain fundamental insights arising in a life. The first\\nmajor shift can occur when one experiences an intense bout of\\nanxiety. In anxiety, the familiar world that seemed to assure one’s\\nsecurity suddenly breaks down, and in this world-collapse one finds\\nthat the significance of things is “completely lacking”\\n(1962 [1927]: 186). One finds oneself alone, with no worldly supports\\nfor one’s existence. In anxiety, Dasein encounters itself as\\nan individual, ultimately alone. In Heidegger’s words,\\n“Anxiety individualizes Dasein and thus discloses it as\\n‘solus ipse’” (1962 [1927]: 188). The\\nsecond transformative event is the encounter with one’s\\n“ownmost” possibility, the possibility of death as the\\npossible loss of all possibilities. In facing our own finitude, we\\nfind that we are always future-directed happenings or projects, where\\nwhat is crucial to that ongoing forward movement is not its\\nactualization of possibilities, but the “How” with which\\none undertakes one’s life. Heidegger tries to envision a way of life\\nhe calls anticipatory running-forward (Vorlaufen) as\\na life that clear-sightedly and intensely carries out its projects, no\\nmatter what they may be. The third transformative event is hearing the\\ncall of conscience. What conscience calls out to us is the fact that\\nwe are “guilty” in the German sense of that word, which\\nmeans that we have a debt (Schuld) and are\\nresponsible for ourselves. Conscience tells us that we are falling\\nshort of what we can be, and that we are obliged to take up the task\\nof living with resoluteness and full engagement. Such resoluteness is\\nseen clearly in the case of vocational commitments, where one has\\nheard a calling and feels pulled toward pursuing that\\ncalling.[2]\",\n \"The three “existentialia” that structure Dasein’s\\nBeing-in-the-world make up the “formal existential totality of\\nDasein’s structural whole”, what Heidegger\\ncalls care. To be Dasein, an entity must have some sense of\\nwhat it is “coming toward” (Zu-kunft, the German\\nfor “future”), what has “come before” (what is\\n“passed”, Vorbei), and what one is dealing with\\nin one’s current situation (“making present”). The\\ndefining characteristics of Dasein’s potentiality-for-Being are\\ndisplayed in the transformative events that lead to the possibility of\\nbeing authentic (eigentlich, as we saw, from the stem meaning\\n“proper” or “own”). When Dasein confronts and\\ngrasps its authentic possibility of being, it becomes possible to see\\nthe whole of Dasein, including both its being as a They-self\\nand as authentic being-one’s-self. “Dasein is authentically\\nitself in [its] primordial individualization”, where the\\n“constancy [Ständigkeit] of the Self\\n… gets clarified” (1962 [1927]: 322). What defines the\\nwholeness and unity of Dasein is determined not by an underlying\\nsubstance (e.g., the sub-ject, that which underlies), but by the\\n“steadiness and steadfastness” (beständigen\\nStandfestigkeit, ibid) of authenticity.\",\n \"The key to understanding authenticity lies, as we have seen, in the\\ncharacterization of Dasein’s being as a relation between two\\naspects or dimensions making up human existence. On the one hand, we\\nfind ourselves thrown into a world and a situation not of our\\nown making, already disposed by moods and particular commitments, with\\na past behind us that constrains our choices. With respect to this\\ndimension of human life, we are generally absorbed in practical\\naffairs, taking care of business, striving to get things done as they\\ncrop up from time to time. This “being-in-a-situation”\\nnaturally inclines us to everyday falling as Heidegger describes\\nit.\",\n \"At the same time, however, to be human is to be underway toward\\nachieving ends that are understood as integral to one’s overarching\\nlife-project. My actions at any moment, though typically aimed at\\naccomplishing tasks laid out by the demands of circumstances, are also\\ncumulatively creating me as a person of a particular sort. In this\\nsense, my futural projection as “understanding” has the\\nstructure of being a projection onto one’s ownmost possibility of\\nbeing. So, for example, when I attend a boring parent/teacher\\nconference, I do so as part of handling my current duties. But this\\nact is also part of being a parent insofar as it contributes\\nto determining “that for the sake of which” I understand\\nmyself as existing. Given this distinction between current means/ends\\nstrategic actions and long-range life-defining undertakings, it is\\npossible to see that there are two senses of freedom in play in\\nHeidegger’s account of human existence. There is freedom in the\\nhumdrum sense of doing what I choose to do under ordinary conditions,\\na freedom Heidegger presumably interprets in an agent-libertarian way.\\nBut there is also freedom in an ethically more robust sense. In\\naddition to choosing courses of action among options, Dasein is\\ncapable of “choosing to choose a kind of being-one’s-self”\\n(1962 [1927]: 314) through its ongoing constitution of that identity\\nfor the sake of which it exists. Thus, I attend the parent/teacher\\nconference and behave in a particular way because I care about being a\\nparent and a citizen of a particular sort. I understand this stance as\\nhaving repercussions for my life as a whole, and I grasp the need\\nfor resoluteness in holding steady to undertakings of this\\nsort if I am to shape my identity in the way I can care about. For\\nHeidegger, the resolute commitment that is made concrete and defined\\nin one’s day-to-day actions is what imparts steadiness\\nand steadfastness to a life. It is also the condition for\\nbeing responsible for one’s own existence: “Only so can\\n[one] be responsible [verantwortlich]”,\\nHeidegger says (1962 [1927]: 334, translation modified). Authenticity,\\ndefined as standing up for and standing behind what one\\ndoes—as owning and owning up to one’s deeds as\\nan agent in the world—becomes possible in this sort of resolute\\ncommitment to the “for the sake of which” of one’s\\nexistence.\",\n \"It should be obvious that this conception of authenticity has very\\nlittle to do with the older idea of being true to one’s own pregiven\\nfeelings and desires. But there is still a clear respect in which the\\nidea of “being true to oneself” has a role to play\\nhere. What distinguishes this conception from the conceptions of pop\\npsychology and romantic views of authenticity is the fact that the\\n“true self” to which we are to be true is not some\\npre-given set of substantive feelings, opinions and desires to be\\nconsulted through inward-turning or introspection. On the contrary,\\nthe “true self” alluded to here is an on-going narrative\\nconstruction: the composition of one’s own autobiography through one’s\\nconcrete ways of acting over the course of a life as a whole. Feelings\\nand desires are, of course, profoundly important, as are the features\\nof one’s situation and one’s concrete connections to others. Heidegger\\nwants to recover a firm sense of the wholeness of the existing\\nindividual. But this wholeness is found in the connectedness of what\\nHeidegger calls the “happening” or “movement”\\nof a life—that is, in the unfolding and constantly\\n“in-progress” storyizing that continues until death. What\\nis at stake in the ideal of authenticity is not being true to some\\nantecedently given nature, then, but being a person of a\\nparticular sort. Heidegger emphasizes that being authentic presupposes\\nthat one instantiate such virtues as perseverance, integrity,\\nclear-sightedness, flexibility, openness, and so forth. It should be\\nobvious that such a life is not necessarily opposed to an ethical and\\nsocially engaged existence. On the contrary, authenticity seems to be\\nregarded as a “executive virtue” that provides the condition\\nfor the possibility of being a moral agent in any meaningful sense\\nwhatsoever.\",\n \"Others argue that Heidegger uses authenticity in both\\nevaluative-normative and purely descriptive senses. In the descriptive\\nuse of the term, inauthenticity is simply the default condition of\\neveryday life, in which our self-relations are mediated by others. In\\nthis sense, authenticity involves no judgment about which mode of\\nbeing is superior for Dasein. But sometimes Heidegger’s language turns\\nnormative (Carman 2003), and the seemingly neutral inauthentic form of\\nrelating transforms into something negative. Inauthentic Dasein is now\\n“not itself”, loses itself (Selbstverlorenheit), and\\nbecomes self-alienated. At this point, it is argued that when\\nintroducing the normative-evaluative sense, Heidegger presents three\\nmodes of life: authentic—average(ness)—inauthentic, where\\nthe authentic and inauthentic modes are existential modifications of\\naverage everydayness (Blattner 2006: 130; Dreyfus\\n1991). In this\\npicture, an authentic way of life is owned, an inauthentic disowned,\\nand the middle one—which is how we live much of the\\ntime—is simply one that is unowned. Dasein and authenticity\\nemerge in contrast to this background and out of this background, so\\nthat the primordially indifferent mode is the condition of possibility\\nfor authenticity or inauthenticity. In addition, Carman (2003: 295)\\nargues that Heidegger’s notion of conscience can help us further\\nillustrate his account of authenticity and shows how the “call\\nof conscience” may be interpreted as expressive responsiveness\\nto one’s own particularity.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.1 Kierkegaard and Heidegger\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"Published in 1943, Sartre’s opus magnum, Being and\\nNothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, had a\\nsignificant influence on philosophical thought and intellectual life\\nin the second half of the twentieth century. His principal goal in\\nthis book is to “repudiate the spirit of\\nseriousness” of traditional philosophy as well as of\\nbourgeois culture (Sartre 1992a [1943]: 796). The spirit of\\nseriousness assumes (1) that there are transcendent values that exist\\nantecedently to humans, and (2) that the value of a thing is part of\\nthe actual being of the valued thing. Sartre’s view, in contrast, is\\nthat all values are generated by human interactions in situations, so\\nthat value is a human construct with no extra-human existence in\\nthings.\",\n \"To address the question of human existence, Sartre scrutinizes our\\neveryday lives, focusing on two particular aspects. He notes that\\nhuman beings, like other entities in the world, have certain concrete\\ncharacteristics that make up what he calls their\\n“facticity” or what they are “in themselves”\\n(en soi). Facticity makes up the element of\\n“givenness” we must work with: I find myself with a past,\\na body and a social situation that constrains me in what I can\\ndo. This “just being there” is above all contingent: there\\nis no prior justification or reason for the existence of my being. On\\nSartre’s view, the “in itself” does not even have any\\ndeterminate characteristics, since every determination (every\\n“this, not that”) is first introduced into the\\ntotality of being by our specific interpretations of things.\",\n \"While human beings share their “facticity” with other\\nentities in the world, they are unique among the totality of entities\\ninsofar as they are capable of distancing themselves from what is\\n“in itself” through reflection and self-awareness. Rather\\nthan being an item in the world with relatively fixed attributes, what\\nis distinctive about me as a human being is that I am capable of putting\\nmy own being in question by asking myself, for example, whether I want\\nto be a person of a particular sort. This capacity for gaining\\ndistance inserts a “not” or a “nonbeing” into\\nthe totality of what is, which allows me to organize what surrounds me\\ninto a meaningfully differentiated whole. In addition, human\\nconsciousness is the source of the “not” because it is\\nitself a “nothingness”. In other words, a human being is\\nnot just an “in itself” but also a “for itself\\n(pour soi), thus characterized by what Sartre calls\\n“transcendence”. As transcendence, I am always more than I\\nam as facticity because, as surpassing my brute being, I stand before\\nan open range of possibilities for self-definition in the future.\",\n \"Sartre’s notion of transcendence is closely linked with the idea of\\nfreedom. Humans are free in the sense that they have the\\nability to choose how they are going to interpret things, and in these\\ninterpretations they are deciding how things are to count or\\nmatter. We constitute the world through our freedom to the extent that\\nour ways of taking things determine how reality will be sorted out and\\nmatter to us. At the same time, we constitute ourselves\\nthrough our own choices: though the facticity of my situation creates\\nsome constraints on my possible self-interpretations, it is always up\\nto me to decide the meaning of those constraints, and this means that\\nwhat I take to be limitations are in fact produced by my own\\ninterpretations or meaning-giving activities. Such limitations are\\ngrasped in light of antecedent commitments, on the background of which\\nsituations becomes intelligible, as affording certain actions and/or\\nmodes of evaluation. It is our antecedent commitments that shape our\\nworld, making situations and objects intelligible as threatening or\\nfavorable, easy or full of obstacles, or more generally, as affording\\ncertain actions (Sartre 1992a [1943]: 489). Our engagements provide a\\nhermeneutic structure within which our situations and motives become\\ncomprehensible and reveal themselves in the way situations appear to\\nus—as significant, requiring our attention, etc. (1992a [1943]:\\n485).\",\n \"It is important to note that Sartre’s notion of freedom is\\nradical. Freedom is absolute to the extent that each person decides\\nthe significance of the constraints in his or her facticity: “I\\nfind an absolute responsibility for the fact that my facticity\\n… is directly inapprehensible”, because supposed\\n“facts” about me are never brute facts, “but always\\nappear across a projective reconstruction of my for-itself”\\n(Sartre 1992a [1943]: 710). For Sartre, only our choices and their\\nprojected ends define our situations as meaningful, as threatening or\\nfavorable, as affording certain actions etc. The resistances and\\nobstacles that one encounters in a situation acquire meaning only in\\nand through the free choice. Thus, individuals are responsible not\\nonly for their identities, but for the way the world presents itself\\nin their experiences. Even others are just\\n“opportunities and chances” for my free\\ncreative activity. According to this early formulation, it is up to us\\nto interpret how other people are to matter to us relative to\\nsituations in which we find ourselves engaged (Sartre 1992a [1943]:\\n711).\",\n \"But human beings are not merely characterized by facticity and\\ntranscendence; they are also seen as embodying a deep and\\nirreconcilable tension between facticity and transcendence. This\\ntension comes to the fore in Sartre’s account of “bad\\nfaith”. Bad faith, a kind of self-deception, involves believing\\nor taking oneself to be an X while all along one is (and knows\\noneself to be) actually a Y. The most familiar form of bad\\nfaith is acting as if one were a mere thing—solely\\nfacticity—and thereby denying one’s own freedom to make oneself\\ninto something very different. Thus, the person who thinks she is a\\ncoward “just as a matter of fact” is excluding from view\\nthe ability to transform her existence through changed ways of\\nbehaving. Such bad faith is a denial of transcendence or freedom.\",\n \"At first, it might seem that one could escape bad faith by making a\\nsincere, deep commitment to something and abiding by that\\ncommitment—for example, a total, resolute engagement of the self\\ncomparable to Kierkegaard’s notion of an “infinite\\npassion”. In this regard, Sartre considers a person who tries to\\nwholeheartedly believe that his friend really likes\\nhim. “I believe it”, he says, “I decide to\\nbelieve in it and maintain myself in this decision…”\\n(Sartre 1992a [1943]: 114). My belief will be steady and solid, like\\nsomething “in itself” that informs my being and cuts\\nthrough all the tenuousness and unsteadiness of my subjective\\nlife. I know I believe it, I will say. If I could\\nmake myself believe something in this way, then to achieve this might\\nbe what we could call “good faith:” to\\nactually be something, without the questionability of the\\n“not” creeping in. However, Sartre doubts that such an\\nabsolute, being-determining commitment is possible. In fact, Sartre\\nclaims that any such sort of “good faith” would actually\\namount to little more than another form of self-deception. For if my\\ndecision to believe is in fact a decision, it must always be something\\nthat to some extent distances me from what is decided. That is why we\\nuse the word ‘believe’ to imply some degree of\\nuncertainty, as when we say, “Is he my friend? Well,\\nI believe he is”. Lucid self-awareness shows us that in\\nmaking a choice, we can never attain the condition of the “in\\nitself”, because what we are is always in question for us. This\\nis what Sartre means when he says human being is always\\n“previously corrupted” and that “bad faith [always]\\nreapprehends good faith” (Sartre 1992a [1943]: 116). Thus, the\\nproject of being in good faith seems impossible, as we are always\\nnecessarily in bad faith.\",\n \"The inescapable nature of bad faith seems to leave no room for the\\npossibility of authenticity. This might be why the word translated as\\n“authentic” only appears twice in this vast tome. On one\\noccasion, Sartre attacks Heidegger for introducing the idea of\\nauthenticity as a way of providing something foundational in an\\notherwise totally contingent world. The concept of authenticity\\n“shows all too clearly [Heidegger’s] anxiety to establish an\\nontological foundation for an Ethics…” (Sartre 1992a\\n[1943]: 128). A second and more obscure appearance of the word comes\\nat the end of the discussion of bad faith early in the book. Here\\nSartre acknowledges that his account of bad faith seems to have the\\nconsequence that there can be no such thing as good faith, so that\\n“it is indifferent whether one is in good faith or in bad\\nfaith”, and that in turn seems to imply that “we can never\\nradically escape bad faith”. Nevertheless, he goes on, there may\\nbe a “self-recovery of being which has been previously\\ncorrupted”, a recovery “we shall call authenticity, the\\ndescription of which has no place here” (Sartre 1992a [1943]:\\n116n).\",\n \"One might thus conclude that there is no way to be true to what one\\nis, because there is nothing that one is. However, such a negative\\nconclusion would be reached only by someone who embraced from the\\noutset the “spirit of seriousness” Sartre sets out to\\nattack. Seriousness would lead us to think that there is simply a fact\\nof the matter about a person: the person is either a believer or he is\\nnot. But, as Linda A. Bell (1989: 45) has noted, there is another\\npossibility. If one rejects the spirit of seriousness, one might\\nlucidly acknowledge that, as transcendence, one’s belief is\\nalways in question and so not really a secure belief. Yet, at the same\\ntime, one might also recognize that, as facticity, one\\ngenuinely holds a belief, and that the belief is central to one’s\\nbeing as an engaged agent in this situation. In Sartre’s convoluted\\nstyle of formulation, “he would be right if he recognized\\nhimself as a being that is what it is not and is not what it is”\\n(Bell 1989: 45). On this account, I believe, but I also acknowledge my\\nability to retract the belief, since nothing is ever fixed in\\nstone.\",\n \"What is suggested here is that a correlate of authenticity can be\\nfound in the idea of being true to the inescapable tension at the core\\nof the human self. This would be attained if one clear-sightedly\\nacknowledged the fundamental ambiguity of the human\\ncondition. Authenticity would then be what Sartre calls a\\n“self-recovery of being which was previously corrupted”\\n(1992a [1943]: 116). In a sense, humans can never really be\\nanything in the way brute objects can be things with determinate\\nattributes. In Bell’s words, authenticity would be “the\\nawareness and acceptance of—this basic ambiguity” (1989:\\n46). This conclusion is supported by Sartre’s later\\nwork, Anti-Semite and Jew where he writes,\",\n \"Authenticity, it is almost needless to say,\\nconsists in having a true and lucid consciousness of the situation, in\\nassuming the responsibilities and risks it involves, in accepting it\\n… sometimes in horror and hate. (1948: 90)\",\n \"Lucid recognition of the ambiguity of the human condition is the\\nleading idea behind Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity.\\nBeauvoir takes over Sartre’s characterization of the human condition\\nand expands on ideas only hinted at in Sartre’s famous lecture,\\n“The Humanism of Existentialism” (1946), in developing a\\nconception of authenticity. According to Beauvoir, Sartre’s conception\\nof the human being as “engaged freedom” implies not just\\nthat each individual finds his or her “reason for being”\\nin concrete realizations of freedom, but that willing one’s own\\nfreedom necessarily involves willing the freedom of all humans. In\\nachieving one’s own freedom, she writes, freedom must also will\\n“an open future, by seeking to extend itself by means of the\\nfreedom of others” (1948: 60). The point here is that a\\ndedication to freedom, when clearly grasped in its full implications,\\nwill be seen to call for a future in which an unrestricted range of\\npossibilities is open to all.\",\n \"Beauvoir also builds on Sartre’s notion of engagement to\\nextend the idea of authenticity. Following Sartre, we are always\\nalready engaged in the affairs of the world, whether we realize it or\\nnot. To be human is to be already caught up in the midst of social and\\nconcrete situations that call for commitments of certain sorts on our\\npart. Sartre takes this ground-level fact of engagement as the basis\\nfor exhorting us to be engaged in a deeper sense, where this implies\\nthat we decisively and wholeheartedly involve ourselves in what the\\ncurrent situation demands. Of course, once we have abandoned the\\nspirit of seriousness, we will recognize that there are no\\nantecedently given principles or values that dictate the proper course\\nfor our existential engagement, so that any commitment will be tenuous\\nand groundless. But the authentic individual will be the one who takes\\nup the terrifying freedom of being the ultimate source of values,\\nembraces it, and acts with a clarity and firmness suitable to his or\\nher best understanding of what is right in this context. In this way,\\nthe conception of authenticity is continuous with the ideal of being\\ntrue to ourselves: we are called upon to become, in our concrete\\nlives, what we already are in the ontological structure of our\\nbeing.\",\n \"This is in agreement with the manner in which Sartre describes the\\nconsequences of acting against one’s deepest commitments.\",\n \"There is no doubt that I could have done\\notherwise, but that is not the problem. It ought to be formulated like\\nthis: could I have done otherwise without perceptibly modifying the\\norganic totality of the projects that make up who I am?\",\n \"Sartre goes on to say that the character of the\\nact may be such that\",\n \"instead of remaining a purely local and accidental\\nmodification of my behavior, it could be effected only by means of a\\nradical transformation of my being-in-the-world… In other\\nwords: I could have acted otherwise. Agreed. But at what price?\\n(Sartre 1992a [1943]: 454)\",\n \"Thus, acting otherwise or, more precisely,\\nfailing to act on one’s fundamental commitments, comes at the price of\\ntransforming who one is. This change effectively precludes one from\\ncarrying on with an unchanged self-conception.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.2 Sartre and de Beauvoir\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"In the last three decades, authors like Taylor (1989, 1991, 1995,\\n2007), Ferrara (1993; 1998), Jacob Golomb (1995), Guignon (2004, 2008) and\\nVarga (2011a) have attempted to reconstruct authenticity by\\nmaintaining that the justified criticism of self-indulgent forms of\\nthe idea does not justify the total condemnation of the idea itself\\n(see Taylor 1991: 56). Instead of abandoning the notion of\\nauthenticity, they attempt to reconstruct it in a manner that leads\\nneither to aestheticism nor to atomistic self-indulgence.\",\n \" In The Ethics of Authenticity, and the more fully\\narticulated Sources of the Self, Taylor makes a case for\\nretaining the concept of authenticity (and the practices associated\\nwith it) on the grounds that the original and undistorted idea of\\nauthenticity contains an important element of self-transcendence\\n(Taylor 1991: 15; Anderson 1995). Unsatisfied with the widespread\\ncriticism of authenticity as an adequate ethical orientation, Taylor\\nsets out to prove that authenticity does not necessarily lead to\\naestheticism or self-indulgence: the justified criticism of\\nself-indulgent forms of the ideal does not justify the complete\\ncondemnation of the ideal itself (Taylor 1991: 56). This would mean\\nextricating aestheticism, subjectivism, individualism, and\\nself-indulgent interpretations of this ideal from what Taylor (Ibid.:\\n15) holds to be an original understanding of that concept as achieving\\nself-transcendence (Anderson 1995). Restoring an undistorted version,\\nTaylor says, could guard against meaninglessness, which is one of the\\n“malaises of modernity” that Taylor regards as tied to\\ntrivialized forms of the culture of authenticity. Self-transcendence,\\nwhich once was a crucial element in the ideal of authenticity, is\\npractically lost from the contemporary version, giving rise to\\ncultures of self-absorption, which ultimately deteriorate into the\\nmalaise of absurdity.\",\n \"Already in Sources of the Self, Taylor draws attention to\\nhow modernism gives birth to a new kind of inward turn that not only\\nattempts to overcome the mechanistic conception of the self linked to\\ndisengaged reason but also the Romantic ideal of a faultless alignment\\nof inner nature and reason. Instead, for the modernists, a turn inward\\ndid not mean a turn towards a self that needs articulation.\",\n \"On the contrary, the turn inward may take us\\nbeyond the self as usually understood, to a fragmentation of\\nexperience which calls our ordinary notions of identity into\\nquestion. (Taylor 1989: 462)\",\n \"While in modernism, the turn inward still contained a\\nself-transcending moment, the critical point where the ideal of\\nauthenticity becomes flattened is when it becomes\\n‘contaminated’ by a certain form of\\n‘self-determining freedom’ that also contains elements of\\ninwardness and unconventionality (Taylor 1991: 38). Self-determining\\nfreedom\",\n \"\\nis the idea that I am free when I decide for myself what concerns\\nme, rather than being shaped by external influences. It is a standard\\nof freedom that obviously goes beyond what has been called negative\\nliberty (being free to do what I want without interference by others)\\nbecause that is compatible with one’s being shaped and influenced by\\nsociety and its laws of conformity. Instead, self-determining freedom\\ndemands that one break free of all such external impositions and\\ndecide for oneself alone. (Taylor 1991: 27)\",\n \"Not only is self-determining freedom not a necessary part of\\nauthenticity, it is also counterproductive because its\\nself-centeredness flattens the meanings of lives and fragments\\nidentities. For Taylor, the process of articulating an identity\\ninvolves adopting a relationship to the good or to what is important,\\nwhich is connected to one’s membership in a language community (Taylor\\n1989: 34–35). As he clearly states, “authenticity is not\\nthe enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it presupposes\\nsuch demands” (Taylor 1991: 41). It cannot be up to me to decide\\nwhat is important, since this would be self-defeating. Instead,\\nwhatever is important for me must connect to an inter-subjective\\nnotion of the good, wherefrom a good part of its normative force\\nlastly emanates. In this sense, authenticity simply requires\\nmaintaining bonds to collective questions of worth that point beyond\\none’s own preferences. Taylor wants to show that modes of contemporary\\nculture that opt for self-fulfillment without regard\",\n \"(a) to the demands of our ties with others, or (b)\\nto demands of any kind emanating from something more or other than\\nhuman desires or aspirations are self-defeating, that they destroy the\\nconditions for realizing authenticity itself. (Taylor 1991:\\n35)\",\n \"Thus, not only do we need the recognition of concrete others in\\norder to form our identities, but we must also (critically) engage\\nwith a common vocabulary of shared value orientations. In other words,\\nTaylor points out that authenticity needs the appropriation of values\\nthat make up our collective horizons.\",\n \"In his Reflective Authenticity, Alessandro Ferrara also\\nsets out to defend authenticity as an ideal, but in contrast to Taylor\\nhe is interested in the social and philosophical issues of the\\nrelation between authenticity and validity. According to Ferrara’s\\ndiagnosis, we are currently witnessing a profound transition that,\\nbesides affecting cultures, values and norms, also touch on the\\n“foundations of validity,” thereby affecting the\\n“bedrock of the symbolic network through which we relate to\\nreality and reproduce our life-forms” (Ferrara 1998: 1). At the\\ncore of this transformation is the reformulation of\\n“well-being” (eudaimonia) as the normative ideal\\nof authenticity, which can be of help in reconstructing a contemporary\\nunderstanding of normativity. For Ferrara, it can ground a new ideal\\nof universal validity “ultimately linked with the model of\\nexemplary uniqueness or enlightening singularity thus far associated\\nwith ‘aesthetics’” (Ferrara 1998: 10). Authenticity\\nis then characterized by the “self-congruency” of an\\nindividual, collective or symbolic identity (Ferrara 1998: 70), and is\\nthought of as providing a new universal validity that does not build\\non the generalizable but rather on the exemplary. Ferrara views\\nSimmel’s idea of an individual law as an instructive example of such\\nan anti-generalizing universalism, and it is exactly this\\ncharacteristic that makes it better suited to the pluralist contexts\\nfaced by modern Western societies. More recently, Ferrara (2019) has argued that authenticity currently faces a “dual paradox” and is misconstrued by many critics advocating its deconstructionist dismissal.\",\n \"Golomb (1995) provides an informative historical overview of the\\ngenesis and development of the concept of authenticity, paying\\nattention to both literary and philosophical sources. While\\ncontinuously reminding us of the inherently social dimension of\\nauthenticity, one of the achievements here is the focus on boundary\\nsituations where authenticity “is best forged and\\nrevealed” (Ibid.: 201). Golomb takes a neutral position on the\\nethical value of authenticity, maintaining that “there is no\\nreason to suppose that it is any better or any more valuable to be\\nauthentic than to act inauthentically” (Ibid.: 202).\",\n \"Guignon (2004) explores both the philosophical roots of\\nauthenticity and its contemporary manifestations in popular\\nculture. He thoughtfully criticizes pop-psychological literature that\\ndeals with the authentic life by making recourse to the subdued\\n‘inner child’. Since Rousseau, the dichotomy between\\nauthentic and inauthentic has often been interpreted akin to the\\ndistinction between child and adult (Guignon 2004: 43). Like the inner\\nchild, the authentic self is depicted as not yet corrupted by the\\npressures, competitiveness, and conformity of modern public\\nlife. Guignon draws on the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Jung\\nto remind us of less romanticized visions of the inner\\nchild. Additionally, Guignon (2004: 151) aims to identify the manner\\nin which authenticity can be understood as being at the same time a\\npersonal and a “fundamentally and irreducibly” social\\nvirtue. Authenticity then involves reflectively discerning what is\\nreally worth pursuing in the social context in which the agent is\\nsituated (Ibid.: 155). If the ideal of authenticity is possible only\\nin a free society with a solid foundation of established social\\nvirtues, it would seem that trying to be authentic, if it is to be\\ncoherent, must involve a commitment to sustaining and nurturing the\\ntype of society in which such an ideal is possible. A reflection on\\nthe social embodiment of virtues therefore suggests that authenticity,\\nlike many other character ideals, carries with it an obligation to\\ncontribute to the maintenance and well-being of a particular type of\\nsocial organization and way of life (Guignon 2008: 288; 2004: 161). On\\nthe other hand, Guignon (2004, 2008) argues that in a democratic\\nsociety, in which the authority of government—in setting the\\npolitical course—stems from the consent of the governed, there\\nis good reason to promote virtues like authenticity that sustain such\\nan organization of government. To be authentic is to be clear about\\none’s own most basic feelings, desires and convictions, and to openly\\nexpress one’s stance in the public arena. But that capacity is\\nprecisely the character trait that is needed in order to be an\\neffective member of a democratic society (Guignon 2008: 288).\",\n \" Varga (2011a) shares the fundamental assumption that authenticity\\nhas a certain potential (and therefore deserves to be reformulated),\\nbut he also thinks that it could be used for a critical inquiry into\\nthe practices of the self in contemporary life. By way of an analysis\\nof self-help and self-management literature, Varga detects a\\n“paradoxical transformation:” the ideal of authenticity\\nthat once provided an antidote to hierarchical institutions and\\nrequirements of capitalism, now seems to function both as an\\ninstitutionalized demand towards subjects to match the systemic\\ndemands of contemporary capitalism and as a factor in the economic\\nutilization of subjective capacities. Varga argues that it is in\\n“existential” choices that we express who we are, and that\\nthese have a complex phenomenology characterized by a sense of\\nnecessity. In such choices, described as “alternativeless\\nchoices”, we articulate who we are, bringing into reality some\\ntacit intuitions that often only take on a gestalt-like formation. In\\nthese cases, we both discover who we are “on the inside”,\\nand actively constitute ourselves. Varga’s examination of the\\nstructure of our commitments culminates in the claim that the internal\\nstructure of our commitments commits us to more than what we happen to\\ncare about. In many cases it may actually commit us to publicly\\nintelligible values that we take our commitments to embody—an\\naspect that may constrain the manner of our practical deliberation and\\nthe way in which we can pursue our commitments (Varga 2011a,b).\",\n \"Along similar lines, Bauer (2017) defends authenticity as an ethical ideal, arguing that the ideal should understood as the combination of the ideal of expressing one’s individual personality and the ideal of being an autonomous and morally responsible person. Others have argued that authenticity might require more than living in accord with commitments that one wholeheartedly endorses. For example, Rings (2017) highlights an epistemic criterion. The point is that the commitments in question have to be chosen in light of an acknowledgment of facts concerning one’s personal history and present context. Thus, self-knowledge might matter more than hitherto recognized, even if the self-relation most pertinent to authenticity is not primarily of an epistemic nature. \\n\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Recent Accounts of Authenticity\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Adorno, Theodor W., 1973, The Jargon of Authenticity,\ntrans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will, Evanston, IL: Northwestern\nUniversity Press.","–––, 1974, Minima Moralia: Reflections from\nDamaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London: NLB.","Aho, Kevin, 2014, Existentialism: An Introduction, \nCambridge: Polity.","Anderson, Joel, 1995, “Review Essay: The Persistence of\nAuthenticity”, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 21(1):\n101–109.","Augustine, St., 1953, De vera religione, (On True\nReligion), trans. by J.H.S. Burleigh, South Bend, Indiana:\nGateway.","–––, 1988, Tractates on the Gospel of\nJohn 1–10, translated by John W. Rettig. (The Fathers of\nthe Church, 78), Washington, DC: Catholic University of America\nPress.","Bauer, K., 2017, “To be or Not to be Authentic. In Defense\nof Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal”, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 20(3): 567–580.","Beauvoir, Simone de, 1970 [1947], The Ethics of\nAmbiguity, New York: The Citadel Press.","Bell, Daniel, 1976, The Cultural Contradictions of\nCapitalism, New York: Basic Books.","Bell, Linda A., 1989, Sartre’s Ethics of Authenticity,\nTuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.","Bellah, Robert N. et al., 1985, Habits of the Heart,\nBerkeley: University of California Press.","Benjamin, Walter, 1973, “The Work of Art in the Age of\nMechanical Reproduction”, in Illuminations, ed. by\nHannah Arendt, Glasgow: Fontana.","Berlin, Isaiah, 2000, Three Critics of the Enlightenment:\nVico, Hamann, Herder, Princeton: Princeton University Press.","Berger, Peter, 1970, “On the Obsolescence of the Concept of\nHonor”, European Journal of Sociology, 11(2): 338–347;\nreprinted in S. Hauerwas and A. MacIntyre, eds., Revisions:\nChanging Perspectives in Moral Philosophy, Notre Dame University\nPress, 1983.","Berman, Marshall, 1970, The Politics of Authenticity: Radical\nIndividualism and the Emergence of Modern Society, New York:\nAtheneum.","Bialystok, L., 2014, “Authenticity and the Limits of Philosophy”, Dialogue, 53(2): 271–298.","Blattner, William, 2006, Heidegger’s Being and Time, New\nYork: Continuum.","Bloom, Allan, 1987, The Closing of the American Mind, New\nYork: Simon and Schuster.","Calhoun, Cheshire, 1995, “Standing for\nsomething”, The Journal of Philosophy, 92:\n235–60.","Carman, Taylor, 2003, Heidegger’s Analytic: Interpretation,\nDiscourse, and Authenticity in Being and Time, New York:\nCambridge University Press.","Carnegie, Dale, 1948, How to Stop Worrying and Start\nLiving, New York: Simon & Schuster.","Darnton, Robert, 1984, The Great Cat Massacre and Other\nEpisodes in French Cultural History, New York: Viking.","Davenport, John J., 2012, Narrative Identity, Autonomy, and\nMorality: From Frankfurt and MacIntyre to Kierkegaard, New York:\nRoutledge.","Despland, Michel, 1975, “Can Conscience Be Hypocritical? 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Vannini and J.P. Williams (eds.), Authenticity in Culture, Self, and\nSociety, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 21–36.","–––, 2017, Rousseau and Critical\nTheory, Boston and Leiden, Brill.","–––, 2019, “The Dual Paradox of Authenticity in\nthe 21st Century”, in Th. Claviez, K. Imesch, and B. Sweers (eds.),\nCritique of Authenticity, Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press.","Foucault, Michel, 1980, The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An\nIntroduction, New York: Vintage Books.","–––, 1984, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An\nOverview of Work in Progress,” in The Foucault Reader,\nPaul Rabinow (ed.), New York: Pantheon, pp. 340–372.","–––, 1983, “The Subject and Power”,\nin Michel Foucault Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics by\nHubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Chicago: University of Chicago\nPress.","–––, 1988, “An Aesthetics of\nExistence”, in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy,\nCulture, edited by Lawrence D.Kritzman, pp. 47–53, New\nYork: Routledge.","–––, 1994, The Order of Things: An\nArchaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Vintage Books.","Golomb, Jacob, 1995, In Search of Authenticity from\nKierkegaard to Camus, Routledge: London, New York.","Gray, Glenn J., 1965, “Salvation on the campus: Why\nexistentialism is capturing the students”, Harper’s,\n230: 53–59.","Guignon, Charles, 2004, On Being Authentic, London:\nRoutledge.","–––, 2008,\n“Authenticity”, Philosophy Compass, 3:\n277–290.","Hadot, Pierre, 1992, “Reflections on the notion of the\n‘cultivation of the self’”, in Timothy J. Armstrong\n(ed.), Michel Foucault, Philosopher, New York: Routledge,\npp. 225–232.","Hegel, G.W.F., 2002 [1807], The Phenomenology of Mind,\nVol. 2. 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","Rossinow, Doug, 1998, The Politics of Authenticity:\nLiberalism, Christianity and the New Left in America, New York:\nColumbia University Press.","Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1979 [1762], Émile, Alan Bloom\n(trans.), New York: Basic Books.","–––, 1957 [1770], The Confessions of\nJean-Jacques Rousseau, Lester Crocker (ed.), New York: Pocket\nBooks.","–––, 1992 [1754], Discourse on the Origin of\nInequality, Donald A.Cress (trans.), Indianapolis: Hackett.","–––, 1997 [1761], Julie, or, The new\nHeloise: Letters of Two Lovers Who Live in a Small Town at the Foot of\nthe Alps, P. Stewart and J. 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B., 1998, The Invention of Autonomy: A History\nof Modern Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press","Sennett, Richard, 1993, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design\nand Social Life of Cities, London: Faber & Faber.","Sennett, Richard and Richard Cobb, 1972, The Hidden Injuries\nof Class, New York: Knopf.","Sheldrake, Philip F., 2003, “Christian Spirituality as a Way\nof Living Publicly: A Dialectic of the Mystical and\nProphetic”, Spiritus: A Journal of Christian\nSpirituality, 3(1): 19–37.","Sisk, John P., 1973, “On being an\nobject”, Harper’s, 247: 60–64.","Slater, Philip Elliot, 1970, The pursuit of loneliness:\nAmerican culture at the breaking point, Boston: Beacon\nPress.","Taylor, Charles, 1989, Sources of the Self. The Making of the\nModern Identity, Cambridge: CUP.","–––, 1991, The Ethics of Authenticity,\nCambridge: Harvard University Press.","–––, 1995, “The politics of\nrecognition”, in Philosophical Arguments, by Charles\nTaylor, 225–257. 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A Morality Constraint?” International Journal of\nPhilosophical Studies, 19: 71–82.","Whyte, William H., 1956, The Organizational Man, New\nYork, Simon and Schuster.","Williams, Bernard, 1973, Utilitarianism: For and Against,\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press 108–118.","–––, 1985, “Moral Luck”,\nin Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980,\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.","–––, 2002, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay\nin Genealogy, Princeton: Princeton University Press.","–––, 2002, Truth and Truthfulness, New\nJersey: Princeton University Press.","Wolf, Susan, 1997, “Meaning and\nMorality”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 97:\n299–315. ","Yankelovich, Daniel, 1981, New Rules: Searching for\nSelf-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down, New York: Random\nHouse."],"string":"[\n \"Adorno, Theodor W., 1973, The Jargon of Authenticity,\\ntrans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will, Evanston, IL: Northwestern\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"–––, 1974, Minima Moralia: Reflections from\\nDamaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London: NLB.\",\n \"Aho, Kevin, 2014, Existentialism: An Introduction, \\nCambridge: Polity.\",\n \"Anderson, Joel, 1995, “Review Essay: The Persistence of\\nAuthenticity”, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 21(1):\\n101–109.\",\n \"Augustine, St., 1953, De vera religione, (On True\\nReligion), trans. by J.H.S. Burleigh, South Bend, Indiana:\\nGateway.\",\n \"–––, 1988, Tractates on the Gospel of\\nJohn 1–10, translated by John W. Rettig. (The Fathers of\\nthe Church, 78), Washington, DC: Catholic University of America\\nPress.\",\n \"Bauer, K., 2017, “To be or Not to be Authentic. In Defense\\nof Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal”, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 20(3): 567–580.\",\n \"Beauvoir, Simone de, 1970 [1947], The Ethics of\\nAmbiguity, New York: The Citadel Press.\",\n \"Bell, Daniel, 1976, The Cultural Contradictions of\\nCapitalism, New York: Basic Books.\",\n \"Bell, Linda A., 1989, Sartre’s Ethics of Authenticity,\\nTuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press.\",\n \"Bellah, Robert N. et al., 1985, Habits of the Heart,\\nBerkeley: University of California Press.\",\n \"Benjamin, Walter, 1973, “The Work of Art in the Age of\\nMechanical Reproduction”, in Illuminations, ed. by\\nHannah Arendt, Glasgow: Fontana.\",\n \"Berlin, Isaiah, 2000, Three Critics of the Enlightenment:\\nVico, Hamann, Herder, Princeton: Princeton University Press.\",\n \"Berger, Peter, 1970, “On the Obsolescence of the Concept of\\nHonor”, European Journal of Sociology, 11(2): 338–347;\\nreprinted in S. Hauerwas and A. MacIntyre, eds., Revisions:\\nChanging Perspectives in Moral Philosophy, Notre Dame University\\nPress, 1983.\",\n \"Berman, Marshall, 1970, The Politics of Authenticity: Radical\\nIndividualism and the Emergence of Modern Society, New York:\\nAtheneum.\",\n \"Bialystok, L., 2014, “Authenticity and the Limits of Philosophy”, Dialogue, 53(2): 271–298.\",\n \"Blattner, William, 2006, Heidegger’s Being and Time, New\\nYork: Continuum.\",\n \"Bloom, Allan, 1987, The Closing of the American Mind, New\\nYork: Simon and Schuster.\",\n \"Calhoun, Cheshire, 1995, “Standing for\\nsomething”, The Journal of Philosophy, 92:\\n235–60.\",\n \"Carman, Taylor, 2003, Heidegger’s Analytic: Interpretation,\\nDiscourse, and Authenticity in Being and Time, New York:\\nCambridge University Press.\",\n \"Carnegie, Dale, 1948, How to Stop Worrying and Start\\nLiving, New York: Simon & Schuster.\",\n \"Darnton, Robert, 1984, The Great Cat Massacre and Other\\nEpisodes in French Cultural History, New York: Viking.\",\n \"Davenport, John J., 2012, Narrative Identity, Autonomy, and\\nMorality: From Frankfurt and MacIntyre to Kierkegaard, New York:\\nRoutledge.\",\n \"Despland, Michel, 1975, “Can Conscience Be Hypocritical? The\\nContrasting Analyses of Kant and Hegel”, The Harvard\\nTheological Review, 68 (3/4): 357–370.\",\n \"Dreyfus, Hubert L, 1991, Being-in-the-World. A Commentary on\\nHeidegger’s Being and Time Division I, Cambridge, MA: MIT\\nPress.\",\n \"Dutton, Denis, 2003, Authenticity in Art, in The\\nOxford Handbook of Aesthetics, ed. by Jerrold Levinson. New York:\\nOxford University Press.\",\n \"Dworkin, Gerald, 1988, The Theory and Practice of\\nAutonomy, New York: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Fairlie, Henry, 1978, “Too rich for\\nheroes”, Harper’s, 257: 33–42; 97–98.\",\n \"Farrell, James J., 1997, The Spirit of the Sixties,\\nLondon: Routledge.\",\n \"Feldman, S., 2014, Against Authenticity: Why You Shouldn’t Be Yourself,\\nLanham, MD: Lexington Books.\",\n \"Ferrara, Alessandro, 1993, Modernity and Authenticity: A Study\\nof the Social and Ethical Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau,\\nAlbany, NY: Sunny Press.\",\n \"–––, 1998, Reflective Authenticity,\\nLondon: Routledge.\",\n \"–––, 2009, “Authenticity Without a True Self”,\\nin Ph. Vannini and J.P. Williams (eds.), Authenticity in Culture, Self, and\\nSociety, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 21–36.\",\n \"–––, 2017, Rousseau and Critical\\nTheory, Boston and Leiden, Brill.\",\n \"–––, 2019, “The Dual Paradox of Authenticity in\\nthe 21st Century”, in Th. Claviez, K. Imesch, and B. Sweers (eds.),\\nCritique of Authenticity, Wilmington, DE: Vernon Press.\",\n \"Foucault, Michel, 1980, The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An\\nIntroduction, New York: Vintage Books.\",\n \"–––, 1984, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An\\nOverview of Work in Progress,” in The Foucault Reader,\\nPaul Rabinow (ed.), New York: Pantheon, pp. 340–372.\",\n \"–––, 1983, “The Subject and Power”,\\nin Michel Foucault Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics by\\nHubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Chicago: University of Chicago\\nPress.\",\n \"–––, 1988, “An Aesthetics of\\nExistence”, in Michel Foucault: Politics, Philosophy,\\nCulture, edited by Lawrence D.Kritzman, pp. 47–53, New\\nYork: Routledge.\",\n \"–––, 1994, The Order of Things: An\\nArchaeology of the Human Sciences, New York: Vintage Books.\",\n \"Golomb, Jacob, 1995, In Search of Authenticity from\\nKierkegaard to Camus, Routledge: London, New York.\",\n \"Gray, Glenn J., 1965, “Salvation on the campus: Why\\nexistentialism is capturing the students”, Harper’s,\\n230: 53–59.\",\n \"Guignon, Charles, 2004, On Being Authentic, London:\\nRoutledge.\",\n \"–––, 2008,\\n“Authenticity”, Philosophy Compass, 3:\\n277–290.\",\n \"Hadot, Pierre, 1992, “Reflections on the notion of the\\n‘cultivation of the self’”, in Timothy J. Armstrong\\n(ed.), Michel Foucault, Philosopher, New York: Routledge,\\npp. 225–232.\",\n \"Hegel, G.W.F., 2002 [1807], The Phenomenology of Mind,\\nVol. 2. London: Routledge.\",\n \"Heidegger, Martin, 1962 [1927], Being and Time,\\nJ. Macquarrie & E. Robinson (trans.), New York: Harper &\\nRow.\",\n \"Heldke, Lisa, and Thomsen, Jens, 2014, “Two Concepts of\\nAuthenticity”, Social Philosophy Today, 30: 79–94.\",\n \"Honneth, Axel, 1994, “Schwerpunkt: Autonomie und\\nAuthentizität”, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie,\\n42(1): 59–60.\",\n \"Jay, Martin, 2004, “Mimesis and Mimetology: Adorno and\\nLacoue-Labarthe”, in Critical Theory, Vol. 4,\\nD. Rasmussen and J. Swindal (eds), London: Sage,\\npp. 265–283.\",\n \"Jeffries, Stuart, 2002, “Bernard Williams: The Quest for\\nTruth”, The Guardian, November 29,\\n2. [Jeffries 2002 available online]\",\n \"Kierkegaard, Søren, 1962 [1846], The Present Age, A. Dru\\n(trans.), NY: Harper Torchbooks.\",\n \"–––, 1992 [1846], Concluding Unscientific\\nPostscript to “Philosophical Fragments”, Vol. 1,\\nPrinceton: Princeton University Press,\",\n \"–––, 1983 [1843], Fear and Trembling and\\nRepetition, Princeton: Princeton University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1980 [1849], The Sickness Unto Death:\\nThe Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and\\nAwakening, trans., H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong. Princeton:\\nPrinceton University Press.\",\n \"Lasch, C., 1979, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an\\nAge of Diminishing Expectations, New York: Norton.\",\n \"MacKay, K., forthcoming, “Authenticity and Normative Authority:\\nAddressing the Agency Dilemma with Values of One’s Own”,\\nJournal of Social Philosophy, first online 01 December 2019.\\ndoi:10.1111/josp.12309\",\n \"McManus, D., 2019, “On a Judgment of One’s Own: Heideggerian\\nAuthenticity, Standpoints, and All Things Considered”,\\nMind, 128(512): 1181–1204.\",\n \"Menke, Christoph, 2005, “Innere Natur und soziale\\nNormativität: Die Idee der Selbstverwirklichung”,\\nin Die kulturellen Werte Europas, edited by Hans Joas and\\nKlaus Wiegandt, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, pp. 304–352.\",\n \"Newman, G.E., and Smith, R.K., 2016, “Kinds of Authenticity”, Philosophy Compass, 11(10): 609–618.\",\n \"Novak, Michael, 1976, “The family out of\\nfavor”, Harper’s, 252: 37–46.\",\n \"Nussbaum, Martha, 1994, Therapy of Desire. Theory and Practice\\nin Hellenistic Ethics, Princeton: Princeton University\\nPress.\",\n \"Oshana, Marina, 2007, “Autonomy and the Question of Authenticity”, Social Theory and Practice, 33(3): 411–429.\",\n \"Orwell, Miles, 1989, The Real Thing: Imitation and\\nAuthenticity in American Culture, 1880–1940. North\\nCarolina: University of North Carolina Press.\",\n \"Potter, Andrew, 2010, The Authenticity Hoax: How We Got Lost\\nTrying to Find Ourselves, San Francisco: HarperCollins.\",\n \"Ricoeur, P., 1970, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on\\nInterpretation, trans., S. Savage, New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ\\nPress.\",\n \"Riesmann, David, 1950, The Lonely Crowd. A Study of the\\nChanging American Character, Written with Nathan Glazer and Reuel\\nDenney, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.\",\n \"Rings, M., 2017, “Authenticity, Self-fulfillment, and\\nSelf-acknowledgment”, The Journal of Value Inquiry,\\n51(3): 475–489.\",\n \"Roessler, B., 2012, “Authenticity of cultures and of persons”,\\nPhilosophy and Social Criticism, 38(4-5): 445–455.\",\n \"Rorty, Richard, 1989, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press. \",\n \"Rossinow, Doug, 1998, The Politics of Authenticity:\\nLiberalism, Christianity and the New Left in America, New York:\\nColumbia University Press.\",\n \"Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 1979 [1762], Émile, Alan Bloom\\n(trans.), New York: Basic Books.\",\n \"–––, 1957 [1770], The Confessions of\\nJean-Jacques Rousseau, Lester Crocker (ed.), New York: Pocket\\nBooks.\",\n \"–––, 1992 [1754], Discourse on the Origin of\\nInequality, Donald A.Cress (trans.), Indianapolis: Hackett.\",\n \"–––, 1997 [1761], Julie, or, The new\\nHeloise: Letters of Two Lovers Who Live in a Small Town at the Foot of\\nthe Alps, P. Stewart and J. Hanover (trans.), Lebanon, NH:\\nUniversity Press of New England.\",\n \"Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1948, Anti-semite and Jew, New York:\\nSchocken Press.\",\n \"–––, 1992a [1943], Being and Nothingness: A\\nPhenomenological Essay on Ontology, New York: Washington Square\\nPress.\",\n \"–––, 1992b [1947–48], Notebooks for an\\nEthics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.\",\n \"–––, 1946, “The Humanism of\\nExistentialism”, reprinted in Charles Guignon and Derk Pereboom\\n(eds.), Existentialism: Basic Writings, Indianapolis, IN:\\nHackett Publishing Co., 2001.\",\n \"Schmid, H.B., 2017, “Authentic Role Play: A Political\\nSolution to an Existential Paradox”, in H. Schmid and\\nG. Thonhauser (eds.), From Conventionalism to Social\\nAuthenticity (Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality: Volume 10),\\nCham: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-56865-2_14\",\n \"Schneewind, J. B., 1998, The Invention of Autonomy: A History\\nof Modern Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press\",\n \"Sennett, Richard, 1993, The Conscience of the Eye: The Design\\nand Social Life of Cities, London: Faber & Faber.\",\n \"Sennett, Richard and Richard Cobb, 1972, The Hidden Injuries\\nof Class, New York: Knopf.\",\n \"Sheldrake, Philip F., 2003, “Christian Spirituality as a Way\\nof Living Publicly: A Dialectic of the Mystical and\\nProphetic”, Spiritus: A Journal of Christian\\nSpirituality, 3(1): 19–37.\",\n \"Sisk, John P., 1973, “On being an\\nobject”, Harper’s, 247: 60–64.\",\n \"Slater, Philip Elliot, 1970, The pursuit of loneliness:\\nAmerican culture at the breaking point, Boston: Beacon\\nPress.\",\n \"Taylor, Charles, 1989, Sources of the Self. The Making of the\\nModern Identity, Cambridge: CUP.\",\n \"–––, 1991, The Ethics of Authenticity,\\nCambridge: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"–––, 1995, “The politics of\\nrecognition”, in Philosophical Arguments, by Charles\\nTaylor, 225–257. Cambridge Ma: Harvard University Press. \",\n \"–––, 2007, A Secular Age, Cambridge:\\nHarvard University Press.\",\n \"Thomson, Irene Taviss, 2000, In conflict no longer: self and\\nsociety in contemporary America, Oxford: Rowmann &\\nLittlefield.\",\n \"Trilling, Lionel, 1972, Sincerity and Authenticity,\\nCambridge: Harvard University Press.\",\n \"Varga, S., 2011a, Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal, New\\nYork: Routledge.\",\n \"–––, 2011b, “Self-Realization and Owing to\\nOthers. A Morality Constraint?” International Journal of\\nPhilosophical Studies, 19: 71–82.\",\n \"Whyte, William H., 1956, The Organizational Man, New\\nYork, Simon and Schuster.\",\n \"Williams, Bernard, 1973, Utilitarianism: For and Against,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press 108–118.\",\n \"–––, 1985, “Moral Luck”,\\nin Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2002, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay\\nin Genealogy, Princeton: Princeton University Press.\",\n \"–––, 2002, Truth and Truthfulness, New\\nJersey: Princeton University Press.\",\n \"Wolf, Susan, 1997, “Meaning and\\nMorality”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 97:\\n299–315. \",\n \"Yankelovich, Daniel, 1981, New Rules: Searching for\\nSelf-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down, New York: Random\\nHouse.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../beauvoir/","text":"Beauvoir, Simone de"},{"href":"../existentialism/","text":"existentialism"},{"href":"../heidegger/","text":"Heidegger, Martin"},{"href":"../integrity/","text":"integrity"},{"href":"../kierkegaard/","text":"Kierkegaard, Søren"},{"href":"../sartre/","text":"Sartre, Jean-Paul"},{"href":"../self-knowledge/","text":"self-knowledge"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../beauvoir/\",\n \"text\": \"Beauvoir, Simone de\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../existentialism/\",\n \"text\": \"existentialism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../heidegger/\",\n \"text\": \"Heidegger, Martin\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../integrity/\",\n \"text\": \"integrity\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../kierkegaard/\",\n \"text\": \"Kierkegaard, Søren\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../sartre/\",\n \"text\": \"Sartre, Jean-Paul\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../self-knowledge/\",\n \"text\": \"self-knowledge\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":96,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"authority"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Authority"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Fri Jul 2, 2004; substantive revision Wed Jan 11, 2012"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\n\nWhen is political authority legitimate? This is one of the\nfundamental questions of political philosophy. Depending on how one\nunderstands political authority this question may be the same as, when\nis coercion by the state legitimate? Or, when do we have duties to\nobey the state? Or, when and who has a right to rule through the\nstate? ","This entry is concerned with the philosophical issues that arise in\nthe justification of political authority. First, this entry will\nexamine some of the main conceptual issues that arise relating to\npolitical authority. What do we mean by political authority? This\nentry distinguishes political authority from political power, and the\nidea of morally legitimate political authority from descriptive ideas\nof authority. It also distinguishes between authority in the sense of\nmorally justified coercion and authority in the sense of capacity to\nimpose duties on others and finally from authority as right to rule.\nFurther distinctions concern the nature of the duties that political\nauthority imposes on subjects. ","The main part of the entry (section\n 4) \n concerns the nature and merits of different accounts of the\nlegitimacy of political authority. Under what conditions is political\nauthority legitimate? This entry discusses five different views of\nthe legitimacy of political authority. It discusses the\ninstrumentalist theory according to which authority is legitimate to\nthe extent that it gets people to do what they already have a duty to\ndo. It discusses the consent theory of authority according to which\nauthority is legitimate only if the subjects have consented to it. It\ndiscusses the theory advanced by John Rawls that authority is\nlegitimate if and only if it acts in accord with principles the\nsubjects agree to. It discusses Ronald Dworkin's view according to\nwhich legitimate political authority is akin to the basis of\nobligations to friendships, families and other associations. Finally\nit discusses the democratic conception of authority according to which\nthe democratic assembly has legitimate political authority within\ncertains limits because it treats every citizen as an equal in the\nprocess of making law."],"string":"[\n \"\\n\\nWhen is political authority legitimate? This is one of the\\nfundamental questions of political philosophy. Depending on how one\\nunderstands political authority this question may be the same as, when\\nis coercion by the state legitimate? Or, when do we have duties to\\nobey the state? Or, when and who has a right to rule through the\\nstate? \",\n \"This entry is concerned with the philosophical issues that arise in\\nthe justification of political authority. First, this entry will\\nexamine some of the main conceptual issues that arise relating to\\npolitical authority. What do we mean by political authority? This\\nentry distinguishes political authority from political power, and the\\nidea of morally legitimate political authority from descriptive ideas\\nof authority. It also distinguishes between authority in the sense of\\nmorally justified coercion and authority in the sense of capacity to\\nimpose duties on others and finally from authority as right to rule.\\nFurther distinctions concern the nature of the duties that political\\nauthority imposes on subjects. \",\n \"The main part of the entry (section\\n 4) \\n concerns the nature and merits of different accounts of the\\nlegitimacy of political authority. Under what conditions is political\\nauthority legitimate? This entry discusses five different views of\\nthe legitimacy of political authority. It discusses the\\ninstrumentalist theory according to which authority is legitimate to\\nthe extent that it gets people to do what they already have a duty to\\ndo. It discusses the consent theory of authority according to which\\nauthority is legitimate only if the subjects have consented to it. It\\ndiscusses the theory advanced by John Rawls that authority is\\nlegitimate if and only if it acts in accord with principles the\\nsubjects agree to. It discusses Ronald Dworkin's view according to\\nwhich legitimate political authority is akin to the basis of\\nobligations to friendships, families and other associations. Finally\\nit discusses the democratic conception of authority according to which\\nthe democratic assembly has legitimate political authority within\\ncertains limits because it treats every citizen as an equal in the\\nprocess of making law.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Legitimate Authority, de facto Authority and Political Power","sub_toc":["1.1 Legitimate Political Authority: Some Conceptual Distinctions","1.2 Political Authority and Different Kinds of Duties of Obedience","1.3 Political Authority without Duties of Obedience","1.4 The Diversity of Holders of Political Authority"]},{"content_title":"2. Conceptions of the Legitimacy of Political Authority","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"3. The Puzzle of Political Authority: Philosophical Anarchism","sub_toc":["3.1 Instrumentalism about Legitimate Political Authority","3.2 A Worry about the Instrumentalist Account of Practical Reason"]},{"content_title":"4. A Second Form of Philosophical Anarchism","sub_toc":["4.1 The Consent Theory of Political Authority: The Natural Right to Freedom Argument","4.2 The Instrumentalist Critique of the Natural Right Argument","4.3 The Consent Theory: The Options Argument","4.4 The Instrumentalist Critique of the Option and Natural Right Arguments","4.5 The Consent Theory of Political Authority: The Argument from Personal Reasons","4.6 Consent Theory: The Argument from Disagreement","4.7 The Problems of Irrational, Immoral Failures of Consent","4.8 Tacit Consent","4.9 The Humean Attack on Tacit Consent","4.10 How Can Tacit Consent Be A Basis of Political Authority?","4.11 The Basic Objection of Consent Theorists to Tacit Consent","4.12 Normative Consent"]},{"content_title":"5. Reasonable Consensus Conceptions of Legitimate Political Authority","sub_toc":["5.1 Problems of Reasonableness and Consensus"]},{"content_title":"6. Political Authority as Grounded in Associative Obligations","sub_toc":["6.1 Do Communities of Principle Satisfy the Four Conditions of Genuine Association?"]},{"content_title":"7. A Democratic Conception of Legitimate Political Authority","sub_toc":["7.1 How Can Democracy Make Unjust Laws Legitimate?","7.2 Limits to Democratic Authority"]},{"content_title":"8. Legitimate Political Authority in International Institutions","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Legitimate Authority, de facto Authority and Political Power\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"1.1 Legitimate Political Authority: Some Conceptual Distinctions\",\n \"1.2 Political Authority and Different Kinds of Duties of Obedience\",\n \"1.3 Political Authority without Duties of Obedience\",\n \"1.4 The Diversity of Holders of Political Authority\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Conceptions of the Legitimacy of Political Authority\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. The Puzzle of Political Authority: Philosophical Anarchism\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"3.1 Instrumentalism about Legitimate Political Authority\",\n \"3.2 A Worry about the Instrumentalist Account of Practical Reason\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. A Second Form of Philosophical Anarchism\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"4.1 The Consent Theory of Political Authority: The Natural Right to Freedom Argument\",\n \"4.2 The Instrumentalist Critique of the Natural Right Argument\",\n \"4.3 The Consent Theory: The Options Argument\",\n \"4.4 The Instrumentalist Critique of the Option and Natural Right Arguments\",\n \"4.5 The Consent Theory of Political Authority: The Argument from Personal Reasons\",\n \"4.6 Consent Theory: The Argument from Disagreement\",\n \"4.7 The Problems of Irrational, Immoral Failures of Consent\",\n \"4.8 Tacit Consent\",\n \"4.9 The Humean Attack on Tacit Consent\",\n \"4.10 How Can Tacit Consent Be A Basis of Political Authority?\",\n \"4.11 The Basic Objection of Consent Theorists to Tacit Consent\",\n \"4.12 Normative Consent\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Reasonable Consensus Conceptions of Legitimate Political Authority\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"5.1 Problems of Reasonableness and Consensus\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. Political Authority as Grounded in Associative Obligations\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"6.1 Do Communities of Principle Satisfy the Four Conditions of Genuine Association?\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"7. A Democratic Conception of Legitimate Political Authority\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"7.1 How Can Democracy Make Unjust Laws Legitimate?\",\n \"7.2 Limits to Democratic Authority\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"8. Legitimate Political Authority in International Institutions\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\n\nLet us start with the distinctions between political authority as a\nnormative notion (or morally legitimate authority) and political\nauthority as a non-normative notion (or de facto authority)\nand between political authority in either of these senses and political\npower. To say that a state has authority in the normative sense is to\nsay something normative about the relationship between the state and\nits subjects. This is the relationship that we will concentrate on in\nwhat follows.","\n\nFor most contemporary theorists to say that the state has authority in\nthe descriptive sense is to say that the state maintains public order\nand that it issues commands and makes rules that are generally obeyed\nby subjects because many of them (or some important subset of them\nsuch as the officials of the state) think of it as having authority in\nthe normative sense (Hart 1961) (Some thinkers have understood the\nidea of legitimate authority in this descriptive sense as well (Weber\n1970); in what follows, we will use the term “legitimate\nauthority” in a normative sense only.) We should note here that\nthe attitudinal component of de facto authority is not\naccepted by everyone. For both Thomas Hobbes and John Austin,\npolitical authority in the de facto sense simply amounts to\nthe capacity of a person or group of persons to maintain public order\nand secure the obedience of most people by issuing commands backed by\nsanctions. Subjects need not think of the authority as a legitimate\nauthority, on this account.","\n\nAlso, the distinction between de facto and morally\nlegitimate authority is not universally accepted or at least it is not\naccepted that the distinction makes a difference. Hobbes insists that\nany entity capable of performing the function of de facto\nauthority is necessarily justified and deserves the obedience of the\nde facto subjects (Hobbes 1668). But most have argued that\nthere is an important distinction between de facto authority\nand legitimate authority. We will explore in what follows the\nconceptions political and legal philosophers have had of legitimate\npolitical authority.","\n\nDe facto authority, on anyone's account, is distinct from\npolitical power. The latter is concerned with the state's or any\nagent's ability to get others to act in ways that they desire even when\nthe subject does not want to do what the agent wants him to do.\nPolitical power does not require any kind of pro attitude toward the\nagent on the part of the subject, nor does it require that the state is\nactually successful at securing public order. It operates completely in\nthe realm of threats and offers. No doubt for the state to have de\nfacto authority or legitimate authority requires that the state\nhave the power to compel those subjects who do not wish to go along.\nThis is necessary for the state's ability to maintain public order and\nto assure those who do see it as an authority that it will be able to\ndo what it is supposed to do."],"section_title":"1. Legitimate Authority, de facto Authority and Political Power","subsections":[{"content":["\n\nThe rubric under which the normative notion of political authority\nis normally known is the idea of legitimate political authority. In\nthis section, we will review a number of different ideas that have been\nunderstood to come under this idea of legitimate political\nauthority.","\n\nIt is important here to note the distinction between theoretical and\npractical authority. A theoretical authority in some area of\nintellectual inquiry is one that is an expert in that area. Theoretical\nauthorities operate primarily by giving advice to the layman, which\nadvice the layman is free to take or not. The judgments of theoretical\nauthorities give people reasons for belief while the judgments of\npolitical authorities are normally thought to give people reasons for\naction. Theoretical authorities do not normally impose duties on\nothers, although they might give advice on what a person's duty is.","\n\nMost theorists of political authority view it as a species of\npractical authority rather than theoretical authority, though this\nview is not held by all . Those who hold that political authority is a\nspecies of practical authority maintain that political authorities\nissue directives that give people reasons for action and not reason\nfor belief. The thought is that political authorities impose duties on\ntheir subjects and thereby give them reasons for action. These\ntheorists argue that it is the function of political authorities to\nget people to act in certain ways so as to solve various collective\naction problems such as a variety of different types of coordination\nproblems, assurance problems and free rider problems. There have been\nsome dissenting views on this of late. Some have argued that the\naccount of practical reason required by the idea that political\nauthority is a practical authority is incoherent and so they have\nopted for the idea that political authorities, when legitimate, are\ntheoretical authorities regarding the existence and nature of the\nduties and reasons for action that people have (Hurd 2001). Since this\nview is unusual this entry will concentrate on conceptions of\npolitical authority that treat it as a species of practical\nauthority.","\n\nThe rest of this section will discuss a number of different analyses\nof political authority. There are three basic types of conceptual\naccount of legitimate political authority: legitimate political\nauthority as justified coercion, legitimate political authority as the\ncapacity to impose duties, and legitimate political authority as the\nright to rule. First, many people have understood legitimate political\nauthority as a political authority that is justified in coercing the\nsubjects of its authority. The notion of justification here is a moral\none. The thought is that a political authority might have moral\njustification in coercing those who come under its authority. This is\na particularly thin conception of legitimate authority. For instance,\na state can have this kind of authority when it legitimately occupies\na territory as a result of a just war. It is morally justified in\ncoercing the inhabitants of the occupied territory.","\n\nThe moral justification of a group of people in coercing others may\nbe more or less systematic. For instance, a group of people may be\nmorally justified in engaging in just a few actions of coercing others.\nOr a group may be morally justified in engaging in coercion more\ngenerally as in the case of a morally justified military\noccupation.","\n\nThis notion of authority need not involve duties on the part of the\npopulation that is being coerced. Indeed, they may be justified in\ntrying to escape coercion. This could be the case in a military\noccupation of a country that is justified on the grounds that it is\nnecessary to stop a third country from engaging in morally indefensible\naggression. This conception of morally justified coercion therefore\ninvolves no conception of a moral community among persons. In this\nfirst conception of authority as justified coercion, the authority may\nnot even issue commands let alone make laws. It may simply justifiably\nissue threats and offers. The difference between legitimate and\nillegitimate political authority on this account is that the actions of\nthe illegitimate political authority are not morally justified while\nthe coercive actions of the legitimate authority are justified.","\n\nA second conceptual account of legitimate political authority\nimplies that those over whom authority is exercised have some kind of\nduty with regard to the authority. Or the authority has the moral power to\nimpose duties on the subjects. This duty can be merely a duty not to\ninterfere with the activities of the political authority. Or it can\ninvolve the more significant duty to obey the authority. This\nconception of authority involves the authority and the subjects in a\nweak kind of moral relationship. The authority is justified in issuing\nthe commands and attempting to force people to comply with the commands\nwhile the subjects have some kind of duty not to interfere with these\nactivities or comply with the commands.","\n\nThe duty of the subjects need not be owed to the authority. It may\nmerely be that the subjects have a duty to obey where that duty is not\nowed to anyone in particular or where that duty is owed ultimately to\npeople who are not the authority. For instance, if one thinks that one\nis likely better to respect others' rights by complying with the\nauthority's directives, the action is ultimately owed to those\nothers.","\n\nSome have stressed the idea that the holding of justified political\nauthority may only involve a duty on the part of others not to\ninterfere with the political authority and they argue that the duty of\nnon-interference is much weaker than a duty to obey (Morris 1998). It\nis not clear how great the difference between these two duties is in\npractice at least as far as citizens are concerned. For many cases of\nfailing to obey an authority are cases of interference with the\nauthority. An analogy may be helpful here. If one is playing a game of\nbaseball with an umpire and one refuses to comply with the directives\nof the umpire, one is in effect interfering with the umpire's carrying\nout of his duties by not complying with the directives of the\numpire.","\n\nWhile a duty to obey seems to imply a duty not to interfere, there\nare cases of duties of non-interference that are not duties to obey,\nsuch as the duties of foreign powers not to interfere in the activities\nof a legitimate state. Furthermore, the duty to obey is clearly the\nmore contentious issue in the question of authority since it requires\nthat one make one's actions conform to the specific directives of the\nauthority.","\n\nA third conceptual account of authority or set of conceptions of\nlegitimate authority involves the idea that the authority has a right\nto rule. Strictly speaking, an authority can have a right to rule\nwithout the subjects having a duty to comply. The authority may have a\n“justification” right to rule (Ladenson 1980). This means\nthat the authority has a permission to issue commands and make rules\nand coerce others to comply and its possession of this right is\njustified on moral grounds. This “justification right” is\nnot much more than the first notion we discussed above.","\n\nA more robust right to rule includes a duty owed to the authority on\nthe part of the subjects not to interfere with the activities of the\nauthority. The subjects owe it to the authority not to interfere with\nit. This is connected with the right of the authority to rule. Finally,\nan authority can have a right to rule in the sense that it may issue\ncommands and make rules and require subjects to comply with these rules\nand commands and the subjects have duties, which they owe to the\nauthority, to comply with the rules and commands.","\n\nThe distinction between a right to rule that is correlated with a\nduty not to interfere and one that is correlated with a duty to comply\ncomes in handy when we consider the difference between the duties owed\nto a legitimate political authority by the subjects of that authority\nand the duties owed to it by other states and persons who are not\nsubject to that authority. A state with a right to rule in the\nstrongest sense may be owed obedience by its subjects but it is usually\nowed only a duty of non-interference by those who are not a part of the\nstate such as other states and persons in other states. It is\nworthwhile drawing a distinction here between internal legitimacy and\nexternal legitimacy (Buchanan 2004).","\n\nIt is not a useful aim of philosophers or political thinkers to\ndetermine which one of these conceptual accounts of political\nauthority is the right one. Each one of them grasps a kind of\nlegitimacy of political authority that is worth taking into account\nand distinguishing from the others. The idea of legitimate authority\nas justified coercive power is a suitable way of getting at the\nauthority of hostile but justified occupation powers. And the idea of\nlegitimate authority as an authority that has a right to rule over\nsubjects who owe obedience to the authority and that has a right not\nto be interfered with by foreigners is surely an importantly distinct\nand perhaps ideal type of authority, which is rarely implemented. The\nkind of legitimacy that is merely correlated with duties to obey or\nnot to interfere is a useful intermediate category between those\ntwo.","\n\nWhat is worth noting is that the idea of legitimate authority as a\nright to rule in the strong sense described above does describe a kind\nof ideal of political community. The idea of legitimate authority as a\nright to rule to which citizens owe obedience gives each citizen a\nmoral duty to obey, which it owes to the authority. So this form of\nlegitimacy is grounded in a moral relationship between the parties that\ngoes beyond the fact that they are fellow human beings. The\nestablishment of a robust right to rule depends on the fact that each\ncitizen rightly takes as a reason for obedience that it has a moral\nduty owed to the authority. Since a legitimate political authority with\na right to rule is predicated on the fact that citizens have moral\nreasons grounded in the right to rule to obey it, the right to rule\nengages citizens at a deep moral level. The exercise of political power\nis founded in a moral relationship between moral persons that\nrecognizes and affirms the moral personality of each citizen.","\n\nBy contrast, a society in which it is merely the case that\ncoercion is justified is one in which the subjects are permissibly\ntreated as means to morally defensible purposes. The subjects do not\nowe anything to the authority or have any duties to obey it. So, in the\ncase of an authority as merely justified coercion, the subjects'\nreasons for obedience are merely their desires to avoid punishment. And\nthat is the level at which the authority deals with them. Such a\nsociety does not engage the subjects as moral persons, it merely\nattempts to administer the activities of persons so as to bring about\nin a morally justified way a desirable outcome. At the extreme, a\nprisoner of war camp or even a hostile but justified military\noccupation gives the authorities justification for coercion. The people\nwho are subjected to that treatment often have no duties to obey and\nthey do not regard each other or the authorities as members of a\nunified political community. They are merely fellow human beings. To\nthe extent that a political society is best when it involves the mutual\nrecognition and affirmation of the moral status of each person, the\nkind of society that involves merely justified coercion of some by\nothers is a pale shadow.","\n\nAnd the intermediate form of political authority is incomplete in\nthe respect in which the exercise of political power involves the\nmutual recognition and affirmation of the status of each person. It is\nthe case that subjects have duties but those duties are not essentially\nconnected to anything in the authority. The subjects instead act more\nin accordance with reasons that are independent of the authority when\nthey obey the authority. So to the extent that a society ruled by an\nauthority that has the right to rule is an ideal of a moral community,\nthe other types of authority are lesser forms of a morally ideal\npolitical community."],"subsection_title":"1.1 Legitimate Political Authority: Some Conceptual Distinctions"},{"content":["\n\nTo the extent that a duty of obedience is included in the concept of\npolitical authority, there can be different forms of obedience on the\npart of subjects. This implies a very distinct dimension of political\nauthority. When a political authority issues a command and the subject\nhas a duty to obey, what is the nature of this duty? One might have a\nduty to obey a command merely because it commands the subject to do\nsomething that is just and any alternative action would be unjust. Here\nthe duty to obey would depend on the content of the command. Commands\nthat are unjust or perhaps even commands that require actions that are\nnot exclusively just may not involve duties at all.","\n\nThe commands of a legitimate political authority are usually thought\nto involve something more than this. The duty of the subject is\ngrounded not in the content of the command itself but in the nature of\nthe source issuing the command. The duty to obey is then automatically\ngenerated when the command is issued by the appropriate authority and\nwhen it has the right form and provenance. In this respect, the duty to\nobey is content independent or independent of the content of the\nparticular command. One must obey because one has been commanded and\nnot because of the particular content of the command. One must do it\nbecause one has been told to do it. This kind of duty seems to be the\nmost central kind of duty involved in the duty to obey. It is the idea\nthat one must obey the authority because it is the authority. It does\nnot imply of itself that one owes the duty of obedience to the\nauthority so it does not imply that there is a right to rule on the\npart of the authority.","\n\nHere we must distinguish a duty that is owed to the authority and a\nduty that is merely the result of the authoritative command. The duty\nthat is owed to the authority is grounded in the fact that the\nauthority possesses a feature that gives it a right to command and that\nit is in virtue of that right that one owes obedience. The idea is that\nthere is something just in itself that the authority be obeyed.","\n\nOne other distinction that is worth making in this connection is the\ndistinction between a preemptive duty to obey and a duty that is not\npreemptive. A preemptive duty is one that replaces other duties. It\nputs other duties out of play when it comes into play. A preemptive\nduty is not weighed against other duties that might relate to what one\nis thinking of doing. Of course, a preemptive duty may not preempt all\nother considerations, its preemption may operate only with a limited\nscope and thus preempt only some limited set of considerations.","\n\nAn example of a preemptive duty is the case of a promissory\nobligation. If I have agreed to do something for you and I suddenly see\nsome pleasurable alternative to fulfilling my obligation, most people\nwould think that I ought to exclude the consideration of pleasure\naltogether from my deliberations even though the pleasure would be a\nconsideration had I made no promise. It is simply not something that I\ncan legitimately weigh in the balance against the promissory\nobligation. So if an authority issues a command and the duty to obey is\na preemptive duty, then the subject does not weigh the other duties\nthat might otherwise apply to him in the balance with the preemptive\nduty. The preemptive duty simply excludes the other duties. By\ncontrast, if a duty is not preemptive, then when it comes time to\ncomply with it, one must balance it with other duties that weigh for\nand against acting in accord with the duty.","\n\nMost think that the duties associated with authority are content\nindependent in the sense that one must do what one is told even if one\nis skeptical about the merits of the command. There is some\nskepticism, however, about the claim that legitimate political\nauthorities impose preemptive duties on subjects. These people have\nquestioned the rationality of preemptive duties or reasons for\naction. Surely, there are times when what appear to be preempted\nconsiderations all add up to a consideration that outweighs the\npreempting consideration. How can this be understood on the preemption\nmodel? Some have argued that authoritative commands simply give\nespecially weighty content independent duties, which can be balanced\nagainst other duties (Shapiro 2002). The discussion of instrumentalism\nwill say a bit more about these criticisms below.","\n\nThe most demanding notion of authority is the idea of a political\nauthority that has a right to rule that correlates with a duty to obey\nthat is owed to the authority and that is a content independent and\npreemptive duty."],"subsection_title":"1.2 Political Authority and Different Kinds of Duties of Obedience"},{"content":["\n\nMost who think of legitimate authority as a kind of moral power to\nchange the moral situation of others think of it as creating duties in\nothers. And this is certainly the most prominent and striking\nexercise of authority. But political authorities do not only create\nduties in others in and some cases do not purport to create such\nduties at all. The most prominent instances of this can be found in\ninternational institutions. The Security Council of the United\nNations exercises authority in a variety of ways: sometimes acting as\na kind of legislative body and sometimes acting as a kind of executive\nbody. Its executive authority is its traditional role in\ninternational law. But this executive authority is quite distinct\nfrom the kind of executive authority we see in the state. The\nSecurity Council exercises its executive authority primarily by\nauthorizing actions and not by carrying them out by itself or by\nrequiring them. One way to describe the moral power of the Security\nCouncil is that it gives a liberty to states to prosecute wars. It\ndoes this against a background of a general prohibition of all war\nexcept in the case of self-defense. It suspends that prohibition for\ncertain states. It does not require them to act, it only permits them\nto act in a warlike way. This is because the agent of enforcement in\nthe international system is a decentralized one.","\n\nFurthermore the Dispute Settlement Mechanism of the World Trade\nOrganization functions in very much the same way. The dispute\nsettlement system first determines whether a state has in fact\nviolated its agreements on trade and tariffs with another state. And\nwhen it determines this, it permits the plaintiff state to act in a\nway that would normally be in violation of its agreements. It permits\nretaliation through the system of tariffs and non-tariff barriers. It\ncannot require this retaliation."," \n\nHence the two most effective and authoritative institutions in the\ninternational system do not impose duties at all in many cases, they\nexercise a moral power to alter the moral situation of states but the\nalteration is from duty to permission in many cases. To be sure, they\ndo this against the background of treaties and agreements that have a\nkind of legislative force and that do purport to impose genuine\nduties. And there are duties not to interfere with the authorized\nactivity, but the point remains that the primary exercise is one of\nchanging duties to permissions. This may confirm Applebaum's idea\nthat authority need not impose duties."],"subsection_title":"1.3 Political Authority without Duties of Obedience"},{"content":["\n\nOne reason for keeping our minds open to different accounts of\npolitical authority is that there are different kinds of political\nauthority. Different accounts may be suitable to different kinds of\nauthority. Indeed, different principles grounding authority may be\nsuitable to different kinds of authority. One thing that is not often\nenough discussed in treatments of political authority is the fact that\nthere are very different kinds of political authority. Within the\nstate alone there is legislative authority, executive authority,\njudicial authority, and administrative authority; these different\nkinds of authority can have distinct sub-branches of authority. And\nthere are political authorities outside of the modern state, namely\ninternational institutions. These have a very distinct kind of\nauthority at least in the contemporary world and the authority of\nthese different agencies is grounded in different principles.","\n\nAs an illustration of different forms of authority for different\npolitical entities consider the different parts of the modern state.\nWe might think that a democratic legislative assembly has a genuine\nright to rule in the sense that citizens owe obedience to it. They\nmight owe this obedience because the assembly pools all the democratic\nrights of all the citizens and so citizens treat each other as equals\nby complying with the assembly's directives. But citizens do not owe\nit to courts to respect their judgments about the law. The courts may\ncreate duties but the duties are not owed to them. The same\npresumably goes for policemen and adminstrators as well. They seem to\nhave moral powers to create duties but these duties are not owed to\nthem. Furthermore, the grounds of authority might be distinct for\nthese two kinds of entities. The democratic conception might provide\nthe basis of the authority of the assembly while the authority of\ncourts and administrators may be more instrumentally grounded."],"subsection_title":"1.4 The Diversity of Holders of Political Authority"}]},{"main_content":["\n\nFew theorists after Thomas Hobbes and David Hume have argued that\nthere is a general duty to obey the law or that political authority is\ngenerally legitimate (Hobbes 1668; Hume 1965). Most theorists have\nargued that the legitimacy of political authority is one that holds\nonly when the political authority satisfies certain normatively\nimportant conditions. What we will review here are some of the main\ntheories that attempt to explain when a political authority has\nlegitimacy.","\n\nGeneral theories are theories that identify general properties that\nvirtually any kind of political regime can have that gives them\nlegitimacy. Special theories are ones that mark off particular classes\nof regimes that have legitimacy or that have a particularly high level\nof legitimacy. There are really four types of general theory of\npolitical authority and then there are a variety of special theories of\npolitical authority. The four types of general theory of legitimacy are\nconsent theories, reasonable consensus theories, associative obligation\ntheories and instrumentalist theories. The two historically important\nforms of special theory in the West have been the Divine Right of Kings\ntheories and democratic theories."],"section_title":"2. Conceptions of the Legitimacy of Political Authority","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\nAt the root of all contemporary discussions of the legitimacy of\nauthority is the problem posed by Robert Paul Wolff concerning the\nincompatibility of moral autonomy and political authority. The problem\nis really only connected with the kinds of political authority that\nimply content independent duties to comply with authoritative commands.\nThe basic idea is that it is incompatible for a subject to comply with\nthe commands of an authority merely because it is the command of the\nauthority and for the subject to be acting morally autonomously. Wolff\nthinks that each person has a duty to act on the basis of his own moral\nassessment of right and wrong and has the duty to reflect on what is\nright and wrong in each particular instance of action. Such a person\nwould be violating his duty to act autonomously if he complies with\nauthoritative commands on grounds that are independent of the content\nof the commands. So the duty of autonomy is incompatible with the duty\nof obeying political authority. This is the challenge of philosophical\nanarchism (Wolff 1970).","\n\nThe worry is that authority is never legitimate because the kind of\nobedience associated with authority is inconsistent with the autonomy\nof the subject. We can see, however, that this worry applies only to\ncertain accounts of authority, which imply duties to obey on the part\nof the subjects. The account of authority as justified coercion is not\naffected by this argument nor is the account of legitimate authority\nconsisting of a justification right affected by this worry. Still, most\naccounts of the nature of authority do imply content independent duties\non the part of the subjects. We can see that any content independent\nduty, whether it is a duty not to interfere with the authority's\ncommand or it is a duty to obey the authority, is called into question\nby this argument."],"section_title":"3. The Puzzle of Political Authority: Philosophical Anarchism","subsections":[{"content":["\n\nOne can see different accounts of the legitimacy of political\nauthority as responses to the anarchist challenge. Let us start with\nthe instrumentalist account of legitimacy. The canonical statement of\nthis notion of legitimate authority is provided by Joseph Raz. He calls\nit the Normal Justification Thesis. It asserts that “the normal\nway to establish that a person has authority over another person\ninvolves showing that the alleged subject is likely better to comply\nwith reasons which apply to him (other than the alleged authoritative\ndirectives) if he accepts the directives of the alleged authority as\nauthoritatively binding and tries to follow them, rather than by trying\nto follow the reasons which apply to him directly.” (Raz\n1986)","\n\nThis conception of the legitimacy of authority flows from the idea\nthat “authoritative directives should be based on reasons which\nalready independently apply to the subjects of the directives and are\nrelevant to their action in the circumstances covered by the\ndirective” (Raz 1986.) According to Raz, what should guide\ngovernment decisions about what commands to give subjects is what the\nsubjects already have reason to do. For instance, subjects already have\nreason to give a fair share of resources for the common good.\nAuthorities merely help them comply with these reasons by establishing\nan efficient and fair system of taxation. Subjects have reason to\ndefend their fellow countrymen and authorities help them do this by\nestablishing an army in an efficient and fair way. Authorities do these\nthings by issuing commands to subjects that are meant to replace the\nreasons that already apply to the subjects. Instead of the subject\ntrying to figure out exactly how much he owes and who to give it to by\ncoordinating it with many other people, the authority simply takes over\nthese tasks, determines what the subject has reason to do and expects\nthe subject to take its authoritative command as a reason instead of\nthe reasons that directly apply to the action. An authority does its\njob well and is therefore legitimate when it enables subjects to act\nbetter on the reasons that apply to them when they take the commands as\ngiving them preemptive reasons.","\n\nAn instrumentalist attempts to meet Wolff's challenge by saying that\nan authority is legitimate when one complies better with one's duty\noverall by submission to authority than by trying to act on the basis\nof one's own assessments of what is right and wrong in each instance.\nThis amounts to a rejection of the duty of autonomy that is central to\nthe anarchist idea. Or at least it is a rejection of the idea that the\nduty of autonomy is the most fundamental duty. But it does get at\nsomething important. Wolff's challenge states in a rather general way\nthe worry that there is something immoral about failing to critically\nreflect about what one ought to do in each instance of action. And he\nstates that submitting to the commands of the state is precisely a case\nof failing to act on one's critical assessment of a situation. The\ninstrumentalist suggests a way in which it is not immoral to fail to\ncritically reflect on one's prospective actions in each instance.\nIndeed, the instrumentalist can argue that it is sometimes immoral to\ninsist on critically reflecting and acting autonomously when one may\nactually act worse as a result of consistently critically reflecting.\nWe frequently act on the basis of rules of action, without considering\nall the details of the circumstances in which we act on the grounds\nthat trying to take all the details of each situation into account for\neach action would produce bad decisions. The instrumentalist argues\nthat we ought to take this kind of attitude to the commands of the\nstate when we will better act in accordance with our duty overall by\ndoing so than by attempting to make independent assessments of the\nworth of our actions in every case (see Raz 1986, ch. 3.)","\n\nThis response to the philosophical anarchist challenge establishes\nonly a piecemeal duty to obey the state. The instrumentalist argues\nthat some states some of the time issue commands that we (or at least\nsome individuals) ought to submit to without critical reflection on\neach command. It does not imply that the duty to obey the state extends\nto all commands of the state and to all subjects. It only applies when\nthe subject would likely better comply with duties overall by treating\nthe commands as authoritative (i.e. establishing content independent\nand preemptive duties to obey the commands) than by acting on the basis\nof an independent assessment of the rightness of each action. Whether\nthe commands impose duties or not depends on features of the subject\nsuch as his or her knowledge of the issues related to the commands and\nso forth.","\n\nOf course, it is important to note that not every act of obedience\nwill ensure better compliance with reason, there will be cases when the\ncommands of the state do not accord with the best reasons. Raz's\nconception of authority depends for its cogency on the thought that as\nlong as the subject does better by reason overall by obeying certain\nclasses of commands, the subject has a duty to obey every one of the\ncommands: the correct as well as the incorrect. In some sense, the\nobedience to the commands has a greater likelihood of ensuring\nconformity with reason. Finally, this particular account of the duty to\nobey does not assert that the discharging of the duties is owed to the\nstate. This account does not establish any fundamental right to rule on\nthe part of the state."],"subsection_title":"3.1 Instrumentalism about Legitimate Political Authority"},{"content":["\n\nThe power of this account of political authority and the duty to\nobey depends essentially on the account of practical reasoning that\nlies at its base. Many have argued that this conception of practical\nreasoning is flawed. They have worried that the indirect form of\npractical reasoning that it requires is not legitimate. The worry can\nbe stated fairly easily. The form of practical reasoning this account\nof authority includes requires that we ignore the reasons that apply\ndirectly to the action we are about to undertake even though sometimes\nthose reasons will count against the action. The question arises, when\nare the reasons that directly apply to the action so strongly opposed\nto the action that we must override the preemptive reason?","\n\nIn the case of rule following, we sometimes encounter particular\ninstances in which following the rule is counterproductive. How do we\ndetermine when we ought to follow the rule and when we ought not to\nfollow the rule? Does such determination involve the very deliberation\nabout particular instances that was meant to be excluded by the rule?\nSome have argued that rule following cannot be rational since it cannot\nbe rational to ignore the particular facts of each case (Hurd\n2001).","\n\nRaz's main response to this criticism has been to say that we look\nfor clear cases in which the rule is to be overridden and ignore the\nother cases and that only by doing this do we best comply with reason.\nLimiting exceptions to the rule to clear cases obviates the need for\ndeliberation in every case."],"subsection_title":"3.2 A Worry about the Instrumentalist Account of Practical Reason"}]},{"main_content":["\n\nAnother version of the philosophical anarchist challenge may seem to\navoid the critical edge of the above approach. This approach, defended\nby A. John Simmons (Simmons 2001) and Leslie Green (Green 1989) asserts\nthat each person has a right not to be bound by the state's commands.\nThis thesis is quite different from the kind of anarchism defended by\nWolff. The latter asserts that each individual has a duty to be\nautonomous. The present theory asserts merely that a person has a right\nnot be subjected to another's imposition of duties. The philosophical\nanarchist then argues that only if a person consents to being bound to\nthe political authority can the person actually be bound. The final\npremise in the philosophical anarchist argument is that it is either\npractically impossible or at least actually untrue that states can be\nset up in such a way that they can demand the obedience of all and only\nthose who have consented to their authority. So, the anarchist\nconcludes, no state is legitimate and perhaps no state can ever be\nlegitimate.","\n\nIt is important to note that this view does not imply that one must\nnever obey the state. It merely implies that one does not have content\nindependent duties to obey the state and that the state does not have a\nright to rule. A reasonably just state will command one to do things\nthat are reasonably just and in many cases one must obey those commands\nbecause they are just. What one is not required to do on the\nphilosophical anarchist view is obey any state just because it has\ncommanded one to do certain things.","\n\nTo discuss this view, we will first discuss the arguments people\nhave given for the consent theory of political authority. We will also\ndiscuss some counterarguments. Then we will discuss a popular\nmodification of the consent theory that is designed to avoid\nphilosophical anarchism."],"section_title":"4. A Second Form of Philosophical Anarchism","subsections":[{"content":["\n\nThe consent theory of political authority states only a necessary\ncondition of the legitimacy of political authority. It states that a\npolitical authority is legitimate only if it has the consent of those\nwho are subject to its commands. Many have argued that in addition to\nconsent, a state must be minimally just for it to be legitimate (Locke\n1990).","\n\nA number of arguments have been presented in favor of this view.\nLocke's argument is that each person has an equal natural right to\nfreedom and that this implies that at the age of maturity no one may be\nsubordinated to anyone else's commands by nature (Locke 1990). Let us\ncall this the natural right argument. Such subordination would\nviolate the equal freedom of the subordinated person. To the extent\nthat political authority involves issuing commands and requiring others\nto follow the commands, it seems to involve subordinating one person to\nthe commands of another and thus violates the natural right to freedom\nof the subordinated person."],"subsection_title":"4.1 The Consent Theory of Political Authority: The Natural Right to Freedom Argument"},{"content":["\n\nA natural objection to this line of reasoning is to state that\npolitical authority is actually necessary to protecting each person's\nequal freedom. Locke himself argued that the state of nature would be\nquite threatening to each person's ability to live freely because there\nare likely to be many disagreements about what rights each person has\nand so people are likely to trespass on each other's rights.\nFurthermore he argued that when there is such disagreement, we need an\nimpartial judge to determine when rights have been violated. And\nagainst criminals we need a police power to enforce the rights that\npeople have. Locke argues that only by establishing political society\nwith a legislature that makes known and settled laws and establishing a\njudiciary that resolves remaining controversies between people and\nhaving an executive power that enforces the laws can people's rights\nand freedoms be protected.","\n\nOnce we have the above argument in mind, it is hard to see the force\nof the natural right argument for no political authority without\nconsent. We might think that the very liberty that is being invoked to\nsupport the case for the necessity of consent is better protected by a\nreasonably just political authority. The instrumentalist can then argue\nthat one protects the liberty of each and every person better by\ninstituting political authority and by treating its commands as\nauthoritative. And so the instrumentalist could argue that insofar as\nliberty is a fundamental value, it would be immoral not to support a\nreasonably just political authority and treat its commands as\nauthoritative.","\n\nThe natural right theorist might argue in response that the above\nargument seems to involve a kind of utilitarianism of rights. Such a\nview says that it is justified to violate one person's right in order\nto protect the rights of others. But, such a theorist might say, the\nnatural rights of persons are side constraints against actions; they\nare not to be violated even if others' rights are better protected as\na consequence. This entry will not go into the many issues that arise\nin the discussion of deontology and consequentialism here. We will\nreturn to the issue of side constraints after the discussion of the\nnext argument."],"subsection_title":"4.2 The Instrumentalist Critique of the Natural Right Argument"},{"content":["\n\nSome have proposed what this entry will call the options\nargument against the kind of considerations the instrumentalist\nadduces. The instrumentalist argues that I have natural duties of\njustice to promote just institutions and that these duties are best\nsatisfied by complying with the authority of a reasonably just\nstate. But the philosophical anarchist could argue that though I may\nhave a duty of justice, it does not entail that I must obey any\nparticular institution for promoting justice. The idea here is that\njust as Amnesty International may not require me to pay dues to it\nregardless of my membership even though these dues would clearly\nadvance the protection of human rights throughout the world, so the\nstate may not require me to comply with its commands even though such\ncompliance would advance the purposes of justice in the world. Let us\nsuppose that the reasons clearly favor my support of Amnesty\nInternational. Intuitively, it still may not require me to lend it\nsupport. Only if I have voluntarily joined and voluntarily remain in\nAmnesty do I have a duty to do what the conditions of membership\nrequire. And I am under no obligation to join Amnesty; I may join\nother organizations to fulfill whatever duties of aid that I have. So\nwhether I ought to join Amnesty and be subject to membership dues is\nup to me. The consent theorist seems to think that, in the same way,\nonly if I voluntarily transact to obligate myself to comply with the\nstate's commands can I be said to have a duty to comply with the\nstate. I must somehow enlist myself in the project of promoting the\ngood causes that the state promotes (Simmons 2001)."],"subsection_title":"4.3 The Consent Theory: The Options Argument"},{"content":["\n\nThis argument may miss a central idea in the instrumentalist account\nof authority. The instrumentalist account is premised on the view that\nnot only does the state help one discharge one's duties of justice; it\nasserts that compliance with the state is necessary to the discharge of\none's duties. Hence, one acts unjustly if one fails to comply with the\nstate's commands.","\n\nTo understand this, we need to introduce another concept. The idea\nis that the state does not only promote justice, it\nestablishes justice. What does this mean? It means that for a\nparticular community, the state determines what justice requires in the\nrelations between individuals. It does this by defining the relations\nof property and exchange as well as the institutions of the criminal\nlaw and tort law. To say that the state's legislative activity\nestablishes justice is not the same as saying that the state's activity\nconstitutes justice. Justice is still an independent standard of\nassessment on this account.","\n\nThe reason for saying that the state establishes justice is that, in\nJoseph Raz's words, justice and morality more generally, underdetermine\nthe legislation necessary to bring about justice in a community. This\nmeans that one can implement the same principles of justice by means of\nmany different sets of rules. But one can treat others justly only if\none is on the same page as the others. So what is just in a particular\ncircumstance will depend in part on the set of rules that the others\nare acting on. To the extent that the state determines the basic\nframework of rules, it determines which actions are just and which are\nnot. One does not act justly, on this account, by deciding not to\ncomply with the state one lives in and sending money to another state\nor association. If one fails to comply with the rules of property or\nthe rules of exchange, one treats others unjustly. The options argument\nsuggests that somehow there is a way that one can discharge one's duty\nto others by doing something other than obeying the law. Instead of\nobeying the law of property of the society in which I live, I may\nsimply decide to send money to another part of the world where property\nrights are enforced. But this argument fails to appreciate the central\nimportance of law to defining justice among persons. Though not all\nlaws are just, justice among persons in any even moderately complex\nsociety requires law and obedience to law."],"subsection_title":"4.4 The Instrumentalist Critique of the Option and Natural Right Arguments"},{"content":["\n\nOne argument for consent theory essayed by Simmons asserts that a\nperson ought to be free to act on the basis of personal reasons as\nopposed to impersonal reasons. So even if the state does help each\nperson act more on the basis of impersonal reasons that apply to them\nindependent of the state, a person may refuse, on the basis of personal\nreasons, to accept the directives of the state. And so, it is argued,\nthe state's imposition of duties on the individual may occur only if\nthe individual has consented to the state's authority (Simmons\n2001).","\n\nThe idea that one can have personal reasons not to obey the commands\nof a reasonably just state is unclear. It might be referring to the\nidea that each person has a kind of personal prerogative that permits\nhim to avoid the demands of morality generally. This idea was proposed\nby critics of utilitarianism as a way to avoid the excessive\ndemandingness of utilitarianism while keeping most of the view intact.\nUtilitarianism supplies exclusively impersonal reasons for action to\nindividuals. These seem to undermine the personal projects and\ninterests of individuals. Some have proposed that utilitarianism be\nmodified to accommodate the projects of individuals by including a\npersonal prerogative to act on the basis of personal reasons. Others\nhave argued that there ought to be a personal prerogative to ignore the\nimpersonal reasons of any set of moral requirements.","\n\nBut this role for personal reasons does not seem to provide much in\nthe way of defense of the consent theory. One reason for this is that\nthese are reasons to avoid some of the demands of morality. But the\nissue at stake in the justification of authority is whether morality\ndemands obedience or not. If we think of these personal reasons as part\nof the structure of morality, on the other hand, then it would seem\nthat these personal reasons are best protected by a reasonably just\nstate that protects individual freedom. So the response to the claim\nthat individuals have personal reasons to evade the commands of the\nstate seems to fall prey to the same argument that undermines the\nnatural right approach."],"subsection_title":"4.5 The Consent Theory of Political Authority: The Argument from Personal Reasons"},{"content":["\n\nThere is another way to think of this personal reasons criticism of\ninstrumentalist approaches to political authority. The instrumentalist\napproach seems to be committed to the idea that an authority can be\nlegitimate even if most of the members of the society do not agree with\nwhat it is doing. As long as the state is requiring people to act as\nthey should act, the subjects have a duty to obey, even if they do not\nsee that they have this duty. Now one can see how this may be true in\nsome circumstances, where the members are deeply immoral or irrational.\nBut it seems perverse to think that whether the state has legitimate\nauthority is completely independent of the considered opinions of its\nsubjects. Here is the reason behind the appearance. The state, being a\ngroup of people, owes the subjects some kind of duty of respect for the\njudgments of those members. This duty of respect requires at least some\ndegree of responsiveness on the part of the state in making decisions.\nFurthermore the state, in part, is an institution that is grounded in\nthe need for decisions against a background of disagreement about what\nought to be done. For the state to make decisions against this\nbackground that completely ignores the views of the many dissenters\nseems a particularly egregious violation of the duty to accord some\nrespect to the opinions of reasonable adult human beings.","\n\nConsent theories, reasonable consensus theories, associative\nobligation theories and democratic theories make these observations\npart of the foundation of their accounts of the legitimacy of\nauthority. The consent theory of political authority requires that for\nthe state to have authority over any person, the state must have the\nconsent of the person to that authority. Consent, on this account, is a\nnecessary condition of the legitimacy of authority though it need not\nbe a sufficient condition. The consent theory clearly makes an attempt\nto make political authority compatible with a due respect for the\nopinions of subjects."],"subsection_title":"4.6 Consent Theory: The Argument from Disagreement"},{"content":["\n\nBut we might wonder if it doesn't go too far. For if consent is a\ngenuinely necessary condition of political authority, then it appears\nthat individuals may have the option of not obeying a perfectly just\nstate that has jurisdiction over the area in which they live. And they\nmay do this on perverse grounds or they may simply wish to free ride on\nthe benefits that the state confers without having to undertake any of\nthe burdens. How can this be legitimate and how can it undermine the\nauthority of a just state? It seems that in the effort to express\nrespect for the reasonable opinions of people, consent theory seems to\nhave gone too far in giving respect to immoral, irrational and\nunprincipled failures of consent (Raz 1986).","\n\nThe consent theorist could respond to this difficulty with the claim\nthat it is only the state's claim to authority that is being held\nhostage, not the state's just activities. For if it is the case that\nthe person is merely free riding on desirable activities and that this\nis unjust then the person is acting wrongly. Hence, the justice of the\nactions of the state may be sufficient to condemn the actions of the\nfree rider and this can be done without attributing the right to rule\nto the state.","\n\nBut now the instrumentalist could argue that obedience to the\nauthoritative commands of the state may be necessary to acting justly\nin many instances. The thought is that only if people treat the\ncommands of the state as providing content independent reasons for\nobedience can a reasonably just state actually perform the tasks that\nmake it just. If people are constantly second guessing the state's\ndecisions, the central roles of coordination, collective action and\nassurance in the establishment of justice by the state will be\nundermined. These are collective effects of second guessing. But the\ninstrumentalist will also argue that individuals will often act less in\naccordance with the reasons that apply to them if they fail to take the\ncommands of a reasonably just state as offering content independent\nreasons because only the state's commands can clue them in to what the\nrules that establish justice are in their particular community. The\ninstrumentalist may then argue that it is therefore wrong for the\nperson not to take the commands of the state as authoritative, at least\nin many circumstances."],"subsection_title":"4.7 The Problems of Irrational, Immoral Failures of Consent"},{"content":["\n\nLocke, in part desiring to avoid these obvious difficulties or\nirrational and immoral failures of consent, introduced the notion of\ntacit consent (Locke 1990). The possibility of tacit consent allows\nthat one may consent without having to go through the usual motions\nassociated with expression of consent. For example, at a board meeting,\none consents tacitly to the chairman's scheduling a meeting if one says\nnothing when the chair asks for objections to the proposal. And that\ntacit consent is valid to the extent that the failure to object is\nunderstood as a kind of consent and is voluntary.","\n\nThe main problem with tacit consent is the problem of\ninterpretation. How does one interpret the actions of another so as to\nthink of them as consenting though they did not explicitly do so?\nTheorists differ on the constraints that must be placed on the\ninterpretation of the behaviors of others. Simmons argues that for\nbehavior to count as tacit consent it the behavior must be explicitly\nunderstood by all to be a kind of consent, it must be clear how when to\nperform the act or omission that constitutes tacit consent, it is not\ndifficult to consent and the costs of dissent are not prohibitive. But\nit is not obvious that Locke had this in mind. Locke thought that the\nmere residing in a territory and voluntarily benefiting from the\nactions of a minimally just state were sufficient conditions of tacit\nconsent. One might think that Locke thought the following. If a person\nvoluntarily resides in a territory over which the state has\njurisdiction and that person benefits from the establishment of the\nrule of law and all the other amenities the state provides then that\nperson must know or ought to know that the state's provision of these\nbenefits depends on the obedience of the members of the society. But if\nthe person now continues to reside voluntarily in the state, that\nperson must know that others expect obedience from him unless he is\nunder some special exemption. He must know or ought to know, in other\nwords, that others can reasonably interpret his voluntary residence as\ncommitting him to obedience to the laws of the state. So, we have\nadequate reason to interpret a person's continued voluntary residence\nas a form of consenting to abide by the laws of the state."],"subsection_title":"4.8 Tacit Consent"},{"content":["\n\nDavid Hume criticized this interpretive move (Hume 1965). He argued\nthat given the extraordinary costs to most people of moving out of the\ncountry of their birth, no one can sensibly interpret the voluntary\ncontinued residence of a person in a state as a case of tacit consent.\nHe draws an analogy with a person who has been carried involuntarily\nonto a ship by others and who now finds himself on the ship subject to\nthe commands of the captain and whose only alternative is to throw\nhimself into a stormy sea. Hume argues that such a person's remaining\non the ship can not be interpreted to be consenting to the authority of\nthe captain. The person is merely attempting to avoid the terrible cost\nof getting off the ship.","\n\nBut it is not clear why Hume's argument is supposed to work. It\nsounds like the argument challenges the voluntariness of the consent.\nBut this cannot be a conclusive argument here. After all, many people\nconsent to things in order to avoid the terrible costs of not\nconsenting. People consent to pay their insurance premiums in order not\nto end up without health care when the time comes that they need it.\nPromises made on the battlefield to lay down arms on the condition that\nthe opponent will not harm one are also made under severe duress. But\nwe do not think that these promises are invalid or that they fail to\nobligate. So the fact that the alternative would be terrible is not a\nreason to think that those who choose to remain in a state are not\nthereby bound.","\n\nOf course, Hume's example includes the fact that the person was\ncarried forcibly onto the ship. This may be doing more work that it\nshould be. For few people would say that the state has necessarily done\nsomething wrong by imposing its jurisdiction over a territory on which\na person is born. We need, then, to change Hume's example so that the\nperson who is on the boat is on it through no fault of anyone on the\nboat, though he may have ended up there involuntarily.","\n\nOne possibility is that Hume thinks that we cannot interpret the\ncontinuing residence of a person in a state as a case of consent to the\nauthority of the state because we have no reason to think that the\ncontinuing residence was chosen as a result of reflection on whether it\nconstituted consent. The impoverished person who remains in the state\nin which he finds himself gave no thought whatsoever to any\nconsideration other than that to move would be highly costly or\notherwise unpleasant. We have no reason to think that he gave any\nthought to the question of consent and so it is illegitimate to\ninterpret his behavior in that way.","\n\nBut it is not obvious that this reasoning succeeds. If a person\nbenefits by residing in a territory and everyone knows that the\nbenefit only arises because of the obedience to law of the members,\nshouldn't it be clear to this person that his compliance is expected\nof him if he remains in the territory? And does his remaining in the\nterritory thereby imply that he consents to the authority of the\nterritory?","\n\nOf course it is true of any particular person that his\ncompliance is not necessary to the maintenance of the benefits of\npublic order. But at the same time it is clear that unless there is\nsome special reason for this person not to be subject to the rules\neveryone else is subject to, elementary norms of fairness will suggest\nto him and everyone else that compliance is expected of him just as it\nis of everyone else.","\n\nThis would seem to be a basis for interpreting the person's behavior\nas a case of consent. Anyone can see that the compliance of each person\nis expected of those who reside in a territory as long as the law is\nreasonably just. If someone has not considered these facts, perhaps he\nshould be held responsible for consenting anyway. After all, if we look\nat Simmons's central board room case we might have the same reaction to\nsomeone who, having been told that failure to object implies consent to\na policy, fails to object but only because he doesn't want to anger his\ngirlfriend in the group and really gives no thought to the question of\nconsent. Surely he has tacitly consented, despite his irresponsible\nattitude. So why not think that the person who continues to reside\nvoluntarily in a reasonably just state?"],"subsection_title":"4.9 The Humean Attack on Tacit Consent"},{"content":["\n\nAn important objection to the idea of tacit consent is that it begs\nthe question about how a state gets its authority. Some argue that a\ngroup of persons that has no authority to issue commands in the first\nplace cannot require people submit to their commands or leave a piece\nof territory they are falsely claim as under their jurisdiction\n(Brilmayer 1989; Wellman 2001). In a variation on the boardroom example\ndescribed above, Brilmayer imagines that instead of the chairman\nproposing a date for a meeting, a window washer swings in and makes the\nsame proposal and asks for objections. Clearly in that case, failure to\nregister objections would not constitute consent to the proposed\nschedule. The reason for this is that only a duly constituted authority\ncan have the right to make such a proposal. But, the claim to authority\nis precisely what tacit consent is supposed to support. So as an\naccount of authority the tacit consent view seems to beg the\nquestion.","\n\nThis criticism is right as far as it goes. But there are four points\nto note about it. First, it applies to explicit consent as well as\ntacit consent. My consent to a person's doing something does not\nlegitimate that person's doing it nor does it obligate me to respect\nhis doing it unless he already has a right to make the proposal. In the\ncase of political authorities, my consent to someone's issuing commands\nover a piece of territory that she has no right to rule over does not\nlegitimate her commands nor does it obligate me.","\n\nSecond, it is not a criticism of Locke since he clearly thinks that\ntacit consent only legitimates and obligates under conditions where\nthere is a duly constituted authority. Locke thinks that the right to\nrule of an authority must be traced back to an original act of consent\nin the state of nature (where there is no prior political authority) to\nform a political body. That political body then confers, by the consent\nof all the members, authority on a particular institutional arrangement\n(as long as it is minimally just). The function of tacit consent as\nwell as the consent of new members is simply to renew this already\ncreated authority.","\n\nThird, if Locke is right and consent can create authority out of the\nstate of nature, it may be possible for tacit consent to do the same.\nWe can imagine a state of nature scenario where a highly persuasive\nperson gets up amid the chaos and makes a proposal to create the\ninitial political body from the state of nature and then states very\nclearly that if there are objections, they should be raised without\nfear. And we can imagine the very same person making a proposal to\ncreate the particular structure of authority over the political body\nand calling for objections in the same way as before. There is no\nobvious reason why this could not work. Locke did not suggest this but\nit does not seem impossible.","\n\nThese last two points defeat the argument that tacit consent\nrequires a prior duly constituted authority. What Locke's picture\nsuggests is that valid consent or tacit consent do not require that the\nconsented to proposal be made by someone already in authority; they can\nbe valid as long as the proposal is made when there is no authority\nalready in place. The proposals can be drawn up by someone who has the\nright to make the proposal. In the state of nature, anyone presumably\nhas this right.","\n\nFourth, even if tacit consent cannot establish authority it may\nstill be a necessary condition on the legitimacy of authority. For if a\npolitical authority is duly constituted in the way Locke describes but\nfails to offer its citizens a right of exit or imposes severe burdens\non people who wish to exit, it will become illegitimate over time,\naccording to Locke.","\n\nStill, this criticism is quite important because it shows that\nneither consent nor tacit consent can stand alone as bases of political\nlegitimacy. An exclusively consent based theory of political authority\nseems to require that the original consent take place in a state of\nnature prior to political authority. And this further requirement seems\nto weaken the plausibility of the view."],"subsection_title":"4.10 How Can Tacit Consent Be A Basis of Political Authority?"},{"content":["\n\nWhat is worrisome about this kind of approach from the standpoint of\nconsent theory is that it seems to ignore all the particular reasons\nthat people may have for not consenting. Indeed, it seems to rely on\nthe premise that anyone should see that if they reside within the\nterritory of a reasonably just state, they are properly expected to\ncomply with the law, at least insofar as it is reasonably just. Consent\ntheory, by contrast, seems to rely on the thought that individuals may\nproperly reject these kinds of obligations for purely personal\nreasons.","\n\nWe can see a dilemma that arises from the above considerations. If\ntacit consent genuinely arises from voluntary residence in a\nreasonably just state, then it appears that the interpretation of the\nperson's residence does not take account of what many consent\ntheorists have thought was essential to consent theory, namely the\npersonal reasons of the subject in deciding whether to consent or\nnot. On the other hand, if those personal reasons are ones that the\nsubject may properly take into account in deciding whether to consent,\nthen the interpretive move required for voluntary residence to\ngenerate obligations in all subjects of a reasonably just state cannot\nwork. It cannot work because subjects may have personal reasons for\nnot consenting, which voluntary residence does not rule out.","\n\nHence, it appears that tacit consent theory cannot conform to what\nmany have taken to be the highly individualistic spirit of consent\ntheory. So fans of consent theory are not likely to agree to the idea\nthat people generally tacitly consent to the state's authority when\nthey voluntarily reside in its territory. Critics of consent theory are\nlikely, however, to question that highly individualistic approach in\nthe manner sketched above."],"subsection_title":"4.11 The Basic Objection of Consent Theorists to Tacit Consent"},{"content":["\n\nDavid Estlund has tentatively advanced a new and intriguing suggestion\nfor shoring up an essentially voluntarist account of\nauthority. Estlund argues that even in the absence of explicit or\ntacit consent in some cases persons may be said to have consented to\npolitical authority. He describes this as “normative\nconsent”. The idea is motivated in the following way. Estlund\nnotes that actual explicit cases of consenting can fail to produce\nobligations if what is consented to is seriously immoral. The consent\nis nullified (in its obligation producing effect) by the evident\nimmorality of its content. Estlund then enquires as to whether the\nlack of consent under certain circumstances mightn't similarly be\nnullified in cases where it is plainly wrong not to consent. Why\naren't these symmetrical he asks? Estlund envisions a case in which a\npassenger airplane has crashed and in which there is still a\nsignificant chance of saving many passengers through a very well\ncoordinated effort. As it happens an airline attendant stands up and\n“takes control” by giving commands to various people thus\norganizing the relief effort. Let us suppose that this is evidently\nreasonably successful but that it really does require the cooperation\nof (nearly) everyone to whom the airline attendant chooses to give\ndirectives. And let us suppose that the attendant is not giving any\nclearly immoral commands. Estlund notes that it would be clearly\nimmoral for someone in a position to give essential help not to agree\nto go along with the attendant's commands. Now suppose that someone\nin such a situation refuses to consent to the arrangement. Estlund\nasks whether their non-consent isn't nullified in the light of the\nfact that it is immoral not to consent. And if the non-consent is\nnullified, then its normal effect in preserving the liberty of the\nagent is not produced. In this case the person is no longer free to\nact independent of the purported authority. Since his non-consent is\nnullified, he has, in effect, consented and he is therefore under an\nobligation to the authority. This is normative consent.","\n\nEstlund is anxious to distinguish this idea from hypothetical consent\nor what you would have consented to had you been a better person. Yet\nhe does want to say that this normative consent has a genuine\nconnection to the will.","\n\nOne might wonder here if there is any genuine connection to the will\nof the normative consenter and so whether this really does shore up\nthe voluntarist view. But a further issue that might be raised here\nis whether Estlund has genuinely identified the fallback point of\ninvalidated consent and non-consent. Perhaps the proper description\nof the fall back point is neither consent nor non-consent. A person\nwho has consented to something deeply immoral doesn't thereby refuse\nconsent to that action, the person simply has failed to do anything\nmorally productive. Perhaps the idea in the case of the seriously\nimmoral non-consent is that the person has simply not done anything\nmorally productive. What happens in both cases is that the previous\nmoral situation of the agent remains in place. In the nullified\nconsent case you still have an obligation not to do what you consented\nto do and in the nullified non-consent case you still have an\nobligation to do what you refuse to consent to do. This would suggest\nthat the decision between consent and non-consent has here no\nnormative effect: whatever the agent decides, the previous moral\nsituation remains in place. Hence there is a kind of symmetry that\nholds here between the two cases. It is just that the default\nposition is neither consent nor non-consent. The one implication this\nmight have is that one may ask the person again until he agrees,\nwhereas normally if a person refuses to consent to something you must\nleave them alone. "],"subsection_title":"4.12 Normative Consent"}]},{"main_content":["\n\nReasonable consensus views of political authority attempt to find a\nkind of mean between the extreme individualism of consent theory and\nthe lack of respect for people's opinions of the instrumentalist views.\nJohn Rawls argues that the liberal principle of political legitimacy\nrequires that coercive institutions be so structured that they accord\nwith the reasonable views of the members of the society. As long as\nthey do so they have the right to impose duties on their members. The\nmembers may not demur on the basis of unreasonable views. Furthermore,\nit is not necessary on this view that the persons over whom authority\nis wielded have voluntarily acted or given any sign of agreement. All\nthat need be the case is that the basic principles that regulate the\ncoercive institutions be ones that the reasonable members can agree to\n(Rawls 1996).","\n\nThis view seems to be a kind of middle position between consent\ntheory and the instrumentalist views. It does not allow individuals to\ndivest themselves of obligations on spurious or merely self-interested\nbases because it specifies what is and is not a reasonable basis for\nagreement to the basic principles of the society. At the same time it\nevinces a respect for the opinions of the members of society since it\nrequires that the basic principles that regulate the society accord\nwith the reasonable views of the members.","\n\nThis account of legitimacy is based on an adherence to a principle of\nreasonableness. The basic principle asserts that reasonable persons\nwill propose fair terms of cooperation with other reasonable persons\nonly on condition that the terms can be justified to those others on\nthe basis of premises that they can reasonably accept. There has been\nmuch discussion of this principle and its underpinnings but this entry\nwill focus on a central worry concerning this idea."],"section_title":"5. Reasonable Consensus Conceptions of Legitimate Political Authority","subsections":[{"content":["\n\nA number of criticisms have been made against this kind of view.\nMany have argued that the relevant notion of reasonableness is likely\nto be very difficult to specify in a way that is both plausible and\ncompatible with possible consensus. The key difficulty with reasonable\nconsensus theories is that they rely on the possibility of consensus on\nat least a sufficient number of basic norms to say that there is\nconsensus on the basic principles that regulate a society. So if one\nattempts to come up with a notion of reasonableness that is\nsufficiently robust to generate agreement of this sort, then one is\nlikely to have a notion that is quite controversial. And then the view\ndoes not seem to take a sufficiently respectful view of the opinions of\nthe members of society since so many are likely to disagree with the\nconception of the reasonable. On the other hand, if one elaborates a\nconception of the reasonable that is sufficiently weak for most persons\nin the society to satisfy it, then one is not likely to generate\nagreement on the basic principles of the society.","\n\nThe main worry is that the idea demands a level of consensus among\nmembers of society that is incompatible with the ordinary conditions of\npolitical societies (Christiano 1996; Waldron 1999). The principle\ndemands that there be a kind of consensus among citizens on the basic\nprinciples that underpin the operation of political society.","\n\nThis consensus seems to be unattainable under the conditions of\nmodern society. One way, however, in which Rawls has argued in favor of\nthe attainability of the consensus is to say that it need only be an\noverlapping consensus. The idea here is that citizens do not have to\nagree on everything but only on those principles that apply to the\nbasic structure of society. And even here, when citizens disagree on\nsome issue of social justice, the opposing views are taken off the\ntable. So citizens can disagree on what the nature of the good life is\nand on religious questions and even different issues relating to social\njustice. As long as there are certain principles that everyone agrees\nto, which apply to the basic structure of society, full consensus is\nnot necessary. Hence, the consensus need only be an overlapping\none.","\n\nThough this idea goes some way towards alleviating the worry that\ntoo much consensus is required by Rawls's theory, it does not go nearly\nfar enough. There is one main way in which the overlapping consensus\nfails to provide the kind of consensus that Rawls requires. If a group\nof citizens agrees on a set of principles for regulating society and\nsome of the citizens also think that some other principles apply, the\noverlapping consensus idea is that the citizens who hold the\nidiosyncratic views must take those particular demands off the table\nand must argue only on the basis of the shared principles. The idea is\nthat everyone appeals only to those principles that lie in the overlap\nand not to those that do not lie in the overlap. A legitimate exercise\nof political power is one that is grounded only in those principles\nthat lie in the overlap. This seems to diminish the amount of agreement\nnecessary to make a society legitimate.","\n\nBut this appearance is an illusion. To see this we need only think\nof those people who hold idiosyncratic views. If the society they live\nin is exclusively grounded in principles that lie in the overlap of\nprinciples, then these people will have reason to complain that the\nsociety is unjust to the extent that the idiosyncratic principles are\nignored. For instance, if someone holds the idiosyncratic view that\npeople ought to receive in accordance with their desert then a society\nthat does not act to make sure that this principle is respected is one\nthat will be considered unjust by that person. They will live in a\nsociety that is unacceptable to them in a certain important respect\nrelevant to justice.","\n\nOf course, if the desert principle is used to ground the basic\ninstitutions of society even though it does not lie in the overlap then\nthose who think that desert is not a proper principle of justice will\nlikely think that they are living in a society that they regard as\nunjust. The principle of legitimacy will imply in this context that the\nbasic institutions of society are illegitimate because they are not\nbased on principles everyone accepts. But surely the same can be said\nof those who hold the idiosyncratic principles. They can complain that\nthey are required to go along with institutions that are unjust by\ntheir lights. The imposition on them implied by the basic institutions\nthat fail to distribute in accordance with desert is as great as would\nbe the imposition on the others implied by institutions that do\ndistribute goods in accordance with desert. There is a complete\nsymmetry here. Indeed, one way to put this point is to say that those\nwho hold that desert is not a genuine principle of justice are\nthemselves holding an idiosyncratic view when we take into account the\nfact that many think that desert is a genuine principle of justice.","\n\nAs a consequence of these considerations, only a complete consensus\nof political principles will satisfy the principle of legitimacy that\nRawls defends. But complete consensus on political principles is\nimpossible to achieve given the conditions of ordinary political\nsocieties. And so to the extent that this principle of legitimacy is\nunsatisfiable in ordinary political societies, it appears to be an\nunacceptably utopian principle. In particular, it seems to be an\nunacceptable principle of political legitimacy because a principle of\npolitical legitimacy is partly framed for the purpose of according\nmoral credentials to a society in the circumstances of political\ndisagreement."],"subsection_title":"5.1 Problems of Reasonableness and Consensus"}]},{"main_content":["\n\nOne classical account of political authority has modeled political\nauthority and the attendant obligations on the obligations of family\nand the authority of the parents. Plato gives this account of authority\nand obligation among others in the Crito (Plato 1948). A recent attempt\nto ground the legitimacy of political authority in this way is Ronald\nDworkin's (Dworkin 1986). This view is meant to capture the idea that a\npolitical society can have legitimate authority even if it is not a\nvoluntary association and even if there is disagreement on many\npolitical principles.","\n\nIf we take the family as a model here, we can see that children\nacquire obligations to obey their parents and to love and support their\nparents and siblings without having voluntarily entered into the\nrelationships. And there may be some relation of authority between\nparents and children at least till the latter reach the age of\nmaturity. Another model Dworkin invokes is that of friendship. He\nargues that though friendship does have an important voluntary\ncomponent, it is not the case that people voluntarily agree to the\nterms of a friendship. They find themselves acquiring obligations of\nfriendship as the friendship grows. Of course there is little in the\nway of authority in friendship and even in the family there is little\nauthority once the children reach maturity.","\n\nThe analogy between obligations of family, friendship and political\nsociety is grounded in the idea that in all three of these, individuals\nare obligated to abide by the rules or norms of the community. Dworkin\nargues that legitimate political authority arises as a consequence of\nthe acquisition on the part of members of a political society of\nobligations to obey the rules of a genuine associative community. This\ngives the putative authority justification for coercing the members\ninto obedience of the rules, which is the key element of authority on\nDworkin's account.","\n\nDworkin attempts to discern the basis of obligation in friendships\nand families by the process of interpretation of these social\npractices. His thesis is that communities that satisfy four conditions\nfor being genuine communities thereby generate obligations to go along\nwith the terms of the association. The four conditions are: one, each\nmember of the community sees herself as having special obligations to\nthe other members; two, they see the obligations as owed to each of the\nothers personally; three, these obligations are understood to flow from\na concern for the well being of each of the members; and four, the\nobligations are understood as flowing from a plausible version of equal\nconcern for all the members. Any community that satisfies these four\nconditions is a genuine community and thereby generates obligations in\neach of the members to comply with the terms of the association.","\n\nDworkin thinks that families and friendships satisfy these\nconstraints in many cases and that only when they satisfy them do they\ngenerate obligations. He also thinks that a certain kind of political\nsociety can satisfy these conditions, which he calls a community of\nprinciple, i.e., a community wherein each member sees himself or\nherself as bound by common principles to all the others.","\n\nOne might worry that a political society cannot be expected to\ngenerate the kinds of emotional bonds people have towards one another\nin families or friendships (Simmons 2001). And one might think that in\nthe absence of such bonds, the four conditions will not be satisfied.\nDworkin denies this. He agrees that political societies do not generate\nthese kinds of emotional bonds, but he asserts that emotional bonds are\nnot necessary either causally or conceptually to the satisfaction of\nthe four conditions.","\n\nDworkin argues that the attribution of the four conditions to a\nrelationship occurs through an interpretation of that relationship so\nit need not be the case that each person is aware of satisfying any of\nthe four conditions when they do. Consider a person who appeals to his\nfellow citizens on the basis of a principle of freedom of speech on the\ngrounds that it is part of their constitution. This person is committed\nto legal principles that he shares with other citizens. He will be\ncommitted to the principles underlying the other elements of the\nconstitution and the legal history of his country. He will be committed\nto a principle of equality to the extent that it is part of the\nconstitution. We can interpret this person's behavior and the similar\nbehavior of others as committed to special obligations to their fellow\ncountrymen to the extent that it is the shared constitution they are\nappealing to. We can interpret this person as expressing a kind of\nequal concern for his fellow countrymen to the extent that he is\nappealing to legal principles that protect all. And we can interpret\nhim in this way even if he himself would not have asserted it. And to\nthe extent that people conform to this kind of practice more generally,\nwe can interpret their behavior generally as satisfying the four\nconditions of associative obligation.","\n\nThe community of principle satisfies the four conditions. Dworkin\nattempts to show how a political community can generate special\nobligations of citizens to each other. A community of principle is\nregulated by principles that have been elaborated in a distinctive way\nin the particular community. Citizens see themselves as obligated to\nabide by those principles only in relation to the others who have\nparticipated in elaborating them. The principles do require that\neveryone be included and that everyone's well being counts and counts\nequally.","\n\nThe idea of a community of principle is meant to accommodate\nsignificant disagreement in the society in two ways. First, people may\nnot think that the principles in the society are the best ones. They\nmay simply be the best interpretation of their shared legal culture and\nhistory. So people may try to advance their own conceptions of the best\nprinciples. Second, people will disagree about the best interpretations\nof the shared legal culture and thus may think that the society is\ngrounded in different principles."],"section_title":"6. Political Authority as Grounded in Associative Obligations","subsections":[{"content":["\n\nBut surely, the satisfaction of some of the conditions must depend\non exactly what principles are in the community. Principles that are\nfocused on liberty and that avoid any reference to well being, such as\nKant would require of political principles, presumably would not\nsatisfy the last two conditions. Principles that are not egalitarian,\nsuch as those that governed the United States during the first century\nof its existence and probably longer, would not satisfy the last\ncondition. So it is not clear that being a community of principle is a\nsufficient condition for satisfying the four conditions.","\n\nIt is also not obvious that it is necessary that a community be a\ncommunity of principle in order for it to satisfy the four conditions\nin Dworkin's sense. For one can imagine a community in which\nindividuals are committed to democratic resolution of the disagreements\non justice that arise and thereby are committed to the equal importance\nof the well being of each member. They attempt to advance opposing\nprinciples of justice and conceptions of the common good and make\ncompromises when they cannot secure sufficient majorities for these.\nIndeed, this seems much closer to the character of modern democracies\nthan Dworkin's view. Such a society would satisfy the four conditions\nbut it is not clear that it is a community of principle.","\n\nDworkin's idea that modern political societies can be seen as\ncommunities of principle is grounded in his emphasis on judicial\ninstitutions as the core institutions of modern political societies and\nhis account of legal interpretation. His view is that judges interpret\nthe law by creating a coherent account of as much of the black letter\nlaw as possible and by interpreting that black letter law in terms of\nprinciples that make the law be the best that it can be. Hence, judges\naim at producing a coherent account of the law overall by grounding it\nin the best basic moral principles that it can be grounded in. From\nthis he thinks of modern societies as being concerned to elaborate\ncommon principles by which the society can be guided.","\n\nBut his emphasis on judicial decision making seems excessive. In the\ndemocratic legislative process, citizens often do not see themselves as\nbeing guided by common principles. They see themselves as disagreeing\nwith each other about what principles the society ought to be guided\nby. They also often see themselves as disagreeing with and trying to\nchange the principles they see embodied in the law. They may look at\nthe legislation in their community as negotiated compromises between\ndifferent principles and not as deriving from a common set of\nprinciples. And yet they do see themselves as members of a common\ndemocratic community. This aspect of democratic rivalry does not seem\nto be very well accommodated by Dworkin's view of modern societies as\ncommunities of principle."],"subsection_title":"6.1 Do Communities of Principle Satisfy the Four Conditions of Genuine Association?"}]},{"main_content":["\n\nThe basic idea behind the democratic conception of legitimate\nauthority is that when there are disagreements among persons about how\nto structure their shared world together and it is important to\nstructure that world together, the way to choose the shared aspects of\nsociety is by means of a decision making process that is fair to the\ninterests and opinions of each of the members. When there is\ndisagreement about how to organize the shared system of law, property,\npublic education and the provision of public goods, no one can have his\nway entirely in this context without someone else not getting her way.\nEach person thinks that the ideas about justice and the common good\nwith which the others wish to organize their shared world are mistaken\nin some way. Yet there is a need for collective action. The only way to\ndo this that is reasonably fair to all the members is to make the\ndecision democratically.","\n\nThe thought is that when an outcome is democratically chosen and\nsome people disagree with the outcome, as some inevitably will, they\nstill have a duty to go along with the decision because otherwise they\nwould be treating the others unfairly. If they refuse to go along and\ndisrupt the democratically chosen arrangements, they are assuming for\nthemselves a right to determine how things should go that overrides the\nequal rights of all the others. They are, in Peter Singer's words,\nassuming the positions of dictators in relation to the others. For if\nthey turned out to be in the majority, they would demand the compliance\nof the others.","\n\nThe idea of fairness that underpins the democratic process is\ngrounded in different ways in different theories. The basic idea of\nequality is shared by most democratic theorists. Some argue that there\nis a fundamental duty of equal respect for the opinions of others that\ngrounds democratic decision making in the context of pervasive\ndisagreement (Singer 1974; Waldron 1999). Others wish to ground this\nduty of respect for the opinions of others in a deeper principle of\nequal concern for the interests of each member of society (Christiano\n1996).","\n\nOn this kind of view the democratic assembly has a right to rule and\nto the obedience of its members. This right of the democratic assembly\nis grounded in the right of each member of the assembly to be accorded\nequal respect. The duty of equal respect requires that the collective\ndecision process gives each a vote in a broadly majoritarian process\nand a robustly equal opportunity to participate in the deliberations\nand negotiations leading to decisions. The equal rights of each of the\nmembers are in effect pooled in the democratic assembly so that because\none owes each person equal respect, and the democratic way of making\ndecisions embodies this equal respect, one owes the democratic assembly\nrespect.","\n\nThe democratic assembly can be understood as the assembly of all\nadult citizens or better as the assembly of all the democratically\nchosen representatives of citizens. A conception of a democratic\nassembly requires, on this view, an account of the appropriate form of\ndemocratic representation (Christiano 1996). In addition, the\ndemocratic assembly is only one part of the complete system of\ngovernment. It is concerned with legislation only. In addition to this\na government requires executive and judicial functions whose legitimacy\nmay depend in part on other factors better grasped by the\ninstrumentalist view.","\n\nThe duties that are owed the democratic assembly are content\nindependent and preemptive duties. They are content independent duties\nbecause each member has the duty, with a class of exceptions we will\nreview in a moment, just because the assembly has made a decision. The\nduties are preemptive because the citizen must put aside the\nconsiderations she initially planned on acting on in order to treat the\nrest of her fellow citizens with proper respect. The idea of equal\nrespect requires, on this account, deference to the decision of the\nmajority and not acting on one's own judgment when the majority\ndisagrees. So the decision of the majority gives a reason to obey that\npreempts or replaces the considerations one might act on were there no\nmajority decision.","\n\nIt is important to note that this conception of authority is what was\ndescribed as a special conception above. The fact that democratic\nassemblies have authority does not imply that all other forms of\nregime never have authority. One might go along with a regime on the\nbasis of the instrumentalist conception of authority or even the\nconsent approach even if it is not democratic. It is clear\nnevertheless that democratic assemblies have a special kind of\nauthority."],"section_title":"7. A Democratic Conception of Legitimate Political Authority","subsections":[{"content":["\n\nDemocratic decision making on this account can be evaluated from two\nvery different angles. On the one hand, one can evaluate a democratic\ndecision in terms of the justice or efficiency of the outcome of the\ndecision. One can ask whether the legislation is just or for the common\ngood. This is the standpoint of the citizen who argues in favor of\nlegislation and against others and tries to put together a coalition of\nlike minded people to advance the legislation. On the other hand,\ndemocratic decision making can be evaluated in terms of the way in\nwhich the decision was made. Did the process of decision making treat\nall of its members fairly or with equal respect? Are the institutions\nof legislative representation and of campaign finance, among others,\nfair?","\n\nBut why should the equality embodied in the democratic assembly trump\nother considerations of justice? The democratic conception of\nauthority requires each person to submit issues to a democratic vote.\nSo if they advocate some policy on the grounds that it conforms with\nwhat they take to be the correct principle of justice J, and\nthe majority chooses a different policy on the grounds of an\nincompatible principle L, the democratic theory says that\nthey ought to accept the policy that is grounded in L because\nonly in this way do they accord the proper equal respect to their\nfellow citizens.","\n\nBut someone might ask, why should the principle of equal respect take\nprecedence over the principle J? They are both principles of\njustice so we need some reason for favoring the equal respect\nprinciple in general over the others.","\n\nOne answer to this is to say that social justice demands that\nprinciples of justice be public in the sense that they involve\nprinciples that can be shown to be implemented to everyone who is\nreasonably conscientious and aware of some basic facts of political\nlife (such as disagreement, fallibility and cognitive bias). This is a\nversion of the basic maxim of justice that justice must not only be\ndone, it must be seen to be done. The thought then is that to the\nextent that there is significant disagreement about the substantive\nprinciples of justice in play when policy is being decided, a just\nsociety requires some way in which publicly to embody the equal\ntreatment of all the individuals in society. The controversial\nprinciples guiding the formulation of policy do not generally satisfy\nthis constraint of publicity. Indeed, given the controversies over\njustice, individuals will think that the policies do not accord with\ntheir favored conception of equality. The democratic process does seem\npublicly to embody the equal standing of all citizens and the equal\nworth of their interests against the background of disagreement and\nfallibility and all the facts that attend these phenomena. So the\ndemocratic process seems uniquely capable of publicly embodying the\nprinciple of the equal importance of each person and the equal\nimportance of the advancement of their interests (Christiano 2004).","\n\nCritics of this view might still take issue with the thesis that\nsocial justice requires that principles be public and that this gives\npriority to the principles that underpin democracy over those that\nunderpin substantive policy proposals. The question must be, why is\npublicity, in the sense sketched above, so important?"],"subsection_title":"7.1 How Can Democracy Make Unjust Laws Legitimate?"},{"content":["\n\nThe question that arises for a democratic theory of authority is,\nwhen do the considerations of the justice or injustice of the outcome\noverride the considerations connected with the fairness of the process\nof decision making?","\n\nThe claim that a democratic assembly has a right to rule is not\nincompatible with the idea that there are limits to that right. Indeed,\ntheorists have argued that the very same principle that grounds\ndemocratic authority also ground limits to that authority (Christiano\n2004.) The principle of public equality on which the argument for\ndemocracy is founded also grounds a set of liberal rights (freedom of\nconscience, association, speech and private pursuits). The reason for\nthis is that democratic assembly that fundamentally denied these\nliberal rights to individuals would publicly violate the duty of equal\nrespect to those individuals. Those who violate the basic liberal\nrights of others are publicly treating them as inferiors. To the extent\nthat the democratic assembly's claim of authority is grounded in the\npublic realization of the principle of equal respect, the authority\nwould run out when the democratic assembly makes law that undermines\nequal respect. This establishes, at least for one conception of\ndemocratic authority, a substantive set of limits to that\nauthority."],"subsection_title":"7.2 Limits to Democratic Authority"}]},{"main_content":["\n\nInternational Institutions have acquired political authority over the\nlast half century or so. They are quite diverse in character. For\nsome, their authority has a somewhat different form than the authority\nassociated with the organs of the state. And the grounds of the\nauthority of international institutions may be distinct as\nwell. Overall, these are complex institutions with a number of parts\nand so different principles may apply to the different parts. For\nexample, with regard to the World Trade Organization, some principle\nof state consent may be the ultimate basis of the legitimacy of its\nlaw making function, while a very different kind of standard would be\nrelevant to judging the legitimacy of the dispute settlement\nmechanism.","\n\nBecause global institutions operate in the context of a lack of\noverarching and centralized political power, the form and grounds of\nauthority are likely often to be distinct. As I noted above, some of\nthe most powerful global institutions have powers to create\npermissions rather than duties as in Security Council of the United\nNations authorizations of the use of force. Another example is when\nthe World Trade Organization's dispute settlement mechanism rules that\na state may restrict trade with another state in what would normally\nbe a violation of their agreements in order to retaliate against a\nstate that has violated the trade agreements.","\n\nAnother interesting feature of international institutions is that\nstate consent appears to be a possible basis for the legitimacy of\ninternational institutions. To be sure many would argue that\ninternational institutions ought to be evaluated solely on an\ninstrumental basis and others would argue that only democratic\ninternational institutions can be legitimate. But state consent does\nhave a fighting chance of playing a large role in underpinning these\ninstitutions. The international system is highly decentralized and\nstates are by far the most important instruments for making power\naccountable to persons that we know of.","\n\nTo be sure, the state consent doctrine raises many questions. For one\nthing, we must ask whether the consent of states that do not represent\ntheir peoples is a genuinely legitimating act. Second, we must ask\nabout the fairness of the conditions under which consent is given. If\nthe conditions are unfair and more powerful states take advantage of\nthe vulnerabilities of the weaker state, what impact does this have on\nthe legitimacy of the state? Third, what normative weight, if any,\nattaches to a state's refusal of consent when it's cooperation is\nnecessary to the achievement of morally mandatory aims such as the\nprevention or mitigation of global warming?"],"section_title":"8. Legitimate Political Authority in International Institutions","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nLet us start with the distinctions between political authority as a\\nnormative notion (or morally legitimate authority) and political\\nauthority as a non-normative notion (or de facto authority)\\nand between political authority in either of these senses and political\\npower. To say that a state has authority in the normative sense is to\\nsay something normative about the relationship between the state and\\nits subjects. This is the relationship that we will concentrate on in\\nwhat follows.\",\n \"\\n\\nFor most contemporary theorists to say that the state has authority in\\nthe descriptive sense is to say that the state maintains public order\\nand that it issues commands and makes rules that are generally obeyed\\nby subjects because many of them (or some important subset of them\\nsuch as the officials of the state) think of it as having authority in\\nthe normative sense (Hart 1961) (Some thinkers have understood the\\nidea of legitimate authority in this descriptive sense as well (Weber\\n1970); in what follows, we will use the term “legitimate\\nauthority” in a normative sense only.) We should note here that\\nthe attitudinal component of de facto authority is not\\naccepted by everyone. For both Thomas Hobbes and John Austin,\\npolitical authority in the de facto sense simply amounts to\\nthe capacity of a person or group of persons to maintain public order\\nand secure the obedience of most people by issuing commands backed by\\nsanctions. Subjects need not think of the authority as a legitimate\\nauthority, on this account.\",\n \"\\n\\nAlso, the distinction between de facto and morally\\nlegitimate authority is not universally accepted or at least it is not\\naccepted that the distinction makes a difference. Hobbes insists that\\nany entity capable of performing the function of de facto\\nauthority is necessarily justified and deserves the obedience of the\\nde facto subjects (Hobbes 1668). But most have argued that\\nthere is an important distinction between de facto authority\\nand legitimate authority. We will explore in what follows the\\nconceptions political and legal philosophers have had of legitimate\\npolitical authority.\",\n \"\\n\\nDe facto authority, on anyone's account, is distinct from\\npolitical power. The latter is concerned with the state's or any\\nagent's ability to get others to act in ways that they desire even when\\nthe subject does not want to do what the agent wants him to do.\\nPolitical power does not require any kind of pro attitude toward the\\nagent on the part of the subject, nor does it require that the state is\\nactually successful at securing public order. It operates completely in\\nthe realm of threats and offers. No doubt for the state to have de\\nfacto authority or legitimate authority requires that the state\\nhave the power to compel those subjects who do not wish to go along.\\nThis is necessary for the state's ability to maintain public order and\\nto assure those who do see it as an authority that it will be able to\\ndo what it is supposed to do.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Legitimate Authority, de facto Authority and Political Power\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThe rubric under which the normative notion of political authority\\nis normally known is the idea of legitimate political authority. In\\nthis section, we will review a number of different ideas that have been\\nunderstood to come under this idea of legitimate political\\nauthority.\",\n \"\\n\\nIt is important here to note the distinction between theoretical and\\npractical authority. A theoretical authority in some area of\\nintellectual inquiry is one that is an expert in that area. Theoretical\\nauthorities operate primarily by giving advice to the layman, which\\nadvice the layman is free to take or not. The judgments of theoretical\\nauthorities give people reasons for belief while the judgments of\\npolitical authorities are normally thought to give people reasons for\\naction. Theoretical authorities do not normally impose duties on\\nothers, although they might give advice on what a person's duty is.\",\n \"\\n\\nMost theorists of political authority view it as a species of\\npractical authority rather than theoretical authority, though this\\nview is not held by all . Those who hold that political authority is a\\nspecies of practical authority maintain that political authorities\\nissue directives that give people reasons for action and not reason\\nfor belief. The thought is that political authorities impose duties on\\ntheir subjects and thereby give them reasons for action. These\\ntheorists argue that it is the function of political authorities to\\nget people to act in certain ways so as to solve various collective\\naction problems such as a variety of different types of coordination\\nproblems, assurance problems and free rider problems. There have been\\nsome dissenting views on this of late. Some have argued that the\\naccount of practical reason required by the idea that political\\nauthority is a practical authority is incoherent and so they have\\nopted for the idea that political authorities, when legitimate, are\\ntheoretical authorities regarding the existence and nature of the\\nduties and reasons for action that people have (Hurd 2001). Since this\\nview is unusual this entry will concentrate on conceptions of\\npolitical authority that treat it as a species of practical\\nauthority.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe rest of this section will discuss a number of different analyses\\nof political authority. There are three basic types of conceptual\\naccount of legitimate political authority: legitimate political\\nauthority as justified coercion, legitimate political authority as the\\ncapacity to impose duties, and legitimate political authority as the\\nright to rule. First, many people have understood legitimate political\\nauthority as a political authority that is justified in coercing the\\nsubjects of its authority. The notion of justification here is a moral\\none. The thought is that a political authority might have moral\\njustification in coercing those who come under its authority. This is\\na particularly thin conception of legitimate authority. For instance,\\na state can have this kind of authority when it legitimately occupies\\na territory as a result of a just war. It is morally justified in\\ncoercing the inhabitants of the occupied territory.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe moral justification of a group of people in coercing others may\\nbe more or less systematic. For instance, a group of people may be\\nmorally justified in engaging in just a few actions of coercing others.\\nOr a group may be morally justified in engaging in coercion more\\ngenerally as in the case of a morally justified military\\noccupation.\",\n \"\\n\\nThis notion of authority need not involve duties on the part of the\\npopulation that is being coerced. Indeed, they may be justified in\\ntrying to escape coercion. This could be the case in a military\\noccupation of a country that is justified on the grounds that it is\\nnecessary to stop a third country from engaging in morally indefensible\\naggression. This conception of morally justified coercion therefore\\ninvolves no conception of a moral community among persons. In this\\nfirst conception of authority as justified coercion, the authority may\\nnot even issue commands let alone make laws. It may simply justifiably\\nissue threats and offers. The difference between legitimate and\\nillegitimate political authority on this account is that the actions of\\nthe illegitimate political authority are not morally justified while\\nthe coercive actions of the legitimate authority are justified.\",\n \"\\n\\nA second conceptual account of legitimate political authority\\nimplies that those over whom authority is exercised have some kind of\\nduty with regard to the authority. Or the authority has the moral power to\\nimpose duties on the subjects. This duty can be merely a duty not to\\ninterfere with the activities of the political authority. Or it can\\ninvolve the more significant duty to obey the authority. This\\nconception of authority involves the authority and the subjects in a\\nweak kind of moral relationship. The authority is justified in issuing\\nthe commands and attempting to force people to comply with the commands\\nwhile the subjects have some kind of duty not to interfere with these\\nactivities or comply with the commands.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe duty of the subjects need not be owed to the authority. It may\\nmerely be that the subjects have a duty to obey where that duty is not\\nowed to anyone in particular or where that duty is owed ultimately to\\npeople who are not the authority. For instance, if one thinks that one\\nis likely better to respect others' rights by complying with the\\nauthority's directives, the action is ultimately owed to those\\nothers.\",\n \"\\n\\nSome have stressed the idea that the holding of justified political\\nauthority may only involve a duty on the part of others not to\\ninterfere with the political authority and they argue that the duty of\\nnon-interference is much weaker than a duty to obey (Morris 1998). It\\nis not clear how great the difference between these two duties is in\\npractice at least as far as citizens are concerned. For many cases of\\nfailing to obey an authority are cases of interference with the\\nauthority. An analogy may be helpful here. If one is playing a game of\\nbaseball with an umpire and one refuses to comply with the directives\\nof the umpire, one is in effect interfering with the umpire's carrying\\nout of his duties by not complying with the directives of the\\numpire.\",\n \"\\n\\nWhile a duty to obey seems to imply a duty not to interfere, there\\nare cases of duties of non-interference that are not duties to obey,\\nsuch as the duties of foreign powers not to interfere in the activities\\nof a legitimate state. Furthermore, the duty to obey is clearly the\\nmore contentious issue in the question of authority since it requires\\nthat one make one's actions conform to the specific directives of the\\nauthority.\",\n \"\\n\\nA third conceptual account of authority or set of conceptions of\\nlegitimate authority involves the idea that the authority has a right\\nto rule. Strictly speaking, an authority can have a right to rule\\nwithout the subjects having a duty to comply. The authority may have a\\n“justification” right to rule (Ladenson 1980). This means\\nthat the authority has a permission to issue commands and make rules\\nand coerce others to comply and its possession of this right is\\njustified on moral grounds. This “justification right” is\\nnot much more than the first notion we discussed above.\",\n \"\\n\\nA more robust right to rule includes a duty owed to the authority on\\nthe part of the subjects not to interfere with the activities of the\\nauthority. The subjects owe it to the authority not to interfere with\\nit. This is connected with the right of the authority to rule. Finally,\\nan authority can have a right to rule in the sense that it may issue\\ncommands and make rules and require subjects to comply with these rules\\nand commands and the subjects have duties, which they owe to the\\nauthority, to comply with the rules and commands.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe distinction between a right to rule that is correlated with a\\nduty not to interfere and one that is correlated with a duty to comply\\ncomes in handy when we consider the difference between the duties owed\\nto a legitimate political authority by the subjects of that authority\\nand the duties owed to it by other states and persons who are not\\nsubject to that authority. A state with a right to rule in the\\nstrongest sense may be owed obedience by its subjects but it is usually\\nowed only a duty of non-interference by those who are not a part of the\\nstate such as other states and persons in other states. It is\\nworthwhile drawing a distinction here between internal legitimacy and\\nexternal legitimacy (Buchanan 2004).\",\n \"\\n\\nIt is not a useful aim of philosophers or political thinkers to\\ndetermine which one of these conceptual accounts of political\\nauthority is the right one. Each one of them grasps a kind of\\nlegitimacy of political authority that is worth taking into account\\nand distinguishing from the others. The idea of legitimate authority\\nas justified coercive power is a suitable way of getting at the\\nauthority of hostile but justified occupation powers. And the idea of\\nlegitimate authority as an authority that has a right to rule over\\nsubjects who owe obedience to the authority and that has a right not\\nto be interfered with by foreigners is surely an importantly distinct\\nand perhaps ideal type of authority, which is rarely implemented. The\\nkind of legitimacy that is merely correlated with duties to obey or\\nnot to interfere is a useful intermediate category between those\\ntwo.\",\n \"\\n\\nWhat is worth noting is that the idea of legitimate authority as a\\nright to rule in the strong sense described above does describe a kind\\nof ideal of political community. The idea of legitimate authority as a\\nright to rule to which citizens owe obedience gives each citizen a\\nmoral duty to obey, which it owes to the authority. So this form of\\nlegitimacy is grounded in a moral relationship between the parties that\\ngoes beyond the fact that they are fellow human beings. The\\nestablishment of a robust right to rule depends on the fact that each\\ncitizen rightly takes as a reason for obedience that it has a moral\\nduty owed to the authority. Since a legitimate political authority with\\na right to rule is predicated on the fact that citizens have moral\\nreasons grounded in the right to rule to obey it, the right to rule\\nengages citizens at a deep moral level. The exercise of political power\\nis founded in a moral relationship between moral persons that\\nrecognizes and affirms the moral personality of each citizen.\",\n \"\\n\\nBy contrast, a society in which it is merely the case that\\ncoercion is justified is one in which the subjects are permissibly\\ntreated as means to morally defensible purposes. The subjects do not\\nowe anything to the authority or have any duties to obey it. So, in the\\ncase of an authority as merely justified coercion, the subjects'\\nreasons for obedience are merely their desires to avoid punishment. And\\nthat is the level at which the authority deals with them. Such a\\nsociety does not engage the subjects as moral persons, it merely\\nattempts to administer the activities of persons so as to bring about\\nin a morally justified way a desirable outcome. At the extreme, a\\nprisoner of war camp or even a hostile but justified military\\noccupation gives the authorities justification for coercion. The people\\nwho are subjected to that treatment often have no duties to obey and\\nthey do not regard each other or the authorities as members of a\\nunified political community. They are merely fellow human beings. To\\nthe extent that a political society is best when it involves the mutual\\nrecognition and affirmation of the moral status of each person, the\\nkind of society that involves merely justified coercion of some by\\nothers is a pale shadow.\",\n \"\\n\\nAnd the intermediate form of political authority is incomplete in\\nthe respect in which the exercise of political power involves the\\nmutual recognition and affirmation of the status of each person. It is\\nthe case that subjects have duties but those duties are not essentially\\nconnected to anything in the authority. The subjects instead act more\\nin accordance with reasons that are independent of the authority when\\nthey obey the authority. So to the extent that a society ruled by an\\nauthority that has the right to rule is an ideal of a moral community,\\nthe other types of authority are lesser forms of a morally ideal\\npolitical community.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.1 Legitimate Political Authority: Some Conceptual Distinctions\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nTo the extent that a duty of obedience is included in the concept of\\npolitical authority, there can be different forms of obedience on the\\npart of subjects. This implies a very distinct dimension of political\\nauthority. When a political authority issues a command and the subject\\nhas a duty to obey, what is the nature of this duty? One might have a\\nduty to obey a command merely because it commands the subject to do\\nsomething that is just and any alternative action would be unjust. Here\\nthe duty to obey would depend on the content of the command. Commands\\nthat are unjust or perhaps even commands that require actions that are\\nnot exclusively just may not involve duties at all.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe commands of a legitimate political authority are usually thought\\nto involve something more than this. The duty of the subject is\\ngrounded not in the content of the command itself but in the nature of\\nthe source issuing the command. The duty to obey is then automatically\\ngenerated when the command is issued by the appropriate authority and\\nwhen it has the right form and provenance. In this respect, the duty to\\nobey is content independent or independent of the content of the\\nparticular command. One must obey because one has been commanded and\\nnot because of the particular content of the command. One must do it\\nbecause one has been told to do it. This kind of duty seems to be the\\nmost central kind of duty involved in the duty to obey. It is the idea\\nthat one must obey the authority because it is the authority. It does\\nnot imply of itself that one owes the duty of obedience to the\\nauthority so it does not imply that there is a right to rule on the\\npart of the authority.\",\n \"\\n\\nHere we must distinguish a duty that is owed to the authority and a\\nduty that is merely the result of the authoritative command. The duty\\nthat is owed to the authority is grounded in the fact that the\\nauthority possesses a feature that gives it a right to command and that\\nit is in virtue of that right that one owes obedience. The idea is that\\nthere is something just in itself that the authority be obeyed.\",\n \"\\n\\nOne other distinction that is worth making in this connection is the\\ndistinction between a preemptive duty to obey and a duty that is not\\npreemptive. A preemptive duty is one that replaces other duties. It\\nputs other duties out of play when it comes into play. A preemptive\\nduty is not weighed against other duties that might relate to what one\\nis thinking of doing. Of course, a preemptive duty may not preempt all\\nother considerations, its preemption may operate only with a limited\\nscope and thus preempt only some limited set of considerations.\",\n \"\\n\\nAn example of a preemptive duty is the case of a promissory\\nobligation. If I have agreed to do something for you and I suddenly see\\nsome pleasurable alternative to fulfilling my obligation, most people\\nwould think that I ought to exclude the consideration of pleasure\\naltogether from my deliberations even though the pleasure would be a\\nconsideration had I made no promise. It is simply not something that I\\ncan legitimately weigh in the balance against the promissory\\nobligation. So if an authority issues a command and the duty to obey is\\na preemptive duty, then the subject does not weigh the other duties\\nthat might otherwise apply to him in the balance with the preemptive\\nduty. The preemptive duty simply excludes the other duties. By\\ncontrast, if a duty is not preemptive, then when it comes time to\\ncomply with it, one must balance it with other duties that weigh for\\nand against acting in accord with the duty.\",\n \"\\n\\nMost think that the duties associated with authority are content\\nindependent in the sense that one must do what one is told even if one\\nis skeptical about the merits of the command. There is some\\nskepticism, however, about the claim that legitimate political\\nauthorities impose preemptive duties on subjects. These people have\\nquestioned the rationality of preemptive duties or reasons for\\naction. Surely, there are times when what appear to be preempted\\nconsiderations all add up to a consideration that outweighs the\\npreempting consideration. How can this be understood on the preemption\\nmodel? Some have argued that authoritative commands simply give\\nespecially weighty content independent duties, which can be balanced\\nagainst other duties (Shapiro 2002). The discussion of instrumentalism\\nwill say a bit more about these criticisms below.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe most demanding notion of authority is the idea of a political\\nauthority that has a right to rule that correlates with a duty to obey\\nthat is owed to the authority and that is a content independent and\\npreemptive duty.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.2 Political Authority and Different Kinds of Duties of Obedience\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nMost who think of legitimate authority as a kind of moral power to\\nchange the moral situation of others think of it as creating duties in\\nothers. And this is certainly the most prominent and striking\\nexercise of authority. But political authorities do not only create\\nduties in others in and some cases do not purport to create such\\nduties at all. The most prominent instances of this can be found in\\ninternational institutions. The Security Council of the United\\nNations exercises authority in a variety of ways: sometimes acting as\\na kind of legislative body and sometimes acting as a kind of executive\\nbody. Its executive authority is its traditional role in\\ninternational law. But this executive authority is quite distinct\\nfrom the kind of executive authority we see in the state. The\\nSecurity Council exercises its executive authority primarily by\\nauthorizing actions and not by carrying them out by itself or by\\nrequiring them. One way to describe the moral power of the Security\\nCouncil is that it gives a liberty to states to prosecute wars. It\\ndoes this against a background of a general prohibition of all war\\nexcept in the case of self-defense. It suspends that prohibition for\\ncertain states. It does not require them to act, it only permits them\\nto act in a warlike way. This is because the agent of enforcement in\\nthe international system is a decentralized one.\",\n \"\\n\\nFurthermore the Dispute Settlement Mechanism of the World Trade\\nOrganization functions in very much the same way. The dispute\\nsettlement system first determines whether a state has in fact\\nviolated its agreements on trade and tariffs with another state. And\\nwhen it determines this, it permits the plaintiff state to act in a\\nway that would normally be in violation of its agreements. It permits\\nretaliation through the system of tariffs and non-tariff barriers. It\\ncannot require this retaliation.\",\n \" \\n\\nHence the two most effective and authoritative institutions in the\\ninternational system do not impose duties at all in many cases, they\\nexercise a moral power to alter the moral situation of states but the\\nalteration is from duty to permission in many cases. To be sure, they\\ndo this against the background of treaties and agreements that have a\\nkind of legislative force and that do purport to impose genuine\\nduties. And there are duties not to interfere with the authorized\\nactivity, but the point remains that the primary exercise is one of\\nchanging duties to permissions. This may confirm Applebaum's idea\\nthat authority need not impose duties.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.3 Political Authority without Duties of Obedience\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nOne reason for keeping our minds open to different accounts of\\npolitical authority is that there are different kinds of political\\nauthority. Different accounts may be suitable to different kinds of\\nauthority. Indeed, different principles grounding authority may be\\nsuitable to different kinds of authority. One thing that is not often\\nenough discussed in treatments of political authority is the fact that\\nthere are very different kinds of political authority. Within the\\nstate alone there is legislative authority, executive authority,\\njudicial authority, and administrative authority; these different\\nkinds of authority can have distinct sub-branches of authority. And\\nthere are political authorities outside of the modern state, namely\\ninternational institutions. These have a very distinct kind of\\nauthority at least in the contemporary world and the authority of\\nthese different agencies is grounded in different principles.\",\n \"\\n\\nAs an illustration of different forms of authority for different\\npolitical entities consider the different parts of the modern state.\\nWe might think that a democratic legislative assembly has a genuine\\nright to rule in the sense that citizens owe obedience to it. They\\nmight owe this obedience because the assembly pools all the democratic\\nrights of all the citizens and so citizens treat each other as equals\\nby complying with the assembly's directives. But citizens do not owe\\nit to courts to respect their judgments about the law. The courts may\\ncreate duties but the duties are not owed to them. The same\\npresumably goes for policemen and adminstrators as well. They seem to\\nhave moral powers to create duties but these duties are not owed to\\nthem. Furthermore, the grounds of authority might be distinct for\\nthese two kinds of entities. The democratic conception might provide\\nthe basis of the authority of the assembly while the authority of\\ncourts and administrators may be more instrumentally grounded.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.4 The Diversity of Holders of Political Authority\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nFew theorists after Thomas Hobbes and David Hume have argued that\\nthere is a general duty to obey the law or that political authority is\\ngenerally legitimate (Hobbes 1668; Hume 1965). Most theorists have\\nargued that the legitimacy of political authority is one that holds\\nonly when the political authority satisfies certain normatively\\nimportant conditions. What we will review here are some of the main\\ntheories that attempt to explain when a political authority has\\nlegitimacy.\",\n \"\\n\\nGeneral theories are theories that identify general properties that\\nvirtually any kind of political regime can have that gives them\\nlegitimacy. Special theories are ones that mark off particular classes\\nof regimes that have legitimacy or that have a particularly high level\\nof legitimacy. There are really four types of general theory of\\npolitical authority and then there are a variety of special theories of\\npolitical authority. The four types of general theory of legitimacy are\\nconsent theories, reasonable consensus theories, associative obligation\\ntheories and instrumentalist theories. The two historically important\\nforms of special theory in the West have been the Divine Right of Kings\\ntheories and democratic theories.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Conceptions of the Legitimacy of Political Authority\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nAt the root of all contemporary discussions of the legitimacy of\\nauthority is the problem posed by Robert Paul Wolff concerning the\\nincompatibility of moral autonomy and political authority. The problem\\nis really only connected with the kinds of political authority that\\nimply content independent duties to comply with authoritative commands.\\nThe basic idea is that it is incompatible for a subject to comply with\\nthe commands of an authority merely because it is the command of the\\nauthority and for the subject to be acting morally autonomously. Wolff\\nthinks that each person has a duty to act on the basis of his own moral\\nassessment of right and wrong and has the duty to reflect on what is\\nright and wrong in each particular instance of action. Such a person\\nwould be violating his duty to act autonomously if he complies with\\nauthoritative commands on grounds that are independent of the content\\nof the commands. So the duty of autonomy is incompatible with the duty\\nof obeying political authority. This is the challenge of philosophical\\nanarchism (Wolff 1970).\",\n \"\\n\\nThe worry is that authority is never legitimate because the kind of\\nobedience associated with authority is inconsistent with the autonomy\\nof the subject. We can see, however, that this worry applies only to\\ncertain accounts of authority, which imply duties to obey on the part\\nof the subjects. The account of authority as justified coercion is not\\naffected by this argument nor is the account of legitimate authority\\nconsisting of a justification right affected by this worry. Still, most\\naccounts of the nature of authority do imply content independent duties\\non the part of the subjects. We can see that any content independent\\nduty, whether it is a duty not to interfere with the authority's\\ncommand or it is a duty to obey the authority, is called into question\\nby this argument.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. The Puzzle of Political Authority: Philosophical Anarchism\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nOne can see different accounts of the legitimacy of political\\nauthority as responses to the anarchist challenge. Let us start with\\nthe instrumentalist account of legitimacy. The canonical statement of\\nthis notion of legitimate authority is provided by Joseph Raz. He calls\\nit the Normal Justification Thesis. It asserts that “the normal\\nway to establish that a person has authority over another person\\ninvolves showing that the alleged subject is likely better to comply\\nwith reasons which apply to him (other than the alleged authoritative\\ndirectives) if he accepts the directives of the alleged authority as\\nauthoritatively binding and tries to follow them, rather than by trying\\nto follow the reasons which apply to him directly.” (Raz\\n1986)\",\n \"\\n\\nThis conception of the legitimacy of authority flows from the idea\\nthat “authoritative directives should be based on reasons which\\nalready independently apply to the subjects of the directives and are\\nrelevant to their action in the circumstances covered by the\\ndirective” (Raz 1986.) According to Raz, what should guide\\ngovernment decisions about what commands to give subjects is what the\\nsubjects already have reason to do. For instance, subjects already have\\nreason to give a fair share of resources for the common good.\\nAuthorities merely help them comply with these reasons by establishing\\nan efficient and fair system of taxation. Subjects have reason to\\ndefend their fellow countrymen and authorities help them do this by\\nestablishing an army in an efficient and fair way. Authorities do these\\nthings by issuing commands to subjects that are meant to replace the\\nreasons that already apply to the subjects. Instead of the subject\\ntrying to figure out exactly how much he owes and who to give it to by\\ncoordinating it with many other people, the authority simply takes over\\nthese tasks, determines what the subject has reason to do and expects\\nthe subject to take its authoritative command as a reason instead of\\nthe reasons that directly apply to the action. An authority does its\\njob well and is therefore legitimate when it enables subjects to act\\nbetter on the reasons that apply to them when they take the commands as\\ngiving them preemptive reasons.\",\n \"\\n\\nAn instrumentalist attempts to meet Wolff's challenge by saying that\\nan authority is legitimate when one complies better with one's duty\\noverall by submission to authority than by trying to act on the basis\\nof one's own assessments of what is right and wrong in each instance.\\nThis amounts to a rejection of the duty of autonomy that is central to\\nthe anarchist idea. Or at least it is a rejection of the idea that the\\nduty of autonomy is the most fundamental duty. But it does get at\\nsomething important. Wolff's challenge states in a rather general way\\nthe worry that there is something immoral about failing to critically\\nreflect about what one ought to do in each instance of action. And he\\nstates that submitting to the commands of the state is precisely a case\\nof failing to act on one's critical assessment of a situation. The\\ninstrumentalist suggests a way in which it is not immoral to fail to\\ncritically reflect on one's prospective actions in each instance.\\nIndeed, the instrumentalist can argue that it is sometimes immoral to\\ninsist on critically reflecting and acting autonomously when one may\\nactually act worse as a result of consistently critically reflecting.\\nWe frequently act on the basis of rules of action, without considering\\nall the details of the circumstances in which we act on the grounds\\nthat trying to take all the details of each situation into account for\\neach action would produce bad decisions. The instrumentalist argues\\nthat we ought to take this kind of attitude to the commands of the\\nstate when we will better act in accordance with our duty overall by\\ndoing so than by attempting to make independent assessments of the\\nworth of our actions in every case (see Raz 1986, ch. 3.)\",\n \"\\n\\nThis response to the philosophical anarchist challenge establishes\\nonly a piecemeal duty to obey the state. The instrumentalist argues\\nthat some states some of the time issue commands that we (or at least\\nsome individuals) ought to submit to without critical reflection on\\neach command. It does not imply that the duty to obey the state extends\\nto all commands of the state and to all subjects. It only applies when\\nthe subject would likely better comply with duties overall by treating\\nthe commands as authoritative (i.e. establishing content independent\\nand preemptive duties to obey the commands) than by acting on the basis\\nof an independent assessment of the rightness of each action. Whether\\nthe commands impose duties or not depends on features of the subject\\nsuch as his or her knowledge of the issues related to the commands and\\nso forth.\",\n \"\\n\\nOf course, it is important to note that not every act of obedience\\nwill ensure better compliance with reason, there will be cases when the\\ncommands of the state do not accord with the best reasons. Raz's\\nconception of authority depends for its cogency on the thought that as\\nlong as the subject does better by reason overall by obeying certain\\nclasses of commands, the subject has a duty to obey every one of the\\ncommands: the correct as well as the incorrect. In some sense, the\\nobedience to the commands has a greater likelihood of ensuring\\nconformity with reason. Finally, this particular account of the duty to\\nobey does not assert that the discharging of the duties is owed to the\\nstate. This account does not establish any fundamental right to rule on\\nthe part of the state.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.1 Instrumentalism about Legitimate Political Authority\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThe power of this account of political authority and the duty to\\nobey depends essentially on the account of practical reasoning that\\nlies at its base. Many have argued that this conception of practical\\nreasoning is flawed. They have worried that the indirect form of\\npractical reasoning that it requires is not legitimate. The worry can\\nbe stated fairly easily. The form of practical reasoning this account\\nof authority includes requires that we ignore the reasons that apply\\ndirectly to the action we are about to undertake even though sometimes\\nthose reasons will count against the action. The question arises, when\\nare the reasons that directly apply to the action so strongly opposed\\nto the action that we must override the preemptive reason?\",\n \"\\n\\nIn the case of rule following, we sometimes encounter particular\\ninstances in which following the rule is counterproductive. How do we\\ndetermine when we ought to follow the rule and when we ought not to\\nfollow the rule? Does such determination involve the very deliberation\\nabout particular instances that was meant to be excluded by the rule?\\nSome have argued that rule following cannot be rational since it cannot\\nbe rational to ignore the particular facts of each case (Hurd\\n2001).\",\n \"\\n\\nRaz's main response to this criticism has been to say that we look\\nfor clear cases in which the rule is to be overridden and ignore the\\nother cases and that only by doing this do we best comply with reason.\\nLimiting exceptions to the rule to clear cases obviates the need for\\ndeliberation in every case.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.2 A Worry about the Instrumentalist Account of Practical Reason\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nAnother version of the philosophical anarchist challenge may seem to\\navoid the critical edge of the above approach. This approach, defended\\nby A. John Simmons (Simmons 2001) and Leslie Green (Green 1989) asserts\\nthat each person has a right not to be bound by the state's commands.\\nThis thesis is quite different from the kind of anarchism defended by\\nWolff. The latter asserts that each individual has a duty to be\\nautonomous. The present theory asserts merely that a person has a right\\nnot be subjected to another's imposition of duties. The philosophical\\nanarchist then argues that only if a person consents to being bound to\\nthe political authority can the person actually be bound. The final\\npremise in the philosophical anarchist argument is that it is either\\npractically impossible or at least actually untrue that states can be\\nset up in such a way that they can demand the obedience of all and only\\nthose who have consented to their authority. So, the anarchist\\nconcludes, no state is legitimate and perhaps no state can ever be\\nlegitimate.\",\n \"\\n\\nIt is important to note that this view does not imply that one must\\nnever obey the state. It merely implies that one does not have content\\nindependent duties to obey the state and that the state does not have a\\nright to rule. A reasonably just state will command one to do things\\nthat are reasonably just and in many cases one must obey those commands\\nbecause they are just. What one is not required to do on the\\nphilosophical anarchist view is obey any state just because it has\\ncommanded one to do certain things.\",\n \"\\n\\nTo discuss this view, we will first discuss the arguments people\\nhave given for the consent theory of political authority. We will also\\ndiscuss some counterarguments. Then we will discuss a popular\\nmodification of the consent theory that is designed to avoid\\nphilosophical anarchism.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. A Second Form of Philosophical Anarchism\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThe consent theory of political authority states only a necessary\\ncondition of the legitimacy of political authority. It states that a\\npolitical authority is legitimate only if it has the consent of those\\nwho are subject to its commands. Many have argued that in addition to\\nconsent, a state must be minimally just for it to be legitimate (Locke\\n1990).\",\n \"\\n\\nA number of arguments have been presented in favor of this view.\\nLocke's argument is that each person has an equal natural right to\\nfreedom and that this implies that at the age of maturity no one may be\\nsubordinated to anyone else's commands by nature (Locke 1990). Let us\\ncall this the natural right argument. Such subordination would\\nviolate the equal freedom of the subordinated person. To the extent\\nthat political authority involves issuing commands and requiring others\\nto follow the commands, it seems to involve subordinating one person to\\nthe commands of another and thus violates the natural right to freedom\\nof the subordinated person.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.1 The Consent Theory of Political Authority: The Natural Right to Freedom Argument\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nA natural objection to this line of reasoning is to state that\\npolitical authority is actually necessary to protecting each person's\\nequal freedom. Locke himself argued that the state of nature would be\\nquite threatening to each person's ability to live freely because there\\nare likely to be many disagreements about what rights each person has\\nand so people are likely to trespass on each other's rights.\\nFurthermore he argued that when there is such disagreement, we need an\\nimpartial judge to determine when rights have been violated. And\\nagainst criminals we need a police power to enforce the rights that\\npeople have. Locke argues that only by establishing political society\\nwith a legislature that makes known and settled laws and establishing a\\njudiciary that resolves remaining controversies between people and\\nhaving an executive power that enforces the laws can people's rights\\nand freedoms be protected.\",\n \"\\n\\nOnce we have the above argument in mind, it is hard to see the force\\nof the natural right argument for no political authority without\\nconsent. We might think that the very liberty that is being invoked to\\nsupport the case for the necessity of consent is better protected by a\\nreasonably just political authority. The instrumentalist can then argue\\nthat one protects the liberty of each and every person better by\\ninstituting political authority and by treating its commands as\\nauthoritative. And so the instrumentalist could argue that insofar as\\nliberty is a fundamental value, it would be immoral not to support a\\nreasonably just political authority and treat its commands as\\nauthoritative.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe natural right theorist might argue in response that the above\\nargument seems to involve a kind of utilitarianism of rights. Such a\\nview says that it is justified to violate one person's right in order\\nto protect the rights of others. But, such a theorist might say, the\\nnatural rights of persons are side constraints against actions; they\\nare not to be violated even if others' rights are better protected as\\na consequence. This entry will not go into the many issues that arise\\nin the discussion of deontology and consequentialism here. We will\\nreturn to the issue of side constraints after the discussion of the\\nnext argument.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.2 The Instrumentalist Critique of the Natural Right Argument\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nSome have proposed what this entry will call the options\\nargument against the kind of considerations the instrumentalist\\nadduces. The instrumentalist argues that I have natural duties of\\njustice to promote just institutions and that these duties are best\\nsatisfied by complying with the authority of a reasonably just\\nstate. But the philosophical anarchist could argue that though I may\\nhave a duty of justice, it does not entail that I must obey any\\nparticular institution for promoting justice. The idea here is that\\njust as Amnesty International may not require me to pay dues to it\\nregardless of my membership even though these dues would clearly\\nadvance the protection of human rights throughout the world, so the\\nstate may not require me to comply with its commands even though such\\ncompliance would advance the purposes of justice in the world. Let us\\nsuppose that the reasons clearly favor my support of Amnesty\\nInternational. Intuitively, it still may not require me to lend it\\nsupport. Only if I have voluntarily joined and voluntarily remain in\\nAmnesty do I have a duty to do what the conditions of membership\\nrequire. And I am under no obligation to join Amnesty; I may join\\nother organizations to fulfill whatever duties of aid that I have. So\\nwhether I ought to join Amnesty and be subject to membership dues is\\nup to me. The consent theorist seems to think that, in the same way,\\nonly if I voluntarily transact to obligate myself to comply with the\\nstate's commands can I be said to have a duty to comply with the\\nstate. I must somehow enlist myself in the project of promoting the\\ngood causes that the state promotes (Simmons 2001).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.3 The Consent Theory: The Options Argument\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThis argument may miss a central idea in the instrumentalist account\\nof authority. The instrumentalist account is premised on the view that\\nnot only does the state help one discharge one's duties of justice; it\\nasserts that compliance with the state is necessary to the discharge of\\none's duties. Hence, one acts unjustly if one fails to comply with the\\nstate's commands.\",\n \"\\n\\nTo understand this, we need to introduce another concept. The idea\\nis that the state does not only promote justice, it\\nestablishes justice. What does this mean? It means that for a\\nparticular community, the state determines what justice requires in the\\nrelations between individuals. It does this by defining the relations\\nof property and exchange as well as the institutions of the criminal\\nlaw and tort law. To say that the state's legislative activity\\nestablishes justice is not the same as saying that the state's activity\\nconstitutes justice. Justice is still an independent standard of\\nassessment on this account.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe reason for saying that the state establishes justice is that, in\\nJoseph Raz's words, justice and morality more generally, underdetermine\\nthe legislation necessary to bring about justice in a community. This\\nmeans that one can implement the same principles of justice by means of\\nmany different sets of rules. But one can treat others justly only if\\none is on the same page as the others. So what is just in a particular\\ncircumstance will depend in part on the set of rules that the others\\nare acting on. To the extent that the state determines the basic\\nframework of rules, it determines which actions are just and which are\\nnot. One does not act justly, on this account, by deciding not to\\ncomply with the state one lives in and sending money to another state\\nor association. If one fails to comply with the rules of property or\\nthe rules of exchange, one treats others unjustly. The options argument\\nsuggests that somehow there is a way that one can discharge one's duty\\nto others by doing something other than obeying the law. Instead of\\nobeying the law of property of the society in which I live, I may\\nsimply decide to send money to another part of the world where property\\nrights are enforced. But this argument fails to appreciate the central\\nimportance of law to defining justice among persons. Though not all\\nlaws are just, justice among persons in any even moderately complex\\nsociety requires law and obedience to law.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.4 The Instrumentalist Critique of the Option and Natural Right Arguments\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nOne argument for consent theory essayed by Simmons asserts that a\\nperson ought to be free to act on the basis of personal reasons as\\nopposed to impersonal reasons. So even if the state does help each\\nperson act more on the basis of impersonal reasons that apply to them\\nindependent of the state, a person may refuse, on the basis of personal\\nreasons, to accept the directives of the state. And so, it is argued,\\nthe state's imposition of duties on the individual may occur only if\\nthe individual has consented to the state's authority (Simmons\\n2001).\",\n \"\\n\\nThe idea that one can have personal reasons not to obey the commands\\nof a reasonably just state is unclear. It might be referring to the\\nidea that each person has a kind of personal prerogative that permits\\nhim to avoid the demands of morality generally. This idea was proposed\\nby critics of utilitarianism as a way to avoid the excessive\\ndemandingness of utilitarianism while keeping most of the view intact.\\nUtilitarianism supplies exclusively impersonal reasons for action to\\nindividuals. These seem to undermine the personal projects and\\ninterests of individuals. Some have proposed that utilitarianism be\\nmodified to accommodate the projects of individuals by including a\\npersonal prerogative to act on the basis of personal reasons. Others\\nhave argued that there ought to be a personal prerogative to ignore the\\nimpersonal reasons of any set of moral requirements.\",\n \"\\n\\nBut this role for personal reasons does not seem to provide much in\\nthe way of defense of the consent theory. One reason for this is that\\nthese are reasons to avoid some of the demands of morality. But the\\nissue at stake in the justification of authority is whether morality\\ndemands obedience or not. If we think of these personal reasons as part\\nof the structure of morality, on the other hand, then it would seem\\nthat these personal reasons are best protected by a reasonably just\\nstate that protects individual freedom. So the response to the claim\\nthat individuals have personal reasons to evade the commands of the\\nstate seems to fall prey to the same argument that undermines the\\nnatural right approach.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.5 The Consent Theory of Political Authority: The Argument from Personal Reasons\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThere is another way to think of this personal reasons criticism of\\ninstrumentalist approaches to political authority. The instrumentalist\\napproach seems to be committed to the idea that an authority can be\\nlegitimate even if most of the members of the society do not agree with\\nwhat it is doing. As long as the state is requiring people to act as\\nthey should act, the subjects have a duty to obey, even if they do not\\nsee that they have this duty. Now one can see how this may be true in\\nsome circumstances, where the members are deeply immoral or irrational.\\nBut it seems perverse to think that whether the state has legitimate\\nauthority is completely independent of the considered opinions of its\\nsubjects. Here is the reason behind the appearance. The state, being a\\ngroup of people, owes the subjects some kind of duty of respect for the\\njudgments of those members. This duty of respect requires at least some\\ndegree of responsiveness on the part of the state in making decisions.\\nFurthermore the state, in part, is an institution that is grounded in\\nthe need for decisions against a background of disagreement about what\\nought to be done. For the state to make decisions against this\\nbackground that completely ignores the views of the many dissenters\\nseems a particularly egregious violation of the duty to accord some\\nrespect to the opinions of reasonable adult human beings.\",\n \"\\n\\nConsent theories, reasonable consensus theories, associative\\nobligation theories and democratic theories make these observations\\npart of the foundation of their accounts of the legitimacy of\\nauthority. The consent theory of political authority requires that for\\nthe state to have authority over any person, the state must have the\\nconsent of the person to that authority. Consent, on this account, is a\\nnecessary condition of the legitimacy of authority though it need not\\nbe a sufficient condition. The consent theory clearly makes an attempt\\nto make political authority compatible with a due respect for the\\nopinions of subjects.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.6 Consent Theory: The Argument from Disagreement\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nBut we might wonder if it doesn't go too far. For if consent is a\\ngenuinely necessary condition of political authority, then it appears\\nthat individuals may have the option of not obeying a perfectly just\\nstate that has jurisdiction over the area in which they live. And they\\nmay do this on perverse grounds or they may simply wish to free ride on\\nthe benefits that the state confers without having to undertake any of\\nthe burdens. How can this be legitimate and how can it undermine the\\nauthority of a just state? It seems that in the effort to express\\nrespect for the reasonable opinions of people, consent theory seems to\\nhave gone too far in giving respect to immoral, irrational and\\nunprincipled failures of consent (Raz 1986).\",\n \"\\n\\nThe consent theorist could respond to this difficulty with the claim\\nthat it is only the state's claim to authority that is being held\\nhostage, not the state's just activities. For if it is the case that\\nthe person is merely free riding on desirable activities and that this\\nis unjust then the person is acting wrongly. Hence, the justice of the\\nactions of the state may be sufficient to condemn the actions of the\\nfree rider and this can be done without attributing the right to rule\\nto the state.\",\n \"\\n\\nBut now the instrumentalist could argue that obedience to the\\nauthoritative commands of the state may be necessary to acting justly\\nin many instances. The thought is that only if people treat the\\ncommands of the state as providing content independent reasons for\\nobedience can a reasonably just state actually perform the tasks that\\nmake it just. If people are constantly second guessing the state's\\ndecisions, the central roles of coordination, collective action and\\nassurance in the establishment of justice by the state will be\\nundermined. These are collective effects of second guessing. But the\\ninstrumentalist will also argue that individuals will often act less in\\naccordance with the reasons that apply to them if they fail to take the\\ncommands of a reasonably just state as offering content independent\\nreasons because only the state's commands can clue them in to what the\\nrules that establish justice are in their particular community. The\\ninstrumentalist may then argue that it is therefore wrong for the\\nperson not to take the commands of the state as authoritative, at least\\nin many circumstances.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.7 The Problems of Irrational, Immoral Failures of Consent\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nLocke, in part desiring to avoid these obvious difficulties or\\nirrational and immoral failures of consent, introduced the notion of\\ntacit consent (Locke 1990). The possibility of tacit consent allows\\nthat one may consent without having to go through the usual motions\\nassociated with expression of consent. For example, at a board meeting,\\none consents tacitly to the chairman's scheduling a meeting if one says\\nnothing when the chair asks for objections to the proposal. And that\\ntacit consent is valid to the extent that the failure to object is\\nunderstood as a kind of consent and is voluntary.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe main problem with tacit consent is the problem of\\ninterpretation. How does one interpret the actions of another so as to\\nthink of them as consenting though they did not explicitly do so?\\nTheorists differ on the constraints that must be placed on the\\ninterpretation of the behaviors of others. Simmons argues that for\\nbehavior to count as tacit consent it the behavior must be explicitly\\nunderstood by all to be a kind of consent, it must be clear how when to\\nperform the act or omission that constitutes tacit consent, it is not\\ndifficult to consent and the costs of dissent are not prohibitive. But\\nit is not obvious that Locke had this in mind. Locke thought that the\\nmere residing in a territory and voluntarily benefiting from the\\nactions of a minimally just state were sufficient conditions of tacit\\nconsent. One might think that Locke thought the following. If a person\\nvoluntarily resides in a territory over which the state has\\njurisdiction and that person benefits from the establishment of the\\nrule of law and all the other amenities the state provides then that\\nperson must know or ought to know that the state's provision of these\\nbenefits depends on the obedience of the members of the society. But if\\nthe person now continues to reside voluntarily in the state, that\\nperson must know that others expect obedience from him unless he is\\nunder some special exemption. He must know or ought to know, in other\\nwords, that others can reasonably interpret his voluntary residence as\\ncommitting him to obedience to the laws of the state. So, we have\\nadequate reason to interpret a person's continued voluntary residence\\nas a form of consenting to abide by the laws of the state.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.8 Tacit Consent\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nDavid Hume criticized this interpretive move (Hume 1965). He argued\\nthat given the extraordinary costs to most people of moving out of the\\ncountry of their birth, no one can sensibly interpret the voluntary\\ncontinued residence of a person in a state as a case of tacit consent.\\nHe draws an analogy with a person who has been carried involuntarily\\nonto a ship by others and who now finds himself on the ship subject to\\nthe commands of the captain and whose only alternative is to throw\\nhimself into a stormy sea. Hume argues that such a person's remaining\\non the ship can not be interpreted to be consenting to the authority of\\nthe captain. The person is merely attempting to avoid the terrible cost\\nof getting off the ship.\",\n \"\\n\\nBut it is not clear why Hume's argument is supposed to work. It\\nsounds like the argument challenges the voluntariness of the consent.\\nBut this cannot be a conclusive argument here. After all, many people\\nconsent to things in order to avoid the terrible costs of not\\nconsenting. People consent to pay their insurance premiums in order not\\nto end up without health care when the time comes that they need it.\\nPromises made on the battlefield to lay down arms on the condition that\\nthe opponent will not harm one are also made under severe duress. But\\nwe do not think that these promises are invalid or that they fail to\\nobligate. So the fact that the alternative would be terrible is not a\\nreason to think that those who choose to remain in a state are not\\nthereby bound.\",\n \"\\n\\nOf course, Hume's example includes the fact that the person was\\ncarried forcibly onto the ship. This may be doing more work that it\\nshould be. For few people would say that the state has necessarily done\\nsomething wrong by imposing its jurisdiction over a territory on which\\na person is born. We need, then, to change Hume's example so that the\\nperson who is on the boat is on it through no fault of anyone on the\\nboat, though he may have ended up there involuntarily.\",\n \"\\n\\nOne possibility is that Hume thinks that we cannot interpret the\\ncontinuing residence of a person in a state as a case of consent to the\\nauthority of the state because we have no reason to think that the\\ncontinuing residence was chosen as a result of reflection on whether it\\nconstituted consent. The impoverished person who remains in the state\\nin which he finds himself gave no thought whatsoever to any\\nconsideration other than that to move would be highly costly or\\notherwise unpleasant. We have no reason to think that he gave any\\nthought to the question of consent and so it is illegitimate to\\ninterpret his behavior in that way.\",\n \"\\n\\nBut it is not obvious that this reasoning succeeds. If a person\\nbenefits by residing in a territory and everyone knows that the\\nbenefit only arises because of the obedience to law of the members,\\nshouldn't it be clear to this person that his compliance is expected\\nof him if he remains in the territory? And does his remaining in the\\nterritory thereby imply that he consents to the authority of the\\nterritory?\",\n \"\\n\\nOf course it is true of any particular person that his\\ncompliance is not necessary to the maintenance of the benefits of\\npublic order. But at the same time it is clear that unless there is\\nsome special reason for this person not to be subject to the rules\\neveryone else is subject to, elementary norms of fairness will suggest\\nto him and everyone else that compliance is expected of him just as it\\nis of everyone else.\",\n \"\\n\\nThis would seem to be a basis for interpreting the person's behavior\\nas a case of consent. Anyone can see that the compliance of each person\\nis expected of those who reside in a territory as long as the law is\\nreasonably just. If someone has not considered these facts, perhaps he\\nshould be held responsible for consenting anyway. After all, if we look\\nat Simmons's central board room case we might have the same reaction to\\nsomeone who, having been told that failure to object implies consent to\\na policy, fails to object but only because he doesn't want to anger his\\ngirlfriend in the group and really gives no thought to the question of\\nconsent. Surely he has tacitly consented, despite his irresponsible\\nattitude. So why not think that the person who continues to reside\\nvoluntarily in a reasonably just state?\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.9 The Humean Attack on Tacit Consent\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nAn important objection to the idea of tacit consent is that it begs\\nthe question about how a state gets its authority. Some argue that a\\ngroup of persons that has no authority to issue commands in the first\\nplace cannot require people submit to their commands or leave a piece\\nof territory they are falsely claim as under their jurisdiction\\n(Brilmayer 1989; Wellman 2001). In a variation on the boardroom example\\ndescribed above, Brilmayer imagines that instead of the chairman\\nproposing a date for a meeting, a window washer swings in and makes the\\nsame proposal and asks for objections. Clearly in that case, failure to\\nregister objections would not constitute consent to the proposed\\nschedule. The reason for this is that only a duly constituted authority\\ncan have the right to make such a proposal. But, the claim to authority\\nis precisely what tacit consent is supposed to support. So as an\\naccount of authority the tacit consent view seems to beg the\\nquestion.\",\n \"\\n\\nThis criticism is right as far as it goes. But there are four points\\nto note about it. First, it applies to explicit consent as well as\\ntacit consent. My consent to a person's doing something does not\\nlegitimate that person's doing it nor does it obligate me to respect\\nhis doing it unless he already has a right to make the proposal. In the\\ncase of political authorities, my consent to someone's issuing commands\\nover a piece of territory that she has no right to rule over does not\\nlegitimate her commands nor does it obligate me.\",\n \"\\n\\nSecond, it is not a criticism of Locke since he clearly thinks that\\ntacit consent only legitimates and obligates under conditions where\\nthere is a duly constituted authority. Locke thinks that the right to\\nrule of an authority must be traced back to an original act of consent\\nin the state of nature (where there is no prior political authority) to\\nform a political body. That political body then confers, by the consent\\nof all the members, authority on a particular institutional arrangement\\n(as long as it is minimally just). The function of tacit consent as\\nwell as the consent of new members is simply to renew this already\\ncreated authority.\",\n \"\\n\\nThird, if Locke is right and consent can create authority out of the\\nstate of nature, it may be possible for tacit consent to do the same.\\nWe can imagine a state of nature scenario where a highly persuasive\\nperson gets up amid the chaos and makes a proposal to create the\\ninitial political body from the state of nature and then states very\\nclearly that if there are objections, they should be raised without\\nfear. And we can imagine the very same person making a proposal to\\ncreate the particular structure of authority over the political body\\nand calling for objections in the same way as before. There is no\\nobvious reason why this could not work. Locke did not suggest this but\\nit does not seem impossible.\",\n \"\\n\\nThese last two points defeat the argument that tacit consent\\nrequires a prior duly constituted authority. What Locke's picture\\nsuggests is that valid consent or tacit consent do not require that the\\nconsented to proposal be made by someone already in authority; they can\\nbe valid as long as the proposal is made when there is no authority\\nalready in place. The proposals can be drawn up by someone who has the\\nright to make the proposal. In the state of nature, anyone presumably\\nhas this right.\",\n \"\\n\\nFourth, even if tacit consent cannot establish authority it may\\nstill be a necessary condition on the legitimacy of authority. For if a\\npolitical authority is duly constituted in the way Locke describes but\\nfails to offer its citizens a right of exit or imposes severe burdens\\non people who wish to exit, it will become illegitimate over time,\\naccording to Locke.\",\n \"\\n\\nStill, this criticism is quite important because it shows that\\nneither consent nor tacit consent can stand alone as bases of political\\nlegitimacy. An exclusively consent based theory of political authority\\nseems to require that the original consent take place in a state of\\nnature prior to political authority. And this further requirement seems\\nto weaken the plausibility of the view.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.10 How Can Tacit Consent Be A Basis of Political Authority?\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nWhat is worrisome about this kind of approach from the standpoint of\\nconsent theory is that it seems to ignore all the particular reasons\\nthat people may have for not consenting. Indeed, it seems to rely on\\nthe premise that anyone should see that if they reside within the\\nterritory of a reasonably just state, they are properly expected to\\ncomply with the law, at least insofar as it is reasonably just. Consent\\ntheory, by contrast, seems to rely on the thought that individuals may\\nproperly reject these kinds of obligations for purely personal\\nreasons.\",\n \"\\n\\nWe can see a dilemma that arises from the above considerations. If\\ntacit consent genuinely arises from voluntary residence in a\\nreasonably just state, then it appears that the interpretation of the\\nperson's residence does not take account of what many consent\\ntheorists have thought was essential to consent theory, namely the\\npersonal reasons of the subject in deciding whether to consent or\\nnot. On the other hand, if those personal reasons are ones that the\\nsubject may properly take into account in deciding whether to consent,\\nthen the interpretive move required for voluntary residence to\\ngenerate obligations in all subjects of a reasonably just state cannot\\nwork. It cannot work because subjects may have personal reasons for\\nnot consenting, which voluntary residence does not rule out.\",\n \"\\n\\nHence, it appears that tacit consent theory cannot conform to what\\nmany have taken to be the highly individualistic spirit of consent\\ntheory. So fans of consent theory are not likely to agree to the idea\\nthat people generally tacitly consent to the state's authority when\\nthey voluntarily reside in its territory. Critics of consent theory are\\nlikely, however, to question that highly individualistic approach in\\nthe manner sketched above.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.11 The Basic Objection of Consent Theorists to Tacit Consent\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nDavid Estlund has tentatively advanced a new and intriguing suggestion\\nfor shoring up an essentially voluntarist account of\\nauthority. Estlund argues that even in the absence of explicit or\\ntacit consent in some cases persons may be said to have consented to\\npolitical authority. He describes this as “normative\\nconsent”. The idea is motivated in the following way. Estlund\\nnotes that actual explicit cases of consenting can fail to produce\\nobligations if what is consented to is seriously immoral. The consent\\nis nullified (in its obligation producing effect) by the evident\\nimmorality of its content. Estlund then enquires as to whether the\\nlack of consent under certain circumstances mightn't similarly be\\nnullified in cases where it is plainly wrong not to consent. Why\\naren't these symmetrical he asks? Estlund envisions a case in which a\\npassenger airplane has crashed and in which there is still a\\nsignificant chance of saving many passengers through a very well\\ncoordinated effort. As it happens an airline attendant stands up and\\n“takes control” by giving commands to various people thus\\norganizing the relief effort. Let us suppose that this is evidently\\nreasonably successful but that it really does require the cooperation\\nof (nearly) everyone to whom the airline attendant chooses to give\\ndirectives. And let us suppose that the attendant is not giving any\\nclearly immoral commands. Estlund notes that it would be clearly\\nimmoral for someone in a position to give essential help not to agree\\nto go along with the attendant's commands. Now suppose that someone\\nin such a situation refuses to consent to the arrangement. Estlund\\nasks whether their non-consent isn't nullified in the light of the\\nfact that it is immoral not to consent. And if the non-consent is\\nnullified, then its normal effect in preserving the liberty of the\\nagent is not produced. In this case the person is no longer free to\\nact independent of the purported authority. Since his non-consent is\\nnullified, he has, in effect, consented and he is therefore under an\\nobligation to the authority. This is normative consent.\",\n \"\\n\\nEstlund is anxious to distinguish this idea from hypothetical consent\\nor what you would have consented to had you been a better person. Yet\\nhe does want to say that this normative consent has a genuine\\nconnection to the will.\",\n \"\\n\\nOne might wonder here if there is any genuine connection to the will\\nof the normative consenter and so whether this really does shore up\\nthe voluntarist view. But a further issue that might be raised here\\nis whether Estlund has genuinely identified the fallback point of\\ninvalidated consent and non-consent. Perhaps the proper description\\nof the fall back point is neither consent nor non-consent. A person\\nwho has consented to something deeply immoral doesn't thereby refuse\\nconsent to that action, the person simply has failed to do anything\\nmorally productive. Perhaps the idea in the case of the seriously\\nimmoral non-consent is that the person has simply not done anything\\nmorally productive. What happens in both cases is that the previous\\nmoral situation of the agent remains in place. In the nullified\\nconsent case you still have an obligation not to do what you consented\\nto do and in the nullified non-consent case you still have an\\nobligation to do what you refuse to consent to do. This would suggest\\nthat the decision between consent and non-consent has here no\\nnormative effect: whatever the agent decides, the previous moral\\nsituation remains in place. Hence there is a kind of symmetry that\\nholds here between the two cases. It is just that the default\\nposition is neither consent nor non-consent. The one implication this\\nmight have is that one may ask the person again until he agrees,\\nwhereas normally if a person refuses to consent to something you must\\nleave them alone. \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.12 Normative Consent\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nReasonable consensus views of political authority attempt to find a\\nkind of mean between the extreme individualism of consent theory and\\nthe lack of respect for people's opinions of the instrumentalist views.\\nJohn Rawls argues that the liberal principle of political legitimacy\\nrequires that coercive institutions be so structured that they accord\\nwith the reasonable views of the members of the society. As long as\\nthey do so they have the right to impose duties on their members. The\\nmembers may not demur on the basis of unreasonable views. Furthermore,\\nit is not necessary on this view that the persons over whom authority\\nis wielded have voluntarily acted or given any sign of agreement. All\\nthat need be the case is that the basic principles that regulate the\\ncoercive institutions be ones that the reasonable members can agree to\\n(Rawls 1996).\",\n \"\\n\\nThis view seems to be a kind of middle position between consent\\ntheory and the instrumentalist views. It does not allow individuals to\\ndivest themselves of obligations on spurious or merely self-interested\\nbases because it specifies what is and is not a reasonable basis for\\nagreement to the basic principles of the society. At the same time it\\nevinces a respect for the opinions of the members of society since it\\nrequires that the basic principles that regulate the society accord\\nwith the reasonable views of the members.\",\n \"\\n\\nThis account of legitimacy is based on an adherence to a principle of\\nreasonableness. The basic principle asserts that reasonable persons\\nwill propose fair terms of cooperation with other reasonable persons\\nonly on condition that the terms can be justified to those others on\\nthe basis of premises that they can reasonably accept. There has been\\nmuch discussion of this principle and its underpinnings but this entry\\nwill focus on a central worry concerning this idea.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Reasonable Consensus Conceptions of Legitimate Political Authority\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nA number of criticisms have been made against this kind of view.\\nMany have argued that the relevant notion of reasonableness is likely\\nto be very difficult to specify in a way that is both plausible and\\ncompatible with possible consensus. The key difficulty with reasonable\\nconsensus theories is that they rely on the possibility of consensus on\\nat least a sufficient number of basic norms to say that there is\\nconsensus on the basic principles that regulate a society. So if one\\nattempts to come up with a notion of reasonableness that is\\nsufficiently robust to generate agreement of this sort, then one is\\nlikely to have a notion that is quite controversial. And then the view\\ndoes not seem to take a sufficiently respectful view of the opinions of\\nthe members of society since so many are likely to disagree with the\\nconception of the reasonable. On the other hand, if one elaborates a\\nconception of the reasonable that is sufficiently weak for most persons\\nin the society to satisfy it, then one is not likely to generate\\nagreement on the basic principles of the society.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe main worry is that the idea demands a level of consensus among\\nmembers of society that is incompatible with the ordinary conditions of\\npolitical societies (Christiano 1996; Waldron 1999). The principle\\ndemands that there be a kind of consensus among citizens on the basic\\nprinciples that underpin the operation of political society.\",\n \"\\n\\nThis consensus seems to be unattainable under the conditions of\\nmodern society. One way, however, in which Rawls has argued in favor of\\nthe attainability of the consensus is to say that it need only be an\\noverlapping consensus. The idea here is that citizens do not have to\\nagree on everything but only on those principles that apply to the\\nbasic structure of society. And even here, when citizens disagree on\\nsome issue of social justice, the opposing views are taken off the\\ntable. So citizens can disagree on what the nature of the good life is\\nand on religious questions and even different issues relating to social\\njustice. As long as there are certain principles that everyone agrees\\nto, which apply to the basic structure of society, full consensus is\\nnot necessary. Hence, the consensus need only be an overlapping\\none.\",\n \"\\n\\nThough this idea goes some way towards alleviating the worry that\\ntoo much consensus is required by Rawls's theory, it does not go nearly\\nfar enough. There is one main way in which the overlapping consensus\\nfails to provide the kind of consensus that Rawls requires. If a group\\nof citizens agrees on a set of principles for regulating society and\\nsome of the citizens also think that some other principles apply, the\\noverlapping consensus idea is that the citizens who hold the\\nidiosyncratic views must take those particular demands off the table\\nand must argue only on the basis of the shared principles. The idea is\\nthat everyone appeals only to those principles that lie in the overlap\\nand not to those that do not lie in the overlap. A legitimate exercise\\nof political power is one that is grounded only in those principles\\nthat lie in the overlap. This seems to diminish the amount of agreement\\nnecessary to make a society legitimate.\",\n \"\\n\\nBut this appearance is an illusion. To see this we need only think\\nof those people who hold idiosyncratic views. If the society they live\\nin is exclusively grounded in principles that lie in the overlap of\\nprinciples, then these people will have reason to complain that the\\nsociety is unjust to the extent that the idiosyncratic principles are\\nignored. For instance, if someone holds the idiosyncratic view that\\npeople ought to receive in accordance with their desert then a society\\nthat does not act to make sure that this principle is respected is one\\nthat will be considered unjust by that person. They will live in a\\nsociety that is unacceptable to them in a certain important respect\\nrelevant to justice.\",\n \"\\n\\nOf course, if the desert principle is used to ground the basic\\ninstitutions of society even though it does not lie in the overlap then\\nthose who think that desert is not a proper principle of justice will\\nlikely think that they are living in a society that they regard as\\nunjust. The principle of legitimacy will imply in this context that the\\nbasic institutions of society are illegitimate because they are not\\nbased on principles everyone accepts. But surely the same can be said\\nof those who hold the idiosyncratic principles. They can complain that\\nthey are required to go along with institutions that are unjust by\\ntheir lights. The imposition on them implied by the basic institutions\\nthat fail to distribute in accordance with desert is as great as would\\nbe the imposition on the others implied by institutions that do\\ndistribute goods in accordance with desert. There is a complete\\nsymmetry here. Indeed, one way to put this point is to say that those\\nwho hold that desert is not a genuine principle of justice are\\nthemselves holding an idiosyncratic view when we take into account the\\nfact that many think that desert is a genuine principle of justice.\",\n \"\\n\\nAs a consequence of these considerations, only a complete consensus\\nof political principles will satisfy the principle of legitimacy that\\nRawls defends. But complete consensus on political principles is\\nimpossible to achieve given the conditions of ordinary political\\nsocieties. And so to the extent that this principle of legitimacy is\\nunsatisfiable in ordinary political societies, it appears to be an\\nunacceptably utopian principle. In particular, it seems to be an\\nunacceptable principle of political legitimacy because a principle of\\npolitical legitimacy is partly framed for the purpose of according\\nmoral credentials to a society in the circumstances of political\\ndisagreement.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.1 Problems of Reasonableness and Consensus\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nOne classical account of political authority has modeled political\\nauthority and the attendant obligations on the obligations of family\\nand the authority of the parents. Plato gives this account of authority\\nand obligation among others in the Crito (Plato 1948). A recent attempt\\nto ground the legitimacy of political authority in this way is Ronald\\nDworkin's (Dworkin 1986). This view is meant to capture the idea that a\\npolitical society can have legitimate authority even if it is not a\\nvoluntary association and even if there is disagreement on many\\npolitical principles.\",\n \"\\n\\nIf we take the family as a model here, we can see that children\\nacquire obligations to obey their parents and to love and support their\\nparents and siblings without having voluntarily entered into the\\nrelationships. And there may be some relation of authority between\\nparents and children at least till the latter reach the age of\\nmaturity. Another model Dworkin invokes is that of friendship. He\\nargues that though friendship does have an important voluntary\\ncomponent, it is not the case that people voluntarily agree to the\\nterms of a friendship. They find themselves acquiring obligations of\\nfriendship as the friendship grows. Of course there is little in the\\nway of authority in friendship and even in the family there is little\\nauthority once the children reach maturity.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe analogy between obligations of family, friendship and political\\nsociety is grounded in the idea that in all three of these, individuals\\nare obligated to abide by the rules or norms of the community. Dworkin\\nargues that legitimate political authority arises as a consequence of\\nthe acquisition on the part of members of a political society of\\nobligations to obey the rules of a genuine associative community. This\\ngives the putative authority justification for coercing the members\\ninto obedience of the rules, which is the key element of authority on\\nDworkin's account.\",\n \"\\n\\nDworkin attempts to discern the basis of obligation in friendships\\nand families by the process of interpretation of these social\\npractices. His thesis is that communities that satisfy four conditions\\nfor being genuine communities thereby generate obligations to go along\\nwith the terms of the association. The four conditions are: one, each\\nmember of the community sees herself as having special obligations to\\nthe other members; two, they see the obligations as owed to each of the\\nothers personally; three, these obligations are understood to flow from\\na concern for the well being of each of the members; and four, the\\nobligations are understood as flowing from a plausible version of equal\\nconcern for all the members. Any community that satisfies these four\\nconditions is a genuine community and thereby generates obligations in\\neach of the members to comply with the terms of the association.\",\n \"\\n\\nDworkin thinks that families and friendships satisfy these\\nconstraints in many cases and that only when they satisfy them do they\\ngenerate obligations. He also thinks that a certain kind of political\\nsociety can satisfy these conditions, which he calls a community of\\nprinciple, i.e., a community wherein each member sees himself or\\nherself as bound by common principles to all the others.\",\n \"\\n\\nOne might worry that a political society cannot be expected to\\ngenerate the kinds of emotional bonds people have towards one another\\nin families or friendships (Simmons 2001). And one might think that in\\nthe absence of such bonds, the four conditions will not be satisfied.\\nDworkin denies this. He agrees that political societies do not generate\\nthese kinds of emotional bonds, but he asserts that emotional bonds are\\nnot necessary either causally or conceptually to the satisfaction of\\nthe four conditions.\",\n \"\\n\\nDworkin argues that the attribution of the four conditions to a\\nrelationship occurs through an interpretation of that relationship so\\nit need not be the case that each person is aware of satisfying any of\\nthe four conditions when they do. Consider a person who appeals to his\\nfellow citizens on the basis of a principle of freedom of speech on the\\ngrounds that it is part of their constitution. This person is committed\\nto legal principles that he shares with other citizens. He will be\\ncommitted to the principles underlying the other elements of the\\nconstitution and the legal history of his country. He will be committed\\nto a principle of equality to the extent that it is part of the\\nconstitution. We can interpret this person's behavior and the similar\\nbehavior of others as committed to special obligations to their fellow\\ncountrymen to the extent that it is the shared constitution they are\\nappealing to. We can interpret this person as expressing a kind of\\nequal concern for his fellow countrymen to the extent that he is\\nappealing to legal principles that protect all. And we can interpret\\nhim in this way even if he himself would not have asserted it. And to\\nthe extent that people conform to this kind of practice more generally,\\nwe can interpret their behavior generally as satisfying the four\\nconditions of associative obligation.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe community of principle satisfies the four conditions. Dworkin\\nattempts to show how a political community can generate special\\nobligations of citizens to each other. A community of principle is\\nregulated by principles that have been elaborated in a distinctive way\\nin the particular community. Citizens see themselves as obligated to\\nabide by those principles only in relation to the others who have\\nparticipated in elaborating them. The principles do require that\\neveryone be included and that everyone's well being counts and counts\\nequally.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe idea of a community of principle is meant to accommodate\\nsignificant disagreement in the society in two ways. First, people may\\nnot think that the principles in the society are the best ones. They\\nmay simply be the best interpretation of their shared legal culture and\\nhistory. So people may try to advance their own conceptions of the best\\nprinciples. Second, people will disagree about the best interpretations\\nof the shared legal culture and thus may think that the society is\\ngrounded in different principles.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"6. Political Authority as Grounded in Associative Obligations\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nBut surely, the satisfaction of some of the conditions must depend\\non exactly what principles are in the community. Principles that are\\nfocused on liberty and that avoid any reference to well being, such as\\nKant would require of political principles, presumably would not\\nsatisfy the last two conditions. Principles that are not egalitarian,\\nsuch as those that governed the United States during the first century\\nof its existence and probably longer, would not satisfy the last\\ncondition. So it is not clear that being a community of principle is a\\nsufficient condition for satisfying the four conditions.\",\n \"\\n\\nIt is also not obvious that it is necessary that a community be a\\ncommunity of principle in order for it to satisfy the four conditions\\nin Dworkin's sense. For one can imagine a community in which\\nindividuals are committed to democratic resolution of the disagreements\\non justice that arise and thereby are committed to the equal importance\\nof the well being of each member. They attempt to advance opposing\\nprinciples of justice and conceptions of the common good and make\\ncompromises when they cannot secure sufficient majorities for these.\\nIndeed, this seems much closer to the character of modern democracies\\nthan Dworkin's view. Such a society would satisfy the four conditions\\nbut it is not clear that it is a community of principle.\",\n \"\\n\\nDworkin's idea that modern political societies can be seen as\\ncommunities of principle is grounded in his emphasis on judicial\\ninstitutions as the core institutions of modern political societies and\\nhis account of legal interpretation. His view is that judges interpret\\nthe law by creating a coherent account of as much of the black letter\\nlaw as possible and by interpreting that black letter law in terms of\\nprinciples that make the law be the best that it can be. Hence, judges\\naim at producing a coherent account of the law overall by grounding it\\nin the best basic moral principles that it can be grounded in. From\\nthis he thinks of modern societies as being concerned to elaborate\\ncommon principles by which the society can be guided.\",\n \"\\n\\nBut his emphasis on judicial decision making seems excessive. In the\\ndemocratic legislative process, citizens often do not see themselves as\\nbeing guided by common principles. They see themselves as disagreeing\\nwith each other about what principles the society ought to be guided\\nby. They also often see themselves as disagreeing with and trying to\\nchange the principles they see embodied in the law. They may look at\\nthe legislation in their community as negotiated compromises between\\ndifferent principles and not as deriving from a common set of\\nprinciples. And yet they do see themselves as members of a common\\ndemocratic community. This aspect of democratic rivalry does not seem\\nto be very well accommodated by Dworkin's view of modern societies as\\ncommunities of principle.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.1 Do Communities of Principle Satisfy the Four Conditions of Genuine Association?\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThe basic idea behind the democratic conception of legitimate\\nauthority is that when there are disagreements among persons about how\\nto structure their shared world together and it is important to\\nstructure that world together, the way to choose the shared aspects of\\nsociety is by means of a decision making process that is fair to the\\ninterests and opinions of each of the members. When there is\\ndisagreement about how to organize the shared system of law, property,\\npublic education and the provision of public goods, no one can have his\\nway entirely in this context without someone else not getting her way.\\nEach person thinks that the ideas about justice and the common good\\nwith which the others wish to organize their shared world are mistaken\\nin some way. Yet there is a need for collective action. The only way to\\ndo this that is reasonably fair to all the members is to make the\\ndecision democratically.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe thought is that when an outcome is democratically chosen and\\nsome people disagree with the outcome, as some inevitably will, they\\nstill have a duty to go along with the decision because otherwise they\\nwould be treating the others unfairly. If they refuse to go along and\\ndisrupt the democratically chosen arrangements, they are assuming for\\nthemselves a right to determine how things should go that overrides the\\nequal rights of all the others. They are, in Peter Singer's words,\\nassuming the positions of dictators in relation to the others. For if\\nthey turned out to be in the majority, they would demand the compliance\\nof the others.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe idea of fairness that underpins the democratic process is\\ngrounded in different ways in different theories. The basic idea of\\nequality is shared by most democratic theorists. Some argue that there\\nis a fundamental duty of equal respect for the opinions of others that\\ngrounds democratic decision making in the context of pervasive\\ndisagreement (Singer 1974; Waldron 1999). Others wish to ground this\\nduty of respect for the opinions of others in a deeper principle of\\nequal concern for the interests of each member of society (Christiano\\n1996).\",\n \"\\n\\nOn this kind of view the democratic assembly has a right to rule and\\nto the obedience of its members. This right of the democratic assembly\\nis grounded in the right of each member of the assembly to be accorded\\nequal respect. The duty of equal respect requires that the collective\\ndecision process gives each a vote in a broadly majoritarian process\\nand a robustly equal opportunity to participate in the deliberations\\nand negotiations leading to decisions. The equal rights of each of the\\nmembers are in effect pooled in the democratic assembly so that because\\none owes each person equal respect, and the democratic way of making\\ndecisions embodies this equal respect, one owes the democratic assembly\\nrespect.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe democratic assembly can be understood as the assembly of all\\nadult citizens or better as the assembly of all the democratically\\nchosen representatives of citizens. A conception of a democratic\\nassembly requires, on this view, an account of the appropriate form of\\ndemocratic representation (Christiano 1996). In addition, the\\ndemocratic assembly is only one part of the complete system of\\ngovernment. It is concerned with legislation only. In addition to this\\na government requires executive and judicial functions whose legitimacy\\nmay depend in part on other factors better grasped by the\\ninstrumentalist view.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe duties that are owed the democratic assembly are content\\nindependent and preemptive duties. They are content independent duties\\nbecause each member has the duty, with a class of exceptions we will\\nreview in a moment, just because the assembly has made a decision. The\\nduties are preemptive because the citizen must put aside the\\nconsiderations she initially planned on acting on in order to treat the\\nrest of her fellow citizens with proper respect. The idea of equal\\nrespect requires, on this account, deference to the decision of the\\nmajority and not acting on one's own judgment when the majority\\ndisagrees. So the decision of the majority gives a reason to obey that\\npreempts or replaces the considerations one might act on were there no\\nmajority decision.\",\n \"\\n\\nIt is important to note that this conception of authority is what was\\ndescribed as a special conception above. The fact that democratic\\nassemblies have authority does not imply that all other forms of\\nregime never have authority. One might go along with a regime on the\\nbasis of the instrumentalist conception of authority or even the\\nconsent approach even if it is not democratic. It is clear\\nnevertheless that democratic assemblies have a special kind of\\nauthority.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"7. A Democratic Conception of Legitimate Political Authority\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nDemocratic decision making on this account can be evaluated from two\\nvery different angles. On the one hand, one can evaluate a democratic\\ndecision in terms of the justice or efficiency of the outcome of the\\ndecision. One can ask whether the legislation is just or for the common\\ngood. This is the standpoint of the citizen who argues in favor of\\nlegislation and against others and tries to put together a coalition of\\nlike minded people to advance the legislation. On the other hand,\\ndemocratic decision making can be evaluated in terms of the way in\\nwhich the decision was made. Did the process of decision making treat\\nall of its members fairly or with equal respect? Are the institutions\\nof legislative representation and of campaign finance, among others,\\nfair?\",\n \"\\n\\nBut why should the equality embodied in the democratic assembly trump\\nother considerations of justice? The democratic conception of\\nauthority requires each person to submit issues to a democratic vote.\\nSo if they advocate some policy on the grounds that it conforms with\\nwhat they take to be the correct principle of justice J, and\\nthe majority chooses a different policy on the grounds of an\\nincompatible principle L, the democratic theory says that\\nthey ought to accept the policy that is grounded in L because\\nonly in this way do they accord the proper equal respect to their\\nfellow citizens.\",\n \"\\n\\nBut someone might ask, why should the principle of equal respect take\\nprecedence over the principle J? They are both principles of\\njustice so we need some reason for favoring the equal respect\\nprinciple in general over the others.\",\n \"\\n\\nOne answer to this is to say that social justice demands that\\nprinciples of justice be public in the sense that they involve\\nprinciples that can be shown to be implemented to everyone who is\\nreasonably conscientious and aware of some basic facts of political\\nlife (such as disagreement, fallibility and cognitive bias). This is a\\nversion of the basic maxim of justice that justice must not only be\\ndone, it must be seen to be done. The thought then is that to the\\nextent that there is significant disagreement about the substantive\\nprinciples of justice in play when policy is being decided, a just\\nsociety requires some way in which publicly to embody the equal\\ntreatment of all the individuals in society. The controversial\\nprinciples guiding the formulation of policy do not generally satisfy\\nthis constraint of publicity. Indeed, given the controversies over\\njustice, individuals will think that the policies do not accord with\\ntheir favored conception of equality. The democratic process does seem\\npublicly to embody the equal standing of all citizens and the equal\\nworth of their interests against the background of disagreement and\\nfallibility and all the facts that attend these phenomena. So the\\ndemocratic process seems uniquely capable of publicly embodying the\\nprinciple of the equal importance of each person and the equal\\nimportance of the advancement of their interests (Christiano 2004).\",\n \"\\n\\nCritics of this view might still take issue with the thesis that\\nsocial justice requires that principles be public and that this gives\\npriority to the principles that underpin democracy over those that\\nunderpin substantive policy proposals. The question must be, why is\\npublicity, in the sense sketched above, so important?\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"7.1 How Can Democracy Make Unjust Laws Legitimate?\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nThe question that arises for a democratic theory of authority is,\\nwhen do the considerations of the justice or injustice of the outcome\\noverride the considerations connected with the fairness of the process\\nof decision making?\",\n \"\\n\\nThe claim that a democratic assembly has a right to rule is not\\nincompatible with the idea that there are limits to that right. Indeed,\\ntheorists have argued that the very same principle that grounds\\ndemocratic authority also ground limits to that authority (Christiano\\n2004.) The principle of public equality on which the argument for\\ndemocracy is founded also grounds a set of liberal rights (freedom of\\nconscience, association, speech and private pursuits). The reason for\\nthis is that democratic assembly that fundamentally denied these\\nliberal rights to individuals would publicly violate the duty of equal\\nrespect to those individuals. Those who violate the basic liberal\\nrights of others are publicly treating them as inferiors. To the extent\\nthat the democratic assembly's claim of authority is grounded in the\\npublic realization of the principle of equal respect, the authority\\nwould run out when the democratic assembly makes law that undermines\\nequal respect. This establishes, at least for one conception of\\ndemocratic authority, a substantive set of limits to that\\nauthority.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"7.2 Limits to Democratic Authority\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nInternational Institutions have acquired political authority over the\\nlast half century or so. They are quite diverse in character. For\\nsome, their authority has a somewhat different form than the authority\\nassociated with the organs of the state. And the grounds of the\\nauthority of international institutions may be distinct as\\nwell. Overall, these are complex institutions with a number of parts\\nand so different principles may apply to the different parts. For\\nexample, with regard to the World Trade Organization, some principle\\nof state consent may be the ultimate basis of the legitimacy of its\\nlaw making function, while a very different kind of standard would be\\nrelevant to judging the legitimacy of the dispute settlement\\nmechanism.\",\n \"\\n\\nBecause global institutions operate in the context of a lack of\\noverarching and centralized political power, the form and grounds of\\nauthority are likely often to be distinct. As I noted above, some of\\nthe most powerful global institutions have powers to create\\npermissions rather than duties as in Security Council of the United\\nNations authorizations of the use of force. Another example is when\\nthe World Trade Organization's dispute settlement mechanism rules that\\na state may restrict trade with another state in what would normally\\nbe a violation of their agreements in order to retaliate against a\\nstate that has violated the trade agreements.\",\n \"\\n\\nAnother interesting feature of international institutions is that\\nstate consent appears to be a possible basis for the legitimacy of\\ninternational institutions. To be sure many would argue that\\ninternational institutions ought to be evaluated solely on an\\ninstrumental basis and others would argue that only democratic\\ninternational institutions can be legitimate. But state consent does\\nhave a fighting chance of playing a large role in underpinning these\\ninstitutions. The international system is highly decentralized and\\nstates are by far the most important instruments for making power\\naccountable to persons that we know of.\",\n \"\\n\\nTo be sure, the state consent doctrine raises many questions. For one\\nthing, we must ask whether the consent of states that do not represent\\ntheir peoples is a genuinely legitimating act. Second, we must ask\\nabout the fairness of the conditions under which consent is given. If\\nthe conditions are unfair and more powerful states take advantage of\\nthe vulnerabilities of the weaker state, what impact does this have on\\nthe legitimacy of the state? Third, what normative weight, if any,\\nattaches to a state's refusal of consent when it's cooperation is\\nnecessary to the achievement of morally mandatory aims such as the\\nprevention or mitigation of global warming?\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"8. Legitimate Political Authority in International Institutions\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Applebaum, Arthur Isak, 2010, “Legitimacy without the Duty\nto Obey,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 38:\n215–239.","Austin, John, 1832, The Province of Jurisprudence\nDetermined, H. L. A. Hart (ed.), London: Weidenfeld &\nNickolson, 1955.","Beran, Harry, 1987, The Consent Theory of Political\nObligation, London: Croon Helm.","Brilmayer, Lea, 1989, Justifying International Acts,\nIthaca, NY: Cornell University Press.","Buchanan, Allen, 2004, Justice, Legitimacy and\nSelf-Determination, Oxford: Oxford University Press.","Buchanan, Allen and Robert O. Keohane, 2006, “The Legitimacy\nof Global Governance Institutions,”\nEthics and International Affairs, 20 (4): 405–437.","Christiano, Thomas, 2004, “The Authority of Democracy,”\nJournal of Political Philosophy, 12(3): 245–270.","Christiano, Thomas, 2011, “Democratic Legitimacy and\nInternational Institutions,” in The Philosophy of\nInternational Law, Samantha Besson and John Tasiolas (eds.), Oxford:\nOxford University Press.","Christiano, Thomas, 1996, The Rule of the Many, Boulder,\nCO: Westview Press.","Dworkin, Ronald, 1986, Law's Empire, Cambridge, MA:\nHarvard University Press.","Estlund, David, 2007, Democratic Authority,\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Edmundson, William, 1998, Three Anarchical Fallacies,\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Green, Leslie, 1989, The Authority of the State, Oxford:\nOxford University Press.","Hart, H.L.A., 1961, The Concept of Law, Oxford: Clarendon\nPress.","Hobbes, Thomas, 1668, Leviathan, Edwin Curley (ed.),\nIndianapolis: Hackett Publishers, 1992.","Hume, David, 1748, “Of the Original Contract,” in\nHume's Ethical Writings, Alasdair MacIntyre (ed.), London:\nUniversity of Notre Dame Press, 1965.","Hurd, Heidi, 2001, Moral Combat, Cambridge: Cambridge\nUniversity Press.","Ladenson, Robert, 1980, “In Defense of a Hobbesian Conception\nof Law,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 9: 134–159.","Locke, John, 1690, Second Treatise on Civil Government,\n C. B MacPherson (ed.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1990.","Morris, Christopher, 1998, An Essay on the Modern State,\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Plato, Euthyphro, Apology and Crito,\nF. J. Church (trans.), New York: Macmillan, 1948.","Rawls, John, 1996, Political Liberalism, New York:\nColumbia University Press.","Raz, Joseph, 1986, The Morality of Freedom, Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press.","Raz, Joseph (ed.), 1990, Authority, New York: New York\nUniversity Press.","Shapiro, Scott, 2002, “Authority,” in The Oxford\nHandbook of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law, Jules Coleman\nand Scott Shapiro (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.","Simmons, A. John, 2001, Justification and Legitimacy: Essays on\nRights and Obligations, Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress.","Singer, Peter, 1974, Democracy and Disobedience, Oxford:\nOxford University Press.","Waldron, Jeremy, 1999, Law and Disagreement, Oxford:\nOxford University Press.","Weber, Max, 1918, “Politics as a Vocation,” in\nFrom Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, H. H. Gerth and\nC. Wright Mills (eds.), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970.","Wellman, Christopher, 2001, “Toward a Liberal Theory of\nPolitical Obligation,” Ethics, 111 (4): 735–759.","Wolff, Robert Paul, 1970, In Defense of Anarchism, New\nYork: Harper & Row."],"string":"[\n \"Applebaum, Arthur Isak, 2010, “Legitimacy without the Duty\\nto Obey,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 38:\\n215–239.\",\n \"Austin, John, 1832, The Province of Jurisprudence\\nDetermined, H. L. A. Hart (ed.), London: Weidenfeld &\\nNickolson, 1955.\",\n \"Beran, Harry, 1987, The Consent Theory of Political\\nObligation, London: Croon Helm.\",\n \"Brilmayer, Lea, 1989, Justifying International Acts,\\nIthaca, NY: Cornell University Press.\",\n \"Buchanan, Allen, 2004, Justice, Legitimacy and\\nSelf-Determination, Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Buchanan, Allen and Robert O. Keohane, 2006, “The Legitimacy\\nof Global Governance Institutions,”\\nEthics and International Affairs, 20 (4): 405–437.\",\n \"Christiano, Thomas, 2004, “The Authority of Democracy,”\\nJournal of Political Philosophy, 12(3): 245–270.\",\n \"Christiano, Thomas, 2011, “Democratic Legitimacy and\\nInternational Institutions,” in The Philosophy of\\nInternational Law, Samantha Besson and John Tasiolas (eds.), Oxford:\\nOxford University Press.\",\n \"Christiano, Thomas, 1996, The Rule of the Many, Boulder,\\nCO: Westview Press.\",\n \"Dworkin, Ronald, 1986, Law's Empire, Cambridge, MA:\\nHarvard University Press.\",\n \"Estlund, David, 2007, Democratic Authority,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Edmundson, William, 1998, Three Anarchical Fallacies,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Green, Leslie, 1989, The Authority of the State, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press.\",\n \"Hart, H.L.A., 1961, The Concept of Law, Oxford: Clarendon\\nPress.\",\n \"Hobbes, Thomas, 1668, Leviathan, Edwin Curley (ed.),\\nIndianapolis: Hackett Publishers, 1992.\",\n \"Hume, David, 1748, “Of the Original Contract,” in\\nHume's Ethical Writings, Alasdair MacIntyre (ed.), London:\\nUniversity of Notre Dame Press, 1965.\",\n \"Hurd, Heidi, 2001, Moral Combat, Cambridge: Cambridge\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Ladenson, Robert, 1980, “In Defense of a Hobbesian Conception\\nof Law,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 9: 134–159.\",\n \"Locke, John, 1690, Second Treatise on Civil Government,\\n C. B MacPherson (ed.), Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1990.\",\n \"Morris, Christopher, 1998, An Essay on the Modern State,\\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Plato, Euthyphro, Apology and Crito,\\nF. J. Church (trans.), New York: Macmillan, 1948.\",\n \"Rawls, John, 1996, Political Liberalism, New York:\\nColumbia University Press.\",\n \"Raz, Joseph, 1986, The Morality of Freedom, Oxford: Oxford\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Raz, Joseph (ed.), 1990, Authority, New York: New York\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Shapiro, Scott, 2002, “Authority,” in The Oxford\\nHandbook of Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law, Jules Coleman\\nand Scott Shapiro (eds.), Oxford: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Simmons, A. John, 2001, Justification and Legitimacy: Essays on\\nRights and Obligations, Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress.\",\n \"Singer, Peter, 1974, Democracy and Disobedience, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press.\",\n \"Waldron, Jeremy, 1999, Law and Disagreement, Oxford:\\nOxford University Press.\",\n \"Weber, Max, 1918, “Politics as a Vocation,” in\\nFrom Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, H. H. Gerth and\\nC. Wright Mills (eds.), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970.\",\n \"Wellman, Christopher, 2001, “Toward a Liberal Theory of\\nPolitical Obligation,” Ethics, 111 (4): 735–759.\",\n \"Wolff, Robert Paul, 1970, In Defense of Anarchism, New\\nYork: Harper & Row.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../aquinas/","text":"Aquinas, Thomas"},{"href":"../autonomy-moral/","text":"autonomy: in moral and political philosophy"},{"href":"../bentham/","text":"Bentham, Jeremy"},{"href":"../citizenship/","text":"citizenship"},{"href":"../communitarianism/","text":"communitarianism"},{"href":"../constitutionalism/","text":"constitutionalism"},{"href":"../contractarianism/","text":"contractarianism"},{"href":"../democracy/","text":"democracy"},{"href":"../egalitarianism/","text":"egalitarianism"},{"href":"../equality/","text":"equality"},{"href":"../free-rider/","text":"free rider problem"},{"href":"../habermas/","text":"Habermas, Jürgen"},{"href":"../hobbes-moral/","text":"Hobbes, Thomas: moral and political philosophy"},{"href":"../hume/","text":"Hume, David"},{"href":"../kant-social-political/","text":"Kant, Immanuel: social and political philosophy"},{"href":"../legal-obligation/","text":"legal obligation and authority"},{"href":"../liberalism/","text":"liberalism"},{"href":"../locke-political/","text":"Locke, John: political philosophy"},{"href":"../plato-ethics-politics/","text":"Plato: ethics and politics in The Republic"},{"href":"../political-obligation/","text":"political obligation"},{"href":"../rawls/","text":"Rawls, John"},{"href":"../sovereignty/","text":"sovereignty"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../aquinas/\",\n \"text\": \"Aquinas, Thomas\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../autonomy-moral/\",\n \"text\": \"autonomy: in moral and political philosophy\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../bentham/\",\n \"text\": \"Bentham, Jeremy\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../citizenship/\",\n \"text\": \"citizenship\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../communitarianism/\",\n \"text\": \"communitarianism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../constitutionalism/\",\n \"text\": \"constitutionalism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../contractarianism/\",\n \"text\": \"contractarianism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../democracy/\",\n \"text\": \"democracy\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../egalitarianism/\",\n \"text\": \"egalitarianism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../equality/\",\n \"text\": \"equality\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../free-rider/\",\n \"text\": \"free rider problem\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../habermas/\",\n \"text\": \"Habermas, Jürgen\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../hobbes-moral/\",\n \"text\": \"Hobbes, Thomas: moral and political philosophy\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../hume/\",\n \"text\": \"Hume, David\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../kant-social-political/\",\n \"text\": \"Kant, Immanuel: social and political philosophy\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../legal-obligation/\",\n \"text\": \"legal obligation and authority\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../liberalism/\",\n \"text\": \"liberalism\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../locke-political/\",\n \"text\": \"Locke, John: political philosophy\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../plato-ethics-politics/\",\n \"text\": \"Plato: ethics and politics in The Republic\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../political-obligation/\",\n \"text\": \"political obligation\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../rawls/\",\n \"text\": \"Rawls, John\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../sovereignty/\",\n \"text\": \"sovereignty\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":97,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"reasoning-automated"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Automated Reasoning"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Wed Jul 18, 2001; substantive revision Sat Mar 2, 2019"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nReasoning is the ability to make inferences, and automated reasoning\nis concerned with the building of computing systems that automate this\nprocess. Although the overall goal is to mechanize different forms of\nreasoning, the term has largely been identified with valid deductive\nreasoning as practiced in mathematics and formal logic. In this\nrespect, automated reasoning is akin to mechanical theorem proving.\nBuilding an automated reasoning program means providing an algorithmic\ndescription to a formal calculus so that it can be implemented on a\ncomputer to prove theorems of the calculus in an efficient manner.\nImportant aspects of this exercise involve defining the class of\nproblems the program will be required to solve, deciding what language\nwill be used by the program to represent the information given to it\nas well as new information inferred by the program, specifying the\nmechanism that the program will use to conduct deductive inferences,\nand figuring out how to perform all these computations efficiently.\nWhile basic research work continues in order to provide the necessary\ntheoretical framework, the field has reached a point where automated\nreasoning programs are being used by researchers to attack open\nquestions in mathematics and logic, provide important applications in\ncomputing science, solve problems in engineering, and find novel\napproaches to questions in exact philosophy. "],"string":"[\n \"\\nReasoning is the ability to make inferences, and automated reasoning\\nis concerned with the building of computing systems that automate this\\nprocess. Although the overall goal is to mechanize different forms of\\nreasoning, the term has largely been identified with valid deductive\\nreasoning as practiced in mathematics and formal logic. In this\\nrespect, automated reasoning is akin to mechanical theorem proving.\\nBuilding an automated reasoning program means providing an algorithmic\\ndescription to a formal calculus so that it can be implemented on a\\ncomputer to prove theorems of the calculus in an efficient manner.\\nImportant aspects of this exercise involve defining the class of\\nproblems the program will be required to solve, deciding what language\\nwill be used by the program to represent the information given to it\\nas well as new information inferred by the program, specifying the\\nmechanism that the program will use to conduct deductive inferences,\\nand figuring out how to perform all these computations efficiently.\\nWhile basic research work continues in order to provide the necessary\\ntheoretical framework, the field has reached a point where automated\\nreasoning programs are being used by researchers to attack open\\nquestions in mathematics and logic, provide important applications in\\ncomputing science, solve problems in engineering, and find novel\\napproaches to questions in exact philosophy. \"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Introduction","sub_toc":["1.1 Problem Domain","1.2 Language Representation"]},{"content_title":"2. Deduction Calculi","sub_toc":["2.1 Resolution","2.2 Sequent Deduction","2.3 Natural Deduction","2.4 The Matrix Connection Method","2.5 Term Rewriting","2.6 Mathematical Induction"]},{"content_title":"3. Other Logics","sub_toc":["3.1 Higher-Order Logic","3.2 Non-classical Logics"]},{"content_title":"4. Applications","sub_toc":["4.1 Logic Programming","4.2 SAT Solvers","4.3 Deductive Computer Algebra","4.4 Formal Verification of Hardware","4.5 Formal Verification of Software","4.6 Logic and Philosophy","4.7 Mathematics","4.8 Artificial Intelligence"]},{"content_title":"5. Conclusion","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Introduction\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"1.1 Problem Domain\",\n \"1.2 Language Representation\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Deduction Calculi\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"2.1 Resolution\",\n \"2.2 Sequent Deduction\",\n \"2.3 Natural Deduction\",\n \"2.4 The Matrix Connection Method\",\n \"2.5 Term Rewriting\",\n \"2.6 Mathematical Induction\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Other Logics\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"3.1 Higher-Order Logic\",\n \"3.2 Non-classical Logics\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Applications\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"4.1 Logic Programming\",\n \"4.2 SAT Solvers\",\n \"4.3 Deductive Computer Algebra\",\n \"4.4 Formal Verification of Hardware\",\n \"4.5 Formal Verification of Software\",\n \"4.6 Logic and Philosophy\",\n \"4.7 Mathematics\",\n \"4.8 Artificial Intelligence\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Conclusion\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\nA problem being presented to an automated reasoning program consists\nof two main items, namely a statement expressing the particular\nquestion being asked called the problem’s conclusion,\nand a collection of statements expressing all the relevant information\navailable to the program—the problem’s\nassumptions. Solving a problem means proving the conclusion\nfrom the given assumptions by the systematic application of rules of\ndeduction embedded within the reasoning program. The problem solving\nprocess ends when one such proof is found, when the program is able to\ndetect the non-existence of a proof, or when it simply runs out of\nresources."],"section_title":"1. Introduction","subsections":[{"content":["\nA first important consideration in the design of an automated\nreasoning program is to delineate the class of problems that the\nprogram will be required to solve—the problem\ndomain. The domain can be very large, as would be the case\nfor a general-purpose theorem prover for first-order logic, or be more\nrestricted in scope as in a special-purpose theorem prover for\nTarski’s geometry, or the modal logic K. A typical approach in the\ndesign of an automated reasoning program is to provide it first with\nsufficient logical power (e.g., first-order logic) and then further\ndemarcate its scope to the particular domain of interest defined by a\nset of domain axioms. To illustrate, EQP, a\ntheorem-proving program for equational logic, was used to solve an\nopen question in Robbins algebra (McCune 1997): Are all Robbins\nalgebras Boolean? For this, the program was provided with the\naxioms defining a Robbins algebra:","\n\n\n\n (A1)\n x + y = y + x\n (commutativity) \n\n (A2)\n (x + y) + z = x +\n(y + z)\n (associativity) \n\n (A3)\n −(−(x + y) + −(x +\n−y)) = x\n (Robbins equation) \n\n","\nThe program was then used to show that a characterization of Boolean\nalgebra that uses Huntington’s equation,","\n−(−x + y) + −(−x +\n−y) = x,\n","\nfollows from the axioms. We should remark that this problem is\nnon-trivial since deciding whether a finite set of equations provides\na basis for Boolean algebra is undecidable, that is, it does not\npermit an algorithmic representation; also, the problem was attacked\nby Robbins, Huntington, Tarski and many of his students with no\nsuccess. The key step was to establish that all Robbins algebras\nsatisfy ","\n∃x∃y(x + y =\nx),\n","\nsince it was known that this formula is a sufficient condition for a\nRobbins algebra to be Boolean. When EQP was supplied with this piece\nof information, the program provided invaluable assistance by\ncompleting the proof automatically. ","\nA special-purpose theorem prover does not draw its main benefit by\nrestricting its attention to the domain axioms but from the fact that\nthe domain may enjoy particular theorem-proving techniques which can\nbe hardwired—coded—within the reasoning program itself and\nwhich may result in a more efficient logic implementation. Much of\nEQP’s success at settling the Robbins question can be attributed to\nits built-in associative-commutative inference mechanisms."],"subsection_title":"1.1 Problem Domain"},{"content":["\nA second important consideration in the building of an automated\nreasoning program is to decide (1) how problems in its domain will be\npresented to the reasoning program; (2) how they will actually be\nrepresented internally within the program; and, (3) how the solutions\nfound—completed proofs—will be displayed back to the user.\nThere are several formalisms available for this, and the choice is\ndependent on the problem domain and the underlying deduction calculus\nused by the reasoning program. The most commonly used formalisms\ninclude standard first-order logic, typed λ-calculus, and\nclausal logic. We take up clausal logic here and assume that the\nreader is familiar with the rudiments of first-order logic; for the\ntyped λ-calculus the reader may want to check Church 1940.\nClausal logic is a quantifier-free variation of first-order logic and\nhas been the most widely used notation within the automated reasoning\ncommunity. Some definitions are in order: A term is a\nconstant, a variable, or a function whose arguments are themselves\nterms. For example, a, x, f(x),\nand h(c,f(z),y) are all\nterms. A literal is either an atomic formula, e.g.\nF(x), or the negation of an atomic formula, e.g.\n~R(x,f(a)). Two literals are\ncomplementary if one is the negation of the other. A\nclause is a (possibly empty) finite disjunction of\nliterals l1∨ … ∨\nln where no literal appears more than once in the\nclause (that is, clauses can be alternatively treated as sets of\nliterals). Ground terms, ground literals, and ground\nclauses have no variables. The empty clause,\n[ ], is the clause having no literals and, hence, is\nunsatisfiable—false under any interpretation. Some examples:\n~R(a,b), and F(a) ∨\n~R(f(x),b) ∨\nF(z) are both examples of clauses but only the\nformer is ground. The general idea is to be able to express a\nproblem’s formulation as a set of clauses or, equivalently, as a\nformula in conjunctive normal form (CNF), that is, as\na conjunction of clauses.","\nFor formulas already expressed in standard logic notation, there is a\nsystematic two-step procedure for transforming them into conjunctive\nnormal form. The first step consists in re-expressing a formula into a\nsemantically equivalent formula in prenex normal\nform,\n(Θx1)…(Θxn)α(x1,…,xn), consisting of a\nstring of quantifiers\n(Θx1)…(Θxn)\nfollowed by a quantifier-free expression\nα(x1,…,xn) called\nthe matrix. The second step in the transformation\nfirst converts the matrix into conjunctive normal form by using\nwell-known logical equivalences such as DeMorgan’s laws, distribution,\ndouble-negation, and others; then, the quantifiers in front of the\nmatrix, which is now in conjunctive normal form, are dropped according\nto certain rules. In the presence of existential quantifiers, this\nlatter step does not always preserve equivalence and requires the\nintroduction of Skolem functions whose role is to\n“simulate” the behaviour of existentially quantified\nvariables. For example, applying the skolemizing process to the\nformula","\n∀x∃y∀z∃u∀v[R(x,y,v)\n∨ ~K(x,z,u,v)]\n","\nrequires the introduction of a one-place and two-place Skolem\nfunctions, f and g respectively, resulting in the\nformula","\n∀x∀z∀v[R(x,f(x),v)\n∨\n~K(x,z,g(x,z),v)]\n","\nThe universal quantifiers can then be removed to obtain the final\nclause, R(x,f(x),v) ∨\n~K(x,z,g(x,z),v)\nin our example. The Skolemizing process may not preserve equivalence\nbut maintains satisfiability, which is enough for clause-based\nautomated reasoning.","\nAlthough clausal form provides a more uniform and economical\nnotation—there are no quantifiers and all formulas are\ndisjunctions—it has certain disadvantages. One drawback is the\nincrease in the size of the resulting formula when transformed from\nstandard logic notation into clausal form. The increase in size is\naccompanied by an increase in cognitive complexity that makes it\nharder for humans to read proofs written with clauses. Another\ndisadvantage is that the syntactic structure of a formula in standard\nlogic notation can be used to guide the construction of a proof but\nthis information is completely lost in the transformation into clausal\nform."],"subsection_title":"1.2 Language Representation"}]},{"main_content":["\nA third important consideration in the building of an automated\nreasoning program is the selection of the actual deduction calculus\nthat will be used by the program to perform its inferences. As\nindicated before, the choice is highly dependent on the nature of the\nproblem domain and there is a fair range of options available:\nGeneral-purpose theorem proving and problem solving (first-order\nlogic, simple type theory), program verification (first-order logic),\ndistributed and concurrent systems (modal and temporal logics),\nprogram specification (intuitionistic logic), hardware verification\n(higher-order logic), logic programming (Horn logic), constraint\nsatisfaction (propositional clausal logic), computational metaphysics\n(higher-order modal logic), and others.","\nA deduction calculus consists of a set of logical axioms and a\ncollection of deduction rules for deriving new formulas from\npreviously derived formulas. Solving a problem in the program’s\nproblem domain then really means establishing a particular formula\nα—the problem’s conclusion—from the extended set\nΓ consisting of the logical axioms, the domain axioms, and the\nproblem assumptions. That is, the program needs to determine if\nΓ entails α, Γ⊨ α. How the program\ngoes about establishing this semantic fact depends, of course, on the\ncalculus it implements. Some programs may take a very\ndirect route and attempt to establish that\nΓ ⊨ α by actually constructing a\nstep-by-step proof of α from Γ. If successful, this shows\nof course that Γ derives—proves—α, a fact we\ndenote by writing Γ ⊢ α. Other reasoning\nprograms may instead opt for a more indirect approach\nand try to establish that Γ ⊨ α by showing\nthat Γ ∪ {~α} is inconsistent which, in turn, is shown\nby deriving a contradiction, ⊥, from the set Γ ∪\n{~α}. Automated systems that implement the former approach\ninclude natural deduction systems; the latter approach is used by\nsystems based on resolution, sequent deduction, and matrix connection\nmethods.","\nSoundness and completeness are two (metatheoretical) properties of a\ncalculus that are particularly important for automated deduction.\nSoundness states that the rules of the calculus are\ntruth-preserving. For a direct calculus this means that if\nΓ ⊢ α then\nΓ ⊨ α. For indirect calculi, soundness\nmeans that if Γ∪{~α} ⊢ ⊥ then\nΓ ⊨ α. Completeness in a\ndirect calculus states that if Γ ⊨ α then\nΓ ⊢ α. For indirect calculi, the\ncompleteness property is expressed in terms of\nrefutations since one establishes that\nΓ ⊨ α by showing the existence of a proof,\nnot of α from Γ, but of ⊥ from\nΓ∪{~α}. Thus, an indirect calculus is\nrefutation complete if Γ ⊨ α\nimplies Γ∪{~α} ⊢ ⊥. Of the two\nproperties, soundness is the most desirable. An incomplete calculus\nindicates that there are entailment relations that cannot be\nestablished within the calculus. For an automated reasoning program\nthis means, informally, that there are true statements that the\nprogram cannot prove. Incompleteness may be an unfortunate affair but\nlack of soundness is a truly problematic situation since an unsound\nreasoning program would be able to generate false conclusions from\nperfectly true information.","\nIt is important to appreciate the difference between a logical\ncalculus and its corresponding implementation in a reasoning program.\nThe implementation of a calculus invariably involves making some\nmodifications to the calculus and this results, strictly speaking, in\na new calculus. The most important modification to the original\ncalculus is the “mechanization” of its deduction rules,\nthat is, the specification of the systematic way in which the rules\nare to be applied. In the process of doing so, one must exercise care\nto preserve the metatheoretical properties of the original\ncalculus.","\nTwo other metatheoretical properties of importance to automated\ndeduction are decidability and complexity. A calculus is\ndecidable if it admits an algorithmic representation,\nthat is, if there is an algorithm that, for any given Γ and\nα, it can determine in a finite amount of time the answer,\n“Yes” or “No”, to the question “Does\nΓ ⊨ α?” A calculus may be\nundecidable in which case one needs to determine which decidable\nfragment to implement. The time-space complexity of a\ncalculus specifies how efficient its algorithmic representation is.\nAutomated reasoning is made the more challenging because many calculi\nof interest are not decidable and have poor complexity measures\nforcing researchers to seek tradeoffs between deductive power versus\nalgorithmic efficiency."],"section_title":"2. Deduction Calculi","subsections":[{"content":["\nOf the many calculi used in the implementation of reasoning programs,\nthe ones based on the resolution principle have been\nthe most popular. Resolution is modeled after the chain rule (of which\nModus Ponens is a special case) and essentially states that from\np ∨ q and ~q ∨ r one can\ninfer p ∨ r. More formally, let C\n− l denote the clause C with the literal\nl removed. Assume that C1 and\nC2 are ground clauses containing, respectively, a\npositive literal l1 and a negative literal\n~l2 such that l1 and\n~l2 are complementary. Then, the rule of\nground resolution states that, as a result of\nresolving C1 and\nC2, one can infer (C1 −\nl1) ∨ (C2 −\n~l2):","\n\n\n\n \nC1 C2\n\n (ground resolution) \n\n (C1 − l1) ∨\n(C2 − ~l2) \n\n","\nHerbrand’s theorem (Herbrand 1930) assures us that\nthe non-satisfiability of any set of clauses, ground or not,\ncan be established by using ground resolution. This is a very\nsignificant result for automated deduction since it tells us that if a\nset Γ is not satisfied by any of the infinitely many\ninterpretations, this fact can be determined in finitely many\nsteps. Unfortunately, a direct implementation of ground resolution\nusing Herbrand’s theorem requires the generation of a vast number of\nground terms making this approach hopelessly inefficient. This issue\nwas effectively addressed by generalizing the ground resolution rule\nto binary resolution and by introducing the notion of\nunification (Robinson 1965a). Unification allows resolution proofs to\nbe “lifted” and be conducted at a more general level;\nclauses only need to be instantiated at the moment where they are to\nbe resolved. Moreover, the clauses resulting from the instantiation\nprocess do not have to be ground instances and may still contain\nvariables. The introduction of binary resolution and unification is\nconsidered one of the most important developments in the field of\nautomated reasoning.","\nA unifier of two expressions—terms or\nclauses—is a substitution that when applied to the expressions\nmakes them equal. For example, the substitution σ given by","\nσ := {x ← b, y ←\nb, z ← f(a,b)}\n","\nis a unifier for ","\nR(x,f(a,y)) and\nR(b,z)\n","\nsince when applied to both expressions it makes them equal: ","\n\n\n\n R(x,f(a,y))σ\n\n \n =\n \n R(b,f(a,b))\n\n\n \n \n =\n \n R(b,z)σ \n\n","\nA most general unifier (mgu) produces the most\ngeneral instance shared by two unifiable expressions. In the previous\nexample, the substitution {x ← b, y\n← b, z ←\nf(a,b)} is a unifier but not an mgu;\nhowever, {x ← b, z ←\nf(a,y)} is an mgu. Note that unification\nattempts to “match” two expressions and this fundamental\nprocess has become a central component of most automated deduction\nprograms, resolution-based and otherwise.\nTheory-unification is an extension of the unification\nmechanism that includes built-in inference capabilities. For example,\nthe clauses R(g(a,b),x)\nand R(g(b,a),d) do not\nunify but they AC-unify, where AC-unification is unification with\nbuilt-in associative and commutative rules such as\ng(a,b) = g(b,a).\nShifting inference capabilities into the unification mechanism adds\npower but at a price: The existence of an mgu for two unifiable\nexpressions may not be unique (there could actually be infinitely\nmany), and the unification process becomes undecidable in general.\n","\nLet C1 and C2 be two clauses\ncontaining, respectively, a positive literal l1\nand a negative literal ~l2 such that\nl1 and l2 unify with mgu\nθ. Then, ","\n\n\n\n \nC1 C2\n\n (binary resolution) \n\n (C1θ −\nl1θ) ∨ (C2θ\n− ~l2θ) \n\n","\nby binary resolution; the clause (C1θ\n− l1θ) ∨\n(C2θ − ~l2θ)\nis called a binary resolvent of\nC1 and C2. ","\nIf two or more literals occurring in a clause C share an mgu\nθ then Cθ is a factor of\nC. For example, in R(x,a) ∨\n~K(f(x),b) ∨\nR(c,y) the literals\nR(x,a) and\nR(c,y) unify with mgu {x ←\nc, y ← a} and, hence,\nR(c,a) ∨\n~K(f(c),b) is a factor of the\noriginal clause. ","\nLet C1and C2 be two clauses.\nThen, a resolvent obtained by\nresolution from C1 and\nC2 is defined as: (a) a binary resolvent of\nC1 and C2; (b) a binary\nresolvent of C1 and a factor of\nC2; (c) a binary resolvent of a factor of\nC1 and C2; or, (d) a binary\nresolvent of a factor of C1 and a factor of\nC2. ","\nResolution proofs, more precisely refutations, are constructed by\nderiving the empty clause [ ] from Γ ∪ {~α} using\nresolution; this will always be possible if Γ ∪ {~α}\nis unsatisfiable since resolution is refutation complete (Robinson\n1965a). As an example of a resolution proof, we show that the set\n{∀x(P(x) ∨\nQ(x)), ∀x(P(x)\n⊃\nR(x)),∀x(Q(x)\n⊃ R(x))}, denoted by Γ, entails the\nformula ∃xR(x). The first step is to\nfind the clausal form of Γ ∪\n{~∃xR(x)}; the resulting clause set,\ndenoted by S0, is shown in steps 1 to 4 in the\nrefutation below. The refutation is constructed by using a\nlevel-saturation method: Compute all the resolvents of the initial\nset, S0, add them to the set and repeat the\nprocess until the empty clause is derived. (This produces the sequence\nof increasingly larger sets: S0,\nS1, S2,…) The only\nconstraint that we impose is that we do not resolve the same two\nclauses more than once.","\n\n\n\n S0\n 1\n P(x) ∨ Q(x)\n Assumption \n\n \n 2\n ~P(x) ∨ R(x)\n Assumption \n\n \n 3\n ~Q(x) ∨ R(x)\n Assumption \n\n \n 4\n ~R(a)\n Negate conclusion \n\n S1\n 5\n Q(x) ∨ R(x)\n Res 1 2 \n\n \n 6\n P(x) ∨ R(x)\n Res 1 3 \n\n \n 7\n ~P(a)\n Res 2 4 \n\n \n 8\n ~Q(a)\n Res 3 4 \n\n S2\n 9\n Q(a)\n Res 1 7 \n\n \n 10\n P(a)\n Res 1 8 \n\n \n 11\n R(x)\n Res 2 6 \n\n \n 12\n R(x)\n Res 3 5 \n\n \n 13\n Q(a)\n Res 4 5 \n\n \n 14\n P(a)\n Res 4 6 \n\n \n 15\n R(a)\n Res 5 8 \n\n \n 16\n R(a)\n Res 6 7 \n\n S3 \n 17\n R(a)\n Res 2 10 \n\n \n 18\n R(a)\n Res 2 14 \n\n \n 19\n R(a)\n Res 3 9 \n\n \n 20\n R(a)\n Res 3 13 \n\n \n 21 \n [ ]\n Res 4 11 \n\n","\nAlthough the resolution proof is successful in deriving [ ], it\nhas some significant drawbacks. To start with, the refutation is too\nlong as it takes 21 steps to reach the contradiction, [ ]. This\nis due to the naïve brute-force nature of the implementation. The\napproach not only generates too many formulas but some are clearly\nredundant. Note how R(a) is derived six times; also,\nR(x) has more “information content” than\nR(a) and one should keep the former and disregard\nthe latter. Resolution, like all other automated deduction methods,\nmust be supplemented by strategies aimed at improving the efficiency\nof the deduction process. The above sample derivation has 21 steps but\nresearch-type problems command derivations with thousands or hundreds\nof thousands of steps.","\nThe successful implementation of a deduction calculus in an automated\nreasoning program requires the integration of search strategies that\nreduce the search space by pruning unnecessary deduction paths. Some\nstrategies remove redundant clauses or tautologies as soon as they\nappear in a derivation. Another strategy is to remove more specific\nclauses in the presence of more general ones by a process known as\nsubsumption (Robinson 1965a). Unrestricted\nsubsumption, however, does not preserve the refutation completeness of\nresolution and, hence, there is a need to restrict its applicability\n(Loveland 1978). Model elimination (Loveland 1969)\ncan discard a sentence by showing that it is false in some model of\nthe axioms. The subject of model generation has received much\nattention as a complementary process to theorem proving. The method\nhas been used successfully by automated reasoning programs to show the\nindependence of axioms sets and to determine the existence of discrete\nmathematical structures meeting some given criteria. ","\nInstead of removing redundant clauses, some strategies prevent the\ngeneration of useless clauses in the first place. The\nset-of-support strategy (Wos, Carson & Robinson\n1965) is one of the most powerful strategies of this kind. A subset\nT of the set S, where S is initially\nΓ ∪ {~α}, is called a set of support\nof S iff S − T is satisfiable.\nSet-of-support resolution dictates that the resolved clauses are not\nboth from S − T. The motivation behind\nset-of-support is that since the set Γ is usually satisfiable it\nmight be wise not to resolve two clauses from Γ against each\nother. Hyperresolution (Robinson 1965b) reduces the\nnumber of intermediate resolvents by combining several resolution\nsteps into a single inference step.","\nIndependently co-discovered, linear resolution\n(Loveland 1970, Luckham 1970) always resolves a clause against the\nmost recently derived resolvent. This gives the deduction a simple\n“linear” structure affording a straightforward\nimplementation; yet, linear resolution preserves refutation\ncompleteness. Using linear resolution we can derive the empty clause\nin the above example in only eight steps:","\n\n\n\n 1 \n P(x) ∨ Q(x)\n Assumption \n\n 2\n ~P(x) ∨ R(x)\n Assumption \n\n 3\n ~Q(x) ∨ R(x)\n Assumption \n\n 4\n ~R(a)\n Negated conclusion \n\n 5\n ~P(a)\n Res 2 4 \n\n 6\n Q(a)\n Res 1 5 \n\n 7\n R(a)\n Res 3 6 \n\n 8\n [ ]\n Res 4 7 \n\n","\nWith the exception of unrestricted subsumption, all the strategies\nmentioned so far preserve refutation completeness. Efficiency is an\nimportant consideration in automated reasoning and one may sometimes\nbe willing to trade completeness for speed. Unit\nresolution and input resolution are two such\nrefinements of linear resolution. In the former, one of the resolved\nclauses is always a literal; in the latter, one of the resolved\nclauses is always selected from the original set to be refuted. Albeit\nefficient, neither strategy is complete. Ordering strategies impose\nsome form of partial ordering on the predicate symbols, terms,\nliterals, or clauses occurring in the deduction. Ordered\nresolution treats clauses not as sets of literals but as\nsequences—linear orders—of literals. Ordered resolution is\nextremely efficient but, like unit and input resolution, is not\nrefutation complete. To end, it must be noted that some strategies\nimprove certain aspects of the deduction process at the expense of\nothers. For instance, a strategy may reduce the size of the proof\nsearch space at the expense of increasing, say, the length of the\nshortest refutations. A taxonomy and detailed presentation of\ntheorem-proving strategies can be found in (Bonacina 1999).","\nThere are several automated reasoning programs that are based on\nresolution, or refinements of resolution. Otter (succeeded by Prover4)\nwas a driving force in the development of automated reasoning (Wos,\nOverbeek, Lusk & Boyle 1984) but it has been superseded by more\ncapable programs like Vampire (Voronkov 1995, Kovács &\nVoronkov 2013). Resolution also provides the underlying\nlogico-computational mechanism for the popular logic programming\nlanguage Prolog (Clocksin & Mellish 1981)."],"subsection_title":"2.1 Resolution"},{"content":["\nHilbert-style calculi (Hilbert and Ackermann 1928) have been\ntraditionally used to characterize logic systems. These calculi\nusually consist of a few axiom schemata and a small number of rules\nthat typically include modus ponens and the rule of substitution.\nAlthough they meet the required theoretical requisites (soundness,\ncompleteness, etc.) the approach at proof construction in these\ncalculi is difficult and does not reflect standard practice. It was\nGentzen’s goal “to set up a formalism that reflects as\naccurately as possible the actual logical reasoning involved in\nmathematical proofs” (Gentzen 1935). To carry out this task,\nGentzen analyzed the proof-construction process and then devised two\ndeduction calculi for classical logic: the natural deduction calculus,\nNK, and the sequent calculus, LK.\n(Gentzen actually designed NK first and then introduced LK to pursue\nmetatheoretical investigations). The calculi met his goal to a large\nextent while at the same time managing to secure soundness and\ncompleteness. Both calculi are characterized by a relatively larger\nnumber of deduction rules and a simple axiom schema. Of the two\ncalculi, LK is the one that has been most widely used in\nimplementations of automated reasoning programs, and it is the one\nthat we will discuss first; NK will be discussed in the next\nsection.","\nAlthough the application of the LK rules affect logic formulas, the\nrules are seen as manipulating not logic formulas themselves but\nsequents. Sequents are expressions of the form\nΓ → Δ, where both Γ and Δ are (possibly\nempty) sets of formulas. Γ is the sequent’s\nantecedent and Δ its\nsuccedent. Sequents can be interpreted thus: Let\nI be an interpretation. Then,","\nI satisfies the sequent Γ →\nΔ (written as: I\n⊨ Γ→Δ) iff\n\neither I ⊭ α (for some\nα ∈ Γ) or I ⊨\nβ (for some β ∈ Δ).\n","\nIn other words, ","\nI ⊨Γ → Δ iff\nI ⊨ (α1\n& … & αn) ⊃\n(β1 ∨ … ∨ βn),\nwhere α1 & … &\nαn is the iterated conjunction of the\nformulas in Γ and β1 ∨ … ∨\nβn is the iterated disjunction of those in\nΔ.\n","\nIf Γ or Δ are empty then they are respectively valid or\nunsatisfiable. An axiom of LK is a sequent Γ\n→ Δ where Γ ∩ Δ ≠ ∅. Thus, the\nrequirement that the same formula occurs at each side of the →\nsign means that the axioms of LK are valid, for no interpretation can\nthen make all the formulas in Γ true and, simultaneously, make\nall those in Δ false. LK has two rules per logical connective,\nplus one extra rule: the cut rule. ","\nThe sequents above a rule’s line are called the rule’s\npremises and the sequent below the line is the rule’s\nconclusion. The quantification rules ∃→ and\n→∀ have an eigenvariable condition that restricts their\napplicability, namely that a must not occur in Γ,\nΔ or in the quantified sentence. The purpose of this restriction\nis to ensure that the choice of parameter, a, used in the\nsubstitution process is completely “arbitrary”.","\nProofs in LK are represented as trees where each node in the tree is\nlabeled with a sequent, and where the original sequent sits at the\nroot of the tree. The children of a node are the premises of the rule\nbeing applied at that node. The leaves of the tree are labeled with\naxioms. Here is the LK-proof of\n∃xR(x) from the set\n{∀x(P(x) ∨\nQ(x)), ∀x(P(x)\n⊃\nR(x)),∀x(Q(x)\n⊃ R(x))}. In the tree below, Γ stands for\nthis set:","\nIn our example, all the leaves in the proof tree are labeled with\naxioms. This establishes the validity of Γ →\n∃xR(x) and, hence, the fact that\nΓ ⊨ ∃xR(x). LK\ntakes an indirect approach at proving the conclusion and this is an\nimportant difference between LK and NK. While NK constructs an actual\nproof (of the conclusion from the given assumptions), LK instead\nconstructs a proof that proves the existence of a proof (of the\nconclusion from the assumptions). For instance, to prove that α\nis entailed by Γ, NK constructs a step-by-step proof of α\nfrom Γ (assuming that one exists); in contrast, LK first\nconstructs the sequent Γ → α which then attempts to\nprove valid by showing that it cannot be made false. This is done by\nsearching for a counterexample that makes (all the sentences in)\nΓ true and makes α false: If the search fails then a\ncounterexample does not exist and the sequent is therefore valid. In\nthis respect, proof trees in LK are actually refutation proofs. Like\nresolution, LK is refutation complete: If\nΓ ⊨ α then the sequent Γ →\nα has a proof tree.","\nAs it stands, LK is unsuitable for automated deduction and there are\nsome obstacles that must be overcome before it can be efficiently\nimplemented. The reason is, of course, that the statement of the\ncompleteness of LK only has to assert, for each entailment relation,\nthe existence of a proof tree but a reasoning program has the more\ndifficult task of actually having to construct one. Some of the main\nobstacles: First, LK does not specify the order in which the rules\nmust be applied in the construction of a proof tree. Second, and as a\nparticular case of the first problem, the premises in the rules\n∀→ and →∃ rules inherit the quantificational\nformula to which the rule is applied, meaning that the rules can be\napplied repeatedly to the same formula sending the proof search into\nan endless loop. Third, LK does not indicate which formula must be\nselected next in the application of a rule. Fourth, the quantifier\nrules provide no indication as to what terms or free variables must be\nused in their deployment. Fifth, and as a particular case of the\nprevious problem, the application of a quantifier rule can lead into\nan infinitely long tree branch because the proper term to be used in\nthe instantiation never gets chosen. Fortunately, as we will hint at\nbelow each of these problems can be successfully addressed.","\nAxiom sequents in LK are valid, and the conclusion of a rule is valid\niff its premises are. This fact allows us to apply the LK rules in\neither direction, forwards from axioms to conclusion, or backwards\nfrom conclusion to axioms. Also, with the exception of the cut rule,\nall the rules’ premises are subformulas of their respective\nconclusions. For the purposes of automated deduction this is a\nsignificant fact and we would want to dispense with the cut rule;\nfortunately, the cut-free version of LK preserves its refutation\ncompleteness (Gentzen 1935). These results provide a strong case for\nconstructing proof trees in a backwards fashion; indeed, by working\nthis way a refutation in cut-free LK gets increasingly simpler as it\nprogresses since subformulas are simpler than their parent formulas.\nMoreover, and as far as propositional rules go, the new subformulas\nentered into the tree are completely dictated by the cut-free LK\nrules. Furthermore, and assuming the proof tree can be brought to\ncompletion, branches eventually end up with atoms and the presence of\naxioms can be quickly determined. Another reason for working backwards\nis that the truth-functional fragment of cut-free LK is\nconfluent in the sense that the order in which the\nnon-quantifier rules are applied is irrelevant: If there is a proof,\nregardless of what you do, you will run into it! To bring the\nquantifier rules into the picture, things can be arranged so that all\nrules have a fair chance of being deployed: Apply, as far as possible,\nall the non-quantifier rules before applying any of the quantifier\nrules. This takes care of the first and second obstacles, and it is no\ntoo difficult to see how the third one would now be handled. The\nfourth and fifth obstacles can be addressed by requiring that the\nterms to be used in the substitutions be suitably selected from the\nHerbrand universe (Herbrand 1930).","\nThe use of sequent-type calculi in automated theorem proving was\ninitiated by efforts to mechanize mathematics (Wang 1960). At the\ntime, resolution captured most of the attention of the automated\nreasoning community but during the 1970s some researchers started to\nfurther investigate non-resolution methods (Bledsoe 1977), prompting a\nfrutiful and sustained effort to develop more human-oriented theorem\nproving systems (Bledsoe 1975, Nevins 1974). Eventually, sequent-type\ndeduction gained momentum again, particularly in its re-incarnation as\nanalytic tableaux (Fitting 1990). The method of\ndeduction used in tableaux is essentially cut-free LK’s with sets used\nin lieu of sequents."],"subsection_title":"2.2 Sequent Deduction"},{"content":["\nAlthough LK and NK are both commonly labeled as “natural\ndeduction” systems, it is the latter which better deserves the\ntitle due to its more natural, human-like, approach to proof\nconstruction. The rules of NK are typically presented as acting on\nstandard logic formulas in an implicitly understood context, but they\nare also commonly given in the literature as acting more explicitly on\n“judgements”, that is, expressions of the form\nΓ ⊢ α where Γ is a set of formulas\nand α is a formula. This form is typically understood as making\nthe metastatement that there is a proof of α from Γ\n(Kleene 1962). Following Gentzen 1935 and Prawitz 1965 here we take\nthe former approach. The system NK has no logical axioms and provides\ntwo introduction-elimination rules for each logical connective:","\nA few remarks: First, the expression\n[α — γ] represents the fact that α\nis an auxiliary assumption in the proof of γ that eventually\ngets discharged, i.e. discarded. For example, ∃E tells us that\nif in the process of constructing a proof one has already derived\n∃xα(x) and also β with\nα(a/x) as an auxiliary assumption then the\ninference to β is allowed. Second, the eigenparameter,\na, in ∃E and ∀I must be foreign to the premises,\nundischarged—“active”—assumptions, to the\nrule’s conclusion and, in the case of ∃E, to\n∃xα(x). Third, ⊥ is shorthand for\ntwo contradictory formulas, β and ~β. Finally, NK is\ncomplete: If Γ ⊨ α then there is a\nproof of α from Γ using the rules of NK.","\nAs in LK, proofs constructed in NK are represented as trees with the\nproof’s conclusion sitting at the root of the tree, and the problem’s\nassumptions sitting at the leaves. (Proofs are also typically given as\nsequences of judgements, Γ ⊢ α, running\nfrom the top to the bottom of the printed page.) Here is a natural\ndeduction proof tree of ∃xR(x) from\n∀x(P(x) ∨\nQ(x)), ∀x(P(x)\n⊃ R(x)) and\n∀x(Q(x) ⊃\nR(x)):","\nAs in LK, a forward-chaining strategy for proof construction is not\nwell focused. So, although proofs are read forwards, that is,\nfrom leaves to root or, logically speaking, from assumptions to\nconclusion, that is not the way in which they are typically\nconstructed. A backward-chaining strategy implemented by\napplying the rules in reverse order is more effective. Many of the\nobstacles that were discussed above in the implementation of sequent\ndeduction are applicable to natural deduction as well. These issues\ncan be handled in a similar way, but natural deduction introduces some\nissues of its own. For example, as suggested by the ⊃-Introduction\nrule, to prove a goal of the form α ⊃ β one could\nattempt to prove β on the assumption that α. But note that\nalthough the goal α ⊃ β does not match the conclusion\nof any other introduction rule, it matches the conclusion of all\nelimination rules and the reasoning program would need to\nconsider those routes too. Similarly to forward-chaining, here there\nis the risk of setting goals that are irrelevant to the proof and that\ncould lead the program astray. To wit: What prevents a program from\nentering the never-ending process of building, say, larger and larger\nconjunctions? Or, what is there to prevent an uncontrolled chain of\nbackward applications of, say, ⊃-Elimination? Fortunately, NK\nenjoys the subformula property in the sense that each\nformula entering into a natural deduction proof can be restricted to\nbeing a subformula of Γ ∪ Δ ∪ {α}, where\nΔ is the set of auxiliary assumptions made by the ~-Elimination\nrule. By exploiting the subformula property a natural deduction\nautomated theorem prover can drastically reduce its search space and\nbring the backward application of the elimination rules under control\n(Portoraro 1998, Sieg & Byrnes 1996). Further gains can be realized\nif one is willing to restrict the scope of NK’s logic to its\nintuitionistic fragment where every proof has a normal form in the\nsense that no formula is obtained by an introduction rule and then is\neliminated by an elimination rule (Prawitz 1965).","\nImplementations of automated theorem proving systems using NK\ndeduction have been motivated by the desire to have the program reason\nwith precisely the same proof format and methods employed by the human\nuser. This has been particularly true in the area of education where\nthe student is engaged in the interactive construction of formal\nproofs in an NK-like calculus working under the guidance of a theorem\nprover ready to provide assistance when needed (Portoraro 1994, Suppes\n1981). Other, research-oriented, theorem provers true to the spirit of\nNK exist (Pelletier 1998) but are rare."],"subsection_title":"2.3 Natural Deduction"},{"content":["\nThe name of the matrix connection method (Bibel 1981) is indicative of\nthe way it operates. The term “matrix” refers to the form\nin which the set of logic formulas expressing the problem is\nrepresented; the term “connection” refers to the way the\nmethod operates on these formulas. To illustrate the method at work,\nwe will use an example from propositional logic and show that\nR is entailed by P ∨ Q, P ⊃\nR and Q ⊃ R. This is done by\nestablishing that the formula","\n(P ∨ Q) & (P ⊃ R) &\n(Q ⊃ R) & ~R\n","\nis unsatisfiable. To do this, we begin by transforming it into\nconjunctive normal form: ","\n(P ∨ Q) & (~P ∨ R) &\n(~Q ∨ R) & ~R\n","\nThis formula is then represented as a matrix, one conjunct per row\nand, within a row, one disjunct per column:","\nThe idea now is to explore all the possible vertical paths running\nthrough this matrix. A vertical path is a set of\nliterals selected from each row in the matrix such that each literal\ncomes from a different row. The vertical paths:","\nA path is complementary if it contains two literals\nwhich are complementary. For example, Path 2 is complementary since it\nhas both P and ~P but so is Path 6 since it contains\nboth R and ~R. Note that as soon as a path includes\ntwo complementary literals there is no point in pursuing the path\nsince it has itself become complementary. This typically allows for a\nlarge reduction in the number of paths to be inspected. In any event,\nall the paths in the above matrix are complementary and this fact\nestablishes the unsatisfiability of the original formula. This is the\nessence of the matrix connection method. The method can be extended to\npredicate logic but this demands additional logical apparatus:\nSkolemnization, variable renaming, quantifier duplication,\ncomplementarity of paths via unification, and simultaneous\nsubstitution across all matrix paths (Bibel 1981, Andrews 1981).\nVariations of the method have been implemented in reasoning programs\nin higher-order logic (Andrews 1981) and non-classical logics (Wallen\n1990)."],"subsection_title":"2.4 The Matrix Connection Method"},{"content":["\nEquality is an important logical relation whose behavior within\nautomated deduction deserves its own separate treatment.\nEquational logic and, more generally, term\nrewriting treat equality-like equations as rewrite\nrules, also known as reduction or\ndemodulation rules. An equality statement like\nf(a)= a allows the simplification of a term\nlike g(c,f(a)) to\ng(c,a). However, the same equation also has\nthe potential to generate an unboundedly large term:\ng(c,f(a)),\ng(c,f(f(a))),\ng(c,f(f(f(a)))),\n… . What distinguishes term rewriting from equational logic is\nthat in term rewriting equations are used as unidirectional reduction\nrules as opposed to equality which works in both directions. Rewrite\nrules have the form t1 ⇒\nt2 and the basic idea is to look for terms\nt occurring in expressions e such that t\nunifies with t1 with unifier θ so that the\noccurrence t1θ in eθ can be\nreplaced by t2θ. For example, the rewrite\nrule x + 0 ⇒ x allows the rewriting of\nsucc(succ(0) + 0) as\nsucc(succ(0)).","\nTo illustrate the main ideas in term rewriting, let us explore an\nexample involving symbolic differentiation (the example and ensuing\ndiscussion are adapted from Chapter 1 of Baader & Nipkow 1998). Let\nder denote the derivative respect to x, let\ny be a variable different from x, and let u\nand v be variables ranging over expressions. We define the\nrewrite system:","\nAgain, the symbol ⇒ indicates that a term matching the left-hand\nside of a rewrite rule should be replaced by the rule’s right-hand\nside. To see the differentiation system at work, let us compute the\nderivative of x × x respect to x,\nder(x × x):","\nAt this point, since none of the rules (R1)–(R4) applies, no\nfurther reduction is possible and the rewriting process ends. The\nfinal expression obtained is called a normal form,\nand its existence motivates the following question: Is there an\nexpression whose reduction process will never terminate when applying\nthe rules (R1)–(R4)? Or, more generally: Under what conditions a\nset of rewrite rules will always stop, for any given expression, at a\nnormal form after finitely many applications of the rules? This\nfundamental question is called the termination\nproblem of a rewrite system, and we state without proof that the\nsystem (R1)–(R4) meets the termination condition.","\nThere is the possibility that when reducing an expression, the set of\nrules of a rewrite system could be applied in more than one way. This\nis actually the case in the system (R1)–(R4) where in the\nreduction of der(x × x) we could have\napplied R1 first to the second sub-expression in (x ×\nder(x)) + (der(x) ×\nx), as shown below:","\nFollowing this alternative course of action, the reduction terminates\nwith the same normal form as in the previous case. This fact, however,\nshould not be taken for granted: A rewriting system is said to be\n(globally) confluent if and only if independently of\nthe order in which its rules are applied every expression always ends\nup being reduced to its one and only normal form. It can be shown that\n(R1)–(R4) is confluent and, hence, we are entitled to say:\n“Compute the derivative of an expression” (as\nopposed to simply “a” derivative). Adding more\nrules to a system in an effort to make it more practical can have\nundesired consequences. For example, if we add the rule","\nto (R1)–(R4) then we will be able to further reduce certain\nexpressions but at the price of losing confluency. The following\nreductions show that der(x + 0) now has two normal\nforms: the computation","\ngives one normal form, and","\ngives another. Adding the rule","\nwould allow the further reduction of 1 + der(0) to 1 + 0 and\nthen, by R5, to 1. Although the presence of this new rule actually\nincreases the number of alternative\npaths—der(x + 0) can now be reduced in four\npossible ways—they all end up with the same normal form, namely\n1. This is no coincidence as it can be shown that (R6) actually\nrestores confluency. This motivates another fundamental question:\nUnder what conditions can a non-confluent system be made into an\nequivalent confluent one? The Knuth-Bendix completion\nalgorithm (Knuth & Bendix 1970) gives a partial answer to this\nquestion.","\nTerm rewriting, like any other automated deduction method, needs\nstrategies to direct its application. Rippling (Bundy, Stevens &\nHarmelen 1993, Basin & Walsh 1996) is a heuristic that has its\norigins in inductive theorem-proving that uses annotations to\nselectively restrict the rewriting process. The superposition calculus\nis a calculus of equational first-order logic that combines notions\nfrom first-order resolution and Knuth-Bendix ordering equality.\nSuperposition is refutation complete (Bachmair & Ganzinger 1994) and\nis at the heart of a number of theorem provers, most notably the E\nequational theorem prover (Schulz 2004) and Vampire (Voronkov\n1995)."],"subsection_title":"2.5 Term Rewriting"},{"content":["\nMathematical induction is a very important technique of theorem\nproving in mathematics and computer science. Problems stated in terms\nof objects or structures that involve recursive definitions or some\nform of repetition invariably require mathematical induction for their\nsolving. In particular, reasoning about the correctness of computer\nsystems requires induction and an automated reasoning program that\neffectively implements induction will have important applications.","\nTo illustrate the need for mathematical induction, assume that a\nproperty φ is true of the number zero and also that if true of a\nnumber then is true of its successor. Then, with our deductive\nsystems, we can deduce that for any given number n, φ is\ntrue of it, φ(n). But we cannot deduce that φ is true\nof all numbers, ∀xφ(x); this inference\nstep requires the rule of mathematical induction:","\nIn other words, to prove that ∀xα(x)\none proves that α(0) is the case, and that\nα(succ(n)) follows from the assumption that\nα(n). The implementation of induction in a reasoning\nsystem presents very challenging search control problems. The most\nimportant of these is the ability to determine the particular way in\nwhich induction will be applied during the proof, that is, finding the\nappropriate induction schema. Related issues include selecting the\nproper variable of induction, and recognizing all the possible cases\nfor the base and the inductive steps.","\nNqthm (Boyer & Moore 1979) has been one of the most successful\nimplementations of automated inductive theorem proving. In the spirit\nof Gentzen, Boyer and Moore were interested in how people prove\ntheorems by induction. Their theorem prover is written in the\nfunctional programming language Lisp which is also the language in\nwhich theorems are represented. For instance, to express the\ncommutativity of addition the user would enter the Lisp expression\n(EQUAL (PLUS X Y) (PLUS Y X)). Everything\ndefined in the system is a functional term, including its basic\n“predicates”: T, F,\nEQUAL X Y, IF\nX Y Z, AND, NOT,\netc. The program operates largely as a black\nbox, that is, the inner working details are hidden from the user;\nproofs are conducted by rewriting terms that posses recursive\ndefinitions, ultimately reducing the conclusion’s statement to the\nT predicate. The Boyer-Moore theorem prover\nhas been used to check the proofs of some quite deep theorems (Boyer,\nKaufmann & Moore 1995). Lemma caching, problem statement\ngeneralization, and proof planning are techniques particularly useful\nin inductive theorem proving (Bundy, Harmelen & Hesketh 1991)."],"subsection_title":"2.6 Mathematical Induction"}]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"3. Other Logics","subsections":[{"content":["\nHigher-order logic differs from first-order logic in that\nquantification over functions and predicates is allowed. The statement\n“Any two people are related to each other in one way or\nanother” can be legally expressed in higher-order logic as\n∀x∀y∃RR(x,y)\nbut not in first-order logic. Higher-order logic is inherently more\nexpressive than first-order logic and is closer in spirit to actual\nmathematical reasoning. For example, the notion of set finiteness\ncannot be expressed as a first-order concept. Due to its richer\nexpressiveness, it should not come as a surprise that implementing an\nautomated theorem prover for higher-order logic is more challenging\nthan for first-order logic. This is largely due to the fact that\nunification in higher-order logic is more complex than in the\nfirst-order case: unifiable terms do not always posess a most general\nunifier, and higher-order unification is itself undecidable. Finally,\ngiven that higher-order logic is incomplete, there are always proofs\nthat will be entirely out of reach for any automated reasoning\nprogram.","\nMethods used to automate first-order deduction can be adapted to\nhigher-order logic. TPS (Andrews et al. 1996, Andrews et\nal. 2006) is a theorem proving system for higher-order logic that\nuses Church’s typed λ-calculus as its logical representation\nlanguage and is based on a connection-type deduction mechanism that\nincorporates Huet’s unification algorithm (Huet 1975). As a sample of\nthe capabilities of TPS, the program has proved automatically that a\nsubset of a finite set is finite, the equivalence among several\nformulations of the Axiom of Choice, and Cantor’s Theorem that a set\nhas more subsets than members. The latter was proved by the program by\nasserting that there is no onto function from individuals to sets of\nindividuals, with the proof proceeding by a diagonal argument. HOL\n(Gordon & Melham 1993) is another higher-order proof development\nsystem primarily used as an aid in the development of hardware and\nsoftware safety-critical systems. HOL is based on the LCF approach to\ninteractive theorem proving (Gordon, Milner & Wadsworth 1979), and\nit is built on the strongly typed functional programming language ML.\nHOL, like TPS, can operate in automatic and interactive mode.\nAvailability of the latter mode is welcomed since the most useful\nautomated reasoning systems may well be those which place an emphasis\non interactive theorem proving (Farmer, Guttman & Thayer 1993) and\ncan be used as assistants operating under human guidance. (Harrison\n2000) discusses the verification of floating-point algorithms and the\nnon-trivial mathematical properties that are proved by HOL Light under\nthe guidance of the user. Isabelle (Paulson 1994) is a generic,\nhigher-order, framework for rapid prototyping of deductive systems.\nObject logics can be formulated within Isabelle’s metalogic by using\nits many syntactic and deductive tools. Isabelle also provides some\nready-made theorem proving environments, including Isabelle/HOL,\nIsabelle/ZF and Isabelle/FOL, which can be used as starting points for\napplications and further development by the user (Paulson 1990, Nipkow\n& Paulson 2002). Isabelle/ZF has been used to prove equivalent\nformulations of the Axiom of Choice, formulations of the Well-Ordering\nPrinciple, as well as the key result about cardinal arithmetic that,\nfor any infinite cardinal κ, κ · κ = κ\n(Paulson & Grabczewski 1996).","\nTo help prove higher-order theorems and discharge goals arising in\ninteractive proofs, the user can ask Isabelle/HOL to invoke external\nfirst-order provers through Sledgehammer (Paulson 2010), a subsystem\naimed at combining the complementary capabilities of automated\nreasoning systems of different types, including SMT solvers (see\n4.2 SAT Solvers, in this article; Blanchette et al. 2013).\nLEO-II (Benzmüller et al. 2015) is also a resolution-based\nautomated theorem prover for higher-order logic that has been applied\nin a wide array of problems, most notably in the automation of\nGödel’s ontological proof of God’s existence (see 4.6 Logic\nand Philosophy, in this article). "],"subsection_title":"3.1 Higher-Order Logic"},{"content":["\nNon-classical logics (Haack 1978) such as modal logics, intuitionsitic\nlogic, multi-valued logics, autoepistemic logics, non-monotonic\nreasoning, commonsense and default reasoning, relevance logic,\nparaconsistent logic, and so on, have been increasingly gaining the\nattention of the automated reasoning community. One of the reasons has\nbeen the natural desire to extend automated deduction techniques to\nnew domains of logic. Another reason has been the need to mechanize\nnon-classical logics as an attempt to provide a suitable foundation\nfor artificial intelligence. A third reason has been the desire to\nattack some problems that are combinatorially too large to be handled\nby paper and pencil. Indeed, some of the work in automated\nnon-classical logic provides a prime example of automated reasoning\nprograms at work. To illustrate, the Ackerman Constant Problem asks\nfor the number of non-equivalent formulas in the relevance logic R.\nThere are actually 3,088 such formulas (Slaney 1984) and the number\nwas found by “sandwiching” it between a lower and an upper\nlimit, a task that involved constraining a vast universe of\n20400 20-element models in search of those models that\nrejected non-theorems in R. It is safe to say that this result would\nhave been impossible to obtain without the assistance of an automated\nreasoning program.","\nThere have been three basic approaches to automate the solving of\nproblems in non-classical logic (McRobie 1991). One approach has been,\nof course, to try to mechanize the non-classical deductive calculi.\nAnother has been to simply provide an equivalent formulation of the\nproblem in first-order logic and let a classical theorem prover handle\nit. A third approach has been to formulate the semantics of the\nnon-classical logic in a first-order framework where resolution or\nconnection-matrix methods would apply. (Pelletier et al.\n2017) describes an automated reasoning system for a paraconsistent\nlogic that takes both “indirect” approaches, the\ntranslational and the truth-value approach, to prove its theorems.","\nModal logics find extensive use in computing science as logics of\nknowledge and belief, logics of programs, and in the specification of\ndistributed and concurrent systems. Thus, a program that automates\nreasoning in a modal logic such as K, K4, T, S4, or S5 would have\nimportant applications. With the exception of S5, these logics share\nsome of the important metatheoretical results of classical logic, such\nas cut-elimination, and hence cut-free (modal) sequent calculi can be\nprovided for them, along with techniques for their automation.\nConnection methods (Andrews 1981, Bibel 1981) have played an important\nrole in helping to understand the source of redundancies in the search\nspace induced by these modal sequent calculi and have provided a\nunifying framework not only for modal logics but also for\nintuitionistic and classical logic as well (Wallen 1990). Current\nefforts to automate modal logic reasoning revolve around the\ntranslational approach mentioned above, namely to embed modal logic\ninto classical logic and then use an existing automated reasoning\nsystem for the latter to prove theorems of the former.\n(Benzmüller & Paulson 2013) shows how to embed quantified modal\nlogic into simple type theory, proves the soundness and completeness\nof the embedding, and demonstrates with simple experiments how\nexisting higher-order theorem provers can be used to automate proofs\nin modal logic. The approach can be extended to higher-order modal\nlogic as well (Benzmüller & Paleo 2015).","\nThere are different ways in which intuitionsitic logic can be\nautomated. One is to directly implement the intuitionistic versions of\nGentzen’s sequent and natural deduction calculi, LJ and NJ\nrespectively. This approach inherits the stronger normalization\nresults enjoyed by these calculi allowing for a more compact\nmechanization than their classical counterparts. Another approach at\nmechanizing intuitionistic logic is to exploit its semantic\nsimilarities with the modal logic S4 and piggy back on an automated\nimplementation of S4. Automating intuitionistic logic has applications\nin software development since writing a program that meets a\nspecification corresponds to the problem of proving the specification\nwithin an intuitionistic logic (Martin-Löf 1982). A system that\nautomated the proof construction process would have important\napplications in algorithm design but also in constructive mathematics.\nNuprl (Constable et al. 1986) is a computer system supporting\na particular mathematical theory, namely constructive type theory, and\nwhose aim is to provide assistance in the proof development process.\nThe focus is on logic-based tools to support programming and on\nimplementing formal computational mathematics. Over the years the\nscope of the Nuprl project has expanded from\n“proofs-as-programs” to “systems-as-theories”.\nSimilar in spirit and based on the Curry-Howard isomorphism, the Coq\nsystem formalizes its proofs in the Calculus of Inductive\nConstructions, a λ-calculus with a rich system of types\nincluding dependent types (Coquand & Huet 1988, Coquand &\nPaulin-Mohring 1988). Like Nuprl, Coq is designed to assist in the\ndevelopment of mathematical proofs as well as computer programs from\ntheir formal specifications."],"subsection_title":"3.2 Non-classical Logics"}]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"4. Applications","subsections":[{"content":["\nLogic programming, particularly represented by the language\nProlog (Colmerauer et al. 1973), is probably\nthe most important and widespread application of automated theorem\nproving. During the early 1970s, it was discovered that logic could be\nused as a programming language (Kowalski 1974). What distinguishes\nlogic programming from other traditional forms of programming is that\nlogic programs, in order to solve a problem, do not explicitly state\nhow a specific computation is to be performed; instead, a\nlogic program states what the problem is and then delegates\nthe task of actually solving it to an underlying theorem prover. In\nProlog, the theorem prover is based on a refinement of resolution\nknown as SLD-resolution. SLD-resolution is a\nvariation of linear input resolution that incorporates a special rule\nfor selecting the next literal to be resolved upon; SLD-resolution\nalso takes into consideration the fact that, in the computer’s memory,\nthe literals in a clause are actually ordered, that is, they form a\nsequence as opposed to a set. A Prolog program\nconsists of clauses stating known facts and rules. For example, the\nfollowing clauses make some assertions about flight connections:","\nflight(toronto, london).\n\nflight(london,rome).\n\nflight(chicago,london).\n\nflight(X,Y) :– flight(X,Z) ,\nflight(Z,Y).\n","\nThe clause flight(toronto, london) is a fact while\nflight(X,Y) :– flight(X,Z)\n,\nflight(Z,Y) is a rule, written by convention as a\nreversed conditional (the symbol “:–” means\n“if”; the comma means “and”; terms starting in\nuppercase are variables). The former states that there is flight\nconnection between Toronto and London; the latter states that there is\na flight between cities X and Y if, for some city\nZ, there is a flight between X and Z and\none between Z and Y. Clauses in Prolog programs are\na special type of Horn clauses having precisely one positive literal:\nFacts are program clauses with no negative literals\nwhile rules have at least one negative literal. (Note\nthat in standard clause notation the program rule in the previous\nexample would be written as flight(X,Y) ∨\n~flight(X,Z) ∨ ~flight(Z,Y).)\nThe specific form of the program rules is to effectively express\nstatements of the form: “If these conditions over here are\njointly met then this other fact will follow”. Finally, a\ngoal is a Horn clause with no positive literals. The\nidea is that, once a Prolog program Π has been written, we can then\ntry to determine if a new clause γ, the goal, is entailed by\nΠ, Π ⊨ γ; the Prolog prover does this by attempting\nto derive a contradiction from Π ∪ {~γ}. We should remark\nthat program facts and rules alone cannot produce a contradiction; a\ngoal must enter into the process. Like input resolution,\nSLD-resolution is not refutation complete for first-order logic but it\nis complete for the Horn logic of Prolog programs. The fundamental\ntheorem: If Π is a Prolog program and γ is the goal clause\nthen Π ⊨ γ iff Π ∪ {~γ} ⊢\n[ ] by SLD-resolution (Lloyd 1984).","\nFor instance, to find out if there is a flight from Toronto to Rome\none asks the Prolog prover to see if the clause flight(toronto, rome)\nfollows from the given program. To do this, the prover adds\n~flight(toronto,rome) to the program clauses and attempts to derive\nthe empty clause, [ ], by SLD-resolution:","\nThe conditional form of rules in Prolog programs adds to their\nreadability and also allows reasoning about the underlying refutations\nin a more friendly way: To prove that there is a flight between\nToronto and Rome, flight(toronto,rome), unify this clause with the\nconsequent flight(X,Y) of the fourth clause in the\nprogram which itself becomes provable if both\nflight(toronto,Z) and flight(Z,rome) can be proved.\nThis can be seen to be the case under the substitution {Z\n← london} since both flight(toronto,london) and\nflight(london,rome) are themselves provable. Note that the theorem\nprover not only establishes that there is a flight between Toronto and\nRome but it can also come up with an actual itinerary,\nToronto-London-Rome, by extracting it from the unifications used in\nthe proof.","\nThere are at least two broad problems that Prolog must address in\norder to achieve the ideal of a logic programming language. Logic\nprograms consist of facts and rules describing what is true; anything\nthat is not provable from a program is deemed to be false. In regards\nto our previous example, flight(toronto,\nboston) is not true since this literal cannot be deduced from\nthe program. The identification of falsity with non-provability is\nfurther exploited in most Prolog implementations by incorporating an\noperator, not, that allows programmers to explicitly\nexpress the negation of literals (or even subclauses) within a\nprogram. By definition, not l succeeds if the literal\nl itself fails to be deduced. This mechanism, known as\nnegation-by-failure, has been the target of\ncriticism. Negation-by-failure does not fully capture the standard\nnotion of negation and there are significant logical differences\nbetween the two. Standard logic, including Horn logic, is monotonic\nwhich means that enlarging an axiom set by adding new axioms simply\nenlarges the set of theorems derivable from it; negation-by-failure,\nhowever, is non-monotonic and the addition of new\nprogram clauses to an existing Prolog program may cause some goals to\ncease from being theorems. A second issue is the control\nproblem. Currently, programmers need to provide a fair amount\nof control information if a program is to achieve acceptable levels of\nefficiency. For example, a programmer must be careful with the order\nin which the clauses are listed within a program, or how the literals\nare ordered within a clause. Failure to do a proper job can result in\nan inefficient or, worse, non-terminating program. Programmers must\nalso embed hints within the program clauses to prevent the prover from\nrevisiting certain paths in the search space (by using the\ncut operator) or to prune them altogether (by using\nfail). Last but not least, in order to improve their\nefficiency, many implementations of Prolog do not implement\nunification fully and bypass a time-consuming yet critical\ntest—the so-called\noccurs-check—responsible for checking the\nsuitability of the unifiers being computed. This results in an unsound\ncalculus and may cause a goal to be entailed by a Prolog program (from\na computational point of view) when in fact it should not (from a\nlogical point of view).","\nThere are variations of Prolog intended to extend its scope. By\nimplementing a model elimination procedure, the Prolog Technology\nTheorem Prover (PTTP) (Stickel 1992) extends Prolog into full\nfirst-order logic. The implementation achieves both soundness and\ncompleteness. Moving beyond first-order logic, λProlog (Miller\n& Nadathur 1988) bases the language on higher-order constructive\nlogic."],"subsection_title":"4.1 Logic Programming"},{"content":["\nThe problem of determining the satisfiability of logic formulas has\nreceived much attention by the automated reasoning community due to\nits important applicability in industry. A propositional formula is\nsatisfiable if there is an assignment of truth-values\nto its variables that makes the formula true. For example, the\nassignment (P ← true, Q ← true, R\n← false) does not make (P ∨R) &\n~Q true but (P ← true, Q ← false,\nR ← false) does and, hence, the formula is satisfiable.\nDetermining whether a formula is satisfiable or not is called the\nBoolean Satisfiability Problem—SAT for\nshort—and for a formula with n variables SAT can be\nsettled thus: Inspect each of the 2n possible\nassignments to see if there is at least one assignment that satisfies\nthe formula, i.e. makes it true. This method is clearly complete: If\nthe original formula is satisfiable then we will eventually find one\nsuch satisfying assignment; but if the formula is contradictory (i.e.\nnon-satisfiable), we will be able to determine this too. Just as\nclearly, and particularly in this latter case, this search takes an\nexponential amount of time, and the desire to conceive more efficient\nalgorithms is well justified particularly because many computing\nproblems of great practical importance such as graph-theoretic\nproblems, network design, storage and retrieval, scheduling, program\noptimization, and many others (Garey & Johnson 1979) can be\nexpressed as SAT instances, i.e. as the SAT question of some\npropositional formula representing the problem. Given that SAT is\nNP-complete (Cook 1971) it is very unlikely that a polynomial\nalgorithm exists for it; however, this does not preclude the existence\nof sufficiently efficient algorithms for particular cases of SAT\nproblems.","\nThe Davis-Putnam-Logemann-Loveland (DPLL) algorithm\nwas one of the first SAT search algorithms (Davis & Putnam 1960;\nDavis, Logemman & Loveland 1962) and is still considered one of the\nbest complete SAT solvers; many of the complete SAT procedures in\nexistence today can be considered optimizations and generalizations of\nDPLL. In essence, DPLL search procedures proceed by considering ways\nin which assignments can be chosen to make the original formula true.\nFor example, consider the formula in CNF","\nP & ~Q & (~P ∨ Q ∨\nR) & (P ∨ ~S)\n","\nSince P is a conjunct, but also a unit clause, P\nmust be true if the entire formula is to be true. Moreover, the value\nof ~P does not contribute to the truth of ~P ∨\nQ ∨ R and P ∨ ~S is true\nregardless of S. Thus, the whole formula reduces to","\n~Q & (Q ∨ R)\n","\nSimilarly, ~Q must be true and the formula further reduces\nto","\nR\n","\nwhich forces R to be true. From this process we can recover\nthe assignment (P ← true, Q ← false,\nR ← true, S ← false) proving that the\noriginal formula is satisfiable. A formula may cause the algorithm to\nbranch; the search through a branch reaches a dead end the moment a\nclause is deemed false—a conflicting\nclause—and all variations of the assignment that has\nbeen partially constructed up to this point can be discarded. To\nillustrate:","\nHence, the formula is satisfiable by the existence of (P\n← false, Q ← true, R ← true). DPLL\nalgorithms are made more efficient by strategies such as term\nindexing (ordering of the formula variables in an\nadvantageous way), chronological backtracking\n(undoing work to a previous branching point if the process leads to a\nconflicting clause), and conflict-driven learning\n(determining the information to keep and where to backtrack). The\ncombination of these strategies results in a large prune of the search\nspace; for a more extensive discussion the interested reader is\ndirected to Zhang & Malik 2002.","\nA quick back-envelope calculation reveals the staggering computing\ntimes of (algorithms for) SAT-type problems represented by formulas\nwith as little as, say, 60 variables. To wit: A problem represented as\na Boolean formula with 10 variables that affords a linear solution\ntaking one hundredth of a second to complete would take just four\nhundredths and six hundredths of a second to complete if the formula\nhad instead 40 and 60 variables respectively. In dramatic contrast, if\nthe solution to the problem were exponential (say\n2n) then the times to complete the job for 10, 40\nand 60 variables would be respectively one thousandth of a second, 13\ndays, and 365 centuries. It is a true testament to the ingenuity of\nthe automated reasoning community and the power of current SAT-based\nsearch algorithms that real-world problems with thousands of variables\ncan be handled with reasonable efficency. Küchlin & Sinz 2000\ndiscuss a SAT application in the realm of industrial automotive\nproduct data management where 18,000 (elementary) Boolean formulas and\n17,000 variables are used to express constraints on orders placed by\ncustomers. As another example, Massacci & Marraro 2000 discuss\nan application in logical cryptanalysis, that is, the verification of\nproperties of cryptographic algorithms expressed as SAT problems. They\ndemonstrate how finding a key with a cryptographic attack is analogous\nto finding a model—assignment—for a Boolean formula; the\nformula in their application encodes the commercial version of the U.S\nData Encryption Standard (DES) with the encoding requiring 60,000\nclauses and 10,000 variables.","\nAlthough SAT is conceptually very simple, its inner nature is not well\nunderstood—there are no criteria that can be generally applied\nto answer as to why one SAT problem is harder than another. It should\nthen come as no surprise that algorithms that tend to do well on some\nSAT instances do not perform so well on others, and efforts are being\nspent in designing hybrid algorithmic solutions that combine the\nstrength of complementary approaches—see Prasad, Biere &\nGupta 2005 for an application of this hybrid approach in the\nverification of hardware design.","\nRecent advances in SAT hybrid strategies coupled with supercomputing\npower has allowed a team of three computing scientists to solve the\nBoolean Pythagorean Triples Problem, a long-standing open question in\nRamsey Theory: Can the set {1, 2,...} of natural numbers be divided\ninto two parts with no part containing a triple\n(a, b, c) such that a2\n+ b2 = c2? Heule, Kullmann\n& Marek 2016 proved that this cannot be done by showing that the\nset {1, 2, … , n} can be so partitioned for n\n= 7824 but that this is impossible for n ≥\n7825. Expressing this deceptively simple question as a SAT problem\nrequired close to 38,000 clauses and 13,000 variables with about half\nof these going to represent that the problem is satisfiable when n =\n7824 and the other half to represent that it is not when n = 7825; of\nthe two, proving the latter was far more challenging since it demanded\na proof of unsatisfiability, i.e. that no such partition exists. A\nnaïve brute-force approach considering all 27825\npossible two-part partitions was clearly out of the question and the\nproblem was attacked by using “clever” algorithms within a\nmulti-stage SAT-based framework for solving hard problems in\ncombinatorics, consisting of five phases: Encode (encoding\nthe problem as SAT formulas), Transform (optimizing the\nencoding using clause elimination and symmetry breaking\ntechniques), Split (dividing the problem effectively into\nsubproblems using splitting heuristics), Solve (searching for\nsatisfying assignments or their lack thereof using fast processing),\nand Validate (validating the results of the earlier\nphases). Of special importance was the application\nof cube-and-conquer, a hybrid SAT strategy\nparticularly effective for hard combinatorial problems. The strategy\ncombines look-ahead with conflict-driven\nclause-learning (CDCL), with the former\naiming to construct small binary search trees using global heuristics\nand the latter aiming to find short refutations using local\nheuristics.","\nAfter splitting the problem into 106 hard subproblems\n(known as “cubes”), these were handed down to 800 cores\nworking in parallel on a Stampede supercomputer which, after\n2 days of further splitting and CDCL clause-crunching, settled the\nquestion and delivered a 200-terabyte proof validating the work. After\ndeservedly celebrating this significant accomplishment of automated\nreasoning, and after entertaining all the new applications that the\nenhanced SAT method would afford (particularly in the areas of\nhardware and software verification), we should then ask some questions\nthat are of especial importance to mathematicians: Is there a more\ninsightful way to establish this result that would involve more\ntraditional and intellectually satisfying mathematical proof methods?\nOr, as far as increasing our understanding of a given field\n(combinatorics in this case), what is the value of settling a question\nwhen no human can inspect the proof and hence get no insight from it?\nEven the team responsible for the result admits that “the proofs\nof unsatisfiability coming from SAT solvers are, from a human point of\nview, a giant heap of random information (no direct understanding is\ninvolved)”. The conjecture has been settled but we basically\nhave no underlying idea what makes 7825 so special. Perhaps the real\nvalue to be drawn from these considerations is that they lead us to\nthink about the deeper question: What is it about the structure of a\nspecific problem that makes it amenable to standard mathematical\ntreatment as opposed to requiring a mindless brute-force approach?\nWhile this question is being contemplated, SAT may provide the best line of attack on certain mathematical problems.","\nThe DPLL search procedure has been extended to quantified logic. MACE\nis a popular program based on the DPLL algorithm that searches for\nfinite models of first-order formulas with equality. As an example\n(McCune 2001), to show that not all groups are commutative one can\ndirect MACE to look for a model of the group axioms that also\nfalsifies the commutation law or, equivalently, to look for a model\nof:","\n\n\n\n (G1)\n e · x = x\n (left identity) \n\n (G2)\n i (x) · x =\ne\n (left inverse) \n\n (G3)\n (x · y) · z =\nx · (y · z)\n (associativity) \n\n (DC)\n a · b ≠ b ·\na\n (denial of commutativity) \n\n","\nMACE finds a six-element model of these axioms, where · is\ndefined as:","\nand where i are defined as:","\nThis example also illustrates, once again, the benefits of using an automated\ndeduction system: How long would have taken the human researcher to\ncome up with the above or a similar model? For more challenging\nproblems, the program is being used as a practical complement to the\nresolution-based theorem prover Prover9 (formerly Otter), with Prover9\nsearching for proofs and MACE jointly looking for (counter) models. To\nfind such models, MACE converts the first-order problem into a set of\n\"flattened\" clauses which, for increasing model sizes, are\ninstantiated into propositional clauses and solved as a SAT problem.\nThe method has been implemented in other automated reasoning systems\nas well, most notably in the Paradox model finder where the MACE-style\napproach has been enhanced by four additional techniques resulting in\nsome significant efficiency improvements (Claessen & Sörensson\n2003): term definitions (to reduce the number of variables in\nflattened clauses), static symmetric reduction (to reduce the number\nof isomorphic models), sort inference (to apply symmetric reduction at\na finer level) and incremental SAT (to reuse search information\nbetween consecutive model sizes). The strategy of pairing the\ncomplementary capabilities of separate automated reasoning systems has\nbeen applied to higher-order logic too as exemplified by Nitpick, a\ncounterexample generator for Isabelle/HOL (Blanchette & Nipkow\n2010). Brown 2013 describes a theorem proving procedure for\nhigher-order logic that uses SAT-solving to do most of the work; the\nprocedure is a complete, cut-free, ground refutation calculus that\nincorporates restrictions on instantiations and has been implemented\nin the Satallax theorem prover (Brown 2012).","\nAn approach of great interest at solving SAT problems in first-order\nlogic is Satisfiability Modulo Theory\n(SMT) where the interpretation of symbols in the\nproblem’s formulation is constrained by a background\ntheory. For example, in linear arithmetic the function\nsymbols are restricted to + and −. As another example, in the\nextensional theory of arrays (McCarthy 1962) the array function\nread(a, i) returns the value of the array\na at index i, and write(a,\ni, x) returns the array identical to a but\nwhere the value of a at i is x. More\nformally,","\n\n\n\n ∀a : Array .\n∀i,j : Index . ∀x :\nValue . i = j →\n\n read(write(a, i,\nx), j) = x (read-write\naxiom 1) \n\n ∀a : Array .\n∀i,j : Index . ∀x :\nValue . i ≠ j →\n\n read(write(a, i,\nx), j) = read(a, j) (read-write\naxiom 2) \n\n ∀a,b : Array .\n∀i : Index . a = b →\nread(a, i) = read(b,\ni) \n\n (extensionality) \n\n","\nIn the context of these axioms, an SMT solver would attempt to\nestablish the satisfiability (or, dually, the validity) of a given\nfirst-order formula, or thousands of formulas for that matter, such\nas","\ni − j = 1 &\nf(read(write(a, i, 2),\nj + 1) = read(write(a, i,\nf(i − j + 1)), i)\n","\n(Ganzinger et al. 2004) discusses an approach to SMT called\nDPLL(T) consisting of a general\nDPLL(X) engine that works in conjunction with a solver\nSolverT for background theory T. Bofill\net al. (2008) present the approach in the setting of the theory of\narrays, where the DPLL engine is responsible for enumerating\npropositional models for the given formula whereas\nSolverT checks whether these models are consistent\nwith the theory of arrays. Their approach is sound and complete, and\ncan be smoothly extended to multidimensional arrays.","\nSMT is particularly successful in verification applications, most\nnotably software verification. Having improved the efficiency of SAT\nsolvers with SMT, the effort is now on designing more efficient SMT\nsolvers (de Moura 2007)."],"subsection_title":"4.2 SAT Solvers"},{"content":["\nTo prove automatically even the simplest mathematical facts requires a\nsignificant amount of domain knowledge. As a rule, automated theorem\nprovers lack such rich knowledge and attempt to construct proofs from\nfirst principles by the application of elementary deduction rules.\nThis approach results in very lengthy proofs (assuming a proof is\nfound) with each step being justified at a most basic logical level.\nLarger inference steps and a significant improvement in mathematical\nreasoning capability can be obtained, however, by having a theorem\nprover interact with a computer algebra system, also known as a\nsymbolic computation system. A computer algebra\nsystem is a computer program that assists the user with the\nsymbolic manipulation and numeric evaluation of mathematical\nexpressions. For example, when asked to compute the improper\nintegral","\n\n\n\n ∞\n\n∫\n\n0 \n \ne−a2t2cos2bt\ndt \n\n","\na competent computer algebra system would quickly reply with the\nanswer","\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n √π\n\n\n 2a \n \n \ne−b2/a2\n\n\n","\nEssentially, the computer algebra system operates by taking the input\nexpression entered by the user and successively applies to it a series\nof transformation rules until the result no longer changes (see the\nsection Term Rewriting in this article for more details).\nThese transformation rules encode a significant amount of domain\n(mathematical) knowledge making symbolic systems powerful tools in the\nhands of applied mathematicians, scientists, and engineers trying to\nattack problems in a wide variety of fields ranging from calculus and\nthe solving of equations to combinatorics and number theory.","\nProblem solving in mathematics involves the interplay of deduction and\ncalculation, with decision procedures being a reminder of the fuzzy\ndivision between the two; hence, the integration of deductive and\nsymbolic systems, which we coin here as Deductive Computer\nAlgebra (DCA), is bound to be a fruitful combination.\nAnalytica (Bauer, Clarke & Zhao 1998) is a theorem prover built on\ntop of Mathematica, a powerful and popular computer algebra system.\nBesides supplying the deductive engine, Analytica also extends\nMathematica’s capabilities by defining a number of rewrite\nrules—more precisely, identities about summations and\ninequalities—that are missing in the system, as well as\nproviding an implementation of Gosper’s algorithm for finding closed\nforms of indefinite hypergeometric summations. Equipped with this\nextended knowledge, Analytica can prove semi-automatically some\nnontrivial theorems from real analysis, including a series of lemmas\ndirectly leading to a proof of the Bernstein Approximation Theorem.\nHere is the statement of the theorem simply to give the reader a sense\nof the level of the mathematical richness we are dealing with:","\nBernstein Approximation Theorem.\n\nLet I = [0, 1] be the closed unit interval, f a real\ncontinuous function on I, and\nBn(x,f) the\nnth Bernstein polynomial for f defined as\n\n\n\n Bn(x, f)\n = \n n\n\n∑\n\nk=0 \n (\n n\n\nk\n )\n f(k/n)xk(1\n− x)n−k \n Then, on the interval I, the sequence of Bernstein\npolynomials for f converges uniformly to f.\n","\nTo be frank, the program is supplied with key information to establish\nthe lemmas that lead to this theorem but the amount and type of\ndeductive work done by the program is certainly nontrivial. (Clarke\n& Zhao 1994) provides examples of fully automated proofs using\nproblems in Chapter 2 of Ramanujan’s Notebooks (Berndt 1985)\nincluding the following example that the reader is invited to try.\nShow that:","\n\n\n\n Ar\n\n∑\n\nk=n+1 \n \n\n\n\n 1\n\n\n k \n \n = \n r + 2\n (\n r\n\n∑\n\nk=1 \n (r − k)\n (\n Ak\n\n∑\n\nj=Ak−1+1\n\n \n\n\n\n 1\n\n\n (3j)3−3j\n\n \n )\n )\n + 2rφ(3,A0) \n\n","\nwhere A0=1,\nAn+1=3An+1 and\nφ(x,n) is Ramanujan’s abbreviation for","\n\n\n\n φ(x,n)\n =df \n n\n\n∑\n\nk=1 \n \n\n\n\n 1\n\n\n −(kx)+k3x3\n\n \n\n","\nAnalytica’s proof of this identity proceeds by simplifying both the\nleft- and right-hand sides of the equality and showing that both sides\nreduce to the same expression, −Hn +\nHAr. The simplification uses the added summation\nidentities mentioned before as well as some elementary properties of\nthe harmonic numbers,","\n\n\n\n Hn\n = \n n\n\n∑\n\nk=1 \n \n\n\n\n 1\n\n\n k \n \n\n","\nThe resulting proof has 28 steps (some of which are nontrivial) taking\nabout 2 minutes to find.","\nKerber, Kohlhase & Sorge 1998 use the Ωmega planning\nsystem as the overall way to integrate theorem proving and symbolic\ncomputation. In Harrison & Théry 1998, we find an example\nof the integration of a higher-order logic theorem proving system\n(HOL) with a computer algebra system (Maple).","\nTheir great power notwithstanding, symbolic algebra systems do not\nenforce the same level of rigor and formality that is the essence of\nautomated deduction systems. In fact, the mathematical semantics of\nsome of the knowledge rules in most algebra systems is not entirely\nclear and are, in cases, logically unsound (Harrison & Théry\n1998). The main reason for this is an over-aggressiveness to provide\nthe user with an answer in a timely fashion at whatever cost,\nbypassing the checking of required assumptions even if it means\nsacrificing the soundness of the calculation. (This is strongly\nreminiscent of most Prolog implementations that bypass the so-called\n“occurs-check” also abandoning logical soundness in the\nname of efficiency.) This serious problem opens the opportunity for a\ndeduction system to provide a service to the computer algebra system:\nUse its deductive capabilities to verify that the computer algebra’s\ncomputational steps meet the required assumptions. There is a catch in\nthis, however: For sufficiently large calculation steps, verifying is\ntantamount to proving and, to check these steps, the deduction system\nmay well need the assistance of the very same system that is in need\nof verification! The solution to the soundness problem may then well\nrequire an extensive modification of the chosen symbolic algebra\nsystem to make it sound; an alternative approach is to develop a new\nsystem, entirely from scratch, in conjunction with the development of\nthe automated theorem prover. In either case, the resulting combined\ndeductive computer algebra system should display a much improved\nability for automated mathematical reasoning."],"subsection_title":"4.3 Deductive Computer Algebra"},{"content":["\nAutomated reasoning has reached the level of maturity where theorem\nproving systems and techniques are being used for industrial-strength\napplications. One such application area is the formal verification of\nhardware and software systems. The cost of defects in hardware can\neasily run into the millions. In 1994, the Pentium processor was\nshipped with a defect in its floating-point unit and the subsequent\noffer by Intel to replace the flawed chip (which was taken up only by\na small fraction of all Pentium owners) cost the company close to $500\nmillion. To guard against situations like this, the practice of\ntesting chip designs is now considered insufficient and more formal\nmethods of verification have not only gained large attention in the\nmicroprocessor industry but have become a necessity. The idea behind\nformal verification is to rigorously prove with mathematical certainty\nthat the system functions as specified. Common applications to\nhardware design include formally establish that the system functions\ncorrectly on all inputs, or that two different circuits are\nfunctionally equivalent.","\nDepending on the task at hand, one can draw from a number of automated\nformal verification techniques, including SAT solvers in propositional\nlogic, symbolic simulation using binary decision diagrams (BDDs),\nmodel checking in temporal logic, or conducting proofs in higher-order\nlogic. In the latter case, using an automated theorem prover like\nHOL—see Section 10—has shown to be invaluable in practice.\nProof construction in a system like HOL proceeds semi-automatically\nwith the user providing a fair amount of guidance as to how the proof\nshould proceed: The user tries to find a proof while being assisted by\nthe theorem prover which, on request, can either automatically fill in\na proof segment or verify proof steps given to it. Although some of\nthe techniques mentioned above provide decision procedures which\nhigher-order logic lacks, higher-order logic has the advantage of\nbeing very expressive. The tradeoff is justified since proving facts\nabout floating-point arithmetic requires the\nformalization of a large body of real analysis, including many\nelementary statements such as:","\nThis statement from Harrison 2000 written in HOL says that if a\nfunction f is differentiable with derivative\nf′ in an interval [a, b] then a\nsufficient condition for f(x) ≤ K\nthroughout the interval is that f(x) ≤ K\nat the endpoints a, b and at all points of zero\nderivative. The result is used to determine error bounds when\napproximating transcendental functions by truncated power series.\nConducting proofs in such a “painstakingly foundational\nsystem” (Harrison 2006) has some significant benefits. First,\none achieves a high degree of assurance that the proofs are valid\nsince (admitedly lengthy) they are composed of small error-free\ndeductive steps. Second, the formalization of these elementary\nstatements and intermediate results can be reused in other tasks or\nprojects. For example, a library of formal statements and proven\nresults in floating-point division can be reused when proving other\nresults of floating-point algorithms for square roots or\ntranscendental functions. To further illustrate, different versions of\nthe square root algorithm for the Intel Itanium share many\nsimilarities and the proof of correctness for one version of the\nalgorithm can be carried over to another version after minor tweaking\nof the proof. A third benefit of using a prover like HOL is, of\ncourse, that such lengthy proofs are carried out mechanically and are\ndeductively certain; the likelihood of introducing a human error if\nthey were carried out manually would be just as certain."],"subsection_title":"4.4 Formal Verification of Hardware"},{"content":["\nSociety is becoming increasingly dependent on software systems for\ncritical services such as safety and security. Serious adverse effects\nof malfunctioning software include loss of human life, threats to\nsecurity, unauthorized access to sensitive information, large\nfinancial losses, denial of critical services, and risk to safety. One\nway to increase the quality of critical software is to supplement\ntraditional methods of testing and validation with techniques of\nformal verification. The basic approach to formal verification is to\ngenerate a number of conditions that the software must meet and to\nverify—establish—them by mathematical proof. As with\nhardware, automated formal verification (simply formal verification,\nhereafter) is concerned with discharging these proof obligations using\nan automated theorem prover.","\nThe formal verification of security protocols is an\nalmost ideal application of automated theorem proving in industry.\nSecurity protocols are small distributed programs aimed at ensuring\nthat transactions take place securely over public networks. The\nspecification of a security protocol is relatively small and well\ndefined but its verification is certainly non-trivial. We have already\nmentioned in a previous section the use of SAT-based theorem provers\nin the verification of the U.S Data Encryption Standard (DES). As\nanother example, the Mondex “electronic purse” is a smart\ncard electronic cash system that was originally developed by National\nWestminster Bank and subsequently sold to MasterCard International.\nSchmitt & Tonin 2007 describe a Java Card implementation of the\nMondex protocol for which the security properties were reformulated in\nthe Java Modeling Language (JML) following closely the original Z\nspecification. Proof of correctness was conducted using the KeY tool\n(Beckert, Hanle & Schmitt 2007), an interactive theorem proving\nenvironment for first-order dynamic logic that allows the user to\nprove properties of imperative and object-oriented sequential\nprograms. This application of automated reasoning demonstrates, in the\nwords of the authors, that “it is possible to bridge the gap\nbetween specification and implementation ensuring a fully verified\nresult”.","\nDenney, Fischer & Schumann 2004 describe a system to automate the\ncertification of safety properties of data-analysis aerospace\nsoftware at NASA. Using Hoare-style program verification\ntechniques, their system generates proof obligations that are then\nhandled by an automated theorem prover. The process is not fully\nautomated, however, since many of the obligations must be simplified\nfirst in order to improve the ability of the theorem prover to solve\nthe proof tasks. For example, one such class of obligations makes a\nstatement about a matrix, r, that needs to remain symmetric\nafter updates along its diagonal have been made, and has the form:","\nOriginal form:\n\nsymm(r) →\nsymm(diag-updates(r))","\nSimplified form (when r is 2x2):","\nEven after the simplification, current theorem provers find the proof\ntask challenging. The task becomes intractable for larger matrices and\nnumber of updates (e.g. a 6×6 matrix with 36 updates) and\nfurther preprocessing and simplification on the obligation is required\nbefore the task eventually falls within the reach of state-of-art\ntheorem provers. But it is worth remarking that proofs are found\nwithout using any specific features or configuration parameters of the\ntheorem provers which would improve their chances at completing the\nproofs. This is important since the everyday application of theorem\nprovers in industry cannot presuppose such deep knowledge of the\nprover from their users. The formal verification of software remains a\ndemanding task but it is difficult to see how the certification of\nproperties could happen without the assistance of automated deduction\nwhen one faces the humanly impossible task of establishing thousands\nof such obligations.","\nIn the field of nuclear engineering, techniques of\nautomated reasoning are deemed mature enough to assist in the formal\nverification of the safety-critical software responsible for\ncontrolling a nuclear power plant’s reactor prevention systems (RPS).\nThe RPS component of the digital control system of the APR-1400\nnuclear reactor is specified using NuSCR, a formal specification\nlanguage customized for nuclear applications (Yoo, Jee & Cha 2009).\nModel checking in computation tree logic is used to check the\nspecifications for completeness and consistency. After this, nuclear\nengineers generate function block designs via a process of automatic\nsynthesis and formally verify the designs also using techniques of\nmodel checking in linear temporal logic; the techniques are also used\nto verify the equivalence of the multiple revisions and releases of\nthe design. These model-checking tools were implemented to make their\nuse as easy and intuitive as possible, in a way that did not require a\ndeep knowledge of the techniques, and used notations familiar to\nnuclear engineers. The use of automated reasoning tools not only helps\nthe design engineers to establish the desired results but it also\nraises the confidence of the government’s regulatory personnel that\nneed to approve the RPS software before the reactor can be certified\nfor operation."],"subsection_title":"4.5 Formal Verification of Software"},{"content":["\nIn the spirit of Wos, Overbeek, Lusk & Boyle 1992, we pose the\nquestion: What do the following statements about different systems of\nformal logic and exact philosophy have in common?","\nWe ask again, what do these results have in common? The answer is that\neach has been proved with the help of an automated reasoning program.\nHaving disclosed the answer to this question prompts a new one: How\nmuch longer would have taken to settle these open problems without the\napplication of such an automated reasoning tool? ","\nThe strict implicational fragments of the logical systems S4 and S5 of\nmodal logic are known as C4 and C5, respectively, and\ntheir Hilbert-style axiomatizations presuppose condensed detachment as\ntheir sole rule of inference. With insight from Kripke’s work,\nAnderson & Belnap (1962) published the first axiomatization of C4\nusing the following 3-axiom basis, where the Polish notation\n‘Cpq’ stands for ‘p\n→ q’. ","\nA question was posed sometime after: Is there a shorter such\naxiomatization for C4, using a 2-axiom basis or even a single axiom?\nUsing the automated reasoning program Otter, the authors Ernst,\nFitelson, Harris & Wos (2001) settled both questions in the\naffirmative. In fact, several 2-axiom bases were discovered of which\nthe following turned out to be shortest: ","\nFurther rounds of automated reasoning work were rewarded with the\ndiscovery of a single axiom for C4; the axiom is 21 symbols long and\nit was also proved that it is the shortest such axiom: ","\nTo show that each of (2) and (3) is necessary and sufficient for (1),\na circle of proofs was produced using the automated reasoning tool:\n(1) ⇒ (3) ⇒ (2) ⇒ (1). As for C5, its axiomatization\nwas originally published in a paper by Lemmon, A. Meredith, D. Meredith,\nPrior & Thomas (1957) giving several 4-, 3-, 2- and 1-axiom bases\nfor C5, including the following 3-axiom basis: ","\nThe publication also included the shortest known 2-axiom bases for C5\n(actually two of them, containing 20 symbols each) but the shortest\nsingle axiom for C5 was later discovered by (Meredith and Prior 1964)\nand having 21 symbols: ","\nApplying automated reasoning strategies again, Ernst, Fitelson,\nHarris & Wos 2001) discovered several new bases, including the\nfollowing 2-axiom basis of length 18 and six 1-axiom bases matching\nMeredith’s length of 21 (only one of these is given below): ","\nTo show that each of (6) and (7) is necessary and sufficient for (4),\na circle of proofs was also produced with the theorem prover: (6)\n⇒ (4) ⇒ (7) ⇒ (6). ","\nA charming foray into combinatory logic is presented\nin Smullyan 1985 and Glickfeld & Overbeek 1986, where we learn\nabout a certain enchanted forest inhabited by talking birds. Given any\nbirds A and B, if the name of bird B is\nspoken to bird A then A will respond with the name\nof some bird in the forest, AB, and this response to\nB from A will always be the same. Here are some\ndefinitions about enchanted birds: ","\n\n\n\n B1\n A mockingbird M mimics any bird in\nthe sense that M’s response to a bird x is the same\nas x’s response to itself, Mx = xx.\n\n\n B2\n A bird C composes birds A and\nB if A(Bx) = Cx, for any bird\nx. In other words, C’s response to x is the\nsame as A’s response to B’s response to\nx. \n\n B3\n A bird A is fond of a bird B if A’s\nresponse to B is B; that is, AB =\nB. \n\n","\nAnd here are two facts about this enchanted forest: ","\n\n\n\n F1\n For any birds A and B in the forest there is a\nbird C that composes them. \n\n F2\n There is a mockingbird in the forest. \n\n","\nThere have been rumors that every bird in the forest is fond of at\nleast one bird, and also that there is at least one bird that is not\nfond of any bird. The challenge to the reader now is, of course, to\nsettle these rumors using only F1 and F2, and the given definitions\n(B1)–(B3). Glickfeld & Overbeek 1986 do this in mere\nseconds with an automated reasoning system using paramodulation,\ndemodulation and subsumption. For a more challenging problem, consider\nthe additional definitions: ","\n\n\n\n B4\n A bird is egocentric if it is fond of itself: EE =\nE. \n\n B5\n A bird L is a lark if for any birds x and\ny the following holds: (Lx)y =\nx(yy). \n\n","\nSmullyan challenges us to prove a most surprising thing about larks:\nSuppose we are not given any other information except that the forest\ncontains a lark. Then, show that at least one bird in the forest must\nbe egocentric! Below we give the salient steps in the proof found by\nthe automated reasoning system, where ‘S(x,\ny)’ stands for ‘xy’ and where\nclauses (2) and (3) are, respectively, the definition of a lark and\nthe denial of the theorem; numbers on the right are applications of\nparamodulation: ","\n\n\n\n 1\n (x1 = x1)\n \n\n 2\n (S(S(L, x1), x2) = S(x1, S(x2, x2)))\n \n\n 3\n -(S(x1, x1) = x1)\n \n\n 6\n (S(x1, S(S(L, S(x2, x2)), x2)) = S(S(L,\nx1), S(x2, x2)))\n 2 2 \n\n 8\n (S(x1, S(S(x2, x2), S(x2, x2))) =\nS(S(L, S(L, x1)), x2))\n 2 2 \n\n 9\n (S(S(S(L, L), x1), x2) = S(S(x1, x1),\nS(x2, x2)))\n 2 2 \n\n 18\n -(S(S(L, S(S(L, S(L, L)), x1)), x1) =\nS(S(L, S(x1,x1)), x1))\n 6 3 6 9 8 8 \n\n 19\n []\n 18 1 \n\n","\nCloser inspection of the left and right hand sides of (18) under the\napplication of unification revealed the discovery of a 10-L\nbird, i.e. a 10-symbol bird expressed solely in terms of larks, which\nwas a strong candidate for egocentricity. This discovery was exciting\nbecause the shortest egocentric L-bird known to Smullyan was\nof length 12. A subsequent run of the automated reasoning system\nproduced a proof of this fact as well as another new significant bird:\nA possible egocentric 8-L bird! A few more runs of the system\neventually produced a 22-line proof (with terms with as many as 50\nsymbols, excluding commas and parentheses) of the fact that\n((LL)(L(LL)))(L(LL)) is\nindeed egocentric. The natural questions to ask next are, of course,\nwhether there are other 8-L egocentric birds and whether\nthere are shorter ones. The reader may want to attempt this with paper\nand pencil but, given that there are 429 such birds, it may be wiser\nto try it instead (or in conjunction) with an automated reasoning\nprogram; both approaches are explored in Glickfeld & Overbeek\n1986. For a more formal, but admittedly less colorful, introduction\nto combinatory logic and lambda-conversion the reader is referred to\nHindley & Seldin 1986. ","\nFormulas in the classical equivalential calculus are\nwritten using sentential variables and a two-place function symbol,\ne, for equivalence. The calculus has two rules of inference,\ndetachment (modus ponens) and substitution; the rules can be combined\ninto the single rule of condensed detachment: Obtain tθ\nfrom e(s,t) and r where\nsθ = rθ with mgu θ. The calculus\ncan be axiomatized with the formulas: ","\nWe can dispense with reflexivity since it is derivable from the other\ntwo formulas. This brings the number of axioms down to two and a\nnatural question to ask is whether there is a single axiom for the\nequivalential calculus. In 1933, Łukasiewicz found three formulas\nof length eleven that each could act as a single axiom for the\ncalculus—here’s one of them:\ne(e(x,y),e(e(z,y),e(x,z)))—and\nhe also showed that no shorter single axiom existed. Over time, other\nsingle axioms also of length eleven were found and the list kept\ngrowing with additions by Meredith, Kalman and Peterson to a total of\n14 formulas of which 13 were known to be single axioms and one formula\nwith a yet undetermined status: the formula XCB =\ne(x, e(e(e(x,\ny), e(z, y)), z)).\n(Actually, the list grew to 18 formulas but Wos, Winker, Veroff,\nSmith & Henschen 1983 reduced it to 14.) Resisting the intense\nstudy of various researchers, it remained as an open question for many\nyears whether the 14th formula, XCB, was a single axiom for\nthe equivalential calculus (Peterson 1977). One way to answer the\nquestion in the affirmative would be to show that at least one of the\n13 known single axioms is derivable from XCB alone; another\napproach would be to derive from XCB the 3-axiom set\n(E1)–(E3). While Wos, Ulrich & Fitelson 2002 take shots at\nthe former, their line of attack concentrates on the latter with the\nmost challenging task being the proving of symmetry. Working with the\nassistance of a powerful automated reasoning program, Otter, they\nconducted a concerted, persistent and very aggressive assault on the\nopen question. (Their article sometimes reads like a military briefing\nfrom the front lines!) For simpler problems, proofs can be found by\nthe reasoning program automatically; deeper and more challenging ones\nlike the one at hand require the guidance of the user. The relentless\napplication of the reasoning tool involved much guidance in the\nsetting of lemmas as targets and the deployment of an arsenal of\nstrategies, including the set of support, forward and backward\nsubsumption, lemma adjunction, formula complexity, hints strategy,\nratio strategy, term avoidance, level saturation, and others. After\nmuch effort and CPU time, the open question finally succumbed to the\ncombined effort of man and machine and a 61-step proof of symmetry was\nfound, followed by one for transitivity after 10 more applications of\ncondensed detachment. Subsequent runs of the theorem prover using\ndemodulation blocking and the so-called cramming strategy delivered\nshorter proofs. Here are the last lines of their 25-step proof which\nin this case proves transitivity first followed by symmetry: ","\nWith an effective methodology and a strategy that included the\nassistance of an automated reasoning program in a crucial way, the\nsearch for shortest single axioms for the equivalent calculus came to\nan end. ","\nFitelson & Zalta 2007, Oppenheimer & Zalta 2011, and Alama,\nOppenheimer, & Zalta 2015 describe several applications of\nautomated reasoning in computational metaphysics. By\nrepresenting formal metaphysical claims as axioms and premises in an\nautomated reasoning environment using programs like Prover9, Mace4,\nthe E-prover system and Paradox, the logical status of metaphysical\narguments is investigated. After the suitable formalization of axioms\nand premises, the model finder program Mace4 is used to help verify\ntheir consistency. Then, using Prover9, proofs are automatically\ngenerated for a number of theorems of the Theory of Plato’s Forms,\ntwenty five fundamental theorems of the Theory of Possible Worlds, the\ntheorems described in Leibniz’s unpublished paper of 1690 and in his\nmodal metaphysics, and a fully automated construction of Saint\nAnselm’s Ontological Argument. In the latter application, Saint Anselm\nis understood in Oppenheimer & Zalta 2011 as having found a way of\ninferring God’s existence from His mere being as opposed to inferring\nGod’s actuality from His mere possibility. This allows for a\nformalization that is free of modal operators, involving an underlying\nlogic of descriptions, three non-logical premises, and a definition of\nGod. Here are two key definitions in the formalization, as inputted\ninto Prover9, that helped express the concept of God: ","\n\n\n\n\n\n Definition of none_greater: \n\n all x (Object(x) -> (Ex1(none_greater,x)\n<-> \n\n (Ex1(conceivable,x) & \n\n -(exists y (Object(y) &\nEx2(greater_than,y,x) & \n\n Ex1(conceivable,y)))))).\n\n\n \n\n Definition of God: \n\n Is_the(g,none_greater). \n\n\n\n","\nPart of the challenge when representing in Prover9 these and other\nstatements from axiomatic metaphysics was to circumvent some of the\nprover’s linguistic limitations. For example, Prover9 does not have\ndefinite descriptions so statements of this kind as well as\nsecond-order concepts had to be expressed in terms of Prover9’s\nexisting first-order logic. But the return is worth the investment\nsince Prover9 not only delivered a proof\nof Ex1(e,g)—there is one and only one\nGod—but does so with an added bonus. A close inspection of the\noutput provides yet another example of an automated theorem prover\n\"outreasoning\" its users, revealing that some of the logical machinery\nis actually redundant: The proof can be constructed only using two of\nthe logical theorems of the theory of descriptions (called \"Theorem 2\"\nand \"Theorem 3\" in their article), one of the non-logical premises\n(called \"Premise 2\"), and the definition of God. We cannot help but to\ninclude here Prover9’s shorter proof, written in the more elegant\nnotation of standard logic (from Oppenheimer & Zalta 2011): ","\nIn the same tradition as St. Anselm’s, Gödel also provided an\nontological proof of God’s existence (Gödel 1970, Scott 1972). An\nimportant difference between the two is Gödel’s use of modal\noperators to represent metaphysical possibility and necessity and, of\ncourse, his use of symbolic logic for added reasoning precision. In\nhis proof, Gödel begins by framing the concept of “positive\nproperty” using two axioms, and he introduces a definition\nstating that “A God-like being possesses all positive\nproperties”. This is enough logical machinery to prove as a\ntheorem the possibility of God’s existence,\n◊∃xG(x); three more axioms and\ntwo additional definitions allow Gödel to further his proof to\nestablish not only that God exists,\n∃xG(x), but that this is so by\nnecessity, □∃xG(x).\nGödel’s proof is in the formalism of higher-order modal logic\n(HOML) using modal operators and quantification over properties.\nGödel never published his proof but he shared it with Dana Scott\nwho produced the version presented below, which is taken from\n(Benzmüller & Paleo 2014) along with its English annotation to\naid the reader with its intended interpretation: ","\n\n\nAxiom A1\n\n∀ϕ[P(~ϕ) ≡ ~P(ϕ)]\n\n Either a property or its negation is positive, but not\nboth)\n\n\nAxiom A2\n\n∀ϕ∀ψ[(P(ϕ) ∧ □∀x[ϕ(x) → ψ(x)]) ⊃ P(ψ)]\n\n A property necessarily implied by a positive property\nis positive\n\n\nTheorem T1\n\n∀ϕ[P(ϕ) ⊃ ◊∃xϕ(x)]\n\n Positive properties are possibly exemplified\n\n\nDefinition D1\n\nG(x) ≡ ∀ϕ[P(ϕ) ⊃ ϕ(x)]\n\n A God-like being possesses all positive\nproperties\n\n\nAxiom A3\n\nP(G)\n\n The property of being God-like is positive\n\n\nCorollary C\n\n◊∃xG(x)\n\n Possibly, God exists\n\n\nAxiom A4\n\n∀ϕ[P(ϕ) ⊃ □P(ϕ)]\n\n Positive properties are necessarily positive\n\n\nDefinition D2\n\nϕ ess\nx ≡ ϕ(x) ∧\n∀ψ(ψ(x) ⊃\n□∀y(ϕ(y) ⊃\nψ(y)))\n\n An essence of an individual is a property possessed by\nit and\n\n necessarily implying any of its properties\n\n\nTheorem T2\n\n∀x[G(x) ⊃ G ess\nx]\n\n Being God-like is an essence of any God-like\nbeing\n\n\nDefinition D3\n\nNE(x) ≡ ∀ϕ[ϕ\ness x ⊃ □∃yϕ(y)]\n\n Necessary existence of an individual is the necessary\n\n exemplification of all its essences\n\n\nAxiom A5\n\nP(NE)\n\n Necessary existence is a positive property\n\n\nTheorem T3\n\n□∃xG(x)\n\n Necessarily, God exists\n","\nThe proof has recently been analysed to an unprecedented degree of\ndetail and precision by Benzmüller & Paleo 2014 with the help\nof automated theorem provers. A major challenge faced by these authors\nwas the lack of a HOML-based theorem prover that could carry out the\nwork but this was circumvented by embedding the logic into the\nclassical higher-order logic (HOL) already offered by existing theorem\nprovers like LEO-II, Satallax and the countermodel finder Nitpick.\nDetails of the syntactic and semantic embedding are given in their\npaper and it consists of encoding HOML formulas as HOL predicates via\nmappings, expansions, and βη-conversions. The\nmapping associates HOML types α, terms\nsα, and logical operators θ with\ncorresponding HOL “raised” types\n⌈α⌉, type-raised terms\n⌈sα⌉, and type-raised logical\noperators θ•. If μ\nand ο are, respectively, the types of individuals and\nBooleans then ⌈μ⌉ = μ and\n⌈ο⌉ = σ\nwhere σ is shorthand\nfor ι → ο\nwith ι as the type of possible worlds; as for function\ntypes, ⌈β→γ⌉ =\n⌈β⌉→⌈γ⌉. For\ntype-raised terms, ⌈sα⌉\nis defined inductively on the structure\nof sα as the following example\nillustrates:","\nType-raised logical connectives, θ•, are defined below where r is a new constant symbol in HOL associated with the accessibility relation of HOML:\n","\nThe other connectives can be defined in the usual way. Validity is\nexpressed as a λ-term,\nλsι→ο∀wι sw,\nthat when applied to a term sσ we write as\n[sσ]. For example, under the embedding,\nproving in HOML the possibility of God’s existence,\n◊ο→ο∃(μ→ο)→ο Xμ . gμ→ο X,\nis tantamount to proving its validity in HOL:\n[◊•σ→σ∃•(μ→σ)→σ Xμ . gμ→σ X]μ→ο.\nTo prove so, the type-raised HOL expression\n[◊•∃•Xμ . gμ→σ X]\nis then encoded in the so-called THF0 syntax (Sutcliffe &\nBenzmüller 2010) prior to being fed, along with the above set of\nequality rules, to the provers that were used in completing the proof:\n","\nThe proof in Benzmüller & Paleo 2014 is presented here,\nincluding the axioms and definitions as well as the derivation of its\nfour main results—T1, C, T2, T3—all written in the\ntype-decorated type-raised higher-order logic notation resulting from\nthe embedding. The proof steps are not fully expanded—note the\npresence of type-raised connectives—and the inferential moves\nare not broken down to lower levels of detail. Borrowing a phrase from\nBertrand Russell (Urquhart 1994), this was done to spare the reader of\nthe “kind of nausea” that the fully detailed automated\nproof would cause: ","\nBesides helping in the completion of the proof, the automated theorem\nprovers were also very instrumental in the finding of some novel\nresults. First, Gödel’s set of original assumptions was shown to\nbe inconsistent by LEO-II by proving that self-difference becomes an\nessential property of every entity; a re-formulation of the definition\nof essence due to Dana Scott—this involved the addition of a\nmissing conjunct, ϕX, in the definition—was shown\nby Nitpick to be consistent. Second, LEO-II and Satallax managed to\nprove C, T1 and T2 using only the logic system K and, moreover,\nNitpick found a counter-model for T3 in K thus showing that more\nlogical power is required to complete the rest of the proof. Third,\nusing LEO-II and Satallax, it is shown that the logic system KB\n(system K with the Brouwer axiom) is sufficient to establish the\nnecessity of God’s existence,\n□•∃•Xμ . gμ→σ X,\nwhich is a double-win for automated reasoning: a gain in logical\neconomy, and the deeper philosophical result of having effectively\ndismissed a major criticism against Gödel’s proof, namely his use\nof the stronger logic system S5. Fourth, the authors also prove in KB\nthat:","\n∀•ϕμ→σ .∀•Xμ . (gμ→σ X ⊃• (~•(p(μ→σ)→σ ϕ) ⊃• ~•(ϕX)))\n","\nas well as:","\n∀•Xμ .∀•Yμ . (gμ→σ X ⊃• (gμ→σ Y ⊃• X =• Y)),\n","\nthat is, that God is flawless and that monotheism holds, respectively.\nAt this point, it would be fair to say that any of these results would\nbe enough to vindicate the application of automated reasoning in exact\nphilosophy. Now, for the bad news followed by good news: Fifth, the\nformula\nsσ ⊃• □•sσ\ncan also be formally derived which is unfortunate since it implies\nthat there are no contingent truths and that everything is determined,\ni.e. there is no free will. However, the issue has been addressed by\nfollow-up work based on Fitting’s and Anderson’s variants of the\nontological argument (Fuenmayor & Benzmüller 2017, Fitting\n2002, Anderson 1990). ","\nLeibniz’s dream was to have a charateristica universalis and\ncalculus ratiocinator that would allow us to reason in\nmetaphysics and morals in much the same way as we do in geometry and\nanalysis; that is to say, to settle disputes between philosophers as\naccountants do: “To take pen in hand, sit down at the abacus\nand, having called in a friend if they want, say to each other: Let us\ncalculate!” From the above applications of automated reasoning,\none would agree with the researchers when they imply that these\nresults achieve, to some extent, Leibniz’s goal of a computational\nmetaphysics (Fitelson & Zalta 2007, Benzmüller & Paleo\n2014).\n","\nA nonmonotonic theorem prover can provide the basis for a\n“computational laboratory” in which to explore and\nexperiment with different models of artificial rationality; the\ntheorem prover can be used to equip an artificial rational agent with\nan inference engine to reason and gain information about the world. In\nsuch procedural epistemology, a rational agent is\ndefeasible (i.e. nonmonotonic) in the sense that new reasoning leads\nto the acceptance of new beliefs but also to the retraction of\npreviously held beliefs in the presence of new information. At any\ngiven point in time, the agent holds a set of justified beliefs but\nthis set is open to revision and is in a continuous set of flux as\nfurther reasoning is conducted. This model better reflects our\naccepted notion of rationality than a model in which all the beliefs\nare warranted, i.e. beliefs that once are attained are never\nretracted. Actually, a set of warranted beliefs can be seen as\njustified beliefs “in the limit”, that is, as the ultimate\nepistemic goal in the agent’s search for true knowledge about its\nworld. (Pollock 1995) offers the following definition: ","\nA set is defeasible enumerable iff there is an effective computable\nfunction f such that for each n,\nf(n) is a recursive set and the following two\nconditions hold ","\nTo compare the concepts, if A is recursively enumerable then\nthere is a sequence of recursive sets Ai such that\neach Ai is a subset of A with each\nAi growing monotonically, approaching A\nin the limit. But if A is only defeasibly enumerable then the\nAi’s still approach A in the limit but\nmay not be subsets of A and approach A\nintermittently from above and below. The goal of the OSCAR Project\n(Pollock 1989) is to construct a general theory of rationality and\nimplement it in an artificial computer-based rational agent. As such,\nthe system uses a defeasible automated reasoner that operates\naccording to the maxim that the set of warranted beliefs should be\ndefeasible enumerable. OSCAR has been in the making for some time and\nthe application of automated nonmonotonic reasoning has also been used\nto extend its capabilities to reason defeasibly about perception and\ntime, causation, and decision-theoretic planning (Pollock 2006). "],"subsection_title":"4.6 Logic and Philosophy"},{"content":["\nOne of the main goals of automated reasoning has been the automation\nof mathematics. An early attempt at this was Automath (de Bruijn 1968)\nwhich was the first computer system used to check the correctness of\nproofs and whole books of mathematics, including Landau’s\nGrundlagen der Analysis (van Benthem Jutting 1977). Automath\nhas been superseded by more modern and capable systems, most notably\nMizar. The Mizar system (Trybulec 1979, Muzalewski 1993) is based on\nTarski-Grothendieck set theory and, like Automath, consists of a\nformal language which is used to write mathematical theorems and their\nproofs. Once a proof is written in the language, it can be checked\nautomatically by Mizar for correctness. Mizar proofs are formal but\nquite readable, can refer to definitions and previously proved\ntheorems and, once formally checked, can be added to the growing Mizar\nMathematical Library (MML) (Bancerek & Rudnicki 2003, Bancerek\net al. 2018). As of June 2018, MML contained about 12,000\ndefinitions and 59,000 theorems. The Mizar language is a subset of\nstandard English as used in mathematical texts and is highly\nstructured to ensure the production of rigorous and semantically\nunambiguous texts. Here’s a sample proof in Mizar of the existence of\na rational number xy where x and\ny are irrational: ","\nExamples of proofs that have been checked by Mizar include the\nHahn-Banach theorem, the Brouwer fixed-point theorem, Kőnig’s lemma,\nthe Jordan curve theorem, and Gödel’s completeness theorem.\nRudnicki (2004) discusses the challenges of formalizing Witt’s proof\nof the Wedderburn theorem: Every finite division ring is commutative.\nThe theorem was formulated easily using the existing formalizations\navailable in MML but the proof demanded further entries into the\nlibrary to formalize notions and facts from algebra, complex numbers,\nintegers, roots of unity, cyclotomic polynomials, and polynomials in\ngeneral. It took several months of effort to supply the missing\nmaterial to the MML library but, once in place, the proof was\nformalized and checked correct in a matter of days. Clearly, a\nrepository of formalized mathematical facts and definitions is a\nprerequisite for more advanced applications. The QED Manifesto (Boyer\net al. 1994, Wiedijk 2007) has such aim in mind and there is\nmuch work to do: Mizar has the largest such repository but even after\n30 years of work “it is minuscule with respect to the body of\nestablished mathematics” (Rudnicki 2004). This last remark\nshould be construed as a call to increase the effort toward this\nimportant aspect in the automation of mathematics. ","\nMizar’s goal is to assist the practitioner in the formalization of\nproofs and to help check their correctness; other systems aim at\nfinding the proofs themselves. Geometry has been a target of early\nautomated proof-finding efforts. Chou (1987) proves over 500 geometry\ntheorems using the algebraic approach offered by Wu’s method and the\nGröbner basis method by representing hypotheses and conclusions\nas polynomial equations. Quaife (1992) provides another early effort\nto find proofs in first-order mathematics: over 400 theorems in\nNeumann-Bernays-Gödel set theory, over 1,000 theorems in\narithmetic, a number of theorems in Euclidian geometry, and\nGödel’s incompleteness theorems. The approach is best described\nas semi-automatic or “interactive” with the user providing\na significant amount of input to guide the theorem-proving effort.\nThis is no surprise since, as one applies automated reasoning systems\ninto richer areas of mathematics, the systems take more on the role of\nproof assistants than theorem provers. This is because in richer\nmathematical domains the systems need to reason about theories and\nhigher-order objects which in general takes them deeper into the\nundecidable. Interactive theorem proving is arguably\nthe “killer” application of automated reasoning in\nmathematics and much effort is being expended in the building of\nincreasingly capable reasoning systems that can act as assistants to\nprofessional mathematicians. The proof assistant Isabelle/HOL provides\nthe user with an environment in which to conduct proofs expressed in a\nstructured, yet human-readable, higher-order logic language and which\nincorporates a number of facilities that increase the user’s\nproductivity, automates proof-verification and proof-finding tasks,\nand provides a modular way for the user to build and manage theory\nhierarchies (Ballarin 2014). ","\nDifferent proof assistants offer different capabilities measured by\ntheir power at automating reasoning tasks, supported logic, object\ntyping, size of mathematical library, and readability of input and\noutput. A “canonical” proof which is not too trivial but\nnot too complex either can be used as a baseline for system\ncomparison, as done in (Wiedijk 2006) where the authors of seventeen\nreasoning systems are tasked with establishing the irrationality of\n√2. The systems discussed are certainly more capable than this\nand some have been used to assist in the formalization of far more\nadvanced proofs such as Erdös-Selberg’s proof of the Prime Number\nTheorem (about 30,000 lines in Isabelle), the formalization of the\nFour Color Theorem (60,000 lines in Coq), and the Jordan Curve Theorem\n(75,000 lines in HOL Light). A milestone in interactive theorem\nproving was reached in 2012 when, after six-years of effort and using\nthe Coq proof assistant, George Gonthier and his team completed the\nformal verification of the 255-page proof of the Feit-Thompson\ntheorem, also known as the Odd Order Theorem, a major step in the\nclassification of finite simple groups. ","\nThe above notwithstanding, automated reasoning has had a small impact\non the practice of doing mathematics and there is a number of reasons\ngiven for this. One reason is that automated theorem provers are not\nsufficiently powerful to attempt the kind of problems mathematicians\ntypically deal with; that their current power is, at best, at the\nlevel of first-year undergraduate mathematics and still far from\nleading edge mathematical research. While it is true that current\nsystems cannot prove completely on their own problems at this level of\ndifficulty we should remember that the goal is to build reasoning\nsystems so that “eventually machines are to be an aid to\nmathematical research and not a substitute for it” (Wang 1960).\nWith this in mind, and while the automated reasoning community\ncontinues to try to meet the grand challenge of building increasingly\npowerful theorem provers, mathematicians can draw now some of the\nbenefits offered by current systems, including assistance in\ncompleting proof gaps or formalizing and checking the correctness of\nproposed proofs. Indeed, the latter may be an application that could\nhelp address some real issues currently being faced by the\nmathematical community. Consider the announcement by Daniel Goldston\nand Cem Yildrim of a proof of the Twin Prime Conjecture where,\nalthough experts initially agreed that the proof was correct, an\ninsurmountable error was found shortly after. Or, think about the case\nof Hales’ proof of the Kepler Conjecture which asserts that no packing\nof congruent balls in Euclidean 3-space has density greater than the\nface-centered cubic packing. Hales’ proof consists of about 300 pages\nof text and a large number of computer calculations. After four years\nof hard work, the 12-person panel assigned by Annals of\nMathematics to the task of verifying the proof still had genuine\ndoubts about its correctness. Thomas Hales, for one, took upon himself\nto formalize his proof and have it checked by an automated proof\nassistant with the aim of convincing others of its correctness (Hales\n2005b, in Other Internet Resources). His task was admittedly heavy but\nthe outcome is potentially very significant to both the mathematical\nand automated reasoning communities. All eyes were on Hales and his\nformal proof as he announced the completion of the Flyspeck\nproject (Hales 2014, in Other Internet Resources; Hales 2015) having\nconstructed a formal proof of the conjecture using the Isabelle and\nHOL Light automated proof assistants: “In truth, my motivations\nfor the project are far more complex than a simple hope of removing\nresidual doubt from the minds of few referees. Indeed, I see formal\nmethods as fundamental to the long-term growth of mathematics.”\n(Hales 2006).","\nChurch 1936a, 1936b and Turing 1936 imply the existence of\ntheorems whose shortest proof is very large, and the proof of the Four\nColor Theorem in (Appel & Haken 1977), the Classification of Simple\nGroups in (Gorenstein 1982), and the proof of the Kepler Conjecture in\n(Hales 2005a) may well be just samples of what is yet to come. As\n(Bundy 2011) puts it: “As important theorems requiring larger\nand larger proofs emerge, mathematics faces a dilemma: either these\ntheorems must be ignored or computers must be used to assist with\ntheir proofs.”","\nThe above remarks also counter another argument given for not using\nautomated theorem provers: Mathematicians enjoy proving theorems, so\nwhy let machines take away the fun? The answer to this is, of course,\nthat mathematicians can have even more fun by letting the machine do\nthe more tedious and menial tasks: “It is unworthy of excellent\nmen to lose hours like slaves in the labour of calculation which could\nsafely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used” (G. W.\nLeibniz, New Essays Concerning Human Understanding). If still\nnot convinced, just consider the sobering prospect of having to\nmanually check the 23,000 inequalities used in Hales’ proof!","\nAnother reason that is given for the weak acceptance of automated\nreasoning by the mathematical community is that the programs are not\nto be trusted since they may contain bugs—software\ndefects—and hence may produce erroneous results. Formally\nverifying automated reasoning programs will help ameliorate this,\nparticularly in the case of proof checkers. Proving programs correct\nis no easy task but the same is true about proving theorems in\nadvanced mathematics: Gonthier proved correct the programs used in the\nformalization of his proof of the Four Color Theorem, but he spent far\nmore effort formalizing all the graph theory that was part of the\nproof. So ironically enough, it turns out that at least in this case,\nand surely there are others, “it is actually easier to verify\nthe correctness of the program than to verify the correctness of the\npen-and-paper mathematics” (Wiedijk 2006). For theorem provers\nand model finders, a complementary strategy would be to verify the\nprograms’ results as opposed to the programs themselves. Paraphrasing\n(Slaney 1994): It does not matter to the mathematician how many\ndefects a program may have as long as the proof (or model) it outputs\nis correct. So, the onus is in the verification of results, whether\nproduced by machine or man, and checking them by independent parties\n(where of course the effort may well use automated checkers) should\nincrease the confidence on the validity of the proofs. ","\nIt is often argued that automated proofs are too long and detailed.\nThat a proof can be expressed in more elementary steps is in principle\nvery beneficial since this allows a mathematician to request a proof\nassistant justify its steps in terms of simpler ones. But proof\nassistants should also allow the opposite, namely to abstract detail\nand present results and their justifications using the higher-level\nconcepts, language, and notation mathematicians are accustomed to.\nExploiting the hierarchical structure of proofs as done in (Denney\n2006) is a step in this direction but more work along these lines is\nneeded. Having the proof assistant work at the desired level of\ngranularity provides more opportunity for insight during the proof\ndiscovery process. This is an important consideration since\nmathematicians are equally interested in gaining understanding from\ntheir proofs as in establishing facts. ","\n(Bundy 2011) alludes to a deadlock that is preventing the wider\nadoption of theorem provers by the mathematical community: On the one\nhand, the mathematicians need to use the proof assistants to build a\nlarge formal library of mathematical results. But, on the other hand,\nthey do not want to use the provers since there is no such library of\npreviously proved results they can build upon. To break the impasse, a\nnumber of applications are proposed of which assisting the\nmathematician in the search of previously proved theorems is of\nparticular promise. During its history, mathematics has accumulated a\nhuge number of theorems and the number of mathematical results\ncontinues to grow dramatically. In 2010, Zentralblatt MATH\ncovered about 120,000 new publications (Wegner 2011). Clearly, no\nindividual researcher can be acquainted with all this mathematical\nknowledge and it will be increasingly difficult to cope with one’s\never-growing area of specialty unless assisted with automated\ntheorem-proving tools that can search in intelligent ways for\npreviously proved results of interest. An alternative approach to this\nproblem is for mathematicians to tap into each other’s knowledge as\nenabled in computational social systems like polymath and\nmathoverflow. The integration of automated reasoning tools\ninto such social systems would increase the effectiveness of their\ncollective intelligence by supporting “the combination of\nprecise formal deductions and the more informal loose interaction seen\nin mathematical practice” (Martin & Pease 2013, in Other\nInternet Resources). ","\nDue to real pressing needs from industry, some applications of\nautomated reasoning in pure and applied mathematics are more of\nnecessity than choice. After having worked on the formalization of\nsome elementary real analysis to verify hardware-based floating point\ntrigonometric functions, (Harrison 2006, Harrison 2000) mentions the\nfurther need to formalize more pure mathematics—italics\nare his—to extend his formalization to power series for\ntrigonometric functions and basic theorems about Diophantine\napproximations. Harrison finds it surprising that “such\nextensive mathematical developments are used simply to verify that a\nfloating point tangent function satisfies a certain error bound”\nand, from this remark, one would expect there are other industrial\napplications that will demand more extensive formalizations.","\nAlbeit not at the rate originally anticipated, automated reasoning is\nfinding applications in mathematics. Of these, formal verification of\nproofs is of special significance since it not only provides a viable\nmechanism to check proofs that humans alone could not but it also has,\nas a side effect, the potential to redefine what it would take for a\nproof to be accepted as such. As the use of automated reasoning\nassistants becomes more widespread one can envision their use\nfollowing a certain methodical order: First, automated reasoning tools\nare used for theory exploration and discovery. Then, having identified\nsome target problem, the practitioner works interactively with an\nautomated assistant to find proofs and establish facts. Finally, an\nautomated proof checker is used to check the correctness of all final\nproofs prior to being submitted for publication and being made\navailable to the rest of the mathematical community via the creation\nof new entries in a repository of formalized mathematics. It is indeed\na matter of time before the application of automated proof assistants\nbecomes an everyday affair in the life of the mathematician; it is the\ngrand challenge of the automated reasoning community to make it happen\nsooner than later."],"subsection_title":"4.7 Mathematics"},{"content":["\nSince its inception, the field of automated theorem proving has had\nimportant applications in the larger field of artificial intelligence\n(AI). Automated deduction is at the heart of AI applications like\nlogic programming (see section 4.1 Logic Programming, in this\narticle) where computation is equated with deduction; robotics and\nproblem solving (Green 1969) where the steps to achieve goals are\nsteps extracted from proofs; deductive databases (Minker et\nal. 2014) where factual knowledge is expressed as atomic clauses\nand inference rules, and new facts are inferred by deduction; expert\nsystems (Giarratano & Riley 2004) where human expertise in a given\ndomain (e.g. blood infections) is captured as a collection of IF-THEN\ndeduction rules and where conclusions (e.g. diagnoses) are obtained by\nthe application of the inference rules; and many others. An\napplication of automated reasoning in AI which is bound to have deep\nphilosophical implications is the increased use of BDI computational\nlogics for describing the beliefs, desires, and intentions of\nintelligent agents and multi-agent systems (Meyer 2014) and, in\nparticular, endowing future intelligent systems, such as\ndecision-support systems or robots, with legal and ethical behaviour.\nDeontic logic can be automated for the task (Furbach et al.\n2014) but given that there is no agreement on a universal system of\ndeontic logic, ethics “code designers” need a way to\nexperiment with the different deontic systems (i.e., to lay out axioms\nand see what conclusions follow from them) to help them identify the\ndesired ethic code for the specific application at hand;\n(Benzmüller et al. 2018) discusses an environment for this. If\nactual, physical, robots were to be used in these experiments, the\nterm “deontic laboratory” would be quite descriptive\nalbeit somewhat eerie.","\nRestricting the proof search space has always been a key consideration\nin the implementation of automated deduction, and traditional\nAI-approaches to search have been an integral part of theorem provers.\nThe main idea is to prevent the prover from pursuing unfruitful\nreasoning paths. A dual aspect of search is to try to look for a\npreviously proved result that could be useful in the completion of the\ncurrent proof. Automatically identifying those results is no easy task\nand it becomes less easy as the size of the problem domain, and the\nnumber of already established results, grows. This is not a happy\nsituation particularly in light of the growing trend to build large\nlibraries of theorems such as the Mizar Problems for Theorem Proving\n(MPTP) (Urban et al. 2010, Bancerek & Rudnicki 2003) or the\nIsabelle/HOL mathematical library (Meng & Paulson 2008), so\ndeveloping techniques for the discovery, evaluation, and selection of\nexisting suitable definitions, premises and lemmas in large libraries\nof formal mathematics as discussed in (Kühlwein et al.\n2012) is an important line of research. ","\nAmong many other methods, and in stark contrast to automated provers,\nmathematicians combine induction heuristics with deductive techniques\nwhen attacking a problem. The former helps them guide the\nproof-finding effort while the latter allows them to close proof gaps.\nAnd of course all this happens in the presence of the very large body\nof knowledge that the human possesses. For an automated prover, the\nanalogous counterpart to the mathematician’s body of knowledge is a\nlarge library like MPTP. An analogous approach to using inductive\nheuristics would be to endow the theorem prover with inductive,\ndata-driven, machine learning abilities. Urban & Vyskocil 2012\nrun a number of experiments to determine any gains that may result\nfrom such an approach. For this, they use MPTP and theorem provers\nlike E and SPASS enhanced with symbol-based machine learning\nmechanisms. A detailed presentation and statistical results can be\nfound in the above reference but in summary, and quoting the authors,\n“this experiment demonstrates a very real and quite unique\nbenefit of large formal mathematical libraries for conducting novel\nintegration of AI methods. As the machine learner is trained on\nprevious proofs, it recommends relevant premises from the large\nlibrary that (according to the past experience) should be useful for\nproving new conjectures.” Urban 2007 discusses MaLARea (a\nMachine Learner for Automated Reasoning), a meta-system that also\ncombines inductive and deductive reasoning methods. MaLARea is\nintended to be used in large theories, i.e. problems with a large\nnumber of symbols, definitions, premises, lemmas, and theorems. The\nsystem works in cycles where results proved deductively in a given\niteration are then used by the inductive machine-learning component to\nplace restrictions in the search space for the next theorem-proving\ncycle. Albeit simple in design, the first version of MaLARea solved\n142 problems out of 252 in the MPTP Challenge, outperforming the more\nseasoned provers E (89 problems solved) and SPASS (81 problems\nsolved).","\nBesides using large mathematical libraries, tapping into web-based\nsemantic ontologies is another possible source of knowledge. Pease\n& Sutcliffe 2007 discuss ways for making the SUMO ontology\nsuitable for first-order theorem proving, and describes work on\ntranslating SUMO into TPTP. An added benefit of successfully reasoning\nover large semantic ontologies is that this promotes the application\nof automated reasoning into other fields of science. Tapping into its\nfull potential, however, will require a closer alignment of methods\nfrom automated reasoning and artificial intelligence."],"subsection_title":"4.8 Artificial Intelligence"}]},{"main_content":["\nAutomated reasoning is a growing field that provides a healthy\ninterplay between basic research and application. Automated deduction\nis being conducted using a multiplicity of theorem-proving methods,\nincluding resolution, sequent calculi, natural deduction, matrix\nconnection methods, term rewriting, mathematical induction, and\nothers. These methods are implemented using a variety of logic\nformalisms such as first-order logic, type theory and higher-order\nlogic, clause and Horn logic, non-classical logics, and so on.\nAutomated reasoning programs are being applied to solve a growing\nnumber of problems in formal logic, mathematics and computer science,\nlogic programming, software and hardware verification, circuit design,\nexact philosophy, and many others. One of the results of this variety\nof formalisms and automated deduction methods has been the\nproliferation of a large number of theorem proving programs. To test\nthe capabilities of these different programs, selections of problems\nhave been proposed against which their performance can be measured\n(McCharen, Overbeek & Wos 1976, Pelletier 1986). The TPTP\n(Sutcliffe & Suttner 1998) is a library of such problems that is\nupdated on a regular basis. There is also a competition among\nautomated theorem provers held regularly at the CADE conference\n(Pelletier, Sutcliffe & Suttner 2002; Sutcliffe 2016, in Other\nInternet Resources); the problems for the competition are selected\nfrom the TPTP library. There is a similar library and competition for\nSMT solvers (Barret et al. 2013).","\nInitially, computers were used to aid scientists with their complex\nand often tedious numerical calculations. The power of the machines\nwas then extended from the numeric into the symbolic domain where\ninfinite-precision computations performed by computer algebra programs\nhave become an everyday affair. The goal of automated reasoning has\nbeen to further extend the machine’s reach into the realm of deduction\nwhere they can be used as reasoning assistants in helping their users\nestablish truth through proof."],"section_title":"5. Conclusion","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nA problem being presented to an automated reasoning program consists\\nof two main items, namely a statement expressing the particular\\nquestion being asked called the problem’s conclusion,\\nand a collection of statements expressing all the relevant information\\navailable to the program—the problem’s\\nassumptions. Solving a problem means proving the conclusion\\nfrom the given assumptions by the systematic application of rules of\\ndeduction embedded within the reasoning program. The problem solving\\nprocess ends when one such proof is found, when the program is able to\\ndetect the non-existence of a proof, or when it simply runs out of\\nresources.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Introduction\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nA first important consideration in the design of an automated\\nreasoning program is to delineate the class of problems that the\\nprogram will be required to solve—the problem\\ndomain. The domain can be very large, as would be the case\\nfor a general-purpose theorem prover for first-order logic, or be more\\nrestricted in scope as in a special-purpose theorem prover for\\nTarski’s geometry, or the modal logic K. A typical approach in the\\ndesign of an automated reasoning program is to provide it first with\\nsufficient logical power (e.g., first-order logic) and then further\\ndemarcate its scope to the particular domain of interest defined by a\\nset of domain axioms. To illustrate, EQP, a\\ntheorem-proving program for equational logic, was used to solve an\\nopen question in Robbins algebra (McCune 1997): Are all Robbins\\nalgebras Boolean? For this, the program was provided with the\\naxioms defining a Robbins algebra:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n\\n (A1)\\n x + y = y + x\\n (commutativity) \\n\\n (A2)\\n (x + y) + z = x +\\n(y + z)\\n (associativity) \\n\\n (A3)\\n −(−(x + y) + −(x +\\n−y)) = x\\n (Robbins equation) \\n\\n\",\n \"\\nThe program was then used to show that a characterization of Boolean\\nalgebra that uses Huntington’s equation,\",\n \"\\n−(−x + y) + −(−x +\\n−y) = x,\\n\",\n \"\\nfollows from the axioms. We should remark that this problem is\\nnon-trivial since deciding whether a finite set of equations provides\\na basis for Boolean algebra is undecidable, that is, it does not\\npermit an algorithmic representation; also, the problem was attacked\\nby Robbins, Huntington, Tarski and many of his students with no\\nsuccess. The key step was to establish that all Robbins algebras\\nsatisfy \",\n \"\\n∃x∃y(x + y =\\nx),\\n\",\n \"\\nsince it was known that this formula is a sufficient condition for a\\nRobbins algebra to be Boolean. When EQP was supplied with this piece\\nof information, the program provided invaluable assistance by\\ncompleting the proof automatically. \",\n \"\\nA special-purpose theorem prover does not draw its main benefit by\\nrestricting its attention to the domain axioms but from the fact that\\nthe domain may enjoy particular theorem-proving techniques which can\\nbe hardwired—coded—within the reasoning program itself and\\nwhich may result in a more efficient logic implementation. Much of\\nEQP’s success at settling the Robbins question can be attributed to\\nits built-in associative-commutative inference mechanisms.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.1 Problem Domain\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nA second important consideration in the building of an automated\\nreasoning program is to decide (1) how problems in its domain will be\\npresented to the reasoning program; (2) how they will actually be\\nrepresented internally within the program; and, (3) how the solutions\\nfound—completed proofs—will be displayed back to the user.\\nThere are several formalisms available for this, and the choice is\\ndependent on the problem domain and the underlying deduction calculus\\nused by the reasoning program. The most commonly used formalisms\\ninclude standard first-order logic, typed λ-calculus, and\\nclausal logic. We take up clausal logic here and assume that the\\nreader is familiar with the rudiments of first-order logic; for the\\ntyped λ-calculus the reader may want to check Church 1940.\\nClausal logic is a quantifier-free variation of first-order logic and\\nhas been the most widely used notation within the automated reasoning\\ncommunity. Some definitions are in order: A term is a\\nconstant, a variable, or a function whose arguments are themselves\\nterms. For example, a, x, f(x),\\nand h(c,f(z),y) are all\\nterms. A literal is either an atomic formula, e.g.\\nF(x), or the negation of an atomic formula, e.g.\\n~R(x,f(a)). Two literals are\\ncomplementary if one is the negation of the other. A\\nclause is a (possibly empty) finite disjunction of\\nliterals l1∨ … ∨\\nln where no literal appears more than once in the\\nclause (that is, clauses can be alternatively treated as sets of\\nliterals). Ground terms, ground literals, and ground\\nclauses have no variables. The empty clause,\\n[ ], is the clause having no literals and, hence, is\\nunsatisfiable—false under any interpretation. Some examples:\\n~R(a,b), and F(a) ∨\\n~R(f(x),b) ∨\\nF(z) are both examples of clauses but only the\\nformer is ground. The general idea is to be able to express a\\nproblem’s formulation as a set of clauses or, equivalently, as a\\nformula in conjunctive normal form (CNF), that is, as\\na conjunction of clauses.\",\n \"\\nFor formulas already expressed in standard logic notation, there is a\\nsystematic two-step procedure for transforming them into conjunctive\\nnormal form. The first step consists in re-expressing a formula into a\\nsemantically equivalent formula in prenex normal\\nform,\\n(Θx1)…(Θxn)α(x1,…,xn), consisting of a\\nstring of quantifiers\\n(Θx1)…(Θxn)\\nfollowed by a quantifier-free expression\\nα(x1,…,xn) called\\nthe matrix. The second step in the transformation\\nfirst converts the matrix into conjunctive normal form by using\\nwell-known logical equivalences such as DeMorgan’s laws, distribution,\\ndouble-negation, and others; then, the quantifiers in front of the\\nmatrix, which is now in conjunctive normal form, are dropped according\\nto certain rules. In the presence of existential quantifiers, this\\nlatter step does not always preserve equivalence and requires the\\nintroduction of Skolem functions whose role is to\\n“simulate” the behaviour of existentially quantified\\nvariables. For example, applying the skolemizing process to the\\nformula\",\n \"\\n∀x∃y∀z∃u∀v[R(x,y,v)\\n∨ ~K(x,z,u,v)]\\n\",\n \"\\nrequires the introduction of a one-place and two-place Skolem\\nfunctions, f and g respectively, resulting in the\\nformula\",\n \"\\n∀x∀z∀v[R(x,f(x),v)\\n∨\\n~K(x,z,g(x,z),v)]\\n\",\n \"\\nThe universal quantifiers can then be removed to obtain the final\\nclause, R(x,f(x),v) ∨\\n~K(x,z,g(x,z),v)\\nin our example. The Skolemizing process may not preserve equivalence\\nbut maintains satisfiability, which is enough for clause-based\\nautomated reasoning.\",\n \"\\nAlthough clausal form provides a more uniform and economical\\nnotation—there are no quantifiers and all formulas are\\ndisjunctions—it has certain disadvantages. One drawback is the\\nincrease in the size of the resulting formula when transformed from\\nstandard logic notation into clausal form. The increase in size is\\naccompanied by an increase in cognitive complexity that makes it\\nharder for humans to read proofs written with clauses. Another\\ndisadvantage is that the syntactic structure of a formula in standard\\nlogic notation can be used to guide the construction of a proof but\\nthis information is completely lost in the transformation into clausal\\nform.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.2 Language Representation\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nA third important consideration in the building of an automated\\nreasoning program is the selection of the actual deduction calculus\\nthat will be used by the program to perform its inferences. As\\nindicated before, the choice is highly dependent on the nature of the\\nproblem domain and there is a fair range of options available:\\nGeneral-purpose theorem proving and problem solving (first-order\\nlogic, simple type theory), program verification (first-order logic),\\ndistributed and concurrent systems (modal and temporal logics),\\nprogram specification (intuitionistic logic), hardware verification\\n(higher-order logic), logic programming (Horn logic), constraint\\nsatisfaction (propositional clausal logic), computational metaphysics\\n(higher-order modal logic), and others.\",\n \"\\nA deduction calculus consists of a set of logical axioms and a\\ncollection of deduction rules for deriving new formulas from\\npreviously derived formulas. Solving a problem in the program’s\\nproblem domain then really means establishing a particular formula\\nα—the problem’s conclusion—from the extended set\\nΓ consisting of the logical axioms, the domain axioms, and the\\nproblem assumptions. That is, the program needs to determine if\\nΓ entails α, Γ⊨ α. How the program\\ngoes about establishing this semantic fact depends, of course, on the\\ncalculus it implements. Some programs may take a very\\ndirect route and attempt to establish that\\nΓ ⊨ α by actually constructing a\\nstep-by-step proof of α from Γ. If successful, this shows\\nof course that Γ derives—proves—α, a fact we\\ndenote by writing Γ ⊢ α. Other reasoning\\nprograms may instead opt for a more indirect approach\\nand try to establish that Γ ⊨ α by showing\\nthat Γ ∪ {~α} is inconsistent which, in turn, is shown\\nby deriving a contradiction, ⊥, from the set Γ ∪\\n{~α}. Automated systems that implement the former approach\\ninclude natural deduction systems; the latter approach is used by\\nsystems based on resolution, sequent deduction, and matrix connection\\nmethods.\",\n \"\\nSoundness and completeness are two (metatheoretical) properties of a\\ncalculus that are particularly important for automated deduction.\\nSoundness states that the rules of the calculus are\\ntruth-preserving. For a direct calculus this means that if\\nΓ ⊢ α then\\nΓ ⊨ α. For indirect calculi, soundness\\nmeans that if Γ∪{~α} ⊢ ⊥ then\\nΓ ⊨ α. Completeness in a\\ndirect calculus states that if Γ ⊨ α then\\nΓ ⊢ α. For indirect calculi, the\\ncompleteness property is expressed in terms of\\nrefutations since one establishes that\\nΓ ⊨ α by showing the existence of a proof,\\nnot of α from Γ, but of ⊥ from\\nΓ∪{~α}. Thus, an indirect calculus is\\nrefutation complete if Γ ⊨ α\\nimplies Γ∪{~α} ⊢ ⊥. Of the two\\nproperties, soundness is the most desirable. An incomplete calculus\\nindicates that there are entailment relations that cannot be\\nestablished within the calculus. For an automated reasoning program\\nthis means, informally, that there are true statements that the\\nprogram cannot prove. Incompleteness may be an unfortunate affair but\\nlack of soundness is a truly problematic situation since an unsound\\nreasoning program would be able to generate false conclusions from\\nperfectly true information.\",\n \"\\nIt is important to appreciate the difference between a logical\\ncalculus and its corresponding implementation in a reasoning program.\\nThe implementation of a calculus invariably involves making some\\nmodifications to the calculus and this results, strictly speaking, in\\na new calculus. The most important modification to the original\\ncalculus is the “mechanization” of its deduction rules,\\nthat is, the specification of the systematic way in which the rules\\nare to be applied. In the process of doing so, one must exercise care\\nto preserve the metatheoretical properties of the original\\ncalculus.\",\n \"\\nTwo other metatheoretical properties of importance to automated\\ndeduction are decidability and complexity. A calculus is\\ndecidable if it admits an algorithmic representation,\\nthat is, if there is an algorithm that, for any given Γ and\\nα, it can determine in a finite amount of time the answer,\\n“Yes” or “No”, to the question “Does\\nΓ ⊨ α?” A calculus may be\\nundecidable in which case one needs to determine which decidable\\nfragment to implement. The time-space complexity of a\\ncalculus specifies how efficient its algorithmic representation is.\\nAutomated reasoning is made the more challenging because many calculi\\nof interest are not decidable and have poor complexity measures\\nforcing researchers to seek tradeoffs between deductive power versus\\nalgorithmic efficiency.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Deduction Calculi\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nOf the many calculi used in the implementation of reasoning programs,\\nthe ones based on the resolution principle have been\\nthe most popular. Resolution is modeled after the chain rule (of which\\nModus Ponens is a special case) and essentially states that from\\np ∨ q and ~q ∨ r one can\\ninfer p ∨ r. More formally, let C\\n− l denote the clause C with the literal\\nl removed. Assume that C1 and\\nC2 are ground clauses containing, respectively, a\\npositive literal l1 and a negative literal\\n~l2 such that l1 and\\n~l2 are complementary. Then, the rule of\\nground resolution states that, as a result of\\nresolving C1 and\\nC2, one can infer (C1 −\\nl1) ∨ (C2 −\\n~l2):\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n\\n \\nC1 C2\\n\\n (ground resolution) \\n\\n (C1 − l1) ∨\\n(C2 − ~l2) \\n\\n\",\n \"\\nHerbrand’s theorem (Herbrand 1930) assures us that\\nthe non-satisfiability of any set of clauses, ground or not,\\ncan be established by using ground resolution. This is a very\\nsignificant result for automated deduction since it tells us that if a\\nset Γ is not satisfied by any of the infinitely many\\ninterpretations, this fact can be determined in finitely many\\nsteps. Unfortunately, a direct implementation of ground resolution\\nusing Herbrand’s theorem requires the generation of a vast number of\\nground terms making this approach hopelessly inefficient. This issue\\nwas effectively addressed by generalizing the ground resolution rule\\nto binary resolution and by introducing the notion of\\nunification (Robinson 1965a). Unification allows resolution proofs to\\nbe “lifted” and be conducted at a more general level;\\nclauses only need to be instantiated at the moment where they are to\\nbe resolved. Moreover, the clauses resulting from the instantiation\\nprocess do not have to be ground instances and may still contain\\nvariables. The introduction of binary resolution and unification is\\nconsidered one of the most important developments in the field of\\nautomated reasoning.\",\n \"\\nA unifier of two expressions—terms or\\nclauses—is a substitution that when applied to the expressions\\nmakes them equal. For example, the substitution σ given by\",\n \"\\nσ := {x ← b, y ←\\nb, z ← f(a,b)}\\n\",\n \"\\nis a unifier for \",\n \"\\nR(x,f(a,y)) and\\nR(b,z)\\n\",\n \"\\nsince when applied to both expressions it makes them equal: \",\n \"\\n\\n\\n\\n R(x,f(a,y))σ\\n\\n \\n =\\n \\n R(b,f(a,b))\\n\\n\\n \\n \\n =\\n \\n R(b,z)σ \\n\\n\",\n \"\\nA most general unifier (mgu) produces the most\\ngeneral instance shared by two unifiable expressions. In the previous\\nexample, the substitution {x ← b, y\\n← b, z ←\\nf(a,b)} is a unifier but not an mgu;\\nhowever, {x ← b, z ←\\nf(a,y)} is an mgu. Note that unification\\nattempts to “match” two expressions and this fundamental\\nprocess has become a central component of most automated deduction\\nprograms, resolution-based and otherwise.\\nTheory-unification is an extension of the unification\\nmechanism that includes built-in inference capabilities. For example,\\nthe clauses R(g(a,b),x)\\nand R(g(b,a),d) do not\\nunify but they AC-unify, where AC-unification is unification with\\nbuilt-in associative and commutative rules such as\\ng(a,b) = g(b,a).\\nShifting inference capabilities into the unification mechanism adds\\npower but at a price: The existence of an mgu for two unifiable\\nexpressions may not be unique (there could actually be infinitely\\nmany), and the unification process becomes undecidable in general.\\n\",\n \"\\nLet C1 and C2 be two clauses\\ncontaining, respectively, a positive literal l1\\nand a negative literal ~l2 such that\\nl1 and l2 unify with mgu\\nθ. Then, \",\n \"\\n\\n\\n\\n \\nC1 C2\\n\\n (binary resolution) \\n\\n (C1θ −\\nl1θ) ∨ (C2θ\\n− ~l2θ) \\n\\n\",\n \"\\nby binary resolution; the clause (C1θ\\n− l1θ) ∨\\n(C2θ − ~l2θ)\\nis called a binary resolvent of\\nC1 and C2. \",\n \"\\nIf two or more literals occurring in a clause C share an mgu\\nθ then Cθ is a factor of\\nC. For example, in R(x,a) ∨\\n~K(f(x),b) ∨\\nR(c,y) the literals\\nR(x,a) and\\nR(c,y) unify with mgu {x ←\\nc, y ← a} and, hence,\\nR(c,a) ∨\\n~K(f(c),b) is a factor of the\\noriginal clause. \",\n \"\\nLet C1and C2 be two clauses.\\nThen, a resolvent obtained by\\nresolution from C1 and\\nC2 is defined as: (a) a binary resolvent of\\nC1 and C2; (b) a binary\\nresolvent of C1 and a factor of\\nC2; (c) a binary resolvent of a factor of\\nC1 and C2; or, (d) a binary\\nresolvent of a factor of C1 and a factor of\\nC2. \",\n \"\\nResolution proofs, more precisely refutations, are constructed by\\nderiving the empty clause [ ] from Γ ∪ {~α} using\\nresolution; this will always be possible if Γ ∪ {~α}\\nis unsatisfiable since resolution is refutation complete (Robinson\\n1965a). As an example of a resolution proof, we show that the set\\n{∀x(P(x) ∨\\nQ(x)), ∀x(P(x)\\n⊃\\nR(x)),∀x(Q(x)\\n⊃ R(x))}, denoted by Γ, entails the\\nformula ∃xR(x). The first step is to\\nfind the clausal form of Γ ∪\\n{~∃xR(x)}; the resulting clause set,\\ndenoted by S0, is shown in steps 1 to 4 in the\\nrefutation below. The refutation is constructed by using a\\nlevel-saturation method: Compute all the resolvents of the initial\\nset, S0, add them to the set and repeat the\\nprocess until the empty clause is derived. (This produces the sequence\\nof increasingly larger sets: S0,\\nS1, S2,…) The only\\nconstraint that we impose is that we do not resolve the same two\\nclauses more than once.\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n\\n S0\\n 1\\n P(x) ∨ Q(x)\\n Assumption \\n\\n \\n 2\\n ~P(x) ∨ R(x)\\n Assumption \\n\\n \\n 3\\n ~Q(x) ∨ R(x)\\n Assumption \\n\\n \\n 4\\n ~R(a)\\n Negate conclusion \\n\\n S1\\n 5\\n Q(x) ∨ R(x)\\n Res 1 2 \\n\\n \\n 6\\n P(x) ∨ R(x)\\n Res 1 3 \\n\\n \\n 7\\n ~P(a)\\n Res 2 4 \\n\\n \\n 8\\n ~Q(a)\\n Res 3 4 \\n\\n S2\\n 9\\n Q(a)\\n Res 1 7 \\n\\n \\n 10\\n P(a)\\n Res 1 8 \\n\\n \\n 11\\n R(x)\\n Res 2 6 \\n\\n \\n 12\\n R(x)\\n Res 3 5 \\n\\n \\n 13\\n Q(a)\\n Res 4 5 \\n\\n \\n 14\\n P(a)\\n Res 4 6 \\n\\n \\n 15\\n R(a)\\n Res 5 8 \\n\\n \\n 16\\n R(a)\\n Res 6 7 \\n\\n S3 \\n 17\\n R(a)\\n Res 2 10 \\n\\n \\n 18\\n R(a)\\n Res 2 14 \\n\\n \\n 19\\n R(a)\\n Res 3 9 \\n\\n \\n 20\\n R(a)\\n Res 3 13 \\n\\n \\n 21 \\n [ ]\\n Res 4 11 \\n\\n\",\n \"\\nAlthough the resolution proof is successful in deriving [ ], it\\nhas some significant drawbacks. To start with, the refutation is too\\nlong as it takes 21 steps to reach the contradiction, [ ]. This\\nis due to the naïve brute-force nature of the implementation. The\\napproach not only generates too many formulas but some are clearly\\nredundant. Note how R(a) is derived six times; also,\\nR(x) has more “information content” than\\nR(a) and one should keep the former and disregard\\nthe latter. Resolution, like all other automated deduction methods,\\nmust be supplemented by strategies aimed at improving the efficiency\\nof the deduction process. The above sample derivation has 21 steps but\\nresearch-type problems command derivations with thousands or hundreds\\nof thousands of steps.\",\n \"\\nThe successful implementation of a deduction calculus in an automated\\nreasoning program requires the integration of search strategies that\\nreduce the search space by pruning unnecessary deduction paths. Some\\nstrategies remove redundant clauses or tautologies as soon as they\\nappear in a derivation. Another strategy is to remove more specific\\nclauses in the presence of more general ones by a process known as\\nsubsumption (Robinson 1965a). Unrestricted\\nsubsumption, however, does not preserve the refutation completeness of\\nresolution and, hence, there is a need to restrict its applicability\\n(Loveland 1978). Model elimination (Loveland 1969)\\ncan discard a sentence by showing that it is false in some model of\\nthe axioms. The subject of model generation has received much\\nattention as a complementary process to theorem proving. The method\\nhas been used successfully by automated reasoning programs to show the\\nindependence of axioms sets and to determine the existence of discrete\\nmathematical structures meeting some given criteria. \",\n \"\\nInstead of removing redundant clauses, some strategies prevent the\\ngeneration of useless clauses in the first place. The\\nset-of-support strategy (Wos, Carson & Robinson\\n1965) is one of the most powerful strategies of this kind. A subset\\nT of the set S, where S is initially\\nΓ ∪ {~α}, is called a set of support\\nof S iff S − T is satisfiable.\\nSet-of-support resolution dictates that the resolved clauses are not\\nboth from S − T. The motivation behind\\nset-of-support is that since the set Γ is usually satisfiable it\\nmight be wise not to resolve two clauses from Γ against each\\nother. Hyperresolution (Robinson 1965b) reduces the\\nnumber of intermediate resolvents by combining several resolution\\nsteps into a single inference step.\",\n \"\\nIndependently co-discovered, linear resolution\\n(Loveland 1970, Luckham 1970) always resolves a clause against the\\nmost recently derived resolvent. This gives the deduction a simple\\n“linear” structure affording a straightforward\\nimplementation; yet, linear resolution preserves refutation\\ncompleteness. Using linear resolution we can derive the empty clause\\nin the above example in only eight steps:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n\\n 1 \\n P(x) ∨ Q(x)\\n Assumption \\n\\n 2\\n ~P(x) ∨ R(x)\\n Assumption \\n\\n 3\\n ~Q(x) ∨ R(x)\\n Assumption \\n\\n 4\\n ~R(a)\\n Negated conclusion \\n\\n 5\\n ~P(a)\\n Res 2 4 \\n\\n 6\\n Q(a)\\n Res 1 5 \\n\\n 7\\n R(a)\\n Res 3 6 \\n\\n 8\\n [ ]\\n Res 4 7 \\n\\n\",\n \"\\nWith the exception of unrestricted subsumption, all the strategies\\nmentioned so far preserve refutation completeness. Efficiency is an\\nimportant consideration in automated reasoning and one may sometimes\\nbe willing to trade completeness for speed. Unit\\nresolution and input resolution are two such\\nrefinements of linear resolution. In the former, one of the resolved\\nclauses is always a literal; in the latter, one of the resolved\\nclauses is always selected from the original set to be refuted. Albeit\\nefficient, neither strategy is complete. Ordering strategies impose\\nsome form of partial ordering on the predicate symbols, terms,\\nliterals, or clauses occurring in the deduction. Ordered\\nresolution treats clauses not as sets of literals but as\\nsequences—linear orders—of literals. Ordered resolution is\\nextremely efficient but, like unit and input resolution, is not\\nrefutation complete. To end, it must be noted that some strategies\\nimprove certain aspects of the deduction process at the expense of\\nothers. For instance, a strategy may reduce the size of the proof\\nsearch space at the expense of increasing, say, the length of the\\nshortest refutations. A taxonomy and detailed presentation of\\ntheorem-proving strategies can be found in (Bonacina 1999).\",\n \"\\nThere are several automated reasoning programs that are based on\\nresolution, or refinements of resolution. Otter (succeeded by Prover4)\\nwas a driving force in the development of automated reasoning (Wos,\\nOverbeek, Lusk & Boyle 1984) but it has been superseded by more\\ncapable programs like Vampire (Voronkov 1995, Kovács &\\nVoronkov 2013). Resolution also provides the underlying\\nlogico-computational mechanism for the popular logic programming\\nlanguage Prolog (Clocksin & Mellish 1981).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.1 Resolution\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nHilbert-style calculi (Hilbert and Ackermann 1928) have been\\ntraditionally used to characterize logic systems. These calculi\\nusually consist of a few axiom schemata and a small number of rules\\nthat typically include modus ponens and the rule of substitution.\\nAlthough they meet the required theoretical requisites (soundness,\\ncompleteness, etc.) the approach at proof construction in these\\ncalculi is difficult and does not reflect standard practice. It was\\nGentzen’s goal “to set up a formalism that reflects as\\naccurately as possible the actual logical reasoning involved in\\nmathematical proofs” (Gentzen 1935). To carry out this task,\\nGentzen analyzed the proof-construction process and then devised two\\ndeduction calculi for classical logic: the natural deduction calculus,\\nNK, and the sequent calculus, LK.\\n(Gentzen actually designed NK first and then introduced LK to pursue\\nmetatheoretical investigations). The calculi met his goal to a large\\nextent while at the same time managing to secure soundness and\\ncompleteness. Both calculi are characterized by a relatively larger\\nnumber of deduction rules and a simple axiom schema. Of the two\\ncalculi, LK is the one that has been most widely used in\\nimplementations of automated reasoning programs, and it is the one\\nthat we will discuss first; NK will be discussed in the next\\nsection.\",\n \"\\nAlthough the application of the LK rules affect logic formulas, the\\nrules are seen as manipulating not logic formulas themselves but\\nsequents. Sequents are expressions of the form\\nΓ → Δ, where both Γ and Δ are (possibly\\nempty) sets of formulas. Γ is the sequent’s\\nantecedent and Δ its\\nsuccedent. Sequents can be interpreted thus: Let\\nI be an interpretation. Then,\",\n \"\\nI satisfies the sequent Γ →\\nΔ (written as: I\\n⊨ Γ→Δ) iff\\n\\neither I ⊭ α (for some\\nα ∈ Γ) or I ⊨\\nβ (for some β ∈ Δ).\\n\",\n \"\\nIn other words, \",\n \"\\nI ⊨Γ → Δ iff\\nI ⊨ (α1\\n& … & αn) ⊃\\n(β1 ∨ … ∨ βn),\\nwhere α1 & … &\\nαn is the iterated conjunction of the\\nformulas in Γ and β1 ∨ … ∨\\nβn is the iterated disjunction of those in\\nΔ.\\n\",\n \"\\nIf Γ or Δ are empty then they are respectively valid or\\nunsatisfiable. An axiom of LK is a sequent Γ\\n→ Δ where Γ ∩ Δ ≠ ∅. Thus, the\\nrequirement that the same formula occurs at each side of the →\\nsign means that the axioms of LK are valid, for no interpretation can\\nthen make all the formulas in Γ true and, simultaneously, make\\nall those in Δ false. LK has two rules per logical connective,\\nplus one extra rule: the cut rule. \",\n \"\\nThe sequents above a rule’s line are called the rule’s\\npremises and the sequent below the line is the rule’s\\nconclusion. The quantification rules ∃→ and\\n→∀ have an eigenvariable condition that restricts their\\napplicability, namely that a must not occur in Γ,\\nΔ or in the quantified sentence. The purpose of this restriction\\nis to ensure that the choice of parameter, a, used in the\\nsubstitution process is completely “arbitrary”.\",\n \"\\nProofs in LK are represented as trees where each node in the tree is\\nlabeled with a sequent, and where the original sequent sits at the\\nroot of the tree. The children of a node are the premises of the rule\\nbeing applied at that node. The leaves of the tree are labeled with\\naxioms. Here is the LK-proof of\\n∃xR(x) from the set\\n{∀x(P(x) ∨\\nQ(x)), ∀x(P(x)\\n⊃\\nR(x)),∀x(Q(x)\\n⊃ R(x))}. In the tree below, Γ stands for\\nthis set:\",\n \"\\nIn our example, all the leaves in the proof tree are labeled with\\naxioms. This establishes the validity of Γ →\\n∃xR(x) and, hence, the fact that\\nΓ ⊨ ∃xR(x). LK\\ntakes an indirect approach at proving the conclusion and this is an\\nimportant difference between LK and NK. While NK constructs an actual\\nproof (of the conclusion from the given assumptions), LK instead\\nconstructs a proof that proves the existence of a proof (of the\\nconclusion from the assumptions). For instance, to prove that α\\nis entailed by Γ, NK constructs a step-by-step proof of α\\nfrom Γ (assuming that one exists); in contrast, LK first\\nconstructs the sequent Γ → α which then attempts to\\nprove valid by showing that it cannot be made false. This is done by\\nsearching for a counterexample that makes (all the sentences in)\\nΓ true and makes α false: If the search fails then a\\ncounterexample does not exist and the sequent is therefore valid. In\\nthis respect, proof trees in LK are actually refutation proofs. Like\\nresolution, LK is refutation complete: If\\nΓ ⊨ α then the sequent Γ →\\nα has a proof tree.\",\n \"\\nAs it stands, LK is unsuitable for automated deduction and there are\\nsome obstacles that must be overcome before it can be efficiently\\nimplemented. The reason is, of course, that the statement of the\\ncompleteness of LK only has to assert, for each entailment relation,\\nthe existence of a proof tree but a reasoning program has the more\\ndifficult task of actually having to construct one. Some of the main\\nobstacles: First, LK does not specify the order in which the rules\\nmust be applied in the construction of a proof tree. Second, and as a\\nparticular case of the first problem, the premises in the rules\\n∀→ and →∃ rules inherit the quantificational\\nformula to which the rule is applied, meaning that the rules can be\\napplied repeatedly to the same formula sending the proof search into\\nan endless loop. Third, LK does not indicate which formula must be\\nselected next in the application of a rule. Fourth, the quantifier\\nrules provide no indication as to what terms or free variables must be\\nused in their deployment. Fifth, and as a particular case of the\\nprevious problem, the application of a quantifier rule can lead into\\nan infinitely long tree branch because the proper term to be used in\\nthe instantiation never gets chosen. Fortunately, as we will hint at\\nbelow each of these problems can be successfully addressed.\",\n \"\\nAxiom sequents in LK are valid, and the conclusion of a rule is valid\\niff its premises are. This fact allows us to apply the LK rules in\\neither direction, forwards from axioms to conclusion, or backwards\\nfrom conclusion to axioms. Also, with the exception of the cut rule,\\nall the rules’ premises are subformulas of their respective\\nconclusions. For the purposes of automated deduction this is a\\nsignificant fact and we would want to dispense with the cut rule;\\nfortunately, the cut-free version of LK preserves its refutation\\ncompleteness (Gentzen 1935). These results provide a strong case for\\nconstructing proof trees in a backwards fashion; indeed, by working\\nthis way a refutation in cut-free LK gets increasingly simpler as it\\nprogresses since subformulas are simpler than their parent formulas.\\nMoreover, and as far as propositional rules go, the new subformulas\\nentered into the tree are completely dictated by the cut-free LK\\nrules. Furthermore, and assuming the proof tree can be brought to\\ncompletion, branches eventually end up with atoms and the presence of\\naxioms can be quickly determined. Another reason for working backwards\\nis that the truth-functional fragment of cut-free LK is\\nconfluent in the sense that the order in which the\\nnon-quantifier rules are applied is irrelevant: If there is a proof,\\nregardless of what you do, you will run into it! To bring the\\nquantifier rules into the picture, things can be arranged so that all\\nrules have a fair chance of being deployed: Apply, as far as possible,\\nall the non-quantifier rules before applying any of the quantifier\\nrules. This takes care of the first and second obstacles, and it is no\\ntoo difficult to see how the third one would now be handled. The\\nfourth and fifth obstacles can be addressed by requiring that the\\nterms to be used in the substitutions be suitably selected from the\\nHerbrand universe (Herbrand 1930).\",\n \"\\nThe use of sequent-type calculi in automated theorem proving was\\ninitiated by efforts to mechanize mathematics (Wang 1960). At the\\ntime, resolution captured most of the attention of the automated\\nreasoning community but during the 1970s some researchers started to\\nfurther investigate non-resolution methods (Bledsoe 1977), prompting a\\nfrutiful and sustained effort to develop more human-oriented theorem\\nproving systems (Bledsoe 1975, Nevins 1974). Eventually, sequent-type\\ndeduction gained momentum again, particularly in its re-incarnation as\\nanalytic tableaux (Fitting 1990). The method of\\ndeduction used in tableaux is essentially cut-free LK’s with sets used\\nin lieu of sequents.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.2 Sequent Deduction\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAlthough LK and NK are both commonly labeled as “natural\\ndeduction” systems, it is the latter which better deserves the\\ntitle due to its more natural, human-like, approach to proof\\nconstruction. The rules of NK are typically presented as acting on\\nstandard logic formulas in an implicitly understood context, but they\\nare also commonly given in the literature as acting more explicitly on\\n“judgements”, that is, expressions of the form\\nΓ ⊢ α where Γ is a set of formulas\\nand α is a formula. This form is typically understood as making\\nthe metastatement that there is a proof of α from Γ\\n(Kleene 1962). Following Gentzen 1935 and Prawitz 1965 here we take\\nthe former approach. The system NK has no logical axioms and provides\\ntwo introduction-elimination rules for each logical connective:\",\n \"\\nA few remarks: First, the expression\\n[α — γ] represents the fact that α\\nis an auxiliary assumption in the proof of γ that eventually\\ngets discharged, i.e. discarded. For example, ∃E tells us that\\nif in the process of constructing a proof one has already derived\\n∃xα(x) and also β with\\nα(a/x) as an auxiliary assumption then the\\ninference to β is allowed. Second, the eigenparameter,\\na, in ∃E and ∀I must be foreign to the premises,\\nundischarged—“active”—assumptions, to the\\nrule’s conclusion and, in the case of ∃E, to\\n∃xα(x). Third, ⊥ is shorthand for\\ntwo contradictory formulas, β and ~β. Finally, NK is\\ncomplete: If Γ ⊨ α then there is a\\nproof of α from Γ using the rules of NK.\",\n \"\\nAs in LK, proofs constructed in NK are represented as trees with the\\nproof’s conclusion sitting at the root of the tree, and the problem’s\\nassumptions sitting at the leaves. (Proofs are also typically given as\\nsequences of judgements, Γ ⊢ α, running\\nfrom the top to the bottom of the printed page.) Here is a natural\\ndeduction proof tree of ∃xR(x) from\\n∀x(P(x) ∨\\nQ(x)), ∀x(P(x)\\n⊃ R(x)) and\\n∀x(Q(x) ⊃\\nR(x)):\",\n \"\\nAs in LK, a forward-chaining strategy for proof construction is not\\nwell focused. So, although proofs are read forwards, that is,\\nfrom leaves to root or, logically speaking, from assumptions to\\nconclusion, that is not the way in which they are typically\\nconstructed. A backward-chaining strategy implemented by\\napplying the rules in reverse order is more effective. Many of the\\nobstacles that were discussed above in the implementation of sequent\\ndeduction are applicable to natural deduction as well. These issues\\ncan be handled in a similar way, but natural deduction introduces some\\nissues of its own. For example, as suggested by the ⊃-Introduction\\nrule, to prove a goal of the form α ⊃ β one could\\nattempt to prove β on the assumption that α. But note that\\nalthough the goal α ⊃ β does not match the conclusion\\nof any other introduction rule, it matches the conclusion of all\\nelimination rules and the reasoning program would need to\\nconsider those routes too. Similarly to forward-chaining, here there\\nis the risk of setting goals that are irrelevant to the proof and that\\ncould lead the program astray. To wit: What prevents a program from\\nentering the never-ending process of building, say, larger and larger\\nconjunctions? Or, what is there to prevent an uncontrolled chain of\\nbackward applications of, say, ⊃-Elimination? Fortunately, NK\\nenjoys the subformula property in the sense that each\\nformula entering into a natural deduction proof can be restricted to\\nbeing a subformula of Γ ∪ Δ ∪ {α}, where\\nΔ is the set of auxiliary assumptions made by the ~-Elimination\\nrule. By exploiting the subformula property a natural deduction\\nautomated theorem prover can drastically reduce its search space and\\nbring the backward application of the elimination rules under control\\n(Portoraro 1998, Sieg & Byrnes 1996). Further gains can be realized\\nif one is willing to restrict the scope of NK’s logic to its\\nintuitionistic fragment where every proof has a normal form in the\\nsense that no formula is obtained by an introduction rule and then is\\neliminated by an elimination rule (Prawitz 1965).\",\n \"\\nImplementations of automated theorem proving systems using NK\\ndeduction have been motivated by the desire to have the program reason\\nwith precisely the same proof format and methods employed by the human\\nuser. This has been particularly true in the area of education where\\nthe student is engaged in the interactive construction of formal\\nproofs in an NK-like calculus working under the guidance of a theorem\\nprover ready to provide assistance when needed (Portoraro 1994, Suppes\\n1981). Other, research-oriented, theorem provers true to the spirit of\\nNK exist (Pelletier 1998) but are rare.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.3 Natural Deduction\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe name of the matrix connection method (Bibel 1981) is indicative of\\nthe way it operates. The term “matrix” refers to the form\\nin which the set of logic formulas expressing the problem is\\nrepresented; the term “connection” refers to the way the\\nmethod operates on these formulas. To illustrate the method at work,\\nwe will use an example from propositional logic and show that\\nR is entailed by P ∨ Q, P ⊃\\nR and Q ⊃ R. This is done by\\nestablishing that the formula\",\n \"\\n(P ∨ Q) & (P ⊃ R) &\\n(Q ⊃ R) & ~R\\n\",\n \"\\nis unsatisfiable. To do this, we begin by transforming it into\\nconjunctive normal form: \",\n \"\\n(P ∨ Q) & (~P ∨ R) &\\n(~Q ∨ R) & ~R\\n\",\n \"\\nThis formula is then represented as a matrix, one conjunct per row\\nand, within a row, one disjunct per column:\",\n \"\\nThe idea now is to explore all the possible vertical paths running\\nthrough this matrix. A vertical path is a set of\\nliterals selected from each row in the matrix such that each literal\\ncomes from a different row. The vertical paths:\",\n \"\\nA path is complementary if it contains two literals\\nwhich are complementary. For example, Path 2 is complementary since it\\nhas both P and ~P but so is Path 6 since it contains\\nboth R and ~R. Note that as soon as a path includes\\ntwo complementary literals there is no point in pursuing the path\\nsince it has itself become complementary. This typically allows for a\\nlarge reduction in the number of paths to be inspected. In any event,\\nall the paths in the above matrix are complementary and this fact\\nestablishes the unsatisfiability of the original formula. This is the\\nessence of the matrix connection method. The method can be extended to\\npredicate logic but this demands additional logical apparatus:\\nSkolemnization, variable renaming, quantifier duplication,\\ncomplementarity of paths via unification, and simultaneous\\nsubstitution across all matrix paths (Bibel 1981, Andrews 1981).\\nVariations of the method have been implemented in reasoning programs\\nin higher-order logic (Andrews 1981) and non-classical logics (Wallen\\n1990).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.4 The Matrix Connection Method\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nEquality is an important logical relation whose behavior within\\nautomated deduction deserves its own separate treatment.\\nEquational logic and, more generally, term\\nrewriting treat equality-like equations as rewrite\\nrules, also known as reduction or\\ndemodulation rules. An equality statement like\\nf(a)= a allows the simplification of a term\\nlike g(c,f(a)) to\\ng(c,a). However, the same equation also has\\nthe potential to generate an unboundedly large term:\\ng(c,f(a)),\\ng(c,f(f(a))),\\ng(c,f(f(f(a)))),\\n… . What distinguishes term rewriting from equational logic is\\nthat in term rewriting equations are used as unidirectional reduction\\nrules as opposed to equality which works in both directions. Rewrite\\nrules have the form t1 ⇒\\nt2 and the basic idea is to look for terms\\nt occurring in expressions e such that t\\nunifies with t1 with unifier θ so that the\\noccurrence t1θ in eθ can be\\nreplaced by t2θ. For example, the rewrite\\nrule x + 0 ⇒ x allows the rewriting of\\nsucc(succ(0) + 0) as\\nsucc(succ(0)).\",\n \"\\nTo illustrate the main ideas in term rewriting, let us explore an\\nexample involving symbolic differentiation (the example and ensuing\\ndiscussion are adapted from Chapter 1 of Baader & Nipkow 1998). Let\\nder denote the derivative respect to x, let\\ny be a variable different from x, and let u\\nand v be variables ranging over expressions. We define the\\nrewrite system:\",\n \"\\nAgain, the symbol ⇒ indicates that a term matching the left-hand\\nside of a rewrite rule should be replaced by the rule’s right-hand\\nside. To see the differentiation system at work, let us compute the\\nderivative of x × x respect to x,\\nder(x × x):\",\n \"\\nAt this point, since none of the rules (R1)–(R4) applies, no\\nfurther reduction is possible and the rewriting process ends. The\\nfinal expression obtained is called a normal form,\\nand its existence motivates the following question: Is there an\\nexpression whose reduction process will never terminate when applying\\nthe rules (R1)–(R4)? Or, more generally: Under what conditions a\\nset of rewrite rules will always stop, for any given expression, at a\\nnormal form after finitely many applications of the rules? This\\nfundamental question is called the termination\\nproblem of a rewrite system, and we state without proof that the\\nsystem (R1)–(R4) meets the termination condition.\",\n \"\\nThere is the possibility that when reducing an expression, the set of\\nrules of a rewrite system could be applied in more than one way. This\\nis actually the case in the system (R1)–(R4) where in the\\nreduction of der(x × x) we could have\\napplied R1 first to the second sub-expression in (x ×\\nder(x)) + (der(x) ×\\nx), as shown below:\",\n \"\\nFollowing this alternative course of action, the reduction terminates\\nwith the same normal form as in the previous case. This fact, however,\\nshould not be taken for granted: A rewriting system is said to be\\n(globally) confluent if and only if independently of\\nthe order in which its rules are applied every expression always ends\\nup being reduced to its one and only normal form. It can be shown that\\n(R1)–(R4) is confluent and, hence, we are entitled to say:\\n“Compute the derivative of an expression” (as\\nopposed to simply “a” derivative). Adding more\\nrules to a system in an effort to make it more practical can have\\nundesired consequences. For example, if we add the rule\",\n \"\\nto (R1)–(R4) then we will be able to further reduce certain\\nexpressions but at the price of losing confluency. The following\\nreductions show that der(x + 0) now has two normal\\nforms: the computation\",\n \"\\ngives one normal form, and\",\n \"\\ngives another. Adding the rule\",\n \"\\nwould allow the further reduction of 1 + der(0) to 1 + 0 and\\nthen, by R5, to 1. Although the presence of this new rule actually\\nincreases the number of alternative\\npaths—der(x + 0) can now be reduced in four\\npossible ways—they all end up with the same normal form, namely\\n1. This is no coincidence as it can be shown that (R6) actually\\nrestores confluency. This motivates another fundamental question:\\nUnder what conditions can a non-confluent system be made into an\\nequivalent confluent one? The Knuth-Bendix completion\\nalgorithm (Knuth & Bendix 1970) gives a partial answer to this\\nquestion.\",\n \"\\nTerm rewriting, like any other automated deduction method, needs\\nstrategies to direct its application. Rippling (Bundy, Stevens &\\nHarmelen 1993, Basin & Walsh 1996) is a heuristic that has its\\norigins in inductive theorem-proving that uses annotations to\\nselectively restrict the rewriting process. The superposition calculus\\nis a calculus of equational first-order logic that combines notions\\nfrom first-order resolution and Knuth-Bendix ordering equality.\\nSuperposition is refutation complete (Bachmair & Ganzinger 1994) and\\nis at the heart of a number of theorem provers, most notably the E\\nequational theorem prover (Schulz 2004) and Vampire (Voronkov\\n1995).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.5 Term Rewriting\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nMathematical induction is a very important technique of theorem\\nproving in mathematics and computer science. Problems stated in terms\\nof objects or structures that involve recursive definitions or some\\nform of repetition invariably require mathematical induction for their\\nsolving. In particular, reasoning about the correctness of computer\\nsystems requires induction and an automated reasoning program that\\neffectively implements induction will have important applications.\",\n \"\\nTo illustrate the need for mathematical induction, assume that a\\nproperty φ is true of the number zero and also that if true of a\\nnumber then is true of its successor. Then, with our deductive\\nsystems, we can deduce that for any given number n, φ is\\ntrue of it, φ(n). But we cannot deduce that φ is true\\nof all numbers, ∀xφ(x); this inference\\nstep requires the rule of mathematical induction:\",\n \"\\nIn other words, to prove that ∀xα(x)\\none proves that α(0) is the case, and that\\nα(succ(n)) follows from the assumption that\\nα(n). The implementation of induction in a reasoning\\nsystem presents very challenging search control problems. The most\\nimportant of these is the ability to determine the particular way in\\nwhich induction will be applied during the proof, that is, finding the\\nappropriate induction schema. Related issues include selecting the\\nproper variable of induction, and recognizing all the possible cases\\nfor the base and the inductive steps.\",\n \"\\nNqthm (Boyer & Moore 1979) has been one of the most successful\\nimplementations of automated inductive theorem proving. In the spirit\\nof Gentzen, Boyer and Moore were interested in how people prove\\ntheorems by induction. Their theorem prover is written in the\\nfunctional programming language Lisp which is also the language in\\nwhich theorems are represented. For instance, to express the\\ncommutativity of addition the user would enter the Lisp expression\\n(EQUAL (PLUS X Y) (PLUS Y X)). Everything\\ndefined in the system is a functional term, including its basic\\n“predicates”: T, F,\\nEQUAL X Y, IF\\nX Y Z, AND, NOT,\\netc. The program operates largely as a black\\nbox, that is, the inner working details are hidden from the user;\\nproofs are conducted by rewriting terms that posses recursive\\ndefinitions, ultimately reducing the conclusion’s statement to the\\nT predicate. The Boyer-Moore theorem prover\\nhas been used to check the proofs of some quite deep theorems (Boyer,\\nKaufmann & Moore 1995). Lemma caching, problem statement\\ngeneralization, and proof planning are techniques particularly useful\\nin inductive theorem proving (Bundy, Harmelen & Hesketh 1991).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.6 Mathematical Induction\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Other Logics\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nHigher-order logic differs from first-order logic in that\\nquantification over functions and predicates is allowed. The statement\\n“Any two people are related to each other in one way or\\nanother” can be legally expressed in higher-order logic as\\n∀x∀y∃RR(x,y)\\nbut not in first-order logic. Higher-order logic is inherently more\\nexpressive than first-order logic and is closer in spirit to actual\\nmathematical reasoning. For example, the notion of set finiteness\\ncannot be expressed as a first-order concept. Due to its richer\\nexpressiveness, it should not come as a surprise that implementing an\\nautomated theorem prover for higher-order logic is more challenging\\nthan for first-order logic. This is largely due to the fact that\\nunification in higher-order logic is more complex than in the\\nfirst-order case: unifiable terms do not always posess a most general\\nunifier, and higher-order unification is itself undecidable. Finally,\\ngiven that higher-order logic is incomplete, there are always proofs\\nthat will be entirely out of reach for any automated reasoning\\nprogram.\",\n \"\\nMethods used to automate first-order deduction can be adapted to\\nhigher-order logic. TPS (Andrews et al. 1996, Andrews et\\nal. 2006) is a theorem proving system for higher-order logic that\\nuses Church’s typed λ-calculus as its logical representation\\nlanguage and is based on a connection-type deduction mechanism that\\nincorporates Huet’s unification algorithm (Huet 1975). As a sample of\\nthe capabilities of TPS, the program has proved automatically that a\\nsubset of a finite set is finite, the equivalence among several\\nformulations of the Axiom of Choice, and Cantor’s Theorem that a set\\nhas more subsets than members. The latter was proved by the program by\\nasserting that there is no onto function from individuals to sets of\\nindividuals, with the proof proceeding by a diagonal argument. HOL\\n(Gordon & Melham 1993) is another higher-order proof development\\nsystem primarily used as an aid in the development of hardware and\\nsoftware safety-critical systems. HOL is based on the LCF approach to\\ninteractive theorem proving (Gordon, Milner & Wadsworth 1979), and\\nit is built on the strongly typed functional programming language ML.\\nHOL, like TPS, can operate in automatic and interactive mode.\\nAvailability of the latter mode is welcomed since the most useful\\nautomated reasoning systems may well be those which place an emphasis\\non interactive theorem proving (Farmer, Guttman & Thayer 1993) and\\ncan be used as assistants operating under human guidance. (Harrison\\n2000) discusses the verification of floating-point algorithms and the\\nnon-trivial mathematical properties that are proved by HOL Light under\\nthe guidance of the user. Isabelle (Paulson 1994) is a generic,\\nhigher-order, framework for rapid prototyping of deductive systems.\\nObject logics can be formulated within Isabelle’s metalogic by using\\nits many syntactic and deductive tools. Isabelle also provides some\\nready-made theorem proving environments, including Isabelle/HOL,\\nIsabelle/ZF and Isabelle/FOL, which can be used as starting points for\\napplications and further development by the user (Paulson 1990, Nipkow\\n& Paulson 2002). Isabelle/ZF has been used to prove equivalent\\nformulations of the Axiom of Choice, formulations of the Well-Ordering\\nPrinciple, as well as the key result about cardinal arithmetic that,\\nfor any infinite cardinal κ, κ · κ = κ\\n(Paulson & Grabczewski 1996).\",\n \"\\nTo help prove higher-order theorems and discharge goals arising in\\ninteractive proofs, the user can ask Isabelle/HOL to invoke external\\nfirst-order provers through Sledgehammer (Paulson 2010), a subsystem\\naimed at combining the complementary capabilities of automated\\nreasoning systems of different types, including SMT solvers (see\\n4.2 SAT Solvers, in this article; Blanchette et al. 2013).\\nLEO-II (Benzmüller et al. 2015) is also a resolution-based\\nautomated theorem prover for higher-order logic that has been applied\\nin a wide array of problems, most notably in the automation of\\nGödel’s ontological proof of God’s existence (see 4.6 Logic\\nand Philosophy, in this article). \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.1 Higher-Order Logic\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nNon-classical logics (Haack 1978) such as modal logics, intuitionsitic\\nlogic, multi-valued logics, autoepistemic logics, non-monotonic\\nreasoning, commonsense and default reasoning, relevance logic,\\nparaconsistent logic, and so on, have been increasingly gaining the\\nattention of the automated reasoning community. One of the reasons has\\nbeen the natural desire to extend automated deduction techniques to\\nnew domains of logic. Another reason has been the need to mechanize\\nnon-classical logics as an attempt to provide a suitable foundation\\nfor artificial intelligence. A third reason has been the desire to\\nattack some problems that are combinatorially too large to be handled\\nby paper and pencil. Indeed, some of the work in automated\\nnon-classical logic provides a prime example of automated reasoning\\nprograms at work. To illustrate, the Ackerman Constant Problem asks\\nfor the number of non-equivalent formulas in the relevance logic R.\\nThere are actually 3,088 such formulas (Slaney 1984) and the number\\nwas found by “sandwiching” it between a lower and an upper\\nlimit, a task that involved constraining a vast universe of\\n20400 20-element models in search of those models that\\nrejected non-theorems in R. It is safe to say that this result would\\nhave been impossible to obtain without the assistance of an automated\\nreasoning program.\",\n \"\\nThere have been three basic approaches to automate the solving of\\nproblems in non-classical logic (McRobie 1991). One approach has been,\\nof course, to try to mechanize the non-classical deductive calculi.\\nAnother has been to simply provide an equivalent formulation of the\\nproblem in first-order logic and let a classical theorem prover handle\\nit. A third approach has been to formulate the semantics of the\\nnon-classical logic in a first-order framework where resolution or\\nconnection-matrix methods would apply. (Pelletier et al.\\n2017) describes an automated reasoning system for a paraconsistent\\nlogic that takes both “indirect” approaches, the\\ntranslational and the truth-value approach, to prove its theorems.\",\n \"\\nModal logics find extensive use in computing science as logics of\\nknowledge and belief, logics of programs, and in the specification of\\ndistributed and concurrent systems. Thus, a program that automates\\nreasoning in a modal logic such as K, K4, T, S4, or S5 would have\\nimportant applications. With the exception of S5, these logics share\\nsome of the important metatheoretical results of classical logic, such\\nas cut-elimination, and hence cut-free (modal) sequent calculi can be\\nprovided for them, along with techniques for their automation.\\nConnection methods (Andrews 1981, Bibel 1981) have played an important\\nrole in helping to understand the source of redundancies in the search\\nspace induced by these modal sequent calculi and have provided a\\nunifying framework not only for modal logics but also for\\nintuitionistic and classical logic as well (Wallen 1990). Current\\nefforts to automate modal logic reasoning revolve around the\\ntranslational approach mentioned above, namely to embed modal logic\\ninto classical logic and then use an existing automated reasoning\\nsystem for the latter to prove theorems of the former.\\n(Benzmüller & Paulson 2013) shows how to embed quantified modal\\nlogic into simple type theory, proves the soundness and completeness\\nof the embedding, and demonstrates with simple experiments how\\nexisting higher-order theorem provers can be used to automate proofs\\nin modal logic. The approach can be extended to higher-order modal\\nlogic as well (Benzmüller & Paleo 2015).\",\n \"\\nThere are different ways in which intuitionsitic logic can be\\nautomated. One is to directly implement the intuitionistic versions of\\nGentzen’s sequent and natural deduction calculi, LJ and NJ\\nrespectively. This approach inherits the stronger normalization\\nresults enjoyed by these calculi allowing for a more compact\\nmechanization than their classical counterparts. Another approach at\\nmechanizing intuitionistic logic is to exploit its semantic\\nsimilarities with the modal logic S4 and piggy back on an automated\\nimplementation of S4. Automating intuitionistic logic has applications\\nin software development since writing a program that meets a\\nspecification corresponds to the problem of proving the specification\\nwithin an intuitionistic logic (Martin-Löf 1982). A system that\\nautomated the proof construction process would have important\\napplications in algorithm design but also in constructive mathematics.\\nNuprl (Constable et al. 1986) is a computer system supporting\\na particular mathematical theory, namely constructive type theory, and\\nwhose aim is to provide assistance in the proof development process.\\nThe focus is on logic-based tools to support programming and on\\nimplementing formal computational mathematics. Over the years the\\nscope of the Nuprl project has expanded from\\n“proofs-as-programs” to “systems-as-theories”.\\nSimilar in spirit and based on the Curry-Howard isomorphism, the Coq\\nsystem formalizes its proofs in the Calculus of Inductive\\nConstructions, a λ-calculus with a rich system of types\\nincluding dependent types (Coquand & Huet 1988, Coquand &\\nPaulin-Mohring 1988). Like Nuprl, Coq is designed to assist in the\\ndevelopment of mathematical proofs as well as computer programs from\\ntheir formal specifications.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"3.2 Non-classical Logics\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Applications\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nLogic programming, particularly represented by the language\\nProlog (Colmerauer et al. 1973), is probably\\nthe most important and widespread application of automated theorem\\nproving. During the early 1970s, it was discovered that logic could be\\nused as a programming language (Kowalski 1974). What distinguishes\\nlogic programming from other traditional forms of programming is that\\nlogic programs, in order to solve a problem, do not explicitly state\\nhow a specific computation is to be performed; instead, a\\nlogic program states what the problem is and then delegates\\nthe task of actually solving it to an underlying theorem prover. In\\nProlog, the theorem prover is based on a refinement of resolution\\nknown as SLD-resolution. SLD-resolution is a\\nvariation of linear input resolution that incorporates a special rule\\nfor selecting the next literal to be resolved upon; SLD-resolution\\nalso takes into consideration the fact that, in the computer’s memory,\\nthe literals in a clause are actually ordered, that is, they form a\\nsequence as opposed to a set. A Prolog program\\nconsists of clauses stating known facts and rules. For example, the\\nfollowing clauses make some assertions about flight connections:\",\n \"\\nflight(toronto, london).\\n\\nflight(london,rome).\\n\\nflight(chicago,london).\\n\\nflight(X,Y) :– flight(X,Z) ,\\nflight(Z,Y).\\n\",\n \"\\nThe clause flight(toronto, london) is a fact while\\nflight(X,Y) :– flight(X,Z)\\n,\\nflight(Z,Y) is a rule, written by convention as a\\nreversed conditional (the symbol “:–” means\\n“if”; the comma means “and”; terms starting in\\nuppercase are variables). The former states that there is flight\\nconnection between Toronto and London; the latter states that there is\\na flight between cities X and Y if, for some city\\nZ, there is a flight between X and Z and\\none between Z and Y. Clauses in Prolog programs are\\na special type of Horn clauses having precisely one positive literal:\\nFacts are program clauses with no negative literals\\nwhile rules have at least one negative literal. (Note\\nthat in standard clause notation the program rule in the previous\\nexample would be written as flight(X,Y) ∨\\n~flight(X,Z) ∨ ~flight(Z,Y).)\\nThe specific form of the program rules is to effectively express\\nstatements of the form: “If these conditions over here are\\njointly met then this other fact will follow”. Finally, a\\ngoal is a Horn clause with no positive literals. The\\nidea is that, once a Prolog program Π has been written, we can then\\ntry to determine if a new clause γ, the goal, is entailed by\\nΠ, Π ⊨ γ; the Prolog prover does this by attempting\\nto derive a contradiction from Π ∪ {~γ}. We should remark\\nthat program facts and rules alone cannot produce a contradiction; a\\ngoal must enter into the process. Like input resolution,\\nSLD-resolution is not refutation complete for first-order logic but it\\nis complete for the Horn logic of Prolog programs. The fundamental\\ntheorem: If Π is a Prolog program and γ is the goal clause\\nthen Π ⊨ γ iff Π ∪ {~γ} ⊢\\n[ ] by SLD-resolution (Lloyd 1984).\",\n \"\\nFor instance, to find out if there is a flight from Toronto to Rome\\none asks the Prolog prover to see if the clause flight(toronto, rome)\\nfollows from the given program. To do this, the prover adds\\n~flight(toronto,rome) to the program clauses and attempts to derive\\nthe empty clause, [ ], by SLD-resolution:\",\n \"\\nThe conditional form of rules in Prolog programs adds to their\\nreadability and also allows reasoning about the underlying refutations\\nin a more friendly way: To prove that there is a flight between\\nToronto and Rome, flight(toronto,rome), unify this clause with the\\nconsequent flight(X,Y) of the fourth clause in the\\nprogram which itself becomes provable if both\\nflight(toronto,Z) and flight(Z,rome) can be proved.\\nThis can be seen to be the case under the substitution {Z\\n← london} since both flight(toronto,london) and\\nflight(london,rome) are themselves provable. Note that the theorem\\nprover not only establishes that there is a flight between Toronto and\\nRome but it can also come up with an actual itinerary,\\nToronto-London-Rome, by extracting it from the unifications used in\\nthe proof.\",\n \"\\nThere are at least two broad problems that Prolog must address in\\norder to achieve the ideal of a logic programming language. Logic\\nprograms consist of facts and rules describing what is true; anything\\nthat is not provable from a program is deemed to be false. In regards\\nto our previous example, flight(toronto,\\nboston) is not true since this literal cannot be deduced from\\nthe program. The identification of falsity with non-provability is\\nfurther exploited in most Prolog implementations by incorporating an\\noperator, not, that allows programmers to explicitly\\nexpress the negation of literals (or even subclauses) within a\\nprogram. By definition, not l succeeds if the literal\\nl itself fails to be deduced. This mechanism, known as\\nnegation-by-failure, has been the target of\\ncriticism. Negation-by-failure does not fully capture the standard\\nnotion of negation and there are significant logical differences\\nbetween the two. Standard logic, including Horn logic, is monotonic\\nwhich means that enlarging an axiom set by adding new axioms simply\\nenlarges the set of theorems derivable from it; negation-by-failure,\\nhowever, is non-monotonic and the addition of new\\nprogram clauses to an existing Prolog program may cause some goals to\\ncease from being theorems. A second issue is the control\\nproblem. Currently, programmers need to provide a fair amount\\nof control information if a program is to achieve acceptable levels of\\nefficiency. For example, a programmer must be careful with the order\\nin which the clauses are listed within a program, or how the literals\\nare ordered within a clause. Failure to do a proper job can result in\\nan inefficient or, worse, non-terminating program. Programmers must\\nalso embed hints within the program clauses to prevent the prover from\\nrevisiting certain paths in the search space (by using the\\ncut operator) or to prune them altogether (by using\\nfail). Last but not least, in order to improve their\\nefficiency, many implementations of Prolog do not implement\\nunification fully and bypass a time-consuming yet critical\\ntest—the so-called\\noccurs-check—responsible for checking the\\nsuitability of the unifiers being computed. This results in an unsound\\ncalculus and may cause a goal to be entailed by a Prolog program (from\\na computational point of view) when in fact it should not (from a\\nlogical point of view).\",\n \"\\nThere are variations of Prolog intended to extend its scope. By\\nimplementing a model elimination procedure, the Prolog Technology\\nTheorem Prover (PTTP) (Stickel 1992) extends Prolog into full\\nfirst-order logic. The implementation achieves both soundness and\\ncompleteness. Moving beyond first-order logic, λProlog (Miller\\n& Nadathur 1988) bases the language on higher-order constructive\\nlogic.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.1 Logic Programming\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe problem of determining the satisfiability of logic formulas has\\nreceived much attention by the automated reasoning community due to\\nits important applicability in industry. A propositional formula is\\nsatisfiable if there is an assignment of truth-values\\nto its variables that makes the formula true. For example, the\\nassignment (P ← true, Q ← true, R\\n← false) does not make (P ∨R) &\\n~Q true but (P ← true, Q ← false,\\nR ← false) does and, hence, the formula is satisfiable.\\nDetermining whether a formula is satisfiable or not is called the\\nBoolean Satisfiability Problem—SAT for\\nshort—and for a formula with n variables SAT can be\\nsettled thus: Inspect each of the 2n possible\\nassignments to see if there is at least one assignment that satisfies\\nthe formula, i.e. makes it true. This method is clearly complete: If\\nthe original formula is satisfiable then we will eventually find one\\nsuch satisfying assignment; but if the formula is contradictory (i.e.\\nnon-satisfiable), we will be able to determine this too. Just as\\nclearly, and particularly in this latter case, this search takes an\\nexponential amount of time, and the desire to conceive more efficient\\nalgorithms is well justified particularly because many computing\\nproblems of great practical importance such as graph-theoretic\\nproblems, network design, storage and retrieval, scheduling, program\\noptimization, and many others (Garey & Johnson 1979) can be\\nexpressed as SAT instances, i.e. as the SAT question of some\\npropositional formula representing the problem. Given that SAT is\\nNP-complete (Cook 1971) it is very unlikely that a polynomial\\nalgorithm exists for it; however, this does not preclude the existence\\nof sufficiently efficient algorithms for particular cases of SAT\\nproblems.\",\n \"\\nThe Davis-Putnam-Logemann-Loveland (DPLL) algorithm\\nwas one of the first SAT search algorithms (Davis & Putnam 1960;\\nDavis, Logemman & Loveland 1962) and is still considered one of the\\nbest complete SAT solvers; many of the complete SAT procedures in\\nexistence today can be considered optimizations and generalizations of\\nDPLL. In essence, DPLL search procedures proceed by considering ways\\nin which assignments can be chosen to make the original formula true.\\nFor example, consider the formula in CNF\",\n \"\\nP & ~Q & (~P ∨ Q ∨\\nR) & (P ∨ ~S)\\n\",\n \"\\nSince P is a conjunct, but also a unit clause, P\\nmust be true if the entire formula is to be true. Moreover, the value\\nof ~P does not contribute to the truth of ~P ∨\\nQ ∨ R and P ∨ ~S is true\\nregardless of S. Thus, the whole formula reduces to\",\n \"\\n~Q & (Q ∨ R)\\n\",\n \"\\nSimilarly, ~Q must be true and the formula further reduces\\nto\",\n \"\\nR\\n\",\n \"\\nwhich forces R to be true. From this process we can recover\\nthe assignment (P ← true, Q ← false,\\nR ← true, S ← false) proving that the\\noriginal formula is satisfiable. A formula may cause the algorithm to\\nbranch; the search through a branch reaches a dead end the moment a\\nclause is deemed false—a conflicting\\nclause—and all variations of the assignment that has\\nbeen partially constructed up to this point can be discarded. To\\nillustrate:\",\n \"\\nHence, the formula is satisfiable by the existence of (P\\n← false, Q ← true, R ← true). DPLL\\nalgorithms are made more efficient by strategies such as term\\nindexing (ordering of the formula variables in an\\nadvantageous way), chronological backtracking\\n(undoing work to a previous branching point if the process leads to a\\nconflicting clause), and conflict-driven learning\\n(determining the information to keep and where to backtrack). The\\ncombination of these strategies results in a large prune of the search\\nspace; for a more extensive discussion the interested reader is\\ndirected to Zhang & Malik 2002.\",\n \"\\nA quick back-envelope calculation reveals the staggering computing\\ntimes of (algorithms for) SAT-type problems represented by formulas\\nwith as little as, say, 60 variables. To wit: A problem represented as\\na Boolean formula with 10 variables that affords a linear solution\\ntaking one hundredth of a second to complete would take just four\\nhundredths and six hundredths of a second to complete if the formula\\nhad instead 40 and 60 variables respectively. In dramatic contrast, if\\nthe solution to the problem were exponential (say\\n2n) then the times to complete the job for 10, 40\\nand 60 variables would be respectively one thousandth of a second, 13\\ndays, and 365 centuries. It is a true testament to the ingenuity of\\nthe automated reasoning community and the power of current SAT-based\\nsearch algorithms that real-world problems with thousands of variables\\ncan be handled with reasonable efficency. Küchlin & Sinz 2000\\ndiscuss a SAT application in the realm of industrial automotive\\nproduct data management where 18,000 (elementary) Boolean formulas and\\n17,000 variables are used to express constraints on orders placed by\\ncustomers. As another example, Massacci & Marraro 2000 discuss\\nan application in logical cryptanalysis, that is, the verification of\\nproperties of cryptographic algorithms expressed as SAT problems. They\\ndemonstrate how finding a key with a cryptographic attack is analogous\\nto finding a model—assignment—for a Boolean formula; the\\nformula in their application encodes the commercial version of the U.S\\nData Encryption Standard (DES) with the encoding requiring 60,000\\nclauses and 10,000 variables.\",\n \"\\nAlthough SAT is conceptually very simple, its inner nature is not well\\nunderstood—there are no criteria that can be generally applied\\nto answer as to why one SAT problem is harder than another. It should\\nthen come as no surprise that algorithms that tend to do well on some\\nSAT instances do not perform so well on others, and efforts are being\\nspent in designing hybrid algorithmic solutions that combine the\\nstrength of complementary approaches—see Prasad, Biere &\\nGupta 2005 for an application of this hybrid approach in the\\nverification of hardware design.\",\n \"\\nRecent advances in SAT hybrid strategies coupled with supercomputing\\npower has allowed a team of three computing scientists to solve the\\nBoolean Pythagorean Triples Problem, a long-standing open question in\\nRamsey Theory: Can the set {1, 2,...} of natural numbers be divided\\ninto two parts with no part containing a triple\\n(a, b, c) such that a2\\n+ b2 = c2? Heule, Kullmann\\n& Marek 2016 proved that this cannot be done by showing that the\\nset {1, 2, … , n} can be so partitioned for n\\n= 7824 but that this is impossible for n ≥\\n7825. Expressing this deceptively simple question as a SAT problem\\nrequired close to 38,000 clauses and 13,000 variables with about half\\nof these going to represent that the problem is satisfiable when n =\\n7824 and the other half to represent that it is not when n = 7825; of\\nthe two, proving the latter was far more challenging since it demanded\\na proof of unsatisfiability, i.e. that no such partition exists. A\\nnaïve brute-force approach considering all 27825\\npossible two-part partitions was clearly out of the question and the\\nproblem was attacked by using “clever” algorithms within a\\nmulti-stage SAT-based framework for solving hard problems in\\ncombinatorics, consisting of five phases: Encode (encoding\\nthe problem as SAT formulas), Transform (optimizing the\\nencoding using clause elimination and symmetry breaking\\ntechniques), Split (dividing the problem effectively into\\nsubproblems using splitting heuristics), Solve (searching for\\nsatisfying assignments or their lack thereof using fast processing),\\nand Validate (validating the results of the earlier\\nphases). Of special importance was the application\\nof cube-and-conquer, a hybrid SAT strategy\\nparticularly effective for hard combinatorial problems. The strategy\\ncombines look-ahead with conflict-driven\\nclause-learning (CDCL), with the former\\naiming to construct small binary search trees using global heuristics\\nand the latter aiming to find short refutations using local\\nheuristics.\",\n \"\\nAfter splitting the problem into 106 hard subproblems\\n(known as “cubes”), these were handed down to 800 cores\\nworking in parallel on a Stampede supercomputer which, after\\n2 days of further splitting and CDCL clause-crunching, settled the\\nquestion and delivered a 200-terabyte proof validating the work. After\\ndeservedly celebrating this significant accomplishment of automated\\nreasoning, and after entertaining all the new applications that the\\nenhanced SAT method would afford (particularly in the areas of\\nhardware and software verification), we should then ask some questions\\nthat are of especial importance to mathematicians: Is there a more\\ninsightful way to establish this result that would involve more\\ntraditional and intellectually satisfying mathematical proof methods?\\nOr, as far as increasing our understanding of a given field\\n(combinatorics in this case), what is the value of settling a question\\nwhen no human can inspect the proof and hence get no insight from it?\\nEven the team responsible for the result admits that “the proofs\\nof unsatisfiability coming from SAT solvers are, from a human point of\\nview, a giant heap of random information (no direct understanding is\\ninvolved)”. The conjecture has been settled but we basically\\nhave no underlying idea what makes 7825 so special. Perhaps the real\\nvalue to be drawn from these considerations is that they lead us to\\nthink about the deeper question: What is it about the structure of a\\nspecific problem that makes it amenable to standard mathematical\\ntreatment as opposed to requiring a mindless brute-force approach?\\nWhile this question is being contemplated, SAT may provide the best line of attack on certain mathematical problems.\",\n \"\\nThe DPLL search procedure has been extended to quantified logic. MACE\\nis a popular program based on the DPLL algorithm that searches for\\nfinite models of first-order formulas with equality. As an example\\n(McCune 2001), to show that not all groups are commutative one can\\ndirect MACE to look for a model of the group axioms that also\\nfalsifies the commutation law or, equivalently, to look for a model\\nof:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n\\n (G1)\\n e · x = x\\n (left identity) \\n\\n (G2)\\n i (x) · x =\\ne\\n (left inverse) \\n\\n (G3)\\n (x · y) · z =\\nx · (y · z)\\n (associativity) \\n\\n (DC)\\n a · b ≠ b ·\\na\\n (denial of commutativity) \\n\\n\",\n \"\\nMACE finds a six-element model of these axioms, where · is\\ndefined as:\",\n \"\\nand where i are defined as:\",\n \"\\nThis example also illustrates, once again, the benefits of using an automated\\ndeduction system: How long would have taken the human researcher to\\ncome up with the above or a similar model? For more challenging\\nproblems, the program is being used as a practical complement to the\\nresolution-based theorem prover Prover9 (formerly Otter), with Prover9\\nsearching for proofs and MACE jointly looking for (counter) models. To\\nfind such models, MACE converts the first-order problem into a set of\\n\\\"flattened\\\" clauses which, for increasing model sizes, are\\ninstantiated into propositional clauses and solved as a SAT problem.\\nThe method has been implemented in other automated reasoning systems\\nas well, most notably in the Paradox model finder where the MACE-style\\napproach has been enhanced by four additional techniques resulting in\\nsome significant efficiency improvements (Claessen & Sörensson\\n2003): term definitions (to reduce the number of variables in\\nflattened clauses), static symmetric reduction (to reduce the number\\nof isomorphic models), sort inference (to apply symmetric reduction at\\na finer level) and incremental SAT (to reuse search information\\nbetween consecutive model sizes). The strategy of pairing the\\ncomplementary capabilities of separate automated reasoning systems has\\nbeen applied to higher-order logic too as exemplified by Nitpick, a\\ncounterexample generator for Isabelle/HOL (Blanchette & Nipkow\\n2010). Brown 2013 describes a theorem proving procedure for\\nhigher-order logic that uses SAT-solving to do most of the work; the\\nprocedure is a complete, cut-free, ground refutation calculus that\\nincorporates restrictions on instantiations and has been implemented\\nin the Satallax theorem prover (Brown 2012).\",\n \"\\nAn approach of great interest at solving SAT problems in first-order\\nlogic is Satisfiability Modulo Theory\\n(SMT) where the interpretation of symbols in the\\nproblem’s formulation is constrained by a background\\ntheory. For example, in linear arithmetic the function\\nsymbols are restricted to + and −. As another example, in the\\nextensional theory of arrays (McCarthy 1962) the array function\\nread(a, i) returns the value of the array\\na at index i, and write(a,\\ni, x) returns the array identical to a but\\nwhere the value of a at i is x. More\\nformally,\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n\\n ∀a : Array .\\n∀i,j : Index . ∀x :\\nValue . i = j →\\n\\n read(write(a, i,\\nx), j) = x (read-write\\naxiom 1) \\n\\n ∀a : Array .\\n∀i,j : Index . ∀x :\\nValue . i ≠ j →\\n\\n read(write(a, i,\\nx), j) = read(a, j) (read-write\\naxiom 2) \\n\\n ∀a,b : Array .\\n∀i : Index . a = b →\\nread(a, i) = read(b,\\ni) \\n\\n (extensionality) \\n\\n\",\n \"\\nIn the context of these axioms, an SMT solver would attempt to\\nestablish the satisfiability (or, dually, the validity) of a given\\nfirst-order formula, or thousands of formulas for that matter, such\\nas\",\n \"\\ni − j = 1 &\\nf(read(write(a, i, 2),\\nj + 1) = read(write(a, i,\\nf(i − j + 1)), i)\\n\",\n \"\\n(Ganzinger et al. 2004) discusses an approach to SMT called\\nDPLL(T) consisting of a general\\nDPLL(X) engine that works in conjunction with a solver\\nSolverT for background theory T. Bofill\\net al. (2008) present the approach in the setting of the theory of\\narrays, where the DPLL engine is responsible for enumerating\\npropositional models for the given formula whereas\\nSolverT checks whether these models are consistent\\nwith the theory of arrays. Their approach is sound and complete, and\\ncan be smoothly extended to multidimensional arrays.\",\n \"\\nSMT is particularly successful in verification applications, most\\nnotably software verification. Having improved the efficiency of SAT\\nsolvers with SMT, the effort is now on designing more efficient SMT\\nsolvers (de Moura 2007).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.2 SAT Solvers\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nTo prove automatically even the simplest mathematical facts requires a\\nsignificant amount of domain knowledge. As a rule, automated theorem\\nprovers lack such rich knowledge and attempt to construct proofs from\\nfirst principles by the application of elementary deduction rules.\\nThis approach results in very lengthy proofs (assuming a proof is\\nfound) with each step being justified at a most basic logical level.\\nLarger inference steps and a significant improvement in mathematical\\nreasoning capability can be obtained, however, by having a theorem\\nprover interact with a computer algebra system, also known as a\\nsymbolic computation system. A computer algebra\\nsystem is a computer program that assists the user with the\\nsymbolic manipulation and numeric evaluation of mathematical\\nexpressions. For example, when asked to compute the improper\\nintegral\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n\\n ∞\\n\\n∫\\n\\n0 \\n \\ne−a2t2cos2bt\\ndt \\n\\n\",\n \"\\na competent computer algebra system would quickly reply with the\\nanswer\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n\\n \\n\\n\\n\\n √π\\n\\n\\n 2a \\n \\n \\ne−b2/a2\\n\\n\\n\",\n \"\\nEssentially, the computer algebra system operates by taking the input\\nexpression entered by the user and successively applies to it a series\\nof transformation rules until the result no longer changes (see the\\nsection Term Rewriting in this article for more details).\\nThese transformation rules encode a significant amount of domain\\n(mathematical) knowledge making symbolic systems powerful tools in the\\nhands of applied mathematicians, scientists, and engineers trying to\\nattack problems in a wide variety of fields ranging from calculus and\\nthe solving of equations to combinatorics and number theory.\",\n \"\\nProblem solving in mathematics involves the interplay of deduction and\\ncalculation, with decision procedures being a reminder of the fuzzy\\ndivision between the two; hence, the integration of deductive and\\nsymbolic systems, which we coin here as Deductive Computer\\nAlgebra (DCA), is bound to be a fruitful combination.\\nAnalytica (Bauer, Clarke & Zhao 1998) is a theorem prover built on\\ntop of Mathematica, a powerful and popular computer algebra system.\\nBesides supplying the deductive engine, Analytica also extends\\nMathematica’s capabilities by defining a number of rewrite\\nrules—more precisely, identities about summations and\\ninequalities—that are missing in the system, as well as\\nproviding an implementation of Gosper’s algorithm for finding closed\\nforms of indefinite hypergeometric summations. Equipped with this\\nextended knowledge, Analytica can prove semi-automatically some\\nnontrivial theorems from real analysis, including a series of lemmas\\ndirectly leading to a proof of the Bernstein Approximation Theorem.\\nHere is the statement of the theorem simply to give the reader a sense\\nof the level of the mathematical richness we are dealing with:\",\n \"\\nBernstein Approximation Theorem.\\n\\nLet I = [0, 1] be the closed unit interval, f a real\\ncontinuous function on I, and\\nBn(x,f) the\\nnth Bernstein polynomial for f defined as\\n\\n\\n\\n Bn(x, f)\\n = \\n n\\n\\n∑\\n\\nk=0 \\n (\\n n\\n\\nk\\n )\\n f(k/n)xk(1\\n− x)n−k \\n Then, on the interval I, the sequence of Bernstein\\npolynomials for f converges uniformly to f.\\n\",\n \"\\nTo be frank, the program is supplied with key information to establish\\nthe lemmas that lead to this theorem but the amount and type of\\ndeductive work done by the program is certainly nontrivial. (Clarke\\n& Zhao 1994) provides examples of fully automated proofs using\\nproblems in Chapter 2 of Ramanujan’s Notebooks (Berndt 1985)\\nincluding the following example that the reader is invited to try.\\nShow that:\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n\\n Ar\\n\\n∑\\n\\nk=n+1 \\n \\n\\n\\n\\n 1\\n\\n\\n k \\n \\n = \\n r + 2\\n (\\n r\\n\\n∑\\n\\nk=1 \\n (r − k)\\n (\\n Ak\\n\\n∑\\n\\nj=Ak−1+1\\n\\n \\n\\n\\n\\n 1\\n\\n\\n (3j)3−3j\\n\\n \\n )\\n )\\n + 2rφ(3,A0) \\n\\n\",\n \"\\nwhere A0=1,\\nAn+1=3An+1 and\\nφ(x,n) is Ramanujan’s abbreviation for\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n\\n φ(x,n)\\n =df \\n n\\n\\n∑\\n\\nk=1 \\n \\n\\n\\n\\n 1\\n\\n\\n −(kx)+k3x3\\n\\n \\n\\n\",\n \"\\nAnalytica’s proof of this identity proceeds by simplifying both the\\nleft- and right-hand sides of the equality and showing that both sides\\nreduce to the same expression, −Hn +\\nHAr. The simplification uses the added summation\\nidentities mentioned before as well as some elementary properties of\\nthe harmonic numbers,\",\n \"\\n\\n\\n\\n Hn\\n = \\n n\\n\\n∑\\n\\nk=1 \\n \\n\\n\\n\\n 1\\n\\n\\n k \\n \\n\\n\",\n \"\\nThe resulting proof has 28 steps (some of which are nontrivial) taking\\nabout 2 minutes to find.\",\n \"\\nKerber, Kohlhase & Sorge 1998 use the Ωmega planning\\nsystem as the overall way to integrate theorem proving and symbolic\\ncomputation. In Harrison & Théry 1998, we find an example\\nof the integration of a higher-order logic theorem proving system\\n(HOL) with a computer algebra system (Maple).\",\n \"\\nTheir great power notwithstanding, symbolic algebra systems do not\\nenforce the same level of rigor and formality that is the essence of\\nautomated deduction systems. In fact, the mathematical semantics of\\nsome of the knowledge rules in most algebra systems is not entirely\\nclear and are, in cases, logically unsound (Harrison & Théry\\n1998). The main reason for this is an over-aggressiveness to provide\\nthe user with an answer in a timely fashion at whatever cost,\\nbypassing the checking of required assumptions even if it means\\nsacrificing the soundness of the calculation. (This is strongly\\nreminiscent of most Prolog implementations that bypass the so-called\\n“occurs-check” also abandoning logical soundness in the\\nname of efficiency.) This serious problem opens the opportunity for a\\ndeduction system to provide a service to the computer algebra system:\\nUse its deductive capabilities to verify that the computer algebra’s\\ncomputational steps meet the required assumptions. There is a catch in\\nthis, however: For sufficiently large calculation steps, verifying is\\ntantamount to proving and, to check these steps, the deduction system\\nmay well need the assistance of the very same system that is in need\\nof verification! The solution to the soundness problem may then well\\nrequire an extensive modification of the chosen symbolic algebra\\nsystem to make it sound; an alternative approach is to develop a new\\nsystem, entirely from scratch, in conjunction with the development of\\nthe automated theorem prover. In either case, the resulting combined\\ndeductive computer algebra system should display a much improved\\nability for automated mathematical reasoning.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.3 Deductive Computer Algebra\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAutomated reasoning has reached the level of maturity where theorem\\nproving systems and techniques are being used for industrial-strength\\napplications. One such application area is the formal verification of\\nhardware and software systems. The cost of defects in hardware can\\neasily run into the millions. In 1994, the Pentium processor was\\nshipped with a defect in its floating-point unit and the subsequent\\noffer by Intel to replace the flawed chip (which was taken up only by\\na small fraction of all Pentium owners) cost the company close to $500\\nmillion. To guard against situations like this, the practice of\\ntesting chip designs is now considered insufficient and more formal\\nmethods of verification have not only gained large attention in the\\nmicroprocessor industry but have become a necessity. The idea behind\\nformal verification is to rigorously prove with mathematical certainty\\nthat the system functions as specified. Common applications to\\nhardware design include formally establish that the system functions\\ncorrectly on all inputs, or that two different circuits are\\nfunctionally equivalent.\",\n \"\\nDepending on the task at hand, one can draw from a number of automated\\nformal verification techniques, including SAT solvers in propositional\\nlogic, symbolic simulation using binary decision diagrams (BDDs),\\nmodel checking in temporal logic, or conducting proofs in higher-order\\nlogic. In the latter case, using an automated theorem prover like\\nHOL—see Section 10—has shown to be invaluable in practice.\\nProof construction in a system like HOL proceeds semi-automatically\\nwith the user providing a fair amount of guidance as to how the proof\\nshould proceed: The user tries to find a proof while being assisted by\\nthe theorem prover which, on request, can either automatically fill in\\na proof segment or verify proof steps given to it. Although some of\\nthe techniques mentioned above provide decision procedures which\\nhigher-order logic lacks, higher-order logic has the advantage of\\nbeing very expressive. The tradeoff is justified since proving facts\\nabout floating-point arithmetic requires the\\nformalization of a large body of real analysis, including many\\nelementary statements such as:\",\n \"\\nThis statement from Harrison 2000 written in HOL says that if a\\nfunction f is differentiable with derivative\\nf′ in an interval [a, b] then a\\nsufficient condition for f(x) ≤ K\\nthroughout the interval is that f(x) ≤ K\\nat the endpoints a, b and at all points of zero\\nderivative. The result is used to determine error bounds when\\napproximating transcendental functions by truncated power series.\\nConducting proofs in such a “painstakingly foundational\\nsystem” (Harrison 2006) has some significant benefits. First,\\none achieves a high degree of assurance that the proofs are valid\\nsince (admitedly lengthy) they are composed of small error-free\\ndeductive steps. Second, the formalization of these elementary\\nstatements and intermediate results can be reused in other tasks or\\nprojects. For example, a library of formal statements and proven\\nresults in floating-point division can be reused when proving other\\nresults of floating-point algorithms for square roots or\\ntranscendental functions. To further illustrate, different versions of\\nthe square root algorithm for the Intel Itanium share many\\nsimilarities and the proof of correctness for one version of the\\nalgorithm can be carried over to another version after minor tweaking\\nof the proof. A third benefit of using a prover like HOL is, of\\ncourse, that such lengthy proofs are carried out mechanically and are\\ndeductively certain; the likelihood of introducing a human error if\\nthey were carried out manually would be just as certain.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.4 Formal Verification of Hardware\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nSociety is becoming increasingly dependent on software systems for\\ncritical services such as safety and security. Serious adverse effects\\nof malfunctioning software include loss of human life, threats to\\nsecurity, unauthorized access to sensitive information, large\\nfinancial losses, denial of critical services, and risk to safety. One\\nway to increase the quality of critical software is to supplement\\ntraditional methods of testing and validation with techniques of\\nformal verification. The basic approach to formal verification is to\\ngenerate a number of conditions that the software must meet and to\\nverify—establish—them by mathematical proof. As with\\nhardware, automated formal verification (simply formal verification,\\nhereafter) is concerned with discharging these proof obligations using\\nan automated theorem prover.\",\n \"\\nThe formal verification of security protocols is an\\nalmost ideal application of automated theorem proving in industry.\\nSecurity protocols are small distributed programs aimed at ensuring\\nthat transactions take place securely over public networks. The\\nspecification of a security protocol is relatively small and well\\ndefined but its verification is certainly non-trivial. We have already\\nmentioned in a previous section the use of SAT-based theorem provers\\nin the verification of the U.S Data Encryption Standard (DES). As\\nanother example, the Mondex “electronic purse” is a smart\\ncard electronic cash system that was originally developed by National\\nWestminster Bank and subsequently sold to MasterCard International.\\nSchmitt & Tonin 2007 describe a Java Card implementation of the\\nMondex protocol for which the security properties were reformulated in\\nthe Java Modeling Language (JML) following closely the original Z\\nspecification. Proof of correctness was conducted using the KeY tool\\n(Beckert, Hanle & Schmitt 2007), an interactive theorem proving\\nenvironment for first-order dynamic logic that allows the user to\\nprove properties of imperative and object-oriented sequential\\nprograms. This application of automated reasoning demonstrates, in the\\nwords of the authors, that “it is possible to bridge the gap\\nbetween specification and implementation ensuring a fully verified\\nresult”.\",\n \"\\nDenney, Fischer & Schumann 2004 describe a system to automate the\\ncertification of safety properties of data-analysis aerospace\\nsoftware at NASA. Using Hoare-style program verification\\ntechniques, their system generates proof obligations that are then\\nhandled by an automated theorem prover. The process is not fully\\nautomated, however, since many of the obligations must be simplified\\nfirst in order to improve the ability of the theorem prover to solve\\nthe proof tasks. For example, one such class of obligations makes a\\nstatement about a matrix, r, that needs to remain symmetric\\nafter updates along its diagonal have been made, and has the form:\",\n \"\\nOriginal form:\\n\\nsymm(r) →\\nsymm(diag-updates(r))\",\n \"\\nSimplified form (when r is 2x2):\",\n \"\\nEven after the simplification, current theorem provers find the proof\\ntask challenging. The task becomes intractable for larger matrices and\\nnumber of updates (e.g. a 6×6 matrix with 36 updates) and\\nfurther preprocessing and simplification on the obligation is required\\nbefore the task eventually falls within the reach of state-of-art\\ntheorem provers. But it is worth remarking that proofs are found\\nwithout using any specific features or configuration parameters of the\\ntheorem provers which would improve their chances at completing the\\nproofs. This is important since the everyday application of theorem\\nprovers in industry cannot presuppose such deep knowledge of the\\nprover from their users. The formal verification of software remains a\\ndemanding task but it is difficult to see how the certification of\\nproperties could happen without the assistance of automated deduction\\nwhen one faces the humanly impossible task of establishing thousands\\nof such obligations.\",\n \"\\nIn the field of nuclear engineering, techniques of\\nautomated reasoning are deemed mature enough to assist in the formal\\nverification of the safety-critical software responsible for\\ncontrolling a nuclear power plant’s reactor prevention systems (RPS).\\nThe RPS component of the digital control system of the APR-1400\\nnuclear reactor is specified using NuSCR, a formal specification\\nlanguage customized for nuclear applications (Yoo, Jee & Cha 2009).\\nModel checking in computation tree logic is used to check the\\nspecifications for completeness and consistency. After this, nuclear\\nengineers generate function block designs via a process of automatic\\nsynthesis and formally verify the designs also using techniques of\\nmodel checking in linear temporal logic; the techniques are also used\\nto verify the equivalence of the multiple revisions and releases of\\nthe design. These model-checking tools were implemented to make their\\nuse as easy and intuitive as possible, in a way that did not require a\\ndeep knowledge of the techniques, and used notations familiar to\\nnuclear engineers. The use of automated reasoning tools not only helps\\nthe design engineers to establish the desired results but it also\\nraises the confidence of the government’s regulatory personnel that\\nneed to approve the RPS software before the reactor can be certified\\nfor operation.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.5 Formal Verification of Software\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIn the spirit of Wos, Overbeek, Lusk & Boyle 1992, we pose the\\nquestion: What do the following statements about different systems of\\nformal logic and exact philosophy have in common?\",\n \"\\nWe ask again, what do these results have in common? The answer is that\\neach has been proved with the help of an automated reasoning program.\\nHaving disclosed the answer to this question prompts a new one: How\\nmuch longer would have taken to settle these open problems without the\\napplication of such an automated reasoning tool? \",\n \"\\nThe strict implicational fragments of the logical systems S4 and S5 of\\nmodal logic are known as C4 and C5, respectively, and\\ntheir Hilbert-style axiomatizations presuppose condensed detachment as\\ntheir sole rule of inference. With insight from Kripke’s work,\\nAnderson & Belnap (1962) published the first axiomatization of C4\\nusing the following 3-axiom basis, where the Polish notation\\n‘Cpq’ stands for ‘p\\n→ q’. \",\n \"\\nA question was posed sometime after: Is there a shorter such\\naxiomatization for C4, using a 2-axiom basis or even a single axiom?\\nUsing the automated reasoning program Otter, the authors Ernst,\\nFitelson, Harris & Wos (2001) settled both questions in the\\naffirmative. In fact, several 2-axiom bases were discovered of which\\nthe following turned out to be shortest: \",\n \"\\nFurther rounds of automated reasoning work were rewarded with the\\ndiscovery of a single axiom for C4; the axiom is 21 symbols long and\\nit was also proved that it is the shortest such axiom: \",\n \"\\nTo show that each of (2) and (3) is necessary and sufficient for (1),\\na circle of proofs was produced using the automated reasoning tool:\\n(1) ⇒ (3) ⇒ (2) ⇒ (1). As for C5, its axiomatization\\nwas originally published in a paper by Lemmon, A. Meredith, D. Meredith,\\nPrior & Thomas (1957) giving several 4-, 3-, 2- and 1-axiom bases\\nfor C5, including the following 3-axiom basis: \",\n \"\\nThe publication also included the shortest known 2-axiom bases for C5\\n(actually two of them, containing 20 symbols each) but the shortest\\nsingle axiom for C5 was later discovered by (Meredith and Prior 1964)\\nand having 21 symbols: \",\n \"\\nApplying automated reasoning strategies again, Ernst, Fitelson,\\nHarris & Wos 2001) discovered several new bases, including the\\nfollowing 2-axiom basis of length 18 and six 1-axiom bases matching\\nMeredith’s length of 21 (only one of these is given below): \",\n \"\\nTo show that each of (6) and (7) is necessary and sufficient for (4),\\na circle of proofs was also produced with the theorem prover: (6)\\n⇒ (4) ⇒ (7) ⇒ (6). \",\n \"\\nA charming foray into combinatory logic is presented\\nin Smullyan 1985 and Glickfeld & Overbeek 1986, where we learn\\nabout a certain enchanted forest inhabited by talking birds. Given any\\nbirds A and B, if the name of bird B is\\nspoken to bird A then A will respond with the name\\nof some bird in the forest, AB, and this response to\\nB from A will always be the same. Here are some\\ndefinitions about enchanted birds: \",\n \"\\n\\n\\n\\n B1\\n A mockingbird M mimics any bird in\\nthe sense that M’s response to a bird x is the same\\nas x’s response to itself, Mx = xx.\\n\\n\\n B2\\n A bird C composes birds A and\\nB if A(Bx) = Cx, for any bird\\nx. In other words, C’s response to x is the\\nsame as A’s response to B’s response to\\nx. \\n\\n B3\\n A bird A is fond of a bird B if A’s\\nresponse to B is B; that is, AB =\\nB. \\n\\n\",\n \"\\nAnd here are two facts about this enchanted forest: \",\n \"\\n\\n\\n\\n F1\\n For any birds A and B in the forest there is a\\nbird C that composes them. \\n\\n F2\\n There is a mockingbird in the forest. \\n\\n\",\n \"\\nThere have been rumors that every bird in the forest is fond of at\\nleast one bird, and also that there is at least one bird that is not\\nfond of any bird. The challenge to the reader now is, of course, to\\nsettle these rumors using only F1 and F2, and the given definitions\\n(B1)–(B3). Glickfeld & Overbeek 1986 do this in mere\\nseconds with an automated reasoning system using paramodulation,\\ndemodulation and subsumption. For a more challenging problem, consider\\nthe additional definitions: \",\n \"\\n\\n\\n\\n B4\\n A bird is egocentric if it is fond of itself: EE =\\nE. \\n\\n B5\\n A bird L is a lark if for any birds x and\\ny the following holds: (Lx)y =\\nx(yy). \\n\\n\",\n \"\\nSmullyan challenges us to prove a most surprising thing about larks:\\nSuppose we are not given any other information except that the forest\\ncontains a lark. Then, show that at least one bird in the forest must\\nbe egocentric! Below we give the salient steps in the proof found by\\nthe automated reasoning system, where ‘S(x,\\ny)’ stands for ‘xy’ and where\\nclauses (2) and (3) are, respectively, the definition of a lark and\\nthe denial of the theorem; numbers on the right are applications of\\nparamodulation: \",\n \"\\n\\n\\n\\n 1\\n (x1 = x1)\\n \\n\\n 2\\n (S(S(L, x1), x2) = S(x1, S(x2, x2)))\\n \\n\\n 3\\n -(S(x1, x1) = x1)\\n \\n\\n 6\\n (S(x1, S(S(L, S(x2, x2)), x2)) = S(S(L,\\nx1), S(x2, x2)))\\n 2 2 \\n\\n 8\\n (S(x1, S(S(x2, x2), S(x2, x2))) =\\nS(S(L, S(L, x1)), x2))\\n 2 2 \\n\\n 9\\n (S(S(S(L, L), x1), x2) = S(S(x1, x1),\\nS(x2, x2)))\\n 2 2 \\n\\n 18\\n -(S(S(L, S(S(L, S(L, L)), x1)), x1) =\\nS(S(L, S(x1,x1)), x1))\\n 6 3 6 9 8 8 \\n\\n 19\\n []\\n 18 1 \\n\\n\",\n \"\\nCloser inspection of the left and right hand sides of (18) under the\\napplication of unification revealed the discovery of a 10-L\\nbird, i.e. a 10-symbol bird expressed solely in terms of larks, which\\nwas a strong candidate for egocentricity. This discovery was exciting\\nbecause the shortest egocentric L-bird known to Smullyan was\\nof length 12. A subsequent run of the automated reasoning system\\nproduced a proof of this fact as well as another new significant bird:\\nA possible egocentric 8-L bird! A few more runs of the system\\neventually produced a 22-line proof (with terms with as many as 50\\nsymbols, excluding commas and parentheses) of the fact that\\n((LL)(L(LL)))(L(LL)) is\\nindeed egocentric. The natural questions to ask next are, of course,\\nwhether there are other 8-L egocentric birds and whether\\nthere are shorter ones. The reader may want to attempt this with paper\\nand pencil but, given that there are 429 such birds, it may be wiser\\nto try it instead (or in conjunction) with an automated reasoning\\nprogram; both approaches are explored in Glickfeld & Overbeek\\n1986. For a more formal, but admittedly less colorful, introduction\\nto combinatory logic and lambda-conversion the reader is referred to\\nHindley & Seldin 1986. \",\n \"\\nFormulas in the classical equivalential calculus are\\nwritten using sentential variables and a two-place function symbol,\\ne, for equivalence. The calculus has two rules of inference,\\ndetachment (modus ponens) and substitution; the rules can be combined\\ninto the single rule of condensed detachment: Obtain tθ\\nfrom e(s,t) and r where\\nsθ = rθ with mgu θ. The calculus\\ncan be axiomatized with the formulas: \",\n \"\\nWe can dispense with reflexivity since it is derivable from the other\\ntwo formulas. This brings the number of axioms down to two and a\\nnatural question to ask is whether there is a single axiom for the\\nequivalential calculus. In 1933, Łukasiewicz found three formulas\\nof length eleven that each could act as a single axiom for the\\ncalculus—here’s one of them:\\ne(e(x,y),e(e(z,y),e(x,z)))—and\\nhe also showed that no shorter single axiom existed. Over time, other\\nsingle axioms also of length eleven were found and the list kept\\ngrowing with additions by Meredith, Kalman and Peterson to a total of\\n14 formulas of which 13 were known to be single axioms and one formula\\nwith a yet undetermined status: the formula XCB =\\ne(x, e(e(e(x,\\ny), e(z, y)), z)).\\n(Actually, the list grew to 18 formulas but Wos, Winker, Veroff,\\nSmith & Henschen 1983 reduced it to 14.) Resisting the intense\\nstudy of various researchers, it remained as an open question for many\\nyears whether the 14th formula, XCB, was a single axiom for\\nthe equivalential calculus (Peterson 1977). One way to answer the\\nquestion in the affirmative would be to show that at least one of the\\n13 known single axioms is derivable from XCB alone; another\\napproach would be to derive from XCB the 3-axiom set\\n(E1)–(E3). While Wos, Ulrich & Fitelson 2002 take shots at\\nthe former, their line of attack concentrates on the latter with the\\nmost challenging task being the proving of symmetry. Working with the\\nassistance of a powerful automated reasoning program, Otter, they\\nconducted a concerted, persistent and very aggressive assault on the\\nopen question. (Their article sometimes reads like a military briefing\\nfrom the front lines!) For simpler problems, proofs can be found by\\nthe reasoning program automatically; deeper and more challenging ones\\nlike the one at hand require the guidance of the user. The relentless\\napplication of the reasoning tool involved much guidance in the\\nsetting of lemmas as targets and the deployment of an arsenal of\\nstrategies, including the set of support, forward and backward\\nsubsumption, lemma adjunction, formula complexity, hints strategy,\\nratio strategy, term avoidance, level saturation, and others. After\\nmuch effort and CPU time, the open question finally succumbed to the\\ncombined effort of man and machine and a 61-step proof of symmetry was\\nfound, followed by one for transitivity after 10 more applications of\\ncondensed detachment. Subsequent runs of the theorem prover using\\ndemodulation blocking and the so-called cramming strategy delivered\\nshorter proofs. Here are the last lines of their 25-step proof which\\nin this case proves transitivity first followed by symmetry: \",\n \"\\nWith an effective methodology and a strategy that included the\\nassistance of an automated reasoning program in a crucial way, the\\nsearch for shortest single axioms for the equivalent calculus came to\\nan end. \",\n \"\\nFitelson & Zalta 2007, Oppenheimer & Zalta 2011, and Alama,\\nOppenheimer, & Zalta 2015 describe several applications of\\nautomated reasoning in computational metaphysics. By\\nrepresenting formal metaphysical claims as axioms and premises in an\\nautomated reasoning environment using programs like Prover9, Mace4,\\nthe E-prover system and Paradox, the logical status of metaphysical\\narguments is investigated. After the suitable formalization of axioms\\nand premises, the model finder program Mace4 is used to help verify\\ntheir consistency. Then, using Prover9, proofs are automatically\\ngenerated for a number of theorems of the Theory of Plato’s Forms,\\ntwenty five fundamental theorems of the Theory of Possible Worlds, the\\ntheorems described in Leibniz’s unpublished paper of 1690 and in his\\nmodal metaphysics, and a fully automated construction of Saint\\nAnselm’s Ontological Argument. In the latter application, Saint Anselm\\nis understood in Oppenheimer & Zalta 2011 as having found a way of\\ninferring God’s existence from His mere being as opposed to inferring\\nGod’s actuality from His mere possibility. This allows for a\\nformalization that is free of modal operators, involving an underlying\\nlogic of descriptions, three non-logical premises, and a definition of\\nGod. Here are two key definitions in the formalization, as inputted\\ninto Prover9, that helped express the concept of God: \",\n \"\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n Definition of none_greater: \\n\\n all x (Object(x) -> (Ex1(none_greater,x)\\n<-> \\n\\n (Ex1(conceivable,x) & \\n\\n -(exists y (Object(y) &\\nEx2(greater_than,y,x) & \\n\\n Ex1(conceivable,y)))))).\\n\\n\\n \\n\\n Definition of God: \\n\\n Is_the(g,none_greater). \\n\\n\\n\\n\",\n \"\\nPart of the challenge when representing in Prover9 these and other\\nstatements from axiomatic metaphysics was to circumvent some of the\\nprover’s linguistic limitations. For example, Prover9 does not have\\ndefinite descriptions so statements of this kind as well as\\nsecond-order concepts had to be expressed in terms of Prover9’s\\nexisting first-order logic. But the return is worth the investment\\nsince Prover9 not only delivered a proof\\nof Ex1(e,g)—there is one and only one\\nGod—but does so with an added bonus. A close inspection of the\\noutput provides yet another example of an automated theorem prover\\n\\\"outreasoning\\\" its users, revealing that some of the logical machinery\\nis actually redundant: The proof can be constructed only using two of\\nthe logical theorems of the theory of descriptions (called \\\"Theorem 2\\\"\\nand \\\"Theorem 3\\\" in their article), one of the non-logical premises\\n(called \\\"Premise 2\\\"), and the definition of God. We cannot help but to\\ninclude here Prover9’s shorter proof, written in the more elegant\\nnotation of standard logic (from Oppenheimer & Zalta 2011): \",\n \"\\nIn the same tradition as St. Anselm’s, Gödel also provided an\\nontological proof of God’s existence (Gödel 1970, Scott 1972). An\\nimportant difference between the two is Gödel’s use of modal\\noperators to represent metaphysical possibility and necessity and, of\\ncourse, his use of symbolic logic for added reasoning precision. In\\nhis proof, Gödel begins by framing the concept of “positive\\nproperty” using two axioms, and he introduces a definition\\nstating that “A God-like being possesses all positive\\nproperties”. This is enough logical machinery to prove as a\\ntheorem the possibility of God’s existence,\\n◊∃xG(x); three more axioms and\\ntwo additional definitions allow Gödel to further his proof to\\nestablish not only that God exists,\\n∃xG(x), but that this is so by\\nnecessity, □∃xG(x).\\nGödel’s proof is in the formalism of higher-order modal logic\\n(HOML) using modal operators and quantification over properties.\\nGödel never published his proof but he shared it with Dana Scott\\nwho produced the version presented below, which is taken from\\n(Benzmüller & Paleo 2014) along with its English annotation to\\naid the reader with its intended interpretation: \",\n \"\\n\\n\\nAxiom A1\\n\\n∀ϕ[P(~ϕ) ≡ ~P(ϕ)]\\n\\n Either a property or its negation is positive, but not\\nboth)\\n\\n\\nAxiom A2\\n\\n∀ϕ∀ψ[(P(ϕ) ∧ □∀x[ϕ(x) → ψ(x)]) ⊃ P(ψ)]\\n\\n A property necessarily implied by a positive property\\nis positive\\n\\n\\nTheorem T1\\n\\n∀ϕ[P(ϕ) ⊃ ◊∃xϕ(x)]\\n\\n Positive properties are possibly exemplified\\n\\n\\nDefinition D1\\n\\nG(x) ≡ ∀ϕ[P(ϕ) ⊃ ϕ(x)]\\n\\n A God-like being possesses all positive\\nproperties\\n\\n\\nAxiom A3\\n\\nP(G)\\n\\n The property of being God-like is positive\\n\\n\\nCorollary C\\n\\n◊∃xG(x)\\n\\n Possibly, God exists\\n\\n\\nAxiom A4\\n\\n∀ϕ[P(ϕ) ⊃ □P(ϕ)]\\n\\n Positive properties are necessarily positive\\n\\n\\nDefinition D2\\n\\nϕ ess\\nx ≡ ϕ(x) ∧\\n∀ψ(ψ(x) ⊃\\n□∀y(ϕ(y) ⊃\\nψ(y)))\\n\\n An essence of an individual is a property possessed by\\nit and\\n\\n necessarily implying any of its properties\\n\\n\\nTheorem T2\\n\\n∀x[G(x) ⊃ G ess\\nx]\\n\\n Being God-like is an essence of any God-like\\nbeing\\n\\n\\nDefinition D3\\n\\nNE(x) ≡ ∀ϕ[ϕ\\ness x ⊃ □∃yϕ(y)]\\n\\n Necessary existence of an individual is the necessary\\n\\n exemplification of all its essences\\n\\n\\nAxiom A5\\n\\nP(NE)\\n\\n Necessary existence is a positive property\\n\\n\\nTheorem T3\\n\\n□∃xG(x)\\n\\n Necessarily, God exists\\n\",\n \"\\nThe proof has recently been analysed to an unprecedented degree of\\ndetail and precision by Benzmüller & Paleo 2014 with the help\\nof automated theorem provers. A major challenge faced by these authors\\nwas the lack of a HOML-based theorem prover that could carry out the\\nwork but this was circumvented by embedding the logic into the\\nclassical higher-order logic (HOL) already offered by existing theorem\\nprovers like LEO-II, Satallax and the countermodel finder Nitpick.\\nDetails of the syntactic and semantic embedding are given in their\\npaper and it consists of encoding HOML formulas as HOL predicates via\\nmappings, expansions, and βη-conversions. The\\nmapping associates HOML types α, terms\\nsα, and logical operators θ with\\ncorresponding HOL “raised” types\\n⌈α⌉, type-raised terms\\n⌈sα⌉, and type-raised logical\\noperators θ•. If μ\\nand ο are, respectively, the types of individuals and\\nBooleans then ⌈μ⌉ = μ and\\n⌈ο⌉ = σ\\nwhere σ is shorthand\\nfor ι → ο\\nwith ι as the type of possible worlds; as for function\\ntypes, ⌈β→γ⌉ =\\n⌈β⌉→⌈γ⌉. For\\ntype-raised terms, ⌈sα⌉\\nis defined inductively on the structure\\nof sα as the following example\\nillustrates:\",\n \"\\nType-raised logical connectives, θ•, are defined below where r is a new constant symbol in HOL associated with the accessibility relation of HOML:\\n\",\n \"\\nThe other connectives can be defined in the usual way. Validity is\\nexpressed as a λ-term,\\nλsι→ο∀wι sw,\\nthat when applied to a term sσ we write as\\n[sσ]. For example, under the embedding,\\nproving in HOML the possibility of God’s existence,\\n◊ο→ο∃(μ→ο)→ο Xμ . gμ→ο X,\\nis tantamount to proving its validity in HOL:\\n[◊•σ→σ∃•(μ→σ)→σ Xμ . gμ→σ X]μ→ο.\\nTo prove so, the type-raised HOL expression\\n[◊•∃•Xμ . gμ→σ X]\\nis then encoded in the so-called THF0 syntax (Sutcliffe &\\nBenzmüller 2010) prior to being fed, along with the above set of\\nequality rules, to the provers that were used in completing the proof:\\n\",\n \"\\nThe proof in Benzmüller & Paleo 2014 is presented here,\\nincluding the axioms and definitions as well as the derivation of its\\nfour main results—T1, C, T2, T3—all written in the\\ntype-decorated type-raised higher-order logic notation resulting from\\nthe embedding. The proof steps are not fully expanded—note the\\npresence of type-raised connectives—and the inferential moves\\nare not broken down to lower levels of detail. Borrowing a phrase from\\nBertrand Russell (Urquhart 1994), this was done to spare the reader of\\nthe “kind of nausea” that the fully detailed automated\\nproof would cause: \",\n \"\\nBesides helping in the completion of the proof, the automated theorem\\nprovers were also very instrumental in the finding of some novel\\nresults. First, Gödel’s set of original assumptions was shown to\\nbe inconsistent by LEO-II by proving that self-difference becomes an\\nessential property of every entity; a re-formulation of the definition\\nof essence due to Dana Scott—this involved the addition of a\\nmissing conjunct, ϕX, in the definition—was shown\\nby Nitpick to be consistent. Second, LEO-II and Satallax managed to\\nprove C, T1 and T2 using only the logic system K and, moreover,\\nNitpick found a counter-model for T3 in K thus showing that more\\nlogical power is required to complete the rest of the proof. Third,\\nusing LEO-II and Satallax, it is shown that the logic system KB\\n(system K with the Brouwer axiom) is sufficient to establish the\\nnecessity of God’s existence,\\n□•∃•Xμ . gμ→σ X,\\nwhich is a double-win for automated reasoning: a gain in logical\\neconomy, and the deeper philosophical result of having effectively\\ndismissed a major criticism against Gödel’s proof, namely his use\\nof the stronger logic system S5. Fourth, the authors also prove in KB\\nthat:\",\n \"\\n∀•ϕμ→σ .∀•Xμ . (gμ→σ X ⊃• (~•(p(μ→σ)→σ ϕ) ⊃• ~•(ϕX)))\\n\",\n \"\\nas well as:\",\n \"\\n∀•Xμ .∀•Yμ . (gμ→σ X ⊃• (gμ→σ Y ⊃• X =• Y)),\\n\",\n \"\\nthat is, that God is flawless and that monotheism holds, respectively.\\nAt this point, it would be fair to say that any of these results would\\nbe enough to vindicate the application of automated reasoning in exact\\nphilosophy. Now, for the bad news followed by good news: Fifth, the\\nformula\\nsσ ⊃• □•sσ\\ncan also be formally derived which is unfortunate since it implies\\nthat there are no contingent truths and that everything is determined,\\ni.e. there is no free will. However, the issue has been addressed by\\nfollow-up work based on Fitting’s and Anderson’s variants of the\\nontological argument (Fuenmayor & Benzmüller 2017, Fitting\\n2002, Anderson 1990). \",\n \"\\nLeibniz’s dream was to have a charateristica universalis and\\ncalculus ratiocinator that would allow us to reason in\\nmetaphysics and morals in much the same way as we do in geometry and\\nanalysis; that is to say, to settle disputes between philosophers as\\naccountants do: “To take pen in hand, sit down at the abacus\\nand, having called in a friend if they want, say to each other: Let us\\ncalculate!” From the above applications of automated reasoning,\\none would agree with the researchers when they imply that these\\nresults achieve, to some extent, Leibniz’s goal of a computational\\nmetaphysics (Fitelson & Zalta 2007, Benzmüller & Paleo\\n2014).\\n\",\n \"\\nA nonmonotonic theorem prover can provide the basis for a\\n“computational laboratory” in which to explore and\\nexperiment with different models of artificial rationality; the\\ntheorem prover can be used to equip an artificial rational agent with\\nan inference engine to reason and gain information about the world. In\\nsuch procedural epistemology, a rational agent is\\ndefeasible (i.e. nonmonotonic) in the sense that new reasoning leads\\nto the acceptance of new beliefs but also to the retraction of\\npreviously held beliefs in the presence of new information. At any\\ngiven point in time, the agent holds a set of justified beliefs but\\nthis set is open to revision and is in a continuous set of flux as\\nfurther reasoning is conducted. This model better reflects our\\naccepted notion of rationality than a model in which all the beliefs\\nare warranted, i.e. beliefs that once are attained are never\\nretracted. Actually, a set of warranted beliefs can be seen as\\njustified beliefs “in the limit”, that is, as the ultimate\\nepistemic goal in the agent’s search for true knowledge about its\\nworld. (Pollock 1995) offers the following definition: \",\n \"\\nA set is defeasible enumerable iff there is an effective computable\\nfunction f such that for each n,\\nf(n) is a recursive set and the following two\\nconditions hold \",\n \"\\nTo compare the concepts, if A is recursively enumerable then\\nthere is a sequence of recursive sets Ai such that\\neach Ai is a subset of A with each\\nAi growing monotonically, approaching A\\nin the limit. But if A is only defeasibly enumerable then the\\nAi’s still approach A in the limit but\\nmay not be subsets of A and approach A\\nintermittently from above and below. The goal of the OSCAR Project\\n(Pollock 1989) is to construct a general theory of rationality and\\nimplement it in an artificial computer-based rational agent. As such,\\nthe system uses a defeasible automated reasoner that operates\\naccording to the maxim that the set of warranted beliefs should be\\ndefeasible enumerable. OSCAR has been in the making for some time and\\nthe application of automated nonmonotonic reasoning has also been used\\nto extend its capabilities to reason defeasibly about perception and\\ntime, causation, and decision-theoretic planning (Pollock 2006). \"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.6 Logic and Philosophy\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nOne of the main goals of automated reasoning has been the automation\\nof mathematics. An early attempt at this was Automath (de Bruijn 1968)\\nwhich was the first computer system used to check the correctness of\\nproofs and whole books of mathematics, including Landau’s\\nGrundlagen der Analysis (van Benthem Jutting 1977). Automath\\nhas been superseded by more modern and capable systems, most notably\\nMizar. The Mizar system (Trybulec 1979, Muzalewski 1993) is based on\\nTarski-Grothendieck set theory and, like Automath, consists of a\\nformal language which is used to write mathematical theorems and their\\nproofs. Once a proof is written in the language, it can be checked\\nautomatically by Mizar for correctness. Mizar proofs are formal but\\nquite readable, can refer to definitions and previously proved\\ntheorems and, once formally checked, can be added to the growing Mizar\\nMathematical Library (MML) (Bancerek & Rudnicki 2003, Bancerek\\net al. 2018). As of June 2018, MML contained about 12,000\\ndefinitions and 59,000 theorems. The Mizar language is a subset of\\nstandard English as used in mathematical texts and is highly\\nstructured to ensure the production of rigorous and semantically\\nunambiguous texts. Here’s a sample proof in Mizar of the existence of\\na rational number xy where x and\\ny are irrational: \",\n \"\\nExamples of proofs that have been checked by Mizar include the\\nHahn-Banach theorem, the Brouwer fixed-point theorem, Kőnig’s lemma,\\nthe Jordan curve theorem, and Gödel’s completeness theorem.\\nRudnicki (2004) discusses the challenges of formalizing Witt’s proof\\nof the Wedderburn theorem: Every finite division ring is commutative.\\nThe theorem was formulated easily using the existing formalizations\\navailable in MML but the proof demanded further entries into the\\nlibrary to formalize notions and facts from algebra, complex numbers,\\nintegers, roots of unity, cyclotomic polynomials, and polynomials in\\ngeneral. It took several months of effort to supply the missing\\nmaterial to the MML library but, once in place, the proof was\\nformalized and checked correct in a matter of days. Clearly, a\\nrepository of formalized mathematical facts and definitions is a\\nprerequisite for more advanced applications. The QED Manifesto (Boyer\\net al. 1994, Wiedijk 2007) has such aim in mind and there is\\nmuch work to do: Mizar has the largest such repository but even after\\n30 years of work “it is minuscule with respect to the body of\\nestablished mathematics” (Rudnicki 2004). This last remark\\nshould be construed as a call to increase the effort toward this\\nimportant aspect in the automation of mathematics. \",\n \"\\nMizar’s goal is to assist the practitioner in the formalization of\\nproofs and to help check their correctness; other systems aim at\\nfinding the proofs themselves. Geometry has been a target of early\\nautomated proof-finding efforts. Chou (1987) proves over 500 geometry\\ntheorems using the algebraic approach offered by Wu’s method and the\\nGröbner basis method by representing hypotheses and conclusions\\nas polynomial equations. Quaife (1992) provides another early effort\\nto find proofs in first-order mathematics: over 400 theorems in\\nNeumann-Bernays-Gödel set theory, over 1,000 theorems in\\narithmetic, a number of theorems in Euclidian geometry, and\\nGödel’s incompleteness theorems. The approach is best described\\nas semi-automatic or “interactive” with the user providing\\na significant amount of input to guide the theorem-proving effort.\\nThis is no surprise since, as one applies automated reasoning systems\\ninto richer areas of mathematics, the systems take more on the role of\\nproof assistants than theorem provers. This is because in richer\\nmathematical domains the systems need to reason about theories and\\nhigher-order objects which in general takes them deeper into the\\nundecidable. Interactive theorem proving is arguably\\nthe “killer” application of automated reasoning in\\nmathematics and much effort is being expended in the building of\\nincreasingly capable reasoning systems that can act as assistants to\\nprofessional mathematicians. The proof assistant Isabelle/HOL provides\\nthe user with an environment in which to conduct proofs expressed in a\\nstructured, yet human-readable, higher-order logic language and which\\nincorporates a number of facilities that increase the user’s\\nproductivity, automates proof-verification and proof-finding tasks,\\nand provides a modular way for the user to build and manage theory\\nhierarchies (Ballarin 2014). \",\n \"\\nDifferent proof assistants offer different capabilities measured by\\ntheir power at automating reasoning tasks, supported logic, object\\ntyping, size of mathematical library, and readability of input and\\noutput. A “canonical” proof which is not too trivial but\\nnot too complex either can be used as a baseline for system\\ncomparison, as done in (Wiedijk 2006) where the authors of seventeen\\nreasoning systems are tasked with establishing the irrationality of\\n√2. The systems discussed are certainly more capable than this\\nand some have been used to assist in the formalization of far more\\nadvanced proofs such as Erdös-Selberg’s proof of the Prime Number\\nTheorem (about 30,000 lines in Isabelle), the formalization of the\\nFour Color Theorem (60,000 lines in Coq), and the Jordan Curve Theorem\\n(75,000 lines in HOL Light). A milestone in interactive theorem\\nproving was reached in 2012 when, after six-years of effort and using\\nthe Coq proof assistant, George Gonthier and his team completed the\\nformal verification of the 255-page proof of the Feit-Thompson\\ntheorem, also known as the Odd Order Theorem, a major step in the\\nclassification of finite simple groups. \",\n \"\\nThe above notwithstanding, automated reasoning has had a small impact\\non the practice of doing mathematics and there is a number of reasons\\ngiven for this. One reason is that automated theorem provers are not\\nsufficiently powerful to attempt the kind of problems mathematicians\\ntypically deal with; that their current power is, at best, at the\\nlevel of first-year undergraduate mathematics and still far from\\nleading edge mathematical research. While it is true that current\\nsystems cannot prove completely on their own problems at this level of\\ndifficulty we should remember that the goal is to build reasoning\\nsystems so that “eventually machines are to be an aid to\\nmathematical research and not a substitute for it” (Wang 1960).\\nWith this in mind, and while the automated reasoning community\\ncontinues to try to meet the grand challenge of building increasingly\\npowerful theorem provers, mathematicians can draw now some of the\\nbenefits offered by current systems, including assistance in\\ncompleting proof gaps or formalizing and checking the correctness of\\nproposed proofs. Indeed, the latter may be an application that could\\nhelp address some real issues currently being faced by the\\nmathematical community. Consider the announcement by Daniel Goldston\\nand Cem Yildrim of a proof of the Twin Prime Conjecture where,\\nalthough experts initially agreed that the proof was correct, an\\ninsurmountable error was found shortly after. Or, think about the case\\nof Hales’ proof of the Kepler Conjecture which asserts that no packing\\nof congruent balls in Euclidean 3-space has density greater than the\\nface-centered cubic packing. Hales’ proof consists of about 300 pages\\nof text and a large number of computer calculations. After four years\\nof hard work, the 12-person panel assigned by Annals of\\nMathematics to the task of verifying the proof still had genuine\\ndoubts about its correctness. Thomas Hales, for one, took upon himself\\nto formalize his proof and have it checked by an automated proof\\nassistant with the aim of convincing others of its correctness (Hales\\n2005b, in Other Internet Resources). His task was admittedly heavy but\\nthe outcome is potentially very significant to both the mathematical\\nand automated reasoning communities. All eyes were on Hales and his\\nformal proof as he announced the completion of the Flyspeck\\nproject (Hales 2014, in Other Internet Resources; Hales 2015) having\\nconstructed a formal proof of the conjecture using the Isabelle and\\nHOL Light automated proof assistants: “In truth, my motivations\\nfor the project are far more complex than a simple hope of removing\\nresidual doubt from the minds of few referees. Indeed, I see formal\\nmethods as fundamental to the long-term growth of mathematics.”\\n(Hales 2006).\",\n \"\\nChurch 1936a, 1936b and Turing 1936 imply the existence of\\ntheorems whose shortest proof is very large, and the proof of the Four\\nColor Theorem in (Appel & Haken 1977), the Classification of Simple\\nGroups in (Gorenstein 1982), and the proof of the Kepler Conjecture in\\n(Hales 2005a) may well be just samples of what is yet to come. As\\n(Bundy 2011) puts it: “As important theorems requiring larger\\nand larger proofs emerge, mathematics faces a dilemma: either these\\ntheorems must be ignored or computers must be used to assist with\\ntheir proofs.”\",\n \"\\nThe above remarks also counter another argument given for not using\\nautomated theorem provers: Mathematicians enjoy proving theorems, so\\nwhy let machines take away the fun? The answer to this is, of course,\\nthat mathematicians can have even more fun by letting the machine do\\nthe more tedious and menial tasks: “It is unworthy of excellent\\nmen to lose hours like slaves in the labour of calculation which could\\nsafely be relegated to anyone else if machines were used” (G. W.\\nLeibniz, New Essays Concerning Human Understanding). If still\\nnot convinced, just consider the sobering prospect of having to\\nmanually check the 23,000 inequalities used in Hales’ proof!\",\n \"\\nAnother reason that is given for the weak acceptance of automated\\nreasoning by the mathematical community is that the programs are not\\nto be trusted since they may contain bugs—software\\ndefects—and hence may produce erroneous results. Formally\\nverifying automated reasoning programs will help ameliorate this,\\nparticularly in the case of proof checkers. Proving programs correct\\nis no easy task but the same is true about proving theorems in\\nadvanced mathematics: Gonthier proved correct the programs used in the\\nformalization of his proof of the Four Color Theorem, but he spent far\\nmore effort formalizing all the graph theory that was part of the\\nproof. So ironically enough, it turns out that at least in this case,\\nand surely there are others, “it is actually easier to verify\\nthe correctness of the program than to verify the correctness of the\\npen-and-paper mathematics” (Wiedijk 2006). For theorem provers\\nand model finders, a complementary strategy would be to verify the\\nprograms’ results as opposed to the programs themselves. Paraphrasing\\n(Slaney 1994): It does not matter to the mathematician how many\\ndefects a program may have as long as the proof (or model) it outputs\\nis correct. So, the onus is in the verification of results, whether\\nproduced by machine or man, and checking them by independent parties\\n(where of course the effort may well use automated checkers) should\\nincrease the confidence on the validity of the proofs. \",\n \"\\nIt is often argued that automated proofs are too long and detailed.\\nThat a proof can be expressed in more elementary steps is in principle\\nvery beneficial since this allows a mathematician to request a proof\\nassistant justify its steps in terms of simpler ones. But proof\\nassistants should also allow the opposite, namely to abstract detail\\nand present results and their justifications using the higher-level\\nconcepts, language, and notation mathematicians are accustomed to.\\nExploiting the hierarchical structure of proofs as done in (Denney\\n2006) is a step in this direction but more work along these lines is\\nneeded. Having the proof assistant work at the desired level of\\ngranularity provides more opportunity for insight during the proof\\ndiscovery process. This is an important consideration since\\nmathematicians are equally interested in gaining understanding from\\ntheir proofs as in establishing facts. \",\n \"\\n(Bundy 2011) alludes to a deadlock that is preventing the wider\\nadoption of theorem provers by the mathematical community: On the one\\nhand, the mathematicians need to use the proof assistants to build a\\nlarge formal library of mathematical results. But, on the other hand,\\nthey do not want to use the provers since there is no such library of\\npreviously proved results they can build upon. To break the impasse, a\\nnumber of applications are proposed of which assisting the\\nmathematician in the search of previously proved theorems is of\\nparticular promise. During its history, mathematics has accumulated a\\nhuge number of theorems and the number of mathematical results\\ncontinues to grow dramatically. In 2010, Zentralblatt MATH\\ncovered about 120,000 new publications (Wegner 2011). Clearly, no\\nindividual researcher can be acquainted with all this mathematical\\nknowledge and it will be increasingly difficult to cope with one’s\\never-growing area of specialty unless assisted with automated\\ntheorem-proving tools that can search in intelligent ways for\\npreviously proved results of interest. An alternative approach to this\\nproblem is for mathematicians to tap into each other’s knowledge as\\nenabled in computational social systems like polymath and\\nmathoverflow. The integration of automated reasoning tools\\ninto such social systems would increase the effectiveness of their\\ncollective intelligence by supporting “the combination of\\nprecise formal deductions and the more informal loose interaction seen\\nin mathematical practice” (Martin & Pease 2013, in Other\\nInternet Resources). \",\n \"\\nDue to real pressing needs from industry, some applications of\\nautomated reasoning in pure and applied mathematics are more of\\nnecessity than choice. After having worked on the formalization of\\nsome elementary real analysis to verify hardware-based floating point\\ntrigonometric functions, (Harrison 2006, Harrison 2000) mentions the\\nfurther need to formalize more pure mathematics—italics\\nare his—to extend his formalization to power series for\\ntrigonometric functions and basic theorems about Diophantine\\napproximations. Harrison finds it surprising that “such\\nextensive mathematical developments are used simply to verify that a\\nfloating point tangent function satisfies a certain error bound”\\nand, from this remark, one would expect there are other industrial\\napplications that will demand more extensive formalizations.\",\n \"\\nAlbeit not at the rate originally anticipated, automated reasoning is\\nfinding applications in mathematics. Of these, formal verification of\\nproofs is of special significance since it not only provides a viable\\nmechanism to check proofs that humans alone could not but it also has,\\nas a side effect, the potential to redefine what it would take for a\\nproof to be accepted as such. As the use of automated reasoning\\nassistants becomes more widespread one can envision their use\\nfollowing a certain methodical order: First, automated reasoning tools\\nare used for theory exploration and discovery. Then, having identified\\nsome target problem, the practitioner works interactively with an\\nautomated assistant to find proofs and establish facts. Finally, an\\nautomated proof checker is used to check the correctness of all final\\nproofs prior to being submitted for publication and being made\\navailable to the rest of the mathematical community via the creation\\nof new entries in a repository of formalized mathematics. It is indeed\\na matter of time before the application of automated proof assistants\\nbecomes an everyday affair in the life of the mathematician; it is the\\ngrand challenge of the automated reasoning community to make it happen\\nsooner than later.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.7 Mathematics\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nSince its inception, the field of automated theorem proving has had\\nimportant applications in the larger field of artificial intelligence\\n(AI). Automated deduction is at the heart of AI applications like\\nlogic programming (see section 4.1 Logic Programming, in this\\narticle) where computation is equated with deduction; robotics and\\nproblem solving (Green 1969) where the steps to achieve goals are\\nsteps extracted from proofs; deductive databases (Minker et\\nal. 2014) where factual knowledge is expressed as atomic clauses\\nand inference rules, and new facts are inferred by deduction; expert\\nsystems (Giarratano & Riley 2004) where human expertise in a given\\ndomain (e.g. blood infections) is captured as a collection of IF-THEN\\ndeduction rules and where conclusions (e.g. diagnoses) are obtained by\\nthe application of the inference rules; and many others. An\\napplication of automated reasoning in AI which is bound to have deep\\nphilosophical implications is the increased use of BDI computational\\nlogics for describing the beliefs, desires, and intentions of\\nintelligent agents and multi-agent systems (Meyer 2014) and, in\\nparticular, endowing future intelligent systems, such as\\ndecision-support systems or robots, with legal and ethical behaviour.\\nDeontic logic can be automated for the task (Furbach et al.\\n2014) but given that there is no agreement on a universal system of\\ndeontic logic, ethics “code designers” need a way to\\nexperiment with the different deontic systems (i.e., to lay out axioms\\nand see what conclusions follow from them) to help them identify the\\ndesired ethic code for the specific application at hand;\\n(Benzmüller et al. 2018) discusses an environment for this. If\\nactual, physical, robots were to be used in these experiments, the\\nterm “deontic laboratory” would be quite descriptive\\nalbeit somewhat eerie.\",\n \"\\nRestricting the proof search space has always been a key consideration\\nin the implementation of automated deduction, and traditional\\nAI-approaches to search have been an integral part of theorem provers.\\nThe main idea is to prevent the prover from pursuing unfruitful\\nreasoning paths. A dual aspect of search is to try to look for a\\npreviously proved result that could be useful in the completion of the\\ncurrent proof. Automatically identifying those results is no easy task\\nand it becomes less easy as the size of the problem domain, and the\\nnumber of already established results, grows. This is not a happy\\nsituation particularly in light of the growing trend to build large\\nlibraries of theorems such as the Mizar Problems for Theorem Proving\\n(MPTP) (Urban et al. 2010, Bancerek & Rudnicki 2003) or the\\nIsabelle/HOL mathematical library (Meng & Paulson 2008), so\\ndeveloping techniques for the discovery, evaluation, and selection of\\nexisting suitable definitions, premises and lemmas in large libraries\\nof formal mathematics as discussed in (Kühlwein et al.\\n2012) is an important line of research. \",\n \"\\nAmong many other methods, and in stark contrast to automated provers,\\nmathematicians combine induction heuristics with deductive techniques\\nwhen attacking a problem. The former helps them guide the\\nproof-finding effort while the latter allows them to close proof gaps.\\nAnd of course all this happens in the presence of the very large body\\nof knowledge that the human possesses. For an automated prover, the\\nanalogous counterpart to the mathematician’s body of knowledge is a\\nlarge library like MPTP. An analogous approach to using inductive\\nheuristics would be to endow the theorem prover with inductive,\\ndata-driven, machine learning abilities. Urban & Vyskocil 2012\\nrun a number of experiments to determine any gains that may result\\nfrom such an approach. For this, they use MPTP and theorem provers\\nlike E and SPASS enhanced with symbol-based machine learning\\nmechanisms. A detailed presentation and statistical results can be\\nfound in the above reference but in summary, and quoting the authors,\\n“this experiment demonstrates a very real and quite unique\\nbenefit of large formal mathematical libraries for conducting novel\\nintegration of AI methods. As the machine learner is trained on\\nprevious proofs, it recommends relevant premises from the large\\nlibrary that (according to the past experience) should be useful for\\nproving new conjectures.” Urban 2007 discusses MaLARea (a\\nMachine Learner for Automated Reasoning), a meta-system that also\\ncombines inductive and deductive reasoning methods. MaLARea is\\nintended to be used in large theories, i.e. problems with a large\\nnumber of symbols, definitions, premises, lemmas, and theorems. The\\nsystem works in cycles where results proved deductively in a given\\niteration are then used by the inductive machine-learning component to\\nplace restrictions in the search space for the next theorem-proving\\ncycle. Albeit simple in design, the first version of MaLARea solved\\n142 problems out of 252 in the MPTP Challenge, outperforming the more\\nseasoned provers E (89 problems solved) and SPASS (81 problems\\nsolved).\",\n \"\\nBesides using large mathematical libraries, tapping into web-based\\nsemantic ontologies is another possible source of knowledge. Pease\\n& Sutcliffe 2007 discuss ways for making the SUMO ontology\\nsuitable for first-order theorem proving, and describes work on\\ntranslating SUMO into TPTP. An added benefit of successfully reasoning\\nover large semantic ontologies is that this promotes the application\\nof automated reasoning into other fields of science. Tapping into its\\nfull potential, however, will require a closer alignment of methods\\nfrom automated reasoning and artificial intelligence.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.8 Artificial Intelligence\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nAutomated reasoning is a growing field that provides a healthy\\ninterplay between basic research and application. Automated deduction\\nis being conducted using a multiplicity of theorem-proving methods,\\nincluding resolution, sequent calculi, natural deduction, matrix\\nconnection methods, term rewriting, mathematical induction, and\\nothers. These methods are implemented using a variety of logic\\nformalisms such as first-order logic, type theory and higher-order\\nlogic, clause and Horn logic, non-classical logics, and so on.\\nAutomated reasoning programs are being applied to solve a growing\\nnumber of problems in formal logic, mathematics and computer science,\\nlogic programming, software and hardware verification, circuit design,\\nexact philosophy, and many others. One of the results of this variety\\nof formalisms and automated deduction methods has been the\\nproliferation of a large number of theorem proving programs. To test\\nthe capabilities of these different programs, selections of problems\\nhave been proposed against which their performance can be measured\\n(McCharen, Overbeek & Wos 1976, Pelletier 1986). The TPTP\\n(Sutcliffe & Suttner 1998) is a library of such problems that is\\nupdated on a regular basis. There is also a competition among\\nautomated theorem provers held regularly at the CADE conference\\n(Pelletier, Sutcliffe & Suttner 2002; Sutcliffe 2016, in Other\\nInternet Resources); the problems for the competition are selected\\nfrom the TPTP library. There is a similar library and competition for\\nSMT solvers (Barret et al. 2013).\",\n \"\\nInitially, computers were used to aid scientists with their complex\\nand often tedious numerical calculations. The power of the machines\\nwas then extended from the numeric into the symbolic domain where\\ninfinite-precision computations performed by computer algebra programs\\nhave become an everyday affair. The goal of automated reasoning has\\nbeen to further extend the machine’s reach into the realm of deduction\\nwhere they can be used as reasoning assistants in helping their users\\nestablish truth through proof.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Conclusion\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Alama, J., P. Oppenheimer, and E. Zalta, “Automating\nLeibniz’s Theory of Concepts”, CADE 25:\nProceedings of the 25th International Conference on Automated\nDeduction, (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence: Volume\n9195), A. Felty and A. Middeldorp (eds.), Berlin: Springer, pp. 73–97.","Anderson, C. A., 1990, “Some Emendations of Gödel’s\nOntological Proof”, Faith and Philosophy, 7(3):\n291–303.","Anderson, A. R. and N. D. Belnap, 1962, “The Pure Calculus\nof Entailment”, Journal of Symbolic Logic, 27:\n19–52.","Andrews, P. B., 1981, “Theorem-Proving via General\nMatings”, Journal of the Association for Computing\nMachinery, 28 (2): 193–214.","Andrews, P. B., M. Bishop and C. E. Brown, 2006, “TPS: A Hybrid\nAutomatic-Interactive System for Developing Proofs”, Journal\nof Applied Logic, 4: 367–395. ","Andrews, P. B., M. Bishop, S. Issar, D. Nesmith, F. 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P., 1975, “A Unification Algorithm for Typed\\nλ-calculus”, Theoretical Computer Science, 1:\\n27–57.\",\n \"Kanckos, A., and B. W. Paleo, 2017, “Variants of\\nGödel’s Ontological Proof in a Natural Deduction Calculus”,\\nStudia Logica, (3): 553–586.\",\n \"Kerber, M., Kohlhase and V. Sorge, 1998, “Integrating\\nComputer Algebra into Proof Planning”, Journal of Automated\\nReasoning, 21: 327–355.\",\n \"Knuth, D. and P. B. Bendix, 1970, “Simple Word Problems in\\nUniversal Algebras”, in Computational Problems in Abstract\\nAlgebra, J. Leech (ed.), Oxford, New York: Pergamon Press, pp.\\n263–297.\",\n \"Kleene, S. C., 1962, Introduction to Metamathematics,\\nAmsterdam: North-Holland.\",\n \"Kovács, L. and A. Voronkov, 2013, “First-Order\\nTheorem Proving and VAMPIRE”, CAV 2013: Proceedings of the\\nInternational Conference on Computer Aided Verification, N.\\nSharygina and H. Veith (eds.), LNCS 8044, pp. 1–35.\",\n \"Kowalski, R., 1974, “Predicate Logic as a Programming\\nLanguage”, Proceedings of the International Federation for\\nInformation Processing (Proc. IFIP ’74), Amsterdam: North\\nHolland, pp. 569–574.\",\n \"Küchlin, W. and C. Sinz, 2000, “Proving Consistency\\nAssertions for Automotive Product Data Management”, Journal\\nof Automated Reasoning (Special Issue: Satisfiability in the Year\\n2000), I. P. Gent and T. Walsh (eds.), 24 (1–2):\\n145–163.\",\n \"Kühlwein, D., T. van Laarhoven, E. Tsivtsivadze, J. Urban and\\nT. Heskes, 2012, “Overview and Evaluation of Premise Selection\\nTechniques for Large Theory Mathematics”, Automated\\nReasoning: 6th International Joint Conference, IJCAR 2012,\\n(Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Volume 7364), B. Gramlich, D.\\nMiller and U. Sattler (eds.), Manchester, UK: Springer-Verlag, pp.\\n378–392.\",\n \"Lemmon, E. J., C. A. Meredith, D. Meredith, A. N. Prioir and I.\\nThomas, 1957, Calculi of Pure Strict Implication, Philosophy\\nDept., Canterbury University, Christchurch, New Zealand.\",\n \"Lloyd, J. W., 1984, Foundations of Logic Programming,\\nBerlin: Springer-Verlag.\",\n \"Loveland, D. W., 1969, “A Simplified Format for the Model\\nElimination Procedure”, Journal of the Association for\\nComputing Machinery, 16: 349–363.\",\n \"–––, 1970, “A Linear Format for\\nResolution”, Proceedings of the IRIA Symposium on Automatic\\nDemonstration, New York: Springer-Verlag, pp. 147-162.\",\n \"–––, 1978, Automated Theorem Proving: A Logical\\nBasis, Amsterdam: North Holland.\",\n \"Luckham, D., 1970, “Refinements in Resolution Theory”,\\nProceedings of the IRIA Symposium on Automatic Demonstration,\\nNew York: Springer-Verlag, pp. 163-190.\",\n \"Martin-Löf, P., 1982, “Constructive Mathematics and\\nComputer Programming”, Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of\\nScience (Volume IV), Amsterdam: North-Holland, pp. 153-175.\",\n \"Massacci, F. and L. Marraro, 2000, “Logical Cryptanalysis:\\nEncoding and Analysis of the U.S. Data Encryption Standard”,\\nJournal of Automated Reasoning (Special Issue: Satisfiability\\nin the Year 2000), I. P. Gent and T. Walsh (eds.), 24 (1–2):\\n165–203.\",\n \"McCarthy, J., 1962, “Towards a Mathematical Science of\\nComputation”, International Federation for Information\\nProcessing Congress (Munich, 1962), Amsterdam: North Holland, pp.\\n21–28.\",\n \"McCharen, J. D., R. A. Overbeek and L. A. Wos, 1976,\\n“Problems and Experiments for and with Automated Theorem-Proving\\nPrograms”, IEEE Transactions on Computers 8:\\n773–782.\",\n \"McCune, W., 1997, “Solution of the Robbins Problem”,\\nJournal of Automated Reasoning, 19 (3): 263–276.\",\n \"–––, 2001, MACE 2.0 Reference Manual and Guide,\\nMathematics and Computer Science Division, ANL/MSC-TM-249, Argonne\\nNational Laboratory.\",\n \"McRobie, M. A., 1991, “Automated Reasoning and Nonclassical\\nLogics: Introduction”, Journal of Automated Reasoning,\\n7 (4): 447–451.\",\n \"Meng, J. and L. C. Paulson, 2008, “Translating higher-order\\nclauses to first-order clauses”, Journal of Automated\\nReasoning, 40 (1): 35–60.\",\n \"Meredith, C. A. and A. N. Prior, 1964, “Investigations into\\nImplicational S5”, Z. Math. Logik Grundlagen Math.,\\n10:203–220.\",\n \"Meyer, J.-J. Ch., 2014, “Logics for Intelligent Agents and\\nMulti-Agent Systems”, Handbook of the History of Logic,\\nVolume 9: Computational Logic, J. Siekmann (ed.), pp.\\n629–658, Elsevier.\",\n \"Miller, D. and G. Nadathur, 1988, “An Overview of\\nλProlog”, Proceedings of the Fifth International\\nLogic Programming Conference — Fifth Symposium in Logic\\nProgramming, R. Bowen and R. Kowalski (eds.), Cambridge, MA: MIT\\nPress.\",\n \"Minker, J., D. Seipel and C. Zaniolo, 2014, “Logic and\\nDatabases: A History of Deductive Databases”, Handbook of\\nthe History of Logic, Volume 9: Computational Logic, J. Siekmann\\n(ed.), pp. 571–627, Elsevier.\",\n \"Muzalewski, M., 1993, An Outline of PC Mizar, Fondation\\nPhilippe le Hodey, Brussels.\",\n \"Nipkow, T., L. C. Paulson and M. Wenzel, 2002,\\n“Isabelle/HOL: A Proof Assistant for Higher-Order Logic“,\\nLNCS Vol. 2283, pp. 207–208.\",\n \"Nivens, A. J., 1974, “A Human-Oriented Logic for Automatic\\nTheorem Proving”, Journal of the Association of Computing\\nMachinery, 21 (4): 606–621.\",\n \"Oppenheimer, P. and E. Zalta, 2011, “A\\nComputationally-Discovered Simplification of the Ontological\\nArgument”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 89 (2):\\n333–349.\",\n \"Paulson, L. C., 1990, “Isabelle: The Next 700 Theorem\\nProvers”, Logic and Computer Science, P. Odifreddi\\n(ed.), Academic Press, pp. 361–386.\",\n \"–––, 1994, Isabelle: A Generic Theorem Prover\\n(Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Volume 828), Berlin:\\nSpringer-Verlag.\",\n \"–––, 2010. “Three Years of Experience with\\nSledgehammer, a Practical Link Between Automatic and Interactive\\nTheorem Provers”, PAAR-2010, B. Konev et al. (eds.),\\npp. 1–10.\",\n \"Paulson, L. C. and K. Grabczewski, 1996, “Mechanizing Set\\nTheory”, Journal of Automated Reasoning, 17 (3):\\n291–323.\",\n \"Pease, A. and G. Sutcliffe, 2007, “First Order Reasoning on\\na Large Ontology”, Proceedings of the CADE-21 Workshop on\\nEmpirically Successful Automated Reasoning in Large Theories\\n(Volume 257), G. Sutcliffe and J. Urban (eds.), Bremen.\",\n \"Pelletier, F. J., 1986, “Seventy-Five Problems for Testing\\nAutomatic Theorem Provers”, Journal of Automated\\nReasoning, 2 (2): 191–216.\",\n \"–––, 1998, “Natural Deduction Theorem Proving\\nin THINKER”, Studia Logica, 60 (1): 3–43.\",\n \"Pelletier, F. J., G. Sutcliffe and A. P. Hazen, 2017,\\n“Automated Reasoning for the Dialetheic Logic RM3”,\\nProceedings of the Thirtieth International Florida Artificial\\nIntelligence Research Society Conference, V. Rus and Z. Markov\\n(eds.), pp. 110–115.\",\n \"Pelletier, F. J., G. Sutcliffe, and C. Suttner, 2002, “The\\nDevelopment of CASC”, AI Communications, 15\\n(2–3): 79–90.\",\n \"Peterson, J. G., 1977, The Possible Shortest Single Axiom for\\nEC-Tautologies, Report 105, Department of Mathematics, University\\nof Auckland.\",\n \"Pollock, J., 1989, “OSCAR: A General Theory of\\nRationality”, Journal of Experimental & Theoretical\\nArtificial Intelligence, 1 (3): 209–226\",\n \"–––, 1995, Cognitive Carpentry, Cambridge, MA:\\nBradford/MIT Press.\",\n \"–––, 2006, “Against Optimality: Logical Foundations\\nfor Decision-Theoretic Planning in Autonomous Agents”,\\nComputational Intelligence, 22(1): 1–25.\",\n \"Portoraro, F. D., 1994, “Symlog: Automated Advice in\\nFitch-style Proof Construction”, CADE-12: Proceedings of the\\n12th International Conference on Automated Deduction, (Lecture\\nNotes in Artificial Intelligence: Volume 814), A. Bundy (ed.), Berlin:\\nSpringer-Verlag, pp. 802-806.\",\n \"–––, 1998, “Strategic Construction of\\nFitch-style Proofs”, Studia Logica, 60 (1):\\n45–66.\",\n \"Prasad, M., A. Biere and A. Gupta, 2005, “A Survey of Recent\\nAdvances in SAT-Based Formal Verification”, International\\nJournal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer, 7 (2):\\n156–173.\",\n \"Prawitz, D., 1965, Natural Deduction: A Proof Theoretical\\nStudy, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.\",\n \"Quaife, A., 1992, Automated Development of Fundamental\\nMathematical Theories, Kluwer Academic Publishers.\",\n \"Robinson, J. A., 1965, “A Machine Oriented Logic Based on\\nthe Resolution Principle”, Journal of the Association of\\nComputing Machinery, 12: 23–41.\",\n \"–––, 1965, “Automatic Deduction with\\nHyper-resolution”, Internat. J. Comput. Math., 1:\\n227–234.\",\n \"Robinson, J. A. and A. Voronkov (eds.), 2001, Handbook of\\nAutomated Reasoning: Volumes I and II, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.\\n\",\n \"Schmitt, P. and I. Tonin, 2007, “Verifying the Mondex Case\\nStudy”, Proceedings of the Fifth IEEE International\\nConference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods, IEEE\\nComputer Society, pp. 47–58.\",\n \"Schulz, S., 2004, “System Abstract: E 0.81”,\\nProceedings of the 2nd International Joint Conference on Automated\\nReasoning (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence: Volume\\n3097), D. Basin and M. Rusinowitch (eds.), Berlin: Springer-Verlag,\\npp.223-228.\",\n \"Scott, D., 1972, “Appendix B: Notes in Dana Scott’s\\nHand”, in Sobel 2004, pp. 145–146.\",\n \"Sieg, W. and J. Byrnes, 1996, Normal Natural Deduction Proofs\\n(in Classical Logic), Report CMU-PHIL 74, Department of\\nPhilosophy, Carnegie-Mellon University.\",\n \"Slaney, J. K., 1984, “3,088 Varieties: A Solution to the\\nAckerman Constant Problem”, Journal of Symbolic Logic,\\n50: 487–501.\",\n \"Sobel, J. H., 2004, Logic and Theism: Arguments for and\\nAgainst Beliefs in God, Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Stickel, M. E., 1992, “A Prolog Technology Theorem Prover: A\\nNew Exposition and Implementation in Prolog”, Theoretical\\nComputer Science, 104: 109–128.\",\n \"Suppes, P., et al., 1981, “Part I: Interactive\\nTheorem Proving in CAI Courses”, University-Level\\nComputer-Assisted Instruction at Stanford: 1968–1980, P.\\nSuppes (ed.), Institute for the Mathematical Study of the Social\\nSciences, Stanford University.\",\n \"Sutcliffe, G. and C. Benzmüller, 2010, “Automated\\nReasoning in Higher-Order Logic Using TPTP THF Infrastructure”,\\nJournal of Formalized Reasoning, 43 (4): 337–362.\",\n \"Sutcliffe, G. and C. Suttner, 1998, “The TPTP Problem\\nLibrary – CNF Release v1.2.1”, Journal of Automated\\nReasoning, 21 (2): 177–203.\",\n \"Szabo, M. E. (ed.), 1969, The Collected Papers of Gerhard\\nGentzen, Amsterdam: North-Holland.\",\n \"Trybulec, A., 1978, “The Mizar Logic Information\\nLanguage”, Bulletin of the Association for Literary\\nLinguistic Computing, 6(2): 136–140.\",\n \"Trybulec, A. and H. Blair, 1985, “Computer Assisted\\nReasoning with Mizar”, Proceedings of the 9th International\\nJoint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, (IJCAI-85: Volume\\n1), Los Angeles, pp. 26–28.\",\n \"Turing, A., 1936, “On computable numbers, with an\\napplication to the Entscheidungsproblem”, Proceedings of the\\nLondon Mathematical Society, 42 (2): 230–265.\",\n \"Urban, J., 2007, “MaLARea: A Metasystem for Automated\\nReasoning in Large Theories”, Proceedings of the CADE-21\\nWorkshop on Empirically Successful Automated Reasoning in Large\\nTheories, J. Urban, G. Sutcliffe and S. Schulz (eds.), pp.\\n45–58.\",\n \"Urban, J., K. Hoder, A. Voronkov, 2010, “Evaluation of\\nAutomated Theorem Proving on the Mizar Mathematical Library”,\\nMathematical Software – ICMS 2010: Proceedings of the Third\\nInternational Congress on Mathematical Software, Kobe, Japan,\\n(Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 6327), pp.\\n155–166.\",\n \"Urban, J. and J. Vyskocil, 2012, “Theorem Proving in Large\\nFormal Mathematics as an Emerging AI Field”, arXiv:1209.3914\\n[cs.AI], Report No. DPA-12271, Cornell University.\",\n \"Urquhart, A., 1994 (ed.), The Collected Papers of Bertrand\\nRussell, Volume 4: Foundations of Logic, 1903-05, Routledge,\\nLondon and New York.\",\n \"van Benthem Jutting, L. S., 1977, Checking Landau’s\\n“Grundlagen” in the Automath system, Ph.D. Thesis,\\nEindhoven University of Technology; published in Mathematical\\nCentre Tracts, Number 83, Amsterdam: Mathematisch Centrum,\\n1979. \",\n \"Voronkov, A., 1995, “The Anatomy of Vampire: Implementing\\nBottom-Up Procedures with Code Trees”, Journal of Automated\\nReasoning, 15 (2): 237–265.\",\n \"Wallen, L. A., 1990, Automated Deduction in Nonclassical\\nLogics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.\",\n \"Wang, H., 1960, “Proving Theorems by Pattern Recognition\\n– I”, in Automation of Reasoning (Volume 1), J.\\nSiekmann and G. Wrightson (eds.), Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1983, pp.\\n229–243.\",\n \"–––, 1960, “Toward Mechanical\\nMathematics”, in Automation of Reasoning (Volume 1),\\nJ. Siekmann and G. Wrightson (eds.), Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1983,\\npp. 244-264.\",\n \"Wegner, B., 2011, “Completeness of reference databases,\\nold-fashioned or not?”, Newsletter of the European\\nMathematical Society, 80: 50–52.\",\n \"Wiedijk, F., 2006, The Seventeen Provers of the World,\\n(Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence: Volume 3600), F. Wiedijk\\n(ed.), New York: Springer-Verlag.\",\n \"–––, 2007, “The QED Manifesto\\nRevisited”, Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric, 10\\n(23): 121–133.\",\n \"Wos, L. (ed.), 2001, Journal of Automated Reasoning\\n(Special Issue: Advances in Logic Through Automated Reasoning), 27\\n(2).\",\n \"Wos, L., D. Carson and G. R. Robinson, 1965, “Efficiency and\\nCompleteness of the Set of Support Strategy in Theorem Proving”,\\nJournal of the Association of Computing Machinery, 12:\\n698–709.\",\n \"Wos, L., R. Overbeek, E. Lusk and J. Boyle, 1984, Automated\\nReasoning: Introduction and Applications, Englewood Cliffs, NJ:\\nPrentice-Hall.\",\n \"Wos, L., D. Ulrich, and B. Fitelson, 2002, “Vanquishing the\\nXCB Question; The Methodological Discovery of the Last Shortest Single\\nAxiom for the Equivalential Calculus”, Journal of Automated\\nReasoning, 29 (2):107–124.\",\n \"Wos, L., S. Winker, R. Veroff, B. Smith and L. Henschen, 1983,\\n“Questions Concerning Possible Shortest Single Axiom for the\\nEquivalential Calculus: An Application of Automated Theorem Proving to\\nInfinite Domains”, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic,\\n24: 205–223.\",\n \"Yoo, J., E. Jee and S. Cha, 2009, “Formal Modeling and\\nVerification of Safety-Critical Software”, IEEE\\nSoftware, 26 (3): 42–49.\",\n \"Zhang, L. and S. Malik, 2002, “The Quest for Efficient\\nBoolean Satisfiability Solvers”, CADE-18: Proceedings of the\\n18th International Conference on Automated Deduction, (Lecture\\nNotes in Artificial Intelligence: Volume 2392), A. Voronkov (ed.),\\nBerlin: Springer-Verlag, pp. 295-313.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../logic-ai/","text":"artificial intelligence: logic and"},{"href":"../logic-classical/","text":"logic: classical"},{"href":"../logic-modal/","text":"logic: modal"},{"href":"../reasoning-defeasible/","text":"reasoning: defeasible"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../logic-ai/\",\n \"text\": \"artificial intelligence: logic and\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../logic-classical/\",\n \"text\": \"logic: classical\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../logic-modal/\",\n \"text\": \"logic: modal\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../reasoning-defeasible/\",\n \"text\": \"reasoning: defeasible\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":98,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"ibn-rushd"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Ibn Rushd [Averroes]"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Wed Jun 23, 2021"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\nThe Andalusian philosopher, physician and judge Ibn Rushd\n(1126–1198) is one of the great figures of philosophy within the\nMuslim contexts, and a foundational source for post-classical European\nthought.","\nThe hallmarks of Ibn Rushd’s work are his convictions that\nphilosophy is capable of demonstrative certainty in many domains, that\nit is Aristotle who should be our preeminent guide in philosophy, and\nthat philosophy should play a central role within religious inquiry,\nrather than being an alternative to religion. But part of what gives\nhis ideas their enduring interest is the subtle way in which he\npromotes other methods of reasoning and persuasion in contexts where\nthe rigors of Aristotelian demonstration are not a practical option.\nTo grasp Ibn Rushd’s thought in full requires attending not only\nto the Aristotelian commentaries where he attempts to develop\nphilosophy as a demonstrative science, but also to areas like\nreligion, medicine, and law, where constraints of both subject-matter\nand audience require other argumentative and rhetorical\ntechniques.","\nOften improperly referred to as Averroes—the corrupted form his\nname took in Latin—Ibn Rushd quickly achieved such prominence in\nlater European thought as to rival the influence of Aristotle himself,\nwhose works Ibn Rushd tirelessly championed. Most modern scholarship\norients itself around his reception in Christian Europe, where he was\nknown simply as “the Commentator,” and so fails to\nappreciate Ibn Rushd’s own distinctive philosophical\nachievements."],"string":"[\n \"\\nThe Andalusian philosopher, physician and judge Ibn Rushd\\n(1126–1198) is one of the great figures of philosophy within the\\nMuslim contexts, and a foundational source for post-classical European\\nthought.\",\n \"\\nThe hallmarks of Ibn Rushd’s work are his convictions that\\nphilosophy is capable of demonstrative certainty in many domains, that\\nit is Aristotle who should be our preeminent guide in philosophy, and\\nthat philosophy should play a central role within religious inquiry,\\nrather than being an alternative to religion. But part of what gives\\nhis ideas their enduring interest is the subtle way in which he\\npromotes other methods of reasoning and persuasion in contexts where\\nthe rigors of Aristotelian demonstration are not a practical option.\\nTo grasp Ibn Rushd’s thought in full requires attending not only\\nto the Aristotelian commentaries where he attempts to develop\\nphilosophy as a demonstrative science, but also to areas like\\nreligion, medicine, and law, where constraints of both subject-matter\\nand audience require other argumentative and rhetorical\\ntechniques.\",\n \"\\nOften improperly referred to as Averroes—the corrupted form his\\nname took in Latin—Ibn Rushd quickly achieved such prominence in\\nlater European thought as to rival the influence of Aristotle himself,\\nwhose works Ibn Rushd tirelessly championed. Most modern scholarship\\norients itself around his reception in Christian Europe, where he was\\nknown simply as “the Commentator,” and so fails to\\nappreciate Ibn Rushd’s own distinctive philosophical\\nachievements.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Life and Works","sub_toc":["1.1 Life","1.2 Works"]},{"content_title":"2. Logic and Methodology","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"3. Metaphysics","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"4. Natural Philosophy","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"5. Psychology","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"6. Religion","sub_toc":["6.1 God","6.2 Law"]},{"content_title":"7. Medicine","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"8. Ethics and Politics","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"9. Reception","sub_toc":["9.1 Arabic","9.2 Hebrew","9.3 Latin"]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":["A. Works of Ibn Rushd","B. Other Works"]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Life and Works\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"1.1 Life\",\n \"1.2 Works\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. Logic and Methodology\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Metaphysics\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. Natural Philosophy\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Psychology\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. Religion\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"6.1 God\",\n \"6.2 Law\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"7. Medicine\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"8. Ethics and Politics\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"9. Reception\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"9.1 Arabic\",\n \"9.2 Hebrew\",\n \"9.3 Latin\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"A. Works of Ibn Rushd\",\n \"B. Other Works\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":[],"section_title":"1. Life and Works","subsections":[{"content":["\nAbū al-Walīd Muḥammad ibn Ahmad Ibn Rushd was born in\nCordova in 1126. He belonged to an influential Andalusian family,\nfamous for its judicial power and for its scholarship in the religious\nsciences. His father was a prominent judge, but the most important\nfigure in the family was his grandfather, who also bears his name, Ibn\nRushd, and so the philosopher is called “the grandson”\n(al-ḥafīd) to distinguish him from his grandfather\n(al-jadd). The latter was both a well-known judge and a famed\njurist, being the author of many books in jurisprudence following the\nMālikī school.","\nUnlike\n Ibn Sīnā\n and\n al-Ghazālī,\n Ibn Rushd did not write an autobiography, and as a result many\naspects of his life are obscure and will remain so unless new\ndocuments are discovered. The limited information we have from his\nbiographers unanimously agrees on his good conduct, his diligence in\nscience, and his fairness as a judge, while noting his interests in\nphilosophy and his adoption of certain “audacious” views.\nThe surviving historical sources tell us much about his teachers in\nthe religious sciences, but, with the exception of medicine, we know\nlittle about those who taught him in other fields. He was certainly\nnot a disciple of either of his famous Andalusian contemporaries,\n Ibn Bājja\n or Ibn Tufayl, although he read their philosophical works. (Puig 1992\nand Ben Sharīfa 1999 discuss the intellectual circles around Ibn\nRushd.)","\nIbn Rushd was 22 when the Almohads came to power in the western\nMaghreb and Andalusia. Given that the Ibn Rushds had been prominent in\ncircles close to the previous Almoravid dynasty, it was imperative for\nthe grandson to express in his writings, and perhaps even in person,\nhis commitment to the new rulers and the Almohad creed\n(daʿwa) conceptualized by Muḥammad Ibn\nTūmart (d. 1130). Some surviving testimonies suggest that Ibn\nRushd did in fact adopt Ibn Tūmart’s creed at some point in\nhis life (see Ben Sharīfa 1999).","\nGiven the social position of his family, Ibn Rushd soon found himself\nin the ruling circles of Marrakesh and close to the princes, or at\nleast some of them, in Andalusia. He engaged in debates on\nphilosophical and theological issues with this inner circle, and there\nis a record of a meeting with Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf (r.\n1163–84), the second Almohad ruler, who officially asked Ibn\nRushd to comment on Aristotle’s works and render them\naccessible. Later he became chief physician to the caliph in\nMarrakesh.","\nNevertheless, Ibn Rushd’s relationship with the Almohad creed\nwas complex and seems to have evolved (Geoffroy 1999; Ben Ahmed\n2020c). Recently discovered revisions to his al-Kashf ʿan\nmanāhij al-adilla contain paragraphs where Ibn Rushd shows a\nsort of critical distance towards Ibn Tumart’s creed. These\nparagraphs, when added to his harsh criticism of the Almohads in his\ncommentary on Plato’s Republic, may help us understand\nthe evolution he underwent during his intellectual life. They may shed\nlight in particular on the disgrace he suffered at the end of his\ncareer, when, for reasons that remain unclear, he fell out of favor\nwith the Almohads and was exiled in Lucena, 60 km southeast of\nCordova. According to one account, his death took place while he was\nconfined to a residence in Marrakesh in 1198. (The definitive\nbiography, in Arabic, is Ben Sharīfa 1999. For more on the\nhistorical context see Urvoy 1998 and Ben Ahmed 2020c.)"],"subsection_title":"1.1 Life"},{"content":["\nIbn Rushd remained productive for at least four decades. He was the\nauthor of a large corpus that extends over medicine, logic and\nphilosophy in all its branches, including natural philosophy,\nastronomy, metaphysics, psychology, politics, and ethics. His work\nalso includes the sciences of Islamic religion: jurisprudence\n(fiqh), the foundations of Islamic law (usūl\nal-fiqh), the foundations of religion (usūl\nal-dīn), and the science of the Arabic language, including\ngrammar. With important exceptions, most of his works are available in\nthe original Arabic. For those works that have been lost, while\nreaders await the day of their rediscovery, they must generally make\ndo with medieval translations in Hebrew or Latin.","\nIbn Rushd’s work deploys various methods and styles. Many\ntreatises are in the form of a commentary, most famously and\nextensively on Aristotle—covering nearly the whole Aristotelian\ncorpus—but also on Galen’s medical treatises, as\nwell as on other philosophers such as Plato, Ibn Sīnā and\nIbn Bājja. Many other treatises, devoted to specific issues, are\nnot in commentary form. (For a detailed inventory of texts and\ntranslations see §10.1.)","\nThe focus of his commentaries was Aristotle because no one has yet\nsurpassed his achievement: “no one who has come after him to\nthis our time—and this is close to 1500 years later—has\nbeen able to add a word worthy of attention to what he said”\n(LongPhys proem; Harvey 1985, 83). Scholarship going back to\nthe nineteenth-century has divided the commentaries into three\nkinds:","\nInasmuch as Ibn Rushd routinely wrote different kinds of commentaries\non the same Aristotelian treatise, some such distinction seems\nnecessary. But recent scholarship has doubted whether this neat\nthreefold distinction adequately captures Ibn Rushd’s complexly\nvaried approach (Al-ʿAlawī 1986a; Druart 1994; Gutas 1993).\nAt a minimum, it omits important categories of work, such as compendia\n(mukhtaṣarat), treatises (maqālāt),\nand answers to questions (masāʾil), to say nothing\nof the important treatises that focus on religious questions.","\nThe most prominent of those independent religious treatises are","\nThese works, which seem to have had little influence on medieval\nChristian thought, have traditionally been seen as\n“theological” and contrasted with his supposedly\n“philosophical” works: the commentaries on Aristotle that\ncirculated throughout medieval and Renaissance Europe in Latin and\nHebrew translation. The latter were thought to be demonstrative, and\naimed at the elites, whereas the former were said to be merely\ndialectical, and so aimed at a popular audience. Accordingly Ibn\nRushd’s true position supposedly had to be sought in these\nAristotelian commentaries.","\nThis distinction has affected the direction of scholarship, causing\ngreat attention to be given to the “philosophical” works,\nwhich were thought to represent most truly his thought, and leaving\nthe “theological” treatises to be comparatively neglected.\nEven where the latter are widely taught, they are set apart from his\nsupposedly more philosophical commentaries. The result, ever since the\ninitial research of Renan (1852), has been a segmented and fragmentary\nview of the Rushdian corpus that marginalizes important aspects of his\nthought.","\nAn important correction to this tendency appears in Jamal Al-Dīn\nAl-ʿAlawī (1986a), who defends the unity and coherence of\nthe Rushdian corpus. He proposes that Ibn Rushd’s works form a\nunity where there is no room to distinguish between what is a\ncommentary on another text and what is an ostensibly original work.\nWith this, Al-ʿAlawī attempted to close a gap in a body of\nwork that should rightly be seen as continuous, and to reconnect texts\nthat have been disassociated from their contexts."],"subsection_title":"1.2 Works"}]},{"main_content":["\nThe general character of Ibn Rushd’s philosophy is illuminated\nby his overarching picture of logic. Most broadly, he understands it\nas the study of the conditions and rules that rightly guide the mind\ntoward the conception (taṣawwur) of essences and the\nassent (taṣdīq) to propositions\n(CompLogic 1.1). Glossing Aristotle’s famous remark\nthat “it is the mark of the educated person” to seek the\nappropriate level of precision in any inquiry, Ibn Rushd clarifies\nthat the educated person is “one who has been instructed in the\nart of logic” (ParaEthics I.3, 3C).","\nIn keeping with the weight he accords the subject, Ibn Rushd commented\nseveral times on each work in Aristotle’s logical\nOrganon. Near the start of his career, he wrote a\nCompendium of Logic that includes Porphyry’s\nIsagoge and follows the usual Arabic practice of including\nthe Rhetoric and Poetics as part of an expanded\nOrganon (Black 1990). Later, he wrote a series of longer\nparaphrases of this same corpus (but treated the Isagoge\nseparately, on the grounds that it is neither an introduction to nor\neven a part of logic). Toward the end of his life, he devoted one of\nhis five long commentaries to the Posterior Analytics.","\nIn line with the approach of his predecessors, Ibn Rushd divided\nlogical processes into five types of argument: demonstrative,\ndialectical, rhetorical, poetical, and fallacious. These inferences\nare not distinguished by their forms, which are the same, but by their\nmatter, that is, by their premises. The premises of demonstrative\narguments are necessary (Thom 2019), the premises of dialectical\narguments are generally accepted, the premises of rhetoric are\ngenerally received, the premises of poetic arguments are imaginative,\nand the premises of sophistical arguments are deceiving.","\nFor Ibn Rushd, the center of logic and its very purpose is\ndemonstration, for it is the only procedure that leads to certainty in\nphilosophy: it is “the most perfect kind of reflection\n(naẓar), using the most perfect kind of inference\n(qiyās)” (Decisive Treatise 3).\nAccordingly, even in the context of Plato’s Republic,\nhe begins his commentary by announcing that his goal is “to\nabstract such scientific arguments attributable to Plato as are\ncontained in the Republic by removing from it its dialectical\narguments.” However, this does not mean that non-demonstrative\narguments are useless. Generally, where one kind of argument is not\neffective, other kinds of arguments should be used. Dialectic offers a\npath toward demonstration and to science, which, although it does not\nobtain certainty, is close to it. Rhetoric contributes, through its\nparadigms and enthymemes, to reinforcing and promoting demonstrative\nevidence. The study of sophistical reasoning is useful in assessing\nthe faulty argumentative methods of the theologians (the\nmutakallimūn, that is, practitioners of\nkalām).","\nIn light of the high status of demonstration, Ibn Rushd considered it\nwith great care in his commentaries. He devoted a compendium, a\nparaphrase and a long commentary to the Posterior\nAnalytics—which he calls the Book of Demonstration\n(Kitāb al-Burhān)—and wrote separate\ntreatises on various special issues. The long commentary is probably\nthe most appropriate text for his positions on the components of\ndemonstration, its types, and its role in producing scientific\nknowledge. That commentary is also the occasion for a critical and\nsevere interaction with the two Islamic authorities in logic before\nhim, al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā.","\nThe purpose of examining demonstrative arguments is to understand the\nabsolute demonstration that gives complete certainty and constitutes a\nscience (LongPostAn I.7 {180}). There are, however, other\nkinds of demonstration, less certain than the absolute one, but still\ndemonstrative. In all, Ibn Rushd distinguishes three types\n(LongPostAn I.95 {348}):","\nIn mathematics, it is generally possible to frame absolute\ndemonstrations, because the premises both supply the cause and are\nbetter known than their conclusions. In the natural sciences, however,\nand even in metaphysics, this ideal situation is generally not\nachievable. Here we begin with the accidental sensible features of\nthings, and so extensive use must be made of the demonstration of\nexistence (EpiPhys 1.105 {9}; Sylla 1979; Cerami 2014). Ibn\nSīnā, whose views are often the target of Ibn Rushd’s\nlogic, had denied that these count as a demonstration at all, on the\ngrounds that they establish no substantial connection between the\nposterior cause and the prior effect. Ibn Rushd rejects this view\n(LongPostAn I.95 {349}), but admits that the demonstration of\nexistence is less reliable than the other demonstrations. Certainty\ncomes in degrees, and the differentiation in certainty between these\ndemonstrations is one of the reasons why some sciences are superior to\nothers (ParaPostAn §88–9).","\nIbn Rushd’s enthusiasm for demonstration does not prevent him\nfrom valuing other logical arts, and he was particularly concerned\nwith the place of dialectic. Broadly speaking, according to Aristotle,\ndialectic has three main uses: as intellectual training, as a path\ninto the demonstrative sciences of philosophy, and as a means of\nconversing with ordinary people (Topics I.2). But Ibn Rushd\ndevotes less space and shows less interest in this third feature of\ndialectic, and one wonders whether this is due to his critical\nreaction to the discursive practices of the\nmutakallimūn. Despite the many considerations that make\ndialectic more suitable when dealing with ordinary people, Ibn Rushd\nsuggests that rhetorical and poetic statements are preferable\n(ParaTop I.5C {31}; Ben Ahmed 2010-2011, 299–302,\n307–17). Hence their inclusion in the expanded Organon.\nThe significance of rhetoric and poetics is a result he establishes in\npolitical science, but maintains even when it comes to teaching and\nanchoring theological truths. The bad example set by the dialectical\nsyllogisms of the mutakallimūn shows how dialectical\nmethods, in discussion with ordinary people, are actually\ndisadvantageous.","\nUnder the influence of al-Fārābī, Ibn Rushd puts\nemphasis on the need to introduce dialectic as a method\n(ṭarīq), a set of rules, techniques, and warnings\n(Ben Ahmed 2020a, 262–7). This conception of dialectic makes it\ndistinct from both demonstration and sophistical reasoning, as well as\nfrom ordinary conversations. When used well, dialectic is a communal\nenterprise and so again different from other arts, such as\ndemonstration, where there is no need for more than one party. A\nsuccessful “partnership” in dialectic is one where each\nparty does their best to commit themselves to the rules. From this\nperspective, it becomes evident that the questioner is not simply an\nadversary seeking to defeat his opponent, but rather a partner and a\ncollaborator with the respondent in the search for knowledge. Any\ndebate that is motivated by the pursuit of victory or by deriving\npleasure from defeating one’s opponent is a debate that cannot\nfall under the method of dialectic. He writes, “the communal\nenterprise (al-ʿamal al-mushtarak) can be achieved in\nits utmost perfection only by both partners. They can have something\nin common when their aim is the assessment and the deduction of the\ntruth, or the realization of their training. Thus, the respondent\nshould perfect his response if he intends that aim, because the basest\nof the partners is the one who aims at the obstruction of the communal\nenterprise. But if their aim is to struggle against and defeat the\nother, then they will have nothing in common…. This is not the\nmethod of dialectic” (ParaTop 8.132D {233}; Ben Ahmed\n2020a, 267)","\nAt the far reaches of the logical arts, the connection to the genuine\nsyllogism becomes remote. So, even while Ibn Rushd recognizes that\npoetics is a syllogistic art, he says that it lacks the power of a\nreal syllogism and is thus unproductive (CompLogic 12.3). In\nhis paraphrase of the Poetics, he avoids using the term\n“poetic syllogism” altogether.","\nIn the realm of jurisprudence, Ibn Rushd is famous for his position on\nthe logical and epistemological value of juridical inferences, which\nin his view produce nothing more than opinion\n(ẓann). Even when confronted with the\nsurprising insertion of the word for jurisprudence (fiqh)\ninto the Arabic translation of the Prior Analytics 68b10, Ibn\nRushd chooses totally to ignore it. In his juridical writings, he\nopenly denies the accuracy of the term ‘syllogism’\n(qiyās) for what jurists had become accustomed to\ncalling their juridical inferences (al-maqāyīs\nal-fiqhiyya or qiyās sharʿī).\nWhen jurists speak of qiyās, it is important to\nrecognize that the term bears quite a different meaning\n(Abridgement 299 {130–1}; Bou Akl 2019). In particular,\ncontrary to what happens in the syllogism, the qiyās of\nthe jurists does not have the power to deduce the unknown from the\nknown. And even in those cases where Ibn Rushd seems to accept\njuridical inference, he does not make use of logical vocabulary, but\ninstead deploys the terms used by most of the jurists before him.\nRather than engage in a “syllogistification” of the\njuridical inference, he focuses on the semantic and linguistic origins\nof juridical rules. For Ibn Rushd, every science has its own\ncharacteristics; therefore, anyone who tried to study logic while\nstudying jurisprudence would fail at studying both\n(Abridgement 123 {37–38})."],"section_title":"2. Logic and Methodology","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nThe divisions between metaphysics, natural philosophy, psychology, and\ntheology are permeable for Ibn Rushd, and the systematic character of\nhis thought makes it difficult to treat any part in isolation. (See\nthe start of EpiMeta for his division of the sciences.) Here\nour method of proceeding is to begin with the most general principles\nof being, and then to turn, in the next section, to their causal\nrelationships.","\nOf the various kinds of being, substances are what exist in the most\nproper sense (EpiMeta 4.138 {125}). Among substances, the\nmost familiar are concrete individuals like dogs and stones\n(EpiMeta 2.58 {43}). But these are composite entities, and\nsince the principles of a substance are themselves even more properly\nconsidered to be substances (EpiMeta 1.31 {15–16};\nLongAnima II.8), the most fundamental substances in the\nsensible realm are the metaphysical ingredients of composite\nsubstances, matter and form (LongMeta VII.44 {960}).","\nUnderlying all change, and enduring through it, is homogeneous matter,\ndefined simply by its potentiality—that is, its potential to\nserve as subject for any earthly form (SubstOrb 1.50).\nConceived of without form, it is perpetually enduring and numerically\none everywhere: “all transient bodies share this body that is\nnumerically one” (SubstOrb 2.87), because it is\n“deprived of the divisions of individual forms”\n(LongMeta XII.14 {1473}). Ibn Rushd worries in predictable\nways about the reality of this so-called prime matter (mādda\nʾūlā). On the one hand, he consistently counts it\nas a substance (e.g., ParaAnima 2.115). On the other hand,\nmatter so-conceived is a “pure privation” and “does\nnot exist outside of the soul” (LongMeta XII.14\n{1473–4}). He offers the less-than-perspicuous compromise\nformula that prime matter lies “halfway, as it were, between\nabsolute non-being and actual being” (quasi medium inter\nnon-esse simpliciter et esse in actu) (LongPhys I.70;\nParaPhys I.3.3.276).","\nMatter exists only when actualized by form, but the first form it\nreceives is not the nature of the composite substance (dog, stone,\netc.) but instead the “indeterminate dimensions”\n(al-abʿād ghayr al-maḥdūdat) that give\nmatter its corporeal character: “the three dimensions that\nconstitute the nature of body are the first state in matter, and\nmatter cannot be devoid of them in any instance of generation: not\nthat they exist in matter in actuality, but rather in some kind of\npotentiality different from the potentiality in which matter is\nconstituted” (ParaGC I.4.26 {32}; SubstOrb\n1.55). In postulating a persisting extended substratum beneath all\nphysical change, Ibn Rushd has been said to take a step toward the\nres extensa of seventeenth-century mechanical philosophy\n(Hyman 1965). But his conception of matter, far from making further\nforms unnecessary, explains how multiple forms can be instantiated in\nthe same material stuff: “the presence of dimension in prime\nmatter is a prerequisite for the existence of contraries”\n(EpiMeta 3.126 {112}). Since forms, by their nature, are\nalways individuals—universals, Ibn Rushd insists, do not exist\noutside the soul (EpiMeta 2.73–5\n{57–9})—the theory does not require a “principle of\nindividuation” for form. Extended matter does, however, serve as\nwhat might be called a principle of multiplication. If the material\nrealm were not extended, “there would exist in it only one form\nat a given time” (SubstOrb 1.60; Di Giovanni 2007).","\nAlongside matter, the other internal principle of composite substances\nis form, and so form too counts as a substance (LongAnima\nII.2), and indeed is substance in the most proper sense of the term\n(Amerini 2008; Di Giovanni 2012). Substantial forms can be\ndistinguished from accidents in that a subject (a dog, a stone)\nendures through the gain and loss of its accidents, whereas when the\nsubstantial form of the subject departs, the subject ceases to exist\nor exists only homonymously (ParaAnima 2.120)—as one\nmight speak of cremating one’s grandfather. Interpreters have\ndisagreed on whether Ibn Rushd allows a single substance to have\nmultiple substantial forms. But at least sometimes he seems to suppose\nthat one substance has just one form, as when he holds that “if\nprime matter were to have its own form, it would receive no other\nform, while enduring, but would immediately be corrupted as soon as\nthat other form were generated” (LongPhys I.69; see\nSubstOrb 1.50). If elsewhere he seems to suggest that any\nnecessary feature of a thing will count as a substantial form of it,\nthis may mean merely that a substantial form is a composite of\nmultiple discrete, incomplete constituents (Di Giovanni 2011; Cerami\n2015, 521–4). Ibn Rushd is clear, at any rate, that the essence\n(dhāt) or quiddity (māhiyya) of a thing is\naccounted for entirely by its form, rather than by its form and matter\n(LongMeta VII.34 {896}). Thus, “form is the primary\nsubstance only because it is the cause of the determinate substance\nand the determinate substances come to be substance only by it”\n(LongMeta VII.5 {761k}).","\nAccidents, which can come and go from a substance, are inseparable\nfrom that substance, and are caused by it (EpiMeta 2.56 {42};\nLongMeta XII.25 {1532–3}), but are not themselves a\npart of the substance (LongAnima II.4; Tahāfut\nI.6.216 {359}). They do not have existence in an absolute sense, but\nonly relationally (LongMeta XII.3 {1415}; EpiMeta\n1.28 {12}), and indeed Ibn Rushd generally does not refer to them as a\nform (ṣūra), preferring to reserve that term for\nthe substantial form.","\nThe earthly realm we have been describing is just one small and\nrelatively insignificant part of what there is. Much more exalted, and\na much worthier subject of intellectual contemplation, is the eternal\nheavenly domain. Here Ibn Rushd broadly follows standard premodern\ncosmology in describing the eight celestial spheres of the moon, the\nsun, the five planets, and the fixed stars. These spheres are solid,\ntransparent bodies, spinning around the earth, luminous only at those\npoints where the sphere thickens (SubstOrb 2.92). Celestial\nbodies are composites of matter and form, but of an utterly different\nkind. Their matter is actually existent, incorruptible and\nindivisible, with a determinate size and shape (SubstOrb\n2.82; LongMeta XII.10 {1447}). Celestial matter is in\npotentiality only with regard to motion, and that motion, although\ngenerally circular, is extremely complex, with as many as 55 distinct\nmotions identifiable among the eight spheres (LongMeta XII.48\n{1679}). Each of these distinct motions requires a distinct\nactualizing form (EpiMeta 4.147 {135}; LongMeta\nXII.43 {1645}), but these are not material forms, inhering in the\ncelestial matter (since that matter is already actualized). Instead,\nthese celestial forms are separate and, like all forms not inhering in\nmatter, they are therefore intellectual: “if there are these\nforms that have existence inasmuch as they are not in matter, then\nthese are necessarily separate intellects, since there is no third\nkind of existence for forms qua forms”\n(EpiMeta 4.150 {139}; Incoherence I.6 {338}). In\naddition to intellects, these forms have desires, and indeed are aptly\nreferred to as souls (LongMeta XII.36 {1593};\nSubstOrb 1.71, 2.81). It is this desire, rather than any sort\nof physical contact, that moves the spheres, with the beauty of its\ncelestial intelligence serving as a final cause, and its desire\nefficiently moving the sphere. Far from being cold bodies in empty\nspace, these spheres are “alive, full of pleasure, and delighted\nin themselves” (EpiMeta 4.162 {152}). Adding to their\ndelight is their partial understanding of and desire for the first and\nunmoved mover, which moves all of the spheres through their desire for\nthis highest cause (LongMeta XII.44 {1649–50};\nEpiMeta 4.154 {142}). (For this cosmology in its historical\ncontext, see Wolfson 1962 and Endress 1995.)"],"section_title":"3. Metaphysics","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nThe previous section followed the order of discovery, beginning with\nwhat is better known to us. Here we start with what is causally prior,\nand so begin with the First Cause. (On Ibn Rushd’s method of\ninquiry see Cerami 2015 ch. 7.) Although the existence of some kind of\nFirst Cause was undisputed, religious and philosophical authorities\ndisagreed about the nature of creation. The most common view was that\nthe world came into existence, from God, after having not existed, but\nIbn Rushd follows Aristotle in supposing that the world has always\nexisted, eternally. His strategy for explaining how an eternal world\ncan have a First Cause turns on distinguishing between two kinds of\ncausal orderings, essential and accidental.","\nCauses that are essentially ordered are simultaneous, such that the\nprior stages are a condition for the effect’s ongoing existence,\nas when waves move a ship, the wind moves the waves, and the wind is\nmoved by elemental forces (QPhys 7.25 {235};\nIncoherence I.1 {59}). In such a series there must be a first\ncause, because an endless such series would be actually infinite all\nat once, which Ibn Rushd regards as impossible (Incoherence\nI.4 {275}). The series could, moreover, never reach its end, since\ncausal agency cannot pass through an infinitely long series in a\nfinite time (LongPhys VII.6; QPhys 7.25 {235}). This\nFirst Cause cannot itself be something in motion, given the\nAristotelian dictum that everything that is in motion must be moved by\nanother (LongPhys VII.1; QPhys 7.30 {236}). In\nprinciple, Ibn Rushd allows that there could be many unmoved movers\n(QPhys 7.35 {238}), but at a minimum there must be one such\nthing that is immovable, and eternally so, because otherwise some\nstill prior mover would be required to move the supposedly first\nmover, and this would lead again to an essentially ordered infinity of\nmovers (EpiMeta 4.139 {126}). (For the intricate details see\nTwetten 2007.)","\nAn accidental ordering takes place over time, as when rain comes from\na cloud, the cloud comes from vapor, and vapor comes from a prior rain\n(Incoherence I.4 {268}). Such an ordering is circular,\ninasmuch as the materials from one stage are corrupted and reused in a\nlater stage, and so there is no threat of an actual infinity. There is\nthus nothing incoherent about such a series extending infinitely far\ninto the past and infinitely far into the future, and indeed Ibn Rushd\nargues that such an infinity can be proved in various ways (Davidson\n1987). One fundamental proof arises from the nature of the First\nCause. Since it is itself unmoved—that is, wholly\nchangeless—its causal agency must likewise be eternal. “A\nthing lacking the potential for change and alteration cannot be\nchanged at any time, since if it were then its alteration would be by\ncause of itself, and so there would be alteration without the\npossibility for it” (LongCaelo I.103). It is, for Ibn\nRushd, incoherent to posit an eternally existing, changeless\nactuality, which suddenly springs into agency after having not acted\nfor an eternity. In general, “the effect of a cause cannot be\ndelayed after the causation” (Incoherence I.1 {15}).\nSimilar considerations show that the world’s future existence\nmust likewise be eternal (Incoherence 1.1 {22}).","\nFor the reasons just rehearsed, an eternal and unchanging First Mover\nentails an eternal and unchanging first thing moved, and observation\nsuggests that this must be the outermost sphere of the stars, whose\ndiurnal rotation in turn moves everything within its ambit:\n“there is a moved thing that is first by nature, which moves the\nwhole, and which terminates every movement whose mover is\nexternal…. The mover of this [first] moved thing is, of itself,\nnot a body and is absolutely and essentially unmoved”\n(EpiPhys 8.242 {141}). Past this first ceaseless motion, the\ncausal story becomes increasingly complex, under the influence of the\ncelestial intelligences. Ibn Rushd is suspicious of the unrealistic\nconvolutions of Ptolemaic cosmology, preferring to honor the\nprinciples of Aristotelian physics even where that leaves a gap\nbetween theory and observation (Sabra 1984; Endress 1995). A\nstrikingly personal remark describes how he had once aspired to close\nthat gap, but has now, in his old age, abandoned the project\n(LongMeta XII.45 {1664}). Anticipating the modern rise of\nscientific specialization, he yields the field to those who devote\nthemselves solely to this one science (LongMeta XII.48\n{1679}).","\nThe spheres move eternally in majestic circles simply because it\nbefits their lofty existence to do so (EpiMeta 4.152 {140},\nLongMeta XII.36 {1595}, Incoherence I.15 {484}), but\nthese motions have a subordinate effect of signal importance to us:\nthey sustain the very existence of our sublunary world. Most\nbasically, the motion of the celestial spheres—although they are\nnot themselves hot (SubstOrb 2.95)—gives rise to heat\nin the fiery region immediately beneath the lunar sphere, and from\nheat and its contrary, cold, arise the four elements: earth, air,\nfire, water. “The existence of the celestial body entails\nnecessarily the existence of the elements … as preserving,\nefficient, formal, and final cause” (EpiMeta 4.171\n{161}; Incoherence I.3 {261}). The bodies that furnish our\nsublunary realm are various elemental mixtures, in which the elements\nthemselves endure in an attenuated state, as the material strata above\nprime matter (EpiMeta 1.48 {32}; LongCaelo III.67;\nEpiGC I.121 {22–3}; see Maier 1982 ch. 6). The\nqualities of these elements—hot, cold, wet, dry—“are\nthe causes of all natural things that come into being and pass\naway” (Incoherence II.1 {525}). The entire system so\ndepends on the celestial spheres that “if the motion of the\nheavens were destroyed, … the world in its totality would be\ndestroyed” (SubstOrb 4.117; Kashf 5.112\n{191}).","\nMatter is, at least potentially, infinitely divisible, but at the\nlevel of elements and mixed bodies we can refer to the smallest body\ncapable of still being a body of that kind—the minimum\nnaturale—e.g., “the minimal possible magnitude of\nfire” (EpiPhys 7.212 {114}, Glasner 2009 ch. 8; Cerami\n2015, 429–36). Any sort of mixed body requires a substantial\nform to actualize it, but Ibn Rushd’s view of how such forms\nemerge evolves. His early works hold that, at least at the level of\nliving things, substantial forms cannot be generated by wholly natural\nprocesses, but require a celestial “giver of forms,” the\nAgent Intellect (EpiMeta 4.171 {162}). His later view is more\nthoroughly naturalistic, and argues that prime matter contains the\npotentiality for all substantial forms, which need only be actualized\nby a natural agent, along with the usual cooperation of the celestial\nbodies (LongMeta VII.31 {883}, XII.18.109 {1499}; see\nDavidson 1992 ch. 6; Freudenthal 2002; Cerami 2015 chs.\n8–9).","\nIbn Rushd’s naturalistic conception of generation and corruption\nis of a piece with one of his most famous philosophical stances, his\nrejection of al-Ghazālī’s occasionalism. On this\ntheological tradition, “when a man moves a stone by leaning\nagainst it and pushing it, he does not push it, but it is the Agent\nwho creates the motion” (LongMeta XII.18.112 {1504}).\nIbn Rushd heaps scorn on this view in the Incoherence,\nresting his case most fundamentally on the link between a\nthing’s causal role and its defining nature: “it is\nself-evident that things have essences and attributes that determine\nthe special functions of each thing and through which the essences and\nnames of things are differentiated. If a thing did not have its\nspecific nature, it would not have a special name nor a definition,\nand all things would be one” (II.1 {520}). (For discussion of\nthis argument see Kogan 1985 ch. 3.)","\nFor further details see the entry on\n Ibn Rushd’s natural philosophy\n and the entry on\n causation in Arabic and Islamic thought."],"section_title":"4. Natural Philosophy","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nIn the Aristotelian tradition, Ibn Rushd postulates a special sort of\nsubstantial form—a soul—to account for living substances.\nEven in the mundane case of plants, the complexities of their\noperations require a special principle beyond what would be adequate\nfor nonliving things: nutrition, for instance, “is ascribed to\nthe soul because it is impossible for it to be ascribed to the powers\nof the elements” (LongAnima II.14). His theory of the\nsoul’s operations distinguishes, most basically, between the\nnutritive, sensory, and rational levels. Judging from his casually\nflexible terminology, he sees no real difference between treating\nthese as different souls within a single living thing or as parts of a\nsingle soul—parts characterized as a power (quwwa) or\nprinciple (mabdaʾ). Judging again from his varying\nformulations, he thinks there can be no definitive list of how many\nsuch powers of the soul there are. The question he does regard as\nmeaningful is whether a power is distinguished solely in terms of its\nfunction, or also in terms of its substrate—as he puts it,\nwhether it “differs from the other powers in subject as well as\nin intention (maʿnā), or only in intention”\n(LongAnima III.1; ParaAnima ¶276). Each of the\nfive external senses, for instance, has its own subject, a sensory\norgan, whereas some of the higher sensory operations have dedicated\norgans, in the brain, whereas other operations, such as recollection\n(Black 1996) and choice (Phillipson 2013), are mere functions produced\nby multiple powers working in conjunction. This question of\n“subject” is particularly vexed, as we will see, for the\npowers of intellect.","\nThe “foundation” of cognition at all levels is its\npassivity (LongAnima II.54). This is particularly clear for\nthe five external senses, which have as their objects the material\nqualities of the external world. Color, for instance, the proper\nobject of sight, is an elemental mixture on the surface of bodies\n(ParaParv I.10 {15}), which acts on an illuminated medium and\nthen the organ of the eye, making its recipient at each stage be like\nthe color itself. The general (although not perfect) reliability of\nthe process—that a sense with respect to its proper sense object\n“does not err in regard to it for the most part”\n(LongAnima II.63)—is a product of the natural\nworld’s causal regularity. Indeed, the passivity of the five\nsenses is such that Ibn Rushd, when speaking most carefully, seems to\ntreat these organs as themselves simply the corporeal media through\nwhich sensible qualities are conveyed to the one true principle of\nsensation, the common sense (al-ḥiss al-mushtarak). He\nwrites, for instance, that “through the innermost of all the\ncurtains of the eye, the common sense can perceive the form”\n(ParaParv I.19 {30}); here is where we pass from a purely\ncorporeal stage to “the first of the spiritual stages”\n(ParaParv II.26 {42–3}). The lesson he draws from\nAristotle’s notoriously obscure treatment of common sense\n(De anima 425b12ff) is that the principle of sensation is\n“one in number and multiple in extremities and organs,”\nlike a point at the center of a circle (ParaAnima ¶260).\nOnly here is perception both self-aware and capable of assimilating\nthe objects of multiple sensory modalities. All subsequent cognition\nis dependent on the information collected at this stage. (See Black\n2019 for the theory’s strict empiricism.)","\nTo account for the functional role of common sense, Ibn Rushd accepts\nits traditional—even antiquated—location at the heart,\nwith the concession that common sense has its origin there, but\nterminates in the brain (ParaParv II.36 {59}). This brings\nsensible forms to the higher sensory powers, of which he recognizes\nthree that are distinct within the human brain both in function and in\nsubject:","\nThese faculties, listed in order from the anterior to the posterior of\nthe brain’s supposed three chambers (ParaParv II.26\n{42}), account for much of human cognition. Most basically (for\ndetails see LongAnima II.63, III.6; Blaustein 1984;\nHansberger 2019), imagination allows us to form sensory images taken\nfrom sensation even when we are not presently sensing an object. The\ncogitative power refines these images so as to allow a distinct grasp\nof the “individual contents” (al-maʿānī\nal-shakhṣiya, known in the Latin tradition as\n“intentions”) that are confusedly contained within sensory\nexperience. Memory stores and recalls these images. Ibn Rushd\nexplicitly argues (Incoherence II.2 {546-7}) that the\ncogitative power can do all the work that Ibn Sīnā had split\nbetween a cogitative power and a further estimative power\n(al-quwwa al-wahmiyya). The overall process\nis compared to the gradual “abstracting and cleansing” of\nthe rind, eventually leaving just the fruit itself (ParaParv\nII.26 {43}), these fruits being the “substantial\ndifferences” between individuals (LongAnima II.65).\nNonhuman animals, because they lack a cogitative power entirely, are\nincapable of moving beyond superficial sensory appearances\n(LongAnima III.57).","\nIn keeping with his broadly naturalistic orientation, Ibn Rushd allows\nthe brain a much larger share of the cognitive load than one finds in\nmost premodern philosophers. But the “fruit” these\ncorporeal powers yield is always a representation of a particular\nindividual. To think abstractly—to have universal\nconcepts—requires the powers of intellect, and here is where his\nnaturalism notoriously comes to an end. Ibn Rushd, though he deploys a\nbewildering variety of terms for different aspects of intellect,\nultimately endorses just two intellectual powers distinct both in\nfunction and subject:","\nFollowing what was then the dominant Aristotelian view, he treats the\nagent intellect as a single, separate, eternal substance, and spends\nlittle time arguing for this doctrine, or even explaining how it\n“illuminates” imagined intentions (LongAnima\nIII.17–18; Davidson 1992, pp. 315–18). In contrast, he\ndiscusses the material intellect at length in various treatises, with\nhis views evolving dramatically over time (see Taylor 2009). Here we\nfocus only on his final considered view of the subject, as set out in\nthe Long Commentary, according to which the material\nintellect, like the agent intellect, is a single, separate, eternal\nsubstance (LongAnima III.5).","\nIbn Rushd recognized the audacity of supposing that human beings share\nin a single intellect, writing that “this claim came to me after\nlong reflection and intense care, and I have not seen it in anyone\nelse before me” (CommAlex, p. 30). Indeed, he himself\nhad once called such a view “repulsive”\n(ParaAnima ¶282). Still, we can understand why he was\neventually drawn to it in light of his commitment to three\npropositions:","\nAlthough the trio is jointly contradictory, each claim is individually\nplausible: (A) seems obvious; (B) follows from the familiar\nAristotelian argument that a power capable of understanding all bodies\nmust itself contain the nature of no body (LongAnima III.4);\n(C) is a consequence of Ibn Rushd’s eventual conclusion that the\nvarious strategies for situating an immaterial power within a human\nbeing—his own and that of earlier commentators—were all\nfailures. The genius of his ultimate position was to find a way for\nall three claims to be embraced. In one sense, human beings are\nindividual composites of matter and substantial form, and so wholly\ncorporeal. Although he consistently describes both the material and\nthe agent intellect as parts of the human soul (e.g.,\nLongAnima III.5 {406}), they are souls and actualities only\nequivocally: they are not the actuality of a body (LongAnima\nII.7, II.21, III.5 {396–7}). When human beings are conceived in\nthis narrow way, (C) is true and (A) is false.","\nBut of course there must be some sense in which (A) is true. Ibn Rushd\ninsists that, even though we all share the material intellect, its\nthinking can count as my thinking. To explain this, he\nappeals to Aristotle’s doctrine that “the soul never\nthinks without an image” (De anima III.7, 431a17;\nWirmer 2008, 367–75). The material intellect, although separate,\nis dependent both for its function and for its very existence on\nreceiving imagined intentions from individual human beings\n(CommAlex p. 29); it is eternal only because the human\nspecies is eternal (LongAnima III.5 {407}). Each of us,\ntherefore, partially controls the operation of this separate material\nintellect. Its operation is to think, but inasmuch as we each\ncontrol our imagination, and the imagination is what triggers thought,\nit is appropriate to think of the thoughts we trigger as our\nthoughts, and to think of the two shared intellects, agent and\nmaterial, as each a part of our soul (LongAnima II.60,\nIII.18, III.36 {500}). With this, Ibn Rushd offers the first developed\nstatement of the\n extended-mind\n thesis: that a being’s cognitive system extends beyond the\nindividual organism. When human beings are conceived in this extended\nway, (A) is true and (C) is false.","\nEven if this extended conception of a human being is allowed, that\nstill leaves a question about why these two separated intellects must\neach be singular, and so shared by all human beings. Ibn Rushd’s\nanswer depends in part on an argument against private concepts: that\nwithout concepts that are literally shared, teachers could not convey\nknowledge to students (LongAnima III.5 {411–12}; Ogden\nforthcoming). He also argues that an intellect individuated by a\ncorporeal subject would receive individualized forms\n(LongAnima III.5 {402}; Ogden 2016). Accordingly, he thinks\nthe domain of actually intelligible concepts, and of the intellects in\nwhich those objects exist, must be entirely separate from the material\nrealm, and cannot be individuated by matter. And, as we have seen in\nthe previous two sections, he is for independent reasons committed to\nthe existence of such a realm, among the celestial spheres.\nAccordingly, the human intellectual powers can be identified as the\nlowest members of this hierarchy (LongAnima III.19; Davidson\n1992, 223–31; Taylor 1998).","\nFor further information see the entry on\n Arabic and Islamic psychology and philosophy of mind."],"section_title":"5. Psychology","subsections":[]},{"main_content":[],"section_title":"6. Religion","subsections":[{"content":["\nIbn Rushd believes that God’s existence can be demonstrated\nthrough a complex argument from Aristotelian physics, establishing the\nexistence of a first cause (see §5). As with physical arguments\nin general, the argument is a mere sign (dalīl),\nstarting from empirical features of the world that are better known to\nus even if causally posterior (LongMeta 12.5 {1423}; see\n§2) He rejects the a priori metaphysical arguments of\nIbn Sīnā (Davidson 1987 ch. 10; Bertolacci 2007) and of the\nAshʿarite theologians (Kashf 1), all of which he thinks\nnot only fall short of being demonstrative but also fail to be\npersuasive to ordinary people. For them, one should follow the example\nof the Qurʾān and deploy arguments from design\n(Kashf 1.33–38 {118–22}).","\nIn keeping with Aristotle’s remarks in Metaphysics\nXII.7, Ibn Rushd suggests that God serves not as an efficient cause,\nbut only as a final and formal cause. Efficient causality prevails\namong natural bodies, when one actually moving body brings another\nbody from potential to actual motion. The heavenly bodies, however,\nare already actual, and eternally so, and so in this domain efficient\ncausation has no place (PossibConj 14.86). The relationship\nof First Cause to the celestial spheres, then, is that of intelligible\nto intellect—that is, the eternal thoughts of the First Cause\nare the forms that serve as final causes inspiring the celestial\nintelligences (LongMeta XII.36 {1592}; XII.44 {1652};\nLongCaelo IV.1.654; Incoherence I.14 {481};\nConjunction Epistle 1, par. 3-4). God, being wholly\nimmaterial, cannot directly act on the sublunary material realm at\nall, but plays a causal role only through the mediation of the\ncelestial spheres: “the temporal cannot proceed from an\nabsolutely eternal being, but only from an eternal being which is\neternal in its substance but temporal in its movements, namely, the\ncelestial body” (Incoherence I.13 {467}).\n(Interpretation here is more contentious than this brief summary\nsuggests. For various approaches see Kogan 1985 ch. 5; Davidson 1992,\n227–30; Adamson 2019; Twetten forthcoming.)","\nGod alone, among intellectual beings, has no further object of\nintellectual contemplation that might serve as his final cause. On the\ncontrary, “the First Form thinks of nothing outside\nitself” (LongAnima III.5 {410}; EpiAnima 219\n{93}; EpiMeta 4.158 {147}; LongMeta XII.51 {1700}).\nThis helps account for God’s unique simplicity as a pure mind,\nalways fully actualized by nothing other than God. It leads to\nquestions, however, about the sense in which God can be said to have\nknowledge of the created world. This is “the most powerful\ndoubt” regarding this conception of God (EpiMeta 4.159\n{148}), and it threatens to lead to the view al-Ghazālī had\nbranded as heretical: that God does not know particulars\n(Incoherence II.4 {587}). Ibn Rushd denies that he is\ncommitted to this consequence. God has knowledge of the created world\nin his own manner, neither in universal nor particular, not as if his\nthoughts are caused by the world, but rather as the cause of the world\n(Incoherence I.3 {226-7}, I.13 {462};\nḌamīma 7; LongMeta XII.51\n{1707–8}). The divine mind’s “thinking its own self\nis identical with its thinking all existence”\n(Incoherence I.11 {435}).","\nFor terms to apply to God and creatures in a non-univocal way\n(bi-ishtirāk) is a common state of affairs for Ibn Rushd\n(LongMeta XII.39 {1620–4}). It arises, for instance,\nnot just in the case of knowledge but also in the case of will. For,\nsince God “is exempt from passivity and change,” He does\nnot exercise will in the usual sense of the term (Incoherence\nI.3 {148}). Still, in another sense God is “an intending and\nwilling agent” (Kashf 5.80 {163}) in virtue of the\nspecial causal relationship that God has to the world. Similarly, Ibn\nRushd affirms, in a special sense, that God is the creator of the\nworld (QPhys 3; Kashf 5.78–91\n{161–173}), and that God exercises providence\n(ʿināya) over all existent beings, though he denies\nthat any individual enjoys a special divine providence\n(LongMeta XII.37 {1607}, XII.52; EpiMeta\n4.176–81 {166–71}). It is difficult to assess the degree\nto which, on this account, either God’s will or the world is\nnecessitated (Belo 2007; Hourani 1962; Taylor 2014).","\nThe various strands of Ibn Rushd’s conception of God are set out\non one hand against Ibn Sīnā’s insufficiently\nAristotelian philosophy, and on the other hand against Ashʿarite\ntheology (kalām). His systematic examination of the\nAshʿarites in al-Kashf establishes at length that their methods\nare sophistical and delusional, drawing on two basic resources: the\nintention of Islamic law and Aristotle’s philosophy (Arfa Mensia\n2019). But even where Ibn Rushd is examining the\nmutakallimūn and offering rival interpretations of\nreligious texts, it is not his intention to set philosophy at the\nservice of any kind of theology. Instead these writings are more\nappropriately classified as philosophical considerations on religious\ntexts and theological issues.","\nProphecy is a good example of how Ibn Rushd distinguishes himself both\nfrom the theologians and from previous philosophical approaches\n(Taylor 2018). The trustworthiness of prophecy is foundational to\nIslam: “the sending forth of prophets is based on the fact that\nrevelation comes down to them from heaven, and on this our religion is\nbased” (Kashf 4.58 {142}). The Ashʿarites had\nrelied primarily on miracles to establish the veracity of the Prophet\nMuhammed. Ibn Rushd evaluates this approach from his Aristotelian\nbackground. His first step is to situate the miraculous\n(muʿjiz) as a tool of persuasion belonging to the art of\nrhetoric, standing to the prophetic claim as an extrinsic argument\n(Ben Ahmed 2012). Analogously, when I swear that something is true,\nthe oath I advance has no intrinsic connection to what is claimed as\nbeing true. The Ashʿarites conceive of the relation between being\nprophetic and a miracle as that of a quality to its act. The miracle\nmust be, in principle, an act that is generated from that quality,\njust as the act of healing the sick emanates from the quality of being\na physician (Kashf 5.95–6 {177}). Accordingly, the\nproof that I am a prophet is that I can produce an extra-ordinary act,\nsuch as walking on water, turning a stick into a snake, or splitting\nthe moon. Ibn Rushd responds by identifying a miracle as merely\n“an external sign” of prophecy. The act that more closely\ndemonstrates prophecy is to establish a law that is useful for people.\nThus it is the Qurʾān that proves Muhammad’s veracity:\n“Because of the universality of the teaching of the Precious\nBook and the universality of the laws contained in it—by which I\nmean their liability to promote the happiness of all\nmankind—this religion is common to all mankind”\n(Kashf 5.103 {184}). A miracle alone, in contrast, is at best\ncomplementary, and an argument from miracles is merely persuasive or\nrhetorical. (See further Arfa Mensia 1999, Ben Ahmed 2012)."],"subsection_title":"6.1 God"},{"content":["\nThe Decisive Treatise argues forcefully that philosophy\nshould have a prominent place in religious reflection, and\nspecifically in Islamic law (sharīʿa). This stance,\nalongside his devotion to Aristotelian demonstration (see §2),\nmight raise the question of Ibn Rushd’s\n“rationalism”: Does he regard philosophy as having some\nkind of priority in religious contexts? But this question is not Ibn\nRushd’s, inasmuch as he establishes no hierarchy between\nphilosophy and true religion. The law can serve as a kind of preamble\nto philosophy, addressed to a much wider audience and containing clues\nto guide the philosopher in theoretical matters. But there is no\nquestion of priority. As he famously writes, in a passage that\n(perhaps tellingly) echoes Aristotle’s Prior Analytics\nI.32, “Since the law is true, … we, the Muslim community,\nknow firmly that demonstrative reasoning does not lead to disagreement\nwith what the law sets down. For truth does not oppose truth, but\nrather agrees with and bears witness to it” (Decisive\nTreatise 12; see Taylor 2000).","\nThe implicit target of the Decisive Treatise is\nal-Ghazālī’s notorious fatwa against metaphysics. By\ncharacterizing philosophy in narrowly metaphysical terms, as a science\nthat leads from artifacts back to the Artisan through demonstrative\nmethods, Ibn Rushd means to show that God cannot be demonstrably known\nwithout these methods. To prohibit this path to knowledge from those\nwho are capable of it is an injustice both to God and to these\nscholars. In his Long Commentary on the Metaphysics (I.2\n{10}), he goes so far as to distinguish between two types of\nsharīʿa, one general for everyone or most people,\nand the other “specific” to the philosophers. This might\nsuggest that philosophy, for those capable of it, transcends the\nteachings of Islamic law (Taylor 2012), but it is not at all clear\nthat Ibn Rushd ever commits himself to such a claim. Here in\nLongMeta, he may be speaking of sharīʿa\nonly loosely, as a “way” or “method.” And even\nif he does mean that philosophy is literally a\nsharīʿa, it does not follow that it is a law that\ncompetes against religion. After all, the specific stands to the\ngeneral as something that is complementary, not conflicting.","\nTo be sure, the general sharīʿa of Islam is\npartially subject to the interpretation of philosophers, since they\nare the only ones who have the arsenal, namely demonstration, to bring\nout its hidden meanings, allegories, signs, and symbols. In the end,\nhowever, this serves sharīʿa itself, and cannot do otherwise\nsince, as Ibn Rushd never tires of declaring, Islamic Law is true and\nit calls on everyone, including philosophers, to follow its\nprescriptions (e.g., Incoherence II.4; Decisive\nTreatise 11). Philosophers pursue one path to this\ntruth—the most exalted path available to human beings—but\nthere are other paths, such as the rhetorical and dialectical, that\nalso arrive at this truth.","\nFor all of Ibn Rushd’s involvement in esoteric questions of\nAristotelianism, he was, at the same time, a practicing judge, deeply\nconcerned with jurisprudential theory. Ibn Rushd’s principal\nwork in this domain is the Distinguished Jurist’s\nPrimer, a lengthy handbook on the causes of the jurists’\ndisputes and a comparison between the rationales for decision-making\nby different Sunni schools of jurisprudence. Its originality lies in\nthe rational mechanisms that Ibn Rushd employs to establish general\nrules for understanding agreements and disagreements among jurists. He\nwrites that “our intention in these matters is only the rules\ngoverning the law, not an enumeration of the branches, which would\nhave no end” (Jurist’s Primer 26.241 {ii.202}).\nSo rather than focus on counting the differences that exist between\njurists and schools of jurisprudence, Ibn Rushd attempts to explain\nthese differences by referring them to their principles, rules, and\nthe causes that regulate them. By following the points of disagreement\nbetween the jurists and deducing the causes of this disagreement, and\nthen bringing them back to the general principles and rules equivalent\nto a general maxim rooted in his soul (Jurist’s Primer\n24.179, 220–1 {ii.148, 184-5}), the assiduous jurist\n(al-mujtahid) becomes capable of deciding about the unknown\nsituations he will face.","\nWhat makes these general rules so important is the imitative and\nrepetitive style of jurisprudence in Ibn Rushd’s day, which had\nbeen overwhelmed by a focus on individual cases and the endless\nbranching of views. Thus, either the jurist works according to a rule\nthat distinguishes similar cases from others, or he works according to\nordinary common sense to produce controversial answers. This is what\nthe writings of the Malikites suffered from in his time. Ibn Rushd\ninsists on establishing jurisprudential maxims that make\nunderstandable the disagreement among schools of jurisprudence and\njurists and provide the diligent jurist with basic mechanism for\nmaking decisions regarding emerging problems and cases."],"subsection_title":"6.2 Law"}]},{"main_content":["\nWritings in medicine occupy an important place in Ibn Rushd’s\ncareer. The practice of medicine was not his profession: “it is\nthis part of medicine that I believe restrains me from being perfect\nin this art. And that I haven’t had much practice”\n(Kulliyyāt VII.517). Even so, he left many interesting\ntexts: a Commentary on Ibn Sīnā’s Medical\nPoem, his al-Kulliyyāt (General Principles of\nMedicine), and various writings and commentaries on Galen.\nIndeed, it has been suggested that, near the end of Ibn Rushd’s\ncareer, he was forced to set aside his philosophical project of\nwriting the long commentaries on Aristotle’s texts, and turn\ninstead to Galen’s text on medicine (Al-ʿAlawī\n1986a).","\nThe commentary on Ibn Sīnā challenges the usual conception\nof a rivalry between the two great Islamic philosophers. He says that\nhe chose to comment on Ibn Sīnā’s Poem\nbecause it is “better than many of the introductions written in\nmedicine” (CommIbnSīnā 40). Even so, during\nthe last decade of Ibn Rushd’s life, it is Galen who becomes one\nof his principal authorities. Still, Galen is often a target of\ncriticism. In al-Kulliyyāt, for example, a work that he\nrepeatedly revised (Gätje 1986), the revisions often move in a\ndirection that is increasingly critical of Galen\n(Kulliyyāt II.162, II.184, etc.).","\nMedicine, for Ibn Rushd, is an art rather than a science, concerned\nwith practice rather than theory (Chandelier 2019). According to the\nprologue of al-Kulliyyāt,","\nThe art of medicine is an art that acts (sināʿa\nfāʿila) based on true principles; we seek through it to\npreserve the health of the human body and to eliminate disease as much\nas possible in each body. So the goal of this art is not to heal\nwithout fail (lā budda), but rather to act\nappropriately, to the appropriate extent and time, while waiting to\nachieve its goal, as with the art of navigation and the command of an\narmy. (prol. 127)\n","\nThis definition is based on the famous division of the arts into what\nbelongs to the sphere of necessity and what belongs to the sphere of\npossibility. The art of medicine does not belong to the sphere where\nconsequences follow actions necessarily, as with arts like carpentry.\nIn medicine, even if the physician acts based on scientific\nprinciples, the intended end does not necessarily follow. As he puts\nit, “Apparently, we do not have any of the premises that bring\nus certainty in many of these pursuits. But even so we must try,\ninsofar as we are able” (Kulliyyāt II.208). The\npractical dimension of medicine is similarly central to his commentary\non Ibn Sīnā, which begins with Ibn Sīnā’s\nstatement that “Medicine is preserving health and curing\ndisease,” and comments: “This is the definition of\nmedicine, and its completion would be to say that medicine is an art\nwhose action is preserving health and curing disease, based on science\nand experience” (CommIbnSīnā 46; see also\nKulliyyāt prol.131). As one may notice, Ibn Rushd\ninsists on acting in both texts.","\nThe purpose of al-Kulliyyāt, according to its prologue,\nis to draw from the art of medicine","\na summary (jumla), sufficiently concise and brief to serve as\nan introduction for those who would like to explore the parts of the\nart, and also as a memorandum (tadhkira) for those who would\nlike to reflect on the art. We seek those statements that correspond\nto the truth, even if they contradict the opinions of people who\nbelong to the art. (prol. 127)\n","\nHowever, al-Kulliyyāt is not a book of medical\ngeneralities, as some translations tend to suggest. It is rather a\nbook on the universals of medicine (kulliyyāt fī\nal-ṭibb), as its title suggests—that is, on the\nfoundations, principles, and basic rules that regulate medical theory\nand practice. It thus provides the foundations\n(usṭuqsāt) of the medical art\n(Kulliyyāt III.282).","\nIn the same vein, al-Kulliyyāt is far from being a\ntextbook (kunnāsh); it is rather written against the\ntradition of textbooks that prevailed in the art of medicine. It is a\ndefense of the art of “syllogistic” medicine against\nexperiential medicine. He says: “As for those who limit\nthemselves to the method of the textbooks without knowing the\nuniversal method, they will certainly make mistakes, as do the doctors\nof our time. As for limiting oneself to universal matters, this may be\npossible if the doctor is very skilled. Therefore, one of the\nconsidered conditions of perfection in the arts is that the craftsman\nhave the power to deduce what he needs to deduce”\n(Kulliyyāt VII.552). The status of experience in\nmedicine is limited but not entirely excluded: “Once the\nuniversals of the art of medicine are acquired, one needs the\nexperience from which particular premises are acquired in order to be\nused in each particular case. These premises cannot be written in a\nbook, because they are unlimited” (Kulliyyāt\nVII.517). Ibn Rushd makes an exception, however, in criticizing the\nmanuals and textbooks on medical particulars, for Abū Marwān\nIbn Zuhr, whose al-Taysīr can be trusted because the\nparticulars it contains conform to the universal teachings of\ntheoretical medicine (Kulliyyāt VII.583).","\nIn sum, al-Kulliyyāt is an attempt to advance medical\npractice from the level of the infinite particulars, which cannot be\nassembled in a book, to the level of the rules\n(qānūn) and established principles\n(dustūr) that govern them (Kulliyyāt\nIII.282). It is an attempt to upgrade medical discourse to the level\nof a science, linking its premises and principles to the Aristotelian\nnatural sciences (Al-ʿAlawī 1986a, 180). This holistic\nmethodology is characteristic of how Ibn Rushd approached the arts and\nsciences of his time. It shows his inclination to organize them in a\nway that protects them from chaos and elevates them to the level of\nscientific practice, established on the basis of universal principles\nand foundations. Particular cases, since they are unlimited, cannot be\ndealt with unless there are general laws that help us to deduce\ndecisions about particulars on the basis of principles and\nfoundations."],"section_title":"7. Medicine","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nThe sciences, for Ibn Rushd, fundamentally divide into the theoretical\n(naẓarīya), which is aimed at knowledge\n(ʿilm), and the practical (ʿamalīya),\nwhich is concerned with voluntary action (Republic I.21;\nLongPhys proem). The chief practical science is politics,\nwhich Ibn Rushd sees as dividing, much like medicine, into a more\ntheoretical and a more practical part. The first and more theoretical\npart examines voluntary actions in general, their associated\ndispositions (the virtues and vices), and the relationships between\nthese elements. The second, more practical part examines how these\ndispositions become established within souls and how they are\nperfected and impeded (Republic I.21). The first part is\nfound in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and the second\npart in his Politics. Although Ibn Rushd composed a\ncommentary on the first of these, and although he knew the second was\navailable in Arabic elsewhere, he complains that it “has not yet\nreached us on this peninsula” (ParaEthics X.160G).\nAccordingly, he chose to comment on Plato’s Republic as\nan alternative source for the second part of political science.","\nFollowing the Nicomachean Ethics, Ibn Rushd takes the goal of\nhuman life to be happiness (Hourani 1962). For ordinary people, the\nultimate guide to happiness is the Qurʾān, which exhibits\nmiraculous wisdom in the rules it sets out to promote human\nflourishing (see §6.1). But the ultimate human happiness, for\nthose who are capable of it, is to become perfect in the theoretical\nsciences (LongPhys proem). Such perfection arrives when human\nbeings conjoin themselves to the separate Agent Intellect, which is to\nsay that they pass from a partial conception of intelligible objects\nto a conception of the Agent Intellect itself. At this point a human\nbeing in some sense takes on an “eternal existence”\n(PossibConj 5.41; LongPhys proem), and is\n“made like unto God” (LongAnima III.36 {501}),\nand even “becomes one of the eternal, incorporeal beings”\n(PossibConj 5.40). This notion of conjunction\n(ittiṣāl) had a complex history among earlier\nAristotelians, and Ibn Rushd’s views about what it involves, and\nwhether it is possible, developed over time (Davidson 1992,\n321–56; Black 1999). The texts here are complicated, but suggest\nthat he rejected al-Fārābī’s complaint that\nconjunction is nothing other than “an old woman’s\ntale” (PossibConj 14.85; Epistle 1 par. 40),\nand that he accepted it as, in some sense, the goal of human life, one\nthat would be achieved through contemplation, with the assistance of\nprayer and the Qurʾān (PossibConj\n15.103–4).","\nA perfect, conjoined grasp of the theoretical sciences carries with\nit, necessarily, the complete possession of the moral virtues. One so\npossessed will be perfect both in intellectual understanding and in\n“the activity proper to him” (LongAnima III.36\n{500, 501}). If this sort of moral excellence is not much on display\nin those we see make the greatest claims to the possession of science,\nthis only testifies to the poverty of their achievements\n(LongPhys proem). The perfection Ibn Rushd describes,\nhowever, through conjunction with the Agent Intellect, seems to entail\nsomething other than personal immortality. For he expressly refuses,\nagainst al-Ghazālī, to endorse bodily resurrection\n(Incoherence II.4 {580–6}), and yet he also insists\nthat the human soul is individuated in virtue of its body. So, as he\nexplicitly concludes, “if the soul does not die when the body\ndies, or if there is anything of this kind within the soul, then it\nmust, once it has left the bodies, be one in number”\n(Incoherence I.1 {29}). So—although scholarship is not\nunanimous on this point—it seems that Ibn Rushd, whatever he\nmight have thought about conjunction, did not mean for the promise of\nthe soul’s immortality to extend to each of us as\nindividuals (Taylor 1998).","\nJust as the theoretical part of medicine has as its aim the more\npractical business of preserving health and curing disease, so too, in\nthe political sphere, the first part has as its end the perfection of\nthe second part. This is to say that the goal of ethical inquiry is\nultimately “the governance of cities” (ParaEthics\nI.3, 3F). This instrumental conception of ethics looks strange from\nthe perspective of later European philosophy, but it is what Aristotle\nhimself expressly affirms at Nicomachean Ethics I.2, and it\ncomports well with Ibn Rushd’s orientation away from individual\nhuman beings as the ultimate locus of value in the universe.","\nFrom the start, Ibn Rushd announces that the goal of his commentary on\nthe Republic will be to strip away the parts that are merely\ndialectical, so as to identify the claims that achieve the level of\ndemonstrative science (Republic I.21). Accordingly, he\nattends very selectively to the ten books that comprise Plato’s\nRepublic, dispensing entirely with the first and tenth books\nand the first half of the second book, and merging the rest into three\nbooks. The first presents political science and reflects on the\ncomponents of the virtuous city, especially the guards. The second\nconsiders virtuous governments and the qualities of the ruler of the\nvirtuous city and the philosopher. The third is devoted to\nnon-virtuous governments, comparisons between them, and the transition\nfrom one to another.","\nThe Platonic text is subjected to two parallel frameworks. The first\nis Aristotelian, both in its overarching theoretical\nframework—replacing the dialectical and dialogical character of\nthe Platonic text with Aristotle’s ethical and logical framework\n(Butterworth 1986)—and in its particular details, as when Ibn\nRushd emphasizes the role of logic rather than mathematics in the\ntraining of the guards and the ruler of the virtuous city\n(Republic II.76–7). The second is the contextualization\nof this text in the Islamic and Andalusian environment. Ibn Rushd\ntakes the Umayyad, Almoravid, and Almohad dynasties as examples of\nmany of the issues he deals with in the text, and harshly criticizes\nthe current Almohad reign (e.g., Republic III.103) as well as\nthe position of the philosopher at the time, which he compares to\nbeing surrounded by ferocious monsters (Republic II.64). This\ncritical attitude is particularly notable when he discusses how women,\nsharing the same natures as men, are suited to the same activities,\nfit to serve as guardians, philosophers, and rulers. Yet, as things\nare, these capacities are not fostered: “since women in these\ncities are not prepared with respect to any of the human virtues, they\nfrequently resemble plants. Their being a burden upon the men in these\ncities is one of the causes of poverty” (Republic\nI.54).","\nIt is clear that Ibn Rushd comments on the Republic only for\nlack of Aristotle’s superior work. At the end of his paraphrase\non the Nicomachean Ethics, he describes the shortcomings in\nPlato’s treatise, and criticizes Ibn Bājja for having\njudged the Republic as the perfect treatise on the virtuous\ncity. What is less clear is exactly what Ibn Rushd’s own textual\nsources were. Did he deal directly with Plato’s text, with the\nassistance of Galen, al-Fārābī, and Aristotle’s\nRhetoric? Or was the Platonic text not in his hands, which\nmeans that he was commenting on Galen’s Compendium on\nPlato’s Politics, with the help of al-Fārābī\nand Aristotle? While the use of Aristotle’s and\nal-Fārābī’s texts is clear, the question of his\naccess to Plato remains obscure (Mahdi 2016)."],"section_title":"8. Ethics and Politics","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\nOur focus has been Ibn Rushd. But in studying this subject one cannot\nhelp but notice the strange way in which modern scholarship has\nconcerned itself more with the later reception of his ideas than\naround Ibn Rushd himself. Here we briefly consider the reception of\nhis thought in Muslim, Jewish, and Christian contexts."],"section_title":"9. Reception","subsections":[{"content":["\nIbn Rushd is often described as a philosopher who failed to attract\nthe attention of his first audience, resulting in the death of his\nphilosophy at the hands of its intended Islamic readers, a state of\naffairs that is said to have continued until its revival in the\nideological debates of the Arab Renaissance (nahḍa)\n(Kügelgen 1994, al-Jābirī 1998). To be sure, Ibn\nRushd’s influence in Muslim contexts cannot compare to the\noverwhelming influence of Ibn Sīnā, nor even to Ibn\nRushd’s own influence in Europe. Still, the commonly heard claim\nthat he had no influence on Islamic thought is false.","\nFirst, recent scholarship has shown that Ibn Rushd had successors. Ben\nSharīfa (1999) identifies 39 direct disciples of Ibn Rushd, most\nof whom were faithful, and some of whom continued his work in\nphilosophy and related sciences.","\nSecond, after Ibn Rushd’s death, his works were hardly ignored\nby the leading scholars in Andalusia and Morocco. Theologians,\nmathematicians, sufīs, historians, physicians, philosophers and\nliterary figures used Ibn Rushd’s works extensively. In medicine\nand logic, his influence on Ibn Ṭumlūs has recently become\napparent (Ibn Ṭumlūs 2020; Ben Ahmed 2016, 2017, 2019c,\n2020a). His influence also extended to Ashʿarite theology, as\nwhen Abū al-Ḥajjāj Yūsuf al-Miklātī\nquoted Ibn Rushd’s epitome on the Metaphysics and the\nIncoherence of the Incoherence to refute the philosophers\n(Ḥamdān 2005). The same can be said of certain Maghrebi\nmathematicians who benefited from the conceptual arsenal provided by\nIbn Rushd’s philosophical writings. In this context, one can\ncite the example of Ibn Haydūr al-Tādilī, who put\nforward the concept of “the one” (al-wāhid)\nas crystallized by Ibn Rushd (Ibn Haydūr 2018). Ibn\nṬumlūs, al-Miklāti, Ibn ʿAmīra\nal-Makhzūmī, and Ibn Haydūr, among others, appropriate\nIbn Rushd’s philosophical analysis without naming him, whereas\nIbn Sabʿīn on occasion uses Ibn Rushd’s writings\nwithout name even while in other places he criticizes him by\nname—thus complicating the task of identifying the texts used.\nSome of these texts, in particular in jurisprudence and religion, were\npart of the curriculum in Andalusia until its fall (Ben Sharīfa\n1999; Akasoy 2008; Ben Ahmed 2019b). Indeed, in Muslim contexts, some\nof Ibn Rushd’s works have been in constant use from the\nlatter’s lifetime until today. They formed part of the training\nof scholars such as Ibn al-Tilimsānī and Ibn Khaldūn,\nas well as part of the curriculum of important teachers such as\nAbū ʿAbd al-Lāh al-Ābilī (Ibn\nal-Khaṭīb 1975, iii: 507; Ibn Khaldūn 2004).","\nThird, evidence has emerged that some of Ibn Rushd’s books were\ntransmitted east, to Egypt and the Levant, and used by philosophers\nand scholars there. In addition to copies of the Kashf and\nthe Incoherence found in Turkey, Egypt, and India, and the\ntestimony of\n Maimonides,\n who from Egypt was able to acquire most of Ibn Rushd’s\ncommentaries (Davidson 2005, 108–10), we can identify the spread\nof Ibn Rushd’s ideas among some philosophers, as is the case\nwith the theory of the unity of truth adopted by\n Abd al-Latīf al-Baghdādī\n (Ben Ahmed 2019a). Moreover, some of Ibn Rushd’s philosophical\nand metaphysical positions concerning causality and location were\nadopted by thinkers who were generally regarded as enemies of\nphilosophical and rational thought, as is the case with Ibn Taymiyya,\nwho made extensive and explicit use of Ibn Rushd’s texts and\nadopted some of his positions in his crystallization of his conception\nof the history of philosophy and kalām (Ben Ahmed 2019b,\n2020b, 2020d; Hoover 2018).","\nFourth, we now also have evidence that Ibn Rushd’s texts reached\nIran in the sixteenth century and became widely known to scholars in\nthe seventeenth century. The catalogues indicate that dozens of them\nwere transcribed during this time. The large number of copies reflects\nanother phenomenon that we should not continue to ignore: the demand\nfor the teaching of these books and their use by students and teachers\nin madrasas in Safavid Iran. Some thinkers and philosophers used them\nin their debates and teaching. Suffice it to mention here Abd\nal-Razzāq al-Lāhījī, Mullah Rajab ʿAlī\nTabrīzī, and Muḥammad Ṭāhir\nWaḥīd al-Zamān Qazwīnī (Endress 1999, 2001,\n2006; Pourjavady and Schmidtke, 2015; Ben Ahmed forthcoming)."],"subsection_title":"9.1 Arabic"},{"content":["\nIbn Rushd’s philosophy quickly found a second home in Judaism,\nwhere it became so prominent as even to supplant Aristotle as the\nparamount authority in philosophy and science (Harvey 2000). The first\nand critical event was Maimonides’ acquisition of Ibn\nRushd’s commentaries, perhaps around 1190. His subsequent praise\nof this work precipitated a four-century fascination with Ibn Rushd\namong Jewish philosophers (Harvey 1992), especially focusing on his\ncommentaries but even extending to some of his religious\ntreatises.","\nAs Jewish authors began to write increasingly in Hebrew, Ibn\nRushd’s texts followed, thanks to a series of Arabic-to-Hebrew\ntranslations from 1230 onward (see Zonta 2010 and, in more detail,\nTamani and Zonta 1997, 31–49). By 1340, virtually all of the\ncommentaries were available in Hebrew, even while very little of\nAristotle himself was translated. In parallel with this process,\nJewish authors began to write commentaries on Ibn Rushd, giving rise\nto a extensive series of “supercommentaries” (Glasner\n2011). The leading example of this phenomenon is\n Gersonides’\n series of supercommentaries on Ibn Rushd in the 1320s (Glasner\n1995).","\nThe extent to which Ibn Rushd took precedence over other sources of\nAristotelianism is quite startling. A typical example is Shem Tov Ibn\nFalaquera, whose introduction to his thirteenth-century encyclopedia\nclarifies that “all that I write are the words of Aristotle as\nexplained in the commentaries of the scholar Averroes, for he was the\nlast of the commentators and he incorporated what was best from the\n[earlier] commentaries” (in\n Shem Tov Ibn Falaquera §4).\n Each of the various types of Rushdian commentary had their champions\nat different times. Here is the advice of Moses Almosnino from the\nsixteenth-century: “do not squander your time with the epitomes\nand middle commentaries of Averroes, but read only the long\ncommentaries, for if you read the long commentaries carefully you will\nhave no need to read any other book in order to understand anything of\nnatural science” (in Harvey 1985, 61).","\nOther important figures from the thirteenth century are\n Isaac Albalag\n and\n Isaac Polqar.\n Prominent fourteenth-century figures are Gersonides and Moses Narboni\n(see Hayoun 2005), whose commentary on Ibn Rushd’s theory of\nconjunction has been translated into English along with Ibn\nRushd’s epistle. Prominent names from the fifteenth century\ninclude Abraham Bibago and\n Elijah Del Medigo\n (see Hayoun 2005). Sixteenth-century figures such Abraham de Balmes\nattempt more accurate Latin translations of Ibn Rushd, drawing on\nearlier Arabic-to-Hebrew translations (Ivry 1983, Hasse 2016).","\nSee also the entries on the\n influence of Arabic and Islamic Philosophy on Judaic thought\n and the\n influence of Islamic thought on Maimonides."],"subsection_title":"9.2 Hebrew"}]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Life and Works\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nAbū al-Walīd Muḥammad ibn Ahmad Ibn Rushd was born in\\nCordova in 1126. He belonged to an influential Andalusian family,\\nfamous for its judicial power and for its scholarship in the religious\\nsciences. His father was a prominent judge, but the most important\\nfigure in the family was his grandfather, who also bears his name, Ibn\\nRushd, and so the philosopher is called “the grandson”\\n(al-ḥafīd) to distinguish him from his grandfather\\n(al-jadd). The latter was both a well-known judge and a famed\\njurist, being the author of many books in jurisprudence following the\\nMālikī school.\",\n \"\\nUnlike\\n Ibn Sīnā\\n and\\n al-Ghazālī,\\n Ibn Rushd did not write an autobiography, and as a result many\\naspects of his life are obscure and will remain so unless new\\ndocuments are discovered. The limited information we have from his\\nbiographers unanimously agrees on his good conduct, his diligence in\\nscience, and his fairness as a judge, while noting his interests in\\nphilosophy and his adoption of certain “audacious” views.\\nThe surviving historical sources tell us much about his teachers in\\nthe religious sciences, but, with the exception of medicine, we know\\nlittle about those who taught him in other fields. He was certainly\\nnot a disciple of either of his famous Andalusian contemporaries,\\n Ibn Bājja\\n or Ibn Tufayl, although he read their philosophical works. (Puig 1992\\nand Ben Sharīfa 1999 discuss the intellectual circles around Ibn\\nRushd.)\",\n \"\\nIbn Rushd was 22 when the Almohads came to power in the western\\nMaghreb and Andalusia. Given that the Ibn Rushds had been prominent in\\ncircles close to the previous Almoravid dynasty, it was imperative for\\nthe grandson to express in his writings, and perhaps even in person,\\nhis commitment to the new rulers and the Almohad creed\\n(daʿwa) conceptualized by Muḥammad Ibn\\nTūmart (d. 1130). Some surviving testimonies suggest that Ibn\\nRushd did in fact adopt Ibn Tūmart’s creed at some point in\\nhis life (see Ben Sharīfa 1999).\",\n \"\\nGiven the social position of his family, Ibn Rushd soon found himself\\nin the ruling circles of Marrakesh and close to the princes, or at\\nleast some of them, in Andalusia. He engaged in debates on\\nphilosophical and theological issues with this inner circle, and there\\nis a record of a meeting with Abū Yaʿqūb Yūsuf (r.\\n1163–84), the second Almohad ruler, who officially asked Ibn\\nRushd to comment on Aristotle’s works and render them\\naccessible. Later he became chief physician to the caliph in\\nMarrakesh.\",\n \"\\nNevertheless, Ibn Rushd’s relationship with the Almohad creed\\nwas complex and seems to have evolved (Geoffroy 1999; Ben Ahmed\\n2020c). Recently discovered revisions to his al-Kashf ʿan\\nmanāhij al-adilla contain paragraphs where Ibn Rushd shows a\\nsort of critical distance towards Ibn Tumart’s creed. These\\nparagraphs, when added to his harsh criticism of the Almohads in his\\ncommentary on Plato’s Republic, may help us understand\\nthe evolution he underwent during his intellectual life. They may shed\\nlight in particular on the disgrace he suffered at the end of his\\ncareer, when, for reasons that remain unclear, he fell out of favor\\nwith the Almohads and was exiled in Lucena, 60 km southeast of\\nCordova. According to one account, his death took place while he was\\nconfined to a residence in Marrakesh in 1198. (The definitive\\nbiography, in Arabic, is Ben Sharīfa 1999. For more on the\\nhistorical context see Urvoy 1998 and Ben Ahmed 2020c.)\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.1 Life\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIbn Rushd remained productive for at least four decades. He was the\\nauthor of a large corpus that extends over medicine, logic and\\nphilosophy in all its branches, including natural philosophy,\\nastronomy, metaphysics, psychology, politics, and ethics. His work\\nalso includes the sciences of Islamic religion: jurisprudence\\n(fiqh), the foundations of Islamic law (usūl\\nal-fiqh), the foundations of religion (usūl\\nal-dīn), and the science of the Arabic language, including\\ngrammar. With important exceptions, most of his works are available in\\nthe original Arabic. For those works that have been lost, while\\nreaders await the day of their rediscovery, they must generally make\\ndo with medieval translations in Hebrew or Latin.\",\n \"\\nIbn Rushd’s work deploys various methods and styles. Many\\ntreatises are in the form of a commentary, most famously and\\nextensively on Aristotle—covering nearly the whole Aristotelian\\ncorpus—but also on Galen’s medical treatises, as\\nwell as on other philosophers such as Plato, Ibn Sīnā and\\nIbn Bājja. Many other treatises, devoted to specific issues, are\\nnot in commentary form. (For a detailed inventory of texts and\\ntranslations see §10.1.)\",\n \"\\nThe focus of his commentaries was Aristotle because no one has yet\\nsurpassed his achievement: “no one who has come after him to\\nthis our time—and this is close to 1500 years later—has\\nbeen able to add a word worthy of attention to what he said”\\n(LongPhys proem; Harvey 1985, 83). Scholarship going back to\\nthe nineteenth-century has divided the commentaries into three\\nkinds:\",\n \"\\nInasmuch as Ibn Rushd routinely wrote different kinds of commentaries\\non the same Aristotelian treatise, some such distinction seems\\nnecessary. But recent scholarship has doubted whether this neat\\nthreefold distinction adequately captures Ibn Rushd’s complexly\\nvaried approach (Al-ʿAlawī 1986a; Druart 1994; Gutas 1993).\\nAt a minimum, it omits important categories of work, such as compendia\\n(mukhtaṣarat), treatises (maqālāt),\\nand answers to questions (masāʾil), to say nothing\\nof the important treatises that focus on religious questions.\",\n \"\\nThe most prominent of those independent religious treatises are\",\n \"\\nThese works, which seem to have had little influence on medieval\\nChristian thought, have traditionally been seen as\\n“theological” and contrasted with his supposedly\\n“philosophical” works: the commentaries on Aristotle that\\ncirculated throughout medieval and Renaissance Europe in Latin and\\nHebrew translation. The latter were thought to be demonstrative, and\\naimed at the elites, whereas the former were said to be merely\\ndialectical, and so aimed at a popular audience. Accordingly Ibn\\nRushd’s true position supposedly had to be sought in these\\nAristotelian commentaries.\",\n \"\\nThis distinction has affected the direction of scholarship, causing\\ngreat attention to be given to the “philosophical” works,\\nwhich were thought to represent most truly his thought, and leaving\\nthe “theological” treatises to be comparatively neglected.\\nEven where the latter are widely taught, they are set apart from his\\nsupposedly more philosophical commentaries. The result, ever since the\\ninitial research of Renan (1852), has been a segmented and fragmentary\\nview of the Rushdian corpus that marginalizes important aspects of his\\nthought.\",\n \"\\nAn important correction to this tendency appears in Jamal Al-Dīn\\nAl-ʿAlawī (1986a), who defends the unity and coherence of\\nthe Rushdian corpus. He proposes that Ibn Rushd’s works form a\\nunity where there is no room to distinguish between what is a\\ncommentary on another text and what is an ostensibly original work.\\nWith this, Al-ʿAlawī attempted to close a gap in a body of\\nwork that should rightly be seen as continuous, and to reconnect texts\\nthat have been disassociated from their contexts.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"1.2 Works\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe general character of Ibn Rushd’s philosophy is illuminated\\nby his overarching picture of logic. Most broadly, he understands it\\nas the study of the conditions and rules that rightly guide the mind\\ntoward the conception (taṣawwur) of essences and the\\nassent (taṣdīq) to propositions\\n(CompLogic 1.1). Glossing Aristotle’s famous remark\\nthat “it is the mark of the educated person” to seek the\\nappropriate level of precision in any inquiry, Ibn Rushd clarifies\\nthat the educated person is “one who has been instructed in the\\nart of logic” (ParaEthics I.3, 3C).\",\n \"\\nIn keeping with the weight he accords the subject, Ibn Rushd commented\\nseveral times on each work in Aristotle’s logical\\nOrganon. Near the start of his career, he wrote a\\nCompendium of Logic that includes Porphyry’s\\nIsagoge and follows the usual Arabic practice of including\\nthe Rhetoric and Poetics as part of an expanded\\nOrganon (Black 1990). Later, he wrote a series of longer\\nparaphrases of this same corpus (but treated the Isagoge\\nseparately, on the grounds that it is neither an introduction to nor\\neven a part of logic). Toward the end of his life, he devoted one of\\nhis five long commentaries to the Posterior Analytics.\",\n \"\\nIn line with the approach of his predecessors, Ibn Rushd divided\\nlogical processes into five types of argument: demonstrative,\\ndialectical, rhetorical, poetical, and fallacious. These inferences\\nare not distinguished by their forms, which are the same, but by their\\nmatter, that is, by their premises. The premises of demonstrative\\narguments are necessary (Thom 2019), the premises of dialectical\\narguments are generally accepted, the premises of rhetoric are\\ngenerally received, the premises of poetic arguments are imaginative,\\nand the premises of sophistical arguments are deceiving.\",\n \"\\nFor Ibn Rushd, the center of logic and its very purpose is\\ndemonstration, for it is the only procedure that leads to certainty in\\nphilosophy: it is “the most perfect kind of reflection\\n(naẓar), using the most perfect kind of inference\\n(qiyās)” (Decisive Treatise 3).\\nAccordingly, even in the context of Plato’s Republic,\\nhe begins his commentary by announcing that his goal is “to\\nabstract such scientific arguments attributable to Plato as are\\ncontained in the Republic by removing from it its dialectical\\narguments.” However, this does not mean that non-demonstrative\\narguments are useless. Generally, where one kind of argument is not\\neffective, other kinds of arguments should be used. Dialectic offers a\\npath toward demonstration and to science, which, although it does not\\nobtain certainty, is close to it. Rhetoric contributes, through its\\nparadigms and enthymemes, to reinforcing and promoting demonstrative\\nevidence. The study of sophistical reasoning is useful in assessing\\nthe faulty argumentative methods of the theologians (the\\nmutakallimūn, that is, practitioners of\\nkalām).\",\n \"\\nIn light of the high status of demonstration, Ibn Rushd considered it\\nwith great care in his commentaries. He devoted a compendium, a\\nparaphrase and a long commentary to the Posterior\\nAnalytics—which he calls the Book of Demonstration\\n(Kitāb al-Burhān)—and wrote separate\\ntreatises on various special issues. The long commentary is probably\\nthe most appropriate text for his positions on the components of\\ndemonstration, its types, and its role in producing scientific\\nknowledge. That commentary is also the occasion for a critical and\\nsevere interaction with the two Islamic authorities in logic before\\nhim, al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā.\",\n \"\\nThe purpose of examining demonstrative arguments is to understand the\\nabsolute demonstration that gives complete certainty and constitutes a\\nscience (LongPostAn I.7 {180}). There are, however, other\\nkinds of demonstration, less certain than the absolute one, but still\\ndemonstrative. In all, Ibn Rushd distinguishes three types\\n(LongPostAn I.95 {348}):\",\n \"\\nIn mathematics, it is generally possible to frame absolute\\ndemonstrations, because the premises both supply the cause and are\\nbetter known than their conclusions. In the natural sciences, however,\\nand even in metaphysics, this ideal situation is generally not\\nachievable. Here we begin with the accidental sensible features of\\nthings, and so extensive use must be made of the demonstration of\\nexistence (EpiPhys 1.105 {9}; Sylla 1979; Cerami 2014). Ibn\\nSīnā, whose views are often the target of Ibn Rushd’s\\nlogic, had denied that these count as a demonstration at all, on the\\ngrounds that they establish no substantial connection between the\\nposterior cause and the prior effect. Ibn Rushd rejects this view\\n(LongPostAn I.95 {349}), but admits that the demonstration of\\nexistence is less reliable than the other demonstrations. Certainty\\ncomes in degrees, and the differentiation in certainty between these\\ndemonstrations is one of the reasons why some sciences are superior to\\nothers (ParaPostAn §88–9).\",\n \"\\nIbn Rushd’s enthusiasm for demonstration does not prevent him\\nfrom valuing other logical arts, and he was particularly concerned\\nwith the place of dialectic. Broadly speaking, according to Aristotle,\\ndialectic has three main uses: as intellectual training, as a path\\ninto the demonstrative sciences of philosophy, and as a means of\\nconversing with ordinary people (Topics I.2). But Ibn Rushd\\ndevotes less space and shows less interest in this third feature of\\ndialectic, and one wonders whether this is due to his critical\\nreaction to the discursive practices of the\\nmutakallimūn. Despite the many considerations that make\\ndialectic more suitable when dealing with ordinary people, Ibn Rushd\\nsuggests that rhetorical and poetic statements are preferable\\n(ParaTop I.5C {31}; Ben Ahmed 2010-2011, 299–302,\\n307–17). Hence their inclusion in the expanded Organon.\\nThe significance of rhetoric and poetics is a result he establishes in\\npolitical science, but maintains even when it comes to teaching and\\nanchoring theological truths. The bad example set by the dialectical\\nsyllogisms of the mutakallimūn shows how dialectical\\nmethods, in discussion with ordinary people, are actually\\ndisadvantageous.\",\n \"\\nUnder the influence of al-Fārābī, Ibn Rushd puts\\nemphasis on the need to introduce dialectic as a method\\n(ṭarīq), a set of rules, techniques, and warnings\\n(Ben Ahmed 2020a, 262–7). This conception of dialectic makes it\\ndistinct from both demonstration and sophistical reasoning, as well as\\nfrom ordinary conversations. When used well, dialectic is a communal\\nenterprise and so again different from other arts, such as\\ndemonstration, where there is no need for more than one party. A\\nsuccessful “partnership” in dialectic is one where each\\nparty does their best to commit themselves to the rules. From this\\nperspective, it becomes evident that the questioner is not simply an\\nadversary seeking to defeat his opponent, but rather a partner and a\\ncollaborator with the respondent in the search for knowledge. Any\\ndebate that is motivated by the pursuit of victory or by deriving\\npleasure from defeating one’s opponent is a debate that cannot\\nfall under the method of dialectic. He writes, “the communal\\nenterprise (al-ʿamal al-mushtarak) can be achieved in\\nits utmost perfection only by both partners. They can have something\\nin common when their aim is the assessment and the deduction of the\\ntruth, or the realization of their training. Thus, the respondent\\nshould perfect his response if he intends that aim, because the basest\\nof the partners is the one who aims at the obstruction of the communal\\nenterprise. But if their aim is to struggle against and defeat the\\nother, then they will have nothing in common…. This is not the\\nmethod of dialectic” (ParaTop 8.132D {233}; Ben Ahmed\\n2020a, 267)\",\n \"\\nAt the far reaches of the logical arts, the connection to the genuine\\nsyllogism becomes remote. So, even while Ibn Rushd recognizes that\\npoetics is a syllogistic art, he says that it lacks the power of a\\nreal syllogism and is thus unproductive (CompLogic 12.3). In\\nhis paraphrase of the Poetics, he avoids using the term\\n“poetic syllogism” altogether.\",\n \"\\nIn the realm of jurisprudence, Ibn Rushd is famous for his position on\\nthe logical and epistemological value of juridical inferences, which\\nin his view produce nothing more than opinion\\n(ẓann). Even when confronted with the\\nsurprising insertion of the word for jurisprudence (fiqh)\\ninto the Arabic translation of the Prior Analytics 68b10, Ibn\\nRushd chooses totally to ignore it. In his juridical writings, he\\nopenly denies the accuracy of the term ‘syllogism’\\n(qiyās) for what jurists had become accustomed to\\ncalling their juridical inferences (al-maqāyīs\\nal-fiqhiyya or qiyās sharʿī).\\nWhen jurists speak of qiyās, it is important to\\nrecognize that the term bears quite a different meaning\\n(Abridgement 299 {130–1}; Bou Akl 2019). In particular,\\ncontrary to what happens in the syllogism, the qiyās of\\nthe jurists does not have the power to deduce the unknown from the\\nknown. And even in those cases where Ibn Rushd seems to accept\\njuridical inference, he does not make use of logical vocabulary, but\\ninstead deploys the terms used by most of the jurists before him.\\nRather than engage in a “syllogistification” of the\\njuridical inference, he focuses on the semantic and linguistic origins\\nof juridical rules. For Ibn Rushd, every science has its own\\ncharacteristics; therefore, anyone who tried to study logic while\\nstudying jurisprudence would fail at studying both\\n(Abridgement 123 {37–38}).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. Logic and Methodology\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe divisions between metaphysics, natural philosophy, psychology, and\\ntheology are permeable for Ibn Rushd, and the systematic character of\\nhis thought makes it difficult to treat any part in isolation. (See\\nthe start of EpiMeta for his division of the sciences.) Here\\nour method of proceeding is to begin with the most general principles\\nof being, and then to turn, in the next section, to their causal\\nrelationships.\",\n \"\\nOf the various kinds of being, substances are what exist in the most\\nproper sense (EpiMeta 4.138 {125}). Among substances, the\\nmost familiar are concrete individuals like dogs and stones\\n(EpiMeta 2.58 {43}). But these are composite entities, and\\nsince the principles of a substance are themselves even more properly\\nconsidered to be substances (EpiMeta 1.31 {15–16};\\nLongAnima II.8), the most fundamental substances in the\\nsensible realm are the metaphysical ingredients of composite\\nsubstances, matter and form (LongMeta VII.44 {960}).\",\n \"\\nUnderlying all change, and enduring through it, is homogeneous matter,\\ndefined simply by its potentiality—that is, its potential to\\nserve as subject for any earthly form (SubstOrb 1.50).\\nConceived of without form, it is perpetually enduring and numerically\\none everywhere: “all transient bodies share this body that is\\nnumerically one” (SubstOrb 2.87), because it is\\n“deprived of the divisions of individual forms”\\n(LongMeta XII.14 {1473}). Ibn Rushd worries in predictable\\nways about the reality of this so-called prime matter (mādda\\nʾūlā). On the one hand, he consistently counts it\\nas a substance (e.g., ParaAnima 2.115). On the other hand,\\nmatter so-conceived is a “pure privation” and “does\\nnot exist outside of the soul” (LongMeta XII.14\\n{1473–4}). He offers the less-than-perspicuous compromise\\nformula that prime matter lies “halfway, as it were, between\\nabsolute non-being and actual being” (quasi medium inter\\nnon-esse simpliciter et esse in actu) (LongPhys I.70;\\nParaPhys I.3.3.276).\",\n \"\\nMatter exists only when actualized by form, but the first form it\\nreceives is not the nature of the composite substance (dog, stone,\\netc.) but instead the “indeterminate dimensions”\\n(al-abʿād ghayr al-maḥdūdat) that give\\nmatter its corporeal character: “the three dimensions that\\nconstitute the nature of body are the first state in matter, and\\nmatter cannot be devoid of them in any instance of generation: not\\nthat they exist in matter in actuality, but rather in some kind of\\npotentiality different from the potentiality in which matter is\\nconstituted” (ParaGC I.4.26 {32}; SubstOrb\\n1.55). In postulating a persisting extended substratum beneath all\\nphysical change, Ibn Rushd has been said to take a step toward the\\nres extensa of seventeenth-century mechanical philosophy\\n(Hyman 1965). But his conception of matter, far from making further\\nforms unnecessary, explains how multiple forms can be instantiated in\\nthe same material stuff: “the presence of dimension in prime\\nmatter is a prerequisite for the existence of contraries”\\n(EpiMeta 3.126 {112}). Since forms, by their nature, are\\nalways individuals—universals, Ibn Rushd insists, do not exist\\noutside the soul (EpiMeta 2.73–5\\n{57–9})—the theory does not require a “principle of\\nindividuation” for form. Extended matter does, however, serve as\\nwhat might be called a principle of multiplication. If the material\\nrealm were not extended, “there would exist in it only one form\\nat a given time” (SubstOrb 1.60; Di Giovanni 2007).\",\n \"\\nAlongside matter, the other internal principle of composite substances\\nis form, and so form too counts as a substance (LongAnima\\nII.2), and indeed is substance in the most proper sense of the term\\n(Amerini 2008; Di Giovanni 2012). Substantial forms can be\\ndistinguished from accidents in that a subject (a dog, a stone)\\nendures through the gain and loss of its accidents, whereas when the\\nsubstantial form of the subject departs, the subject ceases to exist\\nor exists only homonymously (ParaAnima 2.120)—as one\\nmight speak of cremating one’s grandfather. Interpreters have\\ndisagreed on whether Ibn Rushd allows a single substance to have\\nmultiple substantial forms. But at least sometimes he seems to suppose\\nthat one substance has just one form, as when he holds that “if\\nprime matter were to have its own form, it would receive no other\\nform, while enduring, but would immediately be corrupted as soon as\\nthat other form were generated” (LongPhys I.69; see\\nSubstOrb 1.50). If elsewhere he seems to suggest that any\\nnecessary feature of a thing will count as a substantial form of it,\\nthis may mean merely that a substantial form is a composite of\\nmultiple discrete, incomplete constituents (Di Giovanni 2011; Cerami\\n2015, 521–4). Ibn Rushd is clear, at any rate, that the essence\\n(dhāt) or quiddity (māhiyya) of a thing is\\naccounted for entirely by its form, rather than by its form and matter\\n(LongMeta VII.34 {896}). Thus, “form is the primary\\nsubstance only because it is the cause of the determinate substance\\nand the determinate substances come to be substance only by it”\\n(LongMeta VII.5 {761k}).\",\n \"\\nAccidents, which can come and go from a substance, are inseparable\\nfrom that substance, and are caused by it (EpiMeta 2.56 {42};\\nLongMeta XII.25 {1532–3}), but are not themselves a\\npart of the substance (LongAnima II.4; Tahāfut\\nI.6.216 {359}). They do not have existence in an absolute sense, but\\nonly relationally (LongMeta XII.3 {1415}; EpiMeta\\n1.28 {12}), and indeed Ibn Rushd generally does not refer to them as a\\nform (ṣūra), preferring to reserve that term for\\nthe substantial form.\",\n \"\\nThe earthly realm we have been describing is just one small and\\nrelatively insignificant part of what there is. Much more exalted, and\\na much worthier subject of intellectual contemplation, is the eternal\\nheavenly domain. Here Ibn Rushd broadly follows standard premodern\\ncosmology in describing the eight celestial spheres of the moon, the\\nsun, the five planets, and the fixed stars. These spheres are solid,\\ntransparent bodies, spinning around the earth, luminous only at those\\npoints where the sphere thickens (SubstOrb 2.92). Celestial\\nbodies are composites of matter and form, but of an utterly different\\nkind. Their matter is actually existent, incorruptible and\\nindivisible, with a determinate size and shape (SubstOrb\\n2.82; LongMeta XII.10 {1447}). Celestial matter is in\\npotentiality only with regard to motion, and that motion, although\\ngenerally circular, is extremely complex, with as many as 55 distinct\\nmotions identifiable among the eight spheres (LongMeta XII.48\\n{1679}). Each of these distinct motions requires a distinct\\nactualizing form (EpiMeta 4.147 {135}; LongMeta\\nXII.43 {1645}), but these are not material forms, inhering in the\\ncelestial matter (since that matter is already actualized). Instead,\\nthese celestial forms are separate and, like all forms not inhering in\\nmatter, they are therefore intellectual: “if there are these\\nforms that have existence inasmuch as they are not in matter, then\\nthese are necessarily separate intellects, since there is no third\\nkind of existence for forms qua forms”\\n(EpiMeta 4.150 {139}; Incoherence I.6 {338}). In\\naddition to intellects, these forms have desires, and indeed are aptly\\nreferred to as souls (LongMeta XII.36 {1593};\\nSubstOrb 1.71, 2.81). It is this desire, rather than any sort\\nof physical contact, that moves the spheres, with the beauty of its\\ncelestial intelligence serving as a final cause, and its desire\\nefficiently moving the sphere. Far from being cold bodies in empty\\nspace, these spheres are “alive, full of pleasure, and delighted\\nin themselves” (EpiMeta 4.162 {152}). Adding to their\\ndelight is their partial understanding of and desire for the first and\\nunmoved mover, which moves all of the spheres through their desire for\\nthis highest cause (LongMeta XII.44 {1649–50};\\nEpiMeta 4.154 {142}). (For this cosmology in its historical\\ncontext, see Wolfson 1962 and Endress 1995.)\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Metaphysics\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe previous section followed the order of discovery, beginning with\\nwhat is better known to us. Here we start with what is causally prior,\\nand so begin with the First Cause. (On Ibn Rushd’s method of\\ninquiry see Cerami 2015 ch. 7.) Although the existence of some kind of\\nFirst Cause was undisputed, religious and philosophical authorities\\ndisagreed about the nature of creation. The most common view was that\\nthe world came into existence, from God, after having not existed, but\\nIbn Rushd follows Aristotle in supposing that the world has always\\nexisted, eternally. His strategy for explaining how an eternal world\\ncan have a First Cause turns on distinguishing between two kinds of\\ncausal orderings, essential and accidental.\",\n \"\\nCauses that are essentially ordered are simultaneous, such that the\\nprior stages are a condition for the effect’s ongoing existence,\\nas when waves move a ship, the wind moves the waves, and the wind is\\nmoved by elemental forces (QPhys 7.25 {235};\\nIncoherence I.1 {59}). In such a series there must be a first\\ncause, because an endless such series would be actually infinite all\\nat once, which Ibn Rushd regards as impossible (Incoherence\\nI.4 {275}). The series could, moreover, never reach its end, since\\ncausal agency cannot pass through an infinitely long series in a\\nfinite time (LongPhys VII.6; QPhys 7.25 {235}). This\\nFirst Cause cannot itself be something in motion, given the\\nAristotelian dictum that everything that is in motion must be moved by\\nanother (LongPhys VII.1; QPhys 7.30 {236}). In\\nprinciple, Ibn Rushd allows that there could be many unmoved movers\\n(QPhys 7.35 {238}), but at a minimum there must be one such\\nthing that is immovable, and eternally so, because otherwise some\\nstill prior mover would be required to move the supposedly first\\nmover, and this would lead again to an essentially ordered infinity of\\nmovers (EpiMeta 4.139 {126}). (For the intricate details see\\nTwetten 2007.)\",\n \"\\nAn accidental ordering takes place over time, as when rain comes from\\na cloud, the cloud comes from vapor, and vapor comes from a prior rain\\n(Incoherence I.4 {268}). Such an ordering is circular,\\ninasmuch as the materials from one stage are corrupted and reused in a\\nlater stage, and so there is no threat of an actual infinity. There is\\nthus nothing incoherent about such a series extending infinitely far\\ninto the past and infinitely far into the future, and indeed Ibn Rushd\\nargues that such an infinity can be proved in various ways (Davidson\\n1987). One fundamental proof arises from the nature of the First\\nCause. Since it is itself unmoved—that is, wholly\\nchangeless—its causal agency must likewise be eternal. “A\\nthing lacking the potential for change and alteration cannot be\\nchanged at any time, since if it were then its alteration would be by\\ncause of itself, and so there would be alteration without the\\npossibility for it” (LongCaelo I.103). It is, for Ibn\\nRushd, incoherent to posit an eternally existing, changeless\\nactuality, which suddenly springs into agency after having not acted\\nfor an eternity. In general, “the effect of a cause cannot be\\ndelayed after the causation” (Incoherence I.1 {15}).\\nSimilar considerations show that the world’s future existence\\nmust likewise be eternal (Incoherence 1.1 {22}).\",\n \"\\nFor the reasons just rehearsed, an eternal and unchanging First Mover\\nentails an eternal and unchanging first thing moved, and observation\\nsuggests that this must be the outermost sphere of the stars, whose\\ndiurnal rotation in turn moves everything within its ambit:\\n“there is a moved thing that is first by nature, which moves the\\nwhole, and which terminates every movement whose mover is\\nexternal…. The mover of this [first] moved thing is, of itself,\\nnot a body and is absolutely and essentially unmoved”\\n(EpiPhys 8.242 {141}). Past this first ceaseless motion, the\\ncausal story becomes increasingly complex, under the influence of the\\ncelestial intelligences. Ibn Rushd is suspicious of the unrealistic\\nconvolutions of Ptolemaic cosmology, preferring to honor the\\nprinciples of Aristotelian physics even where that leaves a gap\\nbetween theory and observation (Sabra 1984; Endress 1995). A\\nstrikingly personal remark describes how he had once aspired to close\\nthat gap, but has now, in his old age, abandoned the project\\n(LongMeta XII.45 {1664}). Anticipating the modern rise of\\nscientific specialization, he yields the field to those who devote\\nthemselves solely to this one science (LongMeta XII.48\\n{1679}).\",\n \"\\nThe spheres move eternally in majestic circles simply because it\\nbefits their lofty existence to do so (EpiMeta 4.152 {140},\\nLongMeta XII.36 {1595}, Incoherence I.15 {484}), but\\nthese motions have a subordinate effect of signal importance to us:\\nthey sustain the very existence of our sublunary world. Most\\nbasically, the motion of the celestial spheres—although they are\\nnot themselves hot (SubstOrb 2.95)—gives rise to heat\\nin the fiery region immediately beneath the lunar sphere, and from\\nheat and its contrary, cold, arise the four elements: earth, air,\\nfire, water. “The existence of the celestial body entails\\nnecessarily the existence of the elements … as preserving,\\nefficient, formal, and final cause” (EpiMeta 4.171\\n{161}; Incoherence I.3 {261}). The bodies that furnish our\\nsublunary realm are various elemental mixtures, in which the elements\\nthemselves endure in an attenuated state, as the material strata above\\nprime matter (EpiMeta 1.48 {32}; LongCaelo III.67;\\nEpiGC I.121 {22–3}; see Maier 1982 ch. 6). The\\nqualities of these elements—hot, cold, wet, dry—“are\\nthe causes of all natural things that come into being and pass\\naway” (Incoherence II.1 {525}). The entire system so\\ndepends on the celestial spheres that “if the motion of the\\nheavens were destroyed, … the world in its totality would be\\ndestroyed” (SubstOrb 4.117; Kashf 5.112\\n{191}).\",\n \"\\nMatter is, at least potentially, infinitely divisible, but at the\\nlevel of elements and mixed bodies we can refer to the smallest body\\ncapable of still being a body of that kind—the minimum\\nnaturale—e.g., “the minimal possible magnitude of\\nfire” (EpiPhys 7.212 {114}, Glasner 2009 ch. 8; Cerami\\n2015, 429–36). Any sort of mixed body requires a substantial\\nform to actualize it, but Ibn Rushd’s view of how such forms\\nemerge evolves. His early works hold that, at least at the level of\\nliving things, substantial forms cannot be generated by wholly natural\\nprocesses, but require a celestial “giver of forms,” the\\nAgent Intellect (EpiMeta 4.171 {162}). His later view is more\\nthoroughly naturalistic, and argues that prime matter contains the\\npotentiality for all substantial forms, which need only be actualized\\nby a natural agent, along with the usual cooperation of the celestial\\nbodies (LongMeta VII.31 {883}, XII.18.109 {1499}; see\\nDavidson 1992 ch. 6; Freudenthal 2002; Cerami 2015 chs.\\n8–9).\",\n \"\\nIbn Rushd’s naturalistic conception of generation and corruption\\nis of a piece with one of his most famous philosophical stances, his\\nrejection of al-Ghazālī’s occasionalism. On this\\ntheological tradition, “when a man moves a stone by leaning\\nagainst it and pushing it, he does not push it, but it is the Agent\\nwho creates the motion” (LongMeta XII.18.112 {1504}).\\nIbn Rushd heaps scorn on this view in the Incoherence,\\nresting his case most fundamentally on the link between a\\nthing’s causal role and its defining nature: “it is\\nself-evident that things have essences and attributes that determine\\nthe special functions of each thing and through which the essences and\\nnames of things are differentiated. If a thing did not have its\\nspecific nature, it would not have a special name nor a definition,\\nand all things would be one” (II.1 {520}). (For discussion of\\nthis argument see Kogan 1985 ch. 3.)\",\n \"\\nFor further details see the entry on\\n Ibn Rushd’s natural philosophy\\n and the entry on\\n causation in Arabic and Islamic thought.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. Natural Philosophy\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nIn the Aristotelian tradition, Ibn Rushd postulates a special sort of\\nsubstantial form—a soul—to account for living substances.\\nEven in the mundane case of plants, the complexities of their\\noperations require a special principle beyond what would be adequate\\nfor nonliving things: nutrition, for instance, “is ascribed to\\nthe soul because it is impossible for it to be ascribed to the powers\\nof the elements” (LongAnima II.14). His theory of the\\nsoul’s operations distinguishes, most basically, between the\\nnutritive, sensory, and rational levels. Judging from his casually\\nflexible terminology, he sees no real difference between treating\\nthese as different souls within a single living thing or as parts of a\\nsingle soul—parts characterized as a power (quwwa) or\\nprinciple (mabdaʾ). Judging again from his varying\\nformulations, he thinks there can be no definitive list of how many\\nsuch powers of the soul there are. The question he does regard as\\nmeaningful is whether a power is distinguished solely in terms of its\\nfunction, or also in terms of its substrate—as he puts it,\\nwhether it “differs from the other powers in subject as well as\\nin intention (maʿnā), or only in intention”\\n(LongAnima III.1; ParaAnima ¶276). Each of the\\nfive external senses, for instance, has its own subject, a sensory\\norgan, whereas some of the higher sensory operations have dedicated\\norgans, in the brain, whereas other operations, such as recollection\\n(Black 1996) and choice (Phillipson 2013), are mere functions produced\\nby multiple powers working in conjunction. This question of\\n“subject” is particularly vexed, as we will see, for the\\npowers of intellect.\",\n \"\\nThe “foundation” of cognition at all levels is its\\npassivity (LongAnima II.54). This is particularly clear for\\nthe five external senses, which have as their objects the material\\nqualities of the external world. Color, for instance, the proper\\nobject of sight, is an elemental mixture on the surface of bodies\\n(ParaParv I.10 {15}), which acts on an illuminated medium and\\nthen the organ of the eye, making its recipient at each stage be like\\nthe color itself. The general (although not perfect) reliability of\\nthe process—that a sense with respect to its proper sense object\\n“does not err in regard to it for the most part”\\n(LongAnima II.63)—is a product of the natural\\nworld’s causal regularity. Indeed, the passivity of the five\\nsenses is such that Ibn Rushd, when speaking most carefully, seems to\\ntreat these organs as themselves simply the corporeal media through\\nwhich sensible qualities are conveyed to the one true principle of\\nsensation, the common sense (al-ḥiss al-mushtarak). He\\nwrites, for instance, that “through the innermost of all the\\ncurtains of the eye, the common sense can perceive the form”\\n(ParaParv I.19 {30}); here is where we pass from a purely\\ncorporeal stage to “the first of the spiritual stages”\\n(ParaParv II.26 {42–3}). The lesson he draws from\\nAristotle’s notoriously obscure treatment of common sense\\n(De anima 425b12ff) is that the principle of sensation is\\n“one in number and multiple in extremities and organs,”\\nlike a point at the center of a circle (ParaAnima ¶260).\\nOnly here is perception both self-aware and capable of assimilating\\nthe objects of multiple sensory modalities. All subsequent cognition\\nis dependent on the information collected at this stage. (See Black\\n2019 for the theory’s strict empiricism.)\",\n \"\\nTo account for the functional role of common sense, Ibn Rushd accepts\\nits traditional—even antiquated—location at the heart,\\nwith the concession that common sense has its origin there, but\\nterminates in the brain (ParaParv II.36 {59}). This brings\\nsensible forms to the higher sensory powers, of which he recognizes\\nthree that are distinct within the human brain both in function and in\\nsubject:\",\n \"\\nThese faculties, listed in order from the anterior to the posterior of\\nthe brain’s supposed three chambers (ParaParv II.26\\n{42}), account for much of human cognition. Most basically (for\\ndetails see LongAnima II.63, III.6; Blaustein 1984;\\nHansberger 2019), imagination allows us to form sensory images taken\\nfrom sensation even when we are not presently sensing an object. The\\ncogitative power refines these images so as to allow a distinct grasp\\nof the “individual contents” (al-maʿānī\\nal-shakhṣiya, known in the Latin tradition as\\n“intentions”) that are confusedly contained within sensory\\nexperience. Memory stores and recalls these images. Ibn Rushd\\nexplicitly argues (Incoherence II.2 {546-7}) that the\\ncogitative power can do all the work that Ibn Sīnā had split\\nbetween a cogitative power and a further estimative power\\n(al-quwwa al-wahmiyya). The overall process\\nis compared to the gradual “abstracting and cleansing” of\\nthe rind, eventually leaving just the fruit itself (ParaParv\\nII.26 {43}), these fruits being the “substantial\\ndifferences” between individuals (LongAnima II.65).\\nNonhuman animals, because they lack a cogitative power entirely, are\\nincapable of moving beyond superficial sensory appearances\\n(LongAnima III.57).\",\n \"\\nIn keeping with his broadly naturalistic orientation, Ibn Rushd allows\\nthe brain a much larger share of the cognitive load than one finds in\\nmost premodern philosophers. But the “fruit” these\\ncorporeal powers yield is always a representation of a particular\\nindividual. To think abstractly—to have universal\\nconcepts—requires the powers of intellect, and here is where his\\nnaturalism notoriously comes to an end. Ibn Rushd, though he deploys a\\nbewildering variety of terms for different aspects of intellect,\\nultimately endorses just two intellectual powers distinct both in\\nfunction and subject:\",\n \"\\nFollowing what was then the dominant Aristotelian view, he treats the\\nagent intellect as a single, separate, eternal substance, and spends\\nlittle time arguing for this doctrine, or even explaining how it\\n“illuminates” imagined intentions (LongAnima\\nIII.17–18; Davidson 1992, pp. 315–18). In contrast, he\\ndiscusses the material intellect at length in various treatises, with\\nhis views evolving dramatically over time (see Taylor 2009). Here we\\nfocus only on his final considered view of the subject, as set out in\\nthe Long Commentary, according to which the material\\nintellect, like the agent intellect, is a single, separate, eternal\\nsubstance (LongAnima III.5).\",\n \"\\nIbn Rushd recognized the audacity of supposing that human beings share\\nin a single intellect, writing that “this claim came to me after\\nlong reflection and intense care, and I have not seen it in anyone\\nelse before me” (CommAlex, p. 30). Indeed, he himself\\nhad once called such a view “repulsive”\\n(ParaAnima ¶282). Still, we can understand why he was\\neventually drawn to it in light of his commitment to three\\npropositions:\",\n \"\\nAlthough the trio is jointly contradictory, each claim is individually\\nplausible: (A) seems obvious; (B) follows from the familiar\\nAristotelian argument that a power capable of understanding all bodies\\nmust itself contain the nature of no body (LongAnima III.4);\\n(C) is a consequence of Ibn Rushd’s eventual conclusion that the\\nvarious strategies for situating an immaterial power within a human\\nbeing—his own and that of earlier commentators—were all\\nfailures. The genius of his ultimate position was to find a way for\\nall three claims to be embraced. In one sense, human beings are\\nindividual composites of matter and substantial form, and so wholly\\ncorporeal. Although he consistently describes both the material and\\nthe agent intellect as parts of the human soul (e.g.,\\nLongAnima III.5 {406}), they are souls and actualities only\\nequivocally: they are not the actuality of a body (LongAnima\\nII.7, II.21, III.5 {396–7}). When human beings are conceived in\\nthis narrow way, (C) is true and (A) is false.\",\n \"\\nBut of course there must be some sense in which (A) is true. Ibn Rushd\\ninsists that, even though we all share the material intellect, its\\nthinking can count as my thinking. To explain this, he\\nappeals to Aristotle’s doctrine that “the soul never\\nthinks without an image” (De anima III.7, 431a17;\\nWirmer 2008, 367–75). The material intellect, although separate,\\nis dependent both for its function and for its very existence on\\nreceiving imagined intentions from individual human beings\\n(CommAlex p. 29); it is eternal only because the human\\nspecies is eternal (LongAnima III.5 {407}). Each of us,\\ntherefore, partially controls the operation of this separate material\\nintellect. Its operation is to think, but inasmuch as we each\\ncontrol our imagination, and the imagination is what triggers thought,\\nit is appropriate to think of the thoughts we trigger as our\\nthoughts, and to think of the two shared intellects, agent and\\nmaterial, as each a part of our soul (LongAnima II.60,\\nIII.18, III.36 {500}). With this, Ibn Rushd offers the first developed\\nstatement of the\\n extended-mind\\n thesis: that a being’s cognitive system extends beyond the\\nindividual organism. When human beings are conceived in this extended\\nway, (A) is true and (C) is false.\",\n \"\\nEven if this extended conception of a human being is allowed, that\\nstill leaves a question about why these two separated intellects must\\neach be singular, and so shared by all human beings. Ibn Rushd’s\\nanswer depends in part on an argument against private concepts: that\\nwithout concepts that are literally shared, teachers could not convey\\nknowledge to students (LongAnima III.5 {411–12}; Ogden\\nforthcoming). He also argues that an intellect individuated by a\\ncorporeal subject would receive individualized forms\\n(LongAnima III.5 {402}; Ogden 2016). Accordingly, he thinks\\nthe domain of actually intelligible concepts, and of the intellects in\\nwhich those objects exist, must be entirely separate from the material\\nrealm, and cannot be individuated by matter. And, as we have seen in\\nthe previous two sections, he is for independent reasons committed to\\nthe existence of such a realm, among the celestial spheres.\\nAccordingly, the human intellectual powers can be identified as the\\nlowest members of this hierarchy (LongAnima III.19; Davidson\\n1992, 223–31; Taylor 1998).\",\n \"\\nFor further information see the entry on\\n Arabic and Islamic psychology and philosophy of mind.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Psychology\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [],\n \"section_title\": \"6. Religion\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIbn Rushd believes that God’s existence can be demonstrated\\nthrough a complex argument from Aristotelian physics, establishing the\\nexistence of a first cause (see §5). As with physical arguments\\nin general, the argument is a mere sign (dalīl),\\nstarting from empirical features of the world that are better known to\\nus even if causally posterior (LongMeta 12.5 {1423}; see\\n§2) He rejects the a priori metaphysical arguments of\\nIbn Sīnā (Davidson 1987 ch. 10; Bertolacci 2007) and of the\\nAshʿarite theologians (Kashf 1), all of which he thinks\\nnot only fall short of being demonstrative but also fail to be\\npersuasive to ordinary people. For them, one should follow the example\\nof the Qurʾān and deploy arguments from design\\n(Kashf 1.33–38 {118–22}).\",\n \"\\nIn keeping with Aristotle’s remarks in Metaphysics\\nXII.7, Ibn Rushd suggests that God serves not as an efficient cause,\\nbut only as a final and formal cause. Efficient causality prevails\\namong natural bodies, when one actually moving body brings another\\nbody from potential to actual motion. The heavenly bodies, however,\\nare already actual, and eternally so, and so in this domain efficient\\ncausation has no place (PossibConj 14.86). The relationship\\nof First Cause to the celestial spheres, then, is that of intelligible\\nto intellect—that is, the eternal thoughts of the First Cause\\nare the forms that serve as final causes inspiring the celestial\\nintelligences (LongMeta XII.36 {1592}; XII.44 {1652};\\nLongCaelo IV.1.654; Incoherence I.14 {481};\\nConjunction Epistle 1, par. 3-4). God, being wholly\\nimmaterial, cannot directly act on the sublunary material realm at\\nall, but plays a causal role only through the mediation of the\\ncelestial spheres: “the temporal cannot proceed from an\\nabsolutely eternal being, but only from an eternal being which is\\neternal in its substance but temporal in its movements, namely, the\\ncelestial body” (Incoherence I.13 {467}).\\n(Interpretation here is more contentious than this brief summary\\nsuggests. For various approaches see Kogan 1985 ch. 5; Davidson 1992,\\n227–30; Adamson 2019; Twetten forthcoming.)\",\n \"\\nGod alone, among intellectual beings, has no further object of\\nintellectual contemplation that might serve as his final cause. On the\\ncontrary, “the First Form thinks of nothing outside\\nitself” (LongAnima III.5 {410}; EpiAnima 219\\n{93}; EpiMeta 4.158 {147}; LongMeta XII.51 {1700}).\\nThis helps account for God’s unique simplicity as a pure mind,\\nalways fully actualized by nothing other than God. It leads to\\nquestions, however, about the sense in which God can be said to have\\nknowledge of the created world. This is “the most powerful\\ndoubt” regarding this conception of God (EpiMeta 4.159\\n{148}), and it threatens to lead to the view al-Ghazālī had\\nbranded as heretical: that God does not know particulars\\n(Incoherence II.4 {587}). Ibn Rushd denies that he is\\ncommitted to this consequence. God has knowledge of the created world\\nin his own manner, neither in universal nor particular, not as if his\\nthoughts are caused by the world, but rather as the cause of the world\\n(Incoherence I.3 {226-7}, I.13 {462};\\nḌamīma 7; LongMeta XII.51\\n{1707–8}). The divine mind’s “thinking its own self\\nis identical with its thinking all existence”\\n(Incoherence I.11 {435}).\",\n \"\\nFor terms to apply to God and creatures in a non-univocal way\\n(bi-ishtirāk) is a common state of affairs for Ibn Rushd\\n(LongMeta XII.39 {1620–4}). It arises, for instance,\\nnot just in the case of knowledge but also in the case of will. For,\\nsince God “is exempt from passivity and change,” He does\\nnot exercise will in the usual sense of the term (Incoherence\\nI.3 {148}). Still, in another sense God is “an intending and\\nwilling agent” (Kashf 5.80 {163}) in virtue of the\\nspecial causal relationship that God has to the world. Similarly, Ibn\\nRushd affirms, in a special sense, that God is the creator of the\\nworld (QPhys 3; Kashf 5.78–91\\n{161–173}), and that God exercises providence\\n(ʿināya) over all existent beings, though he denies\\nthat any individual enjoys a special divine providence\\n(LongMeta XII.37 {1607}, XII.52; EpiMeta\\n4.176–81 {166–71}). It is difficult to assess the degree\\nto which, on this account, either God’s will or the world is\\nnecessitated (Belo 2007; Hourani 1962; Taylor 2014).\",\n \"\\nThe various strands of Ibn Rushd’s conception of God are set out\\non one hand against Ibn Sīnā’s insufficiently\\nAristotelian philosophy, and on the other hand against Ashʿarite\\ntheology (kalām). His systematic examination of the\\nAshʿarites in al-Kashf establishes at length that their methods\\nare sophistical and delusional, drawing on two basic resources: the\\nintention of Islamic law and Aristotle’s philosophy (Arfa Mensia\\n2019). But even where Ibn Rushd is examining the\\nmutakallimūn and offering rival interpretations of\\nreligious texts, it is not his intention to set philosophy at the\\nservice of any kind of theology. Instead these writings are more\\nappropriately classified as philosophical considerations on religious\\ntexts and theological issues.\",\n \"\\nProphecy is a good example of how Ibn Rushd distinguishes himself both\\nfrom the theologians and from previous philosophical approaches\\n(Taylor 2018). The trustworthiness of prophecy is foundational to\\nIslam: “the sending forth of prophets is based on the fact that\\nrevelation comes down to them from heaven, and on this our religion is\\nbased” (Kashf 4.58 {142}). The Ashʿarites had\\nrelied primarily on miracles to establish the veracity of the Prophet\\nMuhammed. Ibn Rushd evaluates this approach from his Aristotelian\\nbackground. His first step is to situate the miraculous\\n(muʿjiz) as a tool of persuasion belonging to the art of\\nrhetoric, standing to the prophetic claim as an extrinsic argument\\n(Ben Ahmed 2012). Analogously, when I swear that something is true,\\nthe oath I advance has no intrinsic connection to what is claimed as\\nbeing true. The Ashʿarites conceive of the relation between being\\nprophetic and a miracle as that of a quality to its act. The miracle\\nmust be, in principle, an act that is generated from that quality,\\njust as the act of healing the sick emanates from the quality of being\\na physician (Kashf 5.95–6 {177}). Accordingly, the\\nproof that I am a prophet is that I can produce an extra-ordinary act,\\nsuch as walking on water, turning a stick into a snake, or splitting\\nthe moon. Ibn Rushd responds by identifying a miracle as merely\\n“an external sign” of prophecy. The act that more closely\\ndemonstrates prophecy is to establish a law that is useful for people.\\nThus it is the Qurʾān that proves Muhammad’s veracity:\\n“Because of the universality of the teaching of the Precious\\nBook and the universality of the laws contained in it—by which I\\nmean their liability to promote the happiness of all\\nmankind—this religion is common to all mankind”\\n(Kashf 5.103 {184}). A miracle alone, in contrast, is at best\\ncomplementary, and an argument from miracles is merely persuasive or\\nrhetorical. (See further Arfa Mensia 1999, Ben Ahmed 2012).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.1 God\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nThe Decisive Treatise argues forcefully that philosophy\\nshould have a prominent place in religious reflection, and\\nspecifically in Islamic law (sharīʿa). This stance,\\nalongside his devotion to Aristotelian demonstration (see §2),\\nmight raise the question of Ibn Rushd’s\\n“rationalism”: Does he regard philosophy as having some\\nkind of priority in religious contexts? But this question is not Ibn\\nRushd’s, inasmuch as he establishes no hierarchy between\\nphilosophy and true religion. The law can serve as a kind of preamble\\nto philosophy, addressed to a much wider audience and containing clues\\nto guide the philosopher in theoretical matters. But there is no\\nquestion of priority. As he famously writes, in a passage that\\n(perhaps tellingly) echoes Aristotle’s Prior Analytics\\nI.32, “Since the law is true, … we, the Muslim community,\\nknow firmly that demonstrative reasoning does not lead to disagreement\\nwith what the law sets down. For truth does not oppose truth, but\\nrather agrees with and bears witness to it” (Decisive\\nTreatise 12; see Taylor 2000).\",\n \"\\nThe implicit target of the Decisive Treatise is\\nal-Ghazālī’s notorious fatwa against metaphysics. By\\ncharacterizing philosophy in narrowly metaphysical terms, as a science\\nthat leads from artifacts back to the Artisan through demonstrative\\nmethods, Ibn Rushd means to show that God cannot be demonstrably known\\nwithout these methods. To prohibit this path to knowledge from those\\nwho are capable of it is an injustice both to God and to these\\nscholars. In his Long Commentary on the Metaphysics (I.2\\n{10}), he goes so far as to distinguish between two types of\\nsharīʿa, one general for everyone or most people,\\nand the other “specific” to the philosophers. This might\\nsuggest that philosophy, for those capable of it, transcends the\\nteachings of Islamic law (Taylor 2012), but it is not at all clear\\nthat Ibn Rushd ever commits himself to such a claim. Here in\\nLongMeta, he may be speaking of sharīʿa\\nonly loosely, as a “way” or “method.” And even\\nif he does mean that philosophy is literally a\\nsharīʿa, it does not follow that it is a law that\\ncompetes against religion. After all, the specific stands to the\\ngeneral as something that is complementary, not conflicting.\",\n \"\\nTo be sure, the general sharīʿa of Islam is\\npartially subject to the interpretation of philosophers, since they\\nare the only ones who have the arsenal, namely demonstration, to bring\\nout its hidden meanings, allegories, signs, and symbols. In the end,\\nhowever, this serves sharīʿa itself, and cannot do otherwise\\nsince, as Ibn Rushd never tires of declaring, Islamic Law is true and\\nit calls on everyone, including philosophers, to follow its\\nprescriptions (e.g., Incoherence II.4; Decisive\\nTreatise 11). Philosophers pursue one path to this\\ntruth—the most exalted path available to human beings—but\\nthere are other paths, such as the rhetorical and dialectical, that\\nalso arrive at this truth.\",\n \"\\nFor all of Ibn Rushd’s involvement in esoteric questions of\\nAristotelianism, he was, at the same time, a practicing judge, deeply\\nconcerned with jurisprudential theory. Ibn Rushd’s principal\\nwork in this domain is the Distinguished Jurist’s\\nPrimer, a lengthy handbook on the causes of the jurists’\\ndisputes and a comparison between the rationales for decision-making\\nby different Sunni schools of jurisprudence. Its originality lies in\\nthe rational mechanisms that Ibn Rushd employs to establish general\\nrules for understanding agreements and disagreements among jurists. He\\nwrites that “our intention in these matters is only the rules\\ngoverning the law, not an enumeration of the branches, which would\\nhave no end” (Jurist’s Primer 26.241 {ii.202}).\\nSo rather than focus on counting the differences that exist between\\njurists and schools of jurisprudence, Ibn Rushd attempts to explain\\nthese differences by referring them to their principles, rules, and\\nthe causes that regulate them. By following the points of disagreement\\nbetween the jurists and deducing the causes of this disagreement, and\\nthen bringing them back to the general principles and rules equivalent\\nto a general maxim rooted in his soul (Jurist’s Primer\\n24.179, 220–1 {ii.148, 184-5}), the assiduous jurist\\n(al-mujtahid) becomes capable of deciding about the unknown\\nsituations he will face.\",\n \"\\nWhat makes these general rules so important is the imitative and\\nrepetitive style of jurisprudence in Ibn Rushd’s day, which had\\nbeen overwhelmed by a focus on individual cases and the endless\\nbranching of views. Thus, either the jurist works according to a rule\\nthat distinguishes similar cases from others, or he works according to\\nordinary common sense to produce controversial answers. This is what\\nthe writings of the Malikites suffered from in his time. Ibn Rushd\\ninsists on establishing jurisprudential maxims that make\\nunderstandable the disagreement among schools of jurisprudence and\\njurists and provide the diligent jurist with basic mechanism for\\nmaking decisions regarding emerging problems and cases.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"6.2 Law\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nWritings in medicine occupy an important place in Ibn Rushd’s\\ncareer. The practice of medicine was not his profession: “it is\\nthis part of medicine that I believe restrains me from being perfect\\nin this art. And that I haven’t had much practice”\\n(Kulliyyāt VII.517). Even so, he left many interesting\\ntexts: a Commentary on Ibn Sīnā’s Medical\\nPoem, his al-Kulliyyāt (General Principles of\\nMedicine), and various writings and commentaries on Galen.\\nIndeed, it has been suggested that, near the end of Ibn Rushd’s\\ncareer, he was forced to set aside his philosophical project of\\nwriting the long commentaries on Aristotle’s texts, and turn\\ninstead to Galen’s text on medicine (Al-ʿAlawī\\n1986a).\",\n \"\\nThe commentary on Ibn Sīnā challenges the usual conception\\nof a rivalry between the two great Islamic philosophers. He says that\\nhe chose to comment on Ibn Sīnā’s Poem\\nbecause it is “better than many of the introductions written in\\nmedicine” (CommIbnSīnā 40). Even so, during\\nthe last decade of Ibn Rushd’s life, it is Galen who becomes one\\nof his principal authorities. Still, Galen is often a target of\\ncriticism. In al-Kulliyyāt, for example, a work that he\\nrepeatedly revised (Gätje 1986), the revisions often move in a\\ndirection that is increasingly critical of Galen\\n(Kulliyyāt II.162, II.184, etc.).\",\n \"\\nMedicine, for Ibn Rushd, is an art rather than a science, concerned\\nwith practice rather than theory (Chandelier 2019). According to the\\nprologue of al-Kulliyyāt,\",\n \"\\nThe art of medicine is an art that acts (sināʿa\\nfāʿila) based on true principles; we seek through it to\\npreserve the health of the human body and to eliminate disease as much\\nas possible in each body. So the goal of this art is not to heal\\nwithout fail (lā budda), but rather to act\\nappropriately, to the appropriate extent and time, while waiting to\\nachieve its goal, as with the art of navigation and the command of an\\narmy. (prol. 127)\\n\",\n \"\\nThis definition is based on the famous division of the arts into what\\nbelongs to the sphere of necessity and what belongs to the sphere of\\npossibility. The art of medicine does not belong to the sphere where\\nconsequences follow actions necessarily, as with arts like carpentry.\\nIn medicine, even if the physician acts based on scientific\\nprinciples, the intended end does not necessarily follow. As he puts\\nit, “Apparently, we do not have any of the premises that bring\\nus certainty in many of these pursuits. But even so we must try,\\ninsofar as we are able” (Kulliyyāt II.208). The\\npractical dimension of medicine is similarly central to his commentary\\non Ibn Sīnā, which begins with Ibn Sīnā’s\\nstatement that “Medicine is preserving health and curing\\ndisease,” and comments: “This is the definition of\\nmedicine, and its completion would be to say that medicine is an art\\nwhose action is preserving health and curing disease, based on science\\nand experience” (CommIbnSīnā 46; see also\\nKulliyyāt prol.131). As one may notice, Ibn Rushd\\ninsists on acting in both texts.\",\n \"\\nThe purpose of al-Kulliyyāt, according to its prologue,\\nis to draw from the art of medicine\",\n \"\\na summary (jumla), sufficiently concise and brief to serve as\\nan introduction for those who would like to explore the parts of the\\nart, and also as a memorandum (tadhkira) for those who would\\nlike to reflect on the art. We seek those statements that correspond\\nto the truth, even if they contradict the opinions of people who\\nbelong to the art. (prol. 127)\\n\",\n \"\\nHowever, al-Kulliyyāt is not a book of medical\\ngeneralities, as some translations tend to suggest. It is rather a\\nbook on the universals of medicine (kulliyyāt fī\\nal-ṭibb), as its title suggests—that is, on the\\nfoundations, principles, and basic rules that regulate medical theory\\nand practice. It thus provides the foundations\\n(usṭuqsāt) of the medical art\\n(Kulliyyāt III.282).\",\n \"\\nIn the same vein, al-Kulliyyāt is far from being a\\ntextbook (kunnāsh); it is rather written against the\\ntradition of textbooks that prevailed in the art of medicine. It is a\\ndefense of the art of “syllogistic” medicine against\\nexperiential medicine. He says: “As for those who limit\\nthemselves to the method of the textbooks without knowing the\\nuniversal method, they will certainly make mistakes, as do the doctors\\nof our time. As for limiting oneself to universal matters, this may be\\npossible if the doctor is very skilled. Therefore, one of the\\nconsidered conditions of perfection in the arts is that the craftsman\\nhave the power to deduce what he needs to deduce”\\n(Kulliyyāt VII.552). The status of experience in\\nmedicine is limited but not entirely excluded: “Once the\\nuniversals of the art of medicine are acquired, one needs the\\nexperience from which particular premises are acquired in order to be\\nused in each particular case. These premises cannot be written in a\\nbook, because they are unlimited” (Kulliyyāt\\nVII.517). Ibn Rushd makes an exception, however, in criticizing the\\nmanuals and textbooks on medical particulars, for Abū Marwān\\nIbn Zuhr, whose al-Taysīr can be trusted because the\\nparticulars it contains conform to the universal teachings of\\ntheoretical medicine (Kulliyyāt VII.583).\",\n \"\\nIn sum, al-Kulliyyāt is an attempt to advance medical\\npractice from the level of the infinite particulars, which cannot be\\nassembled in a book, to the level of the rules\\n(qānūn) and established principles\\n(dustūr) that govern them (Kulliyyāt\\nIII.282). It is an attempt to upgrade medical discourse to the level\\nof a science, linking its premises and principles to the Aristotelian\\nnatural sciences (Al-ʿAlawī 1986a, 180). This holistic\\nmethodology is characteristic of how Ibn Rushd approached the arts and\\nsciences of his time. It shows his inclination to organize them in a\\nway that protects them from chaos and elevates them to the level of\\nscientific practice, established on the basis of universal principles\\nand foundations. Particular cases, since they are unlimited, cannot be\\ndealt with unless there are general laws that help us to deduce\\ndecisions about particulars on the basis of principles and\\nfoundations.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"7. Medicine\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nThe sciences, for Ibn Rushd, fundamentally divide into the theoretical\\n(naẓarīya), which is aimed at knowledge\\n(ʿilm), and the practical (ʿamalīya),\\nwhich is concerned with voluntary action (Republic I.21;\\nLongPhys proem). The chief practical science is politics,\\nwhich Ibn Rushd sees as dividing, much like medicine, into a more\\ntheoretical and a more practical part. The first and more theoretical\\npart examines voluntary actions in general, their associated\\ndispositions (the virtues and vices), and the relationships between\\nthese elements. The second, more practical part examines how these\\ndispositions become established within souls and how they are\\nperfected and impeded (Republic I.21). The first part is\\nfound in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and the second\\npart in his Politics. Although Ibn Rushd composed a\\ncommentary on the first of these, and although he knew the second was\\navailable in Arabic elsewhere, he complains that it “has not yet\\nreached us on this peninsula” (ParaEthics X.160G).\\nAccordingly, he chose to comment on Plato’s Republic as\\nan alternative source for the second part of political science.\",\n \"\\nFollowing the Nicomachean Ethics, Ibn Rushd takes the goal of\\nhuman life to be happiness (Hourani 1962). For ordinary people, the\\nultimate guide to happiness is the Qurʾān, which exhibits\\nmiraculous wisdom in the rules it sets out to promote human\\nflourishing (see §6.1). But the ultimate human happiness, for\\nthose who are capable of it, is to become perfect in the theoretical\\nsciences (LongPhys proem). Such perfection arrives when human\\nbeings conjoin themselves to the separate Agent Intellect, which is to\\nsay that they pass from a partial conception of intelligible objects\\nto a conception of the Agent Intellect itself. At this point a human\\nbeing in some sense takes on an “eternal existence”\\n(PossibConj 5.41; LongPhys proem), and is\\n“made like unto God” (LongAnima III.36 {501}),\\nand even “becomes one of the eternal, incorporeal beings”\\n(PossibConj 5.40). This notion of conjunction\\n(ittiṣāl) had a complex history among earlier\\nAristotelians, and Ibn Rushd’s views about what it involves, and\\nwhether it is possible, developed over time (Davidson 1992,\\n321–56; Black 1999). The texts here are complicated, but suggest\\nthat he rejected al-Fārābī’s complaint that\\nconjunction is nothing other than “an old woman’s\\ntale” (PossibConj 14.85; Epistle 1 par. 40),\\nand that he accepted it as, in some sense, the goal of human life, one\\nthat would be achieved through contemplation, with the assistance of\\nprayer and the Qurʾān (PossibConj\\n15.103–4).\",\n \"\\nA perfect, conjoined grasp of the theoretical sciences carries with\\nit, necessarily, the complete possession of the moral virtues. One so\\npossessed will be perfect both in intellectual understanding and in\\n“the activity proper to him” (LongAnima III.36\\n{500, 501}). If this sort of moral excellence is not much on display\\nin those we see make the greatest claims to the possession of science,\\nthis only testifies to the poverty of their achievements\\n(LongPhys proem). The perfection Ibn Rushd describes,\\nhowever, through conjunction with the Agent Intellect, seems to entail\\nsomething other than personal immortality. For he expressly refuses,\\nagainst al-Ghazālī, to endorse bodily resurrection\\n(Incoherence II.4 {580–6}), and yet he also insists\\nthat the human soul is individuated in virtue of its body. So, as he\\nexplicitly concludes, “if the soul does not die when the body\\ndies, or if there is anything of this kind within the soul, then it\\nmust, once it has left the bodies, be one in number”\\n(Incoherence I.1 {29}). So—although scholarship is not\\nunanimous on this point—it seems that Ibn Rushd, whatever he\\nmight have thought about conjunction, did not mean for the promise of\\nthe soul’s immortality to extend to each of us as\\nindividuals (Taylor 1998).\",\n \"\\nJust as the theoretical part of medicine has as its aim the more\\npractical business of preserving health and curing disease, so too, in\\nthe political sphere, the first part has as its end the perfection of\\nthe second part. This is to say that the goal of ethical inquiry is\\nultimately “the governance of cities” (ParaEthics\\nI.3, 3F). This instrumental conception of ethics looks strange from\\nthe perspective of later European philosophy, but it is what Aristotle\\nhimself expressly affirms at Nicomachean Ethics I.2, and it\\ncomports well with Ibn Rushd’s orientation away from individual\\nhuman beings as the ultimate locus of value in the universe.\",\n \"\\nFrom the start, Ibn Rushd announces that the goal of his commentary on\\nthe Republic will be to strip away the parts that are merely\\ndialectical, so as to identify the claims that achieve the level of\\ndemonstrative science (Republic I.21). Accordingly, he\\nattends very selectively to the ten books that comprise Plato’s\\nRepublic, dispensing entirely with the first and tenth books\\nand the first half of the second book, and merging the rest into three\\nbooks. The first presents political science and reflects on the\\ncomponents of the virtuous city, especially the guards. The second\\nconsiders virtuous governments and the qualities of the ruler of the\\nvirtuous city and the philosopher. The third is devoted to\\nnon-virtuous governments, comparisons between them, and the transition\\nfrom one to another.\",\n \"\\nThe Platonic text is subjected to two parallel frameworks. The first\\nis Aristotelian, both in its overarching theoretical\\nframework—replacing the dialectical and dialogical character of\\nthe Platonic text with Aristotle’s ethical and logical framework\\n(Butterworth 1986)—and in its particular details, as when Ibn\\nRushd emphasizes the role of logic rather than mathematics in the\\ntraining of the guards and the ruler of the virtuous city\\n(Republic II.76–7). The second is the contextualization\\nof this text in the Islamic and Andalusian environment. Ibn Rushd\\ntakes the Umayyad, Almoravid, and Almohad dynasties as examples of\\nmany of the issues he deals with in the text, and harshly criticizes\\nthe current Almohad reign (e.g., Republic III.103) as well as\\nthe position of the philosopher at the time, which he compares to\\nbeing surrounded by ferocious monsters (Republic II.64). This\\ncritical attitude is particularly notable when he discusses how women,\\nsharing the same natures as men, are suited to the same activities,\\nfit to serve as guardians, philosophers, and rulers. Yet, as things\\nare, these capacities are not fostered: “since women in these\\ncities are not prepared with respect to any of the human virtues, they\\nfrequently resemble plants. Their being a burden upon the men in these\\ncities is one of the causes of poverty” (Republic\\nI.54).\",\n \"\\nIt is clear that Ibn Rushd comments on the Republic only for\\nlack of Aristotle’s superior work. At the end of his paraphrase\\non the Nicomachean Ethics, he describes the shortcomings in\\nPlato’s treatise, and criticizes Ibn Bājja for having\\njudged the Republic as the perfect treatise on the virtuous\\ncity. What is less clear is exactly what Ibn Rushd’s own textual\\nsources were. Did he deal directly with Plato’s text, with the\\nassistance of Galen, al-Fārābī, and Aristotle’s\\nRhetoric? Or was the Platonic text not in his hands, which\\nmeans that he was commenting on Galen’s Compendium on\\nPlato’s Politics, with the help of al-Fārābī\\nand Aristotle? While the use of Aristotle’s and\\nal-Fārābī’s texts is clear, the question of his\\naccess to Plato remains obscure (Mahdi 2016).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"8. Ethics and Politics\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\nOur focus has been Ibn Rushd. But in studying this subject one cannot\\nhelp but notice the strange way in which modern scholarship has\\nconcerned itself more with the later reception of his ideas than\\naround Ibn Rushd himself. Here we briefly consider the reception of\\nhis thought in Muslim, Jewish, and Christian contexts.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"9. Reception\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIbn Rushd is often described as a philosopher who failed to attract\\nthe attention of his first audience, resulting in the death of his\\nphilosophy at the hands of its intended Islamic readers, a state of\\naffairs that is said to have continued until its revival in the\\nideological debates of the Arab Renaissance (nahḍa)\\n(Kügelgen 1994, al-Jābirī 1998). To be sure, Ibn\\nRushd’s influence in Muslim contexts cannot compare to the\\noverwhelming influence of Ibn Sīnā, nor even to Ibn\\nRushd’s own influence in Europe. Still, the commonly heard claim\\nthat he had no influence on Islamic thought is false.\",\n \"\\nFirst, recent scholarship has shown that Ibn Rushd had successors. Ben\\nSharīfa (1999) identifies 39 direct disciples of Ibn Rushd, most\\nof whom were faithful, and some of whom continued his work in\\nphilosophy and related sciences.\",\n \"\\nSecond, after Ibn Rushd’s death, his works were hardly ignored\\nby the leading scholars in Andalusia and Morocco. Theologians,\\nmathematicians, sufīs, historians, physicians, philosophers and\\nliterary figures used Ibn Rushd’s works extensively. In medicine\\nand logic, his influence on Ibn Ṭumlūs has recently become\\napparent (Ibn Ṭumlūs 2020; Ben Ahmed 2016, 2017, 2019c,\\n2020a). His influence also extended to Ashʿarite theology, as\\nwhen Abū al-Ḥajjāj Yūsuf al-Miklātī\\nquoted Ibn Rushd’s epitome on the Metaphysics and the\\nIncoherence of the Incoherence to refute the philosophers\\n(Ḥamdān 2005). The same can be said of certain Maghrebi\\nmathematicians who benefited from the conceptual arsenal provided by\\nIbn Rushd’s philosophical writings. In this context, one can\\ncite the example of Ibn Haydūr al-Tādilī, who put\\nforward the concept of “the one” (al-wāhid)\\nas crystallized by Ibn Rushd (Ibn Haydūr 2018). Ibn\\nṬumlūs, al-Miklāti, Ibn ʿAmīra\\nal-Makhzūmī, and Ibn Haydūr, among others, appropriate\\nIbn Rushd’s philosophical analysis without naming him, whereas\\nIbn Sabʿīn on occasion uses Ibn Rushd’s writings\\nwithout name even while in other places he criticizes him by\\nname—thus complicating the task of identifying the texts used.\\nSome of these texts, in particular in jurisprudence and religion, were\\npart of the curriculum in Andalusia until its fall (Ben Sharīfa\\n1999; Akasoy 2008; Ben Ahmed 2019b). Indeed, in Muslim contexts, some\\nof Ibn Rushd’s works have been in constant use from the\\nlatter’s lifetime until today. They formed part of the training\\nof scholars such as Ibn al-Tilimsānī and Ibn Khaldūn,\\nas well as part of the curriculum of important teachers such as\\nAbū ʿAbd al-Lāh al-Ābilī (Ibn\\nal-Khaṭīb 1975, iii: 507; Ibn Khaldūn 2004).\",\n \"\\nThird, evidence has emerged that some of Ibn Rushd’s books were\\ntransmitted east, to Egypt and the Levant, and used by philosophers\\nand scholars there. In addition to copies of the Kashf and\\nthe Incoherence found in Turkey, Egypt, and India, and the\\ntestimony of\\n Maimonides,\\n who from Egypt was able to acquire most of Ibn Rushd’s\\ncommentaries (Davidson 2005, 108–10), we can identify the spread\\nof Ibn Rushd’s ideas among some philosophers, as is the case\\nwith the theory of the unity of truth adopted by\\n Abd al-Latīf al-Baghdādī\\n (Ben Ahmed 2019a). Moreover, some of Ibn Rushd’s philosophical\\nand metaphysical positions concerning causality and location were\\nadopted by thinkers who were generally regarded as enemies of\\nphilosophical and rational thought, as is the case with Ibn Taymiyya,\\nwho made extensive and explicit use of Ibn Rushd’s texts and\\nadopted some of his positions in his crystallization of his conception\\nof the history of philosophy and kalām (Ben Ahmed 2019b,\\n2020b, 2020d; Hoover 2018).\",\n \"\\nFourth, we now also have evidence that Ibn Rushd’s texts reached\\nIran in the sixteenth century and became widely known to scholars in\\nthe seventeenth century. The catalogues indicate that dozens of them\\nwere transcribed during this time. The large number of copies reflects\\nanother phenomenon that we should not continue to ignore: the demand\\nfor the teaching of these books and their use by students and teachers\\nin madrasas in Safavid Iran. Some thinkers and philosophers used them\\nin their debates and teaching. Suffice it to mention here Abd\\nal-Razzāq al-Lāhījī, Mullah Rajab ʿAlī\\nTabrīzī, and Muḥammad Ṭāhir\\nWaḥīd al-Zamān Qazwīnī (Endress 1999, 2001,\\n2006; Pourjavady and Schmidtke, 2015; Ben Ahmed forthcoming).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"9.1 Arabic\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\nIbn Rushd’s philosophy quickly found a second home in Judaism,\\nwhere it became so prominent as even to supplant Aristotle as the\\nparamount authority in philosophy and science (Harvey 2000). The first\\nand critical event was Maimonides’ acquisition of Ibn\\nRushd’s commentaries, perhaps around 1190. His subsequent praise\\nof this work precipitated a four-century fascination with Ibn Rushd\\namong Jewish philosophers (Harvey 1992), especially focusing on his\\ncommentaries but even extending to some of his religious\\ntreatises.\",\n \"\\nAs Jewish authors began to write increasingly in Hebrew, Ibn\\nRushd’s texts followed, thanks to a series of Arabic-to-Hebrew\\ntranslations from 1230 onward (see Zonta 2010 and, in more detail,\\nTamani and Zonta 1997, 31–49). By 1340, virtually all of the\\ncommentaries were available in Hebrew, even while very little of\\nAristotle himself was translated. In parallel with this process,\\nJewish authors began to write commentaries on Ibn Rushd, giving rise\\nto a extensive series of “supercommentaries” (Glasner\\n2011). The leading example of this phenomenon is\\n Gersonides’\\n series of supercommentaries on Ibn Rushd in the 1320s (Glasner\\n1995).\",\n \"\\nThe extent to which Ibn Rushd took precedence over other sources of\\nAristotelianism is quite startling. A typical example is Shem Tov Ibn\\nFalaquera, whose introduction to his thirteenth-century encyclopedia\\nclarifies that “all that I write are the words of Aristotle as\\nexplained in the commentaries of the scholar Averroes, for he was the\\nlast of the commentators and he incorporated what was best from the\\n[earlier] commentaries” (in\\n Shem Tov Ibn Falaquera §4).\\n Each of the various types of Rushdian commentary had their champions\\nat different times. Here is the advice of Moses Almosnino from the\\nsixteenth-century: “do not squander your time with the epitomes\\nand middle commentaries of Averroes, but read only the long\\ncommentaries, for if you read the long commentaries carefully you will\\nhave no need to read any other book in order to understand anything of\\nnatural science” (in Harvey 1985, 61).\",\n \"\\nOther important figures from the thirteenth century are\\n Isaac Albalag\\n and\\n Isaac Polqar.\\n Prominent fourteenth-century figures are Gersonides and Moses Narboni\\n(see Hayoun 2005), whose commentary on Ibn Rushd’s theory of\\nconjunction has been translated into English along with Ibn\\nRushd’s epistle. Prominent names from the fifteenth century\\ninclude Abraham Bibago and\\n Elijah Del Medigo\\n (see Hayoun 2005). Sixteenth-century figures such Abraham de Balmes\\nattempt more accurate Latin translations of Ibn Rushd, drawing on\\nearlier Arabic-to-Hebrew translations (Ivry 1983, Hasse 2016).\",\n \"\\nSee also the entries on the\\n influence of Arabic and Islamic Philosophy on Judaic thought\\n and the\\n influence of Islamic thought on Maimonides.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"9.2 Hebrew\"\n }\n ]\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["Aristotelis opera cum Averrois commentariis (Venice:\nJunta, 1562), \n available online.","Georges C. Anawati, Bibliographie d’Averroes (Ibn\nRushd) (Algiers: Jāmiʻat al-Duwal\nal-ʻArabīyah, 1978).","Philipp W. Rosemann. “Averroes: A Catalogue of Editions and\nWritings from 1821 Onwards,” Bulletin de philosophie\nmédiévale 30 (1988) 153–221.","Majid Fakhry. Averroes (Ibn Rushd): His Life, Works and\nInfluence (Oxford: Oneworld, 2001).","Matteo Di Giovanni. 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Lizzini (eds.), La philosophie\narabe à l’étude: sens, limites et défis\nd’une discipline moderne / Studying Arabic Philosophy: Meaning,\nLimits and Challenges of a Modern Discipline (Paris: Vrin),\n705–21.","––– (2020a). “Ibn Ṭumlūs on\nDialectic Reasoning: The Extent of His Reliance on\nal-Fārābī and Ibn Rušd,” in Nadja Germann\nand Steven Harvey (eds.), The Origin and Nature of Language and\nLogic in Medieval Islamic, Jewish, and Christian Thought\n(Turnhout: Brepols).","––– (2020b). “Re-writing the History of\nPhilosophy in Sunni Muslim contexts: Ibn Taymiyyah and the Impact of\nIbn Rushd,” Hespéris-Tamuda 55:\n303–54.","––– (2020c). “Fī murājaʿat\nʿalāqat Ibn Rushd bi al-maḏhab al-Ashʿarī wa\nbi al-ʿaqīda al-muwaḥḥidiyya,” in\nJamāl ʿAllāl al-Bakhtī (ed.), al-Fikr\nal-Ashʿarī bi al-Andalus: Tārīkh wa\nishkālāt (Tetouan: Markaz Abū al-Ḥasan\nal-Ashʿarī), 477-539.","––– (2020d). “What Were Ibn Rushd’s\nWorks Doing in Egypt and the Levant in the 14th Century? 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(1986). Philosophy, Ethics, and\nVirtuous Rule: A Study of Averroes’ Commentary on Plato’s\n“Republic” (Cairo: AUC Press).","Cerami, Cristina (2014). “Signe physique, signe\nmétaphysique: Averroès contre Avicenne sur le statut\népistémologique des sciences de\nl’être,” in C. Cerami (ed.), Nature et sagesse:\nles rapports entre physique et métaphysique dans la tradition\naristotélicienne: recueil de textes en hommage à Pierre\nPellegrin (Louvain-la-Neuve: Peeters) 429–74.","––– (2015). Génération et\nsubstance : Aristote et Averroès entre physique et\nmétaphysique (Berlin: De Gruyter).","Cruz Hernández, Miguel (1997). Abū-l-Walīd\nibn Rušd (Averroes): vida, obra, pensamiento, influencia,\n2nd ed. (Cordova: Caja de Ahorros y Monte de Piedad de\nCórdoba).","Dales, Richard C. (1990). Medieval Discussions of the Eternity\nof the World (Leiden: Brill).","Davidson, Herbert A. (1987). 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(ed.), Universality\nof Reason: Plurality of Philosophies in the Middle Ages (Palermo:\nOfficina di Studi Medievali, 2012) III: 55–65.","––– (2019). “Averroes, Philosopher of\nIslam,” in Adamson and Di Giovanni (2019), 9–26.","Druart, Thérèse-Anne (1994). “Averroes: The\nCommentator and the Commentators,” in Lawrence P. Schrenk (ed.),\nAristotle in Late Antiquity (Washington: Catholic University\nof America Press) 184–202.","Elamrani-Jamal, Abdelali (2000). “La demonstration du signe\n(burhān al-dalīl) selon Ibn Rushd\n(Averroès),” Documenti e studi sulla tradizione\nfilosofica medievale 11: 113–31.","Endress, Gerhard (1995). “Averroes’ De caelo:\nIbn Rushd’s Cosmology in His Commentaries on Aristotle’s\nOn the Heavens,” Arabic Sciences and\nPhilosophy 5 (1995) 9–49.","––– (1999). “Le projet\nd’Averroès: constitution, réception et\nédition du corpus des œuvres d’Ibn\nRušd,” in Gerhard Endress and Jan A. Aertsen (ed.),\nAverroes and the Aristotelian Tradition: Sources, Constitution and\nReception of the Philosophy of Ibn Rushd (1126–1198)\n(Leiden: Brill), 3–31.","––– (2001). “Philosophische\nein-Band-Bibliotheken aus Isfahan,” Oriens 36:\n10–58.","––– (2006). “Reading Avicenna in the\nMadrasa: Intellectual Genealogies and Chains of Transmission of\nPhilosophy and the Sciences in the Islamic East,” in James E.\nMontgomery (ed.), Arabic Theology, Arabic Philosophy. From the\nMany to the One: Essays in Celebration of Richard M. Frank\n(Leuven: Peeters), 371–422.","Freudenthal, Gad (2002). “The Medieval Astrologization of\nAristotle’s Biology: Averroes on the Role of the Celestial\nBodies in the Generation of Animate Beings,” Arabic Sciences\nand Philosophy 12: 111–37.","Gätje, Helmut (1986). “Die Vorworte zum\nColliget des Averroes,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen\nMorgenländischen Gesellschaft 136: 402–27.","Gauthier, René-Antoine (1982). “Notes sur les\ndébuts (1225–1240) du premier\n‘averroïsme’,” in Revue des sciences\nphilosophiques et théologiques 66: 321–74.","Geoffroy, Marc (1999). “L’Almohadisme\nthéologique d’Averroès (Ibn Rušd),”\nArchives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen\nÂge 66: 9–47.","Glasner, Ruth (1995). “Levi ben Gershom and the Study of Ibn\nRushd in the Fourteenth Century,” Jewish Quarterly\nReview 86: 51–90.","––– (2009). Averroes’ Physics: A\nTurning Point in Medieval Natural Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford\nUniversity Press).","––– (2011). “The Evolution of the Genre of\nPhilosophical-Scientific Commentary: Hebrew Supercommentaries on\nAristotle’s Physics,” in G. Freudenthal (ed.), Science\nin Medieval Jewish Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress), 182–206.","Gutas, Dimitri (1993). “Aspects of Literary Form and Genre\nin Arabic Logical Works,” in Charles Burnett (ed.), Glosses\nand Commentaries on Aristotelian Logical Texts: The Syriac, Arabic and\nMedieval Latin Traditions (London: Warburg Institute),\n29–76.","Ḥamdān, Aḥmad ʿAlamī (2005).\n“Istīʿāb al-laḥẓa al-rushdiyya\nfī naqd al-Miklātī li al-falsafa,” in\nʿAlī al-Idrīsī (ed.), al-Ittijāhāt\nal-kalāmiyya fī al-Gharb al-Islāmī (Rabat:\nManshūrat Kulliyat al-Adāb wa al-ʿulūm\nal-Insāniyya), 237–59.","Hansberger, Rotraud (2019). “Averroes and the\n‘Internal Senses,’” in Adamson and Di Giovanni\n(2019), 138–57.","Harvey, Steven (1985). “The Hebrew Translation of\nAverroes’ Prooemium to his Long Commentary on\nAristotle’s Physics,” Proceedings of the American\nAcademy for Jewish Research 52: 55–84.","––– (1992). “Did Maimonides Letter to\nSamuel ibn Tibbon Determine Which Philosophers Would Be Studied by\nLater Jewish Thinkers?” Jewish Quarterly Review 83:\n51–70.","––– (2000). “On the Nature and Extent of\nJewish Averroism: Renan’s Averroès et\nl’averroïsme Revisited,” Jewish Studies\nQuarterly 7: 100–19.","Hasse, Dag Nikolaus (2016). 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Freudenthal (ed.), Science\\nin Medieval Jewish Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress), 182–206.\",\n \"Gutas, Dimitri (1993). “Aspects of Literary Form and Genre\\nin Arabic Logical Works,” in Charles Burnett (ed.), Glosses\\nand Commentaries on Aristotelian Logical Texts: The Syriac, Arabic and\\nMedieval Latin Traditions (London: Warburg Institute),\\n29–76.\",\n \"Ḥamdān, Aḥmad ʿAlamī (2005).\\n“Istīʿāb al-laḥẓa al-rushdiyya\\nfī naqd al-Miklātī li al-falsafa,” in\\nʿAlī al-Idrīsī (ed.), al-Ittijāhāt\\nal-kalāmiyya fī al-Gharb al-Islāmī (Rabat:\\nManshūrat Kulliyat al-Adāb wa al-ʿulūm\\nal-Insāniyya), 237–59.\",\n \"Hansberger, Rotraud (2019). “Averroes and the\\n‘Internal Senses,’” in Adamson and Di Giovanni\\n(2019), 138–57.\",\n \"Harvey, Steven (1985). “The Hebrew Translation of\\nAverroes’ Prooemium to his Long Commentary on\\nAristotle’s Physics,” Proceedings of the American\\nAcademy for Jewish Research 52: 55–84.\",\n \"––– (1992). “Did Maimonides Letter to\\nSamuel ibn Tibbon Determine Which Philosophers Would Be Studied by\\nLater Jewish Thinkers?” Jewish Quarterly Review 83:\\n51–70.\",\n \"––– (2000). “On the Nature and Extent of\\nJewish Averroism: Renan’s Averroès et\\nl’averroïsme Revisited,” Jewish Studies\\nQuarterly 7: 100–19.\",\n \"Hasse, Dag Nikolaus (2016). Success and Suppression: Arabic\\nSciences and Philosophy in the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA:\\nHarvard University Press).\",\n \"Hayoun, Maurice-Ruben (2005). “L’averroïsme dans\\nles milieu intellectuels du judaisme: Moïse de Narbonne\\n(1300–1362) et Eliya Delmédigo (v.\\n1460–1493),” in André Bazzana, Nicole\\nBériou, and Pierre Guichard (eds.), Averroès et\\nl’averroïsme (XIIe–XVe\\nsiècle): un itinéraire historique du Haut Atlas à\\nParis et à Padoue (Lyon: Presses Universitaires),\\n275–305.\",\n \"Hoover, Jon (2018). “Ibn Taymiyya’s Use of Ibn Rushd\\nto Refute the Incorporealism of Fakhr al-Dīn\\nal-Rāzī,” in Abdelkader al-Ghouz (ed.), Islamic\\nPhilosophy from the 12th to the 14th Century (Göttingen:\\nV&R Unipress), 469–91.\",\n \"Hourani, George F. (1962). “Averroes on Good and\\nEvil,” Studia Islamica 16: 13–40.\",\n \"Hyman, Arthur (1965). “Aristotle’s ‘First\\nMatter’ and Avicenna’s and Averroes’\\n‘Corporeal Form’,” in Saul Lieberman et al. (eds.)\\nHarry Austryn Wolfson Jubilee Volume (Jerusalem: American\\nAcademy for Jewish Research) 385–406.\",\n \"Ibn Haydūr, ʿAlī b. ʿAbd al-Lāh\\nal-Tādilī (2018). Tuḥfat al-ṭullāb wa\\numniyyat al-ḥussāb fī sharḥ mā ashkal min\\nrafʿ al-ḥijāb, in Aḥmad Muṣliḥ\\n(ed.), Al-Riyāḍiyāt fī Maġrib al-qarn\\nal-rābiʿ ʿashar: Tuḥfat al-ṭullāb li\\nIbn Hadūr al-Tādilī (d. 816/1413) (Rabat: Dār\\nNashr al-Maʿrifa).\",\n \"Ibn al-Khaṭīb, Lisān al-Dīn (1975).\\nAl-Iḥāṭa fī akhbār\\nGharnāṭa [History of Granada], 4 vols.: vol.3\\ned. ʿAbd al-Lāh ʿInān (Cairo: Maktabat\\nal-Khānjī).\",\n \"Ibn Khaldūn, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (2004).\\nRiḥlat Ibn Khaldūn [Autobiography], ed.\\nM. Ben Tāwīt al-Ṭanjī (Beirut: Dar al-kutub\\nal-ʿilmiyya).\",\n \"Ibn Ṭumlūs (2020). Compendium on Logic\\n(al-Mukhtaṣar fī al-Mantiq), ed.\\nF. Ben Ahmed (Leiden: Brill).\",\n \"Ivry, Alfred L. (1983). “Remnants of Jewish Averroism in the\\nRenaissance,” in Bernard Dov Cooperman (ed.), Jewish Thought\\nin the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University\\nCenter for Jewish Studies), 243–65.\",\n \"Al-Jābirī, Muḥammad ʿĀbid (1998).\\nIbn Rushd: Sīra wa fikr (Beirut: Markaz\\nDirāsāt al-Waḥda al-ʿArabiyya).\",\n \"Klima, Gyula (1998). “Ancilla theologiae vs domina\\nphilosophorum: Thomas Aquinas, Latin Averroism and the Autonomy\\nof Philosophy,” in Jan A. Aertsen and Andreas Speer (eds.),\\nWas ist Philosophie im Mittelalter? (Berlin: De Gruyter),\\n393–402.\",\n \"Kogan, Barry S. (1985). Averroes and the Metaphysics of\\nCausation (Albany: SUNY Press).\",\n \"Kügelgen, Anke von (1994). Averroes und die arabische\\nModerne: Ansätze zu einer Neubegründung des Rationalismus im\\nIslam (Leiden: Brill).\",\n \"Kuksewicz, Zdzisław (1968). La thèorie de\\nl’intellect chez les averroistes latins des XIIIe et XIVe\\nsiècles: de Siger de Brabant à Jacques de Plaisance\\n(Wrocław: Ossolineum).\",\n \"Mahdi, Muhsin (2016). “Averroes’ Commentary on\\nPlato’s Republic,” in Mokdad Arfa Mensia (ed.),\\nPolitical Philosophy and Philosophy of History: Proceedings of the\\nColloquium Dedicated to Muhsin Mahdi (Tunis: Dār\\nal-tanwīr), 27–42.\",\n \"Mahoney, Edward (1988). “Aristotle as ‘The Worst\\nNatural Philosophy’ (pessimus naturalis) and ‘The\\nWorst Metaphysician’ (pessimus metaphysicus): His\\nReputation among Some Franciscan Philosophers (Bonaventure, Francis of\\nMeyronnes, Antonius Andreas, and Joannes Canonicus) and Later\\nReactions,” in O. Pluta (ed.), Die Philosophie im 14. und\\n15. Jahrhundert (Amsterdam: Gruener), 261–73.\",\n \"Maier, Anneliese (1982). On the Threshold of Exact Science:\\nSelected Writings of Anneliese Maier on Late Medieval Natural\\nPhilosophy, tr. Steven D. Sargent (Philadelphia: University of\\nPennsylvania Press).\",\n \"Marenbon, John (2007). “Latin Averroism,” in Anna\\nAkasoy, James E. Montgomery, and Peter E. Pormann (eds.), Islamic\\nCrosspollinations: Interactions in the Medieval Middle East\\n(Exeter: Gibb Memorial Trust), 135–47.\",\n \"Martin, Craig (2015). “Providence and Seventeenth-Century\\nAttacks on Averroes,” in Paul J. J. M. Bakker (ed.),\\nAverroes’ Natural Philosophy and Its Reception in the\\nWest (Leuven: Leuven University Press), 193–212.\",\n \"Niewöhner, Friedrich and Loris Sturlese (1994).\\nAverroismus im Mittelalter und in der Renaissance (Zurich:\\nSpur).\",\n \"Normore, Calvin G. (1995). “Who Was Condemned in\\n1277?” Modern Schoolman 72: 273–81.\",\n \"Ogden, Stephen (2016). “On a Possible Argument for\\nAverroes’s Single Separate Intellect,” Oxford Studies\\nin Medieval Philosophy 4: 27–63.\",\n \"––– (forthcoming). “Averroes’s Unity\\nArgument against Multiple Intellects,” Archiv für\\nGeschichte der Philosophie.\",\n \"Pasnau, Robert, with Christina Van Dyke (eds.) (2010). The\\nCambridge History of Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge\\nUniversity Press).\",\n \"Phillipson, Traci (2013). “The Will in Averroes and\\nAquinas,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical\\nAssociation 87: 231–47.\",\n \"Pourjavady, Reza and Sabine Schmidtke (2015). “An Eastern\\nRenaissance? Greek Philosophy under the Safavids\\n(16th–18th Centuries AD),”\\nIntellectual History of the Islamicate World 3:\\n248–90.\",\n \"Puig, Josep (1992). “Materials on Averroes’s\\nCircle,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 51:\\n241–60.\",\n \"Putallaz, François-Xavier (2010). “Censorship,”\\nin Pasnau and Van Dyke (2010), 99–113.\",\n \"Rahman, Fazlur (1958). Prophecy in Islam: Philosophy and\\nOrthodoxy (London: Allen and Unwin).\",\n \"Renan, Ernest (1852). Averroès et\\nl’averroīsme: essai historique (Paris: Auguste Durand,\\n1852). A revised and expanded second edition was published in Paris by\\nMichel Lévy in 1861.\",\n \"Sabra, Abdelhamid I. (1984). “The Andalusian Revolt against\\nPtolemaic Astronomy. Averroes and al-Bitruji,” in E. Mendelsohn\\n(ed.), Transformation and Tradition in the Sciences: Essays in\\nHonor of I. Bernard Cohen (Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress), 133–53.\",\n \"Sylla, Edith Dudley (1979). “The A Posteriori Foundations of\\nNatural Science,” Synthese 40 (1979) 147–87.\",\n \"Tamani, Giuliano and Mauro Zonta (1997). Aristoteles\\nHebraicus: versioni, commenti e compendi del Corpus Aristotelicum nei\\nmanoscritti ebraici delle biblioteche italiane (Venice:\\nSupernova, 1997), 31–49.\",\n \"Taylor, Richard C. (1998). “Personal Immortality in\\nAverroes’ Mature Philosophical Psychology,” Documenti\\ne studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 9:\\n87–110.\",\n \"––– (2000). “‘Truth Does Not\\nContradict Truth’: Averroes and the Unity of Truth,”\\nTopoi 19: 3–16.\",\n \"––– (2009). “Introduction,” in\\nAverroes, Long Commentary on the De anima of\\nAristotle (New Haven: Yale University Press), xv–cix.\",\n \"––– (2012). “Averroes on the\\nSharīʿah of the Philosophers,” in R. C. Taylor and I.\\nA. Omar (eds.), The Judeo-Christian-Islamic Heritage:\\nPhilosophical and Theological Perspectives (Milwaukee: Marquette\\nUniversity Press), 283–304.\",\n \"––– (2014). “Providence in\\nAverroes,” in P. d’Hoine and G. Van Riel (eds.),\\nFaith, Providence and Moral Responsibility in Ancient, Medieval\\nand Early Modern Thought: Studies in Honour of Carlos Steel\\n(Leuven: Leuven University Press), 455–72.\",\n \"––– (2018). “Averroes and the\\nPhilosophical Account of Prophecy,” Studia\\ngraeco-arabica 8: 387–304.\",\n \"Thom, Paul (2019). “Averroes’ Logic,” in Adamson\\nand Di Giovanni (2019), 81–95.\",\n \"Twetten, David (2007). “Averroes’ Prime Mover\\nArgument,” in Jean-Baptiste Brenet (ed.), Averroès et\\nles averroïsmes juif et latin (Turnhout: Brepols),\\n9–75.\",\n \"––– (forthcoming). “Aristotle Less\\nTransformed: Averroes and the Prime Mover Not as Artist but as\\nArt,” Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica\\nmedievale.\",\n \"Urvoy, Dominique (1998). Averroès: les ambitions\\nd’un intellectuel musulman (Paris: Flammarion). (There is a\\n1991 edition in English, but the 1998 French edition is significantly\\nimproved.)\",\n \"Van Steenberghen, Fernand (1980). St. Thomas Aquinas and\\nRadical Aristotelianism (Washington: Catholic University of\\nAmerica Press, 1980).\",\n \"Wippel, John F. (1995). Mediaeval Reactions to the Encounter\\nBetween Faith and Reason (Milwaukee: Marquette University\\nPress).\",\n \"Wirmer, David (2008). Über den Intellekt: Auszüge\\naus seinen drei Kommentaren zu Aristoteles’ De anima.\\nArabisch–Lateinisch–Deutsch (Freiburg:\\nHerder).\",\n \"Wolfson, Harry Austryn (1962). “The Problem of the Souls of\\nthe Spheres, from the Byzantine Commentaries on Aristotle through the\\nArabs and St. Thomas to Kepler,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers\\n16: 67–93.\",\n \"Zonta, Mauro (2010). “Ancient Philosophical Works and\\nCommentaries Translated into Hebrew,” in Pasnau and Van Dyke\\n(2010), 826–32.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../arabic-islamic-metaphysics/","text":"Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, disciplines in: metaphysics"},{"href":"../arabic-islamic-natural/","text":"Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, disciplines in: natural philosophy and natural science"},{"href":"../arabic-islamic-language/","text":"Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, disciplines in: philosophy of language and logic"},{"href":"../arabic-islamic-mind/","text":"Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, disciplines in: psychology and philosophy of mind"},{"href":"../arabic-islamic-greek/","text":"Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, historical and methodological topics in: Greek sources"},{"href":"../arabic-islamic-judaic/","text":"Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, historical and methodological topics in: influence of Arabic and Islamic Philosophy on Judaic thought"},{"href":"../arabic-islamic-influence/","text":"Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, historical and methodological topics in: influence of Arabic and Islamic Philosophy on the Latin West"},{"href":"../arabic-islamic-causation/","text":"causation: in Arabic and Islamic thought"},{"href":"../ibn-rushd-natural/","text":"Ibn Rushd [Averroes]: natural philosophy"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../arabic-islamic-metaphysics/\",\n \"text\": \"Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, disciplines in: metaphysics\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../arabic-islamic-natural/\",\n \"text\": \"Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, disciplines in: natural philosophy and natural science\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../arabic-islamic-language/\",\n \"text\": \"Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, disciplines in: philosophy of language and logic\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../arabic-islamic-mind/\",\n \"text\": \"Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, disciplines in: psychology and philosophy of mind\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../arabic-islamic-greek/\",\n \"text\": \"Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, historical and methodological topics in: Greek sources\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../arabic-islamic-judaic/\",\n \"text\": \"Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, historical and methodological topics in: influence of Arabic and Islamic Philosophy on Judaic thought\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../arabic-islamic-influence/\",\n \"text\": \"Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, historical and methodological topics in: influence of Arabic and Islamic Philosophy on the Latin West\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../arabic-islamic-causation/\",\n \"text\": \"causation: in Arabic and Islamic thought\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../ibn-rushd-natural/\",\n \"text\": \"Ibn Rushd [Averroes]: natural philosophy\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}},{"rowIdx":99,"cells":{"shorturl":{"kind":"string","value":"ibn-gabirol"},"title":{"kind":"string","value":"Solomon Ibn Gabirol [Avicebron]"},"pubinfo":{"kind":"string","value":"First published Thu Sep 23, 2010"},"preamble":{"kind":"list like","value":["\n\nA prolific poet and the author of the Fons Vitae, Ibn Gabirol\nis well known in the history of philosophy for the doctrine that all\nthings —including soul and intellect—are comprised of\nmatter and form (“Universal Hylomorphism”), and for his\nemphasis on Divine Will. Ibn Gabirol is moved first and foremost by\nthe Neoplatonic theological sense that God's reality infuses all\nthings, and by the concomitant ethical and existential ideal of\nNeoplatonic Return—the notion that we must strive, through mind\nand deed, to reclaim our own truest being and likeness to our\nsource. Thought wrongly by centuries of Christian scholastics to be\neither a Christian defender of Augustine or a Muslim misreader of\nAristotle, Ibn Gabirol is in fact a Jewish Neoplatonist who, under the\nadditional influence of Pseudo Empedoclean ideas, paints for us a\nmodified Plotinian universe in which all things are rooted in various\n“layers” of matters and forms which reveal the mediating\ngraces of God's own Will/Wisdom/Word. For Ibn Gabirol, everything\n(even the simple unity of intellect itself) reveals a matter+form\ncomplexity, mirroring in this way the complex unity of God's own\n“essential” and “active” moments. Where God\nreveals himself as the “Fountain of Life,” our material\ncore acts as the river through which we may return always to our\nsource."],"string":"[\n \"\\n\\nA prolific poet and the author of the Fons Vitae, Ibn Gabirol\\nis well known in the history of philosophy for the doctrine that all\\nthings —including soul and intellect—are comprised of\\nmatter and form (“Universal Hylomorphism”), and for his\\nemphasis on Divine Will. Ibn Gabirol is moved first and foremost by\\nthe Neoplatonic theological sense that God's reality infuses all\\nthings, and by the concomitant ethical and existential ideal of\\nNeoplatonic Return—the notion that we must strive, through mind\\nand deed, to reclaim our own truest being and likeness to our\\nsource. Thought wrongly by centuries of Christian scholastics to be\\neither a Christian defender of Augustine or a Muslim misreader of\\nAristotle, Ibn Gabirol is in fact a Jewish Neoplatonist who, under the\\nadditional influence of Pseudo Empedoclean ideas, paints for us a\\nmodified Plotinian universe in which all things are rooted in various\\n“layers” of matters and forms which reveal the mediating\\ngraces of God's own Will/Wisdom/Word. For Ibn Gabirol, everything\\n(even the simple unity of intellect itself) reveals a matter+form\\ncomplexity, mirroring in this way the complex unity of God's own\\n“essential” and “active” moments. Where God\\nreveals himself as the “Fountain of Life,” our material\\ncore acts as the river through which we may return always to our\\nsource.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"toc":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"content_title":"1. Bio, Works, Sources and Influences","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"2. A Word on Method: Moving Beyond Aristotle, Augustine, and ","sub_toc":["2.1 Aristotelian Lenses in the Study of Ibn Gabirol","2.2 Augustinian Lenses in the Study of Ibn Gabirol","2.3 Kabbalistic Lenses in the Study of Ibn Gabirol"]},{"content_title":"3. Knowledge and Deeds: the Purpose of Human Being","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"4. The Divine Creative Act","sub_toc":["4.1 Creation ex nihilo and the Fountain of Life","4.2 Will, Wisdom, Word, Intellect and the Cosmos","4.3 God, Matter and the Omnipresence of Desire"]},{"content_title":"5. Matter, Form and “Universal Hylomorphism”","sub_toc":["5.1 Ibn Gabirol's Neoplatonic Hylomorphism 1: Plato's Participation Revised","5.2 Ibn Gabirol's Neoplatonic Hylomorphism 2: Aristotelian Substance Revised","5.3 Ibn Gabirol's Neoplatonic Hylomorphism 3: Plurality of Forms"]},{"content_title":"6. Cosmic Landscape, Soul Landscape: From Heavenly Circuits to Human Return","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"7. The Poet","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Bibliography","sub_toc":["Works by Ibn Gabirol","Some Related Primary Texts","Secondary Literature"]},{"content_title":"Academic Tools","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Other Internet Resources","sub_toc":[]},{"content_title":"Related Entries","sub_toc":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"content_title\": \"1. Bio, Works, Sources and Influences\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"2. A Word on Method: Moving Beyond Aristotle, Augustine, and \",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"2.1 Aristotelian Lenses in the Study of Ibn Gabirol\",\n \"2.2 Augustinian Lenses in the Study of Ibn Gabirol\",\n \"2.3 Kabbalistic Lenses in the Study of Ibn Gabirol\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"3. Knowledge and Deeds: the Purpose of Human Being\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"4. The Divine Creative Act\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"4.1 Creation ex nihilo and the Fountain of Life\",\n \"4.2 Will, Wisdom, Word, Intellect and the Cosmos\",\n \"4.3 God, Matter and the Omnipresence of Desire\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"5. Matter, Form and “Universal Hylomorphism”\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"5.1 Ibn Gabirol's Neoplatonic Hylomorphism 1: Plato's Participation Revised\",\n \"5.2 Ibn Gabirol's Neoplatonic Hylomorphism 2: Aristotelian Substance Revised\",\n \"5.3 Ibn Gabirol's Neoplatonic Hylomorphism 3: Plurality of Forms\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"6. Cosmic Landscape, Soul Landscape: From Heavenly Circuits to Human Return\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"7. The Poet\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Bibliography\",\n \"sub_toc\": [\n \"Works by Ibn Gabirol\",\n \"Some Related Primary Texts\",\n \"Secondary Literature\"\n ]\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Academic Tools\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Other Internet Resources\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n },\n {\n \"content_title\": \"Related Entries\",\n \"sub_toc\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"main_text":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"main_content":["\n\nJewish Neoplatonist Solomon ben Judah Ibn Gabirol (Shelomoh ben\nYehudah Ibn Gabirol in Hebrew; Abu Ayyub Sulaiman ibn Yahya Ibn\nJubayrol (or Ibn\n Jabirul)[1]\nin Arabic; Avicebron / Avicembron / Avicenbrol /\nAvencebrol in Latin) was born in Málaga Spain in 1021/2 (Guttman\noffers 1026) and died, most likely in Valencia, most likely in 1057/8\n(Guttman offers 1050; Sirat offers 1054–8; Joseph Ibn Zaddik\noffers\n 1070).[2]\nFrom his own\nautobiographical remarks in his poems, it appears that this important\npoet-philosopher was orphaned, infirm and unattractive (it seems he\nsuffered a disfiguring skin\n ailment).[3]\nWhile there was a time during which he was\ninvolved with a circle of Jewish intellectuals in Saragossa, and while\nhe did enjoy the patronage of a respected (though, eventually murdered)\nJewish patron for a short while, it is also clear that Ibn Gabirol had\nan anti-social\n disposition[4]\nand a mostly strained relationship with the Jewish community. This\nlatter point has perhaps been overemphasized to full blown misanthropy\ndue to a translation error: in his sharp criticism of Ibn Gabirol's\nphilosophy (as repetitive, wrong-headed and unconvincing), Ibn Daud\nconcludes (in his ha-Emûnah ha-Ramah) that through his\nphilosophy Ibn Gabirol “led the Jewish people into error,”\nwhich through a mistranslation of the Arabic into Hebrew got wrongly\nconveyed as the claim that he slandered the Jewish people\n(dîber sarah gedôlah al ha-ûma) (see Pines\n1977a; for brief discussion in English, see Sirat 1985, p. 81). That\naside, a poem he wrote upon leaving Saragossa does lambast the\ncommunity (“…giants they deem themselves, for me to rate\nno more than grasshoppers…I am away, beneath my feet like mire\nI stamp them hard…”) (for translation and references for\nthis poem, see Loewe 1989, p. 21, and footnote 9, p. 170), and it does\nseem that he had a hard time finding patrons and friends (legend tells\nof his having created some sort of female automaton for house chores\n[apparently this story circulated in the 17th century; see Ashkenazi\n1629, part 1, 9; see Bargebuhr 1976, p. 62; Loewe 1989 fn. 9\np. 170]—perhaps a legend built on his reputation as having had\nfew companions). Perhaps we may root his generally surly disposition\nin his rather hard life or, on the other hand, in his self-assured\nsense of what was, to be sure, his own keen intellect and poetic\ngenius. On this latter point, we might consider another Ibn Gabirol\nlegend—a mythic tale of his death: killed by a jealous poet, Ibn\nGabirol's remains are discovered when curious townsmen dig under a fig\ntree to determine why its flowers, fruit, and fragrance exceed the\nbeauty of anything they've ever experienced (see Loewe 1989, p. 23\nwith reference details in footnote 14, p. 170).","\n\nComplementing a vast corpus of Hebrew poetry (see section 7 below),\nIbn Gabirol's most expansive work is his philosophical treatise,\nthe Fons Vitae (The Fountain of Life, or\nyanbû‘ al-hayâh in\n Arabic,[5]\nand the meqôr\nhayyîm in its later Hebrew\n translation).[6]\nOriginally written in Arabic in\nthe 11th century in the form of a dialogue between a teacher and his\nstudent, the Fons Vitae was translated into Latin in the 12th\ncentury by the translation team of Dominicus Gundissalinus and John of\nSpain (Johannes\n Hispanus),[7]\nand made into an abridged Hebrew version (one\nwhich loses the dialogue format and is something more of a summary of\nthe original) by Shem Tov Ibn Falaquera in the 13th century. The\noriginal Arabic text is lost to us, though we do have some extant\nfragments in the form of citations of the original Arabic version in\nthe Arabic language texts of other Jewish medieval\n philosophers.[8]\nBecause the Arabic\nfragments are sparse, the main version of the text is the Latin 12th\ncentury translation—it is considered more true to the original\nthan the later 13th century Hebrew translation both because it is an\nearlier translation, but also because unlike the Hebrew summary\ntranslation, the Latin edition is (ostensibly) a complete translation,\nmaintaining—as the Hebrew summary does not—the original\ndialogue format of Ibn Gabirol's original text. That said, it is\nworth noting that sometimes the 13th century Hebrew translation is more\nhelpful than the Latin because it is able to resonate with various\nHebrew terms at play in Ibn Gabirol's own vast corpus of Hebrew\npoetry which is often helpful in shedding light on some given\nphilosophical point in the Fons Vitae.","\n\nIbn Gabirol also authored (in Arabic) On the Improvement of the\nMoral Qualities (islâh al-’akhlâq in\nthe Arabic, or tîkkûn mîdôt ha-nefesh,\nthe Hebrew title of the translation by Judah Ibn Tibbon) a blend of\nphysiological and philosophical insights on the nature of the human\nsoul. We also have evidence in other medieval Jewish authors of what\nmight be part of an allegorical commentary on the Bible by Ibn Gabirol\n(as found in Abraham ibn Ezra's commentary on the Bible; see\nFriedlaender 1877, p. 40; Kaufmann 1899, p. 63ff.; for English see\nSirat 1985, p. 79), and it is debated whether he might also be the\nauthor of Choice of Pearls (mukhtâr\nal-jawâhir, lit. Choice (or: Selection) of Jewels;\nor Mivhar ha-Penînîm, Choice of Pearls, in its\nHebrew\n translation),[9]\na collection of maxims aimed at cultivating a\nvirtuous soul. It might be further noted that there are medieval lists\nby later thinkers enumerating a total 21 treatises by Ibn Gabirol (see\nLoewe 1989, pp. 24–5) including an entire [non-extant] treatise on\nDivine Will to which Ibn Gabirol himself alludes in his Fons\nVitae. All this, of course, in addition to his having authored a\nvast corpus of Hebrew poetry, including a number of lengthy\nphilosophical poems (see section 7).","\n\nAlthough we are not certain of what traditions most influenced his\nwork, we might certainly see in the pages of his philosophy and poetry\na unique blend of Jewish, Islamic, Neoplatonic, Pythagorean,\nphilosophical, Biblical, and mystical (Jewish and Islamic) source\nmaterials. We find overt use of Biblical quotes throughout his poetry,\nthough (and this is something for which other Jewish thinkers\ncriticized him) no overt references to the Bible or Jewish tradition in\nhis Fons Vitae (though the title arguably references\nPsalms 36:10). In his notion of a Divine Word (in the Fons\nVitae), we might hear resonances of the Longer Theology of\nAristotle; in his interest in a Divine Throne (in the Fons\nVitae and in his Keter Malkhût [Kingdom's\nCrown] poem), we might hear resonances of Muslim and Jewish\n“Throne\n theologies”;[10]\nin his reference to God creating out of letters, we might hear resonances of the\nSêfer Yezîrah (The Book of Formation,\npossibly known to Ibn Gabirol through the commentary edition of Saadya\nGaon; for discussion of Sêfer Yezîrah and Ibn\nGabirol, see Schlanger 1965 and Liebes 1987); in his causal\nmetaphysical hierarchy we might discern the influence of the Liber\n de Causis;[11]\nand in his emphasis on a principle called “al-‘unsur\nal-awwal” in his Arabic writing (generally translated as\nfirst matter) and called “yesôd”\n(foundation) in his Hebrew poetry, we might hear resonances of a\ntradition which scholars have dubbed “Pseudo Empedoclean”—an \nimprecisely understood tradition of ideas found in an\neclectic array of medieval Jewish and Islamic texts (where authors\nsometimes refer overtly to Empedocles by name) in which there emerges a\nnotable focus on a principle of pure supernal matter\n(al-‘unsur al-awwal, literally “the first\nelement”) at the core of being which is itself either coupled\nwith a principle of first form or described as itself composite of the\nduality of “love and strife.” The exact nature of this\ntradition or traditions remains unclear, but can be found in\nal-Shahrastani, al-Shahrazuri, Ps. Ammonius, and al-Amiri (for\nreferences, see the entry on “anbaduklîs”—the \nArabic transliteration of “Empedocles”—in \nEncyclopedia of Islam), in some medieval Hebrew\nKabbalistic\n traditions,[12]\nand has been linked to ideas in Ibn Masarra (see Asín-Palacios\n1978), Isaac Israeli and Ibn Hasday (See Stern 1983a). Linking Ibn\nGabirol to this tradition seems warranted not only in light of his own\nemphasis on al-‘unsur al-awwal (followed in turn by an\nunusual focus on the role of matter/s in the cosmos), but in light of\na claim by his 13th century translator Shem Tov Ibn\nFalaquera who in the introduction to his Hebrew edition\nof Meqôr Hayyîm (Fons Vitae) writes that\nIbn Gabirol seems to have been influenced by\n“Empedocles' Book of the Five Substances”\n(cf. Falaquera in Fons Vitae 1962, p. 435). Leaving aside what\nthis might refer to (scholars debate both the title as well as what it\nrefers to), it does seem that Ibn Falaquera was right to note some\nlink between Ibn Gabirol's Fons Vitae and some set of ideas\ncirculating under the name of\n Empedocles.[13]","\n\nWhile some later medieval Jewish thinkers—such as Shem Tov\nIbn Falaquera, Moses Ibn Ezra, Abraham Ibn Daud, Joseph ibn Zaddik and\nIsaac and Judah Abrabanel—were familiar with his philosophy,\nIbn Gabirol is probably most well-known among medieval and modern\nJewish authors for his Hebrew poetry, the best known of which being the\nKeter Malkhût (variously translated as\nKingdom's Crown, The Kingly Crown, The\nRoyal Crown, et\n al.),[14]\na long devotional poem exploring the ineffable\nsplendor of the divine and tracing God's presence throughout the\nvarious cosmological spheres which make up the universe. In fact, this\npoem is included in many Jewish prayer books for recitation on\nYôm Kippûr (The Day of Atonement), the highest of\nJewish holy days.","\n\nThe Fons Vitae is arguably the most influential of his\nworks, though mostly among medieval Christians. Available in Hebrew\nsummary form by the 13th century, and quoted in Arabic in\nMoses Ibn Ezra's\n work,[15]\nthe Fons Vitae left its strongest\nimprint not on medieval Jews but on the medieval Christian world.\nTranslated into Latin in the 12th century, and circulating\nno longer under Ibn Gabirol's name per se, but now under the\nLatinized version of his name (variously as Avicebron, Avicembron,\nAvicenbrol and Avencebrol), the Fons Vitae was engaged\n(variously criticized and hallowed) by centuries of medieval Christian\nscholars, who either assumed the author to be a Muslim or a Christian,\nnone suspecting the author to be the accomplished medieval Jewish poet,\nSolomon Ibn Gabirol.","\n\nFollowing the Christian reception of Ibn Gabirol's text\nfurther, we might note that whole groups of medieval Christian\nphilosophers assumed the text to have been written in particular by an\nAugustinian Christian. Taken up by many Franciscan philosophers in just\nthis way, Ibn Gabirol's Fons Vitae text became a\ncornerstone in many theologically charged debates between Franciscans\nand Dominicans, the Franciscans pointing to many of the Fons\nVitae doctrines in support of what they took to be true, untainted\nChristian ideas as laid out by Augustine—in contrast to the\nmore heavily Aristotelianized ideas of Dominicans like St. Thomas\nAquinas. It was not until the middle of the 19th century\nthat the Fons Vitae began its return to its Jewish roots when\nSolomon Munk uncovered the 13th century Hebrew summary by\nShem Tov Ibn Falaquera in which the text is attributed to Solomon Ibn\nGabirol. In this way, Munk recognized the Fons Vitae to have\nin fact been penned by the 11th century Jewish poet.","\n\nIt is worth noting that in spite of this discovery, many scholars\ncontinue to tacitly read Ibn Gabirol's Fons Vitae\nthrough Augustinian and other inappropriate lenses. (See section 2 on\nmethodology below)."],"section_title":"1. Bio, Works, Sources and Influences","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\nWhile there is no neutral lens through which to engage the history\nof ideas, it is important to guard against three particularly\ndistorting lenses in the study of Ibn Gabirol: Aristotelian,\nAugustinian, and Kabbalistic."],"section_title":"2. A Word on Method: Moving Beyond Aristotle, Augustine, and Kabbalah","subsections":[{"content":["\n\nOne of Ibn Gabirol's key interests in his Fons Vitae is a\nstudy of matter and form (and in particular a doctrine which later\nthinkers have called “Universal Hylomorphism”). While\nthere is no question that Ibn Gabirol is in some sense influenced by\nAristotelian concepts of form, matter, substance, categories, etc.,\nthere is no reason to think that he is generally using those concepts\nin anything even close to an Aristotelian way. As hopefully will\nbecome clear in this study, the primary notions of matter and of\nsubstance in Ibn Gabirol are deeply (and obviously)\nnon-Aristotelian [see sections 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3], revealing instead deeply\nPlatonic and Neoplatonic sensibilities, and—even more\nuniquely—deeply “Empedoclean” influence. (In this\nregard, Pessin 2009 (pp. 287–288) uses the novel term\n“Grounding Element” to replace the Latin\n“materia prima” and its English translation as\n“prime matter” as a translation for Ibn Gabirol's Arabic\n“al-‘unsur al-awwal”; see too Pessin\n2004). It is critical to note that “prime matter” is a\nmisleading term to use in a study of Ibn Gabirol as it at imports\nundue Aristotelian resonances to—and masks Pseudo (henceforth,\n“Ps.”) Empedoclean resonances at play in—Ibn\nGabirol's Arabic terminology.","\n\nNoting that Ibn Gabirol is not an Aristotelian goes a long way to\ninvalidating the deepest grounds (as opposed to the details) of Thomas\nAquinas' and other medieval thinkers' criticisms of Ibn\nGabirol's metaphysics as essentially being some kind of\nmisunderstanding of Aristotle. Since Ibn Gabirol is not trying—tacitly \nor otherwise—to do what many scholastics are trying to\ndo (viz. to “get Aristotle right”), it is methodologically\nstrained to critique Ibn Gabirol from an Aristotelian vantage point. An\nAristotelian lens does not open us to understanding the metaphysical\npicture that Ibn Gabirol is trying to paint for us."],"subsection_title":"2.1 Aristotelian Lenses in the Study of Ibn Gabirol"},{"content":["\n\nAnother of Ibn Gabirol's key interests in the Fons\nVitae is the Divine Will. This focus in part explains why many\nChristian Franciscans thought the Fons Vitae to have been\nauthored not only by a Christian but by what they would have seen as a\nright-minded Augustinian Christian. While we have known since the\n19th century that the Fons Vitae was in fact\nauthored by a Jewish poet, this has arguably not altered much of the\nAugustinian-lensed scholarship on the Fons Vitae. Some\nscholars, for example, have concluded simply on the basis of the idea\nof a Divine Will in Ibn Gabirol that he (like Augustine) must mean by\nthis some divine power at odds with emanation. While the details of Ibn\nGabirol's cosmogony are complex, and while it is indeed possible\nthat his notion of Will rules out emanation, another equally strong\noption is that he uses the term “Divine Will” in a way that\n(contra Augustine) is deeply compatible with Plotinian emanation. My\npoint here is simply to caution the reader: just because something\nsounds Augustinian does not mean that it is, and if it is not, we need\nto keep all our conceptual options open. Certainly “will”\nis consistent with emanation in the pages of Plotinus; we should not\nstart out—tacitly wearing Augustinian lenses—with any\nassumptions to the contrary in the Fons\n Vitae.[16]\n(In this regard, Pessin 2009, p. 286 with note 54, \nuses the term “Divine Desire” to replace the\nLatin “voluntas” and the English\n“Will” as a translation of Ibn Gabirol's Arabic\n“al-irâda”).","\n\nFor our current purposes, we must at least bear in mind that since\nIbn Gabirol is not a Christian Augustinian, it is methodologically\nstrained to read Ibn Gabirol from an Augustinian vantage point. An\nAugustinian lens does not open us to understanding the metaphysical\npicture that Ibn Gabirol is trying to paint for us."],"subsection_title":"2.2 Augustinian Lenses in the Study of Ibn Gabirol"},{"content":["\n\nIn his elaboration on the metaphysics of matter, Ibn Gabirol\nfrequently uses the Arabic term “al-‘unsur”\n(instead of the more common Arabic terms\n“al-hayûlâ” and\n“al-madda”) for matter. In fact, as outlined in\nsection 1, this is one of the key pieces of evidence for identifying a\nuniquely “Empedoclean” strain in his thinking. That said,\nmany readers instead simplistically fall into a Kabbalistic reading of\nIbn Gabirol since the Arabic “al-‘unsur” is\ncorrelated to the Hebrew term “yesôd” both\nin Ibn Gabirol's own Hebrew poetry as well as in\nFalaquera's 13th century Hebrew translation of the\nFons Vitae. While to be sure, the Hebrew term\n“yesôd” (literally “foundation”)\nis a cornerstone term and concept in Jewish mysticism, the desire to\nread Ibn Gabirol Kabbalistically (as a proto-Zoharian) is simply\nunder-supported by the mere fact that he (and his Hebrew translator)\nuse the term “yesôd”. While there might be\nKabbalistic traces in Ibn Gabirol, it is methodologically inadvisable—and \ndistorting—to simply start out assuming there are.\nWe might note, for example, F. E. Peters' boldly claiming—with\nno stated evidence—in his “Avicebron” entry in\nthe New Catholic Encyclopedia: “The true philosophical home of\nAvicebron is in the Zohar and in the speculative sections of the\nCabala” (see Peters 1967, volume 1, p. 1130). Such a claim is not\nprima facie evident. In an obviously more methodologically careful\nspirit, there are scholars of Jewish mysticism who recommend\nconnections to Ibn Gabirol (usually with reference to Ibn\nGabirol's poems, not his Fons Vitae) (see, for example,\nIdel, who offers the suggestion of mystical overtones in an Ibn Gabirol\npoetic reference to “ten sefirôt” (Idel\n1982, p. 278); see too: Idel 1992; Liebes 1987; Heller-Wilensky 1967).\nWhile we needn't dismiss the idea of links between Ibn Gabirol\nand Jewish mysticism (he was most likely familiar with the\nSêfer Yetzîrah tradition, and possibly other\ntraditions, of sefîrôt), we must be\nmethodologically cautious to not over-Kabbalize Ibn Gabirol (and\nespecially his Fons Vitae): use of terms like\n“sefîrôt,”\n“yesôd,” et al. do not necessarily reveal\nJewish mystical overtones or influence. Scholem reminds us (in his\nstudy of Ibn Gabirol's influence on Kabbalah) that even after\nmany studies of the link between Ibn Gabirol and the Kabbalah, we have\nno clear conclusions (Scholem 1939, p. 160). (Avoiding reading Ibn\nGabirol as a proto-Zoharist is not to deny any impact of Ibn Gabirol on\nlater Kabbalists; but even this question of forward-influence must be\ntreated with care; as Scholem also notes, the mere use of the term\n“Divine Will” in Kabbalistic thinkers after Ibn\nGabirol does not necessarily reveal a Gabirolean influence (Scholem\n1939, p. 161)).","\n\nSince we have strong reason to claim that Ibn Gabirol's use of\nthe term “yesôd” reflects a Ps. Empedoclean\ntradition, it is methodologically strained to read Ibn Gabirol from a\nKabbalistic vantage point. A Kabbalistic lens does not open us to\nunderstanding the metaphysical picture that Ibn Gabirol is trying to\npaint for us."],"subsection_title":"2.3 Kabbalistic Lenses in the Study of Ibn Gabirol"}]},{"main_content":["\n\nLike any engaged Neoplatonist, Ibn Gabirol is first and foremost\ninterested in understanding the nature and purpose of human being: we\nmust understand what we are (our nature) so that we know how to live\n(our purpose). This set of interconnected human questions is what Ibn\nGabirol is interested in even in the midst of what might sometimes seem\nto be rather laborious cosmological and metaphysical explorations. Ibn\nGabirol, like other Neoplatonists, explores layers of cosmological and\nmetaphysical realities in an attempt to understand how to live the best\nhuman life possible.","\n\nEmphasizing that this is Ibn Gabirol's main concern, we find\nin the opening pages of his Fons Vitae text a reminder that\nthe goal of the entire inquiry is to understand why human beings were\nmade (“Quare factus est homo?,” “Why was man\nmade?”—Fons Vitae 1.1, p. 2, line 8)—which \nis to say, to understand the ends (or purpose) of human being\n(the Fons Vitae teaches that a human ought to “pursue\nknowledge of his final cause [or: purpose] according to which he was\ncomposed,” Fons Vitae 1.2, p. 4, lines 8–9). In spelling\nout the true, divinely ordained goal of human life (the purpose of the\nhuman life is described as a product of God's Will\nat Fons Vitae 1.2, p. 4, lines 10–12), the text describes a\ntwofold endeavor: the pursuit of knowledge and the doing of good deeds\n(Fons Vitae 1.2, p. 4, line 27).","\n\nWhile the remaining hundreds of pages of the Fons Vitae go\non to offer highly obscure elaborations on matter and form, the overall\npoint of the entire study (and one might argue, of Ibn Gabirol's\nentire oeuvre of poetry as well) is not obscure at all: his\ngoal is to understand the nature of being and human being so that he\nmight better understand and better inspire the pursuit of knowledge and\nthe doing of good deeds:","\n\nKnowledge indeed leads to deeds, and deeds separate the soul from\nthe contraries which harm it…In every way, knowledge and deeds\nliberate the soul from the captivity of nature and purge it of its\ndarkness and obscurity, and in this way the soul returns to its higher\nworld. (Fons Vitae 1.2, p. 5, line 27–p. 6, line 4)","\n\n“And in this way, the soul returns to its higher world.”\nThe ends of humanity (reached through the pursuit of truth and\ngoodness) are imagined by Ibn Gabirol—as we find is the case\namong Neoplatonists more generally—through the evocative image\nof a “return” coupled with the image of a “higher\nworld”:","\nStudent: What is the purpose of man?\n\nTeacher: The inclination [applicatio] of his soul to the\nhigher world in order that everyone might return to his like.\n\n(Fons Vitae 1.2, p. 4, lines 23–25)\n","\n\nThe joint imagery of a “return” and a “higher\nworld” are themselves part of a conceptual framework in which all\nof existence is seen to follow a principle of similitude whereby lesser\nbeings mirror higher beings. This idea, often expressed as the idea\nthat “the microcosm mirrors the macrocosm”—a common\nPlatonic, Pythagorean, and Neoplatonic trope—has a strongly\nprescriptive overtone: it's not simply that lesser things mirror\ngreater things, but that in this mirroring, we find the purpose of the\nlesser things, viz. to be just like the greater things. Depending on\nthe context, the “lesser things” and “greater\nthings” might vary, but the most popular version of this\n“microcosm mirrors the macrocosm” idea, and the one at play\nin the above Ibn Gabirol passage, envisions the human being (sometimes\nhuman soul, sometimes human intellect) as the “lesser\nthing” and the wisely ordered cosmos (and sometimes, relatedly,\nthe mind of God or, alternatively, the cosmic Intellect) as the\n“greater thing.” In this descriptive idea that humans\nmirror something greater there emerges the strongly prescriptive\nreminder that we ought to emulate that which is better than ourselves\n(viz. through the pursuit of knowledge and good deeds). This\nprescriptive call to human perfection through truth and goodness is the\nessence of the idea of Neoplatonic Return, and it is this idea which\nlies at the core of Ibn Gabirol's claim that we ought purge our\nsouls of darkness and “return to our like[ness]”.","\n\nIn one especially important Fons Vitae passage, we find a\ndescription of this Neoplatonic return which very much reflects\nPlotinus' own famous ascent passage (at Enneads 4.8.1),\na passage reproduced (with important changes) in what misleadingly\nbecame known as the Theology of Aristotle, an Arabic\ncompilation-edition of books 4–6 of Plotinus'\n Enneads.[17]\nHere is the final part of Ibn Gabirol's version:","\n\n…But if you should lift yourself to the first universal\nmatter and [are] illumined by its shadow, you will then see the most\nwondrous of wonders. Devote yourself to this and be filled with love\nfor it, since here lies the meaning for which the human soul exists,\nand here lies too amazing delight and utmost happiness (Fons\nVitae 3.56; my translation from the Arabic and Latin; for Wedeck\ntranslation, see his Fountain of Life (Ibn Gabirol 1962/2008),\npp. 110–111)","\n\nIn addition to many other changes from Plotinus and the Theology\nof Aristotle, one special point of difference is the reference\nhere to universal matter (see section 5). It is precisely Ibn\nGabirol's unique focus on “universal matter” (a grade\nof spiritual materiality at the very core of existence) which leads him\nto uniquely envision the ultimate moment of Neoplatonic return as a\nmoment of “illuminated shadow”: since there is a material\nelement just “above” Intellect for Ibn Gabirol, the return\nto Intellect will be characterized by the light of Wisdom set within\nthe shade of the supernal first matter.","\n\nIn the closing sentences of the Fons Vitae, Ibn Gabirol\nfurther describes this state of “return” as a liberation\nfrom death and a cleaving to the source of life (“Evasio\nmortis et applicatio ad originem vitae,” Fons Vitae\n5.43, p. 338, line 21). Following on general Neoplatonic intuitions,\nthis means that when one has attained the heights of truth and\ngoodness, one will have reverted to one's truest life, a pure\nstate of soul which transcends mortal life—we might describe it\nas a kind of immortality while in the mortal body. This directly\nresonates with what A.H. Armstrong, in his study of Plotinus, has\ndescribed as the Neoplatonic doctrine of “Double Selfhood,”\na sensitivity to the human condition being at one and the same time (1)\nalready fully imbued with the fullest state of intellect, but somewhat\nparadoxically also (2) fallen from—and needing to return to—the \nfullest state of intellect.","\n\nWhile Ibn Gabirol's quest towards the Neoplatonic Return\ncenters, as we have seen, on the pursuit of truth and goodness, it also\nincludes an attempt to know the unknowable God. In laying out the kinds\nof truth that the human soul must aim to acquire, the Fons\nVitae speaks of “the knowledge of all things according to\nwhat they are” (Fons Vitae 1.4, p. 6, lines 13–14), and\nmost of all of the knowledge of the First Essence [Latin, essentia\nprima, Arabic, adh-dhât\nal-’ûlâ, as evidenced in some\nof the extant Arabic fragments of the Fons Vitae; see Pines\n1958/77 and Fenton 1976] that sustains and moves all things. While we\nare asked to know God—understood by Ibn Gabirol in tripart\nterms as a hidden First Essence and as an active, manifesting Will and\nWisdom—we are cautioned a few lines later that it is impossible\nto truly know the First Essence, and that we can only aspire to know\nthe things which He makes and sustains (Fons Vitae 1.4, p. 6,\nlines 19–22). As it relates to Ibn Gabirol's more general\ncharacterization of God in the Fons Vitae in tripart terms as\nan essential hidden reality and an active manifesting Will and Wisdom,\nwe might say that for Ibn Gabirol, we can only know God through the\nmanifestation of his Will and Wisdom in the ordered structure of\nexistents in the universe (i.e. through the things which He makes and\nsustains, and in particular, through the wisdom revealed by them)."],"section_title":"3. Knowledge and Deeds: the Purpose of Human Being","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\nIbn Gabirol describes God's creative act in many ways across\nhis philosophical and poetic writings. While it is certainly possible\nto find a single overall theological picture emerging from across Ibn\nGabirol's work, it is at least worth noting a degree of tension\nbetween a range of different and sometimes seemingly conflicting ideas.\nIn what follows, we will look at the complex play of creation,\nemanation, Will, Wisdom, Word, and desire in Ibn Gabirol's\ncosmo-ontology."],"section_title":"4. The Divine Creative Act","subsections":[{"content":["\n\nTo begin with, Ibn Gabirol's God is described as a Creator God\nwho is an absolute simple unity—so simple as to exceed the\ngrasp of the human mind and tongue. This apophatic theme (a theme which\nin any philosopher highlights the absolute unity of God) can be seen\nfor example, in the very first canto of his Keter\nMalkhût [Kingdom's Crown] depiction of God:\n“Yours is the name hidden from the wise…” God, for\nIbn Gabirol, is, in proper Neoplatonic fashion, an absolute unity. That\nsaid, God is nonetheless described in the Fons Vitae by Ibn\nGabirol in dual—and in some sense, tripart—terms:\nGod's unity consists on the one hand in a purely hidden Essence\nand on the other hand in the manifesting activity of a Divine Will. We\nalso learn (thirdly) of God's Wisdom (and in related fashion, of\nthe Divine Word). Emphasizing more of a dual—and less of a\ntripart—vision of this absolutely simple Creator, Ibn Gabirol\nsometimes directly identifies the Divine Will with the divine Wisdom\n(though that does not always seem clear throughout Ibn Gabirol's\nwritings).","\n\nWhile God's creative act is described by Ibn Gabirol as a\ncreation ex nihilo (see Fons Vitae 3.3, p. 79, line\n18; FV 3.25, p. 139, lines 24–25) a view normally seen in opposition to\ndoctrines of emanation, he also uses common emanation metaphors—the \nflow of light and the flow of water—to describe the origins\nof the cosmos. For example, drawing on the Psalms 36:10 image\nof a “fountain of life,” in the very title of his Fons\nVitae\n text[18]\nIbn Gabirol seems to at least beckon to Greek and Muslim Neoplatonic\nvisions of an emanating\n God.[19]\nSimilarly stressing an emanating cosmos (though\nnot necessarily the idea of an emanating God per se), Ibn Gabirol—in \nwhat appears to be part of a commentary on Genesis—likens \nthe material core of being (to which we will return in\nsection 5) to a river. Allegorically rendering the Garden of Eden\nwaters to the pure matter which sits at the root of the unfolding\ncosmos, Ibn Gabirol envisions the pulse of existence as a River of Life—a \nvibrant outpouring which links all of existence to a single\noverflowing source (see Sirat 1985, p. 79). Of course, this particular\nimage does not necessarily suggest that God Himself emanates (i.e. the\nidea that existence emanates forth from matter is still consistent with\nGod creating that matter ex nihilo, and not via\nemanation).","\n\nAttempting to put all the pieces of Ibn Gabirol's complex\ncosmogony together, we can find pieces of creation ex nihilo,\nemanation, and creation ex aliquo; God's formative act\nbegins with creating matter and form (possibly a creation ex\nnihilo, but described fluidly enough as to leave open other\ninterpretations), and He then draws out, in an emanating flow, the\nremainder of existence from these dual starting points (emanation, but\nalso creation ex aliquo in the sense that all of existence is\nbeing formed through the mediation of matter, as opposed to each\nexistent being created directly—in the sense of\n‘unmediated’—by God as in other versions of\ncreation ex nihilo\n accounts).[20]\nIn the end, Ibn Gabirol's conceptual play—with \nnotions of creation and emanation side by side—ought \nleave us open to various interpretations of how precisely to\nunderstand his cosmogony.","\n\nIn his Keter Malkhût poem (Kingdom's\nCrown), Ibn Gabirol further describes God's creative act as\na splitting open of nothingness: “…ve-qara el\nha-’ayîn ve-nivqa…,” (“…and\nHe called out to the nothing and it split open…”; in\nGabirol's poem, Keter Malkhût, canto 9; See\nSchirmann 1967, p. 262, line 82; for a treatment of this line, see\nPines 1980). Here, the void of precreation—the pre-existent\n’ayîn, or “nothingness”—is\nsplit open by God's own voice in the moment of creation—a\nmoment arguably described by Ibn Gabirol in his poem\nahavtîkha (“I Love You”) as the material\n“proto-existence” (kemô-yêsh) awaiting\nits fulfillment through\n form,[21]\nand described in the Fons Vitae as a\ncomplex unfolding of and downward manifesting of a first pure matter\nthrough the introduction of (or unfolding of) forms by the Divine Will.\nThe material nothing—in all three images—is the ground\nof existence, as it is at once the site of desire, a yearning to be\nen-formed, which is to say, to become more and more manifest. We will\nsay more about this emphasis on desire below (see section 4.3).","\n\nCentral to Ibn Gabirol's cosmogony is also the notion of the\nDivine Will, an emphasis for which the Fons Vitae is\nhighlighted in the history of ideas."],"subsection_title":"4.1 Creation ex nihilo and the Fountain of Life"},{"content":["\n\nEarly on in the Fons Vitae, we learn that the Divine Will\nis one of three central concepts that the human mind must set out to\ngrasp (the workings of matter and form, and the reality of a divine\nEssence as primal cause are the other two central concepts). We also\nlearn of Will that it is some sort of cosmic “intermediary\nbetween the extremes,” a role described as central to the basic\nunderpinning of the universe (Fons Vitae 1.7, p. 9, lines\n28–30; see too Fons Vitae 5.36, p 322, line 20–p. 323, line 1\nfor another statement of the three divisions of knowledge; in this\nlatter context, Will is identified with Word). We learn that Will is\nthe power of God infused in and penetrating through all things, that it\nis the power of unity in the universe, and that it is that which both\nbrings forth and moves all of existence. It is also described as the\ndivine force that maintains and sustains the essence of all things (see\nFons Vitae 5.39, p. 327, lines 14–15: Will is the power\n[virtus] of God infused in and penetrating all things; 5.39,\np. 327, lines 26–27: Will is the power [virtus] of unity; 1.2, p. 4,\nlines 14–15: Will is the divine power [virtus] bringing forth\nand moving all things; 1.5, p. 7, line 15: Will maintains and sustains\nthe essence of all things).","\n\nTurning further to Will's mediating cosmic role, while the\nLatin text translates “intermediary between the extremes,”\nthe Arabic text uses a dual grammatical form, translating more\nspecifically as “intermediary between the two extremes.” In\nthe context of this claim, the “intermediation” role\nbetween the “two extremes” is ambiguous between two\ndifferent claims which are both equally true within the context of Ibn\nGabirol's worldview: on the one hand, Ibn Gabirol might mean that\nWill intermediates between (1) matter and form on the one hand and (2)\ndivine Essence on the other (the items corresponding to two of the\nthree “divisions of knowledge” which he describes [see\nsection 5]); on the other hand, Ibn Gabirol might mean that Will\nintermediates between (1) matter and (2) form, the two cosmic\n“building blocks” out of which all reality is\ncomprised.","\n\nWill is further described as taking its own root in God's\nEssence, and is sometimes (but not always) described as the immediate\ncreative source of (and not just intermediary between) matter\nand\n form.[22]\nComplicating this picture of Will's creation of matter and form,\nwe also learn on the contrary that Will is the direct source only of\nform (and not\n matter)[23]—a \npoint supported further by the claim\nthat Will is (1) identical to Wisdom (and the source of form; see\nFons Vitae 5.42, p. 335, lines 4–5), and (2) that Wisdom is\nthe source only of form (and not matter), with the divine Essence\nitself being the direct source of matter: “…materia\nest creata ab essentia, et forma est a proprietate essentiae, id est\nsapientia et unitate…” (“…matter is\ncreated from Essence, and form is from the property of Essence, viz.,\nfrom Wisdom and Unity…”; Fons Vitae 5.42, p.333,\nlines 4–5; see too 5.42, p. 335, lines 4–5).","\n\nLeaving the complexities of these competing claims aside in the\ncontext of this study, it is sufficient here to emphasize that Ibn\nGabirol's theology includes a Divine Will not only responsible\nfor the generation of one or both of matter and form, but responsible\nin some way for the “connection between matter and form” in\nall things, and, as such, responsible for sustaining all existing\nthings (all of which are, for Ibn Gabirol, form and matter composites;\nsee section 5). By sustaining the matter and form composition of all\nthings, Divine Will signifies the permeation of God's creative\nforce at the core of Being itself, and as such at the core of every\nindividual being.","\n\nIn addition to identifying Will with Wisdom, Ibn Gabirol also\nidentifies Will with Word (Fons Vitae 5.36, p. 323, line 17).\nFollowing on this identification, in a rather evocative set of\npassages, Ibn Gabirol likens the act of creation to God's\nutterance of word (Fons Vitae 5.43). While this theme is\ncertainly not new within the history of Neoplatonic and Jewish ideas\n(suggesting resonance with the Longer Theology of\nAristotle's reference to the Word [Ar. kalima], as\nwell as resonance with Sêfer Yezîrah's\nemphasis on God's creation via Hebrew\n letters[24]),\nwhat is new is Ibn\nGabirol's unique way of fleshing that idea out in light of his\noverall metaphysics: Creation, writes Ibn Gabirol, is like a word that\nGod utters, and that word is itself the coming together of voice (the\nuniversal matter), the audible sounds that make up a given word\n(manifest forms), and the actual meaning of the word (the hidden\nuniversal form which contains and sustains all manifest forms). For Ibn\nGabirol, this analogy helps highlight his view of the unfolding divine\nWisdom / Will giving way to a cosmos which is a complex blend of\nmatters and forms, with a principle of pure universal matter and pure\nuniversal form at the very root of all existence.","\n\nHere, we may speak of a revised Neoplatonic cosmos in which\nprinciples of form, matter and Will (if we are to think of that as\nsomething separate from God's Essence) emerge\n“between” God and the principle of Intellect (the principle\nwhich follows directly upon God in standard chartings of the\nNeoplatonic cosmos):","\n\nIn Ibn Gabirol's cosmology, Intellect is highlighted as the\n first created being, as the Divine Glory\n (Kavod),[25]\nand as the first\noccurrence of “form in matter” composition (see Fons\nVitae 5.10, p. 274, line 19; 5.11, p. 277, line 4; for the related\nidea that God creates esse in a composite way out of matter\nand form, cf. Fons Vitae 5.40, p. 329, line 4). At times, Ibn\nGabirol emphasizes that this matter is pre-existent (that it does not\nhave existence on its own without form), and at times, he can be taken,\non the contrary, as emphasizing the “per se\nexistens” nature of matter (as for example in his very\ndefinition of matter at Fons Vitae 1.10, p. 13, lines 15–17\nand 5.22, p. 298, lines 13–7). While the precise meaning of Ibn\nGabirol's idea is open for interpretation, Schlanger suggests\nthat matter per se exists for Ibn Gabirol only as an idea in\nthe mind of God, and not as an actual reality prior to Intellect (see\nSchlanger 1968, p. 294). In this vein, we may note Ibn Gairol's\nclaim that the existence (esse) of matter is in the wisdom of\nGod (Fons Vitae 5.10, p. 275).","\n\nReflecting on Ibn Gabirol's idea of some kind of “form\nand matter before Intellect” (either in an actual or in some\nconceptual sense), it is worth considering to what extent this suggests\n(as the above two discrete charts seem to suggest) a genuine departure\nfrom Plotinian Neoplatonism. On the face of it, Plotinus does not\nemphasize a principle of matter and form prior to Intellect. As such,\nwe may say that Ibn Gabirol's emphasis introduces a Ps.\nEmpedoclean change (either an actual ontological change or a\nconceptual “shift in focus”) into the standard Plotinian\npicture. That said, Plotinus certainly is sensitive to the duality of\nthe unity of Intellect (as compared with the unity of the One), and\neven occasionally overtly emphasizes the notion of Intellect's\ncomposition out of “intelligible matter” (See\nEnneads 2.4.1–5, 5.4.2 and 5.5.4; on the conceptual resonance\nof “intelligible matter” in Plotinus and Ibn Gabirol, see\nDillon 1992). While these sections of the Enneads in which\nPlotinus overtly emphasizes this theme are not part of the Arabic\nPlotinus materials which we would presume Ibn Gabirol to have had\naccess, it is worth noting that Ibn Gabirol's emphasis on\n“form and matter prior to intellect” does not necessarily\nrepresent any conceptual departure from Plotinus (or, we might add,\nfrom Platonic and Pythagorean sensitivities to the principle of an\nindefinite dyad at the core of reality). Clearly Plotinus is sensitive\nto the “duality” of any grade of reality outside of the\nOne: while Intellect is for Plotinus a unity, it is clearly a\n“dual” (or even plural) sort of unity as compared with the\nutter unity of the One. In this sense, Plotinus is deeply sensitive to\nthe “duality” outside of God (and, as such, the duality of\nIntellect), even in passages where he is not overtly referencing the\ncomposition of Intellect/Being out of intelligible matter (which is to\nsay, even in passages where he is not emphasizing the dual nature of\nIntellect). In this sense, it is arguably conceptually appropriate to\nalign even Ibn Gabirol's most emphatic sense of the dual\n“matter-with-form” composition of Intellect (or, relatedly,\nhis emphasis on a grade of matter “prior to” Intellect)\nwith even Plotinus' staunchest insistence on the unity of\nIntellect (as for Plotinus, the unity of Intellect, as compared with\nthe unity of the One, is dual by nature)."],"subsection_title":"4.2 Will, Wisdom, Word, Intellect and the Cosmos"},{"content":["\n\nReturning to our earlier discussion, Ibn Gabirol describes pure\nmatter as stemming directly from the Divine Essence itself, with form,\non the contrary, arising somewhat secondarily\nfrom the Divine Will. While this is not to suggest that God is Himself\nmade up of matter (as concluded by some fans of Ibn Gabirol such as\nDavid of Dinant in the history of Christian philosophy who ran into\ntrouble with the Church for theorizing God as matter), there is\narguably in Ibn Gabirol an intimate link between God and matter. Such a\nlink between materiality and God is not much of a conceptual stretch\n(though in standard Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Aristotelian contexts we\nwould tend to link God with form): both matter and God are utterly\nhidden and utterly grounding for all else, while form (and the\nWill/Wisdom with which it is associated) mark the lesser\n“active” or “manifesting” mode of divinity and\nof the cosmos. While of course for Ibn Gabirol God is an utter unity,\nwe may nonetheless theorize with Ibn Gabirol as follows: As God's\nessential hiddenness moves forward into action (Wisdom/Will/Word), so\ntoo pure material pre-existence moves forward into manifest being (i.e.\nbecomes more and more en-formed). Here, in an important sense, the\nimages of “darkness and the hidden” trump the images of\n“light and the manifest” both as they relate to God and to\nthe cosmos: as God's hidden Essence precedes and grounds his\nacts, so too matter precedes and grounds enformed being (and as such,\nall existents). Here, God and matter—in their dark / hidden\nrespects—have something very important in common. (See Pessin\n2009, p. 290, for chart mapping the superiority in this regard of the\nmaterial over the formal).","\n\nIt ought be noted that herein lies a paradox found in one form or\nanother in all versions of Neoplatonism: on the one hand, there is a\nsense that moving forward (or downward) in the great chain of being is\na tragic fall away from the purity of divine unity; on the other hand,\nthere is a sense (not, for example, found in Gnostic materials) that\nthere is beauty and light in the creation, which is to say that in the\ncontinual downward manifesting of being we find the trace of Divine\nWill. In the context of Ibn Gabirol's conceptual space in which\n(as we will see in more detail in section 5) reality is seen as the\nprocess of moving from a more hidden / material to a more manifest /\nformal reality, the result is at once (1) a sense of loss in the move\naway from God's own hiddenness (with a sense that darkness is\nsublime) and (2) a sense of beauty and increasing grace as more and\nmore forms continue to manifest (“joining” to matter\nthrough the intermediation of the Divine Will), resulting ultimately in\nthe fullness of the cosmos (with a sense that light is sublime). These\ndueling images of the sublimity of unity (or pre-creation) on the one\nhand and manifestness (or creation) on the other (here in terms of the\nsublimity of darkness on the one hand and light on the other) offer an\ninsight into what we may call a Neoplatonic “theology of\nparadox” which is very much at play in Ibn Gabirol.","\n\nIn his conception of God's relation to matter in the act of\ncreation, we must also emphasize Ibn Gabirol's focus on desire.\nProviding a bit more context to (and a different translation of) Ibn\nGabirol's Keter Malkhût [Kingdom's\nCrown] rehearsing of God's “splitting of the\nnothing” (see section 4.1), consider:","\n\nYou are wise, and your wisdom gave rise to an endless desire in the\nworld as within an artist or worker—to bring out the stream of\nexistence from Nothing…He called to Nothing—which split;\nto existence—pitched like a tent…With desire's span\nhe established the heavens… (Canto 9 of the Keter\nMalkhût; translation from Cole 2001, p. 149)","\n\nIn these poetic lines, as elsewhere throughout his writing, Ibn\nGabirol emphasizes the central motion of desire at the core of the\nuniverse. This can be seen throughout the Fons Vitae\nin the dual reminders that (1) all things have matter at their core,\nand (2) matter's own reality consists essentially in desire (viz.\na desiring-after-form). These two simple ideas lead to a much more\narresting insight, viz. inasmuch as all things are grounded in matter,\nand inasmuch as matter is a marker of desire, it follows that all\nreality is grounded in desire. Desire—in the guise of matter—is \nin this sense a central principle of Ibn\nGabirol's\n universe.[26]"],"subsection_title":"4.3 God, Matter and the Omnipresence of Desire"}]},{"main_content":["\n\nIn his vision of the world, Ibn Gabirol's focus is on God,\nDivine Will, and the duality of form and matter. From an early section\nin his Fons Vitae, we learn:","\n\nIn the whole of existence, there are three divisions of knowledge:\n(1) the knowledge of matter (al-‘unsur) and form\n(as-sûra), (2) the knowledge of Will\n(al-irâda), and (3) the knowledge of the First Essence.\nAmong substances, there is nothing other than these three. First\nEssence is cause; matter and form, effect; and Will is the intermediary\nbetween the two extremes (Fons Vitae 1.7; for Arabic, see\nPines 1958/77, p. 71; for slightly different translation with reference\nto “The All of Existence,” see Pessin 2009, p. 286 and note\n53 in that study)","\n\nMatter and form—referred to in his Hebrew poetry under the\nalluring Hebrew labels of “yesôd”\n(foundation) and “sôd” (secret)—are,\nalong with the doctrine of Divine Will, cornerstones of the Fons\nVitae. In particular, the Fons Vitae teaches (rather\nunusually within the history of ideas) that all things—including \nspiritual simples such as soul and intellect (but not God)—are \ncomprised of matter and form. This doctrine is called\n“Universal Hylomorphism” by later scholastics in contrast\nto ordinary Aristotelian hylomorphism in which all substances\nother than soul/intellect are said to be comprised of matter\n(Greek: hûlê) and form (Greek:\nmorphê). This doctrine of Universal Hylomorphism emerges\nas a central theological and philosophical point of contention between\nAugustinian Franciscans (who embrace it) and Aristotelian Dominicans\n(who reject it). (It might be noted that one popular way that the\nFons Vitae doctrine comes up in medieval Christian debates is\non the question of whether angels (the separate intellects) are made up\nof matter and form, or just\n form).[27]","\n\nHand in hand with the doctrine that all things (including spiritual\nsimples) are matter+form composites is Ibn Gabirol's idea of a\npure spiritual matter at the core of being which grounds even Universal\nIntellect in the great Neoplatonic chain of being. In the extant\nArabic, we find that Ibn Gabirol uses the term\n“al-‘unsur”, or the more descriptive\n“al-‘unsur al-awwal,” first matter (in\ncontrast to other more common Arabic philosophical terms for matter\nwhich Ibn Gabirol himself uses at other points in his\n work).[28]\nIn spite of the\nfact that this term is translated as “materia\nprima” in the Latin, and is as such often translated as\n“prime matter” in English, we need to keep in mind that\nwhatever Ibn Gabirol is talking about is not best thought of as\nAristotelian prime matter (which is what may readers undoubtedly\novertly or covertly think of when they hear the term “prime\nmatter”; see section 2). First of all, Ibn Gabirol's pure\nmatter is part of an overtly Neoplatonic world-view which, contra\nAristotle, privileges spiritual/intelligible substances over\nsensible/corporeal reality, and which, contra Aristotle and Plato,\nemphasizes the emanation of the sensible realm from the spiritual\nrealm. Further emphasizing that we are not talking of Aristotelian\nprime matter is the fact that Ibn Gabirol's use of the Arabic\nterm al-‘unsur (literally “the element,” and\ntranslated by the 13th century Hebrew editor as\n“yesôd” (foundation)) expressly mirrors a\nPs. Empedoclean tradition of a spiritual matter (called\nal-‘unsur) immediately outside of God. For these\nreasons, it is important to avoid Aristotelian resonances when\nconstructing Ibn Gabirol's ontology, and as such, one ought use\nthe term First Matter over “prime matter.”","\n\nOf this first pure matter we learn at the very start of the Fons\nVitae that it is “…per se existens, unius\nessentiae, sustinens diversitatem, dans omnibus essentiam suam et\nnomen” (“…existent in and of itself, of a\nsingle essence, sustaining diversity, and giving to everything its\nessence and name”; Fons Vitae 1.10, p. 13, lines 15–17).\nAnd, in similar manner we learn at the very close of the Fons\nVitae that it is: “…substantia existens per se,\nsustentatrix diversitatis, una numero; et…est substantia\nreceptibilis omnium formarum” (“…a substance\nexistent in and of itself, the sustainer of diversity, one in number;\n…it is a substance receptive to all forms”; Fons\nVitae 5.22, p. 298, lines 13–7; compare with facing Arabic text at\nPines 1958/77, p. 53, section 9:2). Related to its status as the\n“sustainer of diversity,” pure matter is presented as the\nfundamental receiver that always seeks to receive its partner, viz.\nform. Pure universal matter is thus coupled—in a process\noverseen by Divine Will—with a pure universal form to yield the\nfirst fully existing substance, Universal Intellect. In their coupling,\nmatter and form thus mark the permeating presence of Divine Will in the\nuniverse. Related to his vision of a matter-to-form coupling through\nWill, Ibn Gabirol envisions the Neoplatonic emanating chain of being as\nan ever-descending series of matter-to-form couplings, and so:","\nIntellect (matter + form)1\n\nSoul (matter + form)2\n\nCelestial Body (matter + form)3\n\nTerrestrial Body (mater + form)4\n","\n\nHere, a hylomorphic lens is put onto the standard Neoplatonic\nhierarchy emphasizing the composition of all things (spiritual simples\nas well as bodies) in terms of matters and forms (and highlighting\nthree kinds of matter: spiritual, celestial, and\n terrestrial).[29]\nAnd with this\nhylomorphic lens emerges too the emphasis on Divine Will, the active\npresence of God responsible in some way for “mediating”\nbetween these matters and forms.","\n\nIn the context of this hylomorphic vision, we find a confounding\nflipping in the Fons Vitae between ordinary negative and\nunexpected positive descriptions of the notion of\n matter.[30] \n The universal pure matter certainly has a positive set of associations\nwith it in Ibn Gabirol as compared with “corporeal” (or\n“lower”) matter: in contrast to “lower” matter\nwhich carries the 9 Aristotelian categories, “higher”\nmatter is the matter of pure spiritual simples and carries no quantity\nor quality (or any of the 9 categories). Again, mindful of the\nEmpedoclean tie-in and of his Hebrew terminology of\n“yesôd” (foundation), we are looking at\nsomething quite sublime, a reality which sits, as it were, directly\noutside of God prior even to Intellect, which he likens to a Divine\nThrone (see Fons Vitae 5.42, p. 335, lines 23–4), and which\nhe correlates to the more essential (and hidden) reality of God. In\nthese and related contexts in Ibn Gabirol, matter often emerges\n(somewhat unexpectedly within the history of ideas) as more sublime\n than even pure form.\nAnd yet, there are plenty of passages in\nthe Fons Vitae in which it is form which reigns supreme (as\nwe would expect in standard Platonic, Aristotelian, and Neoplatonic\ntraditions): for example, form is identified as the cosmic source of\nunity and light, and it is form which is said to perfect or complete\nmatter by bringing being to it (although, as we have emphasized, it is\nstill plausible that for Ibn Gabirol matter per se still has\nsome kind of pre-existent—and perhaps superior—subsistence \nprior to and independent of this gift of being from\nform). Further highlighting form's supremacy, Ibn Gabirol\nargues, for example, that the substance of Intellect is superior to\nthe substance of body precisely because the former contains all forms\nand the latter contains only some forms (see Fons Vitae 3.9,\np. 98, line 24– p. 99, line 3), an argument which relies on the\nintuition that formality (not materiality) is the ontological marker\nof supremacy (and an argument which seems directly at odds with the\nintuitions behind another of his ideas, viz. that we ought call\na higher substance “matter” with respect to a lower\nsubstance). In the final account, we can see Ibn Gabirol as\nuniquely sensitive to the equal importance of both matter and form,\ntheir intimate interdependence one upon the other, and, ultimately,\ntheir unity as a single whole—a dynamic arguably mirroring his\nvision of God's own reality in terms of essential and active\n“moments” which are ultimately one inseparable unity."],"section_title":"5. Matter, Form and “Universal Hylomorphism”","subsections":[{"content":["\n\nOne way to think of Ibn Gabirol's hylomorphic levels of\nreality (although Ibn Gabirol does not himself theorize it in this way\novertly) is in terms of his Neoplatonizing the Platonic notion of\nparticipation. For Plato, participation is in a form, and a highest\nform—participated in by all—is the form of being. For\nthe Neoplatonist, as for Ibn Gabirol, the focus on the form is replaced\n(or amplified) by the focus on the Universal Intellect that contains\nall forms (simultaneously, in potency, as one nested in the next).\nImagine the conceptual implication of this Neoplatonic focus on\nIntellect (versus a Platonic focus on the form of being) for a\nparticipation theory—if we think of it carefully, we will find\nthat the Neoplatonic model can quite organically gives rise to the kind\nof hylomorphic focus we find in Ibn Gabirol: In a Neoplatonic\nIntellect, all the forms are “in” Intellect, a notion which\ncan easily be seen as emphasizing Intellect's material role as\nsustainer. This would mean that the move from Platonic talk of forms to\nNeoplatonic talk of Intellect organically invites a new focus on the\nrole of [spiritual] matter (viz. the matter of Intellect by which it\nreceives or holds all the forms). This immediately transforms the\nPlatonic concept of participating in form/s to the concept of\nparticipating in matter (the receiver) (or, we might say, participating\nin matter as the means to participating in forms). And so, whereas for\nPlato all things participate in the form of being, for Ibn Gabirol, all\nthings are grounded in / have as their underlying “true\nsubstrate” the substance of Intellect which is to say, they\nparticipate in matter (viz. the spiritual matter of pure intellect)\nplus forms."],"subsection_title":"5.1 Ibn Gabirol's Neoplatonic Hylomorphism 1: Plato's Participation Revised"},{"content":["\n\nIbn Gabirol's metaphysics are obviously influenced by\nAristotle's talk of substance and its 9 categories. And yet, it\nwould be a mistake to think of Ibn Gabirol as an Aristotelian in much\nof his use of the term “substance.”","\n\nTo confuse things, Ibn Gabirol does use the term substance in an at\nleast somewhat Aristotelian sense when he talks of corporeal substance—the \nsubstance which, a la Aristotle, receives the 9 categories.\nIbn Gabirol argues that this substance is first enformed by the form of\ncorporeity, or quantity (one approach among many ancient and medieval\ninterpretations of Aristotle, even if not actually\nAristotle's\n view).[31]\nMoving\nalready, though, from anything even loosely Aristotelian and\nmanifesting a more Platonic impulse, this substance is seen by Ibn\nGabirol as “lower substance” marking the lowest extremity\nof reality. Continuing on this Platonic move away from Aristotle, Ibn\nGabirol's main talk of “substance” refers, contra\nAristotle, to “simple substances,” by which he means the\nNeoplatonic Universal Intellect and Soul(s), each understood by Ibn\nGabirol as a joining of spiritual matter to spiritual form, and each\ndevoid of any of the 9 categories plaguing the “lower”\ncorporeal (i.e. Aristotelian) substance. These simple substances\n(exemplified in the simple substance of Intellect) are theorized as the\nintermediaries between God and lower substance.","\n\nWe may begin to understand this sense of substance by noting that\nwith other Platonists and Neoplatonists, and deviating from\nAristotelian sensibilities, Ibn Gabirol envisions a “higher\nrealm” as that which is most real. However, whereas standard\nPlatonisms identify forms as the truest realities within that realm,\nIbn Gabirol adopts a hylomorphic (but by no means\nAristotelian) sensibility in his conception of the higher\nrealities: unlike Aristotle for whom only items in the corporeal realm\nare form+matter composites, for Ibn Gabirol, the realities in the\n“higher realm” (a Platonic idea avoided by Aristotle) are\nalso comprised of form+matter. This move turns a number of standard\nAristotelian, Platonic and Neoplatonic sensibilities on their heads in\na Gabirolean metaphysics, including the notion of substance.","\n\nSpeaking of substance in the sense of “true substance”\nseparate from (and higher than) corporeal substance, Ibn Gabirol, in\nline with other Platonisms and contra Aristotle, is referring to a\n“higher realm.” However, unlike Plato, Ibn Gabirol focuses\n(with Neoplatonists) on the substances of Intellect and Soul(s)—which \nis to say, the reality of all forms “in” the simple\nspiritual substances (of Intellect and Soul), not on forms per se (see\nsection 5.1 above). In this sense, the spiritual simples are primarily\nnot the forms (as we might expect in Plato), but (in Neoplatonic\nspirit) the Universal Intellect and Soul. Relatedly, unlike other\nPlatonisms, Ibn Gabirol's higher realm is not theorized as a\nrealm of forms but as a realm of form and matter (again see section 5.1\non how the talk of Intellect leads us to the talk of forms\n“in” matter). This also means that with Aristotle, Ibn\nGabirol employs a lot more hylomorphic talk than Platonists (though\napplied to a completely non-Aristotelian “higher\nrealm”).","\n\nThis also means that contra the standard Neoplatonic (and Platonic)\nrhetorics of “matter as evil,” there emerges in Ibn Gabirol\na concurrent discourse of “matter as supreme”: for Ibn\nGabirol, both form and matter in the “higher realm” carry\nwith them all the positive associations which form carries in standard\nPlatonic pictures (including a trajectory of thought in Ibn Gabirol on\nwhich pure matter arguably emerges as more sublime than pure form)."],"subsection_title":"5.2 Ibn Gabirol's Neoplatonic Hylomorphism 2: Aristotelian Substance Revised"},{"content":["\n\nIn the context of this analysis, we might also say a word about the\ndoctrine of “the plurality of forms,” a doctrine associated\nwith the Fons Vitae by later Christian scholastics. Taken in\ncontrast to the Aristotelian doctrine that each existent has a single\nsubstantial form (ensuring its unity as a substance), “the\nplurality of forms” doctrine describes the Universal Hylomorphic\nsense in which each existent has a number of essential forms (and\nmatters). In our highly Neoplatonic Gabirolean context (but less so in\nRoger Bacon and other Christian Universal Hylomorphists), we can simply\ntake this doctrine as an extension of the standard Plotinian idea that,\nas part of the great chain of being, any given existent is saturated\nthrough with the reality of the hypostases Soul and Intellect: in this\nsense, each existent has a number of essences, corresponding to the\nvarious “layers” (for Ibn Gabirol,\n“form+matter” spiritual simples) in the great chain of\nbeing."],"subsection_title":"5.3 Ibn Gabirol's Neoplatonic Hylomorphism 3: Plurality of Forms"}]},{"main_content":["\n\nIbn Gabirol can be seen as offering us a revised version of the\nNeoplatonic great chain of being, adding an emphasis on Will, matter\nand form (and, in light of section 5, we might say a number of levels\nof matters and forms). With other Jewish Neoplatonists (see Isaac\nIsraeli for example), Ibn Gabirol also envisions not one but three\nWorld Souls, and a Universal Intellect which he describes in his\nKeter Malkhut [Kingdom's Crown] as “the\nSphere of Intellect” (in his Hebrew, galgal\nha-sâkhel), an odd and creative locution which blurs\nastronomical and metaphysical conceptions: generally the languages of\n“sphere” and “intellect” do not mix, the former\nreferring to the celestial realm, and the latter referring to\nsomething well beyond the celestial realm. To these Neoplatonic layers\nof Intellect and Souls, and following mostly in the spirit of astronomy\nof his day (with the exception, that is, of his positing Intellect as a\nso-called “10th sphere” in contrast to the more\naccepted Ptolemaic system of 9 spheres; see Tanenbaum 1996 and Loewe\n1979), Ibn Gabirol also envisions a hierarchy of star fields and\nplanetary orbs, a cosmic picture which he lays out in great detail in\nhis Keter Malkhut poem. Moving from God outward, we find the\nlayers as follows:","\n(God)\n10. “Sphere of Intellect” (galgal ha-sêkhel) (cantos 24–25)\n9. Encompassing Sphere (canto 23)\n8. Zodiac / Fixed Stars (cantos 21–22)\n7. Saturn (canto 20)\n6. Jupiter (canto 19)\n5. Mars (canto 18)\n4. Sun (cantos 15–17)\n3. Venus (canto 14)\n2. Mercury (canto 13)\n1. Moon (cantos 11–12)\n(Earth)\n","\n\nAbove even the “Sphere of Intellect” is the Divine\nThrone, which we know from the Fons Vitae refers to pure\nuniversal matter “between” God and Intellect (on matter as\nThrone, see Fons Vitae 5.42, p. 335, lines 23–4; for a great\ndiagram see Loewe 1989, p. 114).","\n\nIt should be noted that it is in reference to the above chart of the\ncelestial levels of stars and planets that we find in various medieval\nMuslim and Jewish thinkers—for example in al-Farabi and in\nMaimonides—a Neoplatonized Aristotelian focus on a hierarchy of\n“separate intellects,” the last of which (generally\nconstrued as the 10th intellect lowest down—with God\nconceived either as the first such Intellect or as an Intellect above\nthis enumeration altogether) being described as the “Active Intellect”\nwhich governs the sublunar realm, and is that to which human minds\n“conjoin” (through the process of\n ittisâl).[32]\nIt is important to\ndistinguish this system from the one at play in Ibn Gabirol: whereas\nal-Farabi, Maimonides, and others focus their attention on a Return to\n(or a “conjunction with”) the 10th lowest down\nof the separate intellects (the Active Intellect as the intellect\nassociated with our earthly realm below the moon), Ibn Gabirol's\nfocus is, as in Plotinus, on an Intellect at the very heights of the\ncelestial world, and just outside of God's own being: Whereas Ibn\nGabirol's “10th sphere” is a Sphere of Intellect just\noutside of God, Maimonides' “10th\nIntellect” corresponds to the sphere of Moon (just above Earth).\nThis point is often confused in secondary literature, and can lead to\nproblematic misunderstandings and misconstrued correlations between\nphilosophical systems.","\n\nReturning full circle to our start (see section 3), Ibn\nGabirol's emphasis even in his elaboration on a celestial\nhierarchy centers on the Neoplatonic concern with the cultivation of\nthe human soul—its Return to its highest fullness in Intellect:\nfrom a series of planets, we immediately move to Intellect\n(“galgal ha-sêkhel”), the ground and goal of\nthe virtuous human life.","\nStudent: What is the purpose of man?\n\nTeacher: The inclination of his soul to the higher world in order\nthat everyone might return to his like.\n\n(Fons Vitae 1.2, p. 4, lines 23–5)\n"],"section_title":"6. Cosmic Landscape, Soul Landscape: From Heavenly Circuits to Human Return","subsections":[]},{"main_content":["\n\nIn addition to his philosophical writing, Ibn Gabirol is\nauthor to an extensive corpus of Hebrew poems (generally categorized\ninto “religious” and “secular” poems) which it\nis beyond the scope of this entry to\n address.[33]","\n\nAside from Ibn Gabirol's technical prowess as a poet, it is\nworth noting that Ibn Gabirol's own self-conception as a poet (a\ntheme overtly and self-referentially explored in many of his poems)\nopens important philosophical questions about the nature of language,\nselfhood and divinity. In, for example, drawing parallels between\nGod's act of creation (by Word), and the poet's /\nphilosopher's own act of writing, Ibn Gabirol arguably invites us\nto reconceptualize human subjectivity, the sacred, and the relationship\nbetween philosophical theory-building and imagino-poetic play."],"section_title":"7. The Poet","subsections":[]}],"string":"[\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nJewish Neoplatonist Solomon ben Judah Ibn Gabirol (Shelomoh ben\\nYehudah Ibn Gabirol in Hebrew; Abu Ayyub Sulaiman ibn Yahya Ibn\\nJubayrol (or Ibn\\n Jabirul)[1]\\nin Arabic; Avicebron / Avicembron / Avicenbrol /\\nAvencebrol in Latin) was born in Málaga Spain in 1021/2 (Guttman\\noffers 1026) and died, most likely in Valencia, most likely in 1057/8\\n(Guttman offers 1050; Sirat offers 1054–8; Joseph Ibn Zaddik\\noffers\\n 1070).[2]\\nFrom his own\\nautobiographical remarks in his poems, it appears that this important\\npoet-philosopher was orphaned, infirm and unattractive (it seems he\\nsuffered a disfiguring skin\\n ailment).[3]\\nWhile there was a time during which he was\\ninvolved with a circle of Jewish intellectuals in Saragossa, and while\\nhe did enjoy the patronage of a respected (though, eventually murdered)\\nJewish patron for a short while, it is also clear that Ibn Gabirol had\\nan anti-social\\n disposition[4]\\nand a mostly strained relationship with the Jewish community. This\\nlatter point has perhaps been overemphasized to full blown misanthropy\\ndue to a translation error: in his sharp criticism of Ibn Gabirol's\\nphilosophy (as repetitive, wrong-headed and unconvincing), Ibn Daud\\nconcludes (in his ha-Emûnah ha-Ramah) that through his\\nphilosophy Ibn Gabirol “led the Jewish people into error,”\\nwhich through a mistranslation of the Arabic into Hebrew got wrongly\\nconveyed as the claim that he slandered the Jewish people\\n(dîber sarah gedôlah al ha-ûma) (see Pines\\n1977a; for brief discussion in English, see Sirat 1985, p. 81). That\\naside, a poem he wrote upon leaving Saragossa does lambast the\\ncommunity (“…giants they deem themselves, for me to rate\\nno more than grasshoppers…I am away, beneath my feet like mire\\nI stamp them hard…”) (for translation and references for\\nthis poem, see Loewe 1989, p. 21, and footnote 9, p. 170), and it does\\nseem that he had a hard time finding patrons and friends (legend tells\\nof his having created some sort of female automaton for house chores\\n[apparently this story circulated in the 17th century; see Ashkenazi\\n1629, part 1, 9; see Bargebuhr 1976, p. 62; Loewe 1989 fn. 9\\np. 170]—perhaps a legend built on his reputation as having had\\nfew companions). Perhaps we may root his generally surly disposition\\nin his rather hard life or, on the other hand, in his self-assured\\nsense of what was, to be sure, his own keen intellect and poetic\\ngenius. On this latter point, we might consider another Ibn Gabirol\\nlegend—a mythic tale of his death: killed by a jealous poet, Ibn\\nGabirol's remains are discovered when curious townsmen dig under a fig\\ntree to determine why its flowers, fruit, and fragrance exceed the\\nbeauty of anything they've ever experienced (see Loewe 1989, p. 23\\nwith reference details in footnote 14, p. 170).\",\n \"\\n\\nComplementing a vast corpus of Hebrew poetry (see section 7 below),\\nIbn Gabirol's most expansive work is his philosophical treatise,\\nthe Fons Vitae (The Fountain of Life, or\\nyanbû‘ al-hayâh in\\n Arabic,[5]\\nand the meqôr\\nhayyîm in its later Hebrew\\n translation).[6]\\nOriginally written in Arabic in\\nthe 11th century in the form of a dialogue between a teacher and his\\nstudent, the Fons Vitae was translated into Latin in the 12th\\ncentury by the translation team of Dominicus Gundissalinus and John of\\nSpain (Johannes\\n Hispanus),[7]\\nand made into an abridged Hebrew version (one\\nwhich loses the dialogue format and is something more of a summary of\\nthe original) by Shem Tov Ibn Falaquera in the 13th century. The\\noriginal Arabic text is lost to us, though we do have some extant\\nfragments in the form of citations of the original Arabic version in\\nthe Arabic language texts of other Jewish medieval\\n philosophers.[8]\\nBecause the Arabic\\nfragments are sparse, the main version of the text is the Latin 12th\\ncentury translation—it is considered more true to the original\\nthan the later 13th century Hebrew translation both because it is an\\nearlier translation, but also because unlike the Hebrew summary\\ntranslation, the Latin edition is (ostensibly) a complete translation,\\nmaintaining—as the Hebrew summary does not—the original\\ndialogue format of Ibn Gabirol's original text. That said, it is\\nworth noting that sometimes the 13th century Hebrew translation is more\\nhelpful than the Latin because it is able to resonate with various\\nHebrew terms at play in Ibn Gabirol's own vast corpus of Hebrew\\npoetry which is often helpful in shedding light on some given\\nphilosophical point in the Fons Vitae.\",\n \"\\n\\nIbn Gabirol also authored (in Arabic) On the Improvement of the\\nMoral Qualities (islâh al-’akhlâq in\\nthe Arabic, or tîkkûn mîdôt ha-nefesh,\\nthe Hebrew title of the translation by Judah Ibn Tibbon) a blend of\\nphysiological and philosophical insights on the nature of the human\\nsoul. We also have evidence in other medieval Jewish authors of what\\nmight be part of an allegorical commentary on the Bible by Ibn Gabirol\\n(as found in Abraham ibn Ezra's commentary on the Bible; see\\nFriedlaender 1877, p. 40; Kaufmann 1899, p. 63ff.; for English see\\nSirat 1985, p. 79), and it is debated whether he might also be the\\nauthor of Choice of Pearls (mukhtâr\\nal-jawâhir, lit. Choice (or: Selection) of Jewels;\\nor Mivhar ha-Penînîm, Choice of Pearls, in its\\nHebrew\\n translation),[9]\\na collection of maxims aimed at cultivating a\\nvirtuous soul. It might be further noted that there are medieval lists\\nby later thinkers enumerating a total 21 treatises by Ibn Gabirol (see\\nLoewe 1989, pp. 24–5) including an entire [non-extant] treatise on\\nDivine Will to which Ibn Gabirol himself alludes in his Fons\\nVitae. All this, of course, in addition to his having authored a\\nvast corpus of Hebrew poetry, including a number of lengthy\\nphilosophical poems (see section 7).\",\n \"\\n\\nAlthough we are not certain of what traditions most influenced his\\nwork, we might certainly see in the pages of his philosophy and poetry\\na unique blend of Jewish, Islamic, Neoplatonic, Pythagorean,\\nphilosophical, Biblical, and mystical (Jewish and Islamic) source\\nmaterials. We find overt use of Biblical quotes throughout his poetry,\\nthough (and this is something for which other Jewish thinkers\\ncriticized him) no overt references to the Bible or Jewish tradition in\\nhis Fons Vitae (though the title arguably references\\nPsalms 36:10). In his notion of a Divine Word (in the Fons\\nVitae), we might hear resonances of the Longer Theology of\\nAristotle; in his interest in a Divine Throne (in the Fons\\nVitae and in his Keter Malkhût [Kingdom's\\nCrown] poem), we might hear resonances of Muslim and Jewish\\n“Throne\\n theologies”;[10]\\nin his reference to God creating out of letters, we might hear resonances of the\\nSêfer Yezîrah (The Book of Formation,\\npossibly known to Ibn Gabirol through the commentary edition of Saadya\\nGaon; for discussion of Sêfer Yezîrah and Ibn\\nGabirol, see Schlanger 1965 and Liebes 1987); in his causal\\nmetaphysical hierarchy we might discern the influence of the Liber\\n de Causis;[11]\\nand in his emphasis on a principle called “al-‘unsur\\nal-awwal” in his Arabic writing (generally translated as\\nfirst matter) and called “yesôd”\\n(foundation) in his Hebrew poetry, we might hear resonances of a\\ntradition which scholars have dubbed “Pseudo Empedoclean”—an \\nimprecisely understood tradition of ideas found in an\\neclectic array of medieval Jewish and Islamic texts (where authors\\nsometimes refer overtly to Empedocles by name) in which there emerges a\\nnotable focus on a principle of pure supernal matter\\n(al-‘unsur al-awwal, literally “the first\\nelement”) at the core of being which is itself either coupled\\nwith a principle of first form or described as itself composite of the\\nduality of “love and strife.” The exact nature of this\\ntradition or traditions remains unclear, but can be found in\\nal-Shahrastani, al-Shahrazuri, Ps. Ammonius, and al-Amiri (for\\nreferences, see the entry on “anbaduklîs”—the \\nArabic transliteration of “Empedocles”—in \\nEncyclopedia of Islam), in some medieval Hebrew\\nKabbalistic\\n traditions,[12]\\nand has been linked to ideas in Ibn Masarra (see Asín-Palacios\\n1978), Isaac Israeli and Ibn Hasday (See Stern 1983a). Linking Ibn\\nGabirol to this tradition seems warranted not only in light of his own\\nemphasis on al-‘unsur al-awwal (followed in turn by an\\nunusual focus on the role of matter/s in the cosmos), but in light of\\na claim by his 13th century translator Shem Tov Ibn\\nFalaquera who in the introduction to his Hebrew edition\\nof Meqôr Hayyîm (Fons Vitae) writes that\\nIbn Gabirol seems to have been influenced by\\n“Empedocles' Book of the Five Substances”\\n(cf. Falaquera in Fons Vitae 1962, p. 435). Leaving aside what\\nthis might refer to (scholars debate both the title as well as what it\\nrefers to), it does seem that Ibn Falaquera was right to note some\\nlink between Ibn Gabirol's Fons Vitae and some set of ideas\\ncirculating under the name of\\n Empedocles.[13]\",\n \"\\n\\nWhile some later medieval Jewish thinkers—such as Shem Tov\\nIbn Falaquera, Moses Ibn Ezra, Abraham Ibn Daud, Joseph ibn Zaddik and\\nIsaac and Judah Abrabanel—were familiar with his philosophy,\\nIbn Gabirol is probably most well-known among medieval and modern\\nJewish authors for his Hebrew poetry, the best known of which being the\\nKeter Malkhût (variously translated as\\nKingdom's Crown, The Kingly Crown, The\\nRoyal Crown, et\\n al.),[14]\\na long devotional poem exploring the ineffable\\nsplendor of the divine and tracing God's presence throughout the\\nvarious cosmological spheres which make up the universe. In fact, this\\npoem is included in many Jewish prayer books for recitation on\\nYôm Kippûr (The Day of Atonement), the highest of\\nJewish holy days.\",\n \"\\n\\nThe Fons Vitae is arguably the most influential of his\\nworks, though mostly among medieval Christians. Available in Hebrew\\nsummary form by the 13th century, and quoted in Arabic in\\nMoses Ibn Ezra's\\n work,[15]\\nthe Fons Vitae left its strongest\\nimprint not on medieval Jews but on the medieval Christian world.\\nTranslated into Latin in the 12th century, and circulating\\nno longer under Ibn Gabirol's name per se, but now under the\\nLatinized version of his name (variously as Avicebron, Avicembron,\\nAvicenbrol and Avencebrol), the Fons Vitae was engaged\\n(variously criticized and hallowed) by centuries of medieval Christian\\nscholars, who either assumed the author to be a Muslim or a Christian,\\nnone suspecting the author to be the accomplished medieval Jewish poet,\\nSolomon Ibn Gabirol.\",\n \"\\n\\nFollowing the Christian reception of Ibn Gabirol's text\\nfurther, we might note that whole groups of medieval Christian\\nphilosophers assumed the text to have been written in particular by an\\nAugustinian Christian. Taken up by many Franciscan philosophers in just\\nthis way, Ibn Gabirol's Fons Vitae text became a\\ncornerstone in many theologically charged debates between Franciscans\\nand Dominicans, the Franciscans pointing to many of the Fons\\nVitae doctrines in support of what they took to be true, untainted\\nChristian ideas as laid out by Augustine—in contrast to the\\nmore heavily Aristotelianized ideas of Dominicans like St. Thomas\\nAquinas. It was not until the middle of the 19th century\\nthat the Fons Vitae began its return to its Jewish roots when\\nSolomon Munk uncovered the 13th century Hebrew summary by\\nShem Tov Ibn Falaquera in which the text is attributed to Solomon Ibn\\nGabirol. In this way, Munk recognized the Fons Vitae to have\\nin fact been penned by the 11th century Jewish poet.\",\n \"\\n\\nIt is worth noting that in spite of this discovery, many scholars\\ncontinue to tacitly read Ibn Gabirol's Fons Vitae\\nthrough Augustinian and other inappropriate lenses. (See section 2 on\\nmethodology below).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"1. Bio, Works, Sources and Influences\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nWhile there is no neutral lens through which to engage the history\\nof ideas, it is important to guard against three particularly\\ndistorting lenses in the study of Ibn Gabirol: Aristotelian,\\nAugustinian, and Kabbalistic.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"2. A Word on Method: Moving Beyond Aristotle, Augustine, and Kabbalah\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nOne of Ibn Gabirol's key interests in his Fons Vitae is a\\nstudy of matter and form (and in particular a doctrine which later\\nthinkers have called “Universal Hylomorphism”). While\\nthere is no question that Ibn Gabirol is in some sense influenced by\\nAristotelian concepts of form, matter, substance, categories, etc.,\\nthere is no reason to think that he is generally using those concepts\\nin anything even close to an Aristotelian way. As hopefully will\\nbecome clear in this study, the primary notions of matter and of\\nsubstance in Ibn Gabirol are deeply (and obviously)\\nnon-Aristotelian [see sections 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3], revealing instead deeply\\nPlatonic and Neoplatonic sensibilities, and—even more\\nuniquely—deeply “Empedoclean” influence. (In this\\nregard, Pessin 2009 (pp. 287–288) uses the novel term\\n“Grounding Element” to replace the Latin\\n“materia prima” and its English translation as\\n“prime matter” as a translation for Ibn Gabirol's Arabic\\n“al-‘unsur al-awwal”; see too Pessin\\n2004). It is critical to note that “prime matter” is a\\nmisleading term to use in a study of Ibn Gabirol as it at imports\\nundue Aristotelian resonances to—and masks Pseudo (henceforth,\\n“Ps.”) Empedoclean resonances at play in—Ibn\\nGabirol's Arabic terminology.\",\n \"\\n\\nNoting that Ibn Gabirol is not an Aristotelian goes a long way to\\ninvalidating the deepest grounds (as opposed to the details) of Thomas\\nAquinas' and other medieval thinkers' criticisms of Ibn\\nGabirol's metaphysics as essentially being some kind of\\nmisunderstanding of Aristotle. Since Ibn Gabirol is not trying—tacitly \\nor otherwise—to do what many scholastics are trying to\\ndo (viz. to “get Aristotle right”), it is methodologically\\nstrained to critique Ibn Gabirol from an Aristotelian vantage point. An\\nAristotelian lens does not open us to understanding the metaphysical\\npicture that Ibn Gabirol is trying to paint for us.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.1 Aristotelian Lenses in the Study of Ibn Gabirol\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nAnother of Ibn Gabirol's key interests in the Fons\\nVitae is the Divine Will. This focus in part explains why many\\nChristian Franciscans thought the Fons Vitae to have been\\nauthored not only by a Christian but by what they would have seen as a\\nright-minded Augustinian Christian. While we have known since the\\n19th century that the Fons Vitae was in fact\\nauthored by a Jewish poet, this has arguably not altered much of the\\nAugustinian-lensed scholarship on the Fons Vitae. Some\\nscholars, for example, have concluded simply on the basis of the idea\\nof a Divine Will in Ibn Gabirol that he (like Augustine) must mean by\\nthis some divine power at odds with emanation. While the details of Ibn\\nGabirol's cosmogony are complex, and while it is indeed possible\\nthat his notion of Will rules out emanation, another equally strong\\noption is that he uses the term “Divine Will” in a way that\\n(contra Augustine) is deeply compatible with Plotinian emanation. My\\npoint here is simply to caution the reader: just because something\\nsounds Augustinian does not mean that it is, and if it is not, we need\\nto keep all our conceptual options open. Certainly “will”\\nis consistent with emanation in the pages of Plotinus; we should not\\nstart out—tacitly wearing Augustinian lenses—with any\\nassumptions to the contrary in the Fons\\n Vitae.[16]\\n(In this regard, Pessin 2009, p. 286 with note 54, \\nuses the term “Divine Desire” to replace the\\nLatin “voluntas” and the English\\n“Will” as a translation of Ibn Gabirol's Arabic\\n“al-irâda”).\",\n \"\\n\\nFor our current purposes, we must at least bear in mind that since\\nIbn Gabirol is not a Christian Augustinian, it is methodologically\\nstrained to read Ibn Gabirol from an Augustinian vantage point. An\\nAugustinian lens does not open us to understanding the metaphysical\\npicture that Ibn Gabirol is trying to paint for us.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.2 Augustinian Lenses in the Study of Ibn Gabirol\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nIn his elaboration on the metaphysics of matter, Ibn Gabirol\\nfrequently uses the Arabic term “al-‘unsur”\\n(instead of the more common Arabic terms\\n“al-hayûlâ” and\\n“al-madda”) for matter. In fact, as outlined in\\nsection 1, this is one of the key pieces of evidence for identifying a\\nuniquely “Empedoclean” strain in his thinking. That said,\\nmany readers instead simplistically fall into a Kabbalistic reading of\\nIbn Gabirol since the Arabic “al-‘unsur” is\\ncorrelated to the Hebrew term “yesôd” both\\nin Ibn Gabirol's own Hebrew poetry as well as in\\nFalaquera's 13th century Hebrew translation of the\\nFons Vitae. While to be sure, the Hebrew term\\n“yesôd” (literally “foundation”)\\nis a cornerstone term and concept in Jewish mysticism, the desire to\\nread Ibn Gabirol Kabbalistically (as a proto-Zoharian) is simply\\nunder-supported by the mere fact that he (and his Hebrew translator)\\nuse the term “yesôd”. While there might be\\nKabbalistic traces in Ibn Gabirol, it is methodologically inadvisable—and \\ndistorting—to simply start out assuming there are.\\nWe might note, for example, F. E. Peters' boldly claiming—with\\nno stated evidence—in his “Avicebron” entry in\\nthe New Catholic Encyclopedia: “The true philosophical home of\\nAvicebron is in the Zohar and in the speculative sections of the\\nCabala” (see Peters 1967, volume 1, p. 1130). Such a claim is not\\nprima facie evident. In an obviously more methodologically careful\\nspirit, there are scholars of Jewish mysticism who recommend\\nconnections to Ibn Gabirol (usually with reference to Ibn\\nGabirol's poems, not his Fons Vitae) (see, for example,\\nIdel, who offers the suggestion of mystical overtones in an Ibn Gabirol\\npoetic reference to “ten sefirôt” (Idel\\n1982, p. 278); see too: Idel 1992; Liebes 1987; Heller-Wilensky 1967).\\nWhile we needn't dismiss the idea of links between Ibn Gabirol\\nand Jewish mysticism (he was most likely familiar with the\\nSêfer Yetzîrah tradition, and possibly other\\ntraditions, of sefîrôt), we must be\\nmethodologically cautious to not over-Kabbalize Ibn Gabirol (and\\nespecially his Fons Vitae): use of terms like\\n“sefîrôt,”\\n“yesôd,” et al. do not necessarily reveal\\nJewish mystical overtones or influence. Scholem reminds us (in his\\nstudy of Ibn Gabirol's influence on Kabbalah) that even after\\nmany studies of the link between Ibn Gabirol and the Kabbalah, we have\\nno clear conclusions (Scholem 1939, p. 160). (Avoiding reading Ibn\\nGabirol as a proto-Zoharist is not to deny any impact of Ibn Gabirol on\\nlater Kabbalists; but even this question of forward-influence must be\\ntreated with care; as Scholem also notes, the mere use of the term\\n“Divine Will” in Kabbalistic thinkers after Ibn\\nGabirol does not necessarily reveal a Gabirolean influence (Scholem\\n1939, p. 161)).\",\n \"\\n\\nSince we have strong reason to claim that Ibn Gabirol's use of\\nthe term “yesôd” reflects a Ps. Empedoclean\\ntradition, it is methodologically strained to read Ibn Gabirol from a\\nKabbalistic vantage point. A Kabbalistic lens does not open us to\\nunderstanding the metaphysical picture that Ibn Gabirol is trying to\\npaint for us.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"2.3 Kabbalistic Lenses in the Study of Ibn Gabirol\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nLike any engaged Neoplatonist, Ibn Gabirol is first and foremost\\ninterested in understanding the nature and purpose of human being: we\\nmust understand what we are (our nature) so that we know how to live\\n(our purpose). This set of interconnected human questions is what Ibn\\nGabirol is interested in even in the midst of what might sometimes seem\\nto be rather laborious cosmological and metaphysical explorations. Ibn\\nGabirol, like other Neoplatonists, explores layers of cosmological and\\nmetaphysical realities in an attempt to understand how to live the best\\nhuman life possible.\",\n \"\\n\\nEmphasizing that this is Ibn Gabirol's main concern, we find\\nin the opening pages of his Fons Vitae text a reminder that\\nthe goal of the entire inquiry is to understand why human beings were\\nmade (“Quare factus est homo?,” “Why was man\\nmade?”—Fons Vitae 1.1, p. 2, line 8)—which \\nis to say, to understand the ends (or purpose) of human being\\n(the Fons Vitae teaches that a human ought to “pursue\\nknowledge of his final cause [or: purpose] according to which he was\\ncomposed,” Fons Vitae 1.2, p. 4, lines 8–9). In spelling\\nout the true, divinely ordained goal of human life (the purpose of the\\nhuman life is described as a product of God's Will\\nat Fons Vitae 1.2, p. 4, lines 10–12), the text describes a\\ntwofold endeavor: the pursuit of knowledge and the doing of good deeds\\n(Fons Vitae 1.2, p. 4, line 27).\",\n \"\\n\\nWhile the remaining hundreds of pages of the Fons Vitae go\\non to offer highly obscure elaborations on matter and form, the overall\\npoint of the entire study (and one might argue, of Ibn Gabirol's\\nentire oeuvre of poetry as well) is not obscure at all: his\\ngoal is to understand the nature of being and human being so that he\\nmight better understand and better inspire the pursuit of knowledge and\\nthe doing of good deeds:\",\n \"\\n\\nKnowledge indeed leads to deeds, and deeds separate the soul from\\nthe contraries which harm it…In every way, knowledge and deeds\\nliberate the soul from the captivity of nature and purge it of its\\ndarkness and obscurity, and in this way the soul returns to its higher\\nworld. (Fons Vitae 1.2, p. 5, line 27–p. 6, line 4)\",\n \"\\n\\n“And in this way, the soul returns to its higher world.”\\nThe ends of humanity (reached through the pursuit of truth and\\ngoodness) are imagined by Ibn Gabirol—as we find is the case\\namong Neoplatonists more generally—through the evocative image\\nof a “return” coupled with the image of a “higher\\nworld”:\",\n \"\\nStudent: What is the purpose of man?\\n\\nTeacher: The inclination [applicatio] of his soul to the\\nhigher world in order that everyone might return to his like.\\n\\n(Fons Vitae 1.2, p. 4, lines 23–25)\\n\",\n \"\\n\\nThe joint imagery of a “return” and a “higher\\nworld” are themselves part of a conceptual framework in which all\\nof existence is seen to follow a principle of similitude whereby lesser\\nbeings mirror higher beings. This idea, often expressed as the idea\\nthat “the microcosm mirrors the macrocosm”—a common\\nPlatonic, Pythagorean, and Neoplatonic trope—has a strongly\\nprescriptive overtone: it's not simply that lesser things mirror\\ngreater things, but that in this mirroring, we find the purpose of the\\nlesser things, viz. to be just like the greater things. Depending on\\nthe context, the “lesser things” and “greater\\nthings” might vary, but the most popular version of this\\n“microcosm mirrors the macrocosm” idea, and the one at play\\nin the above Ibn Gabirol passage, envisions the human being (sometimes\\nhuman soul, sometimes human intellect) as the “lesser\\nthing” and the wisely ordered cosmos (and sometimes, relatedly,\\nthe mind of God or, alternatively, the cosmic Intellect) as the\\n“greater thing.” In this descriptive idea that humans\\nmirror something greater there emerges the strongly prescriptive\\nreminder that we ought to emulate that which is better than ourselves\\n(viz. through the pursuit of knowledge and good deeds). This\\nprescriptive call to human perfection through truth and goodness is the\\nessence of the idea of Neoplatonic Return, and it is this idea which\\nlies at the core of Ibn Gabirol's claim that we ought purge our\\nsouls of darkness and “return to our like[ness]”.\",\n \"\\n\\nIn one especially important Fons Vitae passage, we find a\\ndescription of this Neoplatonic return which very much reflects\\nPlotinus' own famous ascent passage (at Enneads 4.8.1),\\na passage reproduced (with important changes) in what misleadingly\\nbecame known as the Theology of Aristotle, an Arabic\\ncompilation-edition of books 4–6 of Plotinus'\\n Enneads.[17]\\nHere is the final part of Ibn Gabirol's version:\",\n \"\\n\\n…But if you should lift yourself to the first universal\\nmatter and [are] illumined by its shadow, you will then see the most\\nwondrous of wonders. Devote yourself to this and be filled with love\\nfor it, since here lies the meaning for which the human soul exists,\\nand here lies too amazing delight and utmost happiness (Fons\\nVitae 3.56; my translation from the Arabic and Latin; for Wedeck\\ntranslation, see his Fountain of Life (Ibn Gabirol 1962/2008),\\npp. 110–111)\",\n \"\\n\\nIn addition to many other changes from Plotinus and the Theology\\nof Aristotle, one special point of difference is the reference\\nhere to universal matter (see section 5). It is precisely Ibn\\nGabirol's unique focus on “universal matter” (a grade\\nof spiritual materiality at the very core of existence) which leads him\\nto uniquely envision the ultimate moment of Neoplatonic return as a\\nmoment of “illuminated shadow”: since there is a material\\nelement just “above” Intellect for Ibn Gabirol, the return\\nto Intellect will be characterized by the light of Wisdom set within\\nthe shade of the supernal first matter.\",\n \"\\n\\nIn the closing sentences of the Fons Vitae, Ibn Gabirol\\nfurther describes this state of “return” as a liberation\\nfrom death and a cleaving to the source of life (“Evasio\\nmortis et applicatio ad originem vitae,” Fons Vitae\\n5.43, p. 338, line 21). Following on general Neoplatonic intuitions,\\nthis means that when one has attained the heights of truth and\\ngoodness, one will have reverted to one's truest life, a pure\\nstate of soul which transcends mortal life—we might describe it\\nas a kind of immortality while in the mortal body. This directly\\nresonates with what A.H. Armstrong, in his study of Plotinus, has\\ndescribed as the Neoplatonic doctrine of “Double Selfhood,”\\na sensitivity to the human condition being at one and the same time (1)\\nalready fully imbued with the fullest state of intellect, but somewhat\\nparadoxically also (2) fallen from—and needing to return to—the \\nfullest state of intellect.\",\n \"\\n\\nWhile Ibn Gabirol's quest towards the Neoplatonic Return\\ncenters, as we have seen, on the pursuit of truth and goodness, it also\\nincludes an attempt to know the unknowable God. In laying out the kinds\\nof truth that the human soul must aim to acquire, the Fons\\nVitae speaks of “the knowledge of all things according to\\nwhat they are” (Fons Vitae 1.4, p. 6, lines 13–14), and\\nmost of all of the knowledge of the First Essence [Latin, essentia\\nprima, Arabic, adh-dhât\\nal-’ûlâ, as evidenced in some\\nof the extant Arabic fragments of the Fons Vitae; see Pines\\n1958/77 and Fenton 1976] that sustains and moves all things. While we\\nare asked to know God—understood by Ibn Gabirol in tripart\\nterms as a hidden First Essence and as an active, manifesting Will and\\nWisdom—we are cautioned a few lines later that it is impossible\\nto truly know the First Essence, and that we can only aspire to know\\nthe things which He makes and sustains (Fons Vitae 1.4, p. 6,\\nlines 19–22). As it relates to Ibn Gabirol's more general\\ncharacterization of God in the Fons Vitae in tripart terms as\\nan essential hidden reality and an active manifesting Will and Wisdom,\\nwe might say that for Ibn Gabirol, we can only know God through the\\nmanifestation of his Will and Wisdom in the ordered structure of\\nexistents in the universe (i.e. through the things which He makes and\\nsustains, and in particular, through the wisdom revealed by them).\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"3. Knowledge and Deeds: the Purpose of Human Being\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nIbn Gabirol describes God's creative act in many ways across\\nhis philosophical and poetic writings. While it is certainly possible\\nto find a single overall theological picture emerging from across Ibn\\nGabirol's work, it is at least worth noting a degree of tension\\nbetween a range of different and sometimes seemingly conflicting ideas.\\nIn what follows, we will look at the complex play of creation,\\nemanation, Will, Wisdom, Word, and desire in Ibn Gabirol's\\ncosmo-ontology.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"4. The Divine Creative Act\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nTo begin with, Ibn Gabirol's God is described as a Creator God\\nwho is an absolute simple unity—so simple as to exceed the\\ngrasp of the human mind and tongue. This apophatic theme (a theme which\\nin any philosopher highlights the absolute unity of God) can be seen\\nfor example, in the very first canto of his Keter\\nMalkhût [Kingdom's Crown] depiction of God:\\n“Yours is the name hidden from the wise…” God, for\\nIbn Gabirol, is, in proper Neoplatonic fashion, an absolute unity. That\\nsaid, God is nonetheless described in the Fons Vitae by Ibn\\nGabirol in dual—and in some sense, tripart—terms:\\nGod's unity consists on the one hand in a purely hidden Essence\\nand on the other hand in the manifesting activity of a Divine Will. We\\nalso learn (thirdly) of God's Wisdom (and in related fashion, of\\nthe Divine Word). Emphasizing more of a dual—and less of a\\ntripart—vision of this absolutely simple Creator, Ibn Gabirol\\nsometimes directly identifies the Divine Will with the divine Wisdom\\n(though that does not always seem clear throughout Ibn Gabirol's\\nwritings).\",\n \"\\n\\nWhile God's creative act is described by Ibn Gabirol as a\\ncreation ex nihilo (see Fons Vitae 3.3, p. 79, line\\n18; FV 3.25, p. 139, lines 24–25) a view normally seen in opposition to\\ndoctrines of emanation, he also uses common emanation metaphors—the \\nflow of light and the flow of water—to describe the origins\\nof the cosmos. For example, drawing on the Psalms 36:10 image\\nof a “fountain of life,” in the very title of his Fons\\nVitae\\n text[18]\\nIbn Gabirol seems to at least beckon to Greek and Muslim Neoplatonic\\nvisions of an emanating\\n God.[19]\\nSimilarly stressing an emanating cosmos (though\\nnot necessarily the idea of an emanating God per se), Ibn Gabirol—in \\nwhat appears to be part of a commentary on Genesis—likens \\nthe material core of being (to which we will return in\\nsection 5) to a river. Allegorically rendering the Garden of Eden\\nwaters to the pure matter which sits at the root of the unfolding\\ncosmos, Ibn Gabirol envisions the pulse of existence as a River of Life—a \\nvibrant outpouring which links all of existence to a single\\noverflowing source (see Sirat 1985, p. 79). Of course, this particular\\nimage does not necessarily suggest that God Himself emanates (i.e. the\\nidea that existence emanates forth from matter is still consistent with\\nGod creating that matter ex nihilo, and not via\\nemanation).\",\n \"\\n\\nAttempting to put all the pieces of Ibn Gabirol's complex\\ncosmogony together, we can find pieces of creation ex nihilo,\\nemanation, and creation ex aliquo; God's formative act\\nbegins with creating matter and form (possibly a creation ex\\nnihilo, but described fluidly enough as to leave open other\\ninterpretations), and He then draws out, in an emanating flow, the\\nremainder of existence from these dual starting points (emanation, but\\nalso creation ex aliquo in the sense that all of existence is\\nbeing formed through the mediation of matter, as opposed to each\\nexistent being created directly—in the sense of\\n‘unmediated’—by God as in other versions of\\ncreation ex nihilo\\n accounts).[20]\\nIn the end, Ibn Gabirol's conceptual play—with \\nnotions of creation and emanation side by side—ought \\nleave us open to various interpretations of how precisely to\\nunderstand his cosmogony.\",\n \"\\n\\nIn his Keter Malkhût poem (Kingdom's\\nCrown), Ibn Gabirol further describes God's creative act as\\na splitting open of nothingness: “…ve-qara el\\nha-’ayîn ve-nivqa…,” (“…and\\nHe called out to the nothing and it split open…”; in\\nGabirol's poem, Keter Malkhût, canto 9; See\\nSchirmann 1967, p. 262, line 82; for a treatment of this line, see\\nPines 1980). Here, the void of precreation—the pre-existent\\n’ayîn, or “nothingness”—is\\nsplit open by God's own voice in the moment of creation—a\\nmoment arguably described by Ibn Gabirol in his poem\\nahavtîkha (“I Love You”) as the material\\n“proto-existence” (kemô-yêsh) awaiting\\nits fulfillment through\\n form,[21]\\nand described in the Fons Vitae as a\\ncomplex unfolding of and downward manifesting of a first pure matter\\nthrough the introduction of (or unfolding of) forms by the Divine Will.\\nThe material nothing—in all three images—is the ground\\nof existence, as it is at once the site of desire, a yearning to be\\nen-formed, which is to say, to become more and more manifest. We will\\nsay more about this emphasis on desire below (see section 4.3).\",\n \"\\n\\nCentral to Ibn Gabirol's cosmogony is also the notion of the\\nDivine Will, an emphasis for which the Fons Vitae is\\nhighlighted in the history of ideas.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.1 Creation ex nihilo and the Fountain of Life\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nEarly on in the Fons Vitae, we learn that the Divine Will\\nis one of three central concepts that the human mind must set out to\\ngrasp (the workings of matter and form, and the reality of a divine\\nEssence as primal cause are the other two central concepts). We also\\nlearn of Will that it is some sort of cosmic “intermediary\\nbetween the extremes,” a role described as central to the basic\\nunderpinning of the universe (Fons Vitae 1.7, p. 9, lines\\n28–30; see too Fons Vitae 5.36, p 322, line 20–p. 323, line 1\\nfor another statement of the three divisions of knowledge; in this\\nlatter context, Will is identified with Word). We learn that Will is\\nthe power of God infused in and penetrating through all things, that it\\nis the power of unity in the universe, and that it is that which both\\nbrings forth and moves all of existence. It is also described as the\\ndivine force that maintains and sustains the essence of all things (see\\nFons Vitae 5.39, p. 327, lines 14–15: Will is the power\\n[virtus] of God infused in and penetrating all things; 5.39,\\np. 327, lines 26–27: Will is the power [virtus] of unity; 1.2, p. 4,\\nlines 14–15: Will is the divine power [virtus] bringing forth\\nand moving all things; 1.5, p. 7, line 15: Will maintains and sustains\\nthe essence of all things).\",\n \"\\n\\nTurning further to Will's mediating cosmic role, while the\\nLatin text translates “intermediary between the extremes,”\\nthe Arabic text uses a dual grammatical form, translating more\\nspecifically as “intermediary between the two extremes.” In\\nthe context of this claim, the “intermediation” role\\nbetween the “two extremes” is ambiguous between two\\ndifferent claims which are both equally true within the context of Ibn\\nGabirol's worldview: on the one hand, Ibn Gabirol might mean that\\nWill intermediates between (1) matter and form on the one hand and (2)\\ndivine Essence on the other (the items corresponding to two of the\\nthree “divisions of knowledge” which he describes [see\\nsection 5]); on the other hand, Ibn Gabirol might mean that Will\\nintermediates between (1) matter and (2) form, the two cosmic\\n“building blocks” out of which all reality is\\ncomprised.\",\n \"\\n\\nWill is further described as taking its own root in God's\\nEssence, and is sometimes (but not always) described as the immediate\\ncreative source of (and not just intermediary between) matter\\nand\\n form.[22]\\nComplicating this picture of Will's creation of matter and form,\\nwe also learn on the contrary that Will is the direct source only of\\nform (and not\\n matter)[23]—a \\npoint supported further by the claim\\nthat Will is (1) identical to Wisdom (and the source of form; see\\nFons Vitae 5.42, p. 335, lines 4–5), and (2) that Wisdom is\\nthe source only of form (and not matter), with the divine Essence\\nitself being the direct source of matter: “…materia\\nest creata ab essentia, et forma est a proprietate essentiae, id est\\nsapientia et unitate…” (“…matter is\\ncreated from Essence, and form is from the property of Essence, viz.,\\nfrom Wisdom and Unity…”; Fons Vitae 5.42, p.333,\\nlines 4–5; see too 5.42, p. 335, lines 4–5).\",\n \"\\n\\nLeaving the complexities of these competing claims aside in the\\ncontext of this study, it is sufficient here to emphasize that Ibn\\nGabirol's theology includes a Divine Will not only responsible\\nfor the generation of one or both of matter and form, but responsible\\nin some way for the “connection between matter and form” in\\nall things, and, as such, responsible for sustaining all existing\\nthings (all of which are, for Ibn Gabirol, form and matter composites;\\nsee section 5). By sustaining the matter and form composition of all\\nthings, Divine Will signifies the permeation of God's creative\\nforce at the core of Being itself, and as such at the core of every\\nindividual being.\",\n \"\\n\\nIn addition to identifying Will with Wisdom, Ibn Gabirol also\\nidentifies Will with Word (Fons Vitae 5.36, p. 323, line 17).\\nFollowing on this identification, in a rather evocative set of\\npassages, Ibn Gabirol likens the act of creation to God's\\nutterance of word (Fons Vitae 5.43). While this theme is\\ncertainly not new within the history of Neoplatonic and Jewish ideas\\n(suggesting resonance with the Longer Theology of\\nAristotle's reference to the Word [Ar. kalima], as\\nwell as resonance with Sêfer Yezîrah's\\nemphasis on God's creation via Hebrew\\n letters[24]),\\nwhat is new is Ibn\\nGabirol's unique way of fleshing that idea out in light of his\\noverall metaphysics: Creation, writes Ibn Gabirol, is like a word that\\nGod utters, and that word is itself the coming together of voice (the\\nuniversal matter), the audible sounds that make up a given word\\n(manifest forms), and the actual meaning of the word (the hidden\\nuniversal form which contains and sustains all manifest forms). For Ibn\\nGabirol, this analogy helps highlight his view of the unfolding divine\\nWisdom / Will giving way to a cosmos which is a complex blend of\\nmatters and forms, with a principle of pure universal matter and pure\\nuniversal form at the very root of all existence.\",\n \"\\n\\nHere, we may speak of a revised Neoplatonic cosmos in which\\nprinciples of form, matter and Will (if we are to think of that as\\nsomething separate from God's Essence) emerge\\n“between” God and the principle of Intellect (the principle\\nwhich follows directly upon God in standard chartings of the\\nNeoplatonic cosmos):\",\n \"\\n\\nIn Ibn Gabirol's cosmology, Intellect is highlighted as the\\n first created being, as the Divine Glory\\n (Kavod),[25]\\nand as the first\\noccurrence of “form in matter” composition (see Fons\\nVitae 5.10, p. 274, line 19; 5.11, p. 277, line 4; for the related\\nidea that God creates esse in a composite way out of matter\\nand form, cf. Fons Vitae 5.40, p. 329, line 4). At times, Ibn\\nGabirol emphasizes that this matter is pre-existent (that it does not\\nhave existence on its own without form), and at times, he can be taken,\\non the contrary, as emphasizing the “per se\\nexistens” nature of matter (as for example in his very\\ndefinition of matter at Fons Vitae 1.10, p. 13, lines 15–17\\nand 5.22, p. 298, lines 13–7). While the precise meaning of Ibn\\nGabirol's idea is open for interpretation, Schlanger suggests\\nthat matter per se exists for Ibn Gabirol only as an idea in\\nthe mind of God, and not as an actual reality prior to Intellect (see\\nSchlanger 1968, p. 294). In this vein, we may note Ibn Gairol's\\nclaim that the existence (esse) of matter is in the wisdom of\\nGod (Fons Vitae 5.10, p. 275).\",\n \"\\n\\nReflecting on Ibn Gabirol's idea of some kind of “form\\nand matter before Intellect” (either in an actual or in some\\nconceptual sense), it is worth considering to what extent this suggests\\n(as the above two discrete charts seem to suggest) a genuine departure\\nfrom Plotinian Neoplatonism. On the face of it, Plotinus does not\\nemphasize a principle of matter and form prior to Intellect. As such,\\nwe may say that Ibn Gabirol's emphasis introduces a Ps.\\nEmpedoclean change (either an actual ontological change or a\\nconceptual “shift in focus”) into the standard Plotinian\\npicture. That said, Plotinus certainly is sensitive to the duality of\\nthe unity of Intellect (as compared with the unity of the One), and\\neven occasionally overtly emphasizes the notion of Intellect's\\ncomposition out of “intelligible matter” (See\\nEnneads 2.4.1–5, 5.4.2 and 5.5.4; on the conceptual resonance\\nof “intelligible matter” in Plotinus and Ibn Gabirol, see\\nDillon 1992). While these sections of the Enneads in which\\nPlotinus overtly emphasizes this theme are not part of the Arabic\\nPlotinus materials which we would presume Ibn Gabirol to have had\\naccess, it is worth noting that Ibn Gabirol's emphasis on\\n“form and matter prior to intellect” does not necessarily\\nrepresent any conceptual departure from Plotinus (or, we might add,\\nfrom Platonic and Pythagorean sensitivities to the principle of an\\nindefinite dyad at the core of reality). Clearly Plotinus is sensitive\\nto the “duality” of any grade of reality outside of the\\nOne: while Intellect is for Plotinus a unity, it is clearly a\\n“dual” (or even plural) sort of unity as compared with the\\nutter unity of the One. In this sense, Plotinus is deeply sensitive to\\nthe “duality” outside of God (and, as such, the duality of\\nIntellect), even in passages where he is not overtly referencing the\\ncomposition of Intellect/Being out of intelligible matter (which is to\\nsay, even in passages where he is not emphasizing the dual nature of\\nIntellect). In this sense, it is arguably conceptually appropriate to\\nalign even Ibn Gabirol's most emphatic sense of the dual\\n“matter-with-form” composition of Intellect (or, relatedly,\\nhis emphasis on a grade of matter “prior to” Intellect)\\nwith even Plotinus' staunchest insistence on the unity of\\nIntellect (as for Plotinus, the unity of Intellect, as compared with\\nthe unity of the One, is dual by nature).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.2 Will, Wisdom, Word, Intellect and the Cosmos\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nReturning to our earlier discussion, Ibn Gabirol describes pure\\nmatter as stemming directly from the Divine Essence itself, with form,\\non the contrary, arising somewhat secondarily\\nfrom the Divine Will. While this is not to suggest that God is Himself\\nmade up of matter (as concluded by some fans of Ibn Gabirol such as\\nDavid of Dinant in the history of Christian philosophy who ran into\\ntrouble with the Church for theorizing God as matter), there is\\narguably in Ibn Gabirol an intimate link between God and matter. Such a\\nlink between materiality and God is not much of a conceptual stretch\\n(though in standard Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Aristotelian contexts we\\nwould tend to link God with form): both matter and God are utterly\\nhidden and utterly grounding for all else, while form (and the\\nWill/Wisdom with which it is associated) mark the lesser\\n“active” or “manifesting” mode of divinity and\\nof the cosmos. While of course for Ibn Gabirol God is an utter unity,\\nwe may nonetheless theorize with Ibn Gabirol as follows: As God's\\nessential hiddenness moves forward into action (Wisdom/Will/Word), so\\ntoo pure material pre-existence moves forward into manifest being (i.e.\\nbecomes more and more en-formed). Here, in an important sense, the\\nimages of “darkness and the hidden” trump the images of\\n“light and the manifest” both as they relate to God and to\\nthe cosmos: as God's hidden Essence precedes and grounds his\\nacts, so too matter precedes and grounds enformed being (and as such,\\nall existents). Here, God and matter—in their dark / hidden\\nrespects—have something very important in common. (See Pessin\\n2009, p. 290, for chart mapping the superiority in this regard of the\\nmaterial over the formal).\",\n \"\\n\\nIt ought be noted that herein lies a paradox found in one form or\\nanother in all versions of Neoplatonism: on the one hand, there is a\\nsense that moving forward (or downward) in the great chain of being is\\na tragic fall away from the purity of divine unity; on the other hand,\\nthere is a sense (not, for example, found in Gnostic materials) that\\nthere is beauty and light in the creation, which is to say that in the\\ncontinual downward manifesting of being we find the trace of Divine\\nWill. In the context of Ibn Gabirol's conceptual space in which\\n(as we will see in more detail in section 5) reality is seen as the\\nprocess of moving from a more hidden / material to a more manifest /\\nformal reality, the result is at once (1) a sense of loss in the move\\naway from God's own hiddenness (with a sense that darkness is\\nsublime) and (2) a sense of beauty and increasing grace as more and\\nmore forms continue to manifest (“joining” to matter\\nthrough the intermediation of the Divine Will), resulting ultimately in\\nthe fullness of the cosmos (with a sense that light is sublime). These\\ndueling images of the sublimity of unity (or pre-creation) on the one\\nhand and manifestness (or creation) on the other (here in terms of the\\nsublimity of darkness on the one hand and light on the other) offer an\\ninsight into what we may call a Neoplatonic “theology of\\nparadox” which is very much at play in Ibn Gabirol.\",\n \"\\n\\nIn his conception of God's relation to matter in the act of\\ncreation, we must also emphasize Ibn Gabirol's focus on desire.\\nProviding a bit more context to (and a different translation of) Ibn\\nGabirol's Keter Malkhût [Kingdom's\\nCrown] rehearsing of God's “splitting of the\\nnothing” (see section 4.1), consider:\",\n \"\\n\\nYou are wise, and your wisdom gave rise to an endless desire in the\\nworld as within an artist or worker—to bring out the stream of\\nexistence from Nothing…He called to Nothing—which split;\\nto existence—pitched like a tent…With desire's span\\nhe established the heavens… (Canto 9 of the Keter\\nMalkhût; translation from Cole 2001, p. 149)\",\n \"\\n\\nIn these poetic lines, as elsewhere throughout his writing, Ibn\\nGabirol emphasizes the central motion of desire at the core of the\\nuniverse. This can be seen throughout the Fons Vitae\\nin the dual reminders that (1) all things have matter at their core,\\nand (2) matter's own reality consists essentially in desire (viz.\\na desiring-after-form). These two simple ideas lead to a much more\\narresting insight, viz. inasmuch as all things are grounded in matter,\\nand inasmuch as matter is a marker of desire, it follows that all\\nreality is grounded in desire. Desire—in the guise of matter—is \\nin this sense a central principle of Ibn\\nGabirol's\\n universe.[26]\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"4.3 God, Matter and the Omnipresence of Desire\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nIn his vision of the world, Ibn Gabirol's focus is on God,\\nDivine Will, and the duality of form and matter. From an early section\\nin his Fons Vitae, we learn:\",\n \"\\n\\nIn the whole of existence, there are three divisions of knowledge:\\n(1) the knowledge of matter (al-‘unsur) and form\\n(as-sûra), (2) the knowledge of Will\\n(al-irâda), and (3) the knowledge of the First Essence.\\nAmong substances, there is nothing other than these three. First\\nEssence is cause; matter and form, effect; and Will is the intermediary\\nbetween the two extremes (Fons Vitae 1.7; for Arabic, see\\nPines 1958/77, p. 71; for slightly different translation with reference\\nto “The All of Existence,” see Pessin 2009, p. 286 and note\\n53 in that study)\",\n \"\\n\\nMatter and form—referred to in his Hebrew poetry under the\\nalluring Hebrew labels of “yesôd”\\n(foundation) and “sôd” (secret)—are,\\nalong with the doctrine of Divine Will, cornerstones of the Fons\\nVitae. In particular, the Fons Vitae teaches (rather\\nunusually within the history of ideas) that all things—including \\nspiritual simples such as soul and intellect (but not God)—are \\ncomprised of matter and form. This doctrine is called\\n“Universal Hylomorphism” by later scholastics in contrast\\nto ordinary Aristotelian hylomorphism in which all substances\\nother than soul/intellect are said to be comprised of matter\\n(Greek: hûlê) and form (Greek:\\nmorphê). This doctrine of Universal Hylomorphism emerges\\nas a central theological and philosophical point of contention between\\nAugustinian Franciscans (who embrace it) and Aristotelian Dominicans\\n(who reject it). (It might be noted that one popular way that the\\nFons Vitae doctrine comes up in medieval Christian debates is\\non the question of whether angels (the separate intellects) are made up\\nof matter and form, or just\\n form).[27]\",\n \"\\n\\nHand in hand with the doctrine that all things (including spiritual\\nsimples) are matter+form composites is Ibn Gabirol's idea of a\\npure spiritual matter at the core of being which grounds even Universal\\nIntellect in the great Neoplatonic chain of being. In the extant\\nArabic, we find that Ibn Gabirol uses the term\\n“al-‘unsur”, or the more descriptive\\n“al-‘unsur al-awwal,” first matter (in\\ncontrast to other more common Arabic philosophical terms for matter\\nwhich Ibn Gabirol himself uses at other points in his\\n work).[28]\\nIn spite of the\\nfact that this term is translated as “materia\\nprima” in the Latin, and is as such often translated as\\n“prime matter” in English, we need to keep in mind that\\nwhatever Ibn Gabirol is talking about is not best thought of as\\nAristotelian prime matter (which is what may readers undoubtedly\\novertly or covertly think of when they hear the term “prime\\nmatter”; see section 2). First of all, Ibn Gabirol's pure\\nmatter is part of an overtly Neoplatonic world-view which, contra\\nAristotle, privileges spiritual/intelligible substances over\\nsensible/corporeal reality, and which, contra Aristotle and Plato,\\nemphasizes the emanation of the sensible realm from the spiritual\\nrealm. Further emphasizing that we are not talking of Aristotelian\\nprime matter is the fact that Ibn Gabirol's use of the Arabic\\nterm al-‘unsur (literally “the element,” and\\ntranslated by the 13th century Hebrew editor as\\n“yesôd” (foundation)) expressly mirrors a\\nPs. Empedoclean tradition of a spiritual matter (called\\nal-‘unsur) immediately outside of God. For these\\nreasons, it is important to avoid Aristotelian resonances when\\nconstructing Ibn Gabirol's ontology, and as such, one ought use\\nthe term First Matter over “prime matter.”\",\n \"\\n\\nOf this first pure matter we learn at the very start of the Fons\\nVitae that it is “…per se existens, unius\\nessentiae, sustinens diversitatem, dans omnibus essentiam suam et\\nnomen” (“…existent in and of itself, of a\\nsingle essence, sustaining diversity, and giving to everything its\\nessence and name”; Fons Vitae 1.10, p. 13, lines 15–17).\\nAnd, in similar manner we learn at the very close of the Fons\\nVitae that it is: “…substantia existens per se,\\nsustentatrix diversitatis, una numero; et…est substantia\\nreceptibilis omnium formarum” (“…a substance\\nexistent in and of itself, the sustainer of diversity, one in number;\\n…it is a substance receptive to all forms”; Fons\\nVitae 5.22, p. 298, lines 13–7; compare with facing Arabic text at\\nPines 1958/77, p. 53, section 9:2). Related to its status as the\\n“sustainer of diversity,” pure matter is presented as the\\nfundamental receiver that always seeks to receive its partner, viz.\\nform. Pure universal matter is thus coupled—in a process\\noverseen by Divine Will—with a pure universal form to yield the\\nfirst fully existing substance, Universal Intellect. In their coupling,\\nmatter and form thus mark the permeating presence of Divine Will in the\\nuniverse. Related to his vision of a matter-to-form coupling through\\nWill, Ibn Gabirol envisions the Neoplatonic emanating chain of being as\\nan ever-descending series of matter-to-form couplings, and so:\",\n \"\\nIntellect (matter + form)1\\n\\nSoul (matter + form)2\\n\\nCelestial Body (matter + form)3\\n\\nTerrestrial Body (mater + form)4\\n\",\n \"\\n\\nHere, a hylomorphic lens is put onto the standard Neoplatonic\\nhierarchy emphasizing the composition of all things (spiritual simples\\nas well as bodies) in terms of matters and forms (and highlighting\\nthree kinds of matter: spiritual, celestial, and\\n terrestrial).[29]\\nAnd with this\\nhylomorphic lens emerges too the emphasis on Divine Will, the active\\npresence of God responsible in some way for “mediating”\\nbetween these matters and forms.\",\n \"\\n\\nIn the context of this hylomorphic vision, we find a confounding\\nflipping in the Fons Vitae between ordinary negative and\\nunexpected positive descriptions of the notion of\\n matter.[30] \\n The universal pure matter certainly has a positive set of associations\\nwith it in Ibn Gabirol as compared with “corporeal” (or\\n“lower”) matter: in contrast to “lower” matter\\nwhich carries the 9 Aristotelian categories, “higher”\\nmatter is the matter of pure spiritual simples and carries no quantity\\nor quality (or any of the 9 categories). Again, mindful of the\\nEmpedoclean tie-in and of his Hebrew terminology of\\n“yesôd” (foundation), we are looking at\\nsomething quite sublime, a reality which sits, as it were, directly\\noutside of God prior even to Intellect, which he likens to a Divine\\nThrone (see Fons Vitae 5.42, p. 335, lines 23–4), and which\\nhe correlates to the more essential (and hidden) reality of God. In\\nthese and related contexts in Ibn Gabirol, matter often emerges\\n(somewhat unexpectedly within the history of ideas) as more sublime\\n than even pure form.\\nAnd yet, there are plenty of passages in\\nthe Fons Vitae in which it is form which reigns supreme (as\\nwe would expect in standard Platonic, Aristotelian, and Neoplatonic\\ntraditions): for example, form is identified as the cosmic source of\\nunity and light, and it is form which is said to perfect or complete\\nmatter by bringing being to it (although, as we have emphasized, it is\\nstill plausible that for Ibn Gabirol matter per se still has\\nsome kind of pre-existent—and perhaps superior—subsistence \\nprior to and independent of this gift of being from\\nform). Further highlighting form's supremacy, Ibn Gabirol\\nargues, for example, that the substance of Intellect is superior to\\nthe substance of body precisely because the former contains all forms\\nand the latter contains only some forms (see Fons Vitae 3.9,\\np. 98, line 24– p. 99, line 3), an argument which relies on the\\nintuition that formality (not materiality) is the ontological marker\\nof supremacy (and an argument which seems directly at odds with the\\nintuitions behind another of his ideas, viz. that we ought call\\na higher substance “matter” with respect to a lower\\nsubstance). In the final account, we can see Ibn Gabirol as\\nuniquely sensitive to the equal importance of both matter and form,\\ntheir intimate interdependence one upon the other, and, ultimately,\\ntheir unity as a single whole—a dynamic arguably mirroring his\\nvision of God's own reality in terms of essential and active\\n“moments” which are ultimately one inseparable unity.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"5. Matter, Form and “Universal Hylomorphism”\",\n \"subsections\": [\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nOne way to think of Ibn Gabirol's hylomorphic levels of\\nreality (although Ibn Gabirol does not himself theorize it in this way\\novertly) is in terms of his Neoplatonizing the Platonic notion of\\nparticipation. For Plato, participation is in a form, and a highest\\nform—participated in by all—is the form of being. For\\nthe Neoplatonist, as for Ibn Gabirol, the focus on the form is replaced\\n(or amplified) by the focus on the Universal Intellect that contains\\nall forms (simultaneously, in potency, as one nested in the next).\\nImagine the conceptual implication of this Neoplatonic focus on\\nIntellect (versus a Platonic focus on the form of being) for a\\nparticipation theory—if we think of it carefully, we will find\\nthat the Neoplatonic model can quite organically gives rise to the kind\\nof hylomorphic focus we find in Ibn Gabirol: In a Neoplatonic\\nIntellect, all the forms are “in” Intellect, a notion which\\ncan easily be seen as emphasizing Intellect's material role as\\nsustainer. This would mean that the move from Platonic talk of forms to\\nNeoplatonic talk of Intellect organically invites a new focus on the\\nrole of [spiritual] matter (viz. the matter of Intellect by which it\\nreceives or holds all the forms). This immediately transforms the\\nPlatonic concept of participating in form/s to the concept of\\nparticipating in matter (the receiver) (or, we might say, participating\\nin matter as the means to participating in forms). And so, whereas for\\nPlato all things participate in the form of being, for Ibn Gabirol, all\\nthings are grounded in / have as their underlying “true\\nsubstrate” the substance of Intellect which is to say, they\\nparticipate in matter (viz. the spiritual matter of pure intellect)\\nplus forms.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.1 Ibn Gabirol's Neoplatonic Hylomorphism 1: Plato's Participation Revised\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nIbn Gabirol's metaphysics are obviously influenced by\\nAristotle's talk of substance and its 9 categories. And yet, it\\nwould be a mistake to think of Ibn Gabirol as an Aristotelian in much\\nof his use of the term “substance.”\",\n \"\\n\\nTo confuse things, Ibn Gabirol does use the term substance in an at\\nleast somewhat Aristotelian sense when he talks of corporeal substance—the \\nsubstance which, a la Aristotle, receives the 9 categories.\\nIbn Gabirol argues that this substance is first enformed by the form of\\ncorporeity, or quantity (one approach among many ancient and medieval\\ninterpretations of Aristotle, even if not actually\\nAristotle's\\n view).[31]\\nMoving\\nalready, though, from anything even loosely Aristotelian and\\nmanifesting a more Platonic impulse, this substance is seen by Ibn\\nGabirol as “lower substance” marking the lowest extremity\\nof reality. Continuing on this Platonic move away from Aristotle, Ibn\\nGabirol's main talk of “substance” refers, contra\\nAristotle, to “simple substances,” by which he means the\\nNeoplatonic Universal Intellect and Soul(s), each understood by Ibn\\nGabirol as a joining of spiritual matter to spiritual form, and each\\ndevoid of any of the 9 categories plaguing the “lower”\\ncorporeal (i.e. Aristotelian) substance. These simple substances\\n(exemplified in the simple substance of Intellect) are theorized as the\\nintermediaries between God and lower substance.\",\n \"\\n\\nWe may begin to understand this sense of substance by noting that\\nwith other Platonists and Neoplatonists, and deviating from\\nAristotelian sensibilities, Ibn Gabirol envisions a “higher\\nrealm” as that which is most real. However, whereas standard\\nPlatonisms identify forms as the truest realities within that realm,\\nIbn Gabirol adopts a hylomorphic (but by no means\\nAristotelian) sensibility in his conception of the higher\\nrealities: unlike Aristotle for whom only items in the corporeal realm\\nare form+matter composites, for Ibn Gabirol, the realities in the\\n“higher realm” (a Platonic idea avoided by Aristotle) are\\nalso comprised of form+matter. This move turns a number of standard\\nAristotelian, Platonic and Neoplatonic sensibilities on their heads in\\na Gabirolean metaphysics, including the notion of substance.\",\n \"\\n\\nSpeaking of substance in the sense of “true substance”\\nseparate from (and higher than) corporeal substance, Ibn Gabirol, in\\nline with other Platonisms and contra Aristotle, is referring to a\\n“higher realm.” However, unlike Plato, Ibn Gabirol focuses\\n(with Neoplatonists) on the substances of Intellect and Soul(s)—which \\nis to say, the reality of all forms “in” the simple\\nspiritual substances (of Intellect and Soul), not on forms per se (see\\nsection 5.1 above). In this sense, the spiritual simples are primarily\\nnot the forms (as we might expect in Plato), but (in Neoplatonic\\nspirit) the Universal Intellect and Soul. Relatedly, unlike other\\nPlatonisms, Ibn Gabirol's higher realm is not theorized as a\\nrealm of forms but as a realm of form and matter (again see section 5.1\\non how the talk of Intellect leads us to the talk of forms\\n“in” matter). This also means that with Aristotle, Ibn\\nGabirol employs a lot more hylomorphic talk than Platonists (though\\napplied to a completely non-Aristotelian “higher\\nrealm”).\",\n \"\\n\\nThis also means that contra the standard Neoplatonic (and Platonic)\\nrhetorics of “matter as evil,” there emerges in Ibn Gabirol\\na concurrent discourse of “matter as supreme”: for Ibn\\nGabirol, both form and matter in the “higher realm” carry\\nwith them all the positive associations which form carries in standard\\nPlatonic pictures (including a trajectory of thought in Ibn Gabirol on\\nwhich pure matter arguably emerges as more sublime than pure form).\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.2 Ibn Gabirol's Neoplatonic Hylomorphism 2: Aristotelian Substance Revised\"\n },\n {\n \"content\": [\n \"\\n\\nIn the context of this analysis, we might also say a word about the\\ndoctrine of “the plurality of forms,” a doctrine associated\\nwith the Fons Vitae by later Christian scholastics. Taken in\\ncontrast to the Aristotelian doctrine that each existent has a single\\nsubstantial form (ensuring its unity as a substance), “the\\nplurality of forms” doctrine describes the Universal Hylomorphic\\nsense in which each existent has a number of essential forms (and\\nmatters). In our highly Neoplatonic Gabirolean context (but less so in\\nRoger Bacon and other Christian Universal Hylomorphists), we can simply\\ntake this doctrine as an extension of the standard Plotinian idea that,\\nas part of the great chain of being, any given existent is saturated\\nthrough with the reality of the hypostases Soul and Intellect: in this\\nsense, each existent has a number of essences, corresponding to the\\nvarious “layers” (for Ibn Gabirol,\\n“form+matter” spiritual simples) in the great chain of\\nbeing.\"\n ],\n \"subsection_title\": \"5.3 Ibn Gabirol's Neoplatonic Hylomorphism 3: Plurality of Forms\"\n }\n ]\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nIbn Gabirol can be seen as offering us a revised version of the\\nNeoplatonic great chain of being, adding an emphasis on Will, matter\\nand form (and, in light of section 5, we might say a number of levels\\nof matters and forms). With other Jewish Neoplatonists (see Isaac\\nIsraeli for example), Ibn Gabirol also envisions not one but three\\nWorld Souls, and a Universal Intellect which he describes in his\\nKeter Malkhut [Kingdom's Crown] as “the\\nSphere of Intellect” (in his Hebrew, galgal\\nha-sâkhel), an odd and creative locution which blurs\\nastronomical and metaphysical conceptions: generally the languages of\\n“sphere” and “intellect” do not mix, the former\\nreferring to the celestial realm, and the latter referring to\\nsomething well beyond the celestial realm. To these Neoplatonic layers\\nof Intellect and Souls, and following mostly in the spirit of astronomy\\nof his day (with the exception, that is, of his positing Intellect as a\\nso-called “10th sphere” in contrast to the more\\naccepted Ptolemaic system of 9 spheres; see Tanenbaum 1996 and Loewe\\n1979), Ibn Gabirol also envisions a hierarchy of star fields and\\nplanetary orbs, a cosmic picture which he lays out in great detail in\\nhis Keter Malkhut poem. Moving from God outward, we find the\\nlayers as follows:\",\n \"\\n(God)\\n10. “Sphere of Intellect” (galgal ha-sêkhel) (cantos 24–25)\\n9. Encompassing Sphere (canto 23)\\n8. Zodiac / Fixed Stars (cantos 21–22)\\n7. Saturn (canto 20)\\n6. Jupiter (canto 19)\\n5. Mars (canto 18)\\n4. Sun (cantos 15–17)\\n3. Venus (canto 14)\\n2. Mercury (canto 13)\\n1. Moon (cantos 11–12)\\n(Earth)\\n\",\n \"\\n\\nAbove even the “Sphere of Intellect” is the Divine\\nThrone, which we know from the Fons Vitae refers to pure\\nuniversal matter “between” God and Intellect (on matter as\\nThrone, see Fons Vitae 5.42, p. 335, lines 23–4; for a great\\ndiagram see Loewe 1989, p. 114).\",\n \"\\n\\nIt should be noted that it is in reference to the above chart of the\\ncelestial levels of stars and planets that we find in various medieval\\nMuslim and Jewish thinkers—for example in al-Farabi and in\\nMaimonides—a Neoplatonized Aristotelian focus on a hierarchy of\\n“separate intellects,” the last of which (generally\\nconstrued as the 10th intellect lowest down—with God\\nconceived either as the first such Intellect or as an Intellect above\\nthis enumeration altogether) being described as the “Active Intellect”\\nwhich governs the sublunar realm, and is that to which human minds\\n“conjoin” (through the process of\\n ittisâl).[32]\\nIt is important to\\ndistinguish this system from the one at play in Ibn Gabirol: whereas\\nal-Farabi, Maimonides, and others focus their attention on a Return to\\n(or a “conjunction with”) the 10th lowest down\\nof the separate intellects (the Active Intellect as the intellect\\nassociated with our earthly realm below the moon), Ibn Gabirol's\\nfocus is, as in Plotinus, on an Intellect at the very heights of the\\ncelestial world, and just outside of God's own being: Whereas Ibn\\nGabirol's “10th sphere” is a Sphere of Intellect just\\noutside of God, Maimonides' “10th\\nIntellect” corresponds to the sphere of Moon (just above Earth).\\nThis point is often confused in secondary literature, and can lead to\\nproblematic misunderstandings and misconstrued correlations between\\nphilosophical systems.\",\n \"\\n\\nReturning full circle to our start (see section 3), Ibn\\nGabirol's emphasis even in his elaboration on a celestial\\nhierarchy centers on the Neoplatonic concern with the cultivation of\\nthe human soul—its Return to its highest fullness in Intellect:\\nfrom a series of planets, we immediately move to Intellect\\n(“galgal ha-sêkhel”), the ground and goal of\\nthe virtuous human life.\",\n \"\\nStudent: What is the purpose of man?\\n\\nTeacher: The inclination of his soul to the higher world in order\\nthat everyone might return to his like.\\n\\n(Fons Vitae 1.2, p. 4, lines 23–5)\\n\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"6. Cosmic Landscape, Soul Landscape: From Heavenly Circuits to Human Return\",\n \"subsections\": []\n },\n {\n \"main_content\": [\n \"\\n\\nIn addition to his philosophical writing, Ibn Gabirol is\\nauthor to an extensive corpus of Hebrew poems (generally categorized\\ninto “religious” and “secular” poems) which it\\nis beyond the scope of this entry to\\n address.[33]\",\n \"\\n\\nAside from Ibn Gabirol's technical prowess as a poet, it is\\nworth noting that Ibn Gabirol's own self-conception as a poet (a\\ntheme overtly and self-referentially explored in many of his poems)\\nopens important philosophical questions about the nature of language,\\nselfhood and divinity. In, for example, drawing parallels between\\nGod's act of creation (by Word), and the poet's /\\nphilosopher's own act of writing, Ibn Gabirol arguably invites us\\nto reconceptualize human subjectivity, the sacred, and the relationship\\nbetween philosophical theory-building and imagino-poetic play.\"\n ],\n \"section_title\": \"7. The Poet\",\n \"subsections\": []\n }\n]","isConversational":false},"bibliography":{"kind":"list like","value":["For Arabic fragments of Fons Vitae, see main bibliography:\nPines 1958/77 and Fenton 1976.","1892. Avencebrolis (Ibn Gabirol) Fons\nVitae, ex Arabico in Latinum Translatus ab Johanne Hispano et Dominico\nGundissalino, edited by Baeumker. Münster. In\nBeiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters,\nTexte und Untersuchungen, edited by Baeumker and Hertling.\nMünster.\n\nContains the Latin text of the Fons Vitae as\ntranslated from Arabic in the 12th century by Dominicus\nGundissalinus and John of Spain","1950. La source de vie; livre III, translated with commentary\nby Fernand Brunner. Paris: Librairie Philosophique\nJ. Vrin.\n\nFrench translation of book three of the Fons Vitae, with\ncommentary by Brunner.","1954. Fountain of Life, translated by A. B.\nJacob. Philadelphia.\n\nThis is a full English translation of the Fons\nVitae, but its idiosyncratic terminology greatly obscures\nphilosophical points in the text (e.g. matter and form are translated\nas “material and structure”).","1962. Ozar Ha-Mahshavah shel Ha-Yahadut,\nedited by Abraham Sifroni. Israel: Mosad Ha-Rav Kuk.\n\n This volume includes a contemporary Hebrew\ntranslation by Blovstein of the Latin Baeumker text (see\npp. 3–432): Rabbi Shlomo ben Gabirol, Sefer Meqor\nHayyim, translated [into Hebrew from Latin] by Yaakov\nBlovstein. ","1962/2008. The Fountain of Life, (Book 3), translated by\nHenry E. Wedeck. New York: Philosophical Library. [Reprinted\nas Solomon Ibn Gabirol, The Fountain of Life. Bibliobazaar,\n2008.]","1853/1955. Extraits de la source de\nvie de Salomon Ibn Gebirol. In Solomon Munk,\nMélanges de Philosophie Juive et Arabe.\nParis: Chez A. Franck, Libraire. (Reprinted Paris, 1955).\n\nContains text of Falaquera's 13th century Hebrew summary\nof the Fons Vitae, as well as Munk's French translation and\ncommentary.","1962. Ozar Ha-Mahshavah shel Ha-Yahadut,\nedited by Abraham Sifroni. Israel: Mosad Ha-Rav Kuk.\n\nThe volume includes Shem Tov ibn Falaquera's 13th century Hebrew\nsummary translation of the original Arabic text; see pp.\n433–532. ","2001. Shelomoh ibn Gabirol, Fons Vitae, by Roberto\nGatti. Genova: Il Melangolo. \nA new edition of Falaquera's 13th century Hebrew summary\nof the Fons Vitae (based on new\nmanuscripts not used by Munk) and Italian translation.","2008. “Solomon Ibn Gabirol and Shem Tov b. Joseph\nFalaquera, Excerpts from ‘The Source of\nLife’ ”, in Medieval Jewish Philosophical\nWritings, edited by Charles Manekin. Cambridge: Cambridge\nUniversity Press, pp. 23–87. \n English translation of selections of Falaquera's\nHebrew excerpts by Charles Manekin.","1484. Mibhar ha-Peninim (Choice of\nPearls: Maxims, Proverbs, and Moral Reflections)\n[microform]. Soncino (Italian books before 1601); roll 352, item\n5; Cambridge, Mass., General Microfilm Co.","1925. Solomon Ibn Gabirol's Choice of Pearls (Library of\nJewish Classics, Volume IV), translated from the Hebrew with\nintroduction and annotation, A. Cohen (trans.). New York: Bloch\nPublishing Co., Inc., 1925.","1947. Sefer Mivhar ha-Peninim. A. Habermann, (ed.),\nJerusalem: Sifriyat haPo'alim.","1962. Ozar Ha-Mahshavah shel Ha-Yahadut,\nedited by Abraham Sifroni. Israel: Mosad Ha-Rav Kuk.\n\nContains contemporary Hebrew translation by Bar-On\nof the Arabic text; see second half of the volume after p. 549\n(i.e. after the Blovstein and the Falaquera Hebrew translations\nof Fons Vitae), pagination starts again from p. 1; see\npp. 1–112. Also contains Hebrew translation of Ibn Tibbon; see\nthird section of the volume after the Bar-On translation; pagination\nstarts again from p. 1; see pp. 1–85.","1966. The Improvement of the Moral Qualities, Columbia\nUniversity Oriental Studies, Vol. I, Stephen S. Wise (trans.). New\nYork: AMS Press.\n\nArabic text and English translation of Gabirol's\nSefer Tiqun Midot ha-Nefesh","Bialik and Ravnitsky, eds. 1924/1925. Shirei Shlomo ben Yehudah Ibn\nGevirol, Vol. I–II (Shirei Hol). Tel Aviv; Berlin:\nDwir-Verlags-Gesellschaft.","Schirmann, Y., ed. 1967. Ibn Gabirol: Shirim\nNivharim. Jerusalem; Tel Aviv: Schocken.","Yarden, Dov, ed. 1975. Shirei ha-Hol le-Rabbi Shlomo\nIbn Gevirol. Jerusalem: Kiryat Noar.","al-Shahrastânî (Abu’ l-Fath Muhammad). 1923.\nKitâb al-Milal wal-Nihal (Book of Religious and\nPhilosophical Sects), Part II, edited by W. Cureton (Leipzig), pp.\n260–65. [This is a reprint of 1846 edition; also see 2002 reprint:\nThe Book of Religious and Philosophical Sects, Al-Shahrastani.\nEdited by W. Cureton. Piscataway: Gorgias Press].","Plotinus. The Enneads, translated with notes by\nA.H. Armstrong. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard\nUniversity Press, 1966.","Plotinus, Die sogenannte Theologie des Aristoteles: aus\narabischen Handschriften (Theology of Aristotle),\nF. Dieterici (ed.), Leipzig, 1882. [Reprint: Amsterdam: Rodopi,\n1965.]","Proclus. Liber de Causis (The Book of Causes)/ (in\nArabic: kalâm fî mahd al-khayr /\nDiscourse on Pure Goodness)\n \n\n Bardenhewer, Otto, (ed.). Die pseudo-aristotelische Schrift\nUeber das reine gute: bekannt unter dem Namen Liber De Causis\n[Arabic text]. Freiberg-im-Breisgau: Herder, 1882 / Frankfurt am\nMain: Minerva, 1957.\n\n Badawi, A (ed.). Liber (Pseudo-Aristotelis) de\nexpositione bonitatis purae. In Neoplatonici apud Arabes.\nIslamica 19 [Arabic text]. Cairo, 1955; pp. 1–33.\n\n St. Thomas Aquinas' Commentary on the Book of Causes,\ntranslated and annotated by Vincent A. Guagliardo, Charles Hess, and\nRichard C. Taylor. Washington: Catholic University of America Press,\n1996.\n \n","Bardenhewer, Otto, (ed.). Die pseudo-aristotelische Schrift\nUeber das reine gute: bekannt unter dem Namen Liber De Causis\n[Arabic text]. Freiberg-im-Breisgau: Herder, 1882 / Frankfurt am\nMain: Minerva, 1957.","Badawi, A (ed.). Liber (Pseudo-Aristotelis) de\nexpositione bonitatis purae. In Neoplatonici apud Arabes.\nIslamica 19 [Arabic text]. Cairo, 1955; pp. 1–33.","St. Thomas Aquinas' Commentary on the Book of Causes,\ntranslated and annotated by Vincent A. Guagliardo, Charles Hess, and\nRichard C. Taylor. Washington: Catholic University of America Press,\n1996.","Proclus, De Philosophia Chaldaica:\n \n 1971. De Philosophia Chaldaica, ed. É. des Places.\nParis (Oracles Chaldaïques, text établi et traduit, pp.\n202–12)\n\n 1988. The exhortation to philosophy. Including the Letters of\nIamblichus and Proclus' commentary on the Chaldean oracles.\nIamblichus, Johnson, T. M., Neuville, S., & Proclus. [EST: De\nphilosophia Chaldaica <engl.>]. Grand Rapids, Mich: Phanes\nPress.\n \n","1971. De Philosophia Chaldaica, ed. É. des Places.\nParis (Oracles Chaldaïques, text établi et traduit, pp.\n202–12)","1988. The exhortation to philosophy. Including the Letters of\nIamblichus and Proclus' commentary on the Chaldean oracles.\nIamblichus, Johnson, T. M., Neuville, S., & Proclus. [EST: De\nphilosophia Chaldaica <engl.>]. Grand Rapids, Mich: Phanes\nPress.","Simplicius, 1882. Simplicii in Aristotelis Physicorum libros\nquattuor priores commentaria, edited by Herman Diels. Berlin.","Altmann, Alexander. 1979. “Creation and Emanation in Isaac\nIsraeli: A Reappraisal,” \nStudies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, 1: 1–15.","Altmann, Alexander, and Stern, S. M. 1958/2009. Isaac Israeli.\nOxford: Oxford University Press. [Reprinted 2009 by University of Chicago Press.]","Asín-Palacios, Miguel. 1978. The Mystical Philosophy of\nIbn Masarra and his Followers. Leiden: E. J. Brill.","Bargebuhr, Frederick P. 1976. Salomo Ibn Gabirol,\nOstwestliches Dichtertum. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.","Brunner, Fernand. 1965. Platonisme et\naristotélisme—la critique d'Ibn Gabirol par St.\nThomas d'Aquin. Louvain: Publications universitaires de\nLouvain.","–––. 1956 / 1997. “La doctrine de la\nmatière chez Avicébron,” Revue de\nThéologie et de Philosophie, trois. série, 6:\n261—79. Reprinted in\nFernand Brunner, Métaphysique d'Ibn Gabirol\net de la tradition platonicienne. Great Britain; USA:\nAshgate, Variorum.","–––. 1965. Platonisme et\nAristotélisme: la critique d'Ibn Gabirol par Saint\nThomas D'Aquin. Louvain: Publications\nUniversitaires de Louvain.","–––. Fernand Brunner,\nMétaphysique d'Ibn Gabirol et de la tradition\nplatonicienne. Great Britain; USA: Ashgate,\nVariorum.","Cole, Peter. 2007. The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from\nMuslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492. Lockert Library of Poetry in\nTranslation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.","–––. 2001. Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn\nGabirol. Princeton University Press.","Crowley, Theodore. 1950. Roger Bacon: The Problem of the\nSoul in his Philosophical Commentaries. Louvain; Dublin: James\nDuffy and Co., Ltd.","Damascius. 1889. Dubitationes et Solutiones,\nC. É. Ruelle (ed.), Paris: Klincksieck.","Davidson, Herbert A. 1992. Alfarabi, Avicenna, and\nAverroes on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active\nIntellect and Theories of Human Intellect. Oxford University\nPress.","–––. 1972. “Alfarabi and Avicenna\non the Active Intellect,” Viator, \n3: 109–78.","Dillon, John. 1992. “Solomon Ibn Gabirol's Doctrine of\nIntelligible Matter,” in L. Goodman (ed.), Neoplatonism\nand Jewish Thought, pp. 43–59. Albany: SUNY Press.","Fenton, Paul. 1976. “Gleanings from Môseh Ibn\n‘Ezra's Maqâlat\nal-Hadîqa,” Sefarad, 36: 285–298.","–––. Philosophie et\nexégèse dans le Jardin de la méthaphore [sic] de\nMoïse IbnʻEzra, philosophe et poète andalou du XIIe\nsiècle. Leiden; New York: Brill.","Friedlaender, M. 1877. Essays on the Writings of Abraham Ibn\nEzra. London. [Reprinted: Jerusalem, 1964].\n\nContains (in Hebrew) Abraham ibn Ezra's recounted\nversion of Gabirol's commentary on Genesis.","Frank, Daniel H. 1998. “Ibn Gabirol, Solomon\n(1021/2–57/8),” s.v. Routledge Encyclopedia of\nPhilosophy, Version 1.0. London and New York: Routledge.","Gersh, Stephen. 1978. From Iamblichus to Eriugena: An\nInvestigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysian\nTradition. Leiden: E.J. Brill.","Gibb, H.A.R., et al. (ed.),\n1954. “anbaduklîs,” s.v. Encyclopedia\nof Islam, New Edition, Volume I, pp. 483–4. Leiden:\nBrill","–––, 1954. hayûlâ,”\ns.v. Encyclopedia of Islam, New Edition, Leiden: Brill.","–––, 1954. “Kursî,”\ns.v. Encyclopedia of Islam, New Edition, Volume V, p. 509,\nLeiden: Brill.","Gilson, Etienne. 1955. History of Christian Philosophy in the\nMiddle Ages, New York: Random House.","Gluck, Andrew. 2003. The Kingly Crown, Keter Malkhut,\ntranslation and notes by Bernard Lewis. Indiana: University of Notre\nDame.","Gracia and Newton. 2010. “Medieval Theories of the\nCategories,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy\n(Summer 2010 Edition),\nEdward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =\n<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/medieval-categories/>.","Guttmann, Julius. 1973. Philosophies of Judaism: A History of\nJewish Philosophy from Biblical Times to Franz Rosenzweig. New\nYork: Schocken Books.","Heller-Wilensky, Sara O. 1967. “Isaac Ibn Latif—Philosopher \nor Kabbalist,” in Jewish Medieval and Renaissance\nStudies, edited by Alexander Altmann. Cambridge: Harvard\nUniversity Press.","Husik, Isaac. 1916/1958. A History of Medieval Jewish\nPhilosophy. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of\nAmerica.","Idel, Moshe. 1982. “Ha-sefirot she-me‘al ha-sefirot:\nlahkor meqorotehem shel rishone he-mequbalim,”\nTarbiz 51, pp. 239–280.","–––. 1992. “Jewish Kabbalah and Platonism\nin the Middle Ages and Renaissance,” in L. E. Goodman, (ed.),\nNeoplatonism and Jewish Thought, pp. 319–51. Albany:\nSUNY Press.","Ikhwân as-safâ’ (Brethren of\nPurity). 1928. Rasâ’il Ikhwân\nas-safâ’. Volume 2. Cairo.","Karamanolis, George E. 2006. Plato and Aristotle in Agreement?:\nPlatonists on Aristotle from Antiochus to Porphyry. Oxford\nUniversity Press.","Kaufmann, David. 1877/1964. “Ha-Pseudo Empedocles ka-Mekor\nle-R’ Shlomo ibn Gabirol,” Mehkarim ba-Sifrut\nha-Ivrit, pp. 78–164, Jerusalem: Mosad Ha-Ruv Kuk.","–––. 1880. Die Spuren al-Batlajûsi's,\nStudien Über Salomon ibn Gabirol and Die Sinne,\nBudapest. [Reprint with an introduction by Louis Jacobs: London: Gregg\nInternational Publishers Ltd., 1972.]","–––. 1899. Studien über\nSalomon Ibn Gabirol (Jahresberichte der\nLandes-Rabbinerschule zu Budapest für das Schuljahr\n1898/99). Budapest. [Reprint: New York : Arno Press, 1980]","Lewis, Bernard, tr., 1961. Solomon ibn Gabirol: The Kingly\nCrown. London: Vallentine, Mitchell. [See edition of Gluck\n2003].","Liebes, Yehudah. 1987. “Sefer Yezirah ezel R. Shlomo\nIbn Gevirol u-perush ha-shir ‘Ahavtikha.” In The\nBeginnings of Jewish Mysticism in Medieval Europe, edited by\nJ. Dan. [Also In\nJerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 6: 73–123.]","Loewe, Raphael. 1989. Ibn Gabirol. London: Peter\nHalban.","–––. 1979. “Ibn Gabirol's Treatment of\nSources in the Kether Malkhuth,” in Studies in\nJewish Religious and Intellectual History (Presented to Alexander\nAltmann on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday), edited by\nS. Stein and R. Loewe, pp. 183–194. Tuscaloosa: The University\nof Alabama Press.","Mathis II, C. K. 1992. “Parallel Structures in the Metaphysics\nof Iamblichus and Ibn Gabirol,” in L. E. Goodman, Ed.\nNeoplatonism and Jewish Thought, pp. 61–76. Albany:\nSUNY Press.","Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 1993. An Introduction to Islamic\nCosmological Doctrines. Albany: State University of New York\nPress.","Pessin, Sarah. 2003. “Jewish Neoplatonism: Being\nAbove Being and Divine Emanation in Solomon Ibn Gabirol and Isaac\nIsraeli,” in Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish\nPhilosophy, edited by Dan Frank and Oliver Leaman,\npp. 91–110. Cambridge University Press.","–––. 2004. “Loss, Presence, and Gabirol's\nDesire: Medieval Jewish Philosophy and the Possibility of a Feminist\nGround,” in Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy,\nedited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, pp. 27–50. Bloomington: Indiana\nUniversity Press.","–––. 2005a. “The Manifest Image: Revealing the\nHidden in Halevi, Saadya and Gabirol,” in History of\nPlatonism: Plato Redivivus, edited by John Finamore and Robert\nBerchman, pp. 253–270. New Orleans: University Press of the South.","–––. 2005b. “The Influence of Islamic\nThought on Maimonides,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of\nPhilosophy (Fall 2005 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =\n<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2005/entries/maimonides-islamic/>.","–––. 2009. “Matter, Form and the Corporeal\nWorld,” in The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy: From\nAntiquity to the Seventeenth Century, edited by Tamar Rudavsky\nand Steven Nadler, pp. 269–301. Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress.","Peters, F. E. 1967. “Avicebron (Ibn Gabirol, Solomon ben\nJudah),” s.v. New Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 1, p.\n1130. [New York: McGraw-Hill]","Pines, S. 1955. “A Tenth Century Philosophical\nCorrespondence,” Proceedings of the American Academy for\nJewish Research, 24, pp. 103–136.","–––. 1958/1977. “Sefer\n‘Arûgat ha-Bôsem: ha-Qeta‘im mi-tôkh\nSêfer ‘Meqôr\nHayyîm’,” Tarbiz 27. [Reprinted in\nShlomo Pines, Bêyn Mahshevet Yisrôel\nle-Mahshevet ha-‘Amîm: Mehkarîm\nbe-Tôldôt ha-Fîlôsôfiya\nha-Yehûdit (Bialik: Jerusalem, 1977), pp. 44–60 [in\nHebrew].","–––. 1977a. “ha-’im dîber\nShlômô Ibn Gabîrôl sarah al\nha-ûma?,” in Bêyn Mahshevet Yisrôel\nle-Mahshevet ha-‘Amîm: Mehkarîm\nbe-Tôldôt ha-Fîlôsôfiya\nha-Yehûdit (Bialik: Jerusalem, 1977), pp. 61–7 [in\nHebrew].","–––. 1980. “Ve-qara el ha-Ayin\nve-Nivqa,” Tarbiz, 50: 339–47.","Rudavksy, T. M. 1978. “Conflicting Motifs: Ibn Gabirol on\nMatter and Evil.” The New Scholasticism, 52 (1): 54–71.","–––. 1991. “Ibn Gabirol\n(Avicebron or Avicebrol),” s.v. Dictionary of Literary\nBiography (Medieval Volume, Vol. 115), pp. 248–252. Detroit: Gale.","Samuelson, Norbert. 1987. “Ibn Gabirol, Shelomoh,” s.v.\nThe Encyclopedia of Religion, edited by Mircea Eliade. New\nYork: The MacMillan Publishing Co.","Schechter, Solomon. 1909/1961. Aspects of Rabbinic Theology:\nMajor Concepts of the Talmud. New York: Schocken Books.","Scheindlin, Raymond. 1986. Wine, Women and Death: Medieval\nHebrew Poems on the Good Life. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication\nSociety.","–––. 1991. The Gazelle: Medieval Hebrew\nPoems on God, Israel, and the Soul. Philadelphia: Jewish\nPublication Society.","Schirmann-Fleischer. 1995. The History of Hebrew Poetry in\nMuslim Spain. Jerusalem: Magnes and Ben-Zvi.","Schlanger, Jacques. 1965. “Sur le role du\n‘tout’ dans la création selon Ibn\nGabirol,” Revue des Études Juives,\nVol. IV: 125–35.","–––. 1968. Le philosophie de Salomon Ibn\nGabirol. Leiden: E.J. Brill.","Scholem, G. 1939. “Iqvatov shel Gevirol\nba-Qabbalah.” In E. Steiman and A.A. Kovak,\nEds. Measef Sofrei Eretz Yisroel, pp.\n160–78. Tel Aviv.","Sharp, D. E. 1930. Franciscan Philosophy at Oxford in the\nThirteenth Century. London: Oxford University Press.","Skolnik, Fred (ed.). 1996. “Merkabah\nMysticism,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica (1996\nedition). Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House.","–––. 1996. “Shekhina,”\nin Encyclopaedia Judaica (1996 edition). Jerusalem: Keter\nPublishing House.","–––. 1996. “Throne of God,”\nin Encyclopaedia Judaica (1996 edition). Jerusalem: Keter\nPublishing House.","Sirat, Colette. 1985. A History of Jewish Philosophy in the\nMiddle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","Stern, S. M. 1983a. “Ibn Hasday's Neoplatonist,”\nreprinted in F.W. Zimmerman ed. Medieval Arabic and Hebrew\nThought. London: Variorum Reprints, pp. 58–120.","–––. 1983b. “Ibn Masarra—A\nMyth?” reprinted in F.W. Zimmerman ed.\nMedieval Arabic and Hebrew Thought. London: Variorum\nReprints.","Taylor, Richard C. 1979. “St. Thomas and the Liber de causis on the\nHylomorphic Composition of Separate Substances,” Mediaeval\nStudies XLI, pp. 506–13.","–––. 1981. The Liber de Causis (Kalâm\nfî mahd al-khair): A Study of Medieval Neoplatonism.\nDoctoral Thesis, University of Toronto.","Tanenbaum, Adena. 1996. “Nine Spheres or Ten? A Medieval Gloss\non Moses Ibn Ezra's ‘Be-Shem El Asher\nAmar’,” Journal of Jewish Studies, Vol.\nXLVII, No. 2, pp. 294–303.","Tzemah, Adi. 1985. Essay in Mehkarim bi-yetsirat\nShelomoh Ibn Gevirol, edited by Zvi Malachi. Tel-Aviv:\nMekhon Kats le-heker ha-sifrut ha-‘ivrit, Universitat\nTel-Aviv.","Tzur, Reuven. 1985. “‘Ahavtikha ki-ahavat ish\nyehido’ li-Ibn Gevirol—Shir Philosophi o Philosophia\nbe-haruzim?,” in Mehkarim bi-yetsirat Shelomoh Ibn\nGevirol, edited by Zvi Malachi. Tel-Aviv: Mekhon Kats\nle-heker ha-sifrut ha-‘ivrit, Universitat Tel-Aviv.","Weisheipl, James A. 1979. “Albertus Magnus and Universal\nHylomorphism: Avicebron,” in Southwestern Journal of\nPhilosophy 10, pp. 239–260.","Wensinck, A. J. 1932. The Muslim Creed: Its Genesis and\nHistorical Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress.","Wolfson, Elliot R. 1990. “God, the Demiurge and the Intellect:\nOn the Usage of the Word Kol in Abraham ibn Ezra,”\nRevue des Études Juives 149, pp. 77-111.","Wolfson, H. A. 1973. “The meaning of ex nihilo in\nIsaac Israeli,” reprinted in Studies in the History of\nPhilosophy and Religion, Harry Austryn Wolfson, edited by Twersky\nand Williams, Vol I, pp. 222–33. Cambridge: Harvard University\nPress.","–––. 1979. Repercussions of the Kalam in\nJewish Philosophy. Mass.: Cambridge University Press."],"string":"[\n \"For Arabic fragments of Fons Vitae, see main bibliography:\\nPines 1958/77 and Fenton 1976.\",\n \"1892. Avencebrolis (Ibn Gabirol) Fons\\nVitae, ex Arabico in Latinum Translatus ab Johanne Hispano et Dominico\\nGundissalino, edited by Baeumker. Münster. In\\nBeiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters,\\nTexte und Untersuchungen, edited by Baeumker and Hertling.\\nMünster.\\n\\nContains the Latin text of the Fons Vitae as\\ntranslated from Arabic in the 12th century by Dominicus\\nGundissalinus and John of Spain\",\n \"1950. La source de vie; livre III, translated with commentary\\nby Fernand Brunner. Paris: Librairie Philosophique\\nJ. Vrin.\\n\\nFrench translation of book three of the Fons Vitae, with\\ncommentary by Brunner.\",\n \"1954. Fountain of Life, translated by A. B.\\nJacob. Philadelphia.\\n\\nThis is a full English translation of the Fons\\nVitae, but its idiosyncratic terminology greatly obscures\\nphilosophical points in the text (e.g. matter and form are translated\\nas “material and structure”).\",\n \"1962. Ozar Ha-Mahshavah shel Ha-Yahadut,\\nedited by Abraham Sifroni. Israel: Mosad Ha-Rav Kuk.\\n\\n This volume includes a contemporary Hebrew\\ntranslation by Blovstein of the Latin Baeumker text (see\\npp. 3–432): Rabbi Shlomo ben Gabirol, Sefer Meqor\\nHayyim, translated [into Hebrew from Latin] by Yaakov\\nBlovstein. \",\n \"1962/2008. The Fountain of Life, (Book 3), translated by\\nHenry E. Wedeck. New York: Philosophical Library. [Reprinted\\nas Solomon Ibn Gabirol, The Fountain of Life. Bibliobazaar,\\n2008.]\",\n \"1853/1955. Extraits de la source de\\nvie de Salomon Ibn Gebirol. In Solomon Munk,\\nMélanges de Philosophie Juive et Arabe.\\nParis: Chez A. Franck, Libraire. (Reprinted Paris, 1955).\\n\\nContains text of Falaquera's 13th century Hebrew summary\\nof the Fons Vitae, as well as Munk's French translation and\\ncommentary.\",\n \"1962. Ozar Ha-Mahshavah shel Ha-Yahadut,\\nedited by Abraham Sifroni. Israel: Mosad Ha-Rav Kuk.\\n\\nThe volume includes Shem Tov ibn Falaquera's 13th century Hebrew\\nsummary translation of the original Arabic text; see pp.\\n433–532. \",\n \"2001. Shelomoh ibn Gabirol, Fons Vitae, by Roberto\\nGatti. Genova: Il Melangolo. \\nA new edition of Falaquera's 13th century Hebrew summary\\nof the Fons Vitae (based on new\\nmanuscripts not used by Munk) and Italian translation.\",\n \"2008. “Solomon Ibn Gabirol and Shem Tov b. Joseph\\nFalaquera, Excerpts from ‘The Source of\\nLife’ ”, in Medieval Jewish Philosophical\\nWritings, edited by Charles Manekin. Cambridge: Cambridge\\nUniversity Press, pp. 23–87. \\n English translation of selections of Falaquera's\\nHebrew excerpts by Charles Manekin.\",\n \"1484. Mibhar ha-Peninim (Choice of\\nPearls: Maxims, Proverbs, and Moral Reflections)\\n[microform]. Soncino (Italian books before 1601); roll 352, item\\n5; Cambridge, Mass., General Microfilm Co.\",\n \"1925. Solomon Ibn Gabirol's Choice of Pearls (Library of\\nJewish Classics, Volume IV), translated from the Hebrew with\\nintroduction and annotation, A. Cohen (trans.). New York: Bloch\\nPublishing Co., Inc., 1925.\",\n \"1947. Sefer Mivhar ha-Peninim. A. Habermann, (ed.),\\nJerusalem: Sifriyat haPo'alim.\",\n \"1962. Ozar Ha-Mahshavah shel Ha-Yahadut,\\nedited by Abraham Sifroni. Israel: Mosad Ha-Rav Kuk.\\n\\nContains contemporary Hebrew translation by Bar-On\\nof the Arabic text; see second half of the volume after p. 549\\n(i.e. after the Blovstein and the Falaquera Hebrew translations\\nof Fons Vitae), pagination starts again from p. 1; see\\npp. 1–112. Also contains Hebrew translation of Ibn Tibbon; see\\nthird section of the volume after the Bar-On translation; pagination\\nstarts again from p. 1; see pp. 1–85.\",\n \"1966. The Improvement of the Moral Qualities, Columbia\\nUniversity Oriental Studies, Vol. I, Stephen S. Wise (trans.). New\\nYork: AMS Press.\\n\\nArabic text and English translation of Gabirol's\\nSefer Tiqun Midot ha-Nefesh\",\n \"Bialik and Ravnitsky, eds. 1924/1925. Shirei Shlomo ben Yehudah Ibn\\nGevirol, Vol. I–II (Shirei Hol). Tel Aviv; Berlin:\\nDwir-Verlags-Gesellschaft.\",\n \"Schirmann, Y., ed. 1967. Ibn Gabirol: Shirim\\nNivharim. Jerusalem; Tel Aviv: Schocken.\",\n \"Yarden, Dov, ed. 1975. Shirei ha-Hol le-Rabbi Shlomo\\nIbn Gevirol. Jerusalem: Kiryat Noar.\",\n \"al-Shahrastânî (Abu’ l-Fath Muhammad). 1923.\\nKitâb al-Milal wal-Nihal (Book of Religious and\\nPhilosophical Sects), Part II, edited by W. Cureton (Leipzig), pp.\\n260–65. [This is a reprint of 1846 edition; also see 2002 reprint:\\nThe Book of Religious and Philosophical Sects, Al-Shahrastani.\\nEdited by W. Cureton. Piscataway: Gorgias Press].\",\n \"Plotinus. The Enneads, translated with notes by\\nA.H. Armstrong. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard\\nUniversity Press, 1966.\",\n \"Plotinus, Die sogenannte Theologie des Aristoteles: aus\\narabischen Handschriften (Theology of Aristotle),\\nF. Dieterici (ed.), Leipzig, 1882. [Reprint: Amsterdam: Rodopi,\\n1965.]\",\n \"Proclus. Liber de Causis (The Book of Causes)/ (in\\nArabic: kalâm fî mahd al-khayr /\\nDiscourse on Pure Goodness)\\n \\n\\n Bardenhewer, Otto, (ed.). Die pseudo-aristotelische Schrift\\nUeber das reine gute: bekannt unter dem Namen Liber De Causis\\n[Arabic text]. Freiberg-im-Breisgau: Herder, 1882 / Frankfurt am\\nMain: Minerva, 1957.\\n\\n Badawi, A (ed.). Liber (Pseudo-Aristotelis) de\\nexpositione bonitatis purae. In Neoplatonici apud Arabes.\\nIslamica 19 [Arabic text]. Cairo, 1955; pp. 1–33.\\n\\n St. Thomas Aquinas' Commentary on the Book of Causes,\\ntranslated and annotated by Vincent A. Guagliardo, Charles Hess, and\\nRichard C. Taylor. Washington: Catholic University of America Press,\\n1996.\\n \\n\",\n \"Bardenhewer, Otto, (ed.). Die pseudo-aristotelische Schrift\\nUeber das reine gute: bekannt unter dem Namen Liber De Causis\\n[Arabic text]. Freiberg-im-Breisgau: Herder, 1882 / Frankfurt am\\nMain: Minerva, 1957.\",\n \"Badawi, A (ed.). Liber (Pseudo-Aristotelis) de\\nexpositione bonitatis purae. In Neoplatonici apud Arabes.\\nIslamica 19 [Arabic text]. Cairo, 1955; pp. 1–33.\",\n \"St. Thomas Aquinas' Commentary on the Book of Causes,\\ntranslated and annotated by Vincent A. Guagliardo, Charles Hess, and\\nRichard C. Taylor. Washington: Catholic University of America Press,\\n1996.\",\n \"Proclus, De Philosophia Chaldaica:\\n \\n 1971. De Philosophia Chaldaica, ed. É. des Places.\\nParis (Oracles Chaldaïques, text établi et traduit, pp.\\n202–12)\\n\\n 1988. The exhortation to philosophy. Including the Letters of\\nIamblichus and Proclus' commentary on the Chaldean oracles.\\nIamblichus, Johnson, T. M., Neuville, S., & Proclus. [EST: De\\nphilosophia Chaldaica <engl.>]. Grand Rapids, Mich: Phanes\\nPress.\\n \\n\",\n \"1971. De Philosophia Chaldaica, ed. É. des Places.\\nParis (Oracles Chaldaïques, text établi et traduit, pp.\\n202–12)\",\n \"1988. The exhortation to philosophy. Including the Letters of\\nIamblichus and Proclus' commentary on the Chaldean oracles.\\nIamblichus, Johnson, T. M., Neuville, S., & Proclus. [EST: De\\nphilosophia Chaldaica <engl.>]. Grand Rapids, Mich: Phanes\\nPress.\",\n \"Simplicius, 1882. Simplicii in Aristotelis Physicorum libros\\nquattuor priores commentaria, edited by Herman Diels. Berlin.\",\n \"Altmann, Alexander. 1979. “Creation and Emanation in Isaac\\nIsraeli: A Reappraisal,” \\nStudies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, 1: 1–15.\",\n \"Altmann, Alexander, and Stern, S. M. 1958/2009. Isaac Israeli.\\nOxford: Oxford University Press. [Reprinted 2009 by University of Chicago Press.]\",\n \"Asín-Palacios, Miguel. 1978. The Mystical Philosophy of\\nIbn Masarra and his Followers. Leiden: E. J. Brill.\",\n \"Bargebuhr, Frederick P. 1976. Salomo Ibn Gabirol,\\nOstwestliches Dichtertum. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.\",\n \"Brunner, Fernand. 1965. Platonisme et\\naristotélisme—la critique d'Ibn Gabirol par St.\\nThomas d'Aquin. Louvain: Publications universitaires de\\nLouvain.\",\n \"–––. 1956 / 1997. “La doctrine de la\\nmatière chez Avicébron,” Revue de\\nThéologie et de Philosophie, trois. série, 6:\\n261—79. Reprinted in\\nFernand Brunner, Métaphysique d'Ibn Gabirol\\net de la tradition platonicienne. Great Britain; USA:\\nAshgate, Variorum.\",\n \"–––. 1965. Platonisme et\\nAristotélisme: la critique d'Ibn Gabirol par Saint\\nThomas D'Aquin. Louvain: Publications\\nUniversitaires de Louvain.\",\n \"–––. Fernand Brunner,\\nMétaphysique d'Ibn Gabirol et de la tradition\\nplatonicienne. Great Britain; USA: Ashgate,\\nVariorum.\",\n \"Cole, Peter. 2007. The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from\\nMuslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492. Lockert Library of Poetry in\\nTranslation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.\",\n \"–––. 2001. Selected Poems of Solomon Ibn\\nGabirol. Princeton University Press.\",\n \"Crowley, Theodore. 1950. Roger Bacon: The Problem of the\\nSoul in his Philosophical Commentaries. Louvain; Dublin: James\\nDuffy and Co., Ltd.\",\n \"Damascius. 1889. Dubitationes et Solutiones,\\nC. É. Ruelle (ed.), Paris: Klincksieck.\",\n \"Davidson, Herbert A. 1992. Alfarabi, Avicenna, and\\nAverroes on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active\\nIntellect and Theories of Human Intellect. Oxford University\\nPress.\",\n \"–––. 1972. “Alfarabi and Avicenna\\non the Active Intellect,” Viator, \\n3: 109–78.\",\n \"Dillon, John. 1992. “Solomon Ibn Gabirol's Doctrine of\\nIntelligible Matter,” in L. Goodman (ed.), Neoplatonism\\nand Jewish Thought, pp. 43–59. Albany: SUNY Press.\",\n \"Fenton, Paul. 1976. “Gleanings from Môseh Ibn\\n‘Ezra's Maqâlat\\nal-Hadîqa,” Sefarad, 36: 285–298.\",\n \"–––. Philosophie et\\nexégèse dans le Jardin de la méthaphore [sic] de\\nMoïse IbnʻEzra, philosophe et poète andalou du XIIe\\nsiècle. Leiden; New York: Brill.\",\n \"Friedlaender, M. 1877. Essays on the Writings of Abraham Ibn\\nEzra. London. [Reprinted: Jerusalem, 1964].\\n\\nContains (in Hebrew) Abraham ibn Ezra's recounted\\nversion of Gabirol's commentary on Genesis.\",\n \"Frank, Daniel H. 1998. “Ibn Gabirol, Solomon\\n(1021/2–57/8),” s.v. Routledge Encyclopedia of\\nPhilosophy, Version 1.0. London and New York: Routledge.\",\n \"Gersh, Stephen. 1978. From Iamblichus to Eriugena: An\\nInvestigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysian\\nTradition. Leiden: E.J. Brill.\",\n \"Gibb, H.A.R., et al. (ed.),\\n1954. “anbaduklîs,” s.v. Encyclopedia\\nof Islam, New Edition, Volume I, pp. 483–4. Leiden:\\nBrill\",\n \"–––, 1954. hayûlâ,”\\ns.v. Encyclopedia of Islam, New Edition, Leiden: Brill.\",\n \"–––, 1954. “Kursî,”\\ns.v. Encyclopedia of Islam, New Edition, Volume V, p. 509,\\nLeiden: Brill.\",\n \"Gilson, Etienne. 1955. History of Christian Philosophy in the\\nMiddle Ages, New York: Random House.\",\n \"Gluck, Andrew. 2003. The Kingly Crown, Keter Malkhut,\\ntranslation and notes by Bernard Lewis. Indiana: University of Notre\\nDame.\",\n \"Gracia and Newton. 2010. “Medieval Theories of the\\nCategories,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy\\n(Summer 2010 Edition),\\nEdward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =\\n<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/medieval-categories/>.\",\n \"Guttmann, Julius. 1973. Philosophies of Judaism: A History of\\nJewish Philosophy from Biblical Times to Franz Rosenzweig. New\\nYork: Schocken Books.\",\n \"Heller-Wilensky, Sara O. 1967. “Isaac Ibn Latif—Philosopher \\nor Kabbalist,” in Jewish Medieval and Renaissance\\nStudies, edited by Alexander Altmann. Cambridge: Harvard\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Husik, Isaac. 1916/1958. A History of Medieval Jewish\\nPhilosophy. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of\\nAmerica.\",\n \"Idel, Moshe. 1982. “Ha-sefirot she-me‘al ha-sefirot:\\nlahkor meqorotehem shel rishone he-mequbalim,”\\nTarbiz 51, pp. 239–280.\",\n \"–––. 1992. “Jewish Kabbalah and Platonism\\nin the Middle Ages and Renaissance,” in L. E. Goodman, (ed.),\\nNeoplatonism and Jewish Thought, pp. 319–51. Albany:\\nSUNY Press.\",\n \"Ikhwân as-safâ’ (Brethren of\\nPurity). 1928. Rasâ’il Ikhwân\\nas-safâ’. Volume 2. Cairo.\",\n \"Karamanolis, George E. 2006. Plato and Aristotle in Agreement?:\\nPlatonists on Aristotle from Antiochus to Porphyry. Oxford\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"Kaufmann, David. 1877/1964. “Ha-Pseudo Empedocles ka-Mekor\\nle-R’ Shlomo ibn Gabirol,” Mehkarim ba-Sifrut\\nha-Ivrit, pp. 78–164, Jerusalem: Mosad Ha-Ruv Kuk.\",\n \"–––. 1880. Die Spuren al-Batlajûsi's,\\nStudien Über Salomon ibn Gabirol and Die Sinne,\\nBudapest. [Reprint with an introduction by Louis Jacobs: London: Gregg\\nInternational Publishers Ltd., 1972.]\",\n \"–––. 1899. Studien über\\nSalomon Ibn Gabirol (Jahresberichte der\\nLandes-Rabbinerschule zu Budapest für das Schuljahr\\n1898/99). Budapest. [Reprint: New York : Arno Press, 1980]\",\n \"Lewis, Bernard, tr., 1961. Solomon ibn Gabirol: The Kingly\\nCrown. London: Vallentine, Mitchell. [See edition of Gluck\\n2003].\",\n \"Liebes, Yehudah. 1987. “Sefer Yezirah ezel R. Shlomo\\nIbn Gevirol u-perush ha-shir ‘Ahavtikha.” In The\\nBeginnings of Jewish Mysticism in Medieval Europe, edited by\\nJ. Dan. [Also In\\nJerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 6: 73–123.]\",\n \"Loewe, Raphael. 1989. Ibn Gabirol. London: Peter\\nHalban.\",\n \"–––. 1979. “Ibn Gabirol's Treatment of\\nSources in the Kether Malkhuth,” in Studies in\\nJewish Religious and Intellectual History (Presented to Alexander\\nAltmann on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday), edited by\\nS. Stein and R. Loewe, pp. 183–194. Tuscaloosa: The University\\nof Alabama Press.\",\n \"Mathis II, C. K. 1992. “Parallel Structures in the Metaphysics\\nof Iamblichus and Ibn Gabirol,” in L. E. Goodman, Ed.\\nNeoplatonism and Jewish Thought, pp. 61–76. Albany:\\nSUNY Press.\",\n \"Nasr, Seyyed Hossein. 1993. An Introduction to Islamic\\nCosmological Doctrines. Albany: State University of New York\\nPress.\",\n \"Pessin, Sarah. 2003. “Jewish Neoplatonism: Being\\nAbove Being and Divine Emanation in Solomon Ibn Gabirol and Isaac\\nIsraeli,” in Cambridge Companion to Medieval Jewish\\nPhilosophy, edited by Dan Frank and Oliver Leaman,\\npp. 91–110. Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"–––. 2004. “Loss, Presence, and Gabirol's\\nDesire: Medieval Jewish Philosophy and the Possibility of a Feminist\\nGround,” in Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy,\\nedited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, pp. 27–50. Bloomington: Indiana\\nUniversity Press.\",\n \"–––. 2005a. “The Manifest Image: Revealing the\\nHidden in Halevi, Saadya and Gabirol,” in History of\\nPlatonism: Plato Redivivus, edited by John Finamore and Robert\\nBerchman, pp. 253–270. New Orleans: University Press of the South.\",\n \"–––. 2005b. “The Influence of Islamic\\nThought on Maimonides,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of\\nPhilosophy (Fall 2005 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =\\n<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2005/entries/maimonides-islamic/>.\",\n \"–––. 2009. “Matter, Form and the Corporeal\\nWorld,” in The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy: From\\nAntiquity to the Seventeenth Century, edited by Tamar Rudavsky\\nand Steven Nadler, pp. 269–301. Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress.\",\n \"Peters, F. E. 1967. “Avicebron (Ibn Gabirol, Solomon ben\\nJudah),” s.v. New Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 1, p.\\n1130. [New York: McGraw-Hill]\",\n \"Pines, S. 1955. “A Tenth Century Philosophical\\nCorrespondence,” Proceedings of the American Academy for\\nJewish Research, 24, pp. 103–136.\",\n \"–––. 1958/1977. “Sefer\\n‘Arûgat ha-Bôsem: ha-Qeta‘im mi-tôkh\\nSêfer ‘Meqôr\\nHayyîm’,” Tarbiz 27. [Reprinted in\\nShlomo Pines, Bêyn Mahshevet Yisrôel\\nle-Mahshevet ha-‘Amîm: Mehkarîm\\nbe-Tôldôt ha-Fîlôsôfiya\\nha-Yehûdit (Bialik: Jerusalem, 1977), pp. 44–60 [in\\nHebrew].\",\n \"–––. 1977a. “ha-’im dîber\\nShlômô Ibn Gabîrôl sarah al\\nha-ûma?,” in Bêyn Mahshevet Yisrôel\\nle-Mahshevet ha-‘Amîm: Mehkarîm\\nbe-Tôldôt ha-Fîlôsôfiya\\nha-Yehûdit (Bialik: Jerusalem, 1977), pp. 61–7 [in\\nHebrew].\",\n \"–––. 1980. “Ve-qara el ha-Ayin\\nve-Nivqa,” Tarbiz, 50: 339–47.\",\n \"Rudavksy, T. M. 1978. “Conflicting Motifs: Ibn Gabirol on\\nMatter and Evil.” The New Scholasticism, 52 (1): 54–71.\",\n \"–––. 1991. “Ibn Gabirol\\n(Avicebron or Avicebrol),” s.v. Dictionary of Literary\\nBiography (Medieval Volume, Vol. 115), pp. 248–252. Detroit: Gale.\",\n \"Samuelson, Norbert. 1987. “Ibn Gabirol, Shelomoh,” s.v.\\nThe Encyclopedia of Religion, edited by Mircea Eliade. New\\nYork: The MacMillan Publishing Co.\",\n \"Schechter, Solomon. 1909/1961. Aspects of Rabbinic Theology:\\nMajor Concepts of the Talmud. New York: Schocken Books.\",\n \"Scheindlin, Raymond. 1986. Wine, Women and Death: Medieval\\nHebrew Poems on the Good Life. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication\\nSociety.\",\n \"–––. 1991. The Gazelle: Medieval Hebrew\\nPoems on God, Israel, and the Soul. Philadelphia: Jewish\\nPublication Society.\",\n \"Schirmann-Fleischer. 1995. The History of Hebrew Poetry in\\nMuslim Spain. Jerusalem: Magnes and Ben-Zvi.\",\n \"Schlanger, Jacques. 1965. “Sur le role du\\n‘tout’ dans la création selon Ibn\\nGabirol,” Revue des Études Juives,\\nVol. IV: 125–35.\",\n \"–––. 1968. Le philosophie de Salomon Ibn\\nGabirol. Leiden: E.J. Brill.\",\n \"Scholem, G. 1939. “Iqvatov shel Gevirol\\nba-Qabbalah.” In E. Steiman and A.A. Kovak,\\nEds. Measef Sofrei Eretz Yisroel, pp.\\n160–78. Tel Aviv.\",\n \"Sharp, D. E. 1930. Franciscan Philosophy at Oxford in the\\nThirteenth Century. London: Oxford University Press.\",\n \"Skolnik, Fred (ed.). 1996. “Merkabah\\nMysticism,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica (1996\\nedition). Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House.\",\n \"–––. 1996. “Shekhina,”\\nin Encyclopaedia Judaica (1996 edition). Jerusalem: Keter\\nPublishing House.\",\n \"–––. 1996. “Throne of God,”\\nin Encyclopaedia Judaica (1996 edition). Jerusalem: Keter\\nPublishing House.\",\n \"Sirat, Colette. 1985. A History of Jewish Philosophy in the\\nMiddle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\",\n \"Stern, S. M. 1983a. “Ibn Hasday's Neoplatonist,”\\nreprinted in F.W. Zimmerman ed. Medieval Arabic and Hebrew\\nThought. London: Variorum Reprints, pp. 58–120.\",\n \"–––. 1983b. “Ibn Masarra—A\\nMyth?” reprinted in F.W. Zimmerman ed.\\nMedieval Arabic and Hebrew Thought. London: Variorum\\nReprints.\",\n \"Taylor, Richard C. 1979. “St. Thomas and the Liber de causis on the\\nHylomorphic Composition of Separate Substances,” Mediaeval\\nStudies XLI, pp. 506–13.\",\n \"–––. 1981. The Liber de Causis (Kalâm\\nfî mahd al-khair): A Study of Medieval Neoplatonism.\\nDoctoral Thesis, University of Toronto.\",\n \"Tanenbaum, Adena. 1996. “Nine Spheres or Ten? A Medieval Gloss\\non Moses Ibn Ezra's ‘Be-Shem El Asher\\nAmar’,” Journal of Jewish Studies, Vol.\\nXLVII, No. 2, pp. 294–303.\",\n \"Tzemah, Adi. 1985. Essay in Mehkarim bi-yetsirat\\nShelomoh Ibn Gevirol, edited by Zvi Malachi. Tel-Aviv:\\nMekhon Kats le-heker ha-sifrut ha-‘ivrit, Universitat\\nTel-Aviv.\",\n \"Tzur, Reuven. 1985. “‘Ahavtikha ki-ahavat ish\\nyehido’ li-Ibn Gevirol—Shir Philosophi o Philosophia\\nbe-haruzim?,” in Mehkarim bi-yetsirat Shelomoh Ibn\\nGevirol, edited by Zvi Malachi. Tel-Aviv: Mekhon Kats\\nle-heker ha-sifrut ha-‘ivrit, Universitat Tel-Aviv.\",\n \"Weisheipl, James A. 1979. “Albertus Magnus and Universal\\nHylomorphism: Avicebron,” in Southwestern Journal of\\nPhilosophy 10, pp. 239–260.\",\n \"Wensinck, A. J. 1932. The Muslim Creed: Its Genesis and\\nHistorical Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University\\nPress.\",\n \"Wolfson, Elliot R. 1990. “God, the Demiurge and the Intellect:\\nOn the Usage of the Word Kol in Abraham ibn Ezra,”\\nRevue des Études Juives 149, pp. 77-111.\",\n \"Wolfson, H. A. 1973. “The meaning of ex nihilo in\\nIsaac Israeli,” reprinted in Studies in the History of\\nPhilosophy and Religion, Harry Austryn Wolfson, edited by Twersky\\nand Williams, Vol I, pp. 222–33. Cambridge: Harvard University\\nPress.\",\n \"–––. 1979. Repercussions of the Kalam in\\nJewish Philosophy. Mass.: Cambridge University Press.\"\n]","isConversational":false},"related_entries":{"kind":"list like","value":[{"href":"../arabic-islamic-greek/","text":"Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, historical and methodological topics in: Greek sources"},{"href":"../arabic-islamic-judaic/","text":"Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, historical and methodological topics in: influence of Arabic and Islamic Philosophy on Judaic thought"},{"href":"../aristotle/","text":"Aristotle"},{"href":"../binarium/","text":"binarium famosissimum [= most famous pair]"},{"href":"../maimonides-islamic/","text":"Maimonides: the influence of Islamic thought on"},{"href":"../plotinus/","text":"Plotinus"},{"href":"../theology-aristotle/","text":"Theology of Aristotle"}],"string":"[\n {\n \"href\": \"../arabic-islamic-greek/\",\n \"text\": \"Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, historical and methodological topics in: Greek sources\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../arabic-islamic-judaic/\",\n \"text\": \"Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, historical and methodological topics in: influence of Arabic and Islamic Philosophy on Judaic thought\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../aristotle/\",\n \"text\": \"Aristotle\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../binarium/\",\n \"text\": \"binarium famosissimum [= most famous pair]\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../maimonides-islamic/\",\n \"text\": \"Maimonides: the influence of Islamic thought on\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../plotinus/\",\n \"text\": \"Plotinus\"\n },\n {\n \"href\": \"../theology-aristotle/\",\n \"text\": \"Theology of Aristotle\"\n }\n]","isConversational":false}}}],"truncated":false,"partial":false},"paginationData":{"pageIndex":0,"numItemsPerPage":100,"numTotalItems":1776,"offset":0,"length":100}},"jwt":"eyJhbGciOiJFZERTQSIsImtpZCI6IjVHZDBvd0g5MTM2eDZjc1FvbE1zcktNWUZoRVFoUm5PVVVybEpjOUhaUEEifQ.eyJyZWFkIjp0cnVlLCJwZXJtaXNzaW9ucyI6eyJyZXBvLmNvbnRlbnQucmVhZCI6dHJ1ZX0sInJlcG9JZHMiOlsiNjNlNjNjZDQyNmZhNDJlMTE3ZWY0Zjg0Il0sImlhdCI6MTc5MzQ0NDMzMSwianRpIjoiMDBlODZjMmUtMjMyZi00NWNkLWE1NzgtNzA2M2JjMWE4NDczIiwic3ViIjoiL2RhdGFzZXRzL2h1Z2ZhY2VndXkwMDAxL3N0YW5mb3JkX3BsYXRvIiwiZXhwIjoxNzkzNDQ3OTMxLCJpc3MiOiJodHRwczovL2h1Z2dpbmdmYWNlLmNvIn0.XOF5KG1FHuhriORTHllrMwo7afrTW_rPC8Ia0cleteapLu_3OS5SUwNkptZP3qsyuK7BSslf8wHomRZ8RjgcCQ","displayUrls":true,"splitSizeSummaries":[{"config":"default","split":"train","numRows":1776,"numBytesParquet":90000475}]},"discussionsStats":{"closed":0,"open":0,"total":0},"fullWidth":true,"hasGatedAccess":true,"hasFullAccess":true,"isEmbedded":false,"savedQueries":{"community":[],"user":[]}}">
shorturl stringlengths 2 35 | title stringlengths 3 84 | pubinfo stringlengths 31 71 | preamble list | toc list | main_text list | bibliography list | related_entries list |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
abduction | Abduction | First published Wed Mar 9, 2011; substantive revision Tue May 18, 2021 | [
"\nIn the philosophical literature, the term “abduction” is\nused in two related but different senses. In both senses, the term\nrefers to some form of explanatory reasoning. However, in the\nhistorically first sense, it refers to the place of explanatory\nreasoning in generating hypotheses, while in the sense in\n... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Abduction: The General Idea",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Deduction, induction, abduction",
"1.2 The ubiquity of abduction"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. Explicating Abduction",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. The Status of Abduction",
"sub_toc": [
... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nYou happen to know that Tim and Harry have recently had a terrible row\nthat ended their friendship. Now someone tells you that she just saw\nTim and Harry jogging together. The best explanation for this that you\ncan think of is that they made up. You conclude that they are friends... | [
"Achinstein, P., 2001. The Book of Evidence, Oxford:\nOxford University Press.",
"Adler, J., 1994. “Testimony, Trust, Knowing,”\nJournal of Philosophy, 91: 264–275.",
"Bach, K. and Harnish, R., 1979. Linguistic Communication and\nSpeech Acts, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.",
"Bird, A., 1998. Philosophy of Science, ... | [
{
"href": "../epistemology-bayesian/",
"text": "epistemology: Bayesian"
},
{
"href": "../induction-problem/",
"text": "induction: problem of"
},
{
"href": "../peirce/",
"text": "Peirce, Charles Sanders"
},
{
"href": "../scientific-explanation/",
"text": "scientific explan... |
abelard | Peter Abelard | First published Tue Aug 3, 2004; substantive revision Fri Aug 12, 2022 | [
"\nPeter Abelard (1079–21 April 1142) [‘Abailard’ or\n‘Abaelard’ or ‘Habalaarz’ and so on] was the\npre-eminent philosopher and theologian of the twelfth century. The\nteacher of his generation, he was also famous as a poet and a\nmusician. Prior to the recovery of Aristotle, he brought the native\nLatin tradition ... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life and Works",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Life",
"1.2 Works"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. Metaphysics",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Logic",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. Philosophy of Language",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
... | [
{
"main_content": [],
"section_title": "1. Life and Works",
"subsections": [
{
"content": [
"\nAbelard’s life is relatively well-known. In addition to events\nchronicled in the public record, his inner life is revealed in his\nautobiographical letter Historia calamitatum [“The\nS... | [
"Carmen ad Astralabium. Edited by J. M. A.\nRubingh-Bosscher in Peter Abelard: Carmen ad Astralabium, a\nCritical Edition. Groningen: phil. diss. Rijksuniversiteit\n1987.",
"Collationes a.k.a. Dialogus inter Philosophum,\nIudaeum, et Christianum. Edited by Giovanni Orlandi, with\nintroduction, translation, and no... | [
{
"href": "../aristotle-logic/",
"text": "Aristotle, General Topics: logic"
},
{
"href": "../mereology-medieval/",
"text": "mereology: medieval"
},
{
"href": "../relations-medieval/",
"text": "relations: medieval theories of"
},
{
"href": "../medieval-syllogism/",
"text":... |
abhidharma | Abhidharma | First published Mon Aug 16, 2010; substantive revision Wed Jun 1, 2022 | [
"\nThe first centuries after Śākyamuni Buddha’s death saw\nthe rise of multiple schools of thought and teacher lineages within\nthe Buddhist community as it spread throughout the Indian\nsubcontinent. These new forms of scholarly monastic communities had\ndistinct theoretical and practical interests and, in their e... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Abhidharma: its origins and texts",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Literary style and genre",
"1.2 Abhidharma exegesis: from Dharma to dharmas"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. The ",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Time: from impermanence to momentariness",
... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nThe early history of Buddhism in India is remarkably little known and\nthe attempt to construct a consistent chronology of that history still\nengrosses the minds of contemporary scholars. A generally accepted\ntradition has it that some time around the beginning of the third\ncentu... | [
"[A] Aṅguttara-nikāya",
"[Dhs-a] Atthasālinī\n(Dhammasaṅgaṇi commentary)",
"[Abhidh-av] Abhidhammāvatāra",
"[Abhidh-s] Abhidhammatthasaṅgaha",
"[Akb] Abhidharmakośabhāṣya, P. Pradhan,\n(ed.), Patna: Jayaswal Research Institute, 1975",
"[Kv] Kathāvatthu",
"[Dhs] Dhammasaṅgaṇi",
"[Dhs-mṭ]\nDhammasaṅgaṇi... | [
{
"href": "../atomism-modern/",
"text": "atomism: 17th to 20th century"
},
{
"href": "../atomism-ancient/",
"text": "atomism: ancient"
},
{
"href": "../consciousness-intentionality/",
"text": "consciousness: and intentionality"
},
{
"href": "../contradiction/",
"text": "c... |
abilities | Abilities | First published Tue Jan 26, 2010; substantive revision Thu Oct 8, 2020 | [
"\nIn the accounts we give of one another, claims about our\nabilities appear to be indispensable. Some abilities are so\nwidespread that many who have them take them for granted, such as the\nability to walk, or to write one’s name, or to tell a hawk from a\nhandsaw. Others are comparatively rare and notable, such... | [
{
"content_title": "1. A taxonomy",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Dispositions and other powers",
"1.2 Demarcating abilities",
"1.3 ‘Know how’ and the intelligent powers"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. Two fundamental distinctions",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 General and specific abilities",... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nWhat is an ability? On one reading, this question is a demand\nfor a theory of ability of the sort described above. On\nanother reading, however, this question simply asks for a rough guide\nto what sort of things we are speaking of when we speak of\n‘abilities’. So understood, this... | [
"Albritton, Rogers, 1985. “Freedom of Will and Freedom of\nAction,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American\nPhilosophical Association, 59: 239–251.",
"Alvarez, Maria, 2013. “Agency and Two-Way Powers,”\nProceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 113:\n101–121.",
"Austin, J.L., 1956. “Ifs and Cans,” Proceedings... | [
{
"href": "../action/",
"text": "action"
},
{
"href": "../compatibilism/",
"text": "compatibilism"
},
{
"href": "../conditionals/",
"text": "conditionals"
},
{
"href": "../dispositions/",
"text": "dispositions"
},
{
"href": "../incompatibilism-arguments/",
"te... |
abner-burgos | Abner of Burgos | First published Mon Jul 9, 2012; substantive revision Fri Aug 28, 2020 | [
"\nAbner of Burgos (Alfonso de Valladolid; c. 1260–1347) was\nperhaps the most important philosopher in the stream of Jewish Spanish\nrabbi-apostates in the 14th and 15th centuries.\nIn the first part of his life, Abner was an Aristotelian Jewish\nphilosopher. However, at the age of 60 (if Pablo de Santa Maria is a... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Works",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. The Trinity and Incarnation",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. Determinism",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "5. Critics of the Aristot... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nThere are not many sources on the life of Abner. The majority of the\nsources are autobiographical passages in his works (especially\nMostrador de Justicia). Abner was born around 1260, probably\nin the Jewish community of Burgos, one of the major communities in\nCastile. While stil... | [
"Meyasher aqob, G. Gluskina (ed. and trans.), Moscow:\nNauka, 1983.",
"Ofrenda de zelos y Libro de la ley, W. Mettmann (ed.),\nOpladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1990.\n [Available online].",
"Mostrador de justicia, W. Mettmann (ed.), Opladen:\nWestdeutscher Verlag, 1996–1997.",
"Responses to the Blasphemer (Tesh... | [
{
"href": "../aristotle-natphil/",
"text": "Aristotle, Special Topics: natural philosophy"
},
{
"href": "../crescas/",
"text": "Crescas, Hasdai"
},
{
"href": "../determinism-causal/",
"text": "determinism: causal"
},
{
"href": "../free-will-foreknowledge/",
"text": "free ... |
abrabanel | Judah Abrabanel | First published Fri Dec 2, 2005; substantive revision Wed Jun 8, 2022 | [
"\n\nJudah Abrabanel (ca. 1465–after 1521), also known as Leone Ebreo, is\nan important transitional figure in the history of Jewish\nphilosophy. Common to any transitional figure, however, is the problem\nof contextualization. In the case of Judah Abrabanel, do we regard him\nas the last of the medieval Jewish phi... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life and Works",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Life",
"1.2 Works",
"1.3 Dialoghi d’amore and the Question of Language"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. Faith, Reason, and Myth",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Beauty and Love",
"sub_toc": []
},
... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\n\nThere exists a large debate in the secondary literature concerning the\nplace and role of Jews in Renaissance culture. One group envisages a\nsynthesis between Jewish culture on the one hand, and the ideals of\nthe Renaissance on the\n other.[2] \n Jews, according to this interpre... | [
"Abrabanel, Judah (Ebreo, Leone). Dialoghi d’amore. Ed.\nSantino Caramella. Bari: Laterza e Figli, 1929.",
"–––. Dialoghi d’amore. Tradutione e\nintroduzione ebraica di Menachem Dorman. Jerusalem: Bialik Institute,\n1983.",
"–––. Dialogos de amor. Leao Hebreu.\nTraduzido por Giacinto Manuppella. Testo italiano ... | [
{
"href": "../ficino/",
"text": "Ficino, Marsilio"
},
{
"href": "../maimonides/",
"text": "Maimonides"
}
] |
abstract-objects | Abstract Objects | First published Thu Jul 19, 2001; substantive revision Mon Aug 9, 2021 | [
"\nOne doesn’t go far in the study of what there is without\nencountering the view that every entity falls into one of two\ncategories: concrete or abstract. The distinction is\nsupposed to be of fundamental significance for metaphysics (especially\nfor ontology), epistemology, and the philosophy of the formal scie... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Introduction",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 About the Expression ‘Object’",
"1.2 About the Abstract/Concrete Distinction"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. Historical Remarks",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 The Provenance of the Distinction",
"2.2 An Initial Overview of the... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nThe abstract/concrete distinction has a curious status in contemporary\nphilosophy. It is widely agreed that the ontological distinction is of\nfundamental importance, but as yet, there is no standard account of\nhow it should be drawn. There is a consensus about how to classify\nce... | [
"Armstrong, David, 1978, Universals and Scientific Realism\n(Volume I: Nominalism and Realism; Volume II: A Theory of\nUniversals), New York: Cambridge University Press.",
"–––, 1989, Universals: An Opinionated\nIntroduction, Boulder: Westview Press.",
"Azzouni, Jody, 1997a, “Applied Mathematics, Existential\nC... | [
{
"href": "../analytic-synthetic/",
"text": "analytic/synthetic distinction"
},
{
"href": "../carnap/",
"text": "Carnap, Rudolf"
},
{
"href": "../fictionalism/",
"text": "fictionalism"
},
{
"href": "../frege/",
"text": "Frege, Gottlob"
},
{
"href": "../mathphil-in... |
essential-accidental | Essential vs. Accidental Properties | First published Tue Apr 29, 2008; substantive revision Mon Oct 26, 2020 | [
"\nThe distinction between essential versus accidental\nproperties has been characterized in various ways, but it is\noften understood in modal terms: an essential\nproperty of an object is a property that it must have, while an\naccidental property of an object is one that it happens to\nhave but that it could lac... | [
{
"content_title": "1. The Modal Characterization of the Essential/Accidental Property Distinction",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Other Ways of Characterizing the Essential/Accidental Property Distinction",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Four Ways of Characterizing Es... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nAccording to the basic modal characterization of the\ndistinction between essential and accidental properties, which is the\ncharacterization given at the outset,",
"\n\\(P\\) is an essential property of an object \\(o\\)\njust in case it is necessary that \\(o\\) has \\(P\\),... | [
"Adams, R., 1979, “Primitive Thisness and Primitive\nIdentity”, Journal of Philosophy, 76: 5–26.",
"Bennett, D., 1969, “Essential Properties”, Journal\nof Philosophy, 66: 487–499.",
"Bennett, K., 2004, “Spatio-Temporal Coincidence and the\nGrounding Problem”, Philosophical Studies, 118:\n339–371.",
"Brody, B.... | [
{
"href": "../aristotle-metaphysics/",
"text": "Aristotle, General Topics: metaphysics"
},
{
"href": "../descartes-modal/",
"text": "Descartes, René: modal metaphysics"
},
{
"href": "../identity-indiscernible/",
"text": "identity: of indiscernibles"
},
{
"href": "../identity-... |
action | Action | First published Wed Jan 11, 2023 | [
"\n[Editor’s Note: The following new entry by\nJuan Piñeros Glasscock and Sergio Tenenbaum\nreplaces the\n former entry on this topic by the previous author.]\n",
"\nThere is an important difference between activity and passivity: the\nfire is active with respect to the log when it burns it (and the log\npassive ... | [
{
"content_title": "1. About the Question: What is an Action?",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Causalism and Causal Theories of Action",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 Davidson’s Predecessors and the Central Arguments in the Debate",
"2.2 Davidson on the Nature of Intentional Actions",
... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nThe central question in philosophy of action is standardly taken to\nbe: “What makes something an action?” However, we obtain\ndifferent versions of the question depending on what we take as the\ncontrast class from which actions are to be differentiated. The\ndifferent questions in... | [
"Achinstein, Peter, 1975, “Causation, Transparency, and\nEmphasis”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 5 (1):\n1–23. ",
"Alvarez, Maria, 2013, “Agency and Two-Way Powers”,\nProceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 113: 101–121. ",
"–––, 2017, “Reasons for Action:\nJustification, Motivation, Explanation”, The Stanf... | [
{
"href": "../shared-agency/",
"text": "agency: shared"
},
{
"href": "../anscombe/",
"text": "Anscombe, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret"
},
{
"href": "../daoism/",
"text": "Daoism"
},
{
"href": "../davidson/",
"text": "Davidson, Donald"
},
{
"href": "../episteme-techn... |
action-perception | Action-based Theories of Perception | First published Wed Jul 8, 2015 | [
"Action is a means of acquiring perceptual information about the\nenvironment. Turning around, for example, alters your spatial\nrelations to surrounding objects and, hence, which of their properties\nyou visually perceive. Moving your hand over an object’s surface\nenables you to feel its shape, temperature, and t... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Early Action-Based Theories",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Movement and Touch in the New Theory Of Vision",
"1.2 Objections to Berkeley’s Theory",
"1.3 Lotze, Helmholtz, and the Local Sign Doctrine"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. Sensorimotor Contingency Theories",
... | [
{
"main_content": [
"Two doctrines dominate philosophical and psychological discussions\nof the relationship between action and space perception from the\n18th to the early 20th century. The first\nis that the immediate objects of sight are two-dimensional manifolds\nof light and color, lacking perceptibl... | [
"Abbott, T.K., 1864, Sight and Touch: An Attempt to Disprove\nthe Received (or Berkeleian) Theory of Vision, London: Longman\n& Co.",
"Alsmith, A. and F. de Vignemont, 2012, “Embodying the Mind\nand Representing the Body”, Review of Philosophy and\nPsychology, 3(1): 1–13.",
"Armstrong, D.M., 1960, Berkeley's th... | [
{
"href": "../bodily-awareness/",
"text": "bodily awareness"
},
{
"href": "../embodied-cognition/",
"text": "cognition: embodied"
},
{
"href": "../phenomenology/",
"text": "phenomenology"
}
] |
qm-action-distance | Action at a Distance in Quantum Mechanics | First published Fri Jan 26, 2007 | [
"\n\nIn the quantum realm, there are curious correlations between the\nproperties of distant systems. An example of such correlations is\nprovided by the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen/Bohm experiment. The\ncorrelations in the EPR/B experiment strongly suggest that there are\nnon-local influences between distant sy... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Introduction",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Bell's theorem and non-locality",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. The analysis of factorizability",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. Action at a distance, holism and non-separability"... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\n\nThe quantum realm involves curious correlations between distant\nevents. A well-known example is David Bohm's (1951) version of\nthe famous thought experiment that Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen\nproposed in 1935 (henceforth, the EPR/B experiment). Pairs of particles\nare emitted fr... | [
"Albert, D. (1992), Quantum Mechanics and Experience,\nCambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.",
"Albert, D. and Loewer, B. (1988), “Interpreting the\nmany-worlds interpretation”, Synthese\n77, 195-213. ",
"––– (1995), “Tails of Schrödinger's\ncat”, in R. Clifton (1996b), pp. 81-92.",
"Alexander, H. G. (19... | [
{
"href": "../bell-theorem/",
"text": "Bell’s Theorem"
},
{
"href": "../intrinsic-extrinsic/",
"text": "intrinsic vs. extrinsic properties"
},
{
"href": "../physics-holism/",
"text": "physics: holism and nonseparability"
},
{
"href": "../qm/",
"text": "quantum mechanics"
... |
possibilism-actualism | The Possibilism-Actualism Debate | First published Mon Nov 28, 2022 | [
"\nActualism is a widely-held view in the metaphysics of\nmodality that arises in response to the thesis of\npossibilism. To understand the motivations for possibilism,\nconsider first that most everyone would agree that things might have\nbeen different than they are in fact. For example, no one has free\nsoloed t... | [
{
"content_title": "1. The Focus of the Debate",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. The Origins and Nature of ",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 Possibilism and the Bi-Modal Conception of Being",
"2.2 Possibilism Without Bi-Modalism"
]
},
{
"content_title": "3. Possibilism and Pos... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nThe debate between possibilists and actualists is at root\nontological. It is not—fundamentally, at least—a\ndebate about meaning, or the proper linguistic primitives of our modal\ndiscourse, or the model theory of certain formal languages, or the\npermissibility of certain inferenc... | [
"Adams, Marilyn McCord, 1977, “Ockham’s Nominalism and\nUnreal Entities”, The Philosophical Review, 86(2):\n144–176. doi:10.2307/2184004",
"–––, 1987, William Ockham,\n(Publications in Medieval Studies / Medieval Institute, University of\nNotre Dame 26), Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.",
"Adams,... | [
{
"href": "../bolzano/",
"text": "Bolzano, Bernard"
},
{
"href": "../compositionality/",
"text": "compositionality"
},
{
"href": "../duns-scotus/",
"text": "Duns Scotus, John"
},
{
"href": "../essential-accidental/",
"text": "essential vs. accidental properties"
},
{
... |
actualism-possibilism-ethics | Actualism and Possibilism in Ethics | First published Mon May 20, 2019 | [
"\nSuppose that you have been invited to attend an ex-partner’s\nwedding and that the best thing you can do is accept the invitation\nand be pleasant at the wedding. But, suppose furthermore that if you\ndo accept the invitation, you’ll freely decide to get inebriated\nat the wedding and ruin it for everyone, which... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Historical Origins of the Debate",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Some Background Assumptions",
"1.2 An Argument that Utilitarianism is Formally Incoherent",
"1.3 Replies and the Rise of the Actualism/Possibilism Debate"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. Possibilism",
"... | [
{
"main_content": [],
"section_title": "1. Historical Origins of the Debate",
"subsections": [
{
"content": [
"\nFor contingent historical reasons, this debate has unfolded in such a\nway that the following background assumptions are made in the\nliterature. First, likely for eas... | [
"Almeida, Michael J., 1992, “The Paradoxes of Feldman’s\nNeo-Utilitarianism”, Australasian Journal of\nPhilosophy, 70(4): 455–468. doi:10.1080/00048409212345331",
"Åqvist, Lennart, 1969, “Improved Formulations of\nAct-Utilitarianism”, Noûs, 3(3): 299.\ndoi:10.2307/2214553",
"Baker, Derek, 2012, “Knowing Yoursel... | [
{
"href": "../action/",
"text": "action"
},
{
"href": "../dynamic-choice/",
"text": "choice, dynamic"
},
{
"href": "../consequentialism/",
"text": "consequentialism"
},
{
"href": "../consequentialism-rule/",
"text": "consequentialism: rule"
},
{
"href": "../logic-... |
adaptationism | Adaptationism | First published Thu Jul 22, 2010 | [
"“Adaptationism” refers to a family of views about the\nimportance of natural selection in the evolution of organisms, in the\nconstruction of evolutionary explanations, and in defining the goal of\nresearch on evolution. Advocates of adaptationism or\n“adaptationists” view natural selection among\nindividuals wit... | [
{
"content_title": "1. History",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Different Flavors of Adaptationism",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 Empirical Adaptationism",
"2.2 Explanatory Adaptationism",
"2.3 Methodological Adaptationism"
]
},
{
"content_title": "3. Testing and Stan... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\n\n The debate over adaptationism is often\ntraced back to a 1979 paper by Stephen Gould and Richard Lewontin,\ncalled “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm:\nA Critique of the Adaptationist Programme,” or simply the\n“Spandrels” paper. This paper is important but,... | [
"Ackermann, R. R., and J. M. Cheverud, 2004. “Detecting\ngenetic drift versus selection in human\nevolution,” Proceedings of the National Academy of\nSciences, 101: 17946–17951.",
"Albery, W.J., and J. R. Knowles, 1976. “Evolution of enzyme\nfunction and the development of catalytic\nefficiency,” Biochemistry, 15... | [
{
"href": "../biology-philosophy/",
"text": "biology: philosophy of"
},
{
"href": "../darwinism/",
"text": "Darwinism"
},
{
"href": "../evolution-development/",
"text": "developmental biology: evolution and development"
},
{
"href": "../evolution/",
"text": "evolution"
... |
addams-jane | Jane Addams | First published Wed Jun 7, 2006; substantive revision Thu Jul 7, 2022 | [
"\nJane Addams (1860–1935) was an activist, community organizer,\ninternational peace advocate, and social philosopher in the United\nStates during the late 19th century and early 20th century. However,\nthe dynamics of canon formation resulted in her philosophical\nwork being largely ignored until the\n 1990s.[1]\... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Influences",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Addams’ Standpoint Epistemology",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. Radical Meliorism ",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "5. Social... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nCompared to the many biographical accounts of Addams’ life, relatively\nfew comprehensively consider her philosophy. However, her\nphilosophical insights are closely tied to her life experiences which\nare briefly recounted below.",
"\nLaura Jane Addams was born in Cedarville,... | [
"Bryan, Mary Lynn McCree, Barbara Bair, and Maree De Angury (eds.),\nThe Selected Papers of Jane Addams (Volume 1: Preparing to\nLead, 1860–1881), Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press,\n2003.",
"–––. The Selected Papers of Jane\nAddams (Volume 2: Venturing into Usefulness, 1881–88),\nUrbana, IL: University of... | [
{
"href": "../dewey/",
"text": "Dewey, John"
},
{
"href": "../dewey-political/",
"text": "Dewey, John: political philosophy"
},
{
"href": "../femapproach-pragmatism/",
"text": "feminist philosophy, approaches: pragmatism"
},
{
"href": "../feminism-ethics/",
"text": "femin... |
adorno | Theodor W. Adorno | First published Mon May 5, 2003; substantive revision Mon Oct 26, 2015 | [
"\n\nTheodor W. Adorno was one of the most important philosophers and\nsocial critics in Germany after World War II. Although less well known\namong anglophone philosophers than his contemporary Hans-Georg\nGadamer, Adorno had even greater influence on scholars and\nintellectuals in postwar Germany. In the 1960s he... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Biographical Sketch",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Dialectic of Enlightenment",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Critical Social Theory",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. Aesthetic Theory",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"conten... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\n\nBorn on September 11, 1903 as Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund, Adorno lived\nin Frankfurt am Main for the first three decades of his life and the\nlast two (Müller-Doohm 2005, Claussen 2008). He was the only son\nof a wealthy German wine merchant of assimilated Jewish background and\na... | [
"The Adorno Reader, ed. B. O'Connor, Oxford: Blackwell,\n2000.",
"Can One Live after Auschwitz?: A Philosophical Reader,\ned. R. Tiedemann, trans. R. Livingstone et al., Stanford: Stanford\nUniversity Press, 2003.",
"The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture,\ned. J. M. Bernstein, London: Routledge,... | [
{
"href": "../benjamin/",
"text": "Benjamin, Walter"
},
{
"href": "../contradiction/",
"text": "contradiction"
},
{
"href": "../critical-theory/",
"text": "critical theory"
},
{
"href": "../domination/",
"text": "domination"
},
{
"href": "../enlightenment/",
"... |
advance-directives | Advance Directives and Substitute Decision-Making | First published Tue Mar 24, 2009 | [
"\n\nThere is a rough consensus in medical ethics on the requirement of\nrespect for patient\n autonomy:\nphysicians must ultimately defer to patients' own decisions about the\nmanagement of their medical care, so long as the patients are deemed to\nhave sufficient mental capacity to make the decisions in question.... | [
{
"content_title": "1. The orthodox legal view",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Challenges to the orthodox view regarding the never competent",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Conflicts across time in the formerly competent",
"sub_toc": [
"3.1 Threshold of auth... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\n\nIn legal contexts, two general standards or approaches to question\nQ2 have been developed:",
"\n\n\nThe Substituted Judgment standard: The surrogate's task is to\nreconstruct what the patient himself would have wanted, in the\ncircumstances at hand, if the patient had decis... | [
"Brock, D., 1995, “Death and Dying: Euthanasia and Sustaining\nLife: Ethical Issues,” in Encyclopedia of Bioethics (Volume\n1), W. Reich (ed.), New York: Simon and Schuster, 2nd\nedition, pp. 563-72.",
"Buchanan, A. E. and Brock, D. W., 1990, Deciding for Others:\nThe Ethics of Surrogate Decision-Making, Cambridg... | [
{
"href": "../personal-autonomy/",
"text": "autonomy: personal"
},
{
"href": "../principle-beneficence/",
"text": "beneficence, principle of"
},
{
"href": "../decision-capacity/",
"text": "decision-making capacity"
},
{
"href": "../legal-obligation/",
"text": "legal oblig... |
giles | Giles of Rome | First published Fri Dec 21, 2001; substantive revision Wed Dec 18, 2019 | [
"\n\nGiles of Rome (who died in 1316 as archbishop of Bourges) was one of\nthe most productive and influential thinkers active at the end of the\n13th century, who played a major role also in the political events of\nhis time. Giles of Rome was an extremely prolific author and left a\nvery large corpus of writings,... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Logic and Rhetoric",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Metaphysics and Theory of Knowledge",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. Natural Philosophy",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title"... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\n\nBorn in Rome most probably in the fifth decade of the thirteenth\ncentury, Giles was the first outstanding theologian of the relatively\nrecently founded Order of the Augustinian Hermits. Nothing more is\nknown about his origins: the statement that he belonged to the famous\nRoman... | [
"De ecclesiastica potestate, R. Scholz (ed.), Weimar 1929\n(New critical edition and revised English translation in\nR. W. Dyson, Giles of Rome’s On Ecclesiastical Power. A Medieval\nTheory of World Government., New York 2004",
"De differentia ethicae, politicae et rhetoricae, ed. G.\nBruni, The New Scholasticism... | [
{
"href": "../aquinas/",
"text": "Aquinas, Thomas"
},
{
"href": "../henry-ghent/",
"text": "Henry of Ghent"
}
] |
skepticism-ancient | Ancient Skepticism | First published Wed Feb 24, 2010; substantive revision Wed Sep 21, 2022 | [
"\nThe Greek word skepsis means investigation. Literally, a\n“skeptic” is an inquirer. Not all ancient philosophers\nwhom in retrospect we call “skeptics” refer to themselves\nas such. Nevertheless, they all embrace ways of life that are devoted\nto inquiry. Ancient skepticism is as much concerned with belief\nas w... | [
{
"content_title": "1. The Central Questions",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Skeptical Ideas in Early and Classical Greek Philosophy",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 Early Greek Philosophy",
"2.2 Plato",
"2.3 Aristotle"
]
},
{
"content_title": "3. Academic Skepticism",... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nThe core concepts of ancient skepticism are belief, suspension of\njudgment, criterion of truth, appearances, and investigation.\nImportant notions of modern skepticism such as knowledge, certainty,\njustified belief, and doubt play no or almost no role. This is not to\nsay that the... | [
"Annas, J. and J. Barnes (ed. and trans.), 2000, Sextus\nEmpiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, Cambridge: Cambridge\nUniversity Press, 2nd edition.",
"Bett, R. (ed. and trans. with commentary), 1997, Sextus\nEmpiricus: Against the Ethicists (Adversus Mathematicos XI),\nOxford: Oxford University Press.",
"Bett, R. ... | [
{
"href": "../arcesilaus/",
"text": "Arcesilaus"
},
{
"href": "../aristotle/",
"text": "Aristotle"
},
{
"href": "../carneades/",
"text": "Carneades"
},
{
"href": "../skepticism-moral/",
"text": "moral skepticism"
},
{
"href": "../perception-episprob/",
"text":... |
aesthetic-concept | The Concept of the Aesthetic | First published Fri Sep 11, 2009; substantive revision Mon Feb 28, 2022 | [
"\nIntroduced into the philosophical lexicon during the Eighteenth\nCentury, the term ‘aesthetic’ has come to designate, among\nother things, a kind of object, a kind of judgment, a kind of\nattitude, a kind of experience, and a kind of value. For the most\npart, aesthetic theories have divided over questions\npart... | [
{
"content_title": "1. The Concept of Taste",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Immediacy",
"1.2 Disinterest"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. The Concept of the Aesthetic",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 Aesthetic Objects",
"2.2 Aesthetic Judgment",
"2.3 The Aesthetic Attitude",
"2.4 Aest... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nThe concept of the aesthetic descends from the concept of taste. Why\nthe concept of taste commanded so much philosophical attention during\nthe 18th century is a complicated matter, but this much is clear: the\neighteenth-century theory of taste emerged, in part, as a corrective\nt... | [
"Augustine, 389–390/2005 De vera religione in\nWorks of Saint Augustine. A Translation for the 21st Century,\nBook 1, Volume 8, John E. Rotelle et al. (eds.), New York: New City\nPress.",
"Beardsley, M.C., 1958, Aesthetics, Indianapolis:\nHackett.",
"–––, 1962, “On the Generality of Critical\nReasons,” The Jour... | [
{
"href": "../aesthetics-19th-romantic/",
"text": "aesthetics: 19th Century Romantic"
},
{
"href": "../aesthetic-judgment/",
"text": "aesthetics: aesthetic judgment"
},
{
"href": "../aesthetics-18th-british/",
"text": "aesthetics: British, in the 18th century"
},
{
"href": ".... |
aesthetic-experience | Aesthetic Experience | First published Fri Jan 20, 2023 | [
"\nA paradigmatic aesthetic experience is a perceptual experience focused\non the beauty of an object like a work of art or an aspect of nature.\nSome philosophers take it that this is the only kind of aesthetic\nexperience, though many more take it that there are other varieties as\nwell. You might, for instance, ... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Focus of aesthetic experience",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Form and Function",
"1.2 Power to Please",
"1.3 Merit",
"1.4 (Emotional) expression",
"1.5 Fundamental Nature"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. Mental aspects of aesthetic experience",
"sub_toc"... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nAny aesthetic experience has intentionality: it is an experience (as)\nof some object. Typically, that object will be a work of\nart—such as a sculpture, a symphony, a painting, a performance,\nor a movie—or some aspect of nature, such as a bird’s\nplumage, a cliff, or a bright wint... | [
"Adorno, Theodor, 1970 [1997], Aesthetic Theory, Gretel\nAdorno and Rolf Tiedemann (eds.), Robert Hullot-Kentor (trans.),\nMinneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.",
"Addison, J. and R. Steele, 1712 [1879], The Spectator, A.\nChalmers (ed.), New York: D. Appleton.",
"Alberti, Leon Battista, 1443–1452 [1988],... | [
{
"href": "../aesthetics-19th-romantic/",
"text": "aesthetics: 19th Century Romantic"
},
{
"href": "../aesthetic-judgment/",
"text": "aesthetics: aesthetic judgment"
},
{
"href": "../aesthetics-18th-british/",
"text": "aesthetics: British, in the 18th century"
},
{
"href": ".... |
aesthetics-of-everyday | Aesthetics of the Everyday | First published Wed Sep 30, 2015; substantive revision Mon Nov 18, 2019 | [
"\nIn the history of Western aesthetics, the subject matters that\nreceived attention ranged from natural objects and phenomena, built\nstructures, utilitarian objects, and human actions, to what is today\nregarded as the fine arts. However, beginning with the nineteenth\ncentury, the discourse has become increasin... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Recent History",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. ‘Everyday’ and ‘Aesthetics’ in Everyday Aesthetics",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Defamiliarization of the Familiar",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. Negative Aesthetics",
"... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nWith the establishment of environmental aesthetics, efforts to open\nthe field of aesthetics beyond the fine arts started during the latter\nhalf of twentieth century. Almost all writers on everyday aesthetics\nderive inspiration from John Dewey’s Art as Experience,\nfirst published... | [
"Ackerman, Diane, 1991, A Natural History of the Senses,\nNew York: Vintage Books.",
"Al Qudowa, Salem Y., 2017, “Aesthetic Value of Minimalist\nArchitecture in Gaza”, Contemporary Aesthetics, 15.\n [Al Qudowa 2017 available online]",
"Ameel, Lieven and Sirpa Tani, 2011, “Everyday Aesthetics In\nAction: Parkour... | [
{
"href": "../adorno/",
"text": "Adorno, Theodor W."
},
{
"href": "../aesthetic-judgment/",
"text": "aesthetics: aesthetic judgment"
},
{
"href": "../environmental-aesthetics/",
"text": "aesthetics: environmental"
},
{
"href": "../aesthetics-existentialist/",
"text": "aes... |
affirmative-action | Affirmative Action | First published Fri Dec 28, 2001; substantive revision Mon Apr 9, 2018 | [
"\n\n“Affirmative action” means positive steps taken to\nincrease the representation of women and minorities in areas of\nemployment, education, and culture from which they have been\nhistorically excluded. When those steps involve preferential\nselection—selection on the basis of race, gender, or\nethnicity—affirm... | [
{
"content_title": "1. In the Beginning",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. The Controversy Engaged",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Rights and Consistency",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. Real-World Affirmative Action: The Workplace",
"sub_toc": [... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\n\nIn 1972, affirmative action became an inflammatory public issue.\nTrue enough, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 already had made something\ncalled “affirmative action” a remedy federal courts could\nimpose on violators of the Act. Likewise, after 1965 federal\ncontractors had been sub... | [
"65 Leading American Businesses, 2003: Brief Supporting Respondents\nin Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 244: 1–11.",
"823 Social Scientists, 2015: Brief Supporting Respondents in\nFisher v. University of Texas, 136 S. Ct. 2198 (2016):\n1–42.",
"Allen, Anita L., 1990–1991, “On Being a Role\nModel,” Berkeley Journ... | [
{
"href": "../equality/",
"text": "equality"
},
{
"href": "../equal-ed-opportunity/",
"text": "equality: of educational opportunity"
},
{
"href": "../equal-opportunity/",
"text": "equality: of opportunity"
},
{
"href": "../justice/",
"text": "justice"
},
{
"href":... |
africana | Africana Philosophy | First published Mon Oct 11, 2010; substantive revision Tue May 23, 2017 | [
"\n\n“Africana philosophy” is the name for an emergent and\nstill developing field of ideas and idea-spaces, intellectual\nendeavors, discourses, and discursive networks within and beyond\nacademic philosophy that was recognized as such by national and\ninternational organizations of professional philosophers, incl... | [
{
"content_title": "1. The Concept of Africana Philosophy",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Philosophizings Born of Struggles: Conditions of Emergence of Africana Philosophy",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Africana Philosophy: Continental Africa",
"sub_toc": []
},... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\n\nThere are significant challenges to the viability of the concept\nAfricana philosophy as well as to an effort to map out an\nencyclopedic overview of the extended and still expanding range of\nendeavors covered by the term. Foremost are the challenges to ordering\nthrough a single... | [
"Gordon, L, 2008, An Introduction to Africana Philosophy,\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.",
"Monahan, M. J., 2007, “Africana Philosophy: Globalizing the\nDiversity Curriculum,” in Diversity & Democracy, 10\n(3): 12–13.",
"Outlaw, Jr., L., 1996, “Africana Philosophy,” in L. T.\nOutlaw (Jr.), On Race and ... | [
{
"href": "../african-ethics/",
"text": "African Philosophy: ethics"
},
{
"href": "../african-sage/",
"text": "African Philosophy: sage philosophy"
},
{
"href": "../akan-person/",
"text": "Akan Philosophy: of the person"
},
{
"href": "../double-consciousness/",
"text": "d... |
afterlife | Afterlife | First published Mon Dec 26, 2005; substantive revision Wed Jan 23, 2019 | [
"\nOne of the points where there is a significant, long-lasting\nintersection of the interests of many philosophers with the interests\nof many people of all kinds and conditions concerns the nature and\nsignificance of death. How should we understand the mortality of all\nliving things and, closer to home, how sho... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Survival and its Alternatives",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. The Possibility of Survival—Dualism",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Objections to the Possibility of Survival—Materialism",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. Parapsy... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nIn ancient Western philosophy, Plato affirmed both a pre-natal life of\nthe soul and the soul’s continued life after the death of the\nbody. In Plato’s Phaedo, Socrates presents reasons why\na philosopher should even welcome death (albeit not permitting or\nencouraging suicide), bec... | [
"Bailey, Lee W. and Jenny Yates (eds.), 1996, The Near Death\nExperience: A Reader, New York: Routledge.",
"Baker, Lynne Rudder, 2000, Persons and Bodies: A Constitution\nView, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.",
"–––, 2001, “Material Persons and the\nDoctrine of Resurrection”, Faith and Philosophy, 18\n(2... | [
{
"href": "../death/",
"text": "death"
},
{
"href": "../dualism/",
"text": "dualism"
},
{
"href": "../heaven-hell/",
"text": "heaven and hell in Christian thought"
},
{
"href": "../mind-indian-buddhism/",
"text": "mind: in Indian Buddhist Philosophy"
},
{
"href": ... |
agency | Agency | First published Mon Aug 10, 2015; substantive revision Mon Oct 28, 2019 | [
"In very general terms, an agent is a being with the capacity to\nact, and ‘agency’ denotes the exercise or manifestation of\nthis capacity. The philosophy of action provides us with a standard\nconception and a standard theory of action. The former construes\naction in terms of intentionality, the latter explains ... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Introduction",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Conceptions, theories, and kinds of agency",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 Agency as intentional action",
"2.2 Agency as initiation by the agent",
"2.3 Agency and distinctively human action",
"2.4 Agency wi... | [
{
"main_content": [
"In a very broad sense, agency is virtually everywhere. Whenever\nentities enter into causal relationships, they can be said to act on\neach other and interact with each other, bringing about changes in\neach other. In this very broad sense, it is possible to identify\nagents and agenc... | [
"Adams, F., 2010, “Action Theory Meets Embodied\nCognition”, in Causing Human Action: New Perspectives on the\nCausal Theory of Action, A. Buckareff and J. Aguilar (eds.),\nCambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 229–252.",
"Ahearn, L., 2001, “Language and Agency”, Annual\nReview of Anthropology, 30: 109–37.",
"Allen, C.... | [
{
"href": "../action/",
"text": "action"
},
{
"href": "../shared-agency/",
"text": "agency: shared"
},
{
"href": "../anscombe/",
"text": "Anscombe, Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret"
},
{
"href": "../personal-autonomy/",
"text": "autonomy: personal"
},
{
"href": "../dav... |
reasons-agent | Reasons for Action: Agent-Neutral vs. Agent-Relative | First published Thu Aug 11, 2005; substantive revision Fri Dec 23, 2022 | [
"\nThe agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction is widely and rightly\nregarded as a philosophically important one. Unfortunately, the\ndistinction is often drawn in different and mutually incompatible\nways. The agent-relative/agent-neutral distinction has historically\nbeen drawn three main ways: the ‘principle-b... | [
{
"content_title": "1. The Principle-Based Conception",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. The Reason-Statement-Based Conception",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. The Perspective-Based Conception",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. The Principle-Based Conce... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nThe principle-based version of the agent-relative/agent-neutral\ndistinction actually predates the terminology\n‘agent-relative’ and ‘agent-neutral’. Thomas\nNagel instead uses the terms ‘subjective’ and\n‘objective’ to mark a version of the principle-based\ndistinction in his class... | [
"Broome, John, 1995. “Skorupski on agent-neutrality”,\nUtilitas, 7: 315–17.\n [Preprint available online]\n ",
"Buckland, J., 2019. “Skorupski and Broome on the\nAgent-Relative/Agent-Neutral Distinction”,\nUtilitas, 31(1): 59–82.",
"Castaneda, H.-N., 1975. Thinking and Doing, Dordrecht: D.\nReidel Publishing Co... | [
{
"href": "../consequentialism/",
"text": "consequentialism"
},
{
"href": "../metaethics/",
"text": "metaethics"
},
{
"href": "../moral-particularism/",
"text": "moral particularism"
},
{
"href": "../special-obligations/",
"text": "obligations: special"
}
] |
atheism-agnosticism | Atheism and Agnosticism | First published Wed Aug 2, 2017; substantive revision Tue Mar 22, 2022 | [
"\nThe purpose of this entry is to explore how atheism and agnosticism\nare related to theism and, more importantly, to each other. This\nrequires examining the surprisingly contentious issue of how best to\ndefine the terms “atheism” and “agnosticism”.\nSettling this issue, at least for the purposes of this entry,... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Definitions of “Atheism”",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Definitions of “Agnosticism”",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Global Atheism Versus Local Atheisms",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. An Argument for Agnosticism",
"s... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nThe word “atheism” is polysemous—it has multiple related\nmeanings. In the psychological sense of the word, atheism is a\npsychological state, specifically the state of being an atheist, where\nan atheist is defined as someone who is not a theist and a theist is\ndefined as someone ... | [
"Baggini, Julian, 2003, Atheism: A Very Short\nIntroduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.",
"Bishop, John C., 2008, “How a Modest Fideism May Constrain\nTheistic Commitments: Exploring an Alternative to Classical\nTheism”, Philosophia, 35(3–4): 387–402.\ndoi:10.1007/s11406-007-9071-y",
"Buckareff, Andrei A.... | [
{
"href": "../ethics-belief/",
"text": "belief, ethics of"
},
{
"href": "../formal-belief/",
"text": "belief, formal representations of"
},
{
"href": "../evil/",
"text": "evil: problem of"
},
{
"href": "../fideism/",
"text": "fideism"
},
{
"href": "../moral-argume... |
agrippa-nettesheim | Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim | First published Wed Feb 15, 2017; substantive revision Thu Mar 18, 2021 | [
"\nThe intellectual biography of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von\nNettesheim (1486–1535) provides us with significant proof of a\ncultural crisis in the Renaissance. The most striking aspect of his\nheritage is the seemingly paradoxical coexistence of a comprehensive\ntreatise on magic and occult arts, De occulta ph... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Biography",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. ",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. ",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. ",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "5. ",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "Bibliogr... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nHeinrich Cornelius Agrippa was born on 14 September 1486 in Cologne.\nHe matriculated at the University of Cologne in 1499 and graduated in\n1502. The degree in medicine which he claimed to have earned was ruled\nout by Prost (1882: 67–74), who also raised serious doubts about\nhis ... | [
"Opera, 2 volumes, Lyon, per Beringos fratres, [n.d.].\n[The imprint of this edition is false, since the Bering firm had\nceased publishing several decades before. Zambelli (1972:\n149–50) suggested attributing it to the publisher Tommaso\nGuarino of Basel in 1580]. Repr. Hildesheim-New York: Olms, 1970.",
"Apolo... | [
{
"href": "../ficino/",
"text": "Ficino, Marsilio"
},
{
"href": "../pico-della-mirandola/",
"text": "Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni"
},
{
"href": "../plotinus/",
"text": "Plotinus"
},
{
"href": "../skepticism/",
"text": "skepticism"
}
] |
weakness-will | Weakness of Will | First published Wed May 14, 2008; substantive revision Wed Sep 4, 2019 | [
"\n\nThere is nothing puzzling about Julie’s choice. Perhaps Julie was \nchoosing among vacation options, and b was a week’s vacation\nin Paris, while a was a week’s vacation in Peoria. In any \nevent, Julie evidently took the overall merits of b to \noutweigh those of a, even if b was inferior from a \nfinancial s... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Hare on the Impossibility of Weakness of Will",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Davidson on the Possibility of Weakness of Will",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. The Debate After Davidson",
"sub_toc": [
"3.1 Internalist and Externalist Str... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\n\nLet us commence our examination of contemporary discussions of this \nissue in appropriately Socratic vein, with an account that gives \nexpression to and builds on many of the intuitions that lead us to be\nsceptical about reports like (3) above. For the moral philosopher \nR. M.... | [
"Adler, J. E., 2002, “Akratic\nBelieving?,” Philosophical Studies, 110(1):\n1–27.",
"Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VII, Chs. 1–10.",
"Arpaly, N., 2000, “On Acting Rationally Against One’s\nBetter Judgment,” Ethics, 110: 488–513.",
"Audi, R., 1979, “Weakness of Will and Practical\nJudgment,” Noûs, 13: 17... | [
{
"href": "../action/",
"text": "action"
},
{
"href": "../aristotle-ethics/",
"text": "Aristotle, General Topics: ethics"
},
{
"href": "../davidson/",
"text": "Davidson, Donald"
},
{
"href": "../practical-reason/",
"text": "practical reason"
},
{
"href": "../pract... |
al-baghdadi | ‘Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi | First published Wed Sep 9, 2015; substantive revision Wed Sep 18, 2019 | [
"The Greek-Arabic sciences penetrated in the Islamic world during\nthe 8th and 9th centuries AD due to the massive\nactivity of the translators and al-Kindi’s vision of knowledge\nand also through the exegetical activity of the Aristotelian circle of\nBaghdad. From the end of the 10th, throughout the\n11th, and up ... | [
{
"content_title": " Life and Works",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Life",
"1.2 Works"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. What Philosophical Research is",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Criticisms against the “Moderns”",
"sub_toc": [
"3.1 Against Avicenna",
"3.2 Aga... | [
{
"main_content": [],
"section_title": " Life and Works",
"subsections": [
{
"content": [
"‘Abd al-Latif’s intellectual position comes across in\nhis autobiography (sira). It seems to have formed part of a\nlarger work no longer extant which he wrote for his son Sharaf al-Din\nYu... | [
" Ajoun, Y., 2017, Ma ba‘d al-tabi‘a, ta’alif Muwaffaq al-Din ‘Abd al-Latif ibn Yunus al-Bagdadi (Metaphysics by Muwaffaq al-Din ‘Abd al-Latif ibn Yunus al-Bagdadi), Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-‘ilmiyya.",
"al-Anbari, Nuzhat al-alibba’ fi tabaqat\nal-udaba’ (Intelligent Scholars Promenade in the Classes of\nMen of L... | [
{
"href": "../al-farabi/",
"text": "al-Farabi"
},
{
"href": "../al-kindi/",
"text": "al-Kindi"
},
{
"href": "../arabic-islamic-greek/",
"text": "Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, historical and methodological topics in: Greek sources"
},
{
"href": "../aristotle/",
"text": "A... |
al-farabi | al-Farabi | First published Fri Jul 15, 2016; substantive revision Fri Jul 24, 2020 | [
"\nWe know little that is really reliable about\nal-Fârâbî’s life. Abû Nasr\nal-Fârâbî was probably born in 870 CE (AH 257) in a\nplace called Farab or Farayb. In his youth he moved to Iraq and\nBaghdad. In 943 CE (AH 331) he went to Syria and Damascus. He may have\ngone to Egypt but died in Damascus in December 95... | [
{
"content_title": "1. ",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Language",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Logic",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. Mathematics and Music",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "5. Physics",
"sub_toc": []
},
... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nIn what follows we will underline important scholarly developments of\nthe last thirty years and add useful complements to these listings. In\norder to highlight these scholarly developments we will follow the\ntraditional order of the Aristotelian sciences that\nal-Fârâbî himself o... | [
"Al-Mawrid (Special Issue on Al-Farabi), 4(3), 1975.",
"Chavooshi, Jafar Aghayani, Al-Fârâbî: An\nAnnotated Bibliography, Tehran, 1976. ",
"Cunbur, Müjgan, Ismet Ninark & Nejat Sefercioglu,\nFârâbî Bibliyografyasi, Ankara: Bashakanhk\nBasimevi, 1973. ",
"Daiber, Hans, Bibliography of Islamic Philosophy (from\... | [
{
"href": "../al-farabi-soc-rel/",
"text": "al-Farabi: philosophy of society and religion"
},
{
"href": "../al-farabi-psych/",
"text": "al-Farabi: psychology and epistemology"
},
{
"href": "../arabic-islamic-metaphysics/",
"text": "Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, disciplines in: metap... |
al-ghazali | al-Ghazali | First published Tue Aug 14, 2007; substantive revision Fri May 8, 2020 | [
"\nAl-Ghazâlî (c.1056–1111) was one of the\nmost prominent and influential philosophers, theologians, jurists, and\nmystics of Sunni Islam. He was active at a time when Sunni theology\nhad just passed through its consolidation and entered a period of\nintense challenges from Shiite Ismâ’îlite theology\nand the Arab... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Al-Ghazâlî’s Reports of the ",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Al-Ghazâlî’s “Refutations” of ",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. The Place of ",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title"... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nLater Muslim medieval historians say that Abû Hâmid\nMuhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazâlî was born in 1058 or 1059\nin Tabarân-Tûs (15 miles north of modern Meshed, NE Iran),\nyet notes about his age in his letters and his autobiography indicate\nthat he was born in 1055 or 1056 (Griffe... | [
"Avicenna, 2005, The Metaphysics of The Healing: A Parallel\nEnglish-Arabic Text, M.E. Marmura (ed. and trans.). Provo (Utah):\nBrigham Young University Press.",
"Averroes, 1930, Averroès Tahafot at-Tahafot, M.\nBouyges (ed.), Beirut: Imprimerie Catholique.",
"––– 1954, Averroes’ Tahafut al-tahafut\n(The Incohe... | [
{
"href": "../al-farabi/",
"text": "al-Farabi"
},
{
"href": "../arabic-islamic-natural/",
"text": "Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, disciplines in: natural philosophy and natural science"
},
{
"href": "../causation-medieval/",
"text": "causation: medieval theories of"
},
{
"hre... |
al-kindi | al-Kindi | First published Fri Dec 1, 2006; substantive revision Fri Feb 21, 2020 | [
"\n\nAbu Yusuf Ya‘qub ibn Ishaq Al-Kindi (ca. 800–870 CE) was\nthe first self-identified philosopher in the Arabic tradition. He\nworked with a group of translators who rendered works of Aristotle,\nthe Neoplatonists, and Greek mathematicians and scientists into\nArabic. Al-Kindi’s own treatises, many of them epis... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life and Works",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Life",
"1.2 Works"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. Influences on al-Kindi",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 Greek influences",
"2.2 Contemporary influences"
]
},
{
"content_title": "3. Metaphysics",
"sub_toc": [
... | [
{
"main_content": [],
"section_title": "1. Life and Works",
"subsections": [
{
"content": [
"\n\nAl-Kindi was a member of the Arab tribe of Kinda, which had played an\nimportant role in the early history of Islam. His lineage earned him\nthe title “philosopher of the Arabs” among... | [
"Abu Rida, M.‘A.H. (ed.), 1950/1953, Al-Kindi,\nRasa’il al-Kindi al-Falsafiyya, 2 volumes, Cairo: Dar\nal-Fikr al-‘Arabi.",
"Adamson, P., 2002a, “Abu Ma‘shar, al-Kindi and the\nPhilosophical Defense of Astrology,” Recherches de\nphilosophie et théologie médiévales, 69:\n245–270.",
"–––, 2002b, “Before Essence a... | [
{
"href": "../aristotle/",
"text": "Aristotle"
},
{
"href": "../eternity/",
"text": "eternity, in Christian thought"
},
{
"href": "../philoponus/",
"text": "Philoponus"
},
{
"href": "../plotinus/",
"text": "Plotinus"
},
{
"href": "../proclus/",
"text": "Proclu... |
abu-bakr-al-razi | Abu Bakr al-Razi | First published Wed May 19, 2021 | [
"\nAbū Bakr al-Rāzī (865–925 CE, 251–313 AH)\nwas one of the greatest figures in the history of medicine in the\nIslamic tradition, and one of its most controversial philosophers.\nWhile we have ample surviving evidence for his medical thought, his\nphilosophical ideas mostly have to be pieced together on the basis... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life and Works",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. The Five Eternal Principles",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Ethics",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. Medicine and the ",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "5. Relig... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nAbū Bakr Muḥammad ibn Zakariyyāʾ\nal-Rāzī made his fame mostly as a doctor. As his name\n“al-Rāzī” indicates, he hailed from the Persian\ncity of Rayy, near modern-day Tehran. His biographers report that he\nran a hospital there, and another in Baghdad. He received patronage\nfrom A... | [
"Adamson, Peter, 2008a, “Platonic Pleasures in Epicurus and\nal-Rāzī”, in Adamson 2008b: 71–94.",
"––– (ed.), 2008b In the Age of\nal-Fārābī: Arabic Philosophy in the Fourth/Tenth\nCentury, London: Warburg Institute.",
"–––, 2012, “Abū Bakr\nal-Rāzī on Animals”, Archiv für Geschichte\nder Philosophie, 94(3): 24... | [
{
"href": "../arabic-islamic-natural/",
"text": "Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, disciplines in: natural philosophy and natural science"
},
{
"href": "../arabic-islamic-greek/",
"text": "Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, historical and methodological topics in: Greek sources"
},
{
"href": ".... |
al-din-al-razi | Fakhr al-Din al-Razi | First published Sun Feb 5, 2023 | [
"\nFakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (1149–1210) was one of the\nmost innovative and influential thinkers in the first stage of what is\nsometimes called “post-classical” Islamic thought. Along\nwith other major thinkers of the Islamic East in the twelfth century,\nnotably Abū l-Barakāt al-Baghdādī and\nal-Suhrawardī, Fakhr al-... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life and Works",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Logic and Epistemology",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Physics",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. Metaphysics",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "5. Psychology",
... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nFakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s life was shaped by the\npolitical situation in central Asia in the generations just before the\nMongol conquest of that region. He was born in the Persian city of\nRayy, near modern-day Tehran, in 1149 CE (544 of the Muslim calendar).\nThe name “Rāzī” refers t... | [
"Janos, Damien and Muhammad Fariduddin Attar, 2023, A\nComprehensive, Annotated, and Indexed Bibliography of the Modern\nScholarship on Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, (Handbook of\nOriental Studies. Section 1 the Near and Middle East, 171),\nLeiden/Boston: Brill.",
"Ibn Sīnā [Avicenna], al-Ishārāt\nwa-l-tanbīhāt, Mujtabā ... | [
{
"href": "../aristotle-logic/",
"text": "Aristotle, General Topics: logic"
},
{
"href": "../ibn-sina/",
"text": "Ibn Sina [Avicenna]"
},
{
"href": "../ibn-sina-metaphysics/",
"text": "Ibn Sina [Avicenna]: metaphysics"
},
{
"href": "../suhrawardi/",
"text": "Suhrawardi"
... |
albalag | Isaac Albalag | First published Thu Aug 20, 2020 | [
"\nIsaac Albalag stands out as one of the most rigorous representatives\nof the school of Jewish Averroism which flourished in Western Europe\nin the thirteenth century and lasted until the Renaissance. The\nmembers of this school, such as Ibn Kaspi, Shem Tov Ibn Falaquera,\nMoses Narboni, Isaac Polqar, Gersonides,... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life and Works",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Logic",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Epistemology",
"sub_toc": [
"3.1 Knowledge, Belief and Intellectual Perfection",
"3.2 Human Knowledge: Means and Limits"
]
},
{
"con... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nLittle is known about Isaac Albalag. All that we know about him is\nthat he lived in the second half of the thirteenth century either in\nCatalonia or Provence (Sirat 1985: 238). References to Albalag in the\nmedieval Jewish literature indicate that he was not a figure of\nfavorable... | [
"Albalag, Isaac, Sefer Tiqqun ha-Deʿot, Georges\nVajda, Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1973.\n[Hebrew]",
"–––, Sefer Tiqqun ha-Deʿot [Logic]\nprinted in Heiman Auerbach, “Albalaq und seine Übersetzung\ndes Maḳâṣid al-Gazzalis,” Abū\nḤāmid Muḥammad al-ghazzālī (d.505/1111):\nTexts and St... | [
{
"href": "../al-ghazali/",
"text": "al-Ghazali"
},
{
"href": "../arabic-islamic-judaic/",
"text": "Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, historical and methodological topics in: influence of Arabic and Islamic Philosophy on Judaic thought"
},
{
"href": "../arabic-islamic-causation/",
"text... |
albert-saxony | Albert of Saxony | First published Mon Jan 29, 2001; substantive revision Tue Mar 12, 2019 | [
"\n\nAlbert of Saxony (ca. 1320–1390), Master of Arts at Paris, then\nRector of the University of Vienna, and finally Bishop of Halberstadt\n(Germany). As a logician, he was at the forefront of the movement that\nexpanded the analysis of language based on the properties of terms,\nespecially their reference (in Lat... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life and Works",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Logic",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Natural Philosophy",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. Impact and Influence",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "Bibliography",
... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\n\nIn the later Middle Ages Albert of Saxony (Albertus de\nSaxonia) was sometimes called Albertucius (Little\nAlbert), to distinguish him from the thirteenth-century theologian\nAlbert the Great. He is however a master of great importance in his own right. He was born at Rickensdorf,... | [
"Tractatus de quadratura circuli, ed. H. Sutor,\n“Der Tractatus de quadratura circuli des Albertus de\nSaxonia,” Zeitschrift für Mathematik und\nPhilosophie, XXXII (1887): 41–56.",
"Tractatus proportionum, ed. H.L.L.Busard,\n“Der Tractatus proportionum von Albert von\nSachsen”, Österreichischen Akademie der Wisse... | [
{
"href": "../buridan/",
"text": "Buridan, John [Jean]"
},
{
"href": "../burley/",
"text": "Burley [Burleigh], Walter"
},
{
"href": "../heytesbury/",
"text": "Heytesbury, William"
},
{
"href": "../ockham/",
"text": "Ockham [Occam], William"
}
] |
albert-great | Albert the Great | First published Mon Mar 20, 2006; substantive revision Wed Feb 19, 2020 | [
"\n\nAlbertus Magnus, also known as Albert the Great, was one of the most\nuniversal thinkers to appear during the Middle Ages. Even more so than\nhis most famous student, St. Thomas of Aquinas, Albert’s\ninterests ranged from natural science all the way to theology. He made\ncontributions to logic, psychology, met... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life of Albert the Great",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Philosophical Enterprise",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Logic",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. Metaphysics",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "5. Psych... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\n\nThe precise date of Albert’s birth is not known. It is generally\nconceded that he was born into a knightly family sometime around the\nyear 1200 in Lauingen an der Donau in Germany. He was apparently in\nItaly in the year 1222 where he was present when a rather terrible\nearthqua... | [
"Opera Omnia, P. Jammy (ed.), 21 volumes, Lyon, 1651.",
"Opera Omnia, E. Borgnet (ed.), 38 volumes, Paris: Vives,\n1890–9.",
"Alberti Magni Opera Omnia edenda curavit Institutum Alberti\nMagni Coloniense Bernhardo Geyer praeside, Münster:\nAschendorff, 1951–.",
"Book of Minerals, Dorothy Wyckoff (trans.), Oxf... | [
{
"href": "../aquinas/",
"text": "Aquinas, Thomas"
},
{
"href": "../aristotle/",
"text": "Aristotle"
},
{
"href": "../aristotle-metaphysics/",
"text": "Aristotle, General Topics: metaphysics"
},
{
"href": "../augustine/",
"text": "Augustine, Saint"
},
{
"href": ".... |
albo-joseph | Joseph Albo | First published Thu Jul 20, 2006; substantive revision Wed Jan 8, 2020 | [
"\n\nJoseph Albo (c. 1380–1444) was a Jewish philosopher active in\nChristian Spain in the first half of the fifteenth century. His\ntheoretical work found expression in his well-known opus Sefer\nha-‘Ikkarim [Book of Principles], completed in 1425 in\nthe town of Soria in the crown of Castile. In this work, Albo\n... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Biographical Sketch",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Historical Background",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Introduction to ",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. The Theory of Law",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title":... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\n\nThe known details of Albo’s life are sparse. As far as we know,\nhe was born in Christian Spain in the crown of Aragon around 1380, and\ndied in the crown of Castile around 1444. In documenting the\nhighlights of his career, we should first mention his period of study\nin the scho... | [
"Albo, Joseph, 1929, Sefer ha-‘Ikkarim [Book of\nPrinciples], I. Husik (trans. and ed.), Philadelphia: The Jewish\nPublication Society of America.",
"Ackerman, A., 2013, “Zerahia Halevi Saladin and Joseph Albo\non Natural, Conventional and Divine Law”, Jewish Studies\nQuarterly, 20: 315–339.",
"Agus, J. B., 195... | [
{
"href": "../aquinas/",
"text": "Aquinas, Thomas"
},
{
"href": "../crescas/",
"text": "Crescas, Hasdai"
},
{
"href": "../evil/",
"text": "evil: problem of"
},
{
"href": "../halevi/",
"text": "Halevi, Judah"
},
{
"href": "../ibn-rushd/",
"text": "Ibn Rushd [Av... |
alcmaeon | Alcmaeon | First published Thu Apr 10, 2003; substantive revision Sun Apr 4, 2021 | [
"\nAlcmaeon of Croton was an early Greek medical writer and\nphilosopher-scientist. His exact date, his relationship to other early\nGreek philosopher-scientists, and whether he was primarily a medical\nwriter/physician or a typical Presocratic cosmologist, are all matters\nof controversy. He is likely to have writ... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life and Works",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Medical Writer or Philosopher?",
"1.2 Was Alcmaeon a Pythagorean?",
"1.3 Date",
"1.4 Alcmaeon’s Book and the Evidence for Its Contents"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. Epistemology and Psychology",
"sub_toc": [
... | [
{
"main_content": [],
"section_title": "Life and Works",
"subsections": [
{
"content": [
"\nAlcmaeon, son of Peirithous (otherwise unknown), lived in the Greek\ncity of Croton on the instep of the boot of Italy. Diogenes Laertius,\nin his brief life of Alcmaeon (VIII. 83), assert... | [
"Diels, H. and W. Kranz, 1952, Die Fragmente der\nVorsokratiker (in three volumes), 6th edition, Dublin\nand Zürich: Weidmann, Volume 1, Chapter 24, pp. 210–216. Greek\ntexts of the fragments and testimonia with translations in German.\nReferred to as [DK]. The testimonia for each author are indicated by\nan A and ... | [
{
"href": "../aristotle/",
"text": "Aristotle"
},
{
"href": "../empedocles/",
"text": "Empedocles"
},
{
"href": "../philolaus/",
"text": "Philolaus"
},
{
"href": "../plato/",
"text": "Plato"
},
{
"href": "../pythagoras/",
"text": "Pythagoras"
},
{
"hre... |
alexander | Samuel Alexander | First published Mon Jun 2, 2014; substantive revision Wed Jul 13, 2022 | [
"\nAustralian-born philosopher Samuel Alexander (1859–1938) was a\nprominent figure in early twentieth-century British philosophy. He is\nbest known for advancing “British Emergentism”, a movement\nthat held mind “emerges” from matter. Alexander rejected\nidealism, and accordingly can be labelled a “new\nrealist” a... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Early Writings",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 History of Philosophy: Hegel and Locke",
"2.2 Evolutionary Ethics"
]
},
{
"content_title": "3. Metaphysics and Related Views",
"sub_toc": [
"3.1 Realism and ... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nAlexander was born in Sydney on 6 January 1859, to a Jewish family. He\nwas the third son of Samuel Alexander, a British emigrant and saddler.\nAlexander’s father died a few weeks after his birth, and five\nyears later the remaining family moved to Melbourne. Alexander was\nhome-edu... | [
"1886, “Hegel’s Conception of Nature”,\nMind, 11: 495–523.",
"1889, Moral Order and Progress: An Analysis of Ethical\nConceptions, London: Trubner & Co.",
"1908, Locke, London: Archibald Constable & Co.",
"1909–10, “Ptolemaic and Copernican Views of the Place\nof Mind in The Universe”, The Hibbert Journal, 8:... | [
{
"href": "../anderson-john/",
"text": "Anderson, John"
},
{
"href": "../bradley/",
"text": "Bradley, Francis Herbert"
},
{
"href": "../collingwood/",
"text": "Collingwood, Robin George"
},
{
"href": "../properties-emergent/",
"text": "emergent properties"
},
{
"h... |
alexander-aphrodisias | Alexander of Aphrodisias | First published Mon Oct 13, 2003; substantive revision Thu Jan 19, 2017 | [
"\nAlexander was a Peripatetic philosopher and commentator, active in the\nlate second and early third century CE. He continued the tradition of\nwriting close commentaries on Aristotle’s work established in the\nfirst century BCE by Andronicus of Rhodes, the editor of Aristotle’s\n‘esoteric’ writings, which were d... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life and Works",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Date, Family, Teachers, and Influence",
"1.2 Works and their history"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. Alexander as commentator",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Alexander as philosopher",
"sub_toc": []
},... | [
{
"main_content": [],
"section_title": "1. Life and Works",
"subsections": [
{
"content": [
"\nNext to nothing is known about Alexander’s origin, life circumstances,\nand career. His native city was (probably) the Aphrodisias in Caria,\nan inland city of southwestern Asia Minor. ... | [
"Diels, H. (ed.), 1882–1909, Commentaria in Aristotelem\nGraeca, Berlin: Reimer.\n\n\n\nHayduck, M. (ed.), 1891, Vol. 1 On the Metaphysics.\n\nWallies, M. (ed.), 1883, Vol. 2.1 On Prior Analytics\n1.\n\nWallies, M. (ed.), 1891, Vol. 2.2. On the Topics.\n\nWallies, M. (ed.), 1898, Vol. 2.3. On Sophistical\nRefutatio... | [
{
"href": "../aristotelianism-renaissance/",
"text": "Aristotelianism: in the Renaissance"
},
{
"href": "../aristotle/",
"text": "Aristotle"
},
{
"href": "../aristotle-commentators/",
"text": "Aristotle, commentators on"
},
{
"href": "../elias/",
"text": "Elias"
},
{
... |
algebra | Algebra | First published Tue May 29, 2007; substantive revision Thu Nov 3, 2022 | [
"\nAlgebra is a branch of mathematics sibling to geometry, analysis\n(calculus), number theory, combinatorics, etc. Although algebra has\nits roots in numerical domains such as the reals and the complex\nnumbers, in its full generality it differs from its siblings in\nserving no specific mathematical domain. Wherea... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Elementary Algebra",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Formulas",
"1.2 Laws",
"1.3 Word problems",
"1.4 Cartesian geometry"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. Abstract Algebra",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 Semigroups",
"2.2 Groups",
"2.3 Rings",
"2.4 Fie... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nElementary algebra deals with numerical terms, namely\nconstants 0, 1, 1.5, \\(\\pi\\), variables \\(x,\ny,\\ldots\\), and combinations thereof built with operations\nsuch as \\(+\\), \\(-\\), \\(\\times\\) , \\(\\div\\) , \\(\\sqrt{\\phantom{x}}\\),\netc. to form such terms as \\(x... | [
"Harold R. Jacobs, Elementary Algebra, 876pp, W.H.\nFreeman, 1979.",
"Bartel Leendert van der Waerden, Moderne Algebra (2\nvolumes), Springer, Vol. 1 1930, Vol. 2 1931.",
"I.N. Herstein, Topics in Algebra, 2nd ed, 400pp, Wiley,\n1975.",
"Saunders Mac Lane, Categories for the Working\nMathematician, Springer-V... | [
{
"href": "../boolalg-math/",
"text": "Boolean algebra: the mathematics of"
},
{
"href": "../category-theory/",
"text": "category theory"
}
] |
algebra-logic-tradition | The Algebra of Logic Tradition | First published Mon Mar 2, 2009; substantive revision Fri Feb 12, 2021 | [
"\nThe algebra of logic, as an explicit algebraic\nsystem showing the underlying mathematical structure of logic, was\nintroduced by George Boole (1815–1864) in his book The\nMathematical Analysis of Logic (1847). It is therefore to be\ndistinguished from the more general approach of algebraic\nlogic. The methodol... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Introduction",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. 1847—The Beginnings of the Modern Versions of the Algebra of Logic",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. 1854—Boole’s Final Presentation of his Algebra of Logic",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_tit... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nBoole’s The Mathematical Analysis of Logic presents many\ninteresting logic novelties: It was the beginning of\nnineteenth-century mathematization of logic and provided an\nalgorithmic alternative (via a slight modification of\nordinary algebra) to the catalog approach used in tradi... | [
"Boole, G., 1847, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic, Being an\nEssay Towards a Calculus of Deductive Reasoning, Cambridge:\nMacmillan, Barclay, & Macmillan; reprinted Oxford: Basil\nBlackwell, 1951.",
"–––, 1854, An Investigation of The Laws of\nThought on Which are Founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and... | [
{
"href": "../algebra/",
"text": "algebra"
},
{
"href": "../boole/",
"text": "Boole, George"
},
{
"href": "../leibniz-logic-influence/",
"text": "Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm: influence on 19th century logic"
},
{
"href": "../model-theory/",
"text": "model theory"
},
{
... |
alienation | Alienation | First published Thu Aug 30, 2018; substantive revision Thu Oct 6, 2022 | [
"\nThe concept of alienation identifies a distinct kind of psychological\nor social ill; namely, one involving a problematic separation between\na self and other that belong together. So understood,\nalienation appears to play a largely diagnostic or critical role,\nsometimes said to suggest that something is awry ... | [
{
"content_title": "1. The Basic Idea",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Introduced",
"1.2 Elaborated",
"1.3 Modesty Of"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. Adjacent Concepts",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 Introduced",
"2.2 Fetishism",
"2.3 Objectification"
]
},
{
"content_titl... | [
{
"main_content": [],
"section_title": "1. The Basic Idea",
"subsections": [
{
"content": [
"\nThe term ‘alienation’ is usually thought to have comparatively modern\nEuropean origins. In English, the term had emerged by the early\nfifteenth century, already possessing an interest... | [
"Chiaburu, Dan S., Tomas Thundiyil, and Jiexin Wang, 2014,\n“Alienation and its Correlates: A Meta-Analysis,”\nEuropean Management Journal, 32 (1): 24–36.",
"Cohen, G.A., 1974, “Marx’s Dialectic of\nLabour,”Philosophy & Public Affairs, 3 (3):\n235–261.",
"Forst, Rainer, 2017, “Noumenal Alienation: Rousseau,\nK... | [
{
"href": "../existentialism/",
"text": "existentialism"
},
{
"href": "../feminism-class/",
"text": "feminist philosophy, topics: perspectives on class and work"
},
{
"href": "../hegel/",
"text": "Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich"
},
{
"href": "../marx/",
"text": "Marx, Kar... |
althusser | Louis Althusser | First published Fri Oct 16, 2009; substantive revision Mon Aug 22, 2022 | [
"\nLouis Pierre Althusser (1918–1990) was one of the most\ninfluential Marxist philosophers of the 20th Century. As\nthey seemed to offer a renewal of Marxist thought as well as to render\nMarxism philosophically respectable, the claims he advanced in the\n1960s about Marxist philosophy were discussed and debated w... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Early Work (1946–60)",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 Christianity and Marxism",
"2.2 Hegelian Marxism",
"2.3 Marx not Hegel",
"2.4 Historical Work: Montesquieu and Feuerbach"
]
},
{
"content_title": "3.... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nLouis Althusser was born on October 16th, 1918 in Bir\nMourad Raïs (formerly Birmandreis), a suburb of Algiers.\nHailing from Alsace on his father’s side of the family, his\ngrandparents were French citizens who had chosen to settle in\nAlgeria. At the time of his birth, Althusser’s... | [
"(1940–45) Journal de captivité (Stalag XA\n1940–45), (Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1992)",
"(1946) “L’internationale des bons sentiments”,\nin Ecrits Philosophiques et Politiques I (Paris: Stock/IMEC\n1994), 35–57; tr. as “The International of Decent\nFeelings,” by G.M. Goshgarian in The Spectre of Hegel: Early\nWritings ... | [
{
"href": "../epistemology-social/",
"text": "epistemology: social"
},
{
"href": "../foucault/",
"text": "Foucault, Michel"
},
{
"href": "../hegel-dialectics/",
"text": "Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: dialectics"
},
{
"href": "../hermeneutics/",
"text": "hermeneutics"
... |
altruism | Altruism | First published Thu Aug 25, 2016; substantive revision Mon Aug 31, 2020 | [
"\nBehavior is normally described as altruistic when it is motivated by a\ndesire to benefit someone other than oneself for that person’s\nsake. The term is used as the contrary of\n“self-interested” or “selfish” or\n“egoistic”—words applied to behavior that is\nmotivated solely by the desire to benefit oneself.\n“... | [
{
"content_title": "1. What is altruism?",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Mixed motives and pure altruism",
"1.2 Self-sacrifice, strong and weak altruism",
"1.3 Moral motives and altruistic motives",
"1.4 Well-Being and perfection"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. Does altruism exist?",
... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nBefore proceeding, further clarification of the term\n“altruism” is called for."
],
"section_title": "1. What is altruism?",
"subsections": [
{
"content": [
"\nAltruistic acts include not only those undertaken in order to do good\nto others, but a... | [
"Annas, J., 1993, The Morality of Happiness, Oxford:\nOxford University Press.",
"Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, translated with\nintroduction and notes by C.D.C. Reeve, Indianapolis: Hackett,\n2014.",
"Arpaly, N. and T. Schroeder, 2014, In Praise of Desire,\nNew York: Oxford University Press.",
"Badhwar, Nee... | [
{
"href": "../altruism-biological/",
"text": "altruism: biological"
},
{
"href": "../altruism-empirical/",
"text": "altruism: empirical approaches"
},
{
"href": "../egoism/",
"text": "egoism"
},
{
"href": "../empathy/",
"text": "empathy"
},
{
"href": "../impartial... |
alyngton | Robert Alyngton | First published Wed Jul 25, 2001; substantive revision Mon Jan 17, 2022 | [
"\nRobert Alyngton was one of the most important authors of the\ngeneration after John Wyclif. He was deeply influenced by Walter\nBurley’s logico-ontological system and Wyclif’s\nmetaphysics. His major extant work, a commentary on the\nCategories, heavily depends on Burley’s last commentary\non the Categories and ... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life and Works",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Being and Categories",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Universals and Predication",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. The Theory of Substance",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"conten... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nNot a great deal is known of Robert Alyngton’s life. Most of the\ninformation about him comes from Emden 1957–59. From 1379 until\n1386, he was fellow of Queens College (the same Oxonian college where\nWyclif started his theological studies in 1363 and Johannes Sharpe\ntaught in the... | [
"Litteralis sententia super Praedicamenta Aristotelis, in\nA.D. Conti, “Linguaggio e realtà nel commento alle\nCategorie di Robert Alyngton,” Documenti e studi\nsulla tradizione filosofica medievale 4 (1993), pp.\n179–306, at pp. 242–306. Partial edition: only chaps. 2,\n3, 4, and 7, and the first section of chap. ... | [
{
"href": "../burley/",
"text": "Burley [Burleigh], Walter"
},
{
"href": "../penbygull/",
"text": "Penbygull, William"
},
{
"href": "../sharpe/",
"text": "Sharpe, Johannes"
},
{
"href": "../wyclif/",
"text": "Wyclif, John"
}
] |
ambiguity | Ambiguity | First published Mon May 16, 2011; substantive revision Sat May 22, 2021 | [
"\nFun fact: the word ‘ambiguous’, at least according to the\nOxford English Dictionary, is ambiguous: it can mean uncertainty or\ndubiousness on the one hand and a sign bearing multiple meanings on\nthe other. I mention this merely to disambiguate what this entry is\nabout, which concerns a word or phrase enjoying... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Introduction",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. What (Linguistic) Ambiguity Isn’t",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 Vagueness",
"2.2 Context Sensitivity",
"2.3 Under-specification and Generality",
"2.4 Sense and Reference Transfer"
]
},
{
"cont... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nAmbiguity is generally taken to be a property enjoyed by signs that\nbear multiple (legitimate) interpretations in a language or, more\ngenerally, some system of signs. ’legitimate’ is a cover\nterm I’m using to nod to the fact that many signs can, in principle,\nbear just about an... | [
"Aristotle, On Sophistical Refutations, Pickard-Cambridge\n(trans.), in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford\nTranslation, J. Barnes (ed.), Princeton: Princeton\nUniversity Press, 1984.",
"Aristotle, Metaphysics, W.D. Ross (trans.), in The\nComplete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translatio... | [
{
"href": "../analytic-synthetic/",
"text": "analytic/synthetic distinction"
},
{
"href": "../anaphora/",
"text": "anaphora"
},
{
"href": "../pragmatics/",
"text": "pragmatics"
},
{
"href": "../reference/",
"text": "reference"
},
{
"href": "../sorites-paradox/",
... |
ammonius | Ammonius | First published Wed Oct 19, 2005; substantive revision Fri Nov 10, 2017 | [
"\nAmmonius (ca. 435/445–517/526) taught philosophy at Alexandria,\nwhere his father Hermeias had taught earlier. Known primarily for his\ncommentaries on Aristotle, which were said to be of greater benefit\nthan anyone else’s, he was also distinguished in geometry and\nastronomy. Himself a pupil of Proclus at Athe... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life and Works",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Life",
"1.2 Works"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. Ammonius as Aristotelian Commentator",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Philosophical Positions",
"sub_toc": [
"3.1 Ammonius’ Neoplatonism",
"3.... | [
{
"main_content": [],
"section_title": "1. Life and Works",
"subsections": [
{
"content": [
"\nAmmonius’ father Hermeias, after studying in Athens under\nSyrianus (Head of School in Athens 431/2–437), returned to Alexandria,\nwhere he established the teaching of Platonism as an a... | [
"Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca (= CAG), H.\nDiels (ed.), Berlin, 1882–1909.",
"CAG IV 3, Ammonius in Porphyrii Isagogen sive V\nVoces, A. Busse (ed.), Berlin, 1891.",
"CAG IV 4, Ammonius in Aristotelis Categorias, A.\nBusse (ed.), Berlin, 1895. On Aristotle Categories, S. M.\nCohen and G. B. Matthews (trans... | [
{
"href": "../alexander-aphrodisias/",
"text": "Alexander of Aphrodisias"
},
{
"href": "../aristotle/",
"text": "Aristotle"
},
{
"href": "../aristotle-commentators/",
"text": "Aristotle, commentators on"
},
{
"href": "../boethius/",
"text": "Boethius, Anicius Manlius Seve... |
plotinus | Plotinus | First published Mon Jun 30, 2003; substantive revision Thu Jun 28, 2018 | [
"\n\nPlotinus (204/5 – 270 C.E.), is generally regarded as the\nfounder of Neoplatonism. He is one of the most influential\nphilosophers in antiquity after Plato and Aristotle. The term\n‘Neoplatonism’ is an invention of early 19th\ncentury European scholarship and indicates the penchant of historians\nfor dividin... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life and Writings",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. The Three Fundamental Principles of Plotinus’ Metaphysics",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Human Psychology and Ethics",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. Beauty",
"sub_toc":... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\n Owing to the unusually fulsome biography by Plotinus’ disciple\nPorphyry, we know more about Plotinus’ life than we do about most\nancient philosophers’. The main facts are these.",
"\n Plotinus was born in Lycopolis, Egypt in 204 or 205 C.E. When he was\n28, a growing inte... | [
"Plotinus, 7 volumes, Greek text with English translation by\nA.H. Armstrong, Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library, 1968–88.",
"Plotinus. The Enneads, edited by Lloyd P. Gerson, and\ntranslated by George Boys-Stones, John M. Dillon, Lloyd P. Gerson,\nR.A. King, Andrew Smith and James Wilberding, Cambridge: Cambr... | [
{
"href": "../aristotelianism-renaissance/",
"text": "Aristotelianism: in the Renaissance"
},
{
"href": "../beauty/",
"text": "beauty"
},
{
"href": "../ficino/",
"text": "Ficino, Marsilio"
},
{
"href": "../neoplatonism/",
"text": "Neoplatonism"
},
{
"href": "../pl... |
reasoning-analogy | Analogy and Analogical Reasoning | First published Tue Jun 25, 2013; substantive revision Fri Jan 25, 2019 | [
"\nAn analogy is a comparison between two objects, or systems of\nobjects, that highlights respects in which they are thought to be\nsimilar. Analogical reasoning is any type of thinking that\nrelies upon an analogy. An analogical argument is an\nexplicit representation of a form of analogical reasoning that cites\... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Introduction: the many roles of analogy",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Analogical arguments ",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 Examples",
"2.2 Characterization",
"2.3 Plausibility",
"2.4 Analogical inference rules?"
]
},
{
"content_title": ... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nAnalogies are widely recognized as playing an important\nheuristic role, as aids to discovery. They have been\nemployed, in a wide variety of settings and with considerable success,\nto generate insight and to formulate possible solutions to problems.\nAccording to Joseph Priestley,... | [
"Achinstein, P., 1964, “Models, Analogies and\nTheories,” Philosophy of Science, 31:\n328–349.",
"Agassi, J., 1964, “Discussion: Analogies as\nGeneralizations,” Philosophy of Science, 31:\n351–356.",
"–––, 1988, “Analogies Hard and\nSoft,” in D.H. Helman (ed.) 1988, 401–19.",
"Aristotle, 1984, The Complete Wo... | [
{
"href": "../abduction/",
"text": "abduction"
},
{
"href": "../analogy-medieval/",
"text": "analogy: medieval theories of"
},
{
"href": "../argument/",
"text": "argument and argumentation"
},
{
"href": "../bayes-theorem/",
"text": "Bayes’ Theorem"
},
{
"href": ".... |
analysis | Analysis | First published Mon Apr 7, 2003; substantive revision Wed Mar 19, 2014 | [
"\n\nAnalysis has always been at the heart of philosophical method, but it\nhas been understood and practised in many different ways. Perhaps, in\nits broadest sense, it might be defined as a process of isolating or \nworking back to what is more fundamental by means of which something,\ninitially taken as given, c... | [
{
"content_title": "1. General Introduction",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Characterizations of Analysis",
"1.2 Guide to this Entry",
"Supplementary Document: Definitions and Descriptions of Analysis"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. Ancient Conceptions of Analysis and the Emergence of the Reg... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\n\nThis section provides a preliminary description of analysis—or \nthe range of different conceptions of analysis—and a guide to \nthis article as a whole."
],
"section_title": "1. General Introduction",
"subsections": [
{
"content": [
"\n\nIf ask... | [
"Baker, Gordon, 2004, Wittgenstein's Method, Oxford:\nBlackwell, especially essays 1, 3, 4, 10, 12",
"Baldwin, Thomas, 1990, G.E. Moore, London: Routledge, ch. 7",
"Beaney, Michael, 2004, ‘Carnap's Conception of Explication:\nFrom Frege to Husserl?’, in S. Awodey and C. Klein,\n(eds.), Carnap Brought Home: The ... | [
{
"href": "../abstract-objects/",
"text": "abstract objects"
},
{
"href": "../analytic-synthetic/",
"text": "analytic/synthetic distinction"
},
{
"href": "../aristotle/",
"text": "Aristotle"
},
{
"href": "../bolzano/",
"text": "Bolzano, Bernard"
},
{
"href": "../b... |
analytic-synthetic | The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction | First published Thu Aug 14, 2003; substantive revision Wed Mar 30, 2022 | [
"\n“Analytic” sentences, such as “Pediatricians are\ndoctors,” have historically been characterized as ones that are\ntrue by virtue of the meanings of their words alone and/or can be\nknown to be so solely by knowing those meanings. They are contrasted\nwith more usual “synthetic” sentences, such as\n“Pediatrician... | [
{
"content_title": "1. The Intuitive Distinction",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Kant",
"1.2 Frege"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. High Hopes",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 Mathematics",
"2.2 Science and Beyond"
]
},
{
"content_title": "3. Problems with the Distinction",
"sub_t... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nCompare the following two sets of sentences:",
"\nMost competent English speakers who know the meanings of all the\nconstituent words would find an obvious difference between the two\nsets: whereas they might wonder about the truth or falsity of those of\nset I, they would fin... | [
"Alexander, J. and Weinberg, J., 2007, “Analytic Epistemology\nand Experimental Philosophy,” Philosophical Compass,\n2(1): 56–80.",
"Allott, N. and Shaer, B., 2013, “Some Linguistic Properties\nof Legal Notices,” Canadian Journal of Linguistics,\n58(1), 43–62.",
"Allott, N. and Textor, M., 2017, “Lexical Modula... | [
{
"href": "../analysis/",
"text": "analysis"
},
{
"href": "../apriori/",
"text": "a priori justification and knowledge"
},
{
"href": "../behaviorism/",
"text": "behaviorism"
},
{
"href": "../carnap/",
"text": "Carnap, Rudolf"
},
{
"href": "../definitions/",
"t... |
anaphora | Anaphora | First published Tue Feb 24, 2004; substantive revision Wed Oct 27, 2021 | [
"\nAnaphora is sometimes characterized as the phenomenon whereby the\ninterpretation of an occurrence of one expression depends on the\ninterpretation of an occurrence of another or whereby an occurrence of\nan expression has its referent supplied by an occurrence of some other\nexpression in the same or another\n ... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Unproblematic Anaphora",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Problematic Anaphora",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Recent Theories of Problematic Anaphora",
"sub_toc": [
"3.1 Discourse Representation Theory",
"3.2 Dynamic Semantic Appro... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nThe simplest sorts of anaphoric pronouns are those that “pick\nup” a reference from a previous referring expression whether in\nthe same sentence or another. Consider for example:",
"\non the readings of these sentences on which “he” and\n“his” co-refer with “John”. In such ca... | [
"Asher, Nicholas, 1987, “A Typology for Attitude Verbs and\ntheir Anaphoric Properties”, Linguistics and\nPhilosophy, 10: 125–197.",
"Asher, Nicholas and Alex Lascarides, 2003, Logics of\nConversation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.",
"Bach, Emmon and Barbara Partee, 1980, “Anaphora and semantic\nstruct... | [
{
"href": "../discourse-representation-theory/",
"text": "discourse representation theory"
},
{
"href": "../presupposition/",
"text": "presupposition"
},
{
"href": "../dynamic-semantics/",
"text": "semantics: dynamic"
},
{
"href": "../situations-semantics/",
"text": "situ... |
anarchism | Anarchism | First published Tue Oct 3, 2017; substantive revision Tue Oct 26, 2021 | [
"\nAnarchism is a political theory that is skeptical of the justification\nof authority and power. Anarchism is usually grounded in moral claims\nabout the importance of individual liberty, often conceived as freedom\nfrom domination. Anarchists also offer a positive theory of human\nflourishing, based upon an idea... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Varieties of Anarchism",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Political Anarchism",
"1.2 Religious Anarchism",
"1.3 Theoretical Anarchism",
"1.4 Applied Anarchism",
"1.5 Black, Indigenous, and Decolonizing Anarchism"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. Anarchism in Poli... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nThere are various forms of anarchism. Uniting this variety is the\ngeneral critique of centralized, hierarchical power and authority.\nGiven that authority, centralization, and hierarchy show up in various\nways and in different discourses, institutions, and practices, it is\nnot su... | [
"Anderson, William C. and Zoé Samudzi, 2017, “The Anarchism\nof Blackness” at The Anarchist Library\n [Anderson and Samudzi 2017 available online]",
"Bakunin, Mikhail, 1873 [1990], Statism and Anarchy\n(Gosudarstvennost’ i anarkhii͡a), Marshall S.\nShatz (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.",
"–––, ... | [
{
"href": "../authority/",
"text": "authority"
},
{
"href": "../autonomy-moral/",
"text": "autonomy: in moral and political philosophy"
},
{
"href": "../feyerabend/",
"text": "Feyerabend, Paul"
},
{
"href": "../godwin/",
"text": "Godwin, William"
},
{
"href": "../... |
anaxagoras | Anaxagoras | First published Wed Aug 22, 2007; substantive revision Mon Nov 11, 2019 | [
"\n\nAnaxagoras of Clazomenae (a major Greek city of Ionian Asia Minor), a\nGreek philosopher of the 5th century B.C.E. (born ca.\n500–480), was the first of the Presocratic philosophers to live in\nAthens. He propounded a physical theory of\n“everything-in-everything,” and claimed that\nnous (intellect or mind) wa... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life and Work",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Metaphysical Principles",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 No Becoming or Passing-Away",
"2.2 Everything-in-Everything",
"2.3 No Smallest or Largest"
]
},
{
"content_title": "3. The Physical Principles"... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\n\nAnaxagoras, son of Hegesibulus (or Eubulus), was a native of\nClazomenae, on the west coast of what is now Turkey. According to\nDiogenes Laertius (see the article on Doxography of Ancient\nPhilosophy) (Diels-Kranz [DK] 59 A1), Anaxagoras came from an\naristocratic and landed fami... | [
"Diels, H. and W. Kranz, eds., 1974, Die Fragmente der\nVorsokratiker. Three Vols. Reprint of Sixth Edition, Berlin:\nWeidmann.",
"Curd, P., 2007, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae: Fragments. Text and\nTranslation with Notes and Essays, Toronto: University of Toronto\nPress.",
"Gemelli Marciano, L.M., 2007–2010, Die Vo... | [
{
"href": "../democritus/",
"text": "Democritus"
},
{
"href": "../doxography-ancient/",
"text": "doxography of ancient philosophy"
},
{
"href": "../empedocles/",
"text": "Empedocles"
},
{
"href": "../parmenides/",
"text": "Parmenides"
},
{
"href": "../plato/",
... |
pyrrho | Pyrrho | First published Mon Aug 5, 2002; substantive revision Thu Sep 15, 2022 | [
"\nPyrrho was the starting-point for a philosophical movement known as\nPyrrhonism that flourished beginning several centuries after his own\ntime. This later Pyrrhonism was one of the two major traditions of\nsceptical thought in the Greco-Roman world (the other being located in\nPlato’s Academy during much of the... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Ancient Sources and the Nature of the Evidence",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. The Aristocles Passage",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. Other Reports on Pyrrho’s General Approach",
"su... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nPyrrho appears to have lived from around 365–360 BCE until\naround 275–270 BCE (for the evidence see von Fritz (1963), 90).\nWe have several reports of philosophers from whom he learned, the most\nsignificant (and the most reliable) of which concern his association\nwith Anaxarchus ... | [
"Decleva Caizzi, F., 1981, Pirrone: Testimonianze, Naples:\nBibliopolis. Complete collection of texts referring to Pyrrho, with\nItalian translation and commentary.",
"–––, 2020, Pirroniana, Milan: LED. A\nsecond edition of the previous item, with new material including\nan English translation of the texts by Mau... | [
{
"href": "../ethics-ancient/",
"text": "ethics: ancient"
},
{
"href": "../sextus-empiricus/",
"text": "Sextus Empiricus"
},
{
"href": "../skepticism-ancient/",
"text": "skepticism: ancient"
},
{
"href": "../timon-phlius/",
"text": "Timon of Phlius"
}
] |
anderson-john | John Anderson | First published Mon Oct 22, 2012; substantive revision Mon Nov 8, 2021 | [
"\nJohn Anderson (1893–1962) was a Scottish philosopher who worked\nprimarily in Australia. In 1927 he was appointed to the Challis Chair\nof Philosophy at the University of Sydney and occupied this position\nuntil his retirement in 1958. In relative isolation he developed a\ndistinctive realist philosophy which wa... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life and Work",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Outline of Anderson’s Philosophy",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Difficulties in Understanding Anderson’s Work",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. A Systematic Realism",
"sub_to... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nJohn Anderson was born in 1893 in the weaving and coal-mining village\nof Stonehouse, Lanarkshire (about 20km from Glasgow). His father was\nschoolmaster in the village and politically active in the Independent\nLabour Party. In 1911 Anderson began his university studies at the\nUni... | [
"Armstrong, D. M., 1977, “On Metaphysics”,\nQuadrant, 21 (7): 64–69.",
"–––, 1997, Universals and Scientific\nRealism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.",
"–––, 2001, “Interview”, Matters\nof the Mind: Poems, Essays and Interviews in Honour of Leonie\nKramer, Lee Jobling and Catherine Runcie (eds.), Sydney... | [
{
"href": "../aristotle-logic/",
"text": "Aristotle, General Topics: logic"
},
{
"href": "../bosanquet/",
"text": "Bosanquet, Bernard"
},
{
"href": "../medieval-categories/",
"text": "categories: medieval theories of"
},
{
"href": "../causation-counterfactual/",
"text": "... |
aristotle-commentators | Commentators on Aristotle | First published Thu Aug 11, 2005; substantive revision Fri Sep 24, 2021 | [
"\nOne important mode of philosophical expression from the end of the\nHellenistic period and into Late Antiquity was the philosophical\ncommentary. During this time Plato and Aristotle were regarded as\nphilosophical authorities and their works were subject to intense\nstudy. This entry offers a concise account of... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Introduction",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. The Pre-History of the Commentary Tradition: The Fortune of the ",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Alexander of Aphrodisias and the Aristotelian Tradition in the 1",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"cont... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nThe primary purpose of a commentary is to explain a text. Typically,\nthe text is divided into lemmata (plural of lemma). A lemma is what is quoted from a\ntext in order to explain and interpret it. Some times the text is\nquoted in its entirety. Other times only its beginning is re... | [
"Sorabji, R., 2005, The Philosophy of the Commentators\n200–600 AD. A Sourcebook. (Volume 1:\nPsychology; Volume 2: Physics; Volume 3: Logic and Metaphysics),\nLondon, Ithaca, NY: Duckworth, Cornell University Press.",
"Alessandro di Afrodisia. Commento al De caelo di Aristotele.\nFrammenti del primo libro, A. Re... | [
{
"href": "../alexander-aphrodisias/",
"text": "Alexander of Aphrodisias"
},
{
"href": "../ammonius/",
"text": "Ammonius"
},
{
"href": "../aristotelianism-renaissance/",
"text": "Aristotelianism: in the Renaissance"
},
{
"href": "../aristotle/",
"text": "Aristotle"
},
... |
animalism | Animalism | First published Mon Apr 7, 2014; substantive revision Mon Jul 15, 2019 | [
"\nAmong the questions to be raised under the heading of “personal\nidentity” are these: “What are we?” (fundamental\nnature question) and “Under what conditions do we persist\nthrough time?” (persistence question). Against the dominant\nneo-Lockean approach to these questions, the view known as animalism\nanswers ... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Formulating Animalism",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Our Fundamental Nature",
"1.2 Our Persistence"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. The Lockean Legacy",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 Locke’s Human/Person Distinction",
"2.2 Animalism and the Human/Person Distinction",
... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nDespite its Aristotelian heritage, animalism is a relative newcomer to\nthe personal identity debate. While early intimations of the view can\nbe found in work by Wiggins (1980) and Wollheim (1984), those\nprimarily responsible for injecting the view into the contemporary\ndebate ov... | [
"Árnadóttir, Steinvör Thöll, 2010,\n“Functionalism and Thinking Animals”, Philosophical\nStudies, 147(3): 347–354. doi:10.1007/s11098-008-9287-0",
"Atherton, Margaret, 1983, “Locke’s Theory of Personal\nIdentity”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 8: 273–293.\ndoi:10.1111/j.1475-4975.1983.tb00470.x",
"Ayers, Micha... | [
{
"href": "../cognition-animal/",
"text": "animal: cognition"
},
{
"href": "../consciousness-animal/",
"text": "animal: consciousness"
},
{
"href": "../moral-animal/",
"text": "animals, moral status of"
},
{
"href": "../functionalism/",
"text": "functionalism"
},
{
... |
moral-animal | The Moral Status of Animals | First published Tue Jul 1, 2003; substantive revision Wed Aug 23, 2017 | [
"\nIs there something distinctive about humanity that justifies the idea\nthat humans have moral status while non-humans do not? Providing an\nanswer to this question has become increasingly important among\nphilosophers as well as those outside of philosophy who are interested\nin our treatment of non-human animal... | [
{
"content_title": "1. The Moral Considerability of Animals",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Speciesism",
"1.2 Human Exceptionalism",
"1.3 Personhood",
"1.4 Sentience"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. The Moral Significance of Animals’ Moral Claims",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nTo say that a being deserves moral consideration is to say that there\nis a moral claim that this being can make on those who can recognize\nsuch claims. A morally considerable being is a being who can be\nwronged. It is often thought that because only humans can recognize\nmoral cl... | [
"Aaltola, Elisa, 2013, “Empathy, Intersubjectivity and Animal\nEthics”, Environmental Philosophy, 10(2): 75–96.\ndoi:10.5840/envirophil201310215",
"Adams, Carol J. and Josephine Donovan (eds.), 1995, Animals\nand Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, Durham, NC: Duke\nUniversity Press.",
"Adams, Carol J. an... | [
{
"href": "../consciousness-animal/",
"text": "animal: consciousness"
},
{
"href": "../bentham/",
"text": "Bentham, Jeremy"
},
{
"href": "../consequentialism/",
"text": "consequentialism"
},
{
"href": "../emotion/",
"text": "emotion"
},
{
"href": "../feminism-ethi... |
anomalous-monism | Anomalous Monism | First published Tue Nov 8, 2005; substantive revision Fri Sep 6, 2019 | [
"\nAnomalous Monism is a theory about the scientific status of\npsychology, the physical status of mental events, and the relation\nbetween these issues developed by Donald Davidson. It claims that\npsychology cannot be a science like basic physics, in that it cannot\nin principle yield exceptionless laws for predi... | [
{
"content_title": "1. The Argument for Anomalous Monism",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Premise I: The Interaction Principle",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 Mental and Physical Events",
"2.2 Mental Causation",
"2.3 Psychological Anomalism"
]
},
{
"content_title": "3.... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nThe basic structure of the argument for Anomalous Monism is as\nfollows. We start with the plausible assumption that some mental\nevents, such as believing that it is raining, are caused by certain\nphysical events, in this case the rain. Similarly, it is assumed that\nsome physical... | [
"Allison, H., 1983, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism,\nNew Haven: Yale University Press.",
"–––, 1990, Kant’s Theory of\nFreedom, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.",
"Anscombe, G. E. M., 1971, Causality and Determination.\nCambridge: Cambridge University Press.",
"Antony, M., 2003, “Davidson’s Argument for... | [
{
"href": "../action/",
"text": "action"
},
{
"href": "../davidson/",
"text": "Davidson, Donald"
},
{
"href": "../dualism/",
"text": "dualism"
},
{
"href": "../epiphenomenalism/",
"text": "epiphenomenalism"
},
{
"href": "../events/",
"text": "events"
},
{
... |
anscombe | Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe | First published Tue Jul 21, 2009; substantive revision Mon May 30, 2022 | [
"\nGertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe was one of the most important\nphilosophers of the twentieth century. She worked on an unusually\nbroad array of topics: the entire range of the history of philosophy\n(ancient, medieval, modern, recent), metaphysics, epistemology,\nphilosophy of language, philosophy of mind/... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Moral and Political Philosophy",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Metaphysics",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. Action Theory",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "5. Philosophy ... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nShe was born in Limerick, Ireland 18 March 1919 to Allen Wells\nAnscombe and Gertrude Elizabeth Anscombe (née Thomas). At the\ntime of her birth her father was serving in the British Army. The\nfamily later returned to England where her father resumed his career\nas a schoolmaster, ... | [
"[IWT] An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,\nLondon: Hutchinson, 1959; 2nd edition, 1963; 3rd edition, 1971.",
"[INT] Intention, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957; 2nd\nedition, 1963. Reprinted in 2000 by Harvard University Press.",
"[THP] Three Philosophers: Aristotle, Aquinas, Frege, with\nPeter Geach, Ox... | [
{
"href": "../action/",
"text": "action"
},
{
"href": "../consequentialism/",
"text": "consequentialism"
},
{
"href": "../davidson/",
"text": "Davidson, Donald"
},
{
"href": "../double-effect/",
"text": "double effect, doctrine of"
},
{
"href": "../epistemology-so... |
anselm | Saint Anselm | First published Thu May 18, 2000; substantive revision Tue Dec 8, 2020 | [
"\n\nSaint Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) was the outstanding\nChristian philosopher and theologian of the eleventh century. He is\nbest known for the celebrated “ontological argument” for\nthe existence of God in the Proslogion, but his contributions\nto philosophical theology (and indeed to philosophy more gene... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life and Works",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. The Theistic Proofs",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 “Faith Seeking Understanding”: The character and purpose of Anselm’s theistic proofs",
"2.2 The arguments of the Monologion",
"2.3 The argument of the Proslog... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\n\nAnselm was born in 1033 near Aosta, in those days a Burgundian town on\nthe frontier with Lombardy. Little is known of his early life. He left\nhome at twenty-three, and after three years of apparently aimless\ntravelling through Burgundy and France, he came to Normandy in 1059.\n... | [
"Niskanen, Samu, 2019. Letters of Anselm of Canterbury, Vol. I: The Bec Letters, Oxford: Oxford University Press.",
"Schmitt, Franciscus Salesius, 1936. “Ein neues\nunvollendetes Werk des hl. Anselm von Canterbury,”\nBeiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des\nMittelalters Band 33, Heft 3 (1936): ... | [
{
"href": "../augustine/",
"text": "Augustine, Saint"
},
{
"href": "../duns-scotus/",
"text": "Duns Scotus, John"
},
{
"href": "../freewill/",
"text": "free will"
},
{
"href": "../medieval-philosophy/",
"text": "medieval philosophy"
},
{
"href": "../ontological-ar... |
moral-anti-realism | Moral Anti-Realism | First published Mon Jul 30, 2007; substantive revision Mon May 24, 2021 | [
"\nIt might be expected that it would suffice for the entry for\n“moral anti-realism” to contain only some links to other\nentries in this encyclopedia. It could contain a link to “moral\nrealism” and stipulate the negation of the view described there.\nAlternatively, it could have links to the entries\n“anti-reali... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Characterizing Moral Anti-realism",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Who Bears the Burden of Proof?",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Arguing For and Against Moral Anti-realism",
"sub_toc": [
"3.1 Noncognitivism",
"3.2 Error Theory",
... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nTraditionally, to hold a realist position with respect to X\nis to hold that X exists objectively. On this view, moral\nanti-realism is the denial of the thesis that moral\nproperties—or facts, objects, relations, events, etc. (whatever\ncategories one is willing to countenance)—exi... | [
"Anscombe, G.E.M., 1958. “Modern moral philosophy,”\nPhilosophy, 33: 1–19.",
"Ayer, A.J., [1936] 1971. Language, Truth and Logic,\nHarmondsworth: Penguin.",
"Bagnoli, C., 2002. “Moral constructivism: A phenomenological\nargument,” Topoi, 21: 125–138.",
"Blackburn, S., 1984. Spreading the Word, Oxford:\nClaren... | [
{
"href": "../moral-cognitivism/",
"text": "cognitivism vs. non-cognitivism, moral"
},
{
"href": "../constructivism-metaethics/",
"text": "constructivism: in metaethics"
},
{
"href": "../metaethics/",
"text": "metaethics"
},
{
"href": "../moral-non-naturalism/",
"text": "... |
antiochus-ascalon | Antiochus of Ascalon | First published Tue Mar 1, 2005; substantive revision Thu Aug 6, 2020 | [
"\n\nAntiochus, who was active in the latter part of the second and the\nearly part of the first centuries B.C.E., was a member of the Academy,\nPlato’s school, during its skeptical phase. After espousing skepticism\nhimself, he became a dogmatist. He defended an epistemological theory\nessentially the same as the ... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life, Works and Background ",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Overview of Antiochus’ Philosophy",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Epistemology",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. Ethics",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_ti... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\n\nAntiochus was born in the latter part of the second century B.C.E. in\nAscalon (whose site is in present-day Israel) and died in 69/8\nB.C.E. (On Antiochus’ life, see Hatzimichali 2012). Early in life he\nmoved to Athens, at this time still the center of the ancient\nphilosophical... | [
"Cicero, De natura deorum, Academica (Loeb Classical\nLibrary), H. Rackham (trans.), Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press,\n1933.",
"–––, Akademische Abhandlungen,\nLucullus, C. Schäublin (trans.), Hamburg: Meiner, 1996.",
"–––, On Academic Scepticism,\nC. Brittain (trans.), Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006.",
"... | [
{
"href": "../arcesilaus/",
"text": "Arcesilaus"
},
{
"href": "../carneades/",
"text": "Carneades"
},
{
"href": "../cicero/",
"text": "Cicero"
},
{
"href": "../ethics-ancient/",
"text": "ethics: ancient"
},
{
"href": "../philo-larissa/",
"text": "Philo of Lari... |
apriori | A Priori Justification and Knowledge | First published Sun Dec 9, 2007; substantive revision Wed May 6, 2020 | [
"\nA priori justification is a type of epistemic justification\nthat is, in some sense, independent of experience. Gettier examples\nhave led most philosophers to think that having a justified true\nbelief is not sufficient for knowledge\n (see Section 4.4, below,\n and the examples there), but many still believe t... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Examples that illustrate the difference between ",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. What sorts of propositions can be ",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Is ",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. What is the nature of ",
"sub_toc":... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nA priori justification is a certain kind of justification\noften contrasted with empirical, or a posteriori,\njustification. Roughly speaking, a priori justification\nprovides reasons for thinking a proposition is true that comes from\nmerely understanding, or thinking about, that p... | [
"Audi, Robert, 1997, Moral Knowledge and Ethical\nCharacter, Oxford: Oxford University Press.",
"–––, 2001, The Architecture of Reason: The\nStructure and Substance of Rationality, Oxford: Oxford University\nPress. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195158427.001.0001",
"Bealer, George, 1987, “The Philosophical Limits ... | [
{
"href": "../analytic-synthetic/",
"text": "analytic/synthetic distinction"
},
{
"href": "../epistemology-naturalized/",
"text": "epistemology: naturalism in"
},
{
"href": "../experimental-philosophy/",
"text": "experimental philosophy"
},
{
"href": "../natural-kinds/",
... |
aquinas | Thomas Aquinas | First published Wed Dec 7, 2022 | [
"\n[Editor’s Note: The following new entry by Robert Pasnau\nreplaces the\n former entry\n on this topic by the previous authors.] ",
"\nBetween antiquity and modernity stands Thomas Aquinas (ca.\n1225–1274). The greatest figure of thirteenth-century Europe in\nthe two preeminent sciences of the era, philosophy a... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life and Works",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Life",
"1.2 Works"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. God",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. The Created World",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. Form and Matter",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
... | [
{
"main_content": [],
"section_title": "1. Life and Works",
"subsections": [
{
"content": [
"\nThomas Aquinas was born near Aquino, halfway between Rome and Naples,\naround the year 1225. He was the youngest of at least nine children,\nand born into a wealthy family that presided... | [
"Scriptum super libros Sententiarum (The Commentary on Peter\nLombard’s Sentences) (1252–56)\n\n\nA massive and wide-ranging work, composed during Aquinas’s term\nas bachelor of theology and the first part of his first term as master\nof theology. Until the Leonine version is published, the best Latin\ntext is the ... | [
{
"href": "../analogy-medieval/",
"text": "analogy: medieval theories of"
},
{
"href": "../aquinas-moral-political/",
"text": "Aquinas, Thomas: moral, political, and legal philosophy"
},
{
"href": "../arabic-islamic-influence/",
"text": "Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, historical and ... |
arcesilaus | Arcesilaus | First published Fri Jan 14, 2005; substantive revision Fri Jul 2, 2021 | [
"\n\nArcesilaus (315/4–241/40 BCE) was a member and later leader of\nPlato’s Academy. He initiated the skeptical phase of the Platonic\nschool (‘Academic skepticism’) and was an influential\ncritic of the Stoics, especially of their epistemology.",
"\n\nThe ancient evidence about Arcesilaus’ philosophy is difficu... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life and work",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Skepticism: method or doctrine",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Criticism of Stoic epistemology",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. ",
"sub_toc": [
"4.1 The Non-Rational No... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\n\nAfter an early education in geometry and astronomy in his native\nPitanê (in Aeolis, the northwest Aegean coast of modern Turkey),\nArcesilaus escaped to Athens against his guardian’s wishes. There he is\nsaid to have studied rhetoric in association with Theophrastus\n(Aristotle’s... | [
"Inwood, Brad and Lloyd Gerson (eds.), 1997, Hellenistic\nPhilosophy: Introductory Readings, second edition, Indianapolis,\nIN: Hackett.\n\n[English translation of several of the sources for\nArcesilaus.]",
"Mette, Hans Joachim, 1984, “Zwei Akademiker heute: Krantor\nvon Soloi und Arkesilaos von Pitane,” Lustrum ... | [
{
"href": "../belief/",
"text": "belief"
},
{
"href": "../carneades/",
"text": "Carneades"
},
{
"href": "../cicero/",
"text": "Cicero"
},
{
"href": "../dialectical-school/",
"text": "Dialectical School"
},
{
"href": "../philo-larissa/",
"text": "Philo of Laris... |
architecture | Philosophy of Architecture | First published Wed Sep 9, 2015 | [
"This article offers an overview of issues in the philosophy of\narchitecture. Central issues include foundational matters regarding\nthe nature of:",
"Yet other questions engage applied philosophical concerns regarding\narchitecture, such as the character of architectural notation;\nintellectual property rights;... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Introduction",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Architecture as Relatively Neglected by Philosophy ",
"1.2 A Word on Terminology"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. What is Architecture?",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 The Sort of Enterprise Architecture Is",
"2.2 Architecture a... | [
{
"main_content": [],
"section_title": "1. Introduction",
"subsections": [
{
"content": [
"Over the course of Western philosophy, including the history of\naesthetics, architecture has largely failed to attract sustained,\ndetailed attention—particularly as compared with other\na... | [
"Acharya, Prasanna Kumar, 1928, Indian Architecture according\nto Mānasāra-śilpaśāstra\n[Mānasāra English trans.] London: Oxford University Press.",
"Alberti, Leon Battista, 1485, On the Art of Building in Ten\nBooks (De re aedificatoria, Florence: Niccolò di\nLorenzo), Joseph Rykwert, Robert Tavernor, and Neil L... | [
{
"href": "../aesthetic-judgment/",
"text": "aesthetics: aesthetic judgment"
},
{
"href": "../environmental-aesthetics/",
"text": "aesthetics: environmental"
},
{
"href": "../aesthetics-18th-german/",
"text": "aesthetics: German, in the 18th century"
},
{
"href": "../art-defi... |
archytas | Archytas | First published Thu Jun 26, 2003; substantive revision Thu Nov 5, 2020 | [
"\nArchytas of Tarentum was a Greek mathematician, political leader and\nphilosopher, active in the first half of the fourth century BC (i.e.,\nduring Plato’s lifetime). He was the last prominent figure in\nthe early Pythagorean tradition and the dominant political figure in\nTarentum, being elected general seven c... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life and Works",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Family, Teachers, and Pupils; Date",
"1.2 Sources",
"1.3 Archytas and Tarentum",
"1.4 Archytas and Plato",
"1.5 The Authenticity Question",
"1.6 Pseudepigrapha Ascribed to Archytas",
"1.7 Genuine Works and Te... | [
{
"main_content": [],
"section_title": "1. Life and Works",
"subsections": [
{
"content": [
"\nArchytas, son of Hestiaeus (see Aristoxenus in Diels-Kranz 1952, chap.\n47, passage A1; abbreviated as DK47 A1), lived in the Greek city of\nTarentum, on the heel of the boot of Italy. ... | [
"Diels, H. and W. Kranz, 1952, Die Fragmente der\nVorsokratiker (in three volumes), 6th edition, Dublin\nand Zürich: Weidmann. The Archytas material is in Volume 1,\nChapter 47, pp. 421–439 (Greek texts of the fragments and\ntestimonia with translations in German). Referred to as DK.",
"Huffman, C. A., 2005, Arch... | [
{
"href": "../aristotle/",
"text": "Aristotle"
},
{
"href": "../philolaus/",
"text": "Philolaus"
},
{
"href": "../plato/",
"text": "Plato"
},
{
"href": "../pythagoras/",
"text": "Pythagoras"
},
{
"href": "../pythagoreanism/",
"text": "Pythagoreanism"
}
] |
arendt | Hannah Arendt | First published Thu Jul 27, 2006; substantive revision Fri Jan 11, 2019 | [
"\n\nHannah Arendt (1906–1975) was one of the most influential political\nphilosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a German-Jewish\nfamily, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and lived in Paris for\nthe next eight years, working for a number of Jewish refugee\norganisations. In 1941 she immigrated to t... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Biographical Sketch",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Introduction",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Arendt’s Conception of Modernity",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. Arendt’s Theory of Action",
"sub_toc": [
"4.1 Actio... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\n\nHannah Arendt, one of the leading political thinkers of the twentieth\ncentury, was born in 1906 in Hanover and died in New York in 1975. In\n1924, after having completed her high school studies, she went to\nMarburg University to study with Martin Heidegger. The encounter with\nH... | [
"Aschheim, S. (ed.), 2001, Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem,\nBerkeley: University of California Press.",
"Baehr, P., 2010, Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the\nSocial Sciences, Stanford: Stanford University Press.",
"Baluch, F., 2014, “Arendt’s Machiavellian\nMoment”, European Journal of Political Theory, 13 (2)... | [
{
"href": "../aristotle/",
"text": "Aristotle"
},
{
"href": "../benjamin/",
"text": "Benjamin, Walter"
},
{
"href": "../existentialism/",
"text": "existentialism"
},
{
"href": "../heidegger/",
"text": "Heidegger, Martin"
},
{
"href": "../hobbes/",
"text": "Hob... |
ethics-ancient | Ancient Ethical Theory | First published Tue Aug 3, 2004; substantive revision Fri Feb 5, 2021 | [
"\nWhile moral theory does not invent morality, or even reflection on it,\nit does try to bring systematic thinking to bear on these activities.\nAncient moral theory, however, does not attempt to be a comprehensive\naccount of all the phenomena that fall under the heading of morality.\nRather, assuming piecemeal o... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Introduction",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Socrates",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Plato",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. Aristotle",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "5. Cynics",
"sub_toc": []
},
{... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nIn their moral theories, the ancient philosophers depended on several\nimportant notions. These include virtue and the virtues, happiness\n(eudaimonia), and the soul. We can begin with virtue.",
"\nVirtue is a general term that translates the Greek word\naretê. Sometimes aretê... | [
"Arnim, Joachim von (ed.), Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta,\nVolumes I–IV, Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1903–24.",
"Aristotle, The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1 and 2,\nJonathan Barnes (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press,\n1984.",
"Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum [‘On\nEnds’] (Loeb Classical Library)... | [
{
"href": "../aristotle-ethics/",
"text": "Aristotle, General Topics: ethics"
},
{
"href": "../plato/",
"text": "Plato"
},
{
"href": "../pyrrho/",
"text": "Pyrrho"
}
] |
argument | Argument and Argumentation | First published Fri Jul 16, 2021 | [
"\nArgument is a central concept for philosophy. Philosophers rely\nheavily on arguments to justify claims, and these practices have been\nmotivating reflections on what arguments and argumentation are for\nmillennia. Moreover, argumentative practices are also pervasive \nelsewhere; they permeate scientific inquiry... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Terminological Clarifications",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Types of Arguments",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 Deduction",
"2.2 Induction",
"2.3 Abduction",
"2.4 Analogy",
"2.5 Fallacies"
]
},
{
"content_title": "3. Types of Argume... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nAn argument can be defined as a complex symbolic structure where some\nparts, known as the premises, offer support to another part, the\nconclusion. Alternatively, an argument can be viewed as a complex\nspeech act consisting of one or more acts of premising (which assert\npropositi... | [
"Aberdein, Andrew, 2016, “The Vices of Argument”,\nTopoi, 35(2): 413–422.\ndoi:10.1007/s11245-015-9346-z",
"Aberdein, Andrew and Daniel H. Cohen, 2016, “Introduction:\nVirtues and Arguments”, Topoi, 35(2): 339–343.\ndoi:10.1007/s11245-016-9366-3",
"Aberdein, Andrew and Ian J Dove (eds.), 2013, The Argument of\n... | [
{
"href": "../abduction/",
"text": "abduction"
},
{
"href": "../analogy-medieval/",
"text": "analogy: medieval theories of"
},
{
"href": "../reasoning-analogy/",
"text": "analogy and analogical reasoning"
},
{
"href": "../aristotle/",
"text": "Aristotle"
},
{
"hre... |
aristotle | Aristotle | First published Thu Sep 25, 2008; substantive revision Tue Aug 25, 2020 | [
"\n\nAristotle (384–322 B.C.E.) numbers among the greatest\nphilosophers of all time. Judged solely in terms of his philosophical\ninfluence, only Plato is his peer: Aristotle’s works shaped centuries\nof philosophy from Late Antiquity through the Renaissance, and even\ntoday continue to be studied with keen, non-a... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Aristotle’s Life",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. The Aristotelian Corpus: Character and Primary Divisions",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. ",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. Logic, Science, and Dialectic",
"sub_toc": [
... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\n\n \nBorn in 384 B.C.E. in the Macedonian region of northeastern Greece in\nthe small city of Stagira (whence the moniker ‘the\nStagirite’, which one still occasionally encounters in\nAristotelian scholarship), Aristotle was sent to Athens at about the\nage of seventeen to... | [
"Barnes, J., ed. The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volumes\nI and II, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.",
"Irwin, T. and Fine., G.,\nAristotle: Selections, Translated with Introduction, Notes, and\nGlossary, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995.",
"Ackrill, J., Categories and De Interpretatione,\ntranslated wi... | [
{
"href": "../arabic-islamic-influence/",
"text": "Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, historical and methodological topics in: influence of Arabic and Islamic Philosophy on the Latin West"
},
{
"href": "../aristotle-commentators/",
"text": "Aristotle, commentators on"
},
{
"href": "../aristo... |
arnauld | Antoine Arnauld | First published Sat Jan 27, 2007; substantive revision Fri Nov 5, 2021 | [
"\nAntoine Arnauld (1612–1694) was a powerful figure in the\nintellectual life of seventeenth-century Europe. He had a long and\nhighly controversial career as a theologian, and was an able and\ninfluential philosopher. His writings were published and widely read\nover a period of more than fifty years and were ass... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life and Works",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Arnauld on the Distinction between Philosophy and Theology",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Arnauld’s Cartesianism",
"sub_toc": [
"3.1 Philosophical method",
"3.2 Arnauld’s identifica... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nAntoine Arnauld was born in Paris on February 6, 1612, the twentieth\nand last child of an important French family. He is often referred to\nin the French literature as Le Grand Arnauld. Another famous\nmember of the family was his sister, Mère Angélique\nArnauld. Installed by her w... | [
"Arnauld, Antoine, Oeuvres de Messire Antoine Arnauld (43\nvols.) (edited by G. Du Pac De Bellegarde and J. Hautefage, with a\nVie de Messire Antoine Arnauld by N. De Larrière)\nParis-Lausanne: Sigismond D’Arnay et Cie 1775-83. Cited as\nOA.",
"Oeuvres Philosophiques d’Arnauld (6 vols.) (edited\nand introduced by... | [
{
"href": "../aquinas/",
"text": "Aquinas, Thomas"
},
{
"href": "../augustine/",
"text": "Augustine, Saint"
},
{
"href": "../consciousness-17th/",
"text": "consciousness: seventeenth-century theories of"
},
{
"href": "../descartes/",
"text": "Descartes, René"
},
{
... |
voltaire | Voltaire | First published Mon Aug 31, 2009; substantive revision Fri May 29, 2020 | [
"François-Marie d’Arouet (1694–1778), better known by his pen name Voltaire, was a French writer and public activist who played a singular role in defining the eighteenth-century movement called the Enlightenment. At the center of his work was a new conception of philosophy and the philosopher that in several cruci... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Voltaire’s Life: The Philosopher as Critic and Public Activist",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Voltaire’s Early Years (1694–1726)",
"1.2 The English Period (1726–1729)",
"1.3 Becoming a Philosophe",
"1.4 The Newton Wars (1732–1745)",
"1.5 From French Newtonian to Enl... | [
{
"main_content": [
"Voltaire only began to identify himself with philosophy and the philosophe identity during middle age. His work Lettres philosophiques, published in 1734 when he was forty years old, was the key turning point in this transformation. Before this date, Voltaire’s life in no way pointed ... | [
"Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, edited by A. Beuchot. 72 vols. Paris: Lefevre, 1829–1840.",
"Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, edited by L.E.D. Moland and G. Bengesco. 52 vols. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1877–1885.",
"Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, edited by Theodore Besterman. 135 vols. (projected) Geneva, Banbury, a... | [
{
"href": "../clarke/",
"text": "Clarke, Samuel"
},
{
"href": "../descartes/",
"text": "Descartes, René"
},
{
"href": "../hedonism/",
"text": "hedonism"
},
{
"href": "../hume-newton/",
"text": "Hume, David: Newtonianism and Anti-Newtonianism"
},
{
"href": "../leib... |
arrows-theorem | Arrow’s Theorem | First published Mon Oct 13, 2014; substantive revision Tue Nov 26, 2019 | [
"\nKenneth Arrow’s “impossibility” theorem—or\n“general possibility” theorem, as he called\nit—answers a very basic question in the theory of collective\ndecision-making. Say there are some alternatives to choose among. They\ncould be policies, public projects, candidates in an election,\ndistributions of income an... | [
{
"content_title": "1. The Will of the People?",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Arrow’s Framework",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 Individual Preferences",
"2.2 Multiple Profiles",
"2.3 Social Welfare Functions"
]
},
{
"content_title": "3. Impossibility",
"sub_toc"... | [
{
"main_content": [
"Some of the trouble with social orderings is visible in a simple\nbut important example. Say there are three\nalternatives \\(A\\), \\(B\\) and \\(C\\) to choose\namong. There is a group of three people 1, 2 and 3 whose preferences\nare to inform this choice, and they are asked to ran... | [
"Arrow, K.J., 1950, “A Difficulty in the Concept of Social\nWelfare”, Journal of Political Economy, 58:\n328–346.",
"–––, 1951 [1963], Social Choice and\nIndividual Values, New York: Wiley. 2nd ed.,\n1963.",
"Arrow, K.J. and H. Raynaud, 1986, Social Choice and\nMulticriterion Decision-Making, Cambridge, MA: MIT... | [
{
"href": "../economics/",
"text": "economics: philosophy of"
},
{
"href": "../economic-justice/",
"text": "economics [normative] and economic justice"
},
{
"href": "../collective-intentionality/",
"text": "intentionality: collective"
},
{
"href": "../preferences/",
"text... |
conceptual-art | Conceptual Art | First published Thu Jun 7, 2007; substantive revision Wed Mar 23, 2022 | [
"\nThe philosophy of art addresses a broad spectrum of theoretical issues\narising from a wide variety of objects of attention. These range from\nPaleolithic cave painting to postmodern poetry, and from the problem\nof how music can convey emotion to that of the metaphysical status of\nfictional characters. Until r... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Conceptual Art – What Is It?",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Introduction",
"1.2 The Limits of Art and the Role of Artists",
"1.3 Artistic Media",
"1.4 Art as Idea",
"1.5 Semantic Representation"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. The Philosophy of Conceptual Ar... | [
{
"main_content": [],
"section_title": "1. Conceptual Art – What Is It?",
"subsections": [
{
"content": [
"\nFew artistic movements have attracted so much controversy and debate\nas conceptual art. By its nature, conceptual art has a tendency to\nprovoke intense and perhaps even ... | [
"Alberro, Alexander & Blake, Stimson (eds.), 1999.\nConceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, Cambridge, MA: MIT\nPress.",
"Alberro, Alexander& Buchmann, Sabeth (eds.), 2006. Art\nafter Conceptual Art, Cambridge, MA & Vienna: MIT\nPress/General Foundation.",
"Beardsley, Monroe, 1970. The Possibility of Criticism,\n... | [
{
"href": "../aesthetic-concept/",
"text": "aesthetic, concept of the"
},
{
"href": "../aesthetic-experience/",
"text": "aesthetic experience"
},
{
"href": "../aesthetic-judgment/",
"text": "aesthetics: aesthetic judgment"
},
{
"href": "../art-definition/",
"text": "art, ... |
art-definition | The Definition of Art | First published Tue Oct 23, 2007; substantive revision Tue Aug 14, 2018 | [
"\nThe definition of art is controversial in contemporary philosophy.\nWhether art can be defined has also been a matter of controversy. The\nphilosophical usefulness of a definition of art has also been\ndebated.",
" Contemporary definitions can be classified with respect to the\ndimensions of art they emphasiz... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Constraints on Definitions of Art",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Definitions from the History of Philosophy",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 Some examples"
]
},
{
"content_title": "3. Skepticism about Definitions",
"sub_toc": [
"3.1 Skepticisms in... | [
{
"main_content": [
" Any definition of art has to square with the following\nuncontroversial facts: (i) entities (artifacts or performances)\nintentionally endowed by their makers with a significant degree of\naesthetic interest, often greatly surpassing that of most everyday\nobjects, first appeared hun... | [
"Abell, Catharine, 2012, “Art: What It Is and Why It Matters,”\nPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research, 85: 671–691.",
"Adajian, Thomas, 2005, “On the Prototype Theory of Concepts\nand the Definition of Art,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art\nCriticism, 63: 231–236.",
"–––, 2012, “Defining Art,” in\nA. Ribeiro (... | [
{
"href": "../aesthetic-judgment/",
"text": "aesthetics: aesthetic judgment"
},
{
"href": "../aesthetics-18th-german/",
"text": "aesthetics: German, in the 18th century"
},
{
"href": "../aristotle-aesthetics/",
"text": "Aristotle, General Topics: aesthetics"
},
{
"href": "../... |
artifact | Artifact | First published Wed Jul 18, 2018; substantive revision Mon Oct 3, 2022 | [
"\nThe contemporary world is pervasively artifactual. Even our most\nmundane, biologically based activities, such as eating, sleeping, and\nsex, depend on engagement with artifacts. Moreover, many of the plants\nand animals we encounter on a daily basis qualify as biological\nartifacts (Sperber 2007). But unlike la... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Definition",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Metaphysics",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 Do Artifacts Exist?",
"2.2 Artifact Kinds",
"2.3 Artifact Functions"
]
},
{
"content_title": "3. Epistemology",
"sub_toc": [
"3.1 Methodology",
... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nA standard philosophical definition of\n“artifact”—often assumed even when not explicitly\nstated—is that artifacts are objects made intentionally, in\norder to accomplish some purpose (Hilpinen 1992; 2011). This\ndefinition is rooted ultimately in Aristotle’s distinction\nbetween t... | [
"Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Metaphysics, Physics, in\nJonathan Barnes (ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle,\nVolumes I and II, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.",
"Baker, Lynne Rudder, 2007, The Metaphysics of Everyday Life:\nAn Essay in Practical Realism, Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress.... | [
{
"href": "../abstract-objects/",
"text": "abstract objects"
},
{
"href": "../environmental-aesthetics/",
"text": "aesthetics: environmental"
},
{
"href": "../aesthetics-of-everyday/",
"text": "aesthetics of the everyday"
},
{
"href": "../ethics-environmental/",
"text": "... |
artificial-intelligence | Artificial Intelligence | First published Thu Jul 12, 2018 | [
"\nArtificial intelligence (AI) is the field devoted to building\nartificial animals (or at least artificial creatures that – in\nsuitable contexts – appear to be animals) and, for\nmany, artificial persons (or at least artificial creatures that\n– in suitable contexts – appear to be\n persons).[1]\n Such goals imm... | [
{
"content_title": "1. The History of AI",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. What Exactly ",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Approaches to AI",
"sub_toc": [
"3.1 The Intelligent Agent Continuum",
"3.2 Logic-Based AI: Some Surgical Points",
"3.3 Non-Log... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nThe field of artificial intelligence (AI) officially started in 1956,\nlaunched by a small but now-famous\n DARPA-sponsored\n summer conference at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire.\n(The 50-year celebration of this conference,\n AI@50,\n was held in July 2006 at Dartmout... | [
" Adams, E. W., 1996, A Primer of Probability Logic,\nStanford, CA: CSLI. ",
" Almeida, J., Frade, M., Pinto, J. & de Sousa, S., 2011,\nRigorous Software Development: An Introduction to Program\nVerification, New York, NY: Spinger. ",
" Alpaydin, E., 2014, Introduction to Machine Learning,\nCambridge, MA: MIT ... | [
{
"href": "../logic-ai/",
"text": "artificial intelligence: logic and"
},
{
"href": "../causation-probabilistic/",
"text": "causation: probabilistic"
},
{
"href": "../chinese-room/",
"text": "Chinese room argument"
},
{
"href": "../cognitive-science/",
"text": "cognitive ... |
tense-aspect | Tense and Aspect | First published Tue Jan 7, 2014; substantive revision Mon Sep 17, 2018 | [
"\nMany languages have grammatical means to indicate the time when an\naction or event occurs, or when a state or process holds. This\nphenomenon is called tense. In English, for example, adding\nthe morpheme -ed to the verb walk, to form\nwalked, indicates that the event denoted by the verb occurred\nbefore the pr... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Introduction",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Temporal Logic",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Speech Time, Event Time and Reference Time",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. From Events to Time",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"co... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nTense roughly means reference to the time at which events\ntake place, or at which processes or states hold. English, for\nexample, clearly distinguishes between past and non-past tense as in\n(1a) and (1b) and (1c). ",
"\nIn English, verb forms are typically used to signal th... | [
"Anderson, S., T. Matlock, C. Fausey, and M. Spivey, 2008,\n“On the path to understanding the on-line processing of\ngrammatical aspect”, in Proceedings of the 30th CogSci\nconference, 2253–2258. ",
"Asher, N. and A. Lascarides, 2003, Logics of Conversation.\nStudies in Natural Language Processing, Cambridge: Cam... | [
{
"href": "../discourse-representation-theory/",
"text": "discourse representation theory"
},
{
"href": "../events/",
"text": "events"
},
{
"href": "../logic-nonmonotonic/",
"text": "logic: non-monotonic"
},
{
"href": "../logic-temporal/",
"text": "logic: temporal"
},
... |
assertion | Assertion | First published Mon Jan 22, 2007; substantive revision Wed Nov 17, 2021 | [
"\nAsserting is the act of claiming that something is the case—for\ninstance, that oranges are citruses, or that there is a\ntraffic congestion on Brooklyn Bridge (at some time). We make\nassertions to share information, coordinate our actions, defend\narguments, and communicate our beliefs and desires. Because of ... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Speech Acts",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Pragmatics",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 Presupposition",
"2.2 Implicature",
"2.3 Indirect assertions",
"2.4 Explicitness"
]
},
{
"content_title": "3. Descriptive Accounts, Content-Directed",
... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nConsider typical utterances made by means of the following\nsentences",
"\nSentence (1a) would typically be used to make an assertion. The\nspeaker would tell or inform a hearer that there is\na beer in the fridge. Such an utterance of is called\nassertoric, or assertive. By c... | [
"Adler, Jonathan E., 2002, Belief’s Own\nEthics, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.",
"Alston, William P., 2000, Illocutionary\nActs and Sentence Meaning, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University\nPress.",
"Antonsen, Paal, 2018,\n“Scorekeeping”, Analysis, 78(4): 589–595.\ndoi:10.1093/analys/anx145",
"Austin, John Langshaw, 1956... | [
{
"href": "../austin-jl/",
"text": "Austin, John Langshaw"
},
{
"href": "../belief/",
"text": "belief"
},
{
"href": "../convention/",
"text": "convention"
},
{
"href": "../definitions/",
"text": "definitions"
},
{
"href": "../evidence/",
"text": "evidence"
}... |
associationist-thought | Associationist Theories of Thought | First published Tue Mar 17, 2015; substantive revision Wed Jun 24, 2020 | [
"Associationism is one of the oldest, and, in some form or another,\nmost widely held theories of thought. Associationism has been the\nengine behind empiricism for centuries, from the British Empiricists\nthrough the Behaviorists and modern day Connectionists. Nevertheless,\n“associationism” does not refer to one ... | [
{
"content_title": "1. What is Associationism?",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Associationism as a Theory of Mental Processes: The Empiricist Connection",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Associationism as a Theory of Learning",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_ti... | [
{
"main_content": [
"Associationism is a theory that connects learning to thought based\non principles of the organism’s causal history. Since its early\nroots, associationists have sought to use the history of an\norganism’s experience as the main sculptor of cognitive\narchitecture. In its most basic fo... | [
"Anderson, J., K. Spoehr, and D. Bennett, 1994, “A Study in\nNumerical Perversity: Teaching Arithmetic to a Neural Network”,\nin Neural Networks for Knowledge Representation and\nInference, D. Levine and M. Aparicio IV (eds.), East Sussex:\nPsychology Press, pp. 311–335.",
"Armstrong, K., S. Kose, L. Williams, A.... | [
{
"href": "../behaviorism/",
"text": "behaviorism"
},
{
"href": "../compositionality/",
"text": "compositionality"
},
{
"href": "../connectionism/",
"text": "connectionism"
},
{
"href": "../hume/",
"text": "Hume, David"
},
{
"href": "../kant-transcendental/",
... |
astell | Mary Astell | First published Fri Jul 1, 2005; substantive revision Wed Dec 9, 2015 | [
"\nMary Astell (1666–1731) was an English philosopher. She was born\nin Newcastle, and lived her adult life in London. Her patrons were\nLady Ann Coventry, Lady Elizabeth Hastings, and Catherine Jones, and\namong those in her intellectual circle were Lady Mary Chudleigh,\nJudith Drake, Elizabeth Elstob, Lady Mary W... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Metaphysics",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 God",
"1.2 Individuation among Beings",
"1.3 The Relation between God and His Creatures"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. Epistemology",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 Mind and Ideas",
"2.2 Knowledge and Belief",
"2.3 M... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nMary Astell designed her metaphysics around an account of God and his\ncreation. She was a dualist, maintaining that the two kinds of\nbeings—minds and bodies—come in various degrees of\nfinitude and corruptibility: God is the infinite and incorruptible\nmind; human minds and corpor... | [
"Arnauld, A. and Nicole, P., Logic or the Art of Thinking:\nContaining, besides rules, several new observations appropriate for\nforming judgment, J. V. Buroker (tr. and ed.), Cambridge:\nCambridge University Press, 1996.",
"Astell, M., The Christian Religion, As Profess’d by a\nDaughter of the Church of England.... | [
{
"href": "../cambridge-platonists/",
"text": "Cambridge Platonists"
},
{
"href": "../descartes/",
"text": "Descartes, René"
},
{
"href": "../locke/",
"text": "Locke, John"
},
{
"href": "../john-norris/",
"text": "Norris, John"
},
{
"href": "../occasionalism/",
... |
attention | Attention | First published Tue Sep 8, 2009; substantive revision Tue Oct 26, 2021 | [
"\nAttention is involved in the selective directedness of our mental\nlives. The nature of this selectivity is one of the principal points\nof disagreement between the extant theories of attention. Some of the\nmost influential theories treat the selectivity of attention as\nresulting from limitations in the brain’... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Historical Overview",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Descartes: Attention and Epistemology",
"1.2 Berkeley: Attention and Abstraction",
"1.3 Locke: Attention as a Mode of Thought",
"1.4 The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Attention in Perception, in Action, and in Refl... | [
{
"main_content": [],
"section_title": "1. Historical Overview",
"subsections": [
{
"content": [
"\nIn the early modern period a variety of explanatory roles were\nassigned to attention by a number of different writers.\nDescartes’ Meditations provides one prominent example.\nThe... | [
"Allport, A., 1987, “Selection for action: Some behavioural\nand neurophysiological considerations of attention and action”,\nin Perspectives on perception and action, A. Sanders and H.\nHeuer (eds.), Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp.\n395–419.",
"–––, 1993, “Attention and Control: Have we\nbeen ask... | [
{
"href": "../behaviorism/",
"text": "behaviorism"
},
{
"href": "../bradley/",
"text": "Bradley, Francis Herbert"
},
{
"href": "../cognitive-science/",
"text": "cognitive science"
},
{
"href": "../collingwood-aesthetics/",
"text": "Collingwood, Robin George: aesthetics"
... |
properties | Properties | First published Thu Sep 23, 1999; substantive revision Wed Nov 25, 2020 | [
"\nProperties are those entities that can be predicated of\nthings or, in other words, attributed to them. Thus,\nproperties are often called predicables. Other terms for them\nare “attributes”, “qualities”,\n“features”, “characteristics”,\n“types”. Properties are also ways things are, entities\nthat things exempli... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Properties: Basic Ideas",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 How We Speak of Properties",
"1.2 Arguments for Properties",
"1.3 Traditional Views about the Existence of Universals",
"1.4 Properties in Propositions and States of Affairs",
"1.5 Relations",
"1.6 Univers... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nThere are some crucial terminological and conceptual distinctions that\nare typically made in talking of properties. There are also various\nsorts of reasons that have been adduced for the existence of\nproperties and different traditional views about whether and in what\nsense prop... | [
"Achinstein, Peter, 1974, “The Identity of Properties”,\nAmerican Philosophical Quarterly, 11(4): 257–275.",
"Adams, Robert Merrihew, 1979, “Primitive Thisness and\nPrimitive Identity”, The Journal of Philosophy, 76(1):\n5–26. doi:10.2307/2025812",
"Ainsworth, Peter Mark, 2010, “What Is Ontic Structural\nRealis... | [
{
"href": "https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/species/",
"text": "species"
},
{
"href": "../analysis/",
"text": "analysis"
},
{
"href": "../bradley-regress/",
"text": "Bradley, Francis Herbert: Regress"
},
{
"href": "../category-theory/",
"text": "category theory"
},
... |
perception-auditory | Auditory Perception | First published Thu May 14, 2009; substantive revision Tue Apr 7, 2020 | [
"\nAuditory perception raises a variety of challenging philosophical\nquestions. What do we hear? What are the objects of auditory\nawareness? What is the content of audition? Is hearing spatial? How\ndoes audition differ from vision and other sense modalities? How does\nthe perception of sounds differ from that of... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Other Modalities and the Philosophy of Perception",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. The Objects of Auditory Perception",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 Sounds",
"2.2 Auditory Objects",
"2.3 Sound Sources"
]
},
{
"content_title": "3. The Contents of... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nThe philosophy of sounds and auditory perception is one area of the\nphilosophy of perception that reaches beyond vision for insights about\nthe nature, objects, contents, and varieties of perception. This entry\ncharacterizes central issues in the philosophy of auditory perception,... | [
"Appelbaum, I., 1996, “The lack of invariance problem and the\ngoal of speech perception,” ICSLP-1996, 3(435):\n1541–1544.",
"–––, 1999, “The dogma of isomorphism: A\ncase study from speech perception,” Philosophy of\nScience, 66 (Supplement. Proceedings of the 1998 Biennial Meetings\nof the Philosophy of Science... | [
{
"href": "../color/",
"text": "color"
},
{
"href": "../consciousness-unity/",
"text": "consciousness: unity of"
},
{
"href": "../music/",
"text": "music, philosophy of"
},
{
"href": "../perception-contents/",
"text": "perception: the contents of"
},
{
"href": "..... |
augustine | Saint Augustine | First published Wed Sep 25, 2019 | [
"\nAugustine was perhaps the greatest Christian philosopher of Antiquity\nand certainly the one who exerted the deepest and most lasting\ninfluence. He is a saint of the Catholic Church, and his authority in\ntheological matters was universally accepted in the Latin Middle Ages\nand remained, in the Western Christi... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Work",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Augustine and Philosophy",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. The Philosophical Tradition; Augustine’s Platonism",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nAugustine (Aurelius Augustinus) lived from 13 November 354 to 28\nAugust 430. He was born in Thagaste in Roman Africa (modern Souk Ahras\nin Algeria). His mother Monnica (d. 388), a devout Christian, seems to\nhave exerted a deep but not wholly unambiguous influence on his\nreligiou... | [
"[CSEL] Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum\nLatinorum (Wien: Holder, Pichler, Tempsky, latest volumes Berlin:\nDe Gruyter) and",
"[CCL] Corpus Christianorum Series Latina\n(Turnhout: Brepols). New critical editions are continually being\nprepared and older ones replaced.",
"Augustinus-Lexikon 4 (2012–2018), pp.... | [
{
"href": "../christiantheology-philosophy/",
"text": "Christian theology, philosophy and"
},
{
"href": "../illumination/",
"text": "divine: illumination"
},
{
"href": "../emotion-Christian-tradition/",
"text": "emotion: in the Christian tradition"
},
{
"href": "../ethics-vir... |
auriol | Peter Auriol | First published Wed Nov 6, 2002; substantive revision Tue Sep 8, 2015 | [
"\nWhile the French Franciscan Peter Auriol (ca. 1280–1322) has not\nattracted as much attention as has his slightly younger contemporary\nWilliam Ockham, nevertheless on many topics Auriol was probably just\nas influential among fourteenth century thinkers as was the Venerable\nInceptor. Often explicitly rejecting... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life and Works",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. The Character of Auriol’s Thought and Some Noteworthy Positions",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 The Categories",
"2.2 The Concept of Being",
"2.3 Future Contingents and Divine Foreknowledge",
"2.4 Predest... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nAs with many of his contemporaries, we know very few dates with\ncertainty in the life of Peter Auriol (a.k.a. Peter Auriole, Peter\nAureol, Petrus Aureoli, the Doctor Facundus). On the basis of\nhis later career it seems reasonable to suppose that Auriol was born\naround 1280, and ... | [
"Peter Auriol, Commentariorum in primum librum Sententiarum\nPars Prima, Rome: Ex typographia Vaticana, 1596.",
"Peter Auriol, Scriptum super primum sententiarum, E.M.\nBuytaert (ed.), 2 volumes, St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute,\n1952–56.",
"Adriaenssen, H.T., 2014, ‘Peter John Olivi and Peter Auriol\... | [
{
"href": "../duns-scotus/",
"text": "Duns Scotus, John"
},
{
"href": "../gregory-rimini/",
"text": "Gregory of Rimini"
},
{
"href": "../ockham/",
"text": "Ockham [Occam], William"
},
{
"href": "../relations-medieval/",
"text": "relations: medieval theories of"
}
] |
austin-john | John Austin | First published Sat Feb 24, 2001; substantive revision Fri Jan 14, 2022 | [
"\nJohn Austin is considered by many to be the creator of the school of\nanalytical jurisprudence, as well as, more specifically, the approach\nto law known as “legal positivism.” Austin’s\nparticular command theory of law has been subject to pervasive\ncriticism, but its simplicity gives it an evocative power that... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Analytical Jurisprudence and Legal Positivism",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Austin’s Views",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. Criticisms",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": ... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nJohn Austin’s life (1790–1859) was filled with\ndisappointment and unfulfilled expectations. His influential friends\n(who included Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, John Stuart Mill and Thomas\nCarlyle) were impressed by his intellect and his conversation, and\npredicted he would go far.... | [
"Austin, John, 1832, The Province of Jurisprudence\nDetermined, W. Rumble (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University\nPress, 1995.",
"–––, 1879, Lectures on Jurisprudence,\nor The Philosophy of Positive Law, 2 volumes, R. Campbell\n(ed.), 4th edition, revised, London: John Murray; reprinted, Bristol:\nThoemmes Press,... | [
{
"href": "../bentham/",
"text": "Bentham, Jeremy"
},
{
"href": "../law-language/",
"text": "law: and language"
},
{
"href": "../legal-obligation/",
"text": "legal obligation and authority"
},
{
"href": "../lawphil-naturalism/",
"text": "naturalism: in legal philosophy"
... |
austin-jl | John Langshaw Austin | First published Tue Dec 11, 2012; substantive revision Wed Jun 30, 2021 | [
"\nJohn Langshaw Austin (1911–1960) was White’s Professor of\nMoral Philosophy at the University of Oxford. He made a number of\ncontributions in various areas of philosophy, including important work\non knowledge, perception, action, freedom, truth, language, and the\nuse of language in speech acts. Distinctions t... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life and Work",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. Language and Truth",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 Language and Philosophy",
"2.2 Language and Truth",
"2.3 Speech Acts and Truth"
]
},
{
"content_title": "3. Knowledge and Perception",
"sub_toc"... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nAustin was born in Lancaster, England 26 March 1911 to Geoffrey\nLangshaw Austin and his wife Mary Austin (née Bowes-Wilson).\nThe family moved to Scotland in 1922, where Austin’s father\nwas Secretary of St. Leonard’s School, St. Andrews.",
"\nAustin took up a scholarship in ... | [
"Austin, J.L., 1930s–1940s, “The Line and the Cave in\nPlato’s Republic”, reconstructed from notes by\nJ.O. Urmson, in Austin 1979: 288–304.\ndoi:10.1093/019283021X.003.0013",
"–––, 1939ms/1967, “Agathon and Eudaimonia\nin the Ethics of Aristotle”, in J.M.E. Moravcsik (ed.)\nAristotle, New York: Doubleday: 261–29... | [
{
"href": "../abilities/",
"text": "abilities"
},
{
"href": "../action/",
"text": "action"
},
{
"href": "../ayer/",
"text": "Ayer, Alfred Jules"
},
{
"href": "../compatibilism/",
"text": "compatibilism"
},
{
"href": "../contextualism-epistemology/",
"text": "c... |
authenticity | Authenticity | First published Thu Sep 11, 2014; substantive revision Thu Feb 20, 2020 | [
" The term ‘authentic’ is used either in the strong sense\nof being “of undisputed origin or authorship”, or in a\nweaker sense of being “faithful to an original” or a\n“reliable, accurate representation”. To say that something\nis authentic is to say that it is what it professes to be, or what it\nis reputed to be... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Origins and Meaning of the Concept of Authenticity",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Sincerity and Authenticity",
"1.2 Autonomy and Authenticity",
"1.3 Authenticity and the self"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. Critique of Authenticity",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"con... | [
{
"main_content": [],
"section_title": "1. Origins and Meaning of the Concept of Authenticity",
"subsections": [
{
"content": [
"A number of significant cultural changes in the seventeenth and\neighteenth centuries led to the emergence of a new ideal in the\nWestern world (Trilli... | [
"Adorno, Theodor W., 1973, The Jargon of Authenticity,\ntrans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will, Evanston, IL: Northwestern\nUniversity Press.",
"–––, 1974, Minima Moralia: Reflections from\nDamaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott. London: NLB.",
"Aho, Kevin, 2014, Existentialism: An Introduction, \nCambridge: P... | [
{
"href": "../beauvoir/",
"text": "Beauvoir, Simone de"
},
{
"href": "../existentialism/",
"text": "existentialism"
},
{
"href": "../heidegger/",
"text": "Heidegger, Martin"
},
{
"href": "../integrity/",
"text": "integrity"
},
{
"href": "../kierkegaard/",
"tex... |
authority | Authority | First published Fri Jul 2, 2004; substantive revision Wed Jan 11, 2012 | [
"\n\nWhen is political authority legitimate? This is one of the\nfundamental questions of political philosophy. Depending on how one\nunderstands political authority this question may be the same as, when\nis coercion by the state legitimate? Or, when do we have duties to\nobey the state? Or, when and who has a... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Legitimate Authority, de facto Authority and Political Power",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Legitimate Political Authority: Some Conceptual Distinctions",
"1.2 Political Authority and Different Kinds of Duties of Obedience",
"1.3 Political Authority without Duties of Obedience"... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\n\nLet us start with the distinctions between political authority as a\nnormative notion (or morally legitimate authority) and political\nauthority as a non-normative notion (or de facto authority)\nand between political authority in either of these senses and political\npower. To sa... | [
"Applebaum, Arthur Isak, 2010, “Legitimacy without the Duty\nto Obey,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, 38:\n215–239.",
"Austin, John, 1832, The Province of Jurisprudence\nDetermined, H. L. A. Hart (ed.), London: Weidenfeld &\nNickolson, 1955.",
"Beran, Harry, 1987, The Consent Theory of Political\nObligation, Lo... | [
{
"href": "../aquinas/",
"text": "Aquinas, Thomas"
},
{
"href": "../autonomy-moral/",
"text": "autonomy: in moral and political philosophy"
},
{
"href": "../bentham/",
"text": "Bentham, Jeremy"
},
{
"href": "../citizenship/",
"text": "citizenship"
},
{
"href": "..... |
reasoning-automated | Automated Reasoning | First published Wed Jul 18, 2001; substantive revision Sat Mar 2, 2019 | [
"\nReasoning is the ability to make inferences, and automated reasoning\nis concerned with the building of computing systems that automate this\nprocess. Although the overall goal is to mechanize different forms of\nreasoning, the term has largely been identified with valid deductive\nreasoning as practiced in math... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Introduction",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Problem Domain",
"1.2 Language Representation"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. Deduction Calculi",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 Resolution",
"2.2 Sequent Deduction",
"2.3 Natural Deduction",
"2.4 The Matrix Connecti... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\nA problem being presented to an automated reasoning program consists\nof two main items, namely a statement expressing the particular\nquestion being asked called the problem’s conclusion,\nand a collection of statements expressing all the relevant information\navailable to the prog... | [
"Alama, J., P. Oppenheimer, and E. Zalta, “Automating\nLeibniz’s Theory of Concepts”, CADE 25:\nProceedings of the 25th International Conference on Automated\nDeduction, (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence: Volume\n9195), A. Felty and A. Middeldorp (eds.), Berlin: Springer, pp. 73–97.",
"Anderson, C. A., 19... | [
{
"href": "../logic-ai/",
"text": "artificial intelligence: logic and"
},
{
"href": "../logic-classical/",
"text": "logic: classical"
},
{
"href": "../logic-modal/",
"text": "logic: modal"
},
{
"href": "../reasoning-defeasible/",
"text": "reasoning: defeasible"
}
] |
ibn-rushd | Ibn Rushd [Averroes] | First published Wed Jun 23, 2021 | [
"\nThe Andalusian philosopher, physician and judge Ibn Rushd\n(1126–1198) is one of the great figures of philosophy within the\nMuslim contexts, and a foundational source for post-classical European\nthought.",
"\nThe hallmarks of Ibn Rushd’s work are his convictions that\nphilosophy is capable of demonstrative c... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Life and Works",
"sub_toc": [
"1.1 Life",
"1.2 Works"
]
},
{
"content_title": "2. Logic and Methodology",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "3. Metaphysics",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "4. Natural Philosophy",
"sub_toc": [... | [
{
"main_content": [],
"section_title": "1. Life and Works",
"subsections": [
{
"content": [
"\nAbū al-Walīd Muḥammad ibn Ahmad Ibn Rushd was born in\nCordova in 1126. He belonged to an influential Andalusian family,\nfamous for its judicial power and for its scholarship in the re... | [
"Aristotelis opera cum Averrois commentariis (Venice:\nJunta, 1562), \n available online.",
"Georges C. Anawati, Bibliographie d’Averroes (Ibn\nRushd) (Algiers: Jāmiʻat al-Duwal\nal-ʻArabīyah, 1978).",
"Philipp W. Rosemann. “Averroes: A Catalogue of Editions and\nWritings from 1821 Onwards,” Bulletin de philo... | [
{
"href": "../arabic-islamic-metaphysics/",
"text": "Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, disciplines in: metaphysics"
},
{
"href": "../arabic-islamic-natural/",
"text": "Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, disciplines in: natural philosophy and natural science"
},
{
"href": "../arabic-islamic-lang... |
ibn-gabirol | Solomon Ibn Gabirol [Avicebron] | First published Thu Sep 23, 2010 | [
"\n\nA prolific poet and the author of the Fons Vitae, Ibn Gabirol\nis well known in the history of philosophy for the doctrine that all\nthings —including soul and intellect—are comprised of\nmatter and form (“Universal Hylomorphism”), and for his\nemphasis on Divine Will. Ibn Gabirol is moved first and foremost b... | [
{
"content_title": "1. Bio, Works, Sources and Influences",
"sub_toc": []
},
{
"content_title": "2. A Word on Method: Moving Beyond Aristotle, Augustine, and ",
"sub_toc": [
"2.1 Aristotelian Lenses in the Study of Ibn Gabirol",
"2.2 Augustinian Lenses in the Study of Ibn Gabirol",
... | [
{
"main_content": [
"\n\nJewish Neoplatonist Solomon ben Judah Ibn Gabirol (Shelomoh ben\nYehudah Ibn Gabirol in Hebrew; Abu Ayyub Sulaiman ibn Yahya Ibn\nJubayrol (or Ibn\n Jabirul)[1]\nin Arabic; Avicebron / Avicembron / Avicenbrol /\nAvencebrol in Latin) was born in Málaga Spain in 1021/2 (Guttman\noff... | [
"For Arabic fragments of Fons Vitae, see main bibliography:\nPines 1958/77 and Fenton 1976.",
"1892. Avencebrolis (Ibn Gabirol) Fons\nVitae, ex Arabico in Latinum Translatus ab Johanne Hispano et Dominico\nGundissalino, edited by Baeumker. Münster. In\nBeiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters,\nTe... | [
{
"href": "../arabic-islamic-greek/",
"text": "Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, historical and methodological topics in: Greek sources"
},
{
"href": "../arabic-islamic-judaic/",
"text": "Arabic and Islamic Philosophy, historical and methodological topics in: influence of Arabic and Islamic Philoso... |
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